Category: Life Is A Spell

If I was going to open a business and my name was Dick Ide I would probably change it but he is the number one Honda dealership in Rochester. I had a Harry Ball on my paper route. I wonder what happened to him? Is it just me or does the heat sap your meager allotment of creativity?

We devoted a week’s worth of time and energy to ridding our backyard of wisteria. I posted a picture about ten days back of the mother plant. It had wrapped around an oak tree and grown to the top of it where blossomed each Spring, so high up we couldn’t even appreciate it. And then it would grow those big brown seed pods that would fall, pop open and sprout new plants all over including our neighbor’s yard. That was the real motivator here. The plant is invasive and it had invaded his yard.

We cut the towering plant at the base and then started tearing out the runners (shown above) which were thirty feet long in some cases. They would send down roots every sixteen inches or so and maybe very other time they would send up more shoots as well so they were really tough to pull out of the ground. We are sore all over.

I spent quite a bit of time at Strong Memorial Hospital recently while my father was having an operation. I don’t have a cell phone so I rely on wifi for keeping in touch and they have a free wifi conection there, just the way it should be everywhere. The hospital is huge and the buildings have just been piled on top of one another over the years so you follow color coded signs to get around. They are Rochester’s largest employer now have their own mini-city infrastructure just the way Kodak Park used to.

In the waiting room I sat next to a handicapped person who held his iPhone right up to one of his eyes so he could read it. I mean his eye was pressed against the retina display. He was using Siri to dictate emails to relatives so I heard commands like, “Thank you very much for kind thoughts period.” and “Have a great day exclamation point.”

I used to think wisteria was beautiful, the bubblegum sweet purple flowers that used to burst open near Memorial Day but pop a few weeks earlier now, but not any more. I’m done with it. Our house came with this mother of all wisteria plants climbing up a giant oak tree out back. It appeared to be strangling the tree but it still has green leaves. The real problem is we have hundreds of other baby wisteria plants all over our property and I suspect they are all connected to this mother plant. I started with a hand saw and then got out the chainsaw to finish it off.

I like popping the SDHC card out of my camera. It’s spring loaded and it sometimes flies across the room. I shoot pictures reflexively and I’m often surprised by what’s on my memory card but this one blew me away. It’s a bad photo, a flash shot at dusk and it is out of focus, but it looks like a found photo. The kids’ hair style, their clothes, the instruments, the colors, the setting all look mid-century. It looks like one of those square format pictures from Kodak’s first plastic cameras. I had one of those and this looks like one of my old shots but this was taken last night on East Avenue. To top it off the kids were doing a Miles tune, “Four,” from the fifties.

We staggered our spinach crops but it is all going to town now. It does better in the early Spring and the heat is too much for it so it is all going to seed. We’ve been eating spinach every day for the last month. Had it for breakfast a few days ago. I picked a Wegmans bag full tonight and Peggi made an Indian dish. Cooked the whole bag down to two servings. I rinsed it in the kitchen sink and while the water was running I thought I’d run down in the basement and clean our cat’s dirt box. I must have forgotten to do it yesterday because it was a mess. When the water started coming through the ceiling into the dirt box I remembered I had left it running upstairs.

How long ago was 2001? It feels like the dark ages in digital time. The internet used to be more fun and it held out the promise of even more fun. Maybe it’s just me that has changed. I can always snap out of it.

I came across this link to a digital installation that I did for a Pyramid Art show back in 2001. I had a Mac on a table running Internet Explorer in full screen mode and this series of pages went round and round. It sort of bothered me at the time because the piece had nothing to do with the confines of the gallery and could just as easily have been viewed in the comfort of one’s home. This was the virtual age and the computer just looked clunky sitting there. The last thing you want to do in a gallery is get on a computer.

There’s no Flash involved or anything but I remember struggling to get the various movements to work across platforms. The Pyramid and the show are long gone but this piece is still out the floating around. I’m afraid to look at the code but it still seems to work.

I helped my neighbor do a few repairs to the pump down at the pool today and I had to move this old lawn sprinkler out of the way. It is unbelievably heavy and probably worth a few bucks down at Krieger’s just for the scrap metal. “Model 102” is stamped in the metal along with the manufacturer’s name, “Beatrice. F. D. Kees” of Nebraska. I looked them up on line and found they were started as a gunsmith shop and later patented and produced corn-husking hooks and innovative products such as a window defroster for automobiles and a moving lawn sprinkler that resembled a farm tractor. This photo shows one in good condition. It shows it chasing it’s own tail. I plan to hook ours up and see how it behaves. I heard that Dick Storms from the Record Archive used to have the world’s largest collection of lawn sprinklers but I think he got out of that line of work.

“Don’t you be fawning over me.” This baby fawn was almost in the middle of our path as we walked through the woods today. We came across a fawn a few years ago while walking with Jim Mott and he told us not to go near the fawn or the mother would be spooked. The doe feel the fawn are safer from predators if they are left alone. Even I can smell a deer if they’re nearby so this makes some sense.

Further along we found ourselves between a group of wild turkeys. They get confused when some of the pack are separated and humans make them nervous so they were making a racket while we were in the way. It’s pretty easy to feel like an intruder in the woods.

Vincenzo Giordano runs the coolest spot in Rochester’s Public Market, the “European Cheese Shop.” You could spend your week’s paycheck in here and not be sorry. The yellow tags in this photo mark the Spanish cheese and the green identify the French cheese and the figs in the blue container are out of this world. There’s plenty of Italian cheese here too but we’re loyal to the to the Spanish. If the Spanish Civil War was to break out again we’d be over there fighting to save the Republic.

I do most of my music listening in the basement, shuffling a shared library from a hard drive in another part of the house while I draw or paint. When something comes along that really draws me in I put five stars on it and then add it to my “Favorites” playlist in iTunes. Occasionally I will shuffle the “Favorites” playlist and you would think that would be the ultimate but it’s not nearly as much fun as throwing fate to the wind, shuffling the entire library and running across beautiful surprises.

I was working away the other night, frustrated at not being able to get a gesture down, when I thought, almost aloud, “I wish I could see what I’m trying to draw.” And then I laughed aloud. This is really the game, learning to see. The drawing part is a cinch.

My aunt and uncle live in Niagara Falls so I don’t see them that often but I did last week at another funeral. Their son worked for the tourism board there for a while and I wondered what my uncle thought about the upcoming Nik Wallenda tightrope walk over the Falls. I was thinking the circus like event would be good for the tourist trade on the struggling New York but my uncle said the morality of the whole thing really bothered him and he wasn’t even going to watch it. I was really struck by his answer and my own ever shifting moral line.

Sam Patch, the “The Yankee Leaper,” achieved nationwide fame when he jumped into the Niagara River near the base of the Falls in 1829. He made his last jump in Rochester on Friday the 13th in November of that same year from a 25-foot high platform over the 100 foot High Falls of the Genesee River. 8,000 people watched him land with a loud impact and never surface. His frozen body was found downriver in Charlotte the next Spring. Local ministers and newspapers were quick to blame the crowd for urging him to jump, and put the guilt of his death on them

I get sick on rides that go around on circles so my favorite attraction at amusement parks is the kids’ cars. They seat two and you have to be tiny to fit in. The steering wheel spins around but does no control the car in any way and the kids don’t even care.

We stopped down to Sea Breeze Amusement Park for number 27 of the Rochester Institute of Technology “Big Shots“, pictures made at night using either hand-held electronic flash units or flashlights. Volunteers were instructed to show up at eight and wear black. That was pretty easy because all our clothes are black. The organizers effortlessly divided thousands of people into small groups and assigned them trees or rides to illuminate. We had to keep moving so our bodies weren’t captured in the long exposure. I used the flash on camera to help light this purple T-Bird.

I work under the premise that it is possible to become a better artist by looking at Beckmann and Guston and Matisse and Rouault and Bruegal. And by extension it is possible to become a better musician by listening to Sun Ra, Miles, Ornette and Dolphy even though I never practice. I may be deluding myself but it is a heck of a ride.