Corey will get a kick out of this photo. This mirror is right across the street from his house. That’s his old mattress in the driveway. We brought. back an armload of Collard greens from the garden, the regular, giant leaf plant and the Hen- Pecked version which looks exactly like it sounds. We thinned our carrots and brought back some young ones and Peggi made greens and beans with it all and we ate out on the porch with an ice cold NA Saint Pauli.
Brad Fox is back in town, temporarily living with his brother and bound for his mom’s old place once they finish a few renovations. He’s been gone a long time.
First Friday was fun. Peggi took photos and got a great one of Dominica, Tom and Barbara getting off the elevator which Colleen was operating for the evening. It was mostly a different crowd from the opening and that made it fun. Plenty of art talk. And it was hot under the gallery lights, the way it should be at the peak of summer.
The gallery is open by appointment until the end of the month and there is one more event in the space. City Newspaper ran a little piece about that.
City News article by Kate Stathis about Margaret Explosion performance in Colleen Buzzard Studio Space Friday, August 12, 2022
One of the nicest things about my show at Colleen’s studio is having the chance to get to know Colleen. She once told me she wasn’t “particularly fond of painting” so this wasn’t a given. I am particularly fond of her artwork and I only found her comment intriguing. She invited Peggi and I over to see the garden that she her husband, Hucky, have created in their backyard. It is the garden of the gods! Every kind of plant, flower and tree seems happy here and some like the olive, orange and fig tree are only out for the summer so it was a thill to see it all at the peak of summer..
Statue on Exchange Street welcoming you to the Corn Hill neighborhood
“I am always trying to get home in dream.” The first breath of Louise’s new poem, published here in the Spanish press, drew me in. Our friend, Pete Monacelli has painted a few hundred paintings with the title, “Searching for Home.” We have a few here that we treasure but what’s with the longing for this mythical place. Isn’t it right here?
And this is what makes the world go ’round. I know the gist of the backstory for Louise’s poem, “Mother at Eighty.” It is unsettling. But that very same material shaped this beautiful poem. “that pale disc of sun on a white clouded day —.”
The accompanying photo, by Matthew Leonard. certainly caught my eye. Louise is standing in front my mugshot series of friends from the 1970’s.
Gym class was my favorite period in school. In fact, it was the only one I loved. And after school I would most likely be found on the playground or in a gym. When I got to Indiana University they had a requirement that you had to take two semesters of gym, except they didn’t call it gym, they called it “HPER.” There was a HPER building and a HPER program. The acronym stood for Health, Physical Education and Recreation. The two HPER classes I chose were Diving and Trampoline. The Diving class was taught by Hobie Billingsley, who at the time was the US Olympic diving coach. IU had a great swimming team as well. Doc Councilman was the coach and he also coached the US Olympic swimming team. Mark Spitz was in my class. He sold pot on the side.
Hobie Billingsley as pictured in his obituary.
Hobie’s obituary was in today’s paper along with this photo. As the obit stated, “Great trust and rapport is needed between diver and coach.” I tell this story all the time but it bears repeating today. On the very first day of class, just after he introduced himself, he asked us all to climb to the very top of the high platform and fall backwards into the pool below. The 10 meter platform is comparable to the top of a three-story building. My knees were trembling as I climbed the open stairs. He told us that we needed to trust him and if we did and followed his instructions we would not be hurt.
Once at the top we were to walk to the front of the platform and then turn around so that our heels were on the very edge. We were instructed to stand tall and stiff and then simply fall backwards. There were some sloppy and somewhat painful entries but if you followed his instructions you would do a complete 360 before your toes entered the water.
Brian Peterson studio door in the Hungerford Building
Brian lived in a big house on Alexander Street just a few doors down from where I lived when I was born. My parents place was just an apartment on the second floor and as my father used to tell it, my crib was in the hallway. Brian filled his house with books and art and eventually he rented a studio in the Hungerford Building to work on and display his assemblages.
We first met him at an early Macintosh users group meeting at East High. He was giving a presentation of how he used the photo software to display his digital photos, all commonplace now but this was Macintosh II days. Peggi and I were knocked out by his photos. We talked to him after the show and became lifelong friends. Sadly, his life ended but he was a Buddhist so he is not really dead.
A memorial was held for him in Record Archive’s back room last night and we met his daughter, Rae, who we found capable of carrying Brian’s spirit forward. Dick Storms was there and told us he first met Brian in 1965 at Kodak. Brian had all sorts of jobs. He was a garbage collector for the city and then a city inspector so of course he knew everybody. Some called him Charlie, others called him Brian.
His job included photographing code violations and he said that influenced how he saw the world. Before social media he sent a photo a day to anyone who asked to be on his mailing list.
Brian grew up in the Bay Area and met Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell. He gave us a Ferlinghetti book of poetry. He took still photos on an 8mm movie camera and his son put a few of them online.
Luvon Jones playing Bill Coppard’s drums at High Falls
We parked downtown and walked over to High Falls to hear the Debby Kendrick band play WXXI’s noontime concert. The walk was longer than we realized so we missed about half of their set. Pete was playing a different set of drums. Bill Coppard bought this Ludwig Champagne Sparkle set in 1962 and he gave them to Pete to sell. Lavon tried them out after the set and decided to buy them.
Reading about the demise of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer brought back a flood of memories. In the early web days IE was browser of choice on both the pc and Mac side but web pages behaved differently on a pc than it did on a Mac. This was long before the html5 protocol was established so we were always writing if IE clauses in the code to get pages to look like we wanted them to. If fact we kept a clunky pc around just to see how pages responded in what we called “a worst case scenario.”
This photo, it’s about three feet wide, has hung our bathroom for thirty years. It’s out in the garage now as we did a refresh with our objets d’art. We bought it at a High Falls show back when Sally Wood Winslow ran the art gallery there. Roy Sowers took the photo and he titled it “Debra.” Apparently Debra went to RIT with him back when he was a photo student. Wherever she is today I hope she is happy. She brought a lot of joy to us.
The Bagel shop at 12 Corners was closed today for a funeral. Jack and Robyn’s son, Ian, died due to complications from a rare form of cancer at 27. He was near death years ago and then recovered but that doesn’t make it any easier for his loved ones. His illness strengthened his faith and his faith sustained him. The service was beautiful, just as Ian and his parents had planned it.
The priest who said the mass told the standing room only crowd that he visited Ian in the hospital just a few weeks ago. Ian told him he had come to the realization that his suffering was bringing his friends and loved ones closer to god. He told the priest “If I die it will have all been worth it.”
The funeral was held in Saint John’s the Evangelist church on Humboldt Street, my family’s parish when I was growing up. It all felt so familiar. I took note of saints in the stained glass windows. Joan of Arc was directly across from us. Mary Magdalene, Martin de Porres, Agnes, Charles Borromeo, Francis of Assisi, Elizabeth of Hungary, Michael the Archangel, Martha and Thomas Aquinas. Maybe they can find a spot for Saint Ian. The four evangelists were above the choir along with these Old Testament dudes, Gideon, King Solomon, King David, Moses, Isaiah and Ezekiel. The priest was cool up until the point where he explained that Communion was for Catholics only.
Ian played guitar as well as his dad and even sat in with Margaret Explosion. Here’s Ian’s father, Jack, playing bass clarinet on “Disappear.”
In their final years, Peggi and I helped my mom and dad with their paperwork and taxes. We wound up with a six or seven inch pile of paperwork, many of the pages in my father’s mechanical drawing style – all caps, block printing. We wanted to get rid of them but some of the sheets had their social security numbers on them so we asked our neighbors if we could borrow their paper shredder. We hadn’t finished more that fifty sheets when the thing froze.
I took it apart and spent a couple of hours cleaning it but when we put back together it still wouldn’t shred. So we researched shredder and bought one on Amazon. It arrived today. We tackle the stack and then give the shredder to the neighbors.
Downtown was hopping on Friday night. We started First Friday at the RIT City Art Space where the “Clarissa Street Uprooted” show was. Something was happening at Parcel 5, there was graduation at Harro East and we had a hard time finding a parking space. This green car pulled up in front of the clothing shop across from the Liberty Pole and the music coming from it was so loud it drew everyone’s attention. I Shazamed the song and learned it was “Booming” by Big Boogie.
We met Steve Black when he was an art student at RIT. He hand colored each frame of his video for “Don’t Wake Me” on our first ep, Personal Effects. Recently he shot the video for Margaret Explosion’s “Disappear.”
“At 1:30 on Wednesday, June 8, the Rochester Brainery presents Stephen Black demonstrating examples of GeoPose AR installed in Rochester, near public locations like the Little Theatre, Record Archive, RIT, Strong Museum of Play, the Flower City Art Center, International Plaza, and the Rochester Public Market. The hands-on demo allows visitors to experience GeoPose AR’s ability to inform, entertain and delight. Uses for education, tourism, marketing and art will become apparent.”
Mesclun, Romaine, Red Fire, Gentilina, Spinach and Arugula in garden 2022
Happy Memorial Day – a chance to remember my friend, Rex, who was shot in the back at 19, friendly-fire style, in Viet Nam.
We walked up to the lake along Zoo Road. The cherries, magnolias, apple and lilac blossoms are all finished but we spotted a group of Asian Americans sitting under a stand of dramatic Chinese Fringe trees in full bloom. The lake level is still too high to get from the Durand Lake outlet to the Eastman Lake outlet on dry land. I guess we could have taken off our shoes but we didn’t. On the boardwalk over Tamarac Swamp we looked down at the bull frogs who were making a racket. Peggi pointed to a big one and said, “What’s coming out of it’s mouth?” It looked like another frog’s head. It turned out they were having sex in public.
We saw one of our neighbors on her bike and she told us she was just getting over Covid. She went to a birthday lunch with seven others and five of them got Covid. Our friends, Pete and Gloria, came down with Covid yesterday. We had been with them earlier in the week.
Our Padron peppers are in and the tiny red pepper plants. The jalapeños are next. We’re doing our best to keep up with the greens but they may get ahead of us.
“Licorice Nibs & Ballpoint Pen Springs” 2011 original drawing by David Greenberger. Ink and colored pencil on paper. Purchased on eBay.
“Astronomers announced on Thursday that they had pierced the well of darkness and dust at the center of our Milky Way galaxy to capture the first picture of “the gentle giant” dwelling there: a supermassive black hole, a trapdoor in space-time through which the equivalent of four million suns have been dispatched to eternity leaving behind only their gravity and violently bent space-time.” – NYT
On the same day a package arrived from David Greenberger, the artwork we bought on eBay after receiving an email that alerted us to the listing. We paid $14.99 and David threw in one from his drawing/collage series of drummers, with a postage stamp heads sitting on drummers’ bodies as they sit behind a kit. Ours featured an Indian stamp of Gandhi.
I have friends and family members who are affected by the quantity of sunshine in a day. I recognize that SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) is real. A good friend of ours is moving back here from the Bay Area. As much as I am looking forward to seeing him in person I was encouraging him not to move here. He gets bummed out when it’s cloudy and he complains about it to anyone who will listen. I don’t want to hear it. I like cloudy days and I love living here.
There was a mist in the air this morning but it had temporarily stopped raining. We saw one other person. The cherry, crab apple and magnolia blossoms along Zoo Road looked magnificent against the grey. We took along Durand Lake, through Katsura Glen where the new leaves were just coming out.
Is today as nice nice as yesterday? Maybe but yesterday was my birthday so it was different.
Peggi made blueberry pancakes for breakfast and we took our time with the paper. We went down a YouTube hole for a bit and made a few phone calls. My sister has Covid so we talked on what would have normally been a workday for her. We never left the house until 2 but it was plenty of time for a six mile walk.
We started at my parents’ grave site, seventy-two years after they celebrated their first born’s arrival. I don’t think they knew how lovely this spot is when they picked it out. The green burial section on a hill overlooking Riverside, the non-denominational cemetery next door and the Genesee River was a brand new concept for Holy Sepulcher. There’s daffodils there now and a bench.
Wood pile in the woods near Genesee River
We left the car sitting near the graves and walked into the woods along the river. We found a patch of mature skunk cabbage looking just like cabbage does near the end of the summer. My father loved getting out in the very earliest days of Spring to find skunk cabbage popping through the snow in its flowering state. We found a few homeless guys camping out and this mysterious mound of sticks and eventually hooked up with the paved path that takes you down the river bank to Turning Point Park where the McKeil Spirit was unloading cement from Hamilton, Ontario. It looked as big as an apartment building or cruise ship and made the mighty Genesee look small..
Margaret Explosion song recorded last week at Little Theatre Café
The type face, Glyphic Neue Neue Wide, could read as “Brian Ride.” That would work just as well. This song is from our gig last Wednesday and the train footage was in my home movie collection.
I used a still too, the shot above. I took this in 2011 on a high speed train to Sevilla. I considered using this still for the whole movie. I love it that much. The Spanish colors on the upholstery, the dark hair on the gentleman, his thin mustache, the stripes on his shirt, the olive green tie, the mustard pants! If there was some blood red in this photo we would have the entire Spanish pallette.
This is how to travel. This is how to live. This is civilization.
Margaret Explosion plays one more Wednesday, tomorrow, at the Little Theatre Café.
The imaginary keyboard on my iPad slipped from numbers to letters just as I was typing 2022. I caught a glimpse of the screen just before typing the last “2” and saw that I had typed “wow.” Try it.
I love watching these birds. Woodsier than pigeons they spend more time on the ground than in the air. They waddle around and are always in pairs. I thought they were Morning Doves until I looked it up. They are probably called Mourning Doves because their coo sounds like a lament.
A pair of them are building a nest in the cherry tree out front and we have a closeup view of the action. The male, the more colorful and bigger one, shown on the left in my photo, dutifully collects small sticks and leaves and brings them back to the nest, putting each piece in the mouth of his mate. She packs it under her body while she sitting on the nest and he flys off for another piece. They can live to be thirty years old.
There was a note attached to our morning papers informing us that the carrier has decided to retire ” after thirty plus years of getting up at 4AM.” He threw in “the rising gas prices and the dwindling subscriptions” as factors that convinced him “it doesn’t make any sense for me to continue.”
Spring has come again but a sense of mortality hangs in the air. Friends and neighbors, all close to my age, are dealing with serious health issues. The last of my parents’ siblings is gone and one of my cousins. We have sat in on a few Zoom memorials. And there’s the book I’m reading. Here are two passages from Etel Adnan’s “Shifting the Silence.”
“Almost all of my beliefs have deserted me. I take it as a kind of liberation, and anyway, they were never too many. Our houses are cluttered, our minds too, so a fire as devastating as it can be, can well clear the air, enlarge the space, make room for some silence. Year after year all we do is gather dust.”
“I need to simplify my thinking: to come to the roots of the olive trees I have planted on my island, sit close to them, look at every leaf. Start early in the morning. Then close my eyes and let the morning sun touch my face. Go to the Mediterranean at the street corner, go into its water, its salt, its acid colors, its heat. Oh Lord, let’s stop thinking. Let’s just be, and for many hours in a row, merge with this vegetal and metallic kind of consciousness which is so overpowering.”
Rich’s video for “Tilt-A-Wheel” plays like an extended version of the last scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers On A Train.” It fits the song, from MX-80’s recent, as yet unreleased album, perfectly. Mixed by Steve Albini, it is the last album recorded with the legendary guitarist, Bruce Anderson.
Bruce was a god-like figure in Bloomington, Indiana in the late 60’s when I showed up. He played with Mrs. Seamon’s Sound Band (with Michael Brecker) ( the first band I saw there), the Screaming Gypsy Bandits with Mark Bingham and Caroline Peyton (who also recently passed) and went on to form the seminal band, MX-80 Sound. The bands’ line-ups and sounds kept changing but Bruce stayed the same. I’m sure I saw every local Screaming Gypsy Bandits’ performance. Peggi and I saw the first few MX-80 shows at the local library and then left town in late ’74 before our friends, Rich Stim and Dave Mahoney, joined the band.
Somewhere in the early 70’s, Steve Hoy (that’s him on the cover of MX-80 Hard Attack) and I walked over to Bruce’s apartment to get our hair cut. It was a Zen-like experience and Bruce did a great job but Steve felt he could do just as well for less so he became our barber.
Bruce was a close friend of our close friends and those that remain gathered yesterday over Zoom for a memorial. The pain from the loss was evident. Rich Stim, Angel Corpus Christi, Dale Sophiea, Steve Hoy, Kim Torgerson, Michael Gribbroek, Marc Weinstein and Howard Thompson were all there along with members of Bruce’s family. Peggi and I learned just how special Bruce was as a person and the tributes were beautiful.
I was also struck by connections between people now scattered across the country. Steve Hoy was my roommate in the dorm (Shea 2, Foster Quad) my freshman year. Dave Mahoney was my best friend in high school and came out to Bloomington after dropping out of MCC. Rich was a former Shea resident and a friend of Steve’s. He had a crush on Andrea, then Bruce’s wife, and had me take some Super 8 footage of her behind the counter at Discount Records. Peggi was friends with Rich and Dale before we hooked up. Kim Torgerson was married to Dave. I guess I introduced them. She lived in the dorm across the street from me. She took the classic MX-80 Sound photos.
Michael Gribbroek grew up in Rochester near where Peggi and I live now. He was the first person Bruce Anderson met when he moved into the nearby Wilke Quadrangle on the IU campus. Mrs. Seamon, from the Mrs. Seamon Sound Band was the head dietician at Wilkie Quad. Michael found my blog through Andrea and follows our walks through his old stomping grounds. He told a story yesterday of the moment he knew Bruce was going to drop out of art school. They were in an art history class together, writing an essay in one of those little light blue books about how the art critics treated Mondrian. Michael looked over at Bruce and he was making cartoon-like drawings of critics physically torturing Mondrian in graphic detail.
Marc Weinstein is the co-founder of the world’s largest independent record store, Amoeba. He played drums with MX after Dave passed and grew up in Buffalo. He knows all the bands we played with there in the Personal Effects days. Howard Thompson put out the first MX-80 album while working for Island in London. Howard is good friends with Kevin Patrick, the lead singer in New Math, and he came to Rochester to produce the first single, Die Trying. I played drums on that track. Peggi and I went back to Bloomington to hear MX-80 audition for Howard and his new boss at Bronze in Dale’s basement.
Head-spinning but then again, I could have this all wrong.
Do kids play Pick Up Sticks anymore? They might be considered dangerous. And the game is probably too delicate for these times. I remember loving it. The colors of the sticks, the finesse required to slide one out but then there were all those arguments over whether you disturbed the pile or not.
Instead of walking the last couple of days we picked up sticks on our property. The windstorm left small branches of dead wood everywhere. Our yard is clear and ready for tonight’s snowstorm. When we last walked (March 9th) we spotted these two swimmers looking pretty comfortable in Lake Ontario.
