Joe Tunis performing at Visual Studies Workshop August 23, 2025
In yesterday’s post I mentioned we had had to drop out of Matt Green’s Rochester walk in order to catch at least part of Joe Tunis’s twenty-sixth annual Day-Tour. This one consisted of 8 shows in and around Rochester where Joe performs with different musicians in each location. Peggi and caught one of his very first tours and try to catch at least one performance each year. Peggi made this video.
By chance we crossed paths with one of Joe’s earlier performances while we were on the walk withMatt Green. Joe was just finishing up at East End Green (across from Ugly Duck Coffee) when we left the Little Theatre. And then over near Grove Place we ran into James Tabbi power washing his porch.
If there was ever a movie that was right up our alley “The World Before Your Feet” is it. A documentary about Matt Green walking every street in New York City, over 8000 miles, it is just as fresh today as it must have been when it was released in 2018. Matt just completed his journey in September and he was on stage for a Q &A following an afternoon screening of the movie. He is just as warm and cheerful in person as he was in the movie. No wonder he never mugged.
Schiller Monument Downtown Rochester with tents for the unhoused along the fence
In the movie we get to experience the Brighton Beach bungalows, the gridded streets of torn down houses at the end of Queens, Emma Lazarus’s grave in Greenpoint cemetery. She wrote the poem on the Statue of Liberty. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” How quaint those words sound today. We see the oldest living thing in NY, the 400 year old Queens Giant tree and Seagate, vast expanses of former industrial site in Staten Island and the Coney Island gated community.
Finishing the 8,000 miles was really never really the objective. Each day’s adventure was the point. Along the way he collected funky images of former synagogues that have been converted to churches, barber shops and hair salons with z’s in their name like Cutz or Kutz and 9/11 murals. His ability to stay in the moment was remarkable.
Art Deco Rochester Fire Department
After the Q & A in Rochester Matt plotted a google route for a group walk. We left from the theater and headed over to Grove Place, down Saint Paul, through the Projects to High Falls and then across the river and down an alley behind State Street across Main to the old subway bed on Court Street and then through Washington Square Park. At Clinton Matt turned to us and said “I guess will do one more bridge.” We had been walking for two hours and we planned to catch Joe Tunis performing at Visual Studies Workshop at 4 so we reluctantly left the group. It was as good as the movie.
New paint job on the garage at the end of the street
Our neighbor’s son and his Russian bride have been painting their garage this summer. They live in the Adirondacks but they have spent the last three weeks or so here with his parents. They are taking their time with the paint job but doing it right.
I seems like a week since I last posted here. The summer heat has slowed things to a crawl, things like my brain, but it is all good. We don’t have air conditioning and that contributes to the lazy pace. We’ve spent a good amount of time in the garden keeping a steady stream of greens coming in with successive plantings. And we walk down to and along the beach most days. We spend most nights reading by candlelight on our screened in porch listening to the crickets, the owls, an occasional coyote and our neighbor’s air conditioning.
In order to retain Elon Musk as chief executive Tesla just granted him shares in the company worth $30 billion. The richest man in the world now has $150 billion worth and his overall wealth is estimated to be $350 billion. Just the kind of guy you want to put in charge of slashing federal aid programs.
Forbes has Donald Trump’s worth at $5.1 B, half of that coming from his $TRUMP Meme coin. I could be wrong but his inauguration gave us a glimpse of the end of the world, that scene where he was surrounded by tech giants and billionaires.
Meta posted a 36 percent quarterly increase in profit and a 22 percent jump in revenue. Not sure what happened to the Metaverse but they are now working on “super intelligence.” The A.I. will help Meta’s advertising business by improving its social media feed to keep users on its apps longer. Meta’s family of apps, which includes Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, has 3.48 billion daily users and they are going to use super intelligence to trap them in their ecosystem and increase the advertising revenue.
Peggi read “Careless People,” some of it out loud. NYT called it “genuinely shocking.” I guess that is still possible. Emotional targeting, algorithms that detect when a teenage girl starts deleting her selfies or uses the word “depression.” “It could identify when they were feeling worthless or helpless or like a failure, and would take that information and share it with advertisers.”Not to mention spreading hate speech or finding the “persuadables ” in a presidential election.
Trump at the Club World Cup Final at MetLife Stadium
You can’t stay away from politics. Not that that should be an objective. I’m just thinking how it keeps intruding, like when the president of FIFA couldn’t get Trump off the field while Chelsea celebrated their amazing victory over PSG.
Mary Jean Eisenhower, the president’s granddaughter, said in an interview. “I think it was a beautiful program, andI just found it very disturbing when it got caught into the political …” Conceived by a Kansas farmer and created by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Food for Peace” has sent sacks of grain, agricultural surplus, stamped “From the American People” to more than four billion people in 150 countries around the world. Now it is effectively dead. The program was administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Elon Musk fed “into the wood chipper”
PEPFAR, the campaign to end H.I.V. globally, was crippled by Elon Musk’s Government Efficiency inititive. Created during the George W. Bush administration the HIV treatment and prevention program is credited with saving over 26 million lives in low income countries. It was widely considered the single most effective public health campaign ever.
And this from Reuters: “U.S.-funded contraceptives worth nearly $10 million are being sent to France from Belgium to be incinerated, after Washington rejected offers from the United Nations and family planning organizations to buy or ship the supplies to poor nations following President Donald Trump’s decision to freeze U.S. foreign aid. The U.S. government will spend $160,000 to incinerate the stocks at a facility in France that handles medical waste.”
As Elon Musk told Joe Rogan, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
Judy Gohringer “Shoreline” diptych, acrylic on wood and Peter Gohringer “Totem” black walnut at Proximity Effect at RIT’s University Gallery
In the wall tags near these two pieces Judy Gohringer’s statement reads, “My challenge is the dance between depicting the recognizable in nature and conveying the essence of it in abstraction.” Her husband, Peter Gorhinger’s, statement reads, “Nature and abstraction have been constant sources of inspiration.” I love these two works and I love how they look together. They are my favorite pieces in “The Proximity Effect,” a group exhibition, at RIT’s University Gallery, up through July 25. The title is derived from the nearness of the artists’ studios in the Anderson Art Building.
Pat Bacon Photogravure, Kozo at University Gallery at RIT
These bowls, on a pedestal in front of Colleen Buzzard’s beautiful hanging drawings, stopped us in our tracks. They look too delicate to touch but at the same time they look rough and ready. Paper thin, well, they are made of paper. Photogravure prints on Kozo paper but how did Pat Bacon, the artist shape them so perfectly. Peggi thinks a balloon may be involved. But how does the paper hold its form once the balloon has been popped?
When someone asks for suggestions for things to do with out of town guests I always recommend parking somewhere in the High Falls district off of State Street and walking across the Pont de Rennes Bridge (named after Rochester’s sister city) for a spectacular view of the falls that put Rochester (the Flour City) on the map with all the mills that harnessed the power of the river to turn their stones. And at the other end of the bridge is one of Rochester’s oldest breweries, Genesee, with a restaurant and a great gift store for iconic souvenirs.
Between the gift shop and the room where they make the specialty beers is a huge arial photo of downtown Rochester, like maybe 15 feet long, with approximently twenty buttonsto push, one for each decade of Rochester’ beer history. The buttons each illuminate locations on the aerial photo of the breweries in operation during that time.
As popular as breweries are today you would think we were at a peak but if you pushed “1870-1880” twenty four locations light up. Rochester hit its high mark in working breweries during this time and the city vied with others for recognition as the nation’s preeminent brewing city. Emil Reisky and Henry Spies ran one of the breweries near the city’s High Falls. They sold the brewery to Mathias Kondolf and he renamed it “Genesee.”
1850-1860 Rochester benefited from an influx of industrious German immigrants. The city’s brewing industry also benefited from this migration and from the growing theory that beer was healthy. (It was sometimes referred to as “liquid bread”.) This frustrated temperance advocates. Lager beer was brewed and sold in Rochester for the first time in 1852. The Germans’ technique of aging beer often produced a lighter and smoother alternative to traditional ales.
1880-1890 The brewing industry employed the developing technology of refrigeration. This allowed bigger brewers to transport beer more effectively and to farther locations, eliminating many small local breweries. Bartholomay emerged as the largest of Rochester’s breweries, employing 150 workers, producing 300,000 barrels a year and utilizing 75 horses to deliver beer throughout the city.
1910-1920 The battle over Prohibition continued as the U.S. went to war against Germany. Politically compromised, large brewers (mostly of German descent) were easily vilified. My grandfather and his partner changed the name of his bar on Thurston and Chili Avenue from “Munich Tavern” to the “Dodd Miller Restaurant.”
1920-1933 While alcohol was illegal, consumption did not stop. Estimates indicate that Americans’ overall consumption of alcohol decreased by only 30 percent. My grandfather ran a speakeasy during this period..
1950-1960 Genesee’s entered the world of television advertising with its most memorable campaign. The “Jenny” girl made her first appearance in 1953.
Bob Smith, for twenty five years the host of “1370 Connection,” used to say, “Follow the money.” By starting there he could explain almost everything. It does sort of make the world go ’round. Lately I’ve been starting with the Business Section of the NYT instead of the A section and I’m finding the articles there, grounded in business practices as they are, bring a certain amount of clarity to the topics that can produce rage in the A section. Tariffs, the Big Beautiful Bill, War in Ukraine, China, Crypto and AI.
When I went away to school I was asked to choose a major. Up until then I had not given a thought to that subject. I really had no idea what my father did at Kodak. A Mechanical Engineer working as a Design Engineer, the lens projects were top secret at the time. I put down “Business.” I guess I was thinking about my grandfather behind the counter in his small grocery store. Turned out my roommate, already a junior, was also a business major. His father owned a jewelry store on the town square in New Castle, Indiana. My first semester I took Business Admin 101. Classes were held in a big auditorium just down the street from my dorm. All I remember about it was the IU football players coming in late, en masse, like someone was shepherding them through the academic phase of their careers. People called it a “pud course.” I switched majors in the first few weeks.
Our president got his BS in bs from Wharton Business School, went into business with his dad and was quickly sued for racial discrimination. He is a talented snake oil salesman with an insatiable appetite for attention. How much money can you make on perfume? Capitalism has its aberrations but I believe it is as good an organizing principal as any. I just wish Trump was a better business man.
China already has global dominance in high-tech industries like batteries, robotics and drones. They control the supply chains for rare earth minerals used in electric vehicles and they have the best electric vehicles on the planet for the best price. If you follow the money you see how the Big Beautiful Bill funnels money to the top, the tired “trickle down” theory. The Chinese government provides financial support for aggressive innovation. Trump is crippling green energy initiatives. China is going to have our lunch.
The building above, on Mustard Street near our old neighborhood, may have been part of the old French’s food processing factory. Once one of the iconic Rochester companies, they left town in the late seventies. I grew up with the stuff and remember how good that yellow streak looked on the hot dog pictured in the billboard behind the center field wall in the old Red Wing stadium.
I poked in front of this build while did my interview with Cal Zone on his WAYO Record Geek show. We video-chatted with Rich and Andrea today and Rich asked if I intended to do any more radio work. (Rich has a wildly succesful podcast series on Elmore Leonard’s books.) I laughed at the idea and said something about the interview and my song taste being kind of mild-mannered. When we hung up Peggi asked why I badmouthed my show. I am really happy that Peggi liked it.
During dinner tonight we found a news story from the Detroit News about Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster and Cosa Nostra boss who disappeared in 1975. Peggi had taken me by the Red Fox, the restaurant on Maple and Telegraph Road where he was last seen, when we were visiting her parents back in the day. They never found his body and didn’t even declare him dead until 1982. Now fifty years later someone is selling $30 tickets to a multi media presentation on July 23 at Macomb Community College where they will reveal where the body is buried. .
I parked in front of this window on my way to a yearly dermatologist appointment. I like being his first patient of the day and this window looked especially nice in the early morning light. Do I have skin cancer yet? He didn’t see any.
Our neighbor, Rick, is out front on his unicycle. He has a clown gig at the harbor this weekend and he’s warming up. He told us he’s having trouble with his “quick mount,” getting up on the bike from a standstill. At seventy-five with a knee replacement I would say he’s doing great. We played horseshoes for the first time this year and we both fell apart midway in the third round. It was tied with a match apiece and we were neck and neck to the last throw but it took forever to get there.
Local strawberries are on the shelves. The season lasts only a few weeks so it needs to be pounced upon. We picked up three quarts at the Brighton Farmers Market and heard Debby Kendrick Project at the same time. They sounded great in the open air. We bought some exotic mushrooms (the proprietor called our attention to the primordial underside) and some locally made mushroom pasta as well. It made a perfect dinner.
Last month’s big protest at Cobb’s Hill was reaffirming. But it was someone’s brilliant stroke to organize yesterday’s demonstrations in so many parts of the city, in so many cities. Of course it made attending convenient and surely brought out more people. The local sites included “Lakeshore at Durand Eastman.” That’s more than a mile long. Where, we wondered?
The beginning of a mile of “No Kings” protesters – Zoo Road and Lakeshore Boulevard
We walked from our house through the park (with others) to the lake. We could hear the cars honking and the crowd cheering. The crowd lined Lakeshore Boulevard from Zoo Road to Rock Beach Road. Someone gave us a small upside down flag. “It’s a distress signal,” they said. Most people had homemade signs, not the mass produced signs you see at a Trump rally. We saw many of our neighbors. I told the women holding this sign that I liked her graphics. We came home with the flags. I feel like we are starting to reclaim it.
The crews who go around the world covering up graffitti can’t seem to settle on the right Pantone color for the job. And we are all the richer for that. I love these abstracts. Here’s a few recent captures – onetwo
Peggi and I were shopping at Wegmans yesterday when a man, somewhere near our age, wheeled by in one of those electric shopping carts. We heard him coming. He was chanting, in a sing-song manner, “Trump is a nazi” over and over again. We first saw him in the produce department and then over by the yogurt. As we headed up to the check-out we crossed paths again. Same song, over and over again.
2 page spread from “Brief History of the World” Volume XXII
The days are numbered for this long running project. I delivered newspapers for five years back when a kid could work without breaking the law. I loved the daily headlines (redundant today), the sensational photos, the cracker-jack reporting and opinionated columnists but most of all I like the pictures. Miraculously we still get daily delivery of the local paper and the NYT but I realize newspapers are a thing of the past.
2 page spread from Paul Dodd “Brief History of the World” Volume XXII
For twenty five years or so I’ve cut pictures out. Not every day, sometimes weeks go by before I find myself staring at one long enough to think, “I’ll just cut it out. I keep them in a little box and when the box gets full I arrange them in pairs. Not all find a mate so they just stay in the box. I tape the pictures on three hole punched card stock and I’ve filled twenty three binders with the spreads – A “Brief History of the World.”
2 page spread from Paul Dodd “Brief History of the World” Volume XXII
I have just posted “Brief History of the World” Volume XXII. CLICK HERE to download the free eBook.
This book is available here in the generic ePub format. On Mac the download should should open in your Books app. To read (ePub format) on a PC, you’ll need to use a third-party reader compatible with the ePub format. Popular options include Adobe Digital Editions, Calibre, or FB Reader. You can also use Microsoft Edge
I have a page on PopWars where 36 other “Artists Books” are available as free downloadable eBooks.
"The government will no longer track major sources of greenhouse gases, data that has been used to measure the scale and identify sources of the problem for the past 15 years.
"We're not doing that climate change, you know, crud, any-more." Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told Fox Business on May 8.
By getting rid of data, the administration is trying to halt the national discussion about how to deal with global warming, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist"
I copied that chunk from a recent article in the Democrat & Chronicle. Aren’t we lucky to still have a daily newspaper in Rochester? I’m not sure that we are. I had not heard the word “crud” since the Mad Magazine days.
Everybody’s complaining about all the rain we have had. Our garden loves it. We have a few varieties, in a few stages, of lettuce, arugula and spinach. I took this photo after picking two bags full and Peggi, at the other end of the garden, is putting in the collards and kale plants, that we started indoors, in the earth. We would normally have our tomatoes and peppers in by now but we still have a slight possibility of a frost so we’ll wait until Monday.
We have only been to Tinseltown twice. Once for “Shine a Light,” the Martin Scorsese movie about The Rolling Stones and on Thursday for Neil Young’s new movie, “Coastal.” If we can believe what Neil says in the movie, these were his first live dates in four years. He has gotten older and he is not afraid to show it. The movie moves at an old man pace. But the songs, all gems, sounded better than ever.
We walked through the park and then along the lake before turning around and coming back the same way. We usually construct some sort of loop but the blossoms were so pretty we need a double dose. The scent of the magnolias is heavenly. Today it was mixed with ganja, coming from a parked car.
Sam, who lives down below, told us he bought a book on the history of the Durand Eastman Park. There is section in there that talks about how the area we live in was supposed to have been part of the park but it was sold to developers in 1920’s. He told us he bought the book at the brew pub up on Titus. We made a note to stop by there. He also told us he heard a big tree come down in the woods behind his house. So Peggi and I tucked our pant legs in and walked through the woods to the park today. There were so many big trees down we couldn’t determine which was the new one. The last time we were down here we were on skis. Climbing over the debris I was remembering how effortlessly we moved through the woods on skis.
Out on the golf course we saw they had one of the fairways all torn up. Plastic drain pipes were laying in the bottom of long trenches. One full day of sun and the white magnolias were popping in the arboretum. There was a creepy pick-up parked along Lakeshore with a bumper sticker that read “Gun Control Is Hitting Your Target.” The workers have opened the roads in the park to car traffic. I like it better when they’re closed but it is not my park.
I took my pole saw down to Jedi’s around noon today. He was still in his pjs when I rang the bell. I told him I was going to cut the white plastic bag down that had been trapped in his tree all winter, sometimes billowing at full sail as we walked by. Jedi told me he had tried to get it but he couldn’t reach it. I suspected it bothered us more than it bothered him.
The plastic fitting that allows the pole to extend was locked so Jedi, outdoors in his slippers, hung on to one end while I pulled on the other. Like a tug of war I pulled him into the pachysandra before we got it free. I cut the bag down and went home to fix the pole saw fitting. While I was in the garage Rick stopped by to borrow a wrench. He was getting his his bike ready for spring. I told him I had cut the white bag down that was in Jedi’s tree all winter. He didn’t know what I was talking about.
I didn’t have the right wrench to fix my pole saw either so I went down to Jared’s. He was outside talking to John and I showed them my problem. We went into Jared’s garage where he found a “thin walled” socket that did the trick. I told him I had cut the white bag down from Jedi’s tree and he said he had never noticed it.
I don’t follow baseball anymore and it is not just because the designated hitter rule. A long time ago I was a rabid fan. Eddie Mathews was my favorite baseball player. That’s not his autograph, it was printed on the card. An antique dealer, who we did some work for, gave me the card. It is so off register it is not worth all that much. Mathews played for the Milwallkee Braves (before they moved to Atlanta.) He batted third and played third base (my position.) I had a hat just like his. It is hard to see but the underside of the brim was a restful green (like the background of the card.) The Braves were my favorite team. They beat the Yankees in the 1957 World Series.
Jason Wilder is working on a baseball project and he sent me an outline so it got me thinking about the game. My mom told me she got Stan Musial’s autograph when he was with the Rochester Red Wings. I thought that was pretty cool. I used to love going to the Wings games. Rather park in the parking lot my father would drive up and down those small streets that run off Norton and pick out a parking spot on someone’s lawn (for a small fee, arranged with the owner.) My father would buy me a scorecard and I’d keep score, working those little diamonds. Mostly, I love the billboards in the outfield, all the local brands, the hole in the sign that paid a bonanza if someone hit a ball in there. I remember my brother getting a hole burnt in his jacket when he leaned back on a guy who was smoking a cigar behind us.
When I was seven or eight an older kid down the street gave me a stack of cards from the fifties. There was a corner store near our house on Humboldt Street called Fessner’s and I bought my first cards there, a nickel for five random cards and a stick of gum. My family moved to Webster when I was ten and I inherited a paper route from a kid who was moving. With all that disposable income my collection grew enormously. So did my tally of cavities.
I was thirteen, at the peak of my buying power, when I lost interest in playing with them. My cards from 1963 remained in mint condition. (I had three of Pete Rose’s rookie cards.) When I moved out my mother said, “Take this shoebox of cards or I’m gonna throw them out.” A few years later I saw a sign for some sort of baseball card convention. I took my shoebox and showed them to a guy who turned out to be my high school math teacher, Mr. Setek. He said, “I will buy these and I will give you a fair price but I can’t do it here. I’ll come to your house.” I can’t remember the total but he gave me enough for us to take a week long trip to Cartagena, Columbia. At the time it was the cheapest tropical destination.
Margaret Explosion at Little Theatre Café 7-9 pm – photo by Jason Wilder
I expect to wake up one day and Trump will have made slavery legal again. So the “Super Callous Fragile Racist Sexist Nazi Potus,” Alexa . . Please Change the President,” “Impeach the Beast,” “Just Stop Fucking Everything,” “Follow Your Leader” (pic of Hitler shooting himself), “Know your Parasites”, ” (3 pics, dog tick, deer tick, luna tick) and the 4000 fellow Rochesterians protesting the administration in Cobbs Hill Park was a site for sore eyes.
Margaret Explosion plays Wednesday, March 19 at Little Theatre Café
If the temperature reaches 77 today we will reach a record set in 1903. Margaret Explosion seems to draw better in unpleasant weather. It could be a quiet night tonight. And we used a photo of Peggi and Melissa to promote the show only to learn Melissa can’t make the gig tonight. And just an hour ago we learned Jack will not be able to make it so no bass clarinet. We will perform as a trio.
“So we took over the Kennedy Center. We didn’t like what they were showing and various other things. We’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke. There’s no more woke in this country. NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA – ONLY THE BEST,” – you know who.
These quotes still make me laugh. Is there a better way to deal with this onslaught?
