View of Irondequoit Bay from house for sale on the west side
We were riding our bikes down to the pier near the bay winding our way through the funky neighborhoods that line the bay. There was a garage sale at the house in front of the backyard pictured above. I checked out the books, “I Am Ozzy, “The Long Hard Road Out of Hell” by Marilyn Manson and Nikki Sixx’s “The Heroin Diaries,” and then noticed someone standing in the backyard. There was some sort of temperature inverse going on that day, we rode through warm and cool pockets, and long low cloud hung over the bay so I wanted a closer look.
They owner was out there and she said they were planning on putting the house up for sale in the next few days. I took note because our friend, Kathy, has been looking for a house for quite a while. Like us, when we moved from the city, she has no real need to move so she was taking her time, like years worth of time. We emailed her this photo and said something like, “Here is a view from your backyard.”
She called two days later and told us she had bought the house. Turns out the owners were only living there temporarily. They had downsized and sold their former house to Lou Gramm of Foreigner and were living here while they built a new home. A man who lives down the street is responsible for fixing the house up. A young French couple lives next door. I hope it all works out.
Linda, down the street is in Peggi’s yoga class and she told Peggi she thinks they have a fox living in their backyard. It turns out a few neighbors all think they have a fox living on their property. It’s surely the same fox, golden brown, somewhere between a cat and dog in size. We’ve seen it many times now and we were sitting out back when it pranced by with something in its mouth. I was certain it was part of our neighbor’s black cat. I kept my eye out for the cat the rest of the day and grew even more certain that it had met its demise. I was afraid to ask them if they had seen their cat recently but after a day I got up the courage. Turns out the cat was fine and they too had seen the fox many times.
I asked Jared, at the other end of the street, if he had seen the fox and of course he had. He told us foxes won’t bother a cat. Maybe a kitten but not a cat.
There is nothing like local strawberries. Red all the way through, sweet and juicy, a completely different fruit from the West Coast ones we get here in the winter. We rode our bikes up to Amans Farm Market yesterday and brought home a couple quarts. I didn’t see any local cherries there and that got me thinking. I always thought the cherries came before the strawberries.
That notion was fixed a long time ago when I was 14 or 15. I know school was still in session and a farm on Ridge Road, just outside of the village of Webster, was hiring kids to pick cherries. I had to get a work permit and that’s when I got my social security card. I already had a paper route for years but somehow they got around all the labors laws with paperboys.
Picking cherries after school was a great job. You got paid by how much you picked so it was solid work experience At that time we’d climb the trees with a bucket in our hands and climb down when it was full. Today they have figured out a way to keep the trees low to the ground so you don’t need a ladder or anything. I remember someone had a transistor radio up in the trees and we’d be listening to our favorite songs on WBBF and WSAY and eating as many cherries as we could. I think my brother ate too many and got sick on them or maybe that was me.
Once the cherries were all picked and school was out we were offered jobs picking strawberries out in the hot sun. It was brutal. I quit.
Blue wought iron chairs at lakeside, Rochester New York
The U.S. should have been able to walk all over Nigeria but they only managed one goal, well, two with the bad off-sides call, and they couldn’t even score with Nigeria a woman down. How are they going to handle Germany, Brazil or even Canada? I’m glad Abby got one but but she kind of lumbers around the center. Unless someone is looking for her head on a corner she doesn’t see much action at all. We’ve got a solid defense but things fall apart in the middle. OK, they made it out of the group of death but I wish I wasn’t so worried about them.
After the game we stopped over at our neighbor’s house. Wreckless Eric was staying there overnight on his way to a solo gig in Toronto. He played us his new record, first one in twelve years, but talked most of the way through it. Record sounds lush in low fi way. Peggi told Eric he’s a very melodic bass player and Eric told us the guy in Yo La Tenga told him he sounds like Jack Cassidy. That led to a Jefferson Airplane discussion and then Jack Bruce and Cream, the first three Hendrix albums and Led Zeppelin’s 1. And then we discussed the merits of hearing songs out of context. We left when it got around to Jethro Tull.
Following up on yesterday’s post about photographing interesting looking people there is this whole selfie phenomena. There is no negotiation with a model and the subject is always ready and willing. It is hard to even look at a painting in a museum without someone standing in front of it for a selfie.
I thought maybe I’d read a little something about selfies so I googled it and before I had the word spelled out I was prompted to click on “selfies before death.” I better get busy.
Matisse painting, “The Piano Lesson,”at the Museum of Modern Art
Yoko Ono had so many good ideas her show was almost exhausting. She is a heavy hitter in conceptual art like her friend, the man they call “JC,” John Cage. She certainly didn’t dim John Lennon’s career but he may have hampered hers. She was really on a roll before they met.
MoMA has two sensational Giacometti paintings on display next to one of his figures on a two wheeled cart. A love his paintings. They are as playful, spatially speaking, as his sculptures and the two look so good together it was hard to move along.
There is also a fun show of Gilbert & George’s early work, mostly large drawings accompanied by this quote. “They weren’t Good Drawers. They weren’t Bad Drawers. But My God, they were Drawers.”
The reassembled Jacob Lawrence “Migration” series was graphic and moving. At the end of number 60 they funneled you into a room with film footage of Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” and it packed an extreme punch.
Matisse’s “Swimming Pool.” is still up and next to it a whole room of choice Matisse paintings. The nearby Van Gogh “Starry Night” makes this the gravitational center of Manhattan.
We came down gently with Matisse’s back reliefs on the wall of the sculpture garden.
On Saturday we got to Chelsea much earlier than we usually do. We were prepared to see some art before all the galleries disappear down here. The place is on the move. Up. Most of the galleries were closed. Not because they’ve been squeezed out by condos but for the holiday. Everywhere we go holidays are getting in the way.
The Marlborough Gallery on W. 25 was open unfortunately. The sculpture show on the ground floor was silly so we followed a sign that read “Landscape Painting, Julius von Bismark” to the second floor where two videos were playing on a large screen. One had a group of workers in a tropical setting painting the leaves of large plants. Green on green. The other showed workers on ladders painting the rocks on the side of a hill. Lol. We were offended. Susan Inglett Gallery was open. The Hope Gangloff painting show there had had a nice write-up in yesterday’s paper. I liked them but not a lot. I like who her influences are, Alice Neel and Egon Schiele.
The new Whitney’s inaugural show was really fun. The building itself is fun. They pulled out their best stuff but arranged it in a mostly chronological order from the top floor down and a very curious thing happened. The oldest stuff was the best, the most engaging as well. By the time we got to the fifth floor with the Barbara Kruger and Matthew Barney stuff I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
Photo of Iggy Pop in rock’n roll gear store, Detroit Michigan
Downtown Detroit looks like a war zone but there is so much optimism in the air you just know they are if not over the hump at least on top of it. We are staying in a hotel at the very beginning of Woodward Avenue, the street that runs north from the center of the city past Eminem’s “8 Mile” and all the way out to 12 Mile where we planned to hook up with Peggi’s high school buddies.
The few restaurants that are down here are packed. There was an hour and half wait at the first one we stopped at. And a restaurant named “Hudson”that we stopped at for breakfast was so crowded we ordered coffee to go. There’s a Hard Rock Cafe here and a creepy, high end, rock’ roll gear, chain store called “John Varvatos.” “Vintage guitars, Records & Audio. Tailor on Premise.” We looked at the rock’ roll coffee table books but had hard a very hard time with the clothes.
We found the Juventus vs Real Madrid game from last week on the tube in our room. I knew was a 1-1 tie but it was still thrilling. There’s a dance club across the street from our hotel so we’re lucky the heating system sounds like a white noise generator. We Watched a guy on a bicycle stop and pick up cigarette butts left in front of the club in the morning
Shephard Farley’s doing a huge mural around the corner at the Martius building, formerly the Compuserve headquarters. We headed over there to watch but he wasn’t up yet.
We were listening to Tom Petty’s “American Girl” as we stood in line to buy Flash tickets over the weekend. The song sounded great but once we got in the stadium it turned out to be a cover band. Every song they did sounded as good as the original. So you have to wonder why. Why not just play the recording? I’d much rather hear Angel Corpus Christi’s dreamy Tom Petty covers.
We went up to Olmstead’s Highland Park tonight where the Psychedelic Furs were were playing for free at the Lilac Festival. The guys, the Butler brothers, were covering themselves. They sounded exactly like they did thirty years ago, same songs, nothing new. Kind of an odd experience.
About seventy five of us were seated in a warm room on an eighty degree day, all chairs facing toward a big screen tv. “Called to Serve” featured Sandra Day O’Conner, John Roberts and Samuel Alito extolling the virtues of our trial by jury system. Former jurors talked about their experience. Everyone looked especially large because the video had been stretched from its 4×3 original format to 16×9. The guy sitting next to me was all decked out in Harley Davidson gear and holding onto a hardback copy of Ace Frehley’s autobiography, “No Regrets.” I spotted only a handful of African Americans in the crowd.
When the video ended we were led into the courtroom where we watched some people shuffle papers for about twenty minutes. The judge came in, apologized for the delay and briefly explained the case. Three cops, who were seated directly in front of me, were accused of using excessive force when they arrested this guy in 2007 for some sort of domestic issue. The guy, sitting alone at a big table with a box of papers, was wearing a green jump suit and currently serving a prison term on an unrelated charge. We were told that was of no concern to us.
They called sixteen names, mine included, and we were seated in the jury box. I think they were working their way toward seating only eight jurors. The judge asked each of us many questions based on the forms we had filled out. Would we be available for the next few weeks? I said I might have some conflicts but would try to move them. He asked what I did when I worked for the police department in the seventies. I told him I pulled mugshots and made flyers for about a year until the grant for my graphic arts position ran out.
A woman who said she was breaking out in hives was let go. A man who said his fourth ammendment rights were violated when he went through the metal detector downstairs was let go but I made the cut up to the break. The jury box faced a wood paneled wall with a big built-in clock. It read five to noon and I believed it until I saw smaller clock below it. It was still only ten o’clock. Despite the extensive downtime, relatively few people brought reading material and of course phones were confiscated at the door. The woman sitting next to me in the jury box was reading “Ghostbread.” I told her I loved the book and she said, “I’m reading it for the second time.”
Next came a round of personal questions from the judge. What do you do for a living, are you married, what are you hobbies? About half had no hobbies at all. One guy answered, “I enjoy not working.” That got a good laugh. Most people answered all the questions enthusiastically. I got the sense they really wanted to be on this jury for the next three or four weeks. I can’t say I was looking forward to being trapped in the Federal Building for the next month hearing this sad case.
The two defense attorneys and the prisoner approached the bench for a round of whispering and when they returned the judge told me I was excused. I rode my bike down Main Street and out Joseph Avenue, scene of the 1964 race riots and then the Urban Renewal blight. I was feeling a bit guilty about not making the good citizen grade.
Trout Lilies and Spring Beauty in Edmunds Woods, Rochester, New York
Because we help the Historic Brighton organization with their website we were included in an email from a board member, my father, alerting members about the Spring explosion of color in the Edmunds Woods. The fact that the small patch of mature woods behind a row of doctors’ offices on the corner of Clinton and Westfall is virtually unnoticed by most residents makes its delivery of the goods more spectacular. I’m talking about wildflowers and they are almost all in full bloom now.
There are very few deer nearby so the flowers and undergrowth remain uneaten. The woods is made up of mature trees but you have to hurry because the the trees are full of buds and will soon snuff out the light on the undergrowth. Squirrel Corn, May Apples, Ramps or Wild Leeks, Spring Beauty, White and Red Trillium, Cut-Leaved Toothwort, Blood Root, Trout Lilies and Blue Cohosh sometimes intermingled in a glorious display. You have only a few days left to witness this.
Scat singer and drummer at Eastman School of Music Spontaneous Duos
Our Jazz Fest buddy, Hal, saw one of these Spontaneous Duo concerts in New York and he got the idea going up here last year. The performance order was assigned by a moderator five minutes before the start of the event. One musician started by playing alone. Five minutes later he was joined by another musician. After five more minutes the first musician left and another player joined the second. There was always a duo playing, the music never stopped for an hour and a half. It was like an open jam for music students (and some faculty members) but not on blues tunes, they were improvising freely.
It was bass and drums when we walked in, then drums and piano, cello and piano, piano and a clarinet player who doubled on plastic water bottle, soprano sax and clarinet, banjo and stand up bass, drums and banjo, voice and drums, flute and voice, trumpet and flute, ending with tenor sax by Vince Ercolomento. All with transitions were so seamless there wasn’t space to applaud.
Detail of Colleen Buzzard drawing at MCC Mercer Gallery in Rochester, New York
We missed the first half of Colleen Buzzard‘s artist talk at MCC’s Mercer Gallery last week. When we walked in she was talking about infinity. Her drawings take her to interesting places because she is always asking questions. Her “what happens if I …” process takes her there.
She makes lines and then follows them with other lines and they take shape and form often leaving the page. Strings hold cutout drawings in place and three dimensional drawings cling to corners and spring from the floor. It took her two days to hang this show, a measure of the intricacy of her work. The reward is commensurate with the effort.
John Ganis photo from “America’s Endangered Coastline” show at Spectrum Gallery in Rochester, New York
Someone associated with the photographer, John Ganis, started talking to us about the concept behind the photos before we had even had a chance to look at them. That and running into people you know are some of the hazards of going to an opening on First Friday. Gains documents coastal areas that have already been affected by rising sea levels and records the locations with GPS coordinates and elevations. “Ocean Front Paradise” Rental, Bolivar Peninsula, Texas N 29.53893 W 94.41699 (shown above) is only 5 feet above sea level. This place looks like a double-wide up on stilts. Ganis’s photos are beautiful and we had a good time looking at them without the sales pitch.
It was great to see so many bikes out in front of RoCo, I guess it was free admission if you came on a bike, and then a whole show devoted to the bicycle. Someone told us Rochester was voted the most bike friendly city a hundred years ago. Don’t know if that fact was presented in the show or made up. We’ll have to come back to in this show.
Warren Philips was taking his “OPEN” flag down by the time we found a parking space at the Hungerford building so we just squeezed in. Warren has great taste and always has a nice show, this time lovely watercolors by Mary Orwen. Some friends were raiding the bowl of peppermint patties that he keeps in the back room and someone asked how he keeps from eating them all himself. He said, “I try to limit myself to one peppermint patty a day. Unless I’m feeling sorry for myself. Then I’ll have four or five.”
Charlotte pier in March, Winter 2015, Rochester, New York
We spotted some Pachysandra sticking out from under the piles of snow that line our sidewalk. We picked some sprigs of witch hazel from the bush down the street and brought them home to fully open in our kitchen. They smell rich like butterscotch. We’re two days from Saint Patty’s, our Spring marker, and we took a walk without our skis for the first time in six weeks.
Louise asked what pizzeria we liked and we told her “Nino’s.” We’ve been going there for thirty years, whenever we order pizza that is and that is only about once a year. I described why we liked it, great sauce, fresh ingredients, homemade sausage and thick crust. She stopped me at the thick crust part. “Matthew doesn’t like thick crust.”
On Friday we met Matthew and Louise at La Belle Vita in Webster, right across from the Denonville Inn on Empire Boulevard. They do wood-fired pizza, individual pizzas, and they are thin sliced. I had the “Rustico” with both roasted red and hot green peppers. It was fantastic. At dinner Matthew recommended “Leviathan.” It is currently at the Little and we had gone to see it last week but we never got out of the café and in to the theater. We sat down with Gloria while her husband was playing drums with Maria Gillard. They were stretching with with some rather complicated standards and having a ball. It was all very enjoyable.
I’m glad we got the push for the Russian movie. It’s actually based on an American story. The corrupt power theme works well in all languages. Leviathan is dark and fairly heavy but absolutely beautiful. We loved it.
Dubuffet work in “Soul of the Underground” show at MoMA
“Look at what lies at your feet. A crack in the ground, sparkling gravel, a tuft of grass, some crushed debris, offer equally worthy subjects for your applause and admiration.” That’s Jean Dubuffet writing in 1957 about his influences. A Dubuffet show, “Soul of the Underground,”of mostly works on paper is up at MoMA until April 5.
I started reading Thomas Merton’s first journal. He has seven that were published after his death. Before converting to Catholicism and becoming a Trappist monk he lived a bohemian-style life in downtown New York where he hung around with the early abstract expressionists. His free-flowing thinking, all on the page, feels very contemporary. In a passage about the New York World’s Fair I was thinking, “hey, I was there” but he was referring to the 1939 World’s Fair, not the one in the sixties that I visited with my father. He described an attraction called, “Nature’s Mistakes” where they had animals on display that were misshapen and had missing limbs.
Peggi and I did see a display very much like that at a carnival in Paducah, Kentucky. We were four hours out of Bloomington, Indiana on our way to Mexico. We eventually drove to Oaxaca in Peggi’s orange Vega but this was just our first stop. We had found a campground there and we took in this nearby fair. It got real creepy after dark and this tent with crazy stuff in big bottles of Formaldehyde was the creepiest. I distinctly remember a cow with an extra leg sewn on its backside. This was not “Nature’s Mistake,” it was man’s mistake.
The snow is so deep that the deer have been taking our flattened path through the woods. We found bright red blood in the snow next to each step of one them. I know we scare the shit out of them as we ski by and they sometimes scramble up the hills in the deep snow. They are so much more vulnerable in the white winter months. Coyotes could certainly spot them much easier. I was thinking one of them may have stepped on the edge of a short tree stump buried under the snow and skinned its skinny ankle. The deer are responsible for killing the little trees as they rub the bark off them so it is poetic justice or maybe there is such a thing as nature’s mistakes but I kind of doubt it.
When we moved out of the city and up near the lake we explored all the nearby woods, heading out in a different direction everyday. In the ten years that we’ve been here we have rarely see any of our neighbors out there. One exception is Steve Greive, a self described “rackaholic.” He both feeds and hunts deer but not in the same spot. When we see him he is just wandering around looking for deer or their discarded racks. He’s even been talking about having a Rack Party this Spring, an event at his house where we have something to eat and then head out in the woods to look for the racks that the male deer grow and drop each year.
Richard H. Goss, the author of “Deer Antlers: Regeneration, Function and Evolution” says, “The process of antler regeneration and the chemical signals involved are incompletely understood. The antlers are used for sexual display and fighting, and sex hormones play a key role, especially in the timing. Light signals from the changing day length are also involved.
Recent article in the Times Science section says, “The annual loss and swift regrowth of antlers in the buck deer is one of the most intriguing phenomena in the mammalian world, and some experts think that studying it may shed light on the possibility of regenerating human organs.”
1939 Don Hershey house at 115 Summit Drive Rochester New York,
I was thrilled to join Peggi Fournier, the webmaster of DonHershey.com, at the open house last Sunday of an early mid-century masterpiece on Summit Drive. Directly across the street from the Art-Deco house where Dick Storms used to live on the dead-end street in front of Pinacle Hill, the place has a gorgeous view of the Genesee Valley nd the Bristol Hills. I popped a few pictures of the rounded corner, second story balcony and then one of the front door when I noticed a note. The open house was canceled due to the extremey cold weather.
So we returned this Sunday and had a marvelous time. The realtor showed us this note from Don to the second owners. The place had all the classic Hershey signatures. Corner windows, floor to ceiling windows strategically placed to center the house, open plan kitchen space, curved walls, built-ins and lots of passive solar.
Mike Allen performing at the Clarissa Street Lounge
We heard Jack Schaefer, bass clarinet player with Margaret Explosion and guitar player with Hookface, was playing keyboards with Nod at the Bug Jar on Friday so that went on the calendar. The only question was what time would they go on. They cram so many bands on in one night these days and I think there were four on tap for Friday. We’ve gone out to see Nod before and had to leave before they went on. They certainly didn’t need Jack (I wouldn’t mess with their off-kilter angularity) but it was great to hear him with the band.
My high school classmate, Mike Allen, has been out of commission for a few years now. He called to invite us to a rare gig at the Clarissa Street Lounge, an early gig because, as we found out, the club turns into a dancehall later on. The bar was stocked with Guinness and Red Stripe so I’m guessing it is heavy on reggae. Mike was in good form and the band, mostly Eastman dudes, were real, so-to-be pros.
So, downtown with a void to fill before Nod, we stopped into RoCo and spent some time with the new show. While I was watching a video about Richard Hirsch, the “mentor” in the Makers & Mentors theme, Bleu took Peggi in the office to see if she could fix a coding problem they have been wrestling with, positioning photos in a slider Plug-in on the home page of their WordPress site. No luck there.
We still had a half hour to kill so we stopped in the Little to check out the band in the Café. Hard to believe but it was another Americana band. This stuff is like measles, something you thought was eradicated years ago.
