Category: Lopsided Observations

The mailboxes for four nearby houses are clustered between two big oak trees across the street from us. We repaired some potholes out there earlier this summer and set aside today to dig a drainage ditch right in front of the mailboxes. I took a photo of our neighbor’s layout for the project a few weeks ago. There is a depression there from the mailtruck and last winter it filled with melted snow and turned to a sheet of ice. It was especially dangerous in my slippers when I’d go out to get the papers.

The hole was about three foot deep and we filled it with leftover stone that another neighbor had lying around. Peggi usually drives the tractor but she was still at yoga when we started. Manual labor like this counts as exercise so we skipped our walk today and will probably go to bed a little early tonight.

1 Comment

I used to like baseball a lot. I played it. I collected the cards. My favorite team was the Milwaukee Braves. This was all a long time ago. Fred Costello is still grinding the organ but everything has changed. Gone are the Knot Hole afternoon games when you could get out of school to see the game. Gone is the game itself.

The Red Wings had a good crowd tonight, eight or nine thousand, but no more than a handful were watching the game. The whole world has moved on. The management provides distractions between every inning because no one is watching the game. And that may actually be backwards. No one is watching the game because the management is bent on providing distractions. The guys that used to sell popcorn, peanuts and beer can’t even compete with the concessions stands. We watched people walk up and down the aisles with piles of food, ice cream sundaes and 25 ounce beers for the whole game. It was all rather startling to an old timer. There was a game here but nobody gave a shit.

There is no hole in the home rum fence waiting for a ball that would give the hitter a brand new car like there was on Norton Street. The outfield is an LED overload. They blast snippets of the Violent Femmes, the Ramones and Queen. If they played more than forty five seconds they would have to pay royalties. If this was a soccer game you couldn’t take your eyes off the game. Maybe that is the whole point.

1 Comment

With a little bit to a lot of rain everyday we have perfect mushroom growing conditions. Our walk in the woods last evening was interrupted by samples of several species. I think we finally spotted the Chanterelles that we were looking for last week. We were told they grow near the Coral mushrooms and that’s right where we found them. They are supposed to be delicious.

We spotted the one above in a clearing and took this shot with a flash. I sent it to my father and he identified it from one of his many resource books as a Yellow Amanita Muscaria. It’s poisonous but it has some serious Psychoactive properties. There is so much mushroom lore to sift through. I found this description on Shroomery.org. “Used correctly, it is pleasurable at its worst and limitlessly creative, intensely ecstatic, universally beneficial and incredibly healing at its best! You’ll probably puke all over the place, so be prepared!” And this from erowid.org “the experience I was having was a simulation of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. I understood that I had to keep pounding these nails out of an invisible cross which I was nailed to. I would be free once the task was completed.”

We buy our mushrooms at Wegmans.

2 Comments

I could not figure out what was wrong with the Flash last night. Claire Regan asked me as much while we were sitting with her. I didn’t understand why Adriana wasn’t starting in the midfield. She is a real workhorse. Zerboni, who is usually dominant in the center, was off her game and Carly Lloyd was not much of a factor so the middle just fell apart. Boston, the last place team in the league, scored four goals to the Flash’s two. Abby was still sidelined from the injury we saw a few months back but we have hardly missed her. Samantha and Jasmine are fun to watch as they fill in down front.

Maybe I jinxed the team by cheering for my favorite player on the US national team, Boston’s Heather O’Reilly. She had two goals and two assists. This was a must win if the Flash wanted to go to the playoffs so this will probably be my last WNY Flash post this year. In the meantime, I wish the City could find some way to promote the Flash. There are only eight NWSL teams in the country and this one is really a jewel.

Leave a comment

Annette Lein from the Democrat & Chronicle followed Peggi and me through our jazz fest routine yesterday. She started as we whizzed through the day’s offerings and made snap decisions on what to see/hear and then she met us downtown outside our first venue. She must have shot an hour’s worth of footage and later last night she had edited it down in Final Cut and posted it to the D&C’s site. She is a pro. We are not.

Annette’s edits and transitions are as smooth as silk. What looks like an edit is me jumping in before Peggi had a chance to explain what we look for. My favorite part is the shot of us trudging down the street. Unity Health has been giving away pedometers at the Jazz Fest and Peggi has been logging our miles. We walked over two last night and we never got over to Lucinda Williams in the Park. I was reminded of what my dad said when I sent him a link to a movie of us putting up their awnings. “Do we really walk like that?”

I’m keeping track of the Jazz Fest in a separate space.

1 Comment

When you get political you kinda wreck everything. But then everything is political. Who would have guessed that the environment, marriage, guns, prayer, birth control and evolution would be political issues. A stance on any of these issues puts you in the blue or red camp. Now, the decision to go to war in Iraq again, that’s a political issue.

Meanwhile, the guy who got us into this mess is blissfully painting portraits while Obama gets stuck with the cleanup. I’m happy that President George H.W. Bush had a soft landing on his 90th birthday but I’m not gonna let him off the hook for announcing after the first Gulf War in 1991, “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula.”

I, too, avoid politics for the most part. I’m listening to the great “Money Jungle,” an lp produced by Alan Douglas, who just passed away on Saturday.

2 Comments

I am counting down the hours to the World Cup. Of course the US is my first choice but I’m happy there are thirty-one other teams in the tournament to root for in the later rounds. America’s national team coach, former German star, Jurgen Klinsmann, said the US “would have to play the game of our lives seven times to win the tournament. It is not possible.” Sam Borden in the Times said “such candor seems un-American.” What does come after “America First?”

1 Comment

We started our First Friday art tour before anyone else last night. We were at the MAG savoring the last hours of the Matisse show and I don’t mean his grandson’s pottery. No one draws like Matisse. No one gets as much form and expression in line. Matisse is the master. Your very last last chance to see what I’m talking about is Sunday when the show closes.

This morning’s paper has an item that really isn’t news to those who live here. Despite being one of America’s most livable cities we are ranked third on the list of poverty rates in large metropolitan areas, just behind Detroit and Cleveland. Like I say, not news, but it came the morning after taking in “Upstate Girls” by Brenda Ann Kenneally at Visual Studies Workshop. Kenneally has secured a Guggenheim grant to continue exploring and visually docmenting the how and why of class inequity in America. A meaty project. Take a look at her photos.

In Synecdoche, Katherine Keener, playing Philip Seymour Hoffman’s wife, painted these mildly disturbing miniature pictures and at her openings everyone had to use magnifying glasses to view the art. I was reminded of that bit of absurdity last night at RoCo where the 6×6 show opened. Each piece, limit of six from each entrant, is six by six and every piece is 20 bucks with all proceeds going o Rochester Contemporary. But this year they go food to ceiling. You can hardly see the ones up top but hang. There were signs scattered about that read, “Ladders Available Sundy.”
Ladders Available Sunday.

Leave a comment

John Gilmore called us yesterday just to tell us he had driven by an inflated “God Bless America” lawn ornament like one of those Santas you see at Christmas time. The words were written on a great big American Flag.

We speculated on just how patriotic God is? Does he/she/it have a soft spot for America? The message is exclusionary and I’m guessing that is the whole point. We are superior. Asking God to bless the world would be just as exclusionary and asking god to bless the universe that he/she/it supposedly created would be plain silly.

Leave a comment

Magnolias are much nicer to look at than political signs. Besides our sign is gone and I never got a photo of it.

Gary Pudup, former Monroe County Sheriff, head of the local ACLU and long time Margaret Explosion fan is running for state assembly in Greece and he has taken a stance on New York’s Safe act. He asked if we would put sign on our lawn and we did but I warned him it would probably be stolen. We live on a dead end but our property meets a busier road down back so we put it there. A little further down this road there are two “Repeal NYS Safe Act” signs in front of houses and I didn’t think those people would tolerate an opposing view. I’m not saying one of those two stole the sign and I certainly don’t want to start something with a gun owner but I’ve been thinking about alternate signage.

Something simple but with a different tact like, “MORE GUNS,” or “BIGGER GUNS,” or “GUN NUTS!”

A few years ago I recounted the story about my mom making a peace flag that got stolen.

My friend, who lived down the street, was in Viet Nam dropping Agent Orange out of a helicopter on anything that moved when my mom made a peace flag. She sewed it! It was a white cloth peace sign on a sky blue piece of material. I remember it being beautiful. We flew it on the flag pole out in front of our house and this friend’s mom got all bent out of shape about it. I remember her calling our house and screaming over the phone while my mom made a rational appeal to her. “Surely you want peace too”, I remember her saying, but the argument continued. This neighbor thought it was flat out wrong to fly something like that while her son was fighting for our country. He was only in the army because he flunked out of Bonaventure and got drafted.

I was so proud of my mom but the thing is a lot of people felt like this neighbor at that time so it was a bit of a mystery when the flag was stolen a few weeks later. “Who stole the peace flag?” became the family’s obsession as we weighed the suspicion level of each neighbor on the street. We found out months later that it was the younger brother of the guy who was in Viet Nam. I’ll bet the guys over there were real happy there were people back home working against peace.

2 Comments

Most days we head in to the woods near our house and quickly lose ourselves in nature’s overwhelming beauty. And it is always a shock when, maybe a mile or so in, we need to cross the golf course. The manicured greenery is startling enough but the golfers can really jolt you back to unreality.

We usually wait in the woods until they have played through and our spots allows us to eavesdrop for what that’s worth. A few years ago I made the mistake of crossing part way and standing in a grove of trees. When someone yelled “fore” I naturally turned in the direction of the ball and took it between the eyes. I heard someone say, “Holy shit. You hit someone.” and then they took off.

Which brings me to the tee on the fourteenth hole. I love this kind of stuff. Simple, sly, sneaky and subversive. It’s more than graffiti and a lot less as well. Like the best minimal art, it gets maximum effect from minimal means. I wonder how many golfers have even noticed the magic marker spider on the kitchen floor of the “Floor Coverings International” ad.

1 Comment

When your head is in the clouds the years just slip by.

Leave a comment