Couldn’t decide which picture from the Public Market to put up here – the live chickens or the conga players. We missed the Smokin’ Dopes somehow. I would have bought some of their cajun smoked salmon.
We were on pothole duty this morning. Most of the people on the street met at the corner at ten AM and we swept out 53 potholes that one of our neighbors (let’s call him the foreman) had identified. Then we dumped twelve bags of asphalt in the holes, tamped it down and sprinkled some stone grit on the spots so it wouldn’t stick to the bottom of car tires. We were done by eleven and it actually kind of fun. Nobody told us that we owned the road when we bought this place. It was only after we were moved in that someone someone told us it was a private road. Sounds kinda swanky but I have tar on my arms.
LPW Summer Jam on the street at Jazz Fest in Rochester, New York
I’ve been reading “Picasso and Truth – From Cubism to Guernica” but mostly looking at the pictures. Author, T. J. Clark focuses on the art and stays away from the personality and that is as it should be but I get awfully bogged down in the artspeak.
I came awake thinking about a memorable quote that was actually never said by anyone. I must have dreamed it but I believed it as I regained my footing. I’ll put it in quotes but that doesn’t make it so. Picasso said, “If I could have painted one of my late (1970s) paintings when I first started out I would have stopped right there.”
It must have been the Breaking Bad episode we watched before turning in.
Midtown Tower from Xerox Headquarters in Rochester, New York
After twelve years it finally happened. Not one of the big-ticket, Eastman Theater acts booked at the Rochester International Jazz Fest has anything to do with jazz, unless you count David Sanborn. I am certainly no purist but I drift toward the off beat while the festival goes mainstream and there wasn’t much to choose from last night.
We started with the French trio, Thiefs, at the Xerox Auditorium. While waiting in line I took this photo of the about to be renovated Midtown Tower and I was thinking about the early eighties Personal Effects gigs in the ballroom that juts out of the fourteenth floor. A security guard interrupted my drift with a stern warning, “This is private property and no photography is allowed.”
The Theifs were pretty cool but not quite ready for prime time. The drummer and lead singer was shy of all things. The trio of sax, bass and drums all had effects pedals. The tenor player had more effects boxes than Bob Martin and sampled a few loops to add to the rhythm guitar sounds the drummer was getting from the box on his floor tom.
We ran into our jazz buddy, Hal, on the street. He had already walked out of Kat Edmundson (“the girl with the squeaky voice”) at the Little, the replacement act at Christ Church and Patricia Barber when the fire alarm went off at Max’s. We were sort of at a loss as of what to do. The yee haw Hackensaw Boys, Quincy Jones Presents: Nikki Yanofsky, the comedy Trondheim Jazz Orchestra? We opted for Dr. John in the street. I felt sorry for him banging out his gris gris stuff at another festival.
I’ve been uploading photos for the last week and I could spend the rest of my life organizing them but I was anxious to check out this external embed flash code so I put my first “set” together and embedded it above. (Note: Flickr embed no longer works)These are all stills I took from the Passion of Saint Joan movie. I can’t remember if I stopped the dvd and shot them or did screen captures from YouTube. The movie is public domain and about a million times better than “Frances Ha” which we saw at the Little on a $5 Monday night. Our neighbor’s brother and wife contributed music and had a small part but what happened to that director? We really liked “The Squid & The Whale,” sort of liked “Margot at the Wedding” and hated this one.
And while I’m complaining, the new season of Breaking Bad, that is the newly released dvd season, Part One of the fifth and final season in the series, better turn around because the first six episodes are going downhill on the brilliant meter. I just know they’re setting me up though so I’m hanging in there.
When our former neighbor, Leo, reached his nineties he really started spacing out. He lost track of everything and was always ringing our bell to ask if we knew where his tools were. In his heyday he could fix anything and made a point to help someone everyday. Near the end he had a pile of uncompleted projects and he was buying tools that he already had because he couldn’t remember where he put the the ones he had. There was a note from him stuck to the window near our door one morning that read, “I need some common sense.”
We used to plant vegetables in his garden and it was a joy to garden with him. He taught us how to hoe. I never really understood that simple tool but in his hands it was an ingenious instrument for weeding. No bending over to pull tiny weeds or ones that had grown bigger than our new plants in a few days times. The how is angled just right so it cuts the weeds or at least uproots them while dragging a small amount of earth over the blade and leaving it essentially right where it was. I always pictured a hoe as simply a tool to pull earth along so you could plant seeds in a trough or something but Leo used to sharpen his hoe so it cut like a knife.
He had a few hoes, one was a favorite and it was small. He looked everywhere for that hoe and was so desperate to find it that he good naturedly accused us of taking it. “Are you sure you don’t have my small hoe?” I took him in to our garage to look around and I spent a few hours looking for that thing in his yard. I can’t be sure but I think it was right in his garage. When I showed it to him he said, That’s not the one.”
At dinner last night our nephew, Alex, made a joke about suicide and he motioned with his fingers across his wrist. Peggi and I pointed out that the proper direction is parallel with his wrist and later that night he reached into his sink and cut his wrist rather deeply on a broken wine glass. He spent the night in emergency. Meanwhile I reached into my bag at Duane’s and cut my thumb on a razor blade I had brought to shave with.
Duane suggested the Brian Eno installation on 32nd Street as our first stop of the day. We could have really settled in here on the cushy overstuffed sofas but it was just a little early to chill out. The show consisted of his ambient music, of course, and a symmetrical cluster of twelve monitors, three sets of four, each set a different size and each set showing the same slowly dissolving and appearing abstract imagery, hence “77 Million Paintings” title. We didn’t stay for them all, we had to meet Peggi’s sister in Chelsea.
The art galleries in Chelsea close for Memorial Day weekend and they will close again in August for summer vacation but some of the smaller galleries there were open for business. We found some interesting stuff and had a good time but dinner that night at NoMad was magic.
We swore we would never let that crazy, tension filled, last minute, dash for a train happen again but we pulled off a stunning repeat performance, running to the Fort Hamilton F stop in Brooklyn only to find people flooding out of the subway so we stood there for what seemed like forever. We got off at 34th Street and crammed on to a broken up escalator We were behind an Indian family with two small children who had to coaxed to move forward at every step. Up on the street we ran through the crowds in front of Macy’s and then down the steps in front of Madison Square Garden. I was thinking about the time Dave Mahoney and I hitchhiked down here to see Blind Faith at the old Madison Square Garden. We were the last ones on the train and they slammed the doors shut behind our lucky asses.
Frederick Douglas Resource Center in Rochester, New York
We stopped in the Frederick Douglas Resource Center on King Street on Rochester’s west side for a Black Power art exhibit on Saturday night but it turns out it was more than an art opening. The admission was fifteen bucks and we only had about fifteen minutes so we said we’d stop back. I love the building and all that they have done to one of Rochester’s oldest neighborhoods. Madison Park is looking good with the statue of Susan B. and Frederick as a center piece. Our friend, Shirley Zimmer, lived on King Street many years and the neighborhood looks a lot better than it did when used to visit her. I hope it is not just an illusion. I think this is the same street dj, Roger McCall was killed on when someone held him up.
Speaking of hold ups. My nephew was walking only a few blocks from his home in Brighton on Rochester’s east side when some guys pulled up next to him and his friend and asked if they knew aha time it was. Our nephew’s friend reached into his pocket to pull out his iPhone and the guys in the car pulled out a gun. They rode off with the phone.
We generally stay in the woods when we walk. There’s less chance of running into an off lease dog than there is in the park and it feels safer. Our neighbor stays on the streets even in the park but then she walks alone. She told us she often has Nick Cave on her iPod and that might get a little spooky in the woods.
We cut through the park the other day and came across this target nailed to a tree. It’s an official 25 foot Rapid Fire Pistol Target and it was peppered with small holes. I found a handful of silver BBs at the base of the tree. And here we were just stopping by to check on the progress of the Magnolias.
Georgia O’Keefe “Over Blue” pastel on paper 1918 Memorial Art Gallery
There is no better time to visit Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery than right now. They are celebrating their centennial and have brought out over two hundred works from storage, many works on paper that are too fragile to stay out in the open. My favorites were a woodcut and beautiful lithograph entitled “Mothers” from Kathe Kollwitz. a cool Roy Lichtenstein offset print, an Ed Ruscha drawing named after his girlfriend “Ultra” Violet, two really nice Motherwalls and a fantastic little caricature by Tiepolo. And there is is this showstopper, an almost one hudred year old pastel from Georgia O’Keefe.
Buffalo, like Detroit, knows how to decay. There are so many beautiful old buildings in downtown Buffalo it is sort of unfair to single out this image but there is no denying the city has seen better days. The restored buildings, like the beautiful art deco Hotel Lafayette, defiantly offer hope that the city may someday return to its glory days.
We were reminded that the restaurant we ate at on Chippewa was only blocks form the Continental, a club we played monthly gig at in the early eighties. Back then hookers walked the street and the club got so down the owner, Bud, had some German Shepards living in the building. One of the last times we played there he had someone shovel the shit off the stage with a snow shovel before we setup our equipment.
I’d like to link to the Bootlickers’ “Bus To Buffalo” but I couldn’t find it online.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House in Buffalo, New York
Peggi has been quietly building DonHershey.com, a website devoted to the famed Rochester architect. Hershey was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and they both had a profound reverence for nature. Hershey, we’re told would pull up to an empty lot, survey the lie of the land and start sketching the footprint of the house, determining which way to orient the rooms, the windows, the entrance in order to have the house be in close harmony with the land.
The Frank Lloyd Wright house in Rochester is occasionally open to the public but Buffalo’s Martin House is always ready for non-for-profit business so we booked an 11 AM tour on Saturday. In some cities your commute could be an hour, in Rochester you can be in another city in an hour. This place is much more than a house, it is an entire complex. There is a pavilion on site with a mini museum inside, and there is a beautiful gardener’s house on the property. Wright designed and built a stable and garage, a conservatory with an underground and above ground passageway to it. And there is an additional house on the property for the in-laws. It is undergoing renovation but all work is being done to spec and that’s what makes this tour so interesting. You really get a sense of the effort involved in creating this treasure.
I set aside Georgia Durante‘s “The Company She Keeps” a few months back because her autobiography had left Rochester and settled in LA but as she found you can’t shake your ties to this town. Durante is a strong woman with an epic story. She ran with the top echelon of Rochester’s Cosa Nostra, well dressed thugs, while modeling for Fortune 500 companies. I can’t understand why Hollywood hasn’t run with her story.
She was born the same year as I was so when she names streets and restaurants and clubs her story is especially vivid. Wouldn’t you love to go back and stop in Skinny’s all night diner or the Living Room on Norton, The Blue Gardenia (now the Bingo joint on Empire Boulevard), The Fountain Blue, the 414 Club with the best bands in the city or the Overlook in Webster? On the night he died Sammy G barhopped from the Club Car to Club 747, the Encore Club and then Ben’s Cafe Society where he was blown up. I could’t remember where Ceasers II was so I emailed Georgia. She responded “Lyell and Dewey in a basement. Those were the days, weren’t they? :-)”
Nicholson Baker was still living in Rochester when he placed a few ads for his “U & I” book on the back page of the Refrigerator. His new book, “The Way The World Works,” is an exquisite collection of short pieces from the last fifteen years, a lot of them are set in Rochester. We went to the same Doctor’s office on Goodman Street. These vignettes are like getting high without the drugs. Here’s one.
“One summer I worked as a waiter in a fancy restaurant that had been owned by a reputed mobster. The mobster sold the restaurant to the head chef for a lot of money. But many of the people who’d gone to the restaurant had been friends and associates of the reputed mobster – when he stopped going, they stopped going. So business dropped, and I stood wearing a ruffle-fronted shirt with a black bow tie, looking out at empty tables. Once a waitress told the chef that a patron wanted a simple chicken sandwich. The chef whose specialty was veal dishes, was affronted. “Chicky salad?” he said. Tell him to bring his dick in here. I’ll make him some nice chicky salad.”
This beautiful grey/brown palette won’t last so I’m making the most of it. We went off trail today, (it is so much easier to do that this time of year) ducking under branches and stepping over fallen branches and looking for sheds. Thats what our local deer authority calls them. Deer shed their racks this time of year. They become uncomfortable and deer bang their heads against trees to knock them off. Our neighbor Monica found both sides of a ten pointer yesterday and that got us going.
Funny how many people still haven’t picked up their phone books. Nobody wants those damn things anymore and they’re still sitting in the white plastic Frontier bags at the base of mailboxes a week after they were delivered. I put ours directly in the the recycling box.
I miss downtown. I worked at a few ad agencies down there and loved hanging around midtown at noon. This photo from the mid seventies looks pretty bleak in black and white but it was quite lively and a lot more interesting than it is now. Can we get that Inner Loop filled in and just start over?
I have one of our old computers set up in the painting room that streams music from a drive in another part of the house. It’s on shuffle and I love it that way, random with a one big control factor, it only plays stuff that I put in to the library in one form or another. Of course I ripped most of the cds we had before selling them and some lps and I’m not above borrowing cds from friends and giving them back in five minutes once they’ve been ripped. I’ve taken my laptop over to my brother-in-law’s and ripped while we celebrate a holiday and I occasionally buy downloads from Amazon or the Apple Store. And then there were those Napster years and the news groups so there are plenty of surprises in there. If I stumble on something I don’t like I hit the delete key and it’s gone forever.
But the coolest thing about this setup is the moods that iTunes gets into. It’s been on a Joni Mitchell kick lately. This afternoon it really hit a sweet spot and got on a good run. I was struggling with a drawing and iTunes was as gentle as could be. Think Afro Harping or Below The Bassline. It started with a modern loungy Tango Club thing (cover has woman’s fishnet stocking legs crossed) and then a Gypsy King instrumental and then the real gypsy king, Django Reinhardt, a slinky Cuban piece from Ry Cooder & Manuel Galban, a spacey piano thing by Bill Dixon, something from Kronos Quartet’s Early Music release, Miss Peggy Lee, a beautiful chamber jazz number with cello from Chico Hamilton, Pete LaBonne’s quiet anthem, “Arouse The Thunder,” a Nino Rota piece from Amacord and Bill Frisell, Ron Carter & Paul Motian doing a very slow number called “Introduction” and sounding a lot like Bob Martin.
This set got me where I wanted to go and when I got there all hell broke loose with MX-80’s “Face Of The Earth.”
International School of Music & Arts students performing Philip Glass at Rochester Contemporary
Axom Gallery was jam packed last night for Judd William’s artist talk, so jammed a woman next to us on the way in said, “I better not go in there or I’ll have a panic attack.” Judd’s talk was pretty straight forward and you probably could have guessed that he has fun while he works. He draws a lot. He always has, he was voted the “The Artist” in high school and he likes doing portraits but he shys away from calling them portraits because often times the people he draws say it doesn’t look like them. It was a treat to hear him talk while surrounded by his recent work.
Our favorite show this First Friday was the performance by the International School of Music & Arts students doing works by Philip Glass. This instrumentation sounded fantastic in this room and I have never heard anything sound good in this space. The oldest kid in this ensemble is a tenth grader. Two of the violinists are in seventh grade.
On the way into Manhattan a well dressed, middle aged, black man walked through the door of our subway car and started singing an acapella version of Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me.” He was wearing a small mic and he had a small PA in his backpack with a great reverb setting. We changed trains and a group of three musicians got on. They too had a black singer and they did a beautiful version of “Hooked On A Feeling,” a song I thought I never wanted to hear again.
On the way back to Rochester we were one stop out of NYC when a couple got on the train in Croton on Harmon. We held our breath as they walked by. I tried to give off bad vibes but they sat down across from us anyway in the one seat in the car that faced the opposite way the train was traveling so they faced us. I tried not to look directly at them but she had died blonde hair and dark glasses. He had a pot belly and hearing aids in both ears and he was wearing a faded Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt. They talked non-stop to the people next to them and we quickly learned they had been babysitting the woman’s granddaughter while the child’s parents took a Carnival Cruise. Apparently the two year old is brilliant and this couple had the time of their life babysitting her.
He was in the National Guard and has diabetes so the woman scolded him for buying a big bag of chips from the snack bar. She was drinking a large Diet Pepsi and reading a magazine called HELLO! which had a picture of Elton John and his partner holding a little baby on the cover. Growing up with six siblings I got pretty good at tuning out a crying baby but this was something else altogether. They said whatever popped into their heads to whoever would listen and they acted like this was completely normal behavior. Peggi suspects it was some sort of performance art.
The Amtrak ride along the Hudson is so dreamy especially as you head south on the river side of the train. It perfectly set the stage for our stop in Beacon where the DIA has enshrined major works by an all star cast of big thinking, modern (post 1960) artists. Joseph Beuys, John Chamberlain, Walter De Maria, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Blinky Palermo, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Michael Heizer, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Robert Ryman, Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, and the earth artist maestro, Robert Smithson. But the biggest star of all could be Robert Irwin who designed a plan that would retain the original character of the former Nabisco box factory while accommodating its twenty-first century museum function. The place is a marvel, a theater with dramatic visual acoustics.
Over the years we’ve developed a few theories about who the Hoffman Road Budweiser guy is. We’ve suspected kids, the neighbor with the dog whose breath smelled like liquor one morning when we engaged him in conversation and the guy who built the new house up on the hill. In fact last summer we became certain he was our man because he defaulted on his mortgage, moved out and the pile of beer cans dried up.
I stuck my head over the embankment as we walked by the other day and couldn’t believe my eyes. We brought two Wegmans bags with us the next day and the pile of 24 ouncers barely fit in. Whoever he is he probably has a red nose and black bow tie.
My favorite thing about the Neil Young autobiography is not the wild stories about familiar names, it’s the little things like when he visited Costco for the first time. “My first big purchase was a set of replacement brushes for my Sonicare toothbrush.” Marveling at the vast organic food section and then remembering all the small mom and pop stores from his youth he writes. “I felt pretty old for a moment and then I regrouped and realized I was alive and should be thankful.”
“Fragment of a Head” from Chiapas, Mexico Eighth Century
The Memorial Art Gallery has a really interesting show to celebrate their Centennial. The staff picked local artists and invited them to reinterpret works from their collection. The new work in “Art Reflected” is for sale and it is scattered throughout the gallery, positioned next to or in front of the work of inspiration. This arrangement encourages you to wander into rooms you normally whizz by. Like an Easter egg hunt the show is full of surprises. It reinvigorates the collection.
My brother, John, has a really nice piece here but as a celebration the show is a bit stuffy. One hundred artists for the one hundred years would have added to the merriment. If they had asked I would have given my reflection of this beautiful Mayan, stucco “Fragment of a Head” from the eighth century.
