Andy Warhol is rumored to have stolen Yoko Ono’s idea for helium filled mylar balloons or “pillows”. Or is it the other way around? I can’t remember. Doesn’t matter. The three Colorado kids upstaged them both when they set their dad’s weather ballon free and pretended that one of them was in it. This YouTube savvy family captured the nation’s attention with their pop event and it made for the best tv since OJ’s slow speed chase. And we never would have seen it if we weren’t out at Peggi’s mom’s place where the tv has no off button. In fact, I bet this event wouldn’t even have happened if we weren’t out there to watch.
Harold Copp Painting #754 at Four Walls Gallery in Rochester, NY
First Friday of the month usually means gallery hopping for us. The First Friday website doesn’t list them all but we usually check the list before heading out. Cool video installation at RoCo although it was a little hard to hear the soundtrack so we were sort of lost as to what it was all about. We ran into a guy that had just moved here three days ago from LA. He works for a company that makes sustainable clothing and Wegmans has just taken on the line. It’s made from hemp and recycled plastic. He was wearing a few of the pieces and they looked great.
We stopped in the Four Wall’s Gallery and took in Harold Copp’s show. He mixes silkscreen and painting in some pretty interesting ways. There are a lot more than four walls here in the basement of the Elton Street warehouse. Shawn Dunwoody has a pretty cool setup here that offers art programs to city kids. There was a band playing but they blew the sound system.
We finished the evening in surreal fashion as we watched tivo’d footage of John Gilmore art being sold on the AANtv network. If I understand this right, John bought the art from these people in the first place and he was now turning a profit on it as they auctioned it off again.
Illa Loeb “In Ovo” on display at Nazareth College Art Center
In egg. In embryo. “In Ovo“, a show by local artist, Illa Loeb, may still be up at Nazareth’s Margaret Colacino Gallery. The show officially ended yesterday but the student run space is still accessible. We saw the show with Peggi’s mom and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Peggi wheeled her mom from piece to piece while providing a running, descriptive commentary. The heroic commentary was intended to engage her mom while her defenses are down. Peggi’s mom loves art and we love art but the art that we love hardly ever overlaps. We have seen a lot of art together and difficult, non literal art heightens the experience for both of us.
Illa Loeb, a former student of Fred Lipp, creates luscious, painterly, three dimensional art. Her work has an intensely physical hands on feel. You want to touch her work and she does exactly that. She photographs herself wearing her pieces like clothing or aprons. She created “An Alphabet” of with charcoal and vaseline on her mouth and transferred the look of the letters on her lips to paper. Photos of this process are on view on a monitor but you have to ask the student attendee to turn it on.
It was kind of nice when my parents liked the same kind of music as us kids did. But that didn’t last long. Bob Dylan parted the waters a few years after “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Sad to see Mary go.
I took this photo about midnight last night. Brian Peterson called us from Pep Boys on East Ridge where he was returning a huge truck that he and John Gilmore rented to drive a bunch of John’s art down to Florida for auction. Brian needed a ride to his house. I had forgotten that our neighbor delivered this giant Puffball to our front door while we were working. I guess we could have had it for dinner. We’ve eaten puffballs with Pete and Shelley but we were afraid to eat wild mushrooms without an expert.
I jumped in the pool while Peggi was checking the chemicals. It is still swimming weather in western New York but the temp has dropped to 66 so it was refreshing. It temporarily removed the stress from my dental situation.
I had about a hundred line drawings that I was chopping out of a pdf and putting online as jpegs for a client. The lines in the original were very faint. I couldn’t improve the drawings much in Photoshop’s Levels so I searched online and found a cool video that was posted by Shedge Pranay that explains how to use the Filters/Other/Minimum command to thicken a line. The video is only a minute long but it took me three plays to understand his English. He sounds like the early computer voices. Really quite charming.
In my nightmare scenario post last week I speculated wildly on what the County might have been thinking when they tore up one of our favorite walking paths in what they call the “undeveloped section” of Durand Eastman Park. We walked the path after that post and followed the giant tire tracks from the trail’s entrance across from 700 Hoffman Road to where the path enters the subdivision near the corner of Hillview Drive and Eastman Estates. We spotted some guys hanging around and asked them if they knew who might have driven through the woods in a bulldozer. They didn’t know much about the woods but they said one of their neighbors had unloaded a big piece of equipment on Eastman Estates a few days earlier. As we were talking to them their neighbor drove up the driveway that was once part of this bridal path in a black Hummer.
These people, who apparently have rights to the old bridal path that runs through the sub-development, decided to continue the path about a mile in to the park by hiring some sort of front end loader to drive the distance and widen the old walking path to accommodate motor vehicles. We were up there yesterday and the trail is covered with tire tracks.
I emailed Larry Staub the Director of at the County Parks. The City owns Durand Eastman but it is being managed by the County. Larry walked the path and told me that I had underestimated the damage in my email. He got part way up the path and called 911. When he got to the other end of the path he met this guy who acted like he had done the Park a favor. Larry called for Sherriff’s backup and had the guy arrested. The innocent until proven guilty suspect will appear in City Court on Tuesday October 6th at 9:30 AM. Larry thanked us for bringing this matter to their attention and he asked us to think about what sort of restitution the County should be seeking from the guy. Our neighbors have suggested a few ideas but they are all illegal.
We wandered around Sea Breeze on our bikes, checked out the progress on the traffic circles over on 590, and then rode down to the bay. We sat on the blue bench at the Newport Yacht Club and looked out at the sail boats. Can’t remember where we were when I spotted this lawn installation. I think it may be a Jeff Koons piece.
We’re thinking it won’t rain this evening so we’ll be able to play outdoors at the Village Gate and if it does rain we move the action inside, fire jugglers and all. But we’re thinking it won’t rain.
There is beautiful section of Durand Eastman that we used to call the “undeveloped section” and we hike up there three or four times a week. It’s located south of Titus between Kings Highway and Hoffman Road and in five years we have only come across two other parties on the trail. Today we found the path had been widened to to ten feet or so by a bulldozer. We can’t imagine what kind of nightmare scenario this is part of. Widened and flattened for dirt bikes? ATVs? Housing development going in? Bored park maintenance staff with new taxpayer funded equipment? Handicapped Accessible woods?
We wanted to cry but we were too mad. We plan to call Stephanie Aldersley, our town represenative.
Cross in the back of a pick up at the Hungerford Building in Rochester, NY
I was talking to Tom Lacagnina at the last RoCo opening about a mutual friend who had passed out at a dinner party. Tom said he remembered passing out at Church and I do too. I remember the sinking sensation as my knees buckled and all that Catholic imagery began to swirl. It seemed someone in our family was always passing out during Mass. It was often hot and the clothes we had to wear were stuffy but that wasn’t the reason. We used to have to fast for three hours before receiving Communion. As kids we were up running around the house for hours before my parents rounded us up for Mass. We were starved by the time the service began. And a dry wafer stuck to the roof of your mouth did not exactly hit the spot. Sacrifice is a big part of the Catholic experience.
My favorite part of Catholic Churches has always been the Stations of the Cross. They are usually different in each Church and offer more to contemplate than a single statue. The fourteen stations are spread around the church and tell the story of Christ’s crucifixion. In older churches they are usually presented in a in a traditional fashion but in contemorary churches they are often minimal and symbolic. The greatest story ever told is is fertile ground for artists.
The owner of this pickup truck is ready for a real sacrifice. You just never know when you might come across a Christlike figure. I was not surprised to see this cross parked near the corner of Main and Goodman. I picked East Main Street years ago as the setting for a modern day crucifixion. In 1993 I began collecting source material for a series of paintings that I planned to do of this story. I photographed locations for a contemporary setting that would have Christ sentenced near our home at East High and crucified at the Liberty Pole. This truck is on that route, just across the street from the adult book store.
I still haven’t done the paintings but I did make large prints of the source material and displayed them at the Bug Jar for a month. I entered them in the Finger Lakes Show in 1999 and won a few awards with the “Passion Play” piece. I will do those paintings some day.
Left to right, my mother, my brothers John and Fran, Brad Fox, my sister Amy’s four little buddies and Dave Mahoney
This is one of the first photos I took with my first camera. My father brought it home from the Camera Shop at Kodak. I took the photo in the summer of 69 but I don’t have any photos from Woodstock so I’m guessing I got this camera after the festival. Spevak had called me for some quotes for the article he was writing on Woodstock for the paper and then the editor emailed me to ask if I had any photos. Whatever I said was cut out by his editor but we did celebrate the 40th anniversary by seeing the director’s cut of the movie at the George Eastman House last weekend. They have a crankin’ sound system in the Dryden Theater.
As we sat there watching the movie I kept trying to remember who it was that had recently told me they were in in the movie. It wasn’t until near the end of the movie that I remembered that Holly Clarke from my high school class was one of the nude woman swimming in the pond. We got there a day early but still managed to get stuck in traffic. When it got unbearable we parked the car and started walking. I remember a long line of people going in one direction and an equally long line going in the opposite direction. No one was sure where the festival site was and we watched people turn around and switch directions on a hunch. I don’t remember packing any food, clothes or sleeping gear but we did have some acid they we planned on taking at the show. We couldn’t wait for that and took it the morning of the day before the show. We wandered around and tried purchasing some canned goods that a local family had arranged along the railing of their porch. It all looked so strange and we weren’t sure what we wanted or even how to conduct the transaction. We found the festival site and hung around in the blazing sun while the sound crew conducted an ungodly sound check. There were scattered groups of people with dogs on the hillside and the animals were howling at the stage.
We left before the show was over because Dave Mahoney thought we had better get out before they ran out of food. On the way out we bought some mescaline from some high school friends that we ran into. Back in Rochester we went to an afternoon matinee of “2001” at the old Stutson Theater where Herrema’s is now and took the blue capsules. We were the only “adults” in the theater and we laid down on the floor in front of the screen. I have no idea what that thing was all about. I haven’t done any of that stuff since 69 but it kinda stays with you.
Richie Havens was great in the movie. Canned Heat sounded like the inventors of sludge rock. The Who tore it up but looked pretty silly. I never like the Tommy stuff. Only Queen can mix rock and opera. Ten Years After were wankers. Sha Na Na was hideous and Joe Cooker was over the top. (Is that a Beatles song.? “High with a little help from friends.”) Peggi leaned over and said, “You have to admit that was a good song from pre-bloated Crosby Stills and Nash” and I admitted it. The Jefferson Airplane tracks were goofy one. The rest must have sucked. They could be pretty rough live. I saw their Volunteers tour. I never had any of Santana records but he kicked ass. His drummer was amazing. Sly, Janis and Jimi were all great. It was pretty good show.
I took this photo over by the Public Market on Saturday. The dog is real.
It really bugs me that the Quicktime Pro “Export for Web” feature generates a movie that is not supported on the iPod Touch so I’m through with it. I put five or six movies from this blog (including my shaky Wreckless Eric / Amy Rigby video with extra footage) up on YouTube today and I switched the links. I hope I don’t effect the price of Apple stock with that. And I see the Bobby Henrie & The Goners video I put up there in my last post has a hundred views already.
Old guys are allowed to have favorite cashiers at Wegmans. I asked mine were the charcoal was and she led me down the aisle! She pointed to a big pile of Briquettes and I said, “no, regular charcoal.” She said, “What is regular charcoal?”. I saw a few bags of the old fashioned lump charcoal and I grabbed one of those and thanked her.
We woke up to a few orders for Margaret Explosion cds and they were all from Rochester. It took us a bit to realize that the sales were a result of the rebroadcast of the Margaret Explosion segment of WXXI’s “On Stage”. We were downtown out on the deck at Abilene listening to Bobby Henrie & The Goners so we missed the show. Martin Edic said it was on the tv inside the bar but we were busy watching the best band in the city. Besides, I was making a movie.
Fcuk for him on display at A. J. Wright store in Rochester, New York
I had worn a hole in the rear end of my pajamas so I stopped in A. J. Wright up in Culver Ridge Plaza. I asked the clerk where the pajamas were and she took me over to a rack of “Loungewear”, all bottoms, colorful concoctions that you sometimes see big muscular guys with mullets wearing out on the street. I guess they don’t sell pjs in sets anymore. This place is so discount they don’t have a dressing room and I couldn’t decide whether to go with Large or Medium. At 6 feet, 150, I’m half of each. I went with medium.
This “Fcuk Him” product caught my eye on the reduced table near the checkout. A kid with the “Why Can’t We All Just Get A Bong” t-shirt caught my eye at the Public Market this morning. And I was thinking of this line from Jeff Spevak’s review of the crowd at last night’s Phish concert – “a museum of non-sequiturs.” Give it up for Jeff.
Everything is in season now. We hauled four big bags home. Corn from Honeyoe Falls, peaches from Hamlin and blueberries, apricots, beets, cucumbers, peppers, pears from other local farms. I just made my first tomato and onion sandwich of the year.
Deer aren’t supposed to like Rhododendrons. That’s why ours are shaped like Palm trees. And they aren’t supposed to like Marigolds either but they got ours last night. Second time this year. The yellow would have spoiled all the green anyway.
Want to ruin your day? Try previewing the site you’ve been working on all day in Internet Explorer. We were fine until we had to duke it out with the “Doubled Float Margin Bug”. Then Radio Rick made our day when he played Margaret Explosion’s “Playground Tavern” on WRUR.
Last night we sat on the porch with the lights out. Peggi lit a few candles and we contemplated sleeping out there. It was a beautiful night. I started thinking about The Marshing Band sessions from 2006. We recorded without electricity up at Pete and Shelley’s on a battery operated M-Audio Microtech (as shown in the blow-up of the above photo) and we lit the session with candlelight. We sold that device and bought one made by Sony that records on the small SDHC cards. This unit takes has built in mics and ports for two external mics and it runs on batteries. We could do a killer recording when we meet up there this Fall.
We hadn’t been swimming in the lake since we sold our boat five years ago. We hiked through the woods with Duane on Saturday and then followed the path around the pond to the lake. There were some loud picnics going on up on Log Cabin Road and there were a number people fishing from the edge of the pond. One little kid was reeling in the tiniest sunfish when we walked by. His dad was helping him get it off the line. He was all excited. Lake Ontario’s water felt warm and refreshing at the same time.
We brought the paper down to the street pool on Sunday and we were the only ones there. I read the reviews of the new Woodstock books to Peggi revealing who was tripping while playing and how much the bands were paid. Someone was quoted as saying, “If the transportation was better, ninety per cent of the people would have left. I was there a full day early and watched the soundcheck but eventually left on the second night. Dave Mahoney thought we going to starve to death and he may have. He had to eat when he was hungary. And I read that thousands of people left there sleeping bags there. My brother came home with about ten and gave them away. I always assumed it was because people couldn’t find their campsite but it was because they were full of mud. We went down there with no sleeping bags or camping equipment and no food but we did have tickets that we sent away for through WSAY.
Our neighbors, Rick and Monica, came home from their vacation last night and Monica was wearing a Woodstock t-shirt that she bought at Target. She said some skateboarders that she was starring at flashed the peace sign at them. They missed Joey’s party. One of our other neighbors asked if they could use our driveway on Saturday because they were having a big party. We said sure but no one parked in our driveway. It might have had something to do with the arrow on the sign that Joey’s mother made. It was pointing away from our driveway.
We managed to slow summer’s pace down a bit by not doing a whole lot of stuff. Not going out to see the bands we follow, not going to parties, not going to the last Rhino’s game and not making entries here for a few days. We’ve also been working most evenings because we have a backlog of work for a change. And after work, it’s out to the porch to read. The world slows to a crawl out there.
Peggi took her mom to the doctor this morning They are trying to determine why she has such a hard time swallowing. A battery of tests are in order. She’ll swallow some barium on Monday and they will track the decent with x-rays. I took our 92 year old neighbor’s mail in this morning and I plan to mow his lawn tomorrow while he figures out how to swallow again. They removed most of his pallet when they cut out his mouth cancer last week. He wants to throw in the towel but pep talks may dissuade him. I gave him my best shot while handing him his mail. He was slurping an Ensure.
I do my best thinking while mowing the lawn, taking a shower or walking in the woods. If I’m working on a logo, and I do sketches all day, I’ll jump in the shower and the best idea pops into my head. Today I was thinking about god and I sorted it all out in the shower. We have two neighbors on our small street that boast of being atheists. One is a chemist and the other teaches poetry in the City school district and their conversations got me going on this matter. As a Catholic, I was raised to believe that there was some sort of Trinity construct with the all knowing God the Father, His son, made visible in Jesus, and this spooky Holy Ghost that hovers about. I never could figure it out. I know that when I buried our cat he was stiff as a board I will be too when I die. I don’t believe I’ll be meeting any maker in the great beyond.
I was looking at my niece’s Facebook photos from the recent Jason Mraz concert. He does a song called “Good Orderly Direction“. The first time I came across this concept was in Julia Cameron’s book on creativity. But I gather it is also sort of an out for addicts who use AA but don’t believe in God. The natural order of things is enough of a god construct for me.
Which brings to mind the old MX-80 slogan. “Often in error. Never in doubt.”
Tapas dish called Pimientos De Padron as served in Rochester New York
Spanish people know how to eat, not just what to eat. They kind of excel in both. Some restaurants around here offer what they call tapas but they aren’t. The proportions are way too large. You like that much of one thing, order the dish three times, ya slob!
Tapas in Spain are served over a counter and you eat them at the counter, often while standing. The plates are small like saucers and the silverware is even small sometimes. Maybe the fork only has three prongs or two. If you’re having a beer, a small plate of olives is often served on-the-house and sometimes the person behind the counter may even slide you a complimentary tapa. These small servings take the edge off before dinner and sometimes that is all you need.
We had a small tapas party on Sunday with our friends, Alice and Julio. They brought some, we made one in advance and then made a few while we talked. We ordered Padron Peppers from La Tienda and followed a YouTube chef”s instructions. Although they are a Galician dish we had these for the first time while in Madrid. The place was more cafeteria than bar, brightly lit by fluorescents and was somewhere near Plaza Santa Ana. It was late and we stumbled on it. It looked like it had been there for a century but we could not find it when we returned a few years later. They were sensational.
We watched a documentary on The Crips and The Bloods last night. Forest Whitaker narrated and the funniest part was when they showed how much starch the gangbangers put on there jeans. “Enough to make ’em stand up in the corner with nobody in them.”
We were sitting out front watching our neighbors pack when Monica brought over three bags of greens that would probably go bad while they were gone. She said, “I think one of them is cilantro”‘ and I thought great. I was going to pick some up for one of the tapas we were planning on making when we got together with Julio and Alice this weekend. We headed out to the Public Market and bought as much as we could carry of local blueberries, peaches, dark red cherries and corn. I grabbed some Italian parsley that one of the tapas recipes called for and then we stopped at Wegmans to pick up the rest.
At the corner of Culver and Ridge, right in front of Walgreens, there was a gathering of protesters wearing suits and holding up big white signs. One of them said, “Honk if You Support Traditional Marriage”. Someone honked. I laid on the horn and didn’t let up. The protesters stared at us not knowing what to think. We drove by them again after shopping at Wegmans and I took some photos and yelled, “You guys are nuts.” They were all guys and one of their signs read, “Adam and Eve not Steve and Steve.”
I got home and unpacked and discovered the cilantro that Monica had given us was actually Italian parsley so I hopped on my bike and headed back to Wegmans. I told Peggi I might take a movie of the protesters and she suggested that I say, Hi Steve”, to all of them as I rode by so I did that. “Hi Steve.” “Hi Steve.” “Hi Steve.” “Hi Steve.” “Hi Steve.” “Hi Steve.” “Hi Steve.” etc. They really didn’t know what to think.
Nod closed out the three day Boulder Fest in style and when I say “in style” I mean cowboy style (with disco ball). There were a handful of dancers (Nod is a great dance band) and then there was this cowboy doing his thing. The second song in Nod’s set was “World Still Wants You” and it is one of our favorites.
We planned to eat outdoors on our deck and we just sat down when it started raining AGAIN so we moved indoors. I saw a figure out front in the middle of a torrential downpour and watched as he moved toward our front window. It was our neighbor, Rick, testing his new rain gear. He was smiling and he had what appeared to be a sacred heart on his chest. It was a reflection from a light in our kitchen.
After dinner we checked out the opening of the bi-annual Rochester Finger Lakes Show at the Memorial Art Gallery. This is always a fun event and we were really looking forward to it. We were surprised to find parking spots in the lot and the grounds were eerily quiet. They had to move the outdoor band in because of the rain and maybe the rain scared people away. Or maybe there is just damn much going on here in the warm summer months. Or maybe it had something to do with the fact that they only had twenty eight artists in the show.
One of them did manage to fill a good portion of the space with an inflatable elephant. You usually can’t see the show at these openings but we had plenty of room to take it in. I didn’t see my “Local Crime Faces” over there because they were not accepted. We found Anne Havens’s “Box Of Sighs”. We hung out by the box and marveled at it and the onlookers as they discovered it was making noises. We filled out ballots with Anne’s name on them for the “Popular Vote Award” while Bleu Cease was filling out his ballots at the same time and we presume in the same way.
I stopped in Wegmans this morning to pick up the Friday New York Times. I like their “Fine Arts Section” even though it’s getting combined with other weekend nonsense as they shrink the content and jack up the cost to stay afloat. My cashier’s name was “Heaven”. I told her I liked her name. I spotted this sign near Culver and Ridge for a place called Ricky’s diner. Never been inside but I plan to put their sign in the Funky Signs section as soon as I get around to updating it.
Are Friday fish fries more common in Rochester than other parts of the country? I looked up “origin of the fish fry” in Google for the low down. When I looked up something for someone we do work for she started complaining that the way history is being written today we won’t have anything to trust down the road. Unless I was reading her wrong she was insinuating that people are free to put whatever they like online. I didn’t want to push her because I’m liable to say something boneheaded and she pays the bills so I’m only guessing here. But she wrapped that subject up by saying, “An entire generation will be lost.”
When I was growing up Catholics weren’t allowed to eat meat on Fridays. They rewrote the rules in 1966 so that now the Friday meat abstinence only applies during Lent. We had some fish but I remember toasted cheese sandwiches and fried egg sandwiches that my father called “Mickey Mouse Sandwiches”. It seems every place around here has one on Fridays. Shamrock Jack’s has one of the best but they are too busy during the summer. When we lived in the city the bar at the corner didn’t serve food at all during the week but they had a big crowd for their Friday Fish Fry.
Sure enough Wikipedia’s entry on the “Friday Fish Fry” says “the fish fry is one of the trademarks of Upstate New York cuisine, especially Buffalo, as well as Rochester and Syracuse, New York. But can we trust this entry?
