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.
Joe Ziolkowski at his photo show at Colleen Buzzard’s Studio
I remember Peggi’s father wore a bright orange hat in retirement. We have friend who wears an orange hat in NYC so we can keep track of him. Joe Ziolkowski’s hat looked particularly striking against his cyanotype cloud photos (we bought one, out of view) in Colleen Buzzard’s Studio.
It is warm and sunny today with clear blue skies. The beach looks nothing like this. This photo was taken yesterday. This creek on the beach is the overflow from Durand Lake (across the road to the right.) It flows into Lake Ontario on the left. Depending on the rainfall, the wind and the roughness of the big lake, this creek is always different. It is constantly rearranging itself and then sometime in the summer it just disappears. When it gets warmer we take ours shoes off but often we just turn around. I was able to get across on the log this time. Peggi decided not to try today.
PBS’s “We Want The Funk” was fantastic. They could have subtitled it “Give It Up for James Brown!” He was rightly featured in a full two thirds of the one and half show.
8-9 PM on Wednesday does not work for us. We’re usually watching soccer. So we catch up with “Magic Records,” our brother-in-law’s’ WAYO show, on Mixcloud. Blondie’s “Dreaming,” June Tyson’s a cappella “Astro Black” and Suicide’s “Rocket USA” sounded better than ever! We tuned in to Kevin Patrick’s WPKN show just in time for a live version of Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity” and listened all the way up to Dr John’s “Right Place Wrong Time.” Made plans with my neighbor to head leave for the HOG at 8:30 tomorrow for Record Store Day.
I think Margaret Explosion had a pretty good night last night. There were five of us there (last week was a just a trio) and Phil Marshall was in the crowd. The first set was a little messy but things began to gel in the second set. And there was a bunch of young people there who had never seen the band. So good to hear from them after the set. We met Nacelle from self-described krautrrock band Ellaar and streamed some of their songs on the way home. Particularily liked the song called “Kim Gordon.”
I had a short circuit in the first set, started a beat and then stoped before anyone else had come in. Peggi laughed and asked if I was all right. I didn’t like what I was playing so I stopped. Might have been an age related move. We’ll listen to the recording after we walk.
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
“Radiant” by Margaret Explosion from recent release, “Field Recordings”
Before you click on the video above notice the old downtown Rochester Public Library Building. It is still part of the library but a new, much larger building sits across the street from it now. The streams of water coming out of the building are old races, running off the Genesee River, left over from the days when Rochester was know as the Flour City because of the many mills. And the double decker bridge to the left used to carry the Erie Canal across the Genesee.
I raided Peggi’s hard drive for the footage in this video, her sweeping panoramas of river downtown, the beach in Costa Rica, the psychedelic swans and the guy playing bagpipes in the park. If anybody knows who that guy is I would like to credit him for his performance.
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.
Rolanda JW Spencer work entitled “Mothers – Witches” at RIT City Space
John Gilmore stopped by on Friday afternoon. He snuck in while Peggi and I were playing the basement and he spooked Peggi when she came upstairs. We planned make seven First Friday stops and we got a late start. We ran into Boo Poulin and Joan Lyons twice so we knew we made the right choices. We had an opportunity to tell Joan how much we liked her piece in MoMA’s Robert Frank retrospective.
I particularly liked Rolanda Spencer’s earthy, sensual “yami Aje: Mothers + Witches” installation at RIT’s City Space.
Steve Piper Photo At Lumiere Photo show “Souvenirs, Visits to America’s Agricultural Fairs”
We hardly had enough time to study all the photos in Steve Piper’s “Souvenirs, Visits to America’s Agricultural Fairs” show at Lumiere. Later at Colleen Buzzard’s we saw Jon Gary leafing through a book of Steve’s photos from the show so purchasing a book sounds like the ticket. Steve’s photos are black and whites with the entire grey scale well represented. The ordinary situations are multi-layered. There’s humor in the melancholy.
Ron Giel defending goal for RL Thomas, Webster 1967
I wish I had finished my soccer deep dive a little sooner. Ron would have loved it. I hadn’t seen or heard from him since one of the early reunions. I sent a link to a few of my former teammates and just a week later one of them let me know of Ron’s passing. Ron was a sensational goalie. His family held a celebration of his life at place in Webster called “The Filling Station.” I imagined the place might be where Finn’s Garage was, the Texaco station operated by Andy Finn’s father that I remember for their nickel Coke machine and bicycle pump. It turned out the sports bar was right next door, across the street from Barrett Law Offices where Joe’s father and two of his brother’s worked. Ron apparently spent a lot of time in here.
I rode out to Webster with Jeff and he turned out to be the only other member of our team that was there. We met Ron’s son and gave him our condolences. Three other member of our class were there and we all stood near the back of the bar and talked about the old days. We never did get a drink or partake of the chicken wings.
I had not seen Jim since high school. He was easily the best athlete in our class, center on the basketball team and quarterback on the football team. He had told us about a crazy motorcycle accident he was involved in where a kid pulled out in front of him. Jim was scooped up and flown via helicopter to the hospital where he got two new hips and a long metal rod in his leg. Still bowls he told us.
We all lost a mutual friend by “friendly fire” so Viet Nam came up. Jeff had driven Rex to the physical while unsuccessfully trying to talk him out of going. Bob had a sports injury where his shoulder would go in and out of its socket. He was able to disengage it while in line for his physical. I was classified 1A at the time, having dropped out when college when it provided you a deferment. I was saved buy a high lottery number.
Jim had the best story. His birthday was number one in the lottery. His brother was already serving and Jim didn’t want to go so he called the Selective Services office to see how close he was to being called up. The woman who answered kept trying to get his name and Jim didn’t want to identify himself but he finally he gave in. She looked up his name and told him he was 4F and he could forget about getting drafted. No further explanation.
“Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen. We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down the cost of living for American families, to unleash American energy, to bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more.“ – Lee Zeldin, Environmental Protection Agency
I was really enjoying “Severance” for the first season. I loved that there was snow on the ground when the characters were in their “outie” stage. The two episodes we watched each night felt like a disorienting but pleasant drug experience. More surreal than sci-fi. I loved the four primary actors and the sets were fantastic. The color choices were sensational. The plots were good enough to keep me awake but relaxing. Then came the season finale where my confusion felt frustrating. Peggi had a Severence dream that night where she was trapped in a B&B in our neighbor’s house.
Pete and Gloria came over with their brand new car, a Honda. We got in the back seat and they took us for a ride in our neighborhood. In fact we drove the same route that Peggi and I had walked earlier. We pointed out where we picked the pussy willows, the flowering Red Bud tree, the eagle’s nest and the marsh which is coming alive with irises and red winged blackbirds. In the back seat it was like we were in our “innie” stage but getting glimpses of our “outie” lives.
Tom Orsini painting at estate sale on Turk Hill Road
I like this bird’s eye view of a house on Turk Hill Road. Us humans get to look up at it on a hill. Peggi was alerted to the sale by our friend, Kathy. She saw the listing described as a Don Hershey house. Peggi has been cataloguing the homes that Don Hershey built in this area on her website, DonHershey.com, and she did not have this one. The previous owner did this painting of his house. An $800 item, it was my favorite piece. This arrangement below was the only place in the house where I could rest my eyes.
Items at Turk Hill Road estate sale
Practical things were pretty expensive here and the unpractical items were as loud you can imagine. Lime green and purple walls, lots of glassware, a tabletop display of sun glasses you could imagine Elton John wearing, extra large tropical style shirts, dozens of unopened packages of cute cocktail napkins.
It bugs me when we pass somebody who says, “Nice day for a walk.” I always want to shoot back, “Any day is a good day for a walk.” That being said, we could not have picked a better day to walk across the swing bridge into Webster. The bridge closes on April 1 and we had not been down this way in a bit. We walked to the end of our street, into the woods, out to Culver and then down to the lake where the road gently curves and follows the lakeshore as Lake Road. In the photo above the bay is behind me and the lake is on the other side of this mound, the old Hojack rail line. We turned around at the end of the new Sandbar Park. There was a time when we walked all the way around the bay in preparation for the Camino. Turning around here would make for eight miles or so.
Culver Road is my favorite road in the city and the north end of it is the coolest. In the day it ended on Hot Dog Row. Today it has more of an international flair. The bowling alley has changed hands. The mural outside slants youthful. Their sign in the window is looking for bowling league members. The Parkside Diner was packed at noon and the Asian place was all lit up. We went to the door of Frametastic to check on Joan but a small note on the door read, “Out for Lunch.” The parking lot for the Irish bar was full. Union Tavern looked like they were open. Nick’s, where my father met his Kodak buddies for lunch for years, had a sign that read, “Open for Dinner Only.” The pizza place looked busy and Anatolia’sl was hopping. We would have had lunch at the Bayside if they hadn’t torn it down. We stopped at Don’s Original on the way back for a chocolate Almond Custard. It was stuffy inside so we sat outside in the sun.
March snow showers on Broad Street Bridge
I mentioned above that any day is a good day for a walk. Yesterday was too. We parked at the CoOp and walked downtown. The city looked like an expressionist painting.
We spent a day in the garden before getting back to “our project,” one that took us the better part of three days.
First, the garden, because that was a breeze. We went down there intending to plant lettuce and arugula but we discovered our mache lettuce, sometimes called “corn salad,” had survived the winter. It had spread from its original location so we transplanted the clusters back to where they belonged. We did a bit of weeding and and turned over the earth for two new rows of lettuce and arugula. Peggi counted at least a hundred garlic sprouts. She picked some collard greens to bring home. They were left from last year as well. We tried to do a little raking but it got too windy to keep all the leaves in one place. So windy in fact we heard and then saw the top of large white pine snap off and land in our neighbors’ yard.
Yesterday we finished “our project.” One of our oak trees fell, away from the house, and it landed in a way that one of the branches kept the tree mostly off the ground. A lot of really good firewood, except we had enough firewood. So we let the tree lay there for three years before tackling the project. I cut the branches off and we carried them down our hill and piled them up by the road. I made log length cuts in the trunk and let the chunks roll down the hill. Peggi was down there but safely off to the side, making sure there were no cars coming by. It was impossible to control where the big logs would roll. Some crashed into trees on the way down, others careened across the road. We rounded them up, rolled them up a board into our car and drove them up to our woodpile.
While we were down there I took a photo of the new road sign. It’s kind of an eyesore.
Madison and Bennie at Little Theatre Café for Margaret Explosion gig. Photo by Jason Wilder.
I saw Jason Wilder recently at a Margaret Explosion gig and told him I missed his blog. For some reason it had gone dark. He told me he had switched hosts. I checked back in today and found he had made a few new entries and one was about that gig. I particularly like Jason’s photos. They are full of mystery. I grabbed the one above from Jason’s post.
Bennie, standing to Madison’s right, often sits in with Margaret Explosion on a few songs. She usually travels with at least one Brazilian percussion instrument. Here she is instructing Madison, our number one fan, on how to play the cuica. Madison already has a drum set and she just purchased an imitation P-bass. She plans to take lessons form Margaret Explosion’s bass player, Ken Frank. Someday Madison will able to sub for Ken.
Andrea and Rich standing, Dave, Peggi, Paul, Kim and Steve down front, San Francisco 1980
Not sure who took this photo. Kim had a journalism degree but her camera is in her lap. I’m thinking it was Rich with a timer. He looks like he just slid into place and is trying extra hard to be nonchalant. That is just a guess. Rich and Andrea had a darkroom. Peggi and I did too but there is no way I could get that comfortable after releasing the shutter.
Peggi and I had driven to Mississippi where Steve was living and the three of us got in his pickup and drove all the way out west. We slept in the back. I remember Peggi playing her sax back there while Steve drove and I rode up front, not the whole time of course, but long enough to nail the Hi-Techs recording of “Boogaloo Rendezvous” when we got back.
We stopped in LA to spend some time with Peggi’s sister and then drove up the coast to San Francisco where Kim and Dave and Rich and Andrea were living. It is time for another visit, planning stage anyway. And we are adding another leg to see Matthew and Louise in Honolulu. We will do this one by air.
Red-tailed Hawk with snake in its claws.. Lake Ontario can be seen in the background.
While out walking yesterday we ran into a neighbor who told us he had seen an eagle’s nest in the tall trees behind his house. He said he hadn’t seen any action in there yet. We found the nest, above the marsh, and stared at it for a while but didn’t see any activity either. We had just seen an eagle sitting on a nest along Lakeshore Boulevard on Saint Patrick’s Day.
Our neighbor told us he had taken a picture with his drone of a hawk flying above his house. He said he has since learned that bird watchers frown on the use of drones because it bothers the birds. He added, “for good reason.” But he said before learning this he captured a hawk flying above his house with a snake in its claws. He told us he would send the photo.
His photo hardly looks real but the most dramatic thing about it for me is how well you can see the lake from a bird’s perspective.
Webster vs. Gates Chili. Paul Shriver, Punk Watson and Paul Dodd (center) on the front line for Webster 1967
Back in grade school at Holy Trinity Joe Barrett’s brother Tom coached our 6th grade soccer team. We beat the seventh and eighth grade teams and it was thrilling. I fell in love with the sport.
I went to high school at Bishop Kearney for two years and played there. I remember trying out for the varsity team and stealing the ball from the central midfielder, John Numetko, but getting kicked in the shin with his cleats. They were those hard plastic football style shoes back then and I still have a scar on the front of my leg. At the same time I was playing summer soccer in Webster at the old high school. Most of that group was older than me and I learned the European style game under Ralph Wager.
My father used to scour the FultonHistory site and he had a subscription to Newspapers.com. He was always doing research on something. On a family tree related search for info on his uncle, Paul Dodd, a semi pro ball player, he found Paul’s box scores and an article where his Uncle Paul got busted for playing craps. He also came across articles where my name was mentioned when I was playing soccer. He gave me the articles. On match days in high school my father would often stop by on his way home from Kodak and he took a few photos of our matches. About twenty years ago my high school girlfriend sent me the clippings she had saved when we were going out. So I’ve been sitting on this stuff long enough. I have posted it all here.
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?
