This is how I pictured summer, the way it was in Costa Rica last winter. Instead, we’ve had a couple of weeks of smoke filled air surrounded by rain. We don’t have air conditioning so we count on opening the windows and turning on a fan but the air outside smells like an ashtray. Our neighbor, Jared, has a rain gauge and he told us we had two and a half inches yesterday.
They didn’t have NA beers in Costa Rica so we drank what everyone else was having, “Imperial.” It’s a lot like Genesee, which also tastes especially good cold, right out of a long neck bottle. I picked up a case of Genesee at Aman’s the last time we were there. I pictured having one while playing horseshoes and having it around to serve when friends stop by. I haven’t opened the case yet.
Peggi and I took a walk over the bridge near High Falls and stopped in the brewery. They have a huge map of the city in there with an array of buttons you can push to illuminate the locations of all the breweries in the city at periods. In the 1850s there were more breweries in town than there are now. By the early 1970s just Genesee and Standard remained. My uncle worked for Standard until they closed in 1972 leaving Genesee as the only brewery in the city. And then the micro brewery craze took off.m
“Summertime” will come and when it does all will be right with the world.
I’ve decided to show photos instead of paintings at the Little Theatre Café in September. Everybody takes photos and there are probably more photos in the world than at any other time you can think of. So how do you tell a good photo, one you might print large, put in a frame and then hang in a show, from just another? It is not easy.
I’m thinking I’ll choose twenty from the twenty thousand I have in the cloud. I considered the one above because I like it. I like the dramatic lighting, the symmetry in the composition, the factory behind the street front, the two grey boxes on the that gate, the service gate lettering and why is that guy holding a back pack and clean shirt up like that?
I have a sense of what photos other people might like but does that mean I should put those photos in the show?And I have some no brainers. Should I put them in? And then how will my group of twenty hold up thematically? It’s a lot to think about.
Whenever I went anywhere in the city with my father he would point out places that used to be something else. In an attempt to draw me in he would personalize the location. “That’s where your great grandfather used to live.” I could hardly imagine a time when the city wasn’t what is but then I got old and I can’t go anywhere without thinking about people and places that had some connection to where we are now. I’m in the moment as we walk around and then out of it as I remember how it used to be.
I have always been of the mind that things are getting better and I thought my father was too. But near the end of his life I asked him if he thought things were better now than in the past and without answering directly he started talking about how the neighborhood priest knew what everybody was up to and how he wouldn’t let you get away with anything. I got the sense that he missed the order of yesteryear.
Scene of Hi-Techs photo session
Walking down South Avenue toward downtown Peggi and I paused at this underpass. Linnea Fischer took photos of the Hi-Techs here forty three years ago. We used one on the cover our first single. But back home, looking at the 45 cover, we found the pattern in the blocks goes in the opposite direction. You can’t go back.
The air smelled not so much like smoke but smoke flavoring, like the stuff they put on smoked almonds. So we walked with masks on. The air quality was at 155 when we left and that number kept dropping as we walked. Still unhealthy.
Our friend Pete has spent enough time in the hospital. He is coming home on Wednesday. Last week I gave him my copy of a recent Brooklyn Rail with a collection of essays on Robert Motherwell. I had the page with the first of Motherwell’s “Opens” open on our coffee table for the last week. Transfixed by the simplest of drawings I just couldn’t turn the page. Motherwell studied philosophy at Stanford and Harvard before making art and I knew these articles would fire Pete up so I gave him the issue. By the time we got home from the hospital Pete had texted us to say, “I would love to talk to you about these articles.” So we’re headed back up there tomorrow.
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” –Walt Whitman
David Murray outside the Bop Shop in Rochester, New York
Peggi and I got to the Bop Shop a half hour early to insure we could get a seat down front. The show was sold out but that doesn’t mean much when you can stand in the aisles of records. We found seats behind the counter just off to the left of the stage, close enough to the PA that I went back out to the car to get our earplugs. David Murray was out front smoking a cigarette and after he stubbed it out I asked if I could take his picture. He looked so good in this blue suit.
David Murray and Kahil El Zabar at Bop Shop in Rochester, New York
Kahil had a problem in sound check. His thumb piano kept feeding back. We have seen him so many times I could tell he was a little rattled. Despite that they opened at full tilt with a rousing number, Murray reaching for the stars on tenor sax and Kahil pounding his drums. Kahil started the second song with a beautiful melody on thumb piano. It didn’t feedback but it was no match to Murray’s sax. They settled into their trance-like groove on the third song, “In My House.” Both Kahil and Murray sang, Murray played bass clarinet and Kahil the Cajon. In Kahil El’Zabar’s house you can pray, reach to the soul, sing and dance… day or night!
Nduduzo Makhathini Trio after first set at Kilbourn Hall Rochester International Jazz Fest 2023
I’m thinking the Nduduzo Makhathini Trio’s performance last night at Kilbourn Hall was the best thing you are going to see at this year’s Jazz Fest. I don’t know how anyone could top it. They had it all, in the tradition of the giants like Pharaoh Sanders and Sun Ra.
We arrived about twenty-five minutes before the show but we were still able to snag front row seats. We forgot our earplugs and the woman sitting next to Peggi gave us a Kleenex to fashion some plugs. We didn’t need them. Nduduzo Makhathini’s melodies were propelled by Zwelakhe-Duma Bell le Pere’s bass while Francisco Mela closed his eyes and played the most beautiful, delicate drum parts. The sound was luxurious. A celebration of life and an offering to the gods.
Peggi’s reading Chris Frantz’s book about his time with the Talking Heads. She was telling me about an issue with songwriting credits for an early song of theirs. I went to look at how it was settled on their lp and found that we don’t have any Talking Heads albums anymore. Kept the singles of course. I loved their first single when they were still a trio and we saw them at the Village Gate before their lp came out. But I found I liked them less with each record.
We spent the last few days taking care of a friend with some health issues and then today we spent a good bit of the afternoon in the hospital with our friend Pete and I feel I get more out of helping them than they get from me. I’ve fallen behind with all my usual activities but they don’t seem so important at the moment.
We’ve had salad greens coming out our ears for over a month now. I packaged up a few bags for friends from this batch. We put our Pimiento de Padrón pepper seedings in this morning. We had to kill the first batch we grew from seeds after we learned the tomato seeds that were sprouting next to the peppers were contaminated with a virus. We bought tomato plants to make up for the lost batch but with the pepper plants we decided to start over. The peppers get too hot when they’re big so we’re counting on getting a good batch of small peppers before the snow flies again.
We FaceTimed with Duane this evening and he spotted the camera on my iPad following me around as I got up to do the dishes. The iPad was propped up against a candle and the lens is certainly not moving. We decided it must an AI feature selectively deciding how to zoom and crop the moving subject.
I’m looking forward to the Personal Voice feature that will be incorporated in the new OS. The idea is that you spend 15 minutes reading text prompts aloud to your iPhone or iPad, which will then use this audio data and machine learning to create a digital voice that matches your own. Then, if speech becomes impossible in the future for whatever reason, you will be able to use the Live Speech function to make calls and send messages in a voice similar to your own.
Apple assures us the data will be kept private and secure to prevent the possibility of audio impersonation. Ha.
A big toad was sitting in the middle of our path when the solstice officially hit at 10:57, just sitting there while we looked at it. I scratched the bumps on its back and it hopped away. We saw a few deer and they too just glanced at us and went about their business. As we cut across the maple grove we found a snake in the grass. I would guess it was three feet long or so and it appeared to be sunning itself. Only when we got too close did it slither away. Time stands still twice a year.
Dave Ripton and Todd Beers double self portrait from 1992
Back at the house, Dave Ripton and Todd Beers were cleaning our soffits. They wrapped our porch in plastic and I got this shot of Todd in action. Both Dave and Todd are poets and painters and Dave is a musician as well. We’ve been friends for years and have performed with both of them. We bought the painting below, a joint effort by the two of them, at Godiva’s on Monroe Avenue. It hung over the fireplace in our house on Hall Street. It was good spending time with them again.
We met our neighbor, Jared, at the mailboxes. He pulled a pamphlet from “In Touch Ministries” out of his box and gave it to us. He told us he didn’t know why he got these and he said he had sent them an email to ask them to take his name off their mailing list. An avowed atheist, he said, “I think the world would be better off if they banned all religions.”
Our friend Pete is attracted to the spirituality in art and his art certainly has that as a foundation. I came across a couple of passages I thought he would like so I texted them to him. He called a few minutes later to say he loved the statements and we arranged to meet in his hospital room today at one.
When we got to the front desk, a woman was checking out as we were checking in. She told the woman behind the desk that she had been visiting Peter Monacelli. I told her we were on our way up there and I asked how he was doing. She said, “He has lots of stories.” We were thrilled to hear this. That is the Pete we know.
We found his new room and shouted in to him. He told us we had to suit up with the baby blue gowns and dark blue gloves that were sitting by the door. And while we did he sang the first verse of Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue.”
He has been in the hospital long enough to see the division between life inside, where the focus is on healing, and outside where the focus is on . . . here he let us fill in the blank. I was thinking “Partying? Peggi said “Living?” Pete offered “Fixing things.” Imagine if we focused on healing on the outside.
Below are the two statements I sent Pete.
Chillida – “I am a religious man. Questions of faith and my problems as an artist are closely linked. Naturally my conception of space has a spiritual dimension, just as it also has a philosophical dimension. My continued rebellion against the laws of gravity has a religious aspect.“
Kiki Smith – “It’s one of my loose theories that Catholicism and art have gone well together because both believe in the physical manifestation of the spiritual world, that it’s through the physical world that you have spiritual life, that you have to be here physically in a body. You have all this interaction with objects, with rosaries and medals. It believes in the physical world. It’s a thing culture.“
“It’s also about storytelling in that sense, about reiterating over and over and over again these mythological stories about saints and other deities that can come and intervene for you on your behalf. All the saints have attributes that are attached to them and you recognize them through their iconography. And it’s about transcendence and transmigration, something moving always from one state to another. And art is in a sense like a proof: it’s something that moves from your insides into the physical world, and at the same time it’s just a representation of your insides. It doesn’t rob you of your insides and it’s always different, but in a different form from your spirit.”
Three nearby streets had a community garage sale today so we headed over that way on our walk. Some people had already thrown in the towel and put all their junk out at curb by the time we got there but we heard the cars were lined up earlier in the day. Peggi bought a sealed package of Kodak inkjet paper at our first stop and she picked up a pizza stone at another. A little girl was selling lemonade for fifty cents a glass on the next street so we bought two of those and chatted with her about business.
An Amazon truck was delivering more junk to people’s homes as they manned the tables of junk in their front yards. A UPS driver was wheeling a hand truck full of boxes up to a house down the road, stuff for the next generation to put out. One of our favorite houses, a low lying bungalow set way back on its lot, had a bunch tools for sale. I picked up a crow bar for four bucks and a file for two. We bent the crow bar we inherited from Peggi’s father trying to pry an autumn olive tree out of the ground and I had a file on loan from Jared just like the one I bought. Both these items will be in a future sale when someone cleans our place out.
Mountain Laurel on Clover Street stop on Landmark Society Tour
The only reason I am able to identify these blossoms is the iNaturalist app that Peggi has on her phone. This Mountain Laurel was in the garden of a house on Clover Street, just across the street from a brick Don Hershey house with rounded corners at the entrance. The Landmark Society’s tour started at Mercy High School and included a stop at Bob Martin’s former home, a mid-century marvel.
Peggi in front of Bob Martin’s former house, a stop on 2023 Rochester Landmark Society tour
Cornell’s Merlin bird identification app was made for retirees, especially those who by this age should know how to distinguish between a Yellow Warbler and a Goldfinch. At the push of a button the free app listens as it creates a waveform while spitting out pictures of the birds it hears. We stopped near the marsh on Hoffman Road and gave it a spin.
Robins, Red-Winged Blackbirds, Wrens and Cardinals all popped up in the first few seconds. Sparrows, Warbling Vireos, Morning Doves, Baltimore Orioles, Yellow Warblers, Red-bellied Woodpeckers, Cedar Waxwings, Goldfinches, White Breasted Nuthatchs and even a Rose-breasted Grosbeak were audible in the first minute.
Our neighbor, Rick, is a dj. He had a weekly slot on WRUR for years, he substitutes on “Open Tunings” when Scott is out of town and he has a show on WITR in the Fall. He builds his shows around artists’ birthdays and he plays music by the artists and versions of their songs by others. He buys tribute collections, cds of cover versions of Leonard Cohen or Neil Young or whoever and he would say, “You like Doug Sahm. Check out this collection.” Or “You like the Velvet Underground. Check this out.” I finally told him. I like the originals, by the original artists. I have a hard time with covers.
That paragraph was all a set up for the experiment Peggi and I did this afternoon. I lined up all six songs from the brand new “Bewitched – A Tribute to Luna” record by Angel Corpus Christi with the original versions. Even though we’re friends with Luna’s lead singer’s sister we are not familiar with the band’s music. I created a setlist that interleaved the Luna version with the Angel version of each of the six songs. The first thing I noticed is that all six of the Angel versions are shorter than the originals.
The abbreviation suits the cleaner pop approach. The songs are airier with more dimension in the production. The voice is much sweeter. Angel removes the removed quality of the Luna songs and loads them with personality. The six songs are pop classics in her hands. Lovedust is our favorite, the Angel version.
It might as well be summer. It hasn’t rained in weeks. Our garden has been especially dry, many of our seeds never germinated. And wild fires, raging to the north in Quebec, have bathed our skies in a warm, smoke filled glow.
Hazardous Air Quality display on my watch
On our way to the beach we ran into Greg Prevost and Miss Carol, walking in the park. I asked about his book and he said it was sold out. He told me I was in it, along with everything else, and that I might still be able to get a copy at the HOG. They were concerned about the smoke and decided to turn around. We continued on.
Try as we may to hang onto spring, May is behind us and we are already surrounded by the sounds of summer. From our house we can hear the motor boats on Lake Ontario to the north as well as the motorcycles on Kings Highway to the west. If we try we can hear the dull roar of tires on the Bay bridge to our east but that is louder in the winter when the trees are bare. We sleep with the windows open so besides the coyotes, we hear the sirens south of the Ridge.
A neighbor down in the valley called the cops on his neighbor because her gas powered leaf blower was too loud. She is a really sweet lady, I wish the guy had just tried to work it out with her. They are incredibly loud, and illegal in California because of the pollution, but my beef is the start/stop action. When it’s roaring, you eventually tune it out. Each time it stops you think, ahh, that’s it, and then it starts up again. The final matches of La Liga season are set to unfold tomorrow, most of them set to kickoff at the same time to cut down on the funny business. I will miss it, of course, but it will free up a considerable amount of time.
We have been eating an assortment of lettuces from our garden for the last week. The street pool is open and the solar cover has been especially productive so the water is warm. I’ve played horseshoes with my neighbor five times (and won four). I can boast because he manages a narrow edge on me most years. That is a welcome sound, the clang of the shoes when they hit each other or better yet the stake.
I am still amazed that the City tore up the eastern half of the old Inner Loop. I never thought it would happen. And I am amazed at how quickly it was redeveloped. That part of the city is enjoyable to walk in again. The other half of the Inner Loop is even more divisive but the talk of demolishing it has died down.
High Falls, the geographic reason Rochester was planted here, is just a short walk from midtown but getting by the wall of highway concrete is so unpleasant most people have given up. Artists are being chased out of their warehouse spaces on East Main as developers see bigger bucks in rehabbed living spaces and there are so many empty industrial buildings, former restaurants and storefronts along and off State Street, right near the falls. I have seen a glimpse of Rochester’s future. In another twenty years this area will be thriving again.
We were in this part of town to approve a print Peter at Editions Printing ran for us. Peter asked if my father was an artist. He said his wife had purchased one of Leo’s paintings from a show at Rochester Contemporary and it is hangs in their living room.
From Editions we walked by Obatala & Shango Religious Goods and picked up a couple of candles, Santa Barbara Africana and Santo Niño de Atocha. The owner of the shop asked if we wanted our candles blessed. I said no at first and then asked, “Does it cost anything?” He said no so I agreed. I was expecting a quick sign of the cross but he put a couple drops of a scented oil at the base of the wick and then sprinkled a few dried herb flakes on it. We continued on, across the bridge, stopped in the Genesee Brewery gift shop and headed back to our car.
Peggi sang in a choir for a few years and one of their performances was inside Saint Stanislaus on Hudson Avenue. The church was the epicenter of the Polish section of the city at one time. I don’t know how active the parish is anymore but the magnificent building is still standing. The clocks have stopped working, I can tell you that. Our Holy Trinity grade school basketball team played St. Stan’s back in the day and they were a formidable opponent.
Pete has sorted out the world from his hospital bed. Four weeks in now, but close to being released, he has turned lemons into lemonade as the adage goes. He has art supplies at his fingertips and stories to tell. He cares about each of the hospital workers, the ones that are in charge of his care, and that opens new channels. They take their breaks in his room or stop by to visit after their shift is down. We have witnessed this and it is really quite remarkable.
He wrote this beautiful poem (above) and asked us print fifty copies so he could give them to his caregivers. As Pete said to us, “Imagine how different the world would be if we all took care of each other.”
Debby Kendrick Project playing without Peter Monacelli on drums
Pete was hoping to be out in time for his gig with Debbie Kendrick on Friday but it didn’t work out. Peggi and I caught their second set. Debbie dedicated “You Send Me” to Pete. Lamar from Sons of Monk sat in for Pete along with Jahaka Mindstorm on congas. They were great but to my ears the songs didn’t sound as sweet or soulful with Pete on drums.
Dia Chelsea is an oasis of sorts. Not only do they have great art shows, they have a bathroom and a bookstore. We were there to see the Chryssa show but I spent some time with this book on the Chicago Art Institute’s collection of Ray Johnson work, mostly collages and mail art. The book feels like the original Whole Earth catalog, one foot in the recycling bin, but the more I looked, the more I wanted to see.
Born in Detroit the same year as my parents, he doesn’t fit neatly into any movement but he heralded several simultaneously. A pop artist, earlier and more fluid than Warhol, a performance artist before the category existed and certainly a conceptual artist. He made fun of them all. A queer street artist well before Keith Haring. His collages looked like the best of the punk era a decade before they were born. He made fun of it all. He blew up a deal with Gagosian when he priced his collages at one million each.
At ease with appropriation, Johnson was quick to make connections between everything. As a student at the legendary Black Mountain College, his art was in dialog with his teachers, Joseph Albers and Robert Motherwell and his friends John Cage and Jasper Johns. He lived like a monk and made art with magazines, Xerox machines and the post office. In the sample spread above he spoofs the intellectual Abstract Expressionist, Barnett Newman.
Most of all I see my friend Rich Stim’s work in the humor. And the post cards that Pete and Shelley sent us over the years – rectangular pieces of cereal boxes with cryptic messages for the mailman to decipher before we tucked them away.
“Some people just didn’t get it, and other people like me thought he was an absolute genius,” said the painter James Rosenquist, with whom Mr. Johnson corresponded for years, often asking him to forward mailed artworks onto Willem de Kooning. “Sometimes I did what he asked and sometimes I just couldn’t part with them,” Mr. Rosenquist said, adding: “I really miss him because I accumulate all these strange things that I’d like to mail him, but I can’t because he’s not there.”
For whatever twisted reason the first Captain Beefheart song that got under my skin was “The Blimp.” And then “China Pig.” And then every song on “Trout Mask” and any song he touched. I went backward for the whole catalog and picked up every new release in real time. Well, the blimp is in town. Last time we looked, it was the Met Life blimp. It was still the Goodyear blimp when I took this shot of it over Sparky‘s house in 2002. I thought of that song today when we spotted the blimp as we came out of the hospital where we were visiting Pete. The PGA Championship is in town.
Oak Hill, the swanky country club on the east side of Rochester, last held the PGA in 2013. We went to that one. These sporting events keep getting bigger. In 1989 when the US Open was there Peggi and I (4D Advertising) did a brochure that featured all the branded swag. We took a box of sample product to Chris Maggio’s studio on Saint Paul and he photographed the lot. We designed a commemorative book called “The Crown Jewels of Oak Hill” as well. Today the merch tents are as big as a department store and you can bet no two bit local agency was responsible for any of the action.
We drove right over a dead raccoon this morning on our war way to B&B Automotive. Not with our tires, it was right between them. We dropped the car off and went for a walk while they worked on it. We walked south on Saint Paul and into Seneca Park. We started heading down the steps to the bridge over the river and we came face to face with another raccoon. This one was alive. We scared him and he turned around but he had nowhere to hide so he turned back toward us. We ran up the steps and decided to take the trail along the east side of the Genesee.
The park is named after the Native American tribe that settled here so it seemed fitting we would come across this ceremonial fire pit. I was glad to see kids still hang out in the woods and leave signs of their mischief behind. Peggi’s phone says we went nine miles but it hardly seems possible.
