Saint Martin DePorres wood statue from Animas Traders
After recommending it for years we rewatched “August, Osage County” and it was just as good as we remembered it being. Fantastic script, amazing cast, it feels real and maybe that’s why no one has thanked us for the recommendation.
Our friend, Pete, asked us to pick up some paper at Rochester Art Supply – Italian Bristol 100 lb., 14 x17″ sheet by Fabiano. While downtown we stopped at Fuego for a Cortado. Over at Pete’s we found him sitting at his drawing table and acting like he had turned the corner after seventy-three days on the sixth floor of Highland Hospital. Our next stop was Brad Fox’s on Royal View Drive. We had taken his stereo amp to Hi-Fi Lounge last year to have a short addressed. It worked for a while but the short came back, one of those intermittent problems that convince you the problem has been addressed when it starts working again. I would not want to be the technician trying to track that down.
The first boathouses lined The Canandaigua City Pier that was built in 1848. By 1888, over eighty small wooden structures lined the pier. In 1903, the pier was enlarged to accommodate train and trolley tracks to service the steamboats transporting farm produce and passengers along the lake. As cozy as they look today the Boathouse Owners’ Association enforces the strict rules prohibiting people from living in them or using them as cottages. We were in Canandaigua to celebrate our anniversary. We walked up and down Main Street before having dinner in the Lake House and after dinner we explored the pier before driving home.
You can see the smoke filled air in the photo above. The Air Quality Index has improved considerably since yesterday but the Canadian fires are still burning so it will probably be back. Our niece and her boyfriend came up from the NYC area and spent the weekend with us. We were sort of afraid our lifestyle would be too low key for them but it turned out that was just what they were looking for. We took walks around Durand Lake and the beach to the north and then the following day, east down Seneca Road to the bay. If they were here for a third day we could have walked west to the river. We swam in the pool, family stopped by, beer cans piled up and they left for the week’s work.
Tires dumped in the park on Zoo Road. Photo by Merrypad.
Pete and Emily were out walking before Peggi and I this morning and they sent us this picture of tires that someone had dumped in the park. The two piles had been cleaned up by the time we got there and we spent some time trying to figure out how they got into the park because the yellow gates are locked at dark. We talked to a dog walker and he speculated that they came in early in the morning just after the park workers opened the gate and before all the park goers arrived. That would make them pretty bold on top of really rude.
The Erie Canal made Rochester a boom town so of course we all sang this song in grade school. At dinner last night I asked Kevin if he sang this song growing up in Massachusetts. He said, “Of course. It’s a classic American folk song.” The canal stopped at Buffalo but the lakes allowed a continuation of water freight to and from Detroit but Peggi does not remember singing it in school. The song is so descriptive I expected to experience the sensation of ducking under a bridge when I got older.
I remember canoeing along the shoreline of a lake in the Adirondacks and somehow disturbing a beaver. I don’t know if it was a nest or a damn but the beaver followed us like it was chasing us away from its project. We’ve never seen a beaver in the park but every year we see the damage they cause to trees along the two lakes, Durand and Eastman. They are determined, industrious and persistent. And creative! Look at this sculpture.
Mud Dauber wasp nest on back door
A few hours later I looked out at the spot where the nest was to see if there were any wasps and I found them rebuilding in the same spot. I hosed it again. The next morning the nest was again as big as it was originally. These creatures are big but have no memory. Peggi read that peppermint oil deters then so I but some on a rag and wiped it on the spot where they built their first three nests. They came back undeterred and had another hut built so I blasted that and rubbed peppermint oil all over the area. They have not returned.
We’ve had wasp nests on our house other years. I suit up and blast them with our garden hose while Peggi keeps an eye out for the wasps. The other hives were lantern like structures but these are long and tube-like. I looked them up and found they are called “organ pipes” because they are often in side by side groupings. The worker wasps come one after the other with packages of mud and this tube gets longer and longer. I timed my approach and blasted their construction with all the water pressure we had.
“Shard” 2023 by Paul Dodd 46in h, 3 1/2in w, 2 1/2in d, pine
I couldn’t help but notice the form similarities in the beaver’s sculpture, the Mud Daubers’ nest and my “Shard,” the hunk of pine readymade that sprung from the shattered pine when it fell over in a heavy rain this spring.
70’s t-shirts on clothesline at Dartmouth Street apartment
In January of 1975 Peggi and I left Bloomington and moved to Rochester, where I grew up. We lived in an apartment in Tim Schapp‘s house on Dartmouth Street. Peggi worked in my uncle‘s supermarket when not working as a substitute teacher. She monitored a study hall in my brother Francis’s class. He had lived with us for a summer in Bloomington because my parent’s were having a hard time with him. I got a carpentry job and mowed lawns for a bunch of the neighbors on Dartmouth. I mowed Mr. Cohen’s lawn next door. You can see his house in the picture above.
I took a photo class at UR and wound up with a lot of black and white shots of mundane stuff around the house, like our laundry in the picture above. Interesting to see the entities we were willing to advertise for. These days I wear plain white Fruit of the Loom t-shirts all summer. I get them in six packs from Amazon.
Ray Tierney family, Rochester, New York, mid 1950s
I have a lot of nieces and nephews. The photo above, from the late fifties, is just one side of my family. Not all of my siblings or first cousins were even born yet. Peggi, on the other hand, has one sister and her two sons are the only nephews (or nieces) we have on that side. They are pictured below.
Nephews, Andrew and Alex, in 1999
Alex, the one on the right, is a chef. He and his wife own two successful restaurants in Miami. One, Boia De, has a Michelin star! We are enormously proud of him but we have not dined there yet. We ate at Animal in LA when he worked there and at 11 Madison Park when he was a sous chef there. Boia De just celebrated their fourth anniversary so we are overdue.
The Bear is an enormously successful show. We watched two episodes one night and then four the next. Is it as good as Better Call Saul? No, but Bob Odenkirk makes an appearance. Is it as good as Hawaii Five 0 (the original)? I didn’t fall asleep during The Bear and we are quite enjoying it. The characters are all familiar types. I like that. The powers that be aligned to produce a tie-in ad with Boia De, American Express and the booking app Resy, for the show. You may have seen it. Alex and his wife, Luci, are featured in the ad (below).
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.
