Walzford is one of our favorite streets. We make a point of going down it or coming back on it when we walk up to Aman’s. The lots are generous, the houses are all different having been built over many years rather than all at once so the street has a complex character. We ran into Marsha here, where she has a part-time job tending to one of the gardens. There is a fair amount of BLM banners and a wrap around porch with a sign overhead that reads, “Porch of Indecision.”
We shopped at both Aman’s and Wegmans so our backpacks were loaded. We could barely bend down without falling over but the pile of fresh flowers near the curb on Culver was irresistible. They must have been used briefly at an event, probably a funeral, and then discarded. White Lillies, purple flowers mixed with Eucalyptuse greens all freshly picked. We picked through the pile and carried an armload home. Peggi arranged four gorgeous displays in various parts of the house. It smells like a funeral parlor in here.
Blue skies, yellow tree and white house on Dewberry Street
Manuel Cáceres Artesero, better known as Manolo el del bombo, is Spain’s national football team’s most famous supporter. He was in the stands in Sevilla beating his bass drum when Spain secured a spot in next year’s World Cup by defeating Swedon. We watched the match on ESPN and plan to watch the US tonight when they meet Jamaica in a a qualifying match.
We have walked along the lake most days this year. It is such a cool feeling to get there and realize we can’t go any further north without a boat or a passport. We met three women who had just taken a fall plunge this weekend. They were all wrapped up on the beach and bubbly. Peggi said, “You just went swimming didn’t you?” One of the woman said “Yeah, that will really wake you up.”
Today we followed a few paths through the park and never made it to the lake. We came back through the Commons and inspected our ski route/ We found one new tree down in the path but we found a way to ski around it when the time comes. The weeds are all spindly now as the die back and there is theoretically less chance of bringing a tick home on our clothes.
I wish the US team had a Manolo instead of the obnoxious American Outlaws and their bombastic U S A chants.
I didn’t sleep that well thinking about my dentist appointment this morning. I was seeing a specialist to determine if he could save a tooth, one that was an essential part of a bridge and the appointment was for 8:15. I typed the location, Sully’s Trail in Bushnell’s Basin, into my iPad and Siri was giving me directions as I walked to the car but once inside she went silent. I pulled over on Seneca Road to troubleshoot the sound problem. The volume was up. I rebooted the map app. And then it dawned on me that the iPad was sending the audio via bluetooth to the car stereo and I had the stereo set to AM radio with the volume turned all the way down. I switched the car stereo to bluetooth, heard Siri’s voice and took off.
Siri was giving directions over a soundtrack that was so spacey I wasn’t even sure it was coming from the car stereo. The display on the dashboard read “Track 5 – Love Flows Over Us in Prismatic Waves.” It took me a bit to figure out what was going on. We had read an article about Jon Hopkin’s new release, “Music for Psychedelic Therapy,” and we thought of our friends, Jeff and Mary Kaye. They recently took a guided ayahuasca trip in Mexico and we were having dinner with them over the weekend so I streamed some of the album from my iPad.
I wasn’t entirely awake, it was raining and the music was as ambient as the sounds around me, the tractor trailer tires whooshing by, the wipers beating back and forth and Siri’s voice telling me to merge left” and “take exit 6.” I was running late and the sea of red taillights near the Can of Worms would ordinarily make me very anxious. Not today. Everything was dreamy.
The dental assistant introduced himself as a surgeon from Egypt. He told me he was taking classes here to complete his certification in order to work in this country. I asked if Salah was from Egypt and he said. “Mohammad Salah, the star Liverpool striker, is definitely from Egypt. Not many people here know it he is” I asked about the procedure to lengthen a crown and he drew a diagram. The doctor came in and studied the situation. He told me the tooth will have to be extracted so I have an appointment with an oral surgeon..
“Before Yesterday We Could Fly:” An Afrofuturist Period Room
“Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room” opened last week, the same day we were at the Metropolitan. We were turned away at the door as the opening was for members only so I took this photo from outside the room. We moved along to Jules Tavernier and the Elem Pomo, a show about an Indigenous community in Northern California in 1800s. The Met has it all.
I played horseshoes with Rick the day we came back from New York. Rick played golf with Steve Grieve the day before and after we played Steve found out he had Covid. Rick says he hung out with Steve in his house as well. so we didn’t play for a few days. Rick was tested and it came back negative so we played horseshoes yesterday.
I took my warmup shots, throwing all four shoes down to one stake and then all four back to the other. Rick was doing something on his phone. When we were ready to play we could only find three of the four shoes. I felt around the sandy soil in the pit and started combing through the pachysandra behind the stake. I usually make a metal note if a shot is so bad that bounces in there and I didn’t remember one doing so.
I don’t like wading through the pachysandra because I worry about ticks. Rick is currently doing a month of antibiotics because he came down with Lyme. I got a hoe out and tried to push the plants aside to find the shoe. We looked for about a half hour and Rick went next door and brought back a set of shoes that he had bought on eBay a long time ago. They were lighter and they really threw my toss off. Extra flips and too much distance. And I kept thinking about the missing shoe.
About halfway through the first match with the new shoes I threw one that landed in the pit with a clank. I turned to Rick and asked, “What was that?” Rick finished his throw and we dashed to the other stake. The missing show was about five inches down.
Leaving for home Duane walked with us to the subway stop near his apartment in Brooklyn. We were talking right up to the turnstiles and we heard a train approaching. The woman ahead us us was having a hard time with her card. We stopped using the MetroCard once we learned we could just click our phone or watch. While Duane was telling us not to worry, that the train was on the other side, I clicked my watch and the woman scooted through on my dime. I clicked it another two times and we said goodbye to Duane.
We walked down to the bay on our first day back and into Webster on the swing bridge that will be in place until Spring. We stopped by Kathy’s on the way back planning on getting her advice for overwintering our lemongrass plants. We forgot all about that when we learned that she has new neighbors, a young couple who plan to grow vegetables and raise chickens. The previous neighbor turned out to be a two-faced religious type who had an affair with a minister who then started stalking her.
Stephana McClure drawing based on George Cukor’s “Gaslight” at Bienvenu Steinberg & Partner in Tribeca
Before leaving for NYC we took an armload of collard greens from our garden down to our friends Helena and Jedi. They invited us to dinner but we we told them we were headed to NYC. They told us we must go see Hamilton. Their nephew, an Eastman graduate who plays Washington, arranged to get us discounted tickets. Our third full day in the city revolved around Broadway.
Duane’s place in Brooklyn is as comfortable as home so we hung around there for the morning and took the F train in after noon. We stopped in Tribeca where we carved out a three block chunk of galleries, below Canal with Church Street to the West and Broadway to the east, we went up and down both sides of Lispenard, Franklin and White Streets. The latter being where the Mudd Club was.
Artist Space had an installation of Milford Graves works, videos, hand painted records and even his drums. He was not only a drummer but a botanist, a professor at Bennington, a cardiac technician and a visual artist. We watched a full size stock-ticker scroll by in another gallery while listening to a celestial Greek soundtrack. We spent some serious time at Bienvenu Steinberg & Partner with a fabulous show called “I See You Seeing Me (Meeting the Female Gaze)” by Stephana McClure. The drawing above was done done in reverse. The artist projected George Cukor’s “Gaslight” on her monochromatic drawing and rubbed over the subtitles of each line of dialog. I was so enamored with this piece I asked how much it was. $8,000 did not seem so bad. In the necklace/wall hanging below she wove Italian twine and strung it with vintage axe heads wrapped in prose from Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking.”
Stephana McClure’s axe head necklace as wall hanging at Bienvenu Steinberg & Partner
The play was on 46th Street just off Times Square. NYC has one sixth the positivity rate of our area so the city felt safe except for Times Square. It is just an insane glimpse of our dystopian future. Street venders selling all sorts of crap, designer knock-off purses and watches, chain stores and fast food, blocks of buildings covered in LED monitors, each playing non stop commercials. A guy with a full head mask of Donald Trump stood in the middle of an intersection directing traffic.
With Hamilton I found it odd that the lead character, the guy the play is named after, feels like a minor character. We waited after the play to chat with Tamar. He stole the show but looked smaller off stage than he did as Washington. I said something about that and he said, “That’s because everyone else in the cast is so short.” He looked like his father but his voice needs to drop a few more octaves before he has the Barry White thing.
For our second day in the big city we planned to meet up with my brother at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to take in the Surrealism show. Peter Schjedahl, writing in last week’s New Yorker, described the Metropolitan Museum’s “Surrealism Beyond Borders” as a deliriously entertaining survey.
Statue in the Greek and Roman wing of the Metropolitan Museum
We were a little bit early so we wandered through the Greek and Roman wing. This is one of my favorite parts of the museum. It is curious to me how these two civilizations, both around the BC/AD cusp, were depicting people that feel so human today. The Greeks idealized the form while the Romans depicted the unglamorous as well as the mighty. Then it seems we didn’t come out of the Dark Ages until the Renaissance. I realize this is an uninformed abbreviation of art history but that is the way it strikes me. The Michael Rockefeller wing, where they keep the secrets of the Asmat, is right next door to this wing. They are renovating it and I’m anxiously awaiting its reopening.
“Jucambe” by Agustín Cárdenas at “Surrealism Beyond Borders” Metropolitan Museum
There were some photos in the Surrealism exhibit that really sent me, especially by the Colombian Cecilia Porras, along with a Agustín Cárdenas sculpture and the May Ray sewing machine wrapped in a wool blanket but Surrealism, especially the paintings, is not for me. This was made perfectly clear when we exited the show and came face to face with Max Beckmann’s “The Old Actress painting. And in the next room a series of gorgeous Rothko’s.
After the show we cleansed our palette with a stroll through Central Park.
Stanley Whitney painting at Lisson Gallery in Chelsea
As soon as we read that Stanley Whitney cranks Miles’ “Bitches Brew” each time he paints we knew Lisson Gallery would be our first stop in Chelsea. He puts a color down and responds to it with his next move, a call and response, similar to Miles Davis’s late sixties soundscapes. Needless to say, the show was a delight. These large paintings stop you dead in your tracks.
In a summer program at Skidmore College in 1968 Whitney became the favorite of his teacher Philip Guston. He credits Guston with teaching him how to put a painting together. Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo has a Stanley Whitney retrospective on its calendar for 2023.
Olga De Amara wall hanging at Lisson Gallery in New York
And once we were at Lisson we discovered the Columbian textile art, Olga de Amaral. A revelation. A block away Gilbert and George were showing their “New Normal Pictures.” We spent nearly an hour on a bench in a white room looking at a barely discernible yellow sphere by Helen Pashgian. Lucy Raven’s video installation, “Ready Mix,” at Dia Chelsea was stunning. Chelsea still has the goods.
It wasn’t a fast but but we slimmed down our news consumption when we left for NYC on Tuesday. Even posting here, the news-to-self was curtailed. Other than our overnight in the Adirondacks the trip to NYC was our first since the outbreak. We’re timid and it was reassuring to see most people in the big city taking more precautions than we do in Rochester.
I came back with a disc full of images that I will slowly work my way through. I know this one will be my favorite. Eyeballs fine tuned by three days of gallery hopping and these reclaimed boards, bound with rope, laying on the ground in front of a building in Tribeca looked sensational.
Joe McPhee and Jay Rosen performing as Trio X at the Bop Shop in Rochester New York
We saw the cutest costume at the end of our street. A little girl was wearing a transparent hoop skirt with lights under the hood. We were heading out to the Bop Shop to see Joe McPhee and Jay Rosen. We haven’t had any trick or treaters in years so we weren’t walking out on anyone.
They still perform as Trio X even though their bass player died a few years back. We heard the trio a few times and saw Joe play solo one time. Joe likes to bring it down so low you hear his breath pass thru the horn, the valves on horn popping open and the clicking shut. He pays tribute to and is in league with Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy. He is one of the greats. He is a multi- instrumentalist, a composer and improvisor and also a poet. Last night was the first time we have heard him read. Drummer Jay Rosen backs the poetry perfectly, propelling it, setting it free.
And if that is not enough he has stories. He went to John Coltrane’s funeral with Ornette Coleman.
November tomorrow and we’re still picking Pimientos de Padron and arugula from the garden. The kale will last til the snow flies and we still have carrots and beets below ground. We poked holes in the far corner and dropped fifty or so garlic bulbs in. We’ll cover them with mulch for the winter once the leaves decide to fall. And Peggi picked another batch of collard greens for Helena. She has no saturation point.
On our way back from the garden we ran into Jared who was trying to catch three of the biggest Koi in his pond. He had a big net resting on the bottom with some fish food in it and he was hoping to pull it up quickly if they went for the bait. He had already startled them and they were ignoring his net. The big guys were not only eating too much food they were pooping too much and dirtying the water.
While we were talking Miguel, a fellow walker who lives on the next street over, came up to us to ask if we had seen a young black lab. Apparently his neighbor’s dog had runaway. We told him we would keep an eye out and a few minutes later, the owner of the dog got out of her car and asked if we had seen her dog. She told us “Babe” was just a puppy and had never left home before. We told our neighbors to keep a look out.
We were curious if they ever found the dog so we came back from the lake via their street this morning. Miguel and his partner were out in front of their house. They were holding up their mailbox which had been run over last night. They pointed to the ground at all the shiny plastic car parts. They told us they had a party the night before and one of their guests ran into it.
We asked about the the black lab and they said lady across the street from them also has a black lab. Her mother is staying with them and she apparently let the missing black lab in to their house. Meanwhile their black lab was in the back yard.
In another few days I will be able to take the seasonal bridge across the mouth of Irondequoit Bay and into Webster where my dentist is located. Instead I had to drive north on Culver to get on the expressway and cross on the bay bridge. As I got on 104 I looked down at the license plate on the car in front of me. The frame around the plate read “Not Today Satan.” The bay looked gorgeous with dry ice like steam rising off the water’s surface in the early morning sun.
I always liked this guy. He seemed like a no nonsense craftsman as he filled my cavities, capped my teeth and built and the then replaced my bridges. I’ve been going to him for a long time. I went to his father when he was practicing in the same office. I dated his father’s receptionist. I have always had my suspicions, he listens to the urban country station, he lets Conservative GOP politicians put campaign signs in front of his office but I don’t go there.
Six months ago after the hygienist found some decay he took one of my bridges apart and determined he could not repair it. I would need the teeth pulled. I discovered he can’t, in fact, do miracles. The conversation turned to the pandemic. He said he would not take the MRMA vaccines because they can make you sterile. Can someone who holds this belief still be a good dentist?
As I walked in the door this morning with my N95 on I asked the receptionist if everyone was vaccinated. She said, “We’re workin’ on it.”
Wings of Progress on top of the Times Square Building as seen from the Broad Street Bridge
“Oh, the wives of the saints have troubles of their own.” Chuck’s lyrics pop into my head all the time. Hearing The Colorblind James Experience perform forty of his songs over the weekend has reopened the floodgates.
The titles alone of Colorblind songs come complete with their musical hook. “Considering A Move to Memphis,” “A Different Bob,” “Euphoria Jones,” “Rocking’ As Fast As I Can,” “I Saved Your Life,” “Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself,” “Show Me” and “She Took The Ring Off A Dead Man’s Finger.” The lyrics unfold like parables. Or poetry.
In high school Chuck and I were both friends with a brother and sister, the girl from his class and her brother from mine. When they moved away Chuck drove down to visit the guy with Peggi and me. I’m not using their names for a reason.
One night between Colorblind sets at Schatzee’s I told Chuck a story that the brother had recently shared with me. I was not supposed to tell anyone about this but I did. We were both friends with the players so I told Chuck and said, “Please, don’t tell anyone.”
The girl was working as a nurse when they brought a body into Emergency. The famous (very famous) person was pronounced dead and the hospital staff told her to sit with the body while they notified the family and authorities. She slipped a ring off his finger as a souvenir. Chuck thought the story was fantastic and a short time later the band was performing “She Took The Ring Off A Dead Man’s Finger.”
I helped Chuck put the artwork together for “Solid Behind the Times,” the album the song was on. Chuck always wanted his lyrics printed out on the lp but the company didn’t have it in the budget so they wound up on an insert. Twenty years later the girl caught wind of the song by her classmate. She back-pedaled a bit and said, “It wasn’t his ring. It was a lighter.” Not as poetic. I don’t believe her.
“Or would he want her to have it Oh, he might very well”
Chuck was an old soul in high school. At an age when most of us were turning our backs on our families he shared his deep connections with city relatives who made doughy pizza for his friends. He has been dead for twenty years now but his stature remains legendary. Former bandmates, what some would call the classic, core line-up, the band that played the John Peel session, performed two sold-out shows this weekend at Abilene. Chuck’s son, Mark, sang and strummed guitar like a chip off the old block. Chuck’s wife, Jan, said he “was channelling his father.”
My brother, Mark, Chuck’s bf in HS, planned to meet us at the show. Driving up from New Jersey, he texted to say his ETA was 9:36. A counselor in Newark he got hung up helping a kid and we didn’t see him until 2:30. Mark was one of three people to have witnessed Gary Bennett’s recording of Chuck’s songs, “Live at Rising Place,” in 1976. My brother is credited with “background inspiration.”
Colorblind James performing “Copernicus” from “Live At Rising Place,” 1976
The shows were moved inside due to the weather and no-one was drinking beer with their mask on. We are holding our breadth that it wasn’t a super-spreader. We listened to a good bit of the second set out back. It always sounds better out there. You can hear the bass notes and the mix becomes comfortable rather than harsh. The seven piece band sounded great as they knocked off two, twenty song sets in muscular fashion. Chuck would have loved it and he would have been so proud of Mark.
After the Rising Place cassette the next thing we heard from Chuck was when he played a date it the Red Creek in 1980 with The White Caps, his band from Oswego. We came home with a 45, “America, America.” Chuck’s songs were sing songs catchy but out of time somehow. He had a band on the west coast which we never heard and then near the tail end of the Scorgie days he moved back to Rochester. His brother-in-law, Phil, was playing guitar and he was looking to form a band here. Bernie had just left Personal Effects so he joined on bass.
Chuck’s music, which he liked to describe as “circus rock,” was out of step with punk and new wave. He favored the polka-like, two-beat. The melodies had an old world feel, a sound track for traveling street performers, His brilliant, wryly delivered lyrics read like modern day liturature, the Bible and poetry.
Outlet from Eastman Lake flowing into Lake Ontario at Durand
We were unable to cross the outflow from Eastman Lake this morning. Of course we could have taken our shoes off and waded across but we turned around and walked back along the beach. Someone had left a big round metal fire pit fixture on the beach with ashes and charred beer cans from the night before. We passed twice and considered taking it home both times but it was way too heavy.
We watched a virtual funeral mass yesterday for Joe O’Keefe, my mom’s cousin. He was a real sweetheart. At my mom’s funeral he told me a rather significant story about their common grandmother, a Kelly, who left Dublin on a ship bound for New York as a caretaker of an elderly man. She was supposed to return but she fell in love with a man named Walsh. They married as soon as they landed but only on the condition that Walsh drop his affiliation with the Church of England and get right with Catholicism.
He told me they used to hold these teen dances all over the city and kids would usually go without dates. He said he always made sure he danced with my mom and said he was determined to find a Mercy girl like my mom. And he did, my mom’s lifelong friend, Virginia, who he married.
Tomorrow we drive to Niagara Falls for the funeral of my aunt and Joe’s cousin, Ann Oliver, the last of that generation of Tierneys. She died during the pandemic and the family delayed the Mass and remembrance until now. She was my favorite aunt on that side. I painted a picture of her for “The City” show at Pyramid in 1990 where I depicted one member from each of my relatives’ families working somewhere in Rochester.
You always think, “this will be the last nice day of the year” when we get a day like this (sunshine and somewhere in the seventies) in late October. I borrowed Jared’s chimney scrub brush yesterday and went up on the roof, our new metal roof. It is slippery and we decided not to get those bars that catch the snow before it slides off on top of you because they look ugly but they would provide something to hold onto if you’re sliding off. My Merrill walking shoes have a pretty good grip but I wasn’t prepared for the loose panel that slid out from under me when I stepped on it. I grabbed ahold of the sharp edge the next panel and cut my left hand. I was still able to play horseshoes.
I called the roofing company and they came right out to address it. I climbed up on top of the chimney, took the cap off and shoved the long pole down to the point where it reaches our flu. I was working it up and down, scraping the creosol off the inner walls, when I suddenly felt no resistance at all. The brush had come off the pole and it was stuck in our chimney. I was picturing what it would smell like if we started a fire and I looked toward my neighbors and saw Jared was doing something in his fish pond. I pulled the pole up and he got the picture. He suggested putting our pole saw down there and trying to grab on to it. An hour or so later I came up with the brush. Maybe we’ll have our first fire this weekend.
Peggi Fournier, Dale Mincey, and Robert Marsella at Dale’s apartment in Rochester, New York
The coolest thing about “The Velvet Underground,” Todd Haynes new documentary on the seminal band’ is seeing people dancing to their music in the fabulous old clips of the band performing live. They worked enough for Jonathan Richmond to estimate that he saw the band sixty times but they never caught on or made any money. They were too arty and that aspect is the second coolest thing about this movie.
Plenty of foundational footage establishes the VU links to Lamont Young’s drones, Tony Conrad’s noise, John Cage’s minimalism and Allen Ginsburg’s poetry. John Cale’s rich European musical roots and Lou Reed’s dirty street smarts, pop sensibility and lyrics that read as poetry was a match made in heaven. Moe. Could any other drummer have bridged that gap so well. The movie sets the record straight on Warhol’s involvement. Nico was a brilliant addition and the songs she sings will live forever. Sterling Morrison and then Doug Yule completed the picture. The best rock band of all time!
I was so lucky that Tom Campbell, a year older so much hipper (before Viet Nam did a number on him), talked me into buying the first record at Midtown Records. That original pressing had the upside down guy on back, before he sued the band for using his image. I played that lp to death, lost the banana skin and gave the lp to my nephew, Eli Enis.
Noisemaker along Lakeshore Boulevard near Zoo Road
The instrument above comes with a reflector so you can find it in the dark. The others, on the same chunk of guard rail, stand straight up but this one has been clobbered. I use the reflector as a lever to push down on as we walk by. Peggi recorded the sound on her phone.
We picked a batch of fresh pimientos de Padron yesterday and cooked them just before leaving the house for Kathy’s where we dined out back overlooking the bay. The peppers were cold when we got there, of course, but they tasted great and to our surprise none were too hot. There are plenty of white flowers on the pepper plants so if the frost holds out we’ll be enjoying many more rounds.
We brought home some more tomatoes but the plants are exhausted. Our arugula, collard greens, carrots, beets and kale are still overproducing. Our refrigerator is so full of bags of greens that things are freezing.
We checked in with our neighbor down the street and he told us he has trapped eight raccoons in the last week. I wondered if he had asked Animal Controller where they were taking the creatures and he said the guy told him the the town had some property on the other side of 590. I pity the neighbors over there.
We took our last swim of the year in the pool this afternoon. We’ll be closing it over the weekend. We’re planning to watch Todd Haynes’ “The Velvet Underground” tonight, in our neighbors’ home theater if we are lucky
I always thought the Wildroot Gallery was in an active barbershop. The group that showed there back in the seventies has had many shows, in many different places, since the original space in the South Wedge closed. At their current show in Warren Philips Gallery I learned the Wildroot was a former barbershop when the five artists reclaimed it. The five have continued to turn out work and we have become big fans if George Wegman and Peter Monacelli.
Due to Covid Warren had a soft opening on Saturday. We suspected the artists would be there, the first day of the show, and they were. As we entered the gallery we were stopped in our tracks by the glass case that Warren had in the window. He had just purchased a collection of Africa artifacts and they sort of upstaged the show. We came home with this wooden Makonde mask from Mozambique and a cowbell with a sculpted wooden head as a handle from Cameroon. Warren told us both these pieces were made to be used in rituals. They were not made for the art market. That was reassuring.
