Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
“Here Denonville’s French Army landed to invade the Seneca Country; July 12, 1687. ” So reads the historical marker on the lake side of Lake Road in Webster. We walked over there this afternoon, across the seasonal bridge, and we stopped across the street from this sign for a salad and sandwich at a place called the Bayside. It is out of time and a world away.
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This post has been uppdated:
In my original post here I stated the Roc Holiday Village was constructed by the City. Martin contacted me to say a private company is responsible for the winter paradise. This makes a lot more sense. It is too well done,
Our friend, Kathy, recommended we check out Roc Village. The area between between the skating rink and jungle gym in Martin Luther King Jr Park is elevated on a giant wooden plank patio. Fire pits are scattered about. Vendors and transparent hospitality tents are lined up. We bought some olive oil and handmade soap and after watching the kids skate we had a beet salad and a Space Kitty in the big tent. It was great to see so many people outside in the winter.
We were in Ottawa a few years back for their Winterlude, skating through downtown on the canal with hundreds of other people and wondering why Rochester doesn’t do something it. They have.
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Why did they pick Jeremy Irons to narrate The Prado Museum: A Collection of Wonders? Because he is so damn dramatic! And he rises to the challenge of talking about some of the most dramatic paintings in the world as the Prado celebrates its two hundredth anniversary. The documentary played for just two showings this weekend at the Little and we were lucky enough to catch it.
Marina Saura also narrates and talks of first visiting the Prado with her father, the painter, Antonio Saura. When we were in Madrid in October we saw a show of Saura’s work at Antonio Macon where the gallery owner, Margarita, encouraged us to visit The Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca . We saw more Saura there along with Tapies and the champions of Spanish abstract art in Spain. We were blown away and when we returned to Madrid we found even more of his work in a show at the Reina Sofia. The worlds are colliding.
We visit the Prado each time we visit Spain but my favorite was the first time. After flying overnight we rented a car at the Madrid airport and drove directly to the Prado. We sat in the car until the Museo opened and we had coffee in the basement café. I remember people smoking in there, in the museum. We went upstairs and were blown away.
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We skied from our front door through the woods into the park and around the golf course almost to the lake before turning around. Of course we stopped often, just to marvel at a tree that was hanging on to its color or a sign of life. Unless you have lived in this climate for say your whole life you don’t appreciate how dramatic the winter palette can be.
On our way back we stopped in the garden to find our kale still kicking. We didn’t have a bag so I filled my hat.
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I got a little ahead of Peggi while skiing in the woods and ran into a guy on a curve that was too narrow for the both of us. We stopped and he said something about how nice a day it was for skiing. I replied that it was headed up into the forties tomorrow and immediately felt bad for being such a wet blanket. He said, “You’ll just have to get out early tomorrow if we want to ski.” So we plan on heading out after coffee.
A Spectrum Cable truck was parked at the end of Hoffman near where we usually park. We got out with our skies and saw someone climbing out of a snow bank. The cable guy and he had slipped on the ice while walking up a steep driveway. The first thing he said was, “I got a good hill for you.” We skirted the periphery of the golf course by following three different paths that eventually took us right up to the lake. We followed horseshoe Road for a bit. It is just as pretty in the winter as it is in the summer. When we got back to our car we saw an Enterprise delivery truck, probably something Amazon had rented, stuck in the same snowbank where the cable guy was.
We stopped a few places on First Friday before seeing the Members Show at RoCo so we missed the award announcements but learned that my entry won an award. I put a relatively low price, $200 on the large print and if it sold I planned on donating the the whole thing to RoCo and now I see this about the award. “Lumiere Photo Award Chosen by William Edwards, photographer and owner of Lumiere Photo. $200 gift certificate.”
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The first Refrigerator was an 8 1/2 by 14″ broadsheet, offset printed and available in restaurants and bars in Rochester for free. The circulation grew from 500 to 3,000 and the number of pages climbed to twelve. I did most of the graphics and wrote some, Peggi Fournier was the production manager. Ted Williams, Martin Edic, Chuck Cuminale, Carol Bradley, Chris Schepp, Rob Tyler and Frank Petronio all contributed content. The late Norm Davis hysterically surveyed the shops on Monroe Avenue. This was back in the nineties, before the internet, and all of this work was done anonymously until the D&C did a story about the Refrigerator..
With front page tag lines like “Does Caffeine Make You Smarter?,” “Love World’s Mental Heath Tipsheet,” “Recycle The Earth Issue,” paid for by the advertisers With a tag “George Eastman Is Dead,” “My Funeral,” “Bad Acid Trip,” “Because You Don’t Need an Entertainment Guide,” (a dig at Freetime Magazine), “Rochester’s Only Demolition Derby Fanzine” and “Virgin Mary To Appear in Rochester” we attracted a faithful readership. The “Why Are You Here? issue was especially popular as was Pete LaBonne’s “Dream Breakfasts.”
Lead-ins to pieces like “Rewriting Rochester’s Cultural Heritage,” “Readers Are People Too,” “Dealing With Denial,” “The Difference Between Right and Wrong,” “The End of the World,” “Thel Sound of Doom,” “Virtual Rochester,” “Finally, The Future,” “The Tediousness of Facts,” “I Live Next Door to a Genius” and “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” were often the whole story.
The back page of “The Refrigerator” carried ten dollar, one square inch ads like those shown above. Pyramid Arts Center, The Village Green, The Bug Jar, The Cadillac Hotel, Squires Of The Subterrain, the Rochester Club and City Newspaper were all regulars. Nicholson Baker, the author, was an advertiser.
All 28 editions are available in pdf format here. There is also a PayPal button for $10 Refrigerator hats.
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There is not enough snow for us to safely ski down the big hill in the woods across the street so we put our skis in the car and drove down Hoffman to the golf course. The conditions there were somewhat shy of excellent but the sun was out and it was perfect for us.
I love how the ski tracks, going every which way, abstract the game that is intended to be played here in the warmer months. Something so orderly and controlled is entirely free. We followed someone’s tracks that skirted the periphery of the course staying just a few feet from the woods that surrounds the fairways. We skied most of the nine holes on this side of Kings Highway but we did it in an almost random order.
Last night’s Ossia program included this spellbinding piece, Tria ex uno by Georg Friedrich Hass. It was based on Agus Dei from a mass by Josquin in 1502, a piece described as “astounding in its control of harmony under fearsome conditions of polyphonic complexity.” I like that sentence and took it from the program but I really liked what I heard.
Ossia, the Eastman School’s program of new music, starts at 7:30 tonight and that presents a conflict. Our yoga class doesn’t get out until 8. They usually do five six pieces so we should be able to catch the last half. I heard they were doing an Anthony Braxton number.
I’m secretly looking forward to tomorrow night when we have nothing on our calendar. I need some time to create mp3s from last Wednesday when Pete LaBonne joined Margaret Explosion on piano. Pete and Shelley stayed for the holiday feast and Kevin and Jeanne joined us from Nashville. Kevin Vicalvi was Bat McGrath’s long time bass player (and harmony voice) and he was in town for the tribute on Saturday.
I did my Record Store Day dj set on Friday and we had dinner at Jeff and Marry Kaye’s, tuna from Alaska and some intense homemade ginger bread. We brought home a few pieces of that for breakfast. We had a couple of couples over for dinner on Saturday. Tom and Jann own a shop and Janet and Jonathan wrote a book about Hi Fi living and before the Uber driver returned we finished the evening watching YouTube videos by the fire.
Sunday was reserved for a long walk along the lake and then a visit to Virgin Wood Type. We had hoped to to spend some time with Sam but he was asleep on the couch. Partners, Geri and Paul, showed us their newest line of type. Bill would be so proud.
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Tom Kohn at the Bop Shop asked me to dj a set on Record Store Day. I have the first slot, noon to one, and I discovered how fast an hour will go when I put this set together last night.
Last Poets This Is Madness
Ornette Friends and Neighbors
Silver Apples Oscillations
Suicide Ghost Rider
James Brown Funky President
Bo Diddley Ooh Baby
James Blood Ulmer Are You Glad Tao Be In America
Margaret Explosion Juggler
Miles Davis Miles Runs The Vodoo Down
Peggy Lee Fever
David Essex Rock On
Beach Boys Do It Again
Marvin Gaye Got To Give It Up
Donna Summer I Feel Love
I’m still digesting the photos I brought back from our Portugal to Spain walk. There is art in public spaces throughout the Iberian peninsula. A lot of it is really good art, good being “I must take a photo of this so I can enjoy it again.” I’m always reminding myself not to let that act interfere with my appreciation of the piece in real time. These fishermen’s wives are really expressive, very physical. And the bathers in the distance, in mid October, accentuate the story.
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With the temperature near fifty today I got up on the roof and blew the leaves off. And then we raked those same leaves out of the pachysandra and out on to our so called lawn. I only mowed once this year. We don’t get all that much sunlight through the trees. When all the leaves are out in the lawn I use the mower to mulch them and we just let those chopped leaves turn into dirt. It takes about a year for that to happen and then we start all over again. This cycle is bittersweet.
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Peggi is about halfway through Amy Rigby‘s memoir, “Girl to City,” and she’s loving it. I will get my hands on it next. Amy was in town last night and she alternated between reading and playing songs. The songs, many of them older, were related to the passages she read and the combination compounded the experience.
She started reading a chapter called “Elton Girl,” (her nickname in middle school because she was such a fan) and she got to the part where she wins two tickets to an Elton John concert from her hometown Pittsburgh radio station. She stopped to tell something that wasn’t in the book. Something that had just occurred and that surely will be in the next edition.
While traveling across the country on this book tour she has been listening to the Elton John’s autobiography, “Me,” and Elton has a chapter in there where he talks about calling Stiff Records and offering to play keyboards for a tour they were putting together, the ulterior motive being he had a crush on Wreckless Eric. Amy’s husband! Amy stopped the car and called Eric.
Eric wrote a blog post about Elton John and Elton John saw the post and contacted Eric. All too much.
Amy finished with a bang in a string of songs that began with the anthem, “Do You Remember that?” (video below), her Tom Petty karaoke song, “The President Can’t Read,” and the perfect closer. “Hey, I love you. You’re perfect. Don’t ever change.”
Spain’s transition from the darkness of the Franco era to democracy started well before the death of ‘El Caudillo’ in 1975. This we learned on our last visit to Madrid. We saw the “Poéticas de la Democracia” show at the Reina Sofia and then talked at length to Margarita at Antonio Machón Gallery where she was having a show of Saura’s work, an artist from that time that she represents and who was also featured in the Reina Sofia show. She emphasized how the underground was coming out before the dictator collapsed. And there is no doubt that the suppression under Franco fueled the movement.
Spain’s Transition led to La Movida in the early eighties, specifically La Movida Madrileña where people coined the now famous war-cries of the city: “Madrid nunca duerme” (“Madrid never sleeps”), “Esta noche todo el mundo a la calle” (“Tonight everybody to the street”) or “Madrid me mata” (“Madrid kills me”).
The US is overdue for a correction, a transition or a movida.
Here’s a song recorded at the Little Café a few weeks back..
We were kinda late for our train or I would have stopped to talk to this guy in Penn Station. He looks like a one man band with his stage gear on and his equipment case advertising a Funky Percussion Machine, Country, Irish, Polka, Zydeco and something called Bachata. I wanted to go where he was going but our train was boarding in the other direction.
Maybe it was the cup of coffee we had up at Starbucks but I had a hard time getting with the program in our yoga class tonight. Jeffery usually starts by going around the room asking people what they want to work on. I always say “anything.” Someone suggested shoulders so we got on our backs and stayed there the whole class, opening our spines, breathing deeply in three stages, stretching our shoulders and putting tennis balls under our piriformis (butts).
That was another problem. We walked up to Target this afternoon and ate rather hurriedly before class . Jeffery talked about being in the moment, how the class was just for this group at this time but my food was still settling. I must have stared at the ceiling lights o long because when we closed our eyes I kept seeing a small dancing bear, like one of those little Grateful Dead figures, moving from right to left.
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I have my own system for labeling our firewood. My neighbor uses spray paint. I fold up a piece of white cardboard to 2″x2″ square, label it with the year, wrap it in clear packing tape and nail it into the end of one of the logs in the pile. This year we are burning wood we put up in 2015. While our neighbors were watching the Bills beat Miami we moved two face cords into our porch .
We will fill the space where those logs were with newly split wood. At the moment the log length sections of the big oak that came down on Hoffman are in a heap near our wood pile. They are so big Peggi and I were unable to roll them up on the splitter. So when the weather breaks I will have to swing my ax into them and follow that up with the sledge hammer to split the sections into something manageable for our Heathkit splitter. When those are split we’ll stack them where the the 2015 wood was and I’ll label it 2019. As they say, the wood warms you many times over.
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Bill Keyser has a few degrees, a mechanical engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon, an MFA in furniture design from RIT where he taught until 1997. That year he woke from a dream with a feeling that there was something very important he needed to do. He transitioned from furniture to sculpture and fine art while picking up another degree, an MFA in painting in sculpture. I met him in Fred Lipp’s painting class at the Creative Workshop. After all that school he told me Fred was the best teacher he ever had.
His show, “Painting and Sculpture 2009 – 2019,” at RIT’s University Gallery is an eyeful. The two paintings shown above are my favorites but the large gallery has sculptures and paintings interspersed with one another all competing for your attention in riotous colors.
Bill’s paintings are sculptural. They efficiently (masterly) animate their own physical space and incorporate the environment they sit in just as his sculptures do. The ideas in his paintings on found metal panels spring from the shape of the panel itself. The cut out corner becomes a beam in “Beam” and the angle in “Look Out” leads to another plane. I was particularly attracted to to his sculpture entitled “Pueblo.” In two milk paint colors it is as elegant as a Chillida. The show runs to December 20th so you have plenty of time.
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We saw the Elton John movie on Netflix and then Pedro Almodovar’s new one at the theater and now I’m getting them both mixed up. They both had similarly dysfunctional upbringings and both were clearly gifted. We put the subtitles on for “Rocketman” and I was amazed at how good Bernie Taupin’s lyrics were. As good as Elton John’s amazing melodies. I woke up singing Tiny Dancer.
Almodovar’s “Pain and Glory’ is his best yet. Having just been in Spain it was visually sensational but that is just scraping the surface. The movie was deep. Aging, mortality, futility, all that stuff. Check it out.
I put a photo in the annual RoCo Member’s Show. I came home with so many good ones from the Iberian Peninsula. I had Joan down at Frametastic cut a piece of glass for me. Visiting her is always a treat. She and her husband built the business but he is long gone. Joan, at 87, is the only employee. She had Jazz 90.1 on when I walked in and she was cutting nine holes in one piece of matt board. Each opening was a different size. She showed me the boxes of glass that she starts with, sheets that are 32″ by 40.” “i used to be able to handle a bigger sheet but not anymore.” She only takes cash.
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Does this leaf look happy? As light as leaves are they are weighted more heavily on the stem end. And when the snow comes before the leaves have all fallen we get this delightful show.
Only a few days remain to see “Inside Out,” the Current Scene show at 248 East Avenue, right next door to Little Theatre. This is a cosmopolitan show for a small city artfully curated by Colleen Buzzard. We’ve seen the show a few times and enjoyed it most when the only other person in the space was the gallery attendee, probably one of the participating artists. The front room is playful with work from both Ann and Sue Havens. And the back room beckons with a soundtrack composite, the video installation visible through a crack in the door, of oak balls being cracked open, underground sounds coming from a manhole cover, tape being unspooled as someone tapes himself to a wall and Alan Topolski’s found Super 8 footage with his model airplane soundtrack. Alan pulls out all the stops out with his piece and it deserves its spot above the mantle. His painting, a scene lifted from his video, disappears into the wall, frame and all!
And then there are the shadows which intentionally steal the show from the objects that cast them – Martha O’Connor’s slowly turning floating fabric and a row of four sided cardboard vessels, hand painted in black and white with turquoise interiors and no bottom and arranged on a narrow glass shelf. There is a lot to experience in this small group show.
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This tree was not as close to the lake last year. And its roots were underground.
At one time the Memorial Art Gallery had a biennial show of a half a dozen local artists’ work. They handed the show off to Rochester Contemporary, a good move, and two years ago RoCo had their first Rochester biennial, a three pronged affair with two artists at three different sites. My father and I were chosen to show our work at RoCo. The exhibit was entitled “Witness.”
This time around the biennial, entitled “Current Seen,” is spread all across town in nearly twenty venues. We were in Spain when the shows opened and we’ve been scrambling to get up to speed since our return. On Friday night we met a group at Joy Gallery on West Main where the graffiti show celebrating 30 years of work by the collective known as FUA is on display. Our group walked further west to 540 where Siena Pullinzi is showing her prints of women’s bodies, a show called “Not Your Object,” and then down King Street to the Douglas Auditorium where Mara Ahmed is showing her beautiful collage/paintings, photographic imagery of family members in painted fields that illustrate the displacement imposed on people in India at the end of British colonialism. Thankfully our city is so much broader than the East side.
There is a guide book (5 dollars) for Current Seen, one designed by Tate Shaw at Visual Studies that is packed with insightful articles about the shows and some solid history of our fair city. In the opening Bleu Cease asks, “Can the visual arts connect people across a divided city?” I think it can.
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We are still working our way through the photos we brought back from our Iberian Peninsula trip. Walking through so many towns, taking in streets you have never been down, affords an abundance of opportunities for seeing. And then, with some composition, preparing to take the image home so we can savor the experience a little longer.
With temperatures expected to fall below freezing tonight and white stuff falling from the sky but not sticking we tore up our garden. We brought back the rest of our lettuce, peppers and a few pale tomatoes and we pulled the plants up by the roots. The seasons crashing into one another. “We’re captive on a carousal of time.”
After at least five years on the market there is a “Sold” sign on the front of the Playground Tavern. And a small hand written sign on the side door that reads, “Closed for Remodeling.” They have taken the sign down so I’m guessing the new owners are going to change the name. The bar sits on the corner of Webster and Bay across the street from the grade school and it’s ball field. They are never going to find a better name than the “Playground Tavern.”.
