Once a month we park at the CoOp grocery on South Avenue, just down the street from where my grandfather’s grocery store was. Instead of going in right away we walk downtown, stop at Fuego, and then walk in a loop around downtown before crossing the bridge and heading south to the Ford Street Bridge into the South Wedge. Today we stopped to admire this brick house with the spire. Peggi looked it up on Google and and found that it was built in 1855. We thought about that for a while and then stopped in to visit Pete and Gloria before shopping.
Someday soon AI will be driving our car and we can both look around while we’re driving. As it was on Saturday, I was studying a big boxy jeep in the lane to our right as Peggi was driving, a four seater with a short pickup bed in the rear. All squared off, it was blunt and far from aerodynamic. It moved ahead of us and Peggi said, “It looks like a Hummer. You don’t see many of those anymore.” And just like that a Hummer passed us in the left lane and not just any Hummer but one with a pickup in the back, a larger more obnoxious version of the jeep.
Later we were walking toward the park and I said “I gotta call Mark.” We had called my brother on his birthday and we never heard back so I was getting concerned. Just like that Mark called us.
You know how you look up something on Google and then there’s an article related to it in your news feed? Or you shop online for something and then you get shown ads for for similar products. Or you’re having a conversation about a trip you took years ago and then photos from that trip are your “photo memory” for the day. Well, that kind of stuff seems to be happening in real life now.
We were walking up a hill on a path in the park today. We got to the top and I looked up and saw these two letters carved into a tree.
Leo Dodd watercolor “Feeding the Birds” Washington Square Park
Jeff and Mary Kaye got us tickets to Geva’s “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.” Just last week I had noticed new, brightly colored tables (with umbrellas) and chairs scattered around Washington Square Park so I suggested we meet there before the play and have dinner in the park. Peggi and I prepared sandwiches with the ingredients we had ordered from La Tienda and we made a salad from our garden greens. We brought along a bottle of Spanish Rioja and some plastic cups. Monica, next door, let us borrow four plastic plates. Mary Kaye made sorbet with strawberries from their garden. It was somewhere near ninety degrees downtown but the meal was dreamy.
“Beautiful” premiered in San Francisco in 2013 and made its Broadway debut in 2014. It has been produced around the world since and Sony just announced a biopic adaptation starring Daisy Edgar-Jones. The play is set mostly in the Brill Building in NYC, a song factory, where writers churned out hit after hit up until Dylan and rock groups started writing their own. And the story is told through two song writing couples who worked there, Carole King and Gerry Goffin and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.
We get to hear “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “Up on the Roof,” “On Broadway,” “The Loco-Motion,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” “One Fine Da,” and “Walking in the Rain,” all of which were written by these couples. Of course Carol King goes solo at the end but they mercifully keep that period brief and the play finishes with “I Feel the Earth Move.” The performers, the band and the production were as good as the songs!
In the program the playwright, Douglas McGrath, talks about meeting the four songwriters to discuss his idea-“a musical about kids chasing out the old guard so they could create the new sound of rock and roll. Carole’s face lit up. I knew I had nailed it. She leaned forward to share her reaction. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is completely wrong!’ ‘What?’ I said, almost losing my balance even though I was seated. ‘We idolized Gershwin and Porter and Kem and Berlin,’ she explained. ‘We studied their music’ -Cynthia piped in, ‘I wanted to be Cole Porter.'”
The title of the play comes from a Carole King quote, “You know what’s so funny about life?” Sometimes it goes the way you want and sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes when it doesn’t, you find something beautiful.”
We listened to Cal Zone’s Brian Wilson tribute today, a bit of catch-me-up. We had already done our personal deep dive with a short stack of Beach Boys 45s and then along comes yet another article about Brian. This one by Rob Tannenbaum and it gets right to the heart of the reason for our mourning. Reading this short list slowly (and calling to mind the gorgeous melodies and harmonies) was particularly moving.
"The decisive evidence of Wilson's genius is his melancholy work: "In My Room," "Don't Worry Baby," "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times," "Til I Die" (written, Wilson said, while he was "depressed and preoccupied with death"), "Caroline, No," "The Warmth of the Sun" (written the night President John F. Kennedy was killed), the celestial "God Only Knows," sung perfectly by Carl."
Peggi and I played a respectable version of In My Room in the basement this afternoon.
Street musicians couple with guest at Rochester Jazz Fest 2025
We used to attend every night of the Rochester Jazz Fest. The very first one featured Joe Lovano playing at the MAG. There used to be some really great artists performing and mind-opening discoveries. The most interesting artists didn’t draw that well and it became clear the promoters were not interested in interesting so they kept bringing the same bankable performers back. Anybody ever hear of Trombone Shorty?
We flew to Knoxville in 2019 for the Big Ears Festival and, well, that was arranged by somebody with really good taste. The Rochester festival crash-landed during the pandemic and came back in ‘22. That was the last year we bought a pass and it was worth it, but barely. We saw just a few shows in the last couple of years. Tonight we could have heard Terrell Stafford at Kilbourn, a really good straight-ahead trumpeter, but we decided to just walk around downtown during the festival. Look how big that tip jar is!
The Christ Church by RoCo is no longer a venue. Neither is the Lutheran Church, where the adventurous Nordic groups played. It may not even be a Lutheran Church anymore. There is no stage at East Avenue and Chestnut so we checked out Parcel 5. Just a few people hanging out there. We bought two beers for eighteen dollars on Gibbs Street and listened to the Army band. We saw a couple playing on Main Street (above) that we had seen other years. (2018A & 2018B) They trade back and forth on drums and keys. She was playing the drums while talking on the phone the first time we walked by them and on our way back they had a guest sitting in (above.)
There was a line outside the Little Theatre for an Americana band. As we walked toward the big City stage at Alexander the band was playing a Pat Benatar song. We got in the car and were home before dark.
We were both sitting at our computers last night when we remembered Frying Pan was playing at Abilene. We were out the door in minutes but we had already missed Big Roy, the opening band. Had it not been for the weather this show would have been held outdoors. I would have preferred that. The club can be like walking into a speaker cabinet. I hadn’t even pushed my ear plugs in fully when my watch was warning about exposure to levels above 100 db. The two guitars sounded great, each playing rhythm and lead, sometimes at the same time but always sounding distinctly different. My brother, Tim, was standing next to us. We mouthed, “hello.” I tried to order a beer. I tried a few times and the waitress, sporting one of the biggest beehives I’ve seen since leaving Indiana, had me write my order on a piece of paper.
My order at Abilene
We couldn’t hear any of the lyrics so we asked Pat what he was singing about. He told us he did one sort of political song about “the beast” and another about a trip he took out west. One was about the “glitter girls” he hung around with in high school. I wish the vocals had been audible. Pat said “you could hear the vocals really good in the monitors.” Maybe we should have hopped on stage with the band.
My “45s2go” playlist (Apple) (Spotify) has gotten bigger. Funny thing is, these are clean files and the songs don’t sound nearly as good as they do on vinyl.
I parked in front of this window on my way to a yearly dermatologist appointment. I like being his first patient of the day and this window looked especially nice in the early morning light. Do I have skin cancer yet? He didn’t see any.
Our neighbor, Rick, is out front on his unicycle. He has a clown gig at the harbor this weekend and he’s warming up. He told us he’s having trouble with his “quick mount,” getting up on the bike from a standstill. At seventy-five with a knee replacement I would say he’s doing great. We played horseshoes for the first time this year and we both fell apart midway in the third round. It was tied with a match apiece and we were neck and neck to the last throw but it took forever to get there.
Local strawberries are on the shelves. The season lasts only a few weeks so it needs to be pounced upon. We picked up three quarts at the Brighton Farmers Market and heard Debby Kendrick Project at the same time. They sounded great in the open air. We bought some exotic mushrooms (the proprietor called our attention to the primordial underside) and some locally made mushroom pasta as well. It made a perfect dinner.
Margaret Explosion soundcheck at Highland Bowl June 2025. Peggi Fournier, Bernie Heveron, Ken Frank and Jack Schaefer. The drummer took the photo.
We played in the Highland Bowl over the weekend. Maeve reminded us we had played here with her band back in the early eighties. We saw her (and everyone else from our neighborhood) at the demonstration. I recorded the show but the breeze, which was hardly noticeable, wreaked havoc on the mics. Now I remember why that furry thing came with the recorder.
Margaret Explosion’s two half-hour sets were sandwiched between three different poets, each equally engaging. Ralph Black is a Professor Emeritus at Brockport, Kathy Engel is a Professor at NYU and Patricia Spears Jones is the current New York State Poet Laureate. She read a poem about Sly Stone, so timely after his death I thought for sure she had just written it, but I noticed she was reading from one of her books. I took note of the cover. A few pieces later she read one about James Brown that had us applauding. It was from a different book. After the show I stood in line to buy one of her books. I told her I couldn’t decide whether to get the one with the James Brown piece or the one with the Sly piece. She said “buy them both.” I bought one and Bernie, who played guitar with us, bought the other. We plan to swap.
We listened to our Beach Boys singles over the weekend. Still have thirteen of them, some with Peggi’s teenage signature on them. And we finished that stack with one album track, “Surf’s Up.” They were so good. I have a shorter stack of Sly singles, about ten, on deck for tonight. Long live Brian and Sly.
Last month’s big protest at Cobb’s Hill was reaffirming. But it was someone’s brilliant stroke to organize yesterday’s demonstrations in so many parts of the city, in so many cities. Of course it made attending convenient and surely brought out more people. The local sites included “Lakeshore at Durand Eastman.” That’s more than a mile long. Where, we wondered?
The beginning of a mile of “No Kings” protesters – Zoo Road and Lakeshore Boulevard
We walked from our house through the park (with others) to the lake. We could hear the cars honking and the crowd cheering. The crowd lined Lakeshore Boulevard from Zoo Road to Rock Beach Road. Someone gave us a small upside down flag. “It’s a distress signal,” they said. Most people had homemade signs, not the mass produced signs you see at a Trump rally. We saw many of our neighbors. I told the women holding this sign that I liked her graphics. We came home with the flags. I feel like we are starting to reclaim it.
Margaret Explosion performs at Writers and Books Poetry Festival 2025 in Highland Bowl
A few years back Frank DeBlase of City Newspaper wrote: “Margaret Explosion’s music paints pictures in my head non stop.” For Pete Monacelli our music puts words on paper. He sends us his verse after each gig. Here is something he wrote a few weeks back:
Start and stop Feet on the ground Song of creation Floating atoms Vast fires Change, Change, Change
Open and close Not terminal universal evolving Feet on the ground Change, Change, Change
A black hole Consuming Musical notes To infinity Feet on the ground Change, Change, Change
Stir the water Healing comes Super nova Explosion New beginnings Change, Change, Chang
Awake Alive and well Feet on the ground Rest Silence Change, Change, Change
Desert Between two rivers Birth And death And birth Change, Change, Change
The crews who go around the world covering up graffitti can’t seem to settle on the right Pantone color for the job. And we are all the richer for that. I love these abstracts. Here’s a few recent captures – onetwo
Peggi and I were shopping at Wegmans yesterday when a man, somewhere near our age, wheeled by in one of those electric shopping carts. We heard him coming. He was chanting, in a sing-song manner, “Trump is a nazi” over and over again. We first saw him in the produce department and then over by the yogurt. As we headed up to the check-out we crossed paths again. Same song, over and over again.
I spotted this truck parked by the amusement park in Sea Breeze. I had my España national team jersey on, we walked through the woods and down Culver to Shamrock Jack’s to watch the Nation’s League final with Spain and Portugal. The pre-game was on one of the seven big TVs so we sat right in front of it at the end of the bar.
There was an older couple next to us. We gathered their daughter was sitting next to them and they were having a good time. The guy said something about his birthday and Peggi and I wished him a happy one. I asked if it was a big one, Peggi and I had just celebrated one, and he said, “Yeah, guess how old I am.” I can’t tell anymore and I didn’t want to insult him so I went with 65, thinking he look older than us but was probably younger. “Guess again he said. “Seventy five?” “Higher,” the guy said. “Eighty?” He settled on 83. We clinked glasses again. The bartender said, “Everyone I know who drinks Johnny Walker lives into their eighties.”
The game was pretty good, tied 2-2 by the 40 year old Ronaldo on the hour mark, but it was frustrating for me. Spain had most of the possession but looked like they were scrambling. They clearly had a hard time moving the ball through the center and repeatedly lost the ball there. I was expecting magic. Professional coverage here.
There’s Notre Dame posters and gear all around the bar, the Irish connection, and they are the local hub for the Premier League’s Aston Villa fans but we were the only ones watching the Spain game. More family members showed up to meet the people next to us and they moved to a table. Another couple sat down minutes later. They were clearly older than us and our ears perked up when the woman mentioned something about Ezra Klein. They took forever to decide what they wanted to drink and the guy finally settled on an Amstel Light. It was served in a proper glass with the Amstel logo.
The sound was off on the tv so our squeals appeared out of context. The new couple asked me if I had played soccer. “A long time ago,” I said. They told us someone had given them a gift certificate to nearby restaurant and they went to Margies down on the lake but they were charging admission because there was a band so they were “bar hoping” before dinner. They told us they gone out to hear their son’s band, The Rhino Chasers, a surf band, the night before. We told them we are in a band as well and they acted like they wanted to hear us. We told them we are playing Friday at the Highland Bowl a whole lot of poets, Writers & Books Poetry Festival.
We each managed to nurse a beer the whole 90 minute match but we split a third for stoppage time. The match went the duration and Spain lost in shoot outs. We went home and played music in the basement.
Corrine Atias went to grade school here on the Barrington Street in the Park Avenue area. We picked up our programs for the annual Landmark Society House & Garden tour in the school and walked by the apartment on Dartmouth where we lived when we first moved here in the mid seventies. It is now a hideous green. Our first stop was a Claude Bragdon house on the corner of Dartmouth and Park. There was a beautiful painting of the original owners hanging in the stairwell. We were told the small portrait in the woman’s hand was of her first husband who died in a dual. Our favorite house on the tour was a Bungalow style house at 417 Westminster. A recessed, center entrance under a pergola opens to a light filled living room as wide as the large house. The house was featured in a book. The backyard garden with a weeping Atlas Cedar and waterfall was heavenly.
Since we don’t subscribe to Fox Sports we have to find a spot to watch the international final between Spain and Portugal tomorrow. We’re thinking maybe nearby Shamrock Jack’s or Sheffield if they are open at three in the afternoon. We watched Spain beat France 5-4 in Magpie on Park Avenue with Scott and guy named Bob who told us he watched a lot of Rugby. He didn’t have to tell us that. He looked exactly like a rugby player. We were the only ones in there except for the bartender and a guy we used to call “Mike Mohawk” back in the Scorgie’s days. Scott gave us a couple of his books. Peggi is anxious to dive into the one on Detroit.
City of Rochester aerial photo of Kodak and Genesee River
There was a Whole Earth like moment when the promise of the internet first became apparent. Creative types could have a website with an address on the World Wide Web. I’m not sure what happened. Peggi might know. She’s been reading “Careless People.” Maybe we were doomed to scroll endlessly.
My favorite Rochester website is Gonechester. We think of our city as always having been the way it is. Do you recognize anything in the photo above other than Kodak Office building? Our city is continually reshaping itself. Geoffrey Zeiner’s posts uncover the rich past of our city. My grandparents both worked at local shoe factories. This history shaped us.
A Heckel Pat. Turn Shank advertising paperweight.
The Gonechester site pulls together sources to tell stories about people and places that once were part of Rochester, NY, but now are no longer with us. Photographs, newspaper articles, and primary documents are all included to paint a picture of these lost locations, and the people who lived and worked in them. If deep diving on a well researched website with dreamy photos is not your thing Geoffrey is giving a talk, entitled ”A Walk Through a Disappeared Downtown,” at the Chili Public Library, Thursday, June 12th, at 6:30 PM. He has a video about the History of Rochester’s Main Street Bridge.
“Ecstasy Club”by Margaret Explosion from 2024 release “Field Recordings”
We had fun putting this one together. The footage is about twenty years old, shot in our basement for a song called “Super Slinky” from our “Live Dive” cd. We never got around to doing that video but thought it would fit “Ecstasy Club,” a rambunctious song from our newest cd, “Field Recordings.” The kids, some of our nieces and nephews, are all grown now. Margaret Explosion is still here. We play Wednesday at the Little.
I had never seen the Bop Shop as crowded as it was yesterday. I asked Tom Kohn if it had ever been this crowded and he said it was for the grand opening. The occasion was a book release for “Richard Manual: His Life and Music, from the Hawks and Bob Dylan to The Band” by Stephen Lewis, a local boy. Tom’s wife, Jann, was the editor. Tom said the pages were on their kitchen table for a year and a half.
Karen Mahoney’s husband works behind the counter at the Bop Shop and Bob Mahoney was there for the event. They both told slightly different stories about John Gilmore repeatedly calling our friend, Brad, and not getting any answer, then going there, spotting his car, banging on the door and not reaching Brad. Worried, they called the cops. Four cars responded. To do a so-called “Welfare Check” they needed to call all the local hospitals. No one by named Fox had been admitted so they jimmied the back door. According to Kim, Brad was sitting in his chair with the headphones on, listening to Captain Beefheart. He had turned his phone off because he didn’t want to be disturbed. According to Bob, Brad was listening to Frank Zappa. I like Kim’s version better.
2 page spread from “Brief History of the World” Volume XXII
The days are numbered for this long running project. I delivered newspapers for five years back when a kid could work without breaking the law. I loved the daily headlines (redundant today), the sensational photos, the cracker-jack reporting and opinionated columnists but most of all I like the pictures. Miraculously we still get daily delivery of the local paper and the NYT but I realize newspapers are a thing of the past.
2 page spread from Paul Dodd “Brief History of the World” Volume XXII
For twenty five years or so I’ve cut pictures out. Not every day, sometimes weeks go by before I find myself staring at one long enough to think, “I’ll just cut it out. I keep them in a little box and when the box gets full I arrange them in pairs. Not all find a mate so they just stay in the box. I tape the pictures on three hole punched card stock and I’ve filled twenty three binders with the spreads – A “Brief History of the World.”
2 page spread from Paul Dodd “Brief History of the World” Volume XXII
I have just posted “Brief History of the World” Volume XXII. CLICK HERE to download the free eBook.
This book is available here in the generic ePub format. On Mac the download should should open in your Books app. To read (ePub format) on a PC, you’ll need to use a third-party reader compatible with the ePub format. Popular options include Adobe Digital Editions, Calibre, or FB Reader. You can also use Microsoft Edge
I have a page on PopWars where 36 other “Artists Books” are available as free downloadable eBooks.
Touliouse-Lautrec “Touc, Seated on aTable” Hammer Museum
We were out early on Memorial Day, maybe 7:30, and there was hardly anyone in the park but the dog walkers. It was a gorgeous day as the few people we passed acknowledged. We walked along the beach and saw only one sailboat which seemed odd until we realized there was no wind. As we walked up Zoo Road a black car came up behind us, traveling too fast for the park but also too close to us. We saw the owner get out of the car. He had a dog, on a leash, thank god, and he headed up the road ahead of us. I looked at the sticker on his car, a blue American flag with the words, “Support Your Sheriff” below it.
We walk faster than most people, for now, so of course we caught up to him. We were about ten feet behind him when he started yelling, barking really, at his dog. “No! ” he shouted as he yanked the leash around the dog’s neck. The dog looked like a Rottweiler and I was thinking about turning around. There was an article in our paper yesterday about a pit bull who killed his owner.
As we got closer to the guy the dog looked our way again. I didn’t want to look at the owner. He scolded his dog for turning our way and said, “I’ll teach you military style” as he yanked the dog’s leash. We got ahead of them and his phone rang. We heard him telling someone he was in the park and “had to hang up before the dog destroys someone.”
Henri Matisse “Bas Relief” 1909 – 1930 in MoMA Sculpture Garden New York City
The sculpture garden on UCLA’s campus is one of the wonders of the world. I’m so happy Peggi’s sister took us over there when we were in LA. I posted a photo of these Matisse marvels while we were there and remarked how different the light made the sculptures look and feel. Now that I’m back home I called up the photo I took in New York to compare.
Henri Matisse “Bas Relief” 1909 – 1930 in UCLA Sculpture Garden in Los AngelesLeave a comment
I took this photo last month as we flew east into Chicago. It is a nice compliment to the photo I took of our garden in my last post. It also makes a good abstract. We put a second row of arugula in and weeded the spot where we will put the tomato plants on Tuesday. Unusually late but it has been unusually cool. Our garden is in our neighbors’ yard. It used to be their tennis court when they were younger. They also have a fish pond that a heron found this spring. They suspected as much because the fish have all been clustered in the center under a few plants, afraid to come out. Their suspicions were confirmed when they came out to pick up the mail and saw the heron standing in their pond.
The end of Hoffman was especially alive with bird activity today. Our Merlin app identified Red-winged Blackbird, Song Sparrow, Northern Flicker, American Robin, Eastern Wood-Pewee, Gray Catbird, Tufted Titmouse, American Goldfinch, Yellow Warbler, Carolina Wren and a Tennessee Warbler in less than a minute. The neighbors who live in the last house told us they had a pileated woodpecker crash into their window. It shattered the first of a double pane glass, temporarily knocked itself out but got up and flew away.
"The government will no longer track major sources of greenhouse gases, data that has been used to measure the scale and identify sources of the problem for the past 15 years.
"We're not doing that climate change, you know, crud, any-more." Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told Fox Business on May 8.
By getting rid of data, the administration is trying to halt the national discussion about how to deal with global warming, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist"
I copied that chunk from a recent article in the Democrat & Chronicle. Aren’t we lucky to still have a daily newspaper in Rochester? I’m not sure that we are. I had not heard the word “crud” since the Mad Magazine days.
Everybody’s complaining about all the rain we have had. Our garden loves it. We have a few varieties, in a few stages, of lettuce, arugula and spinach. I took this photo after picking two bags full and Peggi, at the other end of the garden, is putting in the collards and kale plants, that we started indoors, in the earth. We would normally have our tomatoes and peppers in by now but we still have a slight possibility of a frost so we’ll wait until Monday.
