“Turner presents a didactic deconstruction of the visual semantics behind recognizability of form through a parsing of the grey space of the half-formed, “half-naked” (the name of the show). Do you believe that gibberish? I like these Ray Turner paintings but I couldn’t possibly make it through the description that the Artman Gallery in Chelsea offered us. And rather than just letting us look at the paintings, the staff insisted on trying to engage us in conversation. We had no time for that, the galleries were closing and we still hadn’t made it to Hauser & Wirth.
Back at Duane’s we watched Cher videos on YouTube, her new versions of ABBA songs. Surprised how bad they were. We finished with Tammy Wynette’s. “Don’t Touch Me” and I woke up singing “Ass Magnet,” Sa Zu’s (Ken Frank) incredibly sticky dance hit.
On Saturday Duane offered us a choice of three walks, all loops from his apartment in Brooklyn. “Mother nature, quasi industrial or multi ethnic neighborhoods.” We chose the third and walked down Ocean Parkway, over to Coney Island Avenue and back to Church Avenue. Duane’s world, excellent!
Leaf peeping train leaving Utica for the Adirondacks
We’ve been watching a Spanish tv show on Netflix called “Ministerio Del Tiempo” where the characters are given assignments that take them back in time, usually for the purpose of ensuring history unfolds the way they feel it should. We are forever backing the show up because the Spanaids talk so fast, Peggi can only catch a bit of it and we can’t read the English sub-titles before they’re gone.
Looking out the window of our train car in Utica I had the sensation we were time traveling. Maybe next year we’ll ride this old train up to Pete and Shelley’s place.
Jalepenos just before being picked from our garden 2018g
Peggi “put up” or canned six quarts of jalapeños on our last day in Rochester. We left some nice looking eggplants on the vine and emailed our neighbor, on whose property we have our garden, that she could help herself to them. We managed to can or eat a bumper crop worth of tomatoes and we gave the last to Kathy, who drove us to the train station. We’ve been eating kale in every dish we make and we expect to find some still when we return.
I checked the status of yesterday’s train and found that it arrived in Penn Station one minute late. That was encouraging. You need a bit of encouragement before getting on a train in this country. Today the train was a half hour late getting into Rochester and we stopped outside town to let another train pass us. In Utica the conductor announced that we had an engine problem and would not be able to travel at full speed to Albany. We texted Duane that we would be late getting in. In a few days we will be in Spain where the trains run like clockwork.
Picasso said he paints his forms as he thinks of them, not as he sees them. Not to diminish the act of recording what you see but to emphasis the act of creation. Presenting what you think you see, or more dramatically, what you want to see seems a more noble concern. In 2018 this is a reason to carry a sketchbook with you.
We were in Target trying to get a look at the new iPhone XS when everyone’s phones sounded an alert at once. Peggi found it kind of creepy. I was thinking how we were all connected in some new, magical way.
Outside a woman in a big black Suburban hit the curb behind us and then zipped around us to park. We were on foot and I was thinking how our yoga teacher got hit by a shopping cart which had been propelled by a car in the parking lot of Cosco. You have to walk defensively.
Target is the only thing left in Irondequoit Mall and walking across the vast empty parking lot is a surreal experience. The pavement is a cracked and littered with cigarette butts and tiny bits of of trash, mostly plastic. We are already here from the future doing a cursory, shallow archeological dig. I found this broken snow shovel and stuck it in ground at the end of the pavement.
We are only one Rochester walk away from Camino part two. I’m already thinking rocket fuel at Starbucks for that last loop from the house.
Lunch Ladies decorative squash at Aman’s on East Ridge Road
It seems a little cruel that these decorative squash are called “Lunch Ladies.” I don’t make the rules, I just look at the signs.
Peggi made a couple of cherry pies the other day and brought one down to our neighbor, Sue, who just celebrated a big birthday. Today Sue brought a beautiful bouquet of flowers, all from her garden, up to us. We will never be even.
I swallowed an olive pit. I usually have a few olives with a boiled egg, toast and olive oil in the morning and I wasn’t quite awake. It felt like it was stuck in my esophagus but that may have just been the sensation. I’m hoping it doesn’t get stuck in some crevice of my intestines colon.
I bummed that we missed the one night premiere of the Joan Jett movie. We were playing in the cafe that night. Here is a song recorded at that gig.
Ma and Pa Tierney photographed on their fiftieth wedding anniversary
The Tierney side of my family had its annual picnic today and this one was more fun than all the rest for some reason. Only one set of aunt and uncles is left so it is mostly cousins and their families. I have a lot of cousins on this side and we are all around the same age. It always was when we were growing up especially the Christmas parties at my grandmother’s house where we would all run around while the adults talked in the basement. With most of those adults gone now the reunions are fun again.
My cousin, Kathleen, organizes these affairs and a few years back I told her you can’t call it a reunion if you have it every year. I must have read that somewhere. Anyway, she now calls it a “family picnic.” Kathleen is a natural born leader. A few years older than me, she organized us all when we were little kids. Today she is a nun, a Sister of Mercy. I told her we were doing the Camino in Spain and she had never heard of it, the oldest religious pilgrimage in the Christian world. I never knew exactly where she stood with Catholicism and I was especially curious because of all the recent turmoil so I dove right in. We registered our disgust with the priestly sexual abuse and cover-up and within minutes she was discussing how we can can get to the ordination of women.
My sister, Amy, had the brilliant idea to bring some of the watercolors that our dad left behind when he passed. She arranged them on a table and the relatives helped theirselves, each leaving with some original Leo Dodd’s.
I was talking to my mom’s cousin, Joe O’Keefe, when he leaned in to tell me my mom was always his favorite of the Tierney girls. My mom’s sister, Ann, walked by just as he said that and I said, “Does Ann know that?” He laughed and called me a “no good, bog-trotting, trouble making, Mic,” a mouthful of a phrase I had not heard before.
Dentico’s Italian Villa, Culver Road in Rochester, New York, September 2018
I like watching the Wegman’s workers round up the shopping carts. They shuffle around the parking lot, in no hurry whatsoever. They are out of the store and still on the clock. I wasn’t sure if Wegman’s carried light bulbs so once inside I asked the the first worker I saw what aisle they were on. She answered “4B” without a hesitation. At the dairy case I had to wait for a worker to pull all the milk containers to the front of the glass case. I used to have to “front” the shelves in my uncle’s grocery stores – pull the products forward and make sure the labels are facing out. I asked the Wegman’s worker if that was called a “false front” and he said, “rotation.”
We are less than a week from departure for El Camino part two. We have slowly ramped up our walking distances in preparation and that leaves very little time for entries here. Not that there has been anything to report. Peggi and I spent a good deal of time dissecting our back to back reunions and may have finally let them go. Walking is a funny activity. It is addictive in that you don’t feel right unless you make room for it every day. You spend a lot of time inside your head. It is a form of meditation and when you’ve finished, half the day is gone and you have nothing to show for it.
Lee Friedlander called Henry Wessel the “Photo Buddha.” Wessel died recently and in addition to his body of work he left us this beautiful quote. “The process of photographing is a pleasure: eyes open, receptive, sensing, and at some point, connecting. It’s thrilling to be outside of your mind, your eyes far ahead of your thoughts.”
Our yoga teacher talks through the entire class. I like this but he told us one of his former students complained about it. He mostly talks about the pose and I find it helps me to work toward the proper position. Otherwise I would be daydreaming. Sometimes he goes off on a tangent. Last night he told us about a book he was reading on telomeres, the caps at the end of each strand of DNA. He described them as the plastic wraps on the end of shoelaces. His manner of talking is part of the meditation and the class flies by.
Pete LaBonne joins Margaret Explosion on the grand piano Wednesday night. This will be our last performance until November. Here is Transfigure by Margaret Explosion.
Some people know how to throw a party. Fifty years is a lot to celebrate. Quite a few of us didn’t even make it. I went to my fifth high school reunion this weekend and this one should have been the best. Maybe it was. Maybe the standards have shifted.
I was looking forward to the first few hours of chaos, when everyone arrives and you spot an old friend across the room that you haven’t seen since high school, or someone greets you by name and you have no idea who it is, when someone tells you the silliest story, something they remember about you that doesn’t even sound like you. That you. There is a real buzz in the air as you reconnect and find yourself talking to someone you never said a word to in high school.
We experienced all this last week at Peggi’s reunion outside of Detroit. The ones my classmates threw every ten years went like this as well but something was off this time. The get together at the sports bar the night before was pure fun. Surrounded by giant tvs we managed to whoop it up. The reunion itself, the next night at the old Happy Acres golf club, was almost planned to death. Name tags were distributed as we filed in and we were encouraged to find a table so an MC/minister/classmate could work the room. And after that the town supervisor, also a classmate, said his piece. They killed the buzz in record time but we managed to rise above it all. We just had to work a little harder. We were sitting with Joe and he knows how to act. And before dinner was even finished we were milling about and magical conversations ensued.
We drove out here with Frank, the school president in 1968, and we didn’t want to leave until he had finished holding court with Marianne, Holly and Mickey so we hung out by the bar. A classmate said goodbye but came back about ten minutes later because he had forgotten his sports jacket. The committee was packing up the Party Store decorations when we went out for the car. The guy who had forgotten his jacket was still there, trying to get an Uber. He said he might be impaired and he didn’t want to jeopardize his job. We offered to give him a ride.
The front seat was Frank’s because his hip is new so we asked our passenger to sit in the back with Peggi. He had a hard time getting in because both of his knees had been replaced. We found Frank at the door and met another classmate there who was smoking a cigarette. He had too much to drink so we offered to give him a ride even though our car’s four seats were full. He refused our offer and we left. Peggi asked our back seat passenger what his job was and he told us he was a financial planner. He dropped something on the floor and fumbled around for it. It was a breathalyzer. His own breathalyzer.
Peggi on Blind Date, an Australian version the Dating Game, in July of 1969
In the summer of 1969, as I was preparing to go to Woodstock, Peggi and her sister were in Sydney, Australia for the summer. Actually, I didn’t prepare for Woodstock at all. I gave Dave Mahoney 25 bucks so he could buy tickets from a local radio station but no one ever collected tickets when we got there. And I simply got in Joe Barrett’s family’s Corvair with what I had on my back. No sleeping bags or change of clothes, just a few tabs of LSD in my pocket.
Peggi and her sister were bored. Their father had been transferred there from Detroit and they didn’t know anyone. They concocted a scheme to get on Australia’s version of the Dating Game. The tv show was called “Blind Date” and was hosted by Graham Webb. It ran from 1967 to 1970 on the 0-10 Network, now known as Network Ten. Peggi’s older sister sat in the audience and gave Peggi hand signals to ensure that she picked the cutest guy of the three. By some strange, small country coincidence the guy she picked had been an Australian exchange student at Peggi’s high school the year before. And his brother-in-law was working behind the scenes for the tv network. The guy was back in the states for their high school reunion and he brought three old photos, taken by his parents of the show as it was being broadcast.
Berry Gordy purchased this house on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit, Michigan in 1959. The soundtrack of our youth was recorded in Hitsville USA. Now the Motown Museum was a must see for us this weekend when we drove to Detroit for Peggi’s 50th high school reunion. We stayed downtown last time we were here and and we were happy to see how much it has bloomed since. We had lunch in the Eastern Market and Peggi bought a “Detroit Girl” t-shirt from a vendor for five bucks. This time we stayed in Royal Oak with an old friend of Peggi’s.
The reunion was a multi-pronged affair. I took photos of Peggi standing in front of two of her family’s old houses and then we met classmates at a bar where a beer and a glass of wine cost us 23 dollars. The group moved to a party at the home of one her schoolmates. He had his drums set up in the basement with blacklight posters on the wall. A group of guys who were in a band when they all were in high school entertained us in a mature lounge punk style. I spent some time talking to a biker, the partner of one of Peggi’s classmates. He had a beard like ZZ Top and he told me he worked in a machine shop long enough to lose a good deal of his hearing, the low end in his left ear and the high end in his right ear. He said if someone calls “she can always tell if I’m talking to a man or a woman because I use the left ear for women and the right ear for men.” The two of them rode their bikes from Detroit to Key West and back this summer.
The following night was the actual reunion, name tags with the high school pictures and all, and it was almost anti-climatic after the shock of seeing everyone the night before. The dj was pretty good and the class got rowdy in a hurry. Peggi and I danced to Spencer Davis’s “Gimme Some Lovin'” and the Detroit Wheels’ “Devil With The Blue Dress.” Both sounded unbelievably good. I’ve been to all five of Peggi’s reunions so I can easily find someone to talk to while Peggi is careening down Memory Lane. A few people told me I was a good sport for going. I thought I was having more fun than that.
Last year when we were working on Civilization Arpad played us a few tracks that he had recorded at Nod’s rehearsal space. We were finishing mixes for our cd and they were just starting work on a new album. The tracks we heard were rough. Nod is rough. I was anxious to hear the final results and asked about it whenever I saw one on them. I learned Joe Tunis was going to release it on his Carbon Records so I preordered it. The vinyl arrived this afternoon.
Nod has been around for twenty five years or so and this is their best album yet. Most bands go in the opposite direction. Think how good the first Talking Heads lp was and how each album after that got worse and worse. Nod is a three piece. They’ve sometimes worked with other musicians but no matter how good they are they take the edge off of Nod. Three letters, three players, Joe Sorriero, Tim Poland and Brian Shafer.
No one sounds like Nod; rhymes with odd. Imagine “No New York” with Can, an underground sound. Live, they are loud, they get the party started, but mostly because they are raw like the Stooges. And angular so you want to dance like an idiot. My favorite song on “So Much Tonight” is “Go For a Ride,” a classic Nod piece. “Rollin Around” nods to Exile on “Main Street” and “Whatchya Doin” is sweet. Nod is in good form.
“Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda” played last night at the Little and it will be shown one more time, on Saturday afternoon at 3pm before it leaves town. It is a slow, beautiful movie. Slow only in the sense that you must stop talking, walking, texting to observe, to see, to listen and to hear. Like Tarkovsky, whose movies were highly influential to Sakamoto and are excerpted in this film, Sakamoto is focused on the yin and yang of equilibrium. He confronts the nuclear disaster in Japan in work, he says because if we were able to damage the earth we are able to fix it. While thumbing through a book of Tarkovsky Polaroids he says Tarkovsky was a musician because of the way he uses sound, rain, wind, footsteps, movement.
The creative process is beautifully laid out in this film as we see Ryuichi in early settings with his Yellow Magic Orchestra and in the studio working on soundtracks for “The Sheltering Sky,” “The Last Emperor,” “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” and “The Revenant.” He battles cancer in the film and when pushed to explain how he felt when he received the diagnosis he says it feels like it is a joke. He says Bernardo Bertolucci asked him to rewrite some music on the spot. He said it would be impossible and Bertolucci told him, “Ennio Morricone would do it.” So he did it and an orchestra performed it a half hour later.
In a nod to the Fringe Fest, which will start tonight and be happening all around us, Margaret Explosion will be performing without a setlist! Wednesdays Little Theatre Café 7-9pm
This old lumberyard on Holt Road in Webster looks like a movie set now. I took this shot from the side of the place as we walked the Hojak Trail. We started at North Ponds Park and walked to Drumm Road and back seeing only a handful of people the whole time. We felt like we were on the Camino again, an easy straightaway portion of the Camino, with a natural stone or mud surface and a clear trail, the old railroad line. We were almost to the lake when we turned around and will push it that far next time. I’d love to see where that guy drove through the barricade and into the water on Lake Road.
Our credit card has been compromised three times in the last year. Is that average? I don’t feel like we’re reckless but maybe we are. The repercussions are crazy. When we told the Visa representative that this was the third time our card was compromised she told us that our card was not “compromised” but someone had committed fraud with it. An interesting technicality. So that would be one compromise and two frauds in the last year.
We suspect the other fraud happened when we bought gas up near Niagara Falls. Someone skimmed our number when we inserted our card at the funky pumps. About five months ago a vendor where we used our card had their database attacked so we had to get a new card and that was a “compromise.” On Friday night we bought gas at Herrema’s down near Charlotte. Visa had told us to pay in person rather than use our card at the pump but the place was closed and the only way to pay for gas we desperately needed was to pay with a card at the pump. We pay most bills on line and contacting all our vendors is a pain in the ass.
Pete Monacelli Searching For Home Huberton Summers 1950s No3
The Little Theater tests the waters with movies by only giving them one showing. I was looking forward to the Joan Jett documentary and they have just announced it will be here for one screening, on a Wednesday this month when our band is playing in the Café. We’ll miss Dylan at the Auditorium because that too is a Wednesday. Tomorrow night “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda” plays the Little at 7pm. Our friend, Stan, called our attention it this one. Sakamoto was a member of the the Yellow Magic Orchestra and is an Oscar-winning film composer. After the Fukushima disaster he became an an outspoken social activist against nuclear power in Japan. A few weeks back I posted a link to a set of music he compiled for his favorite restaurant in NYC.
I’m starting to feel like that guy you see at every art opening chowing down the food. We went to two this weekend. On Friday we drove along the Parkway to Albion for Pete Monacelli’s “Searching For Home” show. This series is mostly flat, hard edged paintings with architectural shapes pulling and pushing the plane. On Sunday we stopped by Margaret Spevak’s opening in the Café. Her quilts happily cross the boundaries of craft and art. Both shows were delightful.
Five or six miles takes a good sized bite out the day but we are less than a month away from part two of our Camino walk and we need to be ramping it up. Peggi plotted a loop from our house that took us over to the bay, down to the lake, across Lake Bluff Road (where I photographed this house on the lake) and up Birch Hills to the trail that runs along the lake at Durand. When we got to Kings Highway we scurried across the golf course to Hoffman Road. We were surprised to see a vehicle in the driveway of the house on the hill, the one that has sat empty and unfinished since the original owner walked away from place the because he couldn’t figure out how to put a driveway in. Of course he should have given that some thought before he built the house.
Bankruptcy takes time. This house sat empty for eight years. Wouldn’t it have been in someone’s interests to get an occupation there who is paying both a mortgage and taxes? I don’t get why it takes so long. Suddenly it is on the market again and sold in days. The house is built close to the road on such a steep hill that it took three switchbacks to get to level of the garage. And by the time you get up there you don’t have enough room to turn and enter the garage. The driveway is mostly washed out now but this guy got a four wheel drive pickup up to the first turn. He told us the “house was a steal.”
Olcott and Wolcott, are both about the same distance from our house, one in the direction of Buffalo and the other on the way to Syracuse. Both are idyllic little towns on the shore of Lake Ontario, surrounded by fruit orchards. We visited both this summer and pushed it yesterday by continuing on to Fair Haven, the town after Wolcott.
Matthew was our guide. I had not been here since I was a kid and I was anxious to see the diving boards along the channel that runs off the lake into the state park. The hardware is still there but the boards are gone.
We parked in the center of town near the library, next to a street person who was sitting on the lawn. He was barefoot and wearing cut-offs, that’s it. Matthew introduced him to us and he stood up to say, “We’re going to touch” and he gave me a polite hug.
The town is charming. It swells in size over the summer and has three art galleries. We visited them all before heading to Little Sodus Inn, a dark funky bar right at the bottom of the bay. We passed a sign that read, “Curfew in Effect 10PM to 5AM Under 18 years of age.” The bartender’s top was cut really low yet it never ran out of tattoo covered breasts. We took our beers out in the sun but I could see spending some time in there.
Walking toward the lake by some dreamy cottages we stopped at the “Fly by Night Cookie Shop and Miniature Museum,” a fairytale like place run by a large German woman who looked like she stepped out of a Bruegal painting. We picked out cookies from glass jars, chocolate rum balls, “Hee Hee” cookies shaped like marijuana leaves and coconut almond macaroons.
Our next stop was a general store on Main Street with a “No Skateboarding or Loitering” sign out front. First thing that caught my eye was a shelf of gag items, a lollipop that will turn your tongue blue, birthday candles that you can’t blow out, and a bloody bandaid with a nail through it that you can wrap around your finger. A table near the door was stocked with local produce. We bought peaches, apples and eggs. The counter near the cash register was surrounded with tiers of Bic lighters, Bill’s Beef Sticks and five short stacks of “Big Slab” Beef Jerky in a big transparent case. Your choice of “Original, Black Pepper, Teriyaki, Sweet n’ Spicy and Cajun.”
Back at our car the shirtless guy was still on the lawn and a young couple, maybe eighteen years old or so, was sitting on a bench. The woman was was clearly strung out and she jumped up to pace with her phone. She walked around the building and returned holding the phone out to the guy and asking the person on the other end if they wanted to talk to daddy.
Virgin Mary statue in front of Bishop Kearney High School on the first day of school 2018
I went to two high schools. This one, above, is Bishop Kearney. We walked by there yesterday on our way to Starbucks. I like how the Virgin Mary, flag and cross on top of the building line up. I went here for two years and couldn’t wait to get out. Back in the day the whole left side of the building was for girls and we were on the right. The nuns and Irish Christian brothers lived on the top floor. The gymnasium was straight ahead and there was a little closet-like room between the gym doors where the brothers would take you and apply corporal punishment if you misbehaved. It was a Catholic thing. We had dinner with Martha O’Connor the other night and determined that her brother, Kevin, was in my class. I think I remember him. It was a long time ago. RL Thomas, where I went for my second two years, was a lot more memorable.
Margaret Explosion plays the Little Theatre Café every Wednesday in September. Here’s Homeward from our last gig.
Peggi’s phone read 93 degrees when we lost our cellular coverage so it stayed that way for two days while we were off the grid. It was too hot to do anything but sit and talk. And when dinnertime came Pete had some Tabouli, tomatoes and freshly pickled cucumbers ready to serve.
Out on the road the next morning we walked two and half miles toward Crown Point and before turning around. Long before the Revolutionary War the British fought the French at Crown Point on Lake Champlain. This is a dirt road and the only vehicle we saw was a logging truck.
The temperature dropped about forty degrees the next day. I dumped the rain water out of the rowboat and the four of us went out on the marsh. The sticker on the side of the boat said it held 400 pounds so it road pretty low. The boat didn’t have any oars so Pete worked a canoe paddle from the rear and Shelley sat up front with another paddle. Peggi and I sat in the middle and we floated through yellow pond lilies from one beaver dam to the next. It is incredibly beautiful up here.
We drank Gennys by candlelight and listen to tracks from the Gigunda vault.
We couldn’t decide which way to walk. When we got to the corner we paused and then went the way didn’t go yesterday. We discussed coffee and the headed toward Starbucks. We heard someone on a P.A. in the distance, maybe at the town hall, so we headed that way. There was garage sale going on in the old farm house on Culver, the one set way back from the road. I was looking at a Snoopy Pez dispenser and Peggi was looking at some wine glasses when the homeowner came over to say they were closing up shop and they were just going to take everything out to the curb. He offered to get us a box that we could fill up for five bucks. That was easy.
We grabbed the glasses, a Blue Ray box set of the Godfather movies, dvd of Mystic River and Kill Bill. I chose three eps, Tom Jones Live, Ray Charles Crying Time ad the soundtrack to Dr. Zhivago which is primarily Lara’s Theme.We took a stack of books, As I lay Dying, Of Human Bondage, Main Street and the complete works of Shakespeare. And for good measure I through in a book called The Desire of Ages, the 1898 life of Christ by Ellen G. White. Each short chapter is illustrated. I might just cut the pictures out. We told the owner we would be back in a few hours to pick up the box.
A big band, comprised of old people and teens, was playing in the band stand behind Town Hall. That must have been what we heard earlier. They did “Happy” and then KC’s ”Boogie Shoes.” We had seen a sign for the Sea Breeze Fire Department Festival, something we had stumbled onto years ago while we were out biking, so we headed toward the lake on Kings Highway. We found a big cooler with a bag of ice and a five inch stack in individually wrapped American cheese slices in it. The festival was apparently the day before. We turned around and spotted a pair of Santa and Mrs. Claus gnomes, about ten inches high, sitting under a shrub in someone’s yard. So cute they must leave it up year round.
