Colleen Buzzard three dimensional drawing, “Origin of Matter” at Main Street Gallery
The quickest way to Clifton Springs requires two NYS Thruway legs, a fifty five cent toll. We were there in forty minutes. Pete and Gloria were in the back seat and of course we talked the whole way out. We were at Main Street Arts to see the Upstate New York Drawing Invitational, work from six upstate artists.
Kathy Farrell’s work looked more like painting, maybe drawing with paint with chunks of flat maps. They were attractive and fun. Tricia Butski, from Buffalo, has some strong graphic charcoals that are really impressive. My favorite piece, and one we considered buying if only we could figure out how to light it, is the three dimensional drawing by Colleen Buzzard, pictured above. (And please click on the photo so you can see the whole piece.) It’s called “Origin of Matter” and it is made (drawn) with wire, thread, ink on paper, torn paper and printer’s tape. We have radiant heat pipes in our ceiling so mounting a light to cast these integral shadows would be a challenge.
Bag of potato chips on blue sofa by curb along Culver Road in Rochester, New York
We tell how humid it is by how easily our front door closes. When we’re home we keep it locked but slightly ajar so we can get in without a key. A gentle tug closes it part way, the bugs stay out and we have easy access. When the humidity is really low the damn thing closes behind us. It was really low today, a perfect day for a walk to the beach. And once there we walked out the pier. We are headed back to Spain to complete our walk and we have just started to ramp up our milage.
We had dinner with friends last night. The youngest in our midst was an old friend’s son. He was playing country blues on a three quarter size guitar when we arrived. I went to high school with his father and he has been dead for quite some time now. We are still friends with his wife, Chuck’s “Acorn Girl.” I was struck by how much the son reminded me of his father. I wasn’t expecting it for some reason. I thought his father was truly one of a kind. I think he would be so proud of his son.
Here is one of Chuck Cuminale’s songs, “Acorn Girl,” as performed by Pete LaBonne.
Flowers at Amans on East Ridge Road in Rochester, New York
Aman’s Farm Market picked up the slack when Abby Wambach’s parent’s place closed and they’ve been busier than ever. It’s family run as well but they have been around since 1867. They are great alternative to Wegman’s for fresh corn, strawberries and peaches. Their perennials are half price now so we put a few Vermillionaire plants in our backpacks and planted them out front by the four horseshoe chairs. Jim Mott painted the chairs and he was sitting in the fourth while he painted these three. They came from grandparents place on Gregory Hill Road but you can still get metal chairs just like them. We are delighted to find the small, orange, tubular flowers of the Vermillion plants are Hummingbird magnets.
We read this morning that the FBI was able to reconstruct shredded documents and use them to prosecute Trump’s lawyer, Micheal Cohen. I’m trying to imagine what that project must have been like.
Woman painting steeple at Christ Church in Irondequoit
The brakes on our 2003 Element went funky over the weekend. Not bad enough to reach the calipers but they just started falling apart. I called B&B Auto and they were able to take us in so we left before breakfast, dropped it off and walked back home. We stopped at I-Square for a latte and watched this woman scraping the wooden steeple on the church across from the House of Guitars.
We spotted a handmade sign across the street from the town hall for a “Record Album Sale” so we stopped to check it out. A guy with a black wig was loading a car in the driveway and he seemed bothered that we interested in the sale. He told us to wait a minute while he locked up the dogs and then he led us to a small room with thousands of records. “Everything is a buck” he said and that was the last we saw of him.
The records were in surprisingly good shape, some never played, and there were multiple copies of many. We had a short stack in no time, Nino Roto’s soundtrack to the Godfather, KC and the Sunshine Band, Art Tatum, Stand by Sly and Family Stone and something I had never seen before, Our Memories of Elvis with a picture of Elvis’s father and the Colonel on the front.
A woman was screaming at someone on the phone in another room. It seems her brother wanted her to pick him up and help him take back his empties. When she hung up she came in the small room to ask if we wanted some napkin rings. Peggi said no and then the woman asked if we canned. Peggi said yes, but that was as far as that conversation went. And then she started complaining about foreign people. “They want everything for nothing. Always trying to talk me down. I gotta get rid of this stuff. I’m just gonna give it all away.” She asked Peggi if she could get rid of the words on her tv. She said, “I’m a little hard of hearing but I don’t need the words at the bottom.” She was watching QVC and screaming at one of the contestants.
She got on the phone again and told someone that the guy had met someone on Facebook and he was moving out. She said, “I hope it’s a scam.”
Forget about walking along the beach at Durand. The lake level is too high again and there is hardly any sand visible after all that rain.
We met our friends for Fungi pizza at Napa Bistro in Webster. I had been playing Sly and Family Stone singles before we left, I kicked it off the set with with “Family Affair,” and realized I had two copies of “Everyday People.” So I gave one to Matthew and Louise at lunch. Matthew tried returning the wine glasses we had left out at their place but I refused them. Louise was wearing a vintage t-shirt from her brother’s band, Luna, and we talked music, art, home improvement and boating. The time flew by.
The Church of the Transfiguration, on the corner of our street, was having a cookout toady. We had it on our calendar for a month but we had the timeframe wrong and they were packing up when got there. So we came home and ate leftovers.
There was hardly anyone on the golf course when we cut through this afternoon. Maybe it was too wet. We saw the beer lady in her cart and she was just sitting under a tree studying her phone. We came across a dead skunk on one of the greens with a puncture wound in his stomach and surprisingly it didn’t stink.
At the lake we took Kings Highway up to the library. We walk on the shoulder going against traffic as cars act like its a drag strip in that isolated Stretch. The undeveloped part of the park was thick and lush, too thick to even walk through this time of year. We usually stop in the library, study the new releases, and use their bathrooms but we didn’t have any time for that today. We were headed over to Deborah Ronnen’s to check out some new prints. Our favorite was by Kiki Smith.
We passed a Harley up on the sidewalk and grey haired biker on his cell phone. It wasn’t until we were right on top of him that we were able to read his t-shirt. “Iron Cannibal Choppers.” At the end of street we spotted a big patch of orange Chanterelle mushrooms. While we were walking a I made a mental note to look up Genesee beer and BlackkKlansman when I got back. I thought someone would be talking about the Genesee neon signs in the bar scene. Either they carry the local beer in Colorado Springs or someone scored a strategic product placement. I didn’t find anything.
After our art preview we had the Sesame Tofu special at Lanai and talked to the chef, Rico, about Hawaii. Peggi complemented him on the soundtrack, most of which she first heard her mom play on weekends back in the first Polynesian wave.
Soccer ball chair out by the curb, Rochester, New York
We are only a week away from the start of the season for La Liga and this guy is dumping his match time chair!
I like it when late summer slows things down to a crawl. Boring is not the right word for it, I find myself in too much of a stupor to feel bored. We linger longer after the horseshoes fly. I’ve been on a losing streak, though, and I’m wondering if it might be the logy weather. But why wouldn’t it affect my opponent? In a few weeks the cooler weather will clear my head and I’ll be productive members of society again.
I volunteered to do the name tags for an upcoming high school reunion. I did them ten years ago and I still have the files. Someone in the class is sharing a Google spreadsheet of who’s coming with me and I’m working my way through them. I see Matt Sanfilippo has not sent his check in. He signed my yearbook, “Italian Power Forever!”
Jared’s grandkids broke his glass rain collector but he estimated we had almost two inches of rain the other night. Other parts of the county got up to nine. I expected to find some of our tomato plants laying on the ground but they were all still standing. Peggi brought home a bag of them and we plan on making gazpacho. We’ll use the cucumbers from next door. Maybe try this recipe. We were trying to estimate how tall these corn stalks are. Our best guess is fifteen feet.
Yellow wrought iron chairs on Fairlea in Rochester, New York
These are the kind chairs that you don’t sit at. They are in the front yard of house near us. We pass by often and we have never seen anyone sitting in them. They are nice looking and perhaps that is enough.
We started getting serious about putting away some money rather late. Our band was doing a Happy Hour gig at the Bug Jar and Steve Brown, one of the three original owners, was behind the bar those nights. He worked for Merrill in the day and he encouraged us stop by his office. He made it all fun, recommending a few things but mostly coaching us to buy what we like. Of course we bought some Apple. Steve moved on and these days we check in with Joe Marchese out at MCC every couple of years. He guides us toward a comfortable 60/40 balance of equities and fixed income. After a ten year bull market we had some shuffling to do. Our key strategy though is fairly simple. We just don’t spend that much.
It seems you can’t talk about anything these days with Trump coming up. I think we said said something about tariffs and Joe said, “I understand economics but we’re dealing with a nut case.”
Press for “BlacKkKlansman” was everywhere so we bought tickets on opening night. The screening was followed with a discussion, part of a monthly presentation the Rochester Association of Black Journalists (RABJ) and the Little Theatre. Both the movie and discussion were great. The discussion, the range of reactions from disgust to anger, was actually better than the movie but then it would not have happened if not for the movie. It was heartwarming to hear how fired up people in attendance were. There was a real resolve to do something.
This passage in A.O. Scott’s review of the film really caught my attention. “Spike Lee has often been a gleeful curator of racial invective, and he observes the Klansmen with a fascination that stops only a few degrees short of sympathy. They are monstrous and clownish, but more than just figures of fright or mockery. Understanding what makes them tick is as much Ron’s (main character) mission as bringing them down.” This is exactly how people interrupt Philip Guston’s portrayals of the Klan, the hooded characters in his late paintings. We laugh at them because they are hideous and tragic and so much like ourselves. This is an artful movie.
View of Buffalo skyline from top floor of City Hall
It’s too bad this view from 25th floor of Buffalo’s City Hall building doesn’t show you what the building itself looks like. With tips from the NYT Travel Section column we spent 36 Hours in Buffalo and were just starting the final 24. We had already been to Big Ditch Brewery for their award-winning IPA and we had dinner at the Mexican place recommended in the article. We had walked along the waterfront as the sun went down in Canalside Park. We were staying at the refurbished Lafayette Hotel downtown. The article had recommended two other places. The Lafayette was designed by America’s first woman architect, Louise Blanchard Bethune, and was intended to be ready for the Pan American Expo but it wasn’t finished in time. It was big and funky, something like the Overlook Hotel in the Shining. My uncle told us he used to have lunch there but in later years it became what he called a flophouse. We located these places from the the observation deck of City Hall and we met an Indian couple up there who were visiting their daughter in Buffalo. They told us they had been to the Hindu Temple in Rochester.
When our band played Buffalo in the late seventies and early eighties I never knew where we were. I could get to places like the Continental, McVans, the Garage and Nietzsche’s but then we’d head off to a late night party in loft downtown or an apartment off Delaware or to some crazy late night food joint and I’d be totally lost. It would take us forever to get out of town.
This time stayed downtown and walked up to the Albright Knox. We zig aged and found Rowhouse Bakery, a dreamy coffee shop/bar/restaurant. We walked around the museum of course and then back downtown, stopping in Allentown for a local beer and dinner at Tempo, an Italian place with an Ellsworth Kelly print hanging over the fireplace. We ate out on the patio and split two appetizers and a beet salad. We were full before dinner so we stopped. We clocked ten miles before the day was done and now have a much better sense of the lay of the land.
We stayed up late watching the display in the fake fireplace and we started our day with a Cortado in Public Espresso + Coffee on the ground floor of our hotel. They had cool black and white art on the walls, paintings somewhere between Franz Kline and graffiti, and design magazines scattered about. Most of the customers seemed to be carrying on business via laptop or phone. We entered my Aunt and Uncles address in Niagara Falls into our phone and headed up there for the afternoon.
Black and white photo of metronome performance at Albright Knox
This black and white photo in a display case was the first thing that caught our attention at the “Giant Steps: Artists and the 1960” show at Albright Knox. A recording of the metronome piece was playing overhead and a February 1965 letter from John Cage, addressed to Albright Knox, was sitting next to the photo. We wrongly assumed the photo and letter went together. The metronome piece, ‘Poème Symphonique,’ was performed by György Liget at the gallery and John Cage was here for a performance and lecture the same year. Buffalo was and is a happening town. Well, it was really happening when the Pan American Expo was herein 1901 and with a resurgence underway it is happening again.
The show here was was called, “Giant Steps: Artists and and it features major works by some of the leading artists of the period, Bridget Riley, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol, and it reconsiders those who played an underrecognized, but vital, role in furthering the visual avant-garde in the United States and beyond. The permanent collection here is outstanding. Seymour Knox was buying the the collection, mostly modern art, as the artists were making it. This show digs deep into their collection and is well worth a ride along the lake to civilization.
We set the alarm this morning so we could be on the beach by 8 AM for Marijana’s yoga class. It was already hot and I spent half of the class under my towel. Marijana worked a mindfulness theme about taking the time to enjoy the moment. She said when you are thirteen you can’t wait to be fourteen but if are sixty four you are in no hurry to turn sixty five. English is not her first lanquage so she had cute way of urging us to let go of time. She didn’t exactly say “let go” but I can’t remember what she said. I made a point to remember it but now it is gone. We all went swimming in the lake after class.
We read the paper down at pool and then visited our neighbor, Sue, who has been tending to Monarch butterflies. She spots the butterfly eggs on the bottom of the milkweed plants and brings those portions of the plants to the netted cage on her porch. The eggs turn into small caterpillars who eat the eggshell and then the leaves of the plant until they get big at which point they crawl to the top of the cage and curl up into a pupa. That thing stays green and then turns clear enough for you to see the butterfly inside all curled up. They drop out of the pupa and Sue releases them. If it isn’t a miracle it is pretty close.
Sailboats returning to Rochester Yacht Club from Lake Ontario
We rode bikkes over to the the Port of chestier and and sat down just as it started to pour. There is some sort of sailboat race going on at the Yacht Club and we watched them all come in from the storm. Lou Reed’s “Waiting For My Man” was playing on the sound system when we sat down at the restaurant there. I told the waitress the music was god and she said that isn’t often the case. It stopped raining before we finished and we rode home in the sun. We walked up to Starbucks today for a Cold Brew and get in the door just as a thunderstorm struck. We need the rain. We took a few sips and the storm moved on. It never even rain back home.
I consider myself lucky but I am not as lucky as my neighbor. He has thrown so many bounce ringers, ones that hit the pit maybe one or two feet from the post and then bounce at an angle right on to the post. I have not won a round of three in a week now. He is good, no question, and I don’t mean to diminish his abilities. He has thrown so many of these that if it was just luck he would be one lucky SOB.
I have analyzed this situation. He throws a double flip. I throw a single flip, that is one revolution before ideally heading for the stake in an open position. And he has a much higher arc than I do. My tosses are low and hit the pit with forward momentum. His drop from a higher elevation and when they hit the scooped out pit they often bounce toward the stake. Another factor is the unusually dry summer we have had. The ground is firm enough to support a good bounce. I have to either make a change to my toss or wait for the weather to change.
We had not been to a Red Wings game in years but we see Baldness.com still has the naming rights to the scoreboard. We parked off Alexander Street where there was free alternate side parking and we hoofed it over to State Street. The Wings were losing 2-1 to the Scrantom/Wilkes Barre Railriders at the top of the second when we walked in.
I caught a foul ball. Well, I didn’t actually catch it. It bounced off the seats next to us and I grabbed it. I gave it to some kids sitting behind us. 7,000 people were in the stands for a day game and I felt like I was back at the Norton Street stadium with my father on a Knot Hole Day. The Wings were wearing different uniforms and playing under the name of “Rochester Plates,” some sort of promotion marking the 100th anniversary of the Garbage Plate which originated at Nick Tahou Hots just around the corner from Frontier Field. Between innings the announcer said, “There is nothing more Rochester than a Garbage Plate.”
They still play ten second samples of the Ramones, “Hey Ho, Let’s Go!,” Gary Glitter’s “Rock n’ Roll” and “Welcome to the Jungle. Fred Costello’s live organ sounded better than any of that. He did snippets of “In A Gadda Da Vida” and Mungo Jerry’s “Summertime” and then a full, jazzed-up version of Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman.” There are distractions galore, kids games between innings, conversations going on all around you, people on their cell phones and generally not watching the game.
I tried Louise’s sunglasses on when we were out at their place boating. I loved the color of the lenses and I bought my own pair at a local Rite Aid. I took this picture through the sunglasses. We went into the bathroom and they were playing the radio broadcast of the game over the speakers in there. Only there was I drawn into the nuances of America’s favorite pasttime.
Bobby Henrie and the Goners at Radio Social in Rochester, New York
Cheryl Laurro, the former Godiva’s shop owner, restauranteur, singer and spiritual advisor, was in town. She held court over at Radio Social, the old Stromberg Carlson plant. It was the first time we had been in the place even though I grew up on the street, on the other side of Humboldt. We used to play in the parking lot. Bob Henrie and the Goners were playing there so it was a double draw. They sounded better than ever. Bobby is a dynamo with a wealth of songs he can call on. He keeps the band on their toes as they play two long sets with no setlist. I had the opportunity to video the same two dancers as caught eight years ago at another Goners’ show. They are still the best band in the city.
Leroy, New York is only forty five minutes away but it feels like another world. Like so many small towns it has seen better days. The Jello Museum is still here. Donald Woodward, the son of the original owner, bought Amelia Earhart’s airplane, the “Friendship”, in 1928, and Amelia Earhart drove here to visit her airplane. The airport is being revived. And the Creekside Tavern, built in 1820 on the banks of Oatka Creek, has been completely redone by Billy Farmer. He has bands out back on the weekends and we’ve driven out here twice to hear the Debbie Kendick’s project. I recommend the band for sure and I’d take route along the river. We took 490 the second time and it is deadly how boring that stretch can be. Maybe if you were shopping for an RV it wouldn’t be so bad.
Our neighbor thinned out some pachesandra and offered it to us. We decided to plant it along our driveway. That project took up the better part of day, digging little holes and winding up the roots to poke the plants in. To do something like this now you have wear your tick armour, socks, pants and long sleeve hoodies soaked in Permethrin. While I was suited up picked a handful of blackberries from the vines growing in mini forever wild area.
I don’t usually read the food section but I do look at it. I found myself pretty deep into an article about some guy, about our age, who really like the food at a particular restaurant but couldn’t stand the music that they played. He asked the owners if he could do a set list for them and they said yes. Turns out the guy, Ryuichi Sakamoto, was in Yellow Magic Orchestra, a group we followed in the late seventies.
I recreated his playlist in Apple Music and added one at the end, a Philip Glass piece that I stumbled on it while mistyping a song title. The playlist might not work for you but here is the link. I was unfamiliar with most of the music but instantly feel in love with this Bill Evans track called “Peace Piece.”
Ted and Janet Williams at the Bug Jar Margaret Explosion performance in 2001
“Primordial Fleamarket: Sometimes the communist household object strikes you as having been made in geological times, rather than some manufacturing era. Glorified objects . . . rarefied.” Wendy Low echoed this quote from Janet Thayer Williams when she asked, “Who can look at a whisk broom and not think of the stitching in Janet’s painting?”
Friends of the William’s family gathered on Laburnum Crescent today to remember Janet. Someone made a convincing argument that Janet was still with us. Her paintings were were on display throughout the house and once I found this one, “Wite Out” from 2006, I stayed put beneath it. I first saw it in the tunnel between the new downtown library and the old building across the street. They often display art there and this painting stopped me dead on my tracks. The typewriter keys sang and leapt off the canvas as if some fantastic story was unfolding. It wasn’t on the page. It was somewhere between the mind, the keys and the page. I told Janet how much I loved it.
First of all, like all the photos in this blog, there is an enlargement available if you would like to see the whole picture. In fact, I invite you to look at the whole painting before reading my gibberish. I would like to hear what other people think is going on in this late Cezanne. Fred Lipp first brought it to my attention but as was his way he did not tell me what to think about it.
The painting is in the Guggenheim’s collection and I took the next few sentences from their website. “Cezanne’s work was motivated by a desire to give sculptural weight and volume to the instantaneity of vision achieved by the Impressionists, who painted from nature. Relying on his perception of objects in space as visually interrelated entities—as forms locked into a greater compositional structure. The strangely distorted, proto-Cubist view of the sitter—his right eye is depicted as if glimpsed from below and the left as if seen from above—contributes an enigmatic, contemplative air to the painting. ”
Cézanne is considered the precursor of Cubism. You read this all the time when people talk about Cezanne and I don’t particularly like Cubism but I love this painting. There is so much space in it that I never tire of looking at it. The wood trim on the wall below the sitter’s left elbow is coming at us and it wraps around the sitter. The wall is far from flat. The way the wall is painted it creates real space around the sitter. His left leg is coming out of the painting at us and the right falls away. The left side of his body is turning toward us while the right arm, which is actually closer to us, turns away. The chair under him shown only to his right, accents the turn in his body. With his left eye lower, much lower, than the right his head is almost spinning. His upper body is unusually long, he is way present. Cezanne has created so much volume in this painting with what some people dismiss as distortion.
I think the painting is a marvel. The card players are over the top with spatial illusion. I see aspects of these features in most of his portraits and yet when a new book, Cezanne Portraits from a show that was recently at the National Gallery, arrived there was hardly any spatial discussion. I would like to hear what others think. We will write our own book.
