Somehow I forgot that it can rain. And, of course, it is likely to do so in Spring. We broke away from desktop machines just in time for the sky to turn really dark. We donned our rain gear and headed out for a walk. Thunder in the distance and then some lightning but a decent amount of time between, we kept walking. Bang! Flash and noise near simultaneous. We scooted back up the hill in pouring rain. Spring has sprung.
I wish were able to be inside one of the theater at the Little s tonight instead of playing in the café. They’re showing “Five Easy Pieces.”
Orange fountain in Cobbs Hill Reservoir , Rochester, NY
We stopped up to see my mom and took her down to the coffee shop. She asked if we were swimming in our outdoor pool yet. it was good to hear her ask about the outside world.
We had lunch at Magnolia’s on Park Avenue. Peggi sat in the chair Obama sat in and she ordered what he had, a cup of soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. It dawned on me that this was the old Red & White grocery store when we lived in an apartment in this part of town. Henry ran the place. He used to work in my uncle’s store. We sat near the window looking out at KrudCo’s new place. Doesn’t seem right on Park Avenue. And I realized why they call this place Magnolia’s, so close to Oxford Street with the meridian lined with the flowering trees only a few weeks from full bloom.
We stopped at Washington Grove near the top of Nunda Boulevard and we walked through the woods up to the reservoir. My parents used to take us up here. They’d open the car doors and let us run. My mom and dad used to walk laps here just a few years ago. High on a hill, 640 feet above sea level, it’s one of the most beautiful spots in Rochester. The sign in front of the 1908 building reads, “Of unsurpassed quality, the water in this reservoir flows by gravity from Lakes Hemlock and Canadice located 30 miles south.” Peggi and I hadn’t been up here in years.
I’m back to painting again. So many obstacles, of course, most of my own making. I got side-tracked with a lot of family business. Not complaining, just retesting the argument I make these days. It needs defending. That you don’t have to paint to get better at painting. The principles you use, the disciple you apply get a constant workout in the day to day. I have a deadline too and that certainly is a motivator.
We ran into Bill Keyser at Pete Monacelli’s opening last week. Bill was in Fred Lipp’s painting class with me. The first words out of his mouth the other night were, “I miss Fred.” Of course you do. We all do. We are on our own. Fred left his tool kit behind and plenty of instructions. “There are no rules,” he use to say, except for one, “Trust your eye.” Something I do everyday now.
Red ball in front window at Kneads & Wants Bakery in Rochester, New York
It’s time for the snowbirds to come back north. The daffodils are up, the purple myrtle flowers are out, the lenten roses are in full bloom. The crocuses and winter aconite are already folding up, Another few weeks and the wildflowers in Edmunds Woods will be out. We bought spinach, lettuce and “Detroit Red Beets” seeds today at Aman’s and planted them in potting soil. This is all true but I’ve been around here long enough to know we could still see some more snow. So our skis and poles are standing in the corner just outside the door.
We always sit in the front window at Kneads & Wants. With coffee and pastry we watch the Lake Avenue world go by. This morning we watched a group of revelers in green clothing get on the bus, probably headed to the Saint Patty’s Day parade downtown. I took this photo from our seats. The blurry building wth the green spires is now the Charlotte Post Office but in the early sixties it was Doug Duke’s Music Room. Born Ovidio Fernandez in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Doug changed his name and drew guests like Coleman Hawkins, Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, Marian McPartland, Charlie Byrd, Roy Eldridge, Ray Nance and Toots Thielemans to the club. Doug held court behind the organ but doubled on accordion, bassoon and trumpet. I told the women who run the bakery about this place but they were hardly impressed.
I’m going to try and beat this time change thing by going to sleep an hour early tonight.
Here is Coleman Hawkins performing Body and Soul with Doug Duke in the club on Lake Avenue near Latta.Leave a comment
We wore our tick gear for the first time yesterday assuming the little creatures would be out enjoying our record high temps. We tuck our pant legs in our socks to complete the geeky woods look. Don’t want any part of that Kathleen Hanna disease. Unless I’m missing something, they don’t seem to have any bugs in California. Peggi’s sister leaves her back door open during the day although she did see a rat running around. There no screens on the windows or doors. There must be something out there
We had my parents mailing address changed to our house so we’re getting my mom’s Women’s Day magazine now. I brought it up to her yesterday. I don’t know why I say “up.” Her room is on the ground floor. She wanted to go home with us but that is not going to happen.
Sonja Livingston is all over town this week. We heard her on the radio talking to Even Dawson about fertility and her love of language, especially the rhythm of words when we speak. And then we saw her at Margaret Explosion’s show last night.
Im still thinking about the Headlands on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. It is such a magical spot.
Woman Hula-Hooping on sidewalk in Rochester, New York
Writers & Books sponsored Sunday’s “Bus Tour with Sonja,” an event coinciding with the selection of Sonja Livingston’s “Queen of the Fall” as this year’s “If All of Rochester Reads the Same Book.” Sonja planned the tour to coincide with locations from her fabulous memoir, “Ghostbread,” and this book. “It was five minutes past our departure time and Sonja had not yet boarded, setting the stage for a dramatic entry. We heard the bus driver had already run into a car in the parking lot before we arrived. We buckled up.
Our first stop was just around the corner from Writer & Books at the Barrel of Dolls. We had just parked in front of this place on Friday night when we visited Axom Gallery across the street. Sonja read an exquisite excerpt from “Queen of the Fall” about a girl she grew up with who wound up working in the Barrel. Sonja visited the Barrel for research reasons and said it was much cleaner than she pictured.
Second stop was East High where Sonja went to school. She pointed out that less than half of the students graduate and she read a piece as we gazed out the window at our old neighborhood. Peggi and I lived a short block away from this school for twenty seven years and I grew up about eight streets away but I went to Catholic schools. My family situation was 180 degrees away from Sonya’s but the settings were all within reach.
Our third stop was Savoia Bakery on Clifford Avenue, a location mentioned in all three of Sonja’s books. We had just driven by the place on our way to this tour. My family’s haunt was Elite Bakery behind East High on Atlantic but Savoia’s has outlasted them. Our next stop was 33 School, across the street from the Playground Tavern. Sonja read another excerpt from “Queen of the Fall,” one that references Savioa Bakery, Italians (who shape the character of Rochester) and being one of seven children (like I was.)
Lamont Place, off Webster Avenue was our fifth stop. We parked in front of the house where she grew up, or the spot where the house once stood. A man cut through the empty lot headed toward Goodman Plaza with a big plastic bag filled with empty beer cans. A reading from “Ghostbread” was especially poignant.
We motored down East Main to Corpus Christi where I was baptized some twenty years before Sonja. It is now called “Our Lady of the Americas.” My parents lived in apartment around the corner on Alexander Street. Sonja read a piece about a Hispanic wedding that took place here and another about living in the church’s rectory when Father Jim Callan moved out to be closer to the community he served.
The bus driver drove over the curb as we pulled into an official tourist stop, the Susan B. Anthony House, where we sat down for tea while Sonja read from her upcoming book, “Ladies Night at the Dreamland, a combination of research and imagination.” The title refers to the dancehall, amusement park in Sea Breeze near our current home. A guide took us through the house, a beautiful place, one of those mid eighteen hundred houses where the windows in the front room go all the way down to the floor. The tour was inspiring. “Failure is Impossible.”
Our final stop was Mount Hope Cemetery. The bus passengers cheered when the driver made it through the iron gates. Sonja read from a story she wrote about a grave stone here that reads, “Here lies a white slave girl.” She died at fifteen in 1857 and is buried a stone’s throw away from Frederick Douglas’s grave. Sonja is a keen observer. Her observations coupled wth her imagination is a marvel. I hope all of Rochester does read this book.
Listen to Playground Tavern by Margaret Explosion1 Comment
There were nine women in our yoga class this morning. Other than the teacher I was the only guy. And then we went to the women-run bakery where all the clientele were women. Just saying.
The Cornus Mas trees look like Forsythia from a distance but more like bright yellow popcorn up close. It’s too early for the Forsythia to be in bloom. Daffodils are out the ground and might go yellow next week if we get to that 60 degree mark.
If I have an opportunity to shoot mugshots of a group of friends again I would do it with a 3D, the ones that swivel around your head. And then I would do the portraits in miniature on a 3D printer. Duane sent us a picture of self-portrait, bobble-head like prototype that a business associate of his did. I can’t get the concept out of my head.
The stereo is rapidly losing its place as the gravitational center of homes. Ear buds and tiny bluetooth speakers supply sound for our personal devices so you’re not likely find a group gathered around the record player or tv set anymore. We send three signals to our stereo, a wireless stream of music from a desktop in another room to an Apple Express wired to the amp, two long RCA style plugs from our tv and the two phono plugs from our turntable. And the outbound lines go to an “A” and “B” set of speakers. There is a subwoofer wired in-line with the “B” speakers. It’s a fairly simple setup, no surround sound or HDMI connections.
For the last few months we’ve had an intermittent problem with the left channel on both sets of speakers. It gets badly distorted and then cuts out and it happens with all three input feeds so we assumed we had a problem with our amp. To confirm this, we borrowed a spare amp from our neighbor, Rick. It behaved the same way. We hired an unemployed acquaintance, a former audio specialist, someone who smoked pot in the back room and sold high-end equipment to audiophiles.
We were desperate to figure out what the problem was but this guy could care less about finding the problem, he just unplugged every connection, re-stripped the ends of the speaker wires and plugged everything back together again and it all works. This is why you hire a professional.
Catherine Opie “John Baldasari Portrait” at Hammer Museum in Los Angeles
New York has been the art capital of the world for so long. California artists are always getting the short end of the stick. Hockney may have been the most famous but he is English. Diebenkorn is probably the best painter. Robert Irwin is probably the best artist. Ed Ruscha is mostly engaging. The “Pacific Standard Time” show at the Getty in 2011 opened my eyes to the left coast sensibility. And lately I have held some fascination for John Baldessari.
He has been creeping up on me. When we were in New York a few months back we ran into him at the front desk of the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea. There were two shows there, Donald Judd downstairs and Georgio Morandi upstairs. Downstairs left me cold and I remember praying Baldessari was there for Morandi. We found this recent portrait of him at the Hammer Museum last week and then in San Francisco I found a NYT article about Baldessari’s upcoming show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York. Second paragraph in discusses his purchase of one of the paintings from that Morandi show. At 84 he claims it is the first painting he ever bought! So he was at the the David Zwirner desk negotiating a deal for a Morandi when we spotted him. Up another notch. I ordered “More Than You Wanted To Know About John Baldesaari” from Angel‘s couch and it arrived the day we got back.
I have funny connections to artists. I used to like Alex Katz and we were at a Whitney Biennial years ago where someone had a drum set inside a small enclosure in a big room of the museum. Visitors were welcome to play. I sat down for a minute or two and came out face to face with a smiling Alex Katz. He was wearing brown bucks. I was struggling to see an Alice Neel painting at the Modern and some guy in a wheel chair with an assistant behind the chair was planted in front of the painting for ten minutes or so. The assistant spun him around and it was Chuck Close. Years later we were wandering around Chelsea as it was getting dark. A gallery there had just installed a new Chuck Close show, a room full of his daguerreotypes and a room full of his big paintings. Two people in the gallery and one was Chuck. I took his photo and talked for a bit. He wheeled his chair to the door, propped it open a crack and lit a cigarette. We drove down to my brother’s place in New Jersey in 2009 and spent the night. We left for Manhattan the next morning and checked out his paper before getting on the train. David McKee Gallery had reunited Philip Guston’s small panels from 1969, the breakthrough series that was shown at the Marlborough Gallery that year. We went directly there. Some things are meant to be.
Patio of house at the top of Belair Road in Los Angeles
This photo looks a bit like a Maxfield Parish painting, idyllic and perfectly lit. When we were in LA we walked to the top of Bel Air Road. Anyone can do this. Walking on public roads is still free although you do risk your life. There are no sidewalks in this part of the country. You can’t see Stone Canyon Reservoir from the road but there was an open house here and from the patio in the back yard you have a fantastic view. The house is a fixer-upper at six point three million.
Back on the east coast the Winter Acconite is out. The beautiful yellow flowers are in full bloom before tonight’s snowfall. The geese are overhead, squeaking their way north. Equally idyllic on the idylometer.
We sat with my mom for a bit this afternoon. She gave us her take on her suite mates. Most of them drive her crazy. An aide, assisting a blind woman across from my mom, was encouraging the woman to drink her lemonade. “Drink it up. It has your Metamucil in it. The longer it sits, the thicker it gets. Ba da boom, bad da ba!”
Four of the five musician/artists included in the April, Little Theatre art show met there tonight to talk out the details. That took about five minutes after which we got down to what artists and musicians do best. We shot the shit over beer.
Remember the little old lady who lived in a shoe? This is the cutest houseboat in Sausilito, California
Our friend, Brad Fox, is the world’s best tour guide. He drove to our location, a route he takes daily to his job, picked us up and asked where we wanted to go stating “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go” and as we drove, “let me know if you want me to pull over to take a photo. I’ll stop anywhere you like.” A Rochester native, the Bay Area is now his town.
With five of us in his Chevy Blazer he took us to the famous orange bridge but not over it yet. We turned right at the foot and drove up a winding road to a fort in the Marin Headlands where we had spectacular views of the bay, the city and the ocean. I think we watched a helicopter fly under the bridge. Looking down on the bridge none of us were quite sure what we were seeing. On the way down Brad pointed to his favorite campground, Kirby Cove. We crossed the bridge and took an immediate hard left at another fort. Brad chatted up the guy in the gift store as we climbed to the top. Peggi took the best panorama ever with her new phone.
Back in Sausalito we ate Mexican and recaffeinated. Peggi and I toured Lazlo’s houseboat, first tied to the docks here some forty two years ago. It’s woodsy like an Adirondack cabin. Each houseboat has a distinct personality, one that oddly enough reflects the owner’s own. Without any Lowel lights on hand we made plans to shoot the covers of the two classic MX-80 Ralph Records releases in the morning when the foggy sunlight was diffuse. Rich had a sealed copy of each and art files are needed for an upcoming vinyl only rerelease.
MX-80 Sound – Someday You’ll be King. Ralph Records 45RPM1 Comment
I haven’t done any of the tutorials yet so I’m still discovering the surprises built into my Apple Watch. I synced some photos with it last night. The watch is a vertical format so it crops them and they look all new on my wrist. I’ve hit the Siri button on the watch many times but it has only been by mistake so I never had a request for it. Today I said “play the stooges” and right on cue “I Wanna Be Your Dog” came out of Peggi’s phone.
“It Never Rains in California” is not by the Mamas and Papas. I was always fooled by that. Well it does rain. My sister-in-law discovered she has leaks in her living room after the recent downpours in LA. But there is a severe shortage and I am a slow learner. I like to daydream in the shower. Ive even left the water running while I brushed my teeth. We live near the shores of one of the world’s largest bodies of fresh water. We have friends who live on the lake and they complain the level is too high. In SF we discussed strategy, options and proceedures before taking a shower. I choose to wait three days, accumulating extra minutes before jumping in.
Every neighborhood has a go-to guy, someone like Sparky who lived next door to us in the city or Jared who lives next door to us in Irondequoit, someone who virtually owns the street. Rich and Andrea have a guy named T.J. who lives in one of the funkiest houseboats on the docks. He also owns another dock as a workshop and a place for all his stuff, the kind stuff you see in this photo, an ever-changing performance art space and floating installation.
Our friend, Rich, said he’d pick us up at the airport in SF and he did, no small feat in the sprawling bay area. What he didn’t say was he didn’t have a car. So the three of us Ubered over the orange bridge to Marin County where Andrea met us wearing her Tupac t-shirt. She told us we might feel some queasiness in their house and if we felt that coming on we should put these little elastic wrist bands on. I sometimes get seasick so I put both on.
We took a tour of the docks. Just like the “neighborhoods” in the nursing homes they all have different personalities. There is a funky, painted lady vibe to a lot of the houseboats here but each is their own little universe and very dreamy to peer into. By comparison I would call Rich and Andrea’s mid-century modern and the dreamiest houseboat in Sausilto. A photo spread of it would fit nicely in the pages of AD Spain.
The four of us did yoga before dinner. Andrea was the teacher and gentle but firm. I took my white bracelets off and slept like a baby.
Roman head sculpture from 300 AD at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles
We visit the Getty Center almost every time we’re out here but this trip we decided to check out the Getty Villa, a recreation of a Roman house, a really palatial spread for a very wealthy Roman, someone who was as wealthy during the Roman Empire as J. Paul Getty was in his day. Getty built this place for his third or fourth wife. She’s still alive but living downtown. Getty filled the Villa with art and in the seventies moved the Van Gogh and Rembrandts to the new Getty Center while leaving the Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities in the Villa.
We took an audio tour, something we usually avoid in museums preferring to follow our eyes. Our guide was a retired high school principle and brought a lot to the experience even telling us how we were dressed – togas and sandals – as we entered the dining quarters.
I love these early idealized sculptures of the human form. The one above is from 300 AD. They have an abstract fertility statue here from 3,000 BC that looks like something Modigliani would have done. Some of of the statues were repaired in antiquity and the Getty has a restoration department that has reworked some of these pieces. A placard called attention to the nose and chin of a woman’s head from 10 AD that had been rebuilt by the staff. The work looked seamless but there is something off about contributing to an artwork completed a few millennium ago. A diagram of their statue of Hercules pointed to all the work the staff had done on him. I couldn’t help but notice they didn’t reconstruct his penis.
Repared Roman sculpture of Hercules at the Getty Villa in Los AngelesLeave a comment
House and tree at top of Belair Road in Los Angeles
I packed minimally for the week. Three pairs of socks, three pairs of underwear, a couple t-shirts and a change of pants, No jacket or hat, just a sweater. And yet I still had too much on me. My Swiss Army knife was confiscated at the airport check point. I could have mailed it home for twenty bucks but I chose to say goodbye to it. My sister-in-law offered me a beer when we arrived at her house and I reached in my pocket for the opener. Grr.
My nephews, one from Venice and the other from West Hollywood, met us here. The younger is a chef and he made Mexican. He grilled the vegetables outdoors and we watched the moon rise. We are not in Rochester anymore.
Peggi’s sister turned in after dinner and we started watching her Netflix disc, “Straight Outta Compton,” but the soundtrack was too loud upstarts so we saved it in our queue for or return.
M.K. Wagner painting in the hall at the Friendly Home in Rochester, New York
We seem to always catch my mom when she is eating. They get her up early for breakfast and of course she has a full lunch, an afternoon snack and then a hearty dinner. After that it’s time for bed. All part of “the program” as my mom calls it. My mom doesn’t like the program and asks us if she is almost finished with this program.
She usually sits at the same table but they mix it up. Each table has at least one aide, sometimes feeding residents on both sides. They say they try not to have too many “feeds” at one table. My mom doesn’t eat as much as she used to but she needs no assistance and works her way through the meal in an orderly fashion. Some residents are given each item on the menu separately. I assume they would go right for the dessert if it was all put down at once. And we watched the woman sitting next to my mom try to steal her cookie.
Some people have all their food ground up. Their plates have the same items on them as the rest but each item on the menu is shaped like a scoop of ice cream.
The woman sitting next to us yesterday never woke up while she was at the table. The staff tried to shake her a few times but just let her sleep. Near the end of the meal my mom asked us if the woman was dead.
Twigs and seeds on the snow in Durand Eastman Park
I was restless this morning. Not even yoga could calm me down. In fact it may have made me more restless. We spent about a half hour on our backs working a tennis ball into our Piriformis. It was gorgeous out. At sixty degrees it was almost warm enough to have held class outdoors. I kept looking at my watch, my brand new watch. This one works. It is a marvel.
My old watch only worked in irregular intervals. I never knew if it was right and only when it was way off did I know it was wrong. My new watch is made by Apple, the cheapest one, on sale, and it wasn’t cheap. It’s tethered to a phone but I don’t have a phone. Peggi bought one yesterday and I’m tethered to her. I tried playing some music on my watch, the music files are on my desktop machine and the sound came out on Peggi’s phone. We will figure this all out eventually.
We are generally early adapters of Apple products. We have the first generation iPod, the first iPod Touch (ours is engraved) and the first iPad and Apple TV but we never went for a phone until now.
It is always fun going to an Apple Store and yesterday was no exception. The salespeople try to conduct the entire transaction out on the busy showroom floor, while wearing a headset in one ear and talking on an iPhone in the other. The store was packed and it was nearly impossible to hear. Our clerk ordered a phone from the backroom but they brought the wrong GB model out. They assigned us a number and we bought a plan and then realized it wasn’t the right model so we had to enter all Apple and the carrier data again.
Pine tree stand in Durand Eastman Park, Winter 2016
Yesterday’s 18 inches was too much for the groomers. Peggi and I cut our own trail in Durand and that is no easy task. It is more like snowshoeing without the snowshoes. There was a lot of stopping and looking around in awe. When we got back to our computers there was an email from the Cross Country Ski Foundation explaining the process when the snow comes this fast. Their snowmobile driver has to take two or three passes without the groomer attached before he can even try hauling the groomer over his tracks.
We are are hardy woods skiers and we used to poo-poo the wide open, windblown, groomed trails on the golf course but that was then. The groomed paths provide a whole different experience. It is a different type of skiing, faster and more skate like. Also, the packed down surface stays slick when the temperature gets above freezing. I’m really gonna miss winter when it completely disappears.
Not sure if “Busted Valentines” was the name of the band or the performance but we saw Frank DeBlase’s self described “Noir beatnik spoken word jazz” group perform on Valentines Day inside the jam packed Tango Café. Like the best pulp Frank dragged us in and out of strip clubs. With Brian Williams playing the double bass and holding down the musical fort they dug deepest on the slower, minor key numbers. The cat on the organ added the drama.
When we stopped by the Friendly Home we found my mom in the front row of the performance room. A couple of ballroom dancing professionals were using Saint John Fisher students to demonstrate dance steps and the students in turn were dancing with the residents even while most of them stayed in their chairs. They did the box step, the waltz, the tango, the Macarena, the Cha Cha and swing with the mother of all dance tunes for this set, Glenn Miller’s “In The Mood.” For my money though you just can’t beat the rumba.
We tried to watch the Grammys but my sister called in the middle of the show so we missed a good bit of it. I think I liked Taylor Swift better as soft country and the “Hollywood Vampires” with Alice Cooper, Joe Perry and Johnny Depp were just ridiculous. We loved the Lady Gaga’s Bowie tribute and Kendrick Lamar sounded good but I kept wondering what his music would sound like without him rapping all over it.
Jet plane andiron over pines in Durand Eastman Park
We got pretty excited about the Zoolander 2 opening on this weekend. My brother and sister-in-law were visiting colleges with their daughter and they were staying here. We thought it would be perfect for the whole family but we couldn’t get them excited about it. We settled for the Republican debate and had a good time with it.
