Posts

Posted on

New Leaves

Young oak leaves in trees out front
Young oak leaves in trees out front

Jill Ellis, the women’s national team coach, was in the house last night. She was introduced before the game and then we spotted her at halftime hanging over the railing in front of her box seat while talking to Abby Wambach’s parents (who just happened to be sitting next to us.) She’s here to study the Flash players, Jaedene Hinkle and Sam Mewis in particular. She’ll be gong to the Olympics in Rio with only eighteen players (there were 21 on last year’s World Cup roster). Of course, she could still be evaluating Sky Blue’s Christie Rampone and Kelley O’Hara. But the way Hinkle played last night I wouldn’t be surprised if Ellis left town with Hinkle in the back seat.

We got to the game early, as we usually do,to watch the warm-ups from behind the goal. You have to keep your eye on the ball because you can get clobbered back there. And I was already injured. I was hoping to get a chance to talk to the Flash trainer about my injury. I’d ask him what he would do to get a player back on the pitch asap after an injury like mine. But that was only a pipe dream.

I was soaking my leg in the tub this afternoon, reading my John Baldessari book, and the room was getting all steamed up. I gave up reading and just relaxed but in a few minutes our smoke alarm went off, loud as hell. So I hobbled over to the damn thing and pulled the battery out. Why would a smoke alarm go off with steam?

Leave a comment
Posted on

Journey Inward

Fallen Magnolia flower petals in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, New York
Fallen Magnolia flower petals in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, New York

When Josef Albers left the Weimer Bauhaus in Germany to teach at the Black Mountain School in North Carolina he was asked what he planned to teach. He responded, “To make open the eyes.” My limited mobility issues had me thinking about this and I can’t think of a better time to work on it. Instead of walks in the woods I’ve been sitting on the couch with an endless stream of my photos on the tv. A few big doors are closed but others are opening.

It is a toss-up as to whether the dictation tool on my iPad is any better than my typing skills. Of course, I don’t really know if it is the tool’s listening skills or my poor diction that causes so many errors. In my down time I’ve been transcribing the handwritten journals from our previous nine trips to Spain. Peggi and I take turns at the end of each day recording what we did that day. We’ll take short notes during the day with the name of a menu item or a painting we saw but we collect our thoughts at the end of the day in the form a short journal entry. The last few trips were entered on an iPad. I’m transcribing a handwritten entry now from 1998, the year we spent a week in Granada following Semana Santa processions, and I just spoke “down the street to the Monestario de San Geronimo.” My iPad heard “down the street to the monastery all day sun hey Ronnie mall.”

Leave a comment
Posted on

Clouds

Two clouds over Rochester, NY
Two clouds over Rochester, NY

I remember this sensation. I used to do this all the time back in the very early fifties. And then I pulled myself up on a chair or something and I never went back to crawling. My knees are pretty good but they’re getting sore. I might have to pick up some knee pads at Home Depot unless I can manage to walk again.

“Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare; pry; listen; eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.” – Walker Evans

Leave a comment
Posted on

288-0880

Magnolia collection sign with Magnolias in full bloom in Durand Eastman ParkDurand
Magnolia collection sign with Magnolias in full bloom in Durand Eastman ParkDurand

When we started our business we called the phone company to ask for a business line and we asked if they had any easy to remember numbers. They gave us 288-0880 and I always felt like it was lucky. I liked the way the numbers lined up on a push button phone. And I liked the way 4 and “D,” the fourth letter of the alphabet, seemed numerically connected to 288.

When a new Pizza Hut opened nearby they printed our number on refrigerator magnets. We got free shitty pizza for a bit. And we would get calls for JAy-Ve Tackle all the time just because the people who shop there can’t distinguish between 6s and 8s. Most of the calls we get these days are cold calls from India.

When we were growing up, about ten blocks east of where the 4D Advertising office was we had a 288 number as well. That was when people referred to those exchanges with words or two letter abbreviations. 288 was Butler 8 and the Butler was abbreviated as BU. People could tell what part of the city you were from by your exchange. I think our number back then was BU 8-3041.

4D has closed shop so I called the phone company today to pull the plug on that number. They said it would be disconnected at midnight tonight. I just called it thinking I wouLd leave one last message on our answering machine but it was already dead.

1 Comment
Posted on

Walking Upright

"Lourdes 2000" by Paul Dodd, now destroyed
“Lourdes 2000” by Paul Dodd, now destroyed

Once each year we try to rid our property of the the invasive galic mustard plant. We try to get it just before it flowers when it is big enough to identify. It would cover the hillside out back if we let it go. I spent a lot of time standing on that hillside and I overextended my calf muscles.

We took a walk in the woods yesterday and on the way back I decided to run up the last hill the way my friend in San Francisco does. I felt like someone shot me in my calf and I crumpled to the ground.

I borrowed my neighbor’s walker and hopped into Urgent Care where I was diagnosed with either a strained or torn muscle. Only time will tell. They wrapped my leg with an ace bandage, gave me some anti-inflamatory medicine and a pair of $35 aluminum crutches. They are still in the shrink-wrap. My leg is too sore to stand on so I’ve been crawling around the house on my knees and getting along fine.

3 Comments
Posted on

Heaven

Candy Kitchen on Main Street in Webster sometime in the mid 1960s
Candy Kitchen on Main Street in Webster sometime in the mid 1960s

My family moved to Webster when I was ten and I got a paper route pretty soon after that and had plenty of disposable income, most of which I spent on candy bars and baseball cards. That could very well be my bike, laying on its side behind the car in this photo of the Candy kitchen. The D&C knows it’s dwindling demographic and caters to it with these “Whatever Happened To” series.

There was a line at the counter when Holy Trinity let out. Joe Barrett’s father, the town lawyer, and Wilbur Finn, the owner of the Texaco station met here for lunch regularly. It was a genuine soda fountain with a jukebox, home made ice cream and vanilla Cokes.

Leave a comment
Posted on

Colorist

Cherry tree in bloom on Log Cabin Road in Rochester, New York
Cherry tree in bloom on Log Cabin Road in Rochester, New York

One of the residents at my mom’s place was hunched over a book, intently adding yellow crayon to a geometric pattern. I told her it looked really nice and she thanked me. She said, “I’m not really an artist. I’m a colorist.” Matisse was a colorist. Bonnard, Josef Albers and Wolf Kahn were all colonists. They use color as a tool. Their work speaks with color. A very small percentage of artists are colorists.

We did a lot of balance work at yoga this morning. Standing dancer to tree to eagle. We were inside because rain was forecast and we were downstairs because some sort of event was happening upstairs. The students were spread out in front of the bar and our teacher was standing in front of a big window that looked out over the lake. About halfway through the class the bartender started setting up for the evening. We were on our backs in some sort of triangular position and I noticed the yacht club had some local, micro-brews on tap. And I spotted a pennant behind the bar with the Rochester Yacht Club logo on it and the years “1877-1977.” This place has some history.

After class I was making small talk with the bartender and I said, “I see you have eight beers on tap.” He said “Yeah. Would you like one?” I looked at the choices and said, “I’ll have a Guinness.”

Leave a comment
Posted on

Memories Are Made Of This

Paul Bunyan statue on the corner of Portlad Avenue and North Street in Rochester, New York
Paul Bunyan statue on the corner of Portlad Avenue and North Street in Rochester, New York

Does anybody else miss the Paul Bunyan statue that used to hover over the intersection of Portland Avenue and North Street? Ah, but that is what black and white photos are for.

The local gas and electric monopoly came down our street a few years ago laying new gas lines and moving every house’s gas meter outside. Easier for the meter reader to keep to see[ track of your usage. Fr some reason thy were unable to move ours so the guy rings the bell every couple of months and goes down in our basement with a flashlight. Today when he got here I was outside playing horseshoes with Tom Burke. The meter reader, with dreadlocks, was dressed in day-glow and Tom asked him if he wanted to throw a few. He did, two down and two back, but he never hit the pit. I thought about taking a photo but I wouldn’t want to get the guy in trouble.

3 Comments
Posted on

Canadian Driftwood

Driftwood pieces In the window
Driftwood pieces In the window

Peggi was chatting with our teacher, Jeffery, after yoga class. I had climbed out on the big rocks that are protecting the docks at the Rochester Yacht Club. I was taking a photo of the Charlotte pier and I looked down at all these pieces of driftwood that had gotten trapped between the rocks. They were all about the same size but there was such beautiful variation in the color. I rounded up an armload and took them home. Each one is a finished piece of art.

Leave a comment
Posted on

Sitting In The Park

NRBQ at Lilac Festival in Rochester, New York
NRBQ at Lilac Festival in Rochester, New York

The guy standing next to us was screaming so loudly at the tv in O’loughlins he must have bet the farm on “Gun Runner.” His horse was in the lead for a bit but only showed in the end. We were down there years ago on warm Spring day, watching the boats pass by, when we realized it was Kentucky Derby day. The bar owner was selling tickets for a pool and we bought a few but our horse didn’t come in. The Kentucky Derby was Peggi’s and my first date, the real thing, in Kentucky. We were there the year Secretariat won. Anyway, we come down to this joint every year to have a pint, watch the race and look out at he river.

If you are gonna come home with your ears ringing it might as well be for good band. We heard NRBQ in the park yesterday and just like dozen or so times we’ve seen this band, we got right down front, on Terry’s side. He had the same lineup as last time he was here but a different drummer, a young kid, and he sounded great. Couldn’t swing like Tommy could, but right-on otherwise. Even sounded great on “Sitting In The Park.”

1 Comment
Posted on

Living Room

Twin Talk performing live at Bop Shop in Rochester, New York
Twin Talk performing live at Bop Shop in Rochester, New York

Katie Ernst plays bass and sings. The two sound beautiful together and they are made more beautiful by her choosing to not sing words in most cases. She is accompanied by a tenor sax player and a drummer and the Chicago trio, Twin Talk, played last night at the the Bop Shop. Their sound is youthful and fresh, as in a few years out of school, but rich and melodic. Katie, the bass player, went to Eastman. Here she is playing on the street in 2009.

As abstract as their song structure is, the band is extremely musical and very enjoyable to listen to. They color their songs with everything at their instruments’ disposal. Not swinging club jazz, not even close to the traditional bebop thing, they are arty and idiosyncratic. My kind of stuff. They get under your skin and you are not sure why. All three players wore watches, not Fitbits or Apple Watches but the old school kind. Katy is a hell of a bass player and that may be why.

1 Comment
Posted on

Reversals Will Delight You

Metal detector guy on Charlotte Beach in April
Metal detector guy on Charlotte Beach in April

My mom was down in the sun room when we stopped by this morning. Brandon was sitting with about ten of the residents and he was preparing to read the newspaper to them, something he does every Friday. We stuck around and I am so glad we did. It was extraordinarily beautiful.

Brandon is so good with them. Everyone loves Brandon. He started by asking if anyone knew what the date was. One of the woman offered a guess but she was off by a few months. He asked the group what time the sun came up today. My mom said “early” and we laughed. The other Mary guessed 5:30 and she was surprisingly close. Surprising because we had no idea the sun came up that early. Brandon tries to involve everyone and he asked a woman what temperature Lake Ontario was. She answered, “6:30.” He said, “Guess again” and she guessed “8 o”clock.” Brandon said, “You’re guessing times. I’m looking for a temperature.” She guessed another time.

Brandon touched on all the important issues of the day. He read the caption on a Kentucky Derby photo. He read Dagwood and Pickles and then moved on to the horoscopes. He knows most of the residents’ birthdays and read a few signs. “Virgo: What you once struggled with is now so effortlessly accomplished, you hardly remember you’re doing it. Details you got hung up on don’t matter to you anymore – all signs you’re on to bigger and better things.” My mom is a Leo. “Don’t let things get boring. Reversals will delight you, especially those pertaining to familial roles. You’ll find charm in the way children act like adults and adults play like children.”

Next week is National Nurses Week and the Friendly Home made a video of the residents paying tribute to their nurses. There is a shot of my mom in it and the marketing department asked us to sign a release form. We are getting to know most of these people in the piece so we got a real kick out of it.

Leave a comment
Posted on

Keeping Up

Trump and family after winning Indiana primary
Trump and family after winning Indiana primary

Are we supposed to be dumbfounded? Peggi and I were going to school in Indiana when Bobby Knight was in his prime. It only figures that guy could do Trump some good. And how about this first family? I find them far more interesting than the Kardashians.

Leave a comment
Posted on

Maybe Worse

Peggi Fournier, Dale Mincey, and Robert Marsella at Dale's apartment in Rochester, New York
Peggi Fournier, Dale Mincey, and Robert Marsella at Dale’s apartment in Rochester, New York

Still in tidy-up mode I found this photo. Taken somewhere in the late seventies, I may not come across again for another thirty years. Dale Mincey, stretched out across the couch, was the lead guitar player in New Math when I was in the band. Robert, with the shades in his hand, was the bass player. And I found a yellow Post-It note with my father’s Spotify password on it. Not that we could forget. The Mayflowers, the May Apples, the Trillium and every other wildflower he introduced us to, remind us of his passing. And we are tuning into the birds.

I came across this this quote and it has fired me up. “Failure is my best friend. “If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse.” – Alberto Giacometti

Margaret Explosion plays the four Wednesdays in May at the Little Theatre.

Margaret Explosion – Feminismo

1 Comment
Posted on

PostScript

Brush pile in farm field along Lake Ontario Parkway
Brush pile in farm field along Lake Ontario Parkway

Peggi and I have been doing some serious housecleaning. Working our way to the bottom of piles that have been building up for years, sorting though my parents business affairs, dividing our iCloud documents between our two separate IDs, preparing for a new bookshelf that is being made to order and looking for two old journals that we can’t seem to put our hands on. They contain notes from our trips to Spain and we had the bright idea to consolidate all ten journals into one document. Well, the tenth one hasn’t been written yet.

We came across an old business card, one for our business. The original was done on an Atari ST. Bit map was big. Our next computer was a MacII. We were setting postscript and there was no going back. We’ve been fans of Apple for a long time and we’re still trying to convince ourselves that their best days aren’t over. That’s why they call us stockholders.

I love my watch. This iCloud thing, though, is problematic. The infrastructure is not here yet. I’ve been trying to upload my photo library for two weeks now. All I wanted to do was share the library on another mac, the way I used to with iPhoto but Apple removed that feature when they rewrote the program they now call Photos. How and why were they able to use such a generic name? The only way to share now, even locally, is to put everything in the cloud. And the photos are getting crunched on the way up. I’m sticking with Flickr as a BU and probably could have just shared through Flick but I’m getting with the program. Meanwhile, no Netflix streaming, no YouTube. I can barely get a map to paint up. I wish my neighborhood had Greenlight. I plan to work on that. TW cripples our upload speed.

Leave a comment
Posted on

Jazz Day

Communion dresses for sale in Toronto
Communion dresses for sale in Toronto

We kind of thought the Spontaneous Duets event would be crowded so we said we would make a point to get there early. We didn’t and it wasn’t. The event was on our calendar so it showed up on my watch but the 4pm start time really caught us by surprise. The sound in the unlikely Eastman rehearsal space on the corner of East And Gibbs is really nice. Surrounded by glass, there is no need for sound re-enforcement and the grand piano sounds magnificent in here.

This year’s round robin started with a woman playing alto sax by herself. A six string electric bassist joined her after five minutes and five minutes later the sax player sat down when a vibraphonist joined the bassist. A piano player joined the vibraphonist and then a trumpet player took the vibraphonists’ spot.

The room got downright raucous when a tenor sax player reached for the sky with the trumpeter. A bass player, who we had just heard playing with Rich Thompson’s quartet, joined the sax player and the music settled down into pure beauty’s with long sustained notes. Then drums with bowed bass followed by trombone and drums. Finally a guitar with the trombone and then the guitarist solo. This is a really cool concept, part of International Jazz Day. Today.

We stopped over at the Little for the Prince event. Spevak was there to cover it and a WDKX dj was supposed to be spinning Prince tunes in the café but they didn’t show up. A women in line with Peggi said “I was just listening to the station in my car and they’re playing all Prince.” So Marian climbed up on the counter and pulled the rabbit ears out of the radio. We told Jeff we liked his recap of the local Music Hall of Fame event. He spilled quite a bit of ink on the Plasmatics and I told him Wendy was in my high school class. She lived over the right field line of the baseball field at the end of my street. Doug Klick was a lefty and he used to pull the ball into her yard where she was sunbathing. And then, of course we’d run in there to retrieve it.

Leave a comment
Posted on

The Parkway

Trailer cottages along Ontario State Parkway
Trailer cottages along Ontario State Parkway

On the question of whether the city of Toronto or the drive to the city along the Lake Ontario Parkway is more interesting, I guess I would come down on the drive side. I love everything about Route 18, the Public Works Parkway design with its beautiful stone bridges, the dreamy views of the lake, the fact that there is hardly any traffic, the orchards, vineyards and fruit stands, not one gas station between Rochester and Buffalo and the small summer vacation towns with the lighthouses from yesteryear, like Olcott, where we stopped for lunch. I was looking forward to the ride home.

We were behind a cluster of trucks on the QEW as we headed out of town and I was thinking about how John Baldessari talked about the back end of trucks looking like modern art paintings. We were listening to AM740, Toronto’s “Timeless Hits station.” They were playing songs from 40 years ago, recapping the hit of 1976. If someone wanted to know why punk came about, that year’s playlist would be the most concise answer you could provide.

Leave a comment
Posted on

Au Go Go

Garry Winogrand photo in Outsiders show at AGO in Toronto
Garry Winogrand photo in Outsiders show at AGO in Toronto

Today’s destination was AGO, the newly designed Frank Geary-faced, Art Gallery of Ontario. We were excited to see the “Outsiders” show of photography from 1950 to 1980. The show was perfectly arranged by photographer, the best first so we could soak it in before we were saturated. Diane Arbus is great but Garry Winogrand rules! The photo above had me laughing out loud. He goes wide angle and includes enough information for a novel.

We had Manchego cheese, olives, fresh sour dough bread, Haddock Ceviche and Pimentos de Padrón at a Spanish restaurant called Bar Isabel and we walked a mile or so back to our hotel topping yesterday’s 7.2 mile total by on tenth of a mile. The restaurant would have been perfect if it was named “Isabela.”

1 Comment
Posted on

Power Plant

Japanese band playing on the street in Toronto
Japanese band playing on the street in Toronto

The Lewiston bridge was waiting for customers when we crossed into Canada. The trip to Toronto was a breeze. I thought there was supposed to be long lines at the border and back-ups near the city but we were early for check-in at our hotel. We took the Parkway and Robert Moses along the shores of Lake Ontario, skipped the thruway entirely and were downtown in three plus hours.

We set an all-time Moves record on our app by walking from our downtown hotel to the Harbourfront Centre along the northern shore of Lake Ontario. The energy generated in the reconditioned Power Plant is all from the power of contemporary art. The current show is mostly video displayed floor to ceiling in empty, pitch black rooms. We were mesmerized by Leslie Hewitt’s “Untitled Structures.” Shot in Memphis, Chicago and New York the pieces touched on civil rights. Hewitt worked with a cinematographer, Bradford Young, and created 35mm film studies (barely moving still images), transferred them to HD video and used dual projector software to juxtapose two images at a time on perpendicular walls.

We found a Portuguese restaurant near our hotel and had the best grilled squid ever. We were back out on the streets in time to catch this Japanese band playing on the street.

Leave a comment
Posted on

One Under

Marsh off Conifer Drive in Rochester, New York
Marsh off Conifer Drive in Rochester, New York

When I first met Mary she was sitting in a wheelchair outside my mom’s room and she asked us a perfectly coherent question. One of three “Mary’s” on the floor, she asked us if we had seen her husband. She said she was supposed to meet him here and she couldn’t find him. We were not able to help her. Mary sits at my mom’s table for meals and carries on a running commentary. Today she told us, “They do cheese rather well here.” One of the aides said, “I see Mary’s family is here,” referring to my mom. Mary said, “They are? I don’t see them.” We said, “There are two Marys here.” And she informed us that she was the real Mary.

We found two golf balls without even trying. They were both sitting there on the trail when we crossed the course. One was fluorescent green/yellow and the other was a Nike 1. We took turns tossing them toward the hole, a par three. We were just outside the green. Peggi decided to use her foot for the second shot so I followed suit. I scored a one under.

Leave a comment