Glorious spring days like this one could convince you. Cherry trees in full blossom line a stretch of Log Cabin Road. We stood under this one for quite a while as it was alive with bees, butterflies and color. Up on Zoo Road we found the most of the white magnolias over already. The wind and rain of the last few days hurried them along. But the pink and yellow ones are still gearing up. We continued on through the fruticetum where fruit trees of all sorts were beginning to show their stuff.
The park is understaffed by design these days but they manage to get the job done. We run into volunteers, master gardeners and members of the Cornell Cooperative Extension, all the time as rid evasive species from portions of the park. They’re always ready to take a break and talk about weeds. They update the park kiosks as well with information about seasonal features of the park. Today we read how to distinguish cherry trees from apple trees by their bark.
These people have a sense of humor too. Under the photo of horizontal lines in the cherry tree’s bark they had this passage. “And the myth about George Washington and the cherry tree – exactly that. In the story Washington damaged a cherry tree with his hatchet. When questioned by his father, he said “I cannot tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.” The story was invented by a posthumous biographer to demonstrate Washington’s honesty.”
A previous generation claimed the title but this is the golden age of radio.
I sat down to clean up some Margaret Explosion recordings this afternoon, just trimming the front ends and drawn out endings – maybe dropping a few middle bars, but I still had WAYO window open and I clicked on the live button. I was drawn into Alla Boara playing live in the studio. They are a Cleveland band that does modern arrangements of Italian folk songs and they’re playing tonight at the Lovin’ Cup, another Bop Shop sponsored show. Kyle Brown’s “Up on the Roof” (soul, jazz, doo-wop, rhythm and blues, instrumentals and other oldies-but-goodies) sucked us in for the next hour and led right into Jason Wilder‘s “Fantastic Voyage.” Jason had reached out to me yesterday to say he was planning to play a Margaret Explosion song and he wanted me to suggest a Sun Ra song to follow it up with. I chose “Lanquidity.”
We regularly listen to our brother-in-law’s WAYO “Magic Radio” show on Wednesday’s and sometimes Joe Tunis’s show on Fridays. Our neighbor, Rick, has a cool show on WITR. Then there is Howard Thompson’s “Pure” show on WPKN and Kevin Patrick’s late night “So Many Records.” Armand Schaubroeck’s show on Rochester Free Radio is always a blast. Long live radio!
“I will stop the killing, I will stop the bloodshed, I will end the agony of our people, the plunder of our cities, the sacking of our towns, the violation of our citizens and the conquest of our country.” – DT on the campaign trail
His jeans are slung low. He wears a white t-shirt and a red bandana. He’s a bit beyond middle age with a scruffy beard. He looks like one of those guys that stormed the Capitol. He started working on this roof during the pandemic. Back then he had two other signs in his windshield and he was cranking right wing radio while he worked. The roof was never fished. Scaffolding and bundles of roofing sat on the roof through two winters. We thought Covid had killed him but he’s back – with one of his signs.
Miracle Worker movie poster at George Eastman Museum
The George Eastman Museum has pretty cool show of movie posters, “Crashing Into The Sixties: Film Posters From The Collection.” A large portion of the posters were designed by the great Saul Bass. I don’t I’ve seen “the remember seeing “The Miracle Worker” since I was really young but the poster struck me as just as moving as the movie was back then. My favorites, not to say I think they would drive throngs to the theatre, were the Eastern European ones. “Reszta Jest Milczeniem” translates to “The Rest Is Silence,” Hamlet’s last words.
I left the show with the Brogues “1965 song “I Ain’t No Miracle Worker” stuck in my head. I only know that song by Rochester’s Chesterfield Kings.
Eastern European posters from “Crashing Into The Sixties: Film Posters From The Collection” at George Eastman MuseumLeave a comment
We had no idea Peggi’s sister was an umbraphile. The day she arrived from LA it was snowing and when we dropped her off at the airport this morning the temperature was headed into the mid seventies. In between we had some gorgeous spring weather except for that one window when the moon passed in front of the sun. We walked in different directions each day scoping out locations to watch the eclipse from and settled on this spot overlooking Pat Lake.
About a dozen people were gathered around a tripod on the north side of the lake when we arrived. We watched a man sit back in his lounge chair just as it collapsed to the ground and we struck up a conversation with a woman from Oakland, California. These people were settling in with food and blankets while we sat on a bench under this tree. We couldn’t even tell where the sun was without an app so I scurried home and grabbed some cheese, crackers and a beer to split. We never put our glasses on but we’ve seen that bit before. The real kick was how quickly it got dark, like a full scale, real time lapse. There is a marsh right next to the lake and the peepers started singing within seconds. It was magical.
We caught up with two phenoms this morning by watching a highlight reel of Caitlin Clark from Iowa’s victory over LSU. I love her. And then the new Beyonce album, the whole album. It is a monster although at the hour mark I reached overload on the multitracked vocals.
Woodchuck Tree Service has been working at this house for five days! They toppled of this giant. We’re guessing the trunk is headed to a mill. We were headed into the park to looking for a good spot to view the eclipse. We found a perfect spot in the empty lot across the street from Bruce’s house. I was thinking I could stop by the House of Guitars and ask. Last time we were in there Armand, Bruce’s brother, was pacing up and down the aisles while his radio show was playing through the sound system. He was saying “the name of the place is I like it like that” over and over. I assumed we had just missed that classic. Armand sounds really great on the radio. His show airs at these times .
Our morning walk took us past these Easter decorations. Easter, originally a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, has been suplanted by a pagan celebration of spring. Not complaining, it is more fitting, just too cute. It is why Pope John Paul II tacked a 15th station of the cross onto the Passion Play. A happy but implausible ending. I prefer the gospel of Thomas (no miracles please). I was born on the feast day of St. Paul of the Cross (Italian mystic and founder of the Passionists), named after him. Father Shannon brought home a relic of St. Paul for me when he was in Italy, a tiny carbon piece in a plastic case, and I still get my feathers ruffled when people mess with the all too human story.
My brother, who converted to Judaism, was up here over Christmas and we were talking about the way we used to celebrate Christmas. He and his wife have been to Jerusalem and he was trying to remember why it was that Jesus was supposed to have been born there. His family was traveling there to pay their taxes.
All nonsense. When he returned home he did some research and sent up a link to a 2010 New Yorker piece by Adam Gopnikis. “The intractable complexities of fact produce the inevitable ambiguities of faith.” Gopnikis sifted through what historians do agree on. “All the Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death; all were written in Greek, which Jesus and the apostles didn’t speak and couldn’t write (if they could read and write at all); and they were written as testaments of faith, not chronicles of biography, shaped to fit a prophecy rather than report a profile.”
In 1999 I entered an early version of Passion Play in the Rochester Finger Lakes exhibition and they won both The Averill Council of the Memorial Art Gallery Award and the Harris Popular Vote Award. Ron Netsky, reviewing the show in a City Newspaper wrote: “One of the largest works in the show is Paul Dodd’s Passion Play, consisting of 14 digital ink-jet prints. There are a lot of recognizable images here, mostly convicted or accused killers: the Unibomber, Timothy McVeigh, O.J. Simpson. They are mixed in with popular icons like McDonald’s golden arches and images of Father Callan and Corpus Christi Church. But none of it adds up to much. Reading the artist’s statement makes the work even more muddled: “I read the New Testament accounts and then looked for a modern-day Christ figure”: O.J? McVeigh? I think Dodd could have looked harder.” I agree, it was muddled – “the inevitable ambiguities of faith,” and it would be more muddled today.
In his “The Church of Trump: How He’s Infusing Christianity Into His Movement” article in the NYT Michael Bender writes Trump recites from a teleprompter at his rallies, “We will pray to God for our strength and for our liberty. We will pray for God and we will pray with God. We are one movement, one people, one family and one glorious nation under God.”
“They’ve crucified him worse than Jesus,” says Andriana Howard, 67, who works as a restaurant food runner in Conway, S.C.
“Right now, ‘religion,’ you say that word and everyone is up in arms because it’s failed in so many ways,” Scorsese told the newspaper. “But that doesn’t mean necessarily that the initial impulse was wrong. Let’s get back. Let’s just think about it. You may reject it. But it might make a difference in how you live your life – even in rejecting it.” That is a quote from Martin Scorsese talking about his series, “The Saints,” which will air in November, dramatizations of the stories of eight saints including Joan of Arc, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Francis of Assisi and Thomas Becket. What I particularly like about this quote is the “even in rejecting it” part. That was so much a part of my Catholic education.
And I believe thinking your way out of the box was the lesson. When we were young we were taught that Jesus died for our sins. I couldn’t figure out why he would do that but the mystery was part of the package. If he was willing to be crucified then the least we could do was give up candy during Lent. We spent a lot of time in church during Holy Week when the 14 stations of the cross took on special significance as they depicted the ritual killing of our so-called savior that happened this week a long time ago.
The whole story is so old it can’t be verified or fact checked. And it was clearly tailored toward increasing the flock. Still, the Passion story is a lot to chew on. I set out to do a modern day version and collected pictures from the front page of the newspaper on Good Fridays. As I understand it neither Ted Kaczynski nor OJ were beyond redemption. I turned the source material into collages. I posted the twelfth station from that 1998 series yesterday. Over time I simplified the whole matter with Passion Play.
Station 12 from “Passion Play” by Paul Dodd, 24″ x 30″ inkjet print 1998
We were reading the paper on the couch this morning when a car stopped in front of a house across the street. They parked in a really unusual place so I stared at it for a bit. Two women and a man slowly got out. I knew in an instant they were Jehovah’s Witnesses. They worked their way up and down the street before ringing our bell while we mulled over whether or not to lay into them for turning our friend Cheryl against the Covid vaccine. Cheryl went JW and believes that vaccinations are interfering with divine providence. Three years later and she is still battling long Covid.
When they finally did ring our bell they were so sweet I couldn’t bring myself to say a word. They handed me a pamphlet with a hunky-looking Jesus on the front and an invitation to a “Memorial of Jesus’s Death” and a bible talk entitled “The Resurrection: Victory Over Death!” They headed down to the last house on our street, Jared’s. He is an outspoken atheist and he would surely give them a piece of his mind.
We have been pulling up the pavers that ran around the back of our house for the past week. It is back-breaking work and I have been sleeping better than ever. We reset them about twenty years ago when we moved in. The earth had swallowed them up. I was thinking they looked like Flintstone loaves of bread. Peggi was looking out at them while she brushed her teeth this morning and she said they reminded her of a Guston painting. I thought it was great observation and I took a photo of them before we started work today.
It seems most of the neighbors in this area have these pavers in their yards either as garden edging, walkways or stone walls. I’m guessing Culver Road was once paved with these all the way to the lake and at some point they dug them all up, paved the road and gave the pavers away. Funny how that generation of homeowners is gone and the stones are still here. We’re having a landscape company put some blue stone down in its place And Peggi and I have been building a short fence with the stones.
During the warm spell we got the first stage of our garden in. Kale, collard greens, arugula, spinach and lettuce seeds are in the ground. It was so nice, we continued working in the yard for two weeks before winter returned.
Our property got a bit smaller over the winter. Our neighbors had a big oak fall over and into their neighbors’ (on the other side) yard. They were responsible for cleaning up the mess but they were uncertain where their property line was on that side so they had their property surveyed. It turns out the row of Hemlocks between our two houses, the ones we had been treating in a losing battle with the woolly adelgid, actually belonged to our neighbors. The trees had bitten the dust so they had them taken down. It took us two days to move the deer fence (that we always assumed was on the property line) over the stumps and onto the new property line.
We had a suspicion that the magnolias may have popped before the snow fell so we walked up to the park today and sure enough they were.
Doug Rice often comes to the Margaret Explosion shows so he is on our mailing list. When we emailed him about Wednesday’s gig we included a link to the video from our last gig at Skylark and Doug emailed back. “you sound better without a sound system.” Doug used to do sound professionally at big shows in the park in Brooklyn and for bands at Mass MoCA. Last night, at the Little, we played without a sound system. Travel warnings about the ice and snow made for a really quiet night. The twenty five or so people who were there were quiet and listening. The music was better and strangely, we sold more cds (no lps) than we have in long while.
Pete Monacelli was there and he sent us a poem he wrote while listening.
the little Margaret Explosion dinner bottled water + the explosion of silence the explosion of quiet the explosion of soft the explosion of… + lament in time lament anger lament self-destruction lament + reach for light face pressed against glass yearning for life’s meaning
“Boil-water notice issued after body found in Highland Park Reservoir.” Now they are going to have to put a cover over the highlight of Olmsted’s park to protect the drinking water.
The blossoming fruit trees, forsythia and Cornus Mas had a dusting of snow when left for our walk this morning. On Log Cabin Road the sun came out and it was a spectacular sight. I pulled my camera out of my pocket and the lens wouldn’t open. It had been so long since we walked and the battery had drained. We were caught up in the early spring and got ourselves into a few projects in the yard, the kind that leave you exhausted at the end of the day. But what a treat being outside all day. I think this is the longest since Ive been away from my blog.
As seen above, we had gig somewhere other than the Little Theatre Café (where we can be found every four weeks) – a memorial celebration of Dave Ripton at Skylark Lounge with three bands. Frying Pan played first, Margaret Explosion was in the middle and the great Nod played last. It was quite an experience playing through a PA, even the amps were miced and the open vocal mics picked up the stage sound. We had no soundcheck I used Brian’s drum set. Ken played his electric bass rather than the double bass. We did a version of “Floating at the Bug Jar” for Casey, Skylark’s owner. He used to own the Bug Jar when we played happy hours back in the day.
We agreed to engage in a rather unusual video conference in Sodus New York. Once we were inside of our friends’ storage locker we called Bill, a shipping company representative, and waved our front-facing camera around so he could provide an estimate for the cost of shipping the contents to Hawaii. The cell coverage was spotty and we kept losing our connection so we shot still photos and texted them to the representative. I used the wide angle lens to make the contents look small. Someone was struggling with a washing machine in the locker across from us so I helped him load it into his truck. He thanked me and added, “God is good.”
The ride out along the lake was beautiful. The apple trees, pruned to maximize yield while growing close to the ground, looked ever so sculptural. Up on 104 we stopped for gas and I took a photo of a train on the other side of the road. I can’t see the train in the photo but I like it. On the way home we stopped at Abarrotes Mexicano, a store that caters to the migrant workers, and we bought some peppers and hominy.
As many times as we have been up and down Culver Road I never get tired of it. It is one of the city’s main arteries between downtown and the lake. We lived just two block off Culver in the city and we’re just two off it here. I road my bike from one end of it to the other and photographed some of the highlights. I always liked the house above. It reminded me of a house in the old section of Beverly Hills.
The new owners have been making some changes (i.e. wrecking it). So with the temperatures in the seventies yesterday, I rode my bike over to the house to take an updated picture. Nothing Lasts Forever.
Cynthia Hawkins “A Priori Map S6 2023 at Rochester Contemporary
I remember a Little League coach going out of his way to make sure everyone on the team got an equal amount of playing time. I wanted to win and I thought that approach was crazy. If Diego Simeone coached Atletico Madrid like that he would be fired. A community supported art gallery must be as inclusive as possible. Not all the shows are going to be winners. IMHP this one is.
Ronald Mario Gonzalez artwork at Rochester Contemporary
These two artists are featured in the main galleries. “David Cowles: Roc Stars” is in the Lab Space and a elekhlekha moving image on view in the multimedia room. Hope you can stop out.
We walked over to Kathy’s today expecting to find her garden in first gear. Her Lenten Roses were in bloom and the daffodils were almost open. Kayakers and fishing boats were out on the bay and the temperature was headed toward seventy. We walked by the new townhouses on Culver, the ones that chased Matthew and Louise out of the neighborhood. I miss them and St. Salome’s, the church they tore down to build the townhouses (you can see one of them behind the sign above). The church was looking pretty run down. I always like that they advertised the “Sacrament of Penance.”
Saint Cecilia’s on Culver Road
Bingo sign in front of Saint Cecilia’s on Culver Road
St. Cecilia’s, further down Culver, still has one weekly mass but no parish priests, no school and no bingo. They sold most of their property to a senior living facility. According to the Diocese of Rochester website, Rochester had 54,500 Catholics when the diocese was formed in 1868. The average Catholic then was socio-economically poor and they gathered according to their ethnic background in 35 parish churches (and 29 mission churches.) By 1966there were 155 parishes (and 36 mission churches.) Each had parish priests and two or three daily masses. Today they are closing shop all over town. There are so many alternatives. Spiritualism was founded in the city of Rochester by the Fox sisters. The Mormon faith originated in Palmyra, just east of Rochester.
The blue in the photo above is not the sky although it was a perfectly blue day when I took this photo. It is some sort of plastic paneling on the exterior of a building on South Avenue downtown. I have been drifting toward this sort of composition for a long time. I rounded up just over a hundred of my photos in this vein and put them in an album as source material for acrylic paintings that abstract them further.
February’s bonus day brought a brief but welcome reappearance of winter weather. We walked to the end of Hoffman Road in a snow squall. The red winged blackbirds that we’ve been listening to for the last few weeks were nowhere to be found. The marsh looked like a Tarkovsky still. Twenty-four hours later the sky is blue and the temperature is fifty degrees.
Since my father first identified the yellow flower pushing its way through the snow on our hillside I’ve noted the date. They were out on February 14 this year, the earliest date since I started keeping track. Jared spotted a groundhog in the garden a few weeks ago so he already has the electric fence on to protect the lettuce that wintered over. The cherry blossoms in the park are worrisome. It is good to see the chipmunks are out of hibernation but I miss winter.
Violet Dennison with her work in her studio. Photo by New York Times.
An article in NYT’s T Magazine on artists spaces in New York City included this picture of Violet Dennison’s work. I was immediately attracted to it but began to wonder whether the green tape, the strongest element in this diptych, was even part of the work. I looked her up online and didn’t find anything like this so I guess the tape was only a temporary mask. I guess it reminded me of some of my photos. The article describes Dennison as a conceptual artist. That covers a lot of ground and holds open the possibility that this is one of her works.
