Two small skiers hanging from our fireplace, a gift from Janet Marshall.
But I should regret that I don’t stop to proofread my entries before posting. I just read through the last five or six and found whole passages unintelligible. Distracted, I remain determined to keep track of things here.
Even little kids know mittens keep you warmer than gloves yet you rarely see adults wearing mittens. That’s their loss. Back when I was riding a bike downtown everyday for work (even in weather like this) Peggi bought me a pair of big snowmobile mittens. They look like something a hockey goalie would wear. The temperature has been in the single digits and my thumbs were getting numb while skiing so today I wore the big mittens. They are one of the secrets of the universe.
We bought new skis at REI, French skis, made by Rossignol. We had wore our others out trekking through woods and at times over pavement. I could only think of two other things we own from France. The miniature toast crackers, Petits Toast, we buy from Wegmans and my Edith Piaf 45, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.”
Leo Dodd watercolor Rochester Peace Demonstration at Washington Square Park
I love how my father left the tree he outlined in watercolor as is and then animated the figures in this painting. I was standing next to him at my easel when he painted this. We were taking a painting class at the Memorial Art Gallery and I must have seen the photo he was using as reference, one of his own, but I didn’t study it closely. I remember thinking how innocent the protesters appeared, the so called “Raging Grannies.” But then they were free to protest in the middle of a working day. And my father, retired from Kodak, was there protesting the Bush administration. He would be filled with rage today.
Leo Dodd photo of Rochester Peace Demonstration at Washington Square Park
I recently came across the photo my father used as a reference. And I immediately spotted Bill and Marilyn, a former classmate of mine, holding up the peace sign. They often come to Margaret Explosion shows and we sat with them at the last high school reunion. I sent them the photo and a photo ofmy father’s painting.
On our walk we ran into Steve Grieve at the end of Hoffman. He told us we had to go to his Facebook page to see his movie of a fox catching a squirrel, killing it by biting its neck, and then burying it. And just a few minutes later a woman stopped her car and asked me if I was the one carrying a “Trump is a Mindfuck” sign at a demonstration downtown. I said I might have been and she said she loved the sign. She introduced herself as Theresa, a new neighbor, and as she drove off she said, “Trump is a Mindfuck.”
Kodak Park was so big they had their own railroad and highway that ran through the property. They have torn down many of the buildings but these smoke stacks were still spewing something. And a sign on a building at at Ridge and Lake read, “Now Hiring.” My father worked at Hawk Eye and Elmgrove and Lee Road, all local Kodak sites, but I don’t think he ever worked at the Park. And only the execs worked at Kodak Office on Saint Paul. This was a company town at one point.
Our friend, John, worked at the Park for forty years. We took him out to Unity Hospital for an operation on his hand. Peggi drove and I was sitting in the back seat, listening to John’s stories about Grateful Dead shows when I took this shot. I wanted to get some of those classic 60’s buildings with the blue aluminum panels on the side but I couldn’t get my camera out of my pocket fast enough.
John had broken his finger and it wasn’t healing properly so his doctor wanted to reset it. Per instructions we helped him wrap his hand in clean cohesive tape before he got in the car. When we checked in at the hospital I was taken by how much the woman behind the desk reminded me of our friend, Kim. She started making sly jokes about what John had done with his middle finger but John was filling out the paperwork and wasn’t aware of her comments. I looked down at his hand and it did look like it was permanently in the “bird” position. I was laughing so hard I could barely tell John what I was laughing at. When I got it out we all laughed and John said, “It’s not my middle finger, it’s my ring finger. Says a lot about how my marriage worked out.”
Bob Martin, longtime Margaret Explosion guitar player, now living in Chicago, created this video in reaction to the madness in our cities.
It has almost become a chore to get through the daily newspapers. These are dark times and getting darker. Louise comented on my last post with this thought, “It may seem hopelessly atavistic but I have come to believe that a religious view of the world has one thing right: we are in a struggle between good and evil.”
A hawk crashed into our big window in the living room. We’ve had other, much smaller birds fly into the window buit this hawk rattled the house. We’re lucky it didn’t shatter the glass. The birds usually stand, stunned for a few minutes and then fly off. The hawk stood up, a bit dazed, and then moved toward a Red-bellied Woodpecker that was laying upside down near our house. The hawk stood there with one foot on the prey and after a few minutes it fly off with the woodpecker in its talons.
A few weeks back we saw the hind quarter of a deer laying in the road down near the marsh, fresh from nature’s butcher. So fresh there were no turkey vultures swarming. And on our walk today we came across this spinal column, completely stripped of its meat.
“You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” — Stephen Miller
We regularly follow three of the four sides that qualified for this year’s Supercopa so it was especially frustrating that our ESPN package didn’t allow us to stream the three matches. So we decided to watch today’s final in a bar. We called Shamrock Jack’s last night and Mike, the bartender there, said he’d reserve a table in the dining room where the match would be on one of the tvs. “No sound of course,” as the Bills playoff game would be on the sound system.
The Bills game had already started so we checked the score a few times as we walked through the park. The Bills were up when we got to the bar and the place was packed. We had a table alright but it turned out they didn’t have access to ESPN Select either. So we walked back home and decided to try a bar downtown, a new place that our soccer buddy, Scott recommended, Parlays on Monroe Ave.
I checked the score of both games as we drove there. The Bills were down now and Barcelona and Real Madrid were tied 2-2 at the half. Three of those four goals happened in stoppage time while we were driving! This bar had even more TVs, all tuned to the Bills except one with women’s college basketball. We ordered two beers and a bartender took us over to one the TVs in the corner. Young kids were throwing darts between us and the tv as he tried to sign in to ESPN Select. But no go!
The Bills scored and the place went bananas. The “Shout” theme song was cued and a train of revelers danced around the bar following a guy a Bills flag. The “dangerous sound levels” warning went off on my watch. The other team scored and the mood dampened. The Bills scored again and the place exploded as they ran out the clock.
When we shop at the co-op we take advantage of the parking spot while we walk downtown, have coffee at Fuego and stroll along the river to the Ford Street Bridge where we cross back into Pete and Gloria’s neighborhood in the South Wedge. Pete is usually at his drawing table in the front of the house and Gloria is usually in the kitchen, at her computer or making noise with the pots and pans. We visit and laugh and move on. This time we added a stop at Axom where we chatted with both owners, Rick and Robin. We were standing in the front of the store while we talked, looking at the buildings across the street. The one to the right in my photo (above) used to be Bobby Moore’s hair salon. Everyone loved Bobby. I pointed to the low lying building to the left, with the datestone reading 1926, it was my grandfather’s grocery storein the thirties. And we all marveled at the brick building in the center.
Robin said some of the shop-owners in the Wedge were working on a history of that section of the city and I promised her I would send a link to photos my father collected on my grandfather’s three stores. The one on South Avenue was short -lived but it was a big enough deal that Jack Dempsey did an in-store appearance.
My grandfather, Raymond Tierney, was born number eight in a family of eleven. He liked to quote what he called his mother, Winifred Maloney’s poem. Whether she wrote it or just had it memorized was never made clear.
“Life is like a mighty river, flowing from day to day. Men are vessels launched upon it, sometimes wrecked and tossed away. Some succeed at every turning, fortune favors every scheme. Others who are quite deserving, have to puli against the stream. Do your best for one another, making life a brighter dream. Help the tired and worn out brother, pulling hard against the stream.”
Margaret Explosion “Shake” was recorded live at the Little Theatre Café on 12.03.25.
I’m kind of thinking all five members of Margaret Explosion will there on Wednesday. You never know. One thing I do know is that it will be different. The song above was recorded at our last performance. We made a short video for it. Looking forward to Wednesday.
I have been building a small collection of small records, jazz 45s, and two of my favorites are by Ike Quebec. The tenor saxophonist had fallen into obscurity after his mid 40’s 78 “Blue Harlem.” When Blue Note decided to hop on the 45 rpm juke box market (think soul jazz organ and tenor sax), they rereleased Ike’s Blue Harlem and recorded three sessions worth of Ike Quebec 45s, one in ’59, ’60 and ’62. Blue Note has recently released a three lp set of the lot called, “The Complete Blue Note 45 Sessions.” It is a wonder.
Before 1950 all jukeboxes were 78 pm. RCA spent an unprecedented $5,000,000 in 1950 promoting the 45. The Seeburg M100B was at first a nickel a play and six plays for a quarter but after 1951 each machine would be dime a play and three plays for a quarter. That’s the way I remember it.
My brother-in-law gave us the records as a Chanukah gift. With his permission we put it under our imaginary tree and opened it on Christmas morning. We listened to five of the six sides on New Year’s Eve and then the sixth on New Year’s Day. This time I marked my favorites – Blue Monday, Blue Friday, Everything Happens to Me, What a Difference a Day Makes, If I Could Be with You, How Long Has This Been Going On, Imagination and There is No Greater Love. I favor the slow numbers, the ones that would have couple hanging on one another on the dance floor. These killer tracks are scattered across the six sides. Imagine how sensational it would be to have the 45s.
Sun Ra released dozens of singles for the Juke Box market under a variety of names. Evidence repackaged them as a 2 cd set years ago. And what a treat it was to open “It’s Christmas Time” b/w “Happy New Year to You” by the Qualities on 45, also from our brother in law.
Duane sent us up one heavy Xmas package, nine of the ten Brian Eno produced Island/Antilles/Obscure experimental/ambient albums from the mid-to-late 1970s, 20th-century classical music. These discs are easy on the ears and worked well behind long holiday conversations.
Chris from the Squires of the Subterrain included a three volume set of unreleased demos called “Sketchbook” with his holiday card. Chris is a musical craftsman and wizard like Brian Wilson. He does it all, plays most instruments, layers beautiful harmony vocal tracks and engineers musical constructions that are pure joy to listen to.
The YouTube gods teased us with “A Producers Epiphany: Jim Dickinson on Working with the Rolling Stones, Part 1 of 2.” Dickinson is such a natural story teller we we just sat back and let him describe the Stones’ songwriting process, Keith handing him the wrong chords, laying down out-of-tune tracks and then asking Dickinson to play piano on “Wild Horse” because Ian Stewart disliked minor chords. The interview reminded us that we still had not watched our last Netflix. When they pulled the plug on dvds they let you keep the last one and we put ours , 2013’s “Muscle Shoals,” away without ever watching.
The first hour of the 1:42 was brilliant. The birth of the studio, the soulful country vibe, the hits they churned out for Percy Sledge and Wilson Pickett and most of all the decision by Jerry Wexler to bring Aretha Franklin, who had been recording with arrangements, charts and session musicians down south where all those magical songs were recorded. The “Queen of Soul” recording with a bunch of honkies. I have no idea why they had Bono as a talking head. That was the only not brilliant piece of the first hour. The movie takes a wrong turn just after the Stones section with Duane Allman, Leonard Skynyrd and the birth of Southern Rock.
Earl Cassorla was responsible for the display in 2012. The Cassorla brothers, whose father, Red, was a Sephardic Jew or as he liked to say “a Ladino” will live forever on Vimeo.
I’m writing this post before we lose power. It’s been one of those days where the temperature goes down instead of up during the day. We’ve had a leaner, a dead, rotting oak, broken at the base and only still standing because it got hung up on the branch of a nearby tree for the last six or seven years. We had already plotted where it would fall and we weren’t too worried but when it came down this morning it shook the house and just missed our deer fence.
We stopped by Canalltown to pick up coffee and Pete was just roasting a batch so we told him we would come back in an hour and pick it up warm. I watched as he poured beans in the big funnel and told me what goes into the Rochester’s Choice, the blend we buy. “Sumatran and Costa Rican.” I asked who came up with the name. It is such a good name for the house blend as it sounds like it has already won some sort award. He said he and his father-in-law came up with it when they started the business some thirty five years ago.
It seemed like Christmas started way too early but now it’s already gone. The day itself was dreamy. We zoomed with friends in Hawaii while we looked out at the snow. My brother and his wife came up from New Jersey a few day early and the four us went out to Holy Sepulchre and found my parents. It was near dark when we got there. Peggi and I were in the back seat, it was snowing and the roads had not been plowed. I jumped out at one point and ran up a hill just to determine where we were. We parked near the pond and all four of us got out. I started feeling around with my feet and found a stone, “Fred somebody.” I moved to my left and struck gold on the fourth stone. My parents would have gotten a kick out of our adventure. It wasn’t til we got back home that I realized it had been ten years since my father passed.
Amy, my brother’s wife, reminded me that it was the same four of us who rented a boat in Maine and got lost near dark. We had a paper map with us and thought we might be offshore of one of the islands. We spotted someone on shore and yelled, “What island is this.” They couldn’t make out what we were shouting so we kept trying. Finally, the person on shore yelled back, “This is not an island.”
Agnes Martin “Beautiful Life” 2000 granite and oil at Pace in Chelsea
Mary Alice, Peggi’s mom, gave me a book that she had read about in the Wall Street Journal for Christmas. Twenty years later “Pictures of Nothing” by Kirk Varnedoe is still one of my favorite art books. Varnedoe describes Agnes Martin’s work as “utterly incorporeal: no body. . . at the other end of abstraction and yet not at all cerebral. . . thoroughly dependent on sensory and sensual experience.”
Agnes Martin writing on wall at Pace in Chelsea
“Agnes Martin,” currently on view at Pace in Chelsea is stunning. You can’t prepare your self for it but you can take the experience with you. We started our experience by watching the short movie with Agnes Martin that Pace was showing in a side gallery. It was closer to a meditation. She tells us how she finds beauty and how that is enough. And although people say she was a mystic, she says she is not.
Asmat carved “bis” poles, circa 1960, with ancestor figures for memorial feasts in Metropolitan Museum
I was knocked out by a 1967 book we saw at Duane’s place a few years back on the Asmat people, the isolated but culturally advanced New Guinea tribe that had no contact with outsiders until they were be-friended by Nelson Rockefeller’s son, Michael. He was amassing a collection of so called primitive art for his father and it eventually wound up in the Metropolitan Museum but you couldn’t see it. The Michael Rockefeller wing was closed for renovations for years. While anxiously awaiting the reopening I bought a used copy of the book on eBay and read another one on Michael’s adventures and disappearance. Cannibalism? The wing’s reopening mandated a trip to Manhattan.
Carving on front end of Asmat canoe in Rockefeller Wing of Metropolitan Museum
We flew to JFK and took the Q train to Duane’s where he had lunch waiting for us. We had coffee, hummus and eggplant with pita and hung out for a few hours before taking the F train to the Meatpacking District where we had booked a hotel. We ate dinner at a nearby Spanish restaurant called Bartolo’s, played a few hands of gin and then slept like babies. The next morning we met Duane in the lobby of the Met and let the Rockefeller collection sweep us away.
We had plans to meet our nephew in Midtown at the end of his work day and we had an hour to kill so we walked across the park with Duane and he took a train back to Brooklyn. Peggi and I continued along 72nd, past the Dakota where there was some sort of Lennon tribute going on, to a record store called “Westsider.” I had read they had a good jazz collection and they did but when we asked the old guy (our age) behind the counter if he had any jazz 45s he laughed. “Jazz people don’t like 45s and the the 45 people don’t like jazz so you’re in a something of a black hole.” I said, “I know.” We left empty handed.
Knowing that our nephew likes steak we made reservations at a place called Quality Meats on 58th. He ordered a sirloin and Peggi and I split a filet minoin, first beef we had had in years. We ordered a few side dishes as well, broccoli, a Caesar salad and bacon/peanut butter thing that the waiter recommended. I was thinking what a crazy combination that was but it tasted so good. And then it dawned on me, my mom, a butcher’s daughter, used to make peanut butter and bacon sandwiches for us when we were kids.
The streets were so quiet today. The Bills were playing and we had a half inch of fresh snow. It was cold too, around 18 degrees. I took a movie of the marsh as the sun tried to poke through the soupy grey sky. Peggi and had a short practice. Forty five minutes of making stuff up and another version of Fernando.
When Peggi’s parents retired they took a lot of trips, some by car, some by train and some by sea. In 2003, as the US was starting the disastorous war in Iraq, they invited us on a cruise through the Panama Canal. I brought our cassette recorder along and came back with some great tapes of manic Panamanian music and djs. The ship left from Miami. We ran into Norm and Pam in the airport.
Passengers awaiting boarding of cruise ship in Miami
The cruise ship made stops in Playa del Carmen (Peggi and I went snorkeling while the other passengers went shopping) and Honduras where we took a long bus ride to the Mayan ruins of Copán, the highlight of the whole trip. The canal was sort of dingy, my favorite photos from the trip were the ones I took from the bus on the way to Copán. They made a good spread in my homemade scrapbook.
Photos from bus in Honduras on the road to the Mayan ruins at Copán, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Photos from bus in Honduras on the road to the Mayan ruins at Copán, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York
I’m mashing up two stories from today’s paper here. GiveSendGo, a website that says it aims to “share the Hope of Jesus through crowdfunding,” has raised $150,000 (as of this post) for the Cinnabon employee, a Saul Goodman co-worker, who let loose a racist tirade at the drive-through window. So many ugly facts to this story but the “Hope of Jesus” part got me. The same organization raised funds for Kyle Rittenhouse, Luigi Mangione and Thomas Jacob Sanford, who is suspected of killing four people and injuring eight others before setting a Michigan Mormon church ablaze.
In a front page story Cardinal Dolan announced the Archdiocese that he presides over was preparing to raise more than $300 million as compensation for survivors of sexual abuse by priests in his employ. Rochester’s bankrupt diocese, the one I grew up in, already paid 246 million to local victims. The money could never compensate victims. Church leaders covered up the crimes, shuffling the perpetrators to other districts. The very structure of the church attracts pedifiles. The optimism for Pope Francis fizzled when he never came clean on the cover-up and Pope Leo, his successor, says he has no intention to ordain women and does not anticipate changing official teaching against homosexuality.
Dolan’s statement, makes it clear where he stands in all this when he describes how the church has made a series of difficult decisions. “As we have repeatedly acknowledged, the sexual abuse of minors long ago has brought shame on our church.” (Poor guy, to have to repeatedly acknowledge it. And it wasn’t that long ago – these victims are still alive!) “I once again ask forgiveness for the failing of those who betrayed the trust placed in them by failing to provide for the safety of our young people.” Dolan looks so contrite in the photo as passes the blame.
Winter came before fall was finished so our snowman looks a little funkier than usual. We invited everyone on the street to dinner at our house tonight. We left an invite in the mailbox of each of the ten houses. It said we would be serving food from Rubino’s but before we got around to ordering we ran into Pete and Gloria and they suggested Papa Joe’s in Greece. So I’m heading out there to pick up trays of lasagna, gnocchi and Chicken Marsala. Papa Joe’s is new to us. They were not on our Refrigerator round-up of Rochester’s Italian restaurants.
Eduardo Chillida sculptures on the deck of Guggenheim Bilbao
Chillida is rightfully featured in Bilbao’s Guggenheim. That’s two of his sculptures on the deck of the museum designed by Frank Geary. What a combo. Geary died the other day. He was a hero of my father’s. They were just about the same age. When we first visited northern Spain Bilbao was described in the tourist books as the armpit of Spain, an industrial hub with a port on the Bay of Biscay. We drove right by it.
When the MAG organized an art tour of Spain in the late nineties the Guggenheim there was brand new and my parents signed up. My father filled a sketch book with drawings of the building. An article about the architect in today’s paper said the first building Geary designed was for Louis Danziger in 1965, a work/live space on Melrose Avenue in LA. I had just called attention to Danziger a few posts back when researching the artwork he did for a Bud Powell 45. Funny how everything comes together eventually.
We have been to Bilbao a couple of times since and we love the city. The museum, Geary’s masterpiece, transformed the working class city. We want to go back. Architecture aside, I was just thinking how nice it is to live in a spot where we can hear the train whistles downtown, the jet skis on the lake, the motorcycles on Kings Highway and the muffled roar of the bay bridge.
