We have only been to Tinseltown twice. Once for “Shine a Light,” the Martin Scorsese movie about The Rolling Stones and on Thursday for Neil Young’s new movie, “Coastal.” If we can believe what Neil says in the movie, these were his first live dates in four years. He has gotten older and he is not afraid to show it. The movie moves at an old man pace. But the songs, all gems, sounded better than ever.
We walked through the park and then along the lake before turning around and coming back the same way. We usually construct some sort of loop but the blossoms were so pretty we need a double dose. The scent of the magnolias is heavenly. Today it was mixed with ganja, coming from a parked car.
Sam, who lives down below, told us he bought a book on the history of the Durand Eastman Park. There is section in there that talks about how the area we live in was supposed to have been part of the park but it was sold to developers in 1920’s. He told us he bought the book at the brew pub up on Titus. We made a note to stop by there. He also told us he heard a big tree come down in the woods behind his house. So Peggi and I tucked our pant legs in and walked through the woods to the park today. There were so many big trees down we couldn’t determine which was the new one. The last time we were down here we were on skis. Climbing over the debris I was remembering how effortlessly we moved through the woods on skis.
Out on the golf course we saw they had one of the fairways all torn up. Plastic drain pipes were laying in the bottom of long trenches. One full day of sun and the white magnolias were popping in the arboretum. There was a creepy pick-up parked along Lakeshore with a bumper sticker that read “Gun Control Is Hitting Your Target.” The workers have opened the roads in the park to car traffic. I like it better when they’re closed but it is not my park.
I took my pole saw down to Jedi’s around noon today. He was still in his pjs when I rang the bell. I told him I was going to cut the white plastic bag down that had been trapped in his tree all winter, sometimes billowing at full sail as we walked by. Jedi told me he had tried to get it but he couldn’t reach it. I suspected it bothered us more than it bothered him.
The plastic fitting that allows the pole to extend was locked so Jedi, outdoors in his slippers, hung on to one end while I pulled on the other. Like a tug of war I pulled him into the pachysandra before we got it free. I cut the bag down and went home to fix the pole saw fitting. While I was in the garage Rick stopped by to borrow a wrench. He was getting his his bike ready for spring. I told him I had cut the white bag down that was in Jedi’s tree all winter. He didn’t know what I was talking about.
I didn’t have the right wrench to fix my pole saw either so I went down to Jared’s. He was outside talking to John and I showed them my problem. We went into Jared’s garage where he found a “thin walled” socket that did the trick. I told him I had cut the white bag down from Jedi’s tree and he said he had never noticed it.
I don’t follow baseball anymore and it is not just because the designated hitter rule. A long time ago I was a rabid fan. Eddie Mathews was my favorite baseball player. That’s not his autograph, it was printed on the card. An antique dealer, who we did some work for, gave me the card. It is so off register it is not worth all that much. Mathews played for the Milwallkee Braves (before they moved to Atlanta.) He batted third and played third base (my position.) I had a hat just like his. It is hard to see but the underside of the brim was a restful green (like the background of the card.) The Braves were my favorite team. They beat the Yankees in the 1957 World Series.
Jason Wilder is working on a baseball project and he sent me an outline so it got me thinking about the game. My mom told me she got Stan Musial’s autograph when he was with the Rochester Red Wings. I thought that was pretty cool. I used to love going to the Wings games. Rather park in the parking lot my father would drive up and down those small streets that run off Norton and pick out a parking spot on someone’s lawn (for a small fee, arranged with the owner.) My father would buy me a scorecard and I’d keep score, working those little diamonds. Mostly, I love the billboards in the outfield, all the local brands, the hole in the sign that paid a bonanza if someone hit a ball in there. I remember my brother getting a hole burnt in his jacket when he leaned back on a guy who was smoking a cigar behind us.
When I was seven or eight an older kid down the street gave me a stack of cards from the fifties. There was a corner store near our house on Humboldt Street called Fessner’s and I bought my first cards there, a nickel for five random cards and a stick of gum. My family moved to Webster when I was ten and I inherited a paper route from a kid who was moving. With all that disposable income my collection grew enormously. So did my tally of cavities.
I was thirteen, at the peak of my buying power, when I lost interest in playing with them. My cards from 1963 remained in mint condition. (I had three of Pete Rose’s rookie cards.) When I moved out my mother said, “Take this shoebox of cards or I’m gonna throw them out.” A few years later I saw a sign for some sort of baseball card convention. I took my shoebox and showed them to a guy who turned out to be my high school math teacher, Mr. Setek. He said, “I will buy these and I will give you a fair price but I can’t do it here. I’ll come to your house.” I can’t remember the total but he gave me enough for us to take a week long trip to Cartagena, Columbia. At the time it was the cheapest tropical destination.
Margaret Explosion at Little Theatre Café 7-9 pm – photo by Jason Wilder
I expect to wake up one day and Trump will have made slavery legal again. So the “Super Callous Fragile Racist Sexist Nazi Potus,” Alexa . . Please Change the President,” “Impeach the Beast,” “Just Stop Fucking Everything,” “Follow Your Leader” (pic of Hitler shooting himself), “Know your Parasites”, ” (3 pics, dog tick, deer tick, luna tick) and the 4000 fellow Rochesterians protesting the administration in Cobbs Hill Park was a site for sore eyes.
Margaret Explosion plays Wednesday, March 19 at Little Theatre Café
If the temperature reaches 77 today we will reach a record set in 1903. Margaret Explosion seems to draw better in unpleasant weather. It could be a quiet night tonight. And we used a photo of Peggi and Melissa to promote the show only to learn Melissa can’t make the gig tonight. And just an hour ago we learned Jack will not be able to make it so no bass clarinet. We will perform as a trio.
“So we took over the Kennedy Center. We didn’t like what they were showing and various other things. We’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke. There’s no more woke in this country. NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA – ONLY THE BEST,” – you know who.
These quotes still make me laugh. Is there a better way to deal with this onslaught?
Butterfly Knot party on Old Browncroft Road in 2007
I feel lucky to have experienced many of the first generations of digital cameras. My first Kodak, the DC40, took just one half meg photos. I went through a few versions of Sony’s Cybershot and the Nikon 5100 and 7100 before settling on Sony’s RX100. But back in the day the photos required a little Photoshop work before I kept them. I would then save them as .tiffs but the early Mac OS didn’t put the suffix on the files. For the last ten years or so I haven’t even been able to view the files. Occasionally I would search by file name and add the .tif to each file and click confirm, a tedious process just to see the photo. I’m probably the last person to know about “Automator.” The app the comes with the OS and allows you to batch process in seconds. I converted thousands of old photos yesterday and found a few surprises.
In 2007 Margaret Explosion was hired to play a party for the investors of Brian Strine’s “Butterfly Knot” movie. Some cast members were there and the event was held in the funky party house on old Browncroft Road. I had not been inside that place since the fifties. The place itself felt like an old movie set. I took the picture above of bass clarinetist, Jack Schaefer and saxophonist, Peggi Fournier at the bar and had not seen it since 2007.
Bill Jones in our bathroom about to have his hair cut by Peggi 2006Bil Jones getting a haircut from Peggi 2006
Bill Jones posing as Velazquez while getting haircut from Peggi 2006Bil Jones getting a haircut from Peggi 2006
Peggi often cuts my hair. She has cut the hair of most of our friends at one time or another and in 2006 she cut Bill Jones’ hair. I think he had just got his webmaster job at Lawyer’s CoOp. Peggi cut his hair in our bathroom before we had remodeled it. I especially like Bill’s Velazquez pose in the upper right of these four. Bill is gone now so these were especially sweet to find.
Bennie J. performing at the Spirit Room on March 10 2025
Bennie used to lead the drum section at the Flash matches. She often sits in with Margaret Explosion, playing one of her Brazilian percussion instruments. Martha, Bennie’s long time partner, wrote poetry before she passed and Bennie set them to music. She performed them, mostly on ukulele, to a packed room last night at the Spirit Room.
Inspired by the poetry of John Milton and Lord Byron, most of the poems are metered and rhyming. Major themes include death, love, sex and religion – often in the same poem – as well as the pain of lost love and the various manifestations of mental illness that she wrestled with most of her life. Despite the dark subject matter, many of the poem/songs were funny and irreverent. Bennie says, ” The experience of presenting these songs to an audience with honesty and vulnerability has helped me grow as a person in ways I could never have imagined.” It was a beautiful performance.
Alice Neel “David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock” at Blanton in Austin Texas
This 1970 Alice Neel painting, in the collection of the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas Austin, looks like it was painted yesterday. Except it couldn’t be. No one can paint like this today. I came home with this photo and got my Alice Neel book out, the one I picked up at the Alice Neel show at the Whitney in 2000. This painting was there. It was at that show, where Peggi and I struggled to see one of her paintings. A guy in a wheelchair with an aide in tow was planted in front for the longest time. The aide finally spun him around and we were face to face with Chuck Close.
Our first night back in Rochester we met my brother and his Vietnamese lady friend at a new Asian restaurant just blocks from our house. The place was slammed and the service suffered but we had some delicious “Tom Yum” soup and brought a papaya salad home for lunch. Maureen Outlaw and her husband were sitting behind us and we learned the waiter had been on our flight for Atlanta the day before. We laughed about the announcement that our pilot was still in the parking lot while we were already on the plane.
It was sunny today with the temperature in the forties so the park was especially crowded. The lakes were still frozen but the witch hazel is in full bloom. We’ve not heard or seen any red winged blackbirds yet but the Winter Aconite is out. Saint Patty’s, the unofficial first day of spring, is just around the corner.
Mount Bonnell, the highest point in Austin, Texas, with an elevation of 775 feet above sea level.
We saw Lady Bird’s bowling shoes yesterday at the LBJ Library along with an especially moving exhibit about one month in LBJ’s presidency, March 1968, when Peggi and I were still in high school. The Tet Offensive, a massive surprise attack, was a pivotal moment in the Vietnam War. More American troops were in Vietnam Nam than at any other time in the war. Our casualty rate was proportionally high, a nightmare, vividly recalled on multiple video screens by soldiers who were there for the battle.
The photo above is not how I pictured Austin. We walked up to Mt. Bonnell this morning and got a great look at downtown in one direction and the homes along the Colorado River in the other. We learned that just after the Civil War General Custer and his wife, Libby, picnicked up here. The Custers noted that the summit was too steep for a cavalry horse to climb, so it had to be climbed on foot.
Ellsworth Kelley “Austin” at the Blanton in Austin, Texas
Before leaving our nephew’s home this morning we searched for galleries and decided on the Blanton and the LBJ Library for the AM and then the small contemporary galleries in the afternoon. Reading about the Blanton I remembered that Ellsworth Kelley had designed a pagan church here.
Originally conceived in 1987 for a private vineyard in California, he gave the plans to the University of Texas and renamed the piece “Austin.” The 2,715-square-foot stone structure, stained glass and interior artworks are inspired by the many churches Kelly visited in France and draw from religious themes in art history. Reminiscent of the Romanesque style, twin barrel vaults intersect at right angles. Its floor plan is known as a Latin cross. The exterior limestone is from Alicante, Spain.
A freestanding, 18-foot-tall wooden Totem sculpture commands attention at the end of the main aisle. The location, form, and material allude to the cross normally placed at this spot in a church. Like all the artist’s Totems, the form also recalls ancient Greek figurative sculptures. Made from California old-growth redwood logged in the 19th century and salvaged from the bottom of a riverbed. The stained glass windows reflect light differently depending on the time of day and season. The 14 square panels are Kelly’s abstract versions of the Stations of the Cross, a series of scenes that depict the story of the crucifixion.
Kelly masterfully abstracted the Christian church and its symbols. Unfortunately he died before Austin’s completion so he never saw it. I can’t say we saw it either. They were rebuilding the weighty entry door and the building was closed. Made of repurposed native Texas live oak, it needed some repairs. We were only able to walk around the building and imagine.
It takes a special kind of person to rock cowboy boots and/or a western hat and there are quite a few people walking around town that don’t look all that special. We’re guessing they, like us, are from out of town and they just bought the gear at one of the many shops we’ve seen. The annual SXSW is just gearing up and some people are already walking around with their badges.
We talked to Rich last night and he expressed interest in going for a ride in a Waymo next time we visit. We saw one in Miami Beach and we just watched one float by while we were walking up and down Congress. Maybe we’ll trade our car in while we’re down here.
I love reading news like this while I’m trying to have a good time. “Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the E.P.A., has recommended that the agency reverse its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare, according to three people familiar with the decision. That would eliminate the legal basis for the government’s climate laws, such as limits on pollution from automobiles and power plants.” Kathy Hochul whomped him when he tried to run for governor and Trump saved a spot for him in his cabinet of gangsters.
We’ve covered a lot of ground in Miami. The water level in the canals that run through the city is at the top of the retaining walls. People drink a lot bottled water here. There’s no return deposit on the plastic. I better stop. We’re on vacation.
Hand painted signs are the best. We’re visiting our nephew in Miami and staying in the MiMo district in a refurbished turquoise motel, one that the Rat Pack popularized in the day.
According to the historical marker in front of our place, “The Vagabond Motel was constructed in 1953. The Vagabond Motel is a distinctive example of the evolution of modern architecture after World War II. It embodies the characteristics of Florida’s roadside motels catering to tourists arriving by car along main highways such as Biscayne Boulevard. Designed by Miami architect Robert Swartburg, the hotel exemplifies the Miami Modern (MiMo) architectural style that emerged as South Florida architects began to adapt postwar design and materials to Florida’s subtropical climate.”
I was just getting over the Uber driver’s odorizer and the room smells vaguely like bug spray but that goes with the territory. We are on the second floor, overlooking the pool and it is beautiful, a long way from the frozen sidewalks. And pizza and two salads have just arrived from Walrus Rodeo.
Shortly after we moved into our Hershey home the original owners stopped by to check on the house they built in the late forties. They told us they took down a red oak out front and had it milled for the hardwood floors in our living room. They shared some pictures of the two of them (husband and wife) laying the concrete blocks for our foundation. And this one, above, taken in the winter of 1966. Schools were closed for a week back then. Our piles are almost as big this year.
A long time ago people used to give people my age a hard time for putting a flag on your jacket or t-shirt and then one day we were in a golf clubhouse with my father-in-law and a guy walked in with American flag shorts. The rules change.
Peggi was expecting a package yesterday. She was notified around 6 PM that it had been delivered but she couldn’t find it. We looked all around the house and texted our neighbors to see if it went to the wrong address. The delivery notification showed a picture, the one on the left above. We couldn’t even figure out what we were looking at. The three black arches mystified us. I took the low res photo into Photoshop and messed with the levels. Still took a while to realize it was a picture of our mailbox out at the street with the bag inside of it. Isn’t it mail tampering for UPS to put stuff in your mailbox?
Real Madrid vs Atletico Madrid Saturday February 8, 2025
I sat down to write this entry and find the devil has posted we’re going “BACK TO PLASTIC,” promising to sign an executive order to end the paper straw inititive. I feel like we’re living on the front page of the Onion but we will not let this spoil Peggi’s birthday.
We have a big, big match to watch. Real Madrid with the best stars money can buy vs. Atletico Madrid, the scrappy crosstown rivals. Only one post separates the the two teams at the top of the table. Peggi will be wearing the red Atletico jersey. And after the match we have dinner plans at Tapas 147.
Dog Mom’s bumper stickers at Durand Eastman Park 2025
Dog Mom doesn’t care what I think or how I feel but for almost a decade now we have been laughing at Trump’s antics. The guy is entertaining to his fans and his detractors. We watched his news conference today after the helicopter/plane crash and he asked for “a moment of silence for the victims” and then said “thank you” when the moment passed, as if it had been for him. He went on to blame the crash on DEI. With a new outrage everyday it is a perverse to keep laughing but a coping mechanism nonetheless.
Greed was good in the eighties but it was just getting started. Trump has so much money he is untouchable. He will trip up though and Thomas Friedman may have pinpointed Trump’s achilles heel. The beautiful coal and drill baby drill talk is head in the sand even if you don’t give one hoot about the environment but as a business model it is embarrassing. China is going eat our lunch.
Two thirds of Americans want to see major change in our political system. How about we roll back the Citizens United decision so the CEO’s can’t buy the office and then change the way Congress is elected to “proportional representation” like they have Europe. The US is only one four democracies in the world (US, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leon) to have this no compromise, winner take all system. That leaves a lot of good ideas on the sidelines.
The hat certainly threatened to upstage the affair but the bombast when the big guy made his entrance made it clear Round 2 has begun. The “Drill Baby Drill” refrain landed particularly hard after Peggi’s sister almost lost her home in the California fires. But the chorus from my title made us laugh out loud. It was perfect day for cross-country skiing.
Edward Ruscha “Ultra” 1970 Gunpowder and pastel on paper at MAG
Maybe it’s a good thing that the Memorial Art Gallery did not do a catalog for their current “Drawing As Discovery” show. It got us over there three times and each time we found new favorites. I probably photographed a quarter of the 120 pieces. I’ve been visiting there since you entered by going up the big steps in the front of the old section and this is the best show they have ever mounted. And to think that all of these pieces are in their collection. Works on paper are fragile so they will be put to bed when the show closes today.
“I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again.” Ed Ruscha
It will be a long time before we see 8 graphic Kara Walker drawings, Lyonel Feininger, Auguste Rodin, Burchfield, Picasso, Sol LeWitt, Goya, Rembrandt, Daumier, Delacroix, Tiepolo, Georgia O’Keeffe, Tamayo, David Hockney, Léger, and Morandi in the same space.
