Category: Lopsided Observations

We started our First Friday art tour before anyone else last night. We were at the MAG savoring the last hours of the Matisse show and I don’t mean his grandson’s pottery. No one draws like Matisse. No one gets as much form and expression in line. Matisse is the master. Your very last last chance to see what I’m talking about is Sunday when the show closes.

This morning’s paper has an item that really isn’t news to those who live here. Despite being one of America’s most livable cities we are ranked third on the list of poverty rates in large metropolitan areas, just behind Detroit and Cleveland. Like I say, not news, but it came the morning after taking in “Upstate Girls” by Brenda Ann Kenneally at Visual Studies Workshop. Kenneally has secured a Guggenheim grant to continue exploring and visually docmenting the how and why of class inequity in America. A meaty project. Take a look at her photos.

In Synecdoche, Katherine Keener, playing Philip Seymour Hoffman’s wife, painted these mildly disturbing miniature pictures and at her openings everyone had to use magnifying glasses to view the art. I was reminded of that bit of absurdity last night at RoCo where the 6×6 show opened. Each piece, limit of six from each entrant, is six by six and every piece is 20 bucks with all proceeds going o Rochester Contemporary. But this year they go food to ceiling. You can hardly see the ones up top but hang. There were signs scattered about that read, “Ladders Available Sundy.”
Ladders Available Sunday.

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John Gilmore called us yesterday just to tell us he had driven by an inflated “God Bless America” lawn ornament like one of those Santas you see at Christmas time. The words were written on a great big American Flag.

We speculated on just how patriotic God is? Does he/she/it have a soft spot for America? The message is exclusionary and I’m guessing that is the whole point. We are superior. Asking God to bless the world would be just as exclusionary and asking god to bless the universe that he/she/it supposedly created would be plain silly.

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Magnolias are much nicer to look at than political signs. Besides our sign is gone and I never got a photo of it.

Gary Pudup, former Monroe County Sheriff, head of the local ACLU and long time Margaret Explosion fan is running for state assembly in Greece and he has taken a stance on New York’s Safe act. He asked if we would put sign on our lawn and we did but I warned him it would probably be stolen. We live on a dead end but our property meets a busier road down back so we put it there. A little further down this road there are two “Repeal NYS Safe Act” signs in front of houses and I didn’t think those people would tolerate an opposing view. I’m not saying one of those two stole the sign and I certainly don’t want to start something with a gun owner but I’ve been thinking about alternate signage.

Something simple but with a different tact like, “MORE GUNS,” or “BIGGER GUNS,” or “GUN NUTS!”

A few years ago I recounted the story about my mom making a peace flag that got stolen.

My friend, who lived down the street, was in Viet Nam dropping Agent Orange out of a helicopter on anything that moved when my mom made a peace flag. She sewed it! It was a white cloth peace sign on a sky blue piece of material. I remember it being beautiful. We flew it on the flag pole out in front of our house and this friend’s mom got all bent out of shape about it. I remember her calling our house and screaming over the phone while my mom made a rational appeal to her. “Surely you want peace too”, I remember her saying, but the argument continued. This neighbor thought it was flat out wrong to fly something like that while her son was fighting for our country. He was only in the army because he flunked out of Bonaventure and got drafted.

I was so proud of my mom but the thing is a lot of people felt like this neighbor at that time so it was a bit of a mystery when the flag was stolen a few weeks later. “Who stole the peace flag?” became the family’s obsession as we weighed the suspicion level of each neighbor on the street. We found out months later that it was the younger brother of the guy who was in Viet Nam. I’ll bet the guys over there were real happy there were people back home working against peace.

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Most days we head in to the woods near our house and quickly lose ourselves in nature’s overwhelming beauty. And it is always a shock when, maybe a mile or so in, we need to cross the golf course. The manicured greenery is startling enough but the golfers can really jolt you back to unreality.

We usually wait in the woods until they have played through and our spots allows us to eavesdrop for what that’s worth. A few years ago I made the mistake of crossing part way and standing in a grove of trees. When someone yelled “fore” I naturally turned in the direction of the ball and took it between the eyes. I heard someone say, “Holy shit. You hit someone.” and then they took off.

Which brings me to the tee on the fourteenth hole. I love this kind of stuff. Simple, sly, sneaky and subversive. It’s more than graffiti and a lot less as well. Like the best minimal art, it gets maximum effect from minimal means. I wonder how many golfers have even noticed the magic marker spider on the kitchen floor of the “Floor Coverings International” ad.

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When your head is in the clouds the years just slip by.

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There is not that much open space available in the town of Irondequoit. One of Rochester’s oldest bedroom communities, it is surrounded by water on three sides – the river, the lake and the bay. I remember a driving range on Titus Avenue that I used to pass on my way to the House of Guitars. People would tee off up near the road and their drives would go straight downhill.

That same hill was developed into track homes and when it would rain the water washed down the streets overwhelming a creek at the bottom of the hill, a creek that wound it’s way through the lowlands onto Spring Valley and Hoffman Road making the roads impassible. The town increased their tax base but this project was a huge blunder. They had to divert the creek, put in a retention pond and raise the elevation of the roads.

The creek now meanders through the newly minted wetlands and flows under the road through a number of culverts. The strangest stuff comes floating down from the subdivision – styrofoam coolers, stuffed animals, someone’s recycling bin and balls.

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All it takes is a couple of inches of new white stuff and winter is all fresh again. And of course it helps when the temperatures don’t even make it out of single digits. The air crisp and the snow is perfect for skiing. We drove to the other side of the park, the undeveloped section on he west side of Kings Highway, and skied up along the ridge that runs almost all the way up o the fire department. We were the only human tracks, plenty of others out but no walkers, snowshoers or other cross-country nuts.

We skied in the park yesterday too. There still isn’t quite enough snow to cushion the trails in the woods so we’re going all civilized rather than bushwhacking. The Rochester Cross-Country Ski Foundation grooms trails on the golf course and we saw a few tiny signs for the “Nordic Center.” We can only image what that is or where it might be. The signs so few and far between that you might freeze trying to follow them. I should add that our style of X-Crountry skiing is worlds away from the upcoming Olympic variety of skate skiing. We trudge. They glide.

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There was a police car running out in front of our house a few days ago but no one was in the car. We spotted the casually dressed cop and two other distraught guys coming out of a neighbor’s back yard. We asked what was going on and they told us there was an injured deer running around and they were trying to do the “humane thing” and put it out of its misery. We asked what had happened to the deer and they said it had been shot with an arrow as part of the bait and shoot program and it got away.

We found deer down in the creek a few years back. It was a buck with a huge rack so we called our neighbor, someone who both feeds the deer and hunts them, not the same deer of course. That would be inhumane, I think. I’m real blurry on this humane thing. Assisted suicide for people is currently inhumane but it is fine for animals. Anyway, we showed this neighbor where the dead deer was and he sawed the rack off its head so he could get both sides of the rack attached to a deer skull cap. And when he rolled the deer over he found an arrow in its side.

Back to the injured deer that is currently on the loose: The hunters signaled it out, shot an arrow at it, injured but didn’t kill the deer and now they want to do the humane thing on it.

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The Eastman School of Music’s Philharmonia and the Eastman Rochester Chorus tore the roof off the sucker last night in Kodak Hall. The free concert of Mahler’s wild Symphony No. 2, commonly known as “The Resurrection” although it is not about Christ, was dedicated to the memory of Dean Douglas Lowry who passed away a few weeks ago. The place was packed and there were nearly 300 instrumentalists and choral members on stage. Eight double bass players!

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It was comforting to know our neighbor was pecking away in the light filled room at the back of the house next door. I imagine a writer’s work is never done. Even while socializing you always get the sense that you just might be material for repurposing. So it was a sad day when their year lease ran out. We’re still sleeping with our bedroom windows open and it is much too quiet over there.

When the phone rings at 6 AM you know it’s going to be a strange day. My dad asked my mom to call 911 because he felt terrible. She called my sister next and then my sister called us. At a certain age it seems you have to check in at Emergency a few times a year just to keep things moving along.

Lots of tests and a host of the usual problems but no smoking gun. Could it have been the knockwurst sandwich, the German potato salad and or the vanilla milkshake that my dad had for dinner at the Highland Diner? Or maybe a general sausage buildup due to the the meal my dad had the day before at Brew & Brats outside of Naples? The doctor said, “It could be.”

The staff at Highland Hospital was just fantastic, thoroughly professional and attentive, all the things you hope for when things spin out of control, but also very friendly. The Spanish speaking maintenance man was just a delight, the technician who looked exactly like one of those tall, skinny African “inmigrantes” you see on the streets in Spain with blankets of designer contraband spread out in front of them. He had the most beautiful, charcoal black skin. The nurse who my niece, a wedding photographer, had met when she tried to liven up a really boring wedding, demonstrated the dances she did on the emergency room floor. The “Lawnmower, The Shopping Cart” and the “Lawn Sprinkler.” The doctor, who was going to medical school in the Scorgie’s days, told us he had one of our Personal Effects lps and had seen Margaret Explosion at the Little and better yet, he has a copy of my dad’s “Brighton Brick” book at home.

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An advantage of the demise of downtown, starting with the urban renewal efforts, the white flight and the crush of the suburban malls, is the really amazing loft style living arrangements that are now available in the heart of the city. We took the Landmark Society’s weekend tour of exciting spaces to live and work. A loft in the old, 1959 orange striped, Central Trust building on Exchange Street with a birds eye view of the Wings of Progress atop the Art Deco inspired Times Square building was our favorite sweet spot.

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