Category: Lopsided Observations

My neighbor is anxious to resume our summer horseshoe ritual. He texted this morning wondering if I had given any thought to how we could safely play. I ignored the text.

Just days after posting my picture of a fox eating a squirrel outside our bedroom window we came across what we first thought were turkeys, about ten big birds in the trees over the marsh. A few of them were on the ground picking at something. They didn’t startle or take off like turkeys do, they held their ground as we approached. They turned out to be vultures feasting on a dead fox. It didn’t look like the same one.

Don’t know why “New York Is Now” popped into my head. I had to hear it and it still sound fresh. It is now. Ornette recorded the album in 1968 and he used John Coltrane’s rhythm section, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones. I had forgotten that until the second song, “Toy Dance.” Ed Blackwell, Ornette’s go to guy, is my favorite drummer in the world and this didn’t sound like his distinctive parade style. It doesn’t sound like Elvin Jones either. Jones was so physical with Coltrane and on New York Is Now he sounds limber and free.

Coltrane’ s lp, “The Avant Garde,” recorded eight years earlier, features Ornette’s line-up, Don Cherry, Charlie Hayden and Ed Blackwell. Three of the five songs on this lp were written by Coleman. I plan to listen to that today.

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We’re finding the nearby neighborhoods are less crowded than the park in the morning. We walked down to the bay today, down the big hill at the end of Point Pleasant and out Schnackel Drive where the homes are barely above water. Schnackel continues further along the shoreline but only as a walking path. There are a handful of more homes right on the water but we ran into a dog back there a few years ago so we left it unexplored today.

Zig zagging through the neighborhoods we’ve noticed a few garden projects underway. Big pressure treated poles stuck in the ground for fencing on the south side and some sort of open air structure up top tying it all together. There must be plans online for these Victory Gardens because we’ve seen a few and they all look alike. We’re lucky to have a small plot of and in our neighbor’s backyard where there is sunshine and a short electric fence to keep the animals out. And what’s with these fantasy doors in people’s yards that are hung on a frame and apparently swing open to more yard?

We heard the woman at the end of the street found a tick stuck on her side. She had it tested and it was negative. Our friends, Pete and Shelley, in the mountains, have already found a few on them. And Jim Mott, the painter and birder, has three attached to him.

And why isn’t the government putting unemployed people to work rebuilding our infrastructure? It’s not like no-one has ever thought of this. The WPA was a win win. AmeriCorp could be fully staffed. What are we waiting for?

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The street we moved onto has a swimming pool on one of the lots 1960. Ten families belonged to the association then but only three households, all couples, belong now. We do meetings with Roberts Rules of Order. This one was via Zoom. We took the cover off under the threat snow and we all wore masks.

Certain words keep coming up during the pandemic. “Exacerbate” is one. Every move that Trump makes, it seems, exacerbates the crisis. In a conversation with Peggi’s sister she used the word “cavalier” in reference to potentially unsafe behavior while out in public. That stuck and Peggi and I now use that word every day. There was a restaurant downtown, where the Metropolitan Building is now, that my brother and I used to go to when we skipped school. It was called “The Cavalier.”

It was too cold for the golfers this morning although we did see two solo parties. One guy was wearing gloves and a down jacket as he teed off. We took one of the paths that skirts the course and I found three balls. A Wilson, a Titleist and a Precept.

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A big pine fell across this path in Durand over the winter. We crawled under it quite a few times and today we found that they had cleaned it up. The park has such a slim staff it takes them months and sometimes years to clear a trail. This is an especially nice one as it connects Zoo Road to Pine Valley.

Tom Kohn from the Bop Shop stopped by this afternoon to pick up some Personal Effects CDs for his store. Can’t keep em in stock! I found a video on my hard drive that someone had shot at Club Mirage in 1985. I chopped one song out yesterday and posted that but there was also a pretty cool version of “A Love Supreme” in there. And whoever it was that shot the video got some good footage the crowd dancing to a sang called Baby Baby. I might have to chop another song out in my Corona time.

Margaret Explosion was scheduled to be performing in the Little Theatre Café on Wednesdays this month. We would be there tonight but were not. With Bob Martin’s help we’ve been researching ways to stream a performance from multiple locations.

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It was supposed to be warm today but it barely made it. We walked to down to the Sea Breeze pier without any close encounters. We had the small beach to the left of the pier to ourselves. Guess everyone was in the park. The lake was still. It was beautiful but kind of strange.

Our friends, Pete and Gloria, stopped by to wish me a happy birthday. They were the first friends we’ve had over since the pandemic. We had coffee out front and resisted the urge to touch.

Our neighbors (and friends), Jeddy and Helena, stopped by to sing happy birthday. We stood in the driveway and they stood in the road. Helena was playing some reggae on her portable sound system. But all I could think of was Ornette’s “Friends and Neighbors.”

Phil did a version of “Harry Irene” for me on Facebook live.

Our good friend, Louise, dedicated a blog post to me.

Kathy walked over from the last traffic circle and texted us that she was out front. While we were out there Rick and Monica stopped by and Rick asked how we were going to make horseshoes work.

It was a perfect pandemic birthday.

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As the tediousness of the pandemic threatened to dull our perceptions we found a way to reinvigorate our routine. We get out of the house before the second cup of coffee, before we have read the news and opinion pages. The streets are quiet, the dog walkers aren’t blocking the park entrance and the trails in the woods are nearly empty. While the rest of America sleeps in we have been turning in earlier and waking at dawn.

The City or County has put signs up in the park reminding visitors to stay six feet apart. The signs aren’t ugly, they don’t shout, but the message is hard to read from a distance and the tagline are hard to read when you’re on top of the signs. They make a former graphic artist wince.

There was an article in the NYT this morning about how during the Great Depression the government put thousands of artists to work under the WPA . Examples of beautiful murals, posters and signs were cited. In Trump’s world funding for the arts is non starter. So who do they hire when they want get something done? The signs in the park look like they were done by an eighth grader. Who did the Cuomo’s hideous highway signs?

I’m still steaming about the Post Office”s move in 1999 to replace the distinctive logo that fit perfectly on the outdoor boxes with some sort of italicized, speedy like Fed Ex, abomination. The new logo makes the fifties’ styled boxes look like they’re falling over. The old logss are still there under the bigger parallelograms. Maybe we can steam them off.

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We won’t be able to get this view of the Sea Breeze lighthouse again until November as the State will be opening the swing bridge on April Fools Day. The trail, just to the left of the willow trees, what’s left of the former Hojack line, is one of our favorites. There are still some railroad ties buried just below the surface and it eventually runs across a restaurant deck but eventually leads you to a small park with picnic tables across the street from the old Peg’s Hots. I wouldn’t expect anyone to remember where that place was but my friends, Tim Schapp and Joe Barrett. worked there one summer.

Peggi suggested that we may be better prepared for the quarantine than most because of the three Caminos we did. The whole thing of simplifying your world, all your possessions in your backpack, a room to eat, clean up and sleep in. Maybe so. We were planning to take a fourth walk in April, the northerly Primitivo from France to Santiago, but that is only a dream now.

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We used to have a Pussy Willow tree in the backyard of our house in the city. It grew like a weed and I would cut six feet off the branches every year to keep it away from the power lines. We got in the habit of picking fresh bunches for the house. Out here, by the lake, we spotted one on what we think might be park property, the undeveloped part. We keep our eye on the tree and raid it when the time is right.

Only those who are sick have a right to complain so this isn’t a complaint. It is an observation. I am finding it impossible to get anything done during this stay at home shut down. I thought I would be putting dents in all sorts of projects but I spend the whole day reading about the virus, reading about the president’s free-styling, talking to friends and relatives, placing online orders, taking a walk and then worrying. And everyone who has ever picked up a guitar has a down home performance on social media so you can pretty bogged down there.

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I didn’t sleep that good last night so I did an extra dose of walking thinking I will sleep better tonight. It’s hard to get the day started with all the dreadful news and protocol revisals to wade through. And now Vitamin supplements might be good again. It is only 27 degrees so I’m hoping my face was able to take enough of that in.

I love this time of year. Hints of color everywhere after a sustained absence. Spring is so dramatic. More dramatic than the virus.

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We picked our third batch of Forsythia branches today and brought them into the house to replace the first batch that is beginning to fall. This will surely be the last because the bushes are just beginning to flower outside. All I can say about the photo above is that the yellow motorcycle looked cool so I photographed it. It did not look like it was floating.

I don’t shop at Parkleigh but my sister works there and they stayed open through the weekend and then closed, laying of my sister after ten years of loyal service. Everybody has a story like this.

We found the press conference given by the top Medical experts at UR sobering but helpful. We don’t have anywhere near enough tests and there is nothing they can do to treat you if and when you contract the virus. Their top concern is isolating those with it. Keeping health professionals safe and isolating hospital patients with it. Good luck.

This, from Paul Krugman’s column, pisses me off.

“Compare, for example, America’s handling of the coronavirus with that of South Korea. Both countries reported their first case on Jan. 20. But Korea moved quickly to implement widespread testing; it has used the data from that testing to guide social distancing and other containment measures; and the disease appears to be on the wane there.

In the U.S., by contrast, testing has barely begun — we’ve tested only 60,000 people compared with South Korea’s 290,000, even though we have six times its population, and the number of cases here appears to be skyrocketing.”

Meanwhile, we’re working our way through this fantastic playlist.

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NYS prison laborers are making hand sanitizer to keep up with demand. I read an article about how dangerous the grocery store is. The place to go if you want the virus. It fed my suspicions of live shopping. Instead of going in Wegman’s we used their Instacart service and drove up there to pick up the items they had in stock. I was surprised how long an online order takes to fill. Our wait was just over two days.

Our shopper texted us when she began filling the order. They had no dried beans, no canned beans, no beans of any variety. She sent us a photo of the empty shelves. Organic brown eggs. Forget about it. We texted back. “OK, any large eggs.” She texted back, “We have no eggs.”

Out walking today we saw groups of teens. A cluster of girls that wouldn’t give us space on the boardwalk in the park. We had to hold our breath as we passed by. They’re out of school and hanging with their friends. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t have taken any of this seriously at that age.

Our friend Kathy walked by our house this afternoon. She texted us to say say and we waved from the window.

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We got out early in order to beat the rain but it never really came. The temperature was near fifty and queese were overhead heading generally in a northerly direction. There wasn’t much sun out and we didn’t expect the lake to look so dramatic. We came back with so many photos. This was my favorite.

We stopped in the park to chat with some people on our way back. One of the guys in our cluster had come up the road from the direction of the lake and I asked if he had seen the lake. He hadn’t but he said he and his wife lived on Lake Bluff Road for four years and their bedroom looked out over the lake. He said the lake has a different personality every day.

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Joy Adams did these two drawings from memory. They are a tribute to Ducky, a goat she owned for years but had to get rid of. She called him a soulmate and says “in a former life he might have been my husband.” The drawings are featured in Rochester Contemporary’s Makers & Mentors 2020 exhibition and Joy gave an artist’s talk this afternoon along with one of her former students, Lin Price.

Born in England just after the World War her memories of the English countryside reshape what she sees from the window of her barn/studio/home in Ithaca. “There is nothing unique about lavishly prickly weeds or trees dozing off in my backyard, unless I manage to bring something new to how I see them. The challenge is to avoid the predictable because predictability is about as welcome as a cold cuppa tea.”

She told the crowd she tries to tell the truth by moving beyond looking to seeing. Mostly through direct observation. She says the soul that drawings have is the difference between looking and seeing

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Last night’s opening for Bea Nettles show, “Harvest of Memory,” was in fact a harvest of memories. Nettles taught art here at Nazareth College. She finished her masters at Visual Studies and went on to teach at RIT. She raised a family and continued to work. Old friends and students of hers were there. We didn’t know Nettles but some our old friends did and they were there.

Nettles uses alternative photographic processes and achieves organic results. She plays with mythology, family, motherhood, place, landscape, dreams, the passage of time and she makes art with it all. She gives a talk on her work on Saturday, February 1, at 1 p.m.

Jason Farago’s bad review of a photography show at the International Center of Photography in NY was fun to read. “The Case of Art vs. Instagram.” He calls out the Center for playing to the gate, a problem for all the art institutions.

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Peggi dropped me off in front of the Hall of Justice this morning. I was bracing for the worst. They couldn’t even get somebody to shovel the walk. They just threw this blue chemical on the snow and waited for it to melt. I was here for jury duty, called back after only four years because I had weaseled out of the last one. It was the middle of summer, I was shuttling my father back and forth to doctors and they picked me for a trial they expected to last three more weeks.

The lawyers had already presented the gist of their case. The trial was moved from Niagara Falls because the incident had been covered so heavily there. Three cops answered a 911 domestic abuse call. They came into the courtroom in their finest cop regalia, all puffed up, and sat right in front of me. The guy who was beating his wife was representing himself in a orange jump suit, claiming the cops had roughed him up. Within twenty minutes the cops were all slumped down in their chairs while the jump suit guy prattled on.

This time my name was called for a morning case but it wound up being postponed. Forty of the four hundred people in the jury room were instructed stick around for an afternoon trail. The judge want a four part form filled out. “Have you ever been the victim of a crime? Been accused of a crime? Been a witness to a crime? Have you ever been employed by Law Enforcement or Criminal Justice Agency? I answered yes to all four and that case was settled out of court. I’m free for another eight years!

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Wouldn’t you love to have been around before the first cars mucked everything up? Just like the guy in the painting this Everett Shinn piece from 1905 always stops me in my tracks. I’m waiting for self driving vehicles so we can all sit back and dream again.

I put a bunch of new songs on the Margaret Explosion mp3 page. This one is from a few weeks ago.

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