Passion Play

April 8, 2015December 18, 2019

Bleak But Beautiful

Staub's Cleaners on East Main Street in Rochester NY 1994 — Staub’s Cleaners on East Main Street in Rochester NY 1994

Batch processing a folder of photos and throwing them into Apple’s Keynote and then exporting the whole thing to html is so much easier than creating individual web pages. But of course there are all sorts of drawbacks. Like how do you link to a particular page or photo and how do you write tags for the pages so a search engine could find them?

These photos were taken in 1994 with a film camera when I was just beginning to develop an idea for a contemporary setting of the Stations of the Cross (the Passion Play or Way of the Cross; in Latin, Via Crucis), an idea that is still in the developmental stage twenty years down the road. We lived across from East High at the time and we’d head downtown on this route most days. While I was taking the photo of East High a security guard came out and told me “You can’t photograph the school.” East High became a perfect location for Jesus to get sentenced and I pictured him crucified at the Liberty Pole. The route looks rather bleak but it is quite beautiful. The photos were really just location shots for possible staging of a particular station but I found them interesting to look back on especially because so many of these places are gone.

East High School, Carroll’s Bar and McDonalds are all there. Mooneys (formerly Effingers) and Fams Party House are still standing but the businesses have left. El Palladium and Jimmy’s Short Orders have both been knocked down for a monstrous new Regional Transit Bus Terminal. Volunteers of America, Fatboys, Chase Bank, Tucker Printers, the Adult Book Store and Otis Lumber are still there but have changed hands. The Armory Building has actually come back to life as a venue. Corpus Christi Church, Staub’s Cleaners, the Penguin Restaurant and Hedges Funeral Home are still there but are empty or repurposed. WDKX is not going anywhere. Kentucky Fried Chicken is an Asian place. Richmond’s and the Chinese place are still there with new owners. Cathay Pagoda and the Tea House Art Gallery, Snuffy’s Birdland and McCurdys are gone. The Liberty Pole is still standing.

And the Inner Loop is being filled in. Chuck Cuminale, who would lead the Colorblind James crowd in “Death To The Inner Loop chants, would be elated.

Cross in the back of a pick up at the Hungerford Building in Rochester, NY

I was talking to Tom Lacagnina at the last RoCo opening about a mutual friend who had passed out at a dinner party. Tom said he remembered passing out at Church and I do too. I remember the sinking sensation as my knees buckled and all that Catholic imagery began to swirl. It seemed someone in our family was always passing out during Mass. It was often hot and the clothes we had to wear were stuffy but that wasn’t the reason. We used to have to fast for three hours before receiving Communion. As kids we were up running around the house for hours before my parents rounded us up for Mass. We were starved by the time the service began. And a dry wafer stuck to the roof of your mouth did not exactly hit the spot. Sacrifice is a big part of the Catholic experience.

My favorite part of Catholic Churches has always been the Stations of the Cross. They are usually different in each Church and offer more to contemplate than a single statue. The fourteen stations are spread around the church and tell the story of Christ’s crucifixion. In older churches they are usually presented in a in a traditional fashion but in contemorary churches they are often minimal and symbolic. The greatest story ever told is is fertile ground for artists.

The owner of this pickup truck is ready for a real sacrifice. You just never know when you might come across a Christlike figure. I was not surprised to see this cross parked near the corner of Main and Goodman. I picked East Main Street years ago as the setting for a modern day crucifixion. In 1993 I began collecting source material for a series of paintings that I planned to do of this story. I photographed locations for a contemporary setting that would have Christ sentenced near our home at East High and crucified at the Liberty Pole. This truck is on that route, just across the street from the adult book store.

I still haven’t done the paintings but I did make large prints of the source material and displayed them at the Bug Jar for a month. I entered them in the Finger Lakes Show in 1999 and won a few awards with the “Passion Play” piece. I will do those paintings some day.

3 Comments

March 24, 2008August 29, 2019

Happy Ending

This woman had herself crucified along with seventeen others even though the Archbishop of San Fernando in the Philippines urged devotees not to turn Holy Week into a circus. Philippine health officials warned people taking part in Easter crucifixions and self-flagellation rituals to get a tetanus shot first and sterilize the nails to avoid infections.

We traveled to Spain a few years back and spent Holy Week in Granada. Semana Santa is the biggest string of holy days/holidays of the year there. We watched processions wind through the streets with bands, women in black lace mantillas and teams of guys hidden beneath and supporting the weight of floats with the virgin in the lead and a depiction the suffering Christ in the rear. In Spain this is all a reverent but festive affair. The goose bump inducing highlight is always when the procession stops and the crowd grows silent while someone sings a saeta to the virgin.

We had dinner yesterday with Peggi’s mom and my brother, Fran. I was thinking about how we used to give up candy for Lent and then gorge ourselves on Easter and my parents asking us to remain silent between noon and 3PM on Good Friday (the hours Christ was hanging on the cross). I don’t think we were able to do this. My whole family left the Church while I was in high school and my parents are now more likely to celebrate Passover than Easter with their children and in-laws. But that Catholic stuff hangs around.

About fifteen years ago I revisited the Way of the Cross and began the process of recasting the Passion Play in present time. I collected source material with the intention of doing a series of paintings. I don’t believe anyone rose from the dead except maybe Shirley Maclaine so I was kind of bummed to see the last Pope amend the fourteen stations of the cross that I remember so vividly from my childhood. He gave the story an implausible, happy ending by adding the Resurrection as the fifteen station. When I do get around to these paintings I only plan to do fourteen of them.

1 Comment