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This is a watercolor my mother, Nancy Hayes, painted around 1949. View is to the south/southeast, from a ninth floor window at 23 High Street, Buffalo.

Edited for clarification: I’m guessing 1949, but it could have been anywhere from 1946 to 1954, when my Dad worked at UB for the first time.

The building’s gone. It was between Main and Washington, I think mid-block. South side of High Street.

I’m re-doing the matting. The frame was made by my father, then finished by my mother. She slathered black paint on the oak, then wiped it off, the front side anyway. Then my Dad finished it off, in a fairly crude way that’s held up very well. They were a handy couple and quite a team when it came to making things.

I think the houses in the painting are on Washington Street. Some may still be there, though houses were moved around in that block so it might be hard to tell.

. . . it should be: Jesse Ventura, in the course of his successful run for Minnesota governor, was asked by a reporter if wrestling is “fake,” to which he answered: “Fake? Is the ballet ‘fake’?”

Paco, what do you think of the image that all the artists have of you? You’re practically a god in flamenco.

Well, it’s something I got used to. Because it’s always been like that, ever since I was a child I think. When I was small people praised me and they’d say “oh, the kid, how the kid plays!… the kid …the kid…” So it’s something you get used to and it’s more a pain in the ass, if you pardon my language, than anything else. Well, you enjoy it but the responsibility of being there is huge and every time you make a record you get obsessed and you want to do it better. It’s very nice, I can’t complain, but sometimes the responsibility overcomes the pleasure of doing things, having to do things well can at times cancel out the pleasure of doing them.

–Interview with Javier Primo

Four photos from the day-after brunch:

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

James Thurber

. . . to show off materials. The “windows” allow us to use various clear and translucent glasses, the rest of the table could be chestnut, oak or hemlock. Put some lights inside and it will be quite a looker.

Asked if he grows tired of talking about ecological stewardship, digging in, and coalition-building, the poet Gary Snyder responds with candor: “Am I tired of talking about it? I’m tired of doing it!” he roars. “But hey, you’ve got to keep doing it. That’s part of politics, and politics is more than winning and losing at the polls.”

When Allen met him in 1954, Peter [Orlovsky] had been honorably discharged from the Army – where he worked as an ambulance driver — for telling a psychiatrist, “An army with guns is an army against love.”
–Steve Silberman, in Lion’s Roar

From Gore Vidal‘s memoir Palimpsest:

Recently [1994], a television interviewer quoted me as having said, “I seem to have met everyone, but I know no one.” Grinning like a tiger in anticipation of antelope, she leaned forward, gently salivating, eager to hear a tragic sigh, see a tear of self-pity. Plainly, due to my high and solitary place in the world—am I not the Living Buddha?—and to my cold nature and to my refusal to conform to warm mature family values, I am doomed to be the eternal outsider, the black sheep among those great good white flocks of folks who graze contentedly in the amber fields of the Republic.

I told her briskly that I had never wanted to meet most of the people that I had met and the fact that I never got to know most of them took dedication and steadfastness on my part. By choice and luck, my life has been spent reading other people’s books and making sentences for my own. More to the point, if you have known one person you have known them all. Of course, I am not so sure that I have known even one person well, but, as the Greeks sensibly believed, should you get to know yourself, you will have penetrated as much of the human mystery as anyone need ever know.