Spare Us the Cutter...Or Those Who Poorly Use Them

There once stood a proud hydrangea here.

     Sometimes, I leave myself shaking my head.    

     Saturday, my lovely wife Val and I did some needed yard work, mainly in the front of our property, and I also did a bit in back. While there may be more, there are two rules all home/property owners agree exist: All homes are eventually perpetual fixer uppers, and there is always yard work to do. Since we have a 124-year-old house and an extra lot next door to us as our property, you can see how true this rings.

     I was doing some tree and bush pruning and trimming, and attacking some grape vines and other older, more virulent weeds, tool in hand (Val now calls it the “heartless chopper,“ or claims she calls the tool that, and not me, who may be the real tool here). After finishing my major objectives, I started pruning and trimming around a fence on the right side of our front garden; this garden is split in two by the walk from the sidewalk to our porch steps. There are trees, bushes, shrubs and other plants, with the crowning life forms the two hydrangea plants, one on each side of the stairs set back close to the house.

     Of course, Val and my missions Saturday were to weed, cut, prune and trim uninvited growths that were threatening the lives of the items we love as well as being eyesores. I also wanted to trim a couple of trees and remove some unwanted weeds on the side of the house. Val was working hard on the weeds along the front of both sides of the garden as well as on some growth further back. Because I was making better time than expected, I started to work inside the garden on the right side, a bit back near the utility meter on that side near the house. I started in on that side and removed a lot of growth, including vines and weeds.

     We went inside after finishing as much as we could before the weather got too hot; I went grocery shopping, while Val worked on the next episode of her YouTube vlog, “TrikeLife.” After I pickled up dinner, we went to Nick Charlap’s for ice cream, which Val had been looking forward to all weekend. As she went down the stairs, she looked to the right side of the garden and said “Wow, you really cleared a lot of stuff from around the meter…WHERE IS THE HYDRANGEA?” I looked and started to say “Right there…holy shit.” You guessed it, I had pruned/trimmed the hydrangea dangerously low, to the point you could barely see it. It had not registered at all to me before, during or after I had done it that I had actually damaged the hydrangea, a plant we both love and Val especially cherishes.

     I can’t count how many times I apologized to Val about this and how many times I have tried to figure out how I did this so in depth without realizing what I was doing. We’ve both spread coffee grounds over the years to affect our hydrangea’s color, and Val has done all she could to keep them watered and getting sun. The aggrieved hydrangea is not dead, but as Val said, it will take a little time, like 5 years, to fully grow back. Maybe I’ll be allowed to trim things again by then.

David J. Costello: Colleague, Friend, Mensch

  

David J.Costello, right, one of the best, with Steve Mikula

  My friend and colleague from Buffalo State College, David J. Costello, who sadly died June 29, is one of those persons you hope you encounter sometime. He was friendly, funny, intelligent, kind, thoughtful, strong in his beliefs but approached life and situations looking for the best in people and working with them to solve things, instead of instigating conflicts.

     David became my, or I became his, friend and colleague through the United Students Government at Buffalo State, where he served as president for two, one-year terms, from 1982-1983 and 1983-1984, as head of the Positive Outlook party/ticket. I ran unsuccessfully for USG senate on another ticket in 1982 (a whole other story), but stayed active and when two senate vacancies came up at the start of the school year, I was chosen to fill one of them. David welcomed me, let me know there were no hard feelings for me having run on the other ticket, and asked where we could work together.

     One area almost all of us serving in various student representative positions, from the United Students Government and College Senate to the Faculty Student Association and College Council (I was fortunate to serve with Costello on the College Senate and follow him as student representative on the College Council), was fighting the two-pronged assault of tuition increases and faculty reductions. Much of this resulted from painful cuts in federal and state student aid after the conservative policies of Reagan, Pataki, etc., took their toll. David rallied us student representatives and other students to publicly fight these draconian actions, using his own skills plus those developed during his internship with then-U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He appeared at rallies, on television and radio (these being pre-Internet times), teaming up with faculty, staff and administrators when necessary and advantageous, showing us that students could fight for their rights, even when not overly successful. I have always felt a bit betrayed that, while we fought against faculty and staff cuts, we didn’t receive much, if any, support in return for exorbitant tuition increases, but that’s another story.

     David’s ability to work with all kinds of people served him well here; he did not show public anger, but he did display outrage when necessary at the cuts and their effects on students. He also did not turn the USG into a partisan political circus, as some might do, instead focusing on students’ rights and needs at Buffalo State College. David asked me to run on his Positive Outlook ticket the next year; I was honored and said yes, and was honored more when he designated me the senate majority leader during his second term. He also avoided another political circus during the end of his second term, when I ran to succeed him as USG president. David had no wish to run again, as he was planning to graduate, and while he wholeheartedly supported me, we both knew he could not come out publicly supporting me because of the other candidates’ involvement with USG. I would absolutely have loved him to come out endorsing me, but fully understood his decision and still marvel at his integrity. I did take his offer of advice on campaigning for the office, and I probably should have done a better job, since I finished second in the USG presidential race (to someone with the last name of Mosey).

     After David graduated, he occasionally kept in touch about USG issues but did not want to appear like he was interfering and indeed, he had moved on, to work on the finance world, eventually with a career in management at HSBC Bank. I would see him occasionally and always welcome our discussions, me addressing him as “Mr. President,” and he calling me either “Senator Hosey” or “Majority Leader Hosey” before using first names. The last time I spoke to David in person was before he moved from Buffalo to New York City for a position; I was picking up dinner from the late, great Italian Village Restaurant on Buffalo’s West Side when I saw David in a booth with a friend. We hugged, spoke for a few minutes and, as always, vowed to stay in touch. Fortunately, the Internet and social media allowed us to do so. Our main discussions were on politics, both national and Buffalo, dogs (he so loved his beloved Freddie) and the Buffalo Bills, for which David was a rabid fan. My wife Val Dunne and David became fast social media friends, particularly on canine and political topics. As his health took a turn for the worse, I heard less from him, understanding but not wanting to accept why.

      David treated everyone he met with respect and dignity, sometimes more than I would have, and his friendship and love for so many people and causes are a wonderful legacy. The reason I chose the photo accompanying this piece, from the 1984 Elms, the Buffalo State College yearbook, of David sharing a laugh with a member of the Student Union maintenance staff, is it shows his warmth, humor and ability to get along with everybody. I hope Buffalo State University, as the school is now known, does something to honor David J. Costello. I and so many people mourn his loss and already badly miss him. Hail to the Chief, my friend.

Maybe Jim Carroll Can Offer Some Help

Jim Carroll: Inspirational, confrontational

     Despite publishing two recent posts and having several ideas in my head or started, I am still suffering from a major combination of writer’s block and fear of writing and publishing something that is not even close to good or worthy of public consumption.

     It is no surprise that many writers go through this, some I greatly respect and enjoy reading. There is a great two-page illustration of how it affected at least one writer, the late Jim Carroll, in his fantastic, explicit “Forced Entries, The Downtown Diaries: 1971-1973.” After becoming famous for his “The Basketball Diaries,” an award-winning look at his growing up Catholic in New York City, being a basketball wunderkind and wasting it away through heroin addiction and youth, he wrote another diary of his life as a poet, writer, junkie and scenester, including working for Andy Warhol.

     He eventually went on methadone to try to detox, but due to the ugliness heroin and methadone caused, he moved to California for a while, taking lower doses of methadone and cleaning up otherwise. While it worked in several ways, he found an overpowering inability to either write or find value in any of his writing. It came up directly and as part of other thoughts, which I immediately recognized. His pangs of guilt, inadequacy and waste are also felt strongly by me, like punches to the gut.

     I won’t quote it all, particularly on his difficulty of writing with pen and paper, but his typewriter description includes this truth: “Each letter typed seemed to chew up the one before it like a vicious dog so that no words could be completed…It’s all as if words, phrases, images, syntax were small glass beads from a necklace which was wrenched from some neck and spilled on the floor and down the sides of sofa cushions and armchairs and under bookshelves and maybe swallowed by the cat.” Carroll also states how he must collect them all before he can even try to rearrange/reorder any of them.

     The ruefully funny conflict of trying to write about writer’s block and fear of writing but having to use someone else’s writing to do so because I can’t is not lost on me. Fuck, I have to get out of this rut, this trap, and now.

My Mind (or Friend) Playing Tricks on Me

 

These are some of the intriguing items someone has sent me.

   It seems someone inside Erie County is having some fun with me, and so far, I have few clues as to who the comedian is.

     Sometime in late February/early March, I received an interdepartmental manila envelope addressed to “Mr. Kevin L. Hosey, Esq. Erie County Rath Building FOURTH FLOOR,” incorrect middle initial noted. Inside the envelope was a book, “The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks,” by Joshua Cooper Ramo. No accompanying note or anything else was included. About a month later, I received another manila interdepartmental envelope, addressed to “Kevin Hosey 4TH FLOOR,” with another book inside, “Managers, Can You Hear Me Now?” by Denny F. Strigl and Frank E. Swiatek. Again, no note of any kind, but this envelope was in another manila interdepartmental envelope.

     I tried to figure out any connections between the two packages, but there were few, except that both came from the 11th Floor of the Rath Building. One specifically had a previous delivery address of Unit 100, a specialized office of the Erie County Department of Social Services on that floor; I work in the accounting department (Office of Financial and Resource Management) of ECDSS. The other had as one of the crossed-off addresses the “11th Floor;” the main occupant of the 11th Floor is the Comptroller’s Office. I know no one who works at Unit 100, but I have a friend who I formerly worked with in another department/part of Erie County who works at the Comptroller’s Office, and is ridiculously intelligent with a frequently dry sense of humor, but has never pulled such a joke on me and have not even alluded to such a situation; they are also the type who would never use Erie County interdepartmental envelopes for anything but county business. BTW, I also hate self-help books.

     No other instances occurred and I thought this was a hit-and-run joke, but in mid-May, I received a third manila county interdepartmental envelope, this time addressed to “Sir Kevin Hosey Fourth Floor Rath Building,” but with all of the previous addresses inked out and unreadable. The contents were the most interesting yet: A typed note reading “See you real soon! Love you K-DOG!!!!!,” a small envelope containing a preprinted card reading “SURPRISE!” on the outside and handwritten “BOO!!!” on the inside, a postcard announcing the opening reception for “Tonto Revisited: Native American Stereotypes,” at the ArtRage Gallery in Syracuse from November 2010, and a copy of the CD “Rise Up: Colors of Peace,” readings of works of Turkish poet and Muslim political activist M. Fethullah Gulen, who the Turkish government tried to extradite from the US during the Trump presidential monstrosity.

     This last package has me flummoxed. I have no idea why any of the individual items were sent. have absolutely no idea how they relate, and I have NEVER been a nickname person, even though I went through grade school and high school being called “Hose” or “The Hose” way more than my given name. One person in college called me K-Hose a couple of times, but they neither work for nor live in Erie County.

     I applaud the person or people involved with leaving so few identifiable clues and in particular, such a weird assortment of items in the last package. It seems someone knows part of me very well and for a long time, or had a way of finding out those things. Wish I could turn to my late father Edward to utilize his sleuthing skills as developed in the U.S. Army Security Agency; he loved a good puzzle or conspiracy to break.

Let's talk books, er, talk about books, er, read books

 

My most recently started and completed books, respectively.

     I probably love books and reading more and longer than anything in my life, now that my beloved mother Sheila has been gone almost 5 years, with the exception of chocolate. Even music comes second to reading.

     Snapshots of what I am reading at a particular moment are snapshots of what is going on in my life, or at least my head, at that same moment. The vast majority of what I read is non-fiction; after reading a lot of fiction in classes in high school and college, where the breakdown was about 60-40 favoring non-fiction, it rose to 90-95 percent non-fiction for a long time, My interest in comic books and graphic novels in the 1980-2000s, which subsided for a bit but has grown again in the last 5-7 years, affected those percentages again. I do read some fiction (Vonnegut, Fitzgerald, Conrad, Hemingway, Ibsen), but there is a still base in reality.

     So, I thought it was time to present such a snapshot, to let you readers know what is in my hands and in front of my eyes, as well as maybe help break this continuing writer’s block/fear of writing. These examples will be books; I do read/subscribe to other media outlets, including The Athletic, The New Yorker and The Buffalo News online, and read several news websites. But I am a book fan, a bibliophile, and like with newspapers, after more than 18 years writing and editing for them, I enjoy holding a book as well as perusing and buying them still.

     I am one of those persons who reads more than one book at a time, although if I really start getting into one, I will put down the others while I absorb one. I am currently reading “Antietam: The Battle That Changed the Course of the Civil War,” by James M. McPherson, as my upstairs media room/evening book, and downstairs in the living room, I am reading “Mapplethorpe: A Biography,” by Patricia Morrisroe. In my knapsack/at work, for the very few times I can read a book (Iunch time I walk, then check my phone/social media), I am reading “Straight White Male: Performance Art Monologues,” by Michael Peterson. And yes, I also have two books in the downstairs bathroom: “The New Trouser Press Record Guide,” third edition from 1989, and “History of Buffalo Music and Entertainment” by Rick Falkowski. Both books have been perused in short and long takes for a while.

     I didn’t want to go back too far, but the most recent books I finished reading, basically end of 2023-2024, are: “Devotion,” by Patti Smith; ”Apocalypse Nerd” and “Other Lives,” both by Peter Bagge; “All I Ever Wanted,” by Kathy Valentine; “John Constantine Hellblazer: Original Sins,” by Jamie Delano, John Ridgway, Alfredo Alcala, Rick Veitch and Tom Mandrake; “1916: The Easter Rising,” by Tim Pat Coogan; “Blubber,” by Gilbert Hernandez, and “How to Catch a Russian Spy,” by Naveed Jamali. I also find myself going back to old copies of Creem, Trouser Press and Musician magazines for specific articles.

     Don’t worry if any of this causes you to wonder how these books affect and illustrate my life; I think about it often and don’t have all the answers, and maybe avoid some of those answers. I suppose being a professional writer for almost 40 years fits somewhere in here.

Leif Spiritual - Pink Days EP

 

     Leif Spiritual is the nom de musique of Tony Christiano, best known as the lead guitarist/co-lead vocalist and songwriter for Oui73, one of the best/my favorite bands from the 1990s. He recently released (I just can’t make myself say or write “dropped”) a four-song EP, “Pink Days,” and it is really, really, really good.

     There is a lot of what made Oui73 so good, loudly ringing, charging guitar work, moody atmospheres and interesting songwriting; Christiano told me that much of the recording is based on his experience in Oui73 and apparently the surrounding times. I gathered that from some references before he told me that, and subsequent listening to this EP reinforced this.

     The recording starts with “You Know I Need It,” upbeat ringing guitars with a touch of Oasis sound; Christiano has been looking for something better in a relationship of some kind, and believes he’s found it, whether band or partner wise, wanting more than a quick fix or mindless set up. The title song follows, referring to the Pink Flamingo/The Old Pink, Buffalo’s best dive bar for longer than the 30-40 years many of us drank, smoked and listened to great DJs like Terry Sullivan, Casino el Camino, Eric Van Rysdam and David Gutierrez. The hard but melodic rocker has Christiano looking back after so many nights there, and half resenting, half laughing at the bouncers and staff throwing customers out at the end with the same lines and methods he saw as a much younger man. His refrain hook of “this place will never be the same” is humorous, based on experience and little bit of nostalgia.

     “Out of My Hands,” a collaboration with Allison Pipitone, who sings harmony vocals (Christiano’s sister, Holly Christiano, played guitar in both Oui73 and with Pipitone) has more surging, charging guitars, and Christiano’s occasionally slightly distorted vocals sing of trying to save a situation, musical or romantic, but he’s done all he can and it’s up to others to put in the same effort so things don’t end. The final song, “A Crash on the 425,” is a slow, ominous, sometimes spooky or scary song about a car crash on that Canadian highway, made all the more eerie because it’s based on an accident Christiano came upon years ago. The acoustic guitars build until the electric guitars take over, and Christiano seems to go back and forth from the agony of the male driver searching for his partner and his own shock of discovering the accident, the outcome never clarified.

     Leif Spiritual’s “Pink Days”can be found at Apple Music, Spotify and on most music platforms.

RIP Tony Bennett: It's a Family Affair

 

     I’m saddened at the recent death of singer/activist Tony Bennett at age 95, both as a fan and for the family affair connections he created for many years.

     My late father Edward introduced me to Bennett’s music more than 50 years ago; a major big band jazz fan, with Stan Kenton his holy grail, dad's favorite male vocalists, at least from what little he would say in his usual secret way but introduced to me playing them on weekends, seemed to be Frank Sinatra and Bennett. No doubt partly for this reason as well as really liking their music, particularly the 1940s-mid-1960s, they became my favorite male jazz vocalists (I’m willing to be enlightened of others). There is something they could do with a melody and rhythm, and the use of dynamics and subtlety and/or taste both Sinatra and Bennett used are needed more today.

     While I thank my father for the introduction to these two singers, my late mother Sheila is a former fan of Bennett, although I kind of believed she never really stopped liking him. But every time my father would play his music for me, or any time Bennett appeared on television, mom would loudly launch into her mostly staged anger at how she used to love his music and was a favorite, but did I forget he up and left his first wife for a younger woman and that people just didn’t do that and that she couldn’t listen to his music any more. Of course, I frequently heard her singing “Fly Me to the Moon” and “I Left my Heart in San Francisco” while cooking or other activities, sometimes even dancing a bit while she sang.

     I was thrilled when Bennett made a serious comeback in his 60s, first with his tribute to the music of Fred Astaire, “Steppin’ Out,” but as no surprise, my favorite of his later albums was “Perfectly Frank,” a gorgeous, heartfelt and wonderful album of Sinatra songs. His version of “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” would be amazing at any age. The fact that Bennett, a World War II veteran, was busted in rank because he ate meals and fraternized with African American soldiers, and later joined the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on his voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, shows he was more than a singer.

     The first night after the announcement of Bennett’s death, I spent hours listening to his music, starting with the classic “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” album, and even listened to his Christmas album on a hot July night, thinking about the singer, my mother and father. I hope l always think of them when I hear Bennett’s music.