Simply New York

Old farm land off Westfall Road in Rochester, New York
Old farm land off Westfall Road in Rochester, New York

Yesterday, I took a trip back in time with my father. He had asked for some help with a dig he was doing at the old farm property on Westfall Road which the town of Brighton has recently purchased. The town burnt the old farm house in a fire department exercise and then bulldozed the charred remains into the earth and then they stuck a sign in the ground that reads “Archeologic Dig”. My father pointed out that it was misspelled but I didn’t notice. He has uncovered an old well and a brick path that runs between it and the house. I tried to lift some big pieces of concrete out of the old well without falling in. My father is using Google SketchUp and old photos to reconstruct the property as was in the early 1800’s.

Instead of walking in the woods today we headed over to “Simply New York”, the new store on Culver Road up near the lake. We saw an albino squirrel on the way. Everything in the store is made in New York. I looked at a t-shirt that read “If you’re lucky enough to live in Sea Breeze, you’re lucky enough.” We bought a jig saw puzzle made in Buffalo, some pepper pasta made in Watertown and some shoes made in Batavia. I wore the shoes home in the rain and my feet stayed dry. I told the owner I was going to bring them back if my feet got wet. He gave us some Hedonist sesame chocolate (made in Rochester) for the walk home.

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Grey or Gray?

Two deer in the woods near Rochester, NY
Two deer in the woods near Rochester, NY

Everything is going brown and then grey but the the subtly of those browns and greys is astounding. The deer know this. We’re just figuring it out. Click photo to enlarge.

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Add To Queue

Cemetery Trash
Cemetery Trash

Jack Schaefer brought his bass clarinet and Pete LaBonne was in town for the holiday so he played the grand piano. Bob Martin was out of town for the holiday so Wednesday night was all new and different for Margaret Explosion. Just the way we like it. We also picked up another gig at Rochester Roots annual dinner party next Friday.

There was an article in yesterday’s paper about Netflix coming out of nowhere a few years ago and going from the Post Office’s largest customer to the internet’s biggest bandwidth hog. If someone raves about a movie they have just seen my inclination is to “Add to Queue” not “Go the Theater.” The Little Theater is a local treasure and they’re hurting. The independent film network is no loner independent. They need your support. If the the theater goes down the café goes with it. Hope you can stop out tonight for the Little Theater Benefit. Margaret Explosion plays one set at 7:45.

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Learning Disabilities

Paul Dodd "Crimeface 2010" Watercolor
Paul Dodd “Crimeface 2010” Watercolor

My cat is fourteen years old and she still plays with my shoelaces. I don’t think she is going to grow out of it.

It was sixty degrees here today so I went up on the roof with the brown caulk and plugged the holes that the wood peckers made in our fascia board. I do this every year. I love hearing woodpeckers in the woods and trying to spot them. I love watching them slam their head into a tree so I can’t complain about them. I wonder whether they just peck away in an exploratory fashion or do they suspect we have some tasty bugs behind the fascia.

My father bought a Milky Way from the vending machine outside our painting class last night. He split it with his pocket knife and when he bit into his half he pulled out a temporary cap. We both picked up some bad teeth genes and you’d think we’d know enough to stay away from carmel. Our painting teacher stated the obvious. I overheard him telling another painter that he will never tell us what to do. He only points out the problems. If he told us what to do it would take all the fun out of it and we wouldn’t learn anything.

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Ghostbread

Our neighbor,Jack, helps little girl
Our neighbor,Jack, helps little girl

When Jim Mott was staying with us last Spring he mentioned that his wife, Sonja, had just released a new book about growing up in Rochester, New York. I ordered it from Amazon while we stood there. Jim said we could meet Sonja the next week at an art opening at the Oxford Gallery where he had would be showing some paintings. We went to the opening but we had the wrong night so we never connected.

Leighton Avenue, Bowman Street, Grand Avenue, Lamont Place and two locations on East Main near Culver. I know every one of the streets that Sonja Livingston mentions in “Ghostbread”. My parents lived upstairs in an apartment on Alexander and Main when I was born. We were right around the corner from Corpus Christi where Sonja spends so much time. I was baptized there. My family moved east of Culver to Brookfield and we lived there for ten years, right across from the Kirby Vacuum Center that Sonja talks about in her opening pages. Later, Peggi and I lived across from East High for twenty six years. We were only a few blocks away from most of what happens in this gorgeous memoir but we were a world away as well. Like Sonja I played Mass with my siblings but my six siblings all had the same father and he lived with us and provided for and nurtured us. The extreme differences in her circumstances in such close proximity is only part of what makes this book so engrossing.

Sonja’s chapters are short, sometimes only a page but they are so efficiently packed and carefully crafted they knock me out. Some nights I found I could read only a few chapters before wanting to set the book down, close my eyes and savor the exquisite setting. I suggested my mom bring this book to the next meeting of her book club.

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The Agony and Ecstasy

Donovan in Buffalo
Donovan in Buffalo

Last night “The Agony and Ecstasy of Phil Spector” played on the big screen at the Dryden Theatre in the George Eastman House in glorious mono. Most of the songs anyway. It’s adventurous and reckless and almost over the top. There are essentially three pieces running around: Old footage of the Wall of Sound bands, Court TV video of Phil’s first trial and and an amazing interview. You get the sense that the interviewer doesn’t really care about Phil or is even interested in the topics he raises. He just keeps that tight shot on Phil and prods him to open his mouth. Is he drooling? We went in thinking he was guilty and then wound up with a soft spot for the guy.

Donovan, on the other hand is strangely pure. John Gilmore came over the other night with a Donovan documentary. We drove with John to see Donovan in Buffalo a few years back. He still has a beautiful voice and his songs are as good today as they ever were. He played two sets in Buffalo, mostly solo but he had a clunky backup trio for a few songs. Donovan does NOT need a rhythm section. He has a perfect sense of rhythm and other players just clunk up his material (except for the Mickie Most, Led Zeppelin, Jeff Beck backed records). The movie is a bit encyclopedic (three hours and we didn’t make it to the end) but it gives Donovan a chance to introduce his songs by playing abbreviated versions on acoustic guitar.

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Sincerely, Corporate Customer Care

Leaves on the ground in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, NY
Leaves on the ground in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, NY

A few years ago Time Warner blocked free access to the newsgroups, the bulletin boards that were older than the internet. We were one of the first customers in this area when TW test marketed their Roadrunner service and I remember telling everyone how great their service was. Yesterday they sent us this little note.

Dear Road Runner Subscriber,
You are receiving this email because you have used the Personal Home Page service that Road Runner provides. 

Road Runner will no longer offer the Personal Home Page service, effective January 31, 2011.
Sincerely,

 Road Runner 
Corporate Customer Care

I don’t even remember how to access our personal homepage but for the last ten years my father has maintained a small site about Brighton’s brick industry on his personal home page so I called him to discuss moving the site. I’d move our internet access too if I had choice.

While I was on the phone with my father he described this recent Ann Telnaes’ cartoon and asked if I had read the article about the worm that got into the computer’s controlling Iran’s nuclear arsenal. I had sort of skimmed it so I went back to it. It reads like a real game changer. If only we had disarmed Iraq’s weapons that way. Wait, they never had any.

My father also asked if I had seen James McMullan’s newest entry to his blog on drawing. I had not. How does my fatrher keep up with all this? I just spent the last hour here and I plan to go back for more as soon as I get a little work done.

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Free Tchotchkes

Free tires
Free tires

We found good homes for as much of Peggi’s mom’s stuff as we could but there was a whole lot lot over. The clothes all went to the battered women shelter and we donated a couple tvs, a microwave, and other furniture to the living center next door to her apartment. And an antique dealer that Dick Storm’s recommended picked the place clean of stuff he can put in an upcoming household sale. You didn’t think the stuff in those sales actually came from the house where the sale is did you? And then we worked our way down the food chain by offering some stuff to a consignment shop in Winton Place and on the last day Mary Kaye from a place on Titus Avenue took what was left for her shop. We managed to get our garage cleaned out this summer just in time to fill it up with boxes of old photos and knick knacks, baubles, bibelots, curios, curiosities, doodads, gewgaws, novelties, ornamentals, trinkets and tchotchkes. If we had more traffic on our street I’d put a “free” sign out by the road and give this stuff away.

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To Get To The Other Side

Pheasant crossing road
Pheasant crossing road

I used to see pheasants all the time in Webster but I hadn’t seen one in years until this guy waked out in front of us. He was chasing a drab looking mate and was completely oblivious to me. We moved into one of the first housing tracts in Webster back in the sixties. The place is overrun with them now but back then we were surrounded by farm land. We took hikes everyday and had our own names for the pockets of woods that separated the various farmer’s fields. Every time we’d cut through corn fields we’d scare up a batch of pheasants. They’d scare us too when they took off from under foot. I don’t remember them looking this colorful though.

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Indomitable Spirit

Birthday party at the Judu Hall
Birthday party at the Judu Hall

Modesty, Courtesy, Integrity, Self Control, Perseverance, Indomitable Spirit all seem like worthwhile pursuits. These words were written on the wall surrounding an American flag at Gregory’s seventh birthday party. The festivities were held at the Martial Arts Center in Loehmann’s Plaza. I had my iPod Touch with me so I looked up “Indomitable Spirit”. In martial arts it is considered a refusal to be beaten, no matter how tough, talented or big your opponent may be. That will probably be the toughest challenge for these little guys.

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Naples Ain’t Just Pretty

Front dining room at the Naples Hotel in Naples New York
Front dining room at the Naples Hotel in Naples New York

We were not the first customers at the Naples Hotel. The bar was lively with the after work crowd and one woman was reading and sipping a glass of wine in the front dining room. We had eaten here with Peggi’s parents the summer they rented a place on Canandaigua Lake, the summer it rained every day. As we ordered our food another couple walked in. I never turned around to get a look. I was afraid to because one of them was wheezing loudly and there as a clucking sound at the end of each breadth. We overheard the hostess telling them that her sister was the chef.

Someone has a lent this place a creative touch. It still looks more than a century old but the dark patterned wallpaper is new. I remember German food in here but that’s all gone. The sour dough bread was dense and packed with olives and it came with olive oil and balsamic vinegar for dipping. The salad with craisins and roasted pecans was fresh and delicious. We split a roasted shrimp appetizer (they were calling them tapas) that came with a raspberry chipotle sauce and a Friday Fish Fry but we ordered it broiled. That was our one false move. It came buried in butter. We would have been better off picking the deep fried batter off.

We’re knew we were near High Tor State Forest so we cruised around and found a trail head. A sign near the path read “Public Hunting Grounds” so we turned around. We asked someone who was just strapping on a back pack if we should worry about that and he said gun season was over and it was only bows now. He said we didn’t have to worry about them. They only fall out of trees. We hiked almost straight up to a circular meadow that overlooked something like the gorge at Letchworth, as stunning as the “Grand Canyon of the East” in the next county.

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Pink Haven

Wetlands near Pink Haven in Italy Valley, NY
Wetlands near Pink Haven in Italy Valley, NY

The hand written directions to Anne Havens’ cabin in the woods had been in our glove compartment for quite a while. I think Anne jotted them down over the summer when we ran into her at an art opening. They were straightforward and brief but the last detail, where to turn off the Italy Valley road and into the woods, didn’t make any sense. The “Blind Drive” sign that was supposed to be next to an inverted yellow triangle was not there. We drove until the road ended and then turned back to take a guess. We found a pink cottage nestled on a gorgeous marsh and sat down on the Adirondack chairs in the sun. It was so blue the moon and jet trails were the only white in the sky. Shotgun blast ran out from nearby and then echoed for miles around.

This is motorcycle weather, the last hurrah for these guys until April, and heard a bunch of them rumble by. We ate the apples and peanut butter sandwiches we packed at home and then tried to walk around the marsh. We came across a barbed wire fence and decided not to cross it. Everything is posted around here and you never know how serious people are about private property even though it just doesn’t seem possible to own a woods. The deer can run in there but we can’t.

We took a walk down a nearby dirt road but we only got a mile or so away when we were chased back by barking dogs. We’re thinking of heading into Naples tonight to have dinner at the Naples Hotel. I hope we can find our way back here in the dark.

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Some Sort Of Deal

MA Furniture on consignment
MA Furniture on consignment

We made some sort of a deal with a consignment shop to sell Peggi’s mom’s furniture. We split delivery to their shop and they decide what price they’re gonna put on it and if the stuff sells, we get fifty per cent. It only makes sense in this new economy.

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Wednesday Night Ritual

Black birds in trees
Black birds in trees

Most of the birds are getting out but the smart ones are hanging around for this beautiful Fall weather. It’s not Indian Summer because we haven’t had a frost but that’s only a technicality because we live so close to the lake.

We were headed home from Peggi’s mom’s apartment with the last load of stuff to get rid of and we head this clanging under the car. I couldn’t even see out the back window because the big, green ,overstuffed, lift chair took up most of our cargo space. We stopped at the bank and I crawled under the car. Our tailpipe had broken off where it meets the muffler so I stopped in Jerome’s to have them take a look at it. They put the car up on the lift with the lift chair inside of the car and reattached the tailpipe. Further up the exhaust chain we noticed the heat shield on the catalytic convertor was falling off. I find these in the road all the time while on my bike but I’ve given up collecting them.

We don’t really have a piano player in our band unless Pete LaBonne is in town. Fred Marshall sat it a couple of weeks ago and he sounded great. Jaffe from the old Colorblind James Experience used to come all the time but we haven’t seen him in months. James Nichols threatened to come last week but didn’t. Maybe he’ll stop by tonight. He always sounds great. There’s no piano in the song below but the Little Theatre Café’s grand piano was sitting right next to us when we recorded the track so if you listen closely you’ll hear it vibrating sympathetically.

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Tommy vs Marky

Bob Dylan at RIT in Rochester, New York
Bob Dylan at RIT in Rochester, New York

I’ve been giving my orange ear plugs a workout in the last 24 hours. I wore them this morning while blowing leaves off the roof and I had them on last night at the Bob Dylan show and then after that I shoved them in as far as they would go for the second set of SLT at the Montage.

John Gilmore bought us reserved seats for Dylan but we never saw them. We arrived while Dylan was half way through his opening number, “Rainy Day Women #12 & #35, and we worked our way through the crowd on the floor to about forty people back. Bob was great, loose and adventurous and mischievous. His band kept him in check.

It occurred to me that you can’t get too good as a working, rock musician without getting into steamroller territory. That’s why Tommy was a better drummer than Marky Ramone. Bob spent half the night at the organ and that was the best half. He’s already got another rhythm guitar player and a lead guitar (who was trying to be annoying with repetitive figures) and a steel player so there was no way he could shape his own songs while on guitar. Was his band trying to make his harmonica playing sound out of tune? Rock can’t be too healthy. It doesn’t work.

“Like A Rolling Stone” was so sensational when it came out, way more than a pop song. It blew me away and I’m not a lyric kinda guy. I never know what bands are singing about. I remember going wild when they played the long version. Dylan finished with that song last night and it is still sensational. It was great to see him.

SLT was the better band last night.

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Superba Shoes

Sea Breeze Water Tower from a moving car
Sea Breeze Water Tower from a moving car

We spent the whole day cleaning out Peggi’s mom’s apartment. Trying to figure out why people bought commemorative plates. Was it a scam like the sub-prime mortgages? We have a whole box of them for eBay. Had some nice golden hour lighting on the way home so I hung my camera out the window for this shot as we went around the Seneca Road circle.

We were asked to play at the Shoe Factory last opening last night so Peggi brought her sax and I brought a hand drum. The theme for the inaugural exhibition was shoes of course and we ran into so many familiar faces we never made it back to where the music was coming from. Beth Brown said we could just play in her studio and we considered that but never got around to it.

We stopped at Duane Sherwood’s foot video first and watched that go around about ten times. It moved from sensual to creepy but stayed engrossing. Chris Schepp from Schepp Shoes made some beautiful little leather boots and Heather Erwin was wearing some hot, knee-hgh leather boots. Jim Mott had four shoe related paintings scattered about and Alice de Mauriac mounted a most interesting Converse box. And I liked Dick Storms fuzzy slipper paintings. My “Superba Shoe Wallpaper” was hang on such a big beautiful blue wall that it didn’t really look like wallpaper but I’m not complaining. The show looked great and the place was packed so I would say it was a smashing success.

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Art Rules

Kodak building across from the Rochester Art Supply Sale at High Falls Gallery
Kodak building across from the Rochester Art Supply Sale at High Falls Gallery

The gallery space at High Falls in the shadow of Eastman Kodak’s world headquarters was home to an art supply trade show yesterday. Rochester Art Supply is Amazon’s art vendor so they buy in bulk and Mike, the owner, had some barn-burner prices on canvas and paint and brushes so I bought some of each. You were supposed to pre-register for the seminars that ran throughout the day but we hung around the entrance to a watercolor demonstration and they waved us in. Canada’s “Windsor & Newton Artist-in-Residence ” passed around some near photographic prints of landscapes he had painted but didn’t spend any time on composition or expression or any of those sort of painterly concerns.

He started with the composition of paint, pigment, binder and medium. Watercolor is uses gum Arabic as a binder between the pigment and water. All of the gum Arabic comes from Libya and for a few years the art world was panicking because of the instability there. He advised against re-wetting water color from the tube and seemed to recommend what he called pan paints. He demonstrated how much water sable brushes hold but he warned that real sable brushes are getting more expensive because the hair on a sable is not as long as it used to be because of global warming. He showed us a Windsor Newton Series 7 Number 10 brush that lists for $400. And if you spring for a good brush he said, “don’t use it with acrylic or ink.”

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Bare Light Bulb

SLT Dead Gone Dead cd cover - Watercolor by Paul Dodd
SLT Dead Gone Dead cd cover – Watercolor by Paul Dodd

Ken Frank was in “5 Star Buffalo”, one of my favorite bands in the Scorgie’s days. I played with Personal Effects back then and we released a few albums on Earring Records. Colorblind James Experience released their first lp on Earring Records. Ken Frank joined Colorblind in the nineties. Ken plays bass with Margaret Explosion and he never sounded better than he did last night at the Little. His bass amp crapped out so he’s been playing his stand-up bass acoustically and he sounds more melodic and punctual than ever. The overall band volume is lower now and his bass notes have a clarity that gets lost when it’s amplified. It’s subtle but an earful! And subtlety counts for a lot in my book.

But back to Earring Records. They have just released a new recording by SLT called “Gone Dead Gone” and it’s on the other end of the volume spectrum. It’s dedicated to a gone dead old friend, Luke Warm, the one who took to the dj booth at Scorgies to remind the patrons to, “Don’t forget to tip the bartenders for keeping you drunk.” Ken Frank plays bass in this version of SLT along with Phil Marshall and they asked me to supply the cover art, specifically something with a bare light bulb and moths. It sounded like Philip Guston territory to me. Ken co-wrote and produced this rip roaring hard core pop anthem.

Listen to SLT – “I Should Have Been A Guru” on Earring Records.

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Hit Me

It was so much fun to watch Texas lose with the Bushes in the best seats. Tim Lincecum is on the mound for SF tonight and I like his haircut. We’ve had to endure some bad commercials though. Are bad commercials more effective than good ones? What is it? I know this much. The World Cup is a lot more exciting than the World Series.

I talked to Anne Havens this morning. She’s been having some computer problems. Anne closes up her studio and heads south for the winter pretty soon. She likes the sunshine. I don’t mind the sunshine but I can only handle so much heat. It takes the life out of me or it takes the edge off at least. We’re supposed to have our first frost tonight and I love it when the house gets cool. Perfect weather for art.

I’ve not had any time for art the last few months but I do manage to get to painting class each week. I wouldn’t miss an opportunity to spend time with Fred Lipp and I’ve learned that I don’t have to bring in a pile of work to have an insightful conversation with him. I can just start working on something in class and Fred is off. In fact, the more on the line I am, the more cutting, right on and helpful the critique is.

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