Brian Peterson’s big photo downtown in the window of the former McCurdy’s building.
If you are downtown for the big blues concert tonight or the fireworks tomorrow take a look a the big photos in the windows of the empty storefronts. The one above was taken by Brian Peterson and we spotted a couple of people we know in the shot. That is Jeff Munson to the immediate left of the tree and and Dave Frenzel to his left. Dave Mahoney and I went to high school with Jeff and Dave Frenzel played percussion on “Low Riders”, a song Personal Effects wrote after Dave took us down to the Mission District in San Francisco.
We won’t be downtown tonight. We will be down at Conesius Lake for the annual “Ring of Fire”. Sounds pretty innocent and it was when I was going to camp down there at Camp Stella Maris. These days it is like Viet Nam. Most of the cottage owners have parties so the raods around the lake are jammed. We’ll be at at party for John Gilmore’s youngest who just graduated from high school. Quite a few of the owners try to outdo one another with their spectacular, illegal fireworks displays. Some guys spend upwards of ten grand. They try to blow up the lake. We watch. What could be more American than that?
Click photo for Hi-Techs Screaming’ You Head 45 cover. Original photo by Richard Edic.
Someone asked if we had seen Kevin Patrick’s “So Many Records, So Little Time” entry on the Hi-Techs. We hadn’t. That’s because Kevin is still experimenting with two sites (Blogspot and Tumbir) so if you want to stay up to date on all he has posted you will have to check two links for the time being. I like his Tumbir layout better because the play button for the songs is right next to the copy so you can play it while you read the entry. I’m sure he will figure this all out. I put links to both of his locations in the right hand column for the time being.
I really love this site and have been checking it out everyday but was only going to one link so I missed his entry on Screamin’ You Head. We hadn’t got around to digitizing this single ourselves so it was good to see and hear it in its digital shoes.
THose are Peggi’s eyes on the cover and she sang and played Farfisa organ, Ned Hoskin played guitar, Martin Edic played bass and I played drums. Dwight Glodell produced this.
Everybody’s is talking about leaving a smaller footprint these days. Almost everybody, that is. Comparing ourselves to our neighbors is one of the ways that we gauge how big our own footprints are. And I’m quite certain that we are subject of someone’s blog entry on the relative size of our footprints.
I’m thinking about the people on our street with the biggest trash pile each week, the ones with at least three cars in their driveway at all times. Their pick-up truck is made by Cadillac. When someone pulls in their driveway, they honk. Their tv takes up a whole wall. They hire workers to take care of their kids and a guy who we call “the slave” does all of their outdoor projects. They use their leaf blower nonstop. They have added on to their house in all directions, decks off the back, jacuzzi, patios and now the world’s plastic biggest swing set/fort in the front yard.
I don’t know if they left a battery operated toy up in the fort or if the thing is powered but if you walk by after dark you are liable to hear a little voice asking, “Can you come out and play with me? Can you come out and play with me? Can you come out and play with me?”
Fernando Torres played like a real scrapper for the Spanish nationals in the Euro Cup yesterday and “won the day” as they say. We brought Peggi’s mom over for the game and dinner. We had some Spanish red wine on ice with a little sugar and some lime juice. We rooted for Spain. We are sort of obsessed with that country like the kid in Breaking Away was obsessed with Italy. I am happy for Spain. We made strawberry shortcake for dessert.
I put sixteen printouts of photos of my paintings in RoCo’s 6×6 show and kept hearing from people that had bought one. This made cringe because I wasn’t happy with the printouts. The color was not right. The whites weren’t white. And I didn’t like the fake canvas look. They had a nasty un-canvas-like shine to them. I planned to do actual paintings for the show but never found the time. I did those prints on the day of the deadline on the free printer we got with the last computer we bought never expecting anyone to buy them.
So today I hooked up with Richard Edic. We went over to Booksmart and picked out some paper. I decided on some etching paper and we went back to Richard’s house to run prints of the paintings on his printer. These at least looked somewhat like the original paintings. They better, the paper was one hundred bucks for a box of 20 sheeets of 13′ x 19″. I took the new prints over to RoCo and swapped them for the old ones. It was like a software update. The director, Bleu Cease, was very cooperative. The show is up for a few more days.
Olga had a big birthday yesterday. We bought her gift at Wegmans, a “W’ magazine and a biker mag. We put them both in one of those fancy little bags. Coincidentally Olga’s significant other had a gig with Bob Henry and the Goners at Abilene so the stars were alligned. Dale Mincey from New Math who married Myrna from Human Switchboard was in town from Montclair. It was a beautiful Saturday night so the band played outdoors behind the bar and it was quite a party. The place was rocking or swinging or both. The Goners have been together for something like thirty years and they still sound timeless like a dream. Not too loud, not too soft, sophisticted and rough around the edges, somewhere between rockabilly and swing. They had the dance floor packed for most of the night. They did Chuck Berry’s “Havana Moon”. Olga was beaming.
My parents stopped by and we sat out on the deck overlooking our unfinished stone fence project. I served them warm slices of the tortilla espanola that Peggi had just finished making. I helped peel the potatoes. We made two batches. One was destined for Jeff and Margaret Spevak’s post jazz fest party last night. The Spevaks served Sangria and tapas and our tortilla was a hit. Jeff played cds from the artists who appeared at the festival.
We use Gerry Brinkman’s (from the old Rochester Club and now chef at Hotel Wellesley, on the. St. Lawrence Seaway) tortilla espanola recipe. It’s really a simple recipe but it is sort of tricky to make. Ideally you need a hinged frying pan because it is made on a stove top and you have to turn it over and cook the other side before the potatoes, onions and egg have set up. We have such a frying pan. We bought ours online at La Tienda just before Peggi stopped eating eggs to combat her high cholesterol.
My parents had just been to an Historic Brighton luncheon where a speaker talked about the lost city of Tryon, an old Indian settlement on the mouth of Irondequoit Bay near where we live. Early settlers met the Indians here and traded guns for furs and that sort of thing. We sere sitting right under the wasp nest and I kept a watch on it without making parents aware of the thing. That would have been a showstopper. When they left I brought the hose in the front door, opened the back door to the deck and blew the nest away. Peggi videoed it. It was pretty anticlimactic.
As I’ve noted here before, we do quite a bit of shopping in the produce section at Wegmans so I saunter around over there like I’ve been experienced. I reach to the back of the racks to get the bags of baby spinach and arugula with the date furthest out. I dutifully weigh the vegetables and enter the 4 digit produce code. I shake the basil, parsley and cilantro before weighing it because I suspect Wegmans douses them with water to contribute to the weight you pay for. I notice the peaches, pears and apples are all way below room temperature when they are put out on the racks. They have been suspended at just the right temperature to keep them from ripening while they travel or sit in a warehouse. And then they ripen at an accelerated pace so timing is everything.
Peggi likes her bananas on the green side and I like them ripe so I try to buy two bunches. Pineapples, curiously, are sold per unit rather than by the pound so I try to guess which one is the heaviest and then take my top two picks to the scale. Some are denser so size isn’t everything. And how do they get six pound pineapples up here from Costa Rica and only charge $3.99 for them? They sometimes shoot up to $4.99 but they always seem to come back down. I put some asparagus back today because the scale said $4.69 for a small bunch. Guess it’s not in season anymore.
Strawberries are in season and the local ones are red all the way through and delicious but they are $3.99 a pound. I still bought three. Driscoll Strawberries from California which never seem to go out of season are on special for $1.50. They are red on the outside only. Makes me wonder whether they are red when Californians buy them locally.
MX-80’s “Mr. Watson” is up on our digital juke box and I’m trying to picture “the Mona Lisa on the head of a pin”. Peggi has a new sax coming today to try out. She bought the one she has now in 1978 and it sort of out of tune with itself. We’re waiting for the man.
I added the tiny Foxy music player to the new Firefox and linked it to our iTunes library. Neil Young’s “It’s A Dream” is playing right now. Maybe that’s why this photo looks so dreamy. This photo does seem to make time stand still like it used to do in the summer. “Fried Dough” gets a little nasty and “Deep Fried Oreo Cookies” are way over the line but “Funnel Cakes” sound delightful.
We are headed out to Peggi’s mom’s place for dinner in the “Bistro” located on the top floor of her apartment building. It is our favorite restaurant in town.
When I first spotted this hive it was much smaller and I checked it a number of times and but never found any bees near it so I let it go. Now when we step out on the deck one usually dive bombs us as a warning shot and then they leave us alone. The hive has grown to about twice the size and there are wasps coming and going all day. They run around this thing in a clockwise direction while others fly inside for a few seconds and then they take off. Who knows what goes on inside this thing. I know I have to deal with it before it gets out of control so I’ve been thinking about mounting the garden hose machine gun style onto something and turning it on from a distance and blasting this thing into oblivion.
We had ground bees last summer in the front and we let them go until someone told us that could die if they got stung so had to deal with it. I pounded there holes with a sledge hammer, hosed the heck out of the whole area and they just kept coming back. They dug new holes and must have hooked up with underground community because they would not be run off. They were there until the ground froze.
I brought my laptop to Jerome’s over on Atlantic Avenue but can’t find a wireless signal here. I’m sitting in the waiting room reading old Newsweeks while they put new brakes on our car. They are the best car shop in town. I used to just walk home while they worked on our car but we moved out of the neighborhood. Alan, who retired a while back but still checks in, is smoking at the desk. It smells fantastic. I miss small does of secondhand smaoke. Alan talks to himself these days. I find myself doing that more too as I get older. Igor, a mechanic who has been here for years, has his own stable of Russian customers. One couple just stopped in to pick up their car and they looked like something right out of Diane Arbus photo.
I drove by Sparky’s house on way here. His lawn needs mowing. I used to do that when I lived over here. Maybe I’ll check in on him on my way home. He stops by our new place often and keeps us up to date with our old neighbors. Some of the people who lived on our street when we first moved into this neighborhood are still here but just barely. Their spouses have died and now they are struggling to stay in their homes.
Elite Bakery used to be next door to Jerome’s but it’s gone and Leo’s Bakery is too. They merged and moved out to East Rochester. PCI Studios used to be right next door. They started as a chemical company but morphed into a recording studio somehow. We recorded a version of “Love Never Thinks” and Rich Stim’s “So Hard” in there back in the eighties. The windows are all boarded shut now.
Alan keeps mumbling, “What the hell is goin’ on here”.
