PopWars

These shelves from our garage were full of junk when moved in. We piled our junk in front of them and couldn’t find anything in the heap. So after five years we decided to sort it all out, the old door hinges, motor oil, jars of nails and the industrial strength velcro.

I emptied the shelves and brought them out into the yard so I could even up the lines. I reworked the shelving and supports so they line up with one another. I know this is a bit obsessive but they looked like they had been put together by a madman. I can deal with the bright orange but I at least had to straighten out the site lines before I rehang them.

It only two two nights to do this. Not really worth an “After” shot.

We’ve had a generous amount of rain this summer, not enough to keep you indoors but enough so we haven’t had to water the garden. And there has been just the right amount to produce a wide variety of mushrooms in the woods. We’ve seen the ones that look like donuts and the brilliant orange ones that that woman ate and – I can’t remember if she died but she got in the paper for eating them. The ones above look like tropical coral.

We live vicariously through our friends and neighbors, Rick and Monica. They take vacations and we enjoy those. Tonight they went bowling over at that place that has only six lanes on Merchants Road.

We stopped down at the pool today after our walk and we were talking to one of the neighbors about the new people that have moved onto our street. We told him we had met them yesterday but neither Peggi or I could remember what the guy’s name was. Our neighbor set us straight. He too had talked to them the day before. They moved here from Reno and our neighbor heard that the woman telecommutes to work somewhere in the bay area. He asked us if we telecommute. Peggi said, “I guess so, we never leave the house.” I am still trying to imagine what telecommuting is.

Roman Polanski made some of my favorite movies (Knife in the Water, Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant, Chinatown) and one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen (The Fearless Vampire Killers). We had “Repulsion” here for a days and it looked and sounded great. Chico Hamilton did the soundtrack and it’s a big part of the sixties action. Now that I’ve gotten rid of my cds I might try to track that soundtrack down. The dvd (from Netflix) would not play through part of the movie. It froze and then jumped ahead and we couldn’t reverse it. We tried sneaking up on the bad spot and watched the early scenes about five times in the process. They were so good we didn’t complain to Netflix or anything.

This situation came up tonight where I threw a ringer and the shoe landed under a leaner that Rick had. We weren’t sure how to score it so we gave Rick two and me three. I have to look up whether one cancels out the other. Last one thrown scores? I’ll report back.

I’m reading William Corbett’s memoir of Philip Guston where Philip Guston is reading Isaac Babel. “Comrades let us not fool ourselves: this is a very important right (the right to write badly), and to take it from us is no small thing. Let us give up this right, and may God help us. And if there is no God, let us help ourselves”. Guston cherished going out on a limb. Isaac Babel was arrested, tortured and shot during Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge.

We rode our bikes down to the old Newport House on Irondequoit Baty. The former speakeasy is still there but it’s boarded up and in demo mode headed for upscale condos. A worker came out and asked if he could help us. You know you’re in trouble when someone asks you if they can help you. On the way back we smelled something foul in the air. It got worse the closer we got to Culver Road and there we found this guy desperately trying to mow his lawn before his mower burned up.

We gave Kim Simmons two boxes of cds to sell on eBay. He takes 30% for his effort and that seems fair. We spent most of the weekend in the garage going through boxes of junk. Our house came with junk that the previous owners couldn’t sell at their final garage sale and we piled our junk in front of that junk. I feel like we’re all pawns in a giant worldwide garage sale scheme.

8-Tracks have to be one the clunkiest mediums ever invented for playing music but in 1969 they seemed wondrous. My college roommate had a white Plymouth Barracuda and a collection of ten or so 8-Tracks. I couldn’t get enough of Led Zeppelin’s first but the one that seemed absolutely perfect for our off campus outings was Paul Butterfield’s “In My Own Dream.”

Elvin Bishop played guitar on that album and I always figured it was him that sang the title song but Bob Mahoney straightened me out. It was Paul Butterfield singing and playing the slinky guitar part. Philip Wilson had left the Art Ensemble and he played drums on this album and a young David Sanborn played sax but the gorgeous sax solo on this track is credited to Gene Dinwiddie. In my own dream, what a place to be!

Paul Butterfield “In My Own Dream”

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I stopped in to see our neighbor, Leo and found him going through a pile of boxes. He was looking for his crock to make sauerkraut and he looked up at me and said, “Look at this mess. A good fire would solve all my problems”.

I am determined to straighten our garage out this summer. It’s been a dumping ground since we moved in here. I found a few boxes of 8-tracks. I would love to get rid of them before I have a fire.

I guess I should admit it. I like to play golf. I’ve got my own rules though and I don’t use any clubs. I don’t even start with any balls. When our walking route takes near the golf course I’ll stay off the fairways and walk the woods next to the fairways looking for balls. The other day I found four and today I found six including a “Nike”, a “Nitro X Factor” and and a “MC Lady”. If I find a beer bottle I throw it back out on the fairway.

Speaking of beer, the Budweiser guy has slowed his pace this summer. I’ve checked his usually 20 ounce dumping grounds when take that walk but they’ve been coming up clean.

Another one of our routes takes us by an entrance to the park where dog walkers park. You gotta watch where you step here. Lately I’ve been picking up these brightly colored cigar tubes. At first I pictured some guy have having a smoke as he walked his dog but yesterday we walked by a group of teens who turned their music down as we walked by. I’m thinking it might have been Wu Tang’s “Method Man”. “I got fat bags of skunk/I got White Owl blunts.”

I do most of my clothes shopping at AJ Wright’s in Culver Ridge Plaza. I stopped in for a new pair of shorts and picked out a plaid, Phat Farm pair for ten bucks. Up at the checkout the lady in front of me was complaining to the cashier about the amount of merchandise on the floor, literally on the floor. The cashier explained that they don’t have enough employees to keep the place up. While they talked I took this shot of the reduced table.

We played an art opening at RIT over the weekend and during the break a guy came up to me and introduced himself as an old neighbor. I was his paperboy and when I was a little older I babysat for his daughter. His daughter was there too with her husband. They had all just arrived and had not heard us play yet. The daughter’s husband looked at Peggi’s soprano sax and asked, “So do you play the kind of music you snuggle up with?” He winked while asking this. I said, “No, it’s more like the kind of music you drive off the road to.”

After the gig we drove out to Jeff and Mary Kaye’s place to help them with their stereo. They were going to have a pizza party the next night and they wanted to hook their computer up to the stereo so people could dance. Driving along the river on the way home we found a station playing Donovan’s “Catch The Wind” and the dj followed that up with “Wild Is The Wind”. Talk about “driving off the road” music! We were thinking it was Antony singing it but it turned to be Nina Simone. Guess it’s pretty clear where he got his thing from. We were so taken by this song that we found ourselves in the lane for 590 South to Corning. I had to swerve at the last minute to point the car toward Rochester.

Margaret Explosion “Lava” – Download

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Painter Jim Mott has updated his blog with posts on the last two stops of the local edition of his “Itinerant Artist” project. We feel very lucky that North Irondequoit was one of those stops. I was happy to read that Peggi’s tapioca made an impression on him. Jim plans to have a show of these local paintings when the tour is over.

Margaret Explosion plays another art opening tonight. This one at the NTID Dyer Arts Center at RIT is for the Arena Art Group and it’s open the the public so stop out. We’ve played here before and like the sound of this room. Here’s a song from the Edith Small opening from a few years back. Phil Marshall plays guitar.

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Download “West Coasting”

My nephew works in a pizza joint and he’s been having a hard time with his family, the law and just about everything. I stopped in to see him and asked how his job was going. He said it was ok but he needs more hours to pay his bills so he is looking for another job. I suggested he follow his heart and try something related to what he likes. That sounded like adult advice but I was just as confused as he is at that age and everything that I liked didn’t pay worth a darn.

I know I like photographing signs and there is no money in that. I found this one this morning on Culver Road near Clifford. It’s perfect! A big piece of plywood nailed to a tree. Roof’n looks just like it sounds. You want to say it. All caps with a subscript “n” then the masterstroke, black reverse field for the phone number. They intended to center the number but ran out of room and that is so much fun to see in a sign. I don’t think I would ever hire them to roof my house but I love their design sensibility.

I started a data base of my signs last year but got bogged down with constructing php queries. I wanted to have permanent link to pages so I could do an index or link to a certain section instead of always starting at the first page and working your way through. The way my links read they are always changing depending on how many signs I have in the database. I have a hundred or so in there now with another 100 to go but I got way bogged down trying to figure out how to construct these queries and it was getting the way of my day job. Maybe I should trade jobs with my nephew.