PopWars

My punishment for going away is that I have to wade through and catalog all of the photos I took. We watched this guy for a while, waiting for the light to turn red and then darting out in front of the stopped cars to juggle for a minute and then hit the drivers up for money. Better than someone spitting on your windshield and then using a dirty rag to wipe it before accosting you for spare change.

Margaret Explosion – Juggler
Margaret Explosion “Juggler”

Back just in time for winter and last night’s art opening at I-Square at the future four corners of Irondequoit. I have a few pieces in a show with Wendie Menzie, Ed Buscemi, Todd Beers and Richard Harvey. That’s Richard Harvey’s work shown to the left of mine in the photo above. It was a cool little gathering with coffee and homemade sweets. Peggi made ginger snaps with cayenne pepper following Shelley’s recipe.

We met I-Square developer, Mike Nolan, and our friend Charlie’s little sister. It gave me the opportunity to tell her the story Charlie told me of their other sister taking the ring off a famous dead man’s finger. I told the story to Chuck Cuminale and he wrote a song about it for Colorblind James. Charlie and Chuck are both dead now and Charlie’s sister had no idea there was song about all this.

Poet and artist, Todd Beers, said he gets all fired up at openings and can’t wait to get back and start work on something. I told him openings have exactly the opposite effect on me. Todd said he saw Peggi and me in my two portraits and he a sang a line from an old song of ours.

Butter is back in our diet for the holidays, mostly in the form of cookies. Cheese and dips, chocolate covered figs from Spain and even hamburgers are back too. Duane breaks his macrobiotic diet down at Vic & Irvs each year and we joined him for that debauchery last night. And Rick and Monica are bringing a picture of egg nog over later tonight.

Every time I see my former neighbor, Sparky, we talk about cooking some sausage, something we did about five years ago. He called the other day to say he had some sausage and he was coming by for lunch. He told me to have the grill hot but he got here about a half hour early so I wasn’t ready. How can you be ready for Sparky?

I put a collection of country music on and went out back to start a fire while Peggi and Sparky chatted about the old neighborhood. Sparky picked up the album cover and got on a roll. Turns out he knew most of the big stars and even played with a few. He told Peggi he was the one who gave George the “No Show” nickname. Sparky was raised in Kentucky. He knows Country. Peggi made a video of him a few years back and we put it up on YouTube this morning.

The best part of Christmas is the Bobbie Henrie and the Goners‘ Christmas show and it’s already over. The place should have been mobbed, it usually is, but I’m glad it wasn’t. We could stand right in front of the band and soak it up. This band rocks and swings like no other. They effortlessly mix rock and roll with country and jazz. They transcend rockabilly. Their songbook is enormous. They tore up the Christmas chapter at Abilene on Saturday night with choice George Jones, Elvis Presley and Brenda Lee covers.

Now let’s get on with the holidays.
MX-80 Sound
Spinal Tap

I stop at “So Many Records” every morning. First audio of the day and it often gets me time traveling, mostly in a backwards direction but not entirely linear, more like the opium fueled dreams of Robert DeNiro’s character in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon A Time In America.” The older you get the bigger your memories play in your present. The only reggae we had when we first met Kevin in 1976 was Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff. I am one of Kevin’s friends who was blown away by the “THIS IS REGGAE MUSIC (Volume 3)” collection that Kevin talks about in yesterday’s post.

Since we play about once a week and don’t usually do a song more than once we have a lot songs in the kitty. We had this idea to get one hundred downloads up on our site site by Christmas but that took some doing. We spent the last week listening to things like “Prom Night 2″ from a few years ago and now retitled “Submarine Races.” And this afternoon at about four o’clock we uploaded the hundredth song.

Download all 100 here.
Margaret Explosion – Submarine Races

I spotted this orange glove in the middle of Culver Road and I had to turn around and grab a shot. It might make a good Margaret Explosion cover. Here’s one from the “Extreme Materials” art opening at the MAG.

Margaret Explosion – Art Opening
Margaret Explosion “Art Opening” with Pete LaBonne on piano

I helped my nephew manage his iTunes library before Thanksgiving dinner yesterday. He was getting duplicates of the stuff he downloaded and running out of hard disc space on his netbook. Seems everyone has a glut of music. He told me I should get “Spotify” so I installed that this morning.

There was a review of the Stones remastered “Some Girls” lp in the paper. It comes with an album’s worth of extra tracks. I don’t have a digital copy the original so I previewed the new tracks at the iTunes store and thought about buying the package but Mick redid his vocals on some tracks just like he did with the “Exile” outtakes and that pisses me off. That really should be illegal. Keith does a Waylon Jennings song but that just made me want to hear the original. I decided not to buy now.

I was reading Sasha Frere-Jones’s column in the New Yorker on the Russian dj, “Oneohtrix Point Never” and that sounded pretty interesting so I checked that out at the store but didn’t buy anything.

We watched the Gram Parsons documentary the other night. Kieth was in there too, scolding Gram for ODing. I never really caught on to Gram Parsons but I liked the Byrds. They shouldn’t have included the vintage clips of George Jones and Merle Haggard in this movie. That sort of put Gram in his place too.

Ronny Stackman, “Your Selector”, has been spinning roots reggae forty-fives in the upstairs lounge at Abilene on Wednesday nights for a few months now. He knows how to work a room extending the format by playing both sides of a single and dubbing it up on top. Last night he was joined by Jon Nugent on sax and they sounded amazing. If you thought the sax line in Errol Dunkley’s “Black Cinderella” was cool you have to hear what Jon can add to a scratchy dub reggae tune. Prince Far I was in the house along with Toots & The Maytals. Margaret Explosion plays Wednesday nights so we have a bit of a conflict but this is the coolest spot in town.

Our iPod treated us right on the way home. I swear “shuffle” knows the situation and knocks your socks off with random surprises. “Miles Runs The Voodoo Down” took us from downtown to the crib.

People used to identify themselves when they called you but they don’t do that anymore because everyone has cell phones and they know who’s calling before they say hello. In fact people don’t even say hello any more they just start talking. Well we don’t have a cellphone and I’m often completely thrown as to who I’m talking to. Someone will prattle on about something while I’m running through my mental rolladex trying to figure out who the voice is. Is it work related or a friendly? No big deal. I’m just saying.

The phone rang during dinner the other night and our nephew was laughing at the quaintness of the answering machine on our land line and that led to a discussion of the old full size cassette answering machine that we had and how we’d record over and over the tapes until they were layered bits and pieces of voices from the past. I set a few of them aside and went downstairs to check to see if I could put my hands on them. I found a cassette deck and put on a white label advance copy of Colorblind James’ “Why Should I Stand Up?” from 1991 that had been put into service.

Brad Fox called and started with a joke. “Why did the Siamese twins go to England?” No punchline. A snippet of Colorblinds’ “That’s Entertainment”, Deb calling from Massachusetts asking for help with her computer which was suddenly in a foreign language. Peggi’s mom letting us know she didn’t like the answering machine. A snippet of “Ride Board.” A wrong number where someone left a message for someone we’ve never heard of. Our nephew calling for help getting a stuck floppy out of an Mac SE. He’s majoring in artificial intelligence today. Another snippet of “Ride Board.” And plenty of people complaining about the quality of our outgoing message which as I remember had either James Brown or Miles Davis blasting in the background.

Sometimes the machine would record our part of a conversation if we failed to pick up the phone in time. So we heard Steve Black from Singapore answering a call from Steve Hoy while we were out somewhere. Directions to Jeff and Mary Kaye’s house for the first time! And then Peggi’s dad and Gary Bennet calling from beyond the grave. Are people saving their cellphone messages these days? This stuff is priceless.