PopWars

The big pumpkin I pictured here a few days ago has officially escaped the garden. It broke off the vine under its own weight and dropped to the ground. We carried it home but don’t expect it to last until Halloween.

Geez! I remember when Brian Williams was 60 and we celebrated his birthday at the Little Theater Café while his band Lumiere played. On Labor Day afternoon Bob Henrie, his brother, his girlfriend and an assorted cast of musicians connected to the Middlesex scene performed at Abilene as we celebrated Brian’s 65th. We asked Brian how he felt and answered “Great” with his characteristically big smile. There were a few qualifiers but I won’t get into that. Mostly, he said, music keeps you young.

There was an article in the paper last week about the Rochester Public Market ranking as the best public market in the country and sure enough the place was packed on Saturday. We couldn’t park where we normally do. Barry Kucker was out of his world famous sandwiches. The Mexican place was packed. My parents were there. We went with Rick and Monica and all bought as much fresh produce as we could carry. Back home we combined forces for a harvest bounty feast. Monica made a delicious peach pie.

Jim Mott stopped by and dropped off the painting he did for us when he stayed here on his local Itinerant Artist tour. He did five or six and we picked this one. We played some horseshoes before he left and Jim tried throwing with his left and right hands because he is somewhat ambidextrous. He paints left handed but his right hand threw better.

I’ve will soon be able to cross one of the items on our summer to do list off. Our garage is almost organized. It had become a dumping ground since we moved in. People keep asking us if we’ve seen the Hoarders show. We don’t get cable so we haven’t but I can imagine. I’ve been pushing the limits of our Waste Management pick-up service each week for the last month. I have a pile of old paintings out there including the one above. I’m stripping the old canvases and saving the stretchers.

I’ve been a fan of Peggy Lee since “Lady and the Tramp“. Now that we digitized our music library iTunes calculates it will take months to hear it all but we can’t go an hour in shuffle mode without hearing a Peggy tune. As it should be. So I was ecstatic to see Kevin’s post this morning. We played it three times in a row. Stunning arrangement. Minimal for maximum impact. Please stop reading this and visit “So Many Records” now.

Our old band, Personal Effects, covered “Is That All There Is?” and our new band, Margaret Explosion, covers “Fever” and we don’t do very many covers. Duke Ellington called her “The Queen”.

Peggi and I were watching tv at her parents house in the mid eighties and a Peggy Lee tv special came on. We flipped out and scrambled to get a VHS cassette in the machine. Peggi’s dad said, “Not that old broad?”. Peggy (with a “y”) had already had a stroke and she was having trouble with one side of face but she was god like.

Soon after we visited Peggi’s (with an “i”) sister in LA and asked if she knew where Peggy Lee lived. She had a hunch so we headed up in the Hollywood Hills. We bought a star map and Peggy Lee was not on it. We asked around and had it narrowed down to a particular street in Bel Air. We walked the whole street and looked at every house so I’m sure we saw it.

There are so many August birthdays in our family that we celebrate them all at once at my brother Tim’s place. It was his birthday in fact. My mom was born in August too but we already celebrated her birthday. My brother, Fran, who celebrated his birthday a few days ago, brought the corn. He soaked it in the husks for ten minutes or so and then threw it on the grill the way guys do. It was fantastic.

Another brother, John, also born in August, brought this old picture of our great grandfather to give to our dad. My dad, the family historian, said his grandfather was born in Ireland and worked in the shoe factories of Manchester, England before moving to Rochester. He guessed this photo was taken in front of his Hayward Avenue home.

The newest member of the the August club, our niece’s daughter, Lennon, made her first appearance at one week of age. Named after John, she would have been named Jagger (but not after Mick) if she was a boy. She wasn’t even big enough to make a racket when she cried.

Tom Kohn wasn’t even there last night to see how the performers he booked for the “Fourteen Fridays” at the Village Gate went over. They packed the courtyard, drew more than any of the bands. It got me thinking about how bands are overrated. What people really want is entertainment.

Rick Simpson from “Just Foolin’ Around” had performed between sets from Margaret Explosion the last two years and this year Tom gave them their own night. Rick lined up a vaudeville show with jugglers, hula hoop dancers, a saw player, an accordion/percussion player, a string duo performing Neil Young songs, a story teller/sound effects dude that reminded us of Tall Tales Audio and best of all a batch of corny jokes that Rick delivered as he he introduced each performer. We watched a guy juggle five volleyballs. Bob Mahoney was pulled from the audience to assist in an Houdini style escape gag. Two hours flew by before the fire juggling finale.

Peggi and I had seen a show like this in Europe, a traveling mini circus with a handful of performers wearing many hats and this show was every bit as good. It is possible to appeal to all ages without the dumb down, smarmy antics of, you know, the stuff that makes you want to be anti family. Rick, like Pee Wee Herman, rocked the open air, all ages house last last night.

On our way back from Pike we stopped along a dirt road near this batch of windmills. We have seen before, mostly in Spain, but we had never gotten so close to one. They’re sort loud but beautiful. I say, “Not in my backyard but my maybe in my neighbors”.

For the third year in a row we visited Pike, New York for the Wyoming County Fair. It’s a mini vacation for us, a real getaway. Jeff Munson does the driving and Peggi and I sit in the back seat and gaze out the window as the small towns, funky homes and big farms whiz by. If you follow the Genesee River upstream Wyoming County is about half way to the Pennsylvania border. Jeff likes to take the back roads and every so often Mary Kaye turns to him and asks “Do you know where you are?”

The county is aptly named, a bit like the state that shares its name, a mixture of cowboy hats and Slayer t-shirts. We skip the midway for the most part and spend most of our time in the barns looking at the animals and watching the farm families wash and primp their blue ribbon specimens. We became completely absorbed with a pig walking ritual where the owners walk their pigs in circles with the aid of a stick. We hung around long enough to watch a woman scratch her 250 pound pig’s belly in way that caused the pig to roll over on its back.

We laughed as a rooster worked on his “Cock-a-Doodle-Do”, continually stumbling over the last note and we sat down in the 4-H barn to watch the Mannequin Modeling. We ran into Gary Miexner from the Wilderness Family. His son was playing guitar with a band in the evening’s Talent Show. When we got back home I checked the stats on the video I put up from last year’s fair. “I Got It” has 178 hits!

We tossed the toxic hard plastic bottles that WXXI gave us for joining and we bought these stainless steel Bios water bottles. It was hot in the woods today and we both finished our bottles. On our return we walked right by our house, grabbed our mail and our next door neighbor’s mail and headed straight for the pool where we plopped these things on the table.

Peggi had picked up the two autumn colored leaves in the lower right corner and I found the apple in the road. I found four golf balls when we crossed the course. I always like finding Nikes especially the Number ones although I learned they are no better than the other numbers. And I found a Callaway which I’ll give to my brother. That’s all he uses and the last time I saw him he was wearing a Callaway hat.

That’s our mail on the top with the two cds I ordered. Here I am trying to get rid of those things and buying more at the same time. One is the Chico Hamilton soundtrack to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and the other is a recent Sun Ra re-release of two of his old self pressed Saturn lps. I bought two of those Saturn lps from the band when they were at Red Creek in early eighties. They were supposed to be ten bucks but the two I got had no sleeves so they were five each and one had a pure white label so I asked Sun Ra to sign it.

And that’s Peggi’s hand in the upper left hand corner of the blowup.

I just sized the photo above like I usually do but when I typed the dimensions for the crop tool in Photoshop I wound up with 450 inches instead of pixels. The progress bar started its thing and I spaced out for a few seconds before I realized I was creating a file big enough to eat up my hard drive. Stuff like that happens all the time but I thought it was worth noting on a slow news day.

We’ve had three pretty big jobs to deal with in the last month or so and of course a bunch of little jobs. I’ve noticed an inverse curve between the amount of money that a job pays and the degree of satisfaction we get from doing them.

I upgraded my brother’s computer so he can run automatic backups and I helped Anne Havens determine that her dvd recorder had died. I was unable to help another one of brothers open WINSCP files on his Mac. As far as I can tell it’s just another program to keep PC people from getting viruses when they download files but when you put files in there, Mac people can’t get ‘em out. He was trying to download some plans for a building. And then my dad called and wanted to now what Bing was and why he was suddenly doing searches in Bing. He wanted his Google back but he had inadvertently selected Bing as his search engine of choice so I helped him reset it. These of course were all free jobs, on the very low end of that curve but they were all satisfying. Doing multiple rounds of design-by-committee revisions for a company that pays pretty good is grueling. I’m filing this in the “We Live Like Kings” category.