PopWars

Even though Guy Davis (referenced in my last post) played mostly songs from the giants of blues catalog I found him to be more folk than blues. But what do I know? I am not a folkie. He told some great stories between songs.

I woke up thinking I was tending to the cabbage in our garden. We don’t have any cabbage. I was still thinking about the German movie we watched a few nights ago called “The White Ribbon.” It was full of “who done its” without any concrete resolution and it had us speculating all day long. Not that it even mattered, it was a way of getting back into the movie. It was beautifully shot in austere black and white and set in pre WW1 Austria and was as unsettling as “Children of the Damned.” The sub titles were small so we sat cross-legged, up close to the tv. This intensified our involvement and it took a while it shake it. May have to try that again.

Clarence, the man who built our house in the late forties, stopped by with his daughter like he does every summer. Our neighbor, Jared, who was here when Clarence lived in our house, stopped n to reconnect and he asked Clarence what he attributed his longevity too. At 98 and a half Clarence is sharp as a tack. He said something about the Lord and Jared, the lovable atheist that he is, asked, “Why does the Lord decide to let you live to a ripe old age and then take a young person down”? Clarence said he has lived long enough to gain wisdom which is better than intelligence”.

We put “The White Ribbon” in the mail and cued up the Netflix “Instant Play” version of “The Horror of Dracula” on our iPad. Jack Garner recommended it in our local paper. We propped the iPad up between a Philip Guston book and one on Mattise and ran the audio out to our stereo. The application locked up at one point and I grabbed this still.

Peggi’s mom was using her fingers to name her five aunts. She was having trouble coming up with the sixth name and said, “I’m afraid the hereafter is going to be very confusing, trying to reconnect with everybody.” Her sole known cousin had called and it was his mom’s name that we trying to think of. I was thinking how I have about fifty first cousins and I could never name them all.

Sparky stopped by to check up on us. We keep talking about doing a repeat performance of Polish sausage lunch we did a few yeas back. The woman who made these magical sausages died and Sparky hasn’t found a substitute. It gives us something to talk about, sausage and Pete. We gave him a cassette of Pete LaBonnes’s music years ago and he always asks about him.

When Jeanne Perri was in town this summer (she moved to Nashville in the music boom days) we sat around calling out our favorite Pete songs and then playing them on our laptop. One that stuck with me is “Punk Rock Dressing Room” with the refrain, “We’re living in a punk rock dressing room”. I was thinking of that song last night when we got home from Peggi’s mom’s place. There was an unlabeled cd in a white envelope taped to our door with “4 U” written on it. I popped it in to my desktop computer and 19 untitled audio tracks popped up so I gave it a spin. It was a live Ramones’ recording from San Francisco from the “Road To Ruin” tour. We saw them many times and this brought it all back. They rescued rock and roll and were true performance artists. Rick Simpson stopped by this morning and asked if we got the cd. I never would have guessed it was from him.

Our NetFlix movie selection of the night was The Runaways movie. Even the extras were good except there was only still photos of Joan Jett and no current video of her.

Pete LaBonne – Sound Of Doom

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.

We stopped in Abilene on Monday night to hear Jenna sing with her new old band, Krypton 88. Reconnected with left handed drummer, Dana Gregory, from my high school days and asked Jim Via if he was nervous before going on. He laughed and said he wasn’t. Jenna and the band sounded great but we had to leave before their set was over in order to catch the PBS show on the My Lai. That doesn’t sound like much, fun does it? I had read an intriguing review of the show in the morning paper. US soldiers under Lt. Caley’s command were interviewed and and Vietnamese survivors told their side of the story.

I was so out of it in high school that I chose “Hawk” when asked to write a short essay on whether we were a Hawk or a Dove. It was my junior year and the war was raging. That summer Doug, who had already graduated and gone off to war, showed us a belt of gook’s ears that he proudly wore on the plane on the way home. End of tour senior year Rex’s dad wanted his son to go in the army before college. My mom wrote me at school that Rex had been killed, shot in the back by friendly fire. Tom, who lived down the street from my family, came back on leave and I asked him what he did over there. He said he sat in a helicopter and kicked napalm canisters out without even looking at what or who was was below.

I think Kim took this photo at a demonstration in IU’s Assembly Hall. I got arrested at another anti war demonstration (above), eventually dropped out and was reclassified 1A. I was considering my options when they decided to institute the lottery draft system. I watched them pick my ping pong ball in Kenny Macher and Dave Jolly’s apartment. I think Rich was there too. My number was in the two hundreds.

Later I worked with a guy named Paul who wept when Viet Nam came up and I’ll never forget him describing how they were so scared they shot at anything that moved and one time it turned out to be a bunch of kids. And then John the postman, who used to come see Personal Effects, got his Viet Nam photos out and shot himself in the head.

The PBS show was very well done, as good as Hurtlocker which we watched last night, better in fact because it didn’t try to wrap things up with a hokey scene with a soldier talking to his infant son.

Margaret Explosion – Hurt Locker

We had dinner with our friend and neighbor, Rick, and then raced downtown for the early show of Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer“. The is over two hours so started at 6:30. We met Monica in the lobby. She had just come from her yoga class. And we took sets down front. We were a little late so it was sort of confusing at first but then moved along effortlessly. Polanski has made some of favorite movies, Knife in the Water, The Tenant, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown, so was definitely not gonna be a “wait for Netflix.” He is a master in full control of this craft. Sparse but beautiful settings heighten the focus, rich characters whose performances stay with you when their parts have only a few lines and way of telling the story that lets all the movies that have gone before carry weight so you’re on the edge of your seat because you just know what’s coming and then something else happens. Ewan McGregor played a perfect ghost and even Pierce Brosnan was perfect.

We caught the second set of Miché and Scott Bradley at the Little and then headed over to Dick Storm’s 64th birthday celebration at the Flipside on East Main. Of course we all sang that McCartney song. And Jeff Spevak wrote about it all on the HerRochester page.

I love this quote from J. D. Salinger. “Most stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid.”

There was a lot left unsaid in the movie we saw last night at the Dyden Theater. The lead character walked down the street in the opening scene and Peggi and I both leaned toward one another and said, “Brad” (a friend of ours). The movie was made in Uruguay but could have been set anywhere in the world. The heavy metal tinged love story was universal. The main character was a store detective like our niece. They watch shoppers and employees on video cameras that can zoom and focus on a nose picker (according to our niece). There was very little dialog in the movie but we got the picture.

We came across this tiny little snowman today on one of our favorite ski trails. I stopped to take a photo and a snowboarder whizzed by me. We could use some snow. Our neighbor told us 49 states in the union had snow. We’ve got some,enough for skiing, but I’d like to see the three feet they have in Pennsylvania.

It is so exhilarating to come across a new path in the woods. We drove over near the clubhouse in Durand and parked our car along Kings Highway so we could ski off into the undeveloped western part of park. We’ve been over here before and we’re always surprised how big this park is. We are still able to explore and get lost and that is a wonderful feeling.

John Gilmore brought an Andy Warhol movie over on Saturday night. It was more that I needed to know about his sex life. Give the guy a little respect. You wouldn’t even be in this movie if it wasn’t for Andy. It was called the “The Complete Picture” so we we warned. Had some great footage of the early hand drawn pop days and paintings that were painted rather than screened. Kind of old fashioned. The thing that bothered me the most was having someone read Andy’s words. The producers didn’t have access to real recordings so an actor read quotes out of “A to B and Back Again” or “The Philosophy of” I couldn’t even listen to what they were reading, the voice was so not Andy. I wouldn’t think that any one who ever heard his voice would trample on it. Don’t even get me started on Bowie’s portrayal in the Basquiat movie. Warhol had a distinctive, delicate and charming speaking voice. You didn’t know whether to take the words at face value or look for the philosophical twists. Same experience as looking at his art.

Our neighbors bought a new tv yesterday and I helped set it up. I came back across the street to paint and I heard later that Rick was only able to get dvd picture in black and white only. I guess I plugged one of the yellow cables in the wrong spot. Rick picked up a “District 9″ to christen the thing with and he popped the corn. It is a sci-fi mocumentary and I found it hard to get a look at the aliens with all those squirmy thing attached to their face. And I didn’t give a hoot about the lead character so I fell asleep – in someone else’s house. I can’t wait to hear if our friends on the west coast liked it or not. I saw it on their NetFlix list.

We had dinner across the street last night and the conversation turned to jobs, benefits and long term care. I won’t name any names but a teacher was grumbling about all the work involved with trying to stay one step ahead of students while correcting the mountain of papers from previous assignments. A former teacher expressed the numbing tediousness of correcting the same mistakes by different students over and over again. A museum worker said it was nice to walk out of the place and leave the job behind at the end of the day. And the web designers were assessing their lot. A career that will not stand still, that demands new, better but more complicated solutions all the time. Spending days and sometimes whole weeks between paychecks keeping up with new css, html, php and mysql standards while finding your own benefit packages.

We retired to the tv room for “Alfred Hitchcock Presents Season 3, Disc 4″ and all was right with the world.

Arpad and Danita’s son turned six on Saturday and about twenty kids met at the martial arts studio on Clinton for a party. They were all out on the mat doing double kicks when we showed up. We had a slice of pizza and some walnut cake that Arpad’s mother made but we were still hungry when we left so we followed our noses next door to Mysore Woodlands. It’s kind of a strange name for a restaurant. “Mysore” is nasty and “Woodlands” sounds like a park. Boasting that they specialize in both northern and southern Indian food is plain goofy. We ordered dosas from the southern side. It is amazing how potatoes, beans, pancakes and crepes can be supercharged with spices. We loved it.

Monica was away for the weekend so we invited Rick over to watch a movie. He brought the movie too. It was a James Bond thing called “Quantum of Solace”. Jack White and Alicia Keys sang the theme song and then the chase scenes started. I couldn’t tell who was chasing who. Most of the movie was chase scenes and fights. The cutting was so fast and furious that I could,’t tell which guy was James Bond. I gave up on the movie and started ripping some cds. The movie was loud as hell, all screaming and crunching and crashing.

I was in the dark over by the stereo and I tripped on the audio cord yanking the old laptop off the shelf and then the external drive which was connected to it with a short Firewire cable. The cd that I was ripping bounced out of the laptop when it hit the floor. Peggi stopped the movie while I assessed the damage. The cable was shot, the cd drive won’t read a cd anymore but the laptop and hard drive survived.

I could have put on the Velvet Underground box set that I bought, ripped and then filed away but I was still diggin my new turntable so I reached for the “The Velvet Underground & Nico” lp which I noticed is only labeled “Andy Warhol” on the front of the album. And then there is that tiny type up top that says, “Peel Slowly And See”. My copy has the upside down Billy Name photo on the back but it’s beat to hell and the banana skin is missing. I put it on and played the Dean & Britta Warhol Screen Test dvd without the sound. The scratchy VU vinyl sounded fantastic and then ultra-fantastic when Nico’s screen test came on.

Our Friday night was just beginning though. We hopped in the car to ride over to the Village Gate where Cuong Vu was playing with Rochester’s Ted Poor on drums. On the way the Velvets came on the ipod and transported us. Cuong had two bass players and all sorts of knob twisting (see photo above). They were too loud for the space and a little too muscular when stacked against the Velvets but they sounded great once we were inside the record store. They reminded me of those early jazz rock combos like Tony Williams Lifetime and John McLaughlin’s Devotion.

Back home we put our latest Netflix selection on, “Lou Reed’s Berlin”. Lou’s guitar sounded amazing and there were some brilliant moments but Berlin was a pretty dreary lp the first time around and this monstrous production couldn’t disguise that. The Schnabel footage of models in heat was pure crap and the backup singer stole the show.

We cued up the extras a watched Elvis Costell interview Lou and Schnabel. Schnabel wouldn’t let Lou talk and when he declared that he and Lou were best friends we thought we saw Lou wince.