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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.

I digitized some vinyl the other day. I go tape out of our stereo amp into Quicktime on our laptop and then edit it in Audacity. One of the things I digitized was an old Personal Effects 45. Peggi’s voice and sax sounded too high. Peggi got her sax out to play along and we confirmed that our turntable runs fast. We changed the pitch by -110 cents and it came out fine.

Brad Fox sent me a 33 1/3 book on “Trout Mask Replica” and I’ve been reading that and thinking about the cassette recording I made of Captain Beefheart at the Red Creek in Rochester in 1977. I remembered Beefheart saying something nasty about Drumbo (aka John French) between songs. And of course there are a lot of quotes from Drumbo in the book, some of them lambasting Beefheart. So I got an old cassette deck out of the basement and put the tape in but the deck wouldn’t go into play. It was just sort of froze in the eighties. Luckily we had another old deck down there and I transferred the tape. I posted one of the songs below with the quote from The Captain. You can hear Brad Fox scream as the band begins this song.

I remember there was some dreadful magic act (someone saw Magic Band and thought why not?) that went on first and there were two shows. We went to the second. I still have the ticket. When we got there Greg Prevost (Chesterfield Kings) and Carl Mack’s (Zenith Effluveum get compared to MX-80 in this review) were interviewing The Captain in the parking lot. I think Kevin Patrick’s wife, Corrine, took this photo of him and gave me a print. The stage was still in the front of the room there. The Captain mentioned the the chocolate pie that owner, Jeff Springut, gave him before the show. The band was amazing and included Jeff Moris Tepper, Eric Drew Feldman, Denny Walley and Robert Williams. They faithfully recreated the older material and went on to record “Doc at the Radar Station”.

When David Greenberger was here he was telling us that he was in a Boston band in the eighties called Men & Volts and they did Beefheart covers and Beefheart-like material. I told him about seeing the Trout Mask Replica tour in Columbus at Ludlow’s Garage with Hampton’s Grease Band and the Screaming Gypsy Bandits opening. And he said he was talking to the Bandit’s Mark Bingham in New Orleans about doing a project. And then along comes this little book from Brad.

Bruce Fowler was also on the Bat Chain Puller lp and by another coincidence we just saw him playing in the band that appeared throughout Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts”. We’ve been watching the entire Altman catalog in order but have been breaking it up with other stuff. It took us three nights to watch that one because I kept falling asleep. So each time we came back to it we re-watched large portions. There is such a large cast in this one and all these interweaving stories that it worked well in small doses. Tom Waits’ character hangs out in this bar where Annie Ross from Lambert, Hendricks and Ross sings with Terry Adams from NRBQ on piano and Bobby Previte on drums and Bruce Fowler on trombone.

Captain Beefheart Live at Red Creek in Rochester, NY
Captain Beefheart – Low Yo Yo

Watch Amy Kawabata’s film, “Strata”

Amy Kawabata, a fourth year animation student at RIT, asked Margaret Explosion to put some music to her newest film. She’s planning on entering the project in the Ottawa Film Fest and possibly the Brooklyn Film Fest where Duane Sherwood’s video to one of our songs, 4AM, caused a sensation a few years ago.

Peggi stopped out to see her mom last night and they were talking about her mom’s wedding which was very small, just the groom’s parents (Peggi’s paternal grandparents). Peggi’s mom expressed some displeasure that her father was attending to another woman and wasn’t able to make his daughter’s wedding. Then Peggi’s mom jumped the rails and said “Of course, you and Paul weren’t there either because you were to busy”. Peggi said, “Mom, I wasn’t even born”. And then they both had a good laugh.

Steve Lippincott, who lives in Portland and is working on a story about Personal Effects and the Rochester scene, knew that we knew the guys in MX-80 so he sent us some stuff he found on a bit torrent site. One cd was MX-80 Live in the back room at Record Archive when it was over on Mount Hope. The show was broadcast live on WRUR in 1980. It sounded amazing. Dick Storms interviews the band at the end.

The other MX-80 cd that Steve sent was from the night after at Scorgies. The Hi-Techs opened the show and MX tore up the place. It sounds great too and it also sounds pretty familiar. It was made from my cassette tape recording of the night. In fact between the “Theme From Sisters” and MX-80′s classic, “I Walk Among Them” you can hear Bill Jones talking to me as I manned the tape machine. He was having a problem with one of his presses. Bill printed the cover to the Hi-Techs first single on Dick Storm’s “Archive Records” label. You can also hear Martin Edic exclaim, “I’m going up front!”

MX-80 – I Walk Among Them

The Rochester International Film Festival is a great event but it’s at an awkward stage. We did some work for the festival and we have tickets to the events so we are sort of invested. Sponsorship is down everywhere and certainly a huge influx of money might solve some of the problems but unlike the local Jazz Fest, this event has not really caught on so that it grows each year regardless of the economy. There were a lot less movies shown this year and no movies at the Dryden because the venue is too expensive. The movies we saw were great and that’s why I’m complaining.

Yesterday we saw a beautiful movie about the search for the reincarnation of a Tibetan Buddhist monk, a movie called “Skin” that told the story of black girl born to white parents in South Africa during Apartheid and a Russian movie called “Mermaid” about a girl with special powers. The Film Fest delivered the goods but the package made us feel like we were in the Twilight Zone. We drove out to Corporate Woods for one of the film parties and fittingly heard a band wearing suits. And the next night we finished the evening at High Falls where there were two loud bands playing at the same time so we couldn’t talk about the films we’d just seen. There should be movies shown all over town. The ticket price should be a lot less. The web site should at least have links to trailers or the film’s official site. And the parties should be downtown. I’m sure I forgot something but somebody has got to figure out a better way to promote this thing.

detail of Rorshach painting -  photo for full shot

At the end of every painting class Maureen Outlaw folds up her disposable paper palette and creates a Rorschach painting. Sometimes they are quite beautiful like this weeks’ (shown above). They are always nicer than Wavy Gravy’s tie died t-shirts. That whole tie dyed thing is so tired looking I am always surprised to see it still around.

I had heard the name but really had no idea who Wavy Gravy was. He seems to have been everywhere in history and last night he and his fish named after the master graphic artist, Saul Bass, were sitting right behind us at the Little Theater for an advance screening of a new documentary about him and his lovely wife. She almost stole the show. The documentary was made by Odetta’s daughter and she was sitting next to Wavy.

The movie started with footage of Hugh Romney (his previous name) in the Village doing poetry readings with the big Beat names. He opened for the giants of jazz when they were still mostly unknown. He roomed with Dylan. He hung with Moondog, the Dead and the Merry Pranksters. He served free food at Woodstock along with members of the Hog Farm commune where he has lived for forty years. Seven of those years were spent on the road with the commune as they traveled across Eastern Europe and into Pakistan in buses.

He answered questions after the movie while wearing a red clown’s nose and that is really the best description of this guy, “a clown” in the most flattering use of the word. Ben and Jerry have named a flavor after him and he has joined their ranks in raising money for the most worthwhile charitable organizations.

On a beautiful Sunday afternoon we watched the gallery assistant pull the shades at Rochester Contemporary so we could see the PowerPoint display on LA’s cornfield project. L.A.-based writer artist and curator Janet Owen Driggs from the Metabolic Studio, a charitable activity of the Annenberg Foundation, discussed our roles as industrial eaters and the new art movement toward not bullying nature. Her slides took us from Donald Judd’s aluminum boxes to Robert Smithson’s beautiful earth art to the political ramifications of public fruit. Janet used to paint but has turned her energy toward Edible Estates and Fallen Fruit and Islands of LA.

We stopped at Home Depot on the way home and bought a bunch of seeds for the garden.