PopWars

Brian lived in a big house on Alexander Street just a few doors down from where I lived when I was born. My parents place was just an apartment on the second floor and as my father used to tell it, my crib was in the hallway. Brian filled his house with books and art and eventually he rented a studio in the Hungerford Building to work on and display his assemblages.

We first met him at an early Macintosh users group meeting at East High. He was giving a presentation of how he used the photo software to display his digital photos, all commonplace now but this was Macintosh II days. Peggi and I were knocked out by his photos. We talked to him after the show and became lifelong friends. Sadly, his life ended but he was a Buddhist so he is not really dead.

A memorial was held for him in Record Archive’s back room last night and we met his daughter, Rae, who we found capable of carrying Brian’s spirit forward. Dick Storms was there and told us he first met Brian in 1965 at Kodak. Brian had all sorts of jobs. He was a garbage collector for the city and then a city inspector so of course he knew everybody. Some called him Charlie, others called him Brian.

His job included photographing code violations and he said that influenced how he saw the world. Before social media he sent a photo a day to anyone who asked to be on his mailing list.

Brian grew up in the Bay Area and met Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell. He gave us a Ferlinghetti book of poetry. He took still photos on an 8mm movie camera and his son put a few of them online.

1 Comment

We parked downtown and walked over to High Falls to hear the Debby Kendrick band play WXXI’s noontime concert. The walk was longer than we realized so we missed about half of their set. Pete was playing a different set of drums. Bill Coppard bought this Ludwig Champagne Sparkle set in 1962 and he gave them to Pete to sell. Lavon tried them out after the set and decided to buy them.

Reading about the demise of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer brought back a flood of memories. In the early web days IE was browser of choice on both the pc and Mac side but web pages behaved differently on a pc than it did on a Mac. This was long before the html5 protocol was established so we were always writing if IE clauses in the code to get pages to look like we wanted them to. If fact we kept a clunky pc around just to see how pages responded in what we called “a worst case scenario.”

Leave a comment

This photo, it’s about three feet wide, has hung our bathroom for thirty years. It’s out in the garage now as we did a refresh with our objets d’art. We bought it at a High Falls show back when Sally Wood Winslow ran the art gallery there. Roy Sowers took the photo and he titled it “Debra.” Apparently Debra went to RIT with him back when he was a photo student. Wherever she is today I hope she is happy. She brought a lot of joy to us.

1 Comment

The Bagel shop at 12 Corners was closed today for a funeral. Jack and Robyn’s son, Ian, died due to complications from a rare form of cancer at 27. He was near death years ago and then recovered but that doesn’t make it any easier for his loved ones. His illness strengthened his faith and his faith sustained him. The service was beautiful, just as Ian and his parents had planned it. 

The priest who said the mass told the standing room only crowd that he visited Ian in the hospital just a few weeks ago. Ian told him he had come to the realization that his suffering was bringing his friends and loved ones closer to god. He told the priest “If I die it will have all been worth it.”

The funeral was held in Saint John’s the Evangelist church on Humboldt Street, my family’s parish when I was growing up. It all felt so familiar. I took note of saints in the stained glass windows. Joan of Arc was directly across from us. Mary Magdalene, Martin de Porres, Agnes, Charles Borromeo, Francis of Assisi, Elizabeth of Hungary, Michael the Archangel, Martha and Thomas Aquinas. Maybe they can find a spot for Saint Ian. The four evangelists were above the choir along with these Old Testament dudes, Gideon, King Solomon, King David, Moses, Isaiah and Ezekiel. The priest was cool up until the point where he explained that Communion was for Catholics only.

Ian played guitar as well as his dad and even sat in with Margaret Explosion. Here’s Ian’s father, Jack, playing bass clarinet on “Disappear.”

Leave a comment

In their final years, Peggi and I helped my mom and dad with their paperwork and taxes. We wound up with a six or seven inch pile of paperwork, many of the pages in my father’s mechanical drawing style – all caps, block printing. We wanted to get rid of them but some of the sheets had their social security numbers on them so we asked our neighbors if we could borrow their paper shredder. We hadn’t finished more that fifty sheets when the thing froze.

I took it apart and spent a couple of hours cleaning it but when we put back together it still wouldn’t shred. So we researched shredder and bought one on Amazon. It arrived today. We tackle the stack and then give the shredder to the neighbors.

Downtown was hopping on Friday night. We started First Friday at the RIT City Art Space where the “Clarissa Street Uprooted” show was. Something was happening at Parcel 5, there was graduation at Harro East and we had a hard time finding a parking space. This green car pulled up in front of the clothing shop across from the Liberty Pole and the music coming from it was so loud it drew everyone’s attention. I Shazamed the song and learned it was “Booming” by Big Boogie.

Leave a comment

We met Steve Black when he was an art student at RIT. He hand colored each frame of his video for “Don’t Wake Me” on our first ep, Personal Effects. Recently he shot the video for Margaret Explosion’s “Disappear.”

“At 1:30 on Wednesday, June 8, the Rochester Brainery presents Stephen Black demonstrating examples of GeoPose AR installed in Rochester, near public locations like the Little Theatre, Record Archive, RIT, Strong Museum of Play, the Flower City Art Center, International Plaza, and the Rochester Public Market. The hands-on demo allows visitors to experience GeoPose AR’s ability to inform, entertain and delight. Uses for education, tourism, marketing and art will become apparent.”

Attendees will get a free POAP.

Leave a comment

Happy Memorial Day – a chance to remember my friend, Rex, who was shot in the back at 19, friendly-fire style, in Viet Nam.

We walked up to the lake along Zoo Road. The cherries, magnolias, apple and lilac blossoms are all finished but we spotted a group of Asian Americans sitting under a stand of dramatic Chinese Fringe trees in full bloom. The lake level is still too high to get from the Durand Lake outlet to the Eastman Lake outlet on dry land. I guess we could have taken off our shoes but we didn’t. On the boardwalk over Tamarac Swamp we looked down at the bull frogs who were making a racket. Peggi pointed to a big one and said, “What’s coming out of it’s mouth?” It looked like another frog’s head. It turned out they were having sex in public.

We saw one of our neighbors on her bike and she told us she was just getting over Covid. She went to a birthday lunch with seven others and five of them got Covid. Our friends, Pete and Gloria, came down with Covid yesterday. We had been with them earlier in the week.

Our Padron peppers are in and the tiny red pepper plants. The jalapeños are next. We’re doing our best to keep up with the greens but they may get ahead of us.

Leave a comment