Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
Do bananas seem ridiculously cheap? Everybody eats bananas and they don’t grow anywhere near here. How do they get them all way up here for next to nothing? Our Wegmans was out of the regular sized ones this week so we bought a bunch of these little guys. Is there something we can do with our trade deals to make these things cost more?
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When we plugged our tv back in after the power outage there was popping sound and the outlet went dead. I thought I had popped a circuit but the breaker was not tripped. A number of other outlets were also out so we hired a master electrician named Kenny. He fixed that problem fairly quickly but we noticed something strange. The power stayed on in the kitchen when we shut off its breaker. It was being “back-fed” as they say. One of the lines to the stove was also feeding the outlets. Kenny called us over and had us open a compartment under the oven. We had never noticed it. There was an old broiler pan inside and a cardboard carton of Pitted Prunes.
Kenny was afraid to touch it and he asked me to get it out. I grabbed a long stick and pulled it toward the front of the stove. Kenny suggested we take it outside before opening it so we all went out front. The first thing we saw were the E_Z Wider papers and we all laughed. It was the previous owner’s stash. He was a Kodak guy so the weed stored in film canisters and there were matches from the Convention Center and the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel along with a lighter. There was a used screen for a pipe and a plastic straw for the white stuff.
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I can’t let winter end without posting this shot from last week. The parts were right out in the open in the park. Probably the work of a coyote. It may seem like a fairyland out there but nature can be brutal. We took a hike through Spring Valley, the undeveloped part of the park and there were so many trees down from the eighty mile an hour winds we couldn’t follow our regular path. We surprised a large gathering of turkeys while bushwhacking and almost didn’t make it out because the creek was so swollen our usual stepping stones were underwater.
Got this email from Wayne Kusy and I’m trying to place him. “I recently started going through my old album collect to see what I could sell on eBay, and I found your old Personal Effects poster. I expect to find the album soon. I am Wayne from Heavy Mental. I am glad to see you are all still playing, and still in Rochester!”
I did a google search and I’m trying to decide if he is the Wayne Kusy from the “Toothpick Museum” or this one. Maybe one in the same.
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We visited my mom and left before lunch. We were set on a sandwich and coffee at Mise En Place Market in the South Wedge. We headed for an open table and spotted Pete Monacelli, the unofficial mayor of the South Wedge. He was sitting with my old Empire State art teacher, Kurt Feuerherm, and they invited us to sit with them. Turns out we had walked into his regular Friday “Miss en Place Salon” meeting, a group of local artists. He had invited us to this get together many times and here we were.
There was a brief discussion about what we were currently working on and then the conversation wandered all over the map as a few other artists sat down. Kurt started talking about a methods class he had taken at Albright Knox or Cranbrook where they made their own egg tempura, something about peeling the membrane off an egg yolk. Pete said he buys his off the shelf at Rochester Art Supply. And then “the worst medium” discussion. Everyone was picking on charcoal for all the usual messy reasons, the same reasons I love it. Graphic and unforgiving! I went home and started a charcoal drawing.
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Snow starts looking really strange in fifty degree weather. My neighbor, recently back from Amman, Jordon, couldn’t wait to plow his driveway. He has a little tractor with a homemade plow head on it. He had so much fun he continued down the street widening the job the town had done. The piles he made are melting into primitive sculptural forms.
We stopped up to see my mom and found her down in the sun room playing ball with Brandon, the activities co-ordinator. I love watching how he engages the residents. With incredible ease he brings people out of their shells and gets them to play, giggle and laugh. As down home as his manner is he treats everyone with respect and dignity and it really is a joy to watch.
My mom told me I need a haircut. Not the first time. And she said she liked my hat. Later she told me I better take it off before someone sees me.
In the main room I overheard one of the other residents talking with an aide. “I like every poem ever written. Except for the ones that end with someone …” and then she extended her forefinger and dragged if across her throat and smiled.
This post is for Louise. It is her birthday today and she likes it when I write about “the home.”
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OK, I’m weighing in on the controversial “I Love New York” signs that that litter our highways. According to the Democrat & Chronicle the federal government has tried for more that three years to get the Cuomo administration to take down the signs and I agree but not for their reasons. The Federal Highway Administration points to national rules regarding advertisements on federally funded highways like the New York State Thruway. I love the “I heart NY” campaign but I am offended by this graphic implementation.
Compare the layout of a simple utilitarian 55 MPH sign to this unweildly monstrosity above. Imagine driving 55 or 65 miles per hour past this sign. Could you possibly take it in? It is a visual assault. Four logos in white boxes and all four in a horizontal dark blue box with a bold white outline. And in case the logos don’t do their job we have additional type under each. “Attractions,” “History'” “Eat & Drink'” and “Recreation.” I never would have expected New York State to have these common items. This is “The New York State Experience.” But wait, there is more to read on this sign. I see in the bottom left hand corner of the sign that there is a I Love NY app to download and over in the bottom right hand corner, just to balance out the signage, I see there is a “I Love NY” website.
The state spent 8.1 million dollars to print and erect the signs and they didn’t hire a graphic artist. This reminds me of the Post Office redesign from twenty years ago. Texting while driving is crime and throwing all this shit at you is not?
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The bass player chair with Margaret Explosion is just one of Ken Frank’s gigs so we feel really lucky to have him. In addition to having a black belt in chess Ken plays bass with Annie Wells and recently finished production on her new cd, “Lonely Hearts Club.” It sounds like a million bucks. Phil Marshall wrote the music for the song below, a track from the new cd. Annie gave us a copy last night. Peggi did the artwork and it was the first we had seen of the finished product.
Annie was out at the Firehouse Saloon to hear another of Ken’s bands, Big Ditch. This band is a real powerhouse and the Firehouse Saloon is the perfect spot to hear them, a real rock and roll setting. Very few chairs in the back, mostly an empty dark room with a stage and great sound system. And the sound woman, who has been there for a year or so, is fantastic. Big Ditch’s main attraction are the twin guitars of Mark Cuminale and Jack Schaefer, flanking stage right and left. Standing between the two is heaven. The Keelers opened the show and sounded like 1978. I loved it and took a photo of the drummer.
Listen to Annie Wells – Johnny
It’s snowing now and Peggi has calculated ideal time to head into the woods on our skis in order to take advantage of the fresh powder. The 26 inches we got a few days ago turned crusty in the Saint Patty sun and this will give us another shot.
Our Little Theatre date was cancelled because of that storm. Having grown up here I thought they were overreacting. We went up to Regal at Culver Ridge that night to see one of the Academy Award nominated movies, “Hidden Numbers,” but that place was closed too. We saw it last night but need to go back to see “Get Out.”
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We had just left Rick Muto’s art studio on Anderson Avenue when these windows caught our eye. Faux windows, I should have said. Someone carefully executed this deceptively simple attraction, dressing up the boarded up warehouse windows in this row of buildings along the tracks in Rochester. We are not usually here in the daylight but have attended many art openings in Axom Gallery’s space on the second floor of this building. It is one of our favorite gallery spaces in the city. Rick, one of Rochester’s premier landscape painters, curates the gallery and also creates faux finishes to order.
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We’re having us a real disaster. Electric utility trucks from all over the northeast are restoring power to the 100,000 or so that lost it in the wind storm. Our power came back over the weekend and then our cable went out and with that 3-in-1 plan, that means no internet, tv, or phone. And on the heels of that we’ve received about half of the expected 18 inches of snow. I shoveled three times today.
We skied down Hoffman Road and into the woods. These deer were all clustered together and the woods was beautiful. This amount of snow disorients you and even when we found the path, we couldn’t take it because there were so many trees down.
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We had dinner on Peart Avenue overlooking the bay. Our friend, Kathy, had invited us to her house when we didn’t have power. Ours had come on by the time we left for dinner and most of Peart Avenue was still without. Kathy was lucky and so were we. The dinner was delicious, especially the olive and anchovy appetizer.
Kathy asked if we had seen the big pines that had just missed a house on Durand. We drove right by it I guess. You get used to the devastation pretty quickly. She told about this big oak that had fallen on a house further down her street. We had to walk over there this morning to check this out.
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Geri called yesterday to ask if we could stop by her place and cut up a tree, her tree, that had fallen across her neighbor’s driveway and onto her yard. I was tempted to ask her if she knew that removing that tree was actually her neighbor’s responsibility and not hers. A common misperception as I understand it. If Geri’s neighbor had notified her in writing that the tree might fall and damage her property and if Geri decided not to do anything about it then Geri would be responsible for cleaning it up. My friend, Rich Stim, might be able to provide clarification on this. In any case, I wasn’t about to refuse Geri because her husband, Bill, had given us his chainsaw before he died.
We took a walk around the neighborhood today to asses the damage from yesterday’s wind storm. We would have to hike with a chainsaw to get through our favorite path in the woods. There are so many trees down we will have to forge a new path around the obstacles. We cut through the park and circled back on the next street over to see how badly they were hit. Here the huge oaks that toppled over took down the wires and in some cases the poles. Electric, cable and phone lines laying in the road under an impassable pile of wood. I think we’re a week or so away from internet, Netflix, electric light and life as we know it.
The geeks at Titus Mower reccomend non-Ethanol gas for the chain saws, snow blowers, mowers and generators they sell so we drove out to the Fastrac on Creek and Browncroft but the signal light was out there. The gas station was closed and the manager suggested we go to their downtown location. We are trying to keep our neighbor’s generator going. Three houses, one being ours, have extension cords running away from it. The whole neighborhood sounds like a construction site.
When I refilled the generator I leaked gas on my boots and Peggi looked up how to remove gasoline from shoes. Someone suggested sprinkling baking powder on them and I fell for it.
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Our refrigerator is plugged into our neighbor’s generator. They are down south somewhere at a camp site and they called us while we were on break at the Little. I took the call on my watch but I couldn’t hear a damn thing. We had winds up near eighty miles an hour today and 100,000 people are without power. Our part of the city, up near the lake, is in a state of emergency and we’re downtown playing music.
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We were not off the grid that long, just a little over 24 hours, when my watch beeped with some Trump alert. We were out for a walk and had just passed a place the locals call the Funny Farm and I stepped into a hotspot that I wasn’t able to zero in on again. The temperature had dropped below zero the night before and our sleeping bags were not up to it but a couple cups of cowboy coffee straightened that out. There is not that much difference between that and our French Press.
It is no secret that Pete is a gourmet cook. There is a Bayou bent to his favorite recipes and an incredibly resourceful streak to his situation, their location in a mountainous food desert. For breakfast we had a homemade curry dish that started with celery and salt in oil on the wood stove. Chick peas, started from the dry position, were the main ingredient, but the cinnamon in the curry stole the show.
Once back on the grid we discovered that our calendar had changed so we decided to drive up to Lake Placid, an idyllic, small city in the high peaks of the Adirondacks. Our skis were in the car but there wasn’t enough snow to ski on. We should have brought ice skates. Mirror Lake was a giant sheet of glass, a mirror in fact. We whooped it up in the hotel with a flight of scotch at the bar before bed and smoked salmon with chopped red onion and capers for breakfast. I asked the waitress if we could walk around Mirror Lake and said, yes, just follow the red sidewalk. We did and found the sidewalk marked with he names of the 46 High Peaks and their elevations. Upper Wolf Jaw Mountain – 4,185 ft, Table Top – 4,427 ft, Nippletop Mountain – 4,620, Dix Mountain – 4,857 ft, nearby Whiteface Mountain – 4,867 ft. and and of course, Mount Marcy – 5,344 ft.
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We were mixing songs for a new album last night at Arpad’s. He has built an acoustically near perfect room for this activity and we were holed-up there until ten o”clock or so. When we left we were unable to pull out onto Monroe Avenue because a large tree was laying across the road. It was very windy on the expressway and our street was exceptionally dark. The power was off and we were planning on leaving town in the morning for the mountains. We had our skies in the car in hopes of finding snow.
Instead we kept a wood fire going here. We have radiant heat and a nightmare scenario would have the pipes bursting and flooding the place. We brought in some seasoned wood from a stack labeled 2012. We were feeding the cat and taking in the mail for Jared and Sue so we we started a fire in their stove and stopped back there three or four times to stoke it. Our neighbors down the street are in Florida for a few weeks and we told them we would call them if we lost power. They asked us to turn on their gas heater so we tended to that. And then Rick, our next door neighbor called from down south. He told us he had a generator in his garage so we dragged that out and fired it up. We ran extension cords from his refrigerator and freezer out to the generator and we ran a line from our refrigerator to the generator. I tapped into that line to recharge my Apple watch.
When the four houses were under control we took a walk through the woods. The neighbor who is in Florida called us while we were cutting through the park to say the power was back on. One of his smart home devices had alerted him.
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Our Lenten Roses are in bloom. Snow Drops, Winter Aconite, even our Daffodil greens are up. And flocks of geese overhead. Winter does not last forever anymore.
When I stopped up to see my mom this morning she was sitting alone at a table in the dining room. She likes it that way. There was a large black cross on her forehead. When we were all lined up in church the priest would move so fast, spouting Latin and moving to the next parishioner, that the mark on our foreheads usually looked more like a dull smudge. This one was dark and pronounced. My mom looked like she was part of a cult. And I guess she is.
We must have checked something like “formerly a Catholic” when we filled out her application because the Friendly Home is right on it when Ash Wednesday rolls around, the second one in this place for my mom. Some of the employees were sporting the mark and even some the visiting family members, like Gail. I asked her if a priest had come around and she said, “No. It was just the woman pastor.” It was so warm, near 70, I rolled my mom out to the porch and I ran into drummer, Steve Keiner, with his mom. Steve’s mom was checking my mom’s cross as we talked. My mom didn’t even know she had anything on her forehead.
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