Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
When the holiday fanfare dies down and the neighbors leave for Florida the heart of the season is just beginning. The lakes in Durand have ice fishermen on them, high school kids are playing hockey in the coves and hundreds of ducks are flocking together beyond the ice formations along the shore of Lake Ontario. The slate grey skies make the male cardinal look like it is on fire. And the threat of 18 inches over the weekend has made us giddy.
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We were about four hours early for the opening of Alan Singer‘s new show at Axom Gallery. This gave us plenty of clear shots at the vibrant work and it allowed space for a few of the pieces to jump off the wall. Alan mixes science, art, and mathematics in work that looks tightly controlled at first glance but like LSD it opens up, becomes confounding and ultimately delights. I could look at this piece all day.
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My grandfather was a butcher. It is a craft. He took great pride in his work and it was evident when he cut off a big slice of freshly made liverwurst and passed it over the counter to me. He also owned the store so salesmanship, good business practices and knife work were required for him to become successful.
The Asian behind the counter in the fish department at the Pittsford Wegman’s had all these skills. We were considering buying some Red Snapper. (The fish at the top of the picture above is a Red Snapper.) We had made it a few months back. We baked the whole fish and split it down the middle before plopping it it on our plates. It was delicious but we had to eat each small bite very carefully as it was full of bones.
The fish guy told us he would cook it exactly as we did and then eat it with chopsticks because he knew how to pick around the bones. He drew the fish (above) in a few seconds. He even made the fish smile. He illustrated where to look for the various bones. He grabbed another fish, one that he had just filleted, and suggested we cut the fish open before we bake it, remove the bones, put it back to gather like a whole fish and then bake it.
His presentation was so good Peggi that told him that Wegmans ought to video him and share his tips on their website. He liked that idea and said he would propose it.
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After Tarkovsky’s meditative psychological drama, “Solaris,” which we spent three nights with, the post-apocalyptic horror film, “A Quiet Space” felt kind of cheap. It was hard to give a hoot about the nuclear family and the director didn’t bother warming you up to the characters before they started introducing the quick cut, scary things. I spent a good bit of the movie wondering if the male lead would have been a better actor if you could see his face behind the bushy beard. But I guess anything would seem bankrupt after Tarkovsky.
We brought a dvd of “The Post” home from the library and really loved that. A meaty true story told at a brisk, edge of your seat pace, there were only a few places where Spielberg felt the characters needed to explain themselves. And they didn’t. The politics were handled really well.
There was only one other couple for a screening of “Vice” in the stadium seating theater in Culver Ridge Plaza. This movie was a mess. They did not handle the politics well. They could have just told the story of big footprint Cheney and it would have read as horror but instead they tried to be cute or something. I was afraid to google what “What Men Want” is all about.
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I guess I joined Flickr ten years ago. At least that is what it says at the top of my Photostream page. Mostly I used it as a backup for my photos. With a free membership they gave you an insane, one terabyte of storage. Well, that business model broke and free members were recently informed that their limit will now be a measly 1,000 photos and the new owners threatened to dump the rest of your photos unless you go pro. I didn’t upload a thing for months while I looked around for an alternative. Today I went pro.
I promised my cousin I would send her a link to photos from the second leg of our Camino adventure. Peggi and I did the first half of the Camino with her but we had to be back here for some Margaret Explosion gigs. She continued on without us and then we covered the same ground – Leon to Muxia – in October.
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I played drums with both of the bands on the poster above. I made this poster for a gig at Scorgie’s. I’m not sure how it works today but in the early eighties bands were given the door and if the club owner didn’t make enough over the bar you were not asked back to play. So bands made posters, had them copied or printed, and then plastered them all over town. You had to watch out for cops and it was sort of a nasty job, wrestling with tape in the freezing cold, but a good poster paid off.
It wasn’t always like that. When New Math started playing in the late seventies we were booked through management companies. I remember someone named Jim Armstrong who got us into the Orange Monkey and the Penny Arcade and some gig at a college. There was someone named Howie who booked us into a club on the river. He went on to manage Poison in LA. Somehow we got into the Electric Circus and Big Daddy’s. But the music scene was changing. And so were the clubs. Everything, even the song writing, was DIY.
I wish I had a copy of every poster I made in those days. I tried to keep a copy of each. The Hi-Techs came together at the very end of the seventies and we broke up in the middle of 1981 so it was a short ride. Three of us went on to form Personal Effects and we played gigs from ’81 to ’86 before falling apart and then getting back together for the Planetarium gigs and a few reunions. We took cell phone shots of the posters we have and Bob sent us scans of the ones he has.
Here are links to the Hi-Techs posters and Personal Effects posters.
Personal Effects – “Nothing Lasts Forever”
If everyone was nice the world would surely stop spinning. Why someone would go out of their way to send someone that they don’t know a nasty letter is just one of those things. It hardly makes sense. But if you wanted to delve deeply, to descend to those depths, you could probably come up with an explanation. But it would only make as much sense as, “That’s what makes the world go ’round.”
But to call that anonymous someone on it, to rub the letter in their face and capitalize on it, that advances the ball. Bleu Cease did just that when he posted the letter to Facebook and received hundreds of well-deserved, supportive responses. BuzzFeed picked the story. In a brilliant move Bleu took one of the anonymous letter writer’s own phrases, “Cool, Artsy, With It,” put it on a t-shirt and the gallery has sold nearly a hundred.
Everybody has experienced a variation of this story but they usually don’t have such a positive outcome. In 1969 I was jumped by three frat guys at Indiana University. I assume they they were fraternity brothers, they all had yellow Greek symbols on their jackets. The length of my hair triggered a “beat up the fag” response and after getting a few good punches in I was left knocked out, face down on the sidewalk with a broken nose, jaw and glasses.
When we saw Bleu on Friday I told him I wished it was a better slogan on the t-shirt. He said there were others in the letter that he might use down the line. Like, “What Makes You Tick?” “Nothing But A Freak,” “Going Down The Tubes” and my favorite, “Off The Main Steam.”
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It is getting harder and harder to make the rounds on First Fridays. We get bogged down at each stop, mostly in conversation and we wind up running out of time to complete our short list of stops. Jim Mott reminded us that artists are influenced by one another, sometimes in the least obvious of ways. Colleen Buzzard and Dejan Pejovic asked me if I was doing any painting and I answered that I have been organizing my digital life. That response threw both of them and Colleen said, “That doesn’t sound like any fun.”
I love this 2009 Scott McCarney piece, “Married After Gilbert & George.” And it is great to see it out in the open again at Colleen Buzzard’s Studio. Scott has transformed this gallery space with a collection of work pulled from storage. A large paper quilt fills your field of vision as you step off the fourth floor elevator. The show, entitled “Disjecta Membra,” brings Scott’s prints and artifacts together with the bound bookworks of their origin. Married After Gilbert & George” appears here in book form as well. As Scott says, “The private act of turning pages on a horizontal surface can be experienced in tandem with the public viewing of images on a vertical plane.” The show runs through January 12th.
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I feel as though I accomplished something even though it took the best part of the day to straighten out our Apple ecosystem. I mentioned how our iTunes stream crapped out during our party. The Airport Express, sitting next to our stereo, lost its wifi connection but it still had the green light on. I only found that out the next morning when I opened Airpot Utility and saw it had no signal. I rebooted the Express and my computer and then HomePod played what it wanted while something else was coming through the stereo. I tested HomePod by asking Siri what the definition of is is and then “When was the War of 1812?” I learned that HomePod remembers commands and when we asked it to shuffle music, it will until it gets further instructions (which it lost when the Express went under). And I found out where you go to control it.
I got up the guts to turn iCloud Music Library back on in iTunes and stuff flooded onto my iPad mimi and I’m good to go. What did I learn? I’m thinking maybe I didn’t unplug the Express long enough in order for it to straighten itself out. It is good to shut everything down. It fixes things. Pete LaBonne wrote a song about it, “Shut Down,” on Glob. I’m planning on shutting down right now.
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“You are damn right I hit your car.” Actually I didn’t but I said I did. It was Peggi who whacked the back of the guy’s car with her hand after he drove through a red light. We were crossing at the sidewalk. The walk light was on. As if any of that matters. He never saw us and nearly took us out turning right, right in front of us. You think your life is so important and then you realize it could end so quickly. And this guy rolls down his window and yells, “You hit my car.”
We were walking up to the post office on Waring. The commemorative stamp selection had been depleted with Christmas so we came home with a sheet of Hot Wheels stamps and one dedicated to a Muslim holiday.
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We managed to round up some friends for an impromptu New Year’s bash. There was plenty of food and some people brought even more. We carried on past two and have nearly a case of champaign left over. Guests seemed to come in two waves so there was plenty of parking on our dead end street.
I was shuffling a folder of about a thousand songs, ones that I had marked as a favorite over the years, and fast forwarding through clunkers with my watch. I had moved our HomePod out to the kitchen and that added clarity to the stereo sound. Everything was cool for a few hours and then the stereo feed quit on me. My computer wouldn’t let me reselect both the HomePod and the stereo. I switched to vinyl and quickly piled 45s on lps, starting records at the wrong speed or missing the space between songs on lps. I sort of crashed then and never played the Stooges 1969, something I had played at every other NYE party. And this would have been the 50th anniversary.
At about two o’clock one of our guests couldn’t find his jacket in our closet. Someone else had worn it home and the keys to his house were in the pocket. We made a few frantic calls and texted likely suspects but weren’t able to reach anyone. A perfect time to be on the road, we drove to a relative’s and picked up a spare key. The jacket returned in the morning and it looked exactly like the one that was left here.
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The lake looks so beautiful this afternoon. It is ready to turn over and bring on the the new year. We are ready to receive its gifts.
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We “suited up” (Permethrin-treated tick gear) in yesterday’s fifty degree temperatures and walked through the woods with this two person saw. It belonged to Leo, our former next door neighbor, and it still hangs in his old shed. Monica, the new, proud owner of the shed, let us borrow it. I couldn’t wait to use it.
Peggi and I traded ends a few times and coordinated our strokes to make short work of the big Sassafras that had fallen across our ski path at the very bottom of the biggest hill. We carried the saw all the way to the golf course and cleaned up four of five other blow downs. We’re ready for snow.
1 CommentWe watched Greendale again last night and it has only gotten better. We are a small cult, those that love this movie. It is in my top ten. I have an affinity for the form, 8mm and family members as cast. I made the movie above in the winter of 69/70. It features my brother, Tim, on drums, my drums. He’s wearing my clothes too. My brother, John, is playing guitar and their friend, John Spar, playing harmonica. I hung one of my lithographs on the garage door and my youngest brother, Fran, and his friends did double duty as a rental crew and snow acrobats. Years later I added a soundtrack from Invisible Idiot.
The cool thing about filming without sound is that you can direct (bark orders or offer encouragement) while you’re shooting. Neil Young adds an amazing soundtrack from Crazy Horse, just three musicians with very few overdubs, and then has his cast lip-syncs his lyrics. The whole thing is beautiful and brilliant. A rock opera without the hysterics.
The characters, all mouthing Neil’s vocals, make you realize how good the lyrics are, the storytelling and the character development. I remember my nephew telling me the only thing he didn’t like about Neil Young was his voice. I love it. And you realize how expressive it is while you watch all these characters voice the lyrics.
The movie is relentlessly good. When this 2003 movie finally catches on I could see it playing with Rocky Horror Picture Show-sized crowds singing and dancing along with every line.
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I’ve stepped over this black paint, on the curb near the entrance to Wegmans, so many times and I’ve never been able to figure out what it was that someone spray painted.
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We headed out this morning for the outlet bridge but turned toward the bay near the Point Pleasant Fire Department. At the bottom of the hill on Pleasant Avenue is a gated community called Bay Point and Schnackel Drive, a funky neighborhood of small homes, about half of them seasonal, at water’s edge. Many of the homes down here can only be reached on foot or by water. When Schnacknel ended we continued on a path until we spotted a “Beware of Dog” sign. Country music was playing on some outdoor speakers and an older guy came over to see what we were up to. My father had sent Peggi this old picture of the the Birds and Worms Club and we asked him if he remembered where that was. He pointed to the Newport Yacht Club. He said he bought his house in 1965 and then he got off on a tax rant. We told him we had heard there was a store down here and he told us it was called “Alice’s.” He said “she sold penny candy and beer and she died in the store.”
My sister, Amy, had a holiday party last night and we spent some time talking to our niece about her vegan diet. We were standing around a table full of cookies and I felt guilty each time I ate one. Our brother-in-law, Cal Zone told us he was doing a show on WAYO today but I got the time wrong and tuned in too late. Peggi got the lowdown down on our nephew. He’s home from Pittsburgh for a few days and playing there with his band on New Year’s Eve. The band’s called “Swither” and Eli writes the lyrics and sings. “Everybody’s wondering what I’m doing next. Well, I’ve been getting real good at avoiding that.”
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We borrowed chairs from our neighbors’ for Christmas Eve dinner and returned them today along with a plate of cookies. Peggi made two kinds, Christmas butter cookies from her mom’s recipe and cardamom cookies from our friend, Shelley’s, recipe. Our neighbors showed us all their cookies and offered us some homemade toffee. We took a plate of cookies to neighbors across the street too. Turns out they had been making cookies all week and they offered us some of theirs. They have a 3D printer and printed a replica of their Don Hershey house a few months back. They had their mini house on a some snowy white felt along with four new Irondequoit-centric 3D print-outs, House of Guitars, Rubino’s, Pasta Villa and DiVincenzo’s Bakery.
We invited my siblings and their families for Christmas Eve dinner. My brother, Mark, comes up from New Jersey with his family, my sister, Ann, came from her seven day Christmas season shift at Parkleigh and our niece, Brittney, from our old neighborhood. We started with appetizers and conversation, wedges of Spanish Manchego cheese with quince paste, Greek olives from Wegmans, smoked salmon from Jeff Spevak’s backyard with Señorío de la Antigua Rioja.
We overate for dinner. Peggi made applesauce with Jonagold apples from Schutt’s and we served a baked ham from the Co-op, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, mixed green salad and Pears al Vino Tinto, poached pears in Red Wine for dessert. This is why Santa Claus looks the way he does.
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On somewhat of a lark we took a tour of the Metropolitan Building in downtown Rochester. Formerly Lincoln Rochester, Lincoln First and Chase Lincoln, it was bank and it still looks like one. Our friend, Time Schapp worked here and you could see Lake Ontario from from hi office window. The place has been converted into high-end apartments, ones that one with high speed internet, cable tv, parking, trash pick-up, physical fitness room and an on-site restaurant. All for somewhere around 3000 a month.
The apartments we looked at were all on the twenty first floor. The view at sunset was spectacular. The apartments were open space plans and nicely appointed. It was kind of fun imagining how we would use the space, where the drums would go and the tree stump that Pete and Shelley gave us. I think the deal breaker here is lack of access to the outdoors. You can’t even open the windows up here.
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It is surely cleaner to burn natural gas rather than wood but we have a lot of free wood around here. It falls from the sky. Our neighborhood is seventy years old and the trees that were left when the houses went up continue to mature. They grow toward the light which is often right over the house and they become lopsided. Conscientious homeowners prune them and are left with the wood, perfectly good fuel if you have a fireplace. But it takes some real effort to cut, split and stack the wood so it can age before burning.
And that is where we come in. Instead of walking we’ve spent the better part of this week out by the wood pile. Our neighbors took down a big tree that was hanging over their house. They contacted us while we were in Spain and asked if we we wanted it. Of course we said yes and when we came home we found these huge pieces, better than 30 inches in diameter and much longer that the 21 inches that fit in our hydraulic splitter. I watched a YouTube video on how to split large logs. This guy made it look easy. His method works but falls apart when you have burls and limbs going in all directions. We worked our asses off out there but have three face cords aging and a fire fire going. We are going to seed but not there yet.
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We walked along the river this morning from Ford Street to Elmwood and and back on the other side. I found a plastic protractor near UR and over on the west side a piece of paper with handwritten proverbs. “Even a fool is thought wise if he holds his tongue” caught my attention.
Some friends of ours have a yearly holiday gathering. It is centered around wine. Everyone brings a bottle and sets it on a table near the front door and the place is so crowded we hardly get to talk with the hosts. But it is a great opportunity to get together with people we only see a few times each year.
Maybe ten years ago some people brought their guitars and sang a few songs, folk songs like House of the Rising Sun and the Pogues Christmas song. It felt spontaneous and festive. As the years went by more guitars come out earlier. The first few songs grabbed everyone’s attention, I especially liked a former Chesterfield Kings’ version of “Dead Flowers,” but when a boisterous Johnny Cash tune drowned out the conversation we were having in the other room I groaned and said something about originality.
A small group was playing Cat Steven’s “Wild World” when we left and I was thinking about our generation. Outside we couldn’t hear the acoustic guitars, only the voices, and Peggi told me I should keep those kind of comments to myself. She is right. I sound like an old man. I plan to work on that. Besides, “Even a fool is thought wise if he holds his tongue.”
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