Author: Paul

Sheryl Crowe’s shaky anthem was a clunker but the Democratic debate proved to be as entertaining as the Republican two. I really didn’t think they had it in them. Bernie lit the fire and Hilary rolled with the punches. The other three one per-centers just set the two leading candidates up. I don’t see how Biden fits in here.

We missed “2-Ton-Tony.” He was at our door and we were out so he left a note on his campaign flyer. I can sort of imagine what he looks like.

While walking with my mom in the halls of their apartment building I spotted a sign “Welcome to new residents, Giuseppe and Concetta Profetta” I am looking forward to meeting them.

I ran this idea by Gary Pudup at last week’s Margaret Explosion gig and it really didn’t click. He’s a former Monroe County Sheriff and then was the head of the local ACLU. On top of that experience he is a strong gun opponent. My idea was a bumper sticker, condensed block letters, black on white, that read “MORE GUNS.” Knowing where I’m coming from he just looked at me for bit and then said, “People would take that seriously.”

How can you take anything seriously anymore?

Sam lives in a home with four other young adults. The five are classified as autistic but, as with everything, the boundaries are fuzzy. We drove down to Elmira to visit him on Saturday. At first it was hard to tell the aides from the clients. That distinction becomes clear fairly quickly. The clients are more interesting. Sam is lucky. The proportion of aides to clients is weighted heavily in his favor and the aides genuinely like Sam. How could they not? He is so sweet.

Sam lived with his parents, friends of ours, for more than thirty years and now this is his home. He is happy here. He is healthier, much thinner and calmer. Sam took us up to see his room, his computer, game console and tv with the connection ports in the front where he likes them. Sam has always been a computer buff and he calls us every time Apple has an update to make sure we know about it.

An aide gave Sam his medication and we took off. He had an agenda. First stop was Five Guys, a hamburger joint. They pride themselves on their fries. They keep the skin on and use only peanut oil. The three of us ordered grilled cheese and fries and we each had a pop. Next stop was Target where Sam bought some new headphones, a gallon of grape juice with no sugar added and a big box of Scooby Doo graham crackers. We spent a good part of the afternoon in the store and had a ball. In fact I bought a ball, one of those size 5 soccer balls.

Memo to self: Elmira, Horseheads, Big Flats, the southern part of New York is gorgeous this time of year. Wear your camouflage and you’ll fit right in.

I talked before about Jeffery’s Saturday morning yoga class at the Rochester Yacht Club so I won’t recap how beautiful the setting is. I will point out how delightfully distracting the activity on the river is. The yacht club is built out on the river. It almost feels like you are on an island and boats sail past on all sides. The view is unobstructed even when you are on your back because the railing is clear plexiglass. (You can see a bit of it in the blow-up of the photo above.) Yesterday Jeffery had us put out our legs up the wall, the clear plexiglass guardrails, and we did a series of inversions.

Jeffery improvises the practice and his classes have an effortless flow from one position to the next. Consequently the hour and a half flies by. He was telling us about someone who was helped by a particular class. The person asked Jeffery if he could recap what the exercises were and Jeffery said he could not remember. He said if he planned out a class he would be bored out of his mind. When we finished the inversions he said. “This is the best wall ever.” I liked that.

You don’t have to be a member of the club to participate in the class but many of the people are. When class was over a man who is a member, a trustworthy sort, said there was so much going on this weekend. He rattled off a few things and then mentioned the Landmark Society’s tour. My father had given us his tickets to this event and we had forgotten all about it so we thanked the gentleman for reminding us. We stopped back at the house, changed clothes and headed downtown. We found a spot on Washington Square with no problem and walked over to Claude Bragdon’s Universalist Church. There was hardly anyone around and the doors were locked. The tour is next week.

The way Rick, my neighbor and horseshoe opponent, talks, the short stakes in our pits are a disadvantage to him alone. When one of his shoes slides off and he yells I tell him, “they are just as short for me.” Well I found some longer stakes at a garage sale and got my neighbor, Jared, to help us pull the old stakes out with his tractor. We drove the new ones in with a sledge hammer. The official rules have the stakes at fifteen inches tall with a fifteen degree slant toward the opposite stake. Once the new stakes were in place we played our earliest match. Best of three, as usual. Rick won.

This is not the best picture of my father. Even he went through an awkward stage. My cousin has custody of my aunt’s (her mother’s) scrapbooks and she let my father borrow them and then he let me borrow them. This picture caught my attention. This was my first bike. My father gave me his old bike when I became old enough to ride.

We lived in the city over by School 28 on Humboldt Street and by the time my parents gave me the bike, at an age where they felt I would ride responsibly, somewhere near the awkward age of my father, I had already learned to ride by borrowing friends’ bikes. So I had to fake it when they presented the bike. I took a lot of ribbing because of this bike. Nothing that I couldn’t handle, just good natured teasing because the kickstand was something no one had seen before. The triangular stand swung down from the back spoke and held the back tire off the ground by a few inches. It was actually a pretty cool design.

At some point I got to pick out a new bike from a store on Clinton Avenue that is long gone. Seems like it had a German name. This bike was so cool. I would love to have something like it now. Medium tire width, two gears with back pedal brakes. Not a gear shift or anything. You back pedaled slightly, not enough to put the brakes on and you found the other gear.

My camera is still in the shop so I’ve been taking my iPad mini with me on walks. I tried to photograph some butterflies in bright sunlight, so bright I couldn’t see the the iPad display. Don’t know how I managed to get the shot above.

Our niece recommended Old Navy to Peggi as a good place to shop for jeans. We had a banking problem to deal with, a few checks for services written out to a company that we no longer manage, so we signed in on the big touch screen at Eastman Savings & Loan and met with Ken. He advised us to tell the clients, who have so gracefully paid their bills on time, to rewrite the checks. So off we went to the closest Old Navy.

We studied their “hi, denim” chart and determined they offered “Original,” “Curvy,” “Rockstar” and “Boyfriend” jeans in “Skinny,” “Straight” and “Boot-Cut.” And to complicate that they are offered in low, mid and high rise. found a place to sit down and I overheard Peggi telling the young clerk, “These look like I’ve been working in the dust. I’d rather have real dust on my jeans.”

I always have a good time listening to the music in stores like this. There are some styles that never go away and consequently most things sound like stuff that has gone before. Here it is all youthful and upbeat. Can you imagine shopping to Americana? T-Rex’s “Jeepster,” was the only song I recognized, sounded up to the minute to me.

Both Paul Gauguin and sixty years later, Marlon Brando, found their Arcadia in Tahiti. Brando was drawn by the innocence he found in the pages of National Geographic, Gauguin by early 1800’s ethnographer’s accounts. In 1891, Gauguin announced he was travelling to Tahiti to paint illustrations for the most popular novel of the day, “The Marriage of Loti” saying the primitive, erotic living conditions on Tahiti would revive his muse. Of course, both men were escaping troubled domestic situations.

“Listen To Me Marlon” is a must see film for anyone who cares about acting. The good, the bad and the ugly are all here in Brando’s own words. And each of these ingredients is necessasary to form an actor, an artist of Brando’s caliber. He talks about going within, alone, in order to perform, to avoid the obvious and the lie in order to convince. The filmmakers had access to 200 hours of audio, self-hypnotism tapes included, and of course all those fabulous scenes from his movies. Oh yeah, and some goofy, early 3D computer modeling of Brando’s head, a perfect vehicle for reminding you that it is all a construct.

This is my view from my yoga mat at the Rochester Yacht Club on Saturday mornings. I leave all my pocket stuff at home so it doesn’t come tumbling out of my shorts but I always bring my camera. That and enough quiet money to get an iced latte after class. We took the lattes with us and walked out to the end of the pier. Funny, I just searched google for a photo of “Charlotte pier” and found my own photo from a few years ago.

At seventy degrees the water in our street pool was warmer than the air today. I had to get in there. While I was jumping up and down in the deep end, a feat made more difficult by my parachute-like suit, I remembered that Geri had invited us to an open house for Virgin Wood Type. So we headed over there and found Geri working away in the shop. The Open House was yesterday.

We needed to do some banking yesterday but it was too hot to think about riding uphill to the plaza so we rolled downhill to the lake and cruised along Lakeshore. The non-working class was out and the beach scene was happening. My camera is in the shop so I committed the Arcadia snapshots to memory. In Greek mythology “Arcadia” is the home of Pan. In poetic fantasy it represents a pastoral paradise. I spent quite few nights on the porch this summer with “Visions of Arcadia.”

At the other end the beach we turned into the road that leads to Johnson’s Pond, one of my father’s haunts. The town was celebrating October Fest in September in giant big tent and an um-pah band was playing. Grown men were walking around in lederhose and couples were sitting at picnic tables with pictures of beer. There was quite a bit of dancing going on for the afternoon. We had smoked sausage, sauerkraut and German potato salad with a Genesee Scotch Ale. We got back on our bikes and spotted my father at the pond sneaking up on a couple of wood ducks.

Chuck Prophet is doing a house concert across the street at 8 o’clock tonight. It’s after six and no sign of him over there. We heard him open for Sharon Jones a few years back. Both were kinda bombastic that night. Of Chuck UNCUT says, “Sounds for all the world like Bruce Springsteen doing ‘Diamond Dogs.'”