Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
It Better Be
We plan to celebrate the Solstice tonight at the Little Theatre Café with a healthy dose of pagan holiday cheer. Carol Aquilano has a exceptional show of Sumi ink drawings of local landscapes on full sheets of watercolor paper. Best art show I’ve seen in there in a while! Hope you can stop out and join us for a toast to the late Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) as we play one of his songs.
Here’s a track from a few weeks ago. James Nichols joins Margaret Explosion on piano.
A few years ago Time Warner blocked free access to the newsgroups, the bulletin boards that were older than the internet. We were one of the first customers in this area when TW test marketed their Roadrunner service and I remember telling everyone how great their service was. Yesterday they sent us this little note.
Dear Road Runner Subscriber,
You are receiving this email because you have used the Personal Home Page service that Road Runner provides.
Road Runner will no longer offer the Personal Home Page service, effective January 31, 2011.
Sincerely,
Road Runner
Corporate Customer Care
I don’t even remember how to access our personal homepage but for the last ten years my father has maintained a small site about Brighton’s brick industry on his personal home page so I called him to discuss moving the site. I’d move our internet access too if I had choice.
While I was on the phone with my father he described this recent Ann Telnaes’ cartoon and asked if I had read the article about the worm that got into the computer’s controlling Iran’s nuclear arsenal. I had sort of skimmed it so I went back to it. It reads like a real game changer. If only we had disarmed Iraq’s weapons that way. Wait, they never had any.
My father also asked if I had seen James McMullan’s newest entry to his blog on drawing. I had not. How does my fatrher keep up with all this? I just spent the last hour here and I plan to go back for more as soon as I get a little work done.
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I used to see pheasants all the time in Webster but I hadn’t seen one in years until this guy waked out in front of us. He was chasing a drab looking mate and was completely oblivious to me. We moved into one of the first housing tracts in Webster back in the sixties. The place is overrun with them now but back then we were surrounded by farm land. We took hikes everyday and had our own names for the pockets of woods that separated the various farmer’s fields. Every time we’d cut through corn fields we’d scare up a batch of pheasants. They’d scare us too when they took off from under foot. I don’t remember them looking this colorful though.
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Modesty, Courtesy, Integrity, Self Control, Perseverance, Indomitable Spirit all seem like worthwhile pursuits. These words were written on the wall surrounding an American flag at Gregory’s seventh birthday party. The festivities were held at the Martial Arts Center in Loehmann’s Plaza. I had my iPod Touch with me so I looked up “Indomitable Spirit”. In martial arts it is considered a refusal to be beaten, no matter how tough, talented or big your opponent may be. That will probably be the toughest challenge for these little guys.
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This was the first time we used the “Future Residents” slot at the Highlands and we got caught. We were only going to drop off a few things at the Bistro Café and then drive around to Peggi’s mom’s old apartment but time got away. A number of people who came to the small gathering we had in her honor pointed out how much they liked our parking spot.
Peggi prepared a few words to say about her mom and I did the same but we never got around to it. Everyone who came shared thoughtful memories of her with us and at some point it seemed like we all turned some sort of corner and we’re moving on. We may have missed our envelope but I think Mary Alice would have loved the whole affair.
I was going talk about how she used to collect the remainders of bar soup and roll them into these multi-colored balls that she put in the guest bedroom. That is one of my earliest memories of her. She made a mean pecan pie, her Aunt Mabel’s recipe. And even though she travelled all over the world when Peggi’s father was transferred to Australia she was a small town girl at heart. She liked rides in the country and Vic & Irv’s. When she reminisced it seemed she was the happiest as a child in Evansville, Indiana.
I ran into the Springers in the hallway after Mary Alice had passed. They lived in the apartment next to her and coincidentally the Springers had introduced my parents to one another. Mrs. Springer said, “Mary Alice was a pistol.” We all laughed and Mr. Springer, pointing to his wife, said, “And she would know. She’s a real pistol too!” It’s an apt description. Mary Alice was opinionated and sharp, a worthy opponent in hot button discussions.
I was happy to have her her in Rochester for the last eight years of her life. I loved going to the operas with her and watching her have a good time at Margaret Explosion gigs. We genuinely had a good time together and I’ll miss her.
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We raced out to Peggi’s mom’s place for the last time on Saturday. It was pretty clear it was the end of the line this time so we did what we could to keep her comfortable. I hooked up the DVD player in her bedroom and Peggi put on one of her mom’s favorite operas, Mozart’s “Le Nozz Di Figaro” with Rochester’s Renée Fleming in the lead role. Peggi’s mom was gone before the opera finished, just before the applause for the fourth and final act, and I already miss her.
The three of us had seen many operas together in the eight years she spent here. She generally liked the lighter fare. My favorite was Coplands’s “Tender Years”. We had a similar divide when it came to art. She volunteered at the Detroit Institute of Arts and we went to many openings at the Memorial Art Gallery here. Peggi’s mom was troubled by abstract art and she was always asking me to explain pieces. I decide whether I like an art work in seconds. I don’t think about it so I was always at a loss to explain why I liked something. I tried many different approaches, many times, finally just saying things like, “You don’t have to like it.”
A few years back she spotted an review in the Wall Street Journal of a book by Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting at the Museum of Modern Art, called “Pictures of Nothing.” She took the bus from her apartment to Pittsford Plaza and walked with her walker to the Barnes & Noble store at the other end of the plaza and picked up a copy. It is a gorgeous book of “Abstract Art Since Pollack” and the pictures are accompanied by the extremely inciteful text from a series of six lectures that Varnedoe gave as a Mellon lecturer at the National Gallery. If anyone really wants an explanation of modern art I can’t think of a better source so I often wondered why she gave the book to me instead of reading it herself. I didn’t think I needed it but I savored every bit of this book. I could do a much better job of explaining abstract art now.
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The mail lady had off, the kids on our street had off, the neighbor who works for the UofR had off so we decided to take Columbus Day off as well. We drove out to Schutt’s Apple Mill in Webster and picked up a few bushels of apples along with fresh squeezed cider and two fried cakes made with indigestible oils. Since we were out this way we stopped by the 1000 Acre Swamp in Penfield. My father goes birding here and he hunts the skunk cabbage here in early Spring. I’ve heard him talk about it but found it kind of hard to get excited about a place called 1000 Acre Swamp.
I wasn’t sure where it was so I looked it up online and found out it is only 500 acres. It is a beautiful place, an oasis in suburbia. One hour in here made re-entry a jarring experience. There should be a law against huge lawns. They’re obscene. The MacMansions are silly but the lawns are an assault to the senses, all of them.
PBS started its “God In America” series last night and the whole show took a quick nose dive after the arrival of Columbus. A few Native Americans started the show by saying. “Our whole world around us is our religion. Our way of life is our religion. The way we behave toward one another and others is our religion.” This wasn’t good enough for the Spaniards and the sad parade that followed. I don’t think I can handle Part Two.
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We took my sister out to dinner at Proietti’s in Webster last night. She has been living in Webster since our family moved out of the city in 1960 but she’s moving back to the city in November. Proietti’s has to be the best Italian restaurant in this area. I used to keep track of those things but this is one big moving target. I ordered the “all killer, no filler” Linguini Gabrielle (eggplant, hearts, portabella, tomato, vegetable broth, fresh mozzarella) and my sister had the homemade pumpkin raviolis. Every dish is distinctive so order and share. My sister keeps track of the whole family so not only did we catch up with her, we also got the lowdown on the rest. I had no idea that my other sister had broken her foot.
My father lost five years work on the family tree when his computer was stolen. Who knew that Reunion, the program that he uses, stores the database in the Applications folder? And who knew he wasn’t backing up his apps? I take full responsibility and I didn’t know. I think there was space problem when we set it up and I opted out on the App BU. We need a black sheep in this family.
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Find Phone is my favorite feature on our wireless landline phone. It’s such a gas to hunt for the phone while it beeps. It works every time except when I left the phone on the hood of the car and Peggi drove off with it. I helped my father replace his computer after his house was broken into and when we were at the Apple Store my father asked the clerk if there was any way to track down his old computer. Peter demonstrated how he could locate his iPhone at secure.me.com/find. Turns out it was in his pocket.
Somehow we’ve managed to wear out three different Linksis and Netgear routers over the years. We replaced them with an Apple Extreme and then added an Express to extend our coverage. I’ve been playing with Apple’s new Remote for the iTouch and iPad and I connected our stereo to the Express. I used to have an old laptop out there running iTtunes and of course I needed an external drive to hold the music library. But that was so yesterday. I retired the laptop and the drive and I stream music to the stereo from my desktop. With Remote on my iPod I can control the playlist or just let it go and even control the volume in the two rooms. Oh, and they’ve added the ability to mark your favorites when something good comes along.
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Electricity and water make strange bedfellows. Our neighbors were taking a midnight dip in the street pool and the underwater light went out. None of the current members remember ever having to replace it so we collectively stumbled through the whole process. There was an engineer involved so I could never catalog all of the methodical steps.
We waited til the end of the season and drained the pool enough to figure out how to get it out of its recessed home. We discovered a cord coiled up inside, long enough to permit changing the bulb while pool is full. The bulb itself is enclosed in the housing and the Pleasantville New York Pool Company that made the fixture warns you to only burn the bulb when the housing is submerged. We struggled to break the seal on the housing and almost destroyed the thing trying to get it open. Some members were already talking about getting rid of it and plugging up the recess when we managed to break it open. Peggi ordered a new bulb online and I stood on a ladder in the water and put the fixture back in its place.
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I take the same photo over and over, it seems. I have to come up with creative names so I don’t overwrite older files. How many times have I photographed this marsh? I paint the same painting over and over too. I came home with a new batch of crime faces tonight, mugshots from the morning paper.
Our painting teacher came in with three quotes printed on a small pieces of paper. He gave one to each student first thing. And as much as we would like to think we are all painters, we are “students” in Fred Lipp’s presence. The first quote was from Juan Gris. “You are lost the minute you know what the result will be.” The second from Degas. “Only when he no longer knows what he is doing, does the painter do good work.” And the third one was from William Baziotes. “Each painting has its own way of evolving. . . when the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.
No wonder I have to take this class over and over.
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I haven’t been out enough to grab any new photos so I reached into my vault for this one. Sort of picked it at random. Steve was our mailman for about twenty years. We used to trade music and he used our bathroom most days. And we got an earful of the new post office regulations as they rolled them out, efficiency methods that took the life out of his job. You know how you see someone out of context and it’s like wow. Peggi must have been driving when I grabbed this.
Our current mail person is a woman. Our neighbor says she’s “cute as a button”. She delivers from her truck and turns around in our driveway. It’s not the same.
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We don’t set the alarm and often wake up with a phone call. This morning it was my cousin’s wife calling to say she found my parent’s garage door open while she walking her dog. My parents asked us to keep an eye on their place while the were out of town and this didn’t seem right. We suggested she call 911 and we headed over there. The cops were already there by the time we got there and sure enough someone had broken in. They (one or two guys) tried the neighbor’s place first and they stepped in some fresh turned earth near their window and then they tracked these prints across my parent’s driveway.
They used a bar to bust open the back door and smashed a window to unlatch the dead bolt but we couldn’t find the glass pieces. Suction cups? Took the glass with them? And the glass that the cops did find was from a car window. They thought maybe the thief (thieves) had stolen another car to get to my parent’s house and pieces fell off their clothes. They took a couple of Cokes out of the refrigerator and left them in my father’s computer room and one of them took a big, loose shit in their toilet and he didn’t flush it. They went through every cupboard and took what they could get rid of in a hurry. So there was an empty tv stand and a pile of cords behind the desk where the computer was and to my surprise the backup drives were still there so I hope to do a full restore when my dad gets his next computer. Oh, and they put all the stuff in my parent’s car and drove off with the loot. Green Honda Accord with a peace sign on it.
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Even though Guy Davis (referenced in my last post) played mostly songs from the giants of blues catalog I found him to be more folk than blues. But what do I know? I am not a folkie. He told some great stories between songs.
I woke up thinking I was tending to the cabbage in our garden. We don’t have any cabbage. I was still thinking about the German movie we watched a few nights ago called “The White Ribbon.” It was full of “who done its” without any concrete resolution and it had us speculating all day long. Not that it even mattered, it was a way of getting back into the movie. It was beautifully shot in austere black and white and set in pre WW1 Austria and was as unsettling as “Children of the Damned.” The sub titles were small so we sat cross-legged, up close to the tv. This intensified our involvement and it took a while it shake it. May have to try that again.
Clarence, the man who built our house in the late forties, stopped by with his daughter like he does every summer. Our neighbor, Jared, who was here when Clarence lived in our house, stopped n to reconnect and he asked Clarence what he attributed his longevity too. At 98 and a half Clarence is sharp as a tack. He said something about the Lord and Jared, the lovable atheist that he is, asked, “Why does the Lord decide to let you live to a ripe old age and then take a young person down”? Clarence said he has lived long enough to gain wisdom which is better than intelligence”.
We put “The White Ribbon” in the mail and cued up the Netflix “Instant Play” version of “The Horror of Dracula” on our iPad. Jack Garner recommended it in our local paper. We propped the iPad up between a Philip Guston book and one on Mattise and ran the audio out to our stereo. The application locked up at one point and I grabbed this still.
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We look forward to voting because it is such a nice walk through the woods over to the Point Pleasant Fire Department where our polling station is. New York has new voting machines this year and they already look outdated. I miss the big old slot machine like levers. They gave us giant paper ballots and pens and asked us to “completely fill in the bubbles next to the candidate’s name”. And when we finished with that we were asked to feed it into the black machine labeled “Scanner.” It churned away, confirmed the votes and then submitted them somewhere.
We voted for Schneiderman for Attorney General. Peggi especially liked his response to the question, “What do you do for exercise?” The other candidates all went to the gym or ran but he said he “passes out leaflets at the subway stops”. Of course there were a few other like minded responses on the more substantive issues like the Islamic Community Center.
The city used to set up these grey, wooden, outhouse-like buildings at the end of our street when I was growing up and people voted in them. I remember getting inside one a few days before the voting began. My parents had us passing out flyers for John F. Kennedy that year.
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Peggi’s mom was using her fingers to name her five aunts. She was having trouble coming up with the sixth name and said, “I’m afraid the hereafter is going to be very confusing, trying to reconnect with everybody.” Her sole known cousin had called and it was his mom’s name that we trying to think of. I was thinking how I have about fifty first cousins and I could never name them all.
Sparky stopped by to check up on us. We keep talking about doing a repeat performance of Polish sausage lunch we did a few yeas back. The woman who made these magical sausages died and Sparky hasn’t found a substitute. It gives us something to talk about, sausage and Pete. We gave him a cassette of Pete LaBonnes’s music years ago and he always asks about him.
When Jeanne Perri was in town this summer (she moved to Nashville in the music boom days) we sat around calling out our favorite Pete songs and then playing them on our laptop. One that stuck with me is “Punk Rock Dressing Room” with the refrain, “We’re living in a punk rock dressing room”. I was thinking of that song last night when we got home from Peggi’s mom’s place. There was an unlabeled cd in a white envelope taped to our door with “4 U” written on it. I popped it in to my desktop computer and 19 untitled audio tracks popped up so I gave it a spin. It was a live Ramones’ recording from San Francisco from the “Road To Ruin” tour. We saw them many times and this brought it all back. They rescued rock and roll and were true performance artists. Rick Simpson stopped by this morning and asked if we got the cd. I never would have guessed it was from him.
Our NetFlix movie selection of the night was The Runaways movie. Even the extras were good except there was only still photos of Joan Jett and no current video of her.
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I have a lot of old paintings out in the garage and most of them are mine. Our current house has a lot less wall space than our old city house had. I’ve been organizing the garage this summer and I dusted off this painting yesterday. I bought it from Cheryl at Godiva’s when it was over on Monroe Avenue. It’s a double self portrait by Dave Ripton and Todd Beers. I played drums in the Dave’s band for a while along with Jack Schaefer and Martin Edic. We used to practice in the recording studio behind the Bug Jar. I loved Dave’s songs and I love this self portrait. He is a duel threat at least. Dave’s well meaning painting advice to me was, “I’d love to see your faces on heroin.” I think he wanted me to get real, sort of the opposite of lighten up.
Todd used to get poetry workshops at area high schools. He’d work with the kids during the day and then they’d read their work coffee house style in a dimly lit assembly space at night. He often asked Peggi and me to join them as musical accompaniment, bongos and sax. I feel very fortunate to have this painting. It used to hang over our fireplace. Someday I’ll get back on a wall.
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The big pumpkin I pictured here a few days ago has officially escaped the garden. It broke off the vine under its own weight and dropped to the ground. We carried it home but don’t expect it to last until Halloween.
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Geez! I remember when Brian Williams was 60 and we celebrated his birthday at the Little Theater Café while his band Lumiere played. On Labor Day afternoon Bob Henrie, his brother, his girlfriend and an assorted cast of musicians connected to the Middlesex scene performed at Abilene as we celebrated Brian’s 65th.
We asked Brian how he felt and answered “Great” with his characteristically big smile. There were a few qualifiers but I won’t get into that. Mostly, he said, music keeps you young.
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