Building Number 5, former TB Ward in Rochester, NY
It finally happened. We were driving by the intersection of Westfall Road and East Henrietta and we WEREN’T in a hurry to get somewhere. So pulled over to look at these beautiful old buildings that have been all but swallowed up by nature. There are about ten buildings all in the same state of rot. I took a few photos and then spotted another couple taking shots. I asked my father what these buildings were and he said this one, Number 5, was a County run run TB ward and he remembered visiting a friend here who was suffering from TB.
Number 5 is the biggest of the buildings in the complex and the ivy has not engulfed it like it has the others. The Visual Studies Building in yesterday’s post recently had its ivy removed. Ivy sucks the moisture out of the mortar joints and it eventually found its way inside the the VSW building. This is an ongoing problem here. I remember Dave Mahoney in the late sixties up on a later removing ivy from this same building. I used to meet him for breaks and we’d walk up to the corner store for cheese crackers and a coke.
I was talking to our neighbors down the street while their dogs were yapping away. I took this shot and our neighbor said, “Oh you’d like pictures of our dogs?” I can give you hundreds of pictures of our dogs”. I said no thanks but then I got to thinking what that would be like. I could make a scrapbook of them like I did with pictures the former owner of our house left here. He had a wandering telephoto that sought out women’s butts. I break the scrapbook out at parties if the mood is right.
Bruce O’Neal is the best tree surgeon in town but I bet he wouldn’t want to be called a surgeon. He stopped over to look at a few our dead limbs and he was talking about his daughter going to school for nursing and then switching to criminal justice. His advice to her – “Money does grow on trees.” Our trees.
Next blog please. So Many Records has an sensational entry up there now, “He Cried” by the Shangri-Las, an over the top song with Incredible production. It was fun hear Peggi singing along as I gave it a spin. Why can’t they make like this anymore.
My mother called to make plans with Peggi for driving out to our niece’s shower tomorrow. She said they were headed to a pool part at my cousin’s house this afternoon and she was afraid it was going to rain. I said “Let me check the weather” and I went to “Weather Underground. Most of our weather seems to come from Toronto so I think they will be safe for another few hours. I go to Weather Underground because it sounds subversive.
I wasn’t going to take a picture of these orange shelves in their obsessed with state until I saw the way our Hoosier Boy box looked on them. The box was on the way to the trash after all these years. I had electrical parts in it or something. We had this box since Bloomington. It reminds me of the tomatoes we grew in southern Indiana. I’d start with one stake and then another on the same plant and by the end of the season I’d have five stakes holding up the same overloaded plant. Of course the summers there were so hot and humid they would take the life right out of a person. That is unless you were hanging out at the quarries.
We’ve had a generous amount of rain this summer, not enough to keep you indoors but enough so we haven’t had to water the garden. And there has been just the right amount to produce a wide variety of mushrooms in the woods. We’ve seen the ones that look like donuts and the brilliant orange ones that that woman ate and – I can’t remember if she died but she got in the paper for eating them. The ones above look like tropical coral.
We live vicariously through our friends and neighbors, Rick and Monica. They take vacations and we enjoy those. Tonight they went bowling over at that place that has only six lanes on Merchants Road.
We stopped down at the pool today after our walk and we were talking to one of the neighbors about the new people that have moved onto our street. We told him we had met them yesterday but neither Peggi or I could remember what the guy’s name was. Our neighbor set us straight. He too had talked to them the day before. They moved here from Reno and our neighbor heard that the woman telecommutes to work somewhere in the bay area. He asked us if we telecommute. Peggi said, “I guess so, we never leave the house.” I am still trying to imagine what telecommuting is.
I’m reading William Corbett’s memoir of Philip Guston where Philip Guston is reading Isaac Babel. “Comrades let us not fool ourselves: this is a very important right (the right to write badly), and to take it from us is no small thing. Let us give up this right, and may God help us. And if there is no God, let us help ourselves”. Guston cherished going out on a limb. Isaac Babel was arrested, tortured and shot during Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge.
We rode our bikes down to the old Newport House on Irondequoit Baty. The former speakeasy is still there but it’s boarded up and in demo mode headed for upscale condos. A worker came out and asked if he could help us. You know you’re in trouble when someone asks you if they can help you. On the way back we smelled something foul in the air. It got worse the closer we got to Culver Road and there we found this guy desperately trying to mow his lawn before his mower burned up.
We gave Kim Simmons two boxes of cds to sell on eBay. He takes 30% for his effort and that seems fair. We spent most of the weekend in the garage going through boxes of junk. Our house came with junk that the previous owners couldn’t sell at their final garage sale and we piled our junk in front of that junk. I feel like we’re all pawns in a giant worldwide garage sale scheme.
My nephew works in a pizza joint and he’s been having a hard time with his family, the law and just about everything. I stopped in to see him and asked how his job was going. He said it was ok but he needs more hours to pay his bills so he is looking for another job. I suggested he follow his heart and try something related to what he likes. That sounded like adult advice but I was just as confused as he is at that age and everything that I liked didn’t pay worth a darn.
I know I like photographing signs and there is no money in that. I found this one this morning on Culver Road near Clifford. It’s perfect! A big piece of plywood nailed to a tree. Roof’n looks just like it sounds. You want to say it. All caps with a subscript “n” then the masterstroke, black reverse field for the phone number. They intended to center the number but ran out of room and that is so much fun to see in a sign. I don’t think I would ever hire them to roof my house but I love their design sensibility.
I started a data base of my signs last year but got bogged down with constructing php queries. I wanted to have permanent link to pages so I could do an index or link to a certain section instead of always starting at the first page and working your way through. The way my links read they are always changing depending on how many signs I have in the database. I have a hundred or so in there now with another 100 to go but I got way bogged down trying to figure out how to construct these queries and it was getting the way of my day job. Maybe I should trade jobs with my nephew.
Chris Grell, Donna Grell, and Patty Cowie at the Rochester International Jazz Festival
I got in to see my doctor on a day’s notice so that he could take a look at a tick bite that I have on my leg. I spotted the tick as I was getting ready for bed and suspect I picked it up when we walked in the woods that morning. I crushed it as I tried pulling it off and then dug the rest of it out with some tweezers. My doctor said there has not been a case of Lyme disease in Monroe County so he said keep an eye on it and if it acts up he will prescribe antibiotics. There is a lot of worrisome tick bite info online.
Went straight to the Jazz Fest from the doctor’s and started with Billy’s Band, a loungey, Russian Tom Waits-like combo. Worked our way over to the Xerox Auditorium to hear the Lynne Arriale Trio. She plays like Keith Jarrett, lyrical and relaxed and the band listens deeply while backing her.
Most fun of the night was out on Gibbs Street. There were too many people to hear the band so we hung out in the back by the merchandise booths. We got in line for a Downbeat photo session and a woman in front of me asked if she had just butted in line. I said I think so but that’s ok.” Turned out to be Dave Mahoney’s high school flame and a couple of other rockin’ women that I went to high school with. I grabbed a bootleg copy of their photo (above).
Does the Great Blue Heron sound anything like a vuvuzela? Not really but I’m trying to make sense of this collision of coincidence. Rich sent us a photo of a Heron in Sausalito and we just spent some time watching one practice tai chi in Eastman Lake. The World Cup and the Rochester Jazz Fest both start today! I’m a little worried about how we’re going to keep up with our work in the next few weeks.
Maybe it is just the sort of distraction we need to wean us from obsessive Jazz Festival devotion. The organizers added a new venue, a tent in parking lot at Abilene. We were excited about hearing jazz over there but then found out all those acts are Americana, a categorization that bothers me. And the success of the last eight years seems to have only diluted the presence of American jazz. Still no Ornette, Pharoah, Joe McPhee, McCoy Tyner, Art Ensemble but Bernie Williams is here. We have the Club Pass and we’ll wander and we always find some cool stuff so I’m optimistic. Pay no attention to me.
Steve Hoy posted a comment to this blog a few weeks back asking if anyone had recommendations for some good fiction. Pete replied:
STEVE: “i just finished reading john irving’s last night in twisted river, and while it was good i kinda got antsy to finish it, unlike thomas bergers ‘ (my main man) 2nd little big man book, which i was sorry to come to the end. can anybody recommend some good american fiction?”
I’m the wrong one to ask because my favorite books are all picture books. I did, however, know who to ask. Pete LaBonne sent back a list that should get you through the summer.
PETE: “Sorry for not responding sooner, but I picked up a few Donald Westlake books and didn’t get around to it. Let me make it clear though, I don’t advocate the buying of books. Except maybe for Alaska Bear Tales by Larry something.
If you have to read anything other than William T. Vollmann: From the old school there’s The Wild Palms by Faulkner, East Of Eden by Stienbeck, & The American Claimant by Twain.
I don’t know if you can consider Conrad & Nabokov american, Hugo was sure french though. While, and you can quote me on this, Flannery O’Connor left the nastiest and most beautiful legacy in the Catholic language, you know, except for the Petticoat Junction theme song.
Tristan Egolf (Lord Of The Barnyard) killed himself, as did David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest). Saul Bellow died on his own. I haven’t seen anything new by D. Keith Mano (Take Five) in a long time or come to think about it or by Pete Hautman (The Mortal Nuts) but you never know unless you go to the trouble to find out. Thomas Pynchon is still alive and getting better. Mason & Dixon is great and so is Inherent Vice.
We do know all about Richard Bachman (of The Regulators fame).
Paul Theroux has written several great books, O Zone, Picture Palace, The Family Arsenal & probably something else I’m forgetting. While Theodore Rozak wrote only one masterpiece which would be titled Flicker.
Then there’s Robert Coover’s wonderful novel Gerald’s Party which I read three times. In fact I read most of these three times. While you’re in “C”, You might want to check out Cormac McCarthy if your library sometimes throws first names into it’s alphabetization scheme.
Then the shit starts getting nasty with Chuck Pahlaniuk which might have a misplaced “H”. Then it gets downright EVIL with Nykanen’s The Bone Parade.
But. There are two books which scared the HELL out of me; L.A. Rex by Will Beall and Alaska Bear Tales by Larry something.”
Street musician at the City Busker show in Rochester, NY
We saw about half of the buskers on East Avenue before we found the tent where the folks from City Newspaper were handing out the guitar picks that you were supposed to vote for your favorite buskers with. This was a pretty cool cool event and we had no trouble at all handing out the five picks we were given. This guy switched between accordion and washboard. He had taps on the front of his shoes and an assortment of funky percussion attached to his washboard.
I remember going to the zoo at the top of Zoo Road in Durand Eastman and looking out over the hillside full of deer. That zoo is long gone but the deer are still here. Rochester didn’t need two zoos anyway. This set up with them wandering freely around the whole town seems much more civilized.
Peggi and I seem to have been buried in an endless amount of tweaks to sites we thought were done. A lot of this is mission creep and a good bit of it extras. That line however is pretty fuzzy.
When we do get caught up the first recreational project on our to do list is creating a shopping cart for Pete LaBonne’s “Gigunda” digital box set. Pete has been remastering the tracks in his Adirondack studio and the last of the reworked tracks arrived in today’s mail. Pete has added the original cover art for the full blown download experience and he selected tracks from each album to giveaway as teasers. The full albums will be available as downloads for chump change. I noticed that “Antique Revolt”, a project I played on along with Bruce Eaton, was not included in this set. With good reason.
Title song from Godiva Records cassette, “Antique Revolt” Recorded by Arpad Sekeres in 1992
Girls running on path in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester NY
We read on the couch and listened to the rain last night and made what might be our last fire in the fireplace until Fall. Tomorrow morning we open the street pool. The temperatures are are headed up for the next five days. Rick kicked my ass in horseshoes after work today. We plan to see Ken Frank’s other band play tonight. Gotta bring earplugs for that. I’ve switched to kids opaque watercolors and plan to paint for a bit before heading out. I’ll report back on these earth-shattering events.
We took a walk with Jim Mott who is staying at our house as part of his “Itinerant Artist in Metropolitan Rochester Series”. Jim’s attention was focused on the Warblers who pass through this area when the trees start to fill out. That explosion of green brings the bugs that the Warblers feed on. When Peggi spotted this baby deer near a tree, trying to stand for what looked like the first time, Jim had his field glasses trained on a distant bird. He told us he was more distracted than ever while painting in our front yard this morning because of all the bird activity. He saw or heard ten different kinds of Warblers along with an Oriole and an Indigo Bunting.
Jim painted a beautiful picture of the chairs in the front of our house. It is gorgeous and I think he knows it. It has been a pleasure to meet Jim and hang out with him. I heard a lecture he gave at the MAG a few years ago and Peggi and I went out to his show at MCC last year but we really didn’t know him. Funny how that changes when someone moves in for a few days. He told us he was a fan the Refrigerator when it was a print publication and he had heard Peggi and I backing Pete LaBonne at the old Jazzberries many years ago. And he reminded me that I wrote something he liked about his lecture. I had forgotten how charming it was to see and hear him talk about one subject while showing ppt slides that had no relation to what he was talking about.
The deal that we took Jim up on is this. We put him up for a few days. He paints, hangs out. We pick two paintings that we like from the batch that he does while here and from those two Jim will select the one for us. This whole experience would be worth it without the painting.Jim has traveled the country doing this and was featured on the Today Show a few years back.
I tried to help our neighbor, Leo, get his tractor started but his battery wouldn’t hold a charge. Leo himself has a similar problem. He told me, this getting old stuff is for the birds.” He managed to get his tires inflated but we couldn’t start the tractor. He says, “I used to be able to fix things” and I know this to be true. He used to have projects lined up on his workbench and most of them were for other people. He shook his head and said, “I’m getting dumber every day”.
Horace Furminger clown painting for Rick Simpson on his sixtieth birthday
I rode by a garage sale last summer and this painting was propped up against a table. It caught my eye from the street. It and another one were selling for twenty bucks. I said I only wanted the one and asked what the price was for that that. The woman said it would be twenty bucks so I stopped haggling and took out my wallet out. She told me she taught art at Irondequoit High School and she said she really liked the painting too. She had looked online for information on the artist, Horace Furminger, but couldn’t find anything. I rode home with the painting under my arm and showed it to Peggi.
It occurred to us that it would be a perfect gift for our friend and neighbor, Rick. He is a clown, went to school for it even, and already has a small collection of clown paintings. I had not seen clown paintings in a home since the paint by number ones Brad Fox’s father did when we were kids. Monica saw the painting in our living room and I told her I was thinking of giving it to Rick for his birthday. She didn’t seem to like it much.
Well today’s Rick’s 60th birthday and I plan to bring it over there tonight. People have been bugging me to paint something other than crime faces and I’m thinking if a clown series. I’d be lucky to do one as nice as this.
My new Obama health plan covers yearly physicals and I had one yesterday. The timing, so close to a significant birthday, made it feel like a test to see if I can handle the whole thing. So far, so good but the blood tests are still out. We walked up to the park to see if the yellow magnolias had opened and they have. We plan on celebrating tonight at the Little Theater. Peggi ordered a big cake. Stop out if you’d like a piece. Not sure who’s gonna be in the band tonight. It’s been been fun playing with James the piano player. If I’m lucky it will be all new and different for my birthday.
The Rochester Music Hall of Fame has a shindig this weekend and we were asked to do a site for them but we have had a hard time getting around to it. We dove in today and did it live. There’s not much up there but an announcement and a form but it’s a thrill building it while it’s live rather than offline. We just finished doing Buffalo’s PosterArtUSA that way. It’s an Xcart site with credit card authorization, and he got an order within minutes of pulling the secure transaction switch. We’re behind with a few other sites so I won’t link to them.
Mall workers on break at the outlet mall in Waterloo New York
We managed to get to the Outlet Mall in Waterloo without getting on the New York State Thruway. We followed a car with one of the new NY license plates, the retro looking yellow ones with blue lettering. This part of the state has more trailers than Bloomington Indiana. And for some reason, in the middle of nowhere, an abundance of storage lockers. What could possibly be inside these things? We rented one for a few months when we moved Peggi’s mom up here and they cost a fortune. “Mini Storage”. Self Storage”.
All of the stores carry essentially the same stuff. Only the music is different. It was kind of fun trying to figure out the demographic they were each going for. Does eighties music appeal to those who were there or today’s kids in the midst of some sort of resurgence? We had to make a phone call arrange assistance for Peggi’s mom and couldn’t find a phone out here. We may be the only people left on the planet without a cell phone. A clerk in Calvin Klein said he thought they still had one in the food court but that was about a mile away. So we did some mall walking.
I wanted to buy another pair of Timberland work/walking shoes (work as in the stuff you do outdoors) so headed to the Timberland Outlet. I tried one one shoe on and walked around a bit looking at others. I decided to go with the first pair. I had the other shoe in my hand. I was looking at it but I couldn’t find its mate. I asked a clerk if she had put it away and I got Peggi got involved in the hunt and then it dawned on me that I had the other one on my foot. The clerk looked at Peggi and said “You’ve got a lot lot to put up with”.
Saucer Magnolias in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, NY
They call these Saucer Magnolias or Magnolia x soulangiana in Latin. Peggi is always looking at the little tags that the park people affix to the trees. She’ll recite Latin phrases all the way home so she can Google unusual tree specimens. It’s not surprising the Vatican still uses Latin when they want to shuffle sex offenders around. I hope they’re not done kicking the pope around. I want to see him cry “uncle” and make some changes to their men’s club.
Martin Edic sent us a link to a lady DJ who uses two iPads. I noticed YouTube has upped their limit to the size of movie uploads and this video Martin sent was about seventeen minutes long. What happened to that ten minute limit? The link made for a nice afternoon break.
I stuck the Facebook “Like logo” in my sidebar and clicked the blue thumb. I keep catching myself giving that goofy thumbs up sign. I gave it to James Nichols last night after a few songs. He sat in with the band and sounded great on the grand piano. Bob was off mending his back. Our neighbors have a house concert tomorrow and we might have dragged our feet too long because I heard it was sold out.
Ruth Bair, the drama teacher at R.L. Thomas, was so sweet. Irene (Palermo) emailed me that she had died and calling hours were held for her last night on Empire Boulevard. I learned that she continued teaching special needs children at St. Joseph’s Villa after her retirement. I too had special needs when she attempted to crack through my numbskull high school zombie state and on some level she succeeded.
She was an “open study hall” monitor when I met her and she decided I should be the lead in the upcoming production of “Teahouse of the August Moon”. I had never acted or even though of doing so. I was more of a clown although the real honors for that went to Jeff Munson.
I had a hard time taking the whole thing seriously and could not remember my lines. In a dress rehearsal before schoolmates I bounced from the first act to the third taking the entire cast with me and had to free associate to get back to the first act. I remember the drama assistant, Miss Brenda Dockery, taking me into her office to sit me down and look me straight in the eye and stress how important it was to the whole cast that I get serious and learn my lines. Somehow I got through but I know I was bad.
Ruth was fun loving and brave. She let us borrow her car during study hall. I remember taking it airborne on Pellet Road and slamming the bottom on the road on decent and then stopping at the Satellite on Ridge Road for a burger. But mostly I remember her making a real connection. Not many teachers could do this.
