Vic & Irv’s t-shirt advertising remodeling plans that never happened.
We used the Barnes & Noble gift card that our investment advisor gave us to buy the “I Slept With Joey Ramone” book for Duane for Christmas. A virtual regift. And then walked over to the big Wegmans to buy some Chinese take to eat with Peggi’s mom. When we got to her apartment she was watching Anthony Bourdain. I had never seen the show but Peggi told me that her mom had a wild crush on him. He went to Baltimore, Detroit and Buffalo last night and I really liked the show. It was a lot of fun to eat to.
I know he was just in Rochester but if he comes back he should do a segment down at Vic & Irv’s. Our friend Duane got in town today and he helped us shoot some photos of John Gilmore’s paintings and then we went down to the lake for dinner. Vic & Irv’s is every bit as colorful and good as any of the places Bourdain stopped in last night. The chef was wearing shorts and a t-shirt advertising their remodeling plans the never happened. I asked if I good get a photo if it.
A lot of whacky things seem to happen in Greece, a western suburb of Rochester. Bush visited the ideal community when he was trying to privatize Social Security. The former police chief is on trial and a couple of cops were busted for forced sex. Roderick Scott of Baneberry Way shot a 17 year old kid while he was trying to break into a neighbor’s truck. The kid was drunk and high and Scott claims he was “coming at me” so he shot him with his “legally permitted” pistol in self defense. Why didn’t he just stay in the house until the cops came?
We checked the paper this morning to find out if the “Bulldozer Guy” was convicted and he was but then we got stuck on this Greece story. We even listened to the 911 tapes. The story sort of got under our skin because when we were threatened by Jagger AGAIN, on our walk, it crossed both our minds that we could blow the dog away in self defense if we had a legally permitted weapon.
A few years back I was having a discussion with Mike Deming and he said, “Oh yeah, you’re the ‘half full’ guy”. And I usually am so I didn’t argue. I spotted these coffee cups in a gallery in Williamsburg last weekend and recalled that quip. I had always heard the “half full, half empty” part but didn’t know there more to it.
Back on the street, our host, Duane, pointed to some of the newly painted bike lanes there and he told us a bit about Mayor Bloomberg buying some votes by having the lanes removed before the election so the Hasidic community didn’t have to look at scantily clad women as they rode through there neighborhood. It all sounded whacked but it’s a real story.
I road my bike to the post office this afternoon in fifteen degree weather and because the sidewalks are snow packed I stayed on the road. It gets crazy where Culver meets the Expressway. I’m thinking of painting some bike lanes over there when the weather breaks.
You know that Pete LaBonne song where the guy fine tunes a radio station until it goes off the air? I spent a good bit of the day today in a dentist’s chair listening to an all Christmas satellite radio station. I don’t think I heard a single song with auto tune and yet it seems the entire top forty has been auto tuned.
And another thing. I made some hummus yesterday with a big can of Goya chick peas and a regular size can of Goya kidney beans. Peggi was working on these tables for a client and she called me into the other room while the hummus was pureeing.
The food processor started making a really loud grinding noise and we both looked at each other and at the same thinking “WTF?”. I went back out to the kitchen and it stopped. I pictured a frozen jalapéno from our garden temporarily stuck under one of the blades.
Tonight when we returned from our Margaret Explosion gig we both dove into the hummus and Peggi hit a hard nugget of something. She spit it out and it looked like wood. The hummus tasted funny too and I was thinking it was because I used too much garlic. We threw it away. I guess I could go back to Wegman’s with it but I wonder what Rich Stim would advise.
I used to hitchhike to work at my uncle’s grocery store and I met all these guys from East Rochester. They were a little bit hoodier than the guys in my high school and some already had cars. After work they liked to drive around and drink beer. The drinking age was 18 but we knew spots where you could walk in and buy a six at sixteen, no questions asked. And sometimes we just slipped beer out the back door of the store and hid it near the trash. We’d sit in a car on dead end roads or in the park and listen to the radio. On weekends we head over to Panorama Bowl for the teen dances and then these guys would drop me off at home.
We were always looking for places to dump the empties because we didn’t want to get caught with open containers. I remember one of the guys saying, “just thrown them on the lawn of a nice looking house and the people will pick them up in the morning.” It was so much fun being young and stupid, tossing beer bottles out the window as we careened down a street with the radio cranked.
I’m reminded of those days every time we find Bud cans along the road on Hoffman. Last week somebody dumped this big tire down there. The photo doesn’t offer much evidence of scale but it is at least five feet high.
Our neighbor, Leo, came to our door the other morning wondering if our electricity was working. I flicked on a few lights and told him it was. He said half of his lights were out so I told him I would come over and see if I could help. I had tried to help with an electrical problem before but neither of us could find the sub panel with the fuses. Leo has lived in this house for sixty years. An electrician eventually straightened him out then and he he found the sub panel. He figured Leo had blown the fuse when he fired up his old space heater and his new Amish heater at the same time. Only old people read the newspaper anymore and those Amish heaters are featured daily in full page ads. They are essentially a basic electric space heater with a lightbulb-powered display of fake burning logs. I can’t believe Leo fell for this.
He told me they save 15 per cent on your heating bill. I told him they were dangerous but he said they say a child can sit on the with getting burnt. I asked if he had both heaters on at once again and he admitted that he did. Consumer Reports says the $500 heaters are not made by the Amish but in China. It’s going to take longer than Leo has for him to start saving his fifteen per cent.
People sort of trust the Amish, their old fashioned values and all and it’s hard to believe they’re in cahoots with the Chinese on these things.
We were one thousand five hundred miles late for our oil change at Jerome’s but Ted didn’t seem to mind. Our Honda has been pretty damn reliable. Ted was always delivering bad news when he serviced our American cars. I should say that the window sticker said our Honda was made in Ohio so maybe it is an American car after all.
After Jerome’s I stopped by to visit our former neighbor, Sparky. He showed me pictures of his car that was recently totaled while he was sitting in it, parked in front of a friend’s house. The driver of the other car was black as is often the case with antagonists in Sparky stories. I had keys to his garage and shed when we lived next door and I still had them on my key ring so we went out back to see if they worked. They did and I surrendered them. I miss that shed and took a photo of it on the way out. Invisible Idiot named a song after it so it lives on.
I organized a setlist to shuffle on our iPod at tomorrow night’s Margaret Explosion Abilene gig. I threw some Edith Piaf, Last Poets, Duke Ellington, George Jones and cumbia in there. In the old days, in other bands, we would have had a setlist for the band performance but Margaret Explosion doesn’t work that way. I stopped by Nino’s Pizzeria and prepared them for a big order. And we confirmed that Glen, the tech savy bartender at Abilene, has the right cord to go from our laptop to the VGA in on Abilene’s projector. Bob Martin rounded up some June Taylor like visuals and we plan to go into full screen mode with the Quicktime files. I’d be happy with iTunes “Visualizer” but I can do that at home.
When Duane was up here last he told us that humus made with bean other than chick peas was all the rage in NYC. So I tried black bean humus a few weeks ago and it came out more Mexican than Greek. Last night I made a batch and mistakenly opened a can of kidney beans along with a can of Garbonzos so I went with it. I put some roasted peppers in there too and a jalapeno and some Spanish paprika so it is very red. It is sensational. I plan to serve that at out T-day bash.
Tonight is the last painting class. I have resigned myself to the fact that I will be a lifelong student and plan to return in the new year.
I borrowed that headline from a news item on our Google homepage. It came from the “Fair and Balanced” folks and they followed it up with, “Analysts Divided on Ft. Hood Shooting.” Fox would love to stoke that fire.
We did wonder what it was that took this big buck down. It was right in the middle of our path on the other side of the creek so there was no avoiding it. I don’t make the rules out there and sometimes it’s grizzly. We have heard coyotes at night and we saw one a while back so suspect them. Then again maybe it was a hunter. The town hires bowmen to thin the herds. Nature sure is efficient in cleaning up the carcass. I doubt if it was terrorism but it was definitely tragic.
Peggi went a Halloween party last night and we were some of the only people there without a costume. We tried to find the two frog masks that we wore to a party a long time ago but couldn’t find them. I remember that get up sort of pissed people off back then because we didn’t know most of the people and they couldn’t see our faces.
Scott Regan was a dead on Bela Lugosi and Sue dressed like Scott. Soupy Sales was there and the hostess, Claire, was a pretty good Amy Winehouse. Jeff and Mary Kaye had the best looking costumes on as far as I was concerned. I wouldn’t have recognized them if they didn’t speak. They wore hand painted, white cloth skeleton faces and black formal wear, classic Day of the Dead figures. The party had a theme, “Night of the Living Pies”, so Peggi made a cherry pie with a face on it. There was an obscene amount of pie on the counter when we left.
Kevin Patrick did a Zombies entry on the Day of the Dead and mentioned that he wanted to get a Zombies post on his blog before he croaked. When David Greenberger was here he told us he had been thinking about his own mortality lately. Not surprising in his line of work. I spotted some guys working on what looked like a giant casket in Irondequoit Cemetery as I rode my bike by so I pulled in to take a closer look. It turned out to be a form for a concrete structure that will hold urns. They are just about out of space over there so the only way to go is up. It got me thinking about where I would want my ashes scattered. I don’t want to put anyone out. I’ll have to think about this for a while.
As old as our neighbor is he still gets up before us. And this morning we found this note taped to our front window. I should tell you that what you see above is not the entire note but it is the meat of the thing. If you click on the photo you can see the whole note.
Our neighbor is in his nineties and he’s losing it. He knows it and it is very frustrating. He has always been Mr. FixIt and he’s cheap too so he still tries to take care of things but he can’t think straight any more or even remember where his fuse box is. His bedroom light don’t work anymore and he had an extension cord running in there when we stopped in this morning. We suspected he had blown a fuse but there were only two 70 amp fuses for the whole house. He is the original owner and he said he had never changed a fuse. It didn’t seem possible and we were afraid to yank one of them out because they were held in place with metal clips and we had never seen fuses like this. We suggested he call an electrician.
I couldn’t resist walking up into someone’s yard to take this shot this morning of these three balls on a trampoline. I did this after reading a new sign that someone else had put up on a willow tree at the edge of his property, where his yard meets the golf course. Peggi pointed out the new sign, a store bought “No Trespassing” thing, and we noticed the guy had already commented on his own post. At the bottom he added “This Means You”. Of course I pulled out a pen and added, “Not Me!.”
I think I know who he was addressing with this sign. We saw someone on his property a few weeks ago with a baseball hat, parka, cane and plastic bag with golf balls in it. I felt as though I was getting a glimpse of my future. In fact this property owner hollered at me last year when I darted out on his lawn to pick up a glistening golf ball. What did I do? Bend some blades of grass? All he has is lawn out there and he has to mow it every week because it gets so much sun. Someone I work with was complaining about how he was getting tired of mowing the lawn and he said he has a new mower that goes ten miles an hour and yet it still takes him three hours to mow his lawn. I’m generalizing here but only idiots have more than twenty percent of there property devoted to a lawn. That figure is probably too generous.
Water is also a symbol of cleansing, healing, new life or spiritual rebirth, creative potential, the unconscious and the feminine. All sounds pretty good.
Our friends, Rich and Andrea, just bought a houseboat in Sausalito. They plan to give up their apartment in SF and live on the thing. Sounds like a dream.
Saturday was a gorgeous day here, near 70 and sunny, and it looked all the more beautiful out on Lake Ontario. Jon Flowerday invited us to cruise on his 23 foot yacht so we hooked up out in the historic village of Pultneyville and sailed from Bear Creek towards Sodus Bay. It was just fantastic being out on the Lake, in his steady hands, back to the wind. It was a dream.
Outside of high school in Webster and a few years in Indiana I have lived my whole life near Culver Road. It runs north and south from Cobbs Hill Park in the city to Lake Ontario. I never get tired of traveling it. Although the ride above looks pretty comfy it is best experienced on bike.
Duck on a log in a pond at Durand Eastman Prak in Rochester, NY
The trails in the woods were littered with acorns and chestnuts this morning and a nut fell right on my head. It’s harvest time for squirrels. We spotted this duck across one of the ponds in the park.
We heard from a neighbor down the street that our next door neighbor’s dog “grabbed my shirt”. Let’s get this straight. The dog came up behind me and it bit my ass. As soon as I heard it I put my hands in the air. About ten years ago I made the mistake of putting the back of my hand out for a stray dog to sniff. It bit my hand and wouldn’t let go. I had to rip it out. I spent the afternoon in Emergency getting injections of Human Globulin directly into the wounds and then about ten stitches in my fingers. There was a month of rabies shots because I couldn’t remember if the dog had a collar. I couldn’t play drums for for about three months. I still like dogs though.
Duane sent me an email entitled “The End Of PopWars”. I clicked on the link.
We have a picture somewhere of Peggi and me standing in front of the Salvador Dali Museum in Figueras with our A&R Report t-shirts on, “Often In Error – Never In Doubt” on the front. Or at least one of us is wearing the shirt. I can’t remember, it was so long ago! Anyway we still use that phrase at appropriate moments. The A&R Report was published between 1984 and 1992 and the entire collection is now online.
Margaret Explosion plays the Little Theater tonight and John Gilmore will be in the house. It is always a good night when John shows up. Peggi is reading Dean Wareham’s memoir, “Black Postcards“. and we plan to do songs influenced by Dean & Britta who were influenced by the Velvet Underground.
We stopped to watch this turtle today up on the Spring Valley trail that the Bulldozer Man reworked. I’m glad the turtle didn’t get run over by the guy. Can you imagine being on the park trail when this 72 year old drove through on a bulldozer? It still seems like a bad dream. People say the trail will come back but the narrow path that wound its way around hillsides will never come back. It is now a ten foot wide, muddy road. The vegetation will come back especially the invasive species. Life goes on. This turtle doesn’t seem to mind.
I have been on a winning streak in horseshoes for about the last month. My friend and neighbor, Rick, has challenged me to more games than ever in this period and for some reason I keep beating him. In the dentist office I have been on a losing streak. The English are supposed to have bad teeth but the Irish must have worse. My whole family is cursed.
The picture above shows the last four teeth on the top left side of my mouth. I had a root canal on number one about two years ago. That tooth is a wisdom tooth and the roots were goofy so he could not complete the job. Since it didn’t hurt after the first stage of the root canal my regular dentist decided to fill it and see how long it lasts. Tooth number two started acting up this summer but my dentist could not find the cavity. I went back last week and he still couldn’t find it so he sent me for a root canal. That guy found decay in my root and said, “I can’t complete the root canal. One and two should be pulled and I would recommend an implant where one is and another one where tooth number three is. And then a bridge that runs from tooth number one to three.”
I started asking around about implants. Jeffery had nerve damage in his cheek as a result. Shelley described the sensation of a dentist pounding an implant in to her bone with a hammer. Jeff said his jaw was broken. Steve said they had to do a done graft with material from cadavers. Margie talked about sinus lifts. It is surprising how many people have these things but I can hardly sleep at night. I’m considering something you snap in instead.
Rich sent me (via YouSendIt) a 70 meg movie of his root canal. I love that.
Cobblestone garage on Culver Road in Rochester, NY
Three-fourths of America’s cobblestone buildings are within a 75-mile radius of Rochester. This Culver Road garage may be field stone and not cobblestone but it still looks pretty cool. I spent the day with dentists and and I was thinking that their practice is more like a craft than a science. And I don’t mean any insult to them.
I had a tooth that needed a root canal but the roots were too squirrelly to do one properly so they patched it up and let me keep the tooth until it acted up again. Two years later it acted up and so I went to my dentist this morning thinking I needed it pulled. I was bracing myself for a bone crunching experience but when I got there my dentist thought that it was the tooth next door that was giving me the pain so he sent me back over to the root canal specialist.
The specialist was wearing microscopes on each eye and a white surgical mask and I had a dental dam over my mouth while I was laying down a few degrees beyond horizontal. They were playing soft rock and I noticed how silly Rod Stewart’s rough and tumble voice sounds with a string section. The dentist worked furiously filing out the nerve endings and asking the receptionist for tools like “ND 20.5″. He noted that my canals take crazy curves and when he left the room the receptionist said, ” Take a look at the curve on this puppy” as she put one of the files away. The dentist came back in and the new Whitney Houston song came on. The receptionist said, “She has lost her voice completely”.
I kept thinking these were little pies laid out on the seats of Steve’s party boat. Click photo for enlargement.
Dale Hollow Lake was created by the Tennessee Valley Authority when they bought up land and dammed two rivers that had cut through the hills so they could harness the water to generate electricity. The state owns the shotgun shell littered shoreline and the giant lake they created when they flooded the valley. I remember learning about this project in Geography class and now here we were floating on the lake in a party boat. As you can see from the map the lake is huge with hundreds of miles of shoreline and countless coves. On Labor Day weekend most coves were filled with rented party boats but we did manage to find a few to hang out in. We must have seen over a thousand boats here and not one was a sail boat. Four wheel pickup trucks, big power boats, party boats, jet skis and ATVs continue the TVA style assault on the landscape. The Shell station where we first called Steve from is a hub for refilling their toys and it’s the busiest place in town.
We bought some pasta at one of the marinas and had it with Peggi’s homemade tomato sauce for dinner. Steve cleaned up and asked if we wanted to go to a local honky tonk called “Bear’s Place”. It has been about ten years since we were in a smoke filled bar and this place was surly the smokiest of them all. Bear runs it from a seat at the bar. His two sons tend bar and keep the patrons in line. The age group was 20 to 70 and it seemed their relationships were all in play. It was like going to a teen dance. Steve had only been here six times but he knew quite a few of the women. Couples were hooking up and heading out the door as we drank one Bud Light after another. Our eyes hurt from the smoke but feasted on it all.
This county and the surrounding ones prohibit the sale of alcohol. The bar serves only wine and beer and it closes at midnight. It can’t even open on Sunday by law. Bear’s Place is one big open space with a pool table to the left and a DJ and dance floor to the right. The music is loud as hell and it sounded great. The lady DJ played cuts from cds, one at a time. No segues. And the music ranged from shitkicking country to Joan Jett with hip hop in-between. She always had a crowd on the floor but the urban tracks worked best for her. A guy standing nearby wore a motorcycle t-shirt with a picture of a woman with large breasts, a souvenir from an event called “Choppers ‘n Floppers.” Not everyone had a full set of teeth but people were genuinely nice and we closed the place.
We were hoping to get some down home breakfast food at the Dixie Cafe on Sunday morning but they don’t even open until ten because everyone was at church. We got there near noon and watched the place fill up with church goers. We overheard one woman say’ “We went to two services today. We let the spirit in twice!” We tried ordering breakfast and waitress said they don’t do breakfast on Sunday. She recommended a BLT as the closest thing to breakfast.
I love the homemade billboards you see down south. Most of them are put up by religious fanatics. We saw a few with the ten commandments on them and one that read, “Warning! Jesus Is Coming. Are You Ready?” My favorite read, “Hell Is Real”.
I came back from Tennessee looking like I had been hit with buckshot. We drove down there over Labor Day to visit our friend Steve and camp on the land he bought in the hills. I scratched the head off my chigger bites on the way home but they still itch like crazy.
We plotted a Google map from our house to Steve’s property and we knew we wanted to go towards Buffalo but we may have gotten up too early for this trip. We found ourselves on Rochester’s eastern expressway heading toward Syracuse before it dawned on us that we wanted to go west.
Our friend, Monica, let us borrow her Woodstock book, the one with forward by Martin Scorsese, and Peggi was reading it aloud as I drove. We were making good time and were slightly ahead of the Google’s estimated times when we got stuck in a rush hour traffic jam in downtown Cincinnati, right where interstates 75 and 71 merge. And things didn’t get much better in Kentucky where the roads switched from four lane to two lane and kept jamming up for no apparent reason.
Steve’s place is just over state line in Tennessee and I am really surprised they didn’t stop us to check our passports because this place is world away from New York. Steve left instructions for us to call him from the pay phone at the Shell station in Byrdstown and he he came down in his pickup to meet us. There was no way we could have found his place on our own. It is tucked away up some incredibly steep, winding dirt roads.
The Woodstock book is full of descriptive quotes from the organizers, performers and attendees. Because Peggi had been reading to me for so long I kept hearing a narrator’s voice as I took in Tennessee. Steve introduced us to a guy named Troy who was squatting on his property in a tent down by the creek. Troy was on the lam and helping Steve in exchange for a place to pitch his tent. He had killed a rattler while clearing some brush on the property and he was wearing a white cowboy hat that he wrapped with his snake skin band.
We were prepared to camp here but Steve had recently pulled a small trailer up there so we folded down the bed over the kitchen table in the trailer and spread our sleeping bags out there. We were exhausted and ready to crash but first Steve wanted to take us back down the hill to meet some biker friends and the biker friends of theirs that had just driven a Neil Young style Touring RV up from Ft. Meyers, Florida. One of the guys told the story of how this area got the name. “Roughshod Hollow”. A character named Billy rode a horse over here from Indiana and and stopped at the blacksmith to repair a shoe. The blacksmith was busy so Billy shoed the horse himself and then asked the blacksmith how it looked. The blacksmith said, “Pretty rough but it’ll do”. We did some heroic beer drinking and stayed up til three or four that morning.
I’ll have to continue this Tennessee story tomorrow before it all slips away. Photos from Tennessee
You know those goofy old guys who ride down your street on a bicycle that has a basket on it? And they sit up straight on the seat and wear street clothes instead of all that tight fitting bike gear. Well, I am one of those guys. I love wandering around and spacing out on my bike. But I have learned not to space out too much. Not just because I might run into a car or a sign but because someone might say, “Take a picture. It’ll last longer”. I must have been ten when someone called me out like that and I have never forgotten it.
