Mysore Woodlands Indian restaurant in Rochester, NY
Arpad and Danita’s son turned six on Saturday and about twenty kids met at the martial arts studio on Clinton for a party. They were all out on the mat doing double kicks when we showed up. We had a slice of pizza and some walnut cake that Arpad’s mother made but we were still hungry when we left so we followed our noses next door to Mysore Woodlands. It’s kind of a strange name for a restaurant. “Mysore” is nasty and “Woodlands” sounds like a park. Boasting that they specialize in both northern and southern Indian food is plain goofy. We ordered dosas from the southern side. It is amazing how potatoes, beans, pancakes and crepes can be supercharged with spices. We loved it.
Monica was away for the weekend so we invited Rick over to watch a movie. He brought the movie too. It was a James Bond thing called “Quantum of Solace”. Jack White and Alicia Keys sang the theme song and then the chase scenes started. I couldn’t tell who was chasing who. Most of the movie was chase scenes and fights. The cutting was so fast and furious that I could,’t tell which guy was James Bond. I gave up on the movie and started ripping some cds. The movie was loud as hell, all screaming and crunching and crashing.
I was in the dark over by the stereo and I tripped on the audio cord yanking the old laptop off the shelf and then the external drive which was connected to it with a short Firewire cable. The cd that I was ripping bounced out of the laptop when it hit the floor. Peggi stopped the movie while I assessed the damage. The cable was shot, the cd drive won’t read a cd anymore but the laptop and hard drive survived.
I could have put on the Velvet Underground box set that I bought, ripped and then filed away but I was still diggin my new turntable so I reached for the “The Velvet Underground & Nico” lp which I noticed is only labeled “Andy Warhol” on the front of the album. And then there is that tiny type up top that says, “Peel Slowly And See”. My copy has the upside down Billy Name photo on the back but it’s beat to hell and the banana skin is missing. I put it on and played the Dean & Britta Warhol Screen Test dvd without the sound. The scratchy VU vinyl sounded fantastic and then ultra-fantastic when Nico’s screen test came on.
Our Friday night was just beginning though. We hopped in the car to ride over to the Village Gate where Cuong Vu was playing with Rochester’s Ted Poor on drums. On the way the Velvets came on the ipod and transported us. Cuong had two bass players and all sorts of knob twisting (see photo above). They were too loud for the space and a little too muscular when stacked against the Velvets but they sounded great once we were inside the record store. They reminded me of those early jazz rock combos like Tony Williams Lifetime and John McLaughlin’s Devotion.
Antony appearing in Lou Reed’s Berlin
Back home we put our latest Netflix selection on, “Lou Reed’s Berlin”. Lou’s guitar sounded amazing and there were some brilliant moments but Berlin was a pretty dreary lp the first time around and this monstrous production couldn’t disguise that. The Schnabel footage of models in heat was pure crap and the backup singer stole the show.
We cued up the extras a watched Elvis Costell interview Lou and Schnabel. Schnabel wouldn’t let Lou talk and when he declared that he and Lou were best friends we thought we saw Lou wince.
Captain Beefheart drawing at Red Creek in Rochester, New York in 1977. Photo by Greg Prevost.
I digitized some vinyl the other day. I go tape out of our stereo amp into Quicktime on our laptop and then edit it in Audacity. One of the things I digitized was an old Personal Effects 45. Peggi’s voice and sax sounded too high. Peggi got her sax out to play along and we confirmed that our turntable runs fast. We changed the pitch by -110 cents and it came out fine.
Brad Fox sent me a 33 1/3 book on “Trout Mask Replica” and I’ve been reading that and thinking about the cassette recording I made of Captain Beefheart at the Red Creek in Rochester in 1977. I remembered Beefheart saying something nasty about Drumbo (aka John French) between songs. And of course there are a lot of quotes from Drumbo in the book, some of them lambasting Beefheart. So I got an old cassette deck out of the basement and put the tape in but the deck wouldn’t go into play. It was just sort of froze in the eighties. Luckily we had another old deck down there and I transferred the tape. I posted one of the songs below with the quote from The Captain. You can hear Brad Fox scream as the band begins this song.
I remember there was some dreadful magic act (someone saw Magic Band and thought why not?) that went on first and there were two shows. We went to the second. I still have the ticket. When we got there Greg Prevost (Chesterfield Kings) and Carl Mack’s (Zenith Effluveum get compared to MX-80 in this review) were interviewing The Captain in the parking lot. I think Kevin Patrick’s wife, Corrine, took this photo of him and gave me a print. The stage was still in the front of the room there. The Captain mentioned the the chocolate pie that owner, Jeff Springut, gave him before the show. The band was amazing and included Jeff Moris Tepper, Eric Drew Feldman, Denny Walley and Robert Williams. They faithfully recreated the older material and went on to record “Doc at the Radar Station”.
When David Greenberger was here he was telling us that he was in a Boston band in the eighties called Men & Volts and they did Beefheart covers and Beefheart-like material. I told him about seeing the Trout Mask Replica tour in Columbus at Ludlow’s Garage with Hampton’s Grease Band and the Screaming Gypsy Bandits opening. And he said he was talking to the Bandit’s Mark Bingham in New Orleans about doing a project. And then along comes this little book from Brad.
Captain Beefheart performing at Red Creek in Rochester, New York in 1977. Photo by Greg Prevost.
Bruce Fowler was also on the Bat Chain Puller lp and by another coincidence we just saw him playing in the band that appeared throughout Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts”. We’ve been watching the entire Altman catalog in order but have been breaking it up with other stuff. It took us three nights to watch that one because I kept falling asleep. So each time we came back to it we re-watched large portions. There is such a large cast in this one and all these interweaving stories that it worked well in small doses. Tom Waits’ character hangs out in this bar where Annie Ross from Lambert, Hendricks and Ross sings with Terry Adams from NRBQ on piano and Bobby Previte on drums and Bruce Fowler on trombone.
Here is my recording of Captain Beefheart Live at Red Creek in Rochester, NY
Amy Kawabata, a fourth year animation student at RIT, asked Margaret Explosion to put some music to her newest film. She’s planning on entering the project in the Ottawa Film Fest and possibly the Brooklyn Film Fest where Duane Sherwood’s video to one of our songs, 4AM, caused a sensation a few years ago.
Peggi stopped out to see her mom last night and they were talking about her mom’s wedding which was very small, just the groom’s parents (Peggi’s paternal grandparents). Peggi’s mom expressed some displeasure that her father was attending to another woman and wasn’t able to make his daughter’s wedding. Then Peggi’s mom jumped the rails and said “Of course, you and Paul weren’t there either because you were to busy”. Peggi said, “Mom, I wasn’t even born”. And then they both had a good laugh.
Steve Lippincott, who lives in Portland and is working on a story about Personal Effects and the Rochester scene, knew that we knew the guys in MX-80 so he sent us some stuff he found on a bit torrent site. One cd was MX-80 Live in the back room at Record Archive when it was over on Mount Hope. The show was broadcast live on WRUR in 1980. It sounded amazing. Dick Storms interviews the band at the end.
The other MX-80 cd that Steve sent was from the night after at Scorgies. The Hi-Techs opened the show and MX tore up the place. It sounds great too and it also sounds pretty familiar. It was made from my cassette tape recording of the night. In fact between the “Theme From Sisters” and MX-80’s classic, “I Walk Among Them” you can hear Bill Jones talking to me as I manned the tape machine. He was having a problem with one of his presses. Bill printed the cover to the Hi-Techs first single on Dick Storm’s “Archive Records” label. You can also hear Martin Edic exclaim, “I’m going up front!”
The Rochester International Film Festival is a great event but it’s at an awkward stage. We did some work for the festival and we have tickets to the events so we are sort of invested. Sponsorship is down everywhere and certainly a huge influx of money might solve some of the problems but unlike the local Jazz Fest, this event has not really caught on so that it grows each year regardless of the economy. There were a lot less movies shown this year and no movies at the Dryden because the venue is too expensive. The movies we saw were great and that’s why I’m complaining.
Yesterday we saw a beautiful movie about the search for the reincarnation of a Tibetan Buddhist monk, a movie called “Skin” that told the story of black girl born to white parents in South Africa during Apartheid and a Russian movie called “Mermaid” about a girl with special powers. The Film Fest delivered the goods but the package made us feel like we were in the Twilight Zone. We drove out to Corporate Woods for one of the film parties and fittingly heard a band wearing suits. And the next night we finished the evening at High Falls where there were two loud bands playing at the same time so we couldn’t talk about the films we’d just seen. There should be movies shown all over town. The ticket price should be a lot less. The web site should at least have links to trailers or the film’s official site. And the parties should be downtown. I’m sure I forgot something but somebody has got to figure out a better way to promote this thing.
At the end of every painting class Maureen Outlaw folds up her disposable paper palette and creates a Rorschach painting. Sometimes they are quite beautiful like this weeks’ (shown above). They are always nicer than Wavy Gravy’s tie died t-shirts. That whole tie dyed thing is so tired looking I am always surprised to see it still around.
I had heard the name but really had no idea who Wavy Gravy was. He seems to have been everywhere in history and last night he and his fish named after the master graphic artist, Saul Bass, were sitting right behind us at the Little Theater for an advance screening of a new documentary about him and his lovely wife. She almost stole the show. The documentary was made by Odetta’s daughter and she was sitting next to Wavy.
The movie started with footage of Hugh Romney (his previous name) in the Village doing poetry readings with the big Beat names. He opened for the giants of jazz when they were still mostly unknown. He roomed with Dylan. He hung with Moondog, the Dead and the Merry Pranksters. He served free food at Woodstock along with members of the Hog Farm commune where he has lived for forty years. Seven of those years were spent on the road with the commune as they traveled across Eastern Europe and into Pakistan in buses.
He answered questions after the movie while wearing a red clown’s nose and that is really the best description of this guy, “a clown” in the most flattering use of the word. Ben and Jerry have named a flavor after him and he has joined their ranks in raising money for the most worthwhile charitable organizations.
On a beautiful Sunday afternoon we watched the gallery assistant pull the shades at Rochester Contemporary so we could see the PowerPoint display on LA’s cornfield project. L.A.-based writer artist and curator Janet Owen Driggs from the Metabolic Studio, a charitable activity of the Annenberg Foundation, discussed our roles as industrial eaters and the new art movement toward not bullying nature. Her slides took us from Donald Judd’s aluminum boxes to Robert Smithson’s beautiful earth art to the political ramifications of public fruit. Janet used to paint but has turned her energy toward Edible Estates and Fallen Fruit and Islands of LA.
We stopped at Home Depot on the way home and bought a bunch of seeds for the garden.
Science Fair at Brighton Middle School in Rochester, New York
Two of our nephews each had horn solos in their band concert at Brighton Middle School so we had to be there. Their younger brother plays horn too and the three of them have a band called “Rubber Chicken”. The band concert was great but the Science Fair going on upstairs was something else. Both nephews had exhibits. The youngest demonstrated a method for collecting static electricity. The oldest determined which method worked best for getting gum off your show. Burning it off, freezing it so it cracks off and squirting DW40 on the shoe were all explored and the DW40 worked best.
Other kids examined which sandwich bags would keep bread from molding longer and which cleaning product got the dirt off their gym socks. For some reason three separate kids examined colored candles to see which one burns the fastest. Probably because they got to play with fire. One kid studied toilet paper and declred “37 per cent of the people in the US use Wegman’s brand. but our favorite was the experiment to determine whether plants grew faster with loud music , soft music or no music. The kid declared that soft music was the best but the graph that he produced showed that the plant exposed to loud music grew the fastest. That was a good part of the fun, shooting holes in their “controlled studies ” and reading their “conclusions”.
Last night we watched Let The Right One, a really cool Scandinavian movie about kids the same age as our nephews except these kids were vampires.
I had a meeting today with a client at his office. He showed me his logo and then explained that it is not intended to be an oval. His flat panel monitor was distorting everything he looks at by a long shot, even the picture of his son that used as his wallpaper. He asked me if I could remedy the situation so there I was duking it out with his clunky Windows pc.
This afternoon my father sent me this Word doc that he had spent most of the day on. It was given to him by a pc user and he added a bunch of stuff and sent it back but the guy wasn’t able to open the file. All I had to do add the “.doc” suffix to the file name and send it back. You’d think a Windows machine would recognize a Word doc.
A friend of ours programs data bases for web sites and he laughingly told us that he just stopped previewing his sites in Explorer. He said the people who use that program are idiots and he doesn’t care about them. I was reading a bad review of Explorer 8 today and they had a link to stats that showed two thirds of all web users use IE. That’s a lot of idiots. The economy would get a real sot in the arm if all web developers could quit wasting time with IE workarounds.
I was reading about the new system for the iPhone and Touch and an app for them that will allow users to see other users on the same network and exchange virtual business and it reminded me that we haven’t done new business cards since we moved. We have been using the “we just moved” excuse for four years now. We had some business cards printed online for a client they came out great. They offer rounded corners too. So I spent some time today playing with the 4D Advertising logo. I love coming up with logos and haven’t done one in a while.
Latest “Crime Face painting. Painted from photo on Crimestoppers page of the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.
Rome Celli did his annual client appreciation night at the Little Theatre tonight so we had our choice of five movies. We chose “Slumdog Millionaire, “Nixon & Frost” and “The Wrestler” in that order thinking it might be crowded and we might need aback up plan. We got into Slumdog and it was kinda predicable and corny but we really enjoyed it.
Rome had cookies and coffee for everyone after the movie and we ran into a couple we sort of know. They asked how I liked the movie and I said “I loved it”. (Peggi was in the bathroom). They said they were shocked at how bad it was. I said “Really? It wasn’t great but I liked it”. Then it became clear to to me by something they said that they were really affected by how bad the situation was for the kids in India. Peggi came back from the bathroom and said, “Wasn’t that a great movie?” These people were almost crying.
Across the room I saw a woman come in who, the last time I saw her, had asked me why I painted these people who had caused some much trouble in our community. I did not really want to have another discussion with her.
My painting teacher, Fred Lipp, went down to New York to see the Marlene Dumas show at the Modern. About half my class saw that show. Fred bought he book and brought it into class and my father said “I think Marlene is a disturbed individual” (based on her subject matter).
I am beginning to question whether I too spend too much time looking at the dark side. I already knew there was some incredible poverty in India. I thought that was a pretty light movie. And that Bollywood dance number certainly had nothing on “West Side Story”. I told Kathy Palokoff that I was going to start painting babies and she said, “Please don’t”.
The Clarisa Room is no more but the old Shep’s Paradise is open as “Clarissa’s” and it is still a great sounding room for jazz. We were there last night for the open jam hosted by 1968 RL Thomas graduate, Mike Allen, aka “A King Of Soul”. These three horn players, probably Eastman School of Music students, were waiting to play “Love For Sale”. This is one comfortable bar and it was midnight before we knew it.
We were talking about Gap Mangione last night because the bass player from his big band was sitting in. Conversation turned to the Buffalo plane crash and the Chuck Mangione players that died there. We hadn’t heard from Gap in a while but he called today to request some changes to his web site. We did another quote today for a web site. We have a few out there. We could be busy again if all goes well
Like most people in my painting class my father works on a number of paintings at the same time. We work paintings up to the point where we could use some feedback from the maestro and then set them aside before continuing. This one of Margaret Explosion is not done but it is getting close. My father based the painting on a photo he took off the tv when WXXI broadcast the Margaret Explosion episode of “On Stage.”
I stopped by to see Bob Martin yesterday in his second floor suite at Bob Martin Associates. He was working on one computer and uploading the Margaret Explosion WXXI video tracks to YouTube on another. I previewed them on our iTouch this morning when I got up. Some of the songs had zero plays when I checked in.
Terry Zogby painting “Solar Eclipse” at the Highlands Senior Living facility
Matt SanFilippo wrote “Italian Power Forever” on his picture in my high school yearbook. I was looking forward to seeing him at our reunion but he didn’t show up. I have always had a soft spot for Italians. It is hard to believe the Italians let Mussolini and the Fascists take hold in their country. Fellini presents this dichotomy vividly in Amarcord while celebrating all things Italian. We watched the movie last night at Rick and Monica’s and I had another opportunity to confirm that this is still at the top of my all time favorites. The Nino Rota soundtrack is up there as well.
Earlier in the day Rick brought over an assortment of beers to thank me for recording his house concert last week. There was an Italian beer in there, Peroni. He invited us over for dinner so I brought the beer back over there and started with the Peroni. Rick made a neuvous Italian dish with cherry tomatoes. When we got back home we found that someone in Italy had ordered a Margaret Explosion cd from our site.
On the way out to Peggi’s mom’s place today we heard a song on Tom Hanson’s jazz show with the lyric, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”. I’m still getting over Amarcord. Terry Zogby had a sensational new (2008) painting up in the hallway art gallery on the way in to the dining room.
Ontario Beach is thawing. We watched big chunks of ice break off and float away. I was almost like being in Antarctica.
We have been doing a mini Altman fest in our living room. We added most of his movies, in chronological order, to our NetFlix cue and last night it was Mash’s turn. This wild movie is nonstop action without hardly anything happening. The tv show did not do it justice and there is no way that it could. It’s only worth noting because the movie is a near masterpiece.
Vincent Gallo from Buffalo ’66 in NYC subway liquor ad
Somebody told me you’re not supposed to take photos in New York City’s subways but I do it anyway. Hey, I’m from out of town. Peggi and I really liked Buffalo “66 with Christina Ricci, Ben Gazzara, Anjelica Huston, Mickey Rourke and Buffalo’s own Vincent Gallo (on right above). We made a mental note to put this on our Netflix list.
We got on the F train in Brooklyn at Fort Hamilton and headed for the Modern in Manhattan. We were sitting at the front of the first car. This line brings you above ground for a few stops before going down under the East River. A very short man with a camouflaged hat got on and started singing a beautiful folk song in Spanish. I gave him a dollar. At the next stop a guy in a trench coat got on with a styrofoam cup that he was rattling. I tried not to look at him.
A women burst through the door right behind him and loudly addressed the passengers, “OK people. I will try to be brief. My husband has abused me, humiliated me. . . etc.” She kept walking to the other end of the car and we tried to tune her out but she worked her way back to us with her hand out, repeating, “Anybody have a kind heart? Anybody have a kind heart?” She said this like it didn’t have a question mark. Next on was a woman with missing front teeth. She was dragging a big black trash bag. She leaned against the pole in front of us and began singing, “I believe the children are the future”.
The distance between stops as the train goes under the river is longer than that between most stops so this train is a magnet for buskers. Duane, our NYC friend and guide, told us he has seen guys bring a whole drum set in, set it up and bang out a hip hop tune. They get of on the other side, cross over and ride back all day long.
Thanks to Boo Poulin, I know how to pronounce Marlene Dumas’s name. I have watched this video five times now in preparation for the Dumas show at the Modern. I can hardly wait.
We stayed up past four on New Years Eve and were pretty spaced out for New Year’s Day so we sat around most of the day. We caught the dramatic scene in “To Kill A Mocking Bird” where Atticus shoots the rabid dog and I remembered that I had a huge crush on the tomboy, Scout, when I first saw this movie. She was played by Mary Badham and she lost the supporting actress Oscar to Patty Duke to Patty Duke (The Miracle Worker) that year (1962).
“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is a beautiful movie. The lusiously colored, closely cropped, bedridden, framing really looks great on tv. We watched long stretches of it for the second time last night. The French speech therapist’s endless repetition of the alphabet hypnotized me. I felt as I too had “locked-in syndrome” like the lead character, Jean-Dominique Bauby. Julian Schnabel did a great job bringing this (based on a) true story to the screen. Bauby’s memoir, though, is where the magic came from. “My cocoon becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court.”
I’m thinking our white cat may have a variation of this “locked-in-syndrome. She spends nearly twenty four hours a day on our bed yet we’re certain that she has a life in there and that it is full enough for her. We can see this in her eyes.
We’ve had an ongoing short in the power supply for our old laptop and I wasn’t able to turn it on for the last two days so I took it to MacInTak on Clinton Avenue. They’re right across the street from the India House store in the same location where my grandfather had his grocery store. MacInTak is at the other end of the spectrum from the shiny Apple Store. They have about as many computers on display as the Apple Store does but in this case they are all vintage. Everything from the “toilet seat” G3 laptops to the G4 “Cube”, “bubble” I-Macs, G5 towers and every generation of I-Books. This place is family run just like my grandfather’s store was. But my grandfather never had a picture of Emperor Haile Selassie on the wall.
We sent “Blow Up” back to NetFlix today. Peggi and I had both seen it a long time ago but neither of remembered what it was all about. Now I know that’s because it was not about much and the characters are barely sympathetic but it was beautiful to look at. Someone took extra care in picking every shot in the movie with extraordinary attention to color and composition. It was a sensational mix of of old world Europe and swinging, mod London. Would that have been the director, Michelangelo Antonioni, or was there a cinematographer on the job? I’d like to thank that guy.
I feel asleep at some point and I was dreaming about the listening booths in the record store where Guy’s wife worked in Hitchcock’s “Strangers On A Train”. We saw that movie a few days ago. They had booths like that at Jay’s Record Ranch on Clinton Avenue in the sixties where you could check out the singles before plopping down your cash. The movie was still playing when I woke and the Yardbirds with a young Eric Clapton were playing at a party. I thought I was in Kevin Patrick’s blog where I had spent some time earlier in the day. I felt like I had just clicked on one of his mp3s and was now immersed in a whole new scene.
