Yellow electric motorcycle in the park, Rochester, NY
Something someone said or something we read recently prompted us to add “The Conversation” to our Netflix cue. We hadn’t seen it since 1974 but we both remembered loving it. Directed by Francis Ford Copola right after his first Godfather smash, this movie plays like an obsessive art film about an obsessive, sax playing professional surveillance expert. Mundane conversation is pieced together and played over and over, analyzed while we revel in it all, geeky, even going to a convention of professional eves droppers. Electronic sounds are interwoven through the dialog until we can’t be sure if we’re hearing things or imagining them. Gene Hackman gives a killer performance and blows away co-stars and some of my favorite actors (Robert Duval, Harrison Ford and John Cazale). We kept the movie an extra night to watch it again.
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.
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.
Post It Note art in the Hungerford Building on Main Street in Rochester, New York
The Hungerford building on East Main was happening last night. We had a hard time finding a place to park but eventually found a spot in back along the tracks. Hungerford made the syrup in A&W Root Beer before the complex of warehouse space was divided up for small businesses and squatters. The gallery on the ground floor was packed with earth conscious vendors suppling free samples of local produced food stuff. We would have hung around if the art (photos in this case) was more interesting. The 2nd floor had the coolest vide with lots of energy. I photographed the post it note piece there and the fourth floor was way sleepy. We headed over to RoCo where Andy Gilmore had some beautiful trippy geometric prints. We chatted with Joe Tunis and headed home.
Leonard Cohen movie still from little Theater in Rochester, NY
We brought some Vietnamese food out to Peggi’s mom’s apartment. We call it “Chinese” and it seems to go down better with her mom but she is not eating all that much these days. I went down to get my mother-in-law’s mail and pick up a prescription that had been delivered to the front desk. I volunteered to do this since I hadn’t had any exercise all day. Plus the temperature in the apartment is in the eighties and it’s hard to think in there.
A woman with oxygen tubes in her nostrils was talking to herself at the mailbox. She looked up at me and said, “I look like I know you.'” I kind of knew what she meant and introduced myself. I said, “I’ve seen you around.”
We stopped in the Little Theater last night to see the new Leonard Cohen concert movie. I don’t know what it’s called. We were late and missed the credits. Oddly there were no credits at all at the end of the movie. People were complaining about it being too short but it felt too long to me. It seemed all the songs were in exactly the same mode.
Our friend and neighbor, Rick, does a show on WRUR from 6 til 8pm on Thursdays. He’s calling it “Gumbo Variations” and he told us he plans to play a wide variety of music. He played a Monk tune last week and apparently jazz is a little too wide. He got an email from the big cheese over there telling him the jazz tune seemed like it lasted an eternity. Speaking of music that is not jazzI love the video of Neil Young delivering the video of his new album on an iPad to the execs at YouTube. And I love the movie Rich Stim did for Angel Corpus Christi’s version of “Heaven“.
We missed all sorts of cool stuff this weekend. Nod played at a house party on Plymouth Avenue and Jim Mott had a an opening at the Oxford Gallery. We spent most of our free time restoring my dad’s brand new computer.
Peggi decided to to try one of Tom’s yoga classes at the Downtown Fitness Club. Tom used to be in her class there when Jeffery taught there. Peggi walked in a little late (runs in the family) and some familiar music was playing. Peggi said, “That’s our our music” and Tom said “What do you mean?” “That’s our band,” she said. Tom explained that his friend, Paul, made the compilation cd for him.
Here’s Margaret Explosion – Floating At The Bug Jar.
Davis at Rick and Monica’s house concert in Rochester, New York
We’re heading across the street in a few minutes to see/hear Guy Davis. He’s appearing at a house concert in our neighbor’s living room. I lent Rick a mic and some cables and I helped with the sound check and then I snapped this picture. Guy is Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis’s son and he sounds pretty bluesy. I’ve never heard any of his recordings. I’l report back.
I was cutting through the cemetery on my bike when it dawned on me that the trash cans there are made of metal, not plastic. I was thinking how we used to call them “ash cans” when we were kids probably because that’s what our parents called them. And for good reason, they used to put their ashes in them before all the coal burning furnaces were converted to gas or oil. And we called the garbage men “the ashmen”. We used to get exited when they came down our city street. I don’t even remember garbage men after we moved to Webster. Teenagers have other stuff on their mind.
Steve Hoy and I rented a house Bloomington for $85 a month and it had a coal burning furnace. We used to shovel the ashes out and pile them up on the basement floor. One night I went down there with the lights off and the four foot pile was glowing red hot. We were too lazy (or preoccupied) to put the ashes in the damn ash can.
I was tuned in to the metal ash can because I had just finished reading another Guston book, “Telling Stories” by David Kaufmann. Guston uses the trash can lids as shields for his klansmen and Kaufmann discusses Guston’s allegories which are are now all swimming around in my head.
Restored version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York
Don’t sell your Apple stock yet.
Our cable modem went out the other night so I rebooted it and then our Netgear router and then the old Linksys router that we use as a hub. Got everything working but the dumbest one of the bunch, the hub. So we rode our bikes over to Staples to pick up a hub or a switch and while we were there we sort of rethought our setup. A couple of our wired machines could go wireless and that would free up a couple of slots and we use our old HP Laserjet so infrequently that we figured we could share our clunky pc’s slot with it. We left without making a purchase but we did some good thinking over there. We decided to pick up an Apple Express to extend our wireless range and stream iTunes on the stereo at the other end of our house.
So we headed out to the Apple Store and got there about five o’clock on Sunday before Labor Day. The place was packed. The blue shirts had been swallowed up by the throngs. It was tough just getting at the products on the shelves and once we had our Express in hand we couldn’t find a free employee to do the transaction. I liked it better when Apple was the underdog.
The Dryden Theater at the George Eastman House screened two newly restored, early Hitchcock shorts last night. “Bon Voyage” and “Avenure Malgache” were French WW2 propaganda films made in the UK and we got very confused as which side the spys were on. The feature film, “Lifeboat”, was straight forward and built like a train with a few spectacular wrecks along the way. The guy who introduced the film said Talula Bankhaead was rumored to not have worn any underwear and we confirmed that that was the case after a big wave crashed in the boat. The lifeboat became a miniature stage for all the world’s trials and tribulations to play out on. I won’t spoil the ending.
I have more recordings (cds, mp3s, vinyl and even an 8-track) by Sun Ra than any other artist. I go through long periods with nothing else but Sun Ra on my iPod. His music is melodic and rhythmic in equal measures and then abstract as hell but it is joyous above all else. I saw him five times before he died and every time I thought this is the best music I have ever heard/seen in my life. His songs with vocals would be top of the pops in a perfect world.
Many years ago I started building a database of of my my meager Sun Ra collection. Sun Ra has over a hundred releases and re-releases on almost as many labels. He pressed his own records in the band’s rehearsal space and issued them on his own Saturn label. I bought a few of them after the band’s performance at Red Creek in the seventies and had Sun Ra sign them. Impulse issued a few records and then passed on a host of others that are rumored to be locked in a vault. A&M signed him in the eighties and tried to clean up his sound. Other labels just put out whatever they can get their hands on. Live shows make phenomenal Sun Ra albums. One of my favorites, “Music From Tomorrow’s World”, was recorded in a tiny bar in Chicago in the late fifties. A drunken women continually eggs Sun Ra on by hollering, “Play it Sun Ray”.
I ripped my Sun Ra cds and converted the vinyl to mp3s so my collection is all in iTunes now and it occurred to me that that iTunes is as good a database as any. I spent a few days of spare time tracking down covers to the really obscure ones and now I sit back and marvel at them in cover flow view.
We had to weigh our tomatoes to gauge the proportions in the sauce recipe we follow. Twenty one pounds of tomatoes had us multiplying each of the other ingredients by seven. It took us us two hours to chop the basil, onions, peppers, carrots, oregano and parsley and another hour to clean up. We had to borrow Rick and Monica’s restaurant style sauce pan (more like a bucket). It simmered all day and we froze about twelve big containers of sauce.
We had the blight in one of gardens but the other has gone to town. Six plants have produced over a hundred tomatoes. We have very few sunny spots on our property so we have set up shop in our neighbors back yards. They genuinely enjoy the company so it’s a fair shake.
Kevin Patrick stopped by last night with with a dj from a local station called “The Zone”. Can’t say that I have ever heard the station. I can only imagine what kind of stuff they program. We sat around the table drinking Guinness and talking about music. I was remembering flipping from WBBF to WSAY to WKBW (from Buffalo) in the mid sixties. The radio was some sort of lifeline back then. Now, I mostly listen to PBS which coincidentally happens to be at 1370 AM, the former home of WSAY. Kevin said his most recent post was for us because we liked “jazz”.
I’m totally sold on the idea of jazz forty-fives but I didn’t have the heart to tell him I can’t stand jazz guitar. Guitar should stay out of the way of jazz and I could almost say rock would be better off without it. I love rhythm guitar but piano and the organ covered that ground pretty well. Sax is a much better instrument for solos.
Big boat heading on Lake Ontario in Sea Breeze, NY
We rode our bikes down to Sea Breeze. I say “down” even though it is due north because it is all downhill, otherwise we’d be underwater. We walked out on the Army Corps’ pier saying hi to the fishermen while we watched the parade of boats coming and going in the channel, more fishermen, beer drinkers, jet skis, a few sail boats and this wanker.
We studied the historical placard detailing the British Army Encampment that set up shop here in 1759 on their way to the Fort Niagara siege. It’s a beautiful spot except for the people who feed cheap white bread by the loaf to the invasive species of geese. Speaking of invasive species, we did our best to resist the grilled food odors from Vic & Irv’s and even rode by Cheri’s Thai place on our way back.
Matt Whitmeyer self portrait at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York
Most portraits are really self portraits or at least the goods ones are. And collectively the outdoor show of local self portraits, submitted as jpegs to the D&C and printed on durable plastic and tie-wrapped to the fence surrounding the Memorial Art Gallery’s grounds, work as a portrait of the city. I generally lean toward the most expressive painting in a show like this but my favorite was Matt Whitmeyer‘s photographic self portrait. I love the dead pan generic quality, the grey environment and minimal color. I love the calm but deliberate delivery, the cool but intense stare. He appears to be looking right at you but when I looked back at him I found he he wasn’t really looking at anything and then after five minutes or so our eyes connected and I moved on. I looked down at the ground and found this bag of stones, a construction worker’s self portrait.
I liked what I saw of the show at RoCo and I will go back. Opening night was too distracting to take it in. Amy Casey’s painstakingly executed drawings are a delight to look at. I couldn’t quite figure out Trevor Flynn’s messy community drawings but it was fun to see people drawing on the walls. Spectres of Liberty from Troy have an interesting video in the little circular room. I was wondering if they were the same people that put up the inflated art installation at the Eastman House during Montage 93. Overall though, I couldn’t help but long for a real look at the state of Rochester, instead of the generic “city”. I am amazed at the state it is in and I’m sure I’m not alone. I think it would make a terrific show.
Karen Brummund’s “Time-Based Architecture” outdoor installation at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY]
I remember Gallery Nights in Rochester where swarms of people crossed each other’s paths as we bounced from one gallery to the next. Or maybe that was another city. When First Friday’s come every four weeks or so it’s hard to muster that much enthusiasm but sometime the nights with the lowest expectations are the most rewarding.
We started Friday evening at the Village Gate sipping Negra Modelos (feminine adjective male noun) while listening to a Po’ Boys offshoot, Dixieland/Eastman School of Music band. They sounded best when they took it big easy, laying back enough to allow the drummer‘s lightest touch, left hand rolls to poke through. Down the street to the MAG where they had just hung a hundred or so self portraits of Rochester residents on the fence surrounding the gallery grounds. We spotted a handful that we loved. Jamie Seale, bass player for Giant Panda proclaimed this show the best he had seen in in his mom’s gallery.
From there Brian Peterson pointed us down the street to the Visual Studies Workshop where there was an outdoor installation by Karen Brummund. Worker bees were plastering the front face of the building with a stack of 8 1/2 x 11 laser prints of a huge tiled image of the front face of the building blurring the line between a photo of the building and the building itself. I like this technique and used it myself on the mugshots of Bug Jar patrons that I did in 1998.
We finished the night at the State of City exhibition at RoCo and topped that off by ringing the buzzer at Black Dog Studios where they had a show of Hendrix related art from the collection of Jimi’s cousin. Kind of whacky.
Morning Prayers sign outside Saint Salome’s Church in Rochester, NY
Al that praying is not really paying off for the people of Saint Salome’s parish in Rochester. First they closed their grade school and then they tore it down and built a senior living facility in its place with the promise that the new residents would be right next door to the church and now the diocese has announced they’re closing the church. The building, built in 1964, still looks pretty modern but then the whole concept of modern is sort of out of date. Abstract art (Kandinsky, Modrian and all) is now one hundred years old fer cryin’ out loud.
Our next door neighbor, Leo, called us this morning to ask us what his email address is.
George the Second, Paul Dodd digital print of George W. Bush announcing the war with Iraq, 2010. Tom Burke bought this work at Rochester Contemporary.
Our new neighbor stopped by today and we showed her around our house. On the way out she said, “I don’t usually like to talk politics but I like your bumper sticker. If they would only give him a chance.” I had almost forgotten that we still have an Obama sicker on our car. I get a little agitated when I see a Bush/Cheney sticker and I’m sure our sticker annoys some people. We were pretty optimistic when we slapped it on there. I do miss the Bushisms. I can mangle a sentence as good as he can and maybe that’s why I like these so much.
“I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.”
“You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.”
“I heard somebody say, ‘Where’s Mandela?’ Well, Mandela’s dead. Because Saddam killed all the Mandelas.”
“I want to thank the astronauts who are with us, the courageous spacial entrepreneurs who set such a wonderful example for the young of our country.”
“I can only speak to myself.”
“I understand small business growth. I was one.”
“That’s George Washington, the first president, of course. The interesting thing about him is that I read three — three or four books about him last year. Isn’t that interesting?
“My mom often used to say, ‘The trouble with W’ — although she didn’t put that to words.”
“I can press when there needs to be pressed; I can hold hands when there needs to be — hold hands.”
“It would be a mistake for the United States Senate to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of that chamber.”
“The illiteracy level of our children are appalling.”
“It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.”
“There’s no question that the minute I got elected, the storm clouds on the horizon were getting nearly directly overhead.”
“I’m honoured to shake the hand of a brave Iraqi citizen who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein.”
“I hope you leave here and walk out and say, ‘What did he say?’”
“Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”
“Give me — give my chance a plan to work.”
“More and more of our imports come from overseas.”
“I couldn’t imagine somebody like Osama bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukah.”
“I hear there’s rumours on the internets.”
“Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat.”
“All I can tell you is when the governor calls, I answer his phone.”
“I remember meeting a mother of a child who was abducted by the North Koreans right here in the Oval Office.”
I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep on the soil of a friend
“There’s no cave deep enough for America, or dark enough to hide.”
Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”
Private Property No Fishing at Newport House in Rochester, New York
Roman Polanski made some of my favorite movies (Knife in the Water, Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant, Chinatown) and one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen (The Fearless Vampire Killers). We had “Repulsion” here for a days and it looked and sounded great. Chico Hamilton did the soundtrack and it’s a big part of the sixties action. Now that I’ve gotten rid of my cds I might try to track that soundtrack down. The dvd (from Netflix) would not play through part of the movie. It froze and then jumped ahead and we couldn’t reverse it. We tried sneaking up on the bad spot and watched the early scenes about five times in the process. They were so good we didn’t complain to Netflix or anything.
This situation came up tonight where I threw a ringer and the shoe landed under a leaner that Rick had. We weren’t sure how to score it so we gave Rick two and me three. I have to look up whether one cancels out the other. Last one thrown scores? I’ll report back.
Reduced table at AJ Wright’s in Culver Ridge Plaza, Rochester, N
I do most of my clothes shopping at AJ Wright’s in Culver Ridge Plaza. I stopped in for a new pair of shorts and picked out a plaid, Phat Farm pair for ten bucks. Up at the checkout the lady in front of me was complaining to the cashier about the amount of merchandise on the floor, literally on the floor. The cashier explained that they don’t have enough employees to keep the place up. While they talked I took this shot of the reduced table.
We played an art opening at RIT over the weekend and during the break a guy came up to me and introduced himself as an old neighbor. I was his paperboy and when I was a little older I babysat for his daughter. His daughter was there too with her husband. They had all just arrived and had not heard us play yet. The daughter’s husband looked at Peggi’s soprano sax and asked, “So do you play the kind of music you snuggle up with?” He winked while asking this. I said, “No, it’s more like the kind of music you drive off the road to.”
After the gig we drove out to Jeff and Mary Kaye’s place to help them with their stereo. They were going to have a pizza party the next night and they wanted to hook their computer up to the stereo so people could dance. Driving along the river on the way home we found a station playing Donovan’s “Catch The Wind” and the dj followed that up with “Wild Is The Wind”. Talk about “driving off the road” music! We were thinking it was Antony singing it but it turned to be Nina Simone. Guess it’s pretty clear where he got his thing from. We were so taken by this song that we found ourselves in the lane for 590 South to Corning. I had to swerve at the last minute to point the car toward Rochester.
Every time I hear a Beatles song I think of the bikers at “Big Daddy’s” on Lyell Avenue who challenged “New Math” with shouts of “Beatles or bottles”. They didn’t like what we were playing and I can’t quite remember how Kevin handled it but it seems like he announced one of our songs as an “obscure Beatle song”. At least that sounds like something he would do.
We streamed “Stones in Exile” last night with our Netflix app. We had the iPad cranked through the stereo and the footage from the “Exile” period was great. I have the double lp out and have played it quite a bit since reading the 33 1/3 book on the lp. That corresponded with the re-release of the remaster lp on a double cd. I ripped a copy of that while at a friend’s but haven’t listened to it yet. I don’t think I can handle the new tracks that Mick tarted up.
We stopped down at Vic & Irv’s while Duane was here and he spotted a skull and cross bones tattoo on the back of neck of the woman behind the grill. Rochester’s Lou Gramn was playing on the sound system. Their onion rings and milk shakes are sensational and have been since I started coming here back in the British Invasion days. In the Stones documentary Kieth says Mick’s rock and he’s roll. I have always felt that Vic & Irv’s is Stones compared to Don & Bob’s Beatles. The Beatles may have been more musical but the Stones have better hot sauce.
![Karen Brummund's "Time-Based Architecture" outdoor installation at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY]](https://www.popwars.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/KarenBrummundVisualStudieslg.jpg)
