We met my mom and about half of my immediate family down at Vic & Irv’s for Mother’s Day. My mom likes their milkshakes and their onion rings are the best but the rest of the food is a little rough. My dad ordered fried bologna with onions and cheese.
I had some ginger tea to settle my stomach. A few slivers of ginger root in the bottom of the cup is the way to go but we didn’t have any ginger so I used a Yogi tea bag. My fortune read, “Happiness comes when you overcome the most difficult obstacle.” I thought it was the journey that mattered.
We bought some duck eggs at the Public Market yesterday but I didn’t have the guts to to try one this morning. Instead I had a large chicken egg that we bought at Wegmans, one with a stamp on it that says “Use by June 9.” The organic duck eggs from Shannon Brook Farms are in a reused box that still reads “Best If Used By April 22.” The duck eggs are supposed to be creamier and that contain more protein.
Maureen bought me a kite for my birthday. She teaches fourth graders and called with her kids on the line. When I answered they sang Happy Birthday to me. Now that’s a gift! She brought the kite to painting class and I groaned when she gave it me. It was nice and everything but I don’t like the whole idea. There’s so much junk in the world I’m neurotic about the whole gift-giving thing. That said, what a cool gift.
We took it down to the marsh on Hoffman Road. Most of the trees down there have died from too much water so there is a good patch of open sky. We held it out and it took off. There may have been too much wind today because it crashed a few times. I remember adding cloth knots to kites’ tails back when we were kids in an effort to keep the thing oriented right and that may have helped. With today’s gusts we were never able to get the whole roll of string unwound before the kite would nosedive to the ground. We used to get those old paper kites up to the end of a roll of string, tie the kite to a tree and ride down to Bowmans to buy more string, ride back and put that thing up out of sight.
Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby at Lovin Cup in Rochester, New York 2013
Wednesday was a funny night. People expected a big band version of Margaret Explosion but Pete was the only special guest able to make the gig. His piano playing was great and worth the free admission. We packed up quickly and drove out to the Lovin’ Cup in Henrietta to catch the the tail end of Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby’s set. Eric seemed out of sorts and off his between song, free-association game. He kept looking over to the noisy crowd gathered around the bar. Twice he asked if they could turn the tv off. “You don’t go out to watch tv.” The edge added to the excitement for me and musically they sounded better than ever. I love how they trade songs and support one anothers’. I love it when Eric sings high harmonies to Amy’s voice and I loved it when they smiled at each other and kissed in the encore. This is way post punk stuff.
Peggi talked to Amy after the show and Amy told her they felt like they had to do some different material because they’ve played here so often. How many times has it been, six or seven? We’ve been to them all. Eric even did his “Men In Sandals” fashion send up even though Tom Kohn, the one that brought him here, was sitting at the merchandise table in open toe footwear. Their three song encore included a beautiful version of Tom Petty’s “Walls Fall Down.” We learned that before we got the club the bar had a beer tasting and some those idiots stuck around for the show. Eric told them to “shut the fuck up” and someone who had come to the show chimed in only to get thrown out by the club owner.
Watch their brilliant video and see them next time at a better venue.
Pete LaBonne emailed that he would be in town this week which means he’ll be behind the grand piano at the Little Theater Café when Margaret Explosion performs tonight. Jack Schaefer sat in on bass clarinet and addition guitar last week and he said he would probably stop by this week as well and then Peggi talked to Rick McRae and invited him to play trombone with us. None of these parties know the others will be there so the whole thing will be really wong, the future or past participle of wing(ing it).
This song was recorded a few years ago. Bob was out of town so there is no guitar. Pete LaBonne played piano and Jack Schaefer played bass clarinet.
The Jack-in-the-Pulpits are in full bloom in the woods now but you’ll have peak under the hood to see the red spadix (Jack) preaching away. Although it looks like a male plant they are unisexual.
By design our Wednesday painting class is always an adventure. The plan is only a starting point, the road is full of surprises and the goal stays just out of reach. Painting on the other days of the week can seem uneventful by comparison.
We missed two art shows this weekend. The post card invite to the Jim and Gail Thomas opening at Valley Manor got shoved under a pile of mail and Saturday’s Oxford Gallery group show was on our calendar but you have to look at that. I really wanted to see Janet Williams “Jesus Cleansing the Temple” painting.
We smelled the dead groundhog before we saw it laying upside down in the creek covered in flies and we stayed away from it yesterday by crossing the creek at different point. Today we figured it would be all cleaned up, nature is pretty efficient that way, but instead we found turkey vultures in the trees surrounding what was left of the carcass.
I was wearing my Treehugger shirt and when we got up to the park and someone said, “Oh I see you’re a treehugger” and I wanted to say “Whatever gave you that idea?” but I said, “Someone gave me this shirt.” He said, “I’m a treehugger too.”
We caught Bobby Henrie & The Goners’s at Abilene over the weekend and I was thinking how good they sounded, a three piece with all the essentials in just the right place. Bobby sang two George Jones songs, we danced and we headed home and then we heard the next band, a thirteen piece with Eastman students called “Bitchin’ Kitchen” killed. But they couldn’t have been as good as The Goners.
Let’s see. Where should we go to watch the Kentucky Derby this year? The race only lasts a minute or so and it’s so nice out.
We could do Silk O’Laughlin’s. You can sit outdoors or stand in the parking lot if the tables are full and look out over the river right where it meets the lake. They have betting pools and this years race hardly has any favorites so it’s wide open anyway. They serve Guinness but then any pub worth their salt does that. Peggi and I went to the Kentucky Derby in Louisville on our first date. I took this picture there. We didn’t have seats in the stands so we sat on a blanket and we could barely see the race but it was the year Secretariat won. I just did the math!
Pantaloon Flowers on Squirrel-corn wildflower in Edmunds Woods in Rochester, New York
My father takes the Spring off from our painting class. He spends his spare time in the woods, bird-watching and photographing wildflowers. Yesterday we visited the Edmunds Woods in Brighton with my father as guide. This wasn’t a hike. We just walked in the woods and looked at ground near our feet. We saw Mayflower, Squirrel-corn, Bloodroot, Spring Beauty, Mayapples, Trout Lilies, Wild Leeks, Red Berried Elder Bush, White and Red Trillium, Cut-Leaved Toothwort, Fiddle Ferns, Wild Strawberries, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Blue Cohosh and False Solomon’s Seal. Really quite amazing that this was all out there.
What’s left of the woods is surrounded by the expressway, a mosque, the Brighton ballfields and a complex of medical buildings. “It is a unique climax forest composed of Sugar Maple and Beech trees.” I copied that last sentence from my dad’s website on Edmunds Woods.
Spring is almost over. The white magnolias are finished. It always knocks me out how fast it comes on. Winter hangs on forever and then bang, one wildflower or blossoming tree after the other and then they’re gone. We’re going green.
Robert Motherwell “Untitled Open No. 90” 1969 in the Everson Museum Collection
That’s a small Jackson Pollack at the left of the blow-up above. Much more impressive is the Robert Motherwell painting in the center. It’s in the permanent collection at Syracuse’s Everson Museum and this kick-ass painting was done in 1969, the same year I was wallowing in the mud at Woodstock. The door on the right is not bad either.
Boston’s Heather O’Reilly playing WNY Flash in Rochester
Abby Wambach was sitting out last night’s game with a possible concussion and Carly Lloyd, the other US national team member playing for the Flash, was sidelined with a knee injury. If you wonder how much of a difference a few great players make to a team’s performance I’m hear to tell you it must mean a lot. The Flash could not move the ball from one end of the field to the other. They continually booted it and hoped for he best. Boston’s two national team members, Sydney Larraux and Heather O’Reilly were clearly playing on another level but their team was supportive and able to continually move the ball in small steps toward the goal.
Here’s my old man analysis. Lereaux seems too shapely to play the game but she’s deceptively quick and can out finesse the best. O’Reilly’s a tomboy with more energy and enthusiasm then anyone on the field but she is also a strategic player who feels the flow of the game and positions herself accordingly at all times. It was delight cheering for her as she scored two goals to defeat the home team.
Marsden Hartley “Starfish” in Everson Museum show entitled “American Moderns”
For me, Marsden Hartley stole the show at the Everson Museum and “American Moderns” from the collection at the Brooklyn Museum had some stellar pieces. There were four Hartleys here, more that any other artist so it was quite a treat. His paintings look like they were done yesterday. Bold colors, knockout compositions, vigorous paint handling, they rival Philip Guston’s work.
We told a few people that we were going to Syracuse this weekend and two of them asked, “Why?” Hey, Lou Reed went to school here. There is a show at the Everson Museum, a modern painting show from the Brooklyn Museum, that got a great review from our painting teacher so we hopped on the thruway. We stopped at Starbucks for a cappuccino and the next thing you know we were looking at a field of RVs with their doors open, an RV Liquidation Sale at the State Fairgrounds in Syracuse. It was early afternoon but hundreds of SU kids were stumbling around town with red plastic cups of beer in their hands, celebrating something called “May Fest” on April 26th.
We stumbled onto a Ben Shahn mural that was done in small tiles in 1967 and based on the the “good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler,” Sacco and Vanzetti trail. Long before the OJ trial in an earlier wave of domestic terrorism, the 1920 murder of two payroll guards in Braintree, Massachusetts, became the trial of the century. A plot had been exposed in which thirty bombs, disguised as free samples from the Gimbels department store, were sent to such pillars of American capitalism as J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. The plot failed due to lack of sufficient postage and in the resulting atmosphere of shock, fear, and repression, two working-class Italian Americans with anarchist connections, Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco became scapegoats in the reaction to the supposed threat of the combined forces of labor unrest, new waves of immigration, and the advance of the “red menace” that followed the end of World War I.
In my little book the Rolling Stones are the best rock and roll group, Sun Ra is the best jazz artist, James Brown is the best R&B artist, Bob Marley is the best reggae artist, The Beach Boys are the best pop group and George Jones is the best country singer. His recordings will live on. Goodbye George.
I guess the Robert Irwin book has gotten under my skin. I was mesmerized by the overhead light in the dentist’s office.
When I die I want to go out as a Ukrainian. The funeral service for Olga’s father at Saint Mary’s on Saint Paul Boulevard was stunning. The church is gorgeous with white walls, stained glass and a heavy helping of gold-leafed Eastern iconography. We were given a tall, lit candle on the way in and we stood with it through the hour long service while heavenly voices surrounded us, no organ, no sermon, just lots of incense offerings to the icons and this beautiful chanting. What a send off!
“You can’t reheat a soufflé.” I’ve always liked this quote. It is attributed to Paul McCartney responding to a request for the Beatles to reunite. It is the same reason Neil Young uses first takes on his records. It is never as good as the first time.
Margaret Explosion takes it further than most bands. Every song we do is a first and only take. There is no going back unless someone requests something we’ve done before. Although there are the themes that just keep popping up. Bug Jar Shooting is one. Prom Night keeps coming back when Jack sits in. And then there’s “Beautiful Iraq”, a song from our “Live Dive “cd.
Listen to Bug Jar Shooting by Margaret ExplosionListen to Prom Night by Margaret ExplosionLeave a comment
Who else would show up for a 2pm talk at the University of Rochester’s Strong Auditorium to hear a talk by the drummer of the Doors but tired bikers and students of “Pop Music of The Sixties?” Both of these groups were well represented but a surprising amount of really young kids got in line at the mics, one stationed in each aisle, to say “I’m a big fan of the Doors” and then ask questions about the lyrics of a particular song.
The UofR’s Junior Ivy League campus is an idyllic oasis on the banks of the Genesee near where the Eire Canal crosses the river. You can just imagine how you could get your life in order if you just buckled down and studied. I was never able to pull that last part off. I did take 8 hours of photography classes here from a great teacher, William Jenkins, and I hung around in Joe Barrett‘s dorm room.
John Densmore had a great, light touch and talked about those magic moments when the band would “just vamp on a drone chord” while Jim conjured spirits. I loved it when he explained how as drummer he was responsible for starting songs but when he couldn’t remember how a song went he would just ask for the melody to be sung to him. Not the tempo or pattern. That is good drumming in a nutshell.
A fitting Earth Day/Record Store Day celebration would not involve buying more plastic but I got so caught up in the festivities I was tempted to buy a another copy of Charlie Mingus’s “Town Hall Concert” from 1964 with Eric Dolphy. It is the greatest record ever made and they aren’t makin’ em like they used to. We came home with a set of Sir Doug singles in Spanish, a Marlena Deitrich lp and a Vi Redd lp. We kinda fell in love with her in the “The Girls In The Band” movie that played at Rochester’s film fest this weekend.
The Bop Shop was so busy our neighbor, Rick, was behind the cash register learning how to take the cash. An 85 year old Buffalo guy was playing blues on the piano when we left and then a young band was just setting up at the Archive when we got there. We missed “The Fox Sisters” but we heard the manager, Alayna, telling shoppers that they were expecting their biggest day in the history of the store. I find it hard to believe anyone is buying records anymore but my nephew was in line at Needle Drop before they even opened the store. We were planning on stopping by the House of Guitars but the day got away from us.
Bubbles in the Think Tank released a clear vinyl ep for Record Day. It includes this sensational Pete LaBonne track that addresses Record Store Day head on.
Pete LaBonne “Down With It” from “Eponymously Entitled” ep.Leave a comment
For a grown man I spent a considerable amount of time on this project. I realize that has no bearing on the results I’m just saying. If you like this sort of thing there are more here.
Realtor shrine in houe on Wisner Road in Rochester, New York
Wisner Road used to lead right in to the park. It still does if you are on foot but it used to lead right into Zoo Road back when there was a zoo in Durand Eastman. Two zoos for one city seems rather extravagant but that was then. Some how the residents were able to convince the town to turn their road into a dead end back in the seventies and I’m glad they did. It took all of the through traffic off the park roads. Most of the traffic on Wisner now is people driving their dogs to the park entrance where they let take a dump on park property.
We were heading back from the park the other day and were just in time to catch an open house on Wisner. The house is made for Mad Men parties with a big sunken living room, big picture widows and a wall of blue stone fireplace. There were a few scented candles burning in the house. I like candles but hate the scented ones and it makes me suspicious as to what scent they are masking. I thought this little shrine in the hallway was pretty cool.
Margaret Explosion “When Saints Were Saints” from last Wednesday at the Little Theater Café.
