PopWars

The Ramones had some classics. “I’m Against It” was one. George Winter, Webster’s code enforcement officer, is quoted in this morning’s newspaper as saying “A few people called and said, ‘I’m not sure what it means, but I don’t like it.’ I think it’s something from a Bob Dylan song or something.”

He was talking about a sign that read “HOW MANY DEATHS WILL IT TAKE ‘TIL WE KNOW TOO MANY PEOPLE HAVE DIED?” The sign was put up on one of the seven empty lots where houses used to stand before the Christmas eve gunman set fire to the place. In fact he was standing up on the ridge pictured in this photo when he shot and killed the firemen who responded to the fire. We had seen the sign before and I thought about photographing it for my sign collection but it was ugly, all caps lettering, and the sign itself was already commentary. The sign is in violation of code so someone covered it with a tarp and then someone else sprayed “Censored” on the tarp. I photographed that and maybe that will work on my sign page.

The article prompted us to walk down there again. You go across a small seasonal bridge (it will swing open for fishing season in April) and you’re on a sliver of land barely wide enough to contain the road, an old railroad bed and some tiny houses. Lake Ontario is on the north and Irondequiot Bay on the south side. It’s a beautiful spot but the elements make it too rough for luxury homes. There’s an impromptu shrine to the firefighters and an historical marker from the 30s denoting the spot where the French army landed in 1687 before invading the Seneca Indian territory. Both of these displays are permissible.

Our first morning in Madrid a few years ago we found big tent set up in the plaza in front of our hotel with food vendors inside. One of them was selling tray sized cakes with crosses on them. On closer examination the crosses were only visible because of the absence of powdered sugar. There was no way we going to buy a cake that large but the image stuck.

Peggi found a recipe for the pastry, mostly crushed almonds with eggs and some butter. Santiago (the apostle Saint James) is the patron saint of Spain and they probably sell cookie patterns in this cross shape in Spain but I made the pattern with paper mounted on cardboard and wrapped in packing tape. It took me about as long to make the pattern as it took Peggi to make the cake.

All it took was a 60 degree day in March and the geese formations are overhead, although they seem to be headed west instead of north, the witch hazel is out down at the park, I spotted an ant in the kitchen and these little yellow flowers are are poking through the snow.

We stopped at an estate sale at the old Parsons’ farmhouse on East Avenue. It was a Jack Wanderman (Susan Plunket’s brother) production and Dick Storms was there. He told us he doesn’t go to those things early anymore and he was only there to see Jack. Of course Jack brought most of the stuff into the estate. We looked around for some of Peggi’s mom’s stuff but didn’t find any.

We met a guy in a beard there. His beard seemed to swallow his whole persona. He said,”You probably don’t remember me but I used to come see your band.” He said he’d been out in LA and was back for family reasons and his name was Brian and he had made a movie that was coming out on Netflix. He told us he had fought to keep the music of John Martyn in his film because music is very important to him. We were thinking, “Wow, we know another guy from Rochester named Brian who made a movie with John Martyn music in it” but when he told us the name of the movie, something to do with a river, it wasn’t “The Butterfly Knot.” Could it be that this was the same Brian and something as simple as a big black beard made everything so different?

We took my mom out to the mall today. It was real treat watching her roam the aisles in full hunt mode. She has great taste and used to give us a shirt or sweater each year, one time a bike bag that I still use, but always something I would wear, like all the time. People still compliment me on a shirt and I’ll say, “My mom gave me this.”

She got a little flustered though when the saleswomen in Lord & Taylor took her pants out of the dressing room while she was trying on another pair. Peggi had to go find my mom’s pants and when she did the clerk apologized, saying, “we like to keep a clean fitting room.”

We looked at this furniture for a bit. Our friends, Pete and Shelley, make chairs like this. They seem right at home in the Adirondacks but look a little wacky in the mall.