Bulldozer Man plows his own road through Monroe County Park
Tomorrow morning, at 9:30 in Rochester City Court in the Public Safety Building, Anthony Pilato will be arraigned on charges stemming from his “improvements” to the undeveloped part of Durand Eastman Park. Larry Staub, Director of Monroe County Parks, said “He admitted to using a bulldozer and hiring some people with chainsaws to come in and help him. He was taking this narrow footpath and widening it to a thoroughfare. … I’ve never seen anything as wildly offensive as this.”
We’ve taken the path several times since and find it so sad that someone would do this to such a beautiful part of the woods. Anyone who watched the Ken Burns National Parks series could see what a heroic effort it took to set aside park land from development. We have learned that Lisa who lives on Spring Valley called both the town of Irondequoit and the DEC when she heard the “bulldozer man” tearing up the woods. Neither one of of those calls where acted upon until the bulldozer came out the other end of the park. Ken Burns could have used some footage of this 72 year old guy driving a bulldozer through the park.
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.
Our neighbor on one side is digging a drainage ditch for the rain run off that rolls down our street. He call’s this set up his poor man’s transit. With the aid of the level he sited the posts that describe the outside perimeter of the pond and plans to grade the basin and build up a berm on the downhill side.
Our neighbor on the other side has a “Senior for Seniors” dog that he got from Lollipop Farm. The dog is twelve years old and who knows what kind of a past it has had. We were walking across his yard the other day, talking and not really paying attention, when the dog darted at us from rear. It grabbed a hold of my rear end and had it’s mouth opened too wide to really chomp down. I could hardly shake it loose and when I did it ripped my Tommy Hilfiker sweat shirt with its teeth. The shirt is a hand me down from Peggi’s father and only has sentimental value at this point. When I got home I found teeth marks in my ass.
Dean & Britta at Lovin’ Cup in Rochester, New York
The dreary weather this morning was the perfect setting for viewing Dean & Bitta’s “13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests”. We bought the dvd from Dean Wareham after his reading at Record Archive yesterday. Released in conjunction with The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh the dvd features Nico, Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick and Dennis Hopper sitting for Warhol’s silent film portraits. But the films aren’t silent anymore because Dean and Britta have provided a beautiful soundtrack.
We knew nothing about Galaxie 500, Luna or Dean & Britta except that Angel Corpus Christi likes them. And then Casey form Mex called with his offer to pick up tickets for Dean & Britta’s appearance at the Lovin’ Cup in Henrietta out next to RIT. It was total immersion for us, bartender John John playing Luna tracks at Mex and listing all the covers the band used to do, Dean reading from his tour diary at the Record Archive, Dean & Britta in concert and then the gorgeous dvd. The thing that ties all these projects together is the Velvet Underground, the best rock band of all time. How can you go wrong? We loved it.
Hotel Reverie opened the show last night and sounded great. You can almost forget you’re in the suburbs when the band starts. The club has the right idea with no chair or tables in front of the band and the room sounds great.
Alayna sent us a press release from the Record Archive announcing the appearance of Rubble Bucket on stage in the store at 5 o’clock last night. They were described as a “polyrhythmic nine piece dance band” with comparisons to Fela Kuti, James Brown and Bjork so we dutifully headed over there after work. We were late as usual but he band was running late too so we caught their soundcheck. Sound checks are often the most interesting part of a band’s performance. The interaction between members without their stage persona, what they play while getting their sound, the words they use to test the mics are all more revealing than the songs they perform.
Dick Storms told us the band was on Wease’s show in the morning and Scott Regan’s show midday but hardly anyone showed up for their free performance here. I think that says something about the demographic of those shows. This young jam band has all the right old school influences. I hope a younger crowd found them at their club appearance later last night.
We headed over to Casey’s to pick up the tickets he bought us for tonight’s performance by Dean and Brita. We hadn’t been to Mex in a while and I was happy to see the mural was aging gracefully after almost ten years. The plaster chips and scratches and dings all contribute to tipico ambiance. John played Luna tracks from his ipod in bar downstairs and the food upstairs was better than ever.
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.
I shot this dark movie in Steve Hoy’s trailer in Tennessee.
I was laying in the outline of a head and fussing with trying to get it right but I couldn’t when it dawned on me that I should always be painting the whole thing at once. I moved on, addressing the whole instead of beating up the parts and I had much better luck. I already knew this.
Path that Irondequoit man plowed through Durand Eastman Park
So a 72 year old man admitted to driving a bulldozer approximately one mile through Durand Eastman Park and he claims he was “improving” it. The photo above shows an example of what he considers “improvement”. A few weeks ago this was a beautiful, gentle path through the woods. Director of Monroe County Parks said “I’ve never seen anything as wildly offensive as this.” He had the man arrested and he faces a $250 fine. If found guilty the County plans to ask for restitution. Apparently quite a few people complained to the Parks Department. Channel 8 and Channel 13 did a story on the evening news last night and the Democrat & Chronicle did a piece in this morning’s paper. And the Ironequoit Post splashed the story across the front page. Of course, most of the comments are in “Dozerman’s” favor with some offering to pay his fine. “
A page from Anne Havens’ “Resuscitation” piece in Schweinfurth show in Auburn, NY
We cut out of work early today and drove down to Ithaca to pick up my djembe at Toko Drum Store in Ithaca. We did this despite knowing that Cornell was having some sort of Swine Flu outbreak. Toko’s owner,Tom, put a new head on it for me. He is the nicest guy and a true craftsman. He told us that after took the old drum head off he felt something pretty powerful while handling the drum. He couldn’t tell if the sensation was related to the maker of the drum or someone who had played it but he said it was a really good feeling.
I bought the drum from Bob Ament who just lost his race for Irondequoit Town Supervisor on Tuesday. He had just returned from the Peace Corps when he opened a small shop on Monroe Avenue that sold African crafts.
From Ithaca we drove up Route 34 on the east side of Cayuga Lake to Auburn. I had one day left to pick up the painting that I had in the “Made In New York” show otherwise the work became the property of the Schweinfurth Museum. While we were there we saw the current show called “Collage + Assemblage”. Our favorite piece was a book called by Anne Havens called “Resuscitations”. The photo above is a detail from one of the pages.
The museum director gave us directions to an organic restaurant outside Auburn called the Restaurant at Elderberry Pond. They had the best bread in the world and some delicious fresh tomato juice.
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.
We played a gallery opening in the old Jazzberry’s space over the summer and I brought my djembe instead of the drum kit. The old firehouse space has high ceilings and all sorts of vintage printing equipment scattered about yet the sound is warm with just right amount of ambience. Bob Martin stopped by with a cd of this gig and I glanced over at my djembe as it started playing. There was a big crack in the goatskin head. This happened once before, about ten years ago when we were playing happy hours at the Bug Jar. I had Tom at Toko Drums in Ithaca put a new head on back then and he did a great job. So yesterday we drove down to Ithaca to pay him another visit.
Tom is old school all the way. He still takes photos of his customers when they buy a drum, 35 mm photos on film, and puts them up on the walls like they do at Vic & Irvs but Tom has thousands. We still haven’t spotted the one he took of us when I bought a conga drum a few years back. He has a one page website and he doesn’t do email. His shop, in the same building as the Moosewood Restaurant, looks just like it has for twenty years. Percussion instruments, incense and funky hats, no drum sets or cymbals. He is a master craftsman when it comes to hand drum repair.
We strolled up and down the Commons and had dinner at a corner bar. Ithaca College and Cornell kids in flip flops were everywhere and some had their clunky parents in tow. The kids looked pretty clunky too and we felt like clunky strangers but it was all pretty dreamy. Stop out and see Margaret Explosion tonight at the Little Cafe. We have a dreamy set lined up.
It’s vinyl only in Rick and Monica’s basement and last night it was “Doug Sahm and Band”, Tim Buckley’s “Lorca” and Procol Harem’s “Shine On Brightly”. Rick and Monica had friends over for dinner and and one of the guests was Tom Kohn from the Bop Shop so the party naturally gravitated toward the vinyl. We had eaten dinner with Pete and Shelley out on our deck and we were sort of winding down when Rick called to invite us over for some late night pool. So we merged parties.
Rick regularly rotates the album covers in the 12′ x 12″ pictures frames on the wall down there. Personal Effects’ “This Is It” cover was in one of the featured spots. But my favorite picture on the wall is the print of Van Gogh’s “The Pool Players” that hangs behind the pool table. This short movie takes you inside that painting.
Peggi Fournier singing “Subscriptions Are My Prescription” at the Community Playhouse in 1983. Photo by Gary Brandt.
It was hot twenty six years ago today, real hot. Personal Effects rented the Community Playhouse on South Avenue where we were able to back project lights, slides, movies and liquid light on a giant scrim. The multi-media show was called “This Is It”. Duane Sherwood created a mind blowing special effects show, Don Scorgie provided the concessions and Al “Balloon Buffoon” Kerstein engineered the ballon drop. You can hear it on this song. Steve Lippincott in Portland has been after us for a copy of that show and I finally got around to digitizing a cassette recording.
Three members of Personal Effects play in Margaret Explosion and we have a show tomorrow night at the Village Gate in the courtyard at 6pm. We’ll be performing with fire jugglers, not at the same time of course. And we don’t play anywhere near as fast as we used to.
“Subscriptions Are My Prescription” by Personal Effects – Live from the Community Playhouse in Rochester, NY August 27,1983.
Sea Breeze Indians performing in the 2009 Tournament in the Valley
Maureen emailed us to alert us to an event she thought we would like, the “2009 Point Pleasant Firemen’s Association Tournament in the Valley”. Volunteer firemen groups from as far away as Long Island compete in “3 Man Ladder”, “Hose Efficiency”, “Motor Pump”, and “Buckets” events. We assumed it was at the Point Pleasant firehouse where we vote and it is within walking distance so we set out on bikes. There was nothing going on over there so we rode down Culver to the Sea Breeze Fire Department but there was nothing going on there either. We rode along the lake and asked a park official if he had any idea where the event was happening. He told us it was up near the the Town Hall on Goodman. There are two Point Pleasant Fire Departments and the event was being held at No. 2. So we we got here a little late but we saw some of the last two events. We rooted for our home team, the Point Pleasant Pea Pickers, and we were happy to see that our first responders were in such good shape. We watched them run up ladders with buckets of water and fill a 55 gallon barrel in mater of seconds.
