OK. So it’s raining. No excuse for not taking a walk. If you don’t get out there you won’t see the robins gorging themselves on worms or the one legged turkey doing the turkey hop. And you won’t find any golf balls along the golf course and you’re never gonna find any empty 24 ounce Bud cans along the road. I picked up two today and had them in my hand when I waved to a neighbor who drove by. She’s probably thinking, “So that’s the guy that’s been dumping all those cans down here.”
Geri McCormick asked Margaret Explosion to play at her opening tonight of “Electric Florets” at the Genesee Center for the Arts.
Andrea’s Burma Shave bit seems to be having an effect. We only found one 24 ounce can of Budweiser today.
I spent most of the day yesterday doing php and MySQL experiments with Bill Jones. And then at our Margo gig last night Bob told me I should checking out the open source content management system called Joomla. I’m ready to try some dynamic pages. We had friends over for dinner and we got a really late start for the Margo gig. I loaded the car while Peggi made some soup. We were almost there and Peggi asked me if I put her sax in the car. Whoops.
That’s the head of the snowman from yesterday’s entry on the left.
Apple was up six today. Somebody sees some light at the end of this tunnel but we’re still worried. We’re considering making extra house payments with the cash on hand instead of playing the horses. That way “if the market does go to heck in a hand basket”, as our ML guy likes to say, we’ll be protected from the rain.
I’ve been experimenting with hummus recipes that I’ve found online. I thought it was spelled “humas” at first and apparently a few other people did too. I made a batch of “humas” with jalapeños that was quite good. I’ve made four different kinds in last few weeks. I had a hummus, onion and spinach sandwich for dinner. I don’t like it when the first hit tastes like tahini. Three of these recipes have called for too much tahini vs. the chick peas. And the garlic gets overpowering fast. I like lime juice in there. Today I made the mistake of dumping all the gooey ingredients into the food processor without first putting the blade in there first so I had scoop it all back out. I’ll have my own recipe tweaked with a few more trials.
Note to the dude that drives down the dead end, Hoffman Road, and throws his 20 ounce Budweiser cans out the window: We have your number. Most of the snow disappeared today in the near 70 degree temperature and we found ten tall Bud cans along the side of the road. We are talking of making Burma Shave-like signs and sticking them in the ground down there. First one would read, “Mr. Budweiser”. Second one would probably get us arrested if we said what we thought.
We walked through the woods today and came across four different parties of deer. The skies were pure blue and the snow was disappearing under our feet. When we got to the park we decided to walk up Log Cabin Road to the Wisner. We were asking for trouble here because dog people drive to this intersection and then let their dogs run free (i.e. take a dump on the road).
As we walked we watched an oversize woman bend over and call her dog from her over sized husband in a US Army sweatshirt. He had just let the big black dog off its leash. The dog came right at us and the women chided the dog with, “Well I guess you would rather go home with them than us.” A little further up the the road we ran into Whimsey, a Golden Retriever, who walked in circles around us while sniffing our bodies. With raising her voice or applying an inflection, the woman said, “You’re a bad dog Whimsy. You’re a bad dog Whimsy.”
About ten years ago I made the mistake of putting the back of my hand out for a stray dog to sniff. It grabbed my hand and and mangled it. I spent the afternoon in Emergency getting injections of Human Globulin directly into the wounds and then stitches. And there was a month of rabies shots at regular intervals. I couldn’t play drums for weeks. Dogs aren’t all that cute any more. Except for little white, wiry things and Dachshunds and Basset Hounds and our neighbor’s dogs. And that one that bit me.
We picked up some Chinese at Golden Dynasty to take out to Peggi’s mom’s place. I ordered Jalapeño Tofu which I love because it tastes like the pepper and onion mixture that street vendors dump on an Italian sausage. My fortune was was stellar. “Ideas you may believe as absurb ultimately lead to success!”
Back at home we watched “We Jam Econo”, the Minutemen documentary. Main Minuteman D. Boon, in the center, was a lovable teddy bear who advised moms and dads to teach their children about art so they could teach their children about art. I tracked down their double album, “Double Nickles On The Dime” in the basement this morning and plan on taking it for a spin tonight.
It snowed yesterday, a wet snow, and during the night clumps of snow fell off the pine tree that hangs over our bedroom. It sounded like squirrels jumping from the limbs to our roof and it sounded like they were digging into something. I figured they had found a way into our attic which is about a foot and a half tall at the peak. I imagined they were tearing up the place. I got the ladder out in the morning and went up on the roof. There were no footprints.
It was good packing. We rolled up a dirty snowman.
Work is so slow, I’ve been spending days organizing my digital life. I have all our mp3s on one drive and a backup of that folder on another drive. Each computer had its own folder of photos and random backups were scattered about. Never again. Our photos are all on one drive and we have a backup of that. Our primary computers are all running Time Machine. And there is a hard drive next to the stereo with the mp3 library on it. New cds get ripped when they walk in the door. I’m even letting iTunes manage the batch.
With all our mp3s in one place the Party Shuffle feature gets a good groove on. We just listened to a Coltrane tune from Impressions, Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On But The Rent, a 20 minute Mingus Medley, Respectable by the Stones (their last good album), Eric Dolphy Springtime, The ChiLites Oh Girl, Tommy James Cellophane Symphony, Bob Dylan I’m Not There, Maggot Brain, I Got It Bad by Peggy Lee and Marquee Moon.
Dwight sent us this shot of fours guys who went out to hear Margaret Explosion last night. The shot looks like it was caught caught on a surveillance camera. The Little closed the Cafe for a private party last night. Sorry about that. We’ll be back next week.
Peggi spent many hours preparing for today’s pre-hearing on our tax reassessment issue. As we headed into the library for encounter we noticed another couple coming out. The woman had a manila envelope and the man had his hands in his pockets. So I put my hand my packets. We signed in at a desk in the basement in front of three tables where people were making their cases. This was a carpeted rec room with colorful signs on the walls. One read, “How Many Ways Can You Tell A Story”. Others read, “Tell It With Stories”, “Have Fun With Words”, Some Words Rhyme” and “Tell It With Puppets”. We started laughing while picturing the idea of Peggi presenting our case with puppetry.
In the middle of fifth grade my parents moved from the city and I started school at Holy Trinity in Webster. There was immediate pressure to join the group that smoked in the woods on recess. I resisted but made friends with them. Some people teased me and made me the brunt of jokes that I didn’t understand. Mostly it seemed like there was this intense challenge coming from all parties to see where I was coming from and what I was made of. I must have bent over to pick up a penny in the hallway or something because I remember kids kids teasing me with, “Dodd goes down for browns”. I survived and had a good time there.
I told Peggi this story a long time ago and today we found a penny on the ground while we were walking and of course you can guess what Peggi said.
The deer just wander around through the hills where we live. But we don’t really live in hills even though everybody calls them that. The earth goes gradually downhill as you move north toward Lake Ontario and when you get near the lake the sandy soil just sort of falls away into fairly steep ravines. When you’re down in a ravine looking up, it looks like hills. So maybe they are hills. They wouldn’t be fake hills.
These deer spent the night in our backyard. They melt the snow while they sleep and leave little pods of bare ground behind in the morning. And the first thing they do when they get up is poop because there is always a little pile of the pellets near the pod.
This woman had herself crucified along with seventeen others even though the Archbishop of San Fernando in the Philippines urged devotees not to turn Holy Week into a circus. Philippine health officials warned people taking part in Easter crucifixions and self-flagellation rituals to get a tetanus shot first and sterilize the nails to avoid infections.
We traveled to Spain a few years back and spent Holy Week in Granada. Semana Santa is the biggest string of holy days/holidays of the year there. We watched processions wind through the streets with bands, women in black lace mantillas and teams of guys hidden beneath and supporting the weight of floats with the virgin in the lead and a depiction the suffering Christ in the rear. In Spain this is all a reverent but festive affair. The goose bump inducing highlight is always when the procession stops and the crowd grows silent while someone sings a saeta to the virgin.
We had dinner yesterday with Peggi’s mom and my brother, Fran. I was thinking about how we used to give up candy for Lent and then gorge ourselves on Easter and my parents asking us to remain silent between noon and 3PM on Good Friday (the hours Christ was hanging on the cross). I don’t think we were able to do this. My whole family left the Church while I was in high school and my parents are now more likely to celebrate Passover than Easter with their children and in-laws. But that Catholic stuff hangs around.
About fifteen years ago I revisited the Way of the Cross and began the process of recasting the Passion Play in present time. I collected source material with the intention of doing a series of paintings. I don’t believe anyone rose from the dead except maybe Shirley Maclaine so I was kind of bummed to see the last Pope amend the fourteen stations of the cross that I remember so vividly from my childhood. He gave the story an implausible, happy ending by adding the Resurrection as the fifteen station. When I do get around to these paintings I only plan to do fourteen of them.
Remember when Ronald Reagan was a joke and not the revered right wing populist that he is today? Remember Danny Deutsch behind the Reagan mask behind the bar at “Schatzee’s?” Danny bought the old gay men’s club, “Tara’s”, renamed it “Abilene’s” and opened last night. The place was packed with old friends.
Every bar in town seems to go with the locally brewed, Custom Brew Craft or Rohrbach’s. Both are world class and we are lucky to have them. Danny had something from Rohrbach’s on tap and we had a couple pints. You could talk over the music but still hear it and my ears weren’t ringing this morning. I loved the paint by number landscapes on the walls. They looked like embroidery or tapestries.
By coincidence we saw the Shawn Penn film, “Into The Wild” and Hans Petter Moland’s “Zero Kelvin” on back to back nights. Both films have young men ( a top student, an aspiring poet) heading into the wilderness (Alaska, Greenland) for adventure. I won’t spoil it but it is rough out there.
“Into the Wild” opened with with a graduation ceremony at Emory University in Atlanta. We will be there in seven weeks for our nephew’s graduation and the lead character in this movie reminded us of our nephew’s brother who is currently hanging out in Guatemala. Peggi read the book and pictured our nephew in the part and sure enough Emile Hirsch looks just like him. I know my nephews are listening to better music than the Eddie Vedder soundtrack from this film because they plug their laptops into our stereo when they’re here. I don’t get Eddie Vedder. I didn’t like Pearl Jam and that record they made backing Neil Young was a dog.
“Zero Kelvin” had the edge on “Into The Wild” because it had a much better soundtrack. Terje Rydal’s music was the perfect choice for this dark and beautiful adventure.
Last night, on Angel Corpus Christi’s recommendation, we watched something completely different, “My Kid Could Paint That”, about a really young girl from Binghamton who painted with encouragement from her parents. A creepy art gallery owner started selling the paintings for big bucks and the story got a lot of media attention. There was nothing extra special about the paintings. Art from most kids that age is special because they have not been taught or broken. It happens fast. One day they are extraordinarily expressive and the next day the sun is smiling.
Michael Kimmelman from the New York Times is interviewed throughout and offers insights into both sides of the old argument over whether or not modern art is a hoax. The creepy art gallery owner provides the meatiest art talk when he tries to make an absurd argument about the quality of the art being proportional to the time it takes to produce it. He makes his point by explaining how long it takes him to do his tedious exercises. They show him about three inches away from his painting with some sort of a magnifying class in one eye while he works on a huge painting by starting at the top and working his way down.
People buy what they like and sometimes they like the story more than the art.
Irondequoit recently hired an independent company to reassess property values and they sent us a notice of our new tax rate. They determined the town was currently assessed at 88% value which means taxes needed to be raised by 12% on average to generate enough tax money to dump all that salt on our roads and pay people to walk in circles around the gravestones in Irondequoit Cemetery with weed whackers.
Our taxes went up more than 12% and they estimated our house was worth more than we paid for it a few years ago. The town posted the reassessment online and Peggi spent an afternoon comparing our house to similar homes in the area. She had Google maps open on the laptop and and the tax records on a different screen while generally snooping on the neighbors. I was making humas in the kitchen and listening to her updates. I never would have guessed which house was assessed the highest on our street and our neighbors on both sides with similar houses were assessed much lower than us.
It seems Un-American not to contest so we attended an informational meeting at the Town Hall called “Understanding Your Property Reassessment”. I was prepared for a snoozfest so I brought the morning paper with me. There was a headline on the front page that read “Local House Sales Tumble”. The story explained that although the sales have tumbled, the prices have remained steady. We have no housing market collapse here because we had no boom.
Growth is not all it’s cracked up to be. Steve Hoy was talking about this concept yesterday. Sustainability may be a better business model. Irondequoit starts north of the city of Rochester and it is hemmed in by Lake Ontario to the north, Irondequoit Bay to the east and the Genesee River to the west. We aren’t growing and we like it that way. We should probably just pay our taxes and shut up.
Last Wednesday’s Margaret Explosion gig started real slow with only two people in attendance, a couple with broken English accents. They have been here before and they stayed for full ride. We had a pretty good crowd by the end of the night and on the way out the couple said, “See you next time”.
This gig is so casual, it is perfect for Margaret Explosion considering we don’t have any set list, we never practice and we make up most of the night rather than play songs. We have this affliction where our songs never sound as good as they did the first time, when it really wasn’t a song at all.
Truth is most of them are a lot closer to daydreams than songs. This first tune from last week just sort of floated by for that couple.
Paul Dodd Crime Face Paintings in Living Room Early 2008
Peggi answered the phone tonight and a guy asked to speak to Paul. I said, “Hello” and the man/boy voice said, “Fuck you” and hung up. I’m thinking it was the answer to the title of yesterday’s post.
As brutal an exercise as painting can be, it is as brutal an exercise for me to look at one of my paintings. Of course it is not entirely brutal, but close. I’m talking about looking at the finished painting and noting what goes through my mind on confronting it. Just what kind of a dialog do I have with this thing? In other words, why am I doing this?
I alone am responsible for expressing what is on the minds of these people and I need to enable them to hold up their end of an interesting conversation. The procedure for developing a painting is one part of this activity. The conversation with the finished thing is the other.
It is sort of interesting how little anyone who comes into our house has to say about these guys. If someone is not into a confrontation I completely respect that but I suspect the paintings are not speaking clearly enough yet. I think some people are afraid to look at them or they think they are so terrible they don’t want to be the position to have to comment on them so they look away. Maybe everybody has stuff like this in their living room.
I’m trying to pick a couple to enter in a show and I have a bunch of recent ones propped up in our living room. I’m leaning toward bottom left and third from left on the bottom. I’ve been adding to the group over the last month. I would like them to be more engaging.
I just finished “The Object Stares Back” by James Elkins. I fell asleep to it for the last few weeks and it surly is responsible for this entry. But he started to to piss me off because he tossed out too many ideas too quickly. I disagreed with many of his opening arguments and he didn’t take the time to defend them. On to the next entry.
We maintain a number of websites and I’m getting tired of updating hundreds of pages when someone decides to add a new feature to their nav bar menu. So I spent the better part of the last few days investigating ssi (Server Side Includes) and php includes. I had checked out ssi’s years ago and gave up on them and it seems like php is still the more elegant solution. So I’m going down the php road and all of the new pages have a .php suffix on them.
Picking apart these old pages reveals an alarming amount of javascript for the pull down menus, clock, and search engine. And on top of that there’s the Ajax rss feeds, statcounter php, the Spry menu bar and cascading style sheets. It is amazing the pages load at all.
We set our neighbor Leo’s browser to start with Google instead of the Browncroft Church website that the guy from his church chose when helped set up the computer. And now Leo keeps asking, “How does Google know all that?” I have pumped all sorts of queries into Google looking for answers in the last few days and with a little digging I found them all. I also stumbled on a site that addresses the bigger picture, WTF Code.
Our 4D Advertising meeting with clients from Newman, California ended abruptly when Peggi had to leave to meet her mom at the doctors’ office. Her mom had fallen a few days ago and she was in pain. So the clients started taking about where they were going for dinner and Jay Cohen’s new place was in the running. I seconded that choice and they headed out the door. I sat down to do an entry in my blog.
The phone rang and it was some nut from the NRA so I started typing here. The guy wanted me to take a quick survey but first he wanted to play a one minute message from Wayne LaPierre. Wayne warned that we would be shown images of the presidential candidates in hunting gear claiming to support gun owner’s rights but said he would not trust any of them. He wants us to stand up for our gun rights before the next president gets elected. Wayne turned the phone over to his “assistant” and I tried to mildly provoke him. “Does McCain want to take away our guns” I asked. “Well, I know where you are coming from Mr. Dodd but I am not as worried about McCain as I am Obama and Hillary. They have an absolutely terrible record on gun control. They want to shut down your gun shows.”
“Let me ask you a question, Mr. Dodd. Do you believe the government can tell you that you can’t own a gun in your own home?” “Yes, I do believe they can tell me that.” “Well that is exactly what they are doing. There is a case before the Supreme Court right now that will decide whether you can own a gun in your home in DC. This case is before the Supreme Court and how much do you think you’re going to see about it in the media? Can I ask you help us out and join at at a reduced price of $100 for five years. It is normally $175 Mr. Dodd and I’ll also include a free gift of a rosewood handle multitool.” “What is that?” I asked. He explained that it was a leather man like pair of plyers and he assured me it was a quality piece. “Plus you’ll receive a complimentary subscription to “America’s First Freedom”. I asked what that was all about and he said, “Just like the name sounds”. He was right.
He sensed my reluctance to join and upped the ante. “How about $35 for one year? My son just turned ten and for his birthday I bought him a 22 and an NRA membership.” Can you help us out Mr. Dodd. Obama is going to take away our guns. Not to mention that he is soft on crime. Obama and Ted Kennedy wanted to outlaw ammo for hunting guns. Can you believe that? Like all politicians, they want power and they believe if we don’t have access to guns they will have more power. It’s just like Hitler and people voted for him. He was democratically elected.”
I think of myself as a liberal but I have a real conservative streak when it comes to guns.
We skied into the woods this morning under pure blue skies and ahead of the 40 degree temperatures. Peggi had rubbed glide wax on our waxless skis and they were so fast they wanted to go right out from under us. My right right arm felt sore and then I remembered arm wrestling with Monica over the weekend. I will not underestimate her one hundred pounds again. She challenged me and we wrestled to a draw. Actually I called the draw and quit. She is amazing.
Peggi and I hooked up Rick and Monica and skied up to Lake Ontario over the weekend. They invited us over for lunch. We had leftovers of mushroom barley soup from Polska Chata and artichoke, roasted red pepper, Kalamata olives hard Sicilian cheese ($2 extra) from Nino’s. Rick let us borrow a Dick Cavett set of dvds.
We watched “The Woodstock Show” last night. I remember watching that with Dave Mahoney after he talked us into leaving Woodstock early because he thought they were going to run out of food. Joni Mitchell made the Jefferson Airplane look silly with her a capella version of “The Fiddle and the Drum”. Up next was Sly and the Family Stone and Debbie Reynolds (ouch). Sly was very cool but Dick Cavett acted like Sly was incoherent. He was just being Sly for crying out loud. Dick Cavett was starting to piss me off. Janis Joplin had a real dorky band but she was still amazing. Dick fawned all over her because she read a book or two. David Bowie looked kinda geeky and nervous fiddling with his cane. Maybe it was speed. Mick Jagger took complete command of the camera and made Dick Cavett look tiny.
We still have another disc or so to go. I wish they had left the original commercials in there
I set my watch ahead before the daylight time change to ease the transition. And Peggi set the clock in our bedroom ahead before going to sleep so we wouldn’t be fooled in the morning. The next day I started to adjust the clock on our stove. This requires needle nose pliers to twist the broken knob. But I guess I never got around to setting it back in the Fall because it was already reading right. The clock in the car is tricky since the buttons all do double duty. I turned off the radio and fumbled my way through this while Peggi was driving to our Margaret Explosion gig. For a while I lost the clock completely. I guess this is one of the available options and it sounds so dreamy.
We don’t get in the car to just drive around. I remember doing this in Steve Hoy’s Barracuda but that was a lifetime ago. We would just cruise, listening to Led Zeppelin, Cream or Paul Butterfield’s “In My Own Dream” 8-tracks. If we are in the car now, we are on our way somewhere and we are usually running late. And that is usually my fault. I guess that’s selfish but part of it may have been inherited.
My father is notoriously late. I had a paper route during the time this photo was taken so I was getting up at an ungodly hour and still managing to get complaints from neighbors that I wasn’t delivering the paper to their doors early enough. While I was preparing for my route, eating whatever I could get my hands on, my father was trying to get out the door to Kodak. I remember the car pool guys out front waiting for my father to get down there. Some would honk and get pretty upset. One guy, who worked below my father at Kodak, kicked my father out of his car pool.
I had this paper route for five years and kept looking for angles to shorten the effort. I started walking the route with the heavy bag over one shoulder. And then I got a big basket on my bike and loaded that up but the bike kept falling over when I stopped to walk the paper up a driveway. So I started rolling the papers before leaving and throwing them from my bike. And eventually I was just putting the papers in the bag unrolled and rolling them while I road my bike no hands. I even got so I could do the whole route without stopping my bike. Of course this involved riding across some peoples’ lawns and gardens. I developed some pretty efficient child labor skills and my driving force was wanting to stay in bed a little longer.
As my father’s oldest son, I even find it sort of rude when invited guests show up on time. This must be selfish.
Bootsy Collins at King All Stars recording session at PCI Studios in Rochester, NY
I spent the morning in the basement working on a painting that required a fair amount of attention to detail. The face I was working on emerges from a white background and I was struggling with the edges so it wouldn’t look like a mask. Every move I made felt heavy handed so I’d paint it out and sneak up on it again. Bootsy Collins’ “Can’t Stay Away”, especially the falsetto refrain, was stuck in my head. I find the only way to deal with something like this is to play the song and exorcise it so I came upstairs and cranked it.
4D Advertising did a cd cover for “The King Allstars” on After Hours Records and I’ve had this Polaroid of Bootsy in my desk drawer since whenever that was. Tom Kohn and Marty Duda brought all the King Records guys to Rochester and recorded them in PCI Studios. We did the packaging for the cassette and lp as well in those days.
Peggi and I saw Bootsy in the late seventies at the War Memorial with Parliament and Funkadelic. Anita Ward opened the show with a twenty minute version of “Ring My Bell”. Don’t get started with that song. That’ll stick in your head for a while. We saw George Clinton in the eighties at the Warehouse in Rochester and Bootsy was a special guest. He was sensational and stole the show both times. What’s Bootsy doin’?
