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”.
In my nightmare scenario post last week I speculated wildly on what the County might have been thinking when they tore up one of our favorite walking paths in what they call the “undeveloped section” of Durand Eastman Park. We walked the path after that post and followed the giant tire tracks from the trail’s entrance across from 700 Hoffman Road to where the path enters the subdivision near the corner of Hillview Drive and Eastman Estates. We spotted some guys hanging around and asked them if they knew who might have driven through the woods in a bulldozer. They didn’t know much about the woods but they said one of their neighbors had unloaded a big piece of equipment on Eastman Estates a few days earlier. As we were talking to them their neighbor drove up the driveway that was once part of this bridal path in a black Hummer.
These people, who apparently have rights to the old bridal path that runs through the sub-development, decided to continue the path about a mile in to the park by hiring some sort of front end loader to drive the distance and widen the old walking path to accommodate motor vehicles. We were up there yesterday and the trail is covered with tire tracks.
I emailed Larry Staub the Director of at the County Parks. The City owns Durand Eastman but it is being managed by the County. Larry walked the path and told me that I had underestimated the damage in my email. He got part way up the path and called 911. When he got to the other end of the path he met this guy who acted like he had done the Park a favor. Larry called for Sherriff’s backup and had the guy arrested. The innocent until proven guilty suspect will appear in City Court on Tuesday October 6th at 9:30 AM. Larry thanked us for bringing this matter to their attention and he asked us to think about what sort of restitution the County should be seeking from the guy. Our neighbors have suggested a few ideas but they are all illegal.
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.
We wandered around Sea Breeze on our bikes, checked out the progress on the traffic circles over on 590, and then rode down to the bay. We sat on the blue bench at the Newport Yacht Club and looked out at the sail boats. Can’t remember where we were when I spotted this lawn installation. I think it may be a Jeff Koons piece.
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.
We’re thinking it won’t rain this evening so we’ll be able to play outdoors at the Village Gate and if it does rain we move the action inside, fire jugglers and all. But we’re thinking it won’t rain.
There is beautiful section of Durand Eastman that we used to call the “undeveloped section” and we hike up there three or four times a week. It’s located south of Titus between Kings Highway and Hoffman Road and in five years we have only come across two other parties on the trail. Today we found the path had been widened to to ten feet or so by a bulldozer. We can’t imagine what kind of nightmare scenario this is part of. Widened and flattened for dirt bikes? ATVs? Housing development going in? Bored park maintenance staff with new taxpayer funded equipment? Handicapped Accessible woods?
We wanted to cry but we were too mad. We plan to call Stephanie Aldersley, our town represenative.
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.
Joe Plus N Trio at Durand Eastman Beach in Rochester, NY
We rode our bikes down to Durand Eastman beech to catch Joe Plus N’s Day Tour performance, the tenth annual, on Saturday. We have caught at least one stop all ten years except for the year we were in Spain on vacation. Joe had asked me to play with him that year too so I missed out twice as bad. This stop was billed as random trios and Joe Tunis was to play with Will Veeder of Hinkley and Scott Oliver of ORAA but Will didn’t show up. The duo sounded especially nice on the beach.
Cross in the back of a pick up at the Hungerford Building in Rochester, NY
I was talking to Tom Lacagnina at the last RoCo opening about a mutual friend who had passed out at a dinner party. Tom said he remembered passing out at Church and I do too. I remember the sinking sensation as my knees buckled and all that Catholic imagery began to swirl. It seemed someone in our family was always passing out during Mass. It was often hot and the clothes we had to wear were stuffy but that wasn’t the reason. We used to have to fast for three hours before receiving Communion. As kids we were up running around the house for hours before my parents rounded us up for Mass. We were starved by the time the service began. And a dry wafer stuck to the roof of your mouth did not exactly hit the spot. Sacrifice is a big part of the Catholic experience.
My favorite part of Catholic Churches has always been the Stations of the Cross. They are usually different in each Church and offer more to contemplate than a single statue. The fourteen stations are spread around the church and tell the story of Christ’s crucifixion. In older churches they are usually presented in a in a traditional fashion but in contemorary churches they are often minimal and symbolic. The greatest story ever told is is fertile ground for artists.
The owner of this pickup truck is ready for a real sacrifice. You just never know when you might come across a Christlike figure. I was not surprised to see this cross parked near the corner of Main and Goodman. I picked East Main Street years ago as the setting for a modern day crucifixion. In 1993 I began collecting source material for a series of paintings that I planned to do of this story. I photographed locations for a contemporary setting that would have Christ sentenced near our home at East High and crucified at the Liberty Pole. This truck is on that route, just across the street from the adult book store.
I still haven’t done the paintings but I did make large prints of the source material and displayed them at the Bug Jar for a month. I entered them in the Finger Lakes Show in 1999 and won a few awards with the “Passion Play” piece. I will do those paintings some day.
We stopped by Clover Pool Supply to pick up some more ph to add to our street’s pool. We are the presidents this year and our duties include keeping the chemistry balanced. With all the rain the ph has been consistently low. While we were there I noticed these signs for sale. I was trying to decide which one the members would like best.
We drove deep into “Death Panel” country this week to attend the Wyoming County Fair in Pike, New York. New York’s gun toting junior senator was there and I grabbed a photo of her giving a balloon to a little kid. She got pretty cool reception when they introduced her. We rode down with Jeff and Mary Kaye and Jeff really knows the back roads so the scenery was “I Love NY” dreamy. We made this trip last year but our timing was off. We were there at the end of the week and the animals had already gone home. We did have fresh lemonade, ride the Ferris Wheel and see a nasty tractor pull.
This year we went on Tuesday and the fairground barns were full of prize winning livestock. We wandered around for hours and looking at goats, cows, rabbits, pigs, chickens, roosters, horses and sheep. We sat in the stands and watched the judging of cows and horses. It was hard for us to tell whether they were judging the animal or the the handler but that really didn’t matter.
There were no freak shows or creepy things in formaldehyde jars but there was a midway with the usual corn dogs and fried dough fare and farm equipment on display and booths selling t-shirts, wood stoves and ATVs. And a few buildings were devoted to trade show like booths for groups like the American Legion, the Republican Party, Right To Lifers offering tiny feet lapel pins for a dollar, a church group with free literature debunking evolution and a group that wanted to bring back “God given Jewish Law” that stated that “both persons involved in a homosexual act were to be be put to death.”
I spent a few minutes watching contestants play “I Got It”. The operator had a silky smooth voice and the contestants looked like they were in a trance. I took a short movie of one game and it turned out I caught a woman throwing two balls on one turn. Watch closely on ball number three.
Left to right, my mother, my brothers John and Fran, Brad Fox, my sister Amy’s four little buddies and Dave Mahoney
This is one of the first photos I took with my first camera. My father brought it home from the Camera Shop at Kodak. I took the photo in the summer of 69 but I don’t have any photos from Woodstock so I’m guessing I got this camera after the festival. Spevak had called me for some quotes for the article he was writing on Woodstock for the paper and then the editor emailed me to ask if I had any photos. Whatever I said was cut out by his editor but we did celebrate the 40th anniversary by seeing the director’s cut of the movie at the George Eastman House last weekend. They have a crankin’ sound system in the Dryden Theater.
As we sat there watching the movie I kept trying to remember who it was that had recently told me they were in in the movie. It wasn’t until near the end of the movie that I remembered that Holly Clarke from my high school class was one of the nude woman swimming in the pond. We got there a day early but still managed to get stuck in traffic. When it got unbearable we parked the car and started walking. I remember a long line of people going in one direction and an equally long line going in the opposite direction. No one was sure where the festival site was and we watched people turn around and switch directions on a hunch. I don’t remember packing any food, clothes or sleeping gear but we did have some acid they we planned on taking at the show. We couldn’t wait for that and took it the morning of the day before the show. We wandered around and tried purchasing some canned goods that a local family had arranged along the railing of their porch. It all looked so strange and we weren’t sure what we wanted or even how to conduct the transaction. We found the festival site and hung around in the blazing sun while the sound crew conducted an ungodly sound check. There were scattered groups of people with dogs on the hillside and the animals were howling at the stage.
We left before the show was over because Dave Mahoney thought we had better get out before they ran out of food. On the way out we bought some mescaline from some high school friends that we ran into. Back in Rochester we went to an afternoon matinee of “2001” at the old Stutson Theater where Herrema’s is now and took the blue capsules. We were the only “adults” in the theater and we laid down on the floor in front of the screen. I have no idea what that thing was all about. I haven’t done any of that stuff since 69 but it kinda stays with you.
Richie Havens was great in the movie. Canned Heat sounded like the inventors of sludge rock. The Who tore it up but looked pretty silly. I never like the Tommy stuff. Only Queen can mix rock and opera. Ten Years After were wankers. Sha Na Na was hideous and Joe Cooker was over the top. (Is that a Beatles song.? “High with a little help from friends.”) Peggi leaned over and said, “You have to admit that was a good song from pre-bloated Crosby Stills and Nash” and I admitted it. The Jefferson Airplane tracks were goofy one. The rest must have sucked. They could be pretty rough live. I saw their Volunteers tour. I never had any of Santana records but he kicked ass. His drummer was amazing. Sly, Janis and Jimi were all great. It was pretty good show.
I took this photo over by the Public Market on Saturday. The dog is real.
It really bugs me that the Quicktime Pro “Export for Web” feature generates a movie that is not supported on the iPod Touch so I’m through with it. I put five or six movies from this blog (including my shaky Wreckless Eric / Amy Rigby video with extra footage) up on YouTube today and I switched the links. I hope I don’t effect the price of Apple stock with that. And I see the Bobby Henrie & The Goners video I put up there in my last post has a hundred views already.
Old guys are allowed to have favorite cashiers at Wegmans. I asked mine were the charcoal was and she led me down the aisle! She pointed to a big pile of Briquettes and I said, “no, regular charcoal.” She said, “What is regular charcoal?”. I saw a few bags of the old fashioned lump charcoal and I grabbed one of those and thanked her.
We woke up to a few orders for Margaret Explosion cds and they were all from Rochester. It took us a bit to realize that the sales were a result of the rebroadcast of the Margaret Explosion segment of WXXI’s “On Stage”. We were downtown out on the deck at Abilene listening to Bobby Henrie & The Goners so we missed the show. Martin Edic said it was on the tv inside the bar but we were busy watching the best band in the city. Besides, I was making a movie.
Fcuk for him on display at A. J. Wright store in Rochester, New York
I had worn a hole in the rear end of my pajamas so I stopped in A. J. Wright up in Culver Ridge Plaza. I asked the clerk where the pajamas were and she took me over to a rack of “Loungewear”, all bottoms, colorful concoctions that you sometimes see big muscular guys with mullets wearing out on the street. I guess they don’t sell pjs in sets anymore. This place is so discount they don’t have a dressing room and I couldn’t decide whether to go with Large or Medium. At 6 feet, 150, I’m half of each. I went with medium.
This “Fcuk Him” product caught my eye on the reduced table near the checkout. A kid with the “Why Can’t We All Just Get A Bong” t-shirt caught my eye at the Public Market this morning. And I was thinking of this line from Jeff Spevak’s review of the crowd at last night’s Phish concert – “a museum of non-sequiturs.” Give it up for Jeff.
Everything is in season now. We hauled four big bags home. Corn from Honeyoe Falls, peaches from Hamlin and blueberries, apricots, beets, cucumbers, peppers, pears from other local farms. I just made my first tomato and onion sandwich of the year.
Deer aren’t supposed to like Rhododendrons. That’s why ours are shaped like Palm trees. And they aren’t supposed to like Marigolds either but they got ours last night. Second time this year. The yellow would have spoiled all the green anyway.
