Posts

Posted on

Family Reporter

Mirror image on Eastman Lake in Rochester, NY
Mirror image on Eastman Lake in Rochester, NY

We took my sister out to dinner at Proietti’s in Webster last night. She has been living in Webster since our family moved out of the city in 1960 but she’s moving back to the city in November. Proietti’s has to be the best Italian restaurant in this area. I used to keep track of those things but this is one big moving target. I ordered the “all killer, no filler” Linguini Gabrielle (eggplant, hearts, portabella, tomato, vegetable broth, fresh mozzarella) and my sister had the homemade pumpkin raviolis. Every dish is distinctive so order and share. My sister keeps track of the whole family so not only did we catch up with her, we also got the lowdown on the rest. I had no idea that my other sister had broken her foot.

My father lost five years work on the family tree when his computer was stolen. Who knew that Reunion, the program that he uses, stores the database in the Applications folder? And who knew he wasn’t backing up his apps? I take full responsibility and I didn’t know. I think there was space problem when we set it up and I opted out on the App BU. We need a black sheep in this family.

1 Comment
Posted on

Finding The Phone

Peter Sherman demonstrating the "Finding the Phone" feature at the Apple Store in Rochester, NY
Peter Sherman demonstrating the “Finding the Phone” feature at the Apple Store in Rochester, NY

Find Phone is my favorite feature on our wireless landline phone. It’s such a gas to hunt for the phone while it beeps. It works every time except when I left the phone on the hood of the car and Peggi drove off with it. I helped my father replace his computer after his house was broken into and when we were at the Apple Store my father asked the clerk if there was any way to track down his old computer. Peter demonstrated how he could locate his iPhone at secure.me.com/find. Turns out it was in his pocket.

Somehow we’ve managed to wear out three different Linksis and Netgear routers over the years. We replaced them with an Apple Extreme and then added an Express to extend our coverage. I’ve been playing with Apple’s new Remote for the iTouch and iPad and I connected our stereo to the Express. I used to have an old laptop out there running iTtunes and of course I needed an external drive to hold the music library. But that was so yesterday. I retired the laptop and the drive and I stream music to the stereo from my desktop. With Remote on my iPod I can control the playlist or just let it go and even control the volume in the two rooms. Oh, and they’ve added the ability to mark your favorites when something good comes along.

Leave a comment
Posted on

Sun Zoom Spark

Light in the street pool
Light in the street pool

Electricity and water make strange bedfellows. Our neighbors were taking a midnight dip in the street pool and the underwater light went out. None of the current members remember ever having to replace it so we collectively stumbled through the whole process. There was an engineer involved so I could never catalog all of the methodical steps.

We waited til the end of the season and drained the pool enough to figure out how to get it out of its recessed home. We discovered a cord coiled up inside, long enough to permit changing the bulb while pool is full. The bulb itself is enclosed in the housing and the Pleasantville New York Pool Company that made the fixture warns you to only burn the bulb when the housing is submerged. We struggled to break the seal on the housing and almost destroyed the thing trying to get it open. Some members were already talking about getting rid of it and plugging up the recess when we managed to break it open. Peggi ordered a new bulb online and I stood on a ladder in the water and put the fixture back in its place.

1 Comment
Posted on

Off The Cuff

Spring Valley woods in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, NY
Spring Valley woods in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, NY

Margaret Explosion started back at the Little Theater Cafe last night. We’ll be there every Wednesday until the new year so you have some time to see what all the fuss is about. We had a good night and the place was packed. Those two things don’t always go together. Our best song of the evening is usually the first one when there is hardly anyone there. We had emailed people that we were playing all new material which is true but it implies that we worked on new songs when in fact we hadn’t even seen each other all summer except for the two art openings we played. A few people told us how much they liked the new stuff and one even thought we were going in an electronica direction. Jame Nichols sat in on piano in the second set. He said he would have been there earlier but he was teaching a Mexican history class at RIT.

Each night is different and we wouldn’t have it any other way. We perform songs that have not been written or predetermined. We spontaneously compose them and if we try to go back to a song, it never sounds as good as it did the first time. As Paul McCartney once said, “You can’t reheat a soufle”. We are best off going out on a limb every night and that can be intense or it can be mundane.

I’m happy that most people don’t see it for what it is because we are doing our best to make them sound like songs and not jams. As we packed up Peggi was talking to a young kid who who also played sax and an old couple came up to tell Bob and I how much they enjoyed the music. They were such a cute couple I felt like I was looking at a Grant Wood painting and I could hardly digest what they were saying. Before heading to the door the man asked, “Is your music off the cuff?” I was more than happy to fess up.

Leave a comment
Posted on

Zen & The Art Of Painting

Wetlands off Hoffman Road in Rochester, New York, September 2010
Wetlands off Hoffman Road in Rochester, New York, September 2010

I take the same photo over and over, it seems. I have to come up with creative names so I don’t overwrite older files. How many times have I photographed this marsh? I paint the same painting over and over too. I came home with a new batch of crime faces tonight, mugshots from the morning paper.

Our painting teacher came in with three quotes printed on a small pieces of paper. He gave one to each student first thing. And as much as we would like to think we are all painters, we are “students” in Fred Lipp’s presence. The first quote was from Juan Gris. “You are lost the minute you know what the result will be.” The second from Degas. “Only when he no longer knows what he is doing, does the painter do good work.” And the third one was from William Baziotes. “Each painting has its own way of evolving. . . when the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.

No wonder I have to take this class over and over.

3 Comments
Posted on

Not On YouTube

Bill and Geri type truck load
Bill and Geri type truck load

Bill and Geri bought an old-fashioned, state of the art, type-making machine along with hundreds of patterns and type faces. The original patterns can be used to carve out font families in various sizes as long as they are smaller that the pattern. You would use these fonts on a letter press. I’m thinking we should do a Margaret Explosion 45 cover with some of these.

We helped Bill and Geri unload the type making machine that is hidden behind the boxes of patterns and type in the photo above. Nine of us gathered on Sunday afternoon as Bill pulled off a marvelous, madcap, engineering performance that ensured a graceful decent for the 800 pound, steel machine.

Leave a comment
Posted on

Gallery Hop

Post It Note art in the Hungerford Building on Main Street in Rochester, New York
Post It Note art in the Hungerford Building on Main Street in Rochester, New York

The Hungerford building on East Main was happening last night. We had a hard time finding a place to park but eventually found a spot in back along the tracks. Hungerford made the syrup in A&W Root Beer before the complex of warehouse space was divided up for small businesses and squatters. The gallery on the ground floor was packed with earth conscious vendors suppling free samples of local produced food stuff. We would have hung around if the art (photos in this case) was more interesting. The 2nd floor had the coolest vide with lots of energy. I photographed the post it note piece there and the fourth floor was way sleepy. We headed over to RoCo where Andy Gilmore had some beautiful trippy geometric prints. We chatted with Joe Tunis and headed home.

Leave a comment
Posted on

I Look Like I Know You

Leonard Cohen movie still from little Theater in Rochester, NY
Leonard Cohen movie still from little Theater in Rochester, NY

We brought some Vietnamese food out to Peggi’s mom’s apartment. We call it “Chinese” and it seems to go down better with her mom but she is not eating all that much these days. I went down to get my mother-in-law’s mail and pick up a prescription that had been delivered to the front desk. I volunteered to do this since I hadn’t had any exercise all day. Plus the temperature in the apartment is in the eighties and it’s hard to think in there.

A woman with oxygen tubes in her nostrils was talking to herself at the mailbox. She looked up at me and said, “I look like I know you.'” I kind of knew what she meant and introduced myself. I said, “I’ve seen you around.”

We stopped in the Little Theater last night to see the new Leonard Cohen concert movie. I don’t know what it’s called. We were late and missed the credits. Oddly there were no credits at all at the end of the movie. People were complaining about it being too short but it felt too long to me. It seemed all the songs were in exactly the same mode.

Our friend and neighbor, Rick, does a show on WRUR from 6 til 8pm on Thursdays. He’s calling it “Gumbo Variations” and he told us he plans to play a wide variety of music. He played a Monk tune last week and apparently jazz is a little too wide. He got an email from the big cheese over there telling him the jazz tune seemed like it lasted an eternity. Speaking of music that is not jazzI love the video of Neil Young delivering the video of his new album on an iPad to the execs at YouTube. And I love the movie Rich Stim did for Angel Corpus Christi’s version of “Heaven“.

2 Comments
Posted on

Get To The Point

Paul Dodd Crime Face Watercolor from September 2010
Paul Dodd Crime Face Watercolor from September 2010

As I noted here a few days back, we really enjoyed Anne Havens artist’s talk at the MAG. The slides of her work were beautiful. The presentation itself was a work of art. I did an artist talk there a few years back and I know how much pressure there is to add something interesting to the work that was created to speak for itself. You have to go deep to top your best efforts and Anne succeeded. Had I offered her the advice my buddy, Frank Paolo, gave me she would have had a perfect game.

Frank gives seminars on effective presentation techniques. I’ve seen him in action, knocking the socks off a large corporation’s top salesmen. Frank gets top dollar for a day’s work and any company would
realize a sizable ROI. When Frank heard I was doing this talk he invited me over for a few tips and I will never forget this one. “Skip the opening thank yous.” Frank says a crowd will never be more attentive then in the opening moments so don’t bring them down with obligatory thank yous to the stiffs in the front row. Launch right into your presentation.

We had our first painting class last night. It was full and two of the lost looking, new students asked me if I was the teacher. I said no and explained that the teacher will probably be late but it will be worth it. One of the older returning painters asked if I was still doing “those guys”. I said yeah and he asked if it was getting any easier. Of course I said no.

Fred Lipp spent most of his time with the new students. He has a habit of scaring off timid students and the classroom is guaranteed to be not as crowded next week. When he got to me he was as incisive as ever. He covered up the orange shirt on the guy pictured above and showed me my painting. Of course it much more effective without the distracting shirt. The point of the painting was all in the expression. “Always get to the point,” he said. I was stunned. So obvious.

As James Brown would say, “Hit it and quit.”

Leave a comment
Posted on

Cute As A Button

Steve the mailman in his car
Steve the mailman in his car

I haven’t been out enough to grab any new photos so I reached into my vault for this one. Sort of picked it at random. Steve was our mailman for about twenty years. We used to trade music and he used our bathroom most days. And we got an earful of the new post office regulations as they rolled them out, efficiency methods that took the life out of his job. You know how you see someone out of context and it’s like wow. Peggi must have been driving when I grabbed this.

Our current mail person is a woman. Our neighbor says she’s “cute as a button”. She delivers from her truck and turns around in our driveway. It’s not the same.

Leave a comment
Posted on

Floating at the DFC

Trees out back
Trees out back

We missed all sorts of cool stuff this weekend. Nod played at a house party on Plymouth Avenue and Jim Mott had a an opening at the Oxford Gallery. We spent most of our free time restoring my dad’s brand new computer.

Peggi decided to to try one of Tom’s yoga classes at the Downtown Fitness Club. Tom used to be in her class there when Jeffery taught there. Peggi walked in a little late (runs in the family) and some familiar music was playing. Peggi said, “That’s our our music” and Tom said “What do you mean?” “That’s our band,” she said. Tom explained that his friend, Paul, made the compilation cd for him.

Here’s Margaret Explosion – Floating At The Bug Jar.

Leave a comment
Posted on

Natural Approach

Birch trees on the ground in Durand Eastman Park
Birch trees on the ground in Durand Eastman Park

We took a walk in the woods and finished up down at the pool where we celebrated the end of summer with a stimulating dip. The water was 65 degrees but it felt great.

Fair warning. You have one more day to get over to see Anne Haven’s work in the Memorial Art Gallery. She is one of six local artists featured in the 4th Rochester Biennial. Anne gave a lecture on Thursday and we were in the front row. She showed slides of her work of course and read lines from her favorite poems and let us in on her intuitive and completely natural approach to making art. She is an inspiration.

Leave a comment
Posted on

Off Premise Backup Strategies

Footprints in my parent's driveway from thief
Footprints in my parent’s driveway from thief

We don’t set the alarm and often wake up with a phone call. This morning it was my cousin’s wife calling to say she found my parent’s garage door open while she walking her dog. My parents asked us to keep an eye on their place while the were out of town and this didn’t seem right. We suggested she call 911 and we headed over there. The cops were already there by the time we got there and sure enough someone had broken in. They (one or two guys) tried the neighbor’s place first and they stepped in some fresh turned earth near their window and then they tracked these prints across my parent’s driveway.

They used a bar to bust open the back door and smashed a window to unlatch the dead bolt but we couldn’t find the glass pieces. Suction cups? Took the glass with them? And the glass that the cops did find was from a car window. They thought maybe the thief (thieves) had stolen another car to get to my parent’s house and pieces fell off their clothes. They took a couple of Cokes out of the refrigerator and left them in my father’s computer room and one of them took a big, loose shit in their toilet and he didn’t flush it. They went through every cupboard and took what they could get rid of in a hurry. So there was an empty tv stand and a pile of cords behind the desk where the computer was and to my surprise the backup drives were still there so I hope to do a full restore when my dad gets his next computer. Oh, and they put all the stuff in my parent’s car and drove off with the loot. Green Honda Accord with a peace sign on it.

2 Comments
Posted on

Pagan Rites

Chiminea fire in the back yard
Chiminea fire in the back yard

I almost forgot I had a blog. I haven’t been here in a few days. Too much work. Don’t call us. We’re too busy.

We celebrated the Autumnal Equinox in style last night. I think it was a full moon, it looked it. We fired up our Home Depot chiminea and burnt some scrap wood from the garage. It was mostly pine but there was some redwood and cedar scraps from various home improvement projects. It got too hot out there for a while. There is a whole ‘nother world in that chiminea. We were transfixed.

Leave a comment
Posted on

Wisdom vs. Intelligence

iPad Netflix Dracula
iPad Netflix Dracula

Even though Guy Davis (referenced in my last post) played mostly songs from the giants of blues catalog I found him to be more folk than blues. But what do I know? I am not a folkie. He told some great stories between songs.

I woke up thinking I was tending to the cabbage in our garden. We don’t have any cabbage. I was still thinking about the German movie we watched a few nights ago called “The White Ribbon.” It was full of “who done its” without any concrete resolution and it had us speculating all day long. Not that it even mattered, it was a way of getting back into the movie. It was beautifully shot in austere black and white and set in pre WW1 Austria and was as unsettling as “Children of the Damned.” The sub titles were small so we sat cross-legged, up close to the tv. This intensified our involvement and it took a while it shake it. May have to try that again.

Clarence, the man who built our house in the late forties, stopped by with his daughter like he does every summer. Our neighbor, Jared, who was here when Clarence lived in our house, stopped n to reconnect and he asked Clarence what he attributed his longevity too. At 98 and a half Clarence is sharp as a tack. He said something about the Lord and Jared, the lovable atheist that he is, asked, “Why does the Lord decide to let you live to a ripe old age and then take a young person down”? Clarence said he has lived long enough to gain wisdom which is better than intelligence”.

We put “The White Ribbon” in the mail and cued up the Netflix “Instant Play” version of “The Horror of Dracula” on our iPad. Jack Garner recommended it in our local paper. We propped the iPad up between a Philip Guston book and one on Mattise and ran the audio out to our stereo. The application locked up at one point and I grabbed this still.

2 Comments
Posted on

Blues Royalty

Davis at Rick and Monica's house concert in Rochester, New York
Davis at Rick and Monica’s house concert in Rochester, New York

We’re heading across the street in a few minutes to see/hear Guy Davis. He’s appearing at a house concert in our neighbor’s living room. I lent Rick a mic and some cables and I helped with the sound check and then I snapped this picture. Guy is Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis’s son and he sounds pretty bluesy. I’ve never heard any of his recordings. I’l report back.

1 Comment
Posted on

Red Sauce

I suspect Martin eats out more than he eats in but I know he is a great cook. We’ve had his homemade pizzas and olive salad and things I can’t remember right now. He emailed us that he and Boo had bought thirty pounds of tomatoes at the public market and made sauce by baking the tomatoes. We have always par-boiled the tomatoes and then simmered the sauce for most of the day so we were intrigued by the baking approach. We grow tomatoes in the gardens of the neighbors on either side of us. We don’t have enough sun on our property to grow them. In fact I only have to mow our lawn twice a year because it just doesn’t get enough light to grow.

We picked both gardens clean and split the tomatoes in half as Martin suggested. Here’s his recipe:
Cut in half and put in roasting pans with chopped onion, garlic, some with red peppers and olive oil, baked for 3 hours, pull the skins off and blend. We started at 400 for an hour then lowered to 350. They get real juicy at first then the juice starts to evaporate. When most of it is gone take them out and let them cool. We dug in and slipped the skins off before blending them and putting them in freezer bags with a funnel. We put sliced carrots in some batches- they sweeten it a bit. Don’t bother with Basil, the flavor disappears almost as soon as you put it in so it should never be added until you’re ready to eat.

I was working out in the tomatoes cooked down and the whole neighborhood smelled like an Italian restaurant. We started to pull the skins off and then bagged that idea. And we didn’t blend them either. It almost like stewed tomatoes but chunky and rich. The next night I baked a big eggplant at 400 for about an hour and then peeled and sliced it. I mixed it in with the sauce and we served it over whole wheat pasta.

5 Comments
Posted on

Point Pleasant

Path in woods that leads to our voting booth at Pt. Pleasant Fire Department
Path in woods that leads to our voting booth at Pt. Pleasant Fire Department

We look forward to voting because it is such a nice walk through the woods over to the Point Pleasant Fire Department where our polling station is. New York has new voting machines this year and they already look outdated. I miss the big old slot machine like levers. They gave us giant paper ballots and pens and asked us to “completely fill in the bubbles next to the candidate’s name”. And when we finished with that we were asked to feed it into the black machine labeled “Scanner.” It churned away, confirmed the votes and then submitted them somewhere.

We voted for Schneiderman for Attorney General. Peggi especially liked his response to the question, “What do you do for exercise?” The other candidates all went to the gym or ran but he said he “passes out leaflets at the subway stops”. Of course there were a few other like minded responses on the more substantive issues like the Islamic Community Center.

The city used to set up these grey, wooden, outhouse-like buildings at the end of our street when I was growing up and people voted in them. I remember getting inside one a few days before the voting began. My parents had us passing out flyers for John F. Kennedy that year.

Leave a comment
Posted on

Ash Can School

Trash can at the cemetery in Rochester New York
Trash can at the cemetery in Rochester New York

I was cutting through the cemetery on my bike when it dawned on me that the trash cans there are made of metal, not plastic. I was thinking how we used to call them “ash cans” when we were kids probably because that’s what our parents called them. And for good reason, they used to put their ashes in them before all the coal burning furnaces were converted to gas or oil. And we called the garbage men “the ashmen”. We used to get exited when they came down our city street. I don’t even remember garbage men after we moved to Webster. Teenagers have other stuff on their mind.

Steve Hoy and I rented a house Bloomington for $85 a month and it had a coal burning furnace. We used to shovel the ashes out and pile them up on the basement floor. One night I went down there with the lights off and the four foot pile was glowing red hot. We were too lazy (or preoccupied) to put the ashes in the damn ash can.

I was tuned in to the metal ash can because I had just finished reading another Guston book, “Telling Stories” by David Kaufmann. Guston uses the trash can lids as shields for his klansmen and Kaufmann discusses Guston’s allegories which are are now all swimming around in my head.

Leave a comment
Posted on

Punk Rock Dressing Room

Sparky in his Caddy
Sparky in his Caddy

Peggi’s mom was using her fingers to name her five aunts. She was having trouble coming up with the sixth name and said, “I’m afraid the hereafter is going to be very confusing, trying to reconnect with everybody.” Her sole known cousin had called and it was his mom’s name that we trying to think of. I was thinking how I have about fifty first cousins and I could never name them all.

Sparky stopped by to check up on us. We keep talking about doing a repeat performance of Polish sausage lunch we did a few yeas back. The woman who made these magical sausages died and Sparky hasn’t found a substitute. It gives us something to talk about, sausage and Pete. We gave him a cassette of Pete LaBonnes’s music years ago and he always asks about him.

When Jeanne Perri was in town this summer (she moved to Nashville in the music boom days) we sat around calling out our favorite Pete songs and then playing them on our laptop. One that stuck with me is “Punk Rock Dressing Room” with the refrain, “We’re living in a punk rock dressing room”. I was thinking of that song last night when we got home from Peggi’s mom’s place. There was an unlabeled cd in a white envelope taped to our door with “4 U” written on it. I popped it in to my desktop computer and 19 untitled audio tracks popped up so I gave it a spin. It was a live Ramones’ recording from San Francisco from the “Road To Ruin” tour. We saw them many times and this brought it all back. They rescued rock and roll and were true performance artists. Rick Simpson stopped by this morning and asked if we got the cd. I never would have guessed it was from him.

Our NetFlix movie selection of the night was The Runaways movie. Even the extras were good except there was only still photos of Joan Jett and no current video of her.

1 Comment