Dave Ripton and Todd Beers double self portrait from 1992
I have a lot of old paintings out in the garage and most of them are mine. Our current house has a lot less wall space than our old city house had. I’ve been organizing the garage this summer and I dusted off this painting yesterday. I bought it from Cheryl at Godiva’s when it was over on Monroe Avenue. It’s a double self portrait by Dave Ripton and Todd Beers. I played drums in the Dave’s band for a while along with Jack Schaefer and Martin Edic. We used to practice in the recording studio behind the Bug Jar. I loved Dave’s songs and I love this self portrait. He is a duel threat at least. Dave’s well meaning painting advice to me was, “I’d love to see your faces on heroin.” I think he wanted me to get real, sort of the opposite of lighten up.
Todd used to get poetry workshops at area high schools. He’d work with the kids during the day and then they’d read their work coffee house style in a dimly lit assembly space at night. He often asked Peggi and me to join them as musical accompaniment, bongos and sax. I feel very fortunate to have this painting. It used to hang over our fireplace. Someday I’ll get back on a wall.
The big pumpkin I pictured here a few days ago has officially escaped the garden. It broke off the vine under its own weight and dropped to the ground. We carried it home but don’t expect it to last until Halloween.
Brian Williams 65th birthday bash at Abilene in Rochester, New York
Geez! I remember when Brian Williams was 60 and we celebrated his birthday at the Little Theater Café while his band Lumiere played. On Labor Day afternoon Bob Henrie, his brother, his girlfriend and an assorted cast of musicians connected to the Middlesex scene performed at Abilene as we celebrated Brian’s 65th.
We asked Brian how he felt and answered “Great” with his characteristically big smile. There were a few qualifiers but I won’t get into that. Mostly, he said, music keeps you young.
Restored version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York
Don’t sell your Apple stock yet.
Our cable modem went out the other night so I rebooted it and then our Netgear router and then the old Linksys router that we use as a hub. Got everything working but the dumbest one of the bunch, the hub. So we rode our bikes over to Staples to pick up a hub or a switch and while we were there we sort of rethought our setup. A couple of our wired machines could go wireless and that would free up a couple of slots and we use our old HP Laserjet so infrequently that we figured we could share our clunky pc’s slot with it. We left without making a purchase but we did some good thinking over there. We decided to pick up an Apple Express to extend our wireless range and stream iTunes on the stereo at the other end of our house.
So we headed out to the Apple Store and got there about five o’clock on Sunday before Labor Day. The place was packed. The blue shirts had been swallowed up by the throngs. It was tough just getting at the products on the shelves and once we had our Express in hand we couldn’t find a free employee to do the transaction. I liked it better when Apple was the underdog.
The Dryden Theater at the George Eastman House screened two newly restored, early Hitchcock shorts last night. “Bon Voyage” and “Avenure Malgache” were French WW2 propaganda films made in the UK and we got very confused as which side the spys were on. The feature film, “Lifeboat”, was straight forward and built like a train with a few spectacular wrecks along the way. The guy who introduced the film said Talula Bankhaead was rumored to not have worn any underwear and we confirmed that that was the case after a big wave crashed in the boat. The lifeboat became a miniature stage for all the world’s trials and tribulations to play out on. I won’t spoil the ending.
Baby in plastic bag at Public Market in Rochester, NY
There was an article in the paper last week about the Rochester Public Market ranking as the best public market in the country and sure enough the place was packed on Saturday. We couldn’t park where we normally do. Barry Kucker was out of his world famous sandwiches. The Mexican place was packed. My parents were there. We went with Rick and Monica and all bought as much fresh produce as we could carry. Back home we combined forces for a harvest bounty feast. Monica made a delicious peach pie.
Jim Mott stopped by and dropped off the painting he did for us when he stayed here on his local Itinerant Artist tour. He did five or six and we picked this one. We played some horseshoes before he left and Jim tried throwing with his left and right hands because he is somewhat ambidextrous. He paints left handed but his right hand threw better.
A. Botts art at the Record Archive in Rochester, New York
First Friday comes around pretty fast these days. We started at the Bop Shop Atrium and heard a few songs by John and Mary. This was the last of a series called “Fourteen Fridays” there. Peggi and I played quite a few gigs with John back when he was in 10,000 Maniacs and we reconnected after their set. We walked across the street to the Print Club’s show at Rochester Arts & Cultural Council. The definition of a print is pretty wide open these days and it gets a little tedious trying to figure out how the images were made so I skip that part and just take in the imagery. There were some especially nice prints there. My father and I used to be members of that organization.
A. Botts art at the Record Archive in Rochester, New York
We headed over to the Record Archive next where a band had just finished. One of the band members, who goes by the name of A. Boggs, was showing his drawings and collages there as well. A. is influenced by Philip Guston and even used a photocopy of a pile of Guston’s feet in a few of his Dylan collages. The detail above is from a piece called “Two Heads Emerging.” A. Boggs work was priced at around $25 each. Since I am obsessed with Guston I got pretty excited at the show.
We started some seeds from scratch this year, lettuce, peppers and basil, and they did well. We bought our plants, tomatoes and more jalepeños, at Case’s on Norton just like other years. But we picked up some zucchini plants at Aman’s on East Ridge Road. The plants were labeled “zucchini ” but they got huge in a hurry and ran all over the garden. I pulled a twenty foot section out of our tomatoes and threw it back where it started. The leaves are as big as elephant ears and the vegetable that emerged from the blossoms looked a lot like pumpkins now. Some are already orange. We will probably have enough for the whole street. The one see above escaped the garden and is now hanging off the fence that is supposed to keep the deer out. Do deer like pumpkin? We will find out.
I have more recordings (cds, mp3s, vinyl and even an 8-track) by Sun Ra than any other artist. I go through long periods with nothing else but Sun Ra on my iPod. His music is melodic and rhythmic in equal measures and then abstract as hell but it is joyous above all else. I saw him five times before he died and every time I thought this is the best music I have ever heard/seen in my life. His songs with vocals would be top of the pops in a perfect world.
Many years ago I started building a database of of my my meager Sun Ra collection. Sun Ra has over a hundred releases and re-releases on almost as many labels. He pressed his own records in the band’s rehearsal space and issued them on his own Saturn label. I bought a few of them after the band’s performance at Red Creek in the seventies and had Sun Ra sign them. Impulse issued a few records and then passed on a host of others that are rumored to be locked in a vault. A&M signed him in the eighties and tried to clean up his sound. Other labels just put out whatever they can get their hands on. Live shows make phenomenal Sun Ra albums. One of my favorites, “Music From Tomorrow’s World”, was recorded in a tiny bar in Chicago in the late fifties. A drunken women continually eggs Sun Ra on by hollering, “Play it Sun Ray”.
I ripped my Sun Ra cds and converted the vinyl to mp3s so my collection is all in iTunes now and it occurred to me that that iTunes is as good a database as any. I spent a few days of spare time tracking down covers to the really obscure ones and now I sit back and marvel at them in cover flow view.
I’ve will soon be able to cross one of the items on our summer to do list off. Our garage is almost organized. It had become a dumping ground since we moved in. People keep asking us if we’ve seen the Hoarders show. We don’t get cable so we haven’t but I can imagine. I’ve been pushing the limits of our Waste Management pick-up service each week for the last month. I have a pile of old paintings out there including the one above. I’m stripping the old canvases and saving the stretchers.
I’ve been a fan of Peggy Lee since “Lady and the Tramp“. Now that we digitized our music library iTunes calculates it will take months to hear it all but we can’t go an hour in shuffle mode without hearing a Peggy tune. As it should be. So I was ecstatic to see Kevin’s post this morning. We played it three times in a row. Stunning arrangement. Minimal for maximum impact. Please stop reading this and visit “So Many Records” now.
Our old band, Personal Effects, covered “Is That All There Is?” and our new band, Margaret Explosion, covers “Fever” and we don’t do very many covers. Duke Ellington called her “The Queen”.
Peggi and I were watching tv at her parents house in the mid eighties and a Peggy Lee tv special came on. We flipped out and scrambled to get a VHS cassette in the machine. Peggi’s dad said, “Not that old broad?”. Peggy (with a “y”) had already had a stroke and she was having trouble with one side of face but she was god like.
Soon after we visited Peggi’s (with an “i”) sister in LA and asked if she knew where Peggy Lee lived. She had a hunch so we headed up in the Hollywood Hills. We bought a star map and Peggy Lee was not on it. We asked around and had it narrowed down to a particular street in Bel Air. We walked the whole street and looked at every house so I’m sure we saw it.
There are so many August birthdays in our family that we celebrate them all at once at my brother Tim’s place. It was his birthday in fact. My mom was born in August too but we already celebrated her birthday. My brother, Fran, who celebrated his birthday a few days ago, brought the corn. He soaked it in the husks for ten minutes or so and then threw it on the grill the way guys do. It was fantastic.
Another brother, John, also born in August, brought this old picture of our great grandfather to give to our dad. My dad, the family historian, said his grandfather was born in Ireland and worked in the shoe factories of Manchester, England before moving to Rochester. He guessed this photo was taken in front of his Hayward Avenue home.
The newest member of the the August club, our niece’s daughter, Lennon, made her first appearance at one week of age. Named after John, she would have been named Jagger (but not after Mick) if she was a boy. She wasn’t even big enough to make a racket when she cried.
We had to weigh our tomatoes to gauge the proportions in the sauce recipe we follow. Twenty one pounds of tomatoes had us multiplying each of the other ingredients by seven. It took us us two hours to chop the basil, onions, peppers, carrots, oregano and parsley and another hour to clean up. We had to borrow Rick and Monica’s restaurant style sauce pan (more like a bucket). It simmered all day and we froze about twelve big containers of sauce.
We had the blight in one of gardens but the other has gone to town. Six plants have produced over a hundred tomatoes. We have very few sunny spots on our property so we have set up shop in our neighbors back yards. They genuinely enjoy the company so it’s a fair shake.
Kevin Patrick stopped by last night with with a dj from a local station called “The Zone”. Can’t say that I have ever heard the station. I can only imagine what kind of stuff they program. We sat around the table drinking Guinness and talking about music. I was remembering flipping from WBBF to WSAY to WKBW (from Buffalo) in the mid sixties. The radio was some sort of lifeline back then. Now, I mostly listen to PBS which coincidentally happens to be at 1370 AM, the former home of WSAY. Kevin said his most recent post was for us because we liked “jazz”.
I’m totally sold on the idea of jazz forty-fives but I didn’t have the heart to tell him I can’t stand jazz guitar. Guitar should stay out of the way of jazz and I could almost say rock would be better off without it. I love rhythm guitar but piano and the organ covered that ground pretty well. Sax is a much better instrument for solos.
Rick Simpson and his partner, Jeff, from “Just Foolin’ Around” with violin player behind the scrim
Tom Kohn wasn’t even there last night to see how the performers he booked for the “Fourteen Fridays” at the Village Gate went over. They packed the courtyard, drew more than any of the bands. It got me thinking about how bands are overrated. What people really want is entertainment.
Rick Simpson from “Just Foolin’ Around” had performed between Margaret Explosion sets the last two years and this year Tom gave them their own night. Rick lined up a vaudeville show with jugglers, hula hoop dancers, a saw player, an accordion/percussion player, a string duo performing Neil Young songs, a story teller/sound effects dude that reminded us of Tall Tales Audio and best of all a batch of corny jokes that Rick delivered as he he introduced each performer. We watched a guy juggle five volleyballs. Bob Mahoney was pulled from the audience to assist in an Houdini style escape gag. Two hours flew by before the fire juggling finale.
Peggi and I had seen a show like this in Europe, a traveling mini circus with a handful of performers wearing many hats and this show was every bit as good. It is possible to appeal to all ages without the dumb down, smarmy antics of, you know, the stuff that makes you want to be anti family. Rick, like Pee Wee Herman, rocked the open air, all ages house last last night.
Big boat heading on Lake Ontario in Sea Breeze, NY
We rode our bikes down to Sea Breeze. I say “down” even though it is due north because it is all downhill, otherwise we’d be underwater. We walked out on the Army Corps’ pier saying hi to the fishermen while we watched the parade of boats coming and going in the channel, more fishermen, beer drinkers, jet skis, a few sail boats and this wanker.
We studied the historical placard detailing the British Army Encampment that set up shop here in 1759 on their way to the Fort Niagara siege. It’s a beautiful spot except for the people who feed cheap white bread by the loaf to the invasive species of geese. Speaking of invasive species, we did our best to resist the grilled food odors from Vic & Irv’s and even rode by Cheri’s Thai place on our way back.
We watched the Rhinos beat Miami 3-2 and take first place in the USSF Division 2 but Miami looked like the better team. They passed like pros and hustled like high school kids. The Rhinos, who all seemed about foot taller than the Miami players, held their positions like American footballers and continually poked the long ball through and crossed their fingers. Miami couldn’t manage to get through the Rhinos muscular defense for the goal but they played a much prettier game. And that’s all that counts in my book.
I drove over to Home Depot this morning to pick up some white paint for the walls inside our garage. Bob Smith was interviewing U of R religion professor Emil Homerin and Judaic Studies professor Nora Rubel about the (what else?) lower Manhattan Islamic center. Bob mentioned the “Know Nothing” party and I was trying to imagine whether the people in that party refereed to themselves that way or was it a taunt by the opposition. A guy called in and took offense at the panel implying that Republicans were racist just because they opposed the “mosque”. Bob then mentioned some prominent Democrats running for reelection who also opposed the construction. The “Know-Nothing” movement originated in New York in 1843 as the “American Republican Party” and feared that the country was being overwhelmed by Catholic immigrants. Maybe Bob was talking about the current day, “No Nothing” party.
I went through the self check out at Home Depot. I opted to do my transaction in English, scanned the paint can and then I got hung up trying to pry one of the plastic bags open. I had bags all over the place I was about to put the free wooded paint stir stick into one of the bags when the automated voice said, “Unexpected item in the bagging area. Remove this item before continuing.” I removed the stir stick and the recording continued. I flagged down an orange suited employee and she magically fixed the situation.
On our way back from Pike we stopped along a dirt road near this batch of windmills. We have seen before, mostly in Spain, but we had never gotten so close to one. They’re sort loud but beautiful. I say, “Not in my backyard but my maybe in my neighbors”.
Mannequin modeling at the Wyoming County Fair in Pike New York
For the third year in a row we visited Pike, New York for the Wyoming County Fair. It’s a mini vacation for us, a real getaway. Jeff Munson does the driving and Peggi and I sit in the back seat and gaze out the window as the small towns, funky homes and big farms whiz by. If you follow the Genesee River upstream Wyoming County is about half way to the Pennsylvania border. Jeff likes to take the back roads and every so often Mary Kaye turns to him and asks “Do you know where you are?”
The county is aptly named, a bit like the state that shares its name, a mixture of cowboy hats and Slayer t-shirts. We skip the midway for the most part and spend most of our time in the barns looking at the animals and watching the farm families wash and primp their blue ribbon specimens. We became completely absorbed with a pig walking ritual where the owners walk their pigs in circles with the aid of a stick. We hung around long enough to watch a woman scratch her 250 pound pig’s belly in way that caused the pig to roll over on its back.
We laughed as a rooster worked on his “Cock-a-Doodle-Do”, continually stumbling over the last note and we sat down in the 4-H barn to watch the Mannequin Modeling. We ran into Gary Miexner from the Wilderness Family. His son was playing guitar with a band in the evening’s Talent Show. When we got back home I checked the stats on the video I put up from last year’s fair. “I Got It” has 178 hits!
Matt Whitmeyer self portrait at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York
Most portraits are really self portraits or at least the goods ones are. And collectively the outdoor show of local self portraits, submitted as jpegs to the D&C and printed on durable plastic and tie-wrapped to the fence surrounding the Memorial Art Gallery’s grounds, work as a portrait of the city. I generally lean toward the most expressive painting in a show like this but my favorite was Matt Whitmeyer‘s photographic self portrait. I love the dead pan generic quality, the grey environment and minimal color. I love the calm but deliberate delivery, the cool but intense stare. He appears to be looking right at you but when I looked back at him I found he he wasn’t really looking at anything and then after five minutes or so our eyes connected and I moved on. I looked down at the ground and found this bag of stones, a construction worker’s self portrait.
I heard quite a bit of music over the weekend, most of it on my iPod while I was cleaning out the garage but we did go out on Friday to hear Ed Downey and his son at the Village Gate. They were kinda Dylan-like. You knew the words were probably great but you couldn’t understand them in the live setting. Ed told Peggi he was playing in another band, an avant jazz band, later that night in a parking lot across the street from the Cinema so we headed over there. We found a young, old fashioned prog rock band there so we kept moving. John Gilmore was driving and Peggi was sitting in the front seat when she spotted Joe Tunis hanging outside a bar near Monroe and Goodman. We pulled in the parking lot and watched a band with twins on guitar and violin set up for their performance. Nuuj was sitting behind his homemade analog synth playing booms and chiks with random sweeps.
Rob Nuuja’s homemade analog synth
We visited Peggi’s mom on Saturday and I ducked out to check up on our nephew who works at a nearby at pizzeria. I was happy to find he still had his job. I swung by Ken Frank’s place and interrupted his lawn mowing. He gave me an advance copy of a nasty sounding SLT record. “All killer, no filler” as Duane would say. I was listening to a German opera, probably something from Wagner. I know how much my mother-in-law likes opera so I tuned it in back at her place but first I had to turn the sound down on the tv. We watched “Animal Planet” with the opera as a soundtrack for about twenty minutes, a surreal experience, and Peggi’s mom said, “This is the weirdest music for this show”. Peggi suggested that we pop the André Rieu dvd in instead and we hit the road. About an hour later Peggi’s mom called and asked if we could come pick her up and give her a ride home from the concert. She was home, of course, bit it was nice to know she escaped for a bit.
Leo, our next door neighbor stopped by to see if we knew where his big magnet was. He had lost his hearing aid and thought he might be able to find it with the magnet. Peggi helped him locate that and we took a long walk in the neighbor next to ours stopping frequently to look at the silly things people do with their lots. The mini installations are every bit as interesting as the art you see in Chelsea.
Monica’s brother rode in on his Harley, the first one to show up for our neighbor’s house concert on Saturday. This one featured San Francisco via Buffalo singer songwriter Peter Case. We got in free for supplying the mic, cords and stand. Between songs Peter read the second chapter of his book, skipping the first one that concentrated on psychedelics. That was our favorite part and Peggi bought a copy. Monica’s brother and a couple from Cleveland stayed over and Monica came by on Sunday to borrow all our eggs so she could make breakfast for them all. I went back out to the garage and listened to some Sun Ra.
We tossed the toxic hard plastic bottles that WXXI gave us for joining and we bought these stainless steel Bios water bottles. It was hot in the woods today and we both finished our bottles. On our return we walked right by our house, grabbed our mail and our next door neighbor’s mail and headed straight for the pool where we plopped these things on the table.
Peggi had picked up the two autumn colored leaves in the lower right corner and I found the apple in the road. I found four golf balls when we crossed the course. I always like finding Nikes especially the Number ones although I learned they are no better than the other numbers. And I found a Callaway which I’ll give to my brother. That’s all he uses and the last time I saw him he was wearing a Callaway hat.
That’s our mail on the top with the two cds I ordered. Here I am trying to get rid of those things and buying more at the same time. One is the Chico Hamilton soundtrack to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and the other is a recent Sun Ra re-release of two of his old self pressed Saturn lps. I bought two of those Saturn lps from the band when they were at Red Creek in early eighties. They were supposed to be ten bucks but the two I got had no sleeves so they were five each and one had a pure white label so I asked Sun Ra to sign it.
And that’s Peggi’s hand in the upper left hand corner.
I liked what I saw of the show at RoCo and I will go back. Opening night was too distracting to take it in. Amy Casey’s painstakingly executed drawings are a delight to look at. I couldn’t quite figure out Trevor Flynn’s messy community drawings but it was fun to see people drawing on the walls. Spectres of Liberty from Troy have an interesting video in the little circular room. I was wondering if they were the same people that put up the inflated art installation at the Eastman House during Montage 93. Overall though, I couldn’t help but long for a real look at the state of Rochester, instead of the generic “city”. I am amazed at the state it is in and I’m sure I’m not alone. I think it would make a terrific show.
