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Friday Fish Fry

Fish Fry sign on East Ridge Road in Rochester NY
Fish Fry sign on East Ridge Road in Rochester NY

I stopped in Wegmans this morning to pick up the Friday New York Times. I like their “Fine Arts Section” even though it’s getting combined with other weekend nonsense as they shrink the content and jack up the cost to stay afloat. My cashier’s name was “Heaven”. I told her I liked her name. I spotted this sign near Culver and Ridge for a place called Ricky’s diner. Never been inside but I plan to put their sign in the Funky Signs section as soon as I get around to updating it.

Are Friday fish fries more common in Rochester than other parts of the country? I looked up “origin of the fish fry” in Google for the low down. When I looked up something for someone we do work for she started complaining that the way history is being written today we won’t have anything to trust down the road. Unless I was reading her wrong she was insinuating that people are free to put whatever they like online. I didn’t want to push her because I’m liable to say something boneheaded and she pays the bills so I’m only guessing here. But she wrapped that subject up by saying, “An entire generation will be lost.”

When I was growing up Catholics weren’t allowed to eat meat on Fridays. They rewrote the rules in 1966 so that now the Friday meat abstinence only applies during Lent. We had some fish but I remember toasted cheese sandwiches and fried egg sandwiches that my father called “Mickey Mouse Sandwiches”. It seems every place around here has one on Fridays. Shamrock Jack’s has one of the best but they are too busy during the summer. When we lived in the city the bar at the corner didn’t serve food at all during the week but they had a big crowd for their Friday Fish Fry.

Sure enough Wikipedia’s entry on the “Friday Fish Fry” says “the fish fry is one of the trademarks of Upstate New York cuisine, especially Buffalo, as well as Rochester and Syracuse, New York. But can we trust this entry?

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Bar Band In Heaven

Captain Beefheart drawing at Red Creek in Rochester, New York in 1977
Captain Beefheart drawing at Red Creek in Rochester, New York in 1977. Photo by Greg Prevost.

I digitized some vinyl the other day. I go tape out of our stereo amp into Quicktime on our laptop and then edit it in Audacity. One of the things I digitized was an old Personal Effects 45. Peggi’s voice and sax sounded too high. Peggi got her sax out to play along and we confirmed that our turntable runs fast. We changed the pitch by -110 cents and it came out fine.

Brad Fox sent me a 33 1/3 book on “Trout Mask Replica” and I’ve been reading that and thinking about the cassette recording I made of Captain Beefheart at the Red Creek in Rochester in 1977. I remembered Beefheart saying something nasty about Drumbo (aka John French) between songs. And of course there are a lot of quotes from Drumbo in the book, some of them lambasting Beefheart. So I got an old cassette deck out of the basement and put the tape in but the deck wouldn’t go into play. It was just sort of froze in the eighties. Luckily we had another old deck down there and I transferred the tape. I posted one of the songs below with the quote from The Captain. You can hear Brad Fox scream as the band begins this song.

I remember there was some dreadful magic act (someone saw Magic Band and thought why not?) that went on first and there were two shows. We went to the second. I still have the ticket. When we got there Greg Prevost (Chesterfield Kings) and Carl Mack’s (Zenith Effluveum get compared to MX-80 in this review) were interviewing The Captain in the parking lot. I think Kevin Patrick’s wife, Corrine, took this photo of him and gave me a print. The stage was still in the front of the room there. The Captain mentioned the the chocolate pie that owner, Jeff Springut, gave him before the show. The band was amazing and included Jeff Moris Tepper, Eric Drew Feldman, Denny Walley and Robert Williams. They faithfully recreated the older material and went on to record “Doc at the Radar Station”.

When David Greenberger was here he was telling us that he was in a Boston band in the eighties called Men & Volts and they did Beefheart covers and Beefheart-like material. I told him about seeing the Trout Mask Replica tour in Columbus at Ludlow’s Garage with Hampton’s Grease Band and the Screaming Gypsy Bandits opening. And he said he was talking to the Bandit’s Mark Bingham in New Orleans about doing a project. And then along comes this little book from Brad.

Captain Beefheart Band at Red Creek in Rochester, NY
Captain Beefheart performing at Red Creek in Rochester, New York in 1977. Photo by Greg Prevost.

Bruce Fowler was also on the Bat Chain Puller lp and by another coincidence we just saw him playing in the band that appeared throughout Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts”. We’ve been watching the entire Altman catalog in order but have been breaking it up with other stuff. It took us three nights to watch that one because I kept falling asleep. So each time we came back to it we re-watched large portions. There is such a large cast in this one and all these interweaving stories that it worked well in small doses. Tom Waits’ character hangs out in this bar where Annie Ross from Lambert, Hendricks and Ross sings with Terry Adams from NRBQ on piano and Bobby Previte on drums and Bruce Fowler on trombone.

Here is my recording of Captain Beefheart Live at Red Creek in Rochester, NY

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Garbage Trucks In Reverse

View from Pier 45 restaurant on mouth of Genesee River overlooking Lake Ontario in Rochester, New York
View from Pier 45 restaurant on mouth of Genesee River overlooking Lake Ontario in Rochester, New York

It’s hard to believe that City has such a nice restaurant on its hands. Granted they had to build a giant terminal for the so called fast ferry to depart from and a suite of offices for the International Border Patrol to hang out in and then they had to buy the failing ship itself. The staff works for the Convention Bureau and they run this place as a not-for-profit. Somebody has to be making a profit because this place was packed on a slow night. They have a great location on the mouth of the Genesee overlooking the two long piers, Rochester Yacht Club, the Coast Guard station and O’loughlins. “Pier 45” is described as “fine dining in a casual atmosphere” and that pretty much nails it. Our server, Bart, was as nice as can be even though we took forever to decide what we wanted to eat.

We were called on to edit a ppt presentation for a talk on the inventor of the submarine that a client of ours is giving in Vermont. This sounded like a fun project but it was filled with technical challenges. The client is planning to travel with her IBM Thinkpad and plugging it into a projector for the talk. We purchased sound files from the iTunes Store and downloaded all sorts of crazy free sounds to punctuate the talk and constructed the show on our machines but when we slid it on to the Thinkpad the sound files got all jumbled up and some even started over when we advanced the slides. Some didn’t even work. The PowerPoint app that machine is quite old so we had to keep the laptop overnight, convert all the mp3s to wav files and embed them in the ppt file. The Thinkpad’s alert sounds sounded like garbage trucks when they put it in reverse. The original submarine was only a vehicle to deliver a bomb, actually attach a bomb, to the bottom of a British battle ship in midst of the Revolutionairy War. This never worked but the guy wound up with some pretty cool credentials.

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Not In New York

Toy alligator on the road near Spring Valley
Toy alligator on the road near Spring Valley

I think we might have been set up by some kid for this one. We were headed over to Spring Valley to to forge our way though the overgrown woods when we came across thing. Peggi and I both thought it was real for a few seconds and then we quickly realized we were in New York.

Peggi had an assignment tonight to video Annie Wells with Phil Marshall and her NYC drummer so we raced over to the Little Cafe and plugged in. Mick Sarubbi was there with his recording rig and he slipped me a copy of Jenna & The Horse Lovers’ set from last weekend. (I gotta get the story on that name. I get the Jenna part.)

What a pleasant assignment. Annie sounded great. She did a Laura Nyro song for Peggi and a beautiful version of Dave Ripton’s “Heroin & People”. Jack Schaefer was there with his son and we smiled at each other when the song started. Jack and I both played that song with the Ripton band many years ago. Annie’s song to Edith Piaf, “Little Sparrow”, sounded great even without Ed Maris’s accordion. Peggi complained that my tripod was acting sticky when she panned. We’ll probably post one one the videos to Annie’s site.

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Dancing With Joey Ramone

We were thrilled to hear Amy Rigby and Wreckless Eric were coming back to Rochester so soon after their last performance here. You’d think it was boring in France where they currently live. They got off to a slow but steady start. I say “slow” only because the highlights for me are the bantering between songs. They intensify the music. Like when Eric’s guitar fell over and he went off on a beautiful tirade about creeps who work in music stores and try to sell you all this junk, with their Fender t-shirts and know-it-all attitudes. “They start talking about a movie and they tell you the whole fucking story”.

Amy Rigby who seemed overwhelmed by Eric’s antics last time they were here really held her own this time and contributed equally to the banter. She said she was all dressed in black until the Gay Pride parade went by on Goodman and went back to their rental car to slip into this dress. We watched part of the parade and saw Mayor Duffy again as he strutted by to a round of cheers. I took a shaky movie of Amy’s tribute to Joey Ramone.

We got there just as Jenna and The Horselovers were finishing their set. They sounded fuller than ever with the addition Jack Schaefer on lead guitar. Jenna looked great in her pink dress. We love her voice and are big fans.

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Made With Pure Hemlock Lake Water

Tanks at the Genesee Brewery

Margaret Explosion kicked off the”UpLift” party at the Genesee Center for the Arts on Friday night and we never even took a ride in their new elevator. We hung around for a while afterward eating flour-less peanut butter cookies that Geri McCormick made and looking at old Genesee beer ads that the people in the Book Arts room had recently printed on their vintage equipment. One of the ads boasted that Genesee Beer was “Made With Pure Hemlock Lake Water”.

Genesee Beer Sign lit up over the Genesee River
Genesee Beer Sign lit up over the Genesee River

It was only natural that the conversation turned to the re-lighting of the old Genesee Beer at 9:30 so we followed Maureen Outlaw over to the river. We parked in the women employees parking lot. This neighborhood is kind of rough so the brewery provides more security for the women’s segregated lot. We could hear the symphony of bottles rattling as they moved down the assembly line. There was a pretty big party out in the middle of the pedestrian bridge that straddles the river and provides the best view of the sign. We spotted the mayor in the crowd and looked up just in time to see the sign emerge out of the darkness.

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España

Hill in the country south of Rochester, NY
Hill in the country south of Rochester, NY

I would take a ride in the country any day over slugging it out with html, php and css. Although I did enjoy getting thoroughly obsessed with making this page work in the PC version of Explorer. I must have worked on it until one in the morning. I didn’t really intend to get into this whole project of redesigning our web site. You know how it is with a plumber getting around to fixing his own leaky faucet. But we ran out of business cards a few months ago, printed some online, passed a few out and then realized the site should sort of look like the card. So we did a simple rework with most of the old content. The whole site is now only five or so pages because we put all of the content in iFrames so you can scroll through it. I did the Web Design page and the Logos page with an iFrame and everything was cool. When I got the Print page I wanted to pop the small graphics up to show enlargements and I managed to find a version of the Lightbox script that would pop photos up out of the iframe and into the parent but when I tested it in IE8 on the PC the photos tried to open inside the iframe. Grrrr.

So I called Bill Jones and he talked me through setting up a scrollable div that served the same purpose and took on the extra challenge of doing the the page without tables. It was fun but not as nice as hopping in the car driving down to my brother‘s place in South Bristol. We did that the other day and came across this hillside that reminded us of Spain. Now, that would really be fun.

Margaret Explosion plays tonight at an opening at Genesee Center for the Arts. I’m thinking of just bringing my djembe instead of the whole kit.

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Follow That Car

Saturn Sky on Culver Road in Rochester, New York
Saturn Sky on Culver Road in Rochester, New York

We just so happened to be following this car on a perfect summer evening when MX-80‘s song came on the radio. Or maybe it wasn’t on the radio but we were singing it.

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Mother Nature Is Boss

Ducks on pond in Durand Eastman Park in Rochester, NY
Ducks on pond in Durand Eastman Park in Rochester, NY

A local farmer was pictured on the front page of the paper this morning expressing his frustration at the amount of rain that we’ve had. He did recognize that “Mother Nature is the boss” even as he speculated that he would lose more than a $1000,000 this year.

I did a little gardening today while Peggi was cranking out a rush ad. I dug into mother nature with bare hands to separate daffodil bulbs that were growing in clusters on the hillside. I transplanted them along the ridge in the back of our house. I did the same thing last year and I was so surprised to see them come up in the Spring. You are supposed to do it when the green from this year’s plants dies. I almost waited too long. The old plants were all dried up and I only found pay-dirt about half of the time.

Mother Nature is taking a toll on the ninety year olds in our lives. Our next door neighbor had a same day procedure to remove a tumor on his bladder. We stopped over to see him when he got back. I asked if the incision was painful and he said, “There was no incision. They went right up my pencil.” I winced but Peggi delights in repeating that line. Peggi’s mom is finding it hard to swallow liquids and this week she has forgotten how to move her legs a couple of times. We plan to celebrate her 92nd birthday this weekend.

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Going Green

Green pond in Durand Eastman Park
Green pond in Durand Eastman Park

We have had so much rain around here this summer that people are comparing our weather to Oregon or Washington State. The ponds in Durand look like pea soup and we keep spotting green on the walls of the street pool even though the chlorine level reads right. I’m not complaining. I could care less about the weather. Our tomatoes are doing great.

I looked at the pictures in “Wolf Kahn’s America” for about four weeks and then continued reading the book. He is as fluid and colorful a writer as he is a painter. In fact John Updike wrote the Introduction and I kept stumbling over that. This quote struck me. “A subject is worth painting only when it transcends the everyday and gets to represent an over-arching insight. This insight only reveals itself in the course of work.” I kept wrestling with it because I am so drawn to the everyday.

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Doin’ What They Shouldn’t Be Doin’

Brian Williams, John Mooney and Joe Beard performing live in a backyard in Brighton
Brian Williams, John Mooney and Joe Beard performing live in a backyard in Brighton

John Mooney (center, above) used to be pretty big around here. He left home at 15 and began playing with Joe Beard (right, above). Joe introduced John to Son House, who lived in Rochester for many years, and John still shows that influence. He moved to New Orleans in 1976 and played regularly with Earl King, The Meters and Professor Longhair.

The John Mooney Trio from the Rochester days reunited over the weekend for a City gig and a warmup backyard barbecue gig at a home in Brighton. Brian Williams (on the left, above) played bass in that trio along with Bob Cooper on keyboards. Peggi bought her red Farfisa organ from Bob Cooper back in the late seventies. Brian invited us to the party. The Blues book was written a long time ago but it always sounds great when in good hands.

We took a walk up to the lake today and watched the sail surfers darting back and forth. We cut back through the park and visually eavesdropped on the various subcultures of picnickers. We watched a City cop tell an ice cream vendor he couldn’t sell in the park. We came across a park patrol woman and told her we had seen a guy on one of the trails digging up plants and putting them in a five gallon bucket. She told us, “There’s a lot of people doin’ what they shouldn’t be doin’ today”.

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We’re Goin’ To The Liquor Store

Chinchillas performing at Abilene in Rochester, NY last night
Chinchillas performing at Abilene in Rochester, NY last night

We played two sets at RoCo last night and spent most of the first set trying figure out what worked best in that lively gallery space. I Sparse worked best and provided at least some definition so we went with that. Director, Bleu Cease, invited us back to play the Members Show Opening so we must have found the sweet spot.

We packed the equipment and headed over to Abilene to catch the last of The Chinchillas set. They sounded great and the place was packed. Club owner, Danny, told us Toots from the Maytals was in there playing pool a few nights ago. The Chinchillas gig was a cd release party but they ran out of cds. You can see the empty plastic bag at their feet in the blowup of this photo. You’ll also notice the lighting rig in the foreground that gave the band that special glow. One of the two outdoor spots was working. Pete, on the left, churns out some great songs and they make this whole thing look effortless. They played some songs from the early eighties (some of these guys were in the Presstones) and finished with a song I’m still singing. “We’re Goin’ To The Liquor Store”.

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Law Of Large Numbers

MArgaret Explosion Skyhigh playing on Bill and Geri’s patio

Margaret Explosion plays at seven tonight for the Rochester Contemporary closing party of the 6×6 Show. I put some of my Local Crime Faces (from the Crimestopper page) in there and last I checked only one of them had a red dot next to it. Just why would anyone want a crime face on their walls anyway?

We met with our financial guy yesterday and he had some new software that allowed us to put numbers for what age we would like to retire and how much we would need to live on. After a little crunching the results indicated that we would have to work a little longer that we had hoped. So we started looking looking for variables that we could fudge. The life expectancy figures show Peggi would live to 93 and I would live to 92. This sounded ridiculous. I told him I did not want to see ninety so he moved my number down. Pegii said, “Yeah, at ninety I could live like a bag lady and not even know the difference.”

Our financial guru laughed and told us about his brother’s plan. “Put on a nice suit. Go to church. Stop at the doughnut shop on the way home. Have some Irish coffee. Pull in the garage, shut the door and leave the engine running.”

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Box Of Sighs

Trout for the grill at Anne Haven's house
Trout for the grill at Anne Haven’s house

Anne Havens is one of our favorite artists. We recently helped her with a few computer issues so she invited us over for dinner last night. She said we would know which apartment was hers by just by looking and we did. Everywhere you look you are surrounded by art and most of it is Anne’s.

We sat out on their deck while Stuart cooked trout on the grill. Peggi and I marveled at his nonchalant barbecue style and we knew the trout would be done to perfection. Anne made a real Ceasar’s Salad and roasted potatoes. We listened to Ornette Coleman and Duke Ellington and had a marvelous time. Anne proposed a toast to Ornette, our cat, and we got to talk about how special he was. The Ornette synchronicity has been non-stop around here. When David Greenbergger was here he had a Wire Magazine with Ornette on the cover and this morning Marc Weinstein emailed us a link to an Ornette Coleman clip from 1974 with James Ulmer Blood on guitar.

We offered to help Anne with an audio file that she plans to put in her concrete box sculpture, “Box of Sighs” which will be featured in the upcoming Rochester Finger Lakes show. Anne’s studio mate commented on how Anne sighs while she works so Anne recorded her sighs and put them in this box. She showed the piece at Studio 354 in 2008 but she wasn’t happy with the sound quality so we rerecorded the track today in our bathroom. The sighs were barely audible behind the closed doors and were so quiet that I had to really boost the input levels. As a result we wound up with a hum on the track. We traced that to the refrigerator on the other side of the bathroom wall so we unplugged it and got a perfect track. Anne was really in the zone. We were telling her that what we needed was a “whisper room” like they have out at Sutro Sound in San Francisco and she liked the sound of that.

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Visionary Politition

Peggi riding bike in steam after the the rain
Peggi riding bike in steam after the the rain

Back when we were moving out this way we stopped in Vic & Irv’s for dinner and ran into the then town supervisor, David Schantz. Not that we would have recognized him or anything. He just came up to us, introduced himself and started talking like a politician. He looked out over Irondequoit Bay and described his dream of turning this funky little area called Point Pleasant or Sea Breeze into Niagara on the Lake complete with hotels and a boardwalk. It sounded like a nightmare to us.

Well, a small part of that plan is taking shape this summer as construction crews are turning the 590 North expressway (that used to dead end at Marge’s) into a one lane in each direction street with bike/walking paths and wooden fences lining both sides. To slow the traffic down they are putting four traffic circles in between Titus and the lake. And when the road gets near the lake it will go straight right through the old drive-in on the west side of Bill Greys. When they fill in the old road there will be a small park overlooking the bay right where David Schantz was looking.

We decided to ride our bike over there yesterday to get a closer look. We were cutting through the park when it started raining so we ducked into the woods and waited it out. When we came out the sun was shining and the park road was steaming.

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Blowing Up The Lakes

Fireworks on the shore of Lake Ontario
Fireworks ready to go along Lake Ontario

We haven’t quite figured out this holiday. We worked Friday but the library and the stock market were closed. Lowel gave Duane Sherwood both Friday and Monday off. We worked Saturday too but that was mostly rewiring our house to get our new two line phone working. We never did find our cordless phone. Best guess is that we put it on the car while we were working in the yard and then Peggi drove out to her mom’s apartment with the phone on the hood of the car. This new one has an answering machine for both lines and one cordless phone in addition to the wired one. Anyway, we’re thinking about taking Monday off.

We already celebrated the fourth and the third with fireworks. Hard to say whether the folks along Conesus Lake or those on Edgemere Drive on Lake Ontario do a better job of blowing up the lake. Peggi’s mom was kind of bummed that we didn’t celebrate the fourth with her. Ironically, we are always waiting for things to slow down while she wishes there was more going on. Guess we didn’t have to go to two fireworks parties.

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Beautiful Game

Cheerleaders at Rochester Rhinos game
Cheerleaders at Rochester Rhinos game

We are already gearing up for World Cup 2010 around here so we made a point of stopping by Maureen Outlaw’s place to watch the Confederations Cup on her bad ass tv. It seemed like a miracle when the US beat the European champion, Spain. And here they were facing Brazil in the final. The US was ahead 2-0 at the half and then fell apart. They didn’t really fall apart so much as Brazil just turned on their beautiful game, scored three times and defeated the United States 3-2.

There was a two for one coupon offer in yesterday’s paper for admission to the Rochester Rhino’s game downtown. At around five o’clock the sky cleared and it looked like a perfect night for a soccer game so we bought tickets in the upper deck at the midfield line. By the time we got to the stadium it was raining and they delayed the game when lightning struck. We hung around and had 2 dollar Utica Clubs in cans. Didn’t even know that brewery was still in business. The game started about an hour late.

The Rhinos played really well, the best performance I had ever seen from them, and they tied Major League Soccer’s Columbus Crew 1-1 in regulation time. Because this too was a tournament they wen to a penalty kick phase. This really cheapens the whole experience because it is such a crap shoot after such a long slog but the Rhinos won and we cheered.

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Rebooting

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts in Henrietta NY
Krispy Kreme Doughnuts in Henrietta NY

We took a break from our web design work, put old clothes on and went out to work in the yard for an hour or so yesterday. We were expecting a few calls so we took our phone with us and set it down next to the brick walkway that we were relaying. Our 92 year old neighbor, Leo, stopped by to see what we were up to and and said, “If I set my phone down like that I would never see it again. I loose everything”. We laughed. We got a few calls and then came in to work. The phone rang again and we couldn’t find it. Still can’t.

Michael Greenberger came back into town to pick up his car. Remember, it broke down on the NYS Thruway near Henrietta as they were passing Rochester? He stayed at our place and we stayed up too late gabbing. He gave us a short stack of Duplex Planet magazines, a box of Ernest Brookings matches (in return for the Margo Explo matches we gave him) and a bunch of NRBQ releases. David did their artwork when they were a band and he does Terry Adam’s art now. We made plans to make plans to do a project together.

We took Anne Havens‘ computer apart to install more ram and now we’re updating her OS. Keep your fingers crossed that it reboots ok.

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Welfare Of Humanity

Monroe County Almshouse built in 1930
Monroe County Almshouse built in 1930

Leo Dodd, past president of the Historic Brighton, bought us tickets to their group’s tour of Monroe Community Hospital in West Brighton. We had helped the group out with their website and this was a thank you. We took Peggi’s mom along. They provided a box lunch and a slide show/lecture on the many homes in the area that helped with the Underground Railroad effort in the early 1800s. And then we toured the hospital.

Originally built in 1826 as the Monroe County Almshouse, they had 75 residents and a staff of two. The beautiful new building, constructed in 1930, has 566 residents and a staff of 700! The residents used to grow their own food and provide for the upkeep of the facility. There must be other reasons for the narrowing resident-to-staff ratio but I can only guess. Thomas Boyd, Rochester’s first black architect, designed the place and it is so beautiful that critics started calling it “the million dollar poor house”.

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