“You are damn right I hit your car.” Actually I didn’t but I said I did. It was Peggi who whacked the back of the guy’s car with her hand after he drove through a red light. We were crossing at the sidewalk. The walk light was on. As if any of that matters. He never saw us and nearly took us out turning right, right in front of us. You think your life is so important and then you realize it could end so quickly. And this guy rolls down his window and yells, “You hit my car.”
We were walking up to the post office on Waring. The commemorative stamp selection had been depleted with Christmas so we came home with a sheet of Hot Wheels stamps and one dedicated to a Muslim holiday.
We managed to round up some friends for an impromptu New Year’s bash. There was plenty of food and some people brought even more. We carried on past two and have nearly a case of champaign left over. Guests seemed to come in two waves so there was plenty of parking on our dead end street.
I was shuffling a folder of about a thousand songs, ones that I had marked as a favorite over the years, and fast forwarding through clunkers with my watch. I had moved our HomePod out to the kitchen and that added clarity to the stereo sound. Everything was cool for a few hours and then the stereo feed quit on me. My computer wouldn’t let me reselect both the HomePod and the stereo. I switched to vinyl and quickly piled 45s on lps, starting records at the wrong speed or missing the space between songs on lps. I sort of crashed then and never played the Stooges 1969, something I had played at every other NYE party. And this would have been the 50th anniversary.
At about two o’clock one of our guests couldn’t find his jacket in our closet. Someone else had worn it home and the keys to his house were in the pocket. We made a few frantic calls and texted likely suspects but weren’t able to reach anyone. A perfect time to be on the road, we drove to a relative’s and picked up a spare key. The jacket returned in the morning and it looked exactly like the one that was left here.
We “suited up” (Permethrin-treated tick gear) in yesterday’s fifty degree temperatures and walked through the woods with this two person saw. It belonged to Leo, our former next door neighbor, and it still hangs in his old shed. Monica, the new, proud owner of the shed, let us borrow it. I couldn’t wait to use it.
Peggi and I traded ends a few times and coordinated our strokes to make short work of the big Sassafras that had fallen across our ski path at the very bottom of the biggest hill. We carried the saw all the way to the golf course and cleaned up four of five other blow downs. We’re ready for snow.
We watched Greendale again last night and it has only gotten better. We are a small cult, those that love this movie. It is in my top ten. I have an affinity for the form, 8mm and family members as cast. I made the movie above in the winter of 69/70. It features my brother, Tim, on drums, my drums. He’s wearing my clothes too. My brother, John, is playing guitar and their friend, John Spar, playing harmonica. I hung one of my lithographs on the garage door and my youngest brother, Fran, and his friends did double duty as a rental crew and snow acrobats. Years later I added a soundtrack from Invisible Idiot.
The cool thing about filming without sound is that you can direct (bark orders or offer encouragement) while you’re shooting. Neil Young adds an amazing soundtrack from Crazy Horse, just three musicians with very few overdubs, and then has his cast lip-syncs his lyrics. The whole thing is beautiful and brilliant. A rock opera without the hysterics.
The characters, all mouthing Neil’s vocals, make you realize how good the lyrics are, the storytelling and the character development. I remember my nephew telling me the only thing he didn’t like about Neil Young was his voice. I love it. And you realize how expressive it is while you watch all these characters voice the lyrics.
The movie is relentlessly good. When this 2003 movie finally catches on I could see it playing with Rocky Horror Picture Show-sized crowds singing and dancing along with every line.
Spray paint art on sidewalk at Wegman’s in Rochester, New York
I’ve stepped over this black paint, on the curb near the entrance to Wegmans, so many times and I’ve never been able to figure out what it was that someone spray painted.
Birds and Worms club on the shore of Irondequoit Bay where Fish and Game Club is today.
We headed out this morning for the outlet bridge but turned toward the bay near the Point Pleasant Fire Department. At the bottom of the hill on Pleasant Avenue is a gated community called Bay Point and Schnackel Drive, a funky neighborhood of small homes, about half of them seasonal, at water’s edge. Many of the homes down here can only be reached on foot or by water. When Schnacknel ended we continued on a path until we spotted a “Beware of Dog” sign. Country music was playing on some outdoor speakers and an older guy came over to see what we were up to. My father had sent Peggi this old picture of the the Birds and Worms Club and we asked him if he remembered where that was. He pointed to the Newport Yacht Club. He said he bought his house in 1965 and then he got off on a tax rant. We told him we had heard there was a store down here and he told us it was called “Alice’s.” He said “she sold penny candy and beer and she died in the store.”
My sister, Amy, had a holiday party last night and we spent some time talking to our niece about her vegan diet. We were standing around a table full of cookies and I felt guilty each time I ate one. Our brother-in-law, Cal Zone told us he was doing a show on WAYO today but I got the time wrong and tuned in too late. Peggi got the lowdown down on our nephew. He’s home from Pittsburgh for a few days and playing there with his band on New Year’s Eve. The band’s called “Swither” and Eli writes the lyrics and sings. “Everybody’s wondering what I’m doing next. Well, I’ve been getting real good at avoiding that.”
Peggi peeling Jonagold apples from Schutt’s in Rochester, New York
We borrowed chairs from our neighbors’ for Christmas Eve dinner and returned them today along with a plate of cookies. Peggi made two kinds, Christmas butter cookies from her mom’s recipe and cardamom cookies from our friend, Shelley’s, recipe. Our neighbors showed us all their cookies and offered us some homemade toffee. We took a plate of cookies to neighbors across the street too. Turns out they had been making cookies all week and they offered us some of theirs. They have a 3D printer and printed a replica of their Don Hershey house a few months back. They had their mini house on a some snowy white felt along with four new Irondequoit-centric 3D print-outs, House of Guitars, Rubino’s, Pasta Villa and DiVincenzo’s Bakery.
We invited my siblings and their families for Christmas Eve dinner. My brother, Mark, comes up from New Jersey with his family, my sister, Ann, came from her seven day Christmas season shift at Parkleigh and our niece, Brittney, from our old neighborhood. We started with appetizers and conversation, wedges of Spanish Manchego cheese with quince paste, Greek olives from Wegmans, smoked salmon from Jeff Spevak’s backyard with Señorío de la Antigua Rioja.
We overate for dinner. Peggi made applesauce with Jonagold apples from Schutt’s and we served a baked ham from the Co-op, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, mixed green salad and Pears al Vino Tinto, poached pears in Red Wine for dessert. This is why Santa Claus looks the way he does.
Peggi looking out window on 21st floor of Metropolitan in Rochester, New York
On somewhat of a lark we took a tour of the Metropolitan Building in downtown Rochester. Formerly Lincoln Rochester, Lincoln First and Chase Lincoln, it was bank and it still looks like one. Our friend, Time Schapp worked here and you could see Lake Ontario from from hi office window. The place has been converted into high-end apartments, ones that one with high speed internet, cable tv, parking, trash pick-up, physical fitness room and an on-site restaurant. All for somewhere around 3000 a month.
The apartments we looked at were all on the twenty first floor. The view at sunset was spectacular. The apartments were open space plans and nicely appointed. It was kind of fun imagining how we would use the space, where the drums would go and the tree stump that Pete and Shelley gave us. I think the deal breaker here is lack of access to the outdoors. You can’t even open the windows up here.
It is surely cleaner to burn natural gas rather than wood but we have a lot of free wood around here. It falls from the sky. Our neighborhood is seventy years old and the trees that were left when the houses went up continue to mature. They grow toward the light which is often right over the house and they become lopsided. Conscientious homeowners prune them and are left with the wood, perfectly good fuel if you have a fireplace. But it takes some real effort to cut, split and stack the wood so it can age before burning.
And that is where we come in. Instead of walking we’ve spent the better part of this week out by the wood pile. Our neighbors took down a big tree that was hanging over their house. They contacted us while we were in Spain and asked if we we wanted it. Of course we said yes and when we came home we found these huge pieces, better than 30 inches in diameter and much longer that the 21 inches that fit in our hydraulic splitter. I watched a YouTube video on how to split large logs. This guy made it look easy. His method works but falls apart when you have burls and limbs going in all directions. We worked our asses off out there but have three face cords aging and a fire fire going. We are going to seed but not there yet.
Giant cannoli at Rubino’s on East Ridge in Rochester, New York
We walked along the river this morning from Ford Street to Elmwood and and back on the other side. I found a plastic protractor near UR and over on the west side a piece of paper with handwritten proverbs. “Even a fool is thought wise if he holds his tongue” caught my attention.
Some friends of ours have a yearly holiday gathering. It is centered around wine. Everyone brings a bottle and sets it on a table near the front door and the place is so crowded we hardly get to talk with the hosts. But it is a great opportunity to get together with people we only see a few times each year.
Maybe ten years ago some people brought their guitars and sang a few songs, folk songs like House of the Rising Sun and the Pogues Christmas song. It felt spontaneous and festive. As the years went by more guitars come out earlier. The first few songs grabbed everyone’s attention, I especially liked a former Chesterfield Kings’ version of “Dead Flowers,” but when a boisterous Johnny Cash tune drowned out the conversation we were having in the other room I groaned and said something about originality.
A small group was playing Cat Steven’s “Wild World” when we left and I was thinking about our generation. Outside we couldn’t hear the acoustic guitars, only the voices, and Peggi told me I should keep those kind of comments to myself. She is right. I sound like an old man. I plan to work on that. Besides, “Even a fool is thought wise if he holds his tongue.”
Peggi and Paul at “This Is It” show at Community Playhouse in Rochester, New York. Shot taken from monitor of performance video by Duane Sherwood.
Working with Duane Sherwood in 1984, Personal Effects started planning a multi-media show for the Community Playhouse on South Avenue where Swillburger is now. We had seen Emmy Lou Harris perform there and a few other shows and the small playhouse with the big deep stage was perfect for back-projecting on a scrim. From up in the balcony to way back behind the stage Duane worked both sides of the band with dramatic lights, psychedelic liquid light and projections, silhouettes thrown on the scrim from the front and the back where Jeanne Taylor was dancing behind the scrim. There is a photo of Jeanne on this 80’s Polaroids page. As creative and production manager, Duane had a brilliant idea for every song even dropping an overstuffed man from the ceiling for our song “Big Man.” Don Scorgie brought his bar to the lobby. Russ Lunn videoed the show and Duane took Polaroid stills of the video. We used them on the back cover of the album we recorded later that year titled “This Is It.”
Which brings me to the behind the scenes documentary of Michael Jackson’s rehearsals for what was to be his last tour. We watched “This Is It” last night with the sound jacked up. The band, an orchestra, sounded incredible. The production of this thing is mind-blowing and you get to see quite a bit of that along with the performances. Where other performers hire dancers to make them look good, Michael Jackson hired the best dancers and still danced better than all of them. You can’t take your eyes off him. Still transitioning at the end, he appeared to be in great shape. “This Is It” is exhilarating and sad.
Personal Effects album “This Is It” on Earring Records 1984 EAR 1
The stone I carried home from the Camino de Santiago. Photo by Peggi Fournier.
It took some discipline to keep our backpacks around the eleven to twelve pound range. A litter of water can push you over. Add a package of figs and oranges or a hunk of cheese and and you really notice the weight. Especially after twenty miles. We had an outdoor wardrobe, if it was below thirty we wore the whole thing, and a set of clothes for street wear. I had a small sketchbook and my iPad but that was it for extras. So when I found this stone on the second day in, a stone that felt so comfortable in my hand I didn’t want to let go of it. I really had to think hard about whether I was really going to bring it home.
It wasn’t just the shape, like an organic hand warmer or a bar of soap, it was the combination of stone, the milky white and the earthy orange brown. I carried it in my hand for hours and then shoved to the bottom of my pack when we stopped. When we got home Peggi noticed this little arrow etched in the stone, an arrow like the hundreds we followed on the Camino de Santiago. I’m thinking this is a miracle.
Beech-Nut Packing Company East Main Street, Rochester, New York
Warren Philips framed a print for us. He called to say it was ready for pick-up so drive over there this afternoon and found him sitting in the window of shop, eating lunch with the lights while listening to Christmas music. From the looks of what was left it was a healthy lunch, both fruits and vegetables. We got a total cost from him and then walked down East main from his shop near Goodman to ESL at Winton and Main to pick up some cash. The five mile loop took us though our old neighborhood and brought back all sorts of memories.
About half the houses on the North side of Main have been torn down and there’s a lot of new buildings like Auto Zone. The giant Eckerd’s that put in where Kadri’s gas station was is now a Dollar Store. The Comic Book Store is gone. East High was letting out when we passed. Amazing how much energy those kids have. I found a Trump playing card on the ground near the school, the queen of diamonds with “Melania, Supermodel” on the back. We used to get a Friday Fish Fry at My Brother’s Place, now Club Soda where the bikers and cops hang out. Economy Paper is still in business. We had a salesman from that place call on us at 4D. Eastern Printing is still cranking. We did many jobs there.
Fleckinger’s Meat Market is a tax service place. That guy knew my grandfather. Salvatore’s, the original location at Wisconsin Street, has the whole block now. The founder’s father, Fred, owned the grocery store across the street. Bertha’s is gone. It’s a laundramat. We stopped in there to go to the bathroom. There is a Puerto Rican restaurant where Mooney’s was and Effinger’s German restaurant before that and Jamaican place across the street. Carroll’s Irish Bar painted their place dark grey for some reason. Fam’s disco is a teen center. The greenhouse is a coffee shop for recovering alcoholics. Mustard Street, where French’s used to be, looks as bleak as ever. Nobody remembers any of this stuff.
Personal Effects “Silver Finger Nails” from “90 Day In The Planetarium” 1987
The last time I saw Julian Schnabel he was wearing what appeared to be pajamas as he and his lady friend left the Sculpture Pavilion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I say “the last time” even though I only saw him one other time, when Rochester’s Ingrid Sischy brought him to the MAG for a lecture. This was during his smashed plate phase.
Schnabel’s “Basquiat” was embarrassing. His “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” was beautiful but an awful lot like “Johnny Got His Gun.” His “At Eternity’s Gate” is brilliant. Maybe just because the subject is so. But William Defoe is too. Because the movie was done by a painter I expected a more painterly dialog. Instead we have Van Gogh’s personality, his intense relationship with the world, his social ineptness, his psychological disorders and his glimpses of eternity on full display. Maybe that is what it took to produce such extraordinary art.
There is some choice dialog, probably taken from Van Gogh’s letters. “Paintings have to be painted fast, made in one clear gesture.” There is a scene Of Van Gogh and Gauguin taking a piss and talking about how they have to start a revolution. “The Impressionists are so boring.” And Van Gogh adds “But Monet is pretty good.” But there is a cringe worthy scene near the end of the film where Schnabel’s Van Gogh, comparing himself to Jesus, while talking to a priest, says maybe he paints “for people who are not born yet. Adding “nobody knew Jesus until 40 years after his death.”
Van Gogh essentially had ten years where he continued to get better and astronomically better as a painter. Like a rocket. Schnabel’s depiction of Van Gogh in his coffin (Defoe made up by an undertaker) and surrounded by his paintings was incredibly beautiful.
“Kalpa,” tree of lights by San Francisco’s Symmetry Labs come alive 5 -10:30pm at Rochester Contemporary
Would you trust a car salesman who primarily types with the middle finger of his right hand? Or one who sells you a car that has less miles on it than it did when you test drove it a few days earlier. We might have been reading the wrong number on the mini monitor, the one behind the steering wheel, where the speedometer used to be. After you’ve been hit in the rear and the guy takes off, the car you love is beyond repair and its title wrongly has a lean attached it is hard to tell who to trust.
I thought by the time we were ready for a new car there would be all sorts of options. And I don’t mean ones that run on alternative fuels. That whole project has been deliberately stalled. I was thinking of shared vehicles, self driving or maybe just a better mass transit system. We have always had only one car so when our fifteen year run with the Element came to an abrupt end, we had to learn about the current options under pressure.
We did most of shopping online. Sadly there are only three types of vehicles out there and within those types they all look the same. SUVs of various sizes, pick-up trucks and your basic car/sedans that all look the same. We were happy with the Element so went out to Honda. First to complain about the discontinuation of the Element and then to look at the options in 3D. The CRV was the next best thing but then there was this report.
Despite the irreparable damage from the hit and run they offered us some money on a trade in but when we looked at the title to our Element, for the first time in fifteen years, we found there was a lien attached. The 2003 Element was our first new car purchase and we did it in cash so we were taken aback. We remember going out to John Holtz (no longer in business) with a cashier’s check and then going in a back room where we were up-sold on an extended warranty package. Since we already had a cashier’s check for the full amount of the car they said we could put the warranty coverage on our credit card and pay it off monthly so we did but the lien was never removed. And the bank that held the lien was bought by Santander, a giant Spanish bank.
We sort of feel like the kid in “Breaking Away” who was so enamored with the Italian bike team until he raced with them and they took him down. It took us a week to get to someone inside the Spanish bank was willing to help.
We were not a customer. We had no account there and the Customer Service phone line was a giant maze where you wait forever on hold with a music loop for the next person who tries to transfer you and then cuts you off. We started over so many times we learned the codes to get through the phone maze. At the first utterance of a recorded voice we pushed 1, and after the next voice another 1 and another and then four zeros to the next level’s four questions. The zeros are not even an option there but they confuse the system and get you to a real sounding person. And then they want to transfer you to the loan department, a separate company, because they find out you are not a customer. After landing over there a few times we learned to plead with the represenative to get us to their supervisor. We dealt with five supervisors and at last found one who was willing to fax a lien release letter to the car dealer, but by then it was too late in the day on Friday. With any luck we will be driving a new car to yoga on Monday night.
Pink clouds over Lake Ontario at Durand Eastman Park
Steve Brown was one of the three original partners in the legendary Bug Jar. Margaret Explosion was playing a regular Friday night Happy Hour there for a few years and he was always behind the bar, off duty from his day job at a big financial firm, encouraging us to invest the little we had. I’m so thankful for that. He’s now a partner, with Tommy Burnett, in Iron Smoke Whisky, a northern New York whiskey distillery of all things. But it is also a bar with a sound system and tonight, the day before Tom Waits birthday, they hosted a Tom Waits tribute.
I like the Rain Dogs period for Tom Waits. Hated The earlier Electra years and then lost track of him. Apparently I am in the minority’s here because the night’s performers mostly drifted to the mopey loungy stuff. Irish Ben managed to bring the house down with a solo, voice only because they couldn’t get his acoustic guitar feed to work, version of a song called Martha, a song he dedicated to his wife, Helen. Teresa Wilcox went for it with “Clap Hands.” And the band sounded like a million bucks, Phil Marshall, Brian Williams, the drummer from Busted Valentines and the keyboard player from Mighty High and Dry.
Madeline McQueen did a great version of “The Heart Of Saturday Night” and someone named Rod Smith did a reved up version of “Downtown Train.” The whole cast finished with a “We Are The World” kind thing with everyone one on stage singing something like “a freeway will never come” over and over. We had a couple Paradox Brewery Beaver Bite IPAs, saw a whole bunch of old friends, and had good time.
Birch tree along shore of Lake Ontario at Durand Eastman Park
“Una invitación para comprender español y para conversar en espanól, lengua expresiva, romántica y musical.” An invitation to understand Spanish and speak in Spanish, an expressive language, romantic and musical. That is my translation of a passage in the intro to “An Invitation to Spanish,” a 1947 book I picked up at a garage sale. As much as I enjoy listening to Peggi converse in Spanish I came back from Spain more determined than ever to learn some of the language.
I’ve been chipping away at the photos I shot and slowly reliving the experience. I just opened one from the cathedral in Santiago of sign that reads, “Culto Al Santisimo.” Cult of the saint? Worshipers of the holy? Adoration of the Holy Sacrament? That last guess is from Google translate. Maybe there is no literal translation. I do enjoy that.
Three camouflaged deer on Hoffman Road in Rochester, New York
I know I’ve been out of sorts when I don’t find any interesting photos on my camera. It is always with me and I usually start a blog post by looking back at what I have brought home. And then I sort of write to the photo sometimes. Just as often the text has nothing to do with the visuals and that makes its own statement. It is at least a starting point.
It has been a few days and this is all I found. The deer are nearly camouflaged and the photo reminds me of those old Highlights magazines. I remember them in our house but I mostly remember them at Dr. Cleary’s, our family dentist. He had an office on the sixth floor of the Medical Arts building on Alexander Street and my mom would take all six of us, Amy wasn’t born yet, to the dentist at the same time. We usually all needed his attention but there wasn’t a babysitter if you didn’t. We devoured the Highlights magazines and there was always a feature where you had to find a list of things hidden in a photo. I’ve gotten pretty good at it but I could never spot these three deer before they spotted me.
Turns out our car is totaled so we took to the internet to shop for a new one and a few days slipped by. And then there was that whole day we spent looking for the title of old car. If they still made the Element we would already have a new one but they don’t make them anymore. Bob Martin thinks we oughta be looking at panel trucks.
