Theives attempting to break in to house off Hoffman Road in Rochester, New York
Burglaries are good for business. Good for the video camera business, the alarm business and presumably profitable for the theives. These kids look like they are about 16 years old. Their images were caught on a newly installed camera which was mounted on a house these kids had already broken into a few weeks ago. There have been seven break-ins or attempted break-ins in our neighborhood in the last three or four weeks and everyone is talking about it or what they can do prevent it. I know some of the neighbors are armed. I don’t really “know” that they are but they have those “Stop the Safe Act” signs in their front yard and I assume that follows.
The young couple across the street just ordered a 3-pack of video surveillance cameras. If something moves over there while they’re out they’ll get an image sent to to their phones. I spotted a Doyle Alarm vehicle on the next street over and the neighbor down the street was talking about installing his own glass break sensor. The local police have really increased their patrols. It will be interesting to see how this all ends.
I like puzzles but don’t go out of my way to tackle them. I get addicted and can’t stop. This one sort of fell into our lap. My brother, the best stone mason in the city, poured a new concrete driveway for us. Of course there was a lot more work than the pouring. He was over here every day few a couple of weeks preparing the surface and forms. He even offered his artist eye to give the driveway some seductive curves. The concrete was poured on a Saturday and he returned one more time to seal it. We threw a game of horseshoes when he finished and he beat me one out of three.
There is a slate sidewalk from our old driveway to the threshold of our front door and the new driveway, which gently slopes from the garage to the street, is now two inches higher than our sidewalk. So 200 pound piece by 200 pound piece Peggi and I have been raising the level of the sidewalk. We’ve been working on this for over a week now and we can’t wait to get to work each day. We find ourselves looking out the window at our project at night. The pieces of slate or Pennsylvania Bluestone or whatever you call this stuff are all different sizes and some of the old ones were broken so putting it all pack together with shovels, sand, fill, levels, a grinder and diamond blade circular saw that our neighbor Jared let us borrow, and a 2 by 6 to grade the surface has been a real puzzle. It feels great to be outdoors the whole day and I find manual labor to be immensely satisfying. I wonder why that is.
Listen to “Girls With Balloons” from Margaret Explosion Disappear CD
Margaret Explosion plays Wednesday evenings in October and November at the Little Theatre Café.
Just twenty miles south of Rochester on Route 15A you can stop the car and walk to the last two undeveloped Finger Lakes. Canadice Lake is to the west and Hemlock is to the east. Both can be reached by newly developed trails that drop about 1700 feet in elevation and take you right to the shores of the lakes. The lakes look exactly the way they would have to Native Americans 500 years ago. We left at noon and did both hikes, a total of six miles or so, and were home in plenty of time for dinner.
I remember when Genesee Beer touted the virtues of Hemlock Lake water in its beer. Of course the two lakes are our water supply and development on the lakes is prohibited. The trails start on land owned by the Nature Conservancy and finish in the Hemlock-Canadice State Forest passing through beautiful meadows and virgin forest before their descent. The Canadice trail is about eight years old and the Hemlock trail, named Rob’s trail after a past president of the Conservancy, was just opened this summer. The trees are putting on a spectacular show for you now.
Paella cooking over an open fire at Wegman’s Next Door restaurant
Next Door (by Wegmans) threw a “Tapas and Paella” party over the weekend. As hardcore Españaphiles we couldn’t resist. It was pretty expensive so we were afraid to suggest it to any of our friends but we ran into Tony who comes to see Margaret Explosion and we mingled and had a great time.
They had some famous Spanish chefs there cooking paella in huge pans over an open fire on the patio. There was a bar out outside and seating around a couple of fire pits. Tapas were prepared and served inside where a band, Roja Jazz, was playing. They did a great job creating a Spanish atmosphere. The tapas came fast and furious, Manchego and Valderon cheese, pulpo swimming in olive oil, shrimp, champioñes and of course, Jamoón Iberico.
Outdoors the temperature must have been in the forties but the conversation was lively. We were talking to someone about Spain and he told us he was somewhat of a train buff. He and his wife had taken the high speed train from Barcelona to Madrid and then down to Sevilla. We said something about the effort to get a high speed train here and he said, “Well, I’m with Don Trump,” which sounded like a non-sequitor until he explained he didn’t think the government should be subsidizing the trains. Oh, and Danny Wegman was there. I saw someone shaking his hand so I want over thanked him for having this event. I told him my mother was a Tierney and they were all in the grocery business in Rochester. He interrupted, “I know who the Tierney’s were.
Amy Rigby solo gig at Abilene in Rochester, New York
We packed up our gear as quickly as possible last night and headed across town to Abilene where Amy Rigby was doing a solo set. Game 2 of the World Series wasn’t enough of a conflict for Margaret Explosion, Amy was playing at the same time as Margaret Explosion. Rochester was the first stop on a tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of her “Diary of a Mod Housewife” cd with a first-time vinyl release. We were thrilled o find her still on stage, performing a new song, but it was the last song of her encore.
She did a booming business at the march table after the show and posed for photos with fans and then showed us one of the silk-screened towels that she and Eric made for the people who contributed to the campaign to fund her record. It was beautiful and we wanted one but we’ll have to wait until more are printed.
Rick Simpson has a weekly show on WRUR called “Gumbo Variations” and he plans his shows around musician’s birthdays or the anniversaries of their death. It has been three years since Lou Reed’s death and he he asked Peggi and I if we would put together a few sets of his music. We chose “Perfect Day”, “I Love You, Suzanne”, “Walk On The Wild Side”, “Last Great American Whale”, “Pale Blue Eyes” and “All Tomorrow’s Parties” from the Velvets period and then “Fly Into The Sun.”
I was a little leery about how the big 80’s drum sound in “I Love You, Suzanne” aged but Peggi lobbied hard for it. We’re listening to his show now.
The Memorial Art Gallery has an exciting new Media Arts space, a gallery devoted to the moving image, a three year project that will feature different work every three months, work by major artists. They even plan to commission three pieces for an upcoming show. The inaugural exhibition, “Bodies in Space,” features work Nam June Paik (“Experiments with David Atwood, 1969”) and Bruce Nauman, key artists from the early years of video art, alongside more recent work by Sondra Perry and Takeshi Murata. The gallery plans to purchase the work and eventually assimilate it in their collection.
On Sunday afternoon John Hanhardt, MAG’s new Curator of Media Arts, gave a lecture on the work and media arts in general. Hanhardt worked in the department of film and video at the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and from 1974 to 1996 he was curator of the film and video department at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He was the senior curator of film and media arts at the Guggenheim from 1996 to 2006 and he joined the Smithsonian Museum’s staff in 2006 as a senior curator of film and media arts.
Hanhardt curated both the Whitney and Guggenheim retrospectives of Nam June Paik. He recently arranged for the Smitsonian to house the Nam June Paik archive, eight tractor trailer trucks worth. Hanhardt convinced Warhol, when he was still alive, to let him preserve his film archive. He knows his stuff. He is a Rochester native and we are glad to have him back.
Ossia performing live in Highland Park 2016, Rochester, New York. Photo by Peggi Fournier
We dressed warmly for Ossia’s outdoor, noon performance in Highland Park this Sunday. I wore gloves for the first time in months. It was the world premiere of Eastman faculty composer Robert Morris’ “Four Gardens” for mixed instrumental and vocal ensembles. Their website said the piece was “designed to be played outdoors, overlooking the reservoir in Rochester’s Highland Park.” We should have read that more carefully because we assumed the performance was to take place in the grotto that was pictured on their website. We went there first and then drove through the park for a half hour or so before we found the groups (four gardens) performing simultaneously around the overlook where the old Pavilion was overlooking the reservoir. I wish we had been there for the entire performance because what we heard was beautiful.
I’m not so sure about curator, Lisa Hostetler’s premise for the new show at the Eastman Museum. “Personal and collective memories are so inextricably intertwined with photographs,” that the disappearance of the physical print in the digital age “is altering society’s relationship to memory.”
In “A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age” she has rounded up work from contemporary artists whose work speaks to the potential consequences of the medium’s metamorphosis. Often the photographic process and material are intregal to the work and that physical property brings the work closer to an art object than a digital image. Alison Rossiter exposes outdated paper, sometimes from the forties, and without a camera she creates stunning landscape-like images. And Phil Chang has mounted prints that were not fixed. They are fading away under glass and he promised to put new prints in a few days. Even without knowing the premise it is a sensational show, a feast for the eyes and even nourishment for memories.
Eggplants, Tomatoes and lettuce from the garden in October
I set both the clock radio alarm and the one on Peggi’s iPhone to ensure a 7:30 awakening. Pete Monacelli had asked me to talk to his commercial art class at Monroe Community College. Pete is a fine artist and carpenter as well as a teacher and he told me he thought his class would be interested in what I had to say about the connection between fine art and commercial art. How do you make both work?
I pulled into the parking lot on time but I wandered around campus before I found the art department and then I had trouble finding his room until I heard his vice and his unmistakable laugh. The kids, most just under twenty or so, were pretty unruly and all talking among themselves when I walked in. Pete introduced me and I started by saying I don’t have the strongest voice and Pete jumped in in with, “So shut the hell up.”
Pete had a computer connected to a projector so I planned on working from the links on my Popwars homepage. I called up a slideshow of some recent photos and talked over that about my background. I dropped out of school when I was about their age (around the same time my friend, Dave Mahoney, dropped out of this very school). I fooled around for a few years, met my wife, worked construction framing houses, came home exhausted, had to find an easier job and started doing commercial art at ad agencies. I worked at one for five years and noticed that the free lancers, who were hired when we got too busy or took on a new client, were getting paid more than me. So I started freelancing for almost every agency in town and slowly collected work that I could do at home. The Mac II came out, enabling us to set type output film, my wife quit her teaching job and I never left the house again. Some twenty-five years later we retired.
I interrupted the slideshow at this point and showed them some of the logos I did over the years for some of the companies we worked for and talked about the business cards, brochures and websites that went along with the log. I took a quick detour into how to get paid. Make sure you do a simple proposal acceptance form before you start a job and get the client to sign it, preferably with half down to begin. I told them the logos were fun, the work was fun but the most fun was doing my own stuff which I keep completely separate from the commercial work.
I brought up some of paintings and told them how I liked painting the local wanted guys. The room came alive when I clicked on my source material. I showed them some paintings of priests and the basketball players and they really reacted to this drawing from the silent film, “Passion of Saint Joan.”
I was going to mention my blog but I forgot. I finished with my Funky Signs site and they loved that. I was thrilled. There were questions throughout and plenty of students came up to talk after class. School seemed a lot more interesting than it did in my day.
A pile of cardboard boxes of my paintings separates the double bass from the drums. We have a snake running down our basement stairway and another under the rug in our hallway that ends in our bedroom where Peggi has set her amp up on our wicker laundry basket. We have been in record mode for the last month or so but the red light is only on when Arpad is in the house. Margaret Explosion is making a new record, a multi-track affair, and we’re doing it in our home where we are trying to get separation between the instruments by setting up in various parts of the house. We recorded six sessions of bass, drums and various combinations of sax, guitar or synth. Pete LaBonne was in town for two of those evenings and then he came back to add piano tracks on all but one of the tunes.
This is something different for us. Margaret Explosion recordings have all been live two track stereo mixes with no overdubs, mostly recorded at the Little Theater Café where we have had a weekly gig for fifteen years or so. And the music is all improvised. We don’t have any songs until we play them. This time we toyed with taking melodies from some of those songs as foundations for new recordings but we’ve found, in fact, “you can’t reheat a soufflé.” Paul McCartney said that. So we winged it but in a situation where we can pull an instrument out of the mix or redo the track without leaving trails on all the other tracks. Very little bleeding.
Arpad stops by two nights a week and we lay down overdubs. His pc and mixing console is set up behind me. Peggi is replacing a sax track as I write this entry. Arpad records with “Reaper.” It is available on the Mac as well and I may download a copy. I’ve been importing his tracks to Garage Band so I can do some editing and simple looping. Bob plans to do his guitar overdubs in his home. It would be simpler if everyone used the same software and we could work from files shared in the cloud but we haven’t got there yet.
Circle at in Sea Breeze at Durand in Rochester, New York
The Women’s National Soccer team plays Switzerland tonight and three of the WNY Flash have been called up for the occasion. We’ll be at our gig but our hard drive is in record mode. That match is happening in Utah at the same time as the third presidential debate in Las Vegas. We’re recording that too.
Hope you can stop out tonight for Margaret Explosion’s special “Pre-debate Cleansing” performance at the Little Theater Café 7:00-9:00. We promise no politically tinged lyrics. In fact there will be no lyrics at all.
Listen to Fallopian from Margaret Explosion Disappear CD
Margaret Explosion plays Wednesday evenings in October and November at the Little Theatre Café.
Musical entertainer at the Friendly Home in Rochester, New York
We had lunch with my mom yesterday and I struck up a conversation with the woman sitting next to me. A Vassar girl some seventy years ago, she told me she was in the Yale Commons that morning and they were serving peanut butter bagels. Her mother and dad were there too. I was trying to figure out whether the peanut butter was baked into the bagel or spread on top. She said she was trying to eat one with a fork and she just couldn’t get a piece of it. I told her most people pick up a bagel with their hands and eat it that way. She said I know that but I couldn’t get a hold of it so I asked for a fork.
Mural on stairway at Mex Restaurant in Rochester, New York
Margaret Explosion played a Friday happy hour gig at the Bug Jar for almost three years in the late nineties. Casey, one of the three owners of the Bug Jar brought in vegetarian Indian food and Rolling Rocks were a dollar. In 1999 Casey got out and he and his brother bought an old building on Alexander Street. They rehabbed it and opened as Mex, a hip, mostly vegetarian, Mexican food place with a few bars scattered about the building.
Casey asked me to paint a mural on the winding staircase that led up to the restaurant and I worked on it for three or so weeks. I used acrylic paint with a little bit of retarder because the stuff dried so quickly and I mixed the colors right on the wall using two, one inch brushes. I still had whole sections to do when they were getting ready to open so I asked my father for some help. He painted the Marigolds that the Mexican woman is selling right by the door as you come in. They were part of the early East End resurgence and the area got so hot it was eventually Mex’s downfall. A group of us used to sit out on the patio Friday evenings and watch people parade by. Their last day of business will be November 1, the Day of the Dead. Peggi and I stopped in there over the weekend. We didn’t know a soul but we ordered a Margarita and wandered about the place one last time.
I pointed to a spot at the end of Hoffman Road where I have found quite a few drug bags. We were out walking with Pete and Shelley and there were none to be found here that day. I have made it a practice to round up the inorganic material that I find on our hikes. Golf balls, pink, blue and orange plastic tied to branches to mark trails in the woods, Budweiser cans and now drug bags. We continued down the road and turned at Jared and Sue’s to cut through their property and return home. Right there, near the edge of the road, Pete spotted a drug bag. That makes about fifty in the last few months. I keep them in my Elvis Presley ash tray and I brought them outside to take this photo.
They are usually right next to plastic packages for flavored cigars so I have always thought kids were hollowing out the cigars and filling them with this tiny amount of weed but I really have no idea what was in the bags. Some of them are so tiny they could only hold one capsule of something. I’m beginning to wonder if they might have something to do with the recent burglaries in our neighborhood.
We walked down Hoffman to a neighbor’s place this afternoon. It was Danelle’s 60th birthday and coincidentally Damnika’s, another neighbor, 65th birthday. The Bills were on the tube. The sound was off so we didn’t hear any of the crowds’ USA protest against San Francisco’s quarterback, Kapernick. It was in the seventies so we spent the whole party out on the back porch. When Olga came I went in to say hello and I put some Brie cheese on a cracker while we talked. I was thinking, “this is is some funky Brie cheese.” And it dawned on me. I blurted, “These crackers are bad.” Turned out they were Olga’s crackers, organic with no preservatives, and they had gone rancid. She was embarrassed but I can still taste the damn things.
There have been five burglaries in our neighborhood in the last three weeks and, needless to say, the neighbors are all on the lookout. Each car carefully checks us out when we’re out walking. We saw two Doyle Security trucks come out of the street next to us, so someone has a new alarm system. I was laying in bed in the dark last night and a cop car drove by with its searchlight shining in our windows. And when I woke up another cop, this one in a fluorescent green trench coat, came down our street on an ATV. I am happy the police are responding.
Peggi and I have been acting like amateur sleuths and I’ve reached back to my experience in the Crime Analysis Unit of the Rochester Police Department to look for patterns in the locations and possible getaway routes. A neighbor behind us told us a Sergeant had stopped by her house and told her they think the guy is traveling on foot and coming from the golf course on Kings Highway. He is apparently interested in jewelry.
We chatted with a middle aged man who was also out walking and asked if he lived nearby. He was wearing a Dunkin’ Donuts t-shirt and couldn’t possibly have been the suspect. He said he lived on the other side of the park and he told us he had seen something very strange a few days back. A scruffy man came out of Conifer Lane and turned right toward the golf course. He was carrying a suitcase and the the guy said he tried to say hello to the man but the guy looked away. We told him that a house on Conifer was broken into that day in daylight and he probably saw the the suspect. On our way back I waved down a cop car and we told him what the Dunkin Donuts guy had told us. The cop immediately called it in while we were relaying the story and when it became clear that this had all happened a few days ago he cancelled the call and the cop got pissed at us. “You have to call it in immediately,” he scolded us.
We took a walk with Pete and Shelley yesterday and at the end of Hoffman Road, near the golf course, we saw a black windbreaker hanging on a tree. It had white block lettering on he back that read “POLICE.” I looked at the size and it was extra large so I hung it back up. I looked for it today and it was gone. I’m wishing now that I had at least tried it on and had a photo taken in it.
High Falls and gorge by Genesee Brewery in Rochester, New York
“Press one for popular music, two for classical and three for jazz. If you would rather hear silence while you are on hold, press four.” I called Apple to get to the bottom of my music syncing issues. I’m not sure if I got there but I got some guidance. With the “iCloud Music Library” button switched on on my iPad I could not sync a new playlist (live Margaret Explosion music from last Wednesday) from iTunes on my desktop to the iPad. Apparently you have to switch “iCloud Music Library” off on the iPad and then the iTunes syncing menu on your desktop will then allow you to add new playlists. I don’t think any of my music is in the cloud Apple is trying to sync my device with the desktop music library through the cloud and there is not nearly enough room so I a mess of partial playlists. I pressed “four” by the way.
In the car I generally listen to AM 137, the PBS affiliate, or the Spanish language Poder 97.1 on the FM side. But if I’m chopping vegetables I listen to “Deep Garage” on Vicious Radio.
Crazy Firemen band at Octoberfest celebration at Genesse Brewery in Rochester, New York
We didn’t attend the event. We are outside of the whole singer/songwriter scene. But we did hear Bob Martin’s version of the song when we stopped by his place to drop off a hard drive with new Margaret Explosion songs on it. It makes me nervous, sitting in a chair as someone strums a guitar and sings carefully crafted songs. An informal call for entries goes out to songwriters to write a song with the same title. Last year it was “Don’t Go Drinkin’ on an Empty Heart.” This year songwriters gathered at Benunzio’s and performed their version of, “Someday, You’ll Thank Me.” I cannot think of a good reason to not go drinking on an empty heart but this year’s title is workable.
I never liked it when my mom made me send a thank you card. I appreciated the gift but the thank you part was forced and awkward. And it makes me uncomfortable when someone goes out of their way to thank me for something I did. I didn’t do it to be thanked. Love means never having to say “thank you.” Maybe sub-consciously I would just rather have the upper hand after helping someone but when I am thanked it just doesn’t ring right. I guess it supposed to make me feel better but it doesn’t. For me, it sort of cheapens the act of helping.
I don’t have the lyrics for my version or even a melody but I do have the hook. “Someday you’ll thank me but I wish that you wouldn’t.”
Traditional Chinese instrument, a “Pipa,” being played at the Little Theater Café during Margaret Explosion break.
Our fifteen minute breaks at the Little Theater Café are usually noisy. It seems everyone in the place at once. But not not so night. A Chinese woman, here visiting her boyfriend asked us if she could play her pipa during the break. It is a traditional Chinese instrument but she made it sound really modern as she strummed the strings by opening the fingers of her right hand with incredible rhythmic precision.
The ushers handed us pink foam earplugs along with our program at Kilbourn Hall tonight. The first piece, “On and Off and To and Fro, was as loud as it was challenging. A board member thanked Home Depot for helping them construct a few the instruments. This was the beginning of the 20th season for Ossia, the student run modern music, small ensemble program. Of the five pieces the oldest was written in 2008 and one of them was performed here for the first time, a world premier. This music never swings but it often strange and beautiful. My favorite, “Of Being Is a bird,” featured soprano voice singing John Keats poems and harp.
Red Algae near Brickyard Trail in Brighton New York
We met Richard Carstensen in the back corner of Temple B’rith Kodesh’s parking lot and headed off into the woods, bushwhacking style. We were wearing our socks on the outside of our pants, our shirts were tucked in and our Permethrin hoods were up. We skirted but deliberately stayed off the newly dedicated Brickyard Trail. We found fox holes and frogs and butterflies. They are still out there.
The WNY Flash match, which was broadcast on Fox 1 this Sunday, is up on YouTube now. It is the best Flash game we have ever seen and we have season’s tickets. Without entirely spoiling the game for you I will say the Flash are headed to the finals in Houston this Sunday. I wish I could be there to cheer them on and just go crazy like we did hollering at the tv in Kerry and Claire’s living room last Sunday with Barb from the Flash Mob.
The D&C’s Jeff DiVeronica has been doing a great job reporting on the Flash all season and his wrap-up in this morning’s paper was outstanding. The Flash, without any National team starters, are playing like a real team. No weak parts on the whole pitch and plenty of personality. They are playing better than they ever did with Abby or Carley or Morgan or Sinclair or even Marta, the biggest names in Women’s Soccer. And they beat Portland in their home stadium, with over twenty thousand fans, and National team players Tobin Heath, Megan Klingenberg, Allie Long, Lindsey Horan, Emily Sonnett, Nadi Nadim and Christin Sinclair.
