PopWars

Peggi just told me that the pop-up of the photo in my last post wasn’t working. I fixed it but I may have missed the opportunity to send you a holiday greet so I am calling your attention to it. Of course the photo above works just as well without any words.

Louise emailed me to remind me that it had been three days since I last posted here. She gave me an out by suggesting that I must be busy. Busy skiing in the park, visiting my mother and discarding the dead possum that Peggi found in the backyard. Some animal went right for the guts.

Oh yeah and we happened to be in Wegmans when “corporate” showed up. That’s how how our cashier described it. We knew something was up when we saw the employees gathered around the enterance, just kinda standing around, something that would have driven my uncle crazy when I worked for him at his Super Duper stores. He was was a sticker for staying busy in the down times.

With a couple of holiday parties under our belt and planning underway for a family gathering I have gained a clearer understand of the fuzzy line between function and disfunction. It was crystalized by a conversation I had with a married couple who were sitting at opposite ends of a long table. The woman was doing most of the talking and told us how they both came from large families. I thought my was large at seven siblings. They had eight and nine.

The woman said her family gathered somewhere different every year and they all got along but they had a few ground rules that were established because of previous problems. No one was to talk about politics, religion and another topic that I can’t remember but it was big enough to leave pretty much only the weather. And then she gestured toward the other end of the table. “His family is completely dysfunctional.”

The guy said, “That’s because I told a couple of them that they were full of shit.” And we all laughed.

There was just enough snow for us to ski for the first time this year. The temperature was in the teens and there was a brisk wind off the lake. It was exhilarating.

Let’s hope we get a real winter this year. The kind where businesses are closed and the snow falls so fast you can’t shovel it all in one session. Enough snow to bring trees down in the woods, to knock the power out, enough so that even the mail can’t get through. The kind where you can’t leave the house for a week or so.

I was so happy to read that the Army will not approve an easement for the Dakota Access Pipeline. A real victory for the Native American tribes and protesters!

The RoCo Members show is always a treat. It is my favorite show of theirs most years with one work from every member and there are a record number of members this year. The show is still visibly pleasing and credit must go to those who hung the show. Or maybe it is simply the abundance of engaging work. This is really something for Rochester to be proud of.

Louise brought us two Pomegranates for Thanksgiving dinner. We had one with Mascarpone for dinner that day and we hung on to the other. I cut into it this morning and squeezed and knocked the seeds out as she had shown us. It was juicier and much sweeter than the first. The inverted shell looked quite exotic, like coral or something, and I took a few shots of it. It would look good in Instagram’s square format.

My watch says I walked 7.56 miles yesterday and I never left the yard. We raked and then mowed our leaves. In a good year we only mow the so called lawn once but we have mowed (aka mulched) the leaves four times. This should it. We have about two inches of chopped up leaves out there and it looks something like Robert Smithson’s earth art.

Many Maple trees, the Sugar Maples in particular, turn brilliant colors early and drop their leaves before the oaks but Norway Maples turn yellow and hang on. When they fell en masse a few days ago, with rain/wind/snow punch, they landed upright in the snow. It looked unnatural, like an art installation or something.

Recording live, as we do at the Little Theater, has spoiled me. The song is done as soon as we play it. We put a title on some and post them on the site but when we hit two hundred songs I started looking for ones to retire before putting another up in its place. The song below was recorded last week. Conceived, played, mixed and recorded in as much time as the song is long. Simple.

Multi-track recording is a whole other story. We got together here a few months ago, six sessions, a couple hours each and laid down some improvised tracks. Since then we’ve done piano overdubs. We’ve looped sections created ending through editing. We mashed a few songs together as one. Peggi doubled one of her sax tracks. We’ve replaced whole tracks with new takes. We tore the drums and bass out from under one song and put congas and electric bass on it. We’re adding bass clarinet next week. All this is a lot of work. Many nights are consumed with compressor settings and reverb plug ins. I haven’t even had time to check in here.

Does all of this sound any better than closing our eyes and knocking the songs off live? I don’t know.