Month: April 2019

A few weeks back a branch broke off a tree above our house and went right through the roofing and tongue and groove boards below it. It landed between the rafters and luckily it didn’t break through the plaster and copper plumbing in the ceiling of our living room. It got me wondering about Newton’s gravity thing. The branch was hanging horizontally above the house and when I found it it was standing up in our roof. The thickest part of the branch apparently fell the quickest.

We walked up to Wegmans to pick up some fish. Our branch gets fresh seafood in on Thursdays and we always find something – scallops, perch, red snapper or tuna. Last week we bought one swordfish steak to split. They call it steak for a reason. It is oily and meaty and tastes great on the grill. I knew there was something funny about swordfishes. I looked it up and found most healthcare organizations recommend that you don’t eat any because it’s full of mercury. And how does mercury get in the ocean? The number one source is airborne particles from coal burning power plants. So glad the Trumpster is bringing back coal, “beautiful coal..” That will be our last piece of swordfish.

Blue is my favorite color so Rick gets the green. By the end of the season we will hardly be able to tell these apart. They should be dry by tomorrow and it may be opening day.

The blue paint was suspiciously thin and we plan on painting our metal chairs so we walked over to Home Depot and bought a pint. I brought the stick that I used to stir up the old blue and they matched the color. It is about a seven mile round trip but we made it fun by stopping for a Flat White at Starbucks and calling Duane in Brooklyn.

The recap of my carpentry career in my last post didn’t mention why I got out. Swinging a 20 ounce hammer all day, lifting walls that were built on the deck, getting the scaffolding up on the metal brackets, carrying full sheets of three quarter inch plywood in the wind and hoisting tresses up to the second floor completely drained me. As satisfying as the job was, there was nothing left at night. So I got a commercial art job. A “pud” job as they would say in Indiana.

I did my homework this year by reviewing the list before we left the house. It took some of the fun out Record Store Day but it also gave us more freedom to just hang out, drink coffee and eat cookies. There were only a couple of things that caught my eye and I snagged both the Art Ensemble 45 with the African poet, Alfred Panou, and the John Cage Meets Sun Ra 45 (plus dvd of the complete Coney Island performance). I put that on as soon as we got home.

We left our car in the old Tops parking lot on Winton and walked to Monroe where stopped at Bop Shop and Hi Fi Lounge. We stood in front the sound system in the back room. I asked the guy how much the pair of speakers cost and he said “around $300 but don’t quote me. They sounded fantastic and I was considering so I asked the owner when he came in. He said “about two thousand.”.

I brought my Hauser Wirth bag with me and filled it with vinyl, a few more 45s from the sixties and Silver Apple’s debut 1968 lp on milky blue vinyl. They sound like Nod, Can and Suicide, all bands that came after them.

We took a different route over to Record Archive where a big inflated dinosaur was bouncing around in the parking lot. A local brewery called Single Cut was giving away samples of beer that tasted exactly like grapefruit juice. A young mod-like band was performing in the back room you had to get in a long line in order to look at the Record Store Day product.

I will sleep good tonight. I spent a good bit of the afternoon rebuilding the short concrete wall that sort of marks the property line between us and our neighbors. I do this every years as the pachysandra bed on the other side continues to expand the wall tilts toward us. It is not even a foot high and from our perspective, an eyesore. I proposed removing it but that didn’t fly so I rebuilt it again. 

Our local newspaper has been promoting the Pulitzer Prize winning, USA Today documentary, “The Wall.” The movie was free so we signed up.

Once the Trumpster announced and made the big fence a pledge a group of journalists decided to fly the the border from from the mouth of the Rio Grand to the Pacific Ocean. The winding river makes a natural border for large sections and and the terrain is so rugged and inhospitable I kept trying to picture the engineering feat required to run fence up and down the sides of mountains and over huge ravines  Currently there is only 600 miles with an actual fence. The one feasibility study of effectiveness of the wall, which was done in 2006, showed the astronomical costs would bring negligible benefits. So full stream ahead.

God creates Eve from Adam’s rib and they have two sons, Cain and Able. Then Cain takes a wife. Did you ever stop to think about where that woman came from? Was there someone around the corner that was also doing creation?

This is just one of the arguments Spencer Tracy’s famous defense lawyer character uses against his famous prosecuting attorney in the 1960 recreation of the famous Scopes trail. This damn movie, which was screened at the Dryden Theater yesterday, is sixty years old and the story it retells is 100 years old. Yet the movie is still relevant. One third of Americans don’t believe in evolution. The clutches of the fundamentalists, those that believe in a literal, word of god, biblical creation story still go as deep as the Tennessee townspeople singing “Give me that old time religion,” in Stanley Kramer’s “In Inherit The Wind.” And I find that depressing. But the movie is not.

The movie is vivid. It is witty. Quips fly by. Gene Kelly playing a reporter from the Baltimore Herald, lets the most fly. The smallest characters are as large life. Claude Akins is fantastic. Fredric March goes over the top. Spencer Tracy is brilliant. Distrust of science and distrust of journalism is nothing new.

Four of every member of the sax family plus one bass saxophone. A saxophone orchestra. The Eastman Saxophone Project rearranges work for the saxophone and plays from memory without a conductor. We heard at noon today in the Hochstein performance space and you can catch the rebroadcast on WXXI at ten tonight.

With a little bit of help from a small percussion section they performed Emanuel Chabrier’s “Espana,” Astor Piazzolla’s “Contrabajjissimo” and Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, something that would be immediately familiar because it has been used in many movies. It is amazing to me that the sax can do it all. The group will perform again at Kilbourn Hall on Thursday, April 11, 2019 at 7:30PM.

At a distance the witch hazel can look like Forsythia but it is too early for that. At the end of Wisner there are bunch of witch hazel trees growing near the road and in this spot you can see three different varieties. Into the park and up the hill on Zoo Road is another variety, one that blossoms earlier, like February. It is still in bloom and very fragrant.

Carl used to run a saxophone repair shop on East Avenue. The place was called Shuffle Music and his cliental was mostly Eastman students. He’s retired now but he does some work out of his house. Peggi put her soprano in her backpack and we walked over there today along the lake. We made a loop out of the trip by coming back through the far side of the park where the sewage treatment plant is.

We missed yoga last week because we were at Big Ears. I’m looking forward to to tonight.