Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
Not all observations are worth noting.
Forty years ago Personal Effects released “This Is It,” our first full length lp on Earring Records.” X-Melody was and still is my favorite track on the album. Guitarist, Bob Martin made digital copies of the original half inch, 8 track tapes and he re-mixed the lp along with with three Bonus Tracks from those sessions. You can read Bob’s notes on this project here. “This Is It – Remix 2024” is available to stream today!
I am still digesting our recent art binge in NYC. One day in Tribeca, one in Chelsea and one at MoMA left me with a hundred new photos in my library. That’s not exactly true. At MoMA I studied and then photographed some of the same paintings from their collection that I’ve photographed before. So some are only sort of new. And now, after studying my photos I find it interesting that I was attracted to the same thing a few years back. I had photographed two of the three pieces above before. The newer photos are better and that is only because I am better equipped to color correct the white walls in PS.
As exciting as the new art in lower Manhattan was (and I felt like we had struck gold there) these three pieces from MoMA stand out. Despite the fact that their create dates span one century, it is striking how similar they are. Less is still more.
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Forty years ago, on election night 1984, Personal Effects opened for John Cale at Scorgie’s. Ronald Reagan was running for his second term. Americans loved that guy, an old, former movie actor. John Cale behaved as if it was the end of the world. He was drinking a bottle of cognac that Scorgie provided, and he had a TV set on stage with him, tuned to live election night coverage. He bounded on stage, maniacally shouting “Four More Years, Four More Years, Four More Years.” It was sensational. Eight years ago, the night after Election Day, Margaret Explosion played the Little Theatre Café. Another old actor had won the presidency. This time it was like a morgue but I remember it being good musically.
On the A train to JFK we noticed a heavy set man with a big suitcase asking directions with a German accent. Not all the A trains go as far as Howard Beach where we were to pick up the Airtrain and we shared his concern. We decided to get off at the next stop and re-board a later A train. The German fellow did the same. He immediately struck up a conversation with a Jamaican woman and we listened in. She told him she too was going to Howard Beach so we followed her lead.
I took a closer look at the guys’ suitcase. It was one of those bulbous aluminum fortresses on wheels, maybe three feet high, with the Statue of Liberty and American flag printed on it. We told him we were going to JFK as well. He said he had come over on the Queen Mary and had spent a few days in Boston, Washington DC and New York City. He unfolded a paper map and showed us where his hotel was in lower Manhattan. And he traced the route he had walked in the city with his finger. Across town and up to 59th Street where he took the – and here he couldn’t come up with the word, he pinched his fingers together, looked up and moved his hand across the sky. “Tram,” we said in unison.
With delight he told us he had walked over to Trump Tower in midtown. We both groaned but he was beaming. We were impressed by the amount of walking he did and I wondered if he could have possibly walked more than we had. I looked down at his shoes and they were a worn pair of real walking shoes.
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Hardly have time to post down here, looking at all the new buildings and just looking at everything. The skinny black woman in the “RAW” t-shirt, just long enough to serve as a dress. The woman in black hijab garb with clean white sneakers and a pink head scarf. The Mexican with the pompadour, tortoiseshell sun glasses and glitter speckled sweater. The young couple sitting across from us on the F train. He with a “This Is Who You Worship Now” t-shirt and she with the white dress, blond hair, red lipstick, red purse, red phone and gold shoes. All this before we got to the gallery district in Tribeca.
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When Joe Barrett was doing Summer Theatre at University of Rochester he had a part in “Blood Wedding,” the Federico Garcia Lorca play about the big stuff, love, sexuality and violence. The play was in English but I understood very little of it. Years ago we saw a reading of Lorca’s “Poeta en Nueva York” in a bookstore in Madrid. The performer was accompanied by a guitar player and although I understood very little of the Spanish it was memorable because it was intensely dramatic.
Today we saw/heard “Ainadamar,” a dramatization of Lorca’s life and work in flamenco opera form at the Metropolitan. The poet-playwright was assassinated by fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War because of his socialist politics and homosexuality.
I resisted looking down at the translations and let myself get swept away by the modern pageantry. The man who played Franco, or someone like him, sang in a Saeta voice as if he was petitioning the Virgin Mary on Semana Santa. Of Lorca he sang, “He has done more harm with his pen than others with their pistols. “He is a faggot and a communist.”
Lorca, played by a woman, sang “Forgive me Father, even though I have done nothing wrong. Forgive me father for I have sinned. There is no god. Only the bull. There is no god. Only my café.”
Peggi and have been enjoying a mini news fast down here but watching fascism take Lorca out just three days before the election I could not help but think about el payaso, pictured on the streets of Manhattan (above.)
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Our neighbor’s watch lost its connection to her phone yesterday. I’m guessing she was trying to find her phone with it and then discovered the disconnect. She knocked on our door for help and I suggested she start by turning off both devices, then turning Bluetooth and WiFi off and on again, the boring stuff. It fixes everything.
We hardly had time to finish our coffee this morning and we were already at the airport. While we waited for our plane I went to the nearby unisex/baby-changing restroom. I looked the door behind me and immediately an alarm went off. I pictured some sort of emergency in the airport but then spotted a phone blinking on top the toilet paper dispenser. I really didn’t want to touch the phone so I left it there and walked down to the Men’s room.
From JFK we took the train to Duane’s place. Before we even reached the turnstile we got a prompt that informed us we no longer needed to double tap to pay our fares. I held my watch up for Peggi to go through and then held it up again for me to pass but it would not allow me to do two fares. I asked Peggi to pass me her phone and I used it to get through.
This is probably a good thing. A few years ago I I tried to pay Duane’s fare and he was busy talking to Peggi and a total stranger slid through on my dime.
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Bill would joke that he was a lesbian who likes women and Geri was gay and liked men. Everyone would laugh but not quite understand. It was one of those Bill things. With his long hair and beard you would not mistake him as a corporate type but before he died in 2013 he was the web master for Lawyers Coop, Thomson Reuters, and then West Publishing. The company produced all those law books you see lining lawyers’ shelves in old tv shows. Today it’s LexisNexis.
Bill owned Asymmetrical Press and they printed the Hi-Techs first 45 cover for Archive Records. He was at Scorgie’s listening to Personal Effects the night his wife, Geri, gave birth to their first son, Sam. We knew him for a long time. Peggi and I used to do a yearly slideshow for Hampshire Instruments when they were marketing an X-ray lithography process for making computer chips. We took our Canvas files to Bill when he and Geri were running Publisher’s Workshop in an upstairs office at Writers & Books. This was before PowerPoint and Canvas was the only program that would allow you to output files to 35 mm slides. The files took so long to image that we slept there while they ran. Bill was always way ahead of the curve.
Bill was a Whole Earth kind of early adaptor. A first with personal computers and excited by the egalitarian promise of the web. He helped us learn the early versions of Dreamweaver. We spent a good part of every day on the phone with him. And when a problem couldn’t be solved Bill plugged away, did the research and came back with a solution. When West wanted to transfer Bill to the midwest he quit and started Virgin Wood Type with Geri.p
When we were doing some construction on our house Bill stopped by and picked up a piece of re-bar with concrete attached to it and he stuck in the ground out back. We left it there but the winters took a toll. The concrete crumbled and the re-bar was all that remained. This weekend Peggi and I rebuilt the sculpture using leftover concrete from a pool project mixed with the mortar we skim-coated our concrete block house with before painting it this summer. We used three concrete blocks as the forms and lined it with an old sheet of rubylith (Peggi’s idea). I cracked the blocks open in the morning and the sculpture emerged. We stuck it back in the ground where Bill originally put it.
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When Steve Hoy was in town he would sit in the front seat while Peggi drove and I rode in the back. Not that we did that much driving. We took him out to the airport for his trip back and he learned his flight was delayed because of fog. We didn’t see any fog so he suspected some sort of ruse. It was trash day in the city so the streets were aligned with garbage totes and boxes. Steve said, “Americans need to learn how to break down cardboard.” I jotted it down.
Peggi and I were scheduled for physicals this week and made the appointments back to back. Peggi went first and I sat in the waiting room. I was reading the paper but I was also enjoying the banter between the two receptionists and the calls they were fielding. At one point one of them said, “Alexa, play instrumental music” and that ruined the mood in a hurry.
I was reading how Aaron Rogers, the conspiracist/quarterback for the NY Jets, threw a Hail Mary pass to rattle the Bills at the end of the first half in their game last week. They make a big deal about him being 40 years old. Luka Modric, the Croatian midfielder for Real Madrid, is nearing forty and he is clearly at the top of game. His position as the midfield playmaker is very similar to the quarterback’s role and it is very nice thinking about aspects of your game that can get better with age.
I had a little trouble getting to sleep last night, a lot of things on my mind, and I tried counting to four as I inhaled and then to five as I exhaled. I spent some time thinking about why the one number would be lower than the other. And I thought of the Hail Mary, something I used to be able to say in seconds in grammar school. I struggled to get the verses and had to check online this morning to see if I still had it. It is really a beautiful prayer.
We bought the first version of Photoshop. The program came on one 3 1/2 inch floppy disc and it was amazing of course. The coolest thing about it was that is was so intuitive. It just did what you wanted it to do. At least that’s how it felt to me. I can’t stand reading manuals and you shouldn’t have to if the program is designed properly. When we retired we stopped upgrading and went with PS Elements. I missed some of the features but I could get by as a retiree.
Our friend, Bob, found a deal on the full version so we now have a subscription to that. I HATE it but there is no denying there are still some amazing features. I’ve stumbled on them and it does exactly what I imagined it could but it is even more awkward to do it again! It is no longer intuitive.
The object selection tools are AI assisted and ridiculously simple. The guy in the middle in the photo above was the original. This photo took a few minutes to create. I helped Ken with the artwork for his AI album and found that I could RES UP a low resolution photo, one that was originally created with AI, and I was able to let the AI features in PS generate more of the previously AI generated background!
The new pallet panel is a nightmare. Dozens of commonly used tools are buried in a pull down menu. Why can’t I “Save As” a jpeg? Why do I have to “Save A Copy” to get to the jpeg option. And then, just to piss you off, you have to remove the word “copy” from that file name. I don’t even want to know the answers to these questions.
Margaret Explosion plays tonight. Little Theatre Café 7-9.
“I hear a whisper calling us to rise. Our story, it deserves the light.
They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds. A seed that’s planted in this community, it’s dat rose that grew outta da concrete.
Ensured our futures were so bright. I’m never lost with TE as my guide.
From abandoned and burnt houses on Genesee. To a beacon of hope within these cold streets.“
— I’Aisha Elsaw and Mekka Shareef – Teen Empowerment
We were so happy to be in the crowd on Genesee Street when the Mayor cut the ribbon on the new 4 million dollar Teen Empowerment building. The new building just across the street from their old location in the exotic Valiere building. Duane, who grew up in this neighborhood, turned us onto the place back in the late 70’s. The woman who ran the place sold exotic fabrics from the forties and fifties. Duane’s bachelor pad was outfitted by her.
For over twenty years Teen Empowerment has been a lifeline for the kids in this neighborhood.
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This little guy was slinking across the street in front us today as we headed into the park. Peggi took a photo, submitted it to iNaturalist and identified it as an American Dagger, the caterpillar stage of a large moth. Such a dandy! We routinely identify leaves, trees, nuts and insects while we walk. Well, maybe once each walk, but I use the word “routine” because we take it for granted that we can identify something with our camera.
In the mid-nineties Pete LaBonne used the earliest text-to-voice Mac voices to create characters he interviewed on his “Ask Mr. Breakfast” show.
For years, Ken, the bass player in Margaret Explosion has created songs at home that you would never guess came from him. He pitch transposes his voice and uses an alter ego to create vaguely Germanic dance floor smashes. Today he is fooling with AI, submitting his lyrics and selecting parameters for the type of song he has in mind. He lets AI do the cover art while it’s at it. This is the next generation of song poems (without the wait time) and the performances are incredible.
I don’t waste time reading wall tags anymore. I photograph them and convert the photo to live text at home if I want. I’m waiting for curators to eliminate the square footage they devote to explaining the art. Put a bar code there for the curious and use the space to display more art.
We listen to NYT’s articles read by an AI voice while washing dishes or preparing meals. Despite putting too much emphasis on the “J” in Donald J. Trump it does a servicable job. Much better than the fake me I created on my iPad.
This morning we were reading about AI-powered Russian drones picking off tanks manned by Ukrainian forces on the front lines of their battle with Russia. These are brand new, top-of-the-line tanks provided by the US and they are suddenly outmoded. This is a brave new world.
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I took a painting class with my father for twenty years. We were students of Fred Lipp so this was not a formal art class. It was deeper than that, closer to an experience, one that I felt made his “students” richer as human beings. We all worked in our own mediums on our own projects. There were no lessons or exercises. It was often abstract as to what was being accomplished. Fred would circulate around the room for individual consultation – you were not allowed to talk until he “looked” at your work – and sometimes you would only have a couple of exchanges with him but they were packed. I would often write the comments down when he moved on to the next person. The comments would often appear cryptic the next day but then reveal themselves over time.
When Fred got to my father they would often talk about whoever the guest was on Charlie Rose’s show the night before. Fred came down with pancreatic cancer and died before my father. On his deathbed he told me, “Your father is a trip!”
My father, who often said he couldn’t talk without a pencil, used to sketch the guests on his iPad as he watched the show. Peggi read Thomas Friedman’s column aloud today while I did a few stretching exercises and it made think of my father’s iPad sketch. I put 250 of Leo’s Charlie Rose Drawings online in 2011.
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I’ve kind of gone off the deep end with August Sanders’ portraits. I’d like to buy every book available of his photos or maybe just download every photo I find by him from Google image searches. The Nazis put the kabash on his social commentary tainted portraits so he switched to landscapes under their noses. I love the portraits, the brick laborer, the piano teacher, the dwarfs, the couple, another couple, the chef, the artist and the man women.
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I didn’t notice the concentric circles on Gloria’s bread at first. It was maybe the third or fourth time we had some. She gave Peggi some of her sourdough starter a year or so ago and Peggi has managed to keep it alive by feeding it and making bread every other week. Often it is French or semolina loaves but my favorite is the Seeded Multigrain, Gloria’s recipe. But Peggi’s bread never had the rings on it until today. The secret is a wooden proofing basket called a banneton.
The Milwaukee convention was depressing. I copied this line from our local paper’s coverage. “After finishing a prayer, the pledge and a rendition of ‘God Bless America,’ the delegates raised their fists and immediately began chanting: ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!'” I spent too much time thinking about how the good lord spared Trump and yet made a quick decision not to protect the fireman seated near him. I’m so happy Biden is hanging up his cleats. We can finally move on with wild speculation and positive energy.
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We’ve been preparing to paint our house for the last month. Had to repair some of the concrete blocks and let that set up before painting. We finish work by dinnertime and eat while watching soccer. We usually have the summer off but this year the Copa America and Euros were happening at the same time. We don’t have cable anymore so we started out with Sling in order to record the matches, stay away from the news and then watch them one at a time. We dumped Sling about halfway through. They were trimming the games, starting the second half at 70 minutes or so and then cutting away with four or five minutes to go. We settled on Fubo and now we are paying as much as we did with cable but we’re doing it without Spectrum. We will dump it after the finals tomorrow, both on the same day so we”ll save the Copa final for Monday. Posting here has taken a back seat. Did I mention that Spain is going all the way? Peggi will wear the Jersey tomorrow!
One of the most popular 45s in our house is Nature Boy by Bobby Darin. Peggi’s childhood friend, Chris Firth, wrote her name in magic marker on our copy. We might also have Nat King Cole’s version on an lp. I know we used to have it. Bobby Darin does a swinging version and his backup singers almost steal the show. Of course Coltrane’s version is beautiful. Elvin Jones almost sounds melodic. And Etta James does a great version. But “who wrote this thing?” we wondered while out walking.
I looked it up when we got home and that led me down a long rabbit hole. Known by the lower case moniker, eden ahbez (1908 – 1995), he was possibly one of the first hippies, long hair and a beard, white robes, sandals, he lived outside under the first “L” in the Hollywood sign. He left the sheet music to his song with Nat King Cole and it went to number one in 1948.
The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return
We had taken our friend, John, to his doctor in Geneseo and we stopped at Schaller’s on the way home so John could pick up a bacon burger. As we were leaving with the goods we spotted this silver spaceship of a car. It pulled into the parking lot next door and the driver got out and went into Hollywood Traders (“We Buy Gold”). I stopped to take a picture of the car. I wasn’t the only one doing so. Two teenagers were grinning, flashing hand signs and taking selfies in front of the beast before I got out of the car. The license plate read LKY 8466. Peggi looked up the price and found they are north of 100G
On top of our existential crisis, the president has forced people my age to confront our eventual demise. If he doesn’t step aside and let the Democrats nominate a vital, clear headed woman (like Gretchen Witmer) in the next week we’re going to be forced to have a Trump Bible in every household. Maybe she could initiate campaign finance reform and get rid of the electoral college. Great Britain, France and even Iran have all shifted leftward. I want to be optimistic. When asked about stepping down Biden said: “If the Lord Almighty comes out and tells me that I might do that.” We are overdue for the second coming.
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We’ve been walking early this week, before our second cup of coffee that is, in order to beat the heat. We were amazed at how many people were already at the beach on Juneteenth. You run into different people at that hour. This morning we ran into Fred Sanfilipo. His camera looks like a military weapon. He said he had been taking photos in the park since six.
Fred had his own agency back in the Mac II days and each year we’d see him in the front row at Jazz Fest. A couple of years ago we ran into him in the park. He brought our attention to an unusual bush with magnificent flowers, a Harlequin Glorybower. He gave us the address of his Flickr page and said he would put us on his mailing list. Now three or four times a week we find an email with a nature photo, just the photo and a witty subject line. These two photos are recent examples. Almost all his photos are taken in Durand Eastman Park and all are something special.
Fred says he hates Facebook (we seconded that) but he loves sharing his photos. If you would like to be added to his mailing list comment here and I will pass your email address along to Fred.
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We kept the last disc we rented from Netflix and we have yet to watch it. The “Muscle Shoals” documentary is still sitting by the tv. Funny how antiquated that process looks already. I know newspaper home delivery is just a matter of time. I went to the NYT site to report a no show for our paper this morning and found this message when I logged in. “We’re sorry, but we’re unable to deliver your paper today. However, we’ll redeliver it tomorrow.” Redeliver? They’ve already fired their copywriter.
We stopped out to hear Wren Cove at Red White and Brew on State Street. It was the same night the Yankee sensation was on the mound at nearby Red Wing Stadium. They had a record attendance that night and the bar was nearly empty. Wren Cove is just a duo so they only sounded better. Melissa, the cello player (she also plays with Margaret Explosion) turned 40 that night so we had a card for her. After the set Melissa told us she feels so old now. We laughed. Andrew, the guitar player in Wren Cove said, “You’re a musician. Musicians are 29 forever.”
I’ve taken over the table in our place with the construction of another “Brief History” episode. It takes about a year to collect the images (please redeliver) and a few idle hours for the match-making. And then I will take my time with the digital release.
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This Sun Ra Sunday (link) was a gorgeous sunny day. So sunny I felt the back of my neck burning as we sat on a blanket in the middle of Parcel 5. Gentle Sun Ra music was coming from a blue bag and Jason was reading what he described as an Appalachian gothic novel. It was a small book with wide leading. An envelope with found photos spilling out of it was sitting in front of us. Each was a jewel, intriguing for completely different reasons and each prompted digressive conversation.
The second musical selection was a collection of Arkestra tunes featuring June Tyson. My head was swimming with memories of Midtown Plaza and the promised revitalization shows. The Manhattan Restaurant, the stores that used to surround this area, the friends that worked in the buildings around us. The music was transporting us.
Tents lined Broad Street, near where we were sitting, a flea market overstuffed with vintage gear. I bought the found photo (above) for a dollar. On the back of the photo was a handwritten description, “Bob’s new boat. He built it. It will go 70-80 miles per hour. This is at Millerton.”
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We have been putting together songs for a live cd (is there any other kind?) and a few of the tracks are from a night when Peggi couldn’t play because she had broken her finger. She is playing around with overdubbing (I know that would make the track not quite live) electronic sax parts. I shared the songs with her from my Apple Music (formerly iTunes) app and Peggi found she could only play along with the first 30 seconds of each song because of some sort of copy protection. I sent the songs to her directly from my hard drive as a workaround.
We watched the Apple Event, not live and not the whole thing but enough. The presenters were creepy, even Tim Cook. If I have the gist right Apple has borrowed ChatGPT, branded it as Apple Intelligence and incorporated it into their family of apps, all of which we use. The stock went bonkers and we sold some more. We bought our first shares back in the 90s when we were playing the Bug Jar happy hours. Steve Brown, one of the three original owners was tending bar and selling stock.
Our neighbor, Rick, bought the Lou Reed tribute lp at Record Store Day and he just let us borrow it. We have watched the Keith Richards “Waiting for My Man” video many times. It turns out it is the best thing on the album. Second best actually. The cover is the best thing. A Mick Rock photo of Lou with a mirrored reflection printed on a silvery stock. I was looking forward to Joan Jett’s track but it was a flop. Mary Gauthier does a beautiful version of “Coney Island Baby” and Bill Bentley writes the thoroughly enjoyable liner notes.
Bentley talks about working for Warner Brothers when Lou recorded “The Raven,” an album we never caught up with for some reason. So this morning, before our walk, we streamed The Raven! It is sensational!
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