In my other life I am funky sign aficionado and I love it when people use plumbing gear to make a sign. This thing could withstand the wrath of Hurricane Sandy. I love the flush left, initial cap, red lettering and the fact that sign is off center on its rounded corner frame. I love how the “r” in “for” happily teeters on the stem of the “l” in “sale.” The painter took real delight in this effort and appears to have not wanted his task to end judging but the size of the exuberant “e” at the end of “sale.” Most of all I love the way the lettering sits on the bottom edge of the sign.
Barn across from Schutts Cider Mill on Plank Road in Webster, New York
This morning’s paper said a mix of panic and nonchalance was greeting Hurricane Sandy. I’m firmly in the nonchalance category. Peggi left for Wegmans well over an hour ago and hasn’t returned. The storm may provide us with the perfect opportunity to burn the twenty four inch pink candles we bought at a garage sale about ten years ago. And we’re considering parking our car in the garage for the first time ever to protect it against the winds off the lake. We’ll see how nonchalant I am when the internet connection goes down.
We ate dinner at Casey’s new joint on the west side of the river. Tap & Table is a notch upscale from Tab & Mallet but the beer is just as plentiful. I had a pint of Ithaca’s Outdoor Harvest Pale Ale. The name struck me as little odd so took it out on the server by asking him if they offered an Indoor Harvest. We sat in the window looking out over a rainy river that appeared to be flowing south. Duke Galaxy and the Pipliners and T-Rex were on on the sound system. The Mary Jamison tour boat was parked at the dock next door and they had lights on like they were preparing for an evening cruise. We split an green olive salad with poached egg, a smoked trout appetizer and and a roasted pork entree. All fantastic.
Pee Wee (not his real name) mixed the live sound for New Math when I played with the band. Howard Thompson mixed the studio project but he used the name “Howard la Canard.” Pee Wee worked at Sound Source and repaired Peggi’s Farfisa countless times. We used to see him at the record shows scouring the bins for fifties 45s and then we lost touch with him for decades. We into him again and he told us he was changing his name because it was hard for a guy to find a job with the first name of Hillary especially since the former first lady. He has a new musical project under yet another name. We helped him with the packaging and we love what we heard but he asked us not to talk about it.
My neighbor, a former chemist at Eastman Kodak, was helping me get the street wood splitter started the other day. Just making small talk before all the racket began though I asked him if he was going to watch the debate or the baseball final and he said he would probably go back and forth. He had just read an alarming article in Scientific American about the accelerating speed of man-made climate change and he wondered if the topic would come up in the last debate. It didn’t. They have too much bullshit on their plates.
Bench with orange safety cone in front of School of the Arts
As whimsical (or wacky, or nutty, or more uncharitable adjectives) as Tom Otterness’s planned sculptures for the Memorial Art Gallery’s new street face are the City’s new bench across the street from the gallery and in front of the School of the Arts takes the cake. It invites commentary at the very least. This orange safety cone was added the day after the installation. In my personal opinion the City should have gone with John Dodd‘s benches for each of their Neighborhood of the Arts locations.
We got so busy with summer we hardly noticed it was almost over. We were sort of surprised to see this much color in Durand Eastman Park. We’re thinking maybe summer started so early this year that it might just be exhausted.
Women’s shoes at the Public Market in Rochester, New York
There is such an incredible bounty of fresh fruit and vegetables now at the Public Market the non food items provide an attractive foil.
Connie Deming rang our bell this morning at 11 or so and caught us still in our sleep gear. She was was looking for our neighbor, Rick, and he told her he was across the street. He was on our side of the street but he was in the house next door because he bought the place when the original owner died and he’s fixing it up in order to rent it out on September 1st.
He’s scrambling to meet this deadline so we offered to help. We picked a color for their bathroom, our new favorite, gray, and we painted it. He’s hired a local contractor to put a cork floor in the basement and we heard him down there, music blaring, saws whirling and lots of one sided dialog.
First we’d hear the saw and then, “You have got to be kidding me!” Then the saw and “Did I do it again?” “I did it again!”
The guy driving the car next to us on 590 looked just like Gustovo Fring, the Fried Chicken franchise owner/drug king pin in Breaking Bad. And The car up ahead of us looked like Walter White’s car. Isn’t it funny that Jessie still calls him Mister White? Life, these days, plays out like a dull episode of Breaking Bad and there really is no such thing. Watching all of season four in a two week period (we streamed it from Netflix) has me looking at all the angles in everyday situations and expecting the outlandish. I would not be surprised if our favorite character, Saul Goodman, the attorney with the “LWYRUP” plates who put a Jewish spin on his name for business reasons, pulled in our driveway before I finish this piece – just for some comic relief.
We wanted to change the color of a room in our house and picked out a grey color at Home Depot. We must have considered a hundred grays before we settled on the right one. The kid behind the counter looked like was skipping school but he came off like a real pro when we asked him a few questions. They have made some big strides in the paint world since our last project. He offered to mix a tiny can of our color as a sample for three bucks. That’s a nice new feature. And when we asked about priming some bare wood he told us that a primer was built right into the paint. Latex paint on raw wood. And it covered in one coat. I got some on my arm and it’s still stuck there even after swimming.
This entry sounds exactly like one of the spam comments I get for my blog. From people like john@behrpaintproducts.com.
Back-up helicopter pad at Strong memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova from the Russian performance artist’s, Pussy Riot, says, “We are happy because we brought the revolution closer!” I’m happy for that. Nothing scarier than Russia’s new alliance between between church and state.
We had the coffee all set to go. Just push the button and head downtown to wait in line for the ticket office open so we could buy tickets to the US Women’s soccer game with Costa Rica. But the headlines on the morning paper said the ticket sale would be delayed. Eleven thousand were already sold to season ticket holders. Big bummer but nothing compared to our friend, Bill’s situation.
We took him over to the Wilmot Cancer Center for his daily dose of radiation, a tactic intended to shrink the tumors in his brain that spread from his lung cancer. We found him in good spirits, a better man than I imagine I would be in his spot.
On to the days’ other pressing issues. My father got a new modem from Time Warner and when the service guy left my dad was unable send or receive email on his desktop or iPad. All his settings were right. Nothing had changed on his end. I was stumped. I tried collecting email through the browser at the Roadrunner site and as soon as I typed in my father’s email address it autofilled with “@roadrunner.com” rather than “@rochester.rr.com.” This required a call to Time Warner where a technician determined that the serviceman had never set-up the modem to go to the Rochester server.
My parents switched their land line to Time Warner about a year ago so the incoming caller is displayed on their tv and all but they never set up the feature to route call waiting calls to Time Warners answering service so when they are on the phone and I try to call them it just rings and rings. People that know them are familiar with my father’s message on his home answering machine and they have learned that if the phone keeps ringing it just means they are on the line. But people who don’t know them, like the the garage door repair man, just assume their phone does not work. So we looked on Time Warner’s site for the old fashioned option of “engaging a busy tone.” What a concept.
This was not easy. i had to call Time Warner again and a women who was clearly reading instructions from a monitor talked me through setting up an account in my father’s name and then accessing a control panel were I could “turn off call-waiting” even thought they had never set it up and then “engage busy signal” and hit “Save.”
Tree trimmer in bucket on our street in Rochester, New York
I know wood burning is not environmentally cool but solar heat is not gonna work around here especially because we are surrounded by trees. This is a “mature” neighborhood as they say. Not every neighbor burns wood but most do so there is a bit of competition for the downed trees. One of our neighbors has three dogs and she comes by with one and then the other two (they don’t all get along) everyday. She spotted a fallen tree on the next street and told us about it, even introduced us to the neighbors, so Peggi and I dashed over and came back with five loads of red oak. A good score. The people watched as we rolled the logs up in to our vehicle and later asked the dog walkers if we were “hippies”. They thought we were “very industrious”. I didn’t think those two things went together.
This morning while we were reading the paper a huge truck came down our street with a wood chipper trailer in tow. It was a tree service hired by the power company to clean up the branches growing within their airspace, four feet in any direction and ten feet above the power lines that weave their way through the trees. They used to clean up the lower hanging cable tv and telephone lines but now they ignore those and just concentrate on the electric lines. It apparently isn’t worth it to the cable and phone companies (one in the same in many cases) to chip in and have these guys clean up their lines too. That tells me what I already knew. Cable tv and land phone lines are on the way out. Modern developments have all this infrastructure underground. But what about our internet service that comes through those lower lines? Is a wireless connection in our future?
We asked the tree guys for the big stuff and they said, “No problem. It makes our job easier.” Since we asked and our wood burning neighbors didn’t, would it be ethical for us to take the wood that through our intervention was spared from the wood chipper, even if it was trimmed from their tree? How about if the branch was in our air space? Is it rightfully ours anyway? This might be a question for “Dear Rich.”
Seagull portrait, Charlotte Beach in Rochester, New York
I was really saddened to read Robert Hughes passed away. I always like his hard hitting, thought provoking art criticism (American Visions, The Shock of the New and Goya). I often strongly disagreed with him but I liked reading him so much I would soldier on. And when I agreed with him it was fantastic. He slammed a good bit of modern art and champions Philip Guston. In the Robert Crumb he called Crumb “the American Bruegel.” Wow!
I like this quote of his on the art market. “If there were only one copy of each book in the world, fought over by multimillionaires and investment trusts, what would happen to one’s sense of literature – the tissue of its meanings that sustain a common discourse? What strip mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.”
Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings at the Armory in Rochester, New York
A thunderstorm forecast forced the move of Thursday’s “Party in the Parking Lot” into Rochester’s Armory, easily the worst sounding room in the city. My parents used to go to the circus here and it might still be an ideal spot for that. If only last night’s show was anywhere near as interesting as a circus. We walked in while an announcer was introducing “Chuck Prophet & the Mission Express” and you could not understand a word he was saying. The wild reverberation here swallows even a loud speaking voice. I have no idea what Chuck Prophet was singing about but the two guitar, keyboard, bass and drums was some of the most ordinary rock music I’ve heard. I am probably too old to voice my opinion but it was as if the whole punk thing never happened and rock music continued to get straighter and straighter for the last thirty years.
Sharon Jones at least sounds good with simple things like syncopation between drums and bass, rhythm guitar, not just strummed chords, and great backup singers. The Dap Kings have studiously copped the vintage R&B thing and look and sound like a studio band on stage. Nowhere near the heft and funk of the godfather but enough to pull off a good version of Gladys Knight & The Pips’ “Heard It Through the Grapevine.” It was good to see the crowd come alive, smell pot in the air and be in the right spot for some serious break dancing. I guess I was spoiled by some extraordinary music at this year’s Jazz Fest like Mederic Collignon, Hakon Kornstad, Terje Rypdal and Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey.
The sign on a giant ice cream cone along Route 31 read “Welcome LDS.” My dyslexic eye always does a double-take with those three letters. Claire and Kerry had organized an outing to the 75th annual Hill Cumorah Pageant and they only got a few takers but Peggi and I are easy. We even saw Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” in the theater.
The pageant takes place outside of Palmyra, New York, about thirty minutes from Rochester, where Joseph Smith found the golden tablets in 1838. His translations of the inscriptions on these tablets became the “Book of Mormon, Another Testament of Jesus Christ.” I learned all this in the Visitors’ Center and found the subtitle interesting. It is just “another testament.” What the heck. This one has Christ visiting America, just after his crucifixion, where he healed the sick and chose twelve more disciples, all-American disciples. As a former Catholic (I realize there is no such thing) I was surprised to find it no more whacky than any other organized religion.
This was the third time for Claire and Kerry and they told us the parking arrangement was all new this year. They used to park across the street and and a whole protest scene had grown up around the pageant where you had to walk a gauntlet to get to the outdoor theater. The protesters are still an integral part of the festivities. They shout disjointed, mostly right wing (further right wing) evangelical, messages through bullhorns and hold signs advertising AskWhyWeLeft.com. Someone was driving a truck back and forth with WhatMormonsDontTell.com painted on the side in huge letters. One angry agnostic was yelling, “You don’t need religion. Save yourself.”
It is impossible to shut out the protests so they became a part of the show. The open field parking lot is wired for sound with speakers mounted high on poles playing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir or what sounds like loud funeral home music, all in an attempt to drown out the protests. It is a surreal experience just walking to the pageant grounds. The cast members, in full meso-american biblical costume, greet you with disarming smiles. I felt like I must have something permanently wrong with my face.
This trippy, Woodstock-gone-Stepford atmosphere makes the pageant itself a bit of a letdown. The sound system and lights were state of the art and as good as Furtherfest but the play is entirely lip-synched. The parking lot was jammed on the way out so Kerry and I headed to the woods to relieve ourselves. A protesters plea rose above the din. “Time to get off your high horse Mormons!”
Golf swing without a club across from the Plaza Athletic Club in Rochester, New York
OK, we were earlier than we had be to line up for the French Miles Davis “Bitches Brew” era band, Mederic Collignon, so why wouldn’t a city bound golf nut choose to entertain the queue with mime golf? They were outta sight btw.
Kid’s room at Lutheran Church, one of the venues for the Rochester International Jazz Fest
Funny how no two people hear the same thing. We are so lucky this is the case. After Terje Rypdal’s performance last night we were talking to a friend who was disappointed he didn’t hear more Terje Rypdal solos (he only takes two in his score for “Crime Scene”) and then a comment to yesterday’s post about the abundance of solos. The beautiful bass solo at the end was one of our favorite parts in the score.
We checked out the lineup for last night before leaving the house and Peggi said, “When the choice is between music that transports you and music that doesn’t, there really is no choice.” So like a broken record, there we were in the front row for performance number three by Terje Rypdal and the Bergen Big Band. It sort of amazing to watch them virtually clear a house. No more than fifth of the people in attendance make it to the end.
A true crime buff, Peggi had scripted all the parts of this masterpiece in her head. She knew when the crime happened, when the getaway occurred, when the crowd was just standing around gawking and then of course when the crime was eventually solved. The Jazz Festival pulled out all the stops in booking this incredible band.
We were talking to the band leader after the forth show and he told us how they had played with Joe Henderson and Maria Schnieder and so many others but they absolutely loved touring Europe playing the non-traditional arrangements Terje had written. There were no sax solos, only parts with plenty of room for movement, and then sections that heaved and dug deep into Terje melancholia. This gets our vote for best movie we never saw.
Pink and blue chairs at Jazz Fest in Rochester, New York
We made an extra effort to get out early on the first night of Jazz Fest 11 and we were in good shape for down front seats at Kilbourn Hall for the bass player Christian McBride but word spread that he was stuck in Newark airport due to wind. You’d think McBride could have made an extra effort to leave a few hours before the show or just driven up here.
Hatch Recital Hall, the newest addition to the Jazz Fest venue list is easily the best sounding room in the line-up. It’s not a room, it’s a performance space and it only holds about two hundred people. It’s like sitting in front of a big speaker but in this case the tweeter is a Steinway Grand and the woofer is a gorgeous sounding stand up bass in the capable hands of Canadians Don Thompson and Neil Swainson. They have played together for thirty years and know over two thousand songs so they were melodic and lyrical as twenty first century musicians can be.
We had seen “Get The Blessing” before at an earlier Jazz Fest and we gave their straight ahead trip hop a second try. Elements of jazz, the two horns, with plenty of effects on top of a clubby rhythm section in the cavernous Christ Church seems like it could work. The drummer and bass player had success with Portishead but here their instruments had a wide dull rumble sound like a rock band down the street rehearsing.
Goran Kafjes Subtropic Arkestra at the Lutheran Church borrowed the the name of Sun Ra’s band. They built their songs around somewhat repetitive keyboard progressions and with seven players they managed to sound like a big band but they didn’t swing like Ra or visit the astral planes. Jonas Kullhammer was in the band which was sort of odd. He was such a dynamo with his own quartet in years past. But still I liked this band quite a bit. It was trumpet player, Goran Kafjes’, birthday and their music was fun like a Bollywood soundtrack.
Ingmar Bergman comes from the Faroe Islands and there is something of that austere quality in Yggdrasil’s delicate sensitive music. Like the early, hippie, new age ensembles Paul Winter Consort or Oregon, they look for inspiration close to the earth. Yggdrasil performed a beautiful nine part piece devoted to the Inuit and Native American tribes of North and South America. With chanting, piano, bass, flutes, violin, drums and an electric guitar player in a Pink Floyd shirt they were quite extraordinary.
Chuck Webster painting entitled “Untitled” 2012 at Ziehersmith Gallery in Chelsea NYC
Poor Chuck Webster. He delivered a monster painting (it is a crime for me to have cropped the photo of it so click through for the full thing) to his current show at Ziehersmith in Chelsea. The fine work in the rest of the show is not nearly as strong. This one is like a magnet. You are drawn to it. It is hard to look away. You must get closer and examine the surface because it has already convinced you that it is three dimensional. It is not. It has the meaty presence of a Guston. How is he going to top this?
I can’t figure out why there would be an Alice Neel show in Chelsea. Doesn’t someone already own all of her gorgeous paintings? She is a painter’s painter and my favorite woman artist hands down so I don’t really care why there is a show of hers in Chelsea, I’m just happy there is one.
I had jotted down the addresses of three shows in Chelsea in my little notebook and we saw all three along with a Cindy Sherman show and lots of instantly forgettable stuff. The third show on my list was a Brancusi photo show, beautiful arty black and white photos of his sculpture in the studio. This gallery was up on 24th Street so climbed the stairs to the High Line, an absolutely beautiful rooftop park on an old elevated train track. Even in New York City nature can can give art a good run for it’s money.
The altar in the temple, they may not even call it an altar, looks pagan to me. I know that is an absurd assessment since Jesus was a Jew but the prohibition of idols or images of god thing takes my favorite part of religion off the table. There’s a great big wooden cabinet behind the lectern, they probably don’t call it a lectern, and inside the cabinet there is a reproduction of the sacred Torah scrolls. I know this because I opened the cabinet a few years ago when my nephew made his Bar Mitzvah.
My brother converted from Catholicism and we’ve been to three of these coming of age rituals now. Our niece had just turned thirteen the day before and that is such a pivotal period, it’s fun to just look at her on this cusp. Serious on one hand and childlike on the other, the rabbi scolded her when she made eye contact with her friends who were sitting right behind us.
Peggi and I were asked to play music during the event so we were sitting right by the piano. The canter had a beautiful voice and she was backed by the keyboardist for the Yankees. Peggi and I jumped in on sax and hand drum. The minor key modal thing is right up the Margaret Explosion alley.
Our neice’s lesson (upon being called to Torah as a Bat Mitzvah she is now a “teacher”), one she picked from a story in the book of Numbers, was how she learned and will continue to learn how to stop complaining and be happy with what she has. She said, “I know Apple will always introduce new products that are better than what I now have.”
Sign for 4 bands in Penn Yan New York at top of Seneca Lake
The front page story in our local paper Sunday opened with a bang as reporter Gary Craig retold the story of a staff member at the Christian residential ministry, Freedom Village USA, who shot out a television set with a .12-gauge shotgun because the kids were watching a banned show. We’ve driven by this place many times because it is right next to my aunt and uncle’s farm on the shores of Seneca Lake. They were freaked out by this place when it sprang up in middle of farm country thirty years ago. Fueled by PTL (Praise the Lord) donations until the Jim Baker scandal broke, the complex dwarfed Dundee’s tiny parish church and the Mennonite worship house. The flamboyant, evangelical founder, Pastor Fletcher Brothers, commuted by helicopter rattling their community and fueling wild speculation.
He had built up a Gates congregation in the 70’s with strident anti-abortion and anti-pornography stands before running it into bankruptcy by misusing church funds. Now in the middle of a bitter divorce (his fourth) and another bankruptcy at Freedom Village, his own staff is ratting him out over his misuse of the organization’s money. Meanwhile Pastor Fletcher Brothers is still raising money from donors through his weekly show on Rochester’s Christian station. Meanwhile the deacon at Freedom Village USA has quit and started a blog entitled “The Stench Of Spiritual Abuse.”
Exotic Dancers signage on wall next to Tala Vera on State Street in downtown Rochester, New York
I miss “Jenks and Jones” and Shep’s Paradise” and the old school R&B lounges on Rochester’s west side. Those days are not coming back but the urban pioneers over at Tala Vera on State Street are doing their best to update the concept. They have an ideal back room for music with a piano, a built in sound system and a red curtain behind the stage. We heard a fantastic trio called “10 to the 32nd Kelvin” there last night while they recorded the night for a live album. Bass player, Kevin Ray, stood center stage as well he should, a equally fluid melodic and rythmic player, with Frank Lacy on Trombone and Andrew Drury on drums. My favorite passages were when the horn player accompanied the drummer on percussion. All the better to feature my favorite instrument, the upright bass.
This part of the city is on the upswing but progress slow. I know the strip club next door is gone and the ghosts remain but I couldn’t tell whether “Tajze Wine and R&B Lounge” (with a bullet hole through the glass right under the “a” in “and”) was coming or going. We drove home during their break and were able to catch the second set on a live video feed from Tala Vera’s site.
