As we packed up our equipment at the Little tonight, Ken Frank and I had a good discussion about Captain Beefheart. Is it a good discussion when the other party says stuff that you agree with? Kinda saves you from wagging your tongue? Not always. But that was the case tonight. I know it is possible to have really good discussions with Martin Edic and not agree with anything he says.
Mick Sarubbi recorded the band in mono and of course with the recording equipment equipment there it didn’t sound as good as it did last week when only a handful of people were there.
We did a song as a nod to Terje Rydal and Crazy Horse last week and plan to put it on our upcoming cd, Live Dive. Speaking of Nod, Joe or Brian is trying to get a gig at Abeline with Nod and Margaret Explosion before the weather changes or has it already changed?
That Ramone’s song comes to mind all the time but life is too short to complain about everything.
I would guess about fifty Town of Irondequoit dump trucks have come up out of Hoffman Road in the last few days all loaded with rich, dark top soil. Because we are so close to Lake Ontario the soil here is usually orange and sandy so we had to go down in the holler to check it out. It looks like they are just helping themselves to the centuries old deposits of wet fertile soil at the bottom of the valley that runs out of the Sewillo Road development and into Spring Valley.
We hike through this area and I thought the property belonged to Durand Eastman Park but I guess not. It is wet and marshy but I don’t know if it is an official wetland. The town has cleared a hockey rink sized plot with a bulldozer and loaded all that earth in their trucks. As deep as they have gone, it is still dark top soil. Whatever the project is, I’m against it.
If you go down there to check it out you might have to hold your nose as drive by the Town of Irondequiot Cemetery where Hoffman begins. They put so much fertilizer on this property you would think they’re trying to raise these people from the dead. When it rains tomorrow all that chemical will roll downhill toward the lake. Does the town really pay those dudes to walk around each grave stone with weedwhackers while they they smoke cigarettes? What are they going to do when everyone has fogotten who all those people were?
Fire Jugglers at Village Gate in Rochester New York
We did some 4D work this morning and then pretty much blew off the rest. I did take the phone with me when I climbed the ladder out back. Bill Jones called while I was working on the peak and wanted me to check out his navigational scheme on the Bop Shop’s online store. He has been building the data base, the interface and the secure check out with CartWeaver. I told him I would look at it out as soon as I got down but I never did. When we finally quit painting at six or so there was an irate message from a client wondering if we had had a chance to do the changes to his website. I know some of our clients read this thing and if he is, he should know I will get to those asap.
I painted the trim around our living room windows. The oak beams that support this wall of windows were finished with some sort of shellac or wood sealer since the house was built in the forties. I could either sand it all down or strip it or something or just prime it with oil and paint it with the dark brown acrylic we picked out as our trim color. It almost seemed like it was my duty to keep the place up in it’s original form but I went with the latter.
It was in the nineties today of course so we had to visit the pool. We picked tomatoes on the way back and Peggi baked some eggplant for dinner. We ate n the deck and admired our work. We stopped down at the Village Gate to see Lumiare but we got there just as they were doing their last song. We did catch the fire jugglers and I took a few shots in “fireworks” mode.
We stopped out to visit Peggi’s mom in the Living Center and I posted this with her wifi connection. When I get home I’ll put up a photo of the fire jugglers.
Patty Hearst possible disguises from People magazine
We watched “Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst” last night and I remembered that I kept this page from People magazine from that time period. The movie was pretty lame considering the sensational story and dramatic characters. It would make a great opera.
Patty’s narcotic like voice in the audio tapes that she sent home and to the country were like beautiful art pieces. I remember how exciting it was each time a new one was released. There was a lot of speculation that she was drugged but Patty’s voice sounded the same in her press conference when she was released.
Possible disguises of Patty Hearst from People magazine – click photo for full page
Patty’s transformation from Kidnap victim in a closet to the Bonnie and Clyde style bank robber, Tania, was as riveting as watching OJ Smpson get away with murder. “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people”, the Symbionese Liberation Army and their seven headed serpent logo, the whole thing was like performance art. Patty gets her father to empty his bank account and feed the poor. Governor Ronald Reagan predicts no one will accept the food and then riots break out in the mad rush to grab the goods.
And back to the opera. Steven Weed, Patty’s boyfriend who was with her when she was kidnapped, pines for Patty and then gets dumped on the national stage as Patty took up with the revolutionaries. Which one of them was she sleeping with?
This is the way the caption of the People magazine article read. “These pictures show a few of the ways that Patty Hearst might try to avoid recognition. The face directly below, prepared with Identi-Kit composites used in police work by an Identi-Kit expert, is structurally similar to Patty’s own smiling face in the above photograph. Though the basic facial features remain the same, a different hair style (even a man’s), wigs, glasses or a paste-on mustache or Van Dyke beard could radically change Patty’s appearance. What she cannot easily disguise, however, are her height (5’3″), her weight (110 lbs.), or, as all the pictures illustrate, the small mole near her chin.”
I grew up here but went to Indiana for a few years to go to school and then hang out. When I moved back with Peggi I was pretty surprised to find this place on Monroe Avenue. It was in the block where the Bug Jar is today. We ate here once and it was pretty good. We just didn’t eat out much in those days. I think Susan Plunkett from Jazzberrys had something to do with this place but I’m not sure.
Peggi files for unemployment and gets rejected
I found this note from that time period. It’s an unemployment claim that Peggi made while she was looking for work. When we left Bloomington she was working as a dental assistant. The first thing this dentist did was gas the kids to keep them quiet. Peggi and her coworkers hung around the office after it closed and sampled the gas themselves. The note says “Claimant quit to move to New York State with to seek work as teacher and grocery cashier. The employer says that she went to New York with her boyfriend. There is evidence that claimant worked for 10 weeks at $36 or more per week. I think she was rejected.
Pete and Shelley asked us to keep a look out for a used Apple laptop because their old laptop, a Powerbook 190 running System 7.5.2, was acting up. It could not hold a charge anymore and the floppy drive stopped working. We watched Craigs List for a few weeks and found a nice 1.5 GHz PowerBook at a good price. We connected the old laptop to a LaCie 1 gig SCSI drive that we borrowed from Walter Ketcham. We dragged years worth of documents (letters written in SimpleText and short books written in Quark 3.0 for a total of 29.3 meg) from the laptop to the SCSI drive.
PowerMacintosh G3 with scsi and a firewire card running OS 9
You can’t see our PowerMacintosh G3 (we use it as a stand for our HP laser prnter) but that is where the magic happened. Luckily we had saved our old CRT monitor and a ADB mouse and keyboard so I dug them out of the basement. We hooked the SCSI drive up to the G3 and dragged the Pete and Shelley files to an external firewire drive. We had put a $10 firewire card in that machine years ago. It was kind of fun booting in System 9 and watching the SCSI drive mount and I happy we hung on to our old equipment. In fact we are still using the blue/grey 350 MHz PowerMac G4 in the upper left hand corner of this picture to collect our email. Matt from theiLife.com helped us get Leopard on it by booting it in Target mode and installing from his laptop.
1.5 GHz PowerBook G4 running OS 10.5
The last step was a breeze. We just plugged the firewire drive into Pete and Shelley’s new used laptop and slid their files on to the new Powerbook, a major upgrade for them and a seamless transition for us. They can sit in the woods and continue and carry on their digital lifestyle until their battery runs down. And then they will have to depend on solar power to recharge it.
The alkalinity was out of whack at our neighborhood pool so Peggi had to dump in five pounds of a baking soda like mix to get it under control. We brought our laptop down there and had our pick of three unprotected networks. We listened to songs on Kevin Patrick‘s blog and basked in the sun. “A Little Bit of Soap” by the Exciters sounded fantastic. We discovered there is a 1960’s era transistor radio built into our laptop.
I was looking for a poster from the Marianne Faithfull show at Scorgies to put on the Scorgies site and I started rummaging through some old scrapbooks. I came across this “stat” (photo from a line camera used in graphic arts in the old days). Mechanical artists were expected to know how to use a stat camera in those days and you were always running to the darkroom to shoot a logo or blow up some type or just hang around in the dark. The paper that we used could only show black or white, no gray tones, and you usually waxed the back of the photo paper and stuck down on on a mechanical board. This was called a “paste up”. These cameras could do a halftone but you had to put a screen on top of the paper before exposing it. It was usually 65 or 85 line. And your image was still black or white, you just had tiny little black dots to represent the gray tones.
Sometimes the camera was way out of focus or maybe you forgot to put the image you wanted to copy in and you would get some surprising results. I don’t remember how the image above came about. Maybe I just found it in the trash. It still looks pretty good.
Some bigger ad agencies had their their own camera guys. I worked at one place where the guy closed the dark room door, cranked Thin Lizzy and smoked pot all day. He asked that we just slide requests under the door. And the guy at Sibleys would take naps in the dark room. You had to wake him up to get a shot. Of course he was following the Greatful Dead all over the Northeast at night. He had a real darkroom setup in there and he made enlargements of Jerry that he sold at the shows.
I feel like the the guy at the hotel in tropical vacation spots who is out there first thing in the morning drying off the outdoor furniture for the day’s guests. We have had at least one shower a day lately and then it gets nice. We like to start the day on the deck with the newspaper and coffee so I dry off the table and chairs each day. We have managed to slow things down and it feels like summer.
We made a racket in our neighborhood today by running the electric drill in the backyard all afternoon. I put a wire brush attachment in it and sanded off the old ivy that was growing on our concrete block house when we moved in. We pulled the ivy down a couple of years ago but the woody vine are tenacious.
It sounded like our neighbor down the hill was downing some work too but every time we think that we find out later that it is just their kid practicing his skateboard moves.
Duane Sherwood sent this shot of our neighborhood poolup today. He has a lot of his Rorschach photography on Click2vu.
Steve Hoy asked to see some photos of the tile house that I mentioned in yesterday’s post so I found a few in emails from Bill Jones. One is the back of the house from last summer and the other shows the recent work on the front of the house. We saw the project in person last last night but it was after dark before we got there so we turned the car’s headlights on to check it out.
Peggi was driving on the way home and we went through a sobriety checkpoint on 590 South. The Irondequiot police are big on these things and we have been through them before. We pulled up to the checkpoint and rolled down the windows. One guy in a uniform shined a flashlight in our eyes and said, “This is a sobriety checkpoint. Pull up ahead.” We drove slowly up to the next group of police. The blue and red lights on the tops of the police cars were all flashing. They had pulled someone off the road to our right and the driver was standing on one foot with his arms out to his side.
Bill and Geri Tile House
We head been sitting around Bill and Geri’s table for a few hours talking about the art shows Geri had seen in NYC and the java scripts that we had been wrestling with for the last few days. Peggi and I each had two solar power beers. The cop at the next position said, “Where have you been tonight?” It can’t possibly be any of his business. Is this even legal to just start interrogating someone out of the blue? Peggi answered, “Brighton”. “Have you had anything to drink?” Peggi said no and I echoed. The guy wasn’t done though. Next question, “Where are you headed?” It is none of your god damned business. Peggi said, “to our home around the corner.” “OK. Have a good night.”
I installed the Lightbox software on Julia Nune’s site and then on this blog last night. It shows the photos in a pop up box on top of the existing page. I’m happy with this elegant solution. I also put 1pixelout’s audio player on Julia’s site and I like that too so I installed the WordPress plugin here. (updated since)
Twenty years ago today we were preparing to head up to the mountains for Pete and Shelley’s 8.8.88 party. Pete spray painted signs that greeted us on the way in to their summer home in the woods. At the time it was still a summer home because by Fall they were headed back to New Orleans to spend the winter in down home style. I listened to few Pete LaBonne tracks and picked one from that period to post here.
Bill Jones has set up a Pete LaBonne shopping cart that will allow you to purchase twenty years of Pete LaBonne tracks for 50 cents a piece. Peggi and I still have a little work to do to engage the store. In the meantime, here is “Who Dropped That Pin” from the cd entitled “High Time”. In most cases, Pete plays all the instruments and recorded everything in a small small shack on their property called the “Hodge Podge Lodge”.
In this case there are no instruments, just voice.
How does Abilene get to have bands outside every night of the week in downtown Rochester? I’m not complaining, I’m just wondering. When New Math rehearsed in the Cox building on Saint Paul, we would get complaints from people all over downtown. Maybe it was our music. Anyway I’m happy to listen to bands out back at Abilene’s and I can only guess that there is just nobody around in this part of town to complain.
Nobody that is, except the NV clubgoers and the over the top securtity team from the hip hop club around the corner. These guys look like the Guardia Civil in Franco’s day. White chunky skinheads with pirate style hats, radios and handcuffs hanging off their belts. There were about fifteen of them out in front of Abilene the other night. I didn’t know whether to feel safe or be afraid.
I didn’t come up with that word but I am living the concept. Today we did a little bit of 4D work, and then a few home repairs, took a walk in the woods and a swim at the pool. We’re watching our neighbor’s cat while they are on a real vacation so we just raided their movie collection to top it all off.
Last night was First Friday again and Dick Storms had an art opening at his store, Record Archive. The whole store has always been like a funky art piece but for this occasion he set aside some wall space on the ramp that leads to the vinyl pit to show his rock artwork for bands in the late sixties and early seventies. Dick did the lightshow for Quicksilver Messenger Service back in the day. The photo above shows Dick’s album cover art for the Rochester band, Rain. It is a three color silkscreen sticker that the band stuck on the lp and on surfaces all over town. Hermie from the Bug Jar was at the opening and he said his sister had one of these records. Dick’s art work is is comfortable like Robert Crumb or late Philip Guston. His daughter, Margaret, helped hang the show. It should be be up for a month or so.
Avalanche Collective from Syracuse at Rochester Contemporary
Over at RoCo we fell for the the three guys from Syracuse, Avalanche Collective, who set up camp in empty urban lots and videotape their adventures. The photo above, of the three of them, was lit by the car batteries in their wagon.
It has been total Julia immersion for us working on Julia Nunes’s web site. She’s had thousands of hits while we set the thing. People were signing her guest book as we were installing it. We worked until six or so and then we headed down to the pool. It was beautiful there and relaxing. We watched for John Gilmore to drive by and when he did we went home to meet him for dinner. We ate on the deck and headed off to see Julia at Alilene. She was great. She did this song about breaking up with her boyfriend that had the line, “I’m going out to get my mind off you”. It was like an Irish drinking song.
I couldn’t hear her talking between songs (and that’s my favorite part) so I said, “louder”. I was standing next to Dick Storms and he seconded my suggestion, “This is an older crowd. We’re all deaf in here.”
I went up to Julia on her break and waited for an opening to say hi. She was surrounded by admirers. I said, “Hi Julia. I just thought I would say hi. I’m Paul” and she looked at me and smiled sarcastically sweet and went on talking to her friends. I had to interrupt her again to say, “Paul from the website.” And she asked if Debbie was around but she meant Peggi. So we met. We love Julia.
Rich and Andrea gave me a green, long sleeve t-shirt that had “Treehugger” written on the front. I wore it to Abeline on Olga’s birthday. Bobby Henrie & The Goners were playing. I was talking to Hermie from the Bug Jar and some guy came up to me and said, “You don’t have to wear that shirt. I could have spotted you a mile away”. He laughed and I laughed but it seemed kind of odd. And then a woman standing nearby said, “I am a treehugger. Have you ever hugged a tree?” I said no but I actually have. It was in jest but I remember the feeling.
When we were at Peggi’s high school reunion a few weeks ago two people told us we looked organic. This seemed sort of odd to us. We had never heard anyone refer to people as “organic”. Peggi wondered if it was the lack of hair dye or make-up and I thought maybe it was my shirt not being tucked in. But we really have no idea.
We finished our stone wall this evening. We started this project back in May. A few weeks went by when we were unable to get out there but it was a bigger project than we realized. Fitting the stones so they don’t wobble, keeping the two over one and one over two rule in mind, checking the level from time to time and just lifting these things only to find one in every five or so fit was a lot. It kind of looks like a mad man did it. But hey, it’s organic.
Peggi, Ornette, Stella and racks in the back yardv
I checked the link in Andrea’s comment to my “demand destruction” post (below) and found the grizzly pope talking the same thread. “Pope Benedict XVI says insatiable consumption scarring planet”. So I guess I’ll give that a rest and let him bang his head against the wall.
We kind of played hooky today and didn’t do all that much 4D activity. We worked on our stone wall project out back and then went down to the pool for a dip.
It is Peggi’s mom’s birthday so we scooped her up and brought her over to our house for dinner. Sparky stopped by and we sat on the deck for while. We sang Happy Birthday and Sparky launched right into a second verse that none of us had ever heard before. It had something to do with a thousand good cheers, a thousand beers, getting plastered and a line where he would have said bastard but he didn’t and everyone laughed instead. I had marinated chicken all afternoon and we cooked it in the backyard. Peggi made an angel food cake and put fresh strawberries on it with three candles and three little plastic ballerinas.
This all sounds pretty mundane and that’s the way we like it. In fact we were talking about tying to slow the summer down even more.
Peggi had a ball at her reunion and I had a ball watching her have one. “The Townsmen”, a band from her high school days, reunited for the affair. Peggi went to the Junior Prom with the lead singer. Mary, in the brown in the photo above, rides a Harley and told us about these ferries that cross the Saint Claire River at Algonac and Marine City. We stopped at Barnes & Noble in Royal Oak to buy a map of the Great Lakes and choose Marine City. It was an amazing experience. We found the ferry and drove right on it without stopping. They pulled up the gate behind us and we were pushing off in seconds. I still had the car running.
Customs was a breeze. We stopped and picked rasberries on the Canandian side. We drove through a section of Canada with working oil wells in the fields and then crossed into the states at Lewiston. Instead of the thruway we drove along Lake Ontario on Route 18 which has to be one of the prettiest roads in New York. The dreamy small towns all have inlets from the lake with boats slips and funky houses. We stopped in Olcott where they were packing up the rides from their summer carnival. The other side of the road is lined with fruit orchrds and the short little trees were laden with cherries.
We had a great time last night watching people set fires and blow things up. The bonfires were all in place when we arrived. Some guys in a Tiki Hut on the beach were serving drinks to people in pirate costumes while a steel band played. Rockets were already stuck in the sand and pointing out to sea (Canada). It was barely dark when the bonfires were lit. Most were soaked with fuel so they went up with a loud thud.
Fireworks packages were rigged to go off with the touch of a remote control. I photographed one such package with George Bush on it. I wish it was really him in there. Guys were running around with blow torches. They lit the Tiki Hut on fire. Debris was falling out of the air and you hardly see the stars with all the smoke. There was a boat out on the water playing disco music. People on the boat were dancing under a strobe light. The fireworks which were all made in China are illegal in New York State so they were probably bought in Pennsylvania. I was wearing goggles and earplugs and wondering exactly why this whole ritual was considered patriotic. I started asking people what they thought but realized I sounded like a real party pooper so I shut up.
Brian Peterson’s big photo downtown in the window of the former McCurdy’s building.
If you are downtown for the big blues concert tonight or the fireworks tomorrow take a look a the big photos in the windows of the empty storefronts. The one above was taken by Brian Peterson and we spotted a couple of people we know in the shot. That is Jeff Munson to the immediate left of the tree and and Dave Frenzel to his left. Dave Mahoney and I went to high school with Jeff and Dave Frenzel played percussion on “Low Riders”, a song Personal Effects wrote after Dave took us down to the Mission District in San Francisco.
We won’t be downtown tonight. We will be down at Conesius Lake for the annual “Ring of Fire”. Sounds pretty innocent and it was when I was going to camp down there at Camp Stella Maris. These days it is like Viet Nam. Most of the cottage owners have parties so the raods around the lake are jammed. We’ll be at at party for John Gilmore’s youngest who just graduated from high school. Quite a few of the owners try to outdo one another with their spectacular, illegal fireworks displays. Some guys spend upwards of ten grand. They try to blow up the lake. We watch. What could be more American than that?
