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Tree Stuff & Lightning

Mist on one of the ponds in Durand Eastman Park
Mist on one of the ponds in Durand Eastman Park

Steve Lippincott who runs the EarCandy Archive in Portland is doing a profile of Rochester bands in the eighties so I spent some time this weekend putting together cd versions of a few of Personal Effect’s old albums for him. We did a compilation in November for the Scorgies reunion but that was just a smattering of songs from the various vinyl releases.

Bob Martin carved out the perfect bass boast eq curve for the songs from “90 Days in the Planetarium” lp and I wanted to use it on the whole cd but I couldn’t fine the settings in CuBase. I called Bob and he had me set up an AIM account so he could take control of my computer from his house. While we were on the phone I watched as he searched my computer for the old files and set me up through iChat.

Joe Sorriero emailed us and asked if we wanted to do gig with Nod at the Bug Jar. It sounded like fun so I replied without much thought and then mentioned the gig to Peggi. She read the email and pointed out that Joe was asking “Personal Effects” to play. I didn’t catch that. I thought he was asking “Margaret Explosion” to play with them since we had recently played together together at Abilene. I guess we could handle it.

I digitized all our cds and and I rely on the mp3 tags for liner notes but this song that Peggi and I have fallen in love with was only marked “nod4”. So I dug out all the cds and spot checked the songs trying to identify this thing. I finally determined it is from their most recent cd entitled, “Tree Stuff & Lightning”. I think Chris Schepp gave me a copy of it before it was released so never got the right tags. Peggi wants the lyrics to this so I thought I would post it here and see what happens.

“World Still Wants You” by Nod from “Tree Stuff & Lightning”.

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Live Rules

Ossia performing at Kilbourn Hall in March 2009
Ossia performing at Kilbourn Hall in March 2009

Ossia, the Eastman School of Music’s student run, new music ensemble had their last event of the season on Friday night at Kilbourn Hall. You can’t beat this free admission ticket to wide open, experimental soundscapes. The pieces by five different composers on last night’s bill were as varied as you can imagine and hold out boundless promise for new music performed by classically trained musicians.

The second half of the program was devoted to the third, second and first place winners of Ossia’s International Composition Prize. I liked the third place, “die nacht war kalt” by Daniel Tacke the best. The piece with soprano voice, clarinet, cello and piano reached new heights of sparse and used the air in the arrangement to sculpt an environment where our heartbeats slowed and our minds opened wide.

One of the earlier pieces on the program by Luigi Nono called for a piano player to accompany a prerecorded piano track which was played on a laptop through speakers set up behind the piano. I found it tedious but it demonstrated the wide gulf between live sound in a good hall, and the acoustics Kilbourn are as good as it gets, and a state of the art recording.

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King of Beers Lives Here

Budweiser can and golf ball
Budweiser can and golf ball

In a sure sign of Spring they have put the flags up on Durand’s golf course. Beer and golf are really made for each other. We came home with a ball that we picked up as we crossed the course and a can that we found along the road.

I did the math. These big cans of Budweiser are equivalent of two 12 ounce cans. And they are not the sort of thing that comes in six packs or cases. In fact the only way you can buy these giant cans is singularly (or in groups of single cans). Beer sold singularly in a 24 ounce can is marketed to people who are not taking it home for later. And once you open a can you pretty much have to drink the whole thing. So that leaves two types of beer buyers. Kids, who we first thought were responsible for tossing all these empties on one of our hiking routes, fit this profile but so does an alcoholic who doesn’t want to bring the beer home to his wife or get caught with it in his car. The later is our neighbor’s theory and he told us who he suspects.

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Peaceable Kingdom

Turkey crosses our path in the woods
Turkey crosses our path in the woods

Deer are perfectly camouflaged in this gray brown landscape but something got a hold of one in the woods last night. We came across clumps of deer hair still attached to hunks of skin. And further up the path we saw some shit that didn’t look like it came from a dog or a deer shit because that looks like chocolate covered coffee beans and it wasn’t from a turkey because that looks like little blobs of dark pudding. We watched a coyote slink across an opening the other day and we were wondering if they might bother the deer. Our cat is not camouflaged (unless it’s snowing) and I hope they stay away from her.

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Doris Day On Acid

Dave Liebman Trio at the Bop Shop in Rochester, NY
Dave Liebman Trio at the Bop Shop in Rochester, NY

Dave Liebman played sax on Miles Davis’s “On the Corner”, “Big Fun”, “Dark Magus”, and “Get Up With It”, my favorite Miles stuff. The guy is amazing. He’s been here twice at the Jazz Fest. We saw both shows at Montage last year and we bought his DVD. Last night he played at the Bop Shop in what was billed as a “classic organ trio setting”. Paul Smoker, Bill Dobbins and all the local jazz celebrities were out.

Phil Haynes, who we have heard a few times with Paul Smoker, played drums and Steve Adams played a Hammond B3. They played all standards and opened with “The Night Has A Thousand Eyes”. Dave was playing a wooden flute, The organ player held on extremely long fuzzy note and the drums sounded beautiful. Phil Haynes plays with his bare hands, he scratches the top surface of his cymbals with the butt end of his sticks and looks like he is conducting the music with his facial expressions and whole body. He plays “Ayotte” drums with wooden rims and they are the best sounding drums I have ever heard. They sounded especially nice in this bass player less setting.

Dave played one song that Doris Day had popularized and when someone snickered as he introduced it Dave said, “Don’t undercut Doris. She was right there with Sly back in the day.” we weren’t sure if we heard him right so after the show Peggi and I asked him after the show if said’ “Sly”. He said, Oh yeah. She was right there, hanging with Sly, doing LSD, the whole trip.

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Yeah, But It’s Cold

Hoffman Road work, Irondequiot, New York
Hoffman Road work, Irondequiot, New York

I met Monica this morning out by the mailboxes as I was grabbing the soon-to-be-extinct newspaper and she was heading off to work. She rolled down her window and said “Isn’t this a beautiful day?” Before I could say “yes” she continued, “I say that to people and they say, ‘Yeah, but it’s cold’ “.

I’ve talked before about the beautiful color of everything this time of year. Only a few early flowers are up and the buds have not popped on the trees and it has hardly rained in a while so there is very little green.

At first it bugged me that the town left these cones and black plastic here all winter. But I’m realizing that I am attracted to these construction sites at the same time as I am repulsed by the need to constantly mess with nature. In this case a housing project that the town allowed to go forward not only leveled the woods but altered the drainage and overloaded this low lying area so that it is now a certified wetland. They spent most of last Fall raising the level of this road so it will stay above water in the Spring. Just a little further up Hoffman Road from here is where we find most of the big Bud cans.

Anyway the cones look great against our gray brown world and I’m savoring it. I’m starting to think that these people at the Town are more creative than I give them credit for being. I’ve also noticed that I’ve been looking at the stuff in Home Depot like it’s all art supplies. I think they even sell these cones.

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Ladies Choice

Paul Dodd "Crime Face 46" 2009
Paul Dodd “Crime Face 46” 2009


Paul Dodd “Crime Face 46” detail. Click photo for full painting.

I was preparing an online submission of a group of paintings to a show and I was trying to chose which paintings to feature as details. Naturally I turned to Peggi for her expert opinion. I had a few guys open on my monitor and she said. “Well I have already told you which one I like the best”. And of course it is the one I have featured up top but I hadn’t shot it yet. So I set up my Lowel lights tonight and shot her and few others.

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Public Fruit

Public Fruit
Public Fruit

On a beautiful Sunday afternoon we watched the gallery assistant pull the shades at Rochester Contemporary so we could see the PowerPoint display on LA’s cornfield project. L.A.-based writer artist and curator Janet Owen Driggs from the Metabolic Studio, a charitable activity of the Annenberg Foundation, discussed our roles as industrial eaters and the new art movement toward not bullying nature. Her slides took us from Donald Judd’s aluminum boxes to Robert Smithson’s beautiful earth art to the political ramifications of public fruit. Janet used to paint but has turned her energy toward Edible Estates and Fallen Fruit and Islands of LA.

We stopped at Home Depot on the way home and bought a bunch of seeds for the garden.

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Loud Rules

Science Fair at Brighton Middle School in Rochester, New York
Science Fair at Brighton Middle School in Rochester, New York

Two of our nephews each had horn solos in their band concert at Brighton Middle School so we had to be there. Their younger brother plays horn too and the three of them have a band called “Rubber Chicken”. The band concert was great but the Science Fair going on upstairs was something else. Both nephews had exhibits. The youngest demonstrated a method for collecting static electricity. The oldest determined which method worked best for getting gum off your show. Burning it off, freezing it so it cracks off and squirting DW40 on the shoe were all explored and the DW40 worked best.

Other kids examined which sandwich bags would keep bread from molding longer and which cleaning product got the dirt off their gym socks. For some reason three separate kids examined colored candles to see which one burns the fastest. Probably because they got to play with fire. One kid studied toilet paper and declred “37 per cent of the people in the US use Wegman’s brand.  but our favorite was the experiment to determine whether plants grew faster with loud music , soft music or no music. The kid declared that soft music was the best but the graph that he produced showed that the plant exposed to loud music grew the fastest. That was a good part of the fun, shooting holes in their “controlled studies ” and reading their “conclusions”.

Last night we watched Let The Right One, a really cool Scandinavian movie about kids the same age as our nephews except these kids were vampires.

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I Would Rather Be Sailing

Virtual business card for 4D Advertising
Virtual business card for 4D Advertising

I had a meeting today with a client at his office. He showed me his logo and then explained that it is not intended to be an oval. His flat panel monitor was distorting everything he looks at by a long shot, even the picture of his son that used as his wallpaper. He asked me if I could remedy the situation so there I was duking it out with his clunky Windows pc.

This afternoon my father sent me this Word doc that he had spent most of the day on. It was given to him by a pc user and he added a bunch of stuff and sent it back but the guy wasn’t able to open the file. All I had to do add the “.doc” suffix to the file name and send it back. You’d think a Windows machine would recognize a Word doc.

A friend of ours programs data bases for web sites and he laughingly told us that he just stopped previewing his sites in Explorer. He said the people who use that program are idiots and he doesn’t care about them. I was reading a bad review of Explorer 8 today and they had a link to stats that showed two thirds of all web users use IE. That’s a lot of idiots. The economy would get a real sot in the arm if all web developers could quit wasting time with IE workarounds.

I was reading about the new system for the iPhone and Touch and an app for them that will allow users to see other users on the same network and exchange virtual business and it reminded me that we haven’t done new business cards since we moved. We have been using the “we just moved” excuse for four years now. We had some business cards printed online for a client they came out great. They offer rounded corners too. So I spent some time today playing with the 4D Advertising logo. I love coming up with logos and haven’t done one in a while.

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Matisse Is The Master

Maureen Outlaw painting 2009
Maureen Outlaw painting 2009

We had our last painting class at the Creative Workshop last night, last one until the Spring session starts in three weeks. I had my camera with me and I grabbed this shot of Maureen’s painting. She stands next to me in class and it is really fun to watch her paint. She works really fast and has a good time doing it. I try to work fast but spin my wheels and I’m not sure I’m having a good time.

I checked out a Matisse book from the downtown library and I don’t want to give it back. I had a hunch that it would help me with my ongoing problems. That is: drawing ears and noses on faces when the sitter (or mugshot in my case) is facing head on. Matisse does this better than anyone and he makes it look so easy. His drawings are so much fun to look at!

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Reaping Corruption

House on the way to Shamrock Jack' in Irondequoit, NY
House on the way to Shamrock Jack’ in Irondequoit, NY

When we lived in the City we got in the habit of walking to the corner to Carrol’s bar for a corned beef sandwich and pint on Saint Patty’s Day. They had bag pipe players and the Pogues on the juke box. The closest Irish bar to our new local is Shamrock Jacks. To get there we walk through the woods and through a neighborhood of funky Bloomington style houses and then down Culver toward the lake. This was a sort of ominous message to read on the way to a bar.

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Off Road Computing

Woods Walking Movie

The ground is dry and the woods are pretty bare so we were able to do some exploring today. I think we were on a deer path. I took a short movie. Found a few Budweiser beer cans on the way home and ran into a neighbor who was out smoking a cigar. He had his own theory as to who has been doing all the drinking. He thinks his neighbor is pounding them on the way home and hiding the evidence from his wife by chucking them out the window of his car.

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Rocket Number Nine

Peggi's mom's chair
Peggi’s mom’s chair

We picked up Peggi’s mom and brought her over for dinner. This is a big adventure for her these days. I marinated some chicken and Peggi roasted brussels sprouts. Peggi made tapioca pudding for dessert and we watched Rene Fleming sing with the Metropolitan Opera on PBS while we ate. We discussed the origins of Tapioca, speculating that it might have come from China or Japan or maybe Korea, becoming popular during the Martin Deny, Tiki torch days. I asked Peggi’s mom if she remembered having it as a kid and she said she didn’t. She thought it might be an Irish thing. On the way home she informed us that she really doesn’t have any sense of direction any more.

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Simple Truth Ministries

Method Machine presents EDGE by Paul Alexander with Marcy J Savastano as Sylvia Plath
Method Machine presents EDGE by Paul Alexander with Marcy J Savastano as Sylvia Plath

Olga took the afternoon off to help Doug Rice prepare for the opening of his funky new performance space, MuCCC. She called from the place, an old Baptist church, to make sure we were coming. We were still working and hadn’t thought about the evening yet. Then John Gilmore called and wondered what was up so we made plans to go to the opening with him. When John got here he found us out in the road helping our neighbor with his garden tractor. First time out this year and he had two flat tires.

John needed batteries for his new camera so first stop was Walgreens. Peggi and I stayed in the car and switched the radio station. Jamie’s Crying came on and we cranked it. All may not be right with the world but Van Halen still sounds good.

We stopped at a light and an egg yolk yellow Hummer was facing us. I know they’re hogs and all that but they are one cool lookin’, bad ass, military grade auto.

We passed the Playground Tavern and  Simple Truth Ministries and it occured to me that everything is all right with the world from the back seat of John Gilmore’s car.

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Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag

Alan Charlesworth Digital C-Prints at the Little Cafe
Alan Charlesworth Digital C-Prints at the Little Cafe

The art changes monthly at the Little Cafe and this month it is the employees who have the spotlight. I particularly liked these photos by one of the projectionists, Alan Charlesworth. Four kind of big guys just standing there in various settings.

Speaking of big guys, we took my parents out to Tony D’s for dinner tonight. We were celebrating my father’s birthday and I tried making reservations but they would only take them for parties of six or more. So we showed up and hung around the bar for about forty five minutes watching sports bloopers. We had a delicious calamari salad and greens and beans and my father picked a surprising spicy set of ingredients for goat cheese pizza. They were cranking the soul music in here. Good Times, Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag, Atomic Dog and Hot Chocolate’s You Sexy Thing all sounded great but it was almost impossible to hear each other and on the way home I noticed my mom was hoarse.

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Spring Cleaning

Photo of Paul painting taken by Peggi in 2000 with a Kodak 4800
Photo of Paul painting taken by Peggi in 2000 with a Kodak 4800

Some pretty good sized pieces of wood landed on our porch this morning and woke us up. It’s warm but it seemed too windy to walk in the woods without helmets so we stayed on the street. Peggi had the foresight to bring two plastic bags and we filled them both., one with deposit returns (mostly Budweiser products) and the other with plastic recyclables (mostly flask sized vodka bottles).

Rich Stim wrote that he liked it when I discussed my technical problems so here goes. I have two subtle spots on every picture I take with my Nikon P5100. A friend, Corrine, has 5100 too and she just had her lens replaced to correct the same problem. Mine is still under warranty but I am trying to decide whether the spots are bad enough to have to live without the camera for three weeks. The last camera I had was a Sony DSC V1 and it started eating my cards so that is sitting by the door on the way to the trash. Before that I had a Kodak 4800 and I was going to put that on eBay but it is probably worthless now. I was trying to determine if I could use it for the three weeks of downtime so I opened the first photo we took with it back in 2000 (above). It does have a 2×3 aspect ratio and I dig that.

Last week we recorded our Margaret Explosion gig with three new recorders that Bob Martin borrowed from Sound Source. They were a Korg MR1, a Tascam DR1 and a Tascam DR7. The Korg had some amazing stereo imaging but the DR1 sounded the most natural and the best to us. They all have built in mics and run on batteries. Tonight we are checking out a Zoom H-4N that Bob has picked up from the House of Guitars. It has a built in stereo mic and two mic inputs with phantom power so it records four tracks. Sounds amazing on paper.

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Horse of Course

Fifth grader's horse painting, Auburn New York
Fifth grader’s horse painting, Auburn New York

Fred Lipp, my painting teacher, has been trying to make me more aware of the different forms on the two sides of a head when the face is even slightly turned. Most of my recent paintings are mugshots and the photos I paint from were taken pretty much straight on but there is usually something I can pick up to make the structure more interesting. I working on that.

And then along come this painting of a horse by a fifth grader currently on view at the Shweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn. This girl made the dead-on sing.

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Grey or Gray Days

Auburn Sign

It is so beautiful this time of year when the snow disappears and the ground is a dusty brown. The trees without leaves are grey and the trunks turn black if it rains. Big trees take on Egon Schiele like expressions. We had little yellow flowers blooming out back last week before the snow melted. I did a Google search for first yellow flower in New York and I think I have identified them as Winter Aconite Eranthis hyemalis. With a little more rain most things will be green before we know it.

I came back with three new signs for the Signs Section and the one above is my favorite. On our way down to New York we got off the Thruway in Waterloo and drove through Auburn toward Skaneateles. We stopped for a bit in front of this sign because it required some thought to determine which way to turn. I am visually oriented and I really wanted to turn right for Auburn. I’m guessing the prisoners who make these signs for the state are only allowed to “justify” their type. It would be a lot easier to read if they could flush left or right.

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Man From Uncle

DJ from Eric Silvey Entertainment


One too many bar mitzvahs.

It was smooth sailing through the Poconos and on to Route 280 but then it all went wrong. We zoomed by our exit and saw signs for Newark so we got off and tried to turn around. We got back on but it was the wrong highway and we found ourselves heading north on I-95. The Manhatten skyline was receding behind us. We paid a toll and did a u-turn back through the Oranges and into Montclair just in time to drop our bags off at Dale (New Math) and Myrna’s (Human Switchboard) and get to the temple for a run though of the Hebrew chants. Except the cantor canceled the rehearsal because of a personal conflict so we returned to Dale’s and watched a black and white “Man From Uncle” show..

We did the service without rehearsal so I was on the Bima looking for the groove with a guitar player and the chanting cantor. Two kids were making their bar mitzvah today and there were about three hundred people here. The stained glass looked like it had been designed by a madman but my drum sounded great in the room. The young cantor was attending to her boisterous child while she waited for her partner to show up and she encouraged me to not be shy. She MC’d and juggled her parental duties while effortlessly leading us in ancient sounding songs like “Ma Tovu”, “Adon Olam”, “Kiibud Av Vahem” and “Tav L”hodot”.

The regular service ended and the bar mitzvah portion started. Our nephew offered a few possibilities for the meaning of the name of their temple as his bar mitzvah project. It translates as “Eternal Flame” and he made a good argument for taking on the responsibility of keeping it alight.

His parents got up and told a few stories about their son. I kept thinking of the scene in King of Comedy” where Rupert Pupkin listens to his grade school teacher toast him. Overall the ceremony was lackluster and fidgety with bursts of meaningfulnes. The party afterward was a blast. The kids had fun and we had fun watching the kids. My family chipped in to buy our nephew a Kindle.

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