Dow down -504.48(-4.42%). That’s no big deal is it? I talked to Steve Hoy, our unofficial financial guy, and he thought some more banks would fall next. I was thinking we were at the bottom. Our official financial guy called from Merrill Lynch to “touch base”. Merrill was bought today by Bank of America so he wasn’t very reassuring. Maybe we should be panicking but I don’t really care enough to panic. I sticking with the “buying opportunity” picture.
I was up the ladder the other day when Bank of America called again “about our account”. How many times do you have to hang up on these guys before they leave you alone? Our home line is on the “Do not call” registry but those laws are apparently meaningless in India. I told this guy, “We don’t have an account with Bank of America and we don’t want one. What are you calling about?” And all he could say was, “Oh, I see what you mean”.
There must be something a little more exciting than painting a house. The rain they had forecast for today never came so we read about Sarah Palin in the Times and then painted the rest of the day. It was a perfect night for Marge’s, balmy and in the eighties at ten o’clock. Peggi and I each had a Red Stripe and stood out back on the beach.
Genny Beer poster at Marge’s in Seabreeze New York
O.J. never did take the stand in his murder trial so I must have grabbed this newsstand display in the civil trial. It says “Daily News” on it but we were in L.A. I remember spotting it n Westwood. While we were out there we visited the Mezzaluna, Nicole’s Brentwood condo and O.J.’s palace.
O.J was a local sensation when he played for the Buffalo Bills and it’s good to see him back in the news. Can’t think of anyone better to kick around during football season.
The sun never appeared today. In fact the five day forecast, as unreliable as that is, calls for rain on Saturday and Sunday and then on Monday we’re supposed to get the remnants of Ike. So we stuck close to our computers and got sort of caught up with our 4D work. I had time to sort photos that were still on my camera and found this one of the back of the house under the brush. That trim around the windows is now dark brown and I took the newspapers off tonight. We still have window trim, the doors and the porch to do when the rain stops.
I chased a couple of deer out the garden. They were eatting the tops off our tomato plants. I clapped my hands and yelled “hey” and they ran. One of them crashed into the fence but shook it off and ran. Peggi’s helping John Gilmore with his computer. He used this near government level “FileVault” encription on his files and then his “User” folder got corrupted. We were able to recue the files from his old system and we did an erase and install. John brought a fish fry over for us from Captain Jim’s in our old neighborhood. And he gave us a cd copy of the new Brian Wilsom album from vinyl.
If I lived anywhere near LA I would be at the Museum of Contemporary for the Marlene Dumas retrospective before it closes on September 22. I can hardly wait for the show to open in New York in December. I haven’t had time to paint on canvas in the last few months. All of my painting has been “en plen air”, on the house. But I have been thinking about painting and I am excited about getting back to it.
Marlene Dumas is great food for though. This quote is from a book of Marlene Dumas watercolors called “Wet Dreams”.
“For me watercolors used to be associated with failed artists (e.g. Hitler), retired politicians (e.g. Churchill) and Sunday painters. It was the most uncritical, non aggressive asexual thing to do. Then it’s image changed. Now everyone is doing it. Falling for this seductive, addictive medium, it’s hard to stop. Every little blob begs to be loved. It’s easy to drown in its sweet perfumes. So I try to raise the stakes. Increase resistance.
Unlike most painters, my watercolors, these days, are bigger than my paintings. A big mistake is better than a small one.”
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?
Tomatoes are at their peak here and it is time to celebrate them. Peggi made three pots of sauce yesterday. One had no jalapeño peppers and it is made to order for our neighbor, Leo. He has a fenced plot of land that he allows us to grow our own in. The fence keeps the deer out but a pesky rabbit kept getting at our plants. The basil, peppers and tomatoes in this picture all came from our garden.
We made calamari last night to bring to Rick and Monica’s as a first course. The trick to non chewy calamari, according to the fish guy at Wegman’s, is to boil it (water, lime/lemon, beer) no longer that 50 seconds and then get it on ice immediately. We did this and then divided it in six small dishes (the Spevaks were coming to dinner as well). I chilled some of the fresh tomato sauce and buried the calamari in it. It was fantastic.
The Spevaks brought an appetizer, stuffed jalapeños from their garden. And they brought a side dish of different kinds of tomatoes. They sliced up the green, yellow, red and plum colored tomatoes and drizzled some oil and vinegar on them. Both dishes were delicious. Rick, never one to be outdone in the kitchen, made a pasta, arugula and capers dish for the main course.
We cut of of work early today to continue painting our house and we took a break around two for a sandwich. Peggi had peanut butter and I had a tomato and onion sandwich. We both had some fresh tomato salsa.
We found this little plastic ball down in one of the creeks that we crossed while hiking in the woods. We kicked it home. Somebody has to rescue these things.
I like Apple’s WebKit and I heard that Google’s Chrome browser was based on it and Mozilla so I was excited to test drive it but I have to do that on my pc (or as Arpad calls it, my ‘shit pc”) because it is only available on Windows for now. Grrr
But pc people need some relief. What’s up with the wacky shoe store commercial with Bill Gates and Jerry Sienfeld? Our pc sits in the corner while we sit in front of our Mac machines. We only use it as a worst case scenario for previewing websites that we’re working on. Before I installed Chrome on the pc they wanted me to run Registry Mechanic. I did that and it found 122 problems that can’t be fixed with the free version. I have AdAware and AVG and Ad-Watch and Spyware Blaster running on the thing but no real virus protection. If it goes down, I’ll reinstall XP and a new browser. Chrome is up and running and looking pretty good. I love this browser cartoon.
Ran into Martin Edic last night. He is pretty much an expert on all things and he was telling us we should be using a roller to paint our house. Our neighbor told us that too but we like the brush. Our house is made out of concrete blocks and it was built right after WW2 so they are really cinder block and some of the surface is like moon rocks in some places.
I was wondering why I fell so out of it and the AP’s Ted Anthony laid it out. “Snowmobiles are good. NASCAR is very good. Football metaphors about God are better. “Sam’s Club Republicans” are the salt of the American earth. Hollywood, the media and academics are suspect at best, subversive at worst. Though not as bad as European ideas. And too much eloquence? That smacks of intellectualism, which smacks of elitism.”
We took a walk in the woods to clear the air and came across this message on a tree.
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.
Our neighbor, Jerod, rang the bell this morning because we were a half hour late for our our trip to the Penfield quarry. We needed to pick up more stone for the road repair on our street. We had a decent excuse. We were working at our 4D job. Peggi was on the line with support at company we are working with to host an image bank for the library.
We drove out to the stone quarry and filled up his pick-up truck with crushed stone. They have doubled their price out there and it is now $10 a load. Peggi and I did the shoveling and it took us about a half an hour to fill the truck.
Back at 4D we started work on a brochure with stock photos of women executives that Peggi picked out. And then we headed out to the side of the house to continue painting. The temperature of the water down at the pool was 74 and it felt great after all the manual labor.
I’m blogging from the convention and thinking of high school, not just because I heard that Jeff Munson was going to be at the Margaret Explosion gig tonight. He wasn’t. It was one of our best nights. They come out of nowhere.
I wish my friend, Charlie Coco was still alive. His minghia radar would have been going absolutely bonkers with Rudy Giuliani doing his Rupert Pupkin (“King of Comedy”)thing. And then Charlie would have outdone Rudy.
Sarah Palin reminded me of someone Dave Mahoney used to go out with in high school. She was kinda like Goldie Hawn.
In the mid seventies I worked for the Rochester Police Department in the plain clothes division. I’ve talked about before here so there will probably be some repetition. I was hired as a graphic artist and I had access to the mugshot files. In fact part of my job entailed making fliers of suspects and in some cases I was given these goofy composites. A detective met with someone who was a victim or witness and they put together this image that was made up of clear sheets with features printed on them. So the composite was a pile of plastic sheets paper clipped together.
I loved this job but they didn’t give me enough work. I brought the New Yorker to work. I was bored out of my mind. My doctor prescribed Valiums so I could relax but I didn’t really care for them. I skipped out to visit Brad Fox who worked as a guard in the county office building on Main Street. That’s the way it often is in the not for profit world.
I developed a fondness for mugshots and paint them in my spare time. I’m looking for better resources than the Crimestoppers page in the morning paper. Maybe I can get a part time job with Police Department.
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.”
Eric Ryan, Jann, Mary Alice in her Cocktail Hour pjs, Peggi and Ann in the HLC halls
I picked some near perfect tomatoes from the garden along with a handful of jalapeño peppers and made salsa to bring to the family gathering at my brother’s house. My sister-in-law told me it was ‘the best batch yet” and that got me singing that Captain Beefheart song. “We don’t have to suffer. We’re the best batch yet.”
There are five ingredients in my salsa – tomatoes, onion, jalapeños, fresh cilantro and lime juice. Each has a very important role and when the tomatoes are local, it really sings. I studied the salsa they served in the Yukatan to discern the proportions. It takes more cilantro than you would imagine.
It seems like half my family was born in August (my parents used the rythym method) so we celebrate all the August birthdays at once. Our niece’s boyfriend, Eric Ryan, brought the crossword puzzle from Newsday and it took the whole family to lick it. My youngest sister knew that Marie Osmond had a hit with “Paper Roses” and my father knew that “Sandy’s owner” was Little Orphan Annie. We could have used Peggi’s mom’s help as she is somewhat of a crossword puzzle ace but she wasn’t feeling well enough to come.
After the picnic, my other sister, her daughter and her boyfriend, and Peggi and I all stopped in to see Peggi’s mom. Peggi’s mom had her pink, “Cocktail Hour” pjs on. We took a short walk around the halls. My niece had broken her leg while walking her dog so she was on crutches and Peggi’s mom uses a walker. Our pace was so slow that Eric Ryan could read aloud from his magazine.
Margaret Explosion with Bernie Heveron on bass at the Village Gate Courtyard
Peggi sprung her mom from Highland Hospital yesterday afternoon and drove her to the Living Center next store to her apartment. She has to spend two weeks there for rehab in order to get strong enough to return to home.
Margaret Explosion had a gig at the Village Gate Courtyard and it was a beautiful night for it. Bernie Heveron played bass with us so it was Personal Effects again for the night so we did instrumental versions of “Big Man”, “Don’t Wake Me” and Bring Out The Jazz”. It was very casual gig. I got up to take this shot in the middle of a song. Rick Simpson and his buddies juggled fire during our break. Gary Trainer from the Atomic Swindlers was there and Scott from Watkins and the Rapiers. John Gilmore picked up a pizza from Nino’s and brought it back to the house. Bob Mahoney, Bill and Geri and Jeff and Mary Kaye all stopped by. We watched Peggi’s movies from the tractor pull in Pike.
We did some 4D business this morning and then headed out to the backyard to continue preparing the house for its new coat of paint. That meant scraping and sanding the trim around the windows in our living room so I spent most the afternoon up on the ladder. We had the windows open and iTunes cranking so time flew. We took a brake to swim down the street and then got back to work. We thawed some homemade spaghetti sauce from last year for dinner and headed out to visit Peggi’s mom in her new room. She was out walking the halls when we got there. I was happy to find a healthy wifi signal and posted this from there.
Labor Day weekend always signals a sense of panic for me. We were going to take a sail on the big catamaran that’s docked down by the river. I think it’s called “Wild Hearts”. We were going to paint our house this summer and it’s only half done. We talked of taking a vacation but that didn’t really materialize. I was going to rework the Refrigerator so at least I can find stuff. I was reminded of that item last night when someone sent this.
Subject: whoever does this site…
You’re a f**king GENIUS man!!!! I absolutely LOVE the refrigerator.
I used to live in Rochester and after 16 politically correct, yuppy, whitebread years living in Seattle – I’m still homesick. Great stuff. Thanks!
Katherine
And we definitely didn’t spend enough time down at the pool. So where did the summer go? I know you are supposed to take time off from labor this weekend but I feel like I have to work to get caught up.
They really knew how to torture you in high school. Sitting in a room after school with nothing to do was about as bad as it got. Looks like I tried skipping detention and got another slip for cutting detention. I found a few of the pink slips in my old yearbook along with this entry from Melinda Lasher.
“Paul, Next year you’ll probably major in Math right? Or maybe English. (I must have been in those two classes with her) Course it wasn’t too bad for you ’cause you never even came. I never saw someone get away with skipping as much as you.”
Peggi and I were having a nice dinner, an exact repeat of the night before, when I realized that I had to be at a high school reunion meeting in two minutes. I grabbed the badges that I had been working on and drove fast over the Bay Bridge and down to the lake to the classmate’s house. This was supposed to be the last meeting but nobody showed up except me and another woman with a Lilydale (New York State Spiritualist community) t-shirt on. The three of us didn’t exactly finish our business.
We had nominated the three guys that weren’t at our last meeting to be the MCs but then they didn’t show up at this meeting either so they won’t even know that they are the MCs until they show up at the reunion. And of course there won’t be any sort of program to officiate and there probably won’t even be a PA unless the VFW has one lying around. It will all be fine though as as long as the DJ that we hired isn’t too loud or some sort of creep. Bob Brenna and I were the MCs of our high school talent show and I ad libbed most of that. I just recommended Bob’s lawyering services to my sister who was unfairly fired from her job. Bob recommended another lawyer. I had the lead in a high school play too and I fumbled some lines so badly that I shot us all into the next act. We had too do some serious ad lib backpedaling to get straightened out. Laurice Densmore was the female lead and she will be at the reunion. I’m looking forward to seeing her.
Even though I was running late for the meeting I stopped at my brother’s house. I couldn’t just drive by. He was in the middle of dinner, two burnt hot dogs and a bag of potato chips that he was dipping in applesauce. Sounds like something I would like. He pointed to the ashtray on the table and said he had started smoking again because his ex-wife was squeezing him for more money. I told him that wasn’t a good enough reason. When I got to the meeting the host’s husband was working out in the garage with the radio on. He looked really happy. After the meeting he showed me his human skull. He works at Ward’s Scientific. I told him I would like to have one of those.
When I got back home Peggi was on the phone with her mom who had fallen and hit her head. Peggi was preparing to head out to her mom’s apartment and she’ll probably spend the night there. When she got there she reminded her mom of the question the emergency doctor asked her the last time she fell. “Remember mom, the doctor said, ‘What’s your name? And you said?” Peggi’s mom didn’t remember at first but then said, “Puddin’ Tane. Puddin’ Tane. Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same”. She’s gonna be all right.
