People who don’t host their own blogs have it easy. Blogger or Blogspot or WordPress or whoever it is that hosts the sites take care of keeping the thing up to date. I have to do it myself and I always worry that I’m going to lose the whole site during an upgrade.
Peggi installed the Akismet spam filter plugin on the Scorgies site it really works so this morning before coffee she decided to install it on Popwars. At the same time she did the WordPress Automatic Upgrade to 2.6.1. Went pretty smoothly until I tried to login to my own blog. I applied for a new password and that didn’t work. I could comment on my posts but I could not login. I pictured myself forever commenting on my Rolling Stones post. Peggi did battle and determined that the wp-login.php file apparently got corrupted.
Sometimes, when I want to get to my blog, I type PopWars in Google and then click on the link it finds. There is a skate board company out there with the name but I got there first. Today I noticed a “Britpop” tag next to the return on the Google page. I think it has something to do with the StumbleUpon add on I use in Firefox. There is another Paul Dodd too. He’s England’s number one soccer hooligan. Not sure how I got labeled Britpop but I thought I would go with it.
“All sold out. Well I felt so free. It was just like that. I was put down flat.” I think the Stones may have reached their zenith with “Between The Buttons”. This album still sounds wildy adventurous to me and I am old enough to remember the Stones doing a song off this lp with cleaned up lyrics on the Ed Sullivan show. I love the cover photo and Charlie’s drawings on the sleeve. It’s more pop than blues and I think Brian Jones had a lot to do with it. And I love Charlie’s drawings on the sleeve.
Ruby Tuesday was ok but All Sold Out, My Obsession and She Smiled Sweetly should have all been hits. Can we go back and do it again?
We hadn’t quite finished the paper this morning when the gears switched and we got into home repair mode. Could there a more boring topic for a blog entry? I had built this temporary form for the bowed concrete block sill under the windows in our kitchen and today I planned on applying concrete patch to try and restore the crisp corners that had worn away over the years. The two by fours propped up on the bottom of the ledge will serve as support for the wet concrete. This sill actually continues all the way around our concrete block house as a decorative accent. We have over hangs that are four feet wide and they shelter most of the house from the elments but this one section where the window is bumped out gets a lot of weather.
I needed more of the patch product so that meant another trip to our second home, Home Depot, and once I finish this concrete repair we will start painting. So that meant a stop at Mayer’s Hardware for Benjamin Moore paint. I tried to check their Sunday hours online but I got a Google warning, the first time I seen one of these.
“Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer! Of the 3 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 3 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 08/19/2008, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 08/19/2008.”
When we got to the store we asked,”What’s going on with your website?”. The girl behind the counter shrugged and and asked the other two workers, “Do you guys know know anything about the website?”. One of the other workers said, “I’ve never been there” They were nonplussed to say the least. But they had the New York Times at the counter so we continued where we left off while they filled our order.
Tumil at Durand Eastman Beach performing with Joe plus N
We rode our bikes down to Durand Eastman beach this afternoon to catch Joe Tunis as Joe+N at his fifth of six stops on his ninth annual day tour. He is seen here performing with his band Tumul. Cameron (on the left with the Miami Vice t-shirt) has real hair. Joe does too but his is short. The wig came out about a third of the way through their set. That’s Chris Reeg from the Blood and Bone Orchestra on the ground with the camera. The two bikes in this shot are ours. Cameron said he likes hiding behind stuff. The amps are battery operated. Joe from Nod was there. He told us he’s eating at Pasta Villa tonight. Bathers were just behind the bushes and there was a kid yelling for ice cream. His pleas were picked up on and sampled and looped.
A lot of the companies that we do website work for would die for the kind of traffic Julia Nunes gets. We have been trying to keep up with her by joining her YouTube channel so we get notified when she posts a new video. And then we get the embed source and put it on the front page of her website. But by the time we get to YouTube she has already had 20,000 views. Some of her videos have over a million plays.
Today she asked us to put a jpeg of her new cd on the site with a “Pre-order now and get an autographed copy” head. We did that and some work for another client and and then went down to the pool for a half hour or so. We came back to frantic emails and calls on both lines. We assumed the cd was ten dollars like her previous one but this one is more and they were getting swapped with orders already. How do you get swamped in a half hour?
I just spent most of this evening digging up Paper Faces memories to do an entry on the Scorgies site. I was signed in as Peggi, the administrator, so looks it like she wrote it. She is proofing it now on another machine.
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 kept us up til two last night or maybe we kept them up. I don’t remember. They left Rochester this morning with their new laptop and my old Kodak digital camera. They should be able to generate enough solar power up there to keep these two electronic devices going in the woods.
Peggi and I met the other members of Margaret Explosion at the Little Theater at noon. We were asked to be a prop for a photo in the cafe that will be used in an upcoming brochure. Were played a few improvisations while they set up the shot and then started talking about the upcoming Scorgies Reunion. We tried acoustic versions of Personal Effects songs, “Zeke’s Baby Girl”, “I Had Everything”, “Baby, Baby”, “Bring Out The Jazz” and one where Bob was playing “Porch” and Peggi was playing “Fascinating Game”. Ken didn’t really know the songs but he sounded great. It was the first time we had done these songs in twenty years or so.
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.
We had dinner with Alice and Julio on and learned that Alice was geared up to paint but was having too much fun in the garden to get to it yet. Dinner conversation led to a topic that required the assistance of our laptop. And of course that led to other online topics. Julio had me type in their address on Google maps and we looked at a street view of their house. Alice led me down their street with the little arrows and we turned the corner to find two people walking on the sidewalk in front of a neighbor’s house. It was Alice and Julio out for a walk last summer.
Saturday morning we were reading on our deck, eating cherries and delaying the day’s planned activity, power washing the house. I came in to check email and there was one from Jeff Munson telling us that he had just talked Mary Kaye into driving down to Pike at the bottom of the state for the last day of the Wyoming County Fair. He asked if we wanted to ride along with them. I emailed back that we were on.
We had hoped to see the prize winning animals, our favorite part, but they were mostly all headed home after spending the week at the fairgrounds. We did see some goats, pigs and cows. This is the heart of New York farm country and there were a lot of vendors selling wood stoves, cow milking machines, four wheel drive vehicles, dirt bikes, big farm equipment,huge tractors and “The World’s Fastest Lawnmower”.
We saw women in period dress weaving on old looms and baking in brick ovens. We walked around the midway and rode on the Ferris wheel. A lot of people were wearing t-shirts that made statements like, “I Won’t Lower My Standards To Raise Yours”. And one guy had a red t-shirt on that asked a question that puzzled me at first? “Does This Match My Neck?” Peggi explained it.
We felt like we had done it all and were set to leave when tractor pull satrted. It was ten bucks to get in and we didn’t even know what it was but we went for it. That’s another story. I grabbed a few photos and will sort them out.
On Sunday we borrowed our neighbor’s power washer and hooked the gasoline fired machine up to our garden hose to blast our house clean. It’s now ready to paint. Rick and Monica were doing yard work as well and they invited us over for dinner. We ate on their back porch and then watched Hellboy from Netflix. I fell asleep.
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.
After finishing work at 4D we drove to my parents house to help my father trim the shrubs in their backyard. They have grown to about ten feet high and I did the job with my father’s three legged wooden ladder. On the side of it it says, “This ladder is designed for use in orchards”. I worked my way around the row of bushes and was almost done when I cut into a wasp’s nest. I got stung on my head and on my wrist and almost cut the electric cord jumping off the ladder.
We left there and headed out to Peggi’s mom’s apartment where we had dinner in our favorite restaurant, Le Petite Bistro”. As we sat down to dinner an instrumental, easy listening rendition of “And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like, I love you” was playing. But forget about making reservations here, it is open only to residents and their guests.
Peggi’s mom still gets the Wall Street Journal but barely reads it. I glance at the rabid right wing editorials and usually find a few interesting articles. Today there was one about the guy who invented the Captcha system (Completely Automated Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). I am really glad to know there is such a test. I get them confused all the time. Clusters of letters are distorted and presented for you to tell the computer what you see in order to prove that you are a human. Sometimes it takes me three tries to get it right so I am contributing my share of the estimated 500,000 hours a day (I had no idea there were that many hours in a day) that people spend solving these inane security clearance issues.
This guy has developed a new version, called ReCaptcha, that puts those hours to good use. Most people have used OCR software. I use this package that came with the free Canon printer/scanner/fax I got with the last Mac we bought. Today I scanned an old article on Scorgies that Bob Martin’s father left behind when he passed away. Bob photographed the twenty five year old article and I OCRed it rather than typing it. There were many words that looked like cartoon swearing so I had to go back to the photo to make a human call on what the word was supposed to be.
Google and other companies have been scanning printed books from the pre-computer age and they plan to put them online someday but their OCR software has the same problem as mine especially with books that are over a century old. And paying humans to make all these judgement calls is very expensive. So ReCaptcha funnels scans of the words that the software is stumbling over to the online companies that need the captcha service and it has people like us make the human call on what the word is. Others have already guessed at the same word and if a certain number of people all agree what the word is, they settle the issue. The system doesn’t sound exactly foolproof to me but I love the concept. Our security hassles will be worthwhile for future generations.
My friend (and neighbor) Rick, is always ready to play. Horseshoes, pool, fishing, those sorts of things. Our 90 year old neighbor Leo, a workaholic, says, “He really knows how to live”. Rick teaches school so summer is party time. He caught some striped bass in Maine, brought them home frozen and invited us over for dinner. Rick is a great cook too except his gas grill ran out of gas before the fish was cooked. He didn’t miss a beat and moved the fish to the oven. It was delicious. Rick had a few glasses of wine at dinner so I challenged him to a game of pool thinking I could whip his ass for a change. We played three games of 8 Ball and Rick won all three.
New Math performing at the Orange Monkey in 1977. Robert Slide – bass, Gary Trainer – guitar, Paul Dodd – drums, Kevin Patrick – vocals, Dale Mincey – guitar
Tom Kohn from the Bop Shop asked 4D Advertising to develop a site for Scorgies, the old rock and roll club on Andrews Street. He is planning a reunion for November 21 at the German House and he wanted people to be able to share their memories of the place and the many bands that played there. I wrote this short little piece to to kick off the blog on that site and I’m throwing it up here to encourage people to contribute to the site.
Don Scorgie is obviously the key figure in this whole story but probably not in the way you might think. I don’t think he was much of a music fan at least not like I am or most of you are. When I first met him he was behind the bar at street level on Andrews Street. And that fact that he was on that side of the bar had nothing to do with who was doing the drinking.
I was playing drums with New Math at the time and we rehearsed around the corner in the Cox Building on Saint Paul. Geoff Wilson from the Bowery Boys was the elevator operator in this building in later years but it was pretty much deserted when we moved in. We got in the habit of stopping in Don’s place after practice for beer. I never drank too many because I had to ride my bike back home.
Don was sort of an old salt like Popeye the Sailor man. Being next to the river he had nautical theme going with rope railings and a fish net hanging from the ceiling that was just beginning to collect the Spanish moss style dust clusters that became such a fixture here. The guy who rented him the juke box when he opened this place was probably the one who picked out the 45s. It was just generic mid seventies crap. I think Kevin Patrick, who was working as record promo guy at the time, talked Don into stocking the juke box with the good stuff. In later years, it seems Danny Deutsch, who now runs Abilene, was in charge of the tunes and at some point it seemed like every time you walked into that place you heard Bobby Darin’s “Mack The Knife”. But it wasn’t Don calling the musical shots.
One night after rehearsal Don took us down to the basement at Scorgies where he had just installed the first section of green indoor outdoor carpeting on the step up section next to the bar. It was the first time we had set foot in what people think of as Scorgies. He had a few picnic benches down there and he told us he was planning on setting up an indoor putting green. This was going to get people down in the basement of a century old building? We laughed at the idea.
I remember us, and it was probably Kevin doing most of the talking, trying to convince Don that what he had here, an empty room with no chairs or tables, was the perfect rock and roll club. All he needed was a stage and a sound system. So Don built the plywood stage and he eventually rented a sound system from Mark Theobald. Mark mixed the bands if they didn’t have their own guy. New Math was the first band to play here but I had already left the band at that point and was playing with the Hi-Techs.
This is just the way I remember it. That doesn’t mean this is really the way it went down.
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.”
Poster for HI-Techs and Prestones at Scorgies in Rochester, New York on 04.07.1981
There’s a Press Tones show tonight at Abilene. I don’t think we will make it but you never know. We are headed over to Bill and Geri’s to see the progress they have made on their tiled house. I see a lot of people cover their original wood siding with aluminum but not Bill and Geri. They have been slowly applying all shapes and sizes of colorful tile to the side of their house.
We worked on the Scorgie’s site for Tom Kohn today. Tom is planning a Scorgies Reunion show at the German House in November with some of the bands that used to play there. New Math, Personal Effects, Absolute Grey and The Press Tones are on the bill. We have been setting up a site for Tom that will hopefully run itself. People should be able to post stories, pictures, posters, mp3 files and videos to the site without 4D Advertising wrestling with all the little pieces.
Today we spent a good bit of the day getting this slideshow script to automatically size and post thumbnails without distorting them and also size and post larger files that can viewed in a Lightbox slide show. The Press Tones sent in a poster from one of their gigs that was actually a poster that I made for our band, The Hi-Techs. We played this date with them opening. I hadn’t seen ithe poster in a while.
Holy Trinity basketball team, mid sixties. l. to r. Paul Dodd, Alfred Williams, Jim Schneider, Albert Williams, Jim McClellan, Russ Minor’s older brother, Bernie Finch
Dodd, Williams, Schneider, Williams, McClellan, Minor and Finch playing for Holy Trinity basketball team.
I made a birthday card for my mom today and I went rummaging through a bunch of old photos to find one to use on her card. I found one of her working as a cashier in my uncle’s (her brother) grocery store and I scanned it for her card. I did a painting a long time ago of my uncle in his store. I worked there too although never on the cash register. I was a stock boy. I used to take cream pies into the cooler and eat them when he left the store. He came back one time and caught me sitting on top the milk crates holding a whole banana cream pie up to mouth.
I also came across this old photo of the Holy Trinity basketball team from about that same time period. I looked as geeky as these basketball players. I had to do some rumaging to find both of the painting links in this entry. They are old paintings and there is no logical internet route to them anymore other than typing the url. I’ve gotten in the habit of breaking the links to old stuff but leaving it out there, online for times like this.
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.
