I blew it

A local PBS radio person was reporting on the high winds this morning and urged me to “take a safer route to work.” Foolish me, here I was taking my normal route to work when I should have taken the Calm Corridor. Damn, I always forget that.

Opposable thumb

I went into the city tonight to hear a little music from Watkins and the Rapiers – one of my favorite local bands. These guys have a really unique take on music – they are their own band and beholding to no one, as they do mostly original stuff. They throw in the occasional cover –tonight it was The Band’s “It Makes No Difference”, a decades-long favorite of mine and without a doubt the best vocal performance of the late Rick Danko’s long and distinguished career as a singer – but mostly it’s music under the Rapier’s influence, no matter which of the members’ compositions they are playing. They don’t shoot for a highly polished sound, but that doesn't mean thay aren't accomplished, just loose. They go for a fun and almost frivolous feeling, and have lyrics with substance. Another really endearing quality of theirs is that they find a way to keep alive the stylings of The Colorblind James Experience, the trombone being a key element in that aspect of their sound. It was a good night and some close friends unexpectedly turned out, the kind of night that the local music scene cultivates repeatedly. I wish I could take advantage more often.

I left at a reasonable hour, and headed back home. I got off the expressway as I always do and as I buzzed on down the feeder road to my normal turnoff I saw a van alongside the road, pulled completely off the pavement onto the grass, in spite of an oversized curb. Flashers were going, and already dimming and slowing a bit, it seemed. I slowed way down myself to see if someone was in the van, but didn’t spot anyone, so I kept going. About a quarter mile further I blew by a lanky guy slogging along in the snowy grass off the highway, carrying what looked like a gas can. I did a quick stop and backed up to him, rolled down the window and asked him if that was his van back there? He said, in a disgusted voice, “yeah, that’s me.” I asked if he wanted a ride and he said “sure,” and jumped in. Right away he introduced himself and asked my name and stuck out his hand, and it was obvious from the handshake he did manual labor. He began thanking me profusely for stopping, and said that he lived just up the road, and that he was “in big trouble with his girl” because it was so late (it wasn’t even midnight yet). He continued, almost ad nauseum, to thank me for stopping, like he couldn’t believe someone would do that.

I started rambling about how when I was young, hitchhiking was a very common part of life. I was hitchhiking all over the place when I was just a very young teenager, and never thought twice about it. It was a perfect way to get around. Free, reliable, fun even. Weekdays after school to my buddy’s house, Friday night to a party, Saturday afternoon to a pickup football game. It didn’t matter, you started walking and put the thumb out. It wasn’t even really called hitchhiking – you’d call it thumbing a ride. And it always came through for you. It was a given. Old ladies would pick me up. Some people would go well out of their way to take me where I was going.

I thumbed out to Indiana, twice. Adventures, both times. Kinda like this, only without the breasts:

My own van broke down in Sioux Falls South Dakota and somewhere in central Oregon; both times the thumb got me to where I needed to go to get parts for the repairs. Each time, another bonus adventure ensued.

Around 1980 when I was going to school in Geneseo, I stayed late at school one night studying for a test. After midnight I walked to the edge of the village and stood under the last street light before the road led into the darkness of the country stretch between there and Avon to the north, where I lived. It was a cold night and I stood for nearly an hour and none of the handful of cars leaving town stopped. I started walking, thumb still out for any passersby, but nobody pulled over. I walked and walked and ended up hoofing the whole nine miles that night. That was one of the last times I hitchhiked.

I pulled into the lanky guy’s driveway and he hopped out, but not without thanking me one last time for “this Samaritan act,” as he called it. Kind of made me sad that something that should still be a normal part of life is pretty much gone. Thumbs down.

A wee hour encounter

Sitting at the kitchen counter, with the laptop, 1 AM. Headphones on, but no music at the moment, just a dim electronic hiss waiting to be upstaged by a song. I hear a muffled howl, like a dog of some sort. Annette must have the TV turned loud upstairs, I figure. She's sleeping, so I'll go turn it off, I figure. I get up, but the bedroom is dark - no TV. I hear the howl again, but much louder and clearer without the headphones on. I've heard it before so I bolt outside. Coyote.

We live in a village but we're on the fringe, and my yard backs up to a woodlot beyond which are some open fields that are loosely connected to other fields that are out in the country. I've seen one of the bastards in my backyard in daylight, which is disconcerting because I have a small dog who is perfect happy-meal size. I walked to the back of my yard to the edge of the woods to listen. This guy is just beyond the woodlot, in the row of pines alongside the small playground back there, maybe 200 ft. away. He seems to be alone. And he's fired up: bark bark howl, bark howl....bark bark bark howl. The moon is 80% full, wispy clouds running by, cold as the devil, crusty snow underfoot, long shadows from the trees on the silver ground. Real Hound of the Baskervilles stuff. He howls once more, but it sounds like a slightly different spot this time and it gave me one of those serious spine shivers. Then I hear leaves rustling like now he's moving in the woods, and closer. That's all I need to hear, and I hightail back inside.

I got that shiver once before in Canada, at Timberwolf Lake, early 70s. A several-day canoe trip deep into the woods, including portages up to a mile long. Me and Gilmore and I think one other guy. One of those trips where we really achieved that sense of isolation that we always went for back then. The moon was also big that night, it was calm, and a pack of wolves set to wailing for quite a while, and I'll never forget that scary-ass sound because it gave me that shiver. We went back to that lake years later hoping for a rerun but it was a windy night and we never heard the wolves.

When we first moved to this house, there was a pair of great horned owls that must have resided pretty close by because they'd hang around and hoot back and forth to each other every 3rd or 4th night. But they left after a couple of years and never came back. It was a nice county touch to our village setting that was too short-lived. So it's nice to hear something like a coyote once in a while, just to help offset the psychological impact of all the gigantic clear-cutting developments this town is fostering lately.

His presence don't befront me none, but he better leave my dog alone.

Buk

A typical night, after dinner, finds me once again on line. It starts with e-mail, then usually moves to a simple search for a song or band or some music-related tidbit. But inevitably it leads here, then there, then over there, and on and on until a simple desire to learn one thing finds me having already forgotten 13 things that I only just learned.

Such a thread tonight landed me on Charles Bukowski, the low-rent LA writer, poet, fighter and lifetime drunk. I was only fleetingly familiar with him (mostly via the movie Barfly, which he wrote, autobiographically, and I dug), but an hour of clicking and skimming has landed me now among the ranks of his admirers. That's the internet for you. Instant education, fascination, gratification. But I can see I'm a long way off from really getting what this guy was about. Kind of LA's answer to Burroughs, maybe, but who generally chose booze over heroin. Some people called him a Beat poet, but it doesn't look like there was any real connection between him and the Beats. He was fascinating, and a tough guy, but it still amazes me that somebody that led that hard of a life lasted to the age of 74, and it took leukemia to bring him down, not drink. His gravestone even reflects his persona a bit:

Burroughs', on the other hand, just alludes to his craft:

(image compliments of http://www.findagrave.com/)

Marge's

In November the small swing bridge over the outlet at the north end of Irondequoit bay, which is closed in favor of boat traffic all summer, is swung back to accommodate cars all winter. On any given winter night when I’m out and headed for home I generally pass up the big bridge over the bay and keep heading north in favor of the small bridge over the outlet. That brings me to the stop sign at the north end of the Sea Breeze Expressway, where one comes nearly face-to-face with Marge’s Lakeside Inn. Nine times out of ten I’ll turn right and head across the bridge into Webster. But on that tenth night, I pull over, park and head into Marge’s for a beer.

The owner Fran sits at the door, scrutinzing all flow of bodily traffic in and out of the place. Fran is a sizeable woman, wears a fake flower in her hair (think Lola at the Copacabana) and wields a big magnifying glass in her hand. All the better to read your ID with, my dear. If you don’t have gray hair, you get proofed. I walked in unchecked.

This is a tiny, tiny bar, so no matter where you park yourself, you are never very far from any other patron. Being on the beach, such as it is on Lake Ontario, I guess that dictates that the theme be tropical. The barroom is dressed up in a beach hut motif, with grass and palm fronds and bamboo in abundance. A 2-in diameter hemp rope lines the front edge of the bar; the rope and the bar surface are coated with a 1/4-inch thick layer of acrylic. A fishnet covers the ceiling behind the bar and contains all manner of knick-knacks. And if this isn’t enough to set the mood, Marge’s has gone the extra mile with lighting. Like the special orange lights that backlight the specially-arranged bottles filled with the specialty liquors. And a miniature mirror ball shoots tiny shards of light across the bamboo-covered ceiling. But my favorite effects are the few small and strategically-placed black lights. The black light is alive and well at Marge’s. If you’re wearing anything light colored, you glow a bit. Not blinding white iridescence like a 70’s disco, just a warm glow. A white-toothed smile, if you're lucky enough to have one, goes a little farther in Marge’s.

This place is a study in oddities and contrasts. I sat watching a group of hot young girls come in, 20-somethings, with fresh hairdos and stylish clothing. As they ordered drinks, the Kingston Trio ca. 1959 played on the jukebox. The floors have a steep slant, probably the result of being built on the loose sandy soil. You can have trouble walking even before you finish your first drink. I walked uphill into the bathroom where I was greeted with more black light and a healthy dose of glowing white paper labels on the wall with catchy sayings like “Goodbye Tension, Hello Pension,” and the inexplicable “Guns Don’t Kill People, Drivers with Cell Phones Do.”

There is a jukebox, old style, with one-hundred A-sides and one-hundred B-sides. The song population is primarily the work of Fran's daughter Francine. Heavy on the country with lots of old rock and roll and odd pop songs mixed in. She hand-wrote all of the labels, many of which list the B-side song as “yuck.” Francine calls it like she sees it. She was at the bar this night, engaged in heavily besotted conversation with someone for most of my time there. Eventually two young girls came in, chatted with mama Fran briefly, then proceeded to slowly guide Francine out the floor to take her home. Her happy hour was finally over. I have a Marge’s t-shirt that came into my possession one night a few years back after talking music at the box with Francine. She excitedly opened the storage room where I had many colors and sizes to choose from, and now I have a memento of an earlier night spent in the glow.

Looking at an old jukebox is a flashback for me. I worked in a bar and grill back when I was a 20-something, and I did a little bit of everything at the place, including keeping the jukebox stocked with songs. Every couple of months my sister, who was a waitress there, and I would head over to a place called Rochester One-Stop for some new 45s. One of my other jobs was morning cleanup. At 8 AM I’d unlock the jukebox, flip open the front panel and key in my favorite tunes as a soundtrack to my sweeping, mopping and scrubbing. Then after an hour or so a small group of old, alcoholic village regulars would shuffle in for their morning constitutional of a shot and a beer. Or maybe two. It was a ritual, all set to a scratchy vinyl rock and country soundtrack.

Marge’s big stereophonic masterpiece called for 25-cents a song, five songs for a buck. I dumped in four quarters but the machine decided I was only worthy of three songs. I carefully picked them out but never heard a single one. While I was pushing buttons, Toby Keith’s “I Love This Bar” came on. As I turned and headed back to the counter, the drunk woman next to my stool was smiling at me and bobbing up and down to the song, nodding her head, as if to say “yeah baby, great choice, I love this bar too.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her I hate Toby Keith. And besides, the truth is, I do love this bar.

Sound

I was working in the yard this afternoon, still trying to catch up on leaf raking and garden cleanup that usually happens in the cool weather after Thanksgiving but which was preempted by the early snow this year. 'twas a totally overcast but mild day, with essentially no wind. Still air is tolerable at almost any temperature. A 10 degree day without wind is a delight. Today was in the 40s so it was almost ideal for working outside.

When the air is this calm, sound travels really well. At one point I heard the train whistle from the main line that slices through Fariport and East Rochester. The sound source seemed almost due south, so I'm guessing that was an at-grade crossing either right in the Village in Fairport, or the next crossing at O'Connor Road. That's over seven miles away. I have heard it before, but not very often, even though trains go through several times a day. I can also sometimes hear planes take off at the airport, which is 13 "crow miles" away.

The atmospheric conditions must have been ideal for the soundwave travel to be so efficient. I think it takes a temperature inversion for that to happen, that is, a warmer air layer exists over the surface layer, which is the opposite of typical conditions. That warm layer acts as a ceiling of sorts for the sound waves, which keeps them concentrated near the ground. At least, that's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

But there was an abundance of sweet silence (or at least nearly so) and the rake tines scraping the wet ground was the prevalent sound.

Frontmen

Frontmen come in all styles. I was just watching "Rock Around The Clock" (1956) with and about Bill Haley & the Comets. They had a scene where the Comets played two songs at a dance, and Alan Freed (played by Alan Freed) was seeing them for the first time. The comets were a septet, and tight as can be. They had a very Louis-Jordanesque jump element to their rock. I was ignoring the dancers that were featured in the shot and digging the band. Afterward Freed was talking to Haley and trying to convince him and the band to quit their day jobs and become full-time musicians. It was hokey, 50's-style cinema and dialog, but truly cool, daddy-o. But mostly I was thinking how weird Haley looks and how unlikely a frontman he seemed. He was not destined to become "The King." Maybe he needed a sneer.

On the other side of that argument, though...Van Morrison was no Jim Morrison - he's maybe 5 ft. 5 in. tall and kind of funny looking but that never stopped him.

(sidebar - The Platters did "Only You", all dressed up in white suits. Truly suave.)

Initiation

I don't know just what this blog will eventually contain but I guess it gives me a place to spew when I feel the need to do so. I'm not a writing machine, and don't have the need to empty my head daily. But on occasion I get the urge to string together a few sentences and I guess this gives me a place to do it. And no doubt recycle some of the stuff I've conjured over the years.

"I've got a head full of ideas
that are driving me insane"

- bob dylan

(Damn, just out of the gate and I've already quoted two lyricists. Luckily they are my two favorites.)