I do most of my music listening in the basement, shuffling a shared library from a hard drive in another part of the house while I draw or paint. When something comes along that really draws me in I put five stars on it and then add it to my “Favorites” playlist in iTunes. Occasionally I will shuffle the “Favorites” playlist and you would think that would be the ultimate but it’s not nearly as much fun as throwing fate to the wind, shuffling the entire library and running across beautiful surprises.

I was working away the other night, frustrated at not being able to get a gesture down, when I thought, almost aloud, “I wish I could see what I’m trying to draw.” And then I laughed aloud. This is really the game, learning to see. The drawing part is a cinch.

I miss “Jenks and Jones” and Shep’s Paradise” and the old school R&B lounges on Rochester’s west side. Those days are not coming back but the urban pioneers over at Tala Vera on State Street are doing their best to update the concept. They have an ideal back room for music with a piano, a built in sound system and a red curtain behind the stage. We heard a fantastic trio called “10 to the 32nd Kelvin” there last night while they recorded the night for a live album. Bass player, Kevin Ray, stood center stage as well he should, a equally fluid melodic and rythmic player, with Frank Lacy on Trombone and Andrew Drury on drums. My favorite passages were when the horn player accompanied the drummer on percussion. All the better to feature my favorite instrument, the upright bass.

This part of the city is on the upswing but progress slow. I know the strip club next door is gone and the ghosts remain but I couldn’t tell whether “Tajze Wine and R&B Lounge” (with a bullet hole through the glass right under the “a” in “and”) was coming or going. We drove home during their break and were able to catch the second set on a live video feed from Tala Vera’s site.

We stopped by my parent’s place to visit on Mother’s Day and went out for a walk in nearby Ellison Park. We ran into Dee Dee and her dog. She told us she had been here every day for three years now. She said she imagined my parents’ neighborhood as an ideal place to live, so close to the park. Little did she know my parents moved there to be close to the park and then were both chased out by dogs whose owners let them run off leash despite the signs that state “Dogs Must Be On Leash.” We must have seen fifty or so dogs running free. Apparently Parks Director, Larry Staub, does not work on Mothers Day.

A log cabin in the park called Fort Schuyler, a 1938 recreation of the 1721 trading post where Senecas and the French swapped for furs, has the smallest windows I have ever seen on a building, maybe just big enough to shoot an arrow through. That’s one of the windows on the far right of the photo above. I took a flash picture of the pitch black inside and came up with the shot you see when you click on the photo. I had an urge to post a nasty photo after Angel Corpus Christi gave me this shout-out and this blow-up fits the bill.

My brothers and sisters and their families came and went yesterday and eight of us wound up down at Vic & Irv’s for dinner. We tried squeezing in one booth but split up when an adjacent booth opened. My mom and I each had a vanilla shake and split an order of onion rings. Vic & Irv’s changed management over the winter and was closed for a bit but Lynn is still behind the grill and I’m happy to say the food is every bit as good as ever.

My aunt and uncle live in Niagara Falls so I don’t see them that often but I did last week at another funeral. Their son worked for the tourism board there for a while and I wondered what my uncle thought about the upcoming Nik Wallenda tightrope walk over the Falls. I was thinking the circus like event would be good for the tourist trade on the struggling New York but my uncle said the morality of the whole thing really bothered him and he wasn’t even going to watch it. I was really struck by his answer and my own ever shifting moral line.

Sam Patch, the “The Yankee Leaper,” achieved nationwide fame when he jumped into the Niagara River near the base of the Falls in 1829. He made his last jump in Rochester on Friday the 13th in November of that same year from a 25-foot high platform over the 100 foot High Falls of the Genesee River. 8,000 people watched him land with a loud impact and never surface. His frozen body was found downriver in Charlotte the next Spring. Local ministers and newspapers were quick to blame the crowd for urging him to jump, and put the guilt of his death on them

I couldn’t get my Nikon to focus on this Robin egg. Of course I was in “Auto” mode so I can’t really complain. The camera does have a manual focus but that would take me ten minutes to figure out. Imagine how difficult it would be for an auto focus mechanism to find a surface on the egg on which to focus.

I occasionally buy the organic eggs at Wegmans. They clearly taste better than the regular Wegman’s eggs but at almost four times the price they are a real luxury item. And I don’t like the little red Wegmans logo stamped on top of each of the brown eggs. The packaging is bad enough but it really bugs me when they put their mark right on the produce.

A call on our home line from “FOB NY” got us out of bed this morning. Even though that line is on the “National Do Not Call Registry the cops get an exception for their extortion-tinged cold calls.

We borrowed my fathers car because ours is in the shop. He keeps his radio tuned 90.1, the jazz station, so we left it there and heard Pharaoh Sanders’ “Astral Traveling” on the way home. First song I heard back home was Sun Ra’s “We Travel the Spaceways.” I doubt that “Support the Police” sticker they would have given me if I had donated would do me any good in these worlds.

My favorite artist/philosopher, Robert Irwin, is deep into the ponies. Peggi and I usually tune into the Kentucky Derby because it marks the anniversary of our first date when we traveled to Louisville in the back of Steve Hoy‘s van and watched Secretariat win. The derby is one of my favorite sporting events because it only lasts two minutes.

Yesterday’s winner, “I’ll Have Another”, is owned by the former philosophy teacher, Paul Reddam. In the winners’ circle he was asked to quote one of his favorite philosophers and he chose this one form Ludwig Wittgenstein. “After all the philosophical problems have been solved, nothing of importance will have been accomplished.”

I get sick on rides that go around on circles so my favorite attraction at amusement parks is the kids’ cars. They seat two and you have to be tiny to fit in. The steering wheel spins around but does no control the car in any way and the kids don’t even care.

We stopped down to Sea Breeze Amusement Park for number 27 of the Rochester Institute of Technology “Big Shots“, pictures made at night using either hand-held electronic flash units or flashlights. Volunteers were instructed to show up at eight and wear black. That was pretty easy because all our clothes are black. The organizers effortlessly divided thousands of people into small groups and assigned them trees or rides to illuminate. We had to keep moving so our bodies weren’t captured in the long exposure. I used the flash on camera to help light this purple T-Bird.

The Percussion Rochester festival has popped up in Parkleigh Pharmacy. We used to buy the New York Times here on Sunday mornings when we lived in the Park Avenue area. It is no longer a pharmacy and has morphed into a high end trinket shop. My sister works here and I was hoping to see her but she had finished her shift and was out waking the dog by the time the NEXUS Percussion Ensemble started playing in the Mckenzie Childs section of the store. That’s Steve Gadd’s (Kate Bush, Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Steely Dan, Joe Cocker, Chick Corea, Eric Clapton, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Jon Bon Jovi, Chet Baker, Paul Desmond, The Bee Gees) drum teacher, John Beck, the longtime Eastman School of Music faculty member and Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra percussionist on the far right. Peter Erskine performs music from Weather Report tonight.

I check the temperature in seven locations with my iPod weather app. Rochester (where we live), Madrid, Barcelona, Sevilla (where we traveled), New York, LA, San Francisco, Paradox NY (where we have friends) and Huntsville, Canada (where we camped last year). It is not often the case that Rochester is the warmest but today it is. So there.