The Blog of Jason “Jayce” Olshefsky

I headed out to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see Giù la testa (A Fistful of Dynamite, or Duck, You Sucker). According to Michael Neault in his introduction of the movie, Sergio Leone — after having made several movies celebrating political revolution — Duck, You Sucker takes a much more cynical view of it.  It also happens to be that there are no fewer than four versions of the film, and the one we got to see was presumed to be the “original” director’s cut.

I immediate thought that as much as The Bridge on the River Kwai is a testament to the rational insanity of war, Duck, You Sucker shows war as a black comedy. In the film, John — a former Irish Republican Army explosives expert — gets paired up with Juan — a poor thief in Mexico. That is, despite John’s best efforts to avoid it. And to avoid getting roped into another revolution … sort of … it seems that getting involved in revolution is more of an addictive habit than anything. Juan, in the mean time, is also trying to avoid getting into the revolution. But he accidentally keeps saving people and making terriffic progress for the revolutionaries.

As revolutions are, there are advances made by each side, making it seem like no progress is made on either front overall until perhaps, one of the parties involved just gets too tired of fighting — or forgets what the point was in the first place.

Ali and I biked to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see Breaking Away. A lot of people took advantage of their “promotion” to get $4 tickets if you rode a bike — after all, the film is about bicycling and the dreams of one guy to ride competitively.

Neither of us had seen the film before but we both enjoyed it a lot.  It’s kind of funny, really — that the movie can be such a standard story of the underdogs triumphing, yet also come across refreshing and inspirational. Perhaps it’s because the characters are so fully formed. More often than not, the characters are written from the perspective of a solitary writer, and as such, they end up being pretty closely aligned in personality. Of course, the college kids were pretty one-dimensional, but it was, after all, the story of the town kids more than anything.

Although it was a double feature, I decided to go late to see just Vanishing Point at Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.). On the surface, it was a simple tale of a guy running from the law in a fast car. But my take on it was that the guy — Kowalski — represented freedom itself. Super Soul — the black, blind DJ — seems to recognize this, and even spells it right out.

I found Kowalski’s encounters on the road to be one-dimensional allegories where you can just substitute “freedom” for “Kowalski”:

• At every turn, the law is out to stop freedom.
• The hippie couple gets along with freedom.
• Racists try to stop Super Soul from talking about freedom.
• The gay couple tries to rob freedom — perhaps out of desperation.
• Freedom goes all over the desert.
• The religious group sees freedom only as a malicious stranger.
• When the law finally wins, freedom dies.

My best friend Sondra stopped in for the weekend (after [and before] highly annoying air travel). She was in town to wrap up things with her old house in Palmyra but we got to go out and hit the town. We started at my house then decided to change the scenery. I started out with Abeline Bar and Lounge (153 Liberty Pole Wy., formerly Tara) just in case it opened early, but it doesn’t. So we decided to hit our old haunt, Monty’s Krown (875 Monroe Ave.) Surprisingly it was closed — now this is … er … was no ordinary bar. I recall seeing people having beers out on the sidewalk as early as noon some days … typically more like 2 or 3 p.m. though. On this day, they were completely closed. As a substitution, we tried Monty’s Korner (355 East Ave.) but it was closed too. Same with Mex (295 Alexander St.) We gave up and stopped by Ali’s to say hi before heading to The Distillery (1142 Mount Hope Ave.) which — being a restaurant as well — was certainly going to be open, and indeed it was.

We had a couple margaritas and caught up with stuff as we often do (except over the phone usually). Next stop was Solera Wine Bar (647 South Ave.) where we met up with Ali. The three of us split a couple bottles of wine and two of their delicious cheese boards. It was getting late by then and we tried Betty Meyer’s Bullwinkle Café (622 Lake Ave., a.k.a. “Bullwinkle’s”) but it was closed — as rumors go, I’m pretty sure it’s done. [I’ll have to stop by Betty’s house at some point — which is coincidentally not far from where I live — and find out the deal.] So we headed back to The Flat Iron Café (561 State St.) but it wasn’t open yet — and by now it was closing in on 11 p.m. As a consolation, we checked out this ultimate dive of a country music bar called Sandra’s Saloon (276 Smith St.) As places like this go, the bartender and owner was a kind woman and the patrons kept to their own. It was actually quite nice, and the band was really good, too.

To wrap things up, we stopped by Abeline Bar and Lounge (153 Liberty Pole Wy., formerly Tara). This time it was open, and by now the band had finished. We chatted with the bartender a bit and tried their absinthe. Alas, it was more like a licorice liquor than absinthe — flavor-wise it was pretty close to what we’d had in the past, but mild-hallucination wise, not so much.

Sondra had to get up early to make her flight: as in, leave the house at 4:30 a.m. So we said our goodbyes before crashing at my house. In a tale for another day, she did eventually make it back to Colorado.

I also went to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see La planète sauvage (Fantastic Planet). The woman who gave the introductory presentation was new-to-me — she was young, and I believe attending The University of Rochester. Among the other tidbits about the film, she mentioned that it was an allegory to the way the USSR treated its satellite states. I was surprised to find this caused me to try and make direct comparisons for the first 20 minutes or so, at which point I finally freed myself of that thought and could just absorb it as a work of art — and do the analysis later.

Anyway, it was amazing. It’s an animated work of speculative fiction about these two species of intelligent beings: the Om are small and human-like and are treated like pets by the Dragg: the more advanced, 8-times larger, blue bipeds. Wild (that is, not domesticated) Om learn from the Dragg and become more adept, even learning to read the language. I was struck by the attention to detail (two examples: the doll-like clothing the Dragg make domesticated Om wear, and the debate between wild Om where each one ties himself to a vicious creature and the two fight until one Om is killed) and the lack of explanation (i.e. no attempt is made to explain how anything works, and no attempt is made to identify this world’s relation to our own world — not in deep space, nor a tiny sub-world). My only disappointment was how abruptly the film concludes.

I thought it also interesting to note that the film is French, and the central character is a domesticated Om named Terr (both in French and subtitled): “Om” is a homophone for “homme”, the French word for “man” and “Terr” is a homophone for “terre”, the French word for Earth. I suspect the film would have been far more campy if it were about a Man named Earth instead.

I took a little tour of South Wedge and got pizza from Little Venice Pizza (742 South Ave., formerly Skippy’s) which I ate at Solera Wine Bar (647 South Ave.) with a glass of wine. I stopped by Lux Lounge (666 South Ave.) for a bit and hung out with some friends before heading to The Method Lab (650 South Ave.) Photographer Clark Condé’s work was on display. It’s really good stuff: evocative and slightly abstract — and large, which always helps if all else fails.

After the parade, Ali and I got lunch at Mac’s Philly Steaks (76 South Main St., Canandaigua). It’s a decent place and — with my only slightly trained taste — felt that their cheese-steak sandwiches were quite authentic. It was definitely a good start before we headed out to Stony Brook State Park (10820 State Route 36, Dansville) to go camping.

The first thing we noted was there were several signs declaring that no alcohol was permitted in the park. This was not mentioned earlier and we intended on having a *ahem* good time, so our cooler was filled with quite a bit of beer and wine coolers. As such, we said nothing and quietly circumvented the rule by using cups and keeping it inside the tent. It was only because the park was minimally staffed that we — and some significant percentage of other campers (10% to 75% would be my guess) — were able to imbibe.

I imagine the rule was created to allow rangers to eject “rowdy” campers. However, it’s really just a way to circumvent the inherent unfairness of a subjectively applied rule like “no alcohol abuse”. The personal prejudices of a park ranger would directly come into play — perhaps as innocent as permitting attractive young women to “keep it quiet” or as sinister as searching the camps of black people for illegal contraband.

I end up stuck at a crossroads about it all. On the one hand, I think it’s important to allow a certain subjective leeway in interpreting the law — after all, it’s part of the checks and balances devised in the Constitution. But on the other hand, I want law itself to be, well, law — such that it defines the boundaries of permissible behavior.

As it stands now, it appears that determining which laws are “Law” and which are “suggestions” is a collectively agreed-upon and largely arbitrary process — molesting children?: no way; talking on your cell phone while driving?: only if you won’t get caught. It goes back to what I said before: laws are entirely voluntary. Personal behavior is not defined by law, but it often correlates because laws — in my opinion — should codify only universally unacceptable behaviors. A tall order indeed — and in all likelihood, too tall to actually accomplish.

All I’m saying is that laws should either be all absolute or all suggestions but not an arbitrary mix.

Anyway … where was I. Oh yeah, camping.

So Ali and I got set up pretty well and spent the first day kind of lounging around. Well, that’s what we did most of the rest of the time too. We did go on a hike around the rim of the gorge … a long, tiring hike indeed.

We also swam in the man-made, stream-fed pool. It was a clever dam structure in the gorge to offer a swimming area that included a kiddie section and another section that went as deep as 8 feet. It was very cold — around 60°F. I had been in the water already so I was prepared but Ali was quite shocked by it. I found that I could get used to it, though. It was also quite nice that, despite the silt in the water, there was no chlorine so it left you feeling nice and fresh.

We also spent a lot of time exploring the gorge — another illegal activity that a large contingent of park visitors freely violated [thank goodness for funding cuts so there were no rangers to kick us out!]. I particularly liked the larger waterfalls, one of which included a deep section you could jump into from a short rock ledge, and another had a blast of cool water that you could let pound on your back like a friggin’ 200 gallon-per-minute massage. The stream varied in width and flow-rate, depending on whether it had cut through depths of the slate bed. Some of the deeper troughs had enough flow and were smooth enough that you could use them like a water slide. The rough patches in the slate bottoms were enough to rub holes in my 20-year-old swimsuit, though.

We left the campground once to get ice cream at The Stony Brook Farm Market (10895 State Route 36, Dansville) — a nice excursion in the middle of the weekend. Ali had accidentally booked through Monday so we got to stay late on Sunday. The place cleared out right at 11 a.m. — check-out time — leaving us with just a half-dozen other camps in sight; much different from the fully-booked state over the weekend. We got back in the afternoon on Sunday and tried getting back into the swing of things with limited success.

Our friends Scott and Don from Wick-edly Sent (94 S. Main St., Canandaigua) invited Ali and me to bring our custom bikes to ride in the Canandaigua Independence Day Parade. We were part of The Canandaigua Merchants Association’s entry in the parade — their theme was “Go Green!” with five of us on bikes. The other three bikes were custom cruisers loaned from RV & E Bike and Skate (168 South Main St., Canandaigua). A couple people on foot handed out brochures. Two of the little girls carried the sign tethered between them, and the other two handed out penny candy to the crowd.

Now, I’ve never been in a parade, but it sure was a lot of fun. There were several thousand people lined up along Main Street and we waved to them, smiled, said hello, and otherwise had a great time.

I headed out to the late show at The Bug Jar (219 Monroe Ave.) First up was The Copyrights who played some superb high-energy punk-rock with a rich thumping bass. Next up was Kepi Ghoulie (a.k.a. Kepi: The Band) former front-man of The Groovie Ghoulies. Well, his new band is naturally very similar in that it’s still a ghoul-themed punk-rock band, but it’s got a more gritty, distorted sound that suits them well. Plus more people.

Unfortunately they hadn’t learned the Ghoulies’ Chupacabra yet so I’m stuck with it in my head — perhaps until the next time someone mentions the Chupacabra (or is it three times into the mirror?). Regardless: I had an absolute blast.

Ali and I decided to go to Mario’s Italian Steakhouse (2740 Monroe Ave., formerly Mario’s Via Abruzzi) for their Sunday Brunch Buffet. We’d been before, but it sure is a good time. After noon, you can even get mimosas as part of the brunch. We took our time and had three square meals over the course of some 3 hours or so. If you have the time, it’s really worth the price.