The Oppenheimer Report 9/28/09

I begin writing this week’s report on the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest of the Jewish holidays, and the Jewish Day of Atonement. I have not been to temple in a long time, so right away I have plenty of atoning to do. Traditionally, Jews fast from sundown to sundown for Yom Kippur, and I find that a meaningful gesture. Though I am not an observant Jew, I fast on Yom Kippur, and I think it is a pretty good practice. At least once a year, it’s not a bad idea to acknowledge my wrongdoings and to strive to do better in the coming year. While I am not likely to become an Orthodox Jew any time soon, the older I get, the more inclined I am to have some kind of faith. I realize that, at least for me, no comprehensive assessment of the world today is possible without some hope and belief that the future survival of mankind is not really in my control. One example of things that worry me: that bonehead Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I watched him spread his special brand of ignorance on Larry King Live the other night, and the guy bugs me. Though I know very little about the dynamics of Middle Eastern politics, I know ignorance is dangerous. I also know everyone is worried about Iran developing a nuclear bomb, but has everyone forgotten that India and Pakistan already have them? And let’s not forget North Korea. Indeed there are enough bombs to incinerate the world one hundred times over, if anyone is foolish enough to use them. That’s I guess where the blind faith part comes in. Brief aside … I find it fascinating that, according to the all-knowing Mahmoud, there are no gay Iranians. Iran is probably the only country without them. It could be the Mecca for homophobes! I suppose Iranians don’t have the messy “don’t ask, don’t tell” problems we’re having in the American armed forces.

9/28/09 – It’s Yom Kippur and I am watching a storm and heavy rain creep up from the south over the lake. There will be no chinking done on this house for the next several days; we need dry weather, above 40 degrees Fahrenheit or the stuff does not set up properly. At this point, we are racing against time to finish this job. It’s hard to figure out where the summer ended and fall began, because the weather has been so strange of late. I am gun shy. Winter comes without much warning up here, and it is not uncommon to get snow in November. Now the storm is in full force and water is pouring off the roof like Niagara Falls. Maybe we’ll have water in the basement again. Big floods last week in Georgia, and the Philippines are also flooded from a recent typhoon. A quickly as it came, the storm is gone, for the time being.

Yesterday, I went out on my little folding boat and took a leisurely row over to a nearby point. A week last Sunday there had been a fire there. Some new owners had been burning brush from their recently cleared lot, and they left to go home without properly extinguishing the fire. Around dinner time we heard someone screaming Fire! From across the lake, and Shauna called the volunteer fire department in Burk’s Falls. By the time I drove the firemen over in my boat, our next door neighbor and his son had already put the fire out with buckets of water. There was so much dead wood on that property that the fire could have burned the house down had the wind picked up. I must say my adrenaline got pumping when I saw all that smoke in trees, just 300 metres from our house. There are laws about what can be burned up here and when. I’m guessing that these new neighbors will be receiving a visit from the local fire department sometime soon to remind them of the rules. Nice to know those firemen are ten minutes away (one of the captains lives on this lake), but a lot can happen in ten minutes.

With a growling stomach I sign off. Time to atone.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 9/25/09

A few weeks ago, while I was in Toronto on my way down to Buffalo, I stopped at the Canadian National Exhibition for a couple of hours. I have now been to the event twice in my life and I love the carnival atmosphere. Of course, there are all sorts of exhibits I do not see, but there is something about the garish colors, the cacophony of the crowds and the rides, and the callers at the midway games that I love to experience. Years ago, when I was a boy, we used to go to Crystal Beach Amusement Park near our Canadian summer home on Lake Erie, and Crystal beach was one of the last of the old-fashioned amusement parks. So endeared was I to the place that I wrote two songs about it. These days the rides are slick and fast, but give me a rickety old roller coaster any day. The big coaster at Crystal Beach was called The Comet, and the first climb gave riders a bird’s eye view of Lake Erie, with Buffalo in the distance. Back in the early Nineties, on the last day Crystal Beach was open, I and a group of my friends made one last visit, and my friend Bob videotaped his last ride on The Comet. Within months the whole park simply disappeared. Rides were removed and the midway soon became a residential development. We still watch that video with maudlin reminiscences of that last day.

“There is a certain wisdom only fun can teach,
I think I’ll always remember Crystal Beach…”

As I write this, we have begun to chink the new house, hoping to be done in about two to three weeks, expecting, as we do, consistently unpredictable weather. For those of you who are not familiar with the term, chinking is the material used to fill in between logs in a log home. In the old days, it was mortar, or clay or mud. These days, the material is a high tech, very effective and easy-to-apply, elastic, caulk-like substance, but with a much greater durability than caulk. First, we lay in thin strips of foam backer rod, meant to displace some of the gap between logs and allow for a thinner bead of chinking to be applied, then we use a bulk caulking gun to apply the chinking. Finally, the chinking is spread into the space with a special tool to create an even seal across the logs. Once applied and cured, it provides a weatherproof seal for the house. Logs typically insulate quite well, and we’re hoping that now that the house has done most of its “moving” and checking (cracking), it will stand solid against whatever the Northern Ontario climate can throw at it. Last winter was a bit drafty in sections of the house, and there are places where rather large gaps have opened up. Logs are very unpredictable in the ways that they move. Some will twist, some will warp. The new chinking is designed to move and flex with the movement of the logs. We purchased the Neville Log Home package because they sold us on the idea that their dead standing logs had done most of their shifting and drying out. Now that Neville has gone bankrupt, I’m beginning to wonder if we were told the whole truth. The amount of sap coming out some of these logs and the severe checking leads me to believe that they were greener than we were led to believe.

“Roller Coaster reservations, you’ve got them, so do I
But this love deserves consideration, and I think this love can fly
On this hot and humid summer night, the sun closes down a blood orange sky

The lights go in in the amusement park; electricity that lovers spark

Cho: Come on decide be mine decide tonight/ Come on get on that roller coaster ride

Put unspoken fears aside decide tonight

Come on decide be mine decide tonight, cause it’s a midway night….”

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Openheimer Report 9/18/09

While I was down in Buffalo last week, I had the pleasure of attending the Music is Art celebration on the grounds of the world famous Albright Knox Art Gallery. The festival boasted over thirty bands playing on four stages throughout the day, and while I only heard a brief sampling of what was being offered, I enjoyed the experience. My contribution to the Buffalo music community was to purchase a 3 CD compilation, for the bargain basement price of ten bucks, featuring Buffalo bands from the 2006 festival. There are over sixty songs in the set and though I have only listened to one CD so far, I liked many of the songs I heard. Buffalo has always had a vibrant music scene, and though we usually hear about artists who make the big time, such as Ani DeFranco or The Goo Goo Dolls, there are plenty of good bands who do not make it.

Back in the days when I was young and wild, I used to frequent a music club in Buffalo called The Continental. In the early eighties, when punk and new wave music were just becoming big, this bar was pretty hot. Maybe it still is. Back then, MTV was in its infancy, and music videos played on monitors around the bar. I remember seeing now-defunct Buffalo bands like The Elements, Electroman, Paper Faces, and my favorite, The Celibates. There were moments of extreme joy as we, the collective audience, fueled by beer and cheap mixed drinks, throbbed in a frantic wave of mutual appreciation to songs like “Whipped Cream Girls”. No one but a few forty to fifty year old Buffalonians are likely to remember those bands, but the point is this. Local bands rock, and even though the hair band Eighties was not my favorite decade for music, I was and continue to be proud of my city’s contribution to the national music scene. Many of the really creative local bands typically flame out after a few years, realizing that local popularity or a CD release party is not a guarantee of fame, fortune, or even a decent living. Still, I applaud the fireworks, and to this day enjoy these local battle-of-the-bands-yer-fifteen-minutes-onstage-are-up-bub music extravaganzas. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of those bands will never reach more people than can fill a medium-sized bar, but if you happen to be there on the night they shine, it can be magical.

I was in one of my old Buffalo watering holes about ten years ago, and I saw the former female lead singer for one of those old Buffalo bands I remember hearing at the Continental. I liked her band and thought she was cooler than James Dean, but there she now was, no longer the skinny, sullen bassist for a new wave band, but instead something akin to a soccer mom. Her band was simply a moment in time.

There is a line in the Rolling Stones song “No Expectations” off one of my favorite Stones albums “Beggar’s Banquet”, and it goes something like this: “Our love was like the water that splashes on a stone/ our love was like our music, it’s here and then it’s gone.” Music IS art, and like sidewalk art, sometimes it’s here and then it’s gone. Some of the best music I’ve heard is spontaneous, live, and unrecorded. In the purest form, live music, if you’re listening, forces you to be in the moment. I am reminded of a great line in a book I just read, written by a talented Buffalo writer named Greg Ames … “If you have one leg in the past and one leg in the future, you’re pissing on the present.” One of these days, I’m going to figure out how to be in the present on a regular basis; I think it’s a good place to be. In the meantime, it’s nice to have live music to remind me what that’s like.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 9/9/09

9/1/09 – Yikes, is it Labor Day yet? Sure feels like summer is over, or never started. I got a call from one of the carpenters we’ve hired to finish up our house in Katrine, and he told me that Gravenhurst, about an hour south of us, had had a damaging tornado – I think he said it was an F2. He was bidding on some rebuild work down there. Vaughan, just north of Toronto got hit as well, rendering 38 homes uninhabitable. I don’t remember a summer with this much rain or cold weather, and now, I watch with some interest as the hurricane season fires up. Hurricane Bill has already soaked the Maritimes, and the Frisbees of bad weather are beginning to hurl themselves towards North America. I understand a pretty sizeable F4 (Jimena?) hit the Baja Peninsula last week. Summer in Buffalo is always short-lived, and about the second week in August, when we get our first north wind, that’s when we know we will soon be seeing the leaves turn. Up in the Great White North, Fall is ushered in by the invasion of one of my most unfavorite birds, the grackle. The Hell's Angels of the bird world, these miserable black birds travel in flocks and chase away all the other birds. It’s a fitting way to say farewell to summer.

9/4/09 – I’m back down in Buffalo, where I have just sold Dad’s car, and spent last Monday packing up and giving away most of his clothing. I remember him wearing a lot of that clothing, and it was weird to give it away. Lately I have been making an effort to pare down some of the personal possessions in our Chapin Pkwy. house, knowing as I do that a lot of this stuff needs to go. Mom was pretty good about getting rid of junk in the house, but over the last ten years, quite a lot has accumulated in the basement and attic. We must have thirty half empty cans of paint in the basement, as well as remnants of old carpeting and wallpaper, vestiges of long past remodelling projects. Of course, Mom is still living in that house, and I wouldn’t remove anything she might notice or want to keep. Still, there is A LOT of stuff stashed away in this big old house. There must be some kind of service that collects not-so-valuable but usable stuff from a large house and liquidates it for you, but I haven’t found it.

Mom’s 90th is next week, and I will stay down here until then. Shauna ordered chinking and backer rod for the new house which will be delivered to Buffalo late next week, so I have an excuse to stick around. We originally thought we’d have the materials sent directly to Katrine, but the shipping costs as well as the time delays with customs brokers was going to make that an expensive and complicated process. Speaking of cross border hassles, I needed to mail a letter up to Canada, and I went to one of those Mailbox places to buy a stamp. They wanted $1.60 for ONE STAMP, over double the actual cost of the postage, claiming the post office charges them a premium. And we wonder why they are closing post offices all over the place! I hope I can fit twelve five gallon pails of chinking along with 4600 feet of backer rod in the SUV. We should have Dad’s estate matters squared away by the end of next week, and my duties as an executor will soon be less demanding. I can’t say my time in Buffalo has been all that bad. I have enjoyed spending time in my childhood home, as well as being walking distance from my best friend.

Notable deaths: Ted Kennedy finally succumbed to his brain tumor last week; tests confirm that the anaesthesia drug Propofal killed Michael Jackson (big surprise); 60 Minutes founder Don Hewitt died, and acerbic Vanity Fair columnist Dominick Dunn also bit the big one.

9/7/09 As I end this report, I am sitting in the living room of my family beach house on the north shore of Lake Erie. This belonged to my grandfather, and has been in our family for over seventy-five years. I have many happy memories of summers spent in this house, but I have not spent the night here in six or seven years. I am looking forward to falling asleep here, because something about the sounds on this lake at night puts me right to sleep. A belated Happy Labor Day! Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED