1111 East Main Street store window, Rochester, New York
East Main is looking up. There was a time when I’d get propositioned by hookers while riding home from New Math rehearsal on my bike. I’ve been spending a lot of time at Warren Philip’s frame shop at Main and Goodman. He’s helping me frame work for the show. He’s making birch wood frames for my father’s watercolors and I’ve order matts, glass and metal section frame champs from him for my work.
They’re re-working the intersection out in front of his shop but there is construction going on up and down the street with some buildings getting gutted and a whole block of new housing going up. It was pretty bleak twenty five years ago. The Hungerford Building by Warren’s, mostly artist’s studios and illegal lofts, is always busy. I took this photo of the new store in front of that building.
Peggi spotted this sign on the road to Mexico. Mexico, New York over near Oswego at the western end of Lake Ontario. We were in the back seat of Jeff and Mary Kaye’s car traveling up to Watertown to buy organic maple syrup and I was doing something on my iPad. I’m thankful Peggi spotted it. It’s a beauty.
It seemed like a long ways to go to buy maple syrup but when Jeff asked if we wanted to ride along we said, “Sure.” They used to belong to some sort of food co-op and they liked the syrup so they called the number on their empty container. Jeff called the guy again when we were close to town and had us meet him at the Sunoco Station on Rt. 81.
He was with his girlfriend but she never got out of the car. They looked like they might be Native Americans. He dropped his receipt book when he got out of the car and he bent over in slow motion to pick it up. He told us he doesn’t get out in the woods anymore because he had a downhill skiing accident. He buys most of his syrup from others but no synthetic defoamers or formaldehyde pellets are used in the trees. I wished he hadn’t told us that. It’s the last thing I would have thought of. And added that a rabbi had just been up to his warehouse so his syrup was kosher too.
We made the deal and Jeff put the containers in the trunk. It felt like a drug deal but it all went smoothly. We came back through Sodus in time to have dinner at El Rincón.
We have been to Salvatore’s on Bay Road in Webster three times now and we’ve never had their pizza. We go there to hear the Debbie Kendrick Project. It’s a pretty comfortable place. No cover, a good choice of craft beers and a nice sounding room. The band sets up in the corner and sit in a circle with Sean, the guitar player with his back to the crowd. They basically play for themselves and we eavesdrop.
Mike Patric plays bass with Joe Beard and is a real pro. Drummer Pete Monacelli got his start playing with big bands in Albion and he has a perfect touch. I have no idea where Sean Pfiefer, the guitar player, came from but I love the way he plays. And Debbie Kendrick is otherworldly. She has an incredible voice and a beautiful spirit. Her voice fills the room. The first time we heard them I spent half an hour trying to figure out where the speakers were for her voice. Turns out she runs her mic cord into Sean’s tiny Fishman guitar amp. They play blues and R&B and anything in between. Here they are doing a song Amy Winehouse made popular.
We got a message from the woman who bought our old house that our former neighbor, Sparky, was in the hospital. Apparently he had a stroke. He had just stopped down here a couple of weeks ago and he looked so good we were thinking he had stumbled on the fountain of youth.
I’ve probably namedropped Sparky in these pages more than anyone else. Ours is such an unlikely association. We lived next door to each other for twenty six years and our first morning there the woman he was married to for a short time rang our bell with a pot of coffee in her hand. Her first words were, “We’re so glad you’re not niggers.”
We stayed away from them for years. They divorced, she left and we’d talk to Sparky over the fence. He collected junk and fixed things. He gave a us a mower that he found on the street and repaired. I started sneaking photos of him. Little did I know at the time that he loved it when you took his photo.
He played guitar and liked country music. He burned garbage in a barrel behind his garage. He told us he shot a sewer rat out front. He blew our minds and we became intrigued with his every backyard activity. Before we moved, I had keys to his garage and his shed.
We stopped up to see him in the hospital. He’s doing physical therapy but he is in rough shape. We made a card for him with this photo on it.
Listen to Sparky’s Shed by Invisible Idiot (Margaret Explosion)
Grasshopper in the middle of Hoffman Road, Rochester, NY
We walked by this Rhododendron a few times in the last week. About ten foot tall, it was laying on its side but the leaves were still perky. Someone had dug it out of their yard and put it out by the road for the town to pick it up. There was a pretty good sized ball of earth wrapped around the base and I tried picking it up but couldn’t.
When we got back home, we saw our neighbor, Jared, was working on his pond with his friend John. We told them about the tree and they offered their truck. We got it back home and dug a hole out front and dropped it in. It looks like it’s always been there.
Funky yard sale sign at Seneca Road traffic circle in Rochester,New York
This sale was almost scheduled for today. Whether they made a mistake or changed their minds, they covered their tracks well with some blue paint. I rode my bike up on the traffic circle to take a photo of it.
The first thing that caught my eye is the closed letters, the inside of the “a”s, the zeros and the the “d’s. Clearly a spray painted sign from a hand cut stencil. But then when they did the number “8”s, they cleverly cut the stencil so the inside of the eights resist the paint. I love the small caps usage on the name of the street and the ghostly starburst announcing “Free Cookies.” The finishing touch, the thing that really drives this thing home, is the wiggly red arrow with drip running uphill. I know where I’m going to be tomorrow sometime between 8AM and 3. This sign is going on my Funky Sign site when I get back to it.
Nonchalant after questioning: Robert J. DeMay, Charles F. Guldenshuh, Edward B. Lanagan, Robert G. Meintel Jr., from left, booked in connection with assault on Julius Morrison, who thwarted robbery by wrecking truck against tree.
When I was growing up on the east side the neighborhood was dotted with small grocery stores. There were two near our house, one on Humboldt and one on Atlantic and then there was an early behemoth, Star Market, at Merchants and Main. Peggi and I lived in that same neighborhood for twenty-six years and there were still a few small stores nearby. Bertha’s was only open at night. There was no fresh food in the place. She mostly sold six packs and magazines. Fleckenstein’s was a great meat market. But Fred’s, on the corner of Main and Wisconsin was the best small grocery. Fred’s nephew, Sam, a recent East High graduate, opened the first Salvatore’s Pizza across the street in 1978.
In 1940, long before my two stints in the neighborhood, a group of thugs robbed the owner of a grocery store at 2121 East Main, a few blocks down from Fred’s, where State Farm is located today. The owner of that store was robbed by these four thugs. Peggi found the article while tracking down a tip from a reader of her site, DonHershey.com. We knew nothing about Don Hershey when we lived on the east side and never really noticed this cute little place on Melville Street, just off Culver by Nino’s Pizzeria.
Don Hershey, Rochester’s foremost mid-century modern architect, designed the house on Melville for Julius Morrison in the late thirties and the shopkeeper had just moved in in 1940 when this event took place.
If I wasn’t so busy I’d be in Venice. Sure I’d take in as much as I could of the Venice Biennale but after the first good night’s sleep there I would start with the Philip Guston show at the Gallerie Dell’Accademia, “Philip Guston and the Poets.”
I travel as light as possible but when we were in New York last I spotted and picked up this book first thing at Hauser & Wirth Publishers on the first day there and had to pack it around the whole day on our gallery hop. Such a price. I have cherished every moment with this thing even if it is only a few dreamy pages before I nod off on the porch.
I superstitiously read the little slogans on the Yogi teabags even is most of them annoy me. But I’m taking this one at face value. “Love is an experience of infinity.”
We walked up to the lake and spotted these witches gathering before today’s eclipse. Actually, they could be Presbyterians for all I know. They were dressed in white and one of them was wearing a cross around their neck.
Peggi had altered two Shredded Wheat boxes this morning and poked a pin hole in one end. We took them down to the pool where we put our backs to the sun and stared into the tiny theaters for an hour or so. I love it in there and the clouds that floated by made it all the more dramatic. I love the wide aspect ratio of the box end and the way the floor to ceiling screen appeared to be bordered on all four sides with a black frame. The perspective lines converging on the four corners of the black frame appeared to be fine white lines and it was easy to forget this wasn’t a life-sized room. We decided to save our boxes until 2024.
Margaret Explosion live at the Bug Jar 1998. Jack Schaefer – guitar, Paul Dodd – drums, Peggi Fournier – sax, Pete LaBonne – bass.
Our band, Margaret Explosion, played a Friday Happy Hour gig at the Bug Jar for two years in the late nineties. The band at that time was Jack Schaefer on guitar, Peggi on sax, me on drums and Pete LaBonne on bass. We eventually recorded a cd with this lineup but because Peggi and I were playing with a different Margaret Explosion lineup we called the band on the cd “Invisible Idiot.”
Casey, the Bug Jar owner and bartender, brought in vegetarian food from the India House and Rolling Rock beer was a dollar a bottle. One night, before the band began, I set up a stool, a light and white canvas background in the back room and asked whoever was there if they would like to sit for a photo. I remember not calling it a “mugshot” so that aspect wasn’t overplayed but the setting dictated the pose. I’m thinking about putting some of those prints in the show at RoC.
I was using a one megapixel Kodak DC210 camera that my father bought for me at the Kodak employee camera shop. I brought home about thirty photos that night and took them into Photoshop where I converted them into black & white bitmap photos with a pronounced dot pattern. I created Quark documents to scale and printed tiled pages on our laser printer. The print-outs were shown in the Bug Jar later that year.
Margaret Explosion as Invisible Idiot – “Abstract Express”
Dodds and friends working on the pool at Hawley Drive in Webster, New York. Photo by Leo Dodd
I went looking through a box of clippings and old letters and stuff hoping to find an article from the local paper that was written in 1990 about my father during the Can of Worms reconstruction. My dad had taken an early retirement buyout from Kodak and he would go over to the construction site everyday and sketch the proceedings. Three of the paintings he did from these drawings will be in the October RoCo show and it would be nice to find this article for the display case. I did’t have any luck but my brothers and sisters are on the hunt.
I found this photo in the box and it reminded me how much fun we had hanging around our backyard. When my family moved out of the city in the sixties Webster was still a small town surrounded by farms. Although this place was pretty close to the four corners, our subdivision, referred to as the “Schantz track” by locals, was a muddy old corn field.
My dad decided to put a pool in the backyard and the idea was to dig it ourselves. You can see in this picture how much help we were. My dad did most of the work. My brothers did a lot more work than I did but I remember swinging a pick ax to break away chunks of hard packed clay. If you click on the photo for the enlargement you can see my dad borrowed a rototiller to break up the clay.
With seven kids in the family we would sometimes all have our friends over at the same time. There could be thirty kids in the backyard. And when it all got to be too much my mom would pop the back door open and order everyone to go to their own homes.
In this photo, from left:
Norm Ladd – Norm was a couple of years behind me in school but when I was a freshman, living in the dorm at Indiana University, his mom called and said, “Norm has run away and he’s coming out to stay with you.” As I remember it Norm’s future wife, an Indiana native, came to Rochester with some other friends to visit me. She met Norm here and they settled in Bloomington.
Paul Dodd – I’m shown in dress shoes with no socks talking to Norm. Norm also lived in the Shantz track.
Billy Mahoney and David Hill – These kids lived across the street. I used to babysit for them and I just talked to David at my mom’s funeral.
Frank Palozolo – Down in the hole, Frank, moved here from another town in our junior year but he quickly became school president.
Dave Mahoney – In his own world here, Dave came out to Bloomington after he quit MCC and we lived together for a few years. He was a fantastic drummer and he moved to San Francisco with his band, MX-80 Sound. He died rather suddenly. I think that’s the Mahoney’s car, last one in our driveway, a Chevy Impala or something.
Fran Dodd – That has to be my youngest brother, Fran, behind Mark in the group where Brad is holding court. Fran does high-end masonry for Rochester’s finest home builders.
Mark Dodd – Mark is in front of Fran. We shared a bedroom in this house. When our family lived in the city all five boys were in the same bedroom. Mark and I did everything together and shared a lot of the same friends.
Brad Fox – Brad was good friends with everyone in our family. In fact he lived with our family for a while during high school when his parent’s threw him out. He came out to Indiana too and stayed until he moved to San Francisco.
Tim Dodd and John Dodd – I love Tim’s t-shirt. I’m quite sure it was one of mine, handed down. Tim is an art director at Xerox and John designs and handcrafts exquisite furniture.
Joe Barrett – Joe says he doesn’t think this is him but that is his family car in the driveway, the Corvair, the same one he, Dave and I drove to Woodstock and somehow managed to find when we left. Peggi and I are working our way through the Twilight Zones on Netflix and I think of Joe almost every episode. I saw so many of them for the first time in his basement. He needs to pull his pants up.
My two sisters were understandably missing from this manly gathering. My dad took this photo.
Boat coming in to Charlotte Harbor from Jetty Restaurant
I can’t believe how much work is involved with organizing a show. It turns out creating the work that goes on display isn’t even half of it. You have to sort the good from the bad (a moving target) and coordinate your choices with the gallery director. And to promote the show you need photographs of the work and then those images need to posted on the website for the virtual presentation. That could take a few days.
Of course there are the space considerations and the arrangement of the pieces within that space. The show needs a name and then a short amount of copy for a blurb. And the artist statement! Was it always like this? Did we always have bios and post cards and wall tags to explain the art?
But I am not going to let this ruin the summer. We drove north as far as we could in this part of the country and had dinner at the Jetty, the restaurant in the old Fast Ferry terminal.
Every morning I look at the dead branches on the cherry tree out back. I don’t know why cherry are like that but branches are always losing their leaves and the next thing you know the woodpeckers are working on it. Today I got our pole saw out and took care of it. Cleaned up a bunch of other small trees as well and then went for a big one.
I cut the wedge on the downhill side of the tree so the center of my wedge cut was pointed in the direction I wanted it to fall. And I looked up one last time before I made my cut from the other side. I saw Peggi motioning but I was wearing my Home Depot noise cancelling headphones and couldn’t make out what she was saying. The tree was only about eight inches in diameter, a maple with hardly any branches until the top, but it was probably sixty feet tall. If it went the wrong way it would hit the house.
This is where we turned to Jared, our next door neighbor. He advised us to throw a rope around the tree and take the other end of the rope down the hill where someone could stand behind a big oak pulling the tree toward them while I made the cut. Jared’s friend, John, volunteered for that. We dropped it just where we wanted it. I cut the tree into 16 inch logs and came up the hill just in time to hear Rick calling me for a game of horseshoes. I won the first and third game to take the match.
We planned to go down to the pool before bed for a midnight swim.
Green forties car In Four Mile Creek Preserve in Webster, New York
We spent the afternoon in Webster where my brother, Fran, lives. He wasn’t home. He was working like he does everyday unless it rains. We stopped at the farm stand on his road and bought a dozen ears of corn. I wanted to make sure it was the right farm stand so I asked the lady behind the counter if this was where Fran bought his corn. She said “I knew you looked familiar. Fran lives on corn. He’s a real hoot.”
We were out here to pick up a few of my father’s paintings and to go through my father’s repository which is temporarily being stored in a spare bedroom in his home, my sister’s old room.
In preparation for the upcoming Rochester Biennial Peggi and I have been culling my father’s paintings. We have a few hundred on Leo’s website but there is only enough room for thirty in the show. The final decision as to which ones to use is up to the curator but we are making sure we can get our hands on the actual paintings in case they are selected.
There is a book shelf that fills a whole wall in this bedroom and it is stocked from floor to ceiling with Leo’s sketchbooks. We went through half and took a walk in the woods across the street from Fran’s house. That’s where we came across this old car. We’re hoping to make some of the sketchbooks available during the show. Maybe one of those white glove scenarios.
Two farmers painted on silos near Torch Lake in Michigan
Our hosts on Torch Lake were kind enough to stop the car so I could take this picture on our way out of town. I had spotted it the day before and I couldn’t get the image out of my head.
We were visiting Peggi’s sister and she had recently retired so Peggi was pushing her on what she did with her days. Peggi wanted to know, “What is a typical day like?” I find that a totally unfair question. I certainly wouldn’t want to have to account for my time.
So what did we do on our first day back? We were still reading the paper on the deck when our neighbor stopped by to ask for help. He was trying to play an iPod through a small PA system and he couldn’t get the volume up anywhere near the volume of the mic channel. I told him I would stop by when I finished the paper.
He had a brand new cord, Sony stereo mini to stereo RCAs, running from the iPod to the back of the board. He played something for me and then plugged the mic in. It was loud as hell. I looked at the back of the board and saw that that the iPod was coming in the “Record Out.” An easy fix but surprising he got any volume out of it at all with that patch.
Meanwhile Peggi heard back from our nephew, an IT guy at a New Jersey bank and our one man geek squad. The neighbors on the other side of us had asked us if we could recommend a way to learn how to fly their new drone without cracking it up. They were even considering buying a really cheap drone to practice with.
Our nephew had taken birds eye drone movies of our neighborhood when he was up here and we had shared them with the neighbors. We passed their question on to him and he advised them to download an app for their phone and put it in “Beginners” mode. He said that was easier than trying to fly a cheap drone. Peggi went down to the neighbors house to to download the app and she plans to return when they are ready to launch.
With those issues under control we rode our bikes up to Wegman’s. Came out with two quarts of homegrown peaches, some wild caught scallops and a bin of plastic mixed greens. We needed an “LR44” battery for our grilling thermometer but couldn’t find one at Wegman’s so we went up to Walgreens. The clerk there told me LR44 is the same as Energizer 357/303 so I bought one of those. You would think the brands would want to sell to their competitors and put that information on the package. Our last stop was Aman’s Market where we picked up half a dozen ears of corn and some homegrown Escarole.
By he time we got home it was almost time for dinner.
Northern Michigan is so pretty. It’s like Upstate New York except there are more lakes. Vineyards, fruit farms and corn are everywhere and the wildflowers, birds and vegetation are all the same as back home. Torch Lake is long and runs north south. We walked and biked along the shore in both directions but today we went perpendicularly, up the hill for two and a half miles. The road turned to dirt or, more accurately, sand as we crossed Route 31. And when it ran out we could see the next body of water.
There were fruit trees on both sides of the road. Cherry is king here and acres of trees were grouped by age. There were apple orchards and pears as well. We picked an apple and I shined it on my shirt. It was crisp and delicious.
We flew in and out of Cherry Capitol Airport in Traverse City. Our hosts bought cherry pies from two different farm stands and we discussed the merits of both. We bought dried cherries to bring back to our neighbor and on the way to the airport we stopped for a dish of cherry ice cream, the world famous Moomers Homemade Ice Cream.
There is a lot of money in Traverse City. I couldn’t even have told you what state Traverse City was in before this trip. It sounds like a dusty old town in a cowboy movie. Torch Lake, somewhere near the size of the largest Finger Lake, is lined with big “cottages.” Half a million dollar places, the average cost, that are mostly used only in summer. The lake frontage average cost is $5000 a foot. I can’t help but think of this chart as I watch the boats go by.
I’m not complaining. The setting, though, does heighten the surreal nature of the news, epitomized for me in this statement from the president’s evangelical advisor. (As if those last three words weren’t surreal enough.)
“When it comes to how we should deal with evildoers, the Bible, in the book of Romans, is very clear: God has endowed rulers full power to use whatever means necessary — including war — to stop evil. In the case of North Korea, God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un.”
I should have bought that Tigers hat at the airport. I was swimming off the end of the dock when Jack suggested we ride down to the Dockside and get a little something to eat. So there I was in the back of his party boat in the blazing sun. All the docks were full there so we cruised down the Clam River a ways and Jack filled up the gas tank at a place called the Clam Shack. I looked at some Bell’s Two Hearted IPA in the cooler but I didn’t have my wallet so I let it go.
It’s beautiful here at Torch Lake in northern Michigan. Not Upper Michigan but at the top of the mitt. Eminem has a place here and Michael Moore had a place before his divorce.
There was a slip open when we came back up the river and Jack told me to grab the starboard side rope and hop out. I swung one of the rope around a post on the dock so the front end was under control but the wind took the back end out into the channel. Another boat was right behind us and the guy behind the wheel started hollering at us. If I had acted quickly enough I could have secured the front end and then pulled the back end in but that is only hindsight. Peggi and her sister were on the boat but could only watch as we sideswiped another boat. Jack handled it all like a gentleman but I felt responsible.
Dead tree just beyond green lake and trees in Durand Eastman Park
There is a point in every summer where there has been so much rain and it is so humid that everything turns green. Invasive weeds encroach on the paths in the woods. The trees are at their fullest and the woods is at its darkest. It is lush and beautiful. We are peaking.
Citlali Fabian Pop Up Show at Culver and Merchants Road
I was surprised how many people were in the Cineplex Theater Friday afternoon. We had reserved seats for Detroit and in retrospect it was probably a little silly to be excited about seeing a movie about a rebellion. Peggi grew up outside of Detroit and remembers the curfew. Rochester had its own so called “riot” three summers earlier in 1964.
I really liked Kathryn Bigelow’s “Near Dark” and then she got all big budget. We had just seen Jacob Lawrence’s “Migration” series in New York and it was trivialized in her opening scenes. (One reviewer, apparently without knowing where the illustrations came from, called it a children’s book animation.)
The movie weaved a relevant storyline, for someone who came in from the cold, but considering how little things have changed in fifty years, Detroit’s retelling should have had a lot more meat on its bones. It was a big letdown for me.
Our First Friday gallery trot was short but sweet. A pop-up gallery in the North East Triangle, the area of the city that got trendy when we left, featured Mexican photographer, Citlali Fabian. She slowly leafed through her gorgeous, square format, black and white prints, all taken in her small home town outside Oaxaca. She told us a neighbor offered to shoo the dog away in the photo above but of course that would have ruined the entire composition.
