From Steve Lampert’s collection of handbills for Slugs in the East Village 1967 – 1972
I have one Lee Morgan 45 but he is featured on three of the Art Blakey singles I have. I played the Morgan record, “Hey Chico,” last night while we were preparing dinner and Peggi said it sounded like Frug music. She demonstrated it.
I didn’t know much about Lee Morgan, so I googled him and found Ethan Iverson’s Substack article on the movie I Called Him Morgan. Morgan’s wife preferred to call him “Morgan,” and then she shot him at Slugs on the far east side of lower Manhattan.
We watched the movie last night and loved it. Fellow musicians and friends paint a loving picture of Lee. He was a fully formed musician at eighteen. Helen tells her side of the story, and together they paint a picture of Slugs, where nearly every jazz great of that foundational era performed.
“The Chase” by Margaret Explosion. Recorded live at Little Theatre Café in July 2025
We have twenty-eight Margaret Explosion songs in a folder called “Arcadia.” They were all recorded live over the last two years. We are sifting through them in preparation for a new release. About half of them will find a place on the CD of the same name.
“The Chase” is one of the songs from that folder. We put it together with some footage I shot from the car while Peggi was driving. We had this fall-colored leaf stuck to our windshield in spring, so we took it for a spin. Margaret Explosion plays at the Little Theatre Café on Wednesday, June 3.
When we would visit my parents in their last years, my mom often had the obituary page from the local paper open nearby. She’d say, “Did you see that so-and-so died?” Often it was a former neighbor or one of their friends’ spouses. We still read the paper and, of course, at our age we’ve seen plenty of people we know listed there.
Yesterday there was a name I was trying to place under a picture of a guy who looked a bit like Ricky Nelson or Frankie Avalon with his guitar. The obituary for Richard Nicholas Tosti was short, but it included a link to the funeral home’s website. We learned Dick graduated from Aquinas in 1959 and died after a struggle with cancer at 84. It also mentioned that he played at Gigi’s Italian Restaurant on Hudson Avenue.
I found an article that announced Gigi’s closing in 2018. The owner was quoted as saying, “When we were on East Ridge, there were eight Italian restaurants in a few-mile radius: Gigi’s, Pasta Villa, Dentico’s, Mamma Rosa’s, Nick’s Sea Breeze Inn, the Italian Osteria, Ciprianni’s/Carpani’s, and one other just down the street from us.” For a few years Peggi and I tried to keep track of the many Italian restaurants in Rochester but Gigi’s was not there.
The face cords of firewood we have are normally stacked closer together than this. The stack to the left collapsed over the winter, and all this debris gathered between the rows. I started to clean it out and disturbed this snake. I kept poking him to scare him off, but he had apparently made this his home and didn’t want to give it up.
Instead of restacking the fallen row, I decided to distribute the wood to the neighboring stacks, pile them higher, and leave this opening for the new wood we have from the trees that fell on our property over the winter. This took the better part of the day.
That night the stack to the left of the snake caved in. The extra weight collapsed the support I had used, an old pallet. We tore the front end of that pile down. Peggi stood on the end of the biggest board we have and, like a teetertater, we lifted the remainder of the stack and rebuilt it.
So this is the better part of three days spent restacking firewood that had already been stacked. I’m trying to recreate that saying about firewood—how it warms you three times: when you chainsaw it, when you split it, and when you burn it. I’d like to add the days we spent restacking it.
We met Scott and his whole family at Magpie on Park Avenue. Traditionally a Liverpool supporters bar, we were there to watch Arsenal play Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League final. We were still looking for a parking space when Arsenal scored the first goal.
When not pulling for our three Spanish teams, we were thrilled by PSG’s passing game in the earlier rounds, but we found it pretty easy to root against them in this situation. Arsenal were clearly the underdogs, but their defense proved impenetrable. Paris only managed to score on a penalty kick, and the match was a 1-1 logjam (Peggi’s description) through two overtime periods and the dreaded shootout stage. No way, but the only way, to settle things.
Are You Sure To Execute It? screen capture from 2002
I wish I had taken more screenshots back in the day. This time capsule from 2002 seems so long ago, but judging from the icons I was already using Toast 5 to burn CDs. We had an HP LaserJet 4 that printed at 600 dpi, fine enough for us to format and print hundreds of books for Lawyers Co-op. Our prints were arranged in big flats as line art and shot to film for plates that printed all those law books you see behind lawyers’ desks in old movies.
I see we already had a version of Photoshop. I remember the first version came on a 3½-inch yellow floppy. An alias on my desktop took me directly to the newsgroups where I was downloading MP3s. They went into the “mp3” folder shown on my external hard drive, “Outskirts.” We were using the Netscape browser at the time. I was using a Kodak DC4800 with a 3.1-megapixel sensor. And Pete LaBonne had just released “Glob” on Earring Records.
I love how simple the Finder window was back then. When I took this shot—at one in the morning—I was doing something in an app called “CDR Updater” (note the upper-right-hand corner). It might have had something to do with the art program Canvas. We were using that app at the time to image 35mm slides for Hampshire Instruments. I miss the wacky alerts you used to get back then.
Someday I thought I might design a T-shirt with the slogan “I Can’t Believe It” on it. I would wear it.
I’ve had that idea in a text document of notes that I carry around, a nearly random collection of things that seemed too important to just slip by. I weed the list out from time to time and save the document with a different name. I was using the Pages app for this, but not anymore. I had the document open on two devices, had a problem with one, and got a message that read, “This document was deleted in another location.” I was given the opportunity to click “OK.” I’m switching to the Notes app and reconstructing the list from past documents.
The idea that 1950 is considered the start date for the Anthropocene era. The concept, first proposed by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, defines a new geologic epoch in which human activity has profoundly impacted the Earth’s ecosystems and geology. Peggi and I were born that year, so it got my attention.
This news item seemed worth rereading: “Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the E.P.A., has recommended that the agency reverse its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare, according to three people familiar with the decision. That would eliminate the legal basis for the government’s climate laws, such as limits on pollution from automobiles and power plants.”
I have a friend who has been creating music with AI, and I was going to pass this note on to him: “The AI-generated song ‘Walk My Walk’ by the artist ‘Breaking Rust’ recently hit number one on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, sparking debate about the future of music. The track, created using the AI music platform Suno, features a gravelly vocal performance and has garnered millions of streams, raising questions about authenticity and the impact of AI on the music industry.”
We saw a Ribera painting in Bilbao where he depicted three saints in one painting. St. Sebastián lies naked, his arm still suspended from the tree on which he has been tormented, while St. Lucia extracts the arrows and St. Irene prepares to apply healing ointment to the wounds.
I kept this social media post from the president: “So we took over the Kennedy Center. We didn’t like what they were showing and various other things. We’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke. There’s no more woke in this country. NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA — ONLY THE BEST.”
I wanted to remember how much I love the drums at the tail end of Miles’ “He Loved Him Madly.”
Graffiti Cover Up paint on wall under Expressway on East Ridge Road
Graffiti Cover Up paint is specifically formulated for blocking out graffiti on exterior surfaces. Sherwin Williams sells the water-based flat paint in five gallon buckets. There must be many companies making the product because the colors, all in the reduced palette family of grey, never quite match each other or the brutalist concrete structures they are applied on.
Graffiti cover-up paint under bridge in Toronto
The paintings are obviously done with a roller and the strokes are applied confidently. I find the shapes expressive and suggestive of forms.
Graffiti Cover-Up paint on wall under South Avenue bridge
They are often animated and in dialog with one another like these two in downtown Rochester.
Graffiti Cover-Up paint on wall under the 101 in Sausalito
The work above, under Highway 101 in Sausalito, is sensational although it has probably changed since we were there in 2025.
Graffiti cover-up paint on wall leading to Seneca Park bridge
The colors on this wall, in the white cube gallery of Olmstead’s Seneca Park, are particularly striking. The paintings in all of these photos, created by anonymous public works employees looks more interesting this painting we saw in Chelsea.
As we neared the end of Zoo Road Peggi said, “I bet we find people swimming today,” and sure enough we did. Mostly kids, and they seemed pretty comfortable in the water. We were unable to walk along the beach, though, because the lake level is so high—more than a foot above its long-term May average.
There was an article in our paper today that referred to Lake Ontario as the smallest of the five Great Lakes. I felt sort of slighted. I had always believed Lake Erie was the smallest. I looked it up to make sure it wasn’t a typo and found that Lake Erie is the smallest by volume, but Ontario is the smallest by surface area. Together the Great Lakes contain one fifth of the world’s fresh water. Don’t spread it around.
There is a good argument to be made for club soccer being better than national team matches. But then the World Cup comes around again and we get swept up anew. For now we are enjoying every minute of the end of La Liga’s season.
We follow three teams in Spain’s top division, and they all finished in the top four. As I have mentioned before, we have taken to perversely rooting against one of them, Real Madrid. With the world’s top talent they were unable to play as a team. They fired their relatively new coach and will likely dump the next one when the season is over. And when you root against them you inevitably grow to like their scrappier opponents. Celta Vigo is one of our favorites now.
Barcelona had already won the title, but they weren’t holding back against Alavés, from the Basque city of Vitoria-Gasteiz in the Rioja region. Alavés needed points because in Spain the bottom three clubs get relegated. They are kicked out of the league, and the top three teams from the Segunda División move up to the Primera División. Alavés outplayed Barça, and we loved watching them defeat the champs 1–0 and move out of the relegation zone.
None of our teams played yesterday, so we tuned into Girona vs. Real Sociedad in the beautiful Catalan city just an hour north of Barcelona. We were already fond of Real Sociedad, from one of our favorite Spanish cities, San Sebastián, but Girona was in the bottom three with only three matches left. We went with Girona, and they outplayed La Real, tied them 1–1, and with that one point moved out of the relegation zone. It was one of the best matches we’ve watched in weeks.
When the division title has already been decided, La Liga still provides an exciting race at the bottom—no position more important than seventeenth.
This year, for some reason, we had the hardest time getting our most cherished seeds to germinate. We moved the tiny starter pots with the Padrón pepper seeds down to our neighbors’ house while we were in New York, and they sat in their sunny solarium for a week, but nothing sprouted. Fearing we had bad seeds, we ordered more from Hudson Seed. This time we kept the small pots on our bathroom floor, where they were warmed by the radiant heat. We banged into them a few times, but they sprouted in just under two weeks. And those original seeds—they eventually sprouted as well.
We’ve been chipping away at the fallen trees out back. I had to tackle this portion carefully because the big Y-shaped oak on top was only touching the ground at three points: the root ball at the top and the blunt ends, which are just out of the picture. The limb in the foreground was the most manageable, so I worked my way up it, cutting log-length sections but not all the way through because I was afraid the cut would close and pinch my saw. Mostly, I was afraid that if I shortened the foreground limb the big trunk might roll toward me.
Decorative room divider by Kamrooz Aram at Whitney Biennial
Peggi and I took a break at the Whitney and had a beer at the outdoor café on the eighth floor. I put my camera on the table and took a timed photo of the two of us. We don’t do many selfies, so it got more attention than most of my posts. And because I said, “We survived the Whitney Biennial,” I was asked about it several times at our Margaret Explosion gig.
I shouldn’t have been so snarky. I loved the decorative work by Kamrooz Aram. And there was a video in one of those dark rooms about an orchestra that really captivated us. And that beer tasted so good.
We went to three garage sales yesterday. Pete and Emily are moving to Italy, so they have an “Everything Must Go” sale going on. We stopped there first and considered buying a $200 turquoise guitar. We told them we’d think about it while we walked around. When we returned we saw a guy putting it in his car. We came home with a black Cuisinart cast-iron enamel Dutch oven, some glasses, and a crowbar. At the other two sales we mostly laughed and came home with two tiny square plates with the letter “P” on them.
The utility elevators at the hotel we stayed in New York were being repaired so the staff was using the same elevators as the guests. Regular guests were complaining about it, otherwise we wouldn’t have noticed. I went down to the exercise room each morning and I found faster to take the stairs. I took this shot between the 7th and the 8th floor. It is similar to the photo below that I had in “Portals & Planes,” from a few years back.
“Lightbulb” Giclée print from “Portals & Planes: Pictures by Paul Dodd” Leave a comment
The good thing about psychedelics is that you don’t have to do them over and over again? I tied most of them when I was nineteen and I feel like I am experienced. A tune up would be nice but not necessary. My last trip was an overload, a wildly strong LSD capsule, but back then you could never be certain what it was you were taking. I wound up in the college Health Center and woke up in a hospital gown after a shot of Thorazine. I had no idea where I was and I walked to the window to try to figure it out. The parking lot below was full of cars and they were all bending and moving in slow swirls.
Reflection from hotel windows on building in lower Manhattan
I was reminded of that experience when I put these two photos together. Both were taken on recent trips, the first from our hotel room in Toronto and the second from our hotel room in lower Manhattan. The building across from us in the Toronto picture was all mirrors so all those wrinkled buildings you see in that photo are not really there, they were behind us.
The building in the Manhattan photo was as plain as could be, an industrial building of some sort with only four small windows. The pattern you see on that building is all reflections from the glass windows of our hotel. The pattern went away when the sun went behind a cloud.
“I Thought I Would Never” lithograph at Guston “Life With P” at Hauser Wirth
The Guston show at Hauser & Wirth, mounted in conjunction with the release of Life With P, a compilation of poet Musa McKim’s journals and poetry, remains top of mind.
We picked a pawpaw two years ago and let it sit on the counter for a few days. When the fruit felt relatively soft, we ate it and kept the seeds. Peggi nicked each one with a knife and put them in a baggie filled with topsoil for the winter, a process called stratification. She planted them in small pots in the spring, and twelve eventually emerged as tiny trees. We put those in a cool, dark place for the second winter and then on the windowsill in the spring. We just started bringing them out each day to experience a bit of the outdoors, and when it’s warmer we’ll leave them out. This fall we’ll put them in the ground, and they will be on their own.
Something went wrong with our Padrón peppers. Only eleven of the seeds we sowed have sprouted. We need at least twenty plants to ensure peppers each night. We ordered new seeds from Hudson Seeds and planted them in small pots yesterday. Our neighbor suggested we put them in a warm place—the theory being that peppers grow in warm climates. We planted our root vegetables: two rows of carrots and two rows of beets.
Untitled drawing from Philip Guston “Life With P” at Hauser Wirth
Duane took a train in to meet us at the Guston show and he told us that he could see us talking this one home with us. We did our best to bring the whole show home.
It must have have beat least twenty years since we were last in The Frick. It was before I started keeping track of things here because I found nothing in the search. The Frick rounded up other versions of two of their sensational El Greco’s and hosted a mini blockbuster with the variations. We made a special trip to see that.
El Greco’s Purification of the Temple and his Saint Jerome still steal the spotlight in the newly refurbished Fifth Avenue mansion. Other Spanish masters – Goya with his workers, The Forge, Velazquez’s his hapless King Philip IV and Murillo’s self portrait – are well represented. Vermeer’s lighting is a knockout. Bellini’s Saint Francis receiving the stigmata is a wonder. Hans Holbein the Younger appears to have actually preserved the real the Thomas Moore in his canvas.
“Pieta with Donor” Ca. 1450 Frick
Two versions of the Pieta, the Virgin cradling the dead Christ after the Crucifixion, both by unknown artists from the 15th century, were hung together in an upstairs room. They knocked me out. One obviously copied the other and both probably copied someone else. I love the idea of a rich diner hiring an artist to put him at the scene.
Duane wore his orange hat on Sunday and it is a good thing he did. We spent some time at the Frick and then thought we would walk through the park. Fifth Avenue was closed off for the Greek parade, celebrating their indolence from Turkey more than a century ago. We were swallowed up by parade goers and paraders,, all in blue and white. We followed the hat. Duane pointed to this rock in front of the Metropolitan and I took a photo of it.
Paving stone on table in front of Metropolitan Museum of ArtLeave a comment
Philip Guston “Blue Cover” 1977 at Hauser Wirth Chelsea
It didn’t matter that it was raining and especially cold as we headed up to Chelsea. We found an oasis called Rosemary’s on Greenwich Avenue where we had smoked salmon, beet salad with pistachios and coffee. It didn’t matter that so many of the galleries in Chelsea were closed for installation of new shows. Hauser Wirth on 18th was showing “Life With P. Philip Guston : Paintings and Drawings 1964-1976.” The show was mounted in conjunction with the release of “Life With P.: Journals, 1966-1976,” poet Musa McKim Guston’s book collection of her journals.
Philip Guston 8 small panels 1977 at Hauser Wirth Chelsea
Many of the paintings, drawings and prints are from the collection of Guston’s daughter, Musa, and many are illustrations of Musa McKim Guston’s poetry. We got real comfortable here. Five short films with Guston play in a continuous loop in a side gallery. And when you dizzy from Guston immersion the Hauser Wirth book collection merits a few hours of browsing. Rather than packing the book around town we will order online.
Precious Okoyomon’s 2026 Whitney Biennial installation,” Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid”
One whole floor of the Whitney’s 2026 Biennial features Precious Okoyomon’s installation of suspended figures, stuffed bunny suits with 1930s/40s blackface doll heads, taxidermy feathers, wings, and teeth. It’s titled “Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid.” We were not.
Aki Onda presents Ugnayan (1974), music for twenty radios composed by José Maceda at 2026 Whitney Biennial
Aki Onda presents Ugnayan (1974), music for twenty radios composed by José Maceda. Maceda wrote a fifty-one-page score, created separate reel-to-reel recordings of singers and musicians playing gongs and Filipino bamboo instruments, and worked with radio stations across Manila to play the tracks simultaneously. Blanketing the city in sound waves, Maceda’s composition returned music from the concert hall to everyday life. The piece is adapted here for boom boxes, each playing there own part.
We walked through the gift store on the way out and found an eight dollar Warhol banana sticker that looked like it would fit on my bare Velvet Underground & Nico album.
A few erratic warm days and spring goes into high gear. The yellow comes first—witch hazel, winter aconite, forsythia, daffodils, cornus mas—then the cherry blossoms and magnolias, all of it already waning. It is all the more glorious after a long winter. But the winters aren’t long anymore. They fly by. When someone—anyone—starts going on about the winter, I cut them off. I don’t want to hear it anymore.
We have a patch of mâche in our garden that wintered over. We’ve been eating it for a month or so, but after that 80-degree day it just shot up—grew all stalky, with almost an inch between leaves. We’ll let it go to seed and sow some new seeds right on top. It is our favorite of all greens.
Turtle on tree in Trott Lake
We walked through the arboretum and then the fruticetum in the park and down one of those paths to Durand Lake. We turned toward Trott Lake and saw trees newly stripped by beavers. We heard a splash and thought surely it was a beaver, but it turned out to be turtles sunning themselves.
Bill Viola “Earth, Air, Fire and Water Martyrs” at MAG
The passage near where this Bill Viola piece is mounted reads: “The Greek word for martyr originally meant ‘witness.’ In today’s world, the mass media turns us all into witnesses to the suffering of others. The martyrs’ past lives of action can help illuminate our modern lives of inaction. They also exemplify the human capacity to bear pain, hardship, and even death in order to remain faithful to their values, beliefs, and principles. This piece represents ideas of action, fortitude, perseverance, endurance, and sacrifice.”
The special shows at the Memorial Art Gallery are usually the draw, but the collection itself is often better than the shows—especially under the direction of the last two directors. The place has come to life with exciting new acquisitions, adventurous pairings, and the rotation of works on paper from the collection—works like the Claes Oldenburg prints that can only handle a limited amount of light. It is the perfect place to feed your head.
linocut from “PIcasso and the Progressive Print” at MAG
Picasso made about 200 linocut prints during the last fifteen years of his life, and there is a fascinating show of the working and final stages of three in the Lockhart Gallery now. “Picasso and the Progressive Print” shows the artist having fun with his Spanish heritage and mythology.
Georges Rouault “The Abondoned” at MAG in Rochester, New York
“The Abandoned” by Georges Rouault is one of my favorite pieces in the collection. It’s oil paint over an intaglio print on paper mounted to Masonite, and the theme is part of his Miserere series. My father had four Rouault pieces hanging over the couch in our living room when I was growing up—plates he had cut out of a Rouault book. The way they were painted, the religious subject matter—I found them so mysterious.
Jean Arp Leaf on Crystal (Feuille sur Cristal) Bronze MAG Rochester
Since the inception of the Media Arts Watch Gallery at the MAG, they have had one sensational installation after another. Rashid Johnson, one of Hauser & Wirth’s artists, has a video installation called “The Hikers” there now. And just outside that gallery is this beautiful Jean Arp bronze.
