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The first Refrigerator was an 8 1/2 by 14″ broadsheet, offset printed and available in restaurants and bars in Rochester for free. The circulation grew from 500 to 3,000 and the number of pages climbed to twelve. I did most of the graphics and wrote some, Peggi Fournier was the production manager. Ted Williams, Martin Edic, Chuck Cuminale, Carol Bradley, Chris Schepp, Rob Tyler and Frank Petronio all contributed content. The late Norm Davis hysterically surveyed the shops on Monroe Avenue. This was back in the nineties, before the internet, and all of this work was done anonymously until the D&C did a story about the Refrigerator..

With front page tag lines like “Does Caffeine Make You Smarter?,” “Love World’s Mental Heath Tipsheet,” “Recycle The Earth Issue,” paid for by the advertisers With a tag “George Eastman Is Dead,” “My Funeral,” “Bad Acid Trip,” “Because You Don’t Need an Entertainment Guide,” (a dig at Freetime Magazine), “Rochester’s Only Demolition Derby Fanzine” and “Virgin Mary To Appear in Rochester” we attracted a faithful readership. The “Why Are You Here? issue was especially popular as was Pete LaBonne’s “Dream Breakfasts.”

Lead-ins to pieces like “Rewriting Rochester’s Cultural Heritage,” “Readers Are People Too,” “Dealing With Denial,” “The Difference Between Right and Wrong,” “The End of the World,” “Thel Sound of Doom,” “Virtual Rochester,” “Finally, The Future,” “The Tediousness of Facts,” “I Live Next Door to a Genius” and “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” were often the whole story.

The back page of “The Refrigerator” carried ten dollar, one square inch ads like those shown above. Pyramid Arts Center, The Village Green, The Bug Jar, The Cadillac Hotel, Squires Of The Subterrain, the Rochester Club and City Newspaper were all regulars. Nicholson Baker, the author, was an advertiser. 

All 28 editions are available in pdf format here. There is also a PayPal button for $10 Refrigerator hats.

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With the temperature near fifty today I got up on the roof and blew the leaves off. And then we raked those same leaves out of the pachysandra and out on to our so called lawn. I only mowed once this year. We don’t get all that much sunlight through the trees. When all the leaves are out in the lawn I use the mower to mulch them and we just let those chopped leaves turn into dirt. It takes about a year for that to happen and then we start all over again. This cycle is bittersweet.

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We were kinda late for our train or I would have stopped to talk to this guy in Penn Station. He looks like a one man band with his stage gear on and his equipment case advertising a Funky Percussion Machine, Country, Irish, Polka, Zydeco and something called Bachata. I wanted to go where he was going but our train was boarding in the other direction.

Maybe it was the cup of coffee we had up at Starbucks but I had a hard time getting with the program in our yoga class tonight. Jeffery usually starts by going around the room asking people what they want to work on. I always say “anything.” Someone suggested shoulders so we got on our backs and stayed there the whole class, opening our spines, breathing deeply in three stages, stretching our shoulders and putting tennis balls under our piriformis (butts).

That was another problem. We walked up to Target this afternoon and ate rather hurriedly before class . Jeffery talked about being in the moment, how the class was just for this group at this time but my food was still settling. I must have stared at the ceiling lights o long because when we closed our eyes I kept seeing a small dancing bear, like one of those little Grateful Dead figures, moving from right to left.

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We saw the Elton John movie on Netflix and then Pedro Almodovar’s new one at the theater and now I’m getting them both mixed up. They both had similarly dysfunctional upbringings and both were clearly gifted. We put the subtitles on for “Rocketman” and I was amazed at how good Bernie Taupin’s lyrics were. As good as Elton John’s amazing melodies. I woke up singing Tiny Dancer.

Almodovar’s “Pain and Glory’ is his best yet. Having just been in Spain it was visually sensational but that is just scraping the surface. The movie was deep. Aging, mortality, futility, all that stuff. Check it out.

I put a photo in the annual RoCo Member’s Show. I came home with so many good ones from the Iberian Peninsula. I had Joan down at Frametastic cut a piece of glass for me. Visiting her is always a treat. She and her husband built the business but he is long gone. Joan, at 87, is the only employee. She had Jazz 90.1 on when I walked in and she was cutting nine holes in one piece of matt board. Each opening was a different size. She showed me the boxes of glass that she starts with, sheets that are 32″ by 40.” “i used to be able to handle a bigger sheet but not anymore.” She only takes cash.

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This tree was not as close to the lake last year. And its roots were underground.

At one time the Memorial Art Gallery had a biennial show of a half a dozen local artists’ work. They handed the show off to Rochester Contemporary, a good move, and two years ago RoCo had their first Rochester biennial, a three pronged affair with two artists at three different sites. My father and I were chosen to show our work at RoCo. The exhibit was entitled “Witness.”

This time around the biennial, entitled “Current Seen,” is spread all across town in nearly twenty venues. We were in Spain when the shows opened and we’ve been scrambling to get up to speed since our return. On Friday night we met a group at Joy Gallery on West Main where the graffiti show celebrating 30 years of work by the collective known as FUA is on display. Our group walked further west to 540 where Siena Pullinzi is showing her prints of women’s bodies, a show called “Not Your Object,” and then down King Street to the Douglas Auditorium where Mara Ahmed is showing her beautiful collage/paintings, photographic imagery of family members in painted fields that illustrate the displacement imposed on people in India at the end of British colonialism. Thankfully our city is so much broader than the East side.

There is a guide book (5 dollars) for Current Seen, one designed by Tate Shaw at Visual Studies that is packed with insightful articles about the shows and some solid history of our fair city. In the opening Bleu Cease asks, “Can the visual arts connect people across a divided city?” I think it can.

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We had to start early on First Friday in order to make the rounds. The season is in full swing. I loved the way Owen Butler hung his large graphic digital prints in Warren Philips’ space. Steve Piper told us Owen was his favorite teacher ever when he took a photo journalism class from him forty years ago at RIT. I really liked the charcoal drawings at RoCo but it was odd to see all the homeless people smiling. Colleen Buzzard has curated a great little show in the temporary space created when Warren Philips moved his frame shop to the Hungerford Building. And we had fun with Roberley Bell’s household items partially encased in organic shapes at Colleen’s studio gallery.

El Camino, the so called Breaking Bad movie, would have been a snooze of an episode if it was part of the long running show. Jessie was only a vehicle for Walter White. I don’t care enough about him to even root for him. And putting Brian Cranston in the movie for a few minutes only threw salt in the wounds. And for all the money they made and then spent you would think they would have introduced some new scene stealing characters the way the show continually did. The best thing about the movie was Jim White’s song in the closing credits.

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We’ve been reacquainting ourselves wit our environment by taking long walks in different directions. Along the lake where we see the beach has returned. Next time we’ll walk on the new sand. Through the woods to Kathy’s house where we checked up on her backyard project. Along the river from downtown to the UR and across the river to the coffee shop on Brooks Avenue where they had Jefferson Starshit on sound system while the only employee wore earbuds with his own music. And then back down the river on the west side a beautiful stretch. Today we wandered through our woodsy neighbor looking for downed trees fro last night’s wind storm. Not much but big branches and one dead end with no power and generators running.

We are still sort on Spanish time so we decided to stop in Parkside Diner for an early dinner. The newspaper rated their fish fry highly and we felt for it. We could have sold the fried dough casing at a carnival. The fish itself was ok but the cold slaw was as bland as you could imagine and the mash potatoes were the reconstituted kind. Peggi asked our server a question and instead of answering the server asked if she go take some one else’s order. The worst part though was the tv with Fox News on. Dana somebody was interviewing a guy with a cowboy hat who playing an upcoming Patriot’s Bash while streamer ran across the bottom of the screen with “Sticker Shock” teasers for Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare For All and something about Ocassio Cortez. I’m not sure if it was the tv or the food that gave me the indigestion.

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