Author: Paul

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Meat & Beat

Willow tree on its side
Willow tree on its side

The willow tree in the picture above has fallen over but there are enough roots still in the ground to send nourishment to the hundreds of shoots, or branches really, that are growing upward out of its side. We were saddened to hear that Poly Styrene had died of cancer. Her band was so much fun for that brief period. Her smart lyrics and the saxophone were the perfect antidote to the punks. “I Am A Poseur”. My brother in law has cancer and the neighbor’s granddaughter has a brain tumor. We’re all pre-cancerous if we don’t have it already. This fallen willow got me thinking about all this.

I was looking for a replacement window for the skylight that came with our house. The one we have leaks or it used to. I thought it was the roof leaking and I caulked between almost every shingle up there before I realized it was the aluminum seal around the window itself. By that time the wood frame had rotted so I called Velux and determined that they still make our model. I got price from Lowes and then one from Home Depot. Home Depot told me they would match Lowes price and then take 10% off that. So we drove out to Lowes, got he quote in writing and took it to Home Depot. I did this routine once before but I can’t remember what it was I was buying. The clerk at Home Depot had to get special permission to mark the price down and we watched him type “Meat & Beat Competitor” into his computer terminal before he gave us the bill.

I like Home Depot better. They must be hungrier in their race with Lowes but their sales staff seems friendlier and they are very helpful. The Lowes Sore near us is bigger and cleaner with fewer customers. Home Depot is always hopping with contractors and works and of course do-it-tourselfers like us. The store is funkier and more comfortable. Today we saw a a customer having his lunch in the plumbing aisle.

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Fool On The Hill

House on the hill in Irondequoit, NY
House on the hill in Irondequoit, NY

You know how nosey neighbors can be, always speculating about somebody else’s business. The house at the top of the hill in the photo above wasn’t even there when we moved here a few years ago and now it’s for sale. Zillow says their asking 300k and the place doesn’t even have a driveway. Neighbors say it went into foreclosure.

At the edges of the enlargement of the photo above you can see the hill dropping off on both sides, as steeply as it does in the front. We could not believe our eyes when they started building on this lot. Doesn’t the town of Irondequoit have “steep slopes” and “setback”regulations? Did money change hands here or was the town so desperate to increase the tax base that they gave this guy a pass? We hadn’t even set eyes on the owner and we were already calling him “The fool on the hill” but we’re really the fools because this was a beautiful hill on a gorgeous strip of land before they built this modern monstrosity on top of it.

Funniest thing about all of this is I haven’t found a beer can since this guy moved out. We used to haul home twenty at a time from the spot by the creek directly across from his house. We ran into him a few times with the bags of 20 ouncers and we asked if he had any idea who the hops head was. Could it be we found Mister Budweiser?

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Conceptual Photography

John Gilmore photo of lightning storm
John Gilmore photo of lightning storm

Our friend John woke up in that lightning storm that we had early Wednesday morning. He took some photos and we looked at them on my computer last night. He never got a lightning bolt or anything but the purple trees looked pretty psychedelic. I was stuck by a few things. The date on the photo is about four years old and its probably the oldest date that his camera’s software would let him set if he ever found his way to the settings. And secondly, every photo he has ever taken with that camera probably has this same date on it.

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Party Like It’s 1998

Margaret Explosion playing at Bug Jar Happy Hour in 1998. Jack Schaefer on guitar, Paul Dodd on drums. Pete LaBonne on bas guitar and Peggi Fournier on soprano sax.
Margaret Explosion playing at Bug Jar Happy Hour in 1998. Jack Schaefer on guitar, Paul Dodd on drums. Pete LaBonne on bas guitar and Peggi Fournier on soprano sax.

Jack Schaeffer and Pete LaBonne join Margaret Explosion tonight at the Bug Jar. I should say “rejoin” because they were both original members. Jack doesn’t settle for ordinary and Pete doesn’t even know what it is so it promises to be an adventure. The shot above was taken at the Bug Jar about thirteen years ago so it will be a reunion as well.

Invisible Idiot CD "Outta Sight, Outa Mind" (EAR 7) on Earring Records, released 1999
Invisible Idiot CD “Outta Sight, Outa Mind” (EAR 7) on Earring Records, released 1999

Margaret Explosion – Abstract Express

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Sempre Culver

I have been cruising down Culver Road for most of my life and I never get tired of it. Sometimes its magical like this Sunday when we drove in to hear Bach’s “St. John’s Passion.” We had an Italian radio show on as we cruised by Dixon Apartments, Dentico’s and Palermo’s Deli. The sky was cloudy but promising.

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I Miss My Mouse

Three stacks of crime faces from the local paper. Oil paintings by Paul Dodd
Three stacks of crime faces from the local paper. Oil paintings by Paul Dodd

I found this photo in my photo library on our iPad. I’m at least three years behind in photographing my paintings. Our addresses, contacts, email and photos all sync effortlessly with our desktop machines and we use theiPad for just about everything. Everything but productivity that is. Unless you count reading, surfing, listening to music or streaming movies as a productive activity. I kind of like typing on the thing.

Who would have guessed that it would take an heroic effort to crop and scale a photo to a particular pixel dimension like 450 x200 for example? As an experiment I tried a few apps like “Crop For Free” and then bought “Photogene” for $2.99 but that didn’t let me crop and scale which is one activity in Photoshop. So I bought FilterStorm and that does the trick in two steps. I saved two versions (the cropped version you see above and the full shot but in a scaled down size for the blowup) of the original photo back to my photo library and inserted them here. When I say “here” I should say I am in the WordPress app because I can’t even reach my photo library from the WP admin panel at my site in Safari. Not sure why that is but it acts like a limited version of Safari.

So I managed to do a post from the iPad but I’m exhausted. I still haven’t plugged in the $29 Camera Connection Kit but that would allow me to reach photos on my camera from the iPad and post to this site through the WP app. I’s all pretty amazing really.
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Jesus Is A Baritone

Station 12 from "Passion Play" by Paul Dodd, 24" x 30" inkjet print 1998
Station 12 from “Passion Play” by Paul Dodd, 24″ x 30″ inkjet print 1998

I had planned on stopping by Record Archive and the Bob Shop for Record Store Day. Peggi had emailed the Bop Shop ad we did for Tom for the upcoming Jazz Festival and I wanted to make sure it looked ok before we put it into InDesign and sent it off. I would also check the racks for new releases from my favorite artists, most of which are dead. I’m still hoping for one from Ornette before he says goodbye.

As it turns out we started the day by downloading a live Neil Young gig. So much for supporting local record stores. Duane sent us the link so I can blame him. We saw the “Chrome Dreams 2” tour in Buffalo where they were still using pieces of the Greendale set. This is an audience recording, it sounds amazing.

I’ve seen a few Rembrandts, just a handful really, but I was knocked out by how timeless they are. I mean they actually appear alive. This afternoon we heard Bach’s “St. John Passion” performed by “Voices”, the local professional chamber choir. Bach wrote the piece near the end of his long life and it was performed on Good Friday. Today was Palm Sunday and it was close enough. The eighteen voice chorus and small orchestra sounded great in the Lutheran Church, a fitting venue as they have a weekly service in German, a large German contingent to their parish and Bach’s “Passion” was performed in his and their native tongue. Bach’s music is also still alive. The church was packed. We squeezed into the back pew and were blown away by how powerful this music is. We are so fortunate to have this accumulated culture to dip into.

The Stations of the Cross were always my favorite part of church. I collected sources from newspaper clippings for a retelling, the Unabomber was on the front page one Good Friday, and I still plan to paint the Stations some day. I showed the studies at the Bug Jar in 1998 and they were shown again at the Finger Lakes Show in 1999.

I heard the last pope added a fifteen station, the resurrection, the most suspect of all miracles to say the least, for a happy ending. And the current pope wants to rush sainthood for the guy who hired him to “handle” the countless sex abuse cases. I say “sainthood now” for Rembrandt and Bach and Ornette.

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Bang RIP

Billy Bang at Water Street Music Hall in Rochester.NY in 2007
Billy Bang at Water Street Music Hall in Rochester.NY in 2007

Billy Bang loved Rochester because Rochester loved Billy Bang. You could tell when he took the stage and he said as much. Somehow the rough and tumble sophistication fit. He was a cocky star in the underground jazz movement when he appeared with Sun Ra’s band at the Red Creek in ’86 and over the years Tom Kohn brought him to the Bop Shop atrium, the German House and Water Street in many configurations. His music soared when he began writing his haunting Viet Nam suite. It took him a while to process his war experience but when he did it came out in an incredibly rich, dark, beautiful way. Track down “KIAMIA” on iTunes and I’ll stop trying to describe it. He tore the roof off of Montage during the 2004 Rochester Jazz Festival and did so again in 2006 when Garth Fagan joined him on stage. The violinist was scheduled to open the fest this year but word has spread that he’s died of cancer and we’ll miss him.

Bang’s music transcends jazz and could easily fit on Scott Regan’s “Open Tunings” or Rick Simpson’s “Gumbo Variations”. In fact I’ll request it tonight. We saw Scott last night at the Margaret Explosion gig and I hope he doesn’t come down with anything in the next few days. I was telling him I thought I gotten sick from sick from a reaction to the drug they gave me for my colonoscopy but it had been in the back of mind that maybe I caught a bug from Scott’s bandmate, Steve Piper, who shook Peggi’s hand after their gig on Saturday night and then told Peggi that he had been sick with a stomach flu. Well Peggi left the stage while we were playing last night in a rather dramatic fashion. I followed her to the bathroom and sure enough she had the bug so I was wrong about my bad reaction and just as wrong to blame Steve Piper for the bug that is going around. Who wouldn’t shake Steve’s hand after his rousing version of an Elvis’s “His Latest Flame”?

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It’s Heavy

Ken Frank, Paul Dodd and Peggi Fournier playing as a trio version of Margaret Explosion at High Falls in Rochester, New York
Ken Frank, Paul Dodd and Peggi Fournier playing as a trio version of Margaret Explosion at High Falls in Rochester, New York

Ken, Peggi and I played as trio version of Margaret Explosion over the weekend and Brian Peterson took this photo. It was a 50 dollar a head auction/party for the The Genesee Center For The Arts. Rick from Watkins & The Rapiers sat in with on trombone in the second set and we tore it up while Ken’s wife yelled for Stones and Neil Young covers. They had nice spread of food but we had already eaten and the small cannolis on the dessert table looked inviting but I was already paring down my food intake for my Monday morning colonoscopy.

This was second one and because they found a polyp on the run so they wanted to do another in five years. I asked my mom how many she had had and she said she’s never had one and my dad said one of his doctors recommended one but the other said he was too old it. He didn’t really like hearing that. I was dreading this whole thing but as they say, “The prep is the hardest part. Last time I had to drink a gallon of Drano. This time it was one two quarts but that pretty much shoots the day.

The sedative never completely knocked me out but it did space me out for most of the day. I was able to read the paper as soon as they were done but I was little wobbly when I stood up. We went directly from the doctor’s to SEA Restaurant on Monroe for a big bowl of Vietnamese Pho and then to the used bookstore next door. Peggi picked up a few things from the horror section and I found a four dollar book on Picasso and Matisse written by Francoise Gilot, one of Picasso’s exs. It was such a nice day we pretty much blew off work and headed out to the Apple store. I wanted to buy a USB Camera Connection Kit for our iPad. I want to be able to backup photos on my iPad and also work with photos when I’m out of town. My laptop feels so big and clumsy these days and it’s heavy!

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Where The Magic Is

Painting in the bathroom upstairs at Polska Chata in Irondequoit, NY
Painting in the bathroom upstairs at Polska Chata in Irondequoit, NY

After the Margaret Explosion gig on Wednesday I sat down with Jeff, a therapist and friend from high school and beyond, and we began talking about the painting/therapy nexus. Jeff felt there was a strong parallel between the two practices and why shouldn’t there be? This conversation was just getting going when we were interrupted but the topic has been kicking around in my head.

When my father started taking the painting class with me at the Creative Workshop he’d come out of class many times saying he felt like he was in therapy and I would laugh but I know exactly what he meant. Breaking old habits requires someone to point the detrimental habits out. Staying open and using your eyes instead of your brain, learning to trust your own eyes is tougher than would seem so why not accept help from a coach?

Recovering alcoholics all subscribe to the “one day at a time thing” just as painters in Fred Lipp’s class learn to “address the worst first.” “Always, get to the point!” “Painting is not supposed to be easy or everyone would do it.” The journey is the thing, not the plan or final piece, and the toughest lesson is learning to enjoy the struggle because that is where the magic is.

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Good Bad

Painting for sale in house on Queensboro in Rochester, New York
Painting for sale in house on Queensboro in Rochester, New York

About twenty years ago or so Kim sent us a book called “Thrift Store Paintings” by Jim Shaw. It was a pretty cool collection of good bad paintings and it turned out Jim Shaw was the nephew of Peggi’s parents best friends, the Gardners.

Danny from Abilene has a pretty cool collection of thrift store paintings at his bar downtown so when we spotted this painting this morning in a household sale on Queensboro in Rochester I took a photo and emailed it to him. I could just as easily have alerted Marie Via or Clair Marziotti whose collections were featured in a Democrat & Chronicle article on bad art but if they scooped it up I wouldn’t be able to visit it as often. Jack Wanderman, Susan Plunket’s brother, was organizing the sale and asking $65 for the painting. We were there to visit some of Peggi’s mom’s stuff one last time. Jack has been putting her stuff in household sales around town.

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Hitchhike Baby

Paul Dodd with movie camera, Rich Stim and Norm Ladd at Norm's wedding
Paul Dodd with movie camera, Rich Stim and Norm Ladd at Norm’s wedding

When I was a freshman Norm Ladd’s mam called me and said Norm, a friend of mine from high school who was a couple years younger, had run away from home and he was hitchhiking out to see me. He lived in my dorm for while.

I used to hitchhike all the time. Back forth to work at my uncle’s store during high school, over to Brad and Dave’s house and then back and forth to Bloomington. I got picked up by one of the famous Wyeth family members. He was wearing leather gloves and driving a small sports car but it overheated around Buffalo and he through a fit. A few times I got picked up by a guys that wanted to “pick me up” but most of the time it worked out. Once I was picked up by a salesman who gave me some potato chips that his company had just introduced. He was raving about how much less shelf space the chips took up because they came in cans instead of bags. He had boxes of them in the back seat and we ate them as we drove toward Indianapolis. They tasted pretty good and he gave me a can to take back to the dorm.

Today in the business section I read about Procter & Gamble selling off their food brands, Jif, Folger’, Crisco and Pringles. The article said their advertising division was located in Cincinatti and they test marketed the chips in Evansville Indiana in 1968. That salesman would have picked me up halfway between those two locations that year. I didn’t imagine all this.

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In Like A Lamb

Lake Ontario from the ridge trail in Durand Eastman Park
Lake Ontario from the ridge trail in Durand Eastman Park

It was sixty something today but we still have a few pockets of snow and I’m happy about that. If there is one thing that really bothers me it is when Spring comes roaring in like a lion. Winter is a test of of metal and we fail the test if we give up on it. It makes us stronger when we give in to it and it makes Spring all the more dramatic when it unveils itself. Besides I like the minimalist palette of grey brown with small touches of color.

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Big Bird

Turkey in our yard
Turkey in our yard

This female turkey must be in a state and it probably has something to do with mating. We usually see turkeys in packs in the woods but this one was in our back yard this morning when we woke up and she wandered around our yard all day. She stopped stopped in front of our window and gave us this mighty display.

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High Performance

Cuong Vu Trio performing in Hatch Recital Hall at the Eastman School of Music
Cuong Vu Trio performing in Hatch Recital Hall at the Eastman School of Music

Cuong Vu Trio performs their own music tonight in a free concert at Kilbourn Hall. They have been in town for a week while Cuong Vu has been teaching a workshop on creativity. Last night they played six compositions by Eastman students in the brand new performance space Hatch Recital Hall. This is clearly the best sounding room in the city. And “clearly” is a good word for the way you hear sound in this space.

The room is small, 200 or so seats, and it was designed as a “box within a box” so none of the walls come in contact with the rest of the building. The room is live sounding but without added reverb and as natural sounding a space as I have ever heard. It’s nothing like the dead studio spaces of the past. If a band has it’s act together an engineer could put two mics here and be done and the producer would be out of a job.

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Onward

4D business cards on there way to the trash
4D business cards on there way to the trash

“The Guy With The Tie.” We used to use him for copywriting a long time ago. Anne Esse. She’s a great designer and we’ve worked on many projects with her. CompUSA. They’re long out of business. Telesis. Dan Brumley used to work there before he moved to France. We worked on an industrial at Telesis with David Rose. I just saw him the other night at a house concert. Peter Pappas Shadow Match. I have no idea what that was. Bristol Boarding is still making custom cases. We did a brochure for them last year. They’re in the old HH Sullivan building.on Culver. Spectrum Color Lab. Wow. What did they do? Something to do with high end color transparencies. Innovative Type. I think they set type before everyone with a computer could set type. LefThumb Productions. I think Pauli did a film with one of our songs.

Those cards all would up on the top of the heap when I finished a job I had been trying to get to for ages. That is going digital with our contacts and addresses. It took me way less time than I thought because so many of the cards in our Rolodex are from extinct businesses.

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Eternal Search Engine

Ossia at Kilbourn Hall in Rochester NY 2011
Ossia at Kilbourn Hall in Rochester NY 2011

Ossia, the student-run new music performance group at the Eastman School of Music, held their last concert of the 2010-11 season last night in Kilbourn Hall. They performed Philip Glass’s “String Quartet No. 2: Company” and it stopped time. I have no idea how long it was but it wasn’t long enough. I had my eyes closed picturing the clouds in “Koyaanisqatsi” and then it stopped abruptly. My favorite piece of the evening though was “Marsias” for oboe and eight glass goblets by the Mexican born composer, Mario Lavista. The perfect fifth tones from the water filled glasses represented the “celestial” world of Apollo and the desperately melodic oboe stood for “the poet’s eternal search for perfect, precise expression”.

Lavista taught at Indiana University and currently teaches here at the Eastman. I visited his web site this morning and learned “He likes machines with hiccups and spiders with missing legs, looks at Paul Klee’s Notebooks everyday, hasn’t grown much since he reached adulthood at age 14, and tries to use the same set of ears to listen to Bach, Radiohead, or Ligeti.”

Margaret Explosion plays the Little Theater tonight without program notes or a score. Listen to Pit by Magaret Explosion.

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Drummer Jokes

Portrait by Richard Butler from the Psychedelic Furs
Portrait by Richard Butler from the Psychedelic Furs

My friend Brad, also a drummer, usually has a good drummer joke when we talk but I haven’t heard any in while. We watched a Nilsson documentary a while back and I really enjoyed it. I was not a fan but I am now. Too bad he’s dead. I thought our friend and neighbor Rick would have some of his records on vinyl but the only one he had was “Sandman.” It’s a very odd record with song titles like “Jesus Christ You’re Tall,” “How To Write A Song,” “The Flying Saucer Song,” “Hear’s Why I Didn’t Go To Work Today,” and “I’ll Take A Tango.” The first lines of that last song are “Deep down in my soul I hate rock and roll. And I don’t like the way that them drummers beat on them drums. They always hum along, out of tune.” That hit home for me.

Oh well, there is always painting. There must be some good painter jokes? We saw a show of Richard Butler’s (lead singer in the Psychedelic Furs) paintings in Chelsea on Saturday. I really liked this portrait.

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Expressionists & Expressionism

Philip Guston painting in "Abstract Expressionism" show at MoMA
Philip Guston painting in “Abstract Expressionism” show at MoMA

A note written on the back of a business card next to a full pot of coffee read “Out for bagels, Be back soon.” I hadn’t even finished my PopWars entry when Duane returned with a brown bag full. He got on his computer in the back room and told me I had some of the best typos on my blog. I had written “we opened the widow” in that morning’s post. I can’t spell and I depend on spellcheck so I often use the wrong word because, hey, it doesn’t have a red line under it.

We are not members of MoMA so we had to wait until Sunday to see the “German Expressionism”show when it opened to the public. The museum’s staff staged a dramatic presentation of these powerful, graphic works, mostly prints but some paintings, mounted on grey walls interspersed with deep red, yellow green and mustard sections with the usually offending curator’s notes on colors to match the walls. These details are important in a show with 250 mostly small, mostly black and white works on paper. They come off with a bang.

Otto Dix’s “The War” etchings filled a red wall with updated versions of Goya’s “Disasters of War.” Max Beckman’s 1917 painting, “Descent From The Cross” uses Christ’s crucifixion as a metaphor for war. Kathie Kollowitz’s heart wrenching woodcuts from her series called “War” stand as a timeless display of the emotional costs of war. If they were as powerful as they look we would all learn something from them before heading off to war. None of this work is as grizzly as I’ve made it out to be. Nolde, Egon and Kirchner, all giants of German Expressionism, have a masterly ability to cut to the chase.

We had looked a the “MoMA Abstract Expressionism” iPad app so many times I felt as though we had already seen the show but nothing can prepare you for the impact of these monumental paintings in the flesh. Kline, Motherwell, Rothko, Newman, Pollack, Gottlieb and Guston transformed the art world in the last century and their impact is still being felt.

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