Author: Paul

My family, on my father’s side, was in the bootlegging business. Nothing to be ashamed of, the laws changed and they carried on legally. My father’s father, shown above on the right, ran the Munich Restaurant on Chili Avenue near Thurston. His partner must have been of German descent, a good portion of the city was. When World War II broke out though, they quickly changed the name of their place to the the Dodd Miller Tavern.

My grandfather retired the year I was born so I never saw the place. My dad worked there as a kid. The brick building is still there and it’s still a bar. We stopped in there in the early eighties when my brother, Mark, was up from New York. I think it was a black dance club at that time.

We bought our first chiminea, a clay one with sculpted creatures crawling up the side like Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, from Jim at Animas Traders. He used to take two buying trips to Mexico each year and buy directly from the craftspeople and then have a truck deliver it all to his store on Clinton Avenue. Nowadays you can buy a chimenea at Home Depot. That’s where we bought our second one, something made by Hampton Bay. It was a piece of shit. The smoke escaped from all sides making it impossible to sit next to. We sold it or basically gave it away at our garage sale.

A few years ago I photographed this Carl Andre fire brick arrangement at MoMA thinking I had enough fire bricks left over from our fireplace project to make an exact copy, maybe in our back yard. I counted the bricks when I got back home. I didn’t have enough.

Yesterday we headed out to the Garden Factory to see if they had a chimenea that we liked. Our neighbors are always talking about this place. It sounds like a chain but it’s not. They gave us 20% off this floor model because it had some paint chipped off. We burned some sticks tonight to christen it.

We’ve been helping my sister this past week as she moved into a smaller apartment. Some things just had to go but she was able to find a spot for the desk my parents gave her when she turned ten. No idea what happened to the one they gave me but I remember writing a girlfriend’s address on the bottom side of one of the drawers. It was probably handed down to one of my brothers when I left the house. My sister is much more sentimental than I. It would be more accurate to say she is sentimental about more things than I am.

It was such a nice night we decided to drive east along the lake and have dinner at El Rincón in Sodus. We couldn’t do that without stopping at my brother Fran’s place. We never expected to find him home but his truck was in the driveway. We hollered inside and he came out, shaving cream on his face and a towel around his waist and told us he was getting ready for his fortieth reunion.

Between courses at El Rincón I looked up our niece’s address. She had just moved and it turned out she was six minutes away in a two hundred year old farmhouse. We stopped and got a tour while the kids broke open a stuffed animal and scattered lightweight styrofoam kernels all over the house. We never talked about the upcoming family picnic, the one where one party refuses to vaccinate their kids and another won’t bring their kids for fear of what they might be exposed to.

OK, it’s the hottest night of the year. Ninety degrees as I write this. The Western New York Flash who have been playing exceptional well despite their mediocre record, are playing the Portland Thorns tonight. Portland averages 13,000 fans a game. I suspect there will be a lot fewer in the stands tonight but we’ll get to see another batch of World Cup players.

Germany’s amazing Nadine Angerer will be in goal for Portland. Alex Morgan, Rachel Van Hollebeke (née Buehler) and Tobin Heath from the US national team will be playing favor up front for Portland along with Canada’s and maybe the world’s best player, Christine Sinclair. And Columbia’s Lady Andade will be playing forward for the Flash. On Saturday we got close-ups of Carley Lloyd and Megan Klingenberg.

We like to get to the stadium early to see the warm-ups. We stand right behind the U.S. net and watch the players take shots on goal. If only they could shoot as well during regulation time.

“Sweet & Sour,” the title of Stephanie McMahon’s oil on panel painting (above, click photo for full painting) pretty well summarizes my reaction to this year’s Finger Lakes show. I really like this painting. It is playful and surprising, fun and spatially engaging. What more could you ask for? I really liked Lanna Pejovic’s “The Listener II.” We had seen a show of her work recently at the former Bausch & Lomb headquarters. This one picks up where those left off, drawing you in to and under the arches as the ground comes roaring forward. Quite a sensation! The hand of the artist is clearly present in these two paintings. And that’s what I like.

This year’s judge is not so interested in the rough and tumble. There is a distant polish to a lot of the work here, a few hyper realism pieces way over polished. It is a really nice looking show, mostly of a piece with an abundance of abstracts. Of course it’s hard to take a show in on opening night and when I go back I’m sure I’ll find something with some guts. If I want decorative I’ll go to the MAG’s store.

Upstairs in the ballroom we spotted our neighbor, Domnika, as we walked in. She told us the band is great. We already knew that. They were playing Bob Marley’s “Could You Be Loved” and they sounded just like the record. She told us she came up here first and had not even seen the show yet. It was almost eleven.

The band is called “Shine.” The three vocalists were fantastic. In the short time we were there they did Michael Jackson’s “ABC,” Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” and then got us out on the dance floor with Stevie Wonder’s “Superstitious.” Somebody has to book this band for a party and invite us.

Most of the Irondequoit Art Trail, a yearly tour of artist’s home studios, is in West Irondequoit but we only had limited amount of time so we did the east side. We were on bikes and our route took us downhill toward the lake. First stop was The Artist’s Cave in the Quonset hut across from the amusement park. The building has an unusual energy and was the perfect spot for John Leonard paintings, my favorite of which are some curious takes on the crucifixion. The second and third stops were both on Lake Bluff Road, a funky but exotic neighborhood tucked in behind Vic’s Place and overlooking Lake Ontario. We had a delightful time chatting with Sally Steinwachs while we marveled at her paintings.

We intended to continue across town to Deb VanWert’s, Craig Wilson’s and TeeJay’s but we had to help my sister pack up her apartment. On the way back Peggi suggested putting our place on the map next year.

When my father was still working he would bring home loaner digital cameras from Kodak’s Camera Club. The first one was half a megapixel resolution. 500K photos. Once the one mega pixel models came out I bought one, through his camera club connection of course. They were expensive at the time.A few years later I graduated to a 3 megapixel model, another Kodak camera, and it was that camera that I used to take the picture above. The enlargement is shown in its full resolution, 1152 pixels wide.

I photographed fifty or so manhole covers all within a few blocks of our house near East High. My father documents birds and wildflowers, I document signs and dumpsters and manhole covers, things like that. It runs in the family.

I created a slideshow back in’99 and put it on the Refrigerator website. This was in the early html days when you vertical center an object in a table. These days you go through hoops to align things with divs and the page is much more adaptable to various screen sizes. I dusted it off and moved the slideshow to PopWars where it looks brand new. Go to Manhole Mandalas.

The High Line in New York is a sensation, a former railroad line converted to a simple but scenic walkway. The local trail that runs between Lakeshore Boulevard and Lake Ontario, where the old train tracks were, is also a sensation. It is mostly level, the views of the lake are gorgeous, the people watching is prime and it is no where near as crowded as the High Line.

We often do it by bike and start up near the Parkside Diner. From there you can roll through the park woods, across the marsh on the new wooden bridge and on to trail along the lake. There are people picnicking on both sides of the trail, Reggaeton on the sound systems, sun worshippers in lounge chairs oriented just so, bathers in water, most in only up to their knees but some out on the sand bars, windsurfers way out and lines of motor boats anchored just off shore. Today we rode the whole thing, took every bit of it in and continued on to the river where I took this shot while we had lunch. It is a rather inexpensive vacation.

As hot as it was we suited up and walked in the woods. We spooked this little fawn but once it jumped up and ran in circles it got really curious about us and came pretty close. There was no sign of the mother. We were standing as still as possible. After a while I threw it one of the Beechnuts I had picked up and I spooked it again but it came back to check us out once more and then just bent its knees and sat down in the ferns.

When Bill Jones died a few years back, Fred Lipp bought his wife a tree to plant in their yard. Maureen Church, a longtime student, remembered that gesture and asked if we wanted to go in on a cherry tree for Fred’s family. We dug the hole today and planted the tree. His daughter, Janet, promised to send us a picture when it blossoms in the Spring.

We didn’t really discuss what we’d do on our anniversary. It just worked out that we spent a good part of it weeding a new patch of pachysandra that we recently put in. Eventually it will take over and snuff out the weeds but it needs a little space to get going.

We stopped in at the Little Theater Café last night, first time we had been there since our gig ran out for the summer. Maria Gillard was there with her band. They do swing/jazz, mostly great songs from the the golden years but Maria’s originals fit in beautifully. Some music works better than others in here and these guys bring the place alive. Pete Monacelli plays drums with what look like paint brushes. He has just the right touch and a perfect color sense for the tunes.

I suppose any member of our street pool association could take it upon themselves to make a purchase for the pool and then go to the treasurer and get reimbursed for it. I was a little nervous about it. We were at Home Depot returning a nozzle for our garden hose. The thing had come apart on us and I couldn’t get it back together. They are pretty good about returning stuff over there. We spotted these plastic flower pots in the outdoor garden center. They came in four or five colors but the turquoise ones looked especially good to us, sort of retro Florida-like. The flower pots at our pool were the typical garden store, Romanesque things. Ornate and grey with a short stem and a wide base. They were made out of plaster or something that slowly chips and crumbles. There were only two of the turquoise plastic pots left. We were on our bikes. Would the others approve?

Well, we made it home with the things on my handlebars and the treasurer didn’t balk at the reimbursement but it took her and her husband about three weeks before they announced they liked the new flower pots because they went well with pool color adding they weren’t something that they would pick out. I took this shot while standing in the pool, midway between the shallow and deep ends.

Aren’t we lucky that some things still rust?

Our neighbor, the one with sun in his backyard and a big old fence to keep the deer out, informed us that there was another woodchuck in the garden. At the moment we’re so overloaded with spinach and beet greens and lettuce and cilantro and basil that we should probably let him have at it. But last night I cut up an apple and baited a Hav-A-Heart trap and this morning our neighbor emailed us that we had caught a Blue Jay. He freed the bird.

If you haven’t been to Peggi’s site in awhile you really ought to stop by now while she is featuring a Don Hershey designed home on San Rafael Drive. It’s for sale for the first time since it was built for the original owners in 1960. Hershey designed about 300 homes in the Rochester area (we live in one), most of them mid-century modern, and this one is a beauty.

Our painting teacher used to say how lucky he was to have “learned from the best.” By that he meant the artists he liked. He studied their work and claimed the artists “spoke to him.” “We had a dialog.”

As great as Matisse is, I happen to think he is the best, he learned from Cezanne. In fact, everyone who is anyone learned from Cezanne or should have. I knew that Matisse owned a Cezanne but I didn’t know which one until I came across a reference to it the other night in a book. It is the one above, “Three Bathers,” and it was painted in 1879-82. Matisse bought it in 1899. Cezanne was still alive and would live another seven years. Matisse lived with the painting for thirty-seven years and gave it to the Paris Museum of Fine Arts at the end of that time. He included a note that read as follows:

“In the thirty-seven years I have owned this canvas, I have come to know it quite well, I hope, although not entirely.; it has sustained me morally in the critical moments of my venture as an artist; I have drawn from it my faith and my perseverance.”

Standing on the corner, suitcase in my hand
Jack is in his coat, and Jan is in her vest, and me
I’m in a rock’n’roll band Hah!
Ridin’ in a Cadillac, Jim
Y’know, those were different times!
Oh, all the poets they studied rules of verse
And the ladies, they rolled their eyes
Sweet Jan! Whoa! Sweet Jan, oh-oh-a! Sweet Jan!