Wayne Higby, a professor at Alfred University since 1973, has a show at the MAG. We hadn’t seen it so we decided to stop in this afternoon, check it out and hear the talk he was giving about the work. We discussed slipping out if we didn’t care for the talk but that would have been difficult because we had front row seats, the only ones remaining.
A couple of people talked about Higby’s work and then they joined Wayne on the stage to discuss prearranged questions. They were all long winded answers, fitting for a long time teacher, so there was only time for one question from the audience. One of the two gentlemen who introduced Wayne spent quite a bit of time on the vocabulary of containment as used in the descriptive names of earthen formations. Rim, bowl, crater, basin, valley, canyon, vessel. All of these fit the structure of Higby’s ceramic pieces. They put up a slide of the Arizona landscape that looked exactly like the motifs that Higby uses in his pieces that look like bowls.
I say “pieces that look like bowls” because Higby is an artist. He says his work is not about the American West but acknowledges that it is influenced by the landscape. And then there was a lengthy discourse on the age old battle of historical bias and snobbery in art vs. craft. If this sounds rather tedious it really wasn’t. It is always fascinating to hear people talk about art. You know it when you see it.
Paul Dodd 15 “models From Crime Page” at Little Theater Café 2015 18″x24″ charcoal on paper
We set the alarm last night in order to be upright and downtown by 9AM with my paintings and drawings. My last show at the Little Theater Café was 2009 when Pete Monacelli was still hanging the art. I believe that is when we first got to know him and I’m so thankful for that. Pete passed the baton to Kathy Farrell, the director of MCC’s Mercer Art Center, and today was her birthday although we didn’t know it until we got home. I put my six new (the paint was still wet) Basketball Players over the piano and fifteen “Models from Crime Page” (above) on the long wall. Actually one of the charcoal drawings is a local homeless teenager, poor thing was 16, pregnant and homeless when I photographed her, but she fits right in with others.
It was a lot of work getting them finished and framed for the show but I am so happy to have them out of here. My studio is empty at the moment and I have no idea what I am going to work on next, not even an inkling. This is so exhilarating.
Opening for the show is Wednesday, March 4, 7PM. Music by Margaret Explosion.
Show runs February 28 – March 27
Standing in the middle of Eastman Lake, Rochester, New York
Lake Ontario is the only one of the Great Lakes with some open water and if the cold continues as expected it too will be frozen over in other week. The lake looks fantastic but don’t look too close. An RIT kid may have fallen off the ice covered Charlotte pier this week and disappeared. Peggi and I skied across Eastman Lake this afternoon, trusting that it was completely frozen over. I took this photo from the middle of the lake.
The best part of Margaret Explosion’s gig at Mercer Gallery was hearing the talk Carole d”Inverno gave at the opening of her amazing show. Carole takes a place (in this case, Rochester) or an event as a starting point. She gathers multiple layers of information about the place, the building blocks of a visual vocabulary and at the breaking point she works from memory creating sketches and then these beautiful paintings.
She says she “is not a non-objective painter.” All the sketching clears a lot of stuff away so when she gets to the painting she doesn’t try to recreate the sketch but tries to stay in the moment using her newly found abstract vocabulary. We had dinner with Carole the following evening and followed up with the “in the moment” part of her delightful process.
Paul Dodd painting “Basketball Player” 1 of 6 2015
I’m not really a basketball fan but I can get sucked in to game if I’m near a tv. My own basketball team was rather hapless so I was really stuck by the page in the 1957 Myndersian Academy yearbook I found at a garage sale. The page pictured six kids, only one for the bench, and the headline read simply, “Team Faced Tough Competition.” I painted the six twenty years ago, threw the paintings away years ago, and painted them again this winter. I plan to have all six hanging on the wall over the piano in my upcoming Little Theater show.
Paul Dodd “Drawings and Paintings”
Little Theater Café
Opening Wednesday 7PM March 4 with live music by Margaret Explosion
Show runs from February 28 – March 27 2015
When we moved out of the city and up near the lake we explored all the nearby woods, heading out in a different direction everyday. In the ten years that we’ve been here we have rarely see any of our neighbors out there. One exception is Steve Greive, a self described “rackaholic.” He both feeds and hunts deer but not in the same spot. When we see him he is just wandering around looking for deer or their discarded racks. He’s even been talking about having a Rack Party this Spring, an event at his house where we have something to eat and then head out in the woods to look for the racks that the male deer grow and drop each year.
Richard H. Goss, the author of “Deer Antlers: Regeneration, Function and Evolution” says, “The process of antler regeneration and the chemical signals involved are incompletely understood. The antlers are used for sexual display and fighting, and sex hormones play a key role, especially in the timing. Light signals from the changing day length are also involved.
Recent article in the Times Science section says, “The annual loss and swift regrowth of antlers in the buck deer is one of the most intriguing phenomena in the mammalian world, and some experts think that studying it may shed light on the possibility of regenerating human organs.”
Poster for Carole d’Inverno Mercer Gallery art show
If I understand this, Seattle artist, Carole d’Inverno, has new work on display at MCC’s Mercer Gallery that is based on her impressions of Rochester, a city she has never set foot in. This, from her bio; “To prepare for a new series, I extensively research a place, a time period, an event. From the information gathered, I develop an abstract vocabulary of images.” Well, she should be in town today, the coldest day of a frigid winter, her opening is tomorrow night, and I can’t wait to see her take on our fair city.
We are so happy to have been asked to play at Tuesday’s opening for “A Way of Saying”. There’s an artist talk at 4:30 and Margaret Explosion plays 5:30-7. Hope you can stop out and see the show. Here is a preview.
Carole’s husband will not be there. He has a gig in Oxford Mississippi.
From Sunday’s paper:
Seattle artist Carole d’Inverno presents “A Way of Saying,” her abstract pencil works on paper, from Feb. 24 through March 20 at Monroe Community College’s Mercer Gallery, 1000 East Henrietta Road, Brighton. The show features some “intuitive and abstract of the facts” based on d’Inverno’s research into this exotic new city that would be playing host to her work, Rochester. Her artist talk is at 4:30 p.m. Feb. 24, with a reception afterward and music by Rochester’s Margaret Explosion, taking the event further into the avant-garde. She’ll also present a workshop at 10 a.m. Feb. 26 and a lecture 6 p.m. Feb 26. It’s all free, except for the workshop, which will have a charge. Rochesterians may be familiar with d’Inverno’s husband through his work at the Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival, the guitarist Bill Frisell.
-Jeff Spevak, Democrat & Chronicle
1939 Don Hershey house at 115 Summit Drive Rochester New York,
I was thrilled to join Peggi Fournier, the webmaster of DonHershey.com, at the open house last Sunday of an early mid-century masterpiece on Summit Drive. Directly across the street from the Art-Deco house where Dick Storms used to live on the dead-end street in front of Pinacle Hill, the place has a gorgeous view of the Genesee Valley nd the Bristol Hills. I popped a few pictures of the rounded corner, second story balcony and then one of the front door when I noticed a note. The open house was canceled due to the extremey cold weather.
So we returned this Sunday and had a marvelous time. The realtor showed us this note from Don to the second owners. The place had all the classic Hershey signatures. Corner windows, floor to ceiling windows strategically placed to center the house, open plan kitchen space, curved walls, built-ins and lots of passive solar.
Pat Pauley quilt “Mummy Bags Influence” at Axom Gallery in Rochester, NY
Pat Pauley’s quilts are works of art first and only nominally something to snuggle up with. She starts with white fabric and dyes and paints on the cloth while she sews the pieces together. They look fantastic in Axom Gallery. They are big and yet they make the room look bigger. This one would look exceptionally fine on Duane Sherwood’s wall in Brooklyn. I told Pat I love the conga drums and she said, “Thanks, but they are really mummy bags.” Her show runs for a couple more weeks.
We stopped by the opening of Arena art group show at The Williams Gallery tonight but we hardly had a chance to see the work before we were smoked out. It is really a beautiful space but I never noticed the fireplace in there. Someone put a log in it, one of those fake logs that you buy at the grocery store. It filled the room with smoke while some people fooled with the flue and then the thing just burst into flames. They were three feet high and someone was pouring pitchers of water on it. As we raced for the door we saw someone take the big painting off the wall above the fireplace. My suspicion is the log they burned was actually one of those fake plastic logs that are meant for show only.
I moved my painting upstairs to our big south-facing window in order to capture the last few moments of sunlight. Then, as the sun went down, I moved toward the sink to wash my brushes, instinctively trying each light switch I passed. That impulse is almost hard-wired. I was thinking about our friends, Pete and Shelley, living up in the woods with a permanent power outage.
The phone was out too, not because there was any problem with the phone lines, our phones all depend on electricity. And there probably wasn’t any problem with our cable internet connectIon, just that the modem requires electricity. Of course, if we had a cell phone we’d call Rochester Gas & Electric. Ah, but I did purchase a twenty dollar, one gig data plan for my iPad so I went to RG&E’s site and clicked on the “outage” tab. I entered our customer id and and submitted my report. The response read, “There are no power outages reported in your area.”
It was only 5 degrees out. We’re also taking care of our neighbor’s house and I was beginning to panic. We built a fire and I submitted my report again. This time the response read, “We are aware of an electricity outage in your area affecting 917 customer(s). The estimated restoration time is Thursday, February 19 at 7:00 PM.”
You have to wonder about a message like this. The power goes out unexpectantly due to an accident or something and yet they can give you a time for when it will be back up and running? But we put our faith in the power company and went to a movie, the documentary shot in Canadaigua, outside Rochester, where the national Veteran’s Suicide Hotline has received a million calls from current and former soldiers considering or threatening suicide. The neighborhood was all lit up on our return.
Original Rubino’s on East Ridge Road in Rochester, New York
I have had a craving for Rubino’s for a while now so I emailed my father and suggested we bring some sandwiches over there for lunch. Two “Italian Assorted” and a meatball sub for my mom. No peppers or olives on my father’s Italian assorted. He still pronounces the first “I” in Italian as a long vowel.
My sister had found a tin of Charlie Chips somewhere, something I hadn’t seen in thirty years or so, and my father put those on the table. Peggi looked at the ingredients. Cottonseed oil doesn’t sound too heathy but there was zero cholesterol. We had a tough choice between almond and fig cookies at Rubino’s but we settled on almond. The coffee is bottomless down the hall from their apartment. My dad had two Cokes. This might become a regulat gig.
Icicles on Church of the Transformation on Culver Road in Rochester, New York
I have lived in Rochester for a long time but I have never seen an icicle as big as this one on the side of the Church of the Transfiguration on Culver Road. It runs from the roof, two stories up, to the ground where it is anchored to the parking lot.
Just like Jerry Ludwig says in his home improvement column, the ice damning in this case is right where an addition was connected to the existing structure without regard to the pitch. They have some serious heat loss going on here, either a cathedral ceiling or just poorly insulated or possibly no vents for draft from the eaves. A little more money in the collection basket will cover the loss.
Robin Whiteman sculpture in Rochester Contemporary Makers and Mentor Show
These yearly RoCO “Makers & Mentors” shows provide a great opportunity to witness the clusters of art making going on in this area and to experience the guidance a teacher can provide. Mentors, teaching artists like Robert Marx at Brockport, Kurt Feuerherm at Empire State, Judd Williams at the UofR and now Richard Hirsch from RIT all influence students in their own way. Sometimes the influence is literal and sometimes I can’t see it. I like Robin Whiteman’s hand built ceramic pieces in the current show and I like her teacher’s current work, the big abstract clay surfaces.
Someday the mentor will be Fred Lipp (Creative Workshop / RIT) and in the work you will see the depiction of form in two dimensions. A minor miracle.
How come Boston’s getting all the snow and we only have two feet on the ground? The grass is always whiter.
It was five below zero when we woke up this morning and it is currently an even zero. I think zero is an even number. A local dj said the record high for this day is 51 and the record low is -14 and he offered this, “I’d be curious to know if we broke a record for the low high today.” There is a whole other category of weather stats out there that are being ignored. The high lows and the low oohs for the day.
Mike Allen performing at the Clarissa Street Lounge
We heard Jack Schaefer, bass clarinet player with Margaret Explosion and guitar player with Hookface, was playing keyboards with Nod at the Bug Jar on Friday so that went on the calendar. The only question was what time would they go on. They cram so many bands on in one night these days and I think there were four on tap for Friday. We’ve gone out to see Nod before and had to leave before they went on. They certainly didn’t need Jack (I wouldn’t mess with their off-kilter angularity) but it was great to hear him with the band.
My high school classmate, Mike Allen, has been out of commission for a few years now. He called to invite us to a rare gig at the Clarissa Street Lounge, an early gig because, as we found out, the club turns into a dancehall later on. The bar was stocked with Guinness and Red Stripe so I’m guessing it is heavy on reggae. Mike was in good form and the band, mostly Eastman dudes, were real, so-to-be pros.
So, downtown with a void to fill before Nod, we stopped into RoCo and spent some time with the new show. While I was watching a video about Richard Hirsch, the “mentor” in the Makers & Mentors theme, Bleu took Peggi in the office to see if she could fix a coding problem they have been wrestling with, positioning photos in a slider Plug-in on the home page of their WordPress site. No luck there.
We still had a half hour to kill so we stopped in the Little to check out the band in the Café. Hard to believe but it was another Americana band. This stuff is like measles, something you thought was eradicated years ago.
Two willows trees in Winter at the top of Seneca Lake
We spent the night in Geneva, New York and stopped at the top of Seneca Lake to ski in the park along the northern shore. It was a beautiful day but too cold for most people. On the way to Bellhurst Castle, where we would spend the night, we passed through town and spotted a new micro brewery, Lake Drum Brewing. I like the name and thought it was interesting that they named their place after something other than the the lake they were on. Could there be a connection. I googled “Seneca Lake” when we got to the room and found this wiki passage:
“Seneca Lake is also the site of a strange and currently unexplained phenomenon known as Mistpouffers. In this area, they are called the Seneca Guns, Lake Drums, or Lake Guns. These are mysterious cannon-like booms and shakes that are heard and felt in the surrounding area. The term Lake Guns originated in the short story “Lake Gun” by James Fenimore Cooper in 1851.”
At the hotel, near the first floor men’s room, I took a photo of a 1973 Philadelphia Inquirer article about one of the owner’s of the castle. I OCR’d the text in the photo:
This Gambler Is Rich
Kefauver Foe Lives in Luxury
GENEVA, N. Y.
Here in the Finger Lakes, in the wine regions of upstate New York, the big industries are tourism and wine growing. If you own a food store, you jack up the prices in the summer and spend all winter counting money. If you own a few acres of vineyard land, you’re a prosperous gentleman farmer selling grapes for $360 a ton to the wine companies that line the lakes.
But there was a time when Cornelius J. (Red) Dwyer had a third industry going. On the second floor of his huge, looming castle here on the banks of Seneca Lake, Red Dwyer ran one of the hottest gambling casinos in the east. From Saratoga to New York City, the high rollers would gather together their cash and come here to be separated from it in style ‐ all while Sophie Tucker sang in the corner. It went on for 20 years until Sen. Estes Kefauver called Dwyer before his crime investigating committee and persuaded him to find honest employment.
Dwyer turned the place into a restaurant ‐ a pretty good restaurant – and that’s what Belhurst castle is today.
Now, at 83… Red Dwyer spends his days puttering around his 30 oak-studded acres, luxuriating in splendid retirement. He has parlayed a floating crap game in a New York railroad town into a castle by the lake and in his declining years he can take pride in being one of the most successful gamblers of all time.
“I’m relaxing these days,” he says. But that’s a recent development. Dwyer was born in Lyons, N. Y., son of a dirt-poor Irish railroad family. He quit school at 14 to work as a fireman for five years for the New York Central railroad. But he found gambling more profitable. He opened a pool hall and floating crap game in Lyons and before he was done owned casinos in Miami, Saratoga, French Lick, Ind, and he ran another at Cat Cay, a millionaires’ playground in the Bahamas.
His biggest single score was a $50,000 hit from a newspaperman in Saratoga and he‘s done well enough with cards and dice to buy a new Cadillac every year since 1922. “Some years,” he said, “I’ve had as many as three: When I bought my 50th, the Cadillac people threw me a big party.” Dwyer went broke in the crash of ’29, but he bought his castle four years later with money he made running booze by speedboat into the State from Canada. His only arrest was in 1931 when the Feds nailed him for illegal possession of alcohol. He paid a $10,000 fine.
The castle itself is a monstrous, 26-room affair, ornately, carved on the inside and ivy-covered outside. It was built in 1888 by a family named Harron, direct decedents of Henry Clay of Ohio. Dwyer can’t guess at its current worth.
“It’s irreplaceable,” he says. “You just couldn’t build it again.”
Today the castle is Dwyer’s only holding. He says the politicians forced him out of Saratoga by charging outrageous sums for graft. In Geneva the local pols had less expensive tastes.
“A young man couldn’t make it today the way I made it,” he says. “There’s too much mob control in gambling now. I knew them all in my day but they never bothered me. Why not? Well, I was lucky, I guess.”
Dylan is getting great reviews for his Sinatra release. I bought Peggi a $7.99 download copy for her birthday and we listened to it on the way down to Seneca Lake and then on the way back. I love hearing his voice, the slide guitar and the drummer’s brushes but some of the songs were a stretch the first time around. On second listening we were deliberately staying off the highway because of all the snow. We were traveling about twenty miles an hour on the back roads while huge snowflakes were falling. The album sounded just perfect, every song.
When I was first getting to know Rich I remember asking him what kind of music he liked. He told me something about Broadway musical soundtracks that his parents had in the house. I don’t think this is a Brian Williams kind of memory or anything. I clearly remember thinking, “that’s odd.” Well forty some years later Bar Stool Walker has new cd out. And of course that means new videos to go along with the songs. “Oh Hey Broadway” is a smash.
Ryan Lamfers “Degradation” at R Gallery in Rochester, New York
“Through rain, sleet and snow the mail must go through.” Well, forget about that.
We had an envelope in our box for two days and no one picked it up. We’ve been collecting our neighbor’s mail while they are away and their box was empty as well. So I called the Post Office. “Monique (our regular carrier) was on vacation and the substitute got lost.” That was the excuse for the first day. On the second day (Monday) we had some snow, not too much, just enough to freshen up the ski paths through the woods. But I guess it was enough delay the substitute carrier and at five thirty or so they all the delivery people were called off the roads.
So the New Yorker was a couple days late.
The apartment building where my father lives has a subscription to the Wall Street Journal and my father picks it up at the end of the day. He cut out a few articles for us, one on books about the Spanish Civil War, one on the abstract expressionist, Franz Kline, and one on cultivating new brain cells.
Frederick Gage of the Salk Institute says our brains regenerate new cells while taking long walks. Because we are still evolving, thank god, “our bodies associate the exertion with moving from an existing territory, which had perhaps become depleted of food or too dangerous, to a new, unexplored territory whose details must be learned. In anticipation, the brain releases new cells and growth factors, which create a more plastic state and make possible new neural connections.”
If I joined Spotify and shared my country compilation there would sure to be some missing links. I only version of Tammy Wynette’s amazing “Don’t Touch Me” that I have is the one on the soundtrack to “Five Easy Pieces.” Yes, “Stand By Your Man” and “D I V O R C E” are on there but it is this song that kills me. Billy Sherrill produced it work and like so many George Jones hits it still sounds great.
This is one of the best soundtrack albums we have. And it is not available as a download. I thought, “surly it is a collectable lp” so searched it on Amazon. $3.99, the same price we payed when we bought the lp in 1971. With long bits of dialog and all of Bobby’s monologue when he visits his dying father, the album is as moving as the movie. The dark, dreamy Chopin, Bach and Mozart pieces mixed with Tammmy Wynette, Karen Black and Jack Nicholson is pure genius.
Old chicken coop near Gosnell Park in Webster New York
I was living with Peggi in a small rented house on the outskirts of town. We set up our bedroom on the porch. It was enclosed with wrap-around windows. We converted the bedroom to a band room and I was playing drums in there one night when someone knocked on the door. I opened the door and three guys were standing there. I was in my early twenties and these guys were old, well into their thirties. I was certain they were there to complain about the noise but they said they’d been outside listening and they wanted me to join their band. Apparently “Frank Canada” (listed on the card) had left the band and these guys were desperate. They had two gigs coming up that week.
This was Bloomington, Indiana I could tell by looking at them that they were talking about a kind of music I knew nothing about. I tried my best to talk my way out of this but a few days later I found myself out in the country, rehearsing in the living room of a trailer. Black velvet paintings on the wall and strange people sitting in the living room while we played songs I had never heard of. They kept asking, “You know that song called such and such?” and I would go, “No.”
Somehow we got through the gigs and rehearsed the next week in the bass player’s barn without the lead singer. Turns out the bass player, who had a sweet voice, and the rhythm guitar player, who loved Waylon Jennings, were conspiring to give Butch Miller (the cad) the boot and start their own band. They found a young guitar player with slicked back hair who worked at the Bloomington hospital and sang just like Johnny Cash. The three of them traded songs and we were booked every weekend and holiday for the next year and half in Eagles, Elks, Moose Clubs, American Legions, VFWs, coon hunts and anywhere cigarettes were smoked and Falstaff Beer was served.
I fell in love with the stuff, Classic Country by today’s definition. Eric and Amy’s version of Johnny Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone” was stuck in my head for a week after their recent “Homemade Airplane” concert so I decided to get serious about making a digital copy my “Stop The World and Let Me Off” compilation. Over the years I had picked up vinyl copies of the songs we used to do (by the original artists) and during the Napster craze I downloaded low res versions but it was time to do it up right. Ripping vinyl is a real-time exercise. It took me a few days but I assembled the collection with three versions of the title song. Now, it is time to plan a Honky Tonk party.
Robert Indiana Love sculpture in midtown Manhattan
“I’m reading this book. Oh, I can’t remember who it’s by and I can’t remember the name of it but if I tell you what it’s about maybe you’ll recognize it.” We were seated next to a table of four-two well dressed couples, who were maybe in their seventies, in Rooney’s where we often go to celebrate Peggi’s birthday and their conversation was almost impossible to block out.
Rooney’s is an expensive place so this sort of thing goes with the territory. Think Luis Buñuel’s “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.” When we first sat down they were talking about how much money this mutual friend had. They were saying that she would need three and half million for some sort of move and the woman told them, “Well, I don’t have anywhere near that amount.” They acted surprised and then one of them said, “OK, let’s talk about something else.”
We heard how one of the couples was stuck in an elevator in NYC and the hotel gave them a free dinner and how they enjoyed running the tab up over a thousand dollars with cavier and rare wine. And then the two women started their own conversation about going on EBay to find out how much their artwork was worth so that when they died their kids wouldn’t just throw it in a dumpster.
They started running down local restaurants, the good and bad. One of the guys was in the restaurant business at some point and he said back then 40% of the business was in cash and now it all is credit cards and harder to hide. “I still use cash at restaurants, like when the bill comes to twenty dollars, I’ll leave a three dollar tip in cash.” Peggi quickly calculated that that would be mere 15% and we laughed.
On their way out we heard them lamenting the fact that the restaurant doesn’t offer valet parking any more.
