The small lakes in Durand Eastman Park are still covered by ice. They don’t get as much sun as my neighbor’s pond where the ice cover melted last week. All of his bright orange goldfish are accounted for, in fact they seem to have gotten bigger over the winter. Maybe they are just bloated from inactivity. They are floating near the bottom, motionless, near the center where it is nearly a foot and half deep.
Around the periphery of the pond are at least ten frogs, all in the same position, pointed toward land in about six inches of water. They look like they have moss growing on them but my neighbor thinks it is algae that has gathered around their still bodies. I’m thinking about that Incredible String Band song.
Party Nuggets sleeve on display on 45 Record Day, April 5, 2014
I don’t know how I came up with the idea to have a party celebrating the 45, it seems to have just popped into my head as the date closed in on us. We rounded up some friends and invited them to bring 45s if they liked on the evening of April 5 (4.5).
Peggi and I brought up a stack up from the basement, the ones we each had in our youth so there are many duplicates, the cover sleeves long gone and Peggi’s name written on the label. Some even have a small white sticker that reads, “This record belongs to Peggi Fournier.” I also brought up a box of seventies and eighties singles, most with picture sleeves.
Peggi hung a few with ribbons from our overhead light put some on the wall above the fireplace. I left the stack without sleeves on the kitchen counter like party favors and I played requests all night although I dodged calls for the Beatles. Martha brought a pink 45 case with at least a hundred records on a spindle. It looked like a Barbie accessory but the bottom fell out on the way out the door.
Spinning 45s is high maintainence but I loved it. Keeping track of whose 45 was whose was another matter. I wound up with Cheryl’s copy The Music Explosion’s “Little Bit O’ Soul,” Brian’s copy of the Part Nuggets’ “I Mow The Lawn,” Heather’s “Hitchin’ A Ride” by Vanity Fair and Jeff’s Dad’s copy of a tango 45.
This colt is probably no more than a few days old. The small stable on Wisner Road breeds racing horses and this one looks promising. I took about ten shots as it pranced around with its mom blocking my line of sight and then they headed back in the barn.
For us the “Winter Aconite” is the marker. I’ve tracked the yellow flowers every year since we first became aware of them and it is such a momentous sighting that I mention it in this blog. Type “yellow flowers” in the search engine above and you can see the dates from the last five years. This one is particularly late. They usually poke defiantly through the snow before Saint Patty’s Day. In 2012 they were blossoming on February 20th.
And our local rackaholic says the bucks are dropping their sheds, so get out there if you want to bring home a trophy.
Today I will pick some drawings to frame for the upcoming “3 “D”s in Dodd (there are more)” show at I-Square Gallery.
My dad, Leo Dodd, is an inspiration. He is also my favorite watercolor artist. My brother, John, is my favorite furniture designer and a craftsman of the highest order. I am delighted to be part of this show featuring the work of all three of us. I hope you can stop out and see the show.
Cheetah Whores opening for Margaret Explosion at the Bug Jar in Rochester, New York
One of the biggest advantages of the digital world is the shrinkage of the physical volume of things. Books, newspapers, movies, art, music, photos. They are all in plentiful supply but now take up a tiny fraction of their old school selves. Another big plus is how much easier it is to find things. I have things squirreled away in all corners and cubby holes of my computer but I’m able to put my eyes on them with a simple search.
And another advantage is the surprises you stumble on as you peruse your search results. The photo above was labeled OpeningBandBugJar.jpg. The Cheetah Whores mix 70’s punk, 60’s R&B, psychedelia into their rock and roll. They look like they may also have a political bent. Margaret Explosion shared a bill with them back in the early oughts. The band’s original bass player, Shalonda Simpson, shown here, was shot and killed in a robbery in 2007.
Margaret Explosion plays the Little Theater Café tonight at 7:30. Tonight’s performance is dedicated to Pussy Riot, Ai Weiwei and the efforts of artists/activists everywhere.
Listen to Solidarity by Margaret Explosion1 Comment
What a pleasant topic for a blog post. You should hear this idiotic, fifteen second loop that Time Warner has me listening to while I’m on hold. On hold for as long as I can stand it. It has been fifteen minutes. I am being punished for asking for a supervisor.
We are moving my parent’s internet connection to their new address and I was to meet TW there at 11AM. I gave them three phone numbers to reach us at and they didn’t call any of them. They just didn’t show up. I called them at 1, worked my way through the automated 800 maze and got a representative who said “the appointment was cancelled, sir.” “Cancelled by who?” I asked. “It doesn’t say.”
When the service manager finally got on the line, he told me the soonest TW could get there would be Friday, three days away. I was starting to lose it but doesn’t everybody do that with Time Warner? I tried to control myself. I know their business model. Controlled rage on the customer’s part gets special pricing. “OK, I found an opening for Thursday afternoon,” he said. And I’m supposed to be happy? I recapped how they blew me off and the guy relented. “OK, I’ll wave the 49.95 service charge.” I screamed at this point. I had only been quoted 19.99 for the service charge!
I told him Frontier was offering a DSL connection for 19.99 a month and I was thinking of canceling TW unless he could make me a better deal. He lowered the monthly quote to 41 bucks and I took it. He had the nerve to tell me to have a nice day as I was hanging up. Comcast can have them.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released this report. I’m passing it on.
The ice caps are melting, sea ice in the Arctic is collapsing, water supplies are coming under stress, heat waves and heavy rains are intensifying, coral reefs are dying, and fish and many other creatures are migrating toward the poles or in some cases going extinct.
The oceans are rising at a pace that threatens coastal communities and are becoming more acidic as they absorb some of the carbon dioxide given off by cars and power plants, which is killing some creatures or stunting their growth.
Organic matter frozen in Arctic soils since before civilization began is now melting, allowing it to decay into greenhouse gases that will cause further warming, the scientists said. And the worst is yet to come.
I realize we are probably the only ones who think this recent snowfall is pretty. Most people have had enough. It’s so late in the year for this stuff you can’t really take it seriously so I just enjoy it. It will probably be sixty degrees next week.
My cat has not developed in her seventeen years. She is still in the moment, she still enjoys the same toys, a crumpled up piece of paper, an old collar that she drags around the house, an empty box to scratch and sit in. She hasn’t gotten any smarter either. She is already plenty smart, smart enough to know she has a good thing going and she does the same thing every day as if it is the first time. She has taught me plenty and she lowers my blood pressure when I pet her.
I almost get the sense that Warren Phillips’ Frame Shop would be a lot busier if people didn’t feel as though this gem of a place was their little secret. They might want to make sure that Warren can meet their deadlines or they might not want to spread the word for fear that Warren may raise his prices. But artists and art collectors are not that selfish and when you get to know him you naturally want to do whatever you can to support him.
Warren has a great eye so if you are in doubt, let him pick the frame. He’s a craftsman and will even make one from scratch for you. And if you stop in without any art at all, he has a terrific collection of prints by local artists for sale. If you have the time. Warren has the gift of gab as well so you might want to hang while he makes your frame. Warren has been a fixture on East Avenue for a long time but the rent’s going up, way up, and he has ninety days to find another place.
I’ve been waiting for years to get this shot. We laugh at the fake deer whenever we walk down Hoffman Road and we see real deer all the time in the woods and some day we said, we will see them both together.
A good crowd is a mixed blessing. It becomes harder to hear each other and we don’t do crank so, out of necessity, we’ve developed a way to lower the din. We get really quiet in the middle of a song and the crowd follows along. A tuba player from the Eastman was there and he struck up a conversation about improvisation with the low end of our ensemble. Martin Edic was there celebrating his birthday. Tom Burke was there smiling. Jeff Spevak, the local music critic, was there so we should have been putting on our best musical face but we were getting kinda out, so much so that Jack, the bass clarinetist, suggested we do a waltz to start the second set.
Gap Mangione was there last week and I tried to start something a little more straight forward but we are not very good at that. We wound up doing some crazy stuff. Oscar was there tonight in new chair and he was a delight to play to. I thanked him for coming and like a true gentleman he thanked us for playing.
Shawn Dunwoody got out there a week after Winter Storm Vulcan to do his Rochester version of Pharrell Williams'”Happy.” With an iPod, boom box and video camera, he yelled “I’m recording a “Happy” video for Rochester, if anyone wants to be a part of it.”
In the D&C he said. “Most people just walked by me like I didn’t exist. Then finally a young man on his lunch break said, ‘Sure.’ Then I started getting a few more.” Four days later he’s got 40,000 hits. Go Shawn. And then the video was taken down.
I came awake thinking about “The Punk Singer,” a movie we saw last night at the Little. It is a pretty meaty movie with all the sexual abuse and gender unbalance issues that Kathleen Hanna so expertly shoves in our faces. I loved the clips of her old band, Bikini Kill, and it was a kick to see Joan Jett in the movie. I hope the whole Riot Grrrl thing still has some legs. Hanna stopped touring when she discovered she has late stage Lyme disease, a turn that hit hard.
We had just driven by a grizzly accident at Culver and Titus where a car was over on its side and another had its front end up where the front seat should be. There was someone lying in the street and a cop was already there but it had just happened. In the movie, the Beastie Boys Adam Horovitz, who married Hanna, describes the first time he saw Bikini Kill as like an accident you can’t turn away from. I got the picture.
The director was interviewed via Skype after the screening and she said the movie will released on dvd this week.
Jaffe tunes the 9 foot grand piano at the Little Theater and we were chatting with him last night. He told us he’s been playing keyboards in a band with Frank who lives on the same street as Bob Martin and my parents. Jaffe told us this isn’t a coincidence. “We are being played.”
This afternoon I was on 590 coming back from my parents’ place and I was listening to a really cool accordion song on WRUR’s Italian radio show. I was wondering if Jaffe plays accordion and thinking he probably does. I look to the right and who’s in the car next to me? Jaffe with a big smile.
Our friends Pete and Shelley are probably maple syruping up in the Adrironacks. There was an article in the paper about the maple syrup process and it made me think of them. Next thing you know Pete’s “Arouse The Thunder” came up in iTunes.
Subterranean Surrogates, photo installation by Paul Dodd, Rochester Contemporary Arts Center, August 5, 2011 – September 25, 2011 Photo 34
I’ve been drawing the concrete infrastructure that was put under the traffic circles on the old 590. I’m working from a bunch of photos that I took a few years back. Having fun with it but finding it is not as exciting as drawing these guys. I brought back a bunch of holy cards from Spain and I have one of the dreamy Santa Gema Galgani propped up near my monitor. I’m thinking about portraits of the saints.
Back about ten years ago or so David Hockney was in the news with his theory about Renaissance artists using a device like a Camera Obscura and/or mirrors to create their masterpieces. He pointed to distortions in the length of model’s bodies in some famous paintings and even tell -tale convex mirrors on the walls of rooms in the paintings. He wrote a book about it and this Tim guy, a successful tinkerer with money and no art background, set out to prove Hockney right by painting a Vermeer. Like a Renaissance inventor he ingenoiusly determined the right combination of lens and mirrors painted a damn Vermeer.
The movie, “Tim’s Vermeer,” now playing at the Little makes it clear how much patience is required to paint in this tedious fashion. I’m thinking once Vermeer sold his first painting he probably hired minimum wage employees to paint his pictures. I kept wondering what my friend, the painter, Steve Piotrowski who loves Vermeer would think about all this. Someone in the movie made the point that it is only the art historians who are upset to see Vermeer’s star tarnished. Artists just shrug.
Leo Dodd walks around Cobblestone smokehouse in Irondequoit
We were standing in my parents living room looking at their glass coffee table, the current centerpiece of their room. My mother had just announced that my brother was going to take it. I said, “Are you sure you don’t have room for it?” My father, who is really good at visualizing things, said “Our new living room is as big as the rug in this room. So if you move the furniture on to the rug you can see what we have room for.”
In ten days they will be in their new apartment and my father is working out the new floor plan in Google’s free SketchUp 3D drawing program. He has been able to find many of the pieces of furniture that they own in the Google 3D Library. He just plops the drawings that other users have contributed into his floor plan and sits my mom down in front of he computer while spins rotates the drawings in space.
We stopped by their new place this morning to take some final measurements and afterwards headed down to Nick’s for some lunch. We parked in the little park across from Sea Breeze Amusement Park next to the restored cobblestone smokehouse that was moved here a few years back from its original location near the Ridge Culver Fire Department. My parents new place is small but it is bigger than this smokehouse.
Nick came over and sat down with us. We told him a bit about Spain and how we found a place there that reminded us of his place. We talked about the food there and he said his mom used to make an Italian version of Tortilla Española. He got going on how she’d make homemade pasta on Sundays and “Eggs in Purgatory” where she would drop eggs into simmering sauce and pull them out when they were poached. He was nearly lost back in time when he said, “We thought that would last forever.” I told him the memories do.
I’m quite sure St. Patrick’s day is one of those holidays, formerly holy days, that have glommed onto the Equinox the way Christmas glommed onto the solstice. So we celebrate the first unofficial day of Spring by walking through the park and out onto Culver Road where the Guinness truck is parked in front of Shamrock Jacks. This is our family of two tradition.
We were there before noon and green bagels were still set up on a table in front. Our waitress, one of the sisters that own the place, was wearing a “Drink Like A Champion Today” shirt. A band was playing in the bar and another one was setting up out back in the tent. By the time we left the place was mobbed. These are my people. I’m getting out.
I hadn’t checked the beer spot on Hoffman Road since our last thaw. The Budweiser man is still active. I should say I don’t know for a fact that it is a man who has been dumping these cans in the same spot for the last five years. Heck, it might even be the little woman who drives down to the marsh to walk her scruffy white dog. Her mother rides in the back of the car and used to get out but those days are over. Now she sits back there and waves to us through the glass. Like us they are regulars and the only thing we talk about is the weather. All other topics are pointless.
The road is a dead end so sometimes the women just stop their car right in the middle of the road. There is so little traffic down here that each car you see is either one of the few homeowners or a Budweiser suspect. I’ll bring a bag with me next time and clean up after the guy. I don’t really mind. I bring the cans to Michigan where I collect ten cents for each 22 ouncer.
Rock and roll is dying. The process is so slow it only looks like “never.” Decay has been part of the art form for ages. Monty’s Crown on Monroe Avenue is an ideal host for the long funeral, darts, long bar, a dozen beers on tap, a back room with a PA for the band and a pool table stage left. Green shamrocks with the word “Blue” on them were carefully arranged by a beer rep in the front window. All this with two bands on the bill for a three dollar cover. That price hasn’t budged in thirty years.
Dave Anderson was there, Chris from the Squires, Joe Tunis from Carbon, Chris Schepp and Ted Williams of course. Hook Face and Nod were brilliant. Long live rock ‘n roll.
