“Los Inmigrantes,” found drift wood, 15″h x 101″w by Paul Dodd 2021
I collected driftwood this summer, not every day, just when the conditions were right. The lakeshore rearranges itself daily. The waves sift and sort the tiny stones, the small stones, the shells, the seaweed and the sand, and it often presents the ingredients in an array at the edge of the lake. Plastic pieces only wash ashore under the right circumstances. We often see a woman collecting burnished pieces of glass.
Detail of “Los Inmigrantes,” found drift wood, 15″h x 101″w x 2″d by Paul Dodd 2021
These wooden pieces, mostly pieces of bark worn by tumbling, are strewn along the beach after a storm. I imagine them coming down the river and then eastward to Durand. They make me think of los inmigrantes who, fleeing North Africa in overcrowded boats, often wash ashore in southern Spain.
I had a hell of time photographing the piece. Facetimed with Duane for help. Nineteen of them mounted on a white wall. The beauty of the wood is the subtle, warm colors but that is not the hard part. I mounted the wood pieces with two finishing nails, one end backed into the rear of the wood pieces and the other into the wall. So the pieces are suspended about a half inch off the wall. I wanted to show that relief but in order to light the wood properly I wound up casting strong shadows that made the pieces look like they were vibrating. Duane solved that for me.
Joywave “Cellino” & Barnes billboard on side of Joey’s in downtown Rochester, NYJoeys
I have a soft spot for Joywave. Their earliest videos, shot while they were working at a mall in suburban Rochester sold me. I like their pop sensibility. I like the fact that they stuck around town to enjoy their success. I love how they push it with their videos. Like Personal Effects, a mere footnote on the Rochester music scene, they choose interesting places to play. Personal Effects played the Top of the Plaza and the Community Playhouse in the South Wedge. Joywave topped that and played the former revolving restaurant, The Changing Scene..
Joywave’s new album drops 2.11.22 and their new ad campaign picks up where the personal injury lawyers, Cellino and Barnes, left off. I played drums in Personal Effects and animated a few of my favorite Cellino and Barnes billboards back in the early part of this century. Long before “Better Call Saul,” Celino & Barnes was duking it out with Moran & Kufta and Jim the Hammer Shapiro. Remember those ads?
“I cannot rip the hearts out of those who hurt you. I cannot hand you their severed heads.But I can hunt them down and settle the score. I may be an SOB, but I’m your SOB!” – Jim “the Hammer” Shapiro
Our nephew and his girlfriend are having a baby, the first in that generation on that side of the family. My sister, Ann, is our go-to contact for baby gift suggestions. She couldn’t wait to have children, she dotes on her grandkids and she works at Parkleigh (I thought it was i before e). She suggested a “Jellycat” stuffed animal which comes with a little book that brings the animal to life. Peggi looked at them online and picked out the Bashful Lamb. I agreed it was the cutest but it was only available on back order, sold out at the Jellycat site and the few left on Amazon looked like fakes.
Plan B, and probably the best plan, was for Peggi to crochet a baby blanket. Peggi has done this before but the last one was for our grand niece who is now living the life on her own in Brooklyn. We called Gloria, who we have hardly ever seen without a crochet or knitting needle in her hand, and she suggested we go to Michael’s to buy the yarn. No more “Ye Olde Yarn Shoppes.” You can get to Webster, where the closest store is, pretty quickly but once you get there the shopping experience is grisly. I decided to go with her and I’m glad I did. I had been tasked with submitting a self portrait to an upcoming show at Studio 402 and I found one on the shelves at Michael’s.
Sometimes we walk to Kathy’s, sometimes she walks to our place. We walk early, she walks late so when she texted that she was stopping by we started a fire in our front yard fire pit. Originally conceived as a safe way to hang out during last year’s winter months it might be doing duty again. I had just bought some of Buffalo’s Hayburner so we each one of those and it was quite comfortable.
Titus Avenue doesn’t stop at Sea Breeze Drive, the former 590 North. It continues down to the bay as Titus Avenue Extension. We walked down there this morning. It is a wonderland as the road winds down to the water. The houses are built into the hillside like in Belair but in this case, they are funky. They look small from the road but when you get down to the bottom and look up at the backs of them they are three and four stories. The whole idyllic setting takes a dark turn when you get to the bottom. Their is an abundance of American flags, most with that blue stripe in them. The biggest house looks like a tacky country club with a giant Trump 2020 flag still flying in the front yard. The very last houses have dogs in the yard, on duty, barking their heads off at anything that moves. The guy in the very last house was in his driveway smoking while his dog barked at us. We were not more than twenty yards from him and I could tell he had seen us but he wouldn’t look at us or say hi. His big dog was at his side barking its head off at us while we looked across the inlet at the two gigantic new houses going up across the inlet at the bottom of Seneca Road. It’s much nicer over there. People are happy and friendly. We’ll stick closer to home next time.
Sign at railroad tracks near Main and Goodman in Rochester, New York
I don’t follow the stock market closely but I have been keeping an eye on Apple because we had made a decision to sell some more if it reached 170. I checked the price around noon yesterday and it was at 169. When I looked back later it had dropped to 164 on news that the long O variant had been found in the U.S. We bought the stock back when we were playing happy hours at the Bug Jar. Our cost basis is around 20 cents. Steve Brown, the Friday bartender and one of the three owners, was selling stock for Merrill during the day.
We had planned to have Thanksgiving dinner with friends but one of them was waiting for results from a Covid test. Turned out it was only a cold. Our nextdoor neighbors had family over for T-day and their nephew tested positive the following day. We stopped by Pete and Gloria’s house but they weren’t home which turned out to be a good thing because they too had been exposed to family members with Covid. Peggi bought a couple of Rapid tests at Wegman’s after we learned we were exposed before Thanksgiving. We showed no symptoms and we weren’t seeing anyone so we never used the tests. We gave them to Pete and Gloria this afternoon and we’re awaiting the results. The positivity rate in Monroe County is now 9.9%.
Hoping to finish the Muhammad Ali PBS documentary tonight, just after our La Liga match of course. The “Thrilla in Manila” and Zaire are yet to come. Peggi and I saw the “When We Were Kings” movie with my father at the Little but I remember it being mostly about the music. Boxing should have been outlawed lifetimes ago but I’m glad there is an historical record of how cave men behaved.
“We’re so civilized” – MX-80 Sound
Shadows in basement studio
I’d like to photograph my “Los Immigrantes” piece. Three of the twenty can be seen on the wall to the left above. I need to shoot at night because the white wall carries a daylight colorcast from the big window to the left. The pieces are mounted a half inch off the wall to show relief. The colors in the wood pieces are subtle but important. They need plenty of soft light so the shadow doesn’t compete with pieces.
I left NYC with a lighting layout designed by Duane, something that shows a white, semi-transparent shower curtain between my lights and the work. I might try the portrait umbrellas Duane gave me with the Lowel lights before ordering a while shower curtain on Amazon.
We piled up the furniture on our screened in porch and moved a row of firewood in. I guess we’re ready for the fourth season. This time of year is tinged with loss but then it provides relief with plenty of time for deep dives into projects.
Our neighbors, Jared and Sue are getting a new roof, a metal roof just like ours, but they have a different contractor. This one has a crew from Guatemala. Ours was mostly Puerto Rican. Both crews crank the tunes as they work. This time, instead of reggaeton it’s all Mexicali horns and squeeze boxes. And their roof is a lot cheaper.
Last night we watched the Sparks Brothers movie and loved it. It dawned on me that although they are the Gilbert and George of the music world. I woke up singing La Dolce Vita.” The only Sparks lp we own is 1979’s “No. 1 in Heaven” so we played it first thing this morning.
“This is the number one song in heaven Why are you hearing it now, you ask Maybe you’re closer to here than you imagine Maybe you’re closer to here than you care to be”
“Massacre of the Innocents” by Marcantonio Raimondi at Memorial Art Gallery show “Renaissance Impressions”
A show of Renaissance Prints. may not sound all that exciting but just imagine being alive in the early 1500s when images of the ancient myths and religious miracles were mostly in your imagination. The Judgement of Paris, The Massacre of the Innocents, and The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence , where Larry asks his tormentors to “Turn me over, I’m done on this side,” are just some of the fantastic stories depicted in the Memorial Art Gallery’s current exhibit of Renaissance Prints. The show is mind blowing.
MAG Curatorial Assistant Lauren Tagliaferro did a Zoom talk for MAG members the day the show opened and it is now up on YouTube. Peggi and I just watched it a second time. Lauren is a dynamo and she brings art history to life. How we created a beautiful Christ, even eroticized him and the saints to sell the concept, suffering in peace for eternal salvation. How we depict the old as ugly because we are afraid of dying. Tagliaferro is drawn to ugliness as much beauty and she admits a lot of her ideas come from “On Ugliness” by Umberto Eco. She is an adjunct professor at RIT. They should give her tenure now.
Anne Havens sculpture from “Sleeping Around” series 2007
With all the quarantining going on we only had one chance to spend time with Anne Havens before she left for her winter home. Over coffee, scones, dates and roasted Marcona almonds and surrounded by Anne Havens artwork, it could only be from her hand, hanging gallery style on white walls in her open plan home, we talked about art making, specifically how and why Anne has always made art. It has been a lifeline in turbulent waters. Magical art doesn’t come out of nowhere. We came home with a head from her “Sleeping Around” series.
Every three weeks or so we run into Ernie and his owner out for a walk. They live in the neighborhood and over the years polite talk has turned meatier subjects. He is a photographer and we often talk art. We learned he and his wife acquired some pieces, a print, a drawing and a small painting by my favorite artist in the world. I couldn’t wait to see them. And then the pandemic hit. Our self imposed restrictions have eased and we stopped by on our way home from a walk. I was blown away. On top of that we came home with two of Ernie’s owner’s photos. Warren Philips will work his magic on the frames.
Walzford is one of our favorite streets. We make a point of going down it or coming back on it when we walk up to Aman’s. The lots are generous, the houses are all different having been built over many years rather than all at once so the street has a complex character. We ran into Marsha here, where she has a part-time job tending to one of the gardens. There is a fair amount of BLM banners and a wrap around porch with a sign overhead that reads, “Porch of Indecision.”
We shopped at both Aman’s and Wegmans so our backpacks were loaded. We could barely bend down without falling over but the pile of fresh flowers near the curb on Culver was irresistible. They must have been used briefly at an event, probably a funeral, and then discarded. White Lillies, purple flowers mixed with Eucalyptuse greens all freshly picked. We picked through the pile and carried an armload home. Peggi arranged four gorgeous displays in various parts of the house. It smells like a funeral parlor in here.
Blue skies, yellow tree and white house on Dewberry Street
Manuel Cáceres Artesero, better known as Manolo el del bombo, is Spain’s national football team’s most famous supporter. He was in the stands in Sevilla beating his bass drum when Spain secured a spot in next year’s World Cup by defeating Swedon. We watched the match on ESPN and plan to watch the US tonight when they meet Jamaica in a a qualifying match.
We have walked along the lake most days this year. It is such a cool feeling to get there and realize we can’t go any further north without a boat or a passport. We met three women who had just taken a fall plunge this weekend. They were all wrapped up on the beach and bubbly. Peggi said, “You just went swimming didn’t you?” One of the woman said “Yeah, that will really wake you up.”
Today we followed a few paths through the park and never made it to the lake. We came back through the Commons and inspected our ski route/ We found one new tree down in the path but we found a way to ski around it when the time comes. The weeds are all spindly now as the die back and there is theoretically less chance of bringing a tick home on our clothes.
I wish the US team had a Manolo instead of the obnoxious American Outlaws and their bombastic U S A chants.
I didn’t sleep that well thinking about my dentist appointment this morning. I was seeing a specialist to determine if he could save a tooth, one that was an essential part of a bridge and the appointment was for 8:15. I typed the location, Sully’s Trail in Bushnell’s Basin, into my iPad and Siri was giving me directions as I walked to the car but once inside she went silent. I pulled over on Seneca Road to troubleshoot the sound problem. The volume was up. I rebooted the map app. And then it dawned on me that the iPad was sending the audio via bluetooth to the car stereo and I had the stereo set to AM radio with the volume turned all the way down. I switched the car stereo to bluetooth, heard Siri’s voice and took off.
Siri was giving directions over a soundtrack that was so spacey I wasn’t even sure it was coming from the car stereo. The display on the dashboard read “Track 5 – Love Flows Over Us in Prismatic Waves.” It took me a bit to figure out what was going on. We had read an article about Jon Hopkin’s new release, “Music for Psychedelic Therapy,” and we thought of our friends, Jeff and Mary Kaye. They recently took a guided ayahuasca trip in Mexico and we were having dinner with them over the weekend so I streamed some of the album from my iPad.
I wasn’t entirely awake, it was raining and the music was as ambient as the sounds around me, the tractor trailer tires whooshing by, the wipers beating back and forth and Siri’s voice telling me to merge left” and “take exit 6.” I was running late and the sea of red taillights near the Can of Worms would ordinarily make me very anxious. Not today. Everything was dreamy.
The dental assistant introduced himself as a surgeon from Egypt. He told me he was taking classes here to complete his certification in order to work in this country. I asked if Salah was from Egypt and he said. “Mohammad Salah, the star Liverpool striker, is definitely from Egypt. Not many people here know it he is” I asked about the procedure to lengthen a crown and he drew a diagram. The doctor came in and studied the situation. He told me the tooth will have to be extracted so I have an appointment with an oral surgeon..
“Before Yesterday We Could Fly:” An Afrofuturist Period Room
“Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room” opened last week, the same day we were at the Metropolitan. We were turned away at the door as the opening was for members only so I took this photo from outside the room. We moved along to Jules Tavernier and the Elem Pomo, a show about an Indigenous community in Northern California in 1800s. The Met has it all.
I played horseshoes with Rick the day we came back from New York. Rick played golf with Steve Grieve the day before and after we played Steve found out he had Covid. Rick says he hung out with Steve in his house as well. so we didn’t play for a few days. Rick was tested and it came back negative so we played horseshoes yesterday.
I took my warmup shots, throwing all four shoes down to one stake and then all four back to the other. Rick was doing something on his phone. When we were ready to play we could only find three of the four shoes. I felt around the sandy soil in the pit and started combing through the pachysandra behind the stake. I usually make a metal note if a shot is so bad that bounces in there and I didn’t remember one doing so.
I don’t like wading through the pachysandra because I worry about ticks. Rick is currently doing a month of antibiotics because he came down with Lyme. I got a hoe out and tried to push the plants aside to find the shoe. We looked for about a half hour and Rick went next door and brought back a set of shoes that he had bought on eBay a long time ago. They were lighter and they really threw my toss off. Extra flips and too much distance. And I kept thinking about the missing shoe.
About halfway through the first match with the new shoes I threw one that landed in the pit with a clank. I turned to Rick and asked, “What was that?” Rick finished his throw and we dashed to the other stake. The missing show was about five inches down.
Leaving for home Duane walked with us to the subway stop near his apartment in Brooklyn. We were talking right up to the turnstiles and we heard a train approaching. The woman ahead us us was having a hard time with her card. We stopped using the MetroCard once we learned we could just click our phone or watch. While Duane was telling us not to worry, that the train was on the other side, I clicked my watch and the woman scooted through on my dime. I clicked it another two times and we said goodbye to Duane.
We walked down to the bay on our first day back and into Webster on the swing bridge that will be in place until Spring. We stopped by Kathy’s on the way back planning on getting her advice for overwintering our lemongrass plants. We forgot all about that when we learned that she has new neighbors, a young couple who plan to grow vegetables and raise chickens. The previous neighbor turned out to be a two-faced religious type who had an affair with a minister who then started stalking her.
Stephana McClure drawing based on George Cukor’s “Gaslight” at Bienvenu Steinberg & Partner in Tribeca
Before leaving for NYC we took an armload of collard greens from our garden down to our friends Helena and Jedi. They invited us to dinner but we we told them we were headed to NYC. They told us we must go see Hamilton. Their nephew, an Eastman graduate who plays Washington, arranged to get us discounted tickets. Our third full day in the city revolved around Broadway.
Duane’s place in Brooklyn is as comfortable as home so we hung around there for the morning and took the F train in after noon. We stopped in Tribeca where we carved out a three block chunk of galleries, below Canal with Church Street to the West and Broadway to the east, we went up and down both sides of Lispenard, Franklin and White Streets. The latter being where the Mudd Club was.
Artist Space had an installation of Milford Graves works, videos, hand painted records and even his drums. He was not only a drummer but a botanist, a professor at Bennington, a cardiac technician and a visual artist. We watched a full size stock-ticker scroll by in another gallery while listening to a celestial Greek soundtrack. We spent some serious time at Bienvenu Steinberg & Partner with a fabulous show called “I See You Seeing Me (Meeting the Female Gaze)” by Stephana McClure. The drawing above was done done in reverse. The artist projected George Cukor’s “Gaslight” on her monochromatic drawing and rubbed over the subtitles of each line of dialog. I was so enamored with this piece I asked how much it was. $8,000 did not seem so bad. In the necklace/wall hanging below she wove Italian twine and strung it with vintage axe heads wrapped in prose from Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking.”
Stephana McClure’s axe head necklace as wall hanging at Bienvenu Steinberg & Partner
The play was on 46th Street just off Times Square. NYC has one sixth the positivity rate of our area so the city felt safe except for Times Square. It is just an insane glimpse of our dystopian future. Street venders selling all sorts of crap, designer knock-off purses and watches, chain stores and fast food, blocks of buildings covered in LED monitors, each playing non stop commercials. A guy with a full head mask of Donald Trump stood in the middle of an intersection directing traffic.
With Hamilton I found it odd that the lead character, the guy the play is named after, feels like a minor character. We waited after the play to chat with Tamar. He stole the show but looked smaller off stage than he did as Washington. I said something about that and he said, “That’s because everyone else in the cast is so short.” He looked like his father but his voice needs to drop a few more octaves before he has the Barry White thing.
For our second day in the big city we planned to meet up with my brother at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to take in the Surrealism show. Peter Schjedahl, writing in last week’s New Yorker, described the Metropolitan Museum’s “Surrealism Beyond Borders” as a deliriously entertaining survey.
Statue in the Greek and Roman wing of the Metropolitan Museum
We were a little bit early so we wandered through the Greek and Roman wing. This is one of my favorite parts of the museum. It is curious to me how these two civilizations, both around the BC/AD cusp, were depicting people that feel so human today. The Greeks idealized the form while the Romans depicted the unglamorous as well as the mighty. Then it seems we didn’t come out of the Dark Ages until the Renaissance. I realize this is an uninformed abbreviation of art history but that is the way it strikes me. The Michael Rockefeller wing, where they keep the secrets of the Asmat, is right next door to this wing. They are renovating it and I’m anxiously awaiting its reopening.
“Jucambe” by Agustín Cárdenas at “Surrealism Beyond Borders” Metropolitan Museum
There were some photos in the Surrealism exhibit that really sent me, especially by the Colombian Cecilia Porras, along with a Agustín Cárdenas sculpture and the May Ray sewing machine wrapped in a wool blanket but Surrealism, especially the paintings, is not for me. This was made perfectly clear when we exited the show and came face to face with Max Beckmann’s “The Old Actress painting. And in the next room a series of gorgeous Rothko’s.
After the show we cleansed our palette with a stroll through Central Park.
Stanley Whitney painting at Lisson Gallery in Chelsea
As soon as we read that Stanley Whitney cranks Miles’ “Bitches Brew” each time he paints we knew Lisson Gallery would be our first stop in Chelsea. He puts a color down and responds to it with his next move, a call and response, similar to Miles Davis’s late sixties soundscapes. Needless to say, the show was a delight. These large paintings stop you dead in your tracks.
In a summer program at Skidmore College in 1968 Whitney became the favorite of his teacher Philip Guston. He credits Guston with teaching him how to put a painting together. Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo has a Stanley Whitney retrospective on its calendar for 2023.
Olga De Amara wall hanging at Lisson Gallery in New York
And once we were at Lisson we discovered the Columbian textile art, Olga de Amaral. A revelation. A block away Gilbert and George were showing their “New Normal Pictures.” We spent nearly an hour on a bench in a white room looking at a barely discernible yellow sphere by Helen Pashgian. Lucy Raven’s video installation, “Ready Mix,” at Dia Chelsea was stunning. Chelsea still has the goods.
It wasn’t a fast but but we slimmed down our news consumption when we left for NYC on Tuesday. Even posting here, the news-to-self was curtailed. Other than our overnight in the Adirondacks the trip to NYC was our first since the outbreak. We’re timid and it was reassuring to see most people in the big city taking more precautions than we do in Rochester.
I came back with a disc full of images that I will slowly work my way through. I know this one will be my favorite. Eyeballs fine tuned by three days of gallery hopping and these reclaimed boards, bound with rope, laying on the ground in front of a building in Tribeca looked sensational.
Joe McPhee and Jay Rosen performing as Trio X at the Bop Shop in Rochester New York
We saw the cutest costume at the end of our street. A little girl was wearing a transparent hoop skirt with lights under the hood. We were heading out to the Bop Shop to see Joe McPhee and Jay Rosen. We haven’t had any trick or treaters in years so we weren’t walking out on anyone.
They still perform as Trio X even though their bass player died a few years back. We heard the trio a few times and saw Joe play solo one time. Joe likes to bring it down so low you hear his breath pass thru the horn, the valves on horn popping open and the clicking shut. He pays tribute to and is in league with Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy. He is one of the greats. He is a multi- instrumentalist, a composer and improvisor and also a poet. Last night was the first time we have heard him read. Drummer Jay Rosen backs the poetry perfectly, propelling it, setting it free.
And if that is not enough he has stories. He went to John Coltrane’s funeral with Ornette Coleman.
November tomorrow and we’re still picking Pimientos de Padron and arugula from the garden. The kale will last til the snow flies and we still have carrots and beets below ground. We poked holes in the far corner and dropped fifty or so garlic bulbs in. We’ll cover them with mulch for the winter once the leaves decide to fall. And Peggi picked another batch of collard greens for Helena. She has no saturation point.
On our way back from the garden we ran into Jared who was trying to catch three of the biggest Koi in his pond. He had a big net resting on the bottom with some fish food in it and he was hoping to pull it up quickly if they went for the bait. He had already startled them and they were ignoring his net. The big guys were not only eating too much food they were pooping too much and dirtying the water.
While we were talking Miguel, a fellow walker who lives on the next street over, came up to us to ask if we had seen a young black lab. Apparently his neighbor’s dog had runaway. We told him we would keep an eye out and a few minutes later, the owner of the dog got out of her car and asked if we had seen her dog. She told us “Babe” was just a puppy and had never left home before. We told our neighbors to keep a look out.
We were curious if they ever found the dog so we came back from the lake via their street this morning. Miguel and his partner were out in front of their house. They were holding up their mailbox which had been run over last night. They pointed to the ground at all the shiny plastic car parts. They told us they had a party the night before and one of their guests ran into it.
We asked about the the black lab and they said lady across the street from them also has a black lab. Her mother is staying with them and she apparently let the missing black lab in to their house. Meanwhile their black lab was in the back yard.
