Bull’s head over the bar at Ox & Stone on Alexander Street
We spotted our neighbor in Wegman’s buying prescriptions for her mom. We usually see her out skiing in the woods and we told her how perfect the conditions were today. A fresh couple of inches, clear blue sky, newly groomed trails and just 16 degrees. Nothing sticky about that.
The Members Show at RoCo looked really good during the day light hours. Of course in a floor to ceiling, salon style show different things catch your eye each visit. We were there to pick up the Stewart Davis painting we bought from their side gallery. We chatted with Bleu and then headed over to Casey’s new joint on Alexander Street, Lanai. The restaurant wasn’t open yet and we were starved so went across the street to Ox & Stone. It was too early for dinner there too so we sat at the bar under this big bull head and ordered Spanish style tapas.
Matthew made soup but he forgot to bring it out to the new place where we were rebuilding an exterior wall from the inside out. There was a large can of Campbell’s Alphabet soup out there so we heated that up for lunch and I couldn’t believe how good it was. Is that because of the salt? The first two letters I saw were a “P’ and an “E.’
I’m tired of not being able to reach the 45s on the top shelf of the book case so I’m planning on building a cabinet that will sit on the floor under a table near our stereo. That prompted me to file away some the ones that have been sitting in a stack – black column with no jackets – 45s that Peggi and I had when we were young. We didn’t know each other then but we have plenty of duplicates so I’ve been sorting those out too, keeping the copy with least amount of pops. I can usually tell which one is Peggi’s because she used to write her name on them and in some cases her name plus her boyfriend de jour.
I have a lot of friends who worked in record stores, Martin at Midtown and Record Theater, Kevin and Corrine at Record Theater, Andrea at Discount Records, and they would know the protocol for alphabetizing bands but I’m wrestling with a few things. You certainly don’t file all the “The So-&-Sos” bands under “The” so you drop the “The.” If an artist records under their own name you would file it under their last name but if they record under the name of a band with their name in it like Bobby Fuller Four or Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers I think you file them under the first letter in their first names. Do The 4 Seasons go under “Four” in the “F’s” or “4” at the beginning of the whole alphabet? And what about Little Peggy March or Chubby Checker? Do they go under their nicknames or their last names? Does Dr. John go under Dr. or Doctor or John? I went with Dr. he sits just after The Dovells.
Paul and Peggi silhouettes at Durand Eastman Beach
As you can see from the evidence in this photo, the sun, even in the early afternoon, is way down south. Because the temperature was near freezing we felt safe enough to take our woods path up to the lake. The ticks are supposed to be inactive at 40 degrees. We had not been through the Commons in months. Someone has cleared the fallen trees and the trail is ready for cross-country skiing. We did a little extra maintenance, removing branches and fallen debris. We got all the way up to the lake without seeing any deer. Maybe the bow hunters put a dent in the population. We saw Steve Greive the other day and he said he had shot four on his property. The lake is still supposed to be a foot above normal but there is plenty of beach there.
We went by Vic’s Place to confirm the rumor that we first heard from Duane in Brooklyn. The place is clearly out of business. I don’t quite understand it. They had pulled off the impossible, keeping Vic & Irv’s secret hot sauce recipe alive, making real milkshakes and serving the best onion rings in town. They had a real comfortable place there for few years and they seemed to have a good business going. I don’t understand this world.
Our neighbors, Jared and Sue, came to see the band for the first time this week. Jared was teasing Peggi about watching her split wood during the day and then play sax at night. I’m estimating we have three more days of splitting before all the logs that we’ve gathered will be stacked. Our weather is cooperating. The forties is perfect for working outdoors and it is supposed to be in that range for the next few days.
We had some friends over for dinner last night and we spent most of the afternoon preparing for it. We already had a bag of red peppers or I would have bought some of the “Aloha” peppers (above). Anne Havens and Stewart Davis brought a pomegranate and some dark chocolate. Pete and Gloria Monacelli brought some Australian wine with a mugshot on the label. Our common bond is art so naturally the conversation ran circles around that topic and the night flew by.
Jeffery (with two “f”s, Jeffery) is back teaching. He is easing into it, one class a week on Monday nights in the gym of the school Administration building in Brighton. I love it in there. I love looking up at the lights with their protective shields.
Last night was our third yoga class. It has been over a year since Jeffery was hit by a car in Costco’s Parking lot. He takes his time with each pose and thoroughly explains it while we ease into it. He describes the muscle groups we’re stretching and gives you the Sanskrit name for the pose. He is able to get me to focus even when I don’t want to. His class is supposed to be an hour and a half but he always goes long.
At the end of class he said something about enjoying the remains of the day and the dreamworld we enter in our sleep. Boy, did that last part work out. I had one of my favorite dreams. I was driving and the road opened up to an unfamiliar panorama view of the city. And then it took me into a really old, dense, almost European-looking part of the city, a place that was sort of familiar but I wouldn’t be able to get there if I wanted to.
I had my father in the car and I was trying to find the brick building where his doctor’s office was. We parked the car and watched a group of men swing a large, two storied, wood panel gate across the street between where we were and where we were going. We went into a crowded bar on the corner and sat with a heavy set black man who opened a small box of cigars. I took one for my father even though he never smoked. There was a group of people standing between the tables playing an electric guitar. It wasn’t plugged in. They appeared to be two couples and they were taking turns singing Byrds songs from “The Notorious Byrd Brothers” album. I looked down at the guitar case and there was a Personal Effects sticker on it. Did we know these people?
Back on the street they were swinging the gates open and it became clear that a religious ceremony had been taking place in front of a church. Someone had been speaking but the crowd was dispersing. There were small groups of people with life sized crucifixes, life-sized but with a much longer base, and it took at least three people to hold them up. One of the crucifixes was laying on the ground and I went over to get a close look at it. People gathered around me and helped me lift it up. I was thinking, “Wait, I was only looking” but it was too late. I was struggling to keep this thing upright and almost burst out laughing.
Not everyone can get away with wearing a bright orange hat. Peggi’s father could get away with it. I borrowed one from Rich Stim when we were in SF and I look pretty silly in Peggi’s photos. Duane is right at home in a bright orange hat and that is good for us.
We stay at his place when we’re in NY. We sleep on his couch and run around the city with him. But it is easy to get separated in a crowd or in a museum or while darting in and out of subway cars. Peggi and I are always looking around at everything and we can get separated from Duane, the only one who knows where he is going, in a second.
The trains were all screwed up last weekend. Some of the lines were closed. They were replacing the third rail on the F train near Duane’s place. We took trains past our intended stop only to switch and come back on another train. We went downtown when we were headed uptown. You can see from this photo that Duane, like most New Yorkers, gets in the zone when he’s in the subway. Its not at all like driving a car. You don’t have to keep your eyes on the road and you want to go somewhere else in your head while you’re traveling the same route over and over. We leave all the strategizing to Duane. We gawk with one eye on the orange hat.
Art work on the floor for the upcoming Small Works Show at Main Street Arts in Clifton Springs, New York
If I have my Refrigerator hat on I’m either splitting wood or cross-country skiing. If you know someone who participates in either of those activities I have great Cyber-Monday, $10 gift suggestion. I’m quite sure Thelonious Monk wasn’t thinking about stacking firewood when he named his song but that’s what I was thinking when I built the first corner for a new stack. Of course when I stepped back to admire it looked like the Tower of Pisa.
Our neighbor was out chopping up leaves with his mower and he stopped to chat. He has pretty much given up on the Bills this year. And I’m trying to decide whether to give up on or support the Rhinos by buying season tickets for next year. The current owners have been trying to raise a million plus in the next few weeks or they’re threatening to sell the team. This used to be “Soccer Town.”
Suffolk map on wall at Atlas Eats in Rochester, New York
The two women sitting next to us both had headphones on and they were each watching a different channel on the in-seat monitors of our Jet Blue flight. The one sitting closest to the window just about shouted, “What channel are you watching?” Everyone around turned toward her. It was a bad omen. We were delayed embarking and we had been sitting on the runway for twenty minutes when they announced there was a mechanical problem. A mechanic was summoned and he determined the parking brake was not working properly.
Our flight was cancelled and we were all left to fend for ourselves. Delta had a flight leaving for JFK in an hour but they would not honor the Jet Blue tickets. We grabbed the last two seats on a Jet Blue flight leaving at 3:15 and decided to go back home. We stopped at Atlas Eats for lunch and sat under a map of Suffolk County Long Island. JFK was just off the left side of the map. Out of reach. We would have almost been there if we had driven. I ordered the usual, Kimchee and Tofu. This dish is a killer. We got a prompt while we were eating. The Jet Blue flight was delayed. Our new boarding time was now somewhere after four.
Instead of walking, our preferred mode of exercise, we have been chipping away at the pile of unspilt wood. It was a bonanza year for free wood. It started in early Spring with the wind storm that took down about every fifth tree around here. And it finished last week when the big red oak that was hung up fell in the high winds and rain.
We are the wood scavengers around here. We learned from the old guys but they have mostly moved on. And the neighbors who don’t burn call us when their tree surgeon comes. They prune limbs to log length and we scoop them up. We cut fallen trees ourselves to 16 inch pieces and we fill up the back of our Element.
We inherited a Heathkit splitter that our former next-door neighbor built. I gave up swinging a maul because it gave me tennis elbow. We wait for cold weather. High thirties and low forties is perfect working weather. We put on our long underwear, Permethrin treated jeans, wool socks and knit caps and then top that off with Home Depot noise cancelling headphones. They put you in the zone.
The oak we were working on today was about twenty inches in diameter. They are so heavy we roll the logs up onto another log and then onto the splitter. I love positioning it in just the right manner to pop off fireplace sized logs. And if there are no knots you have a wheelbarrow full in a few minutes. Stacking is where real art and homemade science ideas come together. Our wood pile is built on an incline so the corners need to be secure. Its dark now or I would take a photo of it. The one above is from four years ago. The pile is four times as large.
Voting booths at Point Pleasant Fire House in Rochester New York
When I was growing up the City dropped off small wooden houses, the size of large Home Depot shed, in all the neighborhoods. We walked by the one on Humboldt Street on the way to school and I couldn’t wait to get inside one of those. When I was finally old enough to vote the houses were gone and the polling stations all had those technical denies where you turned a small metal lever for each candidate and then locked in and cast all your votes with one pull of the big arm. Today, while the rest of the world is going paperless, we fill out large cardboard ballets with markers and then we slide the ballet into a scanner. Well, mine was rejected yesterday and I was pretty sure I knew why.
We had read a bit about the NYS Constitutional amendment. We like a lot of what it was proposing. Our local paper recommended a yes vote and the Times recommended a “no.” The more we read the more we were leaning toward no but just to be sure we asked our friend, Matthew, what he thought. Although originally from Australia he is the most informed person we know. His reply was short but more than we had asked for. “Flip the ballot over and vote no, yes, yes.” That stuck with me or should have but I have a bit of dyslexia. I voted “yes” on the first one and almost a no on the second but I realized I had messed up. I scribbled a big “X” on the answer and filled in the circle for “no.” One of the voting attendants came over and wrote “Spoiled” on my ballet and gave me another.
I tried to do the second one in record time but in my haste I made the same mistake! The assistant said “I’m not supposed to look at the ballet but she went ahead to see what I was doing wrong. Another assistant came over and introduced herself as the Democratic representative. “We need to be nonpartisan.” My ballet was marked “Spoiled” and I was told this would be the last time I could try. Three strikes and I’m out.
I got the third one right and even managed to write-in “Gary Pudup” for Sheriff. I would like to know the story of who was behind that last minute campaign and we may find out tonight as Gary is usually there for Margaret Explosion gigs.
It rained all day yesterday, never let up, and it got really windy in the night. It was the first time we slept with the windows closed so we didn’t hear the big tree come down out back. It was hung up, leaning at a forty-five degree angle for the last year. A red oak, it was probably ninety feet tall with very few branches. We were worried it was going to take down the power lines on the other side of the street when it fell but we miscalculated.
It fell toward the road and the top quarter was surely blocking the road. Good thing a car wasn’t coming by at the time. When we spotted it in the morning the town had already cut the top off at our property line and hauled it away. We went to work on the rest of it, cutting it into log length sections and loading them into our car so we could drive them up to our wood pile.
The guy across the street came out. We hardly ever talk and we’ve never been introduced. He asked us if we had seen a wounded deer. I told him we saw the eleven point buck on the back of Steve Greive’s car the other day. Steve is in the town’s bow program and he shot the deer on his property at the end of the road. This guy didn’t know Steve but he said he too was bow hunting on his property and he hit a buck but it ran off. He wanted the rack and asked if it was ok to look around in the woods by our house.
Sea Breeze neighborhood with Jack Rabbit, Rochester, New York
We buy our coffee in bulk at Canal Town. We get two five pound bags of “Rochester Choice” at a time and I don’t notice any drop-off in flavor as we get to the bottom of that second bag. We took a chance and didn’t call ahead this time. They had some on hand but Pete said he was planning on roasting more this afternoon so said we’d stop back and pick it up fresh. I wanted to grab cup of coffee but decided to wait until we got to our next stop.
We had a arranged to meet Shoshannah White in her studio space at Visual Studies. She is doing a one month residency there and we were introduced to her at last Wednesday’s Margaret Explosion gig. She had chunk of coal on a table in front of her and had already taken some beautiful photos of it. She works somewhere between low and high tech. She uses expired Polaroid film and takes photograms by directly placing objects onto light-sensitive paper. But she also photographs with 2 1/4 film and subtly manipulates large format prints. She currently lives in Maine and even photographed Stephen King.
We suggested a cup of coffee but she didn’t have time so Peggi and I went across the street to the Memorial Art Gallery. We thought we’d check out the Bill Viola exhibit while we were there but both the cafe and gallery were closed.
We decided to stop in Fifth Frame which had just opened a few days ago. The coffee shop/brewery is on Saint Paul and the article in the paper about them called the place “Fifth Flame.” A typo in the headline of that story. They describe their coffee with ratios instead of the common coffee names like latte, cappuccino etc., and told us the fifth frame in bowling is the beer frame. We had a couple of 6:2s. Delicious.
Our friend, Pete, was trying to install an update on his iPad and he got part way into the install but couldn’t remember his password. Someone at MCC, where he teaches, tried to bail him out and they restored the iPad to its factory state. But Pete had never turned on his iCloud backup and wasn’t able to retrieve anything. Five years of photos and sketches from SketchBook Pro. I tried to help him get some music on the iPad tonight but his wife had already synced the iPad with her pc so I couldn’t get Pete’s Mac to connect to the iPad. So I went back to the pc and dragged some songs out her Windows Media Player into her iTunes so I could get them n the Pad. As I did each song came up with a little message that said it was converting the files from .wma to .acc. It’s like the Tower of Babel.
Peggi and I tried helping Jeff earlier in the week. He had a related problem. ITunes on his PowerBook would not launch anymore. It froze when he was trying to Restore his father’s iPad. I reinstalled iTunes on his PowerBook and reacquainted it with his media files but it wasn’t easy because Jeff couldn’t remember his admin password. Meanwhile Peggi got on the phone with Spectrum to see an operator would give her Jeff’s father’s password for his email account so we could set up his restored iPad. The operator had Jeff’s father’s password hints on file and she asked Peggi what his favorite song was. Jeff called his father and asked him what his favorite song was. He thought for a minute and said, “the Star Spangled Banner.” Peggi said “Star Spangled Banner” to the operator and she said “No.” We all laughed and the operator told us what the right answer was. “Summertime.”
We were on bikes headed to Staples and eventually Starbucks and we were only a block from home when we stopped at a garage sale. Someone the neighbors called “Harmonica Johnny” lived in the house but we hadn’t seen him in a long time. Sure enough, we learned Harmonica Johnny had died. His sons were selling the stuff and there wasn’t much to look at. I went through the stack of lps on the basement bar (shown above) but most were cornball 1950’s harmonica records. As I walked away from the stack one of his sons said, “You didn’t find any rock ‘n roll records in there did you?” I laughed and he said “I found a Black Sabbath album in there.” I said “And it was probably yours.” He said it was.
He told me he played drums and his brother played guitar and they used to play in a band with their father. “Mostly Ukrainian weddings.”
White dog with solar lights in Durand Street in Rochester, New York
We’re going to have to stop back and see this white dog under the solar lights.
Our friend, Kathy, made some pillows for us. She made our last batch too but they have all gone soft, like you pick them up and wonder what the heck is inside of these. She is a decorator and that word is not descriptive enough. She brings an artist’s eye to her craft. She is frugal for starters and has a stash of fabric to rival Fabrics and Findings. She mixes and matches them with ease and the results are delightful.
She stopped by this morning with our new batch and she unveiled them one at a time. Each is a knockout. Invisible zippers, the front and back of some fabrics both used to effect and with piping from yet another fabric, designs arranged to create new designs and pick up on elements in our minimal decor. She made four for our grey couch and said she wanted to make more but she said she kept hearing my voice saying, “We only have one couch.” That and the chair my brother, John, made for us and the stump that Pete and Shelley gave us. We need to have a party.
Leo Dodd watercolor of Rochester’s Washington Square Park currently in Witness show at Rochester Contemporary
Margaret Explosion’s first performance with Phil Marshall came off without a hitch. I was confident that it would. Phil sounds great. Ken Colombo streamed our first two songs live on Facebook so Bob Martin in Chicago could hear how it went without him.
Everybody knows the Mushroom House. It is so over the top. But I had forgotten that the same local architect also designed the Liberty Pole (nowhere near as elegant as the Civil War Monument in Rochester’s Washington Square Park, pictured above in a watercolor by Leo Dodd). I’m not crazy about the house or the pole but James Johnson also designed many of this area’s most unique sacred places, churches and temples, and this is where is his organic sense of form really shines. Temple Sinai in Brighton, the dramatic light silo in St. John the Evangelist Church in Greece and the AME Zion Church on Clarissa Street in Rochester – Frederick Douglas’s old congregation – are all magnificent. Chris Brandt, architectural designer at Bero Architecture, gave a presentation about Johnson’s achievements today at the Memorial Art Gallery and it was really inspiring. I especially loved how he cast giant Gaudi-like organic forms in sand and then lifted them into place in structures like St. Januarius Church in Naples.
We hadn’t been to Atlas Eats all summer. “Witness” has been all consuming. We would have eaten out on the sidewalk but they were taking down a tree across the street. We started with a cup of coffee and both Peggi and I ordered the usual: Spinach Artichoke Grilled Cheese with Braised Onions in Peggi’s case and Kimchee with Tofu in mine. The homemade Dragon Sauce is secret weapon there.
I wanted to take this guy home with me. I had a turtle about this size when I was a kid. I named it Manuel after a character in a movie. No idea what that would have been. I used to let it run around in our backyard on Brookfield, near where Radio Social is now. I took my eyes off it and it went under the neighbor’s fence. I looked for him for days and really missed him.
This one was right out on the walking path that parallels Sweet Fern Road in the Park. I took a few photos and picked him up and set him down in the weeds. I hope he’s ok.
Leo Dodd drawing of my accident with Sammy G” Gingello in Webster, New York
I am not particularly interested in the why. I am more interested in the what.
But we have been developing a back story from fuzzy old negatives as to why I am interested in the mugshot. The better to serve the public.
I traced a certain fascination to 1970 when my brother was arrested in Ohio for pot. It was an incredibly minor infraction but he was facing ten years in maximum security. His arrest had huge impact on our family. My brother was in town a few weeks ago and shared a few of the letters my father wrote to him while he was in prison.
I was back home for the summer, staying with my parents in Webster, and I headed out somewhere in their black VW bug. I had my dog, Molly, in the back seat and I was only a few blocks from our home when I spotted Brad walking up to my house. He had probably hitchhiked over, we hitchhiked everywhere in those days. I swung the passenger door open for Brad to get in while trying to keep Molly from jumping out and then turned left right in front of a fancy red car. My dad illustrates all this in the enlargement of his drawing above.
But he left out one interesting detail. The red car that I hit, the guy I pulled directly in front of, was the infamous Salvatore “Sammy G” Gingello, a local mobster, and he wasn’t as pissed off as I would have expected anyone to be. He was just grumbling about how he was on his way somewhere and this was gonna set him back. I read a pretty interesting book about the Rochester mob written by Georgia Durante, Sammy’s girlfriend. Sammy was killed in 1978 when a bomb was detonated as he entered his car, which was parked outside Ben’s Cafe Society.
Street dancers on Gibbs Street at Rochester Fringe Fest 2017
Part of this, for the time being, all-consuming show is filling a four foot by seven foot display case. A place for ephemera related to the “Witness” show. I could fill ten of those cases with my father’s sketch books but there is only one.
I snuck a few mug shot flyers out of the office when I worked for the cops in 1976 so I’ll show those. They used a transparent overlay system back then called “Identikits” to construct what perpetrators might look like. This kind of mustache, this kind of smile, a wide range for goofy haircuts. Some of the suspects are pretty Frankenstein-like.
I saved the newspaper clipping from the time the District Attorney bought my sketch of Arthur Shawcross. And I’ve been cutting out the Crimestopper page since the Times Union was around. My sister, Amy, saved a few articles about my father that describe him out there in all four seasons sketching the Can of Worms construction project. And there’s a 1970 letter from my father to my brother who was serving time in an Ohio prison for a a minor pot infraction. The letter is precious for a number of reasons. I recommend it.
When my brother, Mark, was up last he talked about his reaction to my latest batch of drawings. I liked what he said and I asked if he could write it down.
“Looking at my brother Paul’s paintings, based on mug shots, always brings up a mix of thoughts and feelings for me ranging from artistic appreciation to memories of personal experience. They’re all portraits of real, and various people who are sharing a certain exceptional experience. They’ve just been arrested, stopped suddenly in the tracks of a free life, and are being transitioned to captivity. They’re all entitled to the presumption of innocence. But it’s a hugely degrading experience. They’re now prisoners, about to be put in a cage. Yet for me Paul’s paintings expose their dignity, their humanity – their emotions: of fear, sadness, embarrassment, defiance, anger, or resignation.
For some this is their first arrest. For others it may be another of many. But they were all innocent children once. They all have families, most probably have families that really care about them. I did when I was arrested in 1970. It was a cold February night and I felt free enough to leave my college dorm with a couple of friends and walk to a distant ball field to smoke a joint. We were looking forward to returning to the dorm to listen to “Let It Bleed,” The Rolling Stones album that just had come out. Then the cops came around a corner, with guns drawn, and in that instant I lost my freedom.
I was handcuffed, forced into a patrol car, then fingerprinted, photographed, and locked up. Paul’s paintings capture people at this border moment, when they’re told to stand at a wall and how to hold their head. They’re portraits but not in the usual circumstances, and I see the dignity in all of them, as I’m reminded of my own experience.”
Irondequoit Bay from front porch of MacGregors on Empire Boulevard in Rochester, New York
John Ashbery grew up in Sodus NY, near where our literary friends just bought a house, and he went to school in Rochester, later living on Dartmouth Street where Peggi and I lived when we moved (back here in my case) from Indiana. I di not know much about him until died. I still don’t but I love the snippets o poetry hat have been quoted in his obits and related remembrances.
“I feel the carousel starting slowly And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books, Photographs of friends, the window and the trees, Merging into one neutral band that surrounds Me on all sides, everywhere I look. And I cannot explain the action of leveling, Why it should all boil down to one Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.”
Ashbery claimed that he was trying to convey “the experience of experience.” What a noble pursuit.
