1968 R.L. Thomas High School volleyball team with Kit Bower and Paul Dodd
A few weeks ago my girlfriend from high school sent me a message on fb saying she was downsizing and had come across some old soccer clippings that I might be interested in. She sent them along with this picture of the volleyball team. I looked at it for a while trying to recall who these people were and then dreaming about old friends. On Saturday another classmate, Jeff Munson, emailed to invite us over for dinner. He was making homemade pasta with kale and his old buddy, number 13 in the photo above, in town for the weekend, was also going to be there. Looking back, Kit Bower probably picked the number 13. He is that kinda guy. But would he still be wearing those fashionably clunky, horn rimmed glasses? I hadn’t seen him in forty years.
No, he was not wearing any glasses. Funny that number 5 doesn’t have his glasses on in this photo. I have worn them non stop since fifth grade. Kit is little heavier than he was back then and I am a little lighter but then he’s the head chef at a fancy country club in the Hamptons and my family can’t gain weight. He brought some fresh Long Island Bay scallops and sautéed them as an appetizer and reminded me that we were both dancers in the high school musical. I had forgotten about that but I was stuck by how much our personalities and goofy interactions were exactly the same as they were back then.
It was a simple remodeling sort of idea but it has turned into a full scale daily Home Depot run. Home owners call it “project creep.” Contractors have different terms for it but the sound effect is the same. Ca-ching! Our spare time, every minute of it, has been devoted to bringing the cost of these improvements down so we’ve been setting the alarm and working like dogs until we collapse.
Our home was built in the late forties but we found a newspaper from July 18th, 1964 in one of the walls, a sign of a previous owner’s improvement efforts. This issue of Rochester’s evening paper, “The Times Union,” was so brittle it came out in tiny fragments. We got pieces of a story about some fellow who won the bid to paint all 2000 of the City’s fire hydrants. He was quoted as saying it’s really like painting 4000 hydrants because he had to do two coats. From Ruth Chamberlain’s society column, “Around the Town,” It’s a Merry “Marry-Go-Round For Miss Dunn. Pretty Gaylord Allen Dunn, daughter of Mrs. Arthur S. Van Brocklin of South Main Street, Pittsford, and Howard M. Dunn of Ambassador Drive is on a gay, happy merry-go-round for the remaining days before her marriage to Navy Ensign Stuart Dudley Hallagan Jr. on Friday next.”
Midtown Plaza, the nations first indoor shopping mall (pictured today as a pit, above), had just opened. A human interest story on 1B talks of the friendly competition between Nick Sarantis’s Soda Spa Restaurant and George Slathes General Sweet Shoppe, which sat next door to one another at 492 and 494 W. Main for thirty years.
“Armory Floor “Fix” Up Again. State officials are trying to get funds to fix the sagging floor of Rochester’s Main Street Armory. The 40,000 square foot floor has been condemned for public purposes since 1960.” Apparently they got the money because my nephew recently saw Slayer perform there. “Fire Damages Schaller’s Drive-In.” “Bicyclist Grabs $27. A teenager riding a bicycle snatched $27 form a man as the latter was about to buy a newspaper at State Street and Main Street East about 12:30 AM today. Police said the victim was Aaron Jacob, 23, of 70 Troup Street.
And from page 10B, “He’s Not Sorry He Got Involved”.” A Rochester truck driver who fatally shot a man while going to the aid of a woman in distress said today that the fear of ‘getting involved’ is mostly unjustified. ‘My experience should show people in New York City that you can get involved and feel good about it later,’ Roy Coffey, 32, of 62 Sullivan Street said. Coffey said it isn’t just a case of fear that that prevents many people form giving assistance to others. ‘A lot of people are are simply concerned about the legal technicalities,’ he said.”
I feel it is our duty to leave a newspaper from 2012 in this wall before we seal it up.
It was gorgeous Fall afternoon, the perfect temperature to be outside. The leaves underfoot were about a foot deep and we were trying to keep the grizzly thoughts at bay while we searched the grounds for our neighbor’s Autumn colored cat. They had emailed in the morning that Sammy had not been seen since the plumber started making a racket yesterday afternoon. Sammy is pretty street savvy. She’d wandered the streets of New York and had travelled all the way from New Zealand in a box. She is big enough to defend herself but certainly not quick enough to outfox a coyote.
A few hours went by and then I spotted our neighbor loading a ladder into his car. Sammy had been found up a tree in another neighbor’s yard. These people have two white dogs who probably cornered Sammy. I put my neighborhood reporter hat on and went down the street to take a photo. Sammy was about about twenty feet up, out of reach with that ladder, so I went home to get ours, the one I used when we painted our city house five times. As I tried to nestle my ladder in the tree I scared Sammy and she came down a few limbs. I was able to throw a rope over the limb and we pulled it toward the earth. Sammy jumped about ten feet and landed softly.
This blog is so sleepy that days can go by before I even think about checking in. And they did. It seems odd that the more caught up you are in the moment, the faster time goes. You would think a jam-packed agenda would slow down your perception of time? Like, wow, I did all that today? It should have lasted forever. But, full speed ahead. Holidays don’t budge. Like it not, next week is Black Thanksgiving.
The older I get the more I like slow songs. I didn’t have the patience for that stuff when I was younger. I used to skip right over the ballads on records. Slow songs were for girls. I wanted to get wild. Now I can listen to slow songs by Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee and George Jones all day long. And still time slips away.
Santa Arrival at Marketplace Mall in Rochester, New York
A nun at Saint John the Evangelist School asked our class, “How many of you still believe in Santa Claus?” I already had my doubts so she didn’t spoil anything but damn, November 10th and the fat man has already landed at the Mall. We were out that way today to pick up some framing material for the upcoming Members Show at Rochester Contemporary and this sign just struck me as a big bummer. I hate the malls. Hate is not strong enough. I get the creeps out here. If we have to suffer through Christmas can’t somebody bring back downtown? Sibleys, McCurdys, Edwards and The National, Neisner Brothers, HL Green and Macks Army Navy Surplus.
Palermos Market in Rochester, New York goes out of business
Artist and drummer, Pete Monacelli, has been doing some construction work for us. He wears three hats at least and he likes to start early, like 8AM, and yesterday he caught us still in our jammies. He told us the best thing about woking here is how close we are to Palermo’s on Culver Road. Palermo’s is old school with a big communal table and Italian newspapers. They have the best sausage and olives this side of the pond, six dollar meals that out did Wegmans down the road, good advice on the perfect main dish for many of our family gatherings and a deli case that had me drooling every time I set foot in there.
I went up there the other day to pick up some lunch and found this distressing sign on the window. There is a liquidation sale there tomorrow but I think it will be too sad to attend. They’re closing on their tenth anniversary but the note had an optimistic tone in that the owners, Guy and Jill, say they are “following another career path.” I wish them all the luck in the world.
Virgin Type building on Valley Road in Rochester, New York
Bill Jones slipped away last night. It was no surprise, he had what he called “kick-ass” cancer. We had been friends for a long time. Our paths were destined to be entwined.
We first met Bill when he and Mitch Cohen were running Asymmetrical Press on Smith Street near the soccer stadium. Archive Records was putting the first Hi-Techs single out and they hired Bill to print the jackets. He delivered a partial order and we picked the rest up in person. Bill came down to Scorgies to hear the Hi-Techs for the first time the night his son, Sam, was born. A few years later Bill was upstairs at Writers & Books running Publishers Workshop with his wife Geri. They had three scanners. The one we liked best was black and white only, no greyscale, and you fed the paper into it by hand. They were on the cutting edge of the burgeoning desktop publishing field.
My father and I did a yearly slide show for Moshe Lubin, the CEO of Hampshire Instruments. He was funded by Harvard and was building a wafer stepping machine for semi-conductors and he did a yearly presentation to high tech companies on some sort of cruise ship off the coast of San Francisco. He was was notorious for modifying the slides up until the drop deadline and I wound up staying up all night with Bill while he ran files created in Canvas on an early Mac to a film recorder for 35mm slides. The iBooks had only been out a month or so when his mom died and he made an eBook of her artwork without an app or anything.
He built web sites for the sales department at Lawyers Cooperative Publishing and he was always available for late night tech support as Peggi and I struggled to keep up with php/mysql and the latest. When Reuters bought the business, they sent Bill packing and he reinvented himself again by buying the oldest wood type making outfit in the country and setting up shop in his garage (above) as Virgin Wood Type. I just checked and the domain name has expired along with Bill.
He told us he was determined to make every Margaret Explosion gig until the end of the year. He didn’t make it. We’re gonna miss him.
Bill Jones always had a keen sense of the absurd. He would call your attention to it in the most unlikely situations and it was a joy to watch him spring his skewed observations on total strangers. He’s taking these skills to the grave and I’m going to miss terribly. I wish there was something I could do to bring him back from the brink.
Chris Schepp and Wreckless Eric at house concert in Rochester, New York
OK, so I sort of caught Eric by surprise but it’s a good picture of Chris Schepp, Rochester’s number one Wreckless fan, and the expression on Chris’s face perfectly captures the mood at last night’s house concert. As if we were living in our own dream this fifth Rochester appearance in the last few years was right across the street from our house.
When we were getting to know the hosts, Rick and Monica, we learned they were Amy Rigby fans but they had never heard of Wreckless Eric. We had never heard of Amy but we loved Wreckless Eric. When Eric and Amy first came through town as a duo we spotted our neighbors in the front row. I told Amy this story last night during their break and she said it often works that way. I also told her that her song about her daughter makes me cry. She liked that.
Last night we were in the front row in our neighbors house and I held my camera in my lap. I caught them doing a Tom Petty song and Amy’s beautiful “Don’t Ever Change.”
I’m watching this morning’s Apple presentation in a separate window as I type a few notes here. Note: Buy a 13″ MacBook Pro with Retina Display or maybe a 27 inch iMac. Can’t decide. Probably won’t by either. I know the whole world has gone mobile but I haven’t. I’m still happy with the first gen iPod Touch. The last thing I want when I leave home is a phone call. Got to sign off now before they introduce that iPad Mini.
Untitled Paul Dodd charcoal drawing for Bill Jones
We stopped up to see Bill in his perch atop the brand new Wilmot Cancer Center. He has a corner room on the southeast corner of the seventh floor overlooking the Bristol Hills south of Rochester but he woke up thinking he was in California. Such is his pain management state. I picked this drawing out for him and brought it up there. I asked if there was anything else we could bring him and he said, “some man-food. Three six-packs of beer.”
The Adirondack Mountains certainly aren’t wired for cable modems and it is so sparsely populated that it is not in any cell phone provider’s interest to erect towers everywhere so most people are left with the spotty satellite connections. The coffee shops in the small towns all have free wifi now and and they are becoming real hubs of activity. We stopped at one in Speculator that had a laptop sitting on table for customers to use. I was tempted but I couldn’t think of any good reason to check my email. I’m kind of enjoying the dead zone.
Video head shots by Ann Oren in current “Me Pix” show at Rochester Contemporary
Leaving the Hochstein last weekend we drove by Plymouth Photo. I was so surprised to see they were still in business. Joe used to be the best at knocking off passport photos and head shots for business people, actors, politicians, and especially aspiring models. I just assumed his business was swallowed up by the DIY digital machine. We still get head shots in the mail, more than ever actually, and I attribute that to the new parenthood model that sees exceptionalism in their offspring. I’ve taken to slicing the 8×10 heads in two and recombining them in mutant forms.
I was immediately attracted to Ann Oren’s video installation in the current “Me Pix” show at Rochester Contemporary. Like Andy Warhol’s “Screen Tests”, mentioned in yesterday’s post, Oren uses non actors as well as professional actors in her piece called “The Audition.” While it is interesting trying to determine the genuine from the fake as the models sell themselves the most interesting thing is how we squirm while watching them.
I love this little guy. He sits by our neighbor’s pond looking over the real frogs and goldfish and today he reminded me of Martin’s post on mindfullness.
We took a walk with the neighbor on the other side this afternoon. She got two phone calls while we we were in the woods. That was a different experience for us. She drove down to the Metropolitan over the weekend to see her brother perform withDean & Britta, doing their Warhol Screen Test thing in conjunction with the “Regarding Warhol” show there. She went to high school in Manhattan and told us the auditorium the band played in was the same one where she and Dean had their high school graduations.
We watch the chipmunks dart in and out of this hole in our sidewalk all day long. They have their own metropolis down there, tiny highway systems, food storage lockers, miniature coonskin hat factories, recreation rooms with large screen tvs, bunk beds and gymnasiums with wrestling mats. They also have a small office down there where chipmunk engineers are drawing up plans for squeezing this large nut through their small portal.
Apple has a tribute to Steve Jobs on it’s front page this morning, marking one year since his passing. Following the “related stories” link under that story, something I seem to spend half my day doing, I found “Ten Steve Jobs Quotes” including this one, “I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete.” Its a brutal assessment when you’re looking to fill the void.
We met Peggi’s family in Cabo San Lucas one Christmas and the hills outside that noisy tourist town smelled like cilantro. It grows like a weed down there. We planted cilantro seeds this Spring and the plants grew quickly but then turned spindly with more shoots and then seeds than leaves. This has happened to us before. I have always wondered how Wegmans gets those big leafy bunches. This year we let the seeds (coriander) go and in month’s time we have a beautiful patch. Nothing but leaves and delicious in salads.
My cousin has organized a family reunion this weekend and another cousin, a nun, was arranging to bring her father (my uncle) and our aunt (who went into and then out of hospice, the only person I know to have done so) to the picnic in a handicap van. But my uncle has taken a turn for the worse and is “on his way to heaven,” according to his daughter. That’s a comforting thought.
We drove our friend, Bill, to the Oncology Center yesterday so they could radiate the base of his spine in order to shrink his newest tumor, one that has made it painful for him to bend over. On the way home we stopped at the Mobil station at Twelve Corners to pick up his car. A mechanic there massaged the transmission so it would pass inspection and Bill wanted me to drive it home. I stayed in second gear the whole way and managed to get it into reverse before shutting it off in his driveway. Bill said he was thinking of giving the car to someone.
Advertising makes the modern world go ’round and this Avon promotion really lit up the mailboxes on our end of the street this morning. I was headed out to get the papers, still in my pjs and bleary eyed when I spotted this apparition. Had to go back in and get my camera before anyone disturbed the installation.
We still refer to the house next door as Leo’s even though he died two years ago but the new tenants are fairly disciplined and will soon have left their mark. One is a writer and from my perch her silhouette can be seen every morning in the saddle at her desk in the back room.
Leo’s lovable legacy includes his depression era skimpiness. When we first moved in he asked if he could put a few things in our trash and of course we said yes. We soon learned he had never purchased a trash pick-up contract and this would be a weekly routine. When a carpenter was rebuilding a wall in the basement for the new tenants he took all his measurements with his twenty five foot tape rule and then mistakenly picked up Leo’s tape rule to measure the lumber. He constructed the wall on the ground and then lifted it in to place and discovered it was ten inches short. It took him a bit to figure out that Leo had broken his tape measure and and instead of springing for a new one he cut out the inches between ten and twenty and then put it back together.
Paul Dodd and Fran Dodd jump into quarry in Bloomington, Indiana
I’ve been spending a lot of time with my youngest brother these days. Funny how that age ranking relationship disappears over time. He’s an expert mason and gets the best fancy brick (and fake brick) jobs in the city because of his reputation. We have a concrete block house so he has helped us out with repairs and a recent improvement and we always feel lucky for the time he has to spend with us.
It was the summer between my brother, Fran’s junior and senior year in high school when my parent’s had had enough. They asked if Peggi and I would take Fran for the summer and we said yes so they drove him out to Bloomington and dropped him off.
He got a part time maintenance job at Peddler’s, the woman’s clothing store that Steve Hoy’s sister ran. I was finishing concrete for a construction company and Peggi was working as a dental assistant. Dave Mahoney was working in the dorms and he lived down the street from us. We all spent a lot of time at the nearby quarries. We didn’t usually wear bathing suits but we did when my parents came back out to pick him up. My father took this photo. You can tell which one of us was more of a rebel rouser by the body language.
Ted Baumhauer of Flower City Vaudeville performing at the Rochester Fringe Fest
If it wasn’t for all the wood that fell out of the sky this summer we would have been in Christ Church on Saturday night for the psychedelic, 3-D digital graphics show organized by tech wizards at RIT accompanied by improv pipe organ and performed with and projected on dancers from RIT. We told our neighbors we would meet them there and we never showed. We sat down after splitting wood all afternoon and couldn’t get up. Maybe we can get them to perform with Margaret Explosion on Wednesday at the Little Theater.
We did catch the second Flower City Vaudeville show and enjoyed ourselves immensely. Like an old fashioned circus or theatrical variety show with five minute segments, it is live performance, no editing. Jugglers occasionally drop the pins. Acrobats keep you on edge and remind you how rigid your body has become. Bad jokes are funnier in person. Ward Hartenstein’s radio show with a trunk load of sound effects comes to life off air. And impromptu guests spots, like when Rick Simpson brought the little kids on stage to hold spinning plates above their heads, become moments of brilliance.
John Dodd and Fran Dodd installing John Dodd’s benches in front of City Newspaper in the Neighborhood of the Arts in Rochester, New York
With so many things happening around town during the Fringe Festival, both sanctioned and bootlegged, piled-oners, it is easy to let go and take everything around us in as an art related event. The boundaries are loosened and that in itself is a reward. San Francisco’s Bandaloop though, dancing its way down the side of the HSCB building with thousands of people in the street is not something you see everyday. We may have go back for their daylight reprise this afternoon.
We set the alarm for this event on Friday morning, the installation of two John Dodd benches in front of the City News building. John won a City Of Rochester Art Walk Extension Bench Competition and hired our brother, Fran, to help install the two benches he designed. From John’s site; “The two benches were designed to flank an entry walkway. The design point of departure for the set was the idea of a right brain /left brain set. I titled the set “Deflected Reflection”
