Category: We Live Like Kings

Our next-door neighbor took the train through Beacon on her way to New York the same day we drove there. She paralleled the Thruway and then the Hudson while we cut diagonally through the Catskills, where the air quality index reached 359 because of the wildfires in Canada. We decided to drive because we planned to visit Storm King Art Center, about twenty miles away.

We decided to go to Storm King on Friday and Dia Beacon on Saturday, as rain was predicted. We found an Italian restaurant our first night there and split a delicious spicy shrimp dish. We told the waitress how much we liked the sauce, and she said many of the regulars order that dish with a side of pasta and mix the two. Next time.

On Friday, our anniversary, we had reservations at another Italian spot, “Amarcord,” with a typeface to match the movie. We split a shrimp-and-polenta appetizer, a whole roasted orata, and a Mediterranean salad. They served us a complimentary glass of champagne with an orange slice for our anniversary.

It rained hard while we were inside the warehouses of Dia Beacon—a sound installation from Mother Nature.

We found a bar at the end of Main Street that was showing the third-place match of the World Cup. The bar was a little rough. A guy at the table next to us was wearing a T-shirt that read, “Please Do Not Feed the Whores Drugs.” Beacon has a terrific IPA called Wrench. We had two of those and were considering leaving at the half when England was up 4–0, but I’m so glad we hung in there to see France come back before eventually going down. And despite the fact that the bar had the English flag over it and an Arsenal supporters sign, it seemed most of the crowd was cheering for France.

The smoke cleared, and we sat on the roof of our hotel as the sun set over the Hudson.

We drove home early on Sunday in order to get to John’s Gilmore’s memorial. Traffic on the Thruway came to a complete halt near Seneca Falls so we were an hour late. We got home in time to watch the thrilling World Cup final. We had been for Spain all along and it was so satisfying to see them play that beautiful possesion game of one touch passes to outfox the great Messi and company. Not even Trump could spoil their victory.

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Like many homeowners, we have a second bathroom in our basement. Because the shower fixtures are mounted to an exterior concrete-block wall, the plumbing is out front, exposed. The shower had leaked for years and I kept cranking down the nut behind the handles, but the leak would always come back. We asked a plumber if he could just replace the handles and they said, no. The leak will just come back.

Mike from McKenna Plumbing told us, “What you need is a new faucet.”

All these years I thought the handles you turn to get the water flowing were the faucets. The plumber explained that the faucet was the brass body the handles were attached to. Ours was simply worn out.

In the last few years we’ve noticed this look—exposed copper or brass pipes, analog pressure gauges, and vintage wheel valves—becoming trendy in places like restaurant bathrooms. It even has a fitting name in design circles: “Steampunk.” So I guess we were steampunk before it had a name.

McKenna was a delight to work with, but finding a new brass faucet like the one we had was a real challenge. Mike, one of their plumbers, suggested I use ChatGPT. I uploaded a picture of our existing fixture and eventually found the parts.

The way the handles are mounted in this new set up you can’t really see which one is hot and which is cold. But I am dyslexic enough to have looked for them on the sides. Mike put the C handle on the hot feed and the H handle on the cold feed. Now, that’s “steampunk.”

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We met Scott and his whole family at Magpie on Park Avenue. Traditionally a Liverpool supporters bar, we were there to watch Arsenal play Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League final. We were still looking for a parking space when Arsenal scored the first goal.

When not pulling for our three Spanish teams, we were thrilled by PSG’s passing game in the earlier rounds, but we found it pretty easy to root against them in this situation. Arsenal were clearly the underdogs, but their defense proved impenetrable. Paris only managed to score on a penalty kick, and the match was a 1-1 logjam (Peggi’s description) through two overtime periods and the dreaded shootout stage. No way, but the only way, to settle things.

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We heard the crackle of limbs breaking. We were eating dinner, and when we looked toward the window we saw a big oak slowly lean down the hill and then came the crash. It took two other trees down with it like dominoes. Before you know it two of our neighbors were looking at the mess in the middle of the road. We scurried down the hill and picked up enough debris to let the mailman through. Someone had already called the firefighters, and they hopped out of the truck with chainsaws, cleared the road, and left the rest for us.

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I picked up the recent Cornelia Magazine at Rochester Contemporary. The yellow and black publication is a visual arts review for Western New York and Southern Ontario, and I turned to it hoping we hadn’t missed a great show during the four days we spent in Toronto. We did—Annie McDowell’s work at two seven two.

Issue #20 includes a fascinating article by Alexa Kanarowski about “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape,” the pivotal 1975 exhibition at the George Eastman House. It is the second most-cited photography exhibition in history, a turning point in photography, a radical shift away from traditional depictions of landscape. Yet, at the time, the show looked more ordinary than radical—ordinary, as in “Ansel Adams photographed landscapes, and you photographed this for the walls of the Eastman?”

The Eastman’s website entry on this show says: “The question persists as to why this unassuming exhibition came to be so widely known and understood as the seminal event in which photography’s landscape paradigm shifted away from the sublime, ushering in a new era of theoretical approaches. Of those who did see the exhibition, few seem to have thought themselves in the presence of a turning point; paradigm shifts are rarely recognized except in retrospect.”

William Jenkins studied at Visual Studies Workshop and was the Curator of Twentieth-Century Photography at the Eastman in 1975. He selected ten then-young American photographers—Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel—for his show “New Topographics.” The Baltz photo above could be an Ed Ruscha painting. Photography in the seventies found a seat at the Modern Art table.

I was an art major at IU but only lasted a couple of years. When I moved back here I took a job as a graphic artist with the Rochester Police Department, a one-year position paid for by a grant, and one of the benefits was they would pay for a college class. So, in that one year I took Photo 1 and Photo 2 at the U of R. Bill Jenkins was my teacher. I remember him liking the Stones’ “Exile on Main Street.” He took us through the darkroom techniques directly into art. I eventually finished with a BA in Studio Arts from Empire State College, and those photo classes were the best classes I took.

In Cornelia, Alexa Kanarowski writes, “for all its economic fatigue, Western New York offers a fertile ground for reimagining approaches to topography and photography. Our stagnation is not purely decay but a pause, a long exposure in which the latent image continues to develop. A New New Topographics could foreground our entanglement with the climate, data, and capital systems we’ve built.”

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We started the evening at Rella in the triangularly shaped space where the original Pyramid Arts Center was on the corner of Marshall and Monroe across the street from where Miles Davis debuted songs from what would become “Bitches Brew.” We sat at the counter and split an order of the Seafood Salad (calamari, scallops and shrimp) with lemon vinaigrette and an order of Shrimp Sliders. They reminded us of the roasted salmon sandwiches we had in Sausalito last year. Spanish is spoken in the open kitchen and Reggaeton music is on the sound system. We each had a glass of Primitivo wine.

The front wall at RoCo has never looked better. “Anne Havens | Sue Havens,” a mother-daughter show, opens with a bang with this collection of Anne Havens sculptures. Anne’s palette is represented, and her playfulness is on full display. We found it hard to move on from here but eventually left to congratulate Anne, who was holding court at the far end of the gallery.

I showed Anne this photo on my camera and she asked if I got the titles. “The titles are important,” she said. I could not fit the first one in my photo so I’ll list that as “not shown.” From left to right — “Climb The Bones” (not shown), “The Artist’s Life,” “Holy One,” “Sieves,” “Chariot,” “Spectacle,” “Barque,” “Lead Belly,” and “Steps.”

Anne Havens’ artist book, “Early Sculpture 1992–1997,” is available as a free ePub download:
Download “Early Sculpture”

We knew we would see more people in the park than we have seen all year. It was 70 as we walked along the beach. It felt so good to see people in mostly black T-shirts with such pale skin. And on our way back we stopped at the garden to pick a bag of over-wintered mâche, our first harvest of the new year.

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We regularly follow three of the four sides that qualified for this year’s Supercopa so it was especially frustrating that our ESPN package didn’t allow us to stream the three matches. So we decided to watch today’s final in a bar. We called Shamrock Jack’s last night and Mike, the bartender there, said he’d reserve a table in the dining room where the match would be on one of the tvs. “No sound of course,” as the Bills playoff game would be on the sound system.

The Bills game had already started so we checked the score a few times as we walked through the park. The Bills were up when we got to the bar and the place was packed. We had a table alright but it turned out they didn’t have access to ESPN Select either. So we walked back home and decided to try a bar downtown, a new place that our soccer buddy, Scott recommended, Parlays on Monroe Ave.

I checked the score of both games as we drove there. The Bills were down now and Barcelona and Real Madrid were tied 2-2 at the half. Three of those four goals happened in stoppage time while we were driving! This bar had even more TVs, all tuned to the Bills except one with women’s college basketball. We ordered two beers and a bartender took us over to one the TVs in the corner. Young kids were throwing darts between us and the tv as he tried to sign in to ESPN Select. But no go!

The Bills scored and the place went bananas. The “Shout” theme song was cued and a train of revelers danced around the bar following a guy with a Bills flag. The “dangerous sound levels” warning went off on my watch. The other team scored and the mood dampened. The Bills scored again and the place exploded as they ran out the clock.

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I’m writing this post before we lose power. It’s been one of those days where the temperature goes down instead of up during the day. We’ve had a leaner, a dead, rotting oak, broken at the base and only still standing because it got hung up on the branch of a nearby tree for the last six or seven years. We had already plotted where it would fall and we weren’t too worried but when it came down this morning it shook the house and just missed our deer fence.

We stopped by Canaltown to pick up coffee and Pete was just roasting a batch so we told him we would come back in an hour and pick it up warm. I watched as he poured beans in the big funnel and told me what goes into the Rochester’s Choice, the blend we buy. “Sumatran and Costa Rican.” I asked who came up with the name. It is such a good name for the house blend as it sounds like it has already won some sort award. He said he and his father-in-law came up with it when they started the business some thirty five years ago.

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I was knocked out by a 1967 book we saw at Duane’s place a few years back on the Asmat people, the isolated but culturally advanced New Guinea tribe that had no contact with outsiders until they were be-friended by Nelson Rockefeller’s son, Michael. He was amassing a collection of so called primitive art for his father and it eventually wound up in the Metropolitan Museum but you couldn’t see it. The Michael Rockefeller wing was closed for renovations for years. While anxiously awaiting the reopening I bought a used copy of the book on eBay and read another one on Michael’s adventures and disappearance. Cannibalism? The wing’s reopening mandated a trip to Manhattan. 

We flew to JFK and took the Q train to Duane’s where he had lunch waiting for us. We had coffee, hummus and eggplant with pita and hung out for a few hours before taking the F train to the Meatpacking District where we had booked a hotel. We ate dinner at a nearby Spanish restaurant called Bartolo’s, played a few hands of gin and then slept like babies. The next morning we met Duane in the lobby of the Met and let the Rockefeller collection sweep us away.

We had plans to meet our nephew in Midtown at the end of his work day and we had an hour to kill so we walked across the park with Duane and he took a train back to Brooklyn. Peggi and I continued along 72nd, past the Dakota where there was some sort of Lennon tribute going on, to a record store called “Westsider.” I had read they had a good jazz collection and they did but when we asked the old guy (our age) behind the counter if he had any jazz 45s he laughed. “Jazz people don’t like 45s and the the 45 people don’t like jazz so you’re in a something of a black hole.” I said, “I know.” We left empty handed.

Knowing that our nephew likes steak we made reservations at a place called Quality Meats on 58th. He ordered a sirloin and Peggi and I split a filet mignon, first steak we had had in years. We ordered a few side dishes as well, broccoli, a Caesar salad and bacon/peanut butter thing that the waiter recommended. I was thinking what a crazy combination that was but it tasted so good. And then it dawned on me. My mom, a butcher’s daughter, used to make peanut butter and bacon sandwiches for us when we were kids. 

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Chillida is rightfully featured in Bilbao’s Guggenheim. That’s two of his sculptures on the deck of the museum designed by Frank Geary. What a combo. Geary died the other day. He was a hero of my father’s. They were just about the same age. When we first visited northern Spain, Bilbao was described in the tourist books as the armpit of Spain, an industrial hub with a port on the Bay of Biscay. We drove right by it.

When the MAG organized an art tour of Spain in the late nineties the Guggenheim there was brand new and my parents signed up. My father filled a sketch book with drawings of the building. An article about the architect in today’s paper said the first building Geary designed was for Louis Danziger in 1965, a work/live space on Melrose Avenue in LA. I had just called attention to Danziger a few posts back when researching the artwork he did for a Bud Powell 45. Funny how everything comes together eventually.

We have been to Bilbao a couple of times since and we love the city. The museum, Geary’s masterpiece, transformed the working class city. We want to go back. Architecture aside, I was just thinking how nice it is to live in a spot where we can hear the train whistles downtown, the jet skis on the lake, the motorcycles on Kings Highway and the muffled roar of the bay bridge.

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Historic Brighton presented their annual “Leo Dodd Heritage Preservation Award” today to Valerie O’Hara of Pike Stained Glass Studios. My father, Leo, was the first president of Historic Brighton and my sister, Amy, is the current president and she presented the award at the Third Presbyterian Church, a site selected by the recipient as Valerie and her stained glass company did so much work here in the last century.

People all around us were checking the score of the Bills game. I was studying the six windows directly across from where we were sitting, a series that was given to the church in memory of five young parishioners who died in World War I. The six windows featured five saints, Saint George, Saint Michael the Archangel, Saint Paul, Saint Gabriel and Saint Martin de Tours. One is an angel and one an archangel, very handy in battle. Paul is depicted twice, once as a Christian Warrior wearing the armor of God and next to it he lays his armor down representing peace after battle. He holds a shield with an oak tree, the scales of justice, and the dove of peace along with the shields of the U.S. Army Engineering and Medical Department.

At the foot of each saint is one sixth of a quote from Timothy, “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith.” Interestingly, each panel also includes insignias of the US allies in the great war, a wacky combination of religion, warfare and politics.

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Peggi and Cynthia Howk from the Landmark Society exchanged emails this week on one of those rabbit hole digs. They were trying to track down where in our neighborhood the architect, Robert Brodie, once lived. Peggi found an article on Newspapers.com about a Mrs. Brodie taking children from Hillside Children’s Center on horseback rides from her house on Hoffman Road. A photo accompanied the story and Peggi was able to determine which house it was although the house was greatly altered by local artist, Sabra Richards. The percussion teacher at the Eastman School lives there now. Cynthia was arranging a tour of one of Brodie’s houses on Lake Road and she invited us to tag along.

The swing bridge is open at the mouth of the bay so we were there in minutes. The current owner is the son of the original owner and the mid-century modern home has thankfully not been altered, only improved. Cynthia pointed out the clerestory windows that run along the top of the house, a new architectural term for us. Some of the interesting features include a soundproofed telephone booth. A light goes on when you sit down and there is a hardwired intercom to the house next door for setting up carpools when both families included Kodak employees. The entire model home darkroom displayed in the Kodak exhibit building at the 1939-1940 World’s Fair in Flushing is installed in the basement. And a feature that you might have to be an electrician to appreciate. Each of the six single-bulb lights in the hallway were modified to accommodate two light bulbs wired in series, not parallel. So all but two or three of the twelve original bulbs, now 73 years old, are still in service.

The owner learned we play music and he showed us his Hammond B3 that he had in the basement. He told us a story about the brakes on his mom’s Metropolitan going out as she came down the driveway. Rather than slam into the house she quickly decided to run the car into a nearby maple tree.

Since we were out this way we stopped in to visit my brother and on the way back we pulled over to admire this house along the lake. We got out to take a photo. The owner was out front and Peggi told her we were architectural buffs. She invited us in and we learned this house too was designed by Robert Brodie. See Peggi’s Don Hershey website for more local mid-century showpieces.

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Last year toward the end of the summer we picked a couple of pawpaws from the cluster of trees on Log Cabin Road. We let the fruit soften up on our counter and spooned it out once it started to turn brown. It is delicious, commonly described as tasting like a blend of banana and mango. We saved the seeds from the fruit and cleaned them off. Then Peggi put the seeds in a small container of moist potting soil and put it in the back of our refrigerator. This is called “cold stratification.” In early May Peggi planted them one inch deep in a pot that sat in our window. Just a few days ago we spotted the spouts pushing the seeds out of the ground. We are watching a YouTube video now on how to plant.

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Corrine Atias went to grade school here on the Barrington Street in the Park Avenue area. We picked up our programs for the annual Landmark Society House & Garden tour in the school and walked by the apartment on Dartmouth where we lived when we first moved here in the mid seventies. It is now a hideous green. Our first stop was a Claude Bragdon house on the corner of Dartmouth and Park. There was a beautiful painting of the original owners hanging in the stairwell. We were told the small portrait in the woman’s hand was of her first husband who died in a dual. Our favorite house on the tour was a Bungalow style house at 417 Westminster. A recessed, center entrance under a pergola opens to a light filled living room as wide as the large house. The house was featured in a book. The backyard garden with a weeping Atlas Cedar and waterfall was heavenly.

Since we don’t subscribe to Fox Sports we have to find a spot to watch the international final between Spain and Portugal tomorrow. We’re thinking maybe nearby Shamrock Jack’s or Sheffield if they are open at three in the afternoon. We watched Spain beat France 5-4 in Magpie on Park Avenue with Scott and guy named Bob who told us he watched a lot of Rugby. He didn’t have to tell us that. He looked exactly like a rugby player. We were the only ones in there except for the bartender and a guy we used to call “Mike Mohawk” back in the Scorgie’s days. Scott gave us a couple of his books. Peggi is anxious to dive into the one on Detroit.

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There was a Whole Earth like moment when the promise of the internet first became apparent. Creative types could have a website with an address on the World Wide Web. I’m not sure what happened. Peggi might know. She’s been reading “Careless People.” Maybe we were doomed to scroll endlessly.

My favorite Rochester website is Gonechester. We think of our city as always having been the way it is. Do you recognize anything in the photo above other than Kodak Office building? Our city is continually reshaping itself. Geoffrey Zeiner’s posts uncover the rich past of our city. My grandparents both worked at local shoe factories. This history shaped us.

The Gonechester site pulls together sources to tell stories about people and places that once were part of Rochester, NY, but now are no longer with us. Photographs, newspaper articles, and primary documents are all included to paint a picture of these lost locations, and the people who lived and worked in them. If deep diving on a well researched website with dreamy photos is not your thing Geoffrey is giving a talk, entitled ”A Walk Through a Disappeared Downtown,” at the Chili Public Library, Thursday, June 12th, at 6:30 PM. He has a video about the History of Rochester’s Main Street Bridge.

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I took this photo last month as we flew east into Chicago. It is a nice compliment to the photo I took of our garden in my last post. It also makes a good abstract. We put a second row of arugula in and weeded the spot where we will put the tomato plants on Tuesday. Unusually late but it has been unusually cool. Our garden is in our neighbors’ yard. It used to be their tennis court when they were younger. They also have a fish pond that a heron found this spring. They suspected as much because the fish have all been clustered in the center under a few plants, afraid to come out. Their suspicions were confirmed when they came out to pick up the mail and saw the heron standing in their pond.

The end of Hoffman was especially alive with bird activity today. Our Merlin app identified Red-winged Blackbird, Song Sparrow, Northern Flicker, American Robin, Eastern Wood-Pewee, Gray Catbird, Tufted Titmouse, American Goldfinch, Yellow Warbler, Carolina Wren and a Tennessee Warbler in less than a minute. The neighbors who live in the last house told us they had a pileated woodpecker crash into their window. It shattered the first of a double pane glass, temporarily knocked itself out but got up and flew away.

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It is not exactly logical, “Mystery is that which gives meaning,” but it does free the mind.

Somewhere in the mid-sixties the nine of us piled into the family station wagon and drove south to Mt. Savior Monastery in Elmira. I assume my father had made some sort of arrangement before we stopped in, I was just going along for the ride and probably would rather have stayed home with my friends. I remember the grounds, the barn, the small church and I remember meeting Brother David. My father was greatly influenced by this mystic monk. This glimpse of monastic life was certainly mysterious to me. On the way home we would stopped at Annis Dairy for ice cream.

In his “Underground Designers Handbook,”Leo Dodd says he attended a lecture series by Brother David and was exposed to “the beauty and clarity of his thought, how common religious terms like awareness, encounter and commitment, in David’s hands, took on a special arrangement with stunning impact. Without this exposure, to how these terms interplay with God, man and mystery this handbook would not exist.”

Brother David Steindl-Rast is a Benedictine monk, author, and interfaith scholar best known for his teachings on gratefulness. He was born in Austria in 1926. He was greatly influenced by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki’s book, “The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk,” and the two protested the Viet Nam war together. 98 years old now, he is still a prominent voice bridging contemplative Christian traditions with Buddhism. He has a Ted Talk.

My father was 41 in 1968 when he created his “Underground Designers Handbook.” My parents were unhappy with the conservative tenants of Catholicism and along with a former priest and a small group of like-minded liberals they went about forming their own church, not a physical building but a community. In the formative stages the group would meet at our house and conversation mixed with cigarette smoke wafted upstairs to our bedrooms.

Leo’s artwork, in colored pencils and ink, is a joy to look at. Trained as a mechanical engineer he worked as a design engineer for Eastman Kodak. He was able to reduce concepts to graphic symbols. And if it got complicated he would create a matrix. He used to to say he couldn’t talk without a pencil. I don’t think he could think without one. He retired early but continued working as a consultant. I was lucky to have been on jobs with Leo while creating slideshows for high-tech companies under insane deadlines. This was fun for him. The concepts expressed in his Underground Designers Handbook remain mysterious to me but mystery is that which gives meaning.

CLICK HERE to download the free book.

Leo’s book is available here in the generic ePub format. On Mac the download should should open in your Books app. To read Apple Books (ePub format) on a PC, you’ll need to use a third-party reader compatible with the ePub format. Popular options include Adobe Digital Editions, Calibre, or FB Reader. You can also use Microsoft Edge. 

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There is a reason Ed Ruscha photographed Every Building on the Sunset Strip in 1966. It was already an iconic slice of California fantasy. Our Uber driver was just finishing his shift this morning as we spotted one attraction after the other. He told us “the billboards (mostly promoting shows we’ve never heard of) really pop at night.” He dropped us off at Ameba a half hour before they opened so we walked the star-studded sidewalks on Hollywood Boulevard and found a coffee shop next to yet another Scientology building. Kim Carnes’ “Betty Davis Eyes” was playing on the sound system.

Gene Autry has more than one star on the sidewalk. The store was mobbed by the time we got back there. Peggi and I found two boxes of used jazz 45s and each went through a box. I found it interesting that the smaller San Francisco store had about three times as many. The clerk, who had family in Rochester, told us they had a listening station up until Covid and they never brought it back so we bought a short stack on good faith. 

Peggi’s sister made reservations at the Getty and we drove over there in the afternoon. We started with the Gustave Caillebotte show, mostly stunning, large Impressionist paintings of his friends with a few awkward clunkers. And then the three Rembrandt’s in the permanent collection that are seared in my memory from previous visits. I find it especially reassuring that Rembrandt is still laughing in this 1628 self-portrait. Only he has/had the ability to capture a human being for all time.

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