Category: We Live Like Kings

We planned to save the RoCo Members Show opening for last and start our First Friday rounds at Axom Gallery with “NARTCAN: On the Subject of Addiction,” a group exhibition curated by Justin Chaiz, a nurse who cares for people suffering from addiction. I like the meaty theme and the way the artists, who all answered a call for entries, handled it. The multiple black and white photos of one addict were my favorite.

Second stop was the Visual Studies Workshop Auditorium where a good old-fashioned happening was in full swing, a 2 hour performance of John Cage’s “Variations III: For one or any number of people performing any actions.” A lot of familiar faces were participating but like any good happening, just by being there you too were a participant.

Mona Seghatoleslami was playing violin and reading randomly chosen passages from a book. Nuuj had his homemade synth there, Ian Downey was breaking wood with a hammer and his father, Ed, was playing violin in another corner. John Borek was passing out money and then charging you the same amount to make you a play dough gift. Ray Ray from the Little Theatre Café was drawing pictures on small sheets of paper while wearing a mask. Someone was riding a bike around in circles. Scott McCarney had an ironing board set up and he was cutting up pieces of paper and maps while working from a score. He explained the directions he was following but I didn’t understand it. At least twenty other performers were doing their thing at the same time. Drums, flutes, and a lot of banging. It was overwhelming at first but then strangely comforting.

We got to RoCo just before they closed up shop and we plan go back to study the Members Show.

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We made a special stop at Wegman’s to buy Halloween candy, just in case. We used to get a handful of trick or treaters but those kids have grown up and the for the last few years we haven’t gotten any at all. When we lived in the city we had an an army of them. So tonight we had Snickers for dessert.

Matthew and Louise let us borrow their 75 Anniversary edition of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula about three months ago. It is packaged with a 1931 Spanish language version, one that was shot simultaneously with the Lugosi version and one that is reportedly “sexier.” I don’t know what took us so long to get to it but I can’t think of a better night than Halloween.

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There’s a big difference between American football and the European sport but I don’t want to sound snotty. My namesake is or was England’s Number One Football Hooligan. The sport has more than its share of louts. We watched a string of matches as the US Mens team played their way right out of the World Cup qualifying North, Central America and Caribbean conference. It was getting increasingly hard to root for them so it is probably for the best that they lost to Trinidad and Tobago and will sit out the World Cup in Russia next year. The team needs to get it together, kind of like the country needs to suffer through Trump to get itself on the right course.

Tonight the North Carolina Courage of the Women’s National Soccer League play the Portland Thorns in Orlando. The Courage is our team. They were the Western New York Flash up until last season when the franchise moved south. I plan to climb up in this chair and scream at the tv.

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I know someone that would love this video game. We were sitting next to it at MacGregor’s overlooking the Irondequoit Bay. The place didn’t come up when I searched for nearby “sports bars” in my map program but I remember coming out here with Matthew and Louise to see a match during some other tournament. We were looking for someone who had the BeIn network so we could watch the US Men’s team play Honduras in a near must-win qualifying match for the 2018 World Cup in Russia.

The US is still relatively new to the sport but we are lucky to be in Concacaf, the North, Central American and Caribbean confederation. Other than tough competition from Mexico it should be pretty easy for the US to finish in the top three of these 35 nations yet we’re getting right down to the wire. We watched the US lose to Casta Rico again a few nights ago and they barely squeaked out a tie via Honduras last night.

I still hold a grudge against MacGregors for leaving their original location in the South Wedge but the guy that manages this location was pretty accommodating. He told us he was a soccer player for thirty five years and he said he has arthritis so bad he has to stretch before getting out of bed. He said his team won the sectionals. Webster went to the sectional finals in my senior year so I asked where he played. He said Wayne County and I asked what year. I had him pegged for “older than me” but he was seven years behind. He was probably thinking the same thing of me.

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East Main is looking up. There was a time when I’d get propositioned by hookers while riding home from New Math rehearsal on my bike. I’ve been spending a lot of time at Warren Philip’s frame shop at Main and Goodman. He’s helping me frame work for the show. He’s making birch wood frames for my father’s watercolors and I’ve order matts, glass and metal section frame champs from him for my work.

They’re re-working the intersection out in front of his shop but there is construction going on up and down the street with some buildings getting gutted and a whole block of new housing going up. It was pretty bleak twenty five years ago. The Hungerford Building by Warren’s, mostly artist’s studios and illegal lofts, is always busy. I took this photo of the new store in front of that building.

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When I was growing up on the east side the neighborhood was dotted with small grocery stores. There were two near our house, one on Humboldt and one on Atlantic and then there was an early behemoth, Star Market, at Merchants and Main. Peggi and I lived in that same neighborhood for twenty-six years and there were still a few small stores nearby. Bertha’s was only open at night. There was no fresh food in the place. She mostly sold six packs and magazines. Fleckenstein’s was a great meat market. But Fred’s, on the corner of Main and Wisconsin was the best small grocery. Fred’s nephew, Sam, a recent East High graduate, opened the first Salvatore’s Pizza across the street in 1978.

In 1940, long before my two stints in the neighborhood, a group of thugs robbed the owner of a grocery store at 2121 East Main, a few blocks down from Fred’s, where State Farm is located today. The owner of that store was robbed by these four thugs. Peggi found the article while tracking down a tip from a reader of her site, DonHershey.com. We knew nothing about Don Hershey when we lived on the east side and never really noticed this cute little place on Melville Street, just off Culver by Nino’s Pizzeria.

Don Hershey, Rochester’s foremost mid-century modern architect, designed the house on Melville for Julius Morrison in the late thirties and the shopkeeper had just moved in in 1940 when this event took place.

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My father was one of the founding members of Historic Brighton and during his time as president he came up with the idea of celebrating Gideon Cobb, an early pioneer and brick maker. Gideon Cobb Day was usually celebrated with a lunch at Mario’s and, of course, Cobb Salad was on the menu. My cousin, Ray Tierney is on the board now and he has renewed the celebration.

We gathered yesterday in a tent behind the Buckland House, an early farmstead home on Westfall Road that was preserved through the efforts of Historic Brighton. The supervisor of Brighton was there and many of the club members and Jerry Ludwig, the guy who writes the home improvement column in Saturday’s paper. My family was there as well because Historic Brighton has decided to give an annual “Leo Dodd Historic Preservation Award” award to someone in the community who worked toward those ends. This year’s recipient was Sandra Frankel and Ray asked if I would say something about Leo.

I talked about how my father was into photography, painting, engineering, history, genealogy and family and how these interests all overlapped. He painted portraits of these early Brighton residents when no photos existed and he reconstructed the brick making kilns and factories in a CAD drawing program. He was able to bring history to life. And he shared his enthusiasm. This made Brighton a better town.

Peggi and I provided technical support with the websites, newsletters, presentations and his Brighton Brick book production. Historic Brighton made us honorary members and that is nice but what Historic Brighton needs is someone with the desire to dig through the past, willing to attend the meetings, lobby the politicians to preserve the remnants, someone who likes taking pictures and illustrating a story and someone who likes to share what they have found. They need someone as enthusiastic as my father was.

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We met Matthew and Louise for a drink down on the beach behind Margie’s, a speakeasy during Prohibition. It was a beautiful night but the signs of a rough winter were plentiful. Huge sand dunes hand reshaped the beach. They’re going to need a piece of heavy equipment to make it look all civilized again.

I took this photo on the way in. I wasn’t the only one taking photos. This Ford Flex was abandoned in three feet of water right where the parking lot used to be for Vic & Irv’s. Ben, who lives across the street on the beach wasn’t taking photos, he was calling 911. He told us they call 911 all the time. Boats gets stranded in front of their house and all sorts of crazy stuff happens down there. He surmised someone was “hammered.” If I’m remembering this right, Greg Prevost told me Irv died in this same puddle when he was trying to hook up a pump to drain the parking lot. This car was gone when we came out of Margie’s.

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Our friends, Jeff and Mary Kaye, hosted a wine tasting at their house last night. Each of us brought some wine and Jeff put it in paper bags, wino style, so we couldn’t see the label. There were ten of us and apparently none of us have a very sophisticated palette because the eighteen dollar bottle of Spanish wine that Peggi picked out won the most votes followed closely by a six dollar bottle of Gnarly Head place second.

Jeff brought a dusty bottle of Chateau Mouton Rothschild out of a back room and passed it around for us to look at. He didn’t plan to open it but told us it was given to him by an old girlfriend. Sue, who was sitting next to me, scanned the label with her wine scanner app and determined the bottle was worth about 1200 dollars. I was intrigued by the label, a watercolor painting of a ram, that was signed by someone named John Houston. Sure enough, the director of Chinatown was also an artist and this label is said to be his last painting.

Another Jeff, sitting across the table from me, asked Jeff the host what his off-the-record, off-duty,professional diagnosis of the president was. Jeff said he thinks Trump is a narcissist of such proportions that he believes he is telling the truth even when he when he lies. In this morning’s paper Maureen Dowd asked a Trump biographer about the orange one and he said, ““Donald’s manic without being depressive.” Having known a few manic/depressives I would say this one fits but is the condition even possible?

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We never talk politics with our neighbor. We don’t have to. His hat sums the subject up. There are plenty of other things to talk about. His dog. The weather. The neighbors who don’t bring their trash receptacle back after pick-up.

Listen to Pete LaBonne -We Live Like Kings

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Peggi and I stopped by the Red Cross on Prince Street to donate and two young women came in while we were still reading the disclaimers. They were intending to give blood but one them had a low iron level so she was refused. She sat with her friend while the three of us pumped our fists in the reclining chairs. The nurse told the young woman that she eats raisons everyday to keep her iron levels up and she asked the long woman if she ate red meat. I looked up “good sources of iron” and found spinach at the top of the list. She said she loved spinach.

I imagine kale is up there too. We planted six small plants in the Spring and we’ve been eating it all summer. It is so hardy. It holds its own in greens and beans and we do that quite a bit. Tonight Peggi found a recipe called “Tuscan Kale” with plums and goat cheese.” She made a dressing with olive oil, honey, lemon and Tamari sauce and added some walnuts and dried cherries. You don’t even cook the kale. We complimented this dish with leftover fresh corn. We cut the kernels off the cobs and bake the corn with a little olive oil and diced jalapeño peppers. We have a bumper crop of peppers this year. If you are picturing these two dishes next to one another on a plate you’re probably thinking “red.” And it goes without saying this time of year. Every meal comes with a few wedges of fresh tomatoes and basil leaves.

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We practiced a lot when we were in Personal Effects. Margaret Explosion, on the other hand, never practices. Our old rehearsal space had a Diane Arbus poster on the wall with a large reproduction of “A young Brooklyn family going for a Sunday outing, NYC 1966.” I like to think she had an influence on the band.

The Met Breuer, the old Whitney, has mounted a show of her early work. Called, “In the Beginning,” it features a hundred photos from 1956 to 1962, work that’s not been seen for the most part. The museum notes she was influenced by the great August Sandler and they displayed one of his photos at the beginning of the show and then her “Sunday Outing” photo at the end of the show.

The ingenious way the curator hung the Diane Arbus show, with narrow grey columns displaying one of her relatively small photos on each side, draws you in to each photo but leaves you surrounded by people, people as strange as the ones she photographed.

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We watched three Euro Cup soccer games yesterday, an activity just my speed with only one working leg. We watched Switzerland and Wales win and then the upset, Russia over England. And then we headed out to the stadium to watch the WNY Flash play Alex Morgan’s team, the Orlando Pride. Morgan hardly got the ball and when she did she was shut down by the Flash’s Hinkle/Eddy/Erceg/Dahlkemper superb back line.

I was really worried when I saw that D’Angelo, our first string goalie (as well as Canada’s national team goalie), was injured but the Flash scored early and held on for the 90 to move into first place in the NWSL. It is so much fun to watch this team get better and better as we get to know them. The US Women have the best team in the world and our city has the best team in the league. It was even fun watching Orlando, the newest team in the league. They have Spencer, Edmonds, Edwards and even Morgan, who all previously played for the Flash.

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Jill Ellis, the women’s national team coach, was in the house last night. She was introduced before the game and then we spotted her at halftime hanging over the railing in front of her box seat while talking to Abby Wambach’s parents (who just happened to be sitting next to us.) She’s here to study the Flash players, Jaedene Hinkle and Sam Mewis in particular. She’ll be gong to the Olympics in Rio with only eighteen players (there were 21 on last year’s World Cup roster). Of course, she could still be evaluating Sky Blue’s Christie Rampone and Kelley O’Hara. But the way Hinkle played last night I wouldn’t be surprised if Ellis left town with Hinkle in the back seat.

We got to the game early, as we usually do,to watch the warm-ups from behind the goal. You have to keep your eye on the ball because you can get clobbered back there. And I was already injured. I was hoping to get a chance to talk to the Flash trainer about my injury. I’d ask him what he would do to get a player back on the pitch asap after an injury like mine. But that was only a pipe dream.

I was soaking my leg in the tub this afternoon, reading my John Baldessari book, and the room was getting all steamed up. I gave up reading and just relaxed but in a few minutes our smoke alarm went off, loud as hell. So I hobbled over to the damn thing and pulled the battery out. Why would a smoke alarm go off with steam?

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My current camera, a Sony RX100, has all sorts of options, ones I really use. But I am glad I have them. The auto mode is so good I have been spoiled. I hardly leave it but I know I should. If only to control the background focus. Duane tells me he runs around town with his ISO set to 1600. There is an advantage there that I can only imagine. I remember when that speed was twice what was possible with fast, grainy Kodak black and white film.

I recently photographed the a batch of oil paintings on wood panels. The ground was mostly white but you would never know it looking at my photos. I came up with maybe a 5 on the grey scale where it should have been white. I knew I should have been setting the white point and shooting with manual mode but I knocked off the shots in auto mode. They paintings are currently hanging in a show but next time I will do it right and I have a pile of my father’s watercolors that I would like to photograph next.

I called Duane for instructions. He worked for Lowel, a lighting company, and I use four Lowel brand Tota lights. We started with my bulbs. A couple are high quality Quartzand the others are Home Depot tungsten lamps which can change color spectrum as they age. I got on Amazon and ordered 5 EIKO FCZ 120V/500W R7s Base Stage and Studio Lamp from Barndoor Lighting Outfitters.

Not only were my whites not white, they were wildly uneven. Most likely the lights were too close to the subject. He suggested I step two feet to the sides of the paintings and then step back at least six feet from the surface of the painting to set the four lights. Two lamps on each side, barn doors set open about 45 degrees. As for aiming Duane recommended that I cross light the paintings so the the lights on the left side of the painting should be lighting the right side of the painting.

To set the white balance Duane suggested I frame a shot in auto made so it is full white, the same same white as ground on the paintings, and take note of the readings (iso, Fstop and shutter speed). Then use the same settings in manual mode (where my camera allows me to capture and store that white balance).

Finally, still in Manual mode, I will try an ISO of 400, an F stop at 8 and then get the M.M. setting to zero out by selecting the appropriate shutter speed. I will report back.

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