Living Large In 3D

Leo Dodd walks around Cobblestone smokehouse in Irondequoit
Leo Dodd walks around Cobblestone smokehouse in Irondequoit

We were standing in my parents living room looking at their glass coffee table, the current centerpiece of their room. My mother had just announced that my brother was going to take it. I said, “Are you sure you don’t have room for it?” My father, who is really good at visualizing things, said “Our new living room is as big as the rug in this room. So if you move the furniture on to the rug you can see what we have room for.”

In ten days they will be in their new apartment and my father is working out the new floor plan in Google’s free SketchUp 3D drawing program. He has been able to find many of the pieces of furniture that they own in the Google 3D Library. He just plops the drawings that other users have contributed into his floor plan and sits my mom down in front of he computer while spins rotates the drawings in space.

We stopped by their new place this morning to take some final measurements and afterwards headed down to Nick’s for some lunch. We parked in the little park across from Sea Breeze Amusement Park next to the restored cobblestone smokehouse that was moved here a few years back from its original location near the Ridge Culver Fire Department. My parents new place is small but it is bigger than this smokehouse.

Nick came over and sat down with us. We told him a bit about Spain and how we found a place there that reminded us of his place. We talked about the food there and he said his mom used to make an Italian version of Tortilla Española. He got going on how she’d make homemade pasta on Sundays and “Eggs in Purgatory” where she would drop eggs into simmering sauce and pull them out when they were poached. He was nearly lost back in time when he said, “We thought that would last forever.” I told him the memories do.

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Green Bagels

Shamrock Jacks Rochester Ne York 2014
Shamrock Jacks Rochester Ne York 2014

I’m quite sure St. Patrick’s day is one of those holidays, formerly holy days, that have glommed onto the Equinox the way Christmas glommed onto the solstice. So we celebrate the first unofficial day of Spring by walking through the park and out onto Culver Road where the Guinness truck is parked in front of Shamrock Jacks. This is our family of two tradition.

We were there before noon and green bagels were still set up on a table in front. Our waitress, one of the sisters that own the place, was wearing a “Drink Like A Champion Today” shirt. A band was playing in the bar and another one was setting up out back in the tent. By the time we left the place was mobbed. These are my people. I’m getting out.

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Pointless Topics

Budweiser beer cans in Winter
Budweiser beer cans in Winter

I hadn’t checked the beer spot on Hoffman Road since our last thaw. The Budweiser man is still active. I should say I don’t know for a fact that it is a man who has been dumping these cans in the same spot for the last five years. Heck, it might even be the little woman who drives down to the marsh to walk her scruffy white dog. Her mother rides in the back of the car and used to get out but those days are over. Now she sits back there and waves to us through the glass. Like us they are regulars and the only thing we talk about is the weather. All other topics are pointless.

The road is a dead end so sometimes the women just stop their car right in the middle of the road. There is so little traffic down here that each car you see is either one of the few homeowners or a Budweiser suspect. I’ll bring a bag with me next time and clean up after the guy. I don’t really mind. I bring the cans to Michigan where I collect ten cents for each 22 ouncer.

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No R&R 4 R&R

Hook Face at Monty's Crown
Hook Face at Monty’s Crown

Rock and roll is dying. The process is so slow it only looks like “never.” Decay has been part of the art form for ages. Monty’s Crown on Monroe Avenue is an ideal host for the long funeral, darts, long bar, a dozen beers on tap, a back room with a PA for the band and a pool table stage left. Green shamrocks with the word “Blue” on them were carefully arranged by a beer rep in the front window. All this with two bands on the bill for a three dollar cover. That price hasn’t budged in thirty years.

Dave Anderson was there, Chris from the Squires, Joe Tunis from Carbon, Chris Schepp and Ted Williams of course. Hook Face and Nod were brilliant. Long live rock ‘n roll.

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Saint Rachel

Last ski through the woods, March 14, 2014
Last ski through the woods, March 14, 2014

Breaking Bad went through a few rather bleak periods and we hung in there. House of Cards is no substitute but it has us pretty wrapped up. Good thing it’s streamable because we keep having to back up to catch the dialog. It is dense and twisted with everyone playing everyone big time. We’re on episode 22 and all of the main characters are so soiled our sympathies are now with the born again prostitute, Rachel Posner, and the creepy photographer, Adam Galloway.

Although it’s set in the White House with a hapless president, the politics take a backseat to the lobbyists and business interests. The only defense against these forces is the naked quest for power. Good thing it is only a tv show.

It is worth watching the show though just to be able to enjoy Vulture’s coverage of it.

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Vitamin D Day

Skier on Durand Eastman Golf Course in Rochester, New York
Skier on Durand Eastman Golf Course in Rochester, New York

Our ski path in the woods had been covered up overnight with additional snow and all that had drifted. Despite the fact that the meteorologists had given the “blizzard” a name and even parked a Weather Channel truck a mile away at the Sea Breeze bridge the storm was just more winter. And this has been a particularly good one. It doesn’t need the hype.

At the other end of the woods we used to ski across a fairway and head up to the lake on one of the trails around the small lakes but a couple of years ago they started grooming paths on the golf course. It can be brutally cold out there in the wind and kind of bleak compared to the woods but in full sun the golf course is surreal. As the guy in this photo whizzed up the hill toward us he said “Who needs Florida?”

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Drawings For The Drawer

Paul Dodd Homeless Rochester Teen 2014 Charcoal on paper
Paul Dodd Homeless Rochester Teen 2014 Charcoal on paper

I photographed some homeless Rochester teenagers a few years ago. I did many drawings of them and then paintings. I finally finished a series of charcoal drawings of them and now I’m ready to move on. But first I have clean u the drawings a bit, spray them with fixative, photograph them am and put them in in a drawer between sheets of glassine.

I plan to pick my favorite version of them and show the batch in an upcoming show at I-Square gallery. The show in tentatively entitled “3 ‘D’s In Dodd” and there may be a subtitle such as “There Are More” so as not to slight the rest of the family. My brother John and our dad will also be featured. Lately I start with a source and quickly stop referring to it so the drawings look quite different from one another. The guy above in an upcoming show at the Creative Workshop.

Today is a perfect day to photograph and a not so good day to spray fixative. There is twenty inches of snow forecast for those of us near the lake and our Margaret Explosion gig at the Little has been canceled because the weather.

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Gulliver’s Travels

Red berries, blue sky and snow in Rochester, New York
Red berries, blue sky and snow in Rochester, New York

My brother was in town, helping my parents downsize in preparation for a change of address. My dad has been going through the items he’s squirreled away, giving them one last glance, scanning some old clippings, drawings and photos, choosing the ones he can’t live without and then letting the rest go either to offspring or Viet Nam Vets.

My brother loaded his car with a bookcase full of Harvard Classics and my dad showed him a hardback copy of “Gulliver’s Travels” that he had come across on a shelf. A chamber had been carved out of the inside pages, big enough to hold a small plastic box. As he was telling us this it all sounded vaguely familiar and I mean vaguely. I remember reading the book for a class and seeing a movie where someone hid a gun or something in an old book but would I have done something like this?. Maybe, not so much to hide pot in or anything (I kept that in my pocket) but just to do it.

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This Is Not A Door

Painted window and door on red brick wall in Madrid
Painted window and door on red brick wall in Madrid

When we were in Madrid we had coffee one morning with an artist from Toronto. She was there for an art fair, ArCo Madrid, and she was bemoaning the state of art today. To my ears she sounded more like a business woman than an artist. What artist thinks about the market? But the point she was making was one that stuck with me.

She produced large scale wall art that had something to do with therapy or healing and she had been all over the world with her art. She told us downtown Toronto was being rebuilt as luxury lofts, condos and apartments and everything was open plan with large glass windows and this trend is playing out everywhere. “There are no more walls,” she exclaimed. “People are not buying wall art because they don’t have any wall space.”

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Conceptual Art

Painted floor around column in Madrid art gallery
Painted floor around column in Madrid art gallery

It seems to me you could get away with anything within the confines of a gallery. You make the place look like a white walled gallery thereby raising the attention paid to the infrastructure, the repurposing of an industrial space for example, bare concrete floors, state of the art LED lighting rigs, remnants of brick walls and plumbing overhead, someone behind a Mac at a desk in the front, basically an empty room. I mean you don’t really need to show any art at all. You just raise our awareness and then find some other way to make money.

With almost ninety percent of the Great Lakes frozen over we wind up with no “Lake Affect” snow and twice as many sunny days. The wind coming out of the west normally collects moisture and dumps it when it hits land again but with all the ice out there this supply of moisture is cut off. I suspect the winter is done for this weekend but it was a great winter for cross-country skiing so I’m not complaining.

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Walking On Water

Ducks on frozen shore of Lake Ontario
Ducks on frozen shore of Lake Ontario

I love this landscape and the weather we have been having. We’ve been heading to the beach everyday to ski and marvel at the forever changing landscape. There was no open water a few days ago. It was all floating ice chunks as far as you could see, but an offshore breeze has taken it all out to sea. We do not have a rocky coast. These ice mounds are exactly that, all ice, and you can walk on the lake up to the edge. Yesterday we strained to make out what the white and sometimes dark things were that were floating near the horizon. Drama and mystery is a powerful lure.

Margaret Explosion returns to the Little Theater Café for the next thirteen Wednesdays.

"Dreamland" by Margaret Explosion. Recorded live at the Little Theatre on 11.06.13. Peggi Fournier - sax, Ken Frank - bass, Pete LaBonne - piano, Bob Martin - guitar, Paul Dodd - drums.
“Dreamland” by Margaret Explosion. Recorded live at the Little Theatre on 11.06.13. Peggi Fournier – sax, Ken Frank – bass, Pete LaBonne – piano, Bob Martin – guitar, Paul Dodd – drums.
Listen to Dreamland by Margaret Explosion
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Hardy Types

Lake Ontario in Rochester, New York
Lake Ontario in Rochester, New York

Skiing along Durand Eastman beach was so much fun we did it two days in a row. The beach is quite a bit larger now because it’s frozen for a ways out and the ice cliffs that have formed at the edge are quite dramatic. They will all be gone in a few weeks.

Only the hardy types were out today, a crystal clear, blue sky day with temperatures in single digits. There are far fewer people out on days like this but they are much friendlier. They want to say say hi and exclaim how beautiful it is. If it was this pretty all the time we wouldn’t appreciate what we have. The so called bad weather puts things into perspective.

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Resolutely Banal

Door near beach in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, España
Door near beach in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, España

The NYT’s Karen Rosenberg recently described Robert Bechtle’s paintings of San Francisco streetscapes as “resolutely banal.” That phrase struck a chord with me. I have an affinity for banal. This photo came about in the most banal of circumstances. Peggi was visiting el servicio en Sanlúcar de Barrameda and left me on the street standing next to this readymade.

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Trap Yourself

Lake Ontario in sun and snow
Lake Ontario in sun and snow

Phil Hoffman, as Alexa Scott-Flaherty a fellow LAByrinth Theater Company member referred to him, was not only an incredible actor he was a superb teacher. Alexa took notes when she worked with him at the company and she read from them last night as she introduced “Jack Goes Boating,” Seymour’s 2010 directorial debut at the Little Theater’s ongoing Philip Seymour Hoffman Film Tribute Series. As an artist, Phil’s advice was to trap yourself. Our tendency is to move toward a safe zone but we have to fight that and go toward risk, in effect trapping yourself. He reminded fellow actors that they were responsible to history, to a long line of those who came before you and those who will follow.

Hoffman was way out on the edge in “Jack Goes Boating” and he brought the small cast along with him. This was a moving tribute and inspiration.

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Today Looks Better

Broken vessels in courtyard of cathedral in Jerez de la Frontera
Broken vessels in courtyard of cathedral in Jerez de la Frontera

There was barely enough snow to ski on yesterday so we put our skis in the car and drove to the park. Most days we ski in the woods but without a good snow cover you’re libel to trip over a branch or root and your fall is not cushioned. The flat open spaces in the park were especially thin though with all the wind. We hadn’t even looked at the temperature before we left so we unprepared for 8 degrees and wind. Where normally you warm up in minutes we froze and and trudged back to the car. Today looks better. I had to shovel a path to the mailbox so I could pick up our paper in my slippers.

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Tennis Ball With Thorns

Tennis ball with thorns
Tennis ball with thorns

There is not that much open space available in the town of Irondequoit. One of Rochester’s oldest bedroom communities, it is surrounded by water on three sides – the river, the lake and the bay. I remember a driving range on Titus Avenue that I used to pass on my way to the House of Guitars. People would tee off up near the road and their drives would go straight downhill.

That same hill was developed into track homes and when it would rain the water washed down the streets overwhelming a creek at the bottom of the hill, a creek that wound it’s way through the lowlands onto Spring Valley and Hoffman Road making the roads impassible. The town increased their tax base but this project was a huge blunder. They had to divert the creek, put in a retention pond and raise the elevation of the roads.

The creek now meanders through the newly minted wetlands and flows under the road through a number of culverts. The strangest stuff comes floating down from the subdivision – styrofoam coolers, stuffed animals, someone’s recycling bin and balls.

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Foreign Shoes

Tattered Dont Tread On Me and American flag
Tattered Dont Tread On Me and American flag

Our neighbors were looking at our photos from Spain while we had dinner. I haven’t weeded them out yet so there were some real clunkers in there like the ones that go off as I try to turn the camera off and put it back in my pocket – a giant hand and a view of my nostrils.

Rick said I ought to take photos of Rochester that show this city off to foreigners. I thought about this for a while. I don’t think I take photos any differently while traveling than I do every day but maybe I do. If I was a Spaniard visiting Rochester and out walking in the Seabreeze area I surely would have stopped to grab this shot.

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Going Back

Jerez de la Frontera España
Jerez de la Frontera España

OK. We’re back but we want to go back. I have a few photos to sort through first. During the Viet Nam war, when I was hitchhiking back and forth to to Indiana, the truck stops in Ohio always carried these hats with the unofficial Marine motto, “Shoot ‘Em All. Let God Sort ‘Em Out.” I keep about half.

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Digital Dumpster

Dumpster in Madrid Spain
Dumpster in Madrid Spain

I have been photographing dumpsters for a few years now, not exclusively of course, just when I come across an interesting one. Our neighbors have one out in front of their house right now. We’re guessing they’re redoing their kitchen. It’s been out there for a few weeks and it is nothing but ugly.

In Spain they are always reworking buildings. Some of them have been around for five hundred years so there are many layers of crudely cut stone, brick, tile and old wooden beams. Exterior doors can be twelve or twenty foot high and maybe five or six inches thick. Living with all this old stuff, Spaniards have developed both a proud appreciation for it and an intense drive toward modernism.

The sound of grinders and jackhammers is everywhere. Dust spewing out of open windows is sometimes so thick you are forced to take an alternate route. And then there are the beautiful dumpsters left out on the street until the project is done.

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