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World Go ‘Round

Paul, Larry, Kenny, Steve, Bill, Dave Bloomington 1969
Paul, Larry, Kenny, Steve, Bill, Dave Bloomington 1969

My father is planning an open house for the Super Bowl. I don’t even know who’s playing and by that I mean the half time show. I could give a hoot about the game. Last great halftime show for us was Prince’s amazing performance in the Florida rain. Prince is always making a comeback and I love his new song with the double bass drums.

Facebook is great but almost everything about it bothers me. Do I really want to reconnect with my old friends in this photo? Do I want to know their birthdays? I don’t participate much the FB scheme but I accept friends when I go there and I’m always suspicious about who FB puts in my stream. Why are they there and not others? FB keeps track of every click of course, mine and my so called friends, and they build my page around those stats. They’re dying to get more content on their pages so they can sell ads and it is only a matter of time before photo albums will be interlaced with ads. I’d rather not think about their business model all the time.

Duane Sherwood recently rescued some thirty year old footage and posted some clips on the barely maintained Personal Effects FB page. He not only designed the production, he ran the show and then edited the video footage. He’s preparing a proper YouTube release this weekend.

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The Seldom Used Plural Of Men

Funky signs added to Tumblr in January 2013
Funky signs added to Tumblr in January 2013

We spent most of the day yesterday at the Don Hershey presentation put on by Historic Brighton. It was a delight to meet Don’s two sons, Ken and Al and hear their fascinating stories about their father and the homes he built around town.

After the meeting Peggi and I wandered through the basement of the Brighton Town Hall looking for a bathroom and finally spotted the “Mens” and Womens” rooms. That was just the jolt I needed to post a few updates to my Tumblr site.

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Open Plans

Clarence and Dottie building their Don Hershey designed house in 1947
Clarence and Dottie building their Don Hershey designed house in 1947

Clarence Maier, who died last year at 100, gave us a few photos of our house being built. It was in the late forties and he did most of the work himself, cutting down oak trees on our lot and having them milled and kiln-dried for the pegged floors. His wife Dottie not only helped, as you can see above, but she also suggested that architect, Don Hershey, put a vaulted ceiling in living room because she had seen some pictures of one in a magazine. According to an article on the Don Hershey website Don always insisted on talking with both husband and wife. “Women usually have the best ideas,” he said. “I always said, let me design this house for both of you. After all, the woman is the commander of the house.”

Legend has it Don would show up on your site and start sketching. House should sit here and face that way with a big window here etc. Historic Brighton, a local history club, is featuring Hershey tomorrow in their “Masters of Mid-Century Design” presentation. We plan to be there along with other fellow Don Hershey owners. In fact we met with a couple today who just bought one off Panarama Trail in Penfield. Their’s was built in the mid sixties and they have furnished it accordingly with turquoise and cork and Saarinen tulip chairs and Trent Reznor’s keyboard stand from NIN. Their design sense makes ours look absolutely spartan but the Hershey characteristics dominate. Open plans, sunken living room, angular bump outs, corner windows, big ass overhangs and problematically flat roofs for this climate.

Jeffrey Owen Jones, a film professor at the Rochester Institute Of Technology, who was “Mr. Jones” in Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” lived in a Don Hershey until died a few years back.

The craziest thing is the fold out carpenter’s ruler shown in Clarence’s back right pocket. That is exactly where I’ve been carrying a similar ruler for the last six months or or so. He and his wife are shown constructing our bedroom. And the commander of our house has been right by my side.

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Bubble Coffee

White Swan Restaurant in South Wedge, Rochester, New York
White Swan Restaurant in South Wedge, Rochester, New York

There was an article in the Food section of the NYT’s recently on dealing with people who take photos of the food the’ve been served. High end restaurants have started provided high quality photos of their dishes and are making them available to diners at the table who are anxious to post real time shots to social media. They’re tied of people standing up on their chair to get a good overview of the meal. I’m certainly guilty of that. Mostly they’re concerned with people taking bad, i.e. flash, photos of their elegant servings. They are over-reaching to protect their designer brand. It’s food for Pete‘s sake.

My favorite Chinese place is White Swan in the South Wedge. I could tell they’re not crazy about photos either but the food is cheap and the place is popular with healthy young Asians so the atmosphere is fun. The language issue is fun too. I easily confused our server by briefly going off topic. I over-stress the “steamed not fried tofu” request when I ordered my dish and would up with fried.

I like their Bubble coffee and their fortunes. “Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.” “In the eyes of lovers, everything is beautiful.”

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Draconian Interaction

No texting message at the East Ridge Road library in Rochester, New York
No texting message at the East Ridge Road library in Rochester, New York

Our neighbor, a writer, reads plenty and she is a library regular. We returned a pile of their books when they left town for a bit and she commented that “the library fines here are draconian.” We had a short pile of books that we forgot about until the automated reminder call came from Monroe County. Our fine, which we chalk up to supporting the library, totaled twelve bucks. The little note above was tacked to the cash register.

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Femme Fatale

Vic & Irvs in winter, Rochester, New York
Vic & Irvs in winter, Rochester, New York

When Duane Sherwood was town over Christmas we made the obligatory pilgrimage to Vic & Irv’s (they are closed until March) and hatched plans to go to the John Cale Nico tribute at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. We were going to take the train down and get off in Beacon. We had all read Robert Irwin’s book and were obsessed with seeing the former Nabisco box-printing facility that was renovated by Dia with Irwin as designer. The only tickets left to the BAM show were scattered about. Peggi, Duane and I contemplated sitting in different locations and then nixed the plan. It’s not like Nico would come back from the dead. Here’s what we missed.

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Minor Milestones

Pete Monacelli's drawing with Paul Dodd's painting on drywall
Pete Monacelli’s drawing with Paul Dodd’s painting on drywall

We started a little project in our basement last August and have been in construction mode for so long now that art projects have taken a back seat and the slight posts here have grown even slighter. Bearing down with the drywall primer I almost covered the Pete Monacelli directions for creating our window trim. I wiped off my work, took this shot of the collaboration for reference and then painted it out with white. Pete helped us with our project and has an opening of his art work next Thursday at RoCo as part of the Maker/Mentor series. His mentor, Kurt Feuerherm, was my also my mentor when I cobbled together an art degree from SUNY at Empire State.

We have half of the flooring down in our new room and that was just enough for me to set up an easel this weekend. I broke into my art supply box today for a new stick of charcoal. The box had been tucked away when we piled our belongings under a big tarp back in November. The Lowel lights that I used to use for drawing have been serving as shop lights months but I put one of them back in art service on Sunday.

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Imitation Of Christ

Fallen Saint Francis of Assisi statue near Durand Eastman park in Rochester, New York
Fallen Saint Francis of Assisi statue near Durand Eastman park in Rochester, New York

Saint Francis of Assisi, the Italian mystic who took a vow of poverty, is usually depicted with birds on his shoulders. In fact I have a small statue of him in the window near my desk. St. Francis was the first recorded person to receive the stigmata, the wounds of Christ’s Passion, and these marks are shown on the small hands of the statue. If there was a popularity contest for saints, he would easily win.

He is the patron saint of animals and the environment so it is fitting to have found him lying flat on his back in the woods.

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One From The Teens

Old light switches on the wall George Eastman House
Old light switches on the wall George Eastman House

Time is running out for “60 From The 60s,” a selection from the Eastman House archives. The show ends the 27th. With the astounding collection they have in the vaults over there this show could have been 600 or 6000.

I took this shot of some old light switches in the gallery over there.

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Somewhat Real World

View of High Falls from deck of Genesee Brew House in Rochester, New York
View of High Falls from deck of Genesee Brew House in Rochester, New York

We were served by Genny herself and were having such a good time at the Genesee Brew House that we had only minutes to spare at the Amtrak station where we dropped our nephew off. He boarded with an e-ticket on his phone and headed back for his final semester at Columbia Law School. It was a whirlwind visit although we didn’t do much. Worked on the floor in the basement and watched YouTube videos, streamed The Queen of Versailles and watched our NetFlix disc, “Shut Up and Play the Hits.”

When I got back I checked in with a nephew on the other side of the family. I don’t have twitter account but I sort of follow him and the followers of his inspirational tweets. He has twelve thousand of those now.

Sometimes I think life would be simpler if I liked football.

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Competing With The Great Outdoors

Shoreline of Lake Ontario in Winter
Shoreline of Lake Ontario in Winter

We have Time Warner internet service and a digital land line through the cable but not cable tv so every so often a salesperson calls to see we’d be interested in cable tv. This time they were offering a complete package for $20 a month for two years so we took it. Not sure what we’re in for. The only tv we watch is Sixty Minutes and we usually do that on our computer. Maybe I’ll find a European soccer channel.

We finished painting our ceilings today. My neck is so sore I can barely hold my head up high enough to see how it all looks.

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Butt Capicola

"Model From Local Crime Page" charcoal drawing by Paul Dodd 2012
“Model From Local Crime Page” charcoal drawing by Paul Dodd 2012

Peggi is getting pretty good at reading the obituaries. I usually glance at the pictures but she spotted my old boss’s obit after I had finished with that section. I was amazed he was still around. He smoked Lucky Strikes and drank a couple of Genny Cream Ales at lunch time when I was working for him. Framing houses is like playing football. You swing a long handle 20 ounce hammer and get so you can sink a 16 penny nail with a set and one shot home. When someone ran to the deli for lunch he’d order “Capicola, the Butt Capicola, not that cheep kind and no mayonnaise.” He was the hardest worker and he taught me how to work. You just go for it with all you have.

Both my parents have the flu. I took my dad to the doctor and his doctor swabbed his nose and sent away the sample to confirm it. They were too sick to attend the wake of their long time friend so my mom asked if we’d stop by and say hello to his wife. Turns out we know their son-in-law, the artist Craig Wilson. He told us his father-in-law was in a barbershop quartet for over fifty years and and by all accounts was the nicest guy. I asked Craig if his father-in-law had a brother named Tom and Craig said, “he’s sitting right over there.” I worked for Tom at Maracle Industrial Finishing in Webster right after I dropped out of school. Tom was the wild one in his family, got good at painting cars and started this business and quickly landed a contract from Xerox to strip and refinish the metal panels on their, at that time, huge copiers. Guess who dunked the panels down into a boiling vat of of paint stripper. When I introduced myself to Tom he said, “I’m glad you got out of there.”

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Attention Shoppers

Looking out the skylight in winter
Looking out the skylight in winter

OK, we do have time to read the newspaper in the morning so it’s not that bad. We’re painting the ceiling in the kitchen so we’ve been having our coffee out in our newly painted living room. Kinda nice to have the drop cloth out of there. We finished that yesterday but I missed a few spots with the roller. I have bad luck going back in on a ceiling so I’m trying to decide how to get those spots. I don’t want to do the whole thing again just to cover my tracks.

We went to Home Depot twice today. Once to return an extra bag of tile grout, an electric box, an extra jug of tile sealer and an extra bag of ThinSet and then once again to look at laminate for our new floor in the basement. We were there until they made the closing announcement.

We would have set aside some time for skiing if everything wasn’t melting. Our nephew is coming from LA for the weekend and he was hoping to go cross-country skiing but I had to break it to him that the temps are headed into the fifties.

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Funky Part Of Town

Crooked house on Webster side of Irondequoit Bay outlet bridge
Crooked house on Webster side of Irondequoit Bay outlet bridge

If I open my Tumblr feed I lose a few hours so I try to space out my visits. I follow Will Prouty’s Roc City site and that’s always nice. How do you suppose he get such dramatic light in his Rochester shots?

Remember the funny house at Sea Breeze in the old days? They had a room with all those funny mirrors and a rotating barrel that you used to have to walk through and a room where everything was crooked. This house is just around the corner from the amusement park on the little strip of land that runs between Lake Ontario and Irondequoit Bay. It’s right next door to the seven homes that were destroyed by that Spangler dude but it was not harmed. This has always been a funky part of town.

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Y2K13

Ski path through woods near Durand Eastman Park
Ski path through woods near Durand Eastman Park

Was Bobby Henrie really duck-walking in our our living room last night? It has always been a fantasy of mine to have a band like the one Ricky Nelson had play in our home the way Ricky’s band did at the end of his father’s show. But it wouldn’t be enough to have this band sound like Rick’s. They would have to swing like a jazz band, rock a little harder, be irresistibly danceable and wild even. The Goners are that band and last night was a dream.

Years ago, when we lived in the city, we were talking to our neighbor over the fence on New Years Eve. She asked what we were doing that night and we said, “Nothing much. We’re just gonna lie low.” Around midnight we were doing a line dance out our front door and around the house. We don’t like to plan our parties and and last night was no exception although this time we gave a couple days notice. We invited the neighbors so no one could complain about the noise. It appears everyone got home ok and no one called the cops when Earl set the psychedelic fireworks off in the back yard. Somehow we wound up with more bottles of wine , more beer and more food than we went in to the the whole affair with. Looks like twenty thirteen will be a good one.

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Gravity Over Time

Looking over Eastman Lake at Lake Ontario in Rochester, New York
Looking over Eastman Lake at Lake Ontario in Rochester, New York

When the snow is this deep it takes a while to get through the woods. And then, of course, it takes a while to get back through the woods but I’m not really keeping track of the time, I’m just trying to figure out where the day went. And a funny thing happens around here, guaranteed. When you go north and you go downhill. If it was the other way around Lake Ontario would overflow. Still, it’s flat enough to be a one speed bike town.

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Dick Tosti Fan Club

Dick Tosti performing at Gigi's Italian Restaurant in Rochester, New York
Dick Tosti performing at Gigi’s Italian Restaurant in Rochester, New York

We usually put our skis on at the front door and ski through our neighbor’s yard and down into the woods up to the lake but we never got around to sawing up the big oak that fell across our path last Fall. And the snow is so deep we would surely have to cut the trail all the way to the golf course so got in the car and drove down to the lake and skied around the ponds. The sun went down while we out there but we hardly noticed because it was a full moon and there is so much of the white stuff out there.

We worked up a good appetite so we drove right past our house on the way home and cruised down East Ridge Road looking for a spot to eat. We hadn’t been in in Gigi’s Italian Kitchen yet and used to like it a lot when it was La Trattoria so we gave it a shot. It’s still funky, the food is great and on Fridays and Saturdays they have Dick Tosti playing live music in the dining room. We were there kinda early but the place filled up fast. Dick had a really light touch, a great sense of rhythm and a really cool voice. He was doing a sensational job with “This Guy’s in Love With You” when we left. We had him pegged as a Continental who played in local bands in the sixties and he might have but he goes way back. We did a little research and found this video when we got back home. Somehow this video led us to a string of Abba videos. You know how it goes with YouTube.

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