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Thank You Day

RG&E building on Euclid Street in downtown Rochester, New York
RG&E building on Euclid Street in downtown Rochester, New York

Hard to believe how many mouse turds we found in an insulation packed short knee wall under the stone ledge in our living room. A short brick and mortar wall carried copper pipe that circulated water from our boiler but it pooped one winter when the heat went off while a previous owner was in sunny Florida. We heard all this from the neighbors after we we bought the house and after I opened a shut-off valve in the basement below and quickly spotted water gushing from the ceiling.

I talked to Clarence, the man that built our house in the late forties and who recently died at 100, and he said it should be a pretty simple job to fix this thing. Simple for Clarence maybe but a circular saw, chisel and shop vac can really make a mess in your living room. With encouragement from our heating guy and the can-do willpower of Pete Monacelli we were able to find the weak spot where the copper popped. That ledge by the big window, the coldest spot in our living room, will once agin be the warmest spot in the house, the way Jackie and Jill, who grew up in our house, described it.

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Ear Protection Season

The Four Fours at the Beale
The Four Fours at the Beale

One of our neighbors converts his mower/tractor to a leaf picker upper in the Fall. He sucks up the leaves and makes an incredible racket but he complains about his neighbor who takes every opportunity to get out there with his gas powered leaf blower to keep his lawn spotless while surrounded by woods. And there I am up on the roof with our electric blower. I wear headphones with no cords coming out of them to cancel the noise. They pretty much silence the world except the ringing in my ears.

Pete Monacelli is my favorite drummer in Rochester. He has a gentle touch and he is at home on just a snare if need be. He plays three times a week in three different groups but his favorite gig is the one he does on Sunday evenings at the Beale. This guitar-less quartet plays standards and swing. Ethan Lyons plays tenor, Mike Patric plays bass and Gian Carbone from John Coles Blues Band plays piano. We stopped by last night with Jeff and Mary Kaye and ordered three servings of collard greens . They came with pork in them and Peggi and were the only ones who would eat that. I brought the rest home but it didn’t look too good this morning. The band sounded really great and Custom Brew Craft’s IPA was nice.

At nine we checked out the Compline at Christ Church. I had never heard the word compline before but I trusted Jeff’s intuition that this might be good. The compline was originated in the fourth century as a monastic custom of devotion before retiring and it is now described as a service to the community where art and liturgy are seamlessly interwoven. With all of the beautiful reverb in this hall I would say the art easily outweighed the liturgy. OK, I did recognize the English language Lord’s Prayer but the rest was something beyond words. The candle light service was about forty five minutes long and was closer to meditation than performance. The choral group, made up of parishioners as well as faculty and students of the Eastman School of Music, specialize in Renaissance and Baroque music so the weekly program changes. This could become a habit for us.

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Breaking News

Sammy in neighbor's pine tree
Sammy in neighbor’s pine tree

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.

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Ain’t It Funny

Inside old Central Library, Rochester, New York
Inside old Central Library, Rochester, New York

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.

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Thinning The Herd

Deer eating pumpkins at our neighbor's house. Photo by Jared.
Deer eating pumpkins at our neighbor’s house. Photo by Jared.

We hear through the grapevine that a bow hunter shot a deer in the nearby woods. This deer didn’t die immediately so the hunter tracked it to Conifer Lane off Hoffman Road where a cop spotted him and arrested him. We suspected it was someone we know who lives down there but when we asked him about it he said he was fifty miles away bow hunting legally. Shooting at deer around here is not even hunting. This area is like a petting zoo.

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Art Hats

The Year: Pull, etching by Trenton Doyle Hancock
The Year: Pull, etching by Trenton Doyle Hancock

First Friday, Rochester’s gallery night, has become a victim of of its own success. It been a shot in the arm for the local art scene but the overcrowding made it impossible to find the good art. Every night would be gallery night in a perfect world.

Last week we were sitting in our neighbor’s living room listening to Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby on First Friday but we easily got our art fix this weekend. Art dealer, Deborah Ronnen, who threw the wildly successful Culver Road Armory Bash last year has a knockout show of Contemporary African American printmakers at Nazareth College. There are some big names here and for few thousand dollars you could take home a Kara Walker, Alison Saar, Mickalene Thomas, Martin Puryear or the Trenton Doyle Hancock pictured above that reminded me of Anne Havens work. Or how about some beautiful quilt like prints from the sensational Gee’s Bend artists?

Our neighbors let us borrow the Australian movie, “Ten Canoes.” They had recommended it to us and took it out of the library for us so we offered to return it and their short stack of books and movies. We stopped at gallery in the tunnel to the old Central Library building to see Scott McCarney’s prints that were done in response to the 2007 car bombing of Baghdad’s historic book district. Scott’s book art, enlarged and reproduced here as prints are stunning.

Most artists wear multiple hats. Jaffe who plays and tunes pianos also creates portraits of musicians in marquetry. His show at the Genesee Co-Op Federal Credit Union is a delight on multiple levels. Jaffe often sits in with with Margaret Explosion.

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Kill Santa

Santa Arrival at Marketplace Mall in Rochester, New York
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.

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Buona Fortuna!

Palermos Market in Rochester, New York goes out of business
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.

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PopWars 1947

Pop bottle caps from basement w in our house
Pop bottle caps from basement w in our house

We’ve got a little project going in the basement that involves moving a concrete block wall. It is surprising how easy it is to bust out a concrete wall. Like a lot of things in life it’s just one small step at a time. We knocked a sledge hammer (or maul) against the first block until the mortar cracked and then we moved on to the next block. The bottom course had some souvenirs in there, bottle caps from beverages consumed when this place was first a construction site, back in the late forties.

I expected to find Genny caps in there but had never seen the “Ale” cap. I used to like Ma’s Root Beer and I sort of remember their “Imitation Cherry Soda” but we called soda “pop” around here and still do as a matter of fact. Interesting they would use the word “Imitation.” Now days they would just call it “Cherry Soda.” The Royal Crown, Squirt and 7up were all national brands. I don’t remember “Cliquot Club Pale Dry” from Rochester’s Qualtop Beverages and I don’t remember “Park Club Beverages” either.

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Goodbye Bill

Virgin Type building on Valley Road in Rochester, New York
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.

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Life Is A Spell

Bill Jones barely there
Bill Jones barely there

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.

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Space Age Couple

Chris Schepp and Wreckless Eric at house concert in Rochester, New York
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.”

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Audio Visual Art

Kevin Teare "Psychic to the Stars", 2000. Oil on Linen. 60 inches x 62 inches
Kevin Teare “Psychic to the Stars”, 2000. Oil on Linen. 60 inches x 62 inches

I was an art major in Bloomington, Indiana for one year and then I hung around town for a few more. It was a pretty cool town for music but it had very little art other than the Calder sculpture in front of the opera school. Kevin Teare played drums in a local band, MX-80 Sound, and had an art opening in a small gallery there. Glenn O’Brien writing in Interview said of MX-80 is either the most Heavy Metal Art Band or the most Arty Heavy Metal Band. The art show was one of the last things I remember doing in that town and it was one of the coolest. Kevin salvaged and painted wooden skids and leaned them against the white walls. They were beautiful. The photo above is a detail from his painting, “Psychic to the Stars”, 2000. Oil on Linen. 60 inches x 62 inches.

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Backward!

Towne Motel on Mount Hope Avenue near the University of Rochester
Towne Motel on Mount Hope Avenue near the University of Rochester

I’m just passing through so I could pretend that I don’t notice but that is not so easy. There is an awful lot of science bashing going on here. It’s kinda like the OJ trial where the TV shows that grew up around the murders discovered they could keep the story alive by pretending that there were two sides to the story. Panels of experts were equally divided regardless of how unbalanced the evidence loads were.

It’s not just climate change deniers. Tennessee, South Dakota and Louisiana have passed legislation that allows the teaching of creationism as an alternative to evolution in their public schools. Evangelicals have mounted similar efforts this year in Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Texas and Alabama. “Teach the controversy.” As John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things.” There is no controversy.

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Art Bank

The Sodus Art Bank in Sodus New York
The Sodus Art Bank in Sodus New York

Almost November and we’re still harvesting tomatoes, red peppers, jalapeños, eggplant and spinach. We came back from the garden with two bags full this morning. That “cooler by the lake” thing that we have going in the Summer works in reverse during the Fall so we’ve managed to miss the hard frosts. I’m looking for an eggplant recipe in a separate window and will report back.

I love the idea of an “art bank” or I should say my idea of what an art bank could be since I have no idea what this place is all about. We had dinner at El Rincón in Sodus and spotted this sign on the main drag. I looked it up online and found remnants of a collective that fell apart years ago and has since let their domain name expire.

I’m thinking of a place where art truths and treasures are stored and protected. Last night in painting class Fred Lipp told Peggi “You can take that to the bank.” He was on a familiar roll, the one where he convinces you to trust your eye and not your mind (or the plan you started with). You trust your eye when things are right on. You just know before thinking about it, and when there is something wrong, as in “I’m not sure about this passage… is there something wrong with it?” For that there is this truth: “If the question comes up, the answer is yes.” Every town should have an establishment that protects these foundations.

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Painterly Delights

"Wood For Sale" Sign in the Adirondacks
“Wood For Sale” Sign in the Adirondacks

In my other life I am funky sign aficionado and I love it when people use plumbing gear to make a sign. This thing could withstand the wrath of Hurricane Sandy. I love the flush left, initial cap, red lettering and the fact that sign is off center on its rounded corner frame. I love how the “r” in “for” happily teeters on the stem of the “l” in “sale.” The painter took real delight in this effort and appears to have not wanted his task to end judging but the size of the exuberant “e” at the end of “sale.” Most of all I love the way the lettering sits on the bottom edge of the sign.

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Pee Wee’s New Adventure

Barn across from Schutts Cider Mill on Plank Road in Webster, New York
Barn across from Schutts Cider Mill on Plank Road in Webster, New York

This morning’s paper said a mix of panic and nonchalance was greeting Hurricane Sandy. I’m firmly in the nonchalance category. Peggi left for Wegmans well over an hour ago and hasn’t returned. The storm may provide us with the perfect opportunity to burn the twenty four inch pink candles we bought at a garage sale about ten years ago. And we’re considering parking our car in the garage for the first time ever to protect it against the winds off the lake. We’ll see how nonchalant I am when the internet connection goes down.

We ate dinner at Casey’s new joint on the west side of the river. Tap & Table is a notch upscale from Tab & Mallet but the beer is just as plentiful. I had a pint of Ithaca’s Outdoor Harvest Pale Ale. The name struck me as little odd so took it out on the server by asking him if they offered an Indoor Harvest. We sat in the window looking out over a rainy river that appeared to be flowing south. Duke Galaxy and the Pipliners and T-Rex were on on the sound system. The Mary Jamison tour boat was parked at the dock next door and they had lights on like they were preparing for an evening cruise. We split an green olive salad with poached egg, a smoked trout appetizer and and a roasted pork entree. All fantastic.

Pee Wee (not his real name) mixed the live sound for New Math when I played with the band. Howard Thompson mixed the studio project but he used the name “Howard la Canard.” Pee Wee worked at Sound Source and repaired Peggi’s Farfisa countless times. We used to see him at the record shows scouring the bins for fifties 45s and then we lost touch with him for decades. We into him again and he told us he was changing his name because it was hard for a guy to find a job with the first name of Hillary especially since the former first lady. He has a new musical project under yet another name. We helped him with the packaging and we love what we heard but he asked us not to talk about it.

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Wrong Paul

Birds in the air outside of Bills hospital room
Birds in the air outside of Bills hospital room

Bill’s nurse was talking about the book she’s reading, “The Company She Keeps”, when we stopped up to visit him. The book is written by Georgia Durante a former Kodak model and mafia wife. She lives in North Hollywood now but she grew up in East Rochester, the same town as Bill’s nurse and spills the beans on the mob bosses that ruled this town in sixties and early seventies.

As we moved closer to look at the pictures in her book we noticed someone had turned the drawing I gave Bill last week so that it was facing out the window. At first I thought that was kind of cool, maybe someone looking in would get a kick out of it, but the nurse offered that Bill’s son, Paul, had done the drawing from some criminal in the newspaper. “It’s nicely drawn and everything. I mean you can see the evil in the guys’ eyes. But why someone would bring something like that up here?”

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Gettin’ Buzzed

Todd East performing at the Inventors Club in Rochester, New York
Todd East performing at the Inventors Club in Rochester, New York

Rob Storms called earlier in the week to invite us to a performance by Todd East, a local pianist who he described as the best musician in Rochester. I wouldn’t even mention that Todd East is blind if it wasn’t for the fact that he sounded exactly like Stevie Wonder and the only song that he did that I recognized was Ray Charles’s “Georgia.”

The performance was in the original Sound Source location on Norris Drive over near Cobbs Hill. We sat by the infamous “Spider” Casorla from Roller Coster Fireworks who was originally in town for the Jewish holidays but has stuck around until his father is well enough to make the trip back to their fireworks outlet in Nevada. A woman sat down next to us and asked if I was a Dodd.

It had been a long time since someone had asked me that. Maybe it was my new brush cut, a hair style that all five boys sported in the days when when my father would have us take our shirts off and stand in a line to get buzzed. She said she went to Holy Trinity with me but was in my sister’s class. Rob was calling this place a hacker space but it’s now called the “Inventors Club”. Conjures up all sorts of possibilities.

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Head In The Sand

Plum trees (maybe) in Sodus, New York
Plum trees (maybe) in Sodus, New York

My neighbor, a former chemist at Eastman Kodak, was helping me get the street wood splitter started the other day. Just making small talk before all the racket began though I asked him if he was going to watch the debate or the baseball final and he said he would probably go back and forth. He had just read an alarming article in Scientific American about the accelerating speed of man-made climate change and he wondered if the topic would come up in the last debate. It didn’t. They have too much bullshit on their plates.

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