It’s Heavy

Ken Frank, Paul Dodd and Peggi Fournier playing as a trio version of Margaret Explosion at High Falls in Rochester, New York
Ken Frank, Paul Dodd and Peggi Fournier playing as a trio version of Margaret Explosion at High Falls in Rochester, New York

Ken, Peggi and I played as trio version of Margaret Explosion over the weekend and Brian Peterson took this photo. It was a 50 dollar a head auction/party for the The Genesee Center For The Arts. Rick from Watkins & The Rapiers sat in with on trombone in the second set and we tore it up while Ken’s wife yelled for Stones and Neil Young covers. They had nice spread of food but we had already eaten and the small cannolis on the dessert table looked inviting but I was already paring down my food intake for my Monday morning colonoscopy.

This was second one and because they found a polyp on the run so they wanted to do another in five years. I asked my mom how many she had had and she said she’s never had one and my dad said one of his doctors recommended one but the other said he was too old it. He didn’t really like hearing that. I was dreading this whole thing but as they say, “The prep is the hardest part. Last time I had to drink a gallon of Drano. This time it was one two quarts but that pretty much shoots the day.

The sedative never completely knocked me out but it did space me out for most of the day. I was able to read the paper as soon as they were done but I was little wobbly when I stood up. We went directly from the doctor’s to SEA Restaurant on Monroe for a big bowl of Vietnamese Pho and then to the used bookstore next door. Peggi picked up a few things from the horror section and I found a four dollar book on Picasso and Matisse written by Francoise Gilot, one of Picasso’s exs. It was such a nice day we pretty much blew off work and headed out to the Apple store. I wanted to buy a USB Camera Connection Kit for our iPad. I want to be able to backup photos on my iPad and also work with photos when I’m out of town. My laptop feels so big and clumsy these days and it’s heavy!

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Where The Magic Is

Painting in the bathroom upstairs at Polska Chata in Irondequoit, NY
Painting in the bathroom upstairs at Polska Chata in Irondequoit, NY

After the Margaret Explosion gig on Wednesday I sat down with Jeff, a therapist and friend from high school and beyond, and we began talking about the painting/therapy nexus. Jeff felt there was a strong parallel between the two practices and why shouldn’t there be? This conversation was just getting going when we were interrupted but the topic has been kicking around in my head.

When my father started taking the painting class with me at the Creative Workshop he’d come out of class many times saying he felt like he was in therapy and I would laugh but I know exactly what he meant. Breaking old habits requires someone to point the detrimental habits out. Staying open and using your eyes instead of your brain, learning to trust your own eyes is tougher than would seem so why not accept help from a coach?

Recovering alcoholics all subscribe to the “one day at a time thing” just as painters in Fred Lipp’s class learn to “address the worst first.” “Always, get to the point!” “Painting is not supposed to be easy or everyone would do it.” The journey is the thing, not the plan or final piece, and the toughest lesson is learning to enjoy the struggle because that is where the magic is.

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Good Bad

Painting for sale in house on Queensboro in Rochester, New York
Painting for sale in house on Queensboro in Rochester, New York

About twenty years ago or so Kim sent us a book called “Thrift Store Paintings” by Jim Shaw. It was a pretty cool collection of good bad paintings and it turned out Jim Shaw was the nephew of Peggi’s parents best friends, the Gardners.

Danny from Abilene has a pretty cool collection of thrift store paintings at his bar downtown so when we spotted this painting this morning in a household sale on Queensboro in Rochester I took a photo and emailed it to him. I could just as easily have alerted Marie Via or Clair Marziotti whose collections were featured in a Democrat & Chronicle article on bad art but if they scooped it up I wouldn’t be able to visit it as often. Jack Wanderman, Susan Plunket’s brother, was organizing the sale and asking $65 for the painting. We were there to visit some of Peggi’s mom’s stuff one last time. Jack has been putting her stuff in household sales around town.

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Hitchhike Baby

Paul Dodd with movie camera, Rich Stim and Norm Ladd at Norm's wedding
Paul Dodd with movie camera, Rich Stim and Norm Ladd at Norm’s wedding

When I was a freshman Norm Ladd’s mam called me and said Norm, a friend of mine from high school who was a couple years younger, had run away from home and he was hitchhiking out to see me. He lived in my dorm for while.

I used to hitchhike all the time. Back forth to work at my uncle’s store during high school, over to Brad and Dave’s house and then back and forth to Bloomington. I got picked up by one of the famous Wyeth family members. He was wearing leather gloves and driving a small sports car but it overheated around Buffalo and he through a fit. A few times I got picked up by a guys that wanted to “pick me up” but most of the time it worked out. Once I was picked up by a salesman who gave me some potato chips that his company had just introduced. He was raving about how much less shelf space the chips took up because they came in cans instead of bags. He had boxes of them in the back seat and we ate them as we drove toward Indianapolis. They tasted pretty good and he gave me a can to take back to the dorm.

Today in the business section I read about Procter & Gamble selling off their food brands, Jif, Folger’, Crisco and Pringles. The article said their advertising division was located in Cincinatti and they test marketed the chips in Evansville Indiana in 1968. That salesman would have picked me up halfway between those two locations that year. I didn’t imagine all this.

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In Like A Lamb

Lake Ontario from the ridge trail in Durand Eastman Park
Lake Ontario from the ridge trail in Durand Eastman Park

It was sixty something today but we still have a few pockets of snow and I’m happy about that. If there is one thing that really bothers me it is when Spring comes roaring in like a lion. Winter is a test of of metal and we fail the test if we give up on it. It makes us stronger when we give in to it and it makes Spring all the more dramatic when it unveils itself. Besides I like the minimalist palette of grey brown with small touches of color.

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Big Bird

Turkey in our yard
Turkey in our yard

This female turkey must be in a state and it probably has something to do with mating. We usually see turkeys in packs in the woods but this one was in our back yard this morning when we woke up and she wandered around our yard all day. She stopped stopped in front of our window and gave us this mighty display.

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High Performance

Cuong Vu Trio performing in Hatch Recital Hall at the Eastman School of Music
Cuong Vu Trio performing in Hatch Recital Hall at the Eastman School of Music

Cuong Vu Trio performs their own music tonight in a free concert at Kilbourn Hall. They have been in town for a week while Cuong Vu has been teaching a workshop on creativity. Last night they played six compositions by Eastman students in the brand new performance space Hatch Recital Hall. This is clearly the best sounding room in the city. And “clearly” is a good word for the way you hear sound in this space.

The room is small, 200 or so seats, and it was designed as a “box within a box” so none of the walls come in contact with the rest of the building. The room is live sounding but without added reverb and as natural sounding a space as I have ever heard. It’s nothing like the dead studio spaces of the past. If a band has it’s act together an engineer could put two mics here and be done and the producer would be out of a job.

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Onward

4D business cards on there way to the trash
4D business cards on there way to the trash

“The Guy With The Tie.” We used to use him for copywriting a long time ago. Anne Esse. She’s a great designer and we’ve worked on many projects with her. CompUSA. They’re long out of business. Telesis. Dan Brumley used to work there before he moved to France. We worked on an industrial at Telesis with David Rose. I just saw him the other night at a house concert. Peter Pappas Shadow Match. I have no idea what that was. Bristol Boarding is still making custom cases. We did a brochure for them last year. They’re in the old HH Sullivan building.on Culver. Spectrum Color Lab. Wow. What did they do? Something to do with high end color transparencies. Innovative Type. I think they set type before everyone with a computer could set type. LefThumb Productions. I think Pauli did a film with one of our songs.

Those cards all would up on the top of the heap when I finished a job I had been trying to get to for ages. That is going digital with our contacts and addresses. It took me way less time than I thought because so many of the cards in our Rolodex are from extinct businesses.

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Eternal Search Engine

Ossia at Kilbourn Hall in Rochester NY 2011
Ossia at Kilbourn Hall in Rochester NY 2011

Ossia, the student-run new music performance group at the Eastman School of Music, held their last concert of the 2010-11 season last night in Kilbourn Hall. They performed Philip Glass’s “String Quartet No. 2: Company” and it stopped time. I have no idea how long it was but it wasn’t long enough. I had my eyes closed picturing the clouds in “Koyaanisqatsi” and then it stopped abruptly. My favorite piece of the evening though was “Marsias” for oboe and eight glass goblets by the Mexican born composer, Mario Lavista. The perfect fifth tones from the water filled glasses represented the “celestial” world of Apollo and the desperately melodic oboe stood for “the poet’s eternal search for perfect, precise expression”.

Lavista taught at Indiana University and currently teaches here at the Eastman. I visited his web site this morning and learned “He likes machines with hiccups and spiders with missing legs, looks at Paul Klee’s Notebooks everyday, hasn’t grown much since he reached adulthood at age 14, and tries to use the same set of ears to listen to Bach, Radiohead, or Ligeti.”

Margaret Explosion plays the Little Theater tonight without program notes or a score. Listen to Pit by Magaret Explosion.

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Drummer Jokes

Portrait by Richard Butler from the Psychedelic Furs
Portrait by Richard Butler from the Psychedelic Furs

My friend Brad, also a drummer, usually has a good drummer joke when we talk but I haven’t heard any in while. We watched a Nilsson documentary a while back and I really enjoyed it. I was not a fan but I am now. Too bad he’s dead. I thought our friend and neighbor Rick would have some of his records on vinyl but the only one he had was “Sandman.” It’s a very odd record with song titles like “Jesus Christ You’re Tall,” “How To Write A Song,” “The Flying Saucer Song,” “Hear’s Why I Didn’t Go To Work Today,” and “I’ll Take A Tango.” The first lines of that last song are “Deep down in my soul I hate rock and roll. And I don’t like the way that them drummers beat on them drums. They always hum along, out of tune.” That hit home for me.

Oh well, there is always painting. There must be some good painter jokes? We saw a show of Richard Butler’s (lead singer in the Psychedelic Furs) paintings in Chelsea on Saturday. I really liked this portrait.

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Expressionists & Expressionism

Philip Guston painting in "Abstract Expressionism" show at MoMA
Philip Guston painting in “Abstract Expressionism” show at MoMA

A note written on the back of a business card next to a full pot of coffee read “Out for bagels, Be back soon.” I hadn’t even finished my PopWars entry when Duane returned with a brown bag full. He got on his computer in the back room and told me I had some of the best typos on my blog. I had written “we opened the widow” in that morning’s post. I can’t spell and I depend on spellcheck so I often use the wrong word because, hey, it doesn’t have a red line under it.

We are not members of MoMA so we had to wait until Sunday to see the “German Expressionism”show when it opened to the public. The museum’s staff staged a dramatic presentation of these powerful, graphic works, mostly prints but some paintings, mounted on grey walls interspersed with deep red, yellow green and mustard sections with the usually offending curator’s notes on colors to match the walls. These details are important in a show with 250 mostly small, mostly black and white works on paper. They come off with a bang.

Otto Dix’s “The War” etchings filled a red wall with updated versions of Goya’s “Disasters of War.” Max Beckman’s 1917 painting, “Descent From The Cross” uses Christ’s crucifixion as a metaphor for war. Kathie Kollowitz’s heart wrenching woodcuts from her series called “War” stand as a timeless display of the emotional costs of war. If they were as powerful as they look we would all learn something from them before heading off to war. None of this work is as grizzly as I’ve made it out to be. Nolde, Egon and Kirchner, all giants of German Expressionism, have a masterly ability to cut to the chase.

We had looked a the “MoMA Abstract Expressionism” iPad app so many times I felt as though we had already seen the show but nothing can prepare you for the impact of these monumental paintings in the flesh. Kline, Motherwell, Rothko, Newman, Pollack, Gottlieb and Guston transformed the art world in the last century and their impact is still being felt.

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Art And More Art

Hermann Nitsch (in chair in front of string quartet) at his show at Pace Gallery in Chelsea 2011
Hermann Nitsch (in chair in front of string quartet) at his show at Pace Gallery in Chelsea 2011

The Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch is described as notoriously theatrical. That’s him slumped over in the photo above. We didn’t know a thing bout him until we stumbled on the opening a show of his paintings in Chelsea and we were just in time to catch a string quintet, Quintetto Nitsch, performing with Herman. A controversial painter and performance artist, he has staged crucifixions and has been arrested many times, his work plays with religious rituals and our violent tendencies. His canvases looked blood soaked even if they weren’t and created a rich, dark mood with the long sustained drones. We were offered soup after the performance but moved on.

Wandering from one gallery to the next in Chelsea is like putting your iPod on shuffle. It is an experience full of surprises and unexpected juxtapositions and it alters your perception. After immersion in or just glimpses of fifty or so galleries you are open to even the trash piles in the street as art.

Back at Duane’s pad in Brooklyn we opened the window, New York style, to the twenty degree weather. Peggi cued up mxrich videos of Angel Corpus Christi and we streamed half of Fellini’s “8 1/2” before sleeping like babies.

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See Something, Say Something

Amtrak 714 with Kodak Headquarters
Amtrak 714 with Kodak Headquarters

Rick Simpson came to the door at 7:45 with our two papers. We had arranged to have him bring us to the train station and you’d think we would have been the ones to be in a hurry but Rick said, “Let’s get cracking’.” Rick dropped us off at the train station before we had a chance to finish our coffee so it was an especially dreamy ride across along the Erie Canal and then down the Hudson into the city where we hooked up with our nephew Andrew who’s going to Columbia Law School.

We met at the Gagosian Gallery uptown on Madison Avenue near 77th where where they were showing five sensational paintings by the Russian Avant-garde Suprematist master, Kazmir Malevich. Andrew said he had done a paper on Malevich during his undergraduate days at Penn and had coincidentally finished the assignment in Rochester while visiting.

How does this business model work for Gagosian? Free admission to their gallery on three floors in a high rent district where none of the work is for sale? I’m guessing he represents some of the other artists in the show, “Malevich and the American Legacy”. Maybe Ellsworth Kelly or Richard Serra? Two beautiful black and white pieces by Kelly paid tribute to the master here as did work by Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Ed Ruscha reinforcing how powerful the Malevich pieces are still one hundred years after they were created.

We watched a guy pick lint off his black jacket as he stood in front of a Dan Flavin black light piece.

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Dream Baby Dream

Concrete building on Eastman Lake in Rochester, New York
Concrete building on Eastman Lake in Rochester, New York

I can’t be the only one who is tempted to take a photo of this concrete structure every time we walk by it. It’s on the western shore of Eastman Lake in Durand Eastman Park. The trail along this side of the lake is a bird lover’s paradise and we often spot birders with binoculars and long lens cameras hanging off their necks but in the dead of winter it is usually only us.

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Subterranean Surrogates

Still from Subterranean Surrogates", a photo installation by Paul Dodd 2009-2011 Dedicated to Philip Guston
Still from Subterranean Surrogates”, a photo installation by Paul Dodd 2009-2011 Dedicated to Philip Guston

Entering the Finger Lakes Exhibition is harder than doing the work that you are entering. The judges make choices based on viewing your jpeg and color shifts between monitors are a concern, not to mention potentially bigger issues like scale. And what if your piece is a photo installation? Try submitting a whole show in a file under one meg.

View images from “Subterranean Surrogates.”

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Who Stole The Peace Flag?

Studebaker in front of Jerome's Ignition Service in Rochester, New York
Studebaker in front of Jerome’s Ignition Service in Rochester, New York

Cars used to look a lot cooler than they do now.

We are at war in Libya. Just like that. Good thing we have an all volunteer army.

A friend who lived down the street was in Viet Nam dropping Agent Orange out of a helicopter on anything that moved when my mom made a peace flag. She sewed it! It was a white cloth peace sign on a sky blue piece of material. I remember it being beautiful. We flew it on the flag pole out in front of our house and my friend’s mom got all bent out of shape about it. I remember her calling our house and screaming over the phone while my mom made a rational appeal to her. “Surely you want peace too”, I remember her saying, but the argument continued. This neighbor thought it was flat out wrong to fly that kind of thing while her son was fighting for our country. He was only in the army because he flunked out of Bonaventure and got drafted.

I was so proud of my mom but the thing is a lot of people felt like her and it was a bit of a mystery when the flag was stolen a few weeks later. “Who stole the peace flag?” became the family’s obsession as we weighed the suspicion level of each neighbor. We found out months later that it was the younger brother of the guy who was in Viet Nam. I’ll bet the guys over there were real happy there were people back home working against peace.

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Bad Moon Risin’

Big moon rise over Durand Eastman Beach in Rochester, New York
Big moon rise over Durand Eastman Beach in Rochester, New York

Neil Young must have gone crazy with this super moon thing. He recorded his most recent record on a full moon and people say he plans key moments in his life around full moons. Peggi has woken me up to look at the moon before and she was excited about this “Super Moon.” She put her coat on around sunset and said, “I’m headed down to the beach to watch the moon come up.” That got me away from the computer for a bit and I went down to Durand Eastman with her. It was about 35 degrees as the sun went down and it soon felt colder. We were getting ready to bail when the most dramatic huge moon popped up over the beach houses in Sea Breeze. This thing was spectacular!

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Staggered Entry

Witch-hazel near Durand Eastman Park in Rochester, New York 2011
Witch-hazel near Durand Eastman Park in Rochester, New York 2011

This Witch-hazel, along the road leading into Durand Eastman Park, is in full bloom now. Your nose detects it before your eyes but it but it is not as fragrant as the winter Witch-hazel which bloomed, like a miracle, up in the park in February. Still to come is the Witch-hazel that will blossom to much less fanfare in our back yard in the Fall. They remind me of Geri McCormick’s paintings.

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Just Askin’

Saint Patrick's Day ad at Shamrock Jack's in Rochester, New York
Saint Patrick’s Day ad at Shamrock Jack’s in Rochester, New York

It was perfect day for the boiling of the beef. Or for an intervention but that’s another story. I wish I had my camera. Nikon had me send the camera back at my expense to fix a lens cover that wouldn’t spring fully open and then told me the replacement part is on backorder! Grrr. If I had the camera I could have pryed the lens cover open to make a movie of our walk through the woods and then the funky little neighborhood of Bloomington style houses (one was for sale for $87,000- just askin’), down Culver Road past the bowling alley and Mastrella’s where we saw the short Elvis impersonator, by the New York Store where we saw new bicycles made in Queens in the window, by the barking dog in front a house with a beautiful view of the lake to Shamrock Jack’s for a sandwich and a pint.

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The Journey

3 Face Drawings by Paul Dodd 03.14.11
3 Face Drawings by Paul Dodd 03.14.11

I left these three drawings at the Creative Workshop tonight. I did them last night for a drawing show that the Workshop is mounting in the next few weeks. No guarantee that they will accept them of course but they were fun to do.

Duane emailed a link to a Neil Young live recording from Carnegie Hall 1970. I downloaded it but haven’t listened to it yet. Our friend and neighbor, Rick, had coincidentally just lent us two British magazines with Neil Young features. Each had a cd of various artists doing Neil Young covers, a tricky proposition that hardly ever works when you’re crazy about the original.

I liked this quote from Neil, saying “I’ve been too concerned lately with moving on so I leave a lot of unfinished and unreleased stuff.” It struck me because it dovetailed so nicely with this quote from Picasso that was in Friday’s NYTs. “I’ve reached the moment, you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.”

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