Indomitable Spirit

Birthday party at the Judu Hall
Birthday party at the Judu Hall

Modesty, Courtesy, Integrity, Self Control, Perseverance, Indomitable Spirit all seem like worthwhile pursuits. These words were written on the wall surrounding an American flag at Gregory’s seventh birthday party. The festivities were held at the Martial Arts Center in Loehmann’s Plaza. I had my iPod Touch with me so I looked up “Indomitable Spirit”. In martial arts it is considered a refusal to be beaten, no matter how tough, talented or big your opponent may be. That will probably be the toughest challenge for these little guys.

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Naples Ain’t Just Pretty

Front dining room at the Naples Hotel in Naples New York
Front dining room at the Naples Hotel in Naples New York

We were not the first customers at the Naples Hotel. The bar was lively with the after work crowd and one woman was reading and sipping a glass of wine in the front dining room. We had eaten here with Peggi’s parents the summer they rented a place on Canandaigua Lake, the summer it rained every day. As we ordered our food another couple walked in. I never turned around to get a look. I was afraid to because one of them was wheezing loudly and there as a clucking sound at the end of each breadth. We overheard the hostess telling them that her sister was the chef.

Someone has a lent this place a creative touch. It still looks more than a century old but the dark patterned wallpaper is new. I remember German food in here but that’s all gone. The sour dough bread was dense and packed with olives and it came with olive oil and balsamic vinegar for dipping. The salad with craisins and roasted pecans was fresh and delicious. We split a roasted shrimp appetizer (they were calling them tapas) that came with a raspberry chipotle sauce and a Friday Fish Fry but we ordered it broiled. That was our one false move. It came buried in butter. We would have been better off picking the deep fried batter off.

We’re knew we were near High Tor State Forest so we cruised around and found a trail head. A sign near the path read “Public Hunting Grounds” so we turned around. We asked someone who was just strapping on a back pack if we should worry about that and he said gun season was over and it was only bows now. He said we didn’t have to worry about them. They only fall out of trees. We hiked almost straight up to a circular meadow that overlooked something like the gorge at Letchworth, as stunning as the “Grand Canyon of the East” in the next county.

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Pink Haven

Wetlands near Pink Haven in Italy Valley, NY
Wetlands near Pink Haven in Italy Valley, NY

The hand written directions to Anne Havens’ cabin in the woods had been in our glove compartment for quite a while. I think Anne jotted them down over the summer when we ran into her at an art opening. They were straightforward and brief but the last detail, where to turn off the Italy Valley road and into the woods, didn’t make any sense. The “Blind Drive” sign that was supposed to be next to an inverted yellow triangle was not there. We drove until the road ended and then turned back to take a guess. We found a pink cottage nestled on a gorgeous marsh and sat down on the Adirondack chairs in the sun. It was so blue the moon and jet trails were the only white in the sky. Shotgun blast ran out from nearby and then echoed for miles around.

This is motorcycle weather, the last hurrah for these guys until April, and heard a bunch of them rumble by. We ate the apples and peanut butter sandwiches we packed at home and then tried to walk around the marsh. We came across a barbed wire fence and decided not to cross it. Everything is posted around here and you never know how serious people are about private property even though it just doesn’t seem possible to own a woods. The deer can run in there but we can’t.

We took a walk down a nearby dirt road but we only got a mile or so away when we were chased back by barking dogs. We’re thinking of heading into Naples tonight to have dinner at the Naples Hotel. I hope we can find our way back here in the dark.

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Some Sort Of Deal

MA Furniture on consignment
MA Furniture on consignment

We made some sort of a deal with a consignment shop to sell Peggi’s mom’s furniture. We split delivery to their shop and they decide what price they’re gonna put on it and if the stuff sells, we get fifty per cent. It only makes sense in this new economy.

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Wednesday Night Ritual

Black birds in trees
Black birds in trees

Most of the birds are getting out but the smart ones are hanging around for this beautiful Fall weather. It’s not Indian Summer because we haven’t had a frost but that’s only a technicality because we live so close to the lake.

We were headed home from Peggi’s mom’s apartment with the last load of stuff to get rid of and we head this clanging under the car. I couldn’t even see out the back window because the big, green ,overstuffed, lift chair took up most of our cargo space. We stopped at the bank and I crawled under the car. Our tailpipe had broken off where it meets the muffler so I stopped in Jerome’s to have them take a look at it. They put the car up on the lift with the lift chair inside of the car and reattached the tailpipe. Further up the exhaust chain we noticed the heat shield on the catalytic convertor was falling off. I find these in the road all the time while on my bike but I’ve given up collecting them.

We don’t really have a piano player in our band unless Pete LaBonne is in town. Fred Marshall sat it a couple of weeks ago and he sounded great. Jaffe from the old Colorblind James Experience used to come all the time but we haven’t seen him in months. James Nichols threatened to come last week but didn’t. Maybe he’ll stop by tonight. He always sounds great. There’s no piano in the song below but the Little Theatre Café’s grand piano was sitting right next to us when we recorded the track so if you listen closely you’ll hear it vibrating sympathetically.

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Tommy vs Marky

Bob Dylan at RIT in Rochester, New York
Bob Dylan at RIT in Rochester, New York

I’ve been giving my orange ear plugs a workout in the last 24 hours. I wore them this morning while blowing leaves off the roof and I had them on last night at the Bob Dylan show and then after that I shoved them in as far as they would go for the second set of SLT at the Montage.

John Gilmore bought us reserved seats for Dylan but we never saw them. We arrived while Dylan was half way through his opening number, “Rainy Day Women #12 & #35, and we worked our way through the crowd on the floor to about forty people back. Bob was great, loose and adventurous and mischievous. His band kept him in check.

It occurred to me that you can’t get too good as a working, rock musician without getting into steamroller territory. That’s why Tommy was a better drummer than Marky Ramone. Bob spent half the night at the organ and that was the best half. He’s already got another rhythm guitar player and a lead guitar (who was trying to be annoying with repetitive figures) and a steel player so there was no way he could shape his own songs while on guitar. Was his band trying to make his harmonica playing sound out of tune? Rock can’t be too healthy. It doesn’t work.

“Like A Rolling Stone” was so sensational when it came out, way more than a pop song. It blew me away and I’m not a lyric kinda guy. I never know what bands are singing about. I remember going wild when they played the long version. Dylan finished with that song last night and it is still sensational. It was great to see him.

SLT was the better band last night.

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Superba Shoes

Sea Breeze Water Tower from a moving car
Sea Breeze Water Tower from a moving car

We spent the whole day cleaning out Peggi’s mom’s apartment. Trying to figure out why people bought commemorative plates. Was it a scam like the sub-prime mortgages? We have a whole box of them for eBay. Had some nice golden hour lighting on the way home so I hung my camera out the window for this shot as we went around the Seneca Road circle.

We were asked to play at the Shoe Factory last opening last night so Peggi brought her sax and I brought a hand drum. The theme for the inaugural exhibition was shoes of course and we ran into so many familiar faces we never made it back to where the music was coming from. Beth Brown said we could just play in her studio and we considered that but never got around to it.

We stopped at Duane Sherwood’s foot video first and watched that go around about ten times. It moved from sensual to creepy but stayed engrossing. Chris Schepp from Schepp Shoes made some beautiful little leather boots and Heather Erwin was wearing some hot, knee-hgh leather boots. Jim Mott had four shoe related paintings scattered about and Alice de Mauriac mounted a most interesting Converse box. And I liked Dick Storms fuzzy slipper paintings. My “Superba Shoe Wallpaper” was hang on such a big beautiful blue wall that it didn’t really look like wallpaper but I’m not complaining. The show looked great and the place was packed so I would say it was a smashing success.

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Art Rules

Kodak building across from the Rochester Art Supply Sale at High Falls Gallery
Kodak building across from the Rochester Art Supply Sale at High Falls Gallery

The gallery space at High Falls in the shadow of Eastman Kodak’s world headquarters was home to an art supply trade show yesterday. Rochester Art Supply is Amazon’s art vendor so they buy in bulk and Mike, the owner, had some barn-burner prices on canvas and paint and brushes so I bought some of each. You were supposed to pre-register for the seminars that ran throughout the day but we hung around the entrance to a watercolor demonstration and they waved us in. Canada’s “Windsor & Newton Artist-in-Residence ” passed around some near photographic prints of landscapes he had painted but didn’t spend any time on composition or expression or any of those sort of painterly concerns.

He started with the composition of paint, pigment, binder and medium. Watercolor is uses gum Arabic as a binder between the pigment and water. All of the gum Arabic comes from Libya and for a few years the art world was panicking because of the instability there. He advised against re-wetting water color from the tube and seemed to recommend what he called pan paints. He demonstrated how much water sable brushes hold but he warned that real sable brushes are getting more expensive because the hair on a sable is not as long as it used to be because of global warming. He showed us a Windsor Newton Series 7 Number 10 brush that lists for $400. And if you spring for a good brush he said, “don’t use it with acrylic or ink.”

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Bare Light Bulb

SLT Dead Gone Dead cd cover - Watercolor by Paul Dodd
SLT Dead Gone Dead cd cover – Watercolor by Paul Dodd

Ken Frank was in “5 Star Buffalo”, one of my favorite bands in the Scorgie’s days. I played with Personal Effects back then and we released a few albums on Earring Records. Colorblind James Experience released their first lp on Earring Records. Ken Frank joined Colorblind in the nineties. Ken plays bass with Margaret Explosion and he never sounded better than he did last night at the Little. His bass amp crapped out so he’s been playing his stand-up bass acoustically and he sounds more melodic and punctual than ever. The overall band volume is lower now and his bass notes have a clarity that gets lost when it’s amplified. It’s subtle but an earful! And subtlety counts for a lot in my book.

But back to Earring Records. They have just released a new recording by SLT called “Gone Dead Gone” and it’s on the other end of the volume spectrum. It’s dedicated to a gone dead old friend, Luke Warm, the one who took to the dj booth at Scorgies to remind the patrons to, “Don’t forget to tip the bartenders for keeping you drunk.” Ken Frank plays bass in this version of SLT along with Phil Marshall and they asked me to supply the cover art, specifically something with a bare light bulb and moths. It sounded like Philip Guston territory to me. Ken co-wrote and produced this rip roaring hard core pop anthem.

Listen to SLT – “I Should Have Been A Guru” on Earring Records.

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Hit Me

It was so much fun to watch Texas lose with the Bushes in the best seats. Tim Lincecum is on the mound for SF tonight and I like his haircut. We’ve had to endure some bad commercials though. Are bad commercials more effective than good ones? What is it? I know this much. The World Cup is a lot more exciting than the World Series.

I talked to Anne Havens this morning. She’s been having some computer problems. Anne closes up her studio and heads south for the winter pretty soon. She likes the sunshine. I don’t mind the sunshine but I can only handle so much heat. It takes the life out of me or it takes the edge off at least. We’re supposed to have our first frost tonight and I love it when the house gets cool. Perfect weather for art.

I’ve not had any time for art the last few months but I do manage to get to painting class each week. I wouldn’t miss an opportunity to spend time with Fred Lipp and I’ve learned that I don’t have to bring in a pile of work to have an insightful conversation with him. I can just start working on something in class and Fred is off. In fact, the more on the line I am, the more cutting, right on and helpful the critique is.

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Future Residents

Future Residents sign at the Highlands in Pittsford New York
Future Residents sign at the Highlands in Pittsford New York

This was the first time we used the “Future Residents” slot at the Highlands and we got caught. We were only going to drop off a few things at the Bistro Café and then drive around to Peggi’s mom’s old apartment but time got away. A number of people who came to the small gathering we had in her honor pointed out how much they liked our parking spot.

Peggi prepared a few words to say about her mom and I did the same but we never got around to it. Everyone who came shared thoughtful memories of her with us and at some point it seemed like we all turned some sort of corner and we’re moving on. We may have missed our envelope but I think Mary Alice would have loved the whole affair.

I was going talk about how she used to collect the remainders of bar soup and roll them into these multi-colored balls that she put in the guest bedroom. That is one of my earliest memories of her. She made a mean pecan pie, her Aunt Mabel’s recipe. And even though she travelled all over the world when Peggi’s father was transferred to Australia she was a small town girl at heart. She liked rides in the country and Vic & Irv’s. When she reminisced it seemed she was the happiest as a child in Evansville, Indiana.

I ran into the Springers in the hallway after Mary Alice had passed. They lived in the apartment next to her and coincidentally the Springers had introduced my parents to one another. Mrs. Springer said, “Mary Alice was a pistol.” We all laughed and Mr. Springer, pointing to his wife, said, “And she would know. She’s a real pistol too!” It’s an apt description. Mary Alice was opinionated and sharp, a worthy opponent in hot button discussions.

I was happy to have her her in Rochester for the last eight years of her life. I loved going to the operas with her and watching her have a good time at Margaret Explosion gigs. We genuinely had a good time together and I’ll miss her.

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M&K

Matt & Kim at the Water Street Music Hall in Rochester, New York
Matt & Kim at the Water Street Music Hall in Rochester, New York

Matt and Kim are the complete package, a minimal two piece pop music machine. I’m so happy we got to see them. Last time they were in town Kevin, their manager and my former band-mate, called from the Bug Jar to tell us to get down there but we were out at Peggi’s mom’s place. This time they came to town in a huge tour bus with a trailer of equipment in tow and they parked behind the Water Street Music Hall while Donnis warmed up the room.

Kevin put us on the guest list and took us upstairs where we grabbed front row seats in the balcony right next to our friend Olga. Matt and Kim smile relentlessly and Kim’s smile is incredibly infectious. She’s a Joan Jett style tomboy with a swinging, stripped down drum kit, no rack tom or hi-hat and only one cymbal. She spent a good bit of the set standing on top of her kick drum. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Maybe some of the girls watch Matt play his keyboards but I doubt it. No wonder her’s was only picture on the balloons thy released. Kim is a star but Matt did write one hell of an anthem.

We hung around after the show while the crowd threw money at the merch table. I considered buying one of their Treehouse t-shirts but I’m desperately trying to bring less stuff into my life. Our garage, that I spent the summer cleaning out, may soon be stuffed with my mother-in-laws stuff. This will be a lifelong struggle. And I would have bought a 45 but the only vinyl there was an English pressing and I’m partial to the big hole American ones.

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I’m Mad Too!

Carl Paladino Trash Bag
Carl Paladino Trash Bag

Paladino’s got pretty catchy campaign gimmick but I think we’re mad about different things.

Ken’s bass amp crapped out last night so he played without it. We got a little quieter and it was all for the better. Paul Perri came up to chat as we were packing up. We went to grade school together at St. John’s on Humboldt Street. He says he has a picture of our third grade class at home and he promised to email it. Talk immediately turned to Catholic School, wacky nuns, alter boy shenanigans, war stories. Paul left and a small group of us were still talking about religion.

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Process

Paul Dodd "Shoes On Silver" 1976, acrylic on canvas 36" x36"
Paul Dodd “Shoes On Silver” 1976, acrylic on canvas 36″ x36″

Beth Brown, Russ Lunn, Heather Erwin and Jim Mott have rented space in the Anderson Alley building, space that was a shoe factory when Rochester had many. My grandparents worked in shoe factories here. In fact, my aunt gave my father this tiny pink shoe made of leather, a sample from the shoe factory their father had worked in. I was called a “Superba”.

One of the only things I accomplished this summer (4D work doesn’t count) was organizing the garage. There were some tools out there and that were almost impossible to get at. I threw away a bunch of old paintings and one of them was the shoe painting above. I did it while I was in school and I had forgotten all about it. I found a big roll of white paper in the garage, something my father had given me when he used visit the Kodak surplus building before coming home from work. I also attempted to deal with the piles of stuff in our office and I did decided to throw away the light table we haven’t used in about twelve years.

I photographed the tiny shoe on my brother’s picnic table and did a few drawings from the photo and then a few small watercolors of it. I brought the scale up to oversize and it looked less like a woman’s shoe and almost like it could fit a nineteenth century dandy. I simplified the drawing and created a pattern that I put on the light table and then unrolled the white paper over the pattern as I painted one shoe after another.

It will be in the show when it opens on Friday, November 5th.

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Angel Of Death

Renée Fleming in Le Nozze Di Figaro at Mary Alice's apartment
Renée Fleming in Le Nozze Di Figaro at Mary Alice’s apartment

We raced out to Peggi’s mom’s place for the last time on Saturday. It was pretty clear it was the end of the line this time so we did what we could to keep her comfortable. I hooked up the DVD player in her bedroom and Peggi put on one of her mom’s favorite operas, Mozart’s “Le Nozz Di Figaro” with Rochester’s Renée Fleming in the lead role. Peggi’s mom was gone before the opera finished, just before the applause for the fourth and final act, and I already miss her.

The three of us had seen many operas together in the eight years she spent here. She generally liked the lighter fare. My favorite was Coplands’s “Tender Years”. We had a similar divide when it came to art. She volunteered at the Detroit Institute of Arts and we went to many openings at the Memorial Art Gallery here. Peggi’s mom was troubled by abstract art and she was always asking me to explain pieces. I decide whether I like an art work in seconds. I don’t think about it so I was always at a loss to explain why I liked something. I tried many different approaches, many times, finally just saying things like, “You don’t have to like it.”

A few years back she spotted an review in the Wall Street Journal of a book by Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting at the Museum of Modern Art, called “Pictures of Nothing.” She took the bus from her apartment to Pittsford Plaza and walked with her walker to the Barnes & Noble store at the other end of the plaza and picked up a copy. It is a gorgeous book of “Abstract Art Since Pollack” and the pictures are accompanied by the extremely inciteful text from a series of six lectures that Varnedoe gave as a Mellon lecturer at the National Gallery. If anyone really wants an explanation of modern art I can’t think of a better source so I often wondered why she gave the book to me instead of reading it herself. I didn’t think I needed it but I savored every bit of this book. I could do a much better job of explaining abstract art now.

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Soggy Crackers

Bald tree in the Commons, Rochester, NY
Bald tree in the Commons, Rochester, NY

When my parent’s house was broken into we wound up spending a considerable amount of time over there with the police, a locksmith and theinsurance agents. We were still in bed when we got the call so we hadn’t eaten anything and at some point I found myself rumaging through their cupboards where I found some Kebler Honey Grahams. There was some pulp heavy Tropicana in the fridge so I anxoiusly tore open the wax paper package on the crackers, excited at the prospect of dunking them in a tall glass of OJ. I hadn’t had this treat since I left home as a teenager.

I would habitually try to split the crackers along the vertical center line so I would get something like a six by one inch long cracker to dip in the glass. I’d hold the cracker in there as long as possible so it would soak in the juice and then try to get the cracker out of the glass and into my mouth before it turned into mush in the glass. My parents used to buy the Nabisco Graham Crackers in the red box and then Honey Grahams came along. I think they were made by Kebler at first so we switched brands. I remember one being better than the other but I can’t remember know which one I preferred. I put a whole package down (one third of a box) and stopped there althoiugh I could have continued. That was limit back then and I stuck to it.

As I mentioned a few days ago I took Peggi to the hospital so they could stop her bloody nose. It was our most pleasent emergency room experience. The receptionist asked if I was a Dodd. I said I was Paul and she said, “Oh my god!”. She lived across the street from me and I used to babysit for her and her siblings. We each ran down the whereabouts of our respective big family members and we noticed that she was particularilly interested in my youngest brother’s status. I’ll have to pass this info on to him when I see him. Anyway I think she fast tracked us and gave us an especially nice doctor.

She was the second former babysitting victim that I have run into this year. I remember how tense it was dealing with the parents and then how easy it was to babysit once they left the house. I loved every minute of it and when I finally got the kids to bed I’d go through the food cupboards just like I did at my parent’s house.

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Mad As Hell

Jared Tree Cut Method
Jared Tree Cut Method

Our car is over at Jeromes’s getting the once over. It was time for an oil change but it’s also time for new brakes, new tires and a new pump for the window washer fluid. Those guys are the best so I know it’s in good hands but it is a strange sensation handing over the keys to a car with an Obama sticker on it to a garage where Glen Beck’s fire and brimstone rants are blasting. Bipartisanship in action. We just watched Network the other night and were surprised how relevant the thirty four year old move is.

We borrowed our neighbor’s car so Peggi could get to emergency because she had a bloody nose that wouldn’t stop. They packed it with liquid cocaine solution. her lips went numb and the bleeding stopped. And then we borrowed our other neighbor’s car so I could get to my painting class. I didn’t mind asking him because I had just helped him take down a diseased tree. You can see his time tested method in the photo above. You basically create a hinge that runs across the center of the tree by cutting the wedge perpendicular to and facing the direction you want the tree to fall in and a cut straight in on the other side about four inches above the wedge cut. The tree teeters on the uncut “hinge, you can almost tip it with a wedge and it drops. Can’t think of a better way to spend an afternoon.

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Doctor Of Music

Ron Carter at Kilbourn Hall in Rochester, New York
Ron Carter at Kilbourn Hall in Rochester, New York

I spotted an article in the paper about Ron Carter coming to the Eastman to receive an honorary “Doctor of Music” degree from his alma mater for his life’s work. He has played on more recordings than any other bass player. His senior year was 1959 and he almost wound up staying here as bassist with the RPO but the Board of Directors was not ready for a black man to anchor their orchestra.

Ron introduced the second song, “My Funny Valentine” as one of his favorites and Jacques Terrasson’s piano intro was astonishingly beautiful. These guys were so under control and on top of their game the percussion player played with his fingers throughout, the drummer played mostly brushes and didn’t even have a clattering ride cymbal. The bass was melodic. No PA for the instruments, just the natural sound and dynamics, makes Kilbourn my favorite place to hear music in the whole world.

Ron Carter plays on some of my favorite Joe Henderson and Alice Coltrane records and one of my absolute favorite albums of all time, one credited to Eric Dolphy and Ron Carter called “It’s Magic”. These guys pulled of some real magic here.

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