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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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Obsessive Obsession

Yellow electric motorcycle in the park, Rochester, NY
Yellow electric motorcycle in the park, Rochester, NY

Something someone said or something we read recently prompted us to add “The Conversation” to our Netflix cue. We hadn’t seen it since 1974 but we both remembered loving it. Directed by Francis Ford Copola right after his first Godfather smash, this movie plays like an obsessive art film about an obsessive, sax playing professional surveillance expert. Mundane conversation is pieced together and played over and over, analyzed while we revel in it all, geeky, even going to a convention of professional eves droppers. Electronic sounds are interwoven through the dialog until we can’t be sure if we’re hearing things or imagining them. Gene Hackman gives a killer performance and blows away co-stars and some of my favorite actors (Robert Duval, Harrison Ford and John Cazale). We kept the movie an extra night to watch it again.

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Smiley Faces

Three CrimeFaces (Rochester mug shots) for Lucy Bryne Show at Creative Workshop in Rochester, NY
Three CrimeFaces (Rochester mug shots) for Lucy Bryne Show at Creative Workshop in Rochester, NY

For the last six months or so I’ve been painting on paper with water color, opaque water color, kid’s tempera paint to be precise. The Creative Workshop passed out a flyer to announcing a portrait show and students were asked to submit up to three works that were properly mounted and ready to hang. I don’t Know if push pins through the corners of works on paper would qualify and I waited ’til the last minute so I chose three small oils from earlier this year. I snapped a photo of them in my driveway before dropping them off. Rachel, the Workshop director told me they would only have room for two which I took to mean two of your “crime faces”. So I let Rachel pick the two she liked and I took the one on the right back home with me. The show is up now and it looks pretty good.

Stop by the Little Theater Cafe tonight for Margaret Explosion. We’ll be there every Wednesday until the new year.

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Sorry

1000 Acre Swamp wetlands near Rochester, NY
1000 Acre Swamp wetlands near Rochester, NY

The mail lady had off, the kids on our street had off, the neighbor who works for the UofR had off so we decided to take Columbus Day off as well. We drove out to Schutt’s Apple Mill in Webster and picked up a few bushels of apples along with fresh squeezed cider and two fried cakes made with indigestible oils. Since we were out this way we stopped by the 1000 Acre Swamp in Penfield. My father goes birding here and he hunts the skunk cabbage here in early Spring. I’ve heard him talk about it but found it kind of hard to get excited about a place called 1000 Acre Swamp.

I wasn’t sure where it was so I looked it up online and found out it is only 500 acres. It is a beautiful place, an oasis in suburbia. One hour in here made re-entry a jarring experience. There should be a law against huge lawns. They’re obscene. The MacMansions are silly but the lawns are an assault to the senses, all of them.

PBS started its “God In America” series last night and the whole show took a quick nose dive after the arrival of Columbus. A few Native Americans started the show by saying. “Our whole world around us is our religion. Our way of life is our religion. The way we behave toward one another and others is our religion.” This wasn’t good enough for the Spaniards and the sad parade that followed. I don’t think I can handle Part Two.

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Family Reporter

Mirror image on Eastman Lake in Rochester, NY
Mirror image on Eastman Lake in Rochester, NY

We took my sister out to dinner at Proietti’s in Webster last night. She has been living in Webster since our family moved out of the city in 1960 but she’s moving back to the city in November. Proietti’s has to be the best Italian restaurant in this area. I used to keep track of those things but this is one big moving target. I ordered the “all killer, no filler” Linguini Gabrielle (eggplant, hearts, portabella, tomato, vegetable broth, fresh mozzarella) and my sister had the homemade pumpkin raviolis. Every dish is distinctive so order and share. My sister keeps track of the whole family so not only did we catch up with her, we also got the lowdown on the rest. I had no idea that my other sister had broken her foot.

My father lost five years work on the family tree when his computer was stolen. Who knew that Reunion, the program that he uses, stores the database in the Applications folder? And who knew he wasn’t backing up his apps? I take full responsibility and I didn’t know. I think there was space problem when we set it up and I opted out on the App BU. We need a black sheep in this family.

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Finding The Phone

Peter Sherman demonstrating the "Finding the Phone" feature at the Apple Store in Rochester, NY
Peter Sherman demonstrating the “Finding the Phone” feature at the Apple Store in Rochester, NY

Find Phone is my favorite feature on our wireless landline phone. It’s such a gas to hunt for the phone while it beeps. It works every time except when I left the phone on the hood of the car and Peggi drove off with it. I helped my father replace his computer after his house was broken into and when we were at the Apple Store my father asked the clerk if there was any way to track down his old computer. Peter demonstrated how he could locate his iPhone at secure.me.com/find. Turns out it was in his pocket.

Somehow we’ve managed to wear out three different Linksis and Netgear routers over the years. We replaced them with an Apple Extreme and then added an Express to extend our coverage. I’ve been playing with Apple’s new Remote for the iTouch and iPad and I connected our stereo to the Express. I used to have an old laptop out there running iTtunes and of course I needed an external drive to hold the music library. But that was so yesterday. I retired the laptop and the drive and I stream music to the stereo from my desktop. With Remote on my iPod I can control the playlist or just let it go and even control the volume in the two rooms. Oh, and they’ve added the ability to mark your favorites when something good comes along.

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Sun Zoom Spark

Light in the street pool
Light in the street pool

Electricity and water make strange bedfellows. Our neighbors were taking a midnight dip in the street pool and the underwater light went out. None of the current members remember ever having to replace it so we collectively stumbled through the whole process. There was an engineer involved so I could never catalog all of the methodical steps.

We waited til the end of the season and drained the pool enough to figure out how to get it out of its recessed home. We discovered a cord coiled up inside, long enough to permit changing the bulb while pool is full. The bulb itself is enclosed in the housing and the Pleasantville New York Pool Company that made the fixture warns you to only burn the bulb when the housing is submerged. We struggled to break the seal on the housing and almost destroyed the thing trying to get it open. Some members were already talking about getting rid of it and plugging up the recess when we managed to break it open. Peggi ordered a new bulb online and I stood on a ladder in the water and put the fixture back in its place.

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Off The Cuff

Spring Valley woods in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, NY
Spring Valley woods in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, NY

Margaret Explosion started back at the Little Theater Cafe last night. We’ll be there every Wednesday until the new year so you have some time to see what all the fuss is about. We had a good night and the place was packed. Those two things don’t always go together. Our best song of the evening is usually the first one when there is hardly anyone there. We had emailed people that we were playing all new material which is true but it implies that we worked on new songs when in fact we hadn’t even seen each other all summer except for the two art openings we played. A few people told us how much they liked the new stuff and one even thought we were going in an electronica direction. Jame Nichols sat in on piano in the second set. He said he would have been there earlier but he was teaching a Mexican history class at RIT.

Each night is different and we wouldn’t have it any other way. We perform songs that have not been written or predetermined. We spontaneously compose them and if we try to go back to a song, it never sounds as good as it did the first time. As Paul McCartney once said, “You can’t reheat a soufle”. We are best off going out on a limb every night and that can be intense or it can be mundane.

I’m happy that most people don’t see it for what it is because we are doing our best to make them sound like songs and not jams. As we packed up Peggi was talking to a young kid who who also played sax and an old couple came up to tell Bob and I how much they enjoyed the music. They were such a cute couple I felt like I was looking at a Grant Wood painting and I could hardly digest what they were saying. Before heading to the door the man asked, “Is your music off the cuff?” I was more than happy to fess up.

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Zen & The Art Of Painting

Wetlands off Hoffman Road in Rochester, New York, September 2010
Wetlands off Hoffman Road in Rochester, New York, September 2010

I take the same photo over and over, it seems. I have to come up with creative names so I don’t overwrite older files. How many times have I photographed this marsh? I paint the same painting over and over too. I came home with a new batch of crime faces tonight, mugshots from the morning paper.

Our painting teacher came in with three quotes printed on a small pieces of paper. He gave one to each student first thing. And as much as we would like to think we are all painters, we are “students” in Fred Lipp’s presence. The first quote was from Juan Gris. “You are lost the minute you know what the result will be.” The second from Degas. “Only when he no longer knows what he is doing, does the painter do good work.” And the third one was from William Baziotes. “Each painting has its own way of evolving. . . when the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.

No wonder I have to take this class over and over.

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Not On YouTube

Bill and Geri type truck load
Bill and Geri type truck load

Bill and Geri bought an old-fashioned, state of the art, type-making machine along with hundreds of patterns and type faces. The original patterns can be used to carve out font families in various sizes as long as they are smaller that the pattern. You would use these fonts on a letter press. I’m thinking we should do a Margaret Explosion 45 cover with some of these.

We helped Bill and Geri unload the type making machine that is hidden behind the boxes of patterns and type in the photo above. Nine of us gathered on Sunday afternoon as Bill pulled off a marvelous, madcap, engineering performance that ensured a graceful decent for the 800 pound, steel machine.

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Gallery Hop

Post It Note art in the Hungerford Building on Main Street in Rochester, New York
Post It Note art in the Hungerford Building on Main Street in Rochester, New York

The Hungerford building on East Main was happening last night. We had a hard time finding a place to park but eventually found a spot in back along the tracks. Hungerford made the syrup in A&W Root Beer before the complex of warehouse space was divided up for small businesses and squatters. The gallery on the ground floor was packed with earth conscious vendors suppling free samples of local produced food stuff. We would have hung around if the art (photos in this case) was more interesting. The 2nd floor had the coolest vide with lots of energy. I photographed the post it note piece there and the fourth floor was way sleepy. We headed over to RoCo where Andy Gilmore had some beautiful trippy geometric prints. We chatted with Joe Tunis and headed home.

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