The YouTube gods teased us with “A Producers Epiphany: Jim Dickinson on Working with the Rolling Stones, Part 1 of 2.” Dickinson is such a natural story teller we just sat back and let him describe the Stones’ songwriting process, Keith handing him the wrong chords, laying down out-of-tune tracks and then asking Dickinson to play piano on “Wild Horses” because Ian Stewart disliked minor chords. The interview reminded us that we still had not watched our last Netflix dvd. When they pulled the plug on dvds they let you keep the last one and we put ours , 2013’s “Muscle Shoals,” away without ever watching.
The first hour of the 1:42 was brilliant. The birth of the studio, the soulful country vibe, the hits they churned out for Percy Sledge and Wilson Pickett and most of all the decision by Jerry Wexler to bring Aretha Franklin, who had been recording with arrangements, charts and session musicians down south where all those magical songs were recorded. The “Queen of Soul” recording with a bunch of honkies. I have no idea why they had Bono as a talking head. That was the only not brilliant piece of the first hour. The movie takes a wrong turn just after the Stones section with Duane Allman, Leonard Skynyrd and the birth of Southern Rock.
Earl Cassorla was responsible for the display in 2012. The Cassorla brothers, whose father, Red, was a Sephardic Jew or as he liked to say “a Ladino” will live forever on Vimeo.
I’m writing this post before we lose power. It’s been one of those days where the temperature goes down instead of up during the day. We’ve had a leaner, a dead, rotting oak, broken at the base and only still standing because it got hung up on the branch of a nearby tree for the last six or seven years. We had already plotted where it would fall and we weren’t too worried but when it came down this morning it shook the house and just missed our deer fence.
We stopped by Canaltown to pick up coffee and Pete was just roasting a batch so we told him we would come back in an hour and pick it up warm. I watched as he poured beans in the big funnel and told me what goes into the Rochester’s Choice, the blend we buy. “Sumatran and Costa Rican.” I asked who came up with the name. It is such a good name for the house blend as it sounds like it has already won some sort award. He said he and his father-in-law came up with it when they started the business some thirty five years ago.
It seemed like Christmas started way too early but now it’s already gone. The day itself was dreamy. We zoomed with friends in Hawaii while we looked out at the snow. My brother and his wife came up from New Jersey a few days early and the four us went out to Holy Sepulchre and found my parents. It was near dark when we got there. Peggi and I were in the back seat, it was snowing and the roads had not been plowed. I jumped out at one point and ran up a hill just to determine where we were. We parked near the pond and all four of us got out. I started feeling around with my feet and found a stone, “Fred somebody.” I moved to my left and struck gold on the fourth stone. My parents would have gotten a kick out of our adventure. It wasn’t til we got back home that I realized it had been ten years since my father passed.
Amy, my brother’s wife, reminded me that it was the same four of us who rented a boat in Maine and got lost near dark. We had a paper map with us and thought we might be offshore of one of the islands. We spotted someone on shore and yelled, “What island is this.” They couldn’t make out what we were shouting so we kept trying. Finally, the person on shore yelled back, “This is not an island.”
Agnes Martin “Beautiful Life” 2000 granite and oil at Pace in Chelsea
Mary Alice, Peggi’s mom, gave me a book that she had read about in the Wall Street Journal for Christmas. Twenty years later “Pictures of Nothing” by Kirk Varnedoe is still one of my favorite art books. Varnedoe describes Agnes Martin’s work as “utterly incorporeal: no body. . . at the other end of abstraction and yet not at all cerebral. . . thoroughly dependent on sensory and sensual experience.”
Agnes Martin writing on wall at Pace in Chelsea
“Agnes Martin,” currently on view at Pace in Chelsea is stunning. You can’t prepare yourself for it but you can take the experience with you. We started our experience by watching the short movie with Agnes Martin that Pace was showing in a side gallery. It was closer to a meditation. She tells us how she finds beauty and how that is enough. And although people say she was a mystic, she says she is not.
Asmat carved “bis” poles, circa 1960, with ancestor figures for memorial feasts in Metropolitan Museum
I was knocked out by a 1967 book we saw at Duane’s place a few years back on the Asmat people, the isolated but culturally advanced New Guinea tribe that had no contact with outsiders until they were be-friended by Nelson Rockefeller’s son, Michael. He was amassing a collection of so called primitive art for his father and it eventually wound up in the Metropolitan Museum but you couldn’t see it. The Michael Rockefeller wing was closed for renovations for years. While anxiously awaiting the reopening I bought a used copy of the book on eBay and read another one on Michael’s adventures and disappearance. Cannibalism? The wing’s reopening mandated a trip to Manhattan.
Carving on front end of Asmat canoe in Rockefeller Wing of Metropolitan Museum
We flew to JFK and took the Q train to Duane’s where he had lunch waiting for us. We had coffee, hummus and eggplant with pita and hung out for a few hours before taking the F train to the Meatpacking District where we had booked a hotel. We ate dinner at a nearby Spanish restaurant called Bartolo’s, played a few hands of gin and then slept like babies. The next morning we met Duane in the lobby of the Met and let the Rockefeller collection sweep us away.
We had plans to meet our nephew in Midtown at the end of his work day and we had an hour to kill so we walked across the park with Duane and he took a train back to Brooklyn. Peggi and I continued along 72nd, past the Dakota where there was some sort of Lennon tribute going on, to a record store called “Westsider.” I had read they had a good jazz collection and they did but when we asked the old guy (our age) behind the counter if he had any jazz 45s he laughed. “Jazz people don’t like 45s and the the 45 people don’t like jazz so you’re in a something of a black hole.” I said, “I know.” We left empty handed.
Knowing that our nephew likes steak we made reservations at a place called Quality Meats on 58th. He ordered a sirloin and Peggi and I split a filet mignon, first steak we had had in years. We ordered a few side dishes as well, broccoli, a Caesar salad and bacon/peanut butter thing that the waiter recommended. I was thinking what a crazy combination that was but it tasted so good. And then it dawned on me. My mom, a butcher’s daughter, used to make peanut butter and bacon sandwiches for us when we were kids.
The streets were so quiet today. The Bills were playing and we had a half inch of fresh snow. It was cold too, around 18 degrees. I took a movie of the marsh as the sun tried to poke through the soupy grey sky. Peggi and had a short practice. Forty five minutes of making stuff up and another version of Fernando.
When Peggi’s parents retired they took a lot of trips, some by car, some by train and some by sea. In 2003, as the US was starting the disastorous war in Iraq, they invited us on a cruise through the Panama Canal. I brought our cassette recorder along and came back with some great tapes of manic Panamanian music and djs. The ship left from Miami. We ran into Norm and Pam in the airport.
Passengers awaiting boarding of cruise ship in Miami
The cruise ship made stops in Playa del Carmen (Peggi and I went snorkeling while the other passengers went shopping) and Honduras where we took a long bus ride to the Mayan ruins of Copán, the highlight of the whole trip. The canal was sort of dingy, my favorite photos from the trip were the ones I took from the bus on the way to Copán. They made a good spread in my homemade scrapbook.
Photos from bus in Honduras on the road to the Mayan ruins at Copán, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Photos from bus in Honduras on the road to the Mayan ruins at Copán, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York
I’m mashing up two stories from today’s paper here. GiveSendGo, a website that says it aims to “share the Hope of Jesus through crowdfunding,” has raised $150,000 (as of this post) for the Cinnabon employee, a Saul Goodman co-worker, who let loose a racist tirade at the drive-through window. So many ugly facts to this story but the “Hope of Jesus” part got me. The same organization raised funds for Kyle Rittenhouse, Luigi Mangione and Thomas Jacob Sanford, who is suspected of killing four people and injuring eight others before setting a Michigan Mormon church ablaze.
In a front page story Cardinal Dolan announced the Archdiocese that he presides over was preparing to raise more than $300 million as compensation for survivors of sexual abuse by priests in his employ. Rochester’s bankrupt diocese, the one I grew up in, already paid $246 million to local victims. The money could never compensate victims. Church leaders covered up the crimes, shuffling the perpetrators to other districts. The very structure of the church attracts pedophiles. The optimism for Pope Francis fizzled when he never came clean on the cover-up and Pope Leo, his successor, says he has no intention to ordain women and does not anticipate changing official teaching against homosexuality.
Dolan’s statement, makes it clear where he stands in all this when he describes how the church has made a series of difficult decisions. “As we have repeatedly acknowledged, the sexual abuse of minors long ago has brought shame on our church.” (Poor guy, to have to repeatedly acknowledge it. And it wasn’t that long ago – these victims are still alive!) “I once again ask forgiveness for the failing of those who betrayed the trust placed in them by failing to provide for the safety of our young people.” Dolan looks so contrite in the photo as passes the blame.
Winter came before fall was finished so our snowman looks a little funkier than usual. We invited everyone on the street to dinner at our house tonight. We left an invite in the mailbox of each of the ten houses. It said we would be serving food from Rubino’s but before we got around to ordering we ran into Pete and Gloria and they suggested Papa Joe’s in Greece. So I’m heading out there to pick up trays of lasagna, gnocchi and Chicken Marsala. Papa Joe’s is new to us. They were not on our Refrigerator round-up of Rochester’s Italian restaurants.
Eduardo Chillida sculptures on the deck of Guggenheim Bilbao
Chillida is rightfully featured in Bilbao’s Guggenheim. That’s two of his sculptures on the deck of the museum designed by Frank Geary. What a combo. Geary died the other day. He was a hero of my father’s. They were just about the same age. When we first visited northern Spain, Bilbao was described in the tourist books as the armpit of Spain, an industrial hub with a port on the Bay of Biscay. We drove right by it.
When the MAG organized an art tour of Spain in the late nineties the Guggenheim there was brand new and my parents signed up. My father filled a sketch book with drawings of the building. An article about the architect in today’s paper said the first building Geary designed was for Louis Danziger in 1965, a work/live space on Melrose Avenue in LA. I had just called attention to Danziger a few posts back when researching the artwork he did for a Bud Powell 45. Funny how everything comes together eventually.
We have been to Bilbao a couple of times since and we love the city. The museum, Geary’s masterpiece, transformed the working class city. We want to go back. Architecture aside, I was just thinking how nice it is to live in a spot where we can hear the train whistles downtown, the jet skis on the lake, the motorcycles on Kings Highway and the muffled roar of the bay bridge.
Untitled “Planes of a Tangle” wire and DNA film by Colleen Buzzard at 2025 Rochester Contemporary Members Show Rochester Contemporary Members Show
RoCo’s annual Members Show opened last night. Their community outreach program is clearly working because RoCo is running out of wall space to accommodate one piece from each member. Democratically hung, floor to ceiling, the show always manages to look especially good.
I found three pieces particularly engaging. Colleen Buzzard’s three dimensional drawing is sculptural but it also plays with the wall itself and the light in the room. The various elements appear in active conversation with each other and the viewer.
“Wanted to Give Myself a Nightmare” acrylic on canvas by Bradley Butler at 2025 Rochester Contemporary Members Show
Bradley Butler is the former director of Main Street Arts in Clifton Springs. His own work has always struck me as rather mysterious considering he spent so much time in that cheery space. His diptych above is mysterious and beautiful at the same time.
“The Way the Grass Smells at Night” film photography by Jovana Babovic at 2025 Rochester Contemporary Members Show
This photograph by Jovana Babovic was given the Visual Studies Workshop Award so I wasn’t the only one attracted to it. The small photo in the big mat is dramatic. The warm mat and the cool photo is a striking contrast. But most of all the piece is very human. That sounds funny considering every piece in the show was made by a human but I feel that quality most here.
Just look at this place. Is that Elvis with a Santa hat on behind the drummer? It is a visual nightmare. But Annie Wells transcended all that tonight in Record Archive’s back room. Annie performed songs from her new release, “Pictures of a Heart,” with a stellar band, l. to r., Melissa Davies on cello, Mike Kaupa on trumpet and flugelhorn, Roy Marshall on drums, Dave Arenius on upright bass and Phil Marshall on guitar. Cindy Tag on soprano sax and flute and Ken Frank on electric bass also joined Annie at other points. (Three current or former members of Margaret Explosion are in that list.) The band sounded especially great on Annie’s softer songs.
Louis Danziger cover art for “The Artistry of Bud Powell” 7″
How many products are there that can get re-sold over and over again and sometimes often increase in value? I think about that while going through boxes of used records at the Bop Shop. Like millions of other people I sold most of my records when cds came out and then I sold the cds after ripping them. And someone has probably bought every one of those items a few times over by now.
The 1954 Bud Powell record above used to belong to Douglas Silver who lived in this house in Lakewood California. His address was written on the back of the 45 I purchased. I love imagining Doug sitting in this house with Bud Powell on his hi-fi. Records have a long life. They live longer than we do. Louis Danziger, the guy who designed this fabulous cover, is 102. Examples of his work are included in the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at RIT.
I don’t miss all that vinyl and certainly not the cds but Peggi and I hung on to our forty-fives. And the collection continues to swell, mostly with the addition of jazz titles. I made a playlist of our jazz 45s for Apple and Spotify. Here are the links – Apple Music–Spotify
“One” by Margaret Explosion. Recorded live at the Little Theatre Café on 10.05.25
Margaret Explosion plays this Wednesday, December 3rd at the Little Theatre Café. We try to do a different show every time we play. It helps that not all of five of us can be there most nights. Melissa will not be there on Wednesday so there will be no cello. All five of us were there on October 5 and this song is from our second set. There was a full moon that night and I made this movie as we drove home on East Main after the gig. Peggi was driving. At the intersection of Culver things got a little strange and we went into a dream state. Our friend, Pete, was there and he wrote a poem while he listened. We’ve used his poem in the video.
Peggi Fournier plays soprano sax, Jack Schaefer plays guitar, Melissa Davies plays cello, Ken Frank plays the big bass and I play the drums. I hope you can stop out on Wednesday. Little Theatre Café 7-9pm
My sister, Amy, and her husband came over for dinner a few nights back and they brought a short stack of fresh vinyl – shrink-wrapped, re-releases and some newly released. We listened to all of one, one side of two others and just one track from a fourth. Not every record works as a setting for conversation and isn’t that really what “over for dinner” means? We need a pretext for “conversation.”
The next morning I asked Howie” if he could send me a photo of the eight records so we could stream them. He sent this video and I made a playlist of the songs. I couldn’t find the compilation, “When the Rain Turns Into Snow” (I like it when some things just aren’t available to stream). We listened in our living room, in the car and in the kitchen while we separated cardamom seeds from their pods for a recipe.
Andrew Hill “Judgement” on the fabled Blue Note label features Bobby Hutchinson on vibes, Richard Davis on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. The way Andrew Hill plays piano he could’ve almost done this date himself. He states the melody, goes on flights of fancy while staying fiercely grounded and carries on a dialog with his own counter-rhythmic, melodic lines. The earthy Elvin Jones and Richard Davis on drums and bass are a perfect compliment and they make this release a masterwork.
Coleman Hawkins “and confreres” (Oscar Peterson Trio and Roy Eldridge) is a curious release. Hawkins horn sounds so rich and the natural reverb they used on it makes it a study in late fifties recording techniques but the bass and drums get lost on some tracks. Almost sounds like they were doing overdubbing back then. The song “Cocktails for Two” transports you and your date to one of those small tables in a smokey, late fifties nightclub .
I had never heard of Muriel Grossmann. Her “Breakthrough” lp is dated 2025 but the opening song, “Already Here,” had me convinced this was something I missed back in the modal jazz heyday of spiritual jazz – Alice Coltrane, Joe Henderson and Pharaoh Sanders etc.
Albums like Jackie McLean’s “One Step Beyond” with Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams are the reason students still study jazz at schools like Eastman. I particularly like the expressive, shape-shifting “Ghost Town” where they slowed things down.
Leroy Vinnegar’s “Leroy Walks Again” reminds you that a band is only as good as their bass player. Known as “The Walker,” he leads his quartet through a solid set of really enjoyable songs. I particularly liked “For Carl.”
Another bass player led disc, Emma Dayhuff’s “Innovation & Lineage: The Chicago Project,” is a live recording with Kahil El’Zabar on drums, Dee Alexander on vocals and Isaiah Collier on sax and piano. This is right up my alley, a contemporary version of spiritual jazz. I love this record.
Saxophonist Charlie Mariano’s “Mirror” lp could have only been made in 1972, that cusp when jazz went rock and rock went jazz. Tony Levin plays electric bass, Airto Moreira plays percussion and Asha Puthil (from Ornette’s “What Reason Could I Give” and “I’ve Waited All My Life”) sings on the title song. Here is a verse from the back of the lp.
MIRROR Mirror Of your mind Wheels and gears Spinning ’round and ’round Look out for diamonds You don’t need them What for? They can’t help you Find the rainbow’s end Open your third eye
Mona Seghatoleslami is the host of WXXI ‘s Classical 4-7 PM slot. She also hosts the lunchtime concert series at Hochstein. On top of that she books the bans at the Little Café. The WXXI site says “Mona works on any project she can find that helps connect people and music in our community. We asked Mona if she could recommend someone to tune our piano. The piano came from Peggi’s parents and we have only had it tuned once since we moved here. Jaffe, the Colorblind James/Fugs keyboardist took care of that one. Mona recommended Gene Baker, a composer new to the area. Now we are recommending him.
With new life in the upright Peggi has been refreshing her reading skills, concentrating on the left hand, low register parts as she reads. I’ve been listening to her slowly work through the Alec Wilder songbook with enough space between chords to make it sound like Morton Feldman’s “For Philip Guston.”
We do our share of raking and leaf blowing in the Fall but mostly we process leaves. Peggi came up with that term. I run over them with our lawn mower. The mulch sits there all winter as it decomposes. In the summer our lawn looks brown and if we’re lucky I will only have to mow once.
With the yard under control we planned to go downtown but our car wouldn’t start. The computerized dash kept cycling through a long list of things that were amiss. We called AAA thinking we might need a tow. The AAA guy told us even though our battery looked new it needed to be replaced. He jumped it and we headed up to AutoZone. The battery was still under warranty and the cashier, with fake nails an inch and a half long, grabbed a tool kit and the new battery and carried them out to our car. Peggi popped the hood and the cashier installed our battery wearing gloves that allowed her nails to protrude. She tested the new battery and told us we still may have a problem with the alternator. So we drove our car over to B&B Automotive on Saint Paul.
They were super busy, as usual, but said they would take a look. Peggi and I started the long walk home. We stopped at Monte Alban for some Mexican food and just as we were finishing Brian called from B&B to say there was nothing wrong with our car. So we headed back to the shop. I took this picture of a bittersweet bush behind the House of Guitars.
Back home we scooped up two wheelbarrow loads of the leaf mulch from our lawn and took it down to the garden where we scattered it on the garlic bulbs we had just planted. I’m listening to Cal Zone’s show on WAYO as I write this and overjoyed to be hearing Ornette Coleman’s “Trouble in the East” on the radio. The song was recorded live at NYU in 1969. The music critic Martin Williams, who was in the crowd that night, wrote, “It felt spontaneously ordered in all its aspects, and had the timeless joy and melancholy of the blues running through it. It had its feet planted on the earth and it spoke to the gods. It is one of the most exciting, beautiful, and satisfying musical performances I have ever heard.”
Leo Dodd drawing of my accident with Sammy G” Gingello in Webster, New York
There lots of links in the post. Let’s give it up for that guy invented the hyperlink.
I linked to my father’s website in my last post and then poked around the site for a bit. Many of the presentations that he had linked to no longer work in Safari. Some wouldn’t work in Chrome either so Peggi and I tracked down the original Keynote files from 2012 and generated new html pages. We started with the slides from the talk my father gave to the New Jersey Engineering Society in Montclair New Jersey, something my brother, Mark, had arranged. The presentation tracks his engineering work for Kodak and UR. The work he did at the Art Deco Hawkeye plant was top secret.
By chance this morning’s paper had an article about the city securing the site due to increasing criminal activity. Kodak is bankrupt and the current owner, Phoenix Investors, a Milwaukee-based real estate investment firm, acquired the property through a bankruptcy auction after the previous owner, WBS Capital, defaulted and the lender foreclosed.
I worked B trick in Hawkeye one summer as a janitor. We were assigned a route and then found a place to play cards until it was time to punch out. My father was working on a top-secret aerial reconnaissance mission for the U.S. government during the Cold War. The project, known as “Bridgehead” produced lenses and film for cameras that flew over Russia to see where they might have tanks, bombs, munition plants, planes and troops.
While looking for my father’s original files I came across the drawing above that my father sent to my brother, Mark, in 1970 when he was in prison for smoking a joint. I had cracked up, totaled it turn out, the family VW Bug while he was sitting in jail. I wrote about the accident back in 2013. I never saw this drawing above until my brother gave it to me to put in the display case of an art show. I am amazed at how my father was able to visually present a story he heard about from me (the accident). One detail my father left out though was that the guy I hit was a famous mobster, Sammy G. Gingillo. He was killed in 1978 when a bomb was detonated as he sat down in his car parked outside Ben’s Cafe Society downtown. I read a great book about the Rochester mob written by Georgia Durante, Sammy’s girlfriend.
“The Christian Warrior” (St. Paul) Butler, Pike Stained Glass Studios 1921 Third Presbyterian Church Rochester, NY
Historic Brighton presented their annual “Leo Dodd Heritage Preservation Award” today to Valerie O’Hara of Pike Stained Glass Studios. My father, Leo, was the first president of Historic Brighton and my sister, Amy, is the current president and she presented the award at the Third Presbyterian Church, a site selected by the recipient as Valerie and her stained glass company did so much work here in the last century.
People all around us were checking the score of the Bills game. I was studying the six windows directly across from where we were sitting, a series that was given to the church in memory of five young parishioners who died in World War I. The six windows featured five saints, Saint George, Saint Michael the Archangel, Saint Paul, Saint Gabriel and Saint Martin de Tours. One is an angel and one an archangel, very handy in battle. Paul is depicted twice, once as a Christian Warrior wearing the armor of God and next to it he lays his armor down representing peace after battle. He holds a shield with an oak tree, the scales of justice, and the dove of peace along with the shields of the U.S. Army Engineering and Medical Department.
At the foot of each saint is one sixth of a quote from Timothy, “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith.” Interestingly, each panel also includes insignias of the US allies in the great war, a wacky combination of religion, warfare and politics.
