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Dragon Sauce

Leo Dodd watercolor of Rochester's Washington Square Park currently in Witness show at Rochester Contemporary
Leo Dodd watercolor of Rochester’s Washington Square Park currently in Witness show at Rochester Contemporary

Margaret Explosion’s first performance with Phil Marshall came off without a hitch. I was confident that it would. Phil sounds great. Ken Colombo streamed our first two songs live on Facebook so Bob Martin in Chicago could hear how it went without him.

Everybody knows the Mushroom House. It is so over the top. But I had forgotten that the same local architect also designed the Liberty Pole (nowhere near as elegant as the Civil War Monument in Rochester’s Washington Square Park, pictured above in a watercolor by Leo Dodd). I’m not crazy about the house or the pole but James Johnson also designed many of this area’s most unique sacred places, churches and temples, and this is where is his organic sense of form really shines. Temple Sinai in Brighton, the dramatic light silo in St. John the Evangelist Church in Greece and the AME Zion Church on Clarissa Street in Rochester – Frederick Douglas’s old congregation – are all magnificent. Chris Brandt, architectural designer at Bero Architecture, gave a presentation about Johnson’s achievements today at the Memorial Art Gallery and it was really inspiring. I especially loved how he cast giant Gaudi-like organic forms in sand and then lifted them into place in structures like St. Januarius Church in Naples.

We hadn’t been to Atlas Eats all summer. “Witness” has been all consuming. We would have eaten out on the sidewalk but they were taking down a tree across the street. We started with a cup of coffee and both Peggi and I ordered the usual: Spinach Artichoke Grilled Cheese with Braised Onions in Peggi’s case and Kimchee with Tofu in mine. The homemade Dragon Sauce is secret weapon there.

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Developing My Picture

Leo Dodd working on watercolor of Margaret Explosion
Leo Dodd working on watercolor of Margaret Explosion

Leo Dodd is shown here, working on his painting of Margaret Explosion. Although it is unfinished, that is definitely Ken Frank on bass, Peggi Fournier on soprano sax and Paul Dodd on drums. And that’s Pete LaBonne on piano but he only plays with the band every couple of months. Is that Bob Martin? No. Wait, I think that is Phil Marshall, Margaret Explosion’s newest member, on guitar. Hope you can stop tonight and say hello to him. You can see the finished painting on Leo Dodd’ website.

Of course, we have not rehearsed with Phil. We never rehearsed with Bob or in the twenty year history of the band. That would spoil everything. We don’t have any songs to rehearse. We only have songs after having played them live and they will never sound better than they did that first time. We have tested this hypothesis. The interaction and exchange that goes on while the song is developing is something you cannot recreate. And why would you want to recreate when you could be part of creation?

Our first show with Phil is tonight at the Little Theatre Café 7-9pm Free Admission. Hope you can stop out.
Paul and Peggi

Leo Dodd and Paul Dodd have a show called “Witness” at Rochester Contemporary – Opening Friday Oct. 6, 6-9pm

And here’s a link to George Jones’ song.

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Rogues Gallery

Purple round wall at Rochester Contemporary for Witness show of Leo Dodd and Paul Dodd paintings and drawings.
Purple round wall at Rochester Contemporary for Witness show of Leo Dodd and Paul Dodd paintings and drawings.

I created a movie of my sources, some of them more than twenty years old. I used to hold the CrimeStopper page in hand, folded up to reveal just one of the mugshots, and work from that. I held the page with the thumb of my left hand, pressing it against my paint palette. At some point I started scanning the page and blowing up the small photos so I could print out the mugshots at a larger size. The photos didn’t get any better, just larger. For the past few years they have been putting the CrimeStopper page online so I download the pdf, crop the photos and print them out.

I don’t need all the CrimeStopper pages, I just paint and draw the same faces over and over, only refreshing the batch from time to time. I rounded up my collection of scans (blown up they have a golf ball sized dot pattern) and cropped photos from the pdf (no dot pattern but a rather limited resolution) and I put the jpegs into Keynote. I turned the images on their side and cropped them to the 16 by 9 wide format. RoCo will spin their wall mounted, large Sony monitor on its side and the movie I created from the slide show will go ’round and ’round in a dvd player mounted in the ceiling.

That monitor is mounted about four feet up, in the dark, on the inside of this round room (near the back of Rochester Contemporary). They painted the title wall near the entry and the round wall purple, the purple I got when I sampled my father’s Freddy Sue Bridge painting to do the postcard for Witness. Show opens this Friday 6-9pm.

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Manuel

Turtle on a walking path in Durand
Turtle on a walking path in Durand

I wanted to take this guy home with me. I had a turtle about this size when I was a kid. I named it Manuel after a character in a movie. No idea what that would have been. I used to let it run around in our backyard on Brookfield, near where Radio Social is now. I took my eyes off it and it went under the neighbor’s fence. I looked for him for days and really missed him.

This one was right out on the walking path that parallels Sweet Fern Road in the Park. I took a few photos and picked him up and set him down in the weeds. I hope he’s ok.

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Drawing • Talking

Leo Dodd watercolor painting of O'Rourke Bridge construction
Leo Dodd watercolor painting of O’Rourke Bridge construction

My father was drawn to construction sites. And he drew construction sites. He was attracted to the scale of man to machine and machine to the project, in this case the O’Rourke Bridge. The new bridge went up while the nearby Stutson Street Draw Bridge continued to carry traffic over the Genesee River near the Port of Rochester. And then they demolished that bridge and reconfigured the end of River Street. Change is good and my father was excited by it all.

There are four Leo Dodd paintings of this scene in “Witness,”the show that opens Friday at Rochester Contemporary. One shows both bridges, the new one meeting from both sides of the river while cars chug by on the old bridge. He must have done thirty watercolors of this bridge. Some were done on the site, some rather quickly, but mostly he would sketch the men and machines while work went on and later he would assemble the painting at home. And when he got the composition right he would do multiple versions until he was happy with the painting.

Axom Gallery‘s director, Rick Muto, wrote “What is most distinctive in Leo Dodd’s art is the composition and design, particularly in the activity filled construction scenes. In these works he has created images which have been distilled down to a lyrical interplay of geometric shapes and expressive color that reaches into the abstract vocabulary of the modernist period.”

Leo loved to draw and would fumble for a pencil while he talked to you, saying, “I can’t talk without a pencil.” Sure enough a quick sketch would clarify a thought. There is a real sense of drama in his paintings and it’s mixed with whimsy. You can sense his delight at capturing a movement or a gesture. The ease with which he lays out the perspective blows me away. He could draw. I hope his show will be a draw.

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Something Else

Paul Dodd Model from Crime Page painting 2017
Paul Dodd Model from Crime Page painting 2017

This painting was still wet when I dropped it off. I know that’s a risky thing to do, show something before the dust settles, but I wanted something that got away from the grid. Or grids. I’m showing a lot of them. Twenty new charcoal drawings, ten of the Bug Jar Mugshots, 12 of my 2008 oil on canvas “Models from Crime Page,” a double triptych of the 2004 “Models from Crime Page” (36″ x 24″ oils), six of the 2015 small oil on wood panel “Models from Crime Page,” and all six of the original 4″x4″ 1971 mugshots of my Bloomington friends. So this one at 4 feet by 5 feet, will position itself on one wall.

There’s other stuff there too. The place is huge. Original Crimestopper pages, scans of my sources on a monitor and the earliest mugshot painting I could find, one from 1996. I fretted for days about showing that one, thinking my new stuff is so much better. And then I came back down to earth. RoCo wanted an early piece to show show the scope of this project. I searched everywhere for one that was even earlier. A have a photograph of it but I must have thrown it away.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite Philip Guston quotes.

“There is the canvas, and there is you. There is also something else, a third thing. In the beginning’s dialog – between you and the surface. As you work, you think and you do. In my way of working. I work to eliminate the distance or the time between my thinking and doing.

Then there comes a point of existing for a long time in a negative state, when you are willing to eliminate things that have been looking good all the time; you have as a measure – and once you have experienced it, nothing else will satisfy you – that some other thing or force is commanding you: only this shall you, can you, accept a this moment.”

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What Vs. Why

Leo Dodd drawing of my accident with Sammy G" Gingello in Webster, New York
Leo Dodd drawing of my accident with Sammy G” Gingello in Webster, New York

I am not particularly interested in the why. I am more interested in the what.

But we have been developing a back story from fuzzy old negatives as to why I am interested in the mugshot. The better to serve the public.

I traced a certain fascination to 1970 when my brother was arrested in Ohio for pot. It was an incredibly minor infraction but he was facing ten years in maximum security. His arrest had huge impact on our family. My brother was in town a few weeks ago and shared a few of the letters my father wrote to him while he was in prison.

I was back home for the summer, staying with my parents in Webster, and I headed out somewhere in their black VW bug. I had my dog, Molly, in the back seat and I was only a few blocks from our home when I spotted Brad walking up to my house. He had probably hitchhiked over, we hitchhiked everywhere in those days. I swung the passenger door open for Brad to get in while trying to keep Molly from jumping out and then turned left right in front of a fancy red car. My dad illustrates all this in the enlargement of his drawing above.

But he left out one interesting detail. The red car that I hit, the guy I pulled directly in front of, was the infamous Salvatore “Sammy G” Gingello, a local mobster, and he wasn’t as pissed off as I would have expected anyone to be. He was just grumbling about how he was on his way somewhere and this was gonna set him back. I read a pretty interesting book about the Rochester mob written by Georgia Durante, Sammy’s girlfriend. Sammy was killed in 1978 when a bomb was detonated as he entered his car, which was parked outside Ben’s Cafe Society.

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Molly Malone

Funny that John Gilmore stopped by today. It was 90 degrees and he wanted to soak in our pool but by the time we got down there he thought it was too cold. This time of year I don’t stick my toe in, I just jump in. I say “funny” because I was editing this 2014 footage of my father speaking at an artist’s talk at I-Square in 2014. John videoed it and he gave us a copy. My brother John and I were also in the show but I edited our parts out. I may post them as parts 2 and 3 somewhere down the road.

There is an artist’s talk at RoCo on October 7th for the “Witness” show with Leo and me. I guess they are doing it FB Live so you don’t have to leave home. My father won’t be able to be there so I’m posting this footage. It’s 23 minutes long and and I don’t want to spoil it for you if you actually slog your way through but my father mentions this song at the end and I want to dedicate it to him.

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Ephemera

Street dancers on Gibbs Street at Rochester Fringe Fest 2017
Street dancers on Gibbs Street at Rochester Fringe Fest 2017

Part of this, for the time being, all-consuming show is filling a four foot by seven foot display case. A place for ephemera related to the “Witness” show. I could fill ten of those cases with my father’s sketch books but there is only one.

I snuck a few mug shot flyers out of the office when I worked for the cops in 1976 so I’ll show those. They used a transparent overlay system back then called “Identikits” to construct what perpetrators might look like. This kind of mustache, this kind of smile, a wide range for goofy haircuts. Some of the suspects are pretty Frankenstein-like.

I saved the newspaper clipping from the time the District Attorney bought my sketch of Arthur Shawcross. And I’ve been cutting out the Crimestopper page since the Times Union was around. My sister, Amy, saved a few articles about my father that describe him out there in all four seasons sketching the Can of Worms construction project. And there’s a 1970 letter from my father to my brother who was serving time in an Ohio prison for a a minor pot infraction. The letter is precious for a number of reasons. I recommend it.

When my brother, Mark, was up last he talked about his reaction to my latest batch of drawings. I liked what he said and I asked if he could write it down.

“Looking at my brother Paul’s paintings, based on mug shots, always brings up a mix of thoughts and feelings for me ranging from artistic appreciation to memories of personal experience. They’re all portraits of real, and various people who are sharing a certain exceptional experience. They’ve just been arrested, stopped suddenly in the tracks of a free life, and are being transitioned to captivity. They’re all entitled to the presumption of innocence. But it’s a hugely degrading experience. They’re now prisoners, about to be put in a cage. Yet for me Paul’s paintings expose their dignity, their humanity – their emotions: of fear, sadness, embarrassment, defiance, anger, or resignation.

For some this is their first arrest. For others it may be another of many. But they were all innocent children once. They all have families, most probably have families that really care about them. I did when I was arrested in 1970. It was a cold February night and I felt free enough to leave my college dorm with a couple of friends and walk to a distant ball field to smoke a joint. We were looking forward to returning to the dorm to listen to “Let It Bleed,” The Rolling Stones album that just had come out. Then the cops came around a corner, with guns drawn, and in that instant I lost my freedom.

I was handcuffed, forced into a patrol car, then fingerprinted, photographed, and locked up. Paul’s paintings capture people at this border moment, when they’re told to stand at a wall and how to hold their head. They’re portraits but not in the usual circumstances, and I see the dignity in all of them, as I’m reminded of my own experience.”

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A Dream Come True

Leo Dodd paintingsI in the back of our car, headed downtown for the Witness show at Rochester Contemporary
Leo Dodd paintings in the back of our car, headed downtown for the Witness show at Rochester Contemporary

We saved the big painting for last, the only full sheet watercolor in RoCo’s upcoming show of Leo Dodd paintings. The glass was spotless. We used a homemade concoction of 1/2 cup rubbing alcohol, 1/2 cup water and 1 tablespoon of of vinegar, a recipe we found online. The painting, of the old stadium on Norton Street, was sandwiched between an off white matt board and acid-free foam core but every time we nestled it into the frame we managed to suck in some tiny little pieces of our rug or some other disturbing micro fibers. We finally got a clean version but only by taking it into the bathroom under bright lights and assembling it on the edge of the bathtub.

I was thinking about the Red Wing games we saw in that old stadium. Havana, Montreal and Toronto all had teams in the International League back then. The time the guy sitting behind us burned a hole in my brother’s sweater with his cigar.

RoCo selected a great batch of paintings for this show. They focused on his Rochester paintings. My father was attracted to the scale of construction projects so there is a batch from the O’Rorke Bridge construction, the Bausch & Lomb headquarters downtown, the Freddy Sue Bridge and the biggest project of them all, the reworking of the Can of Worms, a project that coincidentally started in 1988, the year my father retired.

He’d sit off to the side and sketch the activity. The newspaper did a piece on Leo at the time and I like this quote. “It was a dream come true,” Dodd said last week, probably the only person in Monroe County who would say that with a straight face when it comes to the Can.”

“But most people haven’t spent the past two and a half years sketching the construction of the new $123 million interstate interchange. Dodd, a retired Kodak engineer who has taught courses at Rochester Institute of Technology, has made hundreds of sketches of the Can reconstruction since work began in March of 1988. Dodd, who started sketching large‐scale construction projects four years ago, said the Can project was a blessing because it was just minutes from his home on Corwin Road. So while tens of thousands of people were dreading three years of detours, Dodd was delighted.”

I think he would be delighted with this show. It opens Friday, October 6.

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These Times

Brian Wilson playing Pet Sounds at Eastmanl Theater in Rochester, New York
Brian Wilson playing Pet Sounds at Eastmanl Theater in Rochester, New York

The Squire was there. Rob Filardo too. And Kinloch Nelson. Brian Wilson played Pet Sounds start to finish in Kodak Hall. We got our tickets at the the last minute, nudged into it when our thirty year old neighbor asked if we were going. Brian had an eleven piece band with him, a Wrecking Crew on wheels. His cousin, Rochester native, Al Jardine, was there along with Al’s son on vocals. The musical director played every kind of horn. Mike D’Amico and a percussionist played drum fills like Hal Blaine. A keyboard player sang like a Beach Boy and a second keyboard player, from Heart’s old road band, solidified the sound. Brian pretty much just had to sit there but he went for it in about half the songs.

First set was Beach Boys gold, Little Honda, In My Room, Surfer Girl, Wild Honey, Darlin, Add Some Music. No Surf’s Up, but just as well. That masterpiece should never be touched again.

We had to be there. I bought every Beach Boy album as they were released and still love them. Brian is a musical saint. He introduced Pet Sounds, the song, by warning the crowd that the song had no words. His version of Carline No, the last song on the album and the evening’s last tune was fittingly, achingly longing. “Where did your long hair go?” sung by the boy that wrote that in his latter years. I wanted to cry. Love and Mercy was a great tune to send us home with but I woke up singing, I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.

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Next

Venus statue in Wolcott New York
Venus statue in Wolcott New York

I’m determined to swim today. Although we’re in charge of the chemistry for the street pool this week, I haven’t had time to get down there. I’ve been trying to complete a painting for this upcoming show and it has taken all my time. Even when you are “finished” with a painting there is no real sense of satisfaction. The painting may be finished but the next one is already all you can think about.

There must be some good in collecting your thoughts. Reluctantly. I have done so and I’m now ready to move on. I may find clarity in the swimming pool.

I am not comfortable in front of the camera. It is hard for me to stand still and a broad smile seems unnatural. I feel vulnerable, trapped. Maybe that is why I find mugshots so interesting.

Maybe it is because my brother was arrested at such an early age. He served time for possession of a small quantity of marijuana in 1970. I posed five of my friends in front of a white canvas shortly after that. My entire family’s life was impacted by his arrest.

In 1976 I took a job as a graphic artist for the City of Rochester. I worked on the fourth floor of the Public Safety Building in the Rochester Police Department’s Crime Analysis Unit. I had access to the mugshots and I constructed flyers and posters with them in an attempt to link perpetrators to crimes in particular areas of the city.

In the mid-nineties I started painting portraits of local people. My source was, and often still is, the Crimestoppers page from the Democrat & Chronicle, people who are wanted for violation of parole. I have continued to revisit this subject for many years and recently competed twenty charcoal drawings for this show.

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Plastic Arts

Hazelnut on picnic table in Elison Park, Rochester, New York
Hazelnut on picnic table in Elison Park, Rochester, New York

With this string of gorgeous days the outdoor palette is changing ever so slightly. Oranges and browns are creeping in. Nuts are falling from the sky. I heard an acorn fall on our neighbor’s trailer as I drifted off last night. The horseshoe pits are dusty. Although it was forecast we haven’t had rain in a week or so. It’s good that we can’t count on a particular kind of weather. You never know. And that’s why we live here.

Plastic has been around so much longer than plastic, way before Dustin Hoffman’s line in The Graduate. “Capable of being molded or modeled. Capable of adapting to varying conditions.” There is a time-lapse video out there of someone working on a painting. He reworks a section and it looks exactly like it did before he reworked it. I have not seen the video, I have only heard about it. I don’t want to see it.

Paint is malleable. I’ve been reworking sections of a painting for the last week. Does it look any better? Am I going around in circles? Painting always gets the best of you. That’s the way it should be.

That’s my Uncle Bob heading to the bathroom in the blowup of the photo above.

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Points Of Departure

InkJet watercolors at Mercer Gallery Rochester New York
InkJet watercolors at Mercer Gallery Rochester New York

Colleen Buzzard, the thinking man’s artist, along with Karen Sardisco, has brought together twenty or so artists who explore the idea of mapping as thinking. The show, at MCC’s Mercer Gallery and six satellite locations, turns out to be whole lot of fun. We started with a three page handout that associated 61 artworks with the artists. There are some familiar names like Ann Havens, Scott McCarney and Jim Mott but many from other cities. A postcard for the show listed the six satellite locations but you might need a map to find them. Three are on the UR campus, one is at RIT, one at VSW and one opens sat RoCo in the Lab Space on October 6.

Ryan Boatright, from Paris France, deconstructed a failed email attachment and translated it into a score for music. The binhex code is printed on a stack of pages on the gallery floor and the music is looped on an iPod. Tate Shaw’s watercolors above, photos printed on watercolor paper and reworked with water, were stacked in an especially inviting way but accompanied by two little notes that read “Please do not touch.” By clicking on the photo you can see six beautiful works that we were allowed to look at. It’s a wildly interesting show including even a circuit board negative for an old MXR effects box.

There is a four foot high pile of US Geological Survey maps at the door of the gallery and we were invited to take a map home with us. Mine shows Santa Margarita Lake in California.

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Pure Creation

Paul Dodd "Models From Crime Page" paintings from 2008 getting sun at the pool in 2017
Paul Dodd “Models From Crime Page” paintings from 2008 getting sun at the pool in 2017

Peggi is practicing sax upstairs while I work on a painting in my studio. There has hardly been time to come up for air since I found out about this show last winter. I suppose I could have just just put work in from the past. Bleu, the gallery curator, wanted to show the scope of this project, the “Models from Crime Page.” I’ve been revisiting it for over twenty years now. But as he was pushing me to show examples of the earliest pieces I could only think about doing something new. So the summer flew by and I’m still banging away, but not on my drums. I haven’t touched those since June. Not that I have any chops to lose but I don’t like cramping up after the first hour. Margaret Explosion is back at the Little on Wednesdays in October and we will be joined by the great Phil Marshall

I haven’t been listening to music while I paint. It is too distracting. But the sound of Peggi’s sax, as she plays along with Margaret Explosion recordings and melodies that she originated the when those songs were recorded is very inspiring. I can barley hear the backing tracks over the dehumidifier but her lines come through perfectly. From my vantage point it is extraordinary, the way Peggi pulls these melodies from the air. An act of pure creation. She is my favorite artist. I can always tell when she’s winding down because the last few play-alongs are from John Coltrane’s “Ballads.”

I took a bunch of paintings from 2008 down to the pool so they could sit in he sun. A funny thing happens to white oil pigment when it sits in a box for a few years but a few hours in the sun bleaches that yellowish tint.

Listen to High Life by Margaret Explosion

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Park Nuts

Walnut Man in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, New York
Walnut Man in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, New York

On a good day we don’t see anyone in the park. Actually, that is not entirely true. On really nice days we always run into other people. Most days, though, we hardly see anyone in the park. I used to find that surprising but not anymore. People have stuff to do.

We were coming back up from the lake on Pine Valley Road when we watched this guy pull over, hop out of his car and walk directly over to a tree near the side of the road. He didn’t even look back at us as we walked by so I asked, “What’s going on with that tree?” He said, “I didn’t know there was a walnut tree here. I’ve been picking walnuts from the tress over there for years but I never new there was one here.” He had a few of them in his hands already. They are about the size of a tennis ball before you get the outer green layer off. And inside that there is the wooden shell and inside that the fruit.

He told us he takes them home and soaks them in a bucket, about a hundred at a time. “If they rise to the surface I throw them out because they are rotten but that only happens to two or three.” He said he cracks them open with a rubber mallet and eats them while he’s watching tv. As he was talked he got a small shovel out of the back of his car and he cracked a few nuts open and gave us taste. They were great, nice and moist. Then he showed us a long handled pruning sheer that he uses to cut them from higher branches. I asked if the park people ever bothered him while he was picking and he said, “No, but I’m not picking nuts today, I metal detecting.”

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Big Bird

Eagle in dead tree in marsh off Hoffman Road, Rochester, New York
Eagle in dead tree in marsh off Hoffman Road, Rochester, New York

As we leave our street we get a good view of a few of the neighbors backyards. One is mostly unused but with a professionally maintained lawn. Periodically dosed with chemicals and surrounded with the yard-worker version of yellow police crime tape. A small evergreen tree, the size you would buy as a live, tabletop Christmas tree, sits in the middle of their lawn. Still in the red plastic pot from a few years back it is now partially brown.

The house next door is like Noah’s Ark. They have one of everything in their back yard. An extra car, a boat, a camper, a small patio with chairs and fire pit, a dog pen, a small vegitable garden and an old treasure chest. It wasn’t surprising that they picked up the small pink tent that we saw out by the curb further down the street last week. It caught our eye too but we assumed a little girl had outgrown it and another would find it, not these middle aged scavengers.

The other day there was a hawk on their garage and we didn’t scare it off. It was so close to us I wondered whether the bird was right (rabid?) and then I put it together that we had interrupted it. Instead of taking more photos of it I looked down at the ground and sure enough there was a dead squirrel about ten feet from us.

We continued down Hoffman Road and stopped at the marsh like we always do. There was a really big bird sitting on top of the tallest dead tree and I assumed it was another hawk with its prey. As we moved closer we started to think it might be an eagle. Steve Greive came around the bend in his Jaguar and he honked at us. That scared it off. I had to come home and compare my photo with a google “eagle” search to be convinced.

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The Experience Of Experience

Irondequoit Bay from front porch of MacGregors on Empire Boulevard in Rochester, New York
Irondequoit Bay from front porch of MacGregors on Empire Boulevard in Rochester, New York

John Ashbery grew up in Sodus NY, near where our literary friends just bought a house, and he went to school in Rochester, later living on Dartmouth Street where Peggi and I lived when we moved (back here in my case) from Indiana. I di not know much about him until died. I still don’t but I love the snippets o poetry hat have been quoted in his obits and related remembrances.

“I feel the carousel starting slowly
And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,
Photographs of friends, the window and the trees,
Merging into one neutral band that surrounds
Me on all sides, everywhere I look.
And I cannot explain the action of leveling,
Why it should all boil down to one
Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.”

Ashbery claimed that he was trying to convey “the experience of experience.” What a noble pursuit.

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I Remember Maggie

This post originally linked to a video that has since been removed by YouTube.

Actually I don’t remember doing this show at all. And I wish I didn’t remember all those years we had Maggie Brooks as our County Executive. I read this morning’s obit for the Cuban boxer, Sugar Ramos, whose opponent, Davey Moore, died three days after their bout in Dodger Stadium. Bob Dylan’s “Who Killed Davey Moore?” started going through my head and sure enough, as I read on, Dylan wrote the song based on this story. He lays the blame right where it belongs.

So off to the right, as I’m watching the video to Dylan’s song I see this “Personal Effects featuring Eddie Allen” link suggestion. Who the heck is Eddie Allen? The WHEC guy who talks over the performance and says “Let me see the little girl singer Camera 5”?

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