November 2020

NEWS. ARTS. LIFE. | NOVEMBER 2020 | FREE | SINCE 1971 COMMENTARY

HOLIDAY GUIDE

MUSIC

THIS ELECTION IS ABOUT CHARACTER - OUR OWN

ADVENT'S 24 BOTTLES OF BEER ON THE WALL

BEN MOREY SCALES BACK AND SETTLES DOWN

HOW SKATEBOARDERS SHREDDED A 13-YEAR ROAD TO ROCHESTER’S FIRST PUBLICroccitynews.org SKATEPARK CITY 1

INBOX WANNA SAY SOMETHING? NEWS. ARTS. LIFE.

CITY wants to hear you rant and rave. Your feedback must . . . . . . be no more than 250 words . . . respond to CITY content . . . be engaging

November, 2020 Vol 49 No 3 On the cover: Photo by Max Schulte Design by Ryan Williamson

CITY reserves the right to edit for accuracy, length, and readability.

280 State Street Rochester, New York 14614 feedback@rochester-citynews.com phone (585) 244-3329 roccitynews.org

Send your rants and raves to: feedback@rochester-citynews.com

CITY, 280 State St., Rochester, NY 14614 (ATTN: Feedback) LOVING THE NEW CITY I loved my first issue of CITY with the new format! I echo all the “plus” features noted by the letter writers in the October “Inbox.”

I used to find CITY too ponderous to read. Goldilocks, this is just right. There were a lot of articles I’m looking forward to reading. Thank you.

Cathy McMahon, Irondequoit

RETHINK BUYING PLASTICS Karen DeWitt’s piece on New York’s plastic bag ban taking effect (“New York to begin enforcing plastic bag ban on Oct. 19,” roccitynews.org, Sept. 25) got me thinking about a related topic.

Consider whether you want to buy something packaged in plastic at all. Unlike glass, metal, and paper recycling, plastic recycling is a myth.

Don’t let the recycle symbol fool you into thinking a plastic item will be recycled. Nationally, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, only 8 percent of plastic is actually recycled.

What happens to the other 92 percent? Some of it goes into landfills where it remains for hundreds of years.

Some of it goes into incinerators where gases like dioxin and carbon dioxide are released into the air. Some of it goes into waterways and oceans, where it’s a threat to marine life.

How did we get into this situation?

Plastic is made from fossil fuels. Recycling plastics isn’t feasible. But the makers of plastic knew that when they started a deceptive multi-million-dollar advertising campaign in the 1990s to promote 2 CITY

NOVEMBER 2020

PUBLISHER Rochester Area Media Partners LLC, Norm Silverstein, chairman

SIGNS AND CONSEQUENCES Upon reading “Fairport says farewell to its ‘first white child’ memorial” (October 2020), I was surprised at the author’s suggestion that “anyone setting eyes for the first time [on the marker] could have been forgiven for doing a double-take.”

In tumultuous times, this piece read like a literary manifestation of white guilt. I feel that imposing our values and “woke” vocabulary on events that took place in the late 1700’s is akin to fighting ghosts. We are assigning racist intent to the placement of a sign in 1949 instead of simply taking it for what it is; a historical record. While detailed in the discussion of framing history in the context of race, the article didn’t offer any substance or insight into the outcomes of removing signs deemed offensive by our current cultural context.

Can we ever truly live in a post-racial world if we’re constantly clogging our bandwidth with considerations on whether a monument for an historical event is racist?

Jon Bray, Rochester recycling. That advertising told us plastic would be recycled into useful products.

Their strategy was to get us to believe plastic recycling was good for our environment so we wouldn’t think about plastic waste. Meanwhile, they unethically made huge profits at the expense of our environment.

Much of this material is single-use plastic found in supermarkets (bottles for juice, soda, salad dressing, etc.).

Alternative packaging like glass and metal should be offered in stores. If enough customers tell supermarkets they want less plastic packaging, stores would listen.

Speak up.

Leo Giannavola, Webster LOCAL THEATER IN THE SPOTLIGHT I didn’t expect my letter criticizing CITY’s Best of Rochester’s limited recognition of the local theater scene to be published in the October issue.

I also didn’t expect to see it posted under the heading, “Hell hath no fury,” with a response from CITY.

At first I was disappointed, feeling both that my comments about how some theater shows before the pandemic were ignored and that CITY could have been more sensitive to the criticism. I still feel that way to some extent, but as far as CITY’s recognition of theater as a whole during this tough year, my feeling of disappointment has fallen off.

It’s easy to see why some in the theater community may have felt the way I felt when CITY offered only one theater category in its Best-of poll.

Yet the community I think recognizes the value of CITY’s coverage of local theater. CITY has been a champion of those shows, and I know it will continue supporting what we do. Limiting the theater categories this year could not have been an easy decision.

Let’s hope 2021 will be a better year for theater to get more recognition, even if it’s just in one category. It’s better than nothing at all, right?

Justin Rielly, Rochester Rielly is the founder of Aspie Works.

FOUNDERS Bill and Mary Anna Towler EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT themail@rochester-citynews.com Editor: David Andreatta News editor: Jeremy Moule Staff writer: Gino Fanelli Arts & entertainment editor: Rebecca Rafferty Music editor: Daniel J. Kushner Music writer: Frank De Blase Calendar editor: Kate Stathis Contributing writers: Beth Adams, Roman Divezur, Adam Lubitow, Vince Press, David Raymond, Chris Thompson CREATIVE DEPARTMENT artdept@rochester-citynews.com Creative director: Ryan Williamson Designer/Photographer: Jacob Walsh ADVERTISING DEPARTMENT ads@rochester-citynews.com Sales manager: Alison Zero Jones Advertising consultant/ Project mananger: David White OPERATIONS/CIRCULATION Operations manager: Ryan Williamson Circulation manager: Katherine Stathis kstathis@rochester-citynews.com CITY is available free of charge. Additional copies of the current issue may be purchased by calling 585-784-3503. CITY may be distributed only by authorized distributors. No person may, without prior written permission of CITY, take more than one copy of each monthly issue.

CITY (ISSN 1551-3262) is published monthly 12 times per year by Rochester Area Media Partners, a subsidiary of WXXI Public Broadcasting. Periodical postage paid at Rochester, NY (USPS 022-138). Address changes: CITY, 280 State Street, Rochester, NY 14614. Member of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia and the New York Press Association.

Copyright by Rochester Area Media Partners LLC, 2020 - all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, photocopying, recording or by any information storage retrieval system without permission of the copyright owner.

@ROCCITYNEWS

IN THIS ISSUE OPENING SHOT

Tens of thousands of voters cast their ballot early in Monroe County this year.

Lauren and Charlie Trible of Pittsford wait in line to vote at Perinton Square Mall on the first day of early voting in New York. PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE

NEWS

8

IS ROCHESTER READY FOR 'OPEN HIRING'?

No background checks, no interviews, no drug tests — no problems.

ARTS

LIFE

16

42

Artist Annalisa Barron mines the city's history with photography and film for her latest project.

BY BETH ADAMS

10

THE LONG GRIND

BY GINO FANELLI

BORED OF ETHICS

State auditors finger-wag City Hall on its ethics oversight.

BY DAVID ANDREATTA & JEREMY MOULE

24

THE RISE OF THE UNDEAD

Rochester's Undeath soars on the death metal scene.

26

The Memorial Art Gallery opens an Andy Warhol exhibit, and a local legend has a story to tell.

BY JEFF SPEVAK

IN TROUBLE? WHO YOU GONNA CALL? JOE DAMELIO

BY DAVID ANDREATTA

54

BY GINO FANELLI

THE GREATEST WARHOL STORY NEVER TOLD

PUBLIC LIVES:

He's the go-to lawyer for power brokers, pawns, and paupers up against the law.

BY DANIEL J. KUSHNER

ON THE COVER

How skateboarders shredded a 13-year road to Rochester's first and only public skatepark.

14

COLLECTING MEMORIES, CREATING ART

A MEAL TO REMEMBER

Inside Avvino's Janine and Tim Caschette's Thanksgiving bash.

BY VINCE PRESS

60

NOW HIRING: SANTA CLAUS

What it takes to be a professional Saint Nick. He knows if you'll be bad or good.

BY GINO FANELLI

MORE NEWS, ARTS, AND LIFE INSIDE INCLUDING OUR HOLIDAY GUIDE STARTING ON PAGE 48 roccitynews.org

CITY 3

WELCOME

Got art? It does a body good.

Y

ou’ve probably heard by now that a growing body of research shows that the arts are integral to our overall health and wellness.

That comes as no surprise at CITY, where our tagline — News. Arts. Life. — puts the arts at the center of everything we do.

People have used pictures, stories, dances, and chants as healing rituals since the beginning of recorded time. Whether they worked was a matter of faith for millennia.

In recent decades, though, empirical evidence from numerous studies have shown that art and music can soothe chronic pain, stave off dementia, and accelerate brain development in children. One study showed that simply being exposed to the arts may help us live longer.

Researchers in London who followed thousands of people 50 and older over a 14year period revealed in a paper published last year in The BMJ that those who went to a museum or a concert just once or twice a year were 14 percent less likely to die during that period than those who didn’t.

And they found that the chances of living longer increased with the frequency that people engaged with the arts. The study controlled for socioeconomic factors, like income, education, and mobility — all factors in overall health. Even taking that into account, there was a difference in the survival rate of people who were involved in the arts.

Interestingly, the study didn’t examine what kind of art led to a longer life. In other words, it isn’t clear whether living longer hinges on listening to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” or taking in a pop art exhibit, like the tribute to Andy Warhol now showing at the Memorial Art Gallery.

Does enjoying Elmer Fudd singing “Kiww da wabbit!” to urgent strains of “Ride of the Valkyries” as he jabs his spear into a rabbit hole count? Maybe.

A lead researcher of that study theorized that having a sense of purpose was integral to living longer, healthier lives and that being involved in and excited about the arts, in whatever form, helped most participants maintain a sense of purpose.

That sense of purpose surfaces repeatedly in the eclectic stories about the arts and artists in this month’s issue of CITY. Our reporting highlights the newfound success of a local death metal band; explores what moved a 70-year-old man living off the grid to record a solo Americana folk rock album; tells of the curious camaraderie between a Rochester guitar store owner and the most celebrated pop artist of the last century; reviews a documentary that examines our city’s deep relationship with photography, Bob Bunce gives "unplugged" and delves into the inspiration behind a new a whole new meaning. Page 22. installment of cinematic sculptures at a literary PHOTO BY RYAN WILLIAMSON center in the Neighborhood of the Arts.

We think these stories, and other content in this issue that underscore the importance of the arts, are worth telling, especially in light of the ongoing health crisis and the toll it has taken on so many of us.

Whether our artists are on the cusp of greatness or creating in obscurity, their sense of purpose is contagious.

David Andreatta, Editor

Thoughts about the new CITY? Tell us at feedback@rochester-citynews.com 4 CITY

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EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

The election was about character — our own

BY DAVID ANDREATTA

@DAVID_ANDREATTA

DANDREATTA@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM

B

y the time most of you read this, the election will be over and we will know what Americans value.

As of this writing, though, only a few days of early voting have passed. Tens of thousands of voters in Monroe County and many tens of thousands more across New York waited in long lines that snaked around buildings and stretched for blocks outside polling sites.

Who among them made the right choice?

Every one of them with whom I spoke recognized that the election was less about ideas than about contrasting visions of what the United States is, should be, and can become. It was a reflection of character — not only of the two men running for president, but our own.

We’ve heard this in some fashion from the candidates themselves.

“At no time before,” President Donald Trump said in August, “have voters faced a clearer choice between two parties, two visions, two philosophies or two agendas.”

In the final presidential debate before the election, Joe Biden echoed a theme of his campaign when he looked directly into the camera and said, “You know who he is,” referring to Trump. “You know his character.

You know my character.”

In the general sense, “character” means the mental and moral qualities distinctive to a person. But what we’re really talking about is good character — one that nurtures the once universally celebrated traits of courage, composure, integrity, and justice.

We don’t value those traits anymore the way we should. Character has been overshadowed by other attributes, namely status, fame, and financial success. That much became obvious with Trump’s election in 2016.

He flaunted bad character and became president. His own words about grabbing women, mocking a disabled reporter, and referring to veterans as “suckers” and “losers” couldn’t overpower America’s

Long lines snaked around buildings and stretched around blocks outside early voting polling sites. PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE

fascination with his celebrity and purported business acumen.

One powerful television ad by his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, asked voters to imagine how a Trump presidency might shape a child, the future of this country. The ad, called “Role Models,” showed closeups of children gazing at TV screens broadcasting real footage of Trump making caustic remarks, some of them R-rated, on the campaign trail.

Not enough Americans batted an eye. As the father of two young boys of impressionable ages, I wish more had.

Four years ago, Trump pledged to stock his administration with “only the best and most serious people” and “top-of-the-line professionals,” then proceeded to open the White House doors to a parade of liars, opportunists, grifters, incompetents, and crooks — people devoid of character, people no one in their right mind would want their children to become.

There are a handful of people in his administration who maintained

their character, mostly civil servant holdovers, like Dr. Anthony Fauci.

How was he rewarded? The president impugned his character.

Leaders draw people like themselves into their orbits. Intellectuals attract intellectuals. Compassion begets compassion. Given that the president is a narcissistic boor peddling a paranoid vision of America detached from truth, is it any wonder that someone like Breitbart News founder Steve Bannon had a starring role in his administration and still has his ear?

Did the people who stood in line to vote early see that? I didn’t ask them for whom they voted, but rather why they felt compelled to vote early.

“I have been waiting four years to do this,” said Joanne Wexler, who spent about a half hour in line at Perinton Square Mall on a Sunday to cast her ballot.

Gary Peterson said he wanted his voice heard. “The way things look, it will be a drastic change for our country and the world as we know it,” he said.

For Scott Andrews, he simply couldn’t wait to Election Day. “You look at Nov. 3 coming up and I’m so riled up, I just wanted to make sure I could get my vote in,” he said.

Arnold Condon, a 76-year-old Vietnam War veteran and former Rochester police officer, asked, only half-jokingly, “What if I die before Election Day?” If that happened, chances are his family and friends would gather to celebrate his life and reflect on his character. In the end, it is our character that matters most.

My hope is that Americans will have had a change of heart about the importance of character in our nation, our president, and ourselves, and have done the right thing this election.

Winston Churchill was said to have once famously observed that Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, after all other possibilities have been exhausted.

Was he right? roccitynews.org

CITY 5

NEWS

OFF THE RAILS

Monroe County emergency responders have been warned that trains hauling liquefied natural gas are coming to the Rochester area. PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE

‘Bomb trains’ may be coming to a railroad crossing near you

BY JEREMY MOULE

R

@JFMOULE

ochester and its suburbs could be in the path of a new wave of so-called “bomb trains” — engines pulling strings of tankers laden with highly combustible fuel that could explode in the event of a derailment — due to a recent federal rule allowing liquefied natural gas to be transported by rail.

While natural gas is extremely flammable, it is not explosive in its liquid state. But spilled liquefied natural gas, or LNG, evaporates rapidly, forming a highly-combustible vapor that, if ignited, could be disastrous.

A devastating explosion that occurred at a liquefied natural gas plant in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1944 when a full storage tank burst killed 128 people, injured 225, and scorched some 30 acres of land. Advances in cold-storage technology since then have significantly reduced the likelihood of a similar incident, according to experts, and liquefied natural gas has been shipped on water by container ships for decades without any major incident.

But the prospect of a derailment of a liquefied natural gas shipment by train has raised concerns among 6 CITY

NOVEMBER 2020

JMOULE@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM

transportation and fire safety authorities.

The National Transportation Safety Board and the National Association of State Fire Marshals both objected to the new regulation.

The rule, which faces several legal challenges, clears the way for trains to carry up to 100 tankers of liquefied natural gas on American railroads, as long as the gas is stored in a specificallydesigned tanker whose safety record in hauling LNG is largely untested.

An American Association of Railroads spokesperson said that liquefied natural gas isn’t being shipped in bulk under the new rule because the necessary tankers haven’t been built yet. She said a long lead time is needed to manufacture them and that they cost between $650,000 and $750,000 apiece. Railroads don’t own the cars, shippers have to buy or lease them, she added.

But the Rochester Fire Department, which leads the hazardous materials response for Monroe County, has been warned that trains hauling liquefied natural gas are coming to the area.

“We know it’s there, we know it’s moving through the region,” said Jamie Renner, lieutenant of special operations at RFD. “It’s on our radar but it’s not

on the top of the list for what we lose sleep over.” That spot, he added, is reserved for toxic industrial chemicals.

In response to an inquiry, a CSX spokesperson Cindy Schild told CITY that its two main rail lines in Rochester aren’t currently being used to transport liquefied natural gas. She declined to speculate as to when LNG trains could be expected here, saying only that the company is “currently evaluating the potential market opportunity of the new rule.”

In general, there is little public transparency around what trains haul through any given area at any given time.

A MATTER OF TIME Even if trains laden with liquefied natural gas aren’t coming through Rochester now, there’s reason to believe they might.

Rochester is on a rail line already used to transport other fossil fuels, including volatile crude oil. Shipments of crude oil have skyrocketed since 2010, in light of a dearth of pipelines connecting the oil-rich Bakken Shale region of Montana and North Dakota to the rest of the country.

It was an unattended train carrying

crude oil whose derailment reduced a half-mile swath of the tiny Quebec town of Lac-Megantic to embers.

The fire from that explosion killed 47 people and consumed 30 buildings.

A major CSX crude oil train line cuts through Monroe County, including the city of Rochester. The railways connect crude from the Bakken formation to a terminal at the Port of Albany as well as terminals and refineries in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The same line is used to transport tank cars of liquefied propane across the Northeast.

Rail and energy companies envision using similar virtual pipelines to get liquefied natural gas to export terminals and domestic markets.

“We would expect to see a lot of demand for rail-based transportation of LNG in the Northeast where it may be politically difficult to build new pipelines,” said Jordan Luebkemann, an attorney with the environmental group Earthjustice, which is part of a lawsuit seeking to overturn the rule. “I see this as an end run around the popular and political opposition to building new pipelines.”

In its objections to the rule

sent to the federal Department of Transportation, Earthjustice said that an LNG spill could potentially level an entire city.

Leading the litigation to roll back the rule are 14 states, including New York, as well as the District of Columbia. They argue that the rule is unlawful under the Hazardous Materials Transportation Act, which was signed in 1975 by President Gerald Ford.

The CSX oil train route that passes through Rochester crosses gas producing regions of Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania before cutting through Monroe County and continuing east to Albany, which is connected by other rail lines to major New England markets.

Natural gas suppliers and large consumers such as utility companies claim that interstate pipeline bottlenecks prevent them from meeting growing demand in downstate New York and parts of New England. They blame the bottlenecks on New York regulators, who have blocked pipeline projects that would boost natural gas supplies to those regions.

Presently, New York is heavily dependent on natural gas. In 2018, the fuel was used to generate roughly 35 percent of electricity consumed in the state, according to data from the federal Energy Information Administration.

The state had 4.5 million residential natural gas consumers in 2019, a 2-percent increase from 2014.

But state officials and regulators, with urging from environmental and social justice groups, have taken steps to transition the state away from natural gas and other fossil fuels. A 2019 state law set an aggressive goal for New York to reduce its carbon emissions to at least 85 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

It also calls for 70 percent of energy consumed in the state to come from renewable sources by 2040.

State regulators recently rejected a downstate natural gas pipeline proposal partly on the grounds that it was in conflict with the state’s energy and emissions goals. They also cited its potential to degrade water quality, a justification they’d used to nix other pipeline proposals over the past few years.

Although natural gas is a cleaner fuel than coal or oil, it is still a fossil fuel that contributes to climate change and, for that reason, its use needs to end as quickly as possible, said Abby McHugh-

The explosion of a runaway freight train carrying crude oil in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in 2013 killed 47 and destroyed a wide swath of the town.

COURTESY TRANSPORTATION SAFTEY BOARD OF CANADA

Grifa, executive director of the Climate Solutions Accelerator of the GeneseeFinger Lakes Region.

“I do personally find the bomb train idea alarming,” McHugh-Grifa said.

“But in the scheme of things, what I find even more alarming is that we are continuing to contribute to the problem of climate change which has much greater implications over both the short and long term for our communities.”

EXECUTIVE ORDER CLEARED THE WAY The new federal rule stems from an April 2019 executive order from President Donald Trump which called for federal agencies to rewrite rules to allow trains to haul liquefied natural gas in bulk.

The DCReport.org, a Trump administration watchdog media outlet founded by Rochester-based journalist David Cay Johnston, reported that the regulation financially benefits an energy company founded by Wes Edens, the co-founder of the Fortress Investment Group hedge fund that helped loan the Trump Organization $130 to build the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago in 2005.

Until now, there have only been a few places around the country where trains have been allowed to carry liquefied natural gas, and, as the NTSB noted in its objections to the rule, that was only under a special permit from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and

with a tank that met Federal Railroad Administration approval.

Opponents have criticized the agencies responsible for drafting and finalizing the regulation — namely the Department of Transportation and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration — for moving too quickly and not doing enough to ensure that transporting liquefied natural gas by rail is indeed safe.

For instance, the NTSB pointed out in its objections that “there is scant accident data” on the tank car proposed to carry LNG in bulk — a car known as DOT-113 — and called for a “thorough safety assessment” of the car.

“Until such time as the risks associated with transporting large numbers of LNG tank cars in a single train are better understood, the NTSB strongly suggests that PHMSA use this rulemaking opportunity to implement operational controls similar to the protections currently in place for highhazard flammable trains,” the NTSB chairman, Robert Sumwalt, wrote in his objections to the rule late last year.

“We believe the risks of catastrophic LNG releases in accidents is too great not to have operational controls in place before large blocks of tank cars and unit trains proliferate.”

Environmental groups, the International Association of Firefighters (IAFF) union, and attorneys general from the more than a dozen states suing the federal government also argue

that transporting vast amounts of a volatile fossil fuel, particularly through cities and other populated areas, is inherently risky.

One DOT-113 car can carry about 30,000 gallons. The rule allows for one train to haul 100 such tankers.

“It is nearly certain any accident involving a train consisting of multiple rail cars loaded with LNG will place vast numbers of the public at risk while fully depleting all local emergency response forces,” read comments submitted by the IAFF during the rule’s review period.

If a natural gas train passing through the Rochester area were to derail and ignite, it would be an allhands-on-deck scenario for emergency crews across Monroe County, just as it would for a train carrying crude oil or another hazardous substance, said Renner, the RFD lieutenant said.

The Rochester Fire Department is “able to handle pretty much anything that’s thrown at us.” Renner said.

The liquefied natural gas accident that devastated Cleveland in 1944 occurred after the gas leaked from the storage tank into sewer lines. Multiple explosions occurred over a square mile and flames reaching 2,800 feet high reportedly licked the sky.

“It was as if a flame-thrower had been turned on you,” one man who witnessed the devastation and survived told the local newspaper.

roccitynews.org

CITY 7

NEWS

JOBS FOR ALL

Police confront demonstrators on Broad Street during a Black Lives Matter protest on May 30. PHOTO BY GINO FANELLI

Eddie Chapple cleans and polishes a floor at an industrial park on Rochester's west side. He landed his job with CleanCraft through the open hiring process. PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE

No background checks, no drug tests, no interview – no problem

BY BETH ADAMS

H

@BETHADAMS20

e probably didn’t realize it at the time, but Sanford Coley’s life took a dramatic turn in the mid-1990s.

That’s when Coley, who is now 66, got a job at CleanCraft, a commercial cleaning company in Rochester. He had interviewed for 10 or 15 other jobs before this one came through.

“Being an ex-felon,” he said, “other companies just looked over me, and it was tough.”

Ty Hookway, CleanCraft’s founder and president, didn’t know about his employee’s criminal history until one day, about six months after hiring him, he noticed an electronic monitoring device on Coley’s ankle.

“And it turns out he had robbed a bank, believe it or not,” Hookway

8 CITY

NOVEMBER 2020

BADAMS@WXXI.ORG

recalled. “He had just gotten out of prison and I had no idea, and I was completely nervous and worried and Sanford said, ‘Give me a chance, give me a chance.’”

Hookway gave Coley that chance, and Coley earned his trust.

“Twenty five years later, he’s one of my best friends. He’s one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met,” Hookway said. “He still works for me part-time now, but he retired after watching like 120 people, one of my highest-level and (highest)-paid managers.”

Hookway said the experience inspired him to be more open-minded about who he hires. So when he heard the term “open hiring” for the first time at a conference on conscious capitalism about six years ago, he realized he had

already been practicing a form of it for over a decade.

The concept is the main principle of Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, New York, which opened in 1982. It was the brainchild of Bernie Glassman, an aeronautical engineer turned Zen master and Buddhism teacher from Brooklyn.

Glassman, who died in 2018, opened the bakery with the help of the Zen Community of New York as a way to employ his Zen students. He began hiring any student who wanted to work, even if they had an arrest record or lacked work experience.

NO BACKGROUND CHECKS, NO DRUG TESTS, NO INTERVIEWS The Greyston Center for Open Hiring was later established to encourage

other business owners to replicate the hiring model. It is targeted specifically at companies that need entry-level workers to fill jobs in areas such as production, construction, or cleaning.

The approach is simple. Anyone who is legally authorized to work can sign up on a first-come, first-served waiting list. When a job opens, the next person on the list gets a call.

“We don’t do background checks, we don’t do interviews, we don’t do drug testing. We, basically, are looking at the person’s potential and not issues that may have happened in their past,” explained Mubarak Bashir, the regional director of the Greyston Center for Open Hiring of Rochester. “We just want to make sure we give people the opportunity to get to work.”

In June, the Rochester site became the first satellite center to open outside of Yonkers, with encouragement from Hookway and financial support from the Rochester Area Community Foundation, the ESL Charitable Foundation, and other organizations.

The center is in northwest Rochester at 55 Rutter St., off Lyell Avenue and adjacent to CleanCraft headquarters.

The sites spread the word about the open hiring model throughout their respective business communities.

Sara Marcus, director of the Yonkers center, said Rochester is a natural fit for the project.

“In some ways,” she said, “even though it’s a much smaller city, there are a lot of similarities between Rochester and southwest Yonkers in terms of rates of poverty and unemployment being generally higher than the national average, vast income inequality, and racial disparity.”

The centers not only urge employers to remove obstacles for prospective workers, they also provide so-called “wraparound services” to help those who are hired succeed in their work.

That includes assistance with services like transportation, housing, and mental health. At Greyston Bakery and CleanCraft, even employees who were not brought on board through open hiring are eligible for the benefits.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, executive-level professionals at Greyston received help with child care.

If open hiring opens doors for people who are homeless, have a criminal background, or other barriers to employment, what’s in it for the employer?

Both Bashir and Marcus pointed out that opening hiring is a business model, not a social services program.

They noted that companies that rely heavily on entry-level workers also face extremely high employee turnover rates.

Marcus said the open hiring has made a difference at Greyston Bakery. Roughly 40 to 50 percent of the employees who start a six- to nine-month apprenticeship remain in the program.

“That’s pretty much in line with industry standard, in terms of turnover,” she said. “But then, those for whom it works out and they stay, they often stay for quite some time. We find that we get really committed, loyal talent through this model.”

From left, Eddie Chapple, Sanford Coley, and Ty Hookway. Chapple was hired at CleanCraft about six years ago, and Coley started at the commercial cleaning company owned by Hookway in the 1990s. PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE

The Greyston Center in Yonkers works with a handful of employers, including the UK-based cosmetics, skin care, and perfume company The Body Shop.

According to Marcus, the company hired about 200 open hire employees to work at its distribution center in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, starting in October 2019. She said turnover there has decreased by 60 percent and that the facility has increased production by 13 percent.

“We’ve heard from The Body Shop at their distribution center that suddenly their supervisors were more engaged in the work because suddenly their job wasn’t just moving boxes. They were really in the business of transforming lives,” Marcus said.

NOT ALL-OR-NOTHING Still, not all employers are convinced open hiring would work for them.

Hookway hears this all the time.

“Most of my friends have big companies,” he said. “A lot of them are like, ‘Ty, are you crazy? You can’t do this.’”

But open hiring doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. At CleanCraft, for instance, about 10 percent of its 400-person workforce is hired through this model.

And they’re not guaranteed a permanent job, only an opportunity. Marcus said the biggest misconception about open hiring is that there is no accountability for workers.

“I think people think that there’s chaos in our bakery because we do no screening on our employees, but that’s so far from the truth,” she said. “Our bakery supplies brownies to Ben and Jerry’s, so we have to meet the highest food safety and quality standards, and we also have to run a profitable business and so we have a pretty rigorous accountability model in place.”

In the fall of 2019, Adrian Hale, strategic initiatives manager at the Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce, toured the Greyston Bakery in Yonkers.

He was quickly sold on the concept of open hiring.

Hale said organizations like Greyston don’t view corporate social responsibility as a public relations endeavor, but as a way to create shared value for highneeds populations and the community at large.

He thinks Rochester can benefit from the initiative because he believes the practices that employers in the region have been using have not been historically equitable or inclusive.

“I grew up in the 14621 ZIP code, extremely poor,” Hale said.

“We were dependent on every government program you can imagine, and I just can’t help but think if these kind of workforce developers and talent strategists and economic developers were having these kinds of conversations when I was a young kid, how much different my life and the lives of all my peers would be.”

OPEN HIRING MEANS BEING OPEN-MINDED Bashir has been cold-calling local business owners to educate them and try to sell them on the open hiring concept.

He’s also having conversations with community-based organizations about how open hiring could serve some of the clients they work with.

“We say we’re not looking for people that are looking to climb the ladder.

We’re looking for people who are trying to find the ladder,” Bashir said.

At CleanCraft, Coley recently came out of retirement to help the company manage cleaning crews during the pandemic, which forced new standards of maintenance.

He has mentored a number of coworkers in his more than two decades with the company and sees some of them climb the ladder like he did.

“You’ve got to be open minded about it and give a person a chance,” he said. “You might get a bad seed in here at the same time and then you might get a great guy that goes from cleaning toilets to managing 10, 15 people.”

Eddie Chapple, 40, was hired at CleanCraft six years ago. He said he landed the job through the open hiring process. Before that, he was juggling three part-time jobs and trying to build a new life after he served time in prison for drug possession.

“When I filled out my application, I didn’t lie,” Chapple said. “I told them I had a felony. I was actually on light parole when I got hired. Me being honest, they accepted it.”

He said he feels respected and valued at work, which was a new experience for him. “It motivated me to do more hard work,” he said. “In six years, I probably had nine or 10 raises.”

Chapple said when his mother died four years ago, the company supported him through his grief. On another occasion, he said the company guided him through financial difficulties.

As for Coley, he said he has watched his income grow.

When he started at CleanCraft more than 20 years ago, he made about $10,000 a year. He worked his way up to $50,000, and views the opportunity to get there as changing the course of his life.

“I’m still with the wife,” he said. “I might not have been with her 20 years ago, the way I was living. My life’s been good.” roccitynews.org

CITY 9

Kanten Russell, professional skateboarder from California, designed the Roc City Skatepark.

10 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

HOW SKATEBOARDERS SHREDDED A 13-YEAR ROAD TO ROCHESTER’S FIRST PUBLIC SKATEPARK

BY GINO FANELLI // PHOTOS BY MAX SCHULTE

ON A CRISP OCTOBER DAY, a handful of construction workers mill about the underbelly of the Frederick Douglass-Susan B. Anthony Bridge, an acre expanse that was once occupied by a nearly year-round tent encampment for homeless people.

The workers walk on concrete platforms and bowls as smooth as glass, taking measurements here and pouring concrete into small gaps there. Some are clad in neon construction vests. Others wear camouflage jackets embossed with the logo of Thrasher, the monthly magazine that is the bible of the skateboarding universe.

They are putting the final touches on the first phase of the Roc City Skatepark, a 26,000-square foot skate plaza on previously vacant land along the Genesee River, and in the process delivering on a dream of the skateboarding community that was 13 years in the making. CONTINUED ON PAGE 12

roccitynews.org CITY 11 roccitynews.org CITY 11

Among them is a tall and lanky man with a beard speckled with gray. His name is Alan Presutti, who, as the 46-year-old executive director of the Friends of the Roc City Skatepark, has been at the forefront of the push for a city skatepark for a third of his life.

“I’ve always tried to stay focused, I always believed this was going to happen,” Presutti said. “For me, failure wasn’t an option. This is who I am, I’m a skateboarder, it’s how I live, how I breathe, since I was 13 years old.”

Describing the park, which was slated to open Nov. 5, as a long-overdue development for local skaters doesn’t adequately encapsulate what the place means to the skateboarding community.

Until now, Rochester was said to have been the only city among the 125 largest in the country without a public skatepark. Skating in the city and its suburbs has for decades been a nomadic pursuit, with its practitioners relegated to grinding on storefront window ledges and parking lot curbs and kickflipping off supermarket loading docks, spots from which they were inevitably ousted.

Through skating, or simply looking for a place to skate, many skaters had their first encounters with police and security guards. They received warnings and citations and the wrath of residents who complained about the thwacking noise of their passion. Toss in the tattoos, the music, and the studied ragtag appearance associated with the sport, and you had athletes consigned to second-class citizen status.

For them, the Roc City Skatepark offers a message of validation: we have arrived. But it seemed to take forever.

OLLIEING OBSTACLE AFTER OBSTACLE

The Friends of the Roc City Skatepark organized in February 2008 and that year began holding public information meetings around a potential city skatepark. The group also received a $10,000 grant from the Tony Hawk Foundation. Initially, it had hoped the park would take off swiftly.

That was not to be the case, however. After much debate among city officials as to where to locate the park and how to fund it, a proposal was eventually submitted, only to be abandoned in time, overshadowed by projects that held greater priority.

“For a long time, it really felt like every time we took one step forward, we took three steps back,” said Aaron Costa, owner of the Rochester skateshop Krudco.

One of the major steps forward happened in 2013, as the city began to flirt with the idea of putting the park under the bridge. Stantec, the engineering firm currently working on the park, had released renderings for a skate plaza and a $50,000 feasibility study was carried out by the city, which found the project viable.

The following year, though, the city’s eye shifted toward Charles Carroll Plaza on Andrews Street as a potential location for the park, which would have been the anchor to a broad renovation of the plaza

Roc City Skatepark designer Kanten Russell checks the pool coping on the bowl during a walk-through before the park was opened to the public.

12 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

and accompanying parking garage. But that plan was later scrapped, and for Jim Maddison, then president of Friends of the Roc City Skatepark, there was a sinking feeling that the project was dead in the water.

“We had nothing at that point,” Maddison said. “They were going to move it there, leverage all of these resources, fix the garage, and we will put the skatepark there, and that went to nothing, no, we aren’t doing that.”

Maddison and Presutti said they believed Mayor Lovely Warren, the fourth mayor to hold office since talk of a park began, was sincere in her intent to build a skatepark. But for them, answers to questions of where and when and, more critically, expense, became increasingly elusive as the years wore on.

“Rochester can be a very conservative city,” Presutti said. “It can be difficult to convince people why we need this, and how much money we need to spend to do it right.”

But a windfall came in 2018 when Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Roc the Riverway, a series of development projects along the riverfront bolstered by $50 million in state funding. The skatepark, now firmly planned to one day open under the bridge, was set to receive $1 million in support.

Additionally, the Tony Hawk Foundation, which through its “Built to Play” initiative helps underserved skateboarding communities open skateparks, pledged $250,000 to the project. The total cost of the park clocked in at $1.5 million.

The skatepark was again alive, and ground was broken the following year.

C F

Legend: A. Skatepark entry, B. Bowl area entry/mini-ramp, C. Top deck, D. Multi-depth bowl with pool coping, E. Seven-stair handrails, Hubba ledge and bank, F. Grind ledge, G. Nine-stair with handrail and Hubba ledges, H. A-frame with ledge, rail and quarter pipe hip. (Under Insterstate 490 and not pictured: Mellow bank with rail and Hubba ledges, flat rail, manual pad/flat ledge, and quarter pipe extension.)

A D

ROLLING ONWARD

G

B A

E

H

A SAFE HAVEN

Skateboarding and rebellion have been intertwined since the earliest days of 1970s California sidewalk surfing. But it was less by choice than design that skateboarding became an outlaw pursuit.

“Being a kid growing up in this sport, we didn’t want to have to run from security guards or trespass,” Presutti said. “That was something we had to do, there was nowhere safe for us to go. It was a risk we had to take just to be able to do this thing we all really loved.”

Skateboarding today is no longer an underground sport by any definition. It is firmly embedded in youth culture. This year, researchers at the University of Southern California published a study — funded by the Tony Hawk Foundation — that showed how skateboarding builds resilience, encourages diversity, and fosters community in young people across varying backgrounds.

Lest there be any doubt about skateboarding’s mainstream appeal, the sport is set to debut as an Olympic event at the next Summer Olympics in Tokyo. The global skateboard market is currently valued at just shy of $2 billion annually and financial analysts have projected it to rise nearly 25 percent to $2.4 billion by 2025. A skatepark building boom in cities and towns across the country has fueled growth in the sport, as has sponsorship support from huge companies like Nike and Pepsico.

“The new generation of kids are into ‘action sports,’ skateboarding, BMX, roller skating,” Costa said. “You look at this wide group of individuals, from five year olds to 50-year-olds, there’s whole families that do this activity. And there’s nowhere for them to go.”

Supporters of the skatepark believe what kept it on hold in Rochester for so long was a lack of recognition of the public benefit that skateparks offer. While there is a stigma that skateparks attract crime, other cities have reported seeing the opposite effect. Following the

construction of a skate plaza in a high crime area in Long Beach, California, in 2008 for instance, the city reported that drug-related incidents fell 61 percent and that violent crime dropped by 29 percent in the immediate area.

Costa believes the skatepark will inevitably bring more money to the city.

“When you have an attraction like this, you’ll have people not just from Rochester, but from the surrounding towns coming here for the day,” Costa said. “And what will they do when they’re here? They’ll spend money at my shop, or they’ll get lunch, they’ll spend money in our community.”

On a recent Tuesday night, Kanten Russell, a professional skateboarder-turned-skatepark designer from California, hopped a plane there to Rochester. In two days, he would be under the Frederick Douglass-Susan B. Anthony Bridge for a final walkthrough of the park he designed.

On the walk, he pointed to subtle artistic touches he thought encapsulated a true “Rochester” look. Rails painted a vibrant yellow and complemented by ledges of cool blue. Mosaic tiling on the lip of the nine-feet deep pool is also laid out in the same color scheme.

At the center, a steel Flour City-Flower City logo star supports a kinked rail over a pyramid.

“Really, the way we enjoy trying to start off a project is kicking it off the right way and looking at it from a high level perspective,” Russell said. “Does it fit here? What will it look like? How much will it cost?

Those are the first steps.”

Russell said careful consideration was put into making sure there was something for everyone at the finished park. There are mellow banks, low ledges, and plenty of stout transition pieces for novices. At the same time, there are full vertical sections, handrails, stair sets, and steep ledges for the more daring shredders. Russell said it was meant to be a “community asset.”

“At the end of the day, the skaters and the residents who don’t ride are going to be able to celebrate, highfive on what it looks like as part of the community,” Russell said.

While the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the park marked a win for the skateboarding community, members of the Friends of the Roc City Skatepark said there is still work to be done to create their grand vision.

Presutti envisions a county-wide network of parks, with small safe-skate spots around the city and each suburban town having its own park, all of it designed by skaters.

He points specifically to Honeoye Falls, where the town greenlit skaters to build their own park at Monroe Street Village Park. The project began last year, and continues to grow.

“We have to think about the resources we have available to the kids here,” Presutti said. “I hope that once this park is settled in, the city sees how much value is here.”

Maddison, who does not participate in any action sports, picked up work with the Friends after making a promise to his children to get a skatepark built. Those children were 10 and 4 years old at the time. They’re now in their teens and early 20s. Maddison said he sees the park as a promise fulfilled.

“We’ve never had a good park in Rochester,” said Maddison’s son, 16-year-old Harry. “We’ve had indoor parks, but it’s hard to go with your friends because you always have to pay.”

“This just means a lot,” he added. “We have somewhere to go every day.” roccitynews.org CITY 13

NEWS

BORED OF ETHICS

State auditors finger-wag city on ethics training

BY DAVID ANDREATTA & JEREMY MOULE

T

wo weeks after the family of Daniel Prude and its attorneys made his death and the circumstances around it public, Mayor Lovely Warren, under pressure for her administration’s handling of the matter, announced several actions to repair the damage.

One of those was directing the city’s Office of Public Integrity to determine whether any employees tied to the matter, herself included, had violated any city or departmental policies or ethical standards.

In calling for the review, Warren placed attention on the city’s code of

14 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

ethics, a three-page document that in essence instructs city employees to refrain from using their positions for personal gain, particularly for their own financial benefit.

But state auditors found recently that enforcement of the code is lacking in areas — so much so that the members of the Board of Ethics, the seven-person body tasked with rendering advisory opinions on matters related to the ethics code, received no ethics training.

That was a key finding of a draft of an audit of the city’s ethics oversight by the office of state Comptroller Thomas Dinapoli and

independently obtained by CITY. Two other significant findings were that more than a third of city employees required to file annual financial disclosure statements either did not file them or filed them late, and that employees’ disclosed outside business dealings were not cross-referenced with payments made to city contractors to weed out any potential conflicts of interest prohibited by law.

The draft audit, which covered the period of January 2017 to September 2018, did not suggest that any city contracts were improperly authorized or in

violation of the law, but noted that the city’s lack of oversight made conflicts a possibility.

A final version of the audit, which would likely contain revisions and a formal response from the city, could be released in the comings days or weeks. It would be unlikely, however, that auditors would significantly alter their findings.

In an unusual move, the Warren administration released a copy of the audit and its response, with a spokesperson citing having received inquiries about it from media.

“Running an ethical and transparent government is a top

priority for the city of Rochester and the draft audit reflects our success in doing so,” read a statement attributed to Tim Weir, the Office of Public Integrity director, whose role as secretary of the Board of Ethics was cited throughout the audit.

“The draft audit does not raise issues regarding the ethics of any city contracts, city employees, or the operations of the Board of Ethics,” the statement went on. “The audit makes minor recommendations regarding formal group training versus the current practice of oneon-one discussions to educate members on Board of Ethics operations and responsibilities.”

The statement noted that auditors also recommended better communication between the Human Resources Department and the Board of Ethics to ensure more timely completion of personal financial disclosure documents.

“The city has already taken action to enact these minor recommendations,” Weir said.

FINANCIAL DISCLOSURES MISSING, FILED LATE Much of the audit focuses on the city’s handling of financial disclosure statements that roughly 200 city employees, elected officials, and other people associated with the city, like appointed members of various boards, are required to file.

The forms, which ask recipients to list things like personal banking information, stock and real estate holdings, and business dealings, are intended to be used to ward off any conflicts of interest before they arise.

The Board of Ethics is ostensibly tasked with administering the city’s financial disclosure system. But when City Council created the board, it assigned responsibility for collecting and reviewing the filings to the board’s secretary, a role filled by director the city’s Office of Public Integrity Director.

That job has been held since 2014 by Weir, a longtime FBI veteran who specialized in forensic accounting at the bureau. Auditors found that Weir generally carried out his duties, but that inadequate procedures were in place to ensure

The audit contained some irony: members of the Board of Ethics never received ethics compliance training. all the forms were filed.

For instance, roughly 11 percent of officers and employees who were required to file forms never bothered, as did about 14 percent of people associated with the city who were to fill out forms. More than half of City Council members handed theirs in late.

Among those who didn’t file over the course of the audit period were the chief of police, the assistant director of parking, and members of the Planning Commission and the Board of Ethics, according to the audit.

The findings are hardly damning, but warned that, “Under these circumstances, there is an increased risk that potential conflicts of interest were not identified and/or not reported to the Board of Ethics.”

The audit also noted that the code of ethics requires the mayor or the City Council president, or their designees, to review the disclosure statements for possible violations of ethical standards.

Weir told auditors that, as the mayor’s designee, he reviews the forms. Auditors found, however, that the filings were not checked against payments to city vendors.

The audit recommended that the city’s procurement officials be provided a list of business interests

to be compared against vendors.

“Without careful review of the information reported on disclosure statements, and procedures to identify transactions that could pose a conflict of interest, taxpayers have less assurance that the city has a strong stance on transparency and can identify conflicts of interest of officers and employees that could compromise impartiality in decisionmaking,” warned the report.

FEWER INTERNAL INVESTIGATIONS AT OPI The Office of Public Integrity was established in 2006 during the administration of Mayor Robert Duffy to watchdog and audit city operations for corruption and waste. At first, the office did that to some extent. In its early years, its investigators unraveled a city contractor kickback scheme and a parking meter theft ring.

But the law that created the office presented inherent challenges, namely ensuring that the director was truly independent of the mayor. The director is appointed by the mayor.

During the Warren administration, investigations focused on financial crimes have plummeted. The Democrat and Chronicle reported in 2018 that the number of such cases dropped to 5.4 per year from an average of 18.5 per year prior to Warren’s tenure.

City officials have said that the office was returning to basics, focusing on audits and on strengthening internal controls and education.

Newly-hired city employees are to receive ethics training, which is to include an overview of the code of ethics, during their orientation.

The workers are required to attest in writing to receiving and understanding the code of ethics.

Auditors noted that Weir told them he provided ethics compliance training to new workers, but auditors found that nearly half of all workers hired during the audit period — 9 out of 20 — claimed they did not receive the code.

City officials explained that those workers were seasonal workers who were not required to attend newhire orientation.

ETHICS BOARD WASN’T TRAINED ON ETHICS The audit contained some irony: members of the Board of Ethics never received ethics compliance training. Auditors recommended that the members be trained on the provisions of state law relating to ethics and conflicts of interest.

In its formal response to auditors, the city acknowledged that Board of Ethics members did not receive ethics training, but explained that it was because the members were volunteers and not city employees. The city went on to explain that board members are provided a package of materials relevant to ethics and can seek guidance from the secretary and other city officials.

“The city is confident that each board member is afforded the proper guidance and resources to effectively carry out their responsibilities,” the statement read.

The Board of Ethics is tasked with issuing written advisory opinions to city employees and officers regarding the code of ethics.

For example, in June the ethics board issued an advisory opinion that stated Warren ran afoul of a provision prohibiting city officers or employees from using “city-owned vehicles, equipment, materials or property for the convenience or profit of himself or herself or any other person” when she mailed a letter to Rochester Police Department retirees encouraging them to donate to United Way. The board was acting on a complaint from a Rochester resident.

Auditors recommended that City Council require all employees to receive training that includes an overview of the ethics code and of whistleblower protections “Unless the Council reinforces employee awareness of the code of ethics, there is a higher risk that officers’ and employees’ actions may violate the city’s code of ethics and public assets could be subject to misuse,” the audit read.

roccitynews.org CITY 15

ARTS

CINEMATIC SCULPTURES

Annalisa Barron in her workshop in Gates. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH

COLLECTING MEMORIES, CREATING ART Sculptor Annalisa Barron draws from technological history with ‘Place Projectors’

BY DANIEL J. KUSHNER

P

Painter, sculptor, and filmmaker Annalisa Barron has lived in Rochester for barely a year, but she’s already a force on the art scene — and she’s mining the city’s reputation as “the image capital of the world” for inspiration.

Her latest exhibition, the second in a series called “Place Projectors,” uses artifacts she’s gathered from Rochester’s rich history of innovation in film and photography to create whimsical 16 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

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glass-and-metal sculptures that project light. The work currently resides in the atrium of Writers & Books on University Avenue, where Barron is currently the artist-in-residence.

“Collecting has to do with memorializing places you’ve been, people you’ve been around,” she says.

“They reinforce your own memories of your own life, with these physical markers. It’s not necessarily the object, it’s the pursuit of getting the object,

it’s the going and looking for it.”

Barron, 33, is no stranger to creating art from a seemingly random collection of items. She views collections as a kind of portraiture and their individual pieces as memory triggers.

When she was a student at Penn State University, she lived in a centuryold boarding house off campus in which the previous tenant had died.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 18

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All his possessions remained; even his cremated ashes.

The man had a reputation for being a creep. But Barron wasn’t convinced, and dug through his things and interviewed people in the neighborhood who knew him.

A picture emerged of a gay Korean War veteran who loved stained glass windows, so much so that he collected Polaroids of all the windows in town.

Along with those photos, he left behind slides from the war and writings about falling in love with a man named Nick.

Barron went about making a memorial for this misunderstood soul, resulting in an ambitious art project that included creating a sculpture of the objects left behind and a 40-minute documentary complete with an original score.

The project got the attention of the university’s art department, from which she graduated in 2013 with a bachelor’s degree in drawing and painting.

Barron moved from Brooklyn to Rochester last year. Shortly before her arrival, she constructed what was essentially a giant puppet, 1318 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

feet tall, for an original film called “The Molok,” a project that was highlighted in a 2018 performance at the Rochester Contemporary Arts Center. The experience convinced her she needed to stay.

“I basically thought that if I was going to do the project and live the life I want to live, I need to be around earnest, genuine people that are not just trying to get Instagram followers,” she says.

She caught the eye of Alison

"Place Projectors" in the atrium of Writers & Books.

PHOTOS BY JACOB WALSH

Meyers, the executive director of Writers & Books, who was struck by Barron’s ability to beautify functional objects and infuse them with life.

“Her sculptures are not only beautiful and fascinating, but they are provocations in a way,” Meyers says. “They provoke us to think more deeply about our own place in the world, to understand, think outside of our own social constructs.”

In “Place Projectors,” Barron utilizes items that were pivotal to the evolution

of still images and moving pictures, as well as the growth of Rochester institutions like Kodak, Xerox, Bausch + Lomb. One such item is optical glass, which Barron uses to manipulate light with her projectors.

Another historical gamechanger in the exhibition is the balopticon, the original opaque projector produced on a mass scale. Important painters, including Norman Rockwell, used the balopticon to project a photograph, change its size, and then outline it and paint it in. The device forever changed the process of drawing and painting.

While Barron maintains that these technological advances relegated people to passive spectators in the creative process, “Place Projectors” is an attempt to reclaim the technology in such a way that makes us active participants.

While Writers & Books’ physical doors remain closed due to the pandemic, images from “Place Projectors,” as well as additional information about the project, are available at annalisabarron.com/ placeprojectors. roccitynews.org CITY 19

ARTS

SIMPLER SOUNDS

Ben Morey in his studio at The Submarine School of Music in Brighton. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH

BEN MOREY SCALES BACK AND SETTLES DOWN The songwriter simplifies his sound on The Eyes’ sophomore album, “Still Life”

BY DANIEL J. KUSHNER

B

en Morey recorded his debut album with the backing band known as The Eyes in 2017 under the vaulted ceiling of the South Wedge Mission on Caroline Street with an ensemble of more than 30 musicians. The 11-track “Mt. Doom” was a sprawling blend of rock, folk, country, and singersongwriter tropes.

It was a grandiose project by any measure, especially when compared to Ben Morey & The Eyes’ second album, “Still Life,” which is to be released on Nov. 13 via Dadstache Records on vinyl and cassette tape.

Here, Morey scaled things way back. For one thing, the group was reduced to a quintet. For another, the entire album was recorded in his old South Wedge apartment.

20 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

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The paring down in “Still Life” was a metaphor of sorts for Morey’s own life. In the three years since he recorded his first album with The Eyes, Morey married, bought a new home, and opened a music school. At 33, he has settled down.

“My feeling right now is that the simpler thing is the better thing, and that I want to only say as much with as little as possible, and get to the simple heart of the matter,” he says.

Morey and his wife, the former Katie Preston, who is the band’s keyboardist and whom he calls his “co-producer in all things,” bought a house on South Clinton Avenue in

Brighton that doubled as a dentist’s office and from which they now operate The Submarine School of Music. (Katie has been a contributing writer at CITY.) Bassist Cammy Enaharo, drummer Joe Parker, and vocalist Mikaela Davis round out the band, with Morey as the guitarist and primary songwriter.

The stylistic signifiers of “Mt. Doom” are present in “Still Life,” but, like Morey, have evolved.

For instance, the 12-bar blues that drove the retro-rocker “Been Gone” on the former album has become a more balanced infusion of blues and rock on the latter.

A case in point is the track

“Down in a Hole” — a grungy, guitar-fueled romp that oscillates between evocations of Bob Dylan’s “Bringing It Back Home” and “Highway 61 Revisited” and the energy of punk.

The classic twang of the pedal steel guitar that sold the bittersweet “New Life” as a modern country ballad with old-school roots on “Mt. Doom” returns on the new album, this time on “Ghosts in the Attic.” But the song achieves a more authentic honky-tonk sound — so much so that Davis’s lilting vocals give it the feel of a long-lost Dolly Parton tune.

“This album has a little bit of that country twang in it, and I think he found that voice very comforting, and a good way to get his stories out,” Parker says.

Ben Morey & The Eyes, left to right: Katie Morey, Joe Parker, Ben Morey, Cammy Enaharo, and Mikaela Davis. PHOTO BY MIKE TURZANSKI

“In the Shade of the Mountain,” the closing track on “Mt. Doom,” featured Morey’s indie sensibility, with a wistful piano-guitar tandem providing a dreamy blend of

melodic hook and chords. That combination shows up again on the “Still Life” track “Negative Space,” which initially appeared on Morey’s 2018 solo album “With Birds,” but

was recorded this time around with a trio of backing voices.

“His mission is to write the perfect song,” says guitarist Justin Pulver, a “Mt. Doom” musician who also played with Morey in the bands Howlo and Dumb Angel.

That may explain why, on “Still Life,” Morey revisited older songs he had written for those two groups. There is “Vacuum,” originally played by Dumb Angel, and “Deja Vu,” a Howlo Song.

Pulver says that in the case of “Vacuum” in particular, Morey wanted to see if he could cast the song in a different light.

“It sounds like music you’ve been listening to your entire life, but also it takes turns that surprise you in places,” Pulver says of Morey’s songs.

Morey admits that the new Eyes album is sharper and more streamlined compared with its predecessor. “I wanted to do something that was kind of the polar opposite of what ‘Mt. Doom’ was,” he says.

The Eyes’ new scaled-back sound is centered around the three-part harmony of Katie Morey, Enaharo, and Davis, whose combined voice is the most vital instrument featured on the album, Ben Morey says.

“Still Life” and its dozen songs hinge on a more minimalist and immediate sound than “Mt. Doom” did — a change Morey made in order to better connect with listeners and himself.

“I think as I’ve grown older, I’ve pared down to what is essential and important to me, and I think that I’ve done the same thing in my music,” he says.

roccitynews.org CITY 21

ARTS

UNPLUGGED

Bob Bunce playing on one of the stages he made by hand at his rural property in the Southern Tier. PHOTO BY RYAN WILLIAMSON

BOB BUNCE GETS BACK ON THE GRID WITH “BLUE NORMAL”

BY FRANK DE BLASE

W

FRANK@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM

hen you pull up to the homestead of Bob Bunce in the Southern Tier, you have to shout your arrival. The man is a little hard of hearing.

He blames prolonged exposure to jackhammers and electric guitars. Bunce isn’t a construction worker, although he knows his way around a toolbox. Rather he’s a folk musician versed in the instruments of independence.

You have to be when you live off the grid for as long as Bunce did.

“Off-grid is lots of work,” Bunce says. “It hardens you up. No municipality to call for help. It gave me a feeling of independence.”

That independent streak is evident on his newest album, “Blue Normal,” a 12-song collection of

22 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

Feeding time is a highlight for the chickens, but more so for Bunce, who considers the birds pets.

raw Americana borne of isolation, exacerbated by a pandemic.

Until recently, Bunce, 70, had lived off the grid for eight years. It was the price he paid for a feud with a neighbor up the road who he says wouldn’t allow him to access the utility lines that ran through the neighbor’s property.

They ultimately reached a compromise that plugged Bunce back in to modernity, although you wouldn’t know it to look around.

He lives with his partner on three acres of unpolished land. You might call his spread a compound if it were fenced in, but like the chickens he keeps, Bunce is free-range.

To get to his place from Rochester, hop in the car and drive south on Interstate 390 for about 45 minutes and take the exit for Groveland.

Around there, tucked away in the woods atop a steep climb cloaked by a massive canopy of sundappled trees is where you’ll find him — if you shout for him.

Plenty of artists in Rochester’s music scene have.

His property is the site of a yearly music smorgasbord called the June Bug Jump that Bunce hosts on one of his two solar-powered stages. The stages sit among about 10 structures on his spread that he built himself, from a lean-to to a deluxe outhouse.

The annual event, which was sidelined this year due to the pandemic, has featured some of the best roots-based musicians from the area, including Danielle Ponder and

the Tomorrow People, Folkfaces, and The Crawdaddies. Bunce’s band, Rural Delivery, also regularly performs.

But his bandmates were notably absent on “Blue Normal,” which he cut solo and socially-distanced. The coronavirus dictated the creative process, and the result was a commentary on his new normal.

“Mostly this group of songs were an expression of my anxiety at the times, frustration with folks not being safe, and worrying about my family,” he says.

“I found myself feeling nervous and jerky — like, there’s no respirators for codgers like me,” Bunce says. “So I wrote the song ‘Nervous N Jerky.’”

“Blue Normal” is Bunce’s sixth album thus far. He plays guitar and sings

SONGWRITER SPOTLIGHT

with the same casual reserve with which he speaks. He’s sly and cucumber-cool and has been hard at it since picking up the accordion at age 7. He sounds like Mose Allison on a horse or Frank Zappa trying to talk his way out of a speeding ticket. And he loves the whammy bar.

Also missing from the sessions for “Blue Normal” was Gary Holt, of Holt Studios in Mt. Morris, where Bunce has recorded much of his work, including his last album with Rural Delivery, “Mixed Messages,” in 2019.

As he explains it, Bunce recorded “Blue Normal” in his garage “with the wood stove cranking.” “No computer was used,” Bunce says. “I used a TASCAM 24-track digital recorder, sort of oldschool, along with the help of a drum machine from the ’90s and a keyboard.”

The unlikely marriage lends an oddball feel to the music, with the synthetic drums and keys complementing Bunce’s slippery slide guitar.

Holt, the bass player for Rural Delivery, has known Bunce since 1980, when Bunce was the soundman for a band Holt was in called The Deserters. Holt says Bunce’s lyrics about life in rural America and commentary on global affairs simultaneously conjure images of down-home comfort and rebellion.

“I think that it is more what he chooses to do, to not follow the crowd,” Holt says. “I really feel that with Bob, that what you see is what you get. He’s self-reliant and I think that’s cool.”

Bunce raises chickens that lay two dozen eggs a day. He keeps a shotgun within reach in case he spots the fox that raids his henhouse. He pumps his own water and has solar panels installed on his garage roof, but cuts 20 cords of firewood a year to get through the cold months.

A self-described hermit, Bunce was a homebody before the pandemic, keeping busy by keeping his property and making music. In that way, the health crisis didn’t change his day-today. His routine consists of relaxing, cooking, and writing and recording music for at least five hours.

“We are on the grid now with our system as backup,” Bunce says. “I have battery storage and can stay afloat when there’s a utility issue.

“I like having more time for music and the convenience of cheap electricity.”

JIMSO SLIM The music of Shane Joyce, a.k.a. Jimso Slim, is a pleasant surprise — particularly in these stressful times. Slim’s tenor voice manages to blend the nasality of John Lennon, the reedy folk-singing quality of Michael Nau (formerly of Cotton Jones and Page France), and the declamatory, aloof delivery of ‘60s-era rock ‘n’ roll Bob Dylan.

Jimso Slim’s overall sound is awash in psychedelic ambiance and endearing, lo-fi production. His music acts as a panacea to tension in a series of singles he’s released in recent months, in addition to this year’s fulllength album “What’s the Deal.”

The Rochester singer-songwriter projects laid-back surf vibes with layers of acoustic and flange-inflected electric guitars on “Another Day,” induces a mid-tempo sway on “She Says,” and evinces a sundown mood on the romantically wistful “Madeline.”

The newest single, “Abilene,” features a more straight-ahead folk rock feel, but not without a tasty guitar lick and Slim’s signature spacy vocals. But it’s on the song “In Between” that Jimso Slim best synthesizes the relaxed vocals, ear-tickling guitar lines, and dreamy aesthetic that are ever-present in his music.

— BY DANIEL J. KUSHNER

RIVER LYNCH

Since 2017, Rochester-based rocker River Lynch — with periodic help from his band The Spiritmakers — has been slowly putting out singles at the rate of roughly one a year.

This unofficial series started with “Straight Through” and has continued through to the present, with the release of the latest single, “Blood Thirsty,” on Oct. 23. The differences between these individual tracks are more readily apparent than if they were served up together as an EP. The fresh “Blood Thirsty” is an acoustically driven, mid-tempo ditty. There’s a tension between Lynch’s voice and loping acoustic guitar and the reverb-drenched atmosphere provided by the electric guitar’s easy presence.

“Trip through Tomorrow,” from 2019, is a happy tune that casts Lynch and The Spiritmakers as eternal optimists beneath a cloudless sky. “This World Now,” also released last year, is an uptempo number with an incredible giddy-up from the drums, while the rest of the band wails. It’s the most rockin’ cut in the bunch.

Complete with 12-string guitar and 1960s-esque psychedelia, 2018’s “Outside the Sun” is a sweet, jang-a-lang number — and favorite of mine — seemingly from an era in which music like this blasted out of transistor radios, making way for artists such as John Cougar Mellencamp and Tom Petty, years later. From that same year, “Straight Through” owes its appeal to Lynch’s stunning range and swaggering vocals.

— BY FRANK DE BLASE roccitynews.org CITY 23

ARTS

DEATH METAL LIVES

Vocalist Alex Jones and guitarist Kyle Beam of the death metal band Undeath. PHOTO BY MELISSA SUAREZ

UNDEATH’S METEORIC RISE

BY GINO FANELLI

B

@GINOFANELLI

efore the title credits even roll in the 2009 remake of “Friday the 13th,” all of the essential slasher-movie tropes come to fruition — teens tell ghost stories around a bonfire, they drink and smoke pot, they have sex in a tent, and a murderous madman hacks them to bits with a machete. It’s a breakneck pace that satiates horror fans’ hunger for gore.

The same sort of accelerated tempo unfolds on the Rochester death metal band Undeath’s first full-length album, “Lesions of a Different Kind,” released Oct. 23 on the Los Angeles-based label Prosthetic Records.

The record is dense, brimming with brutal, guttural vocals from Alex Jones, incendiary guitar riffing from Kyle Beam, and Matt Browning’s pulsing 24 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

GINO@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM

drum rhythms. The 10-track LP coalesces in a rich cataclysm of sound, mercilessly gripping the listener from start to finish.

“We just had this idea that every song was going to put you right into it,” Browning said recently over a pale ale at Nine Maidens Brewing Co. The University Avenue brewery has released two beers, “Undeath” and “Acidic Twilight Visions,” in collaboration with the band.

“A lot of the newer metal bands, you’ll hear these like three-minute intros and ambient parts, and we hate that,” Browning said. “We just want to put you right into the middle of it.”

“Lesions of a Different Kind” is a major break for a group in its infancy that has played just a handful of live shows. Formed only last year, Undeath

is a collaboration of Rochester metalheads who bonded over a love for extreme music and honed their sound in a few recordings that made their way online and caught on with like-minded listeners.

To put the band’s signing with Prosthetic Records into perspective, consider that the label has released works from underground metal icons like The Acacia Strain, Skeletonwitch, Gojira, and Lamb of God, the latter of which averages 1.7 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone.

“It’s a lot of right place, right time,” Beam said.

The success came as a surprise to Jones. Undeath is the furthest he has ventured into extreme death metal, a direction he had wanted to go since his days in the post-hardcore outfit Druse

and doom metal band Bone Mask.

“I honestly was expecting this to not go further than a demo project,” Jones said.

After Undeath put out its first selfreleased EP, “Sentient Autolysis,” in 2019, the world of metal took notice.

Undeath’s first single on Prosthetic, “Lesions of a Different Kind,” the title track of the new album, features vocals from Trevor Strnad of The Black Dahlia Murder, one of the most influential modern death metal bands.

“He was one of our first supporters ever,” Beam said. “He is on the pulse — I feel like he knows every new band out there.”

The newfound attention is the culmination of baby steps to success for Undeath, most of which coincided with a global pandemic. To date,

NEW MUSIC REVIEWS completely unfamiliar to non-trombonists, but it is all worth discovering. Albrecht is a virtuoso guide, sweet or stentorian as required, and her tone resounds splendidly throughout. Organist Amanda Mole and the Hohenfels Trombone Quartet provide firstclass support.

— BY DAVID RAYMOND

EP REVIEW: “AM I DREAMING?” BY THE RECALL

From left, vocalist Alex Jones, drummer Matt Browning, and guitarist Kyle Beam of Undeath.

PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH

Undeath’s live performances have been regional, confined mostly to Rochester mainstays like Bug Jar and Record Archive. Prior to the health crisis, the band had been scheduled to tour internationally and hit 100 shows.

Even the band’s record release show was done virtually, from Songbyrd Music House and Record Cafe in Washington, D.C. “We had a full 45-day North American market tour we were supposed to do. We were going to hit every major city before it came out,” Beam said. “On one hand, it sucks. But on the other, I can’t really imagine a world where it could be doing better.”

In the time saved from not touring, the members of Undeath have nearly completed a second album, and they’ve added a bassist in Tommy Wall and a second guitarist in Jared Welch.

Death metal revels in gratuity, obscenity, and pushing the boundaries of good taste to extremes.

In the case of Undeath, Jones’ neardemonic vocals coupled with song titles like ‘Kicked in the Protruding Guts” or “Chained to a Reeking Rotting Body” may leave the uninitiated running for the hills.

But for Jones, death metal and all its trappings are meant to be absurd.

“We really don’t want to play these songs for people that think, ‘That’s so stupid, everybody in this band is on acid,’” Jones said. “We want to play it for people that say, ‘That’s so stupid, everybody in this band is on acid, I love it. This speaks to me.’”

There’s an inextricable link between horror movies and death metal, beyond the aesthetics of carnage and chaos.

Classic slasher films, like “Friday the

13th,” have barebone plots and play out with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Raunchy teenagers are little more than cannon fodder, creative murders are punchlines, and mass murdering lunatics become lovable series icons.

In this world, gratuity and silliness are not bugs, but features. So it is with death metal.

“What we do is just like the best horror movies,” Jones said. “There’s so many horror movies right now that take themselves so seriously, and end up being dumb in a really smart way.

But what’s lost is that those old movies are very clever. They’re smart in a dumb way.”

Undeath strives for “smart in a dumb way.” The goal is to record songs that are thematically absurd, but seamlessly crafted and teeming with musical prowess.

On “Lord of the Grave,” the sixth track on “Lesions,” the lyrics, “I hear their screams and smell their reeking, rotting corpses,” are sung — or growled — over intricate melodies played with impressive technical skill. On “Acidic Twilight Visions,” the album’s fifth track, Beam fills an interlude with rapid, pinched harmonic squeals on the guitar, marching in rhythm to the pounding of Browning’s drums.

Undeath has no expectations of breaking into the mainstream music scene. Just like the best of slasher flicks, death metal is crafted for a cult following.

“I think a lot of people may be put off by the vocals, or the speed, or the heaviness of it,” Jones said. “And you know what, that’s okay — maybe this isn’t for you.”

The Recall — a talented jazz band composed of University of Rochester students that first emerged in 2018 — released the EP “Am I Dreaming?” The four-track collection serves as a hi-res snapshot of a group to watch out for.

The instrumental cut “Why Come” introduces subtle funk grooves, propelled by the keyboard work of Alexa Silverman, whose contribution to the band’s music is always felt if not always explicitly heard. As on the opening track, the pop and soulinfused “Ok”, guitarist Beau Hanson’s licks are polished while maintaining an edge of unpredictability.

“Faster” is a superbly written piece with a brisk big-band sensibility. Hanson and trumpeter Jeff Pinsker-Smith come to the fore as soloists adept at crafting phrases and sustaining the forward momentum of those phrases. Silverman’s tripped-out take on circus music also deserves props for sheer cleverness.

The title track — with music by Silverman — is a passionate close to the album, and it begins with a sound collage of news clips documenting the devastating impact of COVID-19 on the United States.

It evolves into a brooding pop-jazz tour de force, led by the charismatic spoken-word performance of guest poet-rapper Kofi Lost, whose perspective on the plight of Black America is all too resonant. Additional vocals are provided by N’Dea Tha Dada, a recent U of R graduate who also created the EP’s psychedelic artwork.

All money made from the EP’s sale goes to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

— BY DANIEL J. KUSHNER

ALBUM REVIEW: “SOUND AND RESOUND”

BY LISA ALBRECHT When a classical recital CD opens with the crunchy dissonances of 20th-century avant-garde composer Charles Ives, you can tell something different is in store. That’s the case with this disc of music for trombone and organ featuring Lisa Albrecht, second trombone of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. Ives’ “Processional” packs a lot of nobility into two minutes and 12 seconds, and variety is the keynote of the pieces that follow: chorales, variations, a Wagnerian tango (via Peter Schickele), and much more. The most impressive item, Alfred Schnittke’s stern “Schall und Hall (Sound and Resound),” suggests that on Judgement Day, we may hear the Last Trombone rather than the Last Trumpet.

The music on this album will likely be

TRACK REVIEW: “LOOK AROUND: B/W “A LITTLE BIT”

BY DANIELLE PONDER AND KARATE BOOGALOO If you know anything about local singer Danielle Ponder, you know how deep she’s willing to dig in search of a righteous groove. With her first record label release — “Look Around”/ “A Little Bit” from Hope Street Recordings — she’s dug into the musical substrata by plugging in with Karate Boogaloo, a band of cinematic funkateers from Melbourne, Australia.

These are two mellow tunes from Ponder’s arsenal. I say “mellow,” but I don’t mean any less intense. On “A Little Bit,” the drums start to escalate the proceedings, but the guitar keeps it bashful and sweet.

Karate Boogaloo has a delightful vintage soul sound, à la the late Sharon Jones’s band The Dap Kings, which provides a great balance to Ponder’s more contemporary soul-pop leanings.

Ponder’s voice sounds bolder than ever, as she brings the dynamics all the way down to nearly a whisper, and then all the way up again. It’s as if she’s kissing each note goodbye before she sings it away. With Ponder out front, the music smolders and burns.

— BY FRANK DE BLASE

TRACK REVIEW: “WHEN SHADOWS FALL”

BY SLIGHTLY PSYCHEDELIC On its new single “When Shadows Fall,” Rochester alternative rock trio Slightly Psychedelic taps into an atmospheric vibe that is spooky, but not over the top. While the lyrics reference a haunted house, the subject matter could also be a smoke screen for fear itself.

This track was recorded in a garage, using a reel-to-reel tape deck. “When Shadows Fall” starts with an instantly catchy chorus, and frontman Robert Dagnolo’s vocal melody is decidedly smooth. His clean guitar tone and the upbeat arrangement recall a ’60s rock ‘n’ roll sound. Clocking in at less than two and a half minutes, the result is sugary pop with a dark twist.

— BY ROMAN DIVEZUR

roccitynews.org CITY 25

ARTS

A LIFE IN POP

'Season of Warhol' is on display at the Memorial Art Gallery from October 25 through March 28.

PHOTOS BY MAX SCHULTE

26 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

THE GREATEST WARHOL STORY NEVER TOLD

BY JEFF SPEVAK

@JEFFSPEVAK1

Season of Warhol,” the newest exhibit at Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery, is a major event for the city’s art scene that explores Andy Warhol’s wild ride. On display are samples of his vibrant pop art, tributes to his fascination with film and television, and goofy cow wallpaper juxtaposed with an image of the electric chair used to execute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

To the museum’s director, Jonathan Binstock, the pop artist was “probably the most influential artist of the 20th century, and probably the most prolific artist of all time.”

Two grand statements. And here’s another: With his signature celebrity portraits — like a saucy Marilyn Monroe exploding in color — Warhol was probably the most celebrity-conscious artist of all time.

Which is what makes the story of Warhol’s camaraderie and would-collaboration with Armand Schaubroeck, a co-owner of Rochester’s iconic House of Guitars, so intriguing.

“He helped me,” Schaubroeck says, “and I was nobody.”

Schaubroeck wasn’t a celebrity when he caught Warhol’s attention in 1966. He was just a guy fresh out of prison who ran a small music store in Irondequoit with his brothers and recorded songs with them in their mother’s basement about his time in the clink under the band name Armand Schaubroeck Steals.

He was a former thief who at 17 was sentenced to three years in juvenile detention at Elmira Correctional Facility, where he was Inmate No. 24145. With that pedigree, Schaubroeck could have been easily overlooked by a celebrity artist who was simultaneously upending traditional art with his Campbell’s soup cans and sucking artists, writers, musicians, and celebrities into his social orbit.

But Schaubroeck wasn’t overlooked, not even when he

JSPEVAK@WXXI.ORG

Armand Schaubroeck, co-owner of Rochester's House of Guitars, was an aquaintance of Andy Warhol for more than 20 years. PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE

cold-called Warhol that year at the New York City apartment the artist shared with his mother.

“He goes, ‘How’d you get this number?’” Schaubroeck recalled.

“And I said, ‘I called the Rundel Library.’ And he goes, ‘What’s Rundel?’ I said, ‘Oh, it’s just a big library in Rochester, New York. And I had them look it up in “Who’s Who.”’ And he goes, ‘My number’s in there?’ And he laughed.”

“Season of Warhol” introduces Rochester to Warhol’s prints and films and “Silver Clouds,” an airy representation of the silver interiors of Warhol’s famous studios, The Factory. Silver balloons, filled with helium or air, adrift.

“You can kind of control them for a moment,” Binstock says of the balloons, “but then they’re doing their own thing, like this is the spirit of The Factory, this is the energy

of The Factory. Let people come together and, like, see what happens.

It’s just” – and here he channels Warhol – “‘Turn on the film camera, we don’t have a script, but you put on a cowboy hat and you take off your clothes, and let the screenplay happen in front of the lens of the camera, I’m going into the other room, I have to make some calls . . .’”

Or take some calls, as he did that day in 1966 when Schaubroeck caught him unawares at home.

After Warhol got a chuckle out of Schaubroeck’s ingenuity in tracking him down, Schaubroeck recalled, “I talked about my jail thing, and how I was working on prison songs and stuff, and he got very interested in it. He asked me to send him a tape and I did. . . . Then he started calling me to come to The Factory right away.”

As Schaubroeck and others

familiar with his relationship with Warhol recall, Warhol was struck by the concept of Armand Schaubroeck Steals — juvenile delinquency as a musical persona was counterculturecool, a standard for which Warhol was by then a standard bearer.

So Schaubroeck showed up at The Factory with his brothers, Bruce, who played drums in the band, and Blaine, who played bass, and three hours of tapes — songs, lyrics, and spoken material about prison life as a youngster.

Young boy / the way he walks / the way he holds his cigarette / he reminds me of my wife at night.

But as the two men tried to grow the jail culture of “Armand Schaubroeck Steals” into a popculture touring musical, logistical issues became evident. Mainly CONTINUED ON PAGE 28

roccitynews.org CITY 27

the band, which consisted of the Schaubroeck brothers and a few Irondequoit friends.

“Everybody that was in it worked at the House of Guitars, and back then we only had one or two employees, and they were in the band,” Schaubroeck says.

“And he wanted us to sign up for seven days a week for three years.

The problem is we’d lose House of Guitars, and I didn’t ever want to do that, so I was trying to talk him into doing a movie.”

As the story goes, if it weren’t for perhaps the most infamous artist assassination attempt ever, Warhol might have turned the concept of “Armand Schaubroeck Steals” into a very unconventional musical — maybe even a movie — based on the band’s songs and their spokenword intros.

But the question was settled in 1968, when Warhol was shot

by Valerie Solanas, a paranoid schizophrenic hanger-on at The Factory. Warhol was seriously wounded, and declared dead at one point. He lived. But his vision for “Armand Schaubroeck Steals” died.

“I’d been sitting on it since the ’60s,” Schaubroeck says. “Also, John Hammond at Columbia Records was very interested in it. Andy would always call him, ‘your Hammond.’

‘Tell your Hammond this,’ almost like he had a little resentment about it. ‘Tell your Hammond that he can pay for the whole play for soundtrack rights.’ And I said, ‘You really want me to say that, Andy?’

He goes, ‘Yes.’ So I went up over.

“He liked the jail thing too. And I was kind of proud of that because he’s the guy that signed Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen.”

While Warhol was hospitalized, Schaubroeck re-recorded the music and released it as a three-LP collection, “A Lot of People Would Like to See Armand Schaubroeck . . . DEAD.” The cover was a photo of Schaubroeck with a fake bullet hole in his forehead, blood running down his face.

“Once I put it out on my own,” Schaubroeck says, “it kinda killed that because he doesn’t want to look like, he didn’t say it, I don’t think he wanted to look like he picked up something else that was out already.”

The collaboration was finished, 28 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

'Season of Warhol' runs at the Memorial Art Gallery from October 25 through March 28. PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE

but Schaubroeck would still hang around The Factory from time to time. Warhol used to call the shop.

“They’d page me, ‘Andy Warhol on the phone,’ and stare at me, you know,” Schaubroeck said.

He knew Warhol well enough that, when a local television news program reported on Warhol speaking at Rochester Institute of Technology in 1967, Schaubroeck recognized that the guy in heavy pancake makeup, black-framed eyeglasses and floppy hair painted silver and white wasn’t Warhol. It was an actor who had appeared in a few Warhol films, and paid by Warhol to impersonate him on the college tour. After a few more speaking engagements, someone at the University of Utah who knew the real Warhol pointed out the hoax.

“He said that he thought the actor made a better Andy than he would ever make,” Schaubroeck recalled Warhol saying when he asked him about it later.

“He liked to go to parties, and I would never go to parties with him, trying to keep it business,” Schaubroeck. “And I misunderstood, because every night he’d leave maybe about six o’clock or so from The

Factory, and parties would go on all night at The Factory. I mean music blasting, bands playing and people sleeping there and drugs, sex, you name it was going on there all over the place. And he’d leave and not worry about it.”

But it wasn’t all play and no work.

“This idea that he didn’t care,” Binstock says, “and that he just transparently, thoughtlessly collected stuff or made stuff or talked about stuff, is what he would want you to believe. Because that was a strategy for getting the attention of the general public, and also the serious art public.”

But he didn’t want you to know that. The contrarian draws attention.

Binstock reads a quote — a confession, actually — from Warhol himself: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

“Now you have to think about a statement like that in an art world that really takes itself very seriously,” Binstock says. “And here comes a guy that says, ‘I don’t know, it’s really, there’s nothing to it, I’m just doing these things because I have

nothing better to do with my time.’”

The sheer volume of creativity disputes that notion. “Warhol was a workaholic,” Binstock says. “He took speed every day for at least a decade or more, he worked all the time.”

Warhol died 33 years ago, at age 58, of complications following gallbladder surgery.

Fast forward to May 2013, and three employees of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh are conducting an autopsy of sorts before a small audience. They are not examining a body, but a body of work — a plain cardboard box that is one of 610 that Warhol had packed with the detritus of American society he had collected over the years. He called them Time Capsules. This one was dated 1978.

One by one, the employees carefully removed its contents.

Among the dozens of items were paper McDonald’s take-out bags, clearly used. A cook book. A card that read “Flowers are sex organs.”

An unsmoked cigar. A telegram concerning a possible meeting with Mick Jagger.

And a vinyl record that drew laughter from the spectators. The title was “Ratfucker,” the final album

by Armand Schaubroeck Steals.

roccitynews.org CITY 29

MUSIC Acoustic/Folk

Live at Lunchtime: Adam Surasky & Drew Bellavia. Cobblestone Arts Center, 1622 NY 332. 398-0220. Fri., Nov. 13, 12:15-12:45 p.m.

Virtual Sing Around. Golden Link Folk Singing Society, Online. goldenlink.org.

Tuesdays, 7:30 p.m.

Classical

Alden Wright, Aeolian pipe organ.

George Eastman Museum, 900 East Ave. eastman.org. Sun., Nov. 15, 3 p.m. W/ museum admission: $7-$18.

Beiliang Zhu, baroque cello. Pegasus Early Music, Online. pegasusearlymusic. org. Fri., Nov. 20, 7:30 p.m. and Sun., Nov. 22, 4 p.m. With live indoor concerts still an impossibility, Pegasus Early Music’s online presentation of solo recitals this fall is like an oasis in a desert.

A local performing organization long dedicated to celebrating Baroque music, Pegasus won’t let physical distancing keep us from enjoying some J.S. Bach together. Rochester-based cellist Beiliang Zhu will play compositions by J.S. Bach on the five-string Baroque cello. This performance on a vintage instrument will feature the Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, as well a rare rendition of violin partita.

Zhu interprets Bach’s cello music with a dedication and fluidity that highlights the composer’s mellifluous melodies. The recital is free, with donations welcome.

— BY DANIEL J. KUSHNER Brass Guild. Eastman School of Music, Online. esm.rochester.edu/live. Mon., Nov. 16, 7:30 p.m.

Bravo Nights. Virtual Little Cafe, Online. thelittle.org/music. Mon., Nov. 30, 7-9 p.m.

Chamber Music Extravaganza. Eastman School of Music, Online. esm.rochester. edu/live. Thu., Nov. 12, Mon., Nov. 23 and Tue., Nov. 24.

Choral Department Concert. Eastman School of Music, Online. esm.rochester. edu/live. Sun., Nov. 15, 3 p.m.

Classical Guitar Night. Virtual Little Cafe, Online. thelittle.org. First Sunday of every month, 7 p.m.

Collegium Musicum. Eastman School of Music, Online. esm.rochester.edu/live.

Sat., Nov. 21, 7:30 p.m.

Eastman Percussion Ensemble. Eastman School of Music, Online. esm.rochester. edu/live. Tue., Nov. 10, 7:30 p.m.

Eastman Philharmonia. Eastman School of Music, Online. esm.rochester.edu/live.

Wed., Nov. 4, 7:30 p.m.

Eastman School Symphony Orchestra.

Eastman School of Music, Online. esm. rochester.edu/live. Mon., Nov. 9, 7:30 p.m.

Eastman Wind Ensemble. Eastman School of Music, Online. esm.rochester. edu/live. Fri., Nov. 6, 7:30 p.m. and Fri., Nov. 20, 7:30 p.m.

Eastman Wind Orchestra. Eastman School of Music, Online. esm.rochester. edu/live. Mon., Nov. 2, 7:30 p.m. and Mon., Nov. 23, 7:30 p.m.

ECMS Showcase. Eastman School of Music, Online. esm.rochester.edu/live.

Sat., Nov. 14, 3:30 p.m.

30 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

VISUAL & PERFORMI Faculty Artist Series: Mark Kellogg, trombone. Eastman School of Music,

Tuba Mirum. Eastman School of Music,

Faculty Artist Series: Yoojin Jang, violin; Guy Johnston, cello; Alexander Kobrin, piano; Masumi Per Rostad, viola.

Contemporary Classical

Online. esm.rochester.edu/live. Sun., Nov. 1, 7:30 p.m.

Eastman School of Music, Online. esm. rochester.edu/live. Sun., Nov. 15, 3 p.m.

Gateways Virtual Chamber Music Festival. Livestream, Online.

gatewaysmusicfestival.org. Nov. 9-13.

Rochester’s own Gateways Music Festival is not just a celebration of Black classical musicians. The five-day event also brings performers of African descent together and provides the support of an inclusive community — even if this year’s festival is a virtual one with a focus on chamber music as opposed to large-scale orchestral performances. Regardless of the circumstances, Gateways features some of the most prominent classical musicians working today. The opening concert, on Monday, Nov. 9, at 7:30 p.m. will feature several Rochester musicians, including Metropolitan opera star Nicole Cabell, soprano and WXXI announcer Kearstin Piper Brown,the pianist and First Inversion Artistic Director Lee Wright, and Eastman professor George Taylor on viola, among others. New York Philharmonic Principal Clarinetist Anthony McGill will play a solo recital on Tuesday, Nov. 10, at 7:30 p.m. Cellist and Eastman alum Thapelo Masita will give a recital on Wednesday, Nov. 11, at 7:30 p.m.

Pre-concert talks take place 30 minutes prior to each performance. Visit the festival website for a complete schedule, which includes a film screening, art exhibit, and lectures. Individual concert tickets are free for children under age 18, $5 for students and seniors, $10 to $15 for individuals, and $15 to $20 for households. Festival passes are free for those under 18, $20 for students and seniors, $30 to $40 for individuals, and $40 to $50 for households.

— BY DANIEL J. KUSHNER Incantare Talks: The Origin Story.

Livestream, Online. incantaremusic.com.

Sun., Nov. 1, 4 p.m.

Joe Blackburn, Aeolian pipe organ.

George Eastman Museum, 900 East Ave. eastman.org. Sun., Nov. 8, 3 p.m. and Sun., Nov. 29, 3 p.m. W/ museum admission: $7-$18.

Rochester Celebrity Organ Recital Series: The Eastman Five. Livestream,

Online. rocago.org/rcors. Fri., Nov. 20, 7:30 p.m.

RPO @ Home. Livestream, Online. rpo.org. Through Dec. 29.

Nov 1-Dec 15:: Halloween at Home.

Nov 5-Dec 20: Dvorak, Walker & Haydn.

Nov 7-Dec 22: Mosaic: Sounds of the American Experience.

Nov 14-Dec 29:Chamber Ensembles with Herb Smith’s Jazz Combo. $5-$10.

RPO Living Room Series. Livestream, Online. Saturdays, 6 p.m. Live on FB. Steve Kelly, Aeolian pipe organ. George Eastman Museum, 900 East Ave. eastman.org. Sun., Nov. 1, 3 p.m. W/ museum admission: $7-$18.

Trombone Choir. Eastman School of Music, Online. esm.rochester.edu/live.

Wed., Nov. 11, 7:30 p.m.

Online. esm.rochester.edu/live. Fri., Nov. 13, 7:30 p.m.

Composers Concert. Eastman School of

Music, Online. esm.rochester.edu/live.

Thu., Nov. 12, 7:30 p.m.

Composers Sinfonietta. Eastman School of Music, Online. esm.rochester.edu/live.

Tue., Nov. 3, 7:30 p.m.

Eastman Audio Research Studio.

Eastman School of Music, Online. esm. rochester.edu/live. Thu., Nov. 19, 7:30 p.m.

It Can’t Not Be Dance Music: New Music Inspired by the Art of James Welling.

Virtual George Eastman Museum, Online. eastman.org. Sat., Nov. 14, 1 p.m.

Registration required.

Jazz

Eastman Jazz Ensemble/ Eastman New Jazz Ensemble. Eastman School of Music, Online. esm.rochester.edu/live.

Thu., Nov. 19, 7:30 p.m.

[ Opening ]

The Black House, 215 Tremont St., Door 3, Suite 300. The Black House

Narratives. Nov. 19-Jan. 1. Nov 1929: Black Will Not Step Back. FB: BlackHouseROC. 235-2767.

Cobblestone Arts Center, 1622 NY 332.

Jason Dorofy: Illustrations (Main Gallery) | Gale McArdle (Staff & Student Gallery).

Nov. 19-Jan. 3. Viewings by appointment.

398-0220.

Geisel Gallery, 2nd floor rotunda, Legacy Tower, One Bausch & Lomb Place. In Hiding: Recent Works by Dan

Arday. Nov. 2-Dec 29. thegeiselgallery. com.

Image City Photography Gallery, 722 University Ave. Betsy Phillips: Driven to Abstraction. Tuesdays-Saturdays.

271-2540.

International Art Acquisitions, 3300 Monroe Ave. Alexander Calder: Sun and Planets. Nov. 1-30. 264-1440.

Pat Rini Rohrer Gallery, 71 S Main St. Canandaigua. Holidays at the Gallery.

Sat., Nov. 14. Reception Nov 14, 1-5pm. prrgallery.com.

Jon Seiger: Piano Bar & Trumpet Happy Hour. Livestream, Online. Saturdays, 5

RIT City Art Space, 280 East Main St.

Laura Dubin & Antonio Guerrero.

Rochester Museum & Science Center, 657 East Ave. (rmsc.org). The

p.m. Live on FB.

Livestream, Online. Ongoing, 8:30 p.m.

Live on FB. Pawlik/Moniuszko: Symphonic Jazz.

Livestream, Online. rochester.edu/ SKALNY. Sat., Nov. 21, 4 p.m. Part of the Skalny Lecture & Artist Series.

Wine Down Wednesdays. The Penthouse, 1 East Ave, 11th floor. 7752013. Wednesdays, 5-9 p.m. $20.

Pop/Rock

Amanda Ashley: Afternoon Cocktail.

Livestream, Online. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, 1 p.m. Live on FB.

Vocals

Women’s Chorus. Eastman School of Music, Online. esm.rochester.edu/live.

Thu., Nov. 12, 7:30 p.m.

With evolving NYS guidelines for live music, events are highly subject to change or cancellation. It’s wise to check with individual venues to confirm performances and protocols.

Beyond Addiction: Reframing Recovery.

Thursdays-Sundays. cityartspace.rit.edu.

Changemakers: Rochester Women Who Changed the World. Nov. 20-May 16. To celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment ratification, RMSC has gathered the stories of more than 200 women, past and present, who embody the spirit of change, vision, and persistence. The third floor of the museum will exhibit the struggles and hard-won victories of Rochester and Haudenosaunee women, with hopes of inspiring more than a few to carry the work forward. W/ museum admission: $14/$16. rmsc.org/changemakers.

Studio 402, 250 N Goodman St.

Grounded. Nov. 4-30. Drawings & paintings by Carol Acquilano, Denise Fabrizio, Kathleen Hanney, & Lucinda Storms. 269-9823.

[ Continuing ] Art Exhibits

Bertha VB Lederer Online Gallery, SUNY Geneseo. Leslie Stroz: Between

the Moors & the Sea (to Dec 12) | The Misogyny Papers: Apology by Victor Davson (to Apr 1). Through April 1, 2021. geneseo.edu/galleries/lederer-onlinedigital-exhibitions.

Cobblestone Arts Center, 1622 NY 332. Group Ceramics Show (Main

Gallery) Susan Link (Staff & Student Gallery). Through Nov. 15. Viewings by appointment. 398-0220.

Frontispace @ Art & Music Library, 755 Library Rd. Mizin Shin: Small World

Network Model. Through Nov. 20.

273-2267.

Geneva Historical Society, 543 S Main St. Geneva. Rightfully Hers (to

Dec 31) | Those Who Served: Items from the Clothing Collection (to Jan 3) | An Educated Citizenry: Education in Geneva (to Apr 30). $3 suggested. genevahistoricalsociety.com.

Volunteers needed: E-cigarette users

NG ARTS George Eastman Museum, 900 East Ave. eastman.org. . Gathering Clouds:

Photographs from the Nineteenth Century and Today (to Jan 3). James Welling: Choreograph (to Jan 3). History of Photography (to Jan 3).

Wednesdays-Sundays. $5-$15.

Image City Photography Gallery, 722 University Ave. David Bleich: True Colors.

Tuesdays-Sundays. 271-2540.

Memorial Art Gallery, 500 University Ave. 276-8900. Andy Warhol Portfolios: A Life in Pop Works from the Bank of America Collection. Through March 28, 2021.

NTID Dyer Arts Center, 52 Lomb Memorial Dr. rit.edu/ntid/dyerarts.

Palettes of Nature. A collaborative exhibit with deafgreenthumbs. rit.edu/ntid/ dyerarts-center.

R1 Studios, 1328 University Ave. Suite B. Kota Ezawa: Taking a Knee. ThursdaysSaturdays. deborahronnenfineart.com.

RIT City Art Space, 280 East Main St.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: “Untitled” (L.A.).

Thursdays-Sundays, 1-5 p.m. Thursday, Nov 12, 6pm: Talk and Q&A with Niko Vicario. Closed Nov 26-29 & Dec 17-Jan 3. cityartspace.rit.edu.

Rochester Contemporary Art Center, 137 East Ave. 461-2222. Andrew Zimbelman:

The Subway Series. Through Nov 14. $2.; Trust, but verify.

Wednesdays-Sundays. $2.

Rochester Museum & Science Center, 657 East Ave. (rmsc.org). Take It Down!

Organizing Against Racism. Objectively Racist: How Objects & Images Perpetuate Racism -- And What We Can Do To Change It. Ongoing. $14-$16. rmsc.org.

Virtual Genesee Country Village & Museum, Online. Mumford. . Explore

the Collection. Ongoing. gcv.org/explore/ online-collection.

Virtual George Eastman Museum,

eastman.org. Eastman Museum at Home.

Ongoing.

Virtual Memorial Art Gallery, mag.rochester.edu. Explore the Collection. Ongoing.

Visual Studies Workshop, 31 Prince St. vsw.org. Joshua Rashaad McFadden: Evidence. Through Nov. 21. Viewings by appointment.

Virtual SUNY Brockport Tower Fine Arts Gallery Monroe & Vicinity Biennial Exhibition 2020. Through Nov. 29. vimeo.com/469527265.

Yates County History Center, 107 Chapel St. Penn Yan. A Dangerous Freedom: The Abolitionists, Freedom Seekers, & Underground Railroad Sites of Yates County. Tuesdays-Fridays. By appointment only. yatespast.org.

Film

Rochester Street Films: "Think Transit First." Viurtual screening, Thu.,

Nov. 12, noon. $5-$15 suggested. reconnectrochester.org.

Cinema Theater, 957 S Clinton Ave.

Now open. Advance tickets required. cinemarochester.com.

Dryden Theatre, 900 East Ave.

Screenings resume Nov 10. eastman.org.

Little Theatre, 240 East Ave. Screenings resume Nov 6. thelittle.org.

Visual Studies Workshop, 31 Prince St. vsw.org. Benjamin Lovell: SLP. Nov. 4-29.; A History of Police Brutality & Accountability Initiatives in Rochester from the Portable Channel Archive.

Ongoing.

Two visits ($50 per visit).

The second visit will be 6 months after the first. There will be lung function test and blood draw (two tablespoons), saliva, breath condensate and urine collection at each visit.

Earn $100 by participating in our study!

Call for Artists

Last Year on Earth. Through Dec. 19.

Rochester Contemporary Art Center, 137 East Ave. 461-2222 RoCo is calling on more than just artists to participate in a juried exhibition reflecting on this crazy year, seeking 2D, 3D, and video works created by locals. Submissions are due Dec 19 for a February 2021 exhibition.

Perhaps by then, the events of 2020 will be so last year. Submissions are due Dec 19.

Call our Research Coordinator at 585-224-6308 if you are interested or if you have questions. Thank you!

Art Events

Hodinöhsö:ni’ Art Show. Fri., Nov. 6.

VIrtual Seneca Art & Cultural Center, ganondagon.org.

Laylah Amatullah Barrayn: We are Present. Wed., Nov. 4, 6 p.m. Virtual

George Eastman Museum. Registration required $5. eastman.org.

REACH OUT

Comedy

Talent’s Comedy Takeover. 6, 8 & 10

p.m. RIT Inn & Conference Center, 5257 W Henrietta Rd. Masks & distancing are mandatory $5. theitsjustcomedyclub.com.

Unleashed! Cabin Fever Improv: Day of the Dead Presidents. 7 p.m., 795 E. Main St Registration is required 454-1260.

Dance Events

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: by Quicksilver Dance. 8:30 & 10 p.m. Livestream,

Online quicksilverdance.com.

Theater

Daddy Longlegs, The Musical. Fri., Nov. 13, 8 p.m., Sat., Nov. 14, 8 p.m. and Sun., Nov. 15, 2 p.m. Livestream, Online $15. theatre444.com.

Mystery Radio Theater. Through Nov. 30. Virtual Bristol Valley Theater, Online.

Naples Featuring:. “Lights Out: Ghost Party” “Sherlock Holmes: The Problem of Thor Bridge” “Suspense: Ray Bradbury’s Zero Hour” “The Shadow: The Long Arm of Death” $5-$15. bvtnaples.org/fall.

Recognition Radio: An Audio Play Festival Celebrating Black Voices.

Through Jan. 3, 2021. Livestream, Online Four modern plays written and directed

by Black artists have been reimagined as radio adaptations for a GEVA Theatre season reimagined for 2020: “Feeding Beatrice: A Gothic Tale” (now playing); “The Bleeding Class” (starts Nov 10); “we are continuous” (starts Nov 24); “The Resurrection of Michelle Morgan” (starts Dec 8). $17. recognition-radio.com.

Social Distancing: A Monologue Play.

Ongoing. JCC Hart Theatre, 1200 Edgewood Ave. 461-2000.

Voices of Freedom Summer. Through Nov. 3. Livestream, Online On FB 395-2787.

@ROCCITYNEWS

@CITYNEWSPAPER

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32 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

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34 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

NOVEMBER HIGHLIGHTS INSIDE WXXI PUBLIC MEDIA | WXXI-TV PBS AM 1370 NPR | CLASSICAL 91.5 FM WRUR 88.5 FM | THE LITTLE THEATRE

America’s Test Kitchen Special: Home for the Holidays Thursday, November 12 at 5 p.m. on WXXI-TV

Arthur’s Thanksgiving

Little Women

Monday, November 16 at 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on WXXI-TV

Thursday, November 26 at 8 p.m. on WXXI-TV

Giving Thanks Thursday, November 26 at 8 a.m. on WXXI Classical

Native America

Splendid Table: Turkey Confidential

Saturdays, November 7 & 14 at 4 p.m. on WXXI-TV

Thursday, November 26 at 12 p.m. on AM 1370 roccitynews.org CITY 35

WXXI-TV • THIS MONTH

(Credit: Courtesy of TJL Productions)

Aretha Franklin Remembered Saturday, November 14 at 10 p.m. on WXXI-TV Celebrate the legendary Queen of Soul and the first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with her greatest hits from television appearances spanning the 1960s-2000s, many of which have never been seen in the U.S.

(Credit: Courtesy of Providence Pictures)

Native America Saturdays, November 7 & 14 at 4 p.m. on WXXI-TV Weaving history and science with living Indigenous traditions, this series brings to life a land of massive cities connected by social networks spanning two continents. Made with the active participation of Native American communities and filmed in some of the most spectacular locations in the hemisphere, this four-part series illuminates the splendor of a past whose story has for too long remained untold.

(Credit: Courtesy of Courtesy of © 2020 WGBH Educational Foundation)

An Arthur Thanksgiving Monday, November 16 at 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on WXXI-TV Arthur and his family are getting ready for Thanksgiving! Dad’s whipping up his famous turkey dinner extravaganza, the Lakewood elementary kids are preparing for the annual Thanksgiving parade, and Aunt Minnie is coming to spend the holiday with the Reads. Also airs on WXXI-Kids 24/7 at 1 p.m. on 10/16.

WXXI-TV l DT 21.1/cable 11 + 1221 CREATE l DT 21.3/cable 1276 36 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

WORLD l DT 21.2/cable 1275 WXXI-Kids 24/7 l DT 21.4/cable 1277

Support public media.

Become a WXXI Member!

Whether it’s television, radio, online, or on screen, WXXI is there with the programs, news, and information – where you want it and when you want it. If you value PBS, NPR, PBS Kids, WXXI News, WXXI Classical and so much more, consider becoming a member.

(Credit: Courtesy of MASTERPIECE on PBS, BBC and Playground)

Little Women on Masterpiece Thursday, November 26 at 8 p.m. on WXXI-TV

Visit WXXI.org/support to choose the membership that works for you. There are many membership levels with their own special benefits, including

becoming a sustaining member.

Set against the backdrop of the Civil War, the story follows sisters Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy March on their journey from childhood to adulthood. With the help of their mother, Marmee, and while their father is away at war, the girls navigate what it means to be a young woman: from sibling rivalry and first love, to loss and marriage. Starring Willa Fitzgerald as Meg, Kathryn Newton as Amy, Annes Elwy as Beth, and Maya Hawke as Jo.

(Credit: Courtesy of America’s Test Kitchen LLC)

America’s Test Kitchen Special: Home for the Holidays Thursday, November 12 at 5 p.m. on WXXI-TV Hosts Bridget Lancaster and Julia Collin Davison and the rest of the America’s Test Kitchen cast gather together in a casual behind-the-scenes setting to share their tips and tricks for planning a stress-free gathering. They also recount personal holiday memories and reveal their all-time favorite holiday recipes from the Test Kitchen archives, including new twists on classic holiday fare such as turkey en cocotte and beef tenderloin with smoky potatoes and persillade relish. roccitynews.org CITY 37

TURN TO WXXI CLASSICAL FOR MUSIC PERFECTLY TUNED TO YOUR DAY Performance Upstate Mondays at 8 p.m. beginning November 23 on WXXI Classical This new WXXI Classical series, hosted by Brenda Tremblay, takes you into concert halls, sacred spaces, and festivals across Western and Central New York, where you’ll hear a diverse and colorful array of pieces interpreted by passionate and skillful musicians. Ensembles include Cordancia Chamber Orchestra, First Inversion, five by five, Roberts Wesleyan College, Skaneateles Festival and Third Presbyterian Church and more. Many concerts are exclusive to the series.

New York in Concert: Highlights from the Gateways Music Festival Wednesday, November 11 at 2 p.m. on WXXI Classical Enjoy music from Black composers, including Adolphus Hailstork, Florence Price, and Michael Abels. You’ll also hear a unique arrangement of the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” all performed by the Gateways Music Festival Orchestra, which was recorded live at the Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre in August 2019.

Every Good Thing Thursday, November 26 at 6 p.m. on WXXI Classical Andrea Blain hosts a visit with classical music fans around the country as they give thanks and celebrate one of life’s most meaningful gifts: music. You’ll hear listeners from across the U.S. share stories about their favorite classical music pieces.

Five Things of Note about Julia Figueras WXXI Classical mid-day host and music director 1. First job in radio: WICN in Worcester, MA playing hard punk rock...with the pink mullet to prove it.

2. Favorite place in Rochester: On our beautiful patio or at Marge’s as the sun goes down.

3. Favorite part of your job: Booking and hosting Backstage Pass.

It’s on COVID-19 hiatus, and I’m just itching to have it come back.

4. Hardest composer or musical piece for you to pronounce: Composer Jean Baptiste Lloeillet-I can say it twice, then I’m done. Conductor Jiří Bělohlávek is a tongue twister, too.

Giving Thanks: A Celebration of Fall, Food & Gratitude Thursday, November 26 at 8 a.m. on WXXI Classical John Birge hosts a contemporary celebration of gratitude with classical music and stories of Thanksgiving. Guests include conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who remembers his childhood Thanksgivings in L.A, and Brooklyn Rider, performing the beautiful Heiliger Dankgesang, and more.

38 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

5. Three things you can’t live without: My family, music-from Springsteen to Sibelius, and books – especially mysteries and histories.

AM 1370, YOUR NPR NEWS STATION + WRUR-FM 88.5, DIFFERENT RADIO

Election Night Coverage Tuesday, November 3 on AM 1370 + WXXI-TV Spend your election night with WXXI. Tune in to AM 1370 at 7 p.m. for special coverage from NPR on national races and WXXI News on local races. Or join us on WXXI-TV at 6 p.m. for PBS NewsHour’s live coverage of election results anchored by Judy Woodruff.

Splendid Table: Turkey Confidential Thursday, November 26 at 12 p.m. on AM 1370 Splendid Table’s Francis Lam (pictured) answers your culinary questions on the biggest cooking day of the year! In this annual, live Thanksgiving call-in show Francis comes to the rescue of Thanksgiving cooks, kitchen helpers, and dinner guests during the biggest cooking day of the year. Send your Thanksgiving-related questions via voice memo before November 25 to contact@splendidtable.org or call 1-800-537-5252 during the show.

Best of the Best: Third Coast International Audio Festival Friday, November 27 at 12 p.m. and again at 9 p.m. on AM 1370 Best of the Best is an annual ode to audio storytelling, taking you on a journey through the full breadth of what’s possible in stories made from sound. This year’s program showcases the winners of the 20th annual Third Coast/Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition. From nearly 500 entries and 23 countries, eleven stories were chosen as winners. On Best of the Best, we share each of these meticulously crafted and boundary-pushing stories, alongside behind-the-scenes interviews with the producers who made them.

Open Tunings with Scott Regan Weekdays 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. on WRUR-FM 88.5 Scott Regan (pictured) introduces you to an eclectic mix of rock, folk, acoustic, and categories of music that have yet to be defined. Often with guest performances the connections and sounds are uniquely local.

Scott’s selections are the region’s newest habit, so be sure to tune in each day for truly different radio.

1. NEWS FOCUS:

Government, education, and city issues.

2. COLLEGE + DEGREE:

Niagara University + Communications degree with Fine Arts + Writing minors.

3. WHAT YOU WANTED TO BE WHEN YOU GREW UP:

By the time I was 7, I knew I was going to tell stories.

4. FAVORITE PLACE IN ROCHESTER:

Driving up State Street to Charlotte Pier.

Beaches are best when no one else is there.

5. THREE THINGS YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: Coffee (I tried. I failed.)

The internet. Media.

roccitynews.org CITY 39

The Little is OPEN!

Movie theaters are magical spaces.

There’s something inherently special about experiencing art, entertainment, and creativity in those cozy dark rooms.

Audiences can bond over that mid-film twist in “Parasite,” join in a chorus of guffaws when Saoirse Ronan dives out of the car in “Lady Bird,” or let the tears flow while soaking in the beauty of Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight.”

As of November 6

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, The Little went 237 days without screening a movie, and we missed seeing this community’s passionate and smart film fans every day.

Judging by the responses we got, The Little was missed by you as well. But now, The Little is back.

The historic theater at 240 East Avenue is open once again as of November 6.

Visit thelittle.org for up-to-date information, including safety measures, programming, and more.

HomeStage at The Little Fridays at 8:30 p.m. on WXXI-TV Jams are coming to The Little’s historic East Avenue theatre as part of WXXI’s HomeStage production, airing Fridays in November. The series — filmed on location at The Little with no audience — includes a selection of Rochester superstars flexing their soul, jazz, and rock chops.

Danielle Ponder photo courtesy of Aaron Winters

The Little will continue to host films virtually, even after reopening.

What’s a virtual film? This just means you can rent and stream movies through thelittle.org. Each film page includes additional information on how to stream, including ways to watch via Roku, Apple TV and more.

40 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

Become a Little Member During this extended closure, support for The Little has been incredible. Truly. The Greater Rochester area contains some of the smartest and most passionate film lovers around, and it shows. If you’re able to, you can support The Little through donations (thelittle.org/donate), or by becoming a member (thelittle. org/membership). Have questions about any of this?

We’re happy to chat! Email scott@thelittle.org with any comments or questions.

roccitynews.org CITY 41

LIFE

Joe Damelio's client roster runs the gamut, from prominent politicians to police officers to petty thieves...er, alleged petty thieves.

PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE

42 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

PUBLIC LIVES

BY DAVID ANDREATTA

@DAVID_ANDREATTA

DANDREATTA@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM

Joe Damelio: A savvy defense lawyer at the top of his game Between public defenders and private practice lawyers, there are upward of 150 criminal defense attorneys in Monroe County.

But there are only a handful anyone really wants, and the one that any person of stature in trouble with the law seems to want lately is Joe Damelio.

When the late Assemblyman Joseph Errigo was arrested on federal bribery charges, he called Damelio.

When former City Council member Adam McFadden was indicted on federal fraud charges, he called Damelio.

And when Mayor Lovely Warren realized that state investigators were building a criminal case against her on alleged campaign finance violations, she called Damelio.

For a man to whom elected officials turn for answers, he can’t say why they do. “You know, I don’t know how that happened to be honest with you,” he said recently.

Damelio, 59, spoke from his meticulous 12th-floor corner office in the First Federal Building downtown Rochester overlooking the Genesee River and a wide swath of the skyline. A physically imposing figure, fastidiously groomed and punchy, he was catching a breather after representing a man accused of stealing a car at a preliminary hearing in City Court.

He moved into his digs a couple of years ago after spending most of his career in a second-floor office next door to The Pizza Stop on State Street. He loved that place, he said, but had to move when the landlord wanted to renovate.

It is here that Damelio, by his account and that of those who know him, spends most of his time, putting in at least 12-hour days on behalf of power brokers, pawns, and paupers facing felonies and misdemeanors — everything from murder to fraud to petty theft. Despite his prominent client roster, Damelio, a bachelor with no children, accepts cases through the county’s assigned counsel program, which pairs indigent defendants with private attorneys at a deeply

discounted rate.

“When his office was on State Street and I had to be downtown for whatever reason on a Saturday or Sunday, you could almost count on his car being there,” said James Nobles, another wellknown defense lawyer in town.

“He’s a guy who can work an immense amount of hours and does. He lives and breathes his job.”

Since striking out on his own in the late 1990s, Damelio has represented notorious killers like Johnny Blackshell, Frank Garcia, and Robert Spahalski, and former cops like Chad Rahn and James Telban, the latter of whom was acquitted of manslaughter.

Ten years before he took Warren’s case, Damelio defended the man who would become her deputy mayor, James Smith. As deputy Monroe County executive, Smith was charged with multiple misdemeanor counts of official misconduct for allegedly turning a blind eye to county workers bilking the county out of thousands of dollars. He was acquitted of all charges.

How Damelio became the go-to defense attorney for so many highprofile people may simply lie in the fact that, according to his peers, he is among the best at what he does. A couple of years ago, the Monroe County Public Defender’s Office recognized him as the lawyer in the county who mostly fiercely advocates for their clients.

“Joe has an excellent reputation for providing a vigorous defense for his clients,” Monroe County Public Defender Tim Donaher said. “If I were, God forbid, charged with an offense, he would be in the top five lawyers I would contact for my defense, for sure.”

Damelio can stand off an army of microphones and cameras, and he has a reputation as a savvy courtroom tactician and jury charmer. And the bundle comes with no bravado. He is effusively self-deprecating, punctuating

every put-down with a booming laugh.

“I try to be polite [to juries] because I’m a bigger guy,” he said, followed by the boom. “I try not to be a bully, and I don’t think I am.

I just like to talk to jurors. You got to get them to like you, then you can get them to trust you.”

His modesty reveals a guy raised with few luxuries or Ivy League polish, but with a relentless work ethic.

On evenings before a trial, Damelio can be seen in his office window, pacing and dictating his thoughts into an antiquated, handheld cassette recorder he calls his “security blanket.” He doesn’t trust digital recorders.

Damelio wasn’t educated at the finest schools and he didn’t climb the defense lawyer ranks in the typical fashion, putting in time as a prosecutor.

“When I was in law school, I interned at the [Monroe County] DA’s Office and everyone I interned with got hired except me,” Damelio said, followed by the boom.

He grew up working class and a devout Catholic in Rochester’s Lyell-Otis neighborhood as one of four children to an Italian father and an Irish mother. His father was a dispatcher at Pfaudler, a glass-lined steel tank manufacturer. His mother was a public school secretary. He was to be named Salvatore, after an uncle he never met who died in the Korean War. But his superstitious grandmother thought it was bad luck, so he was named after his father and given Salvatore as a middle name.

He went to Jefferson High School, earned a bachelor’s degree from SUNY Buffalo, and graduated from Capital University Law School in Ohio in 1986.

Shortly after law school, he spent roughly 10 years as an associate of

Michael Rose, a former criminal lawyer whom Damelio considers among his mentors, before hanging his own shingle in a storefront in his old neighborhood at Lyell Avenue and Child Street.

“My plate-glass insurance was more than my rent,” he said, followed by the boom.

Home for Damelio is now Irondequoit, but church is the historic Our Lady of Victory downtown.

Religion is omnipresent in his life. The Prayer of St. Francis is tattooed on his left shoulder and a plaque by the light switch in his office, translated from Latin, reads, “Bidden or Not Bidden, God is Present.”

Damelio views his work a calling.

One of the verdicts he remembers best is one he wishes he never heard. His client, a young man who wanted to be a police officer, was convicted of assault stemming from a bar fight, effectively killing his dream.

“It made me realize, wow, this changed this kid’s entire life, this verdict,” Damelio said. “This is how important I think this work is.”

Joe Damelio enters court with his client, Mayor Lovely Warren, in October 2020.

PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE

roccitynews.org CITY 43

ARTS

FILM

Scenes from "Photo City," a documentary about Rochester's vaunted place in photographic history. PROVIDED PHOTOS

‘PHOTO CITY’ IS A SNAPSHOT OF ROCHESTER

BY ADAM LUBITOW

@ADAMLUBITOW

(NR), DIRECTED BY JOHN MURPHY AND TRAOLACH Ó MURCHÚ NOW AVAILABLE ON VIMEO ON DEMAND

T

he shadows of George Eastman and Kodak loom large over the city of Rochester. Even as the legendary photography company has faced its share of hardships over the years —massive layoffs, bankruptcy, mismanagement, an ever-shifting technological landscape, and a dubious foray into pharmaceuticals — the Photo City imprint it left on Rochester has not faded.

Back in 2016, Irish filmmakers John Murphy and Traolach Ó Murchú traveled to Rochester and spent six months interviewing members of our city’s photographic community.

They homed in on a handful of visual

44 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

artists — from budding amateurs and hobbyists to those who make their living looking through the lens — to learn about their personal relationship with the art form and the city where they make their home.

Their resulting documentary, “Photo City,” is a fascinating look at Rochester’s history as “the image capital of the world” and how it continues to evolve. The filmmakers’ outsider perspective helps them provide a cleareyed portrait of a city struggling to reshape an identity that for so long hinged largely on the reputation of a single corporation.

Conversations with former Kodak employees, historians, artists, and enthusiasts reveal a city with a rich history and a deep affection for the visual arts. The filmmakers find that

even as the Kodak empire declined, photography has remained inextricably linked to life in Rochester.

Among the artists and photographers featured in the film are CITY’s Frank De Blase, WXXI’s Max Schulte, filmmaker Carvin Eison, and Todd Gustavson and Nick Brandreth of the George Eastman Museum. Each of them use the photographic medium for various purposes — whether to appreciate its history, to connect with people, or to understand their own place in the world.

“Photo City” premiered in Rochester at The Little Theatre’s One Take Documentary Film Festival in 2018, and later screened at the Dryden Theatre in December of that year. If you missed your chance to see it during those limited showings, the

film is now available for the first time digitally through Vimeo on Demand, ready for quarantine-friendly viewing at home. It runs 78 minutes and can be rented for $5.

Viewed in the context of 2020, the film hits a little differently. As its tone veers between the inspirational and the melancholic, certain sections of it feel more timely than ever. At a time when so much around us seems to be in complete chaos, there’s some comfort in the idea that the only certainty in life is that things will, and often must, change. And the loss of a certain way of life doesn’t necessarily mean catastrophe. The film is a heartening depiction of the ways people will always adapt, learning from the past and using that knowledge to build something new.

ABOUT TOWN Lectures

Adult Tour: The Haudenosaunee. Tue.,

Nov. 10, 3-4 p.m. Rochester Museum & Science Center, 657 East Ave. (rmsc.org) $20/$21.

Carved in Stone: Exploring Cemetery Symbolism & Iconography. Sat., Nov. 14,

10:30 a.m. Virtual Central Library. Part of the Mourning in the Morning series. calendar.libraryweb.org.

Cavanaugh Reading Series: Sejal Shah.

Thu., Nov. 5, 7 p.m. Presented by the St. John Fisher College English Department, Live on FB. Conserving Wildlife in Bright Noisy Places: Do Light & Noise Pollution Affect Urban Frogs & Bats?. Tue., Nov. 17, 7:30 p.m. gvaudubon.org.

The History of Pandemics. Fri., Nov.

6, 10 a.m. Dr. Carolyn Vacca, Monroe County Historian & chair of the St. John Fisher College History Dept. Registration required. sjfc.edu/calendar.

A History of Racial Segregation in Rochester Schools. Thu., Nov. 5, 7 p.m.

Henrietta Public Library. Registration required. hpl.libcal.com.

In Punishment We Trust: Mass Incarceration in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Mon., Nov. 16, 7 p.m. Dr. Khalil

Muhammad. monroecc.edu/life-at-mcc/ mcc-events.

Martha Taylor Howard, Savior of 17 Madison Street. Sat., Nov. 7, 1 p.m.

Virtual Central Library, calendar.libraryweb. org.

A Modern Necessity: Feminism, Popular Culture, & American Womanhood, 19201948. Wed., Nov. 4, 6:30 p.m. Virtual

Central Library, calendar.libraryweb.org.

Olmsted & Rochester Parks. Thu., Nov. 5, 7 p.m. Livestream, Online A talk with Master Gardener, Bob Beabout, presented

by Rush Public Library. Registration required calendar.libraryweb.org.

Rightfully Hers: Building the Foundation for Freedom, Suffrage, & Equality Webinar Series. Wed., Nov. 4, 7 p.m.,

Wed., Nov. 11, 7 p.m. and Wed., Nov. 18, 7 p.m. Virtual Genesee Country Village & Museum, gcv.org.

Pages with Purpose: A History of Seneca Park Zoo. Thu., Nov. 19, 7 p.m. A virtual

book discussion with historian and Zoo docent Maureen Whalen. Registration required. senecaparkzoo.org/event/ bookgroup.

Sweet Bites: A Taste of Poetry. Tue., Nov. 10, noon. Registration required penfield. libraryweb.org.

UR Neilly Author Series: Paul Lauter.

Tue., Nov. 10, 7 p.m. “Our Sixties: An Activist’s History” Registration required library.rochester.edu/about/neilly.

Kids Events

1 p.m Virtual Central Library, calendar. libraryweb.org.

Intergalactic Outpost. Sun., Nov. 22, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Strong National Museum of Play, 1 Manhattan Sq. (museumofplay. org) .

Preparing for Winter. Sat., Nov. 21, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Genesee Country Village & Museum, 1410 Flint Hill Rd Mumford Before hunkering down became a hot topic, it was a seasonal tradition. The Genesee Village & Museum brings back equal parts duty and fun as the historic buildings and landscapes are winterized for another year, and handmade crafts get made for the holidays. Villagers will demonstrate traditional crafts, which will be available for purchase as kits to take home. GCV&M members and kids under the age of 12 get in free, and admission must be reserved in advance $10. gcv.org.

Storytime Club: Fun with Food. Mon., Nov. 9, 10:30 a.m., Mon., Nov. 16, 10:30 a.m. and Mon., Nov. 30, 10:30 a.m. Strong National Museum of Play, 1 Manhattan Sq. (museumofplay.org) W/ museum admission ($16).

Virtual Animal Encounters. Mon., Nov. 2, 11 a.m., Mon., Nov. 9, 11 a.m. and Mon., Nov. 16, 11 a.m. Virtual Strong National Museum of Play, Online $25/$30. museumofplay.org.

Rochester’s Marvelous Monuments (And More). Tue., Nov. 10, 6:30 p.m.

Wreath Display & Silent Auction (Nov 4-29) | Sweet Creations Gingerbread Display (Nov 6-Dec 13) | Tabletop Tree Display & Silent Auction (Nov18-Dec 16). Tuesdays-Sundays George Eastman

Literary Events & Discussions

Books Sandwiched In. Tuesdays Virtual

Central Library, Online. ffrpl.libraryweb.org.

Eco-Book Club & Hike. Wed., Nov. 4, 11 a.m.-1:30 p.m. Cumming Nature Center, 6472 Gulick Rd. On the first Wednesday of each month through April, the Cumming Nature Center will combine readings and reflections on nature with immersion and hikes inspired by the theme of each book.

November’s selection is “Flight Behaviour”

by Barbara Kingsolver. Book discussions will be online, followed by in-person hikes. Check the Cumming Nature Center website for the series reading list. The event is free and registration is required rmsc.org.

NEW PATIENT SPECIAL: Receive 20% off your first purchase

Home Delivery Available

Find us

www.col-care.com/location/rochester New York Medical Marijuana ID required to make a Medical Marijuana purchase.

Holiday

Holidays at the Market. Sundays, 8 a.m.-2 p.m Rochester Public Market, 280 N. Union St. 428-6907.

Livestream, Online Presented by Caitlin Meives, Tyler Lucero, & Christopher Brandt of the Young Urban Preservationists rochesterbrainery.com.

Medical Marijuana Dispensary in Rochester now offering ground flower

Ben Guterson: Winterhouse. Wednesdays,

Rochester’s Rich History: James H. Johnson, Architect. Sat., Nov. 21, 1 p.m.

Virtual Central Library, calendar.libraryweb. org.

Columbia Care

Museum, 900 East Ave. eastman.org W/ museum admission: $7-$18.

Recreation

Black Friday Hike. Fri., Nov 27, 10-11:30

a.m. Ganargua Creek Meadow Preserve, 727 Wilkinson Rd Macedon trailworks.org.

Nature’s Hidden Language. Sat., Nov 14, 10-11:30 a.m. Helmer Nature Center, 154 Pinegrove Ave $5. 336-3035.

Special Events

National Toy Hall of Fame Induction.

Thu., Nov. 5, Sat., Nov. 7 and Sun., Nov. 8. Strong National Museum of Play, 1 Manhattan Sq. (museumofplay.org) .

RMSC After Dark: Science On The ROCs. Thu., Nov. 19, 7 p.m. Cocktail hour with a scientist, live on FB. roccitynews.org CITY 45

LIFE

A FILL-YOUR-BELLY DELI

A Reuben sandwich with a side of coleslaw. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH

A BOOM AMID A BUST

BY CHRIS THOMPSON

@CHRONSOFNON

BOOMTOWN CAFÉ

1900 S. CLINTON AVENUE ROCHESTER, NY 14618 (585) 363-5333 BOOMTOWNCAFEROC.COM M-F: 7AM-2PM

N

ot five minutes after I took my seat at Boomtown Café, a new deli in the New York style in Brighton, a tornado of activity swept through the place.

Firefighters from the Rochester Fire Department’s Truck 3 pulled up with a hunger burning in their bellies. A group of University of Rochester students walked in demanding take-out. Boomtown’s owner Kathy Reggo was preparing boxes for orders already placed. Through it all, an old man who has already become a

46 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

regular, wouldn’t stop talking about how the eatery had transformed itself from its former incarnation as a Chinese-American restaurant.

The rush recalled the amplified energy of a deli on Manhattan’s Lower East Side that made Boomtown truly live up to its name.

Like most new businesses this year, Boomtown’s grand opening was delayed by the pandemic. It was supposed to open on March 18, but its health and occupancy certifications were put off as government offices navigated the crisis. Late winter became mid-summer, and Boomtown officially opened in the Shoppes at Lac De Ville plaza on South Clinton Avenue on July 20.

Reggo and Boomtown’s manager, Danielle Alaimo, had spent the better part of a year renovating the space that was once home to Golden Dynasty.

Transforming a former ChineseAmerican restaurant into a New Yorkstyle deli is about as arduous as you might expect. By the time they stripped the place of the decor and fixtures they didn’t want, there was nothing left but steel frame and concrete.

The benefit of an overhaul like that was that it gave Reggo and Alaimo the opportunity to hand-pick every detail of the new restaurant. Boomtown’s interior is a blend of a home kitchen counter and a mom-and-pop diner, although, in this case, it is more of a mom-and-mom-and-mom diner. All

three regular employees are working mothers. Tina Rhodes, an employee who, like Reggo and Alaimo, wears hats from server to cook to custodian, rounds out the trio.

I arrived around lunchtime craving breakfast. The menu has a familiar diner look: Sides and appetizers in the front, followed by specialty burgers, hearty salads, and personally stylized hot and cold sandwiches, punctuated by all-day breakfast on the back page. Anyone can get a filling meal for $9.99-$10.99.

There is also vegan fare, and a “Schmutz Plate” ($12.25), Boomtown’s take on a Rochester staple, with kosher salami, corned beef, and sauerkraut.

I opted for the “Leo,” an omelet or eggs scrambled with lox and sautéed

find it.

axomhome.com 661 south ave

Roasted turkey on a hard roll with sauerkraut. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH

onions ($8.99). I had the scrambled eggs and substituted the usual rye toast with an everything bagel supplied by the Rochester bakery Balsam for an extra dollar. The coffee ($1.89) is Vassilaros & Sons, a Queens-based roaster founded by Greek immigrants more than 100 years ago, and currently headed by the fourth-generation matriarch of the family. If you’ve ever ordered a cup of coffee from a New York City street cart or diner, chances are it was Vassilaros.

Later in the week, I had a customized sandwich: in-house roasted turkey on a hard roll with sauerkraut, tomatoes, and onion, with a side of fries and coleslaw ($9.50 + $2.29 for the fries). The hard roll was the size

of a fist, and it barely enveloped the heaping sheets of sliced turkey stuffed in its maw. It was the type of sandwich my grandmother would serve me upon complaining that I was “wasting away.”

Boomtown’s aim is to give Rochester a blend of a Canarsie Kosher deli and a Brooklyn Italian market, but still pay homage to Rochester’s own rich food history, all while providing a place for folks to congregate and socialize. Although social distancing has made physically congregating in close quarters an issue, the atmosphere is alive at Boomtown.

Worth noting is Boomtown’s commitment to employing people with disabilities and fostering a family atmosphere among its workers. The

ambition is personal for Alaimo, who has a son with disabilities and bristles at the “rotating door” approach to hiring that often plagues the service industry.

Boomtown Café is a delight, from its food, to its employees, to its character, and the characters who walk through its doors.

The only thing about the place that gave me pause was its name. For me, “Boomtown” conjured images of the Klondike Gold Rush rather than a New York-style deli. Then Alaimo refreshed my memory: Rochester, once little more than a hamlet along the Genesee River, was among America’s first boomtowns.

roccitynews.org CITY 47

A guide to merry-making during a pandemic The holidays don’t stop — not even for a pandemic. There are still family members to see, dinners to be had, parties to attend, and plenty of holiday stress to endure.

Not to worry — CITY’s Holiday Guide returns to make sense of it all and to provide some festive respite from all the frantic activity.

We’ve got your quick-reference resource for everything from holiday beverages and a pictureperfect Thanksgiving meal to themed movies and virtual Christmas party-planning. No need to pore over long articles about how to be merry.

Music editor Daniel Kushner checks in with three local bartenders who provide excellent options for those who want a fall cocktail without that ubiquitous (and to some, obnoxious) pumpkin flavor. If you’re more of a beer person, staff writer Gino Fanelli has created the Advent Rochester Beer Calendar. You won’t be without ideas for imbibing this season.

In the meantime, Thanksgiving approaches. Food writer Vince Press gives us a mouth-watering preview of the annual three-course Thanksgiving meal at the Brighton restaurant Avvino, courtesy of owners Janine and Tim Caschette. Parties and the holidays go hand-in-hand, even when you have to physically distance from fellow partygoers.

This year, it’s even more important to enjoy the holidays from the comfort of home. And what better way than to get your fill of holiday movies? But should you go with Thanksgiving films or Christmas flicks? Our “November Madness” bracket pits the two holidays against each other in head-to-head cinematic matchups, to decide once and for all. Which movie will emerge victorious as the ultimate in holiday viewing?

By the way, has anyone checked in with Santa lately? Gino Fanelli investigates to see what kind of presence good ol’ St. Nick will have in the Rochester area this Christmas and how to become one of his helpers.

Whichever way you make merry this holiday season, be safe and spread love.

Season’s greetings from CITY. 48 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

Three Holiday Cocktails — hold the pumpkin please

BY DANIEL J. KUSHNER

@DANIELJKUSHNER

DKUSHNER@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM

‘The Iron Sickle’ by Mack Hartman, The Revelry

PHOTOS BY JACOB WALSH

Mack Hartman is the affable, long-haired bar manager at The Revelry, the University Avenue restaurant and bar that serves craft beverages with unpretentious, cocktail nerd vibes.

For fall flavors, Hartman avoids pumpkin in favor of spices such as clove, brown sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg. With that in mind, he’s particularly excited about The Iron Sickle — a drink made with Iron Smoke Distillery’s applewood-smoked whiskey, a syrup made with brown sugar and clove, Angostura bitters, and a flamed orange peel as a garnish.

“The flavor you normally find in it can sometimes be pungent or overwhelming, but with the clove and the brown-sugar spice, it blends with it in a way that makes it more approachable,” Hartman says.

The clove flavor also accentuates the smoky aspect of the cocktail, and the fresh citrus aroma of the burned orange peel adds freshness. The Iron Sickle may sound foreboding, but this warming drink is subtly sweet.

‘Blue Blazer’ by Evvy Fanning, Cheshire

Evvy Fanning, owner of the classy, intimate cocktail bar Cheshire, somewhat secluded above Solera Wine Bar on South Avenue, is a high school English teacher by trade. Prior to opening, she had never bartended before, though she comes from a family of mixed-drink aficionados that frequently hosted cocktail parties.

Before opening the bar almost nine years ago, she did her research, visiting cocktail bars throughout Europe to see what worked and what didn’t.

Cheshire specializes in Prohibition-era drinks; Fanning calls its seasoned-bourbon Old Fashioned the bar’s “claim to fame.” With temperatures getting colder in autumn, she recently created her take on a Blue Blazer when a customer asked her for something warm.

The ingredients are deceptively simple: whiskey, sugar, and water. While the traditional liquor in a Blue Blazer is cask-strength Scotch, Fanning prefers bourbon. After stirring the ingredients, she caramelizes the sugar with a lit match, so that the cocktail is infused with the element of fire. The result has a boozy aroma, but is very sippable.

“The flavor is kind of cozy,” Fanning says. “It’s like comfort food.”

PHOTOS BY JACOB WALSH

‘Fashionably Late’ by Donny Clutterbuck, Cure

PHOTOS BY RYAN WILLIAMSON

The mustachioed Donny Clutterbuck is a conspicuous presence behind the bar at Cure, a hip cocktail spot that shares space with Java’s in The Public Market. As Cure’s head bartender, he offers customers classic flavors and elegant, understated presentation.

In this vein, Clutterbuck’s Fashionably Late is inspired by both the margarita and whiskey sour. The cocktail uses the strong orange-and-clove flavor of Caffo Vecchio Amaro del Capo combined with the molasses of a turbinado simple syrup for sweetness, which balances out the whiskey. Finally, lemon juice, tempered by a small amount of salt, adds additional character without being overly acidic.

When it comes to other cold-weather cocktails, Clutterbuck is drawn to specific ingredients — and none of them are pumpkin.

“Cinnamon, clove, orange, and curry are up there for me in terms of elements incorporated in the fall and winter,” he says. “But I typically find spirits or liqueurs that have hints of them.”

roccitynews.org CITY 49

SING-ALONG DIVISION

VS

America needs old white guys singing and dancing right now like it needs an old, white second-term president. But “The Last Waltz,” which documents the last live performance of The Band over Thanksgiving 1976, eludes all the dated cringe of “White Christmas” to better stand the test of time.

WINNER: The Last Waltz.

VS

Let’s face it, “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving” is just a holdover between “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” and “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Indeed, most people think “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” is the Thanksgiving special, while the Christmas special featuring America’s favorite animated, put-upon blockhead unmistakably screams, “‘Tis the season!”

WINNER: A Charlie Brown Christmas.

VS

Humanity and spirituality run deep through both of these classics. The age-old themes of redemption and duty to community that The Band explores in its lyrics dovetail neatly with the Thanksgiving holiday.

But it really doesn’t feel like the holidays until Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy” playing at Wegmans snaps you out of a funk induced by the commercial trappings of the season.

WINNER: A Charlie Brown Christmas.

VS

HO-HO-HO, HA-HA-HA DIVISION

VS

Woody Allen’s neurotic and nebbish imprint is all over a brilliantly-executed script about the lives of three sisters bookended by Thanksgiving dinners, but there’s a reason it doesn’t play around-the-clock on a cable network near you like the nostalgia-soaked Christmas saga of Ralphie.

WINNER: A Christmas Story

VS

This one is a toss-up between a bona fide holiday Thanksgiving classic and a beloved Christmas classic-in-waiting. Will Ferrell is arguably at the height of his comedic powers as the orphanturned-elf Buddy. But the chemistry of Steve Martin and John Candy as unlikely travel buddies is the stuff of genius.

WINNER: Planes, Trains and Automobiles 50 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

Holiday Movie Showdown

VS

Someone is going to be upset here. Both films are perennial favorites that go toe-to-toe with scene after scene of comedic gold. Getting picked up by the groin by a cabbie, getting kicked down a slide by Santa, sharing an awkward cuddle in bed, wearing awkward “deranged Easter Bunny” pajamas, the list goes on and on. But rejoice, Ralphie fans, he got his “official Red Rider, carbine action, 200-shot, rangemodel air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time.” WINNER: Planes, Trains and Automobiles

As touching as it is to hear Linus Van Pelt’s precocious recitation of the Biblical version of the birth of Jesus in answer to Charlie Brown’s desperate plea for the true meaning of Christmas, it is far more poignant to fly, ride, and drive with Martin — as he transforms from an analretentive, self-important jerk to a compassionate soul grateful for his family and newfound friend Candy — to encapsulate the true meaning of Thanksgiving.

WINNER: Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

VS

It’s a Wonderful Life

The most popular Thanksgivi against the most popular Ch turkey. Or is it ham? There’s p out-loud, odd-couple comed serving of heart-warming go and Automobiles” features w best performance and — with “Father of the Bride” — Martin But none of that has made th viewing tradition for generat Capra’s Christmas fantasy b at just the right time . . . and e

WINNER: It’s a W

VS

VS

When the tryptophan kicks in, all there is left to do is flop on the couch, unbuckle the belt, and escape in hours of pre-programmed Thanksgiving movies. There are plenty of them centered around the holiday, but are they any match for their Christmas counterparts a few weeks away? November Madness breaks it down.

Failed suicide attempts become life-affirming moments for the heroes of these films. Stewart’s George Bailey is saved by a pitiful angel who teaches him the true importance of his life.

Al Pacino’s blind Lt. Col. Frank Slade is saved by a high school student who sticks with him in the darkest hour of his miserable life. Pacino’s conversion is more riveting, but Stewart’s leaves your eyes welling up.

WINNER: It’s a Wonderful Life

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Wonderful Life

VS

VS

This is going to sit about as well with fans of the Griswolds as the idea of Cousin Eddie crashing Christmas is with Clark.

Hilarity ensues when relatives with nothing in common get together for the holidays. But the sentimental humor of a strong ensemble cast led by Holly Hunter, who loses her job and visits her parents for Thanksgiving while her daughter stays home to have sex with her boyfriend, is far more sophisticated than the over-the-top irreverence of the third installment of the “Vacation” franchise.

WINNER: Home for the Holidays

This is a tough draw for “The Ice Storm,” a formidable drama about adultery, escapism, and teenage sexuality over Thanksgiving 1973.

But its star-studded cast doesn’t hold a Christmas candle to the slapstick antics of the Griswolds with their earnest patriarch in Clark and ne’er-do-well Cousin Eddie. WINNER: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation

VS

DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY DIVISION

ing movie squares off hristmas movie, for all the plenty of both in the laughdy topped with a heaping oodness. “Planes, Trains what is perhaps Candy’s h the possible exception of n’s crowning movie role. he film an annual movietions. All the magic of Frank bubbles up like a muffin top endures.

The Baileys versus the Larsons.

The Bailey clan is pretty much perfect in every single way, with the exception of Tommy incessantly banging out “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” on the piano in a climactic scene. Who can blame George for lashing out at him?! The Larsons of Baltimore, on the other hand, are a disaster to gut-bustingly humorous effect.

Their Thanksgiving, loaded with absurdity and pity, is the goldstandard for family-gathering holiday films. But the deep emotional drama combined with warm humor of “It’s a Wonderful Life” gives the Baileys the edge.

WINNER: It’s a Wonderful Life.

VS

While Newman as a cantankerous hustler whose routine of drinking and carousing is upended with the arrival of his estranged son over Thanksgiving sounds like a better movie than Stewart as a big-dreaming do-gooder down and out on Christmas, it isn’t.

WINNER: It’s a Wonderful Life.

VS

S

TEARJERKER DIVISION

BY DAVID ANDREATTA & DANIEL J. KUSHNER

The made-for-TV animated special starring Boris Karloff as the curmudgeon of Mount Crumpit makes the most of its mere 26 minutes, including a lump-inthe-throat moment when, they say, the Grinch’s heart grew three sizes that day. But it’s no cinematic match for the story of a hoo-aahing grouch who finds redemption helping a prep-school poor boy over Thanksgiving.

WINNER: Scent of a Woman.

A “Home”-and-“Home” series.

While few things scream dysfunction like a family leaving their 8-year-old home alone at Christmas, consider that the tagline for “Home for the Holidays” is “84 million American families will gather on Thanksgiving . . . only to wonder why.”

WINNER: Home for the Holidays

roccitynews.org CITY 51

10 WANT TO LEAVE? CRY ZOOM FATIGUE:

Playing the “I’m tired” card to escape a lame company party early is risky business. There’s always that drunk assistant manager ready to call your bluff. But “Zoom fatigue” is a real thing, and after nine months of video conferencing, everyone is feeling the pain.

YOU’RE YOUR OWN DJ: Let accounting listen to all the Kenny G they want. You'll be busy headbanging to TransSiberian Orchestra.

SAY GOODBYE TO $5 YELLOW TAIL: The beauty of partying virtually is stocking your own bar with quality beverages.

(See our CITY local beer Advent calendar on pg. 58 and what Rochester’s mixologists are recommending on pg. 49 for help.)

52 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

REASONS WHY

your virtual holiday office party doesn't have to suck...

DON’T FEEL LIKE TALKING? BLAME YOUR BANDWIDTH: When that dude from marketing is bending your ear on next month’s product launch, freeze like a reindeer in headlights, pretend stutter, and blame your internet connection. He’ll move on to the next sucker.

THREE WORDS: EGG. NOG. BREATH: Downing five holiday-spiced milkshakes in two hours can really make a person get in your face. Say goodbye to close talkers and their Evan Williamsinduced halitosis this year.

NO MORE WANDERING HANDS: Yeah, you’ve all taken the sexual harassment training, but get a few mistletoe martinins in the guys on the eighth floor and it all goes out the window.

NO COMPANY-LOGOED SWAG: You need another coffee mug, golf shirt, tote bag, and socks with your company logo on it like you need a . . . actually, you don’t them at all.

YOU CAN GO PANTS-FREE: What could be more freeing than attending a work party al fresco from the comfort of your living room? Just don't take it literally when your boss shouts, “Bottom’s up!”

YOU DON'T HAVE TO WATCH YOUR COWORKERS DANCE: Few things are as cringeworthy as your colleagues attempting to sexy dance, swing dance, breakdance... any dance, really.

FORGET A NAME? FUHGEDDABOUTIT: The guy in the Christmas sweater is coming your way, and you won't have to whisper to your spouse, "What's his name again?"

Virtual parties are tricked out with name tags.

HOLIDAY HIGHLIGHT RPO presents “Holiday Classics”, rpo.org. Dec. 17, at 7:30 p.m.

There’s something about the inherent majesty and elegance of music from the Baroque era that makes it ideal for

Christmas concert programming. The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Ward Stare, will perform just such a program on Thursday, Dec. 17 in a live-streamed concert. “Holiday Classics” consists of time-tested favorites —including Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3, excerpts from Handel’s “Water Music,” and Arcangelo Corelli’s “Christmas Concerto.” The 20th century composer Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on Greensleeves” rounds out an evening of beautiful, subtly festive orchestral music. Tickets for the virtual performance are $15.

— BY DANIEL J. KUSHNER.

PHOTO BY ROGER MASTROIANNI

roccitynews.org CITY 53

54 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

A HOLIDAY MEAL TO REMEMBER

BY VINCE PRESS

@VLPRESS

E

very October, Janine and Tim Caschette plan their annual Thanksgiving celebration — choosing the menu, ordering ingredients, and stocking the bar — at Avvino, their contemporary American eatery in Brighton.

Since opening in 2014, the restaurant has consistently been one of the region’s best dining experiences in large part due to its commitment to quality ingredients, local sourcing, high-level culinary acumen, and genuine attention to detail. It has also been the setting for a holiday feast for the Caschettes’ friends and family.

The annual ritual started small, with just close family. But like the waistline on Thanksgiving, it expanded — first to extended family, then to friends.

Now some 50 guests pass through Avvino on Thanksgiving in true open house format. They begin trickling in around noon, with some guests hanging around for 10 minutes and others closing the place down around 10 p.m.

“There’s a whole lot of selfishness going on here,” Tim said with a laugh, only half-joking.

“This basically happened out of convenience.

Hosting a dinner at the restaurant is so much easier than at home. We’ve got a much bigger kitchen, a dishwasher that has a 45-second cycle, a fully stocked bar, pasta cooker, four bathrooms, plenty of parking and all the dishware, flatware and barware we need, with the bonus of no mess at home!”

The beauty of the day is its eclectic mix of people without the dysfunction. Regulars include wine reps, restaurant owners, mixologists, servers, and local celebs from the dining scene like Marty O’Sullivan (Marty’s Meats), Mark Cupolo (Rocco and Rella) and restaurant consultant Chris Grocki (the German House).

“It’s a great opportunity to see family, especially being in the restaurant biz where it’s hard to regularly connect with them,” Janine said.

Transforming the chic space into a homey yet elegant holiday backdrop is Janine’s jam. She has amassed décor, trinkets, and finery over time for an autumn tablescape to rival any Food Network holiday set. To illustrate the lengths to which she goes, Janine rents lounge furniture to create relaxing spaces and supplies arts and crafts and games for the kids. Nerf gun fights have been known to break out while “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” and football battle for attention on TVs behind the bar.

The menu belongs to Tim, who builds it with discerning palettes in mind and the same philosophy he employs year-round at the restaurant, whose motto is, “Locally sourced, fiercely seasonal.”

His slow-cooked Sunday-style sauce and pasta with oxtail, thighs of farm-raised chicken, and homemade sausage and meatballs is a winner with CONTINUED ON PAGE 56

roccitynews.org CITY 55

Tim and Janine Caschette prepare their annual Thanksgiving feast at their Brighton restaurant, Avvino.

PHOTO BY VINCE PRESS

the kids, while the brined and smoked local turkey and basil potato puree are elevated twists on tradition that adults adore. His luxurious gravy is made with New York apple cider reduced down with drippings and chicken stock.

The sausage stuffing recipe is equally decadent, baked with rosemary, thyme, garlic, celery, carrot and onion.

But he doesn’t shy away from introducing global flavors, such as local Delicata squash spiked with North African spices like clove, cumin, cardamom, and cinnamon. He might offer a vegetarian dish of curried lentils with Indian notes or creamed swiss chard with Ethiopian spices — keeping the tradition of Thanksgiving while ever so slightly playing with flavor profiles.

The first course comes out at 1 p.m. that day featuring a bountiful charcuterie board with smoked and 56 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

cured meats, pâtés, local and imported cheeses, nuts, olives, pickled vegetables, breads, dips, and spreads. And then there’s the chilled seafood platter overloaded with lobster meat salad, stone crab claws, spiced shrimp and lobster claws.

A couple of hours later, secondcourse arrives and it is a true carnivore’s delight. It consists of a

towering tray of simmered meats and colossal dishes of piping hot rigatoni pasta tossed with slow-cooked meat sauce served with homemade rosemary focaccia bread that is “last-meal worthy” and ready for dipping.

The main event is a buffet with something for everyone, including sliced smoked turkey and beef tenderloin, whole porchetta, caramelized Brussels sprouts with sautéed pancetta, potato purée, squash, rapini with garlic and lemon, curried lentils, salads, stuffing, and Avvino’s famous Parker House rolls.

Although Tim somehow finds the time to whip up a deep-dish pecan pie, dessert is largely pot-luck, with guests bringing the lion’s share of sweets.

Consistent with the casual vibe of the place, there are no pretentious wine pairings at the dinner. Janine, a certified sommelier, serves as the bartender and

has been known to mix some signature cocktails, like a Concord Grape Martini (with grape infused vodka) or a crazy good sounding Clarified Apple Milk Punch with Calvados brandy, rum, maple syrup cider, lemon, and whole milk.

If it sounds exhausting, consider that Avvino is open to the public the very next day. Evidence that something went down the night before is subtle, but is there if you know where to look. A Nerf bullet sits in a corner of the room. A misplaced gin bottle mingles with the bourbon behind the bar. The extra Tupperware containers in the cooler.

“We love hosting this event just as we do with our regular guests,” Tim said. “We hope people feel comfortable, happy, nurtured and loved. That’s our goal.”

*If served together, these recipes should serve 8 -12 people.

GRANDMA CASCHETTE’S TOMATO SAUCE 4 tablespoons vegetable oil 2 quarts Spanish onions (fine dice) 2 #10 size cans (6 lbs 7 oz each) - San Marzano tomatoes (pureéd) 5 tablespoons thyme 6 bay leaves 6 tablespoons chopped garlic 1 ½ cups olive oil 3 lbs oxtail 2 lbs bone in short ribs 2 ½ lbs bone in chicken thighs 3 lbs bone in country pork ribs 10 basil leaves 6 oz parmesan rinds Salt and pepper to taste 2 teaspoons red pepper flake Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees. Heat a heavy bottom stock pot heat to medium high heat. Liberally season the oxtail, short ribs, chicken thighs, and country ribs. Add vegetable oil to stock pot. Add seasoned meat to stock pot in batches (do not overcrowd). After all the meat has been browned, transfer to a braising pan.

Drain excess oil form the stock pot. Add olive oil to the stock pot. Add the Spanish onions and thyme. Season with salt, pepper, and the red pepper flake. Cook the onions in the olive oil until they are completely translucent.

Add garlic and cook for 30 seconds.

Add the pureéd tomatoes, and bay leaves. Stir occasionally. When tomato sauce has come to a simmer, add basil and parmesan rinds. Add salt and pepper to taste. Pour tomato sauce over seared meat in the braising pan. Cover with plastic wrap. Then cover with aluminum foil. Transfer braising pan to pre-heated oven and cook for 3 ½ hour, or until oxtail is falling off the bone. Remove all meat, parmesan rinds, and bay leaves from tomato sauce. Discard rinds and bay leaves and let meat cool on a cookie pan till just warm. With gloved hands, remove all bones and cartilage from cooked meat.

Reintroduce meat to tomato sauce and mix well.

Tim and Janine Caschette's Thanksgiving spread at Avvino is an open-house for the who's who of Rochester's dining scene.

PHOTO BY VINCE PRESS

TURKEY BRINE 1 gallon water ½ cup salt ¾ cup sugar ¼ lb sliced raw ginger 1/8 cup coriander seeds ½ stalk lemon grass Combine all ingredients into a large stock pot.

Heat over high heat or until all salt and sugar is dissolved.

Cool completely before using.

SMOKED TURKEY (2) 5 lbs bone-in turkey breast Turkey brine (see recipe) 5 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons shallots 2 tablespoons thyme Zest on one lemon 2 tablespoons vegetable oil Salt and white pepper to taste 2 large sealable bags Souvide machine Smoker Hickory wood Large plastic Cambro for sous-vide Place turkeys in a large sealable container and pour turkey brine over until both are completely submerged. Cover and refrigerate for 24 hours. Turn on smoker with hickory wood and pre heat to 220 degrees. Remove turkeys from brine and pat dry. Lightly coat turkeys with vegetable oil and season with salt and white pepper.

Place on smoking rack. Place turkeys in smoker for 1 hour. Remove turkey and

let completely cool. Fill Cambro with water and insert sous vide and set to 143 degrees. Add turkey, butter, shallot, thyme and lemon zest to sealable bag. Seal bag and submerge in sous-vide water bath and set timer for 2 ½ hour. Pre-heat over to 375 degrees.

After turkey is cooked, remove from sealable bag and place on sheet tray with a resting rack. Lightly season with salt and white pepper and place turkey in oven for 12-15 minutes or until skin is golden brown and crispy. Remove from oven and place on a cutting board. Slice and serve.

GRAVY 3 tablespoons vegetable oil 4 tablespoons diced shallot 2 tablespoons thyme 1 tablespoons rosemary 1 tablespoons sage 1 ½ tablespoons garlic 3 cups apple cider 1 cup chicken stock ¼ cup all purpose flour ¼ cup soft butter Add vegetable oil to a small one-gallon pot under medium heat. Add shallots, thyme, rosemary, and sage, and cook until the shallots are just translucent. Add your garlic and cook for a few seconds then add the apple cider. Reduce the apple cider until there is only a tablespoon of liquid is left in the pot. Add the chicken stock and bring to a boil. In a separate bowl combine the ap flour and butter and with your hands make a paste. Whisk in the flour and butter mixture into the boiling gravy until it thickens.

BRUSSELS SPROUTS ½ cup vegetable oil 2 lbs Brussels sprouts cut in half ¼ lb diced pancetta 3 tablespoons thyme Salt and black pepper to taste Heat large sauté pan to medium high heat. Place the Brussels sprouts cut side down and cover the pan without overlapping (you may have to work in batches). Add your oil to the pan and sear the one side of the Brussels sprouts till a medium dark brown color. Transfer the Brussels to a cookie pan with a resting rack to drain. In the same pan add your pancetta and cook until the pancetta is almost crisped up and has exuded its oil. Add the drained sprouts back to the pan with the pancetta. Add thyme and cook the Brussels sprouts until they are fully cooked. Salt and pepper to taste.

roccitynews.org CITY 57

58 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

Additions of raspberriess and limes to a light Berliner Weiss base create an easy-drinking delight for even the most

SWIFTWATER IS THIS BEER?

7

The godfather or Rochester craft. Roasted malts breed a comingling of coffee and dark cocoa.

A classic for the first day of December.

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An otherwise unassuming ngg brown ale is flanked by an obscene amount of coconut. Dessert-like, yet sessionable, an ideal Wednesday beverage as the weather cools.

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The addition of Watson’s Chocolates sponge candy gives a saccharine, toffee-like overtone to this Buffalo stout staple.

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BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL

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Truly excessive amounts of boysenberries and marshmallows turn thiss py imperial IPA into a pulpy, alcoholic smoothie.

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The holiday season can be stressful. There’s the hunt to buy presents, the trials of wrapping those presents, full days cooking family feasts. After all of that, you need a beer. CITY’s resident beer expert, Gino Fanelli, is here to help.

Nothing says ‘tis the season like his 24-day Advent calendar filled with regional beers to jolly up your December.

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A cidery sour packed with stone fruit and berry notes.

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Mulling spices and a last minute addition of cranberry make for a perfect turkey dinner pairing.

YOUNG LION CRANBERRY BERLINER

24 Bottles of beer on the wall

roccitynews.org CITY 59

A caress of stone fruit lingers on the end of this mild white ale, complemented by delicate notes of spice.

TRIPHAMMER LIL’ DREAMER

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A simple, sessionable, and refreshing Viennaa lager without a shred of pretense.

ABANDON BREWING BEER

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beer-averse imbiber.

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STONEYARD PEACH KOLSCH

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Sweet and dark with notes of dark chocolatee and cold brew.

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! s r e Che

Light, sessionable Pilsner with a healthy dose of residual bitterness. A fitting game day companion from this Buffalo staple brewery.

Go Bills!

THIN MAN PILLS MAFIA

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Glen Edith coffee and a dash of oatmeal are th the right way to start a day.

WARHORSE NITRO O H BREAKFAST WITH CHURCHILL

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This unheralded Finger Lakes brewery ps emphasizes Mosaic hops in this mild pale ale.

Find notes of melon, pineapple, and mango.

LUCKY HARE LIVE ACTION

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Monstrous sour laden with additions of pineapple, guava, and lime. Savory, white wine-like characteristics juxtapose sharp fresh fruit notes.

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NAKED DOVE WINDBLOWN AMBER

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GENESEE BEER

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Simple, unpretentious, and perfect Christmas Eve beverage.

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BIG DITCH MAKE ME WANNA STOUT

18

Max Robertson has donned the red suit for 25 years. This holiday season, though, this jolly old elf is taking the year off. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH

Mall Santas are back, but playing it safe

BY GINO FANELLI

W

@GINOFANELLI

ith his snowy white beard, rosy cheeks, and booming laugh, Max Robertson is a shoe-in for jolly old Saint Nick. And for 25 years, the retired Greece school teacher has embraced the role, donning the red suit and spreading holiday cheer to children in and around Rochester.

But as the pandemic roils the holiday season, this Santa Claus is taking the year off. The choice was a dilemma for Robertson, whose volunteering at schools and charities for children with disabilities carries decades of treasured memories.

“Gosh, I just look forward to it so much,” Robertson said. “Especially the Down syndrome kids, it’s so special. They love you unconditionally, and none of them are scared, they’re just so excited to see Santa.”

The concern for Santa is his getting sick. Sure, the old elf is magical and his existence hinges on faith, but he’s human,

60 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

GINO@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM

too. That means Santas everywhere, and the places that host him, have some tough decisions to make about his presence this year.

Santa will still make his annual rounds at Marketplace, Greece Ridge, and Eastview malls, said Wendy Roche, the director of marketing and public relations at Eastview who this time of year assumes a role as one of Santa’s helpers and coordinates his visits in Rochester.

But to get his ear for a few minutes, families will have to make reservations.

Santa will wear a mask and children will not be allowed to sit on his lap.

“We have to keep everyone safe, and keep Santa safe,” said Roche, who spoke of Santa as a real person because, of course, he is real, just as love and generosity are real. “They’ll still be able to talk with him, and hopefully we’ll still be able to keep the magic alive.”

While it is tempting to imagine that doing the same job for time immemorial

would mean Santa knows his role by rote, he does have to take refresher courses.

Those are provided by New Jerseybased Cherry Hill Programs, a company that leases space at malls and stuffs its stockings with green by offering photo packages with Santa Claus. The company is training three Santas to alternate duties at Rochester malls, the same as in recent years.

Indeed, a spokesperson said the company has managed to maintain a typical roster of Santas.

“The number of locations Santa visits across the U.S. and Canada typically fluctuates by as much as 10 percent up or down in normal years, this year is consistent with that,” the company’s chief marketing officer, Matt Windt, said. “While some smaller centers are making the decision to cancel their Santa experience, the vast majority plan to host Santa.”

Santa, of course, is fed by the love of

children around the world and delivers toys to them out of the goodness of his heart. But he can also pocket a pretty penny, Windt said, pulling in between $6,000 and $30,000 in a season, depending on the market size.

The North Pole is a harsh place to live, and keeping his home and workshop in tip-top shape ain’t cheap, you know.

Robertson said he is sometimes paid for appearances, but donates the money to local children’s charities.

Some Santas are going digital this year, following the path of so many other things in the age of the novel coronavirus.

Jeremy Zehr, a captioning team specialist at RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf, is one of them.

At 42, Zehr is a young Santa. But Santas have to start somewhere and Zehr, who is playing the role for the first time and began growing out his CONTINUED ON PAGE 62

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We don’t have to tell you that local journalism is on the ropes.

In the last 10 years, nearly half of all newsroom jobs nationwide were lost. Tech titans plundered newsrooms’ traditional revenue streams and did little to replace the local news coverage knocked out in the process.

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That’s why we’ve been fighting the good fight since 1971. But every fighter needs a team.

If you value CITY’s voice, we invite you to get in our corner and become a CITY Champion. CITY has always been free, and will continue to be, in print and online. But it isn’t free to produce.

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Jeremy Zehr will volunteer as Santa Claus for the first time this year, including making Saturday ZOOM calls with kids. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH

VISIT ROCCITYNEWS.ORG FOR OUR FULL CALENDAR OF VIRTUAL EVENTS AND CONCERTS

62 CITY NOVEMBER 2020

beard and hair back in January, figured bringing Santa to children over Zoom was as good a way as any.

Zehr plans to accept small donations to benefit Caledonia’s Focus on the Children, a 211 Lifeline program that provides financial support for kids in Livingston County.

“My plan is to set aside a few hours on Saturdays throughout the month to schedule appointments with families,” Zehr said. “We can use technology to meet with kids if maybe they’re worried about grandma, or there’s family members with co-morbidities that could be infected.”

Zehr, who informally played Santa for family in the past, said putting on the red suit is akin to becoming possessed by the spirit of the holidays.

“It’s not just playing a role,” Zehr said.

“When you put on the suit, it’s almost like you are becoming this entity that has existed for over a century in movies, TV shows, everything like that. You also get to ask the question of what would I have

wanted Santa to be when I was a child?”

Robertson gets the same feeling. He said he was hoping to get back on the rocking chair next year. For him, there is nothing more satisfying than bringing joy to children.

“I remember one time working with the Down syndrome kids, we had a 16or 17-year-old that weighed more than me, and he came running from the back of the party house we were having it at and took a big leap at me,” Robertson said, with a hearty chuckle. “We both went toppling over. It was just really amazing. You can’t put a price on that.”

Robertson said he was preordained as a child to one day become Santa Claus, based on his experience visiting Santa with his sisters at Sibley's in the mid-1950s.

“I have the greatest picture, where, out of the three of us, he was reaching out and holding my hand,” Robertson said. “My kids saw that picture and always said, ‘Dad, he picked you.’”

CROSSWORD

Answers to this puzzle can be found on page 31

KEEP LOCAL BUSINESSES

Daily Delivery Puzzle by J. Reynolds

Across 1. Word that follows the start of each starred answer 5. On the ocean 10. "...hear ___ drop" 14. Pound of poetry 15. Tips 16. Russo of "Outbreak" 17. Chop ___ 18. *** Edward Teach, familiarly 20. Asia's ___ Sea 21. Dark time for poets 22. Lets up 23. Many four-doors 25. Billionaire Bill 28. The Braves, on scoreboards 30. Middle of many German names 31. "Go on ..."

34. March 17 honoree, for short 38. Close to closed 40. Mine, in Marseiille 41. *** Cold comfort 44. Ones born before Virgos 45. Jessica of "Dark Angel" 46. "___ Johnny!"

47. Hosp. areas 48. ___ Jeanne d'Arc 49. Stimpy's cartoon pal 51. Some college students 53. Greets nonverbally 58. Popular typeface 61. Gallery display

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Down 1. Tablelands 2. Blue shade 3. "___ you loud and clear" 4. Eric Clapton love song 5. Optimally 6. Mah-jongg piece

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63. Rough breathing 64. *** Place for miscellaneous stuff 67. Baja's opposite 68. "If all ___ fails ..."

69. Vow taker 70. Farm sounds 71. Beliefs 72. Common thing?

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10. Fields 48. Auction cry 11. Potpie ingredients 50. Main course 12. About, on a memo 51. Candle holders?

13. Beatty and Buntline52. Greeted at the 19. "___ here long?" door 24. Defense acronym 54. Pulitzer Prize 26. Personification category 27. Actress Spelling 55. Where dos are 29. Served, as soup done 31. Mideast ruler 56. Illinois city 32. ___ of the above 57. Kid 58. "Leaving on ___ 33. Pad Plane" 34. Presidents' Day 59. Govern event 35. Bleacher feature 60. M.I.T. part: Abbr.

36. Major-leaguers 62.

Cincinnati team 37. Coolers, for short 65. N.F.L. ball 39. Triangular sail carriers 40. "Wheel of Fortune" 66. "___ we there buy yet?"

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64 CITY NOVEMBER 2020