The mail
BUILD WHAT? WHERE?
It’s good to see that Renaissance Square hasn’t absorbed all
of the community’s attention, and that planning for other arts venues is back
on the table. Of course, the Square might absorb all the money that’s going to
be available, but we can at least dream about the future.
Excellent fodder for such fantasies can be found in the
draft report, “Needs Assessment for New Performing Arts Facilities”
by Webb Management Services, issued this month. Yes, they document, there is a
need for more facilities for music and theater. We’re rich in excellent
organizations of all types and sizes to use them. And given our community’s
demographics and education levels, there would be audiences to fill those
spaces. But current audiences are not as big as those numbers suggest, and the
report places the blame on the almost universal inadequacy of our facilities.
We have great arts groups. What we lack is proper showcases
to support them. The small but vital music groups that I work with get by in
lecture halls or large adapted spaces. Many turn to churches for acceptable
acoustics and modest cost, but most lack proper seating and other amenities.
Places of worship aren’t appropriate for all types of programming.
Theatrical productions have more possibilities for adapting
spaces, and our troupes certainly work magic in their black boxes. But their
audiences also suffer from poor accessibility, amenity, and comfort in places
that don’t reflect the quality of the group. The few good theaters are either
booked, too expensive, or both. This hurts everybody. Without proper venues,
our performing-arts community is stuck in a holding pattern, circling
substantial audiences, with no places to land.
Build it and they’ll come. But build what? And where? The
easier answer for the political system is to pick a vacant lot (or create one)
and put up an ArtsCenter
with a couple of “flexible” spaces. Get some renowned architect to bling it up, somebody rich to put his name on it, some
politico’s cousin to manage it, and, in one wave of the wand, problem solved.
Unfortunately, these multi-use halls usually suck. A design
that works well for theater is terrible for acoustic music and vice versa.
Trying to engineer that versatility sends costs spiraling and results in fatal
compromises. RPO and Garth Fagan might need the same size venue, but to attempt
to support them in the same hall is asking for trouble. Many have tried, and
none have achieved the world-class quality that we are shooting for.
So we need four venues, minimum. A home for the RPO, which
they can also rent out. A home for Garth Fagan and suchlike performances. A
smaller recital hall for chamber music, vocal groups, jazz and folk acts. And a
small theater dedicated to just that: theater. The smaller venues have to be
inexpensive to rent. They’ll require on-going subsidy, but they’ll also support
the greater number of local groups. Subsidies are inescapable; it’s dishonest
to speak otherwise.
Where? Downtown, of course. But not under one roof.
“Centers” are so 60’s. By spreading them out around downtown or in the cultural
district, we spread the collateral benefits to the restaurants and clubs
nearby, and prevent the new construction from stealing patrons away from
existing businesses. And we get the randomized traffic and street life our city
needs. If we’re going to spend oodles of public money, those side benefits have
to be maximized.
What money? Well, $83 million, or whatever the Rochester
Broadway Theater League’s roadhouse will cost, would be a good start. Not to dis the League and its patrons, but we’re talking art here.
Musical theater can be artistic, but 2800 seats is way beyond the traditional
Broadway house. A theater with 2800 seats is a commercial enterprise, scaled
for the imported extravaganzas of Disney and Mr. Lloyd Webber — for our
entertainment, not our involvement. Maybe that’s what Rochester
wants to support, to the near exclusion of everything else, but don’t equate it
with the RPO and don’t call it “support for the arts.”
One more thought: Carnegie Hall has offices above it. So do
the Broadway theaters. They help pay for the buildings. We should do that here.
Carl Pultz, Redfern Drive, Rochester
HERE’S ‘WHY WEIRD AL’
DaynaPapaleo
poses the question: “Who among us has purchased a Weird Al album? (“Why
Weird Al? October 11).” She answers the question in her article, saying
that he has gone gold three times and platinum six. And since his newest album
debuted at Number 10 on the charts, the answer is obviously: a lot of people are buying his albums.
I happen to own all his regular (non-compilation) albums and
have gone to two concerts. I even corrupted my son (now 15) by taking him
along.
I love to wear one of the shirts I bought at the concert
that has Al on it; people usually say, “I thought he died.” Nope; he
has outlasted most of the one-hit-wonders he parodied, and is still going
strong.
My wife and daughter can’t see what we like about him. But
not everyone has the same taste in music. I would challenge Ms. Papaleo to listen to the original songs from one of his
albums; they usually are a “style parody” of another artist;
“Dog Eat Dog” (Polka Party) is a style parody of The Talking Heads.
I’m sure she would get an appreciation of how much talent Al and his band have,
to be able to replicate the sounds of so many different artists.
Tom Eldredge, Middleburg, Florida
THE REAL COLUMBUS
Now that another Columbus Day has been celebrated according
to the fairy tale perpetuated on school children, I think it’s time we stopped
celebrating it. Columbus did not
discover America
and never set foot on our continent. The Vikings already had settlements here
in the 11th century. Columbus
landed on San Salvador in 1492
while searching for India
in the Caribbean.
But more important is Columbus’s
tragic legacy, left out of the whitewashed version of events we learned in
school. Historians consider him the New World’s first
slave trader. The atrocities committed by Columbus (and other explorers, who
don’t have a Federal holiday named after them) were nothing short of genocide.
After failing to find a trade route to India
(one of the purposes of his voyage), Columbus
set his sights on gold, and enslaved thousands of Indians to mine it. Native
inhabitants of the Caribbean, Haiti, and Hispanolia
(modern-day Cuba) were among those enslaved, tortured, raped, worked to death,
separated from their families, or slaughtered, or who perished due to lack of
immunity to foreign diseases introduced by Columbus and his men, sometimes
deliberately. (The distribution of smallpox-infected blankets to the natives by
explorers is a well-known fact.)
Natives were used as food for hunting dogs, thrown to them
alive. Thousands of Arawak Indians were shipped to Spain,
a third of them perishing on board ship. Columbus
wrote of these facts in his diaries. According to some historians, the Taino Indian tribe became extinct.
A movement has grown among the indigenous peoples of the Americas
to spread the truth about Columbus,
described by one historian as a “racist killer.”
Columbus Day is not a day for celebration. It is a day for
mourning.
Rosemary Page, Park Avenue, Rochester
WRITING TO CITY
We welcome and encourage readers’ letters for publication.
Send them to: themail@rochester-citynews.com or The Mail, City Newspaper, 250
North Goodman Street, Rochester14607.
Our guidelines: We don’t publish anonymous letters — and
we ask that you include your street name and city/town/village. We don’t
publish letters that have been sent to other media — and we don’t publish form letters generated by activist groups. While
we don’t restrict length, letters of under 350 words have a greater chance of
being published. We do edit letters for clarity and brevity. And in general we
don’t publish letters (or longer “op-ed” pieces) from the same writer more
often than about once every two months.
This article appears in Oct 25-31, 2006.
