News briefs 12.10.03
Pain reliever Hasaan Mackey never stays in one place long. Since Mackey’s mom died 13 years ago, a life of shuffling between relatives’ and friends’ homes has saddled the 24-year-old with an unsettled feeling. Just like his life, his music demands constant adaptation. Mackey’s freestyle rap, in which he improvises rhymes to changing hip-hop…
Saul revisited
Like Saul on the road to Damascus, hard-line Republicans came to accept that they could not cut $42 million out of the county budget, says Republican legislator Ray Santirocco. “They [the cuts] just weren’t there,” he says. “Despite [Republicans’] philosophical orientation, they have to take into account reality, and Bill [Smith, majority leader] is…
The Empire’s new digs
The future of PaeTec Park and the future of Empire Precision Plastics are indelibly linked. The oft-delayed ground-breaking for Rochester’s soccer stadium will not happen until the parties involved have found a new home for Empire. And, more importantly, until it is decided who is going to pay for the relocation. “We’re working on…
Border wars revisited
Three years ago, American writer James Howard Kunstler sat down with famed urbanist Jane Jacobs in her Toronto home. Kunstler asked her why she’d settled in Toronto. “We came in protest of the Vietnam War,” said Jacobs, who grew up in Scranton and came into her own in New York City, struggling against a highway…
Reader feedback 12.10.03
Panning the bus station, Jan Wong; debating the war
A night at the opera
What is art? And what is art’s purpose? Are these questions that can even be asked, much less answered? Well, yes, if you exempt the last 100 years or so. Those objects and paintings that today we call “art” indeed had some very specific purpose within a particular culture at a particular point…
Gathering and pasting a collage of dance
After 33 years of writing about them, it’s difficult to find a new way to describe Garth Fagan Dance. Yet, though the dances are always definably Fagan’s, they are newly inventive. Fagan adds unique work every year. How difficult must it be to achieve that level of creativity? The performances are equally remarkable. Fagan’s…
What, get outta show biz?
In its fourth decade, Neil Simon’s quirky gag fest The Sunshine Boys works amazingly well. Considering those who have played it, I’ve always regarded the play as a showcase requiring master comic actors and comedians. But, though it is headed by one exceptional performance, the Jewish Community Center’s holiday revival of The Sunshine Boys is…
Angels among us
It’s a fine pre-Autumn night, and the stretch of Meigs Street between Park and Monroe Avenue is teeming with life. People are gathered on porches, getting an early start on the weekend’s festivities. The murmur of distant conversation fills the air. As we walk toward Monroe Avenue, a 20-something woman standing on one of the…
Magic and healing on the Western frontier
Although a single swallow, as Aristotle reminds us, doesn’t make a summer, some viewers may be forgiven for hoping that three Westerns can constitute a trend. The release of Open Range, The Last Samurai (despite its setting in Japan, very much an example of the form), and now, The Missing within the span of a…
Ending the Cycle prematurely
I tried — mostly on a dare — to watch Matthew Barney’s entire six-hour-and-thirty-seven-minute Cremaster Cycle (also previewed by Alex Miokovic and Heidi Nickisher on page 18) over the course of one evening after being told it was a virtually impossible task. For starters, there’s the whole time commitment issue, and there’s some question over…
The good budget
In a remarkable display of sobriety and honesty, the Republicans in the County Legislature have passed a budget — the first rational one in years. “Rational” may be too generous a word: It’s absurd to cut funding for school nurses but continue to provide police services for wealthy towns that could well afford to…
