Bad days ahead
The following article was commissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and is being published this week in print and online by City and many other alternative papers throughout the United States. Based on a memo from a US official who has worked in Iraq, the article was written by Jason Vest, a senior correspondent…
Traveling ‘hard,’ on the road
Notch Miyake grew up in Hawaii feeling “very enclosed.” He wanted to break out and travel. A stint in the Navy temporarily satisfied this wanderlust, but college, a business career, and family obligations put further travel plans on hold. He worked for Xerox in Rochester, eventually leaving to start his own optical coating business.…
Full memo
[Below is the full text of the redacted memo upon which Jason Vest’s April 20 article prepared for the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) is based. AAN’s original intention was to withhold the release of the full memo, as it includes a section with new and useful leads on corruption in the United Nations Oil-For-Food…
Feeling a draft
The NFL Draft is astonishingly popular during this age of instant gratification. Fans have to wait several months for the rookies to wear pads and actually play football. It goes against what is largely appealing about sport: That a game reaches an outcome within a few hours and doesn’t drag on like the search for…
Family valued
‘Leadbelly Sings for Children’ This is a collection (Smithsonian Folkways) of 28 recordings from the mid-1940s by Leadbelly, born Huddie Ledbetter in 1888 in Mooringsport, LA. In addition to clever word-game songs for the kids, it also features some deep devotional material, as well as a few of Leadbelly’s best-known numbers. A consummate bluesman,…
Separating history from legend
Glorious defeats and lost causes endure in the imagination far longer than any great victories. The idea of Custer’s Last Stand outlives the truth of the Western campaigns against the Indians; it’s the South, not the North, that keeps the Civil War alive; and any visitor to Europe will notice that monuments to the fallen…
Revenge is a dish best served by a Dane
Something’s rotten in Denmark. Or on a soundstage in Denmark, anyway, which for the purposes of Dogville stands in for a small town in the Rockies during the Depression. Well, the chalk outlines of a town, because aside from those and some furniture, that is all we see of it. Director Lars Von Trier (Dancer…
‘A naked American man stole my balloons’
His name is John Landis. And his irreverent, playful, and deadpan humor has been making audiences laugh since he dropped out of school at age 17. He learned filmmaking by doing, by asking questions, and by working on Hollywood film sets as a mail boy, a production assistant, and a stuntman. This hands-on experience helped…
A long way from Pepticon
“You really don’t want to hear me sing it a capella,” says B.B. King. Of course, he’s wrong. Who wouldn’t relish the opportunity to hear B.B. King sing to them over the telephone? “Here’s the way it went,” he says, before singing a laidback rendition of “Pepticon sure is good / Pepticon sure…
Eclectica for sale
Faced with a house that was overflowing with stuff from the household and estate sales she haunts, Joanne Marvin grabbed her best friend (and fellow pack-rat) Sarahjane Moriarity and rented a Park Avenue storefront for a month to “purge” some items. “We’re now into our second year,” Joanne says. Thus began Utter Clutter. …
Reader feedback 4.21.04
Praise for Spula With City Newspaper’s firing of Jack Bradigan Spula the city’s strongest voice of conscience has been lost. We’ve learned so much from him. His research is impressive, his reasoning fresh and true; and his absolute integrity cannot be compromised. With Bradigan Spula, City has provided the only real forum on progressive…
Body count
To honor the war dead and fill an information gap in US mass media, City Newspaper will run weekly lists of American/”Coalition” soldiers and Iraqi citizens killed during the ongoing occupation of Iraq. The totals: 703 American soldiers, 103 “Coalition” soldiers, and approximately 9,000 Iraqi soldiers and 10,750 Iraqi civilians have been killed in Iraq…
Sticking it to the 19th Ward
The long-awaited transformation of the city’s 19th Ward could be right around the corner. But Adam McFadden has heard that before. “There are a lot of us pissed off about this; the fact that the state keeps throwing obstacles in our way,” he says. “There seems to be somebody playing political games, to be…
Home Design 04
So, what’s new in architecture around here? Environmentally sustainable round houses, floating box houses, new houses that look like their old neighbors — that’s what. In the newest Home Design, we profile three architects who — whether their designs are contemporary, modern, or contextual — are adding creative, striking, and friendly homes to our area.…
Getting back to nature
When Rick Hauser and Ali Yapicioglu, the partners at In Site: Architecture in Perry, designed a house on Auburn’s Lasher Road, they wanted to, as Yapicioglu puts it, “find the sun.” South-facing windows were placed to catch as much winter sunlight as possible and shine it onto a wall that runs along the house’s axis.…
These houses just want to fit in
Rochester architect Roger Brown believes in the public realm. “Where the people are,” he says, “where the sidewalks are, where people walk.” He spends a lot of time for his home designs thinking about what the houses will look like from the street and exactly how welcoming they will be. “It’s what makes the…
Hanging logically in thin air
Craig Jensen has designed a house that appears, in drawings at least, to float. The long, low house is elevated, supported on one end by the ground-floor garage and the other end by a thick concrete pillar. The center of the house hovers above the driveway and the end of the house hangs above the…
The man who builds castles in the sky
Marie Barkley remembers the day a visitor — a man literally off the street — walked through her husband Maurice’s tree house complex, descended the final ladder, stood on the lawn, and applauded. Both the Barkleys know the phenomenon well: people driving by their Henrietta home will suddenly slow down, stop, and turn around,…
