Music reviews 5.11.05
Prefuse 73 Surrounded by Silence Warp Records Prefuse 73 is about making beats, which, in this day and age, might seem like a quaint exercise. But with mainstream hip-hop circling the drain for the past year or two, and the same old turntablists still sounding like, well, the same old turntablists, a new approach to…
Onstage
Topical, shmopical: It’s a laugh riot For introducing Charles Busch’s 2001 The Tale of the Allergist’s Wifeto Rochester in a tasty production, the JCC deserves thanks. I kept missing the play and can now report that the big fuss it received in New York and across the country was justified. It’s a Tony-nominated play by…
Who we are
Earlier this month the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, a Washington-based civil rights group, released a study it commissioned about the representation of Asians on TV. It found very few Asian characters to analyze. The biggest problem for Asians in pop culture isn’t even misrepresentation. It’s under-representation. That’s not hard to see. Remember All…
Nothing at all
The flash is like a cartoon. Humorous at first, amusing even, increasingly grotesque as it goes along. It’s the flash when a 25-year-old pizza delivery man, preparing to press the doorbell for a delivery — pepperoni pizza piping hot in its warming sleeve, baseball hat company logo cocked off to one side — sees his…
Fiz
MAKE & cafepress.com
Go ahead, push me
At a recent practice for PUSH Physical Theatre, Tom Ohl and Topher Holt made handstand pushups look like routine jumping jacks. Gravity never weighs PUSH performers down; the five-person troupe relies on it to carve an imaginary world out of the air around them. “There should be a sense for the audience that the air…
Lilac Festival 2005
The Lilac Fest opens Friday, May 13, and runs through Sunday, May 22. It is 10 days of heady fun not only celebrating our city’s love affair with a certain purple bloom, but also heralding the opening of a long and full summer festival season.
Inbox
Comments on the 2003 film “Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter”
Revisiting the ancient struggle of East and West
Most of the blockbuster historical epics that regularly disturb the peace in the local megaplex display little in the way of relevance to their actual time and place or any connection to the personal lives of the viewers. Aside from its location in a peculiar version of the city’s past, for example, Martin Scorsese’s long,…
Moving backwards and forwards and back again
The last half of the ’90s were the salad days of American independent cinema. That elusive union of art and commerce could arguably be timelined from 1994’s Pulp Fiction to 1999’s The Blair Witch Project. Writer-director Todd Solondz made a couple of envelope-pushing pictures during that period and staked his claim as the enfant terrible…
More budget woes
Last week, in a brief speech to the CountyLegislature’s Ways and Means Committee, County Executive Maggie Brooks pretty much admitted what some observers had already guessed: The numbers on which the county’s 2005 budget was put together were too optimistic. Brooks was updating her budget projections, based on the county’s First Quarter Key Indicator Report.…
Reader feedback 5.11.05
The pope, Catholicism, and Father Callan
Body count
The totals: 1,600 American soldiers, 180 Coalition soldiers, andapproximately 21,521 to 24,398 Iraqi civilians have been killed in Iraq from the beginning of the war and occupation to May 8. American soldiers killed from May 1-8: Sergeant Kenya A. Parker, 26; Fairfield, Alabama | Specialist Derrick J. Lutters, 24; Burlington, Colorado | Major John C.…
Conquering a hodgepodge: remaking Irondequoit
If you question the value of design in urban planning, take a spin through Irondequoit. That northeastern MonroeCounty suburb offers some of the area’s best examples of what happens in the absence of a master plan. The result, say urban planners, is mass development without cohesion. It’s the absence of that synergy that best characterizes…
Submerged in minor keys …but the Black Arrows leave the backbone in
It’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock ‘n’ roll. It’s even longer if you have to burn dreary thruway miles from Ithaca to do it. Each week members of The Black Arrows drive an hour and a half to converge at their bass player’s home in East Rochester. The quartet entombs…
Beelzebub’d and boogied
Something big is either happening or gonna happen. In the past few weeks I’ve seen the Rochester bands go from a whisper to a scream. The roar was apocalyptically epic a few weeks back, like when The Atomic Swindlers opened for Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook and TheFluffers. The Swindlers rock in a big and sweet pop…
