It’s Time for Some Truth
On a bright spring day this year, with great fanfare, the county executive went before the CountyLegislature’s Ways and Means Committee and proclaimed: “We ended 2004 with a budget surplus of $2.4 million.” Great news, if it were true. The problem is that the very next day the county’s auditors certified financial statements showing that…
Metro Ink 10.05.05
Still transforming Artist Lucas Samaras has been at it since 1960. He has worked in broad range of mediums and even participated in the earliest Happenings, a wave of performance art events in the 60s. Always self-referential, Samaras soon became known for producing experimental photographs where he used his body as subject and metaphor. Taking…
Reader Feedback 10.05.05
Remembering Cummings, admiring Sulaiman
Cost of war 10.05.05
The totals: 1933 US soldiers, 198 Coalition soldiers, and approximately 26,323 to 29,653 Iraqi civilians have been killed in Iraq from the beginning of the war and occupation to September 28. American soldiers killed between September 24 and 28: Specialist Mike T. Sonoda Jr., 34; Fallbrook, California | Sergeant Andrew J. Derrick, 25; Columbia, South…
No Slaughter in the House?
If New YorkState’s delegation to the House of Representatives has a bastard stepchild, it’s MonroeCounty. Almost no one seems to want much to do with it. Our suburbs are split among three Republican congressmen whose homes — and primary centers of interest — lie elsewhere. To the west there’s Tom Reynolds, with a base in…
Chad Oliveiri
With this issue, we say goodbye to a talented journalist and editor, Chad Oliveiri, who joined our staff fresh out of college in 1997. A strong writer and an inquisitive reporter, he brought an amazing breadth of interests — new music, art, politics, urban development — and in his own writing he made major contributions…
Home/Design 2005
Who needs New York City-style housing? People in Western New York tend to use city comparisons to denote sleek luxury and urban cool. But anyone who lives in New York City knows that the free-for-all that passes for real estate there is the bane of financial security and sanity. Shower in the corner of the…
Aloft in downtown
“People like being around people,” says Gary Stern, of Stern Properties, explaining the new population density downtown. “I think people want to get back to what it was like, at least for me, when they were a kid. We just walked outside and if we wanted to play ball there were 50 kids out there.…
Before the war
Maybe the most anticipated housing development in downtown Rochester’s recent history is The Sagamore on East, a $13 million new building of 23 luxury condominiums on East Avenue. While most other housing projects downtown reutilize older construction, The Sagamore has risen from an empty spot, what, since the ’60s, has been a tear in East…
Put your car away
Brian Short, site manager for the Temple Building, knows his building offers amenities beyond the new appliances and hi-tech security systems. “There was a guy from Holland, and he’s going to be here five years for work,” Short says. “It was a Friday night. I said, ‘Go put your car away and come back downtown…
I made this for you
Glass artist Nancy Gong is committed to her research. Every piece she makes is created for a person. So when she was designing a piece for a couple who loved to fly, she new she had to try to understand that feeling. Her husband’s birthday was coming up; he’d always wanted to go gliding. She…
It takes four to make a marriage
What do you get when you cross the distinctive dialogue of David Mamet with a Victorian drawing room comedy? One obscenely funny, complicated play. Once dubbed the “poet of the f-word,” Mamet’s signature clipped tone and often vulgar style makes a surprisingly believable (if occasionally awkward) marriage with the florid turns of phrase that proper…
It’s here! It’s queer! Are you used to it?
In 1993, a certain fledgling film festival presented 18 programs of film and video relating to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender experience. Now in its lucky 13th year, the 2005 installment of ImageOut has ballooned to feature 41 film and video programs over 10 days, October 7 to 16, at three majestic theaters, as…
Gangster films are almost always brother films
The New York Times Book Review’s belated discovery of the graphic novel, which has been entertaining readers for some decades now, officially conferred a certain dignity on the form. Much like their ancestors, the comic books, the graphic novels provide a natural source for motion pictures, which exhibit a similar penchant for sensational stories, fluid…
Family Valued 10.05.05
The season of the maze I did something odd a couple weeks ago. I looked up at the sky and realized that the sun was in its place and all was right with the world — at least no dark clouds threatened. I looked around my house and noticed the usual array of stuff, but…
Music of the spheres
An 18th-century draft of the No Child Left Behind Act would have pushed students way beyond math and reading. It might have required extensive testing in the Seven Liberal Arts, inherited from the ancient Greeks, which ranked music with geometry and astronomy. It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of music in pre-Enlightenment worldviews. People from…
Urban journal 10.05.05
Do something! “Man shot dead in argument.” “Father, son arrested in fatal assault.” “Gunfire kills girl, 16.” “Boy, 2, wounded by stray bullet.” “Another child shot in city.” “Teen suffers stab wound.” Well, you’ve seen the news. Rochester’s in the midst of a full-blown epidemic of violence. And there are the usual, predictable, calls for…
