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.
Erica Curtis
Posted inNews & Opinion
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 […]
Posted inSpecial Sections
Barn raising
As iconic as the barn is — it can represent in the American imagination the whole farming lifestyle and economy — it isn’t often recognized for its value as a historic building. Not an office building or a home, where the value is more obvious, or even a school or a factory, where new uses […]
Posted inSpecial Sections
Good as old again
“It’s almost like the guy who likes to restore cars,” says Henry Swiatek. “You know people who do it because they love doing it, they rebuild an old car. Well, this is me, this is what I like to do.” Swiatek is standing in St. Margaret Mary Church in Irondequoit, his work clothes covered in […]
Posted inSpecial Sections
Endangered places
Much of our region’s character can be found in its architecture: The homes, industrial buildings, schools, office buildings, and churches that were built when Rochester’s star was rising. Now many of these buildings are abandoned or are facing vacancy or bankruptcy, while new developments and building projects crop up all around. If these older structures […]
Posted inMusic
MC Beneficial shows how Rochester does it
If commitment made record contracts, MC Beneficial would be rich by now. The young rapper’s first CD dropped last week. Called Great Expectations, it took a year and a half to put together. And with all that work, he made sure it looked and sounded right. “A lot of people, they just record in somebody’s […]
Posted inSpecial Sections
Annual Manual 2005
When I was getting ready to move to Rochester five years ago, my friends and family were confused. They wore worried faces when they asked me, “What’s in Rochester?” and “That’s not too far from the city, is it?” and “Do you like the cold weather?” My mother patted my arm and told me I […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
The lost art of reading
Novelist and former Rochesterian Andrea Barrett, for a little light winter reading, is working her way through the collected works of the Brontë sisters. It’s an exercise she calls “a perverse but very yummy thing.” The thoroughness is characteristic. Take, for example, the intricate family tree she drew for her characters. The casual reader may […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
A life’s sentence
Former death row inmate Shujaa Graham says that if he was guilty of anything, it was of trying to organize his fellow prisoners in the California prison system. It was 1969 and Graham was 18 when he went to jail for robbery, though he had been in out of juvenile hall for years. Out on […]
Posted inSpecial Sections
Or you could just stay in
Maybe you’re of the hibernation school. You burrow into your home in December, swaddle yourself in flannel and goose down, and subsist on frozen pizzas and canned goods until April. If so, that’s cool. No one will judge you. Even the most winter-loving Rochesterians, though they dance and hug themselves with every snowfall, will spend […]
Posted inSpecial Sections
If life gives you snow, make snow angels
These are the events that make you hope the weather stay wintry. How else do you set a world record for snow angels or carve ice sculptures? And chili tastes so much better when it’s cold out, doesn’t it? We have two local winter festivals, and several more are within a drive. Let’s celebrate winter. […]
Posted inSpecial Sections
Get your coat, get your culture
It’s not rocket science: To keep warm, you gotta keep moving. And just because you’re wearing boots and your winter hat makes your hair look funny doesn’t mean you can’t get out and get your culture on. This is just a sketch of some of the artsy highlights from now until March. Be sure to […]
