Table scraps: odds and ends from the Monroe County budget talks
The 2004 Monroe County budget may or may not include big social service cuts. It may also include putting welfare on a charge-back system. Safety Net is a state program for people not eligible for the federal welfare program. The cost is split between the state and the county. One proposal floating around in the…
Ditching Marilyn to fight a mummy
Anyone remember those old What If comics Marvel used to make that wondered how things might have turned out if certain scenarios had played out differently? I only have two that survived my childhood (“What if Elektra hadn’t died?” and “What if the Thing and the Beast continued to mutate?”), but the idea still seems…
East and West, past and future
Whatever else it may accomplish, the new Tom Cruise movie, The Last Samurai, demonstrates that Hollywood continues to conjugate that popular verb, “meet.” Whatever the claims from the industry and the dutiful hype from the faithful Fidos of the media, the picture positively shouts its origins in some communal cogitation that no doubt concluded with…
Narrating the visceral object
As the winter winds are set to billow across Lake Ontario, a wind of a different sort has already blown into Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery. It came in the form of a new director, Louis Grachos, who arrived this past January. Grachos has introduced several new initiatives calculated to reinvigorate the gallery, including a refocused…
Sideman
You might think, by the age of 71, Joe Romano would have mellowed out a little. After six decades of playing, he might not be as aggressive or experimental on the saxophone. Then something on his new album, This Is The Moment, leaps out at you. Toward the end of J.J. Johnson’s “Lament,” Romano…
Pork sandwiches of the Caribbean
One way to find interesting food is to cruise around a neighborhood, making notes when you see something that looks like a restaurant. On a recent drive up North Clinton, I first saw Chimo’s Sandwich Shop, which had actually been recommended a few times, then Las Palma a block up. Speaking with the owner of…
Pickpocket policies
It’s fun to keep up with the mobster-and-oligarch news from Russia. And things get really interesting when our market-manic media tie Russia’s economic woes to the privatization of former state enterprises. (There are limits, of course. Our media generally see privatization as bad medicine for them, but still necessary for us.) Yes, Russia is…
East and West, past and future
Whatever else it may accomplish, the new Tom Cruise movie, The Last Samurai, demonstrates that Hollywood continues to conjugate that popular verb, “meet.” Whatever the claims from the industry and the dutiful hype from the faithful Fidos of the media, the picture positively shouts its origins in some communal cogitation that no doubt concluded with…
New briefs 12.03.03
RGRTA, the Terminalator Rochester Central Station’s proponents must think there are no speed bumps ahead for the downtown bus terminal plan. But even as the December 15 deadline for public comment approaches, the opposition is coming together. Opponents of the plan have been studying the project’s draft environmental impact statement. (It’s viewable at the…
Reader feedback 12.03.03
More election talk, Scott Wallace raves, ferry fantasy
