Hell on earth and in France
The absurd reality that Keanu Reeves has been able to get good jobs in Tinseltown for the last 20 years makes him the luckiest man alive. Mark Ruffalo has that brooding stoner doll thing down cold at this point and he can truly act – why not hire him instead? When Reeves’ movies tank…
Playing for the Dadys
Musicians with “an intangible spark”: John, left, and Joe Dady. Gelfand-Piper Photography A concert at the HochsteinMusicSchool on Sunday, February 20, will pay tribute to one of the Rochester area’s best known folk musicians, Joe Dady — and will help him pay for treatment as he recovers from the serious medical problems that hit him…
Fringe benefits
You could argue that Irwin Chusid’s life was saved by his fascination with strange sounds. It’s an argument that you’d probably lose, but you might have a shot. “I was broke at 40,” says the 53-year-old radio host-journalist-record producer. “I had no career. I was going nowhere. I was a three-time college dropout. I…
Save that napkin
“Uh, I got a BFA, dude.” He spits out that last word as if he had a mouthful of raw dog. It’s his stock reply to the Bug Jar denizens who have bellied up to the bar over the last few weeks and remarked, “Wow, Herman, you paint?” If you’ve been to the Bug…
Reader feedback 2.16.05
Church and state, school closings, Bush-speak
Pushing big changes, in black and white
Can a newspaper make a difference? To answer that question, we’ll be watching our neighbors to the west. On January 2, The Buffalo News inaugurated a year-long focus on the future of the paper’s city and region. They’re calling the special report “Why not Buffalo?” That report — which sports the sub-headline…
Remembering Brother Malcolm
“It was almost like he was forecasting his death.” That’s how Constance Mitchell describes Malcolm X in his last Rochester speech. It was held on February 16 at CornHillMethodistChurch in 1965, just five days before the civil rights leader also known as El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz was assassinated. Mitchell and Malcolm X become close…
Growing, growing… gone? The ‘rural’ county
Thirty years ago, people driving to Rochester from the south would have seen a landscape of mainly farms, fields, and woods. Now, most of that bucolic countryside is little more than a memory, replaced by shopping malls, tract housing, and the odd mix of commercial accretion that follows suburbia. US Census Bureau data…
Body count 2.16.05
To honor the war dead and fill an information gap in US mass media, City Newspaper will run weekly lists of American soldiers killed during the occupation of Iraq. The totals: 1,461 American soldiers, 172 Coalition soldiers, and approximately 15,941 to 18,200 Iraqi civilians have been killed in Iraq from the beginning of the war…
Chad Oliveiri interviews Irwin Chusid: the full transcript
Chusid: Are you tape recording this? Can you hear me OK? City:Yeah, I’m taping this. I was actually thinking of recording you and releasing the recording somewhere as a form of outsider music. Chusid: Go ahead. Just include me in the royalty streams. City:There’ll be plenty of those, I’m sure. Chusid:…
Family valued 2.16.05
Pooh’sHeffalump Movie “The old ones have a little more leaning toward the books,” Lila says, “and I like the music better. But this one is funny and fun.” It took me half the movie to get over myself and admit that my 8-year-old daughter’s right, but she is. If A. A. Milne started to roll…
Best of the wurst
It’s hard to be cool when it’s so cold outside. Monday night and it was snowing sideways. The wind chill had pantsed the thermometer. Nevertheless The White Hots — guitarists Steve Greene and AleksDisljenkovic, bassist Ted Mosher, and harmonica player Tom Hanney — strolled into The Little Theatre Café one at a time with a…
An engrossing ‘Trial’
Fred Nuernberg is giving a heroic performance locally in a Canadian play about a truly great US poet, Ezra Pound, who was accused of treason following World War II. Pound exiled himself from the US to Mussolini’s Italy at age 39, and throughout the war, he broadcast to American soldiers his messages of hatred…
Almodóvar’s latest: sexual confusion
A number of commentators observed in Pedro Almodóvar’s last movie — the eccentric, ambiguous, essentially comic Talk to Her — indications of some softening and mellowing, like some exotic melon, with an unwonted sense of sweetness and sympathy. Although his work in fact often displays a blatant overripeness, a fragrant decadence that the director at…
