A wrinkle in time
Rochester’s newest concert series offers gentle music from a violent age
Forever young
When I caught up with Marian McPartland by telephone last week she was in the middle of taping a new season of Piano Jazz, her long-running National Public Radio show. McPartland may be in her mid-80s, but the perennial hipster has recently released CDs with Bruce Hornsby, Elvis Costello, and Steely Dan. She’s busier than…
Reader feedback – 1.25.06
Changing the voting machines, shutting out citizens
Rasta slinky
Two Sundays ago I shoehorned The Buddhahood — the whole Buddhahood — into the 98-9 BUZZ studios for a cacophonous, polyrhythmic, sexy, super-shimmy-shakedown boogaloo on The Sunday Night Shakedown (my Rochester-music show). The band mixed New Orleans jazz with Afro-Cuban joy. When the band hits the stage and the electric stuff gets plugged in, they…
Stem cell research: a reader-scientist dialogue
Tim Louis Macaluso’s interview with University of Rochester biologist Mark Noble, published January 4, brought quick response from readers opposed to stem cell research. Their comments, and Noble’s response, follow. Feminists for Life of New York disputes Mark Noble’s claim that the controversy surrounding embryonic stem cell research is solely a religious one (“Hope, Fear,…
Family valued – 1.25.06
Ice ice baby It’s nice to learn that Rochester was once under a glacier and mastodons used to roam around here. But more importantly, it’s fun! “This is one of the most fascinating things you’ve ever brought us to!” exclaimed my 12-year-old son as we toured Expedition Earth: Glaciers and Giants, the RochesterMuseum and ScienceCenter’s…
Cost of war – 1.25.06
The totals: 2222 US soldiers, 201 Coalition soldiers, and approximately 28,088 to 31,676 Iraqi civilians have been killed in Iraq from the beginning of the war and occupation to January 17. 16,420 US soldiers were wounded in action between March 2003 and January 2006, according to DoD reports. American soldiers killed between January 13 and…
Fiz – 1.25.06
I like the implication of a “Fun-Size” candy bar
The Cinema’s owner ponders its future
When Jo Ann Morreale hinted a few months ago that she might be getting out of the movie business, scores of city residents balked. While Morreale has operated the one-screen theater at the Clinton-Goodman intersection for more than two decades, the building itself has been a movie house for almost 90 years. Many who grew…
183 Brunswick Street
Unexpected Gem Eye-high hedges surround the home at 183 Brunswick Street and the unexpected charms within. Built in 1908, this American Foursquare style house has been outstandingly maintained and remodeled with historic sensitivity. Entering through the carved wood and glass front door, one is struck by the abundance of unpainted wood trim and oak flooring…
Death comes knocking
Claustrophobia sets in immediately. Dusty purple envelopes the walls. Giant silver flowers dance across the wallpaper, dizzying me. The construction of the room draws the eye in. This set is created with purpose. The plot of Vigil, a morose comedy now running at Geva, mirrors the set: dark and disorienting. A bare wooden floor, sparse…
Home ice
When Rochester Americans general manager Jody Gage took the call from American Hockey League president Dave Andrews, he assumed pessimistically that something was wrong. “My first thought was, ‘What player got suspended?'” Gage says. So when Andrews told Gage he had been selected as one of the first seven members of the nascent AHL Hall…
Inbox – 1.25.06
Remarkable correspondence from the consistently unremarkable world of email The following emails from anonymous people were sent to the webmaster of a site called Thumb Sucking Adults. The site is home to a community of adults who have one gentle habit in common (which should be pretty obvious). The letters exhibit some serious catharsis, and…
Get that emperor some clothes
Woody Allen just might be the most overrated filmmaker drawing breath today. And like most people, when I use the word “overrated,” what I’m really saying is that I am unable to see the appeal behind something everyone else seems to unconditionally adore (as long as I’m confessing, I feel the same way about The…
Uttering innermost thoughts without saying a word
The remote, reclusive Terrence Malick occupies a most unusual position in American cinema as a kind of living anachronism, an artist practicing in a complicated, highly collaborative, labor intensive medium who behaves like some solitary, tormented genius from an earlier time. After making two highly praised films, Badlands(1973) and Days of Heaven (1978), he lapsed…
The XX Files – 1.25.06
Live and let die? Let’s hope the Bush administration got the hint last week. Finally someone — the Supreme Court, specifically — took it to task for overstepping its bounds. The Court, in a 6-3 ruling, pulled the plug on the administration’s program of siccing the Drug Enforcement Agency on Oregon doctors who help terminally…
Measuring Monroe
If you know anything at all about MonroeCounty, you know that we’re in trouble. Sure, there are positive stories here, just like anywhere else. But if current trends continue, we’ll soon be unable to pay for the government we have. Even a mostly upbeat speech from Maggie Brooks can’t change that. So while it’s not…
Metro ink – 1.25.06
On hand There’s an unsolved mystery involving Cobbs Hill. And hands. | In the fall of 2004, gloves began appearing in the trees along the roadside near the reservoir. By spring, more than two dozen of them had sprouted on the ends of branches, usually with the stem piercing through the pointer finger. They came…
