Land lover
Is there anything we take for granted more than the shape of the land around us? Sure, we’re conscious of the streets and sidewalks, and we know how to find the malls and the parks. But how many of us ever stop to consider how the contours of the land came to be over millions…
Trading history for the future
Hollywood owes a considerable debt to the fertile genius of the late Philip K. Dick, the prolific science fiction writer whose work has inspired a variety of highly imaginative and highly successful movies: Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and now, Paycheck. Unlike many of his colleagues, Dick concentrated on subjects and situations transcending the…
Swinging more than the Swedish
When the Danish band Phønix (pronounced, roughly, “FooER-nicks”) takes the stage at Milestones next week, it will be the second Scandinavian group to play Rochester in a year. Yggdrasil, whose members hail from Norway and the Faroe Islands, was featured at last summer’s Rochester International Jazz Festival. But while that incarnation of Yggdrasil (there have…
Sweet ‘Fish’ and bitter ‘Fog’
Tim Burton’s Big Fish (opens Friday, January 9) is a lot like that FedEx commercial where the young office worker suggests using the overnight delivery company to save money and then tells the story of his claim to fame over and over until the day he dies. Thankfully, the “story” in Fish is much more…
Buy the kid a good guitar
Man, what a great year it’s been so far. I guess I’m still waiting for the other shoe to fall. Sure, there’re a few new maladies, a couple more gray hairs, but rock ‘n’ roll is still pogoing all around me. And you all look fabulous. Christmas shopping was a cinch: I bought potholes on…
Reader’s feedback 1.7.04
The big-tent stakes I read with interest “Under the Big Tent: Can County Democrats Get Their Act Together?” (December 23). While I agree with many of the assertions, I take exception to a few points. First, despite City’s contention that Stephanie Aldersley’s ascension to the position of minority leader “was widely thought to be…
Busting up the ghetto
Crime. Poverty. Drugs. To talk about the problems facing certain areas in the city of Rochester in 2004 is to talk about what has been eating steadily away at the community for years.
Erie Canal: going with the cash-flow
Just a few years back, it seemed the Erie Canal was going through its most boosterish phase since 1825, the year the pioneering waterway opened. The old canal ditty that advised “Low bridge, everybody down” was rewritten as “High fives, everything’s looking up.” Now some booster bubbles have burst. But developers’ hopes still sail…
Hungry and fighting
It took fencer Felicia Zimmermann a while to recover from a disappointing performance at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. “I’m like, ‘I suck so bad! I suck!'” she remembers now with a self-deprecating laugh. “I was lost for a long time. I was really upset.” But Zimmermann, who lives in Rush and trains…
