Rhapsody in black and white
On any given weekend, Billie Holiday, Sonny Rollins, or Stan Getz might be performing at the Ridgecrest Inn. Dave Brubeck or Louis Armstrong could be headlining at the War Memorial. Ray Charles might be playing a dance at the Roller Palace. And Ron Carter was always in the house band at the Pythodd Club. …
Creative cultivation
Artists can be solitary creatures. For many, shutting out the world with all its demands is an essential part of the creative process. Isolation though, has its downside and, as the saying goes, it’s good to get out once in a while. At some point, whether it be through exhibition, publication, or performance, the work…
An extraordinary, ordinary man
The opening sequences of his last two movies provide some proof that Jack Nicholson’s much discussed new maturity is not simply one of those inventions of the publicity folks and their accomplices in the entertainment media. Both The Pledge and About Schmidt introduce Nicholson’s character at a retirement party, thus indicating that unlike many Hollywood…
The loneliest piano player in the world
The Pianist is the first film director Roman Polanski has made in Poland since his very first feature. It’s also, according to the press notes, the film he’s waited his entire career to make. It’s too bad he waited so long, because if Polanski had made The Pianist a little earlier into his career, it…
News Briefs 1.8.03
Ain’t it a drag Leave it to the queens to drag Rochester into the national spotlight. VH-1 film crews will hit the town January 9 and 10 to film mucho fabuloso female impersonators Pandora Boxx and Darienne Lake. “It’s going to be kind of a ‘day in the life’ thing,” says drag sensation…
All right Tokyo!
Saturday night was truly the winter of my discontent: salty, shitty, snowy, and cold. Two-thousand-and-three arrived stillborn and under-whelming. My jones for palm trees and sunshine ran feverishly, unchecked. My boots leaked. But once again, I knew rock ‘n’ roll would warm my soul. Richmond’s has a great neighborhood feel. But when you shoehorn…
Details, details: the philosophy of joint-policing
Americans didn’t much notice the death of philosopher Ivan Illich in Germany December 2. A priestly soul with the long view, Illich was a connoisseur of internal contradiction. In Deschooling Society, for example, he wrote that traditional schools teach people “to confuse process and substance” and to assume that “the more treatment there is,…
The great divide: behind the School Board anger
The Rochester School Board entered the new year with one of the deepest — and angriest — divisions in recent history. And while to outsiders the rancor may seem rooted in personality differences and power struggles, the division is more significant than that. All seven School Board members are Democrats, but some of them…
Reader Feedback 1.8.03
Cover shock I have been a reader of City Newspaper since the days when it was two papers, City East and City West, and have always felt that City exemplified taste, decorum, and sensitivity to its diverse readership. However, I was forced to reevaluate this assessment when I was confronted with the cover of…
