Hard truths
Visitors to the Rare Books Library at the University of Rochester this summer may feel like they have entered a parallel world. Filling 19 large display cases are books, articles, manuscripts, journals, letters, and photographs by, or related to, the man writer Ishmael Reed has called the greatest American novelist of the 20th century. So…
Back from the future again
In its progress from a surprise hit made on a relatively modest budget back in the 1980s to its current status as yet another mammoth summer spectacular, The Terminator has undergone the familiar transformation from innovative and influential work with some genuine intellectual implications to yet another ho-hum blockbuster. It now seems to have ascended…
The business of murder and swashbucklery
François Ozon was once considered the enfant terrible of French cinema. Then he made the critically praised and very adult Under the Sand and followed it up with last year’s musical murder-mystery 8 Women. In his latest, Swimming Pool (opens Friday, July 18, at the Little), Ozon has finally found a way to effectively blend…
Sang like the kang
A couple of weeks ago found me eating fish tacos in the warm California sun. I was there to witness Lucha Va Voom — masked Mexican wrestlers and strippers in the gorgeous Mayan Theatre in downtown LA. It was a super sweaty, sexy, salacious, bodacious, bombastic, violent, gravity defying, awe-inspiring, ta-ta tassle-twirling extravaganza (whew). I…
News briefs 7.16.03
On his own behalf Warren Farrell treats the paintings in his first solo show as if they were hatchlings. While he’s talking, he can’t resist jumping up to nudge them a half-centimeter to the right or left. Each wall in the claimed space he has fashioned into a gallery is in perfect equilibrium. “If…
Reader Feedback 7.16.03
WXXI and RUR: Good? Bad?
Free speech at stake in FCC broadcast ruling
So what if the first and most far-reaching guarantee in the Bill of Rights is a prohibition against government curtailment of free speech? On the airwaves starting 40 years ago, the Republicans discovered how to evade it — even while they were aware, in addition to the Constitutional guarantee, that federal law holds that…
Let the games begin
It was an interesting chain of events. Last Monday, July 7, City Newspaper received a press release from the Maggie Brooks for County Executive campaign committee. A press conference was scheduled for Tuesday, at which the county clerk and representatives from the Rochester Broadway Theater League would make “an important announcement about a community project…
Your government at work on the air
Having grown into a cluster of cable channels, C-SPAN has become a semi-official American institution. Not because it offers the most consistently fascinating, exciting programming, of course — but because it engages viewers with what you might call “reality-check” TV. Think of routines like the latest “White House Press Briefing With Ari Fleischer” or “gavel…
