The tobacco trick
It’s interesting to note which political events attract television news coverage. When Monroe County Executive Jack Doyle held a press conference last August to announce sweeping spending cuts in the face of a massive budget deficit, the carefully coifed, heavily make-upped TV news reporters swarmed the Public Safety Building on Fitzhugh Street. That evening,…
They won’t stay dead: Pure Kona Poetry celebrates 10 years
There are wild mood swings. One minute it’s a somber kid with too much metal in his face. Then there’s a slightly out-of-focus Vietnam vet. Religious nuts, fey singer-songwriters, schizophrenics, jittery college students, even some yuppies. Pure Kona Poetry may be Rochester’s best and longest-standing forum for spoken expression. Norm Davis has been the…
Mixed Bill Shakespeare festival
This 51st season of Canada’s Stratford Festival is dedicated to the recently deceased great international designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch. She set the Festival’s incomparable design standards for many years, and invented Stratford’s much-imitated combination Elizabethan/ancient Greek/modern thrust stage. I don’t know what the outspoken Ms. Moiseiwitsch would say about the peculiar mishmash of spectacles in Stratford’s…
Jimmy Poon’s food odyssey
“Hey, dad,” calls out Margerie Poon. “He wants to hear your life’s story!” The interview passes from daughter to father, and Jimmy Poon begins to recount how he came to New York City in 1972, washed dishes 16 hours a day, and spent his spare time learning to cook. “Cooks,” he explained, “only work 10…
The cop formula as before
Although probably best known for a series of gritty, authentic sports flicks often laced with considerable quantities of irony and humor — White Men Can’t Jump, Bull Durham, Tin Cup, Cobb, Play It to the Bone — Ron Shelton has also worked in some of the popular action genres. Most recently, in fact, he directed…
Grander than you can imagine…
Excitement seemed to build higher during the final six days of the Rochester International Jazz Festival, with a full house for Tony Bennett at the Eastman Theatre on Wednesday evening and a sold-out Water Street Music Hall for Ray Barretto, despite the poor sound. Festival promoter John Nugent says the 2003 festival made a…
News Briefs 6.18.03
Touchy subjects Lawmakers at the June 4 meeting of the Monroe County Legislature’s Ways & Means committee went out of their way to be mean to one another. As noted in this week’s cover story (“The tobacco trick,” page 10), tempers flared between Democrats demanding hard data on the county’s finances and Republican legislators, particularly…
Reader Feedback 6.18.03
Paying food’s costs I congratulate you on publishing “Slapping the Hands that Feed Us: Migrant Farm Workers Fight for Basic Rights,” by Joseph Sorrentino. The article presents an honest picture of the realities of farm workers in New York State. While noting farmer resistance to improving the legal and financial status of farm workers, Sorrentino…
Voting day at the Church Home
June 27 is a big day for roughly 235 employees at the Episcopal Church Home. At the heart of the nursing home, among the warm wooden beams and Tiffany stained glass windows of the Chapel of the Good Shepherd, these workers — service, maintenance, and clerical employees; licensed practical nurses; certified nursing assistants —…
Chasing a ‘Whale’ in Lake Placid
For some reason, Fate has seemed determined to keep me from the Lake Placid Film Forum. I didn’t even know about the first Forum, in 2000, until it ended. In 2001 I was all set to go but got run over by a truck instead. Last year, the Forum ran opposite the World Cup, and…
Buses to the rescue?
Central Station, Rochester’s $58-million bus station, is “poised to surge ahead,” says the Democrat and Chronicle. This Thursday (June 19), the Genesee Transportation Council is expected to approve $30 million for the project, which has been proposed by the Rochester-Genesee Regional Transportation Authority. Congress has already agreed to provide $12 million, and Authority leaders…
