Say what?
Brother Wease is worried about his livelihood. Sure, the longtime on-air personality for Radio Free Wease (6-11 a.m. weekdays, 96.5 WCMF-FM) isn’t announcing “it’s over” like Howard Stern so gloomily declared in early March. But the FCC’s latest focus on decency — and the hefty fines it levels to broadcasters of inappropriate content — has…
Cops on trial
Not much has changed in 175 years for Brockport — a picturesque Victorian village on the banks of the Erie Canal. In 1829, Brockport gave itself a police department by writing two constable positions into the village charter. The village dumped the constables a few years later. The positions were restored around 1852, according…
Family Valued
Read to Your Bunny Rosemary Wells’ Read to Your Bunny (Scholastic, 1997) is a delightful invitation to the world of reading. The most important thing in the first year of life, when a child learns to love, trust, speak, and listen, is the growth of the mind and spirit. Wells’ lyrical text extols the…
Playing with time, flashing brilliance
The upcoming series of films at the George Eastman House should educate American audiences in the works of the highly praised but hardly famous Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986). The fact of his nationality — how many Russian directors, aside from Sergei Eisenstein, are widely known or known at all in the West? — his…
This is no action movie, and Dafoe is no Scotsman
In the summer of 2000, a young man by the name of Sandro do Nascimento took 11 hostages on a Rio de Janeiro city bus after a blown robbery attempt. What unfolded, as well as an exploration of the precursory events that made this tragedy ultimately unavoidable, makes up Bus 174, a riveting piece of…
Also playing…
Elephant examines a day in the life of a high school just before a Columbine-like shooting spree turns the idyll upside down. But even without the topicality and drama of that, it would be well worth a look, and a welcome return to form by director Gus Van Sant. Van Sant started out as…
Hour of power
I was in the presence of greatness. Times three. It was J.S. Bach’s birthday (319 years young). I was listening to the Master’s voice on a masterpiece of an organ, the Fisk “Opus 83” at Downtown United Presbyterian Church. And one of the Bach works on the program was the “Great” G minor fugue.…
A story to tell
Michael Atkins Yawn has a lot of big ideas to fit into a little theater. Yawn is the artistic director of the three-month old Imani Theatre Ensemble, the city’s first and only all-African-American theater group. He is now leading the troupe in rehearsals for The Homeboys, a play he wrote (and the ensemble’s second…
Body count
To honor the war dead and fill an information gap in US mass media, City Newspaper will run weekly lists of American/”Coalition” soldiers and Iraqi citizens killed during the ongoing occupation of Iraq. The totals: 587 Americans, 101 “Coalition” soldiers, and approximately 10,000 Iraqi soldiers and 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in Iraq since…
Watchdog
Part two of a two-part series. David Cay Johnston is not what you would call a dispassionate journalist. Over his four-decade career he has exposed police corruption, media manipulation, and lax industrial safety standards. In 2001 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his investigative reporting at the New York Times. And in his new book,…
