Behind the mask
Last Thursday’s Bush-Kerry show wasn’t a debate, of course. And from the outset, I was cross that the media bought into the restrictions about format, camera angle, and the like. Since when do credible journalists agree to that kind of censorship? Still, it was an enlightening night. And I’m more worried than ever about…
Cooking the books
Want a decent public library? You’d better hope your library sits in a State Assembly district represented by a Republican. GOP assemblymembers say they expect to receive an average of $30,000 each for libraries in their own districts. The money is reportedly coming from Gov. George Pataki’s own discretionary funds (read: pork barrel) after Assembly…
Reader feedback 10.6.04
Developing downtown, analyzing MoveOn.org
Body count 10.6.04
To honor the war dead and fill an information gap in US mass media, City Newspaper will run weekly lists of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed during the occupation of Iraq. The totals: 1064 American soldiers, 138 Coalition soldiers, and approximately 12,976 to 15,033 Iraqi civilians have been killed in Iraq from the beginning…
Reports from a refusenik
At one of the many checkpoints maintained by the Israeli military, a pregnant Palestinian woman can only hope to be lucky enough to go into labor. That’s one of the few effective ways of proving a bulging belly isn’t just a pillow packed with explosives, says Major Stav Adivi. A five-year veteran of the Israeli…
We’re not quite in Arcadia anymore
Some time in 1988 I learned one of my biggest lessons in aesthetics. I was living in the Los Angeles area and went to a movie theater in Century City to see Terry Gilliam’s film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. I walked away enthralled, excited, and inspired. The next night, wanting to share my enthusiasm…
Memo to the Rumpsters: there’s no quick fix
Back in the summer, some RochesterSchool District critics tipped us off that the local business leaders known as the Rump Group were preparing a strongly critical report about the district. The report was released last week, and the criticism of the district is milder than I had expected. Actually, the Rumpsters seem to go out…
The art of sex and beauty
“You are so dangerously close to owning me,” confesses enamored college student Adam to his self-proclaimed “artist” girlfriend Evelyn. Poor clueless Adam, he doesn’t know just how emotionally treacherous his relationship is. Stunning and engaging, The Shape of Things by playwright Neil LaBute invests its audience in the tumultuous romance of the seemingly terminally geeky…
Sweet harmony
We’ll take it wherever we can find it these days: a few minutes of calm, a sense of balance. In this latest Home Design, we talk to people who are making harmony happen. Whether they are gardeners growing magical landscapes out of city plots, or a woman classically trained in feng shui balancing the energy…
Twelve years of sex, politics, and videotape
This year’s ImageOut has all of the rule-breaking, gender-bending, sweet love stories, and good old-fashioned skin its audiences have come to love and expect. It also offers a good stock of politically charged documentaries and features, some historical, some fun, some handling the hot-potato issues of marriage and parenting. Several City writers — Matt Ehlers,…
Sweet harmony
We’ll take it wherever we can find it these days: a few minutes of calm, a sense of balance. In this latest Home Design, we talk to people who are making harmony happen. Whether they are gardeners growing magical landscapes out of city plots, or a woman classically trained in feng shui balancing the energy…
Telling the intergenerational tales
“There are thoughts that have the power to trap me. I write them down to be more honest about them and lessen their potential to do harm.” Artists can relate to these sentiments, whether their thoughts take the form of ink, paint, musical notes, or another medium. Those words also serve as an introduction to…
All
You can find hundreds of books on feng shui at the bookstore: Essential Feng Shui, 101 Feng Shui Tips For Your Home, Feng Shui for Singles, Feng Shui for Dummies. There are feng shui candle sets, CDs, and body lotion. Westerners have been trying to tap into the exotic wisdom of the “Orient” since we…
You gotta fight for your right to family
This year’s festival has a series called “Family Snapshot,” a group of features and documentaries that highlight issues of marriage and parenting in the LGBTQ community. These are two of the series’ standout documentaries. Paternal Instinct is an emotional and skilled examination of two Manhattan men and their quest to become parents. Two incredibly earnest…
Down the garden path
Gardeners living in the city don’t always have a lot of space to work with. But the urge to set hands into soil is a powerful one, and thank goodness. The pockets of beauty these tillers create are something we all can enjoy. The City of Rochester recently announced the winners of the Flower City…
A love that binds
Resplendent with poetic images and disquieting performances, Alexander Sokurov’s Father and Son is certainly one of the exceptional films of this year’s ImageOut. Forgoing the standard conventions of narrative storytelling, Father and Son is cinema in its purest form. Sokurov brilliantly uses every frame of film to explore the relationship between a widowed father and…
Strange tango on the tundra
“It was awesome,” Lila said after screening Bears, the new film at RMSC’s Stasenburgh Planetarium. “It was really funny. Like how the bear cubs sounded more like cows than bears.” Two black bear cubs provide much entertainment value, climbing and falling out of trees, and fighting each other like a couple of drunks. Bears is…
Brando gives good queer
By today’s standards, Reflections In A Golden Eye seems repressed, even humorous at times. But major Hollywood figures such as Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, and director John Huston risked damage to their legendary careers to bring this story of repressed homosexuality and sexual dysfunction to movie theaters in 1967. And that deserves respect. Reflections stars…
Those Buffalo blues
The Patriots sacked Drew Bledsoe seven times — five on Buffalo’s last two desperation drives — during the Bills’ 31-17 loss on Sunday. New England scored the game-clinching touchdown when it sacked Bledsoe, forced and recovered his fumble, and ran it 68 yards to the end zone. The play epitomized the long season Bills fans…
A tribut to conflagrations and courage
The usual action film of our time, familiar to any moviegoer, invariably features heavy doses of physical violence, gunfights, car chases (and crashes), advanced technology, and enough weapons of mass destruction to provoke the posturing of George W. Bush. As its title indicates, however, Ladder 49, a very different sort of action flick, celebrates the…
Back to the future
The four members of the Atomic Swindlers who gathered on a recent evening to talk about their new album are no strangers to CD releases. Different combinations of them have played in New Math in the early 1980s, Jet Black Berries in the mid 1980s, and the Raw MaGillys in the 1990s. “If we’d made…
The XX Files
Security Moms? They’ve got to be kidding. What mother isn’t a Security Mom? Long before Bush and Kerry started targeting this “demographic,” trying to prove who is better suited to protect our children, we mothers were already out here on security detail for our families. Pundits claim Security Moms — a group, they say, of…
