The Floating House
“This is not a ‘Hi honey, I’m home!’ house,” artist Annie Dunsky-Kälnitz says of her Pittsford residence. Pod-shaped and perched on 100-foot pylons on the side of a hill — like a long-legged bug — the house was dubbed the Floating House by its first owners. It was designed and built in the late 1970s…
Breaking the mold
Anyone who has shopped for a house knows the process can be fraught with anxiety. The commitment. The responsibility. The mortgage payments. With worries like these, no wonder we become timid, risk-averse. We flock like lemmings to tract neighborhoods, where boxy houses stretch in rows to the horizon. The bravest among us march to…
The straw-bale house
If you tell Sharon Kissack her house smells like a barn, she won’t be insulted. She’s in the final stages of installing straw-bale walls inside, and the scent of sweet, dry hay is just one of the advantages of her unusual choice of materials. Another is the cozy feeling the two-foot-deep walls impart to the…
DIY: children’s bedrooms
I was cruising right along, hitting all the mile markers of adulthood — finished school, landed a real job, bought a used car, got hitched, knocked up, the works. But no one makes it out of childhood without facing something that makes them say, “Whoa! Am I really an adult?” For most people, that moment…
Right under your nose
Art furniture made here
It’s not easy being Green
The Green Party struggles to establish itself in New York
Alchemy with shadows
I should confess that I have long been one of Adam Fuss’s biggest fans. So I came to this show with high expectations. I was not disappointed. Scott Laird, the gallery director, and Deborah Ronnen, a prominent local art dealer, have taken a side room at the Visual Studies Workshop and transformed it into…
When tolerance is merely academic
Although its subject is controversial and its characters’ responses are emotional, Shipping Dock’s current, challenging production is thoughtful, rather low-key, and pleasant. Rebecca Gilman’s Spinning Into Butter takes its central character, Sarah Daniels, the dean of students at an elegant, Vermont liberal arts college, through conflicts with both minority students who feel discriminated against and…
Surefire comic spirits
More than six decades after Noel Coward took about two weeks to toss off his enchanting ghost-frolic, BlitheSpirit, it is still delighting audiences in frequent productions around the world. Everybody loves the show, but it’s about time to start respecting it as a modern classic of foolproof comic theater, as well. Blackfriars’ enjoyable revival this…
‘Red Dragon’ awakes
The appearance of the new film adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novel, Red Dragon, suggests some odd and complicated ideas about literature, cinema, and maybe ourselves. For one thing, as that rara avis — a prequel which is also a remake (in this case, of a 1986 movie entitled Manhunter, much of which it duplicates)…
It ain’t easy being a spoiled teenager
The suits over at the WB network must be staggering around their offices in shock. Roger Avary’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ The Rules of Attraction takes two of the net’s biggest stars — James Van Der Beek and Jessica Biel — and uses them in family-friendly scenes involving coke-snorting, masturbation, an orgy, and hot…
Not it!
As county legislators debate the 2003 budget proposed by County Executive Jack Doyle this month, there’ll be a lot of discussion about how the cuts Doyle’s proposed could hurt various groups of people: abused children, the poor, the disabled, the homeless. But when it comes to discussing a property tax increase to restore some of…
News briefs 10.9.02
Kozol does his homework A few days before the beginning of the school year, on September 3, National Book Award-winning author Jonathan Kozol was in town, addressing an assembly of teachers and support staff for the Greece Teachers Association. Kozol, the author of Death at an Early Age and Savage Inequalities, has been an outspoken…
Reader Feedback 10.9.02
Fields of dreams After reading Chris Busby’s article, “Rhinos and Red Wings and Rattlers, Oh My” (September 18), I’ve come to the conclusion that former County Executive Tom Frey has no clue whatsoever. His moronic statements about a proposed retrofit of Frontier Field prove that he and his so-called Sports Authority are completely out of…
Things go better with food
“Look, these are done,” cries fifth grader Lekisha Mitchell as she tests the weight of a ripening sunflower head. Behind her and friend Terri Burnett, also a fifth grader, the row of flowers stretches almost to a vanishing point beside School 9 on North Clinton Avenue. The sunflowers, though, are only a garnish. The…
Home Sweet Dome
Buckminster Fuller first envisioned geodesic domes as sturdy, easy-to-construct, low-cost housing for the masses in the late 1940s. His idea took hold in the decades following, and today the geodesic dome — part engineering triumph, part philosophy-in-action — is a symbol of an era when world peace was a goal, not just a logo. …
