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Shortly after Thanksgiving, a new bar opened on St. Paul Street, a few doors north of Tapas 177. A week before Christmas, it still had no name. It's about time we stepped in.
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Looking across Pearl's geometric depth at Rick Muto's beautiful Rothko knock-off was like inhabiting a Kubrick film. Kubrick was, George Grella informs us, a true "auteur," an artist with a singular, persistent vision. Pearl, the latest venture from Tonic owners Phil and Charlie Fitzsimmons, also exhibits a clarity of purpose, approach, and execution. Open
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Let me preface this review by saying I generally despise musicals in a very, very serious way. I still have nightmares about Moulin Rouge, and the mere thought of seeing The Producers on Broadway is nearly enough to make me vomit blood. I bought my mom the Sound of Music DVD last Christmas,
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I've been hoping for years that Swillburg, to mention only one city neighborhood on my list, would get substantial "targeted investment" from higher levels of government. And lo and behold, as the season of good tidings peaked, the government took out its
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Mindless masses Although I'm not surprised by the shallow, hypocritical over-reaction of some readers to the "Mammary Monologues" cover (November 27), it is still deeply troublesome. That many of these people ignore the countless misrepresentations and exploitations of women in music lyrics, billboards, television... you name it, stretches beyond narrow-mindedness.
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For professional sports teams, making a bad deal can lead to a disappointing season or two (witness the Bills' decision to trade a first-round draft pick next year for the abysmal Drew Bledsoe). But when a municipality makes a bad deal on a sports stadium, the disappointing results can play out for years.
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The Pianist is the first film director Roman Polanski has made in Poland since his very first feature. It's also, according to the press notes, the film he's waited his entire career to make. It's too bad he waited so long, because if Polanski had made The Pianist a little earlier into his career, it would
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Ain't it a drag Leave it to the queens to drag Rochester into the national spotlight. VH-1 film crews will hit the town January 9 and 10 to film mucho fabuloso female impersonators Pandora Boxx and Darienne Lake.
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Saturday night was truly the winter of my discontent: salty, shitty, snowy, and cold. Two-thousand-and-three arrived stillborn and under-whelming. My jones for palm trees and sunshine ran feverishly, unchecked. My boots leaked. But once again, I knew rock 'n' roll would warm my soul.
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Americans didn't much notice the death of philosopher Ivan Illich in Germany December 2. A priestly soul with the long view, Illich was a connoisseur of internal contradiction. In Deschooling Society, for example, he wrote that traditional schools teach people "to confuse process
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The Rochester School Board entered the new year with one of the deepest --- and angriest --- divisions in recent history. And while to outsiders the rancor may seem rooted in personality differences and power struggles, the division is more significant than that.
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Cover shock I have been a reader of City Newspaper since the days when it was two papers, City East and City West, and have always felt that City exemplified taste, decorum, and sensitivity to its diverse readership. However, I was forced
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On any given weekend, Billie Holiday, Sonny Rollins, or Stan Getz might be performing at the Ridgecrest Inn. Dave Brubeck or Louis Armstrong could be headlining at the War Memorial. Ray Charles might be playing a dance at the Roller Palace. And Ron Carter was always in the house band at the Pythodd Club.
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Artists can be solitary creatures. For many, shutting out the world with all its demands is an essential part of the creative process. Isolation though, has its downside and, as the saying goes, it's good to get out once in a while. At some point, whether it be through exhibition, publication, or performance, the
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The opening sequences of his last two movies provide some proof that Jack Nicholson's much discussed new maturity is not simply one of those inventions of the publicity folks and their accomplices in the entertainment media. Both The Pledge and About Schmidt introduce Nicholson's character at a retirement party, thus indicating that unlike many Hollywood stars,
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A bullet has a life of its own. Sometimes even enough to drive journalists to lyricism. Take this word-portrait by Los Angeles Times reporter Paul Dean: "The bullet left the heart, went into the left lung and exited... [The] slug stretched and displaced
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Neil Simon's 1983 Brighton Beach Memoirsis an immensely pleasing balancing act. Our most popular playwright's first major drama of serious autobiographical content, it deepens Simon's previous 22 years of hit gag-fests, yet more than equals their charm and humor. In these memoirs of the summer when Simon's extended family shared a beach bungalow, we get a
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It was a simple mechanical failure that made me late for Digital Rochester's monthly meet, mingle, and monopolize event at Tonic on East Avenue. I'd gone there to research this week's cover story, "Twenty-somethings to the rescue" (see page 6). Both the Rochester-Area 20-Somethings (R.A.T.S.) and Rochester Young Professionals, a splinter group, were encouraging their
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In Virginia Woolf's first book, The Voyage Out, a character expresses the desire to write a novel about all the things that people don't say, an ambition that the author herself fulfilled in a later book entitled The Waves. Steadfastly devoted to that interior life and those unspoken thoughts and feelings, inclined to close observation
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On the surface, Narc sounds like the kind of flick that should be going straight to either video or cable. I had never heard of the director (Joe Carnahan), and the two leads (Jason Patric and Ray Liotta) are hardly the stuff of dreams. So what am I missing here? Why the hell
