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They make this look good There's so much pride in our local celebrities lately, it's heartwarming. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Teddy Geiger, and, of course, Dancing with Rochester's "Stars" [quotes added]. But here's a news flash. If he wins, Hoffman probably isn't going to let everyone in Rochester take his Oscar home for a night like
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Thanks to filmdom's less-than-inspired offerings last year, I truthfully wasn't looking forward to the Daynas, the awards named after me, voted on by me, and traditionally intended to spotlight those slighted by Oscar. But I couldn't not hold them, due to the fact that a Dayna now carries such astonishing clout, plus celebrities really seem
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Two great American public occasions annually illuminate the dark days and frozen nights of winter with the bright lights of hype and the torrential flow of gush. Though celebrating entirely different endeavors, both events mount elaborate ceremonies that, through assiduous cultivation of the media and enormous expenditure of money on publicity, command the attention of
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Picturing a morph from ape into man into cross, the art on Geva's program for Inherit the Wind speaks volumes about the raging debate over evolution. The play is loosely based on the1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, which took place in rural Dayton, Tennessee. The state's Butler Act forbade public schools from teaching any theory
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MORE THAN MEDICINE [image-1] Dr. Allen Power, Associate Director of St. John's Nursing Home, has never been able to keep music out of his life. Even as a pre-med student at the University of Rochester in the early '70s, Power flirted with the idea of jumping tracks and pursuing music. Nonetheless, he decided on gerontology. "I wanted to use science
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She's been dead 100 years. She belonged to a time of petticoats and whalebone, stagecoaches, "women of a certain age," the Abolitionist and Temperance movements, our Civil War. But Susan B. Anthony refuses to go away. She was a radical, with radical ideas, even by today's standards. She was full of fire. To her critics:
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BLACK AND WHITE While "Acting White" addressed a legitimate challenge for students' educational achievement in this country, it skipped a critical point for me. It was assumed that the very constructs of black and white, though flawed, are sufficient and even acceptable as sole identifiers of a person. However, the terms black and white do
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There was a time when people complained that business leaders called all the shots in Rochester. Then businesses started consolidating and relocating corporate offices. Big-business commitment and leadership disappeared. And we started longing for the old days. Well, you may have noticed that in City Hall, the old days are back. Last November, Rochester elected a
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A Classic American Foursquare with Bonuses Were it not for a move precipitated by career advancement, the current owner of 14 Weldon Street wouldnít give up this solidly constructed, gracious home. Built in 1923, this 1,570 square foot American Foursquare still features numerous original embellishments and shines with quality.
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The totals: 2283 US soldiers, 206 Coalition soldiers, and approximately 28,535 to 32,153 Iraqi civilians have been killed in Iraq from the beginning of the war and occupation to February 22. 2901 Iraqi police and guardsmen have been killed since January 2005, according to an estimate compiled from news reports. 16,653 US military have been wounded in action
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Naked trolls and near-death We here at the Family Valued executive washroom, microwave kitchen, and unified pressroom have randomly selected a 10-year-old from among the one immediately available. So, what have you been reading lately? Thud!. What is that? It's the latest book written by Terry Pratchett. It's funny fantasy. He is a very good writer from Britain. The
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When class is in session for CapoeiraMandinga Rochester, the rhythm grabs you from the parking lot. As you enter the Elton Street building, the steady thump... tha-thump... tha-THUMP suddenly swells, reverberating down the stairwell. The pulse and boom of sound envelopes you and connects with a place deep in your body. Even
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At its very least, director Michel Gondry's follow-up to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind answers the head-scratcher, "What sort of person walks away from $50 million?" Apparently that individual would be brimming with humanity and humility, as terrified by the burden of power and celebrity as he is intrigued by its perks. In short,
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Can you keep a secret? Thanks to that great big confessional called the Internet, we don't have to be burdened by our secrets anymore. There are websites like postsecret (postsecret.blogspot.com), which asks people to send in secrets on hand-crafted postcards, and grouphug (grouphug.us), where visitors can post the contents of their souls and be identified
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It's a striking image --- large, glossy, vibrantly colored. A young girl stands in the lush greenery of a tropical forest; her black skin contrasted against the extreme whiteness of her dress. Punctuating the green is a purple-y pink phallic flower just to the right of the girl's shoulder, and in her right hand she
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While Brokeback Mountain continues to outrage an assortment of the ignorant, the nostalgic, and the vehement with its alleged attack on the stirring falsehoods of the Western, another version of the honored form practically slunk into town with barely a peep of protest from the right. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (a mouthful
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As far as I can tell country music has been co-opted by yuppies. So I'm pretty suspicious of anything claiming to be country. Look, wrapping yourself in the flag as you burn rubber in your pick up truck on the way to see some cookie-cutter cowboy sing about his flag and his pick up
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Hans Davidsson, David Higgs, William Porter The Eastman Italian Baroque Organ Gothic Records [image-2] An instrument stars in a new LOFT recording, which like many solo organ CDs, exists to showcase a particular set of pipes. On this CD, three guys rev up the Eastman Italian Baroque Organ (recently installed at the MemorialArtGallery) and show us what it can do.
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Grammy Award-winning Jessye Norman flies to Rochester this week to sing a benefit concert for Action for a Better Community, a non-profit agency which helps local people in poverty. (It's headed by her brother, James Norman.) In an interview, Ms. Norman reflected on the Grammys, her family, and Saturday chores with the Metropolitan Opera.
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AUDIO ART [image-1] To anyone under 30, the idea of using a phone booth may seem foreign. But Writers & Books could change that with its inspired conversion of an old British booth, rigged to offer passersby a free poetry reading. W&B held a contest that drew 350 submissions, and the 15 winning poets --- ranging
