SINGLES AND COUPLES - David Gallagher If you're single but not as complacent as you'd like to be about it, you might appreciate the characters in YOU DESERVELOVE(was HERE, now gone, to return in February), who seek to shore up their filmsy selves through codependent relationships and then to shore up those through therapy. If not, you could still enjoy the schizoid woman of a mainly feline disposition, her corporate and methodical suitor (very well played by David Cuion), and their funny dancing and ritualistic cathexis of a ...
CHOOSING THEATER - Randy Gener Street People Speak for Themselves
Taking social activism into the realm of theater,several not-forprofit groups are giving the theater back to those who truly need it-the street people. Instead of simply pleading for their case, why not give them the opportunity to speak for themselves?
The Theater Project at Housing Works creates original full-length pieces, mostly musicals, each conceived, written, and performed bv homeless and formerly homeless men, women, and children living with AIDS and HIV-related illnesses. Directed by Victoria McElwaine, its latest production, Every Beat Face Ain't Beautiful, recently ran at the Chelsea Playhouse. On December 19, Broadway Theater Institute's ...
REAL AGAIN - Peter Schjedahl What did people do before photography was invented? They had religion. Reality was God's plan, which people tried to see into. Their means for seeing into anything were crude. Then came instruments so terrific as to make God seem beside the point. Reality became what, with a little more ingenuity, people would know and control.
Any photograph, before we register its subject or anything else about it, may excite an expectation that we are about to know something for sure. Grasping this, expert photographers can choose to satisfy or frustrate the expectation, or to bend it like a blues note. They do so either mainly to manipulate us to certain ends or, if they are artists, mainly to nourish ...
PAY PER VIEW - James Ledbetter For the first time in history, the largest private funders of the presidential inaugural will be media covering the event. To squelch the impression that Bill Clinton is a wholly owned subsidiary of some Asian conglomerate, the January 20, 1997, inaugural is playing under Spartan financial rules: corporate contributions are banned, and individuals are limited to $100 gifts. The press, more or less willingly, will fill the gap. Leading the pack is CBS, whose entertainment division paid between $2 million and $3 million for the rights to broadcast the Inaugural Gala, as it did in 1993. That figure represents approximately 10 per cent of the entire ceremony's budget. Although CBS won this ...
NOT SO MAGIC STATS - Wayne Barrett Did Rudy Cut the Murder Rate Himself?
Despite all the mayorally orchestrated hoopla, it's highly unlikely that the city's 1996 murder rate actually did drop below 1000. The pre--election-year total of 983 on the New York Post odometer was "adjusted" by the Giuliani administration, as odometers often are on used cars up for resale.
The figure came from the police department, which has undercounted murders 14 out of the last 15 years. The city's medical examiner and Department of Health (DOH), which combine to produce all official death statistics, reported 77 more murders per year from 1980 to 1995 than the NYPD. Only in 1987 were the NYPD and DOH numbers identical. So chances are, ...
LETTERS TO THE EDTIOR - Various ROCKETTES' WHITE GLARE
Frank Ruscitti exposed the true spirit of Radio City Music Hall in his article, "White Christmas: The Color Line at Radio City" [The Front, December 31].
As a dancer, I've gone to several auditions at Radio City Music Hall, and I've noticed that it didn't matter how many qualified and beautiful black dancers showed up; with 50 job openings, only one or two would be chosen. And these one or two people are there to supposedly prove that all is equal at Radio City.
I no longer go to their auditions. I find the experience too humiliating. - STACIA MOORE, Bronx
THE POLITICS OF POT - Jennifer Gonnerman Will Medical Marijuana Come Back to New York?
During the 1980s, New York was one of the only states in the country handing out marijuana cigarettes to medical patients. If Assembly health committee chair Richard Gottfried gets his way, some patients may again be legally permitted to smoke pot.
Recent ballot-initiative victories allowing doctors to prescribe marijuana in Arizona and California are fueling a nationwide medical marijuana movement. Gottfried, a Manhattan Democrat, plans to introduce a medical marijuana bill in New York's state legislature. And experts predict that similar measures will pop up this year in more than 20 states. According to patients and doctors, marijuana ...
EBONICS FOR TRAVELERS - James Hannaham Thank you for choosing Ebonics for Travelers, the quick, easy way to learn a new language! We're confident that if you memorize the simple dialogues in this pamphlet, you'll be speaking like mushmouthed, Mississippi jazzmen or mushmouthed, Rainbow Coalition orators in no time! Ebonians are a friendly people and will be armed to hear you speaking their language! As you make your way through the bustling streets of Ebonia, a whole new world will open up to you as you chat with Ebonian shopkeepers, doormen, and other highly skilled people held down in positions of economic subservience by low-paying, go-nowhere jobs that you, the oppressive ruling dass, helped to keep them stuck in, partly ...
THE HEIMEL MANEUVER - Cynthia Heimel An Open Letter to the Most Wonderful Oprah Winfrey
My Dearest Oprah:
I have your picture from TV Guide taped to my computer monitor so that I can stare into your eyes while I write this. Your eyes are a funny peachy shade, but I'm assuming that's the color separation. Not that you aren't peachy, which you are.
Oprah, you are my idol. And I want to say I never did like that Madonna. Okay, she has turned every Catholic girl's birthright--humongous sexual guilt causing rebellion and hilarious acting out against the Church and Daddy--into a multimillion-dollar industry. This is quite the feat, but I still don't want to watch her give a blow job to a bottle and that's that.
Oprah, I just ...
SCREWED - Patricia Thomson Directed by Alexander Crawford At Cinema Village
To see the truth, you have to look a girl right in the asshole. So says "Big Bob", proud owner of 8000 porn videos and an arid reader of Screw, one of America's raunchiest sex rags.
Big Bob's insights are about as deep as they get in Screwed, a documentary about Al Coldstein, publisher of Screw.
No doubt the makers of Screwed- director Alexander Crawford and producers Todd Phillips and Andrew Curland (who also run the New York Underground Film Festival) are hoping to ride the coattails of The People vs. Larry Flynt and make the most of the fact that Coldstein got there first his magazines been around longer (29 years) and he was first to be ...
SALTA OF THE EARTH - Robert Sietsema Need a snack? Trv shafota ($3), a bowl of yogurt turned to porridge by soggy gobbets of flatbread. Stark white, it smolders with raw garlic, cilantro, and nigella-oniony black seeds that scatter the surface. A heavier meal in the same vein is fattah ($9), a tureen crammed with strips of lamb, carrot, and bread in a tacky gravy-super comfort food, and too much for one person to finish.
Yemen Cafe, in Brooklyn's Arab quarter, vaunts a pink neon crown in the window, and photos lining the walls confirm that Yemen is spectacularly beautiful-sort of like New Mexico, but with casbahs clinging to steep cliffs and seaside villages girdled by medieval walls. An ornate sword menaces a bare-necked ...
'SIXTH ANNUAL NEW YORK JEWISH FILM AND VIDEO FESTIVAL' - Leslie Camhi Walter Reade Theater January 12-22 The Jewish Museum January 26-30
This year's Jewish Film Festival is one big family dispute, reflecting the fragmentation of contemporary Jewish identity.
In features and documentaries from Reykjavik to Haifa, the Holocaust is still a major focus. But films about Jewish life today seem increasingly concerned with the rifts that divide this eternally beleaguered people.
Yeud Lavanon began making 119+ 3 Bullets, about the possibility of civil war in Israel, after the 1994 massacre at Hebron, when Jewish settler Baruch Coldstein opened fire on Palestinians praying at the tomb of Abraham. He ends ...