Posts by Elena Rossi-Snook

This spring, the Reserve Film and Video Collection is preserving Joyce Chopra and Claudia Weill’s 1973 documentary Joyce at 34.   One can question whether or not discourses on family planning, reproductive politics and gender roles have advanced since the film’s release; what is certain is that Joyce at 34 remains potent and relevant as a document of the conflict endured by working mothers.

The film’s 

George Balanchine's Serenade. Photo © Paul KolnikFor nearly 30 years I have had a constant and devoted relationship with the New York City Ballet. With the exception of a single dalliance with American Ballet Theatre in my early 20s (free tickets) and an occasional fling with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, I have remained steadfast and true to this singular dance company.

I began attending performances at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center as a child and then continued at the New York State Theater once I had 

Food, Inc. is the latest and one of the most successful films to investigate the politics of produce- exactly who is controlling what we consume and the consequences of unethical industries- but it is certainly not the first.

Filmic instruction and guidance on what and how to grow farm products, from cows to crops, dates back practically to the beginning of film itself. However, it wasn’t until post-WWII consumerism and the advent of artificial foods (Tang, anyone?) and the subsequent social upheaval that films began to 

Throughout these late winter and spring months, work crews have been feverishly drilling, planting, laying, grouting, irrigating, digging and welding outside of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in preparation for summer, when crowds of tourists and city dwellers will be looking for a shaded seat or a grassy knoll on which to perch with a sandwich or a friend.

The problem is, and has been, that Lincoln Center Plaza as it was conceptualized and built in the 1960s was neither shaded nor grassy and that one would be hard pressed to find a reason to 

If you take US Route 20 heading east from Albany, New York, you will eventually drive through the rural village of Nassau. There are three gas stations, a couple of pizza places and a trailer-cum-restaurant on the empty lot where Delson’s department store stood until it burned to the ground in the early 1980s.

Past the village’s one traffic light, on the right is a small white building with a black sign in front: Nassau Free Public Library. Most of this two-room branch of the Upper Hudson Library System is taken up