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BRUCE JACKSON: THE ATTICA AND GUANTANAMO REPORTS

CAITLIN CASS: THE RISE AND FALL OF BENJAMIN RATHBUN

ANTHONY CHASE: MUSICALFARE’S AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’

14 FLATSITTER 19 M. FAUST 20 I LIKE YOU BETTER NOW

THE PUBLIC CONTENTS

MUSIC: “A BUNCH OF DUDES AND CHICKS LIVING THAT YOLO LIFE, TERROR PIGEON IS AN INSTANT PARTY.”

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abstraction of Buffalo’s vacant and abandoned properties. PLEASE EXAMINE THE DEVELOPERS’ DISCIPLES: Bruce Fisher on the 5 THIS PROOF folly of planning a new neighborhood on the city’s Outer Harbor. CAREFULLY

PUBLIC SECRETS: Bruce Jackson on the withholding of

If you which are on 6 approve errors compromised reports on Attica and Guantanamo. this proof,already THE PUBLIC cannot be held responsible. Please examine the ad thoroughly even if the ad NIMAN: Election 2014 FILM: Polish Film Festival, is a 8 pick-up. 20

recap—Tea Party wins and progressive advances. MESSAGE TO ADVERTISER

Whiplash, Rosewater.

Thank you for advertising with THE PUBLIC. Please review your ad and BOOKS: check for any errors. TheColm originalToibin’s layout instructions have been followed as new novel, David Hwang closely as possible. THE PUBLIC offers comes to BABEL. design services with two proofs at no charge. THE PUBLIC is not responsible for any error if not notified within STAFF PUBLIC 24THE hours of receipt. The production department must have a signed proof SPECIAL inEDITOR-IN-CHIEF order to print. Please sign and faxACCOUNTS EXECUTIVE GEOFF KELLY CY ALESSI this back or approve by responding to ARTSemail. & ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR PRODUCTION MANAGER this

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CONTRIBUTORS WOODY BROWN, CAITLIN CASS, JEANETTE CHIN, BARBARA COLE, BRUCE FISHER, JACK FORAN, LYNN FREEHILL-MAYE, MICHAEL I. NIMAN, NANCY J. PARISI, KELLIE POWELL, J. TIM RAYMOND, JEREMIAH SHEA WITH SUPPORT FROM PAR PUBLICATIONS LLC

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MEET THE ARTIST MATTHEW HOFFMAN Friday, December 12, 7–8 pm Matthew Hoffman, the artist behind the You Are Beautiful campaign, will give an Artist Talk at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery on Friday, December 12, from 7 to 8 pm. Doors will open at 5:30 pm and AK Café will offer a happy hour from 5:30 to 7 pm.

Photograph of You Are Beautiful billboard by Tom Loonan. n Photograph of Matthew Hoffman courtesy of the artist.

GIVING UP ONE’S MARK: HELEN FRANKENTHALER IN THE 1960S AND 1970S IMPERFECTIONS BY CHANCE: PAUL FEELEY RETROSPECTIVE, 1954–1965 November 9, 2014–February 15, 2015

1285 ELMWOOD AVENUE BUFFALO, NEW YORK 14222-1096

716.882.8700 www.albrightknox.org

Helen Frankenthaler (American, 1928–2011). Hint from Bassano, 1973. Acrylic on canvas, 85 x 227 inches (215.9 x 576.6 cm). Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto. © 2014 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. n Paul Feeley (American, 1910–1966). Asellus, 1964. Oil-based enamel on canvas, 101 x 101 inches (256.5 x 256.5 cm). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Recent Acquisition. © 2014 Estate of Paul Feeley / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

DAILYPUBLIC.COM / NOVEMBER 12, 2014 / THE PUBLIC 3

NEWS VISUAL AID

BUFFALO IMPLOSION: ABANDONED & VACANT PROPERTIES BY MATTHEW NAGOWSKI Per the City of Buffalo’s real property database, 16,965 of our city’s 93,475 properties were listed as vacant or abandoned in 2013. Local artist Matthew Nagowski’s Nobody Circles the Wagons (Parts I — VI) explores the implosion of abandonment and decay that has occurred within Buffalo’s corporate boundaries, even as hopes abound with the city’s population stabilizing and an increased amount of investment in certain neighborhoods. Rendered using the Processing open source programming language. Data courtesy P of Brian Borncamp and the Buffalo Open Data project.

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PLEASE

NEWS PUBLIC SHAMING less than $10,000 a piece. For a mere $43 million, an enterprising person could have 15 times the volume of Outer Harbor land now dreamed-over by designers. The benefit of the 1,500 acres that is in the existing city is that the sewer lines, water lines, streets, streetlights, fire hydrants, and public transportation, plus the personnel for fire-suppression, public safety, and other services are already in place. Forty-three million bucks, plus another $10 million in demolition, and, in the aggregate, there would be room for 6,000 brand-new single-family houses on a suburban-standard quarter-acre lot. But of course, there won’t be, because there is no demand for 6,000 brand-new single family dwellings, whether they be houses, townhouses, condos, apartments, or sheds. Were there 6,000 units of new housing brought into the market, what would owners of existing houses do—especially the Baby Boomer and Greatest Generation homeowners who are now hoping to find purchasers for the homes they’ve placed on the market?

THE DEVELOPERS’ Hopes, delusions, and plans on Buffalo’s Outer Harbor

BY BRUCE FISHER Rowers are a hardy lot. The annual Hogan-Fries Regatta at West Side Rowing Club, the season’s last, is exclusively for novices, which means eighth-graders and high-school freshmen, and it’s usually held within a day or two of Halloween. Just like in the early May rowing meets, one expects a bit of a breeze, maybe some rain. Sometimes even slush. This year, the weather forecast for Saturday, November 1 was so daunting that the West Side coaches rushed out an email a few days before, postponing the event until Sunday. But came Sunday, with the wind whipping whitecaps into foam and smashing water up against the breakwall, it was still too dangerous to put 14-year-olds into 64-foot-long fiberglass boats, even with coaches hovering nearby in motor launches. The winter winds hit us hard here, especially at that place where all the wind and all the water of the Upper Great Lakes funnels into the Niagara River. Wind drives rain, then snow, then ice, and drives it hard. Maintaining the wooden window-frames of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Fontana Boathouse is an expensive proposition. The sailors, like the power-boaters, pull their toys inland a bit and wrap them in plastic or canvas from November to May. Our regional climate shaped our geography and our land-use. Anybody who drives over the Skyway to what we now know as the Outer Harbor, to the 100 or so acres of what used to be Buffalo’s port complex, knows that five-minute jaunt from downtown lands you in a breezy, quiet, green space in summer, and in Siberia between November and May. For the 150 years that Buffalo had a port there, it was a seasonal port, given Lake Erie’s tendency to freeze over during most winters. For the decade or so since we turned the Times Beach toxic sludge dump into the Times Beach Nature Preserve, it’s been a seasonal-use venue for human strollers, for seasonally migratory birds, and for the more intelligent of the deer that feed there. Even the deer yard up on the other side of the Skyway during winter. It’s the wind. The only year-round occupants of the entire stretch from the Buffalo River to the logistics warehouses on the Bethlehem Steel property work for the US Coast Guard. But this year, the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation’s consultants delivered documents that explain how with just a little bit of infrastructure investment (one or more bridges, some sewer lines, some water lines), Buffalo’s former port area could have tax-paying homeowners in a new neighborhood just across the Buffalo River from the Commercial Slip, Pegulaville, Canalside, and the incomparable cuisine of the Hatch. Even more recently, a New Urbanist designer offered a plan to use almost all the land between the Nature Preserve and the Small Boat Harbor to create a “new neighborhood.”

DISCONNECTED THINKING I confess to using the Skyway to get my free lithium. Thanks to that structure that some of our officials demand down, it’s a five-minute trip from downtown to the other landfill-turned-nature-preserve at Tifft Farm, which is also on old port land. Bright days grow rare in our Dostoyevsky Novembers. Getting to the top of the Skyway, getting a look at the pacific Canadian shore, and at that great, placid expanse of lake, brings light into the brain even on dim days. The sun tentatively returns by Christmas, when the Lake Erie whitecaps fill up with snow and then, usually by late January, stop moving all together. Then the west wind polishes the hard surface of Lake Erie so effectively that the sun’s glinting reflections banish the seasonal affective disorder from our rheumy eyes. Housing out there? Where there’s now some nice picnicking for half the year, and wildlife paths, and cycling, and Pierre Wallinder’s sailing school, and the massive deer and curious chickadees of the Times Beach wildlife preserve? Out where there should be soccer fields? Why? Statistic #1: According to the National Association of Home Builders, in 2014 there were 590 building permits issued for new housing in Erie and Niagara Counties, a drop of 1 percent from 2013. There was a decline of 21 percent in building permits issued for multi-family housing.

The ECHDC planners–oblivious to the economic issues here, even more oblivious to the demographic flattening that has been a persistent feature in the Buffalo area (our regional population peaked in 1970), hired planners who offer a generica sort of waterfront plan. Meanwhile, the New Urbanist plan is, to quote Alice of Alice in Wonderland fame, curiouser–at best, a clever undergraduate architecture student’s notion of how to create the proverbial “human scale,” “walkable space,” and “mixed use” on about 100 flat waterfront acres, as if those acres are in a rapidly growing metro, one without onshore Arctic winds.. Statistic #2: Today, including the Statler Tower with its newly refurbished 32,000-square-foot footplates and the former HSBC tower, there is somewhere between 3.5 and 4 million square feet of empty commercial office space (about 25 percent of today’s inventory) in Buffalo’s central business district, which is within 100 yards of where both the consultants and the New Urbanists would create a new neighborhood.

WHAT’S GOING ON HERE In Buffalo, as in every Rust Belt town that is incrementally reviving despite decades of sprawl without regional population growth, and despite the unchanged international momentum that globalizes production, rewards capital, and thwarts even modest income redistribution, we must work hard to preserve a fragile momentum.

Statistic #3: Home sales have recovered nicely since the Great Recession, rising from a low of 4,951 in Erie County in 2011 back up to 10,800 in 2013, which is just about where they were in 2008, before the bottom fell out of the economy. Here’s the punchline: Despite the curious problem we have, which is that the current supply of housing at every price-point far exceeds the demand at every price-point (mainly because we have no net new in-migration to the region that replaces everybody who is shedding this mortal coil), we still have a nice, healthy up-tick in housing values here. Mostly. For now… Our friends in Erie County government, who track home values because that’s what the property tax levy relies on, pretty much agree with Zillow and Trulia, which are on-line real-estate sales sites that track values, sale prices, taxes, foreclosures, and other data for tens of millions of individual parcels nationwide. Erie County government expects a slower rise in the overall value of housing next year than this year. This is sensible. Why? Because we have many more sellers than buyers. And the buyers of houses here face a wonderful dilemma, especially inside the 40.5 square miles of the City of Buffalo: Should they buy a $50-a-square-foot fixer-upper a block or two from Richmond Avenue, or a $40-a-square-foot bungalow right around the corner from either Larkinville or the new beer joint over on Niagara—in either case less than two miles from Canalside, Elmwood, the Burchfield Penney, and everything else that is clustered in the city. Or should they splurge and buy a $100-a-square-foot house, all tarted up with granite countertops and new furnaces and energy-efficient windows, in either the Elmwood Village or in a downtown loft building? For that relative handful of folks blowing in from any big metro, where the median home price starts at more than $200 a square foot and then hockey-sticks upward, Buffalo is a paradise already. But were the planners and the New Urbanists to get their way on the Outer Harbor, and create from 1,000 to 6,000 new units of housing for a market that currently transacts 10,800 houses a year, then we should expect the following to occur: •

the values of existing housing would drop;

Big plans are the enemy of small wins. That’s because the large-scale economic and demographic trends in our region are decidedly unchanged. It is not necessarily a problem–it’s certainly not an existential threat–that the Buffalo metro area is experiencing population stability rather than population growth. But it is a reality. Just as it’s a reality that employment here has stabilized at just below what it was in 2008.

•

the cost of all the new infrastructure required by people moving into a brand-new subdivision would be added to the cost of maintaining, and incrementally replacing, all the existing infrastructure in the City of Buffalo, which has an infrastructure created for 550,000 people but that today hosts only 265,000 people; and meanwhile,

And so too is it a reality that some areas of the Buffalo Metro area will see population shrinkage, with potential abandonment of housing even in solidly white suburban areas, should the demographers at Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, the US Census, and Buffalo State College prove correct. They all say that Erie County will shrink from its current 906,000 to around 800,000 by 2030.

•

the tax revenue from all the new units of housing would probably look just like the tax revenue from the couple of dozen new units of housing recently brought to the Waterfront Village market by Carl Paladino—namely, zero tax revenue, as there is little chance that any developer in Buffalo will develop Outer Harbor housing without the same tax holiday Carl Paladino obtained for having developed his Waterfront Village condominium.

Smaller, faster, better, right? More focused, better preserved, with better transit, cleaner water, nicer views, better entertainment, and smarter public decision-making. We should take that over overpopulation anyway, right?

THE 1,500-ACRE ISSUE NOBODY TALKS ABOUT But because too many of our leaders imagine that all real-estate development is good, we are overlooking the experience of those brave souls who have brought dozens—not thousands, but certainly dozens— of condos, lofts, and apartments onto the downtown market. What they’ve discovered is what the demographers and the home-sellers already know: There’s a limited and fragile demand here. And until there are more high-paying jobs in the region, the appetite for housing in the $200,000 to $500,000 range will be constrained. And then there’s the inconvenient reality that made for good reading in the British newspaper The Guardian earlier this year when it profiled David Torke’s “Tour de Neglect” bicycle romps through the wasted landscapes east of Main Street, not even half a mile from the nearly $250,000,000 in public money that went into creating Canalside.

And then there’s the other part of the abandonment problem. In a recent colloquy among well-meaning friends on a social media site, one of the New Urbanists quite bluntly advocated suburban abandonment. Another chimed in, “If we’re going to shrink, then let’s shrink toward the center.” Perhaps this ethos is what drives discussion of building new housing, despite the dead-certain guarantee that it will come at considerably greater public expense than either creating a 100-acre Outer Harbor park or just banking the land for a later decision. The 1,500 vacant acres in existing neighborhoods in Buffalo mean nothing, or less than nothing, to the would-be neighborhood creators. Not surprisingly, advocates of Outer Harbor housing are comfortable with the notion of the vacancy/abandonment paradigm just shifting Zip Codes eastward—because the theory is that merely by moving from one tract inside this metro area into another tract, so much wealth will be created, so much light shed, so much goodness harvested, that the good will chase away all evil. Curiously, that thinking inadvertently makes our point: Without overall population growth in the region, we are still talking about moving a few folks this way and that.

Is there a demand for a few thousand new units of housing in a city where there are 20,000 or more vacant housing units already? Just by the numbers, it’s not likely.

One hopes that the folks who are hard at work in repopulating existing Buffalo, refurbishing old Buffalo, rejuvenating tired Buffalo, will exert their collective economic and political clout, and say yes to Congressman Brian Higgins, yes to Assemblyman Sean Ryan, yes to Joan Bozer, yes to Riverkeeper, and to others who have said no to housing on the Outer Harbor.

But we took a look, just to make sure. With the help of Buffalo State geography professor Dr. Wende Mix in 2010, we counted more than 1,500 acres of parcels in Buffalo that were on the assessment rolls for

Bruce Fisher is a visiting professor of economics and finance at Buffalo State College, where he directs the Center for Economic P and Policy Studies.

Outsiders can see it, but some insiders can’t: We have an abandonment crisis.

DAILYPUBLIC.COM / NOVEMBER 12, 2014 / THE PUBLIC 5

NEWS COMMENTARY

PUBLIC SECRETS The disappearance of history: Attica & Guantanamo BY BRUCE JACKSON

The title of this is an oxymoron, I know, but I don’t know how else to describe what I’m writing about here. “Oxymoron” is not an eight-sided-idiot, as the roots of the word would suggest; it is rather a phrase the parts of which contradict one another, as in “make haste slowly” or “act naturally” or “open secret” or “living dead.”

In this case I’m thinking about the 6,000-page report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence having to do with the CIA’s program of rendition, secret detention, and torture of people it suspected of—well, that’s secret too. The Senate Committee doesn’t tell us what tortures they looked at (though if you’ve seen the Abu Ghraib photos you have an idea). And I’m thinking also about the second and third volumes of the Meyer Commission Report, which has to do with the slaughter in New York’s Attica Correctional Facility on September 13, 1971. Both are documents created at great expense by public agencies—one a committee of the US Senate over three years, appointed to examine how and why the CIA violated all sorts of US laws over a seven-year period; the other a committee appointed by then-Governor of New York Hugh Carey to find out why 29 prisoners and 10 guards were shot to death by state police, corrections officials, and miscellaneous bystanders with guns, in Attica prison on September 13, 1971, and why hundreds of inmates were tortured in Attica subsequently. Both of those reports are about illicit violence by government agencies against individuals. As of this moment, we cannot see either of them.

THE SENATE REPORT The CIA renditions, detentions, and tortures happened during the George W. Bush Administration. At least one government attorney came up with elaborate rationales having to do with why it was okay for the US government to scoop people off the street in another country, sometimes send them to a different 6

THE PUBLIC / NOVEMBER 12, 2014 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

country to be tortured (that’s what the euphemism “rendition” means) and to keep them under lockup indefinitely (Guantanamo is still a prison operated on foreign soil by the US military where people are detained under conditions that are wholly illegal in the United States). The Senate Select Committee crippled itself from the beginning. It chose not to look at the behavior or choices of officials like President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, or Justice Department attorney John Yoo (who wrote the memos saying why it was okay to detain and torture foreigners). The report considered only the CIA’s behavior. So there was major self-censorship before the three-year study began: The Senate decided to look at things a government agency did and to ignore the directives from and rationales of higher government officials that set those behaviors in motion. It’s not as if Congress considers the White House sacred ground. Congress spent almost five years and $80 million (not counting its own salaries) investigating the Clintons for illegal involvement in the Whitewater real estate venture a decade before Clinton took office (no evidence of any illegal behavior by either of them was ever found) and Bill Clinton’s having had a blowjob in the Oval Office. What’s worse: getting your joint copped during working hours or starting a war under false pretenses and authorizing methods of arrest, detention, and torture that all were all explicitly illegal under US law? And the beat goes on: House Speaker John Boehner has spent millions of public dollars on a lawsuit against President Obama because he doesn’t like the way Obama legally uses his

NEWS COMMENTARY Inmate James Robinson photographed without a weapon, then with a scimitar under his right hand.

executive authority. Thus far, two prestigious law firms have taken on the case, carefully examined Boehner’s “evidence,” then bailed out because they couldn’t find a case there. So it’s not that Congress couldn’t look at what set the CIA misbehaviors in motion; Congress chose not to look. It’s like investigating the hit man but not the person or organization that hired him and told him who the target was and where he would be found. We have laws against kidnapping, torture, and detention without charge. They are all grounded in the Constitution; the US government engaged in all three, perhaps the worst of it in Iraq, a country we invaded because of “weapons of mass destruction” it didn’t have and because of its involvement in 9/11, which it didn’t have either. Which is to say, we engaged in a bogus war (that destabilized the region), then engaged in activities—at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and who knows how many secret prisons in how many countries—in activities that were and continue to be illegal in the US. The Senate Committee not only limited the scope of its inquiry, but allowed the CIA to vet what parts of its report would be made public. Apparently the CIA made so many cuts that the brief document that remains is gibberish, which no doubt was the CIA’s intent. As of today, the White House, the Senate, and the CIA are still squabbling over how many of those emendations will be allowed to stand and how much of the report, if any of it, will ever be released to the public. There are 6,000 pages in that blind-eyed Senate report. We will eventually get to see only a fraction of them. Like footprints in the sand after the next wave comes in, we will have no idea of what is no longer there. Why? To protect whom or what? Who is served by that protection? Not the public, surely.

ATTICA The Attica deceptions started immediately: Prison officials told members of the press that the dead hostages all were victims of convicts who had slit their throats and who had, in some instances, castrated them and put their sliced-away genitals in their mouths. They were lying. A few days later, the Monroe County Coroner reported they all had been shot to death; nobody had been castrated. He was subsequently ticketed so often on the New York Thruway that he left the state. The Meyer Commission report on Attica is more parochial than the Senate Select Committee report on the CIA—it involves only behavior by New York State officials on a single day 43 years ago—but the issue is the same. A group of individ-

uals was appointed by the governor of New York to find out and tell us the truth of what happened in one of the most violent encounters between agents of government and American citizens since the Civil War. It was headed by New York judge Bernard S. Meyer. When the report was completed, only a third of it was released. Recently New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman tried to get the other two volumes released. Erie County Supreme Court Judge Patrick H. NeMoyer ruled on April 24 of this year that the two suppressed reports of the Meyer report could be released—but only after all names and all evidence presented at the grand jury hearings were redacted. That is, only after the report was fully gutted. After it was rendered meaningless. Why? Who opposed Attorney General Schneiderman’s attempt to let the sunshine in one of New York State’s great atrocities? The New York State police and police union. Whose interests are being served? Not the public’s, surely.

DARKNESS Just as the CIA is getting to block the key parts of the Senate Select Committee’s report on CIA misbehavior during the Bush Administration, the New York State Police are blocking Schneiderman’s attempt to let the public know the facts of New York State Police behavior in Attica prison 43 years ago. I sat through nearly every day of the Attica convicts’ civil rights trial in Federal Court in Buffalo. The case took 20 years to get into court and then took four months to run its course. It began in mid-October 1991 and ended February 4, 1992. The trial was before Judge John T. Elfvin. You would think that a trial in federal court is one place the truth about an event in a state prison could come out. There are unambiguous rules about evidence in federal court, and federal court trumps state preferences every time. The state wanting to protect itself (five or six governors back) couldn’t cripple a case in federal court. Hah. All sorts of things were hidden from the jury. I’ll give you one example. There were many photographs of the slaughter, one group of which interested me in particular. They depict a dead convict, James Robinson. One shows him in a football helmet with the kind of high chair line judges at athletic events sit in across his body; another shows him in the same position but the chair is gone; another shows him in the same position, without the chair, but with what looks like a crude scimitar under his right hand. Some of the prints are black

IN A TRIAL ABOUT INDISCRIMINATE SHOOTING AND DELIBERATE TORTURE, THE JURY WAS NOT ALLOWED TO SEE PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE EFFECTS OF THAT SHOOTING AND TORTURE. and white; some are in color. I don’t know if they were taken with different cameras or if there are multiple versions of the same image. That was long before digital photography, so the images aren’t time-stamped. The original negatives or slides are long gone. But common sense suggests the image with the chair came before the image with no chair and the image with no scimitar came before the image with the scimitar. And that suggests that someone placed the scimitar by the body. Why would anyone do that? To make the dead man look villainous. Who was in a position to have planted that scimitar? You can figure that out as well as I. But no one on the Attica civil rights trial got to see those photographs or hear the lawyers argue their significance. Judge Elfvin ruled that none of the photographs of the retaking could be shown to the jury during the trial (they might be inflammatory, he said), but the jury could see them when they retired for their deliberations. When the arguments ended and the jury retired he said the photographs couldn’t go in to the jury room because they hadn’t been introduced into evidence and they might confuse the jury. So the jury never saw them. In a trial about indiscriminate shooting and deliberate torture, the jury was not allowed to see photographs of the effects of that shooting and torture. The lawyers saw them. The judge saw them. The Meyer Commission saw them. I saw them. But you didn’t see them. You weren’t allowed to see them. I don’t know how this factored in the case, or if it did at all: Judge Elfvin was campaign manager in upper New York State for Nelson Rockefeller during one of his gubernatorial campaigns; Rockefeller appointed him to the State Supreme Court; he became a Federal District Court judge very soon after Rockefeller became vice president in the Gerald Ford Administration. And the jury never saw those photographs.

WATCHING THINGS There is a famous phrase attributed to the Roman poet Juvenal: Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? Who shall watch the watchmen?

In the case of Attica slaughter, it was a special commission, headed by a highly respected judge. In the case of the CIA abuses, it was a Senate Select Committee, headed by Diane Feinstein. They both produced detailed reports. Both limited themselves in what they would look at. We have been allowed to see neither report and the chances are very good that we will never see either report in full. Why have the Senate and the White House permitted the CIA to be the editor of a key report on CIA behavior? Why are the New York State Police still fighting (successfully) to keep secret the truth about a morning of unspeakable violence 43 years ago? Government agencies protect themselves, even if all the villains are long gone. The institution takes priority. The guys here now didn’t do whatever it is we’re looking at, but there are people here now who sit in the chairs those people sat in. Protect the chairs, protect the institution. So the question isn’t just Quis custodiet ipsos custodies. What does it matter who watches if only darkness and silence ensue? We know that successors protect predecessors, because they inherit things the processors set in motion, as Obama inherited two George W. Bush wars we’re still not out of. As he inherited Guantanamo, which he has still not been able to get us out of. But what about people we ask, after the violence is over or has settled down, to look at it, to tell us what really happened? It turns out they, however much work they do, however seriously seek the truth or pretend they are seeking the truth, are often crippled too. Those vile events happened. But those government agencies are not going to tell us why, how, and why they won’t happen again. Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture at UB; he is also an associate member of the UB Law School faculty. In spring 2015, he’s giving a graduate seminar in the UB Law School and UB English Department on the Attica uprising and P its aftermath.

DAILYPUBLIC.COM / NOVEMBER 12, 2014 / THE PUBLIC 7

NEWS COMMENTARY / NATIONAL

A “REPUBLICAN TSUNAMI”? Welcome to Year Three of the Citizens United era BY MICHAEL I. NIMAN

Pundits have been calling this year’s election a “Republican tsunami,” terming the GOP victories in the Senate, House and state legislatures “historic.” I suppose “tsunami” is rather accurate, being a big wave that destroys vulnerable communities in its path. And “historic” works as well, as history certainly predicted this year’s electoral outcome, seeing how every second-term president’s party lost Senate seats in their final mid-term election for the past eight decades. History was deadon for Obama, with the president’s party losing eight Senate seats so far (with a ninth still in play in Louisiana), just like Ronald Reagan did in 1986. In the House, Obama’s party lost 10 seats, compared with the previous president’s party’s 30-seat second-term loss.

INCOHERENT RESULTS If you’re searching for some sort of coherent message in this year’s vote totals, don’t hold your breath. It was a good year for right-wing Republicans, but it was also a good year for left-wing progressive ballot initiatives, such as voter-initiated minimum wage hikes. The odd thing is that these initiatives won by huge margins in the same states where voters elected right-of-crazy Republican senators, empowering the party that used filibusters to scuttle such wage hikes on the federal level for the past six years. Voters in Arkansas voted to raise their minimum wage by a bona fide landslide, 66 percent to 34 percent, while at the same time voting Republican member of Congress Tom Cotton into the Senate by a 17-percent margin. He’s the same Tom Cotton who described food stamp recipients as “addicts” (perhaps addicted to eating?) and voted to cut Medicare and Social Security. Voters in Nebraska supported a minimum wage hike by an 18-percent margin while voting in Tea Party backed Republican, Ben Sasse, a former venture capital adviser and protégé of societal devolutionist Paul Ryan. In South Dakota, voters also raised the minimum wage, by a 10—point margin, while electing former Republican governor Mike Rounds, an outspoken opponent of the increase, to the Senate. The same voters defeated an anti-abortion fetal “personhood” measure by 28 percent. Rounds, however, is a radical anti-abortion wacko who, as governor, signed a rabid anti-abortion law onto the books. It proved so repugnant to South Dakota voters that they went on to overturn it with a ballot initiative. Voters in Alaska won a minimum wage increase by a whopping margin of 38 percent, while also electing a new Republican senator and legalizing pot. Try to extract a coherent conclusion from these tallies. Reince Priebus, chair of the Republican National Committee, thinks he found one, explaining that these results evidence an “embrace of the values of conservative governing.” Janet Hook of Fox News’s corporate partner, The Wall Street Journal, argues that “the election results reinforced the party’s basic conservative identity.” It gets more confusing. Responding to a national exit poll commissioned by ABC News, 34 percent of voters claimed that, presumably by electing Republicans, they were voting in opposition to President Obama. Sixty-one percent, however, said they were also either dissatisfied or angry at Republicans in Congress. By a margin of 53 to 44 percent, voters claimed to hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party (what Republican-fed pundits refer to awkwardly as the “Democrat Party”). As bad as these numbers are for Democrats, the Republicans (the Republic Party?) fares worse, with voters dissing them by a margin of 56 to 40 percent. Go figure. None of this data seems to make any clear sense. Yet, the news spinners in the corporate media and NPR ran with a partial data set, contextualizing the dissonance and chaos in these numbers as a clear mandate for a corporatist agenda that they fraudulently term “conservative.”

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OUR SHORT EXPERIMENT WITH DEMOCRACY There’s a much bigger, and certainly much more historic and ominous, story here. And it’s not getting any major press. The United States engaged in a short experiment with democracy, commencing in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act and ending in 2011 with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, allowing political action committees, oligarchs, and corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money, including untraceable anonymous “dark” money, on swaying the electorate through persuasive and often propagandistic ads, mailings, calls, and the infrastructure to propagate them. This election marks Year Three of our post-democratic electoral dystopia. With approximately four billion dollars spent on this year’s election, it is also the most expensive mid-term election in US history. What does this mean? The independent research group, The Center for Responsive Politics, crunched the numbers from 2000 to 2010, documenting how money “almost always” wins elections. In the House, the high-rollers won 93 percent of the elections. In the Senate, money ruled 83 percent of the time. And this was all before the 2011 Supreme Court negation of campaign finance laws opened the door for unlimited amounts of money while hiding the identities of the entities buying our politicians. It’s not likely you’re going to win an election without a rich sponsor to bankroll your campaign. And rich sponsors are unlikely to bankroll your campaign unless you promise to make them richer or otherwise carry their water by supporting their pet political depravities. We call this form of government a “plutocracy.” Plutocrats usually win at the end of the day. Why isn’t the main news meme about Year Three and the triumph of plutocracy? Follow the money and you’ll find the answer. The vast majority of this year’s record-breaking campaign expenditures went to ad buys, primarily in television, but also across all other media platforms. For the bean-counters in the corporate media, election ads represent a windfall that, along with Christmas ad spending, powers them through the year. The ads are well crafted and focus-group-tested, sometimes measuring viewers’ brain activity as they watch. And the ads work, even for candidates whose views are diametrically opposed to the electorate, as evidenced in this year’s incoherent voting patterns. Public radio and television offers no real alternative to corporate media, choosing mostly to emulate the corporate media’s bias, chasing many of the same corporate dollars in the form of underwriting rather than advertising. Among the top campaign contributors are the oil, gas, coal, pharmaceutical, and “defense” industries. So it doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict what hoops the new Congress will jump through to please their masters. Expect quick action on bills to pressure the Obama Administration to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, roll back power plant emissions standards, lift export restrictions on gas, build expensive new tactically obsolete weapons systems, green-light global trade deals giving away the house to corporations, extend patent monopolies for pharmaceutical companies, and continue subsidies to the carbon energy industries while defunding scientific research and anything having to do with reality-based environmental policies that stand in the way of short-term environmental plunder. Welcome to dystopia.

THE ALPHA HOG

Mitch McConnell, the presumed new Senate majority leader, has already stated that approving the Keystone XL pipeline and lowering corporate tax rates will be his top legislative priorities. Environmentalists have termed the Keystone XL pipeline, which will bring a particularly toxic and environmentally destructive oil to the global market, an “end game” for the climate.

McConnell isn’t the typical hog in the plutocracy’s pen. He’s more of an alpha pig, having served his masters as one of the most outspoken activist politicians fighting to nullify bipartisan campaign finance laws, filing amicus briefs toward that end in the Supreme Court. In reward for his service, the Center for Responsive Politics reports that McConnell received over $31 million in contributions over the past five years, with only four percent of that total coming from “small” donors. The plutocrats’ win is a bit more complicated, however. Even with all of these well-crafted ads airing ad nauseum, the election results show that few eligible voters actually voted for the winning candidates. This year, almost two thirds of eligible voters chose not to vote. These are the highest voting abstinence numbers since the middle of World War Two. Technically, the majority of the electorate voted for nobody. None of the above. Nada.

WHATEVER Among those who did vote, the number of white voters, a group that leans Republican, increased by four percent since the 2012 election, while the number of nonwhite voters decreased by almost 11 percent, in part due to newly crafted voter restrictions. The number of elderly voters, those over 65 years-old, increased by a whopping 53 percent during the same time period, while the number of voters aged 18-29 decreased by 37 percent. The result is a demographically skewed electorate that does not represent the American people. Jezebel columnist Erin Ryan expressed her frustration to her youthful audience, writing, “We don’t have to let the out-of-touch paranoia of the elderly dictate the direction of the country.” Whatever. An Al Jazeera poll of non-voters—the two thirds majority that stayed away from the polls—showed that 52 percent leaned Democratic, while only 27 percent leaned Republican. It’s well known that low turnout in American elections favors Republicans, hence Republican-run state governments have been instituting voter suppression laws mostly targeting minorities and youthful voters—the Democratic base. Still, while Republican voter suppression efforts can affect a close election, I think this year’s election results fall at the feet of voters who could have voted but opted out of the whole democracy thing. By doing so, they, in effect, cast the winning votes for our newly elected and guaranteed-to-be-unpopular Senate.

KILLING HOPE The responsibility for their absence at the polls belongs to this year’s crop of mostly uninspiring and sometime downright repugnant Democratic candidates, as well as with President Obama. In many cases, the Democrats, afraid to upset their own corporate sponsors, ran as Republican-lite candidates. Republican voters, however, will vote for the real thing, while Democrats and progressives, left without a choice, will stay away from the polls. The Democrats are also paying the price for the Obama hope thing. The fact that President Obama incited hope and promised progressive change, only to extinguish hope and betray the trust of a generation, has condemned us to suffer the new political reality in Washington. Winning back that trust, which is essential to beating the odds and reestablishing a democracy, will take a lot more from the Democrats than a Hillary Clinton. Mike Niman is a professor of journalism and critical media studies at SUNY Buffalo State. His columns are archived at mediastudy. P com and available globally through syndication.

NEWS LOCAL

ROLLING DOWNHILL IN ERIE COUNTY SOCIAL SERVICES BY AARON LOWINGER State Senator Timothy Kennedy’s easy victory last week over the GOP candidate, Ricky Donovan Sr., was all but assured after he walloped Betty Jean Grant in September’s Democratic primary. In that prior, more meaningful campaign, Kennedy based a sizable portion of his strategy on positioning himself as an advocate for tough child protection laws, and an even larger portion on constantly hustling funds to outspend Grant. The thorny issue of the state-mandated child welfare system fell onto Kennedy’s lap at a tragically opportune time last September after the brutal murder of five-year-old Eain Clayton Brooks, a child whose family had been the subject of multiple CPS investigations. Kennedy courted the youth’s family in front of the local media and announced he would be researching the incident and eventually proposed and passed a series of relatively perfunctory tweaks to CPS case practice and law as governed by the state Office for Children and Family Services, or OCFS. The piece of the proposed legislation with the largest possible import is one that has stalled on Governor Andrew Cuomo’s desk and awaits expiration: a mandate that counties are required to report their ratio of cases to caseworkers and report the number of caseworkers carrying more than 15 cases. When reached by phone, Kennedy’s office told us they couldn’t figure out why the governor has left the bill out to dry.

Recent years have been unkind to the county’s CPS staff: The number of annual reports made to the State Central Register—which in turn assigns investigations into maltreatment to the counties—has risen into the neighborhood of 12,000 per year. In the past year, workers with more than 80 active cases have been commonplace due to the logjam created when Kennedy aimed a painstaking OCFS audit at an already overwhelmed staff and administration. County Executive Mark Poloncarz has moved the legislature twice in the past 12 months to increase staffing in Child Protective Services by close to 40 percent. That enables CPS to identify more cases. The county’s Children’s Services division is the landing pad for these cases; the more reports that CPS investigates, the more children are placed out of their parents’ custody, resulting in more cases opened for Children’s Services, where 30+ cases per worker are de rigueur. For purposes of disclosure and otherwise, I resigned such a position last week. I was responsible for 30 cases (a mix of foster care, kinship care and preventive services) with a combined 60-some children. A 2006 study commissioned by OCFS recommended 12-16 cases.

last June thanks to the testimony of outgoing Children’s Services caseworker Pam Scotch. In an effort to persuade the legislature to hire more CPS staff, Scotch testified that workers were carrying caseloads over the precarious three digit overflow mark. As CPS responds to the avalanche, Children’s Services has been left to pick the survivors from the ice equipped with only ballpoint pens. Poloncarz’s office has not responded to our inquiry as to whether there is any plan in place to alleviate the high caseloads for Children’s Services.

Poloncarz, Kennedy, and the legislature have shown a lot of love to CPS. But what about the things that roll down the hill? We should by know now, there are always things rolling down the hill. The legislature was made aware of the situation

Meanwhile, the cases for the two workers who were terminated for having the dumb luck of drawing the Brooks case in the past, as well as the cases of their two supervisors who were suspended for good measure, are all headed to labor arbitra-

tion. The disciplinary actions were grieved immediately by CSEA, their union. Multiple sources with CSEA maintain that all four followed the established policy and procedure correctly. Poloncarz won a spirited campaign against a man who was just re-elected to Congress in a landslide by courting the county’s unions as foot soldiers. He touted his father’s union pride. Even though his office didn’t respond directly to the question, you’d think he’d have to respect the decision of an independent arbitrator should those workers be exonerated. It might be a good time to remember that Poloncarz bucked the avalanche of money and support for Tim Kennedy to endorse Grant. Things are rolling down the hill everywhere. P

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NEWS EDUCATION

BUFFALO ADJUNCT MOVEMENT BY SHANE MEYER

n a recent Friday afternoon in Lafayette Square, 60-some O activists representing the Buffalo Adjunct Movement!, or BAM!, gathered to raise the rallying cry for their kind locally and nationally. BAM! is a collection of college instructors with no permanent link to their respective institutions, which, on that day, included Daemen, Canisius, D’Youville, UB, ECC, and Villa Maria. (Those who may have liked to represent Medaille, pointed out one participant who wished to remain anonymous, were conspicuously absent: The school forbids its pool of temporary teachers from organizing. Medaille declined to comment on the story. Calls to the other colleges whose adjuncts were represented at the rally were not returned.) Each of these local schools employs, as a supplement to its securely employed staff, a bevy of disposable professors, who, despite having accreditation and years of experience, are hired on the cheap. They teach the same students as tenured and tenure-track profs and bear the same responsibilities, but are compensated at a rate that keeps even the most industrious living below the poverty line. The list of grievances outlined by the assembled was succinct: unfair pay, no offices, no benefits, no voice on campus, and no access to institutional resources.

In the words of one of the day’s chants, BAM! demands “education not exploitation.” They also hope that their message is heard by other adjuncts in the area. The American Association of University Professors reports that, as of 2011, “contingent positions”—i.e. part-time and full-time nontenure-track—make up 70 percent of the faculty at the nation’s schools. That number is up 13 percentage points from 1993, and 27 percentage points from 1975. The AAUP estimates that the average adjunct earns about $2,700 per course. For some the number is much lower. One BAM! member, Brian Eager, said that he applied for a position at Bryant & Stratton College that paid $1,350 per class. Do the math: An adjunct taking on a three courses per semester earns, before taxes, $16,200 per year. It’s a fate in which some might find cold comfort; yet, schools are under no pressure to guarantee classes, meaning that many adjuncts have the additional anxiety of not knowing—sometimes even one week before classes start— whether they’ll be teaching three classes or none. Kate Caccavaio, PhD, told me that she works in retail to support her habit of educating the nation’s youth.

She’s not alone. Struggling Americans with advanced degrees are a growing segment of the populace. A report from Austin Nichols, a senior researcher with the Urban Institute, showed that, from 2007 to 2010, the number of people with master’s degrees receiving food stamps jumped from 101,682 to 293,029. In the same time span, PhD holders on food stamps increased from 9,776 to 33,655. “What’s outrageous,” asks another of BAM!’s jingles? “Adjunct wages!” It’s not as though degree-granting institutions are hurting for students. The National Center for Education Statistics found that between 2001 and 2011 enrollment increased 32 percemt, from 15.9 million to 21 million Nonetheless, from 2008 to 2013, spending is down 28 percent nationwide, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities [CBPP]. New York State’s cuts have been less severe (14.7 percent) than the national average (28 percent) but significant: In 2013, NYS spent $1,482 less per student than it did five years earlier. However, the CBPP adds that, at the same time, the average annual published tuition at four-year public colleges has grown by $1,850 or 27 percent. Derek Curry, who temps at UB, suggested that the reason for the current situation is not only funding shortfalls but institutional priorities. Universities have moved toward the temp solution, in part, to account for bloating elsewhere-among in administration. The point is made in the 2011 book, The Fall of the Faculty, by Benjamin Ginsberg, who opines that the university is swollen with administrative functionaries. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that many of these same functionaries have little to no experience in the classroom. 40 years ago, he writes, the same duties were handled by faculty. That role of the faculty has disappeared, leaving career admins in their place to steer the ship of the university. Marc Bousquet writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that fitting out the staff with adjuncts gives a way for administration to cry “budget crisis” while redirecting institutional funds for self-serving purposes: “[M]ost critical observers note that ‘saving’ on $70,000 faculty salaries generates a vast, expensive need for $80,000- to $120,000-peryear accountants, IT staff members, and HR specialists, plus a few $270,000 associate provosts. Not to mention the $500,000 bonus awarded to the president for meeting the board’s permatemping target and successfully hiding the consequences from students, parents, and the public.” The BAM! rally was intent on making the labor of its constituents visible–to students, to parents and to the very administrators who’d prefer to have them toil in silence. Melissa Mosko, a full-time professor at Canisius, and self-described ally of BAM!, argued that the market-based approach of admins to education poses the greatest threat to students. How can overworked and underappreciated educators be expected to deliver quality instruction at a consistently high level? Another adjunct, Sigrid Fertig, who said she’s been at it for 25 years, points out that “some college football coaches make over a million a year. Since 1970, the salary of college presidents has gone up 35 percent. By contrast, adjunct pay has gone down 49 percent. Adjuncts make less than federal minimum wage.” Indeed, another participant at BAM!’s rally estimated that she made $4.87 per hour. After hearing from several speakers, the group took a lap around Lafayette Square before marching to Central Library. I followed them into the marble foyer, and past the reference desk, where they took their seats, produced stacks of binders and notebooks and quietly began to grade student tests and papers. It was the first grade-in I’d ever seen. I think it was a first for the library’s staff also. The process of making one’s labor visible in this case was silent but disruptive. BAM! held its first event in April and looks to be building a head of steam. It holds its next meeting in the back room at Casa di Pizza P (447 Elmwood Avenue) on November 15 at 4pm.

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MUSIC SPOTLIGHT

Jax Deluca and Kyle Marler

FLATSITTER BY CORY PERLA “The basis of Flatsitter is to merge new technologies,” says Jax Deluca, who, with her partner Kyle Marler, have formed the interdisciplinary video, programming, and music collaborative known as Flatsitter. The duo have taken to creating immersive sound and video installations, which they have presented live several times over the last year. Their next performance is at 8pm this Sunday, November 16 at The Wash Project—a laundromat turned electronic noise-music boutique on the West Side of Buffalo—along side San Francisco noise manipulators Sult, and Binghamton-based video and sound artist, Brian Murphy—for only $5. Their performance is a true multimedia experience. The duo employs the use of as much new and emerging technology as they can get their hands on to create vivid sound textures and immersive video images. On stage, Flatsitter runs originally produced video images through a custom built javascript browser, which randomly chooses from the selection of videos and layers them on top of one another. The human mind has a way of syncing up sound and video automatically, even if both are random, and Flatsitter exploits this idea. As the performance progresses, the duo cues up specific video installations that they’ve built to accompany their music. The music itself is created by mixing guitars, effects pedals, sound samples, and even iPhone apps. The result is a pulsating organ of sound and video that feels like a living entity. Deluca, who is Executive Director of the media resource center, Squeaky Wheel, met Marler—an attorney by day—on an Amtrak train heading from Buffalo to New York City. The two discovered their common interest pretty quickly, and Marler soon moved to Buffalo to work on video projects with Deluca. They began residencies at Signal Culture—an experimental media art-space in Owego—and the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred Uni-

versity, where they had access to some interesting tools. “[The Institute for Electronic Arts] had all of these really unique analog processing tools for video that you can’t really get anywhere else, so as a result, our video images have all of these highly saturated colors, which kind of create a signature look,” says Deluca. The pair have also been doing some virtual reality programing; working with the Oculus Rift, an all immersive 3D headset. Think Lawnmower Man, but without the “aggressive factors” or Virtuosity, but better. The device is still in a pre-consumer phase right now, but people who donated to the Oculus Rift KickStarter, like Deluca and Marler, had the opportunity to purchase one ahead of everyone else. Only a few other people in Buffalo have had access to the device, which is intended for gaming, but which Deluca and Marler are also using as a platform to produce virtual reality art installations. They debuted their Oculus Rift instillation at Artists & Models earlier this year, where guests took turns immersing themselves in the virtual reality environments that Deluca and Marler have created using developer software. “People were blown away, it was a lot of fun,” says Marler. In order to develop the experiences, the duo has been working with a couple of different gaming engines; Unreal Engine and Unity, which they use to create landscapes and place objects within them. The objects can even emanate sounds as the user passes by or interacts with them. “We just got a new developer kit, so we’re kind of opening up our house and testing it out on friends,” says Marler. “It’s about taking our artwork and P bringing it to a virtual landscape.”

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IN PRINT

BRYAN JOHNSON & FAMILY Cool Your Jets (EP) Recommended if you like: Vampire Weekend, Beach Boys, Ra Ra Riot

Released on Tuesday, Nov 11 via locally rooted label, Admirable Traits, the lake-pop foursome’s debut EP, Cool Your Jets, is five tracks of carefree melodies, bursting vocals, and instrumentals that could fit in at your dad’s annual Labor Day party or on a playlist for a cool friend’s birthday.

NEVERGREEENS It’s Already Paradise (EP) RIYL: M83, Album Leaf, Eluvium

Local chillwave producer continues to drop cinematic, instrumental scores just begging to soundtrack a minimal, contemplative indie flick. The latest release finds Nevergreens, aka Matthew Reilly, delivering a short collection of dreamy melodies washed in warm synths and varied percussion and beats.

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TERROR PIGEON WEDNESDAY NOV 12 8PM / DREAMLAND, 387 FRANKLIN ST / $5 [ELECTRONIC/DANCE] A bunch of dudes and chicks living that YOLO life, Terror Pigeon is an instant party. Emojis dance across their website and phrases like “rock n roll and butt control” can be found on their Bandcamp page, but despite their not-so-serious approach, the synth pop team from Tennessee actually delivers some solid and fun party-dance tunes. On their 2014 full length record, Live It Up Before You Die It Up, even mixes some saxophones and wind instruments into the party on tracks like “Forget Everything That Makes You Not Want To Be In This Band.” Do yourself a favor and check out their bouncy, synthwave track “Girl!” to get you in the mood. Local robot party-boy Lesionread will join in on the fun, too, along with Halifax’s Rich Aucoin, and Buffalo’s Humblebraggers on Wednesday, November 12 at Dreamland -CORY PERLA

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101010 We Are The Movie (LP) RIYL: Hum, Besnard Lakes, Interpol

Farewell album from former Vox Humana members, the spacey post-rock outfit closes up shop with eight tracks of booming shoegaze riffs and soaring vocals.

FALCONT CAT Year of The Wooden Horse (LP) RIYL: Front Bottoms, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Decemberists

Former front man to high school band, Victory For Poland, Tylor Colby released his first full-length post-graduation via LIPS Records. The incredibly earnest and spanning project is 11 tracks of ambitious, bright, poignant, and weary ballads with unpredictable change-ups, perfectly narrating the life of a young adult.

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[PUNK] “Regardless of whether we were a small, mid-level, or big band, we did things our way and I’ll always be proud of that,” writes the Swellers’ drummer, Jonathan Diener, on the band’s tumblr blog, bidding the music scene adieu. Although it’s accompanied by a photo of the Michigan-quintet—middle fingers extended—in front of London’s Big Ben, it reads like a compelling fiction narrative, voiced by a humble, levelheaded musician. Over the Swellers’ 13-year career, they’ve produced five full-length albums; toured tirelessly; signed with multiple record labels; and delivered straight up punk rock full of infectious rock riffs and catchy (never trite) choruses, without succumbing to industry standards. Their music lives in the golden age of punk rock—it’s raw, honest, and full of angst. Their final album, The Light Under Closed Doors, is bittersweet. Badass riffs and infectious vocal refrains polish the collection, but sadly these songs (along with classic staples) will be played in Buffalo for the last time on Thursday, November 13 at the Studio at the Waiting Room. —KELLIE POWELL

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INFECTED MUSHROOM FRIDAY NOV 14 8PM / TOWN BALLROOM, 681 MAIN ST. / $25-$29 [ELECTRONIC/DANCE] On Friday, November 14, the legendary duo known as Infected Mushroom will take over the Town Ballroom. The Israeli electronic producers are pioneers of psy-trance, and the two continue to innovate and push forward. While their last album Army of Mushrooms was released back in 2012, they have released singles since, and have hinted at a new album coming soon. The group is made up of Amit Duvdevani and Erez Eisen, both of whom have side projects of their own, but provide a deeper dynamic when together—pulling in a variety of sounds and textures that they layer in real time. The night is sure to be solid from start to finish with Armageddon Party and Short Circuit performing in support. Given the history of Infected Mushroom and their influence over the entire scene, this is a show that’s not to be missed. —JEREMIAH SHEA

WEDNESDAY NOV 12 Pigeons Playing Ping Pong 8pm Buffalo Iron Works, 49 Illinois St. Free [FUNK] Buffalo may be used to it during the summer, but a free concert this time of year is surely a treat. Wednesday, November 12, Baltimore-based Pigeons Playing Ping Pong will be playing a free show at Buffalo Iron Works. The band is one of the funkiest up-and-comers and has been consistently adding to “The Flock” through incessant touring. Local jammers AjamajA open. —JS

George Winston 7pm Asbury Hall, 341 Delaware Ave. $30-$35 [FOLK] Grammy-Award winning concert pianist, George Winston, will be performing an intimate solo concert at Babeville at 7pm on Wednesday, November 12. A pioneer of New Age, Winston’s impressionistic music draws on the sensibilities of the seasons and topographies of Mother Earth. His nature-inspired compositions convey a sense of life and reality, triggering memories of an ambient snowfall, or a crisp autumn day. You can practically smell the dried leaves that pervade the air. -KP

Modern Baseball 5:30pm The Waiting Room, 334 Delaware Ave. $13-$15 [ROCK] “I hate worrying about the future, cause all my problems are based around the past.” This first line of Modern Baseball’s sophomore album, You’re Gonna Miss It All, is a call to all college students (maybe even some alumni). The Philadelphia-bred, punkpop outfit is becoming a staple of the genre

through their infectiously catchy sound, and intelligent and introspective lyrics, and their bouncy, unique instrumentation. Get lost in the poppy, jaded narrative of Modern Baseball’s frontman, Brendan Lukens, at The Waiting Room on Wednesday, November 12. -KP

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THURSDAY NOV 13 Head North 8pm Starfields Productions, 463 Amherst St. $10 [ROCK] Snarty is a new promotions company out of Buffalo, and they’re hosting their first show this Thursday, November 13 at Starfield Productions, an event hall and recording studio in Amherst. They’re kicking it off with Buffalo pop-punk band, Head North. This will be Head North’s first headlining show in Buffalo following a three month tour that took them from Ohio to Arizona and back home again. Joey Calamita opens the show. -CP

He Is Legend 6pm The Waiting Room, 334 Delaware Ave. $15-$17 [ROCK] After a five-year hiatus, North Carolina, sludge-rock quintet, He Is Legend, returns to the post-hardcore scene with Heavy Fruit—perhaps their catchiest, most mature album to date that doesn’t sacrifice their ostensible macabre motif. It’s an evolved HIL; an unrestrained, cold-blooded, riff heavy rock and roll band. Each track is upheld by passionate, sincere vocals and layered with crushing instrumentation. He Is Legend will perform at the Waiting Room on Thursday, November 13, presented by Afterdark and Creative Concerts. -KP

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EVENTS CALENDAR

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ALEXANDER O. LEVY FRIDAY NOV 14 5:30PM-7:30PM / BURCHFIELD PENNEY ARTS CENTER, 1300 ELMWOOD AVE. / FREE Considered a child prodigy, artist Alexander O. Levy won his first art prize at the age of 12, awarded by a local newspaper in Cincinnati. The eclectic illustrator, who was born in Germany in 1881—before moving to Cincinnati, and then Buffalo in 1909—was known for his trichromatic work, in which he expertly blended colors to create accented textures. By the 1920s, he was arguably Buffalo’s most well known artist—predating Charles Burchfield’s international fame by a few years. Now, 30 years after the last exhibition to focus on his work—a 1982 exhibit at Dana Tillou Fine Arts in Buffalo—the Buchfield Penney Art Center will open an exhibit on Friday, November 14 titled Alexander O. Levy: American Artist, Art Deco Painter, which will focus on Buffalo in the Art Deco Period through the lens of Levy’s quintessentially American work. -CP

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Kung Fu

80s Party for The Food Bank

10pm Studio at the Waiting Room, 334 Delaware Ave. $15-$18 [FUNK] Kung Fu is set to play Waiting Room on Thursday, November 13 with Buffalo’s Funktional Flow kicking off the night. The ninjas are coming back to town after a summer full of festival dates and the release of a new album. The five-piece released their latest album Tsar Bomba earlier this year and the offering continues to show their growth and evolution in highly technical funk shredding. -JS

8pm Handlebar, 149 Swan St. $2 or non-perishable food item [ELECTRONIC/DANCE] Cyclists, pedestrians, and vehicle owners alike are welcome to head over to Handlebar this Friday, November 14 for a dance party that will feature your favorite tunes from the 1980s—the decade of Queen, John Mellecamp, Pat Benatar, Cyndi Lauper Phil Colins, New Order, etc. In addition to serving you craft beers, cocktails, and gourmet appetizers, the new bicycle-themed cafe will be collecting non-perishable items for the Food Bank of Western New York. Get some, give some, and get your dance on. -JC

FRIDAY NOV 14 Undark

8pm Sugar City, 1239 Niagara St. $5 [THEATER] Showings of Undark, a locally produced, one-act play by Rachel Katz, will be held at Sugar City on Friday and Saturday at 8pm and, Sunday at 5pm. The production is a series of vignettes that, as the artist puts it, “explore the catastrophe looming behind every great act of affection and the scientific imagination.” Undark is an intriguing synthesis of performance and audio-visual components, which includes live musical accompaniment, an original score, video, and finally, makeup and costume from local talent spanning across an array of disciplines. -JC

Reggae Roots 8pm Buffalo Iron Works, 49 Illinois St. $7 [REGGAE] On Friday, November 14, Buffalo Iron Works will host an extensive night of reggae music featuring artists including Preach Freedom, Ladi Nafi, and Mosaic Foundation. Reagge fans might know Preach Freedom as a multi-instrumentalist who worked with bands like One World Tribe, and has shared the stage with the likes of the Goo Goo Dolls and the Roots. -CP

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Jordan Suckley 10pm Lift Nightclub, 257 Franklin St. $10 [ELECTRONIC/DANCE] British dance music producer Jordan Suckley is a new DJ we trust; at least according to BBC Radio 1. In 2012 he joined artists like Mosca and Julio Bashmore as a host of BBC Radio 1’s program In New DJs We Trust. On this program he delivered a mix of trance, house, and techno, but as a producer he focuses mostly on steaming trance tracks, like one of his latest, “Contaminated.” The DJ will come to Lift Nightclub, Buffalo’s newest Nightclub, on Friday, November 14. -CP

Carter Hulsey & Brett Newski 8pm Pierce-Arrow Film Arts Center, 1685 Elmwood Ave. $7-$10 [POP] Blending folk and pop, Carter Hulsey’s style is captured nicely on his latest single, “NPR.” Hulsey should match well with Brett Newski—an American singer/songwriter who found his sound while living in Vietnam—when they join together for this For The Music Productions event, which also features a handful of local bands including Thundercloud Kid, and Garrett Shea of Breckenwood. -CP

EVENTS CALENDAR BoBo 8 pm Mohawk Place, 47 E Mohawk St. $5 [ROCK] If they haven’t achieved it yet, Bobo are as close to legendary status as a Buffalo band can come. Formed in the 1990s, the band returned with their brand of garage rock n roll in 2009, lead by local rock star Jimmer Phillips. The band will return to their old haunt, Mohawk Place, on Friday with a few other well known Buffalo bands including future funk-punk band Cowboys of Scotland, rockers Johnny Revolting, and the Nasties, hailing from Toronto. -CP

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SATURDAY NOV 15 Jazz Vibes 8pm Pausa Art House, 19 Wadsworth St. $5-$7 [JAZZ] Buffalo jazz lovers probably know the name Joanne Lorenzo. The talented vibraphonist will lead a group of equally gifted musicians—including bassist Sabu Adeola, pianist Geroge Caldwell, drummer Abdul Qadir, and percussionist Tony Zambito—when the five-piece comes to Pausa Art House on Saturday, November 15. -CP

Donna The Buffalo 8pm Buffalo Iron Works, 49 Illinois St. $20-$24 [ROCK] This Saturday, November 15, an area favorite, Donna the Buffalo, is returning to play a show at Buffalo Iron Works. The band is best known for their long-time stint at The Great Blue Heron Music Festival in Sherman each year, and has a special following here. The group has a feel-good Americana vibe, which has kept them around for over 20 years now. The Falconer will open the show. -JS

Jubilee Riots 7pm The Waiting Room, 334 Delaware Ave. $15-$17 [ROCK] Formerly Enter The Haggis, Jubilee Riots has progressed the sounds of their former identity. In their newly released album, Black Penny, the Canadian folk-rock outfit conveys a melting pot of pop songs based on fan-submitted stories, thickened with Celtic and Scottish blood. Strewn with catchy lines, melodies, and rhythms, this music has a pulse and energy that demands an infectious dance party. Jubilee Riots will play at the Waiting Room on Saturday, November 15. -KP

JOYCUT FRIDAY NOV 14 8PM / BROADWAY JOE’S 3150 MAIN ST. Hailing from Italy, electronic duo JoyCut comfortably stand somewhere between the spectrum created by Ulrich Schnauss and Explosions in the Sky. The duo pair synthesizers with live drums to create ethereal instrumental soundscapes marked by compelling transitions between moments of suspense and rapture on albums like their latest, Pieces of Us Were Left on the Ground. Rife with cozy chords paired with spooky echoes and intricate rhythms, the Italian band’s music has a magnetic quality. In live performance, the band’s combination of live drums and a universe of electronics creates a dreamlike experience. They’re on a tour that has brought the from Budapest to Boston and now to Buffalo for the first time. Catch them this Friday, November 14 where they’ll be playing at Broadway Joe’s as part of their North American tour. -JC

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Blue Ribbon Bastards 10pm Gypsy Parlor, 376 Grant St. $3 [ROCK] Here is a list of the Blue Ribbon Bastards’ favorite drinks: cheap beer, and maybe a gin and tonic with a splash of grapefruit juice. It’s a short list, but these are also the drinks we suggest you indulge in when you check out this high-energy five-piece rockabilly band at the Gypsy Parlor on Saturday, November 15. -CP

WEDNESDAY NOV 19 Cover Up: The Iran Contra Affair 7pm Burning Books, 420 Connecticut St. [FILM SCREENING] Possibly the biggest scandal of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the Iran-Contra Affair, also known as Contragate or simply Iran-Contra, was a whirlwind of lies and coverups. The seceret operation to trade weapons for hostages was revealed to the public in 1986 after a Lebenese magazine reported leaked information. Burning Books will host a screening of the film Cover Up: The Iran Contra Affair and subsequent discussion this Wednesday, November 19 as part of their monthly Leonard Peltier Defense Offense series. -CP

JOHN OLIVER TUESDAY NOV 18 8PM / ALUMNI ARENA, 108 ALUMNI ARENA / $40-$55 [COMEDY] Former Daily Show correspondent and current host of hit HBO show, Last Week Tonight, John Oliver has won audiences over with a mix of clever media criticism and biting satirical wit. The English comedian joined The Daily Show in 2006 as “Senior British Corespondent” but truly broke out in 2013 when he guest-hosted the show for eight weeks while regular host, Jon Stewart, took a break to direct his first film, Rosewater (see our review in the Film section of this paper). By April of 2014, Last Week Tonight had launched on HBO and has since hosted guests like Stephen Hawking, Bill Nye, Jeff Goldblum, and Fareed Zakaria. By uploading each 12 to 15 minute main segment of Last Week Tonight to Youtube, Oliver has been able to reach a broader audience than just HBO subscribers. For many, Oliver is on the verge of dethroning Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as the new king of media satire. He’ll speak at University at Buffalo’s Alumni Arena on Tuesday, November 18 as part of UB’s Distinguished Speaker Series. -CP P

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THEATER REVIEW

THE MUSICALFARE PRODUCTION SERVES TO SHOWCASE SOME MARVELOUS YOUNG TALENT, AND IS SURE TO DELIGHT ITS AUDIENCE. the mold of Nell Carter and Armelia McQueen. (Woodard had actually taken the role over from similarly willowy singer—young Irene Cara—who originated the role in the pre-Broadway Manhattan Theater Club cabaret version). The original performers established their vivid personalities and the specific relationships that bonded the quintet together from the moment they sauntered onto the stage singing lines of the title tune. By turns, they were best friends or rivals. The deliberate imbalance of two men and three women provided for hilarious competitiveness. The presence of two buxom women and a skinny one allowed for further playful invention. The arrogance or aloneness of each solo was countered by the exuberant joy of the ensemble numbers. And it was all set in a fantasy of mid-century America, a time of optimism, sometimes in the face of war, even as the storm clouds of the civil rights struggle loomed ahead. The MusicalFare production serves to showcase some marvelous young talent, and is sure to delight its audience. The men, Dudney Joseph, Jr. and Raphael Santos are particularly strong. Joseph, who won an Artie Award last season for his performance as the maid in La Cage aux Folles, seems to gain confidence and presence with each outing. Here, he channels the Fats Waller personality in the manner of Ken Page, handling the uptown numbers and such signature Fats Waller tunes as “Honeysuckle Rose” masterfully. Santos takes to the stage with roguish charm as he playfully delivers the mischievous material originally assigned to André DeShields, with songs like “’T Ain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do” and “The Viper’s Drag.” Among the women, I was most impressed with Cecilia Snow, a recent graduate of the Crane School of Music in Potsdam. Ms. Snow enjoys the advantage of having been assigned material that is appropriate for her, and she makes full use of this opportunity, landing the Nell Carter numbers with authority and all kinds of personality. From her fresh and sassy “Cash for Your Trash,” to her mournful “Mean to Me,” this performer has range and poise in abundance. Her interpretations of lyrics are clear and engaging, and she projects a likeable nonchalance as she deploys her formidable talent. Cecelia Barron and Jetaun Louie give agreeable performances challenged by a relative lack of clear distinction between their two characters in this production. Each is talented and gifted with a strong voice and pleasing presence. Barron is usually the younger more unbridled, and Louie is usually more restrained and imperious. Michael Walline’s choreography is excellent and is performed with polish. The opening of the show establishes a high standard—one that is duplicated in the second act but difficult to maintain. Precision is diminished when actors do not always articulate important words and do not offer pointed interpretations of lyrics; the romantic entanglement and rivalries implicit in the script are also blurred, but the excellence of the music keeps the forward momentum going, and keeps the audience in a state of bliss.

The cast of Ain’t Misbehavin’.

AIN'T MISBEHAVIN' FOR A NEW GENERATION BY ANTHONY CHASE I must have seen the Broadway musical revue, Ain’t Misbehavin’, about a dozen times between 1978 and 1982, including the original Broadway cast, the replacement cast, and the national touring company. I listened to the original cast recording, featuring the talents of Nell Carter, André DeShields, Armelia McQueen, Ken Page, and Charlayne Woodard hundreds of times. The result is that I know Ain’t Misbehavin’ as well as many other people know the movie versions of The Wizard of Oz and The Sound of Music, or the words to “The Star Spangled Banner.” (Okay, I know those too; I’ve always been rather obsessive about such things.) Only Evita rivaled Ain’t Misbehavin’ in my consciousness during those years. Its captivating tunes, and their sensational interpretations by a stellar Broadway cast, made an indelible impression. This was a perfect musical revue in an era when such shows, especially those celebrating the composers of the Harlem Renaissance—from Bubbling Brown Sugar to Eubie—were very popular. My enthusiasm for Ain’t Misbehavin’ was renewed when I saw the original Broadway cast, again, in the 10th anniversary production in 1988, and another touring production featuring the Pointer Sisters in Bob Mackie costumes in 1995.

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For that reason, I approach each new production of this show aware that I am filtering what I see through the memory of a show I know very well and love very much. This was on my mind when I attended the opening night of the MusicalFare production of Ain’t Misbehavin’ last week, featuring a charismatic cast of young performers, none of whom was even born when the show first became a Broadway sensation. I’d hesitate to ask if they even know who Nell Carter was. Ain’t Misbehavin’ was conceived as a celebration of the talent and legacy of Harlem jazz pianist and composer, Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller, and takes its title from one of his best known compositions. Director Richard Maltby, Jr. built this cabaret-style revue around the specific talents and physicality of its original cast, and has always acknowledged the creative contributions of this astonishing group. All the performers in the first national company duplicated the qualities of the original performers, as did every Broadway replacement, and most subsequent productions. There was always a portly baritone modeled on Ken Page, a lithe and agile tenor fashioned after André DeShields; a skinny ingénue who was a likeness of Charlayne Woodard; and two full-figured belters with larger than life personalities in

There is not a great deal of dialogue or narration in this show. The script generally lets Fats Waller have his say through his music, and this cast capably transports us up to Harlem with songs like “The Joint is Jumpin’” into the war era with a trio of big band numbers, or into the pre-Civil Rights era with the haunting “Black and Blue.” What little narration there is has either been cut or is not included in this version. The element of resurrecting and celebrating the legacy of Fats Waller is diminished when the show neglects to tell how he would sell his songs on Tin Pan Alley for 50 bucks each, only to find them published later with other composers’ names on them. (He always insisted that he had written “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.”) An explanation that Waller’s Harlem repertoire (songs like “Feet’s Too Big” and “Fat and Greasy”) was different from what he played downtown is also missing. Similarly, the introduction of the final sequence, elsewhere rendered as, “Recording Artist: Fats Waller,” thereby emphasizing songs he recorded but did not necessarily write, is here delivered as “Mister Fats Waller,” which is meaningless. In the main, however, audiences will be highly satisfied with a cast that is irresistibly likeable and endlessly energetic, coupled with a production that is lively, smart, and lovely to look at, with a set by Chris Schenk, costumes by Kari Drozd, and light and sound by Chris Cavanagh. While the singers are youthful, the musicians are impressively seasoned and, frankly, superb. Musical director George Caldwell—whose career has taken him from Broadway to The Tonight Show, with tours for the Count Basie Orchestra and the Duke Ellington Orchestra in between—provides a highlight of the evening in the show’s famous first moments, when a recording of Fats Waller himself playing “Ain’t Misbehavin’” segues into Caldwell picking up the familiar tune on the piano himself. Dave Siegfried on bass and Darryl Washington on drums join Caldwell, and the audience gives this trio well-deserved praise in the form of sustained and enthusiastic applause. Ain’t Misbehavin’ continues through December 7. For more informaP tion see musicalfare.com.

BOOKS REVIEW

REVIEW

COLM TÓIBÍN’S NORA WEBSTER BY WOODY BROWN The notes in an Irish air are long and mournful, often solitary against a backdrop of irregular silences and a wailing drone. They howl across the bowed lines of the musical staff and take their time to do it, wandering up and down the pentatonic scale before returning to a grieving refrain. The only rhythm that guides their progress is the tide of loss. We could say, then, that Nora Webster, the newest novel by Colm Tóibín, author of The Master and Brooklyn, is a kind of air. It is abundantly clear on every page that Nora Webster is the work of a virtuoso whose mastery of English prose is intimately connected with a discriminating taste and a keen awareness of what speaks loudest when left unuttered. Tóibín has used these rare qualities to create a serene, deeply necessary work of art—a soft-spoken refuge in a time when writers often feel obligated to write as loudly and spectacularly as possible. He writes with Hemingway’s vital understatement, but where Hemingway’s prose feels lean, Tóibín’s feels uncluttered, attentive, and composed. In a famous scene from Amadeus, the tremendous 1985 film about the life of Mozart, Emperor Joseph II tells the young composer about his most recent opera, “There are simply too many notes.” Tóibín has managed to use just as many notes as there should be. In doing so, he allows moments of wordlessness to speak for themselves about something that is defined by silence: death. Nora is newly widowed. Maurice, her husband, has died young after a difficult illness when the novel begins. She is left with their four children—Fiona, Aine, Donal, and Conor—and the oppressive weight of social life in rural Ireland, a burden she now must bear alone. Fiona and Aine are old enough that they live on their own, but Donal and Conor are still in grade school. Nora must juggle her responsibilities as their mother with her own struggle to come to terms with the death of her life’s love. Her world is not full of the sturm und drang that we might expect to encounter in fiction, however. Nora Webster is a portrait that is as honest, frank, and seemingly unadulterated as, well, real life. What happens when someone dies? He dies and other people do not. If you pull back far enough and look at Nora Webster, that is the essential structure of the novel. What does the life of the person who lives look like? It is similar to the life she lived before and different in ways both obvious and secret. Nora is now alone in a real, practical sense: she cannot consult Maurice about the children, each of whom endures his death in a unique way. Conor, the youngest, asks ques-

tions constantly, as if he is always trying to ascertain the boundaries of a reality that was disrupted. Donal develops a stutter he never had while Maurice was alive. Aine becomes politically active in the Ireland of the 1970s, during the Troubles, a time of violent conflict between those who wanted Northern Ireland to remain a part of the United Kingdom and those wanted a united Ireland. But Nora still lives in a small, close-knit community, one whose constant condolences and, later, judgment begin to smother her. She is forced to find a new way to be, which is the true work of mourning. The novel is difficult to quote. Its most powerful moments are, paradoxically, not written down. They come in the form of a shared glance or an abrupt ending. Like the epiphanies that center each of the stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners, the pivots and turns in Nora Webster

depend upon unexpected understanding that often occurs between the novel’s written lines, moments through which the characters shine in the light of a private, intimate essence. Tóibín is adept at punctuation; the point at which he ends a section or a chapter carries enormous significance. He also rejects the sort of dramatic construction that we take for granted in a narrative. Early in the novel, Nora approaches her aunt Josie about Donal’s stutter, which appeared while Maurice was dying and the boys were staying at Josie’s house. A dim sense of foreboding blankets the pages as Nora suspects something happened during the months when the boys were away. The reader anticipates some disturbing revelation, child abuse or something, but nothing of the sort arrives. The text does not preclude that possibility, but as time passes it seems more and more far-fetched. We cannot escape the novel’s steadfast commitment to realism, though we may fantasize about clandestine dramas and artful designs. Nora, too, must remain grounded, firmly in the present tense, no matter how much her heart may demand that she join Maurice in the past, or in death. Amazingly, Tóibín creates vivid characters without ever really describing what they look like. He has foregone the visual descriptors that we often take for granted in fiction. Instead, we have the characters’ words, what they choose to say and, perhaps more importantly, what they choose not to say, what they cannot say. His depiction of Donal and Conor is astonishingly accurate. They act as young boys do, with curiosity and moodiness and vulnerability. Tóibín does not shy away from the heart-breaking moments when Nora feels how she and her sons are at once intimately close and irremediably separate. After she returns to work at a department store, which her financial situation demands, the boys have to stay home alone for several hours after school. One day, she comes home and sees that Conor has been crying. Try as she might, she has no choice but to accept that nothing will allow her to know what has gone on between the boys during those hours and that the guilt she feels at having to work again may never dissolve. Consider Hemingway’s story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” in which the two main characters refuse to discuss explicitly a secret that the reader comes to understand by virtue of the small references and gestures in their conversation. In contrast, Nora Webster does not posit any knowable secrets. It bears witness to the impasse that lies at the end of all interpretation. There is a limit to understanding, there is an end to life, and the novel’s characters emerge in relation to that impenetrable border. Nora’s visual anonymity allows her to stand for something much larger than herself. Her struggles, which are always struggles that anyone in her position would plausibly experience, are both specific and metaphorical—they mean more than they seem. Tóibín’s real achievement lies in writing a novel that functions on the small scale of daily human life and on the cosmic, timeless scale of the human experience. As the end of Nora Webster approaches, it becomes clear that everything will more or less be all right because that is how things turn out in real life, too. Nora will experience certain challenges and overcome some of them, the boys will live through both happiness and sadness, people will die and people will live, day turns into night and then back into day. Nora Webster knows that and celebrates it with the unassuming deftness of the wind among the reeds.

BABEL: DAVID HENRY HWANG WEDNESDAY NOV 19

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8PM / KLEINHANS MUSIC HALL, 3 SYMPHONY CIRCLE / $35-$100 Next week, Just Buffalo Literary Center will welcome David Henry Hwang on November 19 as the latest addition to the BABEL series. Named for that ancient allegory in which people are divided by language barriers, the BABEL series focuses on a range of authors and texts that address cultural tension and the complexities of identity formation. In keeping with that artistic vision, David Henry Hwang is a particularly fitting addition to the lineup. A literary force if not something of a playwright prodigy, Hwang received his first Obie (read: Off-Broadway) Award at 22; his first Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, and Pulitzer Price nomination in his early 30s; and he has been described by TIME magazine as potentially “the first important dramatist of American public life since Arthur Miller.” Perhaps most well-known for his 1988 play, M. Butterfly, a contemporary re-telling of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and the ripped-from-the-headlines scandal of a French diplomat accused of espionage for having an affair with a Chinese communist spy who, he claimed (seriously), he mistook for a woman. This type of confusion is at the heart of so many of Hwang’s plays which return insistently to themes of miscommunication and misunderstanding. From his first play, FOB (1980), written as an undergraduate at Stanford University, to more recent plays such as Yellow Face (2007) and Ch’inglish (2011), Hwang uses humor to interrogate gender and racial stereotypes. In Ch’inglish, the critique is leveled at the American tendency to fetishize Asian women and Orientalism in general while also taking on the East’s suspicions of Western economic practices and corporate corruption. Though cultural conflict is hardly the stuff of comedy, Hwang succeeds in keeping audiences not merely entertained but laughing out loud. PHOTO BY LIA CHANG

At the same time, his comedy doesn’t shy away from addressing serious issues. Sarah Bay-Cheng, UB Professor of

Theatre and Founding Director of the Techne Institute for Arts and Emerging Technologies, notes that Hwang’s “collected works in theatre, opera, television, film, and dance reveal an artist who is consistently pushing boundaries no matter what form he engages.” His list of collaborators alone is a testament to the breadth of his career: Prince, Philip Glass, Elton John and Tim Rice, Phil Collins, and Aimee Mann. His forays into film and television include writing the screenplays for David Cronenberg’s screen adaptation of M. Butterfly; the NBC mini-series, The Lost Empire; and just one of his latest developments, Shanghai, an original TV series slated for Bravo. “I can’t think of a more inspirational and important playwright for my students to see,” Bay-Cheng adds. “Sometimes in the presence of great artists, one can feel diminished. But, reading Hwang with my students, we see what is possible.” Hwang will meet with students for a special event at the Just Buffalo Writing Center in the afternoon. Then, for those interested in celebrating Hwang’s Chinese heritage, BABEL Community Nights returns to Karpeles Manuscript Museum (453 Porter Avenue) at 6pm. BABEL fans—BABEL-ers, shall we say?—can enjoy authentic food, music, and dance featuring the Chinese Club of WNY and the Red Dragon School of Martial Arts before heading down the street to see David Henry Hwang take the stage at Kleinhans Music Hall at 8pm. Hwang’s talk will be followed by audience Q&A and book signing. Tickets are available online at Just Buffalo’s website, by phone (716-832-5400), or at the doors of KleinP hans on the night of the event. -BARBARA COLE

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FILM FEATURE A more distant part of Poland’s history is illuminated in Stones for the Ramparts (Kamienie na szaniec). Set in the early years of World War II, it is a true story based on the paramilitary activities of the Szare Szeregi (Gray Ranks), formed from the remnants of the Polish version of the Boy Scouts. Chafing under the restrictions of the occupying Nazis and more energetic than their parents who remember the hardships of the last war, these young men engage in subversive activities like smoke-bombing movie theaters during the newsreels of German propaganda. (Of all the reasons we’ve had to hate Nazis over the years, here’s a new one: They ruined going to the movies!) The high spirits of the film’s early scenes (driven by a most uncontemporary rock score) become more serious when one of the young men, Rudy, is captured and tortured to get information about his mates. A rescue operation is mounted but subject to the approval of the resistance’s leaders, who have their own agenda. It’s a gripping, intense film, possibly a bit too much so for some viewers during the torture scenes. It will be screened Friday night at 7:30pm.

Robert Wieckiewicz in Man of Hope.

DOBRE KINO: CANISIUS COLLEGE'S ANNUAL POLISH FILM FESTIVAL BY M. FAUST There was a time when it would be unthinkable for a new film by Andrzej Wajda not to be picked up for theatrical exhibition in North America. Yet his 2013 film about Lech Walesa, which may well be his last (Wajda is now 87) hasn’t even been released here on DVD, much less put into movie theaters. So give thanks to the Polish Film Festival, presented yearly by the Permanent Chair of Polish Culture at Canisius College. Now in its ninth year, it is a small but dependable showcase highlighting some of the best recent movies from a country with a rich cinematic heritage. A kind of continuation to the films that brought Wajda to international attention, Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron (1981), Man

of Hope is the story of the charismatic man whom many saw as leading Poland out of Communist control by organizing the country’s workers in the movement known as Solidarnosc (Solidarity). Framed by an interview of Walesa with journalist Oriana Fallaci, the fictionalized film follows him from his days as an electrician caught up in the Gdansk Shipyard strike of 1970 up to becoming president of Poland in 1990. Robert Wieckiewicz, who starred in the Oscar-nominated Polish drama In Darkness, makes a persuasive Walesa (it’s largely in the moustache). Wajda and writer Janusz Glowacki make a point of presenting Walesa’s not-inconsiderable flaws as part of their portrait, though like everything about the man it provoked controversy when it was shown in Poland. It will be shown at 7:30pm on Saturday.

The highlight of this year’s series for me is the Buffalo premiere of Chce Sie Zyc, which received both the jury prize and the audience award at the Montreal World Film Festival in 2013, where I first saw it. (The somewhat unfortunate English title is Life Feels Good.) Based on a true story that combines elements of My Left Foot and The Miracle Worker, it follows the childhood of Mateusz, played as a boy by Kamil Tcakz and as a young man by Dawid Ogrodnik in two physically astonishing performances. Born with cerebral palsy but misdiagnosed as being mentally retarded (the film is harsh in depicting the Polish medical system), Mateusz is raised in a loving household that cares for him but is never able to communicate with him. Writer-director Maciej Pieprzyca ably navigates the high and low points of the story, leavening its difficult premise with surprising touches of humor. It will be featured for a Sunday afternoon matinee at 3:30pm. At the Montreal press conference for Life Feels Good, I was astonished to see that star Dawid Ogrodnik is not actually afflicted by cerebral palsy in real life. You may have seen him in a supporting role as a young saxophonist in Ida, which had an extended run in Buffalo theaters earlier this year and which has just received five major nominations for the European Film Awards, making it a likely Oscar contender. If, like me, you never got round to seeing Ida, you’ll have another chance when it opens the festival Thursday at 7:30pm. Ida follows a young novitiate, raised in a rural convent, who learns about the dark history of her family when she visits the town of her birth with her only relative, an aunt with desperate secrets to keep. Reviewing it for its commercial run, my colleage George Sax called it “disturbingly involving and quietly provocative….[director Pawel] Pawlikowski renders this story with a spare style, sometimes elegantly.” All features in the Polish Film Festival will be accompanied by recent short films in the best tradition of Eastern European animation. Screenings will be at the Montante Cultural Center (2001 Main Street, a block south of the Kensington Expressway). Tickets are $10 general admission, $5 for students and senior citizens. For more information visit canisius.edu/polish-chair/polish-film-festival/.

FILM REVIEW Officer and a Gentleman. At least that’s how it seems at first, until Fletcher’s relentless goading of his student starts to remind you more of R. Lee Ermy in Full Metal Jacket. And we all remember what happened to recruit Vincent D’Onofrio in that movie. Writer-director Damien Chazelle’s screenplay was inspired by his own experiences as a conservatory student. In the press notes, he recalls, “My journey as a drummer culminated in national honors and awards, but I can still vividly recall the nightmares, the nausea and skipped meals, the days of unmanageable anxiety—all in the service of a style of music that is, on its surface, all about freedom and joy.”

Rosewater

NOTHING FUNNY ABOUT IT Assuming that you’re not planning to see the Dumb and Dumber sequel this weekend (we here at The Public have high expectations of our readers), your choices in new openings include a starring performance from one of the most reliable comic supporting actors of our time, J. K. Simmons, and the directorial debut of comedian and The Daily Show host Jon Stewart. But don’t be expecting big yuks: Both movies are as serious in their different ways as an Oscar Best Picture nominee. Remember the ending of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter,” when an exhausted Ringo Starr yells “I got blisters on my fingers”? For 19-year-old student drummer Andrew (Miles Teller), blisters are the point at which he’s just warming up. By the time he finishes practicing, he has to wipe blood off his kit. It is Andrew’s ambition to be a great jazz drummer.

He is studying at an elite Manhattan conservatory, and when he attracts the attention of the school’s top teacher, Terence Fletcher ( J. K. Simmons), he thinks he’s on his way. Little does he know that his struggle has just begun. Dressed all in black, Fletcher doesn’t so much enter rooms as explode into them. The musicians in his band, presumably the crème of the school’s crème, look down when he does, afraid to make eye contact. And with good reason: when he’s down on a performance, any personal qualities of the player are open for verbal abuse. His justification is that players have to be pushed beyond what they think their limits are to be the best that they can be. If that reminds you of a military cliché, Whiplash takes its cues less from movies about foreboding professors like The Paper Chase than it does from An

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I’m not a jazz buff, but many who are have complained that Whiplash is implausible as a depiction of music education. I don’t think it’s meant to be. Depicting Fletcher as a bully pushing his student to impossible ends (and in so doing providing the role of a lifetime for Simmons), Chazelle is clearly exaggerating in order to ask the question, How far is too far in pursuit of the vague idea of “greatness”? Not to give away anything, but Chazelle doesn’t press his young character to Full Metal Jacket extremes. Instead, he concocts a finale that contains an unlikely plot twist and which arguably counters everything the rest of the film has warned us about. But it includes a musical performance so dazzling and exhilarating that it’s hard to complain. (To the best of my knowledge the young actor Teller does all of his own drum work.) If it were artistically honest the movie wouldn’t end this way. But I can’t say I’m not glad it did. If you’re a regular follower of The Daily Show, you’ll recall that host Jon Stewart took the summer off last year to make a movie. (In his absence the show was hosted by John Oliver, who of late has spun off to his own HBO fake-news show Last Week Tonight.) Rosewater is that film, and while it’s a better piece of narrative filmmaking than, say, Michael Moore’s

Canadian Bacon, it’s a movie that Stewart’s many fans (I’m one) should probably approach with lowered expectations. Rosewater was adapted from Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari’s memoir Then They Came for Me, detailing his imprisonment in Iran. He was there covering the 2009 presidential election, won by incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by far too wide a majority for anyone to believe that the results were legitimate. After his arrest, he was detained for four months while his interrogator tried to get him to confess to being a US spy. Bahari (played in the film by Gael García Bernal) had been a guest on The Daily Show prior to his arrest, and Stewart presumably felt some inadvertent culpability for the journalist’s arrest: A piece of evidence used against him by his captors was a Daily Show spot recorded in Iran in which correspondent Jason Jones refers to himself and Bahari as spies. The ridiculousness of the interrogator’s inability to understand that humorous report is a theme that Rosewater touches on several times, but never enough to lift the film above an earnest blandness. You can see Stewart gently smirking when he pokes a bit of fun at his home state of New Jersey, a place the interrogator is eager to believe is a den of iniquity unseen since the heyday of Sodom, but he doesn’t press it. He may feel that there’s nothing funny about a journalist being imprisoned for doing his job. But humor is a perfectly appropriate tool in attacking a rigidly Manicheanistic mindset that perceives the world wholly as black and white, good and evil, us and them. Competently crafted but seldom more than that, Rosewater shows that Stewart could probably make a living as a filmmaker if he so chose. But for now, I hope he keeps his daily—sorry, his day job.-MF P

ARTS GALLERIES

PATRICIA BRACE & RITA LEDUC:

I LIKE YOU BETTER NOW BY J. TIM RAYMOND erformance art emerged from conceptual art P in the late 1960s to become a dominant genre for the rest of the century. Performance art is real-time activity centered on an artist’s own voice, image, or physical body—it may be documented by photography or intended for a single moment, vanishing with its live audience. Its ancestry may be traced to festivals, pageants, carnivals, music hall, and vaudeville down through the centuries from ancient sacred traditions of shamanism and prophecy. Through their respective histories, Patricia Brace and Rita Leduc have produced a location-specific media installation at Hi-Temp Fabrication that they characterize as “a journey about understanding place and relationships in a world where both are in constant flux.” Four floors up by freight elevator, a columned white space is centrally lit. There is an expanse of white vinyl laid out on the cement floor, covering the center of the room. Propped against each of the interior pillars are large canvases serving as screens for video projections emanating from a central pillar, where four projectors are fastened in four directions, each facing the opposite screen. The images displayed are shown home movie style, without sound. Viewers are encouraged to stand in front of the screen images to become part of the play of shadows. These images consist of scenes of fragmented figurative and landscape juxtapositions synchronized in an episodic, repetitive series. The images are intended to shed light on a year of reconnection with Buffalo and each other by two young women, posing a psychological interface between physical location and an interpersonal relationship—how geography and human contact overlap,

integrate, and create a cultural signifying iconography—what the founding father of performance art, Allan Kaprow, called “parlor anthropology.” Further into the exhibition, a low platform sets off a room empty but for a number of receding columns guiding a viewer’s eye to the wall of windows at the far end. Only some of the columns are load-bearing; additional faux columns have been added, painstaking replicas giving the effect of spatial disorientation to a viewer standing on the platform. Skillfully worked fabric facades mimic the actual walls with the bricked grime of a factory environment. Approaching the far end of the room a viewer activates a real-time sound installation fully audible at the base of the windowed wall. Describing I Like You Better Now, this reviewer is fairly certain a viewer will get a sense of its physical plant, so to speak, but appreciation of the installation will vary with an individual’s own life experience. Certainly there are antecedent artists to cast back to, especially experimental filmmakers of the 1960s—Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage, further to the fragmented narratives of Maya Deren. In choosing to create a “site-responsive” installation, Brace and Leduc have left the 14,000-square-foot factory floor space freely open to the imagination. An additional media element will be added to the installation on Wednesday, November 12 at 7pm: a special dance performance featuring Buffalo Contact Improvisation Jam Performance Group. Reserve a spot: brownpapertickets.com/ event/886115. Visits to I Like You Better Now are by appointment: ilikeyoubetternow@gmail.com.

UB ANDERSON GALLERY:

ART=TEXT=ART BY JACK FORAN

The first page of Ray Johnson’s BOO[K].

THE EXHIBIT WAS ORIGINALLY CONCEIVED AND PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND, BUT WAS RECAST BY UB GRADUATE STUDENTS.

The reason for the sudden appearance of substantial verbal content in visual art in the latter half of the last century, according to creators of the Art=Text=Art exhibit at UB Anderson Gallery, was basically political. Wall explanatory copy talks about Cold War-era anti-Communist and anti-homosexual official propaganda, and the purpose of artists to challenge these conventionalities. Speaking out in words. Though sometimes not too loudly or clearly. Either way could get you into big trouble. Meanwhile, the artists had their own political agendas, on issues from civil rights to women’s rights, plus the Vietnam War. Verbal content amid the visual imagery in paintings was a way to declare articulately on these matters, but with the requisite degree of ambiguity or obscurity in the face of truculent political powers. An alternative reason would be artistic rather than political. Given the general turn to abstract art in the 20th century, maybe the best way to cue the viewer as to the subject of an abstract work or convey a specific message was by incorporation of text in the work. Also, the recourse to abstract art in that period seemed to reinvigorate among artists philosophical issues as old as Plato as to what is real and unreal in art and life. The symbolic character of verbal language—and even more so, of the signs used to convey linguistic or mathematical information—were key to exploring these issues for artists and philosophers alike. The Art=Text=Art exhibit was originally conceived and presented at the University of Richmond, Virginia, but was recast in its present form by UB visual arts graduate students, with additional artworks and written works from the UB Art Galleries and UB Poetry Collection, and elsewhere. It’s a huge exhibit with an undigestible in a single viewing amount of works, and upstairs a score or so of further works from the UB galleries with some connection to the art and text theme. The main exhibit is divided into three topic areas, viz., the Personal is Political, Systems, and Anti-systems, but the topics overlap and intermix. Nothing is one thing and nothing else. With along the way, excursions into such text plus art genres as artist’s books and concrete poetry (some examples that might be described as more concrete than poetry).

The Personal is Political category features works by gay artists the likes of John Cage (whose work also readily connects with the Anti-systems category) and Jasper Johns (whose work readily connects with the Systems category, and philosophical issues about signs and symbols and art and reality). Two of the more notable works in the Personal is Political section are by Annabel Daou, one of them called Constitution, being a handwritten transliteration of the US Constitution in Arabic script. The recipe for democratic government we’ve been trying for the last few decades or more to impose on various Mid-Eastern populations. (The recipe that seems to be working so well for us at the moment.) Whereas sometimes the personal is just personal, as in Elena del Rivero’s two hilarious letters to her mother, one a kind of necklace of tiny pearls—such a lovely present from a daughter to her mother—around a buckshot array of the multiply reiterated single word “No.” The other consisting of just a header (“Carta a La Madre”) and footer (“Jávea, Agosto 93”). The entire body of the letter blacked out. (“Redacted” in officialese.) The Systems category includes geometric drawings by Sol LeWitt, precise areal measurement works by Mel Bochner, and a choreographic annotation diagram on graph paper by Trisha Brown, from which you can visualize a series of sequential movements by a handful of dancers in a zig-zag pattern across the dance space, then maybe reverse and/or repeat. The Anti-systems category includes more work by Cage, a Cy Twombley scribble and smudge painting/drawing, and Mark Lombardi’s large-format chart of unsavory relationships among the multitude of players in the Charles Keating, Lincoln Savings, American Continental Corp. scandal at the heart of the savings and loan financial crisis of the 1980s. (That has since been dwarfed by a series of bigger and better scandals/fiascos. The legacy of the Ronald Reagan years. His policy to allow the foxes free run through the chicken yard.) A ton of stuff here, raising a ton of issues to ponder. The exhibit P continues through January 11.

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EATS BEER

BUFFALO'S BEST AUTUMNAL BEERS BY LYNN FREEHILL-MAYE As Buffalonians festival-hopped over the summer, gnawing Italian sausage and downing light beers, certain men stockpiled supplies. Thinking ahead to when the parties would end and the weather would cool, they gathered local hops. They ordered German malts. They installed tanks in new spaces. Now that the outdoor bashes are over, we’re ready to drink something rich and hearty. The city’s craft brewers have got us. They were inspired by fall tastes like caramel, apple, oatmeal, allspice, and inevitably, pumpkin. They infused the flavors into a wide range of beers, from ales to stouts to bocks, and even a red IPA.

And there are more local breweries than ever. Resurgence and Gene McCarthy’s started making beer earlier this year. Big Ditch opened in October. And even mainstays tried new things—Flying Bison built a new brewery on a different side of town, Larkinville. Here are our picks for some of the best seasonal beers being crafted within Buffalo’s city limits—and the breweries, both new and old, for exploring them. Open since June, Resurgence is ambitiously mashing up flavors. The buzziest mix right now is Vanilla Cappuccino Pumpkin Ale. Its flavor is coffee-forward, without the heavy richness of stout, coffee’s usual partner, for balance. Vanilla aromas float through, although the pumpkin is a little harder to pick up. Give it a whirl at the former Sterling Motors building, which Resurgence has made into a social scene with a fire pit, picnic tables, and games like oversized Jenga and darts. Then brace yourself for what to try next: “We have some crazy tricks up our sleeves,” assistant brewer Erik Greiner says. Resurgence Brewing Co., 1250 Niagara St. The four-floor downtown institution that is Pearl Street Brewery is welcoming beer lovers in for something new: a Jack the RIPA Red IPA. It has a clever Halloween-sparked name and a simple story. “Honestly, the colors of fall inspired us—red for the IPA, brown for ale,” brewer Chris Herr says. He and partner brewer Brian Vaughn did five hop additions and bumped up the caramel malts to arrive at a deeper color. The resulting taste is easy for even non-IPA-lovers to appreciate—smoother and less bitter than its lighter cousins, although the hops hit on the finish. Pearl Street Grill & Brewery, 76 Pearl St. A new kid on the block, Big Ditch Brewing figured, “Why not do something different?” company president Matt Kahn says. So he and his partners set out to create a Cinnamon Apple Amber Ale. Head brewer and vice-president Corey Catalano looked to oatmeal for thickness, brown sugar for color, allspice for aroma, and Mayer Brothers apple cider for flavor. The result has both great taste and body, with everything in balance. Big Ditch’s beer debuted in mid-October. Its downtown tap room, perfect for business func-

Community Beer Works’ Stout Affective Disorder 22 THE PUBLIC / NOVEMBER 12, 2014 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

tions, should open within a couple months. Big Ditch Brewing, 55 E. Huron St. Down in the Old First Ward, Gene McCarthy’s has been a neighborhood haven since 1968. Its new owners have kept the wood paneling, green-checked curtains, Notre Dame banners, and vintage sports photos that make it homey. But they’ve also built a small brewery next door, producing beer since February. Of their fall seasonals, the Wardenator Double Bock is a standout, with rich caramel notes and just a slight bitterness. “I wanted something dark, malty, kind of a statement,” brewer Matt Conron says. Gene McCarthy’s Brewery & Kitchen, 73 Hamburg St. Pan-American Grill & Brewery’s take on a traditional Oktoberfest style brew is hoppy and hard-edged. It has a full mouthfeel, a definite crispness, and a German authenticity—all the Vienna malts were imported from the fatherland. Pan-American is a brother brewery to Pearl Street, but its beer is made on-site at the grand Hotel Lafayette. “There’s a misconception that all our beer is brewed at Pearl Street and brought over,” bar manager Kristy McDonald says. “But it’s a fully functioning brewery right below us.” Pan-American Grill & Brewery, 391 Washington St. Community Beer Works’ Stout Affective Disorder will take you all the way to St. Patrick’s Day. “Fall is too short, really,” president Ethan Cox says. This fall/winter seasonal has a bitterness—the team loves to emphasize hops, even in traditionally malt-forward beers. But the stout makes it a smooth bitterness, with coffee and chocolate notes. Stop in at Community Beer Works’ solid brick West Side nanobrewery and get your growler filled. Community Beer Works, 15 Lafayette Ave. Back for its sixth year is Flying Bison’s classic Blizzard Bock. It, too, is ready to take beer drinkers beyond fall and on to January, with a satisfying body and a rich, malty taste. “When you drink a couple bottles of this on a cold winter’s evening, you’re having something,” owner Tim Herzog says. If you venture out even on a chilly day, try it in Flying Bison’s spare new brewery, where huge windows behind the bar frame the brewing action. Flying Bison Brewing Co., 840 P Seneca St.

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37 42

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63 65

ACROSS

53. ___ Day

26. Blue Monk offering

54. Hosp. test in a tube

27. Winter event in Buffalo

55. Includes on an email

31. The Rose Garden situation in summer?

1. FIRST PART OF ANNOUNCEMENT 9. Basics 13. Basil, e.g. 14. Annual electric tower event 15. Files you can hold in your hand 18. “Otello” baritone 19. Bonanza find

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27. Auto import 28. New restaurant on the site of the Waldorf luncheon counter 29. Photo ___

36. “Frasier” actress Gilpin

63. War of 1812 locale

37. Go for

64. Freshman, probably

39. Children’s area, for short?

65. Cleaning cabinet supplies 66. LAST PART OF ANNOUNCEMENT

21. Former super flea 22. SECOND PART OF ANNOUNCEMENT

35. Monthly util. bill

DOWN 1. Juried art fair 2. An hour before closing 3. Cabernet, e.g. 4. Parenthesis, essentially 5. Current viral concern

30. David Wright, e.g.

6. Government IOUs

40. Spot specialty 43. Pool legend Willie 44. One way to be taken 47. Side effect of a withdrawal? 48. “Wedding Bell Blues” composer Laura 51. Facilitates 52. Santa necessity 56. Arid 58. “Come to think of it ...” 59. RMN’s successor

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34. SUBJECT OF THE ANNOUNCEMENT,

9. “Farewell, mon ami”

61. Roseanne’s mom, on “Roseanne”

10. Grammy winner Toni

62. ___ Speedwagon

GOOD NEIGHBOR NOTICES

HEALTH: MIND & BODY ALL WNY HEALTH HIGHLIGHTS

38. 1999 Pulitzer Prizewinning play

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YOGA, PILATES, SPINNING,

41. Bullring cry

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24. “Moby Dick” captain 25. UB footballer

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