The Public - 12/03/14 by The Public

FREE EVERY WEDNESDAY | DECEMBER 3, 2014 | DAILYPUBLIC.COM | @PUBLICBFLO | SOMETHING GO BOOM?

NEWS: AMERICA’S TEACHER WARS: A NEW HISTORY

MUSIC: RAGBIRDS RISE ABOVE THE FLOCK

CENTERFOLD: RATHBUN TAKES NIAGARA FALLS

ART: FOUR AT NINA FREUDENHEIM

THE PUBLIC CONTENTS

KARPELES MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY 453 PORTER AVE. BUFFALO, NY

BRITTANY MCCLAIN SPEAKS AT A NOVEMBER 25 RALLY ON BAILEY AVENUE, PROTESTING A GRAND JURY’S FAILURE TO INDICT POLICE OFFICER DARREN WILSON FOR THE KILLING OF MICHAEL BROWN IN FERGUSON, MISSOURI. PHOTO BY PIERCE MCCLEARY

THIS WEEK ISSUE NO. 4 | DECEMBER 3, 2014

Please bring a non-perishable food item for donation. Thank you!

HUGE YEAR-END

Clearance sale on now! STARTING AT

Violins $89.00 STARTING AT Guitars $49.00 STARTING AT Ukuleles $32.00 STARTING AT Amps $25.00

If you approve errors which are on this proof,SPOTLIGHT: THE PUBLIC Multifaceted cannot be held11responsible. Please examine musician Pam Swarts loves the ad thoroughly even if thetime. ad Buffalo…most of the is a pick-up.

GU ED ITA BLO W SA OUTR

LE !

Thank youBUFFABLOG for advertisingPICKS: with THE PUBLIC. Please review your ad and Our pals review recordings check for any layout anderrors. showsThe byoriginal local bands. instructions have been followed as closely as possible. THE PUBLIC offers design services with two proofs at no charge. PUBLIC STAFF is not responsible THE THE PUBLIC for any error if not notified within ADVERTISING SALES MANAGER 24EDITOR-IN-CHIEF hours of receipt. The production SPECIAL ACCOUNTS EXECUTIVE GEOFF KELLY department must have a signed CY proof ALESSI & ENTERTAINMENT in ARTS order to print. EDITOR Please sign and fax PRODUCTION MANAGER CORY PERLA this back or approve by responding to DESIGNER GRAPHIC this email. AMANDA FERREIRA MANAGING EDITOR

DRUM KITS • TRUMPETS • FLUTES CLARINETS • SAXOPHONES • & MORE!

STOCKING STUFFERS

LAY AWAY • GIFT CERTIFICATES LESSONS • RENTALS • REPAIRS OUR LESSONS ARE CHEAPER THAN CHAIN STORES WITHOUT DISCOUNTS

MON-SAT 11-7P • SUN NOON-5P

AARON LOWINGER

STARTING AT

25¢

OPEN EVERYDAY! EXCEPT CHRISTMAS

1113 ELMWOOD BFLO (NEAR FOREST)

716.88MUSIC ALLENTOWNMUSIC.COM

THE PUBLIC / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

MESSAGE TO ADVERTISER

LOWEST PRICES ON: LOTS OF GREAT

NEWS: The king of disco, LittleSis on John Koelmel, saving the Allendale Theater, and a dispatch from Richard Lipsitz on today’s labor movements.

PLEASE EXAMINE THE PROOF PUBLIC QUESTIONNAIRE: Actor Marc Sacco, currently starring THIS in The SantaLand Diaries at Road Less Traveled, takes our quiz. 9 CAREFULLY 4

FILM: Tommy Lee Jones produces, directs, and stars in The Homesman.

CRAIG REYNOLDS, R.I.P.: Buffalo has lost a scenemaker. We remember his writing.

SOCIAL MEDIA DIRECTOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER BILLY SANDORA-NASTYN

�FILM Check EDITORCopy Content FAUST �M.Check Important Dates �EDITOR-AT-LARGE Check Name, Address, Phone #,DIRECTOR & OF COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT SEAN HEIDINGER BRUCE JACKSON website EDITOR �COPY PROOF

ARTIST OK (no changes) COVER STEPHANIE DUBIN PROOF OK (with changes)

ALLAN UTHMAN

�

WE ARE THE PUBLIC We’re a weekly print paper, free every Wednesday throughout Western New York, and a daily website (dailypublic.com) that Advertisers Signatureconversation on regional culture. We’ve hosts a continuous got stories to tell. So do you. ___________________________________

COLUMNISTS WOODY BROWN, ANTHONY CHASE, BRUCE FISHER, JACK FORAN, MICHAEL I. NIMAN, NANCY J. PARISI CONTRIBUTORS CAITLIN CASS, JEANETTE CHIN, RICHARD LIPSITZ, PIERCE MCCLEARY, KELLIE POWELL, GEORGE SAX, JEREMIAH SHEA CHRISTOPHER TREACY WITH SUPPORT FROM PAR PUBLICATIONS LLC

SUBMISSIONS The Public happily accepts for consideration articles, artwork, photography, video, letters, free lunches, and unsolicited advice. We reserve the right to edit submissions for suitability and length. Email us at info@dailypublic.com.

Date________________________________

THIS PROOF MAY ONLY BE USED FOR PUBLICATION IN THE PUBLIC.

Opening Celebration

M&T Bank Second Friday

December 12, 5:30pm

Exalted Nature is an extraordinary opportunity to experience Charles Burchfield’s luminous, spiritual interpretations of the natural world—more than 50 masterworks never before seen together.

For additional information, please visit www.BurchfieldPenney.org.

Charles E. Burchfield (1893–1967), Nighthawks at Twilight (detail), 1917–49; Watercolor on joined paper, 33½" x 47" (enlarged from 18" x 21"); The Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan; Gift of the Viola E. Bray Charitable Trust, 1964.

DAILYPUBLIC.COM / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / THE PUBLIC

NEWS FEATURES

TODAY’S LABOR MOVEMENTS Why local workers will picket this Thursday BY RICHARD LIPSITZ The relationship of the growing gap between rich and poor and the decline of union density is a real one. Unless addressed, the wages of the great majority of the American people will continue to decline against increases in the cost of living. It is a historic fact that only through self-organization can the working people achieve any economic or political goals, including improving their economic strength. After the onset of the Great Depression, the international labor movement faced a serious decision: Should it unite as one to defend and extend economic rights or succumb to the triple horrors of fascism, poverty, and war? In Europe, the Great Depression and its aftermath, World War II, decimated the working people. In the US, while that period was difficult to say the least, instead of fascism we found our way to a New Deal. During the New Deal until the end of the 1940s, the American working people enjoyed a better standard of living than any other working class in the world. The chief reason for this was the great drive for self-organization. By the end of the 1940s, worker self-organization, as embodied chiefly but not solely by the trade unions, comprised nearly 40 percent of the workforce. Public policy was crafted by the New Deal coalition, and wages and benefits of the workers were vastly improved. Paradoxically, the decline sets in at the apex of the influence of the trade unions with the passage of the anti-worker, anti-democratic Taft-Hartley Bill in 1947. Taft-Hartley stripped real power from the labor movement and initiated the long decline that continues to this day. It was meant to strip the labor movement of the power achieved during the New Deal, and it has accomplished just that.

POWER AND THE PUBLIC Six Degrees of John Koelmel BY KEVIN CONNOR AND ROB GALBRAITH, LITTLESIS.ORG

Last year First Niagara ousted its CEO, John Koelmel, who had overseen the bank’s rapid expansion and, subsequently, the rapid decline of its stock price. Koelmel, according to a post-mortem of his banking career published in the Buffalo News, was just too engaged in the civic life of the region to do a decent job of managing the bank. The article suggested that “the hallmark of Koelmel’s hubris” was his decision to buy the naming rights for HSBC Arena at a cost of over $1 million a year. This raised the profile of the bank in the region, but apparently not enough to ward off a recent $1.1 billion goodwill impairment charge, which is typically associated with a decline in a company’s brand value. The charge led the bank to declare a major loss in the third quarter of this year. The name change may not have been so great for First Niagara, but it seems to have worked out well for Koelmel. In the process, he appears to have cozied up to the latest initiates into Buffalo’s coterie of billionaires, Terry and Kim Pegula, who had purchased the Sabres prior to the re-naming. After his departure from First Niagara, Koelmel landed a job as president of HarborCenter Development, the company behind the Pegulas’ new $172 million hockey and entertainment complex. This may seem like a big step down for the former CEO of a major bank, but if you need to hitch yourself to a new source of capital – and capital is usually a prerequisite for a civic profile like Koelmel’s – a billionaire on the rise is not a bad option. When business magnates suffer the embarrassment of being tossed aside by the companies they run, they typically lose some of the prestigious positions that they acquired along the way. This was not the case with Koelmel, and the Pegula connection may have had something to do with it. He remains chairman of the New York Power Authority (NYPA), one of the most powerful and wealthy public authorities in the state. He remains chairman of Kaleida Health, the largest healthcare provider in the region. He is a board member at Great Lakes Health System, an odd 4

THE PUBLIC / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

umbrella group for UB, Kaleida, and ECMC. He is a member of the Western New York Regional Development Council, which is overseeing the Buffalo Billion. And he is a board member at the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, which is driving that favorite project of the local power elite. And so a failed bank CEO remains one of the most powerful and well-connected people in Buffalo. Forget about six degrees— most influential people in the region are either on a board with Koelmel or are one step removed. All this coziness creates some awkward situations. For instance, NYPA, where Koelmel is chairman, funds business startup competition 43North, which recently announced that it is moving to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, where Koelmel is a board member, and which is also host to Kaleida, where Koelmel is chairman, and which also receives NYPA grants. Got that? These sorts of relationships are sometimes described as “conflicts of interest,” and sometimes described as “business as usual.” In any case, Koelmel’s ties to both NYPA and BNMC did not stop him from lauding 43North’s move to BNMC in a recent press release. “The plans to locate an incubator space at BNMC,” he said, “will establish the most favorable conditions for the success of the finalist companies emerging from the 43North competition.” The press release did not note that Koelmel is especially aware of the conditions at the medical campus, given his oversight roles at both BNMC and Kaleida. The consummate dealmaker seems to be comfortable on both sides of a deal. We could go on. And we probably will. LittleSis.org (the opposite of “Big Brother”) tracks information on power networks in Buffalo and throughout the United States. The above map was produced with Oligrapher, the LittleSis mapping tool. Have a Buffalo power tip for us? Email tips@littlesis.org.

Among the worst aspects of the decline is the growing gap between the wealthiest Americans and now almost everyone else. In 1979, the average CEO made about 84 times the income of the average worker in their company; today that differential is at 475 times. Further, according to the Bloomberg Report, the income of the average American household has fallen to its lowest level since 1967 (when inflation is factored into the equation). Taft-Hartley immediately put pressure on the labor movement in order to reduce its policy role. In short order other pressures emerged. The rush to de-industrialization, the wholesale deregulation of key sectors of the economy (transportation in particular), the breaking of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, the passage of NAFTA, and two recessions–one after 9/11 and the other in 2008– have further reduced the organized workforce. In spite of all these difficulties, our movement is not afraid and has always fought back. The “Fight for 15” is one very clear and strong response. The workforce is changing and our economy can produce high-road jobs with good pay and benefits. We need to promote such economic development. However—and here is the most important point—major corporations like Wal-Mart and McDonalds are paying poverty wages. A living wage must be at the top of the agenda for a better and more prosperous future for this country. The core mission of the Western New York Area Labor Federation, AFL-CIO is the defense of the living standards and working conditions of the affiliated unions and their members. This is the basis of our unity and it must at the center of our program. Further, the organization has taken the stand that we must have community allies in this fight. In point of fact, we need each other. Whether on immigrant rights, temporary workers, strikes and tough contact negotiations, or the need for saving communities decimated by de- industrialization and a changing economy, we must find common ground. The fight to address the impoverishment of the working people is one such way. Richard Lipsitz is president of the Western New York Area Labor Federation, AFL-CIO. P

FEATURES NEWS

The Pietrowski family: (left to right) Dave, Alexa, Mary, and Taylor. PHOTO BY NANCY J. PARISI

STORY:

CHARITY BOOGIE OOGIE OOGIE Meet David Pietrowski, founder of the World’s Greatest Disco BY NANCY J. PARISI Quoting the immortal—and authoritative—1970s lyrics of disco ensemble A Taste of Honey: “Everybody here tonight must boogie, let me tell ya, you are no exception to the rule.” Thousands of mostly-costumed revelers converged at Buffalo Niagara Convention Center to boogie at the raucous annual World’s Largest Disco on November 29, two days after Thanksgiving. Now in its 21st year, WLD continues to be one of the area’s largest fundraisers. All proceeds (ticket sales, song sponsorships, vending) raised on this night of sexy dance beats, miles of gleaming polyester, and romping nostalgia goes to a single beneficiary, Camp Good Days and Special Times. The summer camp, located on Keuka Lake, as well as its year-round activities in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Ithaca, are for children with cancer, and those in other dire situations. To date nearly four million disco dollars have benefited the camp. Camp Good Days was founded in 1979, the exact year that a World’s Largest Disco happened in Buffalo for the first time, in the very same concrete convention center. On the 15th anniversary

of that disco event, which drew 13,000, Buffalonian Dave Pietrowski, with assistance from a band of friend-volunteers, staged a revival. As he tells the story, his impetus was a forlorn, early-1990s downtown the Saturday night after Thanksgiving. Dave vowed to change that. Pietrowski, president of LoVullo Associates, an insurance brokerage located in Depew, threw the first World’s Largest Disco revival in 1994. Inspired by his mother, who taught her children to do charitable good deeds, he knew that the event had to be a fundraiser. Did he envision then that he was fashioning a Buffalo tradition? “I certainly didn’t know it was going to be, but I’m glad it is,” he says in a production office just off what will soon be the oversized dance floor. This is hours before doors will open to 1,400 VIP ticket holders at 8pm and 7,000 regular ticket holders an hour later. Dave has not yet changed into his checked white and maroon button-down shirt, this year’s inner-circle uniform: He’s still in his St. Joe’s sweatshirt (his high school alma mater).

Also in the office is one of Dave’s two teenage daughters, Alexa, who will be working WLD along with her sister Taylor, Dave’s wife Mary, and 400 other volunteers. ”You told my mom that there were only going to be five discos,” Alexa says. “When we were first dating,” he counters, “I said ‘This thing will only last a couple of years,’ and now it’s the 21st year. ”Right before I can’t wait for it to start, and then once it gets going I can’t wait for it to end,” Dave says. And what is it like to look out over the sea of the thousands of disco attendees? “The energy is incredible. I love watching people smiling and laughing, and the moments when people recognize each other.” For those who have not yet been, many come in novelty, oversized accessories: Somewhere along the way, faux ‘fros became a go-to item. This is a night to bask in the cartoonish aspects of the decade: freaky dance moves, wacky iconic stars (immortalized on large banners festooning the walls), and absolute love-in vibes.

HERITAGE INSIGHTS: ALLENDALE THEATER The Allendale Theater, 207 Allen Street, was built in 1913 by clothier Levin Michaels. Designed by Leon Lempert & Son in the neoclassical revival style, the Allendale staged silent films and performances by W. C. Fields, Katherine Cornell, and the Barrymores. By the 1970s, it featured dirty movies, and closed in 1982 after a short run of Alfred Hitchcock films. In 1985, the marquee collapsed into Allen Street, the event a metaphor for how far Buffalo—all American cities—had fallen to neglect. Later that year, the Allentown Association successfully outbid another party—intent on demolition for parking—for $1,000 at the city foreclosure auction. In 1986, the Theater of Youth (TOY) started a two-year, $1 million restoration project that grew to 13 years and more than $3.5 million—the Allendale reopening in 1999. Why did Colleen Fahey, TOY managing director, stick it out for so long? “Being an Irish girl from South Buffalo, I just P got stubborn.” DAILYPUBLIC.COM / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / THE PUBLIC

NEWS COMMENTARY

THE TEACHER WARS A history of the education profession in the US informs current debates BY SHANE MEYER

Talk of failing schools or American school kids who can’t compete with their Asian and European counterparts tends to revolve around the figure of the teacher—usually not a particular teacher, but teachers in the abstract. What are they doing wrong? How can they be motivated to do better? Are they even capable of doing better? If not, is it possible to replace them with those more suited to the task? Dana Goldstein’s book, The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession, demonstrates that when we talk about our expectations for teachers, we place unwarranted stress on their role in producing highly achieving students. In doing so, we obscure the matter—highly achieving students are most often the products of socially and economically secure families who place importance on their children’s education. Goldstein identifies two reductive types often projected onto the teacher – one positive, the other negative: first, that of the tireless and humble servant of the people, whose charge, the nation’s impoverished children, must be raised from the trappings of their conditions into a better, more productive life; and second, that of the incompetent, overpaid and selfish leech on a broken system. Whereas the former is a child’s one best hope for a better life, the latter is an obstacle to it.

by the insistence of secular education that self-improvement through education is its own brand of salvation. Even the most deprived individual should have the opportunity to improve his earthly lot. As Goldstein shows, the progressive force of Beecher and Mann’s vision contained a moral kernel. The centerpiece of the curriculum would not be the customary Western European liberal arts fare, but the “care of the physical, social, and moral interests,” as Beecher put it in her autobiography. Beecher and Mann, while sloughing their Puritan skin, disclosed an even deeper core of Puritanism. In doing so, they helped create the illusion of the school as a secular church, responsible for making “faithful, decent, socially adept young men and women.” School as a panacea for social ills. At the start, expectations for schools were impossibly high.

These are the types invoked when we talk about accountability and fixing schools. Both are exaggerations, designed to obscure a political subtext. Goldstein provides a more nuanced portrait of the figure of the teacher by tracing her evolution throughout the nation’s most tumultuous periods.

Mann, the US’s first state secretary of education, envisioned a nationwide education system that would compete with Prussian institutions, at the time considered the standard of excellence. However, limited by budget restraints (a common theme in Teacher Wars), he came up with a plan to open training schools to female applicants only, who would not have to be paid as much as their male counterparts.

Early reformers Catherine Beecher and Horace Mann envisioned secular education as an alternative to their own Calvinist upbringing. The Calvinist creed of the soul’s predestined salvation or damnation was revised

Mann and Beecher imagined that women were a better fit for their mission not only because of the relative cheapness, but also because women were perceived as less ambitious, less intelligent, and so more suited for

THE PUBLIC / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

such a humble role. It was not likely then, the thinking went, that women would chaff against the conditions of a mid-19th-century schoolroom. Mann and Beecher didn’t have Susan B. Anthony in mind while imagining their ideal instructor. She got her start as a school teacher, but soon found the pay demeaning and the subject matter dull. In disposing of the traditional liberal arts core of the curriculum, Mann and Beecher had lowered the achievement potential for teachers and students. Anthony, irritated especially on the point of remuneration, was eager to change the situation. At the 1853 meeting of the New York State Teachers’ Association, she saw an opening. The discussion, dominated by the male members, had lingered on the subject of their persistently low wages, giving Anthony her moment to make a salient point: “Do you not see that so long as society says a woman is incompetent to be a lawyer, minister, or doctor, but has ample ability to be a teacher, that every man of you who chooses this profession tacitly acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman? And this, too, is the reason that teaching is a less lucrative position, as here men must compete with the cheap labor of women?” The emancipation of the slaves presented another challenge for proponents of universal education.

COMMENTARY NEWS

WOMEN’S RIGHTS ACTIVIST SUSAN B. ANTHONY (PICTURED, FACING PAGE) GOT HER START AS A SCHOOL TEACHER, BUT SOON FOUND THE PAY DEMEANING AND THE SUBJECT MATTER DULL. Much like the educators formed in the Mann and Beecher mold—who struck out West, to inculcate the mass of pioneers—the educators who heeded the call to go South found themselves presented with a difficult task that was nonetheless undertaken with missionary zeal. “By 1870,” Goldstein notes, “black activists and Reconstruction politicians had driven every state to organize at least a rudimentary public education system, with separate schools serving white and black students.” However, black schools faced the immediate threat of violence and the long term threat of underfunding. Underfunded, overcrowded schools had difficulty retaining talented and ambitious teachers, who often went North, where their prospects improved. (Teacher retention, writes Goldstein, is a proven means of ensuring a school’s success.) Such was the case of Anne Cooper, who, although born a slave, received a “rigorous classical education” at the Collegiate Institute in Raleigh, and went on to become a member of the North Carolina Teacher’s Association, advocating for equal pay for black teachers and equal funding for black schools. When North Carolina disenfranchised black voters (poll taxes, literacy tests), Cooper headed North, where she was hired to teach Latin at M Street High School in Washington, DC, which Goldstein calls “the most prestigious black public school in the United States.” She taught there for 19 years until ousted in a manufactured scandal by white school board members. Beecher and Mann, along with Anthony and Cooper, provide Goldstein with three very different portraits of 19th-century educators. What unifies them is their use the promise of education to respond to a particular injustice: Beecher and Mann to the outsized role of religion in an ostensibly democratic society, Anthony to the subordinate position of the female, and Cooper to the lack of opportunity and outright racism in the US following the Civil War. By the early 20th century, Margaret Haley, leader of the Chicago Teachers Federation (the nation’s first teachers-only union) had led the charge to affiliate with the Chicago Federation of Labor, a male working-class union. Haley recognized that the union’s influence would help her and her sisters in the fight for higher wages and for the right to vote—a necessity if the largely female occupied profession was to come to have an important political voice. In response to progressive victories in women’s rights and worker’s rights, the business, political, and media elites closed ranks in favor of a system in which the well-off would get a traditional education, while the not-so-well-off would get vocational training. The new educational ideology was inspired by Taylorism (itself designed to increase production in factories), and centered on student evaluations, teacher ratings, and power amassed in the figure of the manager-principal. Teachers unions, which favored the option of a liberal arts education for all, were met with resistance by advocates of the tiered educational model. The vocational model had the aim of shunting minorities and poor whites into careers in which administrators believed they’d be more likely to excel.

Goldstein’s description of early-20th-century Chicago politics has an uncanny resemblance to the present day: “Education policy was set by a school board…and board members were lobbied aggressively by Chicago’s business and media elite, who resisted taxes that paid for ‘fads and frills’ like foreign language classes. The Chicago Tribune editorialized against the preposterous idea of preparing ‘the children of working men’ for college, and called summer school courses for poor students ‘alluring luxuries’.” The anti-democratic vocational model trades the promise of social progress for social engineering. The early 20th century shift to vocation driven curriculum for the lower classes is mirrored in the late 20th century shift to testing. Both limit the scope of instruction and, in doing so, remove power from teachers’ hands and place it into the hands of administrators. The push for top-down management and high-stakes IQ testing in the 1920s is the direct predecessor of today’s privatization movement. Value-added measurement [VAM] is the modern incarnation of the idea that a child’s performance on a standardized test is an accurate reflection of a teacher’s effectiveness. It is used in conjunction with testing to measure a child’s progress along with the teacher’s ability to influence it. In its simplest form, VAM uses a child’s standardized test score at the end of one year to predict his or her score on the next year’s exam. If the child does worse than expected, the difference is subtracted from the teacher’s value-added rating; if the child does better, the teacher’s rating improves by that margin. Goldstein notes that proponents of VAM used it to make claims inconsistent with its methodological limits. The measure rends teachers from their context and proposes that replacing them with a series of better teachers will bring about significant leaps in percentile rank. That shaky hypothesis brought about a seismic shift in the political discussion surrounding our expectations of teachers.

and gym—that had previously judged performance by more appropriate means; the resignation of talented and ambitious teachers frustrated by the new mandates; and, the outright manipulation of tests by administrators. Cheating, once the provenance of cavalier students, had become the specialty of staff. It’s a system that is designed to be gamed. The sorry fate of merit pay programs—attempted first during the accountability craze of the 1980s— repeated itself; and, after two years of data had been gathered, the most vocal supporters of Race to the Top and VAM had been chastened by the lack of measurable data to uphold their previously bold claims.

The limits of VAM had already been demonstrated in academic studies when the Obama administration appointed Arne Duncan as the secretary of education on the recommendation of Democrats for Education Reform [DFER]. (Goldstein describes DFER as “a political action committee founded by charter school philanthropists who work in the financial sector.”) Race to the Top, the administration’s signature education plan, compelled states into complying with the high-stakes testing/VAM regime by setting aside $4 billion in grants for states that complied:

Throughout her book, Goldstein reports that an improvement in the prestige (measured in pay, job security, and the social standing of the profession) of teaching as a profession is accompanied by an improvement in the quality of education kids receive. Yet, she acknowledges, at the same time, unions, the best advocates for proven means of improving teacher prestige came out of the 20th century looking worse than going into it.

“Politically, it worked. Though only nineteen states won Race to the Top grants, two-thirds of the states changed their laws on public school teachers in order to compete, half of the states declared that student test scores would be included in teacher evaluations, and eighteen weakened tenure protections.”

“Perhaps that is because union-won gains for educators coincided with a steady rightward shift in the nation’s larger political life, with severe shortages of living-wage jobs and affordable child care, housing and health care—many of the social supports, other than schools, that have the potential to improve poor children’s lives. Urban teachers, who were making strides in income and benefits appeared to be riding high compared to the families they served, even though teachers remained underpaid

In the wake of these highly touted changes, came a host of unexpected consequences: a substantial increase of school time spent test prepping and test taking; the use of tests in subjects—like art, music

Here she comes up against a paradox: as the movement of teacher unionism “increased in power, it declined in popularity”:

compared to their college-educated counterparts in the broader economy.” There’s little unions can do to effect the larger political mood of the country, but Goldstein argues that they suffer more in the public eye for a lack of transparency. Bad teachers are protected by a system that is designed to shuffle them rather than discard them (union members should direct themselves to her chapter titled “Union Teachers Versus Black Power During the Era of Community Control” for a hard look at their past failures). Nevertheless, Goldstein finds that the answer is not to dump unions, which have consistently fought for the dignity and prestige of the profession, but to recognize the job of teachers as one important variable influencing a child’s educational outcome, and to invest in them accordingly. Goldstein makes two policy recommendations for improving student outcomes and the relationship of teachers to the larger community: 1) higher pay for teachers is “absolutely associated with better student outcomes,” and “we must take this evidence seriously, because we are not paying teachers the upper-middle class salary that would align with our sky-high expectations for their work”; and 2) that “tenure cannot mean, in practice, that it is prohibitively expensive for a district to fire a bad teacher.” Proponents of publicly funded/privately operated charter schools have exploited unions’ inability to address this second point by doing away with job protections for their employees. In doing so, the second objective is achieved, while the first is dashed. A serious conversation about improving schools would start by talking about investment in teachers with the expectation of union transparency and collaboration with the community. When we talk about charter schools, we’re really talking about our unreasonable expectations for teachers. Like Beecher and Mann, we want them to be saints, working with a religious zeal for a pittance. Of course, we aver—with no sense of our own knack for self-contradiction—if the better teachers prove more effective, then their pay shall reflect it. When we talk about accountability, we’re really talking about making our current crop of teachers pay for the city’s systemic economic failure. The notion of accountability may have been engendered to well-meaning ends, but too often it’s employed as a means for deflecting blame. “Someone’s got to be held accountable,” says the man who expects stock to be taken in all corners but his. History doesn’t give us a simple checklist complete with boxes to be ticked in order to ensure we’re moving in the right direction, but it does present us with models of success and models of failure. More importantly, it reminds us how a noble cause looks in comparison with a base cause. Goldstein demonstrates that, from the mid 19th century to today, the plight of the American teacher has aligned with the plight of progressivism in general. At the core of progressive thinking is the noble belief in the possibility for the gradual improvement of humankind. Teachers have been on the front lines of such causes for the past two centuries—one reason why Goldstein is right to call P theirs the “most embattled profession.”

PERLA & PERLA, LLP INJURED? DON’T JUST CALL A NUMBER. CALL A NAME.

hen looking for an injury lawyer, you can call a number that you heard in a jingle, or you can call a name. With 36 years of trial experience and $millions recovered, I will personally handle your case and get you every penny you deserve.

MARK PERLA FORMER ERIE COUNT Y COURT JUDGE. FORMER CIVIL CHIEF, U.S. ATTORNEY’S OFFICE

CAR ACCIDENTS • SLIP & FALL • WORKPLACE INJURIES NEVER A FEE UNTIL YOU ARE PAID

PERLAATTORNEYS.COM 361-7777 367 LINWOOD AVENUE, BUFFALO, NY 14209 “A T T O R N E Y A D V E R T I S I N G . P A S T R E S U L T S D O N O T A S S U R E F U T U R E S U C C E S S . ”

PLEASE

DAILYPUBLIC.COM / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / THE PUBLIC

NEWS COMMENTARY

GOOD VIBRATIONS Recalling a conversation with Nobel laureate Herbert Hauptman BY BRUCE JACKSON

Herbert Hauptman and I were sitting on a sofa at the UB president’s house waving our hands. People came over to interrupt our conversation, the way people do at academic parties, but they didn’t get in. Most of them wanted to talk to Herbert, who was then UB’s only Nobel laureate. It was April 2008. John Simpson was then president of UB. Herbert won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Jerome Karle, in 1985. His work in crystallography let pharmaceutical manufacturers keyhole certain drugs for specific cells, making, among other things, chemotherapy for cancer patients much more specific and therefore much less destructive to other parts of the body. If you watched the TV series Breaking Bad, the first episode held on a plaque in Walter White’s bedroom that identified him as a research assistant in Herbert’s team. That was fictional. Herbert’s work was not, and it made a real difference in the world. Herbert was a generation older than I—he was born in 1917; I in 1936—but we had a lot of background in common. We were both Jewish kids from New York who made it through the system and found ways to do our work. We both came out of New York City schools. That evening on the sofa when we were waving our hands: We weren’t talking about ideas. We were talking about an annoying affliction we both had, something called “essential tremor.” It hits the hands primarily, which annoyed us both. Herbert liked to make models of crystal structures, and the tremor made it ever harder for him to do that. It made it ever harder for me to make notes or sign photographs or books. The nasty thing about essential tremor is, it doesn’t do much of anything when you’re not doing much of anything, but when you set about doing something, your hand is not your friend. Gluing this piece to that piece, having soup at a dinner, typing quickly: It gets in the way. Your brain says, “Let’s do this,” but your body says, “Wait a minute.” For some people with this affliction, a shot of alcohol will settle the hand down. I’m like that: A glass of wine, a martini, I can write a note or sign a photo or a book. Without that mediation, I cannot do such simple things. I now ask my graduate students to send me their papers on email so I can make comments on Word Comments. But Herbert’s did not respond to alcohol at all. That’s what we were talking about that night when we were waving our hands and people stayed away because they thought we were talking about ideas but we were only comparing vibrations. The neurologists we both dealt with hadn’t a clue why a bit of booze helped some of us and did others of us no good. They all said, “Whatever.”

THE PUBLIC / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

IT WAS ABOUT OUR VIBRATIONS. WE WEREN’T WAVING OUR HANDS; WE WERE HOLDING THEM UP FOR EACH OTHER TO COMPARE FREQUENCIES. One time I gave an afternoon lecture and had a book signing immediately afterwards. Diane made me a martini and put it in a coffee mug which I didn’t start sipping until the Q&A. So by the time of the book-signing, my hand was calm and I got through it. But I said, “We can’t do this any more. If it gets out that I’m having booze in the late afternoon in order to be able to sign books, well…” There are afflictions of age we all are comfortable with: the body cannot do what it could do a few years ago; it sags in places it did not sag previously. We function more above the neck than below it. We depend on certain pills. That is the natural order of things. But the matter of the hand bothered me, and still does. I used to be a guitar player; I am not anymore: I cannot do it. I cannot even tune one. I used to be an astonishingly fast typist; I am not anymore: It is always frustrating. When I could type really fast, I would see my thoughts on the screen before I heard them in my head; now I’m always catching up. That is the sort of thing Herbert and I were talking about on the couch at the UB president’s house that night, waving our hands, when they wanted to talk to us but we did not want to talk to them. Later, people asked me, “What were you into there on the couch?” and “What were you and Herbert so intense about?” and “Why were you two sitting there, waving your hands?” I said, “We were just talking.” They wanted to hear about ideas, but I had no ideas to report. It was about our vibrations. We weren’t waving our hands; we were holding them up for each other to compare frequencies. We weren’t talking about theories of micro- or macrocosm; we were talking about how you manage a pen, how you glue a strut for a model. After a while, we got up and walked out to the patio. We talked about the two wars George W. Bush had plunged us into: Afghanistan, with which Bush had gotten bored and had therefore let Osama bin Laden and his entire senior team escape from Bora Bora, and Iraq, which seemed to us then, and which later proved to be, totally bogus: We stopped looking for the villain of 9-11 to pursue weapons of mass destruction everyone in the White House knew did not exist. So Herbert and I had gone from the annoying vibrations of our hands to the atrocious wars in the Middle East.

It was a cool clear night in a Buffalo spring, a lovely time of year here. Herbert looked up and pointed at the stars. That patio was isolated from a lot of local light pollution so you could see a bunch of them. Not like Nome or the Big Bend or other places I’ve been where you can still see the Milky Way, but for around here, pretty good. “You look at that,” he said, “and it’s hard to take a lot of this seriously. The stars we’re looking at, none of them are there anymore. Some aren’t even there at all. The light from them started on its way here a thousand, a million years ago.” We both knew that was absolutely true, and that our place in the universe, in relation to all that, was negligible. Several orders of magnitude beyond negligible. We talked about vibrations: how light existed in a field of vibrations, how sound existed in a field of vibrations, how the movements of the people on that patio existed in a field of vibrations. And then, the next day Herbert went back to work on his crystals giving physicians ever-more sophisticated access to the human body, and I went back to doing whatever it was I thought I was up to at that time. And we both went back to talking and writing about things we thought were out of any natural rhythm at all, that just did violence to the world. I look over what I have just written, think of the idiocy of our politicians and so many of my academic colleagues, or Herbert’s superb lucidity and grand perspective, and I cannot help but think of my favorite Whitman poem: When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

PUBLIC QUESTIONNAIRE THEATER

ESTATE SALE

Liquidation of Multi-Family Estate & Former Auto Repair Shop Friday & Saturday December 5 - 6th 9AM - 5PM 1128 Main St Buffalo, NY 14209

cHOUSEHOLD: Kitchen and Appliances, Lawn & Yard tools, Automotive Tools & Equipment Automobilia including old signs and gas pumps, Vintage Christmas Decorations cANTIQUES & COLLECTIBLES: WW2 Military uniforms, medals and equipment, Vintage toys, games and puzzles. Zippo Lighters, Political Buttons, Knives, Pens Bottle Openers, Advertising Ashtrays and Thermometers, Fireman’s Helmets and Alarm Equipment, Police Dept. Memorabilia Vintage Crystal Beach Items, Lionel Train Accessories cMUSICAL INSTRUMENTS and Accessories Including Guitars, Drums, Amplifiers and effects pedals Vintage A/V and stereo equipment, Old Vinyl LP’s 45s cSPORTING GOODS: old hockey sticks, baseball gloves and bats, Baseball & Football Cards cDOZENS OF FRAMED ARTWORK, PRINTS & POSTERS THIS WILL BE A HUGE SALE DON’T MISS IT. Contact 1128estatesale@gmail.com for more info

PLEASE EXA PROOF CA

IF YOU APPROVE ERRORS WHIC PUBLIC CANNOT BE HELD RESPO THOROUGHLY EVEN IF THE AD IS A

MESSAGE TO ADVERTISER

Thank you for advertising with THE PUBLIC. Please review your ad and check for any errors. The original layout instructions have been followed as closely as possible. THE PUBLIC offers design services with two proofs at no charge. THE PUBLIC is not responsible for any error if not notified within 24 hours of receipt. The production department must have a signed proof in order to print. Please sign and fax this back or approve by responding to this email.

THE PUBLIC QUESTIONNAIRE:

MARC SACCO BY ANTHONY CHASE

THIS PROOF MAY ONLY BE USED FOR Marc Sacco is currently appearing in David Sedaris’s SantaLand Diaries at Road Less Traveled. He plays a cynical New York department store employee required to dress as one of Santa’s helpers and to shepherd children and their often odious parents in to see Santa Claus during the Christmas shopping season. Among his numerous stage appearances, the Niagara University graduate has appeared many times at MusicalFare, including Adrift in Macao, La Cage aux Folles, Rent, Avenue Q, Falsettos, their production of Bat Boy at Studio Arena, and Altar Boyz, for which he won an Artie Award. For BUA, he has done The Temperamentals, Little Dog Laughed, Valhalla, Naked Boys Singing, Southern Baptist Sissies, and Pterodactyls, and also his well received cabaret shows: Marc with a ‘C’ and Marc with a ‘C’ Quel. An actor of great range and versatility, with his puckish good humor and mischievous demeanor, Sacco seems well suited to his current role. Here, he answers the Public Questionnaire. Girls. But I don’t really feel guilty about it.

When and where were you the happiest? At my

Who is your favorite fictional hero?

What is your greatest fear? Flying.

Who are your real-life heroes? Anyone who

30th birthday roller disco party.

Which talent do you most wish you had? I wish

I could play piano.

What would you change about your appearance? I would be taller. I always

wanted to be at least six feet tall.

What trait do you most dislike in others? Excessive negativity. I also dislike this

within myself.

What do you most value in your friends? Loyalty and being trustworthy.

Not the usual!

What is your guilty pleasure? The Golden

What word would your friends use to describe you? Matter-of-fact.

Award Winning

Sherlock Holmes.

Extended Holiday Hours

is raising or has ever raised children. That’s a hard job. What do you consider to be the most overrated virtue? Chastity.

On what occasion do you lie? When it will spare

someone’s feelings.

798 Elmwood at Auburn Buffalo . 873-0734

If you come back in another life, what person or thing would you like to be? A giraffe. See

Every diamond we sell comes with our most prized possession - Our Reputation!

fifth question above.

What is your motto? Take responsibility for

your actions.

9 IF YOU APPROVE ERR PUBLIC CANNOT BE H

DAILYPUBLIC.COM / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / THE PUBLIC

MUSIC FEATURE

RISE ABOVE THE FLOCK Ragbirds front-gal Erin Zindle is a travelin’ machine BY CHRISTOPHER JOHN TREACY

Growing up isn’t easy. It’s fraught with looming uncertainty and awkward, uncomfortable moments galore. But some of us roll with the punches more gracefully than others. Michigan-based quintet the Ragbirds, who’ll play the Ninth Ward at Babeville this Friday, have spent the last few years in a quirky, coming-of-age period, facing a number of personnel changes while parenthood entered the picture. There was a time when such tumult would permanently break most bands. But we’ve moved into an era where life’s most basic demands—food, shelter, security—aren’t often met by a career in the arts, even when your talent floats to the top of the heap. Periods of time spent in bands are transient, and careers in music lack sustainability, more so than ever before. Most often, people opt out because they’re not surviving well, not because of comparatively lofty issues like “artistic differences.” “The lineup changes have been both good and bad,” front-gal Erin Zindle tells me over the phone during a tour stop last week. “We’ve been so lucky to work with great people, and these are all relationships that have ended peacefully. But it’s been challenging in that you have to start fresh each time, make room from the new energy and the new perspective…and it takes time to get the band fully gelled again. It may have slowed down the momentum we had going a few years ago.” Thankfully, the Ragbirds don’t have a ton of competition from other, similar sounding bands. Serving up a gypsy-inflected world-music stew that defies categorization, the band has the percussive kick of 1990s roots-sensation, Poi Dog Pondering, married with the Eastern Mysticism of It’s a Beautiful Day, a late 1960s Bay-area band that caused a stir with its violin-wielding vocalist, David LaFlamme. Top that off with the feminine touch of Zindle’s capable croon and what 10 THE PUBLIC / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

THE RAGBIRDS W/ DANIEL CHAMPAGNE, FOLKFACES FRI, DEC 5 / 7PM / $10 9TH WARD AT BABEVILLE, 341 DELAWARE AVE. you’ve got isn’t easily replicated: the Ragbirds are a singular sensation. “People’s lives change over the course of two or three years,” Zindle said. “They get married, have kids…different things pull us in various directions. It’s a hard life being on the road, and even though people like to glamorize it, that’s not an accurate reflection. There’s no fancy bus or hotels every night the way we have to do it. I love touring because it keeps me engaged and alert. I tend to get too comfortable when I don’t have a specific place to be at a certain time, so it’s a positive thing for me. But it’s definitely not for people that require a high degree of certainty.” Before Zindle was maturing with her band, she grew up in the more traditional sense right outside of Buffalo in the Lancaster/Depew area. As a classically trained violinist with a nagging creative vision, she left when she was 19 and headed to Michigan. But she still gets excited about coming back here. “I feel a general nostalgia for my hometown,” she said. “When you grow up in a suburb there’s always a mystique about the nearby city—‘the cool place’—and I still experience that thrill along with a feeling of familiarity and connectedness.”

Zindle says the band released their 2013 live disc, We Belong to the Love, in part as a way of appeasing fans that have long maintained that the band’s true spirit doesn’t come across as well in studio recordings. As a means of hopefully bridging that gap, they’ve been playing more and more new songs at their shows as they ready a followup to 2012’s Travelin’ Machine. “It’s something I’ve heard from fans repeatedly over the years, and we’ve had a hard time accomplishing that,” she said. “They’re two completely different mediums, and it’s not so simple as ‘paint your canvas in the studio and then duplicate it’—that’s not how it works. I’m really ambitious and tend to rush into things, so lately I’ve been trying to pull back the reigns. We’re giving the new songs extra time to develop live and have resisted the urge to run into s recording studio with them.” Once the new disc is ready, Zindle forecasts a return to the more rigorous touring schedule of yore—the Ragbirds used to play over 150 shows a year, traveling in a modest van running on converted veggie oil. Thanks to a successful kickstarter campaign, a larger van was acquired last year, though the awesome low-cost fuel-source remains the same. She married percussionist Randall Moore in 2006 and recently had a baby girl, Aviva, which has also been a catalyst for slowing down. “Having a baby changes everything,” she said. “We couldn’t go quite as far for quite as long, and so we’ve stayed a little closer to home this year. Each of these decisions has affected the reach and hype of the band. But it’s all part of the journey and I wouldn’t change anything. My husband and I are the two original members of this band, and P our love is at the heart of the music from the beginning.”

SPOTLIGHT MUSIC I’ve also seen the misery and disappointment that ensues when it doesn’t work out. Plus, I never really could envision this wonderful place to go that showed so much promise, and I think people get screwed over chasing that. After all, it’s not like I can’t work on my music here.” Swarts’s next show is at Filigrees on December 11 with Hooked on Casiophonics, an electronic hip-hop duo she formed with local funk-maven Cordell “RockNutz” Brooks that simultaneously parodies and pays tribute to the state of commercial hip-hop. It’s where unabashed libido and bathroom humor meet, and it seems to have struck a chord with Buffalo, given that the duo enjoys fairly frequent bookings. But Swarts has never been one to concentrate on a single project. She plays guitar, flute, clarinet, saxophone, mandolin, bass, and various keyboards, and she does it in a handful of local bands, contributing to the Gifted Children, Bad Ronald, Anal Pudding, and Family Bacon Funk. She’s just started playing in a new, unnamed outfit that revolves around traditional Bulgarian music.

Want to advertise in The Public? ADVERTISE@ DAILYPUBLIC.COM

DAILYPUBLIC.COM

Her solo shows are where she gets to show off her bewitching pipes and air her grievances with the world. “I always think of my solo guitar stuff as the heavier, more emotional side,” she said. “Casiophonics is the direct opposite of that. The more playful band projects help alleviate stress, so I’m not always living in that serious, dark space. It’s nice to have some reprieve.” Tying together her passion for music and involvement in visual art is her ongoing role as a key purveyor of Infringement Festival. Having formed an alliance with Infringement guru Curt Rotterdam many years ago, Swarts now has her students in on the fun, annually designing fliers for the event. Not only does she perform repeatedly throughout the entire 11-day shebang, she also skips from venue to venue, supporting as many artists as she possibly can. To catch her during Infringement is to encounter a woman happily saturated in a state of creative delirium. “It’s an art marathon, and it’s exhausting,” she said. “But it’s also an ideal world: for 11 days there’s art and music everywhere…we get to live in a fantasyland where everyone just does art. Buffalo has the largest Infringement festival going, while some other participating cities really struggle to put theirs on. We do fundraising all year to pay for that.”

PAM SWARTS

The festival’s ongoing success is part and parcel to what Swarts feels that Buffalo has going for it…and what she fears it’s in danger of losing. The concept of urban renewal means different things to different people.

BY CHRISTOPHER JOHN TREACY

Pam Swarts loves Buffalo… most of the time. But when we talked last week, she’d just endured the drive back from Batavia, where she teaches digital arts to the masses at Genesee Community College. The commute took place during what will undoubtedly go down in the record books as a crippling blizzard. Her eye-catching Scion is decorated blue with bolts of white lightening, and to know her is to be in on the joke: There’s definitely a creative storm brewing in that car. A sea of patch-cords, text materials, instruments, clothes, and coffee cups whizzes by like a private thunderstorm on wheels, a conundrum of ideas buzzing in the driver’s head of red hair. On this

day, however, the heavier storm was definitely outside the car. Still, the 49-year-old Scorpio is as used to it as any Western New Yorker could be, having arrived in Buffalo in 1990 after spending time in Sparta, Fredonia, and Rochester. The daily journeys to Batavia began in 1997, but through it all, Swarts has pursued a life in music alongside her teaching career. A healthy distrust of the music industry and all its red-herring-hope keeps her here. “The satisfaction of making music is, to me, more personal,” she said. “I’ve seen so many other people go out there that are genuinely talented, and

“I actually really like the poverty aspect of Buffalo, and I think it allows easy access to certain things—cheap practice space, for instance—that are out of reach elsewhere,” she said. “Additionally, there’s a value in having to think to get by, it forces you to be creative…as does winter, which keeps me occupied with indoor projects.” We’re in a cool place, because Buffalo has gotten to a point of sophistication where offbeat things are lauded,” she continued. “But at the same time, many of our local artists are worried about getting priced out of their city spaces. The whole idea of a big-money-savior is a foolish one, and often the folks who are truly responsible for positive change don’t get compensated. It’s all done under the guise of advancement, but real progP ress always has to come from within.”

THIS WEEK ON DAILYPUBLIC.COM CULTURE>MUSIC WIN TICKETS!

UPCOMING TICKETED SHOWS

FRI 12/5 @ 9PM RELICS

» $5 ADV / $7 DOS » 18+

SAT 12/6 @ 9PM DIRTY SMILE

CD Release Party w/ Reggie Childs

» $5 / $10 and CD » 18+

WED 12/10 @ 5PM SPUN OUT JAM OUT

Art, FLOW, Dancing, DJ’s, Bands » $3 - $6 » 18+

SAT 12/13 @ 9PM SCHISM AND ANGER IS A GIFT

(Tool and Rage Against the Machine Tribute Bands) » $10 ADV / $12 DOS » $3 w/ Sabres Ticket Stub » 21+

THU 12/18 @ 9PM KERFUFFLE AFTER PARTY W/ THE TINS » FREE 9 PM » 21+

WED 12/31 @ 9PM AQUEOUS & FUNKTIONAL FLOW

» $10 ADV/ $12 DOS » $7 w/ Sabres Ticket Stub » 21+

TICKETS: BUFFALOIRONWORKS.COM OR TICKETFLY.COM CAN BE PURCHASED AT: BIW BOX OFFICE OR TERRAPIN STATION

SHARE OR RETWEET OUR GIVEAWAY POST ON SOCIAL MEDIA

CHECK FOR MUSIC NEWS ON TWITTER

@PUBLICBFLO

49 ILLINOIS STREET • BUFFALO, NY 716.200.1893 • BUFFALOIRONWORKS.COM DAILYPUBLIC.COM / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / THE PUBLIC

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

RATHBUN TAKES NIAGARA FALLS / CAITLIN CASS is a Buffalo-based illustrator whose work can be perused at greatmomentsinwesternciv.com. DAILYPUBLIC.COM / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / THE PUBLIC 13

EVENTS CALENDAR PUBLIC APPROVED

IN PRINT

FLOGGING MOLLY THURSDAY DEC 4 DIFFICULT NIGHT “Ex-Lover” (Song) Recommended If You Like: Stephen Malkmus, Pavement Slacker quartet continues to release great, one-off singles via soundcloud. “Ex-Lover” is led by Shane Meyer’s typically desperate vocals.

7PM / RAPIDS THEATER, 1711 MAIN ST. / $27.50 [PUNK] Flogging Molly’s Celtic-tinged punk rock anthems haven’t staled a bit, even after nearly two decades. In fact, their sound—comprised of folk instrumentation, stammering drums, raging guitar, and Dublin-born David King’s passionate bark—offers up one of the best escapes from the ordinary in music today. In 2000, the band released their debut record, Swagger, on SideOneDummy records. The record inserted the Celtic-punk band into the mainstream with songs like “The Worst Day Since Yesterday” and “The Ol’ Beggars Bush.” The seven-piece band, which includes pro skater Matt Hensley on the accordion, are a workingman’s band, often sending messages of alienation with a glint of hope in the background through their musically rich, yet straightforward punk rock anthems. The band usually makes a yearly effort to schedule a Buffalo or Niagara Falls tour date into their tour, and this year will be no different when they take the stage at The Rapids Theatre on Thursday, December 4. You can bet your last drink that their manically paced spurts of punk rock enthusiasm will give way to arena-rousing melodies. -KELLIE POWELL

BILL AND JAMIE’S HOUSE Snowed In Stairwell Mystery (Album)

WEDNESDAY DEC 3

RIYL: The Moldy Peaches, sing-a-longs

Ian Karmel

Recorded live at the Hostel BuffaloNiagara with Ohio’s Velvet Alphabet during #snowvember, the touching acoustic set features current and former members of Mallwalkers,

8pm Helium Comedy Club, 30 Mississippi St. $15-$29

Sexist, and TMMC.

FASHION EXPO 1990 “Thunder Coast” (Song)

[COMEDY] Ian Karmel loves basketball, and his father; who is a 59 year old attorney who loves kombucha and Call of Duty. He also loves making audiences laugh through his hilarious Twitter feed, on which he makes ample note of the Portland Trail Blazer’s status and his father’s habits. The comedian from Portland, Oregon will come to Buffalo’s Helium Comedy club this Wednesday, December 3 through Saturday, December 6 for six shows. -CP

RIYL: 90’s acid house The latest single of infectious keys and blasting beats from the former dormant bedroom project turned suddenly busy producer (Difficult Night’s Miles Kirsch) will be included on the forthcoming album, Club Bleek.

JACK TOPHT & LITTLE CAKE “Can I Talk To You About My Son” (Song) RIYL: MC Chris, Erykah Badu Soulful folk number from the alternative Allen Town MC and partner in crime, Radarada’s Little Cake. Keep an eye on the pair’s soundcloud account for seemingly weekly additions.

LOCAL SHOW PICK OF THE WEEK SECRET PIZZA THE HOYT HOUSE FRI, DEC 5 / 5PM / $3

THURSDAY DEC 4 Lift Grand Opening 8pm Lift Nightclub, 257 Franklin St. free

[ELECTRONIC/DANCE] Buffalo’s newest electronic dance music spot, Lift Nightclub, at the corner of Franklin and Chippewa, is finally having a grand opening party on Thursday, December 4. The free event includes the music of house DJ Nik Styles, two free drinks and hors d’oeuvres, as well as your chance to win some cool prizes. -CP

Difficult Night and Schwervon 9pm Electric Avenue, 300 Ellicott St donations suggested

[ROCK] Schwervon is a veteran indie rock two-piece transplanted to Kansas City from New York City’s anti-folk scene. Matt plays a guitar that ranges from grunge to folk, Nan plays the drums, and they both sing. Opening is the Buffalo four-piece fronted by The Public contributor Shane Meyer, Difficult Night. Together now for over a year, Difficult Night has rounded the corner with a creative turn on folk rock with plaintive and swooning vocals from Meyer and strong play from Miles Kirsch on the keys, Damian Weber on bass, and David Hooper on drums. Both bands will play Buffalo’s Electric Avenue on Thursday, December 4. -AARON LOWINGER

14 THE PUBLIC / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

Ornette: Made In America 7pm Hallwalls, 341 Delaware Ave. $5-$8

[SCREENING] At the age of 14, Ornette Coleman picked up his first saxophone. Coleman grew up in segregated Texas. This is not a cliché: but the young boy who would eventually become a cultural icon in the jazz world and beyond, actually saved up money to buy his first saxophone by shining shoes. He says that the first time he picked up the instrument, he played it as well as he would 25 years later in Hamburg, Germany when he reunited the original Ornette Coleman quartet. Director Shirley Clarke and producer Kathelin Hoffman chronicle the famed jazzist’s boyhood in Fort Worth Texas as the saxophonist returned there in 1983, in their film Ornette: Made In America. The film will be screened at Hallwalls on Thursday, December 4. -CP

Cold Turkey 8pm Nietzsche’s, 248 Allen St.

[ROCK] Each year for the past 28 years, Nietzsche’s has hosted a tribute to John Lennon. This year will be no different with a slew of local bands including Tom Stahl and the Dangerfields and Bob James and the Love Parade, and singer/songwriters like Sara Elizabeth, Celia White, Julia Meldrum, and many more paying tribute to one of the greatest musical minds of all time. The event is called Cold Turkey, and it’s this Thursday, December 4 at Nietzsche’s, presented by the Buffalo Song Project. -CP

Bill Kirchen

7pm Sportsmens Tavern, 326 Amherst St. $20

[COUNTRY] Bill Kirchen has seen many things throughout his long career and he brings those experiences with every pluck of his guitar string. Known as a musical outlaw from the onset of his career, Kirchen’s live show is fueled with raw energy and the American spirit. His blend of rockabilly, country, and blues has a unique quality to it that is hard to understand without seeing and hearing it live. The old school badass will be making a stop at his favorite spot in the city, Sportsmen’s Tavern, on Thursday, December 4. The “Honky Tonk Holiday Show” will feature Kirchen and his band Too Much Fun, appropriately named and understood once you see them live. If it’s any indicator of the type of stringed-encyclopedia Kirchen is, he’s known for mimicking the styles of damn near every major guitarist in music history in his song “Hot Rod Lincoln.” For music lovers and historians alike, Kirchen is a bucket list-type act to catch at least once in your life; don’t miss this one. -JEREMIAH SHEA

FRIDAY DEC 5 Reciprocity: A Side-by-Side Art Exhibition 5:30pm El Museo, 91 Allen St.

[ARTS] The Buffalo Public Schools Art Department and El Museo will be present an exhibition featuring the work of students, teachers, and teachers’ own children, and how delicately they are all inter-connected on Friday, December 5. Three categories of awards for youth, teen, and adult will be recognized. If you haven’t checked out one of these exhibitions before, it’s an uplifting complement to a night out in Allentown. -AL

The Relics

8pm Buffalo Iron Works, 49 Illinois St. $5-$7

[TRIBUTE] Local Pink Floyd tribute band, The Relics, will play at Buffalo Iron Works on Friday, December 5. With an experimental, cutting-edge group like Pink Floyd, paying homage must be uniquely executed. The Relics achieve this by incorporating improvisational jam cutaways into Floyd’s original album tracks, and creating a visual experience—a notoriously Floydian quirk—through multimedia lightshows. -KP

CALENDAR EVENTS

ROAD LESS TRAVELED PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS

PLEASE E PROOF C

PUBLIC APPROVED

IF YOU APPROVE ERRORS PUBLIC CANNOT BE HELD THOROUGHLY EVEN IF THE AD LIVE MUSIC EVERYNIGHTFOR OVER 30YEARS! WEDNESDAY

DEC 3

THURSDAY

DEC 4

FRIDAY

DEC 5

Pam Ryder 9PM FREE

Cold Turkey: A John Lennon Tribute A band named sue 6PM FREE

Uncle Ben’s Remedy Folkfaces The CPX 10PM $5

SATURDAY

DEC 6

BUFFALO BEARD BRAWL FRIDAY DEC 5 7PM / TOWN BALLROOM, 681 MAIN ST. / $10-$15 [BEARDS] We’ve all wondered: “who boasts Buffalo’s best beard?” The answer may finally be given on Friday, December 5 at Buffalo Beard Brawl: The 2014 Beard and Moustache Championships at the Town Ballroom. Now you may be asking, “Are you serious?” The answer to that question is yes, this is serious. “How does one judge a beard?” might be your next logical question. Well, a panel of judges including Brandi Viola of VH1’s Rock of Love, Trevor Cranmer of the Rochester Beardsmen Society (yes, there is a Rochester Beardsmen Society), as well as Craig “Shameless” Lucas of Electric Tattoo, local musician Keith Shuskie, and Steve K of Edge Underground will be on hand to rate those staches in terms of size, density, healthiness, and personal fit. So wax those moustaces and groom those goatees, because it sounds like this one could be a fight to the death. -CORY PERLA

DEC 10

Thank you for advertis with THE PUBLIC. Ple review your ad and ch for any errors. The orig layout instructions h been followed as closely possible. 4THE DECEMBER - 14PUBLIC off design services with t proofs at no charge. T PUBLIC is not respons for any error if not notif within 24 hours of rece The production departm must have a signed proo order to print. Please s and fax this back or appr by responding to this emai

THIS PROOF MAY ONLY BE USE

Afterfunk (tor) Adam Bromstien Trio The Goods 9PM $5

WEDNESDAY

MESSAGE TO ADVERTIS

The Kevin Gaynor Experience

2 PERFORMANCES ADDED! DECEMBER 19 & 20!

9PM FREE

248 ALLEN STREET 716.886.8539

NIETZSCHES.COM

TICKETS: 716.629.3069 ROADLESSTRAVELEDPRODUCTIONS.ORG ROAD LESS TRAVELED THEATER: 639 MAIN ST. BUFFALO NY 14203 (INSIDE MARKET ARCADE FILM & ARTS CENTRE)

Candy Coated Darkness 7pm Artspace Lofts, 1219 Main St. $5

[ARTS] New works by Tanya Chutko, Darlene Garcia Torres, and Ashley Smith will be on exhibit in the expansive first floor of Artspace this Friday, December 5. These three art educators are revisiting the chops that launched their careers. Chutko is a teacher at Olmsted #156, Smith at Elmwood Village Charter School, and Garcia Torres a doctoral education student at UB. All three have backgrounds in multimedia, so expect a crushed-peppermint kind of visual experience to perhaps declare the underside of the holiday season. -AL

Prohibition Repeal Day Celebration and Keg Procession 8pm Hydraulic Hearth, 716 Swan Street

[DRINK] On Friday, December 5, the Hydraulic Hearth restaurant and brewery will be hosting a keg procession at 8pm (following Holiday Live at Larkin) in honor of the 81st anniversary of the 21st Amendment—the repeal of Prohibition. The celebration will have music, themed drinks, and kegs provided by three of Larkinville’s newest residents: Community Beer Works, Flying Bison Brewing Company, and Buffalo Distilling Company. -KP

CONTINUED ON PAGE 16 DAILYPUBLIC.COM / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / THE PUBLIC 15

EVENTS CALENDAR CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15

PUBLIC APPROVED

Live At Larkin Holiday 5pm Larkin Square, 745 Seneca Street free

[HOLIDAY] Live at Larkin has become a holiday tradition. As usual they’ve got the Robot Holiday crew on hand to deliver some non-traditional, unusual, and alternative holiday music. (My favorite: “We Three Robots.” Think Daft Punk meets The New Horizons.) Since this is Larkin Square, there will of course be plenty of food trucks on hand to satisfy any taste. Expect a holiday marketplace full of vendors like Elizabeth’s Holiday Granola, Fern Croft Flora, Mazurek’s Bakery, Devil Chicken Design, and many more. To top it all off, sales of Robot Holiday music and Elizabeth’s Holiday Granola will benefit for the Food Bank of WNY. The 3rd annual Holiday Live At Larkin event is this Friday, December 5, and it is free and open to the public. -CP PHOTO BY JACOB PAYNE

WOODEN WAVES ALBUM RELEASE SHOW FRIDAY DEC 5 8PM / MOHAWK PLACE, 47 E. MOHAWK ST. / $5 [ROCK] The city’s five-member surf rock staple, Wooden Waves, are releasing their long anticipated LP Wilder Dreams on December 9 via One Percent Press. And to celebrate the hard work, they’re throwing a release party this Friday, December 5 at Mohawk Place. In addition to showcasing the album live, they’ve rallied some of Buffalo’s most distinguished outfits to fill out the lineup: Jack Topht and Little Cake, Mallwalkers, and TMMC. Come revel in what will be a sampling of the best the city’s alternative music scene has to offer. -JEANETTE CHIN

PUBLIC APPROVED

Slice of Americana 10:30pm Nietzsche’s, 248 Allen St. $5

[AMERICANA] Three of Buffalo’s finest Americana acts come together at Nietzsche’s on Friday, December 5. Uncle Ben’s Remedy, Folkfaces, and the Andrew J. Reimers Country Punk Extravaganza, each band with their own distinct style—Folkfaces with their edgy folk rock, CPX with their aggressive country sounds, and Uncle Ben’s Remedy with their outlaw rock sound—will take the stage for a whole night of downhome rock. -CP

SATURDAY DEC 6 Floodwood 9pm Sportsmens Tavern, 326 Amherst St. $17-$20

[BLUEGRASS] Floodwood might not ring a bell for most that aren’t in the musical know, but how about a band name all Buffalonians should be familiar with: moe. The link between the two isn’t necessarily stylistic, but in the names that make up the group. Al Schnier (guitar) and Vinnie Amico (drums) are in both bands, and while Floodwood can attribute some of their success to the association, the band is an incredible act in their own right; leveraging experience with a unique musical vision that pulls fans in. The group is a string band and draws influences from everything from bluegrass to blues to fill out their progressive sound. Floodwood will be playing Sportsmen’s Tavern on Saturday, December 6 for an intimate set at a venue known as a place to catch a good show. John & Mary open the show. -JS

SEVEN FRIDAY DEC 5 8PM / DNIPRO UKRAINIAN CULTURAL CENTER, 562 GENESEE ST. / $20-$25 [ELECTRONIC/DANCE] As far as bass music goes, Seven and Joe Raygun make a good pair. Raygun’s lush vocals perfectly compliment Seven’s reverberating synth tones and steaming hi hats, which the UK jungle master has been perfecting since the early 1990s. When they come to Dnipro Ukrainian Cultural Center on Friday, December 5, it will be a treat for all Buffalo bass heads, not only because Seven and Raygun drop dubstep breakdowns like depth charges, but also because the show features one of the biggest line ups of local DJ talent this city has ever seen. Basha, The Verdict, Potent J, Jah Creation, Neckbrace, Drop D, Armageddon Party, and many more will be spread out through the center’s two main rooms. It’s a bass takeover and everyone is invited. Presented by Frosty Tone and Dark Waves. -CP

16 THE PUBLIC / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

CALENDAR EVENTS PUBLIC APPROVED

Red Show 7pm Dreamland, 387 Franklin St. $5

[ARTS] This Saturday, December 6 for the first time ever Dreamland will be hosting a red show. The eclectic multi-media venue will be dedicating itself to the color red for the night—red light bulbs, red instruments, and encouraging attenders (that means you) to wear all red attire. Accept the challenge and you will most certainly be rewarded. Live musical performances by Bryan Johnson and the Family, Lesionread, and Scajaquada Creeps. -JC

After Funk 9pm Nietzsche’s, 248 Allen St. $5

[FUNK] Exisiting at the intersection of funk and soul, After Funk are making a name for themselves in their hometown of Toronto, and now, beyond. Tracks like their old-fashioned flow-funk tune “The Way It Is” would not sound out of place on a fuzzy AM radio station sandwiched between James Brown and Sly & The Family Stone. The band, currently in the midst of a four month winter tour of the East Coast, will make a stop into Nietzsche’s on Saturday, December 6 with support from ABTrio and The Goods. -CP

SUNDAY DEC 7

SEAN TYAS FRIDAY DEC 5 10PM / LIFT NIGHTCLUB, 257 FRANKLIN ST. / $10 [ELECTRONIC/DANCE] You can bet that when Sean Tyas takes the decks, it’s a fist-pumping good time. The DJ from New York—who now calls Teufen, Switzerland home—has made a career of churning out synth stabbing, hi-def, high energy trance and techno music. Earlier this year, Tyas inked a deal with Black Hole Recordings, a label known for releasing music by artists like Deadmau5, Jordan Suckley, and Julie Thompson—the latter with whom he’s released several collaborative tracks, including 2012’s, “What I Am.” Holding a steady 130-150 beats per minute, Tyas certainly keeps the crowd working. In 2006, after releasing his debut single, “Lift,” Mixmag and Beatport named him “Best New DJ.” Eight years later, let’s see if that reputation still holds when he comes Lift Nightclub on Friday, December 5 for his Degenerate tour with support from Jesse Aaron presented by Factory Nightlife. -CP

PUBLIC APPROVED

O-Town 5pm The Forvm, 4224 Maple Rd. $25-$60 (VIP)

[POP] Lock up your wives and daughters—the era of the Boy Band Reunion is upon us, and the reunion of 1990s and early-aughts favorites are expanding the demographic from ages 10 to 40. Millennials may remember slow dancing to O-Town’s “All or Nothing” at school dances, or jumping on their beds singing along to “Liquid Dreams”, unaware that they were singing about, well, you know. Now, 11 years after disbanding, O-Town comes back with a new album, Lines and Circles. Their voices are deeper, but the quartet is still undeniably a boy band in all their hook-laden, amorous glory, which hopefully means their live shows will feature some good old fashioned choreographed dance moves. Though heartthrob, Ashley Parker Angel, won’t be returning, it seems that the passion and work ethic of the others is more solid than their physical appearance. After a successful European tour, they’re back in the states and will be performing at The Forvm on Sunday, December 7. New York City-via-Buffalo heartthrobs The Doyle Brothers will join in support. -KP

SPIRITUAL REZ FRIDAY DEC 5 8PM / THE WAITING ROOM, 334 DELAWARE AVE. / $10 [REGGAE] Since 2005, seven-piece, reggae-rock outfit, Spiritual Rez, has released four studio albums. Their albums are good, but they’re like looking at photographs of the Grand Canyon – beautiful, but they don’t compare to the real experience. When Spiritual Rez takes the stage, they launch a full-frontal assault on the audience with textures and tones, and even the most somber become victims of the body-shaking epidemic. From the frantic drumming, hypnotic guitar, and their trump card—bassist Jesse Shternik laying down infectious, funky grooves—to the synchronized, dancing brass section and Muhammed Araki slaying the keytar, each member rips a hole through space and time. Through it all, upbeat vocalist Toft Willingham charms the crowd with his scratchy tenor. Their chemistry on stage is genuine, and their passion so pure, that the whole show feels like an intimate jam session in a friend’s garage. Spiritual Rez will play P at The Waiting Room on Friday, December 5. -KP DAILYPUBLIC.COM / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / THE PUBLIC 17

BOOKS REVIEW

THE SUN IN SKIEY ROBES After 90 years, Tolkien’s Beowulf is finally published

BY WOODY BROWN

J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of, among other things, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, is a writer of almost mythic stature, and rightfully so. His fiction essentially founded what is now known as high fantasy—the sort of fantasy literature that does not simply discuss Frodo’s journey to Mordor, but also the millennia that preceded his seminal quest, the legends and lays that were born in Middle-earth, the rich pantheon of gods and spells and languages that comprised life in the fictional world. He did not write stories so much as he wrote an entire universe, self-consistent and enormously complex, in which readers for the better part of the last century have happily lost themselves. Elvish, the language of the Elves, is not something to which Tolkien simply alluded. He wrote two complete languages, Quenya and Sindarin, that his Elves speak. Think for a moment about your own experience learning a new language— the varied suffixes of Spanish, the proliferation of mysteriously silent consonants in French— and then imagine creating an entirely novel language with its own conjugations and cases and vocabulary. Tolkien, who was a philologist and professor of Anglo-Saxon and English literature, had an abiding interest in and love for not only Germanic languages but their mythologies. For Tolkien, a language was inseparable from its legends, and therein lies the justification for the unprecedentedly comprehensive agenda of his fiction. Though he is best known now for his tales of Middle-earth, Tolkien was responsible for a revolution in the criticism of the epic Beowulf, which, at 3,182 lines, is the longest surviving Old English poem. Finally, almost 90 years after its completion, Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf has been published. Beowulf is the first major poem written in English, though Old English looks very little like Modern English. Even the Middle English of The Canterbury Tales, which is not exactly easy for a modern reader to translate, is at least recognizable. Old English, on the other hand, looks and sounds like an intricate linguistic fossil, with runic characters, Latinate syntax, and unfamiliar accents. Old English poetry is even more interesting. Whereas modern poets tend to use metrical feet (e.g. iambs, trochees, dactyls, etc.) and rhyme as the major structural elements of their verse, Old English poetry essentially revolved around alliteration. The meter of a given line is not described by the number of syllables it contains (iambic hexameter, for instance, is a line composed of six iambs), but by the pattern of stresses made by the syllables that alliterate. This is difficult to understand without looking at an example, so consider the three selections below. The first is the original Old English text, then the translation of those lines by Howell D. Chickering, the G. Armour Craig Professor of Language and Literature at Amherst College and the man who taught me Old English and Beowulf, and finally Tolkien’s translation.

BEOWULF: A TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY BY J. R. R. TOLKIEN, EDITED BY XCHRISTOPHER TOLKIEN HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT, 2014

Original: Oft Scyld Scēfing sceaþena þreatum monegum mǣgþum meodo-setla oftēah egsode eorl[as] syððan ǣrest wearð fēasceaft funden; hē þæs frōfre gebād, wēox under wolcnum, weorð-myndum þāh, oðþæt him ǣghwylc þāra ymb-sittendra ofer hron-rāde hȳran scolde, gomban gyldan. Þæt was gōd cyning! Chickering translation: Often Scyld Scefing seized mead-benches, from enemy troops, from many a clan; he terrified warriors, even though first he was found a waif, helpless. For that came a remedy, he grew under heaven, prospered in honors until every last one of the bordering nations beyond the whale-road had to heed him, pay him tribute. He was a good king! Tolkien translation: Oft Scyld Scefing robbed the hosts of foemen, many peoples, of the seats where they drank their mead, laid fear upon men, he who first was found forlorn; comfort for that he lived to know, mighty grew under heaven, throve in honour, until all that dwealt nigh about, over the sea where the whale rides, must hearken to him and yield him tribute — a good king was he! In the Old English, I have shown in bold the consonants that alliterate in each line. In short, the first stressed syllable of the second half-line will alliterate with either or both of the stressed syllables in the first half-line. So sceaþena (pronounced “shay AH-thena”) alliterates with Scyld (“shuld”) and Scēfing (“shaving”). Same thing with meodo-setla, monegum, and mǣgþum (“myethum”). When read aloud in the Old English, the alliterative half-lines lines and the pause, or caesura, in between them have a distinctive rhythm. The poetry sounds both recognizable and foreign, somehow ancient. More recently, the poet James Merrill explored this sort of rhythm in his beautiful poem, “An Upward Look.”

18 THE PUBLIC / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

UNDER THE DRAWING OF A DRAGON THAT APPEARS ON THE BOOK’S COVER, TOLKIEN WROTE, “(NOW WAS) THE HEART OF THE COILING BEAST STIRRED (TO COME OUT AND FIGHT).” Chickering occasionally preserves the alliteration in his translation, but he seems more focused on retaining the rhythm and sense of the original poetry. He translates literally the parenthetical descriptions called variation, an example of which occurs in the penultimate line: “had to heed him, / pay him tribute.” This technique of writing two or more clauses that mean basically the same thing but say it differently has been called, according to Chickering’s introduction, “the very soul of Old English poetical style,” and indeed variation abounds in Beowulf. Chickering also maintains the peculiar naming devices called kennings that comprise so much of the unique tone of Old English poetry. From the voluminous commentary that comprises most of Tolkien’s text: “A kenning is an Icelandic word meaning (in this particular technical use) ‘description.’ From Old Icelandic criticism of Norse alliterative verse it has been borrowed and used by us as a technical term for those pictorial descriptive compounds or brief expressions which can be used in place of the normal plain word.” (Note Tolkien’s tone here. His son, Christopher Tolk-

ien, compiled the commentary by cobbling together his father’s written lecture notes, which have thankfully retained their kind, informative quality.) The above selection contains one wonderful example of a kenning, hron-rāde, which literally means “whale-road,” i.e. the road that whales use, i.e. the ocean. This is how Chickering chooses to translate the phrase. Tolkien, on the other hand, uses “the sea where the whale rides.” In his commentary, he provides several paragraphs to justify this decision. Apart from strictly etymological concerns, Tolkien writes, “It is incorrect stylistically [to translate it as “whaleroad”] since compounds of this sort sound in themselves clumsy or bizarre in modern English, even when their components are correctly selected.” At this point, I am going to guess that a lot of this has sounded like the sort of infernal hair-splitting that is typically relegated to the more cobwebbed halls of academia. In a sense, it is, and it is possible that I only appreciate this sort of discussion because I can read Old English. And yet there is really nothing prohibitively technical

REVIEW ARTS about Tolkien’s commentary. Its main goal is to explain why he has translated the poem in the way that he has, a way that if I had to guess I would say will prove polarizing for critics. The most obvious (and perhaps controversial) decision Tolkien made was to completely do away with the verse form. He has rewritten Beowulf as prose, albeit a noticeably lyrical sort of prose. This is the prose of myth and legend, and anyone who is familiar with Tolkien’s fiction will be familiar with this narrative mode. Tolkien also uses a Latinate syntax, in which the main verb is usually found at the end of the sentence, after a seemingly infinite number of clauses and dependant clauses. This syntax is similar to that used by Milton in Paradise Lost. It is, in a word, epic: Whole histories and races and nations, thousands of years, cascade across the page in a single grammatical unit. It is also appropriate for Beowulf, the original English epic. Translation has as its goal the communication of the original “meaning” of a text into a new language. The essential question, however, is what sort of meaning we’re talking about. Do we mean “meaning” to mean “what the individual words mean”? If so, then hilde-lēoma means “battle flame.” If not, the phrase can mean “sword bathed in the flame of battle,” or any number of other renderings. Hilde-lēoma is another kenning that Tolkien either collapses or expands to suit his purposes. This decision certainly eclipses a large part of the color and character of the Old English text, but Tolkien finds in its place a mythic resonance. There is one other characteristic of Old English poetry that we should consider. Litotes is a figure of speech that defines something with negative qualification. For instance, if someone asked me, “Are you happy?” and I wanted to respond using litotes, I might say, “Well, I’m not exactly miserable.” Is the sword sharp? Well, it’s certainly not the dullest blade. Is Beowulf a great guy? Well, take a look at line 2179b, in which we learn that he nealles druncne slōg heorð-genēatas; that is, he “by no means killed comrades in drink.” There is something inherently funny about saying that. “Yes, he was wonderful—he certainly never got hammered and murdered all of his friends.” That unique timbre, whether you call it funny or not, is one of the many terrifically strange aspects of Old English poetry that Tolkien tends to omit. It is hard to argue with the decisions made by a writer and scholar of Tolkien’s stature, however, especially when his work has had such a massive effect on our understanding of Old English and Beowulf. Tolkien’s translation illuminates some of the questions that abound in contemporary criticism, but its aim is finally elsewhere. He has in effect taken Beowulf and made it his own, a text that would not be at all out of place in The Silmarillion. So much of Tolkien’s legendarium of Middle-earth comes from Beowulf. The name of Théoden, the King of Rohan, is related to þēoden “leader of people.” The term “middle-earth” is a literal translation of line 751b middan-geardes. The robbery of the dragon’s hoard in section XXXII of Beowulf is basically the second half of The Hobbit. Tolkien’s famous habit of describing his characters’ ancestries (“Gimli, son of Glóin, son of Gróin”) is straight out of Old English literature as well. The jacket of Tolkien’s text features three of his drawings. The first, on the cover, is a painting of a dragon, under which he wrote the following, from Beowulf line 2561 (ðá wæs) hringbogan heorte gefýsed, “(now was) the heart of the coiling beast stirred (to come out and fight).” On the back is a drawing of Grendel’s mere, the deep lake in which Beowulf battles Grendel’s mother. Beneath, in Tolkien’s famous handwriting, which looks very similar to the Elvish script he devised, he wrote wudu wyrtum fæst, “a wood clinging by its roots.” The images are stunning. Most of all, they demonstrate how fully Tolkien occupied Middle-earth, midden-geardes, the epic space in which Beowulf exists, and how fully it occupied him. The result is a translation born of true love, the kind of love that lives longer than P a lifetime.

Spectre of Age by Ellen Phalen.

A BODY OF WORK Four artists explore the human form at Nina Freudenheim Gallery BY JACK FORAN

A Body of Work, the current exhibit at the Nina Freudenheim Gallery, consists of paintings and photos of four artists, all the work somehow about body, bodies, human subjects. The work ranges in appearance from misty to sketchy to sardonic grotesque to powerful painterly realistic broaching Michelangelesque. Ellen Phalen’s paintings in watercolors and gouache and pastels are half-present presences, like dim memories or shadowy apprehensions of past or future actualities. One outstanding work, Little Ellen, is like a faded photo—except that photos don’t fade quite in this way, so more like a faded mental image—of a little girl in party dress and formal portrait pose. A haunting work in a different way is the watercolor called Spectre of Age. It shows a ghostly, incompletely presented figure with something indecipherable on or at its back. Death, it must be, the ever-present doppelgänger. Another work is a hazy portrait of Ed Moses, the painter, not the Olympic track star. (But memory as a psychological faculty has a penchant toward sentimentality. Another work, faintly presenting two toddlers getting acquainted does not avoid this pitfall.) Judy Glantzman’s paintings in acrylics on small canvases are about carnival, maybe the big one, in Rio de Janeiro, but third world at any rate. Sketch-like portraits of local urchins dressing or dressed up for the big event in poverty finery. (These works, too, skirt sentimentality.) And the portraits are in pairs, of the same youngster or youngsters in the same pose, in one case more finished, more complete, more detailed, than the other. But neither version what you would call a finished portrait. Both versions rather with a deliberately tentative look, deliberate sense of artwork in progress. Work in progress seems to be Glantzman’s theme. Another work is a huge watercolor and pencil and ink on paper piece consisting of myriad sketch exercises, like an entire sketchpad on one big sheet of paper, with fold mark divisions into sketchpad-size sections. The sketches include numerous versions of hands, in various positions and from various angles, several bodies in peaceful repose—corpses it looks like, in severe perspective view

from feet to head—some flowers, some skulls, a messy world globe or two, and some sketches of sketches. Plus one of one of the urchins from the dressing up for the carnival series. John Coplans has a self-portrait series of body parts that is alternately serious and comic, about the fundamental absurdity of the human situation of a spirit or imagination or self-consciousness or however one might designate—but it can soar, feel empathy, produce poetry and music—tethered to a mortal apparatus. Coplans started his body segments project at age sixty, twenty years ago. One shot is of feet in what looks like a parody of a number at once of the basic ballet positions. No face or head shots, but it’s not too hard to read a grotesque facial image into a hairy chest and belly shot. Various dorsal views, evocative of some putative modern sculptural works in stone. Or ancient stone works, one of the Stonehenge uprights. Also included are two vertical triptych works of more or less comprehensible jumble sequences of body parts, but upside down, lower leg portions above, then knees, then belly and chest, in hunched, compacted postures. Alternately absurdist and balletic. Martin Swift has four paintings of naked figures—or naked as much as we see of them, which is limited to head and torso or less—in dark hues against an opaque black background, the subjects illumined by an ambiguous but sufficient light source. Male figures of substantial musculature—though in one case you have to study a minute to determine the gender—as if bodybuilders in pose, or athletes after a workout. What you see is raw flesh, muscle contours, back and shoulders, chest, breast. With facial portraits in just two of the four works, so not the main interest. I think of Michelangelo. One of the sibyls—the one in back and shoulders view, taking a huge book down from a shelf—on the Sistine ceiling. I think of Rembrandt’s famous medical clinical painting The Anatomy Lesson. The double meaning of that title for a painting. Each of the Martin Swift paintings could be called The Anatomy Lesson. The four-artist show continues through January 14.

DAILYPUBLIC.COM / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / THE PUBLIC 19

FILM REVIEW

IN CINEMAS NOW: BY M. FAUST & GEORGE SAX

PREMIERES THE HOMESMAN—Tommy Lee Jones directed and co-stars in this western drama about a woman (Hilary Swank) tasked with taking three women who have gone insane on the prairie back East. With Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, Sonja Richter, William Fichtner, John Lithgow, Tim Blake Nelson, James Spader, Hailee Steinfeld, and Meryl Streep. Reviewed this issue. THE PYRAMID—Archaeologists burrowing under a recently unearthed pyramid discover a monster. Starring Ashley Hinshaw, James Buckley, Denis O’Hare, and Christa Nicola. Directed by Grégory Levasseur.

ALTERNATIVE CINEMA A CHRISTMAS STORY (1983)—Admit it: This is the Christmas movie you’ve seen more than any other, and the one you’re most likely to watch again. Humorist Jean Shepherd’s stories form the basis for this portrait of Christmas in a blue collar midwestern city in the 1930s. Starring Darren McGavin, Melinda Dillon, and Peter Billingsley. Directed by Bob Clark (Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things). Sat, Sun 11:30 am. North Park Theatre, 1428 Hertel Ave. (836-7411) AN EVENING WITH ZAMIR GOTTA—The Russian personality seen on Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations will be present to screen two short films: Touch-Line (2009) about wounded Russian and Chechens who form a soccer team of physically challenged athletes; and The Stage Awaits (2011) about a Moscow-based theatre company whose actors all have Down syndrome. Mon 7pm. The Screening Room, 3131 Sheridan Drive Amherst (837-0376) screeningroom.net ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA (1985)—Newly restored release of Shirley Clarke’s acclaimed documentary about jazz performer/composer Ornette Coleman, seen visiting his Texas birthplace in 1983. Interview participants include William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Buckminster Fuller, Don Cherry, Yoko Ono, Charlie Haden, Robert Palmer, Jayne Cortez, and John Rockwell. Thurs Dec 4 7pm. Hallwalls, 341 Delaware Ave. (854-1694) hallwalls.org

Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones in The Homesman.

HARD TIMES THE HOMESMAN BY M. FAUST this means back East. As none of the local men, farmers all, want to take time away from their labors for the round trip of several months, the duty is taken up by Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank— who else?), a woman who has been unable to find a husband despite having property and some money. She is considered plain and bossy; despite some makeup thickening her eyebrows, that she is supposed to be so unattractive that no man would have her is one of those movie fictions you accept and move past.

ing some background on the three women, played by Miranda Otto, Grace Gummer, and Sonja Richter, make you think that of all the eras of history one might hope to visit if time travel is ever possible, this would not be among them.

Needing someone capable of dealing with the Tommy Lee Jones has always had the attitude todangers of such a trip across 500 miles of unward the Old West that you might expect from guarded territory, she enlists George Briggs, a Texas boy who went to Harvard, which is to played by the director, whom she saves from a say more tied to the mythology than he probably lynching for claim-jumping. thinks he is. His first theatrical film as a director, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, piled 68 Jones is a bit & oldREVIEWS for the role,>>but it’s so VISIT DAILYPUBLIC.COM FOR MORE At FILM LISTINGS macho stereotypes into a needlessly fractured well-suited to him that I can’t imagine who else structure. The Homesman is none of that. It is a could have played the part. (Paul Newman once straightforwardly told story that pays tribute to optioned the book for himself and Sam Shepard people who faced unthinkable conditions. to adapt.) Briggs—probably not his real name—is

It is beautifully composed and photographed by Rodrigo Prieto (Brokeback Mountain), with many shots that could be enlarged and mounted on a gallery wall. The cast includes familiar faces in effective if small parts, including Meryl Streep (whose daughter plays one of the afflicted), John Lithgow, William Fichtner, James Spader, and Tim Blake Nelson. It’s a film worth seeing before the crowd of Oscar contenders sweeps it out of the way for the holiday season.

“Life gave them more than they can bear” is how the local pastor puts it. It is 1854 in an unnamed settlement territory in Nebraska. Life is hard enough for those who were prepared for the harsh conditions, but it’s worse for those who really didn’t know what they were getting into, young women brought here to be brides. Diphtheria that kills their children, nameless diseases that kill the livestock and crops, husbands who see them as breeding fields and little more—it’s no wonder that they go insane.

CULTURE > FILM

The Homesman unfolds around three women who must be sent away, which in a desolate region like

a rapscallion who shows up just as the movie is starting to look unbearably grim. The scenes giv-

CULTURE > FILM

Still, don’t be too lulled when the film appears to be turning into an Old West variation on The African Queen. Adapting a novel by Glendon Swarthout (The Shootist, Bless the Beasts and the Children), Jones is careful not to make the story too harsh, but he doesn’t clean it up much either.

The Homesman opens this Friday at the North P Park Theatre.

VISIT DAILYPUBLIC.COM FOR MORE FILM LISTINGS & REVIEWS >>

20 THE PUBLIC / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

SCROOGED (1988)—Michael O’Donoghue (who has a cameo part as a priest) co-wrote this update of the Charles Dickens story with Bill Murray as a cynical TV executive taking his lumps from three ghosts on Christmas Eve. With Karen Allen, John Forsythe, Bobcat Goldthwait, David Johansen, Carol Kane, and Robert Mitchum. Look fast for Wendie Malick and Miles Davis. Directed by Richard Donner (Superman). Sat, Tues, 7:30pm. The Screening Room, 3131 Sheridan Drive Amherst (837-0376) screeningroom.net JOYEUX NOEL (France, 2005)—Handsomely produced drama is based on the true story of the Christmas Eve in 1914, the first year of World War I, when British, French and German soldiers entrenched in a French battlefield lay down their arms for the day to celebrate the holiday as best they could. Writer-director Christian Carion uses that near-mythic event as a starting point for an examination of the means through which governments rouse their people to war, enlisting teachers, clerics and the media to whip the public into a frenzy of bloodlust. As an antiwar film it ranks with Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. Don’t miss it.-MF Free and open to the public. Fri 8pm. Burchfield Penny Art Center, 1300 Elmwood Ave.

IN BRIEF BIRDMAN—Too much and not enough. Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s “meta-movie” stars Michael Keaton as Riggan Thomson, a once famous actor whose career took a downturn after he stopped playing the superhero character he was famed for. In need of a comeback vehicle and artistic validation, Thomson mounts a Broadway play as a vehicle for himself, a troubled production that forms the basis of this film’s increasingly wild proceedings. It’s certainly challenging, dynamic and technically fluid. But it’s also erratic, lurching from scenes of banal domestic confrontation and confession to deliberate comic excess to surreal flights. In the end it’s too much structural complexity for one film to handle. Co-starring Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, and Andrea Riseborough. -GS DUMB AND DUMBER TO—A few good laughs at the end aren’t worth the agonizingly dull 100 minutes preceding them in this sequel to a hit from 20 years ago. Creators the Farrelly Brothers (There’s Something About Mary) seem to have lost the light touch they used to have with bad taste; combined with the noticeable aging of stars Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, it makes for a desperately unfunny comedy. With Kathleen Turner, Rob Riggle, and Laurie Holden. -MF

PLAYING NOW FILM

THE PUBLIC CLASSIFIEDS

A Christmas Story

FURY—War has seldom been portrayed more hellishly than in writer-director David Ayer’s (Training Day) film that follows an American tank crew in the very last days of the Second World War’s European Theatre operations. Brad Pitt plays the sergeant leading this crew as a quasi-mythic figure, a profane but all-American warrior-saint. His philosophy is presented as he trains a green kid (Logan Lerman in a sensitive, persuasive performance) in the cynicism and savagery that are natural consequences of war. The theme of brothers-in-arms fades under all the juvenile pulp-fiction fantasy, and by the last overblown, drawn-out, catastrophic battle scene, it has become impossible to take seriously. With Shia LaBeouf, Michael Peña and Jason Isaacs. -GS GONE GIRL—Ben Affleck as a husband who becomes a suspect in the disappearance of his wife. With Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, and Tyler Perry. Directed by David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). HORRIBLE BOSSES 2—It’s less offensive than the original, which probably won’t be a selling point. The story pits ordinary guys Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day against the financiers (Christoph Waltz and Chris Pine) who ripped them off, but it hardly matters: Director and coscripter Sean Anders, currently hot in Hollywood after the success of his screenplay for Meet the Milllers (he also wrote Dumb and Dumber To) is mostly concerned with repeating what audiences liked about he first movie: sex-addict dentist Jennifer Aniston talking dirty, Jamie Foxx upending gangsta clichés, and the three stars doing a cross-talking routine that is funny even when the dialogue isn’t. In the interest of bringing back every surviving character Kevin Spacey also pops up briefly; bet he got paid a lot of money for what looks like a single day’s work. -MF INTERSTELLAR—That Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus, about the search for a planet capable of supporting human life, is the most argued-about movie of the year has less to do with reaction to its content than with its inconsistency. Your own opinion likely to hinge on what you most want in a movie, visual effects, provocative ideas or fleshed-out drama. The ideas are there, though whether they’re plausible or merely fantastical is likely to be over the heads of most viewers. Nolan and his co-scripter brother Jonathan alternately withhold information that you want (about the demise of our planet in the near future) while rushing science at you too quickly to digest. Matthew McConaughey performance demonstrates that it’s possible to overact quietly, though he’s still effective in the occasional tear-jerking moments. It’s worth seeing, but don’t expect anything as dazzling as The Dark Knight or Inception. With Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Matt Damon, John Lithgow, Casey Affleck, and Topher Grace. -MF NIGHTCRAWLER—It could be called Skincrawler for Jake Gyllenhaal’s viscerally creepy performance as sociopath Lou Bloom, pitched somewhere between Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin. (A younger Robert DeNiro would clearly have been the first choice for the role.) An LA bottom feeder looking for a path to success, Bloom finds it selling video footage of crime and accident scenes to a television station where the overnight news director (Rene Russo) is desperate to save her career. Writer/director Dan Gilroy keeps his examination sharply focused, shooting mostly at night on streets that crackle with danger and excitement. Bloom’s recitations of speeches learned from internet self-improvement classes add a satirical edge to story that is no less

unsettling for being somewhat obvious. With Riz Ahmed and Bill Paxton. -MF OUIJA—Teens are terrified when they mess with a Hasbro toy. Calling Count Floyd. With Olivia Cooke, Ana Coto, and Daren Kagasoff. Directed by Stiles White. PENGUINS OF MADAGASCAR—Animated spin-off of Madagascar. With the voices of Tom McGrath, Chris Miller, Christopher Knights, John Malkovich, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Werner Herzog. Directed by Eric Darnell and Simon J. Smith. ROSEWATER—Jon Stewart’s directorial debut is a respectful, solidly crafted drama about Maziar Bahari, the Iranian-Canadian journalist who was jailed in Iran after reporting on that country’s 2009 presidential election. He was charged with spying, and part of the evidence used against him was an appearance on The Daily Show. Perhaps sensitive to possible charges of glibness, Stewart avoids any use of humor, even when it would be useful in portraying a ridiculous if tragic situation. The result is adequate but rather bland. Starring Gael García Bernal and Kim Bodnia. -MF ST. VINCENT—Bill Murray may shout to the heavens that he doesn’t want an Academy Award, but it’s hard to see this mawkish comedy-drama as anything other than a calculated shot at an Oscar. His performance is fine enough, but there’s only so much you can expect from a story about a curmudgeon saved from a life of whoring and gambling by his friendship with a lonely boy who movies in next door with his harried mother (Melissa McCarthy). Plausibility is never the film’s strong point, but contrived finale is so shameless that it looks like an old SNL parody. Written and directed by Theodore Melfi. With Naomi Watts, Chris O’Dowd and Terrence Howard. -MF THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING—As an Oscar contender, this biography of Stephen Hawking, based on a memoir by his first wife Jane, is a model of restraint and inoffensiveness: it’s a shoo-in for the The King’s Speech voters. Hawking’s work takes a back seat to his slow debilitation from ALS and the history of his marriage. But while we go into the film knowing it will end in divorce, the factors driving the couple apart feel elided. It’s as if the filmmakers didn’t want to be disrespectful to a man who is considered one of the great scientific minds of our era. But in that case, why make the film at all? Even the irony that, as presented here, all that ended the marriage of a man so obsessed with the nature of time was time itself seems unintended. With fine but unostentatious performances by Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones as the Hawkings. Co-starring Harry Lloyd, David Thewlis, and Emily Watson. Directed by James Marsh, best known for documentaries like Man on Wire. -MF WHIPLASH—Inspired by his own experiences at a musical conservatory, writer-director Damien Chazelle’s film about an obsessed drum student and his even more obsessive teacher takes its cues less from movies about the arts or academics than the military, starting in An Office and a Gentleman territory before plunging unexpectedly toward Full Metal Jacket. An excellent performance by Miles Teller as the student is overshadowed by J. K. Simmons in the role of a lifetime as the teacher who believes in pushing students past what they think their limits are. The finale arguably undercuts everything the rest of the movie stands for, but it’s so well executed it’s P hard to complain. -MF

SEE DETAILS ON PAGE 22 The Public Classifieds: boasting the freshest and most reliable classified advertising option in Western New York. All ads are “publicly approved,” yielding a safe and trustworthy marketplace that highlights what the public needs to see. PUBLIC PERSONAL ADS

WNY PETS

BUFFALO’S MISSED CONNECTIONS

ADOPTION LISTINGS

HEARD AROUND TOWN

PET OF THE WEEK

PREMIUM REAL ESTATE LISTINGS

AUTOMOTIVE MARKET RELIABLE FOR SALE LISTINGS

PROPERTIES FOR RENT

VEHICLES DESIRED

PROPERTIES FOR SALE

EMPLOYMENT IN THE COMMUNITY

LOCAL JOB LISTINGS

WNY’S PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENTS LOCAL FARMERS AND WINTER MARKET INFO COMMUNITY EVENTS HIGHLIGHTS

RELIABLE SERVICES TRUST WORTHY LOCAL SERVICES

VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES LOCAL BUSINESS DEVELOPMENTS

THE PUBLIC MARKET

THE ARTS VARIOUS WORKSHOP & AUDITION LISTINGS PRIVATE LESSON OPTIONS

RELIABLE FOR SALE LISTINGS

ARTISTIC EVENTS

ITEMS DESIRED

OPEN MIC & KARAOKE GUIDE

GOOD NEIGHBOR NOTICES

HEALTH: MIND & BODY ALL WNY HEALTH HIGHLIGHTS

BIRTHDAYS AND DEATHS

YOGA, PILATES, SPINNING,

WEDDING ANNOUNCEMENTS

PERSONAL TRAINING, GYM MEMBERSHIPS,

LEGAL AND PUBLIC NOTICES

MEDITATION, PSYCHOTHERAPY, MASSAGE

IF YOU’D LIKE TO BE INCLUDED, PLEASE EMAIL SEAN@DAILYPUBLIC.COM FOR MORE INFORMATION DAILYPUBLIC.COM / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / THE PUBLIC 21

CLASSIFIEDS TO PLACE AN AD: SEAN@DAILYPUBLIC.COM THE PUBLIC’S NOTICE The Public encourages you to use caution while participating in any transactions or acquiring services through our classified section of the newspaper. While we do approve the ads in this section, we do not guarantee the reliability of classified advertisers. If you have questions regarding advertisers in this section please email sean@dailypublic.com.

REAL ESTATE

PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENTS

FOR RENT

WHAT A STUPID AD! IT’S J.R. - NOT JR BUT STILL 02-08-15 TIME & PLACE T.B.A.

BIDWELL PARKWAY 1 bedroom apartment. Super location, great apt! Rents from $795 to $850, including all utilities. Parking, laundry, hardwood floors, quiet secure building , entry system, elevator. Lease/security required, sorry no dogs. Call 716 -885-5223

THE PINK We both stepped outside the Pink for a smoke. The air was crisp and full of snow, the streetlights bright. It was late. “Do you smell the wolf?” you said. I didn’t say anything, sorry, I thought you were crazy. But I have an answer to your question now. I work at Vasili’s downtown. Come find me. SPOT COFFEE ELMWOOD I watched you put ice cubes & 4 sugars in your coffee. I don’t understand you. Let’s connect over tea instead?. 7/11 PIZZA ROLL BLUES To the girl in the ICP shirt buying pizza rolls at 7/11 on Elmwood & Bryant: Seems like we have similar interests, on multiple levels. Hope to strike up conversation next time - B

QUOTE OF THE WEEK “So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.” ~ N.H. Kleinbaum

MISSED CONNECTION NOTICE If you would like to follow up with a missed connection seen here, contact information will be provided to you by emailing sean@dailypublic.com.

AUTOMOBILES

2007 MAZDA 3 85,000 miles, black.

MICHELLE TOMASELLO STEVE RITTNER JAKE DONNELLY CHARLIE GOLDMAN

37 42

48 51

53 57

59 61

IN THE COMMUNITY

DANCE LESSONS

THE ARTS

BRETT BENDER

Crossword Puzzle by (donnahoke.com)

CROSSWORD BY DONNA HOKE

COMMUNITY EVENTS ACROSS 1. Bygone nightclub with a Firecracker glass 9. Billing abbr. 13. Batavia’s Max ___ CELEBRATE FESTIVUS DEC 23RD Attention all Buffalo, NY Seinfeld fans! Join Community Beer Works and S. Thomas Group for Buffalo’s biggest Festivus celebration at Hydraulic Hearth in Larkinville. The event will consist of competitive trivia, the feats of strength and the airing of grievances. Specialty cocktails and menu will be available. Prizes awarded! Email sthomasevents@gmail.com for info.

BELLY DANCE CLASSES by Nadia Ibrahim. All levels welcome. 560-1891 nadiaibrahim.com

HEALTH: MIND & BODY CLASSES STUDIO SOPHIA in Kenmore! Buy 5 classes get 1 free, 10 get 2, 20 get 3.

BURNING BOOKS WINTER OPEN HOUSE Radical holiday gifts for the whole family at 10% Off Storewide! Special Sales! Good food, season’s greetings and holiday cheer! 6 to 9pm, Wednesday December 10, 2014 Burning Books 420 Connecticut Street, Buffalo

27. Stock plans providing worker ownership: abbr.

54. See 53 Down

30. “It’s ____ thing!”

56. Words before iniquity or thieves

33. Tiny groove

57. Site of “The Canoes,” for short

35. Prominent “The Wire” character

59. Calamitous

36. Grammy-winning Radiohead album of 2000

17. Approved 18. Order to go?

61. Big name in elevators

19. ___ Pepper

62. Wegmans competitor

20. Tofu source

63. House in Clarence since 1853

16. “I ___ even”

21. Nicholas Gage memoir

vinyasa yoga, zumba & boot camp!

22. BURCHFIELD PENNEY’S “THE FRONT YARD,” PURPOSELY

37. Support meeting 39. Expecting a storm, perhaps 40. Bills ___ Series that was postponed this year 43. Buffalo lax bros

DOWN 1. Lines at the register?

44. Where 40 Down is 46. Provides personnel for

YOGA

27. The ____ Good Feelings

BUDDING TREE YOGA FOR KIDS (& ADULTS TOO!) BTY is an educational approach to yoga in a fun and creative way that has been proven to lower stress while raising test scores. For more info, please visit, buddingtreeyoga.com

28. Motor along

3. Art Deco Terminal

29. ____ Maria

4. WW II craft: Abbr.

31. Actress Hayak

5. “SNL” specialty

32. Chess great Mikhail

6. Resins used in paints

52. Rx watchdog

33. Those who can’t pass the bar?

7. Daisy ____

55. Huck Finn-like assent

8. Barrett of Pink Floyd

57. ___ glance

9. Out of the picture

58. Flattens, in brief

THE PUBLIC CLASSIFIEDS: boasting the freshest and most reliable classified advertising option in Western New York. All ads are “publicly approved,” yielding a safe and trustworthy marketplace that highlights what the public needs to see.

22 THE PUBLIC / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

53. With 54 Down, reason to TGIF perhaps

60. FOREST LAWN’S ORSON PHELPS MONUMENT AND OTHERS

Offering pilates fusion, hatha yoga, Call 903-1009

QUEEN CITY MARKET will be held on a Saturday, December 13, 2014 from 11am - 5pm, at the Karpeles Manuscript Library on Porter Ave (453 Porter Avenue 14201) Buffalo, NY. This event will feature 50+ local vendors, selling handmade and vintage items.

14. THROWS A FRISBEE NEAR “BIRDS EXCITED INTO FLIGHT,” E.G.

34. WHAT GRIFFIS SCULPTURE PARK REPAIR CREWS TEND TO AT THE START OF EACH SUMMER

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

DELAWARE AVENUE 1 bedroom luxury apartment available immediately for $1,075 per month. Located minutes away Children’s Hospital, Buffalo General Hospital, Allentown district, Elmwood Village, and Downtown Buffalo. Laundry, hdwd floors, parking, fitness center. Includes heat, cable and internet. Call 332-2141

THE PUBLIC MARKET

GOOD NEIGHBOR NOTICES

MISSED CONNECTIONS TURKEY TROT HOTS You had a donut hanging off your face and ample stomach roll. I was wearing all pink, and I mean it: all pink. Anyway, something about your sneakers really spoke to me, made me want a different kind of stuffing with my mashed taters. U can find me at St. Michael’s every Sunday for mass.

$5,500 Call Brett at 706-9254

PUBLIC PERSONALS

WORKS WORKSOFOFHEART HEART

2. Falls for married women?

10. Rinse or dry

38. Plant places

11. Is so inclined

41. Prefix with century

12. Large chunk of Route 78

42. Flowery nuptial spot

15. “I did NOT need to hear that”

45. ___-Caps 46. Beatles title woman who “made a fool of everyone”

20. To date 23. Forest Lawn contents

48. Former NPR host Hansen

24. Was a cast member of “Death of a Salesman,” say

49. SHARK GIRL, E.G.

25. Horse color

52. Regional vegetation

26. Caffeine-yielding nut

47. Neighbor of Francia 50. Brownie batch? 51. Cell phone precursor

59. News anchor Postles

By Donna Hoke ( RUNNING ITS all occasions at d LAST WEEK’S ANSWERS COURSE H E N R I D I E C A N A T F E M A I S U S F O N I N F U S I L L H A E Y L I R M A N A A C E I G H T

Y A S D I E L E N O D N Y C O A U M P P T A C

L I A R S

L A N I

B R O S

W A I S T

A W H O

L I A M

I S O N M F E A F O N A C H N A D T S K B W O N K O F W O P R A T U M E S F E C S O L D O E O L D W I N M E C A A A V E N

S T D U I R K T E N Y T T R K O U T N G S F E U E

IN MEMORIAM CULTURE

Last week Craig Reynolds, a pioneering figure in Buffalo’s cultural scene for two decades, died at age 42. In his memory, we reprint this essay, which appeared in the first issue of the ’zine he cofounded, Basta!, in 1997. PHOTO BY NANCY J. PARISI

HOW BUFFALO GET A WARHOL? BY CRAIG REYNOLDS

THE ARGUMENT: Buffalo provides a challenge, not a legacy; it taunts the uninspired until they flee to a city where legacy’s flow will carry them along, like New York, San Francisco or Seattle. Buffalo requires a substantial commitment, like that of a drowning man to his condition. In Buffalo, we wrestle with God, Job’s God, and the fact of being is enough. I begin to understand this after asking my 2 friends visiting from Seattle how they like the Albright Knox Art Gallery, the first stop in my weekend tour of Buffalo’s monuments to greatness. Pointing at Andy Warhol’s 100 Cans, they ask, “how Buffalo get a Warhol?” making me realize: 1) my friends aren’t exactly Peggy Guggenheims, but that’s perfectly a-okay; and 2) even after enjoying firsthand some of the greatest paintings anywhere, the misconception that Buffalo couldn’t possibly be significant remains even still. It is a Saturday morning late in the football season and the museum is relatively empty, so one guest poses the inevitable question, “where is everybody?”––but rather than waste energy answering it, we who are not somewhere else do what we always do when queries like that arise: lean forward as far as we can without stubbing our noses on cold marble or bronze or drooling all over the paintings we risque absurdity to love, muttering under our breaths: “my God…” “NOT MUCH HAPPENING HERE!” A few hours later, after a quick architectural tour beginning on the gallery’s rear steps and ending downtown, we wind up at the waterfront, where we enjoy the cacophony of winds whistling through the car’s window casings. Naturally, being downtown, there’s no-one around… Except a pack of wild dogs…

1.3 million people live in the greater-Buffalo area and all I see is not much happening here. I see empty factories overlooking empty lakes and rivers. I see empty streets leading nowhere but to other empty streets, empty parking lots in the shadows of empty churches. Buffalo is the most spiritually evolved city in America. Like Christ, we have sacrificed everything for a better line on the suffering we always sensed was the only truth. In Buffalo, it’s man against God. Leaving your house mid-January is a Grecian odyssey all in itself––. PURE SURREALIST MONUMENTS TO NOTHING Soon enough, my friends begin to enjoy the sense of release our inevitable expiration arouses–– We drive on, past half-full warehouses and factories pumping loose, disjointed rhythms into the vast, inhuman night. We drive on, through the staggering corpses of unused grain elevators, pure surrealist monuments to nothing. We drive on, past windowless bars where solitary patrons try to trap oblivion in the bottoms of their beer glasses, but never succeed (oblivion). We drive on, alongside vestigial railroad lines but tonsils were always my favorite body part so who am I to complain? We drive on, past the leftover remains of Bethlehem Steel’s old headquarters, a creepy mansion on the hills only it’s all alone on the banks of Lake Erie and the dirt is deep like on the buildings in Paris. We drive on, past the dilapidated cruise ship imported extra–special from Cleveland to collect spiders and rats on the polluted shores of eastern Lake Erie, also creepy.

Wrestling savagely beside an over–turned garbage can on the corner of Erie and Lakefront Boulevards.

We drive on––

I go absolutely nuts to myself realizing I live in a city where wild dogs roam the streets, where the only activity is the impossible action of postmodern comic strips and outlandish science-fiction fantasies. I explode with delight realizing just how primal things have become, how ugly, how real.

Until we reach Our Lady of Victory National Shrine and Basilica and the trumpets begin to sound. And the angels on its rooftops sing: “everything you ever thought was true is wrong!”

Society has no claim on Buffalo anymore. We’re alone and that’s happy. We’re all gonna die and that’s happy. The empty storefronts that line Main Street dot sentences that ceased being written in earnest decades ago (anybody who writes them still invites the cancer that threatens to devour America). Buffalo is a grand Dadaist joke played on the American dream. What to do now is anybody’s guess–– My friends and I drive off wildly into the tangled maze of industrial nothing and bliss. “Not much happening here!” I shout and take a robust pride in its being true.

We drive on––

Five minutes later we are standing dumbstruck in the center of the cathedral’s magnificent atrium, where the walls and ceiling exude the strange inner light the images painted on them ache to depict. Everybody in our group is amazed, silently gaping with eyes large like the black hole that is Buffalo. “What is a beautiful, amazing place like this doing in Lackawanna?” my one friend asks. Our Lady of Victory is a typical Buffalo achievement in so far as there’s absolutely no reason why it should exist…but it does…just like Buffalo does…and the reason why is that Father Baker had a

vision and committed himself wholeheartedly to its fulfillment. Buffalo is ripe with enigmas and why here?s––and the answer always comes back “because” (Buffalo precedes all rational explanations). There is a fine line between something and nothing and Buffalo manages to walk it straight despite the large quantities of alcohol it consumed in hopes of blurring that line just a little wider. Unlike other cities, where it’s easy to sink into the flow of everything’s fine, in Buffalo, you must be a prophet or drown in utter mediocrity. Buffalo demands existential authenticity, and the rock we push up the hill (only to have it roll back down over us time and time again) is our only salvation. Like Rimbaud in the gutters and back-alleys of Paris, in Buffalo, you have no choice but to remake life; there’s no bullshit left to buy, no palace gates to hide behind (I endure Siddhartha Gautama’s 4 passing sights whenever I walk out my front door). Buffalo is the most advanced city in America; we progressed beyond progress. Our truth is grounded on an intense understanding of everything that is false (or an intense understanding that everything is false). We don’t need to realize the ultimate insignificance of the world; our world realizes it for us. Not only does Buffalo’s faded, tattered industrial landscape prefigure a dawning, postmodern art and architecture, it augers a new way of being. I mark in every face I pass marks of weakness, marks of woe––the sane, saintly sufferings of Christ. In Buffalo, we have exhausted all the tired cliches of American culture, but who needs them anyway? I’d rather run with wild dogs through silent streets than jump from old mall to new mall hopelessly fleeing my own inevitable collapse. It doesn’t vex me that the world has abandoned Buffalo to the cold, hard night of passing time, impermanence and irrelevance; it just means I have an art gallery of incalculable merit all to myself, a downtown whose jewels were left for me to reap, a lake like a vision and the wind that blows across it proves that I’m alive, a discarded history so rich I feel privileged to watch it unfold. In Buffalo, we have turned something inside out, revealing the paradoxical everything of nothing. Our insignificance is of such great consequence it weighs on me like death; next stop: illumination. AND NOW, FOR THE FORCED FINALE THAT’S TRUE NEVERTHELESS: in the growls of wild dogs I hear the song of the new American frontier, where being and not-being fade into the fact of we’re here anyway so what are you gonna do about it?–– where significance and insignificance meet on weekends for an illicit drink (before returning to their established corners in time for tenure-track office-hours on Monday). We are the still point at which all contradictions meet and become one. I don’t care if you don’t care. The past, present and future is Buffalo’s essence. Someday you’ll join P me in eternity. DAILYPUBLIC.COM / DECEMBER 3, 2014 / THE PUBLIC 23

80252_HN_BUF_BrandAd_ThePublic / 10.5” x 14” / no bleed / pub: The Public

“We needed a plan that could keep up with us. Blue was that—and so much more.” • $250 wellness card* • $1,000 in savings with Two For One discount program** • Recognized worldwide • Over 50 free checkups and preventive services

David & Aimee, members

If you don’t get insurance through your employer or are shopping for insurance on the Exchange, turn to Blue. Learn more about our health plans, including whether you qualify for a tax credit to help cover monthly premiums, at

ShopBluePlans.com.

BlueCross BlueShield of Western New York. A division of HealthNow New York Inc., an independent licensee of the BlueCross BlueShield Association. *One $250 Wellness Card per contract with 2015 BlueCross BlueShield of Western New York individual and small group plans. **Two For One program available with 2015 plans based on plan type and employer participation, limit one per subscriber.

80252_HN_BUF_BrandAd_ThePublic.indd 1

11/26/14 8:37 AM