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NEWS: POLICE KILLING, POLICE POUTING

LOOKING BACKWARD: ANN MONTGOMERY’S LITTLE HARLEM HOTEL

THEATER: LISA LUDWIG’S PUBLIC QUESTIONNAIRE

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THIS WEEK ISSUE NO. 8 | JANUARY 7, 2015

STUBBORN NUMBERS: Bruce Fisher explains why raising the minimum wage is good for Western New Yorkers.

YEAR OF THE RACIST: Mike Niman is shocked, shocked to find examples of racism on the Facebook page of the Buffalo Republican Committee.

ART REVIEW: Phillip Stearns installation at the Burchfield Penney Art Center.

SPOTLIGHT: A visit with Buffalo-born dancer Rebecca Jefferson.

ART REVIEW: Paul Feeley retrospective at the AlbrightKnox Art Gallery.

BOOKS: Two local authors to launch new reading series next month.

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STORY NEWS

PHOTOS BY NANCY J. PARISI

Clockwise from top: Sarah Sonnenbreg and Amy Hagermeier at Sweet_ness7; Jordan Smith at Perk’s Cafe; and Timothy Perkins at Merriweather Library.

WORKING IN PUBLIC Three stories about people working in plain sight BY NANCY J. PARISI As the air hums with post-holidays and year-opening energies—an intermingling of anticipation and angst—most are getting back into solid work grooves, recovering from travel/visits, and perhaps planning big for the brand new year. Heading out on a late December afternoon, The Public sought out three Buffalo stories of those working in public places. Spotted reading in the lovely brick and hardwood side room of the downtown Perk’s on Broadway was Jordan Smith, holding a magazine on his lap and a cell phone to his ear. He was on hold with his doctor, he said, and had been for more than 20 minutes. As we began our interview, he abandoned all hope and ended the call. “I’m a technical librarian at the library [the Central Library just across the way from Perk’s]. I teach classes and make promotional videos,” he said. He also described himself as a film critic, writing reviews for ioncinema.com. He was on his lunch break and was “catching up on movie news.” He orders the same lunch every day: a pulled pork sandwich and iced coffee. He was reading Film Comment and said the last great movie that he saw was The Imitation Game. Jordan said that he will not be attending Sundance this year, as he’s done in the past. “I’m getting married in March and we’re going to Europe for our honeymoon, so I’m using my time to do that instead.” He’s having a suit made at Bureau on Elmwood for his wedding and is also quite excited about that. Crosstown, at work at one of the computers at vibrant and sun-drenched Merriweather Library on Jefferson Avenue on the East Side, was Timothy Perkins, who lives on nearby Northland Avenue. “I’m online looking at Facebook, and browsing news about what’s happening in the hip-hop and R&B worlds,” he said.

“I write music, and tell stories when I do. I went to South Park High School and English was my favorite class—and gym. I played drums and did sports at school. “Bless is the name I go by when I make music, it’s my stage persona. I use Bless because though I’ve gone through struggles my whole life I feel blessed. I’m blessed with talent, with the family that I have, and the friends that I have. Even though there are hard times I’m glad to be here. I work at this library once a week, there’s a wide variety of computers, a lot of music, books, movies—and it’s huge. And it’s quiet. A lot of libraries aren’t, you know. It’s peaceful.” On Grant Street, hard at work in Sweet_ness7, preparing for a gig on New Year’s Eve, were Sarah Sonnenberg and Amy Hagemeier. The two, adding decorative flourishes to two plastic demi-heads, are part of a troupe of five face-painters who worked First Night Buffalo at Buffalo Niagara Convention Center, the family-friendly New Year’s Eve event with its own countdown and balloon drop. “Right now we’re training for face painting at First Night. I have to contract other artists so I want to be sure that they know the supplies, they know what to expect,” Sonnenberg said. “I have these quick design sketches for them to follow, they can all be done in one minute and the paint will react to black light. We’ll be next to a black-light techno bubble dance party. “Last year the line was non-stop for four or five hours. It was fun, all the kids were happy, I was happy.” And what do they anticipate will be the most popular design? “One with stars and ‘2015’ on it will probably be,” Sonnenberg said. “And this pretty, swirly deP sign,” added Hagemeier. DAILYPUBLIC.COM / JANUARY 7, 2015 / THE PUBLIC

NEWS COMMENTARY

POLICE KILLING, POLICE POUTING BY BRUCE JACKSON

PHOTO BY DIANA ROBINSON

WHY THE NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT WENT MISSING

The New York Police Department is presently having a huge hissy-fit. It is miffed at New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, so it has simply stopped working. The cops are not staying home or walking around with picket signs. That would be illegal and could result in firings. Instead, it is coming to work, getting into the cars, driving around, and doing pretty much nothing. It is what convicts in Texas prisons, in the years I worked there, called a “slow buck.” A “buck,” in prison parlance was a strike. That produced an immediate response. A “slow buck” was when you went to work and pretended you were doing something, but in fact you were doing nothing. The bosses couldn’t nail you for inactivity, for you were out there moving, but at the end of the day, nothing had happened, nothing had been accomplished. New York cops are engaged in a slow buck that would make Texas convicts applaud. The New York Post reported on December 29 that “NYPD traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses dropped off by a staggering 94 percent” as compared to the same week in 2013. “Summonses for low-level offenses like public drinking and urination also plunged 94 percent—from 4,831 to 300.” Citations for traffic violations dropped 10,069 to 587. And parking violations were “down 92 percent, from 14,699 to 1,241.” The Post also said police were “making arrests only ‘when they have to,’” which brings up a question: When else should they be making arrests? The net effect of this pout-out thus far seems to be zero. The crime rate in New York City hasn’t risen. Nothing has risen except public anger at NYPD for being sulkers instead of cops. Civil rights attorney Ron Kuby responded to Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article on the slowdown: “I have not seen a single black youth bent over a car in days. Scary.” And, in an email to me he noted, “It is the danger of work slowdowns like this—people may grow to like it and realize much of your job is not only unnecessary, it is counter-productive.” A New York Times editorial (December 30) was harsher: They called the police action “repugnant

THE PUBLIC / JANUARY 7, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

and inexcusable. It amounts to a public act of extortion by the police.” The same editorial listed the reasons the cops are mad at the mayor and punishing the city:

the problems that plague our society, problems that you didn’t create,” someone in the audience, according to the Times, shouted, “You did,” which “drew some laughter and applause.”

1. He campaigned on ending the unconstitutional use of “stop-and-frisk” tactics, which victimized hundreds of thousands of innocent young black and Latino men.

Because of the mayor’s remarks to his son about being careful on the streets police union had earlier distributed a letter suggesting that members sign a petition telling the mayor he would not be welcome at their funerals if they were killed on the job.

2. He called for creating an inspector general for the department and ending racial profiling. 3. After Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, was killed by a swarm of cops on Staten Island, he convened a meeting with the police commissioner, William Bratton, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, giving Mr. Sharpton greater prominence than police defenders thought he should have had because Mr. Sharpton is a firebrand with an unsavory past. 4. He said after the Garner killing that he had told his biracial son, Dante, to “take special care” in encounters with the police. 5. He generally condoned the peaceful protests for police reform — while condemning those who incited or committed violence — and cited a tagline of the movement: “Black lives matter.” What’s to argue?

BACK-TURNERS The NYPD has also taken up back-turning whenever the mayor is around, a gesture meant to show contempt but which more and more comes off as petulant. They turned their backs on de Blasio when he visited the hospital where Officer Rafael Ramos died, and at Ramos’s funeral. He got boos and jeers when he spoke to the class of 884 new officers at the Police Academy Graduation a few days later. When de Blasio said, “You will confront all

These are people with guns, Tasers, and blackjacks. And badges.

WHO IS KILLED BY POLICE? Numbers on police use of firearms resulting in injury or death are, presently, impossible to come by. The FBI, which counts just about everything in its annual Uniform Crime Report, doesn’t count that. According to Jon Greenberg in the Tampa Bay Times ( January 1, 2015), “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keep data on fatal injuries from 1999 to 2011 and one category is homicides by legal intervention. The term ‘legal intervention’ covers any situation when a person dies at the hand of anyone authorized to use deadly force in the line of duty.” In the period covered by that study, 2,151 whites and 1,130 blacks were shot to death by police. (Greenberg doesn’t mention others.) That number is deceptive. Greenberg quotes American University professor Brian Forst (Department of Justice, Law, and Criminology): “More whites are killed by police than blacks primarily because whites outnumber blacks in the general population by more than five to one.” What we should be looking at is not the raw numbers, but the rates: What is the likelihood of a white or black person dying by police gunfire? Do that, and the numbers go rightside up: Blacks are three times more likely than whites to die by police gunfire. That’s true, but it’s not sufficient. It still doesn’t tell us what we need to know. Whites in America, however you cut it, have more

COMMENTARY NEWS money than blacks. You didn’t see any black faces in that parade of Wall Street megagonifs that almost brought down the economy a few years back, and you see precious few when the Wall Street Journal publishes photos of executives giving themselves megabonuses now. Other than crimes of finance— the sort of thing Bernard Madoff got into your vocabulary for—felonies are primarily the territory of poor people. Nobody who lives on Park Avenue goes to prison for holding up a convenience store or shoplifting at Bergdorf-Goodman. When those very rich white felons are drawn in by the system, their lawyers get a letter saying, “Bring your client to our office next Thursday.” When it’s poor people in the lens, the cops are at the door, either knocking with guns drawn or bashing it in.

the kind of danger. Two-thirds of the deaths in the top 10 are from vehicular or industrial accidents. Only a few are from deliberate violence. (I assume that’s how sales workers make the list: They’re the convenience store clerks shot in robberies.) Police live in a world of potential violence. They don’t know if the guy they stop on the highway is reaching into his pocket for his wallet or for his gun; they don’t know if a door will open and someone will say, “How can I help you officer?” or if it will be someone with a sawed-off shotgun or unregistered Glock. According to the police blog PoliceOne.com, “15 police officers have been killed in the line of duty in ambush attacks in 2014.” Snipers took shots at police vehicles in Los Angeles and San Francisco in late December. Police work really is dangerous work. It is reasonable that they are fearful of strangers and always on the alert.

ERIC GARNER Eric Garner was killed in Tompkinsville, Staten Island, July 17, 2014. Police were, presumably, questioning him for selling untaxed cigarettes. He said to the police questioning him that he’d done nothing of the kind. He argued with them about them mau-mauing him, saying he’d done nothing wrong. In the videotape of the event, he never makes any physically aggressive action against the police. Nonetheless, a gang of them wrestle him to the ground and one of him uses a chokehold, which is banned by the New York Police Department. On the videotape, Garner says at least 11 times (by my count), “I can’t breathe.” Then he was dead. He weighed more than 350 pounds. Police sources suggested that contributed to his death. It may have contributed, but it is hard to argue that the primary factor was the strangling. It’s all over YouTube. You can see it all for yourself. After the video went public, de Blasio promised a full inquiry. A few days later, a grand jury cleared Daniel Pantaleo, the cop who did the choking.

GRAND JURIES Grand juries do not consider guilt and innocence. That’s what trial juries do. Although sometimes prosecutors use a grand jury as an investigatory device (as happened after the Attica slaughter in 1971; there was a big grand jury investigation, most of which is still secret), the primary function is to determine whether or not the prosecutor has sufficient evidence to bring a case to trial. New York Judge Sol Wachtler famously said in a 1985 interview that prosecutors could get grand juries to “indict a ham sandwich.” There is no defense attorney at a grand jury hearing: The grand jury learns only what the prosecutor wants it to learn. Some states—Missouri among them—don’t even require grand juries: Prosecutors can get their indictments from a judge. Prosecutors in those states use grand juries only when they serve a political purpose. Which leads to the one other function of the grand jury, and it came into play in the Darren Wilson case in Ferguson, Missouri, and the Daniel Pantaleo case in New York: It insulates a prosecutor from not pursuing a case when there is going to be political heat for doing nothing. Prosecutors are elected; they don’t want heat. They also need the cooperation of police for their run-of-the-mill cases. If they are to be successful, they can’t be at war with the cops. So police officers are very rarely indicted for killings or abusing prisoners. Almost always, those cases go to the grand jury. After the grand jury decides not to indict, the prosecutor can say, “It wasn’t my call,” and the cop can say, “I was cleared.” Everybody’s clean and home free, except the dead guy. Who cannot speak.

PUBLIC OPINION This whole narrative has ridden on a sea of public opinion, or lack thereof. Most police violence goes unrecorded, unreported and therefore unknown. Two killings recently propelled it into public attention and resulted in a huge number of anti-police-brutality demonstrations across the country. Even the president of the United States joined the conversation. There has been a huge amount of web information and web misinformation along the way. The first killing was Michael Brown on August 9 in Ferguson, Missouri. That resulted in an extraordinarily drawn-out grand jury proceeding. The grand jury announced on November 24 that it would not indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Brown. The second was Eric Garner’s, which launched a larger wave of protests, nearly all of them peaceful.

Patrick J. Lynch, president of the NYPD union, pictured in the New York Times wearing a badge that says “PBA” instead of “NYPD.”

I’VE WORKED WITH COPS OVER THE YEARS AND I DO NOT THINK THEY ARE ANY MORE, OR ANY LESS, RACIST THAN ANYONE ELSE. WHO IS FREE OF RACISM IN THIS COUNTRY? Both of those protests were grounded in public memory of other awful events. Here are a few that come to mind for me: —In 1991, Rodney King was brutally beaten by four members of the LAPD. They were charged in state court for assault with a deadly weapon and excessive force. Despite an unambiguous videotape of the incident, all four were acquitted in state court, setting off riots that resulted in 53 deaths and thousands of injuries. The four were tried again in federal court. That time two were convicted and sent to prison; the other two were again acquitted. —In 1997, Haitian immigrant Abner Luima was beaten in a NYPD police car and sodomized in a police station with a broken broomstick in Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct. He had three major operations to repair the injuries to his colon and bladder and was hospitalized for three months. Several cops were convicted in that one, but only one, Justin Volpe, got serious time: 30 years. —On February 5, 1999, Amadou Diallo, 22 years old, was killed by four NYPD officers, who fired 41 shots at him. He was standing in his own doorway and reaching for his wallet to show the cops his ID when he was gunned down. The cops said they thought his wallet was a gun. All four were acquitted in a trial held in Albany. After the deaths of Brown and Garner there were not only the marches and demonstrations, but a huge amount of editorial commentary in the print and digital press about police violence.

PUBLIC OPINION II Then two other killings—the murders of New York police officers Rafel Ramos and Wenjian Liu by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who took a bus to New York to perform those murders after shooting his girlfriend in Baltimore—changed everything. The shrill voices treating cops as if they were all the same bad white guy went silent. For a day or so, the marchers mostly stayed home and the pundits mostly stayed quiet. Then New York Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president Patrick J. Lynch and a bunch of sulky cops in New York turned it all around again. All the goodwill occasioned by those pointless murders of two guys on the job went out the window in a power grab: Who owns the city? The PBA or City Hall or the people? The PBA seemed to be saying, “We do.” Lynch used the murders of the cops to try to shift heat away from NYPD for the death of Garner. “’There is blood on many hands, from those that incited violence under the guise of protest to try to tear down what police officers did every day,” the Times reported Lynch saying at the hospital where Ramos and Liu had been taken. “That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor.’” So the bad guys were now the peaceful demonstrators and the mayor, not the guys we all saw on the viral video strangling Eric Garner, and not the lunatic who shot those two guys sitting in a car, doing their job. A page-one above-the-fold photo in the December 23 New York Times shows Lynch striding forward,

purposefully, another uniformed cop and a police emergency vehicle at his back. The headline of the article is, “After Shootings, Police Union Chief Deepens Rift with de Blasio.” The astonishing thing about the photo is this: New York patrolmen all wear in their collar lapels the metal letters NYPD (cops with rank wear their rank markers). But Lynch is wearing lapel badges that say “PBA.” Lynch has been head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Union for 15 years. He makes $76,000 a year as a New York cop and $98,000 a year as head of the PBA. Those out-of-uniform lapel badges were a shout-out, telling us whom and what he really represented. It was not the citizens of New York. And he was quickly joined by many of his NYPD colleagues. That stopped following Police Commissioner William J. Bratton’s “broken windows” policy. They stopped doing much of anything.

BROKEN WINDOWS “Broken windows” was a notion of crime control introduced by James Q. Wilson and George L Kelling in 1982. Their idea was small things lead to bigger things in crime, so if you crack down hard on the little offenses it would trickle up into a reduction in more serious offenses. When William J. Bratton became head of the New York Transit Police in 1990, he said Kelling was his “intellectual mentor.” Rudy Giuliani, then mayor of New York City, made him police commissioner and pushed ahead with Bratton’s policy of “zero tolerance.” That led to a lot of stop and frisk action, a lot of arrests for the most trivial of things. It created a we-versus-them between poor people in New York and New York cops that had never existed before. Cops in New York became, for many, like the cops in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil: leather-bound thugs who came and went at will. I always thought “broken windows” was a stupid idea; there was never any data to back it up and a lot that indicated it was silly-putty. There was indeed a drop in New York City’s crime rates in the following years. Giuliani and Bratton took full credit for it. Neither, to my knowledge, has ever acknowledged the facts that employment in New York City in those years went up by 40 percent or that crime rates fell across the country by the same amount as in New York City in places where no one subscribed to the “broken windows” theory or “zero tolerance policy.”

DANGER According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 10 deadliest jobs in America are, in order of dangerousness: logging, fishing and related work, aircraft piloting and flight engineering, roofing, structural iron and steel work, refuse and recyclable material collection, electrical power-line installation and repair, driving/sales work and truck driving, farming and ranching, and construction work. That list has appeared many times on the web the past few weeks, mainly to show that police work isn’t really that dangerous. The list has the death rates right, but it doesn’t tell us what we need to know about dangerousness or

Furthermore, cops don’t approach all parts of the world the same way because, in their experience, all parts of the world are not the same. They are mostly realistic in that assessment. They don’t feel the same degree of danger going into an office in downtown Buffalo or a house on Lincoln Parkway than they might feel going into a house they have been told is where several kilos of illicit drugs might be or a guy wanted on several felony warrants might be. Cops don’t cause the huge discrepancies in American life; they deal with them. They make their judgments and adjust their fear accordingly. I’ve worked with cops a lot over the years and I do not think they are any more, or any less, racist than anyone else. Who is free of racism in this country? If you’re white, imagine this: You’re walking down the street alone at night. Five young men, all wearing hoodies, approach. At first you think they’re black, then you realize they are tall, blond, and blue-eyed, and the hoodies say “NYU Crew.” Do you relax? Welcome aboard. A lot of protests these past few months have focused on “police” brutality against minorities. In cities like Ferguson, the police department is almost all white, but the city is almost all black. That is bizarre. In New York, it’s not so simple: The uniformed ranks of NYPD are 51 percent white, 49 percent black, Hispanic, and Asian. It still doesn’t match the city’s population—whites are 33 percent of New York City’s population—but the violence may not simply be a matter of color. But, then, it may be exactly that. No one, to my knowledge, has done a study of the ethnic backgrounds of cops involved in incidents of unprovoked violence and the subjects of that violence. This entire area, as I noted before, is one the FBI has chosen to ignore. The only reason we know about Rodney King and Eric Garner is because both events happened to be recorded and prosecutors were forced to bring them to grand juries. Most of these events are invisible.

IRRATIONALITY Most cops are good people doing a difficult job we need and want done. But not all of them are, and when cop-politicians like Patrick Lynch defend them at all costs, they do all of us, including their fellow cops, a disservice. We should be asking questions, not desperately shifting the blame and turning our backs. What makes no sense to me is the huge discrepancy in police shootings in different cities that aren’t substantially different in any other way. Or shoving a nightstick up a handcuffed prisoner’s ass in the station house, or firing 41 bullets at a guy in his own doorway reaching for his wallet to show the ID the police were asking for, or choking to death a guy who keeps saying, “I can’t breathe,” and who hasn’t exhibited any physically aggressive behavior or shown a weapon. You can’t explain that away by blaming marchers or City Hall. If you have the power and honor of the badge and the gun, you also have the responsibility of the badge and gun. We, the public, have empowered you to use both on our mutual behalf. Not on behalf of some of us; on behalf of all of us. If you cannot make that distinction, give us back the badge and the gun, because you are not worthy of either and you are as dangerous as any of the villains we’ve employed you to protect us from. If you understand that difference, then you are worthy of the honor and respect that Patrick Lynch and all the back-turners tarnished last week. Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture at UB, where he is also an associate member of the Faculty of Law. He was senior consultant to the field research team on the one of the seven units of the President’s Commission on Law EnP forcement and Administration of Justice.

DAILYPUBLIC.COM / JANUARY 7, 2015 / THE PUBLIC

NEWS COMMENTARY

STUBBORN NUMBERS Cuomo wants wages to grow. How high is enough to help Western New Yorkers? BY BRUCE FISHER

As of New Year’s Day, the minimum wage in New York State is $8.75 an hour. By next New Year’s Day, the minimum wage will be $9 an hour. If the Coalition for Economic Justice and the AFL-CIO’s Richard Lipsitz had their way, the minimum wage would be $15 an hour. Today. The 2,000-member Buffalo-Niagara Partnership went on record in 2012 opposing this raise, even though the 500,000 national Women’s Chamber of Commerce supported President Obama’s call Governor for a higher national minimum wage. Labor, pro- Andrew Cuomo gressive activists, and most economists endorse the sound economic logic of putting more money into the pockets of consumers who will spend all their income locally. For skeptics or just agnostics, taking a look at the numbers is the best way to cut through the tired, partisan messaging that raising the minimum wage hurts more than helps. Go to the Living Wage website, where the folks at MIT have calculated what it costs to live in Buffalo and other US metros. The new $8.75 an hour minimum wage works out to be okay for a single adult whose rent is $600 a month, who will spend $250 on food and $250 on the ride to work and back, and who—thanks to Obamacare—can probably get a basic health insurance package for $1,200 a year. The full-time minimum-wage worker will take home $17,500 this year, and if he or she takes advantage of the Earned Income Tax Credit by filing a tax return, then that worker will get to keep pretty much all of it. Making $8.75 an hour will get you enough to cover the basics, unless you happen to also have a couple of hundred bucks a month in student loans to pay. That $17,500 doesn’t do much for a single parent. The cost of food, transportation, and healthcare jumps smartly with children in the house—one has to clothe the little creatures, too—and then there’s daycare. MIT calculates that daycare for two kids in Buffalo costs about $1,500 per month. That would be roughly $500 more than the gross income of a person earning the new $8.75 minimum wage. In 2010, at the height of the Great Recession, then-County Executive Chris Collins amplified the region’s economic distress by closing two inner-city daycare centers that provided low-cost services to working women. The local business community, adamant about keeping wages low, was silent on this anti-family, anti-worker, pro-unemployment policy initiative. Luckily for low-wage workers and for the broader economy as well, Albany officials ignored them. The economics profession, so tarnished by the multiple cases of intellectual prostitution that have been exposed since the 2008 crash, had mainly endorsed the policy. Here’s why it’s important to parse the issue again: In the Obama recovery, there are more jobs, but in the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metro, in New York State, and nationally, many of the new jobs pay less than the jobs we lost during the Great Recession.

DIFFERENT JOBS TODAY THAN YESTERDAY Let us, withal, be optimistic. The Obama recovery has been chugging along at a very fast clip since mid-2014. Overall employment in New York State is up. Statewide, there are 200,000 more people working than there were in 2008. The Buffalo-Niagara Falls metro employed 558,400 in June 2008; in June 2014, there were 557,400 working here. At the depth of the Great Recession in 2009, the region lost 17,300 jobs. Now, 16,300 of them are back. A thousand jobs short of where we were, yes, but let not the perfect be the enemy of the good. Now the details. Buffalo-Niagara Falls lost jobs in manufacturing (-7,600), government (-5,400), trade/transport/utilities (-2,100), finance (1,600), construction/natural resources (-1,500), and IT (-1,200). Buffalo-Niagara Falls gained jobs in leisure/hospitality (+8,000) and various services (+10,400). In other words, the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metro replaced high-paying jobs with minimum-wage jobs. So not only is it a good thing that Governor Cuomo, Speaker Sheldon Silver, and the rest of the Democrats in Albany raised the minimum wage, because most of the new, post-Great Recession jobs in Buffalo-Niagara and across New York State pay minimum wage. It’s also a good thing that there’s a campaign to raise the minimum wage even higher. About a quarter of all workers in the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metro can fit the description of low-wage workers. The pattern will probably continue, if not grow: A 2010 study by the Buffalo office of the New York State Department of Labor shows that the greatest number of job openings are for cashiers and retail salespersons, waiters, janitors, teacher assistants, food-prep workers, office clerks, and registered nurses. Only registered nurses make above the $15 an hour threshold that is now becoming a national rallying cry.

THE POLARIZED ECONOMY Here, the Coalition for Economic Justice is campaigning for what the Seattle metro has—a $15-an-hour minimum wage, which translates to a base annual salary of $30,000 for a full-time worker. In December, CEJ helped organize a strike among some of what it estimates to be about 14,000 fast-food workers. The group will focus on the fast-food sector because it’s so visible, and because most of the big international chains are highly profitable. It’s weird that a local business-lobbying group would defend low wages at McDonalds, Burger King/Tim Hortons, Denny’s, et alia, when those brands export local dollars that would recirculate in the regional economy were our burgers and cronuts served by locally owned hashouses. But it’s bigger than food. Currently, folks making less than $15 an hour include just about everybody who prepares food, cleans buildings, cuts hair, stocks shelves, protects kids at crossings, watches kids while par-

ents work, and even those who work in the category we hear so much about, namely, production, meaning manufacturing. Getting those workers up to $8.75 an hour this year, and $9 an hour in 2016, means progress—but still poverty-level wages. Bucking the trend is going to be hard. Globalization does what it does, relentlessly: High-wage jobs are for the highly skilled, and high-wage jobs are suffering. Returns to capital are not: As we’ve shown in this column, the federal income tax data show that a tiny sliver of households in Western New York have enjoyed very high returns on invested capital since the Obama recovery began. But there’s been an erosion of the steady, good-wage, good-benefits in the public sector, jobs that never amounted to more than about 16 percent of total employment, but that create a stable base. The hope is that the Buffalo Billion will bring in high-wage workers to make solar panels at Riverbend, and to create marketable drugs, therapies, or processes at the Medical Campus, and bring more income into the economy. But let’s face it. We have a front-row seat on the change from a broadly-shared, pro-middle-class economic structure to an increasingly polarized setup. The prosperous households around here, which we can generously define as those that are at or above the median income level of about $50,000 in annual income, amount to about 22 percent of total households. Everybody else—the slightly more than 77 percent that bring in less than $50,000 a year—have a shrinking share of total income. Stabilizing the number of high-paying jobs here is a good economic-development goal, especially because those jobs will bring in dollars from outside the region—and not just tax dollars shipped up to Buffalo from Manhattan via state government in Albany. But stabilizing the economic base of the region means putting more money into the hands of people whose wages are so low that they can’t afford to keep households together. Do the numbers. The new minimum wage, at $8.75 an hour, or $17,500 a year, keeps a single person working full-time above the federal poverty level of $11,670. Bravo! But the federal definition of poverty for a three-person household (a single parent and two kids) is $19,790. A sensible living wage, as defined by MIT based on the same market-basket approach the federal agencies use, is over $18,000 for a single person, and more than twice that amount for a single parent with two kids, largely because of the cost of childcare. But let us be hopeful. Niagara University’s Eddie Friel, the ebullient Irishman who was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire for creating a tourism boom in post-industrial Glasgow, dismissed critics who complained about low-wage hospitality industry jobs. New jobs, even entry-level jobs, he said, were good news. Tourism and retail put people to work where there’d been no work. Young people could at least get a start. Globalization had wrecked Glasgow’s shipbuilding as sure as it had wrecked Buffalo’s steel. Scotland, about the same population as Upstate New York at around six million, remains a net recipient of the UK’s public spending, just as Upstate is remains a dependency of Manhattan, via Albany. The question for Scotland, as for Upstate, remains the same: how to handle globalization. Helping change low-wage work into living-wage work sounds like part of a sound strategy. Bruce Fisher is visiting professor of economics at Buffalo State College, where he directs the Center of Economic and Policy Studies.

LOOKING BACKWARD: ANN MONTGOMERY’S LITTLE HARLEM

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BUFFALO HISTORY MUSEUM.

THE PUBLIC / JANUARY 7, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

New York had its Cotton Club, Chicago its Grand Terrace, and New Orleans its Preservation Hall, but in Buffalo, the preeminent place to experience great jazz during the Great Depression was Ann Montgomery’s Little Harlem. The Little Harlem, 496 Michigan Avenue, was part of the “jazz triangle” that included the nearby Club Moonglo, Vendome, and still-active Colored Musicians Club—a few of the dozens of jazz clubs that once existed in Buffalo. Ann Montgomery, a local African-American icon, started the business as an ice cream parlor in 1910, a billiard parlor in 1922, and a supper club in 1929, before establishing it as a cabaret in 1934. The Little Harlem was a freewheeling joint that welcomed black and white, straight and gay, gambler and call girl. Jazz greats such as Lena Horne, Sara Vaughn, Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, Bing Crosby, and Count Basie all played or stayed there. In 1993, four years after its purchase by former chief city judge Wilbur P. Trammell, the Little Harlem—much of its Deco interior still intact—was the victim of a suspicious fire, P and demolished by the City.

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Cuomo’s Buffalo inauguration picketed by public education advocates BY SHANE MEYER Governor Andrew Cuomo rang in the New Year with his inauguration event at the Buffalo History Museum. Inside, an invitation-only crowd of boosters celebrated the onset of his second term. Outside, a mass of protesters voiced their opposition to his education agenda. Had they been allowed inside, the ceremony of self-congratulation may have taken on a more serious character. The protesters would have certainly found much ground for disagreement. Indeed, had they been let inside, the pro forma pomp may have been replaced with a politically meaningful debate. Cuomo used his inaugural speech to take aim at teachers: “Albany has been too concerned with protecting the pension rights of teachers,” he said—a statement that came days after Cuomo vetoed his own bill which would have blunted the impact of the reviled Annual Performance Professional Review [APPR]. The governor isn’t pleased with the low percentage of teachers rated “ineffective,” and so he wants to rig the evaluation process to bring up the rate. Finally, Cuomo is considering a plan to remove power from Buffalo’s School Board and hand over control to an education czar. He’s got the support of two influential board members—Carl Paladino and James Sampson—who, oddly enough, seem enthusiastic about the opportunity to have their board duties stripped from them. The assembly outside the museum—a group that included parents, students, and teachers—are familiar with the Cuomo education agenda, and they are opposed to nearly every aspect of it. The debate, they argue, must be shifted from blaming teachers for underperforming schools and center instead on the conditions in which education takes place. Their principle focus: getting rid of the Gap Elimination Adjustment [GEA], a legislative tool responsible for cutting funding to school districts since the recession of 2008. Because a budget surplus has been projected for New York State thanks to unexpected bank settlements, there is the possibility for restoring funding for education. But is there political will? “I think it’s time for [Cuomo]—with the $5 billion surplus—to give that money back to the students of New York State,” protester and Kenmore resident Kevin Gibson said. “He claims that he’s the students’ governor. Then he should put his money where his mouth is.” Another activist, Chris Cerrone, a Hamburg teacher and Springville School Board member, said that the effects of the GEA in Springville have been pronounced. The situation has had a deleterious effect on the schools’ capacity for producing positive educational outcomes. “We’ve been shorted over the last four years $14 million, which means that class sizes have exploded. They’ve cut staff, we’re cutting programs such as AP and specialty courses. And if the GEA is not restored in this coming budget season, schools across New York are facing devastating decisions.” Cerrone was worried that, should the governor restore funding to schools (by no means a certainty), the restoration may come at a high cost. “Cuomo keeps saying that the schools have enough money. I think what he’s going to do is that he has

this new plan for teacher evaluations—to knock it up to 40 percent.” Cerrone was referring to a recent letter sent to Cuomo by Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, who has made her plans for the teacher evaluations clear. Currently, 20 percent of a teacher’s effectivity rating is “based on student growth on state asessments,” 20 percent is “based on locally selected measures of student achievement established through local collective bargaining,” and 60 percent is based on “measures of teacher/principal effectiveness established through local collective bargaining, including observations and surveys.” Tisch’s recommendation is to dump the 20 percent determined locally, double the state portion to 40 percent, and to give control of the scoring ranges in the observation component to the state. Her contention is essentially that the state is a better judge of teacher performance than the school administrators who interact with teachers and their students every day. Carol Burris, principal at South Side High School in New York, writes for the Washington Post that the “Tisch plan is a power grab designed to snatch away the right of elected Boards of Education to determine quality teaching, by shifting it to a formula produced in Albany based on flawed tests.” Cerrone speculated that Cuomo is looking to implement Tisch’s recommendations by using the restoration of GEA funds to do so. The old carrot and stick routine. “I think he’s going to tell the districts, ‘If you go to this, then we’ll give you some money,’ because that’s how they did with the first round of evaluations. He blackmailed all the districts and said, ‘If you don’t get this approved with your local union, you’re not going to get a certain amount of money.’” Parents and teachers who feel marginalized by the state’s bully tactics have united in the opt-out movement. The state continues to amass power over curriculum via the Common Core standards—in the process tying it to teacher evaluations—and the simple yet effective response has been to neuter the tests by refusing to take them. In one stunning example, 90 percent of parents from Castle Bridge Elementary in New York City forced their school to nix the tests, because results from such a small sample of the student body would be useless. Cerrone noted that last spring more than 60,000 parents refused to let their kids take the tests. “I was one of the first people to publicly opt out their children in Upstate New York, and we had probably about 100 people three years ago. Two years ago we had maybe about 5,000, then we went up to 65,000 last year, so the movement has just grown by leaps and bounds as parents start to see the harm of highstakes testing.” This spring he and parents around the state will be pushing for an even higher number. So, why is the governor, in his second term, pushing an agenda for which there is such public antipathy? Green Party leader Howie Hawkins, who ran against Cuomo last year, says it’s simple: Cuomo is beholden to interests which stand to gain by the dis-

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mantling of the public school system and its replacement by for-profit, private charter schools. “After after Cuomo got re-elected [the financial press] said ‘start investing in charter school companies [and] in the real estate companies that suck the money out of there by financing the construction of charter schools and charging rents that are too high…Jim Cramer on CNBC—he’s touting education privatization, [saying] that the market’s going to be up.” Nonetheless, Hawkins thinks that there’s a broad coalition of New Yorkers—criss-crossing partisan boundaries—who won’t stand for it: “We’ve got $54 million of documented fraud by the charters in New York. People are beginning to find out that they might be nonprofit shells, but then they hire a for-profit management company and suck all the money out. And people are going to see this as theft. They’re going to get wise to it.” Alden resident Don Hey—who was at the rally with a contingent protesting the SAFE Act and advocating for Second Amendment rights—claimed that Cuomo’s disdain for popular will has no bounds. Thus, he was bullish on the prospects for a populist coalition to thwart the governor. Pointing to the Buffalo History Museum, he said, “The teachers’ association and the Second Amendment supporters, we have a mutual problem: He’s in that building; his name is Andrew Cuomo, and he does not respect the rights of New Yorkers.” Hey also opined that Cuomo’s ham-handed passage of the SAFE Act “backfired.” “[H]e has law enforcement against him,” claimed Hey. “If you talk to the troopers, if you speak with the sheriff ’s department, and the local police departments as well, you’ll find very, very few people in those groups believe that the New York SAFE Act is going to save lives.” Teachers, administrators, and parents od students in public schools seem to feel the same way about Cuomo’s education policy. Why did he use his inauguration speech to take a shot at pensions? Why is he so intent on weakening teacher job protections with APPR? Why is he promoting policies to increase state control at the expense of district control?Why is the Buffalo School Board Majority so eager to recuse themselves from the duties voters elected them to perform? At some point, said Kevin Gibson, Cuomo will have to confront the public swell of hostility to his style of governance: “To me it’s clear that the governor’s policies—if you wanted to look at the SAFE Act—it’s very similar to what he’s doing in public education. It’s a heavy-handed type of policy. It’s done essentially without respect for the public, and I think that’s what’s bringing people out. You’re hard pressed to go anywhere else in this country and see so many people going out against their sitting governor. He was only elected by, what, only four percent over 50 percent—he had 54 percent of the vote—so I don’t see him as a popular person.” Shane Meyer reports on New York State policy and education. A photo essay of the protest can P be found at dailypublic.com.

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City Living

ALLENTOWN: 5/3 Double w/ vintage details, needs TLC. Offstreet parking. 59 N. Pearl St, $199,900. Mark W. DiGiampaolo, 887-3891(c) ALLENTOWN: 2BR 1BA open-concept condo w/ exposed brick wall, update bath, secure off-st parkg. 125 Edward St #1A, $139,900. Timothy Ranallo, 400-4295(c) ALLENTOWN: Historic 3BR 2.5BA brick Italianate. Updated. Near Medical Campus. Off-street parking. 16 Allen St. $349,900. Mark W. DiGiampaolo, 887-3891(c) DELAWARE DIST: Elegant 5BR 3BA condo--2 balconies, 2 strg & parking for 3! New kit & bths. 1088 Delaware #16-HIJ. Unit can be returned to 2BR or 3BR. $949,900. Susan D. Lenahan, 864-6757(c) D’YOUVILLE: 4 unit Vict. w/ ext. updates: roof, furnc, plumb, masonry, insul, storms, HWTs! 731 Columbus Pkwy, $395,000. Mark W. DiGiampaolo, 887-3891(c) ELMWOOD VLG: Beaut. 5BR 1.5BA Victorian w/ orig. fixtures & woodwork. Excellent mechanicals. 246 Norwood Ave. $409,900. Mark W. DiGiampaolo, 887-3891(c) ELMWOOD VLG: 4BR, 2BA near Bidwell. Natural wdwrk thru-out, finished 3rd flr inlaw or mastr ste. 146 Livingston. $189,900. Robert Karp, 553-9963(c) ELMWOOD VLG: 4BR 3BA w/ eat-in kit, 1st flr BR w/ bth & lndry (poss in-law). Fin 3rd flr w/ 2BR 1BA $100/nite rental on Air BNB. 528 W. Ferry, $499,900, Susan D. Lenahan, 864-6757(c) NO. BUFFALO: Updated 3BR 2BA w/ refin. hrdwd flrs, porch, 1car gar & full bsmt. 60 Sagamore Terr, $159,500. Thomas Needham, 574-8825(c) PARKSIDE: 5BR 2+BA w/ tall ceilings & hrdwd flrs, maple kit, sunrm, DR w/ coff. ceilg, part fin bsmt w/ kitchen-bar & updated mechan. 51 Jewett Pkwy, $479,000. Christopher Lavey, 480-9507(c) SO. BUFFALO: 2/2 Duplex w/ hrdwd flrs & updated siding, windows, electr, roof, furnc. Fenced yard. 20 Stevenson, $99,500. Mark W. DiGiampaolo, 887-3891(c) SYMPHONY CIRCLE: Updated 1BR 1BA condo close to Elmwood Vlg w/ 1 parking space. 309 North St #3, $144,900. Susan D. Lenahan, 864-6757(c) WEST VILLAGE: 2BR 1BA condo. Bamboo flrs, exposed brick walls, hi-end kit, in-unit lndry, new windows. 65 Whitney Pl #6, $139,900. Susan D. Lenahan, 864-6757(c)

Rental Properties

NO. BUFFALO: 2+BR, lrg LR, formal DR, eat-in kit, den-study w/ exit to sm. porch. Updated bath, new windows & furnc. 27 Commonwealth, $900+ util. Robin Barrell, 986-4061(c) SOUTH BUFFALO: 3BR lower unit, appliances included, W/D hookups avail. On street parking only. 28 Magnolia, $675+ (for 1st 6 mos). Tina Bonifacio, 570-7559(c) WEST SIDE: 2BR on 2 flrs in former church w/ hrdwd flrs, gas fp, in-unit laundry. 2nd flr has lrg mstr, 2nd BR, enormous sitting rm & full bth. Rooftop deck with views of river. 75 Bird Ave. $1,300+. Robin Barrell, 986-4061

716-819-4200 431 Delaware Avenue Buffalo, NY 14202

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NEWS COMMENTARY

YEAR OF THE RACIST Buffalo Republican Committee’s Facebook page offers evidence that racism is alive and kicking BY MICHAEL I. NIMAN

When I say “Year of the Racist,” I’m not quite sure if I’m talking about 2014 or 2015. That’s up to us. The cellphone-video-to-YouTube upload pipeline has given image to a systemic institutional racist violence that legacy American media has chosen to ignore since its inception. Thanks to these images the nation is finally talking about what previously was primarily discussed only in sociology courses and amongst communities of victims—the racist reality of policing in America. These images also provided for a clear and simple primer to help understand another formerly taboo concept—the role of the criminal justice system in legitimizing and protecting racist police violence. On one hand, 2014 went down in history as the year we as a society finally began to acknowledge and address our deep-seated racism. This discussion, however, has also brought the racists out of the closet, giving us a really ugly start to 2015. Just as social media revolutionized journalism by allowing the public to bypass the gatekeepers, it also created new platforms for racist trolls—people who less than a generation ago were relegated to venting their xenophobic bile on the walls of public bathrooms. Comedian Chris Rock summed it up after the Ferguson decision, tweeting, “Just found a new app that that tells you which one of your friends are racist. It’s called Facebook.” Of course Facebook was always a platform for ignorant racists to share their ignorance and hate beyond the confines of their sad lives, but it really caught on fire just as meaningful anti-racism finally started to break through the mainstream media filter.

WITHOUT WHITE WARNING CONES ON THEIR HEADS Consider this post: Just some political satire to help you get over the beautiful drive this morning. I-65 will be closed tomorrow across Tennessee and Kentucky. They are hauling a 200 ton lump of coal to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota so they can add Barack Hussein Obama to Mount Rushmore…They had to settle for coal, because they couldn’t find a 200 ton piece of shit. The post appeared on the Buffalo Republicans Facebook page, which is moderated by Tracey McNerney, the chair of the City of Buffalo Republican Committee. This is not political satire, as the poster claims. It doesn’t mention politics. It’s elementary school racism. Traditionally such unabashed drivel is expected from N-bombing cretins in pissstenched bars or avowed racists adorned with white warning cones on their heads—with no backpedaling pretenses of “satire.” The new racism tries to package itself as anything but racism. Today’s racism is once again ascendant in more mainstream venues—in this case a social media site run by a local affiliate of the political party that just won control of the US Senate and New York State Senate, while solidifying its control of the US House of Representatives. Unlike your dweeb cousin’s Myspace or Tumblr page, this is not an obscure racist outpost. It’s mainstream. The same page hosts posts from Rick Donovan, a recently defeated Republican candidate for the New York State Senate, who writes that Obama “brought in Illegal Immigrant children into America and placed them all over America causing a flu epidemic to OUR American children” [sic]. Donovan, who got almost 12,000 votes, also posts that American cities are “being taken over by Sharia law.” Such run-of-themill xenophobia has always been present in American society, but 2014 seems to have brought it to the surface after a few years of being out of fashion. Now it’s back in mainstream political discourse— and at the Thanksgiving dinner table. A month ago, Donovan posted a link on the Buffalo Republicans site to a story about a 19-yearold white Mississippi woman who was set afire and burned to death. Above the link he wrote, “WHER’S THE LOCAL MEDIA ON THIS

STORY ???? Where’s the WHITE ‘OUT CRY’ Black on White ‘HATE CRIME’ Three Black teens beat this young woman with a hammer” [sic]. He went on the write, “I WANT JUSTICE for this young woman and her family!” This sort of anger is sadly familiar. Unlike systemic racist police brutality against black people, which medical professionals have termed a “public health crisis,” the horrific murder of this Mississippi woman is not part of a persistent historic national pattern of hate crimes against white people. The poster’s response is reminiscent of a historic pattern of rhetoric, the meme of out-of-control black men predating upon innocent white women, that fueled generations of lynching murders of innocent black men—the “white outcry” against “black on white hate crime.” And as was usually the case with lynchings, there are no “three black teens” who “beat this young woman with a hammer.” There have been no arrests to date. There are no suspects. We just know that this white women dated black men, which was always a taboo in lynching-era Mississippi, and now apparently in New York Republican politics. The problem here is not so much that a few idiots soiled the GOP Facebook page, but that the moderator, who is the leader of the local party, didn’t perceive these posts as problematic. In New York City, the YouTube broadcast police killing of Eric Garner and the grand jury failure to indict his police-officer killer has ignited a long-overdue dialog about patterns of police assaults against innocent black men in that city. As part of that dialog, New York’s progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio, discussed how he and his wife gave their biracial son Dante the same obligatory talk that unfortunately is part of the rearing of almost every non-white child in the US. According to the mayor, “We said, ‘Look, if a police officer stops you, do everything he tells you to do, don’t move suddenly, don’t reach for your cell phone…Because we knew, sadly, there’s a greater chance it might be misinterpreted if it was a young man of color.” This should be one of those comments that flies by without controversy—just sadness. Unfortunately this is necessary parental advice that is certainly backed up by data. The outrage should be that a parent has to say this to his son, rather than that he said it. But in the rising racism of 2014, it drew condemnation from the unfortunately named president of the New York City Police Benevolent Association, Patrick Lynch. The opening for Lynch’s attack on the mayor came after a mentally disturbed man with a semi-automatic handgun murdered his wife in Maryland and then returned to his hometown of Brooklyn and murdered two police officers, whom he apparently chose at random, ambushing them as they innocently sat in their car, then killed himself. The spin on this horrible murder/suicide wasn’t about the lack of available treatment for people suffering mental illness, or the easy availability of military-grade weapons, but instead, according to Lynch, “That blood on the hands, starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.” The New York City Sergeants Benevolent Association tweeted, “blood of 2 executed police officers is on the hands of @BilldeBlasio.” Rather than embrace the investigations into patterns of racist violence that undermine the professionalism of the NYPD and threaten the lives of innocent New Yorkers, which the police are sworn to protect, Lynch and other PBA officials instead blame these deaths on demonstrators, community leaders, and politicians, including the mayor, who demanded accountability from police officials. It’s just too much of a leap to blame the murder of two innocent police officers by a disturbed man, on unrelated people who are exercising their constitutionally protected right to publically demand that other murderers also be brought to justice.

AN UPRISING THAT MAKES NO SENSE Lynch’s uprising is pivotal in the Year of the Racist because, absent racism, it really doesn’t make any sense. The majority of rank-and-file NYPD officers patrolling the streets, including the two who were

THE PUBLIC / JANUARY 7, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

murdered, are non-white. Many of these officers have gone public with their own concerns about the dangers they perceive from their fellow officers when they are off-duty walking around in New York City. Lynch’s uprising against those calling for racial justice does not represent this majority—instead splitting the police department along racial lines. Many of the white officers, who generally are older, were recruited from segregated areas of the city, such as Bensonhurst in Brooklyn and Howard Beach and Breezy Point in Queens. When Lynch speaks in public, he’s usually flanked by white officers, presenting a statistical anomaly that could be perceived as a last hurrah for a centuries-old tradition of racist policing. This uprising has presented a smokescreen for enlightened racists—those who look, smell, walk, and talk like racists, all while denouncing racism and anyone who would call them racist. We now see angry white men holding signs reading “I can breath,” mocking Eric Garner’s dying words, “I can’t breath,” which have become a rallying cry for the racial justice movement. What do you call a political action that exists only to oppose a movement for racial justice? This movement is now growing, with “pro-police” demonstrations popping up in places where there are no racial justice demonstrators to counter. The new movement has memes such as “Blue Lives Matter.” The reality is, police lives do matter. They have always mattered. But that’s not what mocking the “Black Lives Matter” meme is about. Ironically, many of the same demonstrators who are coming out in support of “blue lives” were coming out last April to support Nevada Rancher Cliven Bundy’s private war against the federal government, celebrating the vigilantes and mercenaries who came from around the country and set up sniper positions, taking aim upon officers who tried to evict Bundy’s cattle from public land after he refused to pay grazing fees, instead declaring public land to be his sovereign land. That movement included old-school white supremacists traveling hundreds of miles to take up arms against “Obama’s” cops.

BLACK AND BLUE CRIME It’s easy enough to research the new ascendant racism without leaving the discomfort of your own computer. Just follow Kid Rock’s advice and go on Facebook. Or read the comments posted after most mainstream media articles. Or surf through the muck at Fox News and listen to Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and “tough prosecutor” under whose watch police racism flourished. He’ll explain that the real problem is “black on black crime,” which he says accounts for 83 percent of black murders and requires white cops to protect black people. The racism in this comment is illuminated by the lack of any logic in this argument. First off, what does this factoid have to do with white cops killing innocent black men like Eric Garner, which is the point of the “Black Lives Matter” protests? Deconstruct the term “black on black crime.” Technically, we can simply call this “crime.” Roughly the same percent of white people are killed by white people. This is a segregated society. But your average Fox viewer will never learn of the mirror statistic for white murders. Instead, Fox will assault you with a parade of similar commentators, all referencing the same “black on black” crime meme, asking why no one is protesting against these killings, as if we’re not supposed to expect any sort of difference between law enforcement officers and murderers. When these arguments get so thin, there’s really nothing left but racism. I’d like to look back on 2014 as the Year of the Racist. They all came out of the closet. That’s good. Now let’s have a discussion. Let’s hope 2015 is the year we finally effectively begin to confront racism. Absent this, the discussion of racism can once again slip into the closet, snuffed out by fear, harassment, and a culture of trolls. I don’t see that happening, however. Liberty just feels to good to give up on. Michael I. Niman is a professor of journalism and critical media studies at SUNY Buffalo State. His columns are available globally through syndicaP tion and are archived at mediastudy.com.

REVIEW ARTS Stearns’s Geiger counter chandelier.

WITH A BANG OR A FLICKER Phillip Stearns’s installation at the Burchfield Penney BY JACK FORAN

Phillip Stearns’s installation on nuclear energy in the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s project room is something to see and contemplate. The work transforms the space into an enormous Geiger counter—comprising actually 92 individual Geiger counters, for the 92 electrons in the uranium atom—registering the ambient environment barrage of cosmic radiation in light flashes and audible crackle on a magnificent chandelier of hanging vertical bar lights. The work is said to be inspired by the disaster at the Japanese Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant four years ago when it was struck by a tsunami triggered by a nearly 9.0 magnitude earthquake in the Pacific Ocean. Meltdowns occurred in three of the plant’s six nuclear reactors, releasing substantial radioactive material in the terrestrial vicinity and adjacent ocean waters and necessitating evacuating the population for miles around the plant site. It was the second-worst nuclear plant disaster in history, after Chernobyl in 1986 in what was then the Soviet Union. The random flicker of lights and accompanying Geiger static establish a mood and theme of instability, incertitude, unpredictability, with regard to numerous aspects and features of the atomic subject matter. Fundamental instability of the uranium element. Randomness character of all types and forms of radiation activity. Environmental issues and concerns related to nuclear power production, including geological concerns. The unpredictability of earthquake and tsunami events such as resulted in the Fukushima disaster. A theme and mood underscored by the ambiguity of the work title: A Chan-

delier for One of Many Possible Ends. Ends in the sense of purposes? Or endings? Ways the world might end? With a bang or a flicker. A recent report in the British Guardian newspaper on the current state of the Fukushima cleanup pointed out that each day about 400 metric tons of groundwater flows “from hills behind the plant into the basements of the three stricken reactors, where it mixes with coolant water being used to prevent melted fuel from overheating and triggering another major accident.” In the process, the groundwater becomes nuclear contaminated. Some of the water is pumped from the basements and stored in holding tanks, “but large quantities find their way to other parts of the site, including maintenance trenches connected to the sea.” In addition to the water flowing to the sea, so far the operation has accumulated about 500,000 metric tons of contaminated water in more than 1,000 tanks. Ultimately, of course, tanks leak. The contaminated water is the most pressing issue. Another vital concern though is removal of fuel rods from the damaged facilities. Workers recently completed removal of some thirteen hundred fuel rods from a reactor damaged in a hydrogen explosion following the initial disaster. The Guardian report says “some experts had warned of a potential catastrophe had the fuel rods collided or been damaged during the operation.” The report says one Japanese official “went as far as claiming that ‘the fate of Japan and the whole world’ depended on the successful removal” of the fuel rods in this case.

But even more dangerous and difficult jobs lie ahead. The project has yet to begin removing melted fuel from the most damaged reactors, where radiation levels are too high to allow humans to approach. Nor do operators even know just where the damaged fuel is located in these facilities. The Guardian report says the dangers posed by this prospective phase have forced the operators to postpone the planned start of fuel removal from the first of the reactors until 2025. Cleanup and decommissioning of the entire plant is expected to take at least 40 years. Likely an optimistic estimate. Following the Fukushima disaster, Germany determined to close all its reactors by 2020 and Italy has banned nuclear power. But nuclear power in the rest of the world in recent years, including the United States, has been and remains a growth industry. In addition to ever-increasing world energy demands, there is the climate change issue. Nuclear power production produces virtually no carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas. The World Nuclear Association points out that, “as concern about climate change has grown, a number of high-profile environmentalists have decided that climate change is a more serious problem than their previous concerns with nuclear power.” Among the “high-profile environmentalists” who have thus come around, they list Stewart Brand, but not Bill McKibben. Well in the forefront among nations in plans underway for nuclear power production is China. The Phillip Stearns installation remains up through April 12.

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ARTS REVIEW

IMPERFECTIONS BY CHANCE Paul Feeley retrospective at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery BY BRUCE JACKSON

Paul Feeley (1910-1966) had his first solo exhibit in the Palo Alto Public Library in 1927, when he was 17 years old; the show was drawings of his brothers. He was in a few other group shows in the 1930s, but it wasn’t until after he returned from World War II that he became the important and influential artist and teacher whose work is presented in this splendid exhibit. He had his first post-war solo exhibition at the New School for Social Research in 1948. That was followed by a lot of solo and group exhibitions in the 1950s continuing into the early part of this century. (A comprehensive list through 2002 is on paulfeeley.com.) This is the major exhibit for his work thus far in in this century. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery describes this show as “The artist’s first retrospective in more than fifty years.” There have been other Feeley retrospectives, but all have been of narrower focus. This exhibition includes “the full spectrum of his creative output: early Abstract Expressionist-inspired paintings from the mid-1950s, organic figure-ground compositions from the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the idiosyncratic, diagrammatical compositions that preoccupied him from 1962 until his untimely death in 1966, which share a conceptual affinity with Minimalism and Op Art. The exhibition [also includes] a selection of the painter’s fluid works on paper, as well as several painted sculptures, some of the last works he made.” The exhibition comprises 40 paintings, 15 works on paper, and three sculptures. It was initiated by Peggy Pierce Elfvin Director Janne Sirén and organized by Albright-Knox Chief Curator Emeritus Douglas Dreishpoon and Tyler Cann, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Columbus Museum of Art. It balances a parallel exhibit on the north side of the Gallery’s main building, also initiated by Sirén and curated by Dreishpoon: Giving Up One’s Mark: Helen Frankenthaler in the 1960s and 1970s. The parallel exhibit is not accidental: Feeley was head of Bennington’s spectacular Art Department from 1939 to 1966 (save for the years he was serving in World War II) and Frankenthaler was one of his students. This is, to my knowledge, the first time any American modern art gallery has mounted parallel exhibits of a major artist who was also a teacher and another major artist who was that teacher’s student. The Feeley exhibit is divided into three time periods: 1954-59, 196062, and 1963-65. They show his astonishing experiments with and development in form, color, rhythm, and structure. The earlier phase of the exhibit has several images that seem based on polyps: Tiberius (1961) has six of them attached to a vertical core, all cut off at the edges, blue against a dark yellow field. Homer (1962) has four of them, two facing up and down, two facing left, all attached to a fatter, bigger one facing right, red against (or in) a field of yellow. My favorite is Kilroy (1957), not unlike the nose of the famous World War II graffito often accompanied by the text, “Kilroy Was Here.” It’s a cinnabar node or polyp, spreading to the canvas edges at the top, surrounded by a field of yellow. (Or is it a bowl of yellow surrounding

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a field of cinnabar? That’s what color-field is about. Like that figure that in one glance is a lamp and another glance is two faces: It’s either, or both.) But there’s more to Kilroy than that. The cinnabar figure hanging down suggests an udder, a breast, whatever comes to mind. Doug Dreishspoon said to me, “It’s both peaceful and it’s anguished…It’s abstract, but we well know that abstraction has meaning,” On closer look, the cinnabar of Kilroy isn’t at all perfect. The cinnabar leaks into the yellow much like photographs of sunspots leak into the world. That wasn’t accidental: Feeley could easily have cleaned that up. He chose not to, as if to show us that this was something being made. It’s a painting, one that implies time and process. And the cinnabar itself isn’t the least bit monochromatic: It is a constantly shifting field of shade, saturation, and intensity. Drieshpoon said about this picture, “He’s not afraid to show imperfection and strokes.” It’s even more than that: Feeley wants us to see the imperfection and strokes. Art is not just product; it is also process. And that is what Feeley’s work is about. They’re all like that. Even though at first glace each of the rooms feels like a room of similar things, they are similar only in the most gross of ways, ways that very soon after serious looking evaporate. When I walked around the exhibit with Dreishspoon I mentioned that even though the images are non-referential, I couldn’t keep a variety of other images and forms from coming to mind. “That’s what art does,” he said. At one point I said that I couldn’t keep from going anthropomorphic. “I think that’s fair,” he said. “They’re catalysts for dreams. That’s part of their quality.” Some of the drawings provide a clue to the larger paintings in the larger galleries. They have thin lines bisecting the page horizontally and vertically, and diagonals going from top left to lower right and top right to lower left. Perfectly geometrical. But then a drawing is made in those quartered fields, sometimes symmetrical, but not quite. The lines are perfectly formal, the drawings or watercolors only sometimes are. Order is there only as a starting point. The earlier paintings show leaking edges, as if to let us in to the process of making; the later paintings, clearer in line and form, sometimes have thin, light spaces between the fields, providing, Dreishspoon says, space for the color to “breathe.” The spaces are small; you won’t notice them unless you’re looking for them, but you’ll feel them. And that’s all art is about anyway: feeling. If there’s no feeling, it’s just technique. Feeley prepared a document for the Bennington Art Department in

October 1959, “Bennington Art Policy.” It is twenty brief paragraphs that are as much a manifesto of making art as teaching it. If I were head of a university art department or ran a gallery, I’d make it into a huge poster, because it says so much about what making art and understanding art is all about. Here are some of my favorites of those 20 paragraphs: 3. A valiant attempt to define the 20th century so that we may know what we are working with. 4. The encouragement to do the most elementary and primitive things in art, if necessary, in order not to operate in a hollow, pretentious manner. 5. A willingness at all times to return to first principles to get back to simple things in order not to get lost in complex uncertainties. 6. Increased understanding of past and present culture. 9. To be challenged by the opportunity of finding life relationships in the rare arena where form is confronted by the word, and not to answer that challenge by an art school formula. 13. To give specific though to what it means to study art in our time. Clearly we are responding to world conditions that have never been quite this way before. 18. To encourage contemplation and reflection as sources of human action; however, not to deny the creative power of impulsiveness and spontaneity. Here are some thing to keep in mind when you look at Feeley’s lovely formal paintings and his polyps with their complex manifestations of color and space. He grew up in art, he taught art in the late 1930s and then in the 1950s and thereafter. But in between he was in World War II and at the end of his service he was one of the first US GIs in Nagasaki. He was a Marine. In those years, you couldn’t be drafted into the Marines you had to enlist for it. He was an artist who made that very specific choice. He knew what what was the best we had come up with and he’d seen the worst we might do. When he writes, in that 1959 manifesto, about the importance of art being related to real life, he was not the least bit abstract. His paintings are abstract, but what they reach for is your very real gut. Those polyps are also mushroom clouds. Through February 15 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The Feeley exhibit travels next to Columbus Museum of Art, October 16, 2016 to January 10, 2016. P

FEELEY WANTS US TO SEE THE IMPERFECTION AND STROKES. ART IS NOT JUST PRODUCT; IT IS ALSO PROCESS. AND THAT IS WHAT FEELEY’S WORK IS ABOUT.

SPOTLIGHT DANCE

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If yo this held the is a

REBECCA JEFFERSON

always open til 4am

Than PUB chec instr clos desi char for 24 depa in or this this

BY VANESSA OSWALD Professional dancer Rebecca Jefferson has spent her life dancing and touring in major cities all across the globe with some of the most prestigious dance companies in the world. She’s lived in New York City and currently resides in Germany, but the 42-year-old dancer says she will always recognize Buffalo as her true home. Jefferson grew up in Buffalo near Allentown and has fond memories of attending her first dance classes with her three siblings. As she grew older, dance became more of a passion than recreation, and she successfully made it her career. Inspired by dancers like Gelsey Kirkland, whom she calls “a true fairy,” Jefferson became serious about dance in college. After leaving SUNY Purchase in the late 1990s, she moved to Germany to pursue dance full time. She continues to push herself, physically and mentally as a dancer, with each new experience, and cherishes every minute of it. This week we talked to Jefferson about learning to dance in Buffalo and taking her skills worldwide. What is your first memory of dancing?

I think I was about four dancing in our living room on Christmas Eve around the tree. I have a picture of myself in my pajamas, fuzzy slippers, and curlers in my hair! What was it like growing up in Buffalo?

I grew up near Allentown and attended the Cathedral School and Sacred Heart Academy High School. I have amazing memories of our house. It was five floors and it had so many secret hiding spots. My parents had a master bedroom with a wall size mirror. I would dress up in costumes, play Chopin’s Moonlight Sonata on my tape recorder over and over, and perform “The Dying Swan.” The music was so sad and beautiful to me. I could do nothing but die dramatically at the end. When and why did you move to Germany to pursue a dance career there?

In 1998, when I was still on tour with Phantom, I got a call from Amanda Miller who I worked with when she made a piece in Ballet Hispanico. Her company, Pretty Ugly, was taking over a theater in

Southern Germany and she asked me to come to Europe and dance with them. I always wished to travel the world so this was really a dream come true. At first I was quite homesick. My dad had died just months before so I was missing my family. I thought I would stay just one year, but life, love, and a child happened. I danced for Amanda for over 10 years and still work on and off with her. She taught me all energy, fear, nervousness, doubt was okay. Just to be honest, keep moving, and take risks. The biggest difference with my experience in New York and Europe was that in Europe the perspective of dance styles was way more open than in New York, which had at the time mostly only classical ballet companies or post-modern, but not so much in between, and both were very separated. I was somehow both and neither and was able to combine all my influences and grow further in Europe. Another difference is most of the dance companies in Germany are state-funded, so there is a company in almost every city, but that is slowly changing due to less funding.

Tell me about some of your favorite instructors.

One of my most important teachers as a young dancer was Patricia Farkas Sprague. She was a member of the BBT and had such an enthusiasm, passion, and pure love for dance. I trained mainly with her for many years. For me she broke the stereotype of what dancers “should” look and be like in terms of height, weight, and flexibility. I thought I couldn’t dance ballet because I was too dark and didn’t fit in. I learned from her, dance was simply about love and hard work. Another important teacher was Christine Wright in New York. I learned from her not to be afraid of ballet and to really dance. She worked with the body, from the inside out, which enabled me to become freer in my movement.

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What are you currently working on?

I am currently working with a dancer colleague, Ruben Reniers. We met in my last dance company, Pretty Ugly. I occasionally work with his dance, art collective called Rubarb Dance and Art. In the past we have made pieces for small theaters in Berlin and Cologne and are currently writing applications to bring our pieces to other venues. I am also dancing in an opera and doing dancing in some theater pieces. I recently became a Pilates instructor as well, so I am studying a lot. Finally, tell us why you love to dance.

I am not a big talker, so dance is my language. It really feels like my home, where I am most close P to myself. It’s my anchor.

Adver

____

Date_

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ANNE MUNTGES is a Buffalo-based artist who received

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d her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2005 and an MFA from the University at Buffalo in 2008. Her show, Skewed Perspective, opens January 12 at Jamestownâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Center Gallery, with a reception and talk on January 16, 6-8pm.

13 13 THE DAILYPUBLIC.COM PUBLIC / JANUARY / JANUARY 7, 20157,/ 2015 DAILYPUBLIC.COM / THE PUBLIC

EVENTS CALENDAR PUBLIC APPROVED

COLIN QUINN THURSDAY JAN 8 8PM / HELIUM COMEDY CLUB, 30 MISSISSIPPI ST. / $20-$36 [COMEDY] Longtime fans of Saturday Night Live may remember Colin Quinn from his stint on the show during the late 1990s with characters like Joe Blow and Lenny the Lion, or his hilarious anchoring of Weekend Update. The 55-year-old comedian has also made several appearances in movies and television—in movies like A Night at the

IN PRINT

Roxbury and Grown Ups, and on TV as host of his own Comedy Central show, Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn—delivering lines with an attitude only a true New Yorker could pull off. Known for his observational humor and sketch comedy style, Quinn is a comedian’s comedian. This weekend, Quinn will be making a stop for several performances in Buffalo at Helium Comedy Club over the weekend. Catch some laughs on Thursday, January 8 at 8pm or Friday, January 9 and Saturday, January 10 at 7:30pm and 10pm. -JEREMIAH SHEA

TEENAGE SATAN Teenage Satan II (EP) Recommended If You Like: Woods, Avey Tare Dan Bauer returns with another EP of off-kilter pop, mixing haunting, lo-fi vocals with eerily beautiful melodies.

HUSSALONIA  Edward Everett Hussalonia (LP) RIYL: Big Star, the Kinks EEH is the latest collection of British Invasion infused rock from the local power pop maestro.

THE AFTERBIRTH TYCOON Purgatory on Parade (EP) RIYL: Son House, Jack White, Charlie Patton This power-garage trio ended 2014 by dropping the tense and rollicking new collection of swamp rock produced by Eden’s go-to producer, Matt Smith of Hi/Lo.

LOCAL SHOW PICK OF THE WEEK

ANDY POTHIER W/ DAMIAN, SONNY BAKER MOHAWK PLACE THUR, JAN 8 / 8PM / $5

THURSDAY JAN 8 Portrait of Jason 7pm Hallwalls, 341 Delaware Ave. $5-$8

[SCREENING] Called “the most extraordinary film I’ve seen in my life” by no less than Ingmar Bergman, the 1967 documentary Portrait of Jason was all but lost for decades. Painstaking research by the film archivists at Milestone Film led to the discovery of sufficient elements to restore the film, which will be screened this week at Hallwalls. Director Shirley Clarke (whose The Connection and Ornette: Made in America have also recently been screened at Hallwalls) spent 12 hours in a room at Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel interviewing Jason Holliday, a gay hustler and cabaret performer. This was groundbreaking enough for its time, but the results remain extraordinary. Holliday’s carefully constructed persona is worn down by the filmmakers through questioning, and while we can never be sure that the removed layers don’t simply reveal another façade, the portrait of a man marginalized from society by race, sexuality and class is none the less indelible. -M. FAUST

Squaw Island: Why Does It Matter? 7pm Burning Books, 420 Connecticut St.

[LECTURE] What do you know about Squaw Island? What do you know about the origin of the word “squaw” itself? If you knew (or know), you might take offense. Tyendinaga Mohawk scholar-activict Jodi Lyn Maracle will give a presentation on the history of the island, and the origin of its name on Thursday, January 8 at Burning Books. Squaw Island: Why Does It Matter is hosted by Nekanęhsakt: Friends of Ękwehęwę. -CORY PERLA

14 THE PUBLIC / JANUARY 7, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

CALENDAR EVENTS PUBLIC APPROVED

LIVE MUSIC EVERY NIGHT FOR OVER 30 YEARS! WEDNESDAY

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JAN 7

7PM FREE

FREE BIKE GIVEAWAY FOR BEST DRESSED ELVIS! THURSDAY

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JAN 9

Reggae Happy Hour with Neville Francis 6PM FREE

Ish Kabibble, Jack Topht & Lil Cake Different Planets, Ahavaraba Hooked on Casiophonics Jamie & The Debt, the boy scouts 10PM $5

PHOTO BY MAX COLLINS

THE ALBRIGHTS FRIDAY JAN 9 SATURDAY

8PM / BUFFALO IRON WORKS, 49 ILLINOIS ST. / $5-$8 [POP-ROCK] Buffalo quartet The Albrights dish out spine-tingling pop-rock ballads, boasting infectious hooks through brilliant instrumentation and soaring vocals. Named after Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Albrights’ repertoire of power-pop seamlessly changes style as if each track were its own strategically sculpted exhibit. From their 2011 debut album, Ask, Tell, to their 2014 self-titled sophomore album, they maintain the ability to blend a diverse range of genres, while still sounding unified and melodic. Possibly their most consistent characteristics, their strong vocal harmonies and heartfelt lyrics, are written and sung by guitarist Brandon Barry and keyboardist Joe Donohue III. Donohue’s honey-sweet, poppy melodies find balance in Barry’s edgy croon. Their instrumentation varies, but always delivers in spades—like the piano-fueled “Zion Man,” which opens with bold, Chopin-like keys, or “Soundwave”, which is ultimately gleaming with gorgeous instrumentation, from the triumphant horn to the graceful piano hook. Even when they’re subdued and stripped down, like in “Honey”—comprising just Barry’s heartfelt vocals and the gentle plucking on the ukulele—their sound is unparalleled. On Friday, January 9 the Albrights will be kicking off their Great Noreaster Tour at Buffalo Iron Works. Mike Gantzer and Dave Loss, guitarists of Aqueous—Buffalo’s favorite rising jam band with a fiery execution style—will open, performing as Acoustic Wonder Emporium. -KELLIE POWELL

JAN 10

WEDNESDAY

JAN 14

THURSDAY

JAN 15

The Brothers DuBenion 8pm Pausa Art House, 19 Wadsworth St. $5-$7

[JAZZ] Buffalo’s jazz scene has some fresh new talent and they’re called The Brothers DuBenion. Brothers Aaron and Syl Dubenion, accompanied by guitarist Jared Tinkham, bassist Brian Dejesus, and drummer David Phillips, will perform original contemporary jazz compositions when they come to Pausa Art House on Thursday, January 8. -CP

FRIDAY JAN 9

FRIDAY

JAN 16

The Observers

WAKOS, Kothen,The Leones 9PM $5

The Kevin Gaynor Experience 9PM FREE

ABTrio

(Bronstein/Campbell/Henry) 9PM FREE

The Jony James Band 6PM FREE

Artvoice presents Boom 10PM FREE

WEEKLY EVENTS EVERY SUNDAY FREE 6PM. ANN PHILLIPONE

8PM . DR JAZZ & THE JAZZ BUGS

San Fran Buff Non Stop

(EXCEPT FIRST SUNDAYS)

8pm Big Orbit Gallery, 30 Essex St

[ART] Culling artistic gestures from the ether of social interaction and home itself seems to be the ongoing project for Tina Dillman, a Bay Area artist who is splashing down on her new Buffalo digs and big plans with Big Orbit‘s inaugural show for 2015. If her project truly borrows from the Bay Area Conceptual Artist Tom Marioni’s maxim, that “drinking with friends is the highest art form,” then Dillman’s impromptu living room at Big Orbit will be the place to be. -AL

Chuckie Campbell 6pm The Forvm, 4224 Maple Rd. $7-$10

[HIP HOP] Rapper Chuckie Campbell is starting to make some waves nationally. Though he calls Richmond, Kentucky his hometown, he grew up in Buffalo and is currently a professor of English at Bryant and Stratton College. His obsession with syntax has most certainly helped him form the impressive prose and bouncing lyrical flow that he delivers over mostly sublime beats.

In 2014 the young rapper dropped his record, More Die of Heartbreak, which garnered him some attention from websites like the Huffington Post, which wrote a piece about the rapper that interweaved gritty visions of Buffalo with glimpses into Campbell’s unique worldview. Chuckie Campbell comes to the Forvm with G Premacy, Krame, Bill$Mafia, Jay Nawldoe, and more on Thursday January 8, presented by For the Music Productions. -CP

8PM. SONGWRITER SHOWCASE 9PM. OPEN MIC W. JOSH GAGE

EVERY TUESDAY

8PM. RUSTBELT COMEDY 10PM. JOE DONOHUE

11PM. THE STRIPTEASERS

EVERY WEDNESDAY FREE

The Silks IMAGE COURTESY TINA DILLMAN

EVERY MONDAY FREE

5PM. TONY DEROSA

8pm Mohawk Place, 47 E Mohawk St. $5

[ROCK] Providence, Rhode Island rock-androllers Tthe Silks pick up where bands like Faces and Superchunk leave off. With the help of producer Paul Westerberg, frontman of Replacements, the band has created a set of monochromatic, yet psychdelic and melodic rock and roll tunes in the form of their debut album, Last American Band. The Silks will dig into their deep cuts when they come to Mohawk Place on Friday, January 9 with Buffalo garage rockers Handsome Jack. -CP

EVERY THURSDAY FREE 5PM. JOHN & BILL

(ACCORDIAN & SAX)

248 ALLEN STREET 716.886.8539

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CONTINUED ON PAGE 16 DAILYPUBLIC.COM / JANUARY 7, 2015 / THE PUBLIC 15

EVENTS CALENDAR CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15

Serious Literature II

PUBLIC APPROVED

8pm Just Buffalo Literary Center, 468 Washington St., 2nd floor

[LITERARY] Insignificant or significant—it’s only when you recall a moment through a lens of comedy or drama that you’ll truly be able to soak up its juice. This is within the domain of what writers do. This Friday, January 9, head down to Just Buffalo Literary Center for the second installment of Serious Literature, where a host of local artists and poets have been invited to share personal testimonies of 2014. From the irreparably tragic to the shamelessly hilarious, come experience some of the most colorful impressions of the past year. -JC

Ahavaraba 10pm Nietzsche’s, 248 Allen St.

[FOLK] Klezmer music collective Ahavaraba will perform at Nietzsche’s on Friday, January 9 with a slew of bands including Different Planets, Hooked on Casiophonics, Jamie and the Debt, Little Cake & Jack Topht, and more. The range of musical acts on this show is wide—from folk to hip hop, rock, and klezmer, which is an Eastern European brand of music that usually employs the use of instruments such as flutes, accordions, violins, drums, and bass. Ahavaraba (which means “infinite love” in Hebrew) use all of these instruments and more. -CP

Cowboys of Scotland 9pm Milkie’s, 522 Elmwood Ave $4

[ROCK] In today’s world, with vast amounts of music at our fingertips, genres are being blended and new styles are being churned out regularly. Staying true to this simple fact, Buffalo’s Cowboys of Scotland have an interesting blend of experimental tones and sounds that makes them one of the more unique bands in the area. With cited influences such as David Bowie, Tool, Bob Marley, and Porcupine Tree, it’s pretty obvious why. This Friday, January 9, the band will be setting up shop at Milkie’s on Elmwood for a set of music to kickstart your weekend. Paradox opens the show. -JS

MARTHA DAVIS & THE MOTELS FRIDAY JAN 9 7PM / STUDIO AT THE WAITING ROOM, 334 DELAWARE AVE. / $18-$20 [NEW WAVE] People recall the Motels for their 1980s chart toppers “Only the Lonely” and “Suddenly Last Summer,” both excellent examples of moody New Wave to synth-pop crossover from the early MTV era. But bewitching singer/songwriter Martha Davis was never thoroughly content to be a pop star, and the first two Motels albums, which preceded their Stateside chart success (although, tellingly, were hits in Europe and Australia), spoke to significantly quirkier musical aspirations. In fact, 1982’s All Four One, which markedly raised the band’s profile, was initially rejected by Capitol for not being commercial enough…and so began the corporate meddling that eventually led Davis, now 63, to an extended hiatus. The newly minted Martha Davis and the Motels—actually, Motels 4.0—is a capable six-piece with a disc of fresh material on the way. Hear them do the new and the old, upstairs at the Studio at the Waiting Room on Friday, January 9. -CHRISTOPHER JOHN TREACY

SATURDAY JAN 10 I’ve Been Everywhere With You Closing Party 7pm Dreamland, 387 Franklin St.

PUBLIC APPROVED

[PHOTOGRAPHY] Head down to the Dreamland gallery this Saturday, January 10, where local documentary photographer Christopher Pierce McCleary will cap off the month-long exhibition, I’ve Been Everywhere With You, which comprises portraits of toll-both workers from across the nation. The event will include a showing of a video that highlights his travels, featuring a glimpse into the personalities of these individuals. -JC

As Summer Dies 7pm Mohawk Place, 47 E Mohawk St. $5

[ROCK] If you haven’t stopped out to Mohawk Place since they’ve reopened, you’re missing out on one of Buffalo’s true relics. The venue has been around a while and Buffalonians have had the opportunity to catch music of all genres there. This Saturday, January 10 won’t be any different as a hodgepodge of styles will be thrust on stage. Headlining the show is Buffalo’s own As Summer Dies, a metal/hardcore band that will tear through their discography, with other local heavy-hitters taking the stage before them. Also making appearances will be the bluesy Randle and the Late-Night Scandals, Governess, Poison in the Nest, and The Last Sentry. For $5, how can you beat it! -JS

The Stooges Brass Band 9pm Buffalo Iron Works, 49 Illinois St. $7-$10

[JAZZ] The Stooges Brass Band plays contemporary jazz with a kick. Blending rock instruments with traditional brass, they create a smooth, hip-hop-R&B-jazz fusion dripping with soulful funk. Hailing from New Orleans, they’ve been in the top-tier of the city’s brass bands since the late 1990s. On stage, frontman Walter Ramsey playfully flirts with his audience, as the upbeat, horn-heavy grooves force them into an uncontrollable dancing mass. Put on your dancing shoes, and head to Buffalo Iron Works on Saturday, January 10. Jam band, Skypilot, will open. -KP

FREDTOWN STOMPERS SATURDAY JAN 10 9PM / GYPSY PARLOR, 376 GRANT ST. [ROCK] “There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” It’s this kind of scene within The Great Gatsby that the Fredtown Stompers conjure through their performances, filling venues across the city with a sound that evokes an era of dynamic brass sections and swinging percussion. Comprising musicians who graduated from SUNY Fredonia’s music program, the lively eight-piece ensemble have been turning heads in Buffalo ever since their arrival, garnering fans throughout the region with their polished jazz covers and impeccable showmanship. This Saturday, January 10, they’ll be performing at the Upper West Side hotspot, the Gypsy Parlor, whose antiquated, saloon-themed interior complements the musical legacy that this outfit channels. If you’re looking to experience an evening of terrific live jazz in a spirited atmosphere, this is an event you will not want to miss. -JEANETTE CHIN

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CALENDAR EVENTS

SUNDAY JAN 11

PUBLIC APPROVED

Head North 5pm Studio at the Waiting Room, 334 Delaware Ave. $10-$13

[POP PUNK] Local pop-punk outfit Head North will play at The Studio at The Waiting Room on Sunday, January 11. Their recently leaked track, “In The Water,” previews their upcoming spring EP, produced by Bad Timing Records (Kevin Devine, Valencia). It’s more subdued than past efforts, but doesn’t sacrifice the band’s staple intensity, landing somewhere between Brand New’s Deja Entendu, and Taking Back Sunday’s Where You Want To Be. -KP

Woody Pines 4pm Sportsmens Tavern, 326 Amherst St.

[COUNTRY] Fast cars, pretty women, trials and tribulations: The music of Woody Pines encapsulates the state of mind of his folk predecessors, Johnny Cash, Woodie Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Leadbelly. Hailing from Oregon, Pines rewrites the tradition with a modern flair. This Sunday, January 11, he’ll perform at the Sportmen’s Tavern. An upright bassist alongside a vintage electric guitarist will accompany him to add color to the live material. -JC

MONDAY JAN 12 That 1 Guy 7pm The Forvm, 4224 Maple Rd. $12-$17

[FUNK] When this one-man band takes the stage it might look a bit like he’s hitting a giant one-man bong, but that’s not actually the case. That 1 Guy, Las Vegas-based musician Mike Silverman, is an expert in playing his homemade tubed and strung instrument, which he refers to as the Magic Pipe. On his Magic Pipe (and various other one-man, homemade insturments like the Magic Boot and the Magic Saw) he pumps out a mix of belching funk and burping gypsy hip hop in a comedic, yet musically interesting performance. That 1 Guy comes to the Forvm on Monday, January 12 with DJ Feels Goodman. -CP

PHOTO BY MARK MILLER

CAGES SATURDAY JAN 10 8PM / HALLWALLS, 341 DELAWARE AVE. / $10 [EXPERIMENTAL] Led by vocalist and instrumentalist Nola Ranallo, Cages is an experimental music group. Accompanied by her songwriting partner, David Bailey, the pair blur the line between pop and the avant garde with their sonically spectacular live performance. When the band comes to Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center for a performance on Saturday, January 10, for the release of their latest album, Vivipary, their live show will be even further enhanced through their collaboration with several multifaceted and talented musicians including Wooden Cities, Steve Baczkowski, David Adamczyk, Alex Glenfield, and Gas Chamber. For their first set, the band will work with Wooden Cities, Baczkowski, Adamczyk, and Glenfield to present the first side of their new record; adding an improvisational touch that should “evoke a sonical pastoral grid.” For their second set, Cages will work with Gas Chamber, which they say should display the “brutality and density” of side B of the record. Says the group: “This will be an extreme expression of what is within and outside of us all.” -CORY PERLA

PUBLIC APPROVED

TUESDAY JAN 13 Digital Tape Machine 8pm The Waiting Room, 334 Delaware Ave. $12-$15

[ELECTRONIC] Chicago funktronica outfit Digital Tape Machine brings their fresh, soulsoaked beats (with an improvisational edge) to The Waiting Room on Tuesday, January 13. A favorite on the festival circuit since 2010, their danceable grooves are epitomized by the consistently raw and versatile musicianship of each DMT member. Joe Hettinga’s tenacious keys, plus a funky rhythmic thrust—courtesy of bassist Bryan Doherty and drummer Neal Wehman—back Marcus Rezak’s spine-tingling guitar-work. See “Big N Tall.”) Their jazzy vibes course through your veins like warm, electro-liquid gold—guaranteed to keep you dancing all night. Space Junk and Packy Lunn of Jimkata will open. -KP

WEDNESDAY JAN 14 Scrabble® Fest 2015

5pm The Filling Station, 745 Seneca St. Donations accepted

[FUN] For the 10th year running the Literacy New York Buffalo-Niagara (LNYBN) is using perhaps the greatest board game ever invented as a tool to raise awareness and funds to combat illiteracy. Guests are being asked to make a $20 donation which will go directly toward literacy programming in the Buffalo-Niagara region. It’s the first event of the Scrabble®Fest tournament season that goes all the way through March, The finals take place at the Buffalo Central Library on March 26. -AL

ELIOT LIPP WEDNESDAY JAN 14 9PM / BUFFALO IRON WORKS, 49 ILLINOIS ST. / $5-$8 [ELECTRONIC/DANCE] With his washed-out, usually lo-fi electronic sounds, knob-tweaking mastermind Eliot Lipp preceded chillwave’s similar vibes by a few years. The Brooklyn-based musician is a true electronic music craftsman, hammering out eclectic beats and softening down beautiful synthesizer sounds. Lipp made his debut in 2004 with a self titled album, released by Eastern Developments—known for releasing music by bands like Bear in Heaven, Daedelus, Icy Demons, and many others. In 2006 he released his masterpiece, The Days EP, featuring RJD2-like electro-hip hop tracks like “Grab Mic” and “The Days,” and in 2014 he released his second album on Pretty Lights Music titled Watch the Shadows; a mix of dark, uptempo bangers and smooth, Golden Age hip hop-inspired tunes. Eliot Lipp comes P to Buffalo Iron Works on Wednesday, January 14, with support from Buffalo’s Sonder. -CORY PERLA DAILYPUBLIC.COM / JANUARY 7, 2015 / THE PUBLIC 17

BOOKS EVENTS

Matt Higgins and Brian Castner

BUFFALO, BOOKS, BEER Two local authors prepare to launch new reading series BY JUSTIN SONDEL A pair of local authors are hoping to get Buffalo talking about books. Matt Higgins and Brian Castner have launched a new author series called Buffalo, Books & Beer that will bring more writers through the Queen City on book tours in the casual setting of Resurgence Brewery’s bar room. “Traditional book events tend to be kind of stuffy affairs,” Higgins said. “We’re always talking about books in a bar. It’s so easy. It’s so informal and laid back.” Higgins, the author of Bird Dreams, a nonfiction book about wingsuit pilots trying to land without a parachute, met Castner at a reading of The Long Walk, Castner’s nonfiction book recounting his time as an explosive ordinance disposal officer in Iraq. They then began to meet up at local watering holes to discuss their work and what they were reading. It was during one of these sessions that the idea was hatched, Higgins said.

Higgins said he and Castner hope to create a more inviting environment for their book series and to attract people that might otherwise not attend the event. “Some people are put off by the idea of a reading at a book store,” Higgins said. “I think it’s intimidating for them. They think that perhaps it will be too intellectual.” The authors have launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for the series. With just more than two weeks remaining in the campaign they have raised about one third of their $3,500 goal. They are offering different packages for donations ranging from a pint glass to dinner with the authors. Higgins said they decided that Resurgence Brewing would be the ideal spot for their series: Not only does it have a good selection of beer and an open space that lends itself to such an event, but the Niagara Street business and building also capture the kind of community-based spirit that they are looking to build through the series.

“We’re tapping into the community, people in the community who want these types of events,” he said. While there are readings from big-name authors in Just Buffalo’s Babel series and some readings at local book stores, Buffalo is not often a regular stop on book tours, as both Higgins and Castner found out while promoting their own work, Higgins said. “We don’t get the mid-list authors here who are writing about the kind of contemporaneous topics that people, I think, are interested in,” Higgins said. The crowdfunded money will be used to get those authors into town, creating a dialogue around reading and writing in the city, while also helping the writers reach a wider audience, Higgins said. “We’re helping the authors on one hand, but we also feel like we’re creating a little bit of a scene and a community,” Higgins said.

BUFFALO, BOOKS & BEER SPRING SCHEDULE

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 11 Co-authors Kevin Maurer and Jeff Schober will read from their nonfiction thrillers torn straight from the headlines. Both books focus on the hunts for, and takedowns of, infamous bad guys: No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama Bin Laden by Mark Owen and Kevin Maurer; and Bike Path Rapist: A Cop’s Firsthand Account of Catching the Killer Who Terrorized a Community by Jeff Schober with Det. Dennis Delano.

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WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18 This event will have a barroom theme with New York Times editor Clay Risen and his American Whiskey, Bourbon & Rye: A Guide to

the Nation’s Favorite Spirit. He will be partnered with local comedian Greg Bauch, whose novel, Frank Dates, tells the story of a character’s disastrous and hilarious barroom romances.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18 The final event of the spring will feature Sherill Tippins, and Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York’s Legendary Chelsea Hotel. The local author for this date has yet P to be determined.

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LISA LUDWIG BY ANTHONY CHASE

One of Buffalo’s most admired and enduring leading ladies, Lisa Ludwig is currently appearing as Claire, the restless wife in A. R. Gurney’s Family Furniture, at the Kavinoky Theatre. As known for her personal sense of style as she is for her imposing stage presence and professionalism as an actor, Ludwig has played a wide range of roles—dramatic, comic, musical, classical—at the full range of Buffalo theaters, from the Kavinoky to the Robeson to BUA to MusicalFare to Jewish Rep. She’s done Shakespeare (and is the managing director of Shakespeare in Delaware Park); she’s done musicals from Sondheim to Sinatra; she’s done dinner theater. When she appeared in the courtroom drama, Nuts, at Desiderio’s Dinner Theatre this season, she rated her name above the title in a sign board along Broadway in Lancaster. She is also a noted director of high school shows. The Lisa Ludwig signature is focus and specificity, often playing characters with unexpectedly acerbic wit. In Family Furniture, she returns to the close-knit and well-bred world of post-war Buffalo. As the play begins, her character has taken a trip to New York City, ostensibly to buy slip covers; it is 11 o’clock and she has not returned to her hotel room. In Gurney’s world, such a departure from the daily norm has ominous implications. Claire is a woman with a calm and perfectly composed exterior, whose placid smile obscures a hidden discontent; it is a definitive Lisa Ludwig role. What word would your friends use to describe you? Loyal.

What trait do you most dislike in others? Narcissism.

What quality in the character you are currently playing is most unlike your own personality? She tends to hide her feelings. I’m

What do you most value in your friends? Loyalty.

not very good at that. Also, she’s a stay-at-home 1950s house wife/ mom. I can’t imagine staying at home and baking cookies—although, given the opportunity, I might like to try that. What quality in your current role is most like your own personality? She loves her

children and makes an effort to dress well.

When and where were you the happiest? I am

generally the happiest when I am with my family and friends…and I am always happy when at Disney world. So if my family, friends, and I could all be at Disney World together at one time I would be in heaven!

What quality do you most value in a good director? Being prepared. What is your guilty pleasure? Tabloid

magazines and Paula’s doughnuts. (Chocolatecovered angel cream!) Who is your favorite fictional hero? The evil

queen from Disney’s Snow White. Who are your real-life heroes? My parents. What do you consider to be the most overrated virtue? To be casually forgiving. I do not think

forgiveness should be asked for or given lightly; I think it needs to be truly earned.

What is your idea of hell on earth? When

On what occasion do you lie? If I tell you that,

What is your greatest fear? Suffocation.

What was the subject of your last Google search? Dogs/Puppies.

people I love are in pain and there is nothing I can do about it

I’d have to kill you!

Which talent do you most wish you had? The

If you come back in another life, what person or thing would you like to be? A wiser version

What superpower do you most wish you had? Mind control.

of myself.

What would you change about your appearance? Too many things to pick just one.

better then death, that’s all.” (From The Princess P Bride.)

ability to dance.

What is your motto? “Life isn’t fair. It’s just

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FILM PLAYING NOW

IN CINEMAS NOW: Selma

BY M. FAUST & GEORGE SAX

PREMIERES INHERENT VICE—Adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel starring Joaquin Phoenix as a pothead detective investigating a mystery in Los Angeles circa 1970. Co-starring Josh Brolin, Katherine Waterston, Michael Kenneth Williams, Benicio Del Toro, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, and Martin Short. Reviewed this issue. SELMA—Drama based on the historic 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (David Oyelowo) to secure passage of the federal Voting Rights Act that prohibited racial discrimination in voting. With Cuba Gooding Jr., Tim Roth, Giovanni Ribisi, Carmen Ejogo, Martin Sheen, and Tom Wilkinson. Directed by Ava DuVernay (Middle of Nowhere). TAKEN 3—Liam Neeson swore during promotion for Taken 2 that there would be no third film for his retired CIA operative character. Which means they must have paid him a lot of money for this. With Famke Janssen, Forest Whitaker, and Dougray Scott. Directed by Olivier Megaton (Transporter 3).

ALTERNATIVE CINEMA AIRPLANE! (1980)—The movie that restored parody to the motion picture screen after years of banishment in the wastelands of television, in the process building new careers for such “B” actors as Leslie Nielsen, Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack, and Peter Graves, all longtime masters at keeping straight faces while delivering ridiculous dialogue. Directed by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker. Sat-Sun 11:30am. North Park BERNIE (2011)—Oddball comedy starring Jack Black as a much-beloved small time funeral director whose relationship with a cantankerous widow (Shirley MacLaine) ends badly. Co-starring Matthew McConaughey and the citizens of Hollandsworth, Texas as themselves. Directed by Richard Linklater (Boyhood). A presentation of the Hubbard Film Society. Sun 4pm. Parkdale School Auditorium, 141 Girard Ave. East Aurora. roycroftcampuscorporation.com KING CREOLE (1958)—Reputedly Elvis Presley’s favorite of the movies he appeared in, presented in celebration of his 80th birthday. He plays a high school drop-out in need of a job to support his father but trying to avoid working for local gangster Walter Matthau. With Dean Jagger, Carolyn Jones, Dolores Hart, and Vic Morrow. Directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca). Thurs, Fri, Tues 7:30pm. Screening Room PORTRAIT OF JASON (1967)—Newly restored version of the classic cinema verite film about a gay man that Ingmar Bergman called “the most extraordinary film I’ve seen in my life.” Directed by Shirley Clarke (The Connection). Thurs 8pm. Hallwalls

IN BRIEF

ANNIE—Latest remake of the musical adaptation of the 1930s comic strip—or was it a radio serial first? It’s been a long run. Starring Quvenzhané Wallis, Jamie Foxx, Rose Byrne, and Bobby Cannavale. Directed by Will Gluck (Friends with Benefits). BIG EYES—Tim Burton’s biopic about Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz), the artist whose kitschy portraits of distressed children were a national sensation in the early 1960s. In the days before Andy Warhol, he turned the art world on its ears, earning a fortune (mostly from prints and posters) even though critics loathed his work. Except, as the film tells it, the paintings were actually made by his wife Margaret (Amy Adams). It’s as close to a mainstream film as Burton has ever made; he confines his visual interest to recreating the hipster paradise of San Francisco in the late 1950s (where the Keanes lived) and in such other flourishes as a visit to Hawaii awash in blue and pink pastels. The first half is an enjoyable lark as the Keanes enjoy their unexpected success, but it turns sour with the couple’s breakup and ensuing legal battles. The paintings themselves are a weird artifact of the time,

but there’s no real story in them; They’re only a MacGuffin for a story about two sad people. With Krysten Ritter, Terence Stamp, Jason Schwartzman, and Danny Huston. -MF EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS—Christian Bale as Moses leading his people out of Egypt. With Joel Edgerton, Aaron Paul, Sigourney Weaver, and Golshifteh Farahani. Directed by Ridley Scott, who after Prometheus and The Counselor is not exactly on a hot streak. FOXCATCHER—Another biopic from director Bennett Miller (Capote, Moneyball), this time based on the relationship between millionaire John du Pont, of the du Pont chemical family, and brothers Mark and Dave Schultz, both Olympic gold medalists for wrestling. You may want to read up on the case before you see the movie, which seems to go out of its way not to offer any explanations for what happened. Stars Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, and Mark Ruffalo perform under daunting amounts of facial prosthetics, a somewhat odd decision given that few in the audience are likely to know what these people looked like in the first place. The clinically observational tone is fascinating, but in the end all of the cool weirdness leaves you more than a little frustrated. With Vanessa Redgrave, Sienna Miller, and Anthony Michael Hall. –MF 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 brothersin-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 THE GAMBLER—Even if you haven’t seen the 1974 film on which this is based, this glossy remake is a facile waste of time, retaining most of the macho posturing from the original but none of the plausibility. Done up like a slumming rock star, Mark Wahlberg is hard to take seriously as a literature professor (his self-aggrandizing lectures are hilarious) with a gambling addiction that seems born of a death wish. The script by William Monahan (The Departed) is ripe with writerly dialogue, much of which is entertaining, especially as delivered by Michael Kenneth Williams and John Goodman (who has a classic speech on earning the right to say “Fuck you” is almost as good as Monahan thinks it is). But director Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) gives it a superficial sheen that doesn’t make any sense. And its treatment of gambling is shameful— any virtues the film has are negated by a bullshit ending. With Jessica Lange, Brie Larson, and George Kennedy. -MF

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THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES—The last of Peter Jackson’s six J. R. R. Tolkien’s adaptations is the shortest but feels like the longest. After perfunctorily dispensing with the dragon Smaug, the remainder of the film becomes a sword and sorcery take on The Treasure of Sierra Madre, with dwarf leader Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) refusing to share the treasure with his now homeless Middle Earth neighbors. A subplot inspired by references in other Tolkein work finds the White Council (Gandalf, elf king Elrond, Lady Galadriel, wizard Saruman) on a parallel quest to solve the mystery of the Necromancer, setting up the reign of evil Sauron in Lord of the Rings. This padding out of The Hobbit’s relatively simple storyline is the equivalent of George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels, though fans are less likely to mind its inclusion. At the end of the day, Jackson and his army of collaborators have achieved something remarkable with this series, but I’m glad it’s over and Jackson can concentrate on other endeavors. This final entry feels like the last half hour of a traditional feature, stretched out to five times the length. Starring Martin Freeman, Orlando Bloom, Richard Armitage, Cate Blanchett, Ian McKellen, and Christopher Lee. –Greg Lamberson. 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 co-scripter 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 THE IMITATION GAME—The story of English mathematician and logician Alan Turing, who was instrumental in breaking Germany’s Enigma code during World War II but was later driven to suicide for being gay. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing as a kind of comic but poignant genius in a clever and vivid performance. Britain’s stringent secrecy laws kept Turing’s role in the Allied victory a secret until the mid-1970s, since which point Turing has become both a hero of the code-breaking program and as a martyr of the oppressive, sometimes vicious treatment of homosexuals in the British Isles. Although the movie’s dramatic arc is consistently entertaining, it bears only a limited general resemblance to the more complicated story told in Andrew Hodge’s long, dense 1983 Turing biography, credited

as a primary source. Exaggerating and invention are hardly uncommon in biopics, but the filmmakers choices here are dramatically conservative and audience-oriented. Co-starring Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Charles Dance, and Mark Strong. Directed by Morten Tyldum (Headhunters). -GS 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 coscripter 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 THE INTERVIEW—After all the sturm und drang surrounding its release, all that’s left to say about this comedy starring James Franco as a fatuous tabloid TV host and Seth Rogan (who also wrote and directed with his partner Evan Goldberg) as his producer, who gets him an interview with North Korean dictator Kim Jongun, is that it’s exactly what you would have expected, a broad comedy with a few smart ideas struggling to free themselves from endless juvenile ass jokes. Destined to be remembered as the film that led a major studio to embarrass itself over and over. With Lizzy Kaplan, Randall Park, and Diana Bang. -MF INTO THE WOODS—This long-anticipated adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical parodying traditional fairy tales and their ancient themes is likely to play best for the choir of the already converted. Sondheim’s work is as ever clever but not really mass market-friendly, a problem that director Rob Marshall (Chicago) addresses by amping up the show’s periodic infusions of wiseguy show-business sass (sometimes at the expense of the generally darker mood). But he keeps the turning, incurving plot moving gracefully, and the songs are almost always delivered with verve and emotive skill, particularly by Meryl Streep. Co-starring Anna Kendrick, Emily Blunt, Johnny Depp, Chris Pine, and Christine Baranski. -GS NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM: SECRET OF THE TOMB— Larry (Ben Stiller) is off to the British Museum for the final film in the series. With Dan Stevens, Dick Van Dyke, Owen Wilson, Ricky Ger

REVIEW FILM vais, and Robin Williams, but no Amy Adams. Directed by Shawn Levy (the remake of The Pink Panther). 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 TOP FIVE—Chris Rock wrote, directed, and stars as a comedian trying to make a career switch to a serious actor. Set in one day (with way too much happening for 24 hours), it veers between show business satire and sexual politicking as Rock’s character is interviewed by journalist Rosario Dawson. It’s the best of Rock’s efforts behind the camera but still wildly uneven, balanced between a fair amount of laugh-out-loud humor and too much unbelievable plotting. With Gabrielle Union, Ben Vereen, and Kevin Hart. –MF UNBROKEN—The true story of Olean native and Olympic athlete Louis Zamperini (adapted from Laura Hillenbrand’s 2010 book) focuses on the horrifying experiences of his young life: as a lieutenant in the Air Force during World War II, he spent 47 days adrift in the Pacific Ocean after his plane was shot down, only to wind up in a Japanese POW camp where for two years he was tortured by a corporal who became obsessed with him. These painful scenes may be unparalleled in a movie intended for a mass audience. And by ending with Zamperini’s rescue from the camp, the film oddly avoids terminates the more satisfying dramatic arc that would have been provided by the rest of his life. Director Angelina Jolie does fine work in the opening scenes of the plane being shot down, but at 137 minutes most audiences are likely to be very uncomfortable with the movie’s brutality. Starring Jack O’Connell, Finn Wittrock, Domhnall Gleeson, and Miyavi. Joel and Ethan Coen were among the scriptwriters. –GS WILD—Novelist Nick Hornby wrote the screenplay for this adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir of her 1994 hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, which extends for 2,663 from Mexico to Canada. Strayed (played by Reese Witherspoon, who also co-produced the film, in an effective act of image-adjusting) was not an experienced hiker, and she doesn’t seem especially well prepared for such an arduous trek. But she undertakes it as an act of will and self-punishment, to confront and exorcise her demons. As unveiled in flashbacks, they don’t seem all that awful, especially when we compare the film to Into the Wild and 127 Hours, both recounting much more distressing wilderness journeys. Wild is at its best not when it’s trying to persuade us how bad Strayed’s life was but when it focuses on the alternately grim and dull slog of a three-month walk—now there’s a triumph. With Laura Dern, Thomas Sadoski, and Michiel Huisman. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club) -MF THE WOMAN IN BLACK 2: ANGEL OF DEATH— There’s no Daniel Radcliffe, not anyone else you’re likely to have heard of in this sequel to the 2012 horror movie. The same secluded haunted house is used forty years later to house children and two schoolteachers escaping the World War II bombing of London, and the same trouble spirit causes more trouble. There are more shock moments than any one film should have, though in generally it’s a relatively old-fashioned spook movie. But if you haven’t seen the original you’re going to be lost as to what’s going on. Starring Phoebe Fox, Helen McCrory, and Jeremy Irvine. Directed by Tom Harper (Peaky Blinders). -MF Original Sin

Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice.

ORIGINAL SIN INHERENT VICE BY M. FAUST It’s easier to say what Inherent Vice isn’t than what it is. Of course it’s a movie based on a novel by Thomas Pynchon, the first ever film adaptation of his work, but that doesn’t tell you much, as his densely contrived fiction is not the kind of stuff that sends you away thinking, “Damn, that would make a great movie!” Published in 2009, it is in many ways Pynchon’s most accessible novel: a detective story set in Los Angeles at the end of the 1960s. To call it, and this film by Paul Thomas Anderson, a parody would set you off in the wrong direction: Austin Powers it’s not. Nor is it an elegy to the hopes and ideals of the hippie years (though if that idea appeals to you, try to dig up a copy of The Big Fix from 1978 starring Richard Dreyfus). If Anderson has any interest in recreating the 1960s (he was born in 1970), it shows in only the most perfunctory ways. The closest thing you might compare it to is the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski, which also borrows liberally from the Raymond Chandler playbook in the interest of indulging the filmmakers’ varied interests. Inherent Vice is also likely to become a cult film, though I’ll guess with a substantially smaller cult than those who toast The Dude with their White Russians.

But while the story expands and changes, it doesn’t really get bigger. A biker murder at a strip joint leads him to an organization called the Golden Fang, which may be an international drug smuggling operation or simply a front for some partying dentists (including a very funny Martin Short). Mix in a musician (Owen Wilson) who is supposed to be dead, a teenage runaway, some FBI agents working at cross-purposes, and a local cop ( Josh Brolin) nicknamed “Bigfoot” for his door-stomping technique, and what do you have? Damned if I know. Anderson has described it as (among a whole lot of other things) his version of a Cheech and Chong movie, and it’s clearly imbued with a pothead mentality. It may expose my own limitations for saying that I kept expecting all this to go somewhere, but if you share that bourgeois flaw with me let me warn you that it doesn’t. That’s not to say that there isn’t an awful lot to like about the movie at any particular moment. There’s an utterly pointless scene of Brolin eating a frozen banana that made me laugh out loud. The opening meeting scene, with its carefully orchestrated sunlight and the look on Doc’s face as he sees Shasta for the first time, are gorgeous. Jonny Greenwood’s score is lovely, even if it seldom sounds like anything you might have heard in 1970 (the point, I presume.)

Pynchon has always been a fan of conspiracy theories, so the standard framework of detective story seems perfect for him to go slumming with. The book and film both open in a way that couldn’t be more classical: pri- But too much of it feels haphazardly stitched together from pieces of the vate investigator Larry “Doc” Sportello ( Joaquin Phoenix) is visited in his book. (If you haven’t read it, there are a number of jokes you’re unlikely to office by the lover who jilted him years ago, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Kath- get.) Anderson is at his best when he stays focused on a small number of erine Waterston) She asks his help in investigating a plot by the wife of her characters: The Master, There Must Be Blood. With a cast this size, his attenrich new boyfriend to have him declared insane. Shortly after this meeting, tion gets diverted and hopelessly diluted. There’s nothing here that Robert VISIT DAILYPUBLIC.COM FOR MORE FILM LISTINGS & REVIEWS >> Shasta disappears, which really gets Doc’s attention. Altman didn’t do more effectively and in his 1976 adaptation of The Long

CULTURE > FILM

Well and good. From this point, we expect Doc’s digging and poking to unravel a story of increasing significance. At the very least we expect a bigger story to unfold regardless of Doc’s efforts. He is, to say the least, a piss-poor P.I., usually too stoned even to understand what the people he talks to are telling him. (Occasional glances into his notebook confirm this.)

Goodbye, a film that rewards repeat viewings more than I suspect Inherent Vice will. Reviews of Selma and Taken 3 will appear on dailypublic.com later P this week.

CULTURE > FILM

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IN MEMORIAM CULTURE

PUBLIC MEMORIES CORY PERLA “When Lance was named one of the coolest people in Buffalo (this was less than 12 months ago), I asked him what makes a person cool. He said, ‘People can make you cool, man. It’s all in how you carry yourself.’ I think it was that and the dozens of loud suits he owned. He told me he owned enough suits to dress the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.”

LANCE DIAMOND TAKES HIS PLACE

JACOB DRUM ”The best thing was the joy that everyone got out of him almost more as an idea than as a person; people loved the idea that there was a ’70s-style lounge with a ’70s-style guy with a ’70s-style dedicated night. It was like Elmwood lore that people who hung out and went to shows knew about but if you didn’t, you didn’t. Kind of like a little entertainment industry secret.”

BY PAT KEWLEY

KEVIN THURSON ”Best move the Goo Goo Dolls ever made was recording tracks with Lance. Best move my exmother-in-law ever made was having him perform at her second marriage wedding reception.” JILL MERZ “That Coincidental Hour coincidentally was (sadly) my last chance Lance encounter. Such a nice guy. Always really supportive of whatever bookings were going on at the Lounge/Milkie’s, curious as to what was in store for the evening. As much as he loved the spotlight, he was also an eager spectator/observer. I liked that about him.”

Jeff Tweedy, Billy Corgan, Kim Deal, Thurston Moore, Kurt Cobain, and Lance Diamond. Which one of those names doesn’t fit? Of course–Kurt Cobain. Everybody else had their name in the liner notes of the seminal early 1990s alt-rock benefit album No Alternative. Nirvana had to be coy and have their contribution be the unlisted hidden track. Actually, that’s not even entirely accurate. Lance is technically billed as “The Incredible Lance Diamond” in the liner notes. While “billy corgan” couldn’t even get up the energy to have them capitalize his name, Lance had none of the typical 1990s alt-rocker ambivalence about taking credit. It takes some balls to bill yourself as “The Incredible” anybody, not to mention when you’re the least famous person on an album that features not one but two bands from Flying Nun records. But that’s how Lance rolled. I’m a kid from the suburbs of a certain age, and in the 1990s I liked a certain kind of music, and that means that the No Alternative compilation looms large in my childhood musical memories. I had never been to a rock club, had only ever seen an independent record store on TV, and found out about “cool” music from the odd episode of 120 Minutes or Space Ghost Coast to Coast–but I sure as hell had the “No Alternative” compilation. The early 1990s were the golden age of the superstar benefit compilation, and No Alternative was the quintessential example. It featured the Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Soul Asylum back when they were all the biggest bands in the world, at their absolute commercial peaks. As a dork in middle school, it was the first time I ever heard the voice of Kim Deal, or Bob Mould, or Stephen Malkmus. (It was years before I thought of Pavement as anything other than “the band with the funny song about R.E.M. on the ‘No Alternative’ comp.”) It also featured the Goo Goo Dolls, still years away from any of their big hits, blasting through a version of the Rolling Stones’ “Bitch” with a soul singer named The Incredible Lance Diamond guesting on vocals. Did that particular track become a seminal indie-rock touchstone? Not really, although it surely ages better than Soul Asylum’s atrocious cover of “Sexual Healing.” But when Lance and the boys performed it on live on the accompanying MTV special, you’d better believe he acted like he was born to be there. In my mind, it’s the iconic image of Lance Diamond: Johnny Rzeznik in the shadows off to the side, while Lance is shredding the spotlight at center stage in his trademark white jacket and captain’s hat, jumping, posing, making love to the camera, and belting it out like the building is on fire. At the time, I had no idea who the Goo Goo Dolls were, or that they were from Buffalo, or that The Incredible Lance Diamond wasn’t their actual lead singer. I was in middle school. I’m not even going to pretend that it turned me into a Lance Diamond fan—that didn’t happen until years later the first time I saw him absolutely own the crowd at one of his epic Thursday at the

Square performances. But the memory stuck with me, and over the years I came to fully appreciate what it meant. Just think about it: 21 years ago, when legions of kids who are now in their 30s and 40s might have been hearing Pavement for the first time, or the Breeders, or Jonathan Richman—they also heard Lance Diamond. Think about what a big deal that is. Lance Diamond was a big deal. Over the years, I got to know Lance Diamond the same way a lot of other people got to know him, and my stories are probably pretty similar: seeing him perform at the Elmwood Lounge, seeing him at other shows around town, or sharing a beer with him at this or that bar. Once at Milkie’s a couple years ago, after I’d subjected the club to a half-thought-out attempt at comedy that involved wearing a mummy costume and telling bad cruise ship jokes, I remember seeing Lance in the back smiling. It clearly wasn’t the smile of someone who had busted a gut laughing at my dumb act, but it was a generous, “nice try” kind of a smile. He seemed to genuinely enjoy being around younger performers trying to figure out their thing, and that meant something to me. That’s why, oddly enough, the fact that Lance plays a small part in a piece of seminal 1990s alt-rock nostalgia makes perfect sense to me. What the hell was he doing on the same record as Urge Overkill or Uncle Tupelo or the Beastie Boys? It didn’t matter—he sang that song like he owned it, and he acted like all these young rock star punks were stepping onto his turf, not the other way around. Two decades later, seeing him on a quiet Saturday night strolling down Utica in a sparkling yellow suit bright enough to be seen from space, it seemed to fit together into the same puzzle. It sounds funny, but what Lance Diamond represents to me is the same thing that DIY music heroes of mine like Jad Fair or Daniel Johnston represent to me: that the secret to being cool is realizing that it doesn’t matter who you are or what crazy thing you’re doing or who’s watching—whether you’re on MTV or in the back room of Milkie’s—as long as you believe what you’re doing is great. Anybody else that has a problem with it just isn’t cool enough to be on your level. Rest in glitter, Lance.

BERNICE RADLE “Lance Diamond was filled with spirit, soul, and love. He had the magical ability to always bring a crowd to their feet and always made everyone feel beautiful. I was amazed to watch him eat, talk, and sing about chicken wings for national television in one of his finest suits without getting a drop of sauce anywhere—not even on his chin. He is, and will always be, truly larger than life!” ANDREW J REIMERS “A little over four years ago The CPX played a gig at Elmwood Lounge, after Lance Diamond’s set. After he was done, he changed his clothes and hung out for our set. Once we had finished, he came up to me and told me I had a lot of energy and was a good frontman for this band. He gave me a note on a folded sheet of paper, and all it said was “George Clooney’s character in O Brother Where Art Thou?” It was kind of odd, but hey, it was Lance Diamond, so who am I to judge? Now fast-forward four years and I have a son, Everett. What was Clooney’s characters name in that movie? Everett. I think Lance Diamond subconsciously named my son.” THELMA LEE BALLARD “What’s on my mind? Missing the ones I love, the passing of Lance Diamond, Elmwood Lounge. Sitting outside, summer and spring—I walk by, get a big kiss—that P corner will never the same.”

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Pat Kewley is a Buffalo writer, comic, and artist. DAILYPUBLIC.COM / JANUARY 7, 2015 / THE PUBLIC 23