Artvoice: Buffalo's #1 Newsweekly
Home Blogs Web Features Calendar Listings Artvoice TV Real Estate Classifieds Contact

Cover Story

Here Comes the Neighborhood

by Geoff Kelly

When Aaaron Bartley and Eric Walker founded People United for Sustainable Housing last year, among their first priorities was to begin a property survey of the West Side neighborhood the organization serves. The survey, which was accomplished by means of heavy door-to-door work, took about six months.

Free Will Astrology

by Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Seventh grader Michael Kawa’s poem is about the official face he shows the world. “My mask helps me when I am scared and when I am embarrassed,” he writes. “My mask tells me to act like someone else when I want to act like myself. My mask tells me I should go on the Big Dipper roller coaster when I really want to go on the little rides. My mask hides me from girls and fights. My mask hides my mad mind.” Now I invite you to write about your own mask, Aries. It’s the perfect time to take inventory of your persona—the official face you show the world—and to make changes to get it into closer alignment with the person you actually are in your depths.

News of the Weird

by Chuck Shepherd

■ “Reeking” As a Career Field: Homeless New Jersey man Richard Kreimer said in February that he had settled, on undisclosed terms, part of his most recent lawsuit, against a transit company and two drivers, for having denied him rides because of his foul odor. Kreimer’s history includes a $150,000 settlement in 1991 with the public library in Morris County, which had tried to keep him out because of the odor, and, by his count, $80,000 in additional lawsuit-related income (though some went for legal expenses). Kreimer dropped another foul-odor lawsuit in February, against a transit company and a train station in Summit.

Letters to Artvoice

Nobody likes righteous indignation and surely I am no shining example of personal sacrifice, having spent four years in a peacetime Army that never once asked me to do what was asked of Sergeant Hart (“Brave Hart,” Artvoice v5n10).

The News, Briefly

Big Shotz or Big Loser?

by Jamie Moses

Power Struggles

by Peter Koch

...Is a Magic Number

Literary

From the Visual to the Verbal

by Kevin Thurston

The history of art is filled with those moving from one medium to another (Warhol, for example, moved from commercial art to fine art to film). The move, however, from plastic to verbal arts is far less common. Next Thursday (March 30), two Baltimore poets come to town who were both trained in the visual arts but have dedicated themselves to poetry. Lauren Bender and Justin Sirois have immersed themselves in poetics to such a degree that each is now responsible for writing, collecting and organizing their own work and the works of others (Bender edits the poetry section of www.peekreview.net and Sirois is founder and creative director of Narrow House Recordings, www.NarrowHouseRecordings.com, a recording label dedicated exclusively to poetry). With their activism and artistry, the question arises, why move to words? Bender and Sirois answered that question in an e-mail interview with Artvoice.

Stagefright

by Javier

Happy birthday to Richard Chamberlain (pictured above) who will turn 72 on March 31st! The ever popular Dr. Kildare is getting ready for the national tour of the play On Golden Pond (in the part played by Henry Fonda in the movie) which begins in September in Fort Worth, Texas. Directed by Leonard Foglia, who directed the recent Broadway revival starring James Earl Jones and Leslie Uggams, the touring production will also star former child star Hayley Mills, who turns 60 next April.

Film Reviews

Bank It: Inside Man

by M. Faust

Dark of the Soul: Losing Ground

by M. Faust

Writer's Cramp: Ask the Dust

by George Sax

See You There

Doug E. Fresh

by Daniel B. Honigman

Samuel R. Delany

by Peter Koch

I Can Lick Any SOB in the House

by Gore Petersen

Jason Forrest (AKA Donna Summer)

by Greg Gannon

Artist of the Week

Charles Haupt

by Geoff Kelly

If you don’t know who he is, perhaps you’ve never been to a performance of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Charles Haupt, who has been the BPO’s concertmaster for an astonishing 37 years, is, as much as JoAnn Falletta or any of the BPO’s illustrious list of conductors, among the first faces that regular concert-goers associate with the orchestra. A violinist of exquisite technique and emotional range, Haupt has performed under the baton of such luminaries as Josef Krips, Leonard Bernstein, Julius Rudel, Michael Tilson Thomas and Joseph Steinberg, and alongside such names as Pinchas Zukerman, André Watts, Jascha Heifetz and Itzhak Perlman. He has served as concertmaster for the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, has been a soloist with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and is a former member of the Baird Piano Trio in residence at SUNY at Buffalo. He has taught master classes at the New World Symphony, SUNY at Buffalo and the Eastman School of Music, where he is a part-time member of the faculty. He was also Artvoice’s first ever Artist of the Week, back in 2001.

Left of the Dial

Rhett Miller: The Believer

by Matt Barber

Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs: Under the Covers Vol. 1

by Mark Norris

Neko Case: Fox Confessor Brings the Flood

by Matt Barber

Bandwidth

Open Music Ensemble

Best show the band ever played: The Carnegie Arts Center Eyes and Ears show. We interpreted time-based visual scores in the form of video and film projections in a collaborative project set up by Joanna Racynska and Will Redman with the Carnegie Arts Center. Twelve filmmakers from WNY were commissioned to create these scores for our ensemble, and the installation was set up in the gallery for the month of October 2005.

Music

Taught To Be Proud: Tea Leaf Green

by Joe Doherty

SXSW 2006

by Donny Kutzbach