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The Halloween Issue

Halloween at Murder Creek

by Buck Quigley

Revisiting the Eerie Haunts of Our Youth

by Brett Miller

Gregory Lamberson: The Halloween King

by M. Faust

The News, Briefly

UB Students Unveil Projects for West Side Park

by George Sax

The Original Nader Raider

by George Sax

News

Obama's Pragmatism

by Bruce Fisher

As chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke is America’s most powerful banker. He is nonpartisan. He’s known as a very cautious person, extremely reserved in his public remarks—a scholar of the Great Depression of the 1930s who is thoroughly non-ideological, unlike his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, whom many blame for legitimizing the anti-regulation mindset that the world now regrets.

Getting a Grip

Keeping McCain in the Game

by Michael I. Niman

American elections are won not by the best qualified, the most educated, the more experienced, articulate, levelheaded, or intelligent candidate, but by the candidate who raises and spends the most money on political advertising. This reality has proven itself over and over again in the vast majority of local, state, and national elections for the past two generations.

Puck Stop

Blueliners, Special Teams Propelling Sabres' Hot Start

by Andrew Kulyk & Peter Farrell

No disrespect to Thomas Vanek, who has earned the NHL’s “First Star of the Week” last week, after recording nine points (seven goals and two assists) in the team’s first five games of the season.

Season Ticket

A Study of "The Worst-Behaving Fans in All of Sports"

by Dave Staba

We never knew his name, or his quest, or even his exact port of origin. “I am from Holland,” he said, bringing a cliché to life by sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck in a parking lot outside Ralph Wilson Stadium early Sunday afternoon, a brown bottle of beer in his right hand, his full beard seemingly extending from one of the more spectacular pieces of headgear you will ever see.

Music Feature

The Sisters of Mercy Keep Their Long, Dark Shadow Alive

by Eric Boucher

Rumored to have taken the name of the classic 1968 Leonard Cohen song, the Sisters of Mercy have long been derided with the “goth” label. And although their blend of psychedelia, doomy metal, and danceable beats appealed to the clad-in-black crowd, it is a term that sole constant Andrew Eldritch has come to loathe.

Classical Music

Beethoven Rules, Again

by Jan Jezioro

If you were an undergraduate at UB in the late 1960s, a frequently heard complaint from fellow students who were New Yorkers was that there was nothing to do in Buffalo, that it was a cultural wasteland. Well, even in that now distantly past year of 1969, the performance of the Slee/Beethoven String Quartet Cycle of the complete string quartets of the composer who was the greatest master of the form, was already in its 14th season.

Theaterweek

A Strong Season Grows Stronger

by Anthony Chase

A theater season that has already been extraordinary for the number of interesting offerings continues this week with the opening of the first show of the season for Torn Space. Dan Shanahan continues his exploration of contemporary paranoia and technological alienation with Area, which he has both written and directed.

Film Interview

Edward Norton: Talking Truth and Power

by M. Faust

Pride and Glory, a gritty drama about corruption in the New York City police department, was originally scheduled to be filmed at the end of 2001—until the events of that September put the film on the back burner. When it finally was completed last year, it sat on the shelf for awhile when the studio that produced it, New Line, was shut down by its parent Warners Brothers.

Film Review

Flow

by M. Faust

You won’t see a scarier movie this Halloween than this startling documentary. The best horror movies are able to make the mundane frightening, and the subject of Flow is a something so common that we take it for granted: water, as abundant as oxygen and just as vital for human life.

Listings

On The Boards Theater Listings

Movie Times (October 24 - October 30)

Film Now Playing

Events

See You There!

Artvoice's weekly round-up of events to watch out for the week, including this week's Editors Pick: The Dark Side of Allen Street tribute to Pink Floyd, taking place on Friday, October 25th at Nietzsches.

Offbeat News

News of the Weird

by Chuck Shepherd

Brian Hopkins, 25, severely burned in 2006 after climbing onto the roof of an empty train at Boston’s South Station at 2 a.m., filed a lawsuit in August against Amtrak. Though admitting that he was trespassing at the station when he was zapped by 27,500 volts of overhead wire, Hopkins said Amtrak ought to have known that people trespass and climb on top of trains, and therefore should have parked its train in a less-accessible place.

In The Margins

10/29: Babel: Michael Ondaatje

by Geoff Kelly

Literary Buffalo Events

Gaywatch

A new kind of Halloween party hits Buffalo this month

by Bryan Whitley-Grassi

Gaywatch Event Listings

Horoscopes

Free Will Astrology

by Rob Brezsny

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Uranus symbolizes your instinct for freedom, your drive to express your dormant genius, and your attunement with your intuition. Saturn represents structure and responsibility; when it’s prominent, it’s time to get back to basics and cut down on distractions and excesses. So what should you do when these two planets are in exact opposition, as they are now?

Advice

Ask Anyone

Every time I go down Chippewa, I see a billboard for some kind of big fetish/bondage event that happened, like, three years ago. Shouldn’t people who advertise stuff like that on billboards have to take the ads down at some point?