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Cover Story

Remembering Creeley

by Bruce Jackson

Robert Creeley, who died in Odessa, Texas, on March 30, 2005, would have been 80 years old this coming Sunday. Many of his many Buffalo friends are getting together at the Church on Saturday evening and at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Sunday afternoon to celebrate his life, his work and the nearly four decades he was vitally engaged in this city’s artistic and social life. He stayed involved with Buffalo even after he decamped for Brown University in 2003.

Remembering Creeley

A Poet in Buffalo

"make out"

by Jonathan Skinner

Night Watch

by Ansie Baird

Letters to Artvoice

Your Mother’s Day cover story, “Open for Business, Fighting for Choice” (Artvoice v5n19) neglects salient parts of the abortion story. First and foremost, business is about money, yet no abortionist ever wants to talk about their take or pricelist. Last year, Planned Parenthood alone took in over $104 million in surgical abortions, up six percent, not counting the $265 million annual taxpayer subsidy.

Free Will Astrology

by Rob Brezsny

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): This is a time when you must put one concern above all others: being true to yourself. Don’t you dare elevate other people’s needs above your own. Don’t you dare let their guilt trips manipulate you into watering down your interesting quirks. You have simply got to devote yourself exuberantly to your idiosyncratic dreams. You owe it to yourself to learn all you can about your innermost secrets and ripening mysteries. You need to be ingeniously obsessed with serving your deepest, wildest, most noble longings.

Streetvoice

Buffalo's Beaches: Where Will Buffalo Swim This Summer?

by Brian W. Wright

With summer nearly here and the temperatures beginning to rise, people in Buffalo are looking for a place to cool down, relax and swim this summer. So close to so much fresh water, Buffalo would seem an obvious destination for any beach-goer. However, the city on the lake is almost completely without swimming beaches today—despite much talk about developing a beach inside city limits, swimmers still must make their way to Canada or points south. With Bennett and Wendt Beaches closed for the season and Gallagher Beach becoming a state-controlled park, we wondered where Buffalonians will go to get to a beach this year and if they think they will ever get a swimming beach of their own inside the city.

News of the Weird

by Chuck Shepherd

■ A Texas jury decided in 1991 that Steven Kenneth Staley, now 43, should be put to death for killing a restaurant manager, but three days before his February 2006 date with destiny, psychologists testified that he is mentally ill, and the US Supreme Court has ruled that a mentally ill person cannot be executed. The solution, declared state judge Wayne Salvant in April, is for the state to inject Staley with enough psychotropic medicine to make him sufficiently sane to understand why he is going to die, at which point he can be killed. (In similar cases, drugs improved Charles Singleton enough for his 2004 execution in Arkansas, but have failed since 1999 to restore Texan Emanuel Kemp’s competency.)

Getting a Grip

Why We Won't Invade Iran

by Michael I. Niman

Twenty-seven years ago, President Jimmy Carter gave his most famous address, since dubbed the “Malaise Speech.” Rather than take a Republican “vote for me and you can eat all the ice cream you want, never get fat and drive your SUVs forever” approach to government, Carter warned the nation that our addiction to Mideast oil was killing us, and that we had to address it immediately.

News

Conflict Creates Origins

by Christopher Leise

Buried deep within Microsoft Word, the word-processing program, there’s a type of history, a not-so-secret cultural memory that indicates those things that do and those that do not appear in the collective mind of American English and the majority of those that speak it. The program has a built-in, spell-as-you-go mechanism that highlights, with an underscored red squiggle, words and names it thinks its users have misspelled.

The News, Briefly

Helping Hands

by Peter Koch

Sex Education at Canisius College

by Caroline Phelan

Artshorts

Tawdry Love Affairs and Outright Lust

by Cynnie Gaasch

The arresting paintings of Jackie Felix tell the stories we do not tell. These are images that capture unthinkables and leave worlds to be discovered, experimented with and understood. Borrowing image fragmentation methods from graphic novels and the subjects from film noir, these paintings are surprising in their ability to jostle your comfort zone.

Artist of the Week

David Felder

by Buck Quigley

Why you should know who he is: Globally recognized as one of the leading American composers of his generation, David Felder has held the Birge-Cary Chair as Professor of Composition at the State University of New York at Buffalo since 1992 and has served as the artistic director of the June in Buffalo Festival since 1985.

Poetry

Violence

by J. Oakes

Loose Change

by Sam Magavern

Oh, Bathsheba

by Sam Magavern

Book Reviews

Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan

by Tony Leuzzi

Copper Canyon’s posthumous tribute to June Jordan’s verse, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, demonstrates the poet’s range was as varied as her experience. Spanning four decades, Desire samples portions of Jordan’s poetry revealing a voice that resists classification, despite her involvement with a wide range of causes.

Puck Stop

Sabres Arithmetic 101

by Andrew Kulyk & Peter Farrell

By now you’ve probably made your ticket purchases for round three, or at least you tried to. Maybe you camped out all night at HSBC Arena, or headed over to Tops bright and early and lined up, or hit that redial on the phone, or perhaps you had that internet browser up and going.

Theaterweek

The Artie Awards

by Anthony Chase

The 16th Annual Artie Awards, celebrating excellence in Buffalo theater, will be presented Monday, May 22 at the Town Ballroom. The doors will open at 7:30 and the awards show, hosted by actors Lisa Ludwig and Norm Sham, and me, will begin just after 8pm. Jazz singer Peggy Farrell has committed to make her 16th Artie appearance.

Stagefright

by Javier

Can you believe it has been 34 years since the release of the original The Poseidon Adventure? The classic disaster movie starred, among others, the fabulous Stella Stevens (pictured above), who turns 70 this year. Besides Poseidon Adventure, Stevens has starred in two other films that are considered classics in their genres, the classic comedy The Nutty Professor and the classic western The Ballad of Cable Hogue. Several years ago Stevens starred in a Canadian production of The Odd Couple, The Female Version opposite the late Sandy Dennis. One of Stevens’s early movies was the 1959 film version of the Broadway musical Li’l Abner, in which she played Appassionata Von Climax, the role created on stage by Tina Louise.

Film

21st Annual Jewish Film Festival

by M. Faust & George Sax

Buffalo’s longest-lived such event, the Jewish Film Festival celebrates its 21st year with a week’s worth of films from around the world, including seven features and eight documentaries. Saturday and Sunday screenings will be held at the Market Arcade Film and Arts Center, after which the series moves to the Amherst Theater for the remainder of the week. Among the films to be screened:

Film Reviews

Man Outside: The Devil and Daniel Johnston

by Donny Kutzbach

Not Normal, but Nice: The Notorious Bettie Page

by M. Faust

Gewgaws and Gimcracks

Fujitsu U-Scan vs. Checkout Clerk

by David P. Kleinschmidt

“Electronic kiosks are the wave of the future,” the president of a software company once told me during the dot-com boom. “Nobody wants to talk to some flunkie who doesn’t know what’s going on when they can use a computer that’s always right. It won’t be long before you’ll even be able to check out your groceries yourself. No cashier or anything—just a scanner and a kiosk.”

Music

Save Your Tortured Soul

by Donny Kutzbach

Seattle-based singer/singer songwriter Laura Veirs has spent most of the last couple years not recording and touring behind her highly celebrated string of albums, but instead doing interviews and topping best-of-the-year lists. UK publications like Mojo and Uncut are just a pair of the significant publications to heap praise on Viers.

Left of the Dial

Wire

by Donny Kutzbach

Red Hot Chili Peppers: Stadium Arcadium

by Joe Sweeney

Bandwidth

Dee Adams

I'm looking forward to lots of solo gigs, lots of band gigs, and lots of friends' bands gigs throughout the summer. In the fall, Channel 23 WNLO will be broadcasting the Music Is Art Live At The Center show that I played with my band Dee & the Housecats.

See You There

The Yard Dogs Road Show

by K. O'Day

The Outlyers CD Release Party

by Buck Quigley

Fahrenheit All Night

by Peter Koch

Pick of the Crop Spring Performance

by Nikki Gowan