COMMENTARY
Jeff Simon: Culture puts Buffalo on itinerary
We’re no. 37 — out of 44. We’re between Kazakhstan and Madagascar, which sounds a little like one of David Letterman’s jokes about being in People Magazine’s Top 100 Sexiest Men.
In the New York Times Sunday travel section’s “The 44 Places to Go in 2009,” struggling, plucky Buffalo was listed between No. 36 Kazakhstan and No. 38 Madagascar. And you had to find that out in the online version of the piece to boot, not the newsprint version.
About the attractions of our fair city for travelers, the Times said:
“With the exception of Senatorial hopefuls, many New Yorkers write off the rest of the Empire State as a cultural hinterland. But the chilly Rust Belt city of Buffalo now has something to thrill culture junkies other than its scattered specimens of early 20th century architecture: the Burchfield Penney Art Center.”
Strictly speaking, of course, we’ve had that for a while, it’s just that it now has altogether magnificent new digs and a kind of rededicated mission to “thrill culture junkies.” But hey, they DO get the point.
Go next door to Kazakhstan and the first thing you read is “shelve the Borat jokes. The oil boom poured serious money into Kazakhstan.”
Go the other direction to No. 38 and you’re advised to “think of Madagascar as Nature’s Laboratory. Thanks to its isolation, climate and wildly varied landscapes — volcanic mountains, lush rain forests, dry forests, deserts, private beaches — the world’s fourth-largest island turns out unusual critters with almost unmatched originality.”
Among other places listed after No. 1 Beirut (“poised to reclaim its title as the Paris of the Middle East”) and No. 2 Washington, D.C., (try the toro sashimi at CityZen Restaurant) are such traditional travel destinations as No. 7 Hawaii, No. 8 Vienna and such untraditional places as No. 10 Dakar, Senegal, and No. 12 Phuket, Thailand, and let’s leave to Borat jokes about that last one too.
Obviously, the Times is just doing what a good lively travel section is supposed to do — cool final destinations with something of a “believe it or not” quality for ordinary New York City readers.
The traveling classes can then mix them nicely with such tourist hangouts as Hawaii and Key West.
And the inclusion of Buffalo — while not quite in the exalted “believe it or not” company of Kazakhstan and Madagascar — was obviously intended for a bit of that flavor.
But what so many of us have long known is becoming more and more inescapable to people elsewhere most attentive to cultural matters — that there is cultural activity in Buffalo infinitely worthy of downstate attention and that of the rest of the world as well.
The long-term paradox, of course, is how much Olympic pretzel-bending gymnastics are frequently necessary to convince those who actually live here of all that.
It’s not that the facts of economic life haven’t ravaged us. The end of Studio Arena Theatre wasn’t pretty, even if it really wasn’t indicative of a lessening of virulent dramatic activity.
You can’t imagine how I wish we weren’t now the kind of city where I could lead a lovely tour of the great jazz clubs past and gone, starting with the former Moonglow, now a plumbing supply warehouse, on to the Royal Arms, now a parking lot etc.
But Buffalo’s monied, Bohemian and student classes have long collaborated to make culture here truly rare, if not unique for a city its kind — a place to be fabled along with the beaches of Phuket and Madagascar.
