http://www.buffalonews.com Latest stories from The Buffalo News en-us Sat, 25 May 2013 22:04:50 -0400 Sat, 25 May 2013 22:04:50 -0400 http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130523/GUSTO/130529701/1198
So they call this stuff “jamgrass,” mostly because it’s bluegrass music played by stinkin’ hippies, who like to solo and carry on a musical discourse during performances and may or may not be wearing hats while doing so. There is certainly a strain of this new roots music that tugs at the edges of credulity – Mumford & Sons, anyone? – but Cabinet avoids the cloying bandwagon-esque trend-hopping in favor of some serious musicianship, strong songwriting, and genre-appropriate harmony vocals.

These guys can play, and that makes all the difference in the world. They aren’t merely dressing up cliché-ridden pop tropes in dusty overalls. Witness “Leap,” Cabinet’s fourth album, not counting live, in-concert releases. The guys tracked the record live in the studio in front of an audience, and the results are about what you’d expect from such a procedure – an album with a decidedly energetic feel.

Cabinet is worth your time if you dig roots music that manages to be authentic without regurgitating the past verbatim. Check the band out at Cabinetmusic.com. Find “Leap” on Spotify, if you must. But certainly consider bringing $8 to Duke’s on Friday. Evil Things will open. Advance tickets are available through mnmpresents.inticketing.com.Anita West’s weekly Thursday Night Blues @ CPG series – born out of the longtime WNY DJ’s weekly blues show on WBFO FM, heard Sunday evenings at 7 p.m. – has been generating a substantial buzz in the weeks since its inception.

The blues community has rallied around both West and the bands she brings to the Central Park Grill (2519 Main St.) each week. The shows start promptly at 7 p.m., and admission is free, so there go your two primary arguments for staying home.

This week, the series presents R&B/soul/blues collective Dive House Union. If you haven’t caught this band live yet, you should.A collective of Buffalo musicians will join Preach Freedom of Rusted Root in a tribute to Bob Marley, re-creating one of the late reggae legend’s final concert performances at 7 p.m. Friday in the Water Street Landing (115 S. Water St., Lewiston).

The Tralf Music Hall (622 Main St.) hosts a timely tribute to the Doors at 7:30 p.m. Saturday. Mo Porter’s Doors Tribute will be joined by the Petty Thieves: A Tribute to Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and the Filter Kings.

Tickets are $20 advance, $25 day of show (box office). This will be the Filter Kings’ final performance, as guitarist Mark Krurnowski is leaving town. Stop by and wish him well.

The Tins and On Beta share a bill at 11 p.m. Friday in Mr. Goodbar (1110 Elmwood Ave.). Admission will be $3 at the door.

The seasonal “Sunset Sundays” series hosts its launch party at 9 p.m. Sunday in the Pearl Street Grill & Brewery (76 Pearl St.). The free weekly series presents a varied blend of electronic dance music on the venue’s second floor patio. The launch party will feature DJs Lalka, 3PO & Ryan Liddell, Brandon Chase and Rufus Gibson.

Karen Hudson returns to Buffalo to celebrate the release of her new CD, “Sonic Bloom,” with the help of revered guitarist/bassist and all-around good dude Jim Whitford, at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the Sportsmen’s Tavern (326 Amherst St.).



email: jmiers@buffnews.com ]]> Thu, 23 May 2013 16:42:08 -0400 Jeff Miers
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As this greatest of the great rock generations starts to see its numbers diminish, reflecting on the loss of an artist who means – or meant, at one time – something to you becomes more common than is desirable. For most of us, these losses are not truly felt on a personal level – we don’t know these people intimately. And yet, the losses feel personal.

So it is with myself and Manzarek, I find. I never met the guy. I only saw him perform once, and it was awful, a major disappointment after 30 years of waiting. Still, his passing feels somehow significant.

As I wrestle with why I might feel some sort of empathy with someone I’ve never met, I’m realizing that this is something music conditions us to be able to do. It speaks to our common humanity, ignores all of the superfluous stuff, cuts across cultural dividing lines, ignores nationalistic borders, and makes us feel connected. Even if we’ve never met.

People who play music on a regular basis understand this implicitly. Who among that group hasn’t had the experience of bonding immediately with a stranger, often without speaking a word? You start to play together, and you realize that you’ve probably just made a friend for life.

My son said this to me, out of the blue earlier in the day on Monday: “Music is better, because it’s a language without words, unlike school, where everyone talks way too much.”

I get that. Sometimes, talking is just unnecessary. It’s noise, and the music is pure signal.

Manzarek and the Doors got to me young. I read the Morrison biography “No One Here Gets Out Alive” in the eighth grade, and that was it – time to put the KISS records away and get serious. Here was music that presented itself with the power of myth. It was dangerous, frightening, Gothic, poetic and decidedly pompous. I loved this about it, without needing to put it into words. This music had nothing to do with boring middle-class life.

Part of the magic was Manzarek, who played organ and piano with his right hand, while manning the bass (the Doors had no bass player when they performed live) with his left hand. His tone came close to suggesting the sound of a church organ, which resonated with my already lapsing Catholicism. The Doors, then, had invaded the sanctuary, and once inside, they employed Morrison’s somewhat naïve but incredibly powerful interpretations of Nietszche and William Blake to create a whole new church. This was the temple of a transcendence born of rabid volition.

That rabid volition ate Morrison alive – he was dead by 27, proving with his death that full and constant obliteration of the senses was not a sustainable method of transcending the mundane.

But before he went, he – along with Manzarek, guitarist Robby Kreiger and drummer John Densmore – crafted music that was destined to outlive his vapor trail of a life.

When you become intimately attached to an artist’s music at a young age, you can’t help but feel a little piece of your youth stripped from you when that artist dies. This is not rational, but it’s real.

No sense dwelling on this, though. Far better to remember Manzarek and the Doors through their most transcendent musical moments. Here are a few of the moments that were transformative for me.

“When the Music’s Over,” from “Strange Days.”

Manzarek’s organ stabs and creepy fills bounced around Kreiger’s snaky guitar lines, creating something exotic. Those lyrics weren’t too shabby, either.

“Back Door Man,” from “The Doors.”

A Willie Dixon blues song, but Manzarek made it his own with a twisted Booker T. line wrapping itself around Morrison’s incredible vocal, which sounded like the hiss of the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

“Five To One,” from “Waiting for the Sun.”

Manzarek knew how to set up a vocal. This is masterful, and a little bit scary. “We want the world and we want it now!” Yes!

“Light My Fire,” from “The Doors.”

If Manzarek ends up being remembered by most people solely for the modal line that introduces this song, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

So long, Ray. You gave us a lot. We’ll pass it on.



email: jmiers@buffnews.com ]]> Wed, 22 May 2013 21:30:25 -0400 Jeff Miers
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If anything confirmed for me how very different the current crop of activist and committed movie stars is from those of the past, it was last week’s rather stunning announcement by Angelina Jolie of her double mastectomy in an op-ed piece in the New York Times.

Not in People, or In Touch or with Diane Sawyer or Barbara Walters, but in an op-ed piece in the Times.

As Jolie explained it, the decision – as momentous as it was for a star whose career has involved so much glamour and physical display – seemed simple enough.

Doctors had told her that because of genetic predisposition, she had an 87 percent chance of getting breast cancer and a 50 percent chance of ovarian cancer. Her genetic “defect,” she told the world, results in cancer 65 percent of the time.

“I hope that other women can benefit from my experience,” she wrote. “Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer and then take action.”

She turned her private decision, then, into part of America’s public education. I don’t know that I’ve admired such a public rendering of the most private medical matters since Betty Ford told the world she was going into rehab, thereby changing entirely how America would think about addiction.

There were too many women in the world – and their families – who needed to know that even an actress of such vaunted sensuality could choose her life with her children over show business exploitation.

It’s what the best of her generation seems to do – George Clooney, for sure, but also her husband, Brad Pitt, and Matt Damon. They put their films – and their very lives – in service to higher ideals and the world if they can.

They know that the minute they walk into a Los Angeles Von’s Market or a Trader Joe’s for an avocado or a liter of coconut water there will be a flurry of cellphone photos and text messages and social media pronunciamentos. Their fame is different from that of earlier Hollywood generations. (And so are its transmission systems.)

I once watched Marlon Brando being maneuvered through Los Angeles airport by a dense cloud of blond women (his personal assistant and her daughters, it turned out), and as much of a commotion as it stirred in LAX, back then it wasn’t instant fodder for an entire Internet world.

If it had been Clooney or Pitt now, it would be. If it took too long, alerted paparazzi – so much denser in population than they used to be – would be on the scene to catch the star waiting patiently, as Brando did, for his entourage to retrieve his luggage from the carousel.

Their whole star generation is aware of the spotlight that accompanies them out into the world, wherever they go. So they put it to use in ways that even the Paul Newman/Robert Redford/Warren Beatty/Jane Fonda generation never did. (More carefully and wisely, certainly, than Fonda; more effectively than Brando; far more publicly than Beatty.)

They have no fear of bringing their sociopolitical beliefs into their films – or it seems their very lives into their very reasons for fame.

It’s almost as if a whole cautionary top layer of diffidence has been removed and we now have a generation of performers determined to detoxify the absurdities of fame with which they’re all too familiar.

Yes, it’s true that Jolie was set to star in a $200 million live-action “Sleeping Beauty” tale called “Malificent” to be released in July 2014. But when it came time to write and direct her own first film, it was “In the Land of Blood and Honey” about Bosnia, made with a Bosnian cast.

We won’t even mention playing Mariane Pearl in “A Mighty Heart” or her movie “Beyond Borders.” They’re a long way from “Wanted” and “Salt.” It’s as if she were telling the world, “OK, you care so much about my life with Brad, here is the reality of it. And here are some things we think about – a few more interesting realities – since you seem to care about nonsense.”

Clooney, of course, admits flat-out that he uses fame to call attention to world problems (in Darfur, say). When he makes films of his own, his family’s journalistic idealism is going to be poured into “Good Night and Good Luck.”

In “Promised Land,” Damon made a pretty good film about the business of “fracking.” In HBO’s upcoming “Behind the Candelabra” (see Saturday’s Buffalo News for a review), he plays Liberace’s live-in lover to Michael Douglas’ Liberace in a rare use of their high level of stardom by both actors. (In different ways, previous sets of straights playing homosexual lovers in movies – Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in “Brokeback Mountain” and Richard Burton and Rex Harrison in “Staircase” – were at different stages of their careers.)

There is, of course, the ancient argument that actors – whose profession, after all, is pretending to be what they are decidedly not – should keep their lives and opinions about everything to themselves and leave thinking to others much better equipped to do it in public.

What if, after all, some of those actors are conspicuously smarter than so many others whom society entrusts to think out loud?

Is there any serious journalist who’s sorry Clooney made “Good Night and Good Luck”?

Is there anyone in any American family with some experience of cancer who doesn’t think Jolie did something useful and even heroic with the fame that had heretofore abused and mistreated her?

She made public what earlier generations of actresses would have kept as private as possible because – $200 million films or not – she jolly well knew her story would make it easier for others to save their own lives.

They seem to be a whole generation that knows exactly how ridiculous is the fame that a Kardashian society confers on them – until, that is, they use that fame to illuminate what the world seems to want hidden.

They know the secret of any spotlight – aiming it where it needs to go.



email: jsimon@buffnews.com ]]> Mon, 20 May 2013 22:36:10 -0400 Jeff Simon
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Some version of this question was on the lips of dozens of art fans on Wednesday night after a sold-out talk delivered by the Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s auditorium.

In 2010, the gallery commissioned Goldsworthy to produce a piece of art for the gallery’s rapidly transforming campus. What he produced, after more than a few false starts and one of the longer trial-and-error periods in the history of Albright-Knox commissions, is what appears to be an unremarkable gravel path running along the southeastern edge of the campus.

In the right light, with the right weather and the right time of day – everything short of the proper alignment of Jupiter and Mars – a thick serpentine line will emerge from the dust and gravel only to dissipate minutes later. Its appearance is unpredictable, an elusive result of conditions that are unpredictable.

“It’s really a canny piece of work,” Goldsworthy said to laughs during Wednesday night’s talk. “It’s going to sneak around, and then come up at 2 in the morning, and then go away again.”

The piece, still technically in progress and temporarily titled “Path,” is one of the strangest, quietest and ultimately boldest pieces of artwork the gallery has ever purchased.

The path leading to “Path,” appropriately enough, was a winding one. Goldsworthy’s ambitious first idea was to create a “herd of stones” which would be heated by an array of solar panels and send up steam in the winter and after rain storms. That project, into which many dollars and hours were invested, was eventually scuttled because of the inordinate power necessary to make it work.

The gallery, Goldsworthy said, turned down ideas for a tree planted in the middle of the east steps and a line snaking its way through a marsh in Delaware Park. So, finally, he adapted an idea he tried for the roof of his home in Scotland for his successful “Path” proposal.

As artworks go, and even as Goldsworthy’s often understated and ephemeral work goes, “Path” is extraordinarily unconventional. It’s a little whisper compared with the sonic boom of Nancy Rubins’ violence of canoes on the west lawn. It avoids your glance, unlike the piercing eyes of Jaume Plensa’s 32-ton sculpture “Laura” on the north lawn.

Art lovers could be forgiven for asking whether the Albright-Knox got its money’s worth from Goldsworthy, whose other major sculptural commissions for museums around the world tend to be available around the clock.

That’s a valid point. It’s natural to wonder why an artwork that only occasionally exists should be worth buying. (The gallery did not disclose how much it paid, though other Goldsworthy commissions have run up to seven figures.)

But “Path” seems remarkable to me simply for its organic nature. It is a living, breathing piece of sculpture that has to be coaxed, like some kind of temperamental zoo animal, out of its cage. That strikes me as a unique and welcome idea in the clattering, clanging, high-decibel art world in which we now live.

The protracted process of finishing the work has no doubt been frustrating for the museum and for Goldsworthy, and some of that frustration was evident in his presentation Wednesday. The end result, however, is just about as beautifully strange, refreshing and unexpected as the artist or his patron could have hoped for.

“I just think it’s amazing that this institution is able to deal with these ideas,” he said. “You should be very proud of this museum.”



email: cdabkowski@buffnews.com ]]> Fri, 17 May 2013 18:07:03 -0400 Colin Dabkowski
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That’s the way I’ve always remembered Brooks’ classic delineation since I first read it about six or seven presidents ago.

He says it, much less effectively, in reverse in Robert Trachtenberg’s documentary “Mel Brooks: Make a Noise.” Nor is that the only instance where a lifelong devoted scholar of Brooksiana (and you have to trust me, I’m all of that) will notice that Trachtenberg’s solid (if stolid) PBS documentary contains a slightly lesser version of an immortal Brooks line that was a good deal better the first time around.

For instance, in this Brooksian version of his film-by-film saga of filming his second movie, “The 12 Chairs,” Brooks says this about the local cuisine as they made it: “We ate wood. In Yugoslavia.” The version I’ve always treasured – and much prefer – is this description of how terrible was the Yugoslavian food during shooting: “One day they served us fried chains.”

Let us be kind and generous here: He has been so many people’s nomination for the funniest man alive for so long – and such a national institution since he soared back into the highest level of American idolatry with his Tony-sweeping Broadway version of “The Producers” – that he has been poked and prodded and interviewed almost endlessly by Brooks worshippers. If he has begun to repeat himself on occasion – and to lesser effect the second time around – let us, by all means, give him the sympathetic understanding he deserves 12 times over.

Brooks will be 87 on June 28 and even a wildly fertile comic genius and improviser like Mel Brooks has to fall back on a familiar trope or two sometimes. That is especially true now that everyone and his brother-in-law Bobby seems to be in the “We love you Mel” Brooks interview business. Brooksian scholars should nevertheless, by all means, not miss “Mel Brooks: Make a Noise” when it airs at 9 p.m. Monday on Channel 17 as part of PBS’ “American Masters” series. It’s heartily recommended to everyone else too for its happily large quotient of both frequent hilarity and revelation.

The title of Trachtenberg’s portrait comes from Brooks’ explanation of why he became a drummer when he was a teenage tummler in the Borscht Belt: “I think I became a drummer because you made the most noise.” (A brilliant bit of insight from his lifelong friend and accomplice Carl Reiner: “He has rhythms in his head. His jokes are great structures of rhythm.”)

Here, in line with that, is an anecdote from my own family from a slightly later period – mid-’50s – among predominantly Jewish guests at a Miami hotel. At an amazing lunch there was at a very large nearby table what seemed to be half the comedians from that era’s television: Jack Carter, Buddy Hackett, and everyone on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows:” Caesar, Howie Morris, Carl Reiner. The laughter from that table was huge and constant. And it was all occasioned by only two men cracking the others up – Hackett and, especially, a man utterly unknown to the rest of America at the time even though he was the unquestioned comic czar of the Sid Caesar Writer’s Room. Everyone asked who that little man was that everyone else thought was so funny. “Mel Brooks,” they were told by the restaurant staff.

“Mel Brooks: Make a Noise” is a portrait of Mel Brooks from a documentarian determined to entertain but at the same time take Brooks with utmost proper seriousness. Trachtenberg doesn’t miss talking about a single film with him (some – “Dracula: Dead and Loving It” for instance – were decidedly missable). But he also reveals a lot more of the real texture of Brooks’ not-always wonderful life than has been commonly seen elsewhere. During the years of Sid Caesar’s weekly beauties, such was Brooks’ anxiety at producing under the gun constantly that, says Brooks “I was puking between parked cars” on the street.

And too, there’s a lot about his long relationship with his second wife Anne Bancroft, who died at the age of 73. She tells the camera that from the moment she met him “the man never left me alone – thank God.” (“He looked like my father” she says. “He acted like my mother.”)

In the ancient jazz musicians’ distinction that separates great drummers from good ones, documentarian Trachtenberg doesn’t really “swing” the way Brooks does but he certainly “keeps good time” in his watchable Brooks portrait.

In his mid-80s, Brooks’ self-defensive memory understandably gets a few things a bit wrong. His memory, now, is of getting a wholly bad review from the New York Times for his first film as writer-director, the classic “The Producers.” If you reread Renata Adler’s ultra-shrewd review of the film, she calls it “a violently mixed bag. Some of it is shoddy and gross and cruel; the rest is funny in an entirely unexpected way.” Adler is hard on “The Producers” star Zero Mostel (so, in recollection, is Brooks) but thinks Gene Wilder is “wonderful.” (So does Brooks: “Everything Gene did was angelic and brilliant.”) And, bless Adler, she was smart enough to tell Times readers that “the first act of ‘Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva in Berchtesgarden’ is the funniest part of this fantastically uneven movie.”

It’s hard not to enjoy everyone who practically lined up to be filmed in the act of loving Mel Brooks: Joan Rivers (who confides that his intellectualism surprises people; later, Brooks correctly uses the word “verisimilitudinous” in passing), Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner, Barry Levinson, Neil Simon, Tracey Ullman (“Mel Brooks loves women” she says, unlike so many comedians and comedy directors), Richard Benjamin, Richard Lewis, his Broadway “Producers” director Susan Stroman. And how can you resist a Brooks portrait as replete as this one is with clips from Brooks’ own films and the films about him? (One from 1981 was memorably called “I Thought I Was Taller.”)

When Brooks in fact won an Oscar for Best Screenplay for “The Producers,” he gave one of the great acceptance speeches. He began by saying “I want to thank the Motion Picture Academy of Arts, Sciences and Money.” He ended by telling his peers “I want to say what’s in my heart. (Pause). Ba-BUMP, Ba-BUMP, Ba-BUMP.”

I dearly wish that as long as Trachtenberg was determined to be thorough, he’d have given us more about the pre-”Producers” period when Brooks was the darling of New York City’s comic intelligentsia – the voice on Ernest Pintoff’s Oscar-winning short “The Critic” and the improv master Madison Avenue loved to pair up with the ultra-American Dick Cavett. (Bic’s new pen, said Brooks, was called the Bic Banana and not the Bic Prune because prunes, as everyone knows, are “wrinkled and dopey.”)

Mel Brooks’ final message to us during the closing credits of PBS’ portrait? Eat plenty of citrus fruit. It tastes sweet. And once it goes into your stomach “it knows what to do.”



email: jsimon@buffnews.com ]]> Mon, 20 May 2013 12:13:03 -0400 Jeff Simon
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I’m deeply sorry if there are Trekkers out there who might want to string Abrams up for what he did to Gene Roddenberry’s earnest, precocious Hollywood progressivism (Roddenberry put “diversity” onscreen long before anyone knew what it was), but I think what Abrams did is rather brilliant.

It was the first time around too and is even more so in his follow-up, when he’s giving us his take on one of the best original “Star Trek” movies – “The Wrath of Khan.”

We’ve got a new Khan to replace Ricardo Montalban, former fancier of fine “Corinthian leather” in Chrysler commercials and possessor of the most formidable pecs of any senior citizen prowling the Fantasy Island of American moviedom.

The new Khan is Benedict Cumberbatch, whose sharply chiseled face and piercing wide-set eyes have made him a good new Sherlock Holmes (for the Brits and PBS) but are probably never going to lead to anyone casting him as a pediatrician or a kindly old math teacher. (His face, in its severity, reminded me a little of Robinson Jeffers, great American poet who was, I swear, once dismissed from a jury in California because his face was too cruel. If they’d read his poetry, they wouldn’t have changed their minds.)

Cumberbatch makes Khan a pretty good villain – a kind of space-prowling Superman who can practically take out a whole company of armed, attacking Klingons all by himself. He can crush heads with his bare hands too – as well as take a barrage of punches by James T. Kirk straight to his bladelike cheekbones, without even a flinch.

This Khan is not a guy you’d want carrying a grievance around – not even in outer space, where, presumably, those with bad personalities and nasty agendas have a lot of space to be off by themselves.

When you find out what his grievance is in this movie, you have to admit he’s got a point. Anyone suspecting that the script was written under the influence of administrative justifications of forays into Iraq and Afghanistan is right on the money, I think.

Bad guys come in all shapes, flavors and uniforms in this movie. And some of those uniforms are supposedly friendly.

So things are so messed up this time that James T. Kirk and Khan spend a lot of this movie fighting Klingons together and trying to get back at a guy who may be even worse than Khan.

All of which is lovely, but I must admit that what I love about these revisionist Abrams “Star Trek” fantasies is what he did to James T. Kirk, whose self-loving actorisms in his extraterrestrial football practice jersey were first brought to us by Priceline’s very own William Shatner, who, in old age, has settled into his own absurdity quite wonderfully.

Back when he was the original James Tiberius Kirk, though, he and Leonard Nimoy were sometime serious actors unmistakably condescending to the lines given to them both by the writer/producer they both obviously liked and endorsed but didn’t necessarily think was the equal of, say, the original Chekhov (the writing one).

Abrams’ re-creation of James T. Kirk is delicious – the best thing by far about these big new Abrams “Star Treks.” (Though, I must admit, all the big action, CGI and elaborate production design are quite good too in modern blockbuster style.)

Abrams’ idea of Kirk before he sat in the command chair with all the pompous confidence in his toupee that a human being could have is that before he got there he was a standard American wild boy, given to all manner of maverick reckless behavior.

The Kirk we see here is still liable to wake up in the middle of two beautiful women in the same bed. And when he gets bad news on the job, he’s quite at home sitting alone at a bar somewhere and quaffing rich, nut-brown fluids.

He’s a bit of a willful cocksure jerk but underneath all that wild boy affect is a guy with deep humanity and all the heroism you could ever want for any dire situation that presents itself.

And the situation that presents itself at the end is as dire as they come.

If he doesn’t risk his life, his “family” – the entire crew of the USS Enterprise – will be goners.

That’s when you know how badly the world needs its Jim Kirks. And that’s when you know how much the Spocks, Sulus, Boneses and Uhuras will put up with. (And that’s even when, as an older man, Kirk is the embodiment of all the toupeed Super Pomp a former Shakespearean actor can muster). And why they put up with it as well.

Abrams’ Jim Kirk is a better creation, I think, than Roddenberry’s. (Apologies to all Trekkers, sincerely).

And too I kind of love the idea that Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) in Abrams’ revisionist Young Star Trek are having a thing. It’s especially droll this time when Uhura’s courageous, self-sacrificing humanity has to deal with Spock’s penchant for letting computer logic turn him into one giant toggle switch (ready to take peremptory action without – you know – talking it over.)

Everyone else in Abrams’ Trek is, as always, a colorful spear carrier. Anton Yelchin is a fine young actor but not exactly the young Chekov of anyone’s dreams. Simon Pegg plays Scotty like a movie actor with a fair amount of fancy credits James Doohan never had.

New besides Cumberbatch are the estimable Peter Weller as a starfleet admiral Dick Cheney might have liked and Alice Eve as his loyal daughter, whom Cheney’s loyal daughter Mary might have liked.

There’s a plot here that’s reasonably involving without ever being entirely serious. And there’s an awfully large amount of action thunder and even physical brutality. (This isn’t really for the little ones. A lot of “S” words float by too, in moments of extreme military consternation. It’s a star “fleet” remember?)

We need, I think, to stop taking for granted just how entertaining so many of these summer blockbusters are. They’re fun in a way movies had trouble being a few movie eras ago.

But then when I watched Spock and Khan punching and gouging each other’s faces atop fast moving car-like vehicles zipping through the air of a 23rd century city, it all seemed like our version of something Ken Maynard or Hoot Gibson or Hopalong Cassidy might be doing atop a buck board or a stagecoach led by a bunch of out of control horses.

“Star Trek Into Darkness” is just a big, brilliantly designed, smart aleck Saturday matinee from a fellow – J.J. Abrams – who has inherited in his generation the mantle that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg once wore.

It’s stunning how much movie technology has changed.

It’s even more stunning how little we in the audience have.

Movie Review

Star Trek Into Darkness

Three and a half stars (Out of four)

Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Pinto, Zoe Saldana, Benedict Cumberbatch, Alice Eve and Peter Weller in director J.J. Abrams’ newest installment of the “prequel” tales of the Starship Enterprise. 132 minutes. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action, violence and some rough language.

email: jsimon@buffnews.com ]]> Fri, 17 May 2013 16:04:47 -0400 Jeff Simon
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Of course, sports are important to the development of children and young adults on both the physical and mental levels.

I’d argue, however, that given the current state of our culture and the fact that the very future of that culture is in the hands of kids who are attending middle school and high school right now, music programs are more important than sports programs.

Why? Simple. Sports are a big part of our entertainment culture, and like pretty much every other living human being, I get great enjoyment from them. However, sports do little to elevate our culture on their own.

Music can actually elevate culture. And our culture is in dire need of elevation.

Earlier this week, I asked Steve Shewan – who, with Wayne Moose, shares directorship of the Williamsville East High School Jazz Ensemble and Jazz Orchestra – if he believed that engaging in the expressive discipline of music-making can provide sustenance to young people, and in some cases, even offer a bedrock of stability for them during the often trying years of adolescence and young adulthood.

“The answer is an unequivocal yes, in all capital letters,” Shewan said.

Shewan has had plenty of time to contemplate this notion over recent weeks, as he and Moose worked with their music students to prepare them for the biggest gig of their young lives – the arrival of world-renowned jazz guitarist and vocalist John Pizzarelli, who will perform at Williamsville East as part of the Legends of Jazz series at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. Pizzarelli isn’t just performing for the kids and the general public, he’s playing alongside them. For the first half of the show, Pizzarelli and his band will welcome Williamsville East Jazz Ensemble members who auditioned to play solos during each tune. During the concert’s second half, Pizzarelli will be joined by the entire Williamsville East Jazz Orchestra.

“In the bigger picture, this is about even more than music,” said Shewan. “These kids are aspiring to play on the highest level, with one of the true greats. These are not watered-down versions of the charts – these are the same charts that the professional musicians who normally play with John use. So the idea of facing a serious challenge and overcoming it in order to perform at this level – that certainly teaches self-confidence.”

I asked Shewan if he agreed that many young people are not being challenged by contemporary pop culture – that perhaps the idea of “everyone and anyone can do this” celebrated by the mainstream pop marketplace is merely honoring a lazy lowest common denominator.

“I think pop culture – not always, but sometimes – sets the bar pretty low. It can sometimes seem like a case of the worst and least meaningful avenues of expression being treated as the status quo to be most admired. Of course, all of this can be enjoyed, because it’s entertaining, fun and so forth. But when it becomes almost like a religion to the kids – well, then it gets very difficult to get beyond it.”

Entertainment, as Shewan points out, should certainly have its place. However, we can and should work to expand the definition of what is entertaining, whenever possible. For example, watching Rihanna gyrate around a concert stage could reasonably be described as entertaining. Hearing music of a high caliber played with a blend of discipline and passion by real musicians employing real instruments might also be described as entertaining, for those who have trained themselves to appreciate nuanced expression.

“I think in general, education is most valuable when the kids are given the chance to play, to read or to write on the level of the real thing,” Shewan said. “Challenging kids is essential if we are to help them discover their personal possibilities. This is the fifth year we’ve been bringing big-name artists to play with the kids, and every time, the kids react to the challenge in a positive way. Just this morning, they came in at 7 a.m., almost an hour before school starts, to do the extra work necessary to prepare for next week’s concert. All of this while they are preparing for Regents exams and what have you. We push the kids hard, and you know what? They can handle it.

“Life has more meaning if you challenge yourself rather than simply taking the easy way out. Music is a great way to impart that lesson to kids.”

My own experience backs up Shewan’s thoughts. I play music with kids and young adults in a variety of situations – from informal basement studio jams to fairly high-profile professional gigs – on a regular basis. Invariably, I’ve found that the young musicians are capable of much more than even they might imagine. This is partly because they haven’t yet learned – or been conditioned – to doubt themselves. Part of music’s gift to us is the fact that it ingrains such self-belief in a lasting way.

In a less general sense, teaching young people to form a meaningful relationship with challenging music will have the long-term effect of raising the bar on what we consider to be entertaining. It just might be the cure for our current cultural rot.

preview

What: John Pizzarelli

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Williamsville East High School, 151 Paradise Road, East Amherst

Tickets: $15

Info: 626-8425

email: jmiers@buffnews.com ]]> Thu, 16 May 2013 06:22:44 -0400 Jeff Miers
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130513/CITYANDREGION03/130519668/1198
It’s even worse that I FEEL worse about the recent cancellations of “Vegas” and “Golden Boy” than I do about the cancellation of “Rock Center.” Not only did the show migrate to five different time slots in its short, fretful history, but it never seemed, after watching the first two, to be reinventing the TV newsmagazine the way it probably needed to do to survive.

Heaven knows Brian Williams’ news magazine had some news “stars” – Ted Koppel, Meredith Vieira – but that might have been as much a problem as a solution.

In an era when actual print magazines have been beaten black and blue by the Internet (so long Newsweek, we’re sorry to see you go) TV’s version of them, I think, needed to do something very different and showy to launch a new one.

“Rock Center” did boast Bob Costas’ head-shaking interview with now-convicted Penn State pedophile Jerry Sandusky, but it was otherwise very much in the mode of what we’ve been seeing since “60 Minutes” first went on the air and turned the form into a network staple (distinguished by its relative cheapness compared with most prime-time TV).

“60 Minutes,” the Don Hewitt invention that is the grandfather of the form, is still alive and well Sunday nights. Far better is “CBS Sunday Morning,” the best and most creative network TV newsmagazine of them all, by far, and one of the few shows on television it is never advisable to miss. (If ever there was a show that cried out for the invention of the DVR, it’s “CBS Sunday Morning.”)

Otherwise, the network newsmagazines that work best for audiences seem to be the crime magazines – NBC’s “Dateline” and CBS’ “48 Hours.” Just as cable TV is in metric Nirvana when a Jodi Arias murder trial shows up or Cleveland women are liberated after many years from the sexual prison of a monster rapist, the regular networks can almost always count on audiences showing up for cheaply turned-out crime reportage.

Actual prime-time crime shows are a different matter. They cost serious dough and demand some sort of metric return. We are, at last report, still waiting to see if NBC sticks with “Hannibal,” but CBS’ “Vegas” and “Golden Boy” are reportedly goners.

The cancellation of “Vegas” was a fait accompli, it seems to me, long ago. The show was mildly enjoyable – mostly for its cast – but with the surprising death of writer/director Nora Ephron, the wife of “Vegas’” co-creator Nick Pileggi, one had to assume that the amount of time a co-creator would want to spend baby-sitting his creation, would likely be limited indeed.

“Golden Boy” is an unfortunate loss for CBS. It too was far from great; we’re not talking about a show in the “Elementary” or “The Good Wife” or even “The Mentalist” class here. But it had what turned into a nice premise about an ambitious homicide cop with a deeply dysfunctional family, a wise bear of a partner, and an in-house cop rival so used to being the departmental hot shot that he was capable of all manner of dirty undermining tactics to deprive the new star’s career of necessary oxygen. “Golden Boy” had a nice feel for the ugliness of office politics, especially those involving mediocrity threatened by indefatigable excellence.

Chi McBride, as the young ace’s wise, ursine mentor, was even more of a weekly pleasure on “Golden Boy” than he’d been on “Boston Public.” He didn’t even look as if they had to buy him new suits for his new role.

That’s why I’ll miss them far more than “Rock Center,” a TV newsmagazine that seemed to scream to be let loose to reinvent the TV newsmagazine for the Internet Age but never was.

That, I think, is where the TV newsmagazine needs to go as we close in on “60 Minutes’” half-century mark. (It was invented in 1968, a dreadfully crowded year for news on TV, almost all of it traumatic.) There is no reason why the Demo Babies of the 21st century, raised on a constant flow of information literally in the palms of their hands, should have the same needs as those raised in an ancient broadcast era which began with three channels that were then joined by two more.

What “Rock Center” could have been was an avowedly experimental news show right from the start – one where younger NBC News staff members – even those without “names” – could invent all kinds of new things to put in an hour of TV news. Lower rating expectations, expand the amount of freedom involved and move well outside the confines of those who have been taught all-too-well the dreary conventions of broadcast news in America, and they’d have had a news magazine that could have been exciting to watch.

At this stage, we didn’t need another conventional TV newsmagazine; we need an on-air TV news laboratory that some network is brave enough to launch as competition for the Internet and the 24/7 cable news channels.

That, I think, is similar to what’s necessary for the late-night talk shows now, too. Letterman’s show is so conventional on most nights that it works only because of Letterman. Leno’s show is an old reliable that even dedicated watchers are probably ashamed to watch. Jimmy Kimmel’s is middling at best, but he’s actually added something edgy to late-night gaggery – his pointed forays into “This Week in Unnecessary Censorship.”

Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” has freed them all to be more political. Letterman’s bilious “Stooge of the Night” bits currently publicly humiliate every senator who voted against gun control legislation in a use of late-night comedy no one would have expected before Stewart’s adaptation of Craig Kilborn and Lizz Winstead’s original “Daily Show.”

But late-night comedy has to be freed up. Someone’s got to play around with the desk and the couch and give us something better than the ghastly inanities of movie opening hype at its very worst.

NBC just announced that when Leno is, in fact, finally removed the way they’ve long wanted to do and Jimmy Fallon will take his place, “Saturday Night Live’s” head writer Seth Meyers will take Fallon’s place.

In other words, Lorne Michaels will, at long last, become the total late night comedy czar of NBC as he seems to have wanted since the first “oust-Leno” move was made.

That, it seems to me, is far indeed from the radical late-night comedy reinvention that we need in the Age of Information.

If someone somewhere has the guts to even start, the time to look for a new Steve Allen or Jack Paar for the 21st century is now.

A new Don Hewitt for TV news wouldn’t hurt, either.



email: jsimon@buffnews.com ]]> Wed, 15 May 2013 20:07:24 -0400 Jeff Simon
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130512/CITYANDREGION/130519787/1198 Canalside through the summer.

The speeches were ebullient and self-congratulatory, as such speeches tend to be, but this time the speakers’ puffed chests were justified. As the sound of construction equipment from four ongoing projects clattered in the background, we heard of plans for some 800 events to take place along a small section of the burgeoning Buffalo waterfront from May through October.

Five years ago, if someone said that the driving force behind this project was the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corp., few would have believed it. For many years, the organization was an emblem of regressive thinking, an agent of stasis and a well-greased funnel for money flowing from our pockets to corporate interests.

Gradually, as the collective delusion known as Bass Pro receded from memory, the agency has performed a remarkable about-face. After plenty of prodding from the community, its philosophy evolved from dangling massive subsidies in front of retailers to sponsoring smaller-scale activities and projects designed to attract actual people.

Now, at least on the evidence of the past few weeks, it seems that the ECHDC’s leaders have finally realized the economic wisdom of directing public tax dollars toward the public good. This is a novel idea where economic development agencies are concerned, but a welcome one.

Until now, the skeptics among us could be forgiven for suspecting the agency of conducting a bit of propaganda in its endorsement of cheap projects for small-scale and public-minded growth from the likes of unfairly maligned “obstructionists” Fred Kent, Tim Tielman, Mark Goldman, his late brother Tony Goldman and others.

Some posited that the corporation’s sponsorship of summer events, rainbow-colored Adirondack chairs and other cheap additions to the waterfront was little more than hush money for the immutable critics of the Bass Pro debacle.

But this week, we received convincing proof that this is not the case in the form of a multimillion-dollar project to illuminate the city’s grain elevators and the announcement of the hundreds of summer events.

Under the leadership of president Tom Dee and civic-minded chairman Robert Gioia – a genuine believer in the public good – the ECHDC seems finally to have emerged from the dark days of Larry Quinn’s misguided leadership.

“In the last three years, it’s changed dramatically from the silver-bullet approach to an incremental approach,” Dee said after Friday’s news conference. “We always base our focus on public access followed by things to do. Add to that incremental improvements, infrastructure and construction, and then comes economic development. It’s a formula.”

Other IDAs and City Hall should watch closely over the next couple of years to see how well this time-tested approach pans out in Buffalo. Given the success of similar projects in cities across the Rust Belt and far beyond – along with the $250 million of subsidized private investment this philosophy has already yielded on Buffalo’s waterfront – we have little reason to believe it won’t.

We must always pay attention to the way agencies like the ECHDC spend and misspend public dollars. Perhaps there are more missteps in the offing. But today, the agency and the waterfront it is building look better than ever.



email: cdabkowksi@buffnews.com ]]> Sun, 12 May 2013 13:04:29 -0400 Colin Dabkowski
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130509/LIFE/130509179/1198
The name of the off-Broadway show was “National Lampoon’s Lemmings” or just “Lemmings” for short. You filed into Art D’Lugoff’s venerable Village Gate in Greenwich Village in 1973 for one of its 350 performances. For the entire second half, you were treated to a savage and glorious popular music festival parody called “Woodshuck: Three Days of Peace, Love and Death.” Belushi did his Joe Cocker bit, but the gospel truth is I don’t remember it at all. More memorable, by far, was Chevy Chase with a dopey scarf around his neck, a flashlight in his hand and a doofus, simpleton grin on his face singing the parody number “Colorado” in his best John Denver voice. But then Chase’s memorability may have had something to do with the fact that at that early stage, he was perfecting his wild, sprawling comedy pratfalls and one of them, I swear, came no more than 4 inches away from spilling every drop of cider, iced coffee and cream on our nightclub table.

It was Christopher Guest, though, who won my allegiance and my biggest belly laughs with his cunning pseudo-Dylan bit singing for us all “Positively Wall Street.” So good, in fact, was Guest’s Dylan impression that I copied Guest’s vocal inflections feebly for years. What happened to the “Lemmings” principals in the next 40 years is a matter of universally acknowledged showbiz history. Belushi rocketed through “Saturday Night Live” and movie blockbusters and died sloppily and tragically young. Chase flourished crazily on his own “SNL” rocket ride and in his own blockbuster movie comedies and then aged badly – badly enough that most of us were pleased as can be that he was Chevy Chase and we weren’t.

Guest found a much quieter and more brilliant way to keep going for four more decades – right up, in fact, until this coming Sunday when his half-hour sitcom, “Family Tree,” debuts at 10:30 p.m. on HBO. Sure, Guest had his high-profile moments on “Saturday Night Live” when he and Billy Crystal would recount baroque horrors from their experience and then acknowledge blandly “I hate when that happens.”

But the eternal contribution of Guest to the culture-forming world of post-“National Lampoon” comedy was to become the key figure in the world of movie “mockumentaries.” Who is ever likely to forget Guest as Nigel Tufnel dialing it up to 11 in Rob Reiner’s “This Is Spinal Tap?”

More importantly came Guest as writer-director with what became a stock company giving us those truly great semi-improv beauties “Best in Show,” in which he and his bunch pretended to be major dog show functionaries and, my favorite of them all, “Waiting for Guffman,” a satire on community theater profoundly distinguished by the big-hearted generosity of absolutely everyone involved in the project while they were being so cruelly accurate and hilarious about the aspirations and eccentricities of community theater.

Which brings us to Sunday’s newest exploration of the comic mind of Christopher Guest.

You need to indulge Guest in the first installment of “Family Tree.” Not only is it in a clumsy time slot that will make it an almost-certainty on DVRs for those wanting to keep up with it, the first episode establishes the show’s basic premise without getting into mammoth guffaws.

For that, you’ll have to wait until an episode called “Treading the Boards,” wherein our schlemiel hero (played by Chris O’Dowd) goes on the second of his excruciating blind dates with a buxom woman with deep décolletage who confesses, in all candor, “Some girls are really into shoes. I’m into bones,” and then proceeds to tell him many of the fascinating bones she’s encountered in her life.

The premise of “Family Tree” goes like this: Our boy has discovered on his latest visit to his Dad (Michael McKean, honored senior member of the Guest stock company) that his great aunt Victoria has bequeathed him a trunk full of family memorabilia in her will.

Which, thereby, sets him on a search through a family that has, so far, offered him a divorced father who watches brilliantly inane sitcoms (especially created by Guest) and a sister (Nina Conti), whose teenage vision of a masturbating puffin has set her on a life course where she communicates through a monkey puppet at the end of her arm.

If you know that Guest is, in life, so authentically related to British peerage that he actually had a seat in the House of Lords, it is that much funnier when our hero, in search of his relatives, discovers that his grandfather was well-known in his time for being the back-end of a comedy horse act. (“They were very well respected,” offers an amateur show business historian, by way of consolation.)

It’s also that much funnier that his research into his boxer grandfather leaves him in episode three with an old boxing glove from the 1948 London games and granddad’s 1948 jockstrap.

And to think, his travels to the New World for his family’s American branch are still to come.

“Family Tree” sneaks up on you in the first episode, begins to offer you mammoth belly laughs in the second and, by the third, leaves you thanking the world that Guest is still in it with you.



email: jsimon@buffnews.com ]]> Thu, 9 May 2013 23:37:58 -0400 Jeff Simon
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130508/GUSTO/130509264/1198 To Bonnaroo, or not to Bonnaroo? That is the question, more so with each passing year, as summer music festivals increasingly become the must-see events for the serious music head. This is an even more pronounced reality for music lovers in the Buffalo area, who routinely gripe about the tendency of major marquee (and uber-hip alternative) acts given to skip over our town in favor of ... well, just about everywhere else, it seems.

So if you're hoping to see, say, Paul McCartney, Vampire Weekend, Tame Impala, the Cure, Nine Inch Nails, Bjork, Phoenix or Queens of the Stone Age, you're going to have to travel to a festival like Sasquatch, Bonnaroo or Lollapalooza for the privilege. (This may change, of course, but at press time, none of the above mentioned acts are scheduled to play the Buffalo area this summer.)

This can get expensive pretty quickly. Tickets are generally a bit of a bargain for the quantity and quality of talent on display at a major festival, $75 to $235 for a three-day pass to Bonnaroo, for example. But when you factor in travel costs, lodging or camping fees, food, gas, etc., a trip to a summer festival becomes a major investment.

If you can swing it, well, bless you, and you should certainly go for it. But if finances, work obligations, family demands and the like weigh heavily on you, there are certainly other options.

The touring Mayhem Festival is one. Without breaking the bank, you can catch Jane's Addiction, Alice In Chains, Coheed & Cambria and more at Darien Lake on July 14. (Top prices for this show are $85; lawn admission is $35.) The Warped Tour comes to Darien Lake on July 6, and for about $45, you might feasibly catch as many as 50 bands. This, too, is a very good deal.

But why wait? Beginning tonight, you can catch an incredible array of bands at a three-day festival without even leaving Western New York. Spring Revival takes place at the Hideaway, 548 Townline Road in Lyons, which is roughly 90 minutes from Buffalo.

Spring Revival has more than the price – $60 for three days of music and three nights of camping – to recommend it. In fact, the festival is in many ways a celebration of our area's vibrant music scene, with many of Buffalo's finest bands making the roster this year, performing alongside prominent touring acts like Dopapod, a reformed Schleigho and Consider the Source.

Slip Madigan, Ocupanther, Universe Shark, Little Mountain Band and Aqueous – Buffalo bands, all of them – will perform lengthy sets between today and the early hours of Sunday morning.

Described by promoters State Wide Music as a collection of “some of the region's nastiest face-melters” concentrating on “jam/prog/funk/rock,” Spring Revival offers outdoor wooded camping, RV parking, food and craft vending, an arts village, drum workshops, and ample opportunity for you to let your inner hippie run (respectfully) wild for a few days. Food and drink vendors will be on site, but the festival is also a “BYOB” event (glass bottles excluded); valid ID is mandatory. Any festivalgoer knows this is a major money-saver.

Tickets can be purchased online through upstatelive.com, where you can also find a full lineup. You can sample the wares of the scheduled performers through soundcloud.com/statewidemusic.

If you kick off your season with Spring Revival, odds are, you'll have a taste for some more festival activity this summer. I offer my picks here, based on what I know about the venues, the history of the festival in question, the value for the dollar, and the lineup.

Sasquatch!, May 24-27 at the Gorge in Quincy, Wash., can brag about its stunning locale and incredible view. It also boasts sets from Vampire Weekend, Tame Impala, Elvis Costello, the XX and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, among nearly 100 others. Sadly, by this point, you're likely reduced to searching out tickets through StubHub, so I can't comment on pricing, which may vary widely for whatever's left. Check sasquatchfestival.com.

Bonnaroo (June 13-16) is the big daddy of them all. This year's trip to Manchester, Tenn., will yield headlining sets by the likes of Paul McCartney, Bjork and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but Bonnaroo is basically an all-day and all-night proposition, and the headline acts are only part of the story. Essentially, you'll have to work pretty hard to avoid having a good time in this temporary city of brotherly (and sisterly) love. Four days of music, too, as opposed to the common three days offered by most other festivals. Again, you'll have to dig around for the best ticket deals on your own – the advance ticket packages are now very close to sold out. See Bonnaroo.com.

Lollapalooza helped birth the festival concept as we now understand it with a series of groundbreaking tours in the 1990s. Now a stationary yearly one-off (Aug. 2-4 at Grant Park in Chicago), the fest has built itself back up to its former glory over the past several years, and with its home in Chicago, is basically a temporary urban idyll featuring some of the most interesting alternative music extant. This year, the new version of Nine Inch Nails – featuring Trent Reznor with friends Adrian Belew and Eric Avery – joins the Cure, Phoenix and Queens of the Stone Age at the top of the roster. Drink and food prices at Lollapalooza are much more reasonable than much of the competition.

Not surprisingly, most of the tickets are gone already, so you'll have to search to find an economically viable option. But it's worth the work. Lollapalooza.com has all the info.

You should never overlook the yearly Moe.down festival. The Buffalo-born band's annual get-togethers at the Snow Ridge Ski Resort in Turin, N.Y., always boast a diverse and interesting lineup, and this year's 14th fest is no different.

In addition to several sets of moe., the Aug. 9-11 festival will also welcome Conspirator, the Stanley Jordan Trio, Conehead Buddha, the Steve Kimock Band and others. A three-day pass covering all of the bands and camping goes for $110, which makes this one far from a bank-breaker. Check out Moedown.com.

Have fun out there. And don't forget to hydrate.



email: jmiers@buffnews.com
]]> Wed, 8 May 2013 23:45:42 -0400 Jeff Miers
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130502/CITYANDREGION03/130509795/1198
That much is certain about one of the new ways of watching television that has been freed up by the technological and corporate revolution in the media world we’re living through.

I refer to what is now cheerfully illustrated in TV commercials and actually referred to in magazines as “binge viewing.” The subject comes up frequently – if indirectly – in the live online chats with readers that Jeff Miers and I do at 1 p.m. Thursdays when people solicit opinions of Netflix’s brand-new way of giving us new TV shows: dropping whole seasons of them on the world in one big clump.

They last did it with their remake of the British political series starring Kevin Spacey called “House of Cards.” Despite everything about its advent that was radically new, the show has had enough of an impact that a long semi-comic parody of it – featuring Spacey’s reptilian Southern pol in full political puppet master mode – was featured at last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

Ever since the advent of home video, it has been possible to own whole TV series, as if they were volumes of Wallace Stevens’ complete poems or a coffee-table book of Titian’s complete paintings. I must confess that as delighted as I am to have Tom Fontana’s “Homicide” complete on disc, a secretly prized possession of mine is the complete Lee Marvin “M Squad” on disc that rests comfortably on one of my stereo speakers. (Some people will understand; I could never begin to explain it to the rest.)

I find it more than a little disorienting, however, that there are actually people proud of their capacity to go on viewing “binges” – to watch, say, a complete season of an hourlong TV series in one sitting.

I’m sorry, but a 10-plus-hour investment in one sitting on one TV series is, to my way of thinking, more than a little dysfunctional. But then I’ve never been one of those at film festivals who goes around bragging they’ve seen five or six films in one day, either.

My limit – and I only did it once, never again – is five. My outer limit now, as a mature, sentient, reasonably sapient adult, is three in one day. After that, it seems to me, you’re in acute danger of remembering only a small fraction of what you really need to remember. (I have never forgotten when an elevator full of film critics I liked pressed me to accompany them to the immediate subsequent screening of a piece of total junk to which we were all invited after seeing “Schindler’s List” in New York. I declined as sweetly as I could because, frankly, I was in no emotional condition at that moment to be putting some piece of cinematic mega-dreck into my head. There are some movies that need to reside alone and comfortably there, surrounded by plenty of space. They shouldn’t be jammed up right next to alleys full of odoriferous garbage cans where so many rats have dived in looking for dinner that the lids refuse to stay on.)

“House of Cards,” from what I’ve seen, is good television by any assay. But there is no single TV series I know of, frankly, that I’m willing to spend more than three hours with at one sitting.

It isn’t all that uncommon, in fact, for networks and studios to send advance packs of as many as five, six or seven episodes of series to critics for them to view before they review upcoming shows. My own personal “three’s my limit” rule applies to them too. If it’s good enough, I’ll come back for more the next day – or next week.

The idea of people – literally – bingeing visually on TV series for the sake of some supposed amusement depresses me to no end.

Lest any fool think I’m some idiot Luddite decrying the merciless technological advances of the digital era, I must confess being immensely fond of everything the DVR has brought to TV viewing, chiefly the ability to 1) zap through commercials and 2) program our own evenings of TV watching rather than put up with the godawful scheduling incompetence of, say, CBS on Sunday nights (where overspilling sports push start times back at least a half-hour and fans of “The Amazing Race” are presumed to be in the same phylum as those of “The Good Wife” and “The Mentalist” that follow).

It’s just that the series “viewing model” established by TV in its primal era – one a week – turns out to be quite a sensible way to watch television. It’s still an intelligent way to watch, say, something like “The Following” even when a whole season comes out on DVD. There’s no way I want to see that show for more than three hours at a time. It’s a TV series, in fact, whose atmospheric overhang might only last for about three hours.

It has also turned out to have a much sturdier premise than I ever thought at first. Even now, when the serial killer/cult leader Joe Carroll has been blown to smithereens in an exploding boathouse, he wound up with so many murderous followers that the hero and heroine never know where they’ll turn up next. It’s a nice bit of TV about paranoia – sort of the old TV series “The Fugitive” turned upside down: two people vs. an ever-expanding number of killers that may include anyone and everyone.

The premise of TV’s “Golden Boy” has proved to be far sturdier than I thought at the beginning, too. It turns out that the office politics and family dysfunctions of a New York homicide squad can be fascinating when they all revolve around one sage veteran played by Chi McBride in his best growling grizzly mode – especially when you know that his partner/acolyte will, in seven years time, become the youngest police commissioner in New York City history.

Even so, when the time comes, nothing could ever get me to watch more than three episodes of “Golden Boy” in one sitting. No matter how much the technology and corporate expectations change in their “business model,” it’s unreasonable to expect all viewers to be infinitely malleable.

I’ll never, for instance, become a regular daily viewer of morning television the way so many are. It will never seem civilized to me. My mornings are spent with the newspaper, recorded music I’m reviewing, email I have to answer and pieces I’m writing for the paper. I watch TV only when I feel I have to.

And when I do, I never find it more depressing than when it’s overly bright and cheery.

For those fascinated by the world of morning TV, I heartily recommend Brian Stelter’s “Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV” (Grand Central, 312 pages, $28). a fine X-ray of ugly doings that has, so far, been distinguished by weird internecine disapproval in the pages of Stelter’s employer, the New York Times, where the guest reviewer of the book tsk-tsked Stelter for not quite measuring up to the putative immortality of fellow Timesman Bill Carter in his books on the late-night TV wars.

All of which, I suppose, may have some truth but is also crashingly irrelevant for such a revealing look at a part of the TV schedule that has probably never received the attention it deserves.

Let me put it this way: I’d rather read Stelter than watch morning TV regularly.



email: jsimon@buffnews.com ]]> Thu, 2 May 2013 22:34:04 -0400 Jeff Simon
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130429/CITYANDREGION03/130429068/1198
So let’s do. Once upon a time. …

There were no cellphones. And no personal computers. Which means there was no Internet. Newspaper reporters who filed stories in difficult locations dictated them to clerks who were fast and accurate back in the office. Who then shipped them to nearby editors who, when stories were big enough, handed them over to rewrite men (rewrite women were sadly rare back then) for the fastest possible polish, melding wire service information into them to make for a coherent whole adequate to the event.

And that, I confess, is what I thought of when the news came down last week of the death of Richie Havens, who became a major beloved figure in American music and culture almost by accident.

He was, legendarily, the opening act at the Woodstock Festival – or, as it said on the tickets, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair (It was also called the Woodstock Aquarian Exposition, too.)

I covered it for this newspaper. I was, so help me, assigned to it the morning of its beginning. I was a reporter of exactly 4½ months’ experience at the time. I was as “cub” as reporters get (though the actual term “cub reporter” was used only in movies, comic books and on TV).

And I was in the Woodstock press tent dictating my first Woodstock story into the phone when Havens went on. The dictation clerk could dig Havens in the background.

It was a small miracle (to me) that I’d managed to get there – facilitated by an executive secretary at The Buffalo News who got me on the right plane to Sullivan County, and the right cabdriver in Monticello, who actually did know all the back roads in the area so that he could get me a couple of miles away.

After that, pal, he said, you’re on your own. (The Thruway was briefly closed – such was the youth migration. Weeks before the event, the local press ran stories about the producers thinking they could easily handle 150,000. They wound up with almost four times that.)

So there I was filing with our amazed dictation clerk (she was flabbergasted that we’d entered a new era and were actually covering the event – and that she could hear it in the background). I was wearing an olive drab suit I’d never be able to wear again. And, yes, a tie.

By the time a truly great rewrite man named Al Zack finished with my orotund dictated drivel, my front page story sounded as if I were the second coming of Grantland Rice.

That press tent didn’t last long. In no time at all, the bad acid was taking its toll and the whole tent was converted into a makeshift infirmary. From then on, if Abbie Hoffman dropped in to kibitz with journalists, he wound up being pressed into medical service.

Producer Michael Lang, years later: “Richie Havens, as the person who started the whole weekend off, was unbelievable in the way he connected with the audience. No one wants to start so it was no surprise that he was hesitant, but I finally convinced him. I said, ‘You have to, we have to get this thing started.’ He set the exact right tone for the weekend – that we were in this together and what a miracle this was.”

The tone he set was so good that he became, at the beginning, one of the twin musical towers of the festival – the other being Jimi Hendrix at the very end, whose Monday morning set for a much-dwindled crowd of 30,000 or 40,000 had its apotheosis in his Vietnam fantasia on “The Star-Spangled Banner” for the stubborn faithful (and, according to Lang, those tripping too hard to leave just yet).

Part folk, part R&B and distinguished by a prophet’s beard and a near-saintly disposition, Havens was a kind of great Greenwich Village soul who colored the whole event far more than many admitted at the time. He gave it an opening benediction.

By the time it was over, it was a drug festival, a mud festival and an eternal tribute to inept planning as much as a music festival. Its three days of music and peace were as much a product of healthy young people under extreme duress helping each other – by necessity – through mutual hardship (rain, a half a million people learning to use God’s own plumbing facilities) as they were Abbie Hoffman’s “Woodstock America,” i.e., a nonviolent and music-loving counterculture who disdained civilization and only wanted to hear Richie Havens sing “Freedom! Freedom!” into the waning afternoon sun.

But too many people had a stake in Woodstock as legend to be detained by too much nettlesome and contradictory truth. In the classic words of John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” when “the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

You have no idea how much I sympathize with younger generations who just might have had it up to here with the whole Woodstock/Woodstein era from 1965-75 when Aqaurian Art Fairs were thought to be paradigms of a new civilization and journalists could depose sitting presidents by speaking just enough truth to power.

We in Buffalo have had a lot of cultural remembrance lately – most notably in the Albright-Knox’s successful show and semisuccessful catalog “Wish You Were Here.”

On Thursday in UB’s Anderson Gallery on Martha Jackson Place off Englewood Avenue near Kenmore Avenue, the University at Buffalo Humanities Institute will begin its Gray Matter Lecture Series with a retrospective on UB’s extraordinary cultural life in the 1970s.

Participating beginning at 6:30 p.m. will be people in the know – Mark Shechner, a professor of English at the time; American Studies professor Mike Frisch, who’ll discuss the politics of the time; and, to my mind, the most important, Renée Levine, who was from 1965 to 1978 the managing director of the UB Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. Her book on it: “This Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music in Buffalo” is definitive.

Levine is now working on a book about the single-most tragic Buffalo musical figure from that period – composer/performer Julius Eastman, once acclaimed nationally but so increasingly involved in both gay and African-American politics that even some friends lost touch with him after he moved to New York.

His unnoted death in Millard Fillmore Hospital in 1990 was, in my opinion, the single greatest lapse in our newspaper’s cultural coverage in my lifetime, but such was the obscurity his life had fallen into, there was no notice of it anywhere until Kyle Gann did so in the Village Voice eight months later. The most powerful disc of his music I’ve ever heard was recently released – Jace Clayton’s “The Julius Eastman Memory Depot” (New Amsterdam).



email: jsimon@buffnews.com ]]> Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:21:30 -0400 Jeff Simon
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130428/CITYANDREGION/130429189/1198
Surely, I thought, a shrinking midsize city that was adding a pair of new theater companies and at least as many gallery spaces every year, along with innumerable individual collaborations spanning all the artistic disciplines, would reach its limit before long. The pace of cultural growth in this city since the late 1990s, it seemed to me, could not possibly keep up forever.

But here I stand, more than six years later, happily flabbergasted that the growth of Buffalo’s cultural offerings is not only continuing, but rapidly accelerating.

Exhibit A is my inbox this month. Much to the dismay of many of those hoping for more in-depth coverage for their projects, it is overflowing with evidence of at least 13 simultaneously running productions from the city’s more than 20 professional and semiprofessional theater companies. At least twice as many exhibitions pepper the kaleidoscopic visual arts scene here, without even factoring in the many major-league offerings of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Burchfield Penney Art Center.

We’re not talking about community theater productions of “You Can’t Take It With You,” or your grandma’s Sunday afternoon watercolor paintings. Weed out the amateur and half-baked offerings, and you are still left with far more activity on the theater and art scenes here than you could possibly see in several months’ time. And that is to say nothing of the breathless literary or growing indie-music communities.

Because I didn’t participate in the much-ballyhooed artistic explosion of the 1970s in Buffalo, I cannot say with certainty whether we are now living in the most culturally diverse and active period in the city’s recent history. But it sure does feel that way.

The trend applies across all levels of culture. The active underground hip-hop, graffiti and b-boy scene peeking its head above ground on Friday for the ambitious “Cuts & Breaks” exhibition at the Vault Arthouse on Main Street. This summer’s Buffalo Infringement Festival – at this point by far the area’s largest arts festival by participation – will shed even more light on the region’s vast below-the-radar artistic ecosystem.

New galleries like Meridian West and the Project 308 space in North Tonawanda cater to broader tastes, while venues like Silo City have arisen as playgrounds for a new and active generation of artists and performers. At the same time, attempts by the likes of art professor and curator Jonathan Katz and others to bring the fascinating work of the University at Buffalo’s visual studies department into the community at large are growing.

The proliferation of Buffalo’s theater ecosystem, which underwent a sea change with the closure of the former Studio Arena Theatre (now the 710 Main Theatre), has been an especially interesting case. For many years, the city could boast of an extraordinarily high number of theaters for a region of this size, but couldn’t crow quite as loudly about the quality of its productions.

Even that is finally beginning to change as theaters such as the Kavinoky are spending more time in rehearsal, and three-show seasons, like that of the excellent Jewish Repertory Theatre, are becoming more popular than substandard, wall-to-wall productions from September to June.

Because of all these projects and many more on the horizon, the city’s quickening cultural pulse won’t be slowing down any time soon.



email: cdabkowski@buffnews.com ]]> Sun, 28 Apr 2013 09:16:18 -0400 Colin Dabkowski
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130426/CITYANDREGION03/130429389/1198
Or at least I think we did. Sometimes, I’m not so sure.

The rumored cancellation of “The Good Wife” that sent spasms of contempt and disgust through a good part of early 2013 never came to pass, thank heaven. After a depressingly long time “on the bubble” – as the programmers like to say – the show was renewed for next season, thereby preserving what is, arguably, the smartest show on network prime time and, inarguably, the most sophisticated one.

And that last is why I’m not completely sure that “The Good Wife’s” return to CBS prime time next season is a total victory for those of us who like the show so much. There is, after all, a small part of me that thinks that at the plot point the show has now reached, the ideal place for “The Good Wife” would be cable-TV – CBS’ premium cable sister Showtime, let’s say, where they routinely get away with things like “Californication,” “House of Lies,” “Shameless” and “Homeland” that would probably get a green-lighting CBS executive arrested in Cincinnati.

We’re talking, for instance, about a prime-time CBS show that has had an instance of blatantly implied oral sex on a bathroom laundry hamper and another instance where Alicia Florrick, during a family get together, yanked her estranged husband into their formerly conjugal bedroom just to share some quick and dirty intimacy and rebel decisively against the unseemly and intrusive inquisition of her mother into her current erotic life.

When the former bathroom incident took place, a female superior – gingerly – wrote to ask me if I’d seen “The Good Wife” the night before. It was the middle of the day when she got around to it, but I knew that she was hoping for another perspective on the rarity – perhaps even singularity – of what she’d just seen on CBS during prime time on Sunday (which used to be known as “family viewing night” in another era).

I was committed to writing about something else the next day, but I understood what she was really asking: “Can they DO that on prime time? Are they going to get away with it?”

Yep. I reassured her they could indeed. There might be a minor yelp or two, but it was all handled so deftly that no one who knew what was happening would object on a night that has now given us “Shameless,” “Californication,” “The Sopranos” and “Game of Thrones” across the dial.

But what’s uncommonly interesting about the situation of the central characters of “The Good Wife” – a situation that is sharpened so acutely in Sunday’s upcoming season finale of the show – is that the episode’s ending came as both a big surprise to me, as well as a thoroughly logical answer to the characters’ major dilemmas, when you think about it.

But the preview of the finale I saw also leaves the heroine with a problem that it seems could best be explored on a cable network that allows for more specific bedroom frankness than we are ever likely to see on CBS Sunday nights at 9.

The emotional core of “The Good Wife” is an unusual triangle in which “Good Wife” Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) is in the middle of two smitten high-power Type A men: a formerly philandering husband who is running for governor of Illinois (Chris Noth, formerly “Big” on “Sex and the City”) and an old law school fling and now law partner (Josh Charles, formerly of “Sports Night”).

What’s uncommon about all this is that it’s her husband, the gubernatorial candidate, who’s the dirty guy – a tempting sexual release valve at stolen moments.

Her law partner Will (her promotion was a big plot point this season) offers another kind of stolen moment – warm, romantic, smushy kisses on elevators after the doors close or in cars parked in deserted lots.

If her randy, oversexed husband hadn’t derailed their marriage by messing around with prostitutes and getting caught (the show was originally based loosely on Eliot Spitzer’s marriage), there might not be any triangle at all for “The Good Wife.” She could stay “Good.”

And repressed.

It is a fact of life among genuinely civilized human adults that there is erotic information so specific and so intimate that no one should be really entitled to it other than the participants.

It doesn’t stop college kids in gyms, dorms, fraternities and sororities from flinging it around recklessly, but it is axiomatic among the adults of the world that the more detailed it gets, the more it is likely to be self-serving (on the part of the tale-teller) to the point of rank inaccuracy.

It’s especially true of relationships that have gone so south that tales told out of school are acts of revenge. Their truth value is, at best, 50-50.

On a TV show, though, viewers want a triangle resolution that makes sense. And the way “The Good Wife” leaves us in Sunday’s finale is with questions that maybe only a bit more detailed information would solve.

Where we are on “The Good Wife” is the point where a good therapist – or a good friend – would have to press for a bit more information about the differing satisfactions involved in each of Florrick’s relationships.

Sunday’s season finale – thank heaven it wasn’t the series finale – does a lot of things very well indeed.

It has a couple of solid belly laughs and, as I said, a surprising conclusion to all the dramatic matters that have been bubbling all season long. It’s a solution that is, when you think about it all the way through, an eminently logical and full solution to our heroine’s most pressing life problems.

And yes, of course, they can handle it all very well on network prime time next season with the same kind of deft toe dancing along the sidelines they’ve been doing with carnal matters all along on the show.

But what you have to wonder about a show that offers so much sophistication in prime time is this: How much better would it be if we were privy to the intimate information that really told us something about the central figures rather than dropped broad hints and then quickly went back to hide behind the curtain.

When a week’s episode of “The Good Wife” is over, we’re still watching television.

To paraphrase an old promotional ad, maybe now on “The Good Wife,” what we need isn’t television but rather HBO.

Or Showtime or FX or AMC or …



email: jsimon@buffnews.com ]]> Thu, 25 Apr 2013 21:16:44 -0400 Jeff Simon
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130425/GUSTO/130429512/1198 It started with Nietzsche's, unquestionably.

The venerable Allen Street nightclub booked live music seven nights a week from the moment it opened its doors more than 30 years ago. In the decades since, it has never modified its initial manifesto. Nietzsche's fostered a hippie/beatnik/artist/poet/musician vibe, and with the Old Pink Flamingo just a hop, skip and a jump away, this little corner on Allen Street became a central spot for the Buffalo music scene.

But Allentown has grown considerably over the past few years, taking the original Nietzsche's ethic and running with it. With the recent closing of Mohawk Place, the area's significance as a live-music hub increased tenfold. These days, you can head to Allentown at dinnertime and stay through the night, catching a diverse array of musical performances without having to move your car. (Parking is still an issue, it must be admitted. Street parking is at a premium in the area surrounding the Elmwood/Allen junction, perhaps now more than ever. A paid public parking lot in the neighborhood would not be a terrible idea.)

There are five clubs regularly featuring live music most nights within a one-block stretch of Allen Street near Elmwood Avenue. Together, Nietzsche's, Duke's Bohemian Grove Bar, Allen Street Hardware Cafe, the Bend on Allen and the new Pausa Art House form the hub of the live music community in our town.

That's not to suggest that these are the only vibrant music clubs in Buffalo – there are in fact many including the Town Ballroom, Tralf Music Hall, the Ninth Ward at Babeville and the newly launched Waiting Room. But the concentration of music venues within this single block form a Bohemian arts/music district that speaks of an incredibly healthy broader arts culture in Buffalo.

An open, accommodating and eclectic atmosphere pervades, and that is a significant part of the area's charm. Whatever your musical taste, you are likely to find something that compels you – from nationally touring bands to Buffalo born-and-bred artists – in one of these five clubs on any given night. Significantly, you can wander from club to club and sample the wares on offer rather freely – shows at Pausa Art House, for example, start early and end by 10 p.m., so catching a late show at one of the other venues is more than doable.

Calling Allentown our own little version of, say, Greenwich Village during its heyday might be gilding the lily a little bit. But it can't be denied that Allentown is buzzing these days, and the musical diversity on display rivals that offered by many cities five times our size.

Here's a musical guide to Allentown, the live music mecca right in our own backyard.

Nietzsche's

248 Allen St. (886-8539)

The vibe: This is the granddaddy of live music, not just in Allentown, but in Buffalo as a whole. A long, deep room, with the tarnished elegance of a true Bohemian nightspot.

The tunes: From roots music to jam bands, blues to progressive rock, world beat to jazz, Nietzsche's hosts 'em all.

The hot night: For what seems like forever, Nietzsche's has been presenting live music seven nights a week. For the late-night crowd, Thursday through the early hours of Sunday are the must-go nights. Folks who like to get home a bit earlier can enjoy happy hour shows on Fridays and matinees on Saturdays.

Check: nietzsches.com

Upcoming: The B-Side Dubs, Cosmic Shakedown and Chasing Moira team to present an evening of spacey psychedelia, tripped-out reggae and Rust Belt rock at 10 p.m. Friday; Conehead Buddah, Slip Madigan and Groove Force get their jam-band on beginning at 9 p.m. Saturday.

email: jmiers@buffnews.com

Duke's Bohemian Grove Bar

253 Allen St. (240-9539)

The vibe: Urban Bohemian – our own version of New York City's fabled CBGB's.

The tunes: Diversity is the key to the success of the Duke's lineup. Hip-hop, neo-soul, dance, jam bands, DJs, soul-jazz outfits, techno – you name it, and if you can dance to it, Duke's is likely to book it. And you can make a night of it by coming early for dinner and staying put.

The hot night: You'd have to work very hard to avoid having a good hang at Duke's on any given Thursday, Friday or Saturday night. Very hard.

Check: dukesbohemiangrovebar.com

Upcoming: Chicago indie-rock outfit Archie Powell & the Exports will be joined by the Screaming Jeans and Made Violent at 9 p.m. Sunday; Neo-Soul Tuesdays with Verse is at 8:30 p.m. every Tuesday.

The Bend on Allen

256 Allen St. (884-1030)

The vibe: Casual atmosphere, darts and billiards in the house, and a craft beer-lover's nirvana.

The tunes: An eclectic mix – blues, rock, R&B, jam, soul-jazz and acid-jazz make regular showings at the Bend.

The hot night: Live music is booked on select nights, so check the schedule in the Gusto listings section, or visit the club's website.

Check: thebendonallen.com

Upcoming: Michael Hund and Alison Janet of Widowmaker host an open mic night at 11 p.m. Tuesday; Saturday finds DJs handling the late-night music until 4 a.m.

Pausa Art House

19 Wadsworth St. at Allen (697-9069)

The vibe: Authentic art house ambience. Intimate, casual but elegant, with the boundary between audience and performer all but obliterated. Intermingling between audience and performers encouraged.

The tunes: All over the map, and all presented in a chamber music format – from contemporary percussion pieces to world beat, jazz to modern free-form improv.

The hot night: Pick one.

Check: pausaarthouse.com

Upcoming: Saxophonist Kelly Bucheger brings his What Would Mingus Do? to Pausa at 8 p.m. May 2. The Young/Keen Philharmonic finds Jon Nelson leading the newest version of his Genkin Philharmonic at 9 p.m. May 4.

Allen Street Hardware Cafe

245 Allen St. (882-8843)

The vibe: Casual, hip, elegant, arty, but most assuredly not pretentious. Serves dinner, good beer on tap. Owners Mark and Charlie Goldman brought us the sorely missed Calumet Arts Café, and Hardware continues that club's urban hipster theme.

The tunes: Wonderfully eclectic. Jazz, roots music, elite DJs, jam bands, spoken word, alternative and indie rock abound.

The hot night: One is tempted to say “Any night that Doug Yeomans and Down to the Roots, or What Would Mingus Do? is playing,” but that's only part of the story. Thursdays through Saturdays are always hopping, whoever happens to be on stage.

Check: allenstreethardware.com

Upcoming: Doug Yeomans and Down to the Roots bring their virtuosity to bear on American roots music at 9 tonight; Hip Hop Saturdays with DJ Daringer & Scott Down spinning starts at 11 p.m. weekly. ]]> Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:00:52 -0400 Jeff Miers
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130425/GUSTO/130429515/1198
Sound engineering is a science, and the quality of sound in a concert club or bar can vary widely, greatly impacting the experience for the audience. How many times have you gone to a show and left feeling a little bit ripped off because the sound quality made it close to impossible to get into the music? Conversely, how often have you gone to a show and been blown away by the crisp, clean quality of the sound?

There are many variables in play when it comes to creating a pleasing sonic experience in a club or bar. Right off the bat, the sound engineer is dealing with the fact that most of these rooms were not designed with sound quality in mind. Large, cavernous rooms with high ceilings and lots of concrete are a soundman’s nightmare. Often, the live music aspect is treated as an afterthought.

We are seeing a change in Buffalo clubland regarding the sound experience, however. Several area establishments have set the bar rather high in this regard, to the point where anyone who wants to have a stake in the game needs to address the issue of quality live sound. This means more investment on the club side – newer, in many cases better PA equipment, perhaps some acoustic tiling or baffling in the room, and most significantly, a full-time sound engineer who knows the room, knows the equipment, and knows how the two will (and should) intermingle.

I took an informal poll of Buffalo News readers via Facebook over the past few weeks, and threw the sound quality issue out there. The response was impressive, both in terms of quantity and quality. This is an issue that regular attendees of concerts in clubs and bars feel strongly about. I asked readers to pick their favorite club for a positive live sound experience, and explain why this club had an advantage over others, from their perspective.

Of the several hundred responses, one club emerged as the winner by a significant margin. The Sportsmen’s Tavern (326 Amherst St.) was mentioned in nearly every response I received as a club that is handling the sound issue most effectively. Recent investments in remodeling at the club have been matched by the attention to sonic detail, and the result, according to readers, is a pristine sound quality that is clean, loud without being obnoxiously so, and well-mixed. My experiences at the club back up this notion. The Sportsmen’s does indeed sound great. That said, the club does tend to present artists falling within the roots music niche, many of whom play at lower volumes, and are thus more inclined to mix themselves, so to speak. Music played at significantly higher decibel levels presents its own set of unique challenges for the soundman/woman.

Bearing this in mind, it makes sense that the next two most popular clubs cited in the reader responses were the Tralf Music Hall (622 Main St.) and the Town Ballroom (681 Main St.), both of which routinely present heavy rock, alternative and electronic music shows at near-arena rock volumes. Reader response suggested that both of these concert clubs have figured out the formula necessary to balance high volume with a pleasing mix that suits the room.

I’ve had great experiences at the Tralf over the years, ranging from a heavy outfit like Adrian Belew’s Power Trio or King’s X, to the trippy nuance and ornate detail of jam-tronica pioneers Ozric Tentacles, or the broad dynamics by a band led by jazz great Kenny Garrett. All of these shows boasted live sound that was pretty close to flawless.

I have never heard better live sound in a Buffalo club than during Sunday’s Steven Wilson show at the Town Ballroom. It was pristine and broad in dynamic range, loud enough to be powerful, but never overwhelming.

The newly opened Waiting Room is a surprisingly good sounding space. It’s long and deep, and there are plenty of reflective surfaces for the sound to bounce off. However, at the recent grand opening celebration at the club, I was impressed by the sound quality. It was loud, but clear and well-mixed.

Your thoughts on this topic reveal the significance of sound quality, and how the issue in some cases has been a decisive factor in which clubs you choose to patronize. Many responses suggested that the most important person in the room is the soundman – that these professionals can make less-than-perfect equipment sing beautifully, overcome flaws inherent to the available space and strike the perfect balance. A shout-out seems in order for the sound professionals at the clubs you voted for.



email: jmiers@buffnews.com ]]> Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:54:09 -0400 Jeff Miers
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130421/CITYANDREGION/130429877/1198
On this gritty drag in a proud neighborhood that had seen better days, DeBoth opened a modest studio in an old storefront on the 400 block. It was one of the first visible signals that a change was afoot on this half-mile stretch of Amherst Street, which over the past decade has bloomed into a bona fide cultural destination.

DeBoth’s gallery, Artsphere, is in the midst of a monthlong 10th anniversary celebration, which culminates Saturday with a talk from photographer Bogdan Fundalinski and artist Michelle Mazur. It’s a celebration that DeBoth and Artsphere, important catalysts and beneficiaries of the ongoing Black Rock revival, richly deserve.

Earlier this week, I sat with DeBoth in the front room of her gallery space at 447 Amherst St., across the street from its original location, as she reflected on a decade at the helm of Artsphere.

There is little particularly edgy or hipsteresque about Artsphere, a renovated former funeral parlor DeBoth shares with her daughter’s hair salon. It’s a place where the floral aroma of hair products wafts from the salon into a sort of homey gallery space where you are more likely to encounter idyllic watercolor scenes of pastures and prairies than avant-garde installations.

That makes DeBoth’s role in kicking off the transformation of this neighborhood into a haven for the city’s young arts culture even more interesting. But the aesthetic of Artsphere or the artists who exhibit there isn’t really what matters when it comes to the resurgence of the street. What matters is that DeBoth went first.

She brushed off her decision to open Artsphere on Amherst Street, writing it off as a pragmatic choice based more on the proximity of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Burchfield Penney Art Center than on any grand desire to infuse new life into the area.

“I thought this was an absolutely perfect place to have a gallery,” she said. “I didn’t have any qualms about being the first one. I guess I believed in myself, and I believed it would work, and I was going to make it work. So I did.”

During the past decade, DeBoth has worked with neighborhood residents to build an archive of historic photographs of Black Rock, to promote the neighborhood’s important role in the War of 1812 and to produce educational material and murals about the area’s history. In addition to hosting dozens of exhibitions, Artsphere has served as a hub for community members to meet and share ideas about how to improve the neighborhood and honor its historic importance.

On the back cover of a catalog marking the gallery’s 10th anniversary, Amherst Street architect Max Willig sings DeBoth’s praises:

“The revival of Black Rock, a historic community that is seeing a proud revival of art, music, architecture, food and culture over the past few years, has been the collective effort of the people who proudly lived there and those who’ve moved to the neighborhood to join in bringing the vision of what could be, to what it is quickly becoming,” Willig wrote. “Doreen single-handedly began the renaissance of the cultural soul of this community.”

Though that might be overselling it just slightly – others, such as Black Rock developer Susan Cholewa, 464 Gallery owner Marcus Wise and many other longtime neighborhood residents and businesses, played integral roles as well – the sentiment is right on.

Without DeBoth and Artsphere, it’s unlikely Amherst Street would look the way it does today.



email: cdabkowski@buffnews.com ]]> Sat, 20 Apr 2013 19:08:16 -0400 Colin Dabkowski
]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130419/CITYANDREGION03/130419052/1198
Jon Stewart teed off on CNN generally and King personally on “The Daily Show” on Wednesday night. Stewart’s targets couldn’t have deserved it more. They were caught that afternoon reporting – from King’s “exclusive” sources, said his colleague Wolf Blitzer – that a suspect had been caught in the horrific Boston Marathon bombings.

“A dark-skinned male,” King told the world rather nonspecifically from his “exclusive” sources – which, of course, gave Stewart abundant ammunition for a public fusillade at whatever shred of dignity King might have hoped he still had.

There are no worse ways to be “caught” in journalism. What so many others knew at the time was that the apprehension of a suspect King reported as fact could always turn out to be premature. He’d been caught believing the wrong source and not confirming it.

The precise technical term for what he said at that precise moment was “untrue.”

Which is why, despite everything, I may be one of the few people in America who have more than a little sympathy for King. The reason I do is that he is not exactly on a career roll. His regular nightly TV show was canceled. The CNN reporter – who is separated from CNN anchor Dana Bash – is now in a position, no doubt, of having to prove himself in a new CNN environment where Jeff Zucker is the new überboss. Zucker is the former NBC executive famous for guiding the Katie Couric-Matt Lauer “Today Show” and infamous for engineering the fabled late-night calamity that began with promising Conan O’Brien the “Tonight Show” chair already occupied by ratings leader Jay Leno.

What I can’t forget is how virtuosic John King was on the last presidential election night in November. Armed with a touch-screen map that was clearer than everyone else’s and what seemed to be inexhaustible information on every election precinct in America, he was close to jaw-dropping (in the hyperbolic modern cliche) on election night.

And now here he is mere months later as the living symbol of journalistic ignominy for a story about a horrifying event that has, in many ways, turned into a kind of journalistic waterloo for second-by-second “reporting.”

So many of the new media, new institutions and new technologies that routinely deliver news 24/7 have been caught in the act of blowing it – reporting phantom suspects in custody, and inflating fatality numbers, as the New York Post did.

King, who used to work for the Associated Press, and CNN weren’t alone in reporting a suspect arrest in the bombings. Fox News briefly followed suit, then quickly took it back. The AP fired off a 1:42 p.m. tweet on Twitter about “a suspect to be brought to the court” and then, of course, had to un-tweet it. (CBS and NBC, to their credit, never bit on the story. They never succumbed to the hysteria.)

Every journalistic professional in America has always known that the process of news gathering is chaotic indeed, with stops and starts and detours and misdirections and spurts of misinformation and error sometimes beclouding everything. We have to assume Boston police and resident FBI investigators to be less experienced dealing with media on major traumas than police and feds elsewhere (New York, to be sure).

Great sources sometimes get it very wrong. Previously weak sources prove to be the Rock of Gibraltar.

It’s a sausage factory where it is indeed sometimes not recommended that nonprofessionals observe every second of the sausage-making process.

But that was in the old days – the days of concentrated journalistic authority with organizations and reporters competing to nail down what actually happened during moments of national trauma.

All bets – and I do mean all – are off in the modern era of 24/7 cable news babble and Facebook and Twitter mixed into the process which seem to transform competition into a second-by-second battle for primacy.

The technical term for this at the moment, it seems to me, is “insanity.” Another extremely useful expression that suggests itself is a two-syllable word that starts with “bull.”

I have had trouble with news media coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings since the opening day. Let me hasten to admit here that I’m not writing this as a spot news reporter with sources both inside and outside but rather as a longtime watcher and analyst of what everyone else in America can watch and read.

As I watcher, I have these basic questions during moments of extreme national news trauma:

1) What exactly happened?

2) How many were affected? What were the casualties, in as much detail as possible?

3) Where did it happen?

4) How did it happen?

5) When did it happen?

6) Why did it happen?

7) Who was responsible?

8) How does the event affect the future lives of everyone involved and the rest of us, too?

9) How can authorities lessen the chances of it ever happening again?

On such a story, all information is indeed subject to momentary change. But certain things about it remain stable.

What happened in Boston was obvious from the start. And caught on camera again and again. The New York Post may have reported 12 deaths when there were only three, but it was not a widespread media error.

Where it happened, so help me, has remained a problem from the first minutes. We know that the two explosions took place at the marathon finish line less than 100 yards away from each other.

But where? WHERE?

Maybe I’m too used to watching TV’s forensic mysteries. Maybe my memory of the traumatic assassination of John F. Kennedy remains too vivid. (There were maps everywhere showing the parade route and Dealey Plaza the very next day). If so, I apologize profusely to all investigative agencies and hardworking journalists covering the tragedies and horrors at the Boston Marathon.

But I immediately wanted to know where the bombs were placed – on the sidewalk? Inside the buildings? What were the buildings at the explosion sites? Businesses, nightclubs, book depositories?

We were quickly told by the FBI that at least one of the bombs seemed to have been made from a common cooking unit – a pressure cooker. But the precise placement of them – or even general placement – was kept mysterious.

I know the answers to the rest of my questions will be revealed in due time while media battle each other reporting details. The best will get it right and the gullible and insecure will battle to get it first.

Of all the online coverage, a colleague was able to find only one place giving us a sense of the geography of the explosions – the Boston Public Library across the street from the first, the office building above its sidewalk, the Starbucks mere feet away from the second blast.

It seems to me that elementary question I had should have been answered almost everywhere, not just in a New York Times schematic our editor found. Except for Jon Stewart, this has not been American media’s finest hour.

With the viral growth of American media – especially cable TV news and social websites – America’s information storm has made everyone a “media critic.” What becomes obvious with every truly major story is that the job is infinitely more difficult than is generally assumed.

It seems now the job of “media critic” in America has been virtually wiped out by the unsparing supremacy of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and, to a lesser extent, his time-slot partner Stephen Colbert’s “Colbert Report.” Both, to many, are as close to reliable and unimpeachable as anything we have. And Stewart, God help us all, is going off to direct a film soon.

We’re going to be in a little bit of trouble when that happens, it seems to me.



email: jsimon@buffnews.com ]]> Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:23:45 -0400 Jeff Simon
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Bob Seger’s music is the epitome of Detroit-style rock ’n’ roll, and before what appeared to be a mostly full house in First Niagara Center on Thursday, he offered up two-plus hours of the stuff. The man is 68 years old. But he partied like he was still waiting for his 30th birthday to roll around. And the whole thing felt soooo Detroit.

Flanked by a large band – which included Grand Funk Railroad’s Don Brewer on drums and harmony vocals, as well as original Silver Bullet Band members Alto Reed on sax and Chris Campbell on bass – Seger gave everything he had to his meat-and-potatoes rock and soul. The assembled partied like it was 1975. Or 1985. Or 2011, the last time Seger played Buffalo.

Opening with “Long Twin Silver Line,” from 1980’s “Against the Wind” album, Seger appeared energetic, relatively trim and in much stronger voice than he was when he played the then-HSBC Arena. The large band, beautifully mixed by the touring soundman, presented an earthy blend of Motown, soul and primal rock ’n’ roll from the get-go, and if Seger couldn’t hit the highest of his high notes from days of yore, he gave it everything he had, as he stalked the stage like a grizzled rocker who had come to pay a visit to some old friends.

Arena shows can be cold, clinical and lonely affairs, the vastness of the room acting as a buffer between performer and audience, as if we had all gathered to watch a legend perform via satellite from some other locale. Thursday’s show revealed Seger’s greatest strength to be his ability to make a hockey arena feel like a living room – his living room. The vibe was intimate, the sound was well above average for an arena show, and the set list proved to be impeccably paced.

“The Fire Down Below,” “Main Street,” “Old Time Rock ’n’ Roll” – to refer to these tunes as classics is to utter a cliché. But there’s no way around it. These songs are classics, no-frills singer-songwriter fare that was oiled and lubed in the Detroit factory. Which is to suggest that the shadow of Motown music never left the stage Thursday.

Seger played “Like A Rock” for the first time in a quarter century, while seated and strumming an acoustic guitar. He delivered the song with passion and almost made us forget that the paean to personal fortitude had been made into a commercial in service of Chevrolet trucks in the latter ’90s. Almost. In truth, this was a bit of a weak spot. It’s hard for a song to reclaim its integrity once that integrity has been compromised.

But whatever. The Seger fans came to hear their man give it all he had, and he did that, tearing through “Live Bullet” classics like “Beautiful Loser” and “Travelin’ Man” with considerable vigor, and offering a taste of his forthcoming album in the form of a cover of Billy Bragg & Wilco’s “California Stars” (a high point of the show) before taking a seat at the piano and leading the band through the fairly cheesy ballad “We’ve Got Tonight” (a low point, but not so low as to be unforgivable).

What can be said about Bob Seger in 2013? His tours are essentially victory laps, with a few new numbers thrown in to keep things somewhat vital. And guess what? That’s just what the doctor ordered.

The opening set from Joe Walsh and his band threatened to make Seger appear superfluous. Walsh, who is only playing a select few dates opening for Seger, tore the roof off with a smoking set that dipped into every era of his lengthy career.

email: jmiers@buffnews.com ]]> Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:20:41 -0400 Jeff Miers
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