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CHARLIE Will France deal with its crisis as the US dealt with 9/11?

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BY BRUCE JACKSON This past weekend almost four million people marched peacefully through Paris to honor the Charlie Hebdo staff murdered by some lunatic fringe Muslim extremists. The murders were no more a Muslim event than the murder of Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by ultranationalist Yigal Amir was a Jewish event. Extremists do extreme things. They do not represent or document or place the rest of us. That is what the Paris demonstration was about. It was Paris saying, We are not going to let you own us. It was a bigger turnout than the Liberation of Paris at the end of WWII. Every time I’ve been in Paris in recent years and have picked up Charlie Hebdo, I have had the same sequence of thoughts: 1) bloody outrageous; 2) this warrants thought. I’ve long thought the Charlie Hebdo gang comprised the best anarchists I know. For them, there were no sacred cows. No sacred icons. Every copy of Charlie Hebdo I have picked up, every page would strike me as outrageous. Every week challenged in graphic terms whatever -ism you took delight in. Turn the page and another sacred cow was skewered.

perchecks. Our cops are far more armored than they were before. We are far more paranoid than we have been any time in my lifetime, even during the lunatic McCarthy years. Almost seven million of our citizens are in jail or prison or are on probation. So what will happen now in France? Paris has the largest Muslim community of any city in Europe. Most Parisians think of them as Parisians. Most of the Paris Muslims think of themselves as Parisians. Which they are. Will the French go crazy, as we did after 9/11, or will they insist on sanity and civility?

A BATTLE ROYALE!

The French have an election coming up, which will no doubt answer that question: One candidate is a liberal, the other a neo-Nazi. When 9/11 happened, we could have defined it as a criminal event or as an international political event. The US government chose the latter and went to war. It was, I think, a profound mistake. What if we’d decided that was a criminal event? Several key people in the Justice Department argued for that. They lost.

The Charlie Hebdo people held nothing sacred. Which means they thought everything really deserved thought, not blind obedience. The way they signaled it was through humor. The grounding idea there was and is that if you can’t view the world with some humor, you are in dangerous territory. You are a person who lacks irony. A person who lacks distance.

We have huge power. The fact we have it does not mean we must, in every instance, utilize it.

As were those guys who slaughtered all those good people in the Charlie Hebdo office last week. Those thugs who went into the Charlie Hebdo office with Kalishnikovs last week could not answer Charlie with words. They had no sense of humor or irony or poetry.

There have been a lot of political cartoons in Europe this past week as a result of the Charlie murders. My favorite is the one above, by Manjul, which portrays the editor dead on the floor, but his bloodpool saying a final “fuck you” to the murderers. We should not let them triumph.

What happened this past week in Paris has critical resonance for us in the US. After 9/11, we pretty much turned into a fascist nation. We started a war (in Iraq) for which there was no justification. We hardened our borders. If you live in Buffalo, you no longer make casual trips to Canada. If you live on the southern border or work there (as I have the past three years), you get used to roadblocks, searches, pa-

Charlie Hebdo certainly isn’t. Charlie’s usual circulation is 30,000 copies. This week ( January 14) it is publishing three million copies.

So how will France define this? How will France deal with it? How will it play out in the upcoming election? We can only wait to see, and to hope they deal with this better than we dealt with our political life after 9/11.

Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and UB James Agee Professor of American Culture. He is also chevalier in France’s Ordre national du Mérite and a chevalier in P France’s Ordre national des Arts et des Lettres.

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NEWS LOCAL

TALE OF TWO AGENDAS Radford and DPCC push the Paladino agenda, Scott and BPTO oppose privatization BY SHANE MEYER The Buffalo Parent Teacher Organization [BPTO] wants its voice heard and its recommendations taken seriously by the Buffalo School Board. The group is made up of parents and teachers from roughly 40 different schools, and it has started a petition to the Board of Education and Buffalo Public School District to include it in the district’s Parent Involvement Policy and in District Shared Decision-Making—the legally mandated means whereby community voices are heard by the board. According to the New York State Education Department Commissioner’s regulation 100.11, the school district must establish a relationship with an independent parent organization for the purpose of shared decision making. For Buffalo Public Schools, the parent organization is the District Parent Coordinating Council [DPCC]. However, the BPTO claims that the DPCC doesn’t represent its members and has proposed “that the District establish a Parent Advisory Education Committee [PAEC], made up of three parent-only representatives from each District-wide parent group.” “The District is far too large and diverse to have one parent and one parent group represent the voice of all parents,” writes the BPTO in a recent resolution. The rub, claims BPTO chair Larry Scott, is that the DPCC’s agenda aligns with that of the board majority, in particular, with respect to its position

on the privatization of public schools. Effectively, parents who disagree with the charter agenda are not represented. “There are many parents, including myself, who have felt, for some time, that the DPCC doesn’t represent us as parents, and, it has become very apparent that they are aligned with the board majority and agenda to destroy public schools with privatization,” Scott wrote in an e-mail. In response, Jennifer Bauer Walker, the vice president of the DPCC, told me that the organization has “no official position” on the issue. However, in an appearance on WBEN’s Hardline with Dave Debo earlier this month, DPCC president Sam Radford was more enthusiastic about the prospect of the privatization of public schools. “You need to tear it down,” Radford said of the Buffalo Public Schools in response to a caller who advocated for increased charter presence. Radford also chimed in on the BPTO, opining that the organization is little more than a union proxy: “I think that’s just an effort by the teachers’ union to undermine the effectiveness of our parent group.” He went on to say that the BPTO is a redundancy, given that the teachers already have a representation group—the Buffalo Teachers Federation—and the parents already have a representation group— the DPCC:

“[The] truth of the matter is that [the] Buffalo Parent Teachers Organization—if you’re going to have two parent organizations, that means you should have two teacher organizations, two administrators organizations, because they don’t have just parents in their group they have teachers and administrators in their group. The whole idea of a stakeholder group is that you represent the body of people who are your membership. You don’t have two teacher union groups, you don’t have two administrative union groups, you should not have two parent groups.” However, the BPTO suggests that it acts as a meeting point for teachers and parents, with the promise that collaboration will raise the profile of the Buffalo Public Schools’ successes and bring opportunity for improvements. For instance, Scott praised the efforts of the turnaround plans presented by the four so-called “out of time” schools (Bennett, East, MLK, Lafayette), saying the plans represented the type of community collaboration that the BPTO can get behind: “[The] Buffalo PTO endorses the redesign plans as developed by each school’s internal team and the public process which has occurred to create these plans and include the community.” In his Hardline appearance, Radford dismissed the turnaround plans, while bemoaning that the district hadn’t gotten any applications from charters: “[W]e haven’t been able to attract other people from

outside of Buffalo to take a look at this thing, so we’ve got to really figure out how to take the local high performing charters and get them more involved and expanding and creating opportunities for children locally.” When asked by Debo whether “you’re predicting more charter involvement regardless?” Radford responded, “No question.” Scott’s praise for the public process behind the turnaround plans contrasts with Radford’s charter demagoguery: Had charter operations submitted plans to the district, neither parents nor teachers would have been able to scrutinize them. The process takes behind closed doors, excluding the population whom they purportedly serve. In such a case, the DPCC has sold out its “stakeholders.” Nevertheless, Radford baldly denies that there is a difference between charters and public schools: “[C]harter schools are public schools. We need to say that clearly: Charter schools are public schools.” It’s an astonishing position for the head of the only official parent voice to stake out—one that ought to make parents think twice about who’s speaking in their name. Shane Meyer reports on education and New P York State policy.

Pirate Fight Club is Now Recruiting Leading The Fight Against Intellectual Property Pirates

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John DelVecchio

In the Age of the Internet, intellectual property piracy is rampant. That means it’s more important than ever to protect names, logos, and ideas from ill-meaning and unwitting intellectual property pirates in Buffalo and beyond.

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THE PUBLIC / JANUARY 14, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

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STATE NEWS

FLEECING THE LITTLE GUY New York State debt collectors falsely allege that you still owe BY FLORINA ALTSHILER

ust as this country was trying to dig out from underneath a fiJ nancial crisis, thousands of debt collection suits commenced in courtrooms across New York State. These lawsuits included repeated copy-and-pasted testimony and affidavits without merit. Yet the accuracy of these filings remained unquestioned. Until recently. As part of last week’s settlement with the New York State Attorney General’s Office, Encore Capital Group Inc. is now looking to vacate about 4,500 illegally obtained judgments against New York State residents, worth about $18 million. Encore will also pay $675,000 as part of the settlement. The AG’s Office says that Encore brought lawsuits against consumers after the statute of limitations (a written law that creates a deadline by which to file a lawsuit) had already expired. Encore then won default judgments in cases against these consumers who never responded. This is not the first settlement of this type. New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has brought multiple actions against debt buyers, too. A settlement was reached last May the Sherman Financial Group, based in New York, and with the PRA Group in Norfolk, Virginia. In those settlements, stale judgments worth nearly $16 million were vacated against New York residents. Last week, an Encore Capital spokeswoman told the New York Times, “We are pleased to have addressed and resolved the attorney general’s concerns in a manner that supports consumers’ interests.” Certainly the consumers who were fleeced are not so “pleased.” But Encore Capital has cause to be. According to its regulatory filings for 2013, Encore collected $564.7 million in legal collections. According to the Times, this is up more than 49 percent from 2011. The PRA Group, according to their regulatory filing, collected $80.2 million in just the last three months of 2013. The industry is one of significant profit. Profit that comes at a cost to the consumer. The 2008 mortgage crisis may be years removed from recent memory but its effects linger in the empty pocket books of homeowners across the nation. Lenders were then accused of producing loan-supporting documents by the thousands without ever reviewing them for accuracy. That practice, at the base of the crisis then, is the same practice that has caused the consumer debt crisis of today. The sums of money

New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman targets debt collectors.

concerned in the consumer debt crisis are smaller than those of the mortgage crisis, but a far greater number of consumers are affected. Few people show up to fight the lawsuits; the vast majority of them, as many as 95 percent, are issued default judgments. The result of a default judgment is the credit buying companies’ ability to then freeze bank accounts and garnish wages. Many of these consumer cases are filed and closed without any media attention or public focus. Prosecutors will explain that the problems inherent in these actions stem from the way that the debts change hands. As loans change hands, much of the information required with those loans (payment histories and account statements) often go missing. One New York attorney reports spending over a year trying to obtain the original account statements from a lender that re-purchased a debt that his client allegedly owed. The matter was eventually settled, more than a year later, when that lender finally admitted that they no longer had the original account statements. The attorney’s client’s debt was forgiven. But what about all the other potential debtors whose account statements are also missing? The way that debt buyers usually address these missing documents is to produce affidavits, claiming that the outstanding debt is accurate. Much like with the banks that mass-signed lending documents that fueled the mortgage crisis of 2008, these lenders engage in a practice called “robo-signing.” Sources reveal that debt buyers sign as many as

2,000 of these affidavits daily. The practice is not unusual. It is, however, fraught with concerns. In the investigation against Encore, Schneiderman’s office found that the employees who signed thousands of these affidavits never verified the accuracy of the information contained therein. It was those affidavits that afforded Encore the ability to win thousands of judgments against unsuspecting New York State consumers. The statute of limitations for filing a debt collection lawsuit for a “consumer credit transaction” is six years, counting from the “date of the default.” The “date of the default” is about 30 days after you last made a payment. In other words, if your last payment was in December 2008, you can be sued for the money until January 2015. If the company you originally owed money to is based outside of New York State, the statute of limitations may be less than six years. The statute of limitations on a store credit card (like a Macy’s card) is four years. If you made a payment at any time after you first stopped paying, the plaintiff ’s time to sue you starts to run again. If the court finds that the statute of limitations has passed, you do not owe the money. This last part is a fact that debt collectors have been conveniently forgetting as they kept the lawsuits coming. As part of last week’s settlement, Encore Capital agreed to reform its practices and to alert consumers about the statute of limitations as it applies to debt collection.

LOOKING BACKWARD: STREETCAR NAMED UNDESIRE

Photograph taken from Broadway and Mills, looking east.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BUFFALO HISTORY MUSEUM.

The dismantlement of the streetcar industry after World War II was an event that took place at the same time in nearly every American city. The International Railway Co. (IRC), established in 1902, operated the network of streetcar lines that served Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Lockport, and the suburbs. By 1930, this network included more than 900 streetcars on a staggering 415 miles of track. The conversion from streetcar to “modern buses” began in 1935 as a cost-saving measure, a prelude to the IRC’s declaration of bankruptcy in 1947. By 1950, when Niagara Frontier Transit, Inc., took over the system, only six streetcar lines remained in operation. The last three—the Broadway, Fillmore-Hertel, and Genesee—were abandoned and replaced with buses on July 1, 1950, the date of this photograph. “One of the world’s cruelest instruments of torture, the Buffalo trolley, became one with Gen. Custer last night on a belated last stand in the Broadway-Fillmore area,” wrote the Buffalo Courier-Express. “Not since Ivan the Terrible was planted head down in seven feet of Russian tundra has there been such a cheerful wake, so many hundreds of smiling mourners, such general jubilation at the final and irrevocable demise.” The remaining 175 streetcars were brought to a depot on Military Road, disassembled, and burned. - THE PUBLIC STAFF P

DAILYPUBLIC.COM / JANUARY 14, 2015 / THE PUBLIC

NEWS LOCAL

HANDS-ON POLICEWORK Residents of Buffalo’s public housing report a stop-and-frisk problem BY MEGAN WILLIAMS

PHOTO BY NICK NORMAL

After a November Common Council hearing regarding the Buffalo Police Department’s contract to patrol Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority buildings, Police Commissioner Daniel Derenda made clear that he does not believe that police officers use the controversial “stop-andfrisk” tactic as a “routine course of action.” Yet in the same breath, Derenda said, “Have officers used the stop-and-frisk? I’m sure they have.” At the same meeting, Attorney John Lipsitz delivered a statement on behalf of the National Lawyers Guild. “We have been speaking with BMHA residents who have expressed concern that their children, themselves, and their guests are unfairly stopped, questioned, and arrested for trespass,” Lipsitz said. ”People report being stopped repeatedly and asked to produce identification, questioned because of lack of identification, stopped because of use of the public outdoor spaces around the buildings, and subjected to other troubling encounters with police officers who regularly patrolled the buildings.” “Stop-and-frisk” became a hot button issue following a lawsuit filed in New York City in 2013. In a landmark decision, Judge Shira Scheindlin found the New York Police Department’s practices violated New Yorker’s Fourth Amendment rights—specifically, their right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Additionally, Judge Scheindlin found that the NYPD’s practices were racially discriminatory and that they violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The clause, which took effect in 1868, provides that no state shall deny any resident “the equal protection of the laws.”

cerns raised by such leaders.” As Joseph Kelemen of the Western New York Law Center and the Buffalo Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild has noted, “Despite this provision, precious little has been done to accomplish the goals set forth. In fact, when residents reach out to the housing unit for assistance they are often told to call 911, causing some residents to question the value of having the unit at all.” Kelemen goes on to say that residents who testified at a meeting with the Police Oversight Committee on November 5, 2014 voiced concerns about the lack of security in BMHA properties. He wrote, “Many residents and their guests have reported that they are repeatedly stopped, questioned, and arrested for trespass. Interactions of this kind erode the legitimacy of the police in the eyes of the community and keep victims and witnesses from reporting crimes, thus fueling a downward spiral in police community relations.” In a statement to the Police Oversight Committee, John Lipsitz of the National Lawyers Guild said, “The constant policing, involving frequent stopping and questioning for innocent behavior, commonly referred to as stop-and-frisk, has led to community concern, and general distrust of the police on BMHA property.” Lipsitz asserts that “[a]n officer may stop and question an individual if he has an articulable reason to believe that the person is trespassing or engaging in some other form of illegal activity,” but notes that many residents of BMHA housing and their visitors—particularly people of color— are being stopped for “merely walking around—or entering or exiting” a BMHA property.

As it turns out, the controversial practice of “stopand-frisk” and the damage it does to communities aren’t limited to New York City. Buffalo and BMHA are currently struggling with the frustrating practice. Roughly four years ago, the policing responsibilities at BMHA properties were reassigned from the BMHA to a Housing Unit of the Buffalo Police Department. BMHA pays the City $650,000 a year for extra police protection; 21 officers are assigned to the five housing projects within Buffalo with the highest crime rates such as Kenfield-Langfield, Perry, and Schaeffer Village.

Both Keleman and Lipsitz have called for police to meet with residents of the BMHA properties and engage in a dialogue to figure out how best to increase both security and trust between residents and the BPD. On January 6, residents had a meeting with BPD and voiced concerns ranging from safety fears to dismay over the amount of “stopand-frisk” incidents that are occurring. Residents hope, as Keleman stated that the Police Oversight Committee will “work with the residents to develop a security plan that engages police, security guards and resident leaders in developing new ways to reduce crime while building public trust.”

The agreement governing the transfer to BMHA states that the police captain of the Housing Unit will “initiate and monitor ongoing lines of communication with public housing resident leaders to effectively employ community policing concepts and to address in a timely manner the con-

Stopping, detaining, and often arresting Buffalo residents for going about their daily business— often while they are walking to and from their BMHA apartments—arguably violates their Fourth Amendment Right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Terry v. Ohio, a

THE PUBLIC / JANUARY 14, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

case decided by the Supreme Court in 1968, established that a police officer who reasonably believes that criminal activity is occurring or about to occur is authorized to stop whoever they suspect of participating in the criminal activity and conduct a limited search of the suspect’s outer clothing for weapons. One would be hard-pressed to argue that walking on public property would give a police officer reasonable grounds to believe that criminal activity is afoot. This method of policing has been lauded by government officials, police officers, and New York City mayors. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been quoted in the New York Times saying, “I said it…and I will say it again: Quality-of-life crimes are something we are not going to back away from.” Bloomberg dedicated a special taskforce to fighting these low-level crimes called the Office of Special Enforcement. In a controversial 1982 article for the Atlantic Monthly, James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling introduced the “broken window” theory of crime-prevention, which argues that “minor COMIC BY PAT KEWLEY / patkewleyisgreat.com

physical and social disorder, if left unattended in a neighborhood, causes serious crime.” The broken window theory focuses on maintaining public order as a means of lowering crime rates. Wilson and Kelling wrote in the article that “If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” The broken window theory urges that more police officers dedicated to foot patrol—and utilizing the “stop-and-frisk” practice—is a necessary component in fighting crime. If we were to adhere to the logic behind the broken window theory, the practice of “stop-andfrisk” makes perfect sense and poses no problem. However, in practice, “stop-and-frisk” does much more harm than good. Instead of making residents feel more safe, “stop-and-frisk” creates a feeling of distrust for police officers: Those who are supposed to protect and serve citizens begin to represent a constant threat. When residents of a city are unsure when they are going to be stopped, trusting that the police have their best interests in P mind becomes difficult.

STORY NEWS Johnny Rzeznik and Robby Takac at Lance Diamond’s memorial.

MJPeterson .com

Suburban Living

PHOTO BY NANCY J. PARISI

City Living

LANCE’S ALL-STAR TRIBUTE Buffalo bids farewell to Lance Diamond at Kleinhans Music Hall BY NANCY J. PARISI

THE SENDOFF AND MEMORIAL FOR ENTERTAINER EXTRAORDINAIRE LANCE DIAMOND WOULD PERHAPS HAVE BOTH PLEASED THE MAN FOR THE OUTPOURING OF LOVE IN THE ROOM, AND ALSO MADE HIM BLUSH A LITTLE AT ALL THE ATTENTION. HE WAS, OFFSTAGE, A HUMBLE MAN.

Known for his glimmering bedazzled suits that sparkled like diamonds under the white-hot lights of the stage, Lance was also known for his great kindness to friends, neighbors, and fellow musicians. Dozens took the elegant wooden stage of Kleinhans Music Hall on January 9 to pay tribute through recollections and musical tributes. The event was emceed by vocalist Joyce Nixon, who was a nurturing force onstage, helping speakers get through their reminiscences by acknowledging the difficulty of expressing love and grieving in public. Later in the program she joined singer Caitlin Koch for a sexy rendition of the Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll.” Nixon, just before the song, told the crowd that Lance would tease her about the inclusion of the rocker on her mostly -R&B set lists. A highlight of the evening was the poetic and emotional performance of “Name” by Johnny Rzeznik and Robby Takac of Goo Goo Dolls— their 1995 hit from their album A Boy Named Goo. The duo, longtime friends of Lance, linked a live stream of the tribute on their site. Johnny told the story of how he played an early version of the song for Lance, who announced that the singer-songwriter and band were about to turn a corner. After the song there was a standing ovation. Mayor Byron Brown presented a city proclamation, reading the document outlining the impact of Lance on the music scene. The proclamation, which touts “the boundless energy” of Lance, and states that his audiences “were part of the show,”

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ends with the declaration that heretofore January 10 is to be known as “Lance Diamond Day” in Buffalo. Nelson Starr, Buffalo booster/singer/musician and junior administrative consultant to Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz, read a proclamation on Poloncarz’s behalf. This proclamation declares January 9 to be “Lance Diamond Day” throughout Erie County. New York State Senator Tim Kennedy’s office gave a proclamation on behalf of the State. Among other speakers Jay Bonafede, chief communications officer of the local branch of American Red Cross, praised Lance for his performances at their annual fundraiser, BASH. He stated that revelers oftentimes attended to see Lance and the 24K Diamond Band, and that Lance and bandmates helped to raise “$300,000 every year” for the non-profit. Lance’s sisters, Paulette and Joan, spoke of their childhood and affirmed how he considered his fans family. Paulette called for one final standing ovation for Lance. The tribute ended with the announcement of Lance’s work-in-progress, a recording of original material, including the song “Lancification.” The lyrics urge “come on y’all, let’s take a ride, everybody must get Lancified.” The tribute concluded with a large ensemble of musicians and singers who shared stages with Lance, the audience on P their feet and the front row dancing.

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ARTS PREVIEW

AMID/IN WNY Hallwalls launches first of five-part series this Friday

BY MARTIN MCGEE

Growing up in Toronto, John Massier remembers his impression of Buffalo being oddly formed by our three TV networks, legendary TV anchor Irv Weinstein, and long-gone local shows like Rocketship 7. “When I was a kid, your impression was that some part of Buffalo was constantly on fire. There’s always a fire in Cheektowaga or somewhere and I realized over time that was because there are a lot of wooden houses here, more than Toronto. You get this strange sense of the place when you are close to it, but far away.” Over the course of his 15-year tenure as visual arts curator at Hallwalls, John has overseen a tremendous amount of programming, spanning regional, national, and international artists. Due to their close proximity, it’s easy to let appreciation of our major assets slip. Examples abound: Niagara Falls, the Albright-Knox Gallery, the Darwin Martin House, and our Art Deco masterpiece, City Hall. Hallwalls is unquestionably on this list. It was founded in 1974 by present-day luminaries—among them Cindy Sherman, Charlie Clough, and Robert Longo—while art students at Buff State. Hallwalls today enjoys a national and international reputation as a presenter of avant-garde visual art, music, performance artists, film screenings, and literary events. Few cities anywhere can boast of having a place as cutting-edge. After the iconic Kitchen in New York, Hallwalls is perhaps next in the chronology of like-minded art centers that strive to discover emerging talent and give them a space to present, create, or perform rather than build permanent collections. Numerous major artists had an early career boost at Hallwalls. That fact does not escape the current generation of artists who recognize the importance of being asked to participate there and waste no time is saying yes.

Sculpture by Tommy Nguyen.

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Massier has been effective in guiding Hallwalls’ trajectory over the last decade and a half. Early on, he calmly took the reins of the chaotic Artists & Models Affair in all its logistical complexity and launched the crazy, haphazard art event to new heights. He demonstrated astute networking with his co-founding of the popular Science & Art Cabaret series with UB and the Buffalo Museum of Science. He’s been instrumental in fostering other popular events on the Buffalo arts calendar such as the live drawing rally and auction, a quirky one-night fundraiser— Massier prefers to call it a “rent party”—that takes place in mid-winter and mid-summer. It brings dozens of local artists together, each creating a new work in under an hour as a gallery full of eager yet discerning bidders looks on. The next incarnation, A Midwinter’s Draw, takes place on Wednesday, February 25.

Massier has brought many visiting artists to Hallwalls and marked their reactions to Buffalo. “It’s far better [than its reputation]” Massier says, “and people see it immediately when they’re here. I think they see it in the community of artists and at their openings. They’re often really impressed and gratified at how many people show up. The artist is coming here from afar and I was often their lone contact. Then at their opening, everybody talks to them, asks them about their work, engages them. Some of these artists come from bigger cities where they don’t get that as frequently because there’s a little bit more of a reserve and there’s something about a generosity of spirit that exists here that people recognize and feel very quickly.” Massier has primarily focused on solo exhibitions for artists. “I think those are the most important opportunities for the artists themselves and the best opportunity for the audience to get into their work,” he says. But in 2015 Hallwalls will depart from the solo show approach. This Friday evening, January 16 at 8pm, Amid/In WNY Part One, a group exhibition featuring 13 regional artists, opens at Hallwalls. This is the first of a five-part series to be presented that Massier is co-curating with his keen-eyed assistant Rebecca Wing and rising artist Kyle Butler. The name is a riff on Beyond/In WNY, the major biennial that has been held a trio of times in recent years. “It’s not a critique of it,” Massier says. “It’s not meant to be any expansion of it. But conceptually, Amid is sort of the antithesis of Beyond. Right? beyond, amid. I just wanted to do something that was fast, loose, lo-fi, and sort of spontaneous. I didn’t want to resort to calls for submissions. I didn’t want to overthink it. I didn’t want to give us too much time. I wanted us to go to studios and see what people are making now and decide what we want to show. We consulted with each other to cobble together a list of artists whose work we were interested in investigating at this time. Between November 11 and December 9, 2014, 45 separate studio trolling visits were undertaken for the first part of the project. Artists and their work was discussed before, during, between, and after our visits. Amid/In WNY will be—with the exception of the summer members’ exhibition, its own kind of casual survey—the only 2015 project in Hallwalls’ gallery schedule. Four additional exhibitions will premiere in March, May, September, and November 2015. We have no idea what these remaining exhibitions will contain. They will be similarly culled from an ongoing process of studio trolling, conversation, and lunch.” I asked John for some examples of interesting surprises or discoveries in the course of their studio visits. “You’re always surprised because you never know what someone is going to show you when you walk into their personal space,” he replied. “We went to visit Marie-Claire Bozant because we knew her drawings, and here’s this pile of sweaters on a piece of furniture with one pair of shoes underneath. That’s just in her bedroom. She isn’t thinking like, ‘Oh, that’s a work of art.’ We walk out of the studio visit and we’re going, ‘Yeah, that sweater pile!’ Because it reflected very closely the work that she does. We told her we want that pile of sweaters, the shoes, and that piece of furniture. “The very first visit we had was with Marc Tomko. Marc is a very compulsive artist that works on accumulated images and objects and ideas. Compulsive

PREVIEW ARTS

Marie-Claire Bozant’s sweaters and shoes.

Co-curators Kyle Butler, Rebecca Wing, and John Massier.

…CONCEPTUALLY, AMID IS SORT OF THE ANTITHESIS OF BEYOND…I JUST WANTED TO DO SOMETHING THAT WAS FAST, LOOSE, LO-FI, AND SORT OF SPONTANEOUS. I DIDN’T WANT TO RESORT TO CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS…

Kyle Butler’s drawing of Marc Tomko’s dust bottle.

is not an unfair word to describe his practice because it is kind of an aggregate of things. At one point we’re like, ‘Oh, what’s this bottle over here?’ He had this oversized bottle in the other room and it had this dust in it and Marc said, ‘Oh, I sweep up the studio floor and I funnel the dust into the bottle.’ We walked out of that studio visit and we said, ‘That bottle, we have to have that bottle,’ because on the one hand it perfectly and concisely exemplified his practice. It was beautiful. It had sparkly bits in it and was a poetic metaphor for our ongoing experience as we continued on after that very first studio visit. We kept calling it his bottle of pixie dust. A couple weeks later we were doing other studio visits and we were still talking about that bottle here and there and Rebecca reminded us that I had described Marc’s bottle as being a symbol of our process because it’s like we’re sweeping up the floor, doing all these studio visits and sweeping up ideas and putting them in a funnel and then we’re getting this little pile of pixie dust at the end and that’s sort of what the process was for us. So the bottle became like our symbol, our mascot in a weird way, an icon for the process. “When it came to the point to make our poster and invite, I told my co-curator, Kyle Butler, he should redraw Marc’s bottle, do a drawing of that bottle just from memory because it had been a month since we saw it. So he said, ‘Yeah, I can do that.’ Well, it didn’t look exactly like that. That’s now Kyle’s hazy beautiful dream of the memory of that thing that we saw. His drawing was much nicer than what I expected. I just thought it would be a simple line drawing, but it’s a really beautiful painting.” Rebecca Wing meticulously hand-lettered the informational text on the poster, turning it into a collaborative work that all three curators see as symbolizing their journey so far.

“We went to visit Kurt Von Voetsch and afterwards,” Massier continues. “We were talking about this one particular drawing which is going to be in the show. And in regards to that drawing, Kyle remarked, ‘Kurt said he was trying to draw the soul.’ I mean who says that? What kind of an artist in his studio says, ‘I don’t know, I wonder what it would be like to draw the soul?’ Some times it’s that crazy kind of thing. “We wanted to include a sound artist out in Rochester, Martin Freeman, because he’s really someone that operates more in the live music scene, but the way that he builds his equipment and the elements he uses in it, it’s a completely artistic practice. He was very excited about being included in the gallery scenario and is doing a new sculptural work for it. We haven’t seen it yet, but the audio is activated when the viewer puts a certain element in their mouth. Apparently it’s localized around themselves and nobody else can hear it.” I asked John if they found themselves choosing work based on how it would exhibit with other work or if they avoided that approach in favor of selecting each work on its own merits. “Well, it’s both because all the work that we’ve included, you have to love it in and of itself, right? You have to and we do. At the same time, from the beginning we knew we were doing a group show so we’re also semi-consciously or even consciously developing relationship dynamics in our selections. We’ll see something and go, ‘That would work good with this other piece we saw and if we’re loving them both then why not have them both.’ It’s up to the audience to see if they agree.” An artistic pile of sweaters? A big bottle of pixie dust? Putting “sounds” in your mouth? A drawing of the soul? Amid/In WNY Part One looms iconoP clastically before us.

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ARTS REVIEW

Left: Key to the Universe by Sean Madden. Right: Clearing of the Paths by Tara Sasiadek.

ALCHEMY OF DREAMS Tara Sasiadek and Sean Madden at Hi-Temp Fabrication BY JACK FORAN

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Some art speaks in a whisper. Some art shouts at you. In either case, the audience might have trouble understanding just what the artist is trying to say. The work of Sean Madden fairly screams its message. Or confusion of disparate messages. The work of Tara Sasiadek is more in an undertone. As if not quite willing to speak up, say aloud. An exhibit of paintings by both artists, plus sculptures by Sasiadek, is on view in the Hi-Temp building, 79 Perry Street, next to the Sabres’ arena. The exhibit is called The Alchemy of Dreams. A tunnel-like installation of foam and torn paper and tubing and tape you pass through to enter the exhibit proper recalls Alice’s tunnel into a dream world, and some of Sasiadek’s works have a dreamy hallucinative quality, but many of Madden’s are more in the category nightmares. Fraught with symbolism, hinting at mystery, that is often overwhelmed by a penchant for mundane literalism. A painting called Songs of Love and Death shows a banjo player—all except for his head, a kind of fiery emanation coalescing in a single large green eye—surrounded by cliché symbols of life—flowers, bees—and death—a skull, bullets, planes bombing a city in flames. Another, called When SaturnDAILYPUBLIC.COM Blew My Mind, shows a guy— his torso anyway, his head, what must have been his head, floating off like an oil slick on water—and right above him, above the oil slick, a huge Saturn with rings. So close it looks like it is going to crash into the earth. (Though I don’t think that’s the message. Gravity is not a particular law in Madden’s nightmare world.)

Religious faith takes a hit in a painting of a kid in a confession box beset by a variety of ogres and monsters, denizens of the darkness. But one article of faith remains, faith in artistic endeavor, artistic vision. A work called Key to the Universe shows the arm and hand of a painter holding a paintbrush aloft like a torch, the brush surrounded by an electronics effect halo, as if to attest its preternatural power to solve whatever problem or conundrum. Emphatic arteries along the arm of the artist attest the source of that power. Another shows an artist at meticulous work on a painting. It is called A Love Supreme. A number of works—too many—in a bizarre vein. Such as Cocktails with Uncle Fudgie at the Robot Apocalypse, presenting Uncle Fudgie, presumably, and his companion bulldog, both drinking what look like pink martinis, the dog also smoking a cigarette in a holder, while space alien apparatus hovers in the near background sky. An anomalous work stylistically—traditional realist, and in normal speaking tones, as it were, not a shout or a scream—is a double portrait of the artist—the other artist, that is, called Tara. Two faces of the same subject, in different moods, looking in different directions, Janus-like. But very impressive work. Sasiadek’s paintings are often tall verticals as to format, and sometimes in pairs, and depict a variety of similar images—trees, tree trunks that tend to morph at the base, the roots, into human hands, long and slender fingers, and forest animals, sometimes vaguely vulpine, with dark

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eyes possibly concealing mysteries, sometimes more deer-like, and characteristically pale, pallid, in an other-worldly way. Snakes are another recurring image. And flowers, frogs, moths. What it all means— might mean—is a puzzle. You look to the individual work titles for help. You’re disappointed. Capricious titles like Exhibitionist Snails on Their Cigarette Break (a tall vertical work, imagery of trees and what might be snails). Or its mate, Adolescent Owl Banned From Facebook (imagery of trees and a little owl partly hidden among them). Sometimes the titles are just suggestive of a message or meaning, for example, Experience in All Its Uncertainty, but hard to see how the actual work bears out the title sense (imagery of trees, in this case, and a frog, a moth, a human face). The sculptural works are extrusion blossoms of polymer foam and other media, in a jumble of shell and tentacle forms, suggestions of primitive life, suggestions of sea floor. One of these is called Aletheia, a word that predates Plato but means truth in what is basically a Platonic sense of something known—remembered, not forgotten—from a distant past—perhaps even earlier existence. (From the root lethe, meaning forgetting—the river Lethe in Greek myth and Dante—and alpha privative, negativing the forgetting idea.) Perhaps such truth—such arcana—needs to be whispered. P The Madden/Sasiadek exhibit is up through January 18.

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JEREMY JERMAINE JEROME

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BY ANDREW ESPOSITO Everything that Jeremy Jermaine Jerome does forever alters the course of human history. Technically speaking, this is true of all people. Many of us have probably even felt connected to this principle at some point in our lives. We were taught or became spontaneously aware of our interconnectedness, of the primordial fact that each of our actions and decisions have an enormous impact on the world at large…blah, blah, blah. What distinguishes Jerome from the majority of us, however, is that he isn’t jaded by this miraculous facet of life. It has even become somewhat of a mantra for him. Jerome doesn’t take his existence for granted. After spending an hour with the self-described avant-garde recording artist and proud father of five months, one thing becomes as clear as the unhinged glint in his left eyeball: Jerome is one of the most self-confident people I have ever met. “I’m one of the most dangerous artists in the world,” he says squinting. His daughter Lyric, “the product of an immaculate conception,” bounces gleefully on his knee. His eyes are fixed on some distant point over my shoulder, somewhere in the far blue yonder. “I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. How much more ammunition do you need to execute your shot in life?” Far from being a foul-tasting social faux pas, this sort of brazen self-confidence should probably serve as an inspiration to the self-doubter in all of us. And yet according to Jerome, his grandiose artistic endeavors and radiating enthusiasm have been met with increasing levels of animosity from members of the press and local music community. He explains that critics and haters perpetually overlook the depth and brilliance of his lyrical constructions, rhymes stuffed so full of symbolism that Bob Dylan himself might have a hard time unpacking the fullness of their meanings. Jerome proclaims that to truly make sense out of what he does one must examine him through a telescope. Instead of being enticed to pay closer attention to the local wildcard, it seems that many are annoyed and put off by Jerome’s passionate pursuits. Come to think of it, I even notice myself becoming slightly agitated sitting in the wake of his high-energy jaunt, which slaloms between motifs on the nature of true success and his faith in the people of Buffalo. And yet the more I become aware of my own irritation, and the deeper I listen to the man speak, the clearer it becomes to me that his words are grating largely because of the way in which they challenge my own long-held doubts and insecurities about this town. As I begin to wrestle with these philosophical implications, Jerome’s voice rolls on. My eyelids flutter as I feel my thoughts drifting further and further away from the

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finite details of our conversation, up and out of the room. Like an East Indian reed is to a snake in a basket, his words are becoming something of an esoteric thought propellant. I find myself floating above in a nebulous realm, taking his prescribed advice and exploring him through the telescopic lens of greater contextualization. The man is rapidly appearing less as an industrial rap artist and more as an invaluable archetype worthy of study. My inner Plato scratches his long white-bearded chin. For as much as he sings his own praises, Jerome equally boasts and celebrates the love and support he has received in Western New York, referring to it as a mecca of creative individuals and boundless opportunity. Perhaps it is for this reason that to some Jerome comes across as a sort of idealistic clown, a delusional jumble of fragmented ramblings and resin clogged pipe dreams. After all, he is a man quite clearly infatuated with the concept of success in a town where sports fans traditionally drink in celebration of nearly reaching the playoffs. He doesn’t have a big record deal to flaunt nor a remarkable number of fans, so shouldn’t he be tucking his tail between his legs and succumbing to a life of defeat and bitter cynicism like the rest of us? Isn’t that the Buffalo way? Perhaps it’s time that we have an intervention with the wide-eyed artist. Perhaps we should all circle him like a band of wild pirates, chant in unison “Bow your head to the demons of defeat! Settle for mediocrity!” and then bash his optimistic skull in! “Are you falling asleep?” he asks me, evidently noticing that my eyelids are gyrating obtusely. I assure him that I’m paying attention and ask him to please proceed. He is now filling me in on some of his top-secret plans for the epic concert that he is set to perform this Sunday, January 18 at Asbury Hall. In the world of Jeremy Jermaine Jerome, the show is going to be huge for a number of reasons: Not only will it be his first performance in over a year, but it will go down at what Jerome refers to as “one of the most prestigious venues in the city.” One dimension of the concert that Jerome isn’t entirely confident will be epic, however, is the audience turnout. When I ask him how many people he expects to attend, his answer is multi-layered. “There should be no reason why this show is not sold out…it is going to be something unforgettable, and regardless of who’s there the plan is going to be executed.” Jerome says that simply being able to see his visions come to life on stage is the end goal which motivates him to do what he does, and he sees Asbury Hall as a worthy platform for realizing the scope and magnitude of those visions. “The true success is what I get to accomplish on that stage. I get joy out of being able P to attempt these things.”

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POLICE Buffalo artist Tommy Nguyen’s work is part of the Amid/In WNY show opening at Hallwalls this Friday, January 16. Nguyen has a show of wearable sculpture opening January 23 at Buffalo Arts Studio, too.

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MARK WALTON THURSDAY JAN 15 8PM / HELIUM COMEDY CLUB, 30 MISSISSIPPI ST. / $15-$30

IN PRINT

SHELLY THE CAT Chris (EP) Recommended If You Like: Kimya Dawson, Laura Marling, Noah and the Whale Shelly the Cat is the latest project to be released on the Buffalo bedroom label of LIPS Records. Chris is a five track collection of toe tapping lo-fi folk.

SPACE CUBS “The Eye” (Song) RIYL: Bjork, How To Dress Well Currently traveling through the backwoods of the South, Buffalo’s spacey electro-princess still managed to release the R&B tinged, new age-esque “The Eye” over the holiday break.

[COMEDY] Mark Walton is taking himself out of the “Who is Buffalo’s best standup comic?” conversation, leaving the growing pond of standup stages in Buffalo to dive into the cavernous waters of New York City’s storied comedy scene. If anybody has a shot in the big city, it’s Walton. His brew of self-deprecation, confident wit, and deliberate pacing are disarming in a familiar, old friend type of way that quickly puts an audience on his side. All of these traits are very “Buffalo,” and they should continue to serve him well on new stages in New York City and elsewhere. Walton will perform a final run of shows January 15, 16 and 17 at Helium Comedy Club, with headliner and veteran New York City comic Jesse Joyce. People are saying that Buffalo is back. So why are you leaving now that we’re back? Buffalo has made strides in the last few years in comedy. When I started there was only one open mic, now we have four to five throughout the week. It truly has flourished, and as myself and other Buffalo comics have started to travel more, Buffalo comedy is getting a reputation for pumping out strong talent. Do you think that the Buffalo comedy circuit has prepared you to work in the Big Apple? Comedy circuits are like colleges. If you are working hard, and paying attention, you can get a great education in a small state school, or a community college. Ivy League schools put more pressure on you to do the work, have more competitive students, and better faculty, but really, if you want to get an education, you can find the right people that can help you no matter where you are. Buffalo is like that. It is [and] was a smaller scene, but there are people here who know the industry and can give great advice. Do you have any key memories or pivotal moments from your career in Buffalo that stick with you? Some of the best opportunities I have had are the roast of Rob Ray, which was amazing, and opening for Doug Stanhope, Jim Norton, and Marc Maron. All opportunities that I owe to Kristen Becker. I was

Pittsburgh writer and comic Jesse Joyce describes volunteering at a haunted house as spending October “getting punched in the dick by a bunch of scared eight-year-olds.” The self-appointed Father of Swiss Comedy, as he’s the only comedian he’s ever heard of performing in Switzerland, has entertained audiences all around the globe, and contributed to several television ventures including Last Comic Standing, Comedy Central’s The Roast, and AMC’s Date Night, to name a few. His rapid-fire delivery lends a sense of urgency to his material, raising the stakes on jokes about the absence of a thirteenth floor in hospitals, and why it’s not a good idea to hit on an attractive nurse or nursing assistant whiles she’s changing your catheter. -KELLIE POWELL

JACOB PETER Wind Song (EP) RIYL: Jeff Buckley, John Mayer Wind Song is the debut EP from the Humble Braggers guitarist. Peter ditches the soaring synths of HB for a moodier folk sound.

THE TRADITIONAL How To Live Without Blood (LP) RIYL: Bayside, Taking Back Sunday Led by charismatic front man/bassist Anthony Musior, How to Live Without Blood is the latest GCR produced album from the hard working emo revival quartet. The 10-track album will be released via Anchor Eight Four Records.

LOCAL SHOW PICK OF THE WEEK THE SOFT LOVE W/ DJ LULU NIETZSCHE’S SAT, JAN 17 / 9:30PM / $5

able to open for Dave Attell at Helium as well, which was a dream come true; as well as do a handful of feature weekends, which have helped me grow. I probably learned the most from Matt Bergman. I remember seeing him tell a story, that was two to three minutes long at an open mic, and the story only had one, maybe two laugh points. But while the story was going on, the audience was captivated, and listening, and then when the payoff came, the laugh was huge. In comedy you learn you should have a laugh every 15 to 30 seconds, but from that I learned that keeping the audience interested allows you to do a longer set. You’ve got to keep the audience on your side even if one or two jokes don’t work. Can you share any insight or advice for people who might be thinking of getting into stand up comedy themselves? The best analogy I ever heard for how to do stand up was from Penn Jillette. He said it is like being a pilot—experience isn’t measured in years, but instead by flight hours. Comedy is like that, you need your stage hours. It’s very similar to diet and exercise, its the only real effective way to lose weight, and it’s not complicated, but it’s not easy. The only way to get better at standup is to do it, and to edit your jokes as needed, and write as much as possible. Now is a great time to get into comedy, because stage time is available Monday through Thursday, twice on Tuesdays, at Nietzsche’s and Helium. Wednesdays are at Milkie’s, Thursday night at Mr. Goodbar on the second floor, and there is a new open mic starting at Tudor Lounge on Mondays. The scene is growing here and it is a great time to start. It’s not for everybody, but anyone interested should at least check it out. Worst case scenario, you get to see what people put into something you like. -KIP DOYLE

THURSDAY JAN 15 Michael McNeill 7pm Pausa, 19 Wadsworth St. free

[CLASSICAL] Pianist Michael McNeill is more than a habitué and frequent performer at Pause Art House, the gem of a gallery and music club on Wadsworth, just around the bend from Allen Street’s busiest strip of bars. He’s an evangelist for the place, sending visiting musicians to the bar for a drink and, often if not inevitably, to take the stage. At 7pm on Thursday, January 15, McNeill plays a solo gig of classical music: Beethoven’s Op. 14 No. 1, Arnold Schönberg’s Opus 19, and music of Alexander Scriabin. Stick around for the 8pm show, too, in which McNeill joins the all-star Buffalo Jazz Octet, making its Pausa debut.-GEOFF KELLY

FRIDAY JAN 16 Amid/In WNY 8pm Hallwalls, 341 Delaware Ave. free

[ART] Playing on and perhaps previewing WNY’s beloved biennial by a similar name, the Amid/In show is curated by Hallwalls’ John Massier in collaboration with Kyle Butler and Rebecca Wing. It’s as much of a curatorial experiment as it is an artistic one, and they plan on doing it again in March, May, September, and November this year. It’s a pleasant deviation and complement to the solo or double-feature shows the space lends itself well to. Works featured by: Marie-Claire Bozant, Emily Churco, Martin Freeman, Kate Gaudy, Brian Milbrand, Tommy Nguyen, David Schirm, Peter Stephens, Marc Tomko, Jeff Vincent, Virocode, Alfonso Volo, Kurt Von Voetsch. -AARON LOWINGER

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CALENDAR EVENTS PUBLIC APPROVED

LIVE MUSIC EVERY NIGHT FOR OVER 30 YEARS!

WEDNESDAY

JAN 14

THURSDAY

The Kevin Gaynor Experience 9PM FREE

ABTrio

JAN 15

(Bronstein/Campbell/Henry)

FRIDAY

The Jony James Band

JAN 16

9PM FREE

6PM FREE

Artvoice presents

Boom 10PM $5

CAGE FRIDAY JAN 16 SATURDAY

7PM / STUDIO AT THE WAITING ROOM, 334 DELAWARE AVE. / $15 [HIP HOP] When people think of East Coast rap they usually think of names from the 1990s like Wu Tang Clan, Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z, and Nas. Cage is making a run at changing the definition of East Coast rap. The rapper, real name Christian Palko, from Middletown, New York (born in Germany), takes an approach more similar to Aseop Rock or El-P (two artists he’s collaborated with heavily). His 2002 debut, Movies for the Blind, is still probably his most well known record, with tracks like “Agent Orange,” and “Among The Sleep” holding their own after 12 years. In 2013 Cage released Kill the Architect, his first release on Eastern Conference Records since Movies for the Blind. The record was produced by Eastern Conference Records head, DJ Mighty Mi, and reeks of the label’s original, aggressive tendenies. Cage comes to the Studio at Waiting Room on Friday, January 16 with support from Ceschi Ramos, Weerd Science, and Short Moscato. -CORY PERLA

JAN 17

WEDNESDAY

JAN 21

THURSDAY

JAN 22

The Soft Love, The Absolutes, LuLu 9PM $5

Kathryn Koch 9PM FREE

Folkfaces, Bone Orchard Butchers, & Blue Stone Groove 9PM

WEEKLY EVENTS EVERY SUNDAY FREE

6PM. ANN PHILLIPONE 8PM . DR JAZZ & THE JAZZ BUGS (EXCEPT FIRST SUNDAYS)

EVERY MONDAY FREE

8PM. SONGWRITER SHOWCASE 9PM. OPEN MIC W. JOSH GAGE

EVERY TUESDAY PHOTO BY NICK SONSINI

Max Creek 7pm Tralf Music Hall, 622 Main St. $16-$21

[ROCK] For 43 years, Max Creek has been delivering a brand of music all their own, and in 2015, not a thing has changed, except maybe the bands members. However, this has never stopped them from bringing their unique energy and legendary music to the stage. The current members—Bill Carbone on drums, Mark Mercier on keyboard, Scott Murawski on guitar, John Rider on bass, and Jamemurell Stanley on percussion—emphasize that they are a family band, and further emphasize that the audience is a part of that family. The jam-rock-Americana band will be touring the northeast with a stop at Tralf Music Hall in Buffalo, but they won’t be alone. Max Creek will be jam-rockin’ it with Preach Freedom and Connect (PFC). PFC, an emerging group, weaves reggae, rock, funk and soul into their music style and bring

all their energy to the stage. The front man for the group, known as Preach Freedom, has shared the stage with music stars like the Goo Goo Dolls and many others. Tralf Music Hall will have both these energetic groups live, on Friday, January 16. -NAJEE WALKER

Wax Museum Radio presents Boombox 11pm Allen Street Hardware Cafe, 245 Allen St. $5

[ELECTRONIC/DANCE] For the last year, the crew at Wax Museum Radio (waxmuseumradio. net) has been running their independent, artist-led internet radio station as a platform for streaming Buffalo-based music and culture to the rest of the world in real-time. Boombox is something like the station’s IRL transmission, featuring a rotating line-up of WMR DJs in the intimate brick-lined confines of Hardware’s Backroom; the show will be broadcasting live from Allentown. Friday is the opening of the

Live-To-Air series featuring Concurr, Jolly Wailer, Stonez and Folklore holding court behind the decks alongside enhanced sound and a special art installation. -THE PUBLIC STAFF

Star People: The Miles Davis Project 8pm Pausa Art House, 19 Wadsworth St. $7/$5 with student ID

8PM. RUSTBELT COMEDY

10PM. JOE DONOHUE 11PM. THE STRIPTEASERS

EVERY WEDNESDAY FREE 5PM. TONY DEROSA

EVERY THURSDAY FREE 5PM. JOHN & BILL

(ACCORDIAN & SAX)

[JAZZ] An all-star lineup of the local jazz faithful featuring Tim Clark, Bobby Militello, John Bacon, George Caldwell, Miles Tucker, and Danny Ziemann will play their ongoing tribute to jazz legend Miles Davis and the so-called “Sons of Miles.” The extensive family-tree of Davis collaborators and contemporaries will also be put on heavy rotation at the Allentown spot by the able hands and lungs of the Star People. -AL

EVERY SATURDAY FREE

4:30-7:30PM. CELTIC SEISIUNS (TRADITIONAL IRISH MUSIC FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY)

248 ALLEN STREET 716.886.8539

NIETZSCHES.COM

CONTINUED ON PAGE 16 DAILYPUBLIC.COM / JANUARY 14, 2015 / THE PUBLIC 15

EVENTS CALENDAR CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15

PUBLIC APPROVED

Behind Deadlines 8pm The Forvm, 4224 Maple Rd. $5

[PUNK] Get your fix of indie rock, punk, and ska at The Forvm on Friday, January 16. Philadelphia “high-energy ska band” Behind Deadlines headlines with support from Strasburg Virginia’s 90 Proof Therapist, Buffalo indie rockers Noah Gokey and the Skulls, and local jammers Fat Tire Society. -CP

Skewed Perspective: Anne Muntges 6pm The Center Gallery, 260 North Union St. Olean

[ART] Fresh off her wonderful illustration in the centerfold of last week’s Public, Muntges is holding her first open house in her apartment installation of furniture, walls, and familiar objects that have all been painted white and delicately cross-hatched in one-inch black marker lines. Her artist statement suggests the music that architecture plays on our psyché. Well and good, but the enormity of Muntges’s obsessive project reveals much about the absurd feats we set before ourselves to see what can (or cannot) be accomplished. -AL

SATURDAY JAN 17

BIPOLAROIDS FRIDAY JAN 16 8PM / MOHAWK PLACE, 47 E MOHAWK ST. / $5 [ROCK] The BiPolaroids hatched last fall with a high profile debut at the Hotel Lafayette’s annual Witches Ball. The band consists of stalwart local mainstays Kristin and Dave Gilmet along with Sakura Paternini, ala Global Village Idiots which, you may recall, quite nearly blew up a while back. Here, joined by Bad Decisions bassist Al Uthman and Cellars drummer Justin Rowland, they take a cue from the After Hours Lounge Band, (which featured the Gilmets and Lou Mang, who also played in Bad Decisions with Paternini). The result is an incestuous, aged-Buffalonian musical stew that melds new wave and post-punk covers with ironic, neo-jazzy flair. The Halloween set included nods to Blondie (“Dreaming”) and New Order (“Bizarre Love Triangle”). Watch them evolve on Friday, January 16 at Mohawk Place with the Vores, the Etchings and Cashier Smile. -CHRISTOPHER JOHN TREACY

Kickstart Rumble 8pm Mohawk Place, 47 E Mohawk St.

[ROCKABILLY] Anyone with an appetite for Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, or Jerry Lee Lewis, should head to Mohawk Place on Saturday, January 17 and check out local rockabilly quintet, Kickstart Rumble. Equipped with an arsenal of fierce originals to accompany the same covers they hauled into Merlin’s (now Blue Monk) in 2009, they’re ready to rattle the floorboards through the roots of rock, and Junior Douglas’s upright bass with a thump that just won’t quit. -KP

PUBLIC APPROVED

ALVIN RISK SATURDAY JAN 17 Igloo at the Gypsy Parlor 10pm Gypsy Parlor, 376 Grant St. $5

[ELECTRONIC/DANCE] Following up what was by all accounts a blast of a New Year’s Eve party, the Igloo crew return to their old haunt to kick off the 2015 edition of their monthly dance party on Saturday, January 17. This one will feature Rufus Gibson, Nicky Folwer, Bill Bacon, Get Chase, and John Patrick. -CP

9PM / THE WAITING ROOM, 334 DELAWARE AVE. / $15-$20 [ELECTRONIC/DANCE] Enter the world of Alvin Risk, where genres roam free and consistently grungy, bass-riddled remixes are at the helm. Hailing from Washington, DC, Risk’s capacity for producing wobbly electronic sounds has elevated his status to one of the most sought after producers in the electronic music scene, lending his talents to icons like Kaskade and Skrillex. Like a sonic Rumpelstiltskin, he spins songs like Fun’s “We Are Young” into pure dance floor gold with upbeat synths and bouncy beats. His aptly titled 2014 EP, Venture, ventures into new, electronic music territory with Risk lending his own vocals and wild production on all five tracks. The result is extraterrestrial from the moment you hear his vocals on opening track, “Alone.” These songs bleed emotion through heartfelt lyrics, while still maintaining get-up-and-move vibes. The EP solidifies Risk’s ability to consistently evolve and reinvent himself while retaining his all-star reputation. Risk’s stage presence is always dynamic. He takes the audience on a heart-pounding trip, singing along and fully engaging with the people sweating to his music. His 2015 tour features Kodak to Graph and their instrumentally charged urban glam beats. They come to The Waiting Room on Saturday, January 17 with BrotherBear. -KELLIE POWELL

16 THE PUBLIC / JANUARY 14, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

CALENDAR EVENTS

SUNDAY JAN 18

PUBLIC APPROVED

Martin Luther King Day Celebration 6pm Kleinhans Music Hall, 3 Symphony Circle free

[CELEBRATION] On Nov. 9, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke at Kleinhans Music Hall at the request of the University at Buffalo’s Graduate Student Association. Now, 48 years later, Kleinhans will host their annual Martin Luther King Day Celebration in the same hall where he once stood. The celebration will include a word from Bishop T. Anthony Bronner from the Elim Christian Fellowship Ministry, as well as song, dance, and other performing arts in celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King’s work and legacy. The Celebration will take place Sunday, January 18 and is free to the public. -NW

WEYES BLOOD SUNDAY JAN 18 8PM / MOHAWK PLACE, 47 E MOHAWK ST. / $5

WEDNESDAY JAN 21 Little Mountain Band 7pm Buffalo Iron Works, 49 Illinois St. $7

[JAM] The “Spun Out-Jam Out” might not explain well enough what’s going on at Buffalo Iron Works, but in its third installment, the series is aimed at providing much more than just music. Next Wednesday, January 21, the venue will play host to Little Mountain Band, Experimental Sandwich, and Fortunate Hobos as the backdrop for an overall immersive evening. The series is a bi-weekly event for “those who need a place to come FLOW.” This includes space for hula-hoopers and jugglers, which should make for an interesting and unique experience for anyone who is looking for something different in their live music. -JEREMIAH SHEA

[ROCK] Warm your frozen souls at Mohawk Place next Sunday, January 18 where Weyes Blood will be stopping by and delivering a performance as part of her winter tour across the nation. For those who don’t know, Weyes Blood is the indie-folk project of Natalie Mering, whose vocals you may recognize from Ariel Pink’s Mature Themes. Her own project takes a different direction, calling to mind the thrust of fleeting and vivid impressions she’s collected while wandering throughout the nation, beatnik style. The product of her experiences translates into other-worldly music that deftly straddles the thin line between passive reflection and oblique intensity, where swelling instrumentals put her haunting and elegiac voice on full display. Last October she released her second full length album, The Innocents, which was described to occupy a “gothic, magical realm” by Consequences of Sound and furthermore, as an “earthy melodrama for catacombs that deserves to be heard above ground.” Live, she’s the kind of performer who can silence a packed room through sheer magnetism. If you’re seeking an ideal closure for your week, you will not want to miss this. -JEANETTE CHIN

PUBLIC APPROVED

Black Rock Zydeco 7pm Sportsmens Tavern, 326 Amherst St. $5

[ZYDECO] If you’ve ever experienced the music of New Orleans, you’ve likely heard a form of Zydeco music. The style represents the spirit of the city with a party feel and can cause just about anyone to break out into dance. Black Rock Zydeco sums up the Cajun nature well with a musical approach that puts the style on wheels and brings it all around the country. The band is slated to hit the Sportsmen’s Tavern next Wednesday, January 21 and they’ll bring a mix of danceable originals and genre classics that any fan will recognize. The band includes Ron Kowalewski on accordion and Stan Whatley on scrub board, so there’s no doubting their authenticity. -JS

DR. DOG WEDNESDAY JAN 21 7PM / TOWN BALLROOM, 681 MAIN ST. / $20-$23 [ROCK] If you’re a fan of West Grove, Pennsylvania rock band Dr. Dog, then this has been a good week for you. Not only did the band premier their new live album, Live at a Flamingo Hotel on the Wall Street Journal’s blog (you know you’ve hit it big time when the Wall Street Journal is premiering your albums), but they also released a new live video for their psychedelic sing-a-long “Shadow People,” and they’re coming to the Town Ballroom on Wednesday, January 21. Since their 2002 debut record, Toothbrush, the band has released a steady stream of pop-rock records each with its own neo-psychedelic twist. 2008’s Fate put them on the map for most fans after their song “My Friend” was featured in the Judd Apatow movie Funny People. They followed Fate with the pared back indie-rock of Shame, Shame, and then hit their stride again with 2013’s retro-rocker B-Room. Obviously Live at a Flamingo Hotel highlight’s the band’s impressive live show, but don’t go looking for a Flamingo P Hotel; it doesn’t exist. It’s simply that place this band goes each night when they truly connect on stage. -CORY PERLA DAILYPUBLIC.COM / JANUARY 14, 2015 / THE PUBLIC 17

BOOKS REVIEW

THE BACKSIDE OF LIFE A new biography of Richard Pryor reveals both his brilliance and his cruelty BY WOODY BROWN

What makes a good biography? I would not pretend to know the answer to that, but I can tell you that Becoming Richard Pryor is, in fact, a good biography. Dick Stratton, who has taught English at Nichols School for many years, enjoys literary biographies more than anything—and he has apparently read all of them. I do not normally gravitate to them because they tend to miss a certain mark. If I am interested enough in someone to read his biography, it usually means that I love his art or the things he has done or created. How does parsing the mess of a life illuminate usefully a text that I already appreciate for what it is? The fact remains, however, that people are often very interesting, whether or not they have written a Great American Novel. Richard Pryor lived a fascinating, miserable life, one in which the fame he achieved rarely did anything to alleviate the pain of his daily struggle to exist in the world. Scott Saul, a professor of English at UC Berkeley, wisely confines the scope of his investigation to subjects and periods about which comparatively little was known until now, especially Pryor’s youth. His research is extensive, including interviews with friends and family members who had never before agreed to speak to the press. Despite comparing Pryor to Icarus on the third page of the book, a comparison that the subsequent 600 pages do not really bear out, Saul resists the temptation to romanticize the comedian. His aim is instead to illuminate the life of the man who was arguably the most influential comedian of the last 70 years. “Though Pryor’s life was certainly tumultuous—full of extreme swings of mood and violent reversals of fortune,” Saul writes, “it can, and does, make sense.” That is the aim of Becoming Richard Pryor: to make sense of a life that was at times so brutal and unhappy that it was comical.

BECOMING RICHARD PRYOR BY SCOTT SAUL HARPER, DECEMBER 2014

18 THE PUBLIC / JANUARY 14, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

That is where Saul locates the genesis of Pryor’s humor—in his youth, the majority of which he spent in the brothel his grandmother ran in Peoria, IL. He came from a long line of impressive criminals whose names often appeared in the newspapers for violent crimes, prostitution, and selling a wide array of illegal substances. As often as his ancestors assaulted their enemies, they beat the hell out of the ones they loved. Spousal abuse was omnipresent in Pryor’s childhood. In his later life, he was notorious for his terrifically savage treatment of his wives and girlfriends. Saul examines this

THE FAME RICHARD PRYOR ACHIEVED RARELY DID ANYTHING TO ALLEVIATE THE PAIN OF HIS DAILY STRUGGLE TO EXIST IN THE WORLD. along with all of the details, which are disturbing to say the least. In one particularly offensive episode, Pryor beats a woman in the head with a bottle of liquor in each hand. That is more or less par for the course. The reason that Becoming Richard Pryor succeeds is that the reader is not asked to excuse this sort of behavior. Instead, our task along with Saul is to understand it as one element of an interesting life. Pryor is a sympathetic character, but as the story of his life progresses it becomes clear that he was a frustrating, often mean man. He also happens to have been brilliant, at least when it came to the composition and performance of comedy. Reading this book made me realize the radical difference of Pryor’s brand of humor. His unflinching evaluation of the experience of being black in America was without precedent. The era of offensively honest, profane humor seems to have died with him as well, at least in part. A quick look at any of the many videos of Pryor on the internet will show a kind of discourse that today would generate incredible opposition. Saul does not pass judgment on that change—it is simply a fact. If Pryor were alive and performing today, let’s just say he’d be generating a lot of angry thinkpieces. With Becoming Richard Pryor, Saul has compiled a comprehensive, moving history that is interesting to Pryor fans and the uninitiated alike. It is reassuring in a way to see how much rejection the comedian endured on his way to fame, and how little his achievements contributed to his happiness and sense of self-worth. In that sense, it is a potent reminder. In the end, money solves very little, and humor can have a dark inversion. Written that way, it sounds trite. P Becoming Richard Pryor says it better.

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MATT WITTEN

LEARN TO FENCE AGILITY • BALANCE • CONFIDENCE

BY ANTHONY CHASE Currently playing Richard the Lionheart in James Goldman’s play The Lion in Winter at the Irish Classical Theatre, Matt Witten is a formidable figure in the Buffalo theater scene. He recently played Vince Lombardi, the indomitable and tireless head coach of the Green Bay Packers in Lombardi, at 710 Main for MusicalFare. Last season, he won an Artie for his one-person tour de force in An Illiad at Road Less Traveled. A character actor with the presence of a leading man, Witten is known for his meticulous preparation and the vivid muscularity of his performances. He is a perfect choice to take on the violent and brooding son of King Henry II of England and his estranged queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, a man hell-bent on ascending to the throne. Here, Witten submits to The Public Questionnaire. What word would your friends use to describe you? Approachable.

What quality do you most value in a good

What quality in your current character is most unlike your own personality? Ruthlessness.

What is your guilty pleasure? Watching Diners,

What quality in your current role is most like your own personality? Moodiness.

Who is your favorite fictional

When and where were you the happiest? Touring Europe with Jesus Christ

Superstar.

What is your idea of hell on earth? Bounce

Magic Birthday Parties. What is your greatest fear? Failing as a father. Which talent do you most wish you had? The

ability to conduct an orchestra. What superpower do you most wish you had? Underwater breathing. What would you change about your appearance? I would like to be able to grow a

full beard.

director? Confidence.

Drive-ins and Dives. hero? Don Quixote. Who is your real-life hero? My wife. She’s

the best. What do you consider to be the most overrated virtue? Integrity. On what occasion do you lie? When in

conversation with a Jehovah’s Witness at my front door.

Let’s tell them together.

What was the subject of your last Google search? Krampus. or thing would you like to be? A hermit. What role, in which you will never be cast, is

in, etc.).

perfect for you? Elsa in Frozen.

What do you most value in your friends? A

What is your motto? There is no defeat except

that in no longer trying.

1/8V

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If you come back in another life, what person

What trait do you most dislike in others? Trying too hard (to impress, to fit

sense of humor.

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FILM REVIEWS

IN CINEMAS NOW: BY M. FAUST & GEORGE SAX

PREMIERES AMERICAN SNIPER—Clint Eastwood’s drama adapted from the memoir of Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), who as a Navy SEAL sniper killed between 160 and 250 targets in Iraq. With Sienna Miller, Jake McDorman, and Luke Grimes. Reviewed this issue. BLACKHAT—Cyber-crime drama directed by Michael Mann, who is due for a hit after two consecutive snoozers (Miami Vice, Public Enemies). Starring Chris Hemsworth, Viola Davis, Wei Tang, and John Ortiz. PADDINGTON—The talking bear named after the British tube station comes to life in an unpreviewed movie whose supporting cast (after Nicole Kidman) is an Anglophile’s dream: Peter Capaldi, Julie Walters, Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville, Jim Broadbent, and Geoffrey Palmer. Directed by Paul King (the cult TV comedy The Mighty Boosh). THE WEDDING RINGER—The ubiquitous Kevin Hart as a wedding planner who specializes as posing as a hip best man for nerdy grooms. Co-starring Josh Gad and Kaley Cuoco. Directed by Jeremy Garelick.

ALTERNATIVE CINEMA

David Oyelowo in Selma.

THE ARC OF HISTORY SELMA BY GEORGE SAX Recently out on the publicity trail on behalf of her movie Selma, about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the drive a half-century ago to gain voting rights for blacks in the American southland, director Ava DuVernay has told a story about one person’s reaction to it. According to DuVernay, one of the movie’s producers was approached by an African-American youth who told him that Selma had made clear to the boy what “MLK” meant. “You mean what he meant to the nation?” the producer asked. No, the young man replied, what these initials he’d so often encountered stood for. This little story, apocryphal or not, does point to the real educational potential of her movie (particularly given the sad lack of historical and political knowledge in America, especially among the young, black and white). Selma can only have an enlightening effect, generally. It’s a solidly, often compellingly achieved recreation of a crucial period in King’s life and this country’s history. The picture is devoted to the events leading up to the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, the capital, to protest the denial of the vote to the great majority of the state’s African-American residents. DuVernay’s movie is thus not just a portrait of King (David Oyelowo), it’s about a prime movement and a critical, volatile historical moment. King is at the center of Selma, both the great public leader and symbol and the private man, but he’s presented as part of an increasingly diverse and populist campaign in this movie’s unusually clear and sophisticated narrative. DuVernay and her co-writer Paul Webb (she’s uncredited for the script) keep a focus on King’s crucial leadership, but they haven’t slighted the scope, details and difficulties the drive for voting rights entailed. Selma has a rather refined and conscientious approach to the historical record—with one significant lapse—even as it necessarily edits and condenses it. The tensions between King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, which had started the voting initiative in Selma, is given a fair and lucid part in the storyline. Selma even paus-

es at a couple points to give recognition to the deep-rooted social and economic inferiority of America’s black citizens in the 1960s, a plight, King tells the Rev. Ralph Abernathy (Coleman Domingo), that won’t be much alleviated just by access to the ballot. Where DuVernay and her movie stumble is in starkly exaggerating President Lyndon Johnson’s (Tom Wilkinson) resistance to sending a voting rights bill to Congress. Selma manages to push its Johnson nearer the opposition and to King’s enemies, including the odious FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. In one brief scene it even seems as if he might be about to collude with Hoover in sending Coretta Scott King (a fine Carmen Ejogo) recordings of her husband’s alleged trysts with women in bugged hotel rooms. As Selma somewhat inadequately acknowledges, Johnson’s reluctance was based upon his assessment of the timing and political opposition. Selma’s distortions aren’t anything like Oliver Stone’s demagogically irresponsible accusations against Johnson in his wretched assassination conspiracy movie JFK, but they’re out of sync with the movie’s otherwise even-handed and dramatically convincing storytelling. DuVernay’s direction is assured and incisive. The movie’s large-scale centerpiece, the confrontation of state troopers with the marchers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the violent dispersal of them is dynamically riveting and frightening, a triumph of staging, camera work and editing. Oyelowo’s King is a measured, subtle performance. His resounding speech making is in pointed contrast with the private, quietly troubled King. (The speeches aren’t in King’s actual words because his litigious, quarrelsome children wouldn’t permit their use.) Wilkinson, however, doesn’t seem to quite have got the hang of his role; his Johnson’s delivery is a little awkward and inconsistent in his Texas accent, surprising from such an accomplished actor. Selma has earned a place among the very few respectable and involving American movie treatments of historical characters, forces and events.

20 THE PUBLIC / JANUARY 14, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

THE DARK MIRROR (1946)—Noir thriller starring Olivia de Havilland as a woman implicated in the murder of her husband—but was it her witnesses saw leaving the apartment or her twin sister? With Lew Ayres, Thomas Mitchell, and Richard Long. Directed by Robert Siodmak (The Killers). Fri-Sun, Tues 7:30pm. The Screening Room L’ELISIR D’AMORE—From the Royal Opera House in London, Laurent Pelly’s production of Donizetti’s comic opera about the romance between dim-witted Nemorino and flirtatious Adina, who tries to make him jealous by flirting with Belcore, an army sergeant. Starring Vittorio Grigolo, Lucy Crowe, Levente Molnár, and Bryn Terfel. Conducted by Daniele Rustioni, Sun 11am. Amherst Theater THE RETURN OF THE PINK PANTHER (1975)—Peter Sellers’ return to the role of the bumbling Inspector Clouseau in an effort revive his career after five years of flops. With Christopher Plummer, Catherine Schell, and Herbert Lom. Directed by Blake Edwards (The Great Race). Sat-Sun 11:30am. North Park

IN BRIEF: ANNIE—Latest remake of the musical adaptation of the 1930s comic strip—or was it a radio serial first? It’s been a long run. Starring Quvenzhané Wallis, Jamie Foxx, Rose Byrne, and Bobby Cannavale. Directed by Will Gluck (Friends with Benefits). BIG EYES—Tim Burton’s biopic about Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz), the artist whose kitschy portraits of distressed children were a national sensation in the early 1960s. In the days before Andy Warhol, he turned the art world on its ears, earning a fortune (mostly from prints and posters) even though critics loathed his work. Except, as the film tells it, the paintings were actually made by his wife Margaret (Amy Adams). It’s as close to a mainstream film as Burton has ever made; he confines his visual interest to recreating the hipster paradise of San Francisco in the late 1950s (where the Keanes lived) and in such other flourishes as a visit to Hawaii awash in blue and pink pastels. The first half is an enjoyable lark as the Keanes enjoy their unexpected success, but it turns sour with the couple’s break-up and ensuing legal battles. The paintings themselves are a weird artifact of the time, but there’s no real story in them: They’re only a MacGuffin for a story about two sad people. With Krysten Ritter, Terence Stamp, Jason Schwartzman, and Danny Huston. -MF BIRDMAN—Too much and not enough. Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s “meta-movie” stars Michael Keaton as Riggan Thomson, a once famous actor whose career took a downturn after he stopped playing the superhero character he was famed for. In need of a comeback vehicle and artistic validation, Thomson mounts a Broadway play as a vehicle for himself, a troubled production that forms the basis of this film’s increasingly wild proceedings. It’s certainly challenging, dynamic, and technically fluid. But it’s also erratic, lurching from scenes of banal domestic confrontation and confession to deliberate comic excess to surreal flights. In the end it’s too much structural

complexity for one film to handle. Co-starring Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, and Andrea Riseborough. –GS EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS—Christian Bale as Moses leading his people out of Egypt. With Joel Edgerton, Aaron Paul, Sigourney Weaver, and Golshifteh Farahani. Directed by Ridley Scott, who, after Prometheus and The Counselor, is not exactly on a hot streak. FOXCATCHER—Another biopic from director Bennett Miller (Capote, Moneyball), this time based on the relationship between millionaire John du Pont, of the du Pont chemical family, and brothers Mark and Dave Schultz, both Olympic gold medalists for wrestling. You may want to read up on the case before you see the movie, which seems to go out of its way not to offer any explanations for what happened. Stars Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, and Mark Ruffalo perform under daunting amounts of facial prosthetics, a somewhat odd decision given that few in the audience are likely to know what these people looked like in the first place. The clinically observational tone is fascinating, but in the end all of the cool weirdness leaves you more than a little frustrated. With Vanessa Redgrave, Sienna Miller, and Anthony Michael Hall. –MF FURY—War has seldom been portrayed more hellishly than in writer-director David Ayer’s (Training Day) film that follows an American tank crew in the very last days of the Second World War’s European Theatre operations. Brad Pitt plays the sergeant leading this crew as a quasi-mythic figure, a profane but all-American warrior-saint. His philosophy is presented as he trains a green kid (Logan Lerman in a sensitive, persuasive performance) in the cynicism and savagery that are natural consequences of war. The theme of brothersin-arms fades under all the juvenile pulp-fiction fantasy, and by the last overblown, drawn-out, catastrophic battle scene, it has become impossible to take seriously. With Shia LaBeouf, Michael Peña, and Jason Isaacs. -GS THE GAMBLER— Even if you haven’t seen the 1974 film on which this is based, this glossy remake is a facile waste of time, retaining most of the macho posturing from the original but none of the plausibility. Done up like a slumming rock star, Mark Wahlberg is hard to take seriously as a literature professor (his self-aggrandizing lectures are hilarious) with a gambling addiction that seems born of a death wish. The script by William Monahan (The Departed) is ripe with writerly dialogue, much of which is entertaining, especially as delivered by Michael Kenneth Williams and John Goodman (who has a classic speech on earning the right to say “fuck you” is almost as good as Monahan thinks it is). But director Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) gives it a superficial sheen that doesn’t make any sense. And its treatment of gambling is shameful—any virtues the film has are negated by a bullshit ending. With Jessica Lange, Brie Larson and George Kennedy. -MF THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES— The last of Peter Jackson’s six J. R. R. Tolkien’s adaptations is the shortest but feels like the longest. After perfunctorily dispensing with the dragon Smaug, the remainder of the film becomes a sword and sorcery take on The Treasure of Sierra Madre, with dwarf leader Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) refusing to share the treasure with his now homeless Middle Earth neighbors. A subplot inspired by references in other Tolkein work finds the White Council (Gandalf, elf king Elrond, Lady Galadriel, wizard Saruman) on a parallel quest to solve the mystery of the Necromancer, setting up the reign of evil Sauron in Lord of the Rings. This padding out of The Hobbit’s relatively simple storyline is the equivalent of George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels, though fans are less likely to mind its inclusion. At the end of the day, Jackson and his army of collaborators have achieved something remarkable with this series, but I’m glad it’s over and Jackson can concentrate on other endeavors. This final entry feels like the last half hour of a traditional feature, stretched out to five times the length. Starring Martin Freeman, Orlando Bloom, Richard Armitage, Cate Blanchett, Ian McKellen, and Christopher Lee. –Greg Lamberson INHERENT VICE— Whether or not the densely contrived novels of Thomas Pynchon provide proper material for the movies, this first attempt to do so shows that Paul Thomas Anderson isn’t the guy to do so. Anderson is certainly fond of rambling, overstuffed narratives, but he has trouble bringing them into focus (which is why his best films are the ones with the fewest characters—There Will Be Blood, The Master). Pynchon’s 2009 book, a private eye homage set in Los Angeles at the end of the 60s, is his most broadly appealing novel, but it still features a story that comes apart instead of congealing, which brings out the

REVIEWS FILM

Brady Cooper in American Sniper.

JUST DOING MY JOB AMERICAN SNIPER BY M. FAUST “Based on a true story.” How I’ve come to dread seeing those words at the start of a film, along with variations like “Based on true events.” (What’s the difference? You’d probably have to ask the studio lawyers who weigh in on such things.) In the past few months, that phrase has opened Big Eyes, Foxcatcher, The Imitation Game, Selma, The Theory of Everything, Unbroken, and Wild. (That The Interview has the standard “This is all a work of fiction” disclaimer doesn’t let it off the hook.) My objection to all this is purely professional: How can I critique a filmmaker’s vision of actual events without first acquiring an objective perspective of those events? This, of course, takes the conscientious reviewer right down the rabbit hole. You can spend endless amounts of time researching a subject without getting to the entire “truth” of it. Yet even the most cursory investigation of the subjects of any of these films shows that the filmmakers have taken liberties. Of course drama usually requires some “shaping.” But the power of movies is such that a successful film based on a true story becomes the truth in the memories of the viewers. And that is an enormous responsibility.

good ol’ boy from Texas. It would be going too far too call him teddy bear-ish, but not by much. I have no objection to this, particularly given that the man died two years ago, shot to death by a veteran he was trying to counsel. You wouldn’t expect anything that disrespectful from Eastwood, though of course neither would you expect an attack on the military mentality, at least for a contemporary war. Truthfully, you can never know exactly what to expect from the director, who at 84 remains more in control of his craft as ever. But having seen the film, I can’t imagine just what it is that Eastwood and Hall wanted viewers to take away from it. It takes no particular political stand on the invasion of Iraq, and if its viewpoint is limited to Kyle’s Manichean view that you’re either a good guy or a bad guy, it doesn’t particularly parade it.

Which brings us to American Sniper, the new film from Clint Eastwood. It is based on American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, the memoir of Chris Kyle, who as a Navy SEAL sniper in Iraq killed between 160 and 250 targets.

The film is so bland that it even minimizes its subject’s claim to fame, the extraordinary number of people he shot after carefully sizing them up through the sights of a rifle. Either that affects a man or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t you have to wonder why. But the film’s Kyle is more concerned with leading a squad to find an Iraqi torturer. His only regret is that he wasn’t able to save more American lives. The final reel of the movie finds him suffering from PTSD, but he gets over it with little apparent effort. Even the standard-issue complains of his wife (Sienna Miller)—“Even when you’re here, you’re not here”—are heard but not shown.

Working from a screenplay by Jason Hall (Paranoia), the film not surprisingly removes Kyle’s rough edges. A common comment from online readers of the book—even those who liked it—is that Kyle in his own words comes across as arrogant and indifferent to the Iraqis he dismisses as “savages.” There’s none of that in the movie. Bradley Cooper put on a lot of extra weight for the role, which takes away his usual feral angularity and renders him a reasonable facsimile of a stocky

It’s my understanding that Kyle was involved with the early stages of production of the film prior to his death. That might explain some of American Sniper’s reticence, as an unwillingness to sully the image of a dead hero. But it doesn’t explain why a filmmaker so generally indifferent to popular opinion as Eastwood would take away just about everything else of interest about the character. So far from harming his memory, it gives you just about nothing to remember him for.

worst in Anderson. His film feels haphazardly stitched together from pieces of the book, and while there are many rewarding scenes and amusing performances, the whole thing goes nowhere. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Katherine Waterston, Michael Kenneth Williams, Benicio Del Toro, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, and Martin Short. -MF THE IMITATION GAME—The story of English mathematician and logician Alan Turing, who was instrumental in breaking Germany’s Enigma code during World War II but was later driven to suicide for being gay. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing as a kind of comic but poignant genius in a clever and vivid performance. Britain’s stringent secrecy laws kept Turing’s role in the Allied victory a secret until the mid-1970s, since which point Turing has become both a hero of the code-breaking program and as a martyr of the oppressive, sometimes vicious treatment of homosexuals in the British Isles. Although the movie’s dramatic arc is consistently entertaining, it bears only a limited general resemblance to the more complicated story told in Andrew Hodge’s long, dense 1983 Turing biography, credited as a primary source. Exaggerating and invention are hardly uncommon in biopics, but the filmmakers choices here are dramatically conservative and audience-oriented. Co-starring Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Charles Dance, and Mark Strong. Directed by Morten Tyldum (Headhunters). -GS INTERSTELLAR—That Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus, about the search for a planet capable of supporting human life, is the most argued-about movie of the year has less to do with reaction to its content than with its inconsistency. Your own opinion likely to hinge on what you most want in a movie, visual effects, provocative ideas or fleshed-out drama. The ideas are there, though whether they’re plausible or merely fantastical is likely to be over the heads of most viewers. Nolan and his co-scripter brother Jonathan alternately withhold information that you want (about the demise of our planet in the near future) while rushing science at you too quickly to digest. Matthew McConaughey performance demonstrates that it’s possible to overact quietly, though he’s still effective in the occasional tear-jerking moments. It’s worth seeing, but don’t expect anything as dazzling as The Dark Knight or Inception. With Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Matt Damon, John Lithgow, Casey Affleck, and Topher Grace. -MF THE INTERVIEW—After all the sturm und drang surrounding its release, all that’s left to say about this comedy starring James Franco as a fatuous tabloid TV host and Seth Rogan (who also wrote and directed with his partner Evan Goldberg) as his producer, who gets him an interview with North Korean dictator Kim Jongun, is that it’s exactly what you would have expected, a broad comedy with a few smart ideas struggling to free themselves from endless juvenile ass jokes. Destined to be remembered as the film that led a major studio to embarrass itself over and over. With Lizzy Kaplan, Randall Park, and Diana Bang. -MF INTO THE WOODS—This long-anticipated adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical parodying traditional fairy tales and their ancient themes is likely to play best for the choir of the already converted. Sondheim’s work is as ever clever but not really mass market-friendly, a problem that director Rob Marshall (Chicago) addresses by amping up the show’s periodic infusions of wiseguy show-business sass (sometimes at the expense of the generally darker mood). But he keeps the turning, incurving plot moving gracefully, and the songs are almost always delivered with verve and emotive skill, particularly by Meryl Streep. Co-starring Anna Kendrick, Emily Blunt, Johnny Depp, Chris Pine, and Christine Baranski. -GS NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM: SECRET OF THE TOMB— Larry (Ben Stiller) is off to the British Museum for the final film in the series. With Dan Stevens, Dick Van Dyke, Owen Wilson, Ricky Gervais, and Robin Williams, but no Amy Adams. Directed by Shawn Levy (the remake of The Pink Panther). SELMA—Drama based on the historic 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (David Oyelowo) to secure passage of the federal Voting Rights Act that prohibited racial discrimination in voting. With Cuba Gooding Jr., Tim Roth, Giovanni Ribisi, Carmen Ejogo, Martin Sheen, and Tom Wilkinson. Directed by Ava DuVernay (Middle of Nowhere). Reviewed this issue. TAKEN 3—It may have the same star (Liam Neeson) and production team as previous Takens, but there’s no kidnapping this time. Instead, the story is lifted from The Fugitive: Retired CIA operative Bryan Mills scours Los Angeles for the men who framed him for murder

while evading police detective Forest Whitaker (in the Tommy Lee Jones part, but without any of the snappy dialogue). There’s plenty of action, all filmed in a way likely to induce seizures—hand-held cameras, editing that cuts so much you can’t get a grip on what your seeing. Worse, there’s nothing in the by-the-numbers story that makes you in any way interested in what you’re seeing. It’s slickly made product ordered up by executives just because they need a third film in order to be able to market a Taken Trilogy DVD box set next Christmas. With Dougray Scott, Famke Janssen and Maggie Grace. Directed by Olivier Megaton, a name that just dares reviews to make cracks about “megaton bombs.” -MF THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING—As an Oscar contender, this biography of Stephen Hawking, based on a memoir by his first wife Jane, is a model of restraint and inoffensiveness: it’s a shoo-in for the The King’s Speech voters. Hawking’s work takes a back seat to his slow debilitation from ALS and the history of his marriage. But while we go into the film knowing it will end in divorce, the factors driving the couple apart feel elided. It’s as if the filmmakers didn’t want to be disrespectful to a man who is considered one of the great scientific minds of our era. But in that case, why make the film at all? Even the irony that, as presented here, all that ended the marriage of a man so obsessed with the nature of time was time itself seems unintended. With fine but unostentatious performances by Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones as the Hawkings. Co-starring Harry Lloyd, David Thewlis, and Emily Watson. Directed by James Marsh, best known for documentaries like Man on Wire. -MF TOP FIVE—Chris Rock wrote, directed and stars as a comedian trying to make a career switch to a serious actor. Set in one day (with way too much happening for 24 hours), it veers between show business satire and sexual politicking as Rock’s character is interviewed by journalist Rosario Dawson. It’s the best of Rock’s efforts behind the camera but still wildly uneven, balanced between a fair amount of laugh-out-loud humor and too much unbelievable plotting. With Gabrielle Union, Ben Vereen, and Kevin Hart. –MF UNBROKEN—The true story of Olean native and Olympic athlete Louis Zamperini (adapted from Laura Hillenbrand’s 2010 book) focuses on the horrifying experiences of his young life: as a lieutenant in the Air Force during World War II, he spent 47 days adrift in the Pacific Ocean after his plane was shot down, only to wind up in a Japanese POW camp where for two years he was tortured by a corporal who became obsessed with him. These painful scenes may be unparalleled in a movie intended for a mass audience. And by ending with Zamperini’s rescue from the camp, the film oddly avoids terminates the more satisfying dramatic arc that would have been provided by the rest of his life. Director Angelina Jolie does fine work in the opening scenes of the plane being shot down, but at 137 minutes most audiences are likely to be very uncomfortable with the movie’s brutality. Starring Jack O’Connell, Finn Wittrock, and Domhnall Gleeson and Miyari; Joel and Ethan Coen were among the scriptwriters. –GS WILD—Novelist Nick Hornby wrote the screenplay for this adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir of her 1994 hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, which extends for 2,663 from Mexico to Canada. Strayed (played by Reese Witherspoon, who also co-produced the film, in an effective act of image-adjusting) was not an experienced hiker, and she doesn’t seem especially well prepared for such an arduous trek. But she undertakes it as an act of will and self-punishment, to confront and exorcise her demons. As unveiled in flashbacks, they don’t seem all that awful, especially when we compare the film to Into the Wild and 127 Hours, both recounting much more distressing wilderness journeys. Wild is at its best not when it’s trying to persuade us how bad Strayed’s life was but when it focuses on the alternately grim and dull slog of a three-month walk—now there’s a triumph. With Laura Dern, Thomas Sadoski, and Michiel Huisman. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club) -MF THE WOMAN IN BLACK 2: ANGEL OF DEATH—There’s no Daniel Radcliffe, not anyone else you’re likely to have heard of in this sequel to the 2012 horror movie. The same secluded haunted house is used forty years later to house children and two schoolteachers escaping the World War II bombing of London, and the same trouble spirit causes more trouble. There are more shock moments than any one film should have, though in generally it’s a relatively old-fashioned spook movie. But if you haven’t seen the original you’re going to be lost as to what’s going on. Starring Phoebe Fox, Helen McCrory, and Jeremy Irvine. Directed by Tom P Harper (Peaky Blinders). -MF

DAILYPUBLIC.COM / JANUARY 14, 2015 / THE PUBLIC 21

CLASSIFIEDS TO PLACE AN AD: SEAN@DAILYPUBLIC.COM THE PUBLIC’S NOTICE The Public encourages you to use caution while participating in any transactions or acquiring services through our classified section of the newspaper. While we do approve the ads in this section, we do not guarantee the reliability of classified advertisers. If you have questions regarding advertisers in this section please email sean@dailypublic.com.

PUBLIC PERSONALS MISSED CONNECTIONS TALKED AT CASINO We talked Tuesday night while you were with your family as they played one of the slots. You told me you worked at Wegmans as a cake decorator and I am a local business owner. I felt maybe there was a connection between us. Tell me how many children you have so I know it’s you. YINGS IN DEPEW You were at Ying’s this past saturday. I tried making eye contact with you but I’m not sure you noticed me. You had both full sleeve tattoos and were wearing a fitted hat. I though you were so good looking and I knew, I knew you from somewhere but couldn’t figure out where. WEGMANS IN FALLS I saw you looking my way. We locked eyes quite a few times. I left before you did. Thanks for the attention ☺️

REAL ESTATE FOR RENT DELAWARE AVENUE 1 bedroom luxury apartment available immediately for $1,075 per month. Located minutes away Children’s Hospital, Buffalo General Hospital, Allentown district, Elmwood Village, and Downtown Buffalo. Laundry, hdwd floors, parking, fitness center. Includes heat, cable and internet. Call 332-2141 STAY WARM Elmwood Village studios at Gates Circkle. 525. Close to crisis and buff state. Util included. Coin laundry on site. 553-3112. Please leave voicemail.

MISSED CONNECTION NOTICE If you would like to follow up with a missed connection seen here, contact information will be provided to you by emailing sean@dailypublic.com.

EMPLOYMENT

NIGHT SHADES

THE ARTS CLASSES & LESSONS

ARTS SERVICES INITIATIVE Development Director Position. ASI WNY (ASI), a not for profit 501c3 organization located in Buffalo, NY that provides capacity building, collaboration, and advocacy services to cultural organizations and individual artists is seeking a full time Development Director to raise funds for the organization and its programs (Including Give For Greatness). The successful applicant must have a thorough knowledge of fundraising principles and have a proven track record in multiple forms of fundraising and development. A college degree in a relevant field is required; an advanced degree is desirable. A working knowledge of GiftWorks fundraising software is preferred. Full time position. EEO. The deadline for application is 12 pm Friday, Jan 30. To apply, send a cover letter, a resume, and three references to asiwnyinfo@gmail.com. Phone inquiries and applications will not be accepted.

NIGHT SHADES

BELLY DANCE CLASSES by Nadia Ibrahim. All levels welcome. 560-1891 nadiaibrahim.com

MADE 2 MOVE FITNESS Holiday Fitness Deals at our Private Studio in Williamsville, Month 2 Month, $0 Enrollment, Gifts Packages $25$75. made2movefitness.com/holiday

BIG BROTHERS BIG SISTERS MIXER Thursday, January 29th 5:30 - 7:30 PM at Providence Social (490 Rhode Island). Enjoy a fun evening out at the Big Mixer. It’s a great opportunity to learn more about Big Brothers Big Sisters and meet current volunteers. All are encouraged to bring friends that might be interested in learning more about the program or volunteering as a mentor. Complimentary Hors D’oeurves and drink specials.

ACROSS

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SUNDAY 8 FEBRUARY RUSKIN’S WORLDVIEW TIME / PLACE TBA

THE PUBLIC CLASSIFIEDS: boasting the freshest and most reliable classified advertising option in Western New York. All ads are “publicly approved,” yielding a safe and trustworthy marketplace that highlights what the public needs to see.

52 55

69 72 74

1. Steam up

72. Bring into law

6. Kitchen in Buffalo

73. Inn in Buffalo

40. “Go Your ___ Way” (Fleetwood Mac song)

13. Name associated with 70 Across

74. Former Delaware restaurant

DOWN

16. Bar in Buffalo

1. “Magical Mystery Tour,” e.g.

19. Car ad abbr.

2. “48 Hours” star

20. Beehive State native

3. “Wuthering Heights” food staple

21. From the U.S. 22. “Phantom” presenter

26. “Lord, is ___?”: Matthew

NUTRITION, WEIGHT LOSS, VITAMINS & SCIENCE-BASED NUTRITIONAL ANALYSIS Purchase vitamins and services for yourself, a friend or loved one directly from www.healthrevolutions.net. We can service a majority of your health and wellness needs in our convenient location right inside of Ashker’s Juice Bar at 1002 Elmwood Ave. Available hours are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday 10 am to 4:30 pm. By appointment only. Call 716-759-4747 or email drmarkmatesich@gmail.com

KEVIN KIRCHMYER LINDSEY RIZZO ASHLEY “6” DRUAR ABBY BEST KITTY KAT SMITH SAM BLACK ANTHONY RIZZO EVAN “LEGEND” EVANS AMANDA YOUNG

29. Night club in Williamsville 34. Cartoon canine 37. Authorized

4. 112.5 degrees away from S

41. Kaydara noodles 42. “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is ___” 44. Drone 49. “... and too many to mention” letters 50. Broadway bust 51. #1 position

5. Did a cover

52. No experts, they

6. Cause yawning, perhaps

55. At the top of one’s lungs

7. Babeville founder

56. “Saturday Night Fever” set

8. Attica inmate 9. “American Idol” winner ___ Allen

57. Acts as a fence for 58. BPO section

10. “Compliments of yours truly”

59. “Discover” competitor

39. Saloon in North Tonawanda

11. Big Orbit merge partner

60. “Fair” or “foul”

12. Party staples

61. “En garde” weapon

43. Bar in Buffalo

17. ___ nitrate

63. Lancaster moviehouse

45. Adjective ending 46. Like no Bills Super Bowl

18. “Jeopardy!” contestants, collectively

67. Black Sea nation: Abbr.

47. “Major” suffix

23. “O,” in love letters

68. Arbiter

48. Pub in Lancaster

25. Certain court hearing

69. “Blastoff!” preceder

53. Original Bill’s home; abbr.

27. “___’Clock Jump”: Harry James recording

Crossword Puzz FOLLOW THE LEADER LAST WEEK’S ANSWERS

28. Between H and M

M A N O R

E R I K A

N E A R S

D D T S

O N A T

W Y L E

P E S T

O T T O

W E A R

38. Long of “Boyz N the Hood”

62. “Girl ___ Dreams”: 1927 song 64. Adam’s ___ 65. Doc bloc 66. Saloon in West Seneca 70. “30 Rock” inspiration, for short

22 THE PUBLIC / JANUARY 14, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

36. “Monty Python” star

24. ___ Fair

CHIROPRACTIC

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

71. -- out (barely earn)

15. Alumna bio word

ICE HOCKEY TRAINING NEW Off-Ice Training Center focusing on hockey Fitness/Nutrition/Skills inside the new Lockport Ice Rinks. Pre-Sale Deals skateaheadwny.com/ pre-sale-deals.

53 59

14. “____ did you nothing hear?”: Hamlet

GOOD NEIGHBOR NOTICES

COMMUNITY EVENTS

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19 22

HEALTH: MIND & BODY CLASSES

PETER PAN AT ARTPARK (July/August 2015) will be held on Saturday January 31 from 11-6 PM at Niagara University Annex, Niagara Falls. All of roles are available including children ages 7 to 17, dancers and singers. An accompanist is provided. Please bring your sheet music and picture/resume. Callbacks will be held on Sunday February 1. Please email susan@artpark. net with any questions. This is an open call – No Appointment is needed.

AUDITION!

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58. Pizza maker

54. “O” follower

Puzzle b CROSSWORDCrossword BY DONNA HOKE DONNAHOKE.COM crosswords at donna

30. “Just ___ water” 31. Part of “Law and Order SVU” 32. “___ Misbehavin’” 33. Chip collector 34. Antonym of c.c. 35. “Honeykins”

(DONNAHOKE.C

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FAMOUS LAST WORDS BACK PAGE

HOROSCOPES BY SHEEBA INCAVIGLIA

CANDY CORNS (Dec 22/Jan 19)—The new year will mean a new position and rise in social status. If you’re offered that job putting gigantic newspapers on yardsticks at the library, take it. A man sporting chiseled good looks will walk in. “I’m looking for a gigantic newspaper on a yardstick,” he’ll say. You will fall very quickly into a torrid romance.

CANCERS (Jun 22/July 22)—This is a good week to mix business with pleasure. Offer yourself to your boss. If you are at first rebuffed, just keep offering and make the outfits skimpier and skimpier. He won’t be able to resist. This is also a good week for discovering a new hobby (which could just be offering yourself to your boss–your choice).

AQUARIUMS (Jan 20/Feb 18)—A trying month for Aquariums. Yours will be a lonely patrol of desolate landscapes until you come upon a man by an old swimming pool. He is watching some people cook spaghetti on a small television set. He will hold it up for you to see. However, there will be little solace in this. Still, a conversation may shed new light on your difficult situation.

LEO (July 23/Aug 23)—Visit someone in a hospital. Bring a lot of balloons. Throughout history, balloons have always made everyone happy. Hit the malls after that–lot of great bargains right now!

PISCES (Feb 19/Mar 20)—Show your considerate side this week. A change of scenery could delight someone who has been stuck indoors recently, particularly if they are really fat. Take your fat reclusive acquaintance to a mall or maybe to the zoo to gawk at some arboreal apes. Just be sure to exercise good judgment. ARIES (Mar 21/Apr 20)—Put some emphasis this week on acquiring knowledge through magazines. Have a close look at the color pictures—you know what they say, “A picture tells a lot more words than words.” Join a charitable organization and climb over people to get to the top. TAUTUS (Apr 21/May 21)—Wonderful opportunities on the horizon this week. You’ll be able to see them from your porch. They will arrive like giant otherworldly waves breaking against the shore of a desolate, undiscovered planet. Work on improving your physical fitness. GEMINUS (May 22/Jun 21)—Go ahead and ignore a family member’s concern this week. It will go away. Give nothing and you may still get a lot. It’s all coming up YOU, although beware of parking your car on the grass no matter what the man at the carnival tells you.

VIRGO (Aug 24/Sept 22)- People consider you a glamorous figure. You attract fascinating people and animals. Be discreet. Don’t reveal everything immediately (especially to the animals). If you hold back, you create an atmosphere of mystery and elusiveness. Continue to pursue efforts of making money through highly irregular channels. LIBIS (Sept 23/Oct 23)—Don’t be afraid to put your boot up somebody’s ass this week. You’ve got to be tough with some of your co-workers. They’ll respect you for it in the end. SCORPIONS (Oct 24/Nov 21)—Come to work all week with a gigantic, stupid smile on your face. Keep that stupid smile affixed to your face all day, even if you are experiencing extreme ennui. In the evenings, stand naked before a mirror flexing slightly. Murmur, “Nothing can touch me” over and over again. You will be well prepared for the next day. SAGITTARIAN (Nov 22/Dec 21)—Something will go awry with the float in your toilet. A plumber will be called in—a handsome man with a dimpled chin. He will offer you advice. At first, you will tell him that you are not taking any advice from some lowly plumber. You’ll soon come around after he fixes the float. Sheeba appears courtesy of the Lankville Daily News. DAILYPUBLIC.COM / JANUARY 14, 2015 / THE PUBLIC 23

Public School / Ladies Night at Allen St. Hardware F e a t u r i n g January 30 2015 / 11 Pm All female DJs / Drink specials Ladies free before midnight Photo Booth on Site! / $5 Cover Showing Mean Girls / Spice World / Clueless

DJ YAMA

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