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COMMENTARY: Bruce Fisher on the late Tuscarora sculptor Joseph Jacobs.

ART: Jack Foran on eight collage artists at TGW@497 Gallery.

THE PUBLIC QUESTIONNAIRE: Actor Anthony Alcocer.

CENTERFOLD: Patrik Foran’s work at Castellani Museum.

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BUFFALO SEWER AUTHORITY, BUFFALO UGLY, SUCCEEDING SKELOS BY GEOFF KELLY WHAT’S $1.8 MILLION BETWEEN FRIENDS?

We were astonished when, in March, a friend told The Public that the Buffalo Sewer Authority pays the City of Buffalo $1.8 million each year for—well, we’re not sure for what. That initial source said the money represented rent for the authority’s offices in City Hall, but that made little sense: That would be the most expensive lowgrade office space in downtown Buffalo. (Iconic address, to be sure, decent wi-fi, but scary elevators and sketchy phone service.) So we checked it out with some folks in City Hall who follow municipal finances. It’s true, they told us, more or less: Each year the Buffalo Sewer Authority pays the city something in the range of $3.5 million. Some of that money is for services rendered to the authority by the city—payroll processing, billing, IT services, etc. However, a significant amount— ranging in recent years from $1.4 million to $2 million, and budgeted most recently at $1.8 million—is not itemized. The money just goes to the city’s general fund. It feels, another source told us, like the administration uses the Buffalo Sewer Authority as an ATM, taking money at will to plug holes in its budget. MANY HAVE SPECULATED THAT COMMON COUNCILMAN DAVE FRANCZYK, long of the

Fillmore District, might finally retire this year, rather than seek a new term in the fall. Perish the thought. Franczyk is campaigning. So far he faces at least two declared candidates: East Side activist Sam Herbert and Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority tenant commissioner Joe Mascia. Both have had trouble in the past collecting enough valid signatures on nominating petitions to make the primary ballot. Others are sniffing around the race too, but the more the merrier for Franczyk: A primary with multiple candidates favors the incumbent in this case. We have also heard that the Buffalo school board member Jay McCarthy may not challenge Delaware District Councilman Mike LoCurto this fall, as he had indicated he would do. McCarthy faced some a significant hurdle besides the natural advantages that accrue to LoCurto as an incumbent: He is a member of a school board majority that is perceived to be at odds with the teachers union, whose members are active in Democratic primaries both as voters and campaigners. A challenger to South District Councilman Chris Scanlon may arise but no organized faction in that district is backing such a candidate now. For better or for worse, then, expect few strong

challenges to any incumbents on the Common Council and a relatively quiet primary season in the city. REPORTS ON A GARISH FENCE UNDER CONSTRUCTION around the historic Miller

mansion on Nottingham Terrace have elicited some spirited back-and-forth on various websites in the last week, including dailypublic.com, where Public editor-at-large Bruce Jackson calls it “Buffalo Ugly.” Jackson also dug up a salient record on the city’s website: The owner of the property obtained a permit for an eightfoot fence. The fence under construction is far higher than eight feet tall, even without the ornamentation above the gates. SO, REPUBLICANS IN THE NEW YORK STATE SENATE have chosen John Flanagan, a senator

from Long Island’s Suffolk County, to succeed Dean Skelos, a senator from Long Island’s Nassau County, as majority leader, following Skelos’s resignation on Monday. Skelos and his son, Adam, surrendered to federal authorities last week, accused of corruption. For those who had imagined that the removal of Skelos presented an opportunity for upstate and Western New York to assume some leadership role in the Senate, check a map: Suffolk County is in fact slightly farther removed from the west coast of New York State than Nassau County. All that has been gained through this scandal is the removal of a longtime, apparently corrupt incumbent from his leadership role (but not yet from his seat in government), and the ascension of another longtime, as yet unindicted incumbent to that leadership role. (Flanagan has been a legislator since 1986, when he won an Assembly seat vacated by his father, who died of a heart attack at age 50. In this regard his story resembles that of Buffalo’s Sam Hoyt, who assumed the Assembly seat of his father, Bill, who died in office of a heart attack in 1992.) On Tuesday morning, Flanagan pretended that there was no regional divide in the state or in his party. “From my standpoint, the fact that I’m from Long Island has no bearing,” he said. “I’m a colleague in the state Senate. What’s good for Jamestown, what’s good for Plattsburgh or Glens Falls or Utica or Syracuse or Rochester is good for the state of New York.”

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NEWS COMMENTARY

NARRATIVES IN STONE On the late Tuscarora artist Joseph Jacobs BY BRUCE FISHER EVERY TIME THE ELECTED MEMBERS of Canada’s parliament enter

the House of Commons, they walk past Creation, a limestone frieze by the sculptor Joseph Jacobs, who died last week at his home on the Tuscarora Reservation just north of Niagara Falls. The work is a bas-relief in Indiana limestone. It consists of three horizontal panels abutted on either end by verticals. It is Iroquois allegory that is, one can safely assume, incomprehensible to most of the Canadians who see it, even if they are Native Canadians. Here’s why it’s different from the other pieces of contemporary Native Canadian art that adorn that vestibule, and here’s why it’s opaque: Iroquois iconography is specific, complex, and connected to extensive oral narratives that pierce longstanding European boundaries between religion and history. Creation, the frieze at the Canadian Parliament, is also exegesis and a political statement, at the same time that its presence is a challenging assertion of the permanence of a very specific culture that continues to evolve. What Jacobs did, less than 10 years into his career as an artist, was to execute a version of the Iroquois creation myth in stone in a way that has had a ripple of consequences for Iroquois cultural identity—an identity that carries on in a parallel, largely family-centered world in Upstate New York, Eastern Ontario, and Southern Quebec. It’s a world that is largely invisible to outsiders, even when one of its foremost artistic interpreter’s work is on very public display.

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Jacobs’s innovation was to create sculptures that comprehended the most complex of Iroquois narratives into single works. The pieces he created, mainly in stone, are complex, though most are not larger than three feet square. Executing them required months of exacting work with various hand-tools; according to some observers, he alternately amused himself or played a sculptural toccata by carving miniature figures in some of the recesses of his larger pieces. Had it not been for the patronage of Joseph “Smokin’ Joe” Anderson, the Tuscarora entrepreneur who endows the Native American Museum of Arts (NAMA) on Route 31 across from Niagara Wheatfield High School in Sanborn, economic necessity might have forced Jacobs to have continued in the longstanding Iroquois tradition of carving small objects—if not for the tourist trade, then for quick sale at galleries or art fairs. Most cultures carve. It’s a commonplace for settled peoples. Not surprisingly for a people whom archaeologists say have dwelt in this same part of the world for at least a millennium, Iroquois carvers of wood, bone, and stone have been at it for a very long time here. Items of religious significance that are carved anciently and currently include the famous False Face masks; though there is considerable variation among them, there is continuity with ancient forms, and the post-Contact change in tools from stone to metal did not change the practice of calling the images out from living basswood trees before they are removed for human use. In very brief discussions with Jacobs’s relatives and with Dr. Percy Abrams, director of NAMA, the names of other carvers come up—including the late Duffy Wilson, who helped organize the

now-abandoned Turtle building in downtown Niagara Falls, which was a showcase for Iroquois art for a decade before it closed. Anthony F. C. Wallace, whose 2013 book Tuscarora briefly mentions Jacobs, cites 18th-century accounts of formidable carvers among the Tuscarora, the sixth of the Six Nations. The late William Fenton, who worked on Iroquois subjects his entire professional life, spoke Seneca well, and founded the annual Iroquoia conference, described the late renowned carver Avery Jimerson’s rise to prominence as a religious leader and a musician, but also as a carver of False Face masks. That’s the tradition from which Jacobs emerged. His achievement, though, was consequential in three ways. First, he focused on traditional narratives as integrated wholes, rather than pulling one or another figure out of a narrative and letting it stand alone. Second, his shaping of those narratives demonstrates his own complex cultural context. Third, he used the vocabulary of Iroquois cosmology in some pieces to argue, as it were, for a new interpretation of the place of art in Iroquois identity. This is art within a cultural, religious, historical, linguistic, and political context. There are indeed abstract forms, evocations, references among the representations of mythical beings, animals, trees, plants. An adequate analysis of Creation would require some discussion of how it is that Jacobs decided to include two versions of the twins Sapling and Flint, whose renderings at either end of the piece evoke alternately False Face images and the Skywoman story. And what it means that he made the image of Tadodaho central to the piece—not the reformed Tadodaho whose penis had been cut down to size, whose kinks had been ironed out, whose snakes had been combed from

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his hair, but the unreformed Tadodaho, the Tadodaho whom the Peacemaker and Hayowentha struggled to convert from his evil ways to the new way, the Great Law of Peace. Was Jacobs telling Canadians, in the mid-1980s when Canadian national unity was questionable, that even the Tadodaho’s power could be harnessed for an enduring peace?

VERSIONS OF CREATION It’s probably not knowable whether anyone on Parliament Hill knows what those images have signified, or what the narratives of the Iroquois creation story and Great Law have come to mean to the folks who still tell them. But despite a collapse in the population of Six Nations people who speak the closely related Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca languages, or the sharply divergent Tuscarora language, the narratives persist. You wouldn’t know it to be so by going to Smokin’ Joe’s, but what happens inside the place is not only commerce but a forceful cultural revitalization movement that includes a quietly heroic effort to persist in keeping narrative, language, and metaphor fresh and vital. Smokin’ Joe’s place sells biker gear and discount clothing. It sells tax-free luscious curves of Henry Moore sculptures, just around the corner from the cigarettes made in a native-owned factory. It sells groceries in a retail atmo- Candian-identity gallery where the Group of Seven impressionists are gathsphere that feels more like Price-Rite or Save-A-Lot than Wegmans, and it ered, this particular collection of contemporary art is from another sensibilhas a café that is a family diner with a truck-stop menu. The logical route for ity entirely. a visitor from Toronto or Buffalo is a drive across the Town of Niagara past And without the narratives of Iroquois mythology; without the creation stotracts of modest split-level and modified Cape Cod homes, a formerly agriry; without knowing about the places of clan animals, dreams, certain plants, cultural plain that began to be developed in the 1960s for homes for workers and wind; without knowing about the English-language commonplaces for at the Delphi auto parts plant a few miles east in Lockport, at the chemical mythological characters like Sapling and Flint, like the Peacemaker; and plants along the Niagara River, and at the waste-disposal sites that include without knowing why that man has snakes in his hair, Jacobs’s art makes places where Manhattan Project debris is stored. Many current households little sense. are dependent on the outlet mall just off the Thruway. The Tuscarora reserDoes the presence of the hand below the figures in Skywoman indicate that vation itself is just north of Smokin’ Joe’s. Jacobs’s experience as a Tuscarora Baptist, married into the leading Tuscarora At the art museum just off the diner is a large body of Joseph Jacobs’s work. Baptist family, shaped his understanding of the myth? Versions of the SkyThe graphic art by Simon Brascoupe, also from Tuscarora, may be more woman story differ, but what is common to them all is that she fell through immediately approachable than the collection of sculptures on display at the hole in the sky created when her husband (or her father) uprooted the NAMA. At the National Museum of the American Indian on the Nation- light-tree. We know that her fall to this world was buffered by the wings al Mall in Washington, DC, contemporary native art is what gallery-goers of swans, or geese, or herons, and that she landed on the back of the great these days are accustomed to: It’s themed, it’s abstract, it’s in the vocabulary turtle, and that various animals dived into the vast water to bring mud up for that educated people around the world have grown used to. Brascoupe’s work her to make into the earth, which she spread by dancing the shuffling dance is handsome and accomplished. It is the kind of graphic art that a discerning Iroquois women now perform. We know that her daughter, impregnated by collector could comfortably locate near other works with a 20th-century sen- the West Wind, gave birth the usual way to Sapling, the Good-minded, but sibility. died in birthing his twin Flint, the Bad-minded, who cut his way out of her Jacobs’s work is quite different. It is not, for the most part, abstract. It is body careless of her existence; and that from her corpse sprang the Three not really for outsiders any more than altarpieces at medieval churches were Sisters—Corn, Beans, and Squash—which are the three crops the Iroquois APPROVE ERRORS ON THIScultivated, PROOF, and THE executed for non-Christians,IFnoYOU matter how exquisite the WHICH artistry. ARE The 2009 cultivate still. The versions of the myth vary, but Skywoman piece Skywoman looks like a PUBLIC jumble of naturalistic female gave birth on Turtle Island, took her dead daughter’s head to make the CANNOT BErepresentations—a HELD RESPONSIBLE. PLEASE fell, EXAMINE THE AD face, an eagle, a snake, clouds, maize, some plants, fingers of a moon, watched her grandchildren finish the creation, then do battle—but THOROUGHLY EVENother IF THE AD ISthe A PICK-UP. large hand, various other animals, strange little humanoid figures—all nicely not the Good versus Evil battle of Middle Eastern religions like Zoroastriexecuted, to be sure, by somebody competent with carving tools. it isCOPYanism or Christianity, but something else, something different we’d have to � But CHECK CONTENT MESSAGE TO from ADVERTISER hard for an outsider to categorize. Just back the Jean-Michel Basquiat be schooled on. Jacobs, the enrolled Cayuga who grew up at Tuscarora, who Thank you for advertising CHECK DATES exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which had a big space � next to theIMPORTANT signed his work with his enrollment number from the Canadian reservation

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� PROOF OK (no changes) “Most agreeable odors fill the factories where Mentholatum is put in jars, tubes, and finally boxed and packed for distribution to all parts of the world.” – The�Mentholatum A. A. Hyde Collection, Undated PROOF OKCompany, (with changes) The former plant of the Mentholatum Co., 1360 Niagara Street, is one of the Niagara River’s iconic daylight factory buildings. Here, millions of green jars of Mentholatum ointment—the “Little Nurse for Little Ills” providing relief for burns, colds, and other ailments—were manufactured. Built in 1919, the four-story, Advertisers 64,000-square-foot factory was described as “sunlit, sanitary, andSignature spotless, thus providing the most healthful and agreeable surroundings for employees.” It ___________________________________ was Mentholatum headquarters from 1946 to 1997, after which—with the inducement of grants and tax abatements—all facilities were moved out of Buffalo to suburban Orchard Park. The 126-year-old company, which became a subsidiary of Rohto Pharmaceutical in 1988, still makes Mentholatum ointment—as well as newer products such as Oxy and Softlips—at its suburban facility. The Niagara Street site is now occupied by Garrett Leather Corp., a maker of specialty leathDate________________________________ P er products.-THE PUBLIC STAFF

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COMMENTARY NEWS where most Cayugas live, whose funeral was conducted by a Baptist minister (an Eel Clan Onandaga), was an English speaker from a Christian community. Is that why there’s a hand under Skywoman and all the other elements of her story? Jacobs isn’t known to have undertaken any work on Iroquois subjects until his occupational life as a laborer ended, due to injury, in 1974, when he fell off the roof he was working on. A family member said that before his injury, Jacobs made model cars from kits, but exquisitely, with doors that opened and engine parts that moved. Another family member recalled that before he became a carver, he made model airplanes the way American boys did in the 1930s and 1940s, out of balsa wood and tissue paper. After the injury he turned to Iroquois subjects, and the precision and the scope of his work quickly distinguished him. He began selling pieces at the large and well-regarded Curve Lake gallery in the Kawartha Lakes region of Ontario in the late 1970s. He worked at a studio there, becoming known to a growing and evidently appreciative Canadian audience. When Speaker Jerome of the Canadian Parliament commissioned five Native artists for work for the Member’s Foyer in 1981, Jacobs was one of them.

CANADIAN HONORS Jacobs received an honorary doctorate from Trent University in 1983. He received the Order of Canada in 1989. The parliamentary Speaker, a barrister from Sudbury who served under both Liberal and Conservative governments, included Jacobs’s work in a group of commissions that were all made in Indiana limestone, which is not native material for either the Inuit, the Cree, nor the Cayuga whose work adorns the grand foyer of the Canadian capitol. That’s part of the story here, too. Official Canada began including Native expressions in earnest after the 1970s. Many Canadian leaders were strongly interested then in achieving a more formal breakaway from Great Britain, and in asserting a distinctly Canadian identity in law as well as in culture. In 1981, then-Premier Pierre Eliot Trudeau led the way to enacting the Constitution Act, which became law despite the refusal of Quebec to ratify it. The long conversation about Canadian national unity continued with difficulty in the 1980s, with the Meech Lake accords foundering in 1987 over objections from First Nations as well as Quebeckers, and two near-miss referenda on Quebec independence since then, and great difficulty, in the past couple of years, with national discussions about abusive forced acculturation at both Catholic-run and state-run boarding schools for natives—and more recently, exposure of massive corruption at some reserves, and anguish over Mob-like tough guys using reserves as bases of operation for cigarette-smuggling and other bad acts. But a frequent feature of that process has been outreach to, inclusion of, and attempted collaboration with minority voices, including those of what are variously termed Aboriginal or Native communities. Jacobs’s memorial wake was held at a funeral home near the outlet mall. His obituaries appeared in the Niagara Gazette and in the Buffalo News, but his death wasn’t mentioned in the Toronto Globe and Mail, nor the Toronto Star, nor in the Ottawa papers. The 200 or so people from Tuscarora and surrounding areas filtered through the visitation, the form of which was Baptist, as he and many of the assembled identified as such. The Baptist minister spoke after an elderly woman explained the eagle-feather fan clutched by the deceased in his open casket, the feathers being from the wings of a bird known to them as the one that flies highest, to brush the face of the Creator. Perhaps there is a text of an oral Iroquois narrative about the role of eagles transporting prayers. Joseph Jacobs did not carve such a text. But he did do a version of Skywoman. He did a version of the creation story, the one that gets told in the periodic recitations of the Great Law that describe not only the creation of the world but also the creation of the Iroquois confederacy, at which event the Peacemaker and his ally combed the snakes out of Tadodaho’s hair and buried the hatchet or war-club under the white roots of the great pine, in doing so creating not only peace among the Iroquois but a 50-member governing body, the names of whose founding members live on as the titles of today’s leaders. Jacobs’s rationale for his work was this: “I want to give permanence in stone to the legends of my people.” Bruce Fisher is visiting professor of economics and SUNY Buffalo State and director of the P Center for Economic and Policy Studies.

S AT U R D AY, M AY 1 6 , 2 0 1 5

RECEPTION 10:00 AM / SCREENING 11:00 AM-1:00 PM North Park Theater / 1428 Hertel Ave / Buffalo, NY Visit villa.edu/animation for more details

John Overton Burns • Erich Haneberg • Dan Carey

exhibition: opening reception:

MAY 22 - MAY 31, 2015 FRIDAY, MAY 22, 8-11PM

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ARTS REVIEW

THE COLLAGE 8 Artists at TGW Gallery BY JACK FORAN EIGHT ARTISTS TRY THEIR HAND at collage art in the current

TGW@ 497 Gallery show, with some outstanding results. “Collage loosely defined,” according to gallery operator Robert Vitrano. One benefit of which is that it allows Marie Hassett into the show, her exquisite work that might more readily be characterized as fabric art. Sewn rather than glued—the term collage means glued—but the essence idea of collage seems more layered, and these are layered. Fabric and thread, used to tack down the fabric scraps and snippets, but also create feathers that look like real feathers, embroidery complete birds, birds’ nests. Birds are a theme of her work, and the present parlous and further deteriorating environmental actuality that threatens the extinction of numerous bird (and other animal and plant) species. Two of the works depict listed endangered species, the whooping crane and Kirtland’s warbler. Expository wall text points out that whooping crane numbers in the late 1930s had fallen to 20 individuals, basically due to habitat loss. Whereupon a wintering grounds refuge was created in Texas, and the total number has now climbed to 300. The Kirtland’s warbler, which breeds only in Central Michigan, then winters in the Bahamas—not a bad lifestyle up until now—is also threatened due to habitat loss. Due in turn, in part, to climate change. Another work is on the brown pelican, a species that nearly disappeared in North America between the 1950s and 1970s due to prevalent use of pesticides. Following a ban on DDT in 1972, the species rebounded to a degree that in 2009 it was removed from the endangered list, but then a year later was again threatened in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. As a further case in point about species extinction, one work is about the dodo. This is a triptych, one panel a dodo skeleton in sewn fabric, another with tiny, delicate bird bones thread-tacked to fabric background, and another with a shadow stain on fabric in vaguely dodo form, and tiny bird bone. Part of why the dodo became extinct was its lack of fear of the human species. Double warning there. Joan Fitzgerald’s collages consist of photos or photo fragments of some rural, humble, and somewhat deteriorating—the worse for

IN GALLERIES NOW BY TINA DILLMAN = ART OPENING 1045 Elmwood Gallery for the Arts (1045 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14222, 716-228, photographics2.com/store/welcome-toour-studio-1045-gallery-store): Niagara Frontier Watercolor Society, Spring 2015 Members Show, May 13-June 5. Reception Sat May 23, 2-5pm. Thu & Fri 11-6, Sat 11-4 and by appointment. Albright-Knox Art Gallery (1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York 14222, 8828700, albrightknox.org): Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball on view through Aug 16. Coexistence: Humans and Nature (2015 AK Teens: Future Curators Exhibition) on view through May 17; Overtime: The Art of Work & Eye to Eye: Looking Beyond Likeness, both shows on view through May 17; David Adamo in the Sculpture Court, on view through May 17: Robert Heinecken: Surrealism on TV, on view till May 31. Tue-Sun 10am-5pm, open late First Fridays until 10pm. Art Dialogue Gallery Custom Framing (5 Linwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14209. artdialoguegallery.com): New work by Donald Scheller, on view through May 29. Tue-Fri 11am-5pm, Sat 11am-3pm. Artists Group Gallery (Western New York Artists Group) (1 Linwood Ave, Buffalo, NY 14209, 885-2251, wnyag.com): Artists See Buffalo, on view through May 29. Tue-Fri 11am-5pm, Sat 11am-3pm, Closed SunMon. Benjaman Gallery (419 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY, 14222, 553-8483, benjamangallery.com): An Exploration of Regional Art over three centuries with a focus on the paintings of Robert N. Blair. Thu-Sat 11-5pm, Sun-Wed by appointment. BT&C Gallery (1250 Niagara Street, Buffalo, NY 14213, 604-6183, btandcgallery. com): some things, work by Roberley Bell, on view till May 29. Gallery open Fri 125pm or by appointment. ¡Buen Vivir! (148 Elmwood Ave. Buffalo, NY 14201): Photographs by Orin Langelle, Struggles for Justice: Forests, Land, and Human Rights—Late 80s to Late 90s, on view through June 19. Fri 3-8pm. Buffalo Arts Studio (Tri Main Building 5th Floor, 2496 Main Street, Buffalo, NY 14214, 833-4450, buffaloartsstudio.

THE COLLAGE TGW@497 GALLERY / 497 FRANKLIN ST, BUFFALO

Works by Joyce Hill, part of a group show of collages by eight artists at TGW@497 Gallery on Franklin Street.

wear—cottage or cabin, applied to canvas of a predominant deep maroon hue with other hues in the mix, and marked with scribble and scratch marks made as with the other end of the paintbrush. Patti Harris’s collages about the American Southwest contain substantial actual bits and pieces of the Southwest. Sand, gravel, shells, seed pods, twigs, vegetal fibers, even a fossil ammonite. Other of her pieces—these more sculpture than collage—are built on or around what look to be old wood-construction forms for now long-abandoned industrial processes. Possibly mold forms. From Gerald Mead, two works in his minimalist manner. One called Continuum Redux contains a long, narrow, horizontal strip of colorful printed matter and an optical viewing lens with vertical hairline. The other, called Via Crucis XII, contains a science lab glass pipette and small picture frame containing minuscule graphic or sculptural depictions of or related to Christ’s crucifixion. Joyce Hill’s collages include a wide variety of materials and items— crumpled coupons of sheet metal, hardware, painted matter, print-

org): William Koch, Works on Paper, on view through June 5. Tue-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat 10am-2pm, Fourth Fridays until 8pm. Buffalo Center for Arts and Technology (1221 Main Street, Buffalo, NY 14209, 2591680, buffaloartstechcenter.org): Coexistence: Humans and Nature, April 24-May 15. Mon-Fri 10am-3pm. Buffalo & Erie County Botanical Gardens (2655 South Park Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14218, 827-1584, buffalogardens.com): Gardens’ Painting Class, included with admission; Mar 20-May 25, Mon-Sun 10am5pm. Paintasia, on view till May 25 in the Arcangel Gallery. Mon-Sun 10am-5pm, included with Garden Admission. Buffalo & Erie County Central Library (1 Lafayette Square, Buffalo, NY 14203, 8588900, buffalolib.org): Buffalo Public Schools Annual Art Exhibit, a selection of student work from the city’s art program. 8:30am-6:00pm every day, open Thu until 8:00pm and 12-5pm on Sun. Burchfield Penney Art Center (1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14222, 878-6011, burchfieldpenney.org): The Likeness of Being, portraits by Philip Burke; Selections from a Soldier’s Portfolio, Patteran: A Living Force & Moving Power, Robert Blair; Portrait of a Media Artist, Emil Schult; The Scrutiny of Objects, Sculptures by Robert A. Booth; Inquisitive Lens, Marion Faller; Charles E. (The Font Project), Richard Kegler/P22 Type Foundry; Audio Graphics, Charles E. Burchfield; A Resounding Roar, Charles E. Burchfield; Body Norms, selections for the Spong Collection. Tue, Wed, Fri & Sat 10am-5pm, Second Fridays until 8pm, Thu 10am9pm, Sun 1-5pm. Burchfield Nature and Art Center (2001 Union Road, West Seneca, NY 14224, 677-4843, burchfieldnac.org): Art of the Haudenosaunee, created by Members of the Native Roots Artists Guild. Art Show on view through May 31. Art Vendor Day Fri May 15, 10am-6pm. Mon-Fri 10-4pm, Sun 1-4pm, see site for upcoming classes. Canisius College Mary and Lou Vogt Art Gallery (Canisius College 2001 Main Street, Buffalo, NY 14208, 888-8412): Inked, works by Patrick Willett on view through May 22. Castellani Art Museum (5795 Lewiston Road, Niagara University, NY 14109, 2868200, castellaniartmuseum.org): Patrick Foran: Defacement; Artists View the Falls: 300 Years of Niagara Falls Imagery, on view through Aug 16. Tues-Sat 11am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm. CEPA (617 Main Street, Buffalo, NY 14203, 856-2717, cepagallery.org): Baby’s on Fire: Rachel Rampleman. On view through

THE PUBLIC / MAY 13, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

May 30. Mon-Fri 9am-5pm, Sat 12-4pm. The C.G. Jung Center (408 Franklin Street, (Side Entrance), Buffalo, NY 14202, apswny.com): preluce: gregarious nature, Alicia Marvan, on view through May 22. El Museo (91 Allen Street, Buffalo, NY 14202, 464-4692, elmuseobuffalo.org): Memento: New Paintings by Chuck Tingley. On view through June 2. Tue-Sat 12-5pm. Enjoy the Journey Art Gallery- 1168 Orchard Park Road, West Seneca, NY 14224, 6750204, etjgallery.com): Facing Life, work by Heidi Zanelli & Lauren Fratantonio, on view through May 30. Tue & Wed 11-6pm, Thu & Fri 2-6pm, Sat 11-4pm. Glow Gallery (224 Allen Street, Buffalo, NY 14201): aMuse: NY State of Mind, group exhibition on view through May 31; Cool Dad County Fair, Sat May 16, 3-10:30pm. Thu & Fri 4-8pm, Sat & Sun 3-7pm. Hallwalls (341 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14202, 854-1694, hallwalls.org): Amid/In WNY Part 3, survey of local and regional contemporary artists. Opening Fri May 15, 8-11pm. On view through July 3. Tue-Fri 11am-6pm, Sat 11am-2pm. Hi-Temp Fabrications (79 Perry Street, Buffalo, NY 14203, 852-5656, appointment only): Phism: Sorry, Grandma, Senior Thesis BFA Art Exhibition & Experiential Ecosystems; video projections by Mary Beth Osborn. Indigo Art Gallery (47 Allen Street, Buffalo, NY 14202, 984-9572 indigoartbuffalo. squarespace.com): Collisions, installation & paintings by George Afedzi, artist talk May 16 at 1pm. On view through May 30. Wed & Fri 12-6pm, Thu 12-7pm, Sat 12-3pm, and by appointment Sundays and Mondays. Kenan Center House Gallery (433 Locust Street, Lockport, NY 14094, 433-2617 kenancenter.org/arts/gallery.asp): Extraordinary Forms IV: The Ceramics Legacy of Robert Wood. On view through June 7. Mon-Fri 12-5pm & Sun 2-5pm. Karpeles Manuscript Library (North Hall) (220 North Street, Buffalo, NY 14201, 8854139, rain.org/~karpeles): On view: Buffalo Boxers: A Cultural Celebration. Tue-Sun 11am-4pm. Karpeles Manuscript Museum (Porter Hall) (453 Porter Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14201, 885-4139, rain.org/~karpeles): On view Maps of the United States, and upcoming Early Maps of the World. Tue-Sun 11am4pm. Lockside Art Center (21 Main Street, Lockport, NY 14094, 478-0239, locksideartcenter.com): A Brushing Impression, solo

ed matter—around a recessed portion usually containing a photo or other graphic item ostensibly related to the title or subject of the piece. Several of these are on Ani DiFranco songs. Joyce Hill appears to be a big fan. Evette Slaughter’s works are as much paintings as collages, abstract, with substantial color blocks and occasional add-in fragments of text, and in one case a portion of city map, for a work called Urban Landscape. Daniel Rodgers’s works employ fragmented and distressed photos, and the surfaces of his works are abraded so that it’s hard to tell just what the surface is made of or just what’s been done to it. Several of the works include partial views of Japan’s Mount Fuji. And Russell Ram’s works use old photos, old graphic illustrations, old post cards. Two of his pieces are on the theme of cold weather in Buffalo. Another recollects Buffalo’s iconic Deco restaurant chain. It’s called Blue Collar Coffee. P This exhibit continues through the end of the month.

exhibition by Manning McCandlish. On view through May, Fri-Sun 12-4pm. Market Street Art Studios (247 Market Street, Lockport, NY 14094, 478-0248, marketstreetstudios.com): Sue McKenna Retrospective on view through June 14. Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 11am-4pm. Manuel Barreto Furniture (430 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14202, 867-8937, manuelbarreto.com): Nothing Happens Twice, work by Jozef Bajus. Exhibit on view through May. Tue & Wed 11am-5pm, Thu-Sat 10am-6pm. Meibohm Fine Arts (478 Main Street, East Aurora, NY 14052, 652-0940, meibohmfinearts.com): On a Wing, recent watercolor works by Kateri Ewing, on view through May 23. Tue-Sat 9:30am5:30pm. Native American Museum of Art at Smokin’ Joe’s (2293 Saunders Settlement Road, Sanborn, NY 14123, 261-9251): Open year round and free. Exhibits Iroquois Artists work. 7am-9pm. Niagara Arts and Cultural Center (1201 Pine Avenue, Niagara Falls, NY 14301, 2827530, thenacc.org): Buffalo Niagara Art Association Spring Show. Opening Sun May 17 and on view through June 14. Mon-Fri 9am-5pm, Sat & Sun 12-4pm. Nichols School Gallery at the Glenn & Audrey Flickinger Performing Arts Center (1250 Amherst Street, Buffalo, NY 14216, 3326300, nicholsschool.org/artshows?rc=0): Parent Art: recent work of Nichols School Parents on view through June 22. MonFri 8am-4pm, Closed Sat & Sun. Nina Freudenheim Gallery (140 North Street, Buffalo, NY 14201, 882-5777, ninafreudenheimgallery.com): Lilt, New work by Kyle Butler. Opening Sat May 16, 6-8pm. TuesFri 10am-5pm, Sat & Mon open by appointment only. Paint the Town Studio (74 Allen Street, Buffalo, NY 14202, 465-6682): Don’t Drink The Kool-Aid, new Work by Nekita Thomas, on view through May 8. Pausa Art House (19 Wadsworth Street, Buffalo, NY 14201, 697-9069, pausaarthouse.com): Life’s a Beach, by Peter Caruso. Thu-Sat 6pm-12am, Live music every night. Prism (MyBuffaloPride, 224 Allen Street, Buffalo, NY 14201): Retrospective, 5 years of illustration by Mickey Harmon. On view through June 1. Thu & Fri 4-8pm, Sat & Sun 3-7pm. Project 308 Gallery (308 Oliver Street, North Tonawanda, NY 14120, 523-0068, project308gallery.com): Planetary Perspectives, poster designs by Eric John-

son. Opening May 8, on view though May 15. Tue & Thu 7-9pm and by appointment. Queen City Gallery (617 Main Street, Buffalo, NY, 14203, 868-8183, queencitygallery. tripod.com): Rotating members work on view. Tue-Fri 11am-4pm and by appointment. Open late every First Friday from 6-10pm and every Thursday Open Mic, 7-9pm. Squeaky Wheel (617 Main Street, Buffalo, NY 14203, squeaky.org): Jillian McDonald, Valley of the Deer. Tue-Sat 12-5pm. Starlight Studio and Art Gallery (340 DelP aware Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14202, starlightstudio.org): A Musical Interlude: New & Selected paintings by Gary L. Wolfe on view through May 29. Mon-Fri 9-4pm. Studio Hart (65 Allen Street, Buffalo, NY 14202, 536-8337, studiohart.com): Water’s Edge, group exhibition. Tue-Fri 11:30am-3:30pm, Sat 12-4pm, and open every First Friday 6-9pm. Sugar City (1239 Niagara Street, Buffalo, NY 14213, buffalosugarcity.org): Body is Home, mixed media work by Jaime Schmidt. On view through May 16. Space frequently open for events, reference website. TGW@497 Gallery (497 Franklin Street, Buffalo, NY 14202, 949-6604): The Collage, work by Joan Fitzgerald, Patti Harris, Marie Hassett, Joyce Hill, Gerald Mead, Russell Ram, Evette Slaughter & Daniel Rodgers. Wed-Fri 12-5pm, Sat 12-3pm. UB Anderson Gallery (1 Martha Jackson Place, Buffalo, NY 14214, 829-3754, ubartgalleries.org): Transmaterial, a group exhibition curated by Alicia Marvan. Martha Jackson Graphics: Prints from the UB Art Galleries Permanent Collection; These Fragile Truths, UB MFA Thesis by Tricia Butski; Our Own Devices: Exploring the Tools of Annette Cravens World. On view through June 28. Wed-Sat 11am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm. UB Art Gallery (North Campus, Lower Art Gallery) (201 Center for the Arts, Room B45, Buffalo, NY, 14260, 645-6913, art.buffalo. edu/resources/lower-gallery): Phantom Vibrations, curated by Liz Bayan, works by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Clement Valla, Kris Verdonck, Future Death Toll, Jillian Mayer, Erik Carter and Tyler Madsen. On view through May 16. Tue-Fri 11am-5pm, Sat 1-5pm. Western New York Book Arts Center (468 Washington Street, Buffalo, NY 14203, 438-1430, wnybookarts.org): Through A Dirty Window, work by Joseph Scheer. Opening Thu May 14, 6-7;30pm. On view through June 26. Wed-Sat 12P 6pm.

PUBLIC QUESTIONNAIRE THEATER

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PLEASE PROOF

THE PUBLIC QUESTIONNAIRE:

ANTHONY ALCOCER BY ANTHONY CHASE

FOR SUCH AN AFFABLE FELLOW,

Anthony Alcocer has played an awful lot of nasty characters. As Treat in Orphans at Second Generation, he had significant violence issues; he was ruthless as Injun Joe in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at New Phoenix. He’s been fascistic Javert in Les Miz (Rocking Horse Productions) and sociopathic Prince John in The Adventure of Robin Hood for Theatre of Youth. There’s even a Count Dracula (American Repertory Theatre) in his resume. Now he is playing Elliot Ortiz in Water by the Spoonful at Road Less Traveled, an unforgiving man whose spiteful nature lets him justify pushing his emotionally fragile mother, a woman in recovery from drug addiction, over the edge. Maybe it’s his ability to sneer while letting his coal-black eyes go dead. Maybe it’s the way he lets his characters smile smugly while others suffer. Rest assured; it’s an act. Alcocer’s joyful sense of fun comes through in a less frequent but equally satisfying range of lighthearted roles, like goofy Aldolfo in The Drowsy Chaperone at MusicalFare earlier this season. Whatever the role, Alcocer commits totally. There is never the glimmer of a smirk when he lands a deadpan joke. There is never a hint of hesitation or actorly “please like me” behavior when he plays the villain. Alcocer goes full-throttle for every role and it has made him very popular on the Buffalo theater scene. In just five years, he has racked up an impressive roster of roles here. “I can’t put a price on how Buffalo has accepted me as soon as I arrived here,” says Alcocer. “The relationships I’ve formed and the collaborative efforts from one and all still make me grin from ear to ear every day.” Water by the Spoonful is a Pulitzer-winning play by Quiara Alegria Hudes, the second part of a trilogy based on events in her own family. Summaries of the plot tend to diminish its rich interweaving of fully drawn characters. It is often described as a play about drug addiction. That’s the least of it. The play explores the ways in which our lives interconnect, either to help us navigate the world, or to defeat us. To be fair, there is much more to Alcocer’s character than mere cruelity. He is a man who endured a difficult upbringing who is now tormented by the memory of his military service in the Iraq War. His emotional injuries are mirrored in the permanent physical disability he acquired in Iraq, and he is literally haunted by the ghost of an innocent civilian he likely killed. This experience, ironically, fuels his inability to forgive others, while heightening his sense of life’s injustices. The Road Less Traveled production, directed by Scott Behrend, is powerful and elegant affair, with an exquisite set design by Dyan Burlingame featuring an arresting water fall beneath a surreal tree canopy, dramatically lit by John Rickus. Alcocer sees his character in the context of the play’s history in a way that helps him bring reality to Elliot’s story. “[Quiara Alegria Hudes] used her real life relationships to explore addiction, recovery, and the sources of strength and support required to fulfill the journey,” he observes. “Using the actual events in her cousin Elliot’s life to write this incredible character is thrilling. Knowing that it wasn’t made up on the spot for dramatic effect, that there is an actual living and breathing Elliot who went through these current and relatable issues is a wonderful chance for me to be authentic and attempt to convey the complexity of very current and real issues.” Water by the Spoonful continues through May 24. Here, Anthony Alcocer submits to The Public Questionnaire:

What word would your friends use to describe you? All of the answers that I received were conveniently rolled into one word: charismatic. What aspect of the character you are currently playing is most unlike you? Elliot has a ton of baggage. Fractious relationships, guarded secrets, haunting past. He keeps almost all of it bottled up. I’m thankfully much more free of spirit, and someone who tries to solve my problems head-on and right away. What aspect of the character you are currently playing is most like your own personality? Elliot and I both have a short fuse, but are softies when it comes to our mothers. When and where were you the happiest? Camping with my family and friends, every year, in the woods, with no clocks, no agendas, and no cares. What is your idea of hell on earth? Stuck in an elevator with very loud, loquacious people who have terrible grammar. What is your greatest fear? Exile. Which talent do you most wish you had? The ability to use language in order to blend in with any group of people, anywhere, and therefore be welcome at any time. What superpower do you most wish you had? Control, sense, and alteration of The Force. What would you change about your appearance? I truly wish I were a few inches taller. What trait do you most despise in others? Passive aggression. What trait to you most despise in yourself? Vindictiveness. I wish I were more forgiving. What do you most value in your friends? Their willingness to howl at the moon with me and love me like a brother. What do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment? A continuing work, penning my parent’s love story. What is your guilty pleasure? Reading public comments online about sports articles. People will spew vitriol about one another if their hometown team is involved, and it always cracks me up. What character from fiction do you identify with most? I live my life by a certain set of rules, and so does Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm. What person from history do you identify with most? Brigadier General Joshua L. Chamberlain, because sometimes you just have to do whatever it takes to hold the end of the line. What do you consider to be the most overrated virtue? Piety. On what occasion do you lie? I’ve been giving the same B.S. excuse to get out of speeding tickets since I started driving. What was the subject of your last Google search? “Best stain for decks.” Amy and I bought our first house. If you come back in another life, what person or thing would you like to be? The fearless jungle cat I was always meant to be. What is your most prized possession? The bond I have with my siblings. What role, in which you will never be cast, is actually perfect for you? I fantasize about playing a live-action Jack Skellington on stage. What is your motto? Knowing a little bit P about a lot can take you a long way.

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in a beat-up building with beer cans stacked high on basically every flat surface but the foosball table, which remains open for impromptu games. It’s got all the sleaze of a well-worn frat house minus the bland, privileged pretension of actual fraternity kids. The beer cans bring to mind the cover of the band’s self-titled debut EP, which features guitarist/vocalist Steven Floyd, drummer Ryan Schlia, guitarist Matthew Zych and bassist Jake Strawser toasting the camera behind a table littered with cigarette butts, beef jerky, pizza boxes, and a whole lot of empty PBRs and Old Viennas. An American flag hangs in the background and in the foreground someone has stabbed a pocket knife into the table. I ask Schlia, the band’s drummer, if they drank all of those beers for the photo or if they’d collected them over time. He sighs, telling me that they’d drank everything while trying to brainstorm a different cover photo. The band, he admits, might have a tendency toward “extravagant things.” A more positive spin: The four members of the Slums are guys who tend to push each other. Proof: the drinking, the fact that Strawser ate a week-old oatmeal raisin cookie just to get a rise out of everyone during practice, and the sheer volume at which the band plays. Before they start practicing, Strawser hands me a heavy set of headphones to protect my hearing, and once they start, I’m grateful. But I don’t see a single member opt for earplugs. Hearing damage aside, the upside outweighs these potential downsides, and the upside is this: when you bring together four musicians who want to impress each other so sincerely, the result is likely to be interesting. In the beginning, the Slums was four friends who all loved hardcore. That influence is obvious: Listen to vocalist/guitarist Steven Floyd’s screams at the beginning of “Hot Skins” off of the EP if you don’t believe me. But Floyd says that the band never planned to fully give into their affection for heavier music. “We have in the back of our minds that we don’t want to be a hardcore band,” Floyd says. “It was more like indie music that was super influenced by hardcore…but now it isn’t so black-and-white. We’ve got a nice gray going on.” THE SLUMS PRACTICE

10 THE PUBLIC / MAY 13, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

It’s a departure from the members’ past projects. Floyd, for instance, used to front local indie heavyweights the Malones, who had more in common with the Strokes than Every Time I Die. Combined with the pounding of the rhythm section, the dual guitar heroics of Floyd and Zych contribute quite a bit to the band’s melodic heaviness. Say what you will about the music of the Slums, but it isn’t lazy. There’s always a melody or a shift in the arrangement to hold on to. Floyd and Zych are both active guitarists, and if this leads to a bit of noise and confusion at practice (“We definitely overthink things and fall into a spiral of hell,” admits Zych), it makes the end product that much more intricate and cohesive. But as much as the band’s je ne sais pas comes from the members’ interplay, it’s also the product of Floyd’s creative energy. Floyd brings parts of songs to practice for the band to work out, and despite the fact that the music they end up with might sound completely different, he’s still the Slums’ creative catalyst. This fact is made clear when Floyd leaves the room to grab another beer. I ask if anyone has any shit to talk on him while he’s gone, and the band playfully indulges my joke, sarcastically slinging a few faux insults. But it gets quiet pretty fast and Strawser turns to me. “That kid’s the backbone of this band,” he says. “Everyone’s extremely talented…but he’s a special kind of weird.” I get the feeling that Floyd might equivocate on that point if he heard it being made. As talented a musician as he is, he’s pretty bashful when you ask him about his music directly. When I ask him what a particular song is about, for instance, he looks down at his feet and says something vague about “feeling shitty and being shitty.” The band, meanwhile, is all ears for his answer, and I infer that Floyd probably hasn’t been all that hot to dissect his lyrics with them, either. That shyness, however, melts away when the Slums resume playing. Floyd screams his lungs out, Schlia beats his drums, Zych shreds out a melody, and Strawser stands in the middle with his bass, holding things together. My ears verge on bleeding and I look around, expecting the volume to shake all the empty beer cans off the tables and onto the ground. But everything stays exactly where it belongs.

PILE [INDIE ROCK] A friend in New York City sent me a text the other day. It said, “you have to go see Pile.” His reasoning: This Boston-based band is making moves. Pitchfork called the somewhere between metal-indieand-pop band ”the overwhelming consensus pick in the Massachusetts indie scene for the next to blow,” and this may be true, especially on the heels of their March 2015 release, You’re Better Than This. By this point you might be asking the fully legitimate question: What does Pile sound like? One commenter on the band’s Bandcamp page had this to say: “Cut a hole in a lime and squeeze it in your eye—that’s fuckin Pile.” That’s actually, somehow, a pretty accurate statement. Some other accurate assessments include: “Spiders in my butt” and “The Pixies and Slint have a bastard child.” In all seriousness, Pile so expertly combines the sublime with the manic that you’ll barely realize that you’ve thrown yourself into the mosh pit after one of the band’s abrupt, angular transitions because you’ll still be numb from frontman Rick Maguire’s lulling lyrics and falsely comforting, twangy guitar licks. (see “Bump a Grape” from the band’s 2012 full length, Dripping.) Don’t be afraid of Pile, though: Their brash, post-stoner-rock riffage may knock you into outer space with a twirling, Hulk-like uppercut, but at least they’ll make sure that while you’re up there, running out of oxygen, you’re too high to notice. Pile comes to Mohawk Place on Sunday, May 17 with Buffalo’s overwhelming consensus pick for the next to blow, JOHNS; this week’s Spotlight band, the Slums; and new comers Rosy. -CORY PERLA

PILE w/ THE SLUMS, JOHNS, & ROSEY SUN, MAY 17 / 7PM / $7 MOHAWK PLACE 47 E MOHAWK ST, BUFFALO

DAILYPUBLIC.COM / MAY 13, 2015 / THE PUBLIC

12 THE PUBLIC / MAY 13, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

TWO HELMETS / PATRICK FORAN’s current exhibit at Niagara University’s Castellani Museum examines the ways in which coverings obscure the face, providing anonymity and autonomy for the subject. DAILYPUBLIC.COM / MAY 13, 2015 / THE PUBLIC 13

EVENTS CALENDAR PUBLIC APPROVED

IN PRINT

THE PUBLIC PRESENTS: RADARADA, ZSD, & VITAMIN D DUO THURSDAY MAY 14

“Take It Slow” (Song)

RIYL: Japandroids, Built to Spill, Newish Star

The follow-up single to the duo’s early 2015 EP, Tell It to the Fudge, “Take It Slow” is a curt and fast paced indie rock tune with shouty, anthemic vocals. The basement super-pair is made up of members of Newish Star, Dream Journal, Softlines, and Mapmaker.

SIXTIES FUTURE “Skeleton” (Song)

RIYL: Teddybears, The National

Featuring the former bass player of Sleepy Hahas, Sixties Future premiered its first two singles last week. The stand-out track of the two, “Skeleton,” features bassy vocals, retro organs, and a very “Heroes”-like opening melody.

8PM / NIETZSCHE'S, 248 ALLEN ST. / $5 [PARTY] Radarada sounds suspiciously like “yadda yadda” and basically means the same thing. But don’t let the name fool you—the band does more than just run off at the mouth. At its core, Radarada is about fun and chemistry. An amalgam of funk and jazz with a lounge-like undercurrent and an understated hip-hop finish, the local six-piece sounds unlike anything else happening right now in Buffalo, gaining them a decent-sized following. Formed from a rhythm section (Bryan Segarra on drums and bassist Colin Brydalski) that originated in a jazz band at St. Joe’s prep some years prior, Radarada took shape when a pair of local emcees—Wza (also of Equality, Knowledge, and Light) and Tommy Too—joined up to push the sound in a decidedly hip-hop direction. The tone is tempered by the feminine touch of classically trained pianist/violinist/vocalist, Littlecake and guitar licks a la new member Jared Tinkham. The results are often hilarious, sometimes serious, and always funky. Sample-wizard Wza took a few minutes to answer some questions following an exhausting Porchfest weekend, chatting about what makes Radarada tick in advance of an upcoming Public Presents gig at Nietzsche’s on Thursday, May 14 along with ZSD and Vitamin D. Thanks to our friends at The Good Neighborhood, those who bring a musical instrument to be donated to Music is Art may enter free of admission. What brought Radarada together? I was chillin’ at Mr. Goodbar late one night, and this dude recognized me from one of my Youtube videos— very cool, because that hardly ever happens. He was trying to start a jazz/ hip-hop band with a friend and said I should stop by. I brought my sampler over a few days later and we started jamming and spittin’ raps. Over time, with different people stopping by and adding whatever instrument or vocals, we eventually formed a band out of what was working best and who seemed serious about taking it further. Is Radarada making fun of what hip-hop has become? It’s more about being free with who you are and how you express yourself whether through music, or really just how you live your life...because, swear to god, just living life on a daily basis is an art form. We definitely aren’t trying to make fun of anything or sound like anything. So, I would say it’s more about just remembering to have fun. You guys don’t play outside of Buffalo at this time—are you content to keep Radarada a local sensation? We definitely want to blow up and have big houses in warm sunny places...but we also love

THURSDAY MAY 14 Big Gigantic 7pm Rapids Theatre, 1711 Main St. $40-$45

CCDS (DEATH SQUAD)

“Murdered by Ghouls” (Song) The experimental drum duo delivered an acoustic performance of “Murdered by Ghouls,” captured on tape within the grain elevators at Silo City. The acoustically rich silos prove to be the perfect complement to the pair’s synchronized tribal beat downs.

LOCAL SHOW PICK OF THE WEEK MAX GARCIA CONOVER SPORTSMEN’S TAVERN 326 AMHERST ST SUN, MAY 17 / 8PM / $12

[ELECTRONIC/DANCE] Cringe-worthy buzz words like livetronica and jamtronica are unfortunate— bands like Disco Biscuits, STS9, and Lotus are often branded with these tags. If we can all agree never to use these regrettable portmanteaus again, then we’ll all lead healthier, more satisfying lives, and we’ll be able to talk about talented bands like Big Gigantic with a little less stress. Without resorting to using those nasty genre titles, Big Gigantic are actually exactly that—a live band, drummer Jeremy Salken and sax player Dominic Lalli—backed by electronic beats and synth lines. Unlike their hybrid electronic brethren, this band kicks in a bit of hip hop and jazz, especially on their latest record, Nocturnal. In the last few years, Big Gigantic has gained a considerable following by giving away most of their music for free. The first time they came to town in 2010, they played to a small crowd at Soundlab. This time they’ll play to the 1700 capacity Rapids Theatre on Thursday, May 15 with special guests Snails, Grabbitz, and Almond presented by Castle Music Group. -CORY PERLA

Beau Sasser’s Escape Plan 9pm Buffalo Iron Works, 49 Illinois St. $5-$7 [FUNK] For those familiar with Alan Evans and have caught his various bands in Buffalo, you may be already familiar with Beau Sasser’s Escape Plan. The guy whom the group is named after, Beau Sasser, was the longtime keyboardist of the

14 THE PUBLIC / MAY 13, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

Buffalo and are happy living here. Right now, we’re just playing out as much as possible and working on new material. How do you guys write? Is it improvisational? It’s different every time. Sometimes I’ll be playing a chop on my sampler and everybody perks up and we look at each other like “yoooo” and we start writing a song around it. Sometimes Colin will be playing the bass and the same thing happens, or maybe someone comes up with a funny couple lines that make us all laugh, so we start writing a song around those words. Would you say there are particular artists or albums that are especially influential to the band’s sound? We all listen to drastically different music. I listen to a lot of EDM Trap music; Tommy Too listens to dudes like Common and De la Soul; Littlecake is classically trained and listens to all sorts; Bryan also listens to a wide variety and always has some new shit to show you when you see him. Colin loves jazz. Our freshly minted guitarist, Jared, listens to a lot of rock and I’m pretty sure he’s played in some metal bands, but also likes jazz... huge mix. -CHRISTOPHER JOHN TREACY

Alan Evans Trio/Playonbrother, while one of the guitarists, Danny Mayer, was also in the group. The new formation is fresh and carries some commonalities—the greatest being the rock and roll meets funk spirit. The band will be at Buffalo Iron Works this Thursday, May 14. -JEREMIAH SHEA

Bob Marley 7pm Helium Comedy Club, 30 Mississippi St. $15-$31 [COMEDY] Standup comic Bob Marley, not to be confused with the famous reggae artist who tried in vain to pursue a comedy career (just kidding), stops by the Helium Comedy Club on Thursday, May 14 through Saturday, May 16. Named one of Variety’s “Top 10 Comics to Watch,” Marley uses observational material for his (highly) animated routines. -KP

The Body with Full of Hell

Gas Chamber/Cages; British hardcore band, the Flex; Washington D.C.’s Red Death, and Rochester doom-metal band Black Houses for a show at Sugar City on Thursday, May 14. -CP

FRIDAY MAY 15 Global Justice Talk 7pm Villa Maria College, 240 Pine Ridge Rd. free [DISCUSSION] On Friday, May 15 Dr. Carol Zinn, internationally-recognized justice and peace advocate will discuss the connection between local peace efforts and global realities at Villa Maria College’s Social Hall. She served eight years on the United Nations Economic and Social Council, engaged in issues such as poverty, human rights, peace, and disarmament. -THE PUBLIC STAFF

5pm Sugar City, 1239 Niagara St. $10

Lazlo Hollyfeld

[METAL] For the last 10 years, Thrill Jockey Records duo the Body have been creating music that can be described as nothing less than crushing—emotionally and sonically. “They’re also one of the loudest bands I’ve ever seen,” says Andy Czuba, promoter and a satellite member of hardcore punk band Full of Hell. The Body’s latest full length record, 2013’s Christ, Redeemers is challenging, to say the least. The Providence, Rhode Island-based duo—drummer Lee Buford and guitarist Chip King—excel at creating barbarous music that exists at the outer edges of metal where experimental noise environments collide with grandiose, sludge-metal arrangements. The Body will join Full of Hell; experimental metal super-collaboration

[ROCK] A true Buffalo original, Lazlo Hollyfeld creates heady sonic textures that blend melodies built from vintage synths, breezy guitar lines and the occasional vibraphone cameo, often set to rhythmically challenging beats that are spiked with lots of percussive doodads. The results are delightfully hypnotic, but the jazzy timing will keep you on your toes—and there aren't any lyrics to muddy the music, either. This is an experience for people that truly enjoy listening. Hear for yourself on Friday, May 15 at Mohawk Place when they're joined by Applennium, Johnny Nobody, and Alex Berkley. -CJT

8pm Mohawk Place, 47 E Mohawk St. $5

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YELAWOLF THURSDAY MAY 14 7PM / TOWN BALLROOM, 681 MAIN ST. / $20-$99 [HIP HOP] Holding your center is not an easy task for a musician these days, especially one who is looking to capture the hearts of millions. Alabama-born hip hop artist Yelawolf is looking to do just that with his new record, Love Story. Produced with help from Eminem, the new record is a testament to everything that makes Yelawolf unique, and tells a raw and honest story from his point of view. To prepare for his takeover of the Town Ballroom on Thursday, May 14, The Public spoke with Yelawolf about out how he made Love Story, what it reflects, and the struggles of modern creativity. Every one of your albums, especially Love Story, really demonstrate a huge range of style both musically and lyrically. Would you say you’ve always been one to embrace diversity and change in music? Hip hop can lock you into something specific and trap you there or do the exact opposite and bring out your creativity and madness. You can choose to stick to a style and stay there, or you can choose to be different and mix it up. There’s a huge amount of Southern rock and blues influence in your music. How do you think those styles come together with hip hop? Do you think a blending of styles reinvigorates the music, or is it a reflection of who you are as a person and your history? It’s just about what makes a good song. I don’t walk into the studio and say “Let’s do a Foghat meets NWA track.” We just go in and we jam. Every person has a role, and if you let people do what they do, then the music comes out. It’s genre-less right now, which is a cool and dangerous place to be as an artist. You could play the music we’ve made anywhere. There’s this line in “Whiskey in a Bottle” about taking pain and using it as therapy through music. I’m curious to know

more of your thoughts about music as a conduit for pain and suffering. It’s my only conduit. Everyone’s got their own route. I’m attracted to darker themes, and this album has a darker tone. It brings out painful moments and makes great songs. That’s the way great songs are written. They come out of that pain. You’ve stated that on Love Story you were really able to flex your creativity and really got to implement your original vision for a record. To you as an artist, do you think a lot of other artists that you see around are being forced to compromise their visions? I think more and more artists are independent and don’t have anyone to answer to. I had an organic sound starting, and then some people wanted to mess with that, so me and Marshall (Mathers) just got rid of them, straight up. We were the bosses. A lot of people compromise, but there’s an awakening going on. Kids today can just go on the internet and pull up so many different artists. It’s all at their fingertips for them to piece together, and there’s going to be some amazing upcoming artists because of that. I can’t even imagine all the great artists coming soon. Hopefully I find a few of them myself. -KRIS KIELICH

Downlink + Dieselboy

Lilt

9pm The Waiting Room, 334 Delaware Ave. $18-20

6pm Nina Freudenheim Gallery, 140 North St. free

[ELECTRONIC/DANCE] Veteran underground bass innovator Dieselboy and dubstep maven Downlink are hitting the decks at Waiting Room this Friday as a part of their 2015 Blood Sweat & Bass tour. Long known for pushing the envelope within the genre of drum and bass, Dieselboy's mixes have been heralded as "cinematic" and "intoxicating" from bass critics and as a DJ, he's a purist when it comes his craft; favoring the specialized integrity of spinning vinyl over the pervasive pre-programmed methods of today. His touring partner, Downlink entered the scene circa 2007 and has been showering crowds with his spasmodic and intricately constructed brand of dubstep ever since. Furthermore, they'll be joined by acclaimed Seattle based live drum and bass drummer, KJ Sawkwa, who will be playing a full set from his half acoustic half electronic set-up. Definitely an event that lovers of jungle, drum and bass, and dubstep are not going to want to miss out on. -JEANETTE CHIN

[ART] Make a plan to find yourself out and about in Allentown this Saturday because the Lenox Hotel Nina Freudenheim is presenting new works by upand-coming artist Kyle Butler. Lilt is composed of a series of abstract paintings made with acrylic and spray paint that evoke a sense of communication and movement. Freudenheim has dedicated herself to the arts in Buffalo for more than 35 years with a keen eye for seeking out talent, and this exhibit is no exception. Since moving to Buffalo in 2008 for graduate school, Butler has since made this city his home. His broad practice includes paintings, sculpture, and curatorial projects. If you are an admirer of fine art and want to catch an artist coming into his own, I wouldn’t hesitate seeing this show. -TINA DILLMAN

CONTINUED ON PAGE 16

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www.torontourbanrootsfest.com DAILYPUBLIC.COM / MAY 13, 2015 / THE PUBLIC 15

EVENTS CALENDAR CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15

PUBLIC APPROVED What the Beck?: A Tribute to Beck 9pm Nietzsche's, 248 Allen St. $5-$10 [TRIBUTE] Say what you will about Beck Hansen— Kanye West certainly has—but the man is in search of something…a seeker. Arguably, seekers make more compelling artists, and even his head-scratching devotion to Scientology is evidence that Beck is after some greater truth. Throughout his career, Beck has shape-shifted through personas that, while perhaps not as dramatic as Bowie's, have showcased different aspects of his musicality and viewpoint. On Friday, May 15 Buffalo’s premier (only?) 10-piece Beck tribute band, What The Beck?, will honor the famed singer/songwriter at Nietzsche’s. Nirvana tribute band Big Bottle Rocket opens the show. -CJT

Big Leg Emma 8pm Buffalo Iron Works, 49 Illinois St. $8-$12 [FOLK] One of the perks of being a Western New Yorker is having great music being created right in our backyard. Regardless of your preference, the area has a great mix of bands. One gem in the scene is Jamestown’s Big Leg Emma who hunker down in Americana and mix in the likes of folk, bluegrass, and rock. The band is coming to Buffalo Iron Works this Friday, May 15, with the one-manband opener, the Suitcase Junket. -JS

Amid/In WNY Part 3 8pm Hallwalls, 341 Delaware Ave. free [ART] The crew at Hallwalls (John Massier, Kyle Butler and Rebecca Wing) are at it again, presenting Part 3 of their ambitious survey show of contemporary artists working in Western New York. By now they have visited more than 90 studios and spent countless hours conversing over the theme of each show. Successfully done, each exhibit has had its own distinct feel and presentation with the gallery transforming into their sought-out vision. This is a must-see show with an unexpected group combo of Adrian Bertolone, Denton Crawford, Flatsitter, Pam Glick, Bethany Krull, Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge, Ian McCrohan and Allen Topolski. You’ll have to see this one for yourself. -TD

BUFFALO INTERNATIONAL JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL FRIDAY MAY 15 3PM / DIPSON AMHERST THEATER, 3500 MAIN S. / $10 EACH OR $50 FOR SIX [FILM] This week brings the 30th anniversary of the Buffalo International Jewish Film Festival, one of the oldest such events in North America. To mark this momentous occasion, the festival’s organizers are doing nothing different, which is great considering that this is Western New York’s most reliable annual presentation of quality world cinema. Why mess with a good thing? This year’s lineup includes 17 features and two shorts, all area premieres and most of them otherwise undistributed in the US. Among the expected highlights are The Outrageous Sophie Tucker, a documentary using newly discovered materials about the iconic entertainer; For a Woman, writer-director Diane Kurys’ (Entre Nous) drama based on the story of her parents’ marriage after surviving a French internment camp; Joachim Prinz: I Shall Not Be Silent, about the rabbi who was expelled from Germany by the Nazis and came to the US to become a leader of the civil rights movement; and from Argentina, the psychological thriller God’s Slave, in which a planned bombing pit two extremists from opposite ends of the Arab-Israeli conflict against each other. The festival runs from Friday, May 15 through Thursday, May 21 at the Amherst Theater, followed by an encore of all films in the week beginning May 31 at the Jewish Community Center’s Maxine and Robert Theatre, 2640 North Forest Road in Getzville. For more information visit bijff.com or call 204-2084. -M. FAUST

SATURDAY MAY 16 Steelfest 2015 10am Steel Plant Museum of Western New York, 100 Lee St. free [FUN] Since 1984 Buffalo’s Steel Plant Museum has been offering residents a look back to the industry that put the WNY economy on its back during the postwar years. On Saturday, May 16 the museum will celebrate its collection in the first ever Steelfest and call upon local craftsmen and food trucks to provide goods for sale. Steelfest will also be exhibiting a major retrospective of photographer Patricia Layman Bazelon’s iconic images of Buffalo’s industrial history, entitled Fascinating Forms. -AARON LOWINGER

Canal Street String Band 8pm Pausa art house, 19 Wadsworth St. $7 [FOLK] For pure joy in performance, it’s hard to find a local outfit to match the Canal Street String Band, who will celebrate the release of their second recording this Saturday, May 16, at PAUSA art house. The trio comprises three local musicians who (probably) won’t mind being called grey-hairs: founding member Dave Ruch, who plays guitar, banjo, and mandolin; Phil Banaszak, a former New York State fiddle champion who also adds some mandolin and guitar; and Buffalo Music Hall-of-Famer and jack-of-all-strings Jim Whitford, who, on any given weekend night, seems ready to play anything for any band in town. All sing and all write songs, which fall right into line with their chosen milieu: old-time folk and popular music of the Americas. The new record, Wah Hoo!, both showcases and underplays the virtuosity of each player. That’s a luxury true talent affords itself: modesty in deference to the whole. If you want to hear this combo really sing, really push one another along, you have to hear them live. No better place than the intimate back room of PAUSA. -GEOFF KELLY

Melt Banana 6pm Mohawk Place, 47 E Mohawk St. $14-$16 [PUNK] This Japanese collective is proof positive that punk energy transcends cultural barriers. Based around two central figures—vocalist Yasuko Onuki and guitarist Ichirou Agata—Melt Banana churns out a mind-bending sonic assault that's experimental and noisy one minute, then listenable in the punk tradition the next. Agata's distorted loops and pedal-borne skronk provide suite-like gateways into more standard song structures played at dizzying speeds. Onuki quips, yelps and squeals— mostly in English—giving the uninitiated something to try and hold onto. If it sounds too esoteric to find

KEVIN SMITH SUNDAY MAY 17 7PM / HELIUM COMEDY CLUB, 30 MISSISSIPPI ST. / $30-$38 [COMEDY] The indie filmmaker who introduced the nation to “snowballing,” Kevin Smith, visits Helium Comedy Club on Sunday, May 17 and Monday, May 18. Smith garnered a cult following with his film Clerks (1994), followed by six films joined by the same microcosmic continuity (known as the “View Askewniverse”) and featuring a troupe of characters, trapped in various stages of arrested development (or dead). Here we list some of our favorite characters from the mind of Kevin Smith. 1. Jay & Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith): The most apparent connecting tissue between the films, the cartoonish drug-dealing duo that loiters in malls and outside convenient stores – One can’t shut up and the other is mute, save for one scene 2. Hicks Cousins (Brian O’Holloran): Dante Hicks bookends the View Askewinverse, appearing in both Clerks films and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. O’Halloran returns as another Hicks cousin in the others. He’s at his funniest in Mallrats as dating contestant, Gil Hicks, who kisses “like a jackhammer.” Hopefully we’re introduced to another Hicks in Mallrats 2. 3. Julie Dwyer: Randall ( Jeff Anderson) dubs her funeral the “social event of the year” before accidentally flipping her casket. In Mallrats– which takes place the day before Clerks– we learn that Julie was to be a contestant on “Truth or Date,” and died frantically swimming laps because TS ( Jeremy London) told her that people look fat on television. 4. Brodie Bruce (Jason Lee) Brodie maintains Mallrats on the strength of his inspired pop culture riffs, cynical one-liners, and stinkpalm revenge tactics. 5. Walter Flannagan: Both real and fake, Walter Flannagan is immortalized in Smith’s dialogue as a shared cousin of Randall and Brodie who died during an ill-advised, yet bold attempt at auto-fellatio. The real Walter Flannagan appears in various roles, but his most iconic is Walt Grove, who has his own catch phrase, “Tell em’ Steve-Dave!” -KELLIE POWELL

16 THE PUBLIC / MAY 13, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

CALENDAR EVENTS an audience, think again: Melt Banana's been touring the world for 20 years and opened some dates for Tool in 2007. They'll surely rattle the walls at Mohawk Place on Saturday, May 16. -CJT

PUBLIC APPROVED

Silent Graphic Novel Reading Party 2pm Dreamland, 387 Franklin St. free [LIT] If you’re a graphic novel collector, you probably know that those things can be expensive. Maybe you’re dying to read the latest installment of Sandman or Transmetropolitan, but you just can’t (or refuse to) swing the price tag. Well, the fine people at Dreamland want to help you out: On Saturday, May 16 grab some of your favorite graphic novels and bring them over to Dreamland where they’ll host a Silent Graphic Novel Reading Party. They’ll turn the gallery into a silent zone for eight hours where folks can trade comics and graphic novels—old and new—and catch up on any editions they may have missed. This is a free event, but bring some extra cash in case you’d like to pitch into the pizza fund. -CP

Cool Dad County Fair 3pm Glow Gallery, 224 Allen St. $10 [PARTY] Buffalo underground electronic music collective, Cool Dad Records, will be throwing the first installment of their summer series, Cool Dad County Fair this Saturday, May 16 at Glow Gallery on Allen. Starting in the early afternoon, the event will go on late into the evening and feature a full itinerary of live electronic music sets: Doug English, Ross Regs, ADMN from Detroit, and resident members Eyes Everywhere, Nickie Fowler, and RFiDJ. Dinner, fresh juice, a yoga session, and psychic readings will follow suit. Come out and experience a sampling of local and out-of-state electronic experimentalists in the unique confines of this unprecedented, all inclusive spring event. -JC

Kool Keith 9pm Duke's Bohemian Grove Bar, 253 Allen St [HIP HOP] Duke’s Bohemian Grove Bar continues their streak of classic hip hop acts with Kool Keith on Saturday, May 16. A founding member of Ultramagnetic MCs, Kool Keith, also known as Dr. Octagon—and the self-proclaimed “Black Elvis”—is known for his perverted and surreal lyrical stylings. His 1996 solo debut Dr. Octagonecologyst, which featured turntablism from DJ Qbert among others, solidified the signature trip hop sound that (he claims) eventually led to the rise of horrorcore. Duke's Saturday Night Meltdown Crew—Cochise, DJ Milk, Scott Down, and Charlie the Butcher— will play in support. -CP

THE PIXIES TUESDAY MAY 19 6PM / RAPIDS THEATRE, 1711 MAIN ST. / $45.50-$50 [ALT ROCK] The Pixies are undeniably one of the most influential bands to have graced the alternative rock realm. The twisted, alt-rock progenitors influenced 1990s icons from Nirvana to Radiohead. Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, they released a string of albums–Surfer Rosa, Doolittle, Bossanova, and Trompe Le Monde–all marked with a sense of imminent peril. Songs like “Where Is My Mind” and “Debaser” were comprised of quiet-loud dynamics and weighty concepts that touched on everything from Catholicism to UFOs. But however unorthodox the Pixies got, they always sounded grounded, largely through trade-offs between precision and recklessness. After an 11 year separation, they reunited in 2004, and finally released their first album since reuniting, Indie Cindy, last year. Though Kim Deal’s absence is a tough pill to swallow, the album still boasts traces of classic Pixies. “Greens and Blues” revisits Black Francis’s obsession with extraterrestrials, underpinned by Joey Santiago’s sunny guitar. The title track hinges on a plea for acceptance, and it’s in that spirit of understanding that Pixies fans should approach this album. Their sound is slicker, but that’s not to say there still aren’t a handful of worthwhile songs. Catch the Pixies with special guest, John Grant at the Rapids Theatre on Tuesday, May 19. -KELLIE POWELL

PUBLIC APPROVED

Beertavia 3-6pm Downtown Batavia, $40, $55 VIP and $10 for designated drivers [FUN] Western New York’s brewing revival includes the erstwhile seat of the Holland Land Company office in Batavia, out of which Joseph Ellicott surveyed and divided the entire region beginning in 1802. Beertavia will unite over 50 local brews from across Ellicott’s domain and samples from a bevy of Batavia eateries including Center Street Smokehouse, Main Street Pizza, Papa Pasquale’s Italian Eatery, Sweet Peas Cafe, and Sunny’s Restaurant all in Batavia’s historic downtown. -AL

MONDAY MAY 18 Orgone with Sophistafunk 8pm Buffalo Iron Works, 49 Illinois St. $10 [FUNK] Soulful music, while making rare appearances on the radio, is generally dead in the public’s eye. If you look just under the surface though, it is alive and well with groups like Orgone carrying the torch high and proud. The west coast band has been on the road for years now, with a new release that just came out titled, Beyond the Sun. Step on out to Buffalo Iron Works on Monday, May 18, and catch this sultry act with openers Sophistafunk. -JS

Priory 7pm The Waiting Room, 334 Delaware Ave. $1-$10 [ROCK] Existing at the intersection where hipsters meet the masses, where pop and rock meet a slice of EDM, Priory may be on the cusp of large-scale popularity. Brandon Rush and Kyle Sears knew they were onto something, quitting their day jobs shortly after meeting to focus on making music full time. Warner Bros. took a chance, releasing an EP last fall and "Weekend" became a promising hit. Now in support of the new full length Need to Know, coming off a string of dates with Kaiser Chiefs, Priory plays at the Waiting Room on Monday, May 18 with Kopps and Wild Things. -CJT

MASTODON WEDNESDAY MAY 20 6PM / RAPIDS THEATRE, 1711 MAIN ST. / $32-$36 [METAL] For sludge-metal band Mastodon, it’s been about more than just sick riffs and skillful instrumentation. It’s been about creating worlds; terrifying, bizarre worlds where grotesque characters rule and transcendence is only achieved through the completion of epic journeys. Mastodon officially completed one such journey when they released Crack the Skye—the epic conclusion to their epic natural-element based series of epic albums that began with 2002’s Remission. The series continued with 2004’s Moby Dick-inspired masterpiece Leviathan, before peaking with 2006’s Blood Mountain. Eleven years and a few facial tattoos later, and the Atlantabased groove metal band—led by guitarist Brent Hinds—has rebooted, first releasing 2011’s riff loaded, Led Zeppelin-inspired, The Hunter and most recently, their deathly psychedelic mathmetal record Once More ‘Round the Sun. They’ll likely unleash a consistent barrage of cuts from their entire discography when they come to the Rapids Theatre on Wednesday, May 20 with P Clutch and Graveyard. -CORY PERLA DAILYPUBLIC.COM / MAY 13, 2015 / THE PUBLIC 17

BOOKS REVIEW

Authors Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite.

HIPSTERS GO TO WAR

PHOTO BY ERIN POLLOCK

Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite add new dimensions to modern American war literature BY BRIAN CASTNER

WAR OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDISTS

LET’S REVIEW WHAT WE KNOW of the nascent

body of Iraq and Afghanistan war literature written thus far.

BY GAVIN KOVITE & CHRISTOPHER ROBINSON

For the first decade of the Post-9/11 Wars, only two genres persisted: nonfiction hero stories, and analyses of American foreign policy failures written by wonks, politicians, and generals. Any reader searching for a more personal view would have grown frustrated, as there were very few memoirs, only a single recognizable poet (Brian Turner), and no great fiction.

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conventions, delayed adulthood. Mickey looks positively responsible in comparison, though he is not without humor. When Tricia goes to Baghdad as a journalist, she is confused:

Then, five big novels appeared in the summer of 2012, an opening of the literary flood gates, and ever since we have been treated to a steady supply of fiction and contemplative memoir. Surprisingly quickly, however, many of these books have already started to sound the same. If any characteristic broadly defines them—from Kevin Powers’s best-selling The Yellow Birds to Elliot Ackerman’s brand new Green on Blue—it is their solipsism; short story collection or novel, written from the American perspective or foreign, the post-Hemingway story arc remains essentially the same: I went to war and I feel bad about it. (In my own memoir, guilty as charged.) All of which makes the newest addition to the emerging canon such a breath of fresh air. War of the Encyclopaedists is the extraordinary product of a collaboration between two writers, Gavin Kovite and Christopher Robinson, and almost by definition, a book cannot be stuck in its own head when a pair of authors produced it.

1/8V

SCRIBNER MAY 2015

The encyclopaedists in question are Mickey Montauk and Halifax Corderoy (these names!), Seattle hipsters who throw ironic art-themed parties in their Victorian co-op flophouse. By the third chapter, there is already more pot, coke, earnest drunk party dialogue, and sex (way more sex) than in all previous Iraq and Afghanistan novels combined. And if this sounds more entertaining than your standard important-yet-dreary war novel, I suspect Kovite and Robinson had the same idea. The good times cannot last, however, because Mickey’s National Guard unit has been activated and he is going to Iraq. Halifax is bound for graduate school in Boston. To keep in touch, the two friends start a Wikipedia page titled “The Encyclopaedists,” and update it with non-sequitur impressions apropos of their divergent lives. If the original manifestation of Buffalo’s Sugar City mobilized for war, it might produce this book.

“I’m trying to figure out how to maneuver in a war zone. What you can do, what you can’t. So I’m just left doing things and figuring out the consequences later.” Mickey’s response is perfect. “Now you know how the Army feels,” Montauk said. “Ba-dum-tshh.”

the stage, the writing seamlessly combines into a unique style of its own. The texture is enriched even further when we meet Mani and Tricia, the occasional roommates and lovers of Halifax and Mickey, who bear the fingerprints of both authors. How remarkable, as writing is the art form most frequented by the obsessive and controlling recluse; by the end of the book, I stopped asking “Who wrote what?” and instead appreciated “Wow, how did they do that?” In Baghdad, Mickey’s platoon runs a checkpoint in the Green Zone, and his military life is dominated by threats of car bombs and fishing dead bodies out of the river. Back in Boston, Halifax struggles in his English program, eventually resorting to selling his plasma and sperm for cash. The two speak rarely, see each other only at Christmas, communicate through veiled references on their Wikipedia page. For example, “The Encyclopaedists pop in and out of being like particles on the edge of a black hole. That black hole is war.” Two authors, writing about loneliness and individuality. “Repeat after me, we are all individuals,” they write.

Like any character-driven story, some of the plot points can prove a little too convenient, but at Mickey and Halifax are thinly fictionalized dopleast Mickey’s and Halifax’s self-tied knots are pelgangers for authors Kovite and Robinson, retrue to themselves. Of the two, I found myself spectfully, and their voices wax and wane in fasentranced by Halifax. Maybe that’s natural, if cinating ways. Kovite as Mickey is curt, logical, reading is, at its heart, meant to be a voyeuristic reflective but still a stubborn Army officer when escape; I know how the war worked, and it is the required. Robinson as Halifax is languorous and permissive graduate school life I missed. He may smart-assed, lazy and self-defeating, completely never use the word phony, but there is more than charming. When alone on the page, is aERRORS little of Holden Halifax Corderoy: IF each YOU man APPROVE WHICH Caulfield ARE ON inTHIS PROOF, THE distinct in tone and voice, but when they share aimlessness, the irritated dismissal of popular

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The novel is nominally set in pre-Facebook 2004, but in its adherence to skinny-jean hipster culture, it feels more like a contemporary story reworked to the start of the Iraq war, when there was more hope and less exhaustion. It is certainly a Millennial book, and youthful, Macklemore energy bounces from page to page. These are sweet and sentimental hipsters, not nearly as ironic and detached as their current Brooklyn brethren. In one scene, Mickey grows frustrated in the search for the man who murdered his interpreter, but his exasperation could sum up his generation’s take on the entire Iraq war endeavor: “Stop breaking my balls, all right? I’m fighting for justice here. That’s not even a joke, I’m being serious.” By placing Mickey and Halifax in separate locations, enduring distinct experiences, their voices can do something amazing: have a completely unpedantic intra-generational conversation. This Gen-Y cohort has fought the longest war in our nation’s history and yet, unlike the baby-boomers with Vietnam, has so far managed to resist being defined by it at all. In War of the Encyclopaedists, the war is just something that happens. Painting and drinking beer and avoiding overprotective parents happen too. Unlike so much other war literature to date, Iraq is not all-consuming. Combat trauma doesn’t absorb all the light in the room. Halifax and Mani and Tricia do other things besides think about the war, even with Mickey deployed, and they don’t apologize for it. Finally, an Iraq War novel that puts the war in its place, that stays true to the genuine detached reality of America’s experience. Brian Castner is the author of The Long Walk, a memoir of the Iraq war, and All the Ways We P Kill and Die, to be published next year.

FEATURE FILM

BETTER THAN FICTION Hot Docs showcases best of genre BY M. FAUST I DOUBT I’LL ENJOY ANY MOVIE I SEE IN THE REST OF 2015

as much as Finders Keepers. Here’s the plot: A guy buys a barbecue smoker at a storage locker auction, takes it home, and finds a semi-mummified human leg in it. (Did I mention that this takes place in North Carolina? Did I need to?) He turns it in to the police, but after the local TV news reports on it he regrets not keeping it; surely, he thinks, people would pay money to see something like this. He does charge people money to see the smoker where the leg was found but finds this insufficiently lucrative.

Finders Keepers

The original owner of the leg turns out to be a guy with drug problems who lost it in the plane crash that killed his father. He had been planning to use it as part of a memorial to his dad and wants it back. But the guy who bought it claims the legal precedent set out in the title. This is when the story starts to get strange.

Finders Keepers is one of two dozen new films I saw recently in Toronto at Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary film festival. There are more documentaries than ever being made— technology has made them easier to produce, and those hundreds of cable channels provide a demand. That’s what makes a festival like this so important: Because such a small proportion of documentaries get the attention of a theatrical release, it’s essential to have some kind of a showcase to highlight the good ones. Of course, the world being the difficult place it is, most of the films I saw were not as lighthearted as that Carolina tall tale. A popular theme was crime and enforcement, an issue we’ll probably never stop struggling with. Thought Crime, which has just premiered on HBO, considers the case of a New York City police officer who in his off hours liked to unwind in internet chat rooms where he fantasized about raping, killing, and eating women. When his wife found out, he was arrested and put on trial. These are utterly horrible fantasies, presented in unflinching detail with excerpts from transcripts of his chats. But did he actually do anything criminal? It’s by no means an easy question, and filmmaker Erin Lee Carr presents every side of the debate fairly: It is to her credit that you come away from the film not knowing what to think. Welcome to Leith recounts another story of a people looking to prevent a crime that hasn’t happened. A nearly deserted town in North Dakota becomes the new home to Craig Cobb, a white supremacist who wants to import his fellow travelers and take over, establishing a community. As only 24 people live in Leith, he may

Thought Crime

Orion: The Man Who Would Be King

well do it unless his neighbors can stop him. But how? You come away from the film realizing that nothing Cobb could ever do to these people is as bad as what they do to themselves out of fear, which may have been his plan all along.

the interviewees argue that they were railroaded or imprisoned for relatively minor offenses; then again, a few of the revelations here are so disturbing that you realize an entire film of such stuff would be hard to sit through.

Fear is also central to Peace Officer, an all-too-pertinent study of the militarization of modern American police forces. In Utah, Sheriff Dub Lawrence put together the state’s first SWAT team in the 1970s. Thirty years later, that same team kills his son-in-law in a standoff that should have been handled without bloodshed. Lawrence’s efforts to investigate what went wrong are paralleled with a history of the federal government’s programs to put heavy weaponry in the hands of local police, initially to fight the “war on drugs” but eventually to do anything they want with it, including serving warrants. (A perfect double feature: Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle, about the American manufacturers and marketers of the taser, a weapon whose problems started to become apparent long after it was put into common use because it was never properly tested.)

On the lighter side, another perennial Hot Docs theme is celebrity and those who would do anything to achieve it. (Finders Keepers certainly fits here.)

Another unanswerable question: What do we do with sex offenders after they have served their sentences? Pervert Park follows the residents of a trailer camp in Florida set up as a halfway house for people who almost literally have no place to go after finishing their prison sentences. It may be a function of who was willing to talk to Swedish filmmakers Lasse and Frida Barkfors that most of

The Cult of J. T. Leroy tracks the rise and fall of the author who burst onto the literary scene in the late 1990s with tales of his abused childhood and adolescence as a sex worker. He was embraced by an astonishing range of glitterati, all of whom managed to overlook that Leroy in person was clearly not what he claimed to be. The Beaver Trilogy Part IV presents the story behind the story that director Trent Harris filmed three times trying to get it right: first as the documentary of a small-town Utah teen who impersonates Olivia Newton-John at a talent show, and twice more in fictional versions starring then-unknowns Sean Penn and Crispin Glover. Orion: The Man Who Would Be King remembers Jimmy Ellis, a charismatic Alabama singer with a great singing voice. Unfortunately, he sounds exactly like Elvis Presley, so much so that his shady manager puts a mask on him and sends him on the road after Elvis’s death as “Orion,” implying that he may actually be the King returning to the stage after having faked his death. A longer version of this article appears at dailypublic.com.

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This sounds like it might be a new movie by the Coen Brothers, but in fact Finders Keepers is a documentary made by a pair of filmmakers, Bryan Carberry and J. Clay Tweel, using footage of the two foot wranglers beginning in the early days of their struggle in 2007. There are a fair share of laughs at their expense—it’s hard to keep a straight face when Shannon, the would-be huckster who wants to exploit the leg, tells the camera in a molasses-thick Southern accent, “I’m pretty smart—I guess y’all figured that out by now.” But as the plot thickens our appreciation of them deepens, as we look into their troubled pasts and difficult lives.

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FILM REVIEW

LOCAL THEATERS AMHERST THEATRE (DIPSON) 3500 Main St., Buffalo / 834-7655 amherst.dipsontheatres.com AURORA THEATRE 673 Main St., East Aurora / 652-1660 theauroratheatre.com EASTERN HILLS CINEMA (DIPSON) 4545 Transit Rd., / Eastern Hills Mall Williamsville / 632-1080 easternhills.dipsontheatres.com FLIX STADIUM 10 (DIPSON) 4901 Transit Rd., Lancaster / 668-FLIX flix10.dipsontheatres.com

Leighton Meester and Julian Shatkin in Like Sunday Like Rain.

NO SUPERHEROES HERE LIKE SUNDAY LIKE RAIN / THE FOREIGNER BY M. FAUST with just about nothing in common other than that music is central to both and that you only have a few opportunities to see either one. (I doubt many of you will be interested in both.) Like Sunday, Like Rain is a wistful and wispy drama centered on two lonely characters. Eleanor (Leighton Meester, as different as can be from her role as Gossip Girl’s Blair Waldorf ) has one of those bad Manhattan days that leaves her out of a job and out of a place to live. Despite having no experience with kids, she gets a summer position as a live-in au pair at an Upper West Side mansion. Her charge is Reggie ( Julian Shatkin), 12 years old and used to running his own life since the death of his father and remarriage of his perpetually frazzled mother (Debra Massing in a joyless cameo). A math whiz and talented cello player, Reggie is the kind of kid who can only be called “precocious,” an adjective that is terrific when it’s applied to your own kids but a curse for movie characters. In this case, though, he’s not merely a smart-ass: He’s simply well-grounded, in a way that catches Eleanor off guard. Written and directed by Frank Whaley, best known as an actor (most recently as ill-fated FBI agent Van Miller on Showtime’s Ray Donovan), Like Sunday, Like Rain avoids both sentimentality and melodrama, though some might feel that it does so at the expense of story. Its mood and title were inspired WHAT WE HAVE HERE ARE TWO INDEPENDENT FILMS

IN CINEMAS NOW BY M. FAUST & GEORGE SAX

by the Morrissey song “Everyday is Like Sunday,” and as you might expect from a film about a cello player it features a memorably lovely chamber score by British songwriter Ed Harcourt. It will be shown at the Screening Room Saturday, Tuesday and Thursday nights this week. Filmmaker Amos Poe is today considered one of the progenitors of New York’s “No Wave” movement, but back in the late 1970s he was just a guy trying to make movies about the scene he knew with minimal resources and the help of friends. The Foreigner, his second film, was made in 1977 but looks like an artifact from the early 1950s. Part of that is intentional: He’s trying to recreate the same no-budget, black-and-white crime films that inspired Godard’s Breathless. The plot is improvised around Eric Mitchell as a Eurospy who arrives in Manhattan ready for his next assignment. What that is, he doesn’t know, and his attempts to find out take him through some of the seedier back alleys of Alphabet City, way back before the era of gentrification. Punk fans will want to see it for a CBGBs performance by the Erasers and cameos by Debbie Harry (singing a Brecht song) and the Cramps (as a gang that mugs Mitchell in the CBGB bathroom). If you’re interested in the era, it’s an invaluable time capsule. You can see it next Wednesday (May 20) as part of the Kaleidotropes film series at Squeaky Wheel, followed by a Skype P Q&A with Amos Poe.

tity. Starring Ayako Fujitani and Pepe Serna. Directed by Dave Boyle (Daylight Savings) Reviewed this issue. Fri-Sat, Tue-Thu 7pm. Screening Room QUEST FOR CAMELOT (1998)—The young daughter of a slain Knight of the Round Table tries to take her father’s place in this animated adventure. Directed by Frederik Du Chau (Underdog). Sun 11:30am. North Park

PREMIERES BUFFALO JEWISH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL—See the preview this issue. Amherst DIOR AND I—Documentary observing the Christian Dior fashion house and ts first collection under new artistic director Raf Simons. Directed by Frédéric Tcheng (Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel). A review will be posted at DailyPublic.com. Eastern Hills MAD MAX: FURY ROAD—Long-in-coming sequel for the post-apocalyptic anti-hero of the 1980s, here played by Tom Hardy. With Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, and Zoë Kravitz. Directed by George Miller (The Road Warrior). Area theaters. PITCH PERFECT 2—Acapella sequel. Starring Anna Kendrick, Hailee Steinfeld, Brittany Snow, Katey Sagal and Elizabeth Banks, who also directed. Area theaters WELCOME TO ME—Satire starring Kristen Wiig as a woman with borderline personality disorder who uses a lottery jackpot to buy herself a TV talk show. With Wes Bentley, Linda Cardellini, Joan Cusack, and James Marsden. Directed by Shira Piven (Fully Loaded). Reviewed this issue. North Park

ALTERNATIVE CINEMA CLUE: THE MOVIE (1985)—The first film adapted from a board game was this enjoyable comedy written by John Landis. Starring Tim Curry, Eileen Brennan, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Martin Mull, Lesley Ann Warren, and, because it was the 1980s, cameos from Lee Ving and Jane Wiedlin. Directed by Jonathan Lynn (Nuns on the Run). Sat 9:15pm. Screening Room THE FOREIGNER (1978)—Amos Poe’s early entry in what became the downtown New York “No Wave” movement is a largely improvised tour of punk locations tied to a loose knit story about a European secret agent (Eric Mitchell) trying to figure out his assignment. With Anya Phillips, Patti Astor, and cameos by Deborah Harry and the Cramps. Reviewed this issue. Wed May 20, 7pm. Squeaky Wheel LIKE SUNDAY LIKE RAIN—A rich but sheltered young cello prodigy learns about life from his unconventional new au pair, a musician who takes the job out of financial desperation. Starring Leighton Meester, Julian Shatkin, Debra Messing, and Billie Joe Armstrong. Directed by Frank Whaley (The Jimmy Show). Reviewed this issue. Sat 7pm, Tues & Thu 7:30pm. Screening Room MAN FROM RENO—Noirish thriller about a Japanese novelist trying to start a new life in San Francisco, where she meets a man also looking to establish a new iden-

IN BRIEF

THEATER INFORMATION IS VALID THROUGH THURS MAY 14 THE AGE OF ADALINE—Fantasy starring Blake Lively as an immortal woman tempted to give it up when she falls in love with Michiel Huisman. With With Amanda Crew, Harrison Ford, and Ellen Burstyn. Directed by Lee Toland Krieger (Celeste & Jesse Forever). Maple Ridge, Flix, Regal Elmwood, Regal Niagara Falls, Regal Quaker, Regal Transit, Regal Walden Galleria AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON—The latest and most elaborate special effects extravaganza from Disney-owned Marvel Studios is the weakest of that company’s interconnected crowd pleasers, neither as smart as Captain America: The Winter Soldier nor as fun as Guardians of the Galaxy. Of the overstuffed cast reprising their roles from other superhero movies, only Scarlett Johansen and Mark Ruffalo are called upon to do much more than provide action for green screen technicians and stunt doubles to enhance. So many characters and subplots have been crammed into this film that there is little opportunity for characterization or suspense. Starring Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, James Spader, Jeremy Renner, and Samuel L. Jackson. Directed by Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer). –Gregory Lamberson. Aurora, Flix, Hamburg Palace, Lockport Palace, Maple Ridge, Regal Elmwood, Regal Niagara Falls, Regal Quaker, Regal Transit, Regal Walden Galleria, Sunset Drive-In, Sunset Drive-In, Transit Drive-In CINDERELLA—The surprising thing about Disney’s live action version of the perennial is how little it differs from their 1950 animated version or any other traditional telling of the fairy tale, despite the contributions of director Kenneth Branagh and screenwriter Chris Weitz (About a Boy). Branagh’s direction is stolid and tentative, as if he wasn’t sure how to spark things dramatically. The production is heavily opulent but not very striking in appearance. Lily James, from Downton Abbey, makes a serviceable but bland heroine; Richard Madden, from Game of Thrones, is an appealing Prince. Co-starring Hayley Atwell, Cate Blanchett, Helena Bonham Carter, Stellan Skarsgård, Derek Jacobi, Ben Chaplin, and Rob Brydon. -GS Four Seasons, Regal Transit CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA—French drama starring Juliette Binoche as an actress asked to star in a revival of the play that launched her career, but with an ambitious young actress (Chloë Grace Moretz) in her original role. Binoche is impressive in a low-key diva role, giving a

20 THE PUBLIC / MAY 13, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM

spirited performance with notes of reflection and rue. But as a study in the interpenetration of life and art, the film offers too little dramatic charge and human interest to arrive at any insight or tension. Co-starring Kristen Stewart, who was named Best Supporting Actress at the Cesar Awards. Directed by Olivier Assayas (Summer Hours). –GS Amherst THE D TRAIN—Is there a drearier comedy cliché than the story about the loser who tells a lie to make himself seem like a big shot, only to get stuck trying to live up to it? Here it’s Jack Black as a guy trying to impress his former high school mates by bringing the onetime class star (James Marsden, channeling James Franco) to their 20th reunion. Andrew Mogel and Jarrad Paul, who wrote and directed this, throw a curveball at us halfway through the film by letting us think this is really a film about sexual identity, but it’s just a red herring. Black has a talent for embodying annoying, abrasive characters, but the script gives him no redeeming traits as it stumbles toward a tacked-on sentimental ending. With Jeffery Tambor and Kathryn Hahn. –MF Flix, Regal Elmwood, Regal Quaker, Regal Transit, Regal Walden Galleria EX MACHINA—The question, as one character in this film says, isn’t if artificial intelligence will be developed, but when. The answer is probably in our lifetimes, but it’s a subject that seems to stymie the imaginations of filmmakers, from the evidence of, in the last year, Transcendence, Chappie, Eva, and now this. At a remote research installation, a minor employee in a Google-ish company (Domhnall Gleeson) is asked to interact with a female-formed robot (Alicia Vikander) to see if she seems fully and independently intelligent. That such a test would seem to require that he not know the answer in advance is one of many perplexing aspects of the script by Alex Garland, a variable sci-fi scribe (Sunshine, Dredd, 28 Days Later) here making his directorial debut. It’s hard to take any of it at face value given all the clues that there’s more going on here than meets the eye, making it all the most disappointing when we get to the end and discover we’ve mostly been led astray. With Oscar Isaac in a silly hipster beard as a combination of Steve Jobs and Dr. Frankenstein. –MF Dipson Amherst, Flix, Regal Elmwood, Regal Niagara Falls, Regal Quaker, Regal Transit, Regal Walden Galleria FIVE FLIGHTS UP—Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton as an aging couple forced by the increased stresses of city living to consider selling the Brooklyn apartment where they have lived since the 1970s. With Carrie Preston and Cynthia Nixon. Directed by Richard Loncraine (Brimstone & Treacle) Eastern Hills FURIOUS 7—AKA Fast and Furious 7. Starring Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jason Statham and Michelle Rodriguez. Directed by James Wan (Saw). Maple Ridge, Regal Elmwood, Regal Niagara Falls, Regal Quaker, Regal Transit, Regal Walden Galleria, Sunset Drive-In, Transit Drive-In GET HARD—After Unfinished Business and The Wedding Ringer, you’d think star-vehicle comedies would have bottomed out for the year. Let’s hope the nadir is this tired farce starring Will Ferrell as a dumbass business

FOUR SEASONS CINEMA 6 2429 Military Rd. (behind Big Lots), Niagara Falls / 297-1951 fourseasonscinema.com HALLWALLS 341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo / 854-1694 hallwalls.org HAMBURG PALACE 31 Buffalo St., Hamburg / 649-2295 hamburgpalace.com LOCKPORT PALACE 2 East Ave., Lockport / 438-1130 lockportpalacetheatre.org MAPLE RIDGE 8 (AMC) 4276 Maple Rd., Amherst / 833-9545 amctheatres.com MCKINLEY 6 THEATRES (DIPSON) 3701 McKinley Pkwy. / McKinley Mall Hamburg / 824-3479 mckinley.dipsontheatres.com NEW ANGOLA THEATER 72 North Main St., Angola / 549-4866 newangolatheater.com NORTH PARK THEATRE 1428 Hertel Ave., Buffalo / 836-7411 northparktheatre.org REGAL ELMWOOD CENTER 16 2001 Elmwood Ave., Buffalo / 871–0722 regmovies.com REGAL NIAGARA FALLS STADIUM 12 720 Builders Way, Niagara Falls 236–0146 regmovies.com REGAL QUAKER CROSSING 18 3450 Amelia Dr., Orchard Park / 827–1109 regmovies.com REGAL TRANSIT CENTER 18 Transit and Wehrle, Lancaster / 633–0859 regmovies.com REGAL WALDEN GALLERIA STADIUM 16 One Walden Galleria Dr., Cheektowaga 681-9414 regmovies.com RIVIERA THEATRE 67 Webster St., North Tonawanda 692-2413 rivieratheatre.org THE SCREENING ROOM 3131 Sheridan Dr., Amherst / 837-0376 screeningroom.net SQUEAKY WHEEL 712 Main St., / 884-7172 squeaky.org SUNSET DRIVE-IN 9950 Telegraph Rd., Middleport 735-7372 sunset-drivein.com TRANSIT DRIVE-IN 6655 South Transit Rd., Lockport 625-8535 transitdrivein.com

REVIEW FILM

Kristen Wiig in Welcome to Me.

ANOTHER ALICE, A DIFFERENT RABBIT HOLE WELCOME TO ME BY GEORGE SAX IN MARTIN SCORSESE’S 1980 FILM THE KING OF COMEDY, Rupert Pupkin

(Robert DeNiro), a madly obsessive, no-talent claimant to TV talk show celebrity, decides to kidnap the host of a New York-based show to extort his way onto it and win his “deserved” stardom. Alice Krieg (Kristen Wiig), the titularly self-referred wacko in Shira Piven’s Welcome to Me, doesn’t have to go to such drastic excess to secure her own talk show. After she wins $86 million in a California state lottery, she has the wherewithal to buy herself one. Which she promptly does. And it’s called Welcome to Me because it’s all about Alice. No guests, no currently popular topics, just her chronic complaints, fixations, oddball and dubious nutritional advice—in other words, the world according to Alice. Alice isn’t as dangerously delusional as Rupert Pupkin, but she has nothing like a reliable purchase on reality, nor much of an interest in nor any experience outside her own self-generated and inwardly focused concerns. Alice was once a veterinary assistant, but now retired on disability, she spends her days in Palm Desert, California absorbed in tearfully watching cassettes of old episodes of Oprah—her self-help lodestar—and shabbily unreliable television informercials. (There’s a satirical inflection here, of course, and

you may wonder if Oprah was in on the joke when she agreed to this.) Alice has stopped taking her Abilify, which worries Daryl (Tim Robbins), her psychotherapist. He tries to get her to reconsider. She responds by reading “a prepared statement,” a means of communication she resorts to on other occasions. She is, she says, substituting a high-protein, low glycemic index regimen. String cheese is not a psychiatrically recognized medical treatment Daryl dryly notes, as Alice continues eating the stuff in his office. Alice is single-mindedly committed to her own autobiographical truths and bill of complaints. This is wicked, if low-key comedy, and it gets sharper as she dumps millions on a barely surviving little TV production company, ordering up scores of episodes of her talk show. Welcome to Me, the show, is part confessional, with weird cooking and nutritional advice (how about a meatloaf cake with mashed potato frosting?), and most dramatically, her reenactments with “actors”—whoever shows up at the studio that day—of injuries she believes she’s suffered at the hands of cruel, faithless friends. Alice is apt to loudly interrupt these little dramatizations to berate these stand-ins for persecuting and betraying her. Welcome is oddly, unexpectedly, and sometimes uncomfortably amusing. It can’t have been an easy combination to create and sustain, and it’s surprisingly successful in maintaining its subtlely shifting balance. This is in no small measure a product of Wiig’s often uncannily evocative performance. It’s not a series of sharp vignettes or sketch business and turns such as she produced on Saturday Night Live or in big-yuck movies like Anchorman 2. For this one, she’s come up with an expertly realized, finely tuned performance that anchors and propels the movie. All the performances are skilled, including Robbins’s Daryl. The actor plays it more or less as a straight man to Alice, but he contributes to the amusement, and to a poignant effect. Linda Cardinelli ably brings off her part as Alice’s inexplicably patient, generous, and exploited friend Gina. Piven’s background is in theatre and she must have a facility for working with actors. Scorsese’s movie was released the year after the publication of University of Rochester historian Christopher Lasch’s book The Culture of Narcissism, a best-seller that a lot of people, including President Jimmy Carter, cited but apparently misinterpreted. Lasch wasn’t concerned with describing a society characterized by great numbers of people devoted to self-love, but one in which many lacked both a sound sense of self and an empathetic response to others. Lasch didn’t think most Americans were pathologically crippled but that an increasingly competitive society “dominated by large bureaucratic organizations and mass media” encouraged mild symptoms similar to those of clinically diagnosed narcissism. Piven and writer Eliot Laurence seem to have done some digging in psychiatric literature and categories, but their “diagnosis” of Alice relies on that convenient default psychiatric evaluation of borderline personality disorder. Alice really displays an imperiously, grotesquely narcissistic indifference to others or to social responsibility. She’s unselfconsciously adopted media values and methods; they shape and animate her inner life, as well as her more perverse interpretations of the world. Welcome is, of course, a spoofy take on American fascination with media renderings of life, including aggressively pushed self-help regimes, but a large part of its achievement is in its indirect pursuit of this via the depiction of the delusionally self-engrossed Alice. Welcome offers no social diagnosis or overt lesson. It’s rather quiet and distanced, even as its protagonist engages in sociopathic outrages on her TV show. Piven manages the proceedings with a subdued intelligence, despite the picture’s eventually crude and disturbing quality. She hasn’t always kept the pacing from dragging here and there and things are resolved a little abruptly, and perhaps bittersweetly. P But Alice is a trip, and so is this movie.

man on his way to prison who hires the only black man MONKEY KINGDOM—Disney nature documentary. Directhe knows (Kevin Hart) to teach him survival skills. It’s ed by Mark Linfield and Alastair Fothergill. Regal Elmawash in jokes reeking of racism and homophobia, and wood, Regal Niagara Falls, Regal Quaker, Regal Transit while I’m sure that the film’s creators would argue that PAUL BLART: MALL COP 2—The rent-a-cop whose name they’re simply trying to air out these differences, they rhymes with “fart” (you don’t think that was acciutterly lack the finesse to walk that line. With Alison dental, do you?) goes to Las Vegas. This sequel isn’t Brie and Craig T. Nelson. Directed by Etan Cohen (My being screened in Buffalo, but early votes on IMDB. Wife Is Retarded). -MF Regal Elmwood, Regal Niagara com (which tend to skew positive) give it a rating of Falls, Regal Quaker, Regal Transit, Regal Walden Galle4.2. That’s out of 10. (Update: After the film opened, ria, Sunset Drive-In Transit Drive-In the rating dropped to 3.9.) Directed by Andy Fickman HOME—Runaway alien meets a girl on the road in this (Parental Guidance). Maple Ridge, Flix, Regal Elmwood, animated feature. Directed by Tim Johnson (Over the Regal Niagara Falls, Regal Quaker, Regal Transit, Regal Hedge). Maple Ridge, Regal Elmwood, Regal Niagara Walden Galleria, Sunset Drive-In, Transit Drive-In Falls, Regal Quaker, Regal Transit, Regal Walden GalleTRUE STORY— Adaptation of the book by Michael Finkel, ria, Sunset Drive-In, Transit Drive-In the onetime New York Times magazine writer who was HOT PURSUIT—Action comedy starring Reese Witherfired for creating a composite character to give a story spoon as a straightlaced cop assigned to guard the more impact. Around the time he was fired, the FBI arwidow (Sofía Vergara) of a drug cartel boss. Circumrested a fugitive named Christian Longo who had been stances put them on the road across Texas, emotionalusing Finkel’s name as an alias. Finkel visited Longo ly bonding as they try to stay alive. If it sounds awfully in prison and agreed to write his memoir, but had his familiar, it is: it differs from a hundred other uses of bullshit meter tested by the man who was accused of this formula only in having two female protagonists, murdering his wife and three young children. The story which isn’t enough to save it. The best thing about it is cries out for the controlled direction of a David Finchthat it runs less than 90 minutes, so it doesn’t waste er; instead the job went to debuting Rupert Goold, too much of your day. Directed by Anne Fletcher (The whose experience in British theater only seem to give Guilt Trip). –MF Flix, Maple Ridge, Regal Elmwood, Rehim a model to work against. Cast against type, James gal Niagara Falls, Regal Quaker, Regal Transit, Regal Franco and Jonah Hill are fine as the prisoner and the Walden Galleria, Sunset Drive-In, Transit Drive-In journalist, but at least as conceived here it’s not really a cinematic story. With Felicity Jones, Ethan Suplee, INSURGENT—Teen dystopian sequel. Starring Shailene and Gretchen Mol. –MF Dipson Eastern Hills Cinema Woodley, Miles Teller, and Theo James. Directed by ENDS THURSDAY Robert Schwentke (R.I.P.D.) Four Seasons, Regal Transit, Regal Walden Galleria UNFRIENDED—Chat room friends are stalked by a demon using the account of a dead friend. Amazingly, it’s not MAN FROM RENO—A surprisingly accomplished low buda J-horror movie. It is, however, a “found-footage” get neo-noir from a young director who has a better movie. Starring Heather Sossaman, Matthew Bohrer, understanding than most of just what film noir is and and Courtney Halverson. Directed by Levan Gabriadze is not. In San Francisco, a Japanese mystery novelist (Yolki 3). Maple Ridge, Flix, Regal Elmwood, Regal Niescapes from her book tour to work out some guilt isagara Falls, Regal Quaker, Regal Walden Galleria sues. She meets and is seduced by a fellow Japanese who then disappears. Attempting to solve this real-life THE WATER DIVINER—Russell Crowe’s debut as a feature mystery opens up a hidden world of Lynchian dangers. director was a big hit in his native Australia, where A parallel story involves the efforts of an aging sheriff the military battle at Gallipoli that sparks its plot is in a nearby to find another another mysteriously something a national badge of honor. (Americans VISITtown DAILYPUBLIC.COM FOR MORE FILMof LISTINGS & REVIEWS >> disappeared Japanese man. The film is so solidly conknow it if at all as the title of Peter Weir’s film on the structed that you can enjoy it even if you lose track of same subject.) Crowe also stars as a farmer who, four the plot at times. –MF. Wed 13, Thu 14 7:30pm. Screenyears after the end of World War I, sets off to Turkey ing Room to find his three sons, presumably killed in the battle

CULTURE > FILM

along with nearly 9,000 of their countrymen. The film is high on emotional button-pushing and low on plot, which there could have been more of without a clunkily old-fashioned romance between farmer Russ and a Turkish war widow (played by Ukrainian actress Olga Kurylenko). The production values outclass Crowe’s by-the-numbers direction. And while most audiences who see it won’t know anything about the concurrent genocide of the Armenians by the Turkish government that the film completely ignores, you have to wonder at the distributor’s tastelessness in release it on the exact anniversary of that event. –MF Dipson Amherst, Regal Quaker, Regal Transit WHILE WE’RE YOUNG—The best film yet from Noah Baumbach, writer-director of such tart modern comedies as The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha, and Greenberg. Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts star as a childless Brooklyn couple in their 40s, increasingly alienated from their friends, ho take up with a couple of young hipsters (Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried). The film seems to change direction when the younger guy turns out to have unsuspected depths of personal ambition, but Baumbach pulls it all together for a satisfying conclusion. His satire is gentle and evenhanded, and his wry observations on aging in the post-Boomer era are spot-on. With Charles Grodin and Peter Yarrow. –MF Dipson McKinley Mall WOMAN IN GOLD—Will the movies ever run out of ways to make us hate the Nazis? Helen Mirren stars in a factbased story as an Austrian who fled to America after the Nazi invasion and now wants to reclaim a family heirloom, a valuable Gustav Klimt painting that is the pride of a Viennese museum. To help her fight the Austrian government she hires a green lawyer (Ryan Reynolds) who happens to be the grandson of another refugee, composer Arnold Schoenberg. The film doesn’t quite know what to do with that detail, or with a story that involves a lot of arcane legal wrangling that isn’t terribly cinematic. Mirren is the main point of interest here, but she’s asked to do too much with too little, while most of the memorable supporting players (Daniel Brühl, Charles Dance, Elizabeth McGovern, and Jonathan Pryce) are underused. Directed by Simon Curtis (My Week with Marilyn). –MF Dipson Eastern Hills Cinema, Four Seasons, North Park P

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... top tier talents ... (Kristen Tripp) Kelley is a deadly siren ... serene as candlelight ... a raging fire ... (Josephine) Hogan fills her stage time with blistering revelations ... (Chris) Kelly and (Kristen Tripp) Kelley share great passion in their embodiment of a tragic couple. ... strong performances, incredible set design ... angry yet hilarious dialogue. – Anthony Vitello, Jr., New York Theatre Guide

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WEDDINGS & ENGAGEMENTS JESSE KATSOPOLIS + REBECCA DONALDSON OCCUPATIONS

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WEDDING DATE

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20 22

ANECDOTES The couple met a charity date auction in 2005.

WEDDING PARTY

Best Man: Joseph Gladstone Maid of Honor: Donna Jo Tanner

NOW HIRING 35 36 37 WEDDINGS & ENGAGEMENTS

AGAINST THE GRAIN THEATER Festival seeks a dynamic, full-time 42 Programming Director to facilitate its discovery and promotion of new plays. 46 Experience in directing, literary manageJesse Katsopolis and Rebecca Donaldson of Buffalo, NY were married ment, and/or dramaturgy is required. For on Saturday, April 18, 2014 at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. more details, please visit 49 50 The bride is the daughter of Jerry and Kerry Donaldson of San FranATGFESTIVAL.ORG

38 43

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56 58 60

49. Local fish (that could be represented by this grid)

27. Old dynasts 28. Army VIP

51. Actress Spelling

30. It has feathers and flies

52. Book leaf

32. Santa sounds

54. Place to be when that warm weather comes back

36. Quinn of “Benny & Joon”

BUFFALO EQUESTRIAN RIDING CENTER GARAGE SALE Saturday, May 16, 8 a.m. – 4 p.m. Great Arrow btwn Elmwood and Delaware and didn’t know it. I really wanted to tell you about it but I didn’t want to make a scene. It did manage to fall off towards the end of the meal. --------------------------------------------------

13. Retired food critic Janice

GOOD NEIGHBOR NOTICES

23. Southwest city founded by Mormon pioneers

1. Cold one from Dug’s Dive

24. Up in the air, for short

2. Reject or eject, in a way

25. 2011 Rose Bowl winner, for short

3. Wealthy Londoners

45. 15 Across’s expermental flower garden contents

4. Shrinks’ grp.

48. “Get it ___!”

26. Showbiz bookings

5. What to see at 3 Across

50. Actor LaBeouf

28. Block division

6. Melodic

51. Affectedly cute

7. Ceremonial splendor

53. Gambling outlets, for short

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! CHERYL JACKSON NALINA SHAPIRO ALISON DRAGONE!!!!!! KEVIN HERRERNAN TOMMY TOO CHUCK ROCK BLAKE WALSH MIKE BLASDELL DERRICK HUTTON NICK COLACICCO RACHEL INCORVAIA BLANE

15. Observation tower site 19. Dull drills 20. Daily show 21. Multitide 22. Popular Friday fish

29. Hatch offerings 31. Tonawanda restaurant that’s 54 Across 33. Much fuss 34. Who owns MapQuest 35. Buns and rolls

Meet ! Einstein

37. Worked up

57. Article for Mozart

38. 2009 “Survivor” locale

58. Chain of restaurants

39. Mozart’s alleged poisoner

59. 46 Across rental

40. That “wide right” game, e.g.

60. Signal from the sea

41. Delon of “Purple Noon”

DOWN

44. You might have one at Mickey Rat’s

8. Alias preceder 9. 1920 Capek drama

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10. Wool worker

56. “M*A*S*H” soldier

12. Woodwind need

PLEASE EXAMINE THIS PROOF CAREFULLY

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IF YOU APPROVE ERRORS

LAST WEEK’S ANSWERS Crossword Puzzle by

14. Site of more than 1000 annual events

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The groom is the son of Nick and Irene Katsopolis.57 He is a 1989 graduate of the University of Buffalo with a bachelor degree in music history. In addition to his time spent as a touring musician, he is 59 program, Rush owner of The Smash Club and host of the KFLH radio Hour Renegades.

11. Buffalo ___ (new restaurant)

WORKSHOPS

GARAGE SALE

cisco. She is a 1990 graduate of the University of San Francisco with a bachelors degree in broadcast 54journalism. She is the well-known55 co-host of the popular morning television program, Wake Up San Francisco.

The maid of honor was Donna Jo Tanner, best friend and daughter of the bride’s television co-host, Daniel Tanner. The best men were ACROSS Joseph Gladstone and Daniel Tanner, the groom’s respective radio CONE FIVE POTTERY! SIX WEEK The reception was held at the Epcot Cenco-host and brother-in-law. 1. Shot from an Boys, airgun POTTERY CLASSES BEGINNING JUNE ter Theme park, where wedding band, The Beach performed. the couple is residing in 9TH AND JULY After 21ST.a honeymoon 332.0486 trip OR to the3.Bermudas, 14 Across attraction their new home in Buffalo. conefivepottery.com

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ASSISTED LIVING “FACEBOOK ISOLATION”

BY KEITH BUCKLEY

PHOTO BY SHAWNA STANLEY

PORCHFEST PHOTOS BY RASHARD CUNNINGHAM

Lovely weather and tremendous participation—41 venues and more than 70 acts, not including ad hoc performances—made last Saturday’s Porchfest a huge success. More photos on our facebook page.

DEAR KEITH: A high-school friend of mine posted a political rant on Facebook, which I disagreed with. This friend tends to be a bit hotheaded and often takes a contrarian stance on current event issues just because. I politely (at first) disagreed with him but he quickly blew up at me and made it personal. The conversation ended when he blocked me on Facebook. I’m not so concerned that he blocked me, but I’m afraid that he’s just isolating himself from everyone who disagrees with him. Should I reach out to him via an alternative platform (maybe real life?) and hash it out or should I just accept that this guy is living on his own planet? –MY CONTRARIAN FRIEND DEAR MY CONTRARIAN FRIEND: “Isolate

Yourself From Everyone Who Disagrees With You” should be the slogan for the Internet itself. It may sound like a utopian premise, but when we relocate from the world to the World Wide Web, we are venturing into an environment that we have hand-tailored to bolster and protect each and every perverse desire that lurks in our creepy heart—a veritable wonderland of sexual excretions, grainy footage of two fat women fighting behind Arby’s, and an unlikely friendship forged between a snake and a horse. Gaining access to this paradise is the reason we even gave ourselves a screen name in the first place and yes, in retrospect, I definitely should not have chosen “billcosbyfan_8” but I was young and could not possibly have known. If I may posit an analogy here (of course I may; nobody can stop me now; I’m too big to fail), our online experience is like Oscar the Grouch’s trash can. We find a bunch of stuff that we think we need, we cram it into a space that looks relatively small to the people loitering outside of it, but is actually large enough inside to house a herd of pachyderms and then we close the lid and curse anyone who attempts to disrupt us from enjoying our private and personal version of reality. However—departing from this profound and eloquent trash can metaphor—what we’ve collected isn’t necessarily garbage. It is just paraphernalia that is non-negotiably “ours,” and even though it may not be tangible or valuable to others, the things we carry are indispensable components of who we imagine ourselves to be and how we want others to see us. We log online to find bits of information that pertain to—and fuse with our idea of—ourselves, and we meticulously piece together an entity in the same way that Jesus Christ (our white, male, American lord and savior) pieced me together in my mom’s belly. Then, just as we all did when we finally emerged from our fortress of gestation, we immediately begin arguing about ethics in videogame journalism and making jokes about Jose Canseco shooting off his own finger. Facebook is the showroom floor where we reveal ourselves as our own creation for the first time. Miraculous, right? Then why does it so quickly become a battlefield instead of a viewing arena? The answer is simple: because each opinion is precious and ought to be carefully considered and treated with respect. Hahahaha just kidding. It’s because human beings are awful. The idea of being “nothing special” fills some people with a fear so abject they can barely comprehend it. Thusly, in an attempt to be “something” amidst the ceaseless online commotion that threatens to swiftly blur us into the background, we cling manically to “things” like a vine hovering over a pit of quicksand and we fight with or kill those that might take such “things” away from us. If we lose our “things,” we lose what makes us who we are, unfortunately failing all the while to realize that opposites can actually coexist and often do so with hilarious results, as seen in the hit television show Perfect Strangers. Whether these things are material objects like guns or records or clothes or Bazinga! guy bobbleheads, or whether they’re ideas like religion or a political stance, we defend them with a proud and righteous fervor not necessarily because we believe them, but because without them we risk being undefined. Outgrown. Forgotten. The tallest tree gets the most sun, and we as Instagramers or Tweeters or Facebookers (that sounds like the name of a villainous

futuristic cyber-cult) are not particularly keen on watching others bask in a glory we feel equally entitled to. Entire countries go to war for far less than this. Hell, Jason Bourne found himself in some real pickles for this reason exactly. To quote my favorite hard rock band, the Metallicas, the fact that countless human lives have literally been lost as a result of an identity at risk of being stolen or erased is “You know, it’s sad but trueeeeeeee-ahhhhh.” I realize I may have meandered a bit here into a more cryptic and obtuse rationale than you may have been looking for, but I’m getting 7.5 cents a word and I have a mortgage to pay. The point, however, is this: When you argue with someone on Facebook you are rarely arguing about the issue at hand. In actuality, you are arguing about who is more real—you or them. An opposing viewpoint is an affront to someone’s image or idea of themselves and it is not likely your old friend will rethink his entire existence just because you flippantly tell him that the Foo Fighters actually suck, particularly if he has the stock of a Foo Fighters tattoo and/or bumper sticker invested in them. Facebook has been around for 11 years. There are 1.3 billion users per month, each of whom spends an average of 20 minutes a day posting. In all that time, would you care to guess how many people have read an argumentative comment and sincerely reconsidered their outlook? Zero.* Because most of us don’t visit Facebook to have our mind changed; we go there to try to change the minds of others. We are purposeful and driven and unwavering, and as a result, the internet quickly becomes an island where millions of rams will butt heads until all necks are broken. My advice to you is to scroll through your feed with a lighthearted detachment. Instead of engaging people in arguments—and don’t forget, you admittedly started this whole thing because you were outraged at an opinion different from yours—try spreading the joy that is inherent in jokes about dicks and farts. Share information. Above all, stop taking all of it so seriously. As much as you might want to “put someone in their place” for saying the dress is actually white and gold, step back from your reactionary, impulsive mind and look closely at your motivation. Are you arguing because you feel your ideas are the “right” ideas and the world would be a better place if everyone homogenized their views to match yours? Are you doing it because you want to appear to others as more knowledgeable? Are you hungry for attention? Are any of these reasons different from the ones your friend probably had when he or she posted their “hot take” in the first place? The rush we get from peer approval is an incredible effect of a relatively new drug, but it is temporary and in order to attain it we may find ourselves ostracizing people we considered friends before FB came along. The war will never end and it is absolutely not worth your time or peace of mind. Unless the people you’re arguing with are “meninists.” Fuck those idiots. * Wildly unsubstantiated statistic .

HAVE A QUESTION FOR KEITH? ADVICE@DAILYPUBLIC.COM Editor’s note: As frontman of Every Time I Die, Keith Buckley has traveled the world gaining insights about the universe. In this biweekly column he’ll use those insights to guide our readers with heartfelt and brutally honest advice. DAILYPUBLIC.COM / MAY 13, 2015 / THE PUBLIC 23

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