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Malcolm Bonney: Bottling Quantities of Night

[ART OPENING] Big shout-out to uber-rich Andrew Carnegie, who spread his money around, ensuring that his name would be associated with libraries, universities, community  centers, and other nice things. A handsome Scotsman with a bushy white beard, we can also assume that if he was around today, Andrew would be flying around in a Gulfstream jet and own the Pittsburgh Steelers, all while being a patron of the arts.

Lovers and Friends

[VALENTINE’S DAY] So we’ve got a little thing going with Community Beer Works. It’s not love, exactly—or at least it’s not candlelight-dinner-for-two-on-Valentine’s-Day love. Whatever you want to call it, we do think a lot about that little community-minded microbrewery, and thinking about them makes us feel we-don’t-know-what. We want to be with them on that special day, understand, but we hope to have company.

Spotlight: Big Mood

It’s 9pm on a Saturday in the winter in Buffalo and we’re headed to a new dance party to hear some house and techno DJs play music in a converted industrial office building surrounded by grain silos. The only thing that doesn’t scream “Buffalo” about this whole night is that we’re headed out at 9pm instead of 11:30pm and that there is an actual chance we’ll be safe in bed by 3am—even taking into account a late night snack at Towne or Jim’s. We show up to the party when doors open, because although this is the first edition of this party, it’s about to sell out.

Dick Miller's Buffalo moment

RIP Dick Miller, one of the last of the great character actors: you may not know the name, but you know the face from nearly 200 movies, including just about every movie Roger Corman ever made. Media obituaries will tell you his best known role was as Murray Futterman in Gremlins. But the one to remember him for was his lead in A Bucket of Blood (1959), Corman’s beatnik horror comedy in which Miller starred as Walter Paisley, café busboy and would-be artiste who gets the attention he craves by covering corpses in clay and passing them off as sculptures.

Drew Lynch

[COMEDY] Stand up comedian Drew Lynch will perform at Buffalo’s Helium Comedy Club this Thursday, February 7 through Saturday, February 9. The 27-year-old comedian from Los Angeles was a finalist on season 10 America’s Got Talent and has since appeared on Maron and Conan and amassed over a million subscribers on YouTube with his many comedic endeavors from animated shows to comedy sketches.

John Valby

[FOLK] John Valby, now 74, is a dying breed. But it’s too late to change gears now—and would anyone really want him to? I guess there are those that disapprove. Be a scrooge about it if you must, but the Western New York-based musical comedian’s bread and butter has always been what we might call, ‘the naughty limerick.’ Taking familiar melodies and swapping out vulgar lyrics for the originals is something forever ingrained on our culture (it starts, after all, on the playground… or at least, it used to) and Valby is a master.

Lotus

[JAM] For their latest, Frames Per Second, Lotus recorded ‘live in the studio’ over four days—and filmed the whole thing for a documentary that comes with the music. Thought of as an instrumental jamband with a penchant for pockets of boogie, the Philly and Denver based five-piece dropped the 19-song set as a surprise to fans during the first week of December. The idea was an attempt to catch the telepathic energy moving between a group of improvisational mavens in real time; listening to it, it’s hard to believe they pulled it off so quickly.

Paul DesLauriers

[ROCK] Call it a blues-rock power trio. Formed after two decades of working together on projects far and wide, guitarist/singer Paul DesLauriers, bassist Greg Morency and drummer Sam Harrisson decided a few years back to focus their energy on this outlet, which is based out of Montreal. They’ve gone on to win some coveted awards in the world of Canadian blues, and the trio’s most recent album, Relentless (2016) made appearances on blues album charts in both Canada and the USA, garnering some impressive reviews along the way.

Native Harrow

[INDIE] Hudson Valley based indie-folk duo, Native Harrow, is hitting the road this winter on the eve of releasing a new album in Spring. Known for brandishing an eclectic mix of instruments (ala multi-instrumentalist Stephen Harms), the pair has a more compelling than average stage presence, but it’s the evolution between their two prior albums (2015’s Ghost and 2017’s Sorores –Latin for ‘sisters’) and the forthcoming Happier Now (due 4/12 on Different Time) that’s the real story here.

Marcia Ball

[COUNTRY] Back before Austin, Texas blew up as the progressive oasis and arts capitol of the Lone Star State, Marcia Ball was the front gal for a band called Freda and the Firedogs. Their 1972 debut remains a snapshot of a Southern American culture unadorned by pretenses—a time when a woman singing about sending a guy to “Fist City” if he gets too fresh was considered feminism. It took six years for Ball to release her solo debut, Circuit Queen, and she’s  been at it ever since.

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