[INDIE] On Friday night, a new Buffalo production company, Yace Booking, will be premiering their debut show at Nietzsche’s. The production company plans on churning out shows that will feature exciting local indie projects complemented by out of town names.
[POP PUNK] Long Island pop punk band Giants at Large have landed some pretty legit summer gigs. In August they’ll play the Today’s Mixtape Festival in Patchogue, New York with bands like Every Time I Die, the Movielife, and Real Friends, but not before they stop at Buffalo’s Broadway Joe’s for a show on Friday, May 29 with No Tide, Worse Than Yesterday, Lily Among Thorns, Crooked Gener8ion, and Urban Reverie, presented by For The Music Productions.
“It used to be when we’d go to war with a country, we’d go to the country,” says an authority figure in Good Kill. He’s talking about our government’s use of unmanned aerial vehicles—drones—as used to track and kill “enemy combatants” on the other side of the globe.
Did Thomas Hardy invent the Harlequin romance? I wouldn’t make that accusation against the great 19th century novelist whose stories were all set in the rural south of England. But when you strip his first successful novel of its psychological depth and social critique, the plot that remains rather resembles something you might find on a drugstore paperback rack with Fabio on the cover.
The late Albert Maysles (he died on March 5), one-half of the fraternal duo – with David Maysles – that gave us Grey Gardens years ago, left us this documentary, a discerning portrait of Iris Apfel, flamboyantly self-assured maven of style and exponent of the life force. She is the 94-year-old widow of a wealthy New York textile manufacturer who has become an outsized personality in the café society world where fashion and high art are conjoined.
At the very beginning of Felix Herngren’s whimsical, genially mordant comedy, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, Allan Karlsson (Robert Gustafsson) seems an expectedly doddering incompetent. The window through which he exits is in his room in a Swedish retirement home and he leaves only minutes before the start of a birthday party in his honor, with a marzipan cake and candles. Allan wanders over to a nearby bus station and gets on the first “conveyance” that leaves.
[ART] Thursday, May 28 marks the 143 unveiling of Speak Your Mind’s yearly journal. Featuring art and literature from over 50 high school students in the greater Buffalo area, SYM seeks to encourage students to express themselves creatively in and outside of the classroom. The event will take place at Medaille College at 6pm and will feature live music, poetry readings, and a gallery-style showing of all of the included works.
Handing out palmcards outside of a polling place is one of the less controversial things one can do within the context of a campaign. Unless you’re in Clarence.
On several occasions, a pro-school group was given a stern talking-to because people were leaving palmcards around inside the polling place. Well, that’s nice, dear, but that’s not the problem of the people handing out the palm cards — it’s a problem for the people running the vote and they should be on top of that sort of thing.
Hollywood never seems more like a treadmill than in summer, when it trots out one big movie per week, usually an animation or special effects extravaganza, that it expects everyone in the world to see.
Christian Edie and Kevin Cullen are preparing to renovate their little cottage in Silver Creek, which is a walk across the street and 50 yards from Hanford Bay on Lake Erie. And why shouldn’t they: The couple, united by love not only for one another but for surfing, paddleboarding, rock and ice climbing—any number of outdoor activities—have decided that Western New York is the right place to be.
April in Paris is a well-known song by Vladimir Dukelsky (a.k.a. Vernon Duke) and May in Miami refers to a month of cultural and community activities in its eponymous city. But June in Buffalo? Here our seasonal conceit might founder except among those of the musical cognescenti who are aware of Buffalo’s unique reputation as a North American center for contemporary music.
There is a photograph of me as a kid, maybe eight years old, that represents summers spent the way I’ve always loved best. My hair is long—no haircuts till August—and I’m wearing cutoffs, tube socks pulled over the calf, a faded red t-shirt that was most likely my older brother’s soccer jersey, East Aurora Arsenal, circa 1978. A year later I’d have my own Arsenal jersey; in the meantime I wore the one that no longer fit him.
The first national Independent Bookstore Day was May 2. The celebration was marked by entertainment, reading, special releases, and a thousand other delights that booksellers across the country conceived to draw customers, old and new, into their shops.
Kara Kenney is an urban bicyclist killing Buffalo’s drivers with kindness.
Sporting a lavender-hued pixie cut and a kilowatt smile, Kenney stops by mystified drivers who have rolled down their windows to rubberneck at the 300 bikes passing by them.
“This is called Slow Roll Buffalo,” Kenney says to one of the drivers.
As her bright orange short emblazoned “squad” indicates, Kenney is one of the handful of safety personnel for Slow Roll Buffalo.