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Strange Allure Volume 14: Ari Goldman

[HOUSE] Something awesome is happening in the Buffalo house and techno music scene right now. World class talent is flooding the city virtually every weekend, with new parties popping up what seems like over night. Near the cetner of this—I guess it wouldn’t be crazy to call it a renaissance—is Strange Allure, the collective that has been throwing fun, high quality underground parties for over a year now. Their next party comes this Saturday, March 10 and features Ari Goldman, half of the leftfield house music duo, Beautiful Swimmers.

Weird Al Yankovic

[FUN] Add prophet to Weird Al Yankovic’s long list of weird achievements. “Well, I heard my friends really got in a mess / So I’m gonna have to leave Yoda, I guess / But I know that I’ll be coming back some day / I’ll be playing this part ’till I’m old and gray. The long-term contract that I had to sign / Says I’ll be making these movies till the end of time / With my Yoda,” sang Yankovic back in 1980 about  Mark Hamill in his Star Wars role as Luke Skywalker.

Shu Lea Cheang: FLUIDØ & I.K.U.

[FILM] “I consider sex as a political statement,” said filmmaker and media artist Shu Lea Cheang to the online magazine seditionart.com: “Sexuality is a construct, fluid gender is the norm.” Born in Taiwain, Cheang received an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University in 1979. Remaining in New York, she saw the sexual permissiveness of the 1970s give way to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, followed in the 1990s by the even more revolutionary rise of cyberspace.

Our Lady Peace

[ROCK] Western New York has a soft spot for Canadian rock band Our Lady Peace. Seems the alternative rock band comes here as often as possible, and they’re almost always greeted by sold out shows, whether they’re playing at the Albright Knox or at Edgefest. This time around, the four piece band from Toronto, who celebrated the 20th anniversary of their breakthrough record, Clumsy, just last year, will hit the stage at the Rapids Theatre in Niagara Falls on Monday, March 12.

Richard Shindell

[FOLK] Richard Shindell is the type of folk musician who can craft a song from front to back with just his voice and a guitar. Holding chords on the neck of his electric guitar and gently patting above the first pickup of the instrument with his open palm, Shindell taps out a percussive, minimal folk tune—“Careless”—with a passion that feels as if he had written the song yesterday.

Legislator for Life

The elephant is scared of the mouse. 

Don’t you unhinged leftists know? Like his predecessor Dale Volker, Demented Dave DiPietro thinks he — not the electorate — gets to decide when his Assembly tenure is complete. Nothing sends the local right into a bigger frenzy than Facebook activism (no coincidence, the most preternaturally annoying and unreasonable right-wing trolls I’ve ever encountered are white men over the age of 50 on Facebook.) 

GreenWatch Sunday: Water

We live in a time when earth’s ecological systems are stressed beyond breaking. Human activity and our impact on these systems, as I am sure that most are aware, include climate change, loss of habitat, and unfettered and inappropriate development that has but one purpose-short term profit.

Centerfold: Jim Cielencki at Cafe Taza

JIM CIELENCKI’s photographs—what he calls an “aerial inquiry of the short-lived, seasonal transformation of the built environment”—will be exhibited at Cafe Taza (100 Elmwood Avenue), opening Friday, March 2. The show is called Momentary Canvas.

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