ArtsBeat

The art of protest: vote for your favorite sign

Sen. John McCain's brief fundraising visit to Buffalo Monday afternoon was a highly anticipated and contentious affair. His quick, private gathering at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery attracted some 200 protesters who stood for hours along both sides of Elmwood Avenue, many of them hoisting homemade signs.

Since McCain and his local hosts decided to hold an event at Buffalo's premiere art museum, I thought it would be a good opportunity to take a look at some of the artistry (or maybe lack thereof) in the various protest signs that caused such a stir outside the gallery Monday night.

So, if you're so inclined, take a look at these 10 examples of anti-McCain slogans and vote for your fave.

A disclaimer: This blog entry is not intended as an endorsement of or statement against any political candidate -- just a lighthearted look into the political signs swirling around the Albright-Knox on a particularly muggy and high-spirited afternoon. If Sen. Barack Obama happens to make his way through Buffalo and protesters materialize, rest assured that ArtsBeat will be there.

And for all you sticklers out there, this poll is by no means exhaustive, scientific, systematic or anything other than straight-up fun. So take a gander at the signage and cast your vote! For the signs, that is.

Vote below, and check out bigger pictures of the signs after the jump.

Online Surveys & Market Research

--Colin Dabkowski

'The perfect circle'

In keeping with our story about convergences among the arts, I just ran across a blog entry in which an Albright-Knox Art Gallery visitor was inspired to write a poem after viewing the beautiful piece "+ and -" by Mona Hatoum.

I'll post it after the jump in its entirety and link to it here.

--Colin Dabkowski

Infringe the Infringement

Spoken word poet Ekaete Bailey is part of the Buffalo group Entertaining Angels, an faith-based part of this year's Infringement Festival.

The Buffalo Infringement Festival, that yearly compendium of bizarre rarities and off-the-beaten-path endeavors from the artistically inclined, is a bastion for nearly every kind of expression imaginable. Its participants range from noise rock bands to quirky puppeteers, punk faux-politicians to installation artists. But one thing that might seem out of place amid the artsy eclecticism of the festival is a Christian-based performance troupe.

Ekaete Bailey (above) is part of the newly formed collaborative Entertaining Angels, a four-member organization that performs theater, dance, poetry and music all based firmly in their Christian roots. Their show, "Mother, Sister, Woman: A Celebration of Life and Love" will repeat four times during the festival at Bon Vivant (1862 Hertel Ave.) and include a smattering of the group's varied talents.

Bailey said she'd never heard of the somewhat chaotic Infringement Festival model until her husband, an experimental filmmaker, brought it up.

"I looked it up, and I thought, 'Well, this is different. This is very different.' But we consider ourselves alternative as well," Bailey said.

In a festival focused on pushing boundaries and transgressing the status quo, how (as I asked a bunch of other festival participants) are Entertaining Angels really being "infringey?"

"I would say that we are 'infringey' because we are pushing the envelope, in terms of how not everybody looks at their religion as a way to express their art, or looks at art as a way to express religion. We’re not necessarily expressing religion, we’re expressing our relationship with Christ, how we’ve grown into a relationship with Christ," Bailey said. "We decided, because we all kind of grew in our faith, to come together and to do this specifically for that reason."

And that, in a festival peppered with leftists and Marxists and atheists (oh my!), the Angels might be the most infringey act of all.

Check out a preview of their performance here.

--Colin Dabkowski

Coolest web video ever... again

I might as well just establish an automatic feed to the Very Short List on this blog, since it seems I just can't resist posting the coolio items the Web site sends out on a daily basis. Check it out yourself at VSL.

And now the goods:

--Colin Dabkowski

Buffalo's connection to the Bard

   The Buffalo and Erie County Public Library is showing off its copy of the first folio of Shakespeare plays, published nearly four centuries ago, to salute the recent recovery in Washington, D.C. of a copy stolen 10 years ago from a British university.

   Buffalo's pristine, 902-page compilation was acquired in the early 20th century by Col. Charles Clifton, head of the Pierce Arrow Motor Car Co., in a swap with Henry Clay Folger, an oil tycoon and collector who went on to found Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library, where the purloined copy recently turned up.

   Police in Durham, England, questioned a man who may be the same one who asked Folger library experts to evaluate the folio. They instead contacted the FBI and the book, taken from Durham University in 1998, was seized. It's said to be worth $2.5 million.

   Librarian Elaine A. Barone said Buffalo's folio, which Clifton donated to the library in 1924, is one of only 228 still in existence. Each is "a very significant piece of literature" because it includes 16 Shakespeare plays that had not previously been published, she said.

   Are you curious enough to visit the Rare Books Room in the Central Library? Let us know.

   --Tom Buckham

                                                                     

Darwin D. Martin House on Bloomberg

An image of the Darwin D. Martin House in the early 20th century from the University at Buffalo's Darwin D. Martin collection. 

Bloomberg's architecture critic James S. Russell has a nice piece about the Darwin D. Martin House Complex restoration on the Bloomberg Web site [via MAN]. An excerpt:

The coiled energy of Frank Lloyd Wright's shifting, crisscrossing piers and roofs can't be confined by mere property lines. This house looks ready to sail into the endless space of the continent across waves of tall grass.

...

Massive brick piers form recesses at the corners so the long, low hip roofs appear to float. Wright extends more interlocking piers, like great haunches, into the landscape. The house exerts a raw power that's unusual because he didn't use the decorative finials or lacy, embossed panels found in his other houses of the time.

The interior is still being restored, though Wright's characteristic expansiveness is clear in the primary living spaces that flow liquidly together and open up views in three directions. Wright's justly famous art-glass windows elegantly filter daylight.

Breaking down the rigid hierarchies of Victorian space resonated with Martin, who hoped this house would encourage the rich family life that was lacking in his own childhood. The house has an unusually direct, masculine style in its cream-colored walls and gold-flecked ceilings.

--Colin Dabkowski

Aimee Nezhukumatathil's "At the Drive-In Volcano"

"The problem with skin/is not how it keeps all of you in.../ But how it remembers and remembers even if/ the grey pocket in your brain says forget," writes Fredonia-based poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil in one of the 56 dazzling poems in her second full length collection At the Drive-In Volcano (Tupelo Press). The book was recently awarded the Balcones Poetry Prize as the best collection of poems published in 2007 by the Austin, Texas based Balcones Center for Creative Writing.

Reading through a volume of Nezhukumatathil's poems is like grabbing onto the trapeze bar at a circus of the senses: one moment your hand brushes the skin of a sand shark in a touchpool,  the next you're dodging serpent heads and anti-feminist barbs at the Medusa's Hair Salon, sampling deadly Fugu fish at an unlicensed sushi restaurant, or stealing a kiss from Judas in your community church's production of the Passion Play.

Of the generation of American poets to launch their careers over the past decade, Nezhukumatathil may be the most successful at balancing a well-crafted formal restraint with an unabashed exoticism of the senses.  No less an epicure than a natural historian, a pop cultural maven than a global village storyteller, her work excels at finding the possibilities in cultural difference and inventing a new lexicon for corporeal desires.

Born in Chicago in 1974 to a Pan-Asian family--her mother is from the Philippines and her father from the state of Kerala on the southwest coast of India (where long surnames are the norm)--Nezhukumatathil grew up in Iowa, Kansas, Arizona, and during her junior high school years, nearby Gowanda, NY before her family settled in Beavercreek, Ohio.  She attended Ohio State University as both and undergraduate and graduate student, receiving her MFA under the mentorship of poet David Citino (to whom At the Drive-In Volcano is dedicated), before being appointed Middlebrook Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Since 2001, she has been associate professor of English at SUNY-Fredonia, where she has won both campus wide and SUNY wide teaching and scholarship awards.

If Nezhukumathil's 2003 debut collection Miracle Fruit (winner of Tupelo Press' 1st Book Award and the Global Filipino Literary Award)  explored hyperrealistic representations of the Catholic iconography and lore of her mother's native Philippine Islands, then At the Drive-In Volcano (the title poem refers to an actual tourist attraction in St. Lucia which she visits with her husband on their honeymoon) focuses more poignantly on her father's Keralan legacy.  "You are the father of my father and I am the mosquito of the rain barrel," she addresses her grandfather in '"What the Mosquito Gives."  In "Origin of the Mango," her parents offer contrasting mythical accounts of how the fruit found its way to the Philippines.  Her father's account involves the intervention of a beneficent wind; her mother's the drama of a virgin suicide. 

Perhaps Nezhukumatathil's most significant advance in this volume, however, is in her development of a faltering, self-critical voice as well as the verse equivalent of an unreliable narrator, both of which broaden her palette as an artist.  In "If You Take the Fins Off A Shark" her love struck narrator self destructively overreaches with her metaphors until the poem as speech act lies in shards at her feet.  "Bee Wolf" introduces us to a poet whose need for a lover is so urgent (think Billie Holiday) she envies the stinging power of a female wasp.  "After Challenging Jennifer Lee To Fight" is about a young girl's disquieting discovery of her own capacity for aggression.  "Oriental," perhaps her most subversive poem to date, deconstructs the ethnic identity politics that have been projected onto her, even as it concedes that they are the foundation of her own literary persona.

--R.D. Pohl

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

The Movie Story of Summer 2008

"Iron Man?" Nah.
"Sex and the City?" A very big deal for its audience, to be sure, but not the No.1 item on the list.
"Get Smart?" "Journey to the Center of the Earth?" "Kung Fu Panda?" Surely, you jest.
"Wall-E?" A wonderful movie, but hardly the big movie story of the summer.
"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull?" It wasn't even the movie story of the summer the first time around.
The box-office flopperoo of "Speed Racer?" Nope. It was a radical enough movie in its way to make it more than possible the first time anyone laid eyes on it.
The movie story of the summer has long seemed to be Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker in "The Dark Knight." His death in January insured that.
See today's story leading off this week's Spotlight Section. And tell us what you think.
--Jeff Simon

In search of Cookie Gilchrist

No resident of Buffalo in the '50s and '60s had to be told why Tim Russert named his only son Luke. Anyone who cared about sports in this town at all back then loved Luke Easter, the great Buffalo Bison who, at the tail end of his baseball career, actually parked the ball over the center field scoreboard at Offermann Stadium (it's said that the only other player to accomplish that was Babe Ruth in an exhibition game).

Naming a son "Luke" makes a lot more sense than naming one "Cookie" or "Carlton." But if it didn't, there might be a whole lot of Buffalo sports fans from back then who'd name a son after Carlton Chester "Cookie" Gilchrist, the powerful fullback who, in a very short time as a Buffalo Bill, became the team's biggest star until O.J. Simpson came to town.

Gilchrist, above, was as well-known for his unusual personality as his playing. His consciousness of race and exploitation in sports put him way ahead of his time. (The Olympics of 1968 made an international issue out of the kind of things Cookie Gilchrist complained bitterly of in the early '60s.) He had the temperament of a sensitive and difficult artist in a profession devoted to running over large behemoth men at top speed.

He proved, in later years, to be as elusive on the field as he was in life. The last piece written about him for this newspaper was retired Sports Editor Larry Felser's report, a year ago, of his battles with throat cancer in Pennsylvania.

It turns out that Buffalonians haven't been the only ones to remember Cookie Gilchrist. When avant-garde Manhattan jazz bassist and composer William Parker -- an ex-football player and lifelong football fan, shown at left -- did a 2006 residency at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, he composed one piece for local jazz ensemble and dancers called "Looking for Cookie Gilchrist."

As part of the upcoming Infringement Festival, Parker will come back to Hallwalls with dancer Patricia Nicholson to perform in duo and, after intermission, with Buffalo musicians. Steve Baczkowski, music curator of Hallwalls, will take part in the program at 8 p.m. July 25th in the ALT Theater, 225 Great Arrow (at Elmwood Ave).

Baczkowski promises that Parker's whole Buffalo residency in 2006 -- including the complete "Looking for Cookie Gilchrist" -- will be available soon as a DVD. In the meantime, an avant-garde jazz bassist with some uncommon understandings of Buffalo life and fandom, will return to perform here July 25.

--Jeff Simon

PEN gives China failing grades on freedom of expression

With less than a month to go before the opening of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, three branches of International PEN, an association of writers working to advance literature, defend free expression, and foster literary fellowship worldwide, have jointly issued a report that documents their finding "that the climate for freedom of expression in China has measurably deteriorated over the past year, in full view of the international community."

On Tuesday, the PEN American Center, PEN Canada, and the Independent Chinese PEN Center, which have been monitoring incidents of government repression and violations of free expression over the past seven months in anticipation of the opening of the XXIX Olympiad on August 8th--including the cases of over 40 journalists and writers incarcerated in Chinese prisons--reported that after numerous additional detentions and a few releases, PEN is currently following the cases of 51 writers, 44 of whom are still in prison.

Among the main findings of Failing to Deliver: An Olympic-Year Report Card on Free Expression in China were:

        1.) there are more writers and journalists in Chinese prisons than there were seven months ago; 
        2.) dissident writers and journalists not in prison face serious restrictions on their movements and on their ability to speak and publish freely;
        3.) Internet censorship and other laws such as subversion and inciting separatism or "splittism" are regularly used to deny the universally-guaranteed right to freedom of expression;
        4.) China’s promises to allow media to report freely throughout China have been undermined by its attempts to manage international coverage from Tibet and earthquake-affected areas and by its      refusal to extend any new protections whatsoever to Chinese journalists.

Spokespersons for each of the three contributing PEN centers released statements in conjunction with the report.

“If China had fulfilled its pledges to protect and expand human rights in the run-up to the Olympics, it could now be poised to take a major step forward on the international stage,” wrote Larry Siems, Director of the Freedom to Write and International Programs of PEN American Center. “Instead, as this report makes clear, the world has witnessed a grinding, relentless campaign to jail or silence prominent dissident voices and new and brazen efforts to control domestic and international press.”

“It is not too late,” noted Marian Botsford Fraser of PEN Canada. “There’s still time for China to make good on the commitments it offered its own citizens and the international community when it bid to host the Olympics. With one month before the Opening Ceremonies, we are asking the world to join us in holding the Chinese government to its pledges.”

Yu Zhang of the Independent Chinese PEN Center stressed that fostering respect for basic rights is essential for China’s future. “In the end, it is not by staging a successful Olympic Games, but by honoring these commitments that China’s slogan 'One World, One Dream' will become true,” Zhang concluded.

--R.D. Pohl