The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
— Stephen King

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.
— Martin Luther King

When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
— R. Buckminster Fuller

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
— James Thurber



Friday Overture: I'm not saying it's their best song, but it's my favorite Rolling Stones song, by a country mile....


NOTA BENE: The stellar studio version of this song can be found on the 1978 album Some Girls and while this live television performance isn't quite as good, it's still very good. It's one of those songs that makes me wish I could play the piano (listen to the album version and you'll see what I mean). I think it's remained a favorite song of mine because it skirts along the edge of parody—and very close to the edge of mockery—without quite going overboard, saving itself with an earnest and heartfelt chorus. It's wry and funny, poking fun at both religion and love and offering up a simple solution to assuage one's contempt at the world: find a girl with far away eyes. It's also one of the regrettably few country tracks the band recorded after their brilliant country/blues/rock hybrid days of the early 1970s when Mick Taylor was in the band they recorded the still brilliant albums Let It Bleed, Beggar's Banquet, and Exile on Main Street, still their three finest records.

CONTINUING thru April 9 @ Hallwalls
Gallery hours: Tues to Fri 11am to 6pm, Sat 11am to 2pm

JOSHUA GREENE: CHARACTER DESCRIPTIONS

Josh Green's Website


HEATHER LAYTON: PREPARING TO LOSE

Heather Layton's Website



@ Hallwalls Fri, Mar 26, 8pm
Shine Louise Houston: Champion

Hallwalls Media Arts


@ Hallwalls Thurs, April 1, 7pm
Mark Nowak

Hallwalls Literature


@ Hallwalls Fri, April 2, 8pm
Black Took Collective: Live Feed from the Black Unconscious

Hallwalls Literature


And the rest of March @ Hallwalls



April 7 in the Ninth Ward



Where You Should Be On May 1st



The rest of April/May 2010 @ Hallwalls





Opening Elsewhere
• Annette Cravens @ UB Anderson Gallery op Sun, Mar 28, 1-5pm
• Andre Fradet @ Studio Hart op Fri, April 2, 6-9pm (May 5)



Closing Reception for Jan Nagle: Homespun
@ CEPA TONIGHT 7-9pm



Thru Mar 27 @ Sugar City



@ the Burchfield thurs, April 1, 7pm, FREE
Amanda McDonald Crowley lecture: FOOD IN THE CITY

Food and Emerging Media



Opening April 17 @ Buffalo Arts Studio



"Two art exhibits about environmental issues just opened at the UB art gallery on the North campus: one specifically local, about the waters of Ellicott Creek a five-minute hike from the gallery; the other about global economic and environmental issues, but with substantial local implications."

Artvoice Foran


CALL FOR WORK: 6X6X2010: DEADLINE MAY 2

Rochester Contemporary

Continuing Elsewhere
• ALBRIGHT KNOX • Fletcher Benton (July 5), The Dorothy and Herb Vogel Collection (May 9), Guillermo Cuitca (May 30), The Automatiste Revolution (May 30) Buffalo News
• BIG ORBIT • Frederick Wright-Jones (Apr 17) Buffalo News
• BUFFALO ARTS STUDIO • Tom Hughes, Baili Liu (Mar 27) Buffalo News Dabkowski
• BURCHFIELD PENNEY • Liz Tower (Apr 4), Park School Students (Mar 28), Charles Cary Rumsey (May 30), Surreal Inclinations (July 11), Charles Burchfield: Heatwaves in a Swamp (May 23)
• CARNEGIE ART CENTER • installing
• CASTELLANI ART MUSEUM • Felice Koenig (May 23), Surrealism and the Museum of Dreams (May 30)
• CEPA GALLERY • Members Exhibition, Jan Nagle Buffalo News Dabkowski, Jax Deluca, Richard Nesbitt (all thru Mar 26)
• HALLWALLS • Josh Greene, Heather Layton (Apr 9)
• UB ANDERSON • Paul Jenkins (Aug 22)
• UB ART GALLERY • Alberto Rey & Precious Cargo (both May 15)
• Nelson Bradley in BRUCENNIAL 2010: Miseducation (NYC) thru Apr 4
• Catherine Parker, Monica Angle @ Indigo (Apr 3)
• Adele Henderson @ Studio Hart (Apr 1)
• Greg Kuppenger, Victoria Ciostek, John Merlino, Sharon Kalstek @ Buffalo Big Print (Apr 17)
• Andrew Ortiz @ El Museo (Apr 7)
• Matt Duquette, Tera Barnum, Andrew Dumpleton, Tracy Blook, Martha Rogala, MJ Myers @ NCCC thru Mar 27
• Adele Cohen @ WNYBAC (April 10)
• Andrew Ortiz @ El Museo (Apr 7)
• Gerald Mead @ Nichols (May 1)
• Willian DuBois @ Nina Freudenheim (Apr 14)Buffalo News
• David Pierro, Candace Keegan, Michael Trampert, Ross Chirico, Michael Mulley, Chris McGee, William Herod, Chris Hausbeck @ Queen City Gallery (Apr 30)
• Tim Roby @ Olean Public Library
• Julian Montague @ B&W (NYC) thru May 28
• Greg Kuppenger, Viktoria Ciostek, Gene Witkowski, John Merlino, Sharon Kalstek @ Buffalo Big Print (Apr 17)

"Without reform of the financial system, that problem remains unsolved. Wall Street will keep incentivizing reckless risk. Too-big-to-fail banks will keep getting bigger. The system will crash again sooner rather than later, once more taking Americans’ savings, jobs and tax dollars with it."

NY Times Rich

"For more than a generation, nudity, pain, grueling endurance tests and even bloodletting have been elements of a certain strain of performance art, one Ms. Abramovic helped pioneer. But they have never come together in New York quite as boldly or publicly as they have since the opening this week of the Modern’s new show."

NY Times Kennedy

"His misadventures, particularly in the early books, are ignited by impulse and inquiry, the consequences of wanting to see and to know, and the books’ charm is that they don’t condemn this curiosity; they relish it."

NY Times Rothstein

"Not surprisingly, the words 'curated by Jeff Koons' seem to mean cramming a whole lot of work into a space, thus turning it into a boardwalk funhouse. "

artnet Finch

"Yet the show is no crackpot fantasy. Based on a two-year research project by the engineer Guy Nordenson, the landscape architect Catherine Seavitt and the architect Adam Yarinsky, it builds on recent municipal efforts to create a greener New York, from bike lanes to the construction of the new Brooklyn Bridge Park."

NY Times Ouroussoff

"The event, the first-ever Art Handling Olympics — a combination roast, “Jackass”-style stunt extravaganza and excuse to drink a lot — drew about 200 people at its height who came to the Ramiken Crucible gallery to watch a dozen four-man teams (art handlers are, by and large, male, and, by and large, large) go head-to-head, demonstrating their skills with a lot of fake art and untold amounts of Bubble Wrap."

NY Times Kennedy

"The notion that the rooftop figures look like jumpers is ridiculous; in fact, the skyward guys appear more surefooted and serene than many of those walking on the street staring at devices!"

artnet Finch

"According to online analytics company Visible Measures, Lady Gaga has made internet history by racking up more than 1 billion total views for just three of her music videos posted online."

Huffington Post

"Millions of us type it each day, usually without thinking about it. Yet the Museum of Modern Art in New York has deemed it to be such an important example of design that the @ has been officially admitted to its architecture and design collection. That’s as good as it gets in the design world, rather like bagging a Tony on Broadway or an Oscar in Hollywood."

NY Times Rawsthorn

“I was a very skinny, scrawny kid who couldn’t make it at all with the girls. So I did this as a defense. And it worked.”

NY Times obit

"In crisp photographs, shot mostly in black and white and with a stable of trusty Leica rangefinders, Mr. Marshall captured pop stars in their full onstage glory, as well as in unguarded offstage scenes that humanized them as approachable or vulnerable."

NY Times obit

For Your Netflix Queue...

(1971, dir. William Friedkin) I guess I'm on a favorite-movies-as-favorite-albums jag recently and having waxed on about The Shining last week, I think it prompted me to rewatch The French Connection for the umpteenth time. And like a favorite album, it still doesn't disappoint. It's always been one of my very favorite films. I love the cinemetography of Owen Roizman. I love the use of available light sources and one of the best use of locations in any American film ever—though that opinion may be biased by my fetishitic affection for grimy, perverse 1970s NYC of my youthful imagination. I love the "induced documentary" style that Friedkin concocted and used to tremendous effect—he has spoken about blocking out scenes with the actors, but then being purposely vague in his directions to the d.p. and the cameraman, forcing the camera operator to find and follow the action of a scene. I love the moral ambiguity of the main protagonist, Gene Hackman, and the resigned ennui of his partner, Roy Scheider. And sure I love the car chase, but I also love the first hour of the film, with its long stretches of no dialogue whatsoever and a slow but steady development of plot through action. It's a grim tale, no happy ending, told beautifully.

Something I listened to this week...

(1967) SEBASTIEN CABOT, ACTOR, BOB DYLAN, POET
This was a staggering piece of crap, almost so bad as to be impressive. I'm questioning whether I should explain what made it so bad or just say that it really stunk up the joint, it took a while for the stink to clear, and leave it at that. I'm all for some messed up pop culture mashup of disparate elements into, voila, some new something and I'll love many of those mutant hybrids, but maybe there are limits in my capacity to love pop culture. You could be good and drunk, happy as a clam with the entire world and if someone put this record on, you would sober up against your will in a fitful, angry rage.

Cabot was a British actor most famous for his role as the butler in A Family Affair, a sitcom where swinging NY bachelor Brian Keith adopts his newly-orphaned niece and nephew, the dangerously adorable Buffy and Jody, and brings them to live in his massive penthouse apartment, where the butler is a live-in man servant and Keith, as I recall, always has plenty of girlfriends in and out of his pad while managing to dole out dollops of wisdom to the muppeted orphans in his home. Cabot was good on the show, a serious-seeming comic foil and the de-facto mother figure in the home. His baritone voice is perfectly suited to dramatic reading and I have no qualms about that part of it, but as he recites Dylan's words, there is a musical accompaniment that is never remotely like the original song—and it's not even decent music. Which hugely misses the point that Dylan's words were lyrics, not poems and to deny the music wrote for them, misses the point even further. Perhaps valid as some freakish art piece, though I suspect it wasn't intended or marketed as such. And I wouldn't even mind THAT if it weren't so fucking lousy. It might have pissed me off because I couldn't even find a way to tolerate it ironically. Okay, I can apply some small portion of ironic affection for that ridiculous (but hilarious) cane-on-my-chin-because-I'm-pensive-and-urbane pose on the album cover. Otherwise, dreadful shit. q p

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tries, and a touch that never hurts.
— Charles Dickens

Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.
— Dorothy Parker

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
— Thomas Jefferson

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign: all the dunces are in confederacy against him.
— Jonathan Swift

My work is a game, a very serious game.
— M.C. Escher


Friday Overture: "We are all connected..."


NOTA BENE: Should scientists sing? Well, I have no problem with applying a vocoder to their ruminations and concocting a mashup that reiterates some themes worth remembering.


CONTINUING thru April 9 @ Hallwalls
Gallery hours: Tues to Fri 11am to 6pm, Sat 11am to 2pm

JOSHUA GREENE: CHARACTER DESCRIPTIONS

Josh Green's Website


HEATHER LAYTON: PREPARING TO LOSE

Heather Layton's Website


Last weekend, during gallery hours, we had a visit from some Torontonians on their way through town and while showing them around the space, their daughter Isabella asked if she could play the Steinway. Here's her 63 second impromptu solo concert:

Isabella Tries Out The Steinway from John Massier on Vimeo.

@ Hallwalls Wed, Mar 24, 8pm
Johannes Zits: Performing the Body

Hallwalls Media Arts


@ Hallwalls Fri, Mar 26, 8pm
Shine Louise Houston: Champion

Hallwalls Media Arts


And the rest of March @ Hallwalls



April 7 in the Ninth Ward



Where You Should Be On May 1st




Opening Elsewhere
• The Automatiste Revolution: Montreal 1941-1960 @ the Albright op Fri, Mar 19, 3-10pm
• David Pierro, Candace Keegan, Michael Trampert, Ross Chirico, Michael Mulley, Chris McGee, William Herod, Chris Hausbeck @ Queen City Gallery op Fri, Mar 19, 5-8pm


Studio Sale Concludes



Could be the exhibition title of the year-to-date...Frederick Wright-Jones: The First Meeting of the National Rifle Association for the Advancement of Colored People In My Head

op @ Big Orbit Sat, Mar 20, 8-11pm (Apr 17)


Julian Montague @ B&W in NYC

Sat, Mar 20, 6-9pm (May 28)


Tim Roby @ Olean Public Library

op Sun, Mar 21, 2-4pm (Apr 10)


Spring in Buffalo means biking en masse begins...Sunday!



Thru Mar 27 @ Sugar City



"In the mid-1940s, when Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and the rest of the abstract expressionist gang were honing the skills that would propel them to international acclaim, something quieter was going on north of the border."

Buffalo News Dabkowski



CALL FOR WORK: 6X6X2010: DEADLINE MAY 2

Rochester Contemporary

Continuing Elsewhere
• ALBRIGHT KNOX • Fletcher Benton (July 5), The Dorothy and Herb Vogel Collection (May 9), Guillermo Cuitca (May 30)
• BIG ORBIT • Frederick Wright-Jones (Apr 17)
• BUFFALO ARTS STUDIO • Tom Hughes, Baili Liu (Mar 27) Buffalo News Dabkowski
• BURCHFIELD PENNEY • Liz Tower (Apr 4), Park School Students (Mar 28), Charles Cary Rumsey (May 30), Surreal Inclinations (July 11), Charles Burchfield: Heatwaves in a Swamp (May 23)
• CARNEGIE ART CENTER • Esther Neisen, Phil Cavuto, Jonathan Grassi (Mar 19)
• CASTELLANI ART MUSEUM • Felice Koenig (May 23), Surrealism and the Museum of Dreams (May 30)
• CEPA GALLERY • Members Exhibition, Jan Nagle Buffalo News Dabkowski, Jax Deluca, Richard Nesbitt (all thru Mar 26)
• HALLWALLS • Josh Greene, Heather Layton (Apr 9)
• UB ANDERSON • renovating
• UB ART GALLERY • Alberto Rey & Precious CArgo (both May 15)
• Nelson Bradley in BRUCENNIAL 2010: Miseducation (NYC) thru Apr 4
• Gary Sczerbaniewicz @ Sugar City thru Mar 19
• Catherine Parker, Monica Angle @ Indigo (Apr 3)
• Adele Henderson @ Studio Hart (Apr 1)
• Greg Kuppenger, Victoria Ciostek, John Merlino, Sharon Kalstek @ Buffalo Big Print (Apr 17)
• Andrew Ortiz @ El Museo (Apr 7)
• Priscilla Bowen, Michael Morgulis @ Burchfield Nature & Art Center thru Mar 19
• Matt Duquette, Tera Barnum, Andrew Dumpleton, Tracy Blook, Martha Rogala, MJ Myers @ NCCC thru Mar 27
• Adele Cohen @ WNYBAC (April 10)
• Andrew Ortiz @ El Museo (Apr 7)
• Gerald Mead @ Nichols (May 1)
• Willian DuBois @ Nina Freudenheim (Apr 14)

"Could any of this non-reality-based shtick stick? So far the answer is No. Rove’s book and Keep America Safe could be the best political news for the White House in some time. This new eruption of misinformation and rancor vividly reminds Americans why they couldn’t wait for Bush and Cheney to leave Washington."

NY Times Rich

“I understand the police are just doing their job. I never wanted to freak anyone out. If people think of death and suicide, it’s a sad reflection on evolution. This is meant to be an amazing celebration of New York.”

NY Times Vogel

"Continuing onward, the highway weaves between the past, the present, and the future of the landscape. Dusty farm roads lead to forgotten treasures, town-ships wither as Interstates grow in the distance, and trailer communities sprout into growing neighborhoods..."

Buffalo artist Viktoria Ciostek is on the endless road and taking lots of great photographs. Check out her road trip here.

"Could not the Obama Administration divvy out seven-figure segments of the national debt to artists (instead of bankers), have them, for a commission, transform the debt into an art commodity, sell these instruments at a lower price, thus turning all of commerce into art and wiping out the U.S. government's international financial obligations?"

artnet Finch

"When artwork that once belonged to the late bestselling author Michael Crichton hits the auction block in May, the works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso and others will combine for one of the most high-profile art sales of the season."

LA Times Ng

"Over the last two generations, the science museum has become a place where politics, history and sociology often crowd out physics and the hard sciences. There are museums that believe their mission is to inspire political action, and others that seek to inspire nascent scientists; there are even fundamental disagreements on how humanity itself is to be regarded. The experimentation may be a sign of the science museum’s struggle to define itself."

NY Times Rothstein

"Speaking on Thursday, several of the more than 300 people who had been recruited for the show through e-mail messages and later in interviews (and in the case of the children, an elaborate series of auditions) confirmed that their starring roles in the season’s most talked-about artwork had been challenging, even trying at times. But most also seemed to have found the job and the wide-ranging and often philosophical dialogues it involved inspiring."

NY Times Desantis

"His mother ran a tortilla delivery route and later opened a restaurant, Carlito's Chicken, that recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. (Ochoa worked for both.) His father worked in construction, laying concrete. Three of his uncles have had pallet yards, and several of his cousins install rebar. Earlier projects—such as the conversion of his family's delivery van into a mobile art gallery, where he mounted 20 exhibitions featuring 75 artists shows between 2001 and 2004—reflected aspects of the restaurant experience: an interest in merchant operations and the development of informal economies."

LA Times Myers

"Even the notion that certain works of performance art can or should be restaged after a piece’s original incarnation...is not without controversy. While some artists...create work meant to be repeated, with the presumption that it will be different each time, others feel that attempting to restage a work regardless of its original context—the social and political climate, the kind of art it was reacting to—is a perversion of its essence."

NY Times Kino

"If there were as many memorable paintings done over the last 50 years as there have been allegedly memorable pieces of performance art, people would have stopped making paintings in 1985."

artnet Finch

"In a city with so little first-rate institutional exhibition space, and so much bad space, this building’s near-perfect 36,000 square feet will be dearly missed. Especially because there will always be the terrible feeling that it didn’t have to be this way—that institutional hubris, shortsightedness and mismanagement created this sad situation. The closing is the grim symbol of a deeply misguided expansion era for many museums, one that is only now ending."

artnet Saltz

"The movie may be a little too tame in the end, but at its best it is just wild enough."

NY Times Scott

"Perhaps the surest measure of the tug that Mr. Chilton exerted on subsequent artists can be found in the lyrics of the Replacements – another malleable rock act that moved more hearts than retail units – who sang in their song Alex Chilton: 'Children by the million / Sing for Alex Chilton / When he comes ’round / They sing, ‘I’m in love / What’s that song? / I’m in love with that song.’”

NY Times Artsbeat

NY Times obit

Congress notes the passing of a son of Memphis

“We used to get together a play in a weekend, rehearse on a rooftop, rummage through the garbage for our props and, if we needed extra cash, we hustled our bodies in the streets. We men, that is—we didn’t think we should ask the women to do it.”

NY Times obit

“He did not speak; he did not smile; his eyes rarely left the table. There was a palpable arrogance in his play. He rolled the dice and moved the men about the board with the poise of a man who knows that victory is only a matter of time.”

NY Times obit

"Children wore coonskin caps to school and wore them to bed. They wore them with their Davy Crockett plastic fringe frontier costumes while they played with their Crockett trading cards, their Crockett board games and puzzles, their Crockett color slide sets and their Crockett powder horns. They pestered their parents for Crockett toy muskets and Crockett bubble gum and Crockett rings and comic books."

NY Times obit

For Your Netflix Queue...

(1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick) For your Netflix queue, if you happen to be an unfortunate soul who has not yet relished this exquisite film. If you're in Buffalo, you have a rare opportunity to catch it on the big screen Tues, March 30, 7pm at the Market Arcade. I was 17 when it came out and we went to see it in a large movie palace in downtown Toronto, a summer matinee with only a handful of other people in the theater. We staggered out into the sunshine afterwards, mightily impressed and unnerved. I had read the King novel as a teenager, and loved it, though I never had a problem with Kubrick's adaptation. I was aware even then that Kubrick was using only what he needed from the story. Over the years, and multiple—okay, perpetual—viewings, I've only become more impressed with every aspect of the film. I have a friend who has some internal clock that disables him from watching even his favorite films again until years have passed, though he'll listen to a Queen album again for the milliionth time at the drop of a hat. The Shining is much like an album to me and I can't let too long pass before seeing it again, as I did twice last year and will again in a couple of weeks.

I could rhapsodize at length on the lighting, the editing, the fantastic steadycam photography, but let's just mention one thing that makes it endlessly interesting. Stephen Spielberg said that Stanley Kubrick once asked him to immediately name his favorite actors of all time and Spielberg replied with names like Henry Fonda and Spencer Tracey and a few others when Kubrick stopped him and asked why James Cagney wasn't on his list. Spielberg conceded his love for Cagney though he didn't mention him. Kubrick said that, for him, Cagney was high on that list. He then told Spielberg, "Real is good. Interesting is better."

Kubrick's remark goes a long way to explaining what was going on in Jack Nicholson's over-the-top performance in which he already looks a little off the first time you see his character. A collaborator on the film described a typical shot as something that went through multiple takes, during which Nicholson would give Kubrick every emotional gradation he could think of for the scene. After a couple dozen takes, Nicholson, great actor though he is, would start to run out of ideas and start inserting wildly exaggerated antics and gestures into his performance. Invariably, THOSE were the takes that Kubrick used. (This also explains why Kubrick needed Shelly Duval to function in almost perpetual hysteria, as an emotional foil to Nicholson's simmering, relentless fury.)

Drop those spasmodic performance moments in a wide, often brightly=lit space in which the camera wafts along in a slow, measured pace (even when the story speeds up, the camera manages to remain somewhat languid) and its a heady concoction. There's probably a causal relationship between the film and the age at which I first experienced it, but no number of viewings has ever diluted the pleasure that deepens on each viewing.

Something I listened to this week...

(2005) CULT CARGO: BELIZE CITY BOIL UP
This is never coming off my iPod. I'm not even going to try and articulate the cool of this selection of Caribbean soul and reggae. Look at the album cover. Shimmering, soulful, funky. Good for whatever ails ya.Nuff said.

Men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell, and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving.
— George Bernard Shaw