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Holiday Gift Guide

Neighborly Shopping

by Artvoice

Grant Central

by Amanda Ferreira

Head North, Young Man

by Jill Greenberg

Elmwood Avenue, From the Top

by Cory Perla

Accessible Allentown

by Justin Mekjean

Shopping Online, Locally

by Artvoice

Holiday Gift Guide

One Stop Holiday Shopping

by Geoff Kelly & Jill Greenberg

You don’t need to go to a mall to do all your holiday shopping in one place. In fact, you’ve only yourself to blame if you subject yourself to that nightmare, because here are 10 good reasons not to:

Holiday Gift Guide

Cash-Mobbing

by Geoff Kelly

The word goes out on Twitter: the name of local shop or tavern, an address, a adte and a time. At the appointe hour, dozens upon dozens of customers appear at the business’s doorstep, with money in hand. Maybe a TV news camera crew shows up as well, to document that latest Buffalo Cash Mob.

Holiday Gift Guide

Celebrate Main Street

by Lauren Newkirk Maynard

Obama’s back in the White House with a renewed focus on Main Street, and perhaps never before in our country’s history has the impetus to shop local been more on the minds and in the wallets of holiday shoppers.

Holiday Gift Guide

Show Your Thanks

by Buck Quigley

While some of us are undoubtedly gearing up to storm headlong into the breach, credit cards in hand, charging toward the glass doors of the local big box store of our choice on Thanksgiving evening to cash in on unbelievable holiday savings—there are, believe it or not, others to whom that fantasy does not appeal. Some of us intend to sink into the couch and gaze at football and beer commercials. But that doesn’t float everyone’s boat, either.

Holiday Gift Guide

City of Light

by Jill Greenberg

Whether the winter produces a stereotypical Buffalo snow-piled wonderland or a mucky, frosted but bare ground, you can be sure to see houses strewn with lights, wreaths, inflated snowmen, and perhaps even an animatronic reindeer.

Week in Review

Farewell, Shale Institute: We Knew Thee Too Long and Too Well

by Buck Quigley

McCarthyisms: Read it Three Times Online and its Yours

by Alan Bedenko

News Feature

Santella Signing Off

by Buck Quigley

Since 1969, Buffalo radio audiences have been enjoying the smooth, personable voice of DJ Jim Santella over the FM airwaves. After getting his start at WBFO—the then student-run radio station of the University at Buffalo, which launched the NPR careers of personalities like Terry Gross and Ira Flatow—Santella carved out a persona that appealed to a broad range of listeners.

Art Scene

Paintings by Peter Stephens at Nina Freudenheim Gallery

by Jack Foran

Fiber art by Carol Ann Rice Rafferty at the C. G. Jung Center

by J. Tim Raymond

Theater Week

They Screw You Up

by Anthony Chase

A conservative Republican couple living in an affluent California desert community have entirely liberal relations. The group is both claustrophobically close and painfully estranged. When the daughter returns home after six years and announces that she has written a book that will expose hurtful family secrets, old wounds are reopened and relationships are realigned. That is the plot of Jon Rob Baitz’s play, Other Desert Cities, which opens at the Kavinoky Theatre this week.

Theater News

Stagefright

by Javier

Movie star Jake Gyllenhaal (pictured left) made his American stage debut this season in If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet, a British play by Nich Payne that premiered in London in 2009. The play, which is currently running (through December 23rd) at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre in New York, also stars Tony winner Brian F. O’Byrne (Frozen) who appeared at the Irish Classical Theatre company in Buffalo many years ago.

Classical Music Notes

Sweet Pipes

by Jan Jezioro

On Tuesday, November 27 at 8pm, the Buffalo Chamber Music Society’s concert in the Mary Seaton Room of Kleinhans Music Hall features what may well be a first in the organization’s 89-year history, a performance by a recorder quartet.

FIlm Feature

Betting Against the Dark Clouds

by M. Faust

Winner of the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Silver Linings Playbook is a romantic comedy with the kind of characters you seldom see in a rom-com.

Film Review

Life of Pi

by M. Faust

Do yourself a favor: Don’t read past the end of this paragraph. Whether or not you want to take my word for it that Ang Lee’s Life of Pi is the best film of the year, maybe even of the past decade, trust me that nothing I can tell you would not be better experienced by you in a theater, coming to it with no preconceptions.

Listings

On The Boards Theater Listings

Movie Times (Friday, November 23 - Thursday, November 29)

Film Now Playing

Featured Events

See You There!

Artvoice's weekly round-up of featured events, including our editor's pick for the week: Soul Patch, performing on Friday the 23rd at Duke's Bohemian Grove Bar.

Book Review

Not Molly Bloom, But Still...

by Wood Brown

So, Molly Ringwald. Most famous of course for her career as an actress, yes? No one can forget her starring roles in Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Pretty in Pink (1986), John Hughes’s three films that defined teen life in the 1980s. We might expect Ringwald to spend her adulthood disavowing her earlier work not because it is bad but because of its utter ubiquity.

Guest Essay

Coffee For Two, Pistols for Four

by Mason Winfield

It may shock anyone to envision America undersupplied, but when the 1812 war was declared, the whole US had a standing army of 7,000. There were almost that many redcoats in Ontario, and 100,000 elsewhere. As far as artillery on the Niagara, the US was outgunned 100 to none, and it had no warships. Ship rustling, hence, could be big business.

Letters to Artvoice

For the Non-Artist: A Case for Taxpayer Support of the Arts

by Paul T. Hogan

Occupy Sandy: Mutual Aid in the Wake of the Storm

by Edward Lawton

He's Taking This Well, Isn't He?

by Lloyd A. Marshall, Jr.

Play Ball

He's Back!

by Andrew Kulyk & Peter Farrell

In Buffalo’s baseball world, so much has happened since that press conference in September, when the Buffalo Bisons announced that they were signing a two-year affiliation with the Toronto Blue Jays as their new parent club.

Offbeat News

News of the Weird

by Chuck Shepherd

By 2009, James Washington believed he had gotten away with a 1995 murder, but then he had a heart attack, and on his deathbed, in a fit of remorse, he confessed to a confidant. (“I have to get something off my conscience,” he told a guard in the jailhouse where he was serving time for a lesser, unrelated offense.)

Horoscopes

Free Will Astrology

by Rob Brezsny

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Your redesigned thrust vectoring matrix is finally operational. Love those new nozzles! Moreover, you’ve managed to purge all the bugs from your cellular tracking pulse, and your high-resolution flux capacitor is retooled and as sexy as a digitally-remastered simulation of your first kiss.

Advice

Ask Anyone

We’re planning for a big Thanksgiving dinner at our house this year—30 people, maybe more, with siblings and spouses and kids. We can manage the food and drink all right, and we’ll have four tables set up. My problem is that’s a lot of people to make conversation with. And the thing is, I only really want to catch up with my siblings, whom I seldom see.