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Cover Story

We Have Seen the Future...

The great part about making predictions, I was reminded recently, is that in a year’s time no one will remember what you forecast.

News Analysis

School Fantasies

by Bruce Fisher

At the Grabiarz elementary and middle school on Lawn Avenue in Buffalo, 95 percent of the 530 kids in grades five through eight were eligible last year for free and reduced-price meals. Half the kids are black, a quarter are white, about a fifth are hispanic, with multi-racial, native Americans, and Asians making up the rest.

Sports Feature

2013: The Year in Sports

by Andrew Kulyk & Peter Farrell

Has Buffalo become the most tortured city when it comes to its sports teams? Just a few years removed from visions of Stanley Cups, the Buffalo Sabres’ fortunes hit rock bottom coming out of the lockout, and their longtime coach and their general manager are both gone. Over at One Bills Drive, it is now 14 years and counting since the Buffalo Bills have participated in the NFL playoffs.

Art Scene

All Aboard the Art Barge!

by Jack Foran

The huge main gallery space of the Burchfield Penney Art Center, where a veritable Noah’s Ark of an art project—an artwork barge and gallery in its own right—will be constructed and on display, ultimately to break out of the gallery space and venture across the historic state canal and thence down the Hudson to New York City, in a reenactment of traditional patterns of trade and commerce across the Empire State—and examination of connections among communities—substituting art for wheat and wood.

Artvoice B.O.O.M!

Round 1, Week 4: Ish Kabibble vs. AjamajA

Welcome to the eighth installment of Artvoice’s Battle of Original Music—a contest we call BOOM, for short. Briefly, here’s how it works: Each week, we will feature two local, original music acts like the ones you see to your right. Next, hundreds of readers like you will visit boom.artvoice.com to listen to their music and click on the band they like the best. The band that gets the most votes this way wins a spot in our live showdown scheduled for January 17 at Nietzsche’s.

Theater Week

Wicked's Elphaba

by Anthony Chase

You can look at the top-grossing motion pictures of all time, and none—not Avatar, Star Wars, or Titanic; not The Sound of Music or E.T.—has earned as much as the stage musical Wicked.

Theater News

Stagefright

by Javier

Happy New Year! South Buffalo native John Kennedy Kane (a.k.a. Circ, pictured above) does an outstanding job as the ringmaster for the fabulous Big Apple Circus in New York City. Before embarking on a national tour, the circus will be performing under the Big Top in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center through January 12.

Listings

On The Boards Theater Listings

On the Boards is presented by the Irish Classical Theatre Company. To be considered for On the Boards, submissions must be received by 5pm on Wednesday one week prior to publication. Send notice VIA e-mail to: ontheboards@artvoice.com.

Featured Events

See You There!

Artvoice's weekly round-up of featured events, including our editor's picks for the week: Against Me!, playing Sunday at the Town Ballroom.

You Auto Know

Looking Back in the YAK Rearview Mirror

by Jim Corbran

When I started writing the You Auto Know column 12 years ago, I might have hoped I’d still be doing it now, but did I figure on it? Probably not.

Letters to Artvoice

Public Financing of Elections

by Roger Cook

Turn Around Albany

by Maryann Janicki

Offbeat News

News of the Weird

by Chuck Shepherd

America’s foremost advocate for frontal lobotomies as “treatment” for mental disorder, the late Dr. Walter Freeman, performed an estimated 3,500 lobotomies during the 1940s and 1950s before opposition finally solidified against him, according to a December 2013 investigation by The Wall Street Journal.

Horoscopes

Free Will Astrology

by Rob Brezsny

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Would you be interested in a motto that will help set the tone for you in 2014? I’ve got a suggestion that’s in alignment with the astrological omens. It’s from a poem by Margaret Atwood. Try saying this and see if it works for you: “Last year I abstained / this year I devour / without guilt / which is also an art.”