The 2006 winter/spring season of arts and education workshops is about to get underway at Squeaky Wheel Media Resources, and the center is presenting a free preview of what’s available. Learn about the various courses that will be offered (beginning the last week of January, through the first week of May) and get to know some of the instructors. The open house begins with a tour of Squeaky Wheel’s new downtown facilities and includes information about discount opportunities for upcoming workshops (classses in Digital Video Production, Super-8 and 16mm Filmmaking, Kids’ Workshops, and much more will be offered). Instructor screenings will follow, with presentations by director Dorothea Braemer and instructor/members Elizabeth Knipe, Brian Milbrand, Allyson Mitchell, Vincenzo Mistretta, Julie Perini, Joanna Raczynska, and J.T. Rinker. Brian Milbrand’s video Choose Your Own Adventure, starring the Real Dream Cabaret, is pictured (shown here is Cabaret member Tawnee Grant).

Buffalo’s Town Ballroom is registered as one of the area’s most haunted places. If only the walls of 681 Main Street could tell the stories of gangsters, bootleggers, show girls and other souls who supposedly still lurk in the building. Luckily, since the walls can’t divulge their stories, there’s someone who can. Mason Winfield (pictured), WNY’s premier ghost hunter and author of a series of books on his supernatural studies and findings, will be the guide for a Friday the 13th event set to uncover the secrets behind this building’s decades of psychic folklore. The evening includes a talk of the building’s history, a ghost walk tour of the facility, psychic readings and more. Proceeds benefit the Landmark Society of the Niagara Frontier. The ghost of Al Capone (a frequent visitor to the establishment) might even be glimpsed playing cards in his favorite spot in the Town’s fabled basement. Who knows for sure what lurks and what kind of ghoulish merriment might ensue? Find out for yourself!

What better way to spend a drearily warm January weekend than taking in two great art exhibits at once? A fun and relatively new art series on the Buffalo scene, “24/12” at the Burchfield-Penney Art Gallery continues its showcasing of “24 artists in 12 months” with the works of Cambridge, MA painter Peter Arvidson and Buffalo composer Will Redman. Redman’s fascinating graphical scores will be on display along with Arvidson’s abstract fields of color (pictured). At Friday’s opening, Redman will perform his works with the Open Music Ensemble, a local music collective dedicated to exploring such non-traditional scores to a new audience. The installation of both artists’ works will be up through February 8. Also officially opening at the Burchfield-Penney is a look at the work of photographer Marion Faller as part of the gallery’s “A Life in the Arts” series. Originally from northern New Jersey, Faller is a long-time photo instructor in WNY whose work focuses on the human rituals of holidays, festivals and the changing of seasons. The exhibit runs through February 26.

If you’ve ever taken a class from a professor who has been teaching it on a regular basis for a long time, you’ve probably found that it can be lifeless, the result of repetition that whittles away its edge. That’s not the case with the Buffalo Film Seminars, which grew out of a UB film class taught by Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian, who moved the screenings to the Market Arcade Film and Arts Centre and opened them and the discussions to the general public. While next week brings the twelfth installment of the BFS, none of the 14 films have been screened in any previous edition. And while it’s a film lover’s dream to be able to see The Seven Samurai (Feb. 7), pictured, or Wings of Desire (April 11) on a big screen, the BFS also offers films that are difficult to see in any format, including the seminal 1934 Chinese film The Goddess (Jan. 24), the first postwar German film The Murderers are Among Us (Jan. 31) and Abel Gance’s gargantuan Napoleon, which opens the series on Tuesday (Jan. 17) at 7pm. For a complete list visit buffalofilmseminars.com.