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Cover Story

The Great Wind Debate

by Peter Koch

Last fall I received a brochure in the mail with my monthly electric bill informing me that I could opt to buy “green” energy for a small premium from a company called Green Mountain Energy. Rather than getting my electricity from natural gas, nuclear, coal and oil resources, which account for 81 percent of New York’s energy supply, my $50 each month would go toward buying electricity from renewable resources, a 50/50 split between wind power and hydroelectric. For about $4 each month, I could clear my enviro-conscience, and avoid contributing 1,500 pounds of carbon dioxide into the air.

Letters to Artvoice

In a letter to the editor, an abortion opponent criticizes your cover story of the previous week on the grounds that you neglected salient parts of the abortion story (“Letters to Artvoice,” Artvoice v5n20). Unfortunately the parts the story “neglected” are largely incorrect.

Free Will Astrology

by Rob Brezsny

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?” That’s the question asked by Marc Hedlund in the intro to his “Proverbs for Entrepreneurs” (http://snipurl.com/ndlv). Since you’re experiencing new opportunities to bring more of the entrepreneurial spirit into your life and work, I thought I’d offer you a few of his suggestions. (1) Pay attention to any idea that won’t leave you alone. (2) Give people what they really need, not necessarily what they say they need. (3) If you keep your brilliant ideas secret for fear they’ll be stolen, people will hide their brilliant ideas from you. (4) Great things are made by people who share a passion, not by partners who have been talked into it.

Streetvoice

School Budget Votes: Do We Need a More Regional Approach?

by Rob Metzler

On May 16 many school districts held votes on their proposed budgets for the upcoming school year. Most of them included increases and the vast majority were approved with low voter turnout and little opposition. The city, on the other hand, has suffered three straight years of decline in its education budget. While the suburbs gain in population and continually increase spending and the city loses its tax base, the education gap between city and suburban school district grows wider. Is it time to adopt a more regional approach to school spending?

News of the Weird

by Chuck Shepherd

■ Just after classes let out at Callaway High School in Jackson, Miss., on April 28, Mayor Frank Melton, riding down Interstate 220 with his police escort, motioned to the drivers of four school buses to pull off the road so that Melton could board the buses and shake hands with and hug the students, apparently just because, as he later told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, recent weeks had been “stressful.” Melton told the newspaper that he’s just “passionate” about kids and education. “I didn’t do anything stupid or illegal,” he said, but a state education official said that it was improper to interfere with the operation of a school bus except in an emergency.

Poetry

In the Garden of the Forking Stone Path

by John Marvin

Call me

calm mellen

climb up a ladder

white black white black white

white black white black white black white

Book Review

The What Was Where? Book of Buffalo's Canals: A Field Guide by Steve Corbett

by Gerry Rising

Buffalonian Steve Corbett has given us a most useful field guide to the original extension of the Erie Canal that brought the waterway to downtown Buffalo. His well-illustrated book takes us from the end of the current canal at the federal lock near the International Railroad Bridge all the way down to Lackawanna. Replaced now by the I-190 and all kinds of additional construction, remnants of the old canal are still to be found and Corbett has located and reproduced many of them. Superimposed on old maps and photographs of the area, this book’s pages show what little remains of the old canal. Some bridge footings, some dilapidated engineering works, some low areas near the expressway, some old stone walls and even a few buildings are still extant to honor that remarkable achievement—DeWitt Clinton’s Ditch—completed in 1825. This brochure supplements the histories of the canal that tell of the intense political infighting between Black Rock and Buffalo for the canal terminus. Black Rock finally won that battle by default when the Buffalo section of the canal was deserted after almost a century in the early 1900s and the I-190 mostly obliterated the rest after another hundred years. But that did not prevent Buffalo from over that period becoming one of the major cities of this nation with Black Rock reduced to a hard-to-find city neighborhood. I salute Steve Corbett for his delightful self-published book now available in local bookstores, at the Buffalo Historical Society and on Amazon.com.

Getting a Grip

Jailing the Messenger

by Michael I. Niman

Americans experiencing the reign of George W. Bush are operating on outrage overload. Nothing, it seems, will shock us anymore. No story is too absurd or too outrageous to believe as we sit as spectators witnessing our own demise.

News

Notes from the Underground

by Geoff Kelly & Louis Ricciuti

In 1944, in a memo to Captain Emery L. Van Horn of the US Army Corps of Engineers, the superintendent of the Linde Ceramics plant in Tonawanda described the different courses he might take to dispose of caustic liquid wastes contaminated by radiation. The first option, wrote A. R. Holmes, was to discharge the effluent into a storm sewer that empties into Two Mile Creek, which runs past a public park and into the Niagara River. Alternately, Holmes said, the effluent could be pumped into wells on Linde’s property, from which it would presumably disappear into the water table.

Theater

The 2006 Artie Awards

This year, the Artie Award ceremony, Buffalo’s celebration of excellence in our theater community, were hosted by actors Lisa Ludwig and Norm Sham and Artvoice theater editor Anthony Chase at the Town Ballroom on Monday, May 22. Winners were announced in 19 categories as well as winners of Outstanding Debuts.

You Auto Know

A Car for All Ages

by Jim Corbran

Reading over that headline might make you think this is a car which will stand the test of time. You know, one for the ages. And I’m not saying it won’t—or that it will, for that matter. What I’m saying is that you don’t have to be a stereotypical Buick driver to consider the Lucerne.

Puck Stop

Carolina on My Mind

by Andrew Kulyk & Peter Farrell

We’re feeling a bit full of ourselves right now…Sabres tickets sold out in the first 12 minutes, while Hurricanes tickets sold out in the last 12 minutes…before opening faceoff.

On DVD

She's the Tease

by Wheez Von Klaw

Now that The Notorious Bettie Page has hit the theaters, what better time to celebrate Bettie’s sudden stardom than these essential DVD collections of the world’s greatest charismatic pinup/bondage queen. You know, Gretchen Mol did a pretty decent job in her Page portrayal (kinda reminds me of all those Elvis made-for-TV movies), but it’s virtually impossible to capture the on-screen power and mystery that the real black-banged bombshell of the 1950s projected so effortlessly…

Film Reviews

Addicted To, Uh, Love

by M. Faust

The X-Terminators Again, With Metaphor

by George Sax

Cui Bono?

by M. Faust

See You There

Blues, Bikes & BBQ

by Buck Quigley

Occupation: Dreamland

by K. O'Day

A Case for Case

by Buck Quigley

Mark Kozelek

by Donny Kutzbach

Music

Rose Hill Drive

by Donny Kutzbach

What do Eddie Van Halen, Warren Haynes and Otis Taylor have in common?

Bandwidth

The Waildogs

You might like us if you like…Guitar-driven blues rock jam folk jazz; electric and/or acoustic.