I was a newcomer to Buffalo, 25 years ago, when the first Curtain Up! Celebration was held on a torn-up Main Street with plywood bridges and plastic snow fences steering revelers clear of the most dangerous parts of the rapid transit construction. Who could have imagined, that night, that the event, designed to bring some life to downtown, would become a longstanding tradition and veritable institution in our city, and that the theaters themselves would prove to be the undeniable economic success of the district?

September 16-January 7:

While everyone else is scuttling about over football games and fall fashions, music fans are readying for brisk winds and falling leaves with record shopping, iPod updates and concert tickets. Here’s a quick list of notables among this season’s music releases and local live music events:

This fall the Buffalo Film Seminars presents its 13th series of weekly screenings and discussions. Though the screenings are part of a film course taught by husband and wife UB professors, Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson, they are open to and have become immensely popular with the general public. (The class is capped at 45 students but the screenings routinely draw hundreds of people.) The concept is straightforward: Show great movies on a big screen in a great theater, then talk about them afterward. The films are not chosen thematically, but Christian and Jackson try to select films that will stimulate conversation about a broad range of filmmaking elements: directing, camera work, editing, writing, acting, genre, context, music, sound, set design. Jackson has written that their mentor in creating the series was the late James Card of the George Eastman House in Rochester. “Jim always insisted that films were meant to be seen on a big screen in the company of other people, and that the kind of concentration and focus that comes naturally in the theater is impossible to achieve in a home,” Jackson writes.