Broadband of Brothers

by Rob Collins

Combat is nothing like television. What is seen with the eye may appear the same. An explosion in a movie is no different than an explosion seen by the naked eye, but it’s the other four senses that truly define combat. The smells of gunfire. The loud ping of bullets bouncing off of metal. The vibrations of grenades exploding nearby. The taste of your own fear climbing up into your throat. This is combat. And no matter how many times you experience it, you learn one more thing about yourself and you’re always happy to be walking away.

Whatever happened to the separation of church and state? As of this week, Lamaist Buddhism is the Established Church of the University at Buffalo. “Interfaith” services are state-sponsored, class (but not the class system) is cancelled, and students are all but ordered to herd into the stadium for arena religion in the form of the living incarnation of the Buddha, the Dalai Lama XIV, the biggest thing since the Beatles who were themselves, as the Apostle John (Lennon) observed, “bigger than Jesus.”

by Chuck Shepherd

■ Carry-on Blues: (1) Just after the Aug. 10 restrictions were imposed, British Airways refused to allow disabled New Zealand runner Kate Horan (on her way to the paralympic world championships in the Netherlands) to carry on her prosthetic leg, as she had long been allowed to do. Her checked-baggage leg was then lost in the chaos at Heathrow airport, and the prosthetic’s manufacturer scrambled to make Horan a new one. (The leg was found a week later, and at press time, Horan had won at least one medal.) (2) The Transportation Security Administration’s ban on carry-on liquids, gels and ointments apparently does not apply to small quantities of “personal lubricants,” such as the gels popular as sex aids.

by Rob Brezsny

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Acting on the authority vested in me by the Prophets for Profit Syndicate, and speaking on behalf of the planetary rhythms, I can assure you of this: If your cash flow has been too slow and you remain passive about it in the coming weeks, it will corrode your mental health. If you lift a finger to upgrade your relationship with money, on the other hand, cosmic forces will rush to your aid with unexpected support. Therefore, in the name of all that’s holy, I hereby declare the beginning of a new age in which you conspire and agitate and work hard for a new wage.

Pecha Kucha

by Albert Chao

The Pecha Kucha (Japanese for “chit chat”) craze is spreading. Originating in Tokyo, Japan, and spreading from Shanghai, China to Los Angeles, young architects and designers come together to showcase their work in a unique manner: Each person presents only 20 slides, and each slide is presented for only 20 seconds. The latest Pecha Kucha in London drew more than 1,000 people. New York City will hold its first very own Pecha Kucha on Wednesday, September 20.

Gail Graham

Gail Graham’s first urban garden—apart from the one in his own backyard on Jersey Street—was a project of the Fargo State Association, the community organization of which he is a member. The garden is at the corner of Jersey and West, across the street from Graham’s house. It took the Fargo State Association six years to get the city to tear down the abandoned crackhouse that languished there, but when the city finally did, in 2000, the association’s members planted a garden in the vacant lot, using cuttings from backyard gardens throughout the neighborhood. Today the community garden supplies cuttings to the houses in the neighborhood.

A Blazevox Evening

by Kevin Thurston

Kicking off the fall installment of Just Buffalo’s Small Press Series are Amy King and Geoffrey Gatza at Rust Belt Books. This reading promises to offer a sampling of Gatza’s Buffalo-based BlazeVOX press. Amy King’s first full-length book, Antidotes for an Alibi, was published by BlazeVOX in 2005 and continued to build King’s impressive publishing credentials (she won Pavement Saw’s chapbook contest in 2002) as she was a finalist against Adrienne Rich for the Lambda Award, the country’s most prestigious award for literature written by or for the LGBT community. The poems in her first collection take the power relations of and within language, and domesticated language, poetic form and the family unit head-on. Her poems vibrate, or twitch, like atoms approaching Absolute Zero. Simply put, King has achieved a reliable poetic voice in her first collection. A voice with which she is certain without being overbearing—willing to question itself, but not ashamed of its observations. But beyond her history with BlazeVOX, she shares with Gatza a commitment to poetry as a community.

by Geoffrey Gatza

by Javier

Movie and TV actress Anne Heche (pictured above) is now starring in her own TV series, the comedy/drama Men in Trees (Fridays at 9pm on ABC), set in a small town in Alaska where the ratio of men to women is 10 to one. In 2004 Heche got a Tony nomination for her performance in the comedy Twentieth Century in which she starred opposite Alec Baldwin. She made a very successful Broadway debut in 2002 in David Auburn’s drama Proof, playing the role created by Mary Louise Parker. The play originated at Manhattan Theatre Club.

by Anthony Chase

Plays are opening in fast succession as we approach next week’s Curtain Up! Celebration, the official start of the Buffalo theater season, on September 29.

by Andrew Kulyk & Peter Farrell

Not Just the Shiny Life

by M. Faust

Contrary to what you may have read (and will probably continue to read as its release approaches), Fearless is not Jet Li’s last action movie. Nor is it his last martial arts film, at least not in the way that American audiences use the term.

by M. Faust

Slangin' the Real

by Donny Kutzbach

In the arena of hip-hop, the bottom line often ends up with what’s real. “Realness” is a currency with street value that sometimes supplants even cash. The difference between dollars and realness is the one anyone can earn and the other one, you either have it or you don’t.