Forty years ago University at Buffalo Media Studies professor Tony Conrad created The Flicker, a keystone in the structural film movement; made with nothing but completely black and completely white images, the film’s strobe effect made some audience members physically ill. (“Maybe I would really blow people’s brains right out the back of their head,” Conrad told an interviewer many years later. “I didn’t know.”) Conrad went on to create many more films, to involve himself in a number of influential musical and performance collaborations—most notably with John Cale, Angus MacLise, Lamonte Young and Marian Zazeela, collectively known as the Dream Syndicate—and, of course, to teach, first at Antioch College and then here in Buffalo, where he has been a fixture and a catalyst in Buffalo’s active avant-garde art community. Over three evenings next week, Hallwalls presents Pioneer of the Minimal: Tony Conrad Retrospective, which samples the full canon of Conrad’s experimental music, film and video. Wednesday at 8pm, Conrad performs with an ensemble at Asbury Hall at the Church ($15/$10 for members). Thursday at 8pm, Hallwalls screens No Europe (1990), Beholden to Victory (1983), an excerpt from his cable access TV show Studio of the Streets and Coming Attractions (1970) ($7, $5 students/seniors/$4 members). Friday at 8pm Hallwalls, screens The Flicker (1966), Straight and Narrow (1970), Film Feedback (1972) and Cycles of 3s and 7s (1977) ($7, $5 students/seniors/$4 members). Friday’s screening will be followed by a conversation between Conrad and Columbia University’s Branden Joseph about Conrad’s work.

Artist Kim Jones is a California native and Vietnam veteran who made a name for himself in the early 1970s as “Mudman.” This alter-ego took the form of a walking, tree-like sculpture for which Jones would cover his face with pantyhose, encrust his whole body with mud and attach a latticework of sticks and branches to his back. Then he’d head out onto the streets of LA. Both comedic and disturbing, the Mudman persona is representative of Jones’ peculiar psyche, affected in no small part by his service in Vietnam as well as a near-paralyzing childhood illness that left him bedridden from the ages of seven to 10. During this three-year ordeal the seeds of Mudman may have sprouted, as Jones has said that during this time he developed an “inner world.” As a child confined to bedrest, he simply drew all the time. Gaining some degree of fame as a performance artist (his antics have included burning live rats and tossing charred hot dogs at the audience) hasn’t deterred Jones from creating a large collection of visual work over the past 30-some years—drawings, paintings and inanimate sculptures—and UB Art Gallery is proudly hosting his first full retrospective, which will remain on view through December 17. A meet-the-artist reception takes place in the first-floor, lightwell and second-floor galleries and includes his well-known War Drawings, a series of battlefield diagrams done in pencil that includes a powerful 35-foot, floor-to-ceiling, three-wall installation. This exhibit is organized by UB’s Sandra Firmin, in conjunction with the Luckman Fine Arts Complex in Los Angeles.

Best known for his spot on MTV’s hit Wild ’N Out with Nick Cannon, actor/comedian/recording artist Katt Williams has done much more than television in his burgeoning career. He’s been owning comedy clubs around LA for the past decade and been acting in feature films for the past five years (you may remember him as “Money Mike” from 2001’s Friday After Next). And his star has never shone more brightly than now: In November he will become the first-time host of BET’s new Hip Hop Awards Show, he’s planning the release of a new rap/comedy album for Universal Records and he’ll appear with Eddie Murphy in the upcoming film Norbit, a love comedy about a man who schemes to be with the woman of his dreams. Raised in Dayton, Ohio, Williams was reportedly a precocious child who was reading by the age of three and who started performing stand-up after he snuck into a bar one night while still underage, finagled his way onstage and soon had the whole room laughing. Telling jokes is something that just seems to come naturally to the multi-talented Williams, an improv pro with a quick, hilarious wit.

Since his untimely passing in 1993, Frank Zappa—one of the most complex and ambitious composers ever to spring from the world of rock—has enjoyed a fervid, cult-like following. His son Dweezil has decided the time has come for that cult to enlarge its membership. To that end, he and the Zappa Family Trust are staging a tour to promote his father’s music in a live setting featuring veterans of past Zappa tours including guitarist Steve Vai, drummer Terry Bozzio and multi-instrumentalist Napoleon Murphy Brock. Zappa’s music was all about expanding boundaries, and his social outlook was equally devoted to fighting the icy grip of censorship. He famously put his mustachioed mouth where his heart was in testimony on Capitol Hill during Tipper Gore’s Parental Advisory Label hearings—a movement that, when implemented, inadvertently served to send kids directly toward potty-mouthed artists and laid the groundwork for the sales explosion of gritty rap music, among other genres. According to Dweezil: “What the Zappa family would like to do is bring the music live on stage to different places…and give longtime fans something to be excited about, but almost more importantly, provide an opportunity for new potential fans to discover the music.” Thus, Zappa Plays Zappa. Proving once again that heredity is the Mother of Invention.