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Gift Guide

Buying Buffalo

by Geoff Kelly

Give Them Your Best All Year Round

by Buck Quigley

Recipes for Celebration

Allentown Shopping

by K. O'Day

Shopping Grant Street

by Geoff Kelly

Buffalo's North Pole

by Rose Mattrey

Extravagant Elmwood

by Geoff Kelly

Shopping University Heights

by Todd Natti

Drink In the Season

by Buck Quigley

Thriftmas Shopping

by Buck Quigley

Gewgaws & Gimcracks: Collectible Extended Director's Cut Christmas Catalog Edition

by David P. Kleinschmidt

News of the Weird

by Chuck Shepherd

■ “Thierry F.” recently outed himself as a professional welfare bum, bragging in his brand-new autobiography that he has lived very well off the French government for most of the last 24 years and that, even after his unemployment benefits expired, he found a second unemployment program to leech from. The latest one pays almost all of his monthly home loan, according to an October dispatch from Paris in The Times of London, and provides free medical care plus a “Christmas bonus,” leaving an equivalent of $214 per month for what the delighted Thierry calls his “leisure activities.”

Letters to Artvoice

I found Bruce Jackson’s interview with local developer Carl Paladino to be an endless source of amusement (“Dancing With Paladino,” Artvoice v5n45).

Free Will Astrology

by Rob Brezsny

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): You were standing in the doorway with your crooked smile as big and wild as the morning light. I was spellbound—lost all memory of who I’d been before that moment. You were as shockingly real as the perfect giant spider web stretched across my front porch when I left my house today. Did I hallucinate what you said as you murmured into your cell phone? Or did you really say, “I’m looking for someone who’ll teach me how to live forever as we make love with exploding hearts”? That was too sweet and fierce to bear. So here’s my loving complaint, which is also my bragging promise: I want you so much I want to be you. I adore you with such painful lucidity that I think I could learn how to find you in every bird’s cry, every cloud’s flow, every changing face.

Getting a Grip

Sandinista Redux

by Michael I. Niman

The Bush administration just appointed Robert Gates, a man who helped orchestrate an illegal terrorist war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, as our new Secretary of Defense, replacing Donald Rumsfeld. The Nicaraguans, for their part, just returned the party and the president that our dirty little war ousted back to office. And they did this despite direct threats last month from the Bush administration, delivered by a convicted war criminal, who went to Nicaragua days before the election and told the Nicaraguan people that if such a victory occurred there’d be hell, literally, to pay. It’s not déjà vu—this is the story of a White House bent on world domination and a little democratic revolution that just won’t go away.

The News, Briefly

Sleeper Cell

by Geoff Kelly

East Side housing activist David Torke spent Tuesday night in a sleeping bag on the porch of 28 Coe Place, a rundown Queen Anne typical of the quaint, one-block, one-way street that runs east off of Main Street, in the shadow of the $16-million Artspace renovation project.

Casino Chronicles

Buffalo's Control Board Ducks for Cover

by Bruce Jackson

At its February 9 meeting, the Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority, commonly referred to as “the control board,” voted to approve the deal for the sale of two blocks of Fulton Street that attorney Michael Powers brokered between Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown and the Seneca gambling operation.

In the Margins

With the End In Mind...

by Kevin Thurston

Like many in the North American poetry world, Mark Truscott and a.rawlings organize or have organized a reading series along with producing great creative work. Truscott, author of Said Like Reeds or Things (Coach House Books), is currently curating the Test Reading Series (testreading.org) and rawlings, whose latest book is Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books), co-curated the Lexiconjury reading series. They will be joined by James Hart, who runs the Zeitgeiste Poetry series in Detroit, on Thursday, November 16 at 7pm at Rust Belt Books (202 Allen Street) to end a great season for Just Buffalo’s Small Press Poetry Series. Artvoice caught up with Truscott and rawlings in Toronto recently and asked them about potential connections between their organizing and their creative work.

Book Reviews

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction by Joan Didion

by Laura Nathan

For those wondering how Joan Didion would follow up The Year of Magical Thinking, her heartbreaking memoir about the incoherence of grief that won the 2005 National Book Award, the wait has ended. Sort of. Elevating Didion to the ranks of another great 20th-century American journalist—George Orwell—Knopf’s Everyman’s Library has published her first seven volumes of nonfiction in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, an 1,160-page behemoth named for the opening line of The White Album.

Stagefright

by Javier

With the movie Casino Royale opening this week, Daniel Craig becomes the sixth actor to have portrayed James Bond in the official series. Welsh actor Timothy Dalton (pictured above) was the fourth, starring in The Living Daylights and License to Kill. A classically trained Shakespearean actor, Dalton has more than once stepped into roles played by other actors. In 1970 he followed Laurence Olivier in a new version of Wuthering Heights, and in 1994 he was Rhett Butler in the mini-series Scarlett. Dalton made his first American film in 1978, the comedy Sextette with Mae West. Back in 1991, he starred opposite Whoopi Goldberg in A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters, the first interracial production of the play.

Theaterweek

Time for Gaffney

by Anthony Chase

In recent years, the Studio Arena Theatre board of directors has developed a reputation for being slow and indecisive. They blew that idea out of the water last week when they abruptly announced that Executive Director Ken Neufeld would be stepping down and Kathleen Gaffney was being elevated to chief executive officer effective immediately.

Puck Stop

The Decline of Fighting

by Andrew Kulyk & Peter Farrell

When the Buffalo Sabres and the Toronto Maple Leafs hit the ice in Buffalo earlier this month, the contest featured a fight in the first period between Buffalo tough guy Andrew Peters and Leafs enforcer Wade Belak. The gloves were dropped, both players danced a bit with clenched fists, they both engaged, the crowd screamed and yelled, Belak landed the first blows, then Peters got his footing and answered. The two were separated, the crowd cheered wildly and players from both benches tapped the boards with their sticks in the support.

Film Reviews

Driving Ms. Crazy

by George Sax

Today's Menu

by M. Faust

Design Matters

Frank Lloyd Wright's Tree

by Albert Chao

At Kitchen Distribution, a warehouse near Niagara Street converted into an art venue, Buffalo native Tom Turturro presents photographs of New York City in an exhibit titled 27 Sightings Past the Stele. At the entrance, a photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright’s autobiography highlights a certain passage:

Left of the Dial

The Game: Doctor's Advocate

Willie Nelson: Songbird

See You There

A.K.A. Nikki S. Lee

by K. O'Day

Qbico U-Nite

by Greg Gannon

Chris Knight

by Buck Quigley

Thanksgiving Eve

by Siobhan A. Counihan

Music

Babylon Regained

by Donny Kutzbach

They created hard-charged music from stories of down-and out desperation while embodying equal parts city chic urban sleaze. They knew about these things, they lived them. They changed they face of rock and roll, and not just by wearing too much eyeliner and lipstick.

Calendar Spotlight

Make/Believe

Steve Wynn and the Miracle Three

Bread Gone Wry

by Nikki Kozlowski

Richard Shindell

by Lisa Cialfa

The REV

by Lisa Cialfa

Islands