FOILed Again

by Geoff Kelly

In late November, Artvoice associate editor Peter Koch wanted to review the minutes of several meetings of the City of Buffalo’s Preservation Board. So Koch visited the Preservation Board’s Web site, where the minutes are generally available online. But the links to the minutes were broken.

He Said, She Said

by Bruce Fisher

by Chuck Shepherd

■ Several Duke University campus organizations, including the Women’s Center, the Student Health Center and the Women’s Studies Department, sponsored a “Sex Workers Art Show” on Feb. 3, at which nearly nude “artists” danced for students and others while vulgarly criticizing America via acts such as a woman’s pretending to eat excreted dollar bills and a man’s kneeling with an American flag inserted in his rear end. Two years ago, Duke’s men’s lacrosse team was vilified by the Duke administration and faculty merely for hiring two female strippers for a party (from which emanated false charges of rape and the eventual disbarment of the local district attorney). A university spokesman explained to a National Journal reporter that the recent show was acceptable because it was “art” and “social commentary,” rather than male-bonding entertainment.

by Javier

The remarkable Georgia Engel (pictured above) will be soon in Buffalo starring in the touring production of the musical The Drowsy Chaperone, which opens at Shea’s on March 4. Engel will play Mrs. Tottendale, the part she originated in the Broadway production and in the out-of-town tryout in Los Angeles. Widely known for her TV appearances in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and, most recently, in Everybody Loves Raymond, Engel made her Broadway debut playing Minnie Fay to Ethel Merman’s Dolly. The Drowsy Chaperone, which had its beginning at the 1999 Toronto Fringe Festival, won the 2006 Tony Awards for Best Score and Best Book of a Musical. The Broadway production just closed this past December.

Acts of Regression

by M. Faust

When Brian De Palma made Casualties of War, based on an incident in which a group of American soldiers raped a young girl in Viet Nam, it was 15 years after that war had ended. His new film Redacted is based on a similar incident in Iraq—the rape and murder by American soldiers of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl. That horrendous crime (the girl’s family was also murdered) took place in March 2006, less than a year and a half prior to the film’s premiere.

In Bruges: Killer Holiday

by M. Faust

I didn’t see a shout-out in the end credits of In Bruges to the tourist board or chamber of commerce of the city of Bruges, but surely it was my new glasses failing to focus. Because if ever a movie was likely to bring a flood of tourists to a location, this is it. I’d love to spend my next vacation there.

The French Connection, Beethoven by the Pound

by Jan Jezioro

On Saturday evening, February 23 at 8pm, the Montante Cultural Center of Canisius College, located at 2001 Main Street, will be the venue for a concert billed as “A French Musical Event.” Jointly sponsored by the Alliance Francaise de Buffalo, the Canisius College Department of Modern Languages and the Federation of Alliances Francaises, USA, the concert will feature a performance by Le Quatuor de Chartres along with a special guest artist, singer and saxophonist Philippe Duchesne.

The Artists Among Us

by Lucy Yau

The exhibition at the Burchfield-Penney is the first and only members’ show ever to have taken place at the current location, Rockwell Hall at Buffalo State College, before the move to the new Gwathmey Siegel building.

Sabres & Rangers—The Battle Continues

by Andrew Kulyk & Peter Farrell

Over the past three weeks, the Buffalo Sabres had climbed out of 14th place in the conference to a respectable seventh seed. Just like that, players and fans were no longer concentrating on who among the pack might snag an eighth seed. Now we were looking at Montreal, at New Jersey, and, dare we say it, at Ottawa’s first place neighborhood, just 10 points away.

by Rob Brezsny

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Whether or not you’re a Catholic, I recommend a good stiff dose of confession for you. It’s the most effective action you can take to clear out your psychic congestion and prepare the way for an influx of cathartic realizations. So find someone who won’t judge you for your so-called sins, and tell him or her about things you’ve done in the past year that make you feel squeamish or guilty. If there is no such person, confess to a beloved animal, a favorite tree, a passing cloud or the morning sun.

I work in a professional office environment with several other women of around my age. Lately one of them has been making me sub for her at the reception desk when it’s supposed to be my lunch break, meaning I don’t get one even though we’re docked a half hour’s pay every day for this theoretical break. (Due to the pressures of an active phone switchboard, I cannot simply go at a later time.) This happened for the second time in three days today, and I resolved to ask the office manager about it, while I was sitting stewing at the reception desk. We communicate, desk to desk, using an instant messaging program, so I clicked on it. A window popped up, a conversation in progress that the receptionist had left minimized. In it, the office manager had made a comment about my eccentric fashion of dress, and the receptionist had joked that I was always walking by her desk to either the kitchen or the bathroom so she’d surely get a good look shortly, and also commented that she found me irritating regardless of what I wore, and couldn’t stand me. The conversation referenced another derogatory comment about me by yet another employee, and it appeared as though both aspects of this conversation (my clothes and my eating habits) were a running joke among all three of them.