The ArtsBeat blog, home since 2007 to our bite-sized coverage of art, theater, literature, classical music and film, has reached the end of its road. From now on, updated and improved bloggy coverage of the arts from Buffalo News critics Jeff Simon, Mary Kunz Goldman and Jeff Miers, along with arts writer Colin Dabkowski and literary blogger R.D. Pohl, can be found on the new Gusto blog. Thanks for being loyal readers of ArtsBeat, and please join us over at the Gusto blog for a new series of regular features and updates on the local arts and cultural scene.
New York State Assemblyman Sam Hoyt. Buffalo News file photo / Derek Gee.
Much more to come on Erie County Executive Chris Collins' decision last week to slash funding for all but 10 local cultural groups. But I wanted to post some comments made today by Assemblyman Sam Hoyt at a press conference protesting yet more funding cuts (this time from the New York State Council on the Arts) to local arts education groups. Here's what Hoyt had to say (audio of Hoyt's comments is also posted above):
As a state assembly member who represents a good portion of the city of Buffalo, I can say that it appears to be an assault on the city. I did an inventory of those organizations whose funding was cut and I’d say about 95 percent of the organizations who received funding cuts were in the city of Buffalo. I hope that the mayor of Buffalo and that the county legislators who represent the City of Buffalo will stand up and express their outrage as well. Again, there isn’t a person in this room who doesn’t acknowledge that during tough times, we all have to tighten our belts. As we said about the main topic of this discussion today, when New York City is receiving virtually 100 percent funding and the City of Buffalo is receiving a 69 percent cut, that’s unacceptable.
Secondly, on top of that, the dramatic, draconian cuts that Mr. Collins has proposed for these arts organizations is the most short-sighted thing I’ve seen from this county executive, and there’s been a lot since he became county executive. Why? Because we’ve watched, over the years, our city struggle. We’ve watched the manufacturing base leave, we’ve watched our economy in a downward spiral. We’ve watched the population flee this city. And one of the most consistent and steady and stable, positive forces in the City of Buffalo is its extraordinary arts and cultural environment. It’s not just recognized here in this room; it’s not just recognized in New York State. It’s recognized nationally and internationally.
That a city of our size can have the incredible inventory and collection of magnificent arts and cultural organizations, large and small, large and small, is really something that we need to embrace, celebrate, promote and invest in. And to divest now, as has been done at the county level and at the state level through these arts in education programs, is at the very least short-sighted, at worst disastrous. Because we’re recognized as an extraordinary center of a healthy and vibrant and prospering arts and cultural community. And to strip that away, which is what you do when you cut the funding? The age old question of, 'Whoever the last one out is, please turn out the lights,' will be answered.
This morning on WECK 1230, Loraine O'Donnell interviewed a number of people on the Western New York cultural scene about Erie County Executive Chris Collins' recent decision to cut funding for 33 local cultural groups (including myself).
County Executive Chris Collins. Buffalo News file photo.
Today, the cultural community of Western New York awoke to some of the worst news it's seen in years. County Executive Chris Collins announced that he would cut cultural funding completely for 31 small and mid-sized arts organizations in his 2011 budget. For some background, read Matt Spina's story here and look for my column, which will appear in Sunday's Spotlight section.
One point that needs to be made right off the bat about Collins' move has to do with Beyond/In Western New York, the mammoth international art exhibition which kicked off last weekend. This is a project that grew out of a collaboration among small, medium and large cultural organizations across Western New York, and which has already drawn large number of cultural tourists to the area and promises to continue doing so throughout its three-month run.
It was a genuinely democratic project that Collins supported with county dollars. (UPDATE: That money, which Collins said he had pledged in a June interview, was not provided. Collins spokesperson Grant Loomis said that the county money was contingent on Beyond/In Western New York organizers getting funding from the City of Buffalo, which the organization was not able to secure.) But it would never have been imaginable, much less possible, without county funding for small and mid-size galleries like Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, El Museo Gallery, Buffalo Arts Studio, Squeaky Wheel and many other groups that use vital county dollars to leverage and pull in support from outside funding sources.
To many, this smacks just ever so slightly of hypocrisy, and seems to be yet another example of how Western New York politicians find innovative ways to shoot themselves in the foot and stunt the region's potential growth. As Hallwalls curator John Massier put it in a Facebook status update:
"Last Friday, I stood on the observation deck at City Hall and heard the Mayor make the point that there were NO HOTEL ROOMS available for the coming weekend, as a result of the Beyond/In WNY 2010 project, clear evidence of the value of cultural activityy. Five days after the Mayor gave us two thumbs up, the County Executive has given us the finger."
For the above video, I asked several Infringers to recount their favorite moments of the festival's 11 days. The answers, as expected, range from strange to stranger. I've had a few favorite moments myself, one of which was watching Jack Topht perform a hilarious, 45-minute-long stream-of-consciousness storytelling session peppered with raps he'd written at SP@CE 224. Jack Topht does what's called "Awesome Rap," a not-very-widespread style of hip hop to which this graffiti scrawled on the wall of the Nietzsche's bathroom pays tribute:
Another fave moment, which involved a naked performance artist and a Mark Twain impersonator, I wrote about here.
It's utterly stunning -- just in case I have not been enthusiastic enough about it yet -- that this city supplies so many daring, restless and productive creative minds, and that there exists here an infrastructure to let them do their thing for free and with zero rules. It's great for them, certainly, but it's an even sweeter deal for the ambitious consumer of the arts, who had an almost endless supply of projects and performances to choose from over the past 11 days. The festival proper, as of 1 a.m. Monday, is over. But it's important to stress that many of the acts Infringement has showcased -- along with the art and, to an unfortunately lesser extent, the wacky, one-off theatrical projects -- are going on all year long, often in the same venues that hosted festival performances.
(Side note: The letter below was my "Self-Infringement" project, drawn at random from a box in Rust Belt Books, something I plan to work on in the wake of the festival. I'll report on my progress here. I'm thinking my skill should be juggling, but I'm open to suggestions.)
I've tried to get across a sense of just some of the acts and projects that caught my attention this year at the festival, but obviously what I've written about on this blog and in the newspaper hardly scratches the surface of what was on offer. Feel free to contribute your own favorite festival moment in the comments section of this blog. I'm sad it's over, but glad I had the chance to see a lot of intriguing new talents, some great stuff, and even some awful stuff. But ultimately, what I gained from the festival was a renewed faith in the creative potential of the city of Buffalo. And that faith was pretty strong in the first place.
Hope you all had a similarly gratifying experience, and until next year, Infringe on!
"I intended this work to be the repetition of historically real events the writing of which punches a hole in reality. (As if to void them, but actively)," wrote Leslie Scalapino in a "Note on My Writing," a widely quoted essay about her that they were at the beach — aeolotropic series (North Point Press, 1985). "...[In my writing] An event isn't anything, it isn't a person. No events occur," she wrote. "...The self is unraveled as an example in investigating particular historical events, which are potentially infinite. The self is a guinea pig..."
Scalapino died on May 28th in Berkeley, California after a battle with cancer. She was 65. Although she had long been associated with the West Coast wing of what came to be known as "language-centered writing" (or more simply "Language" poetry), the over thirty books that comprise her oeuvre defy any easy categorization as to genre and lineage. Those who would place her in the language writing camp will point out that her work challenges all the operative mechanisms of literary subjectivity and referentiality as consistently and successfully as any writer who ever sought to foreground the act of reading as constitutive and inherently political.
At the same time much of her work, while adopting the grammatical structure of narrative--i.e., the centrality of a unified subject even if merely as a placeholder--derives its sense of linearity from the serialization of phenomenal experience, and more particularly, the experiences of eroticism and suffering (not necessarily in that order). In this sense, it reflects certain concerns akin to the study of Buddhism and the West Coast iteration of the Beat movement. Scalapino edited The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (2007), a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and West Coast wing of the Beat generation, and was a frequent guest lecturer at The Jack Kerouauc School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.
Conceptualists and experimental writers of all stripes will also claim her as their own, and some have in fact suggested that Scalapino was to postmodernism what Gertrude Stein was to modernism: a writer whose language didn't attempt to "represent" some possible version of "reality," but invented a syntactic reality of its own.
Thanks to advances in digital technology, a great many archival recordings of 20th century poetry that were formerly judged to be of too poor sound quality or too fragile source material for general dissemination are now available for streaming on the World Wide Web.
One of the richest archives of recorded readings dating over seven decades is that of the
Unterberg Poetry Center located in the 92nd Street Y in New York City, home to one of this country's best known programs of readings, seminars, and writing workshops hosted in the organization's facilities at Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street in Manhattan.
The very first poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y was given by William Carlos Williams in October of 1939. While no recording of that reading exists, the Poetry Center at the Y recently posted an 18-minute, 41-second excerpt of a subsequent reading by Dr. Williams at the Y on Jan. 27, 1954.
If you happen to be in or near a bookstore this Mother's Day week-end, be sure to drop in and pick up a copy of the May/June issue of The American Poetry Review, which features poet Chard deNiord's extraordinary last interview with Buffalo native Lucille Clifton, the National Book Award, Ruth Lily Prize, and recent Frost Centennial Medal winning poet, who died on February 13th at age 73.
The Philadelphia-based APR--which has been this country's highest profile poetry "tabloid" since 1972--makes a portion of its content available online, but this interview is a print-only exclusive.
The career-spanning interview which was conducted on January 12th, 2010--just over a month before Clifton's death--at her home in Columbia, Maryland runs to nine triple column-spaced tabloid pages and extended, by deNiord's account, over three hours in real time. Even if you're familiar with Clifton's work and career, there is much here that adds perspective, including her discussion of poetic craft, and her early college experience at Howard University where her fellow students included Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison (later her editor at Random House), and Roberta Flack, and her teachers included Sterling Brown, Owen Dodson, and James Baldwin.
As I wrote in my column in today's Spotlight section, a select group of local cultural organizations have banded together to form a broad new advocacy group.
The Greater Buffalo Cultural Alliance, cast by its creators as a grassroots effort to get more people to acknowledge and invest in the arts, will direct its efforts both at local perceptions about the arts and culture and at sources of public funding and policy.
The organizers of the GBCA made no secret of their intent to enlist all of Western New York's non-profit cultural groups in their ambitious attempt to weave the arts more deeply into the identity of the Buffalo Niagara region. But at this point, specifics are obviously lacking.
So what's your take on this new group? Is it an exercise in futility to try to wring more attention and dollars out of a state government already facing massive deficits? Does it even make sense to treat the arts in the same way as manufacturing, or, say, tourism? How should the GBCA get started on its momentous task?
One of the highlights of last October's & Now Festival of Innovative Writing & the Literary Arts in Buffalo, was this performance by the Black Took Collective, a three person multimedia ensemble co-founded in 1999 by poets Duriel E. Harris, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Ronaldo V. Wilson at Cave Canem--the celebrated retreat for African-American poets & writers founded by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady. Their manifesto "Call for Dissonance—Black Took Collective" first appeared in FENCE, Fall/Winter 2002 and was reprinted last year in A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years, Volume One (University Press of New England, 2009).
Black Took Collective has performed regularly over the past decade, even as Harris, Martin, and Wilson have pursued separate careers in different cities. Tonight at 8, they will reunite for "Live Feed from the Black Unconscious," described as a multimedia performance written in "hybrid experimental forms, embracing radical poetics and critical theories of race, gender, and sexuality" at Hallwalls Cinema, 341 Delaware Ave. (near Tupper). The event is co-sponsored by the University at Buffalo's Poetics Program and it is free and open to the public.
