Teachers, school board irked at Williams' plan to hire administrator to oversee low-achieving schools.

On Wednesday, the Erie County Board of Elections disqualified Larry Adamczyk as a candidate for the Fillmore District Common Council seat. Adamczyk allowed that he had not lived in the district long enough to qualify, while arguing that the residency requirement—one year since the last election—is unjust. His residency was short nearly a month. Meantime, [...]

By Rachel Stover:
 
Returning to the Queen City on August 5th-7th is the 48-Hour Film Project which gives teams a genre, a character, a prop, a line of dialogue and 48 Hours to make a movie. Teams race against time as well as each other in order to complete the writing, filming, and editing of their film in exactly 48 hours.
 
On August 5th, local filmmakers from all around the WNY region will descend upon Buffalo, to hear the four critical elements that must be included in their film to qualify for the cash prize and the chance to have their film screened at the Cannes Film Festival. The movies will screen at The Market Arcade Theater on August 10th & 11th. Registration is open for teams to sign up to compete and new applicants are always welcome.

This year the Buffalo 48-Hour Film Project is sponsored by TheFVC.com which on Saturday July 23rd hosted an open casting call to connect actors/actress to get involved with the 48 Hour Film Projects.
 
For more information please visit: www.48hourfilm.com/buffalo.

Side note:

Buffalo Cinematic Trust is hosting a second meeting this evening (August 3) at The Backroom of Hardware on Allen Street at 6pm. Emails went out to all who attended the initial meeting.

Empire State Development Vice President of Public Affairs, Austin Shafran, explains why the first meeting of the Western New York Regional Council—which is taking place at UB as I write this—is not open to the public… “As part of our community-driven, competitive approach to economic development, regional councils are serving as advisory boards to design [...]

Thee Texas Republican running for president, is slated to speak at a tea party rally Friday evening.

Find out how the Board of Ed's decision to make the superintendent responsible for fewer schools resulted in his decision to add an administrator.

Kelly Carriero is still thanking the emergency responders who rescued her son from the Zoar Valley gorge last November.

As part of today’s “Good Morning, Buffalo” column, The Buffalo News reports the following: The Western New York Regional Council, one of those 10 regional councils created statewide by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, holds its first meeting today to start mapping out the area’s future. The meeting, at the University at Buffalo, is closed to the [...]

Dave Harter Reporting for Green Options Buffalo:

*In this series Green Options Buffalo will be highlighting events, festivals, shows and rides that are guaranteed to be top-notch adventures for bicycle riders.

Creating art as a commodity is something that many artists only begrudgingly accept as a necessity of the modern world. For these artists, a culture centered on property and privilege seems fundamentally opposed to the essence of creative expression. Whether from impulsive bursts or slow, careful crafting - upon its creation, art seems destined to enrich the world and the Buffalo Infringement Festival gives any artist a chance.

In no particular order the Infringement manifesto includes ideas like: art is for people not corporations, so the Infringement Festival takes no corporate sponsorship or any sponsorship that can dictate content. Also, art is for all people so artists are encouraged to put on free or very low cost events that anyone can afford to attend; any money that is made from art should go to the artist. Property and business owners generously donate the use of their spaces for the Infringement festival so that artists are the total beneficiaries of their creativity. Finally, no art is excluded.
   


This weekend I had the pleasure of experiencing the Infringement Festival on a bicycle. Unlike many festivals in Buffalo that take over a street (or an area) of the city and mass people in a defined space, the Infringement Festival isn't in Buffalo - it is Buffalo. The Infringement Festival happens all over the city with participating venues in Allentown, the Theatre District, Blackrock, Broadway/Fillmore, the Elmwood Village and Grant. The diversity of locations is a great reminder of just how many nooks and crannies this city has, each with their own flavor. The diverse locations mean that you'll be doing some adventuring around the city to get from show to show but fortunately, Buffalo is small and flat so traversing it by bicycle is a quick, cheap and fun way to get around.

My infringing started Friday night by skipping around to musical sets at The Vault, Sugar City, Nietzsche's and The Hardware Café. I got to watch Anal Pudding and Gruvology within five minutes of each other. Only at Infringement can one see 4-5 different music acts as diverse as Anal Pudding's crass lounge-rock and Gruvology's virtuosic jazz and spend about $5. When I reached in my pocket and had a bunch of left over money (having not paid for gas or parking, and very little for cover charge) I bought some of Gruvology's merch and got a high-inducing Portabella Po-Boy from Lagniappes.  

I biked to more events on Saturday including the Merge Infringement Circus where more bands, artists and games could be enjoyed for free. Again, because everything was free, I found myself spending more money supporting local artists and institutions. In one particularly sincere moment of local economy, I bought a bands CD who then exclaimed, "Looks like we're going to lunch!" and then took off into Merge.



I contacted Sarah Bishop at Buffalo First! to ask her about the economic benefit of local events like Infringement and she had this to say, "Supporting a local artist is supporting a member of your community - a member that intuitively understands the need for a culturally vibrant, diverse and community-oriented approach to economic development. Supporting initiatives like Infringement keeps 3x more money in the local economy - if that's not a benefit, I don't know what is."
   
Art yearns primarily to express some small piece of the infinite spectrum of human experience to an audience, thus broadening our mutual context of understanding. When art is simply commoditized it too often becomes nothing more than a marker of class privilege, a trophy on a wall like a set of antlers in a house with no hunters. The Buffalo Infringement Festival manages to make art available to everyone and still be good for the financial vibrancy of our community.

The amazing story of The Buffalo Infringement Festival only starts with the idea that art is for all people and continues with a monumental amount of cooperation and grit. The immense work of volunteer organizers is beyond commendable. These tireless believers work like mules to pull together 1,200 artists and 50+ venues for 11 days of "Art Under the Radar" and they do if for love of art and community.

There are only 4 days left of this amazing festival and lots more great events going on. If you ride your bicycle you will not only have a quick, fun, free-parking adventure, but also the satisfaction funneling your money into the local economy instead of the wealthy owners of environmentally devastating resource extraction/refining operations that give us our gasoline. Check out the full schedule here... and Happy Infringing.

Photo credit: Sarah Schneider, co-owner Merge Restaurant - Eye Glimpse

Image via Wikipedia

Notes before I head back home from a brief vacation:
* Three cheers for the idea of a “Friday Night Lights” movie.
Reports that a movie starring Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton is in the works and could be ready by 2013 surfaced from the Television Critics Association meetings in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Peter Berg, the executive producer of the NBC series that was based on a 2004 movie and Buzz Bissinger’s book, gave the typical lament of series with low ratings — that Nielsen never properly measured its audience.
According to the New York Daily News, Berg told TV critics that “the ratings never really showed how many people were watching this show.”
Berg added: “People found it and they loved it. Something about it really touched people and the Nielsens never caught that.”
As any reader of this blog knows, I loved “Friday Night Lights” as much as anyone. But I never doubted its low ratings because a family series about life in a small Texas town that lived for football was a tough weekly sell.
Still, I agree with Berg that a movie could work.
That’s because a low loyal audience for a TV series of say 4 million weekly can translate into a box office of $30 million or more with movie tickets averaging close to 10 bucks these days.
It would be interesting to see how Berg proposes to deal with the move of Eric (Chandler, see above) and Tami Taylor from Texas to the Northeast. In the poignant series finale, Eric became a football coach at the college where Tami is dean of admissions.
* As a follow-up to notes about the decline of prime time viewing of broadcast TV in the summer, only one of the Top 25 local programs in July locally hit a double-digit rating. That honor went to NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” on Channel 2, according to numbers given to stilltalkintv.
Most of the Top 25 were reruns of popular CBS series that are carried by Channel 4. After “Talent,” the top reality shows locally were “Big Brother” on CBS and the just concluded “Bachelorette” on ABC (Channel 7). Only 10 shows in the Top 25 had a rating higher than 5.5 locally.
* It looks like many Western New Yorkers smartly head over to WNED-TV, the local public broadcasting station, in the summer. It was the No.5 broadcast station in prime time with a 1.9 average rating, which was four tenths of a point ahead of the local CW (WNLO) and only three tenths of a point behind fourth place Fox (WUTV), which averaged a 2.2.
The station formerly known as WNGS averaged a .5 – that’s a .5 – in prime time, mostly with its movie package. It switched its call letters to WBBZ and its format to classic TV series on Monday.
The seven broadcast stations averaged a total of 18.9 ratings points in prime time in July and a 33.1 share. That leaves 37.6 points for cable and other programming, which gets about a 65.7 share of the summer audience. The broadcast channels lost about 3.4 rating points and 4.5 share points from a year ago.
In rough terms, it means about 2 out of 3 local viewers prefer something other than broadcast shows in the summer.
pergament@msnb.com

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