a poor player

Dunkirk NY – Buffalo is really a pleasant city in a lot of ways. The summers are very pleasant, the city is relatively safe, it is very inexpensive to live there, and the arts community is alive and active. It has a strong work ethic, it’s very blue-collar at its core, and the residents are quite friendly for the most part.

But it is also a city with a history of corruption and cronyism. City government is a morasse of incompetency and favoritism, not to mention nepotism. Political loyalty and patronage rule the public service sector. In just about every city department you will find some level of corruption, great or small. And finally, although not surprisingly, it has hit the arts community.

Most of the story is in this article from the Buffalo News. You can follow some of the links in the comments section at the end of the article to get earlier news stories on this issue. In a nutshell, the former Executive Director of the Arts Council for Buffalo and Erie County plead guilty this past January to stealing $25,000 from the Arts Council accounts. Now, it seems, another $48,000 has gone missing, according to the Arts Council Board President. That money was the bulk of a New York State Arts Council grant designed to support arts groups around Western NY. According to a former staffer at the Arts Council of Bufalo, the group is about $300,000 in debt. As a result, it appears that by the end of the year there will be no Arts Council for Buffalo and Erie County in existence.

It’s just sad, that’s all. Many small arts groups in the city and in Erie County will suffer. I can only shake my head in disbelief and despair when I read stories like this. Buffalo is a city with so much potential, and for this to happen only means it will get another regional and national black eye. You expect corruption in the city’s public sector departments, and in the local labor unions. But in Buffalo, the sad truth is that even the arts groups are corrupt.  If this keeps up, the arts in Bufalo won’t be worth a plug nickel.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – I have now completed the re-construction of my blog, and thanks once again to Travis Bedard at Cambiare Productions, who sent me his Google feed so I could copy/paste all the lost posts. I could never have done this without his help. If in any way you’re as grateful as I am for Travis’ assistance, use the PayPal “Donate” button on the Cambiare Productions homepage. I’m sure they can use a few bucks.

My apologies to everyone who subscribes to my feed in a reader of any sort. You may notice that your reader is filled with these past feeds as I re-published each one. Hopefully it will not be too much of a problem to mark them all read or just delete them.

What I could not re-construct were the comments. Even if I could, I don’t think I would take the time to do so. Not that the comments weren’t appreciated or worthwhile, but it’s just too much tedious labor. So my apologies to former commentators. Please feel free to comment on my most recent posts. I also will no go back and sort by category or tag anything. Again, too labor-intensive and probably not worth the effort. If you need to find something, perhaps the search box at the top of the page can help you out.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – Barry Hessenius writes what I think is one of the best and most forward-looking blogs around. A former director of the California Arts Council, Barry is a tireless critic of the current models of arts promotion, fundraising and development, and his blog is a continual call to arms to artists across the country to begin doing the hard work of re-thinking and re-positioning the arts in America. He’s also critical of the lack of arts education in the K-12 area, but I think what he has to say about arts education is just as valid at the higher education level (college kids who are not artists receive no better an education in the arts at college as they do K-12).

Here’s a post which I think is terrific. It gets right at the heart of the matter and identifies the problems quickly, succinctly and efficiently. Some money paragraphs:

The models the sector has developed over the past four decades for its business and operational structure, its’ funding, governance, advocacy efforts, leadership development, and audience growth and marketing are all increasingly vulnerable, outmoded, and ineffective in dealing with the challenges of a changing environment and ecosystem. In many cases the default model is no model at all.

We are tooling around in the equivalent of a broken down old Edsel that wasn’t all that well designed in the first place. And yet we haven’t come up with alternatives.

If we don’t make the time to confront our weaknesses now, things may only get worse – perhaps much worse. The time is long overdue to engage in focused and serious conversations about fixing the old models or envisioning new ones.

The consequences of our failure to seriously consider how to revamp, re-invent, rethink, reform or replace the models on which we have for so long relied, but which are now failing us, will unquestionably impact how well we fare in the next decade. To think we can continue on as we have done for so long seems to now be a fool’s paradise.

I am sure you can take in the rest for yourselves. We need to find ways in our own spheres of influence to make these sorts of changes happen, or at the very least get the conversation rolling.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – Wonder of wonders! Travis Bedard over at Cambiare Productions had my blog in his Google Reader, and he was able to email many of my lost posts! I have not had time yet to re-construct everything, but hopefully over the weekend I can shake some time free to do so. I can’t thank or re-pay Travis enough for his effort. It’s situations and solutions like this that make me realize how powerful and interesting the internet can truly be. Travis, my savior – thanks millions!  -twl

Dunkirk NY – Well, with eight months of writing lost, I figured it might be a good idea to get back on track just a little bit. Adding a post tonight, which is my night off, seemed to be a good project. And to be honest, I did the post-a-day thing back in November, and the loss of most of those posts are nothing to get upset about. The world will not be a worse place for the lack of a post or two of mine.

I came to the realization the other day that I let a lot of theatrical events go by without comment, most noticeably the Tonys (if there is one post I regret losing it was the recent one I wrote on the Arties in Buffalo). I am also not finding much of interest to write about. I attribute this to the fact that most of what I had been reading about isn’t particularly pertinent to me personally. It may be pertinent to my students, and I do feel a need to stay relatively on top of things so that I can address issues with some modicum of intelligence. But I am coming to realize that my interest in things theatrical, at the most deeply personal level, is beginning to fade. Continue Reading »

Dunkirk NY – Somehow, in updating my site to WordPress 3.0, I lost a good deal of my recent posts, from about mid-October 2009 to today. That’s why the post below this one dates on October 16th. I have no idea if this was the fault of my server or mine, but it seems that in the sites I have updated to 3.0, I have gotten different error messages, mostly related to file location in the php file structure. That’s a little over my head.

I was able to go back to my original WordPress.com site and capture posts from October 2009 back, but it seems that anything from that date to this has become lost in the ether somewhere. I am trying to inspect the SQL databases on my server to see if anything is recoverable, but it’s not likely. My apologies, and thanks for your patience as I attempt to re-construct the site as best as possible.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – This past Monday night I attended for the first time ever the annual Artie Awards in Buffalo. The Artie Awards are Buffalo’s equivalent of the Tony Awards, celebrating and recognizing outstanding achievements in theatre within the city of Buffalo. They have been going on now for twenty years, which coincidentally is about as long as I have been active in the Buffalo theatre scene. They are the brainchild of Tony Chase, who has been the theatre editor of Buffalo’s alternative newspaper ArtVoice (the alternative to the Buffalo News, at any rate) for 20 years, as well as a local radio personality for WBFO’s Theatre Talk. They also coincide with the explosive growth of Buffalo Theatre that most people believe began in the late 1980s.

I’ve never attended the Arties before for several reasons. The first reason is that I am ambivalent about award ceremonies in general, whether they be in academia or in the arts. Part of me understands the importance of recognizing legitimate achievement; when people or a particular company do well, it is the recognition of that fact that continues to motivate and hopefully inspire others. The human psyche needs affirmation and recognition, and awards serve that function. But part of me also understands that these things can become political, and that they are often used for self-promotion purposes. There is a famous line in Buffalo theatre circles – “The Arties are all political, until you win one.” There was also a bit of an Artie backlash this year from one of the theatre groups in the city that felt they were left out of the proceedings. Continue Reading »