music

Here is the next video in our Countdown to the Ramble series: West Side Blues Band performing "Runaway." See our earlier post for more about the countdown.

Batavia's "Friday Night in the Square" summer concert series in Jackson Square kicks off tonight with everybody's favorite crooner, Jack Civiletto. Civiletto "Sings Sinatra" starts tonight at 7:00pm. For a taste of what to expect, here's a snippet of Civiletto singing "That's Life," by Frank Sinatra. (The video is from Civiletto's MySpace Video Channel.)

Jack

Marianne Clattenburg looks at her city and sees all the benefits you would find in a metropolis — a symphony, appreciation for the arts, great restaurants — yet there is very little of the violent crime and squalor that makes big city living a risk. It's a perfect fit.

"I have a strong belief that we have a strong community and a very nice place to live and I want to keep the quality of life we've had," she says. "I'm guarded about how we cut things, what we cut."

Marianne joined the City Council in April of last year, took the seat for the Second Ward vacated by her predecessor who had left town. She was then elected to the position in November. So why would this mother of two and grade school teacher want to take on the often burdensome chore of running a city?

"I was afraid that with the taxes and budget where it was that we would cut so much from Batavia that the quality of life would not be the same," she says. "You have to have a certain quality of life in the city, otherwise there's no impetus for living in the city. You have to have that feeling of what you want the city to be and living there as a positive experience."

Marianne calls herself a moderate. She isn't so naive that she doesn't realize a city needs to spend money to get the kind of services that make it liveable. But that doesn't mean that there isn't some fat to be trimmed.

"It's just like the private sector has been doing since the downsizing of the '80s," she says. "We want to try to do the same with a smaller government."

No surprise, then, that Marianne supports consolidation, for the most part.

"New York has those issues of overlapping of government services," she says. "That's a testament of how old the state is. Over the years government has just grown and grown."

Marianne teaches the third grade at St. Joseph's School. (They hatched these chicks, here to the left, just yesterday.) She has only been there full-time for a year, though she has been teaching since 1982 as a substitute, while she raised her two daughters, both now in college — one for psychology, one for pre-law.

Now that she has done "all the mom stuff," as she says, it's time to step up and tackle the public business. Namely, consolidating, shrinking things down without sacrificing those things that make Batavia great.

"Sometimes consolidation isn't the panacea that you think it's going to be, but I'm sure there areas where consolidation is the way to go," she says. "The tax base is not what it used to be in Batavia, and everybody knows that. We have an aging city, aging water system."

"Where there's a willingness to do it, there has to be openness to pursue it."

Eighty-four years of anything is worth boasting about. Let us, then, boast on behalf of the Batavia Concert Band, which kicks off its 84th anniversary season June 25 in Batavia's Centennial Park.

The Batavia Concert Band’s repertoire is wide-ranging in origin, period and style: Sousa-style marches, Broadway show tunes, classical adaptations, fun songs for kids of all ages, big-band and swing numbers, popular songs from hit musicals and movies, rock favorites arranged for concert band… and everything in between.

The Band consists of forty to fifty brass, woodwind and percussion players ranging from talented local high school students to 50-year veterans. Many have professional experience, and the rest are advanced amateur musicians. All love to play.

The Batavia Concert Band has been performing here since 1924, except for a reprieve during World War II.

Its regular season concerts all start at 7:00pm, Wednesday evenings, in Centennial Park, unless it rains, and the band moves to the Genesee County Nursing Home. (See below for a complete season schedule.) All concerts are free to the public. Light refreshments are often available.

Call Bob Knipe at (585) 343-5991 for more information.

In an interview with David Sylvester around 1970, the Irish painter Francis Bacon quipped: "You can be optimistic and totally without hope." He was always amazed when he got out of bed in the morning, he said, yet he pursued his work with an almost belligerent perseverance, short-circuiting his own mastery of design by warping and mutiliating his subjects on canvas. By way of an explanation, he said he wanted to pull images straight off his nervous system, wanted, really, to bypass all the interference of judgment and meaning and get right down to the guts and gore of his art.

No matter. Artworks as brutal and pungent as Bacon's don't need the explications of their maker. They tell their story without him — or they at least relate the absence of any tale.

This morning, I came upon a houseful of artworks that stood just as resolutely on their own two feet. They spoke quite well without voice. Nonetheless, I found myself as fascinated by the narratives that spawned the paintings as I was by the paintings themselves. So it went today with the artist and musician Brian Moore.

This is Brian's latest painting. He's not done it with it yet. It's titled Jungle, and you may be able to guess why. Brian's a Rochester native who now lives in Batavia. He has toured the country in an indie-rock band, studied fine art at college, founded his own recording studio — Red Booth Recording in Medina — produced his own albums, worked for a Web site about horses, painted, sculpted and just generally got by, though he hasn't yet reached his goal of settling down and brewing up a family life. For someone who considers painting a secondary activity, he's damned good at it. Real damned good.

"I worked so hard at doing the music," he says, painting "became a sort of release... something I didn't have to take so seriously."

Unlike Francis Bacon, Brian gets at the guts and gore of his painting through hashing out (sometimes for a long time in advance) a narrative that takes shape in his mind before it all comes spilling out. At one point today, he called it mental throwup. His paintings couldn't be more filled with meaning before they hit the canvas.

"An idea starts subconscious, almost as if there's a movie or a storyline," he says. "Then I find one image that represents it."

Let's leave any interpretations of Jungle up to you for now. Instead, let's take an earlier work of his, called Cancer. (This is a section of that piece to the left here.) Brian composed it out of spray insulation, a goopy, intestinal looking stuff that he then painted once it dried.

Cancer most literally means what it says and came out of Brian's own grieving over his friend's death from an agressive melanoma some years back. By giving form to that pain and loss, Brian found at least a little release.

Not that all of his art comes out of the tragedy of living. Another work made of the spray insulation was a commissioned piece that was a straightforward task of re-interpretation.

Folks from the George Eastman House in Rochester asked Brian to build them a replica of Treebeard, a character from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in honor of that year's Oscar celebration. Brian told me the story of constructing the mammoth sculpture in his parent's garage that winter, and how he installed a sound system in the creature's chest that continuously played the white noise of flowing water, sometimes interrupted by the  booming voice of the character speaking lines from the film. He laughed as he remembered the spooked reactions of people at the Oscar party when they heard this lumpy bearded thing suddenly barking at them.

Brian spoke a lot about his music, which should rightly be noted as his number one passion — though he said that he feels the same sort of energy whether he's painting, writing lyrics, singing or recording someone else's music. That would make sense. It was his music, not his painting, that took him across country twice. His music settled him in Ocean City, Maryland for a summer. His music brought him through rural Kentucky and into the heart of New York City. Maybe most importantly, these days, music pays the bills, and that means he gets to live the life he chooses.

Brian's current band Live for the Day will be headlining the Battle of the Bands show at Water Street Music Hall in Rochester this Friday night.

But let us get back to the paintings, for a moment, before I go cook dinner. Of all the great works Brian introduced me to this morning, I may have to say Frogman appealed to me the most, maybe because there is a little frogman in me, though I won't admit it to often.

You may not be able to see it, but this piece is not only made of paint on the canvas. Brian has mounted a table, draped with a gold velvet tablecloth, onto the painting. Atop the table are a pair of wine glasses — one full, one empty — and two place settings, for dinner. The empty glass tells us that frogman has already finished his wine, and that tells us he has likely been sitting there for a while.

After Brian told me the story that became this painting and the story the painting now tells, whether we see it or not, I fell in love with it even more. It sounded like a tale J.D. Salinger might have concoted if he let his humans become a little more... I don't know... animal. (Or maybe more like the Argentinian surrealist Julio Cortazar.) It goes like this: Our hero here, if we may call him that, is a gentleman who was born with the head of a frog. It's no mask. It's him. His wealthy aristocratic parents kept him forever locked up in the house to keep his freakishness from the world. But evenually, frogman makes it outside. He puts on a disguise and ventures out, meets a woman, falls in love. He invites her back to his place. Only, she never shows up. And that is where we find him, sitting, waiting, drinking his wine and contemplating his isolation (which is as if he were stranded in a hut on the top of a mountain). Beautiful.

Check back with us for a future video discussion about Brian's piece Jungle and (possibly) the premiere of Live for the Day's music video now in production.

Can't seem to dredge up anything of great import in the way of news this afternoon. Whenever that happens, I head out into the community, into the shops on Main Street and elsewhere, into the parks...

Batavia police tell me they don't have anything to report — I've called them twice today so far. We should probably consider that good news. Strange though, since a city councilman told me that the city was already 300 calls above where they were this time last year.

Still not much luck connecting with the busy city manager. I did get a couple City Council members on the phone today, but didn't make it much further than that. I'll be meeting with Sam Barone next week. Looking forward to it. Sam mentions fishing, bowling and reading under special interests on the city's Web site. I'm a fan of all three myself, though I'm only good at the last one.

Also, I found this fine shot of the bend in the Tonawanda River in my camera. Have those bulbs popped yet?

Then I met with Hal Kreter over at the county's Veterans Service Agency. He's a great guy — a longtime U.S. Marine himself — who works for an organization that fills the gap between the American veteran and the no doubt intimidating bureaucracy of the federal government.

That's about all for now. But here's a note before I go: The Batavian's MySpace is humming along. We've picked up 30 friends so far — honestly, I don't know if that's very many, but I'm excited about it. For those of you interested in that, please stop by and check it out. We'd be happy to be your friend. For those who aren't interested or just don't know much about the site, it's a social networking hub where anyone can register and create a personal profile for themselves, meet other folks, keep up remotely with friends. Music is big on MySpace, so we're hoping to link up with a few bands, maybe even put together a music video from time to time to bring back here to our site. Look for that in the future.

Jackson Square Concert Series 2008 — Downtown Batavia:

• Friday, June 20th (7-9 p.m.) Civilletto Sings Sinatra

• Friday, June 27th  (7-9 p.m.) Ghost Riders (Country)

• Friday, July 4th, (7-9 p.m.)  Pre-Ramble Concert (Ghost Riders, Sierra & Friends)

• Saturday, July 5  (11a.m. - 9 p.m.)  Ramble Music & Art Fest (Variety)

• Friday, July 11th  (7-9 p.m.) Westside Blues Band (Blues)

• Friday, July 18th  (7-9 p.m.)  Joe Beard & The Blues Union (Blues)

• Friday, July 25th (7-9 p.m.) OHMS Band (Rock)

• Friday, August 1st (7-9 p.m.)  Penny Whiskey (Celtic/folk)

• Friday, August 8th (7-9 p.m.) Julie Dunlap (Country)

• Friday, August 22nd (7-9 p.m.) Bart & Kevin (Family)

• Friday, August 29th (7-9 p.m.)  Craig Wilkins (Johnny Cash Tribute)

Major sponsors of the "Friday Night in the Square" summer music series are: M&T Bank, the Batavia Buisness Improvement District and GoArt!

The series is hosted by the Batavia Business Improvement District. Call (585) 344-0900 for more information.

"We assist new and existing businesses, locate space and provide economic incentives for businesses to locate in downtown Batavia," says Don Burkel, president of the BID. "We also host: the Downtown Public Market, Summer in the City Festival and Christmas in the City Festival."