SARATOGA SPRINGS — A week-long celebration of Saratoga culinary delights will take place Nov. 5-11 during the 14th Annual Restaurant Week, offering a glimpse into the unique dining options within Saratoga County.

Nearly 50 participating restaurants will participate in the event - presented by Discover Saratoga and Spa City Brew Bus – which serves up a variety of prix fixe menu options ranging from $20 and $30 three-course dinners to $10 lunch specials, plus tax & tip. 

As opposed to last year, when the event took place Dec. 1-7, this season’s staging will be held prior to the Thanksgiving holiday and begins Monday, Nov. 5.  

For more information about Saratoga Restaurant Week, go to: www.discoversaratoga.org/restaurantweek, or call 518-584-1531.

THE FOLLOWING RESTAURANTS WILL
BE PARTICIPATING IN THE EVENT:

$10 Lunches
BurgerFi - 460 Broadway
Diamond Club Grill - 86 Congress Street
Esperanto - 4 Caroline Street
Falafel Den - 10 Phila Street
Gaffney's Restaurant - 16 Caroline Street
Local Pub & Teahouse - 142 Grand Avenue
PJ's Bar-B-QSA - 1 Kaydeross Avenue West
Saratoga Stadium - 389 Broadway
Sweet Mimi's Café - 47 Phila Street
Thirsty Owl Bistro - 184 South Broadway

$20 Dinner
2 West Bar And Grille - 2 West Avenue
Boca Bistro - 384 Broadway
BWP Your Local Bar & Grille - 74 Weibel Avenue
Cantina - 430 Broadway
Chianti Il Ristorante - The Lofts @ 18 Division Street
Diamond Club Grill - 86 Congress Street
Dizzy Chicken Wood Fired Rotisserie - 102 Congress Street
Forno Bistro - 541 Broadway
Gaffney's Restaurant - 16 Caroline Street
Jacob & Anthony's American Grille - 38 High Rock
Local Pub & Teahouse - 142 Grand Avenue
Longfellows Restaurant - 500 Union Avenue
Olde Bryan Inn - 123 Maple Avenue
PJ's Bar-B-QSA - 1 Kaydeross Avenue West
Ravenous - 21 Phila Street
Saratoga Stadium - 389 Broadway
Scallions Restaurant - 44 Lake Avenue
The Brook Tavern - 139 Union Avenue 

$30 Dinner
Braeburn Tavern - 390 Broadway
Chez Pierre - 979 Rt. 9 (Saratoga Road), Gansevoort
Hamlet And Ghost - 24 Caroline Street, Suite 1
Hattie's Restaurant - 45 Phila Street
Jacob & Anthony's American Grille - 38 High Rock
Lake Ridge Restaurant - 35 Burlington Avenue, Round Lake
Morton's The Steakhouse Saratoga Casino Hotel - 342 Jefferson Street
Mouzon House - 1 York Street
Prime at Saratoga National Golf Club - 458 Union Avenue
R & R Kitchen + Bar - 43 Phila Street
Salt & Char - 353 Broadway
Sperry's – 30-1/2 Caroline Street
The Blue Hen - 365 Broadway
Thirsty Owl Bistro - 184 South Broadway
Wheatfields Bistro & Wine Bar - 54 Crossing Blvd., Clifton Park
Wheatfields Restaurant & Bar - 440 Broadway
Wishing Well Restaurant - 745 Route 9, Gansevoort

SARATOGA SPRINGS - The Friends of the New York State Military Museum will host its annual Veteran of the Year Ceremony at noon on Saturday, Oct. 27 at the museum, on Lake Avenue.

The 2018 Awardee is LTC (Ret) Nicholas M. Laiacona, who served as a Platoon Leader and Company Commander in the Mobile Riverine Force (MRF), 9th Infantry Division, Mekong Delta, Republic of Vietnam.

Laiacona entered the Army in 1966, graduated from Infantry Officers Candidate School in 1967 and upon returning to the US after Vietnam transferred to the Ordnance Corps. He served in a number of Ordnance assignments in the US, Germany and Korea. In 1985 he was selected as one of the first certified US Army Material Acquisition Managers and became one of the first officers in the Army Acquisition Corps. He retired in 1991.

The event is free and open to the public. U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik is anticipated to make the award presentation.

SARATOGA SPRINGS - The legacy of Alexander “Sam” Aldrich will be honored on Saturday with the dedication of a custom designed bench along the Geyser Creek Trail at Saratoga Spa State Park. It is a location that Aldrich enjoyed visiting with his wife, Phyllis.

Sam Aldrich was first cousins with Nelson Rockefeller and served as the then-governor’s executive assistant during the 1960s. 

Aldrich was dispatched to Washington, D.C. in 1963 – where he was up on the dais during Martin Luther King’s "I Have a Dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and was sent to Alabama two years later to join King on a historic 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery.

The speech - “so moving and so peaceful, extraordinary," Aldrich told this reporter, during a visit to his Saratoga home in January 2012. "I think (King) knew that he was a symbol, that he was at risk and that he would probably die on this mission."

The bench dedication ceremony in honor of Aldrich will take place at noon Saturday, Oct. 27 at Creekside Classroom, Saratoga Spa State Park – located on the Geyser Loop Road in the south end of the Park. Aldrich died in 2017.

SARATOGA SPRINGS – The Rochmon Record Club will dress up for a Special Halloween Encore edition of Queen’s 4th album: “Night at the Opera, Wednesday, Oct. 31 at Caffe Lena.

Attendees are encouraged to dress up as the Queen of their choice to listen to and learn about the classic album filled with pomp and circumstance.

Queen’s 1975 album “A Night at the Opera” features the ground-breaking mini suite, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “You’re My Best Friend,” and 10 other tracks.

The Rochmon Record Club Listening Party begins at 7 p.m. – doors open 6:30 p.m. - with a live audio and video presentation by Chuck Vosganian aka Rochmon.  A Rochmon Record Club Listening Party is meant to inform and deepen our understanding of the history of the individual performers, the songs and the stories that went into the making of this iconic album. Tickets are $8 and available at: caffelena.org.

Future Rochmon record events: Carole King “Tapestry,” Nov. 20 and 25 at Caffe Lena; Aretha Franklin “Queen of Soul Retrospective” Dec. 18 at Caffe Lena; Fleetwood Mac “Rumors” Nov. 23 at Proctors in Schenectady; The Beatles “Revolver” (Oct. 25), Rolling Stones “Sticky Fingers” (Nov. 29), and The Doors’ “The Doors” (Dec. 27) at The Linda Performing Arts Center in Albany.

SARATOGA SPRINGS - Tim Davis roams the corridors of the Tang Museum, surveying the gallery landscape where the work is ongoing in preparation of this weekend’s opening of his new show.

“This is the first time I’ve ever really done a show on this scale of things - things that aren’t just pictures that I took on a wall,” he says, the sonic echo of swinging hammers and buzzing drills flowing all around him. “This has a lot more going on.”

There are photographs – which he calls cartoons, selfies captured in the South Sea, videos of radios that he filmed in Tunisia; There is a self-portrait sculpture composed of multiple copies of Bob Dylan’s “Self Portrait” album, and a multitude of grave rubbings of people with funny names. “I can’t believe that I spent all this time in the summer doing these grave-rubbings,” Davis says, with a laugh. “It just seems insane.”  

“While I’m out there making photographs about the immediate moment, I’m also collecting stuff all the time,” he explains, posing for a photograph in front of his Library of Ideas. Here, the book shelves are lined with titles that boast the word “Idea.” 

 "It all started with the sheet music of the song ‘(When We Are Dancing) I get ideas,’ Davis says. “I started collecting printed matter that has the word IDEAS in it, thinking that if I ever needed more ideas…”

Davis had staged solo exhibitions in Italy and France, Belgium and Canada. He has been involved in group exhibitions in spaces like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “When We Are Dancing (I Get Ideas),” - which opens on Saturday at the Tang Museum - marks the first large-scale exhibit in Saratoga Springs for the artist who spent his childhood here.  

Davis grew up in Saratoga where at a young age he went around town with his friends making home movies with a Super 8 camera. He played in local bands. He created handwritten stories that were published in a homemade newspaper created by his friends. The TV news was their inspiration.   “We were all obsessed with this weekend news anchor in Albany named Joe Moskowitz,” he recalls. “We got his 8x10 glossy, signed. We were in his fan club…”  

The artist’s father, longtime Saratogian Peter Davis, was the program director of the Flurry Festival and plays a variety of instruments with numerous bands in the region, from Annie and the Hedonists to Saratoga Race Course house band Reggie’s Red Hot Feetwarmers. Music also plays a prominent rule in the exhibition. A monitor inside the museum displays music videos the younger Davis created for each of the 11 songs that he wrote for an album titled “It’s OK to Hate Yourself.”   

“It’s got many of Saratoga’s finest musicians on it,” says the artist who spent many years writing lyrics for his brother’s band, Cuddle Magic.  On Dec. 6, Tim Davis will perform all new material with his all new band.  “We’re called Severely Brothers. not THE. Just called Severely Brothers, OK?”

He is an artist, writer and a musician who makes photographs, video, drawings, sound, and installations. Humor plays a vital role.     

One of his earlier videos - “The Upstate New York Olympics” - depicts Davis leap-frogging over lawn jockeys. Sixteen different lawn jockeys in fact and some of which would be readily recognizable to residents of the Spa City. 

“On my 40th birthday, I said: I’m going to go out and just make something that’s super fun, something I enjoy. My birthday is Nov. 5 and it’s always cold and miserable and I came up with idea of making new sports. And I love playing sports, so I was like: Can I make art as fun as playing sports? For a year I made this thing – The Upstate New York Olympics - and I went all around upstate scanning the landscape,” says Davis, who is 48. “The lawn jockey leapfrog seemed logical. I get a rush out of doing something I’m not supposed to do. I never really got in trouble,” he says. “And I only went to the hospital once.” 

Another early video features 12 minutes of various Dollar General stores that accompany the lonesome traveler on a journey across the upstate landscape. 

“I was visiting a friend in Chenango County, out near Binghamton. You’re driving around an realize there are these Dollar General stores in like every town, these amazing glowing things where they leave the lights on really late at night. You’re like: Oh, there goes another one. He fixed his camera to the side window of his car and continued on his journey. ”I enjoy being out in the world and being dedicated to capturing something about the immediacy of the moment.” 

In the Tang Museum exhibition, two fixed walls play moving images that showcase, respectively, the formative beginnings of the hope-filled power of creativity - called “Counting In” - and its successful conclusion, called “Curtain Calls.”  

“This is all footage I shot. Counting In took a year of going to band practices and waiting for them to say: one, two, three, four. Filmed in their rehearsal spaces, I just take the part where they go: one, two, three, four and string all of those together, before the song even starts. Curtain Calls are of amateur theatrical plays. It’s the ecstasy of the thing being over. Different plays from all over the country, shot from the same vantage point,” Davis says.  

“A curtain call is what everyone is aiming for in a play - especially an amateur play that’s three hours long. Everyone’s like: can we get it there without messing it up? And Counting In is something that’s necessary to make music happen. I feel these two pieces are the real American Dream – which is playing in a band in your basement and doing an elaborate theater production. It’s not making a million dollars on Wall Street. “  

Another music-meets-culture depiction - Un-Easy Listening - takes up a glass housed section of the museum’s second-floor space.

“There are about seven or eight hundred easy listening record in here - records you pick up when you go digging through the Salvation Army,” Davis says. “Elevator music. Music meant to be in the background in a suburban house in the ‘50s, when people moved from urban ethnic-type apartment tenements to the suburbs, where they created all this music to fill up that space. That happened at the same time of the invention of the long-playing record and hi-fi stereo. So, it was the perfect storm of blandness.” A trio of record players simultaneously spin three different easy listening selections. “It’s interactive. People can come in and take records, put them on, change them out, take them home if they want. I would be grateful to get rid of them.”  

Davis lives in Tivoli, N.Y., near Kingston and teaches photography at Bard College. He previously taught a different generation of students at Yale, from 2001 to 2004. It was an era before Google, before Facebook and prior to Instagram. The technological changes of the past 15 years have been massive.

 “One thing that’s harder and harder is going out into the world (for a new generation of students). Computers and the Internet are things that make us… we know where we can go to get answers. Every question can be answered in one place. The idea of moving through the world randomly may lead you to your answers, and unexpected answers, but it’s harder for them to do that. So, I give an assignment that’s called ‘Let’s Get Lost’ and the idea is you have to be completely lost before you can take any pictures, and you can’t have a phone with you. For me, the idea is that there’s a heightened attention when we’re lost, a feeling of being hyper-aware,” Davis explains.

“On the other hand, the idea of their lives being something they want to share with other people is something that’s totally familiar to them. It’s easier for them to make work that’s more personal, that’s more connected, because they’re used to it. It’s something they’ve done their whole lives. Not only making art about their whole lives - but publishing it, for all to see.”

The exhibition reflects the wide variety of the artist’s works. “I’m paying attention all the time,” Davis says. “The thing is, we may run out of a lot of things, but we’re never going to run out of significance. We’re never going to run out of something to say. As long as there are human beings, there is going to be significance in a sense that: this is really important, let me tell you this. And that’s what I’m here for.”

 (photo: the artist in the spotlight, at the Tang Museum, Oct. 17, 2018. Photo: Thomas Dimopoulos)

Tim Davis - When We Are Dancing (I Get Ideas), a solo exhibition opens Saturday. Oct. 20 at
The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. Opening reception is at 5 p.m.

On Tuesday, Oct. 30, Davis hosts an evening at the museum of storytelling about how and why people collect things.  he will also stage a musical performance on Dec. 6. For more information, go to: tang.skidmore.edu.

SARATOGA SPRINGS – A family friendly kickoff to fall featuring food, music and individual and group art projects will take place Saturday afternoon at Pitney Meadows Community Farm.  Attendees will have the opportunity to create kites, flower crowns and a collaborative sculpture project - which will be installed at the farm.

The event is hosted by C.R.E.A.T.E Community Studios, a nonprofit organization that works with children and adults to promote freedom of expression, personal growth, and community connection through art.

 “We were formed by a group of art therapists and art educators,” says group co-founder Julie Lewis. “Our mission is really about bringing the expressive arts to an underserved population and working with communities to bring health and wellness - through the expressive arts - as a medium through which community togetherness can happen.”

The focus is on the process of art-making, which includes interacting with subjects, creatively working from a feeling, or becoming inspired by community issues. It is about using the creative process as a vehicle for personal growth, communication and social change.

“My interest came from my background of working in schools and specifically working with some low-income at-risk populations,” says Lewis, a NY State certified teacher. 

“I saw half of my students struggling so much with the academic side of things and what I realized is they weren’t struggling because of academic needs – they’re extremely bright – but because there was so much change and trauma and difficulty in their family lives. And they didn’t have a proper outlet for that in school,” she says. “The kids were clearly showing me that there were ways they wanted to utilize activities in terms of the arts and physical activity, music and the movement to express themselves. I felt a little powerless trying to change that in a school structure. I realized I really wanted to find a way to make a space for that.”

Inspired to seek like-minded collaborators, Lewis connected with Heather Hutchison – a state licensed creative arts therapist, and Aili Lopez, a licensed mental health counselor. “They both had a similar dream of opening up some type of community center focused around using all the arts – movement, music, visual, performance everything to help bring communities together and to heal,” Lewis says. 

C.R.E.A.T.E is located on Broadway in Saratoga Springs in the Collamer Building and on State Street in Schenectady and offers a variety of affordable art-based workshops for all age groups. The organization has also partnered with veterans’ groups and agencies such as the Franklin Community Center, Wellspring, and Shelters of Saratoga to offer programs for specific populations.

“We’re really focused on trying to meet all the needs of our community members,” Lewis says. A list of programs may be found on the organization’s website at: http://www.createcommunitystudios.org/.

Saturday’s events take place 3 to 6 p.m. at Pitney Meadows Community Farm, 223 West Ave. Tickets are $30 per family and $15 per individual and may be purchased in advance on the organization’s website, or at the farm on the day of the event.

Funds raised support C.R.E.A.T.E.’s mission to serve everyone who walks through their doors by providing a space where the benefits of art-making impact each person’s overall mental, emotion-al and physical health through free and low-cost open studio time, expressive arts groups for kids, teens and adults, arts workshops and community wellness activities, community building events and imperative outreach programming.