MATT ZAJAC

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"Buffalo barbecue sauce, in contrast"

Open Pit brand barbecue sauce is so good it's drinkable. Ran out of meat? Mop that maroon gold up with your index finger.

Man of the house

"Blood, brilliance for oil"

Nasty Nick Swardson

Mixing his candid foul-mouthed cocktail of "ambiguously gay" gaffs with moonshine testosterone, party boy Nick Swardson has risen to heights most stand-ups comics will never know.

Henry Rollins: lessons from a 'liar'

There were chairs in the Town Ballroom Tuesday night, an unusual sight for the venue known for its raging concerts.

The Fossil Column

When deep baby-sleep halts to sneering replication tickers - every bureaucratic bicker - all the rubbish tasks I'm going to have to clean up in days to come, I begin tossing and turning around the bed whose sudden crash in comfort level is leading my red eyes toward nausea.This is when the adrenal stress pool is joined by the task of writing a newspaper column.

One-eyed Jack-o-lantern

In exquisite, death-dealing detail, writer-director Rob Zombie illustrates the rebirth of John Carpenter's classic Halloween in ways that provide a bloody blueprint of exactly how a psycho-killer would beat someone to death; that is, what it would look, sound, and feel like-painful as that may be.For this, Zombie deserves a hearty pat on the back.

A soul man abroad

Lifeline, a collection of eleven clean-cut tracks from Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals, won't drench fans in guiltless crime quite like its predecessor-Both Sides of the Gun-the band's marathon double-disc release in 2006.And yet, despite the safe road it rides, there's something about this classy little album-a certain effortless grandiosity-that proves itself memorable.For starters, it was recorded and mixed entirely in Paris over the course of a single week.

Bible trippin?' and ?'The Breakfast Club?' from Hell

Director and senior theatre major Drew McCabe, the master of playhouse "craic," brings torture, hallucination and mighty acting to UB's experimental stage this weekend as the Department of Theatre and Dance Student Guild performs the wonderfully untamed double feature, "Locus/No Exit" at 190 Alumni Arena.

UB Music Instructor leads the life of an artist

In a time where high school guidance counselors would sooner hand in their resignation papers than advise students to pursue careers in the arts, Otto Muller, an adjunct instructor in the music department, is known for breathing the notion of an artistic lifestyle into the minds of his students.His affinity for the arts transcends Baird Hall to the surrounding Buffalo area where the tabooed life of an artist is far from dead."If your desire is to create art and your conviction is that art is a worthwhile endeavor, then you'll continue to make work regardless of what the societal stigma says," Muller said, who graduated from UB in 2003.Muller captivates his student audience every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, no small feat for a graduate student pursuing his Ph.D.