LOSING OUR BALKANIZED PATHOLOGIES?:

In many ways Billy Brown's Buffalo is now passing away as gentrification slowly but surely changes the face of much of the city's character. The formerly bohemian Elmwood Village neighborhood, for instance, once the haunt of packs of feral hipsters (of the non-trust-fund variety), starving artists, and less-than-great musicians, has gone upscale. Gone are the old dive bars, tackily decorated pizza shops, and bowling alleys, replaced by upscale wine bars full of young professionals enjoying tasteful banter with their girlfriends, restaurants that specialize in artisanal guacamole, and doggie daycares to care for the "furbabies" of the area's childless yuppies. Gone, too, are the cheap rents and cheap beer. The once bohemian has become boutique.

Much of the rest of Buffalo's downtown is experiencing a similar phenomenon. New condo projects have gone up, made possible, of course, by generous tax breaks. The formerly decrepit waterfront has been completely renovated. Once-abandoned Main Street has miraculously started to come back to life. Hell, even the Bills finally seem to be doing better, having made the playoffs for the first time in 17 years.

Things have certainly changed since the 90s, but, contra the boosters who have fetishized the new progress for its own sake, not all of it has been good. Something has been lost.

"Buffalo 66" was famously an autobiographical project for Gallo, a sort of belated half-love letter to a town and family he fled from when he was only 16. The house used in the film was Gallo's childhood home, and the abusive, pathological, and detached parents he kidnaps a stranger to try and impress are obvious stand-ins for his own. The film was as much Gallo's own attempt to reckon with the city he left behind, with all its simultaneous dysfunction and subtle charm, as it was a work of art.

It's a reckoning those cheering on the city's continued "progress" might do well to have themselves, lest they succeed in gentrifying out of existence the very things, like the mystical lanes of Recckio's bowling alley, that made Billy Brown's Buffalo so strangely beautiful in the first place.

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