We Are Scientists

Know what the kids love these days? (You’ll never guess.) Science! Thomas Dolby was blinded by it back in 1982, Mister Wizard taught it on TV until the end of the same decade, Bill Nye was the go-to guy throughout the ’90s, and with physicists busy digging little black holes in Switzerland, the scientific method is, like, totally back.

Brooklyn duo We Are Scientists have a hypothesis that music played with guitars, bass, drums, synthesizers and the human voice can, in the proper setting (a small dark room with lots of people), come in contact with the proper chemicals (beer and sweat) to cause gyration and/or uncontrollable ululation in receptive human specimens.

Conclusions will be drawn and data will be analyzed tomorrow (Friday, Nov. 14) at 8 PM in the petri dish that is Valentine’s (17 New Scotland Ave., Albany). Admission is $14. Call 432-6572 for more info.

In Search of Ice

It’s that brisk, blustery time of year when Capital Region residents start hauling out their hats, coats, scarves and shovels, and sharpening their well-honed gripes and grumbles about the bitter winter ahead.

Not veteran landscape painter Marcia Clark. She has ventured to the ends of the earth to capture winter at it’s most brutal and beautiful. For seven years, Clark has been traveling to Alaska, Newfoundland, Greenland, even the Arctic reaches of Norway—by air, sea and land—in an effort to capture the exquisite landscape of ice.

Beginning this weekend, and running through the iciest months of winter, the Albany Institute of History & Art will showcase more than 20 of Clark’s paintings—executed in an array of media and ranging from small sketches to an ex pansive panorama more than 11 feet long—in an exhibition aptly titled In Search of Ice.

In the catalogue accompanying the exhibit, Clark re flects on her firsthand view of climate change, and the danger that the ice scapes in her paintings may be under a greater threat than we choose to believe.

In Search of Ice: Paintings by Marcia Clark opens to the public at the Albany Institute of History & Art on Saturday, (Nov. 15) at 10 AM, and runs through March 2009. Museum admission is $10, $8 students and seniors, $6 children ages 6-12, and Free for members and children ages five and younger. For more info call 463-4478.

Albany Symphony Orchestra

We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: The Albany Symphony Orchestra offers concert programs that are both tasty and smart. Tomorrow (Friday) night, David Alan Miller and company will present Music of the Ballets Rouses, works associated with that famous company, which was both artistically accomplished and popular way back in the early 20th century.

So we get Debussy’s atmospheric Afternoon of a Faun; Stravinsky’s exhilarating, dramatic Petrouchka; and Ravel’s demonic satire on the waltz, La Valse. The world premiere—this is the ASO, so there’s a world premiere—is David Mallamud’s Nijinsky’s Last Dance, which will feature cellist Kenneth Olsen.

The Albany Symphony Orchestra will perform tomorrow (Friday, Nov. 14) at 8 PM at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall (2nd and State streets, Troy). Tickets are $25-$49, and can be purchased at the box office or by calling 273-0038. There will be a preconcert talk at 7 PM at the Rensselaer County Historical Society (57 2nd St., Troy). For more info, call the ASO office at 465-4755.