Alex Chilton died on St. Patrick’s Day in his adopted hometown of New Orleans. He was 59. Click here to read the obit in the New York Times.

A loud explosion—a concussion grenade?—ripped through the neighborhood a couple minutes after the bursts of gunfire. From my backyard I watched the SWAT team prepare to enter the carriage house at 57 Trinity. One officer shouted, “Eric! Eric, shout out to us if you’re in there! Eric!” as a half dozen or so officers streamed into the backyard. “Watch out for crossfire,” another officer shouted. “Watch out for crossfire.”

Three loud bangs—possibly the door being battered down. Another flash and bang, then periodic shouts. A couple of shots fired. After perhaps five minutes, maybe 10, the SWAT team began to file out of the carriage house, their weapons pointed downward. An officer is a squad car outside my house confirmed the shooter had been shot. “Sounds like that’s how he wanted to go,” the officer said.

Shots fired. Maybe 10 or 12. It must have been the SWAT team.

A police negotiating team is talking with the gunman, who is in a carriage house between 51 and 57 Trinity Place, five doors in from the corner of Elmwood. He is apparently armed with a shotgun. A SWAT team is on standby, in case negotiations fail. (Police have already used tear gas.) An officer at ECMC with the wounded policeman tells me he was hit with five or six pellets of buckshot in the face, but should be okay.

I was at home in my kitchen on Trinity Place in the block west of Elmwood at about 12:30 when I heard gunfire, maybe 20 or 30 rounds stretched over two or three minutes. From my back window I could see people running slowly down Virginia Street, away from Elmwood. After the first, concentrated bursts, there was a single shot, then another, then silence. Then sirens.

When I stepped outside and into the street a few minutes later, Trinity was blocked by police cruisers at Virginia. An officer drove down to where I was talking with a neighbor and asked us to go inside our houses. There was an active shooter in the neighborhood, he told us. One officer had been hit, nobody else. He said a SWAT team was preparing to enter a house where they thought the shooter had holed up.

More as I know it.

UPDATE: Although they sounded as if they were coming from Virginia Street, apparently the gunshots were just down the block on Trinity, where police were trying to defuse a hostage situation.

Dig up some bell bottoms for a stylistic return to the seventies: the mustache is making a comeback! The Buffalo chapter of Mustaches for Kids, a nationwide organization that encourages its members to grow mustaches for charity, is participating in a month long growing competition. Eighteen members of the local chapter have vowed to grow ‘staches for the Make-A-Wish Foundation between January 1-January 31. For the past month they’ve met for a weekly “weigh-in,” where competitors shave their faces only to leave the mustache and take pictures of the week’s progress. Last year the event raised $858 and had just four volunteers (or “growers”) taking pledges. This year the organization was hoping to raise at least $2000, but it has surpassed that goal by raising close to $5,000 already. The “Stache Bash,” the group’s final “weigh-in,” will be held on Saturday (Jan. 30) at Volker’s bowling alley. Prizes will be awarded to competitors for “sweetest,” “porn-iest,” “most dastardly,” and “most cop-like” mustaches, as well as for “most valiant effort.” Pictured: Volunteers John Borden, Mike O’Hara, and Adam Weekly sport some handsome bristles. To donate to the cause or find out more information, please visit http://bm4k.shasti.com.

—samantha mcconnell

7pm. Voelker’s Bowling Center, 686 Amherst St. (876-6020).

On Friday evening, that old water-carrier Joe Illuzzi reported that former Tennessee Congressman Harold Ford, who’s looking to run a primary challenge to Kirsten Gillibrand for the US Senate this year, would pay a visit to Western New York on Sunday.

You can tell where he learned of the visit from the spin he imparts:

PoliticsNY.Net has learned exclusively that NYS Senate hopeful Harold Ford will be in Buffalo Sunday to discuss state, esp. upstate, issues with Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown…

The meeting is preliminary no one expects Mayor Brown to make an endorsement. However, the 2010 election cycle seems to be breaking out early & our Mayor will be a key player statewide.

You’d think from this that Ford flew from NYC specifically to see Brown. In fact, I’m told that a meeting with Brown—they had lunch at the Buffalo Chop House—was not on the radar when Ford’s itinerary was first established. Initially Ford was to attend church on the city’s East Side (he wound up at the Greater Refuge Temple), then stop in for lunch at a West Side restaurant (possibly Betty’s), then meet with Erie County Democratic Party Chairman Len Lenihan, then catch a little bit of the Jets game at the Buffalo Brew Pub on his way back to the airport.

But Brown’s people learned of the visit and insisted that they be shoehorned into the schedule. Goodbye, Betty’s. Goodbye, Jets game.

Illuzzi dutifully reported what the mayor’s people would have you believe: That Ford’s trip to Buffalo was all about courting the mayor. And why should he recast Ford’s visit as an homage to Brown? Because the mayor has spent at least $17,000 on advertisements on Illuzzi’s site in the past four years.

This is all about Illuzzi, of course, and not about the mayor. Even the New York Times thinks Brown will play a role in this fall’s statewide elections.

Prediction: Reviewing recent poll numbers that show his Republican rival Rick Lazio gaining on Andrew Cuomo and beating David Paterson, Erie County Executive Chris Collins will begin to suspect that the advice of his political consultant, Michael J. Hook, that he should run for governor is motivated more by greed than by polls.

Collins, having spent close to a million bucks with Hook’s firm so far, is already a gravy train; a run for governor would be like a gravy train with a side of bonanza.

His candidacy’s failure to gain traction downstate will seal the county executive’s sense that he’s being fleeced, and seal the deal: The ambitious Collins is stuck in the Rath Building.

Today Glenn Gramigna posted an account of a conversation with Pastor Darius Pridgen, in which Pridgen diagnoses the dysfunction of City Hall. Pridgen says:

If you look at the City Charter, the Mayor is supposed to be the one who lays out a vision for what Buffalo should be and then the Common Council provides checks and balances. But, we haven’t had that in recent years. We’ve had 10 Mayors, one real Mayor and nine little Mayors. And, I really think that this is part of what has been holding us back.

He’s wrong about that: While Buffalo does have strong mayor system—one in which the chief executive prepares and implements the city’s budget and has broad discretion to hire and fire department heads—there is nothing in the charter that isolates “vision” to the executive branch or which relegates the Common Council to providing “checks and balances.” Pridgen should know this: He served for a spell on the city’s charter revision commission 10 year ago, before resigning. (In part, according to fellow commissioner George Arthur, Pridgen resigned because Mayor Tony Masiello would not endorse his successful run for a seat on Buffalo’s school board. A seat from which Pridgen also resigned.)

In fact, the Common Council is invested with immense powers (including approving the mayor’s hires and budget), and is capable of setting a citywide agenda. That’s more difficult since the downsizing referendum of 2002 stripped the Council of its three citywide-elected at-large members and president, but it’s still possible. The powers invested in the Council by the city charter make it possible. Their failure to do so is the consequence of political division on between councilmembers and between the Council and the mayor’s office.

In a hypothetical world in which the Council tried to legislate into policy and budget priorities its own “vision for what Buffalo should be,” of course, it would rely on the mayor to implement that legislation. That’s the mayor’s job (“to enforce the laws therein”), but our strong mayor has the ability, like many chief executives, to subvert the will of the legislature by choosing not to execute its orders. A strong, independently elected mayor has the political cover to do so, too: Byron Brown, for example, was re-elected handily and so can claim that his policies have been approved by the majority of the city. If this Common Council, controlled by a majority that often stands in opposition to the mayor on the perhaps five percent of issues before them where there’s room for debate, decided to assert its will on one of those issues, the mayor could make a good argument for ignoring their actions.

I tend, perhaps irrationally, to believe that legislative bodies—despite their frequent chaos, horsetrading, parochialism, posturing—ought to be more powerful than the executive branch. They tend to be closer to the people they represent, and the need to build consensus protects the governed, I think, from both tyranny and truly boneheaded ideas.

That’s why I went to last night’s meeting of the Frontier Democrats at J.P. Bullfeather’s, to hear North District Councilman talk about one of his favorite ideas: Golombek believes the city should turn to a city manager form of government. In his “vision for what Buffalo should be,” the Common Council would hire an independent city manager certified by the International City/County Management Association. The city manager would run the day-to-day operations of the city: budgeting, hiring, firing, performance analysis and optimization, etc. A citywide-elected mayor would fill a largely ceremonial role. The citywide-elected city comptroller would continue to monitor government spending and procedures. And the Common Council would set the agenda.

The idea is to isolate personnel practices and the execution of city services from the vagaries of political wrangling. Police are deployed where they are needed most, not preferentially to districts that produce high voter turnouts. Capital expenditures are directed where they’re need, according to a master plan, not as political favors to friendly legislators and contractors. It may seem a radical idea, but it’s not: Nearly half of US municipalities larger than 2,500 people use some form of city manager/council government.

Golombek admits the idea is not popular in political circles—certainly not with his friend the mayor. “Opposition clear across the board,” Golombek says. “People are opposed to this, and I believe it’s because people lose power”—the power to give jobs, to direct contracts, to subvert good governance to political considerations. If so many in our dysfunctional City Hall are opposed to the idea, it must bear examining.

1

THE TESTING-TREE

On my way home from school
   up tribal Providence Hill
      past the Academy ballpark
where I could never hope to play
   I scuffed in the drainage ditch
      among the sodden seethe of leaves
hunting for perfect stones
   rolled out of glacial time
      into my pitcher's hand;
then sprinted lickety-
   split on my magic Keds
      from a crouching start,
scarcely touching the ground
   with my flying skin
      as I poured it on
for the prize of the mastery
   over that stretch of road,
      with no one no where to deny
when I flung myself down
   that on the given course
      I was the world's fastest human.

2

Around the bend
   that tried to loop me home
      dawdling came natural
across a nettled field
   riddled with rabbit-life
      where the bees sank sugar-wells
in the trunks of the maples
   and a stringy old lilac
      more than two stories tall
blazing with mildew
   remembered a door in the
      long teeth of the woods.
All of it happened slow:
   brushing the stickseed off,
      wading through jewelweed
strangled by angel's hair,
   spotting the print of the deer
      and the red fox's scats.
Once I owned the key
   to an umbrageous trail
      thickened with mosses
where flickering presences
   gave me right of passage
      as I followed in the steps
of straight-backed Massassoit
   soundlessly heel-and-toe
      practicing my Indian walk.

3

Past the abandoned quarry
   where the pale sun bobbed
      in the sump of the granite,
past copperhead ledge,
   where the ferns gave foothold,
      I walked, deliberate,
on to the clearing,
   with the stones in my pocket
      changing to oracles
and my coiled ear tuned
   to the slightest leaf-stir.
      I had kept my appointment.
There I stood in the shadow,
   at fifty measured paces,
      of the inexhaustible oak,
tyrant and target,
   Jehovah of acorns,
      watchtower of the thunders,
that locked King Philip's War
   in its annulated core
      under the cut of my name.
Father wherever you are
    I have only three throws
       bless my good right arm.
In the haze of afternoon,
   while the air flowed saffron,
      I played my game for keeps--
for love, for poetry,
   and for eternal life--
      after the trials of summer.

4

In the recurring dream
   my mother stands
      in her bridal gown
under the burning lilac,
   with Bernard Shaw and Bertie
      Russell kissing her hands;
the house behind her is in ruins;
   she is wearing an owl's face
      and makes barking noises.
Her minatory finger points.
   I pass through the cardboard doorway
      askew in the field
and peer down a well
   where an albino walrus huffs.
      He has the gentlest eyes.
If the dirt keeps sifting in,
   staining the water yellow,
      why should I be blamed?
Never try to explain.
   That single Model A
      sputtering up the grade
unfurled a highway behind
   where the tanks maneuver,
      revolving their turrets.
In a murderous time
   the heart breaks and breaks
      and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
   through dark and deeper dark
      and not to turn.
I am looking for the trail.
   Where is my testing-tree?
      Give me back my stones!

—stanley kunitz