Published: October 16, 2009 01:07 am      

ADAMCZYK: An art festival, the night of the 31st

In some ways this is the best time of the year.

There is no need to gripe about how hot it is, and it’s too late to think about summer chores undone. If it’s too cold, I merely wear another layer.

The kids are acclimated to the school semester and the leaves are falling and turning. Western New York never looks so beautiful, and I know what liquor goes well in cider.

Various sports schedules slam together admirably. The baseball season puts most of its drama in its final acts, and that is in October. Hockey has just begun, football is percolating and basketball starts momentarily.

This is the moment in the calendar when, more than usual, one can walk through beauty, go home and witness beauty, look out the car window and enjoy beauty.

Art depends heavily on interpretation, which means the observer’s viewpoint can mean more than the artist’s inspiration or talent or cost of her materials. You like Picasso, I like to watch Albert Pujols swing a baseball bat; we’re both appreciating fine art, and that brings me to the annual Kenmore art festival known as Halloween.

I contend, every year at this time, that no community in Western New York takes Halloween more seriously than does the Village of Kenmore. I refer to Halloween in the social sense, decorating the houses, decorating the kids, prepping for the neighborhood walkaround, the parties, etc. (if anyone out here is using the day for evil and occult purposes, standing naked and amid a roomful of candles in a pentagram drawn on the floor while invoking unholy beasts to unleash harm on enemies real or imagined, well, he or she hasn’t invited me).

Greg Hinaman’s idea of art involves a Hollywood-style fright house, an entire Kenmore residential abode dedicated, nine nights only, to a scary public walkthrough — blood, chainsaws, torture devices, all that stuff — in a low-cost but high-impact demonstration of homemade-but-effective special effects. He’s been at this for six years, with performance art so dramatic it has been featured in House Haunters Magazine (granted, that’s not exactly like appearing in Newsweek, but the international community of amateur horror simulators is evidently a tightly knit and well-connected one, and if it says Kenmore has one of the best of these things, I’ll believe it).

Other Kenmore residents are aiming lower, but they’re at it; no ignoring this opportunity to turn one’s house into a work of art. It is beginning already, houses in my part of the village heavily decorated as though for Christmas but with a different palette of color for the lights, and front lawns redesigned as graveyards. And yes, pumpkins on our famous porches. Little pumpkins, big pumpkins, bags full of leaves that resemble carved pumpkins.

Pumpkins beget engineering projects. A Halloween festival in Clarence includes a pumpkin-tossing contest featuring trebuchets, catapults that use leverage and tension to hurl pumpkin artillery hundreds of feet through the air (think “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”). A team from Kenmore West High School (as well as North Tonawanda High School) is taking part.

Perhaps it’s the large number of churches in Kenmore that turn us into part-time pagans for a little while, or the residue of Kenmore West’s reputation as an artistic hothouse in the 1970s, but those explanations are wearing a little thin. Still, I challenge anyone with a vehicle and a little free time to drive around Western New York, to Clarence or Cheektowaga or the West Side, and find me a neighborhood that goes all-out on Halloween the way Kenmore does.

Maybe we watch too many movies. Dragging out the ladder, after inspiration hits us, is akin to Hollywood set design. We use our houses as the biggest canvases we own, and create our idea of art.

We decorated each other on Halloween when I was a kid, and the candy-collecting rounds were made to homes that looked, in the June Cleaver sense, normal. A lot has changed since then (the trick-or-treaters aren’t dodging dinosaurs anymore, for one thing); in the 21st century nothing’s normal, or everything’s normal, depending on one’s perspective.

It’s a rare opportunity for many people, a chance to be an artist for a day. In not-particularly-scary Kenmore, our artistic impulses tend to be crazy but functional.

Ed Adamczyk is a Kenmore resident whose column appears weekly in the Tonawanda News. Contact him at EdinKenmore@gmail.com.