question

[b3196]

Gimpy
Ma dere southern bro......Ya must not let the ignorance of one person affect ya like this.......JEET
General Booger E lee

[MORTARDUDE]

Just ignore him.

Larry

[catman]

Thanks Ron...nothing like seeing one's intelligence and maturity level shine through!

Trav

[39mto39g]

you know just what you did, When you posted your crap on my thread,
This site doesn't belong to you , I can post anything I want, Ain't that so, Paco
Although I may be ignorant Bob. You and your Fool friends did it first, Im just following you lead.
And Catman/Seat-jerk, this is a Vietnam Site, You weren't there.

Ron

[b3196]

Larry
I think I'm gonna take your advice......I have come to the realization that: As the infamous Ron White once stated "You can't fix stupid"
Bob K

[PHO127]

The hard way, as they say in Vegas

[Gimpy]

Deah General bOOger, er-a BoGgEr, er-a bUUgeR, aw......whateva, Mista Lee!

You'uns are finally gettin it right!.........The percentage of folks 'cured' from the ailment you mentioned is so small it would not even be measurable.

I thank y'all fer pointing that out to us.

Yo Frand,

The Honorable General Jedidiah "Stonewall" Gimpinski, (esquire)...

[39mto39g]

Rinder's essays remind us of his Berkeley Art Museum triumphs
Kenneth Baker

Tuesday, May 30, 2006


Printable Version
Email This Article

Kenneth Baker
Recent Columns
A direct pleasure in appearance, surface sets Masando Kito apart...
06/13/2006
Letting go of handlebars with artist's echoes of Duchamp
06/10/2006


Archives
JanuaryFebruaryMarchAprilMayJuneJulyAugustSeptembe rOctoberNovemberDecember
200620052004200320022001200019991998199719961995








Many, perhaps most, art exhibition catalog texts do not merit reprinting in anthologies. But people who have tracked the career of Lawrence Rinder admiringly since his late '80s days as Matrix program curator at the Berkeley Art Museum will be delighted to see his most significant essays collected in "Art Life: Selected Writings, 1991-2005" (Gregory R. Miller/D.A.P.; 160 pages; $25).

A glance at the well-illustrated book's table of contents reminds us what a great run of shows Rinder had at BAM. His ahead-of-the-curve essay on Rosie Lee Tompkins' quilts is here. So are memorable texts on Rudolf Steiner's chalkboard diagrams, the drawings of Luc Tuymans and the one from "In a Different Light," a still-illuminating discussion of "gay content" in 20th century art.

"I was initially drawn to art as an alternative to suicide," Rinder writes in his introduction. Who could resist such an opener?

He goes on to admit not knowing what "art" is, beyond "a zone of permission."

"It is enervating," he writes, "to witness the rush of young artists generating globally-informed, media-savvy, interdisciplinary works that ultimately speak to no one but curators and academics."

That probably helps explain his resignation from the Whitney Museum of American Art after four years as a senior curator. In 2004 he returned to the Bay Area as California College of the Arts' dean of graduate studies. He had been founding director of CCA's exhibitions program, the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, when the Whitney tempted him away.

Rinder's academic position has meant a lower public profile on the local art scene. "Art Life" at least brings his voice back into the public conversation.


Also from the Whitney: Speaking of the Whitney Museum, it recently lost another curator to California. Marcelle Polednik, its former assistant curator of prewar art, has been appointed director of collections and exhibitions at the Monterey Museum of Art.

The fall 2005 exhibition "Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color" was her most important project while at the Whitney. It considered in detail the career of one of the more neglected figures in Alfred Stieglitz's pantheon of New York modernists.

A graduate of the University of Southern California, Polednik, who speaks seven languages, is a doctoral candidate at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, where she earned her master's degree in art history.

Long not for much longer: In conjunction with a small show of his work earlier this spring, British land artist Richard Long executed a wall drawing on the third-floor landing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

For anyone who has not seen the piece, or wants to see it again: It will soon disappear for good, possibly as soon as this weekend. People within and outside SFMOMA broached the idea of the museum adding the piece to its collection, but the artist and the museum could not reach the necessary agreement.

A distended ziggurat in profile -- "an abstraction of a mountain," in Long's words -- it spans a vast wall painted black.

Long did the piece literally by hand, slapping the wall with palms covered with mud made from earth he collected during a residency in the Sierra. Hence the title "Sierra Nevada Line." The terra-cotta-colored mud splashed and dripped in arcs down the wall. They spill like falling fireworks from the palm-imprinted body of the work's form.


ArtTable event at SFAI: ArtTable, the national organization of female leaders in the visual arts, will present a panel discussion and video screening at the San Francisco Art Institute at 6:30 p.m. June 7.

The event will provide the public its first look at ArtTable's video oral history project. A panel discussion will follow featuring five of the women interviewed for the video archive: artist Amalia Mesa-Bains, critic Dorothy Burkhart, art historians Kathleen Cohen and Wanda Corn and art dealer Ruth Braunstein.

Tickets: $5. Reservations: nca@arttable

[39mto39g]

this one
This is like going to college to be an actor for six weeks,? said Stewart Seal, who works for the county Parks and Recreation department and is acting as producer of the Hyattsville-based group. ??For a lot of the kids in the audiences, this is their first experience with live performance shows.?

Most of the performances will be free to kids who are in summer programs at the county?s community centers. However, there will be some public shows with a nominal ticket fee.

The two groups are scheduled to perform back-to-back shows July 8 at Harmony Hall. They also have separate shows scheduled as opening acts for this summer?s Shakespeare in the Park performance of ??Two Gentlemen of Verona.?

The ??Cocoa dell?arte? show is scheduled to play at 6:30 p.m. July 22 at Cosca Regional Park in Clinton. ??The Human Boy? is scheduled to be the opening act at 6:30 p.m. July 19 at Magurder Park in Hyattsville.

The program operates on a $30,000 budget from the county, Seal said.

After the directors work with the actors for the first 10 days, the show begins. The actors travel from each location with only a stage manager as their support. Everything else is up to them. They must unload their traveling van, set up the stage, get into costume and do the performance. Then they break down the stage and load up the van before going to their next scheduled performance.

??That?s an actor?s challenge,? said Yates, the director of ??Human Boy.? ??They have to make each show look like it?s the first time they?re doing it.?

The director will try and catch at least one show each week and pass along any tips she sees to the cast. But other than that, the actors are on their own.

??I want to act as a profession,? said 17-year-old Lindsay Jimmink, a University of Maryland College Park student who plays the role of Anzi in ??The Human Boy.? ??It?s something I love, so it never gets old for me.?

While the northern county group will be sticking to the script, there are other challenges for the southern county company. The improvisational nature of their show means every performance will be unique. But that brings its own challenges to the cast.

??It?s hard to think on your feet,? said 16-year-old Kirk Pressley Jr. of Brandywine. ??For me, it?s a challenge. It?s coming out of yourself and acting crazy and going for it. I have to take myself out of it and just become the character.?

And that was just the idea for director Dalton.

??Improv is the most important thing you can learn if you?re going to be an actor,? Dalton said. ??If you?re doing a show at some point and another actor forgets a line, or says a line from two pages away, you can fall back on that training to fix it.?

Dalton also said many drama students don?t get enough training in comedy.

That is one of the purposes of this program, which Yates said is rare in the United States. In addition to employing up to 20 teens for six weeks, offering them minimum wage for up to 37.5 hours a week, they get a chance at professional training and living the life of many small-time actors.

??You?re someone else, you need to make that come out in your performance,? said 17-year-old Jasmine Willis of Mount Rainier, who plays the spirit queen and mother of the human boy in the Hyattsville show.

One of her fellow actors, Jimmink of Bowie, said acting is her blood.

??Ever since I was young, I was good at lying,?? Jimmink said. ??I knew that meant I either had to become an actor or a lawyer.?

E-mail Ken Sain at ksain@gazette.net.

[39mto39g]

Q. 1. What made you pull through your depression and get back on top of things? How did you manage to beat the demons? The reason I am asking is that my 19-year-old son has tried to end his life twice, and dropped out of high school last year in his last year. He has lost all self-confidence, is very insecure, very doubtful of himself. He is actually doing much better than before, but I was wondering what brought about the change in you? No comparisons, of course. I admire you for your strength and courage, and look forward to your reply.
? Claudia

Claudia, this is going to be a long answer. I took many steps to get through my depression, and it's not over. (I had a great two weeks, but the last five days have been not-so-good.) The first and most important step I took happened a week after I left the psych hospital, when I realized, while looking over my receipts of all things, that suicide was not an option. I had wasted so much time thinking about it and mulling over its intricacies and artistic seductiveness; starting right then and there I crossed it out as an option. From then on it was a hard road ? even though I didn't want to kill myself, I didn't really want to live either and I withdrew into oversleeping and under-eating. I tried many things to combat this. Writing "It's Kind of a Funny Story" was certainly a help, but once that was over I felt almost as empty as before. Then I started my own business, which lasted less than a year, and then I worked for five months at a huge computer company. None of these things suited me, but neither did sitting in my house alone trying to write the Next Novel. I opted to try for the New York City Teaching Fellows program, an alternative certification track for secondary school teachers in New York City with a two-year subsidized master's degree. I've always loved working with kids and now I have an opportunity to leave the ego train and think about people other than myself for a few years. My attitude has improved immensely since I began the program. Your son is trapped, thinking about himself and his perceived failures to the exclusion of everything else. Do whatever you can to get him out of bed and into some volunteer work. And then, of course, there's medication. I started in on new meds about two months ago for bipolar disorder instead of straight depression and this has been a big help for me. Many people simply need to try and try until they find the right medication.

Q. 2. What do you think of the notion that the more one is aware of current events, the more one is prone to feeling despair?
? Joyce Gorsuch, Las Vegas, Nev.

I disagree with the notion that the more one reads the news, the more depressed one becomes. The opposite is true. Connection is never bad and withdrawal is never good.

Q. 3. Considering how the novel is based on personal events of your life, did the novel help you in any way deal with your sense of self/control/anything? How personal is this novel for you as a person and a novelist?
? Catherine Jung, Flushing, N.Y.

"It's Kind of a Funny Story" helped me in that it provided something good out of something horrible. That was its chief contribution to my life. It also helped me realize that life is precious, that I have gifts, and that it would be a real waste to snuff myself no matter how depressed I get. It's about 85% true, which makes it very personal, but I've never had a problem being personal in my writing ? I'm an open book.

Q. 4. You are just 25 years old and this is your third book. What's it like to be an established author so young and are there other authors your age you think are exciting?
? Lisa Aldiss, New York, N.Y.

Putting out three books by the age of 25 has been a strange and surprisingly long trip. I am ten years into this, so for me it doesn't feel as if I'm young at all. I look at it as something to be proud of but not presumptuous about ? there are many young authors out there. Some of the ones I respect and admire are Tao Lin and Nick Antosca, who are here in New York writing poetry and short stories respectively. I've always admired Marty Beckerman for his iconoclasm and attitude.

Q. 5. Do you have any plans to write a novel with a protagonist who is a mature adult?
? Jefferson Whittaker, New York, N.Y.

Now that I'm an adult (presumably), I absolutely intend to write from an adult perspective. My next work will be an adult novel. I'm not sure how long it will take, but I know it will be good.

Q. 6. Now that this is your third book, do you have a process or a structure in place of how you approach writing your books? Asking as a young writer working on my first book.
? JaCarlo Hairston, Baltimore, Md.

Good luck! I wish I could say that I had discovered the formula and found a foolproof method for writing books, but I don't. They have all been different. "Teen Angst? Naaah . . ." was a collection of essays written over several years, "Be More Chill" was a mostly pleasant process of writing regularly, and "It's Kind of a Funny Story" was a mad month-long dash to exorcise some demons. My approach is to come up with an idea and begin hacking away at it ? I'll know soon enough if it's good enough.

Q. 7. You're going to teach high school math in the fall? I once had a math teacher who said mathematicians thought only in terms of logic, in terms of linear structure and order, and the reason that I was failing math was because writers see things as being made up of logical fallacies, words and complicated structures that we didn't try to understand, only describe. I'm projecting, here, but you get the idea. What do you think?
? Emma, Toronto

It doesn't make sense to anyone that I'm a New York City Teaching Fellow and that I'm going to be teaching math in the fall. But many people don't know that I have a computer science degree and that I've always enjoyed and excelled at math. I don't think that math and writing are mutually exclusive at all. When the right words come, they click just like a math problem. Mostly I took up the Teaching Fellows program because I wanted a challenge, something to occupy my time and put me through more experiences to write about, and it has certainly done that already ? I'm working harder than I ever had in my life and treasuring the time I have to write.

Q. 8. I'm a high school English teacher and reading specialist. Thanks for your wonderful novels. What kind of literature and teaching methods do you wish you had been exposed to when you were in high school?
? Helen Goss, Minneapolis, Minn.

I wish that I had been given the chance to read more contemporary literature in high school. Recently I spoke at my high school and was delighted to learn that "Rule of the Bone," by Russell Banks is now being taught there. To truly inspire students to be writers, we should not limit them to the classics ? let's allow them to see what writers are doing now so that they can aspire to be a part of that continuum.