A day of Music, Art, Poetry and Literature

When? Saturday, Oct. 8, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm

Where? Corner of Tremont St. and Wisconsin

Come join as A Word with You Press celebrates its first anniversary as the hub for writers and artists in Oceanside

Live jazz band, author readings, poetry slam, art show, bbq, raffle; all to benefit our free children’s and young adult’s writing program

Kid Expression

“Every Kid has a story.  Let’s help them tell it”

Sponsored by A Word with You Press, Publishers and Purveyors of Fine Stories

More information for the event at www.awordwithyoupress.com

TRADE THIS INVITATION FOR ONE ADDITIONAL RAFFLE TICKET THE DAY OF THE EVENT!

]]> http://www.kbgressitt.com/2011/09/14/culture/be-humble/feed/ 3 http://www.kbgressitt.com/2011/03/08/fallbrook/fallbrook-film-festival-is-just-around-the-corner/ http://www.kbgressitt.com/2011/03/08/fallbrook/fallbrook-film-festival-is-just-around-the-corner/#comments Tue, 08 Mar 2011 12:30:16 +0000 kbgressitt http://www.kbgressitt.com/?p=8321

The Fallbrook Film Festival has launched a new website just in time for 2011 festival-goers to plan for the April event. The festival, hosted by UltraStar Cinemas at River Village in Bonsall, runs April 8, 9 and 10, with best of show films screening April 11 through 14.

This year the festival features 71 films, four professional workshops, celebrities such as Academy Award winning actress Shirley Jones, Director David Ellis, Producer Frank Capra III, Patron of the Arts award recipient Mary Perhacs, parties and more!

FILMS
International, national and local films, two directly from Sundance Film Festival to us, and a number of the leading filmmakers in attendance, make for three exciting days followed by four more days of Best of Show.

WORKSHOPS
We have four great workshops on Saturday, April 9, including themes for film lovers and filmmakers alike:

“Working With the RED Camera,” at 10 a.m., with Peter Hulst, cinematographer, will highlight the revolution of RED digital filmmaking.

“Growing Up Capra – Part 2,” at 11:30 a.m., with Frank Capra III, director, will continue the Capra family stories Capra shared at last year’s festival.

“If You Can Dream It, He Can Create It,” 1 p.m., with Barney Burman, 2010 Academy Award winning make-up artist for Star Trek, will demonstrate the art of special make-up for the big screen.

“How I Propelled Myself Into a Directing Career,” 2:30 p.m., with David R. Ellis, director and former stuntman, will let you in on Ellis’ secrets of more than three decades of success in show business, including directing Snakes on a Plane, Cellular, Final Destination 3D, plus 2nd unit directing on Matrix Reloaded, Harry Potter, etc.

Workshops tickets will be available at the festival.

VOLUNTEERS
If you are interested in volunteering opportunities, click here.

We look forward to seeing you at the 2011 Fallbrook Film Festival!

Seen leaving a little art store on Main Avenue

A Post-it on the door at eye level: “Call Mom Thursday.”

On South Mission

–      Did you see the artwork they installed at the library Friday?
–      That’s art?

Update: Jim Helms provided an image of the Turning Page Trellis. What do you think now?

At Café des Artistes

–      Starbucks coffee is a sacrilege.

Read more Fallbrookisms…

Photographing Artwork, People, & Objects in the Studio

Saturday December 4th    9:30am to 12:30pm

Cost: $20.00 including handouts

This class is for people who are interested in using low cost lighting equipment or natural light to photograph stationary objects in a studio like setting.  Participants will learn to adapt studio techniques to the home setting to improve the quality of photographs.  Basic studio lighting techniques are applicable to documenting artwork and to making digital photographs of artwork for submission to shows as well as to portraiture and photographing small objects such as jewelry, collectables and large objects like cars.  For students without access to lighting equipment we will demonstrate methods of using natural light effectively or improvising with home lamps.

For more information, visit www.FallbrookSchoolOfTheArts.org.

For more information, visit www.FallbrookSchoolOfTheArts.org.

We all suffer loss — lost loved ones, lost youth, lost beliefs, lost jobs, lost hopes, lost homes, etc. — but we don’t always have the opportunity to express it creatively.

This workshop explores Mexico’s Day of the Dead — Dia de los Muertos — in particular the custom of building altars. You will conceive and build your own altar to a lost loved one or thing, tangible or intangible.

If you are able to offer up your altar to the world, you can conclude the course by installing your altar with those of other members of the public at the Center for the Arts, Escondido, on November 1st, at the Museum’s annual Dia de los Muertos celebration, “Death Comes to Everyone: a Participatory Offering.”

You can start preparing for the workshop now by collecting meaningful symbols, mementoes, photos and other things that represent the loss you want to recognize.

Also, start saving bottle caps, jar lids, popsicle sticks, shoe boxes, all shapes and sizes of cans and any other objects you find interesting and that might add to the texture and tone of your altar.

Recommended items for the first class: scissors, sheet metal shears (if you have them), glue, twine, paper and pencil.

I’m teaching, and I plan to have fun — join me!

To register and for more information, call Kit-Bacon at 760-522-1064
or email kbgressitt@aol.com

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

A sign declaring him a sesquipedalianist adorned his office door. How like him, the lover of one-and-a-half foot long words, to proclaim his eccentricity so proudly and chuckle at it with the same enthusiasm. He ushered me in, showed me his computer, the Mobius strip I’d sculpted for him proudly displayed on a shelf, a mounted segment of sharkproof fiber-optics cable — his latest delight. It was my first visit as an adult to the place that consumed my father’s focus, second only to his church. I looked for clues to reveal his character, to teach me who was this man I’d known only as a father.

Returning briefly from another life, the opposite coast, his prodigal daughter, I was presented to his colleagues, had lunch in the executive dining room — and worried that he had designed a chance encounter with one of the bearded young PhDs. But the tensile strength of such an unlikely coupling was not to be tested, for I knew better: “Never marry an engineer,” my mother said, “They’re a humorless lot, too anal-retentive, your father excepted, of course.”

As we traveled the broad halls of Bell Labs, I saw a man in love with the potential of the human mind to realize a vision. A man honored by his peers and humbly delighted with their affections.

But still, I did not know him, this man who rolled up his sleeves but left his tie in place to putter in the yard after work. The weekend warrior who spoke not a word of the broken bodies he flew home from Vietnam. The same man who taught me to ride a bicycle, to catch and cradle a lacrosse ball without flinching, to search for answers not his own, to embrace the written word, to dream of fairy tales while digging life’s ditches.

There were many visits after that, one or the other of us leaping the bounds of human mobility to soar into the other’s living room and reminisce, dance around discussions of religion, gossip of absent family members, dine on ice cream and other sweet succor.

And as we aged together, my Great White Father slowly gained human proportions. He suffered a dose of cancer with discomfort and graceful humor, sobbed at a loved one’s addiction, lamented his failure to produce a hellfire of fundamentalists.

In his retirement, he built a boat in which to scour the seas for adventure. While it sat in his yard, never quite finished, he rigged a chair on deck and enjoyed his morning coffee — not too hot and just shy two-thirds of a teaspoon of sugar — at one with his horizon.

And I, at last, began to know him, this man who wanted me to be happy but was afraid to ask if I were. A man who reveled in sharing tales of the women he met during the last Great War, of the love letters he saved for fifty years. The man who drew lush pictures of my mother reclining nude and handed them down to those who drew their own. The man who danced with the feet of youth and cupped the ears of an old fogey to catch and cradle my words.

Later, he talked fondly of lost war buddies regained. He remembered the dying highway commuter he held, whose last words of love Father carried to the man’s wife. He bemoaned the foolishness and brash decisions of his youth, his failures as a father, his walk with a God unknown to me. And he laughed at escapades survived, disappointments endured, offspring playing the fool.

At times, when we met halfway across the country, I struggled to feel comfortable alone with my father, uncertain intimates in an uncommon place. No meal preparation for distraction, no siblings to bicker over bridge or charades. Just the amorphous relationship between us.

And then I watched him sleep, curled as a child, and I saw the vast years spread over him: seventy-three years, more than half of which we shared. There were a few I spent determined to hate him, but now I rue that we share them no more, for Father is long dead. But he surely soared to rest in the succulent hues of an Aubrey Beardsley landscape, his boat set to sail, for his is the soul of an artist, a fearful, brilliant artist turned to Christianity to sooth his passions and direct his life.

He was an aesthete, he was a genius, he was a holder of patents and a builder of sailing ships, he was one of the truly faithful and he was forgiven. Though he was not at peace with his progeny, he was loved and adored by us as only a good and kind man could be. And I am grateful to whatever God guided him that the Colonel Father Sir was mine.

He once said to me, “I am a dilettante; don’t follow in my footsteps.”

So tell me: How can I help but become him? Why would I want anything else?

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Anonymous: I have more drama in my family than resides in the racks of an Amazon distribution center.

Davis Sedaris, on his forthcoming book, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, a collection of animal fables: Why animals? Because it’s easier to write — everyone knows what a rabbit looks like.

At Fallbrook Art Center: I hate his paintings so much they make my soul cry.

At Fallbrook’s Writers Read creative writing workshops — a two-sentence plot: He sat rocking back and forth, the accident covering his thoughts like pus. Liquor it was, the goddamned liquor.

– Lillian Lelito

Read more Fallbrookisms…

At Café des Artistes

My daughter was in 4-H in Fallbrook — until she learned they eat the animals.

Born-again virgin: I don’t have an artistic bone in my body.
Artist: Would you like one?

Patron 1: I’ve been a serial monogamist for almost twenty-five years.
Patron 2: Why have you done that?
Patron 1: Safety in numbers.

Michael: Some crazy person punched in one of the front windows last night.
Bob: This is California. The lawyer will say the window shouldn’t have been there.

On art exhibits: If you get them drunk and horny, they’ll buy art.

Read more Fallbrookisms…