VENÜ MAGAZINE #2 July/August 2010

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July/August_CT Edition

Little Starlight

E.G. SIMSON Equine Portraits 2

egsimson@optonline.net

ARTS/CULTURE/STYLE//MAGAZINE

203.984.4611

www.egsimson.com

“art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form - or else it is not art.”

– jacques barzun

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kitschnkouture.com

photography: Scott Brinegar makeup/stylist: Leslie Homan model: Amanda Gift

ACCESSORIES BLAZERS & JACKETS DENIM DRESSES KNITS OUTERWEAR PANTS SHIRTS SKIRTS T-SHIRTS TOPS

1330 POST ROAD EAST, WESTPORT, CT 203.255.7663

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2 July/August_CT Edition

founder, creative director: J. Michael Woodside

executive director: Tracey Thomas

senior arts editor: Philip Eliasoph

publisher:

Venü Media Company

art, design & production: Venü Media Company

copy editor: Brian Solomon

contributing writers:

Alex Defelice, Joan Grant, Colin McEnroe, Christian McEvoy, Alan Neigher, Ryan Odinak, Amy Orzel, Stephen Rhodes, Matthew Sturtevant

contributing photographers:

Dona Menton, Amy Orzel, Maura Stokes

on the cover: With his boundless imagination and hyper-precisionist technique, ROBERT COTTINGHAM has earned international acclaim as one of Photo realism’s innovative pioneers. He speaks candidly about his early advertising agency experiences, how he unexpectedly was exhibited among the first generation of the Photo realist movement, and traces his ongoing growth as a multi-faceted painter, printmaker and expert of visual media. VENÜ’s Philip Eliasoph takes us along for a magical morning of art talk, vintaged memories of his episodic American ‘road trip’ odyssey, and a lively conversation in this American master’s Newtown studio, a converted 18th century diary barn. We come to appreciate how great art is the matrix of a profound intellect, an extraordinary vision, and an infinite capacity for helping us to see beyond our limits.

office:

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editorial contribution:

editorial@venumagazine.com The small print: No responsibility can be taken for the quality and accuracy of the reproductions, as this is dependent upon the artwork and material supplied. No responsibility can be taken for typographical errors. The publishers reserve the right to refuse and edit material as presented.

All prices and specifications to advertise are subject to change without notice. The opinions in this publication are not necessarily those of the publisher. Copyright VENÜ MAGAZINE. All rights reserved. The name VENÜ MAGAZINE is copyright protected.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted without written consent from the publisher. VENÜ MAGAZINE does not accept responsibility for unsolicited material. This is a bimonthly publication and we encourage the public, galleries, artists, designers, photographers, writers (calling all creatives) to submit photos, features, drawings, etc., but we assume no responsibility for failure to publish submissions.

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Earth Garden, Oil on Canvas, 72”x 48”

J U L I E S AT I N O V E R FLORALS . ABSTRACTS . PORTRAITS

www.juliesatinover.com

203.434.8655

jls@juliesatinover.com

founder’s letter

We are a community...

Welcome to VENÜ #2, you will see we’ve added more content in this issue, but, don’t get too comfortable with what’s before you, VENÜ is anything but a commonplace publication. In each issue going forward we intend to explore and expand our editorial and creative boundries to continuously pique your interest. Next month we intend on adding a section that reaches out to the independent film industry throughout CT, similar to Music Notes on pages 48-49. So, if you are, or know of someone who will be writing, directing, or shooting films in and around Connecticut we want to know about it.

VENÜ is about listening to its interactive network of CT’s most talented and creative minds. Our audience sees and hears what’s new, creative, and ahead of the curve. Our readers, sponsors, and friends are a community that is well informed, open and alert to the newest trends, ideas and events which define the arts, culture and style.

VENÜ is the place where you can be sure to capture the pulse and informal networking which the traditional and formal media only trail in press releases. We are proud to be out there with the artists, the innovators, and the creators making the scene -- not following it!

Enjoy,

J. Michael Woodside Founder, Creative Director

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contributors Colin Mcenroe - Radio Personality Colin McEnroe is a well known Connecticut personality, he hosts a daily radio show on WNPR and writes a column for the Courant. He’s also an author, social commentator, and playwright. His books include “Swimming Chickens” and “Lose Weight Through Great Sex With Celebrities (the Elvis Way),” (Doubleday), plus “My Father’s Footprints,” (Warner Books). Colin contributes to VENÜ Magazine an abstract experience of the Sunken Garden Poetry and Music Festival held each summer at the Hillstead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut.

STEPHEN RHODES - WRITER Stephen’s short story is about a Greenwich, CT college student who gets in over her head when she tries to do “the greater good.” A Westport resident, Stephen has two novels published, including THE VELOCITY OF MONEY (HarperCollins), a financial thriller which received widespread critical acclaim for foreshadowing the recent stock market meltdown. A 15-year veteran of Wall Street, his work has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Best American Mystery Stories 2008, Wall Street Noir, and dozens of other publications.

Sheryle Levine AND Alan Neigher - Attorneys Sheryle Levine and Alan Neigher are with the law firm of Byelas and Neigher in Westport. Attorney Levine is a graduate of Brandeis University and Brooklyn Law School. Attorney Neigher is a graduate of Colby College and Boston College Law School. Attorney Neigher was a member of the Connecticut Film Commission and a founding board member and president of the Fairfield Theatre Company. Attorneys Levine and Neigher specialize in media, entertainment and intellectual property law. They represent news organizations, film and television producers, performers and artists, as well as people and entities involved in every aspect of the news, media and entertainment industries. Their informative column for VENÜ readers discusses, “Stealing Ideas and the Copyright Act,” a hot topic in the arts and entertainment world.

we aim to be fresh! We’re interested in hearing from those of you

that have great things to contribute; art, photography, design, illustration, literature, etc., if you’ve got it flaunt it! It’s what venü magazine is about.

Do you have something to share? email us: editorial@venumagazine.com

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Matthew Sturtevant - Antiques Matthew Sturtevant is a Christie’s trained appraiser specializing in American, English and European furniture, decorative arts, sculpture and Fine Art from the 16th century the present, and is a generalist in appraising household goods. Matthew has lectured extensively for Christie’s, George Washington University, and The Appraisers Association of America and taught appraisal courses at NYU appraisal studies for certification process. Matthew contributes evaluations for VENÜ in his column, “What’s it Worth.” Please forward your images and correspondence to matthew@venumagazine.com for consideration to be included in the column.

Alex Defelice - WRITER Alex co-owns a production company and record label based in New Haven, HMG Recordings. The company releases a variety of blues music, roots/americana, gospel, etc. available in stores and digitally on the web.

He has also been a freelance writer for nearly twenty years. Alex interviewed Tina Weymouth and Chris Franz of the Tom Tom Club for VENÜ.

Christian McEvoy - Travel Writer Christian McEvoy is the Director of the Connecticut Challenge Cancer Survivorship Center in Fairfield, CT. He is a graduate of Fairfield University, and he earned his Master’s Degree in Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Christian shares his story of extreme endurance - for a cause and how NOT to get shot in Western Pennsylvania.

Joan Grant - Theatre Joan Grant has been a member of the Theatre Artists Workshop for eight years and an actor for thirty plus years in New York, California, Connecticut and regionally. Over the years, writing has become another avenue of expression. One of her great pleasures is developing an idiosyncratic approach that encapsulates an eclectic vision. Joan tells VENÜ readers about Fairfield County’s Theatre Artist Workshop, introducing us to their talented performers recently featured in their annual benefit themed, “A New York State of Mind.”

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Women’s: Sportswear Outerwear Eveningwear Jewelry Handbags Shoes Accessories Unique Gifts

420 Main Street, Ridgefield, Connecticut Tel: 203.894.8433 Fax: 203.894.9010

VINTAGE AND NEW, ECLECTIC AND INSPIRED, FURNITURE, ACCENTS, ART, JEWELRY FROM THE MARKETS OF ARGENTINA AND FRANCE

423 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877 203.431.7747 Tues-Sat 10-6, Sun 12-5 www.hazelandsid.com

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content// july-august standard fare: founder’s letter we are a community... contributors some words from a talented few

features:

what’s it worth? evaluating your houeshold treasures

profile: Robert Cottingham an american master’s roadtrip express

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rhyme and reason

by Colin McEnroe

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to the beat of a different drum at home with Tina Weymouth and Chris Franz

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florence griswold museum a mid-summer connecticut dream

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events/gatherings Live ‘Dead’ pg. 20 Bramble and Bramble pg. 21 Pollock-Krasner house pg. 21 FCBUZZ goes live pg. 22 hey that’s my story stealing ideas and the copyright act travel + leisure the art of adventure music notes connecticut’s local vocals 7 degrees one great experience extreme endurance

by Christian McEvoy art + objects the one-of-a-kind and hard-to-find local talent paintings by Sholeh Janeti

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Fine Antiques And Decorations From The 16th Century To The Present

8 10 18 20-22

36 42 50 57

A Modern Cast Brass and Agate Lamp by Willy Daro, Circa 1970.

Width: 17", Depth: 12

58 60 63

M.S. Antiques 19 Main Street Tarrytown, New York 10591 914.332.8122 msdecorative.com

Heidi Lewis Coleman’s new collection of giclee prints merges contemporary still life images with the artists uniquely abstracted backgrounds. The results are fresh and engaging... and better yet, entirely affordable.

heidilewiscoleman.com

HEIDI

LEWIS COLEMAN

Matthew Sturtevant, Resident Expert

What’s it Worth?

We welcome photographs of your items with the possibility that they may be considered for publication in our “What’s it Worth” column. Submit all email correspondence to matthew@venumagazine.com.

Please be advised that estimates are based on images and cannot be used for any appraisal purposes.

A Modern Glass Sea form Sculpture

by Dale Chihuly, dated 1995, 6” H , 11-1/2" W, accompanied by a signed copy of “Sea Forms” This is an object of art. Dale Chihuly’s work can be found in many forms. Installations that grow from floor to ceiling or simply as a table top ornament such as this. He uses a wide variety of coloration and they are all inspired by sea anemones of one form or another. All are intriguing when lit properly, and most unless they come with a receipt should be signed as there are many pretenders. Most of which will not measure up when it comes to resale.

Auction Estimate; $3,000-$4,000

A Pair of Italian Baroque-Style Bronze Candlesticks, Late 19th Century 6-1/2" H This a is a wonderful pair of candlesticks most likely reproduced in the 19th century for the newly burgeoning market of industrialists. Much new found wealth was being made due to the industrial revolution during the 19th century spawning a new class of consumers that were trying establish themselves as collectors. As a result a new interest in the arts and culture was born inspiring waves of well to do students to invaded Europe to get an education in society and arts more popularly known as the Grand Tour. One of the more popular styles was medieval works of art and the market accommodated by producing both period and reproductions of this very style which were boxed up and sent to their purchasers as they progressed through Europe and the Middle East. The quality is normally very good and items were even purposefully aged to mimic the originals, and today these Grand Tour objects sometimes fetch as much as the original items they were copied from. In this case, this is not so.

There are traces of gilding and it is very possible that these were sold as authentic 16th century candlesticks. However, as they are cast in one piece and the color of the bronze should be a dark greenish hue, these are reproductions.

Estimate $1,000-$1,500

A Modern American Walnut Coffee Table designed by Robsjohn Gibbings for Widdicomb Furniture Company Grand Rapids Michigan. Circa 1950.

16-1/2" H, 48" W, 24” D This is the type of item that anyone would walk by at a tag sale.

Just because it’s light brown and not flashy does not translate to zero value. Robsjohn Gibbings is a top quality designer who in 30’s and early 40’s was inspired by Classical Roman furniture.

By the time this table was made he had reduced the design to simple arcades mixed with the modern concept of a coffee table.

Auction Estimate; $2,500-$3,500 18

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LUCY M. KRUPENYE SCULPTURE ������������.���

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>> Department: EVENTS + GATHERINGS

Live ‘Dead’ San Francisco, New York City, Seaside Park

With New York’s flagship museums offering blockbuster exhibits this summer – it’s Picasso’s greatest hits from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kandinsky & Malevich at the Guggenheim, and Charles Burchfield at the Whitney – many culture vultures were surprised at the human waves grooving their way to the New York Historical Society. Behind its staid, beaux arts façade and classical columns on Central Park West, the sounds and artifacts of The Grateful Dead were displayed in an exhibition which just closed on July 4.

Like pilgrims fulfilling religious obligations for untapped spiritual piety in Jerusalem, Rome, or Mecca, multitudes of “Dead Heads” beat their way to “The Grateful Dead: Now Playing at the New-York Historical Society.” In a mystical manner similar to viewing sacred relics, inter-generational aficionados clad in everything from tie-dye and Bierkenstocks to Hermes scarves and Prada pumps were spotted in twirling about the galleries.

As “Scarlet Begonias” was wafting through the speakers, the conservative New York landmark, founded in 1804, witnessed how the Dead’s energy and musical genius were a cornerstone of rock history. Celebrating how “the sky was yellow and the sun was blue” the exhibit comes from vast Dead memorabilia archives at the University of California Santa Cruz. It transported viewers back onto the Magic Bus, the Summer of Love, Billy Graham’s shrines at the Fillmore East and West, and decades of international touring in the exhibition.

Bumping into fellow devotees of this unpredictable tribe which includes Ann Coulter, VP Al Gore, Phil Jackson, Senator

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Patrick Leahy, Gov. Patrick Weld, and Bill Walton, attendees felt they were at a family reunion. Among the objects displayed were vintage Fenders and Gibsons, psychedelic artwork posters, tickets, t-shirts, rare LP [remember vinyl?] test pressings from Warner studios, decorated fan mail [including an envelope by “Mike Kosinski of Red

Oak Lane, Fairfield, Connecticut”] and lifesize skeleton props dressed up to resemble band members for the “Touch of Grey” video. Although Uncle Gerry’s ashes were tossed into the Ganges and San Francisco Bay, his reincarnation seems complete as the band plays on.

For those who missed out – there’s a nice chance to “turn on your love light.”

Featured at this summer internationally known “Gathering of the Vibes Festival”– July 29- August 1, there will be plenty of “dancing in the streets” at Bridgeport’s Seaside Park! With appearances by Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, Donna Godchaux, the New Riders of the Purple Sage and Dark Star Orchestra [“if you close your eyes -- you think it’s Cornell ’77!”] – the golden road continues.

For information: gatheringofthevibes.com.

PHILIP ELIASOPH Senior Arts Editor

>> Department: EVENTS + GATHERINGS exhibit from June 3 - July 17, at the Thomas J. Walsh Art Gallery, Fairfield University Bramble and Bramble On

Remnants, Glyphs and Palimpsests: In their painting and mixed-media work, artists Frank and Pamela Bramble independently examine the beauty of the worn surface and the tenuous and fragile nature of time-altered surfaces. Both artists acknowledge that time has the capacity to transform art. It can change its relevance; it has the ability to abrade it physically. For some pieces the effect of time pulls work apart, for others, time forces the melding of elements. Briefly, the Brambles are a married couple who have been painting for more than 30 years. Pam is originally from Easton, and she and Frank live in Torrington. de aspectuum diversitate — Pamela Bramble

Bright Sun Glyph – Frank Bramble

Pamela Bramble Pam has been a professor at the University of Connecticut, Department of Art and Art History, since 1989. Her teaching specialties include drawing, painting, foundation studio and art appreciation. She has served as a juror for exhibits within the state and delivers lectures and talks on art and the artistic process. Pam’s work is represented in public and private collections and has been reviewed by The New York Times, The Hartford Courant and Art New England. Bramble’s awards include the President’s Gold Medallion for her paintings in the exhibit Emerging Artists at The Gregg Galleries in New York City and she was the recipient of a Research Travel Grant from the University of Connecticut to study 13th and 14th century Italian frescoes. “My work is about the visual representation of the search and the find — and of how process establishes content. My artistic process is one where each painting is worked and reworked until form and content merge.”

Frank Bramble Frank has been painting for more than 30 years, as both an abstract and a figurative artist, allowing the discipline of each of these forms to influence and develop the other. “I find a compelling symbiosis in these twin approaches to art and art making.” Bramble’s travels, particularly in Central America, have profoundly affected his view of the abstract in art. “To see all of those great structures — churches, temples, fortresses in ruin — parts of them held up with bracing and scaffolding, and all their form and function stripped away, led me to investigate the process of making and unmaking my own art. My paintings are offered as vignettes that suggest both an experience of art and its lasting impression. They strive for a combination of immediacy and reverie, achieving that balance through painterly application.” Bramble’s work is in corporate, university and private collections across the country.

Pollock-Krasner House Along this summer’s itinerary of museums, galleries and historic sites, a visit to the home and studio of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and his wife Lee Krasner (19081984) at The Springs near East Hampton is a destination for American art connoisseurs and anyone who wants to see an authentic place where genius touched down. Pollock is regarded as the undisputed leader of the Abstract Expressionist movement. With a loan in 1945 from his art dealer Peggy Guggenheim, they purchased a small homestead overlooking Accabonac Creek in The Springs, near East Hampton. The house and studio -- with its original wood floor preserving the spills and drips of Pollock’s choreographic movements - have been lovingly protected under the auspices of the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

A lively schedule of gallery talks and tours are highlights of the summer scene in the Hamptons. On Sunday afternoon, August 29th, VENÜ’s Senior Arts Editor, Dr. Philip

For info call 631-324-4929, or visit http://sb.cc.stonybrook.edu/pkhouse/calendar

Eliasoph, will present a talk: “Swept Away: Re-thinking Realist and Abstract Painters in the Wake of Ideological Hurricanes.” Recognizing the aesthetic and political tensions which fragmented American painting at mid-century, Eliasoph will attempt to reconcile these polarities finding common ground in the ongoing process of art making.

“Working in between Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning and Hopper, Wyeth, and Cadmus, Eliasoph tries to bridge the gap between realism and abstraction as separate paths towards artistic unity.

Above: Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in Pollock’s studio, East Hampton, 1949. Photograph

by Lawrence Larkin courtesy Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. Left: Interior of the Pollack-Krasner studio, with Jackson Pollock’s art materials and the floor on which he worked from 1947-1952.

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>> Department: EVENTS + GATHERINGS

FCBuzz Goes Live Connecting You to Great Events Every Month

by RYAN ODINAK

Left: Keynote Speaker Tom Seligson, Emmy Award-Winning Documentary Producer Speaks at WYFF. Above: Co-Director Katie Hacala takes to the street to advertise WYFF. Below: WYFF team photo from left to right and front to back. Row 1: Ross Karlan, Ian Phillips, Jesse Tiffen, Gus Ruchman.

Row 2: Jason Bernstein, Katie Hacala, Michael Kalmans, Hank Weinstock, Alex Swerdlowe, Daniella Janis, Ricky Rivera. Row 3: Matt Kalmans.

E

ver thought about how nice it would be to get out of your comfort zone to explore some new arts and cultural events?

But then you realize you don’t have time to organize yourself to do it.

Let FCBuzz Goes Live do the work for you.

This new collaborative project among eleven of Fairfield County’s best cultural organizations invites you to attend special events at each partner location once a month throughout the year. From theater performances to film festivals, FCBuzz Goes Live will enrich your social calendar each month. Whether you are looking for a performance, art, music, history or everything in between, this insider’s guide is your source for great cultural experiences in Fairfield County. To learn more about joining the fun, visit www.FCBuzz.org where you will find a feature page about the month’s event. The Cultural Alliance of Fairfield

County is coordinating the partnership and is present at every event to help host and let people know about FCBuzz.org—Arts and Culture of Fairfield County. Partners include the Westport Arts Center, Westport Country Playhouse, Fairfield Museum and History Center, Connecticut’s Beardsley Zoo, Gallery of Contemporary Art at Sacred Heart University, Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts at Fairfield University, Fairfield Theatre Company, Westport Historical Society, Silvermine Guild Arts Center, Fairfield Arts Council and the Center for Contemporary Printmaking.

The first FCBuzz Goes Live event was held at the Westport Youth Film Festival (WYFF) — a program of the Westport Arts Center.

FCBuzz Goes Live participants were invited to attend a Festival Kick-off Breakfast to meet the festival organizers and filmmakers and then attend the all day festival featuring sixty-five student films from around the world. Opening night of the festival featured four films initiated by the CT Project for the Constitution, made by teens from Norwalk High School, Housatonic Regional Valley High School and the Ridgefield High School

Other FCBuzz Goes Live events include a pre-show reception and play at the Westport County Playhouse and an outdoor activity at the Fairfield Museum and History Center on July 14th where participants will picnic and play “Town Ball” An event at Connecticut’s Beardsley Zoo will round out the summer in August.

Find events any day of the week at www.FCBuzz.org presented by the Cultural Alliance of Fairfield County. This art and culture resource offers ticket and event information for music, theater, visual arts, history, lectures, literature, kids and families, classes, workshops, social events and much more.

For more information contact the Cultural Alliance of Fairfield County by emailing info@CulturalAllianceFC.org, or calling 203-256-2329 or visiting our Web site at www.CulturalAllianceFC.org.

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Photo: Helen Klisser During

and eight films produced by Canadian, Israeli, and Palestinian High school filmmakers in a summer program in British Columbia called “Peace It Together”. The opening party closed with a screening of the poignant short drama, Meant to Fly. This year’s films were chosen from over two hundred films made by high school students from twenty three states and four countries.

The festival awards party featured The Complex, a film by Weston High School Filmmaker, Alex Swerdlowe and WYFF Alumni filmmaker Chris Casey’s film, The Roy Orbison Project. Awards are given in the areas of Animation, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Experimental, Music and Public Service Announcement categories. An Audience Choice Award and a Director’s Award were also given. The Westport Youth Film Festival (WYFF) is in its seventh year as a high school student created and managed program of the Westport Arts Center. It is unique because of the focus and commitment to giving high school filmmakers, throughout the world, a dedicated professional outlet for their films.

PETER L. ARGUIMBAU

Four Gallery Showrooms Fine Art & Prints Oil Painting & Frame Restoration Custom Framing

576 Boston Post Road, Darien, CT 203-655-6633

www.gearygallery.com “Sailing Off Nantucket”, 11" x 22", Oil on Canvas

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>> FEATURE: Art Really Matters

An American Master’s Road Trip Express

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by Philp Eliasoph

Cruising on the compass about three minutes away from Newtown’s soaring flagpole, we swing up a country lane towards a stone wall. A picturesque scene of weathered structures sweeps upwards. The expansive grazing meadow meets clouds on a blue horizon line.

If Andrew Wyeth or Eric Sloane had ever imagined a pastoral scene, this 1758 Connecticut farmstead would be its archetypal image. Let’s not even peek into the main residence on this visit. We won’t survey the jaw-dropping paintings and prints by notable American artists of the second half of the last century who are in the artist’s circle of friends.

The art collection is installed like a relaxed museum of vintage English antiques and hand-lettered shop signage on porcelain. It’s a countrified “Antiques Roadshow” on steroids.

If Mary Poppins were an interior decorator for a Connecticut inn, this would be her fantasy stage set.

Walking from the deceptively understated farmhouse residence into the nearby dairy barn, Robert Cottingham begins his daily routine. He glides through a massive barn door into the converted studio. A curtain wall of northern windows offers gloriously diffused ambient light. Sipping his cup of morning brew, he rolls up his sleeves and gets down

to business. With a grim determination, repeating the morning ritual of decades of Yankee dairy farmers, Cottingham automatically gets to work.

But rather than squirting foamy milk out of the teats of his heifers, he begins mixing oil paints onto a stretched linen canvas. As he squeezes paint from tubes onto a glass tabletop palette, the transformation into big paintings begins. He has produced enough buckets of art in almost half a century to earn him the reputation as a bona fide ‘American Master.’

Robustly active, he’s approaching a landmark 75th birthday this September. In a remarkably productive career, he’s created a massive outpouring of work. But there’s more sweet ‘milk’ to come.

Reviewing his last showing at Fifth Avenue’s blue chip Forum Gallery, Art in America magazine notes: “Cottingham’s paintings present an untouchable and pristine universe… Like much hyper-realism, [it] verges on abstraction in its focus on

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PROFILE: ROBERT COTTINGHAM

details that seem to grow stranger the longer you look at them.” Artnews states “he remains at heart an allusive, lyrical realist.” And the Smithsonian’s American Art Journal summarizes his achievement as creating a “vocabulary of pictures and words that now define our times.”

The New York Times chimes in: “He does not slavishly copy photographs [but] clarifies and intensifies color, light, shadows, edges and reflections while giving the image a slightly softened, Vermeerish focus and satiny smooth finish.” Blink and curl that eyebrow. Did the Times’ normally parsimonious art critic just compare Cottingham in the same breath to the sublime 17th century Dutch master Jan Vermeer? You betcha!

Styles are the DNA of art movements. At their moments of conception, a cosmic birthing occurs out of individual creativity, societal zeitgeist and sometimes just a pinch of dumb luck. What was in Edouard Manet’s mind when he depicted a languorous picnic in a Parisian park? Did he realize in 1863 that Impressionism was just over the horizon?

Just how those tiny strokes of a fluttering butterfly might eventually evolve into a global typhoon is the enigma art scholars are continuously re-constructing. Where and when did it all begin?

Try it this way. Music offers an easier way to track a stylistic trajectory. Replay those vintage vinyl 78s and 45s with Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly and Elvis synthesizing unpolished black R&B, jazz, and rockabilly into a new sound. Cleveland DJ Alan Freed first articulated its arrival as a newly minted “style,” naming it “Rock & Roll”— and a distinctively American new groove was blended.

By the early 1960s, four lads from Liverpool (enthralled with imported Sun Records and early Motown 45s) would be converting musical elements into their British version of “Twist & Shout.” From the Mississippi Delta to the ghettoes of Detroit, “Rock & Roll” traveled all over the map before emerging as its own full-blown style by that night, February 9, 1964, when the Beatles changed youth culture, appearing for the first time on the Ed Sullivan Show. The rest was history….

OK, relax. Not so comfortable understanding the prerequisite art lingo/jargon about historical styles? Admit it, back in college your pressing concerns were not studying test images in that big thick Art History text. Cramming ARTS/CULTURE/STYLE//MAGAZINE

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>> FEATURE: Art Really Matters

Roxy, 1972, oil on canvas, 78 x 78 inches © Robert Cottingham, courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York

those dictionary definitions of Cubism, BioMorphism, or Surrealism is a fading, tormented memory. So let’s go right to the final exam.

Q: Define “Photo Realism” and give examples of its origin as the signature artistic movement of its heyday. For bonus points, name three original Photo Realists.

A: It is quintessentially an American style of painterly hyper-visuality. It combines photographic exactitude with the precisionist rendering of forms enhanced and expanded through artistic choices and edits. It is an artistic landmark in the continually unfolding evolution of art styles notching up the ante in the tradition of realism.

Photo Realism’s subjects—wavy neon and stainless steel retail signage, reflective plate glass windows and movie marquees, deadpan fragments of street level iconography, and an inherent tension between popular kitsch and vernacular monuments—both reflect and define the American scene 26

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just before it evaporated with the crumbling detritus of urban imagery past mid-century.

Sandwiched somewhere in between last vestiges of Pop in the late 1960s, but definitely ahead of Postmodernist deconstruction by the late ‘70s, the Photo Realists took their rightful place. Now go onto the multiple-choice section.

Navigating with our GPS on the map of 20th century styles, the movement’s genetic origins are traced back to the OK Harris Gallery in the SoHo district of Lower Manhattan.

Along with Cottingham, its pioneering proponents are lifelong friends and co-workers Chuck Close, Ralph Goings and Richard Estes. Photo Realism was born in 1969 with Cottingham being very quickly featured among its first-wave proponents.

A slightly altered moniker, “Sharp-Focus Realism,” was staged by Sidney Janis for his trend-changing 1972 exhibit.

Among its 28 key figures on the leading edge of the new

Ode, 1971, oil on canvas, 78 x 78 inches © Robert Cottingham, courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York

movement, Cottingham’s star was fixed into the firmament.

Nearly 40 years later, it’s still an identifying tattoo.

Eschewing the romantic, emotional or personalized realist traditions of Copley, Homer, Eakins, or Wyeth, the Photo Realists took a snapshot glimpse at the American scene with a detached objectivity that is always in competition with the sharp focus on the camera’s lens—but applied with paint!

Using a trustworthy Hasselblad camera (“my high speed sketch book”) Cottingham’s photo-derived imagery exploded into iconic paintings. “Through that single reflex lens I was focusing on my visual field—and I am still referring back to those 2 ¼ x 2 ¼ inch square slides as an endlessly reliable source of reference.”

Decades later, Cottingham is still unfolding iterations of complex puzzles dating back to his classic period of the early 1970s. Unforgettably, he projected a fresh take of those daz-

zling, dizzying, déjà vu memories of our neon-lit daydreams in his tour-de-force romp down Main Street. Cryptic fragments of milestone images—F.W, ART, TIP TOP, STAR—are being reconfigured and blended into this hallucinatory Cuisinart blender of American signage. A choreographed arrangement of shapes cleverly form double-entendres as abstract fragments, textures and colors, while being a closeup view of sculptural details documenting a “once upon a time” of America’s urban streetscapes.

Monastic in his daily work habits but frenetic in his prolific output, Cottingham employs a creative process that is a multi-pronged art attack. Mind, heart and hands are synchronized like the perfectly tuned ‘super six’ cylinders of a ‘57 Chevy Corvette. A perpetual motion machine, he is ceaselessly on the offensive, churning out a torrential stream of preparatory graphite studies, larger gouache, or watercolor preliminary paintings, and finally full-tilt oil paintings.

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>> FEATURE: Art Really Matters

HOT, 1973, color lithograph, 21 x 20 3/4 inches (image), Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL © Robert Cottingham, courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York

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Great art happens sometimes accidentally, but more often by an incalculable relationship of intentional decisions— leaving room for the magical, ineffable, and truly unexpected.

Being true to himself as a creative force, there’s no wonder Cottingham is at the top of his game.

as an artist allows me to show with some fondness—even love—how deeply I felt in my emotional sense about these peculiar objects. Yes, these objects performed basic functions. You know we often don’t really look carefully enough at the urban landscape or the details of our visible reality.

VENÜ’s [V] Senior Arts Editor Philip Eliasoph follows along during a morning break for an informal conversation and studio tour:

V: And your artistic process empowers the viewer to better see?

V: In a recent museum catalog, you mention that we sometimes forget how to appreciate vintage signage, industrial components, typewriters, utilitarian objects, as “things in their own right.” How so?

RC: I think many of us have taken too much of our immediate environment for granted. Specific to our time and place—or at least an America that “came and went”—my imagery allows me to resonate in that imaginary intersection between the minds-eye and the retinal image.

RC: We define ourselves, individually and as a society, leaving evidence of these things to future generations. My work

[At this point, Cottingham gets up and moves to his work desk with a glistening white Mac computer: “What a joy: I was

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Cafe, 1976, oil on canvas, 78 x 78 inches © Robert Cottingham, courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York

always searching for jazz on the radio. But now I’m streaming 24 hour jazz programs from Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.” His face lights up with an elfen Irish smile and a hearty Brooklyn-born chuckle. Beneath a grainy 18th century wood beam of the hayloft, the state-of-the-art cyber communications hardware does not go unnoticed.]

V: Let’s take a stroll back to the beginning, when commercial art jumped the tracks over to fine art.

RC: My earliest memories were taking the subway from Brooklyn into Times Square with my dad, a salt of the earth guy with a perfect Irish working class union longshoreman pedigree. I must have been about 10 or 11 when I looked up at those pulsating billboards on Broadway. Do you remember the Camel cigarette sign with actual smoke pumped out in rings? It’s all still there in my mind’s eye—Manhattan just

after WWII was better than any LIFE magazine photo shot could capture!

V: Take us from art school to finding your way and carving out a living as a studio artist.

RC: Even as a boy I was always interested in commercial advertising, especially the full-page “eye-stoppers” in popular magazines. I landed a position with Young & Rubicam in 1959 at their Madison Avenue headquarters.

V: That may as well have been the fictitious Sterling Cooper of today’s Mad Men TV series—was the creative advertising world that wildly cutthroat as you remember it?

RC: Well, let’s just say that there were very few loyalties at those three-martini lunches for the executives. But I was in ARTS/CULTURE/STYLE//MAGAZINE

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>> FEATURE: Art Really Matters

C (From An American Alphabet), 1995, oil on canvas, 42 x 32 inches, Location of subject: Community Thaeter, Fairfield, Connecticut 30

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An American Alphabet, 1996, oil on canvas, 42 x 30 inches (each), Collection of Gunther Quandt-Haus, Bad Homburg, Germany © Robert Cottingham, courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York

the creative area, the art department, designing the ads, doing storyboards, collaborating with the writers and working with outside studios and free-lance people: photographers, illustrators, typesetters and film directors. I had access to the best creative talents in New York. I was also lucky to be in a group of art directors who made it a point to see the more important art exhibitions on our (extended) lunch hours.

RC: Y&R sent me to the Los Angeles office in 1964 and my vision was dramatically changed being out there. Those open boulevards, intense sunlight and clutter of entertainment billboards made a deep impression. I was also attracted to the sort of dilapidated aspect to those 1940s Hollywood Golden-era buildings. Everything looked like the seedy backdrops for a Bettie Page or Raymond Chandler B-movie.

V: So you’ve retained plenty of positive memories from those corporate ad agency days?

V: What were some of your key influences?

RC: Definitely! The Y&R I knew was an energetic, high-morale place to work, and a unique education. And most importantly, I met my future wife Jane, who was working with me in the art department and later became a copywriter. We’ve been married 43 years.

RC: Of course, I always appreciated the special American qualities found in the paintings of Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, and the photographs of Walker Evans. But it was seeing Edward Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning” at the old Whitney when I was in my teens that really ignited me into thinking: “someday I’ll become a painter.”

V: And there’s quite a large brood.

V: How did Pop come to your attention?

RC: Yes, we have three daughters, Reid, Molly and Kyle, and three granddaughters, Charlotte, Rowan and Maggie. I’m very fortunate to have all this family support for my work.

RC: The spark happened to me at the landmark exhibit at the Sidney Janis Gallery, when the “New Realists”, better known as the Pop artists—Andy Warhol, Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg—were first exhibited together in late 1962. Up to that moment, Abstract Expressionism was really the only game in town. Now looking back, it was a crucial turning point.

V: Gauguin left Paris for Tahiti, Jackson Pollock went from art school in Los Angeles to New York. What was your change in scenery?

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>> FEATURE: Art Really Matters

F.W., 1978, oil on canvas, 78 x 78 inches, Collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam © Robert Cottingham, courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York

[Editorial note: So outraged by the exhibit’s realist imagery, the “old guard” Abstract /Action painters actually bolted from Janis’ gallery. Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Mothewell all resigned in disgust.]

V: With that inspiration—drawing from the power of intensified realism—you began your own distinctive version of enlarged fragments of streamlined, Art Deco inspired buildings and signs. Those paintings have a sprawling horizontality, some with plunging perspective, others straight on like that creepy old house painted by Hopper but used by Hitchcock in Psycho.

RC: No question I was aware of those wonderful gas stations and angular perspectives by LA Pop artist Ed Ruscha. But at the same time, I became engaged in the development of a subject by rendering it in various mediums from different points of view. For example, many years later “Barrera-Rosas” 32

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would explore multiple layers of an architectonic and linguistic mosaic of light, shadow and forms which were revealed in an entire series of abstracted images: graphite, lithographs, gouache, watercolors and the final oil painting. I like working on many views in multiple media to keep it all cooking as an image is exploited to its maximum.

V: Tell us when you felt your first big break happened.

RC: There’s no doubt that the OK Harris Gallery downtown was the happening place as Pop art was evolving towards Photo Realism. Jane, always my best critic and promoter, saw a man sweeping the pavement in front of the gallery one morning in 1971. She thought he might have been part of the maintenance crew, but it was in fact the legendary gallerist Ivan Karp. Jane showed him some images of my LA paintings and he quickly replied: “We’re going to make your boy famous.” I’m not sure I became “famous” -- but a short time

Star, 1985, oil on canvas, 32 x 32 inches, Private Collection © Robert Cottingham, courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York

later I joined OK Harris and eventually I was exhibited uptown in a major group survey of Photo Realists. It was an exciting time.

V: Your meticulous realism seems to have a truly abstract armature and undergirding.

RC: It does. The zig-zags, checkerboards, horizontal and vertical patterns on those funky old signs became a gigantic playing field of abstract, dynamic, sometimes even contrapuntal elements. Call it what you like. I’m constantly seeing more intricacies of those basic shapes and forms.

V: A career highlight was your 1973-74 “Road Trip Across America.” What happened out there?

RC: We were living in London at the time, but English signage just didn’t resonate for me. I felt a desire to get back

to the States and applied for a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Winning the award was a big boost. It subsidized a cross-country excursion of lasting significance. Jane once called the trip my “photo-odyssey,” as I basically spread out a map, putting marks in the cities where the Greyhound bus routes were all linked. It was an exhilarating experience that ultimately produced an endless sourcebook of images. I photographed the downtown areas of 27 cities across the Northeast.

V: And how did you travel for the next road trips?

RC: I later rented cars and drove alone out west through roughneck tumbleweed cow towns, and the desert strip highways along the Texas-Mexican border. Many of the downtown buildings were about to undergo urban renewal.

I felt fortunate to capture one final glimpse of urban America with those unique storefront designs from the 1930s-50s.

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>> FEATURE: Art Really Matters

m, 1996, oil on canvas, 78 x 78 inches, Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Robert Cottingham, courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York

V: Reminds us of those bizarre scenes with Tommy Lee Jones chasing psychopathic Javier Barden in No Country for Old Men. Stunningly majestic for all its underlying garishness and artifice.

was setting over my shoulder on endless Main Streets.

RC: Those stark, no-frills hotel rooms—I think a room cost about $6 to $8 a night—were part of my experience, and soon to be a part of the vanished American landscape. Yes, they do tend to show up in Coen Brothers or David Lynch films as backdrops.

RC: People always assume ROXY is a movie theatre. It was actually a small bar that I found on a run-down commercial street in LA. It had the right scale—a small sign striving for a greater presence. I was attracted to the exotic mix of materials: neon, metal, concrete, mirrored surfaces and various lettering styles—pure Americana. With sunlight raking its surface, and smoked glass reflecting the buildings on the opposite side of the street, including a “Jumbo Burger,” this sign could have held its own in Times Square. I was challenged by its complexity—the rich layers of visual information.

V: How did you document that experience?

RC: I took over 2,000 Kodachrome slides with my 35mm Canon, which became a constant source of inspiration over many decades. It was like being in a reality version of Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. I kept jumping on and off buses, catching the light against the facades as the sun 34

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V: Let’s take a signature painting: How does a word evolve into an image like ROXY?

V: This is genuinely fascinating, as you’re really taking the viewer deep into the matrix of your vision.

V: Your love for letters reached its apogee in “An American Alphabet.” This was really an ambitious three-year project, between 1994 and 96.

RC: Yes, and each letter was a detail of a subject I had already painted or photographed. My goal was to depict each letter in a style distinctly different from the other 25.

V: My iPad/iBook generation students have no clue what it meant to labor over a Remington typewriter to produce a 10-page term paper—footnotes, bibliography, and white out fluid all over our fingers! That relationship of manual labor, be it the secretarial pool in Mad Men offices of the ‘60s, or the college student in the ‘70s banging out an assignment on a primitive IBM Selectric or Smith Corona electric, is now part of history. These typewriters bring us to a renewed understanding of this not-too-distant past.

RC: The incredible beauty of those manufactured machines— typewriters with those ingeniously designed keys, rollers, and gears—should not be forgotten. I also did a series of cameras. My “Components” series of the past three years examines individual machine parts with 30-and 60-degree rotations and aerial points of view allowing each form to be viewed as minimalist sculpture. The closer I scrutinize the rounded edges and curves, the more I lean away from typical Photo Realist subjects.

Ansco Shur Shot, oil on canvas, 32 x 32 inches, recently purchased by the Connecticut Commission of Cuture & Tourism Gallery.

Photo: Erin Gleeson Studio, NYC

RC: Let’s break down the central issue: the word ROXY spelled out in flowing quadruple tubes of neon. What I see—what I can’t avoid seeing—is the layering of realities that visually inform us as to what we are seeing, and that will guide me in my translation of this phenomenon to canvas.

Look at one section of the image—I am seeing 4 distinct layers of information. Interacting with each other we find: the neon tubes; the reflections of the neon tubes in the dark glass surface; the faint shadows of the tubes cast onto the dark glass surface; and finally, the intersections where the shadows and the reflections overlap. When I reassemble these elements on canvas, as with all my paintings, I find that the colors subtly become my colors, the forms—positive and negative—adjust minutely to my sense of form. The entire puzzle of ROXY is reassembled to become my painting, the image preserving the integrity of the subject, but as a new construction on canvas, reflecting my personal vision.

Philip Eliasoph, Ph.D. is Professor of Art History at Fairfield University. Over the past 35 years, his research and publications about Paul Cadmus, Robert Vickrey and Robert Cottingham have consistently sought to re-evaluate and re-assess American figurative realist painting in the context of post-modernist agendas.

V: You’ve truly gone full circle by now. With the “Components,” you are almost pushing the limits between hyper-realism and the ground-zero abstraction of Malevich or Donald Judd.

RC: The more I drill down into these shapes, the distinctions between the image and the abstracted forms tend to merge into a cohesive “thingness.” I can’t really say more beyond realizing that each object possesses its “essence.”

V: Bob, thanks for your generous time, and Godspeed. But what’s next?

Robert Cottingham is represented exclusively by the Forum Gallery, 745 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street New York, NY For information please contact: (212) 355-4545 or visit: www.forumgallery.com

RC: Wake up tomorrow, put on my pants, brew some coffee and get back into the studio. I’m still playing out some visual ideas I gathered out there on the road 35 or 40 years ago. And there are plenty of new ideas that are just now percolating, so I have enough work to do as the journey continues.

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Stealing Ideas and the Copyright Act:

Hey, That’s My Story When a person claims that another “stole” a story or plot line, it is not enough that the purported infringing story is merely similar...

Written By: Alan Neigher and Sheryle Levine, Byelas & Neigher, Westport

The often-used comparisons between the sequence of events and character interplay of “Romeo and Juliet” and “West Side Story” are somewhat (but not conclusively) illustrative. The abstract idea of romances between members of hostile families is not protectable.

However, the words and music of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein and the dialogue and interplay among the actors is certainly protectable, notwithstanding that the underlying plot of the musical was clearly based on “Romeo and Juliet,” long in the public domain. As others have long concluded, if “Romeo and Juliet” has been written after enactment of the 1909 Copyright Act, “West Side Story” would have been a colossal infringement.

Copying only the basic idea will not constitute infringement. You cannot protect plots about rogue cops who go outside the system to bring the bad guys to heel; otherwise, Steven Segal and Clint Eastwood movies would never be made. Courts have long held that “scenes a faire” - - incidents, characters or settings that are indispensable in the treatment of a given topic – are not protectable. For example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit held in 1982 that the maze, scoring table and tunnel exits in a Pac-Man game were “scenes a faire”; the 7th Circuit held in 1996 that Turtle Wax commercials that imitated a competitor’s usage of old cars, washing the newly polished cars and claiming favorable lab tests were “scenes a faire”, as well. Brief reflection will bring other examples to mind – hostage-taking with knives to the throats and pistols to the temple, exploding cars, trucks and planes, irate lovers hurling harsh words before reconciling.

In addition to following the scenes a faire doctrine, courts traditionally have been reluctant to protect general ideas, themes and locales.

In recent years, courts have held that the following common ideas did not constitute substantial similarity for purposes of infringement: a lost World War II submarine that strangely surfaces 30 years later; a love triangle in a Vietnam War context; a remote broadcast interrupted by a robber with a gun; and common elements of divers, underwater adventure, underwater fights, treasure hunts, villains and heroes.

Slight similarities are, by definition not substantial, and thus are noninfringing. Literal similarity – verbatim copying, paraphrasing or use of dialogue – is relatively easy to determine, and courts have developed workable (if not always consistent) quantitative and qualitative tests to determine substantial literal similarity.

The difficulty lies in determining non-literal similarity – where the essence or structure of the work is duplicated, without copying or paraphrasing. You have heard the basis precept You cannot protect an idea: you may protect only the way the idea is expressed. The 1976 Copyright Act adopts the idea/expression differentiation in 17 U.S.C. §102(b): Copyright protection does not extend to an “idea” or “concept.” The dichotomy, however, is not easily resolved.

In 1930, Judge Learned Hand set forth his “abstraction test,” in which he wrote that in any story “a great number of patterns of increasing generality will fit equally well... but there is a point in the series of abstractions where they are no longer protected,” because the writer could prevent use of his ideas (rather than expression) by others.

In 1945, Professor Zechariah Chaffee tried to draw the line between protected expression and unprotected ideas by his “pattern” test.

He wrote that the line between the author’s unprotected ideas and the protected way the author expressed the idea depends on the “pattern of the work... the sequence of events and the development of the interplay of characters.”

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There are times when the overall dissimilarity of two works may be important. One Court of Appeals has held that substantial differences will tend to defeat substantial similarity. However, the bare number of dissimilarities will not automatically overcome a claim if the alleged infringed part is material and substantial. For example, if a toy bear’s head and visuals related to a children’s story are close to identical to a competing toy bear’s head, there is a reasonable chance that the second toy will infringe, despite numerous, but less significant, dissimilarities.

So what does a lawyer do when an unhappy author presents a work that is claimed to be “stolen” from his/her writing? Professor Chaffee’s approach, by and large, has withstood the test of time.

Assuming the absence of nonliteral copying, the “pattern of the work...the sequence of events, and the development of the interplay of characters” must be examined.

We would begin the process by asking the client for a chart of what he or she claims to be the similarities in plot. Then we would do our own common-sense test for a preliminary determination of whether the client is on reasonably solid ground. If after these exercises we can reasonably conclude that “the pattern of the work... the sequence of events and the development of the interplay of characters” is substantially similar, the first (but not the last) threshold would be met.

be

ap ad ar ver to t fu con ise s: trib kee u p u te sa live

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As Sunken Garden Poetry & Music Festival fans sit rapt, poet Coleman Barks reads the work of 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi to the acompaniment of Grammy Award-winning cellist Eugene Friesen in Hill-Stead’s historic “paradise for poetry.” Photo by Cindie Cagenello.

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rhyme and reason

This summer, as before, there will be nights when 1,000 or more people pile into the 90-year-old garden and wrap themselves around its gazebo or stand behind its protective-looking stone wall, propping heads on forearms to listen. There will be, as someone else once said, America’s only poetry-induced traffic jam as so many people try to squeeze onto Route 4 at the end.

The Sunken Garden of the Hill-Stead Museum and the grounds surrounding it at are absurdly beautiful in the manner of a Hudson River School landscape. In 1991-92, the museum was in the midst of one of its periodic reconsiderations of itself, and a key player in that was a woman named Alice DeLana. Any large art community needs a certain kind of person whose deeds are largely unsung and whose

... Listen, I’ve seen fever all over this town, no mercy, I’ve seen the bodies I most adored turn to flame and powder, my shattered darlings a clutch of white petals lifted on the avenue’s hot wind: ...

There are poets and summer nights jousting for attention in my head, but the clear winner is Richard Wilbur on a clear-skied June evening in 1994. It was warm enough so that you could think about going for a swim later, after the poems, and the light slowly fell and melted into orange. And then came the mockingbird.

The bird picked up Wilbur’s rhythms and warbled out little echoing solos behind him, like Ella Fitzgerald scatting with the band. “Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World” is one of the finest poems ever written. Imagine it arranged for human voice and mockingbird.

At the end Wilbur said he was glad we had this evening together and glad to have provided so much entertainment to a mockingbird.

Second place: In 1997, Mark Doty read his “Mercy on Broadway” which weaves Laura Nyro lyrics through Doty’s words about losing a partner to AIDS and then daring to love again. After a while, his repetition of the phrase “Gonna take a miracle” actually made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle up.

I suppose one starts with the things one can never forget.

by Colin McEnroe

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individual handiwork – a kind of enthusiastic stitching that connects people and institutions and ideas – is very difficult to spot. Alice DeLana, who moved out of the city in 1999, was for decades an impresario disguised as a Miss Porter’s School teacher. A shove here. A whisper there. A spark. A little curtain-blowing gust of enthusiasm. DeLana served on nearly a dozen boards of cultural institution, but one of her real gifts was rounding up a few people for an unconventional project.

In 1991, the idea that anything big would happen on the grounds of the sleepy Hill-Stead, tightened into an even deeper rictus by the very fussy will and testament of its master builder Theodate Pope Riddle, was a radical notion. DeLana convened an activities committee, on which I served, and she made sure there were just enough eccentric people so that something unusual might kindle there.

When the idea of a poetry festival was suggested – probably

by Alice – I knew whom to take it to.

Lary Bloom ran the Hartford Courant’s Northeast magazine, and by 1991, he had made it an extraordinary place, where some of Connecticut’s best writers could stretch themselves in interesting ways and even get paid decently for doing it. I knew Bloom, and I knew he was interested in poetry readings. He quickly agreed to co-manage the festival with the Hill-Stead and to promote the event in his magazine with profile of each poet the Sunday before the reading. Bloom was the other kind of person you need – a natural ringmaster. During his years in Hartford he showed a knack for making things seem important just because he said they were.

When I told Bloom about the Sunken Garden, I don’t think anybody had any idea of how big this would get. The festival opened in 1992 with a solid line-up of very good Connecticut poets on week nights spread through the summer. By 1993, James Merrill had been enlisted as the lead off poet. In 1995, the festival opened with Galway Kinnell (who opens it again this year) and closed at summer’s end with Donald Hall and his knee-buckling poems about the death of Jane Kenyon. I think that might have been one of the first times he read “Without.” By 1996, the festival was a Murderer’s Row: Stanley Kunitz, Sharon Olds, Brendan Galvin, Marge Piercy, Marilyn Nelson.

Holey Moley.

Each performance is preceded by music, some of it startling in its own right. Jazz stars Kurt Elling and Sheila Jordan have stepped into the Garden to sing. And in 2008, Coleman Banks performed his translations of Rumi with cellist Eugene Friesen as his mockingbird,the poems and the music tangling together in the air like lovers.

One night of each summer is given over to the voices of youth, with the winners of a Connecticut high school poetry contest reading their work.

Hill-Stead - Sunken Garden as designed by Beatrix Farrand, c. 1920. October, 2006. Photo by Jerry L. Thompson.

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We think

we don’t need poetry, until we do.

Look for me, Father, on the roof of the red brick building at the foot of Green Street—that’s where we live, you know, on the top floor.

I’m the boy in the white flannel gown sprawled on this coarse gravel bed searching the starry sky, waiting for the world to end.

There came a day when Northeast magazine was gone and some of the core organizers of the festival had wandered off and the HillStead seemed be drifting back into a little nap. So in 2007, there was no Festival. And there was an odd little hole in that poetryless summer for many of us. It was like a wound where the flesh doesn’t grow back. The next year, it came back, and we were fed again.

Here is a thing I can barely think about. In 1996, Kunitz opened the festival. He would have been a few days shy of 90 and would live another ten years. His father killed himself six weeks before Kunitz’s birth, and the poet wrestled with that ghost in his work.

On the night of the reading, I left the hospital room of my father, on what was probably the first detectable day of the illness that would take another two years to kill him. My father had attempted suicide years before, when I was 14.

I ran down some stone stairs in the woods and got there for the end of Kunitz’s reading, a little too scrambled with worry for my father to receive, fully, Kunitz’s words.

But I’m sure I heard him read “Halley’s Comet,” which ends.

>> Department: TRAVEL + LEISURE

the art of adventure D I S C OV E R I E S

O F

A N

I N S P I R E D

by Amy Orzel

T R AV E L E R

Above and left: In medieval Europe, a monastery’s enclosed cloisters provided space for socializing, gardening, and contemplation. Now they provide a modern museumgoer with abundant opportunities for inspiration and renewal.

Wanderlust has always flowed in Amy Orzel’s veins, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that traveling the world became a reality. Then, unexpected adventures in India, China, and Europe changed her life - transforming her into a passionate, curious traveler, and reawakening a love of writing.

When she’s not exploring, Amy writes from her home in Manhattan.

Off the beaten path in Manhattan: the Cloisters One of New York’s greatest hidden gems, The Cloisters lie off the beaten path in leafy Fort Tryon Park, at the northern tip of Manhattan. An outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this spot offers an alluring glimpse back in time to the Middle Ages.

At first sight, you might believe that a single French monastery had simply been plucked from the Old World. In fact, the building is composed of beautifully reassembled art and structural elements collected from the monasteries and homes of 12th - 15th century Europe. The gargoyles, hand-carved wooden door frames, wall tapestries, and religious statuary are mesmerizing. The very things that seem odd to us today were completely normal sights to people in another time. Seeing it with your own eyes makes the past real in a way that little else can, and furiously fans the flames of imagination.

The most delightful, otherworldly part of a visit? Strolling through the enclosed gardens. Gracefully carved stone arches glow in the sunlight.

A peaceful hush lies over herbs, flowers, and statues, broken only by the gurgling of small fountains. A million miles away from Manhattan’s frenetic streets, time stands still, inviting you to spend hours wandering, with a blissful smile on your face.

The Cloisters are located at 99 Fort Corbin Drive, Fort Tryon Park, New York.

Open Tues. – Sun. Go to www.metmuseum.org/cloisters/ to find information about visiting the collection.

VENÜ’s regular travel column brings you lifestyles, destinations, and off-the-beaten path inspirations from around the globe.

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>> Department: TRAVEL + LEISURE

Chicago: the architecture of inspiration

In the late 1800’s, an unforgiving blaze wreaked havoc on the burgeoning city of Chicago.

Leaping flames obliterated the downtown and left neighborhoods of wood-frame houses in ashes. A few charming little homes in Old Town, and the venerable Water Tower Place, were the only buildings to escape the Great Chicago Fire intact.

F

or elementary school children growing up in the suburbs, the fire featured prominently in lessons on local history. The story always seemed to hinge on the intrigue surrounding Mrs. O’Leary’s cow – did he or didn’t he?* When I was twenty-three, I moved into a three-flat apartment building in Old Town, and began a love affair with the city.

Over the years, I walked all over Chicago, eschewing the El on weekday afternoons to meander home from graduate school. I learned photography by focusing my camera on the Loop’s stunning architecture.

I loved the decorative details that appeared as delightful surprises on

Art Deco building facades. Muscular skyscrapers soared with grandeur, and the residential brownstones on the north side comforted with their neighborly design. The city will nourish anyone’s cravings for beauty and order. I needed only to leave my front doorstep and take a half-hour walk to be reminded that all was right with the world.

That swath of destruction had left behind a blank slate that lured inspired architects. In the decades following the Great Fire, these designers rebuilt Chicago into a city of elegant streetscapes and breathtaking sklines. Great architects replaced emptiness and horror with beauty, order, and harmony.

Because of their vision, Chicago has become a territory of grand inspirations. The ideas that hope can spring from destruction, and that good things may transpire after disaster, are frozen in time, proven viable in each art deco swirl of stone, and in each brilliantly imagined structure that shoulders the years with dignity and grandeur.

Recommended reading: Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City. The 1893 World Fair, and Chicago’s post-fire architectural renaissance, set the stage for this page-turning murder-mystery. * Local legend has it that Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern, starting a barn blaze that became the Chicago Fire.

Left: Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate Sculpture, a must-see in Millennium Park, fuses brilliant design with mesmerizing fun-house reflections of Chicago’s skyline.

Top right: The Reliance Building, a historic landmark and architectural gem, can be found downtown at 32 South State Street.

Bottom right: The Jay Pritzker Pavillion in Millennium Park is officially classified as a work of art, not a building - but that doesn’t prevent this sculptural masterpiece from providing fantastic acoustics for outdoor concerts.

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Theatre

Brightening May With Songs and Original Scenes About the Big Apple

by Joan Grant

Theatre Artists Workshop, Board Member

The Theatre Artists Workshop, a nearly thirty-year-old collective of professional actors, writers, directors and musicians, played three sold-out performances of the Spring Benefit, New York State of Mind, at its 99-seat theatre space in East Norwalk in May. The annual benefit for this talented non-profit theatrical organization brought original scenes and familiar songs about New York City to life in the style of a review.

Audiences cheered a 22-member cast of professional actors and singers who have appeared on Broadway, in film, television and on regional as well as international stages throughout long careers.

Performers sang classic show tunes woven into scenes written specifically for the evening by member playwrights.

Veteran performer, director and writer June Walker Rogers (Westport) staged the musical numbers, and music director Mark Cherry (New Fairfield), whose professional credits include the original New York run of “Nunsense”, accompanied the performers.

Cherry also co-wrote, directed, arranged and performed the awardwinning “An Evening With Brett Somers” starring the late, great lady herself, a project that began at TAW.

Outgoing TAW president Barbara Rhoades (Weston), said of the membership, “This group of people works harder, gives more, and produces as professional a product as any theatre around because we need to keep our skills in shape.” Rhoades, who brought her showgirl talents to the fore in the benefit singing Stephen Sondheim’s “Broadway Baby” began her career as a dancer in New York where she appeared with Sammy Davis, Jr. and continued onto Broadway in “Funny Girl “with Barbra Streisand.

Katie Sparer, also featured in the benefit and recently seen in John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt” at Westport’s Music Theatre of Connecticut, touted the Workshop’s value to the membership by stressing how “TAW literally saves our performing lives and feeds our souls. Each week we have the chance to try anything we want in an environment that is collegial and constructive. TAW is also the closest thing to a repertory company anyone is likely to see this side of the Mississippi.”

Located in the heart of Fairfield County, the Workshop was founded by noted actor Keir Dullea and other theatre professionals in 1983. For more than 25 years, it has served as a theatrical gymnasium for the area’s many working professionals – as well as aspiring ones. Its full, associate and apprentice members learn from, and teach, each other.

Founding members who remain active include Dullea, E. Katherine Kerr (Wilton), and Patsy Englund (Westport); Fred Hellerman of The Weavers (Westport) and James Noble (Norwalk), well known for the long running TV series “Benson” also continue their work

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at TAW. Dullea was seen recently in a highly acclaimed limited run of “I Never Sang For My Father” at the Harold Clurman Theatre in New York City.

TAW members have found their way into community ventures too. Carole Schweid (Westport), an original cast member of “A Chorus Line” is co-founder with Nancy Diamond of the popular lunchtime play reading series “Play With Your Food” and Miles Marek (Stratford) who was a co-founder of the Fairfield Theatre Company, designed and built TAW’s current theatre space, while also acting in many projects at TAW. Member writer Linda Howard (Black Rock), began a writing workshop that was joined by writers Rosemary Foley (Pelham, NY), Sari Bodi (Westport), and Elizabeth Keyser (Fairfield), and actors, Jo Anne Parady (Norwalk), Randye Kaye (Trumbull), and Nadine Willig (Stratford) that blossomed into “Momoirs,” a theatre piece about mothers that has been performed in New York City and continues to be performed throughout Connecticut.

As a non-producing organization, TAW’s theatrical ventures are limited in number each year. The production values are simple, the focus is on the work and admission is reasonable, with some series performed free, notably, the Classic Night reading series that recently featured “Outward Bound” by Sutton Vane in March and again, in June. Donations are always gratefully accepted.

As the Workshop looks forward to a new season and a Playwrights Festival October 15-17, the Board invites local professionals who seek a venue to work in and colleagues to work with, to take advantage of a 24/7 theatre space and apply for membership.

Rhoades encourages new members, “We want and need professionals to join. New creative ideas keep us all on our toes.”

Katie Sparer reads ghost stories to young goblins for Halloween.

Theatre Artists Workshop is located at 5 Gregory Boulevard, East Norwalk. The phone number is 203-854-6830.

For more information and a look at the calendar, view the website at www.taworkshop.org.

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to the beat of a different drum at home with tina and chris

by Alex DeFelice

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Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz are sitting in the living room of their beautifully and tastefully decorated home in Fairfield, Connecticut. The founding couple of the Tom Tom Club and (originally the Talking Heads with David Byrne) moved here twenty-five years ago from their Long Island City loft.

They are currently putting the finishing touches on renovating and reconstructing their expansive home studio which has been under repair for nearly a year. “Hopefully the reconstruction and remodeling will be done by the time you read this,” says Frantz. The 2002 Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame inductees are currently working on a few new projects along with the studio renovations. Their new album, Genius of Live is a re-release of Live @ the Clubhouse which never received its proper calling years ago as the label they were on at the time fell apart.

Now it is scheduled for a Sept. 21 release date. The album was recorded live at the band’s studio in front of a select group of invitees.“Genius of Live was originally intended to be a double album, but we decided to edit it down to a single one,” says Frantz. “We’re also going to do some live dates supporting the album through the U.S. and Canada in late September and October. We’ll start at the Fairfield Theatre Company for a couple of nights.” Another big change is their new record label home.

Nacional, a Latin alternative rock label will release Genius of Live along with six remixes from the CD. The remixes will only be available on iTunes. “The remixes will be separate. I also want to press some vinyl,” says Weymouth. “For the DJs. All these kids who bought turntables still

love their vinyl.” What’s the Tom Tom Club doing on a Latin alternative label you say?

“The owner of the label manages Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. We produced that band’s album Rey Azucar and I sent him a copy of our album and he was playing it in his office and people kept popping in asking ‘who’s that?’” says Frantz. “He said so many people asked about the album and he really liked it so he decided Nacional should release it. It’s going to come out in the U.S. Europe, Japan and Latin America with Warner distributing. The label is doing really well, while all the majors aren’t. They have a very lively roster.”

“We did a lot of remixes with the artists affiliated with Nacional,” says Frantz.

“One of my favorites is by Money Mark who plays keyboards with the Beastie Boys. He also plays with Jack Johnson. A group from Barcelona called The Pinkertones also did a remix along with the Mexican Institute of Sound. The cult favorite Senor Coconut, who does Latin versions of Kraftwerk songs is doing a version of “Genius of Love.” It’s a long way from the Rhode Island School of Design or RISD, as it is affectionately known, where Frantz and Weymouth met in 1971.

While they were pursuing their art careers, music was all around and they were both playing on the side.“I transferred to RISD,” says Weymouth. “I was at Barnard and took drawing at Columbia. I had all my art history credit. If you transfer, you have a better shot at getting in there.”

“We always did music though.

Chris started playing drums when he was 10 or so in marching bands. I was 12.

I played with a bunch of English hand

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bell ringers. I joined their group. I was really lucky I got to go everywhere, Williamsburg, the ’64 World’s Fair which Bob Marley also played at. We even played an insane asylum. I wore Elizabethan and Colonial costumes. We were playing beautiful classical stuff,” says Weymouth. “I started learning guitar to Dylan songs and I picked up the flute as well. When I met Chris he was forming a band and we fell in love a couple of years later. We were great friends. Saturday mornings we would have brunch and watch Soul Train.”

“I had a band with David Byrne who had been a student but dropped out and was hanging around,” says Frantz.

“We called it The Artistics. David and I started thinking about moving the band further along. So we moved to NYC. Tina and I had a relationship by then and we all moved into a loft three blocks away from CBGB’s. I kept asking Tina to join the band.

One day she came home with a bass and amp she had on layaway and that was that.

We became a trio and called ourselves the Talking Heads.” So after all those years of world tours over and over, movies, the juggling of two groups at least until 1995 when Byrne made it official and left the Talking Heads, their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, and multiple production credits including Ziggy Marley & the Meldody Makers, collaboration with the Gorillaz, remixes for Unicorn (a popular Japanese group), and collaborations with Berlin’s Chicks On Speed, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth show no signs of slowing down. If anything, they intend to crank up

their musical output once Genius of Live is released and their home studio is ready to go.“Often I feel your best work is done when you are young. After that you tend to do variations of what you did when you were young,” says Frantz. “We are going to do some more things though that may not be appropriate for Tom Tom Club.”

We want to do some small things that’s just me and Chris,” says Weymouth. “The Tom Tom Club is so huge. It’s a great band, but when we get the studio done we want to try some new things. We’d try it in Europe first, because they are all ahead of us. It’s in the planning stages, so it still remains to be seen.”

“I feel like we are still capable of doing a few good things and maybe more,” states Frantz.

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>> Department: insights & excerpts from a steady stream of CT’S LOCAL VOCALS

music notes TINA COLÓN

KAILIN GARRITY

Though influenced by Alicia Keys and Lauryn Hill and several contemporary Christian artists, Singer-songwriter Tina Colón’s original music is difficult to define. Each song combines elements of hip hop, R&B, neo-soul, acoustic, and alternative influences. Tina’s powerful voice and her intricate lyrics convey a unique and meaningful message. Most of her music was developed in church, as a pianist and occasional vocalist for her youth group’s worship team. Drawing her inspiration from both inside and outside of the church, she began writing original music during her first few years of high school. Her time at Yale University further developed her music. Throughout college, she shared her songs at local open mics, and she taught herself guitar while abroad in Switzerland in early 2008. In the fall of the same year, she was tapped as a member of Shades, one of Yale’s most appraised A cappella groups, and throughout her senior year continued pursuing music: recording and producing her first album, performing around New Haven and Yale, and leading the band Affirmative to first place in Yale’s Battle of the Bands 2009 for the opening spot at Yale’s biggest concert of the year, Spring Fling. Tina’s debut album, Taken Up, was released in May to great reviews.

The digital version of the album is available online through many stores including iTunes and Amazon. Funded by the proceeds from the Taken Up project, Tina recently completed a project in Argentina, working with the organization Word Made Flesh, helping them with their outreach programs for homeless street youth in Buenos Aires. Tina hopes to continue to use her music towards social justice causes in the world. She is currently located in New Haven, CT, where she is closely connected with several non-profits and very involved in the homeless community.

Kailin Garrity is an accomplished, young New York City based singer/songwriter, already gathering nationwide attention. Originally from Madison, CT, Kailin started playing guitar and writing songs at age 14. Growing up Kailin was inspired by musicians such as Bonnie Raitt, Tom Petty, John Lennon & the Beatles. After a recent showcase gig last spring for representatives from colleges across the country, Kailin booked a 40 date college tour that took her more than 5,000 miles across the United States. Her music has been heard on three international ad campaigns, in films and on TV. Currently, Kailin is putting the finishing touches on a new album with the help of Oscar Award winning producer Sam Bisbee, grammy winning producer Steve Addabbo (Suzzanne Vega, Sean Colvin) among others. And this is just the beginning.

GENRE >> Undefined: tinacolon.com

CD:

Taken Up

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GENRE >> Folk/Pop: kailingarrity.com

CD:

Be Free

MIGHTY PURPLE

Genre >> Folk/Rock: mightypurple.com Brothers Steve and Jon Rodgers, the song writing team of the long standing underground band, Mighty Purple have just finished recording their first and long-awaited, largely-acoustic album entitled “Arms And Voices”. The album is a far cry from the recordings of their early years (which were sometimes noted as heartfelt yet derivative) The latest batch of songs convey stories of the brothers’ lives, spiritual journeys and friendships, told in such a way that the listener can relate to. In a world where attitude, image and fleeting success run rampant, Steve and Jon have a true longevity with their true passion for writing music and connecting with their listeners. The Brothers have a complex story that has been told in small pieces along their songwriting Journey. “Arms and Voices” is sure to have a cross generational appeal with a modern-acoustic, yet timeless and comfortably familiar

MUSIC NOTES

Music Notes is where independent and emerging musicians can showcase their talent whatever their genre – rock, alternative, folk or country. Send us your info and a few pics, there’s sure to be someone out there wanting to listen.

sound. Steve and Jon have been touring for well over ten years… (2000 + shows) and have released 7 albums with their band, on three different independent labels. Mighty Purple built a small but loyal & devoted underground fan base through consistent touring. Steve owns an all ages music venue in Connecticut called The Space where many national, regional & local acts play. Steve has been booking tours & acting as manager for Mighty Purple and other artists, as well as booking various venues including his own, for over 10 years. If you are interested in learning more about Steve and Jon, or hearing some of their earlier work contact Mighty Purple, steve@mightypurple.com or two zero three - two eight eight six four zero zero, yes that is our phone number.

snowstorms any time I had a ticket to West Palm to fly down and see him, numerous acts of God. Lightning struck the studio and hours upon hours of recording files vanished and had to be rebuilt. February 2007, we finally got back to the studio to finish it. We pared it down to eight songs that flowed together nicely; some I wrote, some Tom wrote, and one written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. I hope the CD takes you on a journey to somewhere you want to go.

CD:

Dreamology

CD:

Arms & Voices

THIRTY SECOND PULSE

GENRE >> Rock: thirtysecondpulse.com

LAURA SUMNER

GENRE >> Singer/Songwriter: laurasumner.com When I was 18 I walked into a bar with a guitar and asked if I would be allowed to play some songs. I played on the spot (“Ramblin Man” was my signature piece) and got an offer for my first gig. I’ve been writing songs since my teens, but Dreamology is my first recording adventure. I don’t usually delay gratification, but it took me years to get up the guts to make a CD. Tom Christopher, the producer, was instrumental in kicking me out of the proverbial nest and seeing if I would fly. February 2004…

I was in a great big studio in Rhinebeck, NY with Tom recording little songs. After four days of recording and one day of mixing, we thought we were almost done.

It was to be an acoustic CD, minimally produced, bare, simple; just guitar, vocals, percussion, and a melotron.

But something funny happened—the vision evolved into something quirky, dreamy, spacey, dare I say spiritual?

He started adding more instrumentation from his Florida studio: Indian influence, backward guitar, & other cool sounds. The project had delays: hurricanes in Florida,

Thirty Second Pulse was created in West Hartford, CT in April 2008. This four piece eclectic rock band has just released their debut album “Oil of the Whale” at the tail end of 2009 on the band’s own label SubRhythm.

It’s being described as edgy, innovative, and heart yanking. Their high energy live performance reaffirms this band as a unique talent that will have you shouting along with your hands held high embracing the moment. The band consists of Matt Giuggio (lead vocals, guitar), Mike Giuggio (vocals, guitar), Bob Dinan (drums), and Pat Ryan (bass). The band name was derived from a feeling, unfiltered expression, passion, and togetherness. These musicians are actively preparing new material and are always on the verge of something new. It is obvious these four have amazing chemistry, being brothers and best friends. You can feel their vibe radiating from the stage, you’ll want to keep an eye on Thirty Secon Pulse.

CD:

Oil of The Whale

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>> WRITTEN WORD: SHORT FICTION

Written by Stephen Rhodes Artwork, Sholeh Janati

The Greater Good Allegra Bloomfield came to realize that Kabul was an exhilarating, frustrating, astounding, life-changing habitat comprised of dizzying extremes and contradictions. t was yet another oppressively hot evening in Kabul, the way it always was in July. Just before midnight, two of the young soldiers protecting the compound came into the residence for a Gatorade break.

Allegra asked the soldier from Plano, Texas if she could interview him on camera.

“It’s for my senior thesis,” she told him.

To her surprise, the soldier agreed.

While she worked to set up the video camera, he flirted openly with her. In his Texan drawl, he asked, “What’s a girl from Green-wich, Connecticut doing in a hellhole like this, anyways?”

Allegra Bloomfield smiled, not bothering to correct the soldier on the proper pronunciation of her hometown.

“Freaking my parents out, of course.

What else?”

“I’ll bet,” the soldier snorted in laughter.

“Mommy and Daddy must’ve had a kniption fit when you told them you were going to spend your summer in Afghanistan.”

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It went way beyond a kniption fit, Allegra said to herself as she adjusted the color settings of the Canon video camera.

Dealing with the dim greenish light thrown off by the generator-powered light bulbs was a frustrating challenge. “They were pushing me to go backpacking through Europe for summer break. But Europe will always be there.Afghanistan?

This is history in the making.”

“Guess you could call it that.”

The soldier took a four-gulp chug of his Gatorade, then fired up a cigarette. He wore his electric cool like a body armor, projecting a self-assured and invincible attitude -- undeniably sexy in its own way. “Who gave you the shirt? Some pencil-necked Jody?”

Allegra’s T-shirt bore the famous quote from Gandhi. BE THE CHANGE YOU WISH TO SEE IN THE WORLD. “A gift from the professor advising me on my senior thesis.”

“Huh. You must be one of those

peacenik Birkenstock girls from the East Coast then, right?”

She finally got the color temperature right and was ready to start rolling. “Okay,” Allegra said authoritatively, “from here on out, the way this works, I get to ask the questions, you get to answer them.”

“Whoa! Yes, ma’am.” The soldier grinned and snapped off a sarcastic salute. He turned to his fellow soldier, PFC Ricardo Alcantara.

“Her bark’s worse than Colonel Baker’s.”

Alcantara squinted disapprovingly.

“Mac, you sure you want to do this?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” “We’re not supposed to talk to civilians, especially not on videotape.”

The soldier pshawed his companion.

“It’s cool. I want my mommy to see me on YouTube.” He wheeled around to Allegra.

“Okay, hot stuff. Let’s go. Showtime.”

Allegra started up the HD vidcam.

“What’s your name, soldier?”

“Private First Class Trevor McAllister.”

“Where you from, Private McAllister?

“Plano, Texas.”

“How many tours of duty have you done?”

“Including Iraq?”

“Yes.” “This is my fourth,” PFC McAllister responded.

“Does it ever bother you, Private McAllister, that most of the young people fighting this war are from Alabama? Or Georgia? Texas or the Carolinas? That they’re not from New York City or L.A. or Chicago?”

Through the viewfinder,Allegra could see the question had momentarily thrown the cocky young soldier off his game.

“Uh, I’ve never thought much about that. Guess it means we’re from the more patriotic states. You know, the ones with strong American values. Patriotic values.”

Allegra’s voice softened to almost a whisper. “So tell me -- what are we fighting for, Trevor?”

McAllister reared back. “Our freedoms.

Our American way of life. Your American way of life.” He paused thoughtfully.

“They hate us for our freedoms, you know.”

“Who hates us for our freedoms?

Who, exactly?” “’Aw, c’mon. The enemy, the extremists -- they’re ruthless -- they -- “He no longer concealed his frustration. “Look, I follow the orders of my superior officers. And tonight,

protecting you -- those are our orders, okay?” McAllister stubbed out the cigarette and leaned in. “Okay, so now, turn the camera off. What I really want to know is whether you got a dude waiting for you back in New York because I think you and I should stop talking and start -- “ In the next instant, a blinding flash ripped the far wall apart, sending a blast of searing heat and chunks of cement hurtling against their flesh. The roar of the explosion was near-deafening, McAllister shouted to Allegra, “Get down, get down, GET DOWN!” as he instinctively swiveled with his weapon to face the as-yet unseen enemy.

She collapsed to the floor in an out-of-body mortal fear she’d never before experienced, stunned that after all these weeks, fate had randomly chosen her.

An eerily calm voice sounded in her head, speaking to her in the third person.

You’re gonna die tonight, Allegra.

HHH Nearly eight weeks before, Allegra had come home from her junior year at NYU and told her parents she was spending the summer with a charitable organization in Afghanistan to conduct research for her senior thesis.

When her mother Melinda failed to talk her out of her decision, she went on a dayto-day crying jag and didn’t speak to Allegra for weeks. Her father Michael -- a securities lawyer at Davis Polk & Wardwell -- dealt with it his own way. He handwrote a precise three-page note studded with backhanded compliments about her, and articulated all the reasons her decision was imprudent.

“In so many ways,” he wrote, “I admire your selfless passion for the greater good.

But I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t tell you in full candor that I wish it were someone else’s daughter choosing this course of action.”

Though many of her friends had a similar what-the-hell-are-you-smoking? reaction, Allegra would not be dissuaded.

Professor Hansen’s Geopolitics class had convinced her that the United States’ military occupation of Afghanistan was unleashing an ongoing humanitarian crisis of unimaginable proportions. Allegra wanted to spend her summer as a witness to this history, wanted to see the devastation with her own eyes. In some small part, she told her friends, she wanted to offset her nation’s brutality by giving something of herself to the besieged citizenry.

Professor Hansen was so moved by her selflessness, he presented her with the Gandhi T-shirt before she departed for Kabul.

The morning of her 14-hour flight from JFK to Dubai, anxiety set in and she felt a sinking sensation in her stomach. What the hell have I gotten myself into? Her anxiety melted away as she met a half-dozen

other NGO workers on the flight, many of whom looked as if they had stepped out of a Patagonia catalogue. Siobhan, an Irish aid worker from the United Nations with snowwhite blonde hair, matter-of-factly informed Allegra that it was easier to buy a gun in Kabul than it was to purchase toilet paper.

The following day, as her Air India plane approached Kabul International Airport, she was mesmerized by the vision of the snowcapped jigsaw peaks surrounding the city under a brilliant blue dome of sky -- a sight as beautiful as anything she’d ever seen in her life. That’s when it hit her. “Holy shit,” she said aloud, “I’m really in Afghanistan.”

The firefight raged all around her, all in a surreal, speeded-up motion. McAllister, out in the open, shouting to Alcantara, “Where are the hostiles?” but Alcantara had been hit fullforce by the blast of the IED. The white Toyota van with the letters NGO painted on it brought her and two other summer interns to the compound of the One World/One People organization.

As the Afghan driver twisted noisily through the chaotic traffic of the city, the new reality began forming for Allegra.

A cluster of NATO military vehicles with machine gun turrets were positioned every several blocks throughout the city. Even the traffic cops seemed to have Kalashnikov rifles sprouting skyward like appendages.

Within a few weeks, this sight would become so routine, Allegra would think nothing of it. But at that moment, she was stunned. So this is what living under military occupation is really like.

Within a half hour, the van arrived at the compound of OW/OP, a former British embassy enclosed by 12-foot walls with razor wire crowns, armed security guards, and a wrought-iron security gate. At the

orientation session, the directors spent far more time lecturing about personal safety than the responsibilities of the internship.

They passed around a pamphlet entitled: “Do No Harm, Do Know Harm.” The booklet clinically informed her about the need to cover her flesh in an Islamic country, how to wear a burqa and how to avoid “spotters”- - seemingly helpful Afghan drivers, servants, and couriers, who were paid by insurgents to provide information aiding in the abduction of Westerners. Her orientation leader, Soren Sipperstein, emphasized that aid workers were actively being targeted as “satanic Westerners” or “spies” which made them susceptible to abduction, torture, or death.

Tellingly, the session concluded with a document she was obligated to sign or otherwise turn around and go home. It was an indemnification form in which the One World/One People organization would not in any way be legally responsible to her next of kin for her death in Afghanistan.

It was a sobering moment. This wasn’t going to be a leisurely summer vacation in the south of France.

HHH Over the next several weeks, Allegra Bloomfield came to realize that Kabulwas an exhilarating, frustrating, astounding, life-changing habitat comprised of dizzying extremes and contradictions.

Yes, of course, there was the abject poverty everywhere. As her van shuttled from location to location, zombie-like beggars scratched pathetically at her windows every time the vehicle came to a stop. She would forever be haunted by the ghostly look of the gaunt, half-starved children within arm’s reach on the other side of the onyx-tinted glass. There was also a phenomenon that was unique to the impoverished masses of Kabul: the city was perpetually enshrouded in a cloud of fine dust that carried a fecal stench and airborne diseases. (Allegra quickly learned not to wash her clothes in the local water.)

And there were the shady entrepreneurs and freelancers feeding off the massive American war machine. The conflict was costing American taxpayers $1 million a year -- per soldier. Like a magnet, opportunists of every stripe, every nationality were drawn to Kabul to tap this vast reservoir of billions.

Yet Allegra Bloomfield was blissfully sealed off from all of this. She and her co-workers existed in a parallel universe that was jokingly referred to as the “Kabubble.”

The Kabubble was a hermetically-sealed community of several hundred overeducated Westerners populated mostly by aid workers, UN monitors, reporters, photo-journalists and a surprisingly large contingent of hardcore, change-the-world activists like Allegra.

Every weekend, the social swirl included cocktail parties by a swimming pool at a (continued on page 62) ARTS/CULTURE/STYLE//MAGAZINE

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Hidden pleasures flourish in the historic gardens of the Florence Griswold Museum, offering abundant opportunities for inspiration and revelry.

by Amy Orzel

Vezin, The Old Garden Florence Griswold Museum

midsummer connecticut dream An American Giverny blossoms each summer in Connecticut’s picturesque shoreline village of Old Lyme, on the grounds of the Florence Griswold Museum. At any time of the year, a visit to this former Impressionist art colony fills you with the delighted sense of stumbling back in time, and straight into a landscape painting.

But in the warmer months, Miss Florence’s recreated gardens bloom into a masterpiece all their own, becoming a playground for artists, children, and anyone who loves to revel in the simple pleasures of summer.

The luminous modern galleries regularly hold critically acclaimed art exhibitions, but don’t be fooled into thinking that this Connecticut gem is characterized only by the hushed formality

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In homage to the woman who acted as both mother figure and muse to a community of carefree Impressionists, the gardens have been recreated to appear as they did in 1910, at the height of the art colony’s glory days

typical of museums. Its’ landscape is ripe with opportunities for exploration, creativity, and the convivial revelry inaugurated by artists here a century ago.

“We haven’t missed the Midsummer Festival in four or five years. It’s become a family tradition to haul the farm table down to the riverbank, and invite our friends to a potluck dinner.” To Lisa Reneson, the art colony’s old stomping grounds make the perfect setting for an idyllic evening.

A graphic designer and Lyme resident, she cherishes the Midsummer Festival’s Friday concert as one of her favorite events of the summer.

On the last weekend in July, the grounds provide a lush, inviting setting for this annual celebration of landscape and local artisans. It transforms the museum and its’ gardens into an all-in-one al fresco concert hall, picnic spot, and European market, complete with art tents for kids and stalls loaded with luscious produce and flowers.

And when a respite from the market is in order, the magical gardens beckon. Tucked behind Miss Florence’s cheerful yellow estate, the inviting jumble of paths, arbors, and fragrant blossoms cast a spell all their own.

Within, a myriad of sensory pleasures greet: a rose exhaling heady perfume into the balmy summer air, a perfectly ripe heirloom tomato yearning to burst free of its’ shiny skin. Bees buzz soporifically over a profusion of sun-kissed petals. Looking down the long garden path, a sparkling glimpse of river appears between slats of the white arbor, from which deep purple clematis dangle.

These scenes often made appearances on Impressionist canvases such as Lucien Abrams’ “The Orchard,” and Charles Vezin’s “The Old Garden.”

A creative spirit herself, Miss Florence lovingly tended the plots that became inspired subjects for a generation of painters. Like Monet’s Giverny, the garden is jam-packed with perfectly curated vignettes just crying out for a palette and brush. Fortunately, the Hartman Education Center, housed in one of the restored barns, provides everything an aspiring Monet needs to create colorful canvases – stools, paint-smattered smocks, palettes,

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brushes – for free on Sundays, to both children and adults.

Amazingly, none of this existed a few years ago. Trees had annexed the garden, and the neglected barns had fallen into disrepair. It took nothing less than an archaeological dig to reveal the old layout of paths and plots. Then the detective work began, with landscape historian Sheila Wertheimer painstakingly examining old photos, and the Impressionist’s paintings themselves, in order to bring America’s Giverny to life again.

“Hollyhocks, hydrangeas, coneflowers, daisies, roses, irises, poppies…” Sheila lists her discoveries to me. As the words fall from her lips, they conjure images of a romantic, sweetly old-fashioned garden; and of Florence herself wandering the overgrown paths, gathering blooms to decorate the house, and perhaps followed by a few of her doting kittens.

In homage to the woman who acted as both mother figure and muse to a community of carefree Impressionists, the gardens have been recreated to appear as they did in 1910, at the height of the art colony’s glory days. The plots continue to be a labor of love, just a e a century ago, maintained by a volunteer gang of passionate planters.

Last summer, Patrick Dougherty’s stunning sculptural installation, The Rambles, debuted on the riverbank near the gardens. An imaginative stickwork mini-castle, it simultaneously evokes mysterious ruins and the most humble elements of the New England landscape. Like all of the museum’s endeavors, it reflects a progressive openness towards contemporary landscape art, while reinforcing the site’s deep roots in the past. And undoubtedly, Miss Florence herself would be thrilled to know that her gardens still provide inspiration for great masterpieces.

The Florence Griswold Museum is located at 96 Lyme Street in Old Lyme, CT. Open every Tuesday – Saturday 10 – 5, and Sundays 1 -5. Admission is free to children 12 and under. For more information, visit www.florencegriswoldmuseum.org.The Midsummer Festival takes place on July 30-31, on the grounds of the Florence Griswold Museum, and at the Lyme Art Association next door. See www.oldlymeartalliance.org/midsummer for details.

Photos: Jean Santopatre/Fairfield University

Emily Rafferty, President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, takes a closer look at a painting in the exhibition curated by Fairfield University art history majors as their final project in a capstone senior seminar.

Degrees: On Saturday, May 22, while their fellow classmates were readying themselves for Fairfield University’s Family Dance held the night before baccalaureate commencement ceremonies, seven graduating art history majors, were all about business – the business of art, that is.

The young women, all dressed to the nines in black with a single red rose pinned to their ensembles, welcomed guests at an opening reception at the Southport Gallery in Southport, Connecticut, to view an exhibit for which the students, themselves, were the curators.

“7 degrees: Seven Perspectives, One Experience,” was the capstone project in a senior seminar course, and according to the class members, was the culmination of their four years of study and “a grand attempt to tie it altogether, before embarking into the infinite abyss of the art world.”

Without textbooks or curricula to guide them in their quest, students set out to find an artist and

a painting. Each class period during the semester was an art trail – adventure, during which students engaged leading figures in the art world. Among the stops: New York’s Winter Antiques Show at the Park Avenue Armory, Christie’s auction house at Rockefeller Center; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the office of the Connecticut Commission for Culture & Tourism in Hartford, plus many individual visits with curators and gallery owners up and down the coast.

The goal for each student was to have one to three paintings in the exhibit. In addition to the curator endeavors, the students worked together on promoting the exhibit -- developing an exhibit poster, invitation and news release. Caroline Nunez of Miami, Florida, said, “this

One Great Experience capstone is a great way for us to prepare for what is to come,” and Stacey Winsch of Westbury, N.Y., said the experience “completely immersed us in the art world.”

The student curators will receive a percentage of sales if their represented artwork is sold.

As part of giving back to their alma mater, the class agreed that a portion of the money from their sales would be donated as a senior gift to the University’s new Bellarmine Museum of Art, scheduled to open October 2010. The featured artists included Sean Beavers, Ralf Feyl, George Henry Boughton, Charles Warren Eaton, Nick Patten, Charles Wildbank and Kim Ruggiero.

The young curators exhibited to a packed house of art-goers.

Among the guests were Fairfield University President Jeffrey von Arx, S.J., and Emily Rafferty, New York City, President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ms. Rafferty was in Fairfield for the commencement ceremony the following day during which she was given an honorary doctor of laws degree.

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They didn’t tell me I would have to wear Extreme

hunting gear. By “they” I mean the few people endurance

by Christian McEvoy

who had done it before me. They did warn me about the wind, of course. And how my shoes would melt on Nevada’s route 50. And the sandstorms. They told me about the loneliness, the sunburns, and the rain that would pelt me in the face. Late season tornados – you can’t outrun those if they get too close. But no one said,“And oh yeah, if it’s hunting season in Pennsylvania, you will have to wear that bright orange stuff, so you won’t get shot.”

I

am not a musician; my dancing embarrasses my girlfriend, and I can’t even draw simple maps to describe directions. I am not an artist in any conventional sense, but in 2006, I ran 3400 miles from San Francisco to Rhode Island. I took 10 million steps through desert, over mountains, and across plains to raise money for cancer survivors. This is my art. This is my personal expression. Not exclusively running. In fact, I ride my bike more than I run these days. My art is the controlled and prolonged suffering of extreme endurance – for a cause.

And in Pennsylvania in November, my art included hoping not to get shot.

My mother can’t put my art on her refrigerator. Of course, she has hundreds of pictures of me riding my bike, running, and swimming. She will show you the DVD’s of me swimming from Alcatraz through the San Francisco Bay, running past the Continental Divide sign at 9,345 feet in Colorado, and cycling on the deserted West Side Highway of New York City. But even in the videos, you can’t really see it. What you see is the turning of pedals or the shuffle of a tired runner. But my expression is like that of the street-performing trumpet player. You could record the music he plays as thousands stride past him on their way to the Subway, but you will never know the events and the emotions that brought him to play those notes, in that specific order, on that day. The trumpeter’s art disappears as soon as it arrives.

I regularly do things like ride my bike for hundreds of miles or swim against the current of a river long enough to cross town and state lines. I’m not quiet about it either; I want you to notice

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what I’m doing. Most people who do notice act as if they are standing in front of a piece of abstract art.

They shake their heads and say things like – I just don’t get it.

One truth is that my big adventuring efforts are coupled with equally sized public relation campaigns in which I ask for donations to support cancer survivors. I think of it as a not-for-profit art auction. I ask people to offer support for cancer survivors in recognition of my effort. It’s really simple: I try to do something that blows your mind,

You can come stare for a few moments.

What you will see is me, focused and probably dazed, churning my pedals and kicking sweat in almost every direction. and then when I’ve captivated your attention, and you are standing in front of me pondering my sanity, I ask you to support cancer survivors. Trust me, it works.

For one of my next big efforts, I have decided to place my bike in the very public window of the Trek of Fairfield store in Fairfield, Connecticut. I will hook my bike up to a computerized and mechanical device that allows me to ride in one place, yet tracks the

distance I am virtually covering.

I’m going to ride for 24 hours, and I’m going to complete more than 400 miles. You can come stare for a few moments. What you will see is me, focused and probably dazed, churning my pedals and kicking sweat in almost every direction. You might see me grit my teeth or stick my tongue out of the right corner of my mouth (I do this when I’m concentrating). What you won’t see is the rage I feel when I think of all the names they called me as a teenager, or the calmness I have when I remember my mother or the forgiveness I try to give myself for all the times I have fallen short. You won’t be able to see exactly what is driving each pedal stroke.

Maybe you will be like the hunters I ran by in Pennsylvania. Maybe you too will ponder, “I wonder what this is all about?” Maybe you will treat me like the trumpet player and drop a few bucks in my helmet before you get on your way.

About the author: Christian McEvoy is the Director of the Connecticut Challenge Cancer Survivorship Center in Fairfield, CT. He is a graduate of Fairfield University, and he earned his Master’s Degree in Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

You can find links to information about Christian’s athletic activities at www.trekfairfield.com and you can learn about the Connecticut Challenge, including how to donate, at www.ctchallenge.org.

Photo by Maura A. Stokes

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>> WRITTEN WORD: SHORT FICTION (The Greater Good - continued from page 53)

UN compound, or the basement of each other’s residences. Beer and wine flowed freely. Pizza and pistachios were consumed in massive quantities. There were the weekly Karaoke parties where the Westerners took turns drunkenly belting out favorites such as “Love Shack” and “I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll.”

It was almost exactly like college life.

The near-sexual allure of living dangerously in an exotic war zone caused the young Westerners to suppress the fear of dying. Out there -- somewhere in the rural areas just beyond the city limits -Afghan citizens were being shot-up, mutilated, and beheaded by the blood-thirsty insurgents who sought control of the country.

After 25 years of permanent war, the Taliban saw the influx of Western aid workers as nothing less than a foreign invasion and occupation of their homeland. They vowed to kill as many of them as possible.

Allegra wrote about this on her blog.

“It’s easy to forget that your life is constantly in danger here,” she blogged on July 5.

“You don’t even realize how much you simply live with the threat, and minimize it to yourself.”

Abruptly, the atmosphere changed, seemingly overnight. A reliable Afghan informant told U.S. military personnel that the insurgents intended to penetrate the city of Kabul within the next few weeks. Western NGOs would be specifically targeted to create an “international incident.”

This information caused the U.S. military to go into high-alert mode. Back home, the war in Afghanistan was already highly unpopular among the taxpayers supporting it, and the last thing the U.S. administration was a high-profile slaughter of innocent Westerners. The Army began rotating small clusters of troops to the various NGO compounds to protect the aid workers from the threat.

Still, as the grunts flirted with her late at night, the threat seemed to recede, and for the NGO workers, things went back to normal.

“At least, as normal as things get in Kabul,” she blogged on July 17, three days before the attack.

HHH You’re gonna die tonight, Allegra.

The firefight raged all around her, all in a surreal, speeded-up motion. McAllister, out in the open, shouting to Alcantara, “Where are the hostiles?” but Alcantara had been hit full-force by the blast of the IED, and he was screaming at the sight of the lower part of his leg detached from the rest of his body. McAllister swung his weapon toward that gaping maw, and they swarmed in just then, four of them, wearing black ski masks and dressed in dark commando gear.

McAllister picked off the lead intruder before a bullet slammed into his heart, 62

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knocking him backward with the final grunt of his dying breath as it left his lungs.

Instinctively, Allegra jumped up to rush to the fallen soldier’s side, and then, with the coppery taste of fear on her tongue, she realized an assailant was aiming his 7.62mm Kalashnikov rifle at her. The shot seemed to hit her even before the masked man pulled the trigger, as the 70-gram bimetal projectile hit her at a velocity of 2,330 feet per second.

She felt a violent thud in her left shoulder, and she collapsed to the floor as her legs gave out from under her. The pain came like a hot, searing knife plunged into her flesh. She was vaguely conscious that her Gandhi t-shirt was soaking up the blood gushing from her wound. As she began slipping into shock, she moved her mouth, but could make no sound.

Her assailant approached to administer the killshot, but he was cut down by Alvarez, who hit him in the neck with a shot from the floor. The other assailants kicked in the door of the sleeping quarters, launching an attack on the sleeping aid workers in the other room. As Allegra slipped into unconsciousness, the anguished screams of the selfless people she’d come to know and care about over the last eight weeks filled her ears.

Reinforcements arrived from a nearby battalion almost immediately, but it was too late to rescue the six OW/OP aid workers. The U.S. soldiers cornered the two assailants in the guesthouse, but the insurgents had come well-prepared for the inevitability of their fate. The taller one detonated a jacket of explosives, killing them both, and preventing the military from interrogating them in a black box prison in a CIA facility.

HHH Allegra Bloomfield was taken by a four-rotor Medevac chopper to the army’s state-of-the-art Bagram Hospital on the outskirts of Kabul. There, the bullet was removed by a team of military doctors, and she was patched up. They wanted to observe her condition for a few days before discharging her and sending her back stateside.

It was during her second day there that she learned that McAllister was dead and Alcantara -- the soldier who saved her life -- had lost a limb in the firefight.

Alone in her hospital bed, Allegra began to weep. Was she responsible? Did she cause the soldiers to take their eye off the ball? She was tormented by the sing-song tautologies in her head. He’s dead, I’m not. I’m safe, he’s not. I’m going home, he’s not.

When she was finally up for it, she wandered aimlessly around the stark, deathly quiet halls of the military hospital. On the afternoon of the third day, she impulsively entered a room that was marked PHYSICAL THERAPY.

What she witnessed in that room changed her life forever.

In the large space were a dozen once able-bodied, athletic young men who were missing limbs. They were being trained how to live life as amputees.A few of the men had severe burns on their faces, on their necks. She would later learn that they were just a few of the thousands of GIs who would quietly be flown in to Washington’s Walter Reed Military Hospital to be fitted with prosthetics when possible, generally medicated, and given psychological and physical therapy, where they would be kept out of sight and out of mind from the taxpaying public. It would become the basis for her senior thesis and affect her life for years to come.

A surly physical therapist approached her, waving at Allegra with a clipboard.

“This is a closed facility. You have to leave now.”

And Allegra walked out. But the vision itself would never leave her.

HHH When she finally deplaned at JFK and got through Customs, there was a delegation of twelve waiting for her – her mother and father, her ex-boyfriend Ryan, her best friend from Greenwich High, some of her fellow students from NYU. They mobbed her, embraced her, flooded her with Thank-God-you’re-safe exclamations.

Her father, Michael Bloomfield stood back and took in this moment. The highpowered lawyer kept his emotions in check, watching his beautiful, idealistic daughter receive the affection of those who cared so deeply about her. By the grace of God, she had returned home safely from a war zone halfway around the world, surviving a combat situation that should have left her in a bodybag. The American media all but suppressed the story of the assault, but Bloomfield knew from the BBC that six of her colleagues had been cut down. It was nothing short of a miracle that she was standing here on her own locomotion today.

Certainly, it would take a few weeks for her to settle in at home, regain her faculties. And then Michael Bloomfield would sit his daughter down for The Talk.

Surely, this experience had sucked all the irrational save-the-world zealotry out of her system, and she’d be ready to redirect her intellectual gifts to a future that involved applying to law schools, following in his footsteps. Time for her to give up the so-called “greater good,” and maximize her potential, for chrissakes.

But he knew the plans he had conceived for his daughter were for naught, when Allegra stepped forward, fell into her father’s arms and began weeping.

“Daddy, there’s so much left to do,” she sobbed. “So much left to do.”

>> Local Talent: Painting

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Artist Sholeh Janati Sholeh Janati is an award-winning and critically-acclaimed artist whose works are found in Europe, Middle East and North America. Her work is characterized by strong brush strokes, rich textures and vibrant colors and her creative, spontaneous and affectionate personality shines through her paintings, which unite past, present and future and represents a great strength of cultural identity.

Her talents were originally recognized by Persian traditionalists, she has since concentrated on still life, nudes, portraits and abstract paintings, which has brought her praise from a broad spectrum of American and European enthusiasts. The vibrancy of her colors and her ability to express real life

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>> Local Talent: Painting

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1. Natasha, Acrylic on Canvas, 30" x 40", 2010 2. Maestro, Acrylic on Canvas, 46” x 60”, 2010 3. Afterglow, Acrylic on Canvas, 40" x 60", 2010

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through her work is the defining characteristic of her creativity. Her recent works have focused on abstract paintings, through which she expresses her vision through a myriad of colors and shapes.

Sholeh’s paintings typically evoke a unique response. Collectors of Sholeh’s work have commented that her paintings provide a constant interaction with the viewer -- as if taken on a journey to a new place and time. Repeated viewings of her work reveal something that hadn’t seen before ~ a constant interaction with the individual, as if the painting changes dynamically time after time. In this sense, the individual finds each of Sholeh’s works as an expression of their own artistic vision.In the first half of 2010, Sholeh’s works were selected for inclusion in the prestigious Art of the Northeast exhibition and the highly competitive 53rd Chautauqua Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art. Her first solo show, “Secrets,” opened to acclaim at the Ridgefield Guild of Artists in February.

Most recently, she exhibited four paintings in the Westport Art Center’s Art By Local event, and won an award at the Ridgefield Arts Center in March for her painting, “The Jewel of Asia.” Sholeh maintains her studio in Westport, Connecticut. Her works have been on display at the Bowery Gallery in New York City; the Viridian Artists Gallery in New York City; Andrews Art Museum in Andrews, NC; The Pequot Museum in Southport, CT; Ridgefield Artists Guild in Ridgefield, CT; Rowayton Art Center in Rowayton CT; Westport Arts Center and the Westport Arts Festival in Westport CT; and Silvermine Art Gallery in New Caanan, CT.

SHOLEHJANATI@YAHOO.COM SHOLEHART.COM 203.856.0789

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