The Digest
What’s Happening at KVCC
What’s below in this edition
Project Challenge (Pages 1/2)Camera basics (Page 11)
Cowboy truth (Page 3)History’s things (Page 12)
The global KAFI (Pages 4-6)Potter’s jazz (Pages 12-14)
‘An Inconvenient Truth’ (Pages 6/7)Aroma therapy (Page 14)
Speaking Spanish (Pages 7/8)‘West Side Story’ (Pages 14/15)
‘Win-Win’ way (Pages 8/9)Serving the autistic (P-15/16)
Race dialogue (Page 9)Heart Walk (Page 16)
Poet Jack Ridl (Pages 9/10)Writing workshop (Pages 16-18)
College Goal Sunday (Pages 10/11)Spiking galore (Pages 18/19)
And finally (Page 19)
☻☻☻☻☻☻
Point students toward ‘Project Challenge’ contests
Faculty and students are invited to take part in a trio of educational competitions that will culminate in a day-long celebration of multidisciplinary project-based learning on Thursday, March 15, at the Arcadia Commons Campus.
“Project Challenge,” which will also feature a series of free seminars and workshops for KVCC students, will be staged in Anna Whitten Hall, the Center for New Media, and the Kalamazoo Valley Museum from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. that day.
A free lunch for participants is part of the day’s attractions as will be a keynote address.
Entries in the three competitions will be judged by professionals in a variety of fields and prizes in the form of a semester-long scholarship for 12 credit hours and free KVCC courses will be awarded.
Here are the contests:
◙The Apprentice Kalamazoo: In a take-off of the television show, three-student teams are challenged to develop a plan for the future of downtown Kalamazoo. Team members will use the critical-thinking skills they are learning in business, marketing, graphic-design, English, communications and mathematics courses to forge their plans.
The teams will come together on the morning of March 15, be presented the details of the task that has a theme of Kalamazoo’s future, and have the rest of the day to complete their projects. Each member of the winning team will receive a 12-credit-hour, in-district scholarship. There is no limit to the number of entries.
◙Film/Video/Animation/Photo Showcase: Using the words of Helen Keller that “alone we can do so little and together we can do so much,” three-student teams will use any or combinations of these media, along with graphic-design and web-development skills, to create a 30-second artistic expression of that quotation. The deadline for entries is Wednesday, March 14. The judges will announce the winner at the conclusion of “Project Challenge” the next day. Winners will be awarded free KVCC classes.
◙The KVCC Experience: While the other two are targeted toward specific curricula and courses, this one is open to the spectrum of KVCC students who want to share their educational experiences with peers, instructors and the community.
Individual contestants will demonstrate their communication skills, creativity and ingenuity by sharing the impact that a KVCC education has had on their lives through trials, tribulations and successes. Contestants can express their perspectives in essays, posters, the graphic arts, painting, dramatics, pottery, music or video. Whatever the format, it must be “tangible, legible and capable of display.”
The deadline for entries is Wednesday, March 14. Each contestant will also make a two-to-three-minute presentation “of what it is and why it is” on the day of “Project Challenge.”
The winner will also receive a free 12-hour KVCC scholarship while the runner-up can sign up for a free class at KVCC.
“We prepare students for employment,” said Lesa Strausbaugh, the coordinator of multidisciplinary projects at the Arcadia Commons Campus. “One of the many ways we do this is by exposing them to project experiences to challenge creativity and results. Projects demand input from students in various disciplines of study, interacting on teams under shared objectives and using project-management processes to accomplish a goal.”
She said students who take part in “Project Challenge” will gather experience in working in teams and hone their project-management, organizational and personal-management skills. “Students will have an opportunity to apply what they have learned in KVCC classrooms to real-world project situations.”
Strausbaugh is urging KVCC instructors to point their students toward these contests as part of their learning experiences. Individual students and teams can learn more about “Project Challenge” and apply for the contests on line at this website:
With details forthcoming, 19 seminars and workshops on March 15 will focus on such topics as techniques for achieving success in education, career and life, how to manage debt, acquiring public-speaking skills, and stress management.
“While the three contests are the capstone events of ‘Project Challenge,’” Strausbaugh said, “the workshops give students the opportunity to broaden their horizons and acquire skills to reach their career goals.”
Strausbaugh can be contacted for more information at extension 7810 or .
The black and white of America’s cowboy era
Thanks to Hollywood and to television’s early days, the image of the American cowboy comes across as the hero who never kissed the girl, the clean-shaven good guy out to right wrongs, and always white.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of “The Reel West,” a flashback to “The Real West” is scheduled for the Texas Township Campus on Wednesday (Feb. 14).
Murphy Darden, a Kalamazoo resident since 1948, will present “The History of Black Cowboys” from 12:30 to 1:45 p.m. in the Student Commons Theater. His Feb. 7 presentation was cancelled because the blizzard-like conditions closed the college.
On display at that time and through noon Thursday will be part of his collection of black-cowboy memorabilia.
The program, part of Kalamazoo Valley Community College’s observance of Black History Month, is free and open to the public.
Joining him will be KVCC alumnus Buddy Hannah, a Black Civic Theater performer, one of the guiding lights in the Black Arts and Cultural Center as a poet, an organizer of the Black Arts Festival, and a columnist for The Kalamazoo Gazette.
Far from being mirror images of the likes of Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson, the American cowboy was more of an adventurous, narrow-minded country bumpkin whose hard riding was matched by hard drinking.
After a rough cattle drive, he more than likely ended up in jail or a brothel than the local church for Sunday services.
The era of the cowboy lasted about a generation, from the end of the Civil War to the mid-1880s. Researchers estimate their number as no more than 40,000 over that 20-year period.
For every “professional” on the trail, there was a disillusioned adventure seeker from half a world away and a good-humored youth trying to show how tough he was.
Historians and collectors such as Darden place the number of black cowboys at around 5,000. Most of them had been slaves on Texas ranches, where they were taught the skills of roping and riding. Freedom sent them to the cattle range.
Another 5,000 were Hispanics. At least, their future generations had The Cisco Kid on the screen.
Darden’s repertoire includes the story of men such as Nat Love, who was born in a slave cabin in Tennessee in 1854, rode into Dodge City at the age of 15, began work as a trail hand, and ended up as a rodeo celebrity.
Another African-American, Bill Pickett, is considered the greatest steer wrestler of the American West. “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” he can prove, was actually “The Black Rose of Texas.”
Darden, who grew up in Aberdeen, Miss., remembers going to movies as a boy and loving the shoot-’em-ups at the local Bijou. Etched in the back of his mind was a curiosity that none of those faces on the screen looked like him.
Once he learned as an adult that there were cowboys of that ilk, he began in 1976 building his collection of artifacts that reflected the legacy of the black cowboy who earned their niches in the cattle industry and in the world of rodeo.
KAFI truly is international
The 480 entries from 35 countries who entered the four-day 2007 Kalamazoo Animation Festival International (KAFI) in May will be competing for $15,000 in prize money and a bit of national glory.
In addition to entries submitted by major studios, independents and aspiring student animators from across the United States, also represented in the 12 divisions under four major categories are animated features produced in:
Canada, Australia, Mexico, Bangladesh, Scotland, Belgium, Great Britain, Turkey, Brazil, The Czech Republic, Thailand, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, France, Spain, Germany, South Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Serbia, Ireland, Russia, Portugal, Israel, Poland, Italy, Japan, South Korea, China, Malaysia, The Netherlands, and New Zealand.
The next step is for KAFI creative director Ellen Besen and several colleagues to winnow the entrants to a field of around 100 finalists. Their decisions will be announced in mid-March.
Then Besen will be joined by three other judges, who will receive CDs containing all of the finalist entries, to select the dozen winners. They will be named at the festival’s wrap-up event on Sunday, May 20. At the three previous KAFIs, entrants have been nominated for Academy Awards and went on to earn Oscars in their fields.
The three other judges are: independent Canadian animator Karen Aqua, animation instructor Marc Glassman, and John Fountain, a Western Michigan University graduate who has been associated with the top animation studios in Hollywood.
A comedy writer who has been involved with “The Simpsons” for more than half of its 20-year run will be one of the main presenters at the festival that opens May 17.
Mike Reiss, a four-time Emmy winner for co-producing more than 200 episodes and penning a dozen “Simpson” scripts, will be featured on Friday, May 18, at 7 p.m. in the State Theater.
“An Evening with Mike Reiss” will be a ticketed event open to the public during the four-day festival in downtown Kalamazoo. At around 11 p.m., a second event will be a showing of his film, “Queer Duck: The Movie.” Tickets for that are $6.
His participation is being sponsored by the Arcus Gay and Lesbian Fund.
The competitions, screenings, professional development, and networking interaction between today’s and tomorrow’s animators will fill theMay 17-20 festival.
There will be professional-development seminars led by animators who are knee-deep in the industry’s technology age, training sessions for students, workshops that explore animation as a career, and portfolio reviews. Students can learn what it takes to get into the animation business and gain a grasp of the state of the industry.Thirty-three presenters and special guests have committed to the 2007 festival.
One of the festival’s unique attractions, "The Cartoon Challenge," selects 10 teams from animation programs spanning North America who engage in a "24/7" cartoon-creating competition prior to the convening of the festival.
The teams selected to compete arrive at the Center for New Media on the Sunday preceding festival week and bivouac there. Over a four-day period, their objective is to conceive, script, design and produce up to a 30-second, animated public-service announcement on a topic chosen by the event’s sponsor. The winning school receives scholarship funds for animation students. The “Cartoon Challenge” teams will be notified on March 9.
There will be seven showings of the animation created by the finalists at the State Theater and at the Mary Jane Stryker Theater in the Kalamazoo Valley Museum. The eighth at the end of the festival will be the capstone event when the winners will be announced.
The seven showings will not be in a “here-you-are” format that is based on a particular category of competition. Instead, Besen will create individual shows that revolve around a central theme. One could be targeted for a family audience; one for adult viewers. One could focus on humorous approaches or serious topics. No matter what, each will be a “show.”
Reiss, a 47-year-old Harvard graduate now living in California, served as an editor of both The Harvard Lampoon and The National Lampoon.
That prepped him to become involved with “The Simpsons,” which was created by Matt Groening and went on the air in 1987 as part of a real-person sit-com and evolved into its own half-hour series on Fox three years later, as a writer and co-producer in its third season.
The series is known for lampooning almost every aspect of the human condition, American culture, society in general, and television itself. As a satirical parody of the Middle-American lifestyle, it has retained its freshness and relevancy because Reiss is among a cadre of writers and co-producers who have contributed to its staying power that will be celebrated by its 20th anniversary this coming April. A feature-length movie is scheduled to be released in July.
With a “nothing is sacred” approach to topics and issues, “The Simpsons,” its writers and producers have attracted more than a bit of heat from parents’ groups and conservatives because their main characters in the dysfunctional family aren’t exactly “role models.” Commented one: “We are trying to strengthen the American family, to make them more like ‘The Waltons’ and less like ‘The Simpsons.’”
Meanwhile, the rest of the nation and much of the world have been laughing like crazy at the animated series, which was almost cancelled before it hit the air and which Time magazine has labeled “the greatest TV show of the 20th century.”
“The Simpsons” was the first TV series on the Fox network to appear in the top-30 highest-rated shows of the season. Several episodes have been viewed by more than 30 million people in their night-time slots.
Reiss has been more than a one-trick pony in his career as a comedy writer. He’s created material for Johnny Carson, Eddie Murphy and Garry Shandling. Reiss is also the co-creator of “The Critic,” the animated TV series about a movie critic that is part of the Comedy Central lineup of shows.
“Queer Duck” is the animated adventures of a gay duck. Following Reiss’ commentary and one of the festival’s competitive screenings, it will be shown at the State Theater beginning at around 11 p.m. For those who only want to see the film, tickets will be $6.
“There were two things that upset me and led to writing ‘Queer Duck,’” Reiss said. “Back in 2000, there was an article in New York Magazine that reported the core audience for ‘Sex in the City’ was gay men. We all know that now, but at the time that was news because there was no ‘Will & Grace’ or ‘Queer as Folk.’ The closest thing to gay men on TV were those four sluts? I got very upset.
“I wondered,” Reiss said, “why is a large chunk of our population being ignored, while at the same time Dr. Laura Schlessinger had declared war on gay people.”
Schlessinger’s rhetoric, he said, became so sharp that radio stations began to drop her syndicated show, enough that she attempted to apologize through a newspaper ad.
“She was simply spreading hate and homophobia,” Reiss said. “So I wrote the first ‘Queer Duck’ cartoon and envisioned Dr. Laura as Elmer Fudd and Queer Duck as a gay version of Bugs Bunny. For being such a relentlessly happy cartoon, it actually came out of things that made me angry at society.”
In addition to being an award-winning mystery writer, the KAFI keynoter has written for Esquire and Games Magazine.
Kalamazoo’s Irving S. Gilmore Foundation has joined the college in being the major underwriter of all four festivals. All of the activities and events will be held in the Center for New Media, KVCC’s Anna Whitten Hall, the State Theater, and the Kalamazoo Valley Museum.
KAFI is now a biennial event, sharing the every-other-year format with the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival that brings world-famous performers to downtown Kalamazoo for two weeks in May of even-numbered years.
Nuts-and-bolts information and updates about all KAFI activities -- dates, times, location, tickets, and entry information-- is available at this webpage -- -- or by calling Maggie Noteboom at the festival office at (269) 373-7883.
Gore’s documentary booked for Commons
Five free showings of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Academy Award-nominated documentary about global warming featuring former Vice President Al Gore, have been booked for Kalamazoo Valley Community College in February.
Part of the college’s ongoing series, “Eye on Ethics and Civility,” the showings come on the heels of a new report by the 113-nation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that concludes it is “very likely” global warming, as dramatically evidenced by the growing shrinkage of glaciers and polar ice caps, is primarily caused by human activity.
Based on Gore’s best-selling book of the same title, “An Inconvenient Truth” will be show in the Student Commons Theater on the Texas Township Campus: