In the 1950s, Ringgold focused on painting and addressed issues of racism and politics. Over time she became intrigued by character development and experimented with a mix of painting and traditional quilt design elements. Gradually, she added storytelling with words to her visual works, creating a novel hybrid of mural paintings with traditional album or story quilts. To date, Ringgold has made more than 95 quilts and hundreds of other artworks.

Mother and Daughter Create Fabric Frames Together
In the 1970s, Ringgold collaborated with her mother, Willi Posey Jones. Jones worked as a fashion designer and a dressmaker and helped Ringgold fashion fabric borders as frames for her painted canvas. The fabric frames were more flexible and less expensive than traditional wood or metal frames.

Ringgold had found it doubly challenging — as a black artist and as a woman artist — to find galleries willing to show her work. Without an audience, Ringgold could not get her messages across to the community. The fabric frames made it more economical and easier to roll Ringgold’s artwork to ship pieces to interested galleries around the country.

Sharing a Multi-Generation Tradition
Ringgold had a rich family heritage of fabric arts. In addition to her mother, Ringgold’s maternal great-grandmother, Betsy Bingham, had worked in fabric and made quilts. Bingham’s mother, Susie Shannon, had made quilts as a slave in antebellum Florida. In her work, Ringgold appears both to contain the spirit of these women and to set their spirits free once again. In 1997 Ringgold made “Cotton Fields, Sunflowers, Blackbirds and Quilting Bees,” which depicts a traditional circle of women quilting in the midst of a sunflower field — a very nontraditional location, but one which symbolizes the strength and joy in women working together.

Children’s Books
Written in 1991, “Tar Beach,” (Crown Publishers, Inc., 1991, $18.00; paperback 1996, $6.99), a children’s book, was the first of many successful translations of Ringgold’s fabric work to a medium where they could reach more people.

In “Tar Beach,” Cassie Louise Lightfoot, an 8-year-old third grader, lies beside her brother on the flat asphalt roof of their apartment building. Cassie looks up at the stars while her parents and neighbors play cards. She sees herself flying up and over the George Washington Bridge and, magically, it becomes hers. In her vision, she is liberated and free to rescue herself and her family from the oppression of racism and poverty in their lives.

Exuberant from her spiritual flight, Cassie inspires readers with the message that anyone can fly. Ringgold makes a unique contribution through her children’s books by creating many heroic and inspiring girls, in addition to Cassie. The fact that the girls are black — or African-American — fills a void in children’s literature and enriches all her readers.

Holding Ringgold’s book is almost as delicious as being allowed to touch original artwork. Ringgold repainted scenes from her original “Tar Beach” story quilt, made in 1988, and added new images. The translation into print permits the sensation of getting in closer to Ringgold’s vision.

“Tar Beach” was her first book and was both a Caldecott Honor Book and winner of the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration.

Also, “Faith Ringgold” by Robyn Montana Turner (Little Brown & Co., Boston, 1993, $15.95) is an inspiring life story with wonderful illustrations of Ringgold and her artwork.

Quilts to Capture the Experience of Black Women in America
Ringgold developed a rich and complex story about a black American woman and carried the narrative through a series titled “The American Collection.” Several of these works travel together. Seen together, they are soul-stirring. Ringgold can inspire adults through her imaginative works as readily as she can paint a child in flight. She says that she gets ideas from reflecting on those who have inspired her. She grew up in Harlem and feels that she was surrounded by positive role models, including Thurgood Marshall, Dinah Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune and Duke Ellington.

Treat Yourself to a View of New Masterpieces
Faith Ringgold’s work is included in the permanent collections of several museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

During Kwanzaa, treat yourself to your own virtual tour of her Web site and, in the new year, look forward to getting to know her work more. Don’t forget to inspire friends by passing along new names or sharing ideas with them. It is a wonderful way to spread a woman’s touch.

Last January, after the holidays wound to a close, my friend Jenn shared a snippet of cheerful news. A show of works by Faith Ringgold was being installed at the New Museum in New York City. Just passing along an inspiring name is a wonderful gift. Jenn topped that by going with me to see the show. The road trip was a wonderful time to connect beyond our usual talks — friends can cover a lot of emotional ground in 400 miles. Ringgold’s works offered a journey even deeper into the connections between women.

Artwork speaks to us as individuals. To me, Ringgold’s “Weight Loss Performance” quilt spoke loud and clear. The work portrays Ringgold at various weights, on a smorgasbord of weight loss plans and shared her feelings about body image.

Jenn, who has never had a weight issue, didn’t hear the quilt the same way, but she smiled knowingly, knowing me, when I raved about it. The connections we make and take from artwork, as from friends, can replenish us. Similarly, we can nurture ourselves by celebrating creativity from a new perspective.

Kwanzaa is celebrated for seven days and nights, from Dec. 26 through Jan. 1, and includes a special time for celebrating creativity. Kwanzaa offers a perfect opportunity to replenish your creative spirit before the New Year arrives. If it is new to you, consider it a great time to focus on the contributions made by African-Americans. Like a rich work of art, Kwanzaa can speak to us all as individuals.

Creating a New Holiday
Though it draws from ancient rituals and festivals, Kwanzaa is a relatively new holiday, established in America in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga. Karenga felt that African-Americans needed a special time for reflection and affirmation. In Africa, harvest festivals often lasted a week and began late in December. In different areas, different foods were celebrated. Karenga strove to distill some of the common principles from the many different celebrations. He also wished to incorporate ancient wisdom about history, mythology, creativity, social structure, political organization and economics into one holiday.

In creating Kwanzaa, Karenga fulfilled his own aspirations and inspired many others to learn more about African-American culture. Kwanzaa is open for all to celebrate. It is not a religious holiday and is intended to be shared.

A Feast for Creativity: Kuumba
The sixth principle of Kwanzaa, Kuumba, is celebrated on Dec. 31 with a feast. Kuumba represents a time to reflect on our individual creative spirit and the ways we can use this spirit to beautify the world, leaving it richer for our having passed through. The feast allows everyone to use his or her creativity to make an immediate positive difference in his or her family. Kuumba is also a time to honor those who have gone before us and to recognize the gifts they have given us through their own expressions of creativity.

Faith Ringgold: Honoring Creativity in Women
Faith Ringgold is an artist whose work inspires, delights and conveys a woman’s touch. She is both an artist and a teacher, and is a senior professor of art at University of California in San Diego.

Ringgold expresses her creativity in both disciplines. As an artist, Ringgold has created her own balance of mixed media to capture the images she holds in her memory and in her imagination. As a teacher, Ringgold strives to find media to express her messages so that they will captivate, inform and inspire.

Cash Flo thinks you’re terrific — it’s not easy to hit the books after having been away so long. Some tips for finding money:

1. Make an appointment with the loan officer/director at your college. They always have the best and most up-to-date sources of information about scholarships, grants and loans. Be sure to tell this person that you’re a single mom, as there may be money specifically earmarked for women in your situation. Schools across the country are encouraging older women to finish their education.

2. Check out the many federal aid programs. Among the programs to ask about: Pell Grants (which, if you qualify, do not have to be repaid) and Stafford Loans, on which you do pay interest.

3. Contact these three organizations, which often assist moms resuming their educations:

* The American Association of University Women,
* The Business & Professional Women’s Foundation,
* Soroptimist International of the Americas,

The last two also have many local branches; look in the phone book to see if there are any in your area. Decisions about grants are often made at the local level.

4. Find the book “Free Money for College.” The fourth edition, published in 1996 by Facts on File, has a chapter called Grants for Ethnic Students. Both your public and college libraries should have a copy.

5. Check out Beatrice’s Web Guide, where the Education section includes a list of scholarship sites.

6. The Scrippts Howard Foundation in Cincinnati, OH, has a scholarship program for journalism students.

7. This leads me to my final suggestion: Contact the newspapers and magazines published in your area, and ask about grants for local students. You’re likely to land one.

On paper, at least. In The Experience Economy (Harvard Business School Press), James Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II argue that “experiences have emerged as the next step in the progression of economic value.” Basic commodities such as grain and fuel stood at the top of the economic food chain, then came products and eventually services. Today, as more services become commoditized via the Web, delivering what Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos calls “customer ecstasy” becomes an increasingly critical component of business strategy. Smell would seem to fit into that promise nicely.

Gilmore has not smelled an iSmell yet, but if it works as promised, he says, it signals a much-needed evolution for the sensory-starved Internet population. “Part of the reason AOL shot past Prodigy,” Gilmore says, “is that they understood the sensory nature of the Web, even if it was something as simple as colorized fonts and use of the sound, ‘you’ve got mail.’”

Silly as it may sound, a much more sensory-rich Web environment might eventually fatten the profit margins of its most successful and burgeoning businesses. “The Web isn’t all about data and information, it’s equally about the layering on of sensory phenomena,” Gilmore says.

Electronic auctioneering agents, he says, help expose “the reality of frictionless and instantaneous access to pricing,” and will continue to test businesses struggling with thin margins. It could also leave them addicted to advertising-based revenue models. But smell things up a little, and who knows? “It will be the staging of experiences through sensory phenomenon that provides the escape out of that trap,” Gilmore says. “This new technology, the digitizing of scent, adds another sense to the equation. Taste is the only remaining one, and that will be a big challenge.”

How come? For years, psychologists have argued that among all the senses, smell is most closely linked with memory, yet probably the least utilized. (“Try to describe a smell,” Bellenson says. “You probably can’t without sounding like an idiot. The only people that have a vocabulary for that are perfumers.”) But that is not the only reason why digitized scent has big-time commercial potential, according to Avery Gilbert, director of scientific affairs at New York’s Olfactory Research Fund, who has studied the links between psychology and smell for two decades. (He also coordinated the “scent-tracking” of an experimental opera in Boston in the 1980s by planting ushers armed with aerosol cans in the audience to spray scents at specific intervals.) Bellenson recruited Gilbert last April to join DigiScents as its vice president of sensory research and development, where he works on refining and expanding the aroma palette that the iSmell can create.

“In the fragrance industry, a major part of the marketing effort is devoted to just getting the product scent under people’s noses,” Gilbert says. “Go to Safeway and stand in the shampoo aisle. In a few minutes, you’ll see people pop a cap and smell what’s inside. For many product categories, [smell] is the critical determinant.”

Beyond that, though, is the growing realization that in our expanding online universe, delivering ever more sophisticated (and pleasing) experiences to consumers — not just functional innovations such as overnight delivery, one-click buying, or order tracking — is a priority, especially as products and services become commoditized on the Net. The concept of selling experiences may have started in shopping malls and Disneyland in the 1960s, but on the Web it’s still sitting in the dark.

“I’ve been complaining for years that the computer is just a visual medium. It’s flat, it’s quiet, doesn’t smell. And until the iMac, it came in a beige or black box,” Gilbert explains. “By scent-enabling a visual, you take the experience out of the screen. In a way that the music in a movie comments on the action — ironically or literally — smells can do that, too. Instead of visual puns, we could have scented puns.”

The book you’re looking for is called “Publication 17 — Your Federal Income Tax for Individuals.” More than 300 pages in length, it covers most information of interest to individual filers. You can get it from some post offices and libraries And, of course, IRS offices during walk-in hours. But your best bet is to get the publication from the IRS web site or by calling 1-800-TAX-FORM.

I can’t go to an IRS office, and I can’t wait for tax forms to be sent. How can I get some tax forms quickly?

forms and instructions by return fax. Or download them directly.

Does claiming a home office deduction on my tax return significantly increase my chances of being selected for an audit?

Claiming an office in your home does increase the odds of being audited. A special form (Form 8829) must be filed with tax returns by those claiming the deduction. This makes it easy, with the use of computer technology, for the IRS to find returns with the deduction and consider auditing them. The IRS rules that allow the deduction are complex and not always understood by taxpayers. In 1993 the Supreme Court ruled that, in order to be deductible, an office in the home must be the principal location of a taxpayer’s business. The IRS has found it profitable to audit returns in which the home-office deduction has been claimed, because many people do not understand these rules and claim the deduction in error.

What is the alternative minimum tax?

It is a tax imposed on individuals, estates, trusts and corporations that have obtained large tax savings through the use of certain tax deductions and exemptions. The alternative minimum tax is calculated by refiguring taxable income and tax after elimination and/or reduction of a wide variety of items referred to as “Tax Preference Items.” If the refigured tax exceeds the original tax computation, the higher, or “Alternative Minimum Tax,” must be paid. The refigured tax is calculated using Form 4626 (forcorporations), Form 6251 (for individuals) and Form 1041-Schedule 1 (trusts).

Why does the IRS refer to me as a “customer”? I have no choice but to pay my taxes to the government, and I must pay what it says is due. The IRS can also take money from my bank account or garnish wages.

The definition of a customer, according to Webster’s dictionary, is “a person with whom one must deal.” There’s been a real effort at the IRS recently to be kinder and gentler. The IRS manual provides guidance to employees on customer service, telling them they must be “accurate, responsive (complete) and timely.” You may not have a choice as to whether or not to pay taxes, but you do deserve to receive quality customer service.

Professionals are sending men mixed messages about their sexuality. Males are put down sexually, carry a heavy burden, and are set apart from each other because of complicated societal implications, and they say that straight males are more set apart when compared to homosexual men, who lean on each other for guidance. Others give direct suggestions for heterosexual men. Mostly responding to Women’s Lib, men have done many things to make women feel good, but in return, these ways cause them to take on more responsibility and trouble. Men need to face up to the way they regard women before they modify their thinking on sexuality.

The most common sexual difficulty facing men is not erectile dysfunction or premature ejaculation, but instead it is difficulty in enjoying the sexual interaction with his partner. Men zero in on traditional sex only, according to our expert research and experience. This captivation has endangered and hurt a male’s potential for real sexual bliss.

Men have more often than not been seen more for what they do rather than who they are. Male sexuality focuses on skill and performing, which is very central to the amount of satisfaction based on “doing it right.”  In contrast however, it is obsession with performing and methods that restrict the amount of enjoyment a man can have with a sexual mate.

As men age, their physical and mental health can begin to fail, causing various erectile problems. Erectile dysfunction is caused by many things, such as: stress, tiredness, unhealthy living, and prescription drugs used for treating other medical conditions.

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A boy’s sexual knowledge is usually formed based on macho fictions. These obviously have an enormous impact on their sexual relationships. This standard, highly influenced by pornographic books and television, becomes for a lot of men, the most important (and the only source sometimes) for sexual learning. Society teaches men that there isn’t much use for close, emotional relationships forming.

Popular media helps men to learn how to relate to women. One of the pioneers of rock music, Buddy Holly, penned “Maybe baby, I want you tonight,” which implied that girls are just things that want to be needed and won over. The James Bond character sent a message to males that it is their duty to get a female into their bedroom, or they aren’t true men. The song, “I want you,” by the Beatles, resounded similar implications also.

What do males learn? Most of it deals with the drive for performance. The way men are taught to view it is that they must be able to provide what their partner desires at a moment’s notice. By studying these false ideas about sex, we can see some of the myths that trouble men: physical contact always leads to sex, sex is only intercourse, to be good sex, orgasm must result, and a man must lead during sex. Males are taught that a great lover is a person who takes responsibility for his mate having many orgasms. Essentially, a man is taught to be a sex machine primed for action and should understand the precise way to make his partner contented. He thinks that his mate’s happiness will rely on penis size and how hard he is.

A lot of things told to young boys about sex are based on the size of the penis, amount of times they can ejaculate, and the amount of “victories.”  Sexual activity is one method that teen boys use as a comparison to their peers. Sexual feats are sometimes talked about like sporting events, using tough language and competition as conversation drivers.

Using a language like that of sports, accomplishments, sexually, are many times discussed in terms that are competitive. Brian, age 51, was a typical example of this. He had much success running his landscaping company, as he described himself as a hard worker. Brian opted for individual therapy after his divorce because since he began dating again, “things with women have not been right,” and one of the things he felt was causing difficulties was what he referred to as his “overly aggressive approach to get a woman into bed.” When discussing Brian’s earliest recollections of “sex education,” he recounted two images to me. After physical education class in the locker room one day, one of his good buddies was being taunted about his penis size. It came to his mind when a few guys bothered his friend and said to him “a girl will never want you.”  Another thought that came into his mind was when he arrived home from a date and his father asked him, “Well, did you score a home run?”  Brian realized what his father was trying to say, exactly. “Later on, I felt like I was a loser if a girl didn’t want to have sex with me,” Brian said.

I was shocked that as negative as these example were, Brian did not understand immediately that this influenced his current trouble with sexual aggressiveness. Both of these images demonstrate well just how incorrect ideas about sex can affect how men think about their sexuality.

See next post…

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Human Euphoria Pheromone Cologne is just the thing for that guy who simply has no luck with women – a solution that relies upon the one thing that many men have successfully used in the past. This solution is called the pheromone. The pheromone can barely be detected, but it creates an immediate reaction in opposite sex, which results in their interest in you.

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