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Roeliff Jansen Community Library, in partnership with the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Columbia and Greene counties, is sponsoring a series of three “Back to Nature” seminars conducted by Master Gardener volunteers.
The first offering in the series, “Seed Starting Essentials & Seed Swap,” will take place Sunday, March 17, from 1 to 3 p.m. at the library and will be presented by Maureen Mooney, a retired nurse who has been a Master Gardener as part of the Columbia and Greene counties volunteer organization for 12 years.
Participants in the presentation will learn about seed starting essentials, best practices for successful germination of seeds, caring for seedlings, and how to transition the seedlings into the garden in the spring. A seed swap will follow the presentation and participants are invited to bring their favorite seeds to share.
The seminar is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the Roe Jan Library at 518-325-4101. For guidelines on seed swapping, go to: www.roejanlibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/S...
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The Pine Plains FFA will present its 30th annual Toy Show and Auction Saturday, March 16, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Stissing Mountain Junior/Senior High School, 2829 Church St.
The event will include children’s activities and door prizes, plus a pedal tractor pull starting at noon with prizes awarded. The auction, which is limited to approximately 100 quality items, will begin at 2 p.m. Consignments and donations are welcome. Vendor tables are available for $20 and show tables are free.
General admission is $3, and children under age 5 will be admitted free of charge. For more information, contact John Boadle at 845-868-7515.
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Pomona Grange to hold penny social
Mar 08, 2024
Dutchess County Pomona Grange No. 32 will hold its annual penny social Saturday, March 16, at the Stanford Grange Hall, 6043 Route 82.
Doors will open at 5:30 p.m. and calling will begin at 7 p.m. Included will be a penny table, a dollar table, homemade baked goods, theme baskets donated by Dutchess County granges, and door prizes. Refreshments will be sold by Grange youth.
For more information, contact Marilyn Brands at 845-223-5717 or Melissa Traver at 845-891-9779.
Film still from “Radical Wolfe” courtesy of Kino Lorber
If you’ve ever wondered how retrospective documentaries are made, with their dazzling compilation of still images and rare footage spliced between contemporary interviews, The Moviehouse in Millerton, New York, offered a behind-the-scenes peek into how “the sausage is made” with a screening of director Richard Dewey’s biographical film “Radical Wolfe” on Saturday, March 2.
Coinciding with the late Tom Wolfe’s birthday, “Radical Wolfe,” now available to view on Netflix, is the first feature-length documentary to explore the life and career of the enigmatic Southern satirist, city-dwelling sartorial icon and pioneer of New Journalism — a subjective, lyrical style of long-form nonfiction that made Wolfe a celebrity in the pages of Esquire and vaulted him to the top of the best-seller lists with his drug-culture chronicle “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and his first novel, “The Bonfire of The Vanities.”
The film is rife with local connections, featuring talking-head anecdotes by Wolfe’s former agent and Sharon resident Lynn Nesbit as well as Wolfe contemporary Gay Talese of Roxbury and Christopher Buckley, the son of the late Sharon resident William F. Buckley Jr., who interviewed Wolfe on PBS’ “Firing Line” in 1970.
Present at The Moviehouse was the film editor for “Radical Wolfe,” Brian Gersten, a Millerton resident who recently worked on “Enter The Slipstream,” documenting an American cycling team through the 2020 season of the Tour de France, and the film’s archival producer, Rich Remsberg of North Adams, Massachusetts, a two-time Emmy winner who recently produced “Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street” for HBO.
Remsberg admitted that in his archival search, there is a competitive sense of “trophy hunting” — the quest for a previously unseen piece of footage that will add an exclusive peek into the past of a film’s subject. “The trophy-hunting aspect of [archival producing] is the rarity of a clip,” he said at The Moviehouse. “I did a piece about George Lucas recently and found an interview with his high school art teacher. It was just mind-blowing. I found four interviews with Lucas before he became famous. But the director only used two minutes. And you can’t get hung up on, ‘But it’s rare!’ You have to consider how useful it is.”
Remsberg added: “One of my favorite sequences in this film is when Wolfe is being introduced onto all these talk shows, and we spliced ‘Ladies and gentlemen... Tom Wolfe, Tom Wolfe, Tom Wolfe, Tom Wolfe…’ And you see the rapid succession of him entering, shaking hands, doing his ‘hair thing’ three or four times, then crossing his legs three or four times. Beautiful rhythm to it, right? It’s really the musicality of filmmaking.”
“I think, as you could tell from how we structured the film, Tom Wolfe’s personal life was private. There wasn’t much there, to be perfectly honest. So the substance was all in the writing,” said Gersten on the documentary editing process. “If you open a book of his, it has so much style, so much is going on, and we did our best to replicate that in the editing style of the film. I think the quick cuts are effective at certain points. At other points, you want to let the story tell itself. When Tom Wolfe describes his interaction with [then-U.S. Sen. John F.] Kennedy, there’s no reason to stylize that. You want to hear Wolfe’s words.”
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