This incisive publication explores the formal, conceptual, political, and technical aspects of the work of contemporary American artist Charles Ray. For Charles Ray (born 1953), sculpture is a way of thinking that informs his work across a wide range of media-from gelatin silver prints to porcelain, fiberglass, wood, and steel. Spanning the whole of his fifty-year career, Charles Ray: Figure Ground considers the artist's intriguing, often unsettling sculptures from both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in relation to his early photographs and performances. It also explores his interest in Mark Twain's 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Kelly Baum addresses patterns and patterning in Ray's art, foregrounding his engagement with preexisting traditions, classicism among them, as well as charged issues around race, gender, and sexuality. Brinda Kumar investigates the modalities of touch that run through Ray's work, while a reflection by Ray himself and a conversation between the artist and Hal Foster offer further insights into his multifaceted practice.
Al Pennyback is hired to be a bodyguard to an up and coming young singer, Cindy Caton, who is also receiving death threats via email. There's no shortage of suspects, from her agent-manager, Conrad Bierbaum, to three frustrated singers who are jealous of her exclusive contract with Bierbaum.Al lets himself be talked into accompanying the singer and her band to Colombia, where he has to contend with poisonous snakes in bed and an unfortunate Cindy Caton look alike who winds up with a knife in her back.Back in the US after the tour, he's under increasing pressure to catch the killer before Cindy becomes the next victim. Problem is, he finds himself quickly running out of suspects.
In his first novel, Ray is an utterly original intellect as he successfully melds a vast array of styles and voices, and shows readers the writing process as it happens in his brilliant, creative mind.
These roughly chronological stories starting with my earliest memories and continuing to the next eighty years are based on actual activities, including some encounters while coping with aggressive roosters and in-laws. My happy life has been enriched with lessons learned by watching birds, animals, and other humans, even snakes. Life in the piney woods of Alabama prepared me for many adventures encountered in New England, Old England, Korea, Upper Peninsula, south Louisiana, and the Midwest. Sadly, many of the people mentioned are now deceased. Some names have been changed to avoid embarrassment. These awesome people have shaped my happy lifestyle, even the policeman that dropped his pad and vamoosed as well as the Tacoma sex-soliciting pervert, not to mention a drafts lady toting a pail of water or the Bentley-craving client. In the book, you will find a list of reasons I refuse to grow up and a list of a several things eighty years of living have taught me. You might even learn about a titty bream.
As Ben lay there in his semi-conscious state, his body racked with pain from head to toe, the intensely bright light that hung above him seemed to bore itself into his very soul. It happened so quickly and without warning causing him to catapult over the handlebars of his bicycle coming to a bone-crushing heap at the side of the road. He’d only caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of an object being thrown before it clocked him to the side of his head leaving him with clouded thoughts of WHY ME?! An angry familiar voice by the gurney where he lay in the emergency room muttered a vivid threat through gritted teeth, “When I get ahold of that kid, I’ll beat the living tar out of him!” “No you won’t son, you’re not that kind of boy.” For Ben Okura, being Japanese American took on a whole new meaning as he was to become one of the homeland’s first civilian casualties of World War II. Ben didn’t know it yet; but, at that moment, he’d already started down an unimaginable darkened road filled with intrigue, danger, and adventure to places he’d never been. He would have to settle up with fate and meet his destiny.
The pieces in this volume of free verse poetry describe the on-going conflict between Native Americans and the new comers from the time of Columbus to the terrorists of 9/ll. Charles Ray is enrolled in The Lost Cherokee Nation and possesses a unique point of view among American poets and novelists. He expresses the past and the present, and voices a deep respect and personal connectedness to the natural. He has been reluctantly employed as a college professor, high school teacher, farm hand, saw mill worker, and construction laborer. He graduated from Brevard College, Western Carolina University, and Appalachian State University. He holds the Doctor of Arts degree in English from Middle Tennessee State University. Charles Ray's highly original novels are THE TARHEEL CONNECTION; AN ENVIRONMENTAL ROMANCE and LANCE; A CHILD'S GARDEN OF EVIL. He raises black and tan tree hounds, two of them serving as models for the hounds in THE TARHEEL CONNECTION. Charles Ray lives in the Ozark Mountains near Belleville, Arkansas.
Charles Ray's short novel Lance: A Child's Garden of Evil, depicts the predicament of a gifted contemporary boy who falls victim to the evil forces that have influenced western civilization since its paganistic beginnings. As in his earlier novel The Tarheel Connection and the poems in Arrowhead Pieces, he borrows extensively from history to create his original interpretation of the modern world.
Ever since the beginning of World War II on that fateful Sunday on December 7, 1941, trials and tribulations have been Ben Okura’s constant companion. He is currently accused of being a traitor, saboteur, or any other thing they can pin on him, but that pales in comparison to what he now faces. Having only recently arrived at the prisoner of war camp known as Topaz, Ben is suddenly being forced, by tragic circumstances, to escape. Things in his life are changing even faster. It is imperative that he escape from Topaz in the next few minutes! His stomach is churning at the very thought of leaving his mama behind, but he must! His mama and the Tanaka family are making hurried plans which will be implemented momentarily. Leaving Topaz is fraught with danger; but, at the forefront of his mind, is that failure to succeed isn’t an option! Never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined a more interesting cast of characters than he will meet on his escape route into the future. Ben will learn in spades that Faith Does Precede The Miracle!
TANFORAN RACETRACK HORSE STALLS DESTINED TO BECOME HOME FOR JAPANESE AMERICAN INTERNEES! On December 7, 1941, the Japanese Navy inflicted a serious blow on the United States military assets at Pearl Harbor. For Ben Okura, a Japanese American boy living in California, his life as he knew it was to change drastically. President Roosevelt ordered all Japanese Americans living along the west coast of the United States sent to internment camps. Ben’s new life was to begin at the Tanforan Assembly Center. He and his mama were now separated from everything they had known and loved. His life had already been turned upside-down and he thought it couldn’t get worse. Ben found himself being trapped and manipulated by strange people who, for some reason, were out to get him. In his wildest dreams, he never could understand why he was now being hounded by the FBI as a supposed traitor. Ben began to believe his new problems could all be traced back to mind-bending meetings with a strange man held in what was to become the mysterious barrack 49, apartment 1. Ben began to doubt his own sanity. Who is Ben Okura really?
High Priest of California is a the first published novel by Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 - March 27, 1988). Willeford was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism. [In his novels] Willeford created a world in which the predatory cannibalism of American capitalism provides the model for all human relations, in which the American success ethic mercilessly casts aside all who are unable or unwilling to compete, and in which the innate human appreciation of artistic beauty is cruelly distorted by the exigencies of mass culture. (Cochran, 2000)
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