The Ryder Magazine

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There’s a new Bob Ross museum in Muncie. Mason Cassady writes about the iconic painter and television star in Bob Ross: Person, Painter and Perm.

Legendary arthouse filmmaker Werner Herzog visited IU in 2012 and Dennis J. Reardon, Head of the Playwriting Program at IU, unashamedly glommed on to him. It would be a stretch to say that they were inseparable, but they spent a lot of time together. Dennis J. Reardon looks back at a defining week in his life in Stalking Werner.

Many people have time on their hands during the pandemic. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sally Harvey has put her time to productive use by breaking into the homes of her neighbors and she writes about it in My Preferred Pandemic Life.

Ether Game turns 50 (!) and more in this month’s issue

More good stuff to read than any one of us deserves.

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  • Passages
    by theryder
    Craig Brenner’s seventh album reflects a difficult time in his life   By Mike Leonard It’s been said that artists sometimes create their best work when their stress and anxiety metrics are high, and the observation could easily apply to Craig Brenner’s seventh album, Passages. Shortly after receiving a grant from the Indiana Arts Commission to
  • The Forgotten Folk: B-Sides from The Harry Smith Folk Anthology
    by theryder
    The Carter Family (left to right) Maybelle, Sara, and A.P. By Tom Roznowski For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.– Virginia Woolf, A
  • This Week’s Ryder Films: Dec 9
    by theryder
    We’ve just added two films to our movie calendar: FREE TIME and DAMNATION. You can read about these as well as the other films playing in our virtual cinema, right here …. FREE TIME You can watch Free Time right here, right nowFree Time, the latest film by one of our greatest documentarians, Manny Kirchheimer.
  • December issue of The Ryder
    by theryder
    The new issue of The Ryder, funded in part by a Recover Forward grant from the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association, is on the virtual newsstands! Here’s your personal copy, and here’s some of what’s inside…. Passages Craig Brenner’s new album reflects a difficult time in his life. By Mike Leonard Arts Alliance Artists shouldn’t have
  • This week’s Ryder Films: 11/27
    by theryder
    We are continuing to screen brand new award-winning, international and independent American films during the pandemic. Here’s a round-up of this week’s Ryder films … ZAPPA “We were loud. We were coarse. We were strange. And if anyone in the audience ever gave us any trouble, we told them to fuck off.” There has yet
  • THIS WEEK’S ryder filmS
    by theryder
    We are continuing to screen first-run, award-winning, international and independent American films during the pandemic. Here’s what’s playing this week in our virtual theater. COLLECTIVE You can watch Collective right here, right now Journalism’s role at exposing corruption has rarely been as dramatically portrayed as in Collective, in which filmmaker Alexander Nanau follows an unfolding
  • Culture and the pandemic
    by theryder
    A Letter to Brazil By Darlene J. Sadlier [editor’s note: Darlene J. Sadlier, a professor emerita at Indiana University, writes about  literature, arts and culture of the Portuguese-speaking world. Her 2016 book, The Portuguese Diaspora: Seven Centuries of Literature and the Arts, explores literary and artistic works resulting from population travel and displacement during and
  • The Italian Larry David; The Lotus Lantern and Luminaria Project
    by theryder
    It is never too late to change your life. Citizens of the World, three Italians in their seventies, all single and looking for a change, decide to leave their beloved Rome and settle abroad. But where? A rash decision? – perhaps.The Professor, retired after teaching Latin his whole life, is getting bored. Giorgetto, one of
  • The Covered Bridges of Parke County
    by theryder
    Cycling in the Hoosier Heartland By Mason Cassady Sometimes I wonder, what does it mean to be a Hoosier? Perhaps a futile question to ask as there is certainly more than one answer. Hoosier-ness could be found in a variety of things: Teeth-deep in the flavors of sweet corn off the cob on a summer