Upcoming Sessions

Wednesdays, 1-3pm (Pacific)
Meeting Dates: January 29, February 5, 12, & 19
Online via Zoom

Course Description:
In the ongoing saga between Palestine and Israel, the Palestinians are one of the key players. However, many in the Western world know very little about them. Where did they come from? How do they practice their religion? What inspires them or encourages them? What do they hope for? This course will open up the history, culture, and opinions of the Palestinians, attempting to better understand their experiences and struggles. Ultimately, this course’s goal is to give one a more informed understanding of the dynamic between Israel and Palestine, and to aid in the path to peace.

Bio:
Jason Hensley, PhD (Holocaust and Genocide Studies), Dmin (Biblical Studies), teaches religious studies at a private school in Los Angeles. He is a fellow of the Michael LaPrade Holocaust Education Institute of the Anti-Defamation League, a higher-education ambassador for the Council on Foreign Relations, and the award-winning author of 12 books. His work has been featured in The Huffington Post as well as the BBC, and he has served as the historical advisor for a Holocaust documentary. Connect with him at jasonhensley.net.

Our FAB students’ safety is important to us; therefore, we are taking precautions to make the in-person classes a safe and welcoming environment. In this environment, students will be able to enjoy face-to-face interactions with their faculty and classmates and the option to grab a coffee or a bite to eat before or after class. For those not able to join us in person, we continue to be your virtual home for learning!

Note: Walk-ins are not permitted. You may register via phone by calling 805-493-3290 at least 30 minutes prior to the start of the first course or lecture meeting. Persons will not be allowed into the learning space if they are not on the roster in advance.

Regarding in-person attendance:

• FREE, accessible parking at both campus locations (view location and parking details HERE)
• Large lecture room with ample space meeting Cal/OSHA guidelines
• Masks are recommended but are not required

Can’t get to campus for an in-person course? No problem! Attend the course virtually instead.

HyFlex Learning

Using the HyFlex learning model, in-person and virtual students can attend the same class simultaneously. A special “360-camera” will follow the instructor in the classroom, and students attending virtually will be able to see and hear the instructor and view the PowerPoint over Zoom (similar to our traditional virtual courses).

Mondays, 10am-12pm (Pacific)
Meeting Dates: March 3, 10, 17, & 24
Choose to Attend Online via Zoom or In-Person in Thousand Oaks

Course Description:
Artists often work and create together to formulate new styles. Just as often, they compete and respond to each other's work, leading to breakthroughs and new developments. In this course, we begin in the Renaissance with the ideological rivalry between Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, and then between Michelangelo and Raphael. We then move forward in history, exploring different artistic rivalries and how they fueled artistic creation. Other frenemies include Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

Week 1: Renaissance Rivalries (Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, Leonardo and Michelangelo, Michelangelo and Raphael, Caravaggio and Baglione)

Week 2: Manet and Degas

Week 3: Van Gogh and Degas

Week 4: Matisse and Picasso

Bio:
Katherine E. Zoraster is an Art Historian and a Professor of Art History at several local colleges specializing in Western art from the Renaissance to the 20th century. She graduated with a double major in English Literature and Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles. Following her undergraduate degree, she received a Master’s Degree with Distinction in Art History from the California State University at Northridge.

In addition to the courses Katherine teaches for other lifelong learning programs, she also works as an Art History Instructor for the full-time program at the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Arts. Katherine also serves as a commissioner for the Burbank Cultural Arts Commission and volunteers at the Burbank Animal Shelter. In her free time, Katherine is an avid runner and travels extensively.

Tuesdays, 10am-12pm (Pacific)
Meeting Dates: March 4, 11, 18, & 25
Choose to Attend Online via Zoom or In-Person in Thousand Oaks

Course Description:
“The Lost Art of Instrumental Music” focuses on a time in popular music history when creativity in composing music without vocals not only flourished but was commercially viable. Today, you rarely hear memorable melodies that do not feature lyrics. Television shows don’t have theme songs and film scoring has hit a new low in memorable melodies. The apex of instrumental music was the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, when all of these elements came together in a variety of different forms.

Week 1: Musical Miniatures

Many composers of the period between the 1940s and 1960s created scores for motion pictures, but there were other composers who wrote instrumental works for their own sake, creating what might be called “pictures in music,” descriptive songs, 2-3 minutes in length, that used nothing more than the song title to bring forth concrete images using just musical instruments and imagination. We’ll be talking about five of these composers (Raymond Scott, Leroy Anderson, Frank Perkins, Jack Fascinato, and Ross Bagdasarian), and will demonstrate how a specific composer took existing songs and fashioned them into soundtracks for animated cartoons.

Week 2: Mood Music and Sonic Explosions

The time between the rise of Elvis Presley and the emergence of the Beatles and the British Invasion was a time of great creativity and imagination in American music. The period between 1955 and 1965 wasn’t as polarized as much as one might think – with younger Americans flocking to rock ‘n’ roll and older, more mature individuals sticking with classical and Broadway. There were other kinds of music that bridged the generation gap, headed by seasoned practitioners, looking to present older music in new ways, and younger talents using the electric guitar to create an entirely new kind of music for the younger generation. This class will look at two kinds of music. Space Age Pop is an all-encompassing term to reflect orchestral instrumental music that took advantage of two new technological advances in the recording industry in the late 1950s: multi-track recording and stereo. The other is Exotica, a sub-category of space age pop with a greater focus on Polynesian, African, and Caribbean styles and tribal rhythms.

Week 3: Television Theme Songs

Television theme songs of the 1950s and ‘60s were designed to be brief, concise statements that not only represented the content and/or characters in the shows they represented, but they had to be memorable as well. Some of the most remembered hooks in popular music come from television shows. We will examine 10 distinct categories of television theme songs: Sitcoms, police shows, westerns, secret agents, private eyes & courtroom dramas, adventure or buddy shows, science fiction, game shows, soap operas, and kids shows.

Week 4: Movie Theme Songs

Motion picture themes differed from their television counterparts because for film, composers were permitted to more fully develop theme music. Not only was there more time in which to present musical ideas, film themes were used on soundtrack albums and occasionally even succeeded on the pop charts as singular hit recordings. We’ve divided this concept into the following categories: adventure, romance, comedy, drama, thrillers, mystery & intrigue, historical epics, and westerns.

Bio:
Cary Ginell is a Grammy-nominated writer and author of 12 books on American music. After a 30-year career in radio, he has spent the last 20 years as a public speaker, talking about music in classrooms, at conferences, and on cruise ships. Cary brings a lifelong passion for the recording industry to his work and is one of the world’s foremost authorities on his specialty, western swing. Cary previously served as President of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, an international organization of music scholars and world-renowned institutions. He holds a master’s degree in Folklore from UCLA and a bachelor’s in Radio/TV/Film from Cal State University Northridge.

Wednesdays, 10am-12pm (Pacific)
Meeting Dates: March 5, 12, 19, & 26
Choose to Attend Online via Zoom or In-Person in Thousand Oaks

Course Description:
Ancient art serves as a portal to understanding the cultural, historical, and technological aspects of civilizations long past. This interdisciplinary course will explore the science and engineering aspects of ancient art from cave paintings to frescoes, mummy portraits, and sculptures in stone and bronze. This journey back in time will unravel the mysteries of how the ancients made the captivating art that we love today and the role that technology played in its creation. This course invites students to delve into the fascinating world of color creation, technique, tools, and materials used by ancient artists. We will explore various art forms including cave painting, frescoes, portraits, stone statuary, the lost-wax method of bronze casting, and ancient Greek pottery.

It will answer the question, “How did they do that?”

Topics Covered:

• Ancient Colors: We will discover the secrets of vibrant pigments and how ancient artists sourced and utilized color to create their masterpieces and learn how color evolved over the millennia.
• Techniques and Tools: Delve into the artistic techniques and tools used that enabled ancient artisans to bring their visions to life. Explore the ancient versions of kilns, quarrying, metallurgy, drills, and other technologies invented to produce art.
• Frescoes and Portraits: Study the ancient art of fresco painting from ancient Greece and Rome and examine surviving frescoes from Pompeii and Herculaneum.
• Bronze Casting: We will learn about ancient methods of metallurgy including the lost-wax method to create amazing statues and artifacts.
• Stone Sculpture: How did the ancients carve the beautiful statues that are in museums today? We will examine the techniques of quarrying, carving, polishing, and painting ancient sculptures.
• Ancient Pottery: Finally, we will explore the evolution of Greek pottery and its role in Greek society as a cultural artform, including red-figure and black-figure vases, storytelling, and propaganda in the ancient world.

Bonus Material: After completion of the course, we will visit the Getty Villa Museum to see first-hand many of the objects discussed during our classes.

Bio:
Scott Jones is a retired naval officer and businessman with broad experience in national security, foreign relations, and politics. Scott is also a docent at the J. Paul Getty Museum (Getty Villa) where he leads tours in the Greek and Roman Galleries, special exhibitions, Roman architecture, and Roan gardens. He teaches for a few lifelong learning programs in the area.

Wednesdays, 1:30-3:30pm (Pacific)
Meeting Dates: March 5, 12, 19, & 26
Online via Zoom

Course Description:
What was life in the Soviet Union like? This class combines history lectures with an insider’s view of someone born and raised in the USSR. The Bolshevik Revolution, followed by several years of civil war and foreign intervention, changed not only the political structure of the country, but its economy, its social fabric and even the nature of the most personal relationships among its citizens. In this course, we will consider the Soviet planned economy, its repressive dictatorial political regime and its imperial nature. We will examine in what ways post-Soviet Russia continues with economic, political and social models that were established by the Soviet regime. We will explore why the majority of Russians today admire Putin despite a growing economic crisis, why they are so intolerant of homosexuality, why Russian women hate feminism, and other similar issues that perplex a Western observer. By evaluating the balance sheets of the last century of Russian history, we will ponder the future of Russia and its role in international affairs.
Weekly outline:
1. Establishing the Soviet Union.
2. Soviet economy.
3. Social fabric of a socialist society.
4. Soviet ideology, education, and propaganda.

Bio:
Asya Pereltsvaig received a degree in English and History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD in Linguistics from McGill University. She taught at Yale, Cornell, and Stanford universities, and has been teaching in lifelong education programs since 2010. Her expertise is in language, culture, and history, and the relationship between them. Asya has published five scholarly books with Cambridge University Press. Asya is a popular instructor for several lifelong learning institutes around the country. 

Thursdays, 10am-12pm (Pacific)
Meeting Dates: March 6, 13, 20, & 27
Online via Zoom

Course Description:
The unique culture and climate of California as well as our receptiveness to novel ideas offered a splendid variety of opportunities for those architects who designed our built environment in the 20th century. This class explores works of distinguished California architects such as Paul Williams, Wallace Neff, Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, Julia Morgan, John Lautner, and others. Each architect brought an individuality of style to the California landscape, and the innovative characteristics of their work as well as the personal attributes and challenges that influenced their designs will be discussed.

Bio:
Eleanor Schrader is an award-winning educator, lecturer, and author. She lectures worldwide on art and architectural history, and leads art and architecture tours throughout the world.  She has been named a Distinguished Instructor at UCLA Extension, where she teaches history of architecture, interior design, furniture, and decorative arts. She is also Professor Emeritus of Art and Architectural History at Santa Monica College. She has done graduate work in fine and decorative arts at Sotheby's Institute in London and New York.  She has served as a Design Review Commissioner for the City of Beverly Hills and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the John Lautner Foundation.

Thursdays, 1-3pm (Pacific)
Meeting Dates: March 6, 13, 20, & 27
Online via Zoom

Course Description:
The stories of cults have been burned into our national consciousness. From statements like “don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” or remembrances of Waco, many of us have seen cults end in tragic ways. Despite a knowledge of cults having entered into our culture, we continue to harbor many misconceptions about them. We don’t under why a man like Jim Jones, with his bent on “revolutionary suicide,” was able to hold such a sway over people. We see cult members as “brainwashed.” We sometimes refer to them as “sheep.” Nevertheless, cults continue to exist and continue to bring people into their ranks. Why? And how can this be stopped? This series will examine cults in general, and then probe deep into specific case studies like Jonestown, Waco, and a more modern cult, NXIVM.

Bio:
Jason Hensley, PhD (Holocaust and Genocide Studies), Dmin (Biblical Studies), teaches religious studies at a private school in Los Angeles. He is a fellow of the Michael LaPrade Holocaust Education Institute of the Anti-Defamation League, a higher-education ambassador for the Council on Foreign Relations, and the award-winning author of 12 books. His work has been featured in The Huffington Post as well as the BBC, and he has served as the historical advisor for a Holocaust documentary. Connect with him at jasonhensley.net.