The Post-Star from Glens Falls, New York • 25

The Post-Star, Glens Falls, N.Y. Thursday lune 27, 2002 D5 ARTS I LIFE Book offers quick fix for summer boredon By SAMANTHA CRFTCHELL Associated Press NEW YORK Many kids spend 10 months of the year waiting for their summer break from school. They know that once summer If 1 I supplies that comes there are ice cream cones to be eaten, sprinklers to run through and bicycles to be ridden. What children seem to forget, however, is that all of those activities can be accomplished in about an are always a good starting point for fun. The supplies include a large roll of newsprint, construction paper, googly eyes, pipe cleaners, craft foam, balls, colored chalk, playing cards, wooden blocks, a hour.

To keep boredom from setting in and minds from turning to mush, FamilyFun magazine has put 365 ideas in a book called "Boredom Busters" (Disney Enterpris tape recorder, a magnifying glass and a butterfly net. If those items aren't enough to spur some fun, try "The Boredom Bottle," which holds a stash of fortune- LOS ANGELES TIMES This computer-enhanced image shows the MoMa exterior as it will appear at Saturday's opening. For the next three years, the Museum of Modern Art will be housed in a former Swingline stapler factory at 33rd Street and Queens Boulevard in Queens. MoMa becomes staple of Queens, moves to former Swingline factory ASSOCIATED PRESS 'Lunch an activity in 'Boredom encourages kids to use their imaginations to create a sandwich with attitude. 1 "mum UJf 'mi limaa If IF YOU GO MoMA QNS opens at 10 a.m.

Saturday at 33rd Street and Queens Boulevard. Exhibitions include "Tempo," featuring contemporary works on the theme of time; "AUTObodies: speed, sport, transport," spotlighting the museum's collection of automobiles; and "To Be Looked at: Painting and Sculpture From the Collection." The museum is open Thursdays through Mondays, closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., except on Fridays, when closing time is 7:45 p.m. Admission $12.

Information at (212) 708-9400 or www.moma.org. LOS ANGELES TIMES The designer's model of the Museum of Modern Art's temporary location reveals a zone of shifting vertical and horizontal planes in the lobby and mezzanine cafe. The museum will be housed in a former factory In Queens for three years while its permanent location is renovated. and research, as originally planned. The ground-floor piece set aside for exhibitions is about the size of a single floor in the Manhattan museum.

Inescapably, the building was short on style points. It was designed in the 1960s with nothing other than utility in mind. Architect Scott Newman, whose firm of Cooper, Robertson Partners oversaw MoMA's space search and designed the basic retrofit of the factory building, refers to it aptly as a "dumb concrete box." Finding the right architect to transform the box into an exciting, if temporary, public venue was MoMA's challenge. As a patron of modern architecture, MoMA has a long, mixed history. Its Manhattan building is an architectural assemblage Manhattan skyline.

It is plausible also to foresee a more varied future with a rich cultural mix. Alanna Heiss recognized the district's cultural potential 30 years ago when she glommed onto an abandoned public school and converted it into the PS1 Contemporary Art Center, the granddaddy of alternative art spaces. (MoMA and PS1, not incidentally, are now a team.) Sculptor Isamu Noguchi wasn't far behind when he purchased a riverside factory in the 1970s and made it over into his studio. It's now the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum. Other artists and institutions followed, and the pace of conversions has picked up in recent years.

Initially, MoMA bought the factory, then still being used to produce sta es). "The goal of the activities is to spark (kids') imagination, and for (kids) to use their minds and hands and be engaged in something," says Deanna Cook, editor of the book and manager of creative development of FamilyFun. With a little creativity and enthusiasm, even a daily chore can be turned into a good time. Cook says her two children enjoy the "game" of finding all the washcloths in the laundry basket and folding them. Other purposeful tasks include having children wash the car or pick up all the toys in a room before a song is over.

The book also urges kids to do a random act of kindness. Trying to decide what to do is an activity in and of itself and making a get-well card for a sick friend or cleaning their old toys to donate to charity can be as entertaining as any game and more rewarding. Some of the "boredom buster" games, crafts and projects take five minutes, such as spelling words on a calculator and penny basketball, and others can last days, including creating a neighborhood of decorated paper bags or starting a book club. "Boredom doesn't have a specific time," says Cook, so there are suggestions for outdoor games for long, hot afternoons and ideas to spur pretend play indoors, including a "home-office" kit and a doll spa. When it's time to begin to wind down for the night, there are some quieter activities, such as playing with homemade clay.

Even mealtime can be playtime, especially if the book's "lunch guests," sandwiches dressed up with vegetables eyes and noses, and a tongue made of ham, are invited. And if children are restless just as a parent is preparing dinner, quick kitchen science experiments, such as testing the boundaries of a plastic bag with pencils, should tie everyone over. Cook encourages group play whether it's with siblings, friends or parents but there are some single-person projects. "Ideally we want a parent to be involved. These are activities that make the most of 'together she says.

Children will get a boost from their accomplishments and so will parents. "Parents feel good doing these activities like they are doing a good job because the kids aren't sitting and watching TV. They're being creative," says Cook. Each activity in the book is detailed in a "recipe" including a list of the necessary ingredients, but, in general, Cook says there are certain some basic cookie-style pieces of paper with suggested activities. To make this treasure trove, start with a clean, empty plastic bottle and have your children decorate it with stickers.

With your kids, make a list of easy tasks chocolate chip cookies," for instance) and write each one on a small square of paper. Fold the paper and drop into the bottle. When boredom strikes, "shake out" an idea. Examples of "FamilyFun Boredom Busters" recipes: An opportunity to turn the tables on children who have stuck their tongues out a meals they didn't like. Lunch Guests Mayonnaise and mustard Sandwich roll Cold cuts Sliced raw vegetables Softened cream cheese Spread mayonnaise and mustard on the bottom half of a sandwich roll.

Add a slice of ham or another cold cut. Then fold a second slice of meat so that it resembles a tongue and lay it across the bun so the end hangs over the edge. Now create a face on the bun top using sliced raw vegetables, olives and cherry tomatoes. (One possible face includes cucumber eyes with olive pupils, arcs of celery for eyebrows, a cherry-tomato nose, and strips of green pepper pushed into the top of the bun for a spiky hairdo.) Cream cheese can be used as the "glue." The cheese sticks best if the vegetables are blotted dry. Poke a hole in a plastic bag filled with water, and you're sure to spring a leak, right? Wrong.

Penciled In Plastic bag (no holes except for main opening) Water Sharpened pencils Fill a plastic bag three quarters of the way with water and then knot the top. With one hand, hold the bag over a sink. In one swift motion, use the other hand to push a pencil, point first, straight through one side of the bag and out the other. No water should leak out. See how many more pencils you can poke through without causing a leak.

The explanation behind this mysterious feat involves the elasticity of plastic. When you pierce the bag, the plastic stretches and then breaks open just enough for the pencil to fit through. The glove-like fit leaves no room for water to pass through. By BENJAMIN FORGEY The Washington Post NEW YORK Stand in the last car of the No. 7 train leaving Manhattan and keep an eye out the right-hand window as you approach the 33rd Street station in Queens: The Sign will appear.

At first, it will be no more than a jumble of tall white marks on the roof of a low building. But as the elevated train pulls into the station, the initially indecipherable insignia will coalesce into the art world's most famous logo: M-o-M-A. If you miss it, that's OK. The visual trick is easier to catch the second time around, and presumably this will be your first of several visits. The Museum of Modern Art, the venerable institution that peremptorily calls itself "the world's foremost museum of modern and contemporary art," is moving to Queens.

Temporarily. Starting next Saturday and for the next three years you'll be going to a former Swingline stapler factory at 33rd Street and Queens Boulevard to see MoMA's fabled masterpieces, from Picasso to Pollock, as well as a full program of temporary exhibitions. Meanwhile, the museum's flagship in Midtown Manhattan has been closed for the completion of its $450 million expansion. It will reopen in 2005, the institution's 75th anniversary, when the exhibitions will move back to Manhattan. Officially, and awkwardly, the new outpost has been christened MoMA QNS.

(Some folks simply say "MoMA Queens," while others insist on spelling out the last three letters, as in "MoMA The setting could hardly stand in sharper contrast to tony Midtown. Upon exiting the stairwell from the train platform, you turn in the direction of the building with the sign. Instead of a grand edifice, though, you encounter dead-on a well-worn establishment called the New Thompson's Diner. Two clocklike signs proclaim that the original Thompson's dates to 1946, and the new one to 1962. Next door is a check-cashing emporium.

Well hidden, about half a block away, is MoMA's front door. (The entry was designed, like the rooftop sign and the public spaces inside the building, by Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan. But more on that in a moment.) On the face of it, Queens and the Museum of Modern Art make the quintessential odd couple. But you do not have to spend a whole lot of time in MoMA's new neighborhood to realize the pairing actually makes good sense. Long Island City, the specific setting for MoMA's new venue, is a place apart, even in diverse, sprawling Queens, Situated directly opposite Midtown Manhattan on the east side of the East River, it's a fast-changing flatland of working and abandoned factories, auto body shops and industrial miscellany, with a scattering of attached houses and apartment buildings.

The area's future is up for grabs. A few years ago, Citibank built an office tower not far from the stapler factory, so it's possible to imagine a phalanx of towers for commercial and residential tenants eager for the sunset views of the We (I kbit want to completely shut our doors to the public, so we realized we would have to find a temporary place" GLENN LOWRY MoMa director, on the decision to move the museum while renovations continue covering six decades, starting with the 'quietly futuristic 1930s building on West 53rd Street by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone, continuing with elegant additions by Philip Johnson in plers, to recycle into a much-needed, one-roof facility for art storage and research. The renovation of the building had hardly begun, however, when something else came up. "By late 1999, as we were begin sez-faire atmosphere, or from Gehry, or both, Maltzan appears to have imbibed an affection for rough-at-the-edges architecture and transitional areas such as Long Island City. His deconstructivist design for MoMA Queens is sophisticated and sympathetic, if not terribly innovative or decisively personal.

If you judge it by the highest standards, as a work capable of advancing the art of architecture which, presumably, is MoMA's aim then it falls short. But as an enlivening, up-to-date spatial sequence, it is quite all right. Maltzan did a lot with a little. By far the greater part of the project's $42 million budget was spent on those expensive systems to protect works of art, so the amount available for the public spaces was relatively small. The architect accepted the "dumb box" and decided to paint it blue as a reminder of its original tile sheathing.

He took the idea of movement MoMA's leap across the river, the incipient changes throughout Long Island City and ran it through several variations. Once visitors pass through the main entry off-the-shelf, sliding glass doors enlivened by clever, multi-layered MoMA graphics they enter a zone of shifting vertical and horizontal planes. Stairwells and ramps provide alternative pathways to and from the ticket counter, coat room, cafe and store. Walls are set at angles to create strong perspectival views, or angle up from the floor in counterintuitive fashion. The mezzanine cafe provides an overview.

By playing against our conditioning to expect right angles everywhere, Maltzan created a space in which everything appears to be gently shifting or floating. Whether the end result proves to be gentle or, in fact, busy and dizzying, remains to be seen, because projected images will animate many of the surfaces once the doors open to the public. This is highly competent architecture, but because the space remains tight despite Maltzan's best efforts, it might end up seeming as stale as yesterday's multiplex. Regardless, it will all go away when MoMA returns its exhibitions to Manhattan. All, that is, except the tricky, poignant, vivid rooftop sign.

I really like the sign. It recalls a whole history of rooftop commercial signage in Queens while standing, literally and figuratively, as a signal of change. BET honors entertainers of color the 1940s, '50s and '60s, and culminating in Cesar Pelli's gray-glass residential tower in 1984. The expansion now under construction, designed with cool authority by Japanese architect Yoshio faniguchi, is by far the biggest reshuffling of spaces in MoMA's 72-year history. But it is as exhibitor.

rather than patron, that the museum has exerted its greatest influence on architecture. The inclusion of architecture and design as a full curatorial department was an innovation 70 years ago. Johnson, the department's first curator, got things off to a rousing start with the famous "International Style" show in 1932. More than any other single event, this show, and its accompanying book, launched modern architecture in the United States. Maltzan was a good, if not necessarily inspired, choice.

An Easterner by birth and training Harvard Graduate School of Design, 1987 he headed west to tumultuous Los Angeles, then and now the liveliest center of architectural experimentation in the United States. He went to work for Frank Gehry before opening his own architectural office in 1995. From L.A.'s lais- ning to turn earth in Manhattan," says MoMA Director Glenn Lowry, "we saw we could not stay open to the public throughout the construction. We didn't want to completely shut our doors to the public, so we realized we would have to find a temporary place." The Long Island City building proved too good to resist. It had high, loftlike ceilings and a generous structural grid with 25-foot and 50-foot bays, perfect for storing or showing large works of art.

A lot of money already was being spent to make the building safe for a world-class art collection: new roof, new insulation on all exterior walls, new electrical, mechanical and filtration systems. Plus, it was accessible a 10-minute ride on the No. 7 train from Grand Central Terminal, or a short hop by car across the Queensboro Bridge. The revised plan was to take over part of the building for exhibitions and direct support facilities, such as curatorial offices. Then, at the end of the building's three-year run as a public museum, all of its 165,000 square feet of space would be available for storage and Cedric the Entertainer.

Halle Berry, who won a best actress Oscar for "Monster's Ball," took home the favorite actress prize; Will Smith, who starred in the boxing biography "Ali," won the actor award. Neither prize specified a particular role. Other winners of the second annual BET awards: Music group: OutKast Male artist: Usher Female artist: India. Arie Male hip hop artist: Ja Rule Female hip hop artist: Missy Elliott New artist: Alicia Keys Male athlete: Kobe Bryant Female athlete: Laila Ali Associated Press LOS ANGELES The rock-soul group Earth, Wind Fire received a lifetime achievement award and boxer Muhammad Ali was honored with a humanitarian award at the second annual BET awards Tuesday evening. The Black Entertainment Television event recognizes people of color in music, film and sports categories.

The awards are voted by record label executives, media and fans. Hosts for the ceremony at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre were comedians Steve Harvey.