4.30.2013

Foundation 30 - Jim Gilliam of NationBuilder

On Creating a Film Culture in New Orleans and Louisiana


We have to create a film culture in New Orleans and Louisiana if we want to keep filmmaking here. A whole film culture. We need to work on and help make movies and tv shows. We also need to create and produce movies and tv shows. We need to make visual literacy an important part of our schools' curriculum so students understand what they are seeing on a screen the same way they understand what they are reading in a book. We need to be a great place to watch films which means better theaters, a better selection of films, and even more film fests than we currently have.

We already are doing the first part, working on and making films and tv shows. The other day when I want to the movies, four of the six trailers were all films that were shot here in part or in total. And these weren't small films either. These were the major Hollywood productions. We had four pilots shoot here this past spring for TV while True Detective for HBO was filming here and American Horror Story preps to shoot here. We tun neck and neck with Atlanta for the 3rd spot in filmmaking. I work more than friend in Los Angeles do, which shows we are extremely busy here in New Orleans with film production.

We need to evolve though to be the people creating films and tv shows. This means we need to embrace local indie filmmakers. Those of us who work on studio films need to be willing to work on low/no budget films and short films. We need to offer our time and talents to these filmmakers. And the state needs to find a way to encourage more local filmmakers. We call all ourselves Hollywood South, but we have a lack have homegrown production. Bollywood and Nollywood are called that because of the films they create, not because of films they work on. All of us need to embrace and encourage the filmmakers here in New Orleans and throughout the state.

We need to start teaching students in high school (and maybe even younger) visual literacy. They need to understand what they are seeing on screen and why it is being shot the way it is. Our culture has become a primary visual culture. It is just as important for people to understand the difference between a wide shot and a medium shot as it is for them to understand simple, compound, and complex sentences. Students need to be acquainted with the great works of cinema as much as they need to be acquainted with the great works of literature. We also need more classes and lectures like those that NOVAC has been doing for those who want to further their knowledge in filmmaking.

We have to become an even better place to watch films. We have made great strides in the years since I moved back to New Orleans. When I moved back from Austin I would say, "Austin is a great place to watch films, but a lousy place to work on them. New Orleans is a great place to work on films, but a lousy place to watch them." But things have gotten better with the new Canal Place and Chalmette Cinema and expanded programming at Prytania as well as the increase in film festivals here. But we need more theaters run by people who love movies as well as know how to run a business. We need more venues for screenings and for local filmmakers to show their work to an audience. We need more variety of films being shown, from action sport films to documentaries to foreign films to classic films.

Creating a Film Culture should be our goal with the film and tax credits. A film culture that will increase the money here in the city and the state from shows made here by locals. A film culture that will make us a destination not just for productions to be made here but for film artists to flock here to be a part of the scene and for film enthusiasts to come here to see what is being shown and made and created. We should embrace the film culture the same way we have embraced the music culture. New Orleans is experiencing a renaissance in many areas, and film and tv production is a part of that; however; it needs to be a bigger and permanent part of our city and state. We have to have along term view of what the film and tax credits can do for the city and the state. We have to embrace and encourage the blossoming film culture in New Orleans and Louisiana.

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Film Tax Credits Article Response

Response to a comment on the Nola.com article on the film tax credits:

"I am tired of this lie that the film and tv industry here doesn't create jobs except for a few people. That is a complete lie. There are thousands of us employed by the film and tv industry here, and it extends to not just those of us who are working on the projects but also to vendors. 
 
And if you think the money isn't spread around, go and look at the development of the Elmwood/Harahan area. There is a boom down there and a lot of it has been in tandem with many productions having offices there as well as vendors setting up shop there. 
 
The money gets spread around in other ways. I get to live here in the city I love and am from. I get to spend my money here. I have risen up through the ranks making more money as I go along. Also, people are moving to Louisiana and New Orleans to work in the film and tv industry. Not people coming in for one show, but a lot of young people moving here instead of L.A. or New York. This is a very good thing. 
 
Finally, as far as working as an extra, that is how extras are treated everywhere. If you want to move up as an actor you have to try for roles in short films and low/no budget indies. Extra work is never going to lead to a starring role. Go listen to famous actors talking about being an extra."

I will have more on this today as I wake up and have more coherent thoughts.

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Coriolanus



4.29.2013

Steven Soderbergh SFIFF56 State of Cinema Address

New Film Tax Credit Audit Article At Nola.com

From the article:

“Still, the auditor’s report offered some bright spots. It found that the overall economic output of the Motion Picture Tax Credit program, meaning the total value of goods and services produced across all industry sectors, including jobs, materials and supplies that were purchased and spikes in restaurant and retail revenues, was positive.”


So, the overall impact is positive financially. And there is a surge of people moving into the state to work on films and be a part of this community. They are bringing in new things to the city and the state. Yet, the writer leads with a negative headline which is all that most will read. 
Why does my state want to sabotage a bright spot? And we never question the money we spend on Mardi Gras or a SuperBowl or JazzFest.

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John Rogers: Immortality is So, So Creepy


"Look around us now. Boomers are freaking out over millenial values, just as their Greatest Generation parents freaked out over theirs. I have people working for me who've never even seen a dial telephone.  Change hurtles ever onward, and the only thing more corrosive than the fact that the future isn't evenly distributed is the fact that there are plenty of humans who don't want this future at all.  It's all too much change, it may be literally too much change to process for human hardwiring. Many older humans are living future shock, right now. It was ever thus.

But the difference now is that those people are alive.

In 1900 the percentage of the American population over the age of 45 was 17.8%. In 1950 it was 28.4%. As of the last census the share of the US population over 45 is 36.4%. Hell, the 65+ share's gone from 4.1% in 1900 to 13.3% in 2010. More and more people still in the society, with greater and greater influence, still constructing societal and legal norms based on emotional, psychological, cultural and technological frames of reference that are less and less relevant.

We'd all like to think we'd reinvent ourselves, re-assimilate, learn and grow along a constantly regenerative learning curve. But most of us wouldn't. We're just not cognitively wired for it. We crave stasis, because our lizard brains crave safety and security."

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Pacific Rim Con Trailer

I want to see this movie now. It looks incredible.

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Coriolanus



St. Rose Tavern for lunch



Current reading

Doesn't include the poetry books I am currently reading as well.

Waiting


4.28.2013

Graphic Panels Comics Kick Ass Week Special

Jurassic Park Theme

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Movies in 2013

1. Young Adult
2. Jeff, Who Lives At Home
3. Gosford Park
4. The Guard
5. Battle Beyond the Stars
6. Almost Famous
7. Ice Age: Continental Drift
8. G.I. Joe The Movie
9. The Rundown
10. Beasts of the Southern Wild
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
12. Oz, the Great and Powerful
13. The Avengers
14. Captain America: The First Avenger
15. Argo
16. The Hobbit
17. Stick
18. Heat
19. The Goonies
20. The Bay
21. Jurassic Park 3D

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4.27.2013

Remnants


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Macaroons at Sucre


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Dat Dog on Magazine Street



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On The Breakwater by Carl Sandburg

On the Breakwater
By Carl Sandburg

On the breakwater in the summer dark, a man and a
      girl are sitting,
She across his knee and they are looking face into face
Talking to each other without words, singing rythms in
       silence to each other.

A funnel of white ranges the blue dusk from an out-
       going boat,
Playing its searchlight, puzzled, abrupt, over a streak of
       green,
And two on the breakwater keep their silence, she on his
       knee.


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Buckaroo Banzai End Credits

4.26.2013

65dos Rescore of Silent Running

Arches by Carl Sandburg

Young Sea by Carl Sandburg

Young Sea
By Carl Sandburg

The sea is never still.
It pounds on the shore
Restless as a young heart,
Hunting.

The sea speaks
And only the stormy hearts
Know what it says:
It is the face
          of a rough mother speaking.

The sea is young.
One storm cleans all the hoar
And loosens the age of it.
I hear is laughing, reckless.

They love the sea,
Men who ride on it
And know they will die
Under the salt of it

Let only the young come,
    Says the sea.

Let them kiss my face
    And hear me.

I am the last word
    And I tell
Where storms and stars come from.

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Bones by Carl Sandburg

4.24.2013

Aftermath of GI Joe/Cobra Battle

Aftermath of the latest GI Joe vs Cobra battle?:



David Mamet - Film School Through Commentaries

We Are The Stories We Tell Ourselves

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Welcome to Nollywood

Hollywood South needs more of this:

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4.23.2013

Rogue Shakespeare Oatmeal Stout

In honor of The Bard's Birthday:


Random Blue Truck

Smurf colored truck:


Blue Lantern

There is hope.

I am now a Blue Lantern:




This is what happens when you have a 9 year old.

The Escapists

The Prisoner - Just Because





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Po' Boy Blues by Langston Hughes

Po' Boy Blues
By Langston Hughes

When I was home de
Sunshine seemed like gold.
When I was home de
sunshine seemed like gold.
Since I come North de
Whole damn world's turned cold.

I was a good boy,
Never done no wrong.
Yes, I was a good boy,
Never done no wrong,
But this world is weary
An' de road is hard an' long.

I fell in love with
A gal I thought was kind.
Fell in love with
A gal I thought was kind.
She made me lose ma money
An' almost lose ma mind.

Weary, weary,
Weary early in da morn.
Weary, weary,
Weary early in da morn.
I's so weary
I wish I'd never been born.

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Machine Visions 044: Connections - Warren Ellis

From Warren Ellis' Machine Visions Newsletter:


MACHINE VISION 044: Connections
Been writing short stories.  One of them, LICH-HOUSE, was written for a special publication of the Institute For The Future.  I believe it will eventually end up being placed online for free reading.  It’s part of a project also contributed to by Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling, Madeline Ashby, Ramez Naam and Rudy Rucker.  I just did a Skype interview for it tonight.
(Yes, I now turn Skype on from time to time.  I need to get better at that.)
Liminal space.  Broke ground on a possibly-comics-related thing the other night.  Spending a lot of nights staring at the wall and thinking.  Which is kind of easy, these days, as I get very little email, and very little inbound in general.  Which is also a thing to think about.  The nature of shifting connectivity.
(Incidentally, if you, like me, let your Gmail inbox build up to massive, ridiculous, proportions, then a service called mailstrom.co is great for sorting it out.  Smartlabels, in Gmail Labs, needs a bit of tuning, but it redirects some only-occasionally-useful email out of your inbox.  I’m not an inbox-zero person, and I use a shitload of labels in general so I can see what’s going on at a glance, but it feel like I have a bit more control when the front page of my Gmail contains only emails received in 2013…!)
I used to be connected to lots of things.  Now I am connected to almost none.  I also fell out of the habit of blogging.  I get sent no music for SPEKTRMODULE (there’s a new one, by the way – I’m almost weekly at the moment) – it’s all music I buy or find.  I don’t even get good stats from the host any more – they made the stats premium, and I’ll have to pay more to get the old stats package back.
So I can’t grab the CSV to stick into the lovely Panic Status Board appfor iPad.  This app so radiates the sense of Informational Power that you want to use it to watch over everything ever.  My iPad sits in a stand next to my laptop as a second screen.  It’s actually great as a glanceable, even when it’s just monitoring Twitter, email and a few feeds.  If I had the time to work out how to make it do more, I would.  I think Rich Stevens is testing it to destruction right now.
But it is a thing.  It is a thing that speaks of connectedness, of Total Awareness.  On the site today, I spoke of “Bigend-Packerism,” from Hubertus Bigend of Bill Gibson’s last trilogy and Eric Packer from COSMOPOLIS.  Both characters’ practises centre around total awareness of their ecologies.  From one aspect, they’re rogue foresight strategists.  Bigend needs to find The New Thing before it has fully eventuated.  Packer, at one point in COSMOPOLIS, says, looking at his Informational Power Screen, “why am I seeing things that haven’t happened yet?”  They are both, not coincidentally, surreally wealthy. 
This little app on this simple consumer toy that sits on the stand next to me: it’s an emulation of that kind of complete connectedness.  Anything I do is going to be a cheap copy of that kind of practise.  And, yes, it’s entirely fictional.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not seductive, nor that it’s not a weird ideaspace echo of something happening somewhere else.  Information when contextualised by the appropriate intellects is the means of production.  Panic Status Board confers the pleasant but entirely fake feeling of being a captain of informational industry.

Ellis' post on Status Board for iPad which goes alone with this newsletter.

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4.22.2013

Graphic Panels on Superman

I became a Green Lantern


Aardman Animation DC Nation Toys

Found this tonight at BSI Comics:



I have yet to see any Teen Titans Go! toys, so how will they know if the show is a success or not?



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4.21.2013

New Orleans' Lakefront Today

An Indigo Lantern


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Ignatius Restaurant on Magazine Street

Great cocktails. Good Food.


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Vieux Carre Cocktail


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My Reading Buddy



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Why Space Matters - Clyzzel Ann Samson

4.20.2013

Palm Trees at City Park



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Brocato's


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Sinnerman - Nina Simone

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Theme de YoYo - Art Ensemble of Chicago

Harbor Seafood/Fisherman's Cove - Kenner, La


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Three Blooms


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4.18.2013

Be Water My Friend- Bruce Lee



Full Interview:

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The Storytelling of Science






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Oak Street


The Bond Girls



4.17.2013

Movies in 2013

1. Young Adult
2. Jeff, Who Lives At Home
3. Gosford Park
4. The Guard
5. Battle Beyond the Stars
6. Almost Famous
7. Ice Age: Continental Drift
8. G.I. Joe The Movie
9. The Rundown
10. Beasts of the Southern Wild
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
12. Oz, the Great and Powerful
13. The Avengers
14. Captain America: The First Avenger
15. Argo
16. The Hobbit
17. Stick
18. Heat
19. The Goonies
20. The Bay

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Sure On This Shining Night by James Agee

Sure On This Shining Night
By James Agee

Sure on this shining night
Of star made shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.
The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining nightI weep for wand'ring far alone.
Of shadows on the stars.

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A rose





Movies in 2013

1. Young Adult
2. Jeff, Who Lives At Home
3. Gosford Park
4. The Guard
5. Battle Beyond the Stars
6. Almost Famous
7. Ice Age: Continental Drift
8. G.I. Joe The Movie
9. The Rundown
10. Beasts of the Southern Wild
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
12. Oz, the Great and Powerful
13. The Avengers
14. Captain America: The First Avenger
15. Argo
16. The Hobbit
17. Stick
18. Heat


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On Hollywood South

Nollywood and Bollywood are called those because like Hollywood they create and produce their own movies. If we want to truly be Hollywood South, we need to create and produce our own movies and not just work on them.

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Tobasco Bud

Yay! Small tobasco pepper bud in our garden:

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Rosebud

In our garden:

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TED Playlist: The Power of Film

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4.16.2013

Movies in 2013

1. Young Adult
2. Jeff, Who Lives At Home
3. Gosford Park
4. The Guard
5. Battle Beyond the Stars
6. Almost Famous
7. Ice Age: Continental Drift
8. G.I. Joe The Movie
9. The Rundown
10. Beasts of the Southern Wild
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
12. Oz, the Great and Powerful
13. The Avengers
14. Captain America: The First Avenger
15. Argo
16. The Hobbit
17. Stick



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Food Truck Dinner in Fat City