Monthly Archives: May 2009

summer movies

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One of my best summer memories in LA is going to the summer movie sessions at the Forever Cemetery in Hollywood. It’s outdoors, on a huge grass lawn, under the stars and around the remains of Greta Garbo, Rodolfo Velentino, John Huston and Johnny Ramone, among so many others.
The event is called Cinespia and it serves many purposes: a different kind of date, a picnic with content, an oldies film festival lying on the lawn in the city of stars. It’s already in its 8th year and the program includes classics such as Manhattan, Dazed and Confused, Blazing Saddles, Psycho, The Thin Man, Rocky Horror Show (of course) Rebel Without A Cause, etc. We take food and drink and blankets and pillows and hang out with a very cool crowd.

Now living in NY I learn about the roof top movies, which naturally has its east coast cultural twist: moviegoers sit on chairs, aligned one beside the other, in rows, and the “rooftop” may be covered. Hum. Fun, I guess.cinespia

My neopolitan blood

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Browsing You Tube on a gray sunday afternon I come across the trailer of one of the most awaited movies of 2009, Nine. I can’t wait. Big hopes. Based on Fellini’s 8 1/2, filmed in Italy, with a scruffy Daniel Day Lewis, and a laundry list of female divas from Marion Cotillard to Penelope Cruz and Sophia Loren…oh my, it is indeed culturally exciting. In all honesty I confess I look at the casting of Daniel Day Lewis with a little apprehension: will he be explosive enough to play a latin Guido Contini…? And honestly I am a little weary of Nicole Kidman in a film with voluptuous passionate women…. Nonetheless, I got hopes.

More than often these days I am hearing how neopolitan I am, direct result of my lack of patience, or should I admit glimpses of my italian blood boiling in my veins, turning down shelves here and there, and being loud when I should just be quiet? My wonderful partner, patient and wise, is polite enough to tell me its my great will at work. I’d say it’s the latin hunger to be alive — and don’t let anything behind. I’m like any latin, fiery, and as long as treated nicely I am at peace. Otherwise one “bad move” and my quick synapse firing neurons inside my brain make the words come out as a machine gun. I am getting better though, striving to become operate in stealth mode…. If it’s of any good, Latins have ‘savoir vivre’; thus you can call me proud.

metafiction

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I have started to generate my reader. “The fly on the wall, the curious, the corporate, any given giant looking in through the glass to find my soul. Because you have made him or her be. He or she is the hit on this blog, where I list my musings in the universe of pop culture, media and the intimate self. At the same time I struggle with the idea of being the narrator of a fictional story. The fact that I am building my narrative in life, narrating my musings online makes me a fictionist. Do I truly have the ability to see through the mirror? Or am I daydreaming and delusional?

I, the author start writing about you the reader. You the reader-given the enormous amount of text at your fingertips online and the possibility of playing a game with me about returning to human settlement…whatever that is…. start writing cutting and pasting what you would like to read from keywords. In doing this you are authoring me to the dystopic middle landscape.

Lifespan, lifescape, lifestyle, and game. I read about the human experiment of 5,000 years and in any fictional character I hear my voice. It’s the social fiction that makes me transport myself into the story. Like blogging or tweetering. I cannot lose touch with my sensibilities and perform to my writing. I feel daunted because nothing really matters when you are just the narrator. Ignorance is bliss. Silence is bliss. But voicing out my thoughts is part of my self.

Fragmentation and Aggregation

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Growing up I always heard expressions that I couldn’t quite understand because of their paradoxical fatalism-slash-positive twist. Whenever someone made such prophetic statements such as “It’s in time of crisis that the big fortunes are made” people would just smile or nod in agreement an I would just look puzzled…. I had no clue what exactly was meant. There was also “less is more”; “out of the box”; “less is more, small is beautiful, limitation is your friend…”; and “tighter budgets, bigger ideas”.
Alas, here’s television at it’s all-time low, with the cynical announcing the end of broadcast television — myself included. Truth is it is still vibrant and creative, and –myself included — am being creative as ever, looking at the glass half full, and trying to figure out a new business model for myself and the medium, trying to foresee the new era with new finance models. Development execs are tightening budgets and changing the overrated prime time slots. I love it. Leno’s 10pm will end up the pilot money hemorrhage. The Screenings will offer as good titles as ever. How to monetize the viewing migration? Creating new business models.  Content is still king, and nothing replaces a good idea. But television is becoming democratic and social media is changing the face of broadcast. Embrace fragmentation, await aggregation. My new fancy words….Aggregation of channels and bundling themes together will make my viewing experience unique. Can’t wait for it.