Alexander Stuart

     Photo credit Destination360 UCLA Campus On the morning of Monday July 26, I will be giving a talk at UCLA to visiting film students from the University of Miami , thanks to my dear friend, Paul Lazarus , Director of the Motion Picture Program of the School of Communications there.  I used to teach a graduate screenwriting class at UM before we moved to LA and greatly enjoyed it, it's a wonderful school. I'll be talking about what excites me about writing, the "path" (if that's what it was, it feels more like a leap through time) that brought me here - and about the movies, books, music and entertainment of all kinds that ignite true passion in me, the kind of things that really get your (and my) head spinning! If you are interested in attending, it starts at 9:30am.  It's free, please email me at tranquilbuddha@gmail.com for details and directions.

Coming later in 2013, a newly updated edition of Life On Mars , my offbeat account of life in Miami Beach and Southern Florida in the 1990s - and the inspiration for the television documentary, The End of America. Carl Hiaasen wrote of the book: "Sharp and canny... You will not find a better social biopsy of Miami than this."

I love the dawn - and sunsets - and I especially love capturing them with the iPhone camera, whose color palette I really like, and particularly with its Hipstamatic "Polaroid" app, which adds a whole new sense of fun to photography.          

A young friend of ours, Whitney Martishius, recently saw an art piece that I created for the Miami Art Museum in 1997 hanging on our wall. She read it and was greatly moved by it, so much so that I offered to send her a copy. (The actual artwork is about 6 feet by 5 feet, printed on museum-quality white board.) The piece was part of an exhibition in which the Miami Art Museum combined writers and sculptors. I was paired with the  Polish sculptor, Magdalena Abakanowicz (whom I never met, although we corresponded), and at first I hadn't a clue what to do, since her work consists largely of groups of large, obscure, partial human torsos, and is greatly influenced by her childhood experience in Poland of the Nazis during World War II. I ultimately decided to use her own words, from an interview I read with her, which I cut up and rearranged - "sampling" them in the way that a hip hop artist might sample musical or lyrical phrases (I was very influenced by the Frenc