Skip to main content

Next NOIR Writing Workshop - Saturday January 21st 2012

Vintage cover courtesy of culturazzi.org

My next writing workshop at the Central Sierra Arts Council is on Saturday January 21st 2012 from 1:30-3:30pm (to allow for an extra 30 minutes if we run over, before the Arts Council officially closes at 4pm).

It is themed around
NOIR in books and movies, and will explore how the extreme emotions, motivations, characters and plots of noir are worth examining, no matter what you are writing.  


It will include brief clips from classic and more recent noir movies, including The Maltese Falcon, Blade Runner and the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple, as well as passages from noir novels, including The Maltese Falcon and The Postman Always Rings Twice, as well as more recent noir novels.  


We will also examine the arson-induced fires of the past two weeks in West Hollywood and Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles - the circumstances of which have been compared to real-life LA noir.

Admission for the workshop will be $25 - and $15 for students.


There will be a lunch beforehand, probably at Emberz (very close to the Arts Council).  The time of the lunch will be
11:30am-1:30pm - unless you all feel that is too early, in which case we will have a shortened lunch from 12pm-1:30pm.


Blood Simple DVD from Amazon.
I will confirm the details by the middle of this week.  As always, details will be posted and updated on this blog.

I would suggest that you sign up for email updates to my blog.  There is an email box just below the Buddha in the right sidebar.  



If you enter your email address, you will automatically receive an email each time I post to my blog.  


I would also really appreciate it if you would "Like" my blog on Facebook.  The "Like" button is also below the Buddha - or on the associated Facebook page, AlexanderStuart.com.

The AlexanderStuart.com FB page often has additional content to the blog.

I very much hope you will all join me for the next workshop.  I greatly enjoyed yesterday's Real World Writing Workshop, and I think the Noir Workshop will be even more fun.

Also, I will be emailing you a link through box.com tomorrow to the first of the online documents and resources that you can download as part of these workshops.

Warmest wishes,
Alexander

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The High Tower Apartments and The Long Goodbye

Photograph by Dwayne Moser. This beautiful apartment complex in Los Angeles is called the Hightower or High Tower Complex (the High Tower name refers to the central elevator, I believe), and was designed in 1935-1936 by architect  Carl Kay - and made famous in 1973 by my favorite film, Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (see Why I Love Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye ). Although Altman used the building as Philip Marlowe's apartment in his somewhat post-modern Long Goodbye (the film plays with references to Old Hollywood and opens and closes with the song, Hooray For Hollywood ), the building has another direct connection to Raymond Chandler. It was apparently the inspiration for Chandler in his book, The High Window (the first Chandler novel I ever read), in which Chandler describes the residence of Philip Marlowe as being on the cliffs above High Tower Drive in a building with a fancy elevator tower. (Thanks to the Society of Architectural Historians Southern...

Andrew Hale and Sade

Sade in concert in San Jose. All concert photos  Copyright  © 2011  Alexander Chow-Stuart. On Thursday evening, we saw our longtime friend Andrew Hale perform with Sade at the HP Pavilion in San Jose, in one of the most beautifully conceived and produced concert performances I have ever seen. Sade is a rare musician, in that she and the band only write, record and tour every eight to ten years, so that in a very real sense you can measure your life by her. The band's music is always fresh and always newly conceived - for their previous album, Lovers Rock , they stripped everything down musically to a minimalist sound and banished the saxophone that had been so much a part of Sade's heavily soul- and jazz-influenced style. The latest album, Soldier of Love , released in 2010, is one of the most tender, moving collections of songs yet, from the astonishingly beautiful Morning Bird , which features exquisite keyboards from Andrew, to the soulful, retro, r...

The Story Behind the Immortal Bass Line of Lou Reed's Walk On The Wild Side (VIDEO)

Of all the tributes to, and stories about, Lou Reed over the past week, this is one of the most fascinating - even though it doesn't directly concern Reed himself, but rather Herbie Flowers , the legendary British bass player who created the immortal bass line that opens Reed's massive solo hit, Walk On The Wild Side. When I first heard Walk On The Wild Side, it seemed the ultimate late night New York song: a transgender story (which apparently radio stations in the 1970s and since didn't even pick up on, despite the line, " Shaved his legs and then he was a she ") featuring characters from Andy Warhol's Factory , which sounded as if it had been recorded at about 1 am in some smoky lowdown basement hangout in the East Village. The video above reveals the immense influence of Herbie Flowers - who had worked with David Bowie , who produced Walk On The Wild Side and the Lou Reed album it came from, Transformer , on Bowie's own classic breakout s...