Skip to main content

NOIR Writing Workshop - Saturday January 21st from 1:30-3:30pm

Charong Chow's I Am The Daughter of Fu Manchu.

In my NOIR Writing Workshop at the Central Sierra Arts Council, 193 S. Washington Street, Sonora, this Saturday January 21st from 1:30pm-3:30pm, I will be exploring one of the most compelling genres of literature and film.


Tickets are $25 for adults - and $15 for students. There will also be a lunch before the workshop at Emberz, 177 S. Washington Street, from 11:30am-1:30pm. Everyone is welcome!


With style, content and psychological exploration that grew originally out of the German Expressionism of the 1920s - but which is most associated with American "hard boiled" thrillers, gangster stories and unconventional love stories of the 1930s-1950s - noir has influenced everything and everyone from Alfred Hitchcock to David Lynch, from Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless to Christopher Nolan's Batman movies and the dark tone and complex psychology of Inception.


Please join us from 1:30-3:30pm on Saturday to discuss and enjoy excerpts from some of the acclaimed classics of noir - including Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, James L Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, and more radical "future noir" or "neo noir" works such as Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic, Blade Runner - which mixed the feel of a 1940s noir thriller with a dark yet dazzling futuristic Los Angeles.

Blade Runner's dark, noir, futuristic Los Angeles of 2019.
In addition, we will have Charong Chow reading from her new "teen noir" novel, Random, and discussing how she transformed the real life events surrounding the death at 26 of her childhood friend, Jeremy, into a contemporary teen love story and thriller, heavily influenced by noir literature and movies.


There will also be a special screening of Charong's short film, I Am The Daughter of Fu Manchu.


David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.
This black and white film, made on 8mm stock while Charong was a student at Cal Arts in Los Angeles - and both directed by her and starring her in the title role - uses the strongly noir-influenced Hollywood stereotypes of Asian women and men to explore the racial underpinnings of such films as the popular Fu Manchu series, including 1931's Daughter Of The Dragon.


In particular, it  exposes the kind of roles America's most famous Chinese-American movie star, Anna May Wong, was forced to play.

I hope you can join us on Saturday at the Arts Council - and, if possible, at Emberz for lunch from 11:30am-1:15pm - for what I believe will be one of our most fascinating workshops yet.



Thanks, as always, to Yvonne and the wonderful staff at the Starbucks at The Junction for providing free coffee for everyone.


For more information - and to reserve seats at Emberz - please email me at: tranquilbuddha@gmail.com or call me at: 310-383-7562.

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...