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Showing posts from November, 2012

Thank You Sonora ER, Dr Trujillo and Dr Johnson.

Microphone stand designed by Hudson. Our eight year old son, Hudson, has been having severe abdominal pain over the past week to ten days, and this week we took him to see Dr Jennifer Neufeld-Trujillo , one of our regular pediatricians at the Forest Road Pediatric Clinic in Sonora, and also to ER at Sonora Regional Medical Center. We just want to say a big thank you to everyone - including all the very friendly and helpful staff at ER - for their care of and concern for Hudson, who is gradually starting to feel better. We would also like to make a special mention of Dr Lisa Johnson , who was on call tonight for Forest Road Pediatrics, and who had a long telephone conversation with me, in which she answered many questions with a depth of knowledge and experience that was both highly reassuring and informative, and who left us feeling confident that we are on the right path for the weekend - always a difficult time when your child is not feeling well. Hopefully, Hudson will cont

Bond, Barbara Broccoli - and Skyfall!

I cannot wait to see the latest Bond movie, Skyfall , directed by Sam Mendes , starring the perfectly cast Daniel Craig as James Bond and Javier Bardem as, reputedly, the best Bond villain we've seen, Silva. Skyfall is already - in its first weekend of release in the United States - the most successful Bond movie ever, with a worldwide gross, as of writing, of $669.2 million.  Not bad for a franchise that is 50 years old! I'm particularly pleased for producer Barbara Broccoli , who was the first person to option the film rights in my novel, The War Zone , some considerable time ago (although she wasn't involved in making the film when it was finally produced). Barbara was a wonderful person to work with, and a lot of fun - we even went down the helter skelter on Brighton Pier together, as part of a dare:) Here's to blowing things up (on screen) for fun!

Our Buddha in the Snow

Photographs  ©   2012 Alexander Chow-Stuart. Last weekend, we had our first dusting of snow this winter - and it was beautiful. There was only a little at our house, just enough to give our Buddha his first taste of white flakes this year - but a little farther up the hill, our local playground looked like something out of a fairytale. We moved here because our children wanted snow. Last winter was remarkably mild, although we did have a little. This year, given the fact that we've had some before Thanksgiving, we are hoping that we'll have a good deal more.

VOTE VOTE VOTE FOR PRESIDENT OBAMA - AND HISTORY

The Sweep of History: President Obama and MLK. I had hoped to write something sweeping and inspirational, as well as considered and smart and carefully argued, about tomorrow's presidential election - an election that feels as if it has been a decade in the making - but time has proven tighter than usual in the past few days, and so you get this: an impassioned plea to get out and VOTE tomorrow, if you have not already done so, and to VOTE FOR PRESIDENT OBAMA AND HISTORY. I first wrote about Barack Obama on February 3, 2008, for my previous blog, Loving The Wolf, in a fairly lengthy post in which I talked about my reasons for moving to the US from Britain in 1990, my choice to become a United States citizen, the coming economic disaster that George W Bush had led us into, and the future that  candidate Obama (at that time, he was still campaigning in the Democratic primaries against Hillary Clinton) offered. I ended that post with these words, which I still wholehear

Please Join Me On Saturday At 11am For My Talk On Film Noir

Please join me on Saturday November 3, 2012, from 11am-noon at Sonora's historic Opera Hall for my talk  Film Noir: From Murder To Mainstream . It is presented as part of this year's  ITSA Film Festival in Sonora .  I will be exploring one of my absolute favorite film (and literary) genres, noir, and its influence not only on the noted detective/"pulp" classics such as The Maltese Falcon and The Postman Always Rings Twice , but on contemporary mainstream cinema, from the "future noir" of Ridley Scott's groundbreaking science fiction movie Blade Runner to David Lynch's films, such as Mulholland Drive , and dark, intense dramas such as Christopher Nolan's Inception and even the major hit television series, Mad Men. John Hamm as Don Draper in Mad Men. I'll be there at 11am on Saturday November 3 at the historic Sonora Opera Hall, 94 Washington Street, Sonora, CA 95370.  For more details, please visit the ITSA Film Fest