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not much of a spoiler from TV Guide but ...we do like the song.
DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS!!!
Any scoop on Season 2 of True Blood? — Whitney
MICKEY: I'm sorry to say that the person you were hoping wasn't actually dead is actually dead. Bill, Sookie and Jessica, who are now kind of a demented family unit, travel to Texas, where they'll meet this guy. (The stars at night... are big and bright.... everybody!)
NYTimes from September 2008
By Alessandra Stanley
One of the older waitresses at Merlotte's, a dive bar in Bon Temps, La., doesn't dare refuse to serve her customer Trublood, but draws the line at true hospitality. The stranger orders O negative, but is told there is only A negative, even though the fridge is full of both synthetic blood types.
''And don't microwave it, neither,'' the waitress says to the bartender.
''He can drink it cold.''
The vampires on ''True Blood,'' a new series on HBO, have ''come out of the coffin,'' as one woman puts it, thanks to a Japanese substitute that supposedly satisfies their inhuman blood lust. They are seeking acceptance and passage of the Vampire Rights Amendment in a society that is still prejudiced against the life-threatening lifestyles of the living dead.
Vampires have Washington lobbyists, support groups and talk show pundits.
They also have their own louche bars, and the one closest to Bon Temps is Fangtasia, where reckless mortals, known as Fang-bangers, trawl for the intoxicating taste of vampire sex.
That sly sendup of American culture and pop politics is one of the more amusing features in this new venture by Alan Ball, the creator of ''Six Feet Under.'' It's not the only inversion.
Mr. Ball, who also wrote the film ''American Beauty,'' is known for imbuing the most humble and prosaic settings -- a Southern California funeral parlor, a middle-class suburb -- with complex psychological themes and stylish lyricism. He does the opposite with ''True Blood,'' leavening fantasy romance and perverse Southern Gothic with the petty preoccupations of small-town life: ''Dark Shadows'' with a splash of Mayberry.
Vampires have an eternal place in American entertainment. Every generation has its bloodsuckers, from Bela Lugosi and Anne Rice's Lestat to ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'' Love with a supernatural stranger, a soul mate with a dangerous edge, is a particularly resilient romantic fantasy. But the familiarity of the cliches -- garlic, silver crosses, Transylvania -- also abets playfulness. And there is fun to be found in bending the paranormal to fit into the most earthly, banal settings.
Festooned with Spanish moss and swampy Southern nostalgia, this twist on the vampire conceit is full of allusions to racism and homophobia, but the metaphors are hazily applied and don't go very deep. The tale gets more engrossing as it goes along, but the first five episodes, at least, don't quite live up to the fierce score and the amazing, hallucinatory opening montage.
''True Blood'' is based on the Southern Vampire Mysteries, a series of fantasy novels by Charlaine Harris that revolve around Sookie Stackhouse, a cocktail waitress who solves murders while playing hard to bite with a tall, handsome vampire. Mr. Ball has taken what is basically a quirky romance novel and turned it into an R-rated melodrama puffed up with erotic tension and campy gore. It's creepy, steamy and funny at times, and it's also a muddle, a comic murder mystery that is a little too enthralled with its own exoticism. ''True Blood'' is outre, but it's not nearly as eccentric and inventive as ''Six Feet Under'' or even ''Big Love.''
Sookie, played with a clipped Holly Hunter twang by Anna Paquin, is perky, blond and psychic -- she can read people's thoughts. Sookie calls her gift a ''disability,'' one that has left her something of a recluse as well as a virgin. She lives with a dotty, doting grandmother, Adele (Lois Smith), and hangs out with her best friend, a feisty black woman named Tara (Rutina Wesley) who can't hold her tongue, or a job, and is also something of a loner.
One of the more interesting and less stereotypical characters is Tara's cousin Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis), a short-order cook at Merlotte's by day, a gay hooker and drug dealer by night.
When a tall, pale and handsome stranger named Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) enters Merlotte's, Sookie knows at once that he is a vampire, the first to make himself known in tiny Bon Temps. She is tickled, not fearful -- nothing exciting ever happens in her small, redneck community, and she yearns for romance. Sookie finds him irresistibly seductive, partly because he is the first man she has ever met whose mind she cannot read.
Sex is on everyone else's minds, and it takes all of Sookie's concentration not to hear her friends and neighbors' crudest fantasies and lascivious musings. Vampires are predators, but they are also prey: it turns out that in small quantities, vampire blood has an aphrodisiac effect on humans, and there is a brisk illegal trade in V, vampire blood.
Sookie's strapping, dimwitted brother, Jason (Ryan Kwanten), is the town's Casanova, but unfortunately for him, some of the women he sleeps with turn up dead. He's an obvious suspect, but plenty of people in town prefer to blame the vampires for the crimes. Sookie's boss, Sam Merlotte (Sam Trammel), believes in segregation for the undead.
When Sookie chides him for seeking a return to the days of ''separate but equal,'' Sam says he doesn't care about equality. ''Give them more than we got,'' he says, ''just as long as everything is separate.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/arts/television/05bloo.html
Vampire Vodka from England here
Welcome to the online home of Vampyre Vodka. The newest member of the vampire family.
This wickedly smooth elixir is the first red vodka in the United States. Triple distilled in England by one of the world's leading distillers of vodka and gin.
Check back for more information coming soon.
In the meantime, check out www.vampire.com or www.wickedwinesonline.com
( see it ? far left bottom shelf behind Longshadow)
Welcome mortal to Vampire.com, the ultimate beverage resource for vampires seeking alternatives to the mundane ways of this world.
Rumor has it that the Vampire Vineyards are actually owned by a circle of vampires, and the company’s founder, an entertainment attorney from New York, is actually just a front. (Whether he and his convertible were commandeered by a Vampire is still a subject for debate.) We do know however that after satiating themselves for years with their Transylvanian blood of the vine, the powers that be decided to spice things up and migrate westward like so many vampires before them.
Using meticulous advance planning, these vampires planted their rootstock at the dawn of the 21st century in the mountainous region of Paso Robles, California, where the ocean fog frequently rolls in off the coast providing the perfect cover to their hidden vineyards.
Having waited a full seven years, the vampires’ rootstock now has yielded wonderful tight small clusters of grapes that have been skillf
ully blended by vampire winemakers to produce phenomenal wines -- smooth and well rounded, with forward fresh fruit – that have been aged in both French and American Oak Barrels. Sip the Blood of the Vine and enjoy!
( letter from Dracula-click to enlarge)
Cool glasses and other gifts here
No one guessed the last tie question ..
The question was "who wore this and when ?" and pictured a green print tie.
Hint: we already did another tie question -it's here and both of the ties are wore by suitors of Sookie and both the ties match the color of the eyes of the man. ( or shifter, I guess I should say )
Purple Paisley Tie - worn by Quinn the night they go to the play in Shreveport and it matches the color of his eyes.
Green Print Tie- worn by Alicide the first night he and Sookie go out in Jackson and again it matches the color of his eyes.
Our wonderful Twitter friend @SookieBonTemps writes more that just a tweet!
We have at least 3 names for the cemetery that separates the Stackhouse property from the Compton property. (Sookie's house and Bill's house)
In True Blood we know this cemetery as Bon Temps cemetery but in the books we have it called two different names by Charlaine. It's either Sweet Home of Tall Pines ????
Bk 1
I was reviewing the evening as I drove to my grandmother's house, where I lived. It's right before Tall Pines cemetery, which lies off a narrow two-lane parish road. My great-great-great grandfather had started the house, and he'd had ideas about privacy, so to reach it you had to turn off the parish road into the driveway, go through some woods, and then you arrived at the clearing in which the house stood.
Bk 4
The graveyard was somewhat downhill from my house. Bill's house, the Compton house, was quite a bit more uphill from Sweet Home Cemetery. The journey downhill, mild as the slope was, was exhilarating, though I glimpsed two or three parked cars on the narrow blacktop that wound through the graves.
Thanks so much to MastersFX for sharing all their magic - check out their website for their work on other shows and movies. http://mastersfx.com/
A puppeteer is a person who manipulates an inanimate object — a puppet— in real time to create the illusion of life. The puppeteer may be visible to or hidden from the audience. A puppeteer can operate a puppet indirectly by the use of strings, rods, wires, electronics or directly by his or her own hands placed inside the puppet or holding it externally. Some puppet styles require puppeteers to work together as a team to create a single puppet character.
There are a wide range of styles of puppetry but whatever the style, the puppeteer's role is to manipulate the physical object in such a manner that the audience believes the object is imbued with life. In some instances the persona of the puppeteer is also an important feature.
"Puppetry is a highly effective and dynamically creative means of exploring the richness of interpersonal communication. By its very nature, puppetry concentrates on the puppet rather than the puppeteer. This provides a safety zone for the puppeteer and allows for exploration of unlimited themes through a safe and non-threatening environment for com
munication."
Puppetry is a live medium and this distinguishes it from animation in which animators make a puppet appear to move by using a stop motion film technique in which the puppet is moved tiny fractions between each frame.
Puppets listed in various True Blood episodes include: Daniel Q. Rebert (Puppeteer), Bernard Eichholz (Puppeteer), Billy Bryan (Puppeteer)
Ep2 One puppeteer (Sookie is beaten)
Ep7 Two puppeteers (Lettie May exorcism w/possum)
Ep12 Three puppeteers (Sookie and "Dean the Dog" beaten)
Steve Barnes sits down with New York Times bestselling author Charlaine Harris this month and discusses her Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire series.
Born in Tunica, Mississippi and growing up literally in the middle of a cotton field, Charlaine has been writing since she was a teenager. While her early writing consisted mainly of ghost stories, she began writing poetry and focusing on plays as a natural expression of her talent during her young adult years at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.
In her interview with Steve, Charlaine recounts how she was given the opportunity to stay at home and write. She wrote and published a couple of mysteries and after having three children created the two different book series, “Aurora Teagarden” and “Lily Bard”, ultimately winning an Agatha nomination for the Teagarden series, but according to her online bibliography “began to realize that neither of those series was ever going to set the literary world on fire,” that is until she decided to mix-up genres and offer a very unconventional take on the vampire mythos. An interesting twist allowed Charlaine’s vampires in the Sookie Stackhouse series to ingest a blood substitute and integrate into everyday society. As imagined this creates all sorts of problems for vampires and non-vampires alike.
The success of Charlaine’s Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire series captured the attention of HBO who turned it into a made for television series called True Blood. This series earned favor with the Golden Globe voters, garnering a nomination for best dramatic series and a best dramatic actress nod for star Anna Paquin.
Please stay tuned to AETN for this interesting interview and check out Charlaine’s website for the latest news concerning any of her books, her blog or events calendar at www.charlaineharris.com.
http://www.aetn.org/programs/barnesand/archives/posts/barnes_and..._a_conversation_with_charlaine_harris
Tonight we talk spoilers !!
What do we know about True Blood Season 2 from the spoilers we've seen ?
What have we found out about Episodes 3 & 4 ?
Loving True Blood in Dallas Blogtalk radio tonight 9 pm central chatroom will open here at 8:45pm
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/True-Blood-in-Dallas call in (646) 929-0825
***
Thanks to everyone who can join, the podcast should be up in a hour or so and the show will be available on iTunes tomorrow -
Here are the links we talked about:
Spoiler TV HERE
Season Two HERE
Episode three HERE
Episode four HERE
In Japan, "What's your type?" is much more than small talk; it can be a paramount question in everything from matchmaking to getting a job.
In Japan, Whether You Are A, B, AB Or O Can Determine Your Mate, Job, Even Your Fashion Accessories
By type, the Japanese mean blood type, and no amount of scientific debunking can kill a widely held notion that blood tells all.
In the year just ended, four of Japan's top 10 best-sellers were about how blood type determines personality, according to Japan's largest book distributor, Tohan Co. The books' publisher, Bungeisha, says the series - one each for types B, O, A, and AB - has combined sales of well over 5 million copies.
Taku Kabeya, chief editor at Bungeisha, thinks the appeal comes from having one's self-image confirmed; readers discover the definition of their blood type and "It's like 'Yes, that's me!"'
As defined by the books, type As are sensitive perfectionists but overanxious; Type Bs are cheerful but eccentric and selfish; Os are c
Read on
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/02/01/world/main4767079.shtml
They make sawdust pies in Texas.
If you find a giant hole in your yard it's possible a vampire was just hatched.
Dead folk are piled up around Jason.
Rejection causes vampires to lose their fangon.
If anything were to happen to Sookie during Bill's absence then Eric would then be without Sookie's helpful skills.
Try Swaptree
http://www.swaptree.com/
Books, magazines, DVDs, movies and more can all be swapped around on this website, free of charge. All you have to do is join, put in the items that you want to swap and Swaptree will generate a list of thousands of items that you can receive in trade for any of your items, from all over the world. You don't have to search for trades, negotiate or anything of the sort. Swaptree does everything for you and all you have to do is choose what you want to shop for.
Once you are ready, you print off the postage on your computer, provided through free software with Swaptree and mail your item to its new destination. All you have to pay for is shipping, nothing else.
You could even set up a network of friends that would like to swap just Charlaine Harris books ...
Did I mention it's free and media mail postage is only $2.50 -what a bargain !
So get busy today loading up your swaptree account with what you have to trade ( I noticed over 30 Charlaine books available ) and you are also saving trees...
Filming in Dallas !!! yippee!!
Great interview by Markee magazine http://www.markeemag.com/
Bruce Dunn has co-produced Strange Love, Tell Me You Love Me, Local Color, Kingdom Hospital, and has associate produced Californication, The Path to 9/11, Desperation, Sleeper Cell, The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer, Rose Red, Storm of the Century, The Siege at Ruby Ridge, and Sophie & the Moonhanger.
Markee: HBO's new hit series, True Blood, from Alan Ball, gives a new twist to the vampire legend. With the development of synthetic blood, vampires have come out of the coffin to be integrated with mortal culture in rural Louisiana. Did you shoot there at all?
Dunn: We shot in Shreveport to get big-value local exteriors: the town of Bon Temps, the trailer that a tornado supposedly hit surrounded by those mossy trees we love, the exterior of Jason's and Bill's houses. We're definitely going back to block shoot for the second season - it's important for Alan to be where Charlaine Harris set her Sookie Stackhouse books.
Louisiana's tax incentives are icing on the cake, and the crews supporting us there are top-notch.
Since the second book in the series is called Living Dead in Dallas, it's likely we'll do doing a bit of shooting in Dallas, too.
MARKEE: Right from the opening titles - a collage of images ranging from bayous and evangelicals to sexy dancers and road kill - the audience knows it's in for a different viewing experience.
Dunn: Digital Kitchen did the title montage. They worked on the opening sequence for Six Feet Under so Alan had a relationship with them. Their storyboards for the initial presentation blew us away - they really caught the flavor of what we were looking for. One of the mandates was to sell Louisiana, to let viewers know they were going to see something quirky and visit locations they'd never been to before.
MARKEE: How was the look of the show determined?
Dunn: R!OT colorist Scott Klein and pilot DP Checco Varese set the contrasty look with blown-out highlights. We now have quite a library of looks like Sookie's 'psychic TV' where she sees what others are imagining: We pump up the brightness to bring out the film grain and differentiate it from the norm. In the flashbacks our DPs use a Deakinizer lens, named for Cinematographer Roger Deakins, to vignette around the edges of the frame; when we do that in postproduction Zoic simulates the lens look.
MARKEE: Visual effects play a key role in every episode, don't they?
Dunn: Zoic Studios does the digital VFX and MastersFX the makeup effects.
When vampire fangs are out for long periods of time, they're prosthetics from MastersFX. But when they're retracted and extended, they're digital VFX from Zoic. We latched onto the concept of snakes' fangs which are always there. The vampires' fangs are tucked into their mouths and unfold from the back - you can see the CG mechanics in certain scenes.
Zoic created [vampire] Longshadow's death and deterioration with an entirely CG actor - it's probably the costliest effect in the show. They also did the V hallucinations [which occur when mortals drink vampire blood] which have been a lot of fun - sparks flying out of trees, the love scene swimming through a shared-experience dreamscape. The backgrounds were imagined after the water-tank shoot with the actors; it was Alan's idea that they all be based in nature - in a forest, with waterfalls.
MARKEE: Audio is another key component from using Jace Everett's amazing Bad Things as the theme song to Sookie's ability to hear people's thoughts.
Dunn: Working with Technicolor Sound we did multiple design tests to help sell the concept of Sookie's thought dialogues: We needed a good way to convey that without being confusing. We use sound effects coming in and out of the thought process, then reverse dialogue and EQ it in a certain way to make it very clear that what Sookie hears is specific to her. It's important for the storyline that the process be intelligible when we want it to be and cacophonous at other times.
Composer Nathan Barr has really nailed the spirit and feeling of the show.
Nate's love theme for Bill and Sookie has both an Old World feel, since Bill comes from the Civil War era, and the feel of something timeless. The Civil War flashbacks have banjos and cellos, there's an African sub-theme for the voodoo exorcism, big-string power hits for the scary parts and, always, the flavor of Louisiana.
MARKEE: Are any production changes ahead for season two?
Dunn: We've had a top-notch, efficient team for our first 12 episodes. All the key departments worked so well that I don't really expect changes for season two. I've never worked on a series that has spoken to fans like True Blood has. Thanks to Alan and the material we're all excited to get back to work in January.
More great special effects for True Blood from Master FX
http://mastersfx.com/
Check it out in action here :
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* TALK BLOOD RADIO*
Talk Blood Radio has ended for Season 4. Thanks to all my great co- hosts and sponsors. All 12 episode podcasts are available for FREE from Blogtalk and itunes.
To bring back Blogtalk for Season 5 we will need episode sponsors, if you'd like to sponsor an episode for Season 5, please contact me !
~~~
Index to all previous shows HERE
You can also listen and subscribe to all the radio shows on iTunes HERE
Comments, suggestion -- please contact "Dallas".
