Saturday, December 6, 2008

The real Fangatsia - Alex's bar in Long Beach

, epiHave You Been to the Vampire Bar in Long Beach?

If you faithfully watched the first season of "True Blood" on HBO this Fall, then you'll remember Fangtasia, the vampire bar set in Shreveport, Louisiana. The true setting of the bar isn't too far off from reality, in alternative theme at least. It's actually Alex's Bar in Long Beach which is one of the top venues for punk music in the Los Angeles area. LAist has visited them a number of times for shows and is happy to see the great venue used for a great show (also a candy-crack easy-to-read addicting book series by Charlaine Harris).

True Blood Paley Center LA event was postponed

*** no date announced
Dec 9th
Dear Paley Center True Blood ticket holder,

Though we had anticipated we would be able to announce the rescheduled date for our True Blood seminar tomorrow, December 10 -- we unfortunately have not as of yet been able to secure a new date for this program. Please rest assured the event will indeed be rescheduled for the early months of 2009 and your current ticket will be honored on the new date.

We are working tirelessly to schedule the event at a time when the principle cast and creative team will all be available to participate; doing this is regrettably taking a little longer than we first anticipated.

Again, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience you?re encountering due to this scheduling issue. We appreciate your continued understanding and look forward to announcing the new date to you via email in the very near future.

If you need further information, please don?t hesitate to contact me directly via email at rreyes@paleycenter.org

Appreciatively,

Rene Reyes
Producer

Public Programs & Festivals
The Paley Center for Media
P.S. Those of you who purchased Closed-Circuit Viewing Room tickets will get the opportunity to upgrade. -- Gary
Gary W. Browning

The Paley Center for Media

465 N Beverly Dr

Beverly Hills, CA 90210

T: (310) 786-1046

F: (310) 786-1086

gbrowning@paleycenter.org Visionary Drama

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

True Blood
Thursday, December 4, 2008 ( rescheduled!!)
7:00 pm PT
Los Angeles

This event has been postponed. We regret any inconvenience. Ticket holders can redeem their tickets on the new date which will be announced shortly.
Ticket holders requesting a refund should contact then for further information. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Forsaking the suburban world of American Beauty and the mortuary of Six Feet Under, creator Alan Ball now reveals the presence of vampires in a small Louisiana town, the setting for his scary and sexy new HBO series, True Blood. Ball and his creative team will unveil a new episode of the series that he pitched as "popcorn for smart people."
** you can post a comment and have it submitted as a question Send us a question you would like asked of our panelists.

http://www.paleycenter.org/true-blood/

* you will after the program is rescheduled be able to buy a dvd of the event as well as download the audio from itunes

Buy Paley Center DVDs
Select evenings from the 2005 William S. Paley Television Festival in Los Angeles-with the spirited discussion and banter presented in their entirety-are available on DVD for $19.95 each (plus tax & shipping). All proceeds benefit the Paley Center. Pick your favorite one below-or buy all three!

Download Paley Center Programs
You can download your favorite Paley Center programs on iTunes and Audible.com.
http://www.paleycenter.org/shop

Vampire weakened- Guardian UK

No throat-ripping bogeymen, the blood-suckers of Twilight are, like, totally emo.
It's all meta-phwoar, says fang fiction expert Anne Billson

"What if I'm not the hero? What if I'm the bad guy?" asks Edward Cullen, the brooding vampire boyfriend in Twilight, the new film version of Stephenie Meyer's bestselling supernatural romance for young adults. Edward needn't worry; he's no bloodsucking fiend. Gone are the days when Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee violated the quivering throats of their female victims. Now it's the females who are calling the shots. Instead of screaming, getting bitten and being turned into passive playthings, they're reaching out to their erstwhile ravishers and — horror of horrors! — having relationships with them.

It didn't happen overnight. Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Hotel Transylvania novels emphasised the Byronic romance of vampires, while films like Fright Night and The Lost Boys played up the teen angle. But it wasn't until 1997 — when Joss Whedon spun Buffy into a TV phenomenon — that girls really got to grips with the bloodsuckers. Whedon conceived his heroine as the revenge of every "little blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie. The point of Buffy was to subvert that idea, and create someone who was a hero where she'd always been a victim."

It wasn't just Buffy's vampire-slaying that made her so influential; it was her relationships with two of the vampires. Metaphors for the agonies of teenage love were bountiful: transgressive sex, forced abstinence, viruses, physical transformation and personality change were all part of the vampire subtext. And in Buffy's wake came a flood of fang fiction aimed at a female readership hungering for worthy successors to Heathcliff, Mr Rochester and Darcy. Typically, these stories are narrated by a plain Jane Eyre type — usually a virgin — who considers herself nothing special (though she may be gifted with paranormal abilities) but who, to her amazement, finds herself acting like catnip on a seductive male vampire who in centuries of existence has never encountered a young woman as beguiling as she. It's the love that lasts for ever. Wishful thinking, or what?

Early box office for Twilight, the movie, has been huge: a sequel has already been announced. Which suggests that Edward Cullen is indeed what an entire generation of young (and maybe not so young) women has been waiting for. As Bella, the lovestruck narrator of the books, sums him up, "He had the most beautiful soul, more beautiful than his brilliant mind or his incomparable face or his glorious body." In the film, it's British actor Robert Pattinson (who played Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter) who has the unenviable task of incarnating this indescribable paragon. But the hysterical screaming currently greeting his red-carpet appearances suggests he's successfully slotted into the boyband breach as prime object of tween desire, a good-looking blank slate on to which young fans can project their emo fantasies.

The film wisely sticks to the winning formula of Meyer's novel: 17-year-old Bella moves in with her divorced dad, sheriff of a sunless small town in Washington state, and starts at a new school where she notices a clique of extra-pale pupils who don't eat. In fact, they're a coven of vampires who are trying to blend into human society and drink the blood of animals rather than people. Bella and Edward fall in love, but their relationship never gets beyond first base because he's frightened of losing control and tucking into her. And maybe also because writer Meyer is a Mormon who attended Brigham Young University and is more into holding hands than anything hot'n'heavy. Time magazine has dubbed it "the erotics of abstinence".

Not all vamp fiction is this discreet. In Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake novels, the heroine enjoys six novels' worth of foreplay with a vampire called Jean-Claude until they finally get it on ("He plunged inside me faster, harder"). Cassie Palmer, clairvoyant heroine of Karen Chance's Touch The Dark, also gets plunged into by a sexy vampire, while in Charlaine Harris's Dead Until Dark, mind-reading cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse loses her virginity to an undead American civil war vet called Bill.

Alan Ball, creator of Six Feet Under, has adapted the Stackhouse novels into the HBO series True Blood. Since Ball is openly gay, some critics have concluded he is proposing vampirism as an allegory of homosexuality, but this would be to oversimplify matters. The reason vampires are so durable in zeitgeist terms is that they have always offered a multiplicity of metaphors, some of them overlapping and not all of them so obvious.

Which is also why there's no need to worry about vampires being defanged by swoony female fang fiction. Sure, women have responded to the traditional threat of metaphorical rape by refusing to play the victim; they've tamed the bogeyman, to a degree, by transforming him into an object of desire. But this in itself suggests there's something darker about that desire than perhaps they'd care to admit. Whether he's ripping throats out or limiting himself to chaste hand-holding, the vampire will always be mad, bad and dangerous to know

• Anne Billson's vampire novel Suckers is out now. Twilight is out Dec 19
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/dec/06/twilight-stephenie-meyer-vampires

True Blood Music Video of the Day: Je T'aime by Kelly Sweet



Je T'aime by Kelly Sweet
suggested by sunshineonmyshoulder
thanks sun!