Tuesday, February 10, 2009

TV Guide Season 2 Scoop

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!)

http://www.tvguide.com/News/MegaBuzz-Lost-NCIS-1002743.aspx

Handsome Stranger? Be Careful. He Bites.

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

True Blood behind the scene : Fangtasia sells Vampire Vodka




















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)

Vampire Vineyards: I vant to drink your Dracula Pinot Noir !

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 skillfully 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

We'll leave the light on for you

























Who lives where ????


Matches the color of his eyes .....

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.

Lettin' down the ponytail for just a minute with @SookieBonTemps !

Our wonderful Twitter friend @SookieBonTemps writes more that just a tweet!

There are a couple of things I never thought I'd do:

1) Role-play. I've never had any interest in role-playing games. Hell, I had to ask someone what "RP" meant when I first got on Twitter.

2) Write fan-fic.

I've been Tweeting since November 30. For the first month or so on Twitter, I tweeted alone. There was no @EricNorthman, no @VampireBill, no @MerlottesBar. Eventually @DeantheCollie showed up.

I tweeted about my days poking fun at True Blood characters that did not exist in the Twitterverse. And some people felt like listening. So I spent that first month getting to know my followers. I met folks who were die-hard True Blood fans or had read all of Charlaine Harris' wonderful Southern Vampire Mysteries. We talked about everything from Christmas gifts to deadbeat boyfriends. On New Year's Eve, I even managed to tweet a UK follower instructions on how to stop severe bleeding (he'd cut his hand pretty deeply on a shard of glass). My followers repaid me in kind by RT-ing something silly I said or asking their friends to follow me (@themia, @juliaroy, @bsimi, @karma_musings you know what you've done).

And then the Viking came to Bon Temps. Followed by Sam, the first Bill, then the second Bill, etc.

My tweets changed. No more laundry lists of vampire jokes. No more "Top 5 Reasons why I can't date a shifter." No more gratuitous tweeting. I had two sets of relationships to build: 1) with my followers who were with me and 2) with these characters from my life who'd reappeared here on Twitter.

As our daily banter grew to include not just the world of True Blood, but the world of Twitter, something strange started to happen: all of the little character plays that were ordinarily relegated to the forums and fan-fic started to playout here in the mainstream. In 140-character tweets.

It finally occurred to me after @EricNorthman and I did Loving True Blood in Dallas' show on BlogTalkRadio that we'd gotten ourselves into something hotter than the morning after a FotS sleepover. Soon after the show the fangrrls who'd been living on the Wiki, the forums, etc. came pouring in to join the fun on Twitter. On the days when things get busy and I happen to go missing from the bar, there is a steady stream of willing women ready to be the next Merlotte's waitress. Never mind that Merlotte's waitresses have shorter life spans than Spinal Tap drummers.

So what's next? I guess I'll keep RP-ing, fan-fic-ing whatever the hell I'm doing. I guess that means I get to keep rolling around in the dust with the Viking. Keep you posted.

Check it out here and please post a comment for Sook !

http://sookiebontemps.posterous.com/lettin-down-the-ponytail-for-j

A cemetery by any other name is still a place where you bury dead people ..

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.

True Blood behind the scenes : Puppetry from MastersFX

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 communication."
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)

True Blood Music Video of the Days


Creepshow by Kerli [lyrics]