EXCLUSIVE: Armistead Maupin Confirms New Tales of the City Novel

The author Armistead Maupin has revealed to a So So Gay writer that he has began the process of writing a brand new installment in the beloved Tales of the City series. Through his Twitter account, Maupin announced the novel would focus on the nonagenarian transsexual Mrs Madrigal, the wise and witty mother-figure to Michael, Mary Ann and Mona, and should be expected to become available “within the next two years”.

The Days of Anna Madrigal continues a similar pattern laid down by the two most recent novels in the series – Michael Tolliver Lives in 2007 and Mary Ann in Autumn in 2010 – by returning to focus on one particular central character, as opposed to the multiple-storyline serialised format of the earlier instalments. It seems Maupin is still in a period of creativity regarding the Tales series, after an eighteen year drought between Sure of You in 1989 and Michael Tolliver Lives. The collection remains enormously popular with it’s solid base of loyal readers. Being introduced to the first novel is seen by some as a rite of passage for young gay men and women with its blissfully positive and open-minded portrayal of liberal men and women, young and old, in 1970s San Francisco.

http://sosogay.org/2011/exclusive-armistead-maupin-confirms-new-tales-of-the-city-novel/

Cut and Paste

ARA JANSEN, The West Australian
Updated December 2, 2011, 12:00 pm

Get ready to redefine what you know about the Scissor Sisters. The band Bono called the best pop band in the world are brash, racy and buckets of naughty fun but they don't have any problem taking a sharp turn each time they make an album.

Known for stomping dance-pop singles like Take Your Mama, Filthy/Gorgeous and I Don't Feel Like Dancin', the Brit-Award winning and Grammy-nominated American quartet's coming fourth album is "very different" from their previous ones, doesn't have as much of a theatrical edge and is driven by beats.

"The last album was very cold and had lots of sex and dark moods, which is why I loved it," frontman Jake Shears says from his parents' home in Virginia, where he spent Thanksgiving last week having a rare few-days break. "This one has a real emotional quality, a real honesty and a romantic and loving feeling. It's summery and sunny and I think connects emotionally."

The lightening up was also reflected in the process of writing and recording which the Scissor Sisters' co-singer and songwriter says came with ease and a sense of joy not truly present since their debut album.

"When you have people around you who have no question that you can do something, it makes you believe it too," he says of the collaborators the band worked with this time around. "Great songs come from that confidence.

"I really think people are going to fall in love with this music. I feel so great about it. We're doing things we've never done before and taking turns which will put jaws on the floor. Be ready for some big surprises."

He vowed to do his "damndest" to get a couple stage-ready for us to hear during the band's Australian visit on the Summadayze bill next month.

Not only have the Scissor Sisters made an album he truly loves, the year has been one of new adventures for Shears, whose real name is Jason Sellards. The band started 2011 by touring with Lady Gaga before Shears worked on his first musical.

He co-wrote the songs for the musical adaptation of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City novels which follow the lives and loves of a group of gay and straight friends living in San Francisco. He worked with playwright Jeff Whitty and director Jason Moore of the Tony- Award winning Avenue Q.

The singer is a long-time fan of the Maupin books and has described them as a rite of passage for gay men, after he was given a copy of Tales of the City as a teenager. Because he "can't act his way out of a paper bag" Shears was totally happy to work behind the scenes writing the score and lyrics with Scissor Sisters collaborator JJ Garden. He did, however, sit in the audience almost every night of the San Franciscan summer season and cry.

"I don't think I have ever been so emotional about something," he says.

"Sitting with a full house and to hear the first notes on stage every night, I cried my eyes out and white-knuckled it to the end. It was a really emotional experience but someday I would love to do it again."

There's talk of another production being staged and he hopes it will make its way to Broadway or the West End at some point.

From there, Shears jumped straight into the new Scissor Sisters album. After taking four years to deliver 2010's Night Work - the follow-up to 2006's Ta-Dah - and shelving one early version, the band's new album is just about finished and will come out in the first half of next year.

Shears' experience with Tales of the City influenced the album. He says that watching from the audience gave him a hint of what fans experience.

"It just reminded me how important that connection is. At the same time as working on the musical I was DJing as Crystal Pepsi with my friend Jeremy Lingvall and we were playing pretty hard and intense dance and squelchy, noisy techno," he says.

"I loved that extreme and that I can live my life in this way and dabble in things that are different from another. That also informed this record."

Scissor Sisters play Summadayze at Sir James Mitchell Park, South Perth on January 3. Tickets from Ticketmaster outlets.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/entertainment/a/-/music/12231670/cut-and-paste/

2011 BroadwayWorld San Francisco Awards

Congratulations to Wesley Taylor, Judy Kaye, Betsy Wolfe and Mary Birdsong who were all nominated for their works in the "Tales" musical. You can vote for them here. Just enter your email address and follow the instructions. -Armistead on Facebook

http://sanfrancisco.broadwayworld.com/vote2011region.cfm?region=San%20Francisco#

A Good Read

BBC Radio 4

"Tales of the City" has been featured on "A Good Read" from BBC Radio 4 originally broadcast on October 25, 2011.


BOOKS FEATURED IN THE PROGRAMME
Christopher Frayling's choice: Ill Fares The Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents by Professor Tony Judt
Publ. Penguin

Nikki Bedi's choice: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Publ. Harper Perennial

Harriet Gilbert's choice: Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
Publ. Black Swan

Listen to the program here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016817f

Dear Me: A Letter To My Sixteen-Year-Old Self

Armistead Maupins is one of 75 contributors to the new book "Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self" to be released October 25, 2011 (US) by Joseph Galliano.

These nuggets of wisdom are offered by an Academy Award–nominated actor (James Woods), a popular comedian (Aasif Mandvi), and a world-famous novelist (Jodi Picoult) to their sixteen-year-old selves. No matter how accomplished and confident they seem today, at sixteen, they were like the rest of us—often unsure, frequently confused, and usually in need of a little reassurance.


In Dear Me, 75 celebrities, writers, musicians, athletes, and actors have written letters to their younger selves that give words of comfort, warning, humor, and advice. These letters present intimate, moving, and witty insights into some of the world’s most intriguing and admired individuals. By turns funny, surprising, raw, and uplifting, this singular collection captures the universal conditions that are youth, life, and growing up.  -Amazon.com

Proceeds from the book benefit Doctors without Borders.

For more information, visit http://www.dearme.org/

Ziemienski named Sonoma Treasure

BY DAVID BOLLING INDEX-TRIBUNE EDITOR
Sep 26, 2011 - 07:16 PM

Dennis Ziemienski, an internationally-known Glen Ellen artist and prominent supporter of Sonoma Valley art events, has been named the 2011 Sonoma Treasure Artist.

Ziemienski's work is collected across the country and beyond and has been featured prominently in countless Sonoma Valley nonprofit campaigns. He created the inaugural posters for the Sonoma International Film Festival, the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art Wet Paint event and the Sonoma Valley Olive Festival, among others.

Ziemineski has donated numerous paintings for auction lots to raise funds for Valley nonprofits, and organizations his work has benefited include the Sonoma Community Center, Friends of Sebastiani Theatre, Sonoma Plein Air, Sonoma Salute to the Arts,  Sonoma Jazz Plus, the Glen Ellen Village Fair and Dunbar Elementary School.

His paintings are featured on many well-known book covers including, "Tales of the City," by Armisted Maupin and several covers for authors James Lee Burke and Elmore Leonard.

He was chosen to create the poster for Super Bowl XXIX, the 2006 Kentucky Derby, the California Railway Museum in Sacramento, the San Francisco Zoo and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Ziemienski has taught at the California College of the Arts, the Academy of Art in San Francisco, Syracuse University graduate class, Hartford University Masters Program and the Sonoma Community Center. And he has volunteered his time to teach art throughout the Sonoma Valley, including at Hanna Boys Center, Dunbar Elementary School and the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art.

In 2011 he has had three separate solo exhibitions in Santa Fe, Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Los Angeles.

Ziemienski is married to artist Anne Ziemienski and their daughter, Sofia Ziemienski, is a 2010 graduate of  Sonoma Valley High School.

http://www.sonomanews.com/News-2011/Ziemienski-named-Sonoma-Treasure/

Alastair Reid obituary

Director of television drama, including the ground-breaking Tales of the City and Traffik


Peter Ansorge
guardian.co.uk
Friday 9 September 2011 18.42 BST

Alastair Reid, who has died aged 72, was one of Britain's finest directors of television drama. In 1989 he directed all six episodes of Simon Moore's epic drug drama Traffik for Channel 4, which won him both a Bafta and an International Emmy. The Oscar-winning film Traffic (2000) was based on the mini-series; the consensus among critics today is that Alastair's Traffik is the more successful of the two productions.

In 1991 he directed the five-part Selling Hitler, adapted by Howard Schuman from Robert Harris's book, with Barry Humphries as Rupert Murdoch and Alan Bennett as Hugh Trevor-Roper. Then came Tales of the City (1993), an adaptation by Richard Kramer of Armistead Maupin's novel set in the San Francisco of the 1970s, and the only instance to date of an American drama series being entirely funded by a British broadcaster – Channel 4. Tales of the City had always been intended as a co-production – but pre-HBO American television couldn't countenance onscreen kissing between men.

Alan Poul, the American producer, says that when Tales of the City was finally transmitted in the US, with great success, it "forever changed the landscape of American television", paving the way for shows such as Six Feet Under and Sex and the City. It was quite an experience for me, as head of drama at Channel 4, to visit the set in Los Angeles and to be told by both Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney that Alastair was the best director they had ever worked with.

Alastair was born in Edinburgh. His father was a schools inspector and his mother a well-known antiques dealer. Alastair graduated from Edinburgh College of Art, with the intention of becoming a painter. He then studied directing at the Bristol Old Vic. In 1960 he was taken on as a trainee director by Lew Grade at ATV where he worked on the UK's first twice-weekly evening soap opera, Emergency – Ward 10.

He directed well over 100 episodes, which were broadcast live. By his last year on the Ward, Alastair had become extremely bored and chose to direct a whole episode entirely from the point of view of the characters' feet. Unfortunately, Grade happened to be watching at the time. He rang the studio gallery during the commercial break and demanded that the cameras return to their standard positions for the second half of the show.

Alastair went on to direct highly popular series such as South Riding (1974) and Shades of Greene (1975, from Graham Greene's short stories) for ITV but it was a stint at David Rose's innovative drama department at the BBC's Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham that proved a turning point. There he directed two series of the ground-breaking crime drama Gangsters (1976-77), a highly eccentric musical Curriculee Curricula (1978), with words by Alan Plater and music by Dave Greenslade, and David Rudkin's astonishing futuristic nightmare Artemis 81 (1981), starring Daniel Day‑Lewis and Sting.


Gangsters brought multi-racial Britain to a mainstream audience on BBC1 as never before, or indeed since. At the time BBC drama productions were a mix of studio and outside filming. The joins always showed. For Gangsters, Alastair introduced a handheld camera into the studio that created a seamless match with film.

Alastair planned and storyboarded like Hitchcock, who was his hero. Gangsters contains a brilliant homage to the crop-spraying sequence in North By Northwest, while Vertigo was a crucial influence on both Artemis 81 and the San Francisco of Tales of the City. After Gangsters came Hazell (1979) for ITV, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1980) with David Hemmings and the first episode of Inspector Morse (1987), followed soon afterwards by Traffik.

Nostromo (1996) was Alastair's last major work, filmed for the BBC in Colombia in the midst of a drugs war, during which he befriended the Nobel-prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez and his mentor, Alvaro Mutis.

With his wife Jane, a gifted set designer, Alastair opened a vineyard at their house in Stoke St Gregory in Somerset. Famous names would visit, receiving the same welcome from Alastair and Jane off-set as they had once experienced on it. Day-Lewis spent a famous night there – not in the house, but outside in a tent, calling out to the wilderness, preparing for his 1992 role in The Last of the Mohicans.

Alastair is survived by Jane, his son Alex, his stepdaughters Lucy and Leo, and his two grandchildren.

• Alastair Reid, television director, born 21 July 1939; died 17 August 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/sep/09/alistair-reid-obituary