doqublog

Amazing apartment

2010-04-29T16:24:00.000-07:00

I'm back

2010-04-29T15:51:00.000-07:00

Almost TWO YEARS between entries. So this is like starting fresh again. Hoping I will find it in me to update often. What inspired me back? The box in my LinkedIn profile where you can link to your blog. Now lets see what else I can do.

Rolling with Reagan

2008-05-17T04:45:00.000-07:00

I posted this clip of President Ronald Reagan's hearse on YouTube and wanted to experiment embeding the code on the blog. Instead, I'm using a feature of blogspot. Also thought it would be good to open the blog again

I shot these images with my wee Sony Cybershot 1.3mpx camera

Paleyfest 2008

2008-03-15T00:54:00.000-07:00

The first night of PaleyFest the annual television festival in Los Angeles with a screening of Elvis Presley's '68 Comeback Special. In attendance were both the King's wife Priscilla and daughter Lisa Marie. I shot b-roll with an awesome Panasonic handheld high def camera. I also met Rodney Bingenheimer, The Mayor of Sunset Strip.

A good night for hosts and guests alike.

Back in the saddle

2008-03-14T07:46:00.000-07:00

Wow. It's been over a year since I posted anything here at Doqublog, as I lost my longtime mdq@comcast/attbi/mediaone email account. Now that I'm back, I really want to start using this blog for productive purposes. I still love the title of "Doqublog" since it is what I call a " Google oh," however now I guess I can call it a "Google one." Let's see if this post now appears in a place where the whole world can see it. If it does, I can check off a goal on the list I no longer keep. This is Mark DeCew, Mark DQ, mdq, The Admiralllll, and of course my official B-Squad nickname "cube."

2006 Grammy Awards preshow

2006-02-11T13:58:00.000-08:00

doqublog is not very interested in who wins a Grammy Award. We will never forget in 1989 when the Hard Rock category was added, Jethro Tull beat out AC/DC and Metallica. Watching the legendary Elvis Costello perform in an all-star tribute also brought me back to 1979 when he was nominated in the "Best New Artist" category along with The Cars and Tom Petty and the winner was A Taste of Honey (remember "Boogie Oogie Oogie?) MSN has a good account of the sorid history of the Grammys.

doqublog is instead interested in the people and performances appearing on the telecast. We love rock concerts here, and it always fun to spark memories of past live shows upon spotting familiar musicians in the crowd: "Look, Joe Perry and Steven Tyler! The first time I saw Aerosmith was 1978 at the Syracuse War Memorial!" Since moving to Hollywood, personal experiences with famous personalities have been plentiful, primarily while working as a sound recordist for E! Entertainment. The major Awards shows are big events for the little basic cable network that made its name with live coverage of red carpet arrivals, so I always try and catch some of their broadcast to see how they pull it off. Props to the extremely talented Guiliana DePandi. I worked with her on her first shoot at E! covering a benefit for some environmental cause and was instantly impressed with her journalistic professionalism, energetic interview technique, and all around spunk.

I often tell the story of how she asked every celebrity arrival what they personally did to help the environment, aside from pay for tickets to Hollywood parties. Aside from Ed Begley Jr. who drove his own electric car there, the single answer given by all other was "I recycle." Not a mention of the other two 'R's, 'reduce' and 'reuse': no, the most these self-rightous media personalities could claim was following a weekly municipality mandated program household waste separation protocol. In LA, the city provides all addresses on their pick-up route with a plastic yellow bin to collect any garbage you feel guilty throwing in the same can as the take-out leftovers. The list of 'recycleables' including glass, plastic, cardboard, and paper is printed on inside lid of a special 'blue' trash can where the maid dumps the contents of the yellow feel-good bin, leaving other environmentally unfriendly waste products for the tabloid investigators in the 'brown' can' for pre-ranking refuse. No one is going to catch this celebrity mixing Crystal bottles with the poodle poo! Incidently, poo products go in the 'green' can with other organic debris from the mansion yard. The property owner and domestic servants never open the 'green' can, as it is only used by the gardeners to gather the flotsam of the mower and leaf blowers. The grass cutters are good hombres and can be counted on to roll all the green, brown, and ego-boosting blue cans to the curb to be emptied into one of those noisy trucks that wake me up in the morning. I mean, we already put or garbage in seperate bins, do they have to use so many garbage trucks? Why not dump all the cans in the same truck - just convince me I'm still 'recycling.'

The city answers the question what is recycylable and what isn't and why with a list that would challenge the waste management skills of an Earth First! tree house. And don't think lax compliance to the standards have no downside, the city offers us this:

Question:		Why doesn’t the City collect some items that are recyclable, and even have the recycling emblem stamped on the bottom?
Answer:		Although many materials are indeed recyclable, City recycling centers cannot accept some of these materials because they have no current market value. So, if recycling centers can’t find a place to sell the materials, they will end up taking the materials to the landfill at an additional cost, which is passed on to the City

Cinema Paradsiso

2006-02-10T17:24:00.000-08:00

doqublog placed a call to the Hugh Hewitt today to comment on the Italian film Cinema Paradiso. The movie is not a documentary, but highly relevant to the the life story of the docublogger: My grandparents Carmello and Angelina Marcuccio were both Sicilian immigrants born and raised in villages like the setting of the story; I have worked in movie theaters since high school; and proudly fill in the 'OCCUPATION' blank on forms with 'Projectionist.'

The Isle of Wight Festival 1970

2006-02-08T22:34:00.000-08:00

Message To Love: The Isle of Wight Festival - The Movie is the awkward title of one of the better music concert films. James, my classic rock DJ pal was in town so we put in the VHS tape on the video projector and chilled out to the archived sounds and images of legendary performers in their prime. The first song is by Jimi Hendrix, shot just 18 days before his death and instantly reminds me of why even with a relatively short career, Hendrix will always be considered a God. Other baby boomer bands on the bill included Free, Tast, The Moody Blues, and Ten Years After. Icons Miles Davis, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Kris Kristofferson appear when all still had some baby fat. Early film of the flute in Jethro Tull and Moog synths of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

The festival was also the last gig for Jim Morrison with the Doors playing appropriately, 'The End." It was also called 'the last great rock festival.' Half a million hippies showed up, but only 10.000 paid the 2 pound admission. The material between music is fascinating as the promoters bitch backstage about the selfish kids and repeatedly berate the crowd from the stage. A good complement to both Woodstock, Montery Pop and Gimme Shelter.

Norman Corwin

2006-02-07T10:20:00.000-08:00

Even though we have not seen this film yet,
A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin
is doqublogs' favored choice to win the Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject in 2006. Not that it will, just that we want it too. For the record, the other nominees in the most elusive and excluded Oscar pool category are: The Mushroom Club, The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club, and God Sleeps in Rwanda. For the record, we haven't seen any of them either. doqublog was born in part to see if the blogosphere is powerful enough to push a film very few have ever heard of to the one everybody has to see. Including me.

At this point, doqublog makes its first link to hughhewitt.com Future posts will elaborate on doqublog's close connection to Hugh Hewitt "the man so nice, they named him twice" and the epitome of what "Bop" (our pet name for my very best friend Whitney's father, Presbyterian minister Reverend Dr. Benjamin J. Lake) would refer to as "a gentleman and a scholar." Hugh is a nationally syndicated talk radio host on the Salem Radio Network and broadcasts locally in doqublog's media market on KRLA 870am. Most Fridays, Hugh devotes the final blocks of his broadcast week to the 'movie hour,' a lively rhetorical roundabout with resident silver screen scholar Emmet of the Unblinking Eye. During this segment, Emmet discloses his specially selected "top ten list" of theatrically released films in a category chosen by Mr. H. These categories have ranged from "train movies," "films involving Vermont" and "obsessed fan films."

Sometime around the bottom of the hour, engineer Adam Youngman hits the button storing the drum roll and rimshot effect, and Emmet announces "the #1 --[fill in the frame]-- movie of all time. When Hugh opens the lines to callers to complement, criticize, change, or contribute to the list, it is customary for the doqubloger to contact producer Generalissimo Duane (a.k.a. radioblogger) to be put on the board as "Mark in Mid-Wilshire" to add an interesting documentary film title or two that fit with the list of the Unblinking Eye's regularly reasonable rankings.

The story of how the doqublogger became a familiar phone-inner during the movie hour of Hugh's show goes back a decade and may appear in a future post. No guarantees. Blogs and radio shows are a one day at a time. doqublog is now here in the blogosphere but right here is just getting started. Please stay tuned while we tune.

If you find yourself reading this now, please click this link to the official website of
Norman Corwin and listen to the three and a half minute audio excerpt of his legendary VE day radio broadcast. I am very curious to find out how many people know the name Norman Corwin, have heard any part of "A Note of Triumph," or are moved now discovering his century long biography, deft wordcraft, and precient-perfect prose. doqublog hereby seeds the February Oscar blogswarm to support this decidedly deserved Acadamy Award nomination honored documentary film.

A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin

Documentary Films

2006-02-07T07:47:00.000-08:00

Though not our sole subject, the main character in this non-fiction saga is the story of the founding fathers and bastard children of the media monster we call the 'movies.' 'doqublog' is about 'documentaries,' those films without scripts, stars, and special effects that make-up motion pictures' most ghettoized genre. doqublog will focus an ASCII character camera on this collection of cinematic creations composed of cleverly crafted camera clips of our Creator's creatures captured on computer chip, celluloid, and CCD. [the 17 'C' words in that last line will from here on the record to beat for first character strings in the doqublog].

In no particular order than basic stream of consciousness, here are a few of the documentaries doqublog plans to blog on somewhere down the timeline:

La Marche de l'empereur
Grizzly Man
A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin
Chicks in White Satin Galanos on Galanos
Favela Rising
Burning Man: Beyond Black Rock
Modern Marvels
Project Runway
Wal-mart: The High Cost of Low Price
Bush's Brain
Waco: The Rules of Engagement
Crop Circles: Quest for Truth

Much more to come. Consider this post is part of the doqublog test scribe before principle blogography begins.

Cinéma Vérité

2006-02-07T04:20:00.000-08:00

"OK, we're rolling"........Welcome to my blog. I have a lot to say, but, for now, I only want to say a little. The blogosphere is big. I am wee. Internet information is vast, a constantly and continuously vaccillating vessal of content, both cogent and corrupt. What I write here is but wormseed, a small bit of anthelmintic antidote to any portion of parasitic or poison prose posted elsewhere. What I write will be right. Correct. A fact. The truth.

"What you see is what you get," or, in nerdish, "WYSIWYG." "Cinéma Vérité" is French for "true film," a form of documentary moviemaking where you ask questions first, shoot later. And shoot. And shoot. Hopefully something interesting happens. Hopefully you were shooting. Hopefully something you shot is interesting enough that you are still convinced enough others will also be interested enough in enough of what interests you, that you do not say "Enough!," but shoot more and more and more until you really do have enough even though it never ever really seems to be enough. But you sure shot a lot. That is why I made up a joke in film school that "cinema verite" was an international translation for "waste film."

Documentary Filmmaking and Internet Blogging have a lot in common. [two tracts of texts and talents]. I wrote that neat alliteration but could not make it work spliced against the edit of word shots and sentence scenes before. Now I'm into something new. This blog is about documentary film but is also a documentary blog about my own experience with blogging. 'Blogumentary' and 'Docublog' google hit with links galore. My surname is "DeCew," pronounced "dee cue," ('Dairy Queen,' I've heard it), with "DQ" the common family abbreviate. "dqblog" was taken on blogspot by a DramaQueen. I'm calling this fontfilm "doqublog" which must always be written in lower case for the proper graphic effect. The link I made to it here was a google search with no results. Will the link click alway be empty or eventually find itself? Time will tell.

"doqublog" - like I said, always lowercase, even at the beginning of a line, and nothing at all to do with e.e. cummings - is pronounced just like "DocuBlog" but with much less pretention and the smallest bit of sneeze in the middle, i.e. soften the hard consonents and put a double-u sound after the 'u.' This is the title. doqublog. [hard-cut to black or other color scheme]