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Relaunching Boles Dot Com as a Preservation Portal and Restoration Reserve

Since uploading over 500 videos to Vimeo PRO — I’ve been thinking about content and production and restoration and preservation of all the things I’ve worked on over the arc of a lifetime — and I decided now was the time to start digitizing the mountains of paper and film and video and audiotapes that engulf the small gully of my world.

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The Venus Effect and the Artifice of Assumption: Watching the World Watch You Watching Your Screen

“The Venus Effect” is a fascinating concept in painting and film that shatters the illusion of the perceived, the perceiver and the preceptor.  In the example below, the woman is peering into a mirror.

At first glance, we think she is looking at her own reflection, but the angle of the mirror deceives us, because she is really directly looking at us, not herself.  In fact, the artifice of assumption is something of an aesthetic cheat because we fail to realize she is watching us while we watch her.  She is incapable of viewing her own reflection in that particular angle of yaw.

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Finding Your Light on Stage and in the Field

The sun is a magical light source — the mother of all luminosity — and we have tried since we first struck flame into fire, to contain and replicate its hot, molten, goodness of warmth and healing rays. “Finding Your Light” is an important duty in each of our days because sunlight, and even starlight, breaks the darkness and guides us more fully into the span of the horizon.

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How to Teach a Film Course

Teaching a course on film can be one of the major joys of the educational process as long as both instructor and student are on the same page of expectation.  You cannot spend class time watching the assigned movies.  You must use that precious class time together to discuss and dissect the films frame by frame — but you cannot do that unless and until the students have watched the movies on their own time beyond the classroom.

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Peter Stone and the Short Con

Peter Stone was a great writer of Broadway musicals, movies and television.  He was also prickly, an un-diagnosed INTJ personality, and a good friend and mentor.  Peter always told me I was more than an assistant.  I was his associate. That distinction with a difference meant a great deal to me.

When Peter was working on — The Will Rogers Follies — we had a lunch routine we never broke:  Tuna fish sandwiches on a roll with mustard, mayo, lettuce, tomato and provolone and a Martinelli’s apple cider to wash it all down.  Our time to talk about life and art and living was in that break when we’d walk to and from the corner deli to pick up our lunch.

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Eddie Lang: The Father of Jazz Guitar Review

Eddie Lang is the greatest Jazz guitar player you have probably never heard of before today.  Eddie Lang died in 1933 at the age of 30 after a botched tonsillectomy that Bing Crosby urged him to have so Eddie could have speaking roles, in addition to playing the guitar, in Bing’s movies.  Today, a new Eddie Lang album dropped — The Father of Jazz Guitar — and it is a delightful experience to hear Eddie’s archtop guitar sound so round and rich and full and warm 80 years after he first recorded the songs.

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Censoring The King's Speech

It is never an easy nor a short path from when a film is first conceived and when that same film is being watched — to a big calorie-rich bucket of popcorn in the lap. The idea for the film can come from many a place — in the case of “The King’s Speech,” it came from something that actually happened in history.

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