readersvoice.com

Louis Ferrante p1

simon — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:46:22 +0000

Tough Guy, also known as Unlocked: The Life and Crimes of a Mafia Insider, is like listening to a very good raconteur. The writing has no fat. Mr Ferrante just rips into the stories of his life working as a truck hijacker, debt collector and trouble shooter for the mafia, mainly for the Gambino Family, one of the five families of the Commission.
The memoir has a distinctive voice, but the narrator doesn’t rely on it: There is plenty of interesting content.
Mr Ferrante writes about things like taking swags to a fence named Barry the Brokester; or about flying to San Francisco with a crew for a robbery; or how two guys from his crew, Botz and Funzi, hit a drug dealer for thirty grand, but the kid went to his wiseguy uncle who wanted his money back; and many other tales of life in the New York mafia.
Speaking of narrative voice, one reviewer observed that when Mr Ferrante narrates his life as a mobster, he uses a rapid-fire, street punk voice; when he narrates how he discovered books in prison, he uses a more classical style of voice. But the stories are what keep the pages turning.
This book would be a good complement to a general history of the American mafia, like Meyer Lansky, Mogul of the Mob; or Selwyn Raab’s Five Families.
Although Tough Guy does include some interesting mafia history, the best thing about the book is the insight it gives into the modern mafia at street level. It tells about how crews would get tip-offs about trucks carrying valuable cargo, rob them, then send on a cut to families like the Columbos or Gambinos. The book also gives many examples of mafia etiquette and problem solving.
Then Mr Ferrante lifts the lid on life in prisons, and he paints a pretty horrifying picture. Luckilly, during his time in prison he discovered reading. “One book led to another.”
Tough guy is also the story of someone who picked up the pieces of his life and made something new. Redemption through reading is a major theme.

-continued next page
-copyright Simon Sandall.

Louis Ferrante p2

simon — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:29:58 +0000

READERSVOICE.COM: In Tough Guy you mentioned how you started your reading with biographies. In the book you mentioned a biography of editor Max Perkins by A. Scott Berg. (Max Perkins, Editor of Genius) I really enjoyed that, and am reading his author Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, which is great. But what other biographies have you enjoyed?

LOUIS FERRANTE: I liked all bio’s, from Einstein to Newton, Caesar to Mao, Pitt to Churchill, etc. I’ve also read all of Thomas Wolfe’s novels and a great Pulitzer Prize winning bio on him by David Herbert Donald [Look Homeward, A Life of Thomas Wolfe, 1987].

RV: Do you read a lot about the mafia these days, and which histories or biographies have you liked in the past?

LF: I usually stay away from Mafia books. Having lived that life, there isn’t much for me to learn from Mafia books. However, for my second book, Mob Rules, I did do some Mafia reading.

RV: Apart from the Old Testament, which is an important part of your spiritual life, what would be some of your favorite books of all time, whether 19th century novels, philosophy law, fun novels, anything?

LF: Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, and all of Thomas Hardy‘s novels.

RV: Mob Rules: What the Mafia Can Teach the Legitimate Businessman kind of takes things full circle from the Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky days. Apparently Lansky read books on business management and Luciano adopted a corporate style for the mafia. Has the mafia changed from a family kind of institution to one where there’s no personal loyalty to and from its members, or has it always been just about the money?

LF: It’s always been about the money but older mobsters understood that loyalty was an important part of business, more so than contemporary mobsters.

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-copyright Simon Sandall

LOUIS FERRANTE p3

simon — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:21:55 +0000

READERSVOICE.COM: I heard that outlaw motorcycle gangs are bigger than the mafia in the world of organised crime. The mafia used to control the New York waterfront, but is it in decline?

LOUIS FERRANTE: Gangs may be larger but the Mafia, even in this state of decline, is still more organized.

RV: As far as you know, do the same things go on as when you were working for the Gambino family, with truck hijackings and robberies? Are these things in the news much?

LF: The street rackets, for the most part, are the same. I do believe, however, that the Mob has lost its foothold in some of the more lucrative rackets like garbage unions and the waterfront.

RV: What would you like to see done to improve the prison system? It seems cruel how old lifers are stuck inside for years. Could something like bus trips around the city be offered as rewards for good behaviour? What other innovations would you like?

LF: I’ve written an entire book on this – let me know if you know a publisher who is interested.

RV: Do you still live in Queens and what’s your daily routine?

LF: I do not. I write every day.

RV: What kinds of things do you talk about when you give speeches?

LF: My past, and how it can help others; my love for reading, and how it has helped me.

RV: Do you regret your life in crime? How do you think your life might have turned out otherwise?

LF: I do regret my years as a criminal but we all have regrets – all we can do is move forward and glean what good we can from the bad.

RV: What are some of your plans?

LF: Keep writing.

-Visit louisferrante.com.

-Copyright Simon Sandall.

Felix Harvey p1

simon — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 13:56:24 +0000

See Xefpatterson, a name used by Felix Harvey on YouTube, to see his stick figure animations.
Contact: readersvoice at hotmail.com

READERSVOICE.COM: Could you list some of your favorite books of all time?

FELIX HARVEY: First, I have to say that I’m not a big reader. I love to read, but I don’t read as much as I would like due to the fact that I read very slowly, and only before going to bed, and I also fall asleep very easily. That’s why if a book, even if it’s good, is not captivating enough for me, it can take me a long time to read. Just like Rainbow Six, by Tom Clancy, which took me about a year to read even though I liked it.
Anyway, that being said, here are the best books, or the ones that have been the most significant to me:

Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga (Pandora’s Star; Judas Unchained) — I had never read fiction before reading these two massive books, but I think that the ideas and imagination of Peter Hamilton were really impressive.
These books are an optimistic representation of the future of man, and are so well written and thought out that they made me wish to be in a world like this.
Hamilton also succeeds in mixing fiction, action, a detective story, and more into these two books. I am looking forward to reading Hamilton’s Void Trilogy, which is a sequel to those.

Garfield, Jim Davis — Probably because they were my first reading experience, and because of the times when I was a kid that I was the only one laughing out loud in the school library. 
Quino’s comic books — I think Quino is my favorite comic book author. Even though I’m not a huge fan of his most famous work, the Mafalda series, I really loved some of his other stuff.

 Papillon, Henri Charrière  – The incredible story of Henri Charrière (and written by him), an innocent man who got arrested for murder but just couldn’t resign himself to stay behind bars, and escaped several times from prisons with awful conditions and injustices. This is a must-read (controversial) story that also made a really terrible movie, to anyone who read it.

Le Grand Cahier – Agota Krisrtof — Harsh, raw, powerful story about two young twins during a war that they suffered indirectly… I had to read the first few chapters for school work and I dare anyone to read just the first chapter of it. You just won’t stop.

Les fabuleuses aventures d’un Indien malchanceux qui devient milliardaire, Vikas Swarup.  Also known as Slumdog Millionaire. Simply because it is a great story to read!  

Shogun, James Clavell –  Great, epic story with so much history and research that you learn a whole lot of new incredibly interesting stuff about ancient Japan.

-continued next page.
-copyright Simon Sandall.

Felix Harvey p2

simon — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 13:26:09 +0000

READERSVOICE.COM: Do you watch a lot of animation and if so which cartoons do you like?

FELIX HARVEY: I wouldn’t say that I watch a lot of animations, but when I was about 10 to 12, I did. I remember that I discovered stick animations on an old website that still exists called SFDT.com (for Stick Figure Death Theatre).
Ten years later, sometimes I still find some really good stuff on YouTube like the ASDF short movie series from Tom Ridgewell (TomSka), or pretty much all the work from Yotam Perel (LazyPillow). But apart from the web, I’ve always been a big fan of The Simpsons. And I really liked the movie Persepolis (which is also a good comic book series), in part because of the beautiful animation. I’ve also always been a fan of the band Gorillaz as much as for the music as for the animations, and I think one of their last clips, Stylo, is awesome.

RV: What advice would you give for writing gags and stories like the ones in your animations?

FH: Hmmm.  It’s animation. Use the fact that you can do anything to … well, do anything! Especially for stick figures animation. Seeing a baby stickman being thrown from the top of a cliff, is far less shocking to see than if it had been a more complex and life-like animation, and it would just have been terribly shocking and violent if it had been something filmed with a camera somewhere on earth.
You have the liberty to show things that would normally shock people, but just makes them laugh because it’s an animation. It may be this concept that made my Tha Cliff videos way more popular than I would have imagined.

RV: Where do you live in Canada, and what’s your daily routine?

FH: I live in Montreal (Qc) in Canada. I am a student in software Engineering at L’École Polytechnique de Montréal, and am currently finishing an internship in an internet mobility company.
I live with three friends in an apartment, and until Christmas well… I go to work every day! I love music, and I play guitar and piano at home when I have time, and I am trying the violin when I feel I’m patient enough. I also like to play drums on occasions.
I feel lucky to live in a city where there are so many bars, pubs and concert rooms where you can see live music. I have a semi-active band called Krash Lama which performs maybe one show a year. I also like from time to time to buy a new video game to play with friends.

-continued next page
-copyright Simon Sandall.

Felix Harvey p3

simon — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 13:12:03 +0000

READERSVOICE.COM: Your first short animated film The Hold Up was uploaded on YouTube in 2006. What gave you the idea to start making Flash animations?

FELIX HARVEY: I would say that when I first saw stick figure animations, I immediately found them hilarious and I loved it. And I tend to try to reproduce things that I enjoy. It’s the case in animation, music, mobile applications, or even video game maps or levels. So I tried it. I got the software, found some tutorials, and got to make a stickman moving, and that was fun.
And maybe a year later after my posts, I woke up and had 300 mails from YouTube in my inbox because Tha Cliff had been seen by many people, many of whom had commented on it. And I never knew why… And from that point I decided to make some more.

RV: Your tutorials on Youtube are very good and easy to understand. How long did it take you to learn the basics of Flash?

FH: First I would say really don’t know much with Flash… Flash is a really huge (and expensive) software with which you can do so many things and I did so little. And it is easy to see from my videos that the little I learned was by doing stuff with it. There is a noticeable difference between my old animations and my new ones.
And every video I did made me learn something new. And when I noticed people were asking how to make this kind of stuff, I thought I could show them the little I knew.

RV: Your short animation The Real Line Rider (2007) was influenced by a computer game. I wondered where you got some of you ideas for movies.

FX: Ideas come from anywhere; games, music, movies, school, peoples, habits, family. Without inspiration, it is really hard to do something good, especially with animation. It requires much patience and time to do these kind of animations, and if you are not inspired, if you don’t work on something that you, first of all, find funny or good, then you probably won’t finish it.

RV: How long does it take to make a cartoon like Tha Cliff (1,2 and 3)?

FX: As I recall, I think Tha Cliff 2 was the only animation that I looked a bit at the time spent on it and it was something like 20 to 25 hours.

RV: In movies like Cheese and New Bike Song, from 2011, you do your own music. How did you learn how to make music?

FH: Pretty much like animations; I got interested and I tried it. I got my first guitar when I was 12 but I’ve always liked to listen to music and I had a good talent in music classes before that age.

RV: Do you still plan to make some more animations, and will you do long stories or stick to short stories?

FH: I plan on buying the latest Flash while I’m still a student because of the 80% discount. But like I said, it takes time and inspiration, which don’t always come at the same time! As for the length of the videos… They will be probably shorts because I can do them in less time, but it all depends on what ideas I will get.

-See Youtube for the animations of Felix Harvey.
-copyright Simon Sandall.

Noritaka Kawaguchi p1

simon — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 03:50:06 +0000

Someone asked producer Noritaka Kawaguchi about the clouds in Makoto Shinkai’s anime Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below.
The producer said Makoto Shinkai had grown up in a country town.
The town was in a valley, so they could only pick up three tv stations.
So as a boy Makoto Shinkai would spend up to six hours lying down and watching clouds pass overhead.
The producer, Noritaka Kawaguchi, said the director’s sister had told him that.
He gave an interesting talk recently, mostly in English with a little help from translators, at Robina Community Centre at the Gold Coast, Australia, as part of the Gold Coast Film Festival.
He also gave a tour of a room full of original art work from Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below.
It’s the story of a 12-year-old girl, Asuna, who meets a boy, Shun, when he saves her from a strange creature. The boy is from a mysterious underworld, Agartha. Later the boy dies and Asuna goes to Agartha in search of him, along with her teacher Mr Morisaki, who is trying to reunite with his dead wife.
The story draws on a traditional Japanese legend: Izanagi-no-Mikoto lamented the death of his wife Izanami-no-Mikoto and so undertook a journey to Yomi, the shadowy land of the dead. There’s a good summary of this legend on Wikipedia: it’s like a horror comic.
Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below is in the traditional 2d animation style, and is similar to Miyazaki animations like Spirited Away, especially the beautiful landscapes, and fantasy creatures like a Kuzaltol.
Drawings were made in pencil on paper, then these were scanned then colored in Photoshop. Lightwave was used for compositing.
Producer and CEO of CoMix Wave, Mr Kawaguchi, said he spent a lot of time reading scripts sent to his production company CoMix Wave, in Tokyo.
But he still found time to read comics and he loved Japanese comics authors.
He liked Space Brothers by Chuya Koyama, a manga which originally appeared in Kodansha’s Morning Magazine. Two brothers, Mutta (born 1993) and Hibito (born 1996), see what looks like a UFO headed toward the moon. They decide to become astronauts. It’s now being made into a movie.
He also read the website Anime Anime, which is in Japanese.
He described the director, Makoto Shinkai, born in 1973, as a genius.
He said that unlike most directors, Makoto Shinkai could do everything: writing, directing, compositing, backgrounds.
Mr Kawaguchi said he originally contacted Makoto Shinkai after seeing a five-minute movie he’d put on the internet: She and Her Cat. The award-winning movie was told from a cat’s point of view about its owner, a young woman. It can be viewed on YouTube.
He said he thought he could make the director “the top of the world”, and he said he was still doing this.
Check out the next two pages to see how the movie was made.

-continued next page
-copyright Simon Sandall.

Noritaka Kawaguchi p2

simon — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 03:29:06 +0000

In 2007, Mr Kawaguchi received the Asia Pacific Screen Award for Best Animated Film for the previous Makoto Shinkai anime 5 Centimeters per Second.
But later an earthquake hit Tokyo, shaking up Mr Kawaguchi’s eighth floor studio.
Several computers were damaged, and the award was shattered.
But he was surprised and happy to receive a replacement award at the November 24 Asia Pacific Screen Awards.
Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below was also nominated for an Asia Pacific Screen Award.
It didn’t win, but it’s a visually beautiful film.
Mr Kawaguchi talked about how he became an anime producer.
Mr Kawaguchi said that when he left school he studied business administration, then worked at one of the five big trading companies in Japan, which make everything from Chinese noodles to movies.
He was placed in the entertainment division of the company.
They started up a new company, as part of the trading company, and called it CoMix Wave.
Then he grew tired of working for the trading company and bought CoMix Wave.
He said he usually had a couple of movies under production at the same time.
Other CoMix Wave productions include Jun Awazu’s Planzet, and Peeping Life.

Mr Kawaguchi led a group from the public, including me, around a room full of pictures from Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below.
There were colorful concept art and backgrounds hanging on the walls, along with storyboards, character designs and shots or frames drawn in pencil with some colored in Photoshop.
He talked us through the whole process of making an anime.
He said it all started with a scriptwriter or director submitting a story idea to the producer: this could be a few lines or the length of a novel, Mr Kawaguchi said.
He’d then decide whether to go ahead with it.
He received many scripts sent to his studio, but he didn’t produce many of these.
He said he didn’t like some scripts because they were all about satisfying the creator’s ego rather than considering the audience.
He said he would consider the themes of each script, and whether the public would accept them: “if it fits the world”.
He said it took two or three years to make a movie, with 200 to 300 staff, so it was a difficult decision whether to make a movie. It had to be worth taking two to three years out of people’s lives.
If he decided to proceed, he’d get a screenplay from the scriptwriter.
The screenplay took three or four months to write, with meetings every day.
But he said the whole story of Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below had been in the head of the director Makoto Shinkai the whole time. He smiled and said that usually the director wouldn’t listen to any suggestions for changes.
Mr Kawaguchi said he had had to put some limits on the story length of Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below, or else the director would have made it too long.
Then at some time along the way the director would start making image boards or concept art, to show what the movie and its scenes would look like.
There were some of these around the room: colorful pictures of green valleys, sunsets, stairways around rocky ruins.
Concept pictures were not exactly as they appeared in the movie.
Then the animators would start the background art.
These are the settings in front of which the characters move around.
With the pictures used for backgrounds, the director might tell the background director he wanted a kitchen from 300 B.C., and the background director would go away, research and come back with the background drawing.
There were backgrounds for every important scene. Takumi Tanji was art director.
Once the screenplay was completed they moved onto the character design.

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-copyright Simon Sandall.

Noritaka Kawaguchi p3

simon — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 03:16:54 +0000

Producer Mr Kawaguchi said there were different styles of drawing characters in anime: cute and cool. The cute style, for children, had larger heads for the characters. This movie had smaller heads on the characters, for a more adult audience: the cool style. The character design was by Takayo Nishimura, and the director Makoto Shinkai would consult with him during this stage.
The director would describe the proportions he wanted, the hair styles, the style of the eyes.
There were pencil drawings of characters like 12-year-old Asuna, with various expressions, running and from different angles.
Characters usually had five segments.
The storyboards would be made by the director.
Mr Kawaguchi pointed out some storyboards from the movie.
The storyboards had a few columns: for a picture, a description of the action in the picture, the dialogue in the shot, and the time or number of frames devoted to the shot.
One picture had Asuna listening to some railway tracks. Then there was another column with a description of the action and sound effects, and another with the number of frames devoted to the cut or shot: if there wasn’t much action in the shot, they could use less frames:There are usually 24 frames or pictures per second of action, but it can go down to 12.
The movie was 116 minutes long.
Another storyboard had a shot of a valley and it described the lens to be used in order to get depth of field in the shot, rather than ending up with a flat picture.
He talked about in-between shots, too.
In-between shots are the pictures between key poses of a character. Key poses are drawn by the lead animator, and might be a shot of a character with his arm way back about to throw a baseball for example, and another of his hand just releasing the ball. The in-betweeners draw the pictures in-between.
Mr Kawaguchi said that many in-betweeners dropped out of his studio after a short time. He said if you hired 100 people, 90 per cent of the in-betweeners would drop out of the company within three months.
He said many of the in-between shots were sent to China to be drawn.
Some say outsourcing to China might become uneconomical in future, due to the expanding middle class there and possible political demands for higher wages.
There were many character drawings in pencil hanging around the room, too. They were on pages made to be flipped by animators to check the flow of the pictures.
The shots had the director’s scribbles in red pencil for highlights, and blue pencil for shadows.
Many had notes written by the director: Less grass here, more rocky.
Makoto Shinkai was a very hands-on director, individually coloring many of the frames, using Photoshop, and some of these were around the room.
Mr Kawaguchi said that during the busiest stages of making the movie, the director spent 20 hours a day for a month in the studio.
The rest of the 200 to 300 staff also put in very long hours in the last three months of production. The movie was composited in Lightwave. Unlike with many western animations, voice actors were brought in after the animation was drawn.
Children Who Chase Voices from Deep Below is picturesque with some amazing fantasy ideas and some emotional scenes. It’s a long story, but it’s well worth seeing.

-copyright Simon Sandall.

Peter Dunn p1

simon — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 04:11:56 +0000

Elderly American ex-sevicemen have been known to revisit Brisbane. One million U.S. servicemen and women arrived in Brisbane during WW2. Brisbane still has a few remnants of these times: a few igloo buildings, with the semi-circular roof, built by the U.S. military; a museum displaying General Douglas MacArthur’s office in the old AMP Building in the CBD; some old houses in Clayfield and Bowen Hills, and hotels like Perry House in the CBD used by the U.S. military. Buildings were used for everything from accomodation, to intercepting Japanese communications and propaganda production.
Some still have memories of the time. One man said that as a child he was driven in a jeep to the Inns of Court in the CBD, to play with General MacArthur’s son. He recalled playing trucks on the floor with the boy and the Commander of the South West Pacific area. Others remember troop trains in Brisbane and other towns and cities: the trainline went down the street in Rockhampton, and troop trains would be followed by children catching coins thrown by U.S. servicemen. Still some remember the dancing at places like the Trocadero in South Brisbane.
Peter Dunn has a website with many photos and facts about Australia during WW2, and one of many aspects covered on the site is the U.S. military presence in Australia. He has contacted U.S. ex-servicemen about this intriguing time. He said the U.S. military presence made “significant changes to the way we lived in Australia”.
“They were paid significantly better than our soldiers, and brought with them their own tastes in food, music and dancing, the sorts of which had never been seen to any great extent in Australia. They brought equipment and machinery which again had either never been seen here or were a rarity.”
Also, Mr Dunn said a little known fact was that L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, was based in Brisbane, working for Army Intelligence.
Caspar Weinberger also worked alongside Douglas MacArthur in his offices.
While it was an interesting time in Brisbane during WW2, many of these servicemen never returned to the U.S., and are buried in cemeteries in places like Ipswich, near Brisbane, killed in plane crashes on Australian soil for example. A woman in Ipswich used to tend the graves of U.S. servicemen, and would write to their families. These families got together and flew her out to the U.S. to meet and thank her. This interesting time had a high cost for U.S., Australian and other Allied service men and women, and their families. Check out Mr Dunn’s website Ozatwar.com.

READERSVOICE.COM: First up, could you recommend some of your favorite books on military matters, whether biography, history, anything.

PETER DUNN: My favourite book is Wings Around Us by Dr Rod Cardell. It tells the story of Rod growing up as a young lad in the middle of the large US Townsville Air Depot at the foot of Mt Louisa in Townsville, near the Garbutt Airfield. I grew up in the late 1950s and early 1960s riding my trusty push bike out to the old concrete tarmacs and runways and the large igloo hangars that remained from the old Townsville Air Depot.

RV: What are some of your other favorite books, eg. novels, or other books?

PD: All of my books are basically historical reference books on the war in the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) with a particular focus on events inside Australia during WWII. Another great reference book is Queensland Airfields WW2 – 50 Years on by Roger Marks. Another great books is The Eavesdroppers by Jack Bleakley. It tells the story of the RAAF Wireless Units during WWII.

RV: Do you read many magazines and is so, which ones?

PD: Flight Path Magazine is about the only magazine that I subscribe to and read.