Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter and Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort
(photo from DanielRadcliffe.com)
The first, not leaked, official movie trailer for Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows was released Tuesday with much celebration of and anticipation for the film to be released on November 19, 2010. But one issue that would have been overlooked, takes on new importance in the wake of Avatar Director James Cameron's attack on Warner Bros. Clash of The Titans use of 3D in a movie shot as 2D: will Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows have the same problem?
Earlier this year, just after the release of the epic remake of Clash of The Titans , Cameron went on an attack on Clash that could only be called damaging. Cameron said that making 2D films and then reforming them as 3D movies "cheapens" the 3D brand, and called for a board or commission to be formed that would monitor how and when 3D is used.
The one problem from this perspective is there are two kinds of 3D movies: before Avatar and after Avatar. Before Avatar, many movies were made with 2D cameras, then converted to 3D and in a process so common now, you can do it with your movie videos at home. Sure, there were a few stereoscopic films, but the common process was conversion.
Avatar takes advantage of new 3D processes created from Real D 3D, Dolby 3D, XpanD 3D, MasterImage 3D, and IMAX 3D, and was made from the start as a stereoscopic 3D movie.
The unfortunate reality is many movies were created from a one-camera perspective, and not an in-tandem 2 camera view system that mimics the eye and offers a more exact 3D perspective.
The whole point is to create the illusion of depth perception: the idea that something is in front of or behind another object on screen. But that written, movie makers who are converting 2D to 3D argue that the elements of a 3D movie - where a distant object is desaturated and hazy relative to a closer one - are already in 2D movies and thus continue to advocate 2D to 3D conversion.
Avatar distorts the truth
The problem Avatar causes for movie-makers on a budget is it used special equipment and techniques that were extremely expensive, then the movie goes on to be the largest money-maker in film history. So, because of Avatar, we have blogs like Screenrant claiming James Cameron has successfully ushered in the official “era of 3D cinema" because of its success. But it's not that movies haven't been made using stereoscopic film methods, they just weren't all that successful until Avatar. Now, every movie's judged by Avatar and what James Cameron says about that film versus Avatar.
Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows is not an "Avatar 3D" movie
From the James Cameron perspective, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows is not an authentic 3D movie. In other words, it was created with a one-camera-lens perspective and has been converted to 3D, much as The Clash of The Titans was, and at a cost estimated at $10 million or "$5 million for movie conversion and $5 million for the glasses" according to Heat Vision Blog.
My take: Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows is just fine as 2D
If you want to see what Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows will look like in 2D, just look at the movie trailer above, if you'e not done so. It's a beautiful presentation, with all of the visual depth and character drama you expect from another epic installment in the Harry Potter series. Adding 3D is an excuse to charge higher ticket prices and with the popularity of the Harry Potter brand, assure ticket sales. It's a marketing trick on the heels of Avatar, but an unnecessary one.
Avatar made my eyes strain and I had a tightness from trying to watch it with the glasses. I saw Avatar just once for that reason. Maybe my contact lenses were dirty and that reacted with the 3D glasses, but really, watching real 3D is an adjustment.
If Warner Bros was really serious about making Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows in 3D, they'd have insisted on it in the production process, and even in the making of the videos that go on YouTube.
At a YouTube party I attended and will post today, YouTube engineers presented their experiments with 3D and the new online capability of being able to present 3D videos. It was effective, but takes some adjusting to. Will I use it? Considering they gave me a 3D web cam with which to make 3D videos, yes I will. The only thing stopping me is the camera doesn't work on a Mac; it's for a PC!
I've not yet seen a movie studio make a 3D movie that includes a 3D YouTube video version. It's a good idea for a studio to do, and gives movie goers a more authentic view of what the 3D movie will look like when it's released. That written, I'm looking forward to Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows in whatever "D" it's presented in.
Katie Couric offered an overview in a video celebrating 5 years of YouTube without referring to us here at Zennie's
"I commend all the citizen journalists who are showing us their realities and proving that even Burma, China, or Africa can be just a click away."
~Katie Couric
OK, I'll take that, even though I put a lot less on YouTube than Zennie does. We've been commended, but we didn't make her list. Well, what I mean is, he didn't make it. I'm not surprised that I didn't make it, I use YouTube as a sort of incidental tool.
Zennie, though? Zennie has been partnering with YouTube and attracting the kind of discussions in the reply area that built traffic from the start.
"Raising awareness of human rights abuses and providing first hand accounts of conflicts and catastrophes moments after they strike."
~Katie Couric
She came up with a list of five pieces she thinks are demonstrative of how YouTube can be a catalyst for change.
Actually, it's a pretty good list. Who in the U.S. can forget Virginia Senator George Allen's infamous "Macaca" comment? That certainly put politicians on notice. She included the 2007 anti-government protests in Burma, the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province in China, and the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan during the Iranian election protests in 2009.
Four entirely exemplary videos.
But footage of a lion attacking a water buffalo on the Africa plain? Is that really more important to the story of YouTube than, say, interviews with Cornell West and Tavis Smiley, or footage from Obama's campaign and the convention that nominated him?
Come on, Ms. Couric - where's the love?
What does YouTube bring to your view of the world?
Thomas Hayes is an entrepreneur, journalist, political staffer, and photographer who contributes regularly to a host of web sites on topics ranging from economics and politics to culture and community. He's been contributing here at Zennie's since prior to the Democrat's National Convention in Denver that nominated our current President in August of 2008, and hereby officially totally apologizes to Zennie for not doing more video -- for real :)
All of the taggings were done using red spray paint and all were messages related to the Oscar Grant, Johannes Mehserle murder case.
Some of the graffiti messages seemed to wish harm to Johannes Mehserle, the former BART Police Officer who shot and killed Oscar Grant. Here's the video showing the problem:
Today, all of the messages have been removed by the City of Oakland. The shores of Lake Merritt are back to their unmarked and clean look as the photo above shows. I did not check the AC Transit Bus Stop on Grand Avenue, but since the video pointed to all of the places, and all of those points are clean, the bus shelter should be as well. Unless, of course, the City of Oakland's not in the mood to help AC Transit.
Unlike most of the Harry Potter movies before it, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows is wonderfully dark and the trailer for the Warner Bros. movie reflects not just Harry Potter's coming of age as a wizard and a young man, but the evil Potter is facing. Reflecting the overall mood of the book of the same names, the vast majority of scenes presented in the trailer are dark in their style with muted tones and dark colors. Even the sky above is overcast.
And the introduction - the Warner Bros. logo and Time Warner Company name against a dark, cloudy sky, offers a foreshadowing of the not-so-pleasant World Harry Potter's a part of in The Deathly Hallows.
Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows is the seventh book in the series by author J.K. Rowing. The Warner Bros. movie, set to be released in two parts: Part I on November 19th 2010, and Part II on July 15th 2011, has endured some minor set backs and speed-bumps along the way to completion.
Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter and Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort
(photo from DanielRadcliffe.com)
First, completion of the script was delayed because of the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike, then a copy of the script was found under a table in a Suburban London bar after film workers went out for a night of cheer to the Waterside Tavern located near the Leavesden Studios in Kings Langley, Hertfordshire, where the film was made, 21 miles north of London.
The patron who found the script read the 118-page document that was marked "Private and Confidential" did not reveal what they saw, but Screencrave.com reported it contains "several drastic changes" from the book.
Since that episode, various aspects of the plot have been leaked online.
A large cast for The Deathly Hallows
The special blog Harry Potter 7 Movie Trailer has an almost complete description of the cast and their characters as well as a history of all of the trailers released, :
Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter, who makes a decision to find the remaining Horcruxes, not returning for his seventh year at Hogwarts. Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley, one of Harry's two best friends. Emma Watson as Hermione Granger, one of Harry's two best friends. Robbie Coltrane as Rubeus Hagrid, the Hogwarts gamekeeper and Care of Magical Creatures teacher, Harry's first friend from the magical world. David Thewlis as Remus Lupin, former Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. Lupin is a werewolf and a member of the Order of the Phoenix. Matthew Lewis as Neville Longbottom, a slightly nerdy friend of Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny and Luna. Evanna Lynch as Luna Lovegood, one of Harry's friends and member of Dumbledore's Army Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange, one of Voldemort's principal Death Eaters, older sister of Narcissa Malfoy, aunt to Draco, and cousin of Sirius Black, whom she murdered in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Jason Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy. Isaacs considered not returning for the film, before the book was released, as he was worried Malfoy would have very little screentime due to the character's imprisonment in the previous story. Helen McCrory as Narcissa Malfoy, Draco's mother and younger sister of Bellatrix. Timothy Spall as Peter Pettigrew, former member of Harry's father James's group of friends, he betrayed Harry's parents to Voldemort. Now one of Voldemort's principal Death Eaters.
Obviously missing from this list is the great actor Ralph Fiennes who plays Lord Voldemort pictured above.
Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows in 3D
Following a trend that started with last year's hit Avatar, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows will be presented in 3D. From the appearance of the trailer, it looks like The Deathly Hollows was originally a 2D movie that will be presented in 3D.
Will James Cameron slam Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows?
The use of 3D as a marketing tool (the Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Trailer contains promotion as such a film) is a practice panned by Avatar Producer / Director James Cameron, who took a direct shot at another Warner Bros. movie, The Clash of The Titans when he said "They worked against themselves with that film. I've heard people say that they couldn't watch (Clash of the Titans) in 3-D and thought it looked better in 2-D and they enjoyed the film more," in response to the news that Warner Bros. delayed the release of Clash to add 3D effects.
Cameron fears too many movies adding 3D effects to a movie shot as a 2D production will cheapen the 3D brand. That Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows does that remains to be seen.
Former Cal Football and now Oakland Raiders Quarterback Kyle Boller is set to marry former Miss California and Miss USA Carrie Prejean.
Frankly, having met Kyle Boller, Carrie Prejean could not have picked a nicer guy. But to think that one year ago Carrie was under fire for speaking out against Gay Marriage, then getting the boot from Donald Trump, after that the CNN Larry King meltdown, and of course the infamous sex tape issue, all this blogger can say is "Wow. That was fast!" Did the Oakland Raiders Al Davis and Amy Trask encourage this in some unusual indirect promotion for Raiders Season Tickets?
Kyle Boller and Carrie Prejean have been an item since the summer of 2009. The wedding's set to take place this Friday. Let's hope Kyle's marriage to Carrie improves his play in football. He's got a new start with the Raiders and is back in the Bay Area, next to Cal.
In what must be a wild coincidence, Anna Chapman - who looks a little like Angelina Jolie - is accused of being a real Russian spy just weeks before Angelina Jolie's Salt movie is released on July 23rd. And that news of two hot women (OK, Anna Chapman's way too skinny to be considered hot but why not play along?) has pushed the news about Megan Fox getting married off the trend charts for today. Sorry Megan, this blogger will get back to you.
According to the New York Daily News, Anna Chapman ran a New York online real estate company worth $2 million and is one of 11 accused Russian secret agents arrested by the FBI and who allegedly operated in Boston, Seattle and Arlington, Va.
Apparently, she was caught in the middle of a mission, but what the NY Daily News posts reads as no bid deal. There must be more than this:
FBI agents found the Verizon phone contract and Motorola charger along with packaging for calling cards that can be used for international calls in a trash can after Chapman was arrested, according to the complaint.
Angelina Jolie
The court document also details Chapman's interactions with an undercover FBI agent who fed her instructions for preparing a fake passport to transfer to another female spy.
She was instructed to hold a magazine a certain way to signal the other spy to initiate contact.
Chapman is quoted in the complaint repeating back the following instructions: "Okay, tomorrow at 11, I am going to be sitting at one of the benches, she is going to ask me if she saw me in California. I am going to say no, it was in the Hamptons. I will take the documents, tell her to sign. I will hold the journal, this is how she will recognize me."
She was arrested before the mission was carried out. Chapman appeared in Manhattan federal court on June 28, 2010 with four other alleged spies.
Fine, but what was she doing in the mission? Why?
It's about as interesting as Angelina Jolie's Salt movie, but in that case Angelina Jolie's a CIA agent accused of being a Russian spy and goes on the run; we don't get to see Anna Chapman on the run. We do get to see her Facebook page.
The main question is what was this 11-person so-called Russian spy ring doing. That's not answered. In the Salt movie, we know Angelina Jolie is suspected to be planning to get the American President. But in real life, what was Anna Chapman doing?
U.S. Senator John Kerry (D - Massachusetts) is sharpening his knifes for the 2010 election season. Kerry just sent this blogger an email that is a perfect indication of how Democrats are going to paint Republicans as we head into the fall election season: as "dangerously radical."
But given that Kerry mentions Kentucky GOP Senate Candidate Rand Paul, he should call Rand "a wacky guy" because he is. And besides, being dangerously radical is too nice. No. John Kerry should call the Republican Party "dangerously wacky."
Well, here's John Kerry's email:
Hello Zenophon,
Republicans are betting that you don't care - that after all you did to beat them in 2006 and 2008, you're going to sit this one out.
So they're whipping up their base by blocking help to unemployed workers, blocking summer jobs for teens, apologizing to the big companies that gave us the spill in the Gulf, and doing anything else they can do to stop progress. They're betting that they can excite their radical base and you won't respond.
The stakes? Look no further than the truly radical candidates we're up against. Down in Kentucky, it's would-be Senator Rand Paul. Yes, that Rand Paul, who says freedom means a private business can discriminate against African-Americans, and that President Obama holding polluters accountable for the mess in the Gulf is "un-American."
And he's not alone. All across the country, the Republican Party has turned dangerously radical. One candidate calls Social Security "horrible policy," while another has said that Americans will turn to "Second Amendment remedies" against Democrats.
We have to stop them. Please contribute today to Jack Conway, Admiral Joe Sestak, and some other great Democrats. Tell the GOP that you do care and that we will stop them.
The Republican Party believes they have the upper hand; they've made no secret of the fact that they plan to repeal healthcare reform if they win back control of Congress. But we have great candidates, and if we all work at it, we will beat them.
In Pennsylvania, Admiral Joe Sestak is running to keep Pennsylvania blue. In Illinois, Alexi Giannoulias is running hard to keep Barack Obama's seat Democratic. But we're not just playing defense. In New Hampshire, Paul Hodes is running neck-and-neck with his Republican opponent to take this seat for the Democrats.
Each of these candidates will make the Senate work better for average Americans. We need to do more than just play defense. Years of GOP mismanagement dug a deep hole. We've just started to turn our country around, passing healthcare reform, working to hold the big banks accountable for the Wall Street meltdown, pushing legislation to address climate change and end our addiction to oil. The GOP is betting big that saying "no" and blocking progress is a path to success in November.
What bet will you make?
We've still got a lot of work to do.
Thank you for all your help,
John Kerry
Again, John Kerry should just call some names and throw some dirt the GOP's way. That will liven things up a bit. Rand Paul's a wacky guy, not dangerously radical.
City of Oakland At-Large Councilmember and would-be Oakland Mayor's Race participant has announced she's going to make a "special announcement" and reports that it "Will be an eventful speech solidifying her position in the Mayoral race." It will be held Wednesday at 11 a.m at the Joyce Gordon Gallery 406 14th St.
In other words, after meetings, events, talks, and the parking issue, Councilmember Kaplan's going to officially run for Mayor of Oakland. And why not?
The Oakland Mayor's Race is wide open race and anything can happen between now and November, when the election for the next Mayor of Oakland is held. What I hear from Oaklander after Oaklander is that not one of the candidates is exciting to them.
That may be because they haven't seen all of them.
The Joyce Gordon Gallery is located on 14th Street between Broadway and Franklin Streets in downtown Oakland.
While Arthur O. Sulzberger, Chairman and Publisher of The New York Times, holds that Google is the NYTimes "friend" and they have a good working relationship - even to the point of hounding SFGate.com regarding this blogger's claims to the contrary - a recent Amici or "friend of the court" brief filed by the New York Times and other large news organizations openly attacks the work of online news aggregators like Google News.
If the New York Times likes Google so much, why would it attach itself to the friend of the court brief?
The backstory is the Barclay's Capital v. TheFlyOnTheWall.com case. In that case, New Jersey-based TheFlyOnTheWall.com was accused of taking information on bank upgrades and downgrades of stocks that was originally produced by Barclays and the other banks involved in the copyright infringement lawsuit lawsuit.
Barclays holds that TheFlyOnTheWall.com website “systematically and impermissibly accesses” its proprietary equity research and does none of its own. Barclays and the banks enjoined in the lawsuit, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley & Co. Inc., contend their information is "hot news" and "that the regular, systematic, and timely taking and redistribution of their recommendations constitutes misappropriation, which is a violation of the New York common law of unfair competition," as the case reads.
Case was bounced around before
The Barclay's Capital v. TheFlyOnTheWall.com case originally started in June 26, 2006 and then reassigned to the court of U.S. District Judge Denise Cote on June 8, 2009, according to the case document presented in the link above. It never became a jury trial because Barclays and it's banking partners elected to waive a damages claim, and perhaps they reasoned a jury trial could go against them. Summary judgment motions that would have ended the case by tossing it out of court were denied on November 6, 2009; the case was set for a March 8th 2010 bench trial.
Copywrite claims and "Hot-News"
As part of the process of the original 2006 lawsuit against TheFlyOnTheWall.com (or "Fly") that company signed a confidentiality agreement and claimed the information on Barclay's and Merill's recommendations were coming from analyst and broker sources inside those banks's research departments which created the information. Barclay's claimed to end that pipeline of information and settlement talks started over statutory damages, which are much less that any a trial jury would be asked to evaluate. Fly agrees that it committed copyright infringement but that it is not liable for what is called a "Hot-News" misappropriation.
The basis for the "Hot-News" concept is a 1918 case called International News Service v. Associated Press. In that case, the AP reported World War 1 stories from Europe at its own expense and that the International News Service got from the AP by "copying AP’s stories from bulletin boards and early editions of newspapers printed by AP’s eastern affiliates" according to the Barclay's case text.
The International News Service then sent those stories to The West Coast where it sold the news stories paraphrased as its own story. The Associated Press got a permanent injunction blocking the International News Service from the Court of Appeals, after losing the original case decision.
The Supreme Court supported the Court of Appeals ruling under the view that the AP spent money and worked to make the story that the INS then used as the basis for its own news sales. In other words, INS made money off the AP's initial work, even though it was not a direct copy, and did no original work of its own.
You can see where this can apply to the modern Internet news debate. It's the reason The New York Times and Gannett (which owns USA Today) jumped in and filed "friend of the court" briefs. If they can successfully reintroduce the hot-news legal argument it will allow them to sue Internet companies with glee.
But standing in the way of such a modern application is Justice Brandeis minority Supreme Court view of that time: “the general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions -- knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas -- become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.”
While the INS hot-news legal view was challenge by the Second Circuit court's Judge Learned Hand as not intended to establish a general doctrine, it still became part of state common law in several states, including New York. The most famous recent "hot-news" case was National Basketball Association v. Motorola, Inc. in 1997.
In National Basketball Association v. Motorola, Inc., the hand-held pager displayed NBA game action news as the games were in progress. The information that was sold by Motorola via its SportsTrax device and for profit triggered the hot-news argument. The NBA won.
The NBA "Hot-News" view is pre-Twitter
The major problem with the Hot-News view is that it comes from a time before Twitter and smart phones. Now, a person can sent a tweet about an NBA game in progress that is then picked up by Twitter and can be used as a news feed on a blog that gains revenue from ads placed on it. The fan-generated information was not produced by the NBA itself. No sports stats sheet needs to be obtained.
But arguably the person who created the "Hot-News" is the fan, and not the NBA. The NBA can't control what its fans see its players do on the court and report to others. Adding a "no-tweet" ticket disclaimer would be impossible to legally justify if challenged. That's like asking a person not to talk about a game it saw. There's a numbers issue: the NBA game itself is so large and reaches so many people that it becomes a public event, thus the information from it is public.
Now you can see why Twitter jumped into this issue with Google. Indeed, the problem in the Barclay's case is that the "size of the impact of information" was not considered. In other words, in the view of this space, information that can be agreed to impact a large number of people should be considered public and thus more easy to distribute, even if it's for profit. The profit-takers will eventually have such a large market they will reduce the price for the information. In fact, one can claim that's what the Internet is causing to happen.
U.S. District Judge Denise Cote's March 2010 Decision
In March 2010, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote established a creative injunction in the Barclay's v. TheFlyOnTheWall.com case that blocks TheFlyOnTheWall.com and other similar firms from releasing information from a research report not before four hours after the release of that report. TheFlyOnTheWall.com asked the appeals court to delay Judge Denise Cote's order while it files an appeal. This is where Google and Twitter are battling The New York Times, The Washington Post, Gannett, McClatchy, Belo, Scripps, Time, and the Newspaper Association of America, all of which filed a "friend of the court" brief that counters Google and Twitter.
The central problem with the Amici brief filed by The New York Times, et al, it is a direct attack on Google News. Page 25 of the brief reads:
One of the greatest concerns among news originators is inexpensive technology that allows easy aggregation of news. Aggregation can take many forms, including the indexing of fresh news content from one or more websites, by engines of various kinds. News stories are traditionally written to compress the key facts of a story into the opening paragraph. The output of indexing engines can reproduce the headlines, opening paragraph or sentences from originator news stories, and thereby convey the essence of the original news item. Even where an aggregator website or news application contains a hyperlink to the news item on the originator’s website, the risk remains that readers will find that reading the aggregator’s output keeps them sufficiently informed of the latest news. As a result, they may never click through to the originator’s website. If a significant number of readers find the news reproduced by the aggregator to be an acceptable substitute for reading the original story, courts should conclude that the two products compete in the INS/Motorola sense even though the two parties are not in identical businesses.
That is a direct attack on Google News and on the same process that Arthur O. Sulzberger himself has said gives a significant amount of traffic to The New York Times. I will go a step beyond that and say that Google does The New York Times a favor by in effect presenting it in Google News, and perhaps on more occasions that it had a right to have. Even if there is no click through to the website, the NY Times still has the benefit of being seen as the news producer.
Here's the full Amici brief from the news organizations:
According to Bloomberg, Google and Twitter's counter is that...
"In our brief, we're not taking sides or focusing on the details of this particular dispute between the parties," Chris Gaither, a spokesman for Mountain View, California-based Google, said today in an e-mailed statement. "But we believe that the case raises important issues of law that could affect the free flow of important factual information online."
It's clear we're at ground zero of what will be an important legal battle that impacts the future of news online. In this, we can now see true colors of the The New York Times : it has an issue with Google, otherwise it would not have joined the Amici brief in the Barclay's case that attacks news aggregators. Perhaps the NYTimes thought it was making a sneak attack; not any more.
I suppose many have seen this already, even if you're not regular Colbert Report viewers, but as a long-time fan of SNL's Father Guido Sarducci I wanted to share it here, too.
Prophet Glenn Beck - Father Guido Sarducci Incidentally, Fox News took little notice of the significance of August 28th as an anniversary date in 2008, when Democrats nominated Senator Barack H. Obama to run for President of the United States.
As the Oscar Grant / Johannes Mehserle murder trial nears and end and fears that former BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle increase, the fears that a riot, or series of riots, will happen in Oakland, Los Angeles, and other cities and towns in California increase, and for good reason. There are clear and visible signs that individuals and groups will take some kind of action that could include violence and property damage, and nowhere is this more apparent than around Lake Merritt in Oakland. There, property damage has already happened.
This video blogger received a tip from a YouTube viewer:
Not sure if you're aware, but there is graffiti in red spray paint throughout the running/walking path in Lake Merritt regarding Oscar Grant and Johannes Mesherle, just thought you may want to possibly cover it, and the peoples reactions while viewing it.
Take Care
On Sunday, I did just that. My vlogging (video-blogging) journey started with a message painted in red spray paint at the AC Transit bus shelter at the intersection of Perkins Avenue and Grand Avenue in Oakland's Adams Point District. The message read "Mehserle must die too!" and seemed to imply there was at least one more graffiti tag like it around somewhere. So, I went for a walk.
At first, as I arrived at Bellevue and Grand closer to Lake Merritt, there was no other graffitt tag message. So I continued along the walking and running path through Lakeside park until I arrived at what's locally called "The Columns," the structure on the northeastern shore of the Lake that serves an an informal meeting and viewing place between Grand Avenue and Lakeshore Avenue.
There, starting at the end of The Columns on the Grand Avenue side, was the first of three messages. It read "Mehserle must die." The other two are located in what I call the center court area, and at the opposite end of The Columns on the Lakeshore Avenue side.
But it graffiti tagging didn't stop there; it continued around the path next to the Lakeshore on the Lakeshore Avenue side of the water. The majority of the messages, which varied in tone from bad to awful, were next to the benches along the path.
In all I counted 11 messages, all in the video. A sure and clear sign that someone already took action to send a warning of what they either intend to do or wish someone else would do if the Oscar Grant trial ends with Mehserle going free.
The problem is Mehserle just may walk free.
The reason is the charge is murder, not manslaughter. The prosecution in the case has to prove that Johannes Mehserle intended to kill Oscar Grant last year. This is an issue I talked about with Oakland City Attorney John Russo just weeks ago. While not saying outright that Mehserle would "walk," Russo explained that it was going to be difficult to get a murder conviction.
If Johannes Mehserle is set free, Oakland's not going to be the safest place to be on the day of the verdict.
http://5cculturalcenter.org/index.html
FYI, the food is delicious. I had a fresh carrot pudding desert that was vegan and out of this world delicious and blueberry lemonade.
Don't forget to watch my YouTube series on Giuseppi Logan from finding him all alone in Tompkins to helping him reunite with his son for the first time in 40 years!
The miracle of Apple teaching me video and YouTube helped me work a miracle.
I filmed Larry Roland, a bass player who was playing with Giuseppi Logan giving Gisueppi a rest break with a solo performance.
Larry Roland read his poem dedicated to African American jazz greats, known and unknown. Larry Roland told me when I interviewed him after the gig that "Jazz", America's Art form was kicked off by slaves. Larry told me his concerns for jazz greats known and unknown some in homes, forgotten, with no health insurance. He expressed a real feeling for Giuseppi Logan. He told me jazz greats known and unknown are dying and their spirits come down...Dying quietly.
Larry Roland's poem: Poem all of the beautiful ones Known and unknown
Also please note Matt Lavelle is dedicated to Giuseppi Logan booking him gigs and playing with him as well as providing support and encouragement to "G" as Matt calls him.
I used the very cool new feature which I tap the screen and the camera switches to the front and I can myself as I film myself. I am not blushing...we are having a heat-wave!
