Month: January 2009

At last this day has come!!

tedmills Leave a comment

Watching the Inauguration at the Arlington
Today I got up at 7 a.m., walked downtown and joined Nik at the Arlington Theater, where they were showing the inauguration on their film screen for free in HD to the general public. Awesome! Much cheering when President Obama appeared and regular booing anytime the MonkeyFascist showed his smirky face. Obama gave a rousing speech that effectively swept clean the last eight years without explicitly mentioning the architects nearby. We walked out after the benediction (another great speech–never heard of that Reverend before) and I walked home in the warm sun.

(BTW, this is a composite of two exposures, because I wanted to show both the screen (important moment!) and the audience. The exposure on the screen was so good I had to dumb it down a bit.)

Indie darling: Santa Barbara native Najarra Townsend takes a short break before a busy year to come

tedmills Leave a comment
COURTESY PHOTO
COURTESY PHOTO

“My roots are showing,” says actress Najarra Townsend in a self-conscious moment at the beginning of our interview. She’s talking about her hair—dark brunette, almost black, waiting to be transformed again for another role—but she could be talking about being back in the town of her birth, Santa Barbara. Here to see family, she’s taking an end of year break that has been filled with film premieres, auditions, and shoot days. Her most recent film, “Tru Loved,” screened this November at OUTrageous: The Santa Barbara Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Film Festival, and then down the road at the Ojai Film Festival. She plays the title character, Tru, who moves from a progressive Californian town to a more repressed suburb and sets about shaking things up in terms of gay and lesbian awareness. And 2009 is starting to shape up as a busy year, with three more lead roles (“Betty I Am,” “The Dawning” and “Cupid’s Arrow”) and parts in “We Are the Mods” and “The Telling.”

“This year (2008) has been the slowest year,” says Townsend as we chat downtown on an intermittently cold and sunny day. There were projects, she says, but they are all either being wrapped up or edited…and some she hasn’t heard from. But her upcoming film “Marin Blue”—-again, she plays the title character,–plays the Berlin Film Festival in February.

Read More