Havana, Cuba I

We are finally sharing photos from our trip to Cuba earlier this year (though we've given you a sampling with our recent Cuba calendar)! It’s a lot harder to blog our travels when we have another full time job/blog. We have so many photos we want to share from Cuba, and we plan to do that here. Better late than never, right?

Cuba is such an interesting country and unlike any other place we’ve ever visited. The history and culture doesn’t compare to anything we’ve seen. To our parents, our stories of Cuba reminded them of the Communist Soviet Union they grew up in… which isn’t exactly a good thing. Life in Ukraine was hard for our families, which is why they moved to the US when we were both really young. It’s been over 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and though things aren’t perfect, they’ve gotten a lot better. In Cuba, the people are still waiting for a change. The way of life and government seems prehistoric. It’s incredible that a country so close to the United States can be so different.

Cuba has been under the rule of the same old dude (and recently his brother) for over 50 years. It became a Communist country modeled after the USSR and had a strong Russian presence for a few decades. Also for over 50 years, Cuba and the United States have had a no-trade embargo. That means nothing comes in and nothing goes out between the US and Cuba. Everything in Cuba is old and reused, and they’ve excelled at being a self-sustaining country. It’s incredible how they can make the same cars last for 50 years. The United States continues an embargo against Cuba "so long as it continues to refuse to move toward democratization and greater respect for human rights."

We feel like Cuba is on the brink of change and keep seeing that in the media. Just in the last few years the Cuban government has allowed people to open their own businesses (prior to this, absolutely everything was government run and regulated). Obama has loosened some laws that allow Cubans to travel between the US and Cuba to visit family. The old man Fidel is getting up there in age, and something’s gotta give. Yuriy and I really wanted to visit Cuba before it changes and opens up to the US… before McDonalds, Starbucks, and the Hilton rush into Cuba and commercialize it. We feel so fortunate to have experienced Cuba in all it’s rustic beauty and really treasure the photos we brought home from it.

We’ll be sharing posts from Havana, Cienfuegos, and Trinidad in the coming weeks, so come back to see more.

- Julia

*** If you haven’t ordered a Cuba calendar yet, do so by the end of tomorrow to get one before Christmas! (if you’re in the US)

Holidays

This week is rushed. I'm putting final touches on my screenwriting book which I want to publish in January. There's a few issues to deal with technically. 

Since the book is an instructional manual the format is set. But I am also including a complete screenplay as well, it offers some issues. The book is written on the computer but the screenplay is scanned. 

Trouble is the screenplay format has too reduce its size but also, because it's scanned from paper, it's a little grey. You would think this is an easy fix, but it's somewhat complicated. I have to figure this out.

I also have to get the cover done, with a photo my friends liked, rather than just titles. Since it's about a working writer (me) I thought this would be more interesting than titles which don't lend to getting attention. But that also has issues, but my friend Shirley, who was part of the blog at the very beginning, is going to help out greatly.

On top of all this, I'm preparing to go to Calgary, where my brother lives. He works in the newspaper business and we always get together at Christmas.

There might be a problem with the posts as I've been having trouble with Google, who seem to want me to change passwords every other day. So if I don't post over the next 2 weeks, it's due to internet problems.

Anyways, here's the first pass of the photo. I wanted it to look just a little surreal, rather than sharp and realistic. Let me know what you think. . Titles will go in bottom third, the dark area.

     
Will send photos of snow and cold.
 

Haute Hair Tip for Winter: Hydrate

I love my haute natural hair! My winter hair care tip... hydrate! Keep your hair looking beautiful by keeping its moisture content high using steam therapy. It will grow fuller and longer with lots of shine.




My hair therapy session and styling is compliments of Robin D. Groover in Atlanta and New York City.


What do you think about haute natural hair with brilliant color and shine?

On the road

I first read Jack Kerouac's landmark novel On The Road when I was fifteen. Needless to say it was a landmark moment in my life and one that remains an essential part of who and what I am.

The book is basically a rambling collection of stories around a handful of characters in the late 1940's. It was published in 1956 and immediately became a classic example of that period of time in America. Kerouac and his friends were literate, many were university students and others were just plain crazy people.

What's significant about the book is that it was arguably the first book about young people looking for something else besides the world they saw as different after a world war. And rather than look for jobs, they decided to travel across the country for no real particular reason except adventure, drinking, lots of sex and drugs.  And also seeing a country that was recovering from four years of seeing soldiers dying in Europe and the Pacific.

It was also the beginning of the Beat Generation, which would lead to rock and roll, jazz,  beatniks, hippies, the love generation and a feeling of discovery of another America. The one that was waiting to be discovered with cars, something that didn't happen that much in the 20's or 30's.

And it changed my life.

Not so much the drugs and sex, but the feeling I always had when I traveled across the great prairies and the Rocky Mountains and the truckstops where so many characters I've noticed and whom filled my screenplays. It was my adventure.

Kerouac wrote the book on a long roll of newsprint, he wrote on a typewriter at a frenzied rate, no doubt fueled by other substances.  He was from a French Canadian family in upstate Massachusetts and wrote not only of the lifestyle of the road but also of the discovery of what the country had become, from lonely towns to cities and in a way that made it all sound like a movie to me.

I have driven probably a million miles in the last 40 years, my trusty Ford SUV now has over 300,000 miles and I've had several cars. My friends say that all I need in life is a tank of gas and a highway I've never been on. The highway photo at the top of this blog is in Nevada and part of a documentary I did. 

And this brings me to the movie. Finally after years, someone has made On The Road. Francis Coppola, who made The Godfather, optioned it 25 years ago with the intention of making it but never got it together. Finally he gave it to Brazilian Walter Salles who made The Motorcycle Diaries, about the early days of Che Guevara. This took 8 years to get made and finally it will premiere Dec 21st.

But I always wondered if the book could be a movie. It's style of prose is completely different than most novels, it rambles, it rolls along. Sentences continue for forever and the energy was either felt or not. And that's the dilemma. Can it make a movie?

The early reviews were mixed, which I expected and I am uncertain about the outcome. I will see it, I have to see it, but yet a part of me doesn't want to be disappointed, not since it means so much. 

I guess I'll see if the adventure remains.



    

 

Haute Travels Tip: Mini Fragrances for Travel

As a girl on the go, I must carry my favorite fragrances with me. I absolutely love a beautiful vanity counter that highlights my various moods by the perfumes that I select. Mini-size fragrances offer space saving options for carry on bags and they look great next to your bed or in your dressing room.

Marc Jacobs Dot Fragrance for the Young at Heart

Marc Jacobs was so inspired by his love of poka dots that he created DOT a personal signature fragrance. The scent offers top notes of red berries, dragon fruit and honeysuckle. The mild and base notes contain Jasmine, coconut water with musk.

The fragrance is captured in a beautiful red bottle that plays with fantasy. I love the design of the bottle because it looks like a work of art. The bufferfly-inspired top plays with porportions offering a chic way to indulge in something that brings pure joy. The girls who are happy, vivacious and upbeat will enjoy DOT. You can find DOT at Bloomingdales for $89.00.

The Writer's Guild Christmas Party

 The Writer's Guild of America, West holds a Christmas party where a few hundred writers and guests take over an upscale restaurant. Nobody really knows how many WGA writers there are, estimates go from a few thousand to 10,000 members. The west coast WGA is the largest.

This year it was held at Beso, a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard and co-owned by Eva Longaria of Desperate Housewives fame. Eva also brought pizzas to the writers' strike a few years ago. And while her restaurant is way too upscale for the likes of me and other writer's, we get a chance to hang out where wine bottles rest in a huge glass wall for all to see.

The event is free and we all get one ticket for a drink. Last year, after I used my ticket I bought a Manhattan drink and it cost $16 so you know that was my last drink.

Writer's come in all shapes and colors but mostly are middle-aged men with jeans and occasional sport coat or sweater. Mostly we look like we look at home or work. There were a few suits and some glitter costumes but ordinary is the look of the evening rather than the hipsters who regularly come to Beso.

It's a big restaurant with an upstairs private room and actor/waiters moving through the crowd with trays of beef tacos and thin pizzas. Tables were removed to accommodate  the crowd of loud writers and guests. 

What's interesting is that I've discovered there are a lot of writers who work on various other things than movies and TV. I met a writer whose job it is is to create questions for Jeopardy, another writes a reality show where he figures out ideas for one of those housewives-of shows. I even met a radio news writer who was in WGA thru a separate guild in New York.

As I mentioned, men are in the majority here and women writers are fewer and minorities even fewer. It's changing a little, but not much. 

Talking to writers is never easy as many prefer not to really talk to anyone but their friends. Since both I and my guest Mary are pretty good talkers and we managed to talk to a lot of the crowd. Mary introduced me to Tom Schulman, an Academy Award winner who seemed quite friendly and not aloof at all. 

Of course there's nothing like success to make a person humble and there were some of those. I had my deal with the French company that had some good reaction but again the worst thing a writer likes is another writer who's working. Not always of course, but often.

In some ways, the party has the feeling like the employees broke into the owners mansion and are taking advantage of everything. A lot of the discussions I had were from unhappy writers and the lack of work or the lack of respect that writers get. 

I've never bothered with that, I always felt that I respected myself and didn't really care what my bosses thought of me and as long as I delivered, that's all that really counts. The truth is that most of the WGA members are out of work, I read a statistic that suggested around 85% of WGA members are not working. That beats the national unemployment rate for any other job, except for actors maybe.

But we choose what we wanted to do and that's how it goes; some of us are talented, others like me are lucky, and still others aren't sure why they became writers. I spoke to one of the actor/waiters who wanted to make some contacts with a writer who could connect him to a producer and I didn't want to tell him the odds of that happening as writers are the last people to be able to help anyone.

There's an old offensive joke wherein a young not very smart starlet anxious to get herself into movies sleeps with the writer. 

That's the joke.