Our Best Advice

OSCARS 2013 – Event Planning

Monday, February 25th, 2013 | Our Best Advice | Comments Off

Over the years we have seen many clients win Oscar awards (see our Domestic Staffing website). Some of the people we referred for job opportunities were so loved by their employers, they went on to become famous celebrities themselves. Like Chef Wolfgang Puck, who Dora referred to a client. Wolfgang had worked at a renowned restaurant (the kitchen of Ma Maison), but he wanted to work as a Personal Celebrity Chef to expand his opportunities. Wolfgang was eager to prove his talents, and urged the client to give him a try. The Client decided to give him their job opportunity, and that’s how he got hired. While working ISA job referrals Wolfgang met many famous people. They fell in love with his cooking, and followed  him to his first restaurant SPAGO (at that time located on Sunset), which quickly became a sensational celebrity hang.

TIP: Keep reinventing your talents to expand Job Opportunities and study how others created new trends. It’s a famous story that Wolfgang Puck (a Master Chef among Chefs) with brilliant business strategy transformed the restaurant and catering business, who also became famous for Oscar Awards parties. There are no limits to how far a Chef can go as current trends show franchises worth millions.

The first Oscar Awards show was held at The Roosevelt Hotel in 1929. Last night we saw another big Oscars 2013 show, (and Wolfgang still cooking up a storm), with a billion people reported to be watching. An incredible viewing increase in just 83 years (astounding confirmation how much films influence and shape our lives).

Among the noteworthy was a tribute in memorium to those who passed away. We take this opportunity to pay them homage added to our clients gallery, including Richard Zanuck (with his legendary producing skills), and actor Ernest Borgnine. Into his seventies Richard Zanuck was a first choice for studios that had challenging projects. He was Hollywood royalty with a father that was one of three principles who founded Fox Studios. Darryl Zanuck left a legacy with a career spanning the Silent Era, the Golden Age, and decline of the studio system (that fractured under the costly production of Cleopatra). Yet, big Hollywood productions and Fox both survived.

Richard Zanuck had his own style known as a directors producer renowned for going after and protecting quality films. He worked with some of the finest directors (many of whom are our clients) making groundbreaking pictures like Jaws with Stephen Spielberg, Ron Howard’s Cocoon, Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy, Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict, Walter Hill’s Sting, Sam Mendes Road To Perdition, and Tim Burton Alice In Wonderland (which grossed more than 1Billion worldwide). With Burton he worked on six projects among them Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and Planet of the Apes. Films that became Hollywood classics setting new highs in world film history. California is famous for transforming History in so many key industries that people continue to flock here, and remains the leading hub for the most advanced creative talent in the world. 

Ernest Borgnine was among the changing tide of actors who could successfully undertake roles in TV, with the lead in McHale’s Navy (originating the role of an irreverent con man as a PT boat skipper), and wonderful Films, with roles in The Dirty Dozen, The Wild Bunch, Airwolf, and From Here To Eternity among others. His McHale’s Navy role played with unerring comedic timing, while he could also play a tough guy with an unforgettable face.

An unlikely  big-screen star or a romantic lead, this beloved actor won an Oscar in 1955 for Marty that brought him a Palm D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Marty and The Lost Weekend (1945) are the only two films ever to win both grand prizes. A career lasting six decades, Mr. Borgnine’s work continued as the voice of Mermaid Man on Sponge Bob. Nominated for an Emmy at 92 for his work on ER, he died at 95 leaving a body of historical film work for generations to come.

This is not the first time we see people heatedly arguing about violence in films, or its influence on children and American culture. While lobbying for gun control and more laws, parents are also demanding a reduction of violence in films. A friend recently sent me a quote (which Snopes confirmed is true) that Hitler allegedly made in 1942 saying, “History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms, have prepared their own downfall by doing so.” When Stalin came to power he too quickly removed people’s right to bear arms. 

Hopefully, all Americans are concerned with documents that govern our freedoms. It appears that many in Washington don’t know our legacy of inherited undeniable rights. Get to know and revisit the United States Constitution and the United States Bill of Rights often. They are amazing guarantees of our freedom that many worldwide do not enjoy – or could sustain – due to corruption of values. I don’t usually write about political issues (not the place for it) and address movie themes because many of our clients are in the film and music industry.

The right to bear arms is not an easy discussion, but there is none more complex historically with presenting a struggling tortured mind than issues of enslavement of one man to another. Men and Women have died for the right to have both. There are ‘bad guys’ who exist, who don’t just go away on their own, as films show us with some of the greatest characters Hollywood ever brought to story telling. But there is only one Lincoln. Daniel Day Lewis brought him to life for all of us. Although Lincoln remained a dearly beloved President he was beyond reach as a heroic figure overseeing a civil war. Rather than merely characterizing him as President Lincoln, the film industry agreed that only Daniel Day Lewis could bring forth the incredible man behind a title. Winning Best Actor was that statement.

Oscars 2013 Best Picture nominations put forward challenging plot lines of human grit and passion to overcome. With laugh loud humor as Silver Lining provides, or remarkable human wisdom as the young carry, presented in Beasts Of The Southern Wild.

Showing how technology changed (after Avatar) is the marvelous Life of Pi that Ang Lee directed (won Best Director). A breathtaking cinematic film that prompted my question what was the first movie made. To technically answer we turn to Edward Muybridge and his groundbreaking photos called Horses In Motion (1878), which he created using four cameras. The images were assembled as running frames showing all four hoofs of a horse are galloping off the ground. That became the first ‘moving pictures’.

Ten years later came a home movie created by inventor Louis Le Prince in France, showing his family walking around in his garden called Roundhay Garden Scene (1888).

Next came a camera test (from two men working for Thomas Edison) called Monkeyshines 1 & 2, created at Edison’s lab in New Jersey around 1889 or 1890. Why is this film history important is because new technology transformed how we ‘see’.

We take symbolic images (in this case photos) that are ordered into ensembles as frames (today using bits of digitized data), and weave them together to create another frame that comes next, and so on. 

Unfortunately, most people don’t care about film history (but I find it fascinating) and we’re generally not taught in schools how movies impact history. We passively/actively ‘record’ all that we see and feel (whether we’re aware of it or not) and regardless of what we each have as immediate access to memory (at any given ‘frame’). We’re sensitized to be triggered emotionally based on our experiences.

These experiences (in the imagination or in reality) can become entrained as trance-states. Silver Linings Playbook is a great example of trance state patterns), and how we can break them without using medication. Reliance on drugs is clearly not a good thing so curb your enthusiasm.

How manipulatable are we? Reminds me of when I lived in Bali and first saw a brilliant performance of  shadow puppets [theater] art known as Wayang. I’m always amazed how quickly people forget they’re merely watching pictures moving on a wall or a movie screen (computer monitor, iPad, smart phone, etc) which was traditionally taught (and known) as shadows moving on the wall that we react to. Instead of staying conscious we become hypnotized to associatively feel ‘in the movie’ as if it’s real. But it’s an illusion, and when we begin to totally believe in its story (and live by it), that’s called a delusion. A famous teaching by Plato.

In Victor Hugo’s Les Misrables plot line, a story of love, despair, and revolution that changed the world (tuff to argue this is delusion), the challenges of such despair is disparagingly real and still current worldwide. 

About a week ago I had to reach out to a women who was literally whimpering during a movie, because she was so identified with what was on the screen. She thanked me for bringing her out of her trance, and almost immediately fell right back into it.

The movie was Django Unchained, (Django (character) - a name used famously in Spaghetti Westerns (and in the tradition of Sam Peckinpah films) – that deal with conflicts of values and ideals, with the corruption and brutality of human violence in human society. Characters who are often loners or losers, who know of the great hypocrisy, yet somehow find a desire to do something honorable, but are forced into compromise to survive in a world of nihilistic brutality.

Interestingly, we see that while in the past people loved these movies, an ever growing fear of violence is seeking to shut them out. It’s important that director Quentin Terrentino remained undeterred by folks who criticize his efforts to wake them up (as I understood from him during an interview was his intention and interest to expand the cowboy mythos). You can choose not to watch a movie. Without judging its violence (there are films worse then this made in Hollywood in its past), Django Unchained had an important message.

Regardless of creative license in their story telling, I found it important that the Best Picture nominated films had this illuminating key as a central theme running through them (illusion/delusion). Each one of them worthy of their nominations. Among my favorites was Beasts Of The Southern Wild. Although filmgoers believe the movie Lincoln occurred as it was filmed (and debated by historians as somewhat misleading), it doesn’t change the fact that this picture was brilliantly delivered by Stephen Spielberg, or that Daniel Day Lewis remains one of the greatest actors of any generation. It became an instant American film classic.

The first public movie made for commercial viewing (for profit), was by the Lumiere brothers in 1895 (30 seats out of 100 were sold thereby proving its success.) Shown at a basement salon at the Grand Cafe in Paris (a hot city for artists to test their wares) in order to sell their Kinetoscope machine. This was a wood box you peeked into and saw moving pictures (the first “peep show” for commercial viewing). see it HERE.

Then a film was made in Berlin by another two brothers (Max and Emil Sklandanowsky) who invented Bioksop, a complicated technology using two parallel film strips. The Lumier brothers method was easier to use so they’re credited as the first motion picture tech (which I’m sure the Germans disagree with). Differing national pride stories are quickly claimed with most inventions.   

A delusion theme can be inspirational (Alice In Wonderland), or crushing (Lord of The Rings), each Surreal, and crucially important in very different ways ( a bit of a Mad Hatter in every one of us). We could say that James Bond was delusional with lessons to learn using an ever growing grouping of deadly toys (with each side having a seemingly endless arsenal to choose from), or as the film story mantra in Hollywood goes (and director William Friedkin loves to say), “there is good and bad in everyone”. 

We’re now a planetary city of a planetary population who’s center is resonant with a human family everywhere. The technology is only as good as those who can see beyond it.

TIP: All Event Planning today relies heavily on technology. Yet, there is the expertise that still remains within people, not machines. If an ice cream machine breaks down earlier in the day you need to turn on a dime and create another dessert with a flourish finish. Your hands are invaluable. Don’t become too reliant on machines. 

One of the key themes of ARGO showed Hollywood takes its movie planning worldwide (as any of the best clandestine ops could be planned for “what if” scenarios) – because it has the courage of people crazy enough to fight for freedom (on behalf of all people everywhere), and able to turn on a dime to be creative beyond limits of circumstance. We dare to dare ourselves.

TIP: Save all critical judgements that are not intended as positive input at their core. All Event Planning (including dress rehearsals) must allow for spontaneous decisions. Remain openly agile to pivot as needed. I watched my mother (Dora) go through life in faith that there is a higher power, and we are reminded of it ongoingly. Miracles exist (I’ve witnessed many with humbled gratitude). Yet, she’s always worked very hard to help people (and never relying on faith alone), as we continue to refer people to fantastic opportunities and dream jobs. People helping people is real. Don’t just do your job, go beyond it to increase value and the quality of others lives. Yours will also be increased by it.

Last night’s stepped up glamour + diva entertainment included surprise guests of Barbara Streisand and Shirley Bassy, each gorgeous and singing classics loved everywhere. Streisand singing Memories and Bassey delivering Goldfinger, showed that the seasoned ladies are never too old, who can still teach the younger gens a thing or two. And not to forget fashion, seeing Barbra Streisand looking so marvelous, brought a memory of her (then) daring outfit she wore for her Oscar win (for Funny Girl). 

First Lady Michelle Obama (another big surprise), looked naturally relaxed and fashion stunning as she presented Best Picture award to ARGO, via live telecast from the White House, to standing ovations in Hollywood. Many passionate rounds of standing applause throughout the evening as we’ve not seen for some time. Congratulations to all the nominees who are all winners! 

Hollywood holds a beacon for billions of people from all walks of life about freedom, more than any other industry, and we’re very proud to be part of it. Thank you for the job opportunities you give us, we’re grateful to help you.

Send others our TIPS and Our Best Advice. Our team loves hearing form you, and we’d love to refer you towards helping find your dream job. We have top job opportunity offers for household help in the domestic help field, if you have top expert job experience with top checkable references for job referrals.

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A Tragedy Event – security jobs

Tuesday, December 18th, 2012 | Our Best Advice | Comments Off

Most of our VIP clients have bodyguards and security jobs specializing in protection of the rich and famous. They come to ISA staffing because we provide best of the best household help and luxury estate staffing, for which we’re famous. High Profile people rarely feel safe with good reason, due to our history of violence.

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shared tragedy showing we’ve been plunged into a vigil required to be never ending. No words could possibly express the anguish and speechless shock as the killing of children, anywhere, everywhere. Yet the words, ‘here we go again’ is a chord struck far and wide – worldwide, as any country, in any town, could claim the same horror insanity in their/our midst. Simple words: killing, mass murder, suicide.

To quote Edgar Allan Poe: You will remember that one or two of the wise among our forefathers had ventured to doubt the propriety of the term “improvement,” as applied to the progress of our civilization.

This shared experience tore into our hearts piercing our veils, and throwing us out of the “game” (as some insanely call it) permanently. Say it again: Permanently. Never again can we return to what we refer to as ‘safe’, even as we point our concerns overseas. This can only be subjective for each of us when we nod agreements with one another, which is subject to change instantly at human whim. This is our humanity: unpredictable and totally unpredictable.

What is Wise to do about this? Is one International Day of Non-Violance going to solve this? I’m seeing a reaction among the grief that must be spoken (and why I write). I’d not intended to blog about this because it’s not the right environment, and levied my heart to reduce this vigil to words of a few paragraphs in a virtual world. But silence is unacceptable, so I blog anyway. I’m not speaking about people coming together in community of shared grief. Humans have traditionally come together over horror, and helped one another through. We bravely rebuild anew. Historical records are filled with stories as legends of witness. And this is not about out-raging in protest into the night. We must become aware of the fracture, after two world wars (and their extended madness) that each of us is carrying within.

There is no exemption. Our humanity is broken. Humans are broken. It has nothing to do with “rules” or “sin” as people argue and cry for blood endlessly to avenge or revenge, or whatever we label it including naming this dysfunction “whatever”, dismissed glibly in casual callousness of latest cultural diagnostics. There’s a pill for whatever ails you.

Yet what laws or sin can you possibly identify to tell God how to scatter stars in the Cosmos? We dare expound our tales of woe and list of demands and promises unkept, as we are still fiercely brought to our knees because there is nothing holding us up. Hate and blame are not the index of Love. Violence and anger are not arbiters of the Real. Hate only destroys the hater, but Love is its own sublime, and in my understanding the highest form of it is Divine Wisdom. I’m not preaching (never had that talent), but there is something we all need to admit, and it’s a fact that atheism is also a religion (not believing is a belief).

I’m not an atheist, and my approach to keeping myself awake is to pray-without-end daily (and not just on holidays or weekends by rote ritual). I mean to stay awake of being conscious to be conscious. I prefer praying to God under heaven under the stars as witness, witnessed bare by a Cosmos of endless divine mystery, and sometimes I sing out loud, and sometimes I whisper, or undertake to silent prayers. Spontaneously whenever and wherever I am, and that’s often (because my gratitude for our endlessly gifted blessings are never-ending). Meditation is not just for 15 minutes a day.

So this brings me back to the word permanently. That’s the vigil. Stop. And don’t participate in the insanity. There is no going back to anything we know of the old. We are in a new frontier, an Interstellar 21st century and ‘the future’ is created by us, not laws, or medicines to curb and manage our despair that ends in suicide, or as we see infamously, in ‘eye for an eye’ blindly seeking to take others with them plunging over the abyss. This is not new (as the old saying goes). To speak of it as if we are at a new ‘killing threshold’ (yes it’s graphic language), is blatantly ignoring the Historical record: human ignorance. We have been violent for a very long time.

High Wisdom reminder: If everyone followed the Ten Commandments, all self conflict, and that with others, would immediately stop. That’s your and my vigil, and to Learn Wisdom. This is not arguable based on a monotheism versus a polytheism. That argument ends with insanity regardless of who you pray to.

The new super weapons are not just assault guns, or weapons of mass destruction, or nuclear weapons, or lasers and tasers and other energy frequency weapons we create, including a contagious viral plague that we pass to contaminate one another with ignorant energy of our emotional response: to ourselves, and each other.

No, the real ‘new weapons’ are us. Bio-enhanced, medicated, enraged, teeth bared in outraged entitlements of rights, and oppressions and suppressions, and so on. And we ‘look golden’ doing it. We even give awards for it, with trophies. Expensive trophies. It only costs you the world, and all you need do is make some socially constructed ‘cool lewd gestures’ to qualify,  salute in uber-heil to some mad person, or swear on a bible to love honor and obey, or demand to be obeyed. You get to choose, guilty or not guilty. Those are just some of the endless qualifiers. Get in line.

Children everywhere are terrorized into suicide by anxieties too dangerous but obvious to describe, and the adults are asleep at the wheel as they seek to kill one another. There is no talk of Wisdom, and that doesn’t even reside in reason or pragmatic reality. Wisdom transcends reason (or we would have reached it long ago). We’ve attempted to be ‘reasonable’ and as we see our reasonable diplomacy, and reasonable laws, and reasonable compromises, have failed us long ago. Reporters, first responders, parents, and experts alike; and we as the witnesses, are carrying on about security and ‘how to feel safe’ as if that’s not an inside job, and mischaracterize self defense against some phantom evil occurring in a vacuum (hardly), that only the psychiatric and pharmacological field, our military and the political, the religious or the godless, could have rights to exploit, capitalize, and monetize (as the catchy branding phrases say) – with “splinter groups” and corporate offshoots asking for handout donations to control it. Stop! Take a moment. Are you still able to see, or feel, envision anything original, truly new? Or are you steeped in endlessly ritualized habit.

And now we seek “innovation” from silicon valley (even that name is catchy ‘cool’). From those halls of millions of dollars of tech, and the degrees we hand out for their programming abilities, we create ever slicker labs with ever slicker instruments and bigger grants funding them. We feverishly seek behavior modification, as current neurosciences theorize is what’s at hand.

We’ve even had a Noble Prize given to someone (an economist), who took his theory and applied it to ‘Behavior Modification Economics’. So this theory now joins a “political economy”, that drives our insanity. There is no such animal (not to mention a conflict of interest). These things are just mind control abuse (inner and outer directed), and the insanity grows. – It’s all a house of cards.

We are formally pronounced dead (whether we know it or not) , and not as people, but as classified and tattooed “persons”, and we are merely behavior, and what it takes to modify and manage that behavior. Rituals of how to dress for the occasion and behave yourself, as you participate in scenarios of endlessly insane situations. Shakespeare wrote it well. And broke his pencil after writing The Tempest.

These killings, whether small among people we know, or big as warring of mass murdering, are all collectively our sicknesses. We can only transform ourselves out of the jaws of death. Nothing else. We’ve tried it all and failed, as this event vividly brought home to each of us (here and abroad). Transformation is all that we have. And that is not going to happen through “rules of men” and enforcement by way of force. Life and Death in the 21st century has an entirely new threshold. Wisdom is the calling. And it came through small children too innocent to protect themselves, demanding it! No adults sufficiently Wise to respond because it should have never happened. There is no excuse. We are together a River of Life.

And that is how the challenges of our humanity are collectively at hand, without exceptions, and implicitly there is no geographical divide. Taking ‘security measures’ has no meaning in this Space Age stellar frontier. I whisper and write this in invisible chalk: this is not about mental illness, guns, or laws, or medication against what ails us. This is about collective suicide, which we are all participant in together. Omens clear (and not written in fatalistic prophesy of a singular event as some claim). Nor is this is just ‘a study of contrasts’ as foolishly pronounced by some claiming to channel disembodied entities because they’re too cowardly to name it as their own philosophy. Or some other story we tell ourselves like children afraid of the dark, as we stubbornly insist that we’re not miserable and are joyous in our misery.

So turn on symbolic lights and pray. No more darkness now. Praying together wherever you are and with whoever you are openly among the stars. Hold a hand or touch each other’s shoulder or arm and take a moment daily. You don’t have to believe, you can be strangers, you can even pronounce that you dis-believe first, and do it anyway.

Wisdom for our humanity must be taught, guided, and learned by us all. There is nothing else to bring to a new shared table. Our legendary sage Gandhi knew this, became famous fighting for civil rights for all and was killed for it (also by way of a gun), as he spoke of non-violence, as well as when it is appropriate for violence (he was a proponent of violence under certain circumstances, which he patiently explained and taught to his son), that we should take up violence as a last resort if the oppressors leave us no choice, or be perceived as cowards. But this was spoken to ‘the old round table’ he sat at. As did others who sat in, who’ve been writing and teaching for thousands of years. They are of our Wisdom Heritage calling us.

This is not the time of Gandhi. A new conscious vigil is required and a new roundtable where everyone has a seat at the table. Nothing of what applied to the old is applicable to the new. A new 21st century consciousness is not optional, it is our very life as a specie group. What are you prepared to sacrifice in order to learn new Wisdom so that you could become wiser. Your childrens’ lives, and their childrens’ lives, and the labs that will create them in the future in petrie dishes? This cannot be legislated, medicated, or made into ‘new diplomacy rules’. We have crossed a threshold to the beyond. We must first Learn to become wise about how to be Wise. Life is not a game, regardless of what insanity holds a gun or knife to your throat.

We must each find our way like a blind person who has untold capacities yet to be nourished and refined, carefully reaching out to touch one another, and learn to see what is here among us anew, what is here that we can comprehend without shifting blame to anything “out there”, what is new without repeating ‘the old words’ just to hear ourselves preach them, that we can love, that we can Wisely Love. We are one Family Of Humankind in any language, and that “aura” is God’s signature. The rainbow that everyone can see with no words required. We are a rainbow flowing as one great River of Life.

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