#bald mike renaissance

[clericallyinsane]

bald?

[ikwhatyouaremikewheeler]

After a lot of consideration I fear I have to go back to my roots, and become a Bald Mike truther once more.

Bald Mike for president chat!!!

[will80sbyers]

I believe in bald Mike!!!

[manychocolatefactories]

CatCF Ruby Chocolate: Part 1, Kids and characters

This version is the last of the "four main versions". It is named after the new, fourth type of chocolate discovered in 2004 but only publically released in 2017. It is a modern version, supposed to take place in the 2010s. In this version, there are six Golden Tickets released in the world.

First Winner: Augustus Gloop

(Based on: Augustus Gloop)

This version of Augustus was inspired by the 2013 musical, more specifically by the idea of a cute little boy that eats "pigs limbs from limbs", and also swallows whole little dogs. So, something quite dark.

Augustus has a very cute face. A chubby, angelic face, like the puttis of the Renaissance paintings: blond curls, puppy eyes, a radiant smile. If he wants, he can make your heart melt like the video of a little kitten purring.

But Augustus is hungry. All of the time. He eats and snacks all day long. He dreams of food. He sleep-walks to eat. And while he adores candies and chocolate, there is one thing he loves more than anything else: meat. Meat and blood. He is a true carnivore, for him every meal rhymes with "meat". And if you leave him unattended, he will try to get meat by himself. For exemple, by attacking a living pig and devouring it on the spot. Or by biting off the fingers of a plump woman. But, of course, all of that with a cute smile and while saying sorry in the most adorable way.

Nowadays, if your cute you must be innocent, and thus forgien.

Augustus' body is not as cute as his face. It is said to be a "bloated mass of pink flesh", actually very similar to the body of a pig. His fatness is described as "ill-fitting", as if it was "forced" onto his body. His overweightness is not natural. It is puffy, flabby, bloated, but doesn't feel "natural".

Augustus also always wear ill-fitting clothes and suits.

Mrs. Gloop is a tiny woman, usually wearing a pale pink skirt suit, with her hair arranged in a crown of braids. She might be tiny, but she is bold, energetic, and speaks both clearly and loudly. She has so much presence, she often intimidates people. She keeps reminding others of how cute her son, and how eating makes him grow strong. She insists that she is a good mother who makes sure her son eats of everything (to have a balanced diet), eats well (by giving him only the finest and best-quality products (such as the Wonka bars and not their cheap rivals knock-offs), and of course, she only feeds her son because he "needs nourishment".

And don't dare criticize her, or she will scream so much, so hard and so high your ears will bleed. Just like the "original" Mrs. Gloop, this one keeps pointing out the "hooligans", saying it is better to stay at home eating food than being a violent thug on the street. My iteration sincerely believes that violence and criminality is due to poverty, hunger and lack of food, and if everyone was well-fed the world ould be at peace.

(For her, think of Mrs. Gloop the original, mixed with Bernadette from the Big Bang Theory )

Mr. Gloop (full name, Gordon Gloop, parody of Gordon Ramsey) is the son of a butcher, and the grandson of a slaughterhouse worker. He was always knee-deep in blood, and as a result grew accustomed to killing animals and cooking them (in fact the sight of blood makes him peckish). He is a tall and strong man, but suffers from a bad sleep due to his wife's horribly loud snoring.

He tried to teach his son the refinment of haute cuisine, for Mr. Gloop is a world-renowned cook, but to his disappointment Augustus only cares for raw meat and drinking blood-dipped candies. Mr. Gloop is so obsessed with having good dishes and best-quality ingredients, he keeps at the back of his house a little barnyard full of cattle (if he ever has to serve some steak or ribs to his guests). Trouble is, Augustus keeps sneaking into said barnyard to devour the poor animals.

Second Winner: Elvira Entwhistle

(Based on: Veruca Salt)

Veruca Salt being a pretty solid and complete archetype in herself (the girl who wants it all and has her parents buy her all), it is quite hard to reimagine her. So, I tried thinking about "why" she wants things - given the actions are settled and confirmed, it is the goals that are important, the motivation. And , in our time of modernity, what makes people want things? Trends, fashions, what is "in".

This reinterpretation of Veruca, named Elvira Entwhistle (after one of the old drafts names), is a mix between Chanel Oberlin from Scream Queens and Esmé Squalor from a Series of Unfortunate Events. She is a girl living for trends, for fashions, buying and acquiring all of the latest things "in", only to discard them as soon as they are "out" or not trendy anymore. Spending her time on social media, following models and influencers, she keeps going to luxury shops with her "personal assistant" (a nice name for what is a modern slave) to buy accessories, jewels, clothes, pets and whatever corresponds to the current trend.

Spoiled, impatient, self-centered and short-tempered, she needs to have the latest fashion NOW or she will get insanely angry. She also doesn't hesitate to change her personal appearance to fit all the new trends (for exemple her hair changes color and shape every week). Of course, she got her Golden Ticket because it was the current trend. Everyone was searching for it, so she had to get a Ticket to be the most "in" person around.

 Third Winner: Mike Teavee

(Based on: Mike Teavee)

For this version of Mike Teavee, I wanted to get away from the usual hyperactive and hyper-violent kid. I wanted to take back this common idea that television makes you stupid and sluggish, by making Mike the perfect embodiment of a couch potato (even though he was designed to look at the same time like a mushroom and a zombie).

Mr. and Mrs. Teavee are hard-working people, who spend their entire week working and only come back at home for very brief periods of times (usually in the week-end) before going right back at work. As a result, Mike barely knows his parents. He doesn't even know what kind of work they do. To "babysit" their son, the Teavees bought an enormous, high-definition television with a 666 channels pack, and kept telling him to not go outside due to the outside world being "dangerous" and filled with crushing bikes, killing cars, kidnappers and the like. This is how Mike began his life as a shut-in.

Spending his days looking at the television, never going outside, he ended up closing all shutters because light bothered him. Living in the dark, barely lifting his body from the couch, he only survives on candies, snacks, television-plates and microwaved/defrosted food (and the Teavee family can afford to buy a lot of it, because they are really, really rich - Mike has accounts in three different banks).

The result? A chalk-white boy. A bloated ans shapeless body. A full-moon face covered in craters and scars due to a bad case of acne. Two dead, sunken, small eyes. Speakin slowly, and often pronouncing only half of the words, Mike refuses to answer or talk to anyone while television is on : he only speaks during "uninteresting advertisements". The only thing muscular in his body are his fingers, that got a lot of muscle mass due to twitching frenetically all day long on the remote to channel-hop.

Mike is actually a very intelligent boy, but all his cleverness and intellectual gifts are buried and wasted by the brain-washing of his shut-in life and his television obsession. He got his Golden Ticket because his parents often buy him Wonka bars as "television snacks". Even though, in his own words, he prefers food that "tastes like plastic".

Fourth Winner: Violet Beauregarde

(Based on: Volet Beauregarde)

What is Violet, originally? She is a girl that seeks fame and attention, that is snarky, that is nasty towards people, and that does stupid records. What reflects that perfectly in our day and age? Reality television shows!

Violet Beauregarde was strongly inspired by the most brainless and "sassy/nasty" stars of reality television and the Internet. She is a teenage girl wearing clothes of such bright, flashy and clashing colors it often hurts people's eyes. Her face is covered in makeup, her hair is covered in extensions and her hands are covered with fake fingernails.

She thinks she can be as rude and horrible as she wants, as long as she calls it "sassy". But on the other side, she considers "rude" anyone or anything that doesn't please her, or that is too "ugly" or "dirty" for her. She is the kind of girl that keeps screaming loudly "YAAAAAAASSS, bitches!" and "DAAAMMMNNNN", that calls herself "the queen", that chews ferociously on her gum all day long, and that says "Why are you touching me? See, you're touching me again!" while she is the one hitting people. She hates everything "old" and "boring". She keeps publishing musical albums that nobody actually buys, because she sings badly mere words (her singles being titled "Lalalala" and "Heyheyheyhey" - she never understood a song needed to have lyrics). Finally, her biggest dream is to be part of a TV-reality show.

Her father, Mr. Beauregarde, feeds his daughter's "bitchy diva" attitude and her delusions of grandeur by acting as his agent (just like in the 2013 musical). He is also the "ringleader" of Violet's circus (because Violet, with her clothes of ridiculous colors, and her enormous amount of makeup, has a clown subtext). As a result, Mr. Beauregarde is like a ringleader in acircus, a showrunner in a freak show, and also an agent. He "sells" his daughter, he organizes her interviews, he has people pay money for "extra time" with Violet, he shows her around, and finally he uses his whip (yes, he has a whip) to attack all those that try to "touch the product".

He is a short, flabby and balding man, that smokes very long and thick cigars, wears enormous rings and clothes that are garrish and clownish - his over-the-top and ridiculous fashion sense is clearly a compensation for what he lacks in height, hair and health.

 Fifth Winner: Marvin Prune

(Based on: Marvin Prune)

In the original drafts of Roald Dahl, Marvin Prune was a Mr. Know-it-All, a too-perfect schoolboy obsessed with studies, an arrogant bookworm, a haughty teacher's pet, you named it. In this version, i decided to keep the idea of Marvin being a "know-it-all", but instead of using school, books and the like, he rather uses modern technology and the Internet.

Marvin is a tech-obsessed boy. He lives for, with and through technology, to the point of neglecting to live in the real world. He thinks his over-use of technology, and all the knowledge it can provide him, make him an "intelligent" and "superior" boy (when in fact it does not).

He thinks he can claim to have been everywhere in the world because he visited virtually all the most important landmarks of the world. He claims he can speak all the languages in the world, but in fact he uses translation websites. He keeps tracks of all his bodily functions thanks to health monitors (heartbeats, blood pressure, cholesterole...) but not because he is concerned for his health, merely for the sake of knowing more things. For him, Googling something is the best solution to all your troubles, and as a result he is a self-centered and pompous boy.  

Due to his technology dependance, Marvin is actually quite a weak boy. Since he doesn't do any sport or physical activity, and since he rarely leaves his house (due to always ordering things online, having classes online and visiting places virtually), he is a quite thin and frail boy, if not emaciated - at least, a good chunk of his muscle mass has melted away.

The original parents of Marvin Prune were, in Dahl's works, teachers and school principals. I decided here to go with the opposite of a teacher : Mrs. Prune never does anything herself, and always blame it on others. There are problems in the world? For her people should fix it, but they are too lazy to do it - while she herself does nothing about it. Her son acts rude? "Someone should teach him good manners" she says. She loses all of her money? "That's because the people in charge of the economy are all incompetent!"

Mrs. Prune thinks of everything and everyone as stupid because it allows her to blame all of her problems and flaws on other people. But ultimately she never takes any kind of action herself. If someone should teach her son good manners, it is "those lazy teachers at school", certainly not her! She also dislikes things that are "foreign".

Marvin found the Golden Ticket when he ordered by mistake a chocolate bar in France : in truth, he wanted to buy a "tablet" (in French a tablet is tablette, and a chocolate bar is also a tablette de chocolat).

Marvin will also be incredibly frustrated inside Wonka's factory, because in there numeric devices mess up, stop weirdly or disfunction totally (the same way UFOs tend to mess up phones, radios, computers and the like). As a result, he becomes powerless and helpless.

 Sixth Winner: Charlie Bucket

(Based on: Charkie Bucket)

Here, I decided to really twist things up. To have a Charlie Bucket that isn't thin or malnourished, but fat! Yes, here's Chubby Charlie! (No, not Fat Charlie, this one is copyrighted)

Charlie's story is deeply linked to the story of the Wonka factory. The town Charlie lives in was built around the Wonka Factory a bit before the 20th century - it was a "worker town", created to allow the workers of the factory to live with their family next to their place of work. For more than fifty years the Factory was the only occupation and work of the town. But somewhere in the 1950s or 1960s, all the workers had to take an early retirement. They were kicked out, and the Factory closed to the public. The Factory was still working, but not hiring anyone anymore. This was an enormous blow to both the town's economy and moral. There was an economic crisis and poverty (since people were trained only to work in a candy factory).

But there was one good thing: since it was the town Wonka's products were created in, they were sold at must cheaper prices than anywhere else in the world, and all the ex-workers of the Factory got in exchange for their work coupons and reductions for themselves and all of their families - reductions on the Wonka products, of course. This was seen as a chance, because the Wonka products were world-renowned candies, even luxury goods in foreign countries. It was like being able to buy haute-couture as daily clothes and eat gastronomic cuisine every week-end.

But this good wasn't so "good". Indeed, given the poverty and lack of job in town, the ex-workers and their family relied more and more on the coupons and reductions, their diets filled with candy and sugary products. As a result, from the 1970s to the 2010s, the number of people suffering from obesity, diabetes and teeth problems blew up.

[ This background is actually a mix of two different real-world fact. Real-world fact 1: the Menier Chocolate Factory in France, aka the real-life Wonka Factory, was revolutionary for creating a town for its workers, and taking care of their health, education and the like, but closed after World War II, to the deception of everyone. Real-world fact 2: Coca-Cola, Nestlé and other big food industries tend to pay their employees with extra-sugary and extra-addictive if their own products in poor areas, such as South America - resulting in sicknesses and diseases.]

As a result, in this version Charlie is fat. Because in modern days, and in developped countries, poverty and malnourishment actually leads to obesity and diabetes, due to the cheapest food being candies and junk-food.

This version of Charlie is a very nice kid, but a kid addicted to the Wonka products. He grew up on the coupons, due to his family all being ex-workers. Grandpa Joe and Grandpa George both worked at the factory, but were too old or sick after being fired to find a new job ; Mr. and Mrs. Bucket had been trained for the factory and could barely afford new studies after its closing. Mr. Bucket became a street cleaner, while Mrs. Bucket became a receptionist and secretary for a dental office (due to the rise of tooth diseases, dental offices boomed in town, but most are actually crooked or scams).

Charlie grew up in a very humble home, with two parents working really hard to have enough money to buy food for everyone. Of course, fresh or good food is too expensive. Charlie tries to help his family the best way he can with his part-time job (making people fill surveys) and by working really hard at school. But as the years go by, his weight and his health are beginning to cause problems. Due to not having any money he can't do sports, wich makes him gain weight, and the fattest he is the hardest it is to do sport, it's a vicious circle. Every year, the scale reveals he puts on more and more weight, and faster and faster - if he doesn't do something quick, he may end up obese.

And, as I mentionned before, Charlie is truly obsessed with the Wonka products, it is an addiction. He dreams of them at night. He sticks Wonka bars wrappers on the wall of his room like posters. He drools at the mere mention of a Wonka bar. He isn't spoiled, cruel or nasty, but he is too addicted for his own good. In fact, when he finds money in the stret and buy chocolate bars with it, it is a pure act of selfishness, because he doesn't have the willpower to turn away from the candy shop and go back home.

[goudavibrations]

bald man summer mike love renaissance

[1962dude420-blog]

Today we remember the passing of Professor Longhair who died January 30, 1980 in New Orleans, Louisiana

Henry Roeland "Roy" Byrd, better known as Professor Longhair or "Fess" for short, was an American singer and pianist who performed New Orleans blues. He was active in two distinct periods, first in the heyday of early rhythm and blues and later in the resurgence of interest in traditional jazz after the founding of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1970. His piano style has been described as "instantly recognizable, combining rumba, mambo, and calypso".

Music journalist Tony Russell (in his book The Blues: From Robert Johnson to Robert Cray) wrote that "The vivacious rhumba-rhythmed piano blues and choked singing typical of Fess were too weird to sell millions of records; he had to be content with siring musical offspring who were simple enough to manage that, like Fats Domino or Huey "Piano" Smith. But he is also acknowledged as a father figure by subtler players like Allen Toussaint and Dr. John."

Byrd was born on December 19, 1918, in Bogalusa, Louisiana. His distinctive style of piano playing was influenced by learning to play on an instrument that was missing some keys.

He began his career in New Orleans in 1948. Mike Tessitore, owner of the Caldonia Club, gave Longhair his stage name. Longhair first recorded in a band called the Shuffling Hungarians in 1949, creating four songs (including the first version of his signature song, "Mardi Gras in New Orleans") for the Star Talent record label. Union problems curtailed their release, but Longhair's next effort for Mercury Records the same year was a winner. Throughout the 1950s, he recorded for Atlantic Records, Federal Records and local labels.

Professor Longhair had only one national commercial hit, "Bald Head", in 1950, under the name Roy Byrd and His Blues Jumpers. He also recorded his favorites, "Tipitina" and "Go to the Mardi Gras". He lacked crossover appeal among white and wide audiences. Yet, he is regarded (and was acknowledged) as being a musician who was highly influential for other prominent musicians, such as Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint and Dr. John.

After suffering a stroke, Professor Longhair recorded "No Buts – No Maybes" in 1957. He re-recorded "Go to the Mardi Gras" in 1959. He first recorded "Big Chief" with its composer, Earl King, in 1964. In the 1960s, Professor Longhair's career faltered. He became a janitor to support himself and fell into a gambling habit.

After a few years during which he disappeared from the music scene, Professor Longhair's musical career finally received "a well deserved renaissance" and wide recognition. He was invited to perform at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1971 and at the Newport Jazz Festival and the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1973. His album The London Concert showcases work he did on a visit to the United Kingdom. That significant career resurrection saw the recording of the album "Professor Longhair - Live On The Queen Mary", which was recorded on March 24, 1975, during a private party hosted by Paul McCartney and Linda McCartney on board the retired RMS Queen Mary.

By the 1980s his albums, such as Crawfish Fiesta on Alligator Records and New Orleans Piano on Atlantic Records, had become readily available across America. In 1974 he appeared on the PBS series Soundstage (with Dr. John, Earl King, and The Meters). In 1980 he co-starred (with Tuts Washington and Allen Toussaint) in the film documentary Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together which was produced and directed by filmmaker Stevenson Palfi. That documentary (which aired on public television in 1982 and was rarely seen since), plus a long interview with Fess (which was recorded two days before his sudden death), were included in the 2018 released project "Fess Up".

Professor Longhair died in his sleep of a heart attack while the filming of the documentary was under way (and before the live concert, which was planned to be its climax). Footage from his funeral was included in the documentary.

Professor Longhair's manager through those renaissance years of his career was Allison Miner, of which jazz producer George Wein was quoted saying: "Her devotion to Professor Longhair gave him the best years of his life."

[upontheshelfreviews]

Last year I talked about Fantasia, which is not just one of my favorite Disney movies, but one of my favorite movies in general. And if I may be self-indulgent for a moment, it’s also one of the reviews that I’m the proudest of. Fantasia is a visual, emotional masterpiece that marries music and art in a manner few cinematic ventures have come close to replicating. One question that remains is what my thoughts on the long-gestated sequel is –

…you might wanna get yourselves some snacks first.

As anyone who read my review on the previous film knows, Fantasia was a project ahead of its time. Critics and audiences turned their noses up at it for conflicting reasons, and the film didn’t even make it’s budget back until twenty-something years later when they began marketing it to a very different crowd.

“I don’t wanna alarm you dude, but I took in some Fantasia and these mushrooms started dancing, and then there were dinosaurs everywhere and then they all died, but then these demons were flying around my head and I was like WOOOOOAAAHHH!!”

“Yeah, Fantasia is one crazy movie, man.”

“Movie?”

Fantasia’s unfortunate box office failure put the kibosh on Walt Disney’s plans to make it a recurring series with new animated shorts made to play alongside handpicked favorites. The closest he came to following through on his vision was Make Mine Music and Melody Time, package features of shorts that drew from modern music more than classical pieces.

Fast-forward nearly fifty years later to the golden age known as the Disney Renaissance: Walt’s nephew Roy E. Disney surveys the new crop of animators, storytellers, and artists who are creating hit after hit and have brought the studio back to his uncle’s glory days, and thinks to himself, “Maybe now we can make Uncle Walt’s dream come true.” He made a good case for it, but not everyone was on board. Jeffrey Katzenberg loathed the idea, partly because he felt the original Fantasia was a tough act to follow (not an entirely unreasonable doubt) but most likely due to the fact that the last time Disney made a sequel, The Rescuers Down Under, it drastically underperformed (even though the reasons for that are entirely Katzenberg’s fault. Seriously, watch Waking Sleeping Beauty and tell me you don’t want to punch him in the nose when Mike Gabriel recalls his opening weekend phone call).

Once Katzenberg was out of the picture, though, Fantasia 2000, then saddled with the less dated but duller moniker Fantasia Continued, got the go-ahead. Many of the sequences were made simultaneously as the animated features my generation most fondly remembers, others were created to be standalone shorts before they were brought into the fold. Since it was ready in time for the new millennium, it not only got a name change but a massive marketing campaign around the fact that it would be played on IMAX screens for a limited run, the very first Disney feature to do so. As a young Fantasia fan who had never been to one of those enormous theaters before, I begged and pleaded my parents to take me. Late that January, we traveled over to the IMAX theater at Lincoln Center, the only one nearest to us since they weren’t so widespread as they are now, and what an experience it was. I can still recall the feeling of awe at the climax of Pines of Rome, whispering eagerly with my mom at how the beginning of Rhapsody in Blue looked like a giant Etch-A-Sketch, and jumping twenty feet in the air when the Firebird’s massive eyes popped open. But did later viewings recapture that magic, or did that first time merely color my perception?

We open on snippets from the original Fantasia…IN SPAAAAAAAAACE!

It reminds me a little of the opening to Simply Mad About The Mouse, where bits of classic Disney nostalgia fly about to evoke the mood of this upcoming musical venture. In a clever conceit, snippets of Deems Taylor’s original opening narration explaining Fantasia’s intent and music types plays over the orchestra and animators materializing and gearing up for the first sequence, which jumps right into –

DUN DUN DUN DUUUUUUN – I mean, Symphony #5 – Ludwig Van Beethoven

Here, a bunch of butterflies flee and then fight off swarms of bats with the power of light – I can’t be the only one who saw these things and thought it was butterflies vs. bats, right?

It does look cool with its waterfalls and splashes of light and color bursting through the clouds, but this brings me to a bit of contention I have with the movie.

When I planned this review I was going to do a new version of “Things Fantasia Fans Are Sick of Hearing”, except there were only four major complaints I could think of that. On further introspection, I admit they are legitimate grievances worth addressing. I’m going to get them out of the way all at once in order to keep things rolling.

#1 – This Seems Familiar…

Certain sequences are noticeably derivative from the first movie. It’s as if they were afraid of trying too many new things that would alienate audiences so they borrowed from their predecessor in an effort to say “Hey, we can do this too!” Symphony #5 is clearly trying to be Tocatta and Fugue with its abstract geometric shapes swooping all over to kick things off. Though I love how much character the animators managed to give two pairs of triangles, Tocatta’s soaring subconscious flights of fancy leaves me more enthralled. Carnival of the Animals literally began as a sequel to Dance of the Hours until the ostriches became flamingoes. And Roy E. Disney openly stated he wanted the last sequence, The Firebird Suite to have the same death and rebirth theme as Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria, which they got, right down to a terrifying symbol of destruction emerging from a mountain to wreak chaos.

‘Sup, witches?

#2 – Too Short

Speaking of repeating the past, the original idea for Fantasia 2000 was to follow Walt’s vision in that three favorite segments would make a return amongst the newer ones – the Nutcracker Suite, which was eventually cut for time, Dance of the Hours, which I’ve already stated morphed into Carnival of the Animals, and finally, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the obvious choice to keep since that’s the most popular piece out of any of them. Cutting things for time doesn’t make that much sense, however, when you realize that Fantasia 2000’s runtime is only 75 minutes. A very short animated film by today’s standards that lasts barely half as long as its previous installment. I don’t see why they couldn’t keep at least one other sequence from the first Fantasia to make things last a little longer and keep in the original idea’s spirit.

#3 – All Story, No Experimentation

Unlike the first Fantasia, all of the sequences have a linear narrative structure that’s easy to follow. Not a bad thing and kudos to you if you’re among that group who prefers Fantasia 2000 for because of that, but again, I admire how the original film didn’t stick to a coherent story the whole time; how it was unafraid to let the music, atmosphere, and visuals speak for itself without sticking to a three-act plot and designated protagonist for every piece.

#4 – The One You’ve Been Waiting For, The Host Segments

One of the things that turned Fantasia off for its detractors was Deems Taylor’s seemingly dry narration. But maybe Fantasia 2000 can fix that with some folks who are hip and with it, perhaps a wild and crazy guy or two…

Eh, he’ll do.

Now, the idea of varying segment hosts isn’t an altogether bad idea. Most of them work well: Angela Lansbury gives the lead-in to the Firebird Suite plenty of gravitas befitting the finale, as do Ithzak Perlman, Quincy Jones, and James Earl Jones, who build plenty of intrigue for Pines of Rome, Rhapsody in Blue and Carnival of the Animals respectively; this seriousness makes James’ reaction to what the Carnival segment is really about a successful comic subversion. Even Penn and Teller for all their obnoxiousness kind of works with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice due to the linking magic theme.

I suppose what turns people off is the self-congratulatory tone and seemingly forced attempts at comedy you get from Martin, Penn, Teller, and Bette Midler. But you know what? They still make me laugh after all these years (well, you have to laugh at Bette Midler’s antics or she’ll come after you when the Black Flame Candle is lit). In fact, I have to hand it to Midler’s intro in particular. Fantasia 2000 came out right around the time I began taking a keen interest in what animation really was and how it was made. For me, her preceding The Steadfast Tin Soldier piece with tidbits about Fantasia segments that didn’t make it past the drawing board was like the first free hit that turned me into an animation junkie (plus this was before you could look up anything on the topic in extraneous detail on the internet, so it had that going for it). If I have to nitpick, though, The Divine Miss M referring to Salvador Dalí as “the melting watches guy” is a bit reductive. That’d be like calling Babe Ruth “the baseball guy” or Walt Disney “the mouse and castle guy”. Plus, Dalí and Disney were close compadres with a layered history. They planned on many collaborations, though the fruit of their labors, Destino, would not be completed in either of their lifetimes. Couldn’t show just a modicum of respect there, Bette?

Ahhh! I take it back! Don’t steal my soul!

So, I wouldn’t say I hate or even completely dislike the host segments. Sorry to disappoint everyone who was hoping for me to rip into them. They’re not awful, just uneven. And if you think they ruin the movie for me, you’ve got another think coming.

Pines of Rome – Ottorino Respighi

The idea for Pines of Rome’s visuals came about due to an unusual detail in some concept art. Someone noticed that a particular cloud in a painting of the night sky heavily resembled a flying whale. So why make a short about flying whales? The better question would be why NOT make a short about flying whales? A supernova in the night sky miraculously gives some whales the ability to swim through the air over the icy seas. Again, seeing this in IMAX was incredible. There’s just one minor issue I have with. This and another segment were developed well before Pixar made its silver screen debut, and unfortunately, it shows twenty years later; the worst cases are the close-ups.

Okay, who put googly eyes on the moldy beanbag?

There are ways of blending CGI and hand-drawn animation well, and this isn’t one of them. I understand the necessity of having expressive eyes but simply dropping one on top of a CGI creature gives it a bit of an uncanny valley feel. They should have either stuck with traditional all the way or made the whales entirely CG. The CG animation of the whales themselves isn’t too shabby, so they could have pulled it off.

Because simply giving whales flight apparently isn’t enough to hold an audience’s interest, we have an adorable baby whale earning his wings, so to speak. Once he gets his bearings above the surface, he swoops ahead of his family and bothers a flock of seagulls. They chase him into a collapsing iceberg, leaving him trapped, alone and unable to fly. The quiet dip in the music combined with the image of this lost little calf adds some genuine emotional weight to this piece. The baby navigates the iceberg’s claustrophobic caverns until he finds a crevice that elevates him back to his worried parents. From there a whole pod of whales rises out of the ocean to join them as they fly upwards to the supernova’s source.

“So long, and thanks for all the krill!”

As the music reaches its brilliant crescendo, the whales plow through storm clouds until they reach the top of the world and breach through the stars like water. It’s an awe-inspiring climax of a short that, flaws and all, reminds you of what Fantasia is all about.

Majestic.

Rhapsody in Blue – George Gershwin

The music of jazz composer George Gershwin? Timeless. The art of renowned caricaturist Al Hirschfeld? Perfection. All this brought to life with the best animation Disney has to offer? It’s a match made in heaven. Eric Goldberg, who animated the Genie among other comedic characters, idolized Hirschfeld and drew plenty of inspiration from drawings, so getting to work alongside him while making this was nothing short of a dream come true. That attention to detail in rendering Hirschfeld’s trademark curvy two-dimensional style goes beyond mere homage. It is a love letter to a great artist that encapsulates everything about him and his craft, and to a great city that we both had the honor of calling home. The story goes that Goldberg screened the final product for Hirschfeld shortly before his 96th birthday and his wife told him after that it was the best gift he could have ever received.

All this to say I am quite fond of this particular short, thank you very much.

The piece follows four characters navigating 1930’s Manhattan and crossing paths over the course of a single day:

Duke, a construction worker torn between his steady, monotonous job and following his dream of drumming in a jazz band,

Joe, a victim of the Great Depression desperately looking for work,

Rachel, a little girl who wants to spend time with her parents but is forced to attend lesson after lesson by her strict governess,

and “Flying” John, a henpecked husband longing to be free from his overbearing wife –

And her little dog too!

By the way, John is modeled in name and in looks after Disney animation historian John Culhane, who also was the inspiration for The Rescuers’ Mr. Snoops, hence why the two look so similar. He’s not the only name who appears in this sequence: Gershwin himself makes a surprise cameo as he takes over Rachel’s piano solo halfway through the story.

Speaking of, my family used to compare me to Rachel because at that point in my young life I was doing or already did the same mandatory activities as she – swimming, ballet, music, sports, all with the same amount of speed and varying degrees of success.

No one can argue that art is where we both excelled, however.

The physical timing of Rhapsody in Blue’s animation is hilarious, though it doesn’t rely wholly on slapstick for its humor. The sight gags and clever character dynamics all weaved into the music milk plenty of laughs, and envelop you in this living, breathing island that is Manhattan.

I speak from experience, this is the most accurate depiction of commuting on the 1 train that there ever was.

Even with such a premise and two masters of combining comedy and art, there is still enough pathos to keep the story rooted. Take when all four characters are at their lowest point. They look down on some skaters in Rockefeller Center and picture themselves in their place fulfilling their deepest desires. Seeing their dreams so close in their minds and yet so far away while paired with the most stirring part of the score is heartwrenching.

In the end, things pick up as the characters unwittingly solve each other’s problems. Duke quits the construction site, leaving an opening for Joe to fill. Joe accidentally snags John’s wife on a hook and hauls her screaming into the air, allowing him one night of uninhibited fun at the club where Duke performs.

“Anyone hear something? Nah, it’s probably just me.”

Rachel loses her ball while fighting with her nanny, which Duke bounces off the window of her parents’ office, which in turn gets them to notice their daughter about to run into traffic and they save her. Everyone gets their happy ending and it ends on a spectacularly glamorous shot of Time Square lit up in all its frenetic neon glory.

And not a single knockoff costumed character hitting up tourists for photos. Those were the days, my friend.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I adore Rhapsody in Blue. It’s easily my favorite part of the movie; a blissful ménage-a-trois of art style, music and storytelling, and it’s so New York that the only New York things I could think of that are missing are Central Park and amazing bagels. This sequence is gut-busting, energized, emotional, and mesmerizing in its form. I don’t often say I love a piece of animation so much that I’d marry it, but when I do, it’s often directed at Rhapsody in Blue.

  Piano Concerto #2 – Dmitri Shostakovich (aka The One With The Steadfast Tin Soldier)

This piece has an interesting history attached to it. Disney wanted to do an animated film surrounding Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales – including The Little Mermaid and The Steadfast Tin Soldier – as far back as the 30’s, but the project fell by the wayside. During Fantasia 2000’s production, Roy E. Disney asked if they could do something with Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto #2 since he and his daughter were attached to that piece. He looked over sketches and storyboards made for the unrealized Tin Soldier sequence and discovered the music matched in perfect time with the story.

This is the second sequence that features CGI at the forefront. Unlike Pines of Rome, though, it works because the main characters are toys, and you can get away with your early CGI looking shiny and metallic and plastic-like when you’re animating toys.

Hell, it worked for Pixar.

The story centers on a tin soldier cast with only one leg who is shunned by his comrades for routinely throwing off their groove. He falls in love with a porcelain ballerina when he mistakes her standing en pointe as her also missing a limb. Despite his embarrassment when he learns the truth, the ballerina is enamored with him as well. This rouses the jealousy of an evil jack-in-the-box who I swear is a caricature of Jeffrey Katzenberg minus the glasses but with a goatee and Lord Farquaad wig.

“MUST. CHOP. EVERYTHING!!!”

The jack-in-the-box and the soldier duke it out for a bit before the former sends the latter flying out the window in a little wooden boat. The boat floats the soldier into the sewers and attracts a horde of angry rats who attack him, because animated rodents seem to have a natural hatred towards toy soldiers.

Case in point.

The soldier hurtles into the sea where he’s eaten by a fish – which is caught the following morning, packed up to be sold at market, bought by the cook who works at the very house he came from, and he falls out of the fish’s mouth on the floor where his owner finds him and places him back with the rest of the toys. Now the story this is based on hints that the jack-in-the-box is really a goblin who orchestrates the soldier’s misfortunes with his malicious magic. But based the extremely coincidental circumstances of his return home, I’d say the soldier’s the one who’s got some reality-warping tricks up his sleeve.

The soldier and jack-in-the-box duel again that evening, but this time the harlequin harasser falls into the fireplace and burns up. Our hero gets the girl and lives happily ever after. A nice conclusion, though a far cry from what happened in the original tale: the ballerina is knocked into the fire, the soldier jumps in after her, and all that remains of them by morning is some melted tin in the shape of a heart. I gotta say, for all my love of classic fairytales, Disney made the right call. Andersen’s life was far from magical and it reflected in his stories, making many of them depressing for no good reason. The triumphant note the music ends on also would have clashed horribly if they stuck with the original. Even the Queen of Denmark agreed with Disney’s decision to soften their adaptations of Andersen’s work. I don’t know if I’d call The Steadfast Tin Soldier one of my very favorite parts of Fantasia 2000, but in the end, s’all right.

  Carnival of the Animals: Finale – Camille Sant-Saëns

This shortest of shorts (clocking in at less than two minutes) kicks off with James Earl Jones asking with as much seriousness as he can muster from the situation, what would happen if you gave a yo-yo to a flock of flamingos?

The answer –

Good answer!

Fie on those who dismiss this part as a silly one-off that doesn’t belong here. Fie, I say! It’s a pure delight full of fun expressions and fluid fast-paced action. Once again we have my man Eric Goldberg to thank for this, though this time he animated it entirely by himself. I’d call it a one-man show except for the fact that his wife Susan handpainted the entire thing with watercolor, making it look like it sprung to life straight from a paintbrush. It’s a simple diversion about a flamingo who wants to play with his yo-yo while the other snooty members of his flock try to force him to conform. As you can see from the still, they fail quite epically. Nothing beats the power of nonconformity and yo-yos (also every yo-yo move featured here is authentic; I love when animators go that extra mile).

  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice plays next, but since I already touched on that in the first Fantasia review, I’m skipping over it. The segment ends with Mickey congratulating Leopold Stokowski (again), then crossing the barriers of time and space to inform the conductor, James Levine, that he needs to track down the star of the next segment, Donald Duck. Levine stalls by explaining a bit about what’s to come while Mickey frantically searches for his errant costar. The surround sound sells the notion of him moving around the back of the theater accidentally causing mischief all the while. Thankfully, Donald is found and the sequence commences.

Pomp and Circumstance – Edward Elgar

This famous piece of music was included at the insistence of Michael Eisner after he attended his son’s graduation ceremony. He wanted to feature a song that everyone was already familiar with. Of course, since this was after Frank Well’s untimely passing and no one was bold enough to temper Eisner’s worst instincts with common sense, his original pitch had every animated couple Disney created up to that point marching on to Noah’s Ark – and then marching out with their babies.

Okay, A: Unless you’re doing a groin hit joke or are Ralph Bakshi or R. Crum, cartoon characters don’t have junk as a rule. And B, one of the unwritten rules of Disney animation is that barring kids that already exist like the titular 101 Dalmatians or Duchess’ kittens, the established canon couples do not in any official capacity have children.

To which Eisner laughed maniacally and vowed that they would.

But in order to placate Eisner’s desire to turn every branch of the Disney corporation into a commercial for itself, the animators compromised and agreed to do Pomp and Circumstance with the Noah’s Ark theme, BUT with only one couple – Donald and Daisy Duck. In this retelling of the biblical tale, Donald acts as Noah’s beleaguered assistant (I guess Shem, Ham, and Japheth were too busy rounding up the endangered species). Daisy provides emotional support while preparing to move on to the ark as well. It’s refreshing to see these two not losing their temper at each other for a change. I wish we got to see this side of their relationship more often. Donald returns Daisy’s easily lost plot device locket to her and as the rain rain rain comes down down down, he starts directing the animals on board; the lions, the tigers, the bears, the…ducks?

Anyway, all the animals and Donald get on board – well, most of them do.

The world’s first climate change deniers.

Donald realizes Daisy hasn’t arrived yet and runs out to look for her, unaware that she’s already boarded. Daisy sees Donald leaving but is too late to stop him before the first floodwaters hit their home. Donald made it back to the ark in time, however, though both of them believe that the other is forever lost to them. I find it astounding that they never run into each other not even once during the forty days and forty nights they’re cooped up on that boat. It’s the American Tail cliche all over again, and well, at least it’s happening in a short and not the entire movie.

Soon the ark lands atop Mount Ararat and the animals depart in greater numbers than when they embarked on their singles cruise. Daisy realizes halfway down the mountain that she’s lost her locket again, which Donald finds at that very moment while sweeping up, and the two are joyously reunited.

“I thought you were dead!” “I thought YOU were dead!”

I kid around, but I truly enjoy this short a lot. There’s so much warmth to Donald and Daisy’s relationship that makes their reunion at the end all the sweeter, and there’s plenty of great slapstick to offset the drama in the meantime. I will admit it’s nice to hear there’s more to Pomp And Circumstance than just the famous march, and the entire suite matches flawlessly with the visuals, though the main theme itself is so ingrained into the public consciousness that it’s difficult to extricate it from that what we’ve seen accompany it countless times.

Come on, you all know what I’m talking about.

“What? Don’t tell me YOU don’t think of heads exploding like fireworks when you hear Pomp and Circumstance! Name one other life-changing moment could you possibly associate it with…you weirdo.”

The Firebird Suite – Igor Stravinsky

Fantasia 2000 comes to a close with a piece that has some emotional resonance if you know your history. You might remember from my first Fantasia review that Igor Stravinsky was disappointed with how Rite of Spring turned out, especially since he was a big admirer of Walt Disney and really wanted to do more projects with him beforehand. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they picked his premiere ballet to end the movie on decades later. After all these years, Disney worked hard to do right by Stravinsky – with a few twists, though. Instead of a balletic retelling of Russian folktales involving kidnapped princesses and immortal sorcerers, we have a fantastical allegory for the circle of life.

No, not that circle of life.

A lone elk who I’m fairly convinced is the Great Prince of the Forest walks through the forest in the dead of winter. With his breath, he awakens the spirit of the woods and one of the most beautiful characters Disney has ever created, the Spring Sprite.

I. Love. This character. Her design is gorgeous, shifting from a shimmery opalescent blue as she steps out of the water into an eternally flowing fount of live greenery spreading from her hair in her wake. Wherever she moves, grass, flowers, and trees blossom, fulfilling the idea of a springtime goddess more than Disney’s own Goddess of Spring ever did. The Sprite was a massive influence in developing my art style, particularly in her face and expressive eyes, and I used to draw her a lot. Visit any relative of mine and chances are you’ll find a picture of her by me hanging up on a wall somewhere in their house. Yet there’s far more to her character than just a pretty representation of nature; there’s plenty of curiosity, spunk, determination, and a drive for creativity. I love her frustrated expression when she’s dissatisfied with the tiny flower she sculpts out of the ground and how her face lights up when she morphs it into a buttercup as tall as she is.

The Sprite paints the forest with all the colors of the wind (mostly green) until she reaches a mountain that isn’t affected by her magic. Perplexed, she climbs it until she finds a large hunched over rock figure – or is it an egg? – standing inside. She reaches out to touch it and…

The Sprite has awakened her counterpart, the wrathful and deadly Firebird. Think giant evil phoenix made of smoke, flame and lava. And it goes without saying that seeing this on the biggest screen left quite the terrifying impact. One of the biggest inspirations for this sequence was the eruption of Mount St. Helens (though the shot of the Sprite surveying the breadth of the Firebird’s destruction reminds me far too much of the Australian bushfires going on) and the sheer horror of nature’s irrepressible chaos is fully captured here. But the Firebird refuses to settle for merely destroying the Sprite’s handiwork, oh no. It won’t rest until creation itself is consumed, and the Sprite is reduced to a powerless mite as she scrabbles to escape the Firebird’s relentless pursuit of her. Try as she might, however, the towering monster corners and devours her in one fell swoop.

The forest is reduced to gray ashes in the wake of the Firebird’s rampage, but the Great Prince has survived. Once again he brings the Sprite to life with his breath, only this time she is tiny and weak (the animation of her slowly developing from the ash into her huddled ragged form is breathtaking). Now, I didn’t think I’d get emotional revisiting a small part of a single movie I’ve rewatched countless times before but viewing this through a mature eye combined with the beauty of the Firebird Suite’s climax and its timely message has caused me to see it in a new light:

The Sprite is utterly broken by what she’s been through and the destruction she carelessly caused. She’s lost all faith in herself and in the idea of returning the forest to what it once was. Even so, the Prince gently insists on carrying her on his antlers to the remains of their favorite cherry blossom tree. Where her tears fall, grass shoots begin to sprout. This fills the Sprite with hope, and she soars into the air becoming one with the sky and rains life down on the forest. New trees burst from the earth. The air is filled with leaves and pollen and new life flowing from her essence. The Sprite’s joy and power grow so strong that she even encircles the Firebird’s mountain in all her verdant glory. Life and creation overcome death and destruction. It’s not Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria, but it’s close.

And unfortunately, that’s the biggest problem Fantasia 2000 has.

While working on the original Fantasia, a storyman made the mistake of referring to the work they were doing in “the cartoon medium” in Walt’s presence. Walt turned on him and snapped “This is NOT ‘the cartoon medium’. It should not be limited to cartoons. We have worlds to conquer.”

And conquer they did…just not the way Walt intended.

The point I’m trying to make is Walt was breaking new ground and experimenting with things nobody ever tried when it came to Fantasia. While those risks were initially deemed a failure, it eventually gained the recognition it deserved from the animation and filmmaking community. Any attempt to recreate the magic of Fantasia is no small feat. But rather than taking new risks that not even the first film dared, the studio opted to adhere to Fantasia’s formula with pieces that recall if not flat out copy from the original segments. I hesitate to call it a pale imitation or cash grab however because this was done for the art much more than the money (though Eisner was probably hoping it would bring in some bank). There’s even a little bit of depth to it: while the first Fantasia had themes of differing natures in conflict – light vs. dark, fire vs. water, etc. – Fantasia 2000’s theme is accidental but brilliantly meta: CGI vs. traditional animation, a conflict Disney would become very familiar with in the decade following the film’s release. In some ways, it reminds me of Epcot’s genesis. The driving force behind it was long gone, but the attempt to bring it to life as close to the original vision as possible is still much appreciated.

For all my gripes, I really do enjoy Fantasia 2000. Perhaps not on the same level as its predecessor, but it has its moments, oh yes. And believe me, as far as Disney sequels go, you could do far, far, far worse than this one. Fantasia 2000 is Fantasia’s kid sister mimicking its beloved older sibling in an attempt to show it can be cool like the big kids too. But hey, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this review, please consider supporting this misfit on Patreon. Patreon supporters receive great perks such as extra votes for movie reviews, movie requests, early sneak-peeks and more! If I can hit my goal of $100 a month, I can go back to weekly tv series reviews. As of now, I’m only $20 away! Special thanks to Amelia Jones, Gordhan Rajani and Sam Minden for their contributions! I’ll see you in a few weeks when I and review the 1959 Disney animated classic, Sleeping Beauty!

Artwork by Charles Moss.

Screencaps from animationscreencaps.com

Yes, I know The Lion King and Lady and the Tramp ended with the titular characters having babies, but was there anyone out there apart from Eisner who demanded there be sequels to those films that focused on their offspring?

January Review: Fantasia 2000 Last year I talked about Fantasia, which is not just one of my favorite Disney movies, but one of my favorite movies in general.

[mst3kproject]

1008: Final Justice

I had a patient a while back whose name was Geronimo.  He was very impressed that I pronounced it correctly on the first try.  I didn’t have the heart to tell him how I knew.

Thomas Jefferson ‘TJ’ Geronimo III Mitchell is deputy sheriff in the middle of nowhere because that’s how they punish mass murderers in Texas. He has a shootout with mobster Joseph Palermo literally right in front of his office door, which ends in a couple of people dead.  Mitchell beats the shit out of Palermo, then arrests him, and is told to escort him back to Italy so he will no longer be Texas’ problem.  Naturally the mobster escapes on the way, and Mitchell II sets about pissing off the entire island of Malta in the attempt to hunt him down and recapture him.

I take back what I said about both Gregorio Sala and Joe Estevez. At the time I reviewed Track of the Moon Beast and Werewolf I had totally forgotten that the reincarnation of Mitchell here is supposed to be an Apache.  Joe Don Baker is officially and forevermore MST3K’s whitest Native American.

I know we’re supposed to consider Mitchell, the Sequel an antihero who plays by his own rules, and cheer him on in his attempts to recapture Palermo.  I know Wilson turns out to be a bad guy and Palermo has probably killed more people than Mitchell has. But this asshole spends the whole movie stomping around, being rude and obnoxious and shooting people and belittling the woman who’s trying to help him and generally leaving me sitting here thinking so this is how Europe sees Americans.  The Superintendent calls him ‘a walking disaster area,’ ‘leaving bodies in the streets’, and he’s right.  This man is the personification of police brutality.

Do you know what would have happened if Mitchell had gone the hell home when he was told to?  Yes, Palermo would have gotten away, but absolutely nobody would have died, way less property would have been destroyed, and the population of Malta as a whole would have had much nicer weekend!  Do these people not matter?  How about the woman who saw her son nearly killed in front of her?  How about the stripper who got her throat cut?  If Mitchell had just sat his ass down none of that would have happened.

In fact, I think I can make a case that this Mitchell is a significantly less appealing character than his predecessor.  See if you can follow me here.

Mitchell Senior was completely lacking in social skills and basic hygiene, but his motivation throughout his movie was to get justice for a murder victim nobody else cared about.  He followed the rules to a T – the bad guys tried to bribe him with a prostitute, and he arrested her for possession of drugs.  The only guy he killed was the villain, and while he did shoot Bocca he deliberately minimized the chances of a fatal injury.  He rebelled by following his assignment so hard his boss wished he’d never given it to him.  Having been told to follow Cummins, he follows him almost all the way to Mexico. And it was the 70s, so he has an excuse for being badly-dressed!

Mitchell 2, Electric Boogaloo, ignores the rules.  He’s a guest in another country, their police are telling him to stop breaking their shit, and he goes out and keeps doing it.  He commits more on-screen crimes than all the bad guys put together.  He starts a fight over a glass of milk and nearly drowns a bartender.  He shoots dudes down in the street, steals boats, and destroys property.  Having been asked to give his word he lies through his teeth, and he dresses like he might as well be wearing a sign that says asshole from Texas.  He’s so awful he makes Mitchell One look good.

He wouldn’t even be a good character for a comedy, since the point of an asshole in a comedy is that he does things we wish we could get away with, and when comedy assholes are supposed to be the good guys they usually end up learning something (often that they’re assholes).  2 Fast 2 Mitchell learns nothing. He doesn’t come to respect this foreign culture he’s encountered.  He doesn’t realize he was acting out of line.  I honestly think that, like MacGuyver in Atlantic Rim, he’s meant to teach the rest of the cast that assholes should be free to be assholes so they can save the rest of us who aren’t brave enough to shoot first and never fucking bother with the questions.

I’m not sure Final Justice is a comedy, anyway.  It did occur to me… there are at least parts of this movie that I’m pretty sure are meant to be funny.  The idea of transposing cowboy movie shootouts and chases to a European landscape of renaissance art and architecture is probably supposed to be funny.  You’ve got a so-called ‘hero’ who’s a rootin'-tootin'-shootin' cowboy and a villain who’s an honour-and-family-obsessed Italian mobster… that’s a genre crossover, and those are usually comedies, right?  I’m almost certain that Mitchell getting repeatedly arrested and yelled at by the Maltese police is a joke, and the old Nonna trying to confess her sins to a mobster disguised as a monk feels joke-ish.  Yet it’s just missing something.  What could it be?

Oh, right, a main character who’s actually funny.

There is one thing that actually made me laugh in the movie, rather than because of Mike, Crow, and Tom’s commentary – and that’s the blurred rectangle over every shot of the Smuggler’s Tavern strippers, to make sure we won’t see a nipple.  It could not draw more attention to itself if it tried, and maybe it’s just the edition I watched but there was not a single wardrobe malfunction in the shots they used anyway!  There were bits with the strippers topless in the original cut, but those didn’t make it into the version MST3K used. So they blurred it out… just in case?  Did they not want us imagining nipples?  Did the tumblr staff edit this movie?

So the main character sucks… sometimes entertaining side characters can save a movie.  Sadly, there are none here.  The villains are stock mobsters with it’s-a-me, Mario! accents.  The Maltese police chief talks big but seems unwilling to actually do anything to back up his threats to Mitchell.  Then there’s Maria, who is supposed to be a policewoman but mostly acts as a tour guide.  She’s very nearly another example of a sexy lamp.  She does nothing of any importance in this movie except for turning up to spring Mitchell from a jail cell.  The writers clearly couldn’t think of any better way to get him out of a locked room, either, because they have a stripper do the exact same thing.  This other woman never has much by way of personality, and is otherwise just there to look pretty.

The other function Maria serves is to repeatedly tell her superiors that Mitchell didn’t start any of the fights he gets into.  Anybody who has been watching the movie knows that this is a giant fucking lie.  He’s the one who challenged the mobsters in the courtyard and he shot first.  He could have shrugged off the weirdo in the Smuggler’s Tavern pouring beer on him but he didn’t.  Every time things go wrong in this movie it is always his fault.

As far as thematic material goes, I’m pretty sure Final Justice is trying to examine the difference between ‘law’ and ‘justice’.  This is a worthy topic of discussion.  The law is not always just, and even when it is, people do not always apply it in just ways. But a guy who wanders around a foreign country shooting people with only a suspicion that they work for the bad guy, who walks into a bar and announces ‘I don’t want any trouble here!’ before punching everybody in sight, is not the best spokesman for that idea.  Mitchell probably has extra guns stashed all over his house in case The Gubbamint tries to take them away.

The fact that the Maltese are not shown doing anything except yelling at Mitchell 2: Through the Portal of Time, seems to imply that they would have been completely unable to capture Palermo on their own.  Boy, good thing Mitchell was there!  Do Americans really think other countries can’t handle their own problems without an intervention by some bald-eagled ass-whoopin’ liberty?  Looking at the history of the twentieth century, I’m gonna say that yes, they do.

Really all Final Justice is, is a bad cop movie with some unusual accessories.  If it were set in New York or Los Angeles it would be entirely forgettable.  The art and architecture we see in Malta, and the glimpse of their culture (I will admit that the floats in the festa parade are just slightly nightmare-fuel-ish) is pretty much the only reason to watch it.  Even then, there’s not enough of that stuff to make up for how fucking awful the movie’s entire mindset is.

I used to feel pretty meh about Final Justice but I’d never bothered to actually try to analyze it like this.  The more I think about it, the more layers I uncover, the worse it gets.  Everything about it is terrible.  The only level I can find to praise it on is that the photography is decent and you can always tell what��s going on, but even that is wasted on fucking Mitchell 2: Hellbound doing stupid offensive shit. Even the title sucks.  The movie was shot under the working title The Maltese Connection, which at least sounds kind of cool even if the movie it were attached to would still have been Final Justice.

Fuck this movie.

[wineanddinosaur]

VinePair Podcast: Which Covid-Caused Changes to Drinks Culture Will Last?

The Covid-19 crisis is changing the drinks industry in profound and complicated ways, from driving huge growth in online ordering and delivery platforms, to relaxing laws regarding the sales of alcohol and normalizing public drinking in parks and city streets. Some historians speculate that society will come out of this period with a new outlook and perhaps even a cultural renaissance, as was the case after the 1918 flu epidemic. But at a minimum it seems likely that some of these sudden changes will linger on even after social distancing and isolation rules have been relaxed.

That’s the topic for this week’s VinePair podcast, where Adam, Erica, and Zach discuss which changes to the world of alcohol they expect to stick around, and what further changes might be coming in the months ahead.

Listen on iTunes

Listen on Spotify

LISTEN ONLINE OR CHECK OUT OUR CONVERSATION HERE:

Adam: From Brooklyn, New York, I’m Adam Teeter.

Erica: From Connecticut, I’m Erica Duecy.

Zach: And in Seattle, Washington, I’m Zach Geballe.

A: And this is the VinePair podcast. Guys what is up? It’s four weeks in!

Z: Wow!

E: That’s hard to believe.

A: Wow, four weeks… I don’t think anyone thought this was gonna be lasting four weeks.

E: And it may be going for many more weeks.

A: Wow!

Z: I mean, we have a stay-at-home order in Washington State through at least May 4th, so we’ve got basically 3 [or] 4 more weeks at a minimum, and there’s no guarantee that they won’t extend it after that.

A: It’s just… it’s crazy. I mean, I’ve been drinking a lot more, I’ve been baking… I’m gonna come out of this looking like a potato.

E: With a bad haircut, I’m sure!

A: Yeah! Like, it’s just….

Z: Well, I will tell you as someone who is balding, this is really bad. Because I’m not at the stage yet in my life where I’m willing to go… like just straight “Bic it” and shave my head entirely. [So] I rely on a relatively regular haircut to keep the hair I do have looking relatively organized, and it’s getting bad. I fortunately was able to [get] a haircut shortly before the stay-at-home order came out, so we’re only about a week past my due date now, but in another month? You might see a lot fewer selfies on Instagram, that’s all I’m saying.

A: I [made a] big mistake and last weekend [and] was like, I don’t know man, I’m seeing like a lot of people go clean-shaven. I forgot what my face looked like without some hair on it, I’m gonna clean shave. And then I came out of the bathroom and my wife was like, “I don’t wanna look at you.” It was so bad, she’s like, “You look like you’re five, it’s not the look I’m going for. Like please don’t ever do this again.” And then I looked at myself in the mirror and I was like yeah, I really actually do hate it. Like my face doesn’t look good without some facial hair on it. It was weird.

E: Yeah, I told my husband that he has about a week left before I’m getting in there with the scissors and I’m just gonna have to do some work cause it’s starting to get pretty shaggy.

Z: Yeah, it’s rough.

A: I agree with you Zach, like a week before this all started like I went and got a haircut. And I was like, “cool, at least I got that haircut, ‘cause my hair will start getting long and then it starts to curl.” And so it’ll start to like…it’s just not a good look. So it’s good that we’re keeping it where it is. But uh yeah, I mean this thing, who knows, I mean… it’s just crazy, it’s just really crazy. But I thought we would take the opportunity to be at the four-week mark, to talk about… some ideas that have come out of not only the coverage that we’ve been doing on the site, but also some of the conversations we’ve been having in the “Covid Conversations” [podcast]. You know, mini-episodes that have been running every day. If you have been listening to those episodes, by the way, we’d love to know what you think. Drop us a line at podcast@vinepair.com, we’d love to hear sort of what your thoughts are. If there’s anyone that we haven’t spoken to that you think we should, [or] if you are someone you think we should speak to, also reach out. We’d love to talk to as many people as possible and get as large a picture of what’s happening in the total alcohol beverage industry as we can. But yeah, I mean we ran a piece this week – everyone’s gonna listen to this podcast Monday – about […] these historians, especially the one at Yale, whose name now slips my memory but I’m sure Erica you know it….

E: Um yes, but I’m trying to think of what her last name is though. Give me one second and I will tell you.

A: OK, cool. [The historian] has connected a lot of what happened after the 1918 pandemic and then the rise into the Roaring Twenties, as in innovation, etc. to potentially where we could be now. And then also we’ve had a lot of really great interviews where I think people have sort of said similar things. They wonder [if there] is going to be a behavioral change in terms of whether or not we start buying more alcohol online. Like, will people who have downloaded Drizly and Minibar for the first time keep them on their phones now and continue using them post-social distancing? I think Stephanie Gallo made a really good point, that their research shows that it takes 6 to 8 weeks for someone to start a new habit, right? So right now we’re at four weeks, if there’s something that someone started four weeks ago it’s only gonna take two more weeks potentially to lock them into that habit. Whether that be drinking wine at dinner every night now. You know I think what Mike said, the bartender from LA about restaurants in general learning more about what their license actually did allow that they never knew before, which I also thought was fascinating in that interview, is really interesting. So for us, I thought we’d have a conversation of like what behaviors do you think, now that we’re four weeks in, will be with us post-quarantine? We can have this conversation maybe again in four more weeks when we’re still in quarantine, but for now what behaviors do you think will probably still be with us even when we come out of all this?

E: I’ll jump in and [say] that professor who we we’re referring to [is] Jessica Specter; so she’s a Yale University professor, and what we were talking to her about is how the parallels between the 1918 flu pandemic and the Roaring Twenties, and this huge period of innovation that followed and cultural renaissance of sorts are actually intertwined in ways that are overlooked. So that is an article that we’ll be referring to probably as we’re discussing here some different ideas. You know, I think one of my biggest takeaways right now about how things will change from a liquor store/retail perspective is, you know there are so many people who before-hand they loved FreshDirect or Instacart or what have you, and that was just a regular convenience that was part of their life and I think a lot of them just didn’t know that they could do alcohol delivery in that way. But now that they do I think that it actually will lead to a huge change in the way that people interact with retail stores. So I think there’s a pretty big part of the population that may never set foot into a liquor store again and may just move onto online ordering completely.

Z: Yeah I certainly think that’s quite likely, and I think that the whole convenience that has been born out of this whole quarantine time really will be a thing that is a continued kind of motivation for a lot of people. So the idea that, you know in this period of time when you can only get, or for a lot of people you can only get things delivered to your door, or at least it’s considered unwise to go out to the store more than necessary, we’ve all gotten used to the groceries or whatever showing up at the doorstep. And while some people may enjoy the return to browsing and maybe in some other fields that will be the case, but I think with food and especially with drink you’re right Erica, I think a lot of people are just gonna say “I know what I want, why would I go to the store when I can place an order…” You know I think a lot of what we’re gonna see about it too is a lot of people moving to the sort of reservation mindset in general where you make a reservation for something to be delivered or maybe for you to go pick it up and it’s just waiting for you. Again, this idea that we don’t have to have…. you know, we have the technology now to kind of create all of this convenience and I just think few people are gonna wanna go back to a less convenient era.

A: I think you’re right. I think the other thing that’s really interesting is, unlike grocery delivery where you do have… I would say there’s a larger group of people, when you look at consumers of grocery or food compared to consumers of alcohol and I know we talked about this before, there’s a larger group of people who like in food going to the butcher, going to the produce market, having a conversation and picking out that tomato or picking that steak. But in terms of alcohol, we know based on research prior to Covid-19, the vast majority of casual wine, spirits, and beer consumers felt incredibly intimidated shopping for alcohol. And part of that intimidation was the interaction with the person at the store, right? But now, I think they’re realizing, “Oh, I don’t have to have that interaction at all,” right? So now, I can go online, I can do my own research, whether I read VinePair or I ask some friends, I can then look for that wine and see if it’s available digitally and get it delivered and it feels a lot more… you know I feel a lot more comfortable with it than being tripped up if I have that conversation with someone to say, “well I’m sorry I’m looking for this specific winery’s Merlot,” let’s say. And then the person says to me, “Oh, well we don’t have that Merlot, but we have this, we think you’ll like it as well,” and then you start getting really nervous like, will I like it? Do I trust this person? Do I trust their taste? Right? And I think we will see more people saying, this was just a hell of a lot easier and I avoided that interaction completely.

E: Yeah, and for drinks lovers like us I think that feels really sad…

A: It does.

E: One, because we love liquor and wine stores, but two, what about discovery? What about discovering new products? That, I think that is going to be a huge challenge for any sort of producers is, how do you now get the word out effectively if people are going this sort of convenience route, they’re ordering the same bourbon they like, they’re ordering the same Chardonnay they like, and they’re not really taking risks because no one is kind of giving them that hand sell?

Z: Ah! But see here’s where my additional idea comes in and I’m especially curious, Adam, about your thoughts on this because it ties into the music industry. So I think they’re a lot of people who when streaming audio, streaming music, came around said, “Oh, but you know if you can just listen to the same songs you already always loved, why will you ever discover anything new?” And what we found is that all these, you know, the streaming services created algorithms to sort of derive from your playlists and the things you like, suggestions – some of which are good, some of which are bad. And if you’re like me and have a small child and some of what you listen to on your playlist is kid’s music, you get a really, really fucking weird set of songs if you just play your daily/weekly mix. But, what I think you’re gonna see happen is, you’re going to see more synergy between let’s say the alcohol-producing companies and distribution companies and delivery services and potentially, and I’m not spoiling anything I don’t think, I don’t think that this is actually happening, but someone like VinePair. Where in the future you might be able to access the top 25 rosés list that VinePair’s putting out from whatever app and you can say “here are VinePair’s top 25 rosés, which one do you want? Here’s maybe even the write-up.” Now, I don’t know that that will happen but I think you’re gonna see more and more of this discovery come from people who are able to connect their own… whether they’re a journalist or a sommelier or a bartender or whomever, they are able to basically to create essentially a “drinks playlist,” or a drinks list or whatever you wanna call it, and instead of necessarily getting those recommendations from them in person, they’re able to send that out to an entire region, nation, whatever and say, “Hey, you like me, you follow me and every week I’m gonna recommend five wines.” And I think there’s a lot of potential for that and I think that’s one thing that we’re starting to see come out and I think you’re gonna see a hell of a lot more of it.

E: OK, but here’s my challenge. I have a challenge to this, which is: How is that different than James Suckling’s notes? Or anyone else’s notes that are already out there? That are then incorporated into some of these apps already? Like what’s the difference?

Z: I think the difference for me is you… with those things you’re getting about a… you’re getting a score and you’re basically getting that score highlighted on the platform. But I think this is a little more about following… like, what if you could follow essentially Lebron on whatever this app is? Or you could follow us, or someone else in between? And get recommendations and maybe there’s some sort of, you know commission-based system that encourages people who are trendsetters to have their presence on these platforms? I mean look, I’m just a sommelier and a dude who does a podcast, I don’t know all the back end of this, it may not be an idea that works. But I do think that, you know part of the difference is, is that you know with someone like a critic like James Suckling, I mean there are definitely people who just essentially do this already, they just take his scores and go to whatever you know wine shop or online retailer and this to me is just a little bit more streamlined and that may or may not be a thing that matters to people. But I think it’s one way to think about still having the opportunity for discovery. Because you know, as much as we said before that… and I think it’s true that there will be some people who will be even more locked into their already existing purchasing decisions, I think that those people were gonna do that no matter what. I think for people who like discovering new things, this is just gonna be a new way to do it and if you can marry that with convenience that’s actually maybe for a lot of people like Adam was saying, a lot less intimidating than walking into a wine shop and talking to someone you don’t know and getting their recommendations. You know, here you could follow someone who you like from either the field of alcohol or some other field and get their recommendations and you know, whether they’re better or worse than the guy or gal in the wine shop I can’t say but I do think this is something we’re gonna see.

A: So I think I agree with both of you partly. So I think Erica actually has a very valid point here, and I think that for the most part the people who do run for convenience, right? So the person I guess… that typical person I was thinking of, that like they just… they know they like bourbon or they know they like Merlots or Cabernets, etc. that’s really… they’re not totally into complete exploration, they just know what they like and they don’t like the buying practices now, I think they’re going to run to online and I think some of these bigger, more well-known wineries, distilleries, etc. are going to benefit. I think it’s going to be not great in the short-run, especially if we enter a recession, for the smaller brands in the beginning. But, I do think as well, there are going to be people in markets that loved to discover things that didn’t think they had a lot of variety, who have now recognized they can order from wine shops outside of their own state, who will keep doing that, and that will benefit some of these boutique producers. So… my sister-in-law, had the Pennsylvania state liquor authority not shut down their stores, she never would have realized she could order from Astor, cause she never would have, it never would have crossed her mind. Right? She knows that she can go down the block…

Z: That’s Astor Wine & Spirits – for those of you who don’t live in New York City.

A: Right, sorry. So now she knows she can, and Zach to your point, she does like the Staff Pick wines and she likes the notes the staff writes about the wines. She finds it more interesting, they also… the prices are better and I think she’ll continue to be an Astor customer.

E: Nice!

A: Because she didn’t have that in Pennsylvania, right? So she will but I think that someone else, you know maybe her next door neighbor wouldn’t do that. Right? She’s just gonna be like, well I realized I can still… I can just order bulk you know, I don’t know name-a-cult Napa Cab, right? I can just, I can order that and I’m just gonna keep ordering that and I’m not gonna explore. So I think you’re gonna see it sort of benefit both but I do think in the short term the more likely scenario or who sees the most benefit is gonna be what Erica’s saying. ‘Cause you’re seeing it now, right? You’re seeing most consumers like to run to these well-known producers. Run to these well-known craft brands and I wonder, you know… and at least for now that’s the majority of what you do find on a lot of these apps, right? If you go on Drizly or Minibar you’re not finding really great craft whiskey or really great small-production wines.

Z: Uh I think that depends a little bit where you are. I mean I think If you look at… a lot of it, ’cause I mean they partner with liquor stores and what not and wine shops and if you are… if they’re partnered in your market with a shop that stocks a lot of interesting stuff, like they happen to be in Seattle, then you can actually get, I mean, I was surprised looking at it, I can get stuff that’s actually really hard to find in a lot of liquor shops.

A: Really?

Z: Delivered here, yeah. Some more, a little bit esoteric Japanese whiskey and stuff like that. I mean it’s not cheap, but that stuff never is. But again it really just depends on where you are and there are… the selection isn’t always consistent and sometimes it’s really deep in one category and a little bit hit-or-miss in others, but again I think that’s where this idea of, you know, if these things become more connected to people and entities that would promote discovery and learning about new product, there might be impetus for some of these apps or a new app that doesn’t exist or whatever to tap into that market. Because well, you’re right, obviously the big brands are gonna dominate and they’ve dominated, they dominated the pre-Covid landscape too, you know they’re on every grocery store shelf and all that. They’re gonna continue to dominate, but we’re… I think we’re mostly interested in talking about some other subset of consumers for the most part because they’re the ones whose shift from in-person purchasing to online purchasing is going to be impactful to yeah, these small brands. And if they are able to continue to discover and find new things and just move that online I think a lot of them are gonna appreciate the convenience.

A: I agree. So OK, let’s keep it rolling here, cause I think we’ve beaten the online ordering to death for now. One of the things I’m gonna be very curious to see and I was talking to Josh about this a week in, is Josh… you know my co-founder at VinePair, was walking through the park with his dog in Madison Square Park in Manhattan and saw this couple sitting on a bench drinking to-go Dirty Martinis they had bought from The Smith. And he basically was the first one to say this, he was like, “There’s no way we’re puttin’ this back in the bottle.” Like people have now realized they can go and buy really great cocktails from some of their favorite restaurants, but it’s a beautiful day and they don’t want to sit in the dark bar and drink at the restaurant and they were out at the park with their dogs, at the dog run drinking these Dirty Martinis. And I do think you’re gonna see, not all states, but some states especially in the short term because we’re gonna need to help these places continue to survive, just really kind of start pushing the to-go cocktails. What do you guys think?

E: I totally agree. Yeah I mean I think that, I mean look at… look at New York City restaurants, there’s something like a million in the service industry in New York City alone that are out of jobs. So when you see these restaurants and bars really start up full force I think there will be so much pressure on the local and state governments to help support them in any way possible. To help re-invigorate these businesses. And I think what that looks like is some standalone, ready-to-go offshoots, some delivery offshoots, pick-up offshoots from some of these bars and restaurants. You know in the article we just did about the 1918 pandemic and the Roaring Twenties, one of the interesting points that Derek Brown said to us was, you know there is actually an innovative new concept called Ready to Drink in Shanghai that Daniel An, who is a really well known Shanghai bar owner, that he started recently. And he calls it a mix between a Cinnabon and a cocktail bar. Which serves up these pretty packaged cocktails, so like a Shanghai Mule or a Coffee Negroni and also fruit juices that people can spike with like jalapeño-infused tequila, things like that. And that these are all ready-to-go, sort of… it’s a ready-to-go concept, that’s the entire concept. And so I think that type of thing may be something that we see as people, as you know, establishments are thinking like “hey, maybe I can’t just only be on-premise moving forward.”

Z: For sure, and I think actually there’s two interesting parts to what Adam was describing and what you were following up on, Erica. One of them is this thought of to-go cocktails and sort of a brand around them and we… Adam and I did a podcast a while back about canned cocktails. And at that point we were talking about them as products that were made in essentially, you know, some sort of factory-type setting and what I wonder is if we’re gonna see a rise of essentially commissary bars. So instead of a commissary kitchen where you have a catering operation or even a sort of fancy take-out operation, I wonder if we’re gonna see sort of commissary bars or even shared bar spaces open. Because I do think that one thing that’s gonna be interesting especially in the short to medium term after these social-distancing and really extreme quarantines are over, is I think people are gonna be a little bit hesitant to go back into bars. I think you’re gonna see people not necessarily wanting to be in crowded spaces with strangers, but they’re gonna want really good cocktails as they do now. And I think you’re gonna see some existing bars, and maybe some new ones, open in a space that’s really mostly dedicated to cocktail production as opposed to cocktail service. And I think if you can, you know especially introduce some of the technological innovations that you’re seeing whether… that Adam talks about in his upcoming interview with Mike Capoferri from Thunderbolt in Los Angeles, like vacuum-sealed cocktails, canning cocktails on site, those kinds of things are super interesting to me and if you have a commissary bar, essentially that can deliver, or you know produce and deliver or send out for delivery these kinds of drinks, I think that’s a way forward for some of this industry, especially for this medium-term period where I think getting people to go back in closed spaces is tough.

A: Yeah.

Z: The other thing I wanna mention real quick is I also think we are going to have to reconsider our public drinking laws.

A: Completely.

Z: And open container laws in most of the country.

A: Completely.

Z: Because I mean it’s nice in Seattle right now, and my wife and son and I were walking through the local park with our dog a couple of nights ago and there were probably 15 groups of people scattered throughout the park and all of them were drinking.

A: Oh yeah

Z: And you know that to some extent happened anyhow, but it was much more in the open than it had been you know… not, you know, people were just drinking straight out of cans of beer, bottles… they had bottles of wine out, you know no one was trying to hide it and I just think we’re gonna see, in the same way that there was, you know, to reference this piece that was written last week, in the same that there was a lot of social permissiveness that came out of the real, you know, sort of “we-may-all-die-anyhow”-sense of 1918, you know I think for a lot of us it’s gonna be like “well, why is drinking a beer in a park actually that big a deal?” Like does it… I mean, they do it all over Europe, no one… and it’s not an issue there. You know they do it in parts of this country and it’s not mostly an issue, like why shouldn’t I be able to have a glass of wine or a beer or whatever in public as long as I’m not making a scene?

A: Completely

E: Totally

A: Right and I mean I think that that’s… you know basically what you’re saying which could be really interesting to see is like so you know in my neighborhood of Fort Greene there’s this beautiful park, Fort Greene Park and you… there are a few sort of smaller spaces on the park that as of right now I think you know… it’s like a tiny coffee shop of something. You could easily see if the laws loosen, a cocktail bar open, in which the majority of their business is selling those cocktails to-go for people to drink in the park.

E: Yeah

A: You know? And you see that… you see that all over Europe. You have not seen that here until this last month. And you’re right, I mean the amount of people that I see in the park on Friday and Saturday and Sunday afternoons who socially distancing are with their significant other or their family or whatever and they are having a bottle of wine and it’s pretty brazenly open has changed dramatically in the last four weeks. Everyone used to do it but very discreetly, now I think everyone’s just like “Fuck it”.

E: Yeah, genies’ out of the bottle, I don’t think it’s going back.

A: I don’t either. What else do you guys think is gonna stay post-this Corona quarantine.

Z: So this is not necessarily about the production side, so this is more personal habit side, but I do wonder as people who are not necessarily ordering to-go cocktails or they’re in a place where that’s still not doable, as it is in some states and what not, I wonder if you know this is gonna be a sort of return to the era… we’re gonna see a return to the era of the cocktail party. And not that those didn’t happen previously, but again to make another connection to the piece that ran on VinePair, you know it wasn’t just speakeasies but in part because of Prohibition, you know drinking was basically either in private, either in, you know, sort of these underground clubs, or in people’s homes if you could kind of, you know, hide it well enough I guess, I don’t know how much scrutiny was paid to people who… what they were doing in their own home. But I do think that you know if people are coming out of this period of quarantine having, you know, learned a lot about how to make even relatively straightforward drinks like a Manhattan, which I think a lot of people like Manhattans but a surprising number maybe didn’t know how to make them until the last few weeks. I do think you’re going to see that sort of return to like, “Oh well, you know, maybe we don’t wanna go out to a bar, but we do wanna drink with friends, and we’re gonna have them over and you know what? We’re gonna make cocktails.” You know, the way that American entertaining really functioned in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, right? People came over and drank cocktails. They didn’t drink wine, for the most part, you know, maybe if they were having dinner. And I do think we might see a return to the cocktail party as a real thing. And I’m not sure if I’m super excited about that or not, it’s pretty easy to get real wasted at a cocktail party, but I think that’s something that will stick around is the sort of home bartending that had largely gone away in a lot of places.

E: Yeah, I mean I think that if you look at the traffic on our site, for example, a lot of the most popular articles are about those cocktail projects that we’ve been discussing, you know ways to up your cocktail game so… people are investing a lot of time in this. I mean, they’ve got a lot of time, what else are they gonna do, you know? There’s only so much Netflix you can watch. I think this… they’re going to have all these new skills and they’re gonna want to share those like in real life with their friends. So I do agree that it’s going to come back and I do also have that same hesitation as you do, which is all I want to see them do right now is go to bars and restaurants. I mean I think one of the interesting points in the article that a social psychologist made was: You know, if we take the gas off this social distancing and we go back to bars and restaurants too quickly and then there’s a second wave of infections and a second spike, then people actually may be in the long term more reluctant to go back to bars and restaurant with the frequency that they did before. And that is one of the things that concerns me greatly right now.

A: Right, will we see an immediate run back and then all of a sudden boom, you know… I think it could be bad.

Z: Well and I think that’s why we need to be kind of cautious. I know, like you said, I mean as a person who at least normally works in restaurants on this podcast I definitely, you know, part of me wants to see people go back to the way things were right away. But I agree very much with that concern that if there’s sort of too rapid a retreat from social distancing and people are suddenly like “Ah, whatever!” and we get another wave of this that’s as bad or even nearly as bad or worse… I yeah, I think the long-term effects will be much, much, much harder on the industry than if we come back slowly, we sort of say, “OK, we’ve gonna try and tip-toe our way back in and maybe we open with tables further spaced apart, maybe we don’t pack people into bars and nightclubs, maybe we just sort of say look we’re gonna tip-toe into this,” with the goal of getting back to a pre-Covid sort of normalcy in a year, as opposed to trying to do it in three months. That’s probably better long-term, although it’s hard to say.

A: Yeah, well so here’s the deal. This actually was brought up, a bunch of people were talking about this on this group chain of a bunch of like CEOs and things like that, and it’s a very interesting thing to puzzle. And that is… and it is why I think ultimately the at-home cocktail party will be the norm for the next year. So unless this comes down from the federal government, which we don’t know if it will, if we… when we re-open, if Zach, you open a restaurant and I go to your restaurant in the next few months and I get sick, are you liable? Uh, what if it’s someone who was on your kitchen crew? Or what if it was one of your wait staff or what if it was a somm? Or what if it was just a random customer? But you just didn’t know because they didn’t present symptoms? But then I get sick and then I spread it. Or someone has a big event. Or there’s a huge concert and someone gets sick? And these are the conversations people are having right now because no one knows.

Z: Yeah.

A: Right? Like we don’t know and we don’t know what everyone’s liability is going to be and the insurance industry has not been super helpful recently, as we all know.

Z: Shocking!

A: Right, but so… but so until we also understand that I think there’s gonna be a lot of trepidation amongst both business owners and consumers to go back and forth because you kind of need to know, OK., well what does happen? Like is it on me? Are we basically saying well, you’re putting yourself at risk? ‘Cause if you’re doing that, then you’re basically saying to restauranteurs, only people that are confident and feeling comfortable are gonna come to you, because we basically told them as a society – it’s at your own risk. Like when we say you can swim at a beach without a lifeguard. Or are we saying no, it’s gonna be on the establishment, they have to implement social-distancing measures and they have to be checking the customers and if they don’t, it’s on them. And then what risk are they taking on? So it’s gonna be really crazy to see, which is why like at least at a… you know a home gathering like, unless you have a lot of asshole friends, if someone shows up at your house and gets sick, they’re probably gonna be less likely to go after you…

E: And how are they gonna know where they got it anyway?

A: Exactly

E: I mean that’s just… that’s the craziness of it.

Z: Well, and I think the other part is, the challenge for bars and restaurants in particular is, it’s not, it’s like it’s an environment where you can really easily social distance, you know? You can’t wear a mask while you drink a cocktail and it’s hard to imagine a lot of New York City restaurants with tables 6 or 8 feet apart. You know, that’s… most of them could only fit 3 tables if that were the case and so I think that it is really… yeah, you’re right. The liability side is something I’m not qualified to talk about other than that yes, it is definitely a conversation that’s come up even with, you know, sort of small operators that I’ve talked to. They just… no one knows and everyone is gonna be eager on the one hand, because they wanna get back to what they love to do and what they do to make money and all that, but on the other hand like there’s still so many pieces to this that we don’t understand and that’s why I think for the purposes of this conversation we really focused on delivery, at-home, non-shared space changes that have come about and that may persist for a while if not forever.

E: And you know, I think the last thing is… I just, it’s kind of like the PS of this whole thing. When I think about those socially distanced tables at restaurants and bars, there is just no way. Margins are thin enough when you’ve got people packed in like sardines, like how is that even going to work? There’s just so many questions right now, I feel like this is just going to take so many months, potentially years just to untangle new business models and really understand how to find a path forward for on-premise. OK, we gotta leave this on a happy note guys.

A: I think the happy note is that, I think a lot of these laws that we’ve all wondered forever now whether they would ever loosen, will. And I think that’s good ultimately for consumers. I think consumers recognizing that….

Z: And for producers.

A: Yeah, it’s good for everybody, right? Us realizing that we can buy that Cru Beaujolais even if we live in a state in which we don’t have a wine store that would sell it, is awesome. Us realizing that, you know, we can now go out in a park and hopefully have a really great cocktail or bottle of wine or a beer without thinking that we’re breaking a law that everyone breaks anyways unless you’re a person of color or another minority, right? Like we’re just gonna let everyone finally do that, is awesome. And I think that you know, if we can loosen up these laws as well to allow us to drink really great drinks made by really… you know, by amazing professionals, either at their location or somewhere else, is a very good thing. And hopefully all of that stuff will happen.

E: Yeah, hey, we’ll take silver linings anywhere we can find them right now.

A: Exactly, exactly. Well as always, we appreciate everyone who tunes in every week to listen to the podcast and all the Corona Conversations that we’ve been having over the last four weeks. Again, please drop us a line podcast@vinepair.com if you’ve got a subject you want us to talk about, shoot us an idea. Someone we need to interview, please let us know. And as always please give us a review, it really helps people discover the show whether you’re listening to us on iTunes, where most of you are listening, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever else it is that you get your podcasts. And Zach, Erica, always a pleasure, I’ll talk to you again next week.

E: Thanks!

Z: Sounds great.

A: Thanks so much for listening to the VinePair podcast. If you enjoy listening to us every week please leave us a review or rating on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts, it really helps everyone else discover the show. And now for the credits:

VinePair is produced and hosted by Zach Geballe, Erica Duecy, and me: Adam Teeter. Our engineer is Nick Patri and Keith Beavers. I’d also like to give a special shout out to my VinePair co-founder Josh Malin and the rest of the VinePair team for their support. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll see you again right here next week.

The article VinePair Podcast: Which Covid-Caused Changes to Drinks Culture Will Last? appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/vinepair-podcast-post-covid-changes/

[isaiahrippinus]

VinePair Podcast: Which Covid-Caused Changes to Drinks Culture Will Last?

The Covid-19 crisis is changing the drinks industry in profound and complicated ways, from driving huge growth in online ordering and delivery platforms, to relaxing laws regarding the sales of alcohol and normalizing public drinking in parks and city streets. Some historians speculate that society will come out of this period with a new outlook and perhaps even a cultural renaissance, as was the case after the 1918 flu epidemic. But at a minimum it seems likely that some of these sudden changes will linger on even after social distancing and isolation rules have been relaxed.

That’s the topic for this week’s VinePair podcast, where Adam, Erica, and Zach discuss which changes to the world of alcohol they expect to stick around, and what further changes might be coming in the months ahead.

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LISTEN ONLINE OR CHECK OUT OUR CONVERSATION HERE:

Adam: From Brooklyn, New York, I’m Adam Teeter.

Erica: From Connecticut, I’m Erica Duecy.

Zach: And in Seattle, Washington, I’m Zach Geballe.

A: And this is the VinePair podcast. Guys what is up? It’s four weeks in!

Z: Wow!

E: That’s hard to believe.

A: Wow, four weeks… I don’t think anyone thought this was gonna be lasting four weeks.

E: And it may be going for many more weeks.

A: Wow!

Z: I mean, we have a stay-at-home order in Washington State through at least May 4th, so we’ve got basically 3 [or] 4 more weeks at a minimum, and there’s no guarantee that they won’t extend it after that.

A: It’s just… it’s crazy. I mean, I’ve been drinking a lot more, I’ve been baking… I’m gonna come out of this looking like a potato.

E: With a bad haircut, I’m sure!

A: Yeah! Like, it’s just….

Z: Well, I will tell you as someone who is balding, this is really bad. Because I’m not at the stage yet in my life where I’m willing to go… like just straight “Bic it” and shave my head entirely. [So] I rely on a relatively regular haircut to keep the hair I do have looking relatively organized, and it’s getting bad. I fortunately was able to [get] a haircut shortly before the stay-at-home order came out, so we’re only about a week past my due date now, but in another month? You might see a lot fewer selfies on Instagram, that’s all I’m saying.

A: I [made a] big mistake and last weekend [and] was like, I don’t know man, I’m seeing like a lot of people go clean-shaven. I forgot what my face looked like without some hair on it, I’m gonna clean shave. And then I came out of the bathroom and my wife was like, “I don’t wanna look at you.” It was so bad, she’s like, “You look like you’re five, it’s not the look I’m going for. Like please don’t ever do this again.” And then I looked at myself in the mirror and I was like yeah, I really actually do hate it. Like my face doesn’t look good without some facial hair on it. It was weird.

E: Yeah, I told my husband that he has about a week left before I’m getting in there with the scissors and I’m just gonna have to do some work cause it’s starting to get pretty shaggy.

Z: Yeah, it’s rough.

A: I agree with you Zach, like a week before this all started like I went and got a haircut. And I was like, “cool, at least I got that haircut, ‘cause my hair will start getting long and then it starts to curl.” And so it’ll start to like…it’s just not a good look. So it’s good that we’re keeping it where it is. But uh yeah, I mean this thing, who knows, I mean… it’s just crazy, it’s just really crazy. But I thought we would take the opportunity to be at the four-week mark, to talk about… some ideas that have come out of not only the coverage that we’ve been doing on the site, but also some of the conversations we’ve been having in the “Covid Conversations” [podcast]. You know, mini-episodes that have been running every day. If you have been listening to those episodes, by the way, we’d love to know what you think. Drop us a line at podcast@vinepair.com, we’d love to hear sort of what your thoughts are. If there’s anyone that we haven’t spoken to that you think we should, [or] if you are someone you think we should speak to, also reach out. We’d love to talk to as many people as possible and get as large a picture of what’s happening in the total alcohol beverage industry as we can. But yeah, I mean we ran a piece this week – everyone’s gonna listen to this podcast Monday – about […] these historians, especially the one at Yale, whose name now slips my memory but I’m sure Erica you know it….

E: Um yes, but I’m trying to think of what her last name is though. Give me one second and I will tell you.

A: OK, cool. [The historian] has connected a lot of what happened after the 1918 pandemic and then the rise into the Roaring Twenties, as in innovation, etc. to potentially where we could be now. And then also we’ve had a lot of really great interviews where I think people have sort of said similar things. They wonder [if there] is going to be a behavioral change in terms of whether or not we start buying more alcohol online. Like, will people who have downloaded Drizly and Minibar for the first time keep them on their phones now and continue using them post-social distancing? I think Stephanie Gallo made a really good point, that their research shows that it takes 6 to 8 weeks for someone to start a new habit, right? So right now we’re at four weeks, if there’s something that someone started four weeks ago it’s only gonna take two more weeks potentially to lock them into that habit. Whether that be drinking wine at dinner every night now. You know I think what Mike said, the bartender from LA about restaurants in general learning more about what their license actually did allow that they never knew before, which I also thought was fascinating in that interview, is really interesting. So for us, I thought we’d have a conversation of like what behaviors do you think, now that we’re four weeks in, will be with us post-quarantine? We can have this conversation maybe again in four more weeks when we’re still in quarantine, but for now what behaviors do you think will probably still be with us even when we come out of all this?

E: I’ll jump in and [say] that professor who we we’re referring to [is] Jessica Specter; so she’s a Yale University professor, and what we were talking to her about is how the parallels between the 1918 flu pandemic and the Roaring Twenties, and this huge period of innovation that followed and cultural renaissance of sorts are actually intertwined in ways that are overlooked. So that is an article that we’ll be referring to probably as we’re discussing here some different ideas. You know, I think one of my biggest takeaways right now about how things will change from a liquor store/retail perspective is, you know there are so many people who before-hand they loved FreshDirect or Instacart or what have you, and that was just a regular convenience that was part of their life and I think a lot of them just didn’t know that they could do alcohol delivery in that way. But now that they do I think that it actually will lead to a huge change in the way that people interact with retail stores. So I think there’s a pretty big part of the population that may never set foot into a liquor store again and may just move onto online ordering completely.

Z: Yeah I certainly think that’s quite likely, and I think that the whole convenience that has been born out of this whole quarantine time really will be a thing that is a continued kind of motivation for a lot of people. So the idea that, you know in this period of time when you can only get, or for a lot of people you can only get things delivered to your door, or at least it’s considered unwise to go out to the store more than necessary, we’ve all gotten used to the groceries or whatever showing up at the doorstep. And while some people may enjoy the return to browsing and maybe in some other fields that will be the case, but I think with food and especially with drink you’re right Erica, I think a lot of people are just gonna say “I know what I want, why would I go to the store when I can place an order…” You know I think a lot of what we’re gonna see about it too is a lot of people moving to the sort of reservation mindset in general where you make a reservation for something to be delivered or maybe for you to go pick it up and it’s just waiting for you. Again, this idea that we don’t have to have…. you know, we have the technology now to kind of create all of this convenience and I just think few people are gonna wanna go back to a less convenient era.

A: I think you’re right. I think the other thing that’s really interesting is, unlike grocery delivery where you do have… I would say there’s a larger group of people, when you look at consumers of grocery or food compared to consumers of alcohol and I know we talked about this before, there’s a larger group of people who like in food going to the butcher, going to the produce market, having a conversation and picking out that tomato or picking that steak. But in terms of alcohol, we know based on research prior to Covid-19, the vast majority of casual wine, spirits, and beer consumers felt incredibly intimidated shopping for alcohol. And part of that intimidation was the interaction with the person at the store, right? But now, I think they’re realizing, “Oh, I don’t have to have that interaction at all,” right? So now, I can go online, I can do my own research, whether I read VinePair or I ask some friends, I can then look for that wine and see if it’s available digitally and get it delivered and it feels a lot more… you know I feel a lot more comfortable with it than being tripped up if I have that conversation with someone to say, “well I’m sorry I’m looking for this specific winery’s Merlot,” let’s say. And then the person says to me, “Oh, well we don’t have that Merlot, but we have this, we think you’ll like it as well,” and then you start getting really nervous like, will I like it? Do I trust this person? Do I trust their taste? Right? And I think we will see more people saying, this was just a hell of a lot easier and I avoided that interaction completely.

E: Yeah, and for drinks lovers like us I think that feels really sad…

A: It does.

E: One, because we love liquor and wine stores, but two, what about discovery? What about discovering new products? That, I think that is going to be a huge challenge for any sort of producers is, how do you now get the word out effectively if people are going this sort of convenience route, they’re ordering the same bourbon they like, they’re ordering the same Chardonnay they like, and they’re not really taking risks because no one is kind of giving them that hand sell?

Z: Ah! But see here’s where my additional idea comes in and I’m especially curious, Adam, about your thoughts on this because it ties into the music industry. So I think they’re a lot of people who when streaming audio, streaming music, came around said, “Oh, but you know if you can just listen to the same songs you already always loved, why will you ever discover anything new?” And what we found is that all these, you know, the streaming services created algorithms to sort of derive from your playlists and the things you like, suggestions – some of which are good, some of which are bad. And if you’re like me and have a small child and some of what you listen to on your playlist is kid’s music, you get a really, really fucking weird set of songs if you just play your daily/weekly mix. But, what I think you’re gonna see happen is, you’re going to see more synergy between let’s say the alcohol-producing companies and distribution companies and delivery services and potentially, and I’m not spoiling anything I don’t think, I don’t think that this is actually happening, but someone like VinePair. Where in the future you might be able to access the top 25 rosés list that VinePair’s putting out from whatever app and you can say “here are VinePair’s top 25 rosés, which one do you want? Here’s maybe even the write-up.” Now, I don’t know that that will happen but I think you’re gonna see more and more of this discovery come from people who are able to connect their own… whether they’re a journalist or a sommelier or a bartender or whomever, they are able to basically to create essentially a “drinks playlist,” or a drinks list or whatever you wanna call it, and instead of necessarily getting those recommendations from them in person, they’re able to send that out to an entire region, nation, whatever and say, “Hey, you like me, you follow me and every week I’m gonna recommend five wines.” And I think there’s a lot of potential for that and I think that’s one thing that we’re starting to see come out and I think you’re gonna see a hell of a lot more of it.

E: OK, but here’s my challenge. I have a challenge to this, which is: How is that different than James Suckling’s notes? Or anyone else’s notes that are already out there? That are then incorporated into some of these apps already? Like what’s the difference?

Z: I think the difference for me is you… with those things you’re getting about a… you’re getting a score and you’re basically getting that score highlighted on the platform. But I think this is a little more about following… like, what if you could follow essentially Lebron on whatever this app is? Or you could follow us, or someone else in between? And get recommendations and maybe there’s some sort of, you know commission-based system that encourages people who are trendsetters to have their presence on these platforms? I mean look, I’m just a sommelier and a dude who does a podcast, I don’t know all the back end of this, it may not be an idea that works. But I do think that, you know part of the difference is, is that you know with someone like a critic like James Suckling, I mean there are definitely people who just essentially do this already, they just take his scores and go to whatever you know wine shop or online retailer and this to me is just a little bit more streamlined and that may or may not be a thing that matters to people. But I think it’s one way to think about still having the opportunity for discovery. Because you know, as much as we said before that… and I think it’s true that there will be some people who will be even more locked into their already existing purchasing decisions, I think that those people were gonna do that no matter what. I think for people who like discovering new things, this is just gonna be a new way to do it and if you can marry that with convenience that’s actually maybe for a lot of people like Adam was saying, a lot less intimidating than walking into a wine shop and talking to someone you don’t know and getting their recommendations. You know, here you could follow someone who you like from either the field of alcohol or some other field and get their recommendations and you know, whether they’re better or worse than the guy or gal in the wine shop I can’t say but I do think this is something we’re gonna see.

A: So I think I agree with both of you partly. So I think Erica actually has a very valid point here, and I think that for the most part the people who do run for convenience, right? So the person I guess… that typical person I was thinking of, that like they just… they know they like bourbon or they know they like Merlots or Cabernets, etc. that’s really… they’re not totally into complete exploration, they just know what they like and they don’t like the buying practices now, I think they’re going to run to online and I think some of these bigger, more well-known wineries, distilleries, etc. are going to benefit. I think it’s going to be not great in the short-run, especially if we enter a recession, for the smaller brands in the beginning. But, I do think as well, there are going to be people in markets that loved to discover things that didn’t think they had a lot of variety, who have now recognized they can order from wine shops outside of their own state, who will keep doing that, and that will benefit some of these boutique producers. So… my sister-in-law, had the Pennsylvania state liquor authority not shut down their stores, she never would have realized she could order from Astor, cause she never would have, it never would have crossed her mind. Right? She knows that she can go down the block…

Z: That’s Astor Wine & Spirits – for those of you who don’t live in New York City.

A: Right, sorry. So now she knows she can, and Zach to your point, she does like the Staff Pick wines and she likes the notes the staff writes about the wines. She finds it more interesting, they also… the prices are better and I think she’ll continue to be an Astor customer.

E: Nice!

A: Because she didn’t have that in Pennsylvania, right? So she will but I think that someone else, you know maybe her next door neighbor wouldn’t do that. Right? She’s just gonna be like, well I realized I can still… I can just order bulk you know, I don’t know name-a-cult Napa Cab, right? I can just, I can order that and I’m just gonna keep ordering that and I’m not gonna explore. So I think you’re gonna see it sort of benefit both but I do think in the short term the more likely scenario or who sees the most benefit is gonna be what Erica’s saying. ‘Cause you’re seeing it now, right? You’re seeing most consumers like to run to these well-known producers. Run to these well-known craft brands and I wonder, you know… and at least for now that’s the majority of what you do find on a lot of these apps, right? If you go on Drizly or Minibar you’re not finding really great craft whiskey or really great small-production wines.

Z: Uh I think that depends a little bit where you are. I mean I think If you look at… a lot of it, ’cause I mean they partner with liquor stores and what not and wine shops and if you are… if they’re partnered in your market with a shop that stocks a lot of interesting stuff, like they happen to be in Seattle, then you can actually get, I mean, I was surprised looking at it, I can get stuff that’s actually really hard to find in a lot of liquor shops.

A: Really?

Z: Delivered here, yeah. Some more, a little bit esoteric Japanese whiskey and stuff like that. I mean it’s not cheap, but that stuff never is. But again it really just depends on where you are and there are… the selection isn’t always consistent and sometimes it’s really deep in one category and a little bit hit-or-miss in others, but again I think that’s where this idea of, you know, if these things become more connected to people and entities that would promote discovery and learning about new product, there might be impetus for some of these apps or a new app that doesn’t exist or whatever to tap into that market. Because well, you’re right, obviously the big brands are gonna dominate and they’ve dominated, they dominated the pre-Covid landscape too, you know they’re on every grocery store shelf and all that. They’re gonna continue to dominate, but we’re… I think we’re mostly interested in talking about some other subset of consumers for the most part because they’re the ones whose shift from in-person purchasing to online purchasing is going to be impactful to yeah, these small brands. And if they are able to continue to discover and find new things and just move that online I think a lot of them are gonna appreciate the convenience.

A: I agree. So OK, let’s keep it rolling here, cause I think we’ve beaten the online ordering to death for now. One of the things I’m gonna be very curious to see and I was talking to Josh about this a week in, is Josh… you know my co-founder at VinePair, was walking through the park with his dog in Madison Square Park in Manhattan and saw this couple sitting on a bench drinking to-go Dirty Martinis they had bought from The Smith. And he basically was the first one to say this, he was like, “There’s no way we’re puttin’ this back in the bottle.” Like people have now realized they can go and buy really great cocktails from some of their favorite restaurants, but it’s a beautiful day and they don’t want to sit in the dark bar and drink at the restaurant and they were out at the park with their dogs, at the dog run drinking these Dirty Martinis. And I do think you’re gonna see, not all states, but some states especially in the short term because we’re gonna need to help these places continue to survive, just really kind of start pushing the to-go cocktails. What do you guys think?

E: I totally agree. Yeah I mean I think that, I mean look at… look at New York City restaurants, there’s something like a million in the service industry in New York City alone that are out of jobs. So when you see these restaurants and bars really start up full force I think there will be so much pressure on the local and state governments to help support them in any way possible. To help re-invigorate these businesses. And I think what that looks like is some standalone, ready-to-go offshoots, some delivery offshoots, pick-up offshoots from some of these bars and restaurants. You know in the article we just did about the 1918 pandemic and the Roaring Twenties, one of the interesting points that Derek Brown said to us was, you know there is actually an innovative new concept called Ready to Drink in Shanghai that Daniel An, who is a really well known Shanghai bar owner, that he started recently. And he calls it a mix between a Cinnabon and a cocktail bar. Which serves up these pretty packaged cocktails, so like a Shanghai Mule or a Coffee Negroni and also fruit juices that people can spike with like jalapeño-infused tequila, things like that. And that these are all ready-to-go, sort of… it’s a ready-to-go concept, that’s the entire concept. And so I think that type of thing may be something that we see as people, as you know, establishments are thinking like “hey, maybe I can’t just only be on-premise moving forward.”

Z: For sure, and I think actually there’s two interesting parts to what Adam was describing and what you were following up on, Erica. One of them is this thought of to-go cocktails and sort of a brand around them and we… Adam and I did a podcast a while back about canned cocktails. And at that point we were talking about them as products that were made in essentially, you know, some sort of factory-type setting and what I wonder is if we’re gonna see a rise of essentially commissary bars. So instead of a commissary kitchen where you have a catering operation or even a sort of fancy take-out operation, I wonder if we’re gonna see sort of commissary bars or even shared bar spaces open. Because I do think that one thing that’s gonna be interesting especially in the short to medium term after these social-distancing and really extreme quarantines are over, is I think people are gonna be a little bit hesitant to go back into bars. I think you’re gonna see people not necessarily wanting to be in crowded spaces with strangers, but they’re gonna want really good cocktails as they do now. And I think you’re gonna see some existing bars, and maybe some new ones, open in a space that’s really mostly dedicated to cocktail production as opposed to cocktail service. And I think if you can, you know especially introduce some of the technological innovations that you’re seeing whether… that Adam talks about in his upcoming interview with Mike Capoferri from Thunderbolt in Los Angeles, like vacuum-sealed cocktails, canning cocktails on site, those kinds of things are super interesting to me and if you have a commissary bar, essentially that can deliver, or you know produce and deliver or send out for delivery these kinds of drinks, I think that’s a way forward for some of this industry, especially for this medium-term period where I think getting people to go back in closed spaces is tough.

A: Yeah.

Z: The other thing I wanna mention real quick is I also think we are going to have to reconsider our public drinking laws.

A: Completely.

Z: And open container laws in most of the country.

A: Completely.

Z: Because I mean it’s nice in Seattle right now, and my wife and son and I were walking through the local park with our dog a couple of nights ago and there were probably 15 groups of people scattered throughout the park and all of them were drinking.

A: Oh yeah

Z: And you know that to some extent happened anyhow, but it was much more in the open than it had been you know… not, you know, people were just drinking straight out of cans of beer, bottles… they had bottles of wine out, you know no one was trying to hide it and I just think we’re gonna see, in the same way that there was, you know, to reference this piece that was written last week, in the same that there was a lot of social permissiveness that came out of the real, you know, sort of “we-may-all-die-anyhow”-sense of 1918, you know I think for a lot of us it’s gonna be like “well, why is drinking a beer in a park actually that big a deal?” Like does it… I mean, they do it all over Europe, no one… and it’s not an issue there. You know they do it in parts of this country and it’s not mostly an issue, like why shouldn’t I be able to have a glass of wine or a beer or whatever in public as long as I’m not making a scene?

A: Completely

E: Totally

A: Right and I mean I think that that’s… you know basically what you’re saying which could be really interesting to see is like so you know in my neighborhood of Fort Greene there’s this beautiful park, Fort Greene Park and you… there are a few sort of smaller spaces on the park that as of right now I think you know… it’s like a tiny coffee shop of something. You could easily see if the laws loosen, a cocktail bar open, in which the majority of their business is selling those cocktails to-go for people to drink in the park.

E: Yeah

A: You know? And you see that… you see that all over Europe. You have not seen that here until this last month. And you’re right, I mean the amount of people that I see in the park on Friday and Saturday and Sunday afternoons who socially distancing are with their significant other or their family or whatever and they are having a bottle of wine and it’s pretty brazenly open has changed dramatically in the last four weeks. Everyone used to do it but very discreetly, now I think everyone’s just like “Fuck it”.

E: Yeah, genies’ out of the bottle, I don’t think it’s going back.

A: I don’t either. What else do you guys think is gonna stay post-this Corona quarantine.

Z: So this is not necessarily about the production side, so this is more personal habit side, but I do wonder as people who are not necessarily ordering to-go cocktails or they’re in a place where that’s still not doable, as it is in some states and what not, I wonder if you know this is gonna be a sort of return to the era… we’re gonna see a return to the era of the cocktail party. And not that those didn’t happen previously, but again to make another connection to the piece that ran on VinePair, you know it wasn’t just speakeasies but in part because of Prohibition, you know drinking was basically either in private, either in, you know, sort of these underground clubs, or in people’s homes if you could kind of, you know, hide it well enough I guess, I don’t know how much scrutiny was paid to people who… what they were doing in their own home. But I do think that you know if people are coming out of this period of quarantine having, you know, learned a lot about how to make even relatively straightforward drinks like a Manhattan, which I think a lot of people like Manhattans but a surprising number maybe didn’t know how to make them until the last few weeks. I do think you’re going to see that sort of return to like, “Oh well, you know, maybe we don’t wanna go out to a bar, but we do wanna drink with friends, and we’re gonna have them over and you know what? We’re gonna make cocktails.” You know, the way that American entertaining really functioned in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, right? People came over and drank cocktails. They didn’t drink wine, for the most part, you know, maybe if they were having dinner. And I do think we might see a return to the cocktail party as a real thing. And I’m not sure if I’m super excited about that or not, it’s pretty easy to get real wasted at a cocktail party, but I think that’s something that will stick around is the sort of home bartending that had largely gone away in a lot of places.

E: Yeah, I mean I think that if you look at the traffic on our site, for example, a lot of the most popular articles are about those cocktail projects that we’ve been discussing, you know ways to up your cocktail game so… people are investing a lot of time in this. I mean, they’ve got a lot of time, what else are they gonna do, you know? There’s only so much Netflix you can watch. I think this… they’re going to have all these new skills and they’re gonna want to share those like in real life with their friends. So I do agree that it’s going to come back and I do also have that same hesitation as you do, which is all I want to see them do right now is go to bars and restaurants. I mean I think one of the interesting points in the article that a social psychologist made was: You know, if we take the gas off this social distancing and we go back to bars and restaurants too quickly and then there’s a second wave of infections and a second spike, then people actually may be in the long term more reluctant to go back to bars and restaurant with the frequency that they did before. And that is one of the things that concerns me greatly right now.

A: Right, will we see an immediate run back and then all of a sudden boom, you know… I think it could be bad.

Z: Well and I think that’s why we need to be kind of cautious. I know, like you said, I mean as a person who at least normally works in restaurants on this podcast I definitely, you know, part of me wants to see people go back to the way things were right away. But I agree very much with that concern that if there’s sort of too rapid a retreat from social distancing and people are suddenly like “Ah, whatever!” and we get another wave of this that’s as bad or even nearly as bad or worse… I yeah, I think the long-term effects will be much, much, much harder on the industry than if we come back slowly, we sort of say, “OK, we’ve gonna try and tip-toe our way back in and maybe we open with tables further spaced apart, maybe we don’t pack people into bars and nightclubs, maybe we just sort of say look we’re gonna tip-toe into this,” with the goal of getting back to a pre-Covid sort of normalcy in a year, as opposed to trying to do it in three months. That’s probably better long-term, although it’s hard to say.

A: Yeah, well so here’s the deal. This actually was brought up, a bunch of people were talking about this on this group chain of a bunch of like CEOs and things like that, and it’s a very interesting thing to puzzle. And that is… and it is why I think ultimately the at-home cocktail party will be the norm for the next year. So unless this comes down from the federal government, which we don’t know if it will, if we… when we re-open, if Zach, you open a restaurant and I go to your restaurant in the next few months and I get sick, are you liable? Uh, what if it’s someone who was on your kitchen crew? Or what if it was one of your wait staff or what if it was a somm? Or what if it was just a random customer? But you just didn’t know because they didn’t present symptoms? But then I get sick and then I spread it. Or someone has a big event. Or there’s a huge concert and someone gets sick? And these are the conversations people are having right now because no one knows.

Z: Yeah.

A: Right? Like we don’t know and we don’t know what everyone’s liability is going to be and the insurance industry has not been super helpful recently, as we all know.

Z: Shocking!

A: Right, but so… but so until we also understand that I think there’s gonna be a lot of trepidation amongst both business owners and consumers to go back and forth because you kind of need to know, OK., well what does happen? Like is it on me? Are we basically saying well, you’re putting yourself at risk? ‘Cause if you’re doing that, then you’re basically saying to restauranteurs, only people that are confident and feeling comfortable are gonna come to you, because we basically told them as a society – it’s at your own risk. Like when we say you can swim at a beach without a lifeguard. Or are we saying no, it’s gonna be on the establishment, they have to implement social-distancing measures and they have to be checking the customers and if they don’t, it’s on them. And then what risk are they taking on? So it’s gonna be really crazy to see, which is why like at least at a… you know a home gathering like, unless you have a lot of asshole friends, if someone shows up at your house and gets sick, they’re probably gonna be less likely to go after you…

E: And how are they gonna know where they got it anyway?

A: Exactly

E: I mean that’s just… that’s the craziness of it.

Z: Well, and I think the other part is, the challenge for bars and restaurants in particular is, it’s not, it’s like it’s an environment where you can really easily social distance, you know? You can’t wear a mask while you drink a cocktail and it’s hard to imagine a lot of New York City restaurants with tables 6 or 8 feet apart. You know, that’s… most of them could only fit 3 tables if that were the case and so I think that it is really… yeah, you’re right. The liability side is something I’m not qualified to talk about other than that yes, it is definitely a conversation that’s come up even with, you know, sort of small operators that I’ve talked to. They just… no one knows and everyone is gonna be eager on the one hand, because they wanna get back to what they love to do and what they do to make money and all that, but on the other hand like there’s still so many pieces to this that we don’t understand and that’s why I think for the purposes of this conversation we really focused on delivery, at-home, non-shared space changes that have come about and that may persist for a while if not forever.

E: And you know, I think the last thing is… I just, it’s kind of like the PS of this whole thing. When I think about those socially distanced tables at restaurants and bars, there is just no way. Margins are thin enough when you’ve got people packed in like sardines, like how is that even going to work? There’s just so many questions right now, I feel like this is just going to take so many months, potentially years just to untangle new business models and really understand how to find a path forward for on-premise. OK, we gotta leave this on a happy note guys.

A: I think the happy note is that, I think a lot of these laws that we’ve all wondered forever now whether they would ever loosen, will. And I think that’s good ultimately for consumers. I think consumers recognizing that….

Z: And for producers.

A: Yeah, it’s good for everybody, right? Us realizing that we can buy that Cru Beaujolais even if we live in a state in which we don’t have a wine store that would sell it, is awesome. Us realizing that, you know, we can now go out in a park and hopefully have a really great cocktail or bottle of wine or a beer without thinking that we’re breaking a law that everyone breaks anyways unless you’re a person of color or another minority, right? Like we’re just gonna let everyone finally do that, is awesome. And I think that you know, if we can loosen up these laws as well to allow us to drink really great drinks made by really… you know, by amazing professionals, either at their location or somewhere else, is a very good thing. And hopefully all of that stuff will happen.

E: Yeah, hey, we’ll take silver linings anywhere we can find them right now.

A: Exactly, exactly. Well as always, we appreciate everyone who tunes in every week to listen to the podcast and all the Corona Conversations that we’ve been having over the last four weeks. Again, please drop us a line podcast@vinepair.com if you’ve got a subject you want us to talk about, shoot us an idea. Someone we need to interview, please let us know. And as always please give us a review, it really helps people discover the show whether you’re listening to us on iTunes, where most of you are listening, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever else it is that you get your podcasts. And Zach, Erica, always a pleasure, I’ll talk to you again next week.

E: Thanks!

Z: Sounds great.

A: Thanks so much for listening to the VinePair podcast. If you enjoy listening to us every week please leave us a review or rating on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts, it really helps everyone else discover the show. And now for the credits:

VinePair is produced and hosted by Zach Geballe, Erica Duecy, and me: Adam Teeter. Our engineer is Nick Patri and Keith Beavers. I’d also like to give a special shout out to my VinePair co-founder Josh Malin and the rest of the VinePair team for their support. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll see you again right here next week.

The article VinePair Podcast: Which Covid-Caused Changes to Drinks Culture Will Last? appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/vinepair-podcast-post-covid-changes/ source https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/615387153434820608

[johnboothus]

VinePair Podcast: Which Covid-Caused Changes to Drinks Culture Will Last?

The Covid-19 crisis is changing the drinks industry in profound and complicated ways, from driving huge growth in online ordering and delivery platforms, to relaxing laws regarding the sales of alcohol and normalizing public drinking in parks and city streets. Some historians speculate that society will come out of this period with a new outlook and perhaps even a cultural renaissance, as was the case after the 1918 flu epidemic. But at a minimum it seems likely that some of these sudden changes will linger on even after social distancing and isolation rules have been relaxed.

That’s the topic for this week’s VinePair podcast, where Adam, Erica, and Zach discuss which changes to the world of alcohol they expect to stick around, and what further changes might be coming in the months ahead.

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Adam: From Brooklyn, New York, I’m Adam Teeter.

Erica: From Connecticut, I’m Erica Duecy.

Zach: And in Seattle, Washington, I’m Zach Geballe.

A: And this is the VinePair podcast. Guys what is up? It’s four weeks in!

Z: Wow!

E: That’s hard to believe.

A: Wow, four weeks… I don’t think anyone thought this was gonna be lasting four weeks.

E: And it may be going for many more weeks.

A: Wow!

Z: I mean, we have a stay-at-home order in Washington State through at least May 4th, so we’ve got basically 3 [or] 4 more weeks at a minimum, and there’s no guarantee that they won’t extend it after that.

A: It’s just… it’s crazy. I mean, I’ve been drinking a lot more, I’ve been baking… I’m gonna come out of this looking like a potato.

E: With a bad haircut, I’m sure!

A: Yeah! Like, it’s just….

Z: Well, I will tell you as someone who is balding, this is really bad. Because I’m not at the stage yet in my life where I’m willing to go… like just straight “Bic it” and shave my head entirely. [So] I rely on a relatively regular haircut to keep the hair I do have looking relatively organized, and it’s getting bad. I fortunately was able to [get] a haircut shortly before the stay-at-home order came out, so we’re only about a week past my due date now, but in another month? You might see a lot fewer selfies on Instagram, that’s all I’m saying.

A: I [made a] big mistake and last weekend [and] was like, I don’t know man, I’m seeing like a lot of people go clean-shaven. I forgot what my face looked like without some hair on it, I’m gonna clean shave. And then I came out of the bathroom and my wife was like, “I don’t wanna look at you.” It was so bad, she’s like, “You look like you’re five, it’s not the look I’m going for. Like please don’t ever do this again.” And then I looked at myself in the mirror and I was like yeah, I really actually do hate it. Like my face doesn’t look good without some facial hair on it. It was weird.

E: Yeah, I told my husband that he has about a week left before I’m getting in there with the scissors and I’m just gonna have to do some work cause it’s starting to get pretty shaggy.

Z: Yeah, it’s rough.

A: I agree with you Zach, like a week before this all started like I went and got a haircut. And I was like, “cool, at least I got that haircut, ‘cause my hair will start getting long and then it starts to curl.” And so it’ll start to like…it’s just not a good look. So it’s good that we’re keeping it where it is. But uh yeah, I mean this thing, who knows, I mean… it’s just crazy, it’s just really crazy. But I thought we would take the opportunity to be at the four-week mark, to talk about… some ideas that have come out of not only the coverage that we’ve been doing on the site, but also some of the conversations we’ve been having in the “Covid Conversations” [podcast]. You know, mini-episodes that have been running every day. If you have been listening to those episodes, by the way, we’d love to know what you think. Drop us a line at podcast@vinepair.com, we’d love to hear sort of what your thoughts are. If there’s anyone that we haven’t spoken to that you think we should, [or] if you are someone you think we should speak to, also reach out. We’d love to talk to as many people as possible and get as large a picture of what’s happening in the total alcohol beverage industry as we can. But yeah, I mean we ran a piece this week – everyone’s gonna listen to this podcast Monday – about […] these historians, especially the one at Yale, whose name now slips my memory but I’m sure Erica you know it….

E: Um yes, but I’m trying to think of what her last name is though. Give me one second and I will tell you.

A: OK, cool. [The historian] has connected a lot of what happened after the 1918 pandemic and then the rise into the Roaring Twenties, as in innovation, etc. to potentially where we could be now. And then also we’ve had a lot of really great interviews where I think people have sort of said similar things. They wonder [if there] is going to be a behavioral change in terms of whether or not we start buying more alcohol online. Like, will people who have downloaded Drizly and Minibar for the first time keep them on their phones now and continue using them post-social distancing? I think Stephanie Gallo made a really good point, that their research shows that it takes 6 to 8 weeks for someone to start a new habit, right? So right now we’re at four weeks, if there’s something that someone started four weeks ago it’s only gonna take two more weeks potentially to lock them into that habit. Whether that be drinking wine at dinner every night now. You know I think what Mike said, the bartender from LA about restaurants in general learning more about what their license actually did allow that they never knew before, which I also thought was fascinating in that interview, is really interesting. So for us, I thought we’d have a conversation of like what behaviors do you think, now that we’re four weeks in, will be with us post-quarantine? We can have this conversation maybe again in four more weeks when we’re still in quarantine, but for now what behaviors do you think will probably still be with us even when we come out of all this?

E: I’ll jump in and [say] that professor who we we’re referring to [is] Jessica Specter; so she’s a Yale University professor, and what we were talking to her about is how the parallels between the 1918 flu pandemic and the Roaring Twenties, and this huge period of innovation that followed and cultural renaissance of sorts are actually intertwined in ways that are overlooked. So that is an article that we’ll be referring to probably as we’re discussing here some different ideas. You know, I think one of my biggest takeaways right now about how things will change from a liquor store/retail perspective is, you know there are so many people who before-hand they loved FreshDirect or Instacart or what have you, and that was just a regular convenience that was part of their life and I think a lot of them just didn’t know that they could do alcohol delivery in that way. But now that they do I think that it actually will lead to a huge change in the way that people interact with retail stores. So I think there’s a pretty big part of the population that may never set foot into a liquor store again and may just move onto online ordering completely.

Z: Yeah I certainly think that’s quite likely, and I think that the whole convenience that has been born out of this whole quarantine time really will be a thing that is a continued kind of motivation for a lot of people. So the idea that, you know in this period of time when you can only get, or for a lot of people you can only get things delivered to your door, or at least it’s considered unwise to go out to the store more than necessary, we’ve all gotten used to the groceries or whatever showing up at the doorstep. And while some people may enjoy the return to browsing and maybe in some other fields that will be the case, but I think with food and especially with drink you’re right Erica, I think a lot of people are just gonna say “I know what I want, why would I go to the store when I can place an order…” You know I think a lot of what we’re gonna see about it too is a lot of people moving to the sort of reservation mindset in general where you make a reservation for something to be delivered or maybe for you to go pick it up and it’s just waiting for you. Again, this idea that we don’t have to have…. you know, we have the technology now to kind of create all of this convenience and I just think few people are gonna wanna go back to a less convenient era.

A: I think you’re right. I think the other thing that’s really interesting is, unlike grocery delivery where you do have… I would say there’s a larger group of people, when you look at consumers of grocery or food compared to consumers of alcohol and I know we talked about this before, there’s a larger group of people who like in food going to the butcher, going to the produce market, having a conversation and picking out that tomato or picking that steak. But in terms of alcohol, we know based on research prior to Covid-19, the vast majority of casual wine, spirits, and beer consumers felt incredibly intimidated shopping for alcohol. And part of that intimidation was the interaction with the person at the store, right? But now, I think they’re realizing, “Oh, I don’t have to have that interaction at all,” right? So now, I can go online, I can do my own research, whether I read VinePair or I ask some friends, I can then look for that wine and see if it’s available digitally and get it delivered and it feels a lot more… you know I feel a lot more comfortable with it than being tripped up if I have that conversation with someone to say, “well I’m sorry I’m looking for this specific winery’s Merlot,” let’s say. And then the person says to me, “Oh, well we don’t have that Merlot, but we have this, we think you’ll like it as well,” and then you start getting really nervous like, will I like it? Do I trust this person? Do I trust their taste? Right? And I think we will see more people saying, this was just a hell of a lot easier and I avoided that interaction completely.

E: Yeah, and for drinks lovers like us I think that feels really sad…

A: It does.

E: One, because we love liquor and wine stores, but two, what about discovery? What about discovering new products? That, I think that is going to be a huge challenge for any sort of producers is, how do you now get the word out effectively if people are going this sort of convenience route, they’re ordering the same bourbon they like, they’re ordering the same Chardonnay they like, and they’re not really taking risks because no one is kind of giving them that hand sell?

Z: Ah! But see here’s where my additional idea comes in and I’m especially curious, Adam, about your thoughts on this because it ties into the music industry. So I think they’re a lot of people who when streaming audio, streaming music, came around said, “Oh, but you know if you can just listen to the same songs you already always loved, why will you ever discover anything new?” And what we found is that all these, you know, the streaming services created algorithms to sort of derive from your playlists and the things you like, suggestions – some of which are good, some of which are bad. And if you’re like me and have a small child and some of what you listen to on your playlist is kid’s music, you get a really, really fucking weird set of songs if you just play your daily/weekly mix. But, what I think you’re gonna see happen is, you’re going to see more synergy between let’s say the alcohol-producing companies and distribution companies and delivery services and potentially, and I’m not spoiling anything I don’t think, I don’t think that this is actually happening, but someone like VinePair. Where in the future you might be able to access the top 25 rosés list that VinePair’s putting out from whatever app and you can say “here are VinePair’s top 25 rosés, which one do you want? Here’s maybe even the write-up.” Now, I don’t know that that will happen but I think you’re gonna see more and more of this discovery come from people who are able to connect their own… whether they’re a journalist or a sommelier or a bartender or whomever, they are able to basically to create essentially a “drinks playlist,” or a drinks list or whatever you wanna call it, and instead of necessarily getting those recommendations from them in person, they’re able to send that out to an entire region, nation, whatever and say, “Hey, you like me, you follow me and every week I’m gonna recommend five wines.” And I think there’s a lot of potential for that and I think that’s one thing that we’re starting to see come out and I think you’re gonna see a hell of a lot more of it.

E: OK, but here’s my challenge. I have a challenge to this, which is: How is that different than James Suckling’s notes? Or anyone else’s notes that are already out there? That are then incorporated into some of these apps already? Like what’s the difference?

Z: I think the difference for me is you… with those things you’re getting about a… you’re getting a score and you’re basically getting that score highlighted on the platform. But I think this is a little more about following… like, what if you could follow essentially Lebron on whatever this app is? Or you could follow us, or someone else in between? And get recommendations and maybe there’s some sort of, you know commission-based system that encourages people who are trendsetters to have their presence on these platforms? I mean look, I’m just a sommelier and a dude who does a podcast, I don’t know all the back end of this, it may not be an idea that works. But I do think that, you know part of the difference is, is that you know with someone like a critic like James Suckling, I mean there are definitely people who just essentially do this already, they just take his scores and go to whatever you know wine shop or online retailer and this to me is just a little bit more streamlined and that may or may not be a thing that matters to people. But I think it’s one way to think about still having the opportunity for discovery. Because you know, as much as we said before that… and I think it’s true that there will be some people who will be even more locked into their already existing purchasing decisions, I think that those people were gonna do that no matter what. I think for people who like discovering new things, this is just gonna be a new way to do it and if you can marry that with convenience that’s actually maybe for a lot of people like Adam was saying, a lot less intimidating than walking into a wine shop and talking to someone you don’t know and getting their recommendations. You know, here you could follow someone who you like from either the field of alcohol or some other field and get their recommendations and you know, whether they’re better or worse than the guy or gal in the wine shop I can’t say but I do think this is something we’re gonna see.

A: So I think I agree with both of you partly. So I think Erica actually has a very valid point here, and I think that for the most part the people who do run for convenience, right? So the person I guess… that typical person I was thinking of, that like they just… they know they like bourbon or they know they like Merlots or Cabernets, etc. that’s really… they’re not totally into complete exploration, they just know what they like and they don’t like the buying practices now, I think they’re going to run to online and I think some of these bigger, more well-known wineries, distilleries, etc. are going to benefit. I think it’s going to be not great in the short-run, especially if we enter a recession, for the smaller brands in the beginning. But, I do think as well, there are going to be people in markets that loved to discover things that didn’t think they had a lot of variety, who have now recognized they can order from wine shops outside of their own state, who will keep doing that, and that will benefit some of these boutique producers. So… my sister-in-law, had the Pennsylvania state liquor authority not shut down their stores, she never would have realized she could order from Astor, cause she never would have, it never would have crossed her mind. Right? She knows that she can go down the block…

Z: That’s Astor Wine & Spirits – for those of you who don’t live in New York City.

A: Right, sorry. So now she knows she can, and Zach to your point, she does like the Staff Pick wines and she likes the notes the staff writes about the wines. She finds it more interesting, they also… the prices are better and I think she’ll continue to be an Astor customer.

E: Nice!

A: Because she didn’t have that in Pennsylvania, right? So she will but I think that someone else, you know maybe her next door neighbor wouldn’t do that. Right? She’s just gonna be like, well I realized I can still… I can just order bulk you know, I don’t know name-a-cult Napa Cab, right? I can just, I can order that and I’m just gonna keep ordering that and I’m not gonna explore. So I think you’re gonna see it sort of benefit both but I do think in the short term the more likely scenario or who sees the most benefit is gonna be what Erica’s saying. ‘Cause you’re seeing it now, right? You’re seeing most consumers like to run to these well-known producers. Run to these well-known craft brands and I wonder, you know… and at least for now that’s the majority of what you do find on a lot of these apps, right? If you go on Drizly or Minibar you’re not finding really great craft whiskey or really great small-production wines.

Z: Uh I think that depends a little bit where you are. I mean I think If you look at… a lot of it, ’cause I mean they partner with liquor stores and what not and wine shops and if you are… if they’re partnered in your market with a shop that stocks a lot of interesting stuff, like they happen to be in Seattle, then you can actually get, I mean, I was surprised looking at it, I can get stuff that’s actually really hard to find in a lot of liquor shops.

A: Really?

Z: Delivered here, yeah. Some more, a little bit esoteric Japanese whiskey and stuff like that. I mean it’s not cheap, but that stuff never is. But again it really just depends on where you are and there are… the selection isn’t always consistent and sometimes it’s really deep in one category and a little bit hit-or-miss in others, but again I think that’s where this idea of, you know, if these things become more connected to people and entities that would promote discovery and learning about new product, there might be impetus for some of these apps or a new app that doesn’t exist or whatever to tap into that market. Because well, you’re right, obviously the big brands are gonna dominate and they’ve dominated, they dominated the pre-Covid landscape too, you know they’re on every grocery store shelf and all that. They’re gonna continue to dominate, but we’re… I think we’re mostly interested in talking about some other subset of consumers for the most part because they’re the ones whose shift from in-person purchasing to online purchasing is going to be impactful to yeah, these small brands. And if they are able to continue to discover and find new things and just move that online I think a lot of them are gonna appreciate the convenience.

A: I agree. So OK, let’s keep it rolling here, cause I think we’ve beaten the online ordering to death for now. One of the things I’m gonna be very curious to see and I was talking to Josh about this a week in, is Josh… you know my co-founder at VinePair, was walking through the park with his dog in Madison Square Park in Manhattan and saw this couple sitting on a bench drinking to-go Dirty Martinis they had bought from The Smith. And he basically was the first one to say this, he was like, “There’s no way we’re puttin’ this back in the bottle.” Like people have now realized they can go and buy really great cocktails from some of their favorite restaurants, but it’s a beautiful day and they don’t want to sit in the dark bar and drink at the restaurant and they were out at the park with their dogs, at the dog run drinking these Dirty Martinis. And I do think you’re gonna see, not all states, but some states especially in the short term because we’re gonna need to help these places continue to survive, just really kind of start pushing the to-go cocktails. What do you guys think?

E: I totally agree. Yeah I mean I think that, I mean look at… look at New York City restaurants, there’s something like a million in the service industry in New York City alone that are out of jobs. So when you see these restaurants and bars really start up full force I think there will be so much pressure on the local and state governments to help support them in any way possible. To help re-invigorate these businesses. And I think what that looks like is some standalone, ready-to-go offshoots, some delivery offshoots, pick-up offshoots from some of these bars and restaurants. You know in the article we just did about the 1918 pandemic and the Roaring Twenties, one of the interesting points that Derek Brown said to us was, you know there is actually an innovative new concept called Ready to Drink in Shanghai that Daniel An, who is a really well known Shanghai bar owner, that he started recently. And he calls it a mix between a Cinnabon and a cocktail bar. Which serves up these pretty packaged cocktails, so like a Shanghai Mule or a Coffee Negroni and also fruit juices that people can spike with like jalapeño-infused tequila, things like that. And that these are all ready-to-go, sort of… it’s a ready-to-go concept, that’s the entire concept. And so I think that type of thing may be something that we see as people, as you know, establishments are thinking like “hey, maybe I can’t just only be on-premise moving forward.”

Z: For sure, and I think actually there’s two interesting parts to what Adam was describing and what you were following up on, Erica. One of them is this thought of to-go cocktails and sort of a brand around them and we… Adam and I did a podcast a while back about canned cocktails. And at that point we were talking about them as products that were made in essentially, you know, some sort of factory-type setting and what I wonder is if we’re gonna see a rise of essentially commissary bars. So instead of a commissary kitchen where you have a catering operation or even a sort of fancy take-out operation, I wonder if we’re gonna see sort of commissary bars or even shared bar spaces open. Because I do think that one thing that’s gonna be interesting especially in the short to medium term after these social-distancing and really extreme quarantines are over, is I think people are gonna be a little bit hesitant to go back into bars. I think you’re gonna see people not necessarily wanting to be in crowded spaces with strangers, but they’re gonna want really good cocktails as they do now. And I think you’re gonna see some existing bars, and maybe some new ones, open in a space that’s really mostly dedicated to cocktail production as opposed to cocktail service. And I think if you can, you know especially introduce some of the technological innovations that you’re seeing whether… that Adam talks about in his upcoming interview with Mike Capoferri from Thunderbolt in Los Angeles, like vacuum-sealed cocktails, canning cocktails on site, those kinds of things are super interesting to me and if you have a commissary bar, essentially that can deliver, or you know produce and deliver or send out for delivery these kinds of drinks, I think that’s a way forward for some of this industry, especially for this medium-term period where I think getting people to go back in closed spaces is tough.

A: Yeah.

Z: The other thing I wanna mention real quick is I also think we are going to have to reconsider our public drinking laws.

A: Completely.

Z: And open container laws in most of the country.

A: Completely.

Z: Because I mean it’s nice in Seattle right now, and my wife and son and I were walking through the local park with our dog a couple of nights ago and there were probably 15 groups of people scattered throughout the park and all of them were drinking.

A: Oh yeah

Z: And you know that to some extent happened anyhow, but it was much more in the open than it had been you know… not, you know, people were just drinking straight out of cans of beer, bottles… they had bottles of wine out, you know no one was trying to hide it and I just think we’re gonna see, in the same way that there was, you know, to reference this piece that was written last week, in the same that there was a lot of social permissiveness that came out of the real, you know, sort of “we-may-all-die-anyhow”-sense of 1918, you know I think for a lot of us it’s gonna be like “well, why is drinking a beer in a park actually that big a deal?” Like does it… I mean, they do it all over Europe, no one… and it’s not an issue there. You know they do it in parts of this country and it’s not mostly an issue, like why shouldn’t I be able to have a glass of wine or a beer or whatever in public as long as I’m not making a scene?

A: Completely

E: Totally

A: Right and I mean I think that that’s… you know basically what you’re saying which could be really interesting to see is like so you know in my neighborhood of Fort Greene there’s this beautiful park, Fort Greene Park and you… there are a few sort of smaller spaces on the park that as of right now I think you know… it’s like a tiny coffee shop of something. You could easily see if the laws loosen, a cocktail bar open, in which the majority of their business is selling those cocktails to-go for people to drink in the park.

E: Yeah

A: You know? And you see that… you see that all over Europe. You have not seen that here until this last month. And you’re right, I mean the amount of people that I see in the park on Friday and Saturday and Sunday afternoons who socially distancing are with their significant other or their family or whatever and they are having a bottle of wine and it’s pretty brazenly open has changed dramatically in the last four weeks. Everyone used to do it but very discreetly, now I think everyone’s just like “Fuck it”.

E: Yeah, genies’ out of the bottle, I don’t think it’s going back.

A: I don’t either. What else do you guys think is gonna stay post-this Corona quarantine.

Z: So this is not necessarily about the production side, so this is more personal habit side, but I do wonder as people who are not necessarily ordering to-go cocktails or they’re in a place where that’s still not doable, as it is in some states and what not, I wonder if you know this is gonna be a sort of return to the era… we’re gonna see a return to the era of the cocktail party. And not that those didn’t happen previously, but again to make another connection to the piece that ran on VinePair, you know it wasn’t just speakeasies but in part because of Prohibition, you know drinking was basically either in private, either in, you know, sort of these underground clubs, or in people’s homes if you could kind of, you know, hide it well enough I guess, I don’t know how much scrutiny was paid to people who… what they were doing in their own home. But I do think that you know if people are coming out of this period of quarantine having, you know, learned a lot about how to make even relatively straightforward drinks like a Manhattan, which I think a lot of people like Manhattans but a surprising number maybe didn’t know how to make them until the last few weeks. I do think you’re going to see that sort of return to like, “Oh well, you know, maybe we don’t wanna go out to a bar, but we do wanna drink with friends, and we’re gonna have them over and you know what? We’re gonna make cocktails.” You know, the way that American entertaining really functioned in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, right? People came over and drank cocktails. They didn’t drink wine, for the most part, you know, maybe if they were having dinner. And I do think we might see a return to the cocktail party as a real thing. And I’m not sure if I’m super excited about that or not, it’s pretty easy to get real wasted at a cocktail party, but I think that’s something that will stick around is the sort of home bartending that had largely gone away in a lot of places.

E: Yeah, I mean I think that if you look at the traffic on our site, for example, a lot of the most popular articles are about those cocktail projects that we’ve been discussing, you know ways to up your cocktail game so… people are investing a lot of time in this. I mean, they’ve got a lot of time, what else are they gonna do, you know? There’s only so much Netflix you can watch. I think this… they’re going to have all these new skills and they’re gonna want to share those like in real life with their friends. So I do agree that it’s going to come back and I do also have that same hesitation as you do, which is all I want to see them do right now is go to bars and restaurants. I mean I think one of the interesting points in the article that a social psychologist made was: You know, if we take the gas off this social distancing and we go back to bars and restaurants too quickly and then there’s a second wave of infections and a second spike, then people actually may be in the long term more reluctant to go back to bars and restaurant with the frequency that they did before. And that is one of the things that concerns me greatly right now.

A: Right, will we see an immediate run back and then all of a sudden boom, you know… I think it could be bad.

Z: Well and I think that’s why we need to be kind of cautious. I know, like you said, I mean as a person who at least normally works in restaurants on this podcast I definitely, you know, part of me wants to see people go back to the way things were right away. But I agree very much with that concern that if there’s sort of too rapid a retreat from social distancing and people are suddenly like “Ah, whatever!” and we get another wave of this that’s as bad or even nearly as bad or worse… I yeah, I think the long-term effects will be much, much, much harder on the industry than if we come back slowly, we sort of say, “OK, we’ve gonna try and tip-toe our way back in and maybe we open with tables further spaced apart, maybe we don’t pack people into bars and nightclubs, maybe we just sort of say look we’re gonna tip-toe into this,” with the goal of getting back to a pre-Covid sort of normalcy in a year, as opposed to trying to do it in three months. That’s probably better long-term, although it’s hard to say.

A: Yeah, well so here’s the deal. This actually was brought up, a bunch of people were talking about this on this group chain of a bunch of like CEOs and things like that, and it’s a very interesting thing to puzzle. And that is… and it is why I think ultimately the at-home cocktail party will be the norm for the next year. So unless this comes down from the federal government, which we don’t know if it will, if we… when we re-open, if Zach, you open a restaurant and I go to your restaurant in the next few months and I get sick, are you liable? Uh, what if it’s someone who was on your kitchen crew? Or what if it was one of your wait staff or what if it was a somm? Or what if it was just a random customer? But you just didn’t know because they didn’t present symptoms? But then I get sick and then I spread it. Or someone has a big event. Or there’s a huge concert and someone gets sick? And these are the conversations people are having right now because no one knows.

Z: Yeah.

A: Right? Like we don’t know and we don’t know what everyone’s liability is going to be and the insurance industry has not been super helpful recently, as we all know.

Z: Shocking!

A: Right, but so… but so until we also understand that I think there’s gonna be a lot of trepidation amongst both business owners and consumers to go back and forth because you kind of need to know, OK., well what does happen? Like is it on me? Are we basically saying well, you’re putting yourself at risk? ‘Cause if you’re doing that, then you’re basically saying to restauranteurs, only people that are confident and feeling comfortable are gonna come to you, because we basically told them as a society – it’s at your own risk. Like when we say you can swim at a beach without a lifeguard. Or are we saying no, it’s gonna be on the establishment, they have to implement social-distancing measures and they have to be checking the customers and if they don’t, it’s on them. And then what risk are they taking on? So it’s gonna be really crazy to see, which is why like at least at a… you know a home gathering like, unless you have a lot of asshole friends, if someone shows up at your house and gets sick, they’re probably gonna be less likely to go after you…

E: And how are they gonna know where they got it anyway?

A: Exactly

E: I mean that’s just… that’s the craziness of it.

Z: Well, and I think the other part is, the challenge for bars and restaurants in particular is, it’s not, it’s like it’s an environment where you can really easily social distance, you know? You can’t wear a mask while you drink a cocktail and it’s hard to imagine a lot of New York City restaurants with tables 6 or 8 feet apart. You know, that’s… most of them could only fit 3 tables if that were the case and so I think that it is really… yeah, you’re right. The liability side is something I’m not qualified to talk about other than that yes, it is definitely a conversation that’s come up even with, you know, sort of small operators that I’ve talked to. They just… no one knows and everyone is gonna be eager on the one hand, because they wanna get back to what they love to do and what they do to make money and all that, but on the other hand like there’s still so many pieces to this that we don’t understand and that’s why I think for the purposes of this conversation we really focused on delivery, at-home, non-shared space changes that have come about and that may persist for a while if not forever.

E: And you know, I think the last thing is… I just, it’s kind of like the PS of this whole thing. When I think about those socially distanced tables at restaurants and bars, there is just no way. Margins are thin enough when you’ve got people packed in like sardines, like how is that even going to work? There’s just so many questions right now, I feel like this is just going to take so many months, potentially years just to untangle new business models and really understand how to find a path forward for on-premise. OK, we gotta leave this on a happy note guys.

A: I think the happy note is that, I think a lot of these laws that we’ve all wondered forever now whether they would ever loosen, will. And I think that’s good ultimately for consumers. I think consumers recognizing that….

Z: And for producers.

A: Yeah, it’s good for everybody, right? Us realizing that we can buy that Cru Beaujolais even if we live in a state in which we don’t have a wine store that would sell it, is awesome. Us realizing that, you know, we can now go out in a park and hopefully have a really great cocktail or bottle of wine or a beer without thinking that we’re breaking a law that everyone breaks anyways unless you’re a person of color or another minority, right? Like we’re just gonna let everyone finally do that, is awesome. And I think that you know, if we can loosen up these laws as well to allow us to drink really great drinks made by really… you know, by amazing professionals, either at their location or somewhere else, is a very good thing. And hopefully all of that stuff will happen.

E: Yeah, hey, we’ll take silver linings anywhere we can find them right now.

A: Exactly, exactly. Well as always, we appreciate everyone who tunes in every week to listen to the podcast and all the Corona Conversations that we’ve been having over the last four weeks. Again, please drop us a line podcast@vinepair.com if you’ve got a subject you want us to talk about, shoot us an idea. Someone we need to interview, please let us know. And as always please give us a review, it really helps people discover the show whether you’re listening to us on iTunes, where most of you are listening, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever else it is that you get your podcasts. And Zach, Erica, always a pleasure, I’ll talk to you again next week.

E: Thanks!

Z: Sounds great.

A: Thanks so much for listening to the VinePair podcast. If you enjoy listening to us every week please leave us a review or rating on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts, it really helps everyone else discover the show. And now for the credits:

VinePair is produced and hosted by Zach Geballe, Erica Duecy, and me: Adam Teeter. Our engineer is Nick Patri and Keith Beavers. I’d also like to give a special shout out to my VinePair co-founder Josh Malin and the rest of the VinePair team for their support. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll see you again right here next week.

The article VinePair Podcast: Which Covid-Caused Changes to Drinks Culture Will Last? appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/vinepair-podcast-post-covid-changes/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/vinepair-podcast-which-covid-caused-changes-to-drinks-culture-will-last

[clericallyinsane]

bald mike warriors, FIGHT ON. Let's show our appreciation and love and support for bald mike by:

Sharing the bald mike official presidency picture

Editing other pictures of bald mike

Making bald mike support posts (fan art, fanfic, just posts supporting bald mike)

Debating the healthy contribution bald mike will bring to our fandom

Fighting the hate

We can do this guys! Believe in the power of bald mike and all will be alright.

#baldmike2025

[will80sbyers]

I'm seeing a pattern here....

[mst3kproject]

1003: Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders – Part I

Before I sought it out to do this review, I had never seen Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders in any format but the MST3K episode, and even that I'd only seen once.  At some point in the planning stages of this blog I realized I was going to have to review it, and it actually gave me pause.  I seriously considered scuppering the whole project because I didn't want to watch this movie a second time.  In fact, I still haven't watched it again.  I'm writing this intro paragraph as a way of putting off watching the movie for a few minutes longer.

Why is a little hard to explain.  I don't hate this movie, but I sure as hell don't like it.  Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders isn't offensively bad like Attack of the The Eye Creatures, or even just plain offensive like Project Moon Base.  It is, however, intensely uncomfortable in its combination of cheery childlike imagery with what the Brains used to call 'good old-fashioned nightmare fuel', and something about it utterly repels me so deep in my gut it feels like appendicitis.  I use random.org to decide which movie I'm gonna watch next, and this one's number just came up... so after putting it off for a couple of weeks (thank heaven I have a buffer), I've decided the thing to do is just put on my Big Kid Pants and get it the hell over with so I never, ever have to watch it again.

Merlin the magician has used his powers to time-travel to modern California so that he can teach people to believe in magic again.  Among the first visitors to his Shop of Mystical Wonders are Madeline, a woman who can't have children, and her husband Jonathan, who announces his intention to give Merlin a bad review on Yelp or something.  At the urging of his own wife Zurella, Merlin gives Jonathan a book of magic to try to change his mind, and Jonathan tries it out that night in his basement.  Sure enough, the spells work, but after summoning Satan and breathing fire on his cat, Jonathan has expended so much of his life force that he has aged about forty years!  He tries to reverse the process but turns himself into a really ugly baby, granting Madeline's wish for a child to raise.

Now, this is all presented as if it's supposed to be very whimsical.  The interior of Merlin's shop looks like a cross between Galadriel's Glade in Lothlorien and the inside of a Rainforest Cafe.  Merlin himself is a Value Village Dumbledore and Zurella wears a brightly-coloured Renaissance-inspired outfit and gives out wishing stones.  This really ought to be a cheerful family film with a musical number sung by gnomes or something.  Instead, almost everything we see is straight out of a nightmare.  In fact, there is so much nightmare fuel in this movie that I quickly realized it wasn't all going to fit in a single review of my normal length.  That's why I've split both my summary and my analysis in two: if you want to hear about demonic cymbal monkeys, you're going to have to wait a bit.  For this session, let's stick to Jonathan's mercifully brief foray into wizardry.

Jonathan himself comes across as a person who should definitely not be given magical powers.  He mocks everything he sees in grating narration and laughs at the idea of driving small businesses into bankruptcy.  I think we all have a co-worker like him: one of those people who think everything they have to say is so very interesting, and cannot seem to take the hint that we want them to shut up and go away.  That person we would punch in the face if it weren't for the fact that everybody else would have to listen to him talking about it later.  He's a nightmare in himself, and his attitude, demanding that Merlin placate him or suffer the consequences, tells us that the power he wields through his newspaper column is already more than he can handle.

Sure enough, when Jonathan begins playing with Merlin's spellbook he doesn't even try to resist the corruption that this new form of power offers him.  He breathes fire, tortures his cat, and when a demon appears in his mirror it never seems to occur to him that Satan probably doesn't give very good advice.  By the time he finds the youth potion, he's gone all maniacal-eyed as he literally drinks his wife's blood.  The audience can only imagine that if he'd managed to master the powers of the book he would have become a modern-day Dark Lord and we'd all be forced to worship at his feet, as Mike and Crow kneel at Tom Servo's hoverskirt in the opening sketch.

Then there's the ending.  The idea of a man turning into a baby so that his child-less wife can raise him is a deeply uncomfortable one. Part of this is because the story never bothers to ask whether baby-Jonathan retains adult-Jonathan's mind.  Is he a blank slate for Madeline to mold into a less-offensive adult?  Or is he fully aware that he once had sex with the woman who is now changing his diaper?  What about Madeline herself?  She must know who the baby crawing out of her husband's clothing is.  Will she be able to be a good mother to him, or will her parenting always be coloured by remembering how Jonathan used to treat her?  And that's not even going into how twenty seconds of film here contains more Oedipal subtext than the entirety of Quest for the Mighty Sword. Just thinking about it makes me want a shower.

Also, that really is an ugly baby, and this is coming from somebody who's normally a big fan of babies.  Objectively I know that babies are nothing but immobile little loaf-shaped people with flailing limbs and no bowel control, and I don't want to have to change diapers or wipe snotty noses or listen to crying in the middle of the night – but when I see a baby, something in my hindbrain takes over and says adorable, must cuddle.  Big babies, small babies, fat babies, scrawny babies, bald babies, babies with hair... I love babies!  Except this one.  I find myself wondering if they did some makeup or something to try to make the kid look more like Jonathan... if they did, it didn't work.  If they didn't... then ew. That is one ugly baby.

Was this story meant to be nightmarish and uncomfortable?  The title Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders certainly doesn't sound like it belongs to a horror story.  The shop itself is whimsical enough, and there's sort of a happy ending in which I guess Madeline got what she wanted and Jonathan learned his lesson... kinda.  Some of the magical effects Jonathan produces, like the repelling spell, the diamonds, and the levitation, are treated as jokes.  But I think even if the TV show that this is so obviously a pilot for was meant to be relatively light-hearted, at least this episode was supposed to be a horror story.  The reason why has a lot to do with what Jonathan tries to do to his cat.

The narrator explains to us that the potion force-fed to the cat will turn it into a familiar – a helper animal so utterly loyal as to be willing to die for its master.  The audience will immediately notice that this description is diametrically opposed to the very nature of cats as we popularly percieve them.  Cats are thought of as aloof and self-serving creatures, with no interest in coming when they're called, never mind in doing what they're told. (People who own cats know, of course, that cats are actually clingy dumbasses who only like to pretend they think they're better than you – and contrary to popular belief, they're quite capable of learning to obey commands and even do tricks.  It's just that training isn't thought of as essential to the human-pet relationship like it is with dogs, and so most people don't bother.)

So here's Jonathan, trying to turn his cat into the opposite of what cats are 'supposed' to be, completely nullifying the animal's own will and personality.  That's a horrifying concept.  There also seems to be an element of spite in it, as Jonathan mockingly tells the cat, “you're about to learn the true meaning of obedience!” When Jonathan doesn't like a shop, he destroys its reputation.  When he doesn't like an animal, he destroys its mind.  If he'd managed to master the spells and make himself ruler of the universe or whatever, what does all this suggest he would have done to people? Then, when he is unable to enslave the cat (I think we’re meant to believe it attacks him because he got the potion wrong... but trying to rip its owner’s face off is the perfectly normal reaction of a cat having anything forced down its throat), he literally kills it with fire.  That's the kind of thing Nero did to the Christians!  So yeah, this much at least is supposed to give us nightmares.

At the end of this part of the story, I suppose Merlin has at least succeeded in getting Jonathan and Madeline to believe in magic, which he did say was his goal.  Maybe Jonathan will grow up again to understand that magic is not a power to mock or take lightly – and neither, I suppose, are shop reviews.  Maybe Madeline will be able to find hope knowing that miracles can happen as long as you don't get picky about how they happen.  Maybe magic is something we're supposed to believe in the way we believe in... oh, say, safe driving.  Those in command of something that could cause death or property damage need to learn to wield it with respect for it and for everybody around them.  That actually seems like a fairly plausible lesson for this part of the movie.

But then there's the 'evil monkey' sequence, which is actually a whole different movie.  See you next week. Fuck, I'm gonna have to watch this stupid movie again after all!

[over-rated-cheese]

NO! Not again please! I’m begging u 🙏

I'm seeing a pattern here....