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cecilspeaks · 4 years ago

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173 - The Hundred Year Play

Quoth the raven: [bird noises] Welcome to Night Vale.

Listeners, some exciting news from the world of theatre! The 100 year play is about to reach its final scene. Yes, this is the play that has been running continuously since 1920. Written by a brilliant playwright Hannah Hershman, designed to take exactly 100 years to perform. And the tireless volunteer of the Night Vale Players Playhouse have been going through those scenes, one after another, for decade upon decade. There’s little time to rehearse, for each hour brings new scenes and each scene will only be performed once the play moves on, in order to keep up with the tight schedule needed to execute the entire script before a century elapses.

It is a monumental work of theatre, but like all work, it must some day cease. Today, specifically. I will be in attendance at that historic moment, when the final scene is performed and the curtain closes on the 100 year play. More soon, but first the news.

We bring you the latest on the lawsuit “The estate of Franklin Chen vs. the city of Night Vale”. As you know, this case has grown so large and complicated that I’ve not had the time to discuss it in my usual community radio broadcasts. But instead, have started a true crime podcast called “Bloody Laws, Bloody Claws: The Murder of Frank Chen”, in which I strive to get to the truth of just what happened on that fateful night when five-headed dragon Hiram McDaniels met Frank Chen, and then later Frank Chen’s body was found covered in burns and claw marks. It’s a confounding mystery. The Sheriff’s Secret Police announce that it seems really complicated and they’re not even gonna try to solve that sucker. “Oh, what?” a Secret Police spokesman muttered at an earthworm he found in his garden. “You want us to fail? You wanna see us fail? That’s why you want us to investigate this case, to see us fail at it?” The family of Frank Chen say they merely want the appropriate parties, in this case the city of Night Vale, Hiram McDaniels and an omniscient conception of God, to take responsibility for their part in this tragedy. The trial is now in its 10th month, and has included spirited re-enactments of the supposed murder by helpful Players Playhouse performers in between their work on the 100 year play. 3 changes of judge and venue due to “some dragon attacks and constant interruptions from a local audio journalist, who hosts a widely respected true crime podcast”. Still, with all this, we near a verdict. Judge Chaplin has indicated she will issue her ruling soon. “Like in the next year or so?” she said. “Certainly within 5 years. Listen, I don’t owe you a verdict, just because you’re paying me to do a job, you can’t rush me to do it. The verdict will be done when. It’s. Done.” Chaplin then huffed out of the courtroom followed by journalists shouting recommendations for episodes of their podcast to listen to.

I was present, you know, on opening night of the 100 year play. Ah, how the theatre buzzed! Of course this was partly the audience, thrilled to be at the start of such an unprecedented work, but mostly – it was the insects. The Night Vale Players Playhouse had quite a pest problem at the time, and still does. It’s difficult to do pest control when there is a 100 year long play being performed on stage at every hour of every day. The curtain opened those many years ago on a simple set of a studio apartment, a kitchen, a cot, a window overlooking a brick wall. A man sits in the corner deep in thought. A doorbell rings. “Come in, it’s open,” the man says. A woman enters, flustered. She is holding a newborn. “There’s been a murder!” she says. “The victim was alone in a room, and all the doors and windows were locked. “My god!” the man says and springs up. “Who could have done this, and how?!” the woman tells him: “It turns out to be the gardener, Mr. Spreckle. He served with the victim in the war and never could forgive him for what happened there. He threw a venomous snake through an air vent.” The man sits back down, nodding. “Aah! So the mystery is solved.” As a playwright, Hannah Hershman did not believe in stringing up mysteries a second longer than was necessary. The baby in the woman’s arm stirs. “Shush, shush little one!” the woman says. The man looks out the window where he cannot see the sky. “It might look like rain,” he says. “Who knows?” Thus began a journey of 100 years.

And now a word from our sponsors. Today’s episode is sponsored by the Night Vale Medical Board, which would like to remind you that it is important to drink enough water throughout the day. Drink more water! Your body cannot function without water. Without water, you are just dust made animate. Water forms the squelching mud of sentience. Try to have at least ten big glasses of water. Not over the entire day, right now. See if you can get all ten of them down. Explore the capacity of your stomach. See if you can make it burst. You will either feel so much better, or an organ will explode and you will day painfully. And either one is more interesting than the mundane now. You should drink even more water than that. Wander out of your door, search the Earth for liquids. Find a lake and drain the entire thing, until the bottom feeders flop helplessly on the flatlands. Laugh slushingly as you look upon the destruction you have wrought. The power that you possess now that you are well hydrated. Move on from the lake and come to the shore of an ocean. All oceans are one ocean that we have arbitrarily categorized by language. The sea knows no separation, and neither will you when you lay belly down on the sand, put your lips against the waves and guzzle the ocean. The ocean is salty. It will not be very hydrating, so you’ll need to drink a lot of it. Keep going until the tower tops of Atlantis see sky again for the first time in centuries, until the strange glowing creatures of the deep-deep are exposed, splayed out from their bodies now that they no longer have the immense pressure of the ocean depths to keep their structure intact. And once you have drunk the oceans, turn your eyes to the stars. For there is water out there too, and you must suck dry the universe. This has been a message from the Night Vale Medical Board.

20 years passed without me thinking about the 100 year play. You know how it is. One day you’re an intern at the local radio station doing all the normal errands like getting coffee and painting pentacles upon Station Management doors as part of the ritual of the slumbering ancients. Then 20 years passes and everything is different for you. Your boss is gone and now you are a host of the community radio station, and there are so many new responsibilities and worries and lucid nightmares in which you explore a broken landscape of colossal ruins. So with all of that, I just kind of forgot the 100 year play was happening. But they were toiling away in there, doing scenes around the clock, building and tearing down sets at a frantic pace, trying to keep up with the script that relentlessly went on, page after page. And sometimes one of the people working on the play would wonder: how does this all end? But before they could flip ahead and look, there would be another scene that had to be performed and they wouldn’t have a chance. So no one knew how it ended. No one except Hannah Hershman, the mysterious author of this centennial play.

Soon after becoming radio host, during the reading of a Community Calendar, I was reminded that the play was still going on, and so decided to check in. I put on my best tux, you know it’s the one with the scales and the confetti canon. And then took myself to a night at the theatre. I can’t say what happened in the plot since that first scene, but certainly much had transpired. We were now in a space colony thousands of years from now, and the set was simple, just some sleek chairs and a black backdrop dotted with white stars of paint. A woman was giving a monologue about the distance she felt between the planet she was born on, which I believe was supposed to be Earth, and the planet she now stood on. I understood from what she was saying that the trip she had taken to this planet was one way, and that she would never return to the place she was born. “We… are… all of us… moved… by time,” she whispered in a cracked, hoarse voice. “Not… one of us dies… in the world… we were born into.” Sitting in my seat in that darkened theatre, I knew two facts with certainty. The first was that this woman had been giving a monologue for several days now. She wavered on her feet, speaking the entire four hours that I was there. And I don’t know how much longer she spoke after I left, but it could have been weeks. She was pale and her voice was barely audible, but there was something transfixing about it, and the audience sat in perfect silence, leaning forward to hear her words. The other fact I understood was that this woman was the newborn from the very first scene. Not just the same character, but the same actor. 20 years later, she was still on that stage, still portraying the life to the child we had been introduced to in the opening lines. She was an extraordinary performer, presumably, having had a literal lifetime of practice. And that was the last time I saw the play, until tonight, when I will go to watch the final scene.

But first, let’s have a look at that Community Calendar. Tonight the school board is meeting to discuss the issues of school lunches. It seems that some in power argue that it isn’t enough that for some reason we charge the kids actual money for these lunches. They argue that the students should also be required to give devotion and worship to a great glowing cloud, whose benevolent power will fill their lives with purpose. Due to new privacy rules, we cannot say which member of the school board made this suggestion. The board will be taking public comment in a small flimsy wooden booth out by the highway. Just enter the damp, dark interior and whisper your comment, and it will be heard. Perhaps not by the school board, but certainly by something.

Tuesday morning, Lee Marvin will be offering free acting classes at the rec center. The class is entitled “Acting is just lying. We’ll teach you how acting is just saying things that aren’t true, with emotions you don’t feel, so that you may fool those watching with these mistruths.” Fortunately, Marvin commented: “Most people don’t want to be told the truth and prefer the quiet comfort of a lie well told.” Classes are pay what you want, starting at 10,000 dollars.

Thursday Josh Crayton will be taking the form of a waterfall in Grove Park, so that neighborhood kids may swim in him. There is not a lot of swimming opportunities in a town as dry as Night Vale, and so this is a generous move on Josh’s part. He has promised that he has been working on the form and has added a water slide and a sunbathing deck. He asks that everyone swim safely and please not leave any trash on him.

Friday, the corn field will appear in the middle of town, right where it does each September, as the air turns cooler and the sky in the west takes on a certain shade of green. The corn field emanates a power electric and awful. Please, do not go into the corn field, as we don’t know what lives in there or what it wants. The City Council would like to remind you that the corn field is perfectly safe. It is perfect and it is safe.

Finally, Saturday never happened. Not if you know what’s good for you. Got it? This has been the Community Calendar.

Oh! Look at the time. Here I am blathering on and the play is about to end. OK, let me grab my new mini recorder that Carlos got me for my birthday. It’s only 35 pounds and the antenna is a highly reasonable 7 feet. And I’ll see you all there.

Ah. What’s the weather like for my commute?

[Shallow Eyes” by Brad Bensko. https://www.bradbenskomusic.com/]

Carlos and I are at the theatre! The audience is a buzz, with excitement yes, but also many of them are the insects that infest this theatre. The bugs became entranced by the story over the years, passing down through brief generation after brief generation, the history of all that happened before. The story of the play became something of a religion to this creepy crawly civilization. And so now the bugs are jittering on the walls, thrilled to be the generation that gets to see the end of this great tale.

The curtain rises on a scene I recognize well. It is the simple set of a studio apartment. A kitchen, a cot, a window overlooking a brick wall. A man sits in the corner deep in thought. A doorbell rings. “Come on, it’s open,” the man calls. A woman enters. She is very old, tottering unsteadily on legs that have carried for her many many years. “Please take my seat,” the man says with genuine concern. “Thank you,” she says, collapsing with relief onto the cushions and then looking out, as if for the first time, noticing the audience. I know this woman. I first saw her as a baby and later as a 20-year-old. It seems she has lived her whole life on this stage, taking part in this play. “My name,” the woman says, “is Hannah Hershman. I was born in this theatre, clutching a script in my arms that was bigger than I was. My twin, in a way. I started acting in that script of mine before I was even aware of the world. I grew up in that script, lived my entire life in the play I had written from infancy to now.” And she rises, and the man reaches out to help, but she waves him away. She speaks, her- her voice is strong, ringing out through the theatre. “The play ends with my death, because the play is my life. It is bounded by the same hours and minutes that I am.” the audience is rapt, many have tears in their eyes. Even the insects weep. “Thank you for these hundred years,” Hannah Hershman says. “This script is complete.” She walks to the window. “It might look like rain,” she says. “Who knows?” The lights dim.

Thunderous applause, cries of acclaim, and Hannah Hershman dies to the best possible sound a person can hear: concrete evidence of the good they have done in the lives of other humans.

Stay tuned next for the second ever Night Vale Players Playhouse production, now that they finally finished this one. They’re going to do “Godspell”. And from the script of a life I have not yet finished performing, Good night, Night Vale, Good night.

Today’s proverb: Many are called, but few are chosen. And fewer still pick up. Because most calls are spam these days.

#welcome to night vale #welcome to night vale transcripts #episode 173 #the hundred year play

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alphawolfice1989 · 4 years ago

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21 Ways Neil Patrick Harris Is Still a Kid at Heart

Whether he’s escaping a room or his real life, the sitcom star and new quiz-show host loves a game—unless it’s Monopoly

https://www.wsj.com/articles/21-ways-neil-patrick-harris-is-still-a-kid-at-heart-1520528275

PLAYER ONE Neil Patrick Harris, the host of the new game show ‘Genius Junior,’ takes a timeout at The Charlie Hotel in Los Angeles.PHOTO: SHAYAN ASGHARNIA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Chris Kornelis

March 8, 2018 11:57 am ET

AS PRENATURALLY SMART teen surgeon Doogie Howser, M.D., Neil Patrick Harris occasionally let himself believe he was the “young whippersnapper intellect” he portrayed on TV. He’s under no such delusions as the host of NBC’s “Genius Junior,” a new game show premiering this month that quizzes grade schoolers in categories including math, memory and spelling.

“When I interacted with the kids, I realized that [compared to them] I was really just a puppet reading writers’ lines,” the 44-year-old father of two said. “It doesn’t quite involve the same cerebral cortex.”

Following his 2014 Tony-winning role in Broadway’s “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”; the publishing of his children’s book “The Magic Misfits” last year; and the launching of his Netflix adaptation “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” Mr. Harris said he was inspired to take his turn behind the quiz-show dais by a childhood spent watching “Press Your Luck” and “Sale of the Century.” Another motivator: his love of puzzles and game theory, which recently led him to become an escape-room aficionado.

Though he said he normally takes the time to gauge the dynamic in group situations, Mr. Harris admits that he gets “pretty alpha” if the door is locked and the clock is ticking: “When your singular goal is to escape as quickly as possible, you just talk the loudest and fastest you can.”

Clockwise from top left: ‘The Goonies’; Oculus Rift VR goggles; ‘Black Mirror’; his childhood computer; Stretch Armstrong.

My current obsession is: a smartphone app called “The Room.” As you swipe around and examine a box, you find a little switch that opens a panel to puzzles that unlock more and more of the box. It is extraordinarily well executed and a brilliant time suck.

My favorite toy as a child was: Stretch Armstrong, but I was really just interested in knowing what the liquid was inside that allowed him to stretch, so those got mutilated. I also had every “Star Wars” figure. When we made little short films, we would burn them because burning plastic is cool to watch.

My favorite toy now is: The Oculus Rift VR machine. I can’t stop. I will someday be one of those fallow, gaunt VR players who never see the light of day.

My favorite escape room is: New York’s Paradiso Escape. It’s fantastic. Incredibly cinematic, there are multiple rooms, and it’s fully realized. And we escaped, which is most important. The bomb did not go off.

The first piece of tech I remember getting is: an old school TRS-80 computer my parents bought. We were living in Tiny Town, New Mexico—not its real name—and I felt like we were very technological and impressive.

I’m serious about collecting: Disney theme-park memorabilia. I outbid some heavy hitters to get an original Haunted Mansion stretching portrait of a bearded man, which we display proudly and enormously in our living room. I paid too much, but I felt it was something that would never come around again.

When you visit Vancouver you should definitely: bike Stanley Park. That’s their big Central Park. It’s just exquisite. Nature here is just miraculous. When it’s not raining in the spring and summer everything is just in full bloom—and it’s beautiful.”

The best place for brunch in New York is: Balthazar. It’s a great scene. Fantastic brunch: waffles and oysters.

A podcast I download to get a bit smarter is: NPR’s “Hidden Brain.” Shankar Vedantam interviews all kinds of people on topics relating to the brain, the psyche and our common concerns and goals. It’s scientific, topical, really motivational.

A game I do not recommend: Monopoly with 7-year-olds. I think it teaches bad habits. The whole conceit of Monopoly is to destroy every other competitor and acquire so much wealth that you’re stomping on and bankrupting people left, right and center. But we’re very into Sorry!

A book that I re-read every year is: “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho. It is filled with life-changing ways of thinking. It’s the only book I’ve read where I had to just stop to think about a sentence I read, take some deep breaths, smile and then keep reading.

The best book for a first grader is:“The World’s Worst Children” by David Walliams. It’s stories about horrible children, similar to the worlds created by Roald Dahl. Hilarious and still palatable for kids.

A kids film that I love is: “The Goonies.” When it came out, I bought all the chewing gum packs of Goonies cards, read and acquired every Goonies thing I could and called myself a “Goonie looney.” I coined that phrase and thought it was very funny at the time.

The last show I binged is: Netflix’s “Black Mirror.” All the episodes are effective, chilling and awesome.

My favorite VR game is: “The Invisible Hours.” It’s a murder mystery, which is right up my alley. You’re able to wander this mansion and follow people to see what they are doing. It’s like immersive theater. It’s rad.

The last piece of technology I bought: If I’m being honest, is a second Oculus Rift system, because I missed it so much in New York, I wanted to play it here in Vancouver [where he’s currently shooting the third season of “A Series of Unfortunate Events”].

As a child I listened to: my parents’ records. The Kingston Trio, the Brothers Four. In high school I listened to Billy Joel and the Beach Boys—which was the first CD I ever bought.

If I weren’t an actor: I’d either be a puppeteer or an Imagineer—someone hired by Disney to sign a nondisclosure form, learn all the secrets of how the theme park rides work and use current and future technologies to design attractions for parks.

My favorite bathroom away from home is at: the NoMad Hotel in Los Angeles. It’s in an old bank and they saved the vault for the bathroom’s entrance downstairs. It’s super cool.

The best advice I ever received was: play a long game and not a short game, especially career-wise. Don’t hope that a singular thing—especially if it becomes a success—will define you. Strive for longevity and appreciate that where there are flows there are also ebbs.

The worst advice I’ve received: Fly out of Newark instead of JFK.

—Edited from an interview by Chris Kornelis

#nph #neil patrick harris

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aghiadghazal · 5 years ago

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Cosmic Rays

It was 1:39 am, I woke up for no apparent reason, usually, the night is exclusive to my daughter waking us up, however not this time. I look to my left, Sheila was sleeping soundly, I get up and sit on the edge of the bed looking outside our bedroom window. I suddenly realise how clear the skies are, not a single cloud in sight, which is not common in Denmark. The further away from the summer we are, the rarer these cloudless days/nights are, until you hit November (the darkest month of the year) where it’s not uncommon to have only few hours of sun during the entire month. (yes, you read correctly, few hours for the entire month).

It got me thinking that maybe Northern Europeans never excelled in astronomy back in the days simply because they had very little access to the night-sky. With clouds obstructing their view most of the year, it would be difficult to establish a field of science based on peering into the night sky and analysing the movement of the stars. Surely there were some famous astronomers such as Tycho Brahe from Denmark during the renaissance period but even Tycho Braha travelled abroad frequently and founded observatories in different places across Europe (probably less cloudy places than Denmark). However, it never amounted to an advanced field of science as was the case for the ancient Egyptians or the Greeks or the Arabs.

Anyways, back to my personal cloudless night, I notice a bright object in the sky. What is that object? The first thing I do, I align the bright object with my window frame, hold my breath like a sniper who is about to shoot a deer, and try to see how fast is the object moving away from the edge of the window. Somehow, we all have this tendency to want to know what is that bright object in the nightsky? There are three possibilities, it is either a plane, in which case it moves fast, or a satellite which moves slower, or a star which wouldn’t move at all. Unless you can hold your breath for few hours to see the star move. The fourth possibility is an alien spaceship, but let’s not go there. It turned out it was a star.

But then that reminded me of a podcast I heard only few days before. The podcast was called ‘bit flip’ on Radiolab, a podcast hosted by super cool guys called Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich from NYC. Very nice podcast recommended by a dear friend. Bit Flip revolves around the fact that cosmic rays, caused by a supernova (explosion of a star) from deep space, can cause ‘bit flips’ in our electronics turning some 0’s to 1’s and vice versa.

This may seem like a mundane thing, but it can have dire implications such as changing the outcome of digital elections (such as the case of a national election in Belgium in 2003), numerous car accidents in the States, and an airplane nosediving in the sky. When a star explodes in space, it emits huge amounts of energy in the form of gamma rays which is emitted in every direction. We are constantly bombarded by those gamma rays from deep space which passes through us with no prior warning or permission.

Due to the constant miniaturisation of our electronics, transistors (which is the smallest building block of any piece of electronics and is responsible for switching the electrical signals) have become so small (down to 10 nm) that a cosmic ray has enough energy to change its state (0 to 1 or 1 to 0). This was not seen as a big problem back in the days when most of our machines were purely mechanical like cars and planes, and our transistors were massive.

My first encounter with cosmic rays was during an internship I was doing few years back. It was in 2011, I was fresh out of my masters degree, not knowing what to do with my life and whether to pursue a PhD or search for a job, whether to stay in Denmark or move to another country. Then I was offered a 4 month internship at the Ultrafast Laser Spectroscopy Lab at EPFL in Switzerland under the supervision of Prof. Majed Chergui. Ultrafast Spectroscopy is a technique that uses ultrashort pulse lasers for the study of dynamics on extremely short time scales, down to attoseconds, which is a billionth of a billionth of a second (10ˆ-18 of a second).

To detect such pulses, a CCD (charge-coupled device) is used, which is basically a pulse detector, connected to a screen. I was assigned to assist a bright young postdoc at the time and in the process learn about the experimental work of ultrafast spectroscopy. I remember him showing me the signals on the screen as the experiment went on, and all of a sudden, I see a speck on the screen, not connected to the main signal, and few bright spots followed in the screen few seconds later, just random bright pixels, so I ask the postdoc what are these bright pixels? He moves his hand dismissively and says “ahh it’s nothing, it’s just cosmic rays” … I remember saying “excuse me? did you just say cosmic rays?“ .. he said, yes, we constantly receive cosmic rays from deep space and we always get them on our detectors, however, we remove them once we process our data afterwards. I was completely dumbfounded … cosmic rays??!! a stream of rays constantly travelling from deep space passing through us and everything around us? How come we are not taught that in school? Can we harness these rays? I went on and on about these rays, until I discovered other cool things in that amazing green/ red/ ultraviolet laser-induced lab.

But the idea of cosmic rays was always somewhere in the back of my mind, just the idea that something happening literally astronomically far away affects our daily lives, makes me realise how we are one with the universe, how we are so far yet so connected to other galaxies and stars. There are 118 known elements on earth, and when I was a child, I used to think that different planets would have more (or less) elements, but some are surely completely different, and I would sit and come up and draft what these elements would be like, and what characteristics they would have. I would dream about further space explorations just to discover these new elements. It turned out, or at least as far as our knowledge goes, there are no other elements than the ones we know out there, simply because they all came from the same source, from the big bang, so whatever nickel, gold, silver, aluminium or whatever we have, is nothing but the result of an astronomical cosmic sneeze.

After hearing the podcast, it brought back all these memories of cosmic rays, and somehow reminded me to be more tolerant of our electronics, and accept that there are things that are much larger than us at play, so next time your Facebook app abruptly crashes on your smartphone, consider that you may have just been blessed with a message from a galaxy far far away.

End.

Oct. 7th 2019

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residentanchor · 6 years ago

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Coffee

If you don't mind~

You’re Famous AU-- Submitted by Sockpansy

Logan liked coffee shops. The calm atmosphere, the drink that filled logan’s veins, and just the nice feeling of the small coffee shop he worked at was great.

He took the job for his friend Emile, who needed a helping hand at first, but found he did enjoy so he continued to work there.

Which is how he came to know some regulars.

The first one was Patton. He was always cheerful, and either came in something brightly colored or animal themed. On occasion, he would be in a dress, but it suited him. He would take trips to different countries and tell Logan about what he saw as he ordered was what mostly sugar and about a teaspoon of coffee. He would never know how Patton managed to afford so many trips, but it wasn't his business anyway. His business was coffee.

Patton also liked to make puns, and Emile said he was flirting with him, but honestly? Patton would probably say ‘you're purr-fect!’ To a butterfly, so he had a hard time believing it.

Then there was Virgil. He was a little scary at first, but once Logan gave him a black coffee, then saw Virgil try to sneakily add almost as much sugar as Patton, he found that he wasn't as scary as he looks. Logan took to offering him recommendations for sweeter coffee and found out that Virgil likes coffee with skim milk the best, along with the fact that if Logan said it was a new favorite of his, Virgil was more likely to try it out. Maybe he just trusted Logan’s judgment? They probably had similar tastes.

With bright purple hair and a black-purple-patchwork hoodie, Virgil was easy to spot, although, he sometimes came in wearing ripped clothing and different forms of jewelry. He was very sarcastic.

Finally, was Roman. He was…he was a lot. His coffee order took ten minutes at least to make, and Logan often had to ask him to repeat his order to make sure he heard him right ’you want how much espresso?’ Was more common than he would like to admit. Roman had enough energy, he didn't need espresso.

But he did like poetry, enough so that Logan noticed he would often recite some to him. Logan could often tell who wrote it but did find out some poets he enjoyed from Roman’s recommendations. Like Patton, he wore bright colors, but his were more…loud. Loud is a very Roman word. He even came in dressed as a prince often.

Logan enjoyed each’s company in their own ways and looked forward to seeing them come in.

But right now, he was wondering how much damage hot coffee down the back of a shirt could case.

Roman was taking a selfie with a random girl, and the line was growing, but no one could get around Roman too order. They were taking so many selfies and yet no one seemed more aggravated by this than Logan himself.

Logan had been trying to tell Roman to move, but he wasn’t looking at him and the girl kept giggling near Roman’s ear. Finally, he had enough.

He slammed his hands on the counter, gathering everyone’s attention. Maybe that was a bit much, but Roman was definitely looking at him now.

Logan cleared his throat and straightened his tie. “Roman, other customer, if you have such a need to take photos with random strangers, don't do it at the counter. You are holding up the line, so either place your order or let the people behind you do so.”

Logan didn't understand the confusion on Roman’s face, or why he then looked like he solved the mystery before the Scooby Doo gang, but he didn't have time to wonder as Roman suddenly asked.

“Hey, do you watch Disney?”

Logan looked confused now. "Well, yes, on occasion. I do enjoy a classic, but that is not important. If you want to ask questions, do so when the line is gone.”

Roman ignored the last part. “Have you seen any Disney movies created in the last five years?”

Logan sighed and shook his head. “Not that I can recall, can you please order now or move? I am not above banning you for another week.”

Roman quietly mumbled an “it makes sense” before quickly moving so Logan could help the next customer.

_____

Patton found out next. Logan had been making his coffee when Patton slipped into a different language. He had been speaking in Japanese lately and it slipped out.

Logan looked over intrigued. “Oh, you speak another language?”

Patton giggled at how cute he looked. “Yeah, didn't you know that? I speak three fluently.”

Logan shook his head. “You never brought it up, so I didn't know.”

Patton always sang songs in multiple languages. Everyone who knew his name knew he speaks multiple languages.

Patton then realized Logan never asked about crowds or concerts in other countries.

Patton gasped as he put the puzzle together. His hands flew to his mouth in shock and to hold back a laugh.

Logan handed him his coffee confused at his actions. “Something wrong Patton?”

Patton shook his head quickly. "No, everything is just feline!”

_______

Virgil always suspected Logan didn't know who he was, he didn't seem like the kind to listen to his brand of music.

But he was kinda scared if Logan did know him, what would he think of him? And if he didn't know him, what would he think about him if he found out?

So after ordering a new coffee, Virgil decided to find out.

“Hey Logan…out of curiosity, what music do you listen to?”

Logan had glanced over for a second. “Oh, I tend to listen to classical, but I do enjoy podcasts.”

Virgil didn't know whether to laugh, cry, be relieved, or scared. So Logan would have no idea who he was.

“So like, no new music?”

“I don't care much for modern music, no, but to each their own.”

Virgil only nodded again, taking his coffee from the hands of the cute barista.

______

The knowledge that Logan didn't know they were famous was both surprising but expected.

But nothing was more surprising than finding out you aren't the only famous person trying to woo the same barista.

Patton had been chatting with Logan on a slow day, enjoying the casual conversation.

Roman and Virgil had been arguing on a walk to get coffee. Virgil’s band was recording a song for a movie Roman was staring in, and they ended up having to agree to work together, so they were going to get coffee and talk about the song.

They had been arguing over who gets to pick where they go to get coffee.

“Like I'm going to let you pick, it will be like walking into a Halloween store!”

“Yeah, well I'd like to not be in a place with 20 thousand people, you’ll probably pick Starbucks!”

When they both ended up in the cafe unknowingly, due to the habit of walking in anytime they see it, they were still arguing.

Patton had looked back and was very surprised to see a famous Disney actor, and the lead guitarist to 'SHRIEK’ but they were there. In the coffee shop.

Logan spoke up. “Roman, Virgil, as interesting as it is to see you two know each other, you are inside so inside voices please.”

Virgil and Roman faced Logan in shock, then each other. Then they looked back to Logan to look at Patton, the international pop star.

“You uh…you come here?” Virgil spoke to Roman, confused.

Roman nods. “You come here too?”

Virgil nods and Patton spoke up. “I come here often too.”

Logan spoke up. “Ok, is any going to order or is everyone going to sit around 'yeeting’ me confused.”

Virgil laughed a bit. “Close Logan, but yeet is throwing.”

“I thought you said it was also a…how do you say…'mood’ correct?”

Virgil smiled as he leaned on the counter. “Yeah, but it would be like that if someone else said 'hey I feel confused’ then you said 'yeet’ got it?”

Logan took out a flash card. “So it means 'to throw’ and 'same’ ” he nods.

Emile popped his head out grinning. “Logan, could you come-”

Logan walked to the back. "If I walk back there and find the printer broken again, I swear-”

The three famous people were left together.

Roman spoke up first. “Dibs.”

Virgil quickly sent him a glare. "You can’t just call dibs like that! That isn't how it works! Besides, I bet I've been coming here longer.”

Patton pipped up. “Ok but…Logan is a human…shouldn’t he pick who gets 'dibs’ instead?”

And that was how Logan found himself suddenly getting a lot more attention from the regulars than before.

Honestly, if they would ask, he would gladly date all three. (Too bad he doesn't know they like him back.)

Celery: YES! This is great! Thank you so much!!

#youre famous au #three famous boys fighting over Logan #I love it #submission

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doomandgloomfromthetomb · 6 years ago

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The Ballad of Spike & Jerry: Bob Dylan & Jerry Garcia, 1980-1995 / Dylan & The Dead: 2003

A very special treat for you today — the estimable Jesse Jarnow has gone long on the tangled tale of Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, and put together two essential comps for your listening pleasure, with great art by John Hilgart. Before we get started, you should know that Jesse has a new book coming out soon: Wasn’t That a Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle for the American Soul, scheduled for publication by Da Capo on Election Day, 2018. He’s also just started a podcast — Alternate Routes, featuring “independent music not found on major streaming services, all tracks approved by artists.” And of course, you can still catch his Frow Show, weekly on WFMU. OK, I think that covers it — take it away, Jesse!

The Ballad of Spike & Jerry: The Frequently Secret & Always Misbegotten Adventures of Bob Dylan & the Grateful Dead, 1971-2003 by Jesse Jarnow

You might love Dylan. You might even love the Dead. But that says nothing about how you might feel about Dylan & the Dead, the 1989 live album documenting the 1987 tour where Jerry & co. backed Bob. I’m pretty sure I’ve spent more hours listening to Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead than any other two artists combined, and I’m quite sure I don’t dig Dylan & the Dead. Perhaps presumptuously (but I’d bet accurately!), I assume the vast majority of Dylan and Dead freaks I know feel the same way.

So, as Doom & Gloom From the Tomb rolls through the Never-Ending Tour, which started the year after Dylan’s ’87 tour with the Dead, I was inspired to dig into the moment where it intersected with the equally endless Summer of Dead, which has trucked on now for more than two decades since Jerry Garcia’s 1995 death. Specifically, I wanted to hear the appearances Dylan made with the post-Garcia configuration calling themselves “The Dead” in the summer of 2003, playing 18 different songs during eight performances. And so I did, and enjoyed it quite a bit, the two acts’ idiosyncratic tendencies lining up more sympathetically and far more enjoyably than the 1987 onstage train wreckage.

But, of course, there was the missing void of Jerry Garcia, and it seemed silly to stop there. What I wanted--what I want--is Jerry and Dylan. And there’s actually a fair body of that, over 14 hours worth. Inside that, I went a-questing for at least a single disc’s worth of highlights, of performances that I actually want to listen to and could maybe internalize in the same way that I do with my favorite recordings from either. Listening back to what I put aside, I think what I wanted were tracks where neither side overpowered the other, where Dylan doesn’t shout, and where the Dead quit rolling their thunder. I’m sure the expanded Bootleg Series version of Blood on the Tracks will be plenty bloody, but these might be Dylan’s bloodiest tracks of all.

There’s also the plot point that Dylan has repeatedly credited his collaboration with the Dead for turning around his own career, leading directly to his critical and commercial reemergence a decade later. And I also wanted to piece together the story, which--as it turns out--goes back nearly a full decade before the first Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia played together onstage.

1. Reckoning with Dylan & the Dead

Dylan & the Dead is one of the bigger missed opportunities in rock history, but the even bigger missed opportunity probably came about 15 years earlier, when the Dead were at their peak as a nimble Americana/jazz quintet, and Dylan was simultaneously retired and in the process of becoming something of a Deadhead.

The first inklings that Dylan might be gettin’ heady came in spring 1971, when Rolling Stone reported him hanging out by the Fillmore East soundboard during the Dead’s five-night run that April. “Fuck, they’re damned good,” the Stone reported him saying after watching the band jam with the Beach Boys. According to Levon Helm’s autobiography, on New Year’s Eve that year, when Dylan showed up to play with The Band at New York’s Academy of Music, he told the drummer that, “I’m thinking of touring with the Dead.” “Dylan Stalks the Dead,” the Village Voice reported on Dylan’s presence at Jersey City’s Roosevelt Stadium for one of the Dead’s summer ’72 shows, but nothing materialized. Jerry Garcia was elusive when asked about their chillage.

Jerry Garcia was a serious grade Dylan freak, which maybe seems obvious, but it wasn’t ever thus. In fact, Garcia was one of those purists who thought Dylan’s new directions in folk music were impure and walked out on one of Dylan’s legendary folk festival sets in disgust. For Garcia, though, it was the Monterey Folk Festival in May of 1963. By the time Dylan plugged in two years later, Garcia was likewise in the process of going electric, and was totally on board. When Dylan returned to the road in ’74, Garcia caught him with the Band in Oakland and, according to Rolling Stone, headed down to LA to see him again at the Forum a few days later, only to discover that some enterprising beardo had shown up at the box office, claimed to be Jerry, and ganked his ticket.

In the intervening years, Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia continued to circle one another, traces of their developing friendship emerging in the marginalia of rock history. Grateful Dead Records employee Steve Brown told me (when I interviewed him for my book, Heads) about how he and Garcia scored an invitation to a mixdown session for Planet Waves, after Dead crew chief Ramrod befriended some roadies for the Band at their joint gigs. They saw them working on “Going, Going, Gone,” Steve notes, which went almost directly into Garcia’s solo sets. Sometime later that year, it seems, Dylan looked up David Grisman and arrived in Stinson Beach for mandolin lessons, and--at some point--made his way up the hill for a jam session with Garcia at San Souci, cookies by Mountain Girl.

But it wasn’t until 1980 that Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia showed up on a stage together and, by then, things had changed. Bob Dylan had been born again. Jerry Garcia was sliding into a deep heroin addiction. Like star-crossed lovers, the pair continued to cross paths for the next 15 years, playing together from time to time--most notably during Dylan’s six show run with the Dead in the summer of ’87--but never achieved the sustained burst of magic that one might hope for from the two. Bummer.

I’ve revisited their first pairing a few times over the years, a 1980 show during Dylan’s 14-show stand at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater, beginning only a few weeks after the Dead had finished their own 15-night run that would end up, in part, as the great acoustic album Reckoning. Dylan, though, was on his second pass through the Bay Area with his expanding repertoire of born again Christian songs. The previous year, he’d performed only his gospel music.

By 1980, for the first time in Dylan’s performing career, though, shows weren’t selling out. A few of his old favorites soon returned to the setlists, and promoter Bill Graham started to tap into his phonebook for guests that might spice up the proceedings and sell more tickets, which would come to include Carlos Santana, Roger McGuinn, Maria Muldaur, and Dylan’s final performance with Highway 61 Revisited guitar hero Mike Bloomfield. And Jerry.

The first song they played together, “To Ramona,” is fairly magic. Garcia takes over for the solo, shifting into a mode that’s perfect Jerry, simultaneously fully in charge, but finding voicings and turns that also push the song open, making it sound like a limitless conversation -- for 85 seconds or so, anyway. After that, though, Garcia’s contributions are bit more nebulous. Setlists differ about when he was actually onstage, and the recording is of mixed help, his guitar sometimes sinking into the murk, sometimes punctuating thoughts, but never with the confidence of “To Ramona.”

A few months later, Garcia spoke to David Gans about the performance. “I was surprised that the tunes were as difficult as they were,” he commented. “A lot of the tunes that he writes are deceptively simple-sounding, when in reality they’re not. There was really only maybe two or three of the five or six that I played on that I wasn’t doing anything besides trying to learn the tune.”

Little Feat guitarist Fred Tackett, then serving in Dylan’s band, assessed it similarly to Clinton Heylin, if more harshly (and not fully accurately): “Carlos played a song--thank you and left. Mike Bloomfield came out, played ‘Like A Rolling Stone’--thank you--left. Jerry Garcia came out, played and stayed. The whole two-hour show. [Not quuuite --ed.] He didn’t know any of the songs and he was higher than a kite... We finished the show and Bob said, ‘I’m never going to have anybody sit in with us again.’” (Roger McGuinn and Maria Muldaur would sit in over the next few nights.)

Their semi-public paths converged again in 1986. Garcia checked out a Dylan show at the Greek, hung with Bob backstage, planted the seed for the next summer’s tour, and offered some song-by-song notes. Another story from around that era has Dylan showing up at an Oakland Dead show with his Greenwich Village-era roommate, Wavy Gravy, and going unrecognized until he slipped his sunglasses on.

Finally, when the Dead shared a few stadium bills with Dylan (backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers for his own summer tour), Dylan showed up onstage with the Dead in Akron and Washington, DC.

But ye Gods I don’t recommend listening. Only a week later, Jerry Garcia would fall into a diabetic coma and nearly die. He sounds better here than I would’ve suspected, but there is no clickage happening whatsoever between Dylan and the Dead during either of these performances as Dylan tries and often fails to duet with Garcia and Bob Weir on his own songs.

Even still, Dylan arrived at the Dead’s Club Front studio warehouse in the San Rafael industrial zone in January 1987 and jammed with the Dead, landing (according to Dennis McNally) in a version of the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man” that thrilled both parties. Dylan proposed a tour together, and showed up in June for three weeks of rehearsals.

Dylan’s entrance into the Dead’s world was typically absurd and would get no less so. The band’s infamously cliquish road thugs immediately signaled that Dylan was on their turf, deciding that--since the Dead already had one “Bob,” and two if you count Hunter--that they would need to find a new name for Dylan. They settled on “Spike,” and would only address Dylan as such.

Dead roadie Steve Parish remembered Dylan as private, “content to write songs, play guitar, and smoke a little pot,” and enjoyed the surreality of being assigned to hang as Dylan crashed on the Front Street couch, inherited from Parish’s parents, where little Big Steve had once sat and argued that Dylan was the voice of his generation.

While a banner year for the Grateful Dead, scoring their only top 10 hit, 1987 was a terrible year for Bob Dylan. Later, he would tell Newsweek that he was going through a complete musical freak-out, suffering onstage panic attacks, “I-- I can’t remember what it means, does it mean -- is it just a bunch of words? Maybe it’s like what all these people say, just a bunch of surrealistic nonsense...” As Paul Williams points out in his wonderful chapter on the 1987 collaboration, this amnesia is audible throughout Dylan’s performances with the Dead during this period, both onstage and off. Perhaps the most sympathetic Dylan listener the world has ever known, Williams’s Dylan/Dead assessment comes in the third (and sadly final) volume of his Performing Artist series, 1986-1990 & beyond, Mind Out of Time, and I don’t totally agree with it.

In Chronicles, a book to which perhaps shouldn’t always be taken literally, Dylan’s freak-out continued palpably as he arrived at Front Street and discovered the band wanted to dive far back into Dylan’s songbook. “I could hear the brakes screech,” Dylan wrote in his 2004 account. “If I had known this to begin with, I might not have taken the dates. I had no feeling for any of those songs and didn’t know how I could sing them with any intent... I felt like a goon and didn’t want to stick around.”

And here Dylan slips into what sounds more like a parable than an actual story, describing how he escaped to a seedy bar somewhere nearby, not intending to go back, ordered a gin and tonic, turned around to watch the jazz combo onstage, and was struck dumb with musical revelation. “All of a sudden, I understood something faster than I ever did before,” Dylan wrote, and spends time in Chronicles explaining how this sudden download would cause him to rethink his career and approach to performing. He returned to Front Street a new man and had a blast. “Maybe [the Dead] dropped something in my drink, I can’t say, but anything they wanted to do was fine with me. I had that old jazz singer to thank.”

In 1997, Dylan would tell a more believable and practical version of what he gained from the rehearsal sessions. “[Garcia would] say, ‘Come on, man, you know, this is the way it goes, let’s play it, it goes like this,’” Dylan described. “And I’d say, ‘Man, he’s right, you know? How’s he getting there and I can’t get there?’ I had to go through a lot of red tape in my mind to get back there.”

The five hours of music circulating from these sessions at the Dead’s Club Front rehearsal space represent the Basement Tapes of the Dylan/Dead continuum, filled with delights, strange covers, experiments, shop talk, almost four dozen different songs, and a few performances that are, to my ears, just wonderful. I don’t think Dylan’s revelation is necessarily audible here, and I tend to imagine the real story being a bit more prosaic, closer to the second version, as the tape record bears out, but I find almost all of the rehearsal recordings to be enjoyable on some level.

My personal keeper takes come almost entirely on songs that neither act is known for, played in a far quieter manner than either had demonstrated onstage in those years. (Dylan had spent time a earlier that spring working with former Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones.) I’m especially taken with the songs where Garcia plays pedal steel and banjo. With Jerry on the banjo, they turn out some primo folk revival sunshine by way of “John Hardy” (as performed by the Carter Family on the Anthology of American Folk Music) and the jug band standard “Stealin’” (part of the Dead’s early electric repertoire and revisited by Garcia with his pal David Grisman a few years later). With Garcia sitting down at pedal steel for the first known time since 1972, they would play beautiful versions of 1967’s “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” and the half-lost 1962 gem “Tomorrow Is A Long Time,” both delivered with far more intimacy than the onstage versions performed over the summer, even if Dylan seems to remember almost none of the words. Paul Williams hates this version of “Tomorrow Is A Long Time,” and it’s true that Dylan doesn’t remember, really, any of the words and invents a few new phrases on the spot. Williams attributes it to the amnesia, but there’s a softness and spirit in Dylan’s voice I don’t hear many other places. It reminds me more of how--during the Basement sessions--he would sing songs he hadn’t yet finished, grappling for words, and sometimes not make full sense, but still capture some kind of feeling.

There’s raucousness, too. “Nowhere Man” doesn’t show up, but I was also grabbed especially by solid take on the communal favorite Buddy Holly’s “Oh Boy,” a sweet and casual “Watching the River Flow,” and a deliciously Basement-y romp through Paul Simon’s “Boy in the Bubble.” The lead song from Simon’s recent mega-comeback Graceland, it’s a gas to hear Jerry, Bob, and Spike try to remember the words, a song they’ve all clearly spent time with. Plus-one to Garcia for remembering the third verse and alternate chorus about “lasers in the jungle” and powering through even when the Bob section doesn’t recall it.

I wish there was more ethereal music like “Under Your Spell,” the Dead exhibiting surprising comfort with Knocked Out Loaded’s closing song, released the previous year and never played live, which Dylan seems to deliver with an entirely different set of lyrics. They almost hit that spot again doing Ian & Sylvia’s “The French Girl,” which Dylan and the Hawks had played in the Basement era, too, here with Garcia on pedal steel. The music stays nicely moody -- at least until the drummers figure out how to drum it up. Somewhere between the ethereal and the raucous is a take on the Rolling Stones’ 1965 song, “I’m Free,” with the Bobs joining on the chorus.

“You really have to pay attention to him to avoid making mistakes,” Garcia said after the rehearsals, “insofar as he’s doing what he’s doing and everybody else is trying to play the song. If you don’t do what he’s doing, you’re doing something wrong. In that sense, he de facto becomes the leader of the band... I don’t know whether two weeks with us is going to be able to change twenty years of that kind of conditioning.”

“By the end, I had a notebook filled with chord sequences, form diagrams, and lyric cues,” Phil Lesh remembered the sessions in his memoir. It “also confirmed that, hey, this guy’s at least as weird as any of us.” To that end, Spike also fell in love a pink Modulus guitar, later seen on stage in the company of Bob Weir. “This one’s really the right color, isn’t it?” Spike remarked.

It was during these sessions, too, that video director Len Dell’Amico got to screen the first cut of the “Touch of Grey” video during the sessions, and remembers that Dylan and Garcia’s relationship seemed to run deeper than it might’ve seemed. “I got the sense from Jerry that the two of them had a closer relationship than has been revealed by either one,” Dell’Amico recalls. “Because once I got him talking, it was clear they had talked on the phone a lot and they had spent time together in New York when [the Dead] played in New York. Bob had even given him a tour of New York City in his van. I think that was somewhere between ’78 and the Christian tour in 1980.”

Whatever Dylan and Garcia’s connection, and whatever transformation he may’ve undergone at a seedy San Rafael bar, when they got onstage, it was more or less chaos. For starters, Dylan was right back to shouting again and, yeesh Spike, chill out, in addition to setlist chaos. “That seemed like poetic justice for a band that took pride in its flexibility and in not using a setlist,” Lesh would say.

The resultant tour album is so harsh that it scared me off the rest of the tour and, as I dip back into it, it’s not unrepresentative, and that reaction wasn’t unwarranted. But there are also a few takes from the tour that I do actually like. On the “Ballad of a Thin Man,” during the first chorus, Dylan approaches something like the lovely voice he’d find again in the ‘90s, and lays into it, finding a harmony for the verse melody, and suddenly he’s stopped shouting and is singing.

On Sonicnoizelove’s mix of tour highlights, I found two versions that are right for me, both songs that I virtually never need to hear anybody sing ever. I recognize myself as being in the minority, but I’ve always loved Dylan’s versions of “All Along the Watchtower” above all others, but what pulls me in here is Garcia’s utterly over-the-top power shredding, totally ‘80s, but also pure Garcia, like the photo-inverse of the delicate colors he’d added on “To Ramona” the first time he’d joined Dylan. Sung by pretty much anybody, “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” has almost always sounded like “Kumbuyah” to me. But the Dead (whose versions of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” is likewise one I don’t often need to hear) fuckin’ nail it here, perfectly ragged, perfectly graceful. I think it’s ‘cuz Garcia’s leading the oooohs, and Dylan almost accidentally slides back into his purdy style of singing.

But of the six shows, those are the only three performances I really wanna hang out with more. For Dylan-heads, the sets included some big bust-outs, including the first ever live versions of “Queen Jane Approximately” and the first versions of the unreleased “John Brown” since the early ‘60s. Garcia apparently had his own favorites, which he assembled for the proposed live album -- and which were rejected by Dylan, recompiled by Sonicnoizelove on the Albums That Never Were blog. “What am I going to do, pop him one?” Garcia apparently shrugged. Unusually, given how I often I tend to agree with Garcia’s tastes, none of his picks resonated with me, either.

The real importance of the Grateful Dead on Bob Dylan would only become clear after the tour. Through the ‘80s, including his tour with the Dead, Dylan’s live setlists had barely varied. As Paul Williams pointed out, in Dylan’s first two shows of the fall, back with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, that changed, only repeating four songs on the second night of the tour, adding 13 more to the setlist.

Around the time of the ’87 shows, too, he set music to a pair of unrecorded Robert Hunter lyrics, “Silvio” and “The Ugliest Girl in the World,” both included for 1988’s Down in the Groove. “Silvio” featured Garcia, Weir, and Brent Mydland on backing vocals and became the album’s only single. Played nearly every night during large vital stretches of the Never-Ending Tour(s), I think “Silvio” is one of the songs that helped Dylan find his voice again, and even the down-on-his-heels character that would occupy 1997’s Time Out of Mind and 2001’s “Love & Theft.” Paul Williams thinks the song might be about Dylan himself.

By 1989, Dylan’s Deadheaddom had turned to something of an obsession. That February, he arrived at the LA Forum, inviting himself to sit-in and demanding to play “Dire Wolf.” (Perhaps he was inspired by the two nights Neil Young invited himself to play with Bob the previous year.) Dylan joined the band for the first half of the second set, but--for the most part--only played guitar. When they got to “Stuck Inside of Mobile,” the other Bob took the mic, Spike only stepping in when Weir forgot the words.

The next day, Dylan personally called the Dead’s office and asked if he could join the band, like, as a member. They had to have a vote, and it had to be unanimous. Perhaps obviously, it wasn’t. (Phil Lesh has been cited as the likely dissenter.)

Dylan himself became even more of a Deadhead after his tour with them. The Dead influence on his live shows is undeniable. In the early ‘90s, he began to integrate Garcia/Hunter covers into his live sets, including “Friend of the Devil,” “West L.A. Fadeaway,” “Alabama Getaway,” and “Black Muddy River.” A friend of mine has posited a theory about the first half of a particular Dylan show in the fall of ’92 being a shout-out to Garcia, with the first 7 songs being a combination of Dead tunes (“West L.A. Fadeaway”), Dylan tunes Jerry and/or the Dead covered (“Positively 4th Street”), and material they shared (“Peggy-O”). And even if it wasn’t intentional, the math says a lot.

Garcia sat in with Dylan a few more times, too, one in ’92 at the Warfield (a misfired but still enjoyable “Idiot Wind”) and ’95 at R.F.K. Stadium, on Garcia’s final tour (“Train to Cry” is especially the right pace, “Rainy Day Women” has a crashing little jam-off). It’s sadly fitting that Garcia and Dylan’s friendship was only seeming to deepen during these years, ending with yet another heartbreaking missed opportunity: a proposed fall ’95 acoustic duo tour, which both had orally agreed to, according to Dennis McNally’s bio. It was Dylan, too, that provoked what proved to be Garcia’s last studio session in July of 1995, Garcia gathering himself for a cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ “Blue Yodel #9” with David Grisman and pals for a tribute album Dylan put out on his own infrequently invoked Egyptian imprint.

“There’s no way to measure his greatness or magnitude as a person or as a player,” Dylan said in a statement a month later, following Garcia’s death at the age of 53. “I don’t think eulogizing will do him justice.” It remains one of the most articulate and beautiful pieces of writing about Jerry Garcia. “To me he wasn’t only a musician and friend,” it reads in part, “he was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he’ll ever know. There are a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school. His playing was moody, awesome, sophisticated, hypnotic and subtle. There’s no way to convey the loss.”

Dylan stayed with Hunter while visiting for the funeral, the two great lyricists supposedly starting to write songs together, a thread the two would officially pick up on Dylan’s 2009 album Together Through Life, where the two are credited as songwriters on all but two of the album’s songs. Whatever connection Garcia and Dylan shared, it was one that Dylan has continued to carry with him at a deep level. The year after Garcia’s death, he drafted former Jerry Garcia Band drummer David Kemper into his own band, who played with Spike for a half-decade in my personal favorite iteration of the Never-Ending Band. As Dylan entered his pastiche period, Dylan scholar Scott Warmuth has posited that “Love & Theft”’s opening “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum” is an answer song to “Uncle John’s Band” by way of a 1961 single called “Uncle John’s Bongos.” Really!

I haven’t seen much evidence of the Dead’s influence since Dylan shifted into his later career mode of covering pop standards. His setlists have ossified again, too. But it’s hard not to be influenced by Jerry, and, in the equally never-ending hunt for Dylan’s sources, I’m sure Garcia’s bemused beardo grin will show up somewhere.

2. Reckoning with Dylan & “the Dead”

As post-Garcia incarnations of former Grateful Dead members go, the 2003 squad called “the Dead” was one of my favorites. I only caught one show, but there were long jams, weird drumz and spaces, new songs, and no blues yodelers in sight. Looking back, it was the only year where Jimmy Herring acted as sole lead guitarist. I thought it was great.

But, even more, the early 2000s remain one of my favorite periods in the Never-Ending timeline, before Bob Dylan shifted over to keyboards full-time. His mode of improvising new melodies on the fly can be harsh and shouty, and there’s no better example of that than Dylan & the Dead. But, for nearly a decade of the Never-Ending Tour of tapes, I find his inventions to often be gorgeous, especially when he employs a soft and sweet lilt that I simply can’t hear as any derivative of “harsh.” (Check out the “Desolation Row,” especially on the recent Doom & Gloom NET Choice Cuts, vol. 1 mix.)

Spike didn’t join the band for any big jams (though Willie Nelson joined for a 10-minute version of Miles Davis’s “Milestones” that summer), wouldn’t allow his sit-ins to be included in the soundboard CDs sold after after show (again, big ups to Willie), and didn’t exactly sing in that soft, sweet Never-Ending voice (give or take the vitriolic “Ballad of a Thin Man,” ironically). But, listening to it as a compiled disc, they do jump into a great and convincing range of material. They do Garcia favorites (“Señor,” “Tangled Up in Blue”), shared standards they’d tried at the ’87 rehearsals (“You Win Again,” “Oh Boy”), Garcia/Hunter tunes Dylan loved (“Alabama Getaway,” “Friend of the Devil,” “West L.A. Fadeaway”), and more. It’s all a blast to my ears.

In many places, Bob Dylan does something totally remarkable by his standards: he sings songs such that, if a listener knows the words and wanted to, they could sing along. He doesn’t do it every time, certainly, but riding through “Alabama Getaway” on July 29th, Dylan does so with authority, a growling frontman. (Of course, the other two takes are wildly different.) “Subterranean Homesick Blues” didn’t make its live debut well into the scrambled ‘80s, but here sounds shockingly close to the 1965 Bringing It All Back Home version, give or take the Berklee-trained shredder Jimmy Herring in place of Bruce Langhorne, which is hilarious in its own way.

On “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad,” he takes Garcia’s lead vocal with Joan Osborne matching him gamely, and on “Oh Boy,” the Bob section links up successfully. Sometimes it’s a little clunky, like when the Bobs trades verses on “Around & Around” -- never a Dead cover I particularly cared for, though I like Spike’s contributions a good deal. Occasionally, we get hints of what Dylan might be like as a jamming contributor to the Dead, had they taken him up on his 1989 request to join the band, in which he proves himself to be perhaps a more beguiling lead/rhythm hybrid than even Bob Weir, adding clonking piano interjections to “Thin Man” and “Gotta Serve Somebody.”

While perhaps not one of the great collaborations in the history of rock, Dylan and the 2003 Dead managed to achieve what they’d never done before, and--for once--didn’t miss their opportunity. Opening seven shows, Dylan sat in with the band at all of them. The musicians sound competent, the songs are usually recognizable from their first notes, and the music remains enjoyable in recorded form. If achieving competency doesn’t seem like a remarkable achievement, I suspect you might not be a fan of later period Grateful Dead or Bob Dylan, in which case I’m pleased you, dear reader, made it past the first sentence, let alone to the last.

Wall of Sound-sized #deadfreaksunite thanx to Tyler, John Hilgart, Sean Howe, James Adams, Joe Jupille, & Scott Warmuth for pointers / assistance / encouragement.

#bob dylan #The Grateful Dead #Jerry Garcia #jesse jarnow #the neverending tour

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nobszone · 7 years ago

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#ChangeTheChannel: The Decline and Fall of an Empire

(With apologies to UrinatingTree)

After several days on twitter swapping stories, the former producers of Channel Awesome came together to compile a google doc of the experiences they had while working with the website (the doc is rather long so here’s a condensed version for those who don’t have the time or energy to go through it all).

The #ChangeTheChannel hashtag has gained a ton of steam. Tweets, videos, even articles are being written now about the movement. Channel Awesome’s response has been to simply say “We regret you feel that way.”

#ChangeTheChannel symbolizes a lot of things to a lot of people. For some, it’s a strike back against privileged white men, for others it’s another instance of the cntrl-left making a mountain out of a molehill and ruining the internet, and for others it’s just a nice fire to watch burn.

But for me? This symbolizes one thing and one thing only: the end of an era.

Because what we’re witnessing is the fall of the once mighty empire that was Channel Awesome.

Make no mistake though, this empire has long been dying. For the past few years Channel Awesome has been desperately trying to keep up the facade of its former glory as opposed to recognizing and attempting to fix its flaws. And with this whole debacle, Channel Awesome is now siphoning whatever reputation it may have had for the sake of its immediate and long term future.

Since 2013 this website has been doing whatever it could to remind itself of its glory days. The constant over reliance on Doug Walker’s character The Nostalgia Critic, trotting him out barely a year removed from his very public retirement of the character to just do the same style of reviews that he’s done in the past, only now for movies that are barely out of theaters.

But not to worry, he’s still forward thinking. After all, he brought on two actors to help him out in Malcolm Ray and Tamara Lynn Chambers who play various supporting characters in his reviews. He also now includes various little skits to break up the monotony of him sitting in front of a wall and talking to a camera, and now he even does reviews that have no clips in order to get around unscrupulous companies that abuse Fair Use laws.

Unfortunately to say that these new reviews suck is a bit of an understatement. About the only thing that people like about them are Tamara and Malcolm, and that’s more to do with their personalities and acting skills as opposed to the material they have to work with.

But surely it’s not just Nostalgia Critic all the time. Channel Awesome said they were trotting out new shows as well. Well most of those shows turned out to either not be very good, stagnated in development, or were so bad that they tried to sweep them under the rug and hope that everyone forgot they spent a hefty sum of money on them.

And now, thanks to these revelations (that were first reported on by folks like Mister Metokur but confirmed through the google doc), the site is literally hemorrhaging talent. CEO Mike Michaud now runs a company with a bleak present and virtually no future.

But still, the question must be asked; where did everything go wrong? How did a website that was the first name in online content creation become such a train wreck? For this, we have to find the precise moment that signaled the beginning of the end of the empire.

If you’ve watched any of the Channel Awesome critics, then you’re probably familiar with the term “Jumping the shark.” It refers to a moment when a franchise begins a sharp decline in quality that it’s never able to recover from. The term specifically refers to an episode of Happy Days when The Fonz literally jumps over a shark, a moment that began the show’s painful spiral into oblivion.

This thinking can be applied elsewhere as well. In sports you have moments like the 49ers firing Jim Harbaugh. In politics, the Republican party nominating Donald Drumpf.

For Channel Awesome, this moment wasn’t when Demo Reel was announced, or even when Noah “Spoony One” Antwiler left the site (he’s a good producer but his behavior had become increasingly erratic, not to mention that as of late his work ethic has been...non existent).

To find out when Channel Awesome jumped the shark, we have to go back a bit farther.

Starting in 2009, Channel Awesome (then under its old name, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses) filmed major crossover events to commemorate the site’s anniversary. The first one was nothing more than an impromptu brawl between The Nostalgia Critic, James Rolfe’s Angry Video Game Nerd, and the other contributors on the site.

The second year movie, Kickassia, was more ambitious. The TGWTG crew traveled to Molossia to take over the micronation. While in many ways the shoot went well, this is where problems started to emerge.

(Just a quick disclaimer, I was originally going to go over in detail about the problems encountered in the anniversary films, but they’re so extensive that I simply don’t have time to fit them all in here. I strongly recommend reading the google doc for all the gory details.)

But it wasn’t until production of the third Anniversary special, Suburban Knights that things really started to become unsustainable. Things got so bad in fact that the entire movie was nearly scrapped. It only was finished at all because the producers were determined to do so.

So you’d think after such a miserable experience, Channel Awesome (or at the very least the Walker brothers) would recognize that they were in over their head. They would have to scale back production considerably for the next film and make it a smaller affair that’s more suited to their skills, or at the very least up their game. In trying to straddle the line between “amateur” and “professional” they were failing spectacularly.

But nothing was done. And Doug Walker proceeded to write To Boldly Flee. A four-hour long epic involving every single producer he could cram into his house and framed as a critique of acts like SOPA and the abuse of Fair Use laws.

Only when the producers actually read the script did they realize the true purpose of the film: the retirement of the Nostalgia Critic as a character. And the way the film was written, it seemed like it was also meant to be the end of just about everyone else on the site.

RIGHT THERE. THAT is the moment Channel Awesome jumped the shark.

But of course, the Critic’s retirement party wasn’t going to be denied. Doug Walker was still adored by the Internet after all. To refuse to let him retire his character on his own terms? The fandom’s jimmies would’ve been ruffled.

And besides, now they had a studio! And Doug was still on the site, now starring in a brand new show called Demo Reel. The empire will continue to live on!

Well, we all know what happened then.

While To Boldly Flee and the decision to retire the Nostalgia Critic may have been the moment that Channel Awesome jumped the shark, the reality is that there were many problems with the site long before. These were issues that the producers repeatedly voiced their concerns about and attempted to fix. Nothing was done.

To go over every single possible offense that was committed would be redundant as the google doc already does that for us. So instead, I shall do my best to list the “highlights” of the issues that were rampant with Channel Awesome.

Tellingly, it seems the problems with the site focused mainly on two individuals. CEO Mike Michaud, and CCO Rob Walker, though Doug Walker doesn’t exactly come off scott-free here.

So what exactly did these individuals do? Let’s break it down:

Mike Michaud:

He is a majority shareholder in the company and owns the rights to the Nostalgia Critic character.

He was very difficult to reach, regularly disappearing for long periods of time.

He was very reluctant to actually be involved with anything when it came to management of the company or daily operations.

The Pop Quiz Hotshot gameshow was his idea. No one wanted to actually do it, and he forced Doug and Rob to upload the pilot episode (which had to be reshot over a dozen times) to avoid an investigation by IndieGoGo.

When Allison Pregler (Obscurus Lupa) added midrolls to her videos in order to generate revenue, Michaud angrily confronted her while she was filming at the studio. He also left up incendiary comments about the midrolls on her videos to goad her into trying to take them down.

Lupa was literally fired for not answering Michaud on Skype within 15 minutes.

Kaylyn Saucedo (MarzGurl)’s videos were frequently mislabeled when Michaud uploaded them and he was very antagonistic towards her over the fact that she was affiliated with ScrewAttack (whom he perceived as Channel Awesome’s rivals).

Lewis Lovhaug (Linkara) requested to use the Channel Awesome studio to film the Atop The Fourth Wall movie. Michaud refused on the grounds that it would interfere with production of the Nostalgia Critic.

He attempted to fire Jacob Chapman (JesuOtaku) for simply criticizing the site.

When Dr. Gonzo inquired about the numbers for his podcast, he was repeatedly told to stop asking because “they suck and no one comes here to listen to you.” When he tried to create a tribute video for Justin Carmichael (JewWario), he was shot down for the same reason.

During the anniversary specials, Michaud asked that any crossover reviews that were filmed be handed over to Channel Awesome to recoup the costs of the production (none of the producers were ever paid for their part in the anniversary movies).

Was aware that Mike Ellis (another founding member of Channel Awesome) was sexually harassing members of the site, but did not act upon this information until nearly a year later.

Overall Mike Michaud has engaged in behavior that could be considered immature, arrogant, unprofessional, and sexist.

Rob Walker:

He is the brother of Doug Walker and Channel Awesome’s CCO. He also frequently assists with the production of Nostalgia Critic episodes.

When producers came to Rob with concerns or complaints, he would call them “children” behind their backs.

Frequently fought with Doug over the script for To Boldly Flee.

When Lupa brought up that Doug should’ve told the other producers beforehand that he was retiring the Critic, Rob laughed it off.

He claimed that producers advertising their personal Patreon accounts was a “slap in the face” to the fans while also justifying their IndieGoGo as “executive authority.”

Topher Ames (Fool Fantastic) took a leave of absence to address the repercussions he was facing in his personal life due to coming out. Despite informing Channel Awesome’s HR rep at the time (Holly Brown) his videos were removed from the site. When he tried to explain what had happened to Rob, he was belittled and mocked.

During the filming of Suburban Knights, Iron Liz suffered a knee injury. Rob pressured her to sign a form that would absolve Channel Awesome of liability for any injuries, and refused to offer treatment until she did.

Doug Walker:

He is the most well known of the producers on the website, the man behind Nostalgia Critic.

Despite the fact that he’s officially considered “talent”, he is frequently involved with business decisions made by the company.

He’s described as being rather incompetent when it comes to the technical side of production, with Lupa claiming that he didn’t even know how to record a Skype conversation.

There are a limited number of slots on the site to feature videos. Doug tends to hog most of them, especially with series such as “Disneycember.”

By and large, the producers felt that Channel Awesome management was more concerned with what Doug wanted and needed rather than the producers as a whole.

The scene in To Boldly Flee where the Nostalgia Chick is assimilated was written in the guise of a sexual act. Both Linkara and Lindsay Ellis (Nostalgia Chick) were very uncomfortable with the scene and did not want to do it. Doug was unable to understand their reluctance.

Doug was legitimately unaware of how miserable the other producers were during the filming of To Boldly Flee. He had to be told later in a private meeting. He discusses this in the commentary track for To Boldly Flee where he expresses guilt over it and explains it’s one of the reasons he’s no longer doing large scale productions.

Phelan Porteous (Phelous) did some of the VFX for To Boldly Flee. Doug expressed his approval of the VFX. Later, Mat Williams (Welshy) was asked to “spy” on Phelous to make sure he wasn’t phoning in the work.

Doug was the deciding vote on whether or not to fire HR Rep Holly Brown (the decision came the day after she had surgery).

The decision to rebrand “ThatGuyWithTheGlasses” to “Channel Awesome” was to make it seem like the site wasn’t entirely focused on Doug’s work.

Doug did not tell anyone ahead of filming To Boldly Flee that he was retiring the Nostalgia Critic character, and the way he wrote the film gave the impression that he expected all the other producers to retire along with him (or at the very least that he no longer needed them)

Again, these are just the highlights that I could pull up in a quick timespan. I once again encourage you to read the google doc linked above.

Not just because it validates and substantiates these claims, but because it paints a clear picture of the decline and fall of a once mighty empire. The senate became complacent, refused to fix the glaring issues, and the barbarians sacked countless cities as a result.

Mike Michaud chose to focus the site on promoting the Walkers and figured that everyone else would be thankful for the “exposure.” This unfortunately doesn’t work when people expect that over time you’ll gradually move towards a more professional outfit, and especially when platforms like YouTube become more viable in terms of earning revenue.

And the sad part? This all could’ve been avoided. And not by just communicating more openly with the producers and treating them with respect.

When Doug Walker announced the sudden retirement of the Critic, the site’s traffic fell off a cliff and to this day has never been able to recover. The fact that it came seemingly out of nowhere was as much as a shock for the producers as it was for the fans.

Imagine if Doug had announced ahead of time that he was ending The Nostalgia Critic. At the very least, fans would’ve been able to prepare themselves for the end, and the producers who were reliant on Doug’s traffic to bring in views would’ve also been able to make plans for what to do in the aftermath.

Going further, imagine if Demo Reel had started up as a side show before the end of the Critic. People would’ve had time to get used to the show’s more serious tone and docu-style format. Instead of having to reshoot the second episode on the fly, Doug would’ve been able to figure out what worked and what didn’t. It would’ve had time to grow a proper audience and flourish.

Just imagine, people knowing ahead of time that Doug was retiring the Critic and trying a different show. The Critic would’ve gotten a proper sendoff that everyone was on board with and didn’t come out of nowhere. Demo Reel would’ve gotten through its early missteps and been able to grow. The traffic would’ve probably taken a hit but still be sustainable. The other producers would’ve at least felt like they weren’t being unceremoniously tossed to the side for the sake of a vanity project.

The empire could still be living on.

This could’ve been Channel Awesome had Doug told people ahead of time what his intentions were. Or even if Mike Michaud had truly tried to expand the site’s brand instead of focusing solely on the content produced by two men. But instead he’s chosen to be stubborn and cling on to what worked in the early days, back when no one would truly complain that the site was very much amateur hour.

That’s the other side of what’s lead to the fall of the empire: the stagnation. The fact that Channel Awesome hasn’t produced any original content worth a damn in nearly a decade, that they still think the show’s they did back in 2009 and 2010 are what people want to see today.

Take Rooster Teeth and Team FourStar. These studio’s have become so diversified in their portfolio’s you’d be forgiven for not knowing they started off as a Halo Machinma and a DBZ Gag Dub. But they do these things for the greater good.

Look at what focusing on one brand gets you:

Hell, this whole #ChangeTheChannel thing is giving CA the first real spike in trends they’ve had in a while, and it’s for all the wrong reasons.

Even worse, there’s no hope of this going away any time soon.

Literally as I was writing this, Channel Awesome put out their “official” response to the aforementioned google doc.

If you haven’t read the google doc by now, I’d like to bring to your attention the fact that, for the most part, all the former producers want is simply an admission that they screwed up. All they ask is for Channel Awesome to apologize for mistakes they’ve made in the past and vow to do better.

But much like their tweeted statement where they said they “regret (the former producers) feel that way.” This is anything but that. I don’t have to link you the comments or tweets to tell you that this is about as tone-deaf as you can get.

What’s more is that producers are claiming that Channel Awesome is flat out lying in their rebuttal. Only time will tell who’s telling the truth, but given that there’s been multiple accounts about how Channel Awesome told producers that they weren’t really going to do the thing they said they were going to do and that the things the producers were mad about was definitely their fault and not Channel Awesome’s, I’m not inclined to believe this statement.

Because at this point who are you going to believe? Mike Michaud, or your lying eyes?

Sadly, it gets even worse.

Consider this photo. This is the cast photo of To Boldly Flee. These were the headliners of Channel Awesome back in 2012.

Fast forward nearly 6 years later. Most of the people in this photo? They’re gone.

And with Angry Joe now leaving as well, the only people in this photo who are still affiliated with the site are Bennett the Sage, Brad Jones, and The Walker Brothers.

Even worse, the people that are still on the site are getting roped into this regardless if they’re involved or not. Malcolm Ray and Tamara Lynn Chambers are both feeling the heat for their continued affiliation with the site, and both have promised their own response will be coming soon.

Let me be clear, no one has the right to attack Malcolm or Tamara or any producers over their decision to stay. As far as we know, they are completely innocent in these ongoing events. All the same though, I would counsel both of them to have a good look at the document so they can see for themselves what “loyalty” got for their predecessors.

In the end this website has done the unthinkable. Channel Awesome has gone from the envy of the Internet to its newest punchline. This is a feat that takes a special kind of incompetence. In all my life I can only recall one other incident like it.

But the reason why this has happened comes from the top down.

Mike Michaud is truly the Dave Brandon of the Internet. He’s the embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and overall just seems to be a terrible person. This is a man who desires to be in charge of everything while at the same time being in charge of nothing. He will chew out producers for doing things that make him look bad. He is a hollow shell filled with nothing but arrogance, immaturity and greed.

Rob Walker doesn’t seem to be much better. While his list of transgressions is not as extensive as Mike Michaud’s, they give off the air of someone who lords an unwarranted superiority over others. A man who lucked into the position he’s in and is determined not to let anyone find out. A man who lied to his own brother about the problems Demo Reel was having, just for the sake of keeping everything running like clockwork.

Channel Awesome deserved caretakers that could nurture and grow the channel into something special. Instead it got two empty suits who are both convinced they’re the smartest one in the room.

And then there’s Doug.

This is where I suspect many of us on the outside looking in are having the biggest ethical dilemma. That someone like this man could do the things he’s accused of doing.

In the past I have come to this man’s defense. It can be no more.

To be honest, I do find him to be something of a tragic figure. This is the kind of stuff that can (and in all honesty probably should) end his career. And while I don’t know what kind of person Doug Walker is, I doubt that when he started off doing movie reviews on YouTube that he had any of this in mind. I doubt he wanted to do anything besides make movies and entertain people.

But at some point in time, we all need to grow up. We all need to understand that what we might have gotten away with in the past we can’t get away with anymore. That there are things expected of us, responsibilities we are expected to uphold.

For better or worse, Doug Walker does not seem to have realized that.

It’s one thing to be described as being “out to lunch” or off in your own little world when you’re in a social setting hanging out with people. Those kinds of traits can be seen as endearing and lovable. But they simply don’t work when you’re expected, fairly or otherwise, to be in charge of other people, or to help people out of a bad situation.

I have no idea if Doug is management, talent, or both. I don’t know what he considers himself to be. But the fact that he’s been allowed to make sweeping decisions that affect Channel Awesome as a whole seem to indicate that he doesn’t have a grasp of what he does or how his actions affect those around him.

And as a result, the things that we loved about him have now become the things we hate.

Remember when we laughed at the opening of Suburban Knights?

That joke isn’t funny anymore.

The thing that’s really disheartening to me, is that Doug is still being the same person he always is, even as all this stuff piles up. Simply parroting Channel Awesome’s response on his Facebook page.

I think many of us just want him to say something about this, something that doesn’t come from a prewritten statement. Snap at a fan at a con who asks him about the doc, say his boss was a total idiot who’s more or less ensured he’s stuck doing the same thing for the rest of his life, just do something, anything at all that’s not the same stuff he’s been doing for the last 5 years.

Whether Doug is naive, callous or a coward is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t know enough about him to say otherwise, except that he seems like exactly the kind of person who would shut down as his dream job becomes a nightmare.

And like I said, I truly believe this is it for him. This is the kind of thing that many people simply don’t come back from. If he thinks that he can simply tune this out, well he also thought that production of To Boldly Flee was a hoot and a half.

At least Malcolm and Tamara came out and said “That’s not us, that’s not what we do or who we are.”

Doug Walker seems content to burn amongst the flames without so much as shaking a fist at the heavens.

In the end, my hope is that if nothing else what happened with Channel Awesome will be seen as a cautionary tale, for there are two very important lessons here that we would all do well to learn.

The first; we all have an expiration date. One day, whether by chance or design, the Internet shall declare us irrelevant. Even if we don’t have a career destroying scandal, the simple truth is that eventually new mediums and ideas will come along. People will try to do what we do, only do it better. And unless we can adapt and evolve, we will die.

The second; no one escapes judgement. In a day and age when even an innocuous tweet made years ago can be dug up and presented to the world, it’s a reality that no one escapes their past and no one escapes judgement. We’ve all done things we aren’t proud of, and someday we will have to answer for them. And the more we try to bury or deflect the truth, the worse it becomes for all of us.

These are two lessons that all of us, no matter who we are or what we do, should always keep in mind. Because no matter how big or important we may think we are, we are all replaceable, especially on the Internet.

What happens when you don’t adapt and try to run from your past?

You become Channel Awesome.

(Damn this might be the most depressing thing I’ve written yet, I suddenly remember why I don’t do this fandom stuff anymore.)

#ChangeTheChannel #Channel Awesome #Doug Walker #Rob Walker #Mike Michaud

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thornsickle · 7 years ago

Text

This is what I believe to be the basic trajectory of what will happen in ‘The Last Jedi’

(SPOILER ALERT because I’m so cocky I think my own predictions will come true, no, that’s a joke, just putting this there because, you know, if you hate predictions and you want to go into this film blank with no preconceived expectations then yeah, stop reading, like, now.)

I should just preface this by saying, I started to map out roughly what was going to happen in this film but I realized pretty quickly that this was near impossible because of the mere lack of information. I tend to speculate with a mixture of hard proof, rumours and my own ideas but it’s hard to say for example, what Finn and Rose’s agenda is when they go to Canto Bight.

So rather than talking about things beat by beat, I’ll be mainly discussing things I’m MOSTLY POSITIVE will happen, and leave blanks where necessary, rather than just making stuff up for the sake of it (unless I have a really good reason to do so). For things that I merely speculate on and have no basis for really, I will write in italics just so that you can see the difference between what I view as highly probable and merely possible.

Again, this is JUST my opinion, so take it with a pinch of salt, I am still open to ideas, and making sure that nothing in my mind is set in stone. However, you have been warned, once you agree with an idea, it’s hard to get away from it, so if you don’t want any expectations going in to see ‘The Last Jedi’ then I’d recommend that you stop reading now.

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT

Okay, so.

The 1st act.

This is by far the easiest part of the movie to talk about because so much of it was in the recent trailer. However, I am going to start by mentioning MSW, a podcast which talked recently about the first scene of the film, to begin once more with the final scene in TFA, but this time shot from a different perspective. Again, I can’t remember whether they said it would be from Luke’s perspective, but I would bet my money on it being shown from his point of view, with Rey coming towards him and handing him his lightsaber as we saw in the trailer. I believe this scene will involve Luke saying the line “why are you here” as we heard it in the teaser (GMA) for the main trailer.

The shot above (from the trailer) more than confirms this because the camera is shooting from Luke’s POV, and clearly this is the exact same scene as the final scene in TFA because if you look closely Luke has just pushed down his hood.

At the same time, we are introduced to Snoke’s ship, which is called ‘the Supremacy’, as seen above with Kylo overlooking the hangar. It is the headquarters of the First Order and it is making its way from the Outer Rim towards D’Qar. Kylo Ren is taken to the Supremacy and meets Snoke face to face. He is still wounded from his battle with Rey but hides behind his mask. The image below shows Kylo on the command bridge, making his way to Snoke’s ‘throne room’. A similar image can be found on the link I’ll put down momentarily. I think he also uses an elevator to get to the throne as you can see behind Kylo there appears to be a lift.

He might have a little training session here with the guards, I don’t know. This is just my own speculation, not based on anything, but I think Snoke tells Kylo ‘fulfill your destiny’ and possibly tortures him. I remember there was a rumour of this happening and I’m pretty sure Snoke orders him to attack his mother’s ship. Afterwards he re-enters the elevator and takes off his mask and destroys it.

At this stage, ‘the Supremacy’ arrives near D’Qar.

At the same time, the Resistance are preparing themselves. Finn is still unconscious, on board one of the Resistance’s bigger ships, the hospital ship. For more information ‘the Supremacy’ and Leia’s ship ‘the Raddus’, take a look at this link as it adds up with the visuals presented in the trailer.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/a-new-star-wars-the-last-jedi-toy-sneakily-revealed-su-1798701899

It was really difficult, but I found Poe to be an excellent pinpoint in figuring out what happens in this battle. I cannot possibly say in what order things happen, but here is the list. I looked really hard at all the footage, and while I tried to screencap shots, sometimes the scenes just went by too quickly for me to be able to get close shots but it’s all there. Some of this is just speculation so be warned.

Leia and Poe meet and plan the Resistance’s evacuation aboard the Raddus before the battle starts.

1. Kylo is ordered to target the ‘Raddus’, because that is his mother’s ship and Snoke knows Kylo will be able to locate exactly where Leia is.

Leia’ ship is the one in front, not the other ship being destroyed towards the left. On the right you can see the hospital ship. It is the same model as the one seen at the end of ESB.

2. Poe manages to get on his x-wing, despite the fact that explosions are going off. He fights alongside the bombers. However, he makes a rash decision and decides to confront the ‘Supremacy’ directly, (image in the trailer shows him flying through the battle, D’Qar in the background) and as a result, Rose’s sister, Paige, dies, because Poe fails to protect the bombers from assault and she was one of the gunners. He nearly costs the Resistance the battle.

Paige on board one of the bombers.

Poe on his x-wing amid the battle above D’Qar.

3. Leia’s ship survives because Kylo does not engage and cannot kill his mother (I know this, but it’s not just the trailer, I’ll explain why later). Snoke, realizing this, sends Phasma to capture Leia instead. Phasma gets on board the Raddus with a group of Stormtroopers to fulfill her mission.

Inside the bomber, Rose’s sister Paige inside. I think she is surrounded by bombs.

Leia inside the Raddus at the beginning of the movie. I think they are trying to find another planet so that they can hide from the First Order, hence the map.

Phasma arriving on the Raddus. (You can tell because the outer blue frame is the same as the blue frame you see when the explosion goes off behind Poe’s x-wing).

4. Poe escapes along with what’s left of the Resistance and they flee (shot of BB-8 and Finalizer behind, it looks like it’s severely damaged, aftermath of the battle).

5. Kylo Ren, having failed to complete his mission, realizes that he will not be forgiven by Snoke.

Now, after looking at the shot of Phasma arriving on the Raddus, the conclusion I come to is that either Leia gets captured or Phasma is. I definitely think that shot is from the beginning of the film, along with Poe running to get on his x-wing, because later on he has a different outfit and I doubt that he’s going to revert back into pilot gear in the third act. For me, based on these shots that we have, I think that Leia gets captured, but she assigns Poe a mission before the start of the battle, which makes sense since this is exactly what she did before the events of TFA and Poe is her go-to guy.

It’s possible that she isn’t captured, but I can’t see there being any other purpose for Phasma being there on the Raddus at the beginning of the film, other than to capture her and bring her to Snoke.

At this point, I don’t know what happens to Leia, but I have a feeling that this is the jist of it, but again, I have no basis for this, it’s just coming out of my head:

Snoke brings Kylo once more into the throne room and Leia is also brought before him. He is obviously disappointed that Kylo failed, but he is also glad that he did not kill Leia, because now they can find out where Luke’s hidden island is. Snoke probes Leia’s mind and although she resists, eventually she gives in. Snoke then orders Kylo to go to Luke’s island along with the Knights of Ren and finish the business once and for all. He doesn’t say much in so many words, but judging by the way that Leia is at his mercy, Kylo knows that if he fails to kill his uncle, Snoke will kill his mother.

If Leia is not captured, then the other scenario I can see is that Kylo feels the force and connection he has to Rey, and while she is in the middle of training, she unwittingly reveals the location of the island. This is possible, but then I can’t quite figure out what Phasma is up to.

After this, I don’t know what happens to Leia, how she ends up on crait etc. We have next to no information on Finn’s mission or what Poe is up to, so I’m not going to speculate too much on that. I will put out a few possibilities though when we get to it.

The Resistance, having barely escaped, is now trying to find a place of refuge.

Finn finally wakes up, and catches up on what has happened. This shot I think is probably after he’s woken up, still in the medical wing judging by the blinds in the background. Note that Poe is now in his second outfit.

Poe mentions a mission that Leia had told him about, but now that he is demoted, and that Leia is captured, he believes it to be the Resistance’s mission to rescue her first rather than go forward with this mission. Rose convinces Finn that they should go on this mission as this is what Leia would have wanted, and so they set off to Canto Bight, while Poe remains with the fleet as they try to find a new base and then find a way to rescue Leia. (callback to the beginning of ANH).

Now the next shot is one I have had a little trouble with. I cannot decide whether it comes here or at the end of the film. For now, I’m putting it here, but I’m not going to rule out the idea that it could come at the end as the Resistance once again evacuate from Crait.

I believe that ship on the left is ‘the Supremacy’. Just as Resistance believe they have got away and are escaping via pods, the Supremacy appears and chases after them. They get out of this somehow, although I have no idea how haha.

.....................

2nd Act.

We return back on Achto, where Luke feels a disturbance in the force. I think Rey goes there primarily to persuade Luke to join the fight and reunite with his sister, not to be trained to become a jedi. I’ve mentioned this a couple times in previous posts, but I think that the Whills will definitely be explored during Luke’s lessons with Rey.

In any case, they start with basic exploration of Rey’s initial powers and how far they stretch. Some people reported when they were filming in Ireland that Luke was going to mediate on a rock and lift himself up while sitting on the rock. I think it might be possible that this is actually a reference to Rey.

As shown in the trailer, Luke is horrified by how far her power stretches, and while he mentions that he’s only seen such power once before, I wonder whether this is really a reference to Kylo. It might well be, but I think it’s possible that he could be talking about somebody else entirely. This is not to say that Kylo and Rey will not be compared throughout the film, I think this side of the marketing is genuine, but I also think that Luke may be referring to Snoke.

My own little theory is that Snoke knows Rey, because they are both part of what was the Ancient Order of the Whills. Rey’s parents, having seen what happened to Kylo Ren, realized that they didn’t want the same thing to happen to their own child, and that was why they had to leave Rey on Jakku, while trying to escape from Snoke’s grasp. Snoke has been searching for Rey ever since her disappearance and this is why Kylo has ‘heard of this girl’. This is why she has such a peculiar connection to the kyber crystal within the Skywalker lightsaber.

If you want information behind this theory, please check out the link below:

https://www.reddit.com/r/starwarsspeculation/comments/5krs05/snoke_and_rey_were_part_of_the_ancient_order_of/

A rumour was floating around quite some time ago about Luke and Rey dismantling lightsabers inside one of the huts.

I think this is possible, due to the nature of kyber crystals and their long history with the Ancient Order of the Whills (if you look at the link I posted above, I talk about all the things that link the two things together, including the reasons behind Rey’s vision in TFA). The books within that ‘force tree’ are clearly connected to them as well; it is highly possible that one of those books is the ‘Journal of the Whills’. I actually think that the island is not only the original Temple of the Jedi, but consequently the first temple of the Whills. Luke might be giving Rey a little history lesson about them whilst they are inside the tree.

I’m pretty sure this is a shot of Luke looking at the book, after he sees Rey looking at it.

I think the above shots are all part of the same scene.

If reports from Ireland are to be believed, part of Rey’s training will include her tackling an underwater sequence, battling some kind of water creature. Hence you can see the skeleton of some kind of lochness-type creature on the right of this shot.

Aside from that, we have the scene of Rey training with her lightsaber on the cliff edge. The following shots are all from the same scene.

Again, I have no idea which order this all goes in, just piecing together bits and pieces.

So far we have had no images of Kylo on Achto, so it’s impossible to comment on that or where the flashback scene of Luke’s temple is going come in, aside from this image below, which to me suggests that Rey has just had another vision.

Another moment, which I know is controversial is the final shot of Rey in the main trailer.

I actually think this is from a moment between Chewbacca and Rey.

Yeah. I know.

But again, I’m focusing mainly on images, trying to match them up but not forcing it. It’s just my gut feeling, but I think Rey is either talking to Chewbacca or Luke here, but my guess is Chewie, because Rey seems to be confiding with this person and it seems to be after spending some time with Luke, realizing that he is not as supportive as she had hoped he would be. There is also a rumoured scene which was supposed to be in the trailer, of Rey and Luke looking at each other as they stand beneath the Millennium Falcon, so this creates the possibility that Luke is there during this scene, but I doubt it.

It’s a stretch, but I think it’s a possibility. I say this because I think after these scenes, when Kylo comes, this is roughly what happens.

Rey and Luke are aware that Kylo is approaching before twilight, hence the reason for this shot.

I don’t know what happens as Rey and Kylo duel by the cliffs, whether she jumps or not. Regardless, she does get wet at some point, but I wonder whether her hair changes when she dives into the water to fight the monster or whether it’s when she falls while dueling Kylo. I think the latter, because clearly Rey still has her hair in three buns when she confronts Kylo. The above shots show her to be looking very pissed off, not as if she were simply training. The following shots are from the same scene, and I believe this confirms that she does end up in the water after the fight.

All the scenes of Rey training have her with the three buns, so all scenes with her hair down are after Kylo arrives on Achto.

You can tell this is her Resistance outfit because of the armbands, and if you look very carefully you can see her hair is down.

It might be possible that when the reports said she would fight a creature in the water, it wasn’t necessarily to do with training but rather a consequence of her ending up in the water during her fight with Kylo.

I think the vision scene of Kylo and the Knights of Ren in the rain is from this fight, with Achto slowly becoming shrouded in darkness and then rain. Hence, this next shot, I’m pretty sure, is either Luke talking to Kylo or the Knights of Ren.

Now, what happens on Achto between Luke, Kylo and Rey is a total mystery, and I think so far we have had basically nothing on it, which is as it should be. As I said at the beginning, I’m not going to even guess because we have literally nothing to go by.

The only thing is this rumor of Luke blowing up a hut while Kylo and Rey have a conversation inside. This is a possibility, but I actually think the shot below is that of the cave, which Rey ends up in when she gets up from the water after her duel with Kylo. Does Kylo save her from the water and then Luke finds them down there? Maybe. But I don’t think that’s the inside of a hut, it’s much too small. The bts reel gives you a better idea of the scope of the cave.

Yes, Luke is in his earlier robes here, but who knows what the context is. Clearly they are not filming scenes here, and sets tend to be close together on a sound stage, so I think this can be dismissed.

I think the above shot is definitely after Kylo arrives on Achto in any case.

So, skipping ahead, we know that the First Order arrives on Achto. If my previous scenario is correct, perhaps Snoke senses a shift in the force as Kylo starts to connect unwittingly with Rey, and therefore orders for him to be taken back to the Supremacy along Leia and Rey.

It’s hard to know but I think it is Chewie piloting the Falcon in this shot, hence the porg inside the Falcon. There will be x-wings fighting above Achto.

It is very difficult to know what becomes of the three after this conflict.

Meanwhile, Finn and Rose arrive on Canto Bight. Again, we have a few images of them, but very little to go by plot-wise. We know that it’s a gambling planet, hence the horse-racing, and casino-like images. They are also captured in a cell at one point, in what appears to be a jail.

Either way, their goal is to get to Benecio Del Toro’s character, DJ.

I’m afraid that’s as much as I can get out of Finn’s arc on Canto Bight, since it didn’t appear at all in the main trailer.

...............

The 3rd Act.

The biggest thing I had to wrestle with was which way round the scenes on Crait and the Supremacy came. I have no idea how Leia, Poe, Finn and Rey end up on Crait, nor how Rey ends up getting in Snoke’s throne room but I am going to stick with my theory about Leia’s capture. For this reason, I believe the scenes on the Supremacy occur before the scenes on Crait. We started ESB with Hoth, so it would be nice to think that we end TLJ on Crait.

The Supremacy:

Finn and Rose arrive on ‘the Supremacy’ in disguise. Perhaps the Resistance has already arrived on Crait, Finn and Rose have met with Poe and set up a mission to rescue Leia, not knowing that Luke and Rey are also on the ‘Supremacy’ having been captured by the First Order on Achto. Chewie returns to the Resistance aboard the Falcon.

As for the confrontation between Rey and Snoke, god knows how that plays out. However, I do believe Snoke is talking about Rey when he talks about finding her and knowing of her great power. As I have put in my post about the Whills (link above) Snoke has known about Rey for some time, as she is a special type of force user, a Whill, which is what Snoke means when he used the term ‘special’.

Regardless, when Snoke starts torture Rey I think that Kylo comes close to putting a stop to it. I say close, because while he steps in to save Rey, they are both overpowered by Snoke. All seems lost, till Luke steps in, finally taking action. (It’s too early for it to be either Kylo or Rey’s ‘moment’ because this is only the 2nd part of a trilogy for our ‘protagonists’)

Rey and Kylo escape as Luke orders them to leave as he deals with Snoke himself.

Meanwhile, Rose and Finn successfully find Leia and rescue her. I think it’s possible that the Resistance launches an attack on ‘the Supremacy’ but I can’t know for sure...

This is on board the Supremacy I believe, because of the red aesthetic. Rose and Finn blow up the hangar for extra good measure and are about to leave when Phasma shows up. Finn and Phasma fight one on one. Finn wins, and he, along with Rose and Leia leave the Supremacy.

One possibility for the shot of Kylo could be here, with him offering his hand as he and Rey escape from the hangar. If you look at the smoke around him, it is very reminiscent of the smoke surrounding Phasma.

It is possible that they escape aboard his shuttle, as his tie fighter is presumably destroyed when he arrives on Achto.

The two groups (Kylo and Rey, Finn + Rose and Leia) make their way to Crait, and we enter the final phase of the film.

The Supremacy also makes its way towards Crait, with Luke still on board. Leia is back, and Poe and Finn reunite. Finn gets ready, in his pilot gear, the same as Poe.

As for Rey and Kylo, they arrive on Crait, but I think Kylo might seemingly betray Rey by rejoining the First Order as they descend upon Crait in retaliation to what happened upon ‘the Supremacy’…. Part of this conclusion comes from the fact that Rian Johnson was very much inspired by ‘Three Outlaw Samurai’. The characters in that film keep switching between sides and one of the main themes is betrayal. It’s very hard to guess who is on who’s side. Sounds familiar right?

But is Kylo really betraying Rey? Is he possibly returning so that he can protect her the best way he can, instead of merely being captured?

Rey meets Leia and I think she tells her that Luke has been captured. This is one possibility for the image below. The other is something I will talk about in a moment.

As the battle commences, Poe’s ship goes down and he is forced to fight on ground. Trench warfare (WW1) is going to be a big part of this battle, as these images below show.

Another possibility for me is that Poe might die as he saves Rey from one of the heavy assault walkers and that is what Rey is informing Leia about. I don’t know for sure though.

As far as this scenario goes, I think this is as far as it goes. I cannot really say what happens at the end of this, but judging by what I have written before, my guess is Kylo is captured by the Resistance, and we are left hanging when it comes to Luke’s fate, as he remains in Snoke’s grasp. This is of course if we are taking on the stance that the stuff on the Supremacy comes before the scenes on Crait, which of course is not at all certain, but as far as my judgment goes, this is the best I’ve got.

So, what do you guys think? Let me know and don’t forget to comment, follow and like! :D

Oh, and the above shot? That’s definitely Chewie, and he is aboard the Raddus. There is no way that he can be there at the beginning of the film, so the Raddus ship must survive - hence, I find it really unlikely that Leia’s ship gets blown up. God knows where this scene comes in, but I bet it’s towards the end. :-)

#star wars #the last jedi #reylo #kylo x rey #luke #predictions #leia

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popcornblotter · 7 years ago

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At Home Mini Review Round-Up

Hey again, like my last post, I’m writing this just to catch up on the films I rewatched that is a part of my personal Blu-Ray collection, or something I may have found streaming. Let’s get into, there’s a lot.

#1: Star Wars: Episode 4: A New Hope

Before The Last Jedi came out, I decided to re-watch the original trilogy along with the Force Awakens. I got a little tied up with the holidays, which is why there weren’t any reviews then.

A New Hope has always been my personal favorite film of this franchise. I know a lot may disagree, going with the very popular vote that Empire is a better film. While I can agree that Empire is technically a better made film, New Hope will always be my gold star. I love the classic hero’s journey, the look and feel that this film had the job of producing was extremely well done. And honestly, if there had never been another Star Wars film, this would stand well on its own.

#2: Star Wars: Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back

Like I said, I do agree that this is a better made film, quality wise. With expanding this galaxy, there was probably an even more immense task of comparing to the quality of the first.

I’ve always loved Yoda as a character, but not because he’s this wise master who could do great things, but because sort of a little asshole to Luke when they first meet. I love the very weird performance that Frank Oz gives to this character.

I know many people on the internet claim that Empire is the darkest of the films, I don’t know if I necessarily agree with that. Yes, it has its moments, but I think people honestly forget how funny this is due to the writing and great performances by Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher. What I love about the humor is that it isn’t humor for the sake of humor, it’s all generated naturally and comes form the character.

#3: Star Wars: Episode 6: The Return of the Jedi

I like Return of the Jedi well enough but as a film, it lacks a bit in pace. I like the stuff in Jabba’s Palace, it gives off the vibes of the old school serials that Lucas was inspired by. I don’t even mind the Ewoks, it’s more to do with between Jabba’s Palace and the Battle of Endor, the film slogs a little. I personally think they could’ve cut the entire scene of C-3PO reenacting the previous two films to the Ewoks. I don’t think that would have changed anything other than ramping up to the next battle.

But when it does kick into the action, its good. I think the Throne Room scene on the second Death Star is well acted and executed. Ian McDiarmid’s performance is just the right levels of terrifying and mustache twirling. But I love the shot when Luke rages out on Vader where it goes profile, and all you see are their silhouettes with their lightsabers, and the music adds so much to the tension, making you believe that Luke may actually kill Vader.

Despite that great scene, this is probably my least favorite of the original trilogy. But it’s still a fun one to go back to.

#4: Star Wars: Episode 7: The Force Awakens

Personally, I loved Force Awakens the minute I left the theater. I think it brought some new life into Star Wars while harking back to some of the old elements we love about these stories. Do I think it was a re-hash of New Hope? Hell no. I think there was some purposeful mirroring to the original trilogy. This film had a hard job to do bringing fans back after the lackluster criticism of the prequels. It had to give some of what you wanted and some new that you didn’t know you wanted.

I love all of the new characters they introduced, Kylo Ren in particular. I’ve heard a lot of criticism towards this character and the performance given by Adam Driver that I think is a tad unjustified. “He’s not as cool as Vader or Maul, he’s not as scary or calculating as Palpatine, he’s just a whiny little emo kid.” I just think that Kylo Ren is a very different kind f villain that Star Wars and its fan base has never been introduced to. I love Vader and Palpatine, even Maul give the extension his character was given in the Clone Wars animated series, but they are fairly one note. Which I honestly think is fine given for the films that they were in at the time those films were made. Other than them being evil, there wasn’t much more to them, aside from Vader. Kylo is a complex villain, and at the point we see him in Force Awakens he is nowhere close to being at the level of evil as the previously mentioned. But I think that is purposeful. When we see him talking to Vader’s helmet, we understand that he still feels the light side of the force in him when he wants to be on the dark side. I may have already said this in my Last Jedi review, but the story of Kylo Ren is his ascension into the legendary evil status of the previous Sith lords. This isn’t just a mustache twirling bad guy, this is someone you can empathize with on a certain level and understand. I think what he does in the end of this film is comparative to Anakin murdering the children in Revenge of the Sith, and the events of the Last Jedi are his Battle on Mustafar, that was his last step to becoming the villain he wants to be, which is something very novel to see in films like this. I think by the time we get to Episode 9, he’ll be at that level of evil.

But there I go again on a tangent. I think the Force Awakens is a wonderful addition to the legacy that George Lucas created.

#5: Bright

This was one of those films I checked out because the marketing for it was everywhere. I’ve worked a fair amount of movie theaters in my life, and one lesson I took from the last one was something one of my managers said. “The more promotional material you see for a movie, the more likely it is to be shit.” I took that to heart, and in my 3 years of working at that theater, I agree with that statement. Bright is no exception.

Directed by David Ayer and written by Max Landis, Bright is a film that was produced specifically to air on Netflix. From what I’ve read and heard from various podcasts and articles, they threw a lot of money at this, I don’t what that number was, but to be able to afford Will Smith, you’ve got to throw some serious money.

I’ll say that David Ayer is a kind of a director that’s work either works well, or doesn’t at all for me. I really enjoyed Fury, his World War 2 film that took a very Vietnam War approach. But on the other hand, you have Suicide Squad, which I think is giant dumpster fire that’s trying really hard to be Guardians of the Galaxy.

And Max Landis is another one of those creatives that I have a hard time placing. I think his film Chronicle, was a very interesting take on the superhero genre. But from what I’ve seen lately, he’s been hard to find a hit since. Also, I’ve found his online persona, either on Twitter or YouTube to exasperatingly grading, like giving a four year old Mountain Dew spiked with Red Bull. So where does Bright fall, why don’t you ask it’s neighbor in the dumpster.

If you’re unaware of the story, Bright is a cop film that happens to have Orcs and Elves that are a heavy handed metaphor for racism and race relations in America. This film slogs with it's pacing, making its 2 hour runtime feel like 4. The characters are so thinly veiled you could literally define their character trait as good, bad, asshole, or any combo. The writing in this film is so atrocious I couldn’t believe this was written by a grown adult. It handles cursing like a 13 year old who just discovered curse words, so that’s all they say now.

There’s not much else I can say about it, but I’d recommend a YouTube video by a woman named Lindsay Ellis who goes deep into why this film is bad and lazily hatched. Also check out any of her other video essays, they’re super entertaining and educational.

#6: iBoy

Another Netflix original that is middling to say the least. The story is of a teenage boy living in a poor area of London, when he and friend who lives nearby are attacked. Afterwards, somehow the kid attains the ability to manipulate electronics with his mind. From there, he decides to go be a vigilante, trying to punish those who hurt his friend, played by Maisie Williams. Like Bright, iBoy suffers a bit from pacing issues, but the biggest problem is not understand where the more interesting story lay.

Intermittently throughout the film we keep checking in on Maisie Williams seeing how she’s coping with the attack, not coming outside for days or weeks, avoiding school, and just overall terrified. Towards the end she gets a big moment where Williams pulls a great performance of showing someone suffering from a traumatic event. It hit me then that this film should’ve been way more focused on the friend, but then we wouldn’t have all of the tropy vigilante crap that comes from lower end films like this.

#7: The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad

This is a very weird romp of a Disney cartoon. I remember as a child watching the Sleepy Hollow section, but never seeing the Mr. Toad part. I’d found this on Hulu one day, and figured I’d give it a go.

All things that I’ll say negative or positive, the animation is extremely well done considering it came out during the 40s.

The Mr. Toad section of the film is a bit annoying in my opinion. The story is essentially about a guy who’s an asshole who doesn’t care about anyone’s well being or feelings, or his friends for that matter, until he gets scammed out of the deed for his home. Somehow he convinces his friends to help steal the deed back with some wacky action and all is fine and good. This was 30 minutes and felt 20 minutes too long.

I was more hopeful about the Sleepy Hollow story here, having somewhat fond memories of it as a kid. But man, I definitely don’t remember how much nothing happens here.

Like Mr. Toad, Ichabod Crane, the central character here, is an asshole. This weird, goofy looking dude is somehow the new town hunk that exploits the townspeople into making him extravagant meals. And when he finds a girl he “likes” and wants to marry, it’s because her father is the richest guy in town and wants the inheritance. As a kid, I don’t remember 80% of this short. I thought the Headless Horseman chase was a lot longer, but it ends up being about the last 5-10 minutes of it. Now that section is what sells it, with the creepy backgrounds, the sound effects, the music, and that blood curdling laugh of the Horseman when he shows up. In my opinion, if you have any interest in revisiting it, skip to the last ten minutes and you’ll get what you came for.

#8: Sicario

Sicario was one of those films I meant to watch when it came out, but never did. But I came across it on Hulu and thought why not.

The tension that comes from this film is palpable. The action is realistic, nerve wracking, and doesn’t shy away from looking at the harshness of the situation.

This film is proof in my opinion that director Denis Villeneuve is a master filmmaker in the beginning of his career.

I know there is a sequel coming out later this year, but without Emily Blunt’s character, but since she was the audience personified, trying to figure out what the plan was and who these people were that she was working with, I’m not sure how it will work. I do think this is a film to check out.

#9: Me Before You

I won’t lie, I can enjoy a romantic film when done well. Me Before You is about a young woman who falls in love with a paraplegic man who she cares for.

The reason this film works is the chemistry between Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin as the couple the film centers on. The relationship isn’t the immediate head over heels story, the love comes through time and work. The film is a little clunky in it's editing, with some oddly placed montages coming out of nowhere. But by the end of it, I was balling, because I’m not afraid of crying at movies when they hit me in the feels.

#10: Philadelphia

A court trial film during the AIDS crisis, about AIDS, about homophobia, and about life. Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington deliver powerful performances directed by the same guy who made Silence of the Lambs. A genuine court movie that doesn’t treat it’s audience like they’re children that moved me to tears. One of the more interesting roles that I’ve seen Hanks in. Definitely check this out.

#11: Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

An action film that I found incredibly dull and uninteresting. I personally think they should change the title of these films to Tom Cruise Wants to Die on Camera, because I honestly think Cruise tries to tempt fate each time. And it feels like he’s trying so hard to do these stunts just for the headlines.

As far as a film goes, it seemed like a rinse, wash, repeat cycle. A team of people talk about how a mission is impossible, then they do the impossible in succeeding and then they do it again. I was so bored by the 90 minute mark I didn’t even finish it. Skip this one in my opinion.

#12: Captain America: The First Avenger

And in honor of the impending war of infinity, I decided I wanted to go back and watch the historic effort done by Marvel Studios. I’ll say the only one I don’t own is The Incredible Hulk, so that review won’t be happening. Also, saw it on TV once, very meh for me. Side note, the order I’m watching these films back is in a supposed chronological order according to a couple of different sites. So here we go with the first.

Personally, I don’t think the first Captain America film gets the credit it deserves. I enjoyed it immediately out of seeing it in theaters, but what I come to understand is many see it as a middling film.

I think what this film achieves is much more than what it fails at. Chris Evans takes a character that would essentially be the “eat your vegetables” spokesman and all of its corniness, and turns Steve Rogers into a man that you can aspire to be. Even pre-Super Soldier Serum, his efforts to try and join the army and not back down from a fight are what make him a great character.

I also think this film is great for finding a gem like Hayley Atwell for playing Agent Peggy Carter. This character could’ve easily been put to the sidelines as the love interest, but the writers thought progressively and made her a woman of action. The humor, sternness, and kindness she plays Peggy is what made her so electric, hence them giving her a show to give us what happens post First Avenger, which got cancelled too early in my opinion.

What director Joe Johnston achieves at is making a story that could’ve easily been a yawn full of laughs at how dated this could’ve been, and made it a great character piece about a guy who doesn’t like bullies and will stand up to them if needed.

#13: Iron Man

Obviously, we have to give the commendations to Jon Favreau for bringing this film, otherwise the MCU wouldn’t be what it is today.

What can I say that many haven’t already said? Not much, I’m not that clever or have a thesaurus sized knowledge of words at my disposal.

But I think what this film encapsulates so well what is the backbone of most of the Marvel heroes. A person who’s seeing the injustices in the world, or universe, and can’t stand by the side while others do nothing. That’s what makes these characters rich, that most of the time they are just normal people who decide to do what they think is right.

But this film does in the end still hold up, with Robert Downey Jr. giving a great performance. Especially when you see him making that transition to hero.

#14: Iron Man 2

Iron Man 2 is a very so so film. It’s not awful, it’s just not very good. Sam Rockwell and Mickey Rourke are very disappointing villains, Gwenyth Paltrow becomes more annoying to me, but that’s sort of how I feel about her in general, and there are a lot of subplots that don’t add up to much.

The film does a good job in introducing Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, and Don Cheadle as the new Col. James Rhodes.

Out of all of the efforts, this probably my least favorite film of the MCU.

#15: My Week with Marilyn

I decided to re-watch this film for Valentine’s Day. This film made me fall in love with Michelle Williams and persuaded me she needs to be in everything. She is utterly magnetic in every scene. Her and Eddie Redmayne have a wonderful chemistry that is completely believable. If you haven’t seen this film, I’d highly recommend it, if you’re like me, you may leave it with some tears.

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podcastcoach · 8 years ago

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Marketing Your Podcast - How Long Does it Take?

Understand Before Being Understood

About a month ago I left a comment on the Spreaker Live show, and this comment resulted in a response from the host that in a conversation he had with me was "Disproportional." So after we both hissed at each I set up a time when we could talk about this and see how we pushed each other's buttons. We did and it was a great interview. The bad news is my SD Card ran out of room, and my backup (mp3 skype recorder) didn't get it either. I could call Alex back on, but at this point, so much water is under the bridge, I thought I would just paraphrase what really happened.

In my comment, there were times when I used ALL CAPS to make a point.

Alex is used to dealing with comments from YouTube which are much crueler, and personal that the average podcast comment

This was the first time he had been challenged on the podcast side of this content (vs the YouTube side) and it caught him off guard.

He apologized for calling me a schmuck, and I explained that when he made a joke about me not having any listeners (because I don't use Spreaker), and that I wasn't up front with people about the fact that I work for Libsyn, and we chatted about that. I explained how I wasn't trying to push his buttons, and then we did something that most people miss out on.

We had some cool conversation about topics we have in common. For example, Chris Cornell had just died. Neither one of use quite gets while World Trade Center Tower Number 7 went down.

In the end, I look forward to meeting Alex at Podcast Movement. If I had not taken a second to step back, and wonder if there was something I DID to create such a reaction (instead of just condemning the other person) then I would've lost out on an opportunity to learn something (be careful using caps in comments), and Alex wouldn't have been able to see his reaction. Lastly, I think we both gained a new friend. So instead of being so set on proving somebody wrong, instead maybe ask, "Why did you say that?" or "What were you feeling when you said that?" and try to understand before being understood (Which is a lesson I learned from the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)

Seriously, How Do I Grow My Audience?

Devlin Wilder posted in a Facebook Group, "Please, for the love of all that's good and pure, someone please help me WITH REAL INFO on how I get the numbers. I don't want to hear I need to have my show out for years or I need to get to 200 episodes or what not. And I've had no luck with Fiverr. I need to know the real deal"

This is like saying, "I want to know about making a baby, but I don't want to hear about ovaries, sperm, or having to wait 9 months."

THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS

In her book Beyond Powerful Radio Radio Consultant Vallerie Geller states, "in my experience, with few exceptions it takes about three years to build a talk station." She points out that the original Star Trek Series was canceled after three seasons and it was re-runs where the audience found the show. Jerry Seinfeld has framed a memo stating that his show has a poor supporting cast, and most people who saw the test pilot would not watch it again.

Gary Vaynrchuck says nobody watched his show for the first 19 months

Rand Fishkin tells about his wife, Geraldine, and her travel blog, Everywhereist. For two years she never broke 100 visitors a day (she does a blog). Five years later she gets 1000,000 visitors a month. Source

Success comes from feedback, and the ability to look at yourself and ask "Can I Improve This?"

Growing up I had a basketball hoop in my backyard. Every time I shot a basket and it bounced off the rim and back at me.... that was feedback. I watched Kareem Abdul Jabar and his sky hooks shot. It was unblockable. I practiced my skyhook over and over and over. Eventually, I could shoot it with my eyes shut. That took time.

If you want to quit your job in six weeks, I would recommend that you not even start podcasting. This is like someone wanting to lose 40 pounds in six weeks. You soon learn that six weeks is not that long, and 40 pound is not that small.

The Answer is There is No Answer

There are so many factors that play into this

Are you working full time? What market are you in and how crowded is it? How unique are you? Your Web Design

It's Not Who You Know, It's Who Knows You

Podcast Movement is coming up in August, and DC Podfest is coming up in November. I will be at Podcast Movement, and I plan on being in DC Podfest. Do these cost lots of money? Just the travel alone can be expensive based on your budget. That is the key, what is your budget? If you don't have the budget, don't be stupid, don't go. I'm saving money as we speak for Social Media marketing world. I have to plan. I have to put money in my budget. If you have a family with a spouse and kids, don't be stupid.

Is It Worth Going to An Event?

I have a podcast group for people in Northeast Ohio. I rarely get more than five people in attendance. One of those people (Matt from theauthorinsideyou.com) helped get me on a local TV show.

I met Gary Leland, Paul Colligan, and Rob Walch at one of the fire New Media Expos. Rob was the person I called when I found myself out of a job and looking to work in the podcasting industry (I now work for Libsyn).

I met Ken Blanchard at an event and I haven't stopped laughing yet.

I met Jared Easley and Dan Franks at the New Media Show. Later they would start Podcast Movement and I've been blessed to say I've spoken at every single one in one capacity or another.

I met Eri kK Johnson and came up with the idea of adding him to the Podcast Review show at an event.

I met Mike Russel of Music Radio Creative at the New Media Show

I met Glenn The Geek At Podcast Movement. Glen got me involved with Chris Krimitsos and I was able to speak at Podfest.us That lead to me helping with the Messengers Podcast about their documentary. That lead to me being the closing keynote at podfest.us this year. One person, one contact.

Last year I met a whole bunch of people at DC Podfest including Matthew from Podtopod.com.

Most of those I paid for (events post-2016 I typically can expense out).

When I was a musician, I once drove four hours after getting off work at 8 PM to drive to Cincinnati and hangout with a bunch of indie musicians for three hours before turning around and driving home (I was probably 20). One of the relationships I start at that meeting was a guy who went to another event and learned about podcasting.

Whooshkaa Free Media Hosting

For those who are new to me reviewing media hosting, I have some criteria.

1. Don't mess with my file. What I upload is what I want people to download. 2. Give me the ability to have an unlimited back catalog (unlimited storage) 3. Don't limit my audience size (unlimited bandwidth) 4. Don't control my feed, and make it easy to leave if I choose to do so. I need to be able to put in an iTunes redirect script. 5. Give me support. 6. Charge me for your service so you can stay in business 7. Give me stats so I can see what's working. It would be nice if they were accurate

Whooshkaa is doing something that has been tried by audiometric.io and before them podango.com. This is where you give free hosting so you can see advertising on the podcast. Do Whooshkaa meet my criteria? No, but there is an asterisk.

They mess with your file (as they put code into the mp3 file to alert when to play an advertisement), so they keep most of your ID3 tags, but they ditch you image (so if someone downloads your show to their computer and plays it, the dreaded gray music note of death appears on a windows machine). They also change your file name. They don't change your file format, but by nature, they HAVE to change your file to stay in business.

Their support was quick and very helpful. Their stats are very similar to what everyone else provides (number of downloads, geographic, operating system, the technology used, etc). They do offer how long someone has listened. Unless they have cracked a new code, this is typically a wasted stat. The only way they can get that information is if you are using their player. To this, I point out that over 80% of podcasts are listened to on a mobile device (so this stat is kind of a "Corinthian leather" feature, sounds good, but in the end not that accurate).

They have a built in "Clammr" feature, called highlights. Clammr.com is the first service that allows you to make snippets of a show and share it on social media. With Clammr you can share a snippet of the show and when they click on the snippet they are taken to a place where they can listen to the rest of the episode. You can see how many people listened to your "Highlight." For me, I thought the design could be adjusted to make it go from easy to SUPER EASY to hear the rest of the podcast.

They do have a weird "Sign up for our newsletter" when you send people to an episode on Whooshkaa. The problem is that for the Whooshkaa email list (not yours).

Getting Paid

As the code in the mp3 file has the word "Triton" I'm guessing that they are using Triton for their advertisements. This means that podcasters can probably expect 1 to 2 cents per download. So if I had my Weekly Web Tools on their platform I might make $12 for the month (at 1200 downloads a month). That is if you are lucky enough to have advertising.

When I enquired about their CPA, they responded, "We don't have any information on the CPA for ads. We generally only work with our larger podcasters/media companies for ad injection." When I wanted to know how many downloads you need to get a sponsor, a support person lets me know, "Generally more than 10k per month before we approach a podcaster for ads. Some of our current partners monetising include News Corp, Fox Sports, Sky News, Bauer and a few large Australian Sporting organizations.

When I pointed out to them that others had tried this model, they responded, "We support the podcast ecosystem with free hosting, while making ad revenue from the top 5%. At the end of the day, the cost of hosting a podcast with small downloads is negligible. We hope that some of the smaller podcasters turn out to be the next Ira Glass or Alex Blumberg :)

It's super easy to pick a spot where you want your advertising to be placed. By default, they want to add three advertisers (I chose one). I believe you will be contacted when you reach certain milestones for advertising as there is nothing in the dashboard (that I can find, and nothing in their help section) about getting paid (i.e paypal, direct deposit).

Conclusion

Call me weird, but building your podcast on a host that doesn't charge is risky business (again, podango, audiometric.io) but if you're in a boat and have zero budget (they do redirect feeds if you want to leave) then I would recommend Whooshkaa over another free service Pinecast if you're looking for a free service with all the trimmings. If you asked me which one will be in business in five years between Pinecast and Whooshkaa, I would put my money on Pinecast as their free service motivates you to upgrade to their paid service. With Whooshkaa they are hoping that people with 10,000 downloads per episode take their advertising, and don't leave for another host. I notice in their terms of service it states, "If you are a Commercial User/Channel Partner, this may be altered by any specific agreements we hold with you."

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