#and several episodes of my new favorite podcast- square notes | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

magicofthepen · 4 years

Text

Gallifrey Relisten: The Inquiry

So this time I’m posting my reaction thoughts before listening to the corresponding @podofrassilon episode, so I’m curious to see if there’s anything that’s a) the same as someone’s thoughts on the podcast or b) in wild disagreement with someone thoughts on the podcast, because both are fun. And I might do a followup post if there are new things I want to talk about after listening to the podcast? Although mostly I’m just excited to hear other people talk about this episode because there are a few key things that fall under the category of “this is probably an interesting thing to theorize/speculate about but I haven’t really done that and it would be cool to hear other people do that.”

Spoilers for/mentions of: A Blind Eye, Lies, Enemy Lines, plus vague references to overall character arcs.

“I am Lady Romanadvoratrelundar, President of the Supreme Council of Gallifrey and All Her Dominions, Holder of the Wisdom of Rassilon, Preserver of the Matrix, Guardian of the Legacy of Omega.” Romana, please.

“What is Narvin after? Why does he take part?” “Because he has no choice.” No, Narvin definitely was the one who called the inquiry, Leela has a valid point here. The motivations are a bit...weird, idk, in Weapon of Choice Narvin wants to hold Romana accountable, but this not-impartial inquiry with Brax in charge is definitely....not that. Was he hoping there would be a more genuine investigation into the Gryben incident but it didn’t work out? Did he care less about the inquiry after Romana didn’t actually end up starting a war or something in Weapon of Choice? Did he just want to make a point that when she crosses a line, he’ll make sure it isn’t forgotten?

“He’s CIA, of course he’s up to something.” The venom directed towards the CIA here...it’s a bit hilarious. Listen, I know, I know that Romana has solid personal reasons to distrust the CIA at this point, but I’m still like...bold words from a future CIA Coordinator.

“Whatever happened, the CIA recruited Narvin and he never looked back.” This is flagged purely to note that I’m excited to hear people’s Narvin backstory headcanons. And also, I’m not sure if I just never pay attention to this, but who was running Project Alpha, if not the CIA? That kind of weapon feels like it would already fall under the CIA’s supervision.

There’s definitely a messy dynamic there with Narvin and "Torvald” and trust — Narvin lets “Torvald” hang around, but doesn’t actually want to tell him everything about Project Alpha. Obviously Narvin doesn’t know "Torvald’s” real identity, but at what point does he realize that Real Torvald was in league with Free Time? Is there a time when he shifts from some semblance of trust to strictly pretending to trust him? Does Narvin really trust anyone ever at this point?

Romana figures out a way to track the device, but like. Has no one been looking for it this whole time?

Darkel agrees to let Leela go as an impartial observer, and is generally pretty chill with Leela? Also pretty chill in general? Another big “I want to hear Thoughts about this” thing is Darkel’s shift in attitude towards Romana and Leela between The Inquiry and Lies — I think I’ve seen some ideas about it, but it isn’t set up in the same way that you can hear Narvin getting increasingly pissed at Romana the longer series one goes on.

There are these recurring discussion of trust in this episode — Romana: Don’t trust Narvin. Or Torvald. Leela: I do not. They have let me down before. / Narvin: Do you trust the President? Leela: Why do you ask? / Leela to Brax: I trust you. And actually, it’s all about who Leela trusts (or is being told to trust, or doesn’t trust), which is super interesting considering the end of the next episode is going to leave Leela with some major trust issues.

“Trust is something that is earned. Perhaps one day [Braxiatel] and Romana will earn your trust.” “I doubt it.” Well, Leela and Narvin are both half right.

I wrote down “Andred you asshole” and now I genuinely can’t remember what I was referring to, but it sounds right.

Narvin has moments where he’s almost being respectful towards Leela, but ruins it — i.e. “That Savage knows more about the art of war than you do.”

Romana’s insistence that “Andred is probably dead and really you should move on” is uhhhhhh not the most supportive behavior but also dear god she really wants to be Leela’s favorite doesn’t she.

The iconic: “One thing our President cannot be accused of is incompetence.” speech. :)

“I can make mistakes. And my mistakes have consequences.” A flickering moment of self-awareness from our favorite disaster president.

Romana: “I’m going, Narvin, and you can’t stop me.” Me: yeah that’s the show isn’t it.

When exactly does the “metaphorical bridge at midnight” scene take place for Brax? He doesn’t seem to know about the threat of the data bomb yet, and he’s already dealt with the sculpture by the end of the episode in Present Times, and the meeting is clearly meant to be close to the present, but I’ve never really thought about when exactly it falls.

Kind of related: I am in general really interested in hearing other people talk about Brax because I don’t have many Brax thoughts myself? Mainly because I’ve only listened to Gallifrey (haven’t listened to Benny, haven’t read any of the books), so I feel like I can’t really form strong opinions or headcanons or theories about Brax’s character because there’s so much I don’t know about him.

This is something I’ve seen other people talk about, but Narvin is actually being considerate of Leela’s feelings in this episode? “With all due respect to your late husband” — it backfires, but he is trying to acknowledge her loss even while he’s criticizing the Chancellery Guard. And then the whole bit where he hesitates to tell her exactly what Andred said to him, and quickly reassures her that Andred was lying when he was saying terrible things about Leela. I think Narvin’s behavior in that latter scene is partially motivated by trying to keep her calm and drag out telling her about Andred until Torvald can get there for backup (she was threatening him), but there’s another part of it that does seem quite genuine.

Yet another episode this season where the solution is to let the bomb go off, to let events run their course.

So if Brax and Narvin were the only people who knew about Project Alpha, how did Arkadian know to steal the device to try to provoke a war? Certain Theories About Arkadian aside...the question of how the heck he knew it existed and how to go after it is an interesting one. All questions about Arkadian are interesting ones tbh, considering there are no answers about Arkadian.

It genuinely took me several times listening through Gallifrey before I realized that they did actually destroy a planet at the end of the episode because they’re very chill about it? Oh, this device is So Terrible, but yeah, it’s cool if it kills everybody on that planet because that’s how Time Goes. It’s not even really made into a moral dilemma? Idk it always felt a bit tonally inconsistent with the other episodes this series, which I think is why I genuinely did not follow this bit of plot for so long.

Okay, so when the timonic fusion device was stolen, it was snatched right before detonation? And wasn’t there a whole thing in episode one about how the detonation sequence couldn’t be stopped? (I mean, it wasn’t a real detonation sequence in episode one, but still). The point is: they stole it like a second before it blew up and really quickly turned it off...how? (This is mostly just me being nitpicky for fun, I don’t actually care that much about the details, this is Doctor Who.)

Kind of alluded to this above, but yet another episode that ends with Narvin being pissed at Romana (here for disregarding Brax breaking the rules).

Next Episode Reaction: A Blind Eye

Previous Episode Reaction: Square One

#gallifrey audios #in general this is an episode that i don't have strong feelings about #positive or negative #there are some bits i like but overall for me it's just kind of....there #so i liked encouraging myself to think about it more as i listened #emily listens to big finish #ramblings #romana #leela #narvin #irving braxiatel #the relisten of rassilon

8 notes · View notes

theonyxpath · 5 years

Link

Figured that now would be a good time to take a look at how things are going with your favorite gaming company.

No, not them, I mean Onyx Path. Sheesh.

After all, we’re near the end of the year – at least the part before everything gets holiday crazy – and next week we start our They Came From Beneath the Sea! Kickstarter.

So let’s take advantage of the time period and have a little snapshot of where we are. We’ll do more of a “Year That Was” thing in a later blog, I think. (This one is long enough as it is – yeesh!)

2018 was a challenging year, but one where we were able to catch up – finally! – on a lot of projects and start delivering some delayed ones…as well as delivering a bunch of Kickstarter projects earlier than estimated!

If you recall from MMN blogs in the past, I started Onyx Path with a three-part plan for the sorts of projects we would take on, so let me divide my comments based on that.

1- Our Wholly Owned Games:

This category is perhaps our timeliest right now, with both books for Scion 2nd Edition and the Trinity Continuum Core and Aeon all having delivered their KS backer PDFs and in various stages of prepping for their traditional print-runs.

This is very satisfying to be able to say, because as our KS backers know, a large part of the delay in getting these two lines to this point was needing to create a system for them that wouldn’t fall apart at higher power play, and which, frankly, was designed with an eye towards the last couple of decades worth of how games are played.

And while still being a recognizable dice pool system for our fantastic fans of the first editions who kept these games alive all these years!

Just today, our old friend and long-time writer and developer Bruce Baugh posted a long and informative “review” of Storypath on his Facebook page and RPG.net, and I’m taking the liberty of posting some of his thoughts here:

I mean to say, if, on the other hand, you tell players that all active approaches are good – that every one solves some problems well and makes for entertaining drama in trying to solve ones it’s not so great for – the choice moves from “should I risk it?” to “_how_ should I risk it?”, because of course they’re taking the kind of risk and get to decide how. Presuming here that players want to have an adventurous good time, the game’s stepping up to point out the scenic attractions and give them a hand where the footing’s tricky. I love it.

Or take a situation where the character’s pursuing someone, using the Athletics skill. The Forceful character uses Might, running fast, bursting through barriers, maybe throwing things to bring down the pursued, and so on. The Finesse character uses Dexterity, perhaps engaging in impromptu (or prepared!) parkour and acrobatics. The Resilience character uses Stamina, and might look for shortcuts that involve kind of long falls, knowing they’ll be able to take the blow, shake it off, and keep going. Every option is good, every option invites the player and Storyguide to look for opportunities to engage with the setting.

Meanwhile, as those two lines move to printing, we have Scarred Lands, which seems to be living up to its name. After a decent start, we had to go back to square one and reconsider how to publish this classic White Wolf-created D20 game after the death of Stewart Wieck, who was originally my partner in publishing it.

I’m glad to say that we indeed have a plan for how to “reactivate” Scarred Lands and you can look for a Kickstarter for the 5e version of the famous Creature Collection early next year. We’re teaming up with a brand new design studio to bring you a gorgeous and exciting new version of SL‘s classic monster manual as the start of more Scarred Lands greatness.

If you’re looking for a Scarred Lands actual play, Travis Legge runs one on Twitch: They play Mondays from 2-4 PM CST at twitch.tv/plasticageplays and archive episodes on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzVwM7FjhlU&list=PLmiXCaSrrCIjmCJQQ7oLwLNahmDbdn_2J and release it in podcast form via anchor at https://anchor.fm/mythsandmatchmakers

They Came From Beneath the Sea! art by Larry Blamire

And for the fourth of our Onyx-owned projects, the aforementioned They Came From Beneath the Sea! Kickstarter emerges from the waves next week on December 18th. Here’s a link to the teaser trailer, created by film legend Larry Blamire (Thanks, Larry!) and we’ll be revealing an Actual Play vid later this week across our social media:

Matthew and I will go into some more detail on what led up to this most unusual tabletop RPG next week!

We have some possible new game ideas percolating away right now, but I’m not in too much of a hurry to launch a new one right away, there are still great expansions and ideas to explore for the ones we already have!

#2- Creator-owned partner games:

Headed up by Cavaliers of Mars and Realms of Pugmire (which includes Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, FetchQuest, and the upcoming Pirates of Pugmire).

These are different than a straight-up license, in that the creators are generally deeply involved with the project. Often they do a large percentage of the writing, or bring in teams they run for it. Depending on how we conceptualize the deal, they may have a lot of input on the art or just work on the concepts and let our art and layout folks do the voodoo that they do so well.

Scarred Lands was originally structured far more like this.

So, basically, I look for creative partners that have a very strong vision for the game world, and who I like and want to work with. From there, if the game line exists in the main book and some Stretch Goals, that’s cool. We made the thing and with the magic of the eternal shelf on DTRPG, that’s all it needs to be a success in my thinking.

If the line keeps gathering interest, we’ll try out more projects if the creator is cool with that. That’s the key, we don’t do anything if they aren’t OK with it.

For Cavaliers of Mars, we have just got the books selling into stores, and we’re going to see how things go. If you haven’t heard Rose talk about Cavs on the Onyx Pathcast interview that went live last Friday, it’s a great listen, and she gives advice on how to get started with Cavs as a bonus!

Here is the link to that: https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/e/episode-29-rose-on-mars/

Roll of Good Dogs and Cats art by Shen Fei

Realms of Pugmire is the umbrella brand for Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau projects, and we still have a wide range of projects that came out of both Kickstarters. Here’s Eddy interviewed at PAX Unplugged by Gamerati: https://twitter.com/gamerati/status/1070095836233646081

I currently have two creators talking to me about teaming up for their projects, and again, I’m pretty good with our current slate here, but if the opportunity suggests itself I am open to adding more.

#3- Licensed games:

Which of course start with our WW-owned World of Darkness, Chronicles of Darkness, and Exalted gamelines, but which also include Dystopia Rising: Evolution, and Legendlore.

No doubt about it, this has been a challenging year with our White Wolf licenses. To give you an idea of the complexity, Matthew’s oversight is primarily “just” the WoD projects, and Dixie covers CofD and Exalted. Eddy covers all the rest, with Matt overseeing a bunch of our fiction projects.

The transition to Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition, and getting Mage, Wraith, and Changeling 20th projects to final stages at the same time was a huge effort, but seeing the success of the V5 Chicago By Night Kickstarter has justified it. We felt it to be important for Onyx Path to be able to show what we could do with V5 books, as we had a few pundits insist we could only do “old” Vampire.

Chicago By Night put the stake in that!

We’re moving along really well on Exalted 3rd projects as well, with Dragon-Blooded looking to release its Backer PDF several months before estimate, and Lunars looking good for having its complete text ready for an early 2019 Kickstarter. Meanwhile, there have been monthly PDF releases all year, and smaller EX3 books working their way through the production progress list.

I can’t say enough good things about the entire EX3 creative team, and I’ve just been impressed as hell with co-developers Robert Vance and Eric Minton. They work with their writing teams and with Dixie to maintain their vision for the line while incorporating the creativity of the team.

The Chronicles of Darkness game lines continue to come on line in terms getting their projects finished up in reasonable time frames, and Dixie is still working with the creative teams to emphasize their strengths, and bolster the areas that give them trouble. We’ve had some real movement VtR2, and the Night Horrors books, and then Mage2 is getting back on track as well.

As you can see in the project progress list below, we have some fantastic WW game line projects already rolling into next year, and a bunch of pitches at WW we are waiting to hear back on.

We ran the Dystopia Rising: Evolution Kickstarter this last year, and it was enough to seed several added projects as Stretch Goals to the line. I don’t think we actually reached as many of DR‘s fans as we could have, judging by the comments we’ve received after the KS was done, so it will be interesting to see how sales go once it is in stores.

We picked up this license for a few reasons. First, DR‘s top folk, Michael and Ashley, are extremely smart and creative folks who have innovated a lot in the LARP area, and we like people who can teach us stuff. Second, a new kind of zombie mythos that we, the horror “experts” hadn’t had a chance to play with.

Third: zombies meet Mad Max. Love that woohoo concept. Finally, and really most importantly, it gave us a chance to try the Storypath System in a world that was both grittier and more horrific than baseline Scion or Trinity Continuum. This was really important, and from I’ve heard it works really well for this sort of genre.

For Legendlore, well, apply what I’ve been saying about finding licenses that we can apply our aesthetics to, not visual aesthetics as we’re flexible about those, but design and thematic ones. For now, I’ll leave it at that, as the book has just appeared in the project process queue, and we’ll say a lot more about it next year.

Will we be adding more licenses this year? Well, discussions continue on several properties, so we’ll see. Basically, a license has to be either one that we feel we can create compelling worlds from, even if it is an already existing game, and that works well with our publishing model, or that pays us oodles of cash for very little work (riiiight, and if you find one of those, let me know!).

Trinity Continuum Core art by Pat McEvoy

We’re thrilled to be able to publish so many immersive worlds where players can find deep meaning in their game play. That’s a testament to the amazing writing and visuals that take us to all these places, and to an in-house team that has filled-in, rejuvenated, cajoled, encouraged, and relentlessly supported our out-of-house creative teams.

Mighty Matt and Mirthful Mike, and our trio of Dixie, Matthew, and Eddy, have pushed, prodded, pleaded, and practically puked to get our vast array of projects finished with love and care this whole year, and their efforts are paying off big time as noted above!

In fact, you can listen to the Terrific Trio every Friday on the Onyx Pathcast and often get some clues as to where the projects they are responsible for are headed, and the sorts of challenges they surmount every week.

This Friday, they flash back to the conventions we attended a couple of weeks ago and tell each other about their favorite characters!

Truly, this post has been all about our:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

KICKSTARTER:

Next up, we’re working on the Kickstarter for They Came From Beneath the Sea! (TCFBtS!), which has some very different additions to the Storypath mechanics we’ll be explaining during the KS. They take an excellent 50’s action and investigation genre game and turn it to 11!

Check out the teaser above!

Looking to start on Dec 18th at 1pm EST but run it extra long into January!

ELECTRONIC GAMING:

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is both rolling and rocking!

ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue you bought it from. Reviews really, really help us with getting folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these fiction books:

OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the Screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there!

https://ift.tt/2w0aaEW

And we’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

Here’s the link to the press release we put out about how Onyx Path is now selling through Indie Press Revolution: http://theonyxpath.com/press-release-onyx-path-limited-editions-now-available-through-indie-press-revolution/

And you can now order Pugmire: the book, the screen, and the dice! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=296

DRIVETHRURPG.COM:

This week, in celebration of both Monarchies of Mau and Cavaliers of Mars being live for retailers in Studio2, we have new themed merchandise on our RedBubble store: postcards and mugs and all sorts of stuff!

CONVENTIONS

Start getting ready for our appearance at MidWinter this January in Milwaukee! So many demos, playtests, secret playtests, and Onyx Path Q&As you could plotz!

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM FAST EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

C20 Novel (Jackie Cassada) (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Scion Jumpstart (Scion 2nd Edition)

Geist2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Pirates of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Distant Worlds (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

Creatures of the World Bestiary (Scion 2nd Edition)

Redlines

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Witch-Queen of the Shadowed Citadel (Cavaliers of Mars)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

Memento Mori: the GtSE 2e Companion (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Second Draft

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Scion Ready Made Characters (Scion 2nd Edition)

Development

Hunter: the Vigil 2e core (Hunter: the Vigil 2nd Edition)

CofD Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Oak, Ash, and Thorn: Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

CofD Dark Eras 2 (Chronicles of Darkness)

Manuscript Approval:

Wr20 Book of Oblivion (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Editing:

Signs of Sorcery (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Aeon Aexpansion (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Dystopia Rising: Evolution (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Adventures for Curious Cats (Monarchies of Mau)

In Media Res (Trinity Continuum: Core)

Tales of Excellent Cats (Monarchies of Mau)

V5 Chicago By Night (Vampire: The Masquerade)

Spilled Blood (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon (Werewolf: The Forsaken 2nd Edition)

Post-Editing Development:

C20 Players’ Guide (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

Indexing:

ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE:

In Art Direction

Dystopia Rising: Evolution – Finals coming in.

Geist 2e

The Realm

Ex3 Monthly Stuff

Chicago By Night – Contracting next bits.

C20 Player’s Guide – Still sketches and more sketches.

Aeon Aexpansion

They Came From Beneath the Sea! – KS prep.

EX3 Lunars – Sketches coming in, some finals already.

Signs of Sorcery

In Media Res

Marketing Stuff

In Layout

Ex3 Dragon Blooded – 2nd proof.

Ex Novel 2 (Aaron Rosenberg)

Proofing

Scion Hero – Page XXs and then Indexing.

Scion Origin – Page XXs and then Indexing.

CtL2 Jumpstart – At WW for approval.

M20: Gods and Monsters – With Phil.

Pugmire Roll of Good Dogs and Cats

Trinity Core – Waiting for errata from Backer PDF.

Trinity Aeon – Waiting for errata from Backer PDF.

At Press

Wraith 20th – Waiting for new cover proof. Everything else good to go though.

Wraith 20 Screen – Printing.

Scion Dice – At Studio2.

Lost 2e Screen – Printing.

Scion Screen – Printing.

Changeling: The Lost 2e – Soon shipping from printer to shipper. PoD proof ordered.

Fetch Quest – Proof sent back to manufacturer, printing starting.

Exalted 3rd Novel – Prepping for release.

PtC Tormented – PoD proof ordered.

TODAY’S REASON TO CELEBRATE:

It’s 7th Sea creator John Wick’s birthday today. I’m sure he doesn’t feel a day older than YARRR!

#Onyx Path Publishing

3 notes · View notes

nathanielwharton · 4 years

Text

My 2019 in Pop Culture

Same plan here as usual. I discovered this as a draft from back in January that I hadn’t found images for yet. Posting it now, without edits.

Top Forty Things From 2019

45. A Town Called Panic: Agricultural Fair I made a last minute dash into the city to see this at the New York International Children's Film Festival screening (I ducked in, huffing and puffing, as the lights went down), but I was so glad I did. I love these shorts, and this one was an absolutely bonkers, madcap wonder.

44. "Gotham City Guys" from The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part I enjoyed the second Lego Movie pretty well, but I loved this song.

43. Finding Drago This is an Australian podcast about the search for the author of Drago: On Mountains We Stand, a book about Ivan Drago from Rocky IV. It was a delight.

42. Crawl I had a pretty good time with a bunch of horror movies this year. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark made some good use of 3D realizations of Stephen Gammell's potent artwork. Ready or Not was a good cat-and-mouse with a fun ending to see with an audience. Happy Death Day 2U kept the comic frisson of the original, pushing it further into nutty science fiction, while slipping in some real emotion. But the one that probably gave me the most thrills was Crawl. An expertly nasty little piece of work, it efficiently keeps turning the screws up the the very end. Jesse and I remarked afterward that we basically alternated leaning forward with our hands on our faces and leaning back, bracing on the armrest, throughout the entire movie.

41. When They See Us Urgent and harrowing.

40. Mindhunter (Season 2) The rhythms of this show are so distinctive and engrossing. It's not exactly Zodiac: The Series, but it is fascinating in some similar ways and I hope they come back and make more of it.

39. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Season 4, Part 2) I might (okay, definitely) be underrating this final batch of one of my favorite shows on TV. Blame it on Netflix’s half-season strategy, and not on these episodes that were as overstuffed as ever with a breathtaking array of jokes delivered by a note perfect cast. I’ll miss if, but I'm grateful for those final moments. (The line "Your books make me feel safe” definitely made me tear up.)

38. They Shall Not Grow Old in 3D This documentary was fascinating as a look at the less-covered (at least in my lifetime) First World War, and it was AMAZING as a visual experience, watching 100 year-old documentary footage in such an immersive way. And the short documentary that followed my screening showing the process of making the film was worth the price of admission on its own.

37. Glass at the Shyamalanathon Few things can top the weird thrill of seeing the ending of Split before hearing even a hint about the ending (Jesse and I were audibly shocked and delighted, and then spent part of the credits explaining the reveal to the kids in front of us after they asked us about it). So I was pretty psyched for this one. I caught Glass at the end of a Shyamalanathon at the Alamo Drafthouse, where they showed Unbreakable, Split, and a preview screening of Glass, with a Q&A with Shyamalan himself. I had a GREAT time.

36. Amazing Grace I saw it with about 8-10 people in the theater, and folks were still witnessing with Amens and hallelujahs from the back of the auditorium. They were well warranted.

35. The Twilight Zone Revival I definitely preferred this to the last revival, and the hit-to-miss ratio felt pretty standard for an anthology show. Highlights for me were "Nightmare at 30,000 Feet," "Replay," and "A Traveler." Looking forward to the next batch of them.

34. One Cut of the Dead A twisty, surprising one-shot zombie thriller that reveals itself to be something much different (and much more charming) than you'd expect.

33. Star Trek: Discovery - Pike sees his future This season of Discovery had a number of really strong elements (and I'm super intrigued to see what they do with that setup for the third season), but the part that probably most moved me was in episodes 12, "Through the Valley of Shadows." Captain Pike (a wonderful performance all season by Anson Mount; definitely looking forward to that spin-off) is given a vision of his eventual fate, which we know from the original series, in which he is severely disabled in an accident. He is told that if he takes the time crystal from the Klingon temple to help save the day in the season's storyline that he cannot change this fate and is essentially dooming himself. And he gives the most moving, Starfleety performance in choosing the greater good over himself.

32. Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal This was a visceral, thrilling surprise. I caught the first four episodes as a screening at the Alamo and it knocked my socks off. The final episode of this initial run was also really rad. Pure animation.

31. Under the Silver Lake Seeing this one at a late night screening felt just right, as it creates such a bewitching, hallucinatory spell. As someone who enjoyed reading about conspiracy as a youth and recognizes but (hopefully!) avoided indulging the kind of solipsism on display in Garfield's character, I was pretty into this movie.

30. Missing Link This Laika joint was an easy lay-up for me (an adventurer helping Bigfoot to find a lost civilization of yeti? sold.) and it did the trick.

29. Frozen II It's not as clean a narrative as the original, and Kristoff's storyline is too sitcommy, but this still packed a lot of emotional punch for me, and I love that it's a huge Disney animated movie that interrogates colonialism and the way that our history can obscure misdeeds and trauma.

28. The Righteous Gemstones Another acridly funny and tonally daring series from the McBride/Hill/Green team. Loved this first season, and certainly excited to see where they want to take it next.

27. A Series of Unfortunate Events (Season 3) This show continued to be a really marvelous adaptation of the books and the adaptation of the final story (and the elements they included from the ancillary Snicket books) really landed wonderfully. I really wish Netflix had already announced the same team was doing an adaptation series of the All the Wrong Questions books (with Warburton somehow still involved as Lemony Snicket).

26. Klaus & Noelle Two streaming services served up two new Christmas movies this year, and I dug them both. Noelle doesn't quite pull of the same magic trick as Elf, but I found it charming and the cast (and the fact that it is set, in part, in Arizona) went a long way to endearing it to me. And Klaus was a gorgeously animated, very enjoyable surprise. Odds are decent that I pop both of them on again at some point next holiday season.

25. Deadwood: The Movie A bit of bittersweet nostalgia, a post-script, and an elegy. Just the right balance of warm and melancholy. And while the movie definitely didn't give us the Al Swearengen I expected, I was so moved by his story (and McShane's performance).

24. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Season 3) The obvious surface pleasures of this show (the costumes and set design, the snaky sinuous camera work, the charming and charismatic performances, the rat-a-tat dialogue) continued apace, while the storytelling continued to strike a really enjoyable balance between joyful wish-fulfillment and (semi-)realistic period exploration.

23. Adam Sandler & Eddie Murphy on SNL and in the movies The two biggest SNL alumni that had not been back to host (ever, in Sandler's case, or since he was still a cast member, in Murphy's) Adam Sandler and Eddie Murphy both returned too the show that had given them their start and pretty much lived up to decades of expectations. Sandler came back at the end of the 2018-2019 season and it was such a warm, funny homecoming that was really funny without just spending the time revisiting his old characters (the travel agent commercial he was in was one of the best sketches of the season and benefited hugely from his performance), and a genuinely touching tribute to Chris Farley. (And he capped his year with a fantastic, nerve-jangling performance in Uncut Gems, which was a Safdie special, exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure.) Then, following his really galvanizing lead performance in Dolemite is My Name, showing how hilarious and wonderful in a dramatic role he can still be, in the last episode before Christmas in the 2019-2020 season, Eddie Murphy returned to host, coming in with the enormous expectations that would accompany his return to the show at any time with the recent example of having seen it done so right. And they crushed it. His episode understandably featured more of the play-the-hits style of character reprisals, but they generally had clever ideas for using the characters (Mr. Robinson returned to a gentrified neighborhood, Buckwheat was a Masked Singer, and Gumby gave a hilarious Update rant) and, best of all, Murphy brought the necessary energy to make it all work. On top of that, he elevated the non-recurring stuff like a great Baking Championship sketch that he underplayed to perfection, or a North Pole newscast that he knocked out of the park. Both episodes were a joy.

22. Doctor Sleep I liked a lot of stuff in the book, but I think the movie improved on it! I love Mike Flanagan's style of horror story anyway, and it was a really good fit for Doctor Sleep. And the movie does a remarkable job of squaring itself with the Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick versions of The Shining, including a really moving appropriation of elements from the original book and potent movie imagery into a surprisingly touching combination.

21. Stranger Things 3 The run-up to this season was so much fun (special ice creams and store decorations at Baskin-Robbins, a whole Fun Fair set up at Coney Island), and then the season itself was a big summer blockbuster blast that Katie and I spent a whole day on.

20. The Lighthouse This one lingered! Two great performances, a beautiful visual scheme, and a bracing spiral into madness for a story.

19. Parasite Bong Joon-Ho with another what-genre-is-this masterpiece.

18. Watchmen on HBO This was so much richer and provocative than I expected. A compelling and mostly satisfying sequel to a book I didn't much demand a sequel to, it was one of the best shows I watched all year and honored the original by actually being about something.

17. The Farewell A warm and delicate story that really moved me, with a terrific performance by Awkwafina.

16. Jojo Rabbit I've been on Taika Waititi's wavelength since Boy, and this one worked for me as designed, which meant that I was delighted and then devastated.

15. Apollo 11 Like They Shall Never Grow Old, there was such power to seeing a new, vivid angle on major 20th century history.

14. GLOW (Season 3) This season, with it's Las Vegas setting and it stage-show status quo, created a bunch of new dynamics and fun developments (the Christmas Carol version of their show was a delight) while continuing to deepen the characters. Love this show.

13. Dumbo I am generally a Tim Burton guy, but I was surprised by how much I loved this movie. And every moment Michael Keaton was on screen was a great one.

12. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker This was a weird year for Star Wars, with Star Wars: Resistance coming to a satisfactory (but disappointing compared to the previous two animated series) ending and publishing having a handful of fun tie-ins to Galaxy's Edge and Rise of Skywalker, without anything particularly standing out. And all of it was capped off with The Rise of Skywalker, a film that definitely suffers from a bunch of competing storytelling interests. But the big moments that need to hit all pretty much hit for me and the final moments on Tatooine especially got to me.

11. The Irishman We went to see this movie during it's special engagement in a Broadway theater, which felt like an appropriate experience for such an epic. Surprisingly funny and, in the end, almost breathtakingly melancholy, this was a really special movie.

10. Lethal White Another cozy, gripping read. The mystery was less nasty/scary than the last one, but it was still pretty involving, and I certainly want to see what happens next for Strike and Robin.

9. Toy Story 4 This felt truly unnecessary (and even kind of unwelcome) when it was announced, but it turned out to be a genuinely worthy entry. It hits or improves on the expected Toy Story elements (the jokes hit and the characters are lots of fun, and it may be the most beautiful Toy Story, with stunning widescreen animation), and Woody's story builds to a surprising and very emotional climax. Once again, I'd be happy if this was where we left the characters, which is no small feat for a movie that has to push beyond the ending of Toy Story 3.

8. Disney+ (The Mandalorian, The Imagineering Story, Forky Asks a Question, etc) I was still working full time at school and working on my master's degree this fall, so it's not like I really needed a new streaming service to spend time on. But this was such a fun thing to explore. The Mandalorian immediately became appointment television for us (if that whole first episode hadn’t have done it, the final scene would have). But so was The Imagineering Story (one of the best showbiz documentaries I've seen) and Forky Asks a Question ("What? No!" definitely entered our daily lexicon).

7. Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood I loved it for the hang out (I want to watch Cliff Booth and Rick Dalton watch episodes of TV shows together!). I loved it for the incredible tension of the Spahn Ranch sequence. I loved it for the wry wistfulness of the neon sign sequence. I loved it.

6. Knives Out Such a thoroughly great time. I love Rian Johnson's movies in general, but this might be my favorite since Brick.

5. Us I'm reasonably receptive to the "bigger and more rococo" sophomore film, so I was ready to respond to this movie. But it still really knocked me out. I love it for all of the great surface pleasures (scary "monster" design, tense scare sequences, incredible dual performances by Lupita Nyong'o) and I loved it for the chewy thematic ideas it teases at. Peele is two-for-two, in my book.

4. Little Women I was only familiar with this story in a vague sense (like, I am sure I knew one of the sisters died in the book, but I didn't know which one going in). But I LOVED this movie.

3. Avengers: Endgame For this big, climactic year of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I had made note to include the Skrull reaction shots in Captain Marvel (Talos and the milkshake being the top of the heap), and Spider-Man: Far From Home was as consistently delightful as it's Spidey predecessor, but it's hard to think of a collective audience experience that was more fun than Avengers: Endgame. It basically played out as a series of huge payoffs and shocking moments for about three hours, and between the laughs and cheers and audible sobs, it really ran the full audience-reaction gamut. Hard to imagine another movie building up this kind of steam for a big finale again, and it was pretty special to see on opening night.

2. The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance I was pretty excited for this show. The original movie is dear to me, I'd heard really cool, encouraging stuff about the show, and the trailers were pretty gorgeous. And the show exceeded all of my hopes for it. It was funny and exciting. It developed the mythology of Thra in cool, intriguing ways. It was absolutely dazzling to look at. It jockeyed for position with the number 1 spot on this list. I adored it.

1. Godzilla: King of the Monsters I loved this. I wrote about it at SportsAlcohol.com. I saw it five or six times in theaters. A full meal for my imagination.

Top Twenty-Five Things I'm Excited About in 2020

Godzilla vs Kong No question, I'm spectacularly excited to see this one. I loved all three of the previous films leading up to it, and the status quo hinted at in the credits of King of the Monsters suggests some directions that I really hope to see explored further.

Animaniacs revival & Looney Tunes Cartoons Here's hoping that this is finally the year we get to see the new Looney Tunes they've been cooking up (seems like HBO Max will be a good place to put them...) and while it feels like a while since there's been new word on the Animaniacs revival that's due on Hulu, maybe that'll show up this year too. Looking forward to whatever Warner Bros. animation we can get.

Bill & Ted Face the Music One of the few decades-later sequels that I've actively been wanting to happen. I'm so glad this finally happened, and I can't wait to see what it will look like. I love the title. I love the details they've shared so far. And I'm glad to have an excuse to watch the previous two movies in the run-up to this one.

West Side Story Spielberg finally doing his movie musical! And it's a great musical! With a script adapted by Tony Kushner, no less. Sign me up.

Muppets Now I don't know enough about the format of this show to know how excited to be yet (they're generally good at improvising, but the notion of ad-libbed shorts doesn't sound quite like the Muppet Show revival I'd really like to see on Disney+). Still, new Muppets!

The French Dispatch Seems like this one should hit his year after a festival run. Really looking forward to getting a look at what he's cooked up this time.

Death on the Nile #thirtyBranaghPoirotmovies

Onward & Soul Two original Pixar movies in one year! Super excited about this. (Also pretty psyched for another original film from Disney Animation Studios in Raya and the Last Dragon.)

MCU at the Movies I glad to finally get that Black Widow movie this year, and I'm certainly interested to see The Eternals, which has a great cast and sounds like another new avenue to explore in the Marvel movie world.

MCU on Disney+ As excited as I am for the two theatrical Marvel movies this year, I'm also pretty into The Falcon & The Winter Soldier and WandaVision. Now that my beloved Captain America has effectively retired, I'm pretty excited to see what happens to his best friends as Sam Wilson becomes the new Cap. And the word on WandaVision (that it's going to be pretty weird), coupled with the hints that they are taking inspiration from Tom King's run on the Vision comic book, makes this one sound pretty special. The Mandalorian set a high bar for how exciting these Disney+ shows could be, so I'm looking forward to seeing what Marvel comes up with.

In the Heights Hamilton melted my brain five years ago, and the trailer for this movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first Broadway musical is so wonderful. Can’t wait.

Jungle Cruise Mulan looks super cool, but I've got pretty high hopes for Jungle Cruise. Jaume Collet-Serra is responsible for some wild genre excellence and I'm hoping he was able to bring some of that cracked vision to a big Disney adventure movie with the Rock and Emily Blunt. Sounds good to me.

Tenet Certainly looking forward to seeing Nolan return with another big, original genre picture with a great cast.

Dune Denis Villeneuve's last two science fiction films were aces and he's assembled a great cast here, so I'm hoping he'll do something special with this book.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife For as bad a taste as the ghost-bros left me with in their furor over the pretty fun 2016 remake, I'm loath to admit that I'm really looking forward to this. I liked the trailer, I'm excited to see the original characters return, I really like the new cast members, and I'm looking forward to a story with a different setting and everything.

Last Night in SoHo I like all of Edgar Wright's movies, and this sounds like an interesting change-up for him.

Star Trek on CBS All Access First up this year we know we’re getting Star Trek: Picard, and I’m particularly excited because this is a Star Trek that will be reaching past everything we’ve already seen and showing us a story set in the galaxy after the destruction of Romulus and Spock’s trip back in time. It looks really cool, and it’s pretty exciting to see Patrick Stewart playing the role again. Beyond that, we should have Star Trek: Lower Decks, which sounds like it should be a lot of fun, and the third season of Star Trek: Discovery which, based on the ending of the last season, promises to also explore previously unseen corners of the Star Trek universe/timeline.

Penny Dreadful: City of Angels I loved the original Penny Dreadful, and I'm pretty into the milieu they've set this...sequel? revival? spiritual successor? Pretty cool cast, too.

F9 Still really enjoying these big, wild, nutty movies. And I know my #family will be excited to roll out and see this one together.

Cosmos: Possible Worlds I loved the last Cosmos revival, so I'm really looking forward to seeing what they've come up with for this one.

Over the Moon Netflix is supposed to have a new animated film directed by Glen Keane this year, so I'm looking forward to watching it.

The Witches I love the book (and the original film version, for the most part) and I'm always rooting for Robert Zemeckis to make another stellar entertainment. Hoping this is one!

My Favorite Thing is Monsters Volume 2 Maybe this year!

Halloween Kills I loved the 2018 Halloween sequel, so I'm fully down to see the next two installments, starting with this one.

No Time to Die Daniel Craig’s swan song as Bond, this one has had some pretty rad trailers and a very cool director. Hope he gets to go out on a great one!

0 notes

morningmindsetpodcast-blog · 6 years

Text

MM160 - Don't Cut Corners | MM Book Study Pt. 18

One idea that the late, great Dave Thomas left us with was this, don’t cut corners. How often do you or those around you attempt to save time or money by cutting corners? Does cutting corners make your company more attractive or less so?

If you like the show, please check out our Official Morning Mindset Merchandise!

Episode Transcription

[INTRO]

♫ Trenches by Pop Evil ♫

*Alex*

Welcome to Morning Mindset. A daily dose of practical wit and wisdom with a professional educator & trainer, Amazon best selling author, United States Marine, Television, and Radio host, Paul G. Markel. Each episode will focus on positive and productive ways to strengthen your mindset and help you improve your relationships, career goals, and overall well-being. Please welcome your host; Paul G. Markel.

*Professor Paul*

Hello and good morning, or good afternoon or good evening whenever it happens to be. I was listening to a podcast recently and the host said “Good Morning”, he said I say good morning because all decent human beings listen to my podcast on their way to work in the morning. So I'm going to assume that you're all listening in the morning, but you don't have to listen to this show in the morning listening.

Listen the evening do whatever but I think it'd be a good time for you to listen at least once a day or at least a good suggestion. Alright, we're continuing on. With our book study. The book is called Morning Mindset: a 30 Day Plan for a More Positive and Productive Life by Paul Markel. That is me. You can get it at Amazon get it a Kindle. You can go to Morning Mindset podcast.com and you can order yourself a signed copy of the book. Alright, we are on chapter or section number 18 so far, in today's topic is called Don't Cut Corners now. Yes, I am fully aware that we are not supposed to use the negative.

We're supposed to use the positive. We're supposed to say do not, don't, or do not. However, it doesn't really work in this current situation. Now, my bride has been involved in the restaurant, the Food Service management business her entire adult life. She was managing a restaurant when I met her as a matter of fact, that is how I met her.

You'll forgive me while I take a quick sip of coffee, because I really need it. I thought I was going to cough there for a second. But one of the many things that she did over the years as she worked for the Wendy's Corporation or franchise of the Wendy's restaurants. You know Wendy's hamburgers, right, and when she started the company was still owned and operated by the Thomas family, Dave Thomas, and Dave Thomas was still alive. Actually at the time and all new managers got a copy of the book Dave's way. By Wendy's founder Dave Thomas and after she read it. She handed me the book and I read it too, and so every long book is matter of fact, I would highly recommend that if you are a business person, especially if you're a small business person or if you're a manager, get the copy a copy of the book Dave's way. I'm sure you can find them on eBay or Amazon or Kindle whatever get a copy of that book now in the book Dave's way.

He tells several stories of going to visit franchises and how they set up and established the Wendy's franchise and. Dave used to show up at Wendy's stores as franchises and to spot inspections, and Wendy's hamburgers are all square and I don't know if they do it anymore. But when my wife was working for Wendy's and actually my oldest son Jarrad worked for Wendy's for a while. Wendy's hamburgers are square and Dave Thomas was very fond of when people would ask like “Well all of your competitors burgers around Dave, you know, they're all round in yours are square Burgers. Why why would you do that? Why would you make your hamburger patties square when everyone else is around?”

He would he would get a smile on his face and he would say “Because at Wendy's, we don't cut corners” and of course, you know, the interviewers were all chuckle and everything, but Dave was actually very serious about that, and when he meant don't cut Corners, he didn't mean cutting the corners of a hamburgers. He meant we don't take cheap shortcuts. Now quite often in a business experience. You will see your you'll encounter a maybe you encountered a favorite restaurant or shop or what have you and you and became your favorite because you went there and they treated you.

Well, the service was good, the product was good. Whatever that product was and you enjoyed it and you enjoy the experience and you kept going. But then over time after they had established themselves and become popular and and we're making enough money to keep the doors open it changed. How many of you have had a favorite restaurant?

It used to be your favorite restaurant, used to enjoy going there all the time and then you noticed, not overnight but a slow incremental decline and after a while you just decide I'm not going to go there anymore. Because I don't like the service the food is cheap the food doesn't taste the same. What have you you know, they used to give you blankety-blank now, they don't anymore what will happen with many businesses there.

They're very hungry and they're very eager to establish themselves, to fight against their competition to to make their way, and so they'll begin real strong out of the gate, and they establish themselves as a good business or reputable business and they start getting a solid customer base. Then they feel comfortable after a while like okay. We have a regular customer base, we're making our rent. We're paying our bills looks like we're solvent we're going to be around, and they assume that because that's a good thing or because that they're in that position that it will always be that way and now they start looking for ways to cut Corners.

They start looking for ways to save money they switch up ingredients. Whereas they were using an ingredient that cost X they're like, well we can get a generic version. That's basically the same for less money. So what we'll do is we'll do that, you know and simple example is you go to a place and it's just a burger place a custom burger place right or high-end hamburger place and they have really good tasty hamburger buns and you enjoy them very much then you come back and you haven't you're like this doesn't seem the same and you realize oh it's because they change the bun.

Why did change the button well, but because the bond they're using now is 10 cents a unit or five sensor unit or whatever cheaper. It's just about the same. It's pretty much the same. But but this is just cheaper restaurants will do things with employees where they were having, you know, one shift had four people on it, and they realized “You know, if we bring somebody in a little earlier and then have someone stay a little later instead of having four, we’ll have three” and what happens when you eliminate one employee? Service times go down and customer frustration goes up, but they're cutting Corners because they feel comfortable.

How many of you have been in a position yourselves or have been in a company or with a company that starts cutting corners and getting cheap and trying to find the cheap easy way to do something rather than the good way or the best way how many of you have ever been in a company or work for a company that didn't want the best way?

They wanted the easiest way. They didn't want the best product. They wanted the cheapest product and you can stay there and you can do that all you want but I'm telling you this if you hope to be successful someday, if you have hope to be like a person person like Dave Thomas who should be emulated by all small business owners in the United States of America, and it's sad to me.

The Dave has been gone for so long. Now that people have forgotten and they forgotten the example that he said, but if you hope to be productive if you have to help to have a successful business a successful career. You need to be very very aware of that. Now, I'm not talking about wasting money unnecessarily, but there's a difference between being Frugal enough not to waste and deliberately being cheap or going for the easy way instead of the quality way or the best way you do that. You start cutting Corners you start cheapening the experience and eventually it will come around and it will bite you in the butt. So my advice to you as Dave said don't cut Corners if you want to be productive and have a successful business and career. Don't do things the cheap and easy way do things the correct and best way.

Don't cut those Corners. Alright, ladies and gentlemen that is it for today. Thank you for joining me for the Morning Mindset book study. It's never too late to get a copy, you know where to go Amazon Kindle all that good stuff. I am your host Paul Markle. I'll be back to talk to you again real soon.

[OUTRO]

♫ Trenches by Pop Evil ♫

*Alex*

Thank you for spending time with us today. To get show notes, submit a topic request, for more from your host Paul G. Markel, visit MorningMindsetPodcast.com. That’s MorningMindsetPodcast.com. Please leave a review of this podcast on your favorite podcast player, we appreciate your time & effort, and we look forward to reading your honest feedback.

Download this Episode!

0 notes

caveartfair · 7 years

Text

12 New Dealers to Watch at Art Basel in Basel

The original Art Basel draws the art world’s denizens each summer to its namesake, a historic Swiss city straddling the Rhine. Its 48th edition, kicking off next week, comes during a particularly exciting period for cosmopolitan art lovers: Documenta 14 is taking place in Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece, and the Venice Biennale runs through the summer. Into this fray come 291 of the world’s top galleries from 35 countries, with works on display from over 4,000 artists. Seventeen of those galleries are exhibiting at Art Basel in Basel for the first time. Here are 12 to watch.

After many years participating in Liste, Hopkinson Mossman makes its debut at Art Basel in Basel with Berlin-based artist Oscar Enberg, whose presentation in the Statements sector will feature a film and sculpture examining the Australian opal-mining town of Coober Pedy.

“Enberg is working in the exploitative tradition of visitors to the town—a town shaped by prospectors, colonizers, and the uneasy assimilation of non-native cultures and economic interests,” says gallery director Danae Mossman.

The presentation is in step with the Auckland, New Zealand-based gallery’s mission of inviting international dialogue into its home country, while simultaneously promoting prominent contemporary artists from New Zealand and Australia.

“New Zealanders are very engaged, and very outward-looking,” says Mossman. “You have to be—we are a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.”

The gallery is a favorite of Melbourne-based curator and scholar Jan Bryant, who says one of the gallery’s strengths is combining its artists “in unpredictable ways.”

“There are always new effects to be found, and in turn their artists come to you in new ways, no matter how familiar you thought you were with them," Bryant says.

In its 20-plus-year existence, San Francisco gallery Jenkins Johnson has gathered an impressive roster of mid-career artists including Julian Opie and Lalla Essaydi, while promoting the careers of emerging artists such as Sadie Barnette, Omar Victor Diop, Annie Kevans, and Mohau Modisakeng, who is representing South Africa in the current edition of the Venice Biennale.

Owner Karen Jenkins-Johnson is using her Art Basel in Basel debut to present three artists whose social critiques on issues such as violence, marginalized communities, and civil rights feel especially topical right now.

Her booth within Art Basel in Basel’s Feature section will exhibit photographs of the Civil Rights movement by the polymath Gordon Parks, including I AM YOU—a portfolio of 12 little-known works.

“The current struggles in the U.S. and throughout the world for racial equality, freedom of religion, open immigration, women’s rights, and LGBTQ equality echo the activism portrayed in Parks’s photographs,” Jenkins-Johnson says.

As part of Art Basel in Basel’s Film section, the gallery will additionally present Modisakeng’s To Move Mountains (2015), which Jenkins-Johnson calls “a meditation on violence, directly addressing the brutality directed at the black labor force in South Africa,” and We All We Got (2014), by 2016 Guggenheim Fellow Carlos Javier Ortiz, which portrays individuals affected by gun violence.

Antenna Space founder Simon Wang says his initial mission was simply “to show my friends,” artists from China and elsewhere including Yu Honglei, Li Ming, Nadim Abbas, Xu Qu, and Guan Xiao. The gallery was launched in 2013 and is based in M50, the Shanghai contemporary arts district sited in a formerly industrial neighborhood.

Wang, who has shown at Art Basel in Hong Kong since 2013, will present two of the gallery’s artists for his first appearance at Art Basel in Basel. Guan’s newest work, Air Freshener, Spray, is an ecosystem with a light-box background and materials including artificial plants, projector machines and vehicle exhaust pipes. It builds on earlier works Sunset and Sunrise, which Wang describes as “atmospheric situations created for stimulating synthetic feelings.”

In the Parcours section of works presented around the city of Basel in public spaces, artist Wu Tsang will produce a performance piece, The Secret Life of Things is Open, an installation in the exclusive private Club de Bâle of films, sound and text from her collaboration with the theorist and poet Fred Moten that will become a portal to performances happening throughout the week and on Saturday evening for Parcours Night. Her appearance at Art Basel in Basel anticipates her September solo exhibition at Antenna Space.

Gypsum Gallery, which operates out of a converted 1920s-era apartment in Cairo’s Garden City neighborhood, was launched in 2013 by curator and gallery director Aleya Hamza to bring the region’s cutting-edge work into the commercial realm.

Hamza, who trained at London’s Goldsmith College, has been affiliated with several other Cairo art institutions, but saw room for a for-profit gallery that would help foster “the progressive and investigative art practices that in the region of the Middle East had been associated with the non-profits,” she says.

The work by Cairo-based artist Maha Maamoun that Hamza will present at Art Basel in Basel’s Statements sector is emblematic of her program, which she says is “built on an in-depth engagement with sociopolitical, cultural, and formal questions.”

Called The Subduer, Maamoun’s project stems from a trip to one of the many public notary offices in Egypt. “In these offices, citizens, state functionaries and legal and bureaucratic processes strain on a daily basis to continue functioning with and against each other,” Hamza explains. “In the midst of these tense relationships, or maybe because of them, prayers abound.”

Using her cellphone, Maamoun secretly recorded images of these prayers found in various notary offices, written on “a slew of soiled and aging sheets of paper” and “informally pinned or taped on the walls,” in Hamza’s words. The resulting photographic installation and accompanying publication portrays Maamoun’s “personal story slamming against the bureaucratic machine and its idiosyncrasies,” while also representing “a collective fascination with religious representations,” Hamza says.

Chapter NY began in 2013 as a weekend-only project space on the Lower East Side, in a 175-square-foot space smaller than many American closets. In fall 2016, the gallery moved to a larger location in the same neighborhood, but maintained its focus on “intimate exhibitions and projects as a means to understand the diverse development of artistic practice,” according to director Nicole Russo.

Lumi Tan, a curator at The Kitchen, says the gallery’s newer space has allowed its ambitious programming to unfurl, “while maintaining an intimate scale.”

That program includes artists such as Mira Dancy, Willa Nasatir, and Adam Gordon. But Russo also makes a point to experiment with artists she doesn’t directly represent, giving the space over to Keltie Ferris for her “Body Prints” paintings, or to Anicka Yi, who used the gallery to record the first episode of her “Lonely Samurai” podcast series.

For her booth in Art Basel in Basel’s Statements section, Russo will present a new work by Sam Anderson, Antarctica (2017). An installation of clay figures on a series of semicircular risers, it “draws both familiar and peripheral types to center, forming a psychological excavation of identity and role-playing,” says Russo.

Anderson, who was, fittingly, also the first artist Russo showed at Chapter NY, currently has a solo exhibition at New York’s SculptureCenter and will open a solo show at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, Germany, at the end of June.

This Bologna-based gallery was founded in 2010 with a focus on Conceptual and Minimalist artists, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s, whose work co-founders Alessandro Pasotti and Fabrizio Padovani felt was underappreciated.

“There are artists who have preferred to work in seclusion, far from the spotlight, or have been forced to do so because their work was not understood,” says Padovani, noting that the current environment allows for greater recontextualization of these artists’ practices.

That mission is particularly important in an era of “amnesia,” says Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of London’s Serpentine Galleries. By showing pioneering artists such as Irma Blank, Paolo Icaro, and Franco Vaccari “in a sustained and profound way,” he says, the gallery achieves “what Eric Hobsbawm called ‘an urgent protest against forgetting.’”

In Art Basel in Basel’s Feature section, P420 will present Croatian artist Goran Trbuljak’s first four solo shows, which ran between 1971 to 1981. The first show had no actual work in it, with Trbuljak merely writing on the poster for the exhibition, “I don’t want to show anything new and original.”

“From the start of his career, Trbuljak has been averse to the production or even the conception of any work of art, focusing exclusively on the mechanisms of the art system, the dynamics through which an artist can gain a reputation,” says Pasotti.

The gallery is also presenting a re-enactment of Trbuljak’s 1977 show at Venice’s Galleria del Cavallino in Art Basel Unlimited, a show that investigated the power relations between artists and their galleries, as well as Turinese artist Icaro’s Foresta metallica, a large-scale installation created in 1967 in his SoHo studio and exhibited here publicly for the first time.

Located in Beijing’s 798 Art District, Magician Space was founded in 2008 by artist Qu Kejie, with Pan Baohui. The gallery fosters an intentionally intimate scale in the industrial area, and was designed by Qu himself.

“Our exhibitions remain focused on challenging the ideas of the artist and its connection with the audience,” says curatorial director Billy Tang. It was initially used it as a project space where local artists could show work at a remove from the pressures created by the country’s fast-growing commercial art market.

The gallery’s emphasis has been on China’s emerging and experimental artists, providing an early platform for newer artists such as Li Ran, Liu Yefu, and Yao Qingmei, but it also highlights figures who have contributed significantly to the historical development of contemporary art in China, such as Liu Chuang, Li Jinghu, and Liang Wei. Tang says the gallery also maintains a “commitment to introducing new critical positions to China by cultivating a dialogue with…international artists and practitioners,” such as Keren Cytter, James Richards, and Timur Si-Qin.

For its debut in Art Basel in Basel’s Statements section, Magician Space will show a new series of sculptures and paintings by the young Beijing-based artist Wang Shang, who is also a certified gemologist with a jewelry line, and who trained as a curator at Royal College of Art. His installations of stainless steel mountains and “scholar rocks” adapt the classical Chinese rock garden and warp it “from a transcendental space of meditation into a contemporary interpretation, full of contested meanings that clash together,” says Tang.

“His installation for the fair will have a quality of a landscape that can channel the flow of people walking through it,” he adds. “Imagine the installation as a setting of a post-Anthropocene landscape…we are curious about how that experience will interact with the setting of the art fair.”

Emanuel Layr, who founded his eponymous Vienna-based gallery six years ago, and has previously shown at Liste, will mark his inaugural Art Basel in Basel outing with an architectural video installation by Cécile B. Evans, a recent addition to his roster.

Titled Amos’ World, the 2017 piece imagines a television show set in a socially progressive housing estate. Amos, an architect, watches the utopian community he has designed degenerate over the course of the episodes.

“Fissures in this carefully constructed network reveal a breakdown of person-to-person and person-to-infrastructure power dynamics as the audience themselves look on from units nested within an architectural construction built to echo the one on screen,” says Layr.

The past year has been one of expansion for Layr, with artists such as Gaylen Gerber, Lena Henke, and Anna-Sophie Berger joining the program, and with the gallery opening an outpost in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood.

Henke will participate in Art Basel Parcours, a curated selection of public artworks scattered around the small Swiss city. Her rubber and sand sculptures will be located in a garden along the Rhine, and a surrealist bronze sculpture of New York City will be at the Pfalz, a central square.

Galeria Dawid Radziszewski opened in Warsaw in 2013, but Radziszewski and the bulk of the artists he represents date from the mid-1980s; many of them are artists he’s known since they were students together. The works he shows go back even further in their references, exploring Polish art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which has spurred further research into Polish subcultures, such as the new age movement and the Polish hippie scene, which Radziszewski says was “not as cool as the United States’s scene yet nevertheless quite exotic.” He noted many of his artists are engaged with music and sound-based events, including the Warsaw Autumn Festival. The gallery has an international scope too, having shown artists such as David Horvitz and Șerban Savu.

For its debut at an Art Basel fair, the gallery will present a performance by Joanna Piotrowska. Working in the medium for the first time (she usually hews to photography and film), Piotrowska has choreographed a piece inspired by self-defense manuals, which will be enacted by amateur performers in the fair’s Statements section.

“She translates everyday gestures and conventional movement practices, such as self-defense, into new scenarios, lending them an almost caricature-like quality,” says Radziszewski. “The resulting photography acts as a performance documentation, rather than a documentary image.”

The chance to present at Basel represents a great opportunity for his gallery, Radziszewski confirms.

“We do it for fame and money, obviously.”

For over two decades, Athens-based Kalfayan Galleries has been a pioneer of Greece’s contemporary art scene. Its roster includes artists from across Greece, the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa, “acting as a bridge between Eastern and Western visual culture,” says Roupen Kalfayan, who co-owns the gallery with his brother, Arsen Kalfayan.

For its first appearance at Art Basel in Basel, Kalfayan has chosen a hometown favorite, the post-war Greek artist Vlassis Caniaris (1928-2011), whose work is showing in this summer’s documenta 14 in Athens. The Basel installation will feature a selection of works, including Caniaris’s installation for the 1988 Venice Biennale, What's North, What's South? (Children and Testimony).

“As an active witness to history, Caniaris developed an artistic vocabulary that was put to the service of a committed political and social message,” says Kalfayan. “From 1959 onwards, he developed a personal idiom known as concrete realism, reminiscent of Arte Povera. His work comments on immigration, socio-political turmoil and issues of identity in a world that is in constant flux, issues that are “highly relevant to the current global situation.”

CANADA opened in New York in 2000 in the basement of a Tribeca building with the goal of supporting emerging artists and promoting the work of more established artists that gallery partners Phil Grauer, Sarah Braman, Suzanne Butler, and Wallace Whitney felt had been overlooked.

They envisioned a “weird clubhouse” populated by artists including Katherine Bernhardt, Matt Connors, Marcus Jahmal, Xylor Jane, Joanna Malinowska, and Michael Williams, all of whom will take part in CANADA’s debut presentation in Art Basel in Basel’s Galleries sector.

Grauer says that this framing helps the gallery, now based on the Lower East Side, be more “invested in art as an instrument for change” and notes that this ethos extends to the staff, nearly every member of which is a working artist themselves.

That spirit has attracted fans such as London collector Ken Rowe, who recalls first hearing about CANADA from British artists who yearned to work with the gallery. At first, he recalls thinking that it “sounded too cool for me.”

“Then I met Phil at Frieze and realized how wrong I was,” Rowe says. “Collecting art for me has always been about discovery and my most satisfying periods of collecting have involved close collaboration with galleries which have integrity and intelligence at their core. My experience with CANADA has led to one of those all-too-rare relationships."

Barely 18 months after opening its doors in January 2016, Los Angeles’s Parrasch Heijnen will make its first appearance at Art Basel with a survey exhibition of early drawings and sculptures by American artist Tony DeLap.

DeLap, an 89-year-old artist whose drawings and sculptures at Art Basel investigate “themes of perception and the nature of transformation,” was critically acclaimed in the mid-1960s and 1970s, explains co-founder Franklin Parrasch, and hails from the same generation as other prominent American minimalists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt. DeLap’s early advocates included the painter Agnes Martin, who Parrasch says encouraged her own gallerists, Robert Elkon and Nicholas Wilder, to support DeLap’s career.

Heijnen is thankful for his gallery’s “tremendous opportunity” to participate in Basel, one that he says will help provide “a spotlight” for his program, which includes largely West Coast artists that he says “have only recently begun to receive the attention they are due.”

—Anna Louie Sussman

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

0 notes

notverysecretradio · 7 years

Text

Things to think about Before your podcast

CHECK LIST

Web Presence

Social Media

Podcast Summary

Episode Summary

Sub Categories

Logo

Intro theme

Intro Video

Photos

Bios

Format + Time

Posting schedule

Recording

Editing

Summarize/Think About:

How to conduct your show

Best Interview Practices

Good Podcasts to listen to and why

Why you're doing it

Who you're doing it for WWWWW. Who what when where why.

Apps/Uploading/Costs

Hosting the Podcast - Libsyn

Web build/hosting - Squarespace

Mics - Blue Yeti

Phone Recording Options - Ringr, Possible Field Recordings.

Editing Software - Audacity

Recording Software - GarageBand / Mixlr

Web Presence

A simple square space site with info about the show, a place for the archives, and a domain that is hopefully the same or similar to your podcast. Think of it as a virtual biz card.

Social Media

Many of your interviews will want to share on social media, you can be proactive and share it for them by tagging them. This means you’ll want to have a Facebook and twitter minimum. If you go crazy you can also have youtube, Instagram and whatever else but don’t turn it into a full time job just create a presence.

Podcast Summary

A short summary about your show that appears in iTunes, the podcast app, your site. This is a good sample one for length:

Comedian Marc Maron is tackling the most complex philosophical question of our day - WTF? He'll get to the bottom of it with help from comedian friends, celebrity guests and the voices in his own head.

Episode Summary

Something to think about when you post a finished episode. Ex:

A lot of former child stars have been in the garage, but Derek Trucks wasn't so much a child star as he was a prodigy. At the age of nine, Derek was a guitar wizard. He talks with Marc about avoiding the pitfall of becoming a novelty act and evolving into a versatile practitioner and appreciator of music, with help from several notable mentors along the way.

Sub Categories

Ex: Comedy, Art, Business, Religion, Fashion

Logo

Image must be 1400 x 1400 pixels at minimum

Image must be in .jpg or .png format (.jpg preferred)

Image should look good—and readable—at 300 x 300 pixels

A good rule of thumb is to optimize your image for 150 x 150 pixels.

Intro theme

This is easy enough to do by downloading license free music. It can get more elaborate than that but it should always be short. Think about the mood you want to set when you think about this. Also we’re talking less than 10 seconds here.

Intro Video

A good idea to introduce people to your show is to make a quick intro video. I’ve attached some examples, some are longer, some are shorter - some are animated. It’s not a must but It can be a fun way to wrap your head around the project and get people into it.

This guy is CHEESY as hell but you get the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4HFOoe21ko

Serial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbGBFpc0yA4

Two Dope Queens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-4Ky4Xa-As

Photos

Take or pick a photo of yourselves to put on the site.

Bios

Write a brief bio for the site, here’s an example:

I’m Ann Friedman. I'm a freelance journalist who writes about gender, media, technology, and culture.

You can find my weekly column at NYmag.com. I also contribute regularly to The Los Angeles Times, The Gentlewoman, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, ELLE, The Guardian, and Los Angelesmagazine. I co-host a podcast, Call Your Girlfriend, with my good friend Aminatou Sow. Every Friday I send out an email newsletter full of digital treats. I also make hand-drawn pie charts. I live in Los Angeles.

Format + Time:

At first you should decide how long the podcast will be, you can deviate from it later. There are no rules with this it’s more about what works for you.

You want to record with editing in mind so that you don’t have to spend to much time putting the show together. Also always keep the audience in mind, what may seem like the most brilliant two hour recorded show ever can usually be reduced to 30-45 min.. If you’re super attached to the material/raw recordings you can always keep it saved or upload The Whole convo on youtube.

Posting schedule

No matter how long you end up doing the podcast, the minute you tell anyone about it you need to have a set time that you “air” aka upload the thing. This is good for the audience and for you as it keeps it on track. It’s also better not to make people wait too too long to hear their interview if you have a guest on, they will be less inclined to share it with others. The same goes for your own conversations, it becomes harder to follow up when you don’t have a posting schedule.

Recording

A recording schedule is similar to a posting schedule. When do I record this?! How often and where. Obviously the beauty of a podcast is you can record anything anytime anywhere but for your own sanity and in order to get it done, Make a set time for this.

Editing

Make a set time for editing but keep the conversation in mind while you record so that you don’t have to edit as much. Having a loose script or a set of questions/topics written out beforehand will help a lot. You’ll be more focused and you can always ditch it if you find a better tangent to go off of.

When you export the edit you'll be ask to enter in Meta Data about the recording - do this it helps you become more searchable in iTunes.

Attached is also a summary of:

How to conduct your show

This is a personal choice but listen to some other podcasts and decide the tone. Think about it when you write a loose script / plan for the episode.

Best Interview Practices

When you have a guest on think about your favorite interviews. Most of the time the interviewer has done enough research that they can pull a magical, insightful, useful funny response from the interviewee and build on it. It’s a craft but you can do it.

Think of when someone is interviewing their fav band and they know some weird fact that even the singer forgot about and the conversation carries on from there - well the same could be applied to anyone in any industry.

Good Podcasts to listen to and why

Marc Maron - killer interviewer

TrumpCast by Slate- does the research, finds insiders and asks them the right questions

Call Your Girlfriend.- has amazing chemistry and insight, jokes between the two hosts. You feel like their friend afterwards.

Always ask yourself and be totally honest with yourself and co host - why are we doing this? Who’s it for? Would I listen to it?

Apps/Uploading/Costs - This is all stuff I’m better at showing you in person but duly noted.

Hosting the Podcast - Libsyn

Web build/hosting - Squarespace / Hover for domain

Mics - Blue Yeti

Phone Recording Options - Ringr, Loopback, Mixer, Possible Studio Use

Editing Software - Audacity

Recording Software - GarageBand / Mixlr

#podcast #prep #productivity

0 notes