Podcasts about brechtian

Sometimes, the fire of creativity is struck not by lightning but by the slow, smoldering ache of dissatisfaction. And in today's soul-stirring conversation, we welcome Shawn Whitney, a filmmaker who found cinema not in the corridors of academia, but in the quiet rebellion of self-taught screenwriting and micro-budget filmmaking. Shawn Whitney is a screenwriter, director, and founder of Micro Budget Film Lab who empowers indie creators to tell powerful stories on shoestring budgets.Our journey with Shawn begins not in childhood fantasies of movie stardom, but in the dense woods of Brechtian theater and the quiet study of old black-and-white films. His path wandered, as many worthwhile ones do, through rejection, basement solitude, and heartbreak—until something within him demanded not just expression but transmutation. Shawn didn't study film in college. Instead, he emerged from the theater world and fell into filmmaking after a failed workshop production left him broke and dispirited. Yet that fall became his rise. As he said, “I just started writing screenplays and learning the craft in the quiet shadows.”There's something beautiful in learning the art of story not from glamorous sets or high-priced workshops but from the bones of failed experiments and the echoes of dialogue bouncing around your own mind.Shawn described his education not with fanfare but humility—referencing Sid Field, Blake Snyder, and the ever-controversial Save the Cat—tools that became his spiritual guides, not rigid masters. And with every script, he refined a method. Not the method, mind you. A method. “You just need a method. You can't just be anarchy,” he mused.But perhaps what struck me most was Shawn's philosophy that screenwriting is not just structure—it's an argument about what makes life meaningful. Films, he insists, must be animated not by market trends, but by inner turmoil, by the strange flickering passions of the human heart. “It can't just be about chopping up zombies. Your characters must go through an inner transformation.” That idea—that a film is a living question—sets Shawn apart in a world often obsessed with following the formula instead of feeling the pulse.Shawn's micro-budget films—“A Brand New You” and “F*cking My Way Back Home”—aren't just titles that stick. They are rebellious acts of filmmaking born from limited means and limitless creativity.His stories unfold not in sprawling CGI landscapes, but in human longing, funny sadness, and philosophical absurdity. One film follows a man trying to clone his dead wife in the living room. Another explores redemption from the passenger seat of a towed Cutlass Supreme. With a budget of $7,000 and a borrowed tow truck, Shawn pulled off scenes that feel bigger than most tentpole blockbusters.But filmmaking, for Shawn, isn't just about his own expression. Through Micro Budget Film Lab, he's become a teacher, a mentor, and a kind of mad scientist in the alchemical lab of storytelling. His passion is not merely to direct, but to help others break free from the gatekeeping systems that keep fresh stories from being told. “We need a micro budget movement,” he declared, envisioning a cinematic rebellion where filmmakers use what they have to tell stories no one else dares to.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/indie-film-hustle-a-filmmaking-podcast--2664729/support.

History and politics have long found their way onto the Broadway stage, from Hamilton and 1776 to Parade and Fiorello! But in 1989, one musical took a wildly unconventional approach—bringing the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy to life in Senator Joe. Helmed by Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar director Tom O'Horgan, this audacious and bizarre production featured everything from Brechtian satire to a musical number inside McCarthy's alcohol-ravaged liver. Yet, after only three Broadway previews, the show collapsed under the weight of its own chaos, ending in scandal when its producer was arrested in a phone booth. How did Senator Joe go so wrong? And why did anyone think a musical about McCarthyism would work in the first place? This episode dives into the missteps, mayhem, and misguided ambition that turned a political firebrand into one of Broadway's most infamous flops. Theme Music created by Blake Stadnik. Click here to find a transcript for this episode and a full list of materials and resources used. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Expect More Bulldozings”, the Princeton historian Matthew Karp predicts in this month's Harpers magazine about MAGA America. In his analysis of the Democrats' loss to Trump, Karp argues that the supposedly progressive party has become disconnected from working-class voters partially because it represents what he calls "the nerve center of American capitalism." He suggests that for all Democrats' strong cultural liberalism and institutional power, the party has failed to deliver meaningful economic reforms. The party's leadership, particularly Kamala Harris, he says, appeared out of touch with reality in the last election, celebrating the economic and poltical status quo in an America where the voters clearly wanted structural change. Karp advocates for a new left-wing populism that combines innovative economic programs with nationalism, similar to successful left-wing leaders like Obrador in Mexico and Lulu in Brazil and American indepedents like the Nebraskan Dan Osborne. Here are the 5 KEEN ON takeaways in our conversation with Karp:* The Democratic Party has become the party at the "nerve center of American capitalism," representing cultural, institutional, and economic power centers while losing its historic connection to working-class voters. Despite this reality, Democrats are unwilling or unable to acknowledge this transformation.* Kamala Harris's campaign was symptomatic of broader Democratic Party issues - celebrating the status quo while failing to offer meaningful change. The party's focus on telling voters "you never had it so good" ignored how many Americans actually felt about what they saw as their troubling economic situation.* Working-class voters didn't necessarily embrace Trump's agenda but rejected Democrats' complacency and disconnection from reality. The Democrats' vulnerability at the ballot box stands in stark contrast to their dominance of cultural institutions, academia, and the national security state.* The path forward for Democrats could look like Dan Osborne's campaign in Nebraska - a populist approach that directly challenges economic elites across party lines while advocating for universal programs rather than targeted reforms or purely cultural politics.* The solution isn't simply returning to New Deal-style politics or embracing technological fixes, but rather developing a new nationalist-leftist synthesis that combines universal social programs with pro-family, pro-worker policies while accepting the reality of the nation-state as the container for political change.Bulldozing America: The Full TranscriptANDREW KEEN: If there's a word or metaphor we can use to describe Trumpian America, it might be "bulldoze." Trump is bulldozing everything and everyone, or at least trying to. Lots of people warned us about this, perhaps nobody more than my guest today. Matthew Karp teaches at Princeton and had an interesting piece in the January issue of Harper's. Matthew, is bulldozing the right word? Is that our word of the month, of the year?MATTHEW KARP: It does seem like it. This column is more about the Democrats' electoral fortunes than Trump's war on the administrative state, but it seems to apply in a number of contexts.KEEN: When did you write it?KARP: The lead times for these Harper's pieces are really far in advance. They have a very trim kind of working order. I wrote this almost right in the wake of the election in November, and then some of the edits stretched on into December. It's still a review of the dynamics that brought Trump into office and an assessment of the various interpretations that have been proffered by different groups for why Trump won and why the Democrats lost.KEEN: You begin with an interesting half-joke: given Trump's victory, maybe we should use the classic Brechtian proposal to dissolve the people and elect another. You say there are some writers like Jill Filipovic, who has been on this show, and Rebecca Solnit, who everybody knows. There's a lot of hand-wringing, soul-searching on the left these days, isn't there?KARP: That's what defeat does to you. The impulse to essentially blame the people, not the politicians—there was a lot of that talk alongside insistences that Kamala Harris ran a "flawless" campaign. That was a prime adjective: flawless. This has been a feature of Democratic Party politics for a while. It certainly appeared in 2016, and while I don't think it's actually the majority view this time around, that faction was out there again.The Democratic Party's TransformationKEEN: It's an interesting word, "flawless." I've argued many times, both on the show and privately, that she ran—I'm not sure if even the word "ran" is the right word—what was essentially a deeply flawed campaign. You seem to agree, although you might suggest there are some structural elements. What's your analysis three months after the defeat, as the dust has settled?KARP: It doesn't feel like the dust has settled. I'm writing my piece now about these early days of the Trump administration, and it feels like a dust cloud—we can barely see because the headlines constantly cloud our vision. But looking back on the election, there are several things to say. The essential, broader trend, which I think is larger than Harris's particular moves as a candidate or her qualities and deficits, has to do with the Democratic Party as a national entity—I don't like the word "brand," though we all have to speak as if we're marketers now.Since Obama in particular, and this is an even longer-running trend, the Democratic Party's fortunes have really nosedived with voters making less money, getting less education, voters in working-class and lower-middle-class positions—measured any way you slice it sociologically. This is not only a historic reversal from what was once the party of Roosevelt, which Joe Biden tried to resurrect with that giant FDR poster behind him in the White House, but it represents a fundamental shift in American politics.Political scientists talk about class dealignment, the way in which, for a long time, there essentially was no class alignment between the parties. These days, if anything, there's probably a stronger case for the Republicans to be more of a working-class party just from their coalition, although I think that's overstated too. From the Democratic perspective, what's striking is the trend—the slipping away, the outmigration of all these voters away from the Democrats, especially in national elections, in presidential elections.The Party of CapitalKEEN: You put it nicely in your piece—I'm quoting you—"The fault is not in the Democrats' campaigns, it's in themselves." And then you write, and I think this is the really important sentence: "This is a party that represents the nerve center of American capitalism, ideological production and imperial power." Some people might suggest, well, what's wrong with that? America should be proud of its capitalism, its imperial power, its ideological production. But what's so surreal, so jarring about all this is that Democrats don't acknowledge that. You can see it in Harris, in her husband, in San Francisco and in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where you live. You can see it in Princeton, in Manhattan. It's so self-evident. And yet no one is willing to actually acknowledge this.KARP: It's interesting to think about it that way because I wonder if a more candid piece of self-recognition would benefit the party. I think some of it is there's a deep-seated need, going back to that tradition of FDR and especially on the part of the left wing of the party—anyone who's even halfway progressive—to feel like this is the party of the little guy against the big guy, the party of marginalized people, the party of justice for all, not just for the powerful.That felt need transcends the statistics tallied up in voting returns. For the media and institutional complex of the Democratic Party, which includes many politicians, that reality will still be a reality even if the facts on the ground have changed. Some of it is, I think, a genuine refusal to see what's in front of you—it's not hypocritical because that implies willful misleading, whereas I think it's a deeper ideological thing for many people.The Status Quo PartyKEEN: Is it just cyclical? The FDR cycle, Great Society, New Deal, LBJ—all of that has come to an end, and the ideology hasn't caught up with it? Democrats still see themselves as radical, but they're actually deeply conservative. I've had so many conversations with people who think of themselves as progressives and say to me, "I used to think I'm a progressive, but in the context of Trump or some other populist, I now realize I'm a conservative." None of them recognize the broader historical meaning. The irony is that they actually are conservative—they're for the status quo. That was clear in the last election. Harris, for better or worse, celebrated the old America, and Trump had a vision of a new America, for better or worse. Yet no one was really willing to acknowledge this.KARP: Yes, institutionally and socially, the Democrats have become the party of the status quo. People on the left constantly lambaste Democrats for lacking a bold reform agenda, but that's sort of not the point. Some people will say Joe Biden was the most progressive president since FDR because he spent a lot of money on infrastructure programs. But my view is that enhanced government spending, which did increase the federal budget as a share of GDP to significant levels, nevertheless didn't result in a single reform program you can identify and attach to Biden's name.Unlike all these progressive Democratic presidents past—even Obama had Obamacare—it's not really clear what Biden's legacy is other than essentially increasing the budget. None of those programs, none of that spending, improved his political popularity because that money was so diffuse, or in other cases so targeted that it went to build this one chip plant in one town in Ohio. If you didn't happen to be in that county, it made no difference to you. There wasn't anything like healthcare reform, structural family leave reform, or childcare reform—something that somebody could say, "This president actually changed the way my life operates for the better."Cultural Politics and ClassKEEN: Let's talk about cultural politics. Thomas Frank has sometimes been accused, if not of racism, certainly of being a kind of conservative populist, even if he sees himself from the left. Is one of the reasons why the Democratic Party has lost the support of much of the American working class attributable to cultural politics, to the new left victory in the '60s and its control of the Democratic agenda, which is really manifested in many ways by somebody like Kamala Harris—a wealthy lawyer running as a member of the diverse underclass?KARP: Look, I don't want to say the Democrats lost because of "woke." I think there were larger issues in play, and the principal one is this economic question. But you can't actually separate those issues. What people have intuited is that the Democrats have become a party that has retained, if anything advanced, this cultural liberalism coming out of the new left. As recently as 2020, there was a very new left-like insurgency of street protests focused on police brutality and structural racism.I don't actually think Americans are broadly hostile to civil rights equality and, in substance, a lot of the Democratic positions on those issues. But when you essentially hollow out your party's historic core connection to the working class and to economic reform, and in a hundred different ways from Clinton to Obama to Biden take so much off the table in terms of working-class politics, then it's no wonder that a lot of people come to think these minority populations are essentially the clients of very powerful patrons.Paths ForwardKEEN: You note in a tweet that the Democrats are what you call "politically pathetic." In your piece, you write about Dan Osborne, an independent union steamfitter who ran for Senate in Nebraska. Are guys like Osborne the fix here? The solution? A new way of thinking about America, perhaps learning from right-wing populism—a new populism of the left?KARP: Absolutely. I don't think they're a silver bullet. There are a lot of institutional and social obstacles to reconstituting some kind of 19th-century style or mid-twentieth century style working-class project, whether it's organizing labor unions or mass parties of the left. That being said, the Osborne campaign absolutely represents an electoral road forward for people who want real change.He wildly outperformed not just Kamala Harris but the other Democrat running for Senate. His margins were highest precisely in the places where Democrats have struggled the most. In the wealthy suburban districts around Omaha where Harris actually won, Osborne more or less held serve. But where he really ran up the score was further out in rural areas and among workers. I would bet a lot of money that he way overperformed with voters with lower education levels and lower incomes.Looking to the FutureKEEN: Finally, is there an opportunity in a structural sense? You're still presenting the old America, a federal state. But the Trump people, for better or worse, are cutting this. They're attacking it on lots of levels. Are there really radical ideas, maybe not traditional left-wing ideas or even progressive ideas, certainly associated with technology—you talked about universal basic income, decentralization, even what we call Web3—which might revitalize progressives in the 21st century, or is that simply unrealistic?KARP: We've got to keep our eyes open. My little faction of the sort of dissident left is often accused of being overly nostalgic by opponents on the left. I take the criticism that the vision I've laid out risks being nostalgic, towards the middle decades of the 20th century when union density was higher, industrial America was stronger, and you had healthy families and good jobs.I'm very leery of technological quick fixes. I don't think the blockchain is going to resurrect socialism. I do think there is a political opportunity that would represent a more conscious break with the liberal leftism that has been in the water of the Democratic Party and the progressive left since 1968. We need to move away from this sort of championship of small groups and towards a more universal, family-centered, country-centered approach.I think the current is flowing towards the nation-state and not towards the globe. So I'm okay with tariff politics, with the celebration of the national, and to some extent with this impulse to get control of the border. That doesn't mean mass deportations, but it does mean having some actual understanding of who is coming into the country and some orderly procedure. Every other country in the world, including those lefty social democracies, has that.The successful left-wing leaders have all been nationalists of one kind or another. Look at AMLO in Mexico or Lula in Brazil. There are welfare policies that are super popular that can be branded not as some airy-fairy Nordic social democracy thing, but as a pro-family, pro-worker, pro-American sensibility that you can easily connect to traditional values and patriotic sentiment. It's the easiest thing in the world, at least ideologically, to imagine that formulation. What it would run afoul of is a lot of entrenched institutional connections within the Democratic Party and broadly on the left, within the NGO world, academia, and the media class, who are attached to the current structure of things.Matthew Karp is a historian of the U.S. Civil War era and its relationship to the nineteenth-century world. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 and joined the Princeton faculty in 2013. His first book, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy(Link is external) (Harvard, 2016) explores the ways that slavery shaped U.S. foreign relations before the Civil War. In the larger transatlantic struggle over the future of bondage, American slaveholders saw the United States as slavery's great champion, and harnessed the full power of the growing American state to defend it both at home and abroad. This Vast Southern Empire received the John H. Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association, the James Broussard Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Stuart L. Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Karp is now at work on two books, both under contract with Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. The first, Millions of Abolitionists: The Republican Party and the Political War on Slavery, considers the emergence of American antislavery mass politics. At the midpoint of the nineteenth century, the United States was the largest and wealthiest slave society in modern history, ruled by a powerful slaveholding class and its allies. Yet just ten years later, a new antislavery party had forged a political majority in the North and won state power in a national election, setting the stage for disunion, civil war, and the destruction of chattel slavery itself. Millions of Abolitionists examines the rise of the Republican Party from 1854 to 1861 as a political revolution without precedent or sequel in the history of the United States. The second book, a meditation on the politics of U.S. history, explores the ways that narratives of the American experience both serve and shape different ideological ends — in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century, and today.Named as one of the "100 most unconnected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's least known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting the daily KEEN ON show, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy interview series. He is also the author of four poorly reviewed books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two badly behaved children. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

In the ninth episode of Season 11: The Son of Cult Flicks, Kyle is joined by novelist Samuel Cullado and screenwriter/critic Joseph Hamersly to discuss one of the true unique works in cinema history, the whimsical and philosophical conversation of two friends at an existential divide within their cosmopolitan comforts in Louis Malle's experimental, Brechtian, and introspective film My Dinner with Andre (1981).

"Valentine Basilevich Glass, native of Vyborg, accountant in the bureau of administration of the Leningrad Parks of Culture and Rest, led a number of unrelated lives. Whereas most people were trapped by the web of Soviet bureaucracy, he reveled in its complexity and quirkiness, finding in the course of his work numerous loopholes which he impressed in his memory, an unconscious act much like anticipating an annoying scratch on a phonograph record."   Two very short stories about unusual men. Or are they stories about the culture? Or are they stories about you and me and the ways we make meaning? This episode may or may not have the answers. Also, have you ever broken the fourth wall?

Tim and Jen invite their favorite internet crank Bitter Karella to help them analyze a bewildering major release that no one liked, Argylle. It's so confounding a project, it leads Karella to use the phrase "Brechtian distancing mechanism."Listen to our Apple TV+ episode, in which we read the entire platform to filth. F*ck you, Tim Apple!Read this Deadline article about the production and marvel at how out of touch these people sound. At the end, director Matthew Vaughn throws in an enthusiastic endorsement of the Apple Vision Pro.Read the incisive opinion piece Tim invoked when discussing the sexlessness of Argylle, R.S. Benedict's "Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny" via Blood Knife. Have You Seen This? BONUS episodes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Atlas shouldn't have fought she should've seen CP0 and just shrugged [crowd boos] Use code "JORYJO" for $5 off your first #TokyoTreat box through my link: https://team.tokyotreat.com/watchingonepiece and #Sakuraco box: https://team.sakura.co/watchingonepiece Join our Discord: http://discord.gg/WSv2KW34rk This episode came out early for our Patrons! Thank you for supporting on Patreon! We Are! On Twitter: @wearewatchingOP @noimjory @ghostofjo

Timothy Corrigan of the University of Pennsylvania joins moderator Patrice Petro to discuss Rainer Werner Fassbinder's classic film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Together, they examine the larger body of work and influences of the German filmmaker, which include Brechtian aesthetics and classical Hollywood melodramas like that of Douglas Sirk. They also offer close readings of scenes from the film, analyzing themes of class, race, and gender and the social relations of melodrama. Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 39573]

Timothy Corrigan of the University of Pennsylvania joins moderator Patrice Petro to discuss Rainer Werner Fassbinder's classic film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Together, they examine the larger body of work and influences of the German filmmaker, which include Brechtian aesthetics and classical Hollywood melodramas like that of Douglas Sirk. They also offer close readings of scenes from the film, analyzing themes of class, race, and gender and the social relations of melodrama. Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 39573]

Timothy Corrigan of the University of Pennsylvania joins moderator Patrice Petro to discuss Rainer Werner Fassbinder's classic film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Together, they examine the larger body of work and influences of the German filmmaker, which include Brechtian aesthetics and classical Hollywood melodramas like that of Douglas Sirk. They also offer close readings of scenes from the film, analyzing themes of class, race, and gender and the social relations of melodrama. Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 39573]

Timothy Corrigan of the University of Pennsylvania joins moderator Patrice Petro to discuss Rainer Werner Fassbinder's classic film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Together, they examine the larger body of work and influences of the German filmmaker, which include Brechtian aesthetics and classical Hollywood melodramas like that of Douglas Sirk. They also offer close readings of scenes from the film, analyzing themes of class, race, and gender and the social relations of melodrama. Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 39573]

Bob Cratchit. Ron Weasley. Daniel Blake. Working class characters are often painted as humble folk, morally pure and deserving of our sympathy. But what if they're...not?Join us as we discuss truly progressive portrayals of the working class in film. Instead of patronising, what if films instead gave people agency over their own lives? Instead of portraying poverty as a purifying force, what if films were honest about the negative consequences of oppression on the subject? What if – and bear with me here – but what if working class people were sometimes bad? We start our first episode of 2024 with a quick discussion on the Golden Globes and Academy Awards, before jumping into a chat about a number of films, some which we think do the working class a disservice, and others that we feel are much more honest and human in their portrayals. Up for discussion are:The films of Ken Loach and Shane Meadows, including I, Daniel Blake (2016), Sorry We Missed You (2019) and This Is England (2006);Meantime (1983);Saltburn (2023);The films of Bong Joon-ho, including Snowpiercer (2013) and Parasite (2019);Fallen Leaves (2023);Red Rocket (2021);Harry Potter;Pride (2014);The Royle Family (TV sitcom);The Full Monty (1997);Brechtian theatre;The films of Jean-Luv Godard;Together (2000).Support the show

Mixing the traditional documentary form with elements of Brechtian theatre, director Kaouther Ben Hania's (“The Man Who Sold His Skin, “Beauty and the Dogs”) Cannes-winning “Four Daughters” creates a highly intense and emotional experience — for both the audience and the principal characters.   Joining Ken on the pod, Kaouther discusses the challenges and breakthroughs of her hybrid approach. In the film, actors play various roles and intermingle with the “real” sisters and mother in a Tunisian family ripped apart by family strife and Islamic extremism. How did the four sisters respond to their mother's controlling grip and violent outbursts? What happened during a particularly intense scene to cause the lone male actor in the film to ask the director to shut off the cameras? How does this troupe navigate a familial and cultural landscape in which women are marginalized but also forge an unbreakable bond of sisterhood?   “Four Daughters” is shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film and Best International Feature Film. The film is released by Kino Lorber.   Follow: @kaoutherbenhania on Instagram @topdocspod on Instagram and twitter   The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.

Reality is about to hit Emma Margot Roberts hard at row 8 during the Brechtian retelling of Goldilocks and The Three Bears! Volume 50 is out now!!!!! Buy it today!!!! Also, buy your copy of The Tales of Grasmere Valley today! Volumes 1-5 Volume 6-10 Volume 11-15 Volumes 16-20 Volumes 21-25 Volume 26-30 Volume 31-35 Volume 36-40 Volume 41-45 Acoustic/Folk Instrumental by Hyde - Free Instrumentals https://soundcloud.com/davidhydemusic Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported— CC BY 3.0 Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/acoustic-folk-instrume... Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/YKdXVnaHfo8 "Scheming Weasel (slower version)" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Liam Billingham (Die Hard on a Blank / OuevreBusters) joins us to discuss Paul Verhoeven's meta-propaganda Brechtian war film Starship Troopers. We discuss the film's odd mixture of big budget VFX with soap opera stars, how it's three movies in one, the nature of meaning in a world devoid of conflict, and art that risks embarrassment. It's a squishy, gooey, fun time, so jump on this one way rocket to Klendathu with us, folks!

This week we are joined by our friend Matthew Pezzulich (he/him) to discuss PIKMIN 4: the latest entry in the beloved Nintendo franchise about little guys doing silly little tasks at the end of the world (and in that sense, aren't we all Pikmin when you think about it?) We talk about the history of franchise, its themes of environmentalism, collaboration, and the strength of collective labor, and how Pikmin 4's design choices and quality of life improvements make this game the most successful and most accessible game in the series to date. Matthew also shares his experience of seeing Beyoncé live (including an important update on whether or not the Renaissance World Tour is, in fact, Brechtian), Eric recounts his experience at "Everybody Rise! A Sondheim Celebration" at the Hollywood Bowl. We also try to answer important questions like "Which type of Pikmin would be the best to eat?", have a rousing discussion on our favorite summer garden herb, and so much more!================Get in touch with us!EMAIL US at gayforplaypodcast@gmail.comFOLLOW G4P Twitter: @GayForPlayPodInstagram: @GayForPlayPodTwitch: twitch.tv/gayforplaypodSupport the Show & Unlock Bonus Episodes on our PATREON========CREDITSIntro and outro music by Connor Marsh (@connorjmarshmallow)Show art by Benny Kessler (@retro.spectacle.studio)Special thanks to our patrons: Blueberri Mary,  Elijah Punzal,  Trevor McTavish,

Liz is an actor, writer, and musical theatre kid from way back. And she's here with a show that is possibly more relevant now than when it debuted. Topics include: going into the City by yourself when you're 13, Little Sally, Urinetown the place, transferring at Jamaica, Brechtian (in the true sense), and is this show ahead of its time? Liz on Medium Featured recordings: Urinetown the Musical - The Original Cast Recording (2001) • Songs in the Key of Springfield - The Simpsons (1997) ORIGINAL CAST MERCH! Visit our Patreon for access to our monthly live stream The Original Cast at the Movies where 2023 is THE YEAR OF BARBRA celebrating the filmography of Ms. Barbra Joan Streisand! Patreon • Twitter • Facebook • Email

John Newton of the two JOHNs tells us about setting up their own label Pets Care Records, his art background, Brechtian theory, being an accidental chef, working with the contemporary artist Ryan Gander, being The Wurzels' assistant for the day and lots more! Photo: Paul Grace JOHN's new single 'Hopper On The Dial' is out now - from their upcoming 7" out next month. Get 20% OFF @manscaped + Free Shipping with promo code EARWAX at MANSCAPED.com! #ad #manscapedpod Get your 4 day tickets for 2000 Trees Festival, including Wednesday's Forest Stage Line Up with Bob Vylan, Holding Absence and more. Use '101POD' at checkout for £20 off, FREE MONEY: https://www.twothousandtreesfestival.co.uk/ Songs: JOHN 'Hopper On The Dial', Cock Sparrer ‘Working' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andor is Disney+'s new Star Wars series and it's a fantastic Brechtian political spy drama that doesn't rely on lightsabers, K3 from Helvetiq is an abstract game that's a cross of Chess, Connect 4, and programming, and Akropolis from Gigamic is a very quick tile laying boardgame we just love. Plus New Year's resolutions and predictions for 2023 based on movies. 00:00 - What will 2023 bring? Let's consult the movies! 03:52 - New Year's Resolutions. 16:36 - K3 20:46 - Akropolis (also thanks to Play The Game HQ for their brilliant guide) 29:29 - Andor 46:42 - 2022 and Soylent Green All that, and doubtful space elevators, with Dan (@ThisDanFrost), Kris (@DigitalStrider), Peter (@XeroXeroXero), and Sam (@MrSamTurner). Our Spotify Playlist brings together lots of great thematic music inspired by the stuff we talk about. Go check it out, if you like. Links to where you can find us - StayingInPodcast.com Note: sometimes we'll have been sent a review copy of the thing we're talking about on the podcast. It doesn't skew how we think about that thing, and we don't receive compensation for anything we discuss, but we thought you might like to know this is the case.

Rudy joins Dr. Ron G. Davis, founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in 1959, for a reflection of a life in art and politics. We discuss the SFMT's beginnings during the civil rights era, how it turned into a "guerilla" operation, the relationship to Teatro Campesino, civil rights and the black radical movement, why his time with the SFMT came to an end, and the influence of Brecht and his PhD work on a Brechtian ecology. 

Our guest this month is Alex McIntyre from the Irrealist Combat League, Revolutionary Education Distro, and formerly the Cooper Point Journal. We discuss the idea of politics as theater, the irrealist rejection of the world as-is, Leninist fan-fiction, theatrical action (in a Brechtian sense) vs. a capitalist digital gesamtkunstwerk, sectariana, “paper sales,” reactionary vs. revolutionary suicide, the unity of popular front opportunism and third period ultraleftism, the organization of pessimism vs. cultic optimism, weird socialism, not being a humorless leftist, Dadaism, the disruption of order, and more. Music in this episode: Pet Mosquito's “I Hate Illinois Nazis” (2021), “Don't Shoot” (2020) and Omnia Sol's “Walking Around Money” (2022) Readings in this episode: Stink Ape Resurrection Primer's “Ello's Unheard Plea” by Tish Turl and Adam Turl, and Mike Linaweaver's “Long Hours Away from Home,” both in Locust Review 8 (Summer 2022). Check out Pet Mosquito's bandcamp and Instagram, and Omnia Sol's bandcamp and Instagram. And subscribe to Locust Review. Locust Radio is hosted by Tish Turl, Laura Fair-Schulz, and Adam Turl. It is produced by Alexander Billet and Omnia Sol. Theme music by Omnia Sol.

Super excited to announce new guest, John Milosich, to The Story!Born in Buffalo NY, raised in Erie Pa, Actor-Musician John “Milo” Milosich continues to recalibrate his trajectory as a creative and a performer. He taught music and theater in public and private schools for ten years. Scrubbing toilets in exchange for acting and dance classes at Synetic Theater lead him to mainstage shows with them at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and neighboring DC theaters.He composed music for live performance by a gypsy punk band in a devised rendition of the Brechtian play Mother Courage and Her Children. It paid $50 and a case of PBR, but there he took up the accordion to soon after earn a role in a two-year Broadway touring production that ran in 70 cities across the US, Canada and Japan. He acted, played guitar, accordion and foot percussion at Arena Stage in DC, Kansas City Repertory Theatre and Baltimore Center Stage before the pandemic, but has yet to be cast in a theatre production close to Lancaster. Instead, he's the ringleader of the accordion-powered romp-rock band for adventurers, Featherburn, and the one-man ensemble, MiloSolo.You can find John's work here:Band sites:featherburn.comsongwhip.com/featherburninstagram.com/featherburnFeatherburnSolo music sites:milosolo.comMiloSoloActor website:johnmilosich.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-story/donations

Super excited to announce new guest, John Milosich, to The Story!Born in Buffalo NY, raised in Erie Pa, Actor-Musician John “Milo” Milosich continues to recalibrate his trajectory as a creative and a performer. He taught music and theater in public and private schools for ten years. Scrubbing toilets in exchange for acting and dance classes at Synetic Theater lead him to mainstage shows with them at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and neighboring DC theaters.He composed music for live performance by a gypsy punk band in a devised rendition of the Brechtian play Mother Courage and Her Children. It paid $50 and a case of PBR, but there he took up the accordion to soon after earn a role in a two-year Broadway touring production that ran in 70 cities across the US, Canada and Japan. He acted, played guitar, accordion and foot percussion at Arena Stage in DC, Kansas City Repertory Theatre and Baltimore Center Stage before the pandemic, but has yet to be cast in a theatre production close to Lancaster. Instead, he's the ringleader of the accordion-powered romp-rock band for adventurers, Featherburn, and the one-man ensemble, MiloSolo.You can find John's work here:Band sites:featherburn.comsongwhip.com/featherburninstagram.com/featherburnFeatherburnSolo music sites:milosolo.comMiloSoloActor website:johnmilosich.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-story/donations

This week's episode looks at “All You Need is Love”, the Our World TV special, and the career of the Beatles from April 1966 through August 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Rain" by the Beatles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ NB for the first few hours this was up, there was a slight editing glitch. If you downloaded the old version and don't want to redownload the whole thing, just look in the transcript for "Other than fixing John's two flubbed" for the text of the two missing paragraphs. Errata I say "Come Together" was a B-side, but the single was actually a double A-side. Also, I say the Lennon interview by Maureen Cleave appeared in Detroit magazine. That's what my source (Steve Turner's book) says, but someone on Twitter says that rather than Detroit magazine it was the Detroit Free Press. Also at one point I say "the videos for 'Paperback Writer' and 'Penny Lane'". I meant to say "Rain" rather than "Penny Lane" there. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. Particularly useful this time was Steve Turner's book Beatles '66. I also used Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. Johnny Rogan's Starmakers and Svengalis had some information on Epstein I hadn't seen anywhere else. Some information about the "Bigger than Jesus" scandal comes from Ward, B. (2012). “The ‘C' is for Christ”: Arthur Unger, Datebook Magazine and the Beatles. Popular Music and Society, 35(4), 541-560. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.608978 Information on Robert Stigwood comes from Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins. And the quote at the end from Simon Napier-Bell is from You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, which is more entertaining than it is accurate, but is very entertaining. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of "All You Need is Love" is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Magical Mystery Tour. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I start the episode -- this episode deals, in part, with the deaths of three gay men -- one by murder, one by suicide, and one by an accidental overdose, all linked at least in part to societal homophobia. I will try to deal with this as tactfully as I can, but anyone who's upset by those things might want to read the transcript instead of listening to the episode. This is also a very, very, *very* long episode -- this is likely to be the longest episode I *ever* do of this podcast, so settle in. We're going to be here a while. I obviously don't know how long it's going to be while I'm still recording, but based on the word count of my script, probably in the region of three hours. You have been warned. In 1967 the actor Patrick McGoohan was tired. He had been working on the hit series Danger Man for many years -- Danger Man had originally run from 1960 through 1962, then had taken a break, and had come back, retooled, with longer episodes in 1964. That longer series was a big hit, both in the UK and in the US, where it was retitled Secret Agent and had a new theme tune written by PF Sloan and Steve Barri and recorded by Johnny Rivers: [Excerpt: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"] But McGoohan was tired of playing John Drake, the agent, and announced he was going to quit the series. Instead, with the help of George Markstein, Danger Man's script editor, he created a totally new series, in which McGoohan would star, and which McGoohan would also write and direct key episodes of. This new series, The Prisoner, featured a spy who is only ever given the name Number Six, and who many fans -- though not McGoohan himself -- took to be the same character as John Drake. Number Six resigns from his job as a secret agent, and is kidnapped and taken to a place known only as The Village -- the series was filmed in Portmeirion, an unusual-looking town in Gwynnedd, in North Wales -- which is full of other ex-agents. There he is interrogated to try to find out why he has quit his job. It's never made clear whether the interrogators are his old employers or their enemies, and there's a certain suggestion that maybe there is no real distinction between the two sides, that they're both running the Village together. He spends the entire series trying to escape, but refuses to explain himself -- and there's some debate among viewers as to whether it's implied or not that part of the reason he doesn't explain himself is that he knows his interrogators wouldn't understand why he quit: [Excerpt: The Prisoner intro, from episode Once Upon a Time, ] Certainly that explanation would fit in with McGoohan's own personality. According to McGoohan, the final episode of The Prisoner was, at the time, the most watched TV show ever broadcast in the UK, as people tuned in to find out the identity of Number One, the person behind the Village, and to see if Number Six would break free. I don't think that's actually the case, but it's what McGoohan always claimed, and it was certainly a very popular series. I won't spoil the ending for those of you who haven't watched it -- it's a remarkable series -- but ultimately the series seems to decide that such questions don't matter and that even asking them is missing the point. It's a work that's open to multiple interpretations, and is left deliberately ambiguous, but one of the messages many people have taken away from it is that not only are we trapped by a society that oppresses us, we're also trapped by our own identities. You can run from the trap that society has placed you in, from other people's interpretations of your life, your work, and your motives, but you ultimately can't run from yourself, and any time you try to break out of a prison, you'll find yourself trapped in another prison of your own making. The most horrifying implication of the episode is that possibly even death itself won't be a release, and you will spend all eternity trying to escape from an identity you're trapped in. Viewers became so outraged, according to McGoohan, that he had to go into hiding for an extended period, and while his later claims that he never worked in Britain again are an exaggeration, it is true that for the remainder of his life he concentrated on doing work in the US instead, where he hadn't created such anger. That final episode of The Prisoner was also the only one to use a piece of contemporary pop music, in two crucial scenes: [Excerpt: The Prisoner, "Fall Out", "All You Need is Love"] Back in October 2020, we started what I thought would be a year-long look at the period from late 1962 through early 1967, but which has turned out for reasons beyond my control to take more like twenty months, with a song which was one of the last of the big pre-Beatles pop hits, though we looked at it after their first single, "Telstar" by the Tornadoes: [Excerpt: The Tornadoes, "Telstar"] There were many reasons for choosing that as one of the bookends for this fifty-episode chunk of the podcast -- you'll see many connections between that episode and this one if you listen to them back-to-back -- but among them was that it's a song inspired by the launch of the first ever communications satellite, and a sign of how the world was going to become smaller as the sixties went on. Of course, to start with communications satellites didn't do much in that regard -- they were expensive to use, and had limited bandwidth, and were only available during limited time windows, but symbolically they meant that for the first time ever, people could see and hear events thousands of miles away as they were happening. It's not a coincidence that Britain and France signed the agreement to develop Concorde, the first supersonic airliner, a month after the first Beatles single and four months after the Telstar satellite was launched. The world was becoming ever more interconnected -- people were travelling faster and further, getting news from other countries quicker, and there was more cultural conversation – and misunderstanding – between countries thousands of miles apart. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the man who also coined the phrase “the medium is the message”, thought that this ever-faster connection would fundamentally change basic modes of thought in the Western world. McLuhan thought that technology made possible whole new modes of thought, and that just as the printing press had, in his view, caused Western liberalism and individualism, so these new electronic media would cause the rise of a new collective mode of thought. In 1962, the year of Concorde, Telstar, and “Love Me Do”, McLuhan wrote a book called The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which he said: “Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…” He coined the term “the Global Village” to describe this new collectivism. The story we've seen over the last fifty episodes is one of a sort of cultural ping-pong between the USA and the UK, with innovations in American music inspiring British musicians, who in turn inspired American ones, whether that being the Beatles covering the Isley Brothers or the Rolling Stones doing a Bobby Womack song, or Paul Simon and Bob Dylan coming over to the UK and learning folk songs and guitar techniques from Martin Carthy. And increasingly we're going to see those influences spread to other countries, and influences coming *from* other countries. We've already seen one Jamaican artist, and the influence of Indian music has become very apparent. While the focus of this series is going to remain principally in the British Isles and North America, rock music was and is a worldwide phenomenon, and that's going to become increasingly a part of the story. And so in this episode we're going to look at a live performance -- well, mostly live -- that was seen by hundreds of millions of people all over the world as it happened, thanks to the magic of satellites: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "All You Need is Love"] When we left the Beatles, they had just finished recording "Tomorrow Never Knows", the most experimental track they had recorded up to that date, and if not the most experimental thing they *ever* recorded certainly in the top handful. But "Tomorrow Never Knows" was only the first track they recorded in the sessions for what would become arguably their greatest album, and certainly the one that currently has the most respect from critics. It's interesting to note that that album could have been very, very, different. When we think of Revolver now, we think of the innovative production of George Martin, and of Geoff Emerick and Ken Townshend's inventive ideas for pushing the sound of the equipment in Abbey Road studios, but until very late in the day the album was going to be recorded in the Stax studios in Memphis, with Steve Cropper producing -- whether George Martin would have been involved or not is something we don't even know. In 1965, the Rolling Stones had, as we've seen, started making records in the US, recording in LA and at the Chess studios in Chicago, and the Yardbirds had also been doing the same thing. Mick Jagger had become a convert to the idea of using American studios and working with American musicians, and he had constantly been telling Paul McCartney that the Beatles should do the same. Indeed, they'd put some feelers out in 1965 about the possibility of the group making an album with Holland, Dozier, and Holland in Detroit. Quite how this would have worked is hard to figure out -- Holland, Dozier, and Holland's skills were as songwriters, and in their work with a particular set of musicians -- so it's unsurprising that came to nothing. But recording at Stax was a different matter.  While Steve Cropper was a great songwriter in his own right, he was also adept at getting great sounds on covers of other people's material -- like on Otis Blue, the album he produced for Otis Redding in late 1965, which doesn't include a single Cropper original: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Satisfaction"] And the Beatles were very influenced by the records Stax were putting out, often namechecking Wilson Pickett in particular, and during the Rubber Soul sessions they had recorded a "Green Onions" soundalike track, imaginatively titled "12-Bar Original": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "12-Bar Original"] The idea of the group recording at Stax got far enough that they were actually booked in for two weeks starting the ninth of April, and there was even an offer from Elvis to let them stay at Graceland while they recorded, but then a couple of weeks earlier, the news leaked to the press, and Brian Epstein cancelled the booking. According to Cropper, Epstein talked about recording at the Atlantic studios in New York with him instead, but nothing went any further. It's hard to imagine what a Stax-based Beatles album would have been like, but even though it might have been a great album, it certainly wouldn't have been the Revolver we've come to know. Revolver is an unusual album in many ways, and one of the ways it's most distinct from the earlier Beatles albums is the dominance of keyboards. Both Lennon and McCartney had often written at the piano as well as the guitar -- McCartney more so than Lennon, but both had done so regularly -- but up to this point it had been normal for them to arrange the songs for guitars rather than keyboards, no matter how they'd started out. There had been the odd track where one of them, usually Lennon, would play a simple keyboard part, songs like "I'm Down" or "We Can Work it Out", but even those had been guitar records first and foremost. But on Revolver, that changed dramatically. There seems to have been a complex web of cause and effect here. Paul was becoming increasingly interested in moving his basslines away from simple walking basslines and root notes and the other staples of rock and roll basslines up to this point. As the sixties progressed, rock basslines were becoming ever more complex, and Tyler Mahan Coe has made a good case that this is largely down to innovations in production pioneered by Owen Bradley, and McCartney was certainly aware of Bradley's work -- he was a fan of Brenda Lee, who Bradley produced, for example. But the two influences that McCartney has mentioned most often in this regard are the busy, jazz-influenced, basslines that James Jamerson was playing at Motown: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "It's the Same Old Song"] And the basslines that Brian Wilson was writing for various Wrecking Crew bassists to play for the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)"] Just to be clear, McCartney didn't hear that particular track until partway through the recording of Revolver, when Bruce Johnston visited the UK and brought with him an advance copy of Pet Sounds, but Pet Sounds influenced the later part of Revolver's recording, and Wilson had already started his experiments in that direction with the group's 1965 work. It's much easier to write a song with this kind of bassline, one that's integral to the composition, on the piano than it is to write it on a guitar, as you can work out the bassline with your left hand while working out the chords and melody with your right, so the habit that McCartney had already developed of writing on the piano made this easier. But also, starting with the recording of "Paperback Writer", McCartney switched his style of working in the studio. Where up to this point it had been normal for him to play bass as part of the recording of the basic track, playing with the other Beatles, he now started to take advantage of multitracking to overdub his bass later, so he could spend extra time getting the bassline exactly right. McCartney lived closer to Abbey Road than the other three Beatles, and so could more easily get there early or stay late and tweak his parts. But if McCartney wasn't playing bass while the guitars and drums were being recorded, that meant he could play something else, and so increasingly he would play piano during the recording of the basic track. And that in turn would mean that there wouldn't always *be* a need for guitars on the track, because the harmonic support they would provide would be provided by the piano instead. This, as much as anything else, is the reason that Revolver sounds so radically different to any other Beatles album. Up to this point, with *very* rare exceptions like "Yesterday", every Beatles record, more or less, featured all four of the Beatles playing instruments. Now John and George weren't playing on "Good Day Sunshine" or "For No One", John wasn't playing on "Here, There, and Everywhere", "Eleanor Rigby" features no guitars or drums at all, and George's "Love You To" only features himself, plus a little tambourine from Ringo (Paul recorded a part for that one, but it doesn't seem to appear on the finished track). Of the three songwriting Beatles, the only one who at this point was consistently requiring the instrumental contributions of all the other band members was John, and even he did without Paul on "She Said, She Said", which by all accounts features either John or George on bass, after Paul had a rare bout of unprofessionalism and left the studio. Revolver is still an album made by a group -- and most of those tracks that don't feature John or George instrumentally still feature them vocally -- it's still a collaborative work in all the best ways. But it's no longer an album made by four people playing together in the same room at the same time. After starting work on "Tomorrow Never Knows", the next track they started work on was Paul's "Got to Get You Into My Life", but as it would turn out they would work on that song throughout most of the sessions for the album -- in a sign of how the group would increasingly work from this point on, Paul's song was subject to multiple re-recordings and tweakings in the studio, as he tinkered to try to make it perfect. The first recording to be completed for the album, though, was almost as much of a departure in its own way as "Tomorrow Never Knows" had been. George's song "Love You To" shows just how inspired he was by the music of Ravi Shankar, and how devoted he was to Indian music. While a few months earlier he had just about managed to pick out a simple melody on the sitar for "Norwegian Wood", by this point he was comfortable enough with Indian classical music that I've seen many, many sources claim that an outside session player is playing sitar on the track, though Anil Bhagwat, the tabla player on the track, always insisted that it was entirely Harrison's playing: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] There is a *lot* of debate as to whether it's George playing on the track, and I feel a little uncomfortable making a definitive statement in either direction. On the one hand I find it hard to believe that Harrison got that good that quickly on an unfamiliar instrument, when we know he wasn't a naturally facile musician. All the stories we have about his work in the studio suggest that he had to work very hard on his guitar solos, and that he would frequently fluff them. As a technical guitarist, Harrison was only mediocre -- his value lay in his inventiveness, not in technical ability -- and he had been playing guitar for over a decade, but sitar only a few months. There's also some session documentation suggesting that an unknown sitar player was hired. On the other hand there's the testimony of Anil Bhagwat that Harrison played the part himself, and he has been very firm on the subject, saying "If you go on the Internet there are a lot of questions asked about "Love You To". They say 'It's not George playing the sitar'. I can tell you here and now -- 100 percent it was George on sitar throughout. There were no other musicians involved. It was just me and him." And several people who are more knowledgeable than myself about the instrument have suggested that the sitar part on the track is played the way that a rock guitarist would play rather than the way someone with more knowledge of Indian classical music would play -- there's a blues feeling to some of the bends that apparently no genuine Indian classical musician would naturally do. I would suggest that the best explanation is that there's a professional sitar player trying to replicate a part that Harrison had previously demonstrated, while Harrison was in turn trying his best to replicate the sound of Ravi Shankar's work. Certainly the instrumental section sounds far more fluent, and far more stylistically correct, than one would expect: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Where previous attempts at what got called "raga-rock" had taken a couple of surface features of Indian music -- some form of a drone, perhaps a modal scale -- and had generally used a guitar made to sound a little bit like a sitar, or had a sitar playing normal rock riffs, Harrison's song seems to be a genuine attempt to hybridise Indian ragas and rock music, combining the instrumentation, modes, and rhythmic complexity of someone like Ravi Shankar with lyrics that are seemingly inspired by Bob Dylan and a fairly conventional pop song structure (and a tiny bit of fuzz guitar). It's a record that could only be made by someone who properly understood both the Indian music he's emulating and the conventions of the Western pop song, and understood how those conventions could work together. Indeed, one thing I've rarely seen pointed out is how cleverly the album is sequenced, so that "Love You To" is followed by possibly the most conventional song on Revolver, "Here, There, and Everywhere", which was recorded towards the end of the sessions. Both songs share a distinctive feature not shared by the rest of the album, so the two songs can sound more of a pair than they otherwise would, retrospectively making "Love You To" seem more conventional than it is and "Here, There, and Everywhere" more unconventional -- both have as an introduction a separate piece of music that states some of the melodic themes of the rest of the song but isn't repeated later. In the case of "Love You To" it's the free-tempo bit at the beginning, characteristic of a lot of Indian music: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] While in the case of "Here, There, and Everywhere" it's the part that mimics an older style of songwriting, a separate intro of the type that would have been called a verse when written by the Gershwins or Cole Porter, but of course in the intervening decades "verse" had come to mean something else, so we now no longer have a specific term for this kind of intro -- but as you can hear, it's doing very much the same thing as that "Love You To" intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] In the same day as the group completed "Love You To", overdubbing George's vocal and Ringo's tambourine, they also started work on a song that would show off a lot of the new techniques they had been working on in very different ways. Paul's "Paperback Writer" could indeed be seen as part of a loose trilogy with "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows", one song by each of the group's three songwriters exploring the idea of a song that's almost all on one chord. Both "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Love You To" are based on a drone with occasional hints towards moving to one other chord. In the case of "Paperback Writer", the entire song stays on a single chord until the title -- it's on a G7 throughout until the first use of the word "writer", when it quickly goes to a C for two bars. I'm afraid I'm going to have to sing to show you how little the chords actually change, because the riff disguises this lack of movement somewhat, but the melody is also far more horizontal than most of McCartney's, so this shouldn't sound too painful, I hope: [demonstrates] This is essentially the exact same thing that both "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" do, and all three have very similarly structured rising and falling modal melodies. There's also a bit of "Paperback Writer" that seems to tie directly into "Love You To", but also points to a possible very non-Indian inspiration for part of "Love You To". The Beach Boys' single "Sloop John B" was released in the UK a couple of days after the sessions for "Paperback Writer" and "Love You To", but it had been released in the US a month before, and the Beatles all got copies of every record in the American top thirty shipped to them. McCartney and Harrison have specifically pointed to it as an influence on "Paperback Writer". "Sloop John B" has a section where all the instruments drop out and we're left with just the group's vocal harmonies: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B"] And that seems to have been the inspiration behind the similar moment at a similar point in "Paperback Writer", which is used in place of a middle eight and also used for the song's intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Which is very close to what Harrison does at the end of each verse of "Love You To", where the instruments drop out for him to sing a long melismatic syllable before coming back in: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Essentially, other than "Got to Get You Into My Life", which is an outlier and should not be counted, the first three songs attempted during the Revolver sessions are variations on a common theme, and it's a sign that no matter how different the results might  sound, the Beatles really were very much a group at this point, and were sharing ideas among themselves and developing those ideas in similar ways. "Paperback Writer" disguises what it's doing somewhat by having such a strong riff. Lennon referred to "Paperback Writer" as "son of 'Day Tripper'", and in terms of the Beatles' singles it's actually their third iteration of this riff idea, which they originally got from Bobby Parker's "Watch Your Step": [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Which became the inspiration for "I Feel Fine": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] Which they varied for "Day Tripper": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] And which then in turn got varied for "Paperback Writer": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] As well as compositional ideas, there are sonic ideas shared between "Paperback Writer", "Tomorrow Never Knows", and "Love You To", and which would be shared by the rest of the tracks the Beatles recorded in the first half of 1966. Since Geoff Emerick had become the group's principal engineer, they'd started paying more attention to how to get a fuller sound, and so Emerick had miced the tabla on "Love You To" much more closely than anyone would normally mic an instrument from classical music, creating a deep, thudding sound, and similarly he had changed the way they recorded the drums on "Tomorrow Never Knows", again giving a much fuller sound. But the group also wanted the kind of big bass sounds they'd loved on records coming out of America -- sounds that no British studio was getting, largely because it was believed that if you cut too loud a bass sound into a record it would make the needle jump out of the groove. The new engineering team of Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott, though, thought that it was likely you could keep the needle in the groove if you had a smoother frequency response. You could do that if you used a microphone with a larger diaphragm to record the bass, but how could you do that? Inspiration finally struck -- loudspeakers are actually the same thing as microphones wired the other way round, so if you wired up a loudspeaker as if it were a microphone you could get a *really big* speaker, place it in front of the bass amp, and get a much stronger bass sound. The experiment wasn't a total success -- the sound they got had to be processed quite extensively to get rid of room noise, and then compressed in order to further prevent the needle-jumping issue, and so it's a muddier, less defined, tone than they would have liked, but one thing that can't be denied is that "Paperback Writer"'s bass sound is much, much, louder than on any previous Beatles record: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Almost every track the group recorded during the Revolver sessions involved all sorts of studio innovations, though rarely anything as truly revolutionary as the artificial double-tracking they'd used on "Tomorrow Never Knows", and which also appeared on "Paperback Writer" -- indeed, as "Paperback Writer" was released several months before Revolver, it became the first record released to use the technique. I could easily devote a good ten minutes to every track on Revolver, and to "Paperback Writer"s B-side, "Rain", but this is already shaping up to be an extraordinarily long episode and there's a lot of material to get through, so I'll break my usual pattern of devoting a Patreon bonus episode to something relatively obscure, and this week's bonus will be on "Rain" itself. "Paperback Writer", though, deserved the attention here even though it was not one of the group's more successful singles -- it did go to number one, but it didn't hit number one in the UK charts straight away, being kept off the top by "Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra for the first week: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, "Strangers in the Night"] Coincidentally, "Strangers in the Night" was co-written by Bert Kaempfert, the German musician who had produced the group's very first recording sessions with Tony Sheridan back in 1961. On the group's German tour in 1966 they met up with Kaempfert again, and John greeted him by singing the first couple of lines of the Sinatra record. The single was the lowest-selling Beatles single in the UK since "Love Me Do". In the US it only made number one for two non-consecutive weeks, with "Strangers in the Night" knocking it off for a week in between. Now, by literally any other band's standards, that's still a massive hit, and it was the Beatles' tenth UK number one in a row (or ninth, depending on which chart you use for "Please Please Me"), but it's a sign that the group were moving out of the first phase of total unequivocal dominance of the charts. It was a turning point in a lot of other ways as well. Up to this point, while the group had been experimenting with different lyrical subjects on album tracks, every single had lyrics about romantic relationships -- with the possible exception of "Help!", which was about Lennon's emotional state but written in such a way that it could be heard as a plea to a lover. But in the case of "Paperback Writer", McCartney was inspired by his Aunt Mill asking him "Why do you write songs about love all the time? Can you ever write about a horse or the summit conference or something interesting?" His response was to think "All right, Aunt Mill, I'll show you", and to come up with a lyric that was very much in the style of the social satires that bands like the Kinks were releasing at the time. People often miss the humour in the lyric for "Paperback Writer", but there's a huge amount of comedy in lyrics about someone writing to a publisher saying they'd written a book based on someone else's book, and one can only imagine the feeling of weary recognition in slush-pile readers throughout the world as they heard the enthusiastic "It's a thousand pages, give or take a few, I'll be writing more in a week or two. I can make it longer..." From this point on, the group wouldn't release a single that was unambiguously about a romantic relationship until "The Ballad of John and Yoko",  the last single released while the band were still together. "Paperback Writer" also saw the Beatles for the first time making a promotional film -- what we would now call a rock video -- rather than make personal appearances on TV shows. The film was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who the group would work with again in 1969, and shows Paul with a chipped front tooth -- he'd been in an accident while riding mopeds with his friend Tara Browne a few months earlier, and hadn't yet got round to having the tooth capped. When he did, the change in his teeth was one of the many bits of evidence used by conspiracy theorists to prove that the real Paul McCartney was dead and replaced by a lookalike. It also marks a change in who the most prominent Beatle on the group's A-sides was. Up to this point, Paul had had one solo lead on an A-side -- "Can't Buy Me Love" -- and everything else had been either a song with multiple vocalists like "Day Tripper" or "Love Me Do", or a song with a clear John lead like "Ticket to Ride" or "I Feel Fine". In the rest of their career, counting "Paperback Writer", the group would release nine new singles that hadn't already been included on an album. Of those nine singles, one was a double A-side with one John song and one Paul song, two had John songs on the A-side, and the other six were Paul. Where up to this point John had been "lead Beatle", for the rest of the sixties, Paul would be the group's driving force. Oddly, Paul got rather defensive about the record when asked about it in interviews after it failed to go straight to the top, saying "It's not our best single by any means, but we're very satisfied with it". But especially in its original mono mix it actually packs a powerful punch: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] When the "Paperback Writer" single was released, an unusual image was used in the advertising -- a photo of the Beatles dressed in butchers' smocks, covered in blood, with chunks of meat and the dismembered body parts of baby dolls lying around on them. The image was meant as part of a triptych parodying religious art -- the photo on the left was to be an image showing the four Beatles connected to a woman by an umbilical cord made of sausages, the middle panel was meant to be this image, but with halos added over the Beatles' heads, and the panel on the right was George hammering a nail into John's head, symbolising both crucifixion and that the group were real, physical, people, not just images to be worshipped -- these weren't imaginary nails, and they weren't imaginary people. The photographer Robert Whittaker later said: “I did a photograph of the Beatles covered in raw meat, dolls and false teeth. Putting meat, dolls and false teeth with The Beatles is essentially part of the same thing, the breakdown of what is regarded as normal. The actual conception for what I still call “Somnambulant Adventure” was Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. He comes across people worshipping a golden calf. All over the world I'd watched people worshiping like idols, like gods, four Beatles. To me they were just stock standard normal people. But this emotion that fans poured on them made me wonder where Christianity was heading.” The image wasn't that controversial in the UK, when it was used to advertise "Paperback Writer", but in the US it was initially used for the cover of an album, Yesterday... And Today, which was made up of a few tracks that had been left off the US versions of the Rubber Soul and Help! albums, plus both sides of the "We Can Work It Out"/"Day Tripper" single, and three rough mixes of songs that had been recorded for Revolver -- "Doctor Robert", "And Your Bird Can Sing", and "I'm Only Sleeping", which was the song that sounded most different from the mixes that were finally released: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Only Sleeping (Yesterday... and Today mix)"] Those three songs were all Lennon songs, which had the unfortunate effect that when the US version of Revolver was brought out later in the year, only two of the songs on the album were by Lennon, with six by McCartney and three by Harrison. Some have suggested that this was the motivation for the use of the butcher image on the cover of Yesterday... And Today -- saying it was the Beatles' protest against Capitol "butchering" their albums -- but in truth it was just that Capitol's art director chose the cover because he liked the image. Alan Livingston, the president of Capitol was not so sure, and called Brian Epstein to ask if the group would be OK with them using a different image. Epstein checked with John Lennon, but Lennon liked the image and so Epstein told Livingston the group insisted on them using that cover. Even though for the album cover the bloodstains on the butchers' smocks were airbrushed out, after Capitol had pressed up a million copies of the mono version of the album and two hundred thousand copies of the stereo version, and they'd sent out sixty thousand promo copies, they discovered that no record shops would stock the album with that cover. It cost Capitol more than two hundred thousand dollars to recall the album and replace the cover with a new one -- though while many of the covers were destroyed, others had the new cover, with a more acceptable photo of the group, pasted over them, and people have later carefully steamed off the sticker to reveal the original. This would not be the last time in 1966 that something that was intended as a statement on religion and the way people viewed the Beatles would cause the group trouble in America. In the middle of the recording sessions for Revolver, the group also made what turned out to be their last ever UK live performance in front of a paying audience. The group had played the NME Poll-Winners' Party every year since 1963, and they were always shows that featured all the biggest acts in the country at the time -- the 1966 show featured, as well as the Beatles and a bunch of smaller acts, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds, Roy Orbison, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, the Seekers, the Small Faces, the Walker Brothers, and Dusty Springfield. Unfortunately, while these events were always filmed for TV broadcast, the Beatles' performance on the first of May wasn't filmed. There are various stories about what happened, but the crux appears to be a disagreement between Andrew Oldham and Brian Epstein, sparked by John Lennon. When the Beatles got to the show, they were upset to discover that they had to wait around before going on stage -- normally, the awards would all be presented at the end, after all the performances, but the Rolling Stones had asked that the Beatles not follow them directly, so after the Stones finished their set, there would be a break for the awards to be given out, and then the Beatles would play their set, in front of an audience that had been bored by twenty-five minutes of awards ceremony, rather than one that had been excited by all the bands that came before them. John Lennon was annoyed, and insisted that the Beatles were going to go on straight after the Rolling Stones -- he seems to have taken this as some sort of power play by the Stones and to have got his hackles up about it. He told Epstein to deal with the people from the NME. But the NME people said that they had a contract with Andrew Oldham, and they weren't going to break it. Oldham refused to change the terms of the contract. Lennon said that he wasn't going to go on stage if they didn't directly follow the Stones. Maurice Kinn, the publisher of the NME, told Epstein that he wasn't going to break the contract with Oldham, and that if the Beatles didn't appear on stage, he would get Jimmy Savile, who was compering the show, to go out on stage and tell the ten thousand fans in the audience that the Beatles were backstage refusing to appear. He would then sue NEMS for breach of contract *and* NEMS would be liable for any damage caused by the rioting that was sure to happen. Lennon screamed a lot of abuse at Kinn, and told him the group would never play one of their events again, but the group did go on stage -- but because they hadn't yet signed the agreement to allow their performance to be filmed, they refused to allow it to be recorded. Apparently Andrew Oldham took all this as a sign that Epstein was starting to lose control of the group. Also during May 1966 there were visits from musicians from other countries, continuing the cultural exchange that was increasingly influencing the Beatles' art. Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys came over to promote the group's new LP, Pet Sounds, which had been largely the work of Brian Wilson, who had retired from touring to concentrate on working in the studio. Johnston played the record for John and Paul, who listened to it twice, all the way through, in silence, in Johnston's hotel room: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] According to Johnston, after they'd listened through the album twice, they went over to a piano and started whispering to each other, picking out chords. Certainly the influence of Pet Sounds is very noticeable on songs like "Here, There, and Everywhere", written and recorded a few weeks after this meeting: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] That track, and the last track recorded for the album, "She Said She Said" were unusual in one very important respect -- they were recorded while the Beatles were no longer under contract to EMI Records. Their contract expired on the fifth of June, 1966, and they finished Revolver without it having been renewed -- it would be several months before their new contract was signed, and it's rather lucky for music lovers that Brian Epstein was the kind of manager who considered personal relationships and basic honour and decency more important than the legal niceties, unlike any other managers of the era, otherwise we would not have Revolver in the form we know it today. After the meeting with Johnston, but before the recording of those last couple of Revolver tracks, the Beatles also met up again with Bob Dylan, who was on a UK tour with a new, loud, band he was working with called The Hawks. While the Beatles and Dylan all admired each other, there was by this point a lot of wariness on both sides, especially between Lennon and Dylan, both of them very similar personality types and neither wanting to let their guard down around the other or appear unhip. There's a famous half-hour-long film sequence of Lennon and Dylan sharing a taxi, which is a fascinating, excruciating, example of two insecure but arrogant men both trying desperately to impress the other but also equally desperate not to let the other know that they want to impress them: [Excerpt: Dylan and Lennon taxi ride] The day that was filmed, Lennon and Harrison also went to see Dylan play at the Royal Albert Hall. This tour had been controversial, because Dylan's band were loud and raucous, and Dylan's fans in the UK still thought of him as a folk musician. At one gig, earlier on the tour, an audience member had famously yelled out "Judas!" -- (just on the tiny chance that any of my listeners don't know that, Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus to the authorities, leading to his crucifixion) -- and that show was for many years bootlegged as the "Royal Albert Hall" show, though in fact it was recorded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. One of the *actual* Royal Albert Hall shows was released a few years ago -- the one the night before Lennon and Harrison saw Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone", Royal Albert Hall 1966] The show Lennon and Harrison saw would be Dylan's last for many years. Shortly after returning to the US, Dylan was in a motorbike accident, the details of which are still mysterious, and which some fans claim was faked altogether. The accident caused him to cancel all the concert dates he had booked, and devote himself to working in the studio for several years just like Brian Wilson. And from even further afield than America, Ravi Shankar came over to Britain, to work with his friend the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, on a duet album, West Meets East, that was an example in the classical world of the same kind of international cross-fertilisation that was happening in the pop world: [Excerpt: Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar, "Prabhati (based on Raga Gunkali)"] While he was in the UK, Shankar also performed at the Royal Festival Hall, and George Harrison went to the show. He'd seen Shankar live the year before, but this time he met up with him afterwards, and later said "He was the first person that impressed me in a way that was beyond just being a famous celebrity. Ravi was my link to the Vedic world. Ravi plugged me into the whole of reality. Elvis impressed me when I was a kid, and impressed me when I met him, but you couldn't later on go round to him and say 'Elvis, what's happening with the universe?'" After completing recording and mixing the as-yet-unnamed album, which had been by far the longest recording process of their career, and which still nearly sixty years later regularly tops polls of the best album of all time, the Beatles took a well-earned break. For a whole two days, at which point they flew off to Germany to do a three-day tour, on their way to Japan, where they were booked to play five shows at the Budokan. Unfortunately for the group, while they had no idea of this when they were booked to do the shows, many in Japan saw the Budokan as sacred ground, and they were the first ever Western group to play there. This led to numerous death threats and loud protests from far-right activists offended at the Beatles defiling their religious and nationalistic sensibilities. As a result, the police were on high alert -- so high that there were three thousand police in the audience for the shows, in a venue which only held ten thousand audience members. That's according to Mark Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Chronicle, though I have to say that the rather blurry footage of the audience in the video of those shows doesn't seem to show anything like those numbers. But frankly I'll take Lewisohn's word over that footage, as he's not someone to put out incorrect information. The threats to the group also meant that they had to be kept in their hotel rooms at all times except when actually performing, though they did make attempts to get out. At the press conference for the Tokyo shows, the group were also asked publicly for the first time their views on the war in Vietnam, and John replied "Well, we think about it every day, and we don't agree with it and we think that it's wrong. That's how much interest we take. That's all we can do about it... and say that we don't like it". I say they were asked publicly for the first time, because George had been asked about it for a series of interviews Maureen Cleave had done with the group a couple of months earlier, as we'll see in a bit, but nobody was paying attention to those interviews. Brian Epstein was upset that the question had gone to John. He had hoped that the inevitable Vietnam question would go to Paul, who he thought might be a bit more tactful. The last thing he needed was John Lennon saying something that would upset the Americans before their tour there a few weeks later. Luckily, people in America seemed to have better things to do than pay attention to John Lennon's opinions. The support acts for the Japanese shows included  several of the biggest names in Japanese rock music -- or "group sounds" as the genre was called there, Japanese people having realised that trying to say the phrase "rock and roll" would open them up to ridicule given that it had both "r" and "l" sounds in the phrase. The man who had coined the term "group sounds", Jackey Yoshikawa, was there with his group the Blue Comets, as was Isao Bito, who did a rather good cover version of Cliff Richard's "Dynamite": [Excerpt: Isao Bito, "Dynamite"] Bito, the Blue Comets, and the other two support acts, Yuya Uchida and the Blue Jeans, all got together to perform a specially written song, "Welcome Beatles": [Excerpt: "Welcome Beatles" ] But while the Japanese audience were enthusiastic, they were much less vocal about their enthusiasm than the audiences the Beatles were used to playing for. The group were used, of course, to playing in front of hordes of screaming teenagers who could not hear a single note, but because of the fear that a far-right terrorist would assassinate one of the group members, the police had imposed very, very, strict rules on the audience. Nobody in the audience was allowed to get out of their seat for any reason, and the police would clamp down very firmly on anyone who was too demonstrative. Because of that, the group could actually hear themselves, and they sounded sloppy as hell, especially on the newer material. Not that there was much of that. The only song they did from the Revolver sessions was "Paperback Writer", the new single, and while they did do a couple of tracks from Rubber Soul, those were under-rehearsed. As John said at the start of this tour, "I can't play any of Rubber Soul, it's so unrehearsed. The only time I played any of the numbers on it was when I recorded it. I forget about songs. They're only valid for a certain time." That's certainly borne out by the sound of their performances of Rubber Soul material at the Budokan: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "If I Needed Someone (live at the Budokan)"] It was while they were in Japan as well that they finally came up with the title for their new album. They'd been thinking of all sorts of ideas, like Abracadabra and Magic Circle, and tossing names around with increasing desperation for several days -- at one point they seem to have just started riffing on other groups' albums, and seem to have apparently seriously thought about naming the record in parodic tribute to their favourite artists -- suggestions included The Beatles On Safari, after the Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari (and possibly with a nod to their recent Pet Sounds album cover with animals, too), The Freewheelin' Beatles, after Dylan's second album, and my favourite, Ringo's suggestion After Geography, for the Rolling Stones' Aftermath. But eventually Paul came up with Revolver -- like Rubber Soul, a pun, in this case because the record itself revolves when on a turntable. Then it was off to the Philippines, and if the group thought Japan had been stressful, they had no idea what was coming. The trouble started in the Philippines from the moment they stepped off the plane, when they were bundled into a car without Neil Aspinall or Brian Epstein, and without their luggage, which was sent to customs. This was a problem in itself -- the group had got used to essentially being treated like diplomats, and to having their baggage let through customs without being searched, and so they'd started freely carrying various illicit substances with them. This would obviously be a problem -- but as it turned out, this was just to get a "customs charge" paid by Brian Epstein. But during their initial press conference the group were worried, given the hostility they'd faced from officialdom, that they were going to be arrested during the conference itself. They were asked what they would tell the Rolling Stones, who were going to be visiting the Philippines shortly after, and Lennon just said "We'll warn them". They also asked "is there a war on in the Philippines? Why is everybody armed?" At this time, the Philippines had a new leader, Ferdinand Marcos -- who is not to be confused with his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, also known as Bongbong Marcos, who just became President-Elect there last month. Marcos Sr was a dictatorial kleptocrat, one of the worst leaders of the latter half of the twentieth century, but that wasn't evident yet. He'd been elected only a few months earlier, and had presented himself as a Kennedy-like figure -- a young man who was also a war hero. He'd recently switched parties from the Liberal party to the right-wing Nacionalista Party, but wasn't yet being thought of as the monstrous dictator he later became. The person organising the Philippines shows had been ordered to get the Beatles to visit Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos at 11AM on the day of the show, but for some reason had instead put on their itinerary just the *suggestion* that the group should meet the Marcoses, and had put the time down as 3PM, and the Beatles chose to ignore that suggestion -- they'd refused to do that kind of government-official meet-and-greet ever since an incident in 1964 at the British Embassy in Washington where someone had cut off a bit of Ringo's hair. A military escort turned up at the group's hotel in the morning, to take them for their meeting. The group were all still in their rooms, and Brian Epstein was still eating breakfast and refused to disturb them, saying "Go back and tell the generals we're not coming." The group gave their performances as scheduled, but meanwhile there was outrage at the way the Beatles had refused to meet the Marcos family, who had brought hundreds of children -- friends of their own children, and relatives of top officials -- to a party to meet the group. Brian Epstein went on TV and tried to smooth things over, but the broadcast was interrupted by static and his message didn't get through to anyone. The next day, the group's security was taken away, as were the cars to take them to the airport. When they got to the airport, the escalators were turned off and the group were beaten up at the arrangement of the airport manager, who said in 1984 "I beat up the Beatles. I really thumped them. First I socked Epstein and he went down... then I socked Lennon and Ringo in the face. I was kicking them. They were pleading like frightened chickens. That's what happens when you insult the First Lady." Even on the plane there were further problems -- Brian Epstein and the group's road manager Mal Evans were both made to get off the plane to sort out supposed financial discrepancies, which led to them worrying that they were going to be arrested or worse -- Evans told the group to tell his wife he loved her as he left the plane. But eventually, they were able to leave, and after a brief layover in India -- which Ringo later said was the first time he felt he'd been somewhere truly foreign, as opposed to places like Germany or the USA which felt basically like home -- they got back to England: [Excerpt: "Ordinary passenger!"] When asked what they were going to do next, George replied “We're going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans,” The story of the "we're bigger than Jesus" controversy is one of the most widely misreported events in the lives of the Beatles, which is saying a great deal. One book that I've encountered, and one book only, Steve Turner's Beatles '66, tells the story of what actually happened, and even that book seems to miss some emphases. I've pieced what follows together from Turner's book and from an academic journal article I found which has some more detail. As far as I can tell, every single other book on the Beatles released up to this point bases their account of the story on an inaccurate press statement put out by Brian Epstein, not on the truth. Here's the story as it's generally told. John Lennon gave an interview to his friend, Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard, during which he made some comments about how it was depressing that Christianity was losing relevance in the eyes of the public, and that the Beatles are more popular than Jesus, speaking casually because he was talking to a friend. That story was run in the Evening Standard more-or-less unnoticed, but then an American teen magazine picked up on the line about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus, reprinted chunks of the interview out of context and without the Beatles' knowledge or permission, as a way to stir up controversy, and there was an outcry, with people burning Beatles records and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. That's... not exactly what happened. The first thing that you need to understand to know what happened is that Datebook wasn't a typical teen magazine. It *looked* just like a typical teen magazine, certainly, and much of its content was the kind of thing that you would get in Tiger Beat or any of the other magazines aimed at teenage girls -- the September 1966 issue was full of articles like "Life with the Walker Brothers... by their Road Manager", and interviews with the Dave Clark Five -- but it also had a long history of publishing material that was intended to make its readers think about social issues of the time, particularly Civil Rights. Arthur Unger, the magazine's editor and publisher, was a gay man in an interracial relationship, and while the subject of homosexuality was too taboo in the late fifties and sixties for him to have his magazine cover that, he did regularly include articles decrying segregation and calling for the girls reading the magazine to do their part on a personal level to stamp out racism. Datebook had regularly contained articles like one from 1963 talking about how segregation wasn't just a problem in the South, saying "If we are so ‘integrated' why must men in my own city of Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love, picket city hall because they are discriminated against when it comes to getting a job? And how come I am still unable to take my dark- complexioned friends to the same roller skating rink or swimming pool that I attend?” One of the writers for the magazine later said “We were much more than an entertainment magazine . . . . We tried to get kids involved in social issues . . . . It was a well-received magazine, recommended by libraries and schools, but during the Civil Rights period we did get pulled off a lot of stands in the South because of our views on integration” Art Unger, the editor and publisher, wasn't the only one pushing this liberal, integrationist, agenda. The managing editor at the time, Danny Fields, was another gay man who wanted to push the magazine even further than Unger, and who would later go on to manage the Stooges and the Ramones, being credited by some as being the single most important figure in punk rock's development, and being immortalised by the Ramones in their song "Danny Says": [Excerpt: The Ramones, "Danny Says"] So this was not a normal teen magazine, and that's certainly shown by the cover of the September 1966 issue, which as well as talking about the interviews with John Lennon and Paul McCartney inside, also advertised articles on Timothy Leary advising people to turn on, tune in, and drop out; an editorial about how interracial dating must be the next step after desegregation of schools, and a piece on "the ten adults you dig/hate the most" -- apparently the adult most teens dug in 1966 was Jackie Kennedy, the most hated was Barry Goldwater, and President Johnson, Billy Graham, and Martin Luther King appeared in the top ten on both lists. Now, in the early part of the year Maureen Cleave had done a whole series of articles on the Beatles -- double-page spreads on each band member, plus Brian Epstein, visiting them in their own homes (apart from Paul, who she met at a restaurant) and discussing their daily lives, their thoughts, and portraying them as rounded individuals. These articles are actually fascinating, because of something that everyone who met the Beatles in this period pointed out. When interviewed separately, all of them came across as thoughtful individuals, with their own opinions about all sorts of subjects, and their own tastes and senses of humour. But when two or more of them were together -- especially when John and Paul were interviewed together, but even in social situations, they would immediately revert to flip in-jokes and riffing on each other's statements, never revealing anything about themselves as individuals, but just going into Beatle mode -- simultaneously preserving the band's image, closing off outsiders, *and* making sure they didn't do or say anything that would get them mocked by the others. Cleave, as someone who actually took them all seriously, managed to get some very revealing information about all of them. In the article on Ringo, which is the most superficial -- one gets the impression that Cleave found him rather difficult to talk to when compared to the other, more verbally facile, band members -- she talked about how he had a lot of Wild West and military memorabilia, how he was a devoted family man and also devoted to his friends -- he had moved to the suburbs to be close to John and George, who already lived there. The most revealing quote about Ringo's personality was him saying "Of course that's the great thing about being married -- you have a house to sit in and company all the time. And you can still go to clubs, a bonus for being married. I love being a family man." While she looked at the other Beatles' tastes in literature in detail, she'd noted that the only books Ringo owned that weren't just for show were a few science fiction paperbacks, but that as he said "I'm not thick, it's just that I'm not educated. People can use words and I won't know what they mean. I say 'me' instead of 'my'." Ringo also didn't have a drum kit at home, saying he only played when he was on stage or in the studio, and that you couldn't practice on your own, you needed to play with other people. In the article on George, she talked about how he was learning the sitar,  and how he was thinking that it might be a good idea to go to India to study the sitar with Ravi Shankar for six months. She also talks about how during the interview, he played the guitar pretty much constantly, playing everything from songs from "Hello Dolly" to pieces by Bach to "the Trumpet Voluntary", by which she presumably means Clarke's "Prince of Denmark's March": [Excerpt: Jeremiah Clarke, "Prince of Denmark's March"] George was also the most outspoken on the subjects of politics, religion, and society, linking the ongoing war in Vietnam with the UK's reverence for the Second World War, saying "I think about it every day and it's wrong. Anything to do with war is wrong. They're all wrapped up in their Nelsons and their Churchills and their Montys -- always talking about war heroes. Look at All Our Yesterdays [a show on ITV that showed twenty-five-year-old newsreels] -- how we killed a few more Huns here and there. Makes me sick. They're the sort who are leaning on their walking sticks and telling us a few years in the army would do us good." He also had very strong words to say about religion, saying "I think religion falls flat on its face. All this 'love thy neighbour' but none of them are doing it. How can anybody get into the position of being Pope and accept all the glory and the money and the Mercedes-Benz and that? I could never be Pope until I'd sold my rich gates and my posh hat. I couldn't sit there with all that money on me and believe I was religious. Why can't we bring all this out in the open? Why is there all this stuff about blasphemy? If Christianity's as good as they say it is, it should stand up to a bit of discussion." Harrison also comes across as a very private person, saying "People keep saying, ‘We made you what you are,' well, I made Mr. Hovis what he is and I don't go round crawling over his gates and smashing up the wall round his house." (Hovis is a British company that makes bread and wholegrain flour). But more than anything else he comes across as an instinctive anti-authoritarian, being angry at bullying teachers, Popes, and Prime Ministers. McCartney's profile has him as the most self-consciously arty -- he talks about the plays of Alfred Jarry and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti (for magnetic tape)"] Though he was very worried that he might be sounding a little too pretentious, saying “I don't want to sound like Jonathan Miller going on" --

Same as it ever was! Same as it ever was! Today we're in the company of the great David Byrne, the lead singer of Talking Heads, and his one and only feature film True Stories. There are, as Alex suggests, 'big-time autistic vibes' around Byrne in the film, but also in the sensibility of the way the film is structured and presented. We enjoy being led through the world of the film through the eyes of an autistic individual, leading us to question whether an autistic sensibility resists or challenge conventional narrative forms. We discuss the diagrammatic nature of the narrative and how that provides a sense of a soothing order, as well as a Brechtian distance, while also reflecting on Byrne's interest in technofuturism.   The film in this episode was recommended to us by listener Analotta Pauly, who sent us a link to this brilliant article on Medium: https://medium.com/counterarts/david-byrnes-true-stories-as-a-search-for-autistic-connection-43629c62cd07 We're always keen to hear from our listeners, so please do drop us a message on cinemautism@gmail.com if you'd like to suggest films for us to consider in the future.

PAT BLANCHFIELD puts the death drive on autopilot to consider (with) us THE PERFECT PAIRING (2022), plus:  It's no big deal, it's just amnesia! THEME: "Fuck You If You Don't Like Christmas," from Crudbump, by Drew Fairweather PART ONE  Meet Pat Blanchfield! ... CGI soufflé ... Concussed? Take two Sauternes and one nap ... Pat's Brechtian cockfight Hallmark prom night ... Nordstrom piano ... There's a harp ... It's exploitably efficacious! ... Scrambled entertainment ... Cocoa in my T-bird ... Am I responding to this properly? ... Small things with big eyes ...       Break: "Amado Mio," by Pink Martini  PART TWO   Cast Rundown ... The Expositional Challenge: Deracinated! ... Plot Mop-Up: Undercover food blogger; it's just amnesia; ice wine gala ... A Homer Car plot ... Letters to Santa ... The Swagony of Defeat: Teutonic backstory, Hallmark wine club, Hollingbrook Vineyard ... Wack ice wine tradition ... 'An Ortolan Christmas' ... Wines That Rock ... Danica McKellar Air Fryer ... Hallmark Iberico ... Selling out to booze ... Journalismism: Blogger's half-mil' table; Apocalypse Now dossier; rec-room office; Sonic the Editor ...             Break: Original music by Chris Collingwood PART THREE  Spot the Angel: Cherubic moppet; ex writing partner ... Eat Your Heart Out: Dialectical tension; recipes as fixation; anti-savory bias; having cake and Lacanian impossibility too; "Thanksgiving without turkey"; Swiss Miss; wine vat ... Limiting amnesia expertise ... Female race memory ... Reunited with norms via head trauma ... Bed tantrum ... "Dessert Enthusiast" ... We're doing tropes here! ... Self-aware breakup ...  Break: "Sugar Sugar," performed by Amber Burdick PART FOUR  The Hallmark Expanded Universe: Hudson Valley to PNW; Hallmark adds a wine section; Murder, She Baked; wine competitions, upstate New York bogs ... Drew Bledsoe ... Overdetermined: CJ's stilettos; knock on head; happy accidents; mom's grapes; predetermined spontaneity; yanked by the scruff; triple ice wine! ... Overdetermined Eurostep ... Crossover: Intertext!; lousy with Proust; The Transporter chained to his vomit; Get Out-iverse peripheral family; Ghislaine; Ready or Not; America's Heads Got Trauma ...   Break: "Ring My Bell," by Anita Ward  PART FIVE The Hallmark Voight-Kampff Test: "Get What You Give"; Falcon Beach; Kevin, Stonks guy; no second chance; Diane, the Roy ... Great Moments in Moppetry Rating: 3.5, or "Dimple Coach, I have a high motor and feel guilty from head hugs" ... Who's the Real Villain?: CJ; rage-bait media incentives; Michael and the bloodsucking media; undiagnosed heart death ... Spontaneous beverage distributor joy ... Jeb needs work ... Title/Sequel: Name implies chemistry; near title-drop; mom-killing review; trad-wife transitioner; omitted amnesia; The Latest Vintage ... Rating: 3 ... Zero chemistry, offensive politics, artlessly done, enjoyable ...  Break: Original music by Chris Collingwood PART SIX The Leftovers: IMDB Dive: Art Hindle, Nazneen Contractor, workmanlike; the Book of Saw ... Michael closes the convertible ... Flawless eyeliner ... Inappropriate casual footwear ... Steal your bag! ... Don McBrearty, Hot Wheels and "Gay or Straight: Is There a Choice?" ... Three-rows of vineyard ... Polka, Polka, Polka! ... Oompacore ... Art Hindle jacket game ... Lenmom's Tomb or bitcoin farm? ... Sassy Squids ... Plugs! ... Merry Christmas!   All other music by Chris Collingwood of Look Park and Fountains of Wayne, except: "Orchestral Sports Theme" by Chris Collingwood and Rick Murnane and "You Get What You Give" by New Radicals. Follow Pat on Twitter: @PatBlanchfield Pre-order Pat's book here. Take a class with Pat here!

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode, Andrew is joined by Nandita Dinesh, author of This Place That Place. Nandita Dinesh holds a PhD in Drama from the University of Cape Town in South Africa and an MA in Performance Studies from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Focused on the role that theatre and writing can play during and after violent conflict, Nandita has conducted community-based theatre projects in Kashmir, India, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. She has written multiple books about her work and in 2017 she was awarded the Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy by Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas. This is her first novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week's episode is very Brechtian as we come up with our best Trubbish recipes, Jeremy considers the possibilities of Spanish Pokemon cuisine, and Ian and Evan take us to Taco Hell. Follow Us: https://twitter.com/ichewspod Email Us: ichewspod@gmail.com Discord: https://discord.gg/mTscvhdAYe Merch and Website: ichewsyou.menu

Intro: Boz's brain hurts, Ozark, the ordinariness of crime, drug running in Tijuana, Molly, Jerry Harris and Season 2 of Cheer, unpleasant surprisesLet Me Run This By You: I didn't do anything wrong.Interview: We talk to Carolyn Hoerdemann about Steppenwolf's From The Page to The Stage, John C. Reilly, tenacity, hyper-empaths, Oscar Wilde's fairy tales, Tarrell Alvin McCraney, feminist theatre, Pump Boys and Dinettes, Faith Wilding, Rob Chambers' Bagdad Cafe, Ominous Clam, Zak Orth, Good Person of Szechwan, European Repertory's production of Agamemnon, Danny Mastrogiorgio, Michael Moore's Roger & Me, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the anti-memoir memoir, and Ann Dowd.FULL TRANSCRIPT (unedited):1 (8s):And Jen Bosworth from me this and I'm Gina Polizzi. We went to theater school together. We survived it, but we didn't quite understand it. 20 years later, we're digging deep talking to our guests about their experiences and trying to make sense of it all. We survived theater school and you will too. Are we famous yet? I have a place to go to do with, it's not my one bedroom with my dog and my husband, but it's still a lot of work, like an and so, and then on top of that, I mean, I just feel like literally, you know what, I texted you yesterday and you said you knew the feeling like my brain is hurting me, but not in a bad way.1 (50s):I don't have a headache. Like I don't, I just was, you know, telling our couple surface, like, I feel like I can literally hear my brain turning and growing and groaning and like working. I've never had that feeling before in my life, which is weird. But like that, that feeling of, oh, I'm doing or knowing that what it was, what it was like, I'm doing a lot of work, you know, like my brain is doing so ridiculous, but that's how I feel, but it's all like, it, it doesn't feel, you know, what it is. I'm used to doing a lot of physical work.1 (1m 32s):Like I'm used to my body doing a lot of work. Like whether it's, you know, like the jobs I've had, like even the jobs that I, when I was a therapist account, you know, a counselor at social services, like I spent a lot of my time, like moving cases of diet Coke and cause we were in like a halfway house. So like I did a lot of manual labor and lot and case management and case management management is a lot of manual labor, like taking clients to appointments. And like, so when using my brain now in this different way, like literally I wished I would have been a camera on me when I was redoing my resume and cover letter specifically for the ad industry, because it is like making something out of nothing and also using words to like basically, you know, trick people, not trick people, but you know, get them to think what you want them to think.1 (2m 27s):And you think, oh, well she's, you know, television writing. The thing about that is like, you can make up anything like television writing really. You can really say, and then pigs flew out of his asshole and then people are like, oh, that's a weird show. But when you're trying to sell yourself to a particular industry with a particular set of skills, trying to make your skills meld into the skills they want, I was like, I couldn't see. After a while I was like, I don't even know what this, like using words like in this space, you leave space is a big word now.2 (2m 59s):So Metta that you are selling yourself to an advertising1 (3m 8s):Up girl.2 (3m 10s):So the PR how I understand it is there is somebody affiliated with this that is an advocate of yours, a champion of yours. And she wants, she wants you in that industry.1 (3m 23s):Okay. Yes, you are understanding. And there's like multiple things here. So she's, she's a screenwriter that I met and she continued on with the master's program. But her big job is her. Her day job is she's like a creative director at an ad agency in the, in the copy department. Right? So she's a big wig and she edits, she's like, she's the big editor there right at this. And I guess they hop around from agency to agency. Look, I don't know how it works, but so she started this new job and she's like, I want you to come work in the copyright. She also gets a very large bonus for every person that comes on that she refers, which I good look, do what you need to do.1 (4m 6s):But I think it's like five grand per person that she brings. I that's what I'm led to believe from the website. So anyway, there's like a, and so she literally Gina. So I sent her my updated resume and cover letter letter looked great. And then she applied me for 30 jobs. So then I have two.2 (4m 27s):Wow.1 (4m 29s):So which sounds great, which is awesome. Copywriting, all different kinds of copywriting. But for each of those jobs, I have to fill out demographic form. So last night I literally was up after myself tapes one self-tape last night clicking. I am not a veteran. Yes, I am Latina. No, I'm not disabled2 (4m 53s):Online. I was going to say, why don't they have one form, but it's1 (4m 58s):Yeah. It's a different job number. Right? So like every time, oh my God. So then, and sign, you have to sign every, so I literally was like, by the time I went to that, my brain, I was like, what? I'm not a veteran. I'm not a veteran like that. I was like mumbling to myself. And so, so, but I have to say like, you know, it's a good skill to build for. Like, I think that thing about, we only use 5% of our brain. They they've like debunked that right. They've said like that. You can't, but I'm telling you my brain, just like the Grinch's heart grew three sizes that day. My brain is like literally growing three side.1 (5m 41s):I don't know if it's three sizes, but it's, I can feel my, my, my like pathways changing in terms of the skills that I'm using. So that's great. You know,2 (5m 51s):I don't know. I mean, it can't be bad. Nothing. The good news is all of this work you're doing can't lead to anything bad to something. Yeah. Not illegal, You know, honestly, it's really saying something. I finally started watching Ozark. Oh God. And I, what strikes me about it is like, oh, this is not, it's not that this could happen to anybody, but you just think about like how ordinary crime really can be, you know, and how criminals aren't all in a layer or living in a way it's just, it's just moms and dads and, and people who need it, who need money in and who needs to run around and get it right quick.2 (6m 40s):Yeah. And I don't know, I will, I'm only one, not even the full first season in, so there may be a lot of stuff that I don't know, but like, it seems to me that this Jason Bateman guy was just a regular guy who got kind of wrapped up in this criminal enterprise1 (6m 58s):Didn't happen. You, I can see like most of my clients that I saw like were knowingly doing, you know, they were like, oh, I'm going to be a drug dealer and a gang member now. And no, but there were occasionally people that got involved in like scams, you know, financial fraud that you could see how it would start off and, and, and case in point miles. And I have a friend, an older guy, friend, we won't name because this is so illegal was like, Hey, what are you guys doing over Christmas break? And we're like, we're going, doing whatever. And he's like, Hey, do you want to, I shit, you not do you, if you'd let me know if you want to make some money, driving a camper from here to Tijuana.1 (7m 41s):And I, why like, what are you talking about? He's like, yeah, we'll give you like each $5,000 of it. And I said, well, what do you mean? Why do you need the, the, the, the camper and Tijuana? And he was like, oh, there's drugs in it. There's marijuana. And I was like, no. And miles was like, absolutely not. I'm like, have you met miles? Are you boy?2 (8m 3s):Oh, not, not marijuana, I guess,1 (8m 5s):Because it's marijuana. I don't, I don't2 (8m 7s):Think it's legal. Why do they have to do1 (8m 9s):That? I don't know. I think it was like a mass quantity or something like that. I don't know. Like, you're not allowed to like traffic, like large amounts of marijuana from different countries to over the border. Like, but so, especially in Mexico, like what? So I don't know. And we were like, Myles was like, absolutely not. I mean, miles is a lawyer. Like, what are you talking about?2 (8m 34s):Well, it's funny how just one casual aside a reference can really change your whole perspective on somebody you've known for a long time. Like I thought I've been in that situation before, you know, you think, you know, somebody and then they just casually say like, well, you know, we're swingers or1 (8m 55s):The other, the other, the other day I was meeting with somebody. Totally. And this actually didn't make me think less of him, but it was just like, he's like a totally looks like a total straight laced guy. If you're going to look at him, you know, white dude, thirties, balding, whatever. And he's like, yeah, I met him like the first time I, he was talking and he was like, oh yeah, the first time we met, we did Molly. And I was like, wait, what? At first I thought, Tina that's crystal meth. And I thought, but that wasn't, that it's Molly is whatever, HBM,2 (9m 25s):Whatever,1 (9m 26s):MTMA Molly. And I, like, I was so weird and we're like old people, what is happening? It's sitting in a cafe and you're talking about Molly. I don't know. I just it's, it totally rocked my world, which is, I think why I like to write too is because I do like to write those things in where you're like, wait, what? You know? Like, like,2 (9m 53s):Yeah, I have to say just, just the thought of learning, something like that, about somebody that I know is scary to me. And it, it just made me remember that I, after you mentioned season two of cheer, I started watching it. And I forgotten about the whole thing about that guy, Jerry Harris. And it was so heartbreaking to me when that happened. Not that it's worse or better if the person is well-known, it's just, you know, he, he seemed like a person who has such a hard life and it seemed like he was finally getting some, you know, something that he really deserved.2 (10m 38s):And then, and of course, I understand that when I hurt that hurt people, hurt people. And that he was probably doing this because this has been done to him. I don't know, man, I don't, these are surprises. I don't care for, I wanted it to stand for the rug and like for these kids to go on and being abused, that's not it at all. It's just, it's so disheartening. Well, it's really1 (11m 5s):It's. So there is, so yeah, it goes beyond grief. It's like goes beyond disappointment. It's like grief. And it's also, I think for me anyway, and I don't know about for you recreates the feeling of which is what I felt all the time with my parents, which is, oh, I know these people. I can trust these people. Oh God, I'm not safe around these2 (11m 30s):People. Okay. Thank you. That's exactly what it is.1 (11m 33s):I have that experience in Los Angeles, 40 times a day. Right. We're like, I want to like someone and then they'll say some fucking shit. And you're like, okay, well this is, you're a psychopath. Okay. Right. Like I'm talking to this. There's like, I meet them all the time at co-working because you know, co-working attracts like everybody, you just have to have money to have an office here. It's not like they, you know, vet people and some I'll be having a conversation with someone who seems relatively normal. And then they'll be like, oh yeah. You know, I was like, I really admire this Japanese porn star that like really knew what she wanted in life.1 (12m 13s):And it's not that there's anything wrong with being a Japanese porn star. It's that this guy like casually dropping, you know, and then talking about the kind of porn she does in a coworking setting. I I'm like, dude, I gotta go. I gotta make a fucking resume over here. Like I don't need to, but it's it's that in with him. It's just, I was just more like, oh, you're that you're going to bring this up to a stranger. Then I'm getting better about like, what's safe and not safe. But I do think that when you invest in something like Jerry or the cheer or a parent, and then they fucking do some shit, you're like, oh great. I'm not safe with you. That's,2 (12m 50s):It's what it is. It makes the feeling of own. And then, because I tend towards misanthropy, I'm like, okay, nobody's say if you can't trust anybody, everybody's out to get you, which is not true either. But it becomes, that is my defensive posture that I immediately tack back to, you know, I could go away thinking like, oh, there's goodness in the world. And some people and humans are inherently good. And then boom, something happens and I fail. And instead of, and I don't do the opposite when somebody does something good. I don't say yes, it's P you know what I mean? I don't, I don't have the same positive connotation that when somebody does something bad, it makes me say everybody's terrible.1 (13m 34s):It's really interesting because I'm having the experience of having to, what is it? So having to have a little more caution with people, I tend to really, really, really love everybody at first. Like really like I'm like, that person is awesome, but then they start talking crazy shit. And in the past I would have dismissed it and been like, no, I'm just sensitive. Right. Or I'm just so I'm trying now to be like, no, I wasn't there. When I was in therapy yesterday, I was like, no, no. Like in that moment I felt like this is not good for me.1 (14m 16s):And if I am not going to stand up for myself and take care of myself, nobody else is. So I have to mix a little more of the caution in with my, what can be Pollyanna kind of stuff. I have to be mindful of what my instincts are telling me about somebody, because I then will end up, you know, talking about very explicit Japanese porn techniques for half an hour and then walk away feeling violated and fucked up.2 (14m 49s):Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, I knew this. I ha I know somebody who's exceedingly reserved. She doesn't, I like her I'm we're friends, but she doesn't tell you anything about herself. Like, or it takes a long time. And it's just this little snip, like, as an example, I don't know how old she is. And I bring up my age all the time and I, and I think she's younger than I am, but somebody recently said, oh, actually I don't think she's. I think she's more like your age, but that's, but she's never chimed in whenever I've said anything about how old I am.2 (15m 31s):She, she, she won't tell she's, she's a mystery. And on the one hand, I think, oh, she's just, she's just protecting herself for the reason that you just said. I mean, you know, she, she knows me kind of, but it's not like she really, really knows me. Some people really wait until some people don't just give out their confidence to anybody for some people you really, and I, you know, I guess like good for her. Maybe that's the way to go. I don't know. I, I tend to be more like you, not that I love everybody, but that I assume, I assume everybody has good intentions.2 (16m 13s):And, and then it's very surprising and sad and shocking to me when they don't like the thing that happened to me last week, this fricking guy, I was at the, I was picking my son up from tennis and where I've been, where I've been. Yes. And the place has bad vibes. I, I w I don't like the place. The parking is annoying, but yeah, the parking is annoying anyway. So you're, you're not supposed to wait by the curb. The parents aren't supposed to wait by the curb and align for their kids to come out, but everybody does. Right. It's just how it goes. Cause there's nowhere to go. Right. And it's, and it's been really icy here. So even sometimes I will park whatever, but this time I'm thinking, well, it's really icy.2 (16m 57s):And I just don't want him to, it's not lit up really in the parking lot. I just don't want him to fall. So I'm waiting in line and the guy in the car behind me hunks, and I, I assume he's not honking at me. Why would he behind me? Me? I'm just, my car is just sitting there honks again. Hong's a third time. And I put my arm out, like, go, go around. I just thought maybe he didn't think he could go around me. I still honking. So I just kind of opened the door a little bit. I look behind me and I'm like, what's the deal? And he's just yelling something. So I think, okay, whatever, I'll just loop around, pull over, go through the parking lot, turn to come back. And the guy I had the right of way.2 (17m 39s):And he just zoomed in, in front of me made so that I had to slam on the same guy. So I had to slam on my brakes, but then he gets out of the car and walks up, walks over to me. Of course, I lock my doors and he's like just screaming obscenities at me. Now later on, I had the thought this of course had nothing to do with me. Of course, this is how, you know, I didn't do anything wrong. This is about a person who really wanted to kick the dog. And he found that he found somebody to, to do that with absolutely. But I tend to go through my life in kind of this bubble of like, everybody's got everybody's well-intended and maybe even he was well-intended it just, it just didn't come across in the, in this experience.2 (18m 30s):And1 (18m 32s):Did he walk away?2 (18m 34s):I said, get the fuck away from me. Get the fuck away from me. By the way, my dog was in the back of my dog, who barks at literally every leaf like Wallace.1 (18m 54s):What kind of wing man are you? You fucker anyway. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think those experiences are very particularly about driving and cars and obviously there's a whole road rage. Like there's literally a television show about road rage, right? Like the truth really? Oh my God. Yeah. It's a horrible it's so triggering. Don't watch it, but okay. I mean, yeah, it's ridiculous. But that being said it's very, to me, what happens to me in that situation? I'm sorry, that happened to you is yeah. Like what you mentioned on social media, which is feeling completely powerless and like, it's scary.1 (19m 38s):It's out of control. It's traumatizing. It's I, it's not good. It's not good. And it is also to me that what the feeling is being ambushed, right? Like you're being ambushed by, by a fucking crazy ass and you didn't do anything wrong. See, the thing is, I get into this thing of like, I didn't do anything wrong. And again, if I can get to the core of it, which is as a kid, I literally didn't do anything wrong. And all this shit rained down upon me, this trauma and this and this in this bullying and this whatever. And it triggers that in me. Like, wait a minute.1 (20m 19s):I, all I'm trying to do is do good, protect my son, pick up my thing, do this merge into the fucking freeway. It doesn't matter. And then I get like, this is not fair. Like I get really hurt is what it is. I get hurt. I'm shocked and hurt. And then the person, there is no, there is no resolution, right? Like the guy doesn't then call you later and say, I'm so sorry I acted a Dick. Or you can't even call the police and be like, this guy acted like a Dick. We're like, they're like, well, did he threaten you? No. Did he? Then they're like, fuck yourself.2 (21m 5s):Right. To say that it's, it is linked to, you know, growing up in a dysfunctional family. I'm for myself, looking a little bit more deeply into that. And because I, and I'm not saying this is the case for you, but for me, I think that I have said that I think that I have convinced myself that I'm never doing anything wrong, you know? And, and not just say that I was doing something necessarily wrong in the situation with the sky, although actually, you know, if I could have crafted it better, I would have paid attention to the flag from really from the first time they honk, which is like, there's something wrong with this person.2 (21m 51s):Do you know what I mean? Like, and yes,1 (21m 55s):Like get away, let me remove2 (21m 57s):My instinct. My instinct is to want to fight back. In fact, I remember this time that the some concert or something like that with Aaron, it was early in our relationship. So I was in my early twenties and this guy kept whatever. He kept stepping too close to me something. And I, I pushed him and pushed him. He, and of course, what did he do? He looked at Aaron like, are you gonna like, don't do that to me. I don't want to, you know, and it's, but it's not fair. He's encroaching on my space. He's like fair. Who, who told you the thing that we're going to be fair? Like it's, you know, so I guess that's the thing is I sometimes go out in the world thinking like, I'm an, a student and therefore, you know, nothing.2 (22m 42s):I don't, I shouldn't be getting any demerits. And if I get into merit, it's not my fault. I do that a lot.1 (22m 50s):I have the same thing. Yeah. I mean, I, I do it where it's like, I, yeah, I have my version of that is like, I'm a nice person. Like I do good. I'm nice. How dare you do bad or do wrong or treat me bad. Yeah. I mean, he it's, all this stuff is so layered. And2 (23m 10s):As far back, like it takes a lot. Yeah. Yeah. It's so far back. If it took this many years for us to form this way, imagine how long it's going to take us to On the podcast we are talking to Carolyn. Carolyn has a BFA from a theater school and imitate from the school of the art Institute of3 (23m 45s):Chicago. Carolyn is a performer and a professor and a lovely and pathic, amazing human. So please enjoy our conversation with Carolyn Bournemouth.4 (24m 8s):We're not here to talk about cancer. I've got no theaters because the Rick Murphy shirt Murphy's now this is actually made by Kevin Foster, who was my, that student. But I guess so I directed a workshop that he was in. He's a wonderful man. He ended up moving to Alaska, teaching people how to climb ice mountains. And now has a wife and a baby and never left Alaska. So we had that weird connection. Cause I lived in Alaska for the summer in between my first and second year of school, which I guess is it's like another theater school story in a way. I forgot about that one.2 (24m 47s):We're here. So Carolyn Hornimann, congratulations. You survived theater school. Yes you do.4 (24m 56s):You survived it. I know. That's why I bought this very expensive mix. So I would get lots of voiceover work that I never get.2 (25m 2s):Hey, maybe this is going to be your open Amy4 (25m 4s):Visit shit. This is it. This is my ticket. This is my ticket. I love podcasts.2 (25m 10s):So you survived as a student and you teach4 (25m 13s):DePaul. I teach there. I mainly teach the non-majors, which I love, but I have directed a couple of a workshop, intro type things. But many years ago, I keep putting in proposals. They don't ask me to do again, supposedly next year, maybe I will be, which would be awesome because I have this idea to do a version of Bernhardt Hamlet with all genders and just like totally gender fluid. So2 (25m 42s):You have to submit a proposal4 (25m 44s):For a show. That's a whole nother story. I'm probably another podcast, but I have submitted proposals. But oddly enough, a couple of times I did direct. I was just asked to, and that, I guess we're going backwards to go forwards. Are we always bad and make it go forward? Right. Which is that amazing? I think it's David Ball. The book that they made us read called backwards and forwards. Do you guys think I read In HDL, you had to read this book called backwards and forwards. Anyway, I used it in my master's thesis too. Cause it's brilliant. But anyway, backwards and forwards, I was in graduate school.4 (26m 24s):Rick Murphy was like kind of very interested in what I was doing. I was doing work on performing new feminisms and he was like, what the fuck is that? What's going on at the white cards? You can curse. Oh, no podcast. And, and that's a whole nother story because actually Rick Murphy was not my teacher. I had David AVD, Collie, and I went into to Rick Murphy's office. Like I guess it was probably my senior year to ask him advice about wanting to go to London, to study his full cereals. Right. As if I hadn't already been studying for serious. Right. Cause I wanted to go to Europe and be a fancy pants, real actor. And he was like, why are you going to do that? Why don't you just stay here and find a company that does European work.4 (27m 7s):So then I was in the European repertory company for 12 years. Oh,1 (27m 10s):Oh, that's a, that's a nice long run. Is that, is that company still around?4 (27m 14s):No, that's another story.1 (27m 16s):You have so many stories4 (27m 18s):We need to have, like, I have too many stories, too many stories. I don't even1 (27m 21s):Know where to start. Well, here's where I'll start. Did you just let's get the facts? So you went to BFA at the theater school, but you got to be MFA somewhere.4 (27m 32s):Oddly enough. No, I got, what is an M a E a masters of art and art education from the art Institute of Chicago, which is funny. Cause the Goodman started at the art Institute. So I guess I'm like super Chicago already.1 (27m 45s):You did that. Okay. I wanted to get the facts down. That is why. So then I would like to start when you were a child, were you always this awesome where you just like, fuck it. I'm going to4 (27m 59s):Just be crunchy. I have cool glasses, like YouTube,1 (28m 2s):There's serial killer glasses that we have just FYI.4 (28m 7s):I am from a small town down south. And I guess in a way I knew somehow that I wanted to be an actor from like watching old Betty Davis movies with my mom,1 (28m 17s):Her like Betty Davis.4 (28m 20s):And then I, my dad died when I was a sophomore in high school unexpectedly. And I was with my English teacher who taught us Shakespeare. He was fabulous. Mr. Beaver, very eccentric man who was probably gay and was not able to be out in our little small town. And Mr. Beaver took us to another small farm town school bus to all in, to see the show that was coming in from Chicago. And it was from the page to the stage Shakespeare by step and1 (28m 55s):Walk, a little company called4 (28m 59s):John C. Riley was one of the two count of two actors. There was a man and a woman. I wish I knew who she was. I went on deep dive search last night to find out and I can't find it anywhere on the internet. Was that my computer making a noise? Oh,1 (29m 15s):I didn't hear, I didn't hear it either. So something, well, here's the thing I'm sort of in touch with John C. Riley for various weird reasons. So I might ask him,4 (29m 27s):Please ask him, oh, he's the only one that will know. It's not anywhere on the internet. And I don't talk to him, although he's very close with Rick Murphy, oddly enough. They're like buds. But so, so anyway, we're in this, you know, school editorial, I'm watching this Shakespeare show with Jonsi rally and this woman that was also amazing. I hate that. I only know the guy, right. But they had a trunk and they would pull out costumes and props from the trunk. And they went through several scenes of Shakespeare. It was, you know, like devised, wonderful, amazing theater traveling the country, like the old frickin work progress association do used to do with the federal theater, which we should still have. Thank you very much.4 (30m 7s):And I, you know, had the PR I remember holding the program to like, with like, who are these people? What did they do? Where did they go to school? Oh, theater school, DePaul university. That's one question. Okay. How old were you? Like 15 amazing. Maybe 16. Cause I looked and it said it was 86. My dad died in 85. I was 15. I was 16. So I then also had, I was the president of the thespians of Lincoln community high school in Lincoln, Illinois. And I had, we, one of the things that we got was I forgot what it was. Oh, I wish I remembered it was a fabulous name. Like it wasn't forensics theater or something.4 (30m 49s):The, the title of the magazine you would get, it was like a high school theater magazine. And you got a free subscription of that for a year. Cause you, you know, you were the president of the Philippines and it also of course had a wonderful little spread about the theater school. So then I decided it was either going to be NYU theater school. My mom wanted me to go to ISU and kept saying, John Malcovich went there. John Malcovich went there because that was only 45 minutes away from me. So she really wanted me to go there, you know, cause my dad had just fucking died and she and I had moved from the country into the town and she wanted me to stay close, but she wasn't going to say that. But I know that now that that's what she wanted. Plus it was a lot cheaper and also Webster, which is in St. Louis. I think so somehow I got into, I think ISU in Webster, but I don't remember auditioning.4 (31m 33s):I think I just like had to write an essay and say I wanted to go Tish. I didn't even, I don't think pursue it because I couldn't afford to go to New York to audition. I only auditioned at the theater school. I addition to in my junior year I got in and my junior year, I knew where I was going for my senior year of high school. That's awesome. My brother drove me there and his, he had this old convertible. I remember driving down lake shore drive with my brother. It's my brother who now has cancer. And he took me to this audition. I don't know where he went or what he did with his big, long, old, like 67 do you know, muscle car that he had. But I went in and I did the audition and I did the voice and I did the weird movement and I did my two monologues and I don't remember exactly who was there.4 (32m 16s):I think it was maybe Phyllis Gemma stuff. Maybe it was his Carol Delk person who was a movement teacher who then I never really had. But anyway, yeah, I got, I got in, I remember getting the letter. I remember standing on my stairs in my house in Lincoln, Illinois, because then, you know, you've got to actually better in the mail. There's no emails or anything. And I was standing on the stairs is my, mom's stood at the foot of the stairs and opening it and being like, and then she's like, well, you know, we'll figure it out2 (32m 47s):Time out for one second. Do you think that kids think about us opening letters? The way that we think about people opening scrolls1 (32m 55s):Or telegrams? Yeah.4 (32m 59s):I have to explain to my students with snail mail is because at the end of every quarter I send everyone a little card, just a little thank you card. I've been doing it for like 15, 16 years now. So I can't stop now that I started this tradition and I'll ask them for their snail mail and they'll be like, what's that? And then I'll have to explain to them what it is and then they'll give it to me and they'll leave off like there's zip code or the town on her. I'm like, no, you have to put everything.1 (33m 19s):So there is a, I met someone at my coworking space who is like, I think 25 and they didn't know to put stamps on letters. So he just4 (33m 34s):Imagined that he1 (33m 34s):Was going to the post box and I said, oh, you're going to the postbox. I said, oh, you forgot your stamp. He goes, what? I was like, oh my God. Anyway.2 (33m 46s):And also I have to backtrack about one of the things that John C. Reilly thing was that a DePaul production or Novus Devin4 (33m 54s):Oh seven2 (33m 55s):Will forever. Right? Okay.4 (33m 57s):It must've been one of his first jobs out of school cause it was 1986. And I was also looking because there was this amazing picture of him from Gardenia, I think in the brochure. So then not only are in the magazine that I had, I don't think I ever got a brochure in the mail. It was this magazine. I'm going to find out the name of it. Cause it was just a cool little magazine that the theater kids, theater nerd, Scott, and we, and I got it for free when I was the president of, at that speeds. And so there was this wonderful picture that was some of the, you know, lovely glorious lady like grabbing, holding onto his leg or something was very dramatic. And this story goes further because then I'm at the theater school is my freshman year and there was the God squad party.4 (34m 39s):Nobody's really talked about the gods squad a little2 (34m 41s):Bit.4 (34m 43s):So the God squad party, I don't remember who my God parent was. I don't even, I must not been very good cause I have no idea who it was, but I was at this party and John C. Riley was there.2 (34m 56s):You must've been levitating.4 (34m 59s):And Don Elko was there. There was teachers therapy for smoking and drinking with the teachers. I was like, mind blonde, what's going on? And I said, I want it to John C. Riley in the kitchen, leaning up against the kitchen sink with like a beer or something. And I was like, excuse me. I need to tell you it's still on me about why I'm here. You know? Like I got tell him2 (35m 22s):That he's4 (35m 23s):A nice guy. Remember what he said? I don't remember anything. I was just like, that's1 (35m 27s):So good that,4 (35m 29s):And this is before yeah, it was famous. Right. And he might not have even ended up being famous. This is like, I thought he was that famous from skiing. That fricking page, the stage new person traveling around tiny little rural towns of Illinois.1 (35m 45s):That's amazing.4 (35m 47s):So I would love to know what he thinks of that, that show. If he has memories of doing it, who the other,1 (35m 53s):This podcast. I mean like you'll listen, you'll listen to, if you listen to some of the podcasts, you'll hear my John C. Riley story. It's pretty, it's pretty funny.4 (36m 1s):Oh, you have one too. Okay. I've been, I went this way. I have bags. I went down deep dive last night.2 (36m 9s):I love that. A lot of people do that. A lot of people when they find the podcast go and listen to a bunch of. So what was the experience like for you? You were walking down memory lane. What was it making you feel?4 (36m 21s):Ooh, I don't know. Now it's making me want to cry. It was, you know, I was 17 and I started there. I had no idea what I'd got myself into and a lot of it, you know, really broke my heart, but I also think it may, you know, like everyone else has said it made me who I am, made me kind of a tough skinned bad-ass, but I'm also a hyper empath and have trauma. And so now I have to deal with, you know, all of that in my old age. But I did have experiences there in classes with certain teachers, with certain instructors, certain directors, I lived with five girls in a two bedroom apartment on the corner of Sheffield and Belden.4 (37m 13s):We were all poor. Nobody could afford anything else I could barely afford to go to showcase. It was only in New York that year was when they went back and forth between New York and LA I guess, or I don't think we'd even started doing LA. It was the only New York and yeah, I don't know. I mean the whole casting pool process, the whole cutting process. I mean, obviously it didn't get cut, but that was, you know, traumatic. I've heard other people talk about how they didn't really think about it or this and that. Like Eric Slater was like, I don't really think about it. And I was like, I have to say,2 (37m 45s):I hope that isn't over the wrong way. A lot of men didn't really4 (37m 47s):Think about it. I was going to say, it goes a little bit ago and I know him, I'm friends with him and sat there for a little bit of privilege there.2 (37m 55s):Just like, it's just, it's like how a fish doesn't know it's in water. Like you just don't know.1 (38m 1s):Yeah. I mean, they just are doing their set dance. Right. And everyone's dancing around them, but we sort of had to do our own thing. What do you think the tears are about? Like when you, when is it just raw motion or is there like tears for young, a young version of you? Or like it's just a lot.4 (38m 22s):I'm a very teary person. I think. I don't know exactly what it is. I'm in therapy. It's I know. I just,1 (38m 29s):I am the same way. Like I,4 (38m 32s):I get, I get overwhelmed. I get really moved just by kind of yeah. And that sort of strange and weird that I'm still there in some weird way. Like I'm an adjunct, I teach the non-majors, but I'm there. And I went back actually, Rick Murphy directed a show that I adapted for the children's theater called the selfish giant and other wild tales. W I L D E all the Oscar Wilde's fairytales and Alvin McCraney was in it. First of all, Oscar Wilde wrote, wrote, he wrote fairytales and I had actually adapted another book that somebody else ended up having the rights to.4 (39m 13s):And so Rick was like, well, you know, I know you really wanted to do that one, but if you find something else, I'll still direct it. And so I was like, okay, let's do this. And so I adapted us, grows fairytales. Awesome. For me to read, love, to read that I can find it somewhere. Might actually be a hard copy of it and I'd have to like scale or something. I don't know where it is. That was like 2002. I think there's also pictures of that. I also found which I didn't know the production history of the theater school online. You get the pictures for almost everything and they're almost all taken by John Bridges, right. Bridges, which is amazing. Cause these, I don't know why I only have these two printed out of the old whore and the sister-in-law from the good person of such one, which actually is like a happy, sad, weird story because I auditioned to be course and I was called back for it and I really wanted it.4 (40m 8s):And it was that awful time where they would post on our side of the theater school, glass doors that casting it like midnight. So we would come there while we waited and we went to the door and not only did I not get it, but one of my friends got it, of course. Cause how were, how was it not going to be your friend gets it? And, and then I see old whore and sister-in-law, and I just, I had heels on and I took them off and I started running and I like cut my feet up, running in the street crying and like old 18 years old. And your sister-in-law told her, well, that's another thing, you know, because of my voice and my larger frame, I've always been cast older.4 (40m 53s):Even in high school. I have a very traumatic story actually being in high school. And my father dying when we were doing cheaper by the dozen, which if you know the story, the dad leaves at the end and doesn't come back cause he dies and we're doing this play. And it was must have been like the end of the rehearsals right before we opened. And my director who was one of the English teachers at my high school, I remember being on the phone with her because I remember exactly where I was standing in my house. And instead of being like really sympathetic about my dad dying, she was talking about how I was the younger of three of the sisters and the girl that got the older sister, which is the part I wanted, who was the daughter of another English teacher who was always getting all the parts I wanted.4 (41m 34s):She didn't have as big of breasts. And my English teacher was like, maybe we can, you know, tape you down. And I thought, why didn't you just cast me as the older sister plus I was wearing this like beautiful, old, like 40 suit. That was my mom's was vintage suit that I loved. So it was kind of tight and probably did really show my frame. I was 15 and my dad had just died. This woman's telling me to tape my breasts down.2 (42m 7s):So yeah,4 (42m 7s):I always, I always got cast older and I can see what2 (42m 10s):He went down the road of wanting to do feminist theater. I mean, it sounds like from an early age, you were, you were made aware of double standards and beauty standards and all that kind of stuff.4 (42m 21s):1994, I think it was, I had graduated. I was auditioning. And it was when you had to look in like this paper for the auditions and there was like a line you called, oh God, I wish I could remember it. It was, you had to call this line and stay on hold forever and listen to all the audition notices. And there was an audition for pump boys and dynamics, which I was excited about. Cause I'd seen it when I was younger with my mom and I thought, oh, that's fun. And it literally said the men will be paid. And I got a fucking article in the Chicago Tribune about that.2 (42m 55s):You did. Oh, tell us about it. You just wrote about,4 (42m 60s):You know, they they're, they're like backpedaling about, it was like, well it's because the musicians they're going to get paid and the musicians are mad at first of all, now I'm thinking back like, why did the musicians have to be men? And you literally still wrote, the men will be paid. He didn't write, the musicians will be pay. So yeah. I don't know how I did it now. Now it's all kind of a blur. I just started calling places and I got a reporter from the Tribune to like talk to me and do a whole article about it.2 (43m 25s):Oh. So you're really tenacious. That's what I'm getting. I'm getting that. You get something, whether it's a goal or you're trying to write an injustice and you attach yourself to it,4 (43m 36s):Right. I'm an Aquarius moon. I know this. Isn't an astrology podcast, but I've looked at your side. I've learned in the last couple of years, I'm Scorpio, sun cancer, rising, thus the tears and then Aquarius moon, thus the righteous justice for all.2 (43m 52s):I love that. I love that you4 (43m 54s):Did tons of work after school ended up doing tons of work like in, in schools, after-school programs, writing and drama programs and things like that, which ended up taking me to go back to graduate school and get the Mae and education. But then that was like a lot of solo performance work I did too, with this woman, faith wilding, who was like, look her up. She likes started women house it, I think Cal arts and like the seventies, she has this famous piece where she rocks in a rocking chair and says, I'll, I'll wait until I'm old enough. I'll wait till I fall in the I'll wait until I'm married. I'll wait. You know, just incredible woman who taught this class called new feminisms. She taught one called body skin sensation.4 (44m 37s):I mean just, and so I was doing all this incredible work again, looking at myself and being a woman and being an actor and what the trauma that I'd been through. And then my thesis was doing a performance experiment with a bunch of young women from all over Chicago, like high school age women talking about their mothers and feminism and teaching them about feminism and1 (45m 1s):Well what, okay, so, so a question for you, first of all, I tidbit I have to share that we ha we spoke with, I think it was Joel Butler who was a stage manager and said that they would come out and walk to tease us. When we were waiting for the list to come home, they would pretend that they had news and go like the people who weren't involved. Anyway, I just have to say the whole thing was a setup. Like the whole thing was a fucking setup. So all it was like the hunger games and it was also that in itself was a play like a theatrical experience of man.4 (45m 41s):I don't really know how they do it now. It's all online.1 (45m 44s):It's all online. Yeah. They sent you an email with your casting, but I'm just saying like, when I look back, my little corner of the world was walk, walk, walk, look at the list. Feel like shit, walk, walk, walk. But there was a whole play happening around us of everyone knew what the fuck was going on. And it was part of the thing to have this sort of, yeah, it was, it was a production, it was a fucking production, a tragedy for most of us. Right? Like, and anyway, it just was interesting to hear the perspective, like everyone knew what was going on and everyone played a part is what I'm saying is what I get from the theater school. Like it was all back in the day. Anyway, it was all part of a thing.1 (46m 24s):And like, you get the idea2 (46m 26s):We're working through for some of the faculty who, you know, themselves couldn't realize their professional dreams. And you know,4 (46m 35s):That makes me so sad. I hope that it's really not1 (46m 40s):Okay. I mean, like it's not okay, but it's like, they, we, a lot of times we talk on this podcast, right. About the psychology of never fixing what you needed to fix in the first place inside of yourself gets fucking played out all over everywhere.4 (46m 54s):We are living in a new time of awakening and people being able to talk about their trauma. That was not that time. And that was also the time, like I said, where the teachers were coming to parties with us and drinking and somebody else was mentioned, somebody else was mentioning, you know, relationships between faculty and students. I only knew a couple of those instances, but yeah, the fact that they happen at all and yeah, yeah. I've found that like in my own teaching, like even, even in the last couple of years and I've been doing it for a long time, I just I've become so much more transparent. Like I talk about my own mental health issues or what's going on with me or I, I check in and check out with them every day. And it's like, what's something beautiful you saw today.4 (47m 35s):What, what are you going to do good for yourself when you leave this zoom glass, whatever, you know, like, so I think that as a culture we're evolving as facilitators instructors teachers, but yeah, we were there at a really hard, whoa time. I, for sure. I mean, you were there pretty shortly after that, but also I had some amazing experiences. I loved Betsy Hamilton. I loved John Jenkins. Jim. I still laugh. I actually had for two years cause Adam second year and fourth year, which nobody did because he randomly taught second year acting one year for some reason. And everybody had him for fourth year for what that was called, like ensemble or exit or whatever the hell it was called.4 (48m 19s):So I had him second and fourth year. He actually told me at one point, heard him out, what you're doing, why are you an actor? You should be a singer. And so then I sang in the, oh no, it was after I sang in this, it was Rob chambers thesis show Baghdad cafe. And I sang backstage live for just a couple parts of the show. Just Rob asked me to do this. I don't even remember how that all came about. And, and you know, Jim being the jazz and music aficionado called me to his office and was like, what are you doing? You should be a singer. Shouldn't be the act. But was that ever a, a w dream of yours to be a singer? I was in rock band called dominance clam I did say I did sing a lot that there was a summer.4 (49m 7s):I wasn't even 21. So I would go, I've sang it like the Metro and I wasn't really supposed to be in there and, and Zach wards and Steve Sal and all these people from my class came to see me. And yeah, I wanted to do that and I would audition for musicals and stuff after I graduated, but just like Marriott Lincoln Shire and all those like fancy places would never hire me. And I would always end up in shows where I sent, but they weren't musicals, you know? And I also think I have a little bit of trauma around singing. I started singing in my church after my dad died. I was the song leader in Catholic church. Believe it or not. And I would go out the night before and be like smoking and drinking with my friends and then sitting on the alter with like the breeze and like, like Christ, what the hell are we doing?4 (49m 55s):I would say at funerals, I sang at my mom's second wedding. I sang at my brother's wedding, my sister's wedding, my other brothers. But yeah, I say I sang a lot. I haven't really been singing recently cause I, I usually end up crying when I sing. I had a very traumatic audition, 2008. I think it was where I cried when I was singing the song. And the song was about the girl's dad a little bit on the high note and it cracked and the casting director will remain nameless called my agent and told them that they thought I had mental problems and needed help. Okay. Again, this is something that would never happen today.4 (50m 37s):Right. But it wasn't that long ago, 2008, she also said that I was dressed in appropriately. I wore a forties style suit and a pillbox hat, because that was the period of the show. How is that inappropriate? That's someone who's. And why you calling my agent how intrusive to call my agent and tell them that you think I'm. And then the funny thing about it was I had just gone through a huge breakup and had moved and gotten a new job and all this other stuff was going on, but that had nothing to do with it. And that's nobody's business and I was moved by the song. And don't you want somebody, that's just somebody who, who is scared of their own emotions, like, correct. That's all that is. Yeah. So anyway, I digressed cause that's like post theater, school drama,2 (51m 20s):But I've had auditioning. Okay. So you arrived at the theater school at a tender young age. You4 (51m 28s):17. I was 17 because I have a November birthday, 17.2 (51m 32s):And you did your whole BFA there. Tell us about some of your show experiences.4 (51m 41s):Well, the one that I was going to talk about was the good person of such one. Cause oddly enough, it's the only one that I have printed pictures of. And I don't even remember when or how I acquired them. I think I got them from John Bridges cause he took all these pictures and that one of me is the sister-in-law. I don't know that that one was like a production photo. I think that was him coming up. And he saw me in this moment and like had to get this shot. So not only was I not cast as Shantay, which I want it to be now I'm the, the sister-in-law on the old whore. So I'm like, I'm going to kill this. I had 16 lines between the two characters, my old whore. If you look at that picture, I have a blonde wig. I didn't wear a bra. I have a tube, top, a pleather red skirt. I had these hoes that had a dragon up the side.4 (52m 22s):So it looked like I had a dragon tattoo on my leg and high, high red pumps that I think were mine actually from when I was in a beauty contest in high school anyway, and I got these earrings, oh my God. I think I found those earrings too. They were Chinese lanterns like that opened up, but they were earrings and they were huge. And I smoked a cigar. Oh. And I, I don't know if you remember this or if they did this when you were there, but after shows closed, mainly the main stage shows they had like this post mortem, postpartum, whatever you call it in the lobby and everybody and they would critique. I probably blacked that right out while you sat there and just took it.4 (53m 7s):And, but I don't know if it was during that or like after that, I would just be like walking in the halls and all these teachers, some that I had and some that I hadn't yet even had made a point of coming to tell me how excellent I wasn't that. Sure. And it was not false. It was not put on. But I mean, come on. Those people did not give compliments unless they really felt1 (53m 29s):Whatever. Yeah, yeah,4 (53m 30s):No. And I was like, yeah, cause I freaking killed it. Cause I took it so seriously. I was like, I'm going to make these roles so deep and so real. And if you, if you look on the production photos, they have this screen and, and, and, and people would make shadow play on the screen at the beginning of the show to show like the street life of the pool or the Sichuan and stuff. And I got to ride a bike and I rode a bike across and you see the shadow of the girl on the bike and I'm like, I still look at that. And I'm like that.1 (53m 57s):So do you think that's, I love hearing that. That's a great story for me to hear. For some reason, it just really warm, but warms my heart, but also talks about Gina's calling you on being tenacious. But do you think that that sort of set a tone for, cause what I'm getting from you is that like you're simultaneously a, bad-ass a bit of an outsider never given your chance. Never really given the chance to maybe in terms of outside casting, do what you could really do. So then you take what you get and then you fucking kill it. Does that ring a bell4 (54m 37s):Kind of? I think so. And I think I've always been that way really. And that also being in that show, Joe sloth directed, it was Bertolt Brecht. And really got me thinking about political theater and theater for social movement and theater for change. And I really believe when I graduated and I started doing work at the European repertory company, I believed that doing theater could change the world. You don't think that anymore change sometimes, you know, it beats you down pretty hard when you, when you work and work and work and work and you have to have three other jobs. Cause you're in a theater company that doesn't pay you any money.4 (55m 17s):And I, I still like the best work of my life was at that place. I was client of Nestor and Agamemnon for three years. I mean, I, Y you know, yeah, the best work of my life, but was it going to say that there's a different, and I think it's good. There's a different culture, a different mindset. Now students now would never graduate and say, yes, I'm going to be in a school or I'm going to be in a theater company for 12 years that never pays me and I'm going to have three or four jobs. And it was nice to kind of almost like a martyr, poor theater, Jersey, Petoskey board theater mindset of like, I'm an artist. Well, of course I'm, I'm struggling and I'm poor and I'm, you know, but I'm for the oppressed. And so I must experience that.4 (55m 59s):I don't, I dunno, like it just, I wonder how much I manifested that, right. Because I, I would have auditions for TV and film stuff that I would get close to and just not get, or it took me. I was, I think, 30 when I finally gotten a show at the Goodman or no, wait, I was 30 when I got at apt in Wisconsin. I think I was even older when I got in the show at the Goodman. But anyway, yeah. You know, eventually I have done shows larger theaters, but I still will say, I mean, people that saw the stuff I did at the European rep and I was like 24, 25, but I played clouded minister and it was Steven Berkoff's choir master. So it was like the most rockstar frickin, you know, I made my own costume.4 (56m 41s):It was, it was all like fishnet. And I just like punched my hands through fish nets to make sleeves and high heels and crazy Kabuki makeup. And I stood at the top of this ladder Agamemnon. And I came out at the end with like Hershey's syrup on my hands after I'd feel them. And I was like, I mean, if you saw that as hit, you were blown away, this was three years while we did it, like in a regular run. And then it was so popular. It was so popular that we did it on Friday, Saturday nights, like late night. And then we were doing, cause we want it to be a real repertory. So at the time we were doing Agamemnon Electra, uncle Vanya, and this show called all of them are just, yes.4 (57m 32s):And we would also change this. You remind me, okay, this is what I think Steven Davis was talking about when he said he was in four shows at the same time he, he was in, he was in all those shows and yeah. So, oh my God,2 (57m 51s):That's super intense4 (57m 53s):Looking at my notes2 (57m 54s):That like, though, while you're looking at your notes, I mean, was that draining, not just the number of shows you did4 (58m 4s):The physical training. Well, also I was, yeah, I was like a waitress during the day. I mean, I had a job I had to live and I was a waitress where I could only work lunches because all the shows were at nights. So lunches weren't as busy. And if it was really slow at lunch, I mean, so I would find myself every day while I was working calculating in my head, how many tables I had to have, how many tips I had to get just to make enough for that week to pay the rent, you know? And at the time I was living with two British guys, actually, they're the ones that brought me into the European rep, my friend, Charlie, Charlie Sherman, who is a actor and director in and out of Chicago for years. I met him when I was 18.4 (58m 44s):And I worked at cafe Roma, which was down the street from the school. That was my job. Cause I also worked when I was in school. And so when other people were like, we're going to the dead show. You want to come? I was like, you get, not only do I not have money for that, but I got to work all weekend. Right. So anyway, he, he knew that I wanted to do the play Caligula and he called me up one day and he's like, oh my God, this company is already doing it. Maybe you should audition. And this was right when I got out of school. So I auditioned and I got in the chorus and like the first week, the girl that was supposed to place, Zonea had gotten a movie and left and they were like, okay, now you're the lead. And I was like, okay. And that, and that was the company that I ended up being with for 12 years.4 (59m 27s):But it was exhausting as it was. I know we did. We were also all like drinking and smoking and going to the bar every night after the show is2 (59m 35s):You is a powerful force. I was just thinking the other day, remember when you used to wake up in the morning and no matter what had happened to you the night before, and you're like, okay, well, but anyway, it's time to do it today. I haven't had that feeling in years. I haven't had that. Like I can even when some we've once a day, I'm super excited about, I don't ha I don't wake up with this body, like readiness that I remember feeling in my twenties and thirties. Okay. So look at your notes. What are you, what are some of, some of the points that you wanted to get to?1 (1h 0m 7s):So if a showcase question, I have a showcase. Cause I'm obsessed. Since I live in Los Angeles, now I'm obsessed.4 (1h 0m 12s):Oh my God, are you guys going to try to avoid? No, no, no, no, no,1 (1h 0m 15s):No, no, no. I'm obsessed with the idea of the showcase because I made such an ass out of myself at my showcase that I, we went to LA, but I know you were in New York, but what was that? I'm obsessed with the showcase experience because I think it is really one interesting, but two where DePaul lacked in so many ways to getting people to the showcase and then after the showcase.4 (1h 0m 42s):Okay, great. This was before stars and all that. So nobody was collecting money for us. You just had to, you either had the money or you didn't. And so I was able to get enough money to buy a plane ticket, but then I wasn't going to have anywhere to stay. So my friend, Sarah Wilkinson, who was also at the school, but a couple of years behind me, her boyfriend, Daniel master Giorgio, who's also been in a lot of TV shows and on, on, you know, Lincoln stage and public theater, like this dude that went to Juilliard, actually I stayed in his dorm at Juilliard on the floor cause I didn't have money to stay anywhere. And I also could only stay for like a couple of days where like other people were like staying the rest of the week or going out and partying.4 (1h 1m 23s):And I remember having like just enough money to do one of the things people were doing, which was go to a jazz club with Frick and Jim Osstell Hoff, which I did. And that was really cool. The other part of that, that was kind of messed up was in the, in the, you know, audition class that Jane alderman, God rest her soul. And I love her dearly and became closer to her. I probably more after school than during school, but in our audition class where you brought, you know, monologues, I had brought this monologue and then she loved it and wanted me to do it and was just like, that's the, when you're doing. And then I had this total panic about it and was like, I don't think this is right. I don't think this shows me in a good light.4 (1h 2m 3s):I'm going to pick something else. And I don't remember what my other second or third choice was. I did, I did have something else. And I remember calling her on the phone. I don't know if I called her office or at home. And again, before cell phones. So I remember the little window I was sitting in my apartment on the corner of Sheffield and Belden on our little phone, talking to Jane alderman, all nervous. Cause I was going to tell her I'm not doing that when it's not right for me. And she still talked me into it and I did this monologue from Roger and me, the film. Did you see it?2 (1h 2m 34s):The Michael Moore movie4 (1h 2m 36s):About the Michael Moore movie, Roger,2 (1h 2m 40s):The documentary about the auto industry. I mean, yeah.4 (1h 2m 44s):Yes. And it was the poor woman, poor white woman who sold rabbits. Pets are mate. Right? Pets are me. Got it.2 (1h 2m 55s):That's what I did. Wait a minute though. I have a feeling.4 (1h 2m 60s):So I actually became, I probably did, but I actually came from where they had tried to, to suppress and to change and to mold me into anything. But this hit girl from Southern Illinois. And then I did that. Right. And that's what I, I wore my boots. I wear my cowboy boots. I think I had my friend's jacket on my long hair. And I came out and I was like pets for me. Oh my God, mortified, mortified. And I only got, I got like a couple of calls, like one was from like a soap opera. And then another one, I don't remember. That was another weird thing. Like the same thing with the casting call we waited in, I was in somebody else's hotel room.4 (1h 3m 42s):Cause remember I didn't have a hotel. I was staying on the other side of town and the dorm room of somebody who went to Julliard. And so we're in somebody's hotel room waiting for Jim Mostel Hoff. And whoever else was with us to come in with like this list, it was literal. It was like my notes here. There was just like tiny pieces of paper with like telling us who got what calls. Some people were like, got nothing, got 10 that too, about whatever. Yeah. And, and mine were not meetings. Mine were just like, these people want you to call them or send your resume. I was like, they already got my resume. Everybody got what, what? So, you know, like I wanted to move to New York. I wanted to be a New York fancy actor, you know? So that was like really devastating too.4 (1h 4m 23s):But then I was like, well, if I don't get that, I'm going to be an amazing Chicago theater actor. And I'm going to show everybody that Chicago theater is actually better anyway.2 (1h 4m 31s):Yeah. I don't to remember VAs if I've told this on the podcast before, but remember how I did that thing or if I didn't get any meetings. And so then I snuck into administrative office at DePaul after showcase and I found a list of all of our names and everybody had gotten, everybody had agencies or agents names written next to theirs, but not everybody was told that. Yeah. Yeah. So,4 (1h 5m 5s):Oh, podcasts, then couldn't see my face gaping. Now what, what did you do? Did you tell, did you, what?2 (1h 5m 12s):I swallowed it and carried it around resentfully for the next 20 years. Yes ma'am I did my God. And you know, who knows? Maybe there was an important reason for that. Maybe it was, these are shady characters. I don't know what it would have been, but I, I know that I would have4 (1h 5m 36s):That you didn't feel. Yeah. I feel so bad for you that you didn't feel like you could, you know, go further, ask more. I don't know. Probably2 (1h 5m 44s):Carolyn it probably didn't occur to me. I'm sure it did. I'm sure. The way I thought about it was, well, this has happened now. It is over, this is the thing that it is forever such. I just, I would have never thought that way. I would have never thought to advocate for myself. I mean, I fought to find out,4 (1h 6m 4s):Snuck in there. You thought, well, enough of yourself to sneak in there,2 (1h 6m 9s):You know, whatever. That's that's for me to figure out because I, I, I that's what, but that's what I did with it. I, I took it. I took a carried it around like a shame instead of, oh, by the way, I didn't mean to blow anybody up. I just needed to say like, what's the deal? Like what happened happened, right. Yeah.1 (1h 6m 29s):I feel like it's interesting. It is. It is. It is just really, now that we have this podcast, we spend a lot of our time being like, well, yeah, what's the deal. Why did that happen? And, and what,4 (1h 6m 41s):I wonder what John Bridges or somebody like that would say about that.2 (1h 6m 46s):I I'm sure. John Bridges, who is a theater school loyalist to the end when say that, that I, that I misunderstood. He tells them he doesn't tell the truth. I'm saying, listen. And, and by that I've said a thousand times we understand that we couldn't possibly know all of the factors that went into any decisions like casting and stuff like that. And that there are certain things that happened. That felt terrible. That were for my own good, you know, but Yeah, because getting back to that whole thing about casting, I mean, I'm sure that the guiding principle in their minds was, this is what it's like, you know, you want to move to New York.2 (1h 7m 33s):I mean, Don, we had another person on here who told us living in New York. You, you you'd have to go wait in line in the morning at a theater so that you could get your audition later. And if you wanted to have, it had to be a lunchtime thing, so you could leave work. And those sl

With Parade Of The Old New, artist Zoe Beloff has created a panoramic history painting documenting the depths of the Trump years. We get into the impetus for that project, its enormous scale (140 feet long), its Brechtian roots, and its reproduction as a 19-foot accordion book (available only from Booklyn). We talk about notions of rights and responsibilities for artists, the debate over displaying Philip Guston's work, the angry e-mail Zoe received from a white male Marxist that critiqued her for "her own benefit", and why Parade Of The Old New is getting exhibited in Europe & Russia but not America. We also dive into her fascination with artists and thinkers of the interwar era, like Bertolt Brecht & Walter Benjamin, her family's refugee history and why it left her feeling like a Rootless Cosmpolitan, the ways she interweaves painting, film, installation, picture-storytelling (or cartooning) and other forms, the vision of NYC that brought her to the city in her 20s from Scotland, and why being a story-scavenger rather than an inventor means she gets to live in the worlds of her art. Also, we talk about her new multimedia project to celebrate essential workers, my no-fly list for pod-guests, why telling her mother and grandmother's refugee story is the closest she'll come to autobiography, and a LOT more. Follow Zoe on Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

Writer/director Andrei Konst thinks highly of the 2013 erotic thriller THE CANYONS, the love child of Bret Easton Ellis and Paul Schrader. The film stars Lindsay Lohan and James Deen, AKA "the Ryan Gosling of porn" and, according to Konst, is a Hollywood satire with a Brechtian purpose. Episode Links: Blood Countess Joe's Patreon Mr. Owl's Website

Safdar inspires a whole new generation of young actors to join Janam. His aim: to give them creatively challenging work, and to strengthen Janam's connection with the working-class movement.

Toronto-based playwright and author David Demchuk (The Bone Mother) joins the pod to discuss Michael Verhoeven's The Nasty Girl (1990), a coming-of-age tale based on a true story about a precocious and tenacious young student who enrages her small German town as she relentlessly endeavours to uncover what life was really like there during the Third Reich. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, The Nasty Girl has kept a lower profile in recent years but is fascinating to reconsider today with its unexpected use of comedy and Brechtian distancing devices (rear-screen projection, direct address, surrealist scene staging) to tell this troubling tale about buried history and the plight of the truth-teller, grounded by an incredible performance by Lena Stolze. David also discusses his upcoming horror novel RED X. David's latest novel RED X comes to you from boundary-pushing Penguin Random House imprint Strange Light on August 31. Preorder now! Canada: http://tinyurl.com/RED-X-CDA US: http://tinyurl.com/RED-X-USA David's website: daviddemchuk.com David's nice Twitter: @david demchuk David's not-as-nice Twitter: @dd_toronto German trailer for Das schreckliche Mädchen (Michael Verhoeven, 1990)

Uh oh, is that a "Dies Irae"? In minutes 71-75 of The Last Jedi, Luke makes an incipient Force connection, Rey faces her infinite reflection, and Kylo Ren definitely does not put a cowl on. Joining me today is my favorite playwright-professor, Takeo Rivera, here to suffuse my musical observations with his literary insights! We talk magical realism, postmodernism, Brecht, musical recalls, and much more. Discussion topics/Highlights: "Dies Irae" (Day of Wrath) melody/Gregorian chant Magical realism in The Last Jedi Brecht, Sophocles, postmodernism, and other literary references John Williams didn't have spotting sessions for this film Structures of Feeling (Raymond Williams): https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100538488 Sound details in Rey's cave reflection scene Themes Referenced (in order of appearance): Force theme Takeo Rivera: Faculty page (Boston University): https://www.bu.edu/english/profile/takeo-rivera/ Academia.edu page: https://bu.academia.edu/TakeoRivera New Play Exchange: https://newplayexchange.org/users/20558/takeo-rivera Look out for his forthcoming book Model Minority Masochism published by Oxford University Press Connect with Star Wars Music Minute: Watch us on YouTube: youtube.com/starwarsmusicminute Twitter: @StarWarsMusMin and @chrysanthetan Instagram: @starwarsmusicminute and @chrysanthetan Email podcast@starwarsmusicminute.com Submit anonymous questions/comments for the show with this quick form. Want more? Check out Chrysanthe's Patreon for weekly practice/composing/music analysis livestreams.

A LONG TIME AGO ON VERONICA MARS: Mr Kiss and Tell, an original mystery by Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham: A young woman has been raped and beaten, and, once again, the Neptune Grand hires Veronica to investigate - only so they don’t get sued for hiring the undocumented worker who has been accused. But, having cleared him, Veronica keeps going with the case, to get justice for the victim, Grace Manning - that’s right, Meg’s little sister. A decade on from being locked in a closet by her parents, and still having a shit time. Grace is one of several sex workers who have been attacked by this man, a SPORTSBALL coach. I knew I was right not to trust sportsball! So Veronica and Leo team up, dress up and wig up to go to Vegas and bust this man. A golf course is involved - sports really come out of this novel badly. Meanwhile, the sheriff’s election looms into view, with a new candidate, Marcia - with whom Keith has history. Tense sad history, not sexy history. We assume Keith’s pelvis is still knitting itself back together. Keith and Cliff put together a civil case, Weevil vs the sheriff’s department and their evidence planting. But which does Weevil need more: justice, or to stop his family falling apart? And Logan is ashore! He and Veronica are having problems, with her overwork and his months-long absences - but, they do get a puppy! And the puppy’s called Pony! A satisfying conclusion to Veronica’s years-long pony joke. Join Jenny Owen Youngs and Helen Zaltzman to investigate the second Veronica Mars novel, Mr Kiss and Tell, and get stuck into such mysteries as how we can go on a shopping trip with Weevil and Keith; whether this novel features the Marsverse's very first portrayal of gay characters who aren't evil, fake-gay, or some kind of prop for the straights; and if Weevil would ever want to ride a Segway AS IF. Content note:Veronica Mars contains heavy themes, and this episode includes storylines concerning rape, murder, violence and sex work. For more about this episode, and to read the transcript, visit the podcast’s official site http://VMIpod.com/book2. This episode was edited and mixed by Helen Zaltzman; the music is by Martin Austwick and Jenny Owen Youngs. Find the show @VMIpod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. We also have MERCH - get your pins to show your love for Weevil or non-love for milk at hellomerch.com/collections/veronica-mars-investigations. If you’d like to advertise on VMI, and for us to talk amusingly about your product or thing, contact Amanda via multitude.productions/contact.  Support the show: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=TWQYZDRGZUGH8&source=url See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this week's deep dive, The Cultists Present Harmony Korine's controversial cult flick ‘Spring Breakers' (2012). Booze, bikinis, pissing in the streets, temporal existentialism, Disney-girls-gone-wild, flirtation with French New Wave, Brechtian theater... this movie has a little bit of everything. The one thing this film doesn't have is an audience consensus on what to do with it. Is this film—once described as a 'a sleaze-fest akin to Michael Mann on mescaline'—good? Bad? A shallow exploitation film? A masterpiece of cultural critique? A tasteless ultra-violent beach noir? Or a deeply emotion-driven love story about the purest kinds of love? The answer, it seems, is, “yes.” Episode Safeword: “moderation”

A podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world. Hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage. After the upheaval of 1968, Jean-Luc Godard said goodbye to commercial cinema to create a new kind of radical Marxist filmmaking. With TOUT VA BIEN (1972), Godard and his filmmaking partner Jean-Pierre Gorin tried to meet the audience halfway. Taking place in a moment when the student protests, the French New Wave, and even Godard's own militant phase were receding from view, this fascinating Brechtian exercise starring Jane Fonda and Yves Montand may or may not have room for optimism. PLUS: bold predictions about the incoming Biden administration, and the politics of another cinematic legend: James Bond.Check out our Patreon for exclusive bonus episodes: https://www.patreon.com/michaelandus

After the upheaval of 1968, Jean-Luc Godard said goodbye to commercial cinema to create a new kind of radical Marxist filmmaking. With TOUT VA BIEN (1972), Godard and his filmmaking partner Jean-Pierre Gorin tried to meet the audience halfway. Taking place in a moment when the student protests, the French New Wave, and even Godard's own militant phase were receding from view, this fascinating Brechtian exercise starring Jane Fonda and Yves Montand may or may not have room for optimism. PLUS: bold predictions about the incoming Biden administration, and the politics of another cinematic legend: James Bond. Check out our Patreon for exclusive bonus episodes: https://www.patreon.com/michaelandus

Hello, Lovelies! We're celebrating Trans Week of Awareness this week with Hoodslam's own The Great Bambina. She and Brian unpack her journey to and evolution within the ring, the personal philosophy she brings to pro wrestling, her history of trans advocacy and how Brechtian theory and pro wrestling intersect. It's a thoughtful conversation with plenty of inspiration within it. We're here, we're queer and we're fucking immortal. Follow Great Bambina on Twitter: @baseballkick Check out Batter Up at twitch.tv/batterupbambina Follow Brian Bell on Twitter: @WonderboyOTM Follow LGBT In The Ring on Twitter: @LGBTRingPod  The Progress Pride Flag design by Daniel Quasar is a product of Progress Initiative. Find out more at quasar.digital! Huge thanks to Sarah & The Safe Word for the show's theme, Formula 666 from the album Red, Hot and Holy. Find them on Twitter, @STSWBand, and check out their music on Spotify and Bandcamp. Check out IndependentWrestling.tv for the best in current and classic independent pro wrestling, including live events from top independent promotions worldwide. Use promo code “LGBTRingPod” or visit tinyurl.com/IWTVLGBT for a 5-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, Lovelies! We're celebrating Trans Week of Awareness this week with Hoodslam's own The Great Bambina. She and Brian unpack her journey to and evolution within the ring, the personal philosophy she brings to pro wrestling, her history of trans advocacy and how Brechtian theory and pro wrestling intersect. It's a thoughtful conversation with plenty of inspiration within it. We're here, we're queer and we're fucking immortal. Follow Great Bambina on Twitter: @baseballkick Check out Batter Up at twitch.tv/batterupbambina Follow Brian Bell on Twitter: @WonderboyOTM Follow LGBT In The Ring on Twitter: @LGBTRingPod  The Progress Pride Flag design by Daniel Quasar is a product of Progress Initiative. Find out more at quasar.digital! Huge thanks to Sarah & The Safe Word for the show’s theme, Formula 666 from the album Red, Hot and Holy. Find them on Twitter, @STSWBand, and check out their music on Spotify and Bandcamp. Check out IndependentWrestling.tv for the best in current and classic independent pro wrestling, including live events from top independent promotions worldwide. Use promo code “LGBTRingPod” or visit tinyurl.com/IWTVLGBT for a 5-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week's film is the 1973 multiple-Oscar-winning classic THE STING. After (certainly not mixed!) initial reviews, we talk about how this film is more about a con not a heist, it's links to more modern films like John Wick, and the use of obvious artificiality on screen. Next Time The next in our heist mini-season is 1981's THIEF. Recent Media HAMILTON (2015): Lin-Manuel Miranda, Philippa Soo, Leslie Odom Jr. WE SUMMON THE DARKNESS (2019): Mark Meyers, Alexandra Daddario, Keean Johnson VFW (2019): Joe Begos, Stephen Lang, William Sadler Recommendations CLUE (1985): Jonathan Lynn, Eileen Brennan, Tim Curry SLAP SHOT (1977): George Roy Hill, Paul Newman, Strother Martin BLUE HAWAII (1961): Norman Taurog, Elvis Presley, Joan Blackman CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER (2014): Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, Chris Evans JAWS (1975): Steven Spielberg, Roy Sheider, Robert Shaw Footnotes Firstly, this gets to the root of exactly why I (Sam) love this film: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/28/movies/the-sting-robert-redford-paul-newman.html. On the subject of screen artificiality, this article is really good: https://sites.lafayette.edu/fams202-sp15/2015/01/30/artificiality-of-cinema-vs-reality-of-production/. This is more about a film that we discuss as being related to this one, our namesake; but it is a really interesting piece: https://www.altaonline.com/the-pledge-the-turn-the-prestige/. When thinking about THE STING, the last line is especially pertinent: ‘How can you be certain you saw an illusion?' This definitely isn't a Brechtian film, as Rob says, but these films are: https://www.tasteofcinema.com/2015/the-15-best-movies-influenced-by-bertolt-brechts-theater-techniques. (Ok, this link was a bit of a stretch, but I just didn't want to link to the Brecht Wiki page again...) Finally, please do leave a review for the show, so we can keep doing what we love doing! Find Us On Podchaser - https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-prestige-417454 Follow Us - https://www.twitter.com/prestigepodcast Follow Sam - https://www.twitter.com/life_academic Follow Rob - https://www.twitter.com/kaijufm Find Our Complete Archive on Kaiju.FM - https://www.kaiju.fm/the-prestige/

What's Past is Prologue: The True Tragedy of Richard III, by someone for the Queen's Men. The True Tragedy of Richard III is a a truly disturbing piece of Brechtian theatre, several centuries early, and one we'd like to do one day. Here's just the prologue/opening to tantalise and moderately annoy you. The opening is performed by Geir Madland as the ghost of Clarence, Pamela Flanagan as Truth, and Seb Ransom as Poetry. Our little recording is followed by a read through from our YouTube exploring sessions - you too can join in, updates on our website - https://beyondshakespeare.org/get-involved-exploring-in-isolation/ The contributors for the exploring session on Richard III were: Francis Cox as Poetry; Sarah Blake as Truth and Helen Good, Tamara Ritthaler, Alan Scott, Aliki Chapple, Liza Graham, Elizabeth Amisu, Ruth Evans, Simon Nader and Jitka Stollava. You can watch all the exploring sessions on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLflmEwgdfKoLqof8eUWJU5EEJXr93e56y The Beyond Shakespeare Podcast is supported by its patrons – become a patron and you get to choose the plays we work on next. Go to https://patreon.com/beyondshakespeare - or if you'd like to buy us a coffee at ko-fi https://ko-fi.com/beyondshakespeare - or if you want to give us some feedback, email us at admin@beyondshakespeare.org, follow us on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram @BeyondShakes or go to our website: https://beyondshakespeare.org (https://beyondshakespeare.org/) The episode is hosted and produced by Robert Crighton. Additional sound effects from the wonderful people at http://www.freesfx.co.uk (http://www.freesfx.co.uk/)

This episode SPOILS Danganronpa THH through Chapter 5. What's that? There was so much to unpack in this chapter that we had to split it into TWO episodes? That's right folks! Join the Ultra Hope Girls for an epic two-part analysis of Chapter 5 of THH. In this episode we discuss Makoto's fever dream, how many chickens there are in the coop, and Brechtian storytelling devices used in this chapter. Check out Hunt A Killer and use our code ULTRA20 for 20% off your first box: https://shop.huntakiller.com/pages/subscribe Learn more about us: http://ultrahopegirls.com Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ultrahopegirlspod Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/ultrahopegirlspodcast Twitter: https://twitter.com/ultra_podcast Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ultrahopegirls/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ultra-hope-girls/message

We're back with a review of ANOTHER German Television Show from Germany (Deutschland) - BABYLON BERLIN.  We'll cover the entire series and on this podcast, we examine the first 2 episodes of Season 1! We look at Rath, Charlotte, Wolter, The Armenian, Svetlana and all the rest as we break down the Weimar Republic's breakdown. Catfish, Double M and Bubba try to discover what's going on with the Russian Train Car, the scandalous photos and the Brechtian song and dance craze: Zu Asche, Zu Staub!  Join us in the Moka Efti basement for some fun! Twitter/Instagram: @DoublePHQ Facebook.com/DoublePHQ

We walk through Watchmen S1E1, "It's Summer and We're Running Out of Ice." Brechtian storytelling, not asking Robert Redford's permission, and Don Johnson's triumphant return to on-screen cocaine use. Were your thighs chafed?

SARA KATE WILKINSON gets sent to CHRISTMAS CAMP (2018) to learn: All these people are dead ... THEME ... Ready for Christmas in July ... Can't find this movie ... Normie Hallmark Facebook ... Inert but fascinating ... A delightful vision of organized cabin fever ... Adults at camp ... Not taking work seriously ... The book isn't better ... BREAK ... Plot in 30 Minutes ... Bobby Campo IRL ... Greg Evigan's daughter ... Krampus as himself ... The most goth Hallmark character to date ... The hard Hallmark script schedule ... Hyperkinetic opening scene, then constant claustrophobia ... Christmas cult brochure ... Booming Ben as Ken Howard ... David Lynch-ass blocking and set decoration ... BREAK ... Plot in 30 Minutes (Cont.) ... Meet Jeff, camp drifter ... The Christmas Camp Checklist/Certificate ... BJGSSHIC ... Ian and Susie, dumb as hell ... Mike Budenholzer and Billy Donovan ... Hainted Gail and Troop Ryan ... Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party ... Brechtian snow ... Charlie Brown-ass tree ... Snowball-target affirmations ... Met at the wharf ... Franchise camp ... First rational Hallmark quit ... Dating app, troop return ... Gail and Ryan are ghosts ... BREAK ... Spot the Angel: Krampus; Dog possessed by haints?; "Give away products"; John, Blake and Madison, magically non-white, unhelped ... Eat Your Heart Out: All-carb breakfast; turn an oven on; buffalo-wing compromise; no-surprise baby announcement ... The Hallmark Expanded Universe: Gail downloads Mingle All the Way vs. Watching Chase Taynor choke for Botown ... BREAK ... Overdetermined: No...??? ... Aimless, inconsistent but contextually logical ... The Hallmark Bechdel Test: Finally, a heroine who gets promoted and returns to the big city; Haley shows no interest in dating; blowing off a coat; she doesn't pursue him; spontaneous desire to be Mom & Dad; bringing ornaments to camp ... Great Moments in Moppetry Rating: 1 ... Rating: 2.5 ... Embracing Lynch and Gail as a haint ... Maybe they're all dead ... BREAK ... The Leftovers: Your Groupcycle class ... "A go-getter" ... Stevie Nicks Camp ... The Rebranding of the Puffin Hotel ... Pipe burst? Take your time ... Side entrance, fake entrance, deformed house, and a demon greeting elf ... Do you wanna go inside? ... Never forget WHAT, Jeb? ... Naval captain wine glasses ... Validating yourself too much through work ... Yeeaaahhhh, buuuuuddy ... Telling my boss my boss is killing me ... Merry Christmas ... • MUSIC: "Fuck You If You Don't Like Christmas," from Crudbump, by Drew Fairweather • "Laura Palmer's Theme," by Angelo Badalamenti • All other music by Chris Collingwood of Look Park and Fountains of Wayne, except: "Orchestral Sports Theme" by Chris Collingwood and Rick Murnane

Today on Sneople at the Movies, Matty and Helena go deep diving into everyone's favorite Disneyland ride turned movie franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean. They talk about "embarrassing" favorite movies, lay out theories about what liking Legolas versus Will Turner says about you, and talk about James Norrington a completely average amount. They also both wrote whole essays about costuming and scripting, respectively, and do get very very excited about them. They also talk about the worth of art and Brechtian theater, because if anyone could find a way to go from pirate movie to that, it's the Sneople.

This week we conclude our Baz Luhrmann season with his most recent film, 2013's THE GREAT GATSBY. We have disparate opinions on this — and differing levels of familiarity with the story — but then we move onto a discussion of the movie's presentation of different ideas about wealth, concepts of class and race on-screen in various countries, and the extent to which the film works as a presentation of the very social dislocation that is its subject. Next Week Next week we begin our Ben Wheatley season with his 2009 film DOWN TERRACE — find it here: https://www.amazon.co. uk/Down-Terrace-Julia-Deakin/ dp/B00FYO0A0W. This Week's Media R.I.P.D. (2013): Robert Schwentke, Jeff Bridges, Ryan Reynolds DEADPOOL 2 (2018): David Leitch, Ryan Reynolds, Josh Broli Recommendations GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002): Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS (2017): Luc Besson, Dane DeHaan, Cara Delivigne THE DEPARTED (2006): Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon THE ICE STORM (1997): Ang Lee, Kevin Kline, Joan Allen Footnotes For more on the original 1925 novel, see here: https://en.m.wikipedia. org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby. As a reminder of the Brechtian separation we were talking about with ROMEO + JULIET the other week, there's this: https://en.m.wikipedia. org/wiki/Separation_of_the_ elements. Here are articles on ideas of dramatic archetypes and dramatic dislocation: http:// dramaticapedia.com/2012/08/17/ the-8-archetypal-characters-2 and http://tvtropes.org/ pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ DramaticDislocation. This book is good on twentieth-century history, including The Great Depression and The American Dream: https://books.google. co.uk/books/about/America_in_ the_Twentieth_Century.html?id= sJ2KPwAACAAJ&redir_esc=y. And this is good on outsiders in US history: https://books.google. co.uk/books/about/Deportation_ Nation.html?id=irgpGACppy0C& redir_esc=y. Finally, Sam mentions THE BIRTH OF A NATION; if you really want to depress yourself, check out the 1915 original (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/ wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation) or the 2016 remake (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/ wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation_( 2016_film)).

Our next foray into Luhrmann territory is his version of the 16th-century play: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S ROMEO + JULIET (1996). Sam goes off on one about one of his pet topics, and we take things further by discussing the playful and inventive qualities of the play brought out by Luhrmann — along with his innovative use of pop culture and the art of the soundtrack.Next WeekThe next Baz Luhrmann film sees us jumping into the next decade, with AUSTRALIA (2008), available here: https://www.amazon.com/Australia-Shea-Adams/dp/B001UG56ES.This Week's MediaQ — THE WINGED SERPENT (1982): Larry Cohen, Michael Moriarty, Candy ClarkBROEN IIII (2018): Hans Rosenfeldt, Sofia Helin, Kim BodniaRecommendations THE USUAL SUSPECTS (1995): Bryan Singer, Kevin Spacey, Gabriel Byrne DANGEROUS MINDS (1995): John N. Smith, Michelle Pfeiffer, George DzundzaBROKEN ARROW (1996): John Woo, John Travolta, Christian SlaterACROSS THE UNIVERSE (2007): Julie Taymor, Evan Rachel Wood, FootnotesYou can get a general overview of the storyline here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_and_Juliet (and compare the film version here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_%2B_Juliet]). Shakespeare's primary sources were a 1562 Arthur Brooke poem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragical_History_of_Romeus_and_Juliet) and a prose work, published later in the 1560s by William Painter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Painter_(author)). Rob mentions Bertolt Brecht (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertolt_Brecht) as a touchstone for the opening presentation of the drama; for more on Brechtian stage mechanics, see here: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/documents/innervate/09-10/0910jonesebrecht.pdf. Rob refers to ‘smash cuts' a couple of times — if, like Sam, you felt you needed to look this up, then this may help: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SmashCut. We discuss long takes towards the end, in relation to the Mantua scenes of Romeo's boredom; here are a few good comparators: http://www.indiewire.com/2014/03/ranking-the-20-greatest-most-celebrated-long-takes-87699. Finally this Q&A has some good ideas on the ‘soundtrack v score' idea that we start to mention at the end of today's episode: https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/26376/what-is-the-difference-between-a-movies-soundtrack-and-its-score.

Palmer is a singer, songwriter, musician, author and performance artist with an experimental bent. Beginning her career as one half of the beloved “Brechtian punk cabaret” duo Dresden Dolls, she embarked on a solo career in 2007 releasing acclaimed solo albums and collaborations with Ben Read More

Movie Meltdown - Episode 425 This is an episode years in the making... we sit down for not only a group discussion of Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man!, but we also talk with the star of the movie – MALCOLM McDOWELL! We get his thoughts on this often over-looked film as well as his role in creating the project and his relationship with the director. Plus we feature a bonus segment with one of the co-stars of the film Jeremy Bulloch (aka Boba Fett). And as we finally come to terms with just how you lose the spirit of life, we also mention... Ladybird, The Florida Project, Easy, Mother!, Judex, The Boxtrolls, If…, Alan Price, Greta Gerwig, Whiplash, the aspect ratio set wrong, If…, movies should be more like American short stories, Patton Oswalt, Holy Mountain, it’s a wonder my wife hasn’t murdered me, Brooklyn, trash on the streets, majestic feel… picaresque quality, trying to interpret a dream, the word spiffy…, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, after we won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Robert McKee, it’s creating this unnatural look, Jerry Maguire kicked you right out, so personal and so dense, Putney Swope, Ghost World, fictional brothers, a city of zero waste people, Voltaire's Candide… Heaven is my Destination by Thornton Wilder and Kafka's Amerika, I Heart Huckabees, I feel like he ruined a whole generation of screenwriters, it’s a spectrum of guys, it’s sort of that first short story everybody writes, the It Follows toothpaste, Willem Dafoe, people used to say my name with three syllables, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, taking on different aspects of things he’s shoved into, Peter Greenaway, just a voyeur, The President's Analyst, a blunt-faced British guy… with wry expressions, Terry Gilliam, stylistic for the sake of it, Philip Stone, the role of you, Mike Birbiglia did that one time at a La Quinta hotel, he was teaching ballroom dance to dwarf inner city kids, you’re not lost in the dream of it, Monty Python films, this weird hierarchy of society based on the color hat you wear… and cheese tasting, it’s almost like too much my kind of thing… for me, he’s like the human sloth, Ramsay Bolton, a passive observer, a half-human half-pig… dinosaur, the old American hobo symbol for crazy kids, encoded meaning, our day-to-day lives are just filled with absurdity, Warren Clarke, I had lots of strange things going through my mind, seeing a different perception, Don’t Look Back, it’s a document of the process of making a movie, Ken Russell, what a weird world, you can have tea but you’ve gotta pay me for the biscuits, the gold shiny suit and post-apocalyptic world, after my break-up with the movies, getting performances out of non-actors, his voice always reminds me of wearing a shirt that’s just slightly too small, Never Apologize, a totem for you to react through, are pigs just fleshy dinosaurs, we are very fortunate, detritus, Brechtian artifice and alternate egos. Spoiler Alert: Full spoilers for the 1973 film O Lucky Man!, so watch it before you listen. “…that scene, that and a couple of others, you just stop and you’re like - ‘What the hell am I watching? Like this is… so bizarre.' "

One of the early Oscar contenders, this film has been doing the festival rounds for a while and garnered decent critical buzz. We were slightly concerned about its ostensible themes of abuse, and it’s experimental Brechtian vibe, but were intrigued nonetheless.

At your next pub quiz, when asked to name a Whoopi Goldberg movie that features Donald J. Trump, you'll have the answer! THE ASSOCIATE is a 1996 satirical comedy of finance and feminism in which the Whoopster launches a one-woman campaign to break into the world of Wall Street (with help from spunky secretary Dianne Weist). This Clinton-era curiosity was woke before woke... sort of. You see, this film's version of taking down the patriarchy involves layering its heroine in a mask of (Caucasian) latex to pose as a fictitious white male titan of industry: the aptly - and repetitively - named Robert Cutty. (What was that name?? Cutty. Cutty? CUTTY!) There is probably a brilliant Brechtian bouillabaisse to be made from these ingredients, laced with a hearty helping of identity politics, but this earnestly flat-footed film is not it. Instead, it's Simone de Beauvoir meets Mrs. Doubtfire as the very real structures of institutional sexism serve as the backdrop for a gender-bending so-called romp. And they say the name "Cutty"...A LOT!! Part 2 of 3 Clips from the film presented according to fair use policy. Podcast Theme: "Pipeline" by CyberSDF (https://soundcloud.com/cybersdf/tracks).

In this episode, the Arts Report covers the spooky and the scintillating with horrifying events both real and imagined. Check out the Foreclosure Follies, a Brechtian cabaret about the 2008 worldwide economic crisis; The Rio's screenings of Rocky Horror and Phantom of the Paradise; local UBC events including UBC AMS' #SCREAM party; Early Music Vancouver (EMV) presents Monteverdi's Orfeo, an opera about Orpheus and Eurydice, and Pacific Theatre's The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh. Hosted by Ashley Park and Jake Clark.

The sound and fury: the mighty rumbles of both the Rolls Royce Merlin and the Holden 173 cubic inch straight-6 represent victories in the 1941 Battle of Britain and 1974 Australian family suburban mobility, respectively. And just as the farty growl of a Kingswood was the sound of childhood for us here at Better Breeders, so too was the highly toxic stench of Airfix poly cement the noxious odour of our cherished childhood. To the amazement of Benlife and Theblackdouglas, Airfix kits are still very much around and popular. Better Breeders discuss in #106 the enduring aesthetics of Airfix kits and wonder whether today's children still re-enact the Battle of Britain up at the oval on Saturday afternoons with the aid of a 'borrowed' Bic lighter and a jar of metho, as did we? Or has the age-of-screens ameliorated the urge to engage in pyrotechnics for the serotonin rush? Is this a good thing? Better Breeders have always thought the broadcast radio AM band to be a good thing. "GO! YOU GOOD THING!" is an oft heard phrase on the average Australian back porch on Saturday afternoon, accompanying the dish-licker race call on 2KY. Better Breeders do like dogs but do not condone gambling; not that we are wowsers - Benlife and Theblackdouglas have indeed been known to enjoy a Reschs DA shandy on occasion. But we prefer 2SM and 2WS over any station on the FM band. Indeed, it is Better Breeders' ambition not only to comprise programming on an AM station but also to dominate Australian radio...from the obscurity of the AM band. Hear the Better Breeders controversial and curious AM band manifesto in episode #106. Benlife has just turned 50 and Theblackdouglas is also just about to 'raise the bat' for his half-century. The existential question - to party or not to party for a 50th? - is examined at length. Who should - and should not - be on the guestlist? Exciting & inappropriate guests v obligated dullards? To have a costume party v 'smart casual' - i.e. dressing like an off duty policeman. Our two master podcasters this week also debate whether or not to revive their previously unfulfilled Australian Kraftwerk Show project as entertainment at the 50th parties. Better Breeders believe the name of their Brechtian/ bank manager-esque style band should be 'Macrame'. We invite listeners to email in if they have a better suggestion for the name. Whist such an artistic venture is a no-brainer, Better Breeders believe the perennially popular flashmob is never a good idea at a 50th birthday party. Provocative? Sure. Listeners will have to tune in to #106 to hear the reasons! As we all reach 50, do we get any younger? Clearly, no. Many of us refuse, quite rightly, to go gentle into that good night. 'Boys' weekends proliferate at our tender age as a result. In #106, Benlife and Theblackdouglas decode and elucidate the sometimes complex and confusing playground laws of the jungle for these midlife rump-sniffing symposiums. Boys toys and the evolution of former Alpha males in to Beta and even Gamma males. We told you it was tricky. We have diagrams and Excel spreadsheets. No wuckers, mate.

It's Thursday and that means Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck joins us to spotlight one of the region's thespian offerings. Today, she talks with Midday senior producer and guest host Rob Sivak about ----The Cradle Will Rock,---- a 1937 ----play in music---- written by the late Marc Blitzstein that's getting a spirited revival by Iron Crow Theatre, at the Theatre Project, now until Sunday, October 8th.Blitzstein’s pro-union, anti-capitalist musical was the first ever shut down by the federal government. It's allegorical but in-your-face indictment of capitalism and socio-political corruption -- too-familiar themes in today's news. Even as it attacks the wealthy class and the political power it unjustly wields, it also pays homage to the oppressed and the poor, and those struggling to survive. Brechtian in its bold scope and style, The Cradle Will Rock is considered by many critics to be one of the most historically significant works in American theater.The Cradle Will Rock revival by Iron Crow Theatre continues at The Theatre Project until Sunday, October 8th.

In the first of our shorter "minisode" podcasts we (randomly) throw the spotlight on one particular song - this time it's Coffee Homeground! Seán discusses the tracks origins, it's distinctive Brechtian feel, the possible influence of a very creepy short story by Roald Dahl and he also looks at how the song was realised on the live stage by Kate back in 1979.

Discuss on Reddit ➤ Support the Show ➤ Hallo kinder! We’re going further than we’ve ever gone before for our thirtieth birthday, back to pre-war Germany and Brecht and Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera.” We learn the differences between Verfremdungseffekt and Gesamtkunstwerk, talk about how torturous times can create form-changing art and reflect on how Brechtian theatre exists today. The Threepenny Opera – 1954 New York Cast Blitzstein Adaptation Amazon / iTunes / Spotify  SHOW NOTES If you’ve only ever listened to the OBC, why not try something new and listen to the RIAS Berlin Symphony Orchestra recording starring Ute Lemper? It’s Jimi’s all time favourite. Don’t tell Brecht, but you should REALLY listen to ‘Tristan und Isolde’ by Wagner if you haven’t. It’s pretty darn life changing. After that, continue you on your operatic journey and check out our musical theatre pal Patti LuPone in Brecht and Weill’s ‘The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’ and then buy the DVD. Here’s the queen of cabaret, Lotte Lenya, singing one of Jimi’s all-time favourite musical theatre numbers - ‘Pirate Jenny.’ Then have a swatch at Ute Lemper, her contemporary counterpart, doing the same in German. But if you want something completely different, check out Amanda Palmer taking her NSFW take on it! Which do you prefer? Why was Bob Dylan aroused? It’s a question we ask ourselves every day. Check out this article to find a bit about why! We’ve not heard from ‘Forbidden Broadway’ in a while, check out their inadvertent pastiche of ‘The Threepenny Opera’ in their ‘Spring Awakening’ spoof! A SMASHING QUESTION Which musical caused the events of this quote to occur:“From the outside, I’m sure it sounded like all hell had broken loose in my dressing room, which in fact it had. I was hysterical … I took to batting practice in my dressing room with a floor lamp. I swung at everything in sight — mirrors, wig stands, makeup, wardrobe, furniture, everything. Then I heaved a lamp out the second-floor window.”

What are the uncanny forces at work behind Paul Verhoeven's visceral and transgressive cinema? In anticipation of the Film Society's complete retrospective of the Dutch master's films and the U.S. release of Elle, this episode offers a comprehensive discussion of the director's audacious and eclectic career encompassing art-house Dutch films (Turkish Delight [1971], Spetters [1980]) and big-budget Hollywood productions such as Basic Instinct (1992), Total Recall (1990) and Starship Troopers (1997). In the first part of the podcast, Film Comment Digital Editor Violet Lucca sits down with a panel of Verhoeven connoisseurs, including Cinema Scope critic Adam Nayman, Film Comment Deep Cuts columnist Margaret Barton-Fumo (also the editor of a forthcoming book of interviews with Verhoeven), and Fort Buchanan director Benjamin Crotty, to tackle the controversy that lies at the core of Verhoeven's work. In the final part of the episode, Margaret Barton-Fumo speaks to Verhoeven about the uncomfortable eroticism that pervades Elle and his Brechtian influences.

The Threepenny Opera — Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 “play with music — is like an expensive desert that’s so complex and filled with flavor most people can’t quite figure out how to enjoy it. That’s how Brecht liked it. A proponent of what he called “Epic Theater,” Brecht was not interested in entertaining his audiences or allowing them to become lost in the emotions of a story. He wanted his audiences to stay a bit uncomfortable, to remain just distant enough from their feelings —and from the show they are watching — to always be thinking about how the play is being presented, what it all actually means. Therefore, I’d say that for most people, the only significant obstacle in 6th Street’s thoroughly effective and often delightful production of Threepenny Opera is that in the end, it’s still The Threepenny Opera. Staged in the larger G.K. Hardt theater, it a fascinating choice for 6th Street, where its main-stage musicals have tended, of late, toward the safe and predictable. Directed by Michael R.J, Campbell, Threepenny features thrilling singing voices, excellent musical direction by Janis Dunson Wilson, frequently brilliant staging, cooler-than-cool visual stylings, and whimsically Brechtian touches. The set, essentially a large room filled with props and costumes, resembles a theater hoarder’s paradise, and I loved those chalk-drawn signs some characters hold up from time to time, and that well-lit proscenium over the stage, chalked over with the scrawled titles of all the songs, constantly reminding us that this is, after all, just a play with music. The music, by the way, is by Kurt Weill, and includes some of his best known songs. The story is set in London in 1937, and plays like a Victorian-version of the Rocky Horror Show. It’s gleefully sexy and aberrant, and joyously contemptuous of those too sensitive and proper to sit and watch a dark, twisted, tune-filled show about the seedy underbelly of society. Ironically, the musical—based on John Gay’s 1728 “The Beggar’s Opera”—is actually (if you pay attention) all about Europe’s wealthy class of bankers and businessman, who too-often behave like crooks and murderers. Though in Threepenny Opera, we get crooks and murderers behaving like bankers and businessmen. The show’s best-known song (“The Ballad of Mack the Knife”), is presented in a gothy prelude by an accordion-playing street-singer (a first-rate Shawna Eierman), after which the plot-heavy story introduces Mr. and Mrs. Peachum (Robert Rogers & Eileen Morris, both excellent). The Peachums oversee a network of robbers and thugs, rivaled only by the vicious gang of the knife-wielding Macheath (a wonderful Jerry Lee, singing beautifully while looking like a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Gomez Addams). When Mack secretly marries the Peachum’s daughter Polly (Molly Larsen, adding yet another excellent voice to the cast), things get complicated. It seem Mack has more than one wife, and a girlfriend or two on the side. One of them, the prostitute Jenny, played powerfully by Seran Elize Flores, reluctantly collaborates with the Peachums to have Mack arrested, his eventual fate illuminated, literally, the noose hanging over the stage, occasionally lit by a spot so we don’t forget its there. The twisty tale is deliberately hard to follow (Brecht trikes again), but for venturous audiences willing to take their tea with a bit of arsenic, this energetic romp of an anti-capitalist fable is served up with enough style to keep you smiling, even as it sends you out of the theater thinking hard, and perhaps just a little unsettled. 'Threepenny Opera’ runs Thursday–Sunday through October 23 at 6th Street Playhouse. www.6thstreetplayhouse.com

Daniel, Nathan, and AJ drank a whole lotta tequila, ate a giant plate of bagel bites, and watched Road House. So here's your commentary track. There's a brief intermission in the middle where we take a break and perform a two-act Brechtian play based on the film, Nathan makes some editorial choices with his characters' portrayals. A lot of inappropriate things are said about Daniel's aunts. All in all, we think we've created an enhanced viewing experience for this film. Enjoy!

Phil Rouse decides to introduce his production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with a very peculiar sight: some slides of Elizabethan text hover above our very skilled ensemble as they are all club dancing to ‘Turn Down for What.’ It’s one of those audacious mixes of the highbrow classical and the lowbrow modern that the theatre world can never get enough of. Arturo Ui (played here by George Banders), the fictional Chicagoan crime lord, is of course Bertolt Brecht’s parodic and blatantly allegorical version of Adolf Hitler, rendered comprehensible for an American audience in 1941. Since the play took 22 years to make it to Broadway, it has only ever been performed in front of already well-versed audiences, and never as an introductory education on the history of Nazi Germany. Before they’ve even sat down, this 2016 Australian audience will already hate the infamous dictator just as much as the play’s 1963 American audience would have, but their prior knowledge of Brecht and Epic theatre will be less certain. In this production, Rouse bombards the audience with countless lines of text for the same purpose that Brecht once did: to give the audience all the facts they need to follow the allegory and understand his message, without being “distracted” by the fictional story he is telling. In contemporary theatre making this is known as heavy-handedness, but in the 1920s the idea of using theatre to shamelessly recruit people as political activists was a novel and exciting one. However, even today Rouse gets away with it by embracing this style of alienating the audience from the pathos of the story, and by having his own anti-right wing political agenda to parade around. The text on the screen and a handful of throwaway lines make it abundantly clear that Donald Trump is the politician he is truly taking aim at, with the original Hitler allegory itself becoming an allegory for a much more contemporary issue. There is also another, much more subtle comparison made between the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis, which interestingly is pulled off without the assistance of the fact slides. However, there are times when the three story levels, one literal and two allegorical, feel like they are about to crumble in and collapse on one another. It was also a questionable choice in the otherwise sound set design by Martelle Hunt to put the screen so high above the actors. Much of the opening dance sequence and character introductions will likely go unseen by audience members who are reading the opening text, and likewise, many important pieces of text shown throughout the production will go unread since there is rarely anything to direct people’s attention all the way up there. This is why Brecht would project his text at the back of the stage, so that it was always in view. Also, despite all the text, the self-aware jokes and the intentional breaking of character, there is one Brechtian technique that Rouse uses only very sparingly: bright lighting. There is a brief moment where the entire theatre is strongly illuminated and an awkward false curtain call plays out, but, for the most part, Rob Sowinski and Bryn Cullen’s lighting design is surprisingly traditional, putting the audience at a very comfortable distance and ultimately making the viewing experience too passive for this sort of material. Part of the intention of a show like this is to disorientate the audience, to pull them out of the story and keep the focus on the message, but until the very end of the play, the message within the message tends to make the space outside the story just as murky as the story itself. Fortunately though, each time both the narrative and its social significance become unstable, there are always the characters to fall back on. One of Brecht’s greatest inconsistencies was that, despite his frequent postulations on the importance of emotional distance, he had an irrepressible knack for writing vivid and endearing characters. Here we have the ruthless Ernesto Roma (Peter Paltos), Ui’s tough mentor in crime who turned a spineless common thief into a deadly rabble-rouser with the nerve to eventually kill him. In a “parable play” that draws heavily on Shakespeare, and even goes as far as flat-out copying a few scenes from Richard III, Roma, and his real life counterpart Ernst Röhm, are both the Banquo and the Lady Macbeth in Ui and Hitlers’ origin stories. Paltos not only masters his menacing presence, but, with the right makeup on, he also happens to look a lot like Laurence Olivier. Of course, the other standout characterisation here is Ui himself. Banders certainly has the right stuff and isn’t afraid to get up close and personal with the audience while in character. He consciously breaks the fourth wall in a glorious moment of theatrical self-reference and, in one scene, he impressively manages a dexterous run through the audience. Thanks to the talents of Banders, Paltos, Brecht and Rouse, the great anti-hero and his seedy keeper have a life beyond the confines of the allegories, something they probably weren’t supposed to have in theory, but in practice is really what allows this piece to work as a two-hour play. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Phil Rouse decides to introduce his production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with a very peculiar sight: some slides of Elizabethan text hover above our very skilled ensemble as they are all club dancing to ‘Turn Down for What.’ It’s one of those audacious mixes of the highbrow classical and the lowbrow modern that the theatre world can never get enough of. Arturo Ui (played here by George Banders), the fictional Chicagoan crime lord, is of course Bertolt Brecht’s parodic and blatantly allegorical version of Adolf Hitler, rendered comprehensible for an American audience in 1941. Since the play took 22 years to make it to Broadway, it has only ever been performed in front of already well-versed audiences, and never as an introductory education on the history of Nazi Germany. Before they’ve even sat down, this 2016 Australian audience will already hate the infamous dictator just as much as the play’s 1963 American audience would have, but their prior knowledge of Brecht and Epic theatre will be less certain. In this production, Rouse bombards the audience with countless lines of text for the same purpose that Brecht once did: to give the audience all the facts they need to follow the allegory and understand his message, without being “distracted” by the fictional story he is telling. In contemporary theatre making this is known as heavy-handedness, but in the 1920s the idea of using theatre to shamelessly recruit people as political activists was a novel and exciting one. However, even today Rouse gets away with it by embracing this style of alienating the audience from the pathos of the story, and by having his own anti-right wing political agenda to parade around. The text on the screen and a handful of throwaway lines make it abundantly clear that Donald Trump is the politician he is truly taking aim at, with the original Hitler allegory itself becoming an allegory for a much more contemporary issue. There is also another, much more subtle comparison made between the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis, which interestingly is pulled off without the assistance of the fact slides. However, there are times when the three story levels, one literal and two allegorical, feel like they are about to crumble in and collapse on one another. It was also a questionable choice in the otherwise sound set design by Martelle Hunt to put the screen so high above the actors. Much of the opening dance sequence and character introductions will likely go unseen by audience members who are reading the opening text, and likewise, many important pieces of text shown throughout the production will go unread since there is rarely anything to direct people’s attention all the way up there. This is why Brecht would project his text at the back of the stage, so that it was always in view. Also, despite all the text, the self-aware jokes and the intentional breaking of character, there is one Brechtian technique that Rouse uses only very sparingly: bright lighting. There is a brief moment where the entire theatre is strongly illuminated and an awkward false curtain call plays out, but, for the most part, Rob Sowinski and Bryn Cullen’s lighting design is surprisingly traditional, putting the audience at a very comfortable distance and ultimately making the viewing experience too passive for this sort of material. Part of the intention of a show like this is to disorientate the audience, to pull them out of the story and keep the focus on the message, but until the very end of the play, the message within the message tends to make the space outside the story just as murky as the story itself. Fortunately though, each time both the narrative and its social significance become unstable, there are always the characters to fall back on. One of Brecht’s greatest inconsistencies was that, despite his frequent postulations on the importance of emotional distance, he had an irrepressible knack for writing vivid and endearing characters. Here we have the ruthless Ernesto Roma (Peter Paltos), Ui’s tough mentor in crime who turned a spineless common thief into a deadly rabble-rouser with the nerve to eventually kill him. In a “parable play” that draws heavily on Shakespeare, and even goes as far as flat-out copying a few scenes from Richard III, Roma, and his real life counterpart Ernst Röhm, are both the Banquo and the Lady Macbeth in Ui and Hitlers’ origin stories. Paltos not only masters his menacing presence, but, with the right makeup on, he also happens to look a lot like Laurence Olivier. Of course, the other standout characterisation here is Ui himself. Banders certainly has the right stuff and isn’t afraid to get up close and personal with the audience while in character. He consciously breaks the fourth wall in a glorious moment of theatrical self-reference and, in one scene, he impressively manages a dexterous run through the audience. Thanks to the talents of Banders, Paltos, Brecht and Rouse, the great anti-hero and his seedy keeper have a life beyond the confines of the allegories, something they probably weren’t supposed to have in theory, but in practice is really what allows this piece to work as a two-hour play. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

In Minute 33 of The Whole Shebang, Jenny and Mike look at the rockers' reactions to Brian including some more classic British euphemisms and slurs for “gay,” the iconography of suffering and queerness in the Christian artistic image of St. Sebastian, Mandy's and Cecil's differing approaches to constructive criticism, the danger of playing tragic torch songs badly as exemplified by Judy Garland's late career, the Brechtian-style cabaret of both Brian Slade and David Bowie, and the inspirational fabulousness of Mandy's afghan coat. Find us on the web at thewholeshebangpodcast.com, and on Facebook, Twitter, and Patreon at wholeshebangpod.

Wesley's analysis of Hamilton and the act of performing history, through a Brechtian lens. Show notes and transcripts at www.obstructed-view.com. Find us on Facebook at facebook.com/obstructedviewpodcast, on Twitter @obstructed_view, on Soundcloud at soundcloud.com/obstructedview or email us at theobstructedviewpodcast@gmail.com .

The podcast that tugs the teat of popular culture until it explodes all over your face is back, and with a very special guest! This week Boo and David sit down with recording artist, performance poet, wrestling fan and podcaster Scroobius Pip to talk about all things wrestling, UFC and more. Find our what they feel about the Royal Rumble, the Raw Reunion Show and which wrestler's podcast David describes as Brechtian. email - milkingitpodcast@gmail.com twitter - @teattugger www.milkingitpodcast.com Artwork - Deano Peppers via 8oclockcomics.com Music - John Sanz Additional material by Jae Hodgkin End music by Johnny Bailey Scroobius Pip can be found at www.scroobiuspip.co.uk or @scroobiuspipyo on Twitter and his podcast Distraction Pieces can be found on iTunes, Stitcher, aCast or via his website. (c) Milking It Productions 2015

After "Melancholia"(2011), the whole art house circuit wondered what Lars Von Trier would do next. Ousted from Cannes for life, a festival where he had previously been a darling for fifteen years.  He has returned with a massive project, so much that he has divided the story into two, 2 hour films.  "Nymphomaniac Vol. 1" details the formative sexual years of a woman named Joe, as she describes them to Seligman, a gentleman who rescues her from the street after a beating.  Charlotte Gainsbourg plays the mature Joe, who explicitly recounts her sundry past to the intellectual, attentive character Seligman, played by Stellan Skarsgard.  Joe's flashbacks come to life in pornographic detail as the viewer is privy to her compulsive, desultory sexual experiments.  "Nymphomaniac Vol. 1" is bleak, Brechtian and brusque.  Wait til we get to "Vol. 2" You can download the podcast here by right-clicking on the hypertext link and choosing "save as", or you can use the convenient player located below:If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file here

The Overthinkers tackle “The Expendables 2” and commemorate the birthday of Jonathan Ke Quan, aka “Short Round” from “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” Brechtian analysis and roundhouse kicks abound. Episode 216: Happy Birthday, Short Round originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

This video focuses on a Brechtian approach to the character of Ophelia. Created by Katie Mitchell, curated by Kate Bailey for the V&A in partnership with the National Theatre.

The Global Contemporary: Kunstwelten nach 1989 | Symposium 09/16/2011 - 09/19/2011 The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds After 1989 The Tower: A Songspiel, 2010 Chto delat? [English: What is to be done?] sees itself as a platform that aims at the synthesis of political theory, art, and activism. The group’s name refers to the novel of the same title by Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1863), which became a source of inspiration for revolutionary groups and leftist intelligentsia in Russia. Like Chernyshevsky, Chto delat? rejects “art for art’s sake” and the commodification of art, and sees the goal of art in the transformation of reality itself. The Tower: A Songspiel is the final part of a trilogy of socially engaged musicals. It is a reflection on a real conflict over the construction of the Okhta Center in Saint Petersburg, a 403 meters high skyscraper, where Gazprom planned to house its headquarters. The new structure would have changed the appearance of the city forever, introducing a new dominant point in the skyline – a symbol of a new modernized Russia. The film is staged as a confrontation of different social and age groups with the “power lobby” over the question of constructing a corporate tower. The power of the lobby group as well as the autonomy of the community turn out to be fictitious, since in the end the lobby is dismissed and the chorus strangled by the tentacles of the authorities. The action develops through direct appeals by the representatives of power to the community-chorus and the viewer. The enactment follows the principles of Brechtian epic theater and aims at provoking rational self-reflection and developing a critical perspective in the viewer so that he comes to recognize social injustice and manipulation. (DM) /// The Tower: A Songspiel, 2010 Chto delat? [Was tun?] versteht sich als eine Plattform, die mit ihren Arbeiten politische Theorie, Kunst sowie politisches und soziales Engagement zusammenführt. Der Name der Gruppe geht auf den gleichnamigen Roman von Nikolai Tschernyschewski (1863) zurück, der den revolutionären Gruppierungen und der linken Intelligenzija in Russland als Inspirationsquelle diente. Wie Tschernyschewski lehnt Chto delat? das Konzept einer „Kunst um der Kunst willen“ ebenso ab wie die Kommodifizierung der Kunst und sieht als deren Ziel die Verwandlung der Realität selbst. The Tower: A Songspiel ist der letzte Teil einer Trilogie von sozialkritischen Musicals. Es thematisiert den realen Konflikt um den Bau des Okhta Center in St. Petersburg, eines 403 Meter hohen Turms, in dem Gazprom seine Hauptgeschäftsstelle einrichten wollte. Der Wolkenkratzer hätte das Stadtbild maßgeblich verändert und einen alles beherrschenden Blickfang in der Skyline dargestellt – ein Symbol des neuen, modernisierten Russlands. Der Film dokumentiert und inszeniert die Auseinandersetzung verschiedener sozialer Gruppen beziehungsweise unterschiedlicher Altersgruppen mit der „Lobby der Macht“ um den Bau des Konzernturms. Letztlich aber erweist sich die Macht der Lobbyisten als ebenso fiktiv wie die Autonomie der Bevölkerung, denn zum Schluss wird die Lobby entlassen und der Chor von den Greifarmen der Behörden erstickt. Die Handlung wird durch direkte Appelle der Stellvertreter der Macht an den die Einwohnergemeinschaft repräsentierenden Chor und an die Zuschauer vorangetrieben. Die Aufführungspraxis lehnt sich an das epische Theater Brechts an und soll bei den Betrachterinnen und Betrachtern eine rationale Selbstreflexion auslösen und ihre kritische Perspektive stärken, um sie zu befähigen, soziale Ungerechtigkeiten und gesellschaftliche Manipulationen als solche zu erkennen. (DM)

Art is not a mirror with which to reflect reality but a hammer with which to shape it.

This episode of Awesomed By Comics is brought to you by photos of local singles who are looking for you, they sure are! Tons of stuff this week, from cosmic warring to divine magic to Brechtian thrills to animals in lingerie. The flatness of Barry Allen's return is made up for by the debut of a new Power Girl series (TA-DOW), and we learn we're not quite nerdy enough for some comic book humor but that's what the googles are for.