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sol1056 · 6 years

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three anons: what the hell was all that in S7

Picking out the three that are most to the point for this answer, but I’ve got another dozen or so that overlap. Not sure I’ll have time/energy to answer the rest individually, so hopefully this meta will be sufficient.

I mean it could be that they had different execs back then who were better at their jobs and kept Shiro around. No one disliked black paladin Shiro, even the DotU fans were ok with it, and the writing in s1-2 was mostly very good. Changing all that was a bad idea. I would have left on the spot if Shiro died or was benched, like now, I'm only around for closure. Maybe they were different execs with this decision & the EPs leaped at the chance. Well, we know who's also gonna be in trouble if that's the case.

With your theory on how storyboards were reused and characters shuffled around for cost cutting, might this not also partly explain the Adam flashback scene and how it was staged? I mean, they were originally supposed to be roommates and the scene was meant to appear in season 2 but got cut. What if they just reused the storyboard (or even animation, if it was already mostly done) the way it was and then just changed the dialogue? This could explain the lack of intimacy in the staging, too. Ezor and Zethrids interactions were more openly intimate maybe not (just) because they‘re villains who die immediately after, but because the decision to make them an item came before storyboarding was done, so the staging is more suggestive. I mean, if you think Shiro was mostly pasted in in the first half of s7, that might make sense.

If cost was the issue and they already had the black paladin Shiro version written, and got the greenlight to change it to Keith then things don't add up. Because they changed it once more! Which could have been avoided if they stuck to the Shiro one. And it goes without saying it would be better written to follow canon instead of the mess we got, like, I cant imagine this NOT discussed. So if it wouldn't be cost effective to change it again for Keith and it would be badly written, why did it happen?

Behind the cut: the most likely chronology of revisions, the clues in S7 as to its original form, and what this means for S8 and the Black Paladin position.

This is everything I’ve been able to figure out between interviews, podcasts, tweets, plus researching the industry and a few reality-checks with friends more familiar. As always, any mistakes are my own.

version 0: "five teenagers"

This would’ve been the first pitch after getting the green light, and probably only a loose synopsis, with just the pilot given a rough storyboard. A post-apocalyptic Earth conquered by the Galra, who are seeking Blue. The execs rejected JDS' mechanism for the discovery of Blue, in favor of simply having Keith ‘sense’ Blue. The execs also rejected the idea that Shiro would die only a few episodes in. This summary seems to be the basis of the "five teenagers" part of the teaser.

version A: "shiro kicks the bucket"

Timelines would've dictated moving onto an outline pretty quickly, detailed down to the episode level, including bits of dialogue, motifs, turning points or emotional beats. In this revision, Shiro dies/leaves at the end of S2 and does not return. This is the “originally we wanted him to kick the bucket” version, which the execs rejected.

version B: "shiro goes away for awhile"

If I'm interpreting the hints correctly, the "does Shiro die or not" question got tossed back and forth all the way into S1/S2 pre-production. Rather than rearrange everything, the easiest fix would've been to leave most of the story intact and write only a new ending where Shiro returns. The execs reject this rewrite, saying Shiro can’t be gone that long. This is the “we tried to just have him gone for awhile, but the execs said he had to come back sooner” version.

version C: "enter the clone"

Again, easiest fix is to insert Shiro/Kuron, remove Keith, and reverse that just before Shiro's return in version B. This impacts only the middle seasons (S3-S6); the clone compromise satisfies the execs. Kuron's characterization makes a lot more sense if it’s Keith, in visuals (ie Kuron leaning against the wall in Keith fashion), dialogue (fighting with Lance), and action (leaving without consulting the team). It's also why no one mentions Keith's absence. Because in the original version A, Keith was standing right there.

version D: "wtf is going on", aka Season 7

When JDS mentions having a full season written with Shiro as Black Paladin, it didn't make sense how they'd have a script and not use it. With @ptw30's visual detective work, I think I may've figured it out.

Technical notes: first scripts are all written for a season, then voices are recorded, and then the combined script+recording is used to storyboard. Production seasons are 26-episodes, independent of actual broadcast seasons; VA may be recording scenes across two 13-episode seasons completely out of order, since the recording schedule's going to be based on who's available, not chronology of the file numbers. The biggest staff changes are usually in April ('staffing season') when new shows get the greenlight and start sharking around to catch writers, designers, directors, etc.

In March of this year, S5 was released. At least some of the storyboarders were released in time for staffing season; in April, Hedrick moves to a new project. With S7/S8 being unchanged since version B, I suspect Hedrick delivered the scripts for S7 and S8 by winter of last year, at latest. Even that would be tight, since that's expecting animation to deliver 26 episodes in an 8-month timeframe. [edit: probably delivered much earlier, given the studio leaks show images we can recognize from S7/S8, so some amount of these seasons were in production by then.]

In June, S6 dropped, and a week later, Hamilton was announced as the new story editor via the Lets Voltron podcast. With the lead time required in production, there doesn't seem to be any reason to even need a story editor, at this point. All the pre-production work should be done.

In August, S7 dropped. Hedrick's editor credit is only for the first half of the season; Hamilton gets it for the second half. That means the last six episodes were written after Hedrick's departure. (May Chan's S2 script was reused in part, and she gains a belated co-writing script credit for that. Hedrick should've received the same; it's standard.)

Let's recap a few things we know (and a few we can intuit) about S7:

The season was already written with Shiro returning as Black Paladin, possibly also recorded and storyboarded.

S6 reversed the S4-S5 trend, lending strength to exec arguments that Shiro is necessary in the story.

After S6 dropped, the EPs said the wolf's name was a spoiler. See this post from @pwt30; tl;dr is that perhaps the EPs intended the wolf to be Shiro's spirit.

Despite Shiro's return, he's absent for the majority of the first half; when he is present, he barely speaks a half-dozen words, and none are plot-relevant. See @ptw30's post for more details.

There's a glaring incontinuity when Allura says the paladin armor protected the team, yet Shiro is frozen with the other non-paladins despite wearing armor.

Keith never offers for Shiro to pilot, nor mentions it, nor even seems to consider it an issue.

Not everything dovetails since I don't have the full picture, but here's my theory: S7 was originally outlined with Shiro's spirit in the wolf, rather than Black. I have no idea when/how JDS would've thought up the CA:WS parallels for his sole writing credit, but Shiro's "I died" and Lotor's psychotic breakdown are squeezed into S6E6, which was written by Josh Hamilton, Hedrick's later replacement. The only other Shiro-in-Black point is a few minutes at the end of S6's final episode. Shifting from Shiro-in-wolf to Shiro-in-Black really only affects one episode, with a bit of editing for another.

Anyway, S6 ends version C, and we segue to version B. For the first half of S7, the clone's body may have been in stasis while the team traveled through its various non-adventures. The episode we now know as S7E1 may have been the mid-point, with about six episodes of Shiro being unconcious. After watching the numbers drop from S3 to S6, the execs may've rejected another six episodes of where-is-Shiro and insisted he come back ASAP.

S7 only has two episodes that must be in order; the rest are pretty rearrangeable. All they had to do was insert Shiro into the background and record a few lines. (Several lines are pure voice-over, which also saves cost/time by not needing to animate moving mouth.) But the moved episode is only his memory/awakening, and the logical next episode would be Shiro's reconnection, and the rest of the season would roll from there. Without moving the entire second half of the season to the start, moving only his awakening episode would mean Shiro does nothing for 5-6 episodes and then abruptly reconnects.

In a recent interview, JDS said at first the execs weren't enthused until JDS talked up the new mecha they'd give Shiro to captain. Honestly, there's no way JDS got to be EP without giving a really good pitch, but there may've been another element to his argument: nostalgia. The EPs seem certain everyone suffers from their same nostalgia dementia, which if you do, then you probably have been waiting for any glimpse of that og!Keith. If Shiro returns at the start of S7, then Keith's time in Black has been limited to a few disastrous episodes in S3, and a single big battle in S6. The beginning of S7 is the only time we'd ever see the Voltron84 formation working as a unified team, and returning Shiro too soon would defeat the whole purpose of showing how the team has grown in his absence.

The solution seems to have been to remove Shiro's reconnection completely, and keep Keith in Black. That would mean re-recording Shiro's lines from the midpoint onward, and editing in Keith over Shiro. The savings would be that only half the seaon would have to be reworked, not all. The loose end of the space wolf --- an artifact of version B --- was left in place.

What I'm not sure of is whether the following are significant enough changes to warrant removing Hedrick's name and replacing it with Hamilton's. It could be, if supervising the revision process is enough to override the previous credits. I have no idea about that part of the industry, and it's the kind of edge case you're just not going to find a lot of blog posts about, so if you know, tell me. Otherwise, your guess is as good as mine.

Anyway, this would've meant Shiro was switched in for Allura, Allura was put back in a lion, and Keith was switched in for Shiro. This would explain why Shiro speaks as the leader of Voltron despite no longer being a paladin, and the uneasy sensations a lot of people got about the characterizations. It was most striking in the last three episodes: Shiro felt like Allura v2, while Keith felt like Shiro v2. And that further, the Altean-Earthian ship just 'lighting up' for Shiro --- and becoming that oversized white mecha --- may've meant as Allura's fourth (fifth?) deus ex machina.

I'd be willing to bet that mid-battle, Allura repeated her stunt from the end of S2, heading out to destroy Sendak's crystal by herself. She wouldn't need Sam to hack her brain, and then we'd also have a call back to when she got knocked down by the crystal-ball thing on Naxzela. If she was the one meant to go toe-to-toe with Sendak, that would explain the bizarre neutrality of Sendak's words --- he says nothing personal to Shiro, at all --- and the even more bizarre silence on Shiro's part. Allura's words wouldn't fit Shiro, so he's silent.

And lastly, it'd mean that the one leaping out of Black to cut down Sendak wouldn't have been Keith. It would've been Shiro.

Where would the story go from here?

If I look at the events of S7, the first half is terribly disjointed, really. If Shiro was supposed to wake at the midpoint, an episode (or two) is missing. One for him to reconnect with Black, and a second that would provide some minor conflict to settle him back into position. Those two episodes were likely replaced with the unexpected and frankly over-told two-parter of the Earth flashbacks.

Two problems with that, one technical, one structural.

First, the flashback two-parter has a lot of moving parts. Brand-new designs, characters, and backdrops. It's far too elaborate to be done in an ultra-compressed timeframe, not without several heart attacks and therapy bills on the part of the animation staff. (Plus, the US-based storyboarding team is already downsized, so fewer hands to do the work.)

Second, it doesn't make a lot of structural sense, especially against the big revelations in S6 of an existing Altean colony. Within the story, there's no reason to halt everything and travel across the universe to take however long to build a new castle, when the Altean colony question is far more pressing. Returning to earth also violates the structure, because it's really just a standard milieu: start on earth, head out to have adventures, and return home at the end.

But here, they're returning home and then possibly leaving again. That's just... a rather peculiar and imbalanced way to do it. It doesn't help that doing so means literally telling Romelle her people are just gonna have to rot, the paladins are certain they need the castle more. Why would you take one of the more compelling storylines you've come up with, only to background it again, and wreck the traditional bookending milieu structure at the same time? Especially if that means coming up with major set-pieces and brand-new designs in the space of several months, after a chunk of your core staff are already onto other things.

I think those two flashback episodes -- and the rewritten finale episodes --- may've been cribbed from S8. In other words, the second half of S7 was the original end of S8. That would mean repurposing already-created storyboards and animation artifacts, so there's a huge time savings there (not counting the need to re-record voices and edit the visuals to match the changed-around parts).

[note: if there’s anywhere you want to frontload introductions for the spin-off, it’d be in the final season, not the penultimate season. Here it feels like a big honking distraction, rather than an organic segue into the next iteration.]

That change necessitated that utterly bizarro mecha that appeared out of nowhere with the most ridiculously impeccable timing. There needed to be a reason to pull the team back out to space to deal with Haggar and/or the alt-Alteans and/or Lotor or whomever else it turns out to be.

So... where we go from here depends on when S8 gets released, because that’ll tell us how much they did (or did not) edit the episodes. Another clue will be whose name gets listed as head editor for an episode; if we see Hedrick’s name reappear at the top, we’ll know we’re dealing with episodes that are enough unrevised to qualify as being Hedrick-edited, that it’s a version B episode.

My expectation? They’ll move Shiro’s reconnection to the first part of S8, and add an episode or edit pieces of another, to blend it into what would’ve been the first half of S8 (probably with filler to mask the gap). Then add an episode to segue into the version B finale of S7, where we’d end with the original VLD lineup. With the time needed for animation, that’d be the easiest (if potentially awkward) way to repurpose as much as possible of existing artifacts.

If we don’t get S8 in the next 1-2 months, though, all bets are off, and there’s a much greater possibility that the entire final season is being redone from scratch. I’d expect Keith to stay in Black, in that case, but I’m always willing to be pleasantly surprised.

edited to add: see this followup for another detail that supports the reversed-seasons theory

#vld #voltron #analysis #story structure #television production #come for the sugar stay for the salt #sol thinks about stuff

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ditty-diego · 5 years

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Neztalk

An interview with Ken Sharp, 1989

In March, Michael Nesmith spent a couple weeks in New York City doing a series of interviews with the media to promote the New York opening of his latest production, “Tapeheads”. Besides promoting “Tapeheads”, Michael is having one of his most visible, high-profile years in a long, long time, with the recent release of a video and album and the impending release of another album and the “Overview” video magazine. Rock radio reporter (and MBF member) Ken Sharp had the opportunity to interview Michael and he shares that interview with us here:

KS: I know you’re asked this question all the time, so let’s get it out of the way right off. When are you going to get back together with … The First National Band?

MN: Well, yeah, that’s the most common question that I’m asked actually. Most people come up to me and say, “Say, whatever happened to the other guys?” and I know immediately that they’re talking about John London and Red Rhodes and John Ware. I mean, who else would they be talking about?

KS: What is Red Rhodes up to, by the way?

MN: Well, you know, I’ve lost contact with all those guys. John London moved back to Teas. He’s working, I think, in the real estate business or something and Red Rhodes I haven’t talked to. I assume that he still plays. I got a call from one of his family — his ex-sister-in-law — the other day and I called her back and she left the wrong number so I wasn’t able to get in touch with her. And John Ware, I think, moved to Nashville and is working in the radio business in Nashville.

KS: April 5 marks the release of “Nezmusic” …

MN: Oh, really? Is that when it’s coming out?

KS: I think it is. I was curious, some of this stuff came out in different forms, but why now? What was the idea behind compiling it? Were there a lot of requests or what?

MN: Yeah, well, it was just a combination of requests. I get a lot of fan mail from the Monkees fan clubs and stuff. And almost every single letter requests for me to put out the old music. What I did was I went back to the archives and over the years I’ve made a couple of dozen albums, I guess, and the first ten that I made are still under the auspices of RCA, but there were about 4 or 5 that I made subsequent to that beginning with a record called “The Prison”. So Harold Bronson over at Rhino Records called me up and he says, “let’s put out, let’s go back and re-license…” That’s kind of their business, you know, And I said, “Harold, I don’t think anybody’s gonna play any of my records.” And he says, “Well, we specialize in marketing records that don’t get played.” So I compiled two LP’s. One was an LP which was to be songs from the country sort of era, with the First, Second, Third National Bands, and the second which was to include things off “Radio Engine” and “Infinite Rider” but also half a dozen songs that I wrote for a movie called “Video Ranch”. And divided them up into “The Older Stuff” which was the country stuff and “The Newer Stuff”. So “The Newer Stuff” was the only thing we were able to get out because we had licensing problems on “The Older Stuff”. So we could only get one of them out. And when I put together “The Newer Stuff” I realized that I had music videos on seven or eight of them and I had also been getting a lot of requests to combine all those music videos on one videocassette, so I put it together and called it “Nezmusic”.

KS: Wasn’t “Video Ranch” called something different? “Neon” something?

MN: “Neon Ruby”.

KS: Why was that project not completed?

MN: Well, the biggest reason is that I was not able to interest a distributor in releasing it. That’s the biggest reason. Had I been able to do that it would have gone forward. The creative elements were there, but it’s a movie musical and, like “Tapeheads”, these things are tough. Number one, they’re very hard to do creatively and, number two, they’re hard to market. However, I think we’re about to enter into the time when we’re going to see more and more of those, so keep your fingers crossed. Maybe “Video Ranch” will come out. (laughs)

KS: It’s nice to see unreleased tracks like “Tanya” and “Formosa Diner” will see the light of day.

MN: Did you get a pre-copy of this?

KS: No, I didn’t.

MN: Did you see the liner notes, or what?

KS: No, I’m a pretty big fan, besides what I do for a living, so I did a lot of research.

MN: Sounds like you’ve been on Lexus Nexus or one of those online services.

KS: Will you release any videos for the Rhino early material? Something like “Joanne” that you never did a video for to promote it?

MN: Till you said it I hadn’t thought of it. Maybe it’s a good idea. I don’t know. Do you think it would be a good idea to go back and do old songs? Creatively, do you really? I don’t know, because I think of the video as a form and there is such a thing as an audio-only record. Can you imagine a video of “Joanne”, takes a picture of a beautiful woman in a filmy dress living in a house by a pond? It starts to get kind of dumb. (laughs) The emotion it evokes is different. When I wrote “Rio” I really had a picture in mind, although I didn’t realize at the time that it was gonna father an entire way of life, but I did sort of have in mind that this would make something nice to put on film. Then when Island asked me to make a promotional clip to send overseas and I did it, you know, it all married up nicely. But to go bac and do it … maybe I’ll write some stuff. Best I should do “Video Ranch”, I think.

KS: Do you still write songs? Do you still play the guitar.

MN: Yeah. Not a lot, but I still do it.

KS: Will we see new material from you? Not as an audio album, but as a combination?

MN: Yeah, I’d do that.

KS: There is a demand. I’d love to hear it and so would a lot of other people.

MN: You know, the biggest problem that I have, number one, is that nobody will play these records on the air. I won’t get any airplay. So without airplay making a market for this, it’s very hard and unless you have a Rhino Records behind it that is willing to commit to marketing the record without airplay, you’re in trouble. And also when you’re writing to this kind of form it’s very expensive and kind of a big uphill battle to do unless you really feel like you got some sort of a built-in market.

KS: Don’t you thin country radio stations would embrace your music?

MN: Well, I don’t know. We live in the days of Randy Travis and Dwight Yokum. I don’t think so. I think there’s a different mindset afoot out there.

KS: I hope it still doesn’t dissuade you from making new music.

MN: Maybe I’ll be some young Dwight Yokum’s Buck Owens, how’s that? (laughs)

KS: In 1979 you felt the audio end of schemes was going to be obsolete and in 1982 you closed the record division of Pacific Arts.

MN: Was it ’82? I thought it was earlier than that. Well, that sounds about right.

KS: Now ten years later with CD’s and DAT’s here and music sales at an all-time high, how do you account for that and did that enter in your decision to work with Rhino on releasing stuff.

MN: Well, no, it’s an anomalous bulge. It doesn’t mean that there’s a rebirth of audio-only stuff. I mean, I think you have to look at your own lifestyle and find out, you know, what do you do more of? Do you watch more television or do you listen to more radio? That varies from person to person, but I’ll bet if you took a national statistical average you’d find more people watch more television than they listen to radio. Simple. OK, start with that as a point of departure. Why did CD’s suddenly take off? Well, number one, it was exceptional sound quality. Number two, it was a very accessible and easy user-friendly medium, and, number three, you’re able to go back and hear stuff that you’d loved for a period of time but you’d basically worn your records out. So you drew from a huge catalog, a great library of material with people who were replenishing and restocking their early audio times. But these are people who grew up on audio. Now let’s shift to the 9-year-old, to the 8-year-old who is going to be 20 in the year 2000. What kind of equipment will this person have? Will they have a CD? Yes. What can a CD do that an audio record can’t? Well, it can play pictures. You’re seeing go into place the technological base for this video revolution and I still stand by my original statement that the audio medium is going to diminish and diminish and diminish and diminish until audio-only will occupy a very small part of the overall — what do you want to call it — entertainment spectrum. It’s like network television. Network television, look at the shrinking share. Are you familiar with these statistics?

KS: Go ahead, please.

MN: Well, I’m not so familiar with them that I can quote them with complete accuracy, but it’s something to the degree that it’s gone from a 93% share in the mid-‘70’s or early ‘70’s of the total homes using television to somewhere around 60% and one point represents millions of people. But you have to look at that they’ve lost, what, thirty, forty MILLION viewers? They’ve lost it. You also have to look at what videocassette has done to the redefinition of prime time television. Videocassettes are prime time television. And what it says is prime time television is not at 9:00. Prime time television is 2:31 in the morning, it’s 6:17 in the evening, it’s 12:11 in the afternoon, it’s whenever the consumer wants to put the videocassette in and watch it. Now you have an interested consumer, aware of what they’re watching with a high desire to view. That’s prime time television and videocassettes have simply robbed the network television market. Those are the sort of changes that you can’t overlook when you try to make a sense of what’s gonna come in the future, And I think you’re going to find this in the audio/video or video music or whatever name you want to put on it. I don’t know what you could call it. And all the things that are going into place now is not the resurgence of the audio-only medium but basically the audio-only medium riding the technological curve of the present day and with the music getting a nice free ride on this. When it’s all said and done, these are video discs.

KS: Back to “Nezmusic”…on a song like “Cruisin’ “, did you have the idea for the video in mind and then come up with the song or did you write the song first and then create a video around that?

MN: Well, with “Cruisin’ “ the video was very much in mind and all of the songs since then have the pictures very much in mind and try to make them both work together.

KS: Do you enjoy working that way? Does having the visuals in mind help your writing?

MN: Yeah, it expands it because sometimes when you’re writing one of the things you’re looking for is a proper way to express a particular emotion. So you might spend hours or days or quite a bit of time trying to find a word, a phrase or something that conveys some idea what you want to convey. When you put pictures into the equation, you can think, “All right, I don’t need to SAY this out loud. I don’t need to put this in a word because, when I marry the picture to it, it will convey this.” So many times just the presence of the video in your mind, the picture in your creative processes will help you out. For one thing, “Cruisin’ “ was this odd rap record, OK? Go figure. And to me it was OK to just say poems over the top of a kind of simple bleat, you know, it was just bass and drums.

KS: Ahead of its time, when you think about it.

MN: Yeah, when you think about it. (laughs) But at the time no one was thinking that rap would become what it became. And so with “Cruisin’ “ it was a fairly clear poem — the challenge became how do you pictorially represent a phrase like “the light behind their eyes”? How do you do that? And when you write to the video form, sometimes you’ll avoid a phrase like “the light behind their eyes” because it’s much more descriptive and evocative of a mental image than it is of an actual picture. And it’s very important for me to make sure that I steer clear of narrative interpretation of these things. So with “Cruisin’ “ I learned my way a lot and, yes, I did write it with the visual in mind, but I also drove myself into a ditch in several other instances, for instance “the light behind their eyes”, and what I was left with was a cheesy video effect. I mean, I had to do this thing that made this guy’s head blow up with light, you know, Well, OK, so that was fine, but still …

KS: On ”Nezmusic” the overall clips hold up so well — the humor in “Rio” and how current “Cruisin’ “ is — to look at it now.

MN: Well, you know, when we made ‘em a long time ago we were sort of on the cutting edge of the form and we didn’t have the mandate to make a commercial for a record. What we were trying to do was really work on the form. And so the result was that we employed a lot of really basic values and basic values have a tendency to be basic (laughs), to be permanent.

KS: It’s the 25th Anniversary of the Beatles’ arriving in America …

MN: When is that?

KS: Well, actually, it was February.

MN: Oh, it was?

KS: Yeah, Feb. 64. The song “I’ll Remember You” exemplifies your love for the Beatles. I wanted to talk about that and ask you a few Beatles questions.

MN: Let me tell you about “I’ll Remember You”. Have you heard this song? “I’ll Remember You” I wrote while John was alive. I wrote it in ’79 or ’78 and I wrote it to send to him. I was just gonna give it. You know you write songs to friends sometimes. So it was just a message I was gonna send to him and I knew he was living with Yoko at the time in the Dakota taking care of Sean as a househusband, and I admired that in him. I thought it was good, you know, especially after his sort of sowing some oats there before and so I realized that I was quite fond of John and I’d spent some time with him and I had never really, aside from “Lady Madonna”, I had never really expressed a lot of appreciation for his music. One of the things that happens is that as a writer and a famous or celebrated individual you very seldom have your peers walk up to you and say, “Say, you know, I really like what you did,” Very seldom. I mean, most of the time you’re in some major competition. So I wrote that song specifically with that in mind, just to express a little gratitude. And then part of it I was trying to think from what dynamic does this thing that I feel about John and the music that he wrote come? And I realized that I had the same level of appreciation for the Fred and Ginger movies and I began to draw the parallels between the two of them to enhance the song “I’ll Remember You”. But it was not posthumous to John.

KS: Did you send it to him before his death?

MN: Nope. Never got to it. I just kept it and I didn’t send it and then the next thing I know, Howard Cosell says, “At the end of the day, it’s only a football game …”

KS: You stayed with John in 1967. What was that like? There are a lot of comparisons between you and a lot of talk of the rivalry between the Beatles and the Monkees.

MN: It was like, you know, staying with you or staying with anybody else. You just go over somebody’s house and stay!

KS: Was John a fan of the Monkees’ series?

MN: Don’t know. Didn’t talk about it. Like I say, it’s the sort of thing you don’t talk about. They were recording “Sgt. Pepper” at the time and he played me some tracks for “Sgt. Pepper” and that was about as far as it went. We played a little bit. I mean, basically, that’s what you do. That’s what I did with those guys. When you hung out, you played. You picked up a guitar and played.

KS: There’s a video for “A Day in the Life” in the studio and you’re in it! What was that like, to be there for one of the greatest recording sessions? It must have been amazing.

MN: Well, I know, but you have the mists of myth around it. Whatever it is that’s your current discipline, look at what you’re doing and think about the friends that are involved in that discipline with you and think about going out and having a hamburger with them. How big of a deal is it? It’s not a big deal at all! But listen, I mean, it makes for great dinner stories and I can get anecdotal about it and I can tell you all sorts of things and create magical images and stuff but that’s all nonsense. Basically it’s just John says, “Well, we’re going to be in the studio. You wanna come down? And is it OK that we take some pictures? We’re going to have a camera crew there.” And I said, “Sure.” It was good ‘cause there was a stack of people there, you know what I’m saying, it was a party. “Well, Paul’s got this band together and we’re going to do this big orchestra thing and so maybe you’ll sop by.” And I said, “Hey, I wouldn’t miss it.”

KS: What did you think about the comparisons? A lot of people said there was a rivalry…

MN: What, between the Monkees and the Beatles? Well, it was lunacy. I mean, there was not only not a rivalry, it’s like the Beatles were the Green Bay Packers and we played tennis! You know, it’s just not the same game.

KS: Did you think they had an influence on you as a songwriter?

MN: Well, I didn’t feel any, but that’s not to say that they didn’t. I mean, I was not really a product of those times. My musical roots went back more to hymns and movie music, some of the classics and R & B and country. That was sort of my musical mix. It’s one of those things that makes me very comfortable with elevator music today. There’s such a thing as good elevator music. I’s hidden to most people because everybody thinks of dentists when they hear it, but nonetheless, every once in a while I’ll be standing in an elevator and start tapping my foot and everybody in the elevator will look at me like, “What is wrong with this guy?” (laughs)

KS: “Magic” was a great homage to the 1950’s era.

MN: Well, it kind of was, wasn’t it? I didn’t intend it to be but it sorta ended up that way, didn’t it?

KS: Being on the Monkees’ television show, did it plant some ideas in your head even back then about how far you could go with the visuals? Did you gain a lot from that?

MN: I think so, to a certain degree. There was a large amount of the technical and creative part that went on that I didn’t pay any attention to. So I didn’t get as much as you might think. What I learned from that was really how to work with a creative team. The musical dynamic, learning to put together the image with the music really came from watching musicals, “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Fantasia” and, you know, those musicals, those old, old musicals. You can rent them at the video store now. “Wizard of Oz.” You know, these are tremendous musicals. So that was, and I guess Busby Berkeley as much as anybody. Do you know his stuff?

KS: In ’83 you said you lost interest in music videos. You said it was like radio with pictures, whereas you saw it as an art form. I wanted to ask why you dropped out and why you didn’t stay with it to bring it into new areas?

MN: Well, the idea of radio with pictures came because most music videos are like commercials for records and I was being asked to do videos for people and I didn’t want to do that. It’s the same thing if somebody called me up and asked me to do a commercial. I don’t want to do a commercial. So I made a decision to do motion pictures which was where I felt like I could do the art form. I tried to put together music type of motion pictures — wasn’t completely successful with it. “Tapeheads” is the first time I’ve gotten even close. But it really was not an attempt to abandon the music video form but to get into an area where I could actually do it. And music videos weren’t it.

KS: Do you think music video is healthier now or is it even worse than it was six years ago?

MN: Oh, it’s gotta be healthier than it was because there’s just a certain law of progress that goes with everything. You gotta get smarter people. You’re saying to me now as if you understand it — and I assume you do — that the current music video is a commercial for a record. You also say that to me as if that’s a pejorative. You say it in a certain disparaging way, so I assume that you don’t think it’s a good thing, that you think it’s as least not a fulfilling element of the form. So I can tell you from talking to literally dozens of other people like yourself that you echo a common sentiment, at least in my experience. So I think that what that common sentiment is bringing forward is that, well, we’ll tolerate the radio with pictures things because at least it kind of pushes us along, but there’s more here than meets the eye, there’s a bigger bone buried in this backyard than we’ve dug up, whatever metaphor you want to insert. At some point somebody’s gonna come along, grab hold of the form and do it, whether it’s me or whether it’s somebody else, I don’t know, but it’s gonna be somebody who’s gonna come along and do it.

KS: And there’s the occasional gems that do come through that make you still believe in the form.

MN: I think heavy metal is probably the most fertile ground right now for something to come along. Well, it’s Wagnerian. You have to look at it that way, number one. I’m talking about heavy metal as a real point of departure. Heavy metal is a good example of music that’s really taken a left turn somewhere along the line and you have to keep in mind that Hendrix was on the first Monkees tour, you know. That’s one of the great ironies of the 60’s. And it was Hendrix who infected me with a love for heavy metal and made it stay forever, which, you know, I’m still a big heavy metal fan. I couldn’t find much that I liked with heavy metal. I liked AC/DC and I liked some of the stuff, you know, from Aerosmith, Foghat, REO Speedwagon, and some of these things that weren’t really heavy metal but kind of were heavy metal pop. It really wasn’t until Eddie Van Halen came along. And Van Halen was the first time that I thought, “Ah! There’s been some life breathed in here.” Of course, now, I don’t know what he’s doing, he’s off in some other zone again, but where he was working with David and those guys, that was HOT. That was real Iwo Jima stuff. Eddie plays the guitar a lot better than Jimi played it. The difference is Hendrix didn’t play the guitar, Hendrix WAS the guitar. Major difference. This guy, when he would touch the neck of his guitar, number one, it was upside down and backwards, or backside down and upwards, whatever you want to call it, but it was screwy. When he touched the neck of his guitar it was very hard to see where his fingers ended and the guitar started. I mean there was a kind of glow around the whole thing. I know this sounds all kind of cosmic, but it’s true! He really was an amazing dude. With Van Halen, I think what Eddie’s got is the same kind of wonderful sensibility that Jimi had but the guitar is a technical extension. He’s very organized in the way he plays and very soulful but Hendrix was…you cannot compare those two. In terms of real crash/burn rock’n’roll there’s a band out there which is somewhere between my absolute favorite band, which is Z Z Top, to Metallica, which is from some other place. And then I sort of like but ignore the Bon Jovi’s of the world, Poisons and Whitesnakes and stuff and Ratt. It doesn’t work. I thought for a while Michael Schenker’s group was gonna do it, right after he left the Scorpions and he did that one album that was just wow! This guy has flat got it. And then he just went nowhere. I think, drogas, el drogas.

KS: You stated recently that putting movies on videocassette was like driving an Indy 500 car to work, a major misuse of the medium. What do you feel can be done to rectify that, and is that where “Overview” comes in?

MN: Well, I think you have to look at the whole user event, yeah, and “Overview” is a part of that. “Overview” is information carrier, though. “Overview” was a magazine on videocassette that just brought previews and reviews and things of coming attraction and it was designed as kind of a video guide. I think that hews closer to the form. At the end of the day, I gotta tell you I think home video is an entertainment medium and I think it’s gonna occupy the same place in the minds of the future people that records kind of do now. That’s where I think it’s gonna extend from, not from motion pictures, do you know what I mean? So you have to think in terms of contemporary music, what records are, in order to get a handle on how to use the video medium. That’s me. That’s the way I think of it.

KS: The first version of “Overview” that you put out, about two years ago, it failed. You’re doing something again with it. What will be different in terms of concept, marketing, distribution?

MN: You have to be careful about thinking that “Overview” failed. “Overview” did what it was intended to do, which was to provide me with a test market. The reason that it appears to have failed is because I thought that the test results would be more positive than they were and that I would go with it immediately. The test results were negative nit it wasn’t a result of the magazine. The test results were the result of the distribution system not working. I had to redesign the distribution, redesign the marketing system, and once that was done I felt like I could go forward. Well, that’s what I did. I went forward, redesigned the marketing system, redesigned my distribution system, and you’ll see it this fall. Again with another test. It may not work again, but we’ll try it again.

KS: Good. I think it’s a phenomenal idea. Just to have, like even on cable TV, the access of a library in front of you where you can just get any information you want, read the newspaper, do all that…

MN: Well, you’re talking about the Holy Grail right now and what that is is the interface of the computer with the video medium, movies on demand, pictures on demand.

KS: Does that interest you?

MN: I’m into it up to my eyeballs! And as a matter of fact you’ll see me come back through here in August with some announcements along this line. But with the availability to take the computer, interface it effectively with video, you’re very close to what you want and all of us want. All of us want to download. All of us want a couple of keystrokes, gimme the data. But you know the data stream in this thing is so dense. Do you have any idea of the technological mountain you’re trying to climb there? The data stream — and I may get this wrong — the data stream on a color video picture, one second, is 80 megabytes! If you know anything about computers you know that that’s a lot of storage. And most people have a hard disc and maybe have 20 megabytes, 10 megabytes, 40 megabytes on a hard disc. By the time you get up to 80 megabytes you’re starting to get into some serious computing power and BIG BUCKS. Well, to get one second of color video with sound on a screen uses 80 megabytes. It uses all the storage space that you have on one 80 megabyte hard disc. So just figure out how many billions of bytes you have to have in order to get 90 minutes. Apple, Hypercard, some of these other computer programs are really blazing the trail with graphics based computer technology that’s gonna make something of what you want. You might be having to live with black and white slides for a while or just somebody talking underneath it, but, hey, it’s a start. And that’s gonna be there. Everybody wants this. Me, too.

KS: It’s the 15th Anniversary — another anniversary — of the formation of your company, Pacific Arts. Being a musician for your whole life and moving into working as an executive and working on that level, was it a difficult transition?

MN: Well., let me answer it this way because it’s a question that’s commonly asked, which is how do you manage to change hats so often and so easily and the answer is, which is a good answer, is that I don’t change the hats. It’s the same hat. The dynamic and the values that I employ to write a song, make a record, do a video, make “Tapeheads”, is the same one that you use to run a company and it’s just different applications of the same values.

KS: Are you pleased with where the company is now? Is it beyond what you envisioned at the beginning?

MN: Well, it’s different. I don’t know. Every morning I get up and I wonder is this the right place to be going? And a company is a very hard thing to project, you know, the best laid plans of mice and men… The important thing in a company is to be adaptable. U see a lot of people come to me with systems analysis, management systems, a way to control this, that, and the other thing, how to make 5-year projections, 2-year projections, 1-year projections. They all have their place, but none of them occupies as an important place in the hierarchy of things as being adaptable, being able to think fast, be quick on your feet so that when everything goes to hell in a handbasket you can make a decision and ether do something that either saves the day or gets you out of the mud. And when it comes to running a company it’s a question of getting up, assessing the day, and saying, “Well, am I stuck in the ditch?” Or am I on the road? Or is the ditch really the road?” It gets very subtle and curious out there sometimes. So you know one day I may wake up and there will be no Pacific Arts. One day I may wake up and Pacific Arts will be Warner Brothers. I don’t know.

KS: Let’s talk about “Tapeheads”. I loved it. What was it that attracted you to the project? Was it an almost instant affection for the story that made you feel it was right for Pacific Arts?

MN: Well, it was the Swanky Modes. I mean, you know, there was a script that had running through its core the heart and soul of 160’s R & B. Now I don’t mean to indicate that’s what the movie’s about, ‘cause clearly it isn’t. But I thought, depending on who we cast for the Smoky Modes, this could be an unbelievable thing to see. Then when Same Moore and Junior Walker were cast, I was even more thrilled. Of course, all the musicians in the world began to say, “Gee, can we come down and work?” and “Can we come down and play and do all this stuff?” And then when I started hearing the music that they were recording originally for the movie I was just blown away. So the first thing that appealed to me was the music and at the end of the day the thing that makes me the happiest with it is the music. I think “Ordinary Man” is a hit!

KS: Is filmmaking the primary interest for you? Or is it one of many?

MN: Well, right now, I gotta save “Tapeheads”. I gotta make “Tapeheads” work and that’s what I’m talking to you and what I’m talking to everybody I can talk to about right now ‘cause “Tapeheads” has gotta get a shot. If people can understand what is at the root of “Tapeheads” and it can grow, it’s a point of departure for me to make other musical movies and it has to be demonstrated that this is a valid form. I don’t know whether it’s gonna make a lot of money. It may or may not. So far the video looks like it’s gonna do very well. But it’s the music part of this and the combination of movies and music is where I want to be, it’s where I’m totally focused and where I want to ultimately be. And like I say, maybe the next one will be a heavy metal movie. Don’t you think that would be cool? A heavy metal movie? Think of that. I mean, you go into a nice big theatre, I’m not talking about some little squeezie 14-plex, I’m talking about something with this humongoid screen where you can do all this major kill sound and you go in there and you get a couple of concert stacks. You don’t use the speakers that they’ve got ‘cause they’re kinda twinky, you know, you get some concert stacks and you put ‘em in there and you get some big sound and you just do it a little bit like a concert. Why can’t the cinema experience be like a concert experience?

KS: Would it be something like a “Spinal Tap” or a documentary type?

MN: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, something entirely of its own. You know there’s a dynamic, there’s a creative imperative inherent in heavy metal music. It’s male adolescence, it’s cars and women — spelled W-I-M-M-I-N. They’re into it and it works!

KS: And you can identify with it, as well.

MN: You can identify with it. I mean, it’s not the way I lead my life, I’m a fairly conservative guy. But as an art form, I mean, cripes, you can’t ignore that and I think if you’re looking to put some power up on the screen, you know, these guys have got their hands on the trigger.

KS: Which part of the creative process do you enjoy the most? The ideas, the writing, the filming, the editing, or just sitting back and enjoying the end result?

MN: It’s the end result. Yeah, sit back and watch it. I make movies ‘cause I want to see ‘em! It’s the only reason. I don’t know why else to make a movie. You make a movie ‘cause to want to see it. I don’t like chopping the onions and dicing the carrots and standing over the stove much. I don’t like that much.

KS: Same thing with music, as well?

MN: Yeah, you write music ‘cause you want to hear it. That’s why I started writing music. I couldn’t play the guitar. So I couldn’t sing and so anything anybody else was doing so I said, “OK, let’s all sing this song. I don’t know how to play that’ song.” So you make up a song you can sing.

KS: It’s funny that you talked about “Cruisin’” being early rap, because I wanted to ask you about Run DMC’s “Mary Mary”, which you wrote.

MN: Well, I don’t know. My life has been nothing if not poetic. You know what I mean? (laughs) There are certain closed great parentheses is my life and I wonder what open parentheses I’m in the middle of right now. You know, every once in a while, I’ll look at “Mary Mary” and I think, “My Lord! Is this unusual or what?” And then to see this come back around! People say to me, “Are you surprised that the Monkees are doing so well in their reunion?”, and I say, “No, I’m surprised that Run DMC recorded ‘Mary Mary’ as a rap single!” That’s the surprise.

KS: And they did a real good job, I thought.

MN: I thought so. Sure. I mean, if that’s the rap dynamic. I thought when I was doing “Cruisin’” that what I was doing was just reciting poetry over a very spare and simple musical bed. I like the concept of rap because it gives people who can’t sing the ability to express themselves musically. I think that’s cool. I’m not sure what they’re talking about a lot of the time. I suppose it’s OK to talk about “I like the way you look, baby”, but, I mean, I don’t know, it burns out pretty quick for me.

KS: It seems like you’ve reconciled with your past with the Monkees, recognizing that you’ll always be identified with that.

MN: Well, you’re right. The curious thing to me is that there’s ever any question that I may or may not do that. I mean, why in the world wouldn’t I do that> I don’t have anything to reconcile. It’s always been just fine with me. I knew when I got involved in the thing that IU was going to be a Monkee for the rest of my life. You don’t get involved in things that hot and not have it stay around. Christopher Reeve knew when he took the Superman part that he was gonna be Superman so he better get peaceful with that before he does it. I was peaceful with it before I did it.

KS: Do you think if you did anything with the band, especially a movie, would it adversely affect you or would it fit into the scope of your company? Would you consider something like that?

MN: Sure. We’ve talked about it many times. The problem is not whether or not I’d do it. It’s whether or not anybody would make that movie. And there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of interest in it. I mean, I think it would make an interesting film. You wanna know my guess, I think of there was gonna be something on film it would probably end up on television. Television is the Monkees’ medium. And I don’t know whether or not we could pull it off — the four of us as adults could pull off — what we pulled off 25 years ago. Probably not. So that you have to look that pretty hard.

KS: Would you get involved in a Monkees’ record, maybe contributing a couple of songs?

MN: Sure. Absolutely. All those things are up in the air and up in the wind and we talk about ‘em all the time. I would’ve gone on tour, but I didn’t have the time. I was just finishing “Square Dance” and just starting “Tapeheads” and as a matter of fact I told 'em I would. We were gonna go out and just do half a dozen dates, you know, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, something like that. They called up and said, “Listen, we went to get a drink of water and the faucet fell off in our hand and now it’s 280 dates.” I said, “Well, partners, I can’t do that. I’ve got 25 employees here. I can’t walk away from this.”

KS: On the follow-up tour in 1987 they did quite a few of your songs, “Circle Sky” and “You Just May Be The One”. Was there any plan of your doing a few shows in 1987? It seemed that’s why they had those songs in.

MN: That is constantly in our minds. I think they’re gonna come back this year. We’re trying right now to figure out how to make some dates work. We tried to make one work in Philadelphia. I couldn’t get there. We tried to make one work in Chicago. I couldn’t get there. You know, it’s a nightmare.

KS: There’s a video floating around of the Greek Theatre in 1986. It was just so heartwarming to see.

MN: Oh, you should’ve been there! Oh, it was terrific, it was great. You know, we just tried to figure out the right way to do it and decided I’d come on at the end. And so we put together a couple of numbers and, you know, he guys went through their whole show and it was like, “So long, goodbye,” they’re taking their final bows and then I walk out from the edge and hey hit me with the spotlight and I’m telling you the place went up for grabs! It was unbelievable. It exploded!

KS: The big question is did you have to relearn “Pleasant Valley Sunday” and “Listen to the Band”? You were playing that lick on “Pleasant Valley Sunday” pretty good.

MN: No, I don’t think I’ll ever forget that. Number one, it’s not that hard. Like I say, it’s a big part of my life. I like that part of my life. I wish I could do it more and, if we can figure out a way to do it more…you know, we talk all the time, trying to figure out how to get me back un on the TV show. You know, they’re off in Europe right now doing some big tours and I’d love to be there. I’d love it! It’s be great! But…we gotta get people out there to see “Tapeheads”. (laughs)

KS: The Monkees are receiving a Star this year on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. How do you feel about that and will you attend?

MN: Oh, yeah! You bet! I feel great!

KS: If you were watching TV and a Monkees episode came on, would you watch it?

MN: No. I’ve seen ‘em too many times. I’ve seen ‘em all dozens of times.

KS: You saw them as a spectator in ’86 in Texas. What was that like?

MN: Well, that was real edifying. I’ve been asked about that before, too, and the one thing that was obvious to me was that Micky should’ve been in front all along. You know, he is so good. Why we stuck him back on the drums, that was one of the dumber things we ever did. Between David and Micky up front, I mean, you got two power hitters up here, you know? I just stand there, I don’t do anything. I go over and stand by my amp and play the guitar. And Peter probably could have been a better drummer than Micky because Peter’s a better musician than Micky. So I don’t know, maybe we should’ve given Micky a bass and let him play bass or something, but he was great. It was wonderful to see, too, I’ll tell you.

KS: “The Girl I Knew Somewhere” was the first song you guys all recorded together, which you wrote. The first session, was it a big relief or a lot of pressure?

MN: Well, there wasn’t any pressure to it. You know, there wasn’t a lot of support for us playing, because it was like, “Come on, guys, you’re actors,” and “How are you gonna play and make the music? You know, it’s just too big of a workload, number one. Number two, what kind of material are you gonna play? What are you gonna do?” So it wasn’t a question of “Can you play, can you make decent music?” It was a question of “If you play, how are we gonna make all this fit into what we’re doing? ‘Cause there’s so much other stuff!” So the pressure was never really “Can you play and can you play well?” The question was “OK, we figure you can play and we figure you can play well enough and we know Nesmith writes and we know the rest of you guys write, so maybe this well all come about, but then what?” And that was the big question, because as they predicted it got tougher and tougher and tougher as we got busier and busier and busier.

KS: The “Live ‘67” album on Rhino is interesting to listen to because you guys were a great garage band.

MN: That’s exactly what we were. We were a garage band.

KS: Have you heard it?

MN: Well, I mean, I heard it when we made it. (laughs)

KS: It had electricity that blew away a lot of critics when they reviewed it, and it had an almost psychedelic version of “Steppin’ Stone”.

MN: It was a psychedelic version of “Steppin’ Stone”. Unequivocally.

KS: What direction do you think the Monkees would have gone if “HEAD” had been a success?

MN: We would have just continued to make films and records. Abandoned television. Probably have jumped into the video form about the time I did. That’s my guess. We would’ve stayed right there.

KS: Would you have veered into a country direction, as “Good Clean Fun” and ”Never Tell A Woman Yes” indicated for you?

MN: No, I don’t think so. Micky was always the voice and Davy was always the voice of the Monkees and they didn’t…Micky was never comfortable singing those country type songs. But you know Micky’s got a terrific pop voice.

KS: I’ve interviewed him, but he seems very insecure and underestimated himself about how good he is and what a great showman he is.

MN: Yeah. Yeah, he does. That’s one of the reasons he ended up sticking back there on drums. I was like, “Yeah, sure, I’ll play drums.” “Mick, get up, get out here.”

KS: In 1969 you went to Nashville and recorded material for an album side of a Monkees LP. What happened with that?

MN: Well, nothing. By that time he show was off the air and there wasn’t any place to put it. That band went on to become a band that had a little bit of success in their own right called Area Code 615 and they were a session band. One of those songs that we recorded was “Listen to the Band”. And then there were some other songs in there that I can’t remember what they were. “Saint Matthew”, I think, was a song that we did. There was some other stuff. It just got stashed in a vault somewhere.

KS: Why was the live “Circle Sky” replaced with a studio version? A lot of critics have said it was a fantastic live performance. In fact, Peter felt it was the best recorded example of the band.

MN: Well, that was done, and I think Peter’s right. I think, if you talk about the Monkees as a band, you have to look at “Circle Sky”, number one, and “Girl I Knew Somewhere”, number wo. I mean, that’s basically a garage band. And that’s the way garage bands play — loud and fast. (laughs)

KS: Were there any songs Davy or Micky sang that you were especially partial to, that you wish you’d sand? Like you did a demo of “Daddy’s Song” first.

MN: No, I was always happy with the way the vocals went down. Every time I’d sing a Monkees’ song it’d sound like a country tune…and at the time having it sound like a country tune wasn’t a good idea. Maybe it’s different now, I don’t know.

KS: It’s interesting how critics hated the Monkees but the public loved them, while your solo career as a country rock pioneer was a hit with the critics but not with the public.

MN: Well, you have to let history write that chapter, Ken. I don’t know what place I have in all of that and don’t really much think about it one way or the other.

KS: One last question, if you could choose three Nesmith songs for a time capsule that would be discovered in a thousand years from now…

MN: Well, I wrote one like that, you know. Because I thought about that. It’s called “Capsule” and it’s on the “Infinite Rider” LP…

[Transcribed from a PDF found on Monkees Live Almanac]

#Long but worth the read #Nez #Mike Nesmith #Text Transcript

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putschki1969 · 6 years

Text

Harmony Magazine #5 ~ Wakana Solo Interview

Note: Here’s my translation of Wakana’s solo interview from the latest Harmony issue. Since this interview was done back in September, it mostly focuses on her symphony concert in August but there is some mention of her solo tour and her song writing experience as well. All in all, it’s quite nice and it provides some insight. Without further ado, let’s get to it.

Fan club members will have received this issue shortly after the end of Wakana’s first solo tour. However, for this interview we will wind back the clock a little in order to get a proper understanding of how Wakana felt performing all by herself at her very first symphony concert. In addition to that we will get a glimpse at her thoughts and feelings shortly before the start of her solo tour.

The current condition interview

◆ We are doing this interview in mid September. You are in the midst of rehearsals and meetings for your upcoming solo tour? Yes, that’s true. For me it’s obviously the first time doing a solo tour but this is also a new territory for all the staff members around me, there are so many new things that come along with solo tours ... You simply can’t know everything on your first try. At first I was all ready to take a step ahead and I thought I should really try and experience this myself. Now I am at a point where I have lost track of what I know and what I don’t know *laughs*

◆ So a solo tour is really different? When the three of us were together it was Kalafina’s assigned role to bring Kajiura-san’s music to life with our singing and our harmony. In the beginning Kalafina was an existence of its own with an established image and then before we knew it, we had already debuted... that’s kinda what it felt like. For the three of us it was all about catching up with Kalafina, there was a strong sense of trying to live up to that image. But Kalafina was always ahead of us. I think in some ways we were just always pursuing that image of Kalafina. That was our challenge, it was our reason for being and it was also a constant guide. But now that I am singing aone, I can’t just take that image as it is and simply adopt it for myself. But I also don’t want to destroy the image that everyone has in their mind. On top of that I am in the middle of trying to find the right way for me, I am wondering which roads to take to embark on a new journey as Wakana.

◆ You are writing your own lyrics now, aren’t you? Yes, since around March/April I have been taking up that challenge. It was my very first time writing my own lyrics for a song so I am not 100% happy with the outcome. I kept wondering about things like, “which words do I best put into this short 5-note phrase?” For example, you might think "♪ I love you/Aishiteru" would fit well but I kept thinking, “do you really wanna sing these words right here at this point? Is this really the most suitable place for these words in this song? Wouldn’t they fit much better somewhere else?” All those thoughts kept spinning around in my head so I had a very hard time finishing the lyrics.

◆ So far it was the most important aspect of your work to express the songs you had been given with your singing. Now that you have started writing lyrics you have to create something from scratch all by yourself. You are expanding an already existing world, you are digging deeper, you are finding new ways of interpretation, I think this is on a whole new level of difficulty. I have really tried my best to put all the things I wanted to convey into words. The compositions that have been written for me as solo artist are all amazing so little by little I would like to work on them hoping to not ruin their charming nature.

◆ During your upcoming tour will we be able to hear some of the songs that you have written the lyrics for? I am in the midst of working out a plan together with my staff members who keep cheering me on. At the end of my symphony concert which was held back in August I got to perform “Toki wo Koeru Yoru ni”, the first song for which I had written the lyrics. In the questionnaires for that live I received lots of messages telling me, “I would love to listen to more songs like that!” That was very encouraging. For my concert in August I sang a lot of Kalafina songs, by doing that I think I was able to show myself and the audience how far I had come, it was proof of my past experiences and everything I had accumulated up till that point. But I didn’t reach my goal with that, I feel like my solo tour will be a crossover between personal parts that make me who I am and Kalafina.

◆ Well then, let’s go back in time a little, please tell us about the Symphony Concert that you mentioned earlier. Well....I was super nervous ～ !! It had always been my dream to perform together with an orchestra and I wanted to make this a really enjoyable experience for the audience so I felt like I had to do my very best! Because of that I was beyond nervous *laughs*

◆ How did it feel to work together with musicians of a foreign orchestra? Everyone was incredibly kind and openhearted. The conductor was very accommodating, he would tell me, “please feel free to make requests so our musical performance makes it easier for you to sing.” I am very grateful for his help. It was my first time singing alongside an orchestra so I had lots of difficulties. Since the musical performance would be following the lead of my singing I felt like the first thing I had to do was establish my very own tempo, a tempo I felt comfortable with. In the past when we were performing “bandstyle” most of our songs were all about synchronising, if a song was 4 1/2 minutes long then we would have to sing at a speed that would make us finish in that exact time. I realised it’s a completely different experience when you are performing with an orchestra.

◆ Each and every sound is created on the spot by a living human being. There are no technical devices intervening .... Well, I had a foot monitor and my microphone but aside from that, there were no electrical instruments.

◆ Speaking of which, I think you mentioned in one of your MCs that you didn’t use ear monitors that day. That’s right. I had removed them during my rehearsals and I realised I could sing without them so I wondered if I could also remove them for the actual performance. I decided I wanted to sing while being able to listen to the raw sound of the music around me.

◆ Was it easier to perform like that? It felt really nice to sing like that. You can really hear each and every single sound if you want to. When you are wearing ear monitors you don’t really get to experience the real balance among all the different sounds around you because your ears end up being overwhelmed by the sound that’s coming through the monitors. Sometimes my voice itself would become restricted because I would unintentionally adapt it to the sound ringing in my ears. This time around I was able to listen to the live sound because I was accompanied by an orchestra. It’s different when you are performing with a band and you have drums accompanying you. You can’t really sing without ear monitors in that case because your manner of listening to everything around you is very much affected by this “bandstyle”.

◆ Even though you performed in a classical hall, I feel like it’s probably difficult to focus when so many different instruments are ringing together.... Well, I had the conductor there with me and I was fine as long as I concentrated on the piano, I really tried to let the notes of the piano ring through my body. However, for some parts of “Ashita no Keshiki” the harp’s arpeggio was my only accompaniment so that was really hard! I would always be in too much of a hurry. The follow-up song “I Have a Dream” was also incredibly difficult. We had to practise these two songs again and again during rehearsal.

◆ Oh really? It was very hard but also a lot of fun. Since nothing technical was intervening, I was able to decide everything for myself, when to stop singing, when to pause for a longer time, when to start singing again, I was able to sing while having control over all these things, it was very refreshing to work like that. We as Kalafina did a similar thing for our 10th Anniversary performance of “Hikari Furu”, there were some sections where we were able to sing more or less freely but since we were three people we would still have to somehow adhere to the same tempo or it wouldn’t have made any sense. If you are singing at your own tempo the harmonies just don’t work.

◆ By the way, did you feel nervous walking on stage all by yourself? I was super nervous! *laughs* Truth is, I had felt so much anxiety on that day. After the concert I went to have dinner with two of my managers. We ate some delicious steak and various other things and we had A LOT to drink *laughs* I ate so much that I felt I was about to explode. Surprisingly though, when I stepped on the scale the morning after, I hadn’t gained any weight or body fat. Performances are always burning a lot of energy but this time around I wasn’t even performing all the way through...I guess performing on stage all by yourself consumes a lot more energy than expected...I was quite surprised. *laughs*

◆ It seems like this was a kind of pressure you had not experienced before? Right before the performance lots of people had tried to comfort me but I was just too distracted, I was there in body but not in spirit *wry smile*. You see, when you are standing on stage you feel like the audience is talking about you. *laughs* That is really not the case though! When you are too nervous you are just imagining all these voices.

◆ In the first section both you and the audience seem to have been quite nervous. True. I felt SUPER relieved when I was able to pass the baton to Ryuu-san after finishing my last song of the first section *laughs*.

◆ In the second half you appeared together on stage with Ogawa Mana-san, she was your guest vocalist and she sang together with you, right? It was a huge help to have Mana-chan there with me, singing together with her felt totally different from the first part of the concert where I was singing all by myself, I could literally feel myself becoming more relaxed, that weird tension I felt was slowly dissolving *laughs*. That particular part of the setlist was also really amazing, I was so happy to have this unique experience of getting to perform Hirahara Ayaka-san’s “Jupiter” - an adaptation of Holst’s “Jupiter”.

◆ I feel like there were lots of people in the audience who were listening to Kalafina’s songs and your voice for the very first time. I think you did a great job at conveying the splendor of Kalafina’s music. I am happy you think that way but honestly, after the live was over, I felt like I should have talked so much more about all these songs I sang and the people I performed with. I was way too nervous so I couldn’t really talk as much during the MCs as I had intended to. I really regret that.

◆ You are not just singing alone, you also have to do the MCs all by yourself. In terms of singing, did you feel anything special when you were singing alone? Usually my biggest strength is talking but since I was quite nervous all I was thinking about was my singing. All the power I’d usually use for talking went straight into my singing, I was actually very surprised at myself to hear such a voice coming out of me *laughs*

◆ You were singing in falsetto but you were also using a mixed voice, you reached some really high notes. Actually, this was my first time singing like that, I guess it’s because I am singing alone. When the three of us would sing together we would each have to sing with a powerful voice or it just wouldn’t have worked. When it was first decided that I would be performing together with an entire orchestra, some staff members voiced their concern, they worried whether or not my voice could keep up with all of that. They asked me if I wanted more supporting singers, they could have sung the main melody while I would have been able to focus on the chorus, they came up with various arrangements that would take some of the burden off my shoulders. But during one of our final rehearsals I had the arrangements changed again so I would be singing all the main melodies. In the arrangement they had previously provided for “Musunde Hiraku” I was only singing a small part of the song but I really wanted to convey all of it that’s why I made them change the arrangement completely. This way I would be able to sing each and every line. I was quite surprised that I was able to hold my voice throughout all these songs, I guess maybe it’s because it was such a small amount of songs, there were only 14 songs in total. It was a truly marvelous experience. It showed me that I could actually sing like that.

◆ But it's not like you never felt something similar when the three of you were still singing together, right? Absolutely. When the three of us were singing together we used our best voices so it felt good but those were the voices that would best suit the three of us. Now that I am singing alone I am able to discover new singing styles and a new kind of voice.

◆ it was very refreshing to hear you sing the medium and low range parts, you really managed to convey their depth. I am glad I got to hear that. In “I Have a Dream” there is a part that ends on a very high note and then it transitions into quite a low sections with the lyrics “♪Toki wa yuku～” When I was singing those lines I once again fell in love with this song, it is such a lovely piece. Whenever you hear someone sing this song there’s an immediate sense of comfort.

◆ During your encore you sang the previously mentioned “Toki wo Koeru Yoru ni”, it was your first time performing it, right? With an orchestra at that! *laughs* This song was co-written by a Swedish and Japanese composer (Shusui). That's why it has a slightly Western vibe. I was really happy I got to sing alongside an orchestra. But all the time I kept thinking, “oh no, I wanna change this and that part of the lyrics. Please let me rephrase that again! *laughs*

◆ Oh really? Yes. *laughs* At that point it was still a completely new song for me, I hadn’t even recorded it yet. Also, it was my first time singing my very own lyrics so naturally I was quite embarrassed but everyone in the orchestra was incredibly supportive.

◆ The lyrics were great. Depending on the listener, I think there are many different ways to interpret them, many different sceneries to unravel. I was really nervous to get the lyrics wrong actually, I was hoping I wouldn’t make any mistakes *laughs* Although I was needlessly worrying because no one knew the song anyways *laughs*. But I guess I just wanted it to be as perfect as possible when I sang it in front of the audience.

◆ I am looking forward to hearing it again. I also can’t wait to hear your other new songs. Back in March we had a Kalafina live, then our 10th Anniversary Film got released and we took part in a stage greeting event...since then it’s been more than half a year. Right now I am at a major turning point. From now onwards I want to steadily discover news aspects of myself by moving forward and doing my very best.

#kalafina #my translations #harmony magazine vol.5 #wakana solo interview #wakana #wakana in concert #wakana solo tour #toki wo koeru yoru ni

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papermoonloveslucy · 3 years

Text

DESI DISCOVERS!

June 30, 1974

BY BEN FALKE, Sunday Group Writer

Who says they never come back? At 57 and in better physical condition than he's been in for years, Desi Arnaz has finished a pilot which he hopes NBC will convert to a prime time series.

The show is called "Dr. Domingo” and it's about a doctor in a small northern California town who adds to his income by acting as the local coroner and medical examiner.

"He's a cross between Marcus Welby and Columbo," says Arnaz gleefully. If "Domingo" never makes it as a series, Arnaz has four or five other projects in his hopper more than enough to justify the rent on his office at Universal, just around the corner from Lucille Ball Productions. (1)

Desi, who invented television reruns and syndication of hit shows, feels he still has some contributions to make to the medium he did so much to shape 25 years ago.

MENTION ARNAZ' name and most people think first of "I Love Lucy," those 180 merry half hours which, ever since they went into syndication, have been showing somewhere in the world virtually every hour of every day. A New York critic complained recently that one station in that city was showing "I Love Lucy" reruns five times a day!

Those who remember TV credit lines also recall Arnaz as the producer and occasional director of "The Untouchables," another series with gargantuan longevity. (2) Then there was "Desilu Playhouse," a quality anthology series which introduced many top film and stage stars to the small screen. Not to mention shows like "December Bride," "The Mothers-In-Law," "Guestward-Ho," and others whose ghosts still enliven daytime television.

"I quit the business in 1960 because it got to be a monster," Arnaz recalls now. (Actually, he says it "beez-ness" his Cuban accent still as thick as ever).

"At the beginning, It was fun but when you art in charge of three studios, with 3,000 people and 35 sound stages working all the time, the fun is long gone."

He and Lucy, after many stormy off-camera scenes, were newly divorced then, so Arnaz moved quietly out of Los Angeles to breed horses farther south, in Del Mar, and to fish and build a showplace hideaway house at Las Cruces in Baja California. He married again in 1967, to a non-show biz lady who shared his love of horses, and he even found time to teach a course in television at San Diego State College. (3)

DESPITE THE FACT that he is (he says) far from the multi-millionaire which all those reruns of "Lucy" and "The Untouchables" might lead you to suspect, Arnaz claims that it isn't money pressure that's bringing him back to work now.

“I'm okay for money if I don't live too long," he says with a chuckle. "The funny thing is that I never really cared that much about making money just for the sake of making money. I wanted to be able to take care of my family and to live well which I've done. The rest you never see anyway."

What prompted this particular comeback was a call from MCA-Universal boss Lew Wasserman last Christmas. "Lew used to be my agent when I first came out to Hollywood in 1940," Arnaz reminisces. "To show how low he was on the totem pole in those days, he used to pick me up at my house every morning and drive me to work and I was only making $1,500 a week!

"But Lew called me last Christmas and said, 'What are you going to do - play golf and fish for the rest of your life? Why not come to Universal and develop one show at a time? We'll handle all of those administrative details that you hate you just concentrate on the creative end.'

"Well, that sounded very appealing. I already had the idea for 'Dr. Domingo' from an old paperback mystery that somebody left in our Baja house, and to tell the truth, I was beginning to miss show business. After all, I've been in it since I was 16!"

SO NOW this onetime boy bongo player (4), bandleader and star of many a film musical before he and Lucy developed TV situation comedy, is back behind a producer's desk.

"Television comedy has changed a lot since we did 'I Love Lucy,'" he admits. "I don't think you could do a show like 'Lucy' now but some of the things we learned from doing it are still important. "You still have to have a viable premise, not only for the series as a whole but for each individual episode.

"You also need a cast that works together to produce a kind of chemistry. The audience has to like them as people as well as characters in the show.

"That's where we were so lucky with 'Lucy.' I found Vivian Vance playing a prostitute in a play in La Jolla (5) and signed her up on the spot. Then I said to myself, 'What have you done, you mad Cubano? Suppose Lucy doesn't like her?' Luckily, they got along splendidly from the start it could have been a disaster."

How did he invent the rerun?

"I didn't do it on purpose, I swear," he says jokingly. "I never even allowed reruns of 'Lucy' during the summer which was only 13 weeks in those days. But the reruns got started because we made the big decision to do the show on film instead of doing it live the first time anybody had thought of it.

"They wanted us to do the show live in New York in front of an audience. Lucy works best in front of people. But we didn't want to move to New York; we had just bought a new house and we liked it in California.

"When CBS bought the show, they gave us a total budget of $19,500 a week - you can't even hiccup on television for that now. I said to them, 'Let us film the show in California, that way you'll have a much better quality print... and we can stay here.'

"They wanted to know how much more it would cost that way; I had no idea so I picked a number out of the air - $5,000 more a week. Now Lucy and I had been getting $5,000 a week between us, plus 50 percent of all rights in the show.

"CBS came back and said okay, they'd give us the extra $5,000 if we would take a salary cut to $4,000 a week. Again out of the blue, I said, 'Okay but then we have to own 100 percent of the show' never thinking they'd say yes. But they agreed, and we wound up owning everything."

ASIDE FROM such show business triumphs, Arnaz gets most pleasure from talking about his family his daughter Lucie, and son Desi Jr.

Desi Jr. began his film career with "Red Sky at Morning"; his latest picture is "Billy Two-Hats." (6)

"I always' knew Desi would make' it," his father says now, "but Lucie was always so stiff and shy when we brought her on the show that I thought she'd be a teacher or something. I never dreamed she'd want to act. But she has just landed the lead role in the touring company of 'Seesaw,' so big things could be happening for her, too." (7)

Arnaz is currently putting his life together into a book, for which he reportedly is getting a $125,000 advance. (8) Despite the stormy scenes he and Lucy used to have when they were married, he says it won't say anything bad about his former wife, co-star and business partner.

"We're friends now," he insists. "We gave a little family party for young Desi on his 21st birthday last year. I looked over at the two kids standing together and said to Lucy, 'If we never did anything else, that makes it all worthwhile.' And she agreed."

# # #

FOOTNOTES FROM THE FUTURE

(1) “Doctor Domingo” did not become a series. The character was introduced on an episode of “Ironside” titled “Riddle at 24,000″ as a ‘backdoor’ pilot. It aired March 14, 1974.

(2) Desi was never credited as director of any episodes of “The Untouchables”. That doesn’t mean he didn’t step in or assist, as he did on some episodes of “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour”, but he was never credited.

(3) On March 2, 1963, Desi married Edith Eyre Skimming Mack Hirsch aka Edie in Las Vegas, Nevada. The remained married until her death in 1985, just a year and a half before Arnaz’s passing.

(4) Conga drums, not bongos. This is a frequent error by journalists.

(5) Vivian Vance was appearing in the 1943 John Van Druten play “The Voice of the Turtle” at La Jolla Playhouse. Vance had also appeared in the play in the mid-1940s when she had a nervous breakdown, and had to leave the cast. She played Olive Lashbrooke, described as “a promiscuous, worldly girl, questioning the practicality of the lessons in chastity she received as a child and wondering if she is alone in her passion.” Vance, who had Broadway credits, did not appear in the Broadway production. When the film was made, Olive was played by Eve Arden. Vance acted opposite KT Stevens, who played Mrs. O’Brien (the new tenant plotting to ‘blow up the capitol’) on “I Love Lucy.” In some productions, Hayden Rorke (Mr. O’Brien) also appeared in the play.

(6) Red Sky at Morning was released in May 1971. Desi Arnaz Jr. won a Golden Globe as Most Promising Newcomer, Male. His character was named Billy...

Billy was also his character name in Billy Two Hats, released in March 1974.

(7) Lucie Arnaz has stated that she never appeared on “I Love Lucy.” Desi is probably referring to her early appearances on “The Lucy Show” as Cynthia, a character seldom seen but often spoken about. From Hartford in April 1974 to Los Angeles in September 1974, Lucie toured the Broadway musical Seesaw to a dozen cities with John Gavin and Tommy Tune.

(8) Desi Arnaz’s autobiography was titled A Book. It was first published in 1976 by Warner Books. It covers Desi’s life up until 1960. In 2018, an audiobook was released read by Juan Pablo Di Pace.

#Desi Arnaz #Lucille Ball #Desilu #Lucie Arnaz #Desi Arnaz Jr.#A Book #Red Sky at Morning #Billy Two Hats #Seesaw #Vivian Vance #Voice of the Turtle #edith hirsch #I love Lucy #ironside #Doctor Domingo #Detroit Free Press #1974

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segadores-y-soldados · 7 years

Photo

And because tumblr is going to destroy this post: the full image Please be kind to my terrible Paint skills, I wasn’t about to bust out an old tablet to make this super fancy. Please know that this is one possible interpretation of the final year, year and a half of Overwatch given what we currently have available to us right now.

Sources and more information under the cut:

To start off with, our baseline point is Recall.

Recall is when both the game and the main plot begin - the Recall animation and Winston’s “Are You With Us” recall message are initiated, and this “coincides” with the game’s release in 2016. To make things easier for everyone, my math here is simply to project: 2016 + 60 years forward = Recall initiated in 2076

Fairly straightforward and makes following game updates a bit easier.

From here, forward-progressing events move roughly at the same time as the game has been released. For example:

Summer of 2016 || Summer of 2076: Ana is released || “Old Soldiers” comic occurs

November of 2016 || November of 2076: The Sombra ARG concludes || Sombra leaks LumériCo’s secrets

November of 2016 || November of 2076: “Infiltration” is released || Talon attempts to assassinate Katya Volskaya

November 2076: Volskaya asks Zarya for assistance in finding Sombra

Holidays of 2016 || Holidays of 2076: the “Reflections comic” occurs

Now we’ve entered 2017 || 2077. Things shift slightly here.

On-going throughout 2077: Zarya searches for Sombra

Late February 2017 || Late February 2077: Interview with Efi Oladele is released

July 2017 || Late February 2077: “Masquerade” comic is released || Doomfist breaks out of prison and returns to Talon

March 2017 || March 2077: Orisa is released || Efi builds Orisa

Sometime after Orisa is built, 2077: Zarya meets Lynx in Numbani

April 2017 || April 2077: the “Uprising” event is released || files on the Strike Team’s mission against Null Sector are declassified

July 2017: Doomfist is released

August 2017 || (likely) August 2077: Junkertown map is released || Junkrat and Roadhog initiate “The Plan”

September 2017 || (likely) September 2077: “Searching” is released || Zarya finally finds Sombra

This is why the “Uprising” content all says “seven years ago” - because the game and the overall plot since Recall has moved forward one year, but the actual event of Null Sector’s Uprising did not change in time. So, with the “Recall” event and the “Uprising” information, I have two anchor points of reference for the general, final year of Overwatch: 2076 - 6 years = 2070 2077 - 7 years = 2070

Michael’s GDC talk also gives us a third anchor point: the Halloween party where Reinhardt tells the story of “Junkenstein’s Revenge.” This is actually set during Halloween the year before, so 31st October, 2069 (nice).

I’m breaking this up by section to help make this a bit easier.

Introduction

1. “Six Years Ago:” “Fading Glory: On the Trail of Jack Morrison,” in-universe article (https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/blog/19809396/) 2. Michael Chu’s timeline: “Thinking Globally: Building the Optimistic Future of Overwatch,” a GDC talk given by Michael Chu (Timestamp: 49:12 - clip starts at discussion of materials: https://youtu.be/bj56ejM5EcU?t=2952)

Late 2069/Early 2070

1. “Halloween party:” “Junkenstein’s Revenge,” a comic in which Reinhardt narrates a “scary” story to some of the Overwatch members (https://comic.playoverwatch.com/en-us/junkrat-junkenstein). What is important to note here is that Michael actually puts this in the “Fall of Overwatch” era of his timeline. It is also important to note that several major Overwatch characters - Lena, Winston, and Genji - are either not yet a part of Overwatch, or were not permitted to join the “core members’” Halloween party. I have personally chosen to interpret this as the first option. You may view things differently.

2. Tracer disappears from the timeline (not shown): “I was missing for months” - quote from her Origin video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27LPGldyY7M). “[Tracer] reappeared months later, but her ordeal had greatly changed her: her molecules had been desynchronized from the flow of time.” - quote from her Hero profile (https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/heroes/tracer/). “Months” here, as I understand it, probably means fewer than 12 months (a full year) but more than “a couple” (2 months). It’s difficult to say when exactly Lena disappeared and when she returned, but we know she had returned by April of 2070 (at the very latest).

3. The Shimada brothers’ duel: alright. Full disclosure inbound. I got a handful of people countering me on this issue in my Moira discussion and here’s my response: we have a number of conflicting pieces of information and many of them could be possible. I’d like to run through my reasoning for why I’m placing this event in the final year of Overwatch, as well as other possible places it could go.

3.1 “Nearly ten years ago:” a few people brought up that the 2014 Blizzcon Overwatch reveal panel described Hanzo (a then-playable character) as having left his home “nearly ten years ago.” You can find this quote on this transcript here (http://overwatch.blizzplanet.com/blog/comments/blizzcon-2014-overwatch-unveiled-panel-transcript/3). Reason why I disagree with this assessment: this line never made it to either of Hanzo or Genji’s final Hero profiles (Hanzo: https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/heroes/hanzo/) (Genji: https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/heroes/genji/).

That said, this does not mean the line is incorrect, nor that it is not part of whatever internal timeline Blizzard is using. I personally do not think it’s wise to specific details from the 2014 Blizzcon panel because of how old it is and how much changed between 2014 and the game’s release in 2016. Remember - Blizzard was still rethinking its own plot well past the game’s release (when they canceled “First Strike”). But in all fairness, if you want to make your own version of the timeline and use that, then feel free.

3.2 Late March/Early April: I had someone else note the fact that the “Dragons” animation shows several koinobori, or the Japanese koi windsocks traditionally flown on Children’s Day on May 5th. There are a couple of issues with this: one, it does not particularly coincide with the blooming of the cherry blossoms in the Tokyo region (source: http://www.jnto.go.jp/sakura/eng/index.php), which is where Hanamura is “set,” and two, the idea kinda trusts that Blizzard did research on koinobori and when they are supposed to be used. In an effort to be fair to Blizzard, technically, koinobori can begin appearing as decorations as early as April, and be flown all the way through to Children’s Day.

3.3 Genji in training: a related issue to 3.2 and the upcoming 5th event in the timeline is that Genji appears to be testing out his cyborg body in a sparring match against Lena/Tracer. The “Art of Overwatch” book also provides a description that appears to imply that this skin is him when he is still recovering:

“Much like the Origins Edition skins, the designs released for the Uprising event offered a glimpse into a pivotal period of the characters’ lives. One of the most extreme designs belong to Genji. After his brother, Hanzo, nearly killed him, he was taken in by Overwatch and given a new body (below). The experience left the hero embittered and angry, constantly at war with the cybernetics that were now a part of him.

“When designing a skin for this part of Genji’s story, the developers used his outfit to mirror his turbulent state of mind. They made his armor feel like a mishmash of parts, symbolizing the hero’s struggle to accept what he has becomd. The use of red throughout the skin also helped ot emphasize his uncontrollable rage.” - The Art of Overwatch, page 233

No date is given, hence why I feel the idea is only implied, but it is not stated. Again, if you wish to create your own interpretation of this, you are free to do so.

4. Winston crash lands on Earth (no exact date given): this one is very difficult and admittedly extremely loosely incorporated into the final year of Overwatch. You may interpret it differently. My reasoning here is that Winston is not present in the Halloween comic, and no specific details are given in the ironically-named “New Details Emerge About Possible Fate of Horizon Lunar Colony” article (https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/blog/20812209). However, Winston needs to be “present” and part of Overwatch when Tracer returns to the timeline from her accident, so this potentially puts Winston’s landing sometime around the Shimadas’ duel.

5. Uprising: As I described above, I’ve extrapolated that the time since release and the canon-events revealed have some parallels running between them. Obviously, this is not set 100% in stone. However, with Uprising, we do know a few things:

it is Lena’s first mission, so it has to come after her return to the timeline

it features Winston, so he’s either a part of Overwatch now or taking a more active role

it features Winston testing Lena’s chronal accelerator, so it is relatively recent after her return and stabilization

it features Genji before he gets his normal cyborg “skin”

it features Angela who appears to be testing Genji’s cybernetics

Reinhardt has not yet retired

Jesse is still present and part of Blackwatch

Ana is still present

Gabriel is still present

Overwatch is already under public scrutiny

Director Petras has already suspended Blackwatch activities

It takes place “seven years ago” from 2077.

These are a lot of constraints to place on Uprising, but they do limit us to what is likely the final year of Overwatch. The teaser tweet for the event can be found here (https://twitter.com/playoverwatch/status/848958308643885056?lang=en) and the blog post can be found here (https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/blog/20696534). Mid-to-Late 2070 (exact dates unknown) This is where things get very difficult to align, and the majority of events could be effectively rearranged to come before or after each other. 1. Moira recruited to Blackwatch: main source - Moira Origin Story (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ETybQd4uRE) The newest event at the time of this writing, Moira’s recruitment is constrained by two major things - it must come after Genji joins, and it must happen before Genji and Jesse leave Blackwatch. Again, if you see Genji’s fight with Hanzo as happening a couple of years before 2070, then yes, this event could come much earlier. The second “part” of this (which I’ve placed several months after her recruitment in the timeline) is that whatever Moira does or “tests” on Gabriel must come after Ana has “died” and separated from the Overwatch team. Hypothetically, Moira’s “tests” are likely conducted over a period of time, but no matter what, Gabriel’s “final, unmasked appearance” (whatever it is) was never seen by Ana (but hypothetically has been seen by Jack/Soldier: 76).

For the quote that I provided, you can check here (http://segadores-y-soldados.tumblr.com/post/167111711575/moira-preview-new-hero-overwatch-panel) or you can watch the source video yourself:

“Moira Reveal Panel” - quote from Michael Chu (Timestamp: 3:47 https://youtu.be/HsJU3PEk9JY?t=227)

Source for the “Soldier: 24 folder” - http://segadores-y-soldados.tumblr.com/post/167127031445/new-details-on-the-university-map-of-oasis-found

2. Doomfist’s arrest: main source - Doomfist Origin Story (https://youtu.be/vaZfZFNuOpI) Again, no exact date has been given, but there are number of constraints that put this after Uprising:

Tracer is part of the team that arrested him

Winston is part of the team that arrested him (this may come after Winston passes whatever certification test is in the photo in Recall)

Genji appears to have his new cybernetics and may have transferred to Overwatch

Other key members of Overwatch, such as Reinhardt and Torbjörn, are not present and may have retired.

This may come before Moira’s recruitment. Talon activities at this time period are difficult to suss out correctly. As Moira’s hero profile implies:

“After Overwatch was disbanded, O'Deorain was forced to turn to unconventional sources of funding. This time, she was invited to join the scientific collective that had founded the city of Oasis. Yet some have whispered that the shadowy Talon organization had already been supporting her for years, aiding her experiments in exchange for utilizing the results for their own purposes.” Moira may have already been working for Talon at this time. The “organization had already been supporting her for years” overlaps with her recruitment into Blackwatch (no matter where you put it), meaning she may have entered Blackwatch and Overwatch as a Talon agent. It is also possible that she was approached by Talon AFTER becoming a Blackwatch agent.

This is important - and unfortunately very vague - because our next two points rely on knowing when and how Talon began infiltrating Blackwatch and Overwatch. 3. Amélie’s transformation into Widowmaker (no exact date given): main sources - Widowmaker’s Hero profile (https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/heroes/widowmaker/) and “Legacy” comic (https://comic.playoverwatch.com/en-us/legacy)

The exact timeline of Amélie’s transformation is hard to pin down because so much of it is simply unknown. We have a few constraints but don’t know the exact time or nature of them:

Her skin and heartrate have been affected by whatever chemicals Talon put in her, turning her blue/purple (and yes, that’s canon and not just “aesthetics” - “then her physiology was altered, drastically slowing her heart, which turned her skin cold and blue and numbed her ability to experience human emotion.”)

However, her Talon skin does not have the blue/purple tint yet, so it’s possible this is a representation of her shortly after she killed Gérard (I suspect Overwatch would’ve been much less casual about letting her return to her husband if she had been, well, literally blue/purple).

It is not known if this process was started before or after Moira joined Blackwatch, but it is incredibly suspicious that a “possibly Talon-affiliated” scientist with knowledge of altering genetics and physiology who is literally shown testing chemicals on her own arm which later turns blue/purple appears in the exact timeframe that Amélie’s transformation begins. The Fall of Overwatch: Late (?) 2070 1. Ana’s “death:” main sources - Ana Origin Story (https://youtu.be/yzFWIw7wV8Q) and “Legacy” comic. For my original discussion on this, check here: http://segadores-y-soldados.tumblr.com/post/159512959195/alright-so-the-subject-of-ana-being-the-source-of Ana’s death was likely a major, major turning point for both Overwatch and Talon. Again, it’s hard to place because it appears to come after the majority of Amélie’s transformation into Widowmaker, but again, the exact date to place this is unknown. Many fans originally believed that Ana had “died” much, much earlier in the timeline, like, several years earlier. However, after Uprising was released and it was revealed that Ana was still present early in the final year, fan theories had to be changed.

It also makes a lot more sense if Ana’s “shoot-off” with Widowmaker occurs very close to the Fall of Overwatch - so close that she was not able to recover in time and return to the organization to help repair any rifts her “death” may have caused. However, it also has to come before Gabriel’s final transformation or shift into “Reaper,” because Ana does not recognize “what has happened” to him.

It is also a little difficult to sort out, but a major “potential” cause for a rift between Jack and Gabriel could stem from discussions about Ana disobeying orders. It’s a small detail to catch, but in the “Legacy” comic, Ana deliberately defies orders to evacuate and turns off her communications device, possibly leaving the Strike Team unable to find her location. However, in the “Old Soldiers” comic, Reaper says that Overwatch “left [Ana] to die,” which seems to contradict the point that she disobeyed evac orders. I know many fans don’t like the idea of the fallout between Gabriel/Reaper and Jack/Soldier: 76 being over a miscommunication, but it seems entirely plausible that Jack returned from the mission without Ana, claiming she had ignored his orders, and that Gabriel had accused him of abandoning her. Again, this is my interpretation of the events presented. Reading between the lines, especially with such large gaps in the plot, is a difficult task and you may choose to interpret things differently. 2. Events with unknown dates: there are three events that have no set dates but occur near or close to the Fall of Overwatch, or at least must occur after certain other points. These are: 2.1 Genji leaves Overwatch: this must occur after he participates in the arrest of Doomfist. 2.2 Jesse leaves Blackwatch: this must occur after Uprising and Moira’s recruitment (bare minimum), and must occur after “the infighting” within Blackwatch had begun (McCree’s Hero profile: https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/heroes/mccree/). Direct quote: “McCree appreciated the flexibility afforded to the clandestine Blackwatch, unhindered by bureaucracy and red tape. But as Overwatch's influence waned, rogue elements within Blackwatch sought to bring down the organization and turn it to their own ends. Wanting no part of the infighting, McCree set off alone and went underground.” 2.3 The “Venice incident:” an unknown event alluded to in Moira’s Hero profile, in which her presence in Blackwatch is revealed (Moira’s Hero profile: https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/heroes/moira/). Direct quote: “Her employment was a closely kept secret, until it was uncovered during inquiries following the Venice incident. Many high-ranking Overwatch officials disavowed all knowledge of her affiliation with them.” This is significant because a major Talon leader - Vialli - works in Venice and appears (briefly and much later) during the events of the “Masquerade” comic.

These events have no set dates and no particular order. Michael Chu has stated that McCree and Genji kept in touch after leaving Blackwatch separately, but no dates are given for that. 3. “What happened to you?”/“It was a conspiracy:” Main sources:

Reaper’s Hero profile: https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/heroes/reaper/

Soldier: 76′s Hero profile: https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/heroes/soldier-76/

Soldier: 76 Origin Story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byhvUmpAA9c

“Fading Glory: On the Trail of Jack Morrison”: https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/blog/19809396/

Moira Origin Story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ETybQd4uRE

Nesskain’s (the artist of the Moira Origin Story video) response to how Gabriel is feeling about the shadows: https://twitter.com/nesskain/status/926674887615188992

Moira Reveal Panel at 2017 Blizzcon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsJU3PEk9JY

“Old Soldiers” comic: https://comic.playoverwatch.com/en-us/ana-old-soldiers

“Are you with us?” Recall message: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwFu8kEsUW4

And now Here we are. I’ve put these two events side-by-side because it’s incredibly likely that they’re linked in some way. The exact nature of their connections are still unknown, as are their dates. Hypothetically, by the time Genji and Jesse leave, “whatever happened” to Gabriel has not yet occurred. That said, Michael Chu has stated that Jesse McCree has not seen Gabriel/Reaper in the current plotline, but that, if they were to meet, McCree “would known [sic] that Reaper was Reyes if he encountered him” (https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/6b63j3/ama_request_michael_chu/dhlepud/). In other places, Michael has stated that the only people who recognize that Gabriel is Reaper are Jack, Ana, and Sombra (this is prior to the release of Doomfist and Moira). Direct quote: “So far: Ana and Jack (when they encountered him in Old Soldiers) and Sombra (because she Knows Things). “Even with everything that's happened to Reyes, Ana and Jack would be able to recognize him immediately, given all their close experience serving together over the years. “(To make it extra confusing: it gets a little more complicated in-game because we chose to have some non-canon interactions because I think it's more interesting to have Reinhardt take out Reaper and say, "Traitor!" than to accurately reflect that he doesn't know Reaper's true identity. But as I've said before, events in game shouldn't be considered strictly canon.)” - Michael Chu (https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20753735625#post-13) So we’ve come to a few constraints on Gabriel’s “appearance:”

Jack/Soldier: 76 knows that Gabriel is Reaper by the time of “Old Soldiers,” if not beforehand.

Ana recognizes him by demeanor and personality, but is horrified by his appearance when she unmasks him in “Old Soldiers.”

Despite having worked with him for the same amount of time as Ana, Reinhardt canonically does not know who “Reaper” is, but would recognize him if he encountered him.

Jesse McCree canonically does not know who “Reaper” is, but would recognize him if he encountered him.

Interestingly, Widowmaker does not know who “Reaper” is.

Winston does not appear to know who “Reaper” is.

Genji may or may not know who “Reaper” is.

It is important to note that, by the time of the explosion at the Swiss Watchpoint, the majority of these characters are not present in Overwatch anymore. Ana, Reinhardt, Jesse, Amélie (if she ever was close to the Overwatch agents), and Genji have all left. Winston, presumably, is at Watchpoint: Gibraltar. The locations of characters like Torbjörn, Angela, and Lena are unknown.

That leaves three possible “major characters” at the Swiss Watchpoint at the time of the explosion: Gabriel Reyes, Jack Morrison, and potentially Moira O’Deorain. Her direct involvement in this event is unknown. According to the “Fading Glory” article, both Gabriel and Jack were seen by witnesses as being present in the Watchpoint before the explosion. Soldier: 76 confirms this in his Origin Story. Reaper confirms that he too was present at the base in the “Old Soldiers” comic.

What is significant is that Nesskain has confirmed that Gabriel is “scared” when what appears to be his final transformation is occurring (in the presence of Moira), yet for some reason, he specifically blames Jack and Overwatch for “what happened to him.”

Ana: “What happened to you...?”

Reaper: “He did this to me, Ana. They left me to become this thing...”

Ana: “Gabriel...”

Reaper: “They left you to die. They left me to suffer...”

Reaper: “...Never forget that.”

Reaper’s explanation in “Old Soldiers” is fascinating because it appears to be in direct contrast with information given to us in “Legacy” (Ana chose to turn off her comms) and the Moira Origin Story (Gabriel approached her for recruitment, Moira either created or enhanced his genetic mutations, resulting in his “Reaper” powers and/or current appearance/state of existence). It’s incredibly difficult to say how closely together Gabriel’s shift and the Swiss Watchpoint explosion occurred, or how much they are directly related, but it seems likely they are linked in some way. At the very least, Reaper links “being left behind (to suffer)” by Jack/Soldier: 76 and Overwatch with the explanation for his current (2076) state of existence.

Again, I will leave you to formulate whatever interpretation or conclusion you want. Conclusion You don’t have to use this timeline. I’ve provided every major source that I have for this “final year of Overwatch” - watch them, read them, form your own interpretations, do whatever you want. If your biggest issue is where I’ve placed things, go ahead and rearrange your own puzzle pieces. However, you should keep in mind an important quote from Michael Chu: “One of the things that we really like doing with Overwatch is playing with perspective. We utilize perspective when we tell stories about what characters are thinking, what their goals are - and we have a lot of unreliable narrators. We want people to pay careful attention to what characters think about in particular situations. We want them to use their judgement and knowlege of a character’s thoughts to come up with their own ideas about the universe.” - Thinking Globally (Timestamp: 34:35 https://youtu.be/bj56ejM5EcU?t=2075) Not only are many of the points in the timeline effectively “freefloating” (aka, they have no exact dates, or hell, not even exact months or years), they are also complicated by the matter of unreliable narrators and biased perspectives. The Moira Origin Story gives us a crucial clue to Gabriel/Reaper’s story, but the narration in the video is all told to us by Moira. I am personally infinitely grateful for the Moira Reveal Panel and Nesskain’s comments on his own art because they provide us with very significant clues that are from outsiders looking in. That is, they are not tinted with biases or unreliability.

After going through the new clues on Oasis, as well as listening to the Moira Reveal Panel and seeing Nesskain’s comments, I have revised a lot of my initial ideas on her, Gabriel, and Jack. At the moment, I’m waiting to see if we get any in-game interactions between her and Reaper when she is released to the PTR later. For now, this my interpretation of the Fall of Overwatch.

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yoshimotokouki · 6 years

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[SUMABO NEW YEAR SPECIAL REPORT] Yoshimoto Kouki's First Fan Event 'Yoshimoto no Moto' Part 1

05.01.2018

Yoshimoto Kouki who appeared in “Hyper Projection Engeki - Haikyuu!! Summer of Evolution” and is also an active reporter for NTV’s ZIP! held his first ever fan event in Space SF Shiodome, Tokyo on 16 December 2017. We will report on the first half of the event and include photos.

(Yoshimoto Kouki-san holding his first ever fan event ‘Yoshimoto no Moto’)

From his debut stage in 'Patalliro!’ in 2016 as a part of the Tamanegi Troop to the 'Hyper Projection Engeki - Haikyuu!! Summer of Evolution’ (as Bokuto Koutaro of Fukurodani Academy) that was in theatres last summer, Yoshimoto Kouki gave a lot of energy to his acting. He appears as a regular model in the men’s magazine 'FINEBOYS’ to showcase his style and is also a reporter in NTV’s ‘ZIP!’

In the opening movie before Yoshimoto-san appeared, he narrated a video showing on the screen precious photos from his baby pictures to his school days as a baseball player with a buzz cut! There were also photos of Yoshimoto-san cooking, modelling activities and older private photos that made all his fans cheer out of joy. It was when all his fans’ applaud reached climax that Yoshimoto-san appeared from behind his audience! After looking at them, with a smile, he greeted everyone: “The day has finally come! I hope I could have the most wonderful time with you all today!”

From there on, a fun talk segment started with Terasako Mori-san as the MC. Regarding 'Yoshimoto no Moto’, Yoshimoto-san said “I want to make this a place (event) where I can feel as if I came back to my parents’ house as a 'source of energy’ in my actor life. I want to let everyone know a lot about me, and to make this meeting an enjoyable time for everyone.” And with that, the fan event continued.

Going back to the opening movie when it showed Yoshimoto-san cooking, he said “When I first came to Tokyo and started living on my own, I was so clueless and I couldn’t even do the laundry or cook by myself.” When I thought “wow, mum is awesome!”, I wanted to be able to do housework by myself and I worked as a part-timer in a cafe and learned cooking. Yoshimoto-san who is good at fancy cafe-meshi (light meals served at cafe) asked his fans “What do you think about men who cook?”, his audience responded with a big applaud to which he said “I’m glad to hear that, I wish I could serve my cooking to you all.” He made such a remark that boosted his fans’ expectations for his future events.

For the first time in his actor career, Yoshimoto-san played the role of Bokuto Koutaro from Fukurodani Gakuen in 'Engeki Haikyuu!!’ “Actually, at the beginning, I didn’t know the story of 'Haikyuu!!’ as I’ve never read it before. But when I got the chance to audition, I read all the manga chapters and watched the anime episodes and got hooked! I felt a connection with Bokuto and when I went to audition for his part, I was confident that I could play his character well. I was totally charmed by 'Haikyuu!!’ and with each passing performance, I was told that I became more and more like Bokuto even in real life. I began to understand that this is what it means to become an actor, and it became an important thing for me.” Yoshimoto-san stated.

Following the talk segment, Yoshimoto-san was challenged to demonstrate the acting skills of an aspiring actor! As chosen by fans in the audience, Yoshimoto-san showed improvised love confessions in the segment titled 'Ba-dump Theatre’ and acted out on different situations depending on the theme. That was the start of a fun segment where the fans would either accept or reject his love confession, depending on whether his fans’ heart went 'ba-dump!’

The first theme was 'the volleyball captain and the female manager.’ When there were only the two of them left behind the gymnasium, the volleyball captain played by Yoshimoto-san said “I’ve been able to give my best everyday thanks to you.. and before I noticed it, I’ve been looking at 〇〇-chan more. I like you. Please go out with me if we win the next match. I will do my best until 〇〇-chan falls for me” - what a manly confession! This confession got a unanimous 'accept’ from the audience.

The next theme was 'the teacher and the student.’ Yoshimoto-san played the teacher and the fans were the students who had to stay behind after class because of failing grades. As the situation continues, Yoshimoto-san started asking silly questions after questions. At the end, he asked “Who are the students who kept failing and giving me a hard time?” To which they said “It’s me.” Yoshimoto-san then said “That’s right, it’s you. But I can’t just leave you alone, so you better stick with me.” And with that he patted their head! It received cheers from everyone while Yoshimoto-san was feeling shy, and of course, the confession got an 'accept’ from everyone.

(At the 'Ba-dump Theatre’ where everyone’s heart was pounding)

Moving on after the 'Ba-dump Theatre’, a new corner called 'Yoshimoto Challenge’ began. 'In order to become a star, one must clear any challenge in one go’ - so a penalty game started where Yoshimoto-san must answer the questions correctly. To start off, a timer was set to ten seconds in which he must answer the question. If he gets the answer wrong, the punishment is 'Sunshine Ikezaki-san’s full power impersonation’ where he will laugh and shout “A man who loves Kansai and is loved by all of Kansai! Sunshine Yoshimoto!” with full power at the venue.

(Showing off 'Sunshine Yoshimoto’ at full power)

The next game was 'Kendama one-shot game’ in which he had to shoot the ball into one of the kendama cups in one go. Yoshimoto-san who failed this game had to do the penalty game 'Face rubber stretching game.’ He had to bite a large rubber band at one end, and his fan had to hold the other end. When the fan let go, the rubber hits Yoshimoto-san’s face vigorously! “It’s really scary! (lol) Everyone in the entertainment industry is awesome” said Yoshimoto-san who had to experience the rubber stretching game. It was a game that brought laughter to the audience by sacrificing Yoshimoto-san’s body.

At the end of the event, as a present to the fans, a 'Yoshimoto-san photoshoot with the audience’ corner also took place. Yoshimoto-san made a lot of various poses as a response to the requests of his fans. He also drew a lot of illustrations on the merchandises available for purchase in the goods section. The handmade parts of the merchandise were prepared by Yoshimoto-san for all his fans to enjoy.

In addition to the fan event, Yoshimoto-san’s 2018 calendar was also released. “I had photoshoots with various themes so I would be glad if everyone could place my calendar in an area where they could always see it next year” Yoshimoto-san commented. Talking about his 2018 stage projects where he is appearing again for 'Patalliro! ★ Stardust Project ★’ and 'Hyper Projection Engeki - Haikyuu!! Hajimari no Kyojin’, Yoshimoto-san enthusiastically said “I will be playing the same role as I previously did for the both of them, but I would try to bring more power into my stage acting.”

“The event was so much fun. Knowing that my fans came from different places just to come see me will be a source of energy for me from now on. I am going to work hard to give back to everyone. This is the kind of day today has become for me!” Yoshimoto-san stated. “I would also like to extend my gratitude to the event staffs who all worked together to make this event possible.” He added. And as his final remark to end the first part of Yoshimoto no Moto, he exclamed “Hey, hey, hey!”

(Hey, hey, hey!)

After the first part of the event has ended, Sumabo went straight to Yoshimoto-san for an interview! The interview and comments video(?) will be uploaded in the coming days.

Yoshimoto Kouki’s 2018 Calendar and his bromides that were on sale on the venue will also be available to be purchased online around mid-January. The details will be announced by Yoshimoto Kouki when they have been decided so please expect it soon.

For the latest information regarding Yoshimoto-san’s future projects, please refer to the official website of each performances and his official Twitter account.

☆ Information

■ Stage play 'Patalliro! ★ Stardust Project ★’ <Tokyo performances> 15 - 25 March 2018 @ The Galaxy Theatre <Osaka performances> 30 March - 01 April 2018 @ Morinomiya Piloti Hall ≪Official Website≫ http://www.nelke.co.jp/stage/patalliro2018/

■ Stage play 'Hyper Projection Engeki - Haikyuu!! Hajimari no Kyojin’ <Tokyo performances> 28 April - 06 May 2018 @ Nippon Seinenkan Hall <Hyogo performances> 12 - 13 May 2018 @ Amashin Archaic Hall <Fukuoka performances> 18 - 20 May 2018 @ Fukuoka Convention Centre Main Hall <Miyagi performances> 25 - 27 May 2018 @ Tagajo City Cultural Center <Osaka performances> 01 - 03 June 2018 @ Orix Theatre <Tokyo performances> 08 - 17 June 2018 @ Tokyo Dome City Hall ≪Official Website≫ http://www.engeki-haikyu.com/spring2018/

■ For the latest information about Yoshimoto Kouki ≪Official Twitter≫ https://twitter.com/ysmt0817 ≪Official Instagram≫ https://www.instagram.com/yoshimotokouki/ ≪Agency Profile≫ https://furutachi-project.co.jp/profile/yoshimoto/

Source

#yoshimoto kouki #yoshimoto no moto #it's super long so I put a read more #it's like 15 paragraphs long ;;#but it has so much fun info about the event #especially the 'ba-dump theatre'#where he did mock love confessions #it must have been so much fun seeing it live ;;;;#can you imagine kouki patting your head uffu I'd die #sorry it took so long lol #there's also a part two #which is also another long post lol but it's not as long as this #it's more of a question and answer thing #but more pics from the event!!#also idk about the 'comment video'#bcoz I can't find any video of the event...#thank you so much for reading this super long post! x3

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covid19updater · 4 years

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COVID19 Updates: 10/23/2020

Germany: Coronavirus: Germany hits five-figure infections again amid lockdown warning LINK

Philippines: Philippines reports 1,923 new coronavirus cases, 132 more deaths

Romania: Romania rose by a daily record of 5,028 in the past 24 hours,

North Korea: North Korea has warned its citizens to stay indoors over fears that "yellow dust" which blows in from China could bring coronavirus with it. The streets of the capital Pyongyang were reported to be virtually empty on Thursday following the warning. LINK

India: Autopsy finds Covid patient’s lungs ‘hard as a leather ball’ LINK

Scotland: Coronavirus in Scotland: Traces of Covid-19 found in waste water from almost every Scottish area LINK

New Mexico: OVERALL STATE HOSPITAL CAPACITY: As of today, 85 percent of adult general beds at New Mexico hospitals are occupied, and 70 percent of adult ICU beds across New Mexico hospitals are occupied. This includes patients hospitalized for COVID-19 and other illnesses.

Netherlands: 10,007 new confirmed corona infections have been reported to the RIVM until 10:00 this morning. That is 726 more than were reported yesterday.

US: Santa won't be at Macy's for the first time in 159 years LINK

Poland: Poland's PM Morawiecki: - highest tier of restrictions - primary schools switch to e-learning (years 4-8) - restaurants, pubs, cafes, bars to close; takeaway only - rule of five for social meetings - seniors 70+ asked not to leave home unless essential (groceries, GP, pharmacy)

Switzerland: Switzerland 7 day positivity rate: 17.7% LINK

Italy: Italian governor calls for national lockdown amid coronavirus surge

Belgium: Belgium reports 16,746 new coronavirus cases, by far the biggest one-day increase on record - Positivity rate: 18.7% (+1.8) - In hospital: 3,649 (+375) - In ICU: 573 (+48) - New deaths: 49

Iowa: Coronavirus outbreak infects nearly every resident of Amana nursing home LINK

Czech Republic: Czech Health Minister Roman Prymula has refused calls from the country's prime minister to resign, after being pictured by a tabloid newspaper coming out of a restaurant late at night - despite all such establishments being closed. The affair has thrown the country deep into political crisis, and public confidence in government restrictions has been left in tatters. There was already considerable public grumbling at the latest restrictions, which include closing all pubs and restaurants. So when the man who thought up those rules was caught by a tabloid photographer emerging from a restaurant and without a mask, it appeared his days – perhaps hours – were numbered. However, he now says he was at a meeting in a private room in the building that also houses the restaurant, and that he put on his mask as soon as he got to his car. The country now finds itself in an unedifying and toxic political struggle – right in the middle of the worst health crisis it has ever seen.

Kenya: Kenya has reported a sharp increase in Covid-19 cases, with more than 1,000 people confirmed to have contracted coronavirus on Thursday. This is the highest number of single-day cases to be recorded in the country since the first case was reported on 13 March. Critics say the rise in cases is a result of people not adhering to safety measures in open spaces after President Uhuru Kenyatta relaxed restrictions three weeks ago. The health ministry is holding talks with the management of about 20 hotels that will be converted into isolation facilities to ease off pressure in hospitals. Some hospitals are said to have started recording a surge in admissions. Daniel Yumbya, the chief executive of the Medical Pharmacists and Dentists Council, said the country has a total of 18,443 isolation beds - which is not enough. "We’re now back to negotiating with private hotels to charge the bare minimum for patients in isolation. We do not want hospitals to be overwhelmed," Yumbya told journalists on Thursday.

UK: Rugby: England v Barbarians called off after players breach Covid rules LINK

US: Coronavirus pandemic is causing 'unacceptable' shortages in US drug supplies, report says LINK

Italy: Italy: +19,143

US: In the United States, 10.9% of detected COVID19 cases are children, according to data from mid-October. They were only 2.2% in April. --(American Academy of Pediatrics)

France: As millionth case looms, COVID tears through France faster than in spring LINK

World: WHO's Tedros: We are at a critical juncture in the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the Northern hemisphere. The next few months are going to be very tough and some countries are on a dangerous track. "We urge leaders to take immediate action, to prevent further unnecessary deaths, essential health services from collapsing and schools shutting again. As I said it in February and I’m repeating it today: This is not a drill. Too many countries are now seeing an exponential increase in infections, and that is now leading to hospitals and intensive care units running close or above capacity -- and we’re still only in October.

Spain: The Spanish Health Ministry's "symptoms starting in the last 14 days" figure has skyrocketed this week too. Now up to 60,000.

US: LINKEDIN EXTENDS WORK FROM HOME TO JULY 12, 2021

France: French President Macron says coronavirus epidemic in "extremely strong" acceleration, measures could be strengthened if they're not effective enough - BFM

Russia: Russia says COVID "under control" despite record infections, bodies lined up in hospital basement LINK

UK: Covid-19: Boris Johnson hopes families can have Christmas together LINK (The cheese has slid off the poor man’s cracker)

US: TOP NIH OFFICIAL DR. FAUCI: WE NEED TO DOUBLE DOWN ON WEARING MASKS, SOCIAL DISTANCING, AND OTHER PUBLIC HEALTH MEASURES. US TOP NIH DR FAUCI SAYS WH VIRUS TASK FORCE MEETINGS DOWN TO ONCE A WEEK

UK: Coronavirus: 'Uncontrolled epidemic' in young people would have 'dire consequences for NHS', SAGE warns LINK

France: In France, the number of COVID patients in hospital is rising fast (see chart). Nearly 2,100 people were admitted on Thursday, or roughly 1 person every 40 seconds

US: Dr. Eric Ding: My god, I cry so much for North Dakota and the Midwest right now. We are just at the beginning of the wave of deaths that are coming. North Dakota has the highest mortality in the world. Higher than ANY country.

Germany reports 13,405 new coronavirus cases, biggest one-day increase on record - @risklayer - In hospital: 5,175 est. (+377) - In ICU: 1,121 (+87) - New deaths: 46

Italy: S&P: THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC HAS HIT ITALY'S ECONOMY HARD UNDER OUR PROJECTIONS, GDP WILL NOT RETURN TO 2019 LEVELS UNTIL 2023.

Italy: Governor of southern Italian region of Campania calls for national lockdown. PM Conte is resisting a national shutdown, saying it would be a disaster for economy.

Oklahoma: OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) – An Oklahoma family is being forced to consider COVID-19 treatment in Texas after one of the state’s top doctors says open COVID-19 ICU hospital beds in Oklahoma are rare. LINK

US: JUST IN: The US reports over 80,000 new coronavirus cases, the highest daily figure since the pandemic began.

Texas: State sends emergency medical personnel, supplies to El Paso as COVID-19 cases rise across Texas LINK

Italy: Protesters in Naples, Italy, take to the street in defiance of curfew after governor calls for total lockdown. Earlier today, the governor said: "The current contagion figures render any type of partial measure ineffective. It is necessary to close everything, except for sectors that produce and move essential goods" - ANSA

Alabama: Alabama reported 3,852 new cases today on 9,078 tests (42.4% positive).

World: COLD COMFORT Covid second wave spreading FASTER than the first because of the cold, top doc warns LINK

Argentina: Argentina COVID update: - New cases: 15,718 - Positivity rate: 44% (+2.4) - In hospital: 30,405 (+158) - In ICU: 4,696 (+85) - New deaths: 382

US: Total U.S. COVID-19 deaths could hit 500,000 by February, researchers say LINK

Belgium: Belgium reports record 17,568 new coronavirus cases, daily death toll at highest level since May - New cases: 17,568 - Positivity rate: 18.8% (+0.1) - In hospital: 4,061 (+412) - In ICU: 632 (+59) - New deaths: 70

UK: Covid: The NHS workers 'still recovering' as second wave looms LINK

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BREAKING:America Shuts Down again,Choosing reality over Trumps False Claims.

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/breakingamerica-shuts-down-againchoosing-reality-over-trumps-false-claims/

BREAKING:America Shuts Down again,Choosing reality over Trumps False Claims.

While President Donald Trump obsesses about his reelection hopes in his White House bubble, state and local leaders are frantically reversing state reopenings that he demanded, which turned America into the world’s biggest coronavirus hotspot.