I'm Jacob and I've probably met a lot of you before and some of you excited to meet today. I want to preface this talk by saying that you've been all fooled and this is not my talk at all. I actually inherited it from a colleague of mine who actually runs this program at Aquia and he was unable to come but it's actually an important topic and I think kind of interesting. And so he said, hey Jacob can you do this instead? So if it's bad you can blame him and if it's good you can give me all the credit. And I will have a couple people coming in. I think I'll probably answer a lot of the questions so let's make this look collaborative. I'm going to pass the mic around and figure it out. This is not working, what's going on here? That's odd, arrow keys aren't working, even that's not working, oh there we go. Now are you going to advance 10 at once? There's a lot of metaphors people use to explain open source in Drupal. How many of you are an open source developer? The rest of you what are you doing here? And how many of you are open source developers, how many of you go to parties? Wow, that's great, hold on. And then when you go to the party are everyone else an open source developer? Generally not. And so when they ask you what you do, what do you say? Software websites, anyone else? And what if they really like you and they want to get to know you and they're like what do you mean software websites? What does that mean exactly? Then what do you say? Yeah, brand websites. And they'd be like what's interesting about your company or your field then what do you say? Nobody? Nobody tries to explain their work to anybody? I get paid for doing free stuff. You get paid for doing free stuff, that's a great answer. What else? How do you describe Drupal to somebody who doesn't know? What it was if someone says to you if Drupal is open source then how do you guys make money? What do you say? Make life very simple? Right, so I think we hit across an actual problem here which is very hard to describe what you do. So a lot of times we use metaphors for that. For instance, has anyone heard that open source is free as in puppy? That one? What does free as in puppy mean? The puppy's free but you still have to take care of the puppy and that's part of it. One of the metaphors we often use as anyone heard of like a public road, like a rail system or something. We all need the road so we shouldn't all each own individual blocks of the road, we should just build a road for everyone to use, public commons and all that. What is the most common metaphor you've heard to use explain Drupal before? Legos. I know that Legos are super popular in the US and I think they're popular here now. I don't know if they were when everyone here was a kid. Who here played with Legos when they were a kid? Raise your hand please so I know. That's it. So who here knows what Legos are? Wow. Okay, we'll have to explain what Legos are.  You've never seen Legos? That's surprising. Okay, back up. So Lego is a set of plastic bricks that you can snap together to make just about anything. It's got wheels and it's got little flags and there's all different colors and all different shapes and you can snap them together and they stay together really well. You can build spaceships or cars or whatever you want to make. That's what Legos are. And why do we say that Drupal is like Legos? Well, one of the reasons is that it's got a lot of parts. Drupal's got tons and tons of parts. We call those parts modules or themes or the things where there's all these different parts you can assemble. You get this huge box of parts. It's not just one or two. You can't just pick red or blue or black. You can pick every color and every shape. There's so many different ways to do things. There's a lot of parts. If you use those parts in the wrong way, you can really hurt yourself very badly. That's another thing about Drupal, just similar to Legos. The most common reason why we say Drupal is like Lego would be what? You wouldn't know? I guess? What?  I caught you. The main reason we say that Drupal is like Lego is that you can build all kinds of stuff with it. You can build all different types of contraptions and all different types of cities and forts and cars and whatever with it. Similarly with Drupal, it's not limited to just one type of application and building it a certain way. It's not like word. Word is what? Word is a word processor. It's always going to be a word processor. It'll never be a spreadsheet program. It'll never be a Wikipedia thing, whatever. Drupal you can make all kinds of things with and that is fantastic. There's a million ways to do it. There's a million ways to build it. You can snap all those pieces together and create anything you want. Flexibility is awesome. What is it? And if you agree with that statement, raise your hand please. Okay.  It's the same answer. This is you. The programmer represents, this is the IT buyer in an organization. Someone who is responsible for making sure that we can build things efficiently and fast and keep them running insecure for a large enterprise, any enterprise. And they love flexibility. That's really key to their job. That makes sense. Ask a really question. How many of you can drive a car? Okay. How many of you can fix a car? Even like oil changes, spark plugs? One or two? Yeah. Cool. Because my car is outside. I'm going to change the oil. Okay. And how many of you would prefer to buy your car or build your car? How many of you can build a car? Yeah. I don't think anyone in this room can build a car. So, when you look at that and you think, building a car? No. That sounds cool, but I've got other things to do with my time. I need to get to office. My job is not to build cars. My job is to get to office. That's the business buyer in an organization. That's the marketing head or the sales head or whatever who's responsible for getting results out of the software that's being built. In this person, they may appreciate technology. They may even be very technical themselves. But their job is to put the right content in front of the right people at the right time so that they do something the organization wants. You buy something, sign up for something, tell someone about something, whatever it is. That's their job. And building software is a nightmare for them. It's a huge distraction. Your job is to get to office. Your job is to go on a date. Your job is to get to grandma's house on the weekend. Building a car would be a huge distraction for you. And this brings up what we call the build versus buy sort of argument and the build versus buy problem. One side we have it's flexible and the other side is it's easy. And we can't just solve one problem. It's not enough to say that one of these guys is wrong. They're both required for the organization and they both have their needs which are relevant. So how can we figure out a system wherein there's something out of the box that will solve the goals of the business user that has his domain in mind, understands his problems and knows how to solve them. At the same time being flexible enough that you can enhance it, that you can build upon it, that you can create other things with it. It's a flexible system. Anyone have any ideas? How do we do that currently? No answers? Distributions. Distributions, yes. So how many of you know what a distribution is? Okay, how many of you have used one? And how many of you use one on like every project you do? Yeah, that went from like 50 to 20 to 2. Distributions have been moderately successful at solving this gap but not always getting there. So a distribution for those who are not aware is we take, you know, you have core, triple core, and you have a site. In between that you have a distribution layer. So a distribution is core plus a bunch of modules you'd use all the time and some configuration to stitch them together. On top of that you build a site. That's how it's typically worked. And now, you know, and then you can translate that into multi-sites to produce multiple sites. A lot of big enterprises don't produce one site. They have a distribution which may be like an insurance company. It might be a distribution called the insurance representative distribution. And every insurance draft gets a separate site but it's all based on the same distribution, you know, or something to have you. And so lightning falls in there. Lightning is a distribution for Drupal. It's a set of pre-built modules that are configured to work well together that you can build on top of. One of the key design differences though that we thought about with lightning is we said we want to make the best content authoring experience in the industry. Not just Drupal, right? And we know that we don't know what best is. We at AQUIA are not going to figure out what best is. IF3 even is a best because every organization works differently. We are not a marketing organization. We are much more the geeky IT guy with the C colon coffee mug. And we probably would not do a great job of it. So what we'd like to do was to say, hey, there's going to be this base and then there's going to be enterprise customizations on top of that that we can expect are going to come. And on top of that we're going to build sites. So we're trying to build a distribution distribution as it were. And provide a lot of really clean, really well-built components that sit underneath the enterprise customizations. Everyone with me so far? Yeah, okay. A little more specifically, unless theoretically, what problems are we trying to solve in lightning? I think these are problems which have played Drupal for a long time and we're trying to tackle the most difficult ones. We're going to follow layouts. So layout is something where both the block system was traditionally very inflexible. Panel system is incredibly complex and heavy. We're trying to be somewhere in the middle where a marketer can just say, okay, bop, bop, bop, my page, done. Put it off to market. That's something that's just been hard to achieve in Drupal today. Workflow, pretty good in Drupal today, to be honest. Some of the things that aren't there, though, is if you want to preview multiple pieces of content to publish at the same time, that's been a challenge traditionally. Maintaining multiple revision trees of content can be a problem at times. That's what we're focusing on. Again, the previous thing I just mentioned, seeing how the site will look, assuming that we publish four or five things at once, configuration changes as well. Media handling, that's kind of a difficult scene in Drupal, of which I'm partially responsible for. But anyway, that's a separate thing about embedding content, embedding rich media from other sources. And then, of course, at the other bottom layer below that, we're also looking at things that are really important to enterprises and having those pre-built in, making sure that we have automatic testing, security layers, et cetera. And without further ado, I've given you the reasons behind lightning. We can do a quick Q&A now, and then I have a demo video that was produced by the head of the lightning team, who's not here. Those of you who came late, this is not my talk, I'm sitting in for somebody. I mean, I made the talk, but it's his program. So I'm going to show the demo video. But any questions before we do that? Take a break? No? Okay. Is everyone ready to fall asleep? A little after lunch? Watch a movie? Sit back in your chair? Should I turn on the lights? All right, let's see a video, and we'll talk a little bit. It shows a little bit of features. This is still very much a work in progress. It's still a beta sort of product at this point. We're making a demo of a site which is trying to sell drones. And we're making a... We're going to create... First, we're going to create some content. We're going to create an article, a blog post on this site about a different kind of drone. And, you know, for that, we're going to need a little bit of content. So I apologize that this is all about bacon, and I understand that India's 20% Muslim population, but this is made in America. It wasn't my doing. So we're going to use this thing which is full of bacon words, like Laura Wipso. And we paste it in here. We're going to show a little bit of the media handling, so how we add rich content. This is Drupal 8. Yes, lightning is Drupal 8. So we go to a YouTube video. And this is not a cooking show. This is exactly how fast, how long it takes to do things. We're copying the YouTube URL. And then we go to the media library. We can pick existing media, or we can paste it in the embed code from YouTube. And we can save it to our library to use it later. And that will embed it right in the middle of the post. And now we're going to, again, create an embed. We're going to put an image here. This one we're going to upload from our hard drive. You just drag and drop it in there. And, again, we want to save that so we're going to use it later. And then finally, we're going to want to add some social media to the post. So let's do that. Over here we're going to Twitter. And we're going to find a tweet that we want to add from New York Times. So we copy the tweet URL, putting it back here. Again, for the embed, just paste it in. And he gives us that nice embed. And this is built for a lot of services, and it's a pluggable system. So other social networks can follow suit. What's that? Yeah, I think it is own, but I'm pretty sure. But, again, Q&A is probably not, I don't have all the details. But I have actually one of the guys in India who works on this team is actually going to come here and he'll be able to give you a lot more information. Cool.  This is creating a landing page. So landing page being a more complex page around a specific topic, with its own layout and its own different blocks of content. Cool. So here we're going to be adding some blocks. In this case we're using just standard sort of Drupal blocks that are built the same way with embeds. And we're going to be adding another block when it gets down to it. The video block. Again, just built using a standard Drupal block with a video embed, just like we did earlier. We put that in our different regions, so the different regions for the layout of the page. And then here we can see how we can change the layout. We're going to add also an Instagram block. So this one is in a second. It comes to it. So this is a layout picker. You can pick different layouts and change layouts on the fly. And all the content will be positioned. And then you're also able to then resize it and be responsive. Here we're going to add a list of tweets from Twitter. This is a live thing coming from views. This pulls straight from tweet entities using the view system and entity system. So we can pick those. We want five tweets to show. Another call to action. Got it. There we go. Now the page is done. Or maybe it's not done. Sorry. That's pretty much all it takes to create a landing page. It looks like this. This is stock lightning out of the box right now. And the whole thing is responsive all the layouts, which is pretty much more of a Drupal 8 thing, but it also is part of lightning as well. Pretty cool. So we're getting there. I think it's looking not so bad, right? I think it's closer than I thought when I saw the demo. We're going to look at workflow a bit and how we handle revisioning and moderation. So this is back to our original post here. We're going to edit the draft. And make a quick change here. And that came from the media library. So we had that tweet in our media library, which I think is kind of cool to sort of newish feature. Now we're saving it as needs review, to the workflow state. None of this is particularly revolutionary. This is really the same kind of stuff you saw in Drupal 7 for the most part, but it's now working in Drupal 8 thanks to the lightning team. And now we're in editor review. And again, an editor can come in here, see a dashboard of everything that needs to be approved. The editor can go in and approve it or send it back and give comments on the workflow state. But then after it's published, assuming if there's anything that's wrong with it, the revision history is maintained and anyone can revert back to an earlier version. Again, none of this is particularly revolutionary, but in Drupal 8, things are still working in progress. So some of this stuff didn't exist a month ago or would have hurt two months ago. It is now working thanks to the efforts of the contrib efforts here. But a sort of more interesting one is probably where I scheduled updates. So here we're doing this and we're saying that we're going to want to release this content only on a given date, which obviously now is in the past, but not when this video was made. So we're saying that when the time comes to this, we want to change the state to published as that goes into the system, and that also works now. And that's pretty much it. I mean, that's the demo we have right now. So any questions about that? No? Good. What's that? I don't know the exact count of contrib modules. I think they say the team is like 20 or something to date. It's around there right now. I'll get to the team in a minute and who all is involved in this and how it's happening. This is a contrib effort primarily. The team that Gabor is on is the Octo team, and they're all full-time working on Drupal Core. So there's five or six of them and they only work on Drupal Core. And solving some of the biggest problems there. This team is specifically focused not just on contrib, but on solution space. Upgrading all the contrib modules and then making them secure, making them testable, and making them pretty and work well and work well for customers. So one of the reasons that... Well, let me ask you this. When we went from 20 people who had used a distribution to two who used them on every project, what is the delta there? Why is that not happening? Why did it not use distributions to become bulkier? Okay, anyone else? Too rigid, yeah. Too rigid meaning they have one way of doing things. It's hard to do it any other way. They're not like Legos. It's more like an action figure that you buy at the store. You have the chop of his head to get anything else on there. Anyone else? I think those are the same sort of things, yeah? Right. Because you're trying to undo so many things. You have code that's maybe conflicting with your code that you didn't write in your own thing. So I think, yeah, past certain point of complexity, distributions can be difficult. And so we tried to think about that differently in this case again. So we made a huge focus on automated testing one. So we said, we should upgrade the modules cleanly from 7 to 8 with roughly the same functionality as a first step, and we should make sure they have great testing behind them. We use behavioral driven developments. We use B-hat for that. And those tests are run on a regular basis. We make sure that each individual unit works really well as a unit. So they're not heavily coupled, I'll be sure. With others. You know, another one is our sort of philosophy around, there should be a toolkit. It shouldn't be a specific experience. It shouldn't be that we're building a distribution meant for a particular person, a particular use case exactly. It should be more of a toolkit. And so we're hoping that makes it, that keeps it lighter. You know, in Drupal 8 we have auto loading, which also helps with code bloat. It's not as much of an issue perhaps. You know, and I was going to add here. And we're also trying to do this in such a way where we're working with the community more as opposed to trying to build a solution for customers. We're really focusing on just improving the control modules as they are in the ecosystem and letting other people build those customer-centric solutions on top of them. It's a big risk for Acquia, but I think we'll see how it goes. And, you know, I think it's ready now. Like, you can use it. This is a bit of a beta... We don't have sites in production with Lightning yet, but you certainly could start building on it. Like I said, it's really just a very light layer on top of core and very commonly used control modules. So rather than tracking your own Drupal 8 and all those control modules that you need anyway, following a Lightning project is probably actually a really good move right now. I think it's certainly going to be stable enough to do that. Again, it's all about testing. In fact, it can be a good guideline as you get into Drupal 8. A lot of you probably are wondering, which modules can I trust? Which ones are ready? How do I get started? We're trying to provide that guideline to the community so that you can just follow Lightning and say whatever's in Lightning in the stable channel is going to be stable to build on. Or if it's not stable right now, I'll be told it's not stable. And I know that it will eventually become stable. So you can start using that for your projects. And all of this is built by a program we call the Drupal 8 Module Acceleration Program, or D8MAP. We have 15. That's actually not quite accurate. I think it's like 12 or something. Full-time aqua engineers who are dedicated to just doing this. All they do is upgrade contributed modules and refine their usability and do testing on them. Three of whom are in India. One of whom is here. We check on them. There he is. And that's what we do within Aquia. And then at the larger team, we put together over half a million dollars in grants. Which we are paying community members to work on their projects. So examples of that are like who are the good examples of that? They work our field. Workbench rules, Fago and Rules. Yeah? Okay, the multi-version module. You guys are getting paid on top of your jobs to do that? Not bad. You guys are getting paid on top of your jobs to do that? Yeah. I thought we had a rule that we were going to allow that. This is shameless. Very sorry. But this session in this room, right after this session, we're going to talk about the multi-version module and a few other modules. We're not going to demonstrate them within Lightning, but Lightning is looking to use these modules in a later beta version for full-site preview. So if you're interested in that in regards to the workflow piece here, you might be interested in joining the session after this. So if you guys... If you guys don't know what full-site preview means, I think it's kind of maybe a new concept for some people. It means that you saw the scheduling one where I said on such and such a date I'm going to publish this article. Imagine if you do that with 20 different articles. Yeah? How can you see what the whole site looks like on that date? How can you preview the entire site? Or say, I show different content for users if they're from North India or South India. Personalization. How do I see the whole site in one side of this? Is that right? Is that a good... Not quite. How should I say it? It's certainly quite tedious. There's no modules that are not related. But in the next session in this room... Check it out. He's a really smart guy and he always has a good session. I'm sure it'll be good anyway. That's what we're doing. I think it's a really exciting project. I know for the team in India it's a really exciting project to be a part of. And I think it's a... It's scary. Maybe for Aquiat. We're spending a lot of money on this on top of everything else with the Octo team. But we feel like it's necessary for us to kickstart all these things and really get a first edition of all these modules out there and something we can build on.  We need you to test this out. We really need you to try it out in real world scenarios. We need you to get involved early and make sure that we do it the right way. That it becomes really a best practices toolkit for how to build sites in Drupal. We need your feedback. We need it now and later as a continual basis. So please do check out Lightning. Go for the download and try it out to build a little test project to see how it goes. Feel free to write to me. But even better, you can get in touch with John Kennedy about the Lightning product owner. You can find him online or on the product page for Lightning. And with that, I think we'll just go into Q&A. Okay? Thanks everybody. And I think for Q&A, I wish I could come up here and answer the questions. Does anyone have any questions? You know, I think... Repeat the question in the mic. Okay, sorry. So his question is, you know, Drupal as a product, if you create a distribution is essentially a product and you have multiple instances of that product. So you work for Stanford, I'm guessing? How could I guess? And so at Stanford, they have a base distribution. They say that every... Is it departments or...  I don't know anyway. So anyway, you have one sort of template for what every department looks like and you create different instances of that. And the problem is that each of those different departments can go crazy and make their own thing. And so how do you maintain some consistency while allowing flexibility? I don't know. You know the answer to that question? You've done this a lot, tried to do this a lot. I mean, I have some ideas, but I think this is a good job. We have a similar problem where I work as well and there's definitely not a very good answer to it, especially not in Drupal 7. That becomes very tedious with features and features overrides and things like this. We've put I think the place where we work. We have hundreds and maybe almost up to a thousand instances of the same distribution. So for us, at least, I'm not sure about your specific use case, but we've built a lot of automation and a lot of tools to discover where people have overridden things. So we have lots of process going out to each and every side, figuring out where things are overridden. And then it just comes down to human communication to sort of solve these things. There isn't necessarily a good technical solution to this. In Drupal 8, I'm not sure, but discoverability and documentation and introspectability, is that a word? It becomes part of that. And then it's a conversation of what should be included in the base distribution. What can we do? That's how we solve it. So we've built a lot of automation to discover when and where and then be able to document around that. Why was this documented?  I could also add works for Pfizer. When I was on the Drupal Gardens team in the early days, that was kind of a similar problem, but at a different level of complexity the sites are less complex than what you're dealing with. They're less customized, but there's a lot more of them. So when you have 60,000 sites to upgrade and you're upgrading your base framework and they're all run by different people. Some of them was like somebody who walked dogs for a living. Somebody was a dentist somewhere.  There's all different types of people from different walks of life. They can customize it over they want. They can't write code, but they can still do it. One of the tricks we did, which of course is something that only large enterprises could do, is we wrote a suite of very basic tests for things like logging in, logging out, creating a piece of content, creating a view and viewing the view or whatever. Just very basic stuff. We'd take about 50 or 60 reference sites and we knew to be fairly active users and we took a random sample of another 50. We automated every build. We got a lot more than we had expected. We'd break very simple things sometimes and we'd cut screenshots and stuff. We did some of that stuff. It didn't always work though. That's a fun answer. Anyone else? One more insight to the problem space there with Drupal 8. I think the community is still experimenting a little bit with environment-specific overrides and I think it touches the same problem space with environment-specific overrides and so on. There's a very useful functionality in the CMI system or the system in Drupal 8 where you can do full import of configuration but then after you can do partial import of configuration. So if you google for Dave Hall he has written a blog post on environment-specific CMI configuration where he suggests like a layered import of you first do full import of the full configuration which also then deals with configuration that needs to be deleted and things like that. But then you can do partial import. So you could structure a git repository to say it's the base distribution and here's the partial import that you need to be able to do on top of that. So google for Dave Hall and environment-specific configuration you'll find this blog there. That's some of the things that we are experimenting with at the moment for managing that type of problem in space in Drupal 8 as well. I was going to show this. If anyone has any other questions I was going to just talk a little about the modules we've been working on. I was trying to get the list up. What's the password? Do you guys know what it is? Got it. Thank you. Let's do it in a round. So one is I mean Abhishek do you want to talk a little bit about the modules you've been working on or the teams you've been working on? So currently in India we are a team of three people. Myself, there's another guy called Naveen and Neetu. I don't think I can find those guys in the room. So we three have been working on we started with a module called Autologout and that has an RC2 version. What we generally do is we take the module from whichever state it is to a release candidate and after that it is up to the maintenance to get into the state version. So that's what we have been doing. We have put Autologout, we have put ShareThis and now we are working on Ultimate Cron. At the same time SecurePages. SecurePages is interesting because I think Gabor would be able to talk more about it. The functionality has been removed from the core and in the contributed modules we are trying to replicate the switch functionality which switches from HTTP to HTTPS. So that is an interesting problem that we are trying to solve and if anyone is interested, he or she is most welcome to join us and help us with the work that we are doing. So that's pretty much it. So three people we have in last two months, two and a half months we have ported almost three and a half modules and there are a lot more to come. We have Search API and Facet API and a couple of other modules which we are going to pick up in the next month in March. I think that's the time when we are going to get those modules in stable release. I think also for any of you who aren't working at Acquia, it's still all of our Drupal, we all need to do this. Acquia, you contribute a lot but you can also do your own thing and if you are looking to gain experience in terms of working in the community and building reputation and building skills this is a really good opportunity to do this. If you follow the lightning project and you find out the roadmap, start looking at those modules because you know they are going to get very active from some very serious maintainers who are actually paid to do it which is amazing and so if you get in that issue queue you are going to get responses quickly you are going to be able to get involved in projects in a way which I think will work really well for you. So consider that also. Not all of the projects are like entity embed or field collection, really complicated just a little plug there. Alright, unless we have any other questions I guess we'll close, yeah. I don't know what it is. I'm just getting www.drupal.org slash lightning. Just like the other. This is next month, right? Panels, penalizers, or JPI facets. Here's the development team who's working on it, the core development team. Yeah, that's that. Alright, thanks everyone. Hope that was useful. We'll see you around.


Good afternoon. I'm Tara Sonenschein, Executive Vice President here at the U.S. Institute of Peace, and it is my great honor and privilege to welcome you to the official launch of American Negotiating Behavior by Richard Solomon and Nigel Quinney, and they are here in the front row. And I note that the second line of the book says Wheeler Dealers, Legal Eagles, Bullies, and Preachers, but if you want to find out which of the two of them fall into any of those categories you have to buy the book. And it also has a forward by Madeline Albright and Condoleezza Rice. I don't know if you could get any more stars into the book or into the room. Let me talk very briefly about what our own study came to, and let me by all means give recognition to Nigel Quinney, my colleague here. Nigel gave me his proxy to make these comments, but when we get to the Q&A session he really should be part of the discussion. Nigel has been with us through almost all this entire series of studies. He was an editor and put together two very important workshops, one in 2000 and one in 2007 that provided the intellectual grist for the American study, and I'll come do why we structured those workshops the way we did. If you want to understand any negotiating situation, there are really five factors you have to look at. One, the issues in play, and whether it's an economic or a political or a security issue, the substance of the negotiation is shaped by the issues. Secondly, there's the personal negotiating style of the counterpart official across the table. Now, for most government work, the turnover in senior officials is pretty rapid. So it isn't understanding the personality of the official across the table is not something that's easily done unless you're dealing with the Soviet Union and you have an Andrei Gromyko that's there for how many decades, Jerry or Joe and Lai, who was for four decades in one position, then it makes some sense. Thirdly, there are institutional procedures. Fourth, the geostrategic context, and fifth, the culture at play that affects the negotiating behavior. Three last issues that I've mentioned, the institutional context, the geostrategic position of the country, and the culture that are the things that have enough stability for you to really get off into. And I would just make one comment. There's a methodological trick to these studies, and that is you really can't ask someone if I wanted someone from China to tell me how what was unique about their negotiating style. They probably couldn't do it because culture is something like your personality. It's so intimate to you that you don't have the contrast. So the trick is to get observers from another culture, another country who will examine the record, witness a negotiating behavior, and say, hey, that's really distinctive about the way the Americans negotiate the way the Chinese, the Russians, whomever. I could, again, with more time, but I don't want to cut into our panel, point out at one silly little example, but it's interesting. And that's drinking behavior. The Chinese, we learned, want to get you drunk. And you may remember Joe Enlai during the Nixon visit. He went around the room and he toasted 178 American officials and one little fimble of that fiery, mal-tied liquor. If you go to Russia, they want to get drunk with you. I'm serious. And I've had that experience. And if you go to France, they want to impress you with the high culture of their wines, their vinaigrette culture. We could go on. And so you find these elements, these bits and pieces of the diplomatic process that tell you a great deal about the cultural dynamics of the particular country. Well, it was in that context that we asked over 50 foreign officials to come together in these workshops and to tell us how they saw us as negotiators. And we'll hear much more of it. But let me just briefly comment that in terms of institutional behavior, our structure of government, the division of powers, the competition between the Congress and the White House and the different government agencies has a major effect on our negotiating dynamic. And as Chan-Hen-Chi points out in her chapter, and we've heard from many others, Americans mostly negotiate among themselves. It's the interagency process that takes up 80 or 90% of the effort of any given official. But then there's the power of the presidency. The president is the leader, and he really does set the tone, either providing strong guidance and oversight of the negotiating process, or in some, and the Nixon administration was a good example of tight control, or the contrast Ronald Reagan, who was pretty much hands off and let his officials do the negotiating. And that has a big effect on the character of the interagency process. Election cycles have a major effect on negotiating. Our officials feel under real-time constraint that they know they only have four or maybe two years in which to achieve something, and so they're under a time pressure that countries that don't have that electoral cycle don't feel. And finally, one aspect of our system is what might be called lateral entry. Our foreign service, our diplomatic activity, brings in senior people, some political appointees, some brought in into the foreign service with a variety of professional experiences, lawyers, businessmen in particular academics, and one of the key points that Nigel emphasized in his contributions to the book is that we come across as having four distinctive facets, and that's why the subtitle of this book, Wheeler Dealers, Legal Eagles, Bullies and Preachers, reflects the different character of the officials who either are part of the foreign service or come in as political appointees. In terms of the geostrategic context, it's clear that we're seen as a superpower and to the discomfort of our own people, we're seen as at least hegemons, if not bullies. And finally, there's on the cultural side, sorry can I steal somebody's unopened water, thank you Tom, you will get you another one. What are some of the dramatic themes that come out on the cultural side? We're looking at the way that our diplomats are seen as serious professionals, well-prepared. They don't bluster, they don't bluff, they don't lie in the way that, I mean frankly on the Russian side there's a lot of bluster and then bluffing upon occasion. Our diplomats are seen as pragmatic as results oriented, interested in solving problems. transactional style of negotiating rather than a relationship building style of diplomacy, which is in the case of the Chinese and particularly the Japanese.


St. Lucia's frontline workers will be better able to fight against COVID-19, following the donation of medical and personal protective equipment from the government of the Republic of China, Taiwan. Taiwanese ambassador to St. Lucia, his Excellency, Douglas Shen, applauded the achievements of St. Lucia in the fight against COVID-19 and says his government is pleased to provide support. As you may see, COVID-19 changed so many things in this world. But there's one thing that never changed, that is the friendship between Taiwan and St. Lucia. Today, I'm so excited to see the fourth batch of medical supplies from Taiwan to St. Lucia. And this represents the love and the care of Taiwanese people and Taiwanese government to our friends in St. Lucia. Prime Minister of St. Lucia, the Honourable Alan Shastney, expressed heartfelt gratitude to the government and people of Taiwan for the donation of medical equipment. On behalf of the people of St. Lucia, I want to thank you. I want to thank Taiwan for its very generous donations. And the timing of these donations is important because we have a very big hurdle to overcome and let us not underestimate how difficult it is going to be to reopen our borders. Minister for Health and Wellness, Senator the Honourable Mary Isaac, expressed appreciation of the diplomatic relations between the two countries. Senator the Honourable Mary Isaac also appealed to St. Lucia to work together to fight against COVID-19. It is very important for the people of St. Lucia to remember that this is not over. We may well be getting the other wave that the WHO has been speaking of when we reopen our borders. We are standing ready to be able to fight this challenge but we need every St. Lucia to come on board and be mindful that the virus is still with us and we have to make every effort to follow the protocols, to continue to follow the protocols so that we can keep our island and our people safe. The governments of the Republic of China, Taiwan, made a donation of masks, PCR machines, protective and isolation suits to name a few. Reporting from the Communications Unit of the Ministry of Health and Wellness, I am Phenoletian.


and the tiger financial news network update welcome folks we have the down industrials finish up 195 nasa down 55 s&p's up eight gold gold contract down to 25 dollars 40 cents trade and a price point of 1976 we have silver down 12 cents 23 dollars 21 cents light sweet crude up $3.70 $72.96 a barrel notes and bonds a 10-year note down one point plus six ticks at 114 29 the 30 the year down two full points plus four ticks at 130 07 and King dollar King dollar down 267 ticks trade in 102 849 the euros at 107 the ends at 131 the British pound is at 122 to 1 US dollar we can over take a look at the s&p folks get a sideways move out here that's pull this up yeah we actually had slightly slightly higher with volume really light and I expect we're gonna see this next couple days I expect we're gonna stay right around here by the way to you know you got we get through one banking crisis give it a few more weeks we're coming into window dressing but you can see quite clearly you only did volume out here 66 million today you're going into 111 million as well as 119 million you have the buyers on it out here we go into the queues we look at the end the x100 the three queues you're gonna look at the same type of setup inside the queues you know we're at the highs of the queues but the bottom line is the same setup you know we made a high in the queues last Wednesday 315 and that's when it closed it because it failed the first time so the first time it was testing was 83 million we did 75 million and failed on price and volume next day I tried to do it again failed on price and volume 74 million now we did today you're going to win 48 million I can't hold it so bottom line this thing's not going anywhere but south you know but I don't expect it a big route at this particular point because it looks to me like you're gonna build cars and go sideways particularly in the end the x100 because you can see the queues are 307 look at that big volume at 307 man I mean this buyer is here at 307 so to me it just matters how long this is gonna go on before buyers just throw in the towel have a great night folks have a safe night come back and visit Tommy tomorrow morning kicks us off 9 a.m. great show folks yeah look at him folks


sure of me was there before. Hi, everyone. Welcome. Thank you so much. I'm just going to wait for a second for everyone to join us. And then we're going to begin. Oh, everyone, welcome so much. Thank you so much for joining us today for today's special performance. Today's performance trust the process with Tim Hall is supported by the friends of the Robbins Library. And before I even begin, I want to thank the friends of the Robbins Library so much for being such a wonderful supporter of programming here at the Robbins Library. I am Anna Lytton and we are here today and our final performance for March 2021 for our Arlington Reads Together Program. During this month, we've tried to create space to delve into issues relating to race and identity. And I couldn't think of a better way to end this month than with this intimate performance with Tim Hall. Tim Hall is an award-winning musician and performance poet from Detroit, Michigan, now reside in Boston. His poetry draws inspiration from his lived experiences charting the nuances of blackness, masculinity, and the beauties of life. He's an assistant professor in the professional music department at Berkeley College of Music. He's won the Session Musician of the Year by the Boston Music Awards in 2020 and received a 2019 Artist Luminary Award from local youth arts nonprofit Zoomax and was honored by WBUR's Artery 25 as one of the 25 Millennials of Color impacting arts and culture in Boston. And we are so happy that the friends chose to support this wonderful performance today. I also want to thank ACMI and ACMI High School intern Peter Bergrin and Hipstery Studios for editing and support for this performance. After the performance today, we are going to have a live question and answer period, so you'll be able to ask questions on Facebook Live. You can also see this concert on ACMI's channels and on ACMI's YouTube page. So feel free to bump over to any of those places to watch today's concert and we are going to get started and thank you so much again for being here today. Thank you. Hello, this is Tim Hall and I am here to perform and share some of my work with you. Thank you so much to Anna Lytton over at Robbins Library for having me a part of the Arlington Reads Together program. Very thankful to be here with you all and excited to share some of my work. I am originally from Detroit, Michigan and moved to Boston in 2013 to work at Berkeley College of Music. I am a musician, spoken word artist and educator. I work as an assistant professor at Berkeley College of Music in their professional music department and I also am here in Hipstery Studios. I co-own Hipstery, which is a digital media production company dedicated to centering marginalized identities in media through music and film and I have a few tunes for you. So here we go. This first piece is titled Morning Dew. It is actually from a project between myself and my brother Cliff Notes and we go by Holland Notes and it's just a great starter, you know, so I want you to, you know, wherever you are, whether you're at home, the office in your car chilling outside on the lawn while you're watching this is just take a minute to take a deep breath in. Breathe out and feel the vibe. This is Morning Dew. Feel free to snap or clap along with me. That is Morning Dew. So starting with that piece because it's such a warm and homey feel and vibe and that's what we're all about today. So I want you all to relax and vibe with me. Hopefully, you know, if you want to snap or dance along while I'm performing, I invite you to do all of that. That's what I'm all about. Like I said, I'm originally from Detroit, Michigan and growing up in Motor City in Motown. I grew up with a lot of soul music, a lot of funk, R&B, gospel and in hip hop and a lot of those genres influence my work. They inform how I approach music and also what I write about and this next piece is a paying homage and celebration to my roots. My father is a big reason as to why I have chosen the path of musician and music and artist and my family overall just supported me hugely. They are the reason why I got into different arts programs and went to various camps and why I felt very empowered to accept the role of artist and entertainer in this world. So this piece is titled Dad Did. Remember waiting anxiously for my fourth grade music teacher to call on me and ask the question I have been preparing for all week. What instrument would you like to play? And probably I said the saxophone. Well, that was after the drums had already been taken, but still I knew the sax was a good choice because my dad loved jazz and I wanted to make him proud. See, music set the mood and brand new heavies coupled with the smell of eggs and baking mint. I was doing yard work that Kirk Whelam and Oatmeal's sweet scent meant get an extra hour of sleep. Dad was studying his body. Smokey smell of hair. Earth went in fires September and cocky laughter meant my dad was full of himself and I was eating barbecue them. Ooh, this tastes good. It was my cue to run upstairs for a fresh sampling of his creamy mac and cheese right out of the oven. Good music. A smile on my face and some food in my stomach was his saving. It was his way of showing me why I should be proud of my name. And life is about love and faith. Then my word is the most important commitment I can ever make. If I can get a woman to smile with some creamy mac and cheese, then maybe I can share the same beautiful realize the life we shared like the long drives down I 75 to Savannah mom and little brother and sis passed out in the back seat and dad ranting about his glory days. He had this huge collection of albums and babbled on the trombone. I learned about my past. That music was the time machine shaping the way we view the world our tour guide and the lifelong escapade that music was the music of my birth with pockets of soul and rhythm plastered together and break side sound. Listen to miles cold train and Quincy blues infusion hip hop or blackness my dad used music to open my eyes to a life I was meant to live gave me the courage to be the me I was most afraid of be the voice I never thought I had the salvation I sometimes forgot to pray be a beautifully scored masterpiece etched into the memory banks of everyone's nervous fourth grade with a heart to make his father proud with a strong as his word and the ability to cook a smile on that special space that did very fortunate very fortunate to have that upbringing to have that support system and to have that encouragement growing up also being in this really strong music and strong arts community meant that there is an infrastructure and ecosystem for me as a young person to explore my music to explore my voice as an artist and musician by 17 I was gigging in bars and playing festivals in the local scene in 1819 2021 getting to do more and more shows and play with different artists and having a generation before me that invested in me as a young person gave me the courage and the ability to say like yo this is something that I can make into a living and thankfully it's allowed me to do just that. So just very appreciative of of programs and communities that have a place for young people to explore their voice and their artistry and support support that because I wouldn't have the life that I that I do have right now without without that kind of support so very thankful for for where I grew up in how it's brought me here to Boston and being in Boston. Things have just have grown and have blossomed and very appreciative for that this next piece that I wanted to play for you is a poem from my book of poems called trust the process. This is a significant poem as well as the title trust the process. It's actually going to be the title of my upcoming EP which I'm very excited to release the three song EP that got allowed me to compose some of the music that you're hearing into live instrumentation so very excited to to release that and share that with everyone but this first piece from this book is titled hey yes. You you with the pole. You're much stronger than the wind. You able soul. Yes you have defeated the odds. They stare at your back with arms wide and long. Hurt by your resilience you yes you with the baggage. All you need is a carry on there is no more room for the sorry's of your mistakes. They are plenty. They fueled your fury and sharpened your fight. You don't need them yes you with the shattered love. There is no logic to crappy people. Only hope filled goodbyes. Hope for their consciousness. Hope they will forgive themselves for the damages they've done hope no one again becomes their savior. It was a tough role for you once you wouldn't wish that on anyone your love is not broken. It has infinite sunrises and countless moons left in its story you are the writer of the poem your paperback cover has been folded kicked and stepped on not empty your pencils do not dull your pages are ready to be written in such a such a like wonderful medium to be able to encourage inspire and express what I admire about the work in the perspective that I offer is I try to encourage and uplift through imagery that can be easily connected to for the longest poetry seemed like a medium and an art form that I couldn't connect with because at times I felt like certain writers use very cerebral big words and there's nothing wrong with that at all. However, at the point in which I connected with poetry it was something that was inaccessible. And as I started to get to college and explore my own feelings and my transition to a new place leaving home and living away from home for the first time I found poetry as a place for me to throw my emotions my thoughts my feelings into and share my lived experience from my words from my perspective so it's been a beautiful journey with poetry and I'm very thankful for the places has taken me and also where it's going to be taking me so my writing is something that I am very appreciative of because it's it's allowed me to remember my own strength and to speak life into myself. This next piece is also something that is meant to inspire and to give energy and light to so this piece is titled Rise. Feel free to dance along to move your body and to repeat the chant which is just rise rise to the occasion rise through the challenging things that you're going through rise step into your power whatever is happening for you tomorrow next week this weekend whenever that you're able to rise to the occasion that you're able to rise through the challenges that you are faced with that you're able to rise and accept all of the blessings in your life and the good things that are happening to you and for you. Yeah, right so this next piece is is titled picture perfect and it is a piece that I wrote above my parents it's a piece that for me is an example and a picture of their love and what they've been able to share with me and my siblings the things that they've endured and gone through very proud of them very thankful for them and and being the parents that they have been in my life taught me so much so this piece is titled picture perfect fall for you don't know so let me love you at your worst deserve you at your best time tell stories of our past and plots thicken as we all fall down but healing healing is for those courageous enough to be formed want to fall for you I don't know so let me push you when you're weak encourage you when you're tired praise find correlations between your will and your stubborn four of our relationship is rooted in acceptance laws are common but sometimes love is going to fall for you I don't remember what scared feels like allow it to remind my mind that I'm still alive and that you're really rare I don't think my imagination is playing tricks on me so I must be doing something right to let the woman in my dreams far for you I don't know because the past present and future are the spectrum of our life we don't have to be who we were yesterday but tomorrow is depending on who we are today so actually I love you I know the past that I hear you don't see the future that we will reach the restraints that we will breach because of our love is essentially the replication of a time machine playing our best response over a way to internally engrave our love into the DNA of our children so we'll see this time in the next that I will love you until I molecules evaporate into the sky perfectly painted into infinity preserved ever so delicate in the painting hanged by grandchildren it's a it's a poem that I wrote so long ago but it it makes me think of my parents are my mind reminds me of them all the time so hope that you enjoyed that piece picture perfect word so I have one more piece for you this final piece is titled trust the process and the title of a book of poems of course but it also is song that I've been able to compose that will be on this upcoming project trust the process EP in April and it is a piece that I wrote for myself when I was going through a very very challenging time I was taking this poetry writing class and was having a really tough personal week in my professor saw that I was struggling that day and they had a rock and that rock had the words trust the process painted on it and they gave it to me and was just like yo it seems like you could use this and that rock just got me through that semester got me through the remainder of that year it got me through the process of writing this book and it's a poem that I hope is something that you can connect with that you can trust your own process it is a way of me acknowledging my own strength reminding myself that I'm human and that I will be able to get through anything just have to trust my own process and it's the same note that I want to leave for you I want to encourage you to trust your process trust yourself believe in what you feel is the right decision for you in any moment in any time of your life and move forward with that so trust the process it looks impossible the couch feels comfortable and sun rays splashing from the bay windows look uneven when the conversation with your partner seems daunting and your feelings eat away at your tongue's ability to produce words trust the process when depression is the dust that refuses to be swept from the floor all you want is freedom from having to clean up the destructive thoughts that fall when song doesn't sound as beautiful melody no longer scales your arms with goosebumps trust the process here resembles the worn notebook in your book bag rarely open every no app on your phone or the twice folded posted notes dusting your desk that stare and stare hover and weight tire and toggle and get misplaced and are found and still not touched the outside taunts you to smile in its direction eyes and feel the heat wash your feelings matter words hold value is impossible for your partner to know the lining of your mind or heart or hurt from the desk settles you will still be a person all pumping blood processing my pressure quaking hand against the valley of your chest listen to the silence of your beautiful body and welcome the music in your story trust the process of your healing trust the process of your hope trust the process of your deliverance trust the process of your mindfulness trust the process of your pain this is Tim Hall thank you so much for having me thank you to Anna Litton and Robin's library I'm in the Arlington together program thank you so much for having me have a good evening peace Tim thank you so much I feel like so touched by your performance I feel so touched by being able to participate with all the people who clearly love you as we saw in the comments today so I just really want to thank you first of all for taking the time for being here with us for creating such an amazing amazing performance and I do want people to know they're welcome to enter questions in the queue in the in the comments in the Facebook live stream and we'll get to them but I have a couple of questions for you before we begin before we take questions from the community yeah I just I don't think I'm not sure if I told you the story I somebody Jill Harvey who is the director of diversity equity and inclusion for the town of Arlington she and I were talking we're I was telling her that I was looking for a musical performance to finish our month for Arlington reads together and she sent me a video of you performing dad did and as soon as I saw that video I was like oh we need to have this guy that this month we've been really talking about race and identity and in libraries we sometimes talk about literature as being both a window and a mirror into an experience and I think that your work is such a fantastic window in a mirror it's a window into your experience and reflect so much back for so many different people what their experiences have been like and this kind of leads me into a question that you kind of you mentioned a little bit earlier and I know that hip street studios is the organization that you work with and I know that it's or it's your organization really and you work on centering marginalized identities in media and as we know that I as in a library in the world I want people to see so many different stories and it sounds like that's one of the things that you're doing I was hoping you could talk a little bit about about that project. Yeah in terms of the organization hip story it's it's founded by my my brother Cliff Notes I'm one of the co-owners of hip story and essentially the organization is a recording studio media production company so we produce music films and events we have a recording studio in Cambridge and we are are known for curating various events we've worked with the MFA hub week city of Boston Arts and Culture and a number of other organizations we've produced short films and then we adjust we've also worked on music and helped to record and produce another among a number of our own in-house creatives and collaborators as well as folks in the community and essentially we just care about centering a big and a large identity for us is like our blackness we are a black owned company and very unapologetic about that and really talking or using media and using using music and film as a way to shine light and share stories of of those who have been marginalized or historically erased within the public in what that looks like is Cliff Notes he put out a short film called vitiligo addressing mental health in the black community. Additionally the art of being haunted is another short film that was created by Hakeem Hill or other filmmaker on our team both addressing mental health within the black community and then the artists that we we tend to focus on and shine light on within our different programming are often artists who have a story to tell who have a lived experience that they have found a way to articulate through their artistry through their music or poetry or our dance and we create a platform for them to share that and amplify amplify those moments amplify those artists and really it's about finding a way to collaborate to find ways of pain in supporting artists compensating artists fairly while also building a platform for us that essentially our hope is that it becomes bigger than ourselves that you know that our platform becomes a place that is known for showcasing artists that's known for talking about real experiences who articulate and ask and critique questions and thoughts and perspectives our goal is really to to shine light on on those opportunities by using our platform using the technology and space and network to to be able to build that out so it's a it's an amazing organization to be a part of and I encourage you know all to to check it out you can find us at hipsteryhipstory.org we're working on a website update and we will be opening our doors to more more of the public for recording services live streaming in studio performances podcast stuff like that very soon. Yeah, it's fantastic. It's just it's finding ways to amplify for us right now I want to see places that help amplify black voices and share stories that people aren't delving into and it's just it's been I really love the mission of the organization. It's just a great way to help us in the community learn more about artists in our in our community as well that kind of brings me to a little bit to the next question you've come here from Detroit and Detroit is obviously a place with a long history of black artistry and black music. Boston is not so much a history a city with that same kind of history. Is there a difference for you in creating creating art creating music creating poetry in Detroit and in Boston. Yes, there definitely is a difference in and now it goes far to say that there there is a deep and rich history for of of black artists in black art in Boston. It just looks differently. It's amplified differently and I'm one just extremely thankful and blessed have been welcomed into the Boston scene by the by the local artists here in local community members for me Detroit having having a light house like Motown Records in in a black city is and has been incredible. It's an amazing lineage in history that I get to say I'm a part of that I've been inspired by that I've been encouraged by there definitely is something unique to growing up in a predominantly black city compared to you know folks who have grown up here in Boston to to grow up in a school system where I'm I am of the majority was something that I think I didn't really know I had a privilege like that until I left and went to college and all of a sudden I'm in I'm at a predominantly white institution a state college 22,000 you know students are went to my undergrad 30,000 students went to my cop to my grads graduate program and those are you know in Ohio and Iowa so those are very much white towns white cities in terms of where those schools were situated so like growing up in a predominantly black neighborhood where I was of the majority I think that I got to see myself in my community I got to see myself in the people that I was around I got to experience and grow a level of understanding for my own black identity through music food community and interaction just how folks engage with one another and for me there for me there is nothing like going home walking into a venue in the hearing a group of Detroit musicians play like right that I am I am all for that 100% it is it is what rejuvenates me whenever I do go home I have to go and connect and just listen to a group of Detroit artists do their thing it is I think like no other experience I feel like Detroit is very underrated in that in that regard in terms of you know I think there is such a big focus on the lineage in history of of Motown as well as rock music and then also techno music and house music which a lot of people don't know house has a extremely strong foundation from Detroit which like there's there's such a big focus on some of those big things that I think the level of musicianship and artistry that does live in Detroit sometimes gets overlooked and I think I feel like it's happening less and less though I keep hearing about like these amazing art incubators and absolutely yeah I'm really excited to go to Detroit when I get to travel again it is like really high on my list right and kind of speaking to what you just named like when once I started to get into the grant and fellowship in that scene as a professional artist is when I also started to notice that there is these different opportunities right that have started up in in Detroit and from individuals that I know that have been able to benefit from being a part of those programs to just me being in a position to also educate and share knowledge with my friends back at home about yo there's money out here for us there's there's free money out there for us as artists to create there's there's there are resources out there for us to to to take advantage of and I think that being a being a musician in genres that sometimes might not necessarily be recognized in in these spaces because the reality is that grants and fellowships often come from institutions institutions are often supporting and continuing to support I think classical and more traditional art forms and sometimes R&B, hip hop, rap, funk, soul, neo soul those genres sometimes or have not historically I think been recognized as as like just as important as a quartet classical ballet so forth so forth so as we're talking about systemic racism and and any any quality I think that we've started to also see a lot of institutions grant funders and so forth realize how much of a disservice they're doing to themselves in excluding and not thinking about how they are making space for artists one that look like me and then to that artists who are who have disciplines that don't necessarily fit sometimes within the traditional art spectrum even just like looking up art grant or art grant opportunity you know some of the first things that pop up are for like fine arts for visual artists for the classical traditional arts like just in doing a basic Google search you can see that there there definitely is a history of like a focal point in identifying what is seen as more valuable when it comes down to art and practice versus others so I definitely am thankful that I've been able to one be in a city like Boston where some of those barriers are being broken down and we're starting to see more and more institutions make sure that they're creating a more welcoming and inclusive application process but then also to encourage my friends in other places to look into these things because I've thankfully been able to to benefit from them to tap in you know it's funny that you mentioned that we were I was just talking with some staff people about the author Heather McGee she's a sociologist and or maybe she's an economist but she talks about what racism costs everyone and in your example not funding or not supplying the same kind of funding for hip-hop and R&B as you might get for grants for other kinds of music we as a society lose when we don't support all of our artists and I think that's just a great art um but another question of a question from an audience member um trust the process is such a powerful mantra can you talk about the different context oh we've got the question right up here can you talk about the different context where you've called on that mantra have you had moments of doubt all the time you cannot tell because you are so one of the things I love about talking with you every time we've chatted listening to you your music in your performance is so inspiring and uplifting and I know that's one of the things that you hope to bring so it is always interesting to hear what is it like to have a moment of doubt and how do you trust the process um I think that that just in the process I wrote that poem and I wrote that book for me first like first it was it was uh it was a way for me to challenge myself to hit a goal of saying like yo I want to be an author I want to write a book what do I need to do um started to take a class and through that class started to understand um and develop a process for myself being a musician um how I just literally saw uh one of my my high school band director here comment like he's he's one of the individuals that helps me develop a process for playing for practicing like what is the practice the process of practicing and like how beneficial that is to my my creative um uh my creative discipline and over over time over the years I've lost sight of that at times where I hadn't practiced or or I was so busy gigging and performing that I hadn't actually sat down to practice and there was a big difference between like regularly performing and then also having a a practice routine um but trusting the process was also about life this is a a life transition that I was going through and um trusting the process was about trusting myself trusting my institution um trusting that whatever I was going through I was going to find uh the other side to it I was going to find that light at the end of the tunnel um part of that was about trusting my faith um in that I'm I'm making the best decisions for myself it's about trusting um that whatever pain or hurt that I might experience in life would also have what would not be uh the only I won't stay in that essentially like I there's there's a process by which of you know getting to joy and getting to healing and getting to um yeah not feeling as down as we do throughout our life like um I very much have many many doubts at times and many many moments of uh questioning and and as an artist as a professional artist um especially during COVID like COVID turned everyone's world upside down we've experienced a lot of loss and pain and trauma um and we've also had an opportunity to get some rest perspective um to to have a seat in the in the in the in the many uh moments of of our busy lives and I I definitely have experienced that and am still experiencing that um at the top of 2020 I left my full-time job to transition to a part-time job so I can focus on my artistry so I can focus more on performing and turning my art into something that also sustains me financially um more than it was before and trust the process I wrote that book in 2016 and it's still very much prevalent if not like a very important part of what I'm doing now in 2020 um so that I say that as like saying it for myself knowing that there's other folks who can relate. Yeah yeah um I have one last question for you the last question we asked Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum last week as well what gives you hope? First my faith but there is it's part of my foundation it's a part of of what I was born into my family and um the environment that they created for me is first and foremost like faith that we're going to get through this um faith and belief that's for me um that's what I call like useful energy it's like that's that's the energy that is most useful if I'm gonna like think and process what's going on right now like having that hope and faith that things are gonna be okay um as well as I still have hope and people in humanity um as much as there are uh folks out there who are malicious who um are unconscious who have been also taught and constructed to believe um in things that are um horrible and um destructive there are also folks out there who believe in light and love who believe in abundance who believe in justice and righting wrongs who believe in equity and accountability um so I have I have hope and faith in humans in our humanity to say like yo there's some things that are very messed up about our world and about how we are treating one another about our systems our policies our governmental structures um our local governmental structures as well and I'm a part of of those of that group of folks so I know I'm not alone in that hope and in that belief and in that faith that um you know we we want better for our life and for our world so that's the other thing as well yeah and really good food so oh um Tim I cannot thank you enough for joining us today for providing us with what I would have to say is the perfect vibe for the Sunday afternoon that the intimate concert today was just what we all need on this rainy day um I want to thank everyone for joining us today for this last event of our 2021 Arlington Reads Together program I know if you want if you like me cannot wait to see Tim Hall in person somewhere in the Boston area Tim how do we find you yes go to linktree um backslash tv underscore also L I K L I N K T R dot backslash tv is in television underscore H A L L um that is where you will be able to find my newsletter so we'll love for you to join my newsletter to keep track of what I'm doing I will be releasing um my E piece very very soon and we'll love to give folks on my newsletter a sneak peek before I release it to the masses as well as early releases and videos to engage with me by marriage and support um so yeah check out check out that link and you can also find links to other performances there as well great great um this performance today's performance was the last event for our 2021 Arlington Reads Together series for those of you in town who still have not had a chance to read our community read book which is why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria we still have copies in the library we'd love to get you one uh you can go over to robbinslibrary.org and see the full list of events a bunch of those have been recorded so you will be able to see some of those events and there's a reading guide there for the Arlington Reads Together title choice as well so you click over there you're able to move over to our Arlington Reads Together page and find all that information Tim again I can't thank you enough for joining us today I want to thank the friends of robbinslibrary for supporting this program I want to shout out ACMI for providing us with fantastic technical support and thank you so much