We've been trying to work on pattern. Yes, we've been talking this morning about pattern because just like my wedding speech, I didn't really prepare for this also. That was a bad move. I know. So welcome to the UTO Professional Symposium. If you got in...  And we expect you to act that way. So that's the extent of our pattern. Welcome to the Under the Rules Symposium. Thank you for making your way here early morning, in between ASPA, before arts presenters, and taking the time to be with us to have some conversations and to see old friends. And Mark. Yeah. All right. I wanted to thank a few people. There's going to be a lot of thankings at the beginning of the thing. First of all, we've been having a great time putting this festival together. And it's due to the staff of the public theater. And we also have our own core staff. And I need to acknowledge Andrew Kircher, who is our associate director, partner in crime, and program associate... We'll be back in a minute. We're responsible for getting these tickets. The production manager, John Rene. Company manager, Barry Bradford. Is he still... He's probably at the airport right now. He's probably at the airport. In our producing apprentice, Margarita Bergamo-Mangini. Is that the right name? And the under-the-radar interns, Emily Capri and Madeline Barak. And the baby in residence, Frankie Ting. And my partner, Megan Block. Thank you, Mark. And then we also have to thank our supporters and funders, of course. You know, for the public theater, the Louisa T. Merz Foundation, and the continued support of Ford Foundation for the festival, Robbister and Clark, the W Trust. Elect Equity, Mark Krueger, the Trust, the Face Foundation, Cultural Services at the French Embassy, the Chilean Embassy, NIFA, and all the supporters and the partners of the festival and the shows. It's incredible the amount of love that we get from the partners, and it would not happen without them and you. Thank you. There used to be a guy that would come around here quite often, and he'd hang out in the back of the Joda Club and listen to new bands, and he'd slip in and out of theaters. He lived down the block. And so many of our artists owe him a huge debt, and he made so much of this work possible that you're going to see this weekend. And just by his example and his fierce artistic independence, and I wanted to dedicate this festival to David. Thank you. And to start us off, I would like to welcome Louise Castro, who's the acting commissioner of the New York City's mayor office for media and entertainment, to tell you a little bit more about what's happening with the mayor's office and to welcome you to New York. He was most recently an executive with HBO programming, but a real friend of the public from his time as executive director of the land-thropic initiatives at Time Warner in New York City, where he created and oversaw the Time Warner New Works New Voices Fund, a fund for best-in-class artist development programs that support emerging playwrights and screenwriters. So I'd like you to welcome Louise Castro. Morning, everyone. How are you doing? Good morning. Excellent. Great. Listen, it is really my pleasure to welcome you here today to the Under the Radar Symposium. And to those of you who've come from out of town, the artists, the producers, the presenters, I'd like to welcome you to New York City. First, let me thank Mark and Mayen and everyone at the Under the Radar Festival. For the past dozen years, Under the Radar has helped redefine theater making. It's given a platform to countless diverse and boundary-breaking storytellers. You have been an integral part of fostering diversity of voice, perspective, and aesthetic in the arts. And we thank you very much. I'd also like to thank Oscar, Patrick, and all of our very good friends at the Public Theater. I cannot begin to articulate the impact that the public has had on theater and the careers of artists here in New York City and frankly globally. The Public Theater is an institution, an integral part of New York's cultural fabric, and a reflection of what the arts in New York are, diverse, original, thought-provoking, and vital. I also want to thank APAP and each of you, the presenters and producers here today. Your dedication to finding and showcasing cutting edge makers is helping give voice to new generations and shaping the future of the art. Mario, thank you for what you do and what APAP does. This marks the first time that the Mayor's Office is working with APAP, and we are proud and excited to be a part of this year's conference. And what better place than New York to host these important gatherings? New York is home to a diverse and talented community of artists. Diversity and creativity go hand in hand. They are the cornerstone of the work that you do, the work that we all do. Creativity and diversity, a background of experience, of aesthetic, of perspective are what challenge the status quo. They are what enable us to see and create things differently. Here in New York, from Broadway stages to theaters and presenting organizations throughout the five boroughs, theater is a rich, vibrant part of our economic and cultural life. Through the Mayor's Office of Film, Theater, and Broadcast, we seek to advance New York's theater industry. We work to highlight the impact that theater has in New York City. We seek to support and promote career opportunities in the industry for New Yorkers of all backgrounds. And we seek to build partnerships to help make theater experiences available to all New Yorkers and to visitors alike. Here with me today is Carla Hope Miller. She's our Director of Theater Strategic Partnerships. She'll be attending the shows and conferences today and throughout the week. And so I encourage you to find her, talk to her, and learn a little bit more about the work that we're doing. So just, I want to say again, thank you for the work that you do to provide opportunities to the makers here and promote live performance at its very best. Have a wonderful symposium and conference. Thanks, Luis. It is my pleasure to introduce under the radar's original and most constant partner, Mario Garcia-Duro, who's the CEO of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. This is Mario's sixth year in the job and it has been a pleasure working with him and his staff. Before Mario was running APAP, he served as Director of the Arts Community and Presenting Program at the National Governments for the Arts. And I first met him as the Artistic Director of San Francisco's Yerba Buena Arts Center. Mario was a visionary and a great spokesman for our field and it's an honor to welcome him to our stage. Thank you, Mario. Hello, everyone. Happy New Year.   And it is so hard. It's not hard running the conference. It's not hard doing this. The hardest thing in my job is finding out what color lanyard we have so I can match my top. That is really hard. It's like secret information. It's really hard to do that. But anyway, welcome to all of you. Thank you, Mark, for that gracious introduction. Congratulations to Mayan, Mark, Oscar, Andrew. And thank you, Luis, for your warm words. Congratulations to Under the Radar for 12 years. Can we hear applause for that? The only downside of that is they're just going to start going into puberty and it's not going to be pretty. I could just die right now. Anyway, formally on behalf of arts presenters that are born, I want to congratulate Under the Radar for the amazing work. We're always delighted to work with Under the Radar and their staff. And this is my official first step as we head into our conference. I wanted to invite you all to tomorrow's session. We have a speed dating from 9 to 12 at the Hilton. So please come and join us for that. And in closing, I just wanted... I feel like I'm with friends and family here. These are friggin' crazy-ass times. And it's combining... If you're watching and listening, there's like nationalism, paranoia, fear, anger, overt racism, and willful ignorance on so many topics and issues. So at these times, it's so critical for me to work with organizations like Under the Radar with colleagues like yourselves and also, most importantly, to nourish the voices of artists at this time. So I applaud all of you and our artists for the work you're doing. Thank you. God bless and I'll see you again. Thank you all. Thank you, Mario. I am very happy to introduce to you my friend Jeff Chang, although we were just speaking backstage and we've only known each other for a year or so, and the Youth Speaks Conference in the Bay Area. But it feels like I've known him for a longer time. I remember sitting next to him at that conference and feeling like a little fangirl because this was the guy who literally wrote the book on hip-hop. Jeff Chang has written extensively on culture, politics, and the arts and wrote the book on hip-hop with Can't Stop Won't Stop, a history of the hip-hop generation, which won the American Book Award and many other awards. His new book, Who We Be, the Colorization of America, was released in 2014, and both books are fantastic and grossing and eye-opening reads on the political and economic history of the U.S. through the lens of arts and culture. Jeff has been a four-fellow in literature and he co-founded Culture Strikes and Color Lines, and he has written for The Nation, New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Foreign Policy, among many others. And he currently serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. So please welcome my friend Jeff Chang. Hi, how's everybody doing? Good, good, good, good. Thank you so much to me, and let me just get this one here, to Mark, to the amazing staff here, the public, the UTR staff, and APAP staff for the kind of vacation. There's no way to sugarcoat this. So let's just get right into what Mario's talking about. We are living in crazy-ass times. These are times that have been defined by names. Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, by hashtags, Black Lives Matter. Americans right now, a post-show that Americans right now are more concerned about race relations than at any time since 1992, which was, of course, the Los Angeles riots. And the previous spiking concern around race and race relations was 1965, over a half-century ago. It was the year of Selma. It was the year of the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act, the peak of the civil rights movement, the last time that this nation had a consensus for racial equality and cultural equity. Not incidentally, it was also the same year that the National Endowment for the Arts was formed. And then in the summer, the Watts riots broke out. And that moment begins to mark the start, if you will, of the post-civil rights era. It's an era that's been defined by this rich, vital culture born of the demographic changes made of the civil rights legislation and of politics at the same time of racial backlash. And so 1965, 1992, 2014, 2015, 2016, every generation seems doomed to return to the question of Rodney King's, can we all get along? And we find ourselves in strange paradoxical times. We have a black president, and yet we still have to affirm that black lives matter. We see in our media, in our culture, a rainbow country full of happy faces, but all indices show that we actually are experiencing intensifying racial inequality, cultural inequity, and re-segregation. It doesn't seem so long ago, 2008, right? To be exact, that Obama, Barack Obama, presented himself as a symbol of reconciliation, literally a black and white man colorized into red, white, and blue with the word hope attached to him. And so when he's running for office, people start using this strange word, right? Post-racial. And when he's elected, many believe that we have suddenly thrown off the weight of history, that we've launched into a new era of colorblindness. But just as soon as they did, the backlash sets in. And so, Obama becomes a symbol of all things other, right? Not just black, not just the product of miscegenation, but also suddenly a Muslim, a socialist, a quote-unquote illegal alien. And the cultural wars were now back in full swing. And this is something, of course, that he alluded to in the State of the Union address the other night, saying that his biggest regret was the rancor and the strife that he was leaving behind, that he could not help to reconcile the polarization in the country. And so, instead, here at the Obama era, and yet it's not hard to find a crazy picture of Donald Trump. But here at the end of the Obama era, we see Trump, we see Carson using racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, using anti-immigrant, anti-black calls to move to the top of the Republican polls. And yet, I think that in times of trouble, right, in times of flux like this, I think, like Mario, that we here in this room somehow manage to be at our best. We do so much of our work in the shadow of the mainstream, sort of in the subterranean reaches of the national consciousness, that we see things before they're happening. And so we know that cultural change always precedes political change. And that's part of the reason that we do what we do, right? We like the visionaries of Occupy, of Black Lives Matter, the young dreamers. We felt this in our bones. This lack of resolution, this growing social conflict, this desire for transformation. And now that these justice movements have begun to transform the way that many in the public see possibility, we find ourselves once again called to act in our art and in our practice and to push it even further. And so we've seen this amongst fellow artists what they've been doing. So four years ago, Kendrick Lamar was just another kid trying to sling his mixtapes, trying to get a herd. And now he's become one of a handful of artists like fellow musicians D'Angelo, Kamasi Washington, writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankin, Roxanne Gay, the directors, Eva DuVernay, Ryan Coogler, contemporary artists like the How Do You Say Yam in African Collective, Kara Walker, who have helped us have better see the moment of justice movements that we're living through. And in turn, justice movements have helped us to see issues of equity in the arts world. And so we can think of Viola Davis's extraordinary speech at last year's Golden Globes, right? In which she called out Hollywood on its exclusion of women of color from starring roles. That the only thing that separates women of color from anyone else's opportunity. Or we can think about Spike Lee's comments earlier this year when he received an honor, or late last year when he received an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. And he said that it's easier to become president of the U.S. as a black person than to become the head of a studio. And so here we are, right? In the middle of a moment that's rife with tension but also rife with opportunity. And how do we get here? And where are we going? For that we can start with young folks, the thermometer of our society. The first fact to note is that this generation, despite being the most diverse generation that the U.S. has ever seen, has grown up during an era of resegregation. Over the last 25 years schools have been resegregating at an alarming rate. And so it shouldn't be any surprise that we've seen the return of student protests to campus from Oberlin in 2012 to Missouri in 2015. Young people demanding a renewed attention to questions of equity. And they've brought out the other haters, right? Todd Gittlin, a former student protestor, asked, why are today's students so fearful? And he suggests they're too coddled. They're too sensitive. They're not adequate to the task of building social movements. The neoliberal Thomas Friedman wrote yesterday that we're living in an age of protest. And he said, there is surely a connection between the explosion of political correctness. I'm going to put that in scare quotes. Emphasis on the scare of political correctness on campus, on college campuses, including Yale students demanding the resignation of the administrator, whose wife defended free speech norms that might make some students uncomfortable. And the ovations Donald Trump is getting for being crudely, politically incorrect. These are contradictory arguments, right? Are these student protestors? Are they a mob of anti-free speech bullies? Or are they a fearful mass of coddled and oversensitive whips? What are they? Of course, they're neither, right? There was a sage philosopher. He once said, these children that you spit on as you try to change their worlds are immune to your consultations. He said, don't tell them to grow up and out of it. Where's your shame? You've left us up to our next in it. And so haters, afraid of change, always draw these false equivalencies to equate student protest against institutional racism with the ending of free speech. As if calling out racism and demanding change is the same as issuing racist calls to extremism. Critics like Gitlin and Freeman, they act as if they have no idea how power works. Students of color can only build power insofar as they band together. And then they can still be ignored. And they've been ignored for years. And that's actually the definition, right? Of racism, right? Institutional neglect. It's a definition of power. And so when students protest, it's not anti-free speech. It's a practice of free speech. Discomforting power is not the same as power enforcing discomfort. Speaking up against injustice is exactly what democracy is supposed to look like. So students are calling us to see more clearly that achieving diversity is not the same as achieving equity. They were speaking out in Missouri against their own invisibility, a contradictory kind of invisibility. It depends upon them being seen only in a certain kind of way, as added value. The value that they provide is diversity to the university. It's not the same as being seen and valued for their full humanity, because that would require that the university believe that they need to act on their needs. And instead, the university's only act when justice movements push them to do so. And so student protest across the country are performance, right? Directed at power. And they're also performance of power. They're a proposition about how to get everyone in the community to think about community and make necessary change in a time and a place where the language of diversity has grown comfortable and stale and empty. Because just getting everyone into the same branded clothing is not transformative, right? It's diversity turned to conformity, right? So what students are saying is we have to move beyond the mere appearance of diversity to the practice of equity. And so they ask us to confront issues, again, of access, right? Who has access to the means of the production of culture? Who has access to cultural knowledges? Of representation. Who is represented in cultural production in the structure of cultural production? How does the representation, misrepresentation or underrepresentation impact the notion of quality, right? And the reproduction of inequality and power. Who has the power to shape culture and cultural production? Who has the power to allocate resources in an equitable manner? Seeing these protests in a lot of ways has been a very personal thing. I work on the campuses, of course. And in these students, I see a lot of what happened to me when I was a student during the period of the late 80s and the early 90s, a period that was marked by culture wars part one, if you will. It was a story of my generation to come of age after the civil rights movement in the post-civil rights era. We were then the most diverse generation that the nation ever seen. And I was part of the first class at UC Berkeley that was more than half a non-white. And we were the fruits of civil rights victories. We were the fruits of the multicultural uprisings. We were manifesting their victories in the appearance of our own bodies, which turned upon these campuses in larger numbers than anybody had ever anticipated. And as they do now, liberals and conservatives joined in a critique of student protests. They called us anti-democratic. They called us oversensitive when we were calling for access and representation. And then these critics expanded their efforts to critique artists of color, queer artists, feminist artists. And they were successful in destroying the second grade U.S. effort to establish, excuse me, a truly progressive cultural policy. They used these attacks against students, against artists of color, queer artists, feminist artists, progressive artists as a way to push towards a privatization of culture and to attack multiculturalism. In some ways, they were incredibly successful. So this is a graph of NEA funding, which all of you, many of you I'm sure know very well. 1966 to 2015, the blue graph is the numbers in nominal value, right? And the red graph is in adjusted real numbers, adjusted for inflation. And so the peak came within the first 13 years of its founding, right? The U.S. committed more to the arts than at any time since the New Deal. And at its peak in inflation-adjusted numbers, the NEA received equivalent of nearly half a billion dollars in 1979, half a billion dollars in 2015 numbers. And so the result was its creation of rich ecosystems, arts ecosystems, all across the country. And in fact, an infrastructure that leads to a lot of the progressive art, the multicultural explosions that we see happening during the 1980s and the 1990s. But as a result of the culture wars, actual funding drops by one and a half between 1985 and 1996. And cultural policy is effectively all but negated. And so arts and arts ecosystems, arts organizations and arts ecosystems find themselves under severe pressure, especially the performing arts, right? A field which we all know has been always strongly subsidized because we believe in the power of performing arts to bring community together, to entertain and to edify and to often pose important questions. But after the culture wars, the new national cultural policy was essentially if you can't get corporations to buy it, you don't deserve to be making art. The value of culture was reduced to merely its economic value. Again, this is the moment of the privatization of culture. But something else is happening at the same moment. Even as the ecosystems that created multiculturalism were being starved and dried out, a new generation brought some of its energies directly into the mainstream. And so in some ways, hip-hop popularized multiculturalist ideas in a broader way than even the multiculturalism movement have been able to. It grew its own audiences. It grew away to the new affect and the new aesthetics of a new generation. 1993, the hip-hop insurgency, the student insurgency, these insurgencies of multiculturalism together pushed these ideas into the mainstream. And so this is a cover of Time magazine. This woman was created from a proto-photoshop program. They basically took pictures of people from all these different races, put it across the top and put it across the bottom and try to figure out what their offspring would look like. And so they pulled this picture out, right? This is the love child of all the races of the new nation and she looked a lot like Soledad O'Brien. And they called her Eve. Multiculturalism in 1993 was suddenly edgy and hip and, above all, sexy. But not coincidentally, this is also the moment where multiculturalism feels like it's beginning to lose its cultural edge. And it gets attacked, right? In 1993, Whitney Biennial, again, the attacks that we're seeing in Congress. Soon, the novelist Paul Beatty is bemoaning everything's multicultural and nothing's multicultural. And so we end up leading the 90s with this mixed legacy, right? Artists boldly continued to move towards cultural desegregation in the arts in the mainstream, continually surprising arts institutions and the arts elite by finding new audiences, by gaining success amidst changing demographics. While the ruins of the culture wars continue to smolder, which we see in the withering of thousands of arts organizations, the disappearance of a lot of artists, the withering of valuable rich arts ecosystems, and this rising elite hostility to claims for cultural equity. So what do you do when your revolution has been co-opted, pushed out, marginalized again? You might turn to subterfuge and misdirection. And so partly as a joke, partly as a brilliant strategy, Thelma Gordon starts calling the artists the turn of the millennium post-black. A way to create a space for black artists in an environment that could be ideologically hostile. Or you might just bum rush the show, right? Like hip-hop did, finding its own audiences until it could no longer be ignored. So again, over and over again, demographic change strikes these arts institutions that say they're committed to diversity as surprising because the reality of diversity always exceeds the rhetoric of diversity. And this is how we survived the turn of the millennium and the Bush two years, right? In which top-down multiculturalism was less about attaining equity than about promoting a kind of wartime jingoism. And pundits would again soon be triumphal. They'd soon be talking about the rise of this post-war, or post-racial, excuse me, era. As if after 9-11 we had somehow all passed into this colorblind state of grace. But the larger narrative was always there. Sense of predictions had held that halfway into the millennium, 2050, the U.S. would become a majority minority. And so 2050 suddenly seemed intriguing or terrifying, depending on who you were, at least until projections found that it was going to happen sooner. 2042, the year it all goes to hell. But what did it mean, right? What does it mean to be majority minority? What does that even mean? What does that sentence or what does that phrase even mean? It meant that we all have to figure out this new question, which is if we're all minorities, how do we form a new majority? And that question right now is a political problem that people are spending billions of dollars, right, and lots of our TV time to try to figure out, right? But in a much broader, much more enduring kind of way, this cultural, this question is not just a political question, it's a cultural question. If we are all minorities, how do we form a new majority? And so this is why Roberta Uno's formulation that we have to attend to the impacts of changing demographics and changing aesthetics has been so crucial to understanding the post-911 years. It turns our view towards a shared future and what we will make of it. How will we apply our creative powers? And what activists and artists have given us now is a directive to address inequality and inequity. And to make it clear, if we don't do so, we're going to be drawn back into this bad cycle of crisis, reaction, backlash, complacency, crisis. Just as we have been after 1965, after 1992, right now what we have is the opportunity to get it right. So I want to add one more point here regarding cultural equity and the current crisis as it's being seen in the world of nonprofit arts. In the past decade, a lot of attention has been devoted to the decline in audiences for the arts, particularly in the performing arts where declines have been the most prominent. And so let's be clear. Non-white attendance has held steady, white attendance has dropped, yet whites still make up 75% of the audiences. And so why is it that arts institutions who are most concerned about declining audiences continue to program and cater to the portion of their audience that's dropping off the most intensely? And this is reflected in the way that foundation money is distributed. Of every foundation dollar, 11 cents goes to the arts. More than 5 cents goes to arts organizations with budgets of more than 5 million, which make up just 2% of all arts organizations, right? The 2%. One cent goes to arts organizations serving underrepresented communities, and less than half a cent goes to arts organizations for social justice work. In other words, the crisis in the arts is intimately related to the nation's crisis around race and justice and equity. The patterns of inequality in foundation funding and arts funding in particular are in fact worse. They're more severe than patterns of income inequality, which we all know, of course, is getting bad and worse. And so I want to close this talk with the story that maybe takes us back to the stakes of the struggle. It goes back to 1956, the end of 1956. It's been only 28 months since the young preacher Martin Luther King Jr. had been heading the tiny Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. It's been only 10 months since the local NAACP chapter secretary, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat on the bus, precipitating the Montgomery bus boycott. And it's been just eight months since King has been arrested and his home bombed by white supremacists. But at this moment, boycotts are spreading across the South. Some municipalities are explicitly outlined segregation, but Montgomery's white elite vows to hold the line. And so King, as the head and the spokesperson of the Montgomery Improvement Association, he's suddenly a national, even international figure. He tours the U.S. to explain the association's cause and raise money for their efforts to tell the nation why he and the civil rights marchers found it, quote, more honorable to walking dignity than to ride in humiliation. And so on September 27th, he finds himself the single black passenger on an airplane flight to Norfolk, Virginia. First, he flies to Atlanta. It's a connecting flight. And his flight to Norfolk develops generated trouble, and it's forced to turn back. This time he's having his conversation with a white passenger next to him. He's having what we call now the race conversation, right? And the two men are connecting. They're connecting across the gap of segregation. And as they de-play it in the head back into the terminal, they are informed their repairs will take three hours. So they're giving lunch tickets to go to the airport's restaurant, which is called the Dobbs House. Let's talk about the Dobbs House. This concession was already notorious for African-Americans in the area because at the entrance to the Dobbs House is a portally white bearded black man in an old suit who's sitting next to a high veil of cotton. And there's a low table next to him with a box of cigars and a dinner bell. And so his job is to greet guests and sometimes entertain them with a song or a tale. And so in Jet Magazine, they said this was a Remus Alfonso Smith picture.  And so when King told the story to the audiences, he admitted that this image, the image of this man outraged him. It was an image of inferiority and it got him incredibly angry. So the Hosta area, the head waiter separates King from his white companion. And he leads King into a small curtain background in the rear of the restaurant. And so King realizes what's happening. And he starts protesting. He says, I'd rather starve than eat under such conditions. And so he goes back into the main dining room and takes a seat and waits in vain for a long time to be served. So he's getting angry, right? The white hostess is apologetic. She's saying I'm embarrassed. The black wait stuff is coming back and they're saying we'll help serve as witnesses if you want to sue. We'll see the manager. And so this is a small fight, right? By the standards of what's happening with the Montgomery bus boycott. But it's not insignificant. It leads to an epiphany for King. It becomes a central story in a lot of the speeches that he gives in the years before the March on Washington. The manager says to King, I'm bound by the laws of the state and the ordinances of the city. It's not me, it's the law. And King says, hey, I don't know if you've heard but the law has changed, right? Public facilities have been desegregated. But the manager's like, eh, whatever. We can't serve you here, right? But now everything's the same. Everything's equal back there. You'll get the same food. You'll be served out of the same dishes. Everything else. You'll get the same service as everybody in this main dining room. King says, I don't see how I can get the same service here. Number one, I'm confronting aesthetic inequality. I can't see all these beautiful paintings that you have on the walls out here. You can imagine what kind of paintings these were if the man outside is sitting next to a bailout cotton, right? So he's being sarcastic, of course. But he's serious about aesthetic inequality. He's seen all of the work that Mamie and Kenneth Clark have done, the beauty standard experience in which black children, given a choice, choose white dollars or black dollars. And he says later on, you see equality is not just a matter of mathematics, it's a matter of psychology. It's a quantitative something. It's a qualitative something. So he's restating what Ralph Ellison had said not so long before, that as a personal color, he was invisible. He was invisible in the sense of not being seen, but he's also invisible in the sense of not being seen in his full humanity. Law or no law. And further than that, he's been separated by the head waiter from his white companion. Their entire conversation has been disrupted. And so this separation prevents trust, reconciliation, redemption. It denies the possibility of neutrality, the creation of a beloved community. We're living in a time of growing inequality and intensifying resegregation. I think all of us in this room have dedicated ourselves to fight the condition that King put towards that night. Our work is to fight the aesthetic inequalities that King spoke of, or to flip it to fight for cultural equity. To fight to be seen in all of our difference and in all of our humanity. Fighting racism now is about changing the way that we see it. How do we see beyond diversity to equity? Such that we aren't content with a simple kind of Noah's Ark approach to diversity, where you get two of each, right? And you put them on the boat so they can escape the rising floodwaters, right? Which are being caused by climate change, of course. How do we see each other in our full humanity? Such that the unjust death of one is more the same as the unjust death of another. And we, in fact, make a commitment not just to stopping death, but to honoring and loving life. If we can truly see each other, perhaps we can form a more equal and just community. And that's something to believe in and it's something to fight for. Thank you very much for listening to me. Jeff's going to hang out with us for a bit so you can talk to him personally if you want to add during coffee and just kind of come to some of the shows. Now, this is a festival about risk, so we're going to really risk something. We're going to try to do something a little bit different. We're going to head into our breakout sessions and it's part of our meeting. We are going to break out into groups of six This is a chess piece given me up. There's a lot to think about. There's a lot going on these days and I think this is a room of some of the smartest people in our field and I think let's use that. Let's use each other to think about and consider how we're presenting in the world today. So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is introduce yourselves. You have five minutes for the whole group and please take one minute each to share your name, current affiliation, and one response to the following prompt. And if you really knew me, you would know. If you really knew me, you would know. Anyway. So the second part, you summer all of the following questions as prompts to get a conversation started and we're going to have these, you don't have to write these down, they're going to be on your table. How do you view the role of arts institutions in realizing cultural equity in social change? And based on these views and your own experiences, what sort of non-monetary resources are needed to advance this work, either in your own organization, or across the field at large? Specifically, how can performance be utilized as a platform for ideas and for social change? Are there examples that would be really good for folks to know about? Again, these discussion prompts are printed and available in your breakout rooms. You'll have one hour to discuss this and share amongst yourselves your experiences, challenges, and success, and process. And I think there's a lot to be learned. When we come back, if we have enough time, we're going to take just headlines from your conversations. And that's like five minutes once we come back.  You will also have a table number and in that room where you will meet your group and have this conversation. When we break from this plenary session, we ask you to head to your assigned room and find your table. And we have people ready to direct you and help you with that. You pick up a coffee and a Danish on your way to the room. Please get to your rooms by 10.45 a.m. And we'll be giving you notes when it's time to give you an idea of how the hour is going. So, come back in here and we'll see you in about an hour or so. Okay, thank you very much. Heather and I are starting the questions. I'll see you in the library.


And yeah, so it is the biggest conspiracy. Of course, the next topic we're actually going to talk about is the conspiracy within the big conspiracy, which is the whole child abuse issue in the Catholic Church, the travesty. And it seems only to be growing now and more and more revelations and also revelations. That's a good word. But more and more facts are being discovered about what these Catholic priests have been doing and the cover-ups in the Catholic Church itself and the cover-ups within the media in the United States. I liked that movie a few years ago about the Boston Globe spotlight, it was very good in terms of revealing and also the resistance within the paper, the politics, the mayor, the kind of rationalization the church was giving, it was very, very well done. So if you haven't watched it, I encourage everybody to go watch spotlight, but you in an article connected with the new proclamation from the Pope about the death penalty and the idea that he's now come out completely against the death penalty and before it was more tentative and now it's more absolute. Now those two connected and I want to talk about the whole issue of moral authority and what that represents. Well, so there were some people who thought that they might be connected in that the timing was interesting, the church released its revision to the Catechism on the death penalty right around the time that there was this big scan, the latest iteration of the scandal was brewing in various places around the world in South America and also here in Pennsylvania and so they said well this is just a distraction, they want people to debate about this rather than about the scandal and there might be some element of truth to that but I think that the bigger issue here is that they know that they're losing their moral authority, that an institution that holds itself up as holy and as a source of moral guidance to be impugned in such a way as it has been because of the sex abuse crisis is a real threat to the people who they're trying to influence to the believers and they've certainly lost a lot of support and a lot of adherence because of it over the years and the latest round is only going to make things worse and so I think what happened was that they wanted to reassert their authority and say these secular governments, they're killing people unjustifiably and we're the church and we're in a position to say that they're wrong. In effect, I think what they're thinking is maybe we've got some child rapists but at least we don't murder people and here's why. And it's a popular position they're taking, it's a position that all of Europe is already accepted in a sense and most of Europe is already accepted and the US is seemingly moving towards that position slowly so it's quite a popular position, it's not going to alienate anybody in particular and here we are with the moral voice of the world. So I want to clarify that I think that the death penalty question is a complex question. There's certainly a case to be made for the idea that someone who intentionally takes a life doesn't deserve to live but on the other hand you need to have a pretty rigorous standard of proof to know that they did before you give the government the power to take their life away. These aren't the sorts of points that the church is making in defense of its position. What it's doing is saying everybody has this intrinsic dignity that nothing that they do can take away and the world has to be deferential to that fact and respect their life even if they're a vicious criminal and why is that? Why should we believe that? What is this dignity? Where did it come from? It's worth reading the quote from the Pope about dignity because they're really horrific.  Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity and God himself pledges to guarantee this.  And so what I found interesting was the reaction to this change especially coming from various religious conservatives who they didn't want to, the main thing that concerned them was the church was changing its position. And what we were told 100 years ago that this was okay but now we're supposed to believe that it isn't. This is going against our tradition. This is going against the magisterium of the church. And they end up saying things like when the church changes its views about these things so radically, it undercuts their credibility and their authority. And my question is, oh yeah, you mean we don't have any good reason to believe them just because they say so? Well that's an interesting point but you should think about its implications more generally. And why it was that you believe what the church said 100 years ago or why it was that you believe anything that's just based on some thousand year old scripture that's supposed to come from a mountain somewhere. And so the biggest point is that this is just both the controversy about the death penalty and the ongoing sex abuse crisis. These really ought to be the nails in the coffin of the idea that we need religion to have a source of moral guidance because if all it is, is somebody say so, believe us that there's this intrinsic dignity that these criminals have. It's not too much different from the priests who say, you know, believe me, you're a sinner and God's penalty is that you do these terrible things that these priests ask these kids to do. And so many of them just took their priests' word for it and believed them on faith. And they're really, you know, tragic outcomes because of that. No, it's horrific. And yeah, I mean, you'd think that the Catholic church would be, this would be it. I mean, it would end. Right? I mean, put aside, OK, you can kind of, people can rationalize other religion. I agree with you. This is generalizable to all religion, but enter the authority of religion. But certainly the idea that there's a pope and that these cardinals and they have some special authority and special communication with God and they know the truth better than everybody else, that should be gone from the face of the earth. It is stunning to me that Catholicism is not dead. Well, it's a it's a really good point. And I have have the I asked these kinds of questions of the Catholics. I know I was raised Catholic, so I have a family this way. But and it's a it's a real puzzle for me. I mean, and the best that I can come up with is is that just like what we were talking about before, it's not an intellectual issue for them. It's it's it's an emotional issue, their connection to this institution. They they have fond memories of the smell of incense and organ music when they grew up and and they can't bear to break with this. The image of priests of using children should be able to dislodge any memory like that from your mind. Well, you know, here's the other thing. And here's where the intellectual aspect of it does still kick in, which is and I mentioned this in a webinar I did with on car recently. That religion has a built in self defense mechanism for this kind of thing, which is the concept of original sin. We're all sinners. We're all sinners. So forgive us and and judge not. And and and there is another connection then with the dental the death penalty issue, because if how can we judge these murderers if we ourselves are sinners is the idea. And if we can't judge the murderers, we certainly can judge the priests who molest kids and there you go. Everybody gets off scot free and so much of this and the conspiracy theories and so much of all of this, I think, is motivated by fear, by the emotion of fear, default of the mind, default on thinking and reason. But then just going with emotion. And I really do think the dominant emotion, because what happens if you give up on your Catholic church? What do I latch on to? Right. So it's and it's not an intellectual thing. You can probably explain to them that there are other alternatives. But it's truly is this emotion of fear that it's a void. It's it's blackness, you know, and they can't confront that. It's in the same with conspiracy. Again, it's the fear of the unknown, fear of not understanding something, fear of complex explanations.  And and when I started doubting and I had doubts about religion before I discovered objectivism. I had doubts that I came up with on my own. And then, you know, objectivism was just the nail in the coffin. But it's scary to give it up. And I went through about a year there where I was I was terrified. And I didn't know what I was going to do with myself.  I think the advantage of becoming an atheist very young, which which I luckily did for who knows why, but I did, is that you never because fear is something of these kind of things is something you develop as you become more conceptual because there is no concept of, you know, really no concept of evil and punishment, you know, when you're a little kid. So I just dismissed it and walked away. And it was it was I wouldn't even say liberating.  But it's how old were you when you when you made that decision? I was somewhere between six and seven. And I don't know exactly. I only know the where I was. I was in London and it was in England. I was actually studying at a religious Jewish day school. So I wore Yarmulke every day to school to get off when I got home. But it wore Yarmulke and we were studying the Bible. But I can't remember anything specific, although I was traumatized by the idea that if you saw God, you died and it's still stuck in my head.  But but it was definitely six or seven because those are the ages I was in London. So I remember it that way. And then it never I can't ever remembering remember it coming up as, oh, I wonder if I should believe it always was no, this is silly. And now I would debate in class and argue with anybody you believed, including my parents or grandparents or whatever. So it just it just and we continue to study the Bible and I continue to go to synagogue and do all the things you're supposed to do as a good Jewish boy. But, you know, it always just OK, this is what you do, but not because you believe that makes sense to me because you beat me by about 10 years. I didn't start having my doubts and tells about 16 or 17. I think that's part of the reason that it hurt more to give them up because I hold decade more of of integrating this viewpoint into your life. And in my case, it was I had to do some real intellectual work to untangle it. And it was, you know, intellectual confusions and discovery of contradictions that that got me into that doubt in the first place. And I think Catholicism in many ways is more insidious to Judaism in a lot of these things. It it it promotes a lot of and it tries to present itself as somehow rational and somehow. And I never got that sense. I mean, Judaism, you know, some of the stuff is presented as logical, but it basically is all coming from a book and they teach it that way. And nobody takes it too seriously, even the people who pretend to take it very seriously. And there was no dogma. There's nothing about Judaism. There's no dogma. Everybody argues about everything. There's nothing is there's no pope. There's not there's like nothing like every passage in the Old Testament. We studied as kids, there were 25 interpretation of it. There was no one way to understand this, and that's how we studied it. So it wasn't we studied it as this is what you're supposed to do. It says this is what God said. And then some people think it means this. Some people think it means this. Some people think it means that. Who knows, you know? So I guess I guess a breeding ground for skepticism. Somebody asked if our critique is applicable to other other religions, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism. And yeah, I think everything we said about Catholicism, it's just the Catholicism is like slapping Catholics in the face right now. And it should be more obvious to Catholics. Now Islam has done that in spades. So Muslims should be questioning a religion way before Catholic Catholics, but Catholics are next than then everybody else because because there's a lot of questions these religions have to answer for. It's interesting. The the main thing that got me doubting religion in the first place was basically the issue of comparative religion. I I when I was in high school, I got I got to know, I got to know some Jews. I got to know some Muslims. I, you know, they were friends of mine and I started reading their scriptures. I started reading the Quran and it's like this says every this says different things than what my book says. And yet this whole half the world believes it. And why is my book better? Because this is the one that I grew up with. Well, if I had been born somewhere else, I'd have grown up with a different book. And and that's really what got me asking big questions about it. And that's that, again, I think connects to the issue that for so many people, it's it's the accidents of what they're born with, what their parents raise them to believe and where they happen to live and who their friends are. That's what is that's what keeps them in the faith. It's it's not like they've done a survey of all the different world religions and have decided, oh, this is the one with the best logical arguments. It's not like that at all. Yeah. No, that's that's fascinating that that argument worked on you because, you know, it's it's obvious when you think about it. But it doesn't seem to work on a lot of people because they seem to somehow resist it. And I don't know how they rationalize it in their own right.


What's going on guys? It's your boy DJ here today with another Destiny video. Now about a month ago I uploaded the first of a new series I wanted to do called Back to Year 1 where I basically dug out them amazing Year 1 weapons from my vault, gave you guys gameplays on them and gave you guys a year 2 equivalent. I started the series with a weapon called the 1-2-3 Scissor G which is my favourite PvP weapon still to this day. Obviously they were not playing trials or the Iron Banner as it's a Year 1 weapon and weapon level counts. It's basically a Year 1 version of the Grasp of Malak but a lot better in my opinion. Today's video is going to be based on another amazing Year 1 pulse rifle, it's called the 55A Orphate. This was originally a Vanguard weapon, actually a weapon not many people use due to at the time of this being an obtainable weapon. There were pulses such as a messenger and the Hutt Scotch program which were dominant in PvP but their time has gone and PvP now is at a stage where that faster fire at pulse rifles are the way forward. This Orphate now when used in PvP in its current state is one of the best weapons I can ever remember getting a hold of. The fact it don't take an incendiary finger to operate also helps its case. It's a part of the 66-14 archetype of pulses. Now I truly think though that the lore I had dropped on mine does indeed make it stand out from the crowd. Mine landed with red dot OAS, rodeo, hand led stock and reactive reload which is a monster of a perk. When reactive reload is active it will do about 29 to the body and 38 to the head easily capable of two burst and guardians it really is. You can see it in action in the background now. Now the best thing about this weapon is that here in Year 2 there are many different pulse rifles variants within the 66-14 archetype including a few exotics so let's look at the ones I actually have. First up we have the Villainy available from the future WarCult vendor in the tower. Roll she has on hers isn't too bad either with head seeker, perfect balance and glass half full. Also the Vanguard vendor has the apple of discord. Again a roll isn't that bad with head seeker counterbalance and reinforced barrel. Another one worth mentioning is the Suroz PDX41. This weapon is available from the Gunsmith Field Arms Day packages. Surely you've come across this weapon before. If you haven't pick a package up and be patient for a great roll I have seen many come and go. Another variant of this pulse rifle is the Nero Wings Mercy, the Iron Banner pulse rifle. This is not too easy to get as it's only available when the Iron Banner event is here. I've had one for months not landing myself a decent roll on the last Iron Banner where the weapon was actually available to buy and it was dropping quite often. I still didn't get a decent roll one but it is if you do get a great roll the weapon is murderous. Now there are two exotics that deliver the 6614 impact rate of fire. There are the no time to explain which are obtainable via a quest and there's also the red death. Now the red death is actually a 6615 with a little bit more of an impact and the red death actually was a weapon that once stood tall in PVP and I do believe it could do it again. Having that little extra impact as well as the red death perk makes the red death a great choice in PVP for anyone wanting to try out the 6614 archetype of pulse rifles. With the right setup obviously it can deal more damage. The last weapon I have which falls under this category of pulses is the Smite of Maren. This is a raid weapon. Dropping with a variety of different perks mine has cocoon, hand-loaded and firefly and it tears shit up in PVP. There used to actually be a time within PVP where this weapon classes a 6618 firepulse rifle was the only legendary in its archetype that could two burst headshot kill in PVP. Like the red death this weapon does indeed have an impact of 15. Slightly modern weapons such as the Neroin's Mercy and the pdx-41 and capable of doing more damage in PVP with the right setup. Mentioning all these year-to-year pulses though is kind of a disappointment as for me my Orphate still stands above them all in this category and I'm still looking for a year-to-year pulse rifle that can match it. The general feel of the weapon as well as its great role make the weapon perfect for me. I do however have a pdx-41 which I am looking for to try and add as soon as I level it up. It could be that very weapon that matches my Orphate. Now they are all the 6614 pulses I have from year two but I do believe there are others. If you have one in mind which I haven't mentioned please let me know down below in that comment section what it is. As like I said I'm still looking for that perfect year-to-6614 pulse rifle. Also guys tell me down below what you think of this archetype of pulses. If you have a beastly Neroin's Mercy or a pdx or any other pulse rifle that falls under this category and you use it a lot let me know the role and let me know what you think about it down below in that comment section. But guys hope you enjoyed the video do drop on a like I do appreciate the support and I'll catch you guys on that next one.


Yeah, we on boss talk one on one one on one. Yeah, we gonna tell them let me ask you I want to I want to that's a dope story But let me ask you about NBA young boy because that's the one that I don't know how you guys Relationship is the way he'd be looking at the camera when you see him the way he looks He's faking the way the niggas look versus the way the nigga rap Who the niggas it's a whole bunch of things going on with that for me now listen look I remember we was going to Chicago and I listened to his whole you know the whole way I listen to number I probably heard a bunch of your beats to be honest with you I was just listening to young boy, and I was like, hey, let's do dope, but then when I see him I'm like damn Talked to this nigga, you know How did you guys even meet or how did y'all even lock you know hook up man shout out the DJ Swift So I was in college. Okay in class get a phone call from him, right? Hey, dude, you in class. I was like yummy class. What's up? He's like step outside. So I'm like, I cool. So I step outside. He like brothers got a NBA young boy He hard. I'm like, bro. I don't know who this is, but you know, he from bad roots. He hard, but he really liked what you're doing So I'm like, I bet at the time I go on this page here at 3,000 Yes, yeah, I work. All right, cool. You know I'm saying by the time me him at the same amount of follow Oh, yeah, so I'm like, all right. You know I'm saying so I Go look at his music. I'm like something like some like vintage like Louisiana boo see where I'm like, you know I'm saying I can do that. You know I'm saying so I'm like, I'm gonna make the beat so I go right back in class. All right put my headphones on It's all you here. So I get stopped. Oh Mr. Lockhart, but I actually they call me Miami in school Miami even professors to Miami I'm like, huh? Oh What are you doing? Oh, uh assignment. Yeah, I'm right notes.  I ain't no music class. I'm like, I know you don't understand what I'm doing So I'm like, I get out of class email to beat the DJ Swift the next day not even 12 hours later Video out all my almost had a million views. Whoo. So I call Suva like a man. Tell young boy. Hey, let's do it again He was like, all right. So he was like young boy said call him.    I'm like, yo, he was like, hey, keep sending that fire. Let's go up So I'm like, you know, so I'm sending the records or what not I Get a phone call from young boy. He was like, they say gangster. Where you at? I'm like, man, I'm in Tennessee, he was like, I need you to come to come to LA So I get ready to go to LA I bring a whole team I got with me whole team come to LA and Know one thing led to another Hey, I young boy comes out and we did almost 80% of that album Wow and that was like the beginning because I didn't I never met him We were always talking the phone though.  Okay that album. So we going through it's like midnight. We in Atlanta, right? Me might lard a whole team. So we in the hotel. We got one big sweet, right? We still broke We was like man, we got a little sweet, you know saying but all eight of us we gonna sleep in this room Some people hit the floor. Some people get in the bed. We got a little sofa bed We gonna plug it out like that. So 12 o'clock come around young boy drop down Number one. Okay, that's us. Everybody sleep but me. I'm up. Of course number two. Okay. That's us three That's us four. That's us. Hmm. Five. That's us six. That's us Seven that's Hold on. Let me just maybe I'm child. Maybe I'm half-sleep all eight songs was us. I was like You know I'm saying so that was like the turning point of like AA and this is the sound Having like that whole household name because people knew from the Kodak But our relationship like or the music kind of stopped and it wasn't because of Kodak No, the label the label really labels like today they tripped out. There was like yo yo Kodak man, you know double-a's hard, but you know, it's Other producers that can turn you up and Kodak was like nah, like I'm a rock with who I'm rocking with You know I'm saying and then he did got one record and it went viral on Instagram And I guess you know I'm saying the label was like now. Let's go in a different direction, which is cool You don't say this all love you know I'm saying but you know We just kind of just yeah locked in somewhere else. You know I'm saying at the time, but Everything has an expiration How long did it take between Kodak and NBA? Like to meet to Yeah, for the beat Going here and then him contacting you. Yeah, like the difference. Yeah, the relationship Relationships they they was like Because Kodak was in jail at the time. So like it just happened like I don't because I know you were in college at both times Yeah, so it never stopped. Yeah, it was like Kodak was happening and then that happened at the same time But then things kind of got a little funny. You know what I'm saying, but It's all it's favor man.


Howdy, how's it going?  Cause we're gonna be going over the magical world of evocation. I'm gonna be going over what the Evocation School of Magic is, as well as rate all of its spells from first to last level. Do keep in mind that, as I talk about each spell, I'll be taking into consideration what level the spell is, and how it compares to the other spells of that level, since it's already obvious that a 7th level spell is gonna be infinite times better than a 2nd level spell.  But with that out of the way, let's begin.  Evocation spells often take the form of raw magic that can't be easily comprehended as anything other than just MAGIC, such as magic missile or elemental spells that have a hard focus on damaging effects, such as the famous fireball and lightning bolt spells. See, almost all evocation spells are meant to be combat-oriented, hence all the jokes about blowing shit up, so you'll be very hard-pressed to find a caster that doesn't have at least one of these spells with them for self-defense. But with the description out of the way, let's get right into reviewing every single spell starting with CANTRIPS. BOOMING BLADE. Good for classes that want a little more melee in their diet, bad for classes that want to attack more than once per turn. DANCING LIGHTS. And now the sun revolves around me. ELGESPLASTS. This is the best offensive cantrip in the entire game. FIREBALL. If you can't get ELGESPLASTS, get FIREBALL. FROSSBITE. Damage cantrips with added effects are always great, but this one falls off fast once enemies start taking multiple attacks per turn. GREEN FLAME BLADE. Like BOOMING BLADE, only green. LIGHT. Made obsolete by dancing lights. LIGHTNING LURE. Not sure why you would want to pull enemies super close to your squishy casters, but here you go. RAVE FROST. Most enemies are melee fighters. That means that they want to get close to you. Use this to make their day harder. SAKERED FLAME. Good if something is in cover, also good if you took my combat advice about going prone a lot. Otherwise, it's meh. SHOCKING GRASS. Let's face it, you will inevitably end up in melee combat. Taking the spell just means that you don't have to STAY in melee combat. THUNDER CLAP.  WORD OF RADIANCE. Oh hey, it's that thing I just mentioned, but worse because now you can't hit enemies behind you because you have to look at what you're hitting. FIRST LEVEL. BURNING HANDS.  Well that's just too bad. CHAOS BULT. Behold, one of the only sorcerer exclusive spells in the game, and it's nonsense. Chromatic Orb. Better in almost every way to Chaos Bolt, except that you need to buy a goddamn diamond to fire it. Cure Wounds. To show you the power of Cure Wounds, I sawed this Orc and half, and repaired it using only Cure Wounds. Divine Favor. It would be a decent spell, except that it's paladin exclusive and is therefore phased out by a million other concentration spells. EARTH TREMBER. Once again, I must ask why you are putting yourself in a group of enemies. The spell is even worse outside because now you just put difficult terrain all around you like a goober. Fairy Fire.  Guiding Bolt. This spell is like Google Maps in that it will show you where to go. It is also like Google Maps in that you still probably won't make it there. Healing Word. Hey! Hey you! Get off! Hellish Rebuke. No.  Magic Missile. Sometimes you just don't care about the bad guy's AC. Searing Smite. It would be good if not for the paladin's concentration problem. Thundress Smite. FOR! Thunder Wave. Sure, I'll give this one a pass because it's at least got decent range and does something productive about you being surrounded. Witch Bolt. I mean, if you can find a way to get them to never leave the 30 foot range and not beat you up to break the concentration, at least it's good for your spell slot economy. Wrathful Smite. Are you telling me that the holy night with the power of God and anime on his side needs a spell to be scary? Whatever, man. Second Level. Aghanazar's Scorcher. The second level Lightning Bolt is perfectly adequate. Branding Smite. Win! When will you need this? Continual Flame. I mean, I guess if you're underwater you might find use in this, but it is literally just a worse light spell, except that it takes a second level spell slot to be bad. Darkness. Darkness. No parents. Lego Batman is sad. Flame Blade. Yup, that's a blade. And it's definitely in flames. Gust of Wind. I wonder what this spell does. Melph's Acid Arrow. It's weird for a non-saving throw spell to still do half damage if you miss. I do not dislike it. Moon Beam. Celestial Beam! Prayer of Healing. It takes 10 minutes to cast the spell, and by that point you might as well just take a short rest. Scorching Ray. I always did love spells where you can attack one or multiple people. Shatter. Snilock. Snowball Storm. Bow down. Bow down. Before the power of Santa. Or be crushed. Be crushed. Bye. His Charlie boots up too. Spiritual Weapon. You weren't using your bonus action for anything anyway. Warding Wind. One. Personal Space. Two. Stay away from my personal space. Third Level. Useful if you somehow get it on another class, but paladins have enough concentration spells to worry about. Blinding Smite. Does as much damage as a normal smite, and it also blinds people. If only it weren't concentration. Crusader's Mantle. More useful the more friends you have. Still concentration. Daylight.    Fireball. Literally the most famous evocation spell in the game. There's power in these bubbles. Neumann's Tiny Hut. This is not an evocation spell. Lightning Bolt.  Well, they're excited. Mass Healing Ward. Pee-ness! Melph's Minute Meteors. It's like Fireball, but worse. Sending. I know it doesn't seem like much, but this spell has saved my bacon many a time. Wall of Sand. Pocket Sand. Wall of Water. It's like a wall, but worse. Wind Wall. This isn't even a wall. This is like the suggestion of a wall. Level 4. Fire Shield. Free damage, light, and resistance at no concentration. Sign me up. Ice Storm. Let it go. Let it go. Can't stop killing anymore. Adeluke's Resilient Sphere. Whether it's friends or enemies, if someone's in trouble, put them in a bubble. Sickening Radiance. 30 feet is a pretty decent radius. Exhaustion is absolutely killer. And if you manage to get 5 turns in, anybody inside is done so. Staggering. Of all the Smites, this is not the most impressive. Storm Sphere. Thunderbolt and Lightning. Very, very frightening me. Vitriolic Sphere.  Oh, it says D4. Wall of Fire. Now this is how a wall should work. Level 5. Big B's Hand. This is probably the best way to get fingered. Cone of Cold. Let it go. Let it go.  Dawn. This? This is a level 5 spell? Really? Destructive Wave. Emo Rage. Flame Strike. Okay, look at the spell. Then look at the spell right before it, and then tell me why you even need this. Hallow.  Holy Weapon. This just isn't good enough to be level 5. Immolation. Edgy Name. Edgy Game. Maelstrom. It's decent, but it really only serves to make some other AI we attack better. Mass Cure Wounds. Everyone, quick! Let me touch you! It's the only way! Wall of Force. Hmm, yes. This wall is made out of wall. Wall of Light. Wall of Stone. Remember kids, always use protection. Wrath of Nature. So you remember when you played Rinscape for the first time and you had to go to Drainer Manor and Trees and Ship kept attacking you? Welp, this is that spell. Sixth Level. Blade Barrier. Sure, you could get any of the wall spells, or you could get thousands of spinning blade discs. Chain Lightning. 40, T8 damage in one spell? Don't mind if I do. Contingency. Spend two spell slots to maybe cast one spell. Heal. Hmm, does that feel good? I bet it does. Adaluke's Freezing Sphere.  Sunbeam. Beam! Beam! Beam! BEAM! Wall of Ice. At this point, with all the other walls, it's just not worth it. Seventh Level. Crown of Stars.  Delayed Blast Fireball. Hey man, everything's cool. It's all fine. Nothing weird, nothing straight. Surprise Fireball! Divine Word. Moist. Firestorm. Dread it. Run from it. Destiny still arrives. Force Cage. Because this cage extends into the ethereal plane, I will forever picture the spell in my mind as the Fenton Thermus. Mordenkainen Sword.  Prismatic Spray. Hey kids, do you like random effects? Wowie! Whirlwind. Druid! Use Whirlwind! Druid, Druid! Eighth Level. Earthquake.  Maddening Darkness. Go ahead, Warlock. Seein' this darkness, ya nerd. Sunburst. You know, if this were an actual sunburst, it would do a lot more than 12d6. Telepathy. This is not evocation! Ninth Level! Mass Heal. I'm gonna heal you for 700 points of fondling damage! Hahahaha! Meteor Swarm. If you drop another moon on me, I'm gonna lose it. Power Word Heal. As a ninth level spell, just go with Mass Heal. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Leave a like and comment if you did.  And maybe support me on Patreon so that I can slowly make my entire life revolve around D&D. Also, if you wanna stay up to date on all of your Davy news, I keep a link to my Discord and Twitter in the description below. But yeah, Davy out.


You asked and we listened. Today we're going to be diving into five more underrated cinematic techniques. Hey, it's Herman here again on Artlist and it can be difficult to express your creative vision when you don't have the right tools. Imagine having a toolbox and forgetting about the tools meant for specific jobs. That is exactly why we're going over these cinematic techniques so they can be your ace up your sleeve to elevate your storytelling. We shared five already and due to popular demand, we're jumping right back where we left off, so let's go. Our first technique is the point of view shot, otherwise known as POV.  Want to convey a character's sense of paranoia? Have the audience experience it themselves. Why are they all looking at me? What about the thrill of an action sequence? Nothing gets the blood pumping like you're the one in the fight. Some directors have even been bold enough to shoot entire feature length films in POV. I have watched so much POV footage of extreme sports and parkour on TikTok and it's been the fastest way for me to get my knees weak and palms sweaty. But it's not just limited to adrenaline junkies and narrative films. It's an amazing way to vlog your activities like hiking or exploring a new city. Your viewers can feel right there with you experiencing the same sights, sounds, and emotions. It's also a great way for reminding viewers to never miss our next video if they want more tips, tutorials, and behind the scenes that empower them as creators. Using POV is also the most effective way to teach people new skills like cooking or assembling intricate builds. There's less room for confusion because we see exactly what the instructor sees. Sometimes I get FOMO from missing out on a concert but VR experiences allow me to feel like I'm right there in the crowd experiencing the same excitement without getting a painful sunburn. One of the most memorable ads I've seen was shot in POV. Be careful though especially for people like me who easily get motion sick because the POV style can be as disorienting as those VR roller coaster games. Next up we have Frame Within a Frame which is one of my favorite ways to guide the viewer's eyes to where I want it. So what you do is place your subject within a physical frame within the frame of your video, hence Frame Within a Frame. Now the best way to do this is to use natural frames within your scene whether it's windows, doors, or even fingers like that one time that we took on that challenge to film with only one light. Speaking of light you can even shape your light so that it creates a frame around your subject. If you want to get really creative you can even use the frame to create a transition into your next scene. Using a frame within a frame is the perfect way to convey your character's state of mind such as feeling trapped or isolated. Try it out yourself even if it's just to add a little bit of visual interest to your scene. The third technique is shooting with a slow shutter and this became a bit more popular in recent years. It adds a surreal feeling to your footage by introducing more motion blur than you'd naturally see. All you have to do is set your shutter speed to something low like 1 over 10 and have either your subject or camera moving. Want to show a passage of time? Use the motion blur from people walking to feel like we're traveling through time faster. It's also great for showing the character's state of mind whether they're feeling anxious, disoriented, or simply in a dream. We use the slow shutter shot as a transitional element in a couple of our challenges and even accomplish this effect on a phone. If you're an editor looking for slow shutter shots to complement your work just type it into Artless AI powered search engine. Whether you need high quality assets or reference on how to achieve these techniques Artless has your back. Let's try this one out. Using the right music is also crucial to making your shots effective and Artless makes finding your perfect song a breeze. Pairing new techniques with high quality assets is how you bring your stories to life. Next up is free-lensing which was a trending technique a little while back that I don't see used very often anymore. That's why we're showing it some love today because it's another amazing way to capture that dreamy surreal vibe for your videos. You achieve this by detaching your lens and angling it to allow light to leak in and hit your sensor. This gives a softer quality to your footage by having different parts of your frame out of focus and allowing more light to occasionally enter the frame. It's personally my favorite way of visually depicting dreams or trying to recall a memory. Now just like filming with a slow shutter you could also use free-lensing to convey a character state of mind. If we combine it with POV doesn't it feel like they're waking up after hitting their head? Be careful though because getting any dust or debris into your sensor is the fastest way to break the bank and your heart. If you enjoy experimenting as much as I do then I'm sure you'll have fun creating abstract visuals with free-lensing. Last but not least is the extreme close-up. I am guilty of overlooking this one so often but it's such a powerful way to convey a sense of intimacy and importance. It's an extreme close-up because the camera gets so close to the subject that only the details are visible. Want to hyper-focus a character's expression? Extreme close-ups can feel a little intrusive but it's an amazing way to build tension or emphasize the emotion of your characters. What about highlighting specific features in your product commercial? Can't do that without getting tight. And let's not forget about these extremely satisfying TikToks. All it takes is getting your lens super close to your subject whether it's physically moving the camera closer or getting a telephoto or macro lens. Just like noticing the fine brush strokes of a painting you can use extreme close-ups to provide a layer of depth that your audience would miss in a wider shot. These five techniques might be underrated but they can be used in a variety of ways to bring out the full potential of your videos. Just like our last video let us know in the comments if you want us to break down more underrated cinematic techniques that elevate your storytelling. And make sure to subscribe to the artless channel if you want more videos to help you make your best videos. Being a creator means experimenting so try these techniques out and check out our previous five underrated techniques if you haven't already. Otherwise I'll see you in the next one.


Whitney Union approves deal. The Whitney Museum of Art has ratified its first contract with UAW Local 210, which represents about 200 employees of the cultural institution. After 16 months of negotiations, the museum and the union said Monday. The three-and-a-half-year labor agreement expands unionized workers' benefits, including raises and enhanced job security.