The hierarchy of power in the DC universe is about to change. And by DC universe, I mean Disney cinematic universe, because a live action Moana is on the way. Dwayne Johnson is reprising that role. Of course he is. Let's talk about it. The solace, empty, money grubbing corporation known as Disney is at it again. They have another live action movie coming our way. Moana, based on the hit film All the Way Back in 2016. It's been seven years, seven. Tom, from the house of mouse. The people that brought us the live action Pinocchio. The people that brought us the live action Dumbo. The people that brought us the live action Lady and the Tramp. That seriously exists, that there was a movie on Disney Plus, Lady and the Tramp remake. Nobody saw it, zero people. Comment if you actually watched that movie because I'm convinced no one did. Oh, they're also doing a live action Aristocats. We're all craving it. We're all craving that catnip. Anyway, let's talk Moana. What do we have to expect? Well, Maui's back baby. And he's played by Dwayne Johnson again, but this time in live action form. Johnson's also producing this. He announced it live from Hawaii during a shareholders meeting. I couldn't be less excited if I tried. I've talked about this several times in the past. There is zero live action version that surpasses the original in any way, shape or form. The animated classics are beloved because they did it right the first time around. So if it ain't broke, just build the same exact thing again is what Disney's thinking. And that's often the case, like the Lion King, Aladdin.  Right down to the shot for shot storyboards. The little mermaids coming out soon. That looks to be the same thing. Dull, lifeless animation. CG is very realistic, but why do we want that? I like animals with personality. I don't wanna see a crab be a crab. That's boring. Why not just make a Moana too? Why go with the live action route? You know, Frozen's next.  Get that Disney cinematic princess universe thing.  These aren't things they're gonna put feathers in. This isn't a cap for them to wear, Peter Pan style. No, these are nothing more than money generators. You can go to their theme park and you will not see live action anything. It's all still the animated originals. The rides are themed that way. The merch is sold that way. The characters are dressed that way. You don't see live action Mufasa walking around. You'd frighten the kids. Wayne Johnson as Maui is probably his best character because he actually feels like a living, breathing character that's not the rock. But now that the rock is actually going to physically be him, I just don't see it. I really don't and I don't wanna see it. But now I wanna hear your thoughts.  Do you remember when Disney would randomly make a live action film, like 101 Dalmatians and then just give it a rest for like a decade? Those were good times. They would make original things. Creative, beautifully animated, wonderfully entertaining and not just the same crap over and over again.  That'll be frightening beyond all compare. It'll happen. It'll happen. Let me know in the comments. Like this video if you had a good time. Please think about subscribing if you haven't as I post tons of movie related content each and every week. I'd love to have you stick around. Take care. Hey, thanks again for watching the video. Hope you had a good time. If you really like what I'm doing and you wanna support this one man operation, please think about joining me on Patreon at patreon.com slash adamdoesmovies. There's even a $1 membership. So if you're like, I like the guy but I don't love the guy, you could start there. And even at the $1 tier, there are 300 exclusive videos that are only for Patreons and YouTube join members. That's right, you could also become a YouTube member and both of these platforms have the option to support at the Mithril membership which is my favorite tier offering. If you stick with me for the year, you can get up to four movie requests of your own. I shout your name out in the video and I mean I give you a full review. It's a great time. I think it's fair for both parties involved. So check me out at those places and thanks again for watching.


I thought I just would start out also just by saying I spent from 18 to 22 in this area, in this city, and so being back here feels, it just extremely loaded and moving because it's where I first fell in love and where I first went to my first gay bath house.  So it feels incredibly stirring because it's where I first really, it's where I came out and being in this room feels incredibly, you know, I just forget when you look up and see Isherwood and Sappho. I remember how terrified I was. I lived on Market in Sanchez and across the street was a rowdy gay bar and there was guys hanging out. I don't know what it was called, but they were on the pet, and I was so afraid of them and my parents came to visit and I saw them look across the street. And I look back, that's only, you know, that's 30 some years ago, and all that sense of being trapped and hidden and to be back now as a 56-year-old doing these plays, talking, just trying to seek some kind of truth and some kind of transparency about what it is to be human and what it is to try to grow toward some kind of authenticity as a human. I guess I'm expressing this incredible gratitude and sense of how moving it is to be in San Francisco of all places. And this is also where I began my serious, was where I came out and where I also said I'm going to make the decision to really dedicate myself to acting. And I wanted to read, just because I thought it would be fun, from the former book that All the Rage came out recently, but the tricky part came out about 10 years ago almost, but I write a little bit about that process of discovering when I was a young person the first sort of sense of being in love with, possibly in love with this bizarre thing called the theater. And now since I'm performing across the street. And I do want to say too, you guys, this is such a bizarre, isn't it, endeavor, this self-chronicling, like this memoir, what, you know, the whole notion of memoir that stories come from a river of experience rather than completely the land of fiction. And there's such a paradox in that, I don't know if you've ever heard that wonderful Buddhist saying that to study the way is to study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to allow the 10,000 things to flow. So that bizarre paradox by focusing on our own stories, cracking through to what is truly human and universal, for lack of a better word. And I still have a lot of shame, a lot of times, about the fact that that seems to be the essential thrust of my writing is this naval gazing. Like I hear the voice of the priest saying, there you go again, calling attention to yourself, talking about yourself. But it seems that the paradox is in talking about myself, my hope and my prayer is that I am forgetting about myself, that it's really just talking about us. But hey, for fun, a short passage about tripping upon, I don't know if I know some of you might have, you know, may have read this book, a couple of you have, but maybe I'll give voice to this little moment of being about 16 years old, 17 years old and tripping upon the theater for the first time. Let's see if we can get that.  And I was really, really struggling with suicidal feelings and shame and isolation. And by some stroke of fate, this event occurred. I was walking through the lobby at school when I noticed a bright orange poster. On it was drawn a large cartoon figure of a hefty man kicking up his heels. He was wearing a toga or something Roman-like and was running, apparently being chased by a scantily clad, large-breasted blonde. His sandals were skimming along large red letters that said, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Below in the right-hand corner was printed the following information. Since October 14th, auditorium sign up, room 228. Without much thought, I moved through the crush of students up the stairs and across the hall to the drama room. My head had the slightest conversation with my feet, what are you doing? My body's reply, this is the way it is. I signed my name on the clipboard hanging near the door. The following week I sat clutching sheet music for Camelot against my knees, my legs jerking up and down. This whole thing's absurd, I kept thinking. I'll never go through with it. There was a row of folding chairs lined up in the hall just outside the entrance to the auditorium. They were all occupied with students like me, holding music, humming softly, appendages jerking. This is crazy, I kept thinking, how could anyone do this? Next! He was pointing at me, this guy with copper-colored hair. Is that dyed? I wondered. He was telling me I was next. I stood and avoiding the eyes of the others folded in their folding chairs. I walked past the boy with flaming hair through the door and onto the stage of the enormous auditorium. Music please. It was a deep, disembodied voice bubbling up from somewhere. Down here it said, I walked forward and saw a guy seated in the orchestra pit behind an upright piano.   Sick, he asked again. I bent down to hand him my song. He stood to take it. His yellow t-shirt cried, Godspell, Tempo, fast, I whispered. Okay, he gestured for me to move back toward center stage. I shuffled back and forth, stuck my hands in my pockets, took them out. I bent my knees to keep them from shaking. Dive in, baby lamb, came a female voice from amid the dark sea of seats. I squinted and saw, several rows back, the outline of a hairdo, the glimmer of glasses. I stared. Darling, did you hear me? Yes. What are you singing? Camelot. Lovely. Go ahead, Alan. She yelled. The music began, and miraculously, so did I. A law was made a distant moon ago here, July and August cannot be too hot, I got three lines in, blanked and stopped singing. Oh, well, that's the end of that, I thought.  I saw the head of hair stand. She moved briskly down the aisle toward the stage. She seemed excited. She was small, well-dressed. She had a lovely scarf and a huge grin. Did you bring any other music? No. Well, that's okay. Have you got nice legs? What? John, the boy with the fiery hair, was at my side. This is John, my assistant. He nodded at me. Fabulous voice, he whispered. Mrs. Priest likes you. Darling, would you mind throwing on a pair of gym shorts and let me have a gander at your legs? I shrugged and mumbled something, assenting, but embarrassed. She said, it's part of the story, honey. One of the characters has lovely gams. Where's a toga? I'm sure yours are great. I just need to have a quick look. John handed me a pair of gym shorts and pointed. Last door upright. What? Where? Wing three, off upright, he pointed again. I followed the general direction of his finger. I found the door to a small room and returned with bare legs and stocking feet. Turn around once, darling. Will you, please? I spun. They gazed. It was oddly intoxicating.  The ham in me was definitely pleased. The drama lady, that's how I thought of her now, came to the edge of the stage. Sing something else for me, darling. Anything you know without music? Yeah. Acapella. I saw the boy at the piano stand and lean in. I really don't know much except church stuff or, oh, something, honey. You must know something. Whatever comes into your mind, okay. The floor of the stage was slatted, varnished and beautiful. I stared down at the swirling grains of wood, clutched the hems of the gym shorts that I was wearing and sang. The first song, my mom's favorite, that she played over and over again. The first song that came into my head. Will I ever find the boy in my mind, the one who is my ideal? Maybe he's a dream, and yet. What show is that from? The piano player asked when I'd finished. That's not from a show, John said. That's from life. When I first stepped on stage before an audience, a bundle of nerves wrapped in a toga. I could scarcely believe it was my own body. Right on cue, a voice resounded, whose throat is that? And the limbs attached to the trunk, I called Martin, instantly inhabited a character named Hiro, and his bumbling love for the girl next door. I felt myself rise up and lean into the presence, the touch of all those human eyes and ears. It was a lightness of being, a momentary pardon for all the secrets and sins. They were smiling out there. They weren't seeing a bad or damaged kid, so it seemed. They saw, I think, a kid with rouge all over his cheeks, red dots in the corners of his eyes, and a mouth open wide, belting high notes as if his life depended on it. And what I saw written across the field of faces was rapture, I think, a collective delight. How astonishing it was to stumble upon such genuine life while at the business of pretending. And there was something familiar about it all, something church. The huge auditorium, though it didn't have the flying buttresses and jutting steeples of a basilica, had the grandeur of a space built for mortal communion and prayer. Though I was dressed for a silly musical, I couldn't help feeling a bit the altar boy in front of the congregation. A different costume, different stage, but a ritual nonetheless. In the coming years, I would come to think of theater, when it's good, as a place of epiphany. Not the transformation of the body of Christ, but of everybody present. Humans fused by a jolt of laughter, by the thread of a story. And from this very first experience of forum, I felt even in all the irreverence, in all the courtesans chasing Pseudalus, in all the fancy jokes, that there was something sacred. A celebration of what's human and what's here. I stood there and essentially ex-Catholic, uncovering a new faith. And when the curtain call arrived, I bent my head, my body into the praise, and felt no quarrel with living. And the voice in my head said, this is joy. Remember this. This exists. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Thanks for looking at it. It's just a little snapshot of, I just felt, as I say, I felt like reading that. I haven't read it, or looked at it in a long, long time, just because of being here, where I began to study, and fall in love, and more and deeply and more seriously with the theater. And it's strange to be just continuing to do it right across the street. The Strand. Have you guys seen that? Have you all seen The Strand? The new Strand Theater? It's just gorgeous. Have you had a chance to be in there? It's new. Yeah, you live in L.A., you say. Have you seen it? Richard? I remember the old Strand. Yeah. It was... It was a movie theater. Right. I heard about it. It's infamous. People said it was very, like, sticky floor. Yeah. I watched a movie over there. Yeah. Through the disguise of art films. And I was kind of surprised to see that it was quite the place. Yeah. It's amazing. It's an amazing building structure. But they fixed it up so beautifully. And it's got quite a history, I guess, both, as you say, as a movie house, playing classic films, and porn. Yeah. It had a ballet studio on top. Oh, really? It's a market. You could look up there and you saw these longenus. They were practicing their moves. It was quite interesting. It was a beautiful blockade of market street at that point from Civic Center. Oh, my God. Yeah, I guess... Because, you know, up there now on the top couple floors there's a beautiful black box theater. So they have the windows blocked off, I think, because of the theater being up there.  And the students use it a lot. It's a beautiful space. But they've done just a beautiful job with it. I think it's just catching on. They're still having trouble getting audiences and so on. The Strand, yeah. Really? Well, there's, I think, ACT, their subscribers and so on. Their base is generally, I think, a little more conservative, classic crowd. So they were telling me that many of them are reluctant to come down to this part of town. But it's an amazing building. It's such a great space. Yeah, it's so beautiful. Well, I want to jump... I'll read a little bit from the second book. I was trying to think what to... I think I want to read maybe just a little passage about my brother, David. The book is dedicated to my brother, David. And the first book is dedicated to my parents and my husband, Henry. And this one, my little brother... I lost my little brother in... We lost him in 2009. And he was an amazing kid, that young man who struggled a lot with anger, which is, I think, why I chose to write about him through the book. But many parts of him were revealed to me, even after his death, in writings that he had given, but that he had written in journals and so on. But this is a little story about one of the times that I visited him while he was still alive. And so just a taste of David Francis Moran, whose spirit infuses part of the book. And I should say, by the way, that all the rage... Some people have often asked about it. In some ways, it is a kind of response to the tricky part. A lot of people, I talk about this in the play across the street, a lot of people asked, after the tricky part, which has a sort of Zen meditative forgiveness quality about it, why aren't you more angry, or where is the anger? And all the rage began to be sort of this imperative to responding to that question, because it obsessed me. It began to obsess me of thinking particularly that maybe I skipped the anger part and jumped too quickly to forgiveness. So the book is a kind of... It is a prism of these many different angles of what is the function of anger in human life and the dance between us knowing in any given moment that we are all in this together and yet the sense of anger and separation, this fracturing and this coming together, this fracturing and this coming together. And my brother is one window into that. But this is just one little story about one of the last times I visited him and he lived up in the mountains in the Colorado Rockies, a beautiful spot. His name was David, as I say. Dave and I were walking on a road near his cabin in Frazier, Colorado. This was the third, maybe the fourth time I traveled there. We just had dinner and were in good spirits. There were often long silences between us, months, sometimes without a word or a call. But when we'd find each other again after a year or two, sometimes three, there was usually a burst of joy. And my sweet brother, who could be so somber and angry and silent, would open like a book full of secret tales. So yeah, he said, I was on my way to the doctors. I had an appointment down in Denver. I made good time on the trip down to the city, so I decided to stop at REI. You know that big sports store? A bright moon lit the dirt road where we walked. It was early spring. Patches of snow were still scattered about and gleaming at the bases of pine trees. There was a wild racket of what I thought were crickets emanating from the woods. Dave walked slowly, cigarette in hand, occasionally scratching his thick beard between puffs. So, Mart, you remember how big that store is? Well, they've got great sales and they've got great cheap stuff and all this equipment. I wanted to look at maybe buying a new sleeping bag. Anyway, I parked in the lot, got out of the truck, and I started to walk toward the store when suddenly I knew something was wrong, really wrong. I felt a pain, a kind of rough thud in my chest. And a weird feeling in my arm and I got right away what was up. I turned around to get back in the truck to drive myself to the emergency room. I wasn't that far from Denver General. Well, damn it if I hadn't left my keys in the ignition. And of course it was locked.  So I had to crawl through the back of the truck and then through the rear window of the cab.  There were parking places on the street. I probably should have pulled over right there, but I knew if I didn't die, I'd be there for a while and so I'd better get the long-term parking garage. You're kidding me, I said. He said, nope, I can't believe you're presence of mind. He said presence of poverty, man. I hated the thought that if I came out alive my truck would be towed and I'd have a whopping ticket, too much to bear, man. Why didn't you call someone? He took a drag from his marvel, gave me a quick grin, bright and sharp in the lunar light. So he continued, I parked and walked into the emergency room and I said to the nurse, hi, I'm having a heart attack. How did she know to take you seriously? Oh, she knew. She knew that I knew.  I flashed my medic alert bracelet and, you know, I know hospitals. I gave her my basic info and in like seconds they had me on the table in some side room and I remembered the fluorescent lights and commotion. But next thing I knew I woke up with this stint in my heart. Stint, I guess, stint. After a short stint in Denver General. It sounds harrowing, Dave. I don't know. Par for the course, me being diabetic in all these years, you know, he said and shrugged. Do you ever call anyone? Not till after it all happened. Jesus, Dave. I sipped the last of my Sierra Nevada pale ale as we trudged along. Dave always made sure to have some in his fridge when I came to visit. He knew it was my favorite. He was an unfailingly sweet host. We walked north on Crooked Creek Road. The insistent singing, rising from the woods and ponds around us. All was quiet, but for the crunch of our steps. I was trying to imagine life in his shoes. Trying to envisage driving myself to the emergency room while knowing I was having a heart attack. Parking the truck, talking to the nurse. What was it like, little brother, to be negotiating all of this alone? Alone. So he began again.  They saved me. Saved me for now anyway. But what? I asked.  I winced. Like match to gasoline, my dear friend Ken. The doctor had said to me when I asked him about Dave's lifelong diabetes and cigarettes. But what? I asked again. Well, the writing's on the wall, man. He looked to the sky, the milky sky and blew a stream of smoke. We walked on the far side of the wide meadow before us across the train tracks where Union Pacific cars clattered and whistled their way through the valley several times a day. The craggy wall of the continental divide rose up. Granite backbone of the country, Steinbeck called it. It was etched against the star-filled sky. The big dipper and Polaris hung right there before us, clear as bells. At one point Dave swept his cigarette from one end of the valley to the other and said, you see this place, bro? This place is just one big hug from God. The crickets are singing like mad, I said. Oh, that's the hum of love you're hearing, brother. Not crickets, but little frogs. Wood frogs. Peepers. Peepers? Yep, it's spring. They know slightest rise in temp and they rise from the dead, literally. They're basically frozen all winter. They can stop their heartbeat for like weeks at a time. Bizarre, huh? They have some kind of internal antifreeze and hang out there more dead than alive just below the surface. When it comes spring, it takes them like a day to defrost and guess what's on their mind? Well, yep, hooking up. That's what the racket is. They wake up looking for love, he said. Sounding like the sweet philosopher he often was. I guess we all have that in common, he said. You got anyone right now, Dave? We walked and walked. He shrugged. Well, there was a girl from Granby, but nah, she was crazy. Not anyone, not now. Hey, look, he said. What? Just this, dude. He pointed to his foot as he stepped forward. His white sneaker glowed. Look, he said, as he took another step. That's all we can do. His legs moved with a kind of measured pace now, as if willing time to slacken. And this, he said again, as his foot crunched on the gravel and lifted. That's all there is. He took another step and another. All we can do is like, be here, man. He moved forward again. And here, he repeated. And here. And here. His voice trailed off as we walked northward, side by side in the glow of night, encircled by the insistent song of want. Thanks. Thank you, guys. Yeah, just a little taste of Brother Dave. Hey, I wonder if we could pause for a sec. I was thinking there might be one other passage I might read. But I wonder, I want to check in with you guys and see if you have any thoughts or questions. I know some of you have seen the play versions of these. Hi, welcome. Hi, Marty. Hey there. Can you move on and see what's going on with the movie? Yeah, no. You've got to just welcome for stopping by or leaving or whatever you so please. But yeah, Karen. I have a question. You read that passage at the very beginning from Dogen. Yes, yes, from Dogen. To study the ways to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to allow the 10,000 things to flow. Are you a Buddhist or have you studied? Yeah. And how obviously it's influenced your work and how you approach acting. Well, it's definitely, you know, I think all the years of Catholic upbringing has made me leery of ritual and any organizational religion though I still feel a kind of affection in some times, in some ways for the Catholic Church and so on. But I do go regularly to Isendo in New York and I just love to sit silently mostly. And I've found more and more, I'm leery again of the organization but I have found great comfort in the Buddhist outlook of sort of just the letting go of the self. The self of no self. The sense of one large mind. And the practice essentially that just the basic practice of quieting the mind down and attempting anyway to be present with this breath, this room, this gathering, this moment. And that has become much more my practice for me and it's interesting how it feels tied in in some ways to the rituals I experienced as a kid. The prayer and the sense of prayerfulness and meditation that I sort of was imbued with growing up as a Catholic, I think. But Buddhist thought and going to Isendo and the Buddhist community has certainly had a huge influence on me and particularly in the second book, All the Rage, it comes up quite a bit. There are passages that weave in these notions of the mystery and just living, you know, being okay about living in the unknown, you know, that we just, you know, we don't know. And the impermanence of all.  So are you a Buddhist? Yes. Dogus is one of my history, one of my most important teachers but I'm just curious one other thing. Which Zen do you go to? It's called the Zen Center for Contemplative Care on 23rd Street.  Oh, that's fine.  Hey, Jim. And their engagement in the community is hospice work, is their main work that they do. But then they run the center which is dedicated mainly to meditation and so on. Well, one thing I just want to mention, every Wednesday for the past over four years we had a meditation group in this room. Really? Which I started and, you know, the attendance was really high. Often there are 30 people, you know, weekly sitting in here just for a short 12 to 12 30 but the room is very peaceful and so... Is that still happening? Yes. What days of the week? It's every Wednesday at noon. It's just from 12 to 12 30 so people can squeeze it into their busy lives. Yeah. You know, it's a lunch break kind of thing but it's got instructions. Yeah. You know, periods of quiet, periods of just a few words. Yeah. But anyway. It is a beautiful room to do it in and I have found meditation more and more in the last few years to be basically life-saving. The days after this recent election I didn't know what else to do but try to meditate. What did you say? Oh, well one of the monks. The zendo meets regularly on Wednesdays at six and everyone, you know, came in for the weekly meditation on Wednesday, that Wednesday after the Tuesday and you know, I'm going to say, and he took one look at me, one of the monks, Jodo, and he said, well who knew he would have such an amazing opportunity for practice? Yeah. And I thought, well there's one way to look at it. You know, just to have to be, you know, to be forced to practice really. I mean, you know, we're all feeling insane really or just, and it's very, very challenging not to get gripped by worry. It's the mind going. And so to just practice and we're going to a place of, you know, still taking action and showing up and doing what we can but to have a place of essential, essential trust in the ultimate consciousness of our, of our, of the sapien creatures, of sentient creatures that we're still moving somewhere. The long arc of things is, it's very hard, isn't it? It's very, I mean, it's been hard to read the news. It's been hard to, so meditation is, I found even more in the last month it's just been vital an opportunity for practice to say, you know, I'm just going to, you know, because the mind is just going, right?  I don't remember that old saying. It's better to be saved in the same world in the same, same world. Yeah. I mean, there is that feeling that the, at moments that the only act really, the best thing to do is just try to stay calm and be present. Pull the door for someone, just be sane, be sane and around the, because it's the deepest gift, perhaps, that we can give is just our presence, our whole presence. Breathing and being where our feet are and, you know, it's a challenge. I mean, I'm really, I'm falling off all that. I lost my iPhone yesterday and it's like so insane.  I've been thinking, what is this panic? I'm disconnected. Well, what is the panic?  It's like, well, what if I heard these feelings about not texting them back and what if I miss a message and blah, blah, blah, and it's like, here we are. We're present. I have food. We're warm. We're in this beautiful room.  Talk about it and say, I'm insane. I lost my freaking iPhone. So I'm just, you know, it's really something. Well, it does feel like that and then that's an interesting thing to observe. Like, literally I recognize a profoundly addictive feeling. It's unbelievable. I mean, it's interesting to speak about because it's very present moment. I'm in panic about this device and I'm traveling and what if and breathing. We're breathing. But it's really interesting. I spent an hour and a half of the iPhone store at the Apple store and the whole time I kept breathing thinking just observe this. Well, what if we do the verification code and what if we find the, you know, anyway and I thought, wow, this is an union square and devices and Apple and capitalism and I just kept kind of seeing through it to the sunlight and the noises and thinking maybe I just won't get another phone for a while. It would be amazing. It is intriguing because it has migrated into and it's part of our being present also in our work and so on and so on. Yeah, imagine. Yeah, imagine. Looking down. Yeah, yeah, it's true. Can I wait if you're done with it and ask you a little bit about your writing? Sure, absolutely. I have had the good fortune of reading the tricky part and I don't know if this is the answer to this question I think. And it really stayed with me in an incredibly powerful way. I think your writing is beautiful. Thank you. The thing that's interesting to me is it was much more than autobiography your ability to observe and detail things around you. I remember tiny details of you know, of the color of someone's hair or their skin and what was going on in the moment that made me feel that you have this great power as a novelist beyond memoir, beyond you know, autobiography. And you also have a way of having moments that in and of themselves may be random to give them a really nice character art as you have in the readings that you have given us today where there is a beginning from a very specific which is very satisfying I think as a reader. So one part of my guess is have you ever played with the idea or you at all interested in writing something that is you know maybe quite autobiographical but also fictionalizing it because you really transcend again in my mind just based on what the writes in memoirs it's much, much more than that. Thank you for that. That observation I appreciate it and I actually for the first time I am now in the midst of writing fictional play but not a solo play like the plays across the street but a seven character play about an Irish Catholic family I recognize how many quote you know autobiographical things are bubbling up in certain ways are fueling the the world of the play it's an Irish Catholic family and that was and I kept thinking God why is this coming up but what I am finding is that there is a great liberation and moments of joy in just having permission to make up stuff a lot just make it up, make it up, make it up and yet understanding and feeling how it's grounded in experience, the river of experience in the same way memoir is but it's like wanting to arrive at the same kernels of truth but with far more fabrication you know fictional fabric so I am in the midst of that and I'm finding it really hard I find it really tricky to plot to make it up and then believe in it say oh this happened and this happened and then to just hold a belief in the making up of what happened you know it's interesting I know we have a documentary filmmaker here and there is a sense of both artifice not fiction but artifice meeting reality where how you place things together or what you take out in and of itself has elements of fiction you know because of the way you create a story recreate the emotional truth yeah yeah yeah it's your yeah from your spirit your point of view but it's you know it's all this endeavor to want to offer a creation whether from memoir or fiction but I am finding that I'm wondering if I'm through with memoir but I don't know I don't know you know I just again I just think you're so you know you think deeply you're smart but you write beautifully you're very observational and all those things together I'm quite intrigued in the fact that you are writing a play now although I love the tricky part so it's not that I don't love it I guess one other tiny part of it was you you've erased Pavley and you talk about that in so many ways in you know your one-man shows and in the memoir and there is a part of that that's about guilt and you know it's interesting to me and yet you're a very honest person about these experiences and about your own failings and your own vulnerability and I just again I don't know how this is posed as a question but I just wonder how you have moved through things that have happened that you may be inappropriately took responsibility for or you fell guilty and how have you found a way as a writer to be so incredibly honest do you have any little censoring thing on your shoulder that you have to slap off occasionally or is it something that you just in some way found a way to just go to truth whether you look heroic or you don't look heroic again well I think yeah it does I mean I think the critic the slapping you know the is just pervasive is always there and the it's odd I don't not in any ungrandizing way but you know that feeling in your gut that grips you like an imperative that the desire to connect with others with a kernel of some glimpse of the mystery and energy of existence of being here that the the desire to honor that calling as the nuns might say or to in some way has won out I mean but it's like it's a daily moment by moment calling to have the courage is the word or the and to endure the shame to endure the failings to endure to endure even I wish the book were better I wish the play were better or I wish I really knew what the truth of that was but underneath it is this feeling which I am going to dare to call love that the desire to love to be part of a reminder that we are in this together all seven billion of us and all sentient beings and somehow the writing is the form that's taken so the critic is there and the ego is there but I've been grateful I've had spiritual teachers and therapists who really helped me to understand ultimately that it's not me at all that the real job is not I have something to say the real job is please let me be available for what is knocking to come through and then too it may fail and it may but it's just trying not to own it so much you know you show up and you let it come but always there's that weird paradox is it's you you you but it's not at all you it's like a book about party but it's just energy it's just words that have an architecture that create energy and maybe someone reads it and it unlocks something and maybe that's all that I mysteriously could channel into the world in some way and shift some energy for three people or one person or myself and so the ongoing dance with the ego and then and letting go of the ego and not owning any of it including this body which is going to die soon well not who knows I think people have said about the plays I've had a lot of clergy come to the plays and they'd say that's a very priestly work and all that's interesting I mean you know all those years of Jesuit school I don't know you know there was a way and you know you read or you read Saint Augustine or you read you know these guys and you just think they were really you know they were basically mystics and they happen to be Catholic but they're not all and then other many other mystics and other disciplines but it just happened that I was born into that deep pool where you know having being diddled as a kid to put it you know wasn't just I was diddled as a kid and you know that happens sometimes in this culture it was oh my god I have met the devil and I have chosen the devil and I am the devil and that weird collision as a kid is in fact the exercise of my life has become the exercise of my life of understanding no what is devil and what is good and evil it's life it's energy it's please let yourself off the hook get to love get you know like all this bashing of the self I mean god the voices were so difficult on ourselves aren't we Catholicism kind of made sex so special I think you're in life because you're going against all the things that were bad it kind of it made it kind of interesting I kind of value my whole sexuality to my Catholic upbringing I don't think I would have been as sexual for my you know for that Catholicism that's interesting wouldn't have felt as sort of this as much sort of importance around that energy because the Catholicism provided a kind of holiness about it or sacredness or well it was so spurned it was so wrong and you felt such guilt and it was nice undoing that guilt and accepting later part of your life and accepting it as a part of life being okay with it but having to break down all those barriers and all that the evil connotations that I remember when I was a child masturbating as a kid and then promising God that I would never do it again and just forgive me this one time and then four hours later I could but I would be so it's loaded I know it's so loaded I'm trying to think of that for you being raised a Jew and me raised whatever you know I feel like Jewish people I have no idea but my sense is that the corporal the corporal is yeah it's just like I have a body I'm a hunk of meat with spirit you know yeah yeah I relate very much to what Richard said I mean I think it's there's a way in which it's heightened and I would say that it's only the latter part of my life that I've begun to unlock it's the joy and pleasure of saying oh my God I'm in a body and it's fabulous it's not something to be you know the body is less than it's that odd split I don't know where it goes back to they call it the Manichean split some big theological split years ago of the body and the spirit and that the spirit is elevated and the body is somehow the thing against which we fight the savage, a fear of death some people have said a fear of the feminine I mean that in the earliest days the feminine was God because how else are you like women we come from women and why are we so afraid of the feminine we're working out a lot of stuff we sapiens you know which comes first well it's been a combo the tricky part I was far along with the book and then the play the visual element emerged and of course the play is 28 pages and the book is 300 pages so they're the same territory but this is definitely structured to create an event like a communal event these are much more you think about somebody sitting in a chair having an intimate yes the telling omission as they say a lot in a play but all the rage definitely more the play preceded the book tricky part the book more preceded the play though the plays both opened off-broadway prior to the books coming out they both took me longer the books to write but it's been interesting to write in both forms in the spoken and then the literary form you know but yeah I definitely learn a lot from speaking them out loud and talking to them but yeah how are we doing on time I think we might wind down a bit were there any other pressing questions hi Jim well it sort of follows what we were talking about because in both the theatrical presentation you come it's very you engage with the audience immediately in the quotidian and then segue into the play and after I left last night I thought what's the difference between storytelling and acting in this so in the writing of the books you're telling your accounting episodes and then as you perform it what is your relationship to the material well you're talking about as a performer as an actor so to speak that it there's definitely a very different relationship to the material in the book because there is much more devotion in both all works there's a devotion to sentences and word I love language and I want but the language in both plays is crafted to be much more I have a sense of it's just being made up on the spot it's off the cuff and that is a form of storytelling I'd say that has to do with somebody showing up and saying hey we're like around the campfire and I'm just spinning this tail and I want to tell you this thing that I saw over the mountain or something let me tell you about this so my relationship to that the material is very much about the work or the job I would say of being as present as I can be as a human being in the room with the other people and receiving as I am now I hope and we are with each other receiving the souls in the room in the moment this moment lived together through the questions of off the cuff language it's a kind of storytelling this is much more there's you know the storytellers there and my voice is in the books certainly but there my relationship is it does feel very different in that they you know it just really is meant to be tossed away in red off there some without the presence of the actor there in bodying the events yeah so yes yeah tricky part quite a bit all over the world all the range not yet yet I mean it may I get reports a lot it's kind of fun and sweet that both from both plays particularly many many you know there's all these monologue kids have to try out for things in high schools and colleges and they're both I've been told by many teachers are extremely popular with young people young men particularly to do sections of them for auditions and for contests and stuff but the tricky part I get a statement from drama display services like every six months or so and you know and it's I said oh they did it in Australia and oh Iowa four nights in Iowa that's interesting I have I went to South Africa and there was a young actor there he was wonderful and he did the play it's it's tricky it's hard to see the people do it well I'll say you know this is interesting I didn't realize why it was so hard until I really I was talking to my husband Henry about it a little bit but I have this amazing director Seth bearish who's helped me with his plays tremendously and he is so good about constantly reminding me that the the story itself is enough and that the and so just we're just there and that the presence the lightness of touch is so important because otherwise it's like bum bum bum bum so the problem I found with all due respect because I happen to see another fella who did it out west and it's this that from the moment it starts it's so serious and yes I was abused and you know and I get it I mean it's was a hard it is a hard story but the the only thing that the thing that makes the plays live is that at their core when I walk on stage and Seth and I talk about this all the time what I'm walking on stage like when you tell a joke at the dinner table you're aiming for that wonderful punchline and the wonderful punchline of the tricky part is do you know I was sitting in the car and I have this amazing realization of grace grace and that's where it's headed it's not like come live relive this terrible tale with me it's oh my god this is so paradoxical and confusing but let me share this let me try to share this mystery this grace all the rage the same thing you know like oh my god I have this dream but before I tell you let me tell you all these pieces but I got to get to the dream oh but you know this happened first and this happened first but then the dream look at this so it's like one long journey to a punchline so that Seth's image all the time is point point but he's and then he has a language for it when I start to freight when I start this is important this is important and what happens after 80 minutes we're all completely exhausted because I've made everything important I've made everything heavy and it's really interesting over the course of performing them through the years that it's taken me a long time to understand what he means and I feel like at the right age of 56 I'm I finally you know sort of get it I feel my hope the joy of storytelling and that there's this gem you want to offer and it isn't bum bum bum bum it's wow mystery and so then this happened you know so did I answer your question yeah so and then some okay well I think you guys that we can anything else yes Richard I I haven't read the books but I was at both performances yesterday and you read that the thing that you know triggers a bit of me is when you were describing your stepmom smoking and your brother smoking and it reminded me of authorities like the white Hollywood films and the romanticizing and if your brother and like you know my sister and my father died of lung cancer so thank god I just I did for a wee bit of time I did and I I went through a period where I I smoked marijuana you know like in college life you know in once in a while it'll still passes by being from Colorado and being in California but I'm not a smoker no generally I worry too much about my singing my my voice which is mostly how I make my living as a musical theater guy oh that's interesting yeah I hadn't thought about that yeah but I did have a lot of smokers in my life there's a scene with my father but you know we're driving in a rent a car and I'm visiting him in Las Vegas and he lights up and I'm like dad it's a rent a car you can he says you know I mean it's whether they have cameras you know come on I was like dad please it gives me a headache oh you'll be fine you know so it shows up a lot I didn't even realize that you know but in this book you'll see it comes up a lot my father was yeah there's so many things that are I actually yeah it's fun well I understand what you mean but it's interesting what Richard's saying I'm just gonna this one thing that um that little just this little bit we're riding in the car and I dad's like Christ this traffic and the um when he says um dad please the rent a car company has asked it gives me a headache actually can you just wait till we get there I can't be smoking right before my oil change he said referring to his thrice weekly trip to the clinic his date with dialysis he gave me a wink and the I glint of him sailed across the car amazing how it still showed up this undying Irish charisma flashing through a body gone so heavy with defeat they'll give me hell if they see it or smell it dad they're gonna smell it just a few few puffs tiger I'll blow it out the window he cracked it open I cranked the AC smoke filled the car I didn't actually hate it the scent had been an element of his presence since I was a kid a kind of home base standing outside after church or on the back patio after mowing the lawn the whiff of fresh grass and Philip Morris defined a Saturday afternoon


If you would like slick, make chicho. Thank you for your kind words on discord Health mental channel last night. Oh, my pleasure Slick Mac making the decision to drop out and return in a year after working to steady math in a more Relaxed practical University love lots of love man. I can't wait to see this one awesome slick Make sure you fulfill on your promises if you think That is really what you want to do Make sure you don't get caught up in the lazy Sort of mindset because we are we have we do as human beings. We do have a sort of a lazy tendency Right like for you just to let you know for me and just to fill people in It's okay, I'm assuming it's okay Slick Mac if I fill people in really briefly is that cool because you posted on our discord not open So I'm assuming it's all good But I'll wait until you tell me so before I proceed, okay Just finishing off our little intro we do upload audios with audios of these live streams if We don't have any visuals which we do today When we don't have any visuals, we do upload the audios to soundcloud.com forward slash chicho CHYCHO As podcasts and those podcasts should be available on your favorite podcasting platform including Spotify and iTunes Slick Mac CHYCHO of course share and share share and share like awesome slick Mac Just to fill people in slick Mac yesterday sort of yesterday day before Was on our discord under mental health. I guess it was. I'm not sure if it was under mental health or education or mathematics sort of asked a question, you know His his heart was not in Being in college right now, right? He was struggling with it for Obviously reasons, right? There's so much going on in the world, right? And just centralized education is is not rolling out nicely into Sort of this new paradigm shift that's being rolled out, right? So he mentioned that he's having a hard time trying to come to grasp with wanting to drop out and You know wanted to Convey how he feels to family and friends for them to understand why he's feeling this way that he needs to take a break, right? And I just sort of posted a little thing saying That it's okay. It's okay to step out, right? Take a break for a little while But if you do want to you know, it is something that you want to be into make sure you go back into it, right? So just to expand on that just to let you know where I was when I went to post-secondary education, right? I graduated high school and I got accepted into university right off the bat and I've shared this before But I'll share it again because the topic is there. Uh, I went to a university right away, right? and when I wanted university wasn't Like the university I went to was very high school like I was really tired of high school. I was I was done with the whole bubble mentality and the childish I was sort of done with it, right? But this university was very high school-ish, right? And I didn't Find it to be motivating me at all. Uh, slick. Thank you for the tier once up. I appreciate your support, brother So I didn't find there was any motivation for me to continue my studies at university When I went there, right? Yonar, thank you for the follow Um, except for two courses geology and geophysics I was into, right? Physics, mathematics, chemistry, english I just couldn't Get the motivation to do anything in these things, right? And I was getting stressed out like I really didn't like it It was stressing me out, right? And this was a younger chicho, right? So I was a little bit more fiery All right So I was getting a little stressed out and just Not happy about it, right? There's times where I would drive all the way to university days And it's like a 45 minute drive and I really enjoyed the drive.  I decided to drop out of university, but I didn't just drop out and you know Pick my nose I dropped out and this wasn't sciences.  University in college is different here. You go college is you know It is sort of Classified as a lower level than university, but to me it's not Depends on what you do with your education, right? How you're studying? But anyway, the category is usually you go from college to university I went from university to college and people were freaking out And I went instead of going staying in sciences because that's something I was in all the time I went to I enrolled in a business program, right? And after two months, I realized I didn't want to be in the business program This was silly, right? So After being four months at the college, I just dropped out And people freaked out again. I couldn't explain to people why I was dropping out, right?  You got and uh, especially family family was like, oh, what's this guy doing? and you know The poop hit the fan when I wouldn't got a job as a graveyard shift in a gas station across a reservation native Indigenous native. I don't know what the correct terms is anyway We call the we call the reservation at the time, right across from a reservation When there was a lot of conflict, right? There was so I witnessed For six months, I was there, I think And graveyard shift from 11 p.m. till 7 a.m. Lots of interesting things happened So someone, you know, basically fresh out of high school It was a pretty cool place to be and I read books. I read lura rings, right? I wanted to read all three books I was a really slow reader. So I was Building on myself, right? People didn't couldn't understand this. I told people. Oh, I'm there It's really interesting. You know seeing what's going on, right crazy cool, right? I saw accidents. I saw this I saw that it was crazy, right and I was reading books But you couldn't explain that to people that look I need to take time off to read three lura rings books. I'm a slow reader Coming out of high school. They didn't really teach me how to read properly. So I have to teach myself. So I'm learning, right Nobody understood After that I took some time off went on a little vacation I had saved some money went on a little vacation and then I enrolled back in I got my geophysics Degree with a minor in mathematics That was my path Okay, just to expand on that it was I wasn't going to type all that out slick mick That's where I came from and I don't think that's the path that everyone should take But that is a path that is there, right? Which is a path that a lot of people do not talk about Okay Bertie here recently read a great saying goes something like Quote everyone is in a rush to climb to the top of the ladder Not many stop and check is the right ladder for them Imagine spending your life to get to the top of the ladder to realize it's the wrong one and quote 100% agree Bertie here, right? When you come out of university high school or university or college Everybody needs needs to take about two years off to Think about who they are realize How you want to interact with the world? You've been in a prison system to a degree indoctrination Regiment you actually acquire your freedom When you come out of high school for the first time ever Okay, some people go directly into college university. Some people go on to apprentice trips Some people go on to work. Some people go travel whatever it is, but it is your choice now to do that, right? Think wisely and realize that the first choice might not always be the right choice


Okay, yes there we go Cool, I guess we will get started. I'm assuming people can hear me. I'll speak up usually not a problem Cool, thanks everybody for joining you get this Bigger Yeah, so this is Drupal state and the need for a JavaScript SDK. I hope you're in the right place if you're not I won't be insulted But yeah excited to be here in in Prague It's been wonderful so far and it's really great being back in person So, yeah, I am Brian Perry. I am a staff engineer at Pantheon I am an initiative coordinator for Drupal's decouple of menus initiative, which we are so close to Wrapping up here at Drupal con which is great. We'll talk a little bit more about that I live in the Chicago suburbs in the United States. I Enjoy Drupal JavaScript and all things Nintendo. I Started playing Splatoon 3 which is a lot of fun and then I did buy I will admit that I bought an Xbox recently And I've been playing outer wilds on that which is a really fun. It's like a time loop game almost done with that too and also, yeah, semi recently bought a replica Ms. Pac-Man machine, which I have in my office for, you know, very professional work times and Yeah, I'm on the internet in a variety of places and would love to connect an internet with you And as I mentioned I work at Pantheon So the things I would love to thank Pantheon for is that one, you know sponsoring for me to come out here Also, some of the things that we'll be talking about today are things that Pantheon has Sponsored open-source work for which is wonderful And also, yeah, check out our booth. We have our front-end sites Our node hosting in early access a lot of what I focus on at Pantheon is working on starter kits and utilities So a lot of great open-source work happening there and yeah, I would love to know what you think but today we are going to be talking about a Library called Drupal State, which is a simple data store for managing application state sourced from Drupal We'll talk about why it was originally created why you might want to use it and why I think It or something like it is very important for the future of Drupal But also really, you know while we'll be using that as a framework We're also going to go on a winding journey through Drupal's supporting JavaScript ecosystem as well So buckle up So I talked about the I mentioned the decoupled menus initiative and at Drupalcon US a while back at this point We put together a hackathon Where a number of people got together to try to build JavaScript components that consume data from the new menus endpoint That's being developed in Drupal. So this is a web component I focused on building a web component because I wanted to learn more about web components We also had people who create things and react and view But yeah, you can see this Menu component has menu data from Drupal. We can expand and collapse things in the tree It's intentionally kind of stripped down so that the styles can be overridden If we look at the actual HTML file here, it's it's pretty simple. We have a custom element Gdwc-menu That stands for generic Drupal web components. I'm not maybe not the best at naming things But you know, you'll see here that there's some attributes we can pass in There's the branding so we can you know change the heading in the The menu the base URL is the root of the Drupal instance that we're sourcing data from The menu ID here if we change what the menu ID is we change it to the account menu Now if we expand it source new data from Drupal, we see the login link because we're not authenticated Change that back to main And then there also is a theme properties here. So we have horizontal we can instead do Unstyled Which literally just shows that there's no styling at all. It's just an unordered list and also if we leave it off The default styling just has you know, it lightly styled expand and collapse So this ended up being you know a pretty interesting proof of concept in how Something like a web component could make it simpler to create a component that plays nicely and generically with Drupal Getting into the details of it a little bit if you're not familiar with web components As in like the the browser apis They have a number of life cycle methods. This is the connected callback method, which essentially Happens when the component mounts So this is how we're getting the data from Drupal. So if the base URL and menu ID are defined we run this fetch data method and Here's the detail for that, you know, not super complicated We're taking the base URL and menu ID and using that to construct the endpoint that we're going to talk to and then we just use JavaScript fetch some light error handling and then we take the response and using a Supporting package that was also created as part of the initiative. We parse the menu data So it can be you know a little bit easier to work with represented in a hierarchy all that good stuff So, yeah, I do think this was kind of an interesting approach to You know show, you know how a component like this could be built that really took the work of Communicating with JSON API and allowed you to just kind of plug plug-and-play So after that we started thinking about, you know, how could we build other components in this library? But pretty quickly it was apparent that that approach Wouldn't really scale so if you imagine like a card, you know, which is card component something pretty common That might be a next thing to build If you have one card on the page, that's one API call, you know If we're using that approach where it's embedded inside of the component You already have your menu which might be another API call if you got 10 cards on the screen That's 10 API calls. You got a hundred cards or some sort of automatic scroll. You might be running into some problems So at that point You know, it seemed like there were some things that this this component library would need to be able to You know scale past just you know the menu component But also cases where you have you know an application or a page Where there's data that needs to be shared across a variety of components in a consistent way so What what did I think we needed? easy methods to source data from Drupal's JSON API so that They can be used across the the various components and then some sort of solution to be able to manage the Application state that we get back from Drupal that a variety of components can take advantage of And that seemed like not a crazy ask and something that you know as a as a JavaScript developer I could just go and PM install something that solves my problem and You know at the time it really didn't appear to be quite that easy so I looked at other projects in the community and For example Drugs, which is a view base project. They have their own custom JSON API client which uses Axios And it uses the view extor which makes sense because it's a view project and then next for Drupal This was a while back. So it was prior to the 1.3 release And at that point next for Drupal had a bunch of individual helper functions and Then more recently they have also introduced their own client Which definitely has some similarities to the this project that we'll be talking about today There's a lot of overlap in what the two clients do There were other SDK libraries like Drupal SDK Drupal JS SDK Who knows which ones which if any of them are official Drupal things? and then on Just custom builds custom decoupled builds, you know I've been familiar with people just rolling their own in general I don't know if that's been your experience, but you know people write their own fetch things They they you know write their own methods to handle state a lot of solving this problem over and over and over So yeah, what what would we need to stop solving this problem repeatedly? So Something framework agnostic, you know if we're trying to think of something that could apply Broadly to people who are using Drupal in a decoupled architecture Also the ability to use just the utilities your project needs I I do think that there can be some useful defaults here, which we'll talk about But there are going to be situations where maybe somebody just wants to use the fetch utilities or they want to use their JavaScript frameworks state management Utilities, maybe they want to use Redux or something So if the individual pieces are exposed people can just use what they want and use it with their state management for example But also at the same time I do think having some sort of out-of-the-box solution for handling application state Could be really useful. So, you know people don't necessarily have to think about that or customize that Unless they want you and then also, you know as I started thinking about this. I also started thinking about JSON API in general and Like could Interacting with JSON API be friendlier for JavaScript developers like what is the experience of a JavaScript developer who may not be familiar with Drupal? Who finds their way into getting data from JSON API? So, yeah specifically thinking about this from the perspective of people who maybe either aren't familiar with Drupal or aren't Specifically familiar with the JSON API spec or Drupal's implementation of it So, yeah the the kind of best way I think to to explore that a little bit is just through some quick examples so the For JSON API, I assume many of you have probably interacted with JSON API, but I'm not gonna assume that everybody has So you may know what the endpoint so this example is getting recipe data from the you know, umami demo profile As a developer you may know what the recipes endpoint is but you might not if you're not familiar with JSON API or Drupal's implementation of it or Intimately familiar with the site that you're going to be getting the data from You may not know that endpoint so the root of JSON API Gives you an index of all the available endpoints So you may have to first fetch that To be able to determine what the recipes endpoint is which we're doing that here and then at that point you can fetch that from that endpoint and then we get all the recipes which are under the the data object and So if we wanted to for example access the instructions for a single recipe the response that you get back from JSON API It also definitely does have some Drupal specific things inside of it, so Many of the fields are under attributes rather than just kind of at the top level so if we wanted to get the instructions it would for the first data Entry in the array it would be attributes dot field underscore recipe underscore instruction dot value and then think of a situation where Later you needed to get so that the root recipes endpoint will get you all of the recipes If you in the future you needed a specific recipe you could fetch with a UUID here to get just that recipe, but that's really a redundant API call At this point because we already got our recipes So if you somehow store the first response so in this case, you know, we're just storing it as a variable You can get that existing data In this case, you would have to filter through The recipes that you have by ID and find the recipe that matches based on the ID to be able to get that particular recipe Again, not you know three lines of JavaScript, but there's still three lines of JavaScript that need to be written and then going into some other examples This is if you want to deal with a Referenced entity in Drupal so something simple here just a taxonomy term. I really do not want to install Firefox So The we want basically just want to print out the recipe category for this recipe on the screen, which is main courses So we know the endpoint that will give us this particular resource JSON API and Drupal's implementation of it. There are a number of query string parameters you can pass in to do things like include related data filter sort, etc But you know people have to be familiar with this structure, but we can say include Field recipe category to get the recipe category We fetch that we'll get our response back But how the response comes back Again for somebody who's not familiar with the JSON API spec. This might take a little parsing to figure out But under relationships, let's see we have our recipe category So under relationships, we just have the ID of the recipe category But then by saying to include the recipe category under included we have all of the included recipe categories for this so if we wanted to to Get this particular recipe category. We would have to filter all of the included values Because you know in this case, there's just one recipe category But it could be multiple and that set of included data is shared across the whole response So if we were getting all of the recipes that would be all of the categories For all of the recipes so we have to look it up based on ID So again, we have to filter based on the ID to get the correct category and then to actually Get the name it's attributes dot name name is under attributes in the category. So All that to say all the data is there, but it's a pretty long walk to print main courses on the screen And then also, you know another common issue is Overfetching with Json API so by default Json API gives you all the stuff which is definitely useful But oftentimes like think of a teaser You know or you know a grid of items you might only need a few fields You might only need like three fields rather than everything so being specific about what you get back in the response We'll have a pretty substantial impact on your payload So if we want to do that with Json API we can there's again things that we can add to the query string So if we include field recipe category We're gonna get all of the fields on the recipe and all of the fields on the category, which we don't need So again thinking about like a teaser, you know, maybe we need four fields on the recipe So you can add Fields and then the entity type here node recipe and then list out the fields that you want So if we do that for node recipe, we can say title difficulty instruction and category That still gives us more stuff than we want because We'll get just those fields, but the recipe category the referenced entity will have all of the fields So we have to refine that further and say fields taxonomy term recipe category. We just want the name So again, all of the tools are here But you know it takes a little work to structure a request that is going to give us just the stuff that we want There is a great package Drupal Json API programs that simplifies this quite a bit Add some utilities to construct these Json API requests Highly recommended, but you know again, it's something that you have to know exists So this is just seeing that example on its feet a little bit So we have our URL that we constructed we can fetch it But still even you know, we've gone through all that work to be really specific about what we're getting back We still have the structure of the Json API response some things that are under attributes our Relationships and the included data that we have to navigate so It still may be not as clean as as we would expect How's everybody doing everybody doing good doing good excellent head nodding great Cool, I know where you know lunch is next so everybody's level Cool so the talking about over fetching definitely leads to graph QL and Graph QL within the Drupal community So graph QL it's a different query language, and it's really good at solving this problem of of over fetching Because in your request you essentially describe the shape of the response that you want You specify all the fields exactly how they would be structured and the API responds matching that shape that you specify so I Am not heavily involved in Drupal's graph QL ecosystem So this is a my somewhat uninformed overview, but I would say graph QL and Drupal's relationship is it's complicated so One thing is that the graph QL module is a contrived module. It's not in Drupal core JSON API is in Drupal core, and again I'm trying to you know think of this problem from the perspective of people who might be new to some of these things And then the graph QL Module itself went through a pretty substantial change from version 3 to version 4 Version 3 works pretty similar to JSON API where you enable it There's not a lot of config and it essentially exposes a schema for all of your Drupal data So you can just start querying things Version 4 on the other hand does does not do that. It doesn't automatically generate a schema You have to write custom code to define your schema. So pretty big architectural difference My understanding is that the you know the reasoning behind that which you know is valid Is the the version 3 approach would essentially leak a lot of Drupal isms into the API So it probably isn't representing the ideal API structure for people and The version 4 approach really allows people to tailor the API to their specific needs But that comes with a really big cost in that you have to write custom code to do it And I definitely see that as as a barrier Experimented with some things around this in the Drupal State Library. This is kind of jumping head a little bit but it fits here we Did add functionality to use like lightweight graph qo graph ql queries against JSON API There actually were some existing libraries that handled that And it was you know nice really nice developer experience But we found it was a little difficult to maintain that path along with traditional JSON API Communication and then also some of the libraries that we were depending on really weren't maintained anymore So we we've deprecated that feature recently But also within the the community Jesus at octahedroid a friend of Pantheon The octahedroid team has been working on the graph ql compose module Which actually is a supporting module that will allow you to automatically generate a schema for graph ql So that kind of allows us to have the best of both worlds. You want to build your own perfect custom schema You can do that. You want to just generate the best representation of your Drupal data. You can do that as well And for the future of you know, this library, you know with with that problem being solved Like I could see us adding some sort of like actual official graph ql support in the future So back to to Drupal State and how it solves some of these problems that we talked about or at least tries to It is it's framework agnostic. It's vanilla JavaScript So you can use it with whatever JavaScript framework you want or no framework at all It's universal so it can run on the server and the client It the first request that you make to get an object from Drupal It will make an API call If it doesn't have that data already and then it will serve future requests from local state So it caches the response. So if you wanted to get an individual recipe, for example, it won't make an API call for it by default also the response is deserialized and flattened and a little bit simpler and The all of the underlying functions and utilities are exported and made available from the library So if you wanted to just use the pieces here, you could So we'll look at some quick examples just to kind of get a feel for the difference If we were to use this library, so we import Drupal State and then create an instance of the store And we provide the the API base There's you can also provide an optional API prefix if your root is not JSON API and you've customized it and then Getting all of the recipes in this case is as simple as as this one line so a wait store and then we call get object and Pass in the object name node recipe in this case and then this is what the Data that we get back looks like you can see here. It's deserialized and a lot Substantially more flattened Including things that are referenced entities. They're still up at the top level, which we'll look at in a second and then if we Next needed to get in or later needed to get an individual recipe and new the ID We can use get object again and provide the ID and in that case It's going to see that it already has data for that recipe and return that from the local store rather than making a request to JSON API so can cut down on API requests pretty substantially if you use that caching and And then this is looking at the the reference entity taxonomy term example that we looked at The Drupal JSON API params package is also a dependency of Drupal state So we're going to use that here. We create our store We create an instance of Drupal JSON API params and then use its add include Helper to add the recipe category And then when we make our get object request for this particular recipe we just pass in that Params object you can use Drupal JSON API params if you'd rather just construct the query string yourself You can do that too and just pass that in either approach works and then with our response back if we wanted to get the recipe category it is Recipe category is an array. It can have multiple results, but it's just the you know in this case. There's just one so field recipe category Dot name Yeah, here is the field recipe category Yeah, kind of at the top level and you just have the flattened data under the recipe category So a little bit easier to get at the data using these deserialized responses and then We've also been working to support some popular Modules in the JSON API ecosystem. So this is an example of support for the the decoupled router module which lets you look up a an entity in Drupal by resolving the path alias, so In this case, you can use get object by path Provide the object name and the path and the response that you get back is the recipe that Resolves to that path So handles a handful of things behind the scenes to do that, but gives a pretty simple API to make that call And then You know as I mentioned we also expose all of these utilities So if for example, you wanted You know this translate path utility that we use to talk to decoupled router You could instead just import translate path and use that to your your heart's content So that that method takes the the The API endpoint for decoupled router and then the path that you want to resolve So and here the response that we get back is just exactly what the decoupled router endpoint returns And this is an example this is the code the TypeScript code for that Method it's not super complicated But you know, it's not something that necessarily needs to be written over and over You know if we need to to communicate with the decoupled router endpoint so that you know again a quite a long tangent we started by looking at that menu component in the Generic Drupal web components project and then Realize that there was a problem that we needed to solve to be able to make it more realistic to be able to have a bunch of components that share Drupal's application state So that actually allows us to now go back to the generic Drupal web components And now that we have some of these problems solved in a generic and kind of reusable way We can focus on the things that make this design system for example More unique and you know, hopefully it also allows you within your projects to do similar things. So Here this is using the card component in in the library Again working with the same set of recipe data So if we go into the markup here We created a couple of additional web components that use Drupal state and the utilities that we've been talking about So there is the store web component and the provider web component So the store really is just an interface to the Drupal state store that we saw some examples of Pass in similar parameters there including our API base and then any of the provider components within it I basically allow you to interface with that store And make requests so we this is really similar to like the get object calls that we saw So here we're saying that we want to get a recipe with a particular ID Pass in some query string parameters for JSON API and then now You can use a HTML template inside of that provider And it just has access to the scope of the provider that it's in so it has the data that it gets back from the store And that template is an HTML template so it can be any markup So as you'll see here towards the bottom, we just have you know regular headings and a paragraph But we can also use a card component from the library It could also be any web component any custom element So for example, there's the outline project It's another Drupal friendly design system You could use outline components here within your template and just pass in Drupal's data or you know, whatever you would like so Couple other examples of what's possible with this So, you know, we have kind of a twig style double curly brace to reference the variables here So right now we just have a placeholder, but I can just do title To get the title from this particular recipe deep Mediterranean quiche and You know in this case we we probably don't need this anymore But yeah, so we have one result if there's one result it renders out that template if we remove the ID so we get Multiple recipes. It just iterates over the template multiple times.  We could have a style on it here in the template if we wanted to And if we do that we can add, you know, three lines of CSS here to start a two-column grid We have our cards in a grid and then just kind of a fun little additional trick here the generic Drupal web components library uses a package called open props which adds A really great set of design tokens that are just CSS custom properties So we can use those here as well to add, you know, some more styling tweaks to these cards So change the color of the headings add a drop shadow rounded corners all that stuff so You know again really long walk to get get over here, but I think that these two having just a Broadway that we can get data from Drupal that can be shared across all of these components in a consistent way Really opens up some some interesting possibilities Yeah, so Given all that, you know a question is, you know, where where could we go from here and and I performed an extremely unscientific survey to kind of get a feel for how Drupal stands in the wider JavaScript ecosystem which was searching stuff on npm and You know, this is a little outdated the screenshot at this point, but if you search for Drupal on npm the results are Maybe not exactly what you expect So, you know first result here is an implementation of parts of Drupal's the user slash access control API There if we do scroll down a little bit there is Drupal SDK Is that Drupal's official SDK? There are other Drupal SDKs there So yeah, it might for somebody who just searches Drupal, which I could easily see a JavaScript developer who says it was told They have to work with Drupal doing this It's a potentially a confusing set of results Maybe you know that you can look at organizations in npm. You might want to see what Drupal as an organization has This is currently what we have under the official Drupal namespace on npm Two packages that are used by core The exciting news is that hopefully maybe even this week There are two more packages that will be publishing under the Drupal namespace coming out of the decoupled menus initiative So doubling the number of packages here But yeah, I mean looking at this today, you know, it might not even be Clear like how Drupal would use those things search for WordPress This is more in line with what I would have anticipated searching for Drupal First thing is a client for working with WordPress and then I see a bunch of things under The WordPress namespace. I think part of what drives that is the the block editor in WordPress in that it's react And this is probably a lot of things that WordPress core and the block editor use but still this Makes more sense and seems a little more JavaScript friendly to me And then take something like Contentful, which you know, it's not the perfect one-to-one comparison because it's an exclusively headless CMS But people who might be working with Drupal might be familiar with Contentful or worked with it in the past and you know Obviously, there is a really clear client for Contentful here a bunch of things under the Contentful namespace You know, it has to be like this because this is the primary way to interface with Contentful But again compared to the results that Drupal gets it's a it's a different story So how could we improve this? So I as I've probably tipped my hat to a little bit already I think it would be good if Drupal had a larger presence under the Drupal namespace on npm. I Do believe whether it's this or something like it in the future That Drupal should have some sort of official client or SDK And then also, you know a little bit of an offshoot and something that kind of came out of the decoupled menus initiative but We don't really have any documentation on Drupal.org about decoupled Drupal and this approach to building sites And I think that would be really useful both for the community But also to you know make it clear that this is something that you know is important to Drupal and the community So some things that's possible next steps some things that are in progress So I would love to see us promote more things into the Drupal namespace on npm. There are two packages from Coming out of the couple menus initiative We've been talking with the JavaScript maintainers about getting that done So that will actually start to expand, you know I have wondered something like that Drupal JSON API params package that is used by a lot of decoupled Projects like something that has found success within the community Maybe there's a case to move things like that over to the Drupal namespace in the future I also did create a an issue in the ideas queue a little while back about a proposal to You know formally try to start a process to build SDK or client like utilities in Drupal If that idea is interesting to you, I would encourage you to check in on that issue leave comments There hasn't been a ton of traction around it I don't know if it's because I haven't been able to really drive it or if that shows that people aren't interested I don't know But yeah, check that out and then within the decoupled menus initiative We definitely tried to keep the scope down to just decoupled menus But there was a lot of early thought around like what could Drupal wide decoupled Drupal documentation be Early outlines and things so this is a meta issue to try to move that forward I'd love to see something that happens in the future is for people to contribute to actual full decoupled Drupal Documentation and there is a home in the Drupal developer guide for it. So we've taken some initial steps there and This is the part where I somewhat irresponsibly Share thoughts on the trees note yesterday and some things that kind of came up in this this neighborhood very recently But for those who saw the trees no or didn't Towards the end trees talked about things that we can do after Drupal 10 is released and kind of Encouraging to try to push forward in the area of innovation again and some things that came up under that what were to keep investing in headless and the idea of there possibly being some sort of official Drupal the JavaScript front-end reference implementation Which are both things that that I unsurprisingly supports And also yeah the call to action here that these are things we could start in on now and a lot of this stuff Already exists. So I think a lot of the groundwork For you know a client or common SDK utilities, obviously, you know projects like this or the other Clients that have been out there. There's really a lot that exists today Where we could try to bring some of this stuff into Drupal itself somehow an official capacity and This is an old slide from a past trees note where he introduced the idea of the decoupled menus initiative You know hurts a little bit because you know, it took us a long a long time to get to that flag up at the top way More than it should have But you know, we certainly learned some interesting things along the way and and I feel like if you squint your eyes a little bit you squint You know you have a similar mountain for you know thinking to the end goal of having a reference implementation where Starting to build out these utilities Will be useful to the community but could be kind of underlying support for this Maybe an official client is created and then perhaps that reference implementation could actually use these things That were built, but you know, it's only if you squint So Definitely related contribution efforts going on this week. I'll I'll be kicking around the contrib room this afternoon I'll be there most of the day tomorrow Would love to talk about the stuff more. There's issues in the Drupal state issue queue if you're interested There's that ideas issue for the idea of an official Drupal client. We'd love to get people's feedback on that For the couples menus initiative We are hopefully going to get the actual core menu endpoint merged this week. We're so close fingers crossed And there's also some things that we're going to do tomorrow around documentation so if anybody would be interested in trying to wrap up or provide feedback on the decoupled menus documentation or look at what we could do in The future for the couple documentation would love to talk about that and there's also the generic Drupal web components project in general If you're looking to experiment with web components, that would be a great place to do it You know open to any and all contributions and there is almost a limited amount of things that we could In fact build an offer in that Yeah, and I think that is it have a little bit of time for questions And also thanks Were there any any app magic app questions? People here if they have questions can also hop up to the mic over there Yeah, so the the question was I mentioned parallels between next for Drupal and Drupal state Can I you know go into the the differences? So? first off next for Drupal is a kind of larger scale project and and Drupal state is just a piece of Interfacing with json api so next for Drupal is a it also has a starter kit for next js example page templates other utilities but next for Drupal also does have to communicate with json api and somewhat recently as the 1.3 release a few months ago. They also added their own client They had a helper utilities that did a lot of the same things But now they they have a client as well and looking at the two clients They're accomplishing pretty similar things, you know, there's only so much you can do with json api So it makes a lot of sense that they would be doing similar things So from the perspective of this project, I would love to see a Situation where we might be able to start abstracting some of the underlying utilities underlying things that those two clients do That would actually be under the the Drupal namespace and that these clients could start instead consuming those I think that would be a great step in the direction of trying to not have these competing clients And from my perspective, you know, I like I just want there to be a good solution here I don't necessarily care if it's mine or somebody else's The other thing to mention about next for Drupal It is obviously really focused on both next and Drupal, you know, the Drupal part makes sense We're not gonna get out of that, but there are some I guess the better way to say it is both next and react So there are some next specific concepts baked in a little bit some react specific things like hooks So something like Drupal State is intended to be framework agnostic So you can use it with react or view or whatever JavaScript framework is cool in two years And I think that is important for Whatever we offer in this space. I don't think it would be a lot of work to unwind those You know react specific assumptions from next for Drupal's client But I don't know if they'd be interested in doing that Yes in the back Yeah, so I mean the short answer is that that right now this this library does not have you know an answer for that We can get back all of the data and store it locally so that you could build search utilities on top of it You know, I definitely do see a world where we could have supporting utilities try to make search easier But they're really there really isn't anything today, but I think really though the way Well, one of the ways to solve that is really just being able to have the consistent way to manage application states and Trying to you know limit the calls to search where you can that's a piece of that puzzle But yeah, we don't really have an answer for that right now good question though Anything else? Yes So the the question slash comment was that in the past he saw an amazing react admin theme And you know could something like Drupal state make that possible. I mean it would definitely be a Small piece of the puzzle, you know, this library doesn't have opinions about rendering anything really But yeah, I do think that You know again, it's one man's opinion But if there was a world where we had either a reference implementation or started to You know incorporate more react in Drupal itself and it needed to talk to Drupal's APIs Just a you know a client or a common way to interface with it would be part of that it would be kind of underlying Technology as part of it, but it also won't magically make a cool admin API, which I know we would all want Yes Me too Yeah, so I did offhand mention and this was feedback friendly feedback I got this week as well that that's probably not a good name for this library and it is confusing for that reason So yeah, the something to think about is maybe if there is a better more accurate name for this And the reason that it was named that is you know thinking about JavaScript application state and that was the problem I was trying to solve initially But as it evolved, you know, it's not necessarily exclusively about that problem It's about utilities to interface with JSON API. So it's kind of grown out of the name But yeah, good feedback. Thank you Anything else cool in general I'm around and I would love to chat more but thanks everybody. This was very fun Enjoy DrupalCon