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With Great Power #335... Lily & Generoso Fierro · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:00
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, we're still good.
• 0:02
  Generoso Fierro: Cool.
• 0:03
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening every afternoon, everybody. See, I was looking at my computer generoso.
• 0:07
  Generoso Fierro: Oh, that's.
• 0:08
  Tad Eggleston: Because I assumed that it adjusted to the fact that I was in Michigan, and it was the only part that didn't adjust to the fact that I was in Michigan. We have not been recording for the last hour on 22 Panels, as Lily Generoso and I have talked baseball, which we sometimes do on the podcast, too, but, like…
• 0:26
  Tad Eggleston: you have a new comic out, so we wanted to make certain we led with the comic, and since we led the conversation with baseball, we waited to hit the record button. So, my guests today are,
• 0:39
  Tad Eggleston: Lily, I don't wanna, mispronounce the… the middle name.
• 0:46
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah, Lolita Vieira.
• 0:48
  Tad Eggleston: Lilita Fierro and Generosa Fierro, whose new book.
• 0:53
  Tad Eggleston: Book.
• 0:54
  Tad Eggleston: the interpretant Is in stores now.
• 0:58
  Tad Eggleston: And… you guys continue to…
• 1:05
  Tad Eggleston: That's the word I'm looking for
• 1:07
  Tad Eggleston: Push and expand your style by being while remaining like.
• 1:13
  Tad Eggleston: completely identifiably you?
• 1:16
  Generoso Fierro: Oh, that's very sweet. Thank you, Ted. That's.
• 1:19
  Tad Eggleston: It's not the reinvention, but it's, it's, it's always like.
• 1:23
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, we're, we're, we're finding a new level for this.
• 1:27
  Generoso Fierro: We sweat that a lot for this book, for sure.
• 1:31
  Tad Eggleston: It's funny.
• 1:31
  Generoso Fierro: something that we every book, we are always trying hard to push our own boundaries, I think, like for me, like conceptually, I think, for generoso artistically. And then, of course, like how we work together. We're always constantly trying to reevaluate, shift a little bit, learn more. And yeah, so
• 1:51
  Generoso Fierro: Thank you. I really appreciate that. Because this one, I think we we pushed ourselves really hard to try for that expansion.
• 1:58
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, like… I mean, again, it's like, it's like you, but both more and less.
• 2:05
  Tad Eggleston: Like, like, like, the, the, I'm, I'm used to having.
• 2:09
  Tad Eggleston: having odd panel structures, but sometimes you, you emphasize, like, like, I feel like sometimes the space between panels is even bigger to emphasize them, but then other pages is like, wow, that's almost…
• 2:24
  Tad Eggleston: That's almost, for lack of a better term right now, normal.
• 2:29
  Tad Eggleston: Which, from Lily and Generoso, is not what I ever expect. You know, 6 vertical panels, I feel like I saw that in a Marvel comic book.
• 2:39
  Generoso Fierro: How is it possible? We so I, I love vertical panels, actually. I think they're beautiful.
• 2:49
  Tad Eggleston: Vertical panels are great.
• 2:50
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah, and I think that's something that we talked about a lot in this is this kind of play in.
• 2:58
  Generoso Fierro: anchoring the story, which is more abstract in many senses than what we've done before anchoring those vertical panels visually, but also just a little bit conceptually, to kind of give
• 3:13
  Generoso Fierro: us everybody like a little bit more of like checking points of like the vertical panels help move the narrative in one way, but then it gives better transition for things that are a little more experimental. I think Generoso probably can also give you a little bit more from his perspective there. And it really is perspective. It's the way we change the panels. Ted is about who is really.
• 3:35
  Generoso Fierro: giving you the view, because we wanted to be very immersive. That's always been the thing with our books, but we wanted to make sure that when you came to a page.
• 3:43
  Generoso Fierro: And the panels were done in a certain orientation. I think that's fair to say. You start to wonder subconsciously, like, whose view are we getting at this juncture? And that's why it's so static early on. I can honestly say that aspect was very intentional and how it changes throughout the course of the book, I think.
• 4:04
  Generoso Fierro: says something about… but yeah, I… your… your assessment about our earlier stuff is… is… it was… it was done in a way that kind of set a mood that was a lot more chaotic, and I think that that was important as well. Yep.
• 4:18
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean, like, and none of that was supposed to be, like, negative criticism of earlier stuff or.
• 4:25
  Generoso Fierro: That's cool.
• 4:26
  Tad Eggleston: It's totally like…
• 4:29
  Tad Eggleston: One of the things I love about reading any new book to you, from you guys, is I feel like I'm seeing masters evolve.
• 4:37
  Tad Eggleston: It's kind of, it'.
• 4:38
  Generoso Fierro: Thank you.
• 4:39
  Tad Eggleston: It, it, it, it's, it's kind, it's kind of like reading
• 4:42
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, despite the fact that the subject matter and style are completely different, there's a similarity to, like, reading Love and Rockets. Like, they came out fully formed masters, but particularly when you read them in order and you spend some time with it, like…
• 4:59
  Tad Eggleston: You notice that, like, they never…
• 5:02
  Tad Eggleston: They never let themselves get bored, they never let themselves get lazy, they never stop reading comics, they never stop trying new things, they never…
• 5:11
  Tad Eggleston: you know, and like… like, one of the things I love about the fact that we do a Love & Rockets book club, where we've been going through, like, issue by issue, is I think that sometimes when you just pick up a Love & Rockets new, you can go, oh…
• 5:27
  Tad Eggleston: Nothing's changed.
• 5:28
  Tad Eggleston: And on one level, nothing has, because they are still completely distinctly Jaime and Beto Hernandez, but when you're going through
• 5:36
  Tad Eggleston: like issue by issue in a short, shorter period of time, and therefore have to like. See? It's like, Oh, they've been reading this. Oh, look how they did this.
• 5:50
  Generoso Fierro: Think of that time range, my lord. I mean, that's…
• 5:54
  Generoso Fierro: To watch that development, we do that with directors, we definitely have done it with comics as well, but one, kudos to you for doing it issue by issue, that's fantastic. Hey.
• 6:07
  Tad Eggleston: 80 episodes. Well, yeah, 80 episodes so far were 10 issues into volume two.
• 6:14
  Generoso Fierro: Okay.
• 6:15
  Tad Eggleston: We did all the in-between years stuff too, you know, the Wo Nelly and the, the Luba and the Luba comics and stories and.
• 6:23
  Tad Eggleston: the measles, and I feel like there was one other in-between years. So that's… that's how we're at 80, even though there's only been 60 loving rockets.
• 6:33
  Tad Eggleston: you know.
• 6:36
  Tad Eggleston: I'm just doing math in my head. Autism. I'm gonna shut up now and let you guys talk about.
• 6:41
  Generoso Fierro: Good.
• 6:41
  Tad Eggleston: Please.
• 6:44
  Generoso Fierro: No, I… yeah, I think… Well, thank you again for the praise. I… I… we're trying. Yeah, we're trying. I think, like, every new book, we're always, like, I think, looking to go to a new…
• 7:00
  Generoso Fierro: like source of research, new source of inspiration. And I think that's what keeps us energized like. That's a huge part of like continuing to make
• 7:11
  Generoso Fierro: work. And I think, like for me, the as as like the progression has gone for writing the books. I think I started out with like more inspiration from fiction, as well as like a little bit more inspiration from some of the previous like research work that I did. And then, now, I think.
• 7:30
  Generoso Fierro: the books have moved more in a philosophical direction. And so each us like with Absim. It had some foundations in like Descartes. This one has foundations in Christian mystics.
• 7:42
  Generoso Fierro: So, yeah, you know, I think we're really, every single time, trying to go to a different place, and like you said, also, like.
• 7:50
  Generoso Fierro: not lose what we enjoy about our work and especially that experiential piece. I think that's always something when we are going from kind of the first prose draft, first prose piece about what the book is going to be about.
• 8:09
  Generoso Fierro: We spend a lot of time talking about like the experiential part.
• 8:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I, sorry, I got caught up by your posters behind you for a second, like the…
• 8:24
  Generoso Fierro: All the blue stuff.
• 8:25
  Tad Eggleston: I'm well, I'm particularly struck by the movie poster.
• 8:29
  Generoso Fierro: Oh, the Alex Cox generic movie poster? That's Repo Man, actually. Alex sent it to us. Yeah.
• 8:38
  Generoso Fierro: We had gone to an event in Los Angeles where that poster was up, and we helped fund his last movie with just Kickstarter and what have you. And he's like, is there anything you want for your pledge? And I'm like, well, you don't have that generic poster for Repo Man lying around. He goes, I'll send you one. And so he sent us that. But all the other posters behind us, these are all from interviews we've done.
• 9:03
  Generoso Fierro: You know, we also write Frank19.com film reviews. We've been doing that for over a decade now. That's great.
• 9:09
  Tad Eggleston: For whatever reason, those all come to my social folder.
• 9:15
  Generoso Fierro: That's okay.
• 9:16
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but the folder that I look at the least is where those actually get, so I only notice them if they happen to be on top and or if I'm going through and cleaning out the folder.
• 9:29
  Tad Eggleston: Haven't figured out how to make them go to a different folder.
• 9:33
  Generoso Fierro: No, it's okay. We're very lucky that these are a lot of directors who we've talked to or interviewed for 819, but they're also people like… You'll look at the… Cutter and Bone is actually a movie from the early 80s called Cutter's Way, and the…
• 9:47
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's, that's why I was having trouble finding it on IMDb.
• 9:51
  Generoso Fierro: Jeff.
• 9:51
  Tad Eggleston: I was looking for it.
• 9:53
  Generoso Fierro: I love that it's one of our favourite films from that era ever, really. And Ivan Passer, who passed away, I think about five years ago, six years ago, was at the new Beverly Tarantino's Theatre in Los Angeles, and I got to speak with him there, and that was a huge thing for me.
• 10:10
  Generoso Fierro: one of those kind of formative films, as a young person that just blew my mind. Jeff Bridges, John Hurd, great original source material, the book, but, yeah, he signed it, very sweetly to Generosa, which I thought was very nice. But yeah, no, it's… yeah, we keep these posters, but…
• 10:28
  Generoso Fierro: It's where we work. So you know, it's.
• 10:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:31
  Generoso Fierro: Part of, it's part of like, we keep them here as part of memories and again, constant sources of inspiration. And that's the thing, it feeds back into the book, Ted, because for this last book, for example, we lost a couple filmmakers that have always mattered to me in the two years that we were forming this book. Michael Snow is a Canadian experimental filmmaker.
• 10:51
  Generoso Fierro: His work, Wavelength, if you ever get to see it, is one of those moments that just
• 10:56
  Generoso Fierro: breaks things in terms of perception of cinema and what have you. And then Bellator, and I gotta say that, you know, as much of the comic stuff that we read, as much as the paint that we look at and work on.
• 11:09
  Generoso Fierro: Those filmmakers also had a huge input into what we're doing visually, especially for this last book.
• 11:17
  Generoso Fierro: Michael Snow and Bellatar.
• 11:19
  Generoso Fierro: I love their work. But yeah, it's, that's how, that's how the whole cake gets baked. It's, you know, it's, but I, I.
• 11:28
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I'm, I'm, I'm fully, I, I, I always love seeing what people have behind them because it, it.
• 11:34
  Tad Eggleston: almost always says so much about them, their interests, and and often because it's pretty common for people to come to me from their workspaces like what they surround themselves by.
• 11:46
  Tad Eggleston: when they're working creatively. Look at that GI combat.
• 11:50
  Generoso Fierro: Am I gonna say that Joe Qbert hasn't had as, you know, Jerry Granadetti and all these people? Of course they have. I… this is the… this is my first comic book. I really… Wow.
• 12:01
  Generoso Fierro: No, no, no, no, no, not actually physically. These Lily very sweetly, after we finished the comic book, was like, hey, let's go to Nirvana Comics and get some comic books. And I'm like, oh boy, gee, I found that for when I was little. But I love these Joe Cooper comedies. No one at home can see this, but.
• 12:18
  Tad Eggleston: That's okay. They know how to find Joe Kupert's stuff.
• 12:22
  Generoso Fierro: We've talked about it.
• 12:23
  Tad Eggleston: him once or twice on this podcast.
• 12:25
  Generoso Fierro: But yeah, those were, you know, those were my first comics were war comics, all of them. Sergeant Rock, and The Losers, and obviously G.I. Combat, Weird War. My father was in World War II, I didn't really…
• 12:43
  Generoso Fierro: you know, he didn't like talking about it, so for me, the comic books were a way to try to understand as a little person, like, hey, Dad, what was World War II like? Okay, I'm not getting an answer, let me try to figure this out. But the artwork really just killed me. To this day, it still does.
• 13:00
  Tad Eggleston: So.
• 13:03
  Tad Eggleston: You mentioned that this one is you. You delve more into Christian mysticism.
• 13:13
  Tad Eggleston: more into…
• 13:16
  Tad Eggleston: less tangible things. Talk to me about, like… because the other… the others have been… and I noticed that in this one, that even though it comes from a scientific basis, which made it feel very familiar.
• 13:29
  Tad Eggleston: that… that, like… It kind of…
• 13:32
  Tad Eggleston: then takes steps backwards. We start seeing things like landscapes, or… I mean, like, if there's anything that defines Generoso's art, it's like, can we figure out what this is, because we're seeing it at the atomic level?
• 13:49
  Generoso Fierro: Thank you.
• 13:50
  Tad Eggleston: Sometimes you have to figure out what a hand is from the knuckle. With Generoso, you have to feel… figure out what a hand is from the little space in between pores.
• 14:06
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah, it's true. And we would joke all the time of like, landscapes, what are we doing here?
• 14:12
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, so talk to me about, like, I mean, and, and I, I like losing, losing a couple directors, I'm certain.
• 14:20
  Tad Eggleston: could could could be part of that like what?
• 14:24
  Tad Eggleston: What was it with this book that made you decide that you wanted to.
• 14:30
  Tad Eggleston: I hate to say, look at something bigger than science, because science is also huge, but look at something…
• 14:38
  Tad Eggleston: Bigger and and.
• 14:40
  Tad Eggleston: Mmm.
• 14:44
  Tad Eggleston: Less… Investigable, maybe?
• 14:49
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah, yeah, that's a good… yeah, I think that's a good way to describe it, for sure, and I think that a big part of my inspiration for, like, the concept here is that if we look at the very origins of science.
• 15:03
  Generoso Fierro: it was all about understanding the causality of things, and I kind of wanted to go all the way back to the earliest foundations, and when you go back to the earliest foundations there, it naturally leads to this broad exploration, and it forces you to look at
• 15:23
  Generoso Fierro: Macro systems and things that have.
• 15:28
  Generoso Fierro: the various things that can potentially
• 15:31
  Generoso Fierro: cause more than just like the immediate sense of what we can see. Right? I think that's why, like science as a practice early on, was
• 15:42
  Generoso Fierro: of mixed up a little bit more with philosophy, it was mixed up a little bit more with religion, because causality goes back to, deity, a deity or deities, right? And naturally, I think that was, like, a perfect way to start layering on.
• 16:00
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean…
• 16:01
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah.
• 16:02
  Tad Eggleston: Add to that that most religion is about trying to to to assign meaning to.
• 16:08
  Tad Eggleston: Some sort of reality, and…
• 16:11
  Generoso Fierro: Mmh.
• 16:11
  Tad Eggleston: At the times of the beginning of science, the religious people also tended to be the people who could read and write.
• 16:19
  Tad Eggleston: That makes lots and lots of sense. I'm just… I'm doing the dumb person's version right now as I unpack it in my head.
• 16:27
  Generoso Fierro: No, and and exactly. And and I think that's that's why there is like this, this kind of looking at
• 16:34
  Generoso Fierro: what is maybe not provable, and then things that are provable as well, and navigating like how a single person is working through these.
• 16:49
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 16:50
  Generoso Fierro: different states, right? I think, like, one thing that we talked about a lot is the concept of, like, planes of perception, planes of understanding.
• 16:59
  Generoso Fierro: and, look… going to that idea of, like, what are the original parts of causality and how we understand our universe, how we understand ourselves, how we understand God… Right.
• 17:10
  Generoso Fierro: That all just kind of naturally converged and led to, I think, us going beyond just like the really tight look on the knuckle, right? Like thinking more about broad deserts, but also.
• 17:23
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, we get to see, we could see all of the knuckles.
• 17:26
  Generoso Fierro: Yes, almost four. And that's very, very, very intense, isn't it? No, no, but it's true that there's so much in small details that we notice during conversations. You did it just now, like, when we were having this discussion, you're like, what is that generic poster behind you?
• 17:43
  Generoso Fierro: And really, if you look at the way we panel, like between the conversation that happens later in the film with the astronaut and the desert sister, Juliana, you know, you'll notice that the concentration starts focusing in on different things.
• 17:57
  Generoso Fierro: You start looking at people's hands. You might look at the wall. You might look at the floor. You know, that's part of a conversation.
• 18:05
  Tad Eggleston: I looked at the books a lot.
• 18:07
  Generoso Fierro: Yes. And that's. Yeah. Yeah.
• 18:09
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's.
• 18:10
  Generoso Fierro: It's it's so important because it's it's a way, for you know, Juliana, the main character, is silent. So how do we understand Juliana? It's, of course, her actions. But yeah, those books mean a lot to her and are a big part of that experience. I think the other thing I wanted to kind of call out as well is like it, even though we definitely go broad with landscapes. I think what we also wanted to play around with was
• 18:35
  Generoso Fierro: what… how do we construct our own symbols and attach meaning to symbols? That's actually where the title comes from. So, if you see various symbols and signs, how do we, as, like, humans, ultimately interpret them, and what those signs represent? And that's…
• 18:54
  Generoso Fierro: why I think, like, er, before, when we were, off recording, you were talking about this idea that a lot of our books are kind of, like, puzzle.
• 19:03
  Generoso Fierro: boxes in some senses, and I think we really wanted to push that further here. And the major reason why is, I think, that in a world where generative AI is going to become
• 19:15
  Generoso Fierro: super pervasive in ways that we don't even necessarily perceive.
• 19:20
  Generoso Fierro: understanding, like the individual nature of like symbols and meaning is
• 19:27
  Generoso Fierro: important. When language, which is kind of the symbol that we all 1st work with is now becoming kind of dispensable.
• 19:39
  Tad Eggleston: Hmmm.
• 19:41
  Tad Eggleston: So many different thoughts.
• 19:44
  Generoso Fierro: It's okay. If it takes you somewhere like Dash Shaw.
• 19:50
  Tad Eggleston: I love Dash Shaw.
• 19:52
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah, he wrote a really nice thing about this book and it was about just like I put on an astronaut suit and I'm taking a journey and I'm like
• 20:00
  Generoso Fierro: Awesome. Like, thanks, Dash. Like, that really meant the world to us, because we love his work, as I'm sure you do. I do. And yeah, if that's…
• 20:12
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, I was just like, because I was still pondering the religion aspect, and then she dropped the generative AI aspect, and now I have like two threads of questions.
• 20:24
  Generoso Fierro: So we're gonna stick with.
• 20:25
  Tad Eggleston: religion for a second. Yeah. Just because I have always been really
• 20:32
  Tad Eggleston: bothered by the quote-unquote war between science and religion, because I've always kind of viewed it as, like, religion is belief in things not seen.
• 20:44
  Tad Eggleston: Key word there, not seen. Science is…
• 20:49
  Tad Eggleston: seeing and figuring out how things work.
• 20:54
  Tad Eggleston: They, they shouldn't, and don't need to, conflict.
• 21:00
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 21:01
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah, no, they certainly don't. And yeah, there is no reason to. And I think that.
• 21:07
  Generoso Fierro: To be a better scientist, you actually, and this is just my personal opinion, to be a better scientist, like, be a better scientist, you actually, you have to have
• 21:17
  Generoso Fierro: faith in the meaning of the unseen. It's a driver of your curiosity like, I think, if you don't have that. Yeah, I think it would be hard to be as curious.
• 21:30
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and it also goes to like, and I guess part part of where.
• 21:36
  Tad Eggleston: where the war from the religious side comes in is, like, I think a lot about word meaning sometimes, and I'm really big on having ideas more than beliefs, because beliefs are much less malleable.
• 21:51
  Tad Eggleston: I think beliefs should be be held for.
• 21:54
  Tad Eggleston: for relatively absolute
• 21:58
  Tad Eggleston: big things, and everything else is an idea, because as you get new information, it should change. Like, so, Christianity, it makes sense to me that you believe that Christ is the
• 22:13
  Tad Eggleston: the son of God and saved your sins. Those make sense as beliefs, but deciding that, like, because Noah had an ark, there were no dinosaurs, I don't understand why that belief needs, like, where…
• 22:30
  Tad Eggleston: And likewise, I don't understand
• 22:35
  Tad Eggleston: Because you will run across people who think of them as scientific, think of themselves as scientific.
• 22:41
  Tad Eggleston: Thinkers that want to reject all of religion with.
• 22:45
  Tad Eggleston: any of the good parts that come with it, any of the community that may come with it, and any of the just comfort in, like, there are huge things that I don't know, but if I can assign them to this, I feel a little bit better. Want to reject it because, well, how do we know? It could be wrong, blah blah blah. It's like, you don't. That's the point.
• 23:02
  Tad Eggleston: When you do, then we'll shift again, and that's okay.
• 23:09
  Generoso Fierro: True.
• 23:10
  Tad Eggleston: But but some of these things are pretty big. I don't know if we're ever going to know.
• 23:16
  Generoso Fierro: Well, that's fine. Yeah, that's okay.
• 23:20
  Tad Eggleston: That's my point. And that's that's what I like about this book is it balances kind of the.
• 23:27
  Tad Eggleston: The research and learning more with the… But you know… This is a nice place.
• 23:35
  Tad Eggleston: And… wraps in the… But even though this is a nice place, and it's nice to just…
• 23:42
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe 20 days was too much.
• 23:46
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know if being alone for that long is actually something I was built for.
• 23:52
  Generoso Fierro: Of course. Yeah. You know, I think.
• 23:55
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and I love that reality, like, like, like this book.
• 23:59
  Tad Eggleston: I can't even fully… Can't even fully, like…
• 24:04
  Tad Eggleston: conceptualize the question that it's asking, but it's asking it on a molecular, human, and galactic level.
• 24:12
  Tad Eggleston: all at once. For that matter, I'm not 100% certain that it's on Earth.
• 24:17
  Tad Eggleston: And I think that that's supposed to be on purpose.
• 24:21
  Generoso Fierro: Yay. Yay. Yes, exactly. It is a hundred percent supposed to be on purpose. Yeah.
• 24:26
  Tad Eggleston: It could either be on another planet entirely, or it's on, like, a futuristic Earth where spacesuits are required to get to this place in the desert. Either one is possible.
• 24:38
  Generoso Fierro: Absolutely. We left out a lot of cultural identifiers in terms of time. So that's also like there's a truck. We see a truck. What kind of truck is it? Who knows? You know, it could be 40 years old, could be 50 years old, could be last week. And that's also very important about creating that level of ambiguity.
• 25:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yah.
• 25:00
  Generoso Fierro: Are we on Earth? Are we somewhere else? But that…
• 25:04
  Tad Eggleston: How much of that ambiguity is in the writing, and how much do you guys have your version, you just don't want to limit your readers?
• 25:15
  Generoso Fierro: That's a good question. Yeah.
• 25:18
  Generoso Fierro: I think
• 25:23
  Generoso Fierro: There's there's a good chunk that
• 25:26
  Generoso Fierro: is, by design, almost in the unspoken of what is written. So, the first prose version has
• 25:37
  Generoso Fierro: maybe a little more glimpses at like people's motivations a little bit more. There are more hints there in actual word form. But there's still a lot of ambiguity left.
• 25:51
  Generoso Fierro: And then a major reason why is that like we, we do want people to take our books and have a personal connection to it. And I think that if we're overly specific.
• 26:04
  Generoso Fierro: then it forces it in a certain direction, right? And we never want our work to be that way. And I think when Generos and I were working when it comes to this idea of like not including particular time identifiers.
• 26:19
  Generoso Fierro: It's not anything we explicitly discussed ever. Oddly enough, I think it was just something that like
• 26:26
  Generoso Fierro: is implicit in the prose to a certain extent. And then you just like
• 26:31
  Generoso Fierro: took it home. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I don't think there was ever a moment, Ted, where she was like, make sure you don't put a cell phone in. Like, it's not really about that, but I put myself in a place as I was drawing it of what I…
• 26:45
  Generoso Fierro: wanted that place to be like, and a lot of things that are of more contemporary times didn't make it into the book. But it's not really hard designed. I feel it can happen very organically. It flows, I think, some of the visual things that we had discussed.
• 27:03
  Generoso Fierro: that led up to this also have this timeless quality about them. It all blended in that way when we… we constructed it, but it allows for you to see it. I… I think there's a… something… it's very pressing for us, is that we just reviewed the film by James Kenneth Wilkins, the Misconceived. The Misconceived.
• 27:21
  Generoso Fierro: This is a movie that was completely done visually with a game engine.
• 27:27
  Generoso Fierro: And body motion of actors and everything else, and you say to yourself, well, that's a cute trick, and why? But, you know, he's doing that so you strip away all of the sentimentality or anything that relates to the American independent film, and…
• 27:42
  Generoso Fierro: that's partly why we do what we do as well. Like, we want to keep that level of ambiguity for interpretation, but at the same time.
• 27:51
  Generoso Fierro: we do set a world up that we think you could be very immersed into, which I think Kenneth Wilkins makes sure that you don't do that. Yeah, yeah, very much so. He does the opposite. But I think, like, we also are, I think, in search of…
• 28:08
  Generoso Fierro: some sense of interconnectivity, of understanding. I think he's more focused on events that impact the zeitgeist.
• 28:18
  Generoso Fierro: and and the concepts of truth. I think we're looking at something a little bit different. But I think in some ways, like we, we care about the same things and think about visual presentation and narrative in the same senses.
• 28:34
  Tad Eggleston: You know, something that I'm annoyed by IMDb for is they never give credit to who does the posters.
• 28:42
  Tad Eggleston: I'm looking at the misconceived poster that's.
• 28:45
  Generoso Fierro: It's.
• 28:45
  Tad Eggleston: Very comic book style.
• 28:47
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah, it doesn.
• 28:47
  Tad Eggleston: give credit to the artist and that's.
• 28:49
  Generoso Fierro: It's funny, if you go on Letterboxd, the woman that, I believe it was a woman who designed the poster.
• 28:56
  Generoso Fierro: Wrote a little story about the making of the poster, so if you go to the letterbox for that, I found that because I love that poster too. We love an earlier film by Wilkins called The Plagiarist that came out about 7 years ago, and he's constantly putting up short films and pieces. He had a film last year, and so we were super excited to see this, but that poster, if we had not known his work, would have pulled this in too.
• 29:21
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I just, like, and as soon as I discovered, I couldn't unsee it, but, like, Jack Davis did the cover, or did the poster for Bad News Bears.
• 29:34
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah, that's true.
• 29:35
  Tad Eggleston: I found that out like recently, recently.
• 29:39
  Generoso Fierro: That's crazy.
• 29:40
  Tad Eggleston: I've been watching that movie since I was a child. I had the VHS copy that had that poster on the front of it.
• 29:48
  Generoso Fierro: Sure. You know, when we first moved to LA, one of the first things we did is we actually went to the baseball field where they shot the movie.
• 29:55
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's awesome.
• 29:56
  Generoso Fierro: It's meant a lot. Michael Ritchie, who directed that film, by the way, is one of the great underappreciated directors of his generation. The Candidate, Downhill Racer, Smile. Besides Bad News Bears, which is a wonderful film and the screenplay is fantastic, he's a director that needs a lot more love. I think all of his '70s work is…
• 30:20
  Generoso Fierro: Great, but yeah, anyway, I digress, but yes.
• 30:23
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, only a little bit.
• 30:24
  Tad Eggleston: Oh my, did he also… He directed The Scout.
• 30:32
  Tad Eggleston: Which is probably the most underrated baseball movie out there, seeing as it's a 5.5 on IMDb.
• 30:38
  Generoso Fierro: Yo!
• 30:39
  Tad Eggleston: And I don't think it's a perfect movie, but it's, it's
• 30:44
  Tad Eggleston: It's got some stuff going for it.
• 30:46
  Generoso Fierro: I like it a lot. Albert Brooks actually talks about the scout.
• 30:50
  Generoso Fierro: The documentary that the late Rob Reiner did for him, Defending Your Life.
• 30:56
  Generoso Fierro: he actually talks about how the studio compromised the ending. That was not the ending that he wrote, that he wanted, that they forced that kind of ending. He had another ending, it's worth him explaining it. If you've never seen the Albert Brooks documentary, it's good to watch, because we love Albert Brooks, he's like a hero.
• 31:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 31:16
  Generoso Fierro: But yeah, he explains, I think it's a very good film too, except for the ending. And he explains why.
• 31:23
  Tad Eggleston: But overall, it just, it reminded me of Sid Finch.
• 31:27
  Tad Eggleston: the the the greatest, the greatest, or one of the the like.
• 31:33
  Tad Eggleston: easily top 5… April Fool's Day jokes ever.
• 31:39
  Generoso Fierro: Can you explain?
• 31:41
  Generoso Fierro: I've said.
• 31:41
  Tad Eggleston: Finch. Sid Finch was the cover story on on.
• 31:45
  Tad Eggleston: Sports Illustrated, April 1st, 1980-something. It was a Mets pitcher who, you know, Mets phenom that they just signed that, like, threw 100 miles an hour and wore… wore one… one, like, work boot and one barefoot and…
• 32:04
  Tad Eggleston: They got George Plimpton, I think, to write the article.
• 32:08
  Tad Eggleston: Good.
• 32:09
  Generoso Fierro: Brilliant. I don't remember this. That's great.
• 32:14
  Tad Eggleston: The legend, yeah, here. The curious case of Sid Finch.
• 32:22
  Tad Eggleston: is the, I think, the original article. Yeah. April 1, st 1985.
• 32:29
  Tad Eggleston: Sports Illustrated.
• 32:31
  Tad Eggleston: Here, let me… drop a link for you.
• 32:35
  Generoso Fierro: We're looking it up as well. That's funny. Yeah.
• 32:40
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, that goes right up there with, I think it was the BBC did a piece on Swiss spaghetti trees.
• 32:51
  Generoso Fierro: Oh, that's great.
• 32:53
  Generoso Fierro: Because that's where.
• 32:54
  Tad Eggleston: And this and the Swiss, the Swiss spaghetti crop.
• 32:59
  Tad Eggleston: They've included the the how do you draw a spaghetti tree? Take a can of tomato paste and stick a
• 33:05
  Tad Eggleston: stick a piece of spaghetti in it and wait.
• 33:10
  Generoso Fierro: Okay.
• 33:12
  Tad Eggleston: That's funny.
• 33:13
  Generoso Fierro: I'm excited to read that actually. I love things like that.
• 33:15
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, so like that, that was what it always reminded me of is like.
• 33:22
  Tad Eggleston: We've got this, this, like.
• 33:26
  Tad Eggleston: inhuman, fictitious person. So so like.
• 33:30
  Tad Eggleston: I think the first time I watched it, I was kind of disappointed that… that we…
• 33:37
  Tad Eggleston: Ever saw him pitch without Albert Brooks being drunk.
• 33:41
  Generoso Fierro: Yep.
• 33:44
  Tad Eggleston: Because I wanted it to be this whole thing where, where this down and out scout.
• 33:50
  Tad Eggleston: Had had like.
• 33:52
  Tad Eggleston: discovered this guy in Mexico.
• 33:55
  Tad Eggleston: That turned out not only had the anxiety issues and whatnot, but wasn't that good.
• 34:02
  Tad Eggleston: And I'm okay with it either way.
• 34:06
  Tad Eggleston: I… like, I agree, the ending is overboard and whatnot, and I think it doesn't make the movie better, but I also am not one that thinks that sort of thing makes a movie a ton worse. I would rather have a tacked-on happy ending than a tacked-on sad ending.
• 34:24
  Tad Eggleston: And endings are hard. So, while I'm certain that there is, like, that pitch-perfect ending out there.
• 34:32
  Tad Eggleston: If I've got to have an ending that doesn't feel right, I'd rather have it feel right in… or not feel right in an unnecessary… unnecessarily,
• 34:43
  Tad Eggleston: What's the word, like…
• 34:45
  Generoso Fierro: Sad.
• 34:45
  Tad Eggleston: saccharine way than an unnecessarily sad way.
• 34:50
  Generoso Fierro: It's tough. We've coined the term Hollywood ending for a reason, is that, you know, and if you could hear Albert Brooks describe it, they wanted that for the ending of the film, and…
• 35:02
  Generoso Fierro: it's… it's always a hard call, especially by that point in Albert Brooks' career. He had made so many intelligent, well-made, well-received films that you almost hope that they'll just default to him, and be like, no, it's not a good idea, because I'm Albert Brooks, and dot dot dot, but that's unfortunately not what happened, but…
• 35:20
  Generoso Fierro: we've seen directors bigger than him, greater than him, get vetoed on things. So it's… but it's a shame. Because again, you always like to see everything come through the way it does, and…
• 35:31
  Tad Eggleston: What?
• 35:33
  Tad Eggleston: This is this is where I need to ask you guys a completely off topic question because because in the film.
• 35:41
  Tad Eggleston: And I don't consider myself part of the hardcore film community. I don't… I watch more movies now than I have in a while, partially because of people like you, partially because I've got a weekly movie club with my family.
• 35:56
  Generoso Fierro: Lovely.
• 35:56
  Tad Eggleston: But, probably the most divisive movie among people that I know…
• 36:04
  Tad Eggleston: to come out in the last few years, and I'm on the minority side, is Megalopolis.
• 36:12
  Tad Eggleston: What did you think?
• 36:15
  Generoso Fierro: So.
• 36:16
  Generoso Fierro: We were living in a place where it could not be screened, and critic friends of ours in LA and what have you were like, don't watch it at home. Wait till it's screened.
• 36:28
  Generoso Fierro: We're still waiting. We've yet to see it.
• 36:31
  Tad Eggleston: See, I haven't managed to see it screened either, but I've watched it 2 or 3 times at home now
• 36:36
  Tad Eggleston: Even though there's only 1 place where it can be rented right now, which kind of annoys me because yes, I want the full experience.
• 36:45
  Generoso Fierro: Sure. No, no, no. And it.
• 36:47
  Tad Eggleston: But I'm also a homebody.
• 36:49
  Generoso Fierro: Okay.
• 36:49
  Tad Eggleston: And and and like.
• 36:52
  Tad Eggleston: I'm sorry, like, sometimes I feel like I get a more full experience.
• 36:57
  Tad Eggleston: with my headphones on and my phone right here than I do in a movie theater, where I have to deal with
• 37:06
  Tad Eggleston: people, huh?
• 37:08
  Generoso Fierro: I was at a panel about 20 years ago with Nicholas Rogue, the great director Nicholas Rogue, and there were a lot of
• 37:15
  Generoso Fierro: Bob Rafelson was on the panel, Deborah Winger, Tim Roth, there were, like, a lot of people talking about cinema. And it was right around the time, it was the early 2000s, where people started regularly watching content on their phone.
• 37:29
  Generoso Fierro: So they turned to Nicholas Rogue. Nicholas Rogue, besides his own films, was a DP on Dr. Zhivago, on Lawrence of Arabia, like, you know, so he's that level of cinematographer. Right.
• 37:42
  Generoso Fierro: And they said to him, you know, Nicholas, how do you feel about, you know, children watching your, imagine if they watched your film Walkabout on a phone.
• 37:52
  Generoso Fierro: And he told an interesting story very quickly. He said, I grew up in a town where we had one movie theater, and that movie theater was horrible. He was like, it smelled of urine and beer.
• 38:04
  Generoso Fierro: And the seats were sticky, but it was the only theater I knew.
• 38:09
  Generoso Fierro: And whenever I could see a film there, I felt comfortable in that theater. So as much as I'm not in love with the idea of somebody watching one of my films on a phone, if that's the most comfortable they feel with an apparatus.
• 38:25
  Generoso Fierro: then they're gonna have to go for it. And it was surprising, because at the time, Ted, he must have been in his mid-70s. So you're expecting him to be like, well, if you can't watch it on film, then don't do it. For us, we knew Megalopolis was gonna be a visual thing.
• 38:41
  Generoso Fierro: and we were really hoping that it would have come, but we were in flux when it came out, and we just did not have a chance to see it properly. But we're hoping that with reputation that there'll be
• 38:51
  Generoso Fierro: midnight screenings of it, that there'll be screenings where we could see it properly. You know, we tend to skew more on the foreign film and very small American independent.
• 39:02
  Tad Eggleston: I know you do.
• 39:02
  Generoso Fierro: But at the same time, like.
• 39:04
  Tad Eggleston: In some ways, that actually, though.
• 39:07
  Tad Eggleston: Because I think it's kind of the influence of some of the stuff that you… you guys have steered me towards, and some of the stuff that, like.
• 39:15
  Tad Eggleston: Matt Rosenberg has steered me towards, and, like, I like a lot more of the more oddball… like, I got to interview Jason via…
• 39:25
  Tad Eggleston: via… Email and and and like went down a Jim Jarmusch rabbit hole and.
• 39:33
  Tad Eggleston: because, you know.
• 39:36
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah, Robert.
• 39:37
  Tad Eggleston: It is. But but like
• 39:41
  Tad Eggleston: it's, like, one of the things that I've noticed, and I brought this… I brought up Megalopolis in particular, which, by the way, there's also a fantastic comic of.
• 39:53
  Tad Eggleston: I got to talk to Chris Ryle about making it.
• 39:57
  Tad Eggleston: And, and, and one of the things that he talked about was.
• 40:01
  Tad Eggleston: Like.
• 40:04
  Tad Eggleston: Coppola was incredibly like.
• 40:08
  Tad Eggleston: Helpful and worked with them but also bent over backwards, he's like, no, no, no I don't want…
• 40:14
  Tad Eggleston: A comic version of Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis I want
• 40:20
  Tad Eggleston: Chris Ryle and Jacob Phillips Megalopolis.
• 40:25
  Generoso Fierro: Oh, cool. Different.
• 40:27
  Tad Eggleston: So I actually read the comic before I saw the movie, and as is so often the case, I do think the comic is better.
• 40:35
  Tad Eggleston: In part because one of the things that comics.
• 40:40
  Tad Eggleston: Do that that movies.
• 40:43
  Tad Eggleston: It's much more difficult to do, particularly if you're in a theater.
• 40:47
  Tad Eggleston: Is allow you to stop.
• 40:50
  Tad Eggleston: savor and think about something.
• 40:53
  Generoso Fierro: -h.
• 40:55
  Tad Eggleston: You know, you can sometimes do that at home if you're quick on the pause button and think about it in the right moment, but you do it naturally when you're reading a com.
• 41:03
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah. Yeah.
• 41:03
  Tad Eggleston: you do it naturally. When you're reading a comic, there's that natural, okay, I need to…
• 41:09
  Tad Eggleston: take all of this in, what's going on here, what's being said to me.
• 41:16
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, I found both Megalopolis, the movie, and the comic to be just fantastic allegories, and I'm on a very short list of people who seem to think that, whereas almost everybody I know is like…
• 41:36
  Generoso Fierro: Couple of our critic friends really. Yeah, Jordan likes it. Jordan has excellent taste. He runs the Acropolis Cinema, it's a micro cinema in Los Angeles, but he also writes for Art Forum and Film Comment, and he put it on his top 10 list.
• 41:53
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 41:53
  Generoso Fierro: I think a great example of this kind of polarization of film, we saw film this year, finally, on the big screen. Last year, Julie DiCorno won the Palme d'Or in 2022 for a film called Titian.
• 42:09
  Generoso Fierro: Which we liked very much. But there were a lot of people that were like, why are they giving this film the Palme d'Or? And so her new film came out last year, and I have never seen a film savage like that.
• 42:21
  Generoso Fierro: I really mean it. They were like lying at the gate going. Oh, we're going to prove to you that that Titian pick was wrong, and I felt like, no matter what this could have been citizen game part 2.
• 42:34
  Generoso Fierro: They were going to destroy it. And it's, it's a very good film. And, and it's really sad because like the, the film's called Alpha and, and.
• 42:43
  Generoso Fierro: It has an allegory, it has a satire, but, and it is actually something that plays with memory in an interesting way, but outside of all of the really nasty criticism, everybody is missing out on one of the great
• 43:00
  Generoso Fierro: acting performances in a very long time from Tahar Rahim, and so it's… it's kind of heartbreaking that, this film is so polarizing, and I think we are definitely in the minority. Oh yeah, we'll be killed if we actually break…
• 43:15
  Generoso Fierro: Because, no, in the middle of writing the comic, writing the interpreter, we saw the film, and we were actually composing a piece called The Review That Alpha We Feel Really Deserves.
• 43:28
  Generoso Fierro: And again, it's not, I'm not saying it's a complete masterpiece, Tad, but it's a very good film.
• 43:34
  Generoso Fierro: And you wonder with Megalopolis, there was so much made about, oh, he's selling his vineyards to make it, and he's doing this, and I'm like, I don't care. Like, you want to give me backstory? Who cares? What is the movie? Like, everybody gets.
• 43:50
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and.
• 43:50
  Generoso Fierro: Frustrated by this backstory crap, it's like.
• 43:54
  Tad Eggleston: Well.
• 43:54
  Generoso Fierro: them or not.
• 43:56
  Tad Eggleston: And also, like, When you're a Coppola or a McCartney.
• 44:03
  Tad Eggleston: or mobius.
• 44:07
  Tad Eggleston: you know.
• 44:12
  Tad Eggleston: People will have expectations going into the movie, and if you don't hit those expectations, the question is, will they watch again to figure out what your expectations were, or will they just be disappointed that you didn't make their movie, their album, their comic?
• 44:29
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah, we all, you know.
• 44:31
  Tad Eggleston: the…
• 44:32
  Tad Eggleston: This is, this is where I bring it back to your book and, and like the comics discussion in general is that
• 44:40
  Tad Eggleston: something I tell my students is, is like, You're the final collaborator.
• 44:50
  Generoso Fierro: Right.
• 44:51
  Tad Eggleston: what you think matters.
• 44:53
  Tad Eggleston: But also,
• 44:55
  Tad Eggleston: because you're the final collaborator, you didn't like this book that everybody else is liking, and you can't figure out why. Let's… let's first go, well, where were you when you had to read it?
• 45:06
  Tad Eggleston: Did your boyfriend just break up with you? Did your mom just yell at you? Were you hungry? Were you sick?
• 45:12
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, and this is why, like, I kind of say fuck you to the filmmakers who
• 45:18
  Tad Eggleston: Who, like, oh, it should only be seen on, on the big screen and whatnot, cause I'm like
• 45:24
  Tad Eggleston: I'm autistic.
• 45:25
  Tad Eggleston: I can sometimes handle that, and sometimes I can't.
• 45:29
  Tad Eggleston: And… and also, I can't tone out conversations, so, like, if… if somebody's not having a good time, and they're just joking back and forth.
• 45:39
  Tad Eggleston: 6 rows behind me, I'm gonna hear every word. And if, like, 3 rows in front of me, the guy's, like, trying to get his girlfriend to mess around, I'm gonna hear every word, and that's all gonna affect
• 45:54
  Tad Eggleston: how I look at your movie, whether I want it to or not.
• 45:58
  Generoso Fierro: Sure, yeah.
• 45:59
  Tad Eggleston: Like one of the things I say is like.
• 46:02
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I do some of my comic reading on my phone, just for expedience sake.
• 46:08
  Tad Eggleston: But like, when, when I will deliberately go, oh, I need to read this on my phone.
• 46:15
  Tad Eggleston: Is when I love it so much that I want to.
• 46:22
  Tad Eggleston: Zoom in focus.
• 46:25
  Tad Eggleston: I want to be able to look at pages and look panel by panel. I want to get into the minutiae in a way that's much harder to do
• 46:36
  Tad Eggleston: with the physical object. And in general, when I'm doing that, I've already read the physical object. I've sometimes read the physical object in floppy form, and paperback form, and hardcover form, and oversized form.
• 46:50
  Generoso Fierro: Administrator, I have a question for you then. So when you look at a page and you scrutinize an aspect or a panel.
• 46:58
  Generoso Fierro: Are you more concerned about the virtuosity of the actual work or is it like I don't want to miss something? Do you know what I mean? There are people that look at work like Theo Ellsworth's work and are like, wow, how does he draw that many little lines? And I'm like, that's cool because it's really intricate stuff. It's beautiful. It's beautiful work, but…
• 47:19
  Tad Eggleston: I have an I have an easy answer for this. Yeah. And it explains why I get granular.
• 47:24
  Tad Eggleston: It's 1st the virtuosity of the work.
• 47:28
  Tad Eggleston: But, but once I've fallen in love with it, I want to figure out all of the reasons why I fell in love with it.
• 47:35
  Generoso Fierro: That's.
• 47:35
  Tad Eggleston: I want to take it apart and put it back together.
• 47:38
  Generoso Fierro: Mmh.
• 47:39
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, I use Saga as my example all the time. And one of the things one of the things that like it was on one of the phone reads that I I noticed.
• 47:52
  Tad Eggleston: When when there's violence involving Marco.
• 47:57
  Tad Eggleston: After he's taken his, his oath.
• 48:00
  Tad Eggleston: to to not do violence.
• 48:02
  Tad Eggleston: The panels are crooked.
• 48:04
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah, that's what we do.
• 48:07
  Tad Eggleston: No, I know, but but but like I.
• 48:11
  Tad Eggleston: I probably read Saga in its entirety a dozen times before I noticed that, but I'm also certain that even that first time it had an effect.
• 48:21
  Generoso Fierro: Explain.
• 48:22
  Tad Eggleston: on how much I loved
• 48:24
  Tad Eggleston: You know, it, it affected the way I felt about it, you know, it was.
• 48:29
  Tad Eggleston: I noticed a little bit before I did the granular read that there's all sorts of like 80s technology in Saga, 50s to 80s technology.
• 48:40
  Generoso Fierro: Okay.
• 48:41
  Tad Eggleston: You know, you can find a rotary phone booth in Saga. You can, you know, the will watches movies taken off of a camcorder hooked to a TV with RCA cables. Like, all of these little things that take this intergalactic tale and, like, very low-key make it feel…
• 49:03
  Tad Eggleston: more personal, less… out there.
• 49:08
  Generoso Fierro: Fair. Do you ever start — it sounds like you usually don't start with the granular read.
• 49:13
  Tad Eggleston: No, I don't start with the gran.
• 49:14
  Generoso Fierro: That makes sense. Otherwise you would miss kind of like the sweeps, right? Like in the page.
• 49:20
  Tad Eggleston: Right. I mean, the only things I ever read for, like, the first time on a phone are when I'm trying to get a superhero comic in on a deadline.
• 49:30
  Tad Eggleston: And I'm not somewhere that I can do it.
• 49:32
  Tad Eggleston: In other words, where my expectations for fantastic art are.
• 49:38
  Tad Eggleston: Relatively low. Also, I am a big believer, and I have it set up so that
• 49:43
  Tad Eggleston: I see the page.
• 49:46
  Tad Eggleston: And then it zooms in, and then I see the page again. So even though I'm seeing it smaller, I'm getting to see the flow. Most of the apps, if it is a two-page spread, will
• 49:59
  Tad Eggleston: Put it as a two-page spread rather than a single page, and I'll have to turn it sideways to… to see the…
• 50:06
  Tad Eggleston: you know, I mean, the people…
• 50:09
  Tad Eggleston: Not all the time, but a lot of the people who adapt The digital files.
• 50:14
  Tad Eggleston: for reading. Think about these things.
• 50:18
  Generoso Fierro: You.
• 50:19
  Tad Eggleston: So, so it's not as.
• 50:23
  Tad Eggleston: But we are on a clock, and we have to ask…
• 50:26
  Generoso Fierro: Oh, we have about another, like about another 10, 15 minutes. It's totally cool. So don't feel that thing. No, no, no.
• 50:32
  Tad Eggleston: No, I know, but I have two closing questions now and and one of them I'm gonna make you go longer because it turns out you were DJs.
• 50:41
  Generoso Fierro: Sure.
• 50:42
  Tad Eggleston: My 1st question.
• 50:45
  Tad Eggleston: But…
• 50:46
  Tad Eggleston: I'm in my fifth year doing this podcast, and I feel like I've entered the Twilight Zone. When I talk to you guys, I feel like you've lived in the Twilight Zone your entire lives, because you, like, you've lived, like, six lifetimes apiece.
• 50:57
  Generoso Fierro: Oh.
• 50:58
  Tad Eggleston: Like, the conversations I get to have, the people I get to meet, the people who become friends of mine, the things that I get to do that, like, if you told me even…
• 51:09
  Tad Eggleston: 10 years ago, hey, this is gonna be part of your life, I would've gone, yeah, fuck you, on what planet?
• 51:17
  Tad Eggleston: That now are just, like, commonplace to me. It's like, oh, so-and-so just texted me. And, like, my wife just knows them by their first name now, but if I look down in a comic shop and I happen to say that out loud, they're like, what the fuck?
• 51:33
  Tad Eggleston: that sort of thing. But I found that that's true of like everybody in the arts, certainly everybody in comics. So tell me one of your surreal
• 51:44
  Tad Eggleston: Pinch me, is this really my life memories?
• 51:49
  Generoso Fierro: Oh, I was going to say, I have two. Please. But I want Generosa. I think Generosa's Pinch Me ones are interesting too, but I think my Pinch Me moment was sitting down and having dinner with Clive Chin, who really is credited as the person who invented dub.
• 52:08
  Generoso Fierro: And, yeah, that was from our radio show days.
• 52:13
  Generoso Fierro: And it was just, yeah, that was a pinching moment because he was wonderful, beautiful. He's a phenomenal producer. Some of the the greatest.
• 52:24
  Generoso Fierro: Reggae tracks from the kind of like early seventies to mid seventies have Clive's hands on them. And I was yeah, I was a little flummoxed, to say the least, and to be in like the presence of such greatness.
• 52:38
  Generoso Fierro: In terms of just purely musical pinch me moments, doing the radio show for 20 years.
• 52:46
  Generoso Fierro: I think that my heart stopped a bit. Lee Scratch Perry was doing an art installation downtown Los Angeles.
• 52:53
  Generoso Fierro: And just hanging out with Lee Scratch Perry for a couple hours while he actually made visual art, having listened to his music since I was 10.
• 53:03
  Generoso Fierro: Was that moment of, like, I have a video of it, I'll actually send it to you. That's a pinch-me moment that I still look at, and I'm like, wow, we were just there with Scratch, and he's…
• 53:14
  Generoso Fierro: He's a really, people throw this word around a lot. He's a genius. And he was brilliant. So that musically.
• 53:23
  Generoso Fierro: That was huge for me. I think we have cinema pinch me moments, too. I think a lot of them. I think our favorite filmmaker in the world right now, I think that's easy to say, is Radu Jude.
• 53:36
  Generoso Fierro: You know, you get our Christmas card, our holiday card every year. And so we sent it to Radu. He's become a friend. And he wrote this like nice review of our Christmas card. And I was like.
• 53:50
  Generoso Fierro: God, dude! He's… if you haven't seen Do Not Expect Too Much from The End of the World, that is our favorite film of the decade so far. No one… he's… and Dracula last year is insane.
• 54:05
  Generoso Fierro: He's brilliant, but that… just sitting down with him, because we've loved his films for so long. We had gotten an opportunity to interview him during AF5 Fest a couple years ago when Do Not Expect Too Much and The End of the World came out. We had no idea what he would be like.
• 54:20
  Generoso Fierro: the thing that kind of got us about Radu, we're like, well, let's timebox this for Radu, because my god, he's got… he makes a short film every month, he has two features a year, he's… he could… he didn't want to get off the conversation. It was… we talked for almost 3 hours, and it was like…
• 54:37
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that goes.
• 54:39
  Generoso Fierro: Well, no, but we kept giving them out. I'm like, Radu, certainly. I know how that goes.
• 54:43
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I love it.
• 54:44
  Generoso Fierro: He was lovely, and yeah, that was a pinch-me moment, because he really is. Him, Miguel Gomes, there's a few filmmakers that we put in this.
• 54:55
  Generoso Fierro: Hierarch Pedro Costa and Albert Serra, and Radu is definitely one of them. We love his work. He really tries to do something different every time.
• 55:04
  Generoso Fierro: And he's always successful. He's a brilliant filmmaker. He's evolved immensely. We saw one of his early films years ago. And if you look at like that film that was Afarim, and you look at where he's at now, the evolution and the progression is kind of incredible.
• 55:24
  Generoso Fierro: it's almost awe-inducing to see, like, the vastness of the growth. Yeah, it is. It's a great filmmaker. If there's anything…
• 55:32
  Generoso Fierro: You know, besides, hopefully people will want to see your work. We would love if people checked out more of Radu Jude's work. It's very accessible. It's not like, you know, it's eight hours looking at a cabbage. Like, it's not… Dracula is maybe not the easiest film, to say the least.
• 55:48
  Generoso Fierro: But it's all of his, you know, with Dracula originally.
• 55:53
  Generoso Fierro: kind of being tied to Vlad the Impaler, the Romanian figure. It's, a take on kind of all of the different variations of the Dracula myth-ish. I'm not really describing it particularly well on purpose, because.
• 56:08
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 56:08
  Generoso Fierro: It's a wild film. It's our favorite film of last year as well. And yeah, he's great. But yeah, those are definitely pinch me moments.
• 56:17
  Tad Eggleston: So I have to ask the quick question, just regarding film and foreign film in particular. Are you guys multilingual, or are you just really good at reading subtitles? Because I sometimes have the subtitles take me out of the film because I don't read fast.
• 56:31
  Generoso Fierro: So my first language was Italian in the home and Lily. My first language is Vietnamese. Kind of second language is Cantonese outside of that in the home.
• 56:42
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 56:42
  Generoso Fierro: And then I spoke Spanish growing up, and then I do speak some Italian, but to the level that I can, I can like actually watch any films in those languages without subtitles.
• 56:57
  Generoso Fierro: It'd be hard. Whereas I think Generoso, you can watch films in Italian without subtitles for the most part. Oh, of course. Yeah, no, that's my first language, so it's kind of embedded in me. I also speak German, and I'm learning French right now, actually.
• 57:14
  Tad Eggleston: Well, it.
• 57:14
  Generoso Fierro: Right.
• 57:14
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, linguistically, once you've got more than two and certainly more than three languages, picking up more or breaking them down in your head is easier just because of the…
• 57:27
  Tad Eggleston: This is when I get into, like, crazy neuro…
• 57:31
  Tad Eggleston: whatever, we won't go there, because we have another question, but that makes sense. So you guys are definitely more able to make sense of the subtitles in a quicker way than I am, because that's probably the only reason that I don't watch more foreign films.
• 57:49
  Tad Eggleston: Because I often like them more, I feel like… I feel like Hollywood has gotten… Too generic.
• 57:58
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah, exactly. And there's good, for the record, there's good film being made in this country independently. The misconceived we just ranted about is an American independent film and it's, you know, no subs there.
• 58:14
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 58:15
  Generoso Fierro: There's stuff definitely happening, yeah.
• 58:17
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, my friend Jim Terry just made a movie called Shank that I adore.
• 58:22
  Generoso Fierro: Oh, cool!
• 58:23
  Tad Eggleston: all sorts of weird reasons.
• 58:26
  Generoso Fierro: But Hollywood itself sucks.
• 58:28
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but but also like.
• 58:31
  Tad Eggleston: In our lifetimes, there was, there was a time where independent movie would still get.
• 58:38
  Tad Eggleston: Backing where independent where where where there was a dark horse and an image and
• 58:45
  Tad Eggleston: Mad cave of independent film. Independent film didn't have to be a zine fest.
• 58:51
  Tad Eggleston: Right now, it feels like independent film is a zine fest.
• 58:57
  Generoso Fierro: Yes and no, 824 neon, that kind of thing, but they're even big now. Yeah, they're big. MUBI. Yeah, but even MUBI's moving towards bigger, though at least they distribute the small ones, right? Like that's the big thing is like, so I think very much of a film that we adore called Slow Machine. Yeah. And that is, I think it's definitely made in that zine-like way of a film equivalent and that the
• 59:22
  Generoso Fierro: directors made it over the course of weekends where they were not working and their buddies weren't working. Right.
• 59:30
  Tad Eggleston: No, that's how, that's how, that's how Jim's movie was made. It was.
• 59:34
  Tad Eggleston: They made it over, like, the course of a year and a half, where, like, they just…
• 59:39
  Tad Eggleston: ran around Chicago, and, like, I was at… they did a… they got to do a screening at the, like, Goodman theater's education center, and I was at that, and one of the questions was, like.
• 59:50
  Tad Eggleston: you've got some, like, crazy stunts and what? What was the most dangerous thing you did? And he's like, we didn't get any permits or anything like that, and we had scenes with guns on the streets of Chicago.
• 1:00:01
  Generoso Fierro: Very Larry Cohen of them.
• 1:00:03
  Tad Eggleston: Those were the most dangerous scenes. Like, shoot it, drop the plastic cut, walk away.
• 1:00:12
  Generoso Fierro: No, you know, if you've ever seen it, there's a 70s horror film called Cue the Winged Serpent. It's a Larry Cohen film. We love Larry, we got to meet him in LA. That was a pinch-me moment, because we adore him. But there's a scene in the film where these policemen are shooting at this wing
• 1:00:28
  Generoso Fierro: you know, prehistoric serpent and he got no permits and all of a sudden people 40 floors down are getting pelted with empty shell casings and they're calling the cops like they're terrorists on this building that are shooting up. Like guys, come on.
• 1:00:44
  Tad Eggleston: They used only toy weapons.
• 1:00:47
  Generoso Fierro: Fair enough, but yeah, but.
• 1:00:49
  Tad Eggleston: But many of them were brown, and it was the city of Chicago.
• 1:00:53
  Generoso Fierro: Of course. Yeah, it's a little dangerous. Somebody could make a horrible, deadly mistake. Right. I'm surprised that people didn't shoot Larry Cohen's crew. Oh, yeah. I think it was in New York, a very different time. 1970s New York is true. You can't get away with that. But it is crazy. There are a lot of great American independent films. There is a network of distribution a lot of times through microcinemism.
• 1:01:18
  Generoso Fierro: cities.
• 1:01:19
  Generoso Fierro: And I think that that's kind of where the film parallel, the zine fest is happening. You have these small movie theaters that pop up in various locations.
• 1:01:31
  Generoso Fierro: that'll show a film for maybe like 100 people. That was what Acropolis was for us in Los Angeles. There's versions of that in New York and Chicago, and
• 1:01:41
  Generoso Fierro: You know, where you get a better audience, and I'm gonna say it, people that really love.
• 1:01:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, those audiences, I'm way more okay.
• 1:01:49
  Generoso Fierro: Me too. Yeah.
• 1:01:50
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 1:01:51
  Generoso Fierro: want to be there. If you're going to show up to a room that has a mop and a broom in the corner, you know that you really want to see a film. It's not about, like, date night.
• 1:02:00
  Generoso Fierro: Oh.
• 1:02:01
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:02:02
  Tad Eggleston: Final question before you guys have to run, and because you're film nuts, comic people, and I have heard DJs, I actually need 3 parts to the answers to these. I want a film, I want a comic, and I want…
• 1:02:16
  Tad Eggleston: I'll let you go with either an artist, an album, or a song for the…
• 1:02:24
  Tad Eggleston: But… tell me something you love.
• 1:02:27
  Tad Eggleston: I almost don't need to do the next part, because you have such eclectic and underground tastes, but it's the way that it's phrased. Tell me something you love.
• 1:02:38
  Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you have experienced.
• 1:02:41
  Tad Eggleston: And you want them to.
• 1:02:43
  Tad Eggleston: So that… You have more people to talk about it with.
• 1:02:50
  Generoso Fierro: Let's talk. Do you have something? You go first, because I'm going to take a while, because it's a film, a comic, a song, or an album, right.
• 1:02:58
  Tad Eggleston: Yes. Well, song, album, musician. And for that matter, you know, I'll give you that for all of them. Like, it doesn't have to, you know, if you want to give me a director rather than a film or like… Fair.
• 1:03:10
  Generoso Fierro: Fair.
• 1:03:11
  Tad Eggleston: Because I don't want to, I don't want to, normally I say preferably a comic, but we don't have rules, preferably storytelling, but we don't have rules. So I don't want to have too many rules for you now that I've given you the rule that I want something in each of those genres, music, comics, and film.
• 1:03:27
  Generoso Fierro: Fair enough. You go first. I, you know, so we obviously gave our love of fear to Radu Juj, and he doesn't need our help. To hell with him, now we love Radu.
• 1:03:36
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and also, I would have said we already talked about him.
• 1:03:38
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah, we already talked about it. I need.
• 1:03:40
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 1:03:41
  Generoso Fierro: If there is a single film, and I think this might even surprise Lily a little bit, it's, Ricky D'Ambrose's The Cathedral, so I will say it is the most…
• 1:03:50
  Generoso Fierro: non-cliched film I've ever seen about the Italian-American experience, to which I am part of that community. It is an independently made film, it is a family drama film, and you've not seen anything quite like it. And I think that that is one that…
• 1:04:07
  Generoso Fierro: Even critic friends of ours that review pretty, like, ground-level stuff are like, I have to tell them about the cathedral. I think that's…
• 1:04:16
  Generoso Fierro: An amazing film. A masterpiece. It is. It's a it's a masterpiece of a piece of American independent cinema in terms of comics.
• 1:04:26
  Generoso Fierro: I get it.
• 1:04:28
  Generoso Fierro: I… Tana Shima… last year, for example, Tana Shima's before-after was one that I was like, wow!
• 1:04:36
  Generoso Fierro: She does it all with a ballpoint pen. Now, I shouldn't get into that kind of thing about that, but the comic itself is great.
• 1:04:45
  Generoso Fierro: There's a lot of comics artists we love, you know, we love Dustin Holland, we love Chad's work so much, we can go down the list, but that's one book that I really wish more people would see.
• 1:04:58
  Generoso Fierro: I, I love what she does. Tana's, Tana's great, and hats off to them. Tana's part of the group, including Austin English, that are trying to build the, the comics library in New York, which is something, if you haven't talked about.
• 1:05:14
  Generoso Fierro: I think it's a wonderful thing that they're trying to kickstart right now, or go find me now.
• 1:05:20
  Tad Eggleston: Do me a favor and spell the name, because it's not coming up easy.
• 1:05:23
  Generoso Fierro: T, A, N, A.
• 1:05:26
  Generoso Fierro: O S H I M A, Tanoshima.
• 1:05:30
  Tad Eggleston: O, S, H.
• 1:05:33
  Generoso Fierro: I am a.
• 1:05:35
  Tad Eggleston: I am a Aha!
• 1:05:40
  Tad Eggleston: Now I found it.
• 1:05:43
  Generoso Fierro: Great work.
• 1:05:44
  Generoso Fierro: Really great work. You know, I think the way that you mentally say to yourself, if somebody wants a recommendation, you say to yourself, if that person had a new thing, how quickly will I run to get it?
• 1:05:57
  Generoso Fierro: is the greatest praise you could give to a creator you love. And I think Tom is there, obviously, all the bigger guys that we love in Austin and Frida Koche and all those people, but in terms of someone who I think definitely needs a little bit more exposure. And so it was… and then a piece of music
• 1:06:15
  Generoso Fierro: Recently, in the last couple years, as I've been doing the illustrations, I've been obsessed with this jazz trumpeter named Kracham Makaur III from the…
• 1:06:27
  Tad Eggleston: You're gonna have to help.
• 1:06:28
  Generoso Fierro: Grachan, G-R-A-C-H-A-N, Moncore, M-O-N…
• 1:06:36
  Tad Eggleston: As it turns out, as soon as I get Kratron in, the rest of it comes up.
• 1:06:40
  Generoso Fierro: Now, remember, there's a Gretchen Makaur and a Gretchen Makaur III.
• 1:06:45
  Tad Eggleston: 3 is the one that comes up.
• 1:06:49
  Generoso Fierro: But I, I, I've been really tripping out on, on Gretchen McCore. I, I like, I love what he does and trombones. I have no.
• 1:06:59
  Tad Eggleston: I was about to say, you don't have a lot of people who trip out on a trombonist, so I'm…
• 1:07:05
  Tad Eggleston: I'm… I'm psyched to go listen to some.
• 1:07:08
  Generoso Fierro: I've been a bassist my whole life, but if I had my… if I had a lip, I would be a trombonist. I have no lip. I've tried. I can't do it. I just can't do it. She's the woodwind player in the family.
• 1:07:20
  Generoso Fierro: But brass instruments, I just don't have the lip or I would be a trombonist or try to be a horrible trombonist. But those are my…
• 1:07:29
  Tad Eggleston: Gershon Moncourt II was a bassist.
• 1:07:32
  Generoso Fierro: Yes.
• 1:07:34
  Generoso Fierro: It's all, it's all in a line, but Mankoor III, I, I love. His, his release is an actual, or…
• 1:07:42
  Generoso Fierro: Outrageously great. So those are my threes. Interesting. I didn't know, I didn't think you were going to pick those three. I wanted to make sure I remembered, like got the titles exactly. So I think from the film, I say this all the time, I've been obsessed with this film called Occidental by an artist named Neil Beloufa.
• 1:08:01
  Generoso Fierro: it was one that was shown at the Microcinema Acropolis Cinema, and it's just always stuck with me in that. It's
• 1:08:10
  Generoso Fierro: a film about a potential political event that you don't know about, maybe a riot going on outside of a hotel, and everything takes place inside of this hotel, and
• 1:08:24
  Generoso Fierro: every character… every character in the film and every person inside of this hotel is representative of some kind of trope, and then not at the same time. And it's…
• 1:08:38
  Generoso Fierro: It's a fascinating work that you could almost think of in many ways.
• 1:08:42
  Generoso Fierro: it could have been an installation because it was actually filmed like in a constructed structure. And so you feel like there is this like perfect sense of specificity and ambiguity for every character, every situation, every image. So I've just been obsessed with Neil Beloufa's Occidental for a long time.
• 1:09:06
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:09:07
  Generoso Fierro: Now, when it comes to… so that's my film pick. Oh, when it comes to my comic pick, the book recently that I've been…
• 1:09:17
  Generoso Fierro: constantly coming back to. It's actually sitting behind the desk for months. I moved it only because I wanted to make sure that it didn't get, like, to, like, anything on it, because, you know, I drink my coffee and stuff at my desk.
• 1:09:30
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:09:30
  Generoso Fierro: is Varsha Lovater's pictograms. So it's released on 50 watts, I think, as like a reprint of an 08 edition.
• 1:09:43
  Generoso Fierro: What she does is… She really uses basic symbols in terms of shapes and lines.
• 1:09:52
  Generoso Fierro: and various different words, and tries to explain, tell some stories, explain various
• 1:10:02
  Generoso Fierro: concepts and ideas about, I guess, existence, society, philosophy, something that I really adore and keep coming back to. And then albums.
• 1:10:15
  Generoso Fierro: And music pick. This one is really hard for me, and I have to say two. I think one is pretty well known amongst people who, like, listen to the genre.
• 1:10:26
  Tad Eggleston: I always have to tell people, like…
• 1:10:30
  Tad Eggleston: The last time Nate Powell was on, he said Jonathan Hickman's X-Men. He said, I know plenty of people are reading it, but I run in a different crowd.
• 1:10:39
  Generoso Fierro: Fair enough. Fair enough, fair enough.
• 1:10:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, on…
• 1:10:43
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah, so on the reggae side, and I say this because if you love reggae, his records have been reissued somewhat recently. So that's why if you're in that crowd, maybe this is a commonplace pick. But for me, it's like Keith Hudson. I love Keith Hudson. Yes, you should. He's great.
• 1:11:01
  Tad Eggleston: Whereas I like reggae, but have never heard of Keith Hudson, so, like…
• 1:11:06
  Tad Eggleston: I need to go learn about him, just like Rachan McCourt.
• 1:11:10
  Generoso Fierro: Exc.
• 1:11:10
  Tad Eggleston: That's why I had to ask these questions, because it's like, people who like lots of music the way I like lots of music.
• 1:11:17
  Tad Eggleston: I must know now.
• 1:11:19
  Generoso Fierro: Then the other one that maybe is a little less known is a jazz musician, and it's a vibraphonist named Walt Dickerson.
• 1:11:27
  Generoso Fierro: And I just adore Walt Dickerson. The record, particularly that he did with Richard Davis. It's called Divine Gemini. I probably listen to it once every 2 to 3 months.
• 1:11:40
  Generoso Fierro: Vibraphone is very underrated, and everybody knows Lionel Hampton, of course, but, like, Walt Dickerson is where it's at, and those records… yeah, we listen to a lot of that when we're working. Yeah. I… and not when we're working.
• 1:11:55
  Generoso Fierro: Pretty much all the time. So, and those are, there's definitely our picks.
• 1:12:02
  Tad Eggleston: I like them.
• 1:12:03
  Generoso Fierro: Thanks. Thank you. I want to know what you.
• 1:12:05
  Tad Eggleston: I always have.
• 1:12:06
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah, like, what do you think about it? Would love to hear it.
• 1:12:09
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, sometimes it takes time, because I always have long…
• 1:12:12
  Tad Eggleston: Piles of stuff to read, watch…
• 1:12:16
  Tad Eggleston: Listen to, but… but I will. You'll probably hear about the music sooner than the other stuff, because that I can put on while I'm playing, like…
• 1:12:26
  Tad Eggleston: baseball on my… my Nintendo switch.
• 1:12:30
  Generoso Fierro: That's fair.
• 1:12:31
  Tad Eggleston: what I'll do when I'm done. It's a very calming exercise. When I've been overstimulated, I can just and like when Phil gave me his backup switch because I couldn't get
• 1:12:41
  Tad Eggleston: baseball on… like, the new baseball game wasn't for PS4 anymore. It was… it had to get PS5, and I'm like, I only play baseball. So to spend $500 to spend $100 to play baseball…
• 1:12:54
  Generoso Fierro: Oh.
• 1:12:55
  Tad Eggleston: But Phil's like, well, does it play on the Switch? Because I've.
• 1:12:59
  Generoso Fierro: Oh, good for him. That was…
• 1:13:00
  Tad Eggleston: So… so my… my… well, I think it might have been his sister's, but she'd upgraded to, like, the Switch 2 or what… I don't even know. But… but so, like, he sent me one for Christmas, and, like, I thought I was gonna play it primarily on my TV, but kind of, like, it's more calming sometimes for me to watch a movie like this.
• 1:13:18
  Tad Eggleston: I play it handheld way more than I play it on the TV. I fall into my headphones, I have the game in front of me, I block out the rest of the world.
• 1:13:26
  Tad Eggleston: Hahaha!
• 1:13:28
  Generoso Fierro: That's fair. Yeah.
• 1:13:31
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. It's a murder.
• 1:13:32
  Generoso Fierro: It's again, I think what Rogue said in that conversation from earlier, it's the truth. If that's how you connect.
• 1:13:40
  Generoso Fierro: Can I? You know, again, the whole purist thing, oh, it needs to be screened on 35 millimeter. I'd love it if films were always shot and screened on film, but that's getting harder and harder. You do what does you right.
• 1:13:55
  Tad Eggleston: Don't get me wrong. I think there's a special experience. You know, I went out of my way to go to the 70 millimeter.
• 1:14:04
  Tad Eggleston: 8, 4, 8.
• 1:14:06
  Generoso Fierro: Oh, really? Yeah, it needs to be.
• 1:14:08
  Tad Eggleston: I loved it even… I loved it even more that he decided to do 70mm for a film that essentially took place in one room.
• 1:14:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 1:14:18
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah, you get some, like, you get kind of landscapes at the, like, the first five minutes, and then that's.
• 1:14:23
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:14:24
  Generoso Fierro: It's also even in the carriage most of the time.
• 1:14:26
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right. It was, it was annoying that we wound up in almost the front row, so it was like 70 millimeters, but it was 70 millimeters over here.
• 1:14:36
  Generoso Fierro: I kind of love that, though, because it's just… it's so… it's so massive, right? Even though it is…
• 1:14:42
  Tad Eggleston: I did, I did, I didn't, didn't hate it. But I mean, that's, that's the thing is that like
• 1:14:47
  Tad Eggleston: every theater experience is different, and it… you have less control over them. So, like, I don't ever want them to go away, but I think… I think becoming precious about… just like, you know, I love physical comics.
• 1:15:03
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, the reason I ask for a PDF is, like.
• 1:15:07
  Tad Eggleston: I only have so much space. Now, from you guys, I was gonna buy your comic anyway, it was because I want to spend money on your comic.
• 1:15:14
  Generoso Fierro: That'.
• 1:15:15
  Tad Eggleston: And I don't have time to spend money on the comic yet, guys.
• 1:15:18
  Generoso Fierro: No, it's okay. We're glad to, we're glad to send you a copy. We.
• 1:15:22
  Tad Eggleston: But half the reason that I ask, like, most people for PDFs is, like, I've got limited amounts of space.
• 1:15:29
  Generoso Fierro: Sure.
• 1:15:29
  Tad Eggleston: Like, if I if I'm doing everything physical, like.
• 1:15:34
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know where the dog will sit.
• 1:15:37
  Generoso Fierro: Understood.
• 1:15:37
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 1:15:38
  Generoso Fierro: No, no, no, because again, for being DJs for as many years as we are, we have
• 1:15:42
  Generoso Fierro: Conservatively, I think over 5,000 pieces of vinyl in the house. Right. Yeah, it gets to be.
• 1:15:48
  Tad Eggleston: I probably… I probably only have… 4 or 500 vinyl.
• 1:15:56
  Tad Eggleston: But I ran a music department at Best Buy during the height of the CD era, and the time where Best Buy was where you bought your music. And not just a music department, the largest music department Best Buy had. So, like, we had the deep dive stuff. We had the imports. So I probably have close to 5,000 CDs.
• 1:16:18
  Generoso Fierro: That's cool. Yeah.
• 1:16:19
  Tad Eggleston: That's cool.
• 1:16:21
  Generoso Fierro: But that's, that's part of it. You just can only have so much media and then overall, yeah.
• 1:16:25
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I had to build special selves to put my CDs up.
• 1:16:29
  Generoso Fierro: Makes sense.
• 1:16:31
  Tad Eggleston: 'Cause… there wasn't room for the other shelves that I used to have to put them on.
• 1:16:38
  Generoso Fierro: But how?
• 1:16:38
  Tad Eggleston: I saw a place where I could build shelves, so I did.
• 1:16:43
  Generoso Fierro: Alrighty.
• 1:16:43
  Tad Eggleston: But I feel like you guys know this too. I can't imagine what it must be like for you guys when you move.
• 1:16:49
  Tad Eggleston: Because, like, with… between the vinyl, and the posters, and the artwork, and the… It's a lot.
• 1:16:59
  Generoso Fierro: It's a lot. We did it a couple times recently, and it's definitely a struggle when you're not firmly entrenched in a place. So yeah, no, we'd love to cut down, but we donate a lot.
• 1:17:09
  Tad Eggleston: Well, except, except, like, I always say I'd love to cut down, and then it's like I'm holding it and going, but not this one.
• 1:17:18
  Generoso Fierro: Boom!
• 1:17:18
  Tad Eggleston: And not this one.
• 1:17:20
  Tad Eggleston: And not this one. Like the Marie Kondo, does it bring you joy? Yes. Yes, it does. It all brings me joy. Even if I haven't played it in 10 years, knowing that it's up on the shelf brings me joy.
• 1:17:32
  Generoso Fierro: No, I understand. No. Yeah.
• 1:17:37
  Tad Eggleston: So, this has been fabulous, it always has. You've got to run. I need to return a phone call. We'll have to get together again sometime soon, and maybe I'll try to road trip your way, and we'll go to a ball game or something.
• 1:17:50
  Generoso Fierro: That'd be lovely to have a nice long baseball conversation sometime in the future.
• 1:17:53
  Tad Eggleston: Exactly.
• 1:17:54
  Generoso Fierro: Okay.
• 1:17:54
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, we had we had a nice long baseball conversation.
• 1:17:58
  Generoso Fierro: Right here.
• 1:17:59
  Tad Eggleston: You guys are welcome to text me and say, hey, do you want to Zoom and talk baseball? I will do that at the drop of a hat.
• 1:18:06
  Generoso Fierro: Absolutely.
• 1:18:08
  Tad Eggleston: Doesn't need to be planned out.
• 1:18:09
  Generoso Fierro: No.
• 1:18:10
  Tad Eggleston: You're in a I feel like talking baseball.
• 1:18:13
  Generoso Fierro: Your pleasure. It would be.
• 1:18:15
  Tad Eggleston: Surprise!
• 1:18:16
  Generoso Fierro: The main conversation in this house without screamings.
• 1:18:22
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 1:18:22
  Generoso Fierro: This has been a blast. Thank you.
• 1:18:24
  Tad Eggleston: For Lilia, Lilia and Generoso, their new book is The Interpretant.
• 1:18:30
  Tad Eggleston: and it's so good. Go pick it up at your finer bookstores, Lion's tooth in Milwaukee, howling pages in in Chicago.
• 1:18:40
  Tad Eggleston: I'm certain some other ones…
• 1:18:42
  Generoso Fierro: Darling.
• 1:18:42
  Tad Eggleston: Domino has them, or if you hit their link tree, they have links to all the places that are selling them online. So you can pick out who to buy any of their books from.
• 1:18:55
  Tad Eggleston: Oh.
• 1:18:57
  Generoso Fierro: And we also put up a spiffy new website too.
• 1:18:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 1:19:00
  Generoso Fierro: Finally, a.
• 1:19:01
  Tad Eggleston: So.
• 1:19:01
  Generoso Fierro: Yes, and so it also has a list of the retailers at the bottom.
• 1:19:05
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, I did see that. The spiffy new website, plasticgrapes.org.
• 1:19:11
  Generoso Fierro: Yes, we spent many, Lily spent, I should say, like hundreds of hours on it. Now, when we finished the book, there's five books in, we're like, the link trees definitely helps having the social media channels, but let's make like a very basic website. And Lily made this really pretty little website. And yeah, so that's plasticgrapes.org for all of your plasticgrapes.org.
• 1:19:34
  Generoso Fierro: That's right. Thanks, Todd!
• 1:19:35
  Tad Eggleston: And links to to your interviews at Inc. Nineteen. So, you know.
• 1:19:39
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:19:40
  Tad Eggleston: A a a a one one stop shop.
• 1:19:43
  Tad Eggleston: For the Fieros.
• 1:19:45
  Generoso Fierro: And the last thing, our conversations, something we've been really proud of over the last year is we've been doing interviews of other comics creators for canon.
• 1:19:54
  Generoso Fierro: which was just Eisner nominated. It just got nominated for the Eisner, and we've been, our most recent ones with Dustin Holland, pick up Lords of Pagana, really great interpretation, and there's links, there's going to be links to that as well on the website, so yeah.
• 1:20:11
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna have to go pick that up, and I, like, email with Dustin regularly, because he's also a comics publicist, but I haven't actually pinned him down to be on the show yet. I need to remember to do that.
• 1:20:23
  Generoso Fierro: Please do so. He's great. We love Dust.
• 1:20:25
  Tad Eggleston: Because, like, literally one of the first emails I sent after I got a publicity email was I shot back a photo of my copy of his dog head.
• 1:20:34
  Generoso Fierro: Sunset.
• 1:20:34
  Tad Eggleston: Dog had her, yeah, dog had sunset. And I'm like, are you this Dustin Holland? He's like.
• 1:20:40
  Generoso Fierro: He's great to talk to, and Chad Bill you, by the way, if you don't.
• 1:20:44
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I love Chad. Chad's been on.
• 1:20:46
  Generoso Fierro: Yeah, I love.
• 1:20:46
  Tad Eggleston: chat.
• 1:20:47
  Generoso Fierro: He's awesome. So, yeah, great, great possible future interviews.
• 1:20:51
  Tad Eggleston: He's, he, he's another one that has, you gotta, I managed to catch him while he was in the States the last time he was on.
• 1:20:57
  Generoso Fierro: Mmh.
• 1:20:58
  Tad Eggleston: Cause it was, it was relative, cause he, he, I don't think he came out the last time because.
• 1:21:03
  Tad Eggleston: go figure, people aren't coming to the United States the way they used to, particularly if they don't have white skin. I don't know why… the Supreme Court says there's a big nothing burger. That was their thing yesterday.
• 1:21:15
  Tad Eggleston: But,
• 1:21:16
  Tad Eggleston: Chad's great, it's just I can only schedule interviews with him when, when I can work the Amsterdam.
• 1:21:24
  Tad Eggleston: But I was… literally, he was on my list of people to email this week, so now he went higher, because…
• 1:21:31
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I gotta… I gotta figure out where we're at with, with the, the, the re-up.
• 1:21:37
  Tad Eggleston: Is there a new issue yet?
• 1:21:39
  Tad Eggleston: So.
• 1:21:42
  Tad Eggleston: Anyway, thank you guys so much for 22 panels. This has been Lilia and Generoso, and we will see you after the next page.