Buenos tardes or dias depending on your listening time…in this episode: The Wil Wheaton conundrum, Mar de Frades Alberiño, and Sandstone. So grab your Starfleet Academy acceptance letter and your Antonio Banderas action figure, it’s time for Geekery and Wine:
The Geek Side
This week we pose a question: Why do Wil Wheaton’s televised characters so many times seem to come off as a smug ass-hats?
First Mr. Wheaton’s selective CV.
Of course, the erstwhile Wesley Crusher on Star Trek the Next Generation, lately, cartoon voice-over workhorse in such shows as Teen Titans Go!, Transformers and Guardians of the Galaxy, audiobook narrator extraordinaire, tabletop gaming wizard and teacher and smaller roles on shows on the SyFy network as well as playing himself on the Big Bang Theory.
But where I want to start today is The Wil Wheaton Project.
I watched The Wil Wheaton Project in the summer of 2014 on SyFy and I wanted to like it…scratch that , I wanted to love it. It was a weekly clip/sketch/nerd news show with the likable Wil Wheaton as host. If you’re curious about it, the first 9 episodes are on YouTube.
This should have been the perfect vehicle for Wil. He has long been known as something of a nerd demigod! He was voted in as fictional co-president (with author Cory Doctorow) of The Oasis is Ernest Cline's Ready Player One.
He comes across as a nice guy and patient teacher in his web series Table Top.
He was a fantastic entertainer at w00tstock! A variety show he produced with Adam Savage and Paul and Storm during San Diego Comic Con. He performed standup, a notoriously tough gig. And he was awesome at it.
His personal mantra is “Don’t be a dick.”
So, what’s the problem?
Every time on The Wil Wheaton Project he said, “Nerds!” it was meant to be an “all of us together,” statement, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt either ironic (ala hipster) or like name-calling. Something middle-aged nerds grew up with and still makes one’s skin crawl.
When Nerd Culture or Comic-Con Culture was on the rise, the biggest thing it had going for it was that the Geek world wanted everyone to be able to love the media that they loved without shame. If Dungeons & Dragons was your jam…great. If My Little Pony was the song that your heart sang…super. But as he talked about how some shows were being canceled and how some things didn’t turn out the way the Nerd World at large had hoped, he sounded critical. And it just shouldn’t be that way!
The fact that a show was canceled after just a single season, doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t great, or that it didn’t have a dedicated fan base that loved it to pieces.
Two such examples, The Middleman by Javier Grillo Marxauch and the venerable Firefly by Joss Whedon.
On the character acting side, the roles he keeps getting cast in aren’t helping. On SyFy, he played the evil Alexander Rook on Dark Matter, his beard taunting us with its conspicuous, bald patch front-and-center. Going back further he played Dr. Isaac Perrish on Eureka, playing the jerky-geek we all prayed we didn’t project onto the world while tormenting the more likable scientists.
And on The Big Bang Theory he is playing himself. Even then he tends toward douchebaggery. “62 mortal enemies since the newly added Brent Spiner.”
In that show, he gave The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon his last mint-in-package action figure of himself.
But is he likable there only because he’s the foil to the annoyingly-flawed Sheldon Cooper?
I think part of the problem is that old Hollywood quote about sincerity, “Once you can fake that, you can do anything.”
And yet Wil isn’t faking. He is the genuine goods!
I was at Denver Comic-Con in 2013 with my kids and heard him offering the kindest most heartfelt advice to a girl on how he responded to being called a nerd.
I was THERE. I experienced that in REAL TIME.
So, again, I ask, why the negative?
Could it be latent jealousy? He had the role most kids dream of as Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation and as I’ve been watching Next Gen with my daughter, who is a senior in high school, I see what a wonderful window into the Star Trek universe his performance provided for her.
…and then he decided to walk away, as to not be pigeon-holed. Anyone who knows anything about acting knows that to be type-cast is a career death sentence. This was probably a smart move. He talks about it in his biography Just a Geek.
And yet… And yet…
The Nerd Collective said, “He walked away from us. He left our fold because he wanted to go be with the popular kids (i.e. have a varied career).”
Maybe the tribe never forgave him. Maybe, now, it seems like he is the ex that treated you poorly and now wants so desperately to get back with you because they say “I didn’t know how great I had it while I was with you.”
Perhaps I am the wrong person to ask as I am a fan of his. A true fan. Once at a place called Nerd HQ at Comic-Con, I went over and stood right next to him as he played some cool board game with a group of folks at one of the bar tables. I couldn’t speak to him. Wil Wheaton was PLAYING a game, for gosh sakes! What kind of tool would interrupt that?
And as many know, Wil is also an amazing audiobook narrator. My favorites are Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, which I discussed in a previous episode and Redshirts by John Scalzi. Redshirts plays with the Star Trek trope of those that beam down with the captain on away missions being expendable and rather prone to injury and death and Scalzi just runs with it. Wil’s connection to the Star Trek universe gives it a wonderful sense of being in on the joke. I love it and I laughed out loud when I listened to it.
Just how good is he? Well, he’s won two Audie Awards, which is the audiobook equivalent of an Oscar. If you think you might like to hear him do non-fiction check out Masters of Doom by David Kushner. It’s an immersive story about what basically is the genesis of the 1st person shooter genre.
Wil’s narrative style has been described by John Scalzi as a “Narrator of Clarity” as opposed to a “Narrator of Expression.” When I was at New York Comic-Con a few years ago I got to hear Scalzi himself break down how he views narration and it was really interesting. A Narrator of Clarity brings across the ideas and images of the author in a wonderful way, yet doesn’t necessarily do that by changing their voice to a large degree. Those that are the Narrator-of-10,000-voices types are Narrators of Expression. And I see where Scalzi’s coming from. Wil’s characters themselves aren’t all that different from one another, they all sound like Wil Wheaton…and yet…they are all very distinct.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention more current events:
On May 9th, 2018 Wil wrote a blog about dealing with chronic depression, and it is incredibly powerful. The title is: My name is Wil Wheaton, I live with chronic depression and I am not ashamed.
I just hope his puzzle gets figured out. Actors face it all the time: the discrepancy between the characters they create and who they really are causes a disconnect. Maybe he should start his own production company.
When I was onstage in college I had a similar problem. I was generally cast as Lotharios in plays and operas, but I didn’t usually feel that way. But after a long enough period of time having people tell you, “this is what you are” I can understand the impulse to simply say, “Fine, you know what, if that’s all I can be in your eyes, here you go! I’ll be that!”
But my goodness, it sounds like the origin story of a supervillain. Or at least a smug ass-hat.
The Wine Side – Mar de Frades Albariño
This episode’s wine is a white. And it comes with a story. Ah, but don’t they all?
We moved to Massachusetts from Colorado about 3 years ago. And that move was, truth be told, expensive. Since that was the case, any summer vacations we had taken were close to where we lived. We had gone to Boston many times. We’d driven to Washington, DC. We’d even gone to western Connecticut once in the fall for Gilmore Girls Fan Fest! (more about that in a later episode).
And then a year and a half ago we’d met some new friends in our small New England town and had them over for dinner one night. And the tales they had to tell of their family vacations were amazing! They had taken their 3 daughters to Thailand, the European continent, Great Britain and others, having amazing adventures. They were inspiring on so many levels. And the planning it must have taken to make all that happen…sheesh! I was very jealous.
My wife was jealous, too.
And one thing I should note is that my wife is very competitive!
A succession of phrases began appearing in the Elliott household.
“Wow, I can’t believe they did all that.”
Followed by, “Could WE do that?”
And then: “We SHOULD do that.”
And ultimately: “Our daughter is only going to be in high school a short time we need to do a trip like that!”
So, we started saving up. Then we started planning. It finally came down to Spain. My wife had been a foreign exchange student there and the two of us had been with friends in our 20’s. Through a lot of (very competitive) comparison shopping, all the elements came into place.
While in Spain we were in the city of Malaga on the Mediterranean coast. FYI, it is also the birthplace of Pablo Picasso and the hometown of actor Antonio Banderas, so I immediately felt more handsome and artistic just by being there.
In the evening we were walking around the city center when we came across a restaurant that we’d had dinner at on our previous trip some 15 years ago. A little place called Lo Gueno and we had a wonderful wine called Mar De Frades it was labeled a “North Atlantic Albariño.” I’d heard of Alberiño’s before but not been too familiar with them. Martin Codex was one I knew. It was a hot day, and the wine was cool. It was dry and tasted a little like white grapefruit. You could smell the ocean in it and at the end there was something of a metallic taste at the edges of your tongue, but it wasn’t unpleasant.
But what I really liked best about it was the expression it put on my wife’s face. A radiant smile and look as though she had found Her Happy Place.
Later on, we walked toward the bay of Malaga with a Ferris wheel by the sea and I looked over and saw a billboard for the exact wine we’d had that evening. How cool!
And so, with that kind of positive experience and repetition…hey, I can be taught. But the biggest thing was, I wanted to figure out how to take my wife on a mini-vacation to Spain throughout the year. So, my mission was to track down Mar de Frades in the US of A.
Finding it was tricky at least from my home in Massachusetts.
I ended up finding it at internationalwineshop.com for about $24 dollars a bottle. A little expensive for a white, but a bargain as a Spanish vacation in a bottle.
Audio Goodness – Sandstone
I’m gonna start by saying that this section could have been narrated like this instead “Audio Goodness???” Because this is largely weird.
It goes back to the summer of 2012.
My wife said to me, “You’re waiting and wondering what to do next, you could knock this out very quickly. Why not?”
What she was talking about was a 12,400-word short story/novella called Sandstone.
So, I didn’t exactly read it very closely ooooor all the way through before deciding to do this. And upon closer inspection…well, it didn’t seem very solid. As a performer and perfectionist I immediately think, “Ok, it must be me. This is unrecognized genius and I am simply not equipped to understand it. BUT, once I perform it the subtleties of the piece will reveal themselves to me. It’s just like when I would sing in college or professional choirs! The really hard stuff ends up being the most rewarding, but at the start, it is always difficult to understand. That understanding is gained through living with the piece.
So, I worked at it. I read and re-read the piece. I analyzed the characters on a deep level. I spent some serious TIME on this baby. From a “knock-this-out quickly standpoint…erm…it wasn’t.”
I finished the initial recording.
I located my errors and went back and corrected them.
I did the final smoothing and filtering to make it all sound oh-so-sweet.
And…
This was not good.
This was a prosaic sketch. Something to build upon…but not a satisfying story.
I really do hope I’m wrong. I hope that many years down the line someone will listen to this blog and have the same reaction to it as today’s readers do when Decca’s Dick Rowe apocryphally dismissed The Beatles back in 1962 saying to their manager "Guitar groups are on their way out, Mr. Epstein."
My interactions with the author were, odd to say the least.
The first message was, “I’m attaching the text. Thanks for sending me your email. Please see the following link for music ideas.”
Three weeks before the due date I got an email from the author asking “How progress was going.”
Three days before the due date I get a message saying, “I hope your work is turning out well. I've started to adapt Sandstone into the workings of a novel. It's very slow going. I guess I'm not a natural writer. Anyhow, please keep me posted on how it's going.”
Dude, the due date is literally later in the week. You can’t wait that long to hear the finished product?
I also noticed that the name of the author on the work and the name on the contract were not the same.
That’s not all that unusual, many authors have pen names.
Next, I get:
Hi Colby,
Good news delivery. Thanks. I love audiobooks, but I admit it was different hearing your sample. I'm working to put my ego aside before going over the whole thing. Also as an fyi, as it might go to your benefit, since you're close to this text right now, I've copylefted the sale version. Please have a look-- http://authorsname.com/free
And all the best w/ your work, too.
Talk soon,
This keeps getting more and more bizarre. Am I living in a thriller and not realizing it until it’s too late?
I then get notes on how he “liked the sibilants I used and could I change a few things and not to worry, he was just going to rewrite this in the next version.”
Sigh…So this wasn’t ever going make money or be amazing…this warped wanna-be author has no idea what he is doing or why.
Ultimately, the recording gets done and uploaded to the site. I think I am done.
And then after receiving the recording on the site, he sent me a few more notes.
Now, about those notes:
From a philosophical aspect, one could make the argument of “Keeping the mistakes” is a time-honored tradition in jazz. Like Miles Davis in Kind of Blue, there is a phrase in So, What? that is blown (the note is missed), but Miles keeps it in the recording. It feels raw and natural. Could I make this argument in audiobooks? Weeeeeell.
But really, it is a pain to change things in a recording. Try as you might, a keen ear will note the differences in the first recording and the follow-up. It could be something as beyond your control as the barometric pressure that day. And it sucks, going back and listening to the original recording and doing what is basically an impression of yourself re-doing the line. And if you know, up-front, that this project was an amateur using you for batting practice and it isn’t going anywhere it feels like a fool’s errand.
The error: Within the story, the author used the word f-r-i-s-s-o-n, I pronounced it fri-zhun, instead of free-zohn. (It is a French word and the author was absolutely correct)
I even spoke to my friend Zack an amazing English/Language Arts teacher who taught AP Lit and Composition and asked him how he would pronounce this word, and he agreed with me.
But here it is: I was so fed up with what I felt was the nonsensical nature of the work, and knowing that punching in was going to mar the work yet further for one minor mispronunciation.
…so, I said “No,”
I just needed to move on.
Yet I get still more bizarre emails from this person. I won’t trouble you dear listener with all the craziness, but I will say, the second to last email I got from this author had “Any help?” in the subject line.
The message was this:
“Form: hello, I have a court date in Hugo at 9:30a tuesday (21st) I can pay fuel charges and something for your time. Can you move a muscle?”
And finally, the last email I got from the author said, “Can you send me the text of Sandstone, I need it?”
The text of the story…he sent me…in…his…first…email.
What did I learn? I really have to have a strong gut-feeling for a piece in order to narrate it. I work slowly and methodically and think about things to an insane degree. And if it is a work that will be out there for YEARS and I will be living with for a MONTH of creation minimum, it had better be…if not the song of my soul…at least one that "It's got a good beat and you can dance to it."
Additionally, although my wife is wonderful in so many ways, choosing the artistic work I produce is not in her skill set. Nor should it be. I got lazy and wanted someone to tell me what to do next because then I wouldn’t have to take the knocks if it wasn’t ridiculously successful.
I am the producer.
I am the business owner.
It is my call. Make the call confidently and live with the consequences.
Final tally: Since August 2012, Sandstone has sold 11 copies. Earning $19.11. It is a 68-minute recording. It takes roughly 3 times that amount of time to edit, proof and master in addition to the actual finished runtime. So, figure 204 minutes or 3 hours and 24 minutes. That is about…$6.40 per hour…and minimum wage is $7.25. I learned a valuable lesson. That, I suppose, is worth something.
You can find Sandstone on Audible…if you REALLY feel like you have to. But, if you don’t, yeah, I get that too.
Next Time on Geekery and Wine: Betrayal at the House on the Hill, Charumba , and Cross Dressing.
Until then…
My Geeks
My Nerds
My dear, dear friends…
Adieu
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