THIS IS NOW

How it started, How it's going

Aug 05, 2024

We’re stoked to announce a new video project titled THIS IS NOW, destined to live right here on Substack. In short, it’s an non-consumerist travel show—a series less concerned with exotic places you’ll never actually visit and more about the strange situations you can get yourself into in the most ordinary of places. It’s about wanderlust and the fun that can be had without really trying. Accidental tourism? Well, kind of.

I’ve long been inspired by the French words flâneur and dérive which embody a way of seeing and moving through the world that is both attentive and reflective, finding meaning and beauty in the everyday experiences of wandering. And that’s us. That’s the plan. We’ll go places open to situations, but no promises of set interviews or forced reality TV stressors, and light on the tropes endemic to travel TV. Of course, we won’t avoid the paradoxical nature of people in the world—both engaged and disengaged, yearning for change yet numbed by the soothing feed of targeted content/propaganda—but we’ll cross that bridge if/when we get there.

If that sounds like a half-baked idea for a show, well, it is, but this on-screen life of mine always has been. If you are unfamiliar with me, let’s rewind 20 years to the beginning of The Vice Guide to Travel, an idea dreamt up by Shane Smith, Eddy Moretti, and Spike Jonze that would change all of our lives.

Mind you, this was before streaming video existed on the internet, and our plan was to release the content freely on DVDs that would accompany specific issues of VICE the magazine, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let’s get back to me.

The question often arises: how did I become the first VICE video host? An integral part of the story is my dad, who insisted that I have adult clothes and arranged for me to get them handmade in Hong Kong. One rarely realizes, except in hindsight, that your parents are actually doing you a solid when you think they are just being old-fashioned. Flash forward a decade, and I decided to wear one of the pieces, a navy double-breasted blazer that I never really liked but was in pristine condition, to the VICE office on North 10th in Williamsburg as a lark. I jokingly referred to my reasoning as a “Conservative Friday” event. At lunchtime, I went out with the other “salesdudes” to Bedford Avenue.

Quick aside: every time I'm asked to appear in a documentary about VICE, I always pitch that the thing VICE changed more about modern media than just about anything was advertising as related to video content. Erik Lavoie, John Martin, Ryan Duffy, Bryce Franich, and Thobey Campion are the ones that forged the blueprint for monetizing streaming content on the internet. They made everything possible for us and pretty much everybody else.

But back to that day in 2004 on the street in Brooklyn. A New York Magazine photographer was out snapping photos of hipsters and noticed me dressed up like Bob Barker on a day-drinking binge, accompanied by a cohort of vastly cooler, younger, and more fashionable VICE lads, and quite unexpectedly asked to take photos of my outfit. When published, NYM proclaimed a new fashion trend in Williamsburg!

The timing of that whisper of publicity was enough for Shane and Eddy to decide that I should go to the City of God favela in Rio and host the episode of the first ever VICE video, dressed in the aforementioned blazer and cheap aviator sunglasses. I was like, okay. NBD. Once in Rio de Janeiro, we were warned not to go to the favelas with cameras because a journalist had recently been murdered by being placed in a tower of burning tires. That was the first time I ever uttered "mercy" on camera, a quip I’ve become well associated with. But an interesting thing happened: the outfit actually protected me from danger.

Again, we were still planning on releasing our content on DVDs as VICE travel stories. After Rio, we pushed on to Europe looking to buy dirty bombs, etc. You know, run-of-the-mill journalism. It wasn’t until we were set to depart Bulgaria for Lebanon to powwow with Hezbollah in July 2005 that Tom Freston called Shane and told us production needed to stand down. It was the day after the 7/7 London bombings. Viacom was worried they'd be liable if we got killed out in the world with MTV releases in our pockets. In order to continue with the project, we’d need to sign a lot more legal papers. As I remember, we basically ignored the directive and went to Lebanon anyway. After our return stateside, the idea of making DVDs ran into a roadblock, so after we signed a bunch more papers, MTV footed the bill to literally invent streaming video. Just for us! I know it will seem impossible to imagine, but no web-based video players existed—not for news, not for movies, not for cat videos. The furthest along were porn sites where you could download a DVD. That was a model we considered; I even spoke to Larry Flynt about it, but MTV carried the day and a new startup named Brightcove came to the rescue birthing VBS.TV. Everything changed after that, and when I talk about our ad sales guys making it happen, this is what I'm on about: VICE invented pre-roll ads. Yet another black mark for VICE in the media landscape!

All that, and I know it's a lot for a first Substack post, is a way to say I’ve been thinking about stories and “mingling in b-roll” for a long time. I’ve parlayed the blazer and aviator sunglasses guise into a career advising people on how to make something that feel less like a TV show and more like an experience the viewer is sharing, which is partly why people still regularly ask if I’d be interested in being on camera. More often than not, I say no. That was until the idea for THIS IS NOW, pitched by my partners as something without corporate oversight or consumer concern, grabbed my attention. Playing around with cameras and expectations has long been the dream job for me but it’s rare one is encouraged to try something even quasi original. I hope you’ll be interested enough, despite my inherent digressions, to follow along and see what we can get up to by subscribing to the feed and/or sharing our work with your friends. Rest assured there will be plenty more stories.

Last year, Palehound released a song I like called Independence Day that references paths taken.