Serious Introspection special episode @ Nida - 'The Shutout'

posted: 10 July, 2019

There's some cliché about old dogs and new tricks that I always mangle, but clichés are better when stated incorrectly. It's been over three years since I (John) hosted a regular live talk show with Justin and Ernest, but we brought the act out again for a special reunion performance at the Nida Art Colony's ninth inter-format symposium, 'On the Fluidity of Humour and Absurdity' in Nida, Lithuania. It was fun to do it again, and we were joined by guest Dafna Maimon, old friend Vytautas Michelkevičius, and some random people from the audience. This was presented as the 'lounge' event after a long day of art symposium presentations, performances, and talks, so the audience, all crowded into a small room with a bunch of absurdly constructed furniture courtesy of Justin, was pretty exhausted. But yet a stronger sense of anarchy existed here than at any of our performances in Finland; at least audience members took to the stage, someone fell through a table, and someone tried to set me on fire.

Anyway, here it is. We didn't have the full A/V resources of Mad House available, but we did the best we could, and the first 25 minutes or so are pretty fun at least. I meant what I said –– that the world doesn't need another show of three white men on stage –– and thus I don't think we are likely to bring back the show any time soon, if ever. (Though we remain available for hire, for private events). 


Serious Introspection
with John W. Fail was a live show in Helsinki, Finland from 2015-2016. No one is really sure why John hosted a talk show, but a lot of strange things have happened in the universe and this is ultimately pretty insignificant. The show took place at Mad House Helsinki's Ihana Baari, and was free to attend. You know, we did eight shows in the first season and it was pretty time-consuming, but we were excited to come back for eight more in 2016. It's all archived here. Each week, John along with hype man Justin Tyler Tate, interviewed people about their creative process and tried to deliver a direct, communicative experience about art and performance. We tried our best to entertain. We've made videos available from all episodes of the show here for you to watch. The show is indefinitely on hiatus as Justin moved away and other projects took over. We also will occasionally post audio podcasts when we get the time to go more in-depth with people, outside of the public show. The videos aren't always perfect and the audio even less so, but we hope you still enjoy them. But wait, there's more! We are still available, in theory to be booked for parties, wedding, bar mitzvahs and other events. We will come to your event and offer our services for hosting, hyping and media specialisation (live tweeting) for a variable fee. The for-profit arm of Serious Introspection is called SI Services and we're up for anything, really! Now that we all live in different places, it's probably going to be quite an ordeal just to have three white guys host your kid's birthday party. But please believe me when I say that we would really, really love to do this. If you'd like to find out more about Serious Introspection, you can start by watching these episodes and seeing if it's your cup of tea. We have a Facebook page which we use to post info about the upcoming shows and videos as they are released. We have made the show available as a podcast where people get Podcasts, generally iTunes or Stitcher. Try the Overcast app, it's really nice. The hashtag #SeriousIntrospection contains the running stream of live tweets from our media specialist Ernest Truely (and anyone else who might contribute). So yeah, that's it, pretty much. We will announce future events and SI-related matters here so feel free to check back any time. We're trying to keep this page simple, if for no other reason than our cup runneth over with websites already.