Hello, I'm Dana Stevens, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, Shalame Goes Electric Edition.

It's Wednesday, January 22nd, 2024, and this week we'll be discussing,

first off, a complete unknown, the new film directed by James Mangold that stars Timothy

Chalamee as Bob Dylan, specifically focusing on the moment in the 60s when Dylan went from

rising folk balladeer to confirmed rock star. We will also talk about On Call, a new cop show on prime video that's

executive produced by old school broadcast TV guru Dick Wolf, the creator of Law and Order

and its many spinoffs. Finally, we will celebrate and mourn and puzzle over the enigmatic life's

work of the great filmmaker David Lynch, dead last week at the age of 78.

I am joined today after a few weeks of absence by critic Stephen Metcalf, now back from his three-week-long sojourn in Australia.

Hey, Stephen.

Hey.

I have so many questions about Australia, but I'm hoping that you will maybe later on in the show,

maybe in your endorsement segment, give us a little bit of the tales of what you did there. I got answers. It is so, so nice to have you back. We missed you. Thank you. Yeah, we missed you. I want to know if you're forever changed. I want to know, I know you saw a cucobura. I want to know how many kangaroos you saw. I want all the cliches. I got them. I'm packing. Did you bring us each a flatway? No, you know, it's no longer the flat white. Now it's the piccolo. Oh. Well, you mean that's the new coffee trend? I mean, to the extent that the first time I went to Melbourne, I heard the words flat white for the first time in my life. This time I went back, ordered a flat white, and they certainly have them. But the thing that I, the thing that was new to me, the coffee trend that was new to me was the piccolo. I mean, has it reached these shores? I feel like I haven't encountered it. No, what's a piccolo? I assume it's small in some way. Is it like a

cortato but cortado or courtadoer? It's cortado or a version of the cortato, but it's instead of it being

it's a restretto pull, I believe, and then very little milk. But if you can tell me the difference

between an espresso and a restretto, you're a better man than I. All right, fantastic. That's throw out Bob Dylan and

David Lynch and just talk coffee. All right. Also joining us as you hear back in Los Angeles

is our beloved Julia Turner, a fellow at the Annenberg School of Journalism. Hey, Julia.

Hello, hello. And a note to listeners, if you hear any clanking in the background when I'm speaking, it's because it's in the 20s here in New York and my building radiator is clanking itself on. There's really nothing I can do about that background noise, so I apologize. All right, well, it's the big three back again.

I'm so very happy to have both of you on the mic.

So let's dig in.

The director James Mangold is probably best known for the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, which won Reese Witherspoon and Academy Award for Best Actress as June Carter Cash.

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