LiquidAssets.tv Blog

Dear LiquidAssets.tv Divers,

As you all know by now Hurricane Ike played havoc on our playground. Luckily Provo fared OK and we did move the boat to the Dominican Republic for safety, it is due back to the Turks & Caicos mid-week. As long as the airport is open (no word yet) we will be back on track for Weeks #2, 3 and 4. My guess is that it is already open and we are doing research now.

We here at LiquidAssets.tv along with our sponsors have come up with a plan to help a great dive destination that is in need. We are all going to be there enjoying the diving and we want to give back, we hope after realizing our plan and goal that you feel the same. I have ordered 60 t-shirts with Turks & Caicos/Hurricane Ike Clean Up Crew on them and we want to ask for your help. On the normal itinerary we make two dives on Friday before returning to port; our plan is to bypass those dives and return to port after the night dive Thursday night and wake up Friday morning and hit the island to help clean up. We as divers and human beings have a responsibility to help maintain a great dive destination for generations to come and we have a golden opportunity. We will have the film crew helping on the clean up and filming it as well.

I have received approval from the Publisher of Scuba Diving Magazine to put the cleanup effort video on Scuba Diving TV to show divers that the Turks & Caicos wants and is getting ready for business and diving as usual. We will also put this on our site, YouTube and other media outlets to help promote tourism back to this great destination. You will need to bring a pair of gloves and some shoes that you don’t mind ruining and we will provide the clean up T-shirts for you all.

I know this is your holiday but we are only asking you to forgo two dives to help us help the people of the Turks & Caicos islands. Please let me know if you are want to be a part of this by the end of the day if possible. If everyone does not agree to forgo those dives we will have to make some dive plans for you but I truly hope we all do what we can to get these islands back on track. We are already there, let’s be a good ambassador for humanity and our country, we can help!

Sincerely,
Randy Harris
Executive Producer

The crew of LiquidAssets.tv would like to thank the kind and generous folks at Scubapro | UWATEC for contributing to our efforts. We encourage you to visit their web site and purchase their quality products.

Wow.

Just, wow.

For any of you who have been thinking about coming along and want to grab one of the last few spaces left, trust me on this one - week three just got a whole lot more interesting, and it was off the chain to begin with.

I don’t want to spoil it, but I will tell you it has a hell of a lot to do with the best record I bought in 1999, and certainly one of the best rock records of the last 10 years.

Trust me.

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO: “Under It All” - New American Shame

California represents all the best and worst about America. It’s big, wide, varied, has so much opportunity. It’s crime-ridden, choked with suburbs, stuffed with silicone, sitting in gridlock traffic and tanned to a golden brown. It’s harsh and unforgiving. It’s laid back and easygoing. It is the multicultural face of this country, from East L.A. to Beverly Hills, from Orange County to South Central. It has mountains and deserts, snowy peaks and a surf break that is legendary. There is everything to love and hate in California. I choose to love it. All of it.

Welcome to the jungle, indeed.

I arrived at my third Long Beach Scuba Show on friday morning via LAX. I had to chuckle as I landed - the last time I was touching the runway here was on my way to Australia to continue the next leg of filming for the new high-definition DVD for Explorer Ventures. This time around, as the wheels engaged and I was politely asked (for the 9th time) to put my seat belt on and straighten my seat back cushion, Nick Lucey and I were trying our best to decompress from a furiously productive creative session for Into The Drink.

Nick met up with the rest of the Scuba Diving Magazine cartel when we left the terminal and I chose to spend some time in the Silver Lake section of LA with my best friend whose wedding party, incidentally, I cannot be in because I’ll be in Turks churning out some cutting-edge television for the masses. It’s one of those moments that I’ve come to sadly accept as part of what I do for a living, the inability to be present at crucial moments in the lives of the people I love the most. I am lucky that those same people not only forgive me my absence, they support me with a can-I-give-you-a-ride-to-the-airport enthusiasm.

One of my favorite things to do when I’m at Nate’s house is to wake up early and sit on his veranda that looks over the city and watch it come alive as the sun rises. Los Angeles is no less busy than New York or Chicago or Boston; but dammit if it doesn’t come into itself with the most gentle, determined spirit. It’s amazing to watch. Manhattan rushes; Los Angeles is more methodical. But on either side of the country, at the end of the day the same amount of work gets done. It’s something I always take home with me when I’m out here; rising to meet the day with the sun in your heart and a desire to kick professional ass aren’t incongruous ideas.

Long Beach is no different. The Scuba Show had record numbers of people walk through the doors of the Convention Center, but insomuch as we noticed the huge amount of traffic throughout the trade show floor, there was nothing hurried about it. Almost everyone had a smile on their face, and for every hater that felt the need to come by our booth and explain to us why our project will fail because, ahem, their own project failed, there were hundreds more who kept coming back to us to sit and chat and express their excitement for what we’re doing. I have never seen this kind of how-can-I-get-involved attitude anywhere in the country. People wanted to know what they could do to be a part of LiquidAssets.tv, whether it be getting the buzz out in conversation with friends or networking with like-minded people. At Long Beach more than at any other show I watched people take ownership over LiquidAssets.tv in a way that transcended just the four weeks of shooting. We realized here that this is an idea, a company, a collective - that is able to (and will) reach beyond borders and creative territory that we hadn’t even thought of. Turns out we just needed to go West to find that out.

I don’t know if it’s the lack of bad weather or the luxury of a year-round local diving season, but you people rock. Even you, tough guy…and there were a few of you. I love California and I love Long Beach. It’s the only dive show that I build in a couple extra days in town for and I simply cannot wait to come back.

Oh, and as long as I’m thinking about it…

I want to thank the entire staff of The Auld Dubliner for putting up with our rowdiness three years in a row and never asking us to leave before closing time. You could have several times, but you didn’t. There’s that laid-back, easygoing spirit again. Although I’m sure our bar tab didn’t hurt, either. Let us simply say that we’re a production company that’s making a show about diving and drinking. We’ve been doing our research thoroughly on both ends.

I feel like I talked to thousands of you this weekend. As I watched so many people sit enraptured in day-long film festivals, in countless booths, and around the waterfront you reminded me of just how important it is to embrace your passion. You can’t expect to inspire anyone else until you’re inspired yourself.

Dream out loud, people. At high volume.

Thanks for being my friends…all 10,000 of you. We’ll see you next year.

Currently listening to: The Doors - LA Woman

I have a distinct memory as a kid growing up in Pennsylvania what a big deal it was to go to Florida for vacation. You have to understand that even though we were just a few hours from places like Baltimore’s Inner harbor and Ocean Cities Maryland and Delaware, there’s really nothing like the coastline of the Sunshine State.

We’d pass through D.C., on into tobacco country and then, there it was: the Welcome Center at the Florida state line. It was like the Promised Land. Every time we stopped there I grabbed the same brochures: Sea World & MarineLand. That was all that mattered to me. It didn’t matter that we still had hours to go to reach our destination; as far as I was concerned, we had arrived in a new, very humid, citrus-smelling foreign country. I was only days away from seeing whales and dolphins and, most of all, sharks. All from behind eight inches of plexiglas, mind you.

But here’s the thing: having crisscrossed the globe several times and been bit, bumped, scraped and charged by just about every sea creature you can imagine with an attitude, I still haven’t lost contact with the wide-eyed 6-year old inside of me that is still very in touch with that intangible joy that is the ocean and everything in it. And as I discovered at OceanFest, I still really get a kick out of hanging in Florida. Doesn’t matter that I’ve traded the 20-odd hour drive in a Caprice Classic with my family for a short flight to downtown; when i step off the plane and out of the terminal and that hot, familiar air hits me, my heart still leaps.

I was alone amongst the Liquid Assets team this time around in that this was my first experience with OceanFest. Jesus, what’s taken me so long? Neal Watson … this cat knows how to put on a dive show. Seriously — anyone can rent a posh hotel ballroom downtown (you know who you are) or a massive convention center on the outskirts of a major city (you definitely know who you are), but Oceanfest takes the daring step of actually setting up the show about diving on the, uh, beach … Novel, right?

The weather held up perfectly for us as we hung out in the giant party tents with all the other vendors, chatting with locals and getting a bit of frisbee going during low traffic points. Honestly, there wasn’t a whole lot of that. This show was what you’d call “steady.” The breeze off the waves only a few hundred yards away kept our spirits high and in a chatty mood. The gas tank of rum punch we had at the booth probably didn’t hurt, either.

Oh, and by the way — when was the last time any of you north of the Mason/Dixon line went to a dive show that was a) outdoors, b) had a live band playing at the front gate or, most importantly, c) had a steady stream of bikini-clad attendees covered in Mardi Gras beads saunter by. This is my life, people. These days it usually doesn’t suck.

Beyond the general this-show-rocks that pervades this entire entry, it behooves me to share with you 3 Kodak moments from the show:

1. The Bahia Bar & Grill. Right across the street from the show. Within walking (i.e. stumbling) distance from our hotel I highly recommend their chicken finger dinner and their Jagerbombs. One or both will facilitate ending the night in either a mirrorball jacket while wearing sunglasses, or closing down the bar with the gang from Scuba Radio. Or both.

2. We had record dive-show attendances at both of our seminars in Fort Lauderdale, where I was inundated with questions ranging from what camera format we’re shooting with to things like “what kinds of whales do y’all see down in Turks?” To everyone who attended and showed the most enthusiasm of any dive show — thank you. No inquiry was too great or too small. I was honored to share my time with you.

3. We finally got a chance to meet some of the people going out on the Turks boat this fall while we’re on board shooting and I have to tell you, folks, judging by the ones that showed up in Fort Lauderdale, this is going to be a very, very good-looking group. “Eye candy,” I believe, is the expression I’m looking for.

It was just an amazing weekend. I’m looking forward to going back in less than a year. I’d highly recommend anyone make it part of your Spring 2009 vacation plans.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be David Lee Roth and Jaques Cousteau. I wanted to spend my days in the ocean, awed by its beauty and then throw the best party on the block once the diving day was over. Turns out that if and when I decide to grow up, I can be both: I can be Neal Watson.

Talk about a lofty goal … -Aaron Faulls

Currently listening to: U2 - POP
David Morales & Tamra Keenan - Here I Am (Kaskade Remix)

You forget sometimes - especially in a profession that involves a fair amount of bottom time - that the United States of America is so loud. So busy. I suppose I should have expected that the largest consumer dive show in the country would be busy, but I guess I just wasn’t ready for how rowdy it would be. Rowdy. Noisy.

And it was a grand noise. It was the welcome din of thousands of people converging on a single location, all united by a common passion. What you get at Beneath The Sea is a great mix of leathered, salty northeast wreck divers and wide-eyed paradise seekers, hungry for the next blue-water getaway. Vendors, manufacturers and resort operators that won’t drop a dime to go to another show anywhere in the country are always here. It’s as much to do with the fact that there are more people at this show than any other as it is that this part of the country have very, very discriminating tastes.

Due to a timely-last minute cancellation, 2 years after its theatrical premiere I was able to debut Still On Her Keel for the BTS audience. It was the first room that I went into cold, and most people were visibly pissed off that instead of a presentation about shipwrecks of the Orient they were getting a Boston rocker in a jean jacket and aviators trying to collectively kiss their ass. Let’s just say it started as, um, a tough crowd. How far can you coast on charm? Apparently right up until you step foot in New Jersey.

Luckily for me, the story of the Chester Poling and the men who explored her is a tale that transcends baseball team allegiances, because by the end of the hour I had suitably impressed the masses and earned the respect of the toughest audience in the country. We all left the room in a flurry of handshakes and well wishes. In the end, sometimes it’s better to just shut up and show your film. I’ll definitely make note of that for next year.

I hinted at some pretty interesting sidebars that will be going on each week during production on the TCEXII. I’m happy to say that as a result of a few high-powered (i.e., Aaron stayed far away) meetings while at Beneath The Sea, we’re about a week or two away from announcing them formally. Suffice it to say the video, the photo and the radio people will be happy.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, Liquid Assets are obsessed with revealing the unknown places within the known. In the spirit of always trying to get in on a secret or discover the next “thing,” we drank deeply at the well of New York City nightlife while we were in town and I’m glad we did. I found a great new blues singer at the Bottom Line club in the East Village and discovered a brand new drink at a Korean restaurant on the Upper West Side. I would also highly recommend you hit up the Rodeo Bar next time you’re in town. Those of you from the great state of Texas will feel particularly at home.

A pilgrimage to Ground Zero reminded me how important it is for us to learn from history and also what a blessing it is to watch beauty literally rise from ashes. A look at the plans for the new park that will blanket the site of the Twin Towers is simply amazing. May the hushed reverence that still surrounds the perimeter continue past its architectural completion.

On behalf of everyone at Liquid Assets … you know what? Nevermind. Screw ‘em. If they want to thank you, let them write their own blog.

Thank you, New York, for making a Boston kid feel at home. Thanks for staying up late. Thank you, New Jersey, for taking care of me and giving me a place to rest my head. Thank you, Connecticut, for not being stuck up for once and buying me a few rounds of Jager.

Pennsylvania, were you there? I thought I saw you on the show floor a few times. You’ve lost weight, baby. You look great.

We’ll be back next year. I can’t wait. Either way, you have my number.

Listening to: The Cult - Live At Irving Plaza

It’s Friday evening, March 7th, and after getting checked in at the Fairmont and setting up the Liquid Assets booth, all I want is my bed. The concierge staff is graciously running around Copley Square to get me medication. I’ve been running a fever for two weeks straight, coughing up small woodland creatures from my chest cavity and generally feeling lousy. You’ll forgive me, then, if I disclose that I’m in no mood to be at a dive show and talking for 8 hours straight with the (enter your part of the country here)’s greater scuba population.

But this is Boston. These are my people, and we are not a meek tribe. This town and its surrounding community - from Berkshires west to White Mountains north to Narragansett Bay south - have taken me under its wing and into its bosom in a way that I can never fully express thanks for. Whether it was Still On Her Keel’s premiere here at Sea Rovers in 2006 or the countless speaking engagements and classes I have taught, sometimes I feel like I know every diver here by name. In many ways I owe these people my career. So, yeah. Calling in sick just isn’t an option.

I’d like to tell you that I somehow found the strength to get through the weekend by my own sheer will and dedication, but that’s not being honest. The truth is that I got out of bed, popped some meds and hit the show floor because I knew that my New England family would lift me up, carry the weight and make me feel better just by hanging out and talking. They did not let me down.

The greatest thrill of Sea Rovers 2008 was meeting so many great new people. We are an ever-growing brood, New England divers. What an amazing thing. Many with their kids, some with loved ones who are new to the sport, some just lifelong friends and dive buddies. In the elevator, at the bar over a round, as I was walking through the lobby or at the Liquid Assets booth, I want to thank all of you who stopped me to talk and hang out. There were many. You allowed us to share with you the amazing plans we have for the future, and in return we were lifted up by your overwhelming and infectious excitement for the road ahead. It is groundbreaking television with a scuba flair and we are amped about the fall. The more of you I meet that are heading out with us, the more excited (and bewildered) I get at what adventures (and drama) are yet to unfold on the deck of my favorite liveaboard. You will keep us all busy, that’s for sure.

Speaking of which…things are beginning to heat up for the shooting schedule already. Along with a few other surprises TBA, I can tell you that there’s a video contest the second week, a photo contest the last week and we’ve got Scuba Radio on board the week of the 20th. At the very least, there’s evidently going to be enough going on that none of you will notice the camera following you around all day. Kinda.

From all of us - but especially me - thank you. Providence. Hartford. Worcester. Hyannis. Rockport. Gloucester. Portsmouth. Salem. Boston. You have my heart and my state income tax. I couldn’t have done it without you. We won’t do it without you.

Go Sox! -Aaron Faulls

Currently listening to Sing Loud, Sing Proud! -The Dropkick Murphys

Oh, Chicago.

I found it mildly appropriate that - almost a year to the day - I was stuck in New York trying to get out of an airport. Last year at this time I was fighting to get to Cozumel to do a shoot for Scuba Diving magazine with my very good friend Nick Lucey. In keeping with still more tradition, I was the only one stuck. Frantically trying to book a plan B flight on the eve of Winter Vacation week for the northeast…not my idea of fun. Not in 2007, not in 2008, not ever.

The story ends with me getting there after all, just in time to enjoy my first Our World Underwater, an amazing dive show that is run with, I found out, military precision. A host of great speakers, vendors and general attendees. What a great experience.

On behalf of everyone at Liquid, I want to thank all of you who stopped by the booth to say hi or attended one of the seminars I spoke at. A shining example of why the midwest has a rep for good people with great attitudes.

It was our first public appearance and I have to say I was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm all of you expressed for what we’re about to create. My promise - our promise - to you all is that we will deliver you the kind of programming and content you should expect (and demand).

The New Blood is here, Chicagoland. And we brought our cameras. - Aaron Faulls

Hey, it’s 2008, and everybody’s got a blog. Why would we be any different? This is where you’ll need to tune in to find out all the latest on the LiquidAssets.tv crew, and what’s going on with the two pilots we’re shooting aboard the Turks & Caicos Explorer II this September and October. Stay tuned, because spots on the boat are going fast, and developments are taking place almost each and every day. Thanks for stopping by.