Month: January 2021

Killian Hayes, the young French point guard who became the No. 7 overall pick in the 2020 NBA Draft last November, has suffered a torn labrum in his hip and the Pistons are currently determining a course forward that may or may not involve surgery, according to Shams Charania of The Athletic.

Having missed Summer League and making an enormous leap from the German League to the NBA, this development time was quite important for Hayes. The Pistons installed him as the starting point guard even with Derrick Rose also on the roster and other veterans around who would otherwise have set Detroit up to compete for a playoff spot. That was a testament to their investment in Hayes, but now it threatens to be a lost season for the 19-year-old.

Most often, labral tears involve the shoulder for basketball players, such as Paul George at the end of the 2018-19 season. But the labrum is simply the cartilage structure in a bone socket, whether that be the shoulder or hip. Surgery to repair the tear could force Hayes to miss several months.

In the meantime, the Pistons will continue to chart a course forward around a core of Jerami Grant, Sekou Doumbouya, and their other two first-round picks from 2020, Saddiq Bey and Isaiah Stewart.

A lot changed in 2020 but, living in Austin, Sun June are used to seeing perpetual change. The city itself is constantly in a state of transience, with Sun June finding friends either moving to or away from Austin. But amid changes comes the inevitable nostalgia for the past, which Sun June touch on in their newest single “Everything I Had.”

The song arrives alongside a DIY video depicting the band’s vocalist Laura Colwell revisiting places of import from her past. Speaking about the track’s inspiration in a statement, Colwell said the song reflects transient feeling of Austin, Texas:

“‘Everything I Had’ is about feeling stuck and wising you could go back in time. It misses when things were new and easy and full of promise. It feels very ‘Austin’ to us, because things change here so quickly and it’s easy to fall into a rut and feel like the city is moving on without you. Friends are always leaving town too, so sometimes it’s fun to think moving to LA or New York would solve all our problems. It’s also fair to say that the song has taken on some new meaning during the pandemic. We’re all missing someone or something right now.”

The single also offers a preview of their upcoming LP Somewhere, which Sun June call their “prom record.” “The prom idea started as a mood for us to arrange and shape the music to, which we hadn’t done before,” the band said in a statement. “Prom isn’t all rosy and perfect. The songs show you the crying in the bathroom, the fear of dancing, the joy of a kiss – all the highs and all the lows.”

Watch Sun June’s “Everything I Had” video above and check out their Somewhere cover art and tracklist below.

1. “Bad With Time”
2. “Everything I Had”
3. “Singing”
4. “Bad Girl”
5. “Karen O”
6. “Everywhere”
7. “Once in a While”
8. “Finding Out”
9. “Seasons”
10. “Real Thing”
11. “Colors”

Somewhere is out 2/5 via Run For Cover. Pre-order it here.

Kevin Smith’s proven himself to be both an early and steadfast supporter of Zack Snyder’s Justice League director’s cut. And he couldn’t resist using “Snyder Cut” to describe his own original vision for the ending of 1994’s Clerks. Granted, this alternate ending is not a new revelation, Brian O’Halloran (who portrayed Dante) previously told Rolling Stone that he “hated” it. Smith ended up shooting the scene before deciding to go with the closing-up-shop ending that actually suited the spirit of the film well.

Smith did including the scene — in which Dante is killed during a robbery — on the 10th anniversary DVD, and yeah, it is dark stuff. Is it gritty, though? Sure. Even grittier than Caitlin inadvertently having sex with a dead man in a darkened bathroom.

Dark + gritty + original vision? Check, check, check. Take it away, Kevin Smith with illustrative script pages on Twitter:

Ah, memories. Smith uncovered the draft while writing Clerks III, and while the development would have been an ultimate irony (Dante wasn’t even supposed to be there that day!), I’m onboard with O’Halloran’s opinion that this would have been too quick and easy of a wrap-up. And it would have made Clerks III, as Smith has been writing it, a probably nonexistent happening.

Speaking of the threquel, shooting has obviously been pushed back due to you-know-what, but Smith previously revealed to EW that the script was inspired by his own heart attack. “Randal has a heart attack, decides that he came so close to death, and his life has meant nothing, there’s nobody to memorialize him, he has no family or anything like that,” Smith explained. “He comes to the conclusion at mid-life, having almost died, having worked in a movie store his whole life and watched other people’s movies, he tells Dante, I think we need to make a movie. So Dante and Randal make Clerks. That’s the story of Clerks 3.” Boom.

A bottle of Pappy Van Winkle whiskey is the great white whale for many a whiskey drinker. The stuff has reached mythic levels of popularity, due to it’s lauding and limited availability. For the average drinker, it’s damn near impossible to find a bottle (even though it’s released yearly). If you do spot a bottle, you’re going to pay an astronomical markup for the stuff — thereby adding to the mystique.

And your frustration with the whole circus around the juice.

This year, if you live in PA, you can circumvent that rigamarole by winning a chance to pay very close to retail for a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle’s line. Pennsylvania’s Fine Wine & Good Spirits and the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board are running a “lottery” this week that’ll award entrants a chance to buy bottles of Pappy without the aftermarket getting involved.

“In an effort to more equitably distribute limited availability high-demand products to both individual consumers and licensees,” Food Wine & Good Spirits stated via a press release, “we offer a Limited-Release Lottery for our most popular, rare products.”

You can register for the lottery on the liquor store’s website before January 8th. The catch? You have to be a Pennsylvania resident. If so, you’ll have the chance to enter one, multiple, or all six drawings. The prices for each expression range from $89 for the 12-year-old bourbon to $399 for the 23-year-old bottle of Pappy — undeniably a great opportunity for anyone looking to get their hands on this coveted whiskey.

Theoretically, if you’re drawn for all six bottles (very unlikely), you’ll have to pay $1,149.94 to actually take those six bottles home. You’d pay ten times that amount easily right now on the aftermarket.

Buffalo Trace, which owns and produces Pappy Van Winkle, has been very active in acknowledging the ridiculousness of the secondary market’s markups of their various products. When they dropped the 2020 line last the fall, Buffalo Trace said, “If you are a customer trying to buy a bottle at a licensed retailer who has marked it up above MSRP, we encourage you to file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau or contact your state Attorneys General office.”

The brand’s boss, Julian Van Winkle, reiterated that sentiment:

“Unfortunately even though we suggest what we believe to be a very low and fair MSRP,” Van Winkle told Paste. “We cannot control the price retailers charge, and some retailers mark it up even though we and the distributors that those retailers buy from ask them not to.”

While we understand that this feels like a great chance for the average person (in Pennsylvania) to actually get their hands on some good whiskey at a fair price, we can’t read about it without sighing. Yes, it’s great that you can actually buy a coveted whiskey for close to it’s MSRP. And it’s certainly more egalitarian than allowing investors and opportunists to dictate price. But having to win a lottery for the chance to buy a bottle of whiskey still feels… off.

Mostly because it underscores how those aforementioned investors and opportunists have created a system that means many Pennsylvania aficionados will never get to try Pappy without winning a lottery.

In the end, it’s best to think of this more like a ticketing system to avoid a Black Friday style stampede. Hopefully, aftermarket sellers don’t clog the lottery (by having their friends and family enter for them, etc.). If that pitfall can be avoided, perhaps Pennsylvania — by taking a bit of a stand with their supply and giving people a chance to buy some Pappy at a reasonable price via random chance — will lead the way for more retailers and liquor boards to do the same.

After all, once you get past the hype, this is still some pretty special stuff.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump announced that he would be “speaking at the SAVE AMERICA RALLY tomorrow on the Ellipse at 11 a.m. Eastern. Arrive early — doors open at 7 a.m. Eastern. BIG CROWDS!” The president has yet to show up as he’s spent most of the morning tweeting, but even if he’s a no-show, the event attendees are a real greatest hits of his cronies, including attorney Rudy Giulani, MAGA duo Diamond and Silk, and failson Donald Trump, Jr. (whose voice was shot by 10:30 a.m.).

Trump has heavily promoted the Wednesday portion of the event, touting it on Twitter as a “BIG Protest Rally” that “could be the biggest event in Washington, DC, history” — one aimed at pressuring members of Congress to stop the “steal” of the election from him… In other tweets, he echoed the rhetoric speakers at the rally used by calling antifa “a Terrorist Organization” and cited the size of the gatherings to put pressure on Republican senators who so far have not joined his effort to overthrow the election.

The real MVP of the rally, however, was the person in charge of the music.

Giulani took the stage to “Macho Man” (conservatives love the Village People, who knew?) before ranting about election fraud. “If we are wrong, we will be made fools of. But if we are right, a lot of them will go to jail!” he yelled to the dangerously “massive” crowd. “So let’s have trial by combat… I’m willing to stake my reputation, the president is willing to stake his reputation on the fact that we’re going to find criminality there!”

The DJ also played “I Tried So Hard” by Linkin Park; multiple Elton John songs, including “Candle in the Wind” and “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding” (a Trump favorite); and “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion, because if there’s one song to get people fired up, it’s the one from the sinking ship movie. Either the DJ is trolling, or Trump & Co. lack self-awareness. It’s honestly hard to say which is more likely (it’s both).

The DJ’s work did not go unappreciated.

Thanks to Stephen Curry’s scoring brilliance this week, the Warriors are hovering around .500 once again, but executives around the NBA have been keeping an eye on Golden State early this season, particularly as it applies to the availability of Draymond Green.

A recent report from Sam Amick on his podcast on The Athletic NBA Show indicated that not only have the Portland Trail Blazers circled the water on Green in the past, but franchise cornerstone Damian Lillard has specifically lobbied for such a deal.

“If we were handicapping Draymond trade destinations if the Warriors decided to blow it up…that’s the one. Damian and his group have for the last couple years been campaigning for that,” Amick said.

After an extension during the 2019 offseason, Green is under contract through 2023-24, when he has a player option for $27.6 million. That means there’s no realistic reason to believe the Warriors would be looking to dump him anytime soon, even if he is perhaps the most likely of Golden State’s big three to move on.

That was confirmed by a separate recent report, this time from Chris Haynes on his Yahoo! Sports podcast, when Haynes speculated that Green might be put onto the trade market before long if the Warriors’ fortunes worsened. For now, the Warriors will likely sit tight and see how high Curry can take them, as him, Green, and Klay Thompson are all under long-term contracts.

It’s been over five years since Jazmine Sullivan released her last record, Reality Show, but the singer aims to start off the new year with a new album. Offering a final preview of her forthcoming project Heaux Tales, Sullivan tapped guitar virtuoso HER to lend her delicate vocals for the heartbreak anthem “Girl Like Me.”

HER picks at her watery acoustic guitar while Sullivan sings of feeling defeated after being left for another woman on the tender single. Her heartache translates to insecurity over her body and she considers making some changes to her appearance. Echoing Sullivan’s sentiments, HER sings about changing up her style to disconnect from her past relationship. “Yeah, you gon’ make me a gold digger / Maybe I should look like a stripper / Wearin’ Fashion Nova dresses / All these dudes be so pressed and impressed with it,” she sings.

While “Girl Like Me” may be the last single before the release of Sullivan’s Heaux Tales Friday, the singer had spent the closing months of 2020 teasing the project. Along with saying the LP is her “observation of today’s women standing in their power and owning who they are” in a press statement, Sullivan shared the tracks “Lost One” and “Pick Up Your Feelings” to build anticipation for the album’s release.

Listen to Jazmine Sullivan and HER’s “Girl Like Me” above.

Heaux Tales is out 1/8 via RCA. Pre-order it here.

When the members of Big Thief aren’t doing Big Thief things, they tend to stay busy with their own solo endeavors. Adrianne Lenker made two lovely albums in quarantine last year, Songs and Instrumentals. Meanwhile, bandmate Buck Meek has a new solo project of his own quickly on the way. He released a self-titled album in 2018, and its follow-up, Two Saviors, is coming out on January 15. He has offered a couple previews of it so far — “Pareidolia” and “Second Sight” — and he returns with another today, “Candle.”

The track is a mid-tempo alt-country tune on which his languid vocals sound contentedly at home. He also shared a simple video for the track, which shows the song being recorded at home. Meek co-wrote the track with Lenker (who also took the photo that became the Two Saviors album art).

Meek released a statement alongside the track, which closely echoes the song’s lyrics, saying, “I was making my escape, when the siren’s song caught me a mile up the road. My nose started bleeding by the second note, so I lit a candle to keep moving. I may have died and woke in heaven’s motel, with a telephone seashell at the bedside. It rang in waves and waves spoke, and waves heard through me.”

Watch the “Candle” video above.

Two Saviors is out 1/15 via Keeled Scales. Pre-order it here.

Capturing Rudy Giuliani on film sticking his hands down his pants while being interviewed by a young woman he just met is easily one of the biggest, most memorable moments of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. There’s a reason it was saved until the very end of the movie, and to this day, Sacha Baron Cohen and his team still can’t believe the scene actually happened. Director Jason Woliner recently revealed that Giuliani was given several opportunities to realize he was being played, but he never once caught on as he continued to try and seduce Borat’s daughter played by Maria Bakalova.

In a new interview with Variety, Cohen opens up about trying to ensnare at least one member of Trump’s inner circle (Donald Trump Jr. was a potential target at one point) before finding an opening with Giuliani, but the team ran into a potentially dangerous obstacle. Due to filming during the pandemic, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was following strict guidelines to protect the cast and crew including routine testing. Giuliani, however, refused to take a rapid test. Obviously, this presented an ethical nightmare for the production.

“There was this debate of what do we do?” Cohen told Variety. “Do we go ahead with this scene? What happens if he has coronavirus? We concluded that it was worth the risk.”

While Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is technically a comedy, the film is ultimately about exposing the “danger of Trump and Trumpism,” which have helped lead to the current pandemic conditions in America. So for Cohen, it was worth the risk to expose Giuliani, who as close to Trump’s inner circle as it gets, and the Borat star is very pleased with the final outcome. “I do feel happy that every time his name is mentioned as he tries to undermine the election, people are reminded that this is the guy with his hand down his underpants.”

(Via Variety)

The long-presumed number one overall pick in the 2021 Draft is officially headed to the National Football League. In what might go down as the least surprising news of the century, Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence announced his decision to make the jump to the pros on Wednesday morning in a video posted to his Twitter account.

Lawrence, whose career as the signal caller for the Tigers included a national championship and three consecutive trips to the College Football Playoff, made the announcement one day after finishing the runner-up for the 2020 Heisman Trophy. In the video, Lawrence thanked the program and its fans, saying that he hopes his legacy has nothing to do with his accomplishments on the gridion.

The former No. 1 recruit in the nation, Lawrence took over as the Tigers’ starting quarterback as a true freshman and only lost two games in his career. He is viewed as the best quarterback prospect since former Stanford and Indianapolis Colts standout Andrew Luck, and it would be a shock if he is not selected at the top of the 2021 Draft by the Jacksonville Jaguars. Draft prognosticators generally agree that he does not have a single glaring hole in his game — Lawrence has a strong, accurate arm, is very comfortable using his legs when necessary, can process the game at an elite level, and is viewed as a leader on and off the field.

For his career, Lawrence completed 66.6 percent of his passes for 10,098 yards with 90 touchdowns and 17 interceptions. Lawrence also punched it in 18 times on the ground, averaging 4.1 yards per carry as a runner.