At the end of 2020, Gwen Stefani marked her official comeback with the playful song “Let Me Reintroduce Myself.” The song’s video saw the singer calling back to her early aughts heyday by showcasing her most iconic outfits — but she was just getting started. Last month, the singer followed-up with her rhythmic track “Slow Clap” and this week, Stefani announced she has asked Saweetie to join in on a remix.
Stefani and Saweetie’s “Slow Clap (Remix)” video is set to arrive Friday, and the two are already getting fans excited. Stefani shared a few teasers that show the duo’s friendly chemistry. One snippet gives fans a close-up look at both Stefani and Saweetie’s bejeweled acrylic nails and another shows them playing a hand-clapping game on set.
Saweetie is the latest celebrity that Stefani has recently cosigned. Ahead of the anticipated collaboration, Stefani praised Olivia Rodrigo’s debut single “Drivers License” as “a light in the dark” and was tapped by Dua Lipa to hop on a club-ready remix of the singer’s Future Nostalgia track “Physical.”
Of course, Saweetie’s remix arrives on the heels of news that she and Quavo have broken up. The rapper broke the news last month, claiming that Quavo had been unfaithful to her during their relationship. Following reports of their split, a video surfaced that showed Saweetie and Quavo getting into a physical altercation over a suitcase in an elevator. The video is reportedly being reviewed by the LAPD and Saweetie recently came forward to claim the incident happened over a year ago.
Saweetie is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
The 2021 NBA season has been anything but normal for the Toronto Raptors. The team that bears the We The North slogan moved decidedly south to play their games in Tampa due to Canadian travel restrictions. For a franchise that strives for consistency, the disruption of this season exposed some cracks in the foundation and forced a reassessment, at least in the short term, of who they are as a team.
At 20-31, things haven’t gone according to plan for the Raptors. They’ve slipped from perennial East contender to a team fighting for a play-in berth. There have been, however, a few bright spots amid these struggles: Norman Powell emerged as a top-level scorer, allowing the Raptors to flip him to Portland at the trade deadline for Gary Trent Jr., who has impressed early in his time with the team. After Marc Gasol and Serge Ibaka left in free agency, the door opened for another homegrown talent in Chris Boucher to step into a larger role.
While free agent acquisitions Alex Len (since released) and Aron Baynes have not filled the gaps as hoped, Boucher has provided a lift and shown his potential on both ends of the floor. Offensively, he’s averaging career-best marks across the board at 13.3 points and 6.3 rebounds per game, while shooting 51.6 percent from the field and 39.1 percent from three range on nearly four attempts per game. His team-leading 1.9 blocks a night don’t just come at the rim — he uses his tremendous length to alter shots all over the floor, oftentimes stepping out to the perimeter to wreak havoc.
Boucher’s breakout season is the latest step in quite the personal journey, one that’s seen him go from hardships as a teen struggling to find his way in Montreal to finding hope on the basketball court. He fell in love with the game, which took him to Oregon, eventualy, and the NBA. That story is one he’s told before, but right now, he’s focused on the next chapter, one that hopefully will see him become Toronto’s latest G League success story.
The Raptors, in their current iteration, place an emphasis on their development program and helping young talent reach their fullest potential. Pascal Siakam and Fred VanVleet are the best examples, having paid their dues with the 905 before going on to become core pieces on Toronto’s championship team.
Boucher says seeing those guys take that path, one which ended in big paydays, showed him there is a plan in Toronto for players who believe they are “definitely better than what people were thinking about them,” and credits them for keeping him grounded as he dominated in the G League.
“I already knew that if I do the right thing and take the same steps they took, eventually I will get my chance, too,” Boucher tells Dime. “Fred, Pascal, Norm, Kyle, they talked to me most of the time when I was in the G League, like, ‘Yes, you’re doing good, but you still gotta take the next step, because playing an NBA is different.’ And they made me realize it’s not going to be in one night. It’s not because today you scored 30, that means that you’re automatically an NBA player and stuff like that. That really helped me out, just to realize that it’s a long journey, but at the end of the day, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”
Coming into this season, Boucher knew that his opportunity was set to arrive as Ibaka and Gasol departed, and he had to change his physical and mental approaches. His goal was simple: become more consistent and make better decisions, particularly in shot selection. In the G League, Boucher averaged more than 27 points per game, having the greenest of lights to shoot at will and take the lead role, although even there, efficiency wasn’t his biggest strength.
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The biggest adjustment he had to make as he left the 905 was embracing a much lesser role on offense, recognizing that his job is to be an auxiliary piece. In more sparing minutes in the 2019-20 season, Boucher would find himself pressing, trying desperately to make an impression whenever he got some playing time. The result was inefficiency, particularly from deep, as he hit just 32 percent of this three-point attempts.
Even at 28, Boucher is still learning. His first season with consistent minutes has afforded him the opportunity to use live reps to continue refining his game as he looks to maximize his gifts on both ends of the floor. On offense, that means working on that shot selection, as he admits to being “trigger happy” when he first arrived in the league — he’s now at a point where he says that’s only the case “a little bit.” Having a regular rotation role has allowed Boucher to take a bit of a breath and not feel like he needs to have an instant impact whenever he touches the ball, instead opting to take better shots in the flow of the offense.
In order to make the necessary changes to become a 39 percent shooter this season, Boucher credits his newfound obsession with film work that began after the Orlando Bubble. Rather than watching a random YouTube video to pass the time, Boucher now fires up some film to figure out what he’s doing right and, more importantly, what he’s doing wrong. The results speak for themselves, as self-critiquing his game allows him to make the necessary adjustments. He still has his ups and downs, as evidenced by a recent cold spell from three, but rather than simply trying to shoot through it, he’s looking at the tape to see where things might be coming undone with either his shot selection or mechanics.
“One thing I realized is that you can shoot as many shots as you want, but when you look at the game and you look at the tape, you can see you’re not shooting it the same way that you shoot in practice, or my release is too fast, or my feet are not set,” Boucher says. “And those are all little things that affect your shot, so if you don’t watch film, you’re always going to ask, ‘Why are my shots not going in?’
“But then you watch film and then you go look at practice and you’re like, OK, I’m not shooting this too well,” he continues. “I’m changing this, I’m changing that. That does a lot. … If you don’t watch film you think that everything’s fine. But is it really fine? Like, if you’re 0-for-5 in the last three games, something’s wrong, and you might just be like, ‘Oh, I’m just missing.’ But you watch film and, ‘Oh, look my left is in front of my right foot and I never shoot that way.’ You would have never seen it without film.”
Defense is likewise a work in progress, as he works to find the balance all young shot blockers must between chasing blocks and staying in position. Boucher’s natural reflex is to try and block everything, which should come as little surprise given his 7’4 wingspan and ability to close space so quickly with his long strides. At the NBA level, the punishment for leaving an assignment to chase a block as a help defender is far greater than at the college or G League level, and Boucher is trying to lean on his ever-growing experience to recognize the right times to challenge and when to stay at home.
It’s not just rotating at the rim — Boucher is the best player in the NBA at blocking three-point shots. Boucher’s 22 rejections beyond the arc this season lead the NBA and are nine more than second-place Matisse Thybulle, per PBP Stats. He’s mastered the art of the fly-by, chasing out on shooters not by running to one side or the other (the Raptors scouting report details which side to go to on which shooters) and using his ridiculous wingspan to reach across and block the shot without risking the dreaded three-point foul by closing out into a shooter’s landing area.
In order to use that length to deter three-point shots, however, he has to stay attached to his man outside the arc enough to get out and contest. As he splits time between small-ball center and power forward, a position he’s not accustomed to, he’s recognizing that his role as a shot blocker is different.
“Sometimes it’s not your place to go, but I’m so used to being a shot-blocker, I’m leaving my man in the corner. And then I was going in and they kick it out and then I got to go all the way out,” Boucher says of lessons he’s learning on defense. “Those are the little things I’m trying to learn because when you play the four, you’re not really the shot blocker, and if you play with a five, then it’s not really your place to go. And sometimes, you know, contested is good enough. You don’t have to block it and that’s what I get in trouble … I’m trying to block it, and if I didn’t jump, it would have been a great contest, and I’m over here trying to block it. So those are things that I’m trying to learn every time, and the more I watched it, the more I realized, OK, well, you know what, you don’t have to try to block shots every time. You could actually contest a lot tougher without jumping.”
Boucher is a work in progress, but he’s fallen in love with the process and the work that goes into refining his craft. Instinct and natural talent can only get a player so far, and Boucher recognized that the mental work has to catch up to the physical effort if he’s to take the next step. Diving into film and seeking out other opinions on his game has given him a new perspective, one in which he combines his natural self-confidence with more self-awareness and the ability to accept critiques.
Boucher’s rapid maturation isn’t solely about the work he puts in. He’s a member of an organization that demands accountability and a good work ethic from the top down. From the day he stepped foot in the gym with the Raptors, he says assistants like Jim Sann and Jama Mahlalela (formerly his coach with the 905) have worked him like he was a starter, ensuring he’d be ready whenever an opportunity presented itself and showing him that they believed in him and were going to put as much effort into developing him as he was willing to put in himself. That staff backing is important, but development is a two-way street and it requires players who buy in and want to do the work, something Boucher says is impossible not to do when he sees how the stars around him approach practice and off days.
“Fred, Kyle, you look at them right now, they’re playing like they didn’t sign [big contracts]. They’re still playing like they’re trying to get to the next one,” Boucher says. “And that’s what builds for me, because at the end of the day, I’m nowhere close to what they’ve done. If you have guys that already been to the top of the mountain, and still working like they’re at the bottom, what makes you not want to work like you’re at the bottom? Cause you probably are.”
For this season, Boucher’s focus is on maximizing his talents and being the best version of his current self that he can be. That means blocking shots, playing with energy, running hard to the rim, and knocking down shots on the perimeter. It also means taking the lessons from each game as he gets more reps and applying them to the future so that his mistakes don’t get replicated over and over.
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This Raptors season hasn’t gone according to plan. It’s shifted priorities a bit to the near future as the organization looks to set themselves up for another sustained run of excellence with a different core. Boucher hopes to be part of that next run, using this season as a starting point to prove where he can provide value, but this is far from where he sees his potential.
He readily admits that he still has to add more strength to be able to do everything the Raptors need from him defensively, particularly if he’s going to be able to play more minutes at the five, and he wants to refine his game on offense when he gets a guard switched onto him.
“I would like to have a go-to move or a couple post moves because it’s to the point where you play the game and they like to switch. You set a screen and they switch because they don’t want you to shoot,” Boucher says. “And I would like to be able to use that mismatch and go down to the post and then score an easy one, to a point where they can’t really switch it because if they switch it then it’s a small guy on me and then I could do something against it. Like I said, I just want to be able to be a mismatch, no matter who I’m playing and be able to change the game, when I come in the game.”
Getting to the NBA has been a long, winding journey all its own, but Boucher isn’t satisfied. He has dreams of doing so much more. He’s long embraced the physical grind, and has now become obsessed with the mental side of the game and what that can do to unlock his talents.
After a late start, the clock is certainly ticking at 28, but he’s defied odds throughout his voyage to being a regular rotation player in the NBA, so why not believe he can keep climbing?
An Ariana Grande song is often a densely layered affair, especially when it comes to her vocal arrangements. Now the singer has pulled back the curtain on how “Positions” come to be with a new behind-the-scenes clip, which shows her in the studio getting the finer points of the song’s vocals sorted out. In the video, Grande is in a recording booth, busting out multiple takes of vocal layers, trying multiple ideas and honing in on minute details in pursuit of the perfect sound.
some more footage from the making of ‘positions’ for u vocal arranging, stacking the bridge https://t.co/5R0sg42bzl
Grande previously spoke about how “Positions” came to be the lead single of Positions despite the consensus among her team that “34+35” would claim that honor, saying, “I was like driving to [producer and songwriter Tommy Brown]’s one day to finish one of the records […] and I was listening to everything, and I remember the moment where I was like, ‘Oh, ‘Positions’ is really challenging ’34+35′ in a big way.’ This is tonally what I want to set the pace for the album with. It just felt more grown and like more of an accurate representation of what was to come. So I remember that day and I remember telling everyone and everyone looking at me like I was a little bit crazy, except Tommy and Ray. Ray was always team ‘Positions,’ but everyone else was kinda like, ‘We gotta talk her out of this,’ and um, they didn’t.”
Check out the behind-the-scenes video above and revisit our review of Positionshere.
Bill Murray has opened up about his experience making Ghostbusters II, and the actor got candid about how he was “outfoxed” into starring in the lackluster sequel that he claims was not the movie he was originally pitched. While sitting down for an interview with the Santa Barbara Film Festival, Murray discussed being “very, very reluctant” to make a follow-up to the original film, but it was hard to resist after the studio got the entire cast back together to pitch them the new movie. Via People:
“Someone outfoxed me anyway. I don’t know if Ivan [Reitman, director] set it up, but they got us all back together in a room, and really, we hadn’t been together in a room since the movie came out and it was just really, really fun to be together,” Murray said. “We were really funny together.”
After finding himself surprisingly excited to make the sequel, the situation went south when Murray started production on Ghostbusters II, and learned it was clearly not the movie he was pitched. “I showed up on set and went, ‘What the hell is this? What is this thing?’ But we were already shooting it, so we had to figure out how to make it work,” Murray said.
While the Ghostbusters II fiasco was probably not the main reason, just one of many, Murray is notorious for keeping Hollywood at an arm’s length. The actor doesn’t even have an agent, and he confirmed to IndieWire back in 2019 that he can only be reached by a secret 1-800 number that directs people to an automated voice-mail system that he checks whenever he’s in the mood.
“This was a way you could not answer any phone, and whenever you felt like engaging, you could check to see who had bothered to call and what the message was. It just freed up my life a whole lot,” Murray explained. “Sometimes I go days or weeks. Sorry, I’m busy living.”
Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is one of the great cinematic accomplishments of the 21st century, a stunning epic that culminated in a well-deserved Best Picture win for The Return of the King. The Soviet Union’s recently-unearthed television adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring is none of those things, but it’s a different kind of experience. Think of this way: Jackson’s Lord of the Rings is an expensive steak; the Soviet’s The Fellowship of the Ring is the fever dream you’ll have after getting food poisoning from the expensive steak.
The Guardianreports that the “1991 made-for-TV film, Khraniteli, is the only adaptation of [Tolkien’s] Lord of the Rings trilogy believed to have been made in the Soviet Union… Few knew about its existence until Leningrad Television’s successor, 5TV, abruptly posted the film to YouTube last week, where it has gained more than 800,000 views within several days.” Khraniteli, which has even crummier production design than the Star Wars Holiday Special, came out a mere 10 years before The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring became the fifth highest-grossing film of all-time.
The Soviet version includes some plot elements left out of Jackson’s $93 million blockbuster, including an appearance by the character Tom Bombadil, a forest dweller cut from the English-language version because he was too long-winded and failed to move the plot forward.
The two-part special runs about two hours — although rumor tells of a four-hour special edition buried in Lenin’s tomb. Only one way to find out (#ReleaseTheLeninCut). Until then, you can watch parts one and two below.
An unsuspecting guy at a shopping mall Zales got the surprise of his life this week while trying to pay off part of his engagement ring.
As the young man talked with the clerk at the jewelry store counter about how much he still owed for his ring and when he’d be able to pay it off, an extraordinarily large hand handed the clerk a credit card. Shaquille O’Neal, the 7′ 1” basketball legend known colloquially as “Shaq,” overheard their conversation and decided to take care of the bill himself. No big announcement. No fanfare. He just handed over his credit card, shook the stunned customer’s hand and patted him on the back, and that was that.
Someone caught the moment on video and shared it, which prompted Shaq’s co-hosts on NBA on TNT to ask him about it the next day.
One of the first questions was, “You went to the mall, and went to Zales?!?” Not exactly where one would expect a person with a $400 million net worth to be hanging out on a Monday, but Shaq pointed out that he has a jewelry line at Zales. He went in to get some hoop earrings. Alrighty.
The young man at the checkout counter was so shy, Shaq said, and when he heard him talking about paying for his engagement ring, Shaq asked him how much it was and offered to pay for it.
At first, the guy refused, but Shaq insisted. And apparently, he does these random acts of generosity all the time.
“I’m just trying to make people smile… That’s all.”
@SHAQ helped a young man out at a local jewelry store by pay… https://t.co/KuHLBBXTyH
He said he was recently in a furniture store (seriously, do multi-millionaires not shop online?) and saw a mom with an autistic daughter buying furniture. He just took care of their bill, just because.
“I’m into making people happy,” he said. “I didn’t mean for that to get out because I don’t do it for that…I’m just trying to make people smile, that’s all.”
Shaq’s generosity is well-documented, despite his preference to keep much of it under wraps. In a 2015 interview with Graham Bessinger, he explained how his father’s charity—despite their family not having a lot of money—influenced him.
After giving the family’s bag of hamburgers to a homeless veteran, his father got into the family car and told him, “If you ever make it big time, make sure you help those in need.”
Shaq remembered those words and engages in charity in a range of ways, “because of what a man who made $30,000 a year taught me,” he said. “And a woman who was a secretary who probably made $20,000 a year—they taught me that.”
His giving comes “from the heart,” he said. He’s not looking for attention or accolades—he just wants to make people happy.
“I’m doing this because this is what I was taught,” he said. “I’m doing it because to walk in there and see a family, put a smile on their face for a day, that’s just awesome to me.”
“That’s my thing. I just want to make you smile,” he said.
Shaq once asked a restaurant server how much of a tip she wanted, and when she quipped “$4,000,” he gave it to her. When a 12-year-old was paralyzed by a stray bullet in a shooting, Shaq donated a whole house to his family. A fan who saw Shaq in a Best Buy offered condolences to the star for the untimely death of Shaq’s friend and former teammate Kobe Bryant, as well as Shaq’s sister Ayesha, who had recently passed away from cancer. He was treated to a new laptop—the best one in the store.
Many of us like to daydream about what we’d do if we had more money than we know what to do with. And many of us like to picture ourselves being generous with our wealth, helping out random folks who could use some help.
Charitable giving looks like a lot of different things, from funding organizations to distributing money through a foundation to handing over a bag of burgers to someone who’s hungry. It’s just delightful to see wealthy people who not only support official charitable organizations with money and time (Shaq serves as a national spokesperson for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and is a member of the national Board of Directors for Communities in Schools in addition to raising and donating millions of dollars to various causes) but who also just help out random people everywhere they go.
Kudos to Shaq’s parents for teaching him so well, and kudos to him for taking their lessons to heart.
While major Georgia-based companies Coca-Cola and Delta fought back against the state’s new voting rights law with strongly-worded opposition, Patagonia is putting its money where its mouth is and funding activists.
On Tuesday morning, the outdoor apparel maker announced it will donate $1 million to grassroots groups pushing for increased voter access in the state. Half of the money will go to the New Georgia Project, which works to register Georgians to vote.
The other half will go to Black Voters Matter Fund which works to increase power in marginalized, predominantly Black communities by fighting for voting rights.
More from voter rights protests inside the state Capitol today. #protecttheVoteGA #gapol https://t.co/VNPjrMmu3D
Patagonia’s CEO Ryan Gellert called on fellow CEOs to go beyond public statements and to take a more activist role in the fight.
“I call on fellow CEOs to join in denouncing these attacks on our democracy and to do more than make a corporate statement,” Gellert wrote. “The strength of our democracy depends on every vote being counted everywhere, and we must protect access to the ballot box.”
Gellert gave three specific ways that corporations can join Patagonia in the fight. First, they can fund “the activists working to challenge the recently passed laws,” and provided a list in a press release.
Second, they can call on senators in the states where they do business and ask them to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (VRAA). This bill would make it easier for people to vote in federal elections, end gerrymandering, and overhaul campaign finance laws.
His third request was to commit “to reaching out to business partners to facilitate speaking out against further state laws that would restrict voting access.”
Actions speak louder than words.
We’re donating $1 million to groups working to defend our democracy and your righ… https://t.co/r4JTXte35F
Last week, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed SB 202, formerly known as the Election Integrity Act of 2021, into law. The law was passed in a party-line vote and backed by Republicans in the statehouse.
The law is seen as a response by Republicans to push back against big Democratic inroads made in the state in 2020. Democrats won two Senate states and the presidential election in a state that was red for 30 years.
The new laws are seen as an aggressive attempt to suppress minority votes in the state. The laws do so by giving people less time to send mail-in ballots and by only making them available upon request. It also mandates that voters provide some form of identification, a move that will disproportionately affect Black voters.
It also limits the number of ballot drop-off boxes in the state.
One of the most controversial aspects of the set of new laws is the ban on handing out food and water within 150 feet of a polling place, or within 25 feet of any voter. Republicans say it’s a move to stop outside people from influencing voters. Democrats see it as a way to make sure voters are uncomfortable while waiting in long lines.
American democracy is the backbone of a system that allows for us to live in a civil society where businesses such as Patagonia can flourish. When states such as Georgia work to disenfranchise voters, it’s a direct attack on the basic foundations that allow our society to thrive.
Patagonia is right to call on other business leaders to stand up and support the systems that are crucial in allowing them to exist in the first place. Let’s hope that they heed the call.
“I’m hoping this summer is the summer of the road trip,” says Atlas Obscura co-founder (and podcast host) Dylan Thuras. “It’s such an amazing, delightful way to travel. Covid-era feels like the right time for it — we’ll get back to international travel next year.”
Thuras makes a solid point. While international travel sounds insanely appealing after a year spent at home, there’s a wide range of factors to consider when planning a trip abroad in the post-Covid era. Do the people in the place you’re visiting actually want you there right now? Are you ready and willing to take all necessary precautions? Are you adding stress to the local infrastructure?
For anyone not ready to wrestle with those heady matters, the case for focusing on road trips and micro-adventures as we ease out of the pandemic is incredibly strong. And there are plenty of restaurants, hotels, and tour operators who can use your support right now. As for the planning bit, Thuras’s new Atlas Obscura podcast offers a great resource.
“Atlas Obscura started over a decade ago as sort of this crowd-sourced but editor fact-checked database of the world’s hidden wonders,” he tells me over the phone. “Now that database is 20,000 places plus. The podcast is really just a new way to tell those same kinds of stories.”
In a sea of travel pods, the Atlas Obscura podcast takes a unique approach — with four episodes per week (Monday to Thursday) clocking in at an average time of 15 minutes. This makes them remarkably digestible. A quick and easy audio snack, perfect for planting the seeds of your next adventure.
“Each day we take listeners on a journey through a brand new place,” Thuras says. “The place is often kind of the keyhole into a whole little world or a new way of experiencing or seeing the world. Little journeys and moments that allow you to step into a place of wonder.”
We linked up with Thuras to tap the living travel encyclopedia for an epic list of his “must-visit” road trip stops. While this list skews toward western and midwestern curiosities, he was sure to hit us with some east coast gems as well. Let’s dive in!
A great classic road trip stop on the way to Joshua Tree, the Cabazon Dinosaurs are in the Pee-Wee movie. For a long time, they had a kind of creationist museum in the belly of the dinosaur, which made it extra weird, but this is still a great stop to make while heading toward Joshua Tree.
A little bit outside of Joshua tree in a different town, called Landers, is the world’s largest free-standing boulder: Giant Rock. It’s about seven stories tall, it has been an important location since indigenous Native American times but in the ’50s it became the sight of a sort of UFO mania.
The other wild thing about Giant Rock is that even before that happened there was a miner, named Frank Critzer, who dug underneath the boulder and built himself a little house under there. He lived under this rock for years and years until, basically, he had an encounter with the police who thought he was spying during the war, and ended up dying.
They basically threw explosives in his apartment.
All of this history ties together in this incredible and interesting fabric. Part of the reason Critzer ended up there behind this rock is that he was friends with George Van Tassel, who was an inventor who was working with Howard Hughes on plane technology. After Critzer died, Van Tassel was very affected by his death and became obsessed with the idea of otherworldly beings, aliens from Venus, and started these UFO conventions and went on to build a nearby site called the Integratron — this wild circular little white dome-shaped space where they still do these healing sound baths. For Van Tassel, it was this energy focusing alien communicating thing.
Joshua tree, that whole area in the Yucca Valley, is filled with so many outsider art projects, the world-famous crochet museum… Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum is a sort of outdoor sculpture installation, it’s a great place to start a road trip.
As you get into Death Valley, besides all the really great Death Valley national park stuff itself, which is like a whole day’s worth of activity and, if you stick around at night, some of the best stargazing in the world, there is a lot of weird interesting stuff out there! There is something called the Amargosa Opera House — it is what it sounds like, an opera house — but what makes it so interesting is the owner, Marta Becket, moved from New York as a successful performer and moved to this town with no one in it, opened her Opera House, performed daily and painted the entire theater with these murals of an audience.
There is something melancholy about it except that she eventually attracted tons and tons of people and it became this real pilgrimage to make. People would come and watch her shows all the time, she ended up with sold-out houses, it’s this kind of interesting self-fulfilling outsider artist visionary trip.
On the other side of Las Vegas is one of my favorite art pieces, Double Negative, by an artist named Michael Heizer. It’s maybe one of the most monumental pieces of land art in the US. Heizer basically found this mesa and carved on either edge, these two gigantic notches into the edge of the mesa. It’s an interesting sculpture, his quote about it is “There is nothing there, yet it is still a sculpture.” And the name “Double Negative” kind of tells you that.
It’s so strange, by removing the dirt and the rocks, it creates what’s kind of a giant invisible floating sculpture.
Up from Double Negative, you get to some of the more far-out areas of Nevada like Tom Kelly’s Bottle House or the Clown Motel. Tom Kelly’s Bottle House is a house made of bottles, a cool little stop on your way out into the middle of nowhere.
You can then head out to one of my favorite towns, the last town to get gas and beer and snacks before you’re on Route 50 for the loneliest road that goes on forever. You can spend a night sleeping at the Clown Motel if that’s something that doesn’t bother you. Every room has a painted portrait of a clown, the lobby is filled with 700 clown dolls and it just happens to be located next to an old abandoned miners’ cemetery. It could not be more out of a Steven King novel, it’s almost out of a Goosebumps book, honestly.
Home to the most beautiful, weird twisted gnarly trees you’ve ever seen. They’re also some of the oldest trees in the world. The trees in this park, some of them are 5000 years old! It’s an amazing place to spend a little time, take a little hike, eat your lunch, and get some perspective on what a brief moment our lives actually are. It helps you appreciate that whatever you’re doing at that moment, taking that vacation is the right thing to be doing. We don’t have that much time, not compared to a Bristlecone.
Another cave home! I didn’t mean this to be a theme but this is another place where people dug out a house for themselves into the side of a cliff and weirdly, it still has all the furniture. It’s a sort of ’40s and ’50s style home, although it also has a weird taxidermy borough in it, which is not standard ’40s decor.
Bishop Castle is one of my absolute favorite places of all time, and one of the greatest pieces of outsider art in the entire US. It is the largest self-built castle in the United States, it took six decades to build, and one guy named Jim Bishop built it almost entirely by himself.
To visit you have to sign a form that says basically if you fall off the castle and die it’s your bad, and then you can explore this incredible creation, this enormous space where every rock has been moved up by Jim and mortared into place and at the very top there are these incredible, very sketchy feeling, I imagine they’re pretty strong because they’re still standing, but these wrought iron hand-welded bridges on the top of this 16 story castle that you can walk across.
Up near Denver, is the International Church of Cannabis. Obviously, Denver was an early convert to legalization, but in the early days, these two guys bought a defunct church, painted the inside with these wild unbelievable murals, and turned it into an operating church… though the church’s focus has changed over the years.
Now they’re just running a normal dispensary, but they’ve managed to turn it into this incredible beautiful transformed space.
Straight up from Colorado, we’re going to hit one of the most classic roadside attractions — Wall Drug. It’s right outside of Mount Rushmore, back when Mount Rushmore opened, it became immediately a huge draw, so it spawned this radius of attractions around it.
Wall Drug opened up back then and sometimes it called the granddaddy of all tourist traps, which is about right. In the early days, they offered free ice water, which was their big appeal, but then they started adding giant dinosaur sculptures, and weirdly they became Jackalope-themed, which is this mythical creature that is basically a rabbit with horns. For a while, there were a lot of people making jackalope taxidermy, which is basically a piece of rabbit taxidermy with small deer antlers attached to it. We can go for hours about why the jackalope is a thing, but I’m going to skip that for now.
Anyway, it became jackalope-themed and they still sell jackalope taxidermy, they have this giant fiberglass jackalope outside. Wall Drug is this truly quintessential American tourist trap in the best way.
I grew up a mid-western kid, I didn’t travel internationally until I was 18. We didn’t do that kind of travel with my parents at all, it was all these epic road trips around North, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. When I was 12 we went to this place in the woods of Wisconsin called The House on the Rock. Kind of classic weird crazy roadside attraction. This place is so hard to encapsulate for people, the short version is, the folklore is that it was built as sort of an architectural revenge story against Frank Lloyd Wright, but then the creators just kind of kept adding on to it and adding on to it. It takes like five hours to walk through the whole thing. In your trip through this crazy psychedelic house, there is a statue of a whale fighting a squid that is the size of the Statue of Liberty. Inside the house!
It has the world’s largest indoor carousel, it has this room that looks like it goes on for infinity, it’s just this kind of cantilevered hallway that points out over the forest and it gets skinner and skinner and skinner creating a sort of optical illusion.
Those are a small sampling of what’s in that place. If you’ve ever read Neil Gaiman’s book, American Gods it’s where he sets the major kind of meeting of the Gods, and he’s gone on the record and said he’s had to tone down the weirdness so people would buy it.
But as a twelve-year-old that experience had a profound effect on me — if this is in the woods of Wisconsin, what else is in the world?
As I got older, as a teenager in Minneapolis I got into urban exploring and graffiti and that showed me a different way of experiencing a place, and that a city can be filled with all these interesting tucked away corners.
Back near my old stomping grounds, near Minnesota-Wisconsin, after the House under the Rock, there is this nearby place, Dr. Evermor’s Forevertron. It’s a giant metal sculpture yard built by one guy who helped with the House on the Rock. He was a demolition expert in his professional life, he would knock down buildings and tear apart these big industrial spaces and he collected all of that stuff and sort of welded it into these weird electro futuristic almost steampunk spaceships made out of leftover materials. It’s a super cool space.
The company that’s basically making all of these weird fiberglass dinosaurs and jackalopes is this company called FAST fiberglass. This is where they dispose of their failed molds and broken fiberglass experiments. There are cool skate videos of people doing tricks on these weird giant fiberglass mouses and stuff.
If you are in New York and looking for something amazing nearby to do, I’m going to send you to a place in New Jersey called Northlandz with a “Z.” It’s the pet project of a guy who made his money in computers and software in the ’90s who decided that what he wanted to do with that money is build the world’s biggest greatest most mind-boggling miniature train sets. I think a lot of people go “Eh I don’t care about miniature trains.”
If you think that, you’re wrong!
This place is on a different scale, you actually wind through it multiple times because you’re moving up through it at multiple levels, and there are whole mountain ranges that are 50 feet tall! I don’t know if they’re that tall, but they are very tall, many floors tall, there are little mountain towns with trains rounding around them and they go through tunnels and go down into the valley and past the river, and this guy also built a giant enormous pipe organ that he taught himself to play.
He’s still there and is often the dude serving the weird microwave pizza at the snack bar. You can find him and be like “tell me about this whole thing” and maybe if you’re lucky you’ll catch one of the organ performances.
Less weird and wacky, there is a really incredible wolf conservation center in South Salem. You can go and see wolves, learn about them, they even have wolf ambassadors that you can sometimes meet. We did a project with them and they brought a wolf ambassador down to a bar in Greenpoint Brooklyn, everyone was chilling in the bar and this wolf and their handler walked in. Quite literally, a wolf walked into a bar.
Not that far from New York City is a place in Nyack New York called the Clausland Mountain Tunnels. They were built as a rifle range for the New York national guard in the early 1900s, but it was basically a giant boondoggle, they built all of these tunnels half-buried in the grown so the people can move around the rifle range without getting shot but what they didn’t think about was that everyone who was practicing shooting, was shooting over towards the Hudson and over toward a town.
Bullets were falling on people’s barns! It was called “a menace to life” by the New York Times and it was shuttered only three years after it was opened, so it became this abandoned space with all of these overgrown half-buried tunnels. Today it takes on this life as one of these places where teenagers, and not only teenagers, go to freak themselves out. Even in the daytime, these tunnels are pitch black and they are filled with cave crickets. These things grow to the size of a tennis ball, and when they are disturbed they leap three feet. They stay on the ceiling so when you walk under them they just start bouncing around.
I didn’t know that when I went with my bud. There is a spot where you climb through the roots of an old tree into these tunnels and it’s this weirdo terrifying Alice in Wonderland experience and you’re surrounded by these big bouncing spider-looking creatures, they’re totally harmless, but there are hundreds of them, thousands. That’s a space I would not go at night and I would not go alone.
It’s not trespassing… it’s an undeveloped state park, so you can go walk your dog and check them out, you don’t have to go in the tunnels.
Lil Nas X responded to Sada Baby’s jab in true Lil Nas X fashion. Rather than making an argument out of it, Lil Nas X decided to troll the rapper by reminding him that the song is still No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. “this is so f*cked up omg,” Lil Nas X wrote in response. “everyone stream the number 1 smash hit Montero (Call Me By Your Name) out now on all platforms!”
this is so fucked up omg everyone stream the number 1 smash hit Montero (Call Me By Your Name) out now on all platforms!
This isn’t the first time Sada Baby faced backlash for some comments he made about other rappers. Back in November, the rapper found himself in hot water after he discredited female rappers who have OnlyFans pages or were previous sex workers. “Ain’t nobody takin’ you seriously as no motherf*ckin’ artist. Care ’bout none of that sh*t,” he said. “B*tch, you known for shakin’ ass, showin’ titties, f*ckin’ OnlyFans all that type of sh*t. Whatever, b*tch. Don’t nobody give a f*ck about recordin’ no motherf*ckin’ music.”
Sada Baby is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
It was reported earlier this week that Kodak Black’s security guard was shot in the parking lot of a McDonald’s in Florida. The event is still pretty fresh, so it’s currently under investigation and TMZ is reporting that according to law enforcement sources, the shooting was a targeted hit on Black. Furthermore, police are apparently investigating some threats to Black’s life made online, and that includes comments made by Southside.
Over the weekend, Southside got on Instagram Live and shared a message directed at Black, saying, “Yak, you still a b*tch. We can bump, too. I’ll be back in Miami in a week. Pull up wherever, we can bump. Don’t bring no security.” That comment was seemingly a response to Black mentioning Yung Miami, Southside’s girlfriend who Black dated before he went to prison, on Instagram Live.
In regards to the shooting, there are reportedly no officially named suspects in the shooting at the moment and the investigation is ongoing.
In March, Southside was arrested in Miami on firearms charges and for knowingly driving with a suspended license. Meanwhile, Southside recently declared that he’s considering retiring from producing after the release of the next 808 Mafia project, saying, “Just kno this album is going to be great. I’m still gone lead for the culture, I’m still gone try to put new producers on, but as a producer, I’m throwing the towel in after this album.”
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vocal arranging, stacking the bridge 
everyone stream the number 1 smash hit Montero (Call Me By Your Name) out now on all platforms! 
(@LilNasX) 