Month: June 2021

According to the New York Post, music executive Scooter Braun has been hit with a $50 million lawsuit by a former Goldman Sachs partner, named Peter Comisar, who claimed the music executive failed to come through on a promise of a meaningful role at Braun’s new venture if Comisar departed from his current job.

Comisar says that from 2016 to 2017 Braun “aggressively courted” him while he was working for Guggenheim Securities. Braun allegedly bragged about his roster of talents and famous close friends in hopes that Cosimar would jump ship and join the music executive in launching Scope Capital Partners with business manager David Bolno.

The lawsuit says Bolno spoke highly of Braun, crediting him for “reigniting Calvin Klein underwear through a campaign with Justin Bieber and creating the Yeezy brand for Kanye West.” Comisar also claims Braun told him anywhere between $500 million and $700 million could be raised by getting close friends, like Jimmy Iovine and David Geffen, to invest in Scope. Comisar adds that Braun “personally executed contractual commitments to support the new venture,” which would have given Scope an operating expense of $7 million per year for three years while Comisar himself earned a salary of $3 million a year. However, things turned bad when those billionaire investors failed to hold up their end of the bargain.

“The truth was that Braun’s relations valued him as someone to socialize with, but to whom they could never and trust their millions,” the lawsuit read. “When it came to fundraising, Braun turned out to be a sheep in wolves clothing.” Comisar adds that he was threatened by Bolno, saying that if he pursued legal action over the breach of contract saying, “Braun would trash Comisar’s pristine reputation” and “ruin him financially.”

For the third consecutive game, the Atlanta Hawks made life miserable for the New York Knicks on their way to a win, this time in 103-89 fashion to punch their ticket to the second round of the playoffs.

As has been the trend all series, the Knicks simply could not create enough offense against the Hawks to keep up, with a deficit that steadily got larger and larger as the game wore on until the end result was no longer in doubt in the mid-fourth quarter. Leading the way as he has all series for the Hawks was Trae Young, scoring 36 points and dishing out nine assists as he and the Hawks starting lineup continued to bludgeon the Knicks.

Young ended the game with an exclamation point, drilling the dagger from the edge of the logo and then taking a bow to the delight of Reggie Miller.

While not the most efficient night for the Hawks offense, all five Atlanta starters reached double figures, headlined by a 14-point, 14-rebound effort from Clint Capela to walk the walk after talking the talk in the build up to Game 5, doing much of his damage in the first half.

De’Andre Hunter also stepped up in a big way for the Hawks, scoring 15 points on 6-of-11 shooting as one of the few Hawks to find a real offensive rhythm in a sloppy game overall.

To illustrate just how ugly things were at points in Game 5, the Hawks shot 26.5 percent from three-point range in a game they won by 14, as New York’s offensive woes somehow got even worse as they went out not with a bang but a whimper. Julius Randle played best of all the Knicks scoring 20 points on 7-of-19 shooting, but every possession for the Knicks felt like a root canal, where even if the desired result of a bucket was achieved, it took a painful amount of energy just to get there.

The Knicks shot 37.8 percent from the field in the loss, as they had just 31 made field goals to 16 turnovers in the loss. They simply could not respond to the Hawks’ energy and despite their failed attempts to get themselves going with chippy play and after the whistle physicality, they could never be quite as involved during the run of play as they seemed to be after a whistle blew.

New York’s effort was so poor that even Spike Lee couldn’t bear to witness the final few minutes of them going out sad, exiting with three minutes to play and the game well in hand for Atlanta.

The Hawks will move on to face the Sixers on Sunday in Philadelphia, while the Knicks will enter an offseason on a sour note after a spectacular, surprising season. The bitter taste at the end may end up being good for New York, which has clear holes to fill in the offseason and will have seen that on full display in a series most thought would be a toss-up. Atlanta, meanwhile, saw Young step fully into the role of superstar in the postseason for the first time and will now get a very different test in a Sixers team that might at least begin the series without the presence of their MVP candidate in Joel Embiid.

After seeing Joel Embiid go down in Game 4, the Sixers looked flat, unable to respond to the Wizards’ desperation as Washington picked up their first win of the series to force a Game 5 back in Philadelphia. On Wednesday morning, word emerged that Embiid was dealing with a small tear in his meniscus that would make him day-to-day, bringing plenty of concern to the MVP candidate’s immediate future.

Doc Rivers said he was unsure when Embiid could return and as such the Sixers needed to take care of business without him to advance to the second round. That meant someone needed to step up, and the man who took that expanded role head on in Game 5 was sharpshooter Seth Curry, who led the Sixers with 30 points on 10-of-17 shooting (3-of-6 from three) in what ended up being a 129-112 Philly win to send them to the second round, likely against the Atlanta Hawks.

Curry’s big night helped to create space for the Sixers two healthy stars, as Tobias Harris and Ben Simmons each were terrific in the closeout game. Harris had 28 points, nine rebounds, six assists, and three steals, while Simmons added 19 points, 11 assists, nine rebounds, and two blocks to push the Sixers into the second round.

On the other side, it was a just a matter of the Wizards not having enough firepower to overcome their defensive shortcomings, particularly without their top three-point threat with Davis Bertans injured. Bradley Beal had 32 points to lead all scorers and Russell Westbrook added 24 points, 10 assists, and eight rebounds, but neither were particularly efficient and only Rui Hachimura, with 21 points, could reach double figures next to them.

In the end, the Sixers overwhelmed the Wizards with their depth, led by Curry but also getting strong efforts from Tyrese Maxey (13 points, six rebounds) and Dwight Howard (12 points, eight rebounds).

They will now rest up for the second round, with the hope that Embiid will be able to join them sooner than later against a much different test in the form of the Atlanta Hawks. The good news is that Game 5 offered a glimpse at how they can operate successfully on both ends of the floor without Embiid, giving some confidence that they could possibly withstand a brief absence from their big man — particularly Curry showing an ability to create shots off the dribble and not just as a spot-up threat. Still, so much of this year’s playoff run is dependent on Embiid’s health for Philly, and that remains a nervy wait-and-see situation.

In April, Brockhampton returned with Roadrunner: New Light, New Machine, their first album in almost two years. While many were excited about its arrival, the new project came with some bad news. Prior to its release, the group’s lead vocalist, Kevin Abstract, announced through a tweet that the album “will be our last.” But there’s plenty more Brockhampton to come in 2021. They have another album en route later this year, and there’s this: a new video for “Don’t Shoot Up The Party.”

It’s quite the unhinged affair, capturing the group in the midst of some wild behavior. From acting up in the middle of the street and worshiping an odd metal figure to even burying a group member alive, the new video is nothing short of chaotic.

On top of everything else they have coming this year, the group is also droping a deluxe edition of Roadrunner with four additional songs: “Jeremiah (Original),” “Pressure / Bow Wow,” “Sex,” and “Jeremiah (Rmx).” The deluxe edition, which is titled Roadrunner: New Light, New Machine Plus Pack, will arrive on June 4.

You can watch the video for “Don’t Shoot Up The Party” above.

Roadrunner: New Light, New Machine Plus Pack is out 6/4 via RCA. Pre-order it here.

It’s been a wild week for president-turned-failed blogger Donald J. Trump. He doesn’t have much to do, bumbling around a resort, regaling strangers with fanciful tales about a stolen election. One thing he’s allegedly been telling them, we learned, is that he’s going to be reinstalled in the White House in August. How? Surely not even he knows. But it’s not surprising to learn which person may have given him this ridiculous idea.

As per The Daily Beast, Mike Lindell, aka My Pillow Guy, is, he claims, possibly the person who inspired Trump to adopt this fairy tale story as gospel. “If Trump is saying August, that is probably because he heard me say it publicly,” the businessman — whose vast bedwear fortune may be taken from him by Dominions Voting Systems — told the Beast.

This may be one of the only provable things Lindell has said in the last six months. As the Beast points out, he did appear late last month on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room, where he uttered the magic words, “Donald Trump, I believe, will be back in by the end of August.” He also said eventually even liberals, such as Rachel Maddow, would admit the election was stolen.

Of course, it’s not clear who came up with the August line first — if Trump maybe heard Lindell say it then parroted it to others. The Beast did do some snooping into Trump’s August claims, which were first made public by The New York Times, and found some more intel:

In the past few weeks, two people close to Trump told The Daily Beast, the ex-president had begun increasingly quizzing confidants about a potential August return to power. What’s more, he claimed that a lot of “highly respected” people—who Trump did not name—have been saying it’s possible. Both of these sources said they decided not to tell the former president what they were thinking, which was that it’s not going to happen.

On one hand, this all seems cartoonishly unlikely. On the other — and not to sound paranoid — stranger things sure have happened.

(Via The Daily Beast)

Fans of Jupiter’s Legacy, we have some good news and bad. The good: The Netflix adaptation of Mark Millar’s comic — about superheroes struggling to live up to the lofty ideals of the previous generation — is getting a spin-off. The bad: It’s also coming to an end. This slightly confusing bit of news comes from Deadline, which reveals the streaming giant has greenlit Supercrooks, which exists in the same world, but that the main show itself is no longer.

That might not be for forever, mind you. While Netflix is pursuing a different part of the IP, Millar says he’s “confident we’ll return” to Jupiter’s later. But for now, the show’s main cast — Josh Duhamel, Leslie Bibb, and Ben Daniels among them — has been released from their commitments to the show. That way, they’re not sitting around, turning down other work while Netflix figures out when they’ll get back to Duhamel’s The Utopian, Bibb’s Lady Liberty, and Daniels’ Brainwave.

But back to that upside: Supercrooks is a go. The show will be take an anime approach to that comic, which follows eight supervillains involved in some high-powered heist shenanigans. That wing of Millar’s comic-verse does share some characters with Jupiter’s, but it’s unclear if there will be any overlap between the two shows.

Jupiter’s Legacy bowed on Netflix in early May and ran eight episodes. Its heavy look at family matters earned it comparisons from Uproxx to Shakespeare and a verdict that it was a “swell way to spend a handful of hours.”

(Via Deadline)

Ever since The X-Files ended for the first time in 2002, Gillian Anderson has seemed to work whenever she feels like it. She’ll do the occasional movie but she’s never been consistent. Same with TV shows. She’s still basking in the raves for her eerily spot-on Margaret Thatcher on The Crown, but in a new Hollywood Reporter round-table chat with fellow actresses, she confessed that the show that made her also nearly destroyed her.

“I had a good couple of mini breakdowns during that, and at the end, could not talk about it, could not see it, could not see pictures, could not,” she told Cynthia Erivo, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sarah Paulson, Mj Rodriguez, and Sarah Paulson. But she came up with a solution.

“I needed to immerse immediately in theater in another country,” Anderson said. “And then after a while, I was able to embrace it again, but when I started to embrace it, it was almost like I separated myself so much that I was looking at the image as if it was another person. When you immerse yourself so entirely as we can, and we do for such long periods of time, there’s not going to be no consequence to that. Of course, there’s going to be consequence to that.”

Anderson also admitted that she’s “never really gone after things,” which may explain why her work is relatively sporadic. She continued:

“And when I finished with X-Files, I didn’t know if I wanted to be on a set again ever. So aside from having grown up in the U.K. and wanting to go back, I knew it would take time before I could if I was going to. And in London, you could move between theater and TV, and that was always my dream. But every actor has the thing that they’d want more than the thing that they have, and I’m a cinephile, and so I [wonder], ‘Why do I keep doing TV? All I want to do is do film.’ And I’m still doing TV.”

That said, Anderson has a film in the pipeline: White Bird: A Wonder Story, a war drama that pairs her with no less than Helen Mirren. And being on Sex Education, on top of The Crown, is nothing to sneeze at.

Felix Gretarsson, 48, was an electrician working in his home country of Iceland 23 years ago when a miscommunication with coworkers led to him accidentally grabbing a live wire. The 11,000-volt shock threw Gretarsson to the frozen ground more than 30 feet below. Not only did he break his back and neck in three places, but his arms caught fire as well.

“I just remember lying there waiting for the ambulance and feeling pain in my belly because my body had shut out everything else,” Gretarsson told Positive News. “I was put to sleep when I got to the hospital, and woke up three months later with no arms.”

At first, his arms were amputated just above the elbow, but repeated infections resulted in losing the limbs all the way up to his shoulders. He ended up having 54 operations in the years immediately following the accident.

That’s a lot of trauma and pain, and Gretarsson numbed it all with substance abuse. “My therapy was shutting it out with drugs and alcohol and general destruction for the next few years,” he said. “I got to a place where they said: ‘you are either going to be dead or you do something’.”

After getting help from Alcoholics Anonymous and two liver transplants, Gretarsson got a glimmer of hope. A French doctor who had successfully transplanted a hand happened to be lecturing in Iceland in 2007. Gretarsson spoke with him and he agreed to review his case. Gretarrson moved to Lyon, France, to be closer to the transplant doctors who might be able to help him get his arms back.

In Lyon, he met a yoga teacher from Poland named Sylwia. They fell in love, got married, and began a life together with their two dogs as Gretarsson’s hopes for an arm transplant sat waiting in the wings.

This January, the phone call came. A suitable donor had been found and the doctors wanted to go ahead with the surgery.

The procedure, the first double arm and shoulder transplant, was billed a success. It will be three years before they’ll know exactly how successful the surgery really was, as it takes time—and rehabilitation work—for the nerves to grow and function.

However, Gretarsson’s progress is looking incredibly promising. He posts updates on his new arms on Instagram, and in a recent video, he shared how he’s able to flex his bicep far earlier than doctors anticipated. He said that doctors had told him before the surgery that nerves grow on average about one millimeter per day, which would mean that after about a year, his nerves would be reaching the elbow, and in two years, may reach his hands.

It’s been less than six months since the transplant, and Gretarsoon says he already has some nerve feeling in the forearms. And his voluntary movement of his bicep is incredible, since the lead surgeon had talked about how life-changing just the possibility of being able to bend his elbow would be if the surgery and recovery went well.

Gretarsson keeps an upbeat attitude about his rehabilitation, often making jokes about the transformation his body has undergone. He is also grateful for the gift of modern science.

“I have a Danish liver, French arms – I’m a modern-day Frankenstein,” he said to Positive News, adding: “No-one else has ever lost their arms and shoulders, and got them back. I consider myself to be very, very privileged.”

Follow Felix Gretarsson on Instagram to see updates on his progress.

Miley Cyrus closed out 2020 by dropping her seventh album, Plastic Hearts. It’s a project that the singer intended to release at the end of 2019 under the title of She Is Miley Cyrus, but vocal chord surgery for tonsillitis in October 2019 forced her to delay it. But Cyrus has already begun work on her next project, news that producer Andrew Watt shared in a recent interview with Guitar World.

During the sit-down, Watt, who worked with Cyrus on Plastic Hearts, mentioned the singer as he spoke about the upcoming projects he’s working on at the moment. “He’s also on board for another record with Cyrus, though that’s still in the planning stages,” the publication wrote, adding that a timeline for the album’s potential release has “yet to be fixed in stone.”

While the singer’s fans will most likely have to wait a while for that album to arrive, they’ll be able to watch her perform songs from Plastic Hearts and more at a string of upcoming festivals. Cyrus is set to appear at this year’s Austin City Limits, Lolapalooza, and Bottleneck. These come after she brought her talents to Saturday Night Live to perform with The Kid Laroi.

You can read Andrew Watt’s full interview with Guitar World here.

The vaccination roll-out has gone better than expected. As of this writing, 63% of Americans have at least one dose, with 52% fully vaccinated. But the numbers have slowed the last month, to the consternation of many, and President Joe Biden’s goal of getting the nation up to 70% of at least one dose by July 4 seems like it might not happen. But a dark horse (or Clydesdale) has entered the race: Anheuser-Busch, one of the country’s oldest and most successful beer companies, announced that if we pass that milestone, they’ll buy us a round.

As per The New York Times, the company — which brews Budweiser and its variants, Michelob, Rolling Rock, Shock Top, and which has a number of theme parks they’d like healthy people to visit — said in a statement that they “buy America’s next round” should the nation get their act together.

“We pride ourselves on stepping up both in times of need and in times of great celebration, and the past year has been no different,” the statement read. “As we look ahead to brighter days with renewed optimism, we are proud to work alongside the White House to make a meaningful impact for our country, our communities and our consumers.”

How will this work? Should enough people get at least their first dose, the company will release $5 virtual credit cards for one of their beverages, which include not only beer but alcoholic seltzers and nonalcoholic beers as well.

Anheuser-Busch isn’t the first company to step up and offer goods and services in exchange for helping end a once-in-a-century public health crisis. Krispy Kreme and Shack Shack have offered similar incentives. Meanwhile, some states have gone next level. Ohio offers $1 million lottery prizes to people who can prove they’ve been dosed, while West Virginia is giving away guns and trucks to people who want to protect themselves as well as others from a highly contagious disease.

America, you can do this. And then we can all get together for a drink.

(Via NYT)