Month: July 2021

Trevor Noah and The Daily Show are on a break until this fall (after issuing a heartfelt message), when the show will regroup for a studio return after over a year of at-home production. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the show won’t maintain a presence, as it’s doing while taking swipes at Fox News hosts, most recently with Tucker Carlson and Mein Kampf. That was an easy feat to accomplish, given that Carlson is Fox News’ most enthused promoter of white nationalism. With Sean Hannity, the job grew a little more complicated, for the Comedy Central show took on the task of highlighting Hannity’s “worst” moments.

As one might expect, this took awhile. The show emerged with 15 full minutes of Hannity grandiosity for the Fox News host who’s now dubbed as an “infamous hypocrite” as well as “Trump’s pillow talk buddy.” From there, the supercut spiraled into Hannity’s Hillary Clinton obsession, Russia Russia Russia, and the whole Michael Cohen mess, among other things, after beginning with this declaration: “We are all doomed. The end is near, the apocalypse is imminent.”

Settle in for some gloom from the host who can’t decide whether or not he’s a journalist. Perhaps he should vape a little harder on commercial breaks for a more relaxed vibe.

While his camp has not formally requested a move, Ben Simmons’ names have popped up in trade rumors from the second that the Philadelphia 76ers crashed and burned out of the NBA playoffs in the conference semis. Simmons’ flaws as a player, namely as a shooter (both from the field and the free throw line), were on full display, and now, there are major questions about whether him staying in Philadelphia makes sense for either the team or the player.

According to a report from Jon Krawczynski of The Athletic, one such team that intends on getting in on the Simmons sweepstakes is the Minnesota Timberwolves, which would look to add him to their young core of players. The problem: All three members of that core are untouchable, including the guy who might make the most sense for Philadelphia to target in a deal, D’Angelo Russell.

In Minnesota, while the Wolves would certainly need Simmons to shoot more than zero times in the fourth quarter, they wouldn’t need him to be a No. 2 option on offense. Karl-Anthony Towns, Anthony Edwards and D’Angelo Russell (the Timberwolves view Russell as a part of the core and want to keep it that way, sources said) give coach Chris Finch three accomplished offensive players to get buckets down the stretch.

It would make sense that Towns and Edwards, both of whom are really good fits next to a player like Simmons, wouldn’t be on the move. But even if there are ways to make a deal without Russell make sense financially, he’s the kind of player — younger, under contract for two more years, someone who can score and create for others — that the Sixers really could use with Simmons heading elsewhere. Perhaps this would be easier if Minnesota had its first-round pick this year, but even then, Philly is a team that is presumably in win-now mode and not looking to build for the future.

My grandfather was 103 years old when he died this past spring. Like probably a lot of America’s elderly, he spent the final year of his life essentially on house arrest inside of his apartment within his retirement community. In the time that elapsed between the last two times I’d seen him, he went from a relatively coherent version of the man I’d always known to a sinking shell, like an air mattress you push all the air out of just before you roll it up to put away. Extended social isolation was the one storm he couldn’t weather.

Even just a week before he died his personality seemed relatively intact. I didn’t know if he recognized my wife, who he’d met only once before, but when she lowered her mask he reached out his hand and delivered one of his stock phrases, “Just as beautiful as the day I met you,” — coherent enough to at least pretend that he remembered her.

When she asked, “Morris, how are you feeling?” he answered, “Oh, mildewin’” — his usual response to “how you doin’,” proving that he was a little off his game, but still had the presence of mind to try to play. When I gripped his frail but still substantial and scratchy hand for a handshake, he asked weakly “am I hurtin’ ya, honey?” the same way he had at virtually every handshake for the last 50 years. He even hit us with a few Armenian phrases on the way out. I have friends I haven’t seen in 20 years who still know the correct response to “eench bes es?”

When we returned five or six days later he’d taken a turn for the worse. He wasn’t conscious that second visit, his arms occasionally reaching out involuntarily as his organs failed, like he was trying to hug someone who wasn’t there. It was a disappointing end, as probably all ends of life are, though I couldn’t help but wonder how many more days, weeks, months he might’ve had if a year of near-solitary confinement hadn’t sapped his will to live. If there was one thing that perked up my grandfather it was seeing people. Still, not many people are lucky enough to get 103 years. Everything has a price.

He’d lived long enough to know that I’d finally gotten married, though he couldn’t attend the wedding. He lasted long enough to see my wife pregnant with our first child, but not enough to meet the great-grandson, which would’ve been his fifth.

Morris Samuelian had been born in December 1917, the year before the Spanish Flu killed millions, and, like some kind of human pandemic Halley’s Comet, left the world at the tail end of the COVID crisis.

As far as I could tell, the vast majority of those 103 years were pretty good. I’m not sure any human in recorded history had as many good years as my grandfather. His life spanned two world wars, the salad days of small-town America, and the pinnacle of a prosperous middle class.

Born to Armenian immigrants, he spent almost his entire life in the prototypical mid-size 20th-century city of Fresno — one of those places synonymous with “Anytown, USA,” almost always referred to, when acknowledged by pop culture at all, as part of a list alongside other sleepy salt-of-the-Earth bergs. As in, “the young soldiers were a cross-section of Americana. They came from places like Racine, Toledo, Fresno…”

He worked at his father’s (my great-grandfather’s) shoe repair store beginning at the age of 10, when he used to roller skate from his house to the store, from which he and his two younger brothers made deliveries all over downtown. The two stories he liked to tell the most from this time were about the brothel, over which he and his brothers would fight to make deliveries (until his father found out and banned it from their route), and the time they fixed shoes for future Pulitzer Prize winner William Saroyan. My grandfather always said they never would’ve charged him, but he didn’t even offer to pay.

My grandfather himself was more mechanical than artistic, obsessed with flight and with model airplanes from a young age. He moved south during the war and met my grandmother while he was building the tail sections of B-24s at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank. She worked there as a courier, a feisty blonde of Norwegian ancestry from Glendale by way of Saskatchewan. They married at the Burbank Methodist Church in 1943.

Essentially the model of middle class rectitude, he worked hard, retired at 65, and then thrived in retirement, which lasted almost 40 years. In his seventies, he scored two holes in one and bowled a perfect game. He bowled until he was almost 100, and, in 2008, on the day when the Fresno Bee sent a reporter to profile his induction into the Central California Bowling Hall Of Fame, he rolled a 233 (I’ve never even sniffed a 200). The passage that hit me the hardest was,

Bowling also provided some stability for Samuelian during difficult times. When his wife, Ione, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, he continued to take her with him to the bowling alley for as long as she was able.

“She’d sit on the bench and hold my sweater or jacket,” Samuelian says. “But as the disease progressed, it got harder for her to come.”

He loved bridge and backgammon, and towards the end of his life used to drive up to Table Mountain (he drove until he was almost 100) to play penny slots (not much of a gambler, but he loved to socialize). He was the kind of guy who would enter a room and trade a few well-worn jokes with everyone in it, a real let-me-introduce-you-to-the-waitress-here kind of guy. I used to think my grandfather knew everyone in Fresno. Once, when I was sitting in the backseat of his boxy eighties Buick, another car cut him off in traffic. “What a jerk!” I remember him saying (I only ever heard him swear while bowling). “And to think, I used to buy tires from that guy.”

He and my grandmother were married for 63 years before she died in 2006. She stayed in a care facility at the very end, once her symptoms had progressed too far for one old man to manage, but he continued visiting the facility for years afterwards. He knew people there now, so he’d pop by from time to time. He was retired for the entirety of my life, and that was, essentially, my dominant memory of him: going from place to place to socialize with different groups of people, who all seemed to know him by name.

For me, his death feels like more than the death of a person. It’s the end of an era, the death of an entire way of life — all those corny clichés that he always had a knack for making true. My grandfather was essentially the blueprint for How To Make It In America. He did all the things immigrants and children of immigrants were supposed to do, from expanding the family business to marrying a blonde. He lived in the same house, the one my mother and uncle grew up in, for more than 70 years. Even after my parents divorced while I was in college my grandfather remained the definition of stability. Stability built on “values,” sure, but values that were themselves built on the foundation of post-war prosperity, an exceptional lack of industrial competition, and a booming middle class. Is that a useful ideal, or a historical anomaly?

When my great-grandfather, Mugerdich Samuelian, came to central California from Van, then part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1910, he did what he knew. He fixed shoes. He adopted the name “Sam,” supposedly learned perfect English, and opened his own storefront, Sam’s Re-Nu-All, in 1917 (later Sam’s Luggage). You could track the suburban sprawl of Fresno, and by extension of the Middle American city in general, through Sam’s locations — starting in downtown, later opening up a location in the then-new Fulton Mall, closing downtown, going uptown to Blackstone, and eventually shuttering altogether when the Blackstone store closed in 2003.

Even the neighborhood where my grandparents lived feels like a time capsule — a grid of modest, ranch-style homes with low ceilings, with square lawns now beginning to overgrow or with cars parked on them. The original owners have mostly died or moved away, to newer neighborhoods with grander footprints and more open floor plans.

It feels like my grandfather cashed out at just the right time. He never went to college but did well enough to stay retired for more than 40 years and never run out of money. He survived the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl and inherited the New Deal. I was born during Reaganomics and inherited the financial crisis.

My grandfather had two children, a two-car garage, a bowling team, a golf group, a bridge group, and a vacation home. As far as symbols of working-class success go, it’d be hard to beat that cabin by the lake. My great-grandfather built it in 1915, with a big deck and a lakefront view just up the trail from Huntington Lake in the Sierra National Forest. The lake itself was created only a few years before the cabin, filled by adjoining dams and part of the massive hydroelectric project that provides water and power for the naturally arid fields of Central California and the population centers of Southern California. My grandfather and the place he was born grew up in tandem.

Huntington Lake is sort of a poor man’s Lake Tahoe, a great place to ski, sail, and swim, as long as you can tolerate the 60-some degree water, fed entirely by melted snow. I never went in without a full wetsuit, but my grandmother swam around in nothing but a floral one-piece and a blue-bathing cap, sighing leisurely like she was at a hot springs resort. “Norwegian blood,” she’d say, as if she didn’t graduate high school in Glendale.

“Grandpa Sam” loved to fish for rainbow trout off the dock. Grandpa Morris was much more lukewarm on the idea of spending his summer days up in the woods, away from his bowling and his golf. But my grandmother loved it, so my grandfather tolerated it. The family cabin was passed down to my grandfather and his two brothers, and to their children in turn. It was the hub around which the generations rotated.

The cabin lasted, like my grandfather, more than a hundred years before it flamed out. The Creek Fire of 2020 burned for more than three months before it was finally contained in December — the fourth-largest wildfire in California history (five out of the top six were from 2020; the sixth was from 2018).

I’d stayed at the cabin just a week before it was evacuated, my first time back in 20 years, having moved away at 18 and not quite appreciating it enough to make the trip home from San Francisco or LA or New York City or San Diego. Having moved closer to home, and with a wife and a stepson and a couple of dogs, and with travel limited, it suddenly made much more sense as a vacation spot. For a long weekend we fished and threw sticks for the dogs and watched my stepson and his cousin jump off the dock, perusing the old picture books and the kinds of keepsakes and trinketry that tend to accumulate in 100 years of one family owning a rustic Summer cabin. Sitting on a sun-drenched deck overlooking a shimmering lake, my wife asked, “Why didn’t you tell me about this place before?”

We had such a good time that we made plans to return the following weekend. The morning we were set to leave, my mom, who was staying for the week with my stepfather, called to tell me not to come. They’d been evacuated. The roads were closed soon after. We waited with fingers crossed for the next week or two, hoping the fire would miss us like so many had before. Wildfires, generally speaking, are pretty normal in California, when the brush dries in the hot sun and the winds of late summer and fall fan the flames.

Once the area had stopped smoldering and the roads were open again I drove up one afternoon to see it. It was a little hard to find the way, since even in the age of the iPhone you mostly had to navigate by landmarks. “When you hit the meadow turn left,” and so forth. Those old landmarks, half-remembered from childhood, were now not only distorted by memory, but actually warped by fire or obliterated completely. The meadow was still there, luckily, so I knew where to turn.

The sign on the driveway identifying it as the Samuelian cabin remained, looking oddly brand new, the paint not even discolored. Everything else was a mess. A few pieces of what used to be the metal roof dangled limply from the stone chimney stack, swaying gently in the breeze. Almost everything else was gone. Even the walls of what used to be the shower had distorted in the heat and folded in on themselves. The stone chimney still stood, but the fire had weakened the grout and even other parts of the stone pathways and retaining walls had crumbled.

It was sad to look at, but also beautiful in a way, the view to the lake now more expansive and unobstructed than ever. The area hadn’t been charred into ugliness. Many of the trees remained and even on some burnt ones the higher branches were still lively and green. The big logs lining the switch back trail my great grandfather had made who knows how many decades before, Grandpa Sam’s trail we always called it, even though he died before I was born, were all powdery ashes. You’d never know it had existed at all if you hadn’t been there.

It was sad, of course, but consciously I didn’t know how much it was fair to mourn. Certainly not in the middle of a pandemic, when so many people seemed to have so many bigger problems, real problems — losing their jobs, losing their friends, losing members of their own families, etc.

Cabins can be rebuilt. Memories remain, even when mementos burn. Losing the cabin foreshadowed losing my grandpa and, I worried, perhaps a lot more. Was it fair to mourn? How much of a fuss should you make over losing something you were lucky to have for all those years in the first place? After all the years of hoping the fires would miss, should we be sad that they finally didn’t? Or grateful for all the years that they had?

For a time it was a gorgeous place in the sun. I suppose you had to be there.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

A private candlelit dinner on the baseball field at Dodger Stadium sounds like something Drake would do, right?

Well, he did it.

Los Angeles’s ABC News affiliate’s helicopter reporter Chris Christi happened to catch the international superstar during a midnight flyby, spotting him getting cozy. The shots found their way to Twitter, and already, fans are buzzing about not just the utter Drake-ness of the date, but also the identity of the woman sharing a meal with the self-declared Certified Lover Boy — a nickname he’s certainly earning with this stunt. The prevailing theory is that it’s entrepreneur Johanna Leia, who is the mother of high school basketball star Amari Bailey, one of Bronny James’ teammates at Sierra Canyon School.

It seems that Drake has become rather fond of dining in closed-down arenas over the past few months. He recently celebrated his Billboard Artist of the Decade Award win with dinner on the 50-yard-line for his crew at the SoFi Stadium, also in Los Angeles.

Drake’s supposedly been hard at work on his next album, Certified Lover Boy, which he says is due to drop by the end of the summer — although he’s pushed it back a few times already — so perhaps this instance will form the basis for one of his many, many flexes when the album finally does drop. Check out some fans’ responses to his Dodger Stadium date below.

In 2017, Chance The Rapper held a secret show for some of the biggest fans in his hometown, Chicago. The footage forms the basis for a new concert film, Magnificent Coloring World. Chance recently shared the trailer for the film on social media, simultaneously announcing its August 13 release date at select AMC Theatres. Pre-sale begins next Friday, July 16. The film’s premiere is set for August 13 in LA, with a follow-up event planned for New York the next day. According to a press release, it’s the first time an artist has independently distributed a film through AMC Theatres.

The concert, which Chance played and filmed in the spring of 2017, featured a custom stage and sound design created specifically for the movie (which Chance teased a few times throughout the year) and is directed by Jake Shreier, who previously shot the romantic comedy-drama Paper Towns.

Chance, who laid low for much of 2020, popping out a few times to support some of his closest friends including Justin Bieber on “Holy” and Vic Mensa on “Shelter,” is gearing up to return to the spotlight this year with a headlining slot at Summerfest 2021 and the new single, “The Heart & The Tongue,” which promised a return to the stripped-down sounds of his early work.

Watch Chance The Rapper’s Magnificent Coloring World trailer above.

Netflix may already have a hit with Sweet Tooth, but the Jason Momoa-led Sweet Girl seems to have a very different sweet journey in mind for viewers come August. Because if you ever wanted to see Jason Momoa play a grieving dad in a Rust Belt town fighting against drugmakers and their henchmen, well, this is the film for you.

The description for the video Netflix posted to YouTube has two pitches for the film, a choose-your-own Momoa in Pittsburgh journey, so to speak. Here’s both of them.

A devastated husband (Jason Momoa) vows to bring justice to the people responsible for his wife’s death while protecting the only family he has left, his daughter (Isabela Merced).

…

He lost the love of his life to a pharmaceutical company’s greed. Now his daughter is without a mother, and he’s without justice. For now.

As revealed in the trailer, Momoa’s wife needs a certain medicine while hospitalized but it was pulled from the market by the pharma conglomerate owned by Justin Bartha (The Hangover). Momoa’s character calls into a TV appearance for the exec to threaten him, someone notices, and what follows is a boxing training montage and a plot for revenge that quickly spirals into all-out action flick. And then Momoa is attacked on a bus and his daughter gets involved in a physical confrontation that seems to spark the two going on the run.

“There’s nowhere to hide,” a voice says while a subdued version of Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ plays. “We know who you are.”

If the first half of the trailer is heartbreaking drama and anger, the second half turns into a full-fledged action movie with explosions, gunfights, and hand-to-hand combat. There’s a death-defying fall in there as well. And Merced’s character insists she gets involved, too. It’s admittedly all a bit confusing, but it includes some nice sweeping shots of Pittsburgh to smooth it all out. We’ll have to see how it all works out when Sweet Girl hits Netflix on August 20.

“It ain’t just rhythm and blues,” Aaliyah coos on “Loose Rap,” the fan-favorite cut from her self-titled album. After emerging in 1994 with her platinum-selling debut Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number and establishing herself as R&B’s newest star on 1996’s One In A Million, it was clear the singer was hungry to explore beyond the genre’s shores. Within the five years between her second album and 2001’s Aaliyah (which celebrated its 20th anniversary on July 7), Aaliyah untied herself from the predatory shackles of previous mentor/producer/alleged beau R. Kelly as well as R&B’s predictable trends at the time.

Aaliyah was blossoming into her womanhood: she graduated from high school in 1997, became the youngest singer to perform at the Oscars with Anastasia’s “Journey To The Past” the following year, earned her first Grammy nomination with the hit single “Are You That Somebody?” from the Dr. Doolittle soundtrack, and scored her first acting role in 1999’s box office smash Romeo Must Die (which bred the Grammy-nominated “Try Again” single). All of these experiences signaled a maturity in the singer, which was reflected best on her final album.

“I wanted to do that because my name is Arabic and it has a beautiful meaning: ‘The highest and most exalted one, the best,’” Aaliyah said of her decision on the album’s title. “And I wanted the name to really carry the project. It’s different from the last LPs because I’m older, I’m more mature and I think that’s very evident on the album. So it really showcases Aaliyah and who she is right now”.

Aaliyah bridged the gap between the sweet girl-next-door personality she established with One In A Million and a yearning to get more experimental. She relied a little less on her “Supafriends” Missy Elliott and Timbaland — though Static Major from R&B group Playa played an integral role in writing nearly all the songs — who previously helped solidify her sound, and brought in an array of producers signed to her uncle Barry Hankerson’s Blackground record label. The end result? A genre-defining album that looks towards the future of R&B and hip-hop while also embracing the traditional elements of soul and funk.

Aaliyah wasn’t branded as a concept album, but the 14-song collection read like chapters of a dark romance novel, dissecting every stage of a relationship that’s on the verge of crumbling. The initial talking stages are found in “Loose Rap” and “Extra Smooth.” The shadowy production of the former finds Aaliyah bored of men who can’t back up their sh*t-talking, while latter’s heavy and in-your-face bassline mimics the singer’s grumbling (and often-overlooked lower register.

Then comes the growing conflict, which is first introduced by lead single “We Need A Resolution.” One of the few songs produced by Timbaland on Aaliyah, the singer confronts her partner’s laziness atop a snake-charming melody. “That song speaks about a relationship that’s kind of in the middle, it’s not either-or really,” Aaliyah explained at the time of the single’s release. “It’s just at a point where they’re not communicating, they have problems and they want to resolve them. Not all the time do you come to a resolution. At the end of the song, they don’t really resolve anything and that happens in life.”

The issues continue with the Latin-inspired “Read Between The Lines,” the track “Those Were The Days” that reminisces over the playful puppy love stage that’s now been tainted (“You don’t touch no more, give me chills no more / We don’t go out no more”), and the frustration-led “U Got Nerve.” “My own blindness cause my sadness / No longer am I a slave over your madness,” Aaliyah grits through her teeth, ready to kick her cheating man to the curb.

The singer’s growing maturity is found in the cinematic “I Refuse” and “Never No More,” whose themes tackle pain and trauma. “With [‘Never No More’] being about abuse, I wanted you to feel that musically and hear the emotions,” producer Bud’da explained in 2016. “I wish everybody could’ve seen the emotions as well. There’s so many people quietly dealing with abuse and it’s just an unheard thing. I thought it was pretty upfront for that song and it was bold on her part to do it knowing that she has a great influence.”

Aaliyah continues down a winding road of forgiveness (the tender “I Care 4 U” that was originally recorded for One In A Million), being the other woman (“I Can Be”), and sheer wrath (“What If”) whose intense industrial guitar licks teased what could have been if Aaliyah’s wish to work with Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor was granted.

But Aaliyah is not all strife. There is bliss found on the lively “More Than A Woman” single, the breezy charm of “It’s Whatever,” and “Rock The Boat,” whose heavenly nature is unfortunately enveloped in tragedy as the video shoot preceded the singer’s death in August 2001.

“‘Rock The Boat’ hit her real hard,” co-writer/co-producer Rapture Stewart told Fuse in 2016. “She was the one advocating to make that a single, because [the label] was trying to make sure whatever Timbaland produced were up to be singles. But she gave them hell and refused to let them do things. Even Timbaland loved it.”

The autonomy that threads Aaliyah was a refreshing take on neo-soul that cut through the bubblegum pop at the time, but it also gave the world insight into the singer’s impending takeover. Upon the album’s release, she was on the brink of being a major triple-threat entertainer as seen with the posthumous release of Queen of the Damned and being cast in The Matrix Reloaded (the role was later given to Nona Gaye).

To say that Aaliyah was ahead of her time would be an understatement. You can hear it in the delicately stacked harmonies of Solange, Syd, and Snoh Aalegra. You see it in the effortless dance moves and wispy come-ons of Ciara, Normani, and Tinashe. It’s there in FKA Twigs and Kelela’s Afro-futuristic visuals, Rihanna’s lyrical vulnerability and too-cool sense of style, and TikTok’s current Y2K fashion obsession.

It’s hard to miss in Noah “40” Shebib’s murky production he’s provided for Drake over the past decade, mimicking Aaliyah’s in-studio relationship with Timbaland and other Aaliyah producers (Drake’s idea for a posthumous Aaliyah album was shelved in 2014). And it’s found in endless tributes, from The Weeknd’s sampling of “Rock The Boat” on House Of Balloons’ “What You Need,” Chris Brown borrowing her vocals for 2013’s “Don’t Think They Know,” and covers of “At Your Best (You Are Love)” by Frank Ocean and Sinéad Harnett. Her post-R&B influence even bled into the works of indie acts like The xx and Arctic Monkeys.

Aaliyah is also remembered for its iconic sienna-red hue, a color that signifies either a sonic or personal shift for R&B artists throughout the decades. Landmark examples include Janet Jackson’s Control and The Velvet Rope, TLC’s CrazySexyCool, Xscape’s Traces Of My Lipstick, Rihanna’s Loud and ANTI, Toni Braxton’s The Heat, Usher’s 8701, Kelela’s Take Me Apart, and Tamar Braxton’s Love & War.

But unlike these albums, Aaliyah’s final offering and One In A Million aren’t available for streaming (the R. Kelly-touted Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number casts an uncomfortable shadow on said platforms). It’s been a long-discussed topic on when her estate will finally resolve the issue (which they teased last August). The longer they wait, the longer Aaliyah’s legacy is hindered for the new generation’s discovery. But the red light of Aaliyah, and all her other beloved music, glows too brightly for the fallen angel to ever be forgotten.

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

ITEM NUMBER ONE — I’ve missed these awful people so very much

I have some important news: Succession is back. Kind of. Succession is kind of back. It’s coming back, at least, officially, and there’s proof via this new teaser trailer that I’ve watched about 15 times since it dropped on Tuesday afternoon. You’ve probably watched it a few times, too. Who cares? Watch it again. Watch it twice. Here, I’ll embed right after this paragraph so you don’t even have to type words into a box anywhere.

It’s so good. I don’t even mean that like “I missed it so much, I just like seeing their faces again,” although I also mean it a little like that, if I’m being honest. I’m mostly saying that it is about as good as you can do if you’re making one of these teasers. It packs so much into so few seconds. It’s got Tom and Cousin Greg doing their little comedy routine, it’s got Roman being a saucy little rascal, it’s got Shiv trying so hard to make sure she ends up on whichever side wins. And it’s got this moment, which reminds us all of two important things: One, the Succession theme song is so good, with its cascading tinkly pianos and, apparently, “intense string music”; and two, you should be watching everything with the captions turned on, just in case there’s high comedy hiding in there.

But most importantly, the teaser gives us an update on drug-addled failson Kendall’s attempt to take down his old bear of a father, Logan, as the top banana of Waystar Royco. It’s all terrific, even in short bursts, with Logan growling threats and profanity and Kendall stammering out weak little comebacks. It’s one of my favorite parts of the show. And it’s back already. Look at the salty old dog playing with his food.

See, you watch that clip and you hear the words about grinding bones and making bread with bone dust, which can’t possibly taste good, but please also note the little flourishes in the still frames. Flourishes like, for example, the way Logan is holding the phone, with the mouthpiece near his mouth and the earpiece nowhere near his ear. This is the character boiled down into a concentrated sticky paste. He’ll talk to you but he has almost no interest in hearing what you have to say. It’s basically a one-sided conversation. He might as well be leaving a voicemail. Logan Roy is one of the best characters on television. Top 10, easily.

And how does his son Kendall respond to this threat? What witty and snappy comeback does he flip off upon hearing that his skeleton will be used to make a nice seeded rye? Wellllllllllllllllll…

What a pathetic bozo. What a sad little doofus. What a perpetually scared little boy. I love him. If anything bad happens to him I will be inconsolable. I do not want to look into why I feel this way. Let’s move on!

I have a theory. I don’t know if it’s a good theory, but I’m going to put it out there anyway. I think it’s probably better that this new season comes out this fall. I think, for all our talk about how much we wanted it and how much the wait stunk, we wouldn’t have appreciated it fully if it had dropped, say, last August, mid-pandemic, right before the election, when we were all hopelessly fried. I don’t know if we had the reserves left to spend on a show about the most miserable people on Earth being awful to each other for an hour a week. We would have watched and been happy about it, but not at full strength.

I mean, look at the shows we all got passionate about in that window. Look just at Ted Lasso. Even the most cynical people you know, the kind that scoff at puppies and complain about pizza, fell in love with that show and its boundless optimism. I wonder sometimes if the show hits the same way if we’re not all collectively trying to hold back historic amounts of trauma. It still would have been good and had some die-hard supporters, but it’s a sweet show about a character who first appeared in a series of commercials. Remember what we did to the Geico Cavemen? Remember how mean we all were when they tried to turn that into a show? This is different, for sure, but there are similarities, too. That’s all I’m saying.

The long and short of it is that maybe this is all working out perfectly. There’s less out there in the world dragging us down than last year at this time. We have plenty of excess energy to toss at attractive people attempting to ruin each other on television gif our enjoyment. It’s good. It’s maybe how it should be. It’s time.

Hit the intense string music.

ITEM NUMBER TWO — J.K. Simmons is so good at playing cranky guys

J.K. Simmons is in Tomorrow War. I’m sorry for just blurting out something that obvious in the first sentence, but I have things to get to in this section and saying that is the first step. I am being efficient here, for both of our sakes. And J.K. Simmons is great in Tomorrow War, too. He plays an anti-government grandpa who lives off the grid and is absolutely shredded, which you can see in the screencap above of him in a tanktop and which I mention because it is really fun to mention every time you talk about J.K. Simmons. The man is made of leather and rope. But that’s not the point, really. The point is that this is another example of J.K. Simmons playing a Cranky Guy in a movie or television show, and we should really all talk about it a bit.

The impressive thing, to me, about this long history of playing Cranky Guys, is that he doesn’t just play one kind of Cranky Guy. This isn’t an actor just running out the same performance over and over again with different names on basically the same character. J.K. Simmons has a full cupboard of Cranky Guys in his kitchen.

There’s this one, the Bearded Mountain Man Cranky Guy, the kind who lives in a shed and eats jerky made from animals he hunted himself. There’s the kind he’s played in movies like The Accountant and shows like The Closer, let’s call them Authority Figure Who Has Been Beaten Down By The System And Is A Cranky Guy Because Of It, where he’s like a chief or high-ranking government official who has seen too much in his career and is exhausted by it. And there’s, well… there’s J. Jonah Jameson, who I guess you’d say is a Generally Perturbed By The Existence Of Spider-Man Cranky Guy, which is admittedly too specific to be an archetype, but still, so cranky.

It’s really cool when you look at it as a whole. There are so many tiny variations with the same basic structure, so many types of Cranky Guys, none of whom would like each other even a little bit. He created a niche within a niche and he owns it completely. And the best part is that I don’t have to worry even a little about him seeing this and using that voice and face to yell at me about it, because J.K. Simmons is yet another type of Cranky Guy in real-life, as he put on display in a recent interview with Uproxx’s Mike Ryan.

Are you aware of the rabid online community on social media for The Accountant?

I don’t know anything about anything online ever.

I have so much respect for him. J.K. Simmons is the best. There are not many movies — anywhere, about anything — that could not be improved by adding him to the cast as any kind of crank you can imagine. Please make a note.

ITEM NUMBER THREE — Patti Harrison rules

Patti Harrison is in two sketches in the second season of I Think You Should Leave and she absolutely destroys in both of them. This is not something that should surprise you if you are familiar with her previous work, including the first season of I Think You Should Leave, but it is still worth noting because it is cool and true and you should always make a big deal out of things that are cool and true. So, it has been noted.

Go watch the sketches now. Like, right now. I won’t go about spoiling them if you haven’t seen them yet, beyond posting that screencap up there and telling you that her delivery of every single line in both sketches is outrageous. Just so over the top and unhinged and perfect. I could make a solid case that she’s the on-camera MVP of the season, and I probably will if you get a drink or two in me at any time over the next 5-6 months.

The nice thing about all of this — beyond just the part where we shout about things that are cool and true — is that it gives me an excuse to tell you about her Twitter account. Which no longer exists. Because she got banned. For impersonating Nilla Wafers. In maybe the funniest way possible. I’ll let her explain in this clip from a recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s show.

We should all — I’m serious about this, every single one of us — do everything in our power to make Patti Harrison a huge freaking star. This is me starting that process.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR — Someone please make a documentary and/or thinly fictionalized television series about Ichiro

Ichiro is one of my favorite baseball players ever. I don’t know where I’d rank him and I don’t want to try, but if we’re making a list of non-Phillies (go Phillies), the top of it definitely includes the following names: Ichiro, Pedro Martinez, Ken Griffey, Jr., and Vladimir Guerrero. Maybe Bo Jackson and Ozzie Smith if we go back a bit. But definitely Ichiro.

Part of that is because he was just a cool baseball player, a little wiry dude who slapped the baseball all over the field and ran like an overcaffeinated maniac and had an absolute rocket attached to his right shoulder. I’ve never seen someone so small whiz a baseball like him. It didn’t make sense. The ball came out of his hand so fast I was surprised it didn’t have flames shooting out of it. I don’t know why I’m talking about him in the past tense. He’s still alive and presumably thriving.

This brings us to the reason for this section. This week marked the 20th anniversary of Ichiro coming to America from Japan and taking over baseball. And to celebrate this moment, The Athletic rounded up a ton of the best stories about Ichiro, as told by his teammates and coaches. And they are incredible. All of them. Ichiro is a wildly funny and wildly strange guy. I could read them all day long. I’m going to post a few of them here, but please, seek out the rest. Learn about his fascination with burgers and chicken wings. You deserve this.

Let’s begin.

[Aaron] Sele: His first year, in spring training, guys were taking BP, and I believe that he was hitting with Jay (Buhner) and Edgar. They were cranking line drives all over the place, no big deal. Ichiro was just staying inside the ball and just flipping the ball to left field with no real impact. Lou (Piniella) starts to get on him, saying something like, “Son, you’ve got to get behind the ball. Drive the ball.” Ichiro puts his finger to his lips and says, “Shhhhhh. I’ve got a plan.”

This is very funny on its own and even funnier if you are familiar with who Lou Piniella is and what he looks like. And it’s just the beginning.

Bret Boone, Mariners teammate: Opening Day, 2001. I’m taking my position at second base, and there was a veteran umpire out there, a guy that’s been there forever. He comes up to me and goes, “Boonie, what’s up, how are you doing?” And he goes, “What the hell’s up with your right fielder?” I said, “What are you talking about?” He goes, “He runs by me and I say to him, ‘Hey, Ichiro, welcome to America.’” And Ichiro looks at him and says, “What’s happening, home slice,” and keeps running to his position.

There are a lot of stories like this, about Ichiro surprising people with his grasp of the English language. I love that he called an umpire “home slice.” I love this next thing even more.

[Michael] Young: He got on second base and I was playing second base. At this point, I had no idea if he even spoke English. We were in Texas in the middle of the summer. It was just blistering down there, and I go, “What’s up, man?” He looks at me with a straight face and says, “It’s hotter than rats fucking in a wool sock.”

Beautiful. Just beautiful. And not even the best part of this story, or at least the best part about the phrase at the center of this story. Because the best part is that he also said it to Bob Costas. On television. Here, look.

I repeat: Someone please make a documentary and/or thinly-fictionalized television series about Ichiro. I say this because I want to watch either or both. Bob Costas can play himself. So can Ichiro, if he wants. I’m not being picky about this.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE — I am pleased to report that the Teletubbies have received their COVID-19 vaccinations

A few things here:

• This is a nice sentiment that implies a number of troubling things: Either the Teletubbies exist in our universe or COVID exists in the Teletubby universe; Teletubbies are susceptible to disease and can die; a Teletubby would have to prove its vaccination status at some point in a way that requires paperwork; etc.
• It all starts getting really dark really fast
• Imagine explaining any of this to a version of yourself from two years ago today

I do not like any of this all that much. It’s kind of like watching Wile E. Coyote filing his taxes. I don’t need to see it. Just let me live in the fantasy on this stuff. I know, I know. It wasn’t done for me and it exists to maybe help explain a troubling situation to impressionable young minds. I understand all of that. But if the minds are that impressionable, they shouldn’t be on Twitter anyway. No thank you to this whole situation.

READER MAIL

If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.

From Scott:

You have the power to add any actor or actress as any character to Fast 10. Who do you add and who do they play? Do you go with Keanu as an FBI agent? Do you go with McConaughey as a villain? Do you go with Ben Affleck as his character from The Accountant and merge the two universes? What do you do with this power?

Part of me wants to stay on theme and add Patti Harrison in a role that will make her a huge star or J.K. Simmons as a Cranky Guy, which could work if we merge in The Accountant as Scott suggested, and yes, I do want to see this so much that I felt my heart skip a little just now as I typed it.

But the answer here is simple, and I think you’ll all agree if you take a second or two this weekend to really wrap your head around it. Here goes: I would add Gonzo, the Muppet, in the role of narrator, like he does in A Muppet Christmas Carol. Explaining the action directly to the audience. Giving everyone the preposterous history and backstory. Just popping up in front of the action every 15-20 minutes to check-in and update the viewer. I need to be extremely clear about how much I am not joking right now. It would make me so happy. Vin, if you are reading this… please consider.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

To Schenectady!

A criminal syndicate has developed a sophisticated scheme to steal used cooking oil set aside by local restaurants for sale to a third-party refiner and unload the cargo on the black market, according to a Buffalo-based outfit that estimates it is losing $300,000 per week as a result of the thefts.

SCHENECTADY GREASE SYNDICATE

Thieves have executed at least 700 heists in every county in the Capital Region, siphoning oil from the grease-caked black storage vats inconspicuously located behind restaurants and ferrying away the sludge-like substance under the cloak of darkness.

This is, without hyperbole, one of the best sentences I’ve ever read. I don’t think — in fact, I seriously doubt — anyone had ever written the words “ferrying away the sludge-like substance under the cloak of darkness” in that exact order before this week. I’m so proud of everyone involved: the writer, the editor, the grease thieves who are… hang on.

HANG ON.

Did that say… siphoning? Like, actual siphoning? Where you suck on a hose?? Are they stealing $1 million of grease a month by sucking it out with a hose???

Thieves gain access to the vats by either cutting a hole in steel grates or breaking the padlocks. They then siphon the yellow grease into tractor trucks or less-conspicuous panel vans, where the substance is carefully packed into plastic totes.

Surveillance video from one recent heist revealed a two-man operation approaching a site shortly before dawn.

EXPLAIN THIS TO ME.

One suspect gained access to the vat while his accomplice backed the truck into the enclosed storage area. As the man sucked out the grease, his accomplice kept watch. The siphoning itself took four minutes, and the entire operation was completed in fewer than 10 minutes.

“As the man sucked out the grease.” This is officially my favorite story now. Maybe ever. Definitely up there with the time a guy grabbed a bucket of gold off a truck in broad daylight and just walked off with it and the best lead the police had was a picture of him at Madame Tussaud’s riding a bike with a wax figure of E.T. Prestigious company here.

There is precedent to launch investigations, said Majumdar, who pointed at federal indictments handed down in 2019 to a syndicate that targeted one of his main competitors at the time, Darling Ingredients, in North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia over a five-year span.

“At the end of the day, the feds are the only ones who can stop this,” Majumdar said.

Okay, listen to me very carefully: I need this to be a movie, and I need J.K. Simmons to play a federal agent. I need this as soon as possible. Like, weeks from now. I have faith in everyone that we can get it done. But we need to start today.

Despite being the sender of numerous typo-filled and oddly capitalized tweets, Donald Trump reportedly flipped out on the legal team for his second impeachment trial, according to a new book. In an excerpt from Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency by journalist Michael Wolff, the former president blasted his lawyers for their 14-page legal brief that managed to misspell “United States” twice. Via Business Insider:

“What is f—ing wrong with these people? They can’t hit spell-check?” Trump vented to his aides over the phone, Wolff reported.

“Are these lawyers the stupidest?” Trump continued. “Are they the stupidest?”

According to the book, the head of Trump’s legal team, Bruce Castor, actually tried to claim that he did use spell-check on the hastily filed brief, but “doesn’t pick up italicized words.” Trump wasn’t hearing it. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Trump reportedly said in a rage. “Fix it! Get it back! Fix it! NOW!” (If Castor’s name sounds familiar, he’s the former Pennsylvania district attorney whose supposed “deal” with Bill Cosby lead to the comedian’s surprise release from prison at the end of June.)

In a sign of the hectic scramble following Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, the misspelled impeachment brief was actually the second time he had to chew out a legal team for having glaring typos in important court documents.

Axios reported back in February that Trump was embarrassed by a brief filed by Sidney Powell, which glaringly wrote “THE UNITED STATES DISTRICCT COURT, NORTHERN DISTRCOICT OF GEORGIA” at the top of a document. Considering Trump notoriously hates reading, you know it’s a bad typo when even he catches it.

(Via Business Insider)

For those who watch the “gross, sweet” FXX comedy Dave, one of highlights of the show is the lead character’s interactions with his friend and hype man GaTa. As the show’s titular lead is portrayed portrayed by the real-life Dave Burd — aka Lil Dicky — so to is the show’s GaTa just a lightly fictionalized version of the actual GaTa, who has been Lil Dicky’s hype man since early in his career.

In both the show and IRL, GaTa is a talented rapper in his own right. While the show plays up GaTa using his connection with Dave to help himself breakthrough, in the reality, he’s been releasing a steady stream of his own music since before the two first linked up in the blog rap era. Viewers were reminded of this fact in the latest episode, where GaTa’s new song “Check Up” plays a pivotal role in the episode’s plot.

Of course, with this show, the lines between fiction and reality blur constantly, and so “Check Up” has turned out to be a real song released by the real GaTa to streaming services like SoundCloud, and it’s a catchy, charismatic, club-ready throwback to a time before rap songs were more humming than rapping.

Listen to GaTa’s new song, “Check Up,” below.