Month: December 2021

It was reported in October that Ye (formerly Kanye West) was looking to sell one of his Wyoming ranches. As far as what he plans to do with his remaining homes, he apparently intends to leave himself “homeless in a year” by turning them all into churches, according to a conversation between Ye and British-German artist Tino Sehgal for German culture magazine 032c.

In the print-only interview that’s included as “a special edition booklet” in Issue #40 of the publication (photos of which were shared on Reddit but have since been removed), Ye said:

“The ultimate good life is simpler. It’s for those who are willing to not have any possessions. Your baggage weighs you down.

I’m going to be homeless in a year. I’m going to turn all the homes I own into churches. We’re making this orphanage, and it will be a place where anyone can go. It should be like an artist commune. Food should always be available. The opportunity to make art and be around friends should always be available.”

Speaking of possessions, a bulletproof vest that Ye wore during one of his Donda listening parties was recently sold, alongside an NFT, for a whopping sum of $75,000.

Urban Meyer has finally been fired by the Jacksonville Jaguars after a George Costanza-like run of incompetence that could only be explained as being a man who was actively trying to get canned.

Meyer’s Jaguars were 2-11 and showing little sign of improvement after getting shutout by the Titans in Week 14, and while the on-field performance was bad enough, that was not even the focal point of most stories about the Jaguars, as seemingly every week a new off-field issue involving Meyer popped up. There was him getting danced on by a woman who wasn’t his wife at his own restaurant in Ohio earlier this year, followed by reports of him calling assistant coaches losers and getting in arguments with players. Finally, the last straw seemed to be the allegation from former kicker Josh Lambo that Meyer kicked him during a practice, while calling him “dipsh*t.”

As soon as the Meyer news hit (after midnight on the East Coast on Wednesday night/Thursday morning), Twitter was set ablaze with jokes as the Jaguars had finally done the obvious in firing Meyer, but in an added hilarious manner by doing so in the middle of the night. While there are always some jokes that fly in a situation like this, rarely is there such a loathsome character that is almost universally disliked like Meyer to draw schadenfreude from all corners of the football world.

The Jacksonville Jaguars are in the midst of another dreadful football season, sitting at 2-11, tied for the second-worst record in the NFL. However, this year’s misery has come with more controversy than usual in north Florida, as new head coach Urban Meyer has produced non-stop headlines for all the wrong reasons.

There was him hiring the former Iowa strength coach Chris Doyle, who had been fired for allegations of racist behavior while with the Hawkeyes, which lasted less than a week before the unsurprising backlash led to his resignation. Then there was the Tim Tebow saga in training camp, as Meyer couldn’t help but bring his old quarterback in as a tight end, with Tebow ultimately not making the team. Then Meyer was filmed getting danced on by a young woman who was not his wife at a bar in Ohio on an off weekend after Thursday Night Football, leading to an awkward apology. Most recently, there have been numerous reports of Meyer being a generally terrible boss, calling assistant coaches losers in a meeting, arguing with star receiver Marvin Jones, and, on Wednesday, an allegation from former kicker Josh Lambo that Meyer kicked him during a practice.

Apparently the Lambo allegation was the final tipping point and, despite clearly not wanting to make a move in-season, the Jaguars hand was forced and after midnight ET, word broke that Meyer had finally been fired, with owner Shad Khan releasing a statement.

The most damning quote is this one, “I informed Urban of the change this evening. As I stated in October, regaining our trust and respect was essential. Regrettably, it did not happen.”

That, one would think, would be the end of Meyer’s coaching career, where he was wildly successful in college at every stop but a trail of off-field issues followed his teams seemingly everywhere he went. Now, his first NFL job ends in disgrace after a woeful 13 games and the Jaguars, once again, are looking to restart with a new coach.

This week the world learned about the “Bonnie and Clyde of MAGA World,” aka Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lynn Lawrence. (No, not the incredibly famous, Oscar-winning actress.) They were longtime “Stop the Steal” rally organizers who, at least at one point, believed that the “Big Lie.” They claim they were horrified by the events of Jan. 6, which they helped organize, and which they abandoned mid-show once it was clear it would turn violent. And they’ve been cooperating with the Jan. 6 committee and doing interviews, where they denounce their former favorite former president.

But both of them didn’t appear on live on TV together until Wednesday night. They went on MSNBC’s All in with Chris Hayes for a joint interview, in which the host tried to get them to open up more about what led to the Capitol siege. It didn’t always go smoothly. Sometimes it was chaotic. Early on Stockton took umbrage with their host saying Paul Gosar promised to pardon them for what they did — charges he’s called “misinformation.” But speaking of which, he happily went to town on Trump for pardoning Steve Bannon for the scammy “We Build the Wall” campaign (in which Stockton and Lawrence played a part) but not its founder, Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage.

“Of course Trump pardons the one guy, of the guys who were indicted, who has all the money and political connections to fight it — the triple-amputee war hero who wasn’t a lawyer, wasn’t a political operative,” Stockton told Hayes. “Brian in particular got left out to dry. So Trump pardons the only guy that he thinks he can get something back from, and that’s been the hardest thing for me and Jen to deal with.”

Stockton also discussed the Jan. 6 rally that led to the Capitol riot. He said there was “internal conflict” about whether it would remain at the Eclipse, as Stockton and Lawrence wanted. But they didn’t realize it had changed to it was too late.

“We kind of lost that battle, and we didn’t realize we lost that battle until President Trump told people to walk down to the Captiol,” Stockton said. “For us, it was devastating, it was very deflating. It’s one of those snap-to-reality moments where you look back over all the previous warning signs that you ignored.”

They said the rally was supposed to be about inciting a mob. “It was portrayed to us that if the electors were seated for President Biden, that Trump would recognize the results,” Lawrence said, adding that that word was Trump “wanted the largest crowd ever” for what would then be his farewell speech. “That was our plan, so the minute we realized — oh my God, you’re marching those people? We have nothing in place. What are you doing?”

The interview didn’t always go well. When Hayes tried to end it on an upbeat note, in which Stockton and Lawrence would, he clearly hoped, say without reservations that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, they got some reservations.

Stockton immediately launched into some “whatabout”-ist nonsense about the press coverage of Trump’s alleged ties to Russia in the 2016 election. Eventually he admitted that certain bogus claims were indeed bogus, but even that took some doing on Hayes’ part. It’s a reminder that the MAGA “Bonnie and Clyde” may still be, at least in a sense, outlaws.

(Via Raw Story)

For some reason, Dr. Oz recently quit his very successful daytime show filled with sometimes questionable medical advice — or as Stephen Colbert succinctly called him, a “liar” — to run against a very tall progressive who’s better at Twitter than he is. Is it going well? Is the backwards world of Republican politics embracing a guy who was first made big thanks to Oprah? The jury’s still out. But an appearance on Fox News in which he was given a basic quiz on one of its viewers’ biggest pet issues — and failed in spectacular and awkward fashion — suggest maybe not.

The surgeon-turned-TV star, who’s running for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania opposite the very popular John Fetterman, went on the network and didn’t appear to prep a simple answer about abortion. Host Will Cain asked him straight-up when does he think live begins. You could see him grow nervous, perhaps even worried, his Adam’s apple even jiggling in what may have been panic.

“As a doctor, I appreciate the sanctity of life,” he said, robotically. “And for that reason I’m strongly pro-life, with the three exceptions I’ve mentioned. That’s how I would vote.”

Cain, though, asked him to answer the question: “When does life begin?”

“Again, if I’m pro-life, it’s a decision that comes back to the sanctity of when you think life does begin,” Oz said. “And I believe that it begins when you’re in your mother’s womb.”

“When you’re in your mother’s womb?” pressed Cain. “But that carries you up to all the way when you’re into nine months of pregnancy.”

“Well of course, life’s already started when you’re in your mother’s womb,” Oz replied. “But it’s a rathole to get trapped into the different ways of talking about it. We need, as a nation, to make sure the Constitution is appropriately followed, and people like me, we may be in the same camp, who are pro-life, have our feelings respected. And this is something that should not be taken away from us by judiciary legislating from the bench.”

Sadly, Cain did not seem to be buying that. So he gave him some advice going forward instead. “Yeah but that’s also something that’s going to have to be legislated,” he said. “And that answer’s gonna have to be given specifically.”

So, yeah, that didn’t go so well. But Dr. Oz is new to this thing where he sucks up to the right-wing, feeds them the lines they want to hear. But then, it’s only been a few weeks since he made this bizarre life decision. Meanwhile, those not on the right are simply baffled.

(Via Raw Story)

Pelicans-Thunder was not a game many fans outside of New Orleans or Oklahoma City had circled on their calendars on Wednesday night, and with an overtime thriller on national television between the Lakers and Mavs ending in buzzer-beating chaos, it didn’t figure to be the lead NBA story.

However, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Devonte’ Graham had other ideas, as the Thunder trailed by three with 4.5 seconds left, when Gilgeous-Alexander hit an absurd three from the logo while trying to evade Garrett Temple’s efforts at purposefully fouling him. While everyone was rightfully freaking out about that, the Pelicans got the ball into Graham who rather calmly hoisted a 61-footer from the other three-point line that banked in to give New Orleans a 110-107 win.

It is the most ridiculous sequence of the year in the NBA, and it’s hard to imagine anything is going to top it. SGA’s three was preposterous and probably shouldn’t have happened as Temple definitely gave him a push (or should’ve been an and-one if they were allowing the shot to get off). And then Graham is able to get a clean run-up to launch the ball about as high as any successful heave you will see, and it gives a little smooch off the glass and drops in.

As for the rarity of that heave going in, it’s the longest game-winning shot in at least 25 years.

Gilgeous-Alexander’s reaction tells the story for the Thunder, as he almost falls to the floor in disbelief, storming off while cursing to himself wondering how that happened. For the Pelicans, it was sheer elation as they, no pun intended, stole the thunder from Austin Reaves’ buzzer-beater in Dallas moments earlier.

The Los Angeles Lakers came into Dallas as pretty strong favorites against a Mavs team still playing without an injured Luka Doncic, but after a Jalen Brunson takeover and some ugly shooting from both teams down the stretch, the two found themselves in a dogfight that required overtime to settle.

It was the sixth overtime game for the Lakers, who can’t help but make games close, for better or worse, but the good news is they are very good once they get to an extra frame, improving to 5-1 in overtimes this season with a 107-104 win over the Mavs. After Jalen Brunson and Kristaps Porzingis picked apart the Lakers defense to push Dallas ahead by seven in the fourth quarter, L.A.’s defense tightened and the Lakers slowly clawed their way back in.

Still, they needed a minor miracle as they shot some dreadful threes down the stretch, as on their final possession of regulation LeBron James missed a three that Maxi Kleber and Porzingis fought over, with the ball ultimately squirting out to the corner to a waiting Wayne Ellington who hit the game-tying three with two seconds to play.

A Trey Burke deep three went begging on Dallas’ final play, and off to overtime the two teams went. In overtime, both teams had “found money” moments late, as Russell Westbrook hit an out-of-rhythm corner three, which the Mavs answered with a Kleber banked in three from the wing to tie the game at 104-104.

On the Lakers final possession, the Mavs did a great job forcing the ball to Westbrook again in the corner, who didn’t take the bait and drove, collapsing the Mavs defense just enough to spring Austin Reaves open on the right wing, who knocked down his fifth three of the ball game with 0.9 seconds to play to give the Lakers the win.

Reaves finished with 15 points, all from the three-point line, and got mobbed by his teammates after hitting the clutch three (which also could’ve been ruled a foul with the contact that came after the shot). Dallas, out of timeouts, couldn’t even get a heave off in time and for the fifth time this season, the Lakers escaped overtime with a win.

For months, Critical Race Theory has been a curse word among Republicans, its every invocation sending their base into outrage mode. Only problem: Conservatives don’t seem to know what it actually is. It’s an academic approach, largely employed in law schools and other collegiate departments, as a way to understand how longtime systemic racism has affected American society. One place you won’t find it is in K-12 education, but conservatives have baselessly claimed otherwise, so their base must believe it so.

So of course Florida governor and COVID denying grifter Ron DeSantis announced new legislation that, if passed, would ban CRT from the schools in which they’ve never been taught. And as per The Daily Beast, educators and people who actually know what they’re talking about alike are shredding it to bits.

DeSantis calls it the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” the acronym awkwardly standing for “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act.” It will allow parents “private right of action” to sue schools where CRT is being taught. It even allows them to collect lawyers’ fees if they win the lawsuit.

Only problem? There’s never been any evidence that K-12 schools were teaching CRT. But that didn’t stop DeSantis from expanding his focus to the workplace as well, railing against consultants who go to corporations to discuss diversity, equity, and inclusion. “This has become a cottage industry,” DeSantis said. “They basically will get tens of thousands of dollars to go in and do a training.”

Oh, and DeSantis also invoked Martin Luther King Jr. while bragging about legislation that would make it hard for teachers to, say, teach about the existence of slavery in America or the civil rights movement, of which the man he quoted was a major part.

The announcement, from a figure who’s risen the ranks of the Republican party by making bold, Trumpian moves (to Trump’s fury), was decimated by teachers, experts, and others. One teacher-turned-Democratic candidate reminded DeSantis that the thing he’s banning simply isn’t taught in the schools his bill would target.

Legal expert Qasim Rashid pointed out that DeSantis banning CRT only stresses why it’s important to not erase discussion of racism’s place in American society.

Another Florida politician begged DeSantis to “stop creating fake problems.”

But perhaps the most bizarre part of DeSantis’ bill is that graduating students will have to take what is essentially a Soviet-style loyalty test. “We’ll be doing exams when people leave school, which will be like the citizenship exam that naturalized immigrants have to take,” DeSantis crowed. “At the end of the day, everybody that comes through our school system… everyone is going to be an American citizen, and they’re going to have duties and responsibilities. They need to understand what that means, and they need to understand the principles that our country was founded upon.”

In any case, it all sounds an awful lot like that Simpsons episode where Springfield citizens make their top priority protecting them from the nonexistent threat of rampaging bears.

(Via The Daily Beast)

After maybe four months of answering repetitive questions about climate change — and reading back some warped versions of her answers in magazines and websites around the world — Tamara Lindeman needed a break.

Released at the start of February, Lindeman’s fifth LP as The Weather Station, the velvet-gloved and glittering Ignorance, was one of 2021’s first consensus favorites. After putting down the acoustic guitar, Lindeman managed to wrap sophisticated pop grandeur fit for Fleetwood Mac around the kind of vulnerable confessions that framed her early works as a half-whispering singer-songwriter. But that deft balance, Lindeman learned with some surprise, was at best a secondary interest for most interviewers. Instead, they wanted to know how she’d written such fetching songs about oil spills, dying birds, and another novel plague of our Anthropocene, climate grief. And by the way, some wondered, could those very songs help solve the problems?

“There is a heaviness in talking about this, because it feels very personal and intimate,” Lindeman said in early December from her home in Toronto. “When ‘famous’ figures start talking about climate change, they make major mistakes. Once people started to ask me about it, it felt like a minefield.”

I first spoke with Lindeman about Ignorance in the early autumnal days of 2019, when it didn’t yet have its name. I was working on a piece for NPR about the groundswell of musical nods to global warming and how I expected them to be a major storyline of 2020. (Wait, something else happened?) I called Lindeman after noticing not only some subtle references to climate change in her earlier works but also after admiring her bravado on social media, where she admonished politicians and encouraged listeners to care about, say, collapsing ice shelves and the policies quickening the pace. She was even hosting public conversations about it.

Lindeman was almost finished with the album, her debut for Fat Possum; months before the pandemic scuttled all schedules, she hoped to release it near the middle of 2020. She talked about those songs with cautious optimism then, an uncharacteristic boom to her soft voice. These tunes would arrive as Trump’s only term started to end, she hoped, so that her southern neighbors could get back to the business of fixing the extinction-level mess we’ve made, a hopeful notion I cautiously indulged. At that point, her biggest question seemed how directly to address climate change, for fear it may be cheesy or offputting. “I go back and forth between telling it like it is and that fear of ‘the protest song,’” she had said. “But that’s dumb, because this is clearly what’s happening.”

Ignorance is not a didactic record out to change your mind about climate science or unveil advice about changing your behavior; it is, instead, a nuanced expression of grief, a lament of loss that centers on love for the beauty around us. It’s possible to hear its songs so much you can sing along to the breezy “Parking Lot” or the peacocking “Atlantic” before you notice their messages — the emotional fatigue of existential despair and the terror of the headlines, respectively. That was, for Lindeman, one point: “I wanted it to be approachable in the way that pop music is sneaky: ‘Wait a minute, what am I singing?’”

But the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, when Ignorance was finally released, provided a new context. At a moment when so much of the world was chronically grieving but when we somewhat understood that collective actions could help us save ourselves, Lindeman’s considered references to living at a time when life may very well be ending felt felicitous. (The fact that no one was touring during the pandemic allowed her to avoid reductive and useless charges of hypocrisy, too — that is, “How can you care about the climate when you tour?”) Most headlines touted her as some new climate-change singer-savior. Rolling Stone even wondered “Can an indie rocker change the climate conversation?”

Ignorance offers a sophisticated emotional map of the various ways we might feel about the climate. By speaking to our collective failure and extending solidarity as we try to face it together, the songs feel both like a box of tissues and a balm. I spent half of the year walking from Mexico to Canada, trying to stay in front of California wildfires and make it through Oregon before the season’s running water disappeared. In that setting, where the encroachment of climate change provided a steady hum of daily dread, even the most tender moments of Ignorance seemed to me like fight music. Over drums that could feel like fists, Lindeman articulated the confusion of a calamity we somehow continue to abide.

It was nice, Lindeman admitted, to feel like she struck a collective nerve. But when she was being interviewed about Ignorance, journalists often made her feel noble or admirable for writing about climate change, a notion she flatly rejects. “To me, it shouldn’t be unusual or a sign of virtue to want to talk about something that is happening,” she said. Indeed, the bad news is in the very air we breathe and the water we drink — not making it a routine element of art should become the exception. Put another way, the news shouldn’t be that someone has written a song about climate change; the news should be what the song has to say about our varied experiences teetering here at the brink.

This means, I think, that the emotional landscape of music is changing, its breadth stretching to include more songs about our ruptured environment, a loss so vast we cannot actually comprehend it. As listeners and critics, we’re going to have meet these songs where they arrive by learning more about what is at stake as the climate changes. People will experience this sixth extinction in different ways, whether that means their native lands are swallowed by rising tides or that they watch from afar as still-unnamed species continue to collapse, until it eventually reaches their descendants’ doorstep, too.

The assortment of emotions will be complicated — grief, rage, apathy, shock, disgust, and so on. We’ll need to understand the science behind climate change and the inequality it will exacerbate. We’ll need to understand the psychology of loss on this unknown scale and hope that exists beyond reason. Just as every love song is not the same, every song about climate change — and they will soon start to pile up — will not be the same. It will be the critic’s job to integrate them into the larger social conversation about how we save whatever it is we have left; to do that, we must leave behind facile notions of what we think we know.

Lindeman stopped talking about climate change, in part, because she was exhausted by seeing her answers misrepresented by writers who only wanted to skim the surface of this unfathomably deep subject. We’re going to have to do better, because this topic is doomed to be our future, artistically and otherwise. We have to learn the language.

“There will be great protest music made about climate change, but I don’t think we have done that yet because our emotional body around this is still so unresolved and misunderstood,” Lindeman said, sighing. “Maybe Gen Z will be better?”

If we’re aggressive and smart and altruistic and lucky, songs about our climate catastrophe will perhaps someday seem like outdated mementos, reminding us of high anxiety that we endured like some musty “I Survived Y2K” T-shirt. But those odds only get longer. As Lindeman coos during one of Ignorance’s best moments, “At some point, you’d have to live as if the truth was true.”

More than the development or demise of any microgenre or change in distribution models, the way that art reflects and helps shape our conversations about whether or not our species can save itself might be music’s most pressing story in the decades we might be lucky enough to live. That’s a fatalistic premise for the artwork of the future, I suppose, but the songs of Ignorance made a year of devastating environmental headlines slightly easier to handle. We’re going to need more albums like it.

During the Houston Rockets Wednesday night game against the Cleveland Cavaliers, Rockets head coach Stephen Silas left the bench to head back to the locker room during a timeout with the Rockets trainer.

The reason wasn’t immediately clear, but it soon was reported that Silas had to leave the game due to dehydration. Per the Houston Chronicle’s Jonathan Feigen, Silas was receiving fluids in the back after not feeling well on the bench.

Silas was replaced for the time being as head coach by assistant and former NBA head coach John Lucas. Lucas, in fact, was once the Cavaliers’ head coach from 2001 until 2003 before being let go by Cleveland before the start of LeBron James’ first year in the league. He has not been a head coach since then and has been working for the Rockets since 2016.

Overall, things weren’t going well for Houston in Cleveland. At halftime, the Cavs lead the Rockets 69-38 with the Rockets shooting 30 percent from the field and 12 percent from three, as one of the NBA’s hottest teams of late cooled off for at least a half of basketball in Cleveland. However, the bigger concern is for Silas, who will hopefully feel back to his usual self after receiving fluids, as the job he’s done in getting Houston turned around has been remarkable over the last two-plus weeks.