Month: May 2022

The NBA is introducing a pair of new MVP awards. According to Kirk Goldsberry of ESPN, the league has decided to crown the best player in the Eastern and Western Conference Finals every year with a pair of trophies named after Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird and Los Angeles Lakers icon Magic Johnson.

“Larry and Magic defining the ’80s and having that bicoastal relationship representing their conferences like no other two people have,” NBA head of on-court brand and partnerships Christopher Arena told ESPN. “We just thought it was a perfect symmetry as you percolate up to the NBA Finals and you potentially win that Bill Russell Trophy, and obviously the winningest player we have in our history.”

The league announced the news on its Twitter account and unveiled both of the trophies.

In a video posted to an NBA social media account, Bird was informed of the name change, and made it a point to crack a joke about winning the award named after his longtime friend and rival.

Additionally, the league decided to name its two conference championship trophies after a separate pair of legendary players, as the Eastern Conference championship trophy will be named after Celtics great Bob Cousy and the Western Conference championship trophy will be named after the great Oscar Robertson.

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

For the better part of their nearly 30-year career, the members of Radiohead have operated in a world of elevated (and maybe even insane) expectations. Their albums are inspected, dissected, deconstructed, and parsed exhaustively for cultural significance and hidden meanings. Ultimately, they have been judged not only on artistic merit, but on whether they have successfully shifted preexisting paradigms for how music is made and sold. And this pressure comes from both the fanbase and from inside the band. Nobody ever gives Radiohead permission to be “just okay.”

This, naturally, has made the creation of Radiohead music an arduous and deliberative process, with the time between releases growing longer and longer as the band has wandered into middle age. In 2006, Thom Yorke was finally moved to put out a solo record, The Eraser, in part because it was so much easier than working on the future Radiohead classic in development at the time, In Rainbows. These stretched-out gestation periods have also been wearying for the band’s unofficial musical director. “I’m the most impatient of everybody in Radiohead,” Jonny Greenwood recently told NME. “I’ve always said I’d much rather the records were 90 percent as good, but come out twice as often, or whatever the maths works out on that.”

Greenwood’s comments were made in the context of A Light For Attracting Attention, the new album by his band The Smile, formed with Yorke and Sons Of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner. The title of the LP could be taken as ironic, given that The Smile appears to be an antidote to the fanatical anticipation that typically greets Thom and Jonny’s work with their “regular” group. The Smile, in contrast, feels like a deliberately low-stakes affair, having come together during lockdown after 40 percent of one of the world’s most beloved bands decided to work on music together with a highly regarded jazz drummer. If anything, adopting The Smile moniker is a means of attracting significantly less attention than a proper Radiohead release inevitably would.

Then again, going back to 2021, Yorke and Greenwood have teased The Smile as a return of sorts to the kind of overt rock moves that Radiohead abandoned on record on their previous two releases, 2011’s King Of Limbs and 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool. And this is bound to excite a fanbase that’s had precious little new music to inspect, dissect, deconstruct, and parse in recent years.

In January, they released the first single from A Light For Attracting Attention, “You’ll Never Work In Television Again,” a buzzsaw rocker with a shrapnel-spitting vocal by Yorke that is easily the most supercharged rocker to emerge from the Radiohead camp since “Bodysnatchers” on In Rainbows, released a full 15 years ago. Backed by Skinner’s technically brilliant but unobtrusive timekeeping, The Smile present themselves on that song as the most un-Radiohead-like of propositions — a guitar-driven power trio! — that happens to sound, tantalizingly, like a version of Radiohead that Radiohead no longer is apparently interested in being. Given the dearth of actual Radiohead albums since A Moon Shaped Pool, it’s almost too easy to regard A Light For Attracting Attention as the next best thing, a kind of musical methadone for Kid A nation.

The rest of A Light For Attracting Attention doesn’t always conform to the “old rocking Radiohead” standard of “You’ll Never Work In Television Again.” For one thing, Skinner is too good of a drummer to be reduced to mere sideman for two rock stars. His spirited syncopations echo throughout the record, giving the music a relentless pull even when the music slows to an atmospheric, piano-based crawl. On songs like “The Opposite” and “The Smoke,” he gives The Smile a subtle swing, while his machine-like Motorik groove on “Thin Thing” accentuates the song’s robo-funk amid the splashes of sci-fi synths. While almost nothing on the record can be credibly likened to jazz, Skinner’s soft touch on the ballad “Pana-vision” gives the song a smoky, after-hours feel.

But there’s no question that the most profound pleasures of this album are also the simplest — it’s just extremely nice to hear Jonny Greenwood play ripping guitar (or supple bass) while Thom Yorke sings beautiful melodies. On Radiohead records, these men have frequently been moved to subvert their most obvious musical talents, with Greenwood exchanging his guitar for an ondes Martenot and Yorke burying his voice in glitchy subterfuge. (As he famously remarked upon the release of The Eraser, “It annoys me how pretty my voice is.”) But the cover of The Smile guise has apparently liberated them to sound more like, well, them. The album’s most stunning song, “Free In The Knowledge,” is a throwback to unabashedly gorgeous prog-folk epics like “How To Disappear Completely,” in which a simple acoustic strum swells on lush orchestral strings (courtesy of the London Contemporary Orchestra) and Yorke’s operatic emoting. On the opposite end of the spectrum is “We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings,” a synth-rock burner that seethes like a Hail To The Thief outtake, with delightfully churning guitars clanging a wiry riff in the direction of some unidentified apocalypse.

As overseen by Radiohead’s in-house producer Nigel Godrich, A Light For Attracting Attention of course sounds impeccable, perfectly balancing the delicacies of Greenwood’s circular, minor-key licks and Yorke’s choir-boy trilling with the more bombastic elements of the orchestra and brass sections, in the manner of Radiohead’s most famous music. What’s missing, at times, are songs that meet their usual standards. Parts of the record are a little stock in a familiar Radiohead mode; tracks like “Speech Bubbles” and “Skirting On The Surface” are lovely but feel more like outtakes than necessary deep cuts. Much better is “Waving A White Flag,” a spooky and cinematic slice of doom that sounds like Beethoven played on a Prophet 5, in which Yorke and Greenwood find a midpoint between their respective solo careers as a laptop electro-popper and an in-demand film composer.

In the end, nitpicking about filler tracks might be missing the point — what matters is that Yorke and Greenwood are working together, and creating exciting music in a slightly different and incalculably more relaxed environment. For such hard-driven perfectionists, the handful of bum tracks could even be taken as a sign of growth. Either way, an album that’s 90 percent as good as a Radiohead record is damn good indeed.

If you thought Red Rocket was a warts-and-all depiction of porn stardom, then Pleasure might be its perfect complement. Whereas Sean Baker’s Simon Rex vehicle is an outsider picture, mostly depicting post-porn stardom and pre-porn stardom, largely from a male perspective, Pleasure, a debut feature from Swede Ninja Thyberg, depicts the machinations of the industry itself, as experienced by its 22-year-old protagonist, Bella Cherry, played by Sofia Kappel.

While both films feature ingenue aspiring porn stars named after fruit, you could make a case that Pleasure retains the edge in boldness. The film opens with a closeup of Bella shaving her vulva in the shower and continues with countless erect penises, nary a prosthetic in sight (with no offense meant to Rex, who has proved he doesn’t need one). There’s also the plain facts of its release: initially acquired by A24, the distributor behind Red Rocket, A24 traded Pleasure‘s rights Neon in October, rumored to be the result of A24 wanting a different cut for a theatrical release. Neon is releasing the unedited version in New York and LA this weekend, to expand wider the following week.

There’s a push-pull in depictions of porn, between porn being seen progressive or retrograde, feminist or misogynist, and it manages to encompass more than enough material to tell as sensationally a pro-porn or anti-porn story as the teller wants. The anecdotes in both cases would all be 100% true. For her part, Thyberg says this debate over porn is something of a lifelong project for her, and part of what drew her to the material in the first place. As she says, Pleasure, which she initially made as a short in 2013, evolved into something more “about power structures, and using the porn industry as a metaphor or a backdrop.”

Pleasure struck this reviewer (and I’ve spent my fair share of time around porn people myself, hearing all kinds of stories, both horrifying and heartwarming) as a thoroughly even-handed depiction. It’s a testament to Thyberg’s inherent fairness that the cast of Pleasure, aside from Kappel who is a young non-porn actress from Sweden, are all current and former porn professionals — from ex-improv comic-turned-ubiquitous porn actor Tommy Pistol to porn super-agent Mark Spiegel, to a brilliant supporting turn by Chris Cock. Thyberg enjoyed their full participation, even in scenes that portray some particularly nightmarish realities of the industry (one Pleasure scene in particular is even more horrifying than anything in Red Rocket, which was occasionally pretty horrifying in its own right, capturing the same stomach-turning dread with none of Red Rocket‘s ironic cheer).

That Thyberg makes porn industry insiders (and not ex-porn stars turned born again religious anti-porn crusaders, of which there are many, a pattern that began with Linda Lovelace and continues today) complicit in these unsettling scenes is a tribute to their veracity. And also to the fact that Pleasure is neither broadly pro-porn nor anti-porn. It’s a genuine exploration undertaken with respect for the characters involved.

And if that’s too high-minded, porn’s natural juxtapositions can’t help but be endlessly entertaining and occasionally hilarious. When my Pleasure screener expired the night before our interview when I had intended to rewatch it to prepare (I saw it the first time during Sundance), I had to ask to get it renewed. I ended up trying to watch it the following morning just before our interview, viewing this movie full of tumescent penises and closeups of shaved vulva on my laptop at the coffee shop where I do a lot of my writing, surrounded on this morning on either side by patrons literally reading the Bible and highlighting favorite passages. Life’s rich tapestry.

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I was listening to another story about the porn world, and a porn producer told the journalist, “You can find whatever story you want to tell here.” What was it about that world that made you want to tell a story set there?

I’ve been working with this subject for over 20 years, and I think when I went there the first time in 2014, I had one idea. Also, I made a short film the year before. But that idea has really shifted during the process. I think when I started, I really wanted to focus on the porn industry because I’ve always been very interested in challenging the male gaze and, as a filmmaker, that’s what I see myself as having, a female gaze, exposing the male gaze, or challenging it. But the more time I spent there, the more the film started to be about saying something about our society and being a woman, talking about power structures, and using the porn industry as a metaphor or a backdrop.

But I would say the female gaze, because porn is really the essence of male gaze. Heterosexual porn, 99.99%, is made for the male viewer, made from a male perspective. And that’s the sexual education for people all over the world. So we all get to learn about sex from a male perspective. And that’s why I really wanted to go into the epicenter of that, and from that position, turn the camera around the other way, both figuratively but also metaphorically, and tell the other story. What do we not get to see in the porn film? What is the other point of view? And show images that people hadn’t seen before.

Right. I mean, I could tell just from the people in it, and the types of extras and actors that you cast that you’d done quite a lot of research in that world. Can you tell me about that process?

I came there the first time in 2014, and the good thing was I had already done a short film called Pleasure, where my intention had been to portray the real people behind the porn stereotypes. Like kind of a behind-the-scenes on a porn shoot, but at the time I had never been on a porn shoot. I tried to do it as authentic as possible, but of course it was also made out of just assumptions or prejudice. But I could send that as showing that it’s my intention, that it had a very… not trying to…

Sensationalize?

Yeah, no. So then that helped a lot for people to open up, and showed them that I was very genuine and honest, I really want to learn. But then also, I spent so much time there and after a while people got more used to having me around and I became part of the community.

So what were you doing? You were just hanging around on sets ?

Yeah. The first step was to do regular interviews, and then each time I met someone, like Mark Spiegler, for example, was one of the first people that I met. But I asked them, do you know anyone else that you think that I could talk to, or that could share some information? And then it very quickly just led me to meeting new people. It took me a week before I was on my first porn set, and then I became friends with the team, and asked them when are you shooting next? And then after a while people started getting used to having me around, and then I also started to audition and try people for different roles. Quite early I knew that I wanted to have actual porn people in the film. A little bit of industry people. I never thought that it would be only industry people [except for star, Sofia Kappel, who plays Bella], that was just how it turned out. I thought that I would have a mix of professional actors and porn people, but I’m really glad that this is how it happened.

It sort of slowly came together. In the beginning, I didn’t know exactly the whole beginning, middle, and end, I was just picking up things that I found interesting and developed a story from there. But I mean now, in a way, the story is about what’s happening if someone from Sweden was coming into the porn industry and slowly step-by-step getting to know it, and that is also the journey that I went through.

When you were coming into this world, I assume it’s all kind of new, but were there any particular moments that stand out in terms of culture clash?

Yeah, there were a lot of those things. I mean, I just, I remember the first time being on a porn set and the male performer, he just like came up to me with his dick in his hand. With the other one just saying hi to me. And I just… I was blushing so much, I didn’t know where to look, and I was just freaking out. And they had so much fun to see me with that type of stuff, seeing how uncomfortable I was. It wasn’t like in a negative way, just blushing.

But there’s been several shifts I had in my thinking. One was when I was on this porn set and they were doing something that was two big black guys, tiny teenage white girl, schoolgirl outfit, and they were twice her age. And she got some instructions like, “you’re afraid of these big black cocks coming to molest you.” And I was sitting there with my little notebook, writing down how problematic they all are, and then the director turned and looked at me and said, “What is wrong with you people? Why are you making us do this shit? Why is this what you want to see?”

And that was a totally new perspective. Like, okay, so they think that what they’re doing, I’m the reason. I’m the one who’s guilty or responsible for this content. Because I was sitting there thinking this is on them. That was so interesting for me to just understand, oh, they think that we are the problem, or the perverts, or whatever you want to call it. And then so many people in the industry, they think that the mainstream people, as they call us, that we are crazy perverts because they’re just giving us what we want. That was a very important perspective shift.

So I know that you switched distributors, and I think that was over the other one [A24] wanting you to cut some more explicit material. Why was it important for you to leave that stuff in and what did they want you to take out?

I mean, I can’t really comment on anything specific, and I think it’s better also to maybe ask them, because I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know everything about all the details, but this is my film. This is the story that I wanted to tell. That’s always been very important for me.

It feels like there’s this constant conflict with porn depictions, whether people see porn as retrograde or whether they see it as progressive, whether they see it as sexist,or whether they see it as feminist. Does that make it hard for you to just be observational in your storytelling?

I wouldn’t say that it makes it hard for me. I think it’s the opposite. It makes it interesting for me, that whole thing challenging and always trying to find new perspectives, or how can I add other layers too. That’s also why I’m so intrigued by this because there are so many different nuances. And also there are so many different types of porn. I’ve been engaged in the porn debate for 20 years, and I think it’s just really interesting to understand how people can view things so differently. I think it’s a very interesting discussion. To me, the most important thing is that we need to get more images from a female perspective. It is a huge problem that so much of what we see, and especially in porn, is shot from a male perspective, and that that’s the porn everyone is watching. It’s the sexual education for most people, so I think that also makes us project the male gaze in places where it doesn’t belong. As an artist, I think I see myself a little bit as a researcher rather than someone finding the definite answer, but I’m always trying to challenge and push and dig further.

Porn is so ubiquitous, and sort of universally viewed, and yet it still seems like the people that make it and star in it are still ostracized in weird ways. Did you-

Sorry, what does that word mean?

Like they’re sort of pushed outside mainstream society in weird little ways. Were you surprised by any ways that mainstream society sort of tries to push them away, or keep them out of certain normal mainstream spaces?

Yeah. And I mean, I’m so provoked by that– I would say that it’s a lot about projecting your own shame or guilt onto the people in porn. And also blaming the people, the worker, who are just producing the stuff that you are searching for. They are giving their bodies and their work for your satisfication, but then you look down on them and blame them. And yeah, a lot of the porn, it is very problematic. It’s about taboo. It’s sexist and racist, but that is something that we have to deal with on a societal level. And the thing is also with the film, the negative things that happens to Bella, the fact that she is having sex on camera, that’s not what’s causing the problems. It’s misuse of power, it’s the power structures that exist in any industry.

I mean, do you see the way that we treat porn performers as similar to the way we treat workers in general?

What do you mean workers in general? No, I don’t think it’s like workers in general, but also how do we treat workers in general? I don’t completely understand the question.

Like we want their labor, but not them as people necessarily. We want the products of the things they do, but not be-

Yeah. I mean, if you talk about, for example, someone in a factory in a third world country, but I think that’s one thing, but what we’re doing with porn, it’s a little bit like walking past someone taking care of your garbage and saying, “Oh, you stink.” Because they’re dealing with your garbage. So then we’ll push them away and say that they are the problem.

[I think it’s a little revealing, a Swede not initially understanding “workers” as my sort of American shorthand for exploited workers here].

‘Pleasure’ opens in theaters in New York and LA May 13th, before expanding wider May 20th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter.

Tekashi 69 once again reminds the world that he has no problem kicking you when you’re down. The notorious New Yorker took to Instagram to make fun of Young Thug on the heels of his recent arrest for RICO charges. Posting a picture on his Instagram story of Thug in a dress wearing lipstick, 6ix9ine joked “Now he can be himself.” He continued on the next slide with more pictures of the Atlanta rapper in dresses, stating “I wish it was fake.”

He pump-faked being done with the jokes, stating “Ok I’m done Na, free sis, I mean bro” before sharing a clip of Young Thug saying “I want your man.” 69 replied, “there’s plenty men in there.” 69 also targeted Gunna, who surrendered himself to Fulton County officials on Wednesday (May 11), sharing a clip of the rapper from the 2021 movie Dutch. The “Pushin P” rapper is being questioned by the police in an orange jumpsuit and requesting McDonald’s in exchange for information.

It is unclear whether Tekashi intends to troll the other members of the crew, as many more were named in a lengthy 88-page indictment on Monday (May 9) that accuses them all of being in a criminal organization dating back to 2013, with Thug at the helm. Young Thug appeared before a judge on Tuesday (May 10) and was read his charges, which include conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act in addition to criminal street gang activity, namely the murder of a rival gang member Donovan Thomas Jr. in 2015 and the jail stabbing of YFN Lucci earlier this year.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

To describe Ted Cruz as “offensive” is really nothing new, but Washington senator Patty Murray found about a half-dozen different reasons to deem him as such. As Raw Story reports, Murray as a guest on MSNBC on Wednesday, where she chatted with Joy Reid about the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion and attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade.

In discussing the topic, Reid played a clip of Cruz making a ridiculous comparison between the peaceful protestors who are demonstrating outside the homes of those Justices looking to overturn this half-century-old decision and the murderous rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6. An apoplectic Reid lamented the fact that Cruz and his cronies “are comparing people who are holding candles outside of one of these rights-stripping Supreme Court justices’ homes, to the people who busted into the Capitol, sh*t on the floor and threatened to hang the vice president of the United States while smashing through glass and trying to kill United States senators and members of Congress,” then asked Murray for her thoughts. She didn’t hold back, calling it “one of the most offensive things I’ve heard and I’ve heard a lot of offensive things since the Supreme Court leaked this memo.

But Murray, who was in the Capitol on January 6th, didn’t stop there, saying that the pro-choice protestors are “nothing compared to January 6th and I find that offensive.” Then she dug further into Cruz:

“I find his words offensive, I find his tone offensive, and I find his message offensive. What we are talking about today are Republican politicians who are going to take over your choices in your life and tell you what they believe in is more important than you and not only more important but they are going to impose it on you. That to me is offensive. That is using words and legislative language and intent to take away your rights—far different than what happened on January 6th.”

Meanwhile, Cruz is standing his ground—mostly by retweeting footage of protestors exercising their right to have an opinion. With the occasional bit of snark thrown in to remind you why he’s so disliked.

You can watch Reid’s full interview with Murray above.

(Via Raw Story)

In 1993, Harrison Ford famously declared that “I didn’t kill my wife” in The Fugitive, and was ultimately able to prove that he was telling the truth. In real life, the murder charge against Michael Peterson is much more complicated.

On December 9, 2001, the Durham, North Carolina author/wannabe politician called police to report that his wife, Kathleen, had fallen down the stairs and was unconscious, but still breathing. That call ignited a legal roller coaster that still has people intrigued to this day, in part because of Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s 2004 docuseries, The Staircase, which told the story of the many twists and turns in Peterson’s case. New episodes of the series were released in 2013 and 2018. And now, HBO Max has turned Peterson’s world-famous murder trial into a fictional series starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette as the possibly-not-so-happily-married couple?

What does any of this have to do with Ford or The Fugitive? According to Entertainment Weekly, while Ford typically goes for the nice guy roles, he was in fact the original actor attached to play Peterson in the new HBO Max series.

“We originally had been to Harrison Ford,” co-showrunner Antonio Campos told EW. “But we parted ways because he had to go do an Indiana Jones.”

Again, given Ford’s penchant for nice guys—and how closely his legacy is tied to the archaeology professor/adventurer—sticking with the familiar was definitely the safer, and probably better, choice. Though it did leave Campos and his co-showrunner Maggie Cohn scrambling to cast the role.

Given how much media attention Peterson’s case has received over the years, and the amount of footage there is of the author in the courtroom, at home with his kids, and even in jail, they felt that casting the right actor was even more critical because of how familiar people are with the real Peterson. Enter Colin Firth, the ultimate Mr. Darcy, and perhaps not the first actor who you’d think of to portray a possible murderer.

“He had never done a role like this, but we had gone through the Firth filmography and were just constantly struck by how dynamic he was,” Campos said. “I remember watching Where the Truth Lies and there’s this scene where Colin is defending his partner in the movie, played by Kevin Bacon. Kevin Bacon gets insulted and Colin goes and beats the crap out of this guy behind the club that they’re playing at. And it’s so vicious and it’s so ferocious. It was this reminder of the danger that he could also play.”

The first four episodes of The Staircase are available to watch on HBO Max now, with new episodes dropping until June 9.

(Via Entertainment Weekly)

Tomorrow (May 13), Senior Year, a new Rebel Wilson-starring movie, premieres on Netflix. The premise of the film is this: In 2002, Wilson’s character is a high school cheerleader who falls into a coma. 2o years later, she wakes up, determined to finish high school at 37 years old. Naturally, the film will take plenty of cues from the early ’00s, including one of the era’s biggest cultural icons: Britney Spears. On a recent Late Late Show interview, Wilson spoke about a flubbed scene that actually made it into the movie, where Wilson falls trying to do the choreography from Spears’ “(You Drive Me) Crazy” video.

Wilson said:

“I love Britney and I just wanted to pay homage to her because 20 years earlier in the film, in 2002, she was like the biggest star in the world. So we did the ‘Crazy’ video. […] When I’m dancing, I just really like to give it, just give my all to it. And then what happens is that I fall over, and so in the Britney thing, they actually keep the take where I’m dancing and just loving it and doing all the things and then I fall forward out of frame. But then I’m like, ‘The show must go on,’ so I just like [pops back up] and then I get into it.”

While Spears herself isn’t in the movie, there is one music star involved, as Steve Aoki makes an appearance as himself.

Check out the interview above. Also revisit Spears’ original “(You Drive Me) Crazy” video below.

Rod Wave was recently arrested, and new details have come to light surrounding why. He was taken into custody during a traffic stop and charged with battery by strangulation in St. Petersburg, Florida on May 2. The arrest affidavit, obtained by Tampa Bay Times, adds that the Soulfly artist choked his ex-girlfriend while their two children were present in their home.

His former partner alleges that the 23-year-old artist entered her home in Osceola County and choked her “until she couldn’t breathe” because he suspected she was involved with other men. He then returned a second time and accused his ex-girlfriend of taking his phone, leading him to damage the inside of the house before driving away while their two daughters were asleep. The woman sustained a scratch near the left center of her neck.

Rod Wave was released from Pinellas County on $5,000 bail and pleaded not guilty to felony battery charges. He is now waiting for his trial date. This isn’t the most ideal scenario for the artist, who was gearing up to release his next album Beautiful Mind. Wave has since tweeted that he is pushing back his release date to June 10, coupling the announcement with a snippet of the song where he addresses the entire situation: “Just hope you don’t get it twisted, I love that girl to death / I make mistakes in my relationship I still regret / You know the life of a star, they all gon’ pretend / Can’t be moving off of emotions, letting new people in.”

Young Thug and Gunna aren’t the only rappers in trouble with the law for some of their pre-fame activities. New York rapper Casanova, who’s had a few viral hits in the last few years and dropped his debut album Behind These Scars on Roc Nation in 2019, was also indicted on racketeering charges in 2020 due to his alleged membership in the Untouchable Gorilla Stone Nation Blood set. On Wednesday, he pled guilty to the charges against him, which included firearm possession, conspiracy to distribute controlled substances, racketeering, and attempted murder, according to local news.

In 2020, 18 members of Untouchable Gorilla Stone Nation were arrested and charged with racketeering, murder, narcotics, firearms, and fraud offenses, but Cas was not one of them, prompting the FBI to issue a statement asking for information on his whereabouts. He surrendered a day later and was denied bond — just like members of YSL in their ongoing case. Although Cas maintained his innocence, the thing about a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) charge is, that if one member is found guilty of a crime and the association can be proved in court, all members can be charged with that crime.

It appears Cas wanted to save himself the trouble of a lengthy trial and try to curry some favor with the court regarding his sentencing, which is scheduled for December 6. A mandatory minimum sentence would see him serve five years, while a maximum would be set at 60.

The energy in a hospital can sometimes feel overwhelming, whether you’re experiencing it as a patient, visitor or employee. However, there are a few one-of-a-kind individuals like Elaine Ahn, an operating room registered nurse in Diamond Bar, California, who thrive under this type of constant pressure.

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Nurse Ahn felt drawn to a career in healthcare partially because she grew up watching medical dramas on TV with her mother. While the fast-paced level of excitement seen on TV is what initially caught her interest, she quickly found out that real-life nursing is quite different from how it was portrayed on her favorite shows.

Courtesy of Elaine Ahn

The most striking difference, according to Ahn, is the level of involvement that nurses have with their patients during each 12-hour shift. Nurses are often the first to catch subtle signs and symptoms that provide insight into how a patient is doing emotionally as well as physically. Science tells us that emotional health and our overall attitudes have a direct impact on physical health and healing, and Nurse Ahn noticed early on that she could make a huge difference in her patient’s recovery, just by taking the time to sit down for a chat.

California is the only state in the country to require by law a specific number of nurses to patients in every hospital unit. It requires hospitals to provide one nurse for every two patients in intensive care and one nurse for every four patients in emergency rooms, for example. This regulation was created to increase positive outcomes for patients and prevent employee burnout. Even though she never has more than five patients to care for during a shift, Nurse Ahn, like many nurses,still feels stretched thin coping with the needs and demands of the day.

“Sometimes people just need to be heard. In the busy world of acute care, time can really be a luxury. With the number of tasks to perform and numerous alarms pulling nurses and aides in various directions, stretching us thin like pizza dough, it’s upsetting because it can get difficult to be able to spend as much time as we would like with our patients,” said Ahn.

“I remember one day having a patient and his family member being anxious and frustrated. In that moment, I found that drawing up a chair to sit at their eye level and giving them my full, undivided attention for however long I could truly went a long way. They later told me that it was the first time during their hospital stay that they felt heard without being rushed, and this experience led me to adopt this as a part of my practice,” said Ahn.

Nurse Ahn was assigned to a patient with terminal lung cancer, referred to in this series as “Grumpy Man.” Grumpy Man was dying, in constant pain and didn’t have any visitors. He was lonely and without hope, and it tugged at the nurse’s heartstrings.

Elaine | Heroes Behind the Masks presented by CeraVe

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She credits two of her mentors, Josh and Jess, with the idea of providing this patient with more TLC and this inspired her to implement the routine of having daily 15-minute chats with him.

“Especially upon learning that he had no friends or family members to visit or call him, I really wanted to be someone who was present with him in this very difficult time of his life. I wanted him to be able to have another human present and be engaged with him and for him to feel heard and cared for,” said Ahn.

Courtesy of Elaine Ahn

It’s no secret that nurses often put their own patients well-being above their own. That level of caring is what makes them so good at what they do, but it can also lead to exhaustion. Even though she thrives on the rush of being busy, caring for patients like Grumpy Man taught Nurse Ahn the importance of taking a moment to pause, center herself and prioritize taking care of herself first, so she has the energy to devote her undivided care and attention to her patients.

“It’s so easy to get caught up in the momentum of busy-ness, but I make the point to not rush myself and take things one thing at a time. To my delight, taking things one step at a time helped me complete things faster than rushing,” said Ahn.

To help care for the healthcare professionals that are so often giving to others before themselves, CeraVe seeks to spotlight those that go beyond the call of duty for their patients and communities in the Heroes Behind the Masks Chapter 2: A Walk In Our Shoes campaign. The goal of this year’s campaign is to showcase incredible nurses such as Nurse Ahn and celebrate the nursing community as a whole, recognizing the trials, emotional and physical toll the profession has while aiming to inspire and encourage them.

Follow along in the next few days for more stories of heroism here.