Month: May 2022

As far as new music is concerned, things have been mighty silent in MIA’s camp for years. The last time the British shock rapper and noted activist released an album was in 2016, when AIM came out. But today, the next chapter of MIA has been announced, with the impending release of her sixth studio album, Mata, and the arrival of the first single, “The One.”

Mata will mark the first MIA album released via her new partnership with Island Records, following a long-standing history with Interscope and XL Recordings. “The One,” sees her asserting her deification over a beat produced by Rex Kudo & T-Minus. A performance video surfaced on Twitter of MIA performing the song in front of a giant cross and backed by a children’s choir, showing the depth of the song’s vocal arrangement. On the hook, she raps in coyly auto-tuned vocals, “When you’re tryna find the one, why do you need reminding? No matter how you look at it, it’s me you keep finding.”

Listen to “The One” above and check out MIA’s upcoming tour and festival dates below.

06/01 — Grona Lund @ Stockholm, Sweden
06/02 — Heartland Fest @ Funen, Denmark
06/10 — Primavera @ Barcelona, Spain
06/11 — VYV Festival @ Dijon, France
06/12 — Marsatac Festival @ Marseille, France
06/17 — InVersion Festival @ Lyon, France
06/18 — Freemusic Festival @ Montendre, France
07/08 — NOS Alive @ Oeiras, Portugal
07/09 — BBK Bilbao Live @ Biscay, Spain
09/25 — Portola Music Festival @ San Francisco, CA

During the pandemic, people found time to try out some new activities. Maggie Rogers went harder than perhaps anybody on that front, though: She enrolled in graduate school at Harvard. Specifically, she was a student at Harvard Divinity School, which describes itself as “a nonsectarian school of religious and theological studies that educates students both in the pursuit of the academic study of religion and in preparation for leadership in religious, governmental, and a wide range of service organizations.”

Well, today, Maggie Rogers graduates as part of the school’s 2022 class. (At the time this post was published, the ceremony was in progress and viewable live on YouTube.) Annually, the day before the commencement, the Divinity School hosts the Multireligious Commencement Service at the campus’ Memorial Church, during which “graduating students offer prayers, readings, and music drawn from the wide array of faiths and backgrounds represented within the School,” per a new profile on Rogers from the school’s website. As part of that ceremony, Rogers sang the Wizard Of Oz classic “Over The Rainbow.”

Rogers graduates today with a Master Of Religion And Public Life (MRPL) degree, “a program designed for experienced professionals who wish to develop in-depth knowledge of the complex ways religion influences public life related to their career areas.” Rogers is one of the 11 students to first complete the new program this year.

In the aforementioned profile, Rogers noted, “I was thinking about this world in which people are moving further and further away from traditional religion, but yet are seeking to be connected to both something bigger than oneself and to each other. A really palpable and obvious and potent way that we connect to each other is through culture, through social media, but it puts a lot of emphasis and power in the hands of people who are artists. A lot of what I studied was how we come together, looking at religion and theology, and thinking largely about what are the ways in which we connect to each other, how is that done in a way that can be an agent for peace, what does it mean to hold that power, and what is the responsibility one has.”

She also said, “Whatever I was learning in class would immediately get put into practice in my professional world. It felt really integrated. The MRPL enhanced my work and vice versa. Now I’m going to spend the next year putting out this record and performing and living out so much of what I’ve been thinking about. I feel like I’ve just barely started to scratch the surface of what I’ve been studying here.”

The record to which Rogers refers is Surrender, her recently announced new album.

Watch Rogers perform “Over The Rainbow” above and watch the full 2022 Harvard Divinity School Commencement Diploma Awarding Ceremony below.

Though Maisie Williams stars in the highly-anticipated Sex Pistols series Pistol, which hits Hulu next week, though she still doesn’t seem to mind talking about her former life as Arya Stark and the rest of her Game Of Thrones family.

When asked by Variety who from the series she still keeps in touch with, Williams said that she still talks to all of them. “Everyone. We’re all on a group chat, which is lovely.” She added, “Everyone’s doing really well. And I think that it’s nice to keep up with people enjoying their lives, which had been dominated by the show for so long.” No word yet on if Ed Sheeran is also in said group chat.

The iconic series ended in 2019 with a finale that was universally hated by both fans and critics alike. But Williams does intend on watching the upcoming spinoff House Of The Dragon, which is just one of many, allegedly.

“Yes. I’m really looking forward to it, actually. My friend Olivia [Cooke] is in it, and it’s been really interesting just chatting to her about the experience,” Williams said, adding that she is excited to watch the show from a new perspective. “I’m kind of looking forward to watching Game of Thrones — even though it’s not Game of Thrones — and experiencing it as a person that’s not on it. ‘Cause all I’ve done is meet people who have done just that, and I never really was able to relate to it.”

Pistol premieres on May 31st on Hulu.

Finally some representation for men who hate bees as much as Nicolas Cage in The Wicker Man.

Would you ever let a Rowan Atkinson character house-sit for you? I wouldn’t either. Unfortunately, some unfortunate but seemingly very rich homeowners did not know any better and as a result, we have a Netflix show. Netflix just released the trailer for its upcoming comedy series Man Vs Bee which is exactly what it sounds like. Trevor (Atkinson), a dad thrilled to have a job, house-sits a mansion where he encounters a bee who quickly becomes his nemesis. Instead of protecting the home, his feud with the bee results in severe damage to the house and he ends up in court.

Bees are adorable, but the Man Vs Bee trailer clearly establishes that this titular bee, while cute, is kind of a menace who is out to make Trevor’s life as chaotic as possible.

Here’s the official synopsis from Netflix:

Bumbling dad Trevor tries to get the best of a cunning bee while house-sitting a posh mansion — but only unleashes more chaos in this comedy series.

Will Man Vs. Bee win Emmys? Most assuredly not, although Rowan Atkinson does deserve an EGOT for his decades of comedic contributions to cinema.

Man Vs. Bee drops on Netflix on June 24.

Disgraced actor Kevin Spacey, who has somehow gotten acting work recently, has been charged with four counts of sexual assault in the United Kingdom, Variety reports. He was also charged with one count of “causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.”

The decision was revealed Thursday, May 26 by the UK agency Crown Prosecution Services (CPS), which, per Variety, spent over a year reviewing a file passed on by the Metropolitan Police.

“The CPS has authorized criminal charges against Kevin Spacey, 62, for four counts of sexual assault against three men,” said Rosemary Ainslie, head of the CPS Special Crime Division. “He has also been charged with causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent. The charges follow a review of the evidence gathered by the Metropolitan Police in its investigation. The Crown Prosecution Service reminds all concerned that criminal proceedings against Mr Spacey are active and that he has the right to a fair trial.”

During the MeToo movement in 2017, Spacey was publicly accused of sexually assaulting a fourteen-year-old. Other men came forward with instances in which Spacey allegedly made aggressive and unwanted sexual advances toward them. As a result, Spacey was fired from the Netflix series House of Cards and replaced by Christopher Plummer in All the Money in the World.

(Via Variety)

The Game has been known to embellish a story or two in his past, but it appears the latest happening in his life may actually have video proof. This past Tuesday, the Hotboxin’ With Mike Tyson podcast Instagram posted behind-the-scenes footage of an upcoming episode where the legendary boxer hosts the West Coast rapper. The two engage in an intense arm wrestling match where it appears The Game may get the best of Tyson, but the 55-year-old mounts a comeback while simultaneously smoking a joint.

The Game took to Instagram to celebrate his supposed victory. “I beat @MikeTyson arm wrestling & before you get started in the comments… he told me this eye to eye after it was over,” the “Hate It Or Love It” rapper said. “I went light on em in the end cause I love him & I found it in my heart to let him come back lol.”

Perhaps the wildest part of it all is The Game’s admission that he was on mushrooms provided by Tyson. “Mike got me on shrooms, too, y’all. If I’m spaced out for the rest of the day, it’s this n**** fault.”

Evidently, they weren’t potent enough to stop him from a major underdog win and some nice momentum heading into The Game’s upcoming album Drillmatic.

Check out the footage of the arm wrestling match above.

With Memorial Day Weekend officially here, we’ve come to the unofficial start of summertime! Break out the smokers, ribs, and booze, it’s time to party until September. When it comes to booze, we have a long tradition around here of naming an official cocktail of the summer. Last year, we were mixing up Long Island Iced Teas. 2020 was all about the Beer Spritz. Summer 2019 was Paloma season.

For summer 2022, we’re going big. And old-school. And tasty AF. Ladies and gentlemen, I present — the Singapore Sling.

This is one of the best cocktails for summer sipping. It’s bold, not overly boozy (you can drink a few), fruity, tart, and delicious. The thing is, this is a complex shaker. You’re going to need a few (ahem, eleven) ingredients. But once you get the hang of shaking these up, you’ll be shaking faster than you can imagine, busy making more for you’re all-too-infatuated party guests.

For this recipe, I’m going back to the old-school version without soda water to cut it down even more. That version is fine, I guess. But you lose the almost creamy texture you get from this shaker when you add bubbly water. I’m not a fan.

Ready to learn our cocktail of the summer, let’s get shaking!

Also Read: The Top Five Cocktail Recipes of the Last Six Months

• The Corpse Reviver No. 2 Is The Best Gin Cocktail For Winter — Here’s Our Recipe
• The Black Manhattan Is Our 2021 Thanksgiving Cocktail, Here’s The Recipe
• The Vieux Carre Is The Perfect Whiskey Cocktail For The Holidays
• The Americano Is An Excellent Low-Alcohol Cocktail For January, Here’s Our Recipe
• Our French 75 Cocktail Recipe Will Make You A New Year’s Eve Pre-Party Star

Singapore Sling

Ingredients:

• 1.5 oz. London dry gin
• 1.5 oz. fresh pineapple juice
• 0.75 oz. fresh lime juice
• 0.75 oz. cherry liqueur
• 0.25 oz. DOM Benedictine
• 0.25 oz. triple sec
• 0.25 oz. grenadine
• 2 dashes of Angostura Bitters
• Ice
• Orange slice
• Luxardo cherry

If you’ve been following along with my cocktail recipes this year, you should have all of these bottles already. If not, you’re going to need to take a trip to the liquor store. While there clearly are a lot of ingredients, any good liquor store will have them all. Plus, they’ll all be empty by the end of the summer if you’re shaking up these all summer long.

What You’ll Need:

• Hurricane glass
• Cocktail shaker
• Cocktail strainer
• Hand juicer
• Paring knife
• Jigger
• Straw

Mini parasol optional.

Method:

• Fill the hurricane glass with ice.
• Add the gin, pineapple juice, lime juice, Benedictine, triple sec, cherry liqueur, grenadine, and bitters to the cocktail shaker. Add a handful of ice, affix the lid, and vigorously shake for at least 20 seconds.
• Remove the lid and strain the cocktail into the waiting glass, making sure to shake out all the froth.
• Slice a thin half-wheel of orange and place it on the top of the ice with a cherry. Drop in the straw and serve.

Bottom Line:

I mean look at that and tell me it doesn’t stream “WELCOME TO SUMMER 2022!”

On the palate, this is kind of like Hawaiian Punch for adults. It’s mildly boozy, botanical, and herbal with a ton of fruit and not too much sweetness. It’s sweet, don’t get me wrong, but more fruity-sweet than “too much sugar sweet.” Seriously, boozy Hawaiian Punch fits pretty well.

Overall, once you have the bottles, these take about one minute to make. That’s easy and fast in the grand scheme of things. If you want to make these even faster, you can batch the liquors and then add the fresh juices when you shake (don’t batch with fresh juice and booze, the acids don’t play well when sitting for a long time with the sugars). Just switch the ounces to cups and you’re good to go.

Behind every goodfella is a goodgal, and that’s especially true of Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco. Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas is one of the best and most rewatchable movies of all-time for numerous reasons (it’s impossible to imagine this perfect scene with any other song), but it simply wouldn’t work without the chemistry between Liotta and Bracco as Henry and Karen Hill, the tumultuous couple at the center of the film.

Shortly after the news broke that Liotta died in his sleep at 67 years old, Bracco paid tribute to her Goodfellas co-star. “I am utterly shattered to hear this terrible news about my Ray. I can be anywhere in the world & people will come up & tell me their favorite movie is Goodfellas. Then they always ask what was the best part of making that movie. My response has always been the same… Ray Liotta,” she tweeted.

This is, sadly, not the first time that Bracco has had to immortalize an iconic scene partner from a mob-related series/movie who died too young.

In a 2017 interview with the Guardian, Bracco said that while shooting Goodfellas, “Scorsese called me and Ray ‘the kids.’ I was the mother of two girls! But as an actress, I was very raw.” She added, “Ray was always delicious. Marty I didn’t know so well, but what I learned was not to be afraid of my ideas, and that he was open to them.”

On Tuesday morning, just after 11:30 a.m. CDT, 18-year-old high school student Salvador Ramos drove to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and opened fire. Over the course of the next 90 minutes, Ramos killed 19 children and two adults before being killed himself by police officers.

While the incident is the most deadly school shooting since 26 people were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012, it’s sadly an all-too-common scenario in America. The mass murder in Uvalde marks the twenty-seventh school shooting in the U.S. this year alone, and firearms are now the leading cause of death for children over the age of one (overtaking motor vehicle accidents). Yet rather than focus on how we can enact better gun control laws, the typical response to these deadly tragedies—particularly amongst Conservatives and Republicans—is to blame anything but the guns themselves, but offer plenty of “thoughts and prayers” and bad takes.

Texas senator Ted Cruz might win the award for dumbest idea with his suggestion that the best way to prevent yet another incident like this is for schools to only have “one door” through which students can enter and exit. Tucker Carlson, meanwhile, decided that the pandemic lockdowns are to blame for both the recent shootings in Texas and Buffalo, New York.

Then there’s Dan Patrick, the Lone Star State’s Lieutenant Governor, who once blamed the state’s higher-than-average COVID rates on “African Americans who have not been vaccinated.” Yes, he’s a total gem who believes that the best way to face America’s gun problem isn’t by restricting access to guns —it’s all about turning to God. On Wednesday night, he told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham:

“This problem is a much larger problem than the infrastructure, the mental health issue… And all those are important. But at the end of the day, Laura, we are a sick society where we are at each other’s throats all the time… Whether it’s on the internet, whether it’s in any walk of life, people are just at each other every day. And we have to ask ourselves who we are. And I believe we’re a nation of godly people, and godly people need to pray… Christians have to pray for God to heal our land, and we have to take a stand.

“There are some people in this country who are not believers, that’s fine. I respect their right not to believe. But for those of us who are Christians, we need to take hold of our country and we do that through prayer. You cannot change the culture of a country without changing the character of the people, and you just cannot change character without changing a heart, and you can’t do that without turning to God.”

I guess we’ll deal with the fact that there are more guns than people in our country later.

Patrick: We need to take hold of our country and we do that through prayer… You cannot change the culture of country without changing the character of the people. You cannot change character without changing a heart and you can’t do that without turning to god… pic.twitter.com/SYm7IZzn7g

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 26, 2022

Stephen A. Smith’s media career has featured a little bit of everything. He does some TV, he does some radio, he will occasionally appear on his favorite soap opera, General Hospital. He’s appeared on TV shows and in movies as himself. In 2007, he played Allan in the Chris Rock film I Think I Love My Wife.

All of this is to say that Smith is as ubiquitous a media presence as we have right now. And like anyone, that presence expands to Twitter, where Smith will post stuff that serves as an extension of himself (or, more accurately, an extension of the stuff that he says on First Take and whatever other ESPN programming he will appear on in a given day).

One tweet sticks out among the rest, in large part because it’s just really weird. Smith, back in 2015, tried to post a picture but instead just copied the name of the file, with the caption “Take a look, y’all.”

Well, Thursday is the seventh anniversary of that post, and after Katie Nolan celebrated such a special day, Smith decided to quote tweet the original post and make clear that the message he was trying to convey has been lost to time.

In a way, it is more fun that no one knows what Smith was trying to post, and as such, we will forever be left wonder what, exactly, IMG_4346.jpeg was meant to be.