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From Minneapolis to Los Angeles, thousands of people across the US took to the streets to protest the death of George Floyd.
Protests over the death of George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis who died on Monday after a police officer knelt on his neck while pinning him to the ground despite repeated pleas that he couldn’t breathe, have continued across the country for a third night, with demonstrations in Minneapolis leading to repeated public clashes with the police, looting, and fires. According to the Huffington Post, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard on Thursday evening after protestors took over a police precinct and set it on fire.
With several fires rolling throughout the city, some small businesses are getting caught up in the damage. That isn’t stopping small business owners from standing in solidarity with those calling for justice, like Ruhel Islam of the Minneapolis restaurant Gandhi Mahal, who seems undeterred by the unintended destruction of his own restaurant, which caught fire Thursday evening.
Sadly Gandhi Mahal has caught fire and has been damaged. We won’t lose hope though, I am so grateful for our neighbors who did their best to stand guard and protect Gandhi Mahal, your efforts won’t go unrecognized. Don’t worry about us, we will rebuild and we will recover,” writes Hafsa, the daughter of Gandhi Mahal’s owner, Ruhel Islam. “I am sitting next to my dad watching the news, I hear him say on the phone; “let my building burn, Justice needs to be served, put those officers in jail.”
The post is tagged #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd and #BLM to stand in solidarity with the protestors on the ground level in Minneapolis. The police officers involved in Floyd’s arrests, including the officer who pinned Floyd down have been fired but have not yet been charged with a crime.
HBO just dropped a gritty new trailer for its upcoming Perry Mason series. While the main focus is obviously Matthew Rhys as the title character, Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany is a captivating presence as Sister Alice, the fiery, evangelical leader of the Radiant Assembly of God whose sermons are broadcast across the country, making her a powerful force to reckon with.
Judging by the trailer, Sister Alice’s church is knee-deep in city-wide corruption that only Rhys’ Mason can untangle as he navigates his way through crooked cops and systematic injustices in 1930s Los Angeles. Also, Shea Whigham shows up, and who doesn’t love Shea Whigham?
Here’s the official synopsis for Perry Mason:
1931, Los Angeles. While the rest of the country struggles through the Great Depression, this city is booming! Oil! Olympic Games! Talking Pictures! Evangelical Fervor! And a child kidnapping gone very, very wrong. Based on characters created by author Erle Stanley Gardner, this drama series follows the origins of American fiction’s most legendary criminal defense lawyer, Perry Mason. When the case of the decade breaks down his door, Mason’s relentless pursuit of the truth reveals a fractured city and just maybe, a pathway to redemption for himself.
Alongside Rhys, Maslany, and Wigham, the rest of the cast includes John Lithgow, Juliet Rylance, Chris Chalk, Shea Whigham, Stephen Root, Gayle Rankin, Nate Corddry, Veronica Falcon, Jefferson Mays, Lili Taylor, Andrew Howard, Eric Lange, and Robert Patrick.
Perry Mason premieres June 21 on HBO.
(Via HBO)
Anybody who thought the vinyl resurgence was just a fad was mistaken: The industry has experienced a legitimate revival. As a result, music fans are interested in physical media in ways they may not have if the decades-old medium hasn’t made a comeback. That doesn’t mean everybody is listening to just their parents’ old music, though. That’s part of it, sure, thanks to rereleases that present classic albums in new ways. A vital part of the renewed vinyl wave, though, is new projects being released as records, of which there are plenty.
Whatever you might be into, each month brings a new slew of the best vinyl releases that has something for everybody. Some stand out above the rest, naturally, so check out some of the best vinyl releases of May below.
Grateful Dead — VMP Anthology: The Story Of The Grateful Dead
The story of the Grateful Dead is one of music history’s finest, and it’s one Vinyl Me, Please tells with their expansive new box set. The 8-album collection includes four classic studio albums and four live records, all pressed on colored 180-gram vinyl, and includes liner notes and other goodies that will both please season Deadheads and create some new ones.
Get it here.
Fiona Apple — When The Pawn… (Reissue)
Speaking of Vinyl Me, Please, the record purveyors, have done something special: Fiona Apple’s esteemed sophomore album, When The Pawn…, never found its way onto vinyl, but is now available as an honest-to-goodness record. Apple and the Vinyl Me, Please team even worked on new artwork for the release.
Get it here.
Whitney Houston — Whitney Houston (Reissue)
Vinyl Me, Please was on fire this month. In addition to all the above, they have also dropped a deluxe 35th anniversary rerelease of Whitney Houston’s self-titled debut album. Aside from the record itself (pressed on peaches and cream vinyl), this edition comes with an exclusive 40-page hardcover book about the album.
Get it here.
Ariel Pink — The Doldrums, Worn Copy, and House Arrest (Reissues)
Ariel Pink is in the midst of his “Ariel Archives” series, which looks back at his career as Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. His latest dispatch includes a trio of his finest albums, each of which have been restored from their original cassette masters.
Get it here.
Wild Nothing — Gemini (Reissue)
Wild Nothing was established as a key indie act of the 2010s with Gemini, and as the record celebrates its tenth birthday, it is getting a lovely vinyl rerelease. This edition of the album is pressed on translucent sea blue vinyl and includes a limited edition silkscreened jacket, liner notes, and a bonus poster.
Get it here.
John Carpenter — The Thing (Reissue) and Lost Cues: The Thing
John Carpenter is one of horror’s most beloved filmmakers and composers, and one of his most storied creations, The Thing, has been honored on a pair of vinyl releases. One is a reissue of the classic score, and the other features unreleased musical cues from the film’s score.
Get it here.
Fall Out Boy — Believers Never Die — Greatest Hits
Fall Out Boy was one of the preeminent pop-punk groups of the 2000s, and that legacy was honored on their 2009 compilation album, Believers Never Die — Greatest Hits. Now that release has gotten a new vinyl edition (its first vinyl edition, actually), pressed on neon yellow vinyl.
Get it here.
Redd Kross — Phaseshifter and Show World
Beloved in alternative rock circles, Redd Kross have only put out a handful of albums since their 1982 debut. Now, two of their ’90s releases are getting a special reissue via Jack White’s Third Man Records, which will represent the first-ever North American vinyl pressings of these two albums.
Get Phaseshifter here. Get Show World here.
Moses Sumney — Grae
While now, in Sumney’s own words, “feels like an absolutely insane and futile time to be releasing and promoting music,” he has a tremendous new batch of it that deserves to be heard. The musician’s lush new album, Grae, is available in a couple of different black-and-white vinyl editions, both of which ought to serve the sonically rich release well.
Get it here.
Joy Division — Closer (Reissue)
It’s been 40 years since Joy Divison released their iconic final album, Closer, and now it’s getting a special anniversary rerelease. In addition to a new edition of the album, a trio of non-album singles — “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” “Transmission,” and “Atmosphere” — are also getting the reissue treatment, as 12-inch singles.
Get it here.
Yo La Tengo — Electr-O-Pura (Reissue)
It has been 25 years since indie legends Yo La Tengo dropped Electr-O-Pura, and now their label home, Matador, is honoring that with a special reissue of the record. The latest release in Matador’s “Revisionist History” series, this edition of Electr-O-Pura arrives as a 2-LP set, which was cut from the album’s original master.
Get it here.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
LeBron James has had a weird season. It started with the opulent but well-intentioned icebreaker of carting the Lakers roster to Las Vegas for pre-season workouts. There were eight new players on the team, each less mercurial than the disparate pieces James had hand-picked last season, and it was an opportunity to accelerate some chemistry between them in the most artificial and ostentatious place on earth.
James had, of course, organized everything. They would stay at the Wynn, they would train for approximately 2.5 hours every day, they would attend dinner together every night. They were told they would all individually pay their own way. It was a sumptuous trust fall and they hadn’t even signed Dwight Howard or Dion Waiters yet.
The preseason stayed strange. The Lakers played the Warriors, went to China to play the Nets right as diplomatic relations between the league and China fell apart, and then got back to California and played the Warriors three more times. They opened the season against the Clippers, because it was hard for the league to resist the lure of rekindling a western code writ large, a tangle of the two largest in the league even if that town, Los Angeles, had always been big enough for the both of them. It was home court for both, but the Clippers took it, launching immediate questions about James and the Lakers place in the West and whether they had been usurped at the top before ever getting to stake claim to that position.
The Lakers rebounded quickly and were golden through to December, with the Raptors the only ones to whip in like the Santa Anas and knock a team working to shed the inconsistent gap-year of the season before off its win streak. It wasn’t that James finally had all the pieces he wanted alongside him propelling the team to so many wins, though a happy Anthony Davis didn’t hurt, it was that his position on the floor caught up to the role he’d been assigning himself since Miami. A rose is a rose is a rose, and James, in any other position, was the person telling the entire roster exactly where they needed to be and when, but to give him the full naming rights to that power gave a new accelerant to a career many claimed to be downshifting.
It also worked in all the ways new Lakers coach Frank Vogel needed it to. James would lend his authority to the franchise no matter what, it was part of the deal — and appeal to team ownership — of his tenure in L.A. Vogel just opted to ask James to switch to point, to take control, rather than being told. It created a new kind of coachability in James even if it was primarily optics, that Vogel was getting something new out of him when in essence he was asking James to focus his energies exclusively on something he had done, gratis, all along.
But it wasn’t a divergent or a ploy, because more did come from James this season, and in entirely new ways. His assists per game climbed to a career high of 10.6 while his points per game stayed steady, on track to clock in at his career average of 27. He kept out of the paint and aimed long, full-court torpedo passes to Davis and Danny Green as they rushed to the net. He launched backward, no-look hooks to Howard, Alex Caruso, and these soaring, mid-air lobs where only when he’d gotten to the height of his jump would he swivel his head slowly to see who had stayed with him down the stretch and, with a flick of his wrist, reward them.
It is never enough for James to dominate, he has to take the action, the entire statistical category, and adjust our perspective of what’s possible — physically, analytically — through his own framing. When this season stalled out, James had helped with 50 percent of his teammates baskets, a career high that placed him first in the league overall in assists. To put it in gentle perspective, it has historically been players like John Stockton, Steve Nash and Chris Paul, pure point guards, that dole out this kind of consistent, intuitive help.
The duality of James extends beyond his role as scorer and facilitator to the experience of watching him. He appeals to the rigid analytic set as much as the gut-check set. The new fan, fans who stubbornly insist they are over him, even those who claim to hate him, consider him overwrought and overrated, will follow his consistently improving career closely, thin-toothing it for faults and finding none. That exceptionalism has been the co-pilot driving his career is at once defining and to his detriment. What James has spent nearly two decades building is the exception. The example he works flat out to set is one of hard work, integrity and excellence, these aren’t bluffs, they are intrinsic to him as the rarity of his talent.
But the encapsulation of those ethics, the conduit for that talent and the drive that pushes it all forward again every day is singular to James. You can’t be him, but he has made it possible through his philanthropy, his athleticism, his advocacy, his professional acumen off the court, his role as a father, and any number of the other multitudes he has worked to contain to be like him, a little, in those pursuits.
There are more odious and awful underpinnings that crop up around James’s public character that have nothing to do with him and everything to do with the unrealistic expectations put on people of color who hold the space of their success. He isn’t granted the same anonymity that comes with being white and successful. He cannot slip into a shroud of invisibility and move with greater ease around a world where he will be asked, as he ascends, to explain himself less and less. His success, to many, is his qualifier and something he has to regularly account for, when it should be the other way around. That James works three times as hard as anyone around him is simultaneously an internal part of his person and a direct result of the pressure put there by a deeply racist and irrevocably damaged culture.
In his game, his shouldering the stigmas bound up in his success, James has shown he is adept at shifting between the characters both he and his career have created, but it’s impossible to delve into the scope of James’s duality without looking to where it’s most limiting.
In the constant comparisons of him to Michael Jordan, to Kobe Bryant, players who, if they had one thing in common, was the weight and scope and pressure to alter the league to better reflect them in it, we have to flatten history to make it better connect. Depth is lost. But how we pit things, place them sharply side by side, is founded in our fears, our shortcomings, our deepest and most concealed desire than it is on the logic that those two things had any one in common.
James and Bryant overlapped. James played in the landscape Bryant had essentially terraformed to match his personality, his impulse. It was more unforgiving, repressed enough that emotions sat seething and pressurized just below the surface. Their relationship was initially established around absence. Not meeting in the Finals as they proceeded to leapfrog the other for a decade. Later, the dyad became Bryant segueing to James. Not overtly, but in how vehement his fans rejected James, refused to recant on James being anything close to what Bryant was for the Lakers. To James, this was always obvious. The goal was to shift into the last (likely) iteration of himself, rare in how singular. Lakers fans are governed by their own particular set of shifting rules, as mirage-like and hazy as golden hour falling on Sunset Boulevard like a shroud, but at some point they decided, probably when he brought them Davis, that James was theirs now. The only version. Exactly as James always meant it.
It was crystallizing and seizing, in the way explicitly violent timing always is, that James would pass Bryant’s team record, be congratulated by Bryant in a rare and increasing moment for Bryant where he seemed at ease with a career referred to in past tense, the day before Bryant would die.
James doesn’t get to have his own career with the Lakers, it became, this past winter, elegiac. But his wide-openness, his disbelief and grief in the weeks that followed, leading his peers, fans and the league in their shock and the encouragement to express it, became enough, finally and terribly, to put the comparison to rest.
With Jordan, there is no point. One’s universe was shrinking while the other’s exploded out. There was no overlap, not even in culture or league landscape. Their language — court, conversational — wholly different. There’s not going to be any gotcha or analytical basis for what is entirely feeling, preference, the blithe alignment of staking a personal claim. Demanding there be a greatest of all time is to already give up on anything that comes after.
James’s career, in the lurch of this season, has not been shortened or derailed any more than the moon will, shrouding in phases, still be capable of pulling at tides as a lucent hangnail. He will fold the strangeness of this stretch, it’s urgency, into a usable outcome, optimize the hiatus as nothing more than a deep, diaphragmatic breath before vaulting back to where he was, already in motion, eyes placidly fixed to the horizon where all the lines meet.
It was only last November when the world was introduced to “The Child” in Disney+’s The Mandalorian, but it was love at first sight. The Baby Yoda puppet has since been called “the future of Hollywood” and the $5 million it cost to make the puppet was quickly recouped in merchandise sales alone. Can I interest you in a Baby Yoda water bottle? Or a Baby Yoda tote bag? Or Baby Yoda air freshener? The reason “The Child” became such a sensation is partially due to Star Wars nostalgia, but really, it’s because he’s so freaking cute. Would the Baby Yoda craze have caught on if he looked like this, though?
That nightmare comes from the latest episode of Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, a documentary series about the making of The Mandalorian. In “Practical,” developer Jon Favreau takes us through the process of creating and designing Baby Yoda, as well as some of the too-cute and too-ugly concept designs that didn’t make the cut.
“We all, I think had a vision for what [a] bad version of [Baby Yoda] was,” Favreau said. “And what was written in [the script] was just that it was a little baby of Yoda’s species” (George Lucas is notoriously reluctant to explain Yoda’s backstory). He continued, “The look of the big ears, we had inherited that from Yoda, and I had already been preoccupied with the look of big eyes and using ears for motion because I had been working on a VR project called Gnomes and Goblins for many years. And so, the idea of the face not being that expressive, but everything was about the eyes looking at you and the ears moving, was something that I had wanted to try.” And try they did.
Here are some of the early Baby Yoda concepts, some of which “were too cute, some of them were too ugly, some of them were the wrong proportions,” Favreau said.
Finally, there was one image, from illustrator Christian Alzmann, that caught his eye. “His eyes were a little weird and he looked a little out of it,” he said. “We found it charming and that became the rallying image that we said, this is good.” And the rest is adorable, mega-profitable history. Disney+’s The Mandalorian returns for season two in October.