Cardi B recently gave birth to her second child — a son — and fans have been marveling at her post-pregnancy body after she posted a string of photos from Paris Fashion Week. Some, however, have speculated that her “snapback” was due to liposuction or a tummy tuck. Cardi posted an Instagram Story addressing the rumors and explaining why her body transformation wasn’t due to plastic surgery.
“I think it’s because, right now, I got some amazing hips due to my gorgeous son, because he was sitting so low,” she explained of her shape. “You know, when your baby is low, your hips spread, but everybody’s just like, ‘Cardi, you so snatched. What did you do? You did lipo? You had a tummy tuck?’ You cannot do surgery after you give birth.”
She also elaborated on the gory details of her own second birthing experience, which would have prevented her from getting surgery even if it weren’t already so dangerous. “I lost so much blood, guys,” she revealed. “One day, I’m going to tell you guys about my crazy ass delivery.”
Cardi also admitted that “my skin is a little loose and I still got a little pouchy pouch” but insisted on keeping it real with her followers while explaining that she’s been using angles to hide the spots she’s insecure about. “Take y’all f*cking time,” she advised fans about their own health and shape journeys. She seems to be doing just that, although she did press hard on a flurry of collaborations ahead of the birth, including on Lizzo’s “Rumors” and Normani’s “Wild Side.”
Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Starting with his campaign and continuing through his presidency, Donald Trump repeatedly boasted about his brain, his very large brain, and how special and smart it is. While the obsession with his big brain seemed like one of his random public speaking tics, former White House communications director Stephanie Grisham’s new book, I’ll Take Your Questions Now, reveals that Trump was allegedly concerned with his noggin even behind closed doors.
In an excerpt published by Politico on Friday, Grisham shares an anecdote about Trump refusing to accept a charity challenge from a child because it might damage his unparalleled thinking power, throwing the nation into chaos:
On another occasion around the new year, a young boy started publicly challenging Trump to go vegan in TV ads and on highway billboards. If the president agreed, the boy said, the charity he represented would donate $1 million to veterans. I was communications director at the time and I playfully asked the president if he would ever consider doing that, since the challenge would raise a lot of money for a good cause. I knew he loved his steaks and cheeseburgers, but one month didn’t seem that long.
Trump’s response was swift, and his tone was suddenly very serious.
“No, no. It messes with your body chemistry, your brain,” he said, offering his views on vegetarian diets. “And if I lose even one brain cell, we’re f*cked.”
Of course, it should be noted that in the same book, Trump frantically called Grisham personally to assure her that his penis was not small or shaped like a toadstool, and he reportedly required a dedicated “Music Man” (Grisham’s ex-boyfriend) to play “Memories” from the Broadway musical Cats whenever Trump was on the “brink of rage.” In short, those are definitely the signs of a bold and beautiful mind that should be protected from veggie burgers at all cost. Tofu dogs? Don’t even think about it. We’ll all be dead by morning.
Netflix ushers in the spookiest month of the year with a lineup of films that have some bite to them. Literally.
There’s a horror flick about party-hopping vampires in L.A. and a slasher film that takes on cancel culture. For less genre fare, Jake Gyllenhaal’s crime drama and the Zack Snyder-produced heist adventure Army of Thieves should do the trick. Here are the best movies coming to Netflix this October.
(For the best new shows coming to Netflix this month, head here.)
The Guilty (streaming 10/1)
Antione Fuqua and Jake Gyllenhaal team up again, this time for a crime drama with a storytelling twist. Gyllenhaal plays Joe Baylor, a police officer facing suspension after an on-duty incident. He’s relegated to the police dispatch center where he fields fairly mundane calls all morning long until a caller named Emily (Riley Keough in voice only) dials in claiming to be in grave danger. While Joe tries to save her over the phone, he comes in contact with people from his past and events he thought he’d forgotten. It’s an intense, emotionally-gripping cat-and-mouse game that puts Gyllenhaal square in the center of the action at all times — even if he never does leave his desk.
There’s Someone Inside Your House (streaming 10/6)
Netflix is doing its best to bring back the beloved 80s slasher flick — see its impressive Fear Street trilogy for proof — and this latest entry finds a way to marry the past with the present in surprisingly bloody ways. The film follows a young Hawaiian girl named Makani who moves to a small town in Nebraska just as a high-school student goes on a murderous rampage. Who the killer is and why they seem to be targeting peers deemed “cancelable” we still don’t know, but Makani and her friends work to find out before their own muddied pasts come back to, well, kill them.
Convergence: Courage in a Crisis (streaming 10/12)
This new doc for the Academy Award-winning filmmakers behind The White Helmets takes a look at how the COVID-19 pandemic inspired everyday people from around the world to commit acts of true bravery. From hospital volunteers in Wuhan to healthcare providers in Los Angeles, the film attempts to show how we can use this crisis to build better societal systems and adopt a less selfish worldview.
Yes, this is the Megan Fox vampire movie. Yes, it follows an unlucky Uber driver, who gets stuck ferrying two blood-sucking party girls around L.A. as they try to hit every worthwhile bash before the sun comes up. And yes, it’s a ridiculously fun as its premise sounds. The key here is Jorge Lendeborg, Jr. who plays Benny, a quirky college kid just trying to earn some extra cash as a chauffeur. Through him, we’re introduced to an underground world of undead criminals, including two young women (Debby Ryan and Lucy Fry having a deliciously good time) who have their own nefarious plans for him. It’s the kind of campy horror watch we need right now.
Zack Snyder realized the best character in his Army of the Dead flick deserved his own origin story so he’s delivered that with this prequel which follows bank-robbing German-stud Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer, also directing this time) on an all-together different heist. When a mysterious woman named Gwendoline (Game of Thrones star Nathalie Emmanuel) recruits a still-green Dieter for a job that tasks him with cracking a series of legendary safes across Europe, he’s thrust into an even more dangerous world of criminals.
It’s been a year since Sylvan Esso released their third album, Free Love, and to celebrate the date they’ve decided to share some new music with fans while supporting a good cause. The new EP is called Soundtrack for MASS MoCA and is available for streaming and purchase on Bandcamp. It was originally recorded as part of MASS MoCA’s Auditory After Hours series. All proceeds from any sales of the release will go to Imagine Water Works, “a New Orleans organization with a focus based in areas of climate justice, water management, and disaster readiness and response.”
Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn have been artistic partners for nine years and a married couple for five, so they’re more than familiar with commitment. But like any good relationship or creative process, the experience with creating Soundtrack for MASS MoCA helped them grow and shaped a new approach. Check out Nick’s statement on the EP and stream it below.
“Comprised mainly of four long form improvisations (with track breaks added at what felt like natural points) recorded in the fall of 2020 using and reprocessing sounds from “What Now” and “Free Love” – notably a pitched down and reimagined version of latter’s centerpiece song “Free,” a piano piece improvised and recorded backstage at the museum itself, as well as many collaged voice memos, field recordings, and stray bits of stuff – Soundtrack for MASS MoCA now feels like a real snapshot of that time in our band to me. Stuck inside and searching for a way to connect to our own work without the (what I had finally come to realize as) essential finalizing process of playing in front of other people, I was feeling both frozen in conventions of my own making and the need to redefine the way I experienced the act of making something in the first place.
So with MASS MoCA’s (very generous) deadline on the horizon, over the course of about six weeks I would regularly put together a small system of instruments and sounds that felt right in the moment, and just start recording without too much forethought. It freed me up to find a new way of playing, refining ideas I had been trying out during occasional solo sets and combining them with things Amelia and I had been doing together as Sylvan Esso. These sessions eventually led to a complete redesign of our live touring rig (something we hadn’t done since the beginning of the band) incorporating all the freedom and wildness I found here within the more inherently structured SE show patch, rethinking ways to make the show more flexible and immediate. Listening back now, it feels like the beginning of this whole new chapter. As always, thank you for listening.”
The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.
ITEM NUMBER ONE — Listen to me
Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond comes to an end with the release of No Time to Die next week. This means, according to the rules set forth in The Discourse, that we all need to start — or continue — fighting about who gets to fill the role next. Some people got a head start on this by yelling about Idris Elba a few years ago. Daniel Craig himself waded into it last week by saying he doesn’t think Bond should be played by a woman or person of color, only because there should be more and better original roles written for them. Lots of outlets took that quote as ran with headlines like “Daniel Craig: Bond Should NEVER Be Played By A Woman,” because, again, The Discourse.
Luckily, I have a solution here that can save us all some headaches. We can settle this sucker right now, in the next few paragraphs, and move right along. Are you ready? Are you ready for my great idea? Wait. Dammit, you read the headline already. You know where I’m headed with this. Hmm. Kind of takes the punch out of it, but still. It’s a good idea. Here we go: We should let Walton Goggins play James Bond.
My case for Goggins as Bond rests on three pillars. A tripod of a case. Stable. Strong. No wobbles anywhere.
PILLAR ONE: It would be fun
It would be so much fun. Walton Goggins is always great. He was great as Boyd Crowder on Justified and he was great as Baby Billy on The Righteous Gemstones and he’s been great in everything else. He carries himself with this aura of like mischief and menace, which is why he often gets slipped into projects as the villain. But he also has an underlying confidence in his performances, an unflappable vibe, that would work so well as James Bond. Picture him walking into a casino in a tuxedo. Picture him plopping $25,000 on the table and saying, “I’m seeing red tonight.” I need it.
So it would be fun in that way. It would also be, like, fun, full-stop, which, all due respect to Daniel Craig and the people who made the last few Bond movies, is a quality that’s been missing a bit. Bond has gotten emotional and sad lately. That’s fine, I guess, but it’s probably time for a course correction. Let Bond be fun and a little goofy again. I can think of no better way to accomplish this than by strapping a jet back to Walton Goggins and having him thwart a madman who is trying to melt the polar ice caps with a space laser.
The people need this. I need this. Which brings me to…
PILLAR TWO: I would like it
I would like it very much. I like the Bond movies and I like Walton Goggins. I think they are a great match. For me. More decisions should be made with this in mind. “What would Brian like?” is an example of a question they could ask in a pitch meeting. And then, before they sign the contracts, “Are we sure Brian will like this?” You know, to be thorough.
But this one? No doubt about it. I would definitely like this. I mean, look at this…
… and this…
No flaws detected in any of this. Actually, wait. There is one small issue I should address. Meet me in…
PILLAR THREE: Whatever, British people play Batman and Spider-man sometimes
Walton Goggins is not, in the most technical sense of the term, British. He could not be less British, actually. He’s American Southern down to his bones. I suspect this will upset a sizable chunk of Bond purists. To that I say:
Christian Bale did Batman with an American accent and both Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland have played American Spider-men despite being British, so it’s not like there’s no cross-Atlantic flippy-floppy precedent when it comes to playing our nations’ most famous characters
Walton Goggins can probably do a good British accent if he wants to
If not, it would be a blast if he just does his Southern accent the whole movie and no one says anything about it and continues to treat him as British
It’s a good idea. Think about it for a while this weekend. Let Walton Goggins play James Bond.
ITEM NUMBER TWO — Fireworks illegal in 30 Rockefeller Center, too, I imagine
After weeks of speculation about who may or may not be leaving, with open questions about the majority of the female cast (Strong, McKinnon, Bryant, etc.), the cast for the rapidly approaching new season of SNL was announced this week and the only major loss was Beck Bennett. That’s a bummer because Beck Bennett is an awesome sketch performer, kind of in the way Phil Hartman was. He was the binding element to a lot of stuff, often as a dad or a boss or some other authority figure. You need those people to make things work, to make them run smoothly. I’m kind of bummed out.
Luckily, that’s all balanced out by some good news: new cast members are a-comin’. Via the New York Times:
“S.N.L.” is also adding three new featured players for the coming season: Aristotle Athari, a member of the sketch group Goatface; James Austin Johnson, who has acted in shows like “Tuca & Bertie” and in the film “Hail, Caesar!”, and has a viral series of Donald Trump impressions; and Sarah Sherman, who has worked on “The Eric Andre Show.”
While this paragraph appears to be accurate in all the important ways, it does make one big omission. It lists the big credits for James Austin Johnson and mentions his excellent Trump impression, but it leaves out the part where he also stars in the “Fireworks Illegal in Pasadena” tweet. You’ve seen this tweet. You’ve watched the video. TELL ME YOU’VE SEEN THE TWEET AND WATCHED THE VIDEO.
You know what? Let’s be safe. Let’s post it right after this sentence, both to be sure you’ve seen it and because I stopped typing the last paragraph to go watch it again and I still have the tab open.
It’s beautiful. It’s perfect, basically. It makes me very happy and I’ve watched it hundreds of times and whooooooops I stopped typing this paragraph to watch it again just now. I have no further analysis here, honestly. I hope it works out for everyone and I hope they all become big stars. Beck Bennett, too. But mostly I just wanted to post that video again. Thank you for allowing me to do that, Lorne.
ITEM NUMBER THREE — I need La Brea to get a little better or way, way worse as soon as possible
NBC
An incomplete list of things that happened in the first episode of La Brea, a real show that premiered on NBC this week:
A massive sinkhole opened up in Los Angeles
Television’s Natalie Zea fell into it, along with her teen son and a slew of other people
After falling into what appeared to be the abyss, they all popped up relatively unscathed in some sort of unmolested prehistoric jungle
Someone found a trunk filled with heroin
Wolves attacked Natalie Zea’s son and he almost died
Some lady started hoarding food
Natalie Zea’s former/current/future love interest — who was first seen slugging liquor from a flask in traffic — had visions of the magical sinkhole land from our surface world
Mysterious government types who know more than they’re letting on started poking around
Etc etc etc
You get it. It’s all fine and something you’ve seen before plenty of times. It’s like Lost and Manifest and a sinkhole rolled into a big ball. Again, fine. The tricky thing is that it’s going to need to move out of this unremarkable middle area fast if it wants to keep me around (their primary concern, I’m sure), and there are really only two ways they can go about doing that. Back to the bullet points:
It can get a little better by putting an interesting twist on the “where/when are they?” thing they’re clearly setting up so far, with characters that have surprising motivations and yo-yos in the plot that keep people hooked
They can go full Zoo and just get as stupid and wild as hell on purpose so I can make a lot of GIFs of it and blog about the crazy stuff that happens, which would be fun because I haven’t had a really nutso show like that in a while and I’m starting to miss it
Definitely too soon to tell right now. A lot can still happen. They’re off to a promising start, though, both because of all the things in those bullet points and because of, well, this…
NBC
More shows should end episodes on sabertooth tiger cliffhangers. This is something I have always said. Do not look it up, though. Just trust me.
ITEM NUMBER FOUR — It must be so weird to discover you’re a hugely popular meme
Daniel Craig sat down for a kind of exit interview with Dave Itzkoff of the New York Times this week. Their chat covered everything you’d expect a chat with an outgoing Bond and current new franchise star — I watched Knives Out again a few days ago and it still rules — to cover. It’s a good read and I recommend you give it a look if you’re interested in any of that, but, for now, we focus on a smaller, more specific, more hopelessly online aspect of it all.
We focus on this.
As we are speaking, it’s a Friday afternoon, and I am about to see my social media feeds populated with a video of you declaring it to be the weekend. Has the popularity of this gotten back to you in any way?
No, what is that?
There is a clip of you from that “Saturday Night Live” you hosted, introducing the Weeknd with almost a sense of relief. People just like to post that clip as a way of ushering in the weekend.
They do? It’s amazing. I don’t know what that is, but thank you. That’s lovely. I suppose I’d have to have social media to know what that was all about.
This is about as well as anyone can be expected to react upon learning that they’ve become a massively popular meme among the jackals and hyenas on various social media platforms. He uses the word “lovely” in there, somehow. Good for him. He unknowingly gave the world a gift many months ago and we all just opened it and put it to use recently and he seems fine with all of that. It’s the best possible way to handle it all, too, starting with the use of “lovely” and moving on to the thing where he says he doesn’t use social media so wasn’t even aware.
Now, is there is a very tiny, very cynical part of my brain that wonders if this stated ignorance is hooey? Sure. Believing it requires you to believe that Daniel Craig has no one in his life who will text him when he becomes a popular meme. Does Daniel Craig not have any too-online people in his life? Shouldn’t he have someone — manager, agent, assistant — monitoring these things just in case? Isn’t this, in a weird way, kind of sad? I don’t know. Let’s let it go for now. For now.
More importantly, how had no one asked him this on the whole press tour until now?
This is the problem with journalism these days.
ITEM NUMBER FIVE — Give Paul Giamatti his free Burger King, come on
Paul Giamatti was on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert this week, which is a fact I mention for two reasons: One, because this will make three of the last four of these columns where I mention Paul Giamatti, and I kind of like that he’s becoming the official face of The Rundown; and two, after his appearance, I think we should all be doing more to get Paul Giamatti free Burger King for life.
The short version goes something like this, although you should probably just watch the video to get a fuller picture: Paul Giamatti did a Burger King commercial and thought he might be a candidate to receive a card that would give him free food from the burger chain for the rest of his life. That’s apparently a real thing. Explaineth Giamatti:
“I get a FedEx package, and I rip that baby open, reach down inside — and all that’s in there is this little titanium, beautifully finished black credit card,” Giamatti recalled with awe. “And it’s got this embossed black crown on it. And it says nothing on it. I was like, ‘Holy fuck. I have a Burger King for life card.’ So we look it up and in fact, the thing exists. Only like 12 people have it, including George Lucas.”
This is thrilling. I don’t even think I’ve eaten at a Burger King in, like, five years? Could be more, could be less, but it’s long enough ago that I do not remember it whenever it was. I don’t even like Burger King all that much. I’d rather do a Wendy’s or a Popeyes if I’m in a fast-food pinch. None of that matters now. What matters is one simple fact…
I must have one of these cards.
Burger King.
Burger King!
Pay attention!
Give me this card!
Wait. Hold on. I got distracted. It feels like this story was about to take a turn. Did Paul get his card? Is he the Burger King now? Is Paul Giamatti the king of burgers? He should be, if not. Let’s read on to find out.
After brashly bragging to his friends and his son about his stature in the fast-food community, Giamatti said, he examined his newly bestowed treasure a bit more closely.
“I notice there’s some tiny writing on the back,” he said, intrigued. “So I go to some website, I have a serial number. I enter the serial number. And it turns out — it’s a fucking $100 gift certificate. I have never fallen so far and hard and fast.”
Dammit, Burger King. Stop screwing around with me and Paul Giamatti. Let us have the card. We won’t abuse it. Probably. Maybe. Maybe we’ll build a castle made of Whoppers and live in it like kings. That’s not important right now. What’s important is that you give me and Paul Giamatti these cards. By the end of next week, preferably.
READER MAIL
If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.
From Sarah:
I assume 100 people have told you this already but in Guy Ritchie’s next movie Jason Statham is playing a character named Orson Fortune. There has never been a piece of news more tailored to your specific interests. It’s like they did this for you, specifically. I don’t even have a question to add. I’m just reaching out to say how happy I am for you.
Sarah, you are correct all around on this one. Lots of people did send this information to me this week and it — the information itself and the fact that lots of people saw it and sent it to me in many different forms (text, tweet, DM, email) — made me happy.
And it gets even better. The movie is titled Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre, which sent me to Wikipedia, which is where I learned what ruse de guerre means. Per Wiki: “[G]enerally what is understood by ‘ruse of war’ can be separated into two groups. The first classifies the phrase purely as an act of military deception against one’s opponent; the second emphasizes acts against one’s opponent by creative, clever, unorthodox means, sometimes involving force multipliers or superior knowledge.”
Perfect, everywhere. Statham playing a guy named Orson Fortune in a movie about schemes and subterfuge. I could not possibly be more in on all of this, especially when you add in the summary.
“MI6 guns-and-steel agent Orson Fortune (Statham) is recruited by a global intelligence alliance ‘Five Eyes’ to track down and stop the sale of a deadly new weapons technology that threatens to disrupt the world order. Reluctantly paired with CIA high-tech expert Sarah Fidel, Fortune sets off on a globe-trotting mission where he will have to use all of his charm, ingenuity, and stealth to track down and infiltrate billionaire arms broker Greg Simmonds.”
Three primary takeaways here:
Yes
I will need to spend many late evenings cranking my brain away on the name Orson Fortune and where it should slot into my ranking of names of character Jason Statham has played
YES
Pictured below, please find a dramatic representation of me going to see this movie on opening weekend.
A Danish artist was given $84,000 by a museum to use in a work of art. When he delivered the piece he was supposed to make, it was not as promised. Instead, the artist, Jens Haaning, gave the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark two blank canvases and said they were titled “Take the Money and Run.”
This is… I don’t know. I don’t want to dive into hyperbole right away. I don’t want to get out too far too fast in case I need to pull back a little. Let’s just say… let’s say this is definitely not NOT the funniest thing I’ve ever read.
I must know more. I must know everything.
Haaning was asked to recreate two of his previous works: 2010’s “An Average Danish Annual Income” and “An Average Austrian Annual Income,” first exhibited in 2007. Both used actual cash to show the average incomes of the two countries, according to a news release from the artist.
“The curator received an email in which Jens Haaning wrote that he had made a new piece of art work and changed the work title into ‘Take the Money and Run,’” Andersson said. “Subsequently, we could ascertain that the money had not been put into the work.”
Indeed, the frames meant to be filled with cash were empty.
So here’s what we have going on in Denmark, as far as I can tell. A museum wanted to commission a piece that explained economic disparity and they hired an artist who had done something like that before. All good so far. The problem they ran into is that the artist is the kind of rascal who assumed — correctly — that keeping the cash and giving them empty frames to highlight real economic disparity would be hilarious.
Look at this freaking guy.
“Everyone would like to have more money and, in our society, work industries are valued differently,” Haaning said in a statement. “The artwork is essentially about the working conditions of artists. It is a statement saying that we also have the responsibility of questioning the structures that we are part of. And if these structures are completely unreasonable, we must break with them. It can be your marriage, your work – it can be any type of societal structure”.
I love it. I love him. Just the audacity of it all. I hope it’s real. I need it to be real. If, months from now, a story comes out that he and the museum were in cahoots to goose publicity for this exhibition and this was all a sham, I need you to promise you will not tell me. Just let me live inside this beautiful lie.
The museum folks, for their parts, are playing it all pretty cool, either way.
Andersson said while it wasn’t what they had agreed on in the contract, the museum got new and interesting art. “When it comes to the amount of $84,000, he hasn’t broke any contract yet as the initial contract says we will have the money back on January 16th 2022.”
I hope he never gives the money back and I hope it goes to trial and I hope he pleads “not guilty by reason of art and/or comedy” and I hope the judge rips up the indictment and lets him go before it even gets to the jury and I hope the judge makes the museum pay for a full parade for him. I’m not fully up on Danish law, but I feel like that would be the fairest resolution here.
It’s really weird to think that Lil Wayne is doing a joint album, Trust Fund Babies, with Rich The Kid before one with, say, Drake or Nicki Minaj. The two rappers don’t have the same extensive history of collaboration as Wayne’s fellow Young Money residents and their respective profiles among fans are, let’s just say “uneven.” But the tape’s out now and judging from its cheeky first video for “Feelin’ Like Tunechi,” the two have a healthy sense of humor about the whole thing so it kinda works.
For example, for literally no discernible reason at all, the video contains an interlude at the halfway mark spoofing Wayne’s viral 2012 deposition video in which he answered a bunch of questions he wasn’t being asked. Taking a line of dialogue directly from that bewilderingly hilarious clip, the off-screen interviewer asks Wayne whether he performed at Rolling Loud with Rich in 2019, swapping the more modern festival for the Virgin Music Festival in 2008 with Kanye West. Wayne’s answer remains exactly the same: “I don’t know, but I know I did perform at this bad-ass bitch birthday party recently. She was crazy, stupid thick.”
We need more rappers willing to have a laugh at themselves. The rap world will almost certainly be better for it.
Watch Lil Wayne and Rich The Kid’s tongue-in-cheek “Feelin’ Like Tunechi” video above.
Trust Fund Babies is out now on Young Money Records and Republic Records.
One of the best recurring gags on Seinfeld is the character’s fake names and aliases. There’s Art Vandelay, H.E. Pennypacker, Kel Varnsen, Susie, O’Brien and Dylan Murphy from the limo episode, and Van Nostrand, which Kramer uses multiple times over the course of nine seasons and 180 episodes. Sometimes he’s a professor, other times he’s a doctor, but one thing’s for sure: he’s seen moles so big they have their own moles.
Van Nostrand is also near and dear to Jerry Seinfeld’s heart.
When asked by Extra TV‘s George Hahn if he has any “favorite episodes, moments, or line” from his show, Seinfeld replied, “I do really like when Kramer is trying to find Elaine’s medical records and he goes into the hospital and he says, ‘I’m Dr. Van Nostrand from the institute, and the receptionist says, ‘What institute?’ And he goes, ‘That’s right.’ That’s one of those jokes, really, it’s so simple but so funny.”
The scene is from the season eight episode, “The Package,” which is presumably not one of the episodes Seinfeld he wishes he could redo. “There’s a number of them that I would love to have a crack at, but I don’t really believe, philosophically, in changing or even thinking about the past,” he told People. “My philosophy of life is that just happened the way it happened, and we’re going to go from here. And that’s the best way to… live.”
At a certain point, Jon Stewart went from being a comedian and staple of MTV to a satirical news host to one of the country’s most powerful advocates for the disenfranchised. Stewart himself would probably point to 2001 as the year it all changed for him. In the wake of 9/11, he became one of the loudest voices in the room asking for help for 9/11 first responders—a role he continues to take seriously. But along the way, Stewart took up the cause of another group of people who are often overlooked: our country’s military veterans.
In the premiere episode of The Problem With Jon Stewart, the former The Daily Show host’s new Apple TV+ series, Stewart addressed the many ways our veterans are being ignored and mistreated after risking their lives for our country. In a clip from the writers’ room, Stewart and his team talk about the many misconceptions people have about the VA and how veterans are treated once they’ve completed their military service. Including the very false notion that veterans have paid health care for life.
Stewart used his very first episode to shine a light on the truth about war and the brave men and women who are on the frontlines. He lined up a panel of former veterans to talk about their experiences, with a particular emphasis put on the many health risks associated with burn pits—which are exactly what they sound like. As Stewart explains it:
“When you invade a country, they don’t tell you when Trash Day is. So everything that the military wants to get rid of, from rotting food to old uniforms to hazardous materials, medical waste, batteries, to ammunition, armaments, entire trucks, nuclear waste, amputated body parts, and—the maraschino cherry—metric tons of human feces. Which obviously you don’t want to pile that shit up on your base, you just want to put it right next to your base and then poor jet fuel on it, and light it on fire.”
It doesn’t take a doctor—or really, even a grown-up—to understand that breathing in jet fuel and literal sh*t for hours on end for days on end could have some serious health risks. Yet, as Stewart explained, “What the DOD and the VA are saying is that they just don’t have the proof, the scientific evidence, that exposure to benzine and dioxins in burning pits made soldiers sick. And the VA and the DOD keep paying for studies to find the proof, using data provided to them by the Pentagon. But lo and behold, those studies are inconclusive.”
So Stewart, being Stewart, took it upon himself to share the proof with those governing bodies, showing a handful of news clips dating all the way back to the early 1980s where the likes of Dan Rather and Chris Wallace were reporting on government studies that concluded that exposure to these toxins can lead to everything from blood disorders to leukemia to cancer. He also cited a 2010 brochure circulated by the VA itself that advised medical examiners to be on the lookout for issues related to exposure to these very toxins.
So why is the VA so desperately trying to deny that breathing in waste topped with jet fuel could be bad for one’s health. “No surprise,” Stewart says, “the answer is money.”
For nearly a decade, Tanner Jones fronted a pop-punk band from Orlando named after a Happy Gilmore gag – and yet, Jones never once felt like he could even attempt to write a You Blew It! song that was actually funny. At least not the kind of funny he brings on “Sold Our Shirts,” a single from his new and much more circumspectly monikered project Couplet. “I was listening to a lot of Grandaddy, who I think are very good at writing lyrics that are cheeky in a way that You Blew It! or pop-punk could not get away with,” Jones admits, and “Sold Our Shirts” broke his years-long artistic deadlock by imagining a “fairy tale for a touring band”: their Pitchfork scores are always higher than the other guys, venues pay them what they’re worth, and they never miss any milestones of their friends back home. A few years removed from quietly shuttering You Blew It!, Jones was still uncertain about whether he would ever publicly release music again as he shared “Sold Our Shirts” with some fellow artists to see if it resonated. Maxwell Stern of Signals Midwest sent a note back to Jones, describing it as the sequel to “Bands With Managers,” Pedro the Lion’s scorched earth screed on indie rock careerism. For Jones, “it was the most mindblowing compliment I could think of.”
Couplet’s spiritual connection to that song goes deeper than Stern likely anticipated. “Bands With Managers” was the opening track on Achilles Heel, a deeply embittered album that foreshadowed David Bazan’s disbandment of Pedro the Lion and subsequent formation of Headphones – a low-key electro-pop project created amongst longtime collaborators and friends. This is almost the exact circumstances under which Couplet was forged, as Jones’ email exchanges with Chicago emo fixtures Adam Beck of Sincere Engineer and Evan Weiss soon became a full-fledged band. LP1 sounds like nothing Jones or Beck or Weiss have ever made, but it does sound like Mice Parade, The Postal Service, and The Notwist, all of whom also applied their punk and emo-leaning origins to define the sound of early 2000s lap-pop.
And much like “Bands With Managers,” “Sold Our Shirts” is an unmistakably autobiographical account, fueled by the envy and disillusionment that can only come from a marginal level of success that somehow makes things worse than outright failure. Even if You Blew It!’s debut Grow Up, Dude helped define what “emo revival” meant before the term went mainstream, it’s hard to look at a band with that name and that album title and that album cover and assume they aspired for longevity. But as soon as You Blew It! started to experience some semblance of commercial and critical acclaim with 2014’s Keep Doing What You’re Doing, Jones started to see the rot setting in. Touring for nine months per year made the band financially viable, but at the cost of relationships and more sustainable career options. Opening gigs for The Wonder Years, State Champs, and Taking Back Sunday put them in front of bigger crowds than they could ever manage on their own and also made it nearly impossible to operate outside of the pop-punk market.
Jones noticed that the band’s decision-making was almost always fraught with financial considerations; not just the tour schedule, but second-guessing their songwriting instincts if a song felt too pop-punk or emo, or not pop-punk enough. An admitted combination of hubris and bad timing sealed the fate of Abendrot, You Blew It!’s final album. While Jones assumed the band’s prior success would ensure patience with their newly wistful and somber tones, especially in the context of a mid-November release, its arrival was met with indifference at best; emo’s fourth wave had reached a low ebb by the end of 2016 and three days after the election of Donald Trump, it was admittedly tough for anyone to care about any album. “I’m not sure how much of an impact it had on the release of the record,” Jones said in 2017. “I’d like to say it had a big one, but it could be the very simple fact that people just didn’t like that record either.” The ensuing tour tanked and as of now, the story of You Blew It! ends with a grace note of irony – shortly after they publicly called it quits, they accepted an offer to do a three-show run in Florida opening for American Football, the kind of gig that rarely seemed to arise when they were an active band.
But by that point, Jones had already taken the opportunity to join five of his friends in starting up Easy Luck, a coffee shop and bar in Orlando where he works to this day. After years of the just-making-it touring grind, Jones prefers his routinized lifestyle – “working at a coffee shop from 6:30 to 3:30 PM and then going home and going for a run and having dinner and then going to sleep.” Despite the reputation of Florida in general and Orlando in particular, Jones has come to appreciate the college kids and “Birkenstock-wearing, hippie granola types” responsible for making Orange County the bluest-leaning one in the state. While begrudgingly acknowledging Ron DeSantis’ often-progressive environmental legislation, he also points out how Florida’s notoriously anti-vaxx governor has become a rallying point for his community. “It’s a nice thing to bond over but there’s definitely shame in it,” Jones says, “being in a state led by this guy who’s lashing out at reporters every single day over the most inane shit.”
When I interviewed Jones about all of this back in 2017, I left feeling pretty certain that he’d never make music again – or at least never allow himself to be fully reliant on music as a source of income or self-esteem. And that’s why Couplet is allowed to exist in 2021. “We’re all approaching it as a way to explore sonically and lyrically, because the stakes were so low,” Jones tells me. “No one was expecting anything.” Sparked by “Sold Our Shirts,” Jones started writing a handful of songs when he met up with Beck at a Sincere Engineer show in 2019. “He said, ‘please come up to Chicago and I’ll record you for free,’” he recalls. “So I booked a flight for April 2020 and of course that didn’t happen.” Jones linked back up with Weiss, the Into It. Over It. and Pet Symmetry frontman who also produced Keep Doing What You’re Doing and Abendrot. Jones describes his demos as “guitar and maybe a beep-boop drum track and vocals,” before Beck and Weiss rearranged and remixed them into the pointillist and nearly guitar-free synth-pop tracks that populate LP1. As their exchange of ideas continued long past its original weekend plans, Jones decided to build Couplet out into a full-on band rather than a solo project – “the amount of collaboration they were putting into it was as valuable, if not more so, than your traditional ‘three guys getting into a room and banging out a song.’”
But now that Couplet is an actual band with an actual album and, thus, an actual album rollout, Jones is again wrestling with the same aversion to pretense and self-promotion that soured the last few years of You Blew It!. LP1 undeniably owes its creative process to the pandemic and Jones has no interest in turning it into a narrative. “The arrogance to cite the pandemic and how it should be some kind of token to accentuate the artist’s struggle and increase the value of the output is where my true ire lies,” he explains in an email a few days after our initial talk. “The thing’s killed millions of people and changed everyone’s lives, and now some band wants me to covet their songs because their process was different? Wild.” There are times where he wishes he could drop music anonymously and others where he’s inspired by how his peers use social media to be forthright and vulnerable about their artistic process. There are days when he wants to listen to literally anything other than DIY punk and a few hours after we’re done speaking, he’ll be at a show for Florida up-and-comers Virginity. But for now, Couplet’s owes its existence to the same pure and noble impulse that will forever inspire friends to start a band just so they can name it after one of their favorite movie quotes. “This brings me a lot of joy, it brings Evan a lot of joy, it brings Adam a lot of joy,” Jones stresses. “And what are you doing in life? You’re mostly chasing joy, and that’s what this whole thing is.”
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Prior to the formation of Couplet, I recall you expressing ambivalence about whether there was space for you to make music again. How does this concern sit with you now?
Truthfully, it feels fucking ridiculous if I’m being honest with you. I don’t mean to demean this interview [laughs], but over the past three or four years, I’ve been solely a music fan. I’ve been watching rollouts happen and indulging them the way that anyone else would indulge a You Blew It! or Couplet record. I try to be very understanding these days, but the whole process seems disingenuous and frankly kinda annoying. Art should be consumed as art, it shouldn’t be surrounded by this halo of stories and past records. It seems like with every band that has gone on tour or announced tours, there’s been such a long diatribe about “this past year has been so hard for me, we had to be locked down,” recapping the entire pandemic as if none of us have ever lived it, in order to sell tickets. It seems ridiculous and awful, I think I would like to live in a world that didn’t have record rollouts and they would just come out on the day they actually came out.
When I spoke with Foxing earlier this year, they expressed a similar sentiment about wishing they could do an immediate drop – and they were in the middle of a five-month rollout.
It seems like there’s so much effort that goes into informing the record before people hear it when the record should inform itself. Not having been a part of it [for a few years], that was the most glaring thorn in my side that revealed itself that wasn’t there before.
How do you determine whether a song you write is worthy of taking up space in 2021?
I think it would be arrogant to say that we’re releasing music for anything other than my friends and their enjoyment. I stopped making music for a long time because it stopped bringing me joy, until one day it started doing that again and I chased that. I found friends that wanted to make music with me, they found me and we put it out because it was a worthwhile process to us. I think that if it were tied to something altruistic – if releasing music shrunk the wealth gap just a little bit with every song – then maybe I could say that releasing music is for the world. Not to be cynical about it, it wouldn’t be right of me to say that I’m releasing music for anything other than myself or Couplet’s self.
With the intention of writing from a different sonic and lyrical perspective in Couplet, how do you identify subject matter that’s worth pursuing?
I think a lot of that credit can go to Evan and Adam and maybe even the way we wrote songs together. Being so far away from each other physically required a lot of trust and modesty. We had no deadlines, all we had were lockdowns between Chicago and limited lockdowns in Florida. I’m sure you’ve noticed there’s not a lot of guitars on this record, the onus was very much – “if you don’t have a good idea, make it an interesting idea.” And also humoring every member’s input as an equal.
What’s the difference between a good idea and an interesting one?
Sometimes good ideas can be safe ideas. It would be a good idea to write a song with a traditional pop structure because that’s a successful structure. An interesting one would be to stack a chorus at the beginning, build two verses and a bridge and stack a chorus at the end. More specifically, it would be a good idea to use a guitar to play a part because that’s what we’re used to but it would be more interesting to put it through a Rhodes or a Wurlitzer type of thing.
Have you felt burnt out on listening to music from the DIY or punk worlds?
Absolutely. The past three years have been very rewarding because I’ve been able to get out of the mindset of “I have to know everything that’s going on in the guitar rock world” and I’ve been able to dig into things like bossa nova or American classics like Grateful Dead or the Byrds or Gram Parsons. I was able to familiarize myself with Yo La Tengo, I never really did that until You Blew It! broke up – even though they’re guitar music, they’re not really. I go in and out of phases these days where I’d rather not listen to punk or guitar-driven indie.
Are there any newer bands in this space that excite you?
Hovvdy – at the end of “Sold Our Shirts,” I say “mm-hmm” and that’s inspired by one of the songs on Heavy Lifter, I love that band. I love how their earlier records were very sparse, almost slowcore and now they’re kind of pop songs. I like a lot of the new psych bands like Crumb and Mild High Club. King Gizzard too, those bands are so sweet. I work in a coffee shop eight hours a day, so all I can do is go through these “Recommended Artists” [on Spotify]. I found this band called The Sweet Enoughs and all their [“fans also like”] bands are all these guys from Nordic countries wearing silly hats and writing these new jazz records that are just so out of this world cool.
Are there any times where you see your friends or peers releasing an album and think, “man, I actually miss that”?
Any record rollout that’s happening kinda in the sphere where You Blew It! existed. For example, the Shortly album that was released today. I think Triple Crown did a really cool, little quick rollout with her and just seeing her through tweets – I imagine she feels this way – just being grateful and showing her excitement for this record. I feel like I would try to do that with every You Blew It! rollout. In some alternate universe, if I were in her shoes, I would say the same type of things. Or in this universe, I’m releasing a record!
The title of LP1 implies there might be an LP2, has there been more Couplet music made?
We have more music – we finished the record about a year ago and we’ve been slowly writing ever since. We have another release planned after this one and more stuff on the way. We’re trying to plan something [for touring} in the middle of next year should everything go well.
How do you plan on setting boundaries or expectations so that Couplet doesn’t repeat some of the mistakes You Blew It! made while touring?
What’s going to be different is the mindset, rather than the physical aspects that come along with touring. Before, that was how I lived so it was very important that I worked out a routine and that routine followed similar steps and tempos every single day. Whereas now that this is a part-time band I think it will be easier to tolerate the unsavory parts of touring. Before, one wrong thing was detrimental to a routine and therefore resulted in that domino effect of bad mental health, being pissy all the time, being annoying, being annoyed. Now that this is in the “part-time” category, the things that seem dire at first might actually be enjoyable. That’s my hope.
Although Little Simz original version of “Venom,” released on her standout 2019 album Grey Area, initially had nothing to do with the Marvel anti-hero of the same name, it would have been a waste of synergistic potential for the good folks at Sony to not try to employ it in the new sequel film, Venom: Let There Be Carnage. Fortunately, Simz was up for the revival, picking up the pen to revamp the lyrics for a more motivational mood fitting to the comic-book-inspired antics onscreen.
You can thank Venom: Let There Be Carnage (boy, that’s a mouthful — which… considering the character in question… fits?) star Tom Hardy for Simz’s inclusion in the process. Last week, the film’s director Andy Serkis told Uproxx that Simz’s fellow Brit and well-known hip-hop head Hardy suggested the song be used in a sequence in the film and reached out to Simz to make it happen. “She actually had made a song, unbeknownst to her, called ‘Venom’ that connected very much with the first movie,” Serkis said, “And so Tom got in touch with her and that song became sort of the focus [of the scene].”
The moment is perfectly positioned to capitalize on Simz’s recently released album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert and her upcoming North American tour, putting her music in what will undoubtedly be one of the more popular movies of the year just in time to bring in a plethora of new fans. She deserves them.
Listen to the Venom remix of “Venom” above.
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(@CraigWeekend) 
