Like many artists, failed erotic wallpaper salesman Nick Cave was forced to cancel a tour in 2020. He made the best of his time, though, telling fans in a post on his website that it was “time to make a record.” Sure enough, it looks like that’s just what he’s done, as Cave noted in his latest dispatch.
In a new post, Cave wrote about how he’s been doing during lockdown, calling the experience “weirdly familiar” since he “was a heroin addict for many years and self-isolating and social distancing were the name of the game.” He also wrote about how he has missed performing and concluded the post, “Anyway, as promised in my last issue, I did go into the studio — with [Warren Ellis] — to make a record. It’s called Carnage.”
Read Cave’s full note below.
“In many ways lockdown has felt weirdly familiar, like I’ve experienced it before. I guess this should come as no surprise as I was a heroin addict for many years and self-isolating and social distancing were the name of the game. I am also well acquainted with the mechanics of grief — collective grief works in an eerily similar way to personal grief, with its dark confusion, deep uncertainty and loss of control. For me, lockdown feels like a state mandated version of more of the same — a formalisation of the kind of hermit-like behaviour to which I’ve always been predisposed, and so, as difficult as it has been to see the devastation and anguish caused by the pandemic — including to the lives of those close to me, and many who have written into The Red Hand Files — I have been doing okay.
I am surprised, though, at just how hard not being able to play live has felt. I have come to the conclusion that I am essentially a thing that tours. There is a terrible yearning and a feeling of a life being half-lived. I miss the thrill of stepping onto the stage, the rush of the performance, where all other concerns dissolve into a pure animal interrelation with my audience. I miss the complete surrender to the moment, the loss of self, the physicalness of it all, the feeding frenzy of communal love, the religion, the glorious exchange of bodily fluids — and The Bad Seeds themselves, of course, in all their reckless splendour, how I miss them. As much as sitting behind my desk can bring me a lot of joy, and the imagination can be a stimulating, even dangerous place, I long for the wanton abandon of the live performance.
Anyway, as promised in my last issue, I did go into the studio — with Warren — to make a record.
Meghan McCain is having a rough week on The View. The daughter of John McCain is doing her best to uphold his conservative legacy but also seems to completely misunderstand what protections the First Amendment allows to citizens of the United States.
McCain has spent her week demanding that Trump voters be respected, then a good portion of them tried to overthrow the seat of government at the behest of Donald Trump. And now it seems she lacks the basic understanding of the very nation’s constitution we’ve seen seditionists try to upend in real-time on Wednesday. Thankfully, a sitting US senator was on the program on Friday and was able to explain the difference between the right to freedom of speech and how it applies to the publishing industry.
The Daily Beast had the details on Friday, sharing video of McCain learning about the Bill of Rights. The View later tweeted the video as well, as McCain asked a pointed question of Chris Murphy, a senator from Connecticut, about Josh Hawley’s book being canceled by Simon and Schuster a day after he helped incite a riot on Capitol Hill that, as of this publication, has left five people dead.
McCain called Hawley’s book being canceled “an echo of the New York Times canceling senator Tom Cotton over his national guard op-ed,” a writing the paper of record published in which a sitting senator encouraged state-sanctioned brutality against nonviolent protesters advocating for better treatment of people of color by police. Murphy didn’t hold back in responding to what’s often a common trope among the right: that being deplatformed by corporations for violent and dangerous rhetoric is somehow a First Amendment issue.
MORE: Sen. @ChrisMurphyCT: “Nobody’s robbing Josh Hawley of his First Amendment rights. He can go and speak on the Senate floor. He can go speak on a street corner. Nobody’s locking him up for saying what he thinks, for leading an insurrection against the federal government.” https://t.co/ktET7lfvnp
“Nobody’s robbing Josh Hawley of his First Amendment rights. He can go and speak on the Senate floor,” Murphy said. “He can go speak on a street corner. Nobody’s locking him up for saying what he thinks, for leading an insurrection against the federal government.”
Murphy noted that Simon and Schuster is a public company, and therefore Hawley’s First Amendment rights are not being infringed upon by a business decision.
“They’ve made a decision that it is going to hurt their business to be associated with Josh Hawley,” Murphy said. “You have to accept the consequences of engaging in such outrageous behavior as riling up people to march on the United States Capitol. And so if that means you can’t make money off of a book, then so be it.”
McCain, who days earlier advocated for Hawley to be the next president of the country he tried to incite a mob against, called for “unification” and asked how Murphy can help achieve that. But the senator made it clear he wasn’t the one trying to overthrow the will of the people and declare Donald Trump president after he lost a fair and free election.
“Let’s talk to Josh Hawley about that,” Murphy said. “He had an opportunity on Wednesday night to withdraw his objection. The Senate was almost burned down, and he had a decision to make afterwards. He could have withdrawn his seditional objection to Pennsylvania, he knew he wasn’t going to win, but he kept going after four people had died.
“You want to talk about bringing this country together,” Murphy continued, “Then let’s hold the people accountable.”
Murphy was asked if Hawley should resign, and he didn’t outright call for it on Friday. Others, including those in the Senate, have said just that.
!!!! Sen. Murray, No. 3 Senate Democrat: “Any Senator who stands up and supports the power of force over the power of democracy has broken their oath of office. Senators Hawley and Cruz should resign.”
Anyway, McCain sounded a bit miffed about how things went on Twitter on Friday.
Grateful for my job @TheView and the privilege to (try and) speak on behalf of conservatives in America. That being said – what a week to return from my bliss bubble of maternity leave. Going to do nothing but cuddle Liberty all weekend and count my blessings.
Netflix’s latest release, Pieces Of A Woman, is proof that arthouse filmmakers still haven’t tired of exploring grief. It’d be one thing if they had something interesting or entertaining to say about grief (and some do, Hesher and Babyteeth come to mind) but so often it seems filmmakers just want an excuse to stage those oh-so-cinematic moments, like a tear falling gently onto a photograph, or Shia Labeouf screaming “WHYYYYY!” at a frozen harbor. Some people just want to see the world wallow.
Pieces of a Woman, from Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó (White God) and writer Katá Weber (executive produced by Martin Scorsese, whatever that means) stars Vanessa Kirby and Shia Labeouf as a Boston married couple who lose their baby during a home childbirth. They then spend the rest of the film doing grief-y stuff, like lashing out at family members, descending into self-destructive vice, and screaming at harbors. WHY, HARBOR, WHY???
The home birth itself takes a full 30 minutes of screen time, with Vanessa Kirby bellowing to the heavens at every contraction and acting inexplicably doped up in between. It’s a home birth with no drugs administered, so I’m not sure why she seems drunk. It’s one of a handful of odd artistic choices during the sequence, like the frequent focus on Kirby’s very fake-looking stomach, an effect it seems like they could’ve either spent more time constructing or just not shot in so many close-ups. It’s also a little unclear what drew this pair together, Kirby playing the bourgie avocado toast yuppie, LaBeouf the squirrely, blue-collar knucklehead with an unexplained accent.
Playing Kirby’s manic, inexplicably cholo-sounding husband, Sean, LaBeouf seems to have retained a bit of the accent from his previous role, as Creeper in David Ayer’s execrable The Tax Collector (which LaBeouf was actually pretty good in). The out-of-step accent is extra noticeable on account of Kirby’s character being named “Martha.” LaBeouf’s soft, SoCal R pronunciation comes through every time he says her name, which is a lot. MORtha. MORtha? MORtha! MORtha?! Sidenote: how many women under 50 do you know named Martha?
The baby dies, leaving many to wonder whether it was all the fault of their midwife, played by Molly Parker. Emphatic in this belief is Martha’s rich mom, played by Ellen Burstyn, a controlling old money sort who naturally hates Shia LaBeouf and his overemphasized cholo Rs. Iliza Shlesinger as Martha’s sister, Bennie Safdie from Uncut Gems as her brother-in-law, and Succession‘s Sarah Snook as her cousin/lawyer round out a pretty nice ensemble cast. (Netflix must call Iliza Shlesinger every time they have a spare character from Boston.)
From there, the movie goes on to combine excruciating symbolism with the usual tropes of arthouse grief. Sean and Martha engage in some light infidelity (including a hilarious extended closeup of Shia LaBeouf’s pubic patch, the Muff LaBeouf, as I call it), and Martha proceeds to: 1. smash their framed ultrasound pictures 2. pop an exercise ball with the lit end of her cigarette (what’s the opposite of “pregnant” with symbolism?) 3. and take up apple seed cultivation as a hobby (get it, man? she’s creating life!). If I never saw another oh-so-symbolic art movie moment involving an apple I could die a happy man.
At one point, Ellen Burstyn gets to deliver a lengthy monologue about her past as a Holocaust baby, which slowly turns into a parable about how the grieving Martha should act. The speech is fitfully compelling, as it always is watching Burstyn chew scenery, but so overly dramatic and out of left field that it’s a little reminiscent of Mike Myers’ parody Oscar monologue in Wayne’s World. And another thing! I! Never! Learned! To Read!
LaBeouf’s character, meanwhile, a recovering alcoholic construction worker, is manic, borderline abusive, and seemingly always on the verge of becoming unhinged. He’s arguably the most compelling element of the film, even as he seems like might’ve wandered in from a different movie. He teeters on the cusp of real violence and comes frighteningly close, but it feels almost like he spooked the filmmakers in the process. Eventually, they sort of just shunt his character aside and carry on with the rest of the movie.
There’s a courtroom drama sequence involving the midwife that briefly threatens to turn Pieces of A Woman interesting, but even that soon dissolves into corny grief clichés and ends before it can really get going. The film ultimately concludes with arguably the most groan-worthy apple visual. Perhaps as the filmmakers’ way of saying, “So, guys? How do you like them apples?”
Personally, I think if we’re going to spend 30 minutes watching a woman give birth to a dead baby, we deserve more justification than a few good Ellen Burstyn scenes and a bushel of apple metaphors. Come for the grieving, stay for Shia LaBeouf’s pubes.
‘Pieces Of A Woman’ premieres January 8th on Netflix. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.
WandaVision will officially launch the MCU’s Phase Four with next Friday’s Disney+ premiere, which is reported to be a double-dip of episodes. Whether we actually get two episodes (out of the total of nine) remains to be seen, but Jimmy Kimmel is not thrilled with not being able to see a preview screener before interviewing the man who embodies Vision, Paul Bettany. Given that Kimmel can’t see it while working for the same parent company as Disney+, yup, it sure says a lot about Disney and Marvel Studios’ continued commitment to keeping things airtight to avoid spoilers.
Still, Kimmel couldn’t resist theorizing and bouncing ideas off Bettany on Thursday evening. At around the 8:00 mark above, the host guessed that the entire show doesn’t stick around in sitcom land (although it starts in a Dick Van Dyke-esque manner), and Bettany surprisingly confirmed this hunch. To Kimmel’s delight, the actor responded, “That’s 100 percent correct.”
Tell us more, Paul Bettany. He did: “We hurtle through the decades, and we hit different genres of sitcoms and then Vision begins to think that this is getting a little weird, you know. And in the end, you end up in full, MCU action movie.” There was no further comment on whether we’ll hear anything else about Vision’s anatomy, and it’s doubtful that we’ll see anything visually confirmed here. Then again, Disney was alright with Avengers: Endgame‘s tribute to “America’s Ass,” so we might hear a few jokes in that regard. Truly, anything can happen.
A lot of artists tease their fans with new info about their goings-on between albums, but that’s not really how Zayn Malik does things. Since he released Icarus Falls in 2018, he has only popped up occasionally. He’s been more forthcoming lately, though. A few months ago, he revealed he has a new album on the way, and now there’s more info: Nobody Is Listening will be released on January 15.
On top of that, he shared a new single, “Vibez.” It’s a sexy tune, as it’s packed with lusty lyrics like, “Don’t keep me waiting / I’ve been waiting all night to get closer / And you already know I got it for ya / You know the vibes, know the vibes, put it on ya.”
Malik is famously pretty reclusive when it comes to putting himself out there, so he hasn’t unveiled a lot of info about his new album. The best tidbits about the nature of the album has come from press releases, which have indicated it is “set to be his most personal project to date” and also note, “With total creative reign on his third album, Zayn is making the music he has always wanted to.”
Watch the “Vibez” video above and check out the Nobody Is Listening art and tracklist below.
Part I of HBO’s two-part Tiger Woods documentary, Tiger, airs this Sunday, promising to be the perfect golf-centric spinoff for everyone who loved reliving Michael Jordan’s glory days in TheLast Dance. It’s a fitting tribute to the guy who has been described as “the Michael Jordan of golf” since probably even before he’d won his first major at The Masters in 1997. Even their flagship documentaries follow a similar pattern: the rise, the death of a father, the controversy, the resurgence, the nagging question of whether our hero is actually psychotic in some way, and if maybe that’s what dominance on their level requires.
Yet Tiger Woods isn’t a perfect analogue for Michael Jordan. It’s even possible that the pressure to fulfill that hero athlete archetype contributed to Tiger’s arguably lower lows.
I was a competitive youth golfer myself during Tiger’s rise, so rewatching his child prodigy-Stanford phenom arc comes with a heavy dose of deja vu. I remember thinking, throughout that rise, that Tiger Woods must be the most boring superstar athlete who ever lived — the awkward nasal voice, the halting, guarded delivery, the seeming inability to offer anything but the dryest discussion of golf’s minutia. “Well, uh, I think I’d rate the long iron game about a C+ today, but luckily I had the putter working and uh…”
At the time I was far more partial to John Daly, the chain-smoking Arkansas shitkicker with a mullet and porn ‘stache, who wore hideous shirts, inhaled hot dogs at the turn, and barely took practice swings before knocking 300-yard drives with his goofball whirlybird back swing. Tiger Woods: infallible golf robot from Southern California, was a little harder to love.
With the benefit of hindsight and history, it’s easier to acknowledge: Tiger Woods being kind of a dork is what humanizes him. It also contextualizes some of the pressures that he was under — that he’d been essentially bred for greatness, shoved into a spotlight he probably never wanted in the first place literally since before he could talk. It’s possible to see him as an underdog, but only after the fact. Appearing as a golf phenom on the Mike Douglas Show as a two-year-old, Tiger Woods is as much former child star as he is star athlete. To borrow another sports analogy, Earl Woods had a few things in common with Marv Marinovich, the famously overbearing father of “test tube quarterback” Todd Marinovich.
We always knew Earl Woods was a little nuts, and it’s a credit to Tiger directors Matthew Heineman and Matthew Hamachek that they actually find some new and interesting anecdotes in that arena. Unlike Todd Marinovich, whose career sort of flamed out in drug addiction just after he became an NFL first-round draft pick, Tiger Woods really did come to dominate his sport. Watching old footage of Tiger dominating major tournaments by 10 or 15 strokes is irresistible in the same way watching old footage of Jordan in The Last Dance was irresistible. In that way, Earl Woods succeeded where many pushy stage fathers failed.
Yet the constant need to contextualize Tiger’s dominance using other sports illustrates the obvious: that golf isn’t other sports. That Tiger really did manage to transcend golf, in a way no one had before, is his greatest achievement. And yet he was always hamstrung by the fact that he is, deep down, a golfer; master of a sport that the public generally thinks of as being for fat old Republicans who hate their wives and isn’t particularly manly. Tiger relives Nike’s first Tiger Woods commercial, the one in which he flatly declared “there are still courses in the United States that I am not allowed to play because of the color of my skin.”
The ad stirred controversy at the time, for so boldly playing the race card and perhaps not being perfectly true on the merits: Tiger Woods probably could’ve played any course he wanted in 1996. But just because it wasn’t 100% true to the letter didn’t mean it wasn’t true in spirit. It would’ve been entirely true for any other black golfer at the time. Just six years before the ad aired, in 1990, Hal W. Thompson, the founder of Shoal Creek Country Club in Birmingham, Alabama, the venue for the 1990 PGA Championship (one of pro golf’s four majors), said “we don’t discriminate in every other area except the blacks.”
That same year, it was reported that 17 other PGA tour sites had all-white memberships (with most probably not quite stupid enough not to admit that they had specifically excluded black members like Thompson did). And hey, what do you know, the year of that controversy was also the same year that the host of the Master’s, Augusta National, invited their first black member. One can probably assume that golf didn’t magically become not racist in the six years between 1990 and 1996.
So the Tiger quote from the Nike commercial was jarring, and might’ve seemed like “playing the race card” or like unnecessary pot-stirring in any other sport, but because it was golf, it was impossible to claim that the spirit of it wasn’t true with any sort of credibility.
Yet the point of it was clearly to position Tiger Woods as some kind of rebel, a cool iconoclast (read: someone who could sell sneakers). Which may have been true, but only by accident of his birth and probably not by virtue of his personality. Woods was a guy who succeeded by listening to his dad, not by telling his dad to f*ck off.
In the context of history, Tiger Woods’ story is a story that’s inextricable from race. It’s the story of having identities foisted upon him. Being white means never having people ask you which race you most identify with or asked to be a mouthpiece for your people.
And how do you come to know yourself when people are constantly telling you who you are from the time you’re two? Even Michael Jordan never had to deal with that, at least not from such a young age. And maybe that gave Tiger just a wisp of an inferiority complex when he was hanging with his other superstar pals. That’s what Tiger seems to suggest, that Tiger Woods’s partying and womanizing was driven partly by the pressure to live up to “superstar athlete,” partly by Freudian issues inherited from his womanizing father, and partly by the usual childhood-stealing fishbowl of early fame (and in that sense, personality-stealing too). Tiger Woods is sort of Michael Jordan plus Michael Jackson plus golf.
Yet one of the key aspects of Michael Jordan is a meticulously maintained public image. We see Tiger’s DUI video and the 911 call after he crashed his SUV, possibly during a fight with his wife over his mistresses, and all the former mistresses coming forward, and we think we’re getting some vivid picture of Tiger Woods’ inner life. Yet unlike The Last Dance,Tiger feels like it’s telling a story that’s still developing. Tiger’s signature comeback triumph, his win at the Master’s at the age of 43 (eclipsing even Jordan, who was 35 when he won his last title), was barely a year and a half ago, in 2019.
After all the back surgeries, the rehab, the claims of sex addiction, the late night monologue punchlines, we hear an announcer in Tiger triumphantly declare, during footage of him teeing off, that Tiger Woods was making “his first start in 301 days!”
301 days? That’s it? After all that talk about “would he even be able to swing a club” and “father time is undefeated,” his longest layoff was less than a year? This was, by the way, just seven months after his famous DUI arrest where he was filmed mumbling incoherently, not knowing what state he was in and with five different drugs in his system, including two opioids and Xanex.
Most people don’t go from rock bottom to competing in professional sports in seven months. And hey, what about those back surgeries, anyway? The film sort of glosses over them, vaguely implying that they may have been caused by years of Tiger’s violent swing, his refusal to acknowledge physical pain, and his brief penchant for training with Navy SEALS after his father’s death. But is it too conspiratorial to wonder, in reference to the guy arrested with multiple opiates in his system who had four back surgeries between 2014 and 2017, whether those two things might be related? He certainly wouldn’t be the first athlete to develop an opiate dependency after an injury (all his knee injuries in 2008, for instance), nor the first person with an opiate dependency to suffer from chronic back issues. None of this cheapens any of his wins; if anything it makes them that much more impressive.
Tiger Woods’s win at the 2019 Masters is one of the greatest sports comebacks of all time, one of the most inspiring performances of an over-40 athlete ever, and the perfect coda to a rise-fall-comeback documentary series like Tiger. Maybe it’s a little too perfect. At the very least, there are enough open questions in it that I can’t help but wish for a part three. Hopefully after another major victory.
Part one of ‘Tiger’ premieres this Sunday on HBO. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.
Bourbon isn’t a monolith. Sure, there are rules about how the whiskey style is defined — 51 percent corn, first aging in new American oak, etc. Then there are more specific rules about ABVs at distilling, barreling, and so on. But we’re not here to talk about all that. We’re here to talk about the quintessential tastes of bourbon and what elements create those flavor notes.
There are some basic aspects of bourbon that feature in almost every single brand’s core expressions: Vanilla, oak, and caramel. Often those notes are supported by spice (peppery or dusty brown spices), fruits (especially apple or stone fruits), florals, and, of course, corn. From there, anything goes and there are almost endless variations and riffs to explore. That’s what makes drinking bourbon so much fun. The grains, yeasts, oaks, blends, finishing techniques, and time-in-barrel all bring a little something different and unique to any bourbon you try.
The precise impact of each of those elements is exactly what we’re exploring today. And we’re breaking them down one at a time.
The ten bottles below each embody how a single key ingredient or process can affect the final product. This is about pinpointing a taste or why a process like, say, small batching is important to flavor, texture, and overall experience. That being said, of course, these are not the only bottles that represent these production steps in bourbon. They’re simply primes examples that we also have a lot of fun drinking — which is sort of the whole point, after all.
This Texan whiskey utilizes sustainably grown blue corn from west Texas along the New Mexico border. The juice is aged in their warm Waco warehouses under that Texas sun before it’s bottled at barrel-proof without any fuss.
Tasting Notes:
Freshly baked cornbread dripping with salted butter is counterpointed by white pepper and a hint of spicy pipe tobacco. The palate edges towards a buttermilk biscuit dripping with orange marmalade with notes of bitter-then-sweet black tea next to Red Hot candies. The corn makes a comeback on the end, with a sweet, buttery, and charred edge that leads to a marshmallow that’s just been kissed by the flame and smoke from a backyard campfire.
Why It’s Special:
This grabs a lot of attention for its boldness and differentiation from standard bourbons. It’s specifically and intentionally not a standard dram. At the center of this sip is the corn via a cornmeal/cornbread opening and that corn-on-the-cob fresh off the grill finish.
Bourbon is all about corn and this bottle plays into that fact while taking the corn flavor notes somewhere new.
Maker’s (Beam Suntory) is a classic wheated bourbon. Their mash bill (recipe) eschews the usual dose of rye for a 16 percent cut of red winter wheat. The juice is then aged in fairly heavily charred oak for up to seven years before blending, proofing, and bottling.
Tasting Notes:
The sip pulls you in with a nice oakiness next to plenty of classic notes of caramel and vanilla with a grainy underbelly that’s partially grassy and floral. The palate delivers on those notes while adding a bit of a caramel apple sweetness that leads towards a chewy plummy nature. The end is silken with a sense of that dried wheatgrass and oaky spice fading across your senses.
Why It’s Special:
In the world of wheated bourbons, things can get a bit crazy, price wise. Looking at you, Pappy. To get a sense of the beauty of wheated bourbon without selling a kidney, try some Maker’s! It’s affordable and on pretty much every liquor store shelf.
After you have a baseline, try to nab some Weller and Larceny to expand your wheated bourbon appreciation.
Old Grand-Dad is part of Jim Beam’s “Old” line of whiskeys, along with Old Overholt. The juice is made with a mash bill of 27 percent rye, adding a really sharp focus on what the grain can bring to bourbon. The whiskey is then aged for at least four years in a bonded warehouse and bottled at 50 percent, which lets a bit more of the aged juice shine in the bottle.
Tasting Notes:
There’s a clear sense of peppery spice counterpointed by a creamy vanilla pudding with a touch of brown sugar and spices. There’s an orange blossom floral/fruity nature that sharpens to an orange oil cut with Christmas spices, which leads towards more of that vanilla pudding with a touch of oak. The finish leans into the vanilla, pepper, dark spices, fruit, and oak as a final note of corn arrives to remind you this is a bourbon and not rye.
Why It’s Special:
To really get the “rye peppery spice” experience in bourbon, you need to go with the really high-rye stuff — so, a bourbon that has over 20 percent rye in the mash bill. And that’s where this bottle comes in. It’s very easy to find, cheap, and actually tastes pretty damn good for the price, especially if you’re mixing up cocktails.
Four Roses (Kirin Brewing) is renowned for utilizing ten whiskeys with five different yeasts and two mash bills (one high-rye and one low-rye). This expression is a blend of six bourbons that use both mash bills with three different yeast strains: Delicate fruit, slight spice, and herbal notes.
Those whiskeys spend a minimum of six years in the barrel for blending with no chill-filtration and only a touch of water added to bring the proof down.
Tasting Notes:
The fruit and spice are very prominent on the nose, leaning towards fresh raspberry next to sharp cloves and a bit of musty oak. The palate expands on the fruits, adding in apricot, peach, and more red berries while the spice mellows to more cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla, with a very slight hint of fresh mint coming in late. The end builds on the mint, berries, and woody cinnamon bark while warming nicely towards a subtle and slow finish.
Why It’s Special:
You really get a sense of the essence the yeast brings to the mix with this whiskey via those fruity notes. The stone fruit and berries are easily recognizable, alongside that spice and mint. You still know you’re drinking bourbon with all the vanilla and oak present, but there’s certainly something a bit brighter at play thanks to those varying yeasts.
Jim Beam, like all whiskey, is about finding the perfect barrels to create a taste for an expression. Their Black expression is a great example of how multiple barrels of varying ages can come together to create a better whole. This used to be the 8-year Beam expression but is now a blend of Beam bourbon aged up to (and maybe longer) than eight years.
The whiskeys are then married, proofed with that soft Kentucky limestone water, and bottled.
Tasting Notes:
The bourbon opens with classic hits of caramel corn, vanilla, oak, and sweet apples. The taste delivers on those promises while refining each. The vanilla is almost dried or husk-like. The caramel corn is buttery yet slightly salted. The sweet apples have a tartness to them. The oak is slightly toasty and has a touch of sweet smoke following it. The end is medium-length but sticks with you.
Why It’s Special:
This is a damn fine bottle of bourbon that’s just as good (and often better) than the whiskey in $40 bottles. If anyone ever uses “blending” as a bad word in whiskey, give them this bottle to show that the process can be refined rather than muddled.
ELEMENT 6: Small Batching — Elijah Craig Barrel Proof
Elijah Craig Barrel Proof (Heaven Hill) is small-batched in production and released in small batches as well (usually three drops) throughout the year. The small-batch blending approach is all about finding the best barrels that can go directly into a bottle after marrying the barrels with no proofing or filtration needed.
Tasting Notes:
The old musty barrels come through first, with a nice dose of spicy rye, worn leather, and toffees covered in dark chocolate. There’s a bit of a marzipan edge that counterpoints the boldness of the funky and toasty oak as the vanilla pops in next to a touch of Red Hots. The end irons all the rough edges into velvet as the almonds, spice, and oak fade out slowly, leaving you with a warming embrace.
Why It’s Special:
This is the power of small-batching excellent barrels of bourbon into a final product. It’s truly refined and goddamn delicious. The commitment to craft and detail is what makes this dram worth the high(ish) price tag.
ELEMENT 7: Single Barreling — Blanton’s Single Barrel
Blanton’s is Buffalo Trace’s (Sazerac Company) signature single barrel expression that also happens to be the first commercially available single barrel bourbon. The juice is aged in a specific warehouse at BT’s massive campus. The barrels are hand-selected for their exactness and taste. They’re then proofed with a little soft Kentucky water and bottled.
Tasting Notes:
Vanilla and Christmas spices subtly greet you on the nose. The vanilla amps up on the palate, as notes of caramel kettle corn with a slight hint of salt lead back towards that spice and an almost honeyed sweetness. The Christmas spices ramp back up near the finish, leaving you with a sense of nutmeg, creamy vanilla, a hint of oak, and a slight return of the caramel corn.
Why It’s Special:
There’s a subtlety to this single barrel expression that highlights the classic notes of bourbon. Yes, it’s a little spendy. But this is a very easy-to-drink dram that is unmistakably “bourbon whiskey” in every part of the tasting experience.
It’s the opposite of muddled — one bottle from one barrel with one specific POV in play.
This high-end expression from Woodford (Brown-Forman) utilizes two-barrel maturations to help it shine. The juice is aged in one barrel that’s standard charred new American oak. The second barrel is a toasted oak barrel (air-dried) that’s then lightly charred before the whiskey goes in.
The results are then married and cut ever-so-slightly with water before bottling.
Tasting Notes:
The toasted oak is present but not overwhelming, as hints of sweet, red fruit, marzipan, soft cedar, and a touch of honey draw you in. There’s a nice sense of vanilla and more oak that ranges from bitterly charred to lightly toasted as caramel apples dance with Christmas cake spices and dried fruits. The vanilla gets slightly creamy as the nutty nature of the sip attaches to the oakiness with notes of spice, more cedar, and bitter dark chocolate shining through on the long finish.
Why It’s Special:
You really get a sense of how standard charred oak and toasted oak can help bring about a woodiness on multiple levels with this dram. Cedar, bitter charred oak, and sun-kissed toasted oak all make their presence known, adding to the depth of this affordable sipper.
ELEMENT 9: Finishing Oak — Woodinville Port Cask Finished
Specialty finishing casks are starting to dominate the whiskey conversation. From beer finishing to red wine finishing to cognac finishing, there’s a lot to work with. Still, port cask finishings seem to be at the forefront when it comes to taste and awards.
Case in point, Seattle’s Woodinville Bourbon‘s stellar Port Cask Finished expression.
Tasting Notes:
There’ a classic bourbon vanilla note that leads towards candied and dried fruits next to a nutty underbelly. The taste goes full Christmas cake with plenty of holiday spices, more of those candied and dried fruits, fatty nuts, and a plummy nature (that’s the port!) with a bit of a chew.
All that spice, nut, fruit, and vanilla fade slowly away with a nice svelte feel (also thanks to the finishing cask).
Why It’s Special:
There’s something about bourbon finished in port casks that just works. It’s bold, new, yet familiar. You get some lovely red fruit notes and a certain silky texture that’s tough to beat. This expression, in particular, is absolutely delicious.
ELEMENT 10: Long Aging (10 years or more) — Michter’s 10-Year Bourbon
This yearly limited release from Michter’s is one hell of a bourbon. The juice spends ten long years resting in white oak before it’s bottled from single barrels with a drop of water added to bring it down to proof.
Tasting Notes:
This is oaky but not overly so, as a fresh maple syrup sweetness brings about a welcoming counterpoint. The vanilla is dialed back. The toffee is buttery and rich. The oak has a charred bitter edge that’s almost a dark chocolate (especially when water is added) with a worn leather and spicy/fruity tobacco flourish.
It’s spicy warm but not overpowering (thanks to a decade in the barrel). In the end, it leaves your mouth buzzing as the oak, maple, toffee, and leathery notes very slowly fade away.
Why It’s Special:
This is a great entry-point to aged bourbons as the maple, leather, tobacco, and oakiness really starts to ramp up as the years click past in bourbon. Also, this is just classic, old bourbon in a bottle that’s still very accessible (you can actually still find this on shelves and not marked up beyond its MSRP).
Alex Trebek’s final episode as the host of Jeopardy! airs tonight, but the game show will continue with “a series of interim guest hosts,” beginning with Ken Jennings and Katie Couric. It’s unknown who will take over after them (possibly LeVar Burton?), but don’t expect an announcement about a permanent Jeopardy! host until the spring.
“The search is going very well, there are a lot of people very interested in hosting Jeopardy!, which is gratifying, and also appropriately reverent of the shoes they will be stepping into,” executive producer Mike Richards told Deadline. “We have had some great conversations with people… Ken [Jennings] stepped in and did a great job for us as a guest host. We will have a series of guest hosts throughout the spring.”
Richards would not discuss names, with Katie Couric believed to be on the list, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. A permanent new host won’t be named before spring, Richards said. “We are going to take our time and talk to a lot of people, have some people guest host and see what our fans think as well,” he said.
Trebek’s final episode tonight will be followed by a tribute celebrating his legacy.
In September of 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat down — and, after receiving advice from former Green Beret Nate Boyer, took a knee — during the national anthem in protest of police shootings which cost Black men their lives that happened earlier that summer.
He was vilified for it, celebrated for it, cast out of the NFL, and catapulted to a different kind of fame, one built on the sacrifice of the sport he loved and his dogged commitment to the activism he knew would make a difference. It’s a moment that’s been etched into the tomes of sports’ rich, complicated history, one credited for sparking a movement, one that enjoyed all the benefits and challenges of its unforgiving spotlight.
But when Georgia made its own kind of history earlier this week, electing Reverend Raphael Warnock to the U.S. Senate, it wasn’t Kaepernick I was thinking of. It was Seimone Augustus … well, Augustus and the legions of players in the WNBA who, in many ways, have paved a path towards meaningful protest and change for the greater world of sports.
You see, in July of 2016, Augustus. along with fellow Minnesota Lynx team captains Rebekkah Brunson, Maya Moore, and Lindsay Whalen, got together to game plan how they wanted to address the shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. They decided to wear t-shirts, ones that read “Change Starts With Us” on the front and “Black Lives Matter” along with Castile and Sterling’s names on the back. Teams like the New York Liberty, Phoenix Mercury, and Indiana Fever followed suit, even as police officers in charge of security for the upcoming Lynx home game walked off the job and the league issued fines for the players which were later rescinded. The protest didn’t capture the national spotlight like Kaepernick’s did, or like fellow basketball star LeBron James would.
What it did do, however, was lay the framework for what happened in Georgia’s tightly-contested run-off this week, a race that would prove to be the lynchpin for systemic change, a battle that would make all of us rethink the relationship between sports and politics.
And hopefully, give the women of the WNBA, particularly the Black women, their rightful due.
Late last summer, Warnock was comfortably trailing in the state’s “jungle primary” to challenge Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler — who had been appointed to the post by Georgia governor Brian Kemp — for her seat in the Senate. He was up against more well-known candidates, like Matt Lieberman, the son of the former vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, but he had the backing of key party veterans and a strong platform to run on, along with the pedigree of being the minister of the church once helmed by Martin Luther King, Jr. Still, he was trying to become not only the first Black senator to arise from the Deep South state, but the first Democratic senator to serve the red-leaning constituents of Georgia in 20 years.
Around that same time, the women of the WNBA were at a crossroads. League MVP Moore took a sabbatical from the sport to pursue justice reform — she’d later help secure the release of a wrongfully convicted Black man named Jonathan Irons. Others were worried about plans to play in the league’s bubble down in Florida. Female basketball players make a staggeringly low amount of money for the hard work they put out on the court, and during a year that saw a pandemic plague the country, protests against police brutality erupt in major cities, more needless killings, and questions of safety protocols for professional leagues trying to get back to playing their respective games, choosing whether or not to continue playing the sport they loved took on new weight.
For the athletes that did return, the question became, “How do we honor this league’s history of thoughtful activism?”
The league, as a whole, decided to forego playing games after Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by police. They also dedicated their season to Breanna Taylor, an innocent Black woman gunned down in her bed by Louisville police in March, sporting BLM shirts, warm-up gear that read “Say Her Name,” and jerseys with Taylor’s name stitched on the back.
Loeffler, a co-owner of the Atlanta Dream, wrote a letter to commissioner Cathy Engelbert complaining about the league’s decision to support the Black Lives Matter movement and asking that Taylor’s name be removed from the jerseys. Instead, the Dream, along with help from Seattle Storm legend and player’s union vice president Sue Bird, decided to be one of several teams to protest Loeffler’s objection by wearing new shirts, ones that campaigned for her opponent: “Vote Warnock.”
This wasn’t the work of just one or two high-profile players. It certainly wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision, an excuse to express their outrage and frustration through fashion. Instead, this was a carefully constructed silent attack, one that built on the hard work the league had been putting in for years.
Women in sports have always had an uphill battle, but the rocky road of the WNBA feels, in many ways, set apart from that. Not only is the league sponsored by the NBA — which means at least some of its autonomy must play by the rules that govern male athletes — it also receives paltry funding, practically non-existent air-time, and draws smaller crowds because of it. Without wading too far into the larger issue of sexism when it comes to female athletes, the WNBA just hasn’t been able to market itself to the right demo, or, perhaps more accurately, it hasn’t had the resources to do it right.
And so, while players like those on the Dream, or Augustus, or even Bird, arguably the biggest name in the sport right now, don’t lose million-dollar sponsorships and sneaker deals with Nike because of their social justice activism, they’re threatened with losing arguably more: their livelihood. Teams are few, money is tight, some don’t make enough to make playing even worth it — a stark contrast to the men’s side — so to jeopardize that, no matter how morally righteous the cause, is a tough decision to make.
Yet these women have been making it for a long time — before kneeling during anthems became a kind of symbolic wokeness, before BLM became a widely-used rallying cry. They were Black, Brown, and Queer in a sport that didn’t seem to value any of those things for a long time. That grit and drive and fearlessness in the face of prejudice and adversity shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Nor should their impact in this latest political face-off.
Warnock was polling low numbers, as low as nine percent, before the Dream decided to promote his campaign. In a meeting facilitated by voting rights activist Stacey Abrams and Bird, the team sat down with Warnock to discuss his values, his political motivations, and his stance on the issues that mattered to them. They didn’t throw their weight behind him because of his skin color, religious upbringing, or gender. They took the time, did the work, and decided to voice their constitutional freedom of speech by sporting their candidate on their pre-game tees.
And they weren’t alone.
Other teams — Chicago, Seattle, Phoenix, and more — backed the Dream. Those players didn’t have a stake in the Dream’s specific fight. They didn’t live in Georgia, their responsibilities and roots are in other communities. The politics there might not have affected them in any significant way, but they showed solidarity when it mattered, a solidarity that propelled the team’s message to new heights. Not only did Warnock gain significant numbers in the polls and a bigger following on social media, the Dream’s endorsement meant he enjoyed more funding, a crucial element in his underdog campaign.
This isn’t the first time female athletes, particularly Black women, have been the catalyst for change — not just in sports, but in our democracy as a whole — and while leaders like Abrams deserve effusive praise for their efforts to encourage higher voter turnout, it’s crucial we also remember women like the players of the WNBA. Athletes who risked their job security, their reputations, and more to openly defy the person who owns one of the league’s teams because they found it exponentially more important to stay true to their moral compass. They didn’t do it for clout or recognition, to prove a point or to satisfy their ego. They did it simply because they knew they must. They knew that having a platform, regardless of its size, means you have a responsibility to speak up and show up for the things that matter.
So when we celebrate Warnock’s victory, when we marvel at the history made in Georgia, when we bow down at the feet of Abrams and other political galvanizers, when we hype up players like James and the better-paid athletes who can comfortably stand to lose for their social justice values, let’s also remember the women of the WNBA who got us here and taught us the power of the collective when it comes to sports and activism. At the very least, we’ll have a constant reminder that the cause these women got behind was fruitful in United States Senator Rev. Raphael Warnock.
Tyla Yaweh’s “All The Smoke” video featuring Gunna and Wiz Khalifa is a wild, Fast-And-Furious-inspired ride that finds the three rappers trading bars at a test course and counting up their score after a well-executed heist. The clip opens with the masked rappers fleeing a bank vault in an 18-wheeler before switching scenes to the driving course, where finely-tuned racing machines burn rubber and run rings around the rappers while they perform their verses.
Yaweh, who’s in the process of rolling out his upcoming album, Rager Boy, previously worked with Wiz Khalifa in 2020 on the “High Right Now” remix from his debut mixtape Heart Full Of Rage. He kicked off the rollout for Rager Boy late last year with “Tommy Lee” featuring his mentor Post Malone, with whom he also performed at the 2020 Billboard Music Awards. Having Malone as his benefactor has helped him to increase his profile, leading to collaborations with DaBaby and Dame D.O.L.L.A. on his single “Stuntin’ On You” and its remix, respectively.
Meanwhile, Gunna and Wiz Khalifa enjoyed successful 2020s as well, with Gunna featuring on the breakout Internet Money single “Lemonade” after releasing his Wunna album and Wiz starting up a delivery-only restaurant and maintaining a steady stream of mixtapes throughout the year, including the Big Pimpin tape released on his birthday.
Watch the “All The Smoke” video above.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
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