Hudson Mohawke, the Scottish producer, DJ, and one-half of the duo Tnght, has offered fans a new project. With no warning, Mohawke shared the EP Heart Of The Night, which reimagines several laid-back R&B hits as revved-up electronic remixes.
Mohawke’s four-track Heart Of The Night breathes new life into tracks like Beyonce’s’ 2003 hit “Baby Boy” with Sean Paul and Christina Milian’s 2004 number “Dip It Low.” Mohawke hangs onto the integrity of each song but turns them up a few notches, increasing the tempo while adding in several layers of explosive instrumentals.
Announcing the surprise release on social media, Mohawke described the effort as “classic rnb bootlegs” he’s made over the years. The producer also mentioned the EP arrives alongside an exclusive t-shirt designed by artist Chris Simpson which reads, “I wish that hudson mohawke was dead so that he could be my wife.”
New newwww.
Little ep of classic rnb bootlegs I’ve made over the years is out todayyy for free giveaway + a new tee w my favourite boy @getbentsaggy
Ahead of releasing Heart Of The Night, Mohawke’s project Tnght with producer Lunice returned after a six-year hiatus. The collaborative duo released their second EP, titled II, which boasted eight tracks propelled by forceful beats, warped vocal samples, and room-filling bass.
Listen to Mohawke’s “Baby Boy” above.
Heart Of The Night is out now via Warp. Get it here.
After a two-month delay, the 2020 WNBA season tips off Saturday morning with an ESPN double-header featuring four of the most exciting teams in the league. Here to hail the return of the women’s game is an excellent ad spot titled “Make Way” that proclaims “It’s time to not just know the WNBA, but the women behind it.”
The spot features the Chicago Sky’s Diamond DeShields, the Las Vegas Aces’ A’ja Wilson, the Los Angeles Sparks’ Nneka Ogwumike, the Minnesota Lynx’s Sylvia Fowles, the Seattle Storm’s Sue Bird, and is voiced by Los Angeles’ Seimone Augustus.
The league signed a new collective bargaining agreement in January, and WNBA players came together to dedicate the 2020 season to the Black Lives Matter movement and formed a Social Justice Council that will design and carry out initiatives to beat back against racism in America over the course of the season and beyond.
The 2020 season begins tomorrow at noon when Diana Taurasi and the Phoenix Mercury take on Ogwumike, Candace Parker, and the Los Angeles Sparks on ESPN. That game is followed by the WNBA debut of Sabrina Ionescu, the No. 1 pick in the 2020 WNBA Draft, as her New York Liberty take on Sue Bird, Breanna Stewart, and the championship favorite Seattle Storm.
Tequila is summer in a bottle. This couldn’t be more obvious than July 24th — when National Tequila Day lands on our (very empty) calendars. This Blue Weber-agave spirit is fresh, light, and full of vegetal sweetness. It’s the base for some of the best summer cocktails, including the Uproxx-beloved paloma and the happy hour staple the margarita.
While we’re all about sipping cocktails while we sit on a patio or porch, preferably overlooking a large body of water, we also enjoy tequila neat or on the rocks. Which means that we’re often looking for the good stuff. No dyes or additives, please.
Just like with anything and everything on God’s green earth, there are overly hyped, properly hyped, and correctly hyped bottles of tequila out there. But with National Tequila Day upon us, we’re not here to trash brands or sing the praises of brands that don’t need any more press. We’re talking about the bottles that don’t get the respect they deserve — so we asked some of our favorite bartenders to tell us their picks for the most underrated bottles on the market.
Don Julio Reposado
Nestor Marchand, director of food and beverage at Plunge Beach Resort in Lauderdale, Florida
Don Julio Reposado. It’s aged for 8 months in American white oak barrels. The result is a very mellow tequila with hints of cinnamon and sweet agave. Excellent tasting tequila.
Grand Vida Anejo
Shawn Brown, General manager of Wine World in Miramar Beach, Florida
This is tricky. Grand Vida Anejo. The packaging is not the best, but the tequila is very smooth and significantly less expensive and tastes better than Patron.
Don Abraham Reposado
Mohammed Rahman, bar director, Kata Robata in Houston
When thinking of top-shelf tequila, brands such as Don Julio, Patron, and Clase Azul are quick to appear into the forefront. A brand I believe deserves to be in that line up is Don Abraham. With offerings from blanco to extra anejo, this brand has been around for decades. My personal favorite being their reposado.
This expression is a great bang for your buck and never fails to satisfy, exhibiting traits any tequila enthusiast would immediately dub to be worthy of their adoration.
Don Julio Blanco
Reniel Garcia, bar director of Havana 1957 in Miami
Don Julio Blanco has a very nice pungent roasted agave aroma. The taste contained an obvious herbal character combined with some spice/peppery notes. The agave does emerge towards the end to round things out.
One of the better blancos I’ve tried. Perfect for margaritas and maybe neat if it tickles your fancy.
Casa Dragones Joven
Seamus Gleason, bartender at Hotel Jackson in Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Casa Dragones Joven. It’s silky smooth with a full body that doesn’t overwhelm the palate. A great sipping tequila for summer (or pretty much any other time of year).
One of my favorite brands of tequila by far is Jose Cuervo. It might not seem underrated in the classic sense, but it definitely is since it sometimes doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Whether it’s in a cocktail, on the rocks, or in a shot with lime and salt, it gets the job done.
Great flavor and very smooth.
Olmeca Altos Plata
Kurt Bellon, general manager and beverage director at Chao Baan in St. Louis
Olmeca Altos Plata is 100% agave that is reasonably priced so it can and should be found on the speed rails of bars across the country. With that said, for a well tequila, it is smooth with a pleasant nose and bucks the usual danger of ordering a round of tequila shots for the crew.
Cimarron Blanco
Tim Wiggins, co-owner and beverage director of Retreat Gastropub in St. Louis
Cimarron. Their blanco and reposado are both super tasty. I love the grassy hay-like flavor of Cimarron. It is difficult to balance freshness, dryness, and earthiness in tequila and I think Cimarron strikes that balance really well.
I really like Siembre and I wish more people knew about their small-batch, artisanal tequilas. Made from the highest-quality Blue Weber agave, you can’t go wrong with a bottle of Siembre Azul.
Writer’s Pick:
Casa Noble Anejo
The hierarchy of premium tequila brands, Casa Noble deserves a spot alongside Patron, Casamigos, Herradura, and Don Julio. Its anejo is made from 100 percent Blue Weber agave and is exceptionally smooth and full of vanilla, honey, and caramel flavors from aging in French oak barrels for two years.
Flo Milli has taken Twitter by storm with standout hits like “Beef FloMix” and “In The Party,” and today, she follows up with another big swing for hip-hop’s hit-making fences. The 20-year-old breakout star released her debut EP, Ho, Why Is You Here? this week and to celebrate, she released the video to favorite the new favorite “Weak.”
The video sees Flo playing the matriarch to a loyal legion of money-making men in tank tops and jeans, who attend to her as she flexes and preens. Her love for currency is displayed right down to her wardrobe; while she makes it rain dollar bills, money print adorns her swimsuit and her impressive durag. Lyrically, she lists then dismisses he men in her life who have let her down romantically, crowing, “These n****s weak / They’ve been textin’ me all week.”
Among the names that Flo Milli shoos away are Dennis, who doesn’t like to listen, Maleek, who is boring, and Eric, who already has a girlfriend. None of that matters to the Mobile, Alabama-born rapper, who boasts that, “I’ve been in my bag, don’t got time to be in my feelings.” Independent go-getters like Cardi B, City Girls, and Megan Thee Stallion have a worthwhile successor in Flo Milli — judging from the response to her tape, she’s going to join them in the upper echelons of rap stardom soon.
Brittney Griner still has it sitting in a case in her old bedroom back home in Texas. Nneka Ogwumike won it and showed her sister what was possible if she kept working. It was given to Sue Bird at a time when the concept of high-level pro basketball was just coming into picture. The Gatorade Player of the Year award has a long history of prolific winners.
The latest is Paige Bueckers, without a doubt the best high school female hooper in the country and a gold medalist at the age of 18. She’s on her way to the University of Connecticut this fall, but opened up her trophy case one more time this week when Gatorade named her its Athlete of the Year, chosen from a group of finalists across all sports as the high school athlete who demonstrated excellence on the court, in the classroom, and in the community. The honor was shared by Arik Gilbert, a five-star tight end recruit who will play his college ball at LSU.
Bueckers led Hopkins High School in Minnesota to the state championship game her first two years before ultimately pulling through with a title as a junior. Hopkins was headed toward a repeat this spring before the championship game was canceled due to the pandemic. Along the way, Bueckers started her own non-profit basketball clinic called Buckets With Bueckers that doubled as a training camp and fundraiser. And of course, any Athlete of the Year has to have at least a 3.8 grade-point average.
Though it was announced virtually and comes after a senior season that ended abruptly, Bueckers is proud to be honored.
“It means everything to me,” Bueckers told Uproxx over the phone. “This is the most prestigious award you can win in all of high school, especially being the female Athlete of the Year among all the sports. It’s really big for me because it’s not just the player I am, it’s also the person I am, and I take huge pride in that, just being a great person, being somebody that kids can look up to, being a great (member) of the community, and using my platform to make a positive impact in the world.”
Gatorade was determined to give Bueckers her moment, and a video released Thursday features faces of past winners congratulating the latest Athlete of the Year. The history of Gatorade’s top prize is a who’s who of women’s basketball: Maya Moore, Breanna Stewart, Skylar Diggins-Smith. It’s company Buecker is inspired by.
“It kind of shows that if I keep working hard and if I can keep staying on the right path, I can fill their shoes one day and hopefully play professionally and do the things that they’re doing,” she says. “To be in the likes of those athletes at such a young age, seeing what they did with it, it inspires me and helps me understand that I need to keep pushing so I can get to their level.”
Particularly in a year of progress and change for women’s basketball, the chance to welcome Bueckers into the ranks of great young athletes is important. Sabrina Ionescu’s record-breaking senior season at Oregon gave way to a new collective bargaining agreement in the WNBA, which led to the league and its players agreeing on a plan to save the 2020 season.
In interviews with Uproxx, Ogwumike, Griner, and Bird expressed the same sentiment: That the road was being paved for young players like Bueckers to surpass those that came before her in every way.
“We want it to be better (for) those who come after us,” Ogwumike said. “Being able to instill change that outlasts you, it’s something to be very proud of. I hope that what we’re doing now creates a better future for players like (Bueckers).”
As the president of the executive committee of the WNBA players’ association, Ogwumike was the face of negotiations on the CBA and the clean site in Florida, where the league will play its 24rd season. It’s where rookies like Ionescu will make their debuts, but even that is a far cry from where the league was when Bird was, in the late 1990s, moving from high school to UConn just as Bueckers is now.
Back then, there was nothing more than a few TV appearances over the course of the year and the vague sense that there was some money to be made playing professionally in Europe.
“I really had nothing to see, I had nothing to visualize, I had nothing to strive for,” Bird said. “That’s what’s so great about young players now. The WNBA is established, it’s here, the coverage is just continuing to get better, we just did this amazing CBA, and here we are in a Bubble about to have a season. It’s all going to be televised and you’ve got all these young basketball eyeballs watching it.”
While Bueckers is getting settled in Mansfield and Zooming with new Husky teammates, it’s a safe bet she’ll be among the young people watching the league. But Griner believes Bueckers is already in an elite class of human beings who just so happen to play basketball.
“(She’s) coming out of high school and is already hitting all of the criteria to be an elite, prestigious athlete,” Griner said. “She’s ahead of the curve, and a lot of us can learn from her.”
Griner is happy to bet on Bueckers to continue growing the game, but she hopes there’s less to fight for by the time Bueckers is on WNBA radars in a few years. The new CBA increased maximum salaries and the rookie scale, and the league hopes the coverage and business keep building, too. Players like Moore and Bird are on the national radar in a way they never were before.
Many already know Bueckers’ name, too, but Ogwumike hopes the Gatorade award can be the first stepping stone toward people seeing Bueckers as someone on the rise in the world of sports, regardless of her gender.
“It’s an award that shows no discrimination, and I feel as though that’s what we need more of,” Ogwumike said. “There’s a history of so many WNBA players receiving this, and there’s a reason. It’s because we go on and we do great things, and having an organization like Gatorade that continues to support women in sports, it’s exactly what the world needs right now.”
It’s hard to say now what will come of the WNBA season, which tips off this weekend, or Buecker’s UConn career. But there is undoubtedly momentum around women’s sports, with many fighting toward equitable coverage and treatment of female athletes. It won’t always be as uncomfortable or challenging as it was for Bueckers’ predecessors.
Said Griner, “I hope the platform that she’s walking into if she gets all the way there, to the pros, is (past) the injustice of equal pay, the injustice of just being a woman in sports, I hope she doesn’t have to fight that fight that hard.”
“What I hope for her and her generation,” Bird said, “she can do even bigger and better things than what we’re doing right now.”
While Bueckers prepares for the challenge of the bright lights of NCAA hoops and thinks about what comes next in the community work that earned her the Athlete of the Year award, the Gatorade family as well as the women’s basketball community is looking out for players just like her. It is, for better or worse, the work of female athletes not only to play the game but build it up.
In Bueckers, the game has another great leader.
“She is changing the way, she’s the new way,” Griner said. “Where we lack, she’s going to pick up the slack and she’s going to push through for us.”
As of this writing, The New Mutants is still set for an August 28th release date in theaters, which becomes increasingly unlikely by the day. Just this week alone, Mulan and Tenet were pulled from August, and both films currently sit in limbo as Disney and Warner Bros. take a “wait and see” approach while the pandemic continues to spike in America.
But even more blockbusters started abandoning, uncertainty around the The New Mutants making it into theaters was already mounting, which revived speculation that the long-delayed mutant movie would be released on Disney+ or video on-demand. Fans were certain that a streaming announcement would be made during The New Mutants panel at Comic-Con, but nothing materialized. The film stood firm on its August release date.
However, in a new interview with Comic Book, director Josh Boone doesn’t shy away from questions about The New Mutants releasing on streaming, and in fact, he’s all for it as long as fans finally get a chance to see the film after all of these years.
“Well, I mean, I don’t really get scared about stuff like that. I just want as many people to see it as possible. And for everybody who wants to see it to be able to see it,” Boone explained. “So obviously if we can do it theaters, that’s always my first choice. But like Disney came to me and said they were gonna stream it I’d be like awesome. Then everybody can watch it. It’d be great.”
Of course, just releasing The New Mutants on streaming is easier said than done. As we reported back in April, the streaming rights are most likely locked down by HBO, which had a deal with 20th Century Fox that doesn’t expire until 2022. That arrangement would prevent Disney from releasing The New Mutants on Disney+ or Hulu unless it somehow works out a deal with HBO, which is certainly possible. That said, Disney does have the option of releasing The New Mutants on VOD where it would be available for purchase or rental. But once that happens, it will start the countdown for the movie to hit HBO once the streaming window begins.
In short, it’s a messy situation with no easy answers like everything in these pandemic days.
Moe Harkless, like most of us, has felt like he’s just been along for the ride over the past few months. His season, which started in L.A. and ended in New York, came to an unexpected end in March with the sudden postponement of the season due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the decision by the league that the Knicks would be among the eight teams left out of the restart.
As such, Harkless has spent the past four months back at his home in Los Angeles trying to fill the time and battling the wide range of emotions that stem from not just being in isolation, but watching what has been unfolding around the country.
“During this time of quarantine a lot of other stuff is going on socially here and around the world, and that kinda had a big impact on how I’ve been feeling too,” Harkless told Dime. “So I guess that’s the best way to describe it is it’s a ride. It’s been a rollercoaster of emotions. You kinda go through stages of not really knowing what to do or how to react or handle these things, but you just gotta keep going and figuring it out as you go.”
That ride has led Harkless to do more introspection and figure out ways to best use his platform in this moment. It’s a question many athletes have been asking of themselves recently, as it’s impossible to ignore the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the nation in what one can’t help but hope is a tipping point in the battle against racial inequality and systemic oppression in the United States. It’s a question that led to what Harkless calls a “really good” conversation within the NBA Players Association, as the organization held calls to talk through how best to proceed with the restart while still keeping momentum behind the movement.
Harkless sees the league’s restart as a positive for how players can have an impact, as players use the platform of national TV broadcasts and postgame press conferences to continue calling attention to the need to continue fighting for social justice and ending systemic racism and police brutality. While he’s not in Orlando, he’s in group chats with players from around the league, and a frequent topic is what they can do and how they can have an impact in their communities.
Ultimately, Harkless decided a place to start was turning his website into a hub of resources for people looking for ways to help the Black community. His team redesigned the site to simply be a home page with redirect links to online directories for Black-owned businesses, Black-owned restaurants in L.A. and New York that do takeout, Black mental health resources, how to register to vote, petitions to sign, and causes that welcome donations, and more.
“I guess I was talking it over with my team and we were trying to figure out the best way to kind of do things, and one easy — and we were able to get it done pretty quick — was just to create a hub for all different types of resources,” Harkless said. “With their help, we were able to find different resources and we decided to create somewhere that can point you in the right direction. We just turned my website into, like, anyone that goes to my website is just going to see all these different things they can check out. Like, [Black-owned] businesses and restaurants, anything you can look for I tried to find as many resources as possible and put them all in one place. That was pretty much the intention behind it, cause it was something that I can do to help people and being that I have a platform I can share it with as many people as possible.”
It’s the latest step for Harkless in embracing his voice and platform. In this moment, he says he’s learned how important it is for him and others to ensure that people know they are behind them and support them, and he wants to make sure he does what he can to not just use his voice, but amplify others that are driving the movement. A constant question posed on social media is “What can I do?” as not everyone is able to protest, and Harkless’ website offers a number of answers to that question, bringing links to a number of resources into one place.
For someone who is quiet by nature, Harkless has challenged himself in recent years to be more vocal about his passions an interests, and sharing more about himself with fans. It’s part of recognizing the platform he has and the opportunities that presents off the court — like hosting Wine Wednesday for Uninterrupted during quarantine — and in return he’s found it to be a big part of his personal growth as well.
“I think for me personally, the first step was being OK stepping out of my comfort zone and sharing things that I’m interested in with everyone,” Harkless said. “I kind of pushed a little bit the past couple years to do that more because of the things I was interested in, and it’s been helpful. Being more open about it has brought more resources and more avenues of learning for things that I’m interested about, too. It’s definitely been a step out of my comfort zone, but I’ve been enjoying the process of sharing more about me with people and being able to grow as well.”
Art and wine are at the top of the list of Harkless’ interests off the court, which he sees linked by how everyone’s interpretation of both is wholly unique. His own love of art began as a kid in art class, but was cemented when he began taking cartooning classes in high school, which is why his personal collection is filled with “a lot of cartoony, Pop Art stuff,” like the KAWS figures in the above picture. As he’s grown older, he’s gained an appreciation for art of all kinds, namely modern art, noting that he’s been lucky to be in three great art towns in his last three NBA stops with Portland, L.A. and New York.
When he moved to New York, he chose a spot in Chelsea, a neighborhood filled with galleries, to immerse himself in art culture. Even though that time was cut short due to the sudden ending to the season, it only further fueled his passion for art and connected him further to that world. Art is the ultimate form of expression and is capable of capturing moments in time, and Harkless is quick to highlight a number of artists whose works he feels are especially pertinent to the movement happening in the United States.
“You look at artists like Cleon Peterson, his art is really socially relevant to what’s going on now,” Harkless says. “Nina Chanel Abney is another one, she’s always been that way, and especially now. If you look at her older works, they’re pretty much all about, like, black and white and it’s pretty crazy now. I know Maya Hayuk was doing something a couple weeks ago where she was making signs for protestors in New York and giving them out for free, and that was pretty cool. Cause these are like, really well known artists, and they’re doing stuff like this and giving back to the community. I think the people who pay attention really care about that.”
The same goes for athletes, as those communities who feel represented by an athlete care about what they say and do off the court. Athletes can use their platform to tell the stories of those communities to people that would otherwise remain oblivious to them, and draw attention to causes that are far too often ignored. It’s why that journey to finding ones voice is so important for Harkless, because it not only allows him to share things about himself with the world, but to amplify others in the process.
For all I know, action icon Charlize Theron is an active user on Tumblr, the internet’s one-stop shop for GIFs and slash-fiction, and has been for years. Someone’s gotta keep up the All Things Charlize Theron page, y’know? But if she was unaware of the website before this week, she got a fitting introduction by way of being fan-casted in a movie that’s “90% middle aged women doing hand to hand combat and 10% queer romance.”
Tumblr is currently being flooded with GIFs from Netflix’s mega-hit movie The Old Guard, because obviously, including one of Theron’s character Andromache of Scythia drinking booze on an airplane. A literal thirst trap. The GIFs have been re-blogged tens of thousands of times, often with a message from user Knit Me a Pony. It reads:
I don’t know what kind of f*cking genius suggested to Charlize Theron that she become more and more of an action star as she ages, or if she just reached a f*ck it point of having enough star juice to realize her dreams in Hollywood, but whatever reason there is that I keep seeing her looking buff as sh*t and jaded as hell in monochrome tank tops is enough to give me hope that we are not in The Darkest Timeline. The Old Guard, Atomic blonde, Mad Max, this woman is 45 years old, wearing leather and doing her own stunts. Please give me another decade+ of her slowly getting more jacked until she, Lucy Lawless, Gina Carrera, and Linda Hamilton can give us some kind of super wild John Wick type of franchise that is 90% middle aged women doing hand to hand combat and 10% queer Romance.
I believe “Gina Carrera” is supposed to be Gina Carano, last seen chilling with Baby Yoda on The Mandalorian. But whatever the case, Theron is on board.
WOW this did make my day thank you. “90% middle aged women doing hand to hand combat and 10% queer romance” killed me Be damn sure I’ll keep it up 🙂 https://t.co/yCO3fWw8DH
If Netflix can fork over $200 million for a movie with a boring title like The Gray Man, they should spend at least $250 million on “John Wick but Theron/Lawless/Carano/Hamilton.”
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 — It’s about to get pretty ugly out there
Well, guess what: We’re almost out of shows. I did not expect to type that sentence at all when this year started. I expected to have the opposite problem, a waterfall of televised content tumbling down onto me in a neverending rush, battering me about the head and face as I gasped for air, or perhaps some other slightly less dramatic but still accurate analogy. I kind of can’t believe we’re here. But we are. It’s going to get weird.
We’ve seen it with movies already. This has been a summer without a box office, not because the movies aren’t finished, but because studios want to hold them until people can pack into the theaters to see them. It’s a little infuriating to know that the ninth Fast & Furious movie, with its magnet plane and possible haunt to the cosmos, is done and sitting in a damn vault somewhere and I can’t have it until next year. I know it’s probably not in a vault. I know it’s just a file on a computer. But if I pretend it’s in a vault, I can pretend we’re going to steal it like they stole the vault at the end of Fast Five, complete with millions of dollars in property damage to downtown Rio de Janeiro. I need this. Do not take it from me.
Television has been scooting along in a more normal fashion, though, largely because things were filmed and banked and could be distributed through the normal channels to the content-starved homebound populace. That reservoir is quickly drying up. A look ahead at the coming premieres is… it’s kind of dicey. HBO has Lovecraft Country, Amazon has season two of The Boys, and Netflix claims to have a mountain of produced shows hidden away, which a) includes a new cartoon in which an animated Jake Johnson cusses at a youth basketball team, which has all of my support; and b) makes me picture a scenario where they’re the only outlet with new shows in a few months, and they start holding us hostage and extorting us to release them. Real supervillain stuff. Headquarters in a hollowed-out volcano and everything. Can’t rule it out.
The big takeaway here is that we’re all going to have to switch it up and start some rewatches if we want to stay sane. Or continue our rewatches. It’s not as easy as it sounds. There’s an art to a rewatch. Some shows work better with multiple viewings than others. There are some shows I loved very much that I never want to watch all the way through again. An example will help: The Americans is a near-perfect show. I would recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it and needs something to watch. I never want to watch it again, though. It was so stressful. I’m convinced it took six months off the end of my life. But it’s good. Same with a show like The Leftovers. God, did I love The Leftovers. But do I want to rewatch a show about mass sudden death and the ensuing, society-wide grieving process during a real-life pandemic? No. No, I do not.
So then, like, what? You can tell from the image at the top of this page that I’m going to mention Justified again. That’s a perfectly rewatchable show. It’s smart and funny and cool and doesn’t rely on twists that lose their punch a second time through. The Sopranos is always a good choice. So are hangout sitcoms like New Girl and Happy Endings. I started Watchmen again a few weeks ago, just flicking on an episode here and there, and that has proven to be both timely and a blast. Any show that lets Regina King do this is good for multiple viewings in my book.
HBO
You know what isn’t working so well for me right now, surprisingly? Parks and Recreation. It’s one of my all-time favorite shows, one I’ve watched straight through a few times, one I used to leave on all day while I did other things, one that has occasionally soothed me to sleep. But something feels weird about it now. Maybe it’s the boundless optimism clanging against the present situation. Maybe it’s the sting of watching people get through difficult situations by being together in small enclosed rooms. I still haven’t put my finger on it, not exactly. It’s very strange and yet not even a top 100 strangest part of the year. I hate it.
This is what I mean, though. We’re all going to have to think through this rewatch situation more carefully than we expect. Some shows we think we’ll turn to are going to hit a little different right now. Some shows are just not meant to be watched a second time. It’s going to get really weird out there, really soon. I’ve been watching an episode of Columbo from before I was born, which, to be fair, is not a brand new development, but the pace has picked up significantly. There’s going to come a point before this is all over where this column contains an 800-word screed about the episode where Columbo solves a murder using his knowledge of women’s underpants. I was not ready to hear Peter Falk say the word “panties” even once, let alone many times. In my defense, there’s really no way to prepare for it.
See what I mean about things getting weird? We’re still months away from a vaccine. This is just the tip of the weirdness iceberg. The important thing to remember is that we’re all in this together. And that Regina King rules. Those two things, basically.
ITEM NUMBER TWO — Cash those checks, people
There’s this great quote from Michael Caine. Way back in 1987, the veteran actor appeared in Jaws 4, a not very good movie that had no business at all having someone like Michael Caine in it. He was asked about all of this sometime later, as will happen when one conducts many interviews over the course of a long Hollywood career, and replied with this terrific collection of words: “Somebody said, ‘Have you ever seen Jaws 4?’ I said, ‘No. But I’ve seen the house it bought for my mum. It’s fantastic!’”
I bring this up because Quibi is still at it. The fledgling, bite-sized streaming service is still plugging away. There’s that trailer for a new show with Kevin Hart from a few weeks ago. There was a Fugitive show starring Kiefer Sutherland re-announced this week. There was an animated show starring Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds announced this week, too. This week. At the end of July. After about three weeks of progressively worse updates about the state of the company and its disturbing lack of a subscriber base. If Quibi is going to go down, it’s going to go down swinging. Or spending. Definitely spending.
Which brings me back to that Michael Caine quote. I am honestly so proud of the many celebrities who are cashing checks from Quibi this year. Especially the ones who are just signing up to work with the company now. Talk about a no-lose situation. If the show works, you get to be the hero who saved Quibi. If it doesn’t, no one remembers it 10 years from now except for you and maybe the contractor who built your new pool house. Probably not even the contractor. He’s just happy the check cleared, too. Even if Quibi never makes an impression on the entertainment industry, at least it stimulated the economy during a pandemic, I guess.
It’s kind of like… I’ll tell you what it’s kind of like. Before the internet made everything accessible the second it is created, celebrities used to pad their bank accounts by flying overseas and to do commercials for foreign markets. Some of them, because cultural differences are never more pronounced than in frantic 30-second blasts of commercialism, would have seemed weird as hell to American audiences. But no one cared, because they never aired in America. It was just an easy check. That’s Quibi right now. No one is watching, but the money still spends. It’s got to be kind of liberating. Good for them.
Actually, now that I think about it, my feelings about these people padding their income on Quibi’s dime — the celebrities, yes, but also all the writers and crew members and craft service workers — can also be summed up with a Michael Caine quote. A nice little bookend. Take it away, Mike.
ITEM NUMBER THREE — I do not see a situation where it ever comes up in this job, but let’s be clear anyway: Please do not spray me with tear gas
HBO
Everyone’s favorite number one boy, Succession’s Kendall Roy himself, actor Jeremy Strong, is about to appear in a movie called The Trial of the Chicago 7, directed by Aaron Sorkin, about the arrest and prosecution of a group of counterculture figures who protested the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. These are the facts, and the facts are important, because the facts provided context for this next blockquote, which is taken from Vanity Fair’s inside look at the film and is freaking astounding.
The most die-hard Method actor was Jeremy Strong, who once worked as Daniel Day-Lewis’s assistant and seems to have inherited his role model’s relish for total immersion. Filming the riot scenes on location in Grant Park, he insisted, before the cameras rolled, that a former Chicago cop playing one of the storm troopers hurl him to the ground before every take. “Jeremy begged me to spray him with real tear gas,” adds Sorkin. He declined.
A few things:
Please consider this your periodic reminder that actors are very strange people, not always in a bad way, but always in some way
This raises a number of questions, most importantly “Did Jeremy Strong poop in his own bed to prepare for the scene in Succession where Kendall pooped the bed?”
Imagine overhearing this conversation on set, as you, not as a jaded Hollywood lifer
Anyway, I repeat: Please do not spray me with tear gas, even if I ask you to.
ITEM NUMBER FOUR — Marthaaaaaaa
Noted lifestyle enthusiast Martha Stewart set portions of the internet ablaze this week by posting the above selfie on her Instagram page. The clamor is understandable. Martha Stewart is about to turn 79 years old. Most people that close to 80 have trouble taking selfies let alone looking glamorous in them and posting them on Instagram. Good for her. Good for Martha Stewart. It’s not what I want to talk about, though.
The selfie caused such a ruckus that CNN got Martha on the phone to talk about it. This was a good decision on their part. Because when you ask Martha Stewart things, you get answers like this.
“Well, I had just had a very dear friend over for lunch and then I took a long swim and I was getting out of the pool. I was trying to take pictures of my gardens out there. And then the camera automatically went to, you know, selfie mode. I don’t know why,” Stewart said in an interview Thursday. “And I looked at it and I looked so nice because of the sun streaming down. So I snapped the picture and I sent it to the internet.”
I love the phrasing of “I sent it to the internet,” like you would send a package to a friend. I’m going to start talking about my tweets like this. It won’t work nearly as well. Maybe I won’t do it. Either way, this is also not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about this.
She said she had no idea it would solicit so much reaction.
“No, I don’t post to cause a stir,” Stewart said. “I post to treat my audience.”
“I post to treat my audience.” What a legend. What an absolute maniac. I love her. I hope she lives forever and remains exactly the same. I hope she does so for a few reasons, but mostly that one, and definitely most this next one. You see, comedian Chelsea Handler posted her own pool selfie as a tribute to Martha, and lots of people hopped in her replies to praise her for it. Martha hopped in, too. Not so much to praise her, though. To say this: “I’m so happy that you liked my post well enough to emulate it. I do think my pool is a little bit prettier than yours and that my facial expression is a little more relaxed.”
She went on to compliment Chelsea on other things, which is fine, but not the point. The point is that you should never cross Martha Stewart. This is how she responds to tributes, for the love of God. She will absolutely gut you like a fish if you look at her wrong. Metaphorically, for sure, and maybe literally, too.
ITEM NUMBER FIVE — There is nothing less surprising than Tom Cruise making a movie in outer space
Getty Image
A few weeks ago, we learned that Tom Cruise and Elon Musk want to make a space movie. Not just a movie about some space, mind you, or a movie set in space: a movie actually shot in space. This was quite possibly the least surprising news any of us will hear all year. Tom Cruise and Elon Musk are both very ambitious, very intense, kind of loopy dudes. The bigger surprise here is that they had not already shot a movie in outer space. That feels like some extremely 2015 news, when you think about it, which you really should.
And things with the space movie are continuing apace. A studio has been sucked into the project’s orbit. Everything is becoming more real by the day. Variety has a look at the nuts and bolts of the project and where it stands now. As you can probably imagine, there are a few logistical problems here.
The stakes are also high from a filmmaking standpoint. As one person familiar with the project put it, “you can’t be sure what you’re going to get up there, and you have one shot to do it.”
That’s a good point. You’re not going to be doing a bunch of re-shoots if you whiff on something. And you’re not going to get multiple takes of the trickier shots. And there’s also, well, this.
A major issue for any company considering the project is insuring Cruise and the filmmaking team, as no scripted production has ever conceived of shooting action sequences outside of Earth’s orbit. The movie is also said to not yet have a script.
I love that the last sentence is just tacked on there, in large part because it raises two very funny possibilities: One, that Tom Cruise and Elon Musk basically got a $200 million movie greenlit with nothing more than “but we shoot in space”; two, until the script is written, there remains a slim chance that the movie they shoot in space won’t even be about space. They could just shoot a regular-ass movie in space. God, that would be hilarious. Hundreds of millions of dollars and all the scientists in the world for a movie about, like, Tom Cruise as the principal of a troubled high school. Put a green screen on the space station and CGI-in the classroom around him. Sell it to Quibi for all I care. Let’s do it all, people.
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 Roger:
Can we talk for a minute about the Bachelor-themed Holey Moley episode? You think a show about people getting violently thrown into pools of water can’t get any better and then they go and put everyone in tuxedos and cocktail dresses. The one girl was wearing a dress so short they actually had to blur it out when she got wiped out by the windmill. That’s a real double whammy of embarrassment.
My friend, we can absolutely talk about the Bachelor-themed episode of Holey Moley. We should have talked about it two weeks ago when it aired. This is on me. I let us both down. I can and will do better.
That said, I think you hit the nail on the head here. Adding formalwear to what I have lovingly referred to as “a bozo circus of misadventure” was an all-time genius television programming decision. It was perfect. Just a perfect hour of nonsense summer television. About as perfect as Roger’s email, which came with the subject line “An excuse for you to post more Holey Moley GIFs.”
Police in Italy have intercepted a package containing hundreds of coffee beans that were hiding illegal drugs inside them.
This raises a number of questions. Like, for example, how? And why? Mostly those two. How and why? The why applies to a few things, including “why is that sentence structured in a way that makes it seems like the coffee beans did this of their own volition?” But let’s do the how first.
Around 500 beans had been cut open, stuffed with cocaine, and carefully taped closed again with dark brown tape.
Well, okay. That seems magnificently inefficient, but okay. I’m not a drug smuggler. I’ve never smuggled a single drug. Maybe I’m just some naive doofus. Maybe this is just how things work. Maybe these guys are criminal geniuses who have unlocked the secret to drug smuggling. Although… they did get caught. So maybe not.
Anyway. How did they get caught? How does one discover cocaine stuffed inside coffee beans?
Police said suspicions were initially raised when they saw the name “Santino D’Antonio” on the packets — a mafia boss in the American action film John Wick.
This, to be clear, is hilarious. These goofballs went to the extremes of meticulous planning, cutting open hundreds of individual coffee beans to stuff them with cocaine before taping them shut, only to get busted because they couldn’t stop themselves from getting cute on the packaging. This is one of the main reasons I am not a drug smuggler, for the record. I’d get on the burner phone and be like “Hello, this is… uh, this is… Picasso… Valentine and I th-…” and the agents on the wiretap would look at each other in the eye, laugh, and say “We got him.”
So I get it, is my point.
Police intercepted the beans after they had been sent from Medellin in Colombia to Milan’s Malpensa airport.
The 2kg package contained 150g of cocaine powder.
Police also released a picture of the operation’s mastermind in the moments after the seizure.
Netflix
I’m sorry, but Sad Pablo Escobar Sitting On A Bench Swing On Narcos will never not be funny to me.
070 Shake, moniker of innovative hip-hop Danielle Balbuena, released her debut album Modus Vivendi back in January. The musician turned heads with her brooding tones and electric edge on the record. Now, Balbuena has implored an artist across genre lines to reimagine one of her Modus Vivendi tracks. Balbuena tapped Tame Impala’s Kevin Park to share a remix of “Guilty Conscience.”
Parker’s influence on the remix is immediately clear. The musician warped the song’s production to take on a washed-out sound, seemingly flowing in and out of consciousness. Distorted synths open the song and Balbuena’s vocals are decreased several octaves. The result of Parker’s remix is three-and-a-half minutes of pure bliss.
This isn’t the first time Parker and Balbuena have worked together. The duo previously linked to collaborate with Kanye West on his track “Violent Crimes,” which appeared on the rapper’s 2018 record Ye.
Parker’s remix follows his recently released fourth record, The Show Rush. In an interview with Uproxx alongside the album’s release, Parker said he wants to be more “fearless” with his music going forward: “It’s difficult to put into words, but I know exactly what I want to do. I want to continue the progression of being more fearless and bold. I want to make more music. One thing I know for sure is that I won’t take five years next time. I want to be more liberal with myself creatively because I’m so inspired these days by the idea of just being like, ‘F*ck it,’ and not being precious, and not overthinking things in the way that I probably did early on.”
Listen to Tame Impala’s “Guilty Conscience” remix above.
Modus Vivendi is out now via Getting Out Our Dreams. Get it here.
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Be damn sure I’ll keep it up 🙂 
