Month: October 2021

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

ITEM NUMBER ONE — Listen to me

Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond comes to an end with the release of No Time to Die next week. This means, according to the rules set forth in The Discourse, that we all need to start — or continue — fighting about who gets to fill the role next. Some people got a head start on this by yelling about Idris Elba a few years ago. Daniel Craig himself waded into it last week by saying he doesn’t think Bond should be played by a woman or person of color, only because there should be more and better original roles written for them. Lots of outlets took that quote as ran with headlines like “Daniel Craig: Bond Should NEVER Be Played By A Woman,” because, again, The Discourse.

Luckily, I have a solution here that can save us all some headaches. We can settle this sucker right now, in the next few paragraphs, and move right along. Are you ready? Are you ready for my great idea? Wait. Dammit, you read the headline already. You know where I’m headed with this. Hmm. Kind of takes the punch out of it, but still. It’s a good idea. Here we go: We should let Walton Goggins play James Bond.

My case for Goggins as Bond rests on three pillars. A tripod of a case. Stable. Strong. No wobbles anywhere.

PILLAR ONE: It would be fun

It would be so much fun. Walton Goggins is always great. He was great as Boyd Crowder on Justified and he was great as Baby Billy on The Righteous Gemstones and he’s been great in everything else. He carries himself with this aura of like mischief and menace, which is why he often gets slipped into projects as the villain. But he also has an underlying confidence in his performances, an unflappable vibe, that would work so well as James Bond. Picture him walking into a casino in a tuxedo. Picture him plopping $25,000 on the table and saying, “I’m seeing red tonight.” I need it.

So it would be fun in that way. It would also be, like, fun, full-stop, which, all due respect to Daniel Craig and the people who made the last few Bond movies, is a quality that’s been missing a bit. Bond has gotten emotional and sad lately. That’s fine, I guess, but it’s probably time for a course correction. Let Bond be fun and a little goofy again. I can think of no better way to accomplish this than by strapping a jet back to Walton Goggins and having him thwart a madman who is trying to melt the polar ice caps with a space laser.

The people need this. I need this. Which brings me to…

PILLAR TWO: I would like it

I would like it very much. I like the Bond movies and I like Walton Goggins. I think they are a great match. For me. More decisions should be made with this in mind. “What would Brian like?” is an example of a question they could ask in a pitch meeting. And then, before they sign the contracts, “Are we sure Brian will like this?” You know, to be thorough.

But this one? No doubt about it. I would definitely like this. I mean, look at this…

… and this…

No flaws detected in any of this. Actually, wait. There is one small issue I should address. Meet me in…

PILLAR THREE: Whatever, British people play Batman and Spider-man sometimes

Walton Goggins is not, in the most technical sense of the term, British. He could not be less British, actually. He’s American Southern down to his bones. I suspect this will upset a sizable chunk of Bond purists. To that I say:

• Christian Bale did Batman with an American accent and both Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland have played American Spider-men despite being British, so it’s not like there’s no cross-Atlantic flippy-floppy precedent when it comes to playing our nations’ most famous characters
• Walton Goggins can probably do a good British accent if he wants to
• If not, it would be a blast if he just does his Southern accent the whole movie and no one says anything about it and continues to treat him as British

It’s a good idea. Think about it for a while this weekend. Let Walton Goggins play James Bond.

ITEM NUMBER TWO — Fireworks illegal in 30 Rockefeller Center, too, I imagine

After weeks of speculation about who may or may not be leaving, with open questions about the majority of the female cast (Strong, McKinnon, Bryant, etc.), the cast for the rapidly approaching new season of SNL was announced this week and the only major loss was Beck Bennett. That’s a bummer because Beck Bennett is an awesome sketch performer, kind of in the way Phil Hartman was. He was the binding element to a lot of stuff, often as a dad or a boss or some other authority figure. You need those people to make things work, to make them run smoothly. I’m kind of bummed out.

Luckily, that’s all balanced out by some good news: new cast members are a-comin’. Via the New York Times:

“S.N.L.” is also adding three new featured players for the coming season: Aristotle Athari, a member of the sketch group Goatface; James Austin Johnson, who has acted in shows like “Tuca & Bertie” and in the film “Hail, Caesar!”, and has a viral series of Donald Trump impressions; and Sarah Sherman, who has worked on “The Eric Andre Show.”

While this paragraph appears to be accurate in all the important ways, it does make one big omission. It lists the big credits for James Austin Johnson and mentions his excellent Trump impression, but it leaves out the part where he also stars in the “Fireworks Illegal in Pasadena” tweet. You’ve seen this tweet. You’ve watched the video. TELL ME YOU’VE SEEN THE TWEET AND WATCHED THE VIDEO.

You know what? Let’s be safe. Let’s post it right after this sentence, both to be sure you’ve seen it and because I stopped typing the last paragraph to go watch it again and I still have the tab open.

It’s beautiful. It’s perfect, basically. It makes me very happy and I’ve watched it hundreds of times and whooooooops I stopped typing this paragraph to watch it again just now. I have no further analysis here, honestly. I hope it works out for everyone and I hope they all become big stars. Beck Bennett, too. But mostly I just wanted to post that video again. Thank you for allowing me to do that, Lorne.

ITEM NUMBER THREE — I need La Brea to get a little better or way, way worse as soon as possible

An incomplete list of things that happened in the first episode of La Brea, a real show that premiered on NBC this week:

• A massive sinkhole opened up in Los Angeles
• Television’s Natalie Zea fell into it, along with her teen son and a slew of other people
• After falling into what appeared to be the abyss, they all popped up relatively unscathed in some sort of unmolested prehistoric jungle
• Someone found a trunk filled with heroin
• Wolves attacked Natalie Zea’s son and he almost died
• Some lady started hoarding food
• Natalie Zea’s former/current/future love interest — who was first seen slugging liquor from a flask in traffic — had visions of the magical sinkhole land from our surface world
• Mysterious government types who know more than they’re letting on started poking around
• Etc etc etc

You get it. It’s all fine and something you’ve seen before plenty of times. It’s like Lost and Manifest and a sinkhole rolled into a big ball. Again, fine. The tricky thing is that it’s going to need to move out of this unremarkable middle area fast if it wants to keep me around (their primary concern, I’m sure), and there are really only two ways they can go about doing that. Back to the bullet points:

• It can get a little better by putting an interesting twist on the “where/when are they?” thing they’re clearly setting up so far, with characters that have surprising motivations and yo-yos in the plot that keep people hooked
• They can go full Zoo and just get as stupid and wild as hell on purpose so I can make a lot of GIFs of it and blog about the crazy stuff that happens, which would be fun because I haven’t had a really nutso show like that in a while and I’m starting to miss it

Definitely too soon to tell right now. A lot can still happen. They’re off to a promising start, though, both because of all the things in those bullet points and because of, well, this…

More shows should end episodes on sabertooth tiger cliffhangers. This is something I have always said. Do not look it up, though. Just trust me.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR — It must be so weird to discover you’re a hugely popular meme

Daniel Craig sat down for a kind of exit interview with Dave Itzkoff of the New York Times this week. Their chat covered everything you’d expect a chat with an outgoing Bond and current new franchise star — I watched Knives Out again a few days ago and it still rules — to cover. It’s a good read and I recommend you give it a look if you’re interested in any of that, but, for now, we focus on a smaller, more specific, more hopelessly online aspect of it all.

We focus on this.

As we are speaking, it’s a Friday afternoon, and I am about to see my social media feeds populated with a video of you declaring it to be the weekend. Has the popularity of this gotten back to you in any way?

No, what is that?

There is a clip of you from that “Saturday Night Live” you hosted, introducing the Weeknd with almost a sense of relief. People just like to post that clip as a way of ushering in the weekend.

They do? It’s amazing. I don’t know what that is, but thank you. That’s lovely. I suppose I’d have to have social media to know what that was all about.

This is about as well as anyone can be expected to react upon learning that they’ve become a massively popular meme among the jackals and hyenas on various social media platforms. He uses the word “lovely” in there, somehow. Good for him. He unknowingly gave the world a gift many months ago and we all just opened it and put it to use recently and he seems fine with all of that. It’s the best possible way to handle it all, too, starting with the use of “lovely” and moving on to the thing where he says he doesn’t use social media so wasn’t even aware.

Now, is there is a very tiny, very cynical part of my brain that wonders if this stated ignorance is hooey? Sure. Believing it requires you to believe that Daniel Craig has no one in his life who will text him when he becomes a popular meme. Does Daniel Craig not have any too-online people in his life? Shouldn’t he have someone — manager, agent, assistant — monitoring these things just in case? Isn’t this, in a weird way, kind of sad? I don’t know. Let’s let it go for now. For now.

More importantly, how had no one asked him this on the whole press tour until now?

This is the problem with journalism these days.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE — Give Paul Giamatti his free Burger King, come on

Paul Giamatti was on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert this week, which is a fact I mention for two reasons: One, because this will make three of the last four of these columns where I mention Paul Giamatti, and I kind of like that he’s becoming the official face of The Rundown; and two, after his appearance, I think we should all be doing more to get Paul Giamatti free Burger King for life.

The short version goes something like this, although you should probably just watch the video to get a fuller picture: Paul Giamatti did a Burger King commercial and thought he might be a candidate to receive a card that would give him free food from the burger chain for the rest of his life. That’s apparently a real thing. Explaineth Giamatti:

“I get a FedEx package, and I rip that baby open, reach down inside — and all that’s in there is this little titanium, beautifully finished black credit card,” Giamatti recalled with awe. “And it’s got this embossed black crown on it. And it says nothing on it. I was like, ‘Holy fuck. I have a Burger King for life card.’ So we look it up and in fact, the thing exists. Only like 12 people have it, including George Lucas.”

This is thrilling. I don’t even think I’ve eaten at a Burger King in, like, five years? Could be more, could be less, but it’s long enough ago that I do not remember it whenever it was. I don’t even like Burger King all that much. I’d rather do a Wendy’s or a Popeyes if I’m in a fast-food pinch. None of that matters now. What matters is one simple fact…

I must have one of these cards.

Burger King.

Burger King!

Pay attention!

Give me this card!

Wait. Hold on. I got distracted. It feels like this story was about to take a turn. Did Paul get his card? Is he the Burger King now? Is Paul Giamatti the king of burgers? He should be, if not. Let’s read on to find out.

After brashly bragging to his friends and his son about his stature in the fast-food community, Giamatti said, he examined his newly bestowed treasure a bit more closely.

“I notice there’s some tiny writing on the back,” he said, intrigued. “So I go to some website, I have a serial number. I enter the serial number. And it turns out — it’s a fucking $100 gift certificate. I have never fallen so far and hard and fast.”

Dammit, Burger King. Stop screwing around with me and Paul Giamatti. Let us have the card. We won’t abuse it. Probably. Maybe. Maybe we’ll build a castle made of Whoppers and live in it like kings. That’s not important right now. What’s important is that you give me and Paul Giamatti these cards. By the end of next week, preferably.

READER MAIL

If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at brian.grubb@uproxx.com (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.

From Sarah:

I assume 100 people have told you this already but in Guy Ritchie’s next movie Jason Statham is playing a character named Orson Fortune. There has never been a piece of news more tailored to your specific interests. It’s like they did this for you, specifically. I don’t even have a question to add. I’m just reaching out to say how happy I am for you.

Sarah, you are correct all around on this one. Lots of people did send this information to me this week and it — the information itself and the fact that lots of people saw it and sent it to me in many different forms (text, tweet, DM, email) — made me happy.

And it gets even better. The movie is titled Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre, which sent me to Wikipedia, which is where I learned what ruse de guerre means. Per Wiki: “[G]enerally what is understood by ‘ruse of war’ can be separated into two groups. The first classifies the phrase purely as an act of military deception against one’s opponent; the second emphasizes acts against one’s opponent by creative, clever, unorthodox means, sometimes involving force multipliers or superior knowledge.”

Perfect, everywhere. Statham playing a guy named Orson Fortune in a movie about schemes and subterfuge. I could not possibly be more in on all of this, especially when you add in the summary.

“MI6 guns-and-steel agent Orson Fortune (Statham) is recruited by a global intelligence alliance ‘Five Eyes’ to track down and stop the sale of a deadly new weapons technology that threatens to disrupt the world order. Reluctantly paired with CIA high-tech expert Sarah Fidel, Fortune sets off on a globe-trotting mission where he will have to use all of his charm, ingenuity, and stealth to track down and infiltrate billionaire arms broker Greg Simmonds.”

Three primary takeaways here:

• Yes
• I will need to spend many late evenings cranking my brain away on the name Orson Fortune and where it should slot into my ranking of names of character Jason Statham has played
• YES

Pictured below, please find a dramatic representation of me going to see this movie on opening weekend.

This is good. I am happy about this.

Orson Fortune.

I can’t stop saying it out loud right now.

Orson Fortune.

Just terrific work by everyone involved here.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

To Denmark!

A Danish artist was given $84,000 by a museum to use in a work of art. When he delivered the piece he was supposed to make, it was not as promised. Instead, the artist, Jens Haaning, gave the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark two blank canvases and said they were titled “Take the Money and Run.”

This is… I don’t know. I don’t want to dive into hyperbole right away. I don’t want to get out too far too fast in case I need to pull back a little. Let’s just say… let’s say this is definitely not NOT the funniest thing I’ve ever read.

I must know more. I must know everything.

Haaning was asked to recreate two of his previous works: 2010’s “An Average Danish Annual Income” and “An Average Austrian Annual Income,” first exhibited in 2007. Both used actual cash to show the average incomes of the two countries, according to a news release from the artist.

“The curator received an email in which Jens Haaning wrote that he had made a new piece of art work and changed the work title into ‘Take the Money and Run,’” Andersson said. “Subsequently, we could ascertain that the money had not been put into the work.”

Indeed, the frames meant to be filled with cash were empty.

So here’s what we have going on in Denmark, as far as I can tell. A museum wanted to commission a piece that explained economic disparity and they hired an artist who had done something like that before. All good so far. The problem they ran into is that the artist is the kind of rascal who assumed — correctly — that keeping the cash and giving them empty frames to highlight real economic disparity would be hilarious.

Look at this freaking guy.

“Everyone would like to have more money and, in our society, work industries are valued differently,” Haaning said in a statement. “The artwork is essentially about the working conditions of artists. It is a statement saying that we also have the responsibility of questioning the structures that we are part of. And if these structures are completely unreasonable, we must break with them. It can be your marriage, your work – it can be any type of societal structure”.

I love it. I love him. Just the audacity of it all. I hope it’s real. I need it to be real. If, months from now, a story comes out that he and the museum were in cahoots to goose publicity for this exhibition and this was all a sham, I need you to promise you will not tell me. Just let me live inside this beautiful lie.

The museum folks, for their parts, are playing it all pretty cool, either way.

Andersson said while it wasn’t what they had agreed on in the contract, the museum got new and interesting art. “When it comes to the amount of $84,000, he hasn’t broke any contract yet as the initial contract says we will have the money back on January 16th 2022.”

I hope he never gives the money back and I hope it goes to trial and I hope he pleads “not guilty by reason of art and/or comedy” and I hope the judge rips up the indictment and lets him go before it even gets to the jury and I hope the judge makes the museum pay for a full parade for him. I’m not fully up on Danish law, but I feel like that would be the fairest resolution here.

It’s really weird to think that Lil Wayne is doing a joint album, Trust Fund Babies, with Rich The Kid before one with, say, Drake or Nicki Minaj. The two rappers don’t have the same extensive history of collaboration as Wayne’s fellow Young Money residents and their respective profiles among fans are, let’s just say “uneven.” But the tape’s out now and judging from its cheeky first video for “Feelin’ Like Tunechi,” the two have a healthy sense of humor about the whole thing so it kinda works.

For example, for literally no discernible reason at all, the video contains an interlude at the halfway mark spoofing Wayne’s viral 2012 deposition video in which he answered a bunch of questions he wasn’t being asked. Taking a line of dialogue directly from that bewilderingly hilarious clip, the off-screen interviewer asks Wayne whether he performed at Rolling Loud with Rich in 2019, swapping the more modern festival for the Virgin Music Festival in 2008 with Kanye West. Wayne’s answer remains exactly the same: “I don’t know, but I know I did perform at this bad-ass bitch birthday party recently. She was crazy, stupid thick.”

We need more rappers willing to have a laugh at themselves. The rap world will almost certainly be better for it.

Watch Lil Wayne and Rich The Kid’s tongue-in-cheek “Feelin’ Like Tunechi” video above.

Trust Fund Babies is out now on Young Money Records and Republic Records.

One of the best recurring gags on Seinfeld is the character’s fake names and aliases. There’s Art Vandelay, H.E. Pennypacker, Kel Varnsen, Susie, O’Brien and Dylan Murphy from the limo episode, and Van Nostrand, which Kramer uses multiple times over the course of nine seasons and 180 episodes. Sometimes he’s a professor, other times he’s a doctor, but one thing’s for sure: he’s seen moles so big they have their own moles.

Van Nostrand is also near and dear to Jerry Seinfeld’s heart.

When asked by Extra TV‘s George Hahn if he has any “favorite episodes, moments, or line” from his show, Seinfeld replied, “I do really like when Kramer is trying to find Elaine’s medical records and he goes into the hospital and he says, ‘I’m Dr. Van Nostrand from the institute, and the receptionist says, ‘What institute?’ And he goes, ‘That’s right.’ That’s one of those jokes, really, it’s so simple but so funny.”

The scene is from the season eight episode, “The Package,” which is presumably not one of the episodes Seinfeld he wishes he could redo. “There’s a number of them that I would love to have a crack at, but I don’t really believe, philosophically, in changing or even thinking about the past,” he told People. “My philosophy of life is that just happened the way it happened, and we’re going to go from here. And that’s the best way to… live.”

You can now watch every episode of Seinfeld on Netflix.

(Via People)

At a certain point, Jon Stewart went from being a comedian and staple of MTV to a satirical news host to one of the country’s most powerful advocates for the disenfranchised. Stewart himself would probably point to 2001 as the year it all changed for him. In the wake of 9/11, he became one of the loudest voices in the room asking for help for 9/11 first responders—a role he continues to take seriously. But along the way, Stewart took up the cause of another group of people who are often overlooked: our country’s military veterans.

In the premiere episode of The Problem With Jon Stewart, the former The Daily Show host’s new Apple TV+ series, Stewart addressed the many ways our veterans are being ignored and mistreated after risking their lives for our country. In a clip from the writers’ room, Stewart and his team talk about the many misconceptions people have about the VA and how veterans are treated once they’ve completed their military service. Including the very false notion that veterans have paid health care for life.

Stewart used his very first episode to shine a light on the truth about war and the brave men and women who are on the frontlines. He lined up a panel of former veterans to talk about their experiences, with a particular emphasis put on the many health risks associated with burn pits—which are exactly what they sound like. As Stewart explains it:

“When you invade a country, they don’t tell you when Trash Day is. So everything that the military wants to get rid of, from rotting food to old uniforms to hazardous materials, medical waste, batteries, to ammunition, armaments, entire trucks, nuclear waste, amputated body parts, and—the maraschino cherry—metric tons of human feces. Which obviously you don’t want to pile that shit up on your base, you just want to put it right next to your base and then poor jet fuel on it, and light it on fire.”

It doesn’t take a doctor—or really, even a grown-up—to understand that breathing in jet fuel and literal sh*t for hours on end for days on end could have some serious health risks. Yet, as Stewart explained, “What the DOD and the VA are saying is that they just don’t have the proof, the scientific evidence, that exposure to benzine and dioxins in burning pits made soldiers sick. And the VA and the DOD keep paying for studies to find the proof, using data provided to them by the Pentagon. But lo and behold, those studies are inconclusive.”

So Stewart, being Stewart, took it upon himself to share the proof with those governing bodies, showing a handful of news clips dating all the way back to the early 1980s where the likes of Dan Rather and Chris Wallace were reporting on government studies that concluded that exposure to these toxins can lead to everything from blood disorders to leukemia to cancer. He also cited a 2010 brochure circulated by the VA itself that advised medical examiners to be on the lookout for issues related to exposure to these very toxins.

So why is the VA so desperately trying to deny that breathing in waste topped with jet fuel could be bad for one’s health. “No surprise,” Stewart says, “the answer is money.”

You can watch the full clip above.

For nearly a decade, Tanner Jones fronted a pop-punk band from Orlando named after a Happy Gilmore gag – and yet, Jones never once felt like he could even attempt to write a You Blew It! song that was actually funny. At least not the kind of funny he brings on “Sold Our Shirts,” a single from his new and much more circumspectly monikered project Couplet. “I was listening to a lot of Grandaddy, who I think are very good at writing lyrics that are cheeky in a way that You Blew It! or pop-punk could not get away with,” Jones admits, and “Sold Our Shirts” broke his years-long artistic deadlock by imagining a “fairy tale for a touring band”: their Pitchfork scores are always higher than the other guys, venues pay them what they’re worth, and they never miss any milestones of their friends back home. A few years removed from quietly shuttering You Blew It!, Jones was still uncertain about whether he would ever publicly release music again as he shared “Sold Our Shirts” with some fellow artists to see if it resonated. Maxwell Stern of Signals Midwest sent a note back to Jones, describing it as the sequel to “Bands With Managers,” Pedro the Lion’s scorched earth screed on indie rock careerism. For Jones, “it was the most mindblowing compliment I could think of.”

Couplet’s spiritual connection to that song goes deeper than Stern likely anticipated. “Bands With Managers” was the opening track on Achilles Heel, a deeply embittered album that foreshadowed David Bazan’s disbandment of Pedro the Lion and subsequent formation of Headphones – a low-key electro-pop project created amongst longtime collaborators and friends. This is almost the exact circumstances under which Couplet was forged, as Jones’ email exchanges with Chicago emo fixtures Adam Beck of Sincere Engineer and Evan Weiss soon became a full-fledged band. LP1 sounds like nothing Jones or Beck or Weiss have ever made, but it does sound like Mice Parade, The Postal Service, and The Notwist, all of whom also applied their punk and emo-leaning origins to define the sound of early 2000s lap-pop.

And much like “Bands With Managers,” “Sold Our Shirts” is an unmistakably autobiographical account, fueled by the envy and disillusionment that can only come from a marginal level of success that somehow makes things worse than outright failure. Even if You Blew It!’s debut Grow Up, Dude helped define what “emo revival” meant before the term went mainstream, it’s hard to look at a band with that name and that album title and that album cover and assume they aspired for longevity. But as soon as You Blew It! started to experience some semblance of commercial and critical acclaim with 2014’s Keep Doing What You’re Doing, Jones started to see the rot setting in. Touring for nine months per year made the band financially viable, but at the cost of relationships and more sustainable career options. Opening gigs for The Wonder Years, State Champs, and Taking Back Sunday put them in front of bigger crowds than they could ever manage on their own and also made it nearly impossible to operate outside of the pop-punk market.

Jones noticed that the band’s decision-making was almost always fraught with financial considerations; not just the tour schedule, but second-guessing their songwriting instincts if a song felt too pop-punk or emo, or not pop-punk enough. An admitted combination of hubris and bad timing sealed the fate of Abendrot, You Blew It!’s final album. While Jones assumed the band’s prior success would ensure patience with their newly wistful and somber tones, especially in the context of a mid-November release, its arrival was met with indifference at best; emo’s fourth wave had reached a low ebb by the end of 2016 and three days after the election of Donald Trump, it was admittedly tough for anyone to care about any album. “I’m not sure how much of an impact it had on the release of the record,” Jones said in 2017. “I’d like to say it had a big one, but it could be the very simple fact that people just didn’t like that record either.” The ensuing tour tanked and as of now, the story of You Blew It! ends with a grace note of irony – shortly after they publicly called it quits, they accepted an offer to do a three-show run in Florida opening for American Football, the kind of gig that rarely seemed to arise when they were an active band.

But by that point, Jones had already taken the opportunity to join five of his friends in starting up Easy Luck, a coffee shop and bar in Orlando where he works to this day. After years of the just-making-it touring grind, Jones prefers his routinized lifestyle – “working at a coffee shop from 6:30 to 3:30 PM and then going home and going for a run and having dinner and then going to sleep.” Despite the reputation of Florida in general and Orlando in particular, Jones has come to appreciate the college kids and “Birkenstock-wearing, hippie granola types” responsible for making Orange County the bluest-leaning one in the state. While begrudgingly acknowledging Ron DeSantis’ often-progressive environmental legislation, he also points out how Florida’s notoriously anti-vaxx governor has become a rallying point for his community. “It’s a nice thing to bond over but there’s definitely shame in it,” Jones says, “being in a state led by this guy who’s lashing out at reporters every single day over the most inane shit.”

When I interviewed Jones about all of this back in 2017, I left feeling pretty certain that he’d never make music again – or at least never allow himself to be fully reliant on music as a source of income or self-esteem. And that’s why Couplet is allowed to exist in 2021. “We’re all approaching it as a way to explore sonically and lyrically, because the stakes were so low,” Jones tells me. “No one was expecting anything.” Sparked by “Sold Our Shirts,” Jones started writing a handful of songs when he met up with Beck at a Sincere Engineer show in 2019. “He said, ‘please come up to Chicago and I’ll record you for free,’” he recalls. “So I booked a flight for April 2020 and of course that didn’t happen.” Jones linked back up with Weiss, the Into It. Over It. and Pet Symmetry frontman who also produced Keep Doing What You’re Doing and Abendrot. Jones describes his demos as “guitar and maybe a beep-boop drum track and vocals,” before Beck and Weiss rearranged and remixed them into the pointillist and nearly guitar-free synth-pop tracks that populate LP1. As their exchange of ideas continued long past its original weekend plans, Jones decided to build Couplet out into a full-on band rather than a solo project – “the amount of collaboration they were putting into it was as valuable, if not more so, than your traditional ‘three guys getting into a room and banging out a song.’”

But now that Couplet is an actual band with an actual album and, thus, an actual album rollout, Jones is again wrestling with the same aversion to pretense and self-promotion that soured the last few years of You Blew It!. LP1 undeniably owes its creative process to the pandemic and Jones has no interest in turning it into a narrative. “The arrogance to cite the pandemic and how it should be some kind of token to accentuate the artist’s struggle and increase the value of the output is where my true ire lies,” he explains in an email a few days after our initial talk. “The thing’s killed millions of people and changed everyone’s lives, and now some band wants me to covet their songs because their process was different? Wild.” There are times where he wishes he could drop music anonymously and others where he’s inspired by how his peers use social media to be forthright and vulnerable about their artistic process. There are days when he wants to listen to literally anything other than DIY punk and a few hours after we’re done speaking, he’ll be at a show for Florida up-and-comers Virginity. But for now, Couplet’s owes its existence to the same pure and noble impulse that will forever inspire friends to start a band just so they can name it after one of their favorite movie quotes. “This brings me a lot of joy, it brings Evan a lot of joy, it brings Adam a lot of joy,” Jones stresses. “And what are you doing in life? You’re mostly chasing joy, and that’s what this whole thing is.”

____

Prior to the formation of Couplet, I recall you expressing ambivalence about whether there was space for you to make music again. How does this concern sit with you now?

Truthfully, it feels fucking ridiculous if I’m being honest with you. I don’t mean to demean this interview [laughs], but over the past three or four years, I’ve been solely a music fan. I’ve been watching rollouts happen and indulging them the way that anyone else would indulge a You Blew It! or Couplet record. I try to be very understanding these days, but the whole process seems disingenuous and frankly kinda annoying. Art should be consumed as art, it shouldn’t be surrounded by this halo of stories and past records. It seems like with every band that has gone on tour or announced tours, there’s been such a long diatribe about “this past year has been so hard for me, we had to be locked down,” recapping the entire pandemic as if none of us have ever lived it, in order to sell tickets. It seems ridiculous and awful, I think I would like to live in a world that didn’t have record rollouts and they would just come out on the day they actually came out.

When I spoke with Foxing earlier this year, they expressed a similar sentiment about wishing they could do an immediate drop – and they were in the middle of a five-month rollout.

It seems like there’s so much effort that goes into informing the record before people hear it when the record should inform itself. Not having been a part of it [for a few years], that was the most glaring thorn in my side that revealed itself that wasn’t there before.

How do you determine whether a song you write is worthy of taking up space in 2021?

I think it would be arrogant to say that we’re releasing music for anything other than my friends and their enjoyment. I stopped making music for a long time because it stopped bringing me joy, until one day it started doing that again and I chased that. I found friends that wanted to make music with me, they found me and we put it out because it was a worthwhile process to us. I think that if it were tied to something altruistic – if releasing music shrunk the wealth gap just a little bit with every song – then maybe I could say that releasing music is for the world. Not to be cynical about it, it wouldn’t be right of me to say that I’m releasing music for anything other than myself or Couplet’s self.

With the intention of writing from a different sonic and lyrical perspective in Couplet, how do you identify subject matter that’s worth pursuing?

I think a lot of that credit can go to Evan and Adam and maybe even the way we wrote songs together. Being so far away from each other physically required a lot of trust and modesty. We had no deadlines, all we had were lockdowns between Chicago and limited lockdowns in Florida. I’m sure you’ve noticed there’s not a lot of guitars on this record, the onus was very much – “if you don’t have a good idea, make it an interesting idea.” And also humoring every member’s input as an equal.

What’s the difference between a good idea and an interesting one?

Sometimes good ideas can be safe ideas. It would be a good idea to write a song with a traditional pop structure because that’s a successful structure. An interesting one would be to stack a chorus at the beginning, build two verses and a bridge and stack a chorus at the end. More specifically, it would be a good idea to use a guitar to play a part because that’s what we’re used to but it would be more interesting to put it through a Rhodes or a Wurlitzer type of thing.

Have you felt burnt out on listening to music from the DIY or punk worlds?

Absolutely. The past three years have been very rewarding because I’ve been able to get out of the mindset of “I have to know everything that’s going on in the guitar rock world” and I’ve been able to dig into things like bossa nova or American classics like Grateful Dead or the Byrds or Gram Parsons. I was able to familiarize myself with Yo La Tengo, I never really did that until You Blew It! broke up – even though they’re guitar music, they’re not really. I go in and out of phases these days where I’d rather not listen to punk or guitar-driven indie.

Are there any newer bands in this space that excite you?

Hovvdy – at the end of “Sold Our Shirts,” I say “mm-hmm” and that’s inspired by one of the songs on Heavy Lifter, I love that band. I love how their earlier records were very sparse, almost slowcore and now they’re kind of pop songs. I like a lot of the new psych bands like Crumb and Mild High Club. King Gizzard too, those bands are so sweet. I work in a coffee shop eight hours a day, so all I can do is go through these “Recommended Artists” [on Spotify]. I found this band called The Sweet Enoughs and all their [“fans also like”] bands are all these guys from Nordic countries wearing silly hats and writing these new jazz records that are just so out of this world cool.

Are there any times where you see your friends or peers releasing an album and think, “man, I actually miss that”?

Any record rollout that’s happening kinda in the sphere where You Blew It! existed. For example, the Shortly album that was released today. I think Triple Crown did a really cool, little quick rollout with her and just seeing her through tweets – I imagine she feels this way – just being grateful and showing her excitement for this record. I feel like I would try to do that with every You Blew It! rollout. In some alternate universe, if I were in her shoes, I would say the same type of things. Or in this universe, I’m releasing a record!

The title of LP1 implies there might be an LP2, has there been more Couplet music made?

We have more music – we finished the record about a year ago and we’ve been slowly writing ever since. We have another release planned after this one and more stuff on the way. We’re trying to plan something [for touring} in the middle of next year should everything go well.

How do you plan on setting boundaries or expectations so that Couplet doesn’t repeat some of the mistakes You Blew It! made while touring?

What’s going to be different is the mindset, rather than the physical aspects that come along with touring. Before, that was how I lived so it was very important that I worked out a routine and that routine followed similar steps and tempos every single day. Whereas now that this is a part-time band I think it will be easier to tolerate the unsavory parts of touring. Before, one wrong thing was detrimental to a routine and therefore resulted in that domino effect of bad mental health, being pissy all the time, being annoying, being annoyed. Now that this is in the “part-time” category, the things that seem dire at first might actually be enjoyable. That’s my hope.

Couplet’s LP1 is out today. Get it here.

Although Little Simz original version of “Venom,” released on her standout 2019 album Grey Area, initially had nothing to do with the Marvel anti-hero of the same name, it would have been a waste of synergistic potential for the good folks at Sony to not try to employ it in the new sequel film, Venom: Let There Be Carnage. Fortunately, Simz was up for the revival, picking up the pen to revamp the lyrics for a more motivational mood fitting to the comic-book-inspired antics onscreen.

You can thank Venom: Let There Be Carnage (boy, that’s a mouthful — which… considering the character in question… fits?) star Tom Hardy for Simz’s inclusion in the process. Last week, the film’s director Andy Serkis told Uproxx that Simz’s fellow Brit and well-known hip-hop head Hardy suggested the song be used in a sequence in the film and reached out to Simz to make it happen. “She actually had made a song, unbeknownst to her, called ‘Venom’ that connected very much with the first movie,” Serkis said, “And so Tom got in touch with her and that song became sort of the focus [of the scene].”

The moment is perfectly positioned to capitalize on Simz’s recently released album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert and her upcoming North American tour, putting her music in what will undoubtedly be one of the more popular movies of the year just in time to bring in a plethora of new fans. She deserves them.

Listen to the Venom remix of “Venom” above.

Time to whip out the ol’ cowboy hat and six shooter — Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is headed to television. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Scott Steindorff and Dylan Russell’s Stone Village Television have purchased the rights to Charles Leerhsen’s Butch Cassidy biography, Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw, following a pretty intense bidding war with several other buyers. As of right now, it’s unknown what outlet Stone Village plans to sell the show to, however they have expressed plans to self-finance the development though before making the call.

The studio has also revealed they intend to make the show for an international audience, utilizing Latin American and European sources and production to create a series that appeals to both North American and Latin American audiences alike. The series’ story is set to follow Butch Cassidy across the United States and throughout Latin America, with the show ultimately ending in Bolivia. According to Steindorff, this choice was made to keep the series’ firmly in line with Leerhsen’s biography on the notorious historical figure and to tell the story that “needs to be told.”

“Much of the book and the adventures of The Sundance Kid (Cassidy’s partner Harry Longabaugh) and the ‘Wild Bunch’ gang takes place in South America. During that time period, Butch Cassidy and his gang were more well-known there than in North America. This isn’t just an American Western story, but a Latin American story, and it needs to be told. There are so many aspects of this story that will excite the audiences of today.”

For all you fans of the 1969 Paul Newman and Robert Redford adaptation of the Butch Cassidy story who might be feeling a bit nervous about the upcoming series, rest assured it seems to be in very capable hands. Currently, Stone Village is working on both HBO’s Station Eleven series as well as a television adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Furthermore, author Leerhsen has stated he believes Steindorff is “uniquely qualified to explore the Butch Cassidy story as a TV series” based on him being a lifelong fan of the story as well as a one of Paul Newman’s friends.

“He’s been a lifelong fan of the movie and was a colleague and friend to Paul Newman, who to many people is Butch. But beyond that he is as excited as I was to discover that the movie, as great as it was, left out some of the most intriguing parts of Butch and Sundance’s great adventure. Scott is drawn to the fact that there’s so much untapped drama and romance in the true tale — as well as a mind-blowing finale that the Hollywood of 50-something years ago felt it just couldn’t handle. He’s as at-home with my book and its characters as Butch Cassidy was on the Outlaw Trail.”

Netflix is dropping a ton of fresh content on the TV side this month.

Kicking things off is a moving adaptation of a New York Times best-selling novel starring Margaret Qualley before Penn Badgley returns to play the serial stalker and sometimes-murderer in Netflix’s You. Colin Kaepernick drops his limited series with Ava DuVernay towards the end of the month, but there are some returning gems and new animated comedies in between that look like they’re worth a watch. Here are the best new originals coming to Netflix this October.

(For the best new movies coming to Netflix this month, head here.)

Maid (streaming 10/1)

Margaret Qualley stars in this adaptation of The New York Times best-selling novel of the same name. Qualley plays Alex, a young mother fleeing an abusive relationship who attempts to start over by taking a job as a housecleaner. The comedic moments come from her time on the job, but there’s enough emotional depth in her fight to protect her daughter and free herself from her past to keep you invested long past the lighter moments.

On My Block: Season 4 (streaming 10/4)

The teen drama returns for its final season this month, kicking things off with a two-year time jump that see the close-knit crew more grown-up and definitely grown apart. But a secret from their past comes back to haunt them, forcing the friends to rehash old arguments and heal together.

The Baby-Sitters Club: Season 2 (streaming 10/11)

Who said October wasn’t the time for feel-good comedy? The second season of this beloved childhood series — its adapted from Ann M. Martin’s best-selling books — takes us on more club adventures as the group’s babysitting business continues to boom. A new school year brings new romances and challenges for the ladies but friendship is the most important thing here so don’t expect the bad times to stick around for too long.

You: Season 3 (streaming 10/15)

You returns for its third season as Joe Goldberg moves his new family to the suburbs of Northern California. Just to recap: he’s kidnapped and killed a bunch of people (mostly women) and his new wife, Love (the always excellent Victoria Pedretti) has got her own fratricidal past haunting her. But a new baby smooths things over for a bit as the pair try to blend in with their rich, out-of-touch neighbors and avoid temptation.

Inside Job (streaming 10/22)

This new adult animated comedy series sees Lizzy Caplan voicing a tech genius who works for a shadow government corp. specializing in conspiracy theories. Christian Slater plays her unemployed dad, who also used to work at the agency. The two take on every whacko story you can think of — from reptilian shapeshifters to secret societies, masked orgies and more — all while Caplan’s Reagan fights for a promotion (and her sanity).

Colin in Black & White (streaming 10/29)

Ava DuVernay and Colin Kaepernick team up for this bold limited series that chronicles the athletic icon’s early years. From his struggles with racism as the adopted Black child of a white family to his introduction to football, Kaepernick narrates his own story here while Jaden Michael plays his younger self.

That’s how it starts…

After a bunch of social media promotion yesterday, Bowery Presents/AEG have announced they’re presenting a 20-show run from LCD Soundsystem. The shows will be held at the venue Brooklyn Steel, and tickets go on sale next Friday, October 8, at 10 AM EST. Tickets will be available to purchase right here. Here are the show dates — they’re coming up pretty quickly:

November 23
November 24
November 29
November 30
December 1
December 3
December 4
December 5
December 7
December 8
December 9
December 11
December 12
December 13
December 15
December 16
December 17
December 19
December 20
December 21

It makes sense that the band would be offering such a long run because with a capacity of only 1800, Brooklyn Steel is definitely an underplay for them. Remember that “goodbye” show at Madison Square Garden? Considering they can fill a venue ten times the size of Brooklyn Steel, and headline festivals, the multiple nights helps ensure that all the fans who want to see them will get the chance (Except for those few and far between fans who don’t live in New York). Back in 2017, the band finally did release new music along with their reunion for a festival circuit, and according to our own Steven Hyden American Dream was exactly as brilliant and annoying as the band itself tends to be. Still, I’ve seen this live act before and it’s a real treat, so if you’re a New Yorker in the mood for some holiday indie rock, get those tickets.

Texas’ oppressive new abortion law outlaws the (medical) practice at six weeks and allows any private citizen to sue someone (akin to financial vigilantism) who helps a woman secure an abortion in any way (including giving a ride to a clinic). There’s no rape exception to the six-week rule, which is something that Gov. Greg Abbott seemed very proud about while signing the bill in room full of white dudes and declaring that he was going to solve the problem by jailing all rapists.

Abbott added that there was also plenty of time for a woman to secure a pregnancy before the six-week deadline, which is something that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who has revealed herself to be a sexual assault survivor) could not stomach. At the time, she declared that Abbott spoke from “such a place of deep ignorance,” and that he clearly didn’t understand how the female anatomy functions.

AOC makes a valid point. Six weeks pregnant generally means that a woman’s period is two weeks late, and two weeks late is something that happens for many reasons, including stress, illness, or… no reason at all. It’s not uncommon to not realize that you’re six weeks pregnant, and you can’t get an abortion until at least five weeks of pregnancy, if not longer due to scheduling and logistics. Six weeks ain’t enough time. And AOC spoke on Thursday during a House panel to address the subject:

“Six weeks pregnant is two weeks late for one’s period. When you are raped, you don’t always know what happened to you. And I speak about this as a survivor. You are in so much shock… I’m 115 pounds. You look at me funny, I’m two weeks late for my period. And you’re supposed to expect me to know I’m pregnant? Or the stress of a sexual assault? That makes you two weeks late for your period, whether you’re pregnant or not.”

She wasn’t done yet. On Twitter, AOC declared that the Texas GOP is fostering “[t]he same kind of abuse culture & misogynistic culture that allows for abusers to cause harm inside their homes.” She also tweeted a video of her House panel statement.

To that end, she pointed out that a whole lot of rapes aren’t sexual assaults by a stranger. They can happen at home, or an otherwise “safe” location, when the perpetrator is a friend, a family member, a teacher, or the like. That can make it even more difficult for a woman to come forward and say that she was raped, let alone figure out whether she’s slightly late for her period or pregnant, while attempting to unpack all that happened.