Oprah has long and widely been the subject of parodies, which mostly focus on her exuberance and generosity. The latest take on her came via Lil Yachty’s hilarious “Oprah’s Bank Account” clip. In the nine-minute video, Yachty plays an Oprah-like talk show host named Boprah who has sit-down interviews with the artists featured on the song, Drake and DaBaby. Now Oprah herself has offered a reaction to the song, and she’s a fan.
Although she hasn’t watched the video yet, Oprah is fully on board with “Oprah’s Bank Account,” telling the Associated Press, “I love it. I love it. I loveeeeee it! Yes, I love it! I haven’t seen the video, but it’s nice to be in a Drake song no matter what — especially for your bank account, OK!”
Meanwhile, Lil Yachty recently spoke about how his original intent for the song was to have Lizzo guest on the song, saying, “It’s so crazy because I originally wanted to put Lizzo on it. I sent it to her, and I don’t want to say she didn’t like it, because she never got back to me on it, which was cool. I understand people are busy.”
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Restaurants and bars were the last undisruptable business. The simple act of eating or getting drinks with friends forced even the most indoors and weird among us onto at least one avenue of genuine connection with our local communities. Now, with stay-at-home orders in effect over much of the country, they’re in trouble.
A recent James Beard Foundation survey of chefs, restaurateurs, beverage professionals, and workers found that 60% won’t be able to sustain closure for one full month. 75% said they wouldn’t be able to reopen after two months. Many are trying to scrape by on take out and delivery orders, but the survey, released in mid-March, showed that 78% of hourly workers and 58% of salaried had already been let go.
The $2 trillion stimulus package that recently its way through Congress includes $370 billion in loans for small businesses through the Small Business Administration (some of which don’t have to be paid back) but it’s still unclear how much that will help bars and restaurants, or whether they can stay afloat until the bill would go into effect. The New York Times reports that “the S.B.A.’s website has been so jammed that many users have been unable to complete loan applications, and those who did are told that they will take at least three weeks to process.”
Even assuming that money does fill some holes, there are other types of revenue bars and restaurants count on that you just can’t bring back.
“I think one of the sad things is, if a concert or a party or something was canceled, that’s something that you never get back. If you’re a Toyota dealership and you have to close for six months, you know people’s cars are still falling apart and they need a new car. But when it comes to entertainment purchases or travel, that’s forever lost,” says Jim Woods, owner of a chain of small brew pubs in San Francisco and Oakland. “I think people are going to recover and they’re going to get scrappy, but that’s already a massive amount of wealth that has been lost by this industry that they’re never going to get back. ”
Profit margins with restaurants are already so thin that any little thing can affect them, and the COVID quarantine brings with it a kaleidoscope of secondary consequences. It’s odd that in the most elemental of business models — feeding people — viability is so tenuous.
“Right now, when I’m quarantining at home myself, I’m trying to order from places that I want to support as much as possible,” says Jim Van Blaricum, owner of Bernadette’s Bar and Buddy’s restaurant in downtown LA. “There’s a bar/restaurant that’s downstairs in our building, but I live two blocks away from Staples Center, and so this bar, three weeks ago when the NBA shut down, they were already starting to feel the pinch. Because so much of their business comes from people going to and from events at Staples and the Convention Center and now all that’s gone.”
Likewise, Van Blaricum runs his own bar and restaurant from a neighborhood that once seemed promising, but amidst a shelter-in-place order might be more of a liability.
“There aren’t a ton of people that live down here yet,” says Van Blaricum, whose bar and restaurant are about a block from Pershing Square and a few doors down from the recently gentrified Grand Central Market. “We basically built a neighborhood bar in an area where there is not yet a neighborhood. A lot of our food is aimed at a late night bar crowd, and that’s obviously completely evaporated.”
Clint Melville
These are the kinds of neighborhoods, the ones not yet established but with potential, where young bar and restaurant owners set up shop. It’s not difficult to imagine them being the hardest hit, and if they fail, to imagine the effect on the neighborhoods that they put so much effort into revitalizing.
Virtually every restaurant owner I spoke to had had to let go of staff. For most, that means laying off hourly workers to make them eligible for unemployment, in the hopes of being able to eventually rehire them. The stimulus plan mandates up to a $600 per week across-the-board increase in unemployment benefits, but unemployment is based on reported income, which, as anyone who’s ever had a tip job can attest, tend to be underreported by anyone whose income comes mostly from tips.
“We had right under 50 employees and we laid off about 40 of them, and then we have 10 salaried members of our staff that we’re trying to keep employed,” says Kristen Essig, co-owner of Coquette and Thalia, an established fine dining restaurant and a new neighborhood spot, respectively, in New Orleans.
The numbers vary among the restaurateurs and bar owners I spoke to, based on so many factors it’s hard to account for — whether the restaurant can easily pivot to takeout, how loyal a fanbase they have, the rent on the space, what other things they can sell, etc.
“As a Chinese restaurant, I think we got lucky because when people are aware that restaurants are only doing carryout orders, Chinese food is probably one of the first things that comes to mind,” Richard Horner, a partner in the Chinese-American New Orleans concept, Blue Giant, told me. “Some of my friends in fine dining have implemented these curbside pickups or whatever and have seen a much bigger percentage drop in sales just because I think people aren’t thinking about the fine dining restaurants as a carryout option.”
“I’m selling gift cards just to try to get some money coming into the bar, and I’m selling merch, like sweatshirts, shirts, pint glasses and stuff,” says Van Blaricum. “All of that money, I’m not even keeping cost on it, I’m just passing all of it to the employees directly, just so they have some amount of income coming in.”
“Gift cards are like a no-interest loan to your favorite bars and restaurants,” Woods says.
So it seems with just about everything, smaller operations seem to be harder hit. I spoke to Clint Melville, who has run Rip City Grill, a tri tip cart, from the same location in Portland, Oregon for 13 years, who told me “I just said goodbye to one of my employees. I’m not really sure when I will see him again, but I told him if he needed cash to hit me up.”
Rip City Grill had expanded into a mobile food truck business serving local offices and a catering business, both of which are now on hold indefinitely.
Meanwhile, a similar large-small dynamic may be playing out among the purveyors supplying those restaurants — the stay-at-home requirements may be a blip for supermarkets, but a disaster for smaller, more specialized farmers that sell to fine dining restaurants.
“I don’t know how long they’re going to be picking vegetables, I don’t know how long they’re going to be slaughtering pigs, all of these are jobs that require people to do them,” Essig says. “Trying to keep that supply chain going is so important because of that. As soon as people stop buying en masse, people start losing their jobs in other areas. We’ve already had just our reps for distributors are starting to lose their jobs because they don’t need 20 reps for the 25 restaurants or whatever’s open in New Orleans.”
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that people are suddenly aware of workers that may once have been taken for granted, and they’re strengthening their communities out of necessity.
“We have turned Thalia into a community kitchen where we’re trying to feed as many industry people as possible, helping them with family meals, and then continuing to provide our laid-off employees with family meals as well so that we are at least still working through,” says Essig. “We’re doing some work with a really fantastic organization called the Red Beans Parade. They started out as a Mardi Gras group, but they do a lot of philanthropic work throughout the community. My friend Devin DeWulf runs it and he has been gathering donations from the public to support paying restaurants for meals that we are sending to hospital and emergency workers. We’re doing those hospital meals and the staff meals out of Thalia and then we’re doing our general public pickup of to-go food from Coquette.”
There’s a similar effort underway in LA, and other restaurants have been trying to use the facilities to feed all the laid-off industry service staff.
Family meal to those in need is top priority. We need a minute to get caught up. Regular delivery and curbside pick up after those in need are fed today. Thanks for y’alls patience. https://t.co/6v2yDeoxVU
It’s unclear how long restaurants will be able to do it, but it’s nice to see community step in where government is still absent. Whereas the stock market is so often held up as the benchmark of economic health, for most of us in the non-shareholding class, losing a paycheck or a favorite local haunt is the more immediate hardship. Consumer choice can only ever get us so far, of course, but almost all the restaurant owners I spoke to say there are things you can do to help restaurants and their employees through the rough patch.
“I think one of the biggest things that you can do is that there are a lot of restaurants that are using their social media platforms to call for federal action. We have a lot of action, but how that money is going to be distributed amongst all of the different industries — it’s great that the aviation industry is going to get $50 billion or whatever. What’s the small restaurant with under 50 employees, what am I going to get?” Essig says.
“Then also, just see who’s doing the work, see who’s contributing. If you don’t know how to help a local restaurant that you’re a fan of, call them,” Essig says. “They are literally sitting in their restaurants trying to figure something out.”
“We’re all just sitting here. It’s like being in detention,” Horner says. “I’m just happy to talk to a new person. We are genuinely appreciative of every single person who’s come through and bought food right now.”
“I’ve seen some Instagram things where people are tagging restaurants that they like,” Van Blaricum says. “I think honestly, probably the best way is if there’s a place that you like, look on the website, check their Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or whatever, and see if you can figure out what hours they still have and how you can order from them.”
There was a lot the government could have done to help an industry that’s an integral part of so many of our daily lives, from offering healthcare to furloughed workers to rent and utility freezes for restaurant owners, or simply stepping in to pay workers salaries as in Denmark, rather than giving the biggest chunk of money to banks. But in the absence of that, it seems “call your congressman” and “vote with your dollar” are about the best that we’ve got.
“The scariest part of all of this is just the uncertainty,” Van Blaricum says. “If there were a single event that just had obvious repercussions that you could quantify right now, and go, ‘Okay, we’re closed for two weeks, that’s X-amount of dollars, and so we need to take out this loan or ask for this amount of deferral or whatever,’ it would be a lot easier to handle. I’m obviously going to try to get the landlord again to do some kind of abatement, but are we talking about a one-month abatement? Or is it going to be a thing where we’re asking for three months?”
It’s happened to me I don’t even know how many times by this point.
I see a famous person trending on Twitter, click on their name fearing the worst, and the top result isn’t “Betty White, Dead at 98” (phew!). It’s some random tweet from an account with 300 followers about how they, too, feared the worst, along with a GIF of actor Denzel Washington looking relieved. It happened to me yesterday, when Jack Black was the number-one trending topic on Twitter. Nervously, I was greeted with this.
I hate it. Not that Betty White isn’t dead — I’m glad Betty White is alive and Jack Black is doing Jack Black things — or even our collective (if Twitter algorithm-futzing) worry about a national treasure passing away (don’t joke about National Treasure star Nicolas Cage being dead; luckily, he’ll outlive us all). No, I hate that Denzel GIF. So much.
I’m not the only one.
God DAMN I wish I could mute that fucking gif of Denzel Washington. Y’all use it everytime a celebrity is trending.
In response to that last tweet, “Yes, yes they are.” They’re the same people who have notifications for when Donald Trump tweets, so they can claim to be “FIRST.” Reply guys, in other words. “The top reply to a Trump tweet is guaranteed to get in front of hundreds of thousands of eyes. That’s likes and retweets, not to mention profile views, replies, and new followers,” BuzzFeed wrote about the obnoxious phenomenon. At least the Trump repliers are usually dunking on the president or sharing poorly-designed memes — the Denzel GIF is the Twitter version of the guy who still does the Borat voice.
Denzel deserves better. Denzel is a great actor, a two-time Oscar winner, nine-time nominee. But I fear that in 30 years, people won’t remember him for his performances in Malcolm X or Glory — he’ll become the next Robert Redford, someone who’s too often associated with a meme. (It’s unclear who created the GIF, although Know Your Meme notes that one of its earliest known uses “was by ArcheAge Forums member Bearspeed on November 18, 2014,” a day that will live infamy.) That would be a shame.
Part of the issue is that both the Redford and Washington (I would hire that law firm) GIFs are from lesser-known movies in their filmography. For the former, it’s Jeremiah Johnson; for the latter, it’s Fallen, a Gregory Hoblit thriller about two Philadelphia detectives, played by Washington and John Goodman, who investigate a copy-cat killer. But there’s a ’90s supernatural twist, because of course there is. “This NYPD Blue-meets-The X-Files thriller stars an under-energized Denzel Washington as a homicide detective with a strange bond to a dead serial killer,” the mixed Entertainment Weekly review reads. “The evil spirit that once inhabited the murderer is now on the loose, passed from one soul to another.”
It would not surprise you to learn that the movie (written by Elia’s son and Zoe’s father, Nicholas Kazan) begins with Washington, in voiceover, saying, “I want to tell you about the time I almost died.” The GIF-friendly moment occurs about an hour-and-a-half into the two-hour film, while Detectives Hobbes (Washington) and Jonesy (Goodman) are sharing a laugh and philosophizing in the office. Here’s how the scene plays out:
Jonesy: Meanwhile, Delores says we’re put here to do one thing.
Hobbes: One thing? What’s that?
Jonesy: It’s different. It’s different for everybody. Hers is lasagna.
Hobbes: Lasagna? And just one thing, not two or…?
Jonesy: Maybe two, I don’t know. It’s just her opinion, Hobbes. But it’s like when a moment comes, we either do the right thing… or wrong.
Hobbes: When do you know when your moment comes?
That’s when a phone rings, triggering Washington’s reaction. So, every time you see someone share the GIF on Twitter to celebrate, I dunno, Vin Diesel or Bugs Bunny not being dead, you can now think of Denzel Washington and John Goodman discussing lasagna in a movie where an evil spirit is unleashed on the world after a serial killer gets the electric chair. Oh, and I forgot to mention that Fallen also stars James Gandolfini.
Hm, maybe I like the GIF now?
Maybe not. But what should supplant it? (I’m not so naive as to believe people responding to tweets with movie GIFs will ever be retired. Otherwise, the SpongeBob content factory would be out of business). Should it be another Denzel GIF, something from Training Day or The Hurricane? While I would love for Twitter to be swamped with Roman J. Israel, Esq. GIFs, I’m going to suggest another moment from Fallen.
WARNER BROS.
It’s the perfect reaction to anyone who uses the Denzel GIF. I feel relieved already.
In an alternate, inarguably worse timeline, there is no The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, no The Colbert Report, no “Prince Charles Scandal,” no Chuck Noblet. There is only Stephen Colbert, Saved by the Bell star. During Wednesday’s at-home taping of The Late Show, Colbert confessed to guest Ryan Reynolds that he auditioned for the ironically (?) adored high school-set sitcom that aired on NBC from 1989-1993. He’s not exactly a Zack Morris type, though, and it’s hard to imagine Colbert as the muscular Slater, either. That must mean, yup, Colbert as Screech. Like I said, the darkest timeline.
“My first professional audition, 1986, they came to Chicago,” Colbert told Reynolds. “I was a student at Northwestern University, and someone had seen me do something. Somebody had scouted me at school. I got called down to a casting agent on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. I walk in and they hand me the [script]. I was auditioning for the part of…was the character’s name Screech? I auditioned for Screech. No, I’m not joking.”
Colbert continued:
“I’m not making this up. Imagine how that character ended up in broadcast. I did my audition and they said to me, ‘There’s a term you’re going to need to know about as a professional. It’s called over-the-top. You just went over-the-top. Don’t do that anymore.’ I saw the subtle, I saw the subtle interplay of status dynamics that Dustin Diamond brought to that part.”
Just think, that could have been Colbert as “Alumnus Guy #1” in American Pie Presents: The Book of Love and releasing his own (fake) sex tape, Screeched – Saved by the Smell. I bet he would still trade it all — the Emmys, the Peabodys, the best-selling book — to have appeared in a single episode of Saved by the Bell: The College Years.
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