Why is Jeff Bezos’s space company backing racist Senator Tuberville?
John Legum has done an exemplary job on the Senator Tommy Tuberville race imbroglio that has been covered by just about every media organization over the past few days. Tuberville framed his explicitly racist rally talk this weekend in the usual “us” versus “THEM,” conflating the argument for reparations to the descendants of slaves to, well, criminality. How Tommy got there only Daffy Duck knows. The MAGA-hatted crowd, to be sure, lapped it up like biscuits and gravy. Classic Republican last-month-before-the-election rhetoric, but without, noticeably, the ceremonial dog-whistling. Donald Trump has provided the permission structure for modern day bigots to say the quiet part out loud.
After the racist diatribe, after the biscuits and the drippings had been removed, Legum followed the money to Tuberville’s corporate backers, and found — sapriste! — Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin. Will Jeff Bezos continue to support a bigot like Little Tommy? And what of Tuberville’s other corporate backers? “ … Tuberville's corporate supporters, including Home Depot, Pfizer, BAE Systems, UPS, Leidos, and Tysons Food, have thus far all remained silent,” notes Legum. Are they, he asks, hoping this is just seasonal midterm winds that will blow away? Will business be conducted as usual come the holiday season? “In any event, they are not yet compelled to let Tuberville's overt racism interfere with their relationship with the Senator, who will be in office until at least 2026.” (Popular Information)
Has the late night talk show format run its course? Or is it just evolving?
The surprise exit of Trevor Noah, the cancellation of Samantha Bee and the departing of James Corden (among others), has led to some chattering class conversation about the continuance of late night tv programming. Is it just a relic of the past in an era of On Demand? Jon Alsop at CJR considers the role of diversity — a somewhat recent addition to the late night calculus — in this conversation:
For one, recent moves have raised sharp questions around diversity in a corner of the media industry that, as with many others, has long been dominated by white men; of those departing their shows, Bee was a rare woman with a big late-night platform, while Noah was born to a Black mother and a white father in apartheid-era South Africa (the subject of his book Born a Crime) and Desus and Mero hail, respectively, from Jamaican and Dominican immigrant families in New York. (Also of note here: NBC last year canceled its show A Little Late with Lilly Singh, which actually aired very late, and didn’t replace it.) Replacements—for Noah and Corden, at least—have yet to be appointed, so opportunities to diversify the late-night space persist. Still, as Eric Deggans, NPR’s TV critic, wrote after Bee’s show was canceled, ‘It seems the space for original content in late night TV is slowly shrinking. And it’s happening just as women and people of color are getting real opportunities to join the party.’
Over at Harper’s Bazaar, another conversation about diversity and the imperiled late night talk show format was taking place. Chelsea Handler, Sam Jay, and Amber Ruffin talked about Reimagining the Late-night Talk Show, rewriting the rules of comedy and creating hyperspecific shows for the audiences that need them via Zoom with journos Ariana Marsh and Andrea Cuttler. “What you were doing was innovative because it was so unapologetically you,” Sam Jay said to Chelsea Handler. “I really appreciated it as a model in this genre. It doesn’t have to have that pandering vibe; you can make something hyperspecific in late night. Before shows like yours, it felt like you had to be Jimmy Fallon.” Ouch! Jimmy Fallon gets the gasface! To which Handler responded, “For me, it’s so important not to have things overproduced when you’re in a talk-show format.” Are we at the end of the era of not late night talk television, per se, but non-diverse, overproduced late night fare of yesteryear?
Arthouse film breakout and fantasy family marital arts movie Everything All At Once is a hit. Comparisons are being made to their success at the box office in North America, Australia, Taiwan and Russia to another surprise martial arts hit of an earlier age that ultimately was garlanded with Oscars, namely — Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But Everything has not only a racially diverse cast, but a gay lead. Stephanie Hsu, who plays Joy Wang, actress Michelle Yeoh’s daughter in the film, has a lesbian girlfriend. The excellent Michael Musto for Queerty asks Hsu about this, and the film’s success against that of Bros. “This movie is about so many things, and it has somehow surpassed identity politics and managed to tell a story about a family that happens to be Asian American and someone who happens to be queer,” Hsu replies. And on the success of Everything All At Once against the unfortunate failure of Bros: “It shows that you can’t put all the eggs in one basket. Every time, it’s a gamble. We think we can predict what audiences want, but we don’t know what art is capable of.”
Yesterday, Warner Bros. Discovery announced that it was ending its 40-year old TV writers development program and its equivalent pipeline program for directors. “For more than 40 years, the Warner Bros. writers’ workshop selected up to eight early-career writers (out of more than 2,500 annual submissions) with the immediate goal of staffing them on a WBTV-produced show and the longer-term goal of establishing their careers in the industry,” Rebecca Sun writes in The Hollywood Reporter. “Although the program was open to participants of all backgrounds, as was the Warner Bros. directors’ program, which also is shutting down, both were regarded as crucial pipelines for artists from historically excluded backgrounds who lacked the industry connections to enter the business the ‘traditional’ way.” Showrunner Latoya Morgan wrote: “What I want, more than anything, is for you not to lose hope. Doors may close, but windows always open. Paths are blocked, but we find our way to exactly where we are meant to be. Our energy is defiant, unbridled love, creativity and passion. Can't stop. Won't stop. Don't forget.” Liz Hsiao Lan Alper added: “This is why we need to tackle mini-rooms. I’ve done three rooms in three years. 10-15 week rooms that expected 40 week room quality. Budgets are minuscule. As a showrunner, if you can only hire 4 writers and the same money that gets a fresh voice gets you a 20 year vet…” And Akilla Cooper: “I got my first staff writing gig b/c of the WB Writers Workshop. The reason I can celebrate the release of a trailer for my movie today ties back to this workshop. It helped kick start so many careers. To see it scrapped in the name of capitalism is infuriating and heartbreaking.” (Rebecca Sun/THR)
Magnificent raconteur Christina Oxenberg tells the story of how she met Canadian portraitist Marcus Leatherdale. “I met him in New York City in 1980, just by chance, through Antonia de Portago, whom I had also met, just by chance,” Oxenberg begins. “But (de Portago) was part of the downtown cool scene, even if she was herself was planted in a more uptown elegant scene,” she continues and we follow, hanging on her every carefully chosen word. What follows is a warm and wise portrait of the portraitist — who I had never heard of until now — by Christina, who is, if you don’t already know, my favorite.
She writes of a New York almost unrecognizable now, simultaneously gritty and glamorous, where artist-intellectuals and the monied collaborated to make the downtown scene at night what it once was but no longer is. Back when Basquiat roamed the night. Listen for the Robert Mapplethorpe reference, but stay for Christina. (Royal Family Insider)
Everyone is talking about the Business Plot, the 1933 conspiracy that almost overthrew the American government. It is only natural, of course, considering the January 6 plot similarities and the time it took to develop the various projects that are all coming out right about now in droves. First, there is David O. Russell’s “Amsterdam,” doing terribly at the box office but — small comfort — getting critical raves. “It’s a historical fantasy that is written and acted like a comedic tall tale, but it’s all the more remarkable for its solid (albeit slender) basis in reality,” Richard Brody enthuses in The New Yorker. “It also takes its place in a recent, odd but significant subgenre of movies that has cropped up in response to the authoritarian and hate-filled deeds and rhetoric of the Trump era: resistance cinema.”
And then there is Rachel Maddow’s new podcast Ultra, which I plan on listening to tonight (first two episodes already dropped). “So you make it about 23 minutes into the episode, feeling like you’re in Amelia Earhart and D.B. Cooper territory, when finally you start to realize what you’re actually doing there: Of COURSE this business about Senator Lundeen and the mysterious plane crash was apparently somehow related to a Nazi agent infiltrating Congress as part of a plot to overthrow the US government,” Joe Pompeo writes in Vanity Fair. “That’s the gist of Ultra, which drops Monday, an eight-episode weekly audio series about the little-remembered Great Sedition Trial of 1944.” It’s 1944 all over again, by way of January 6th. To paraphrase Marx, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as episodic podcast.
I’ve written as early as 2006 about the idea of the revenge of the nerds, of how the libertarian bro culture of Silicon Valley has essentially conquered the world. And they are just as bad as their predecessors, for sure. In the end we are all descendants of apes, and the strivers after power eventually enact their own “ape laws.”
The Dirt newsletter is a private cultural pleasure. And today Jameson Rich tackles a subject I love — Slackers versus Strivers and how it plays out on TV. “But today the slacker has been replaced almost wholesale by the striver, a character known less by their human flaws and more by their accomplishments,” Rich writes. He continues:
Conventional narrative advice holds that a story is merely the action that occurs when a character attempts to reach the object of their desire. But what has tilted the Slacker/Striver binary has less to do with the definition of character and more to do with desire itself. What “we” want has changed, for many different reasons, but career and financial success have taken on greater importance while becoming materially more difficult to achieve. While selling out was once a label artists tried to dodge, it has become the goal that most pursue—endorsement or support of their work by corporate media that increasingly dictates what we do and don’t see.
Fascinating stuff. The slacker/striver binary is being erased on television, the last vestige of indie film! More here.
Finally, model Paulina Porizokova writes frenetically about women aging. And also sometimes about the sad ending of her marriage to the late Ric Ocasek. Sometimes she posts crying selfies. It is jarring and beautiful and honest content. Getting older means staring at Death more frequently than not. Today she writes about aging, again, which is shorthand for our impending last showdown with The Grim Reaper (sorry for being so downright morbid this crisp October afternoon).
“To me, it sometimes feel surreal that we have ‘a choice’ in how we appear to be aging.
You can, like @lisarinna , unapologetically embrace the full spectrum of professional help - or you can, like @_justinebateman_ , unapologetically embrace the changes.
”What I love about both of them is the ‘unapologetic’ part.
They refuse to be shamed and live their lives exactly the way they want. With honesty.
”Me, I’m in the strange center of the seesaw. One day I want to accept me exactly as I am, the next day I’ll stand pulling the skin in my face back to see what I would look like with a face lift.
“… To fix or not to fix.” That is the question, dear Reader. The notion of following a model aging on social media reminds me a little of the beginning of the forgotten Nabokov poem “Ode to a Model,” “I have followed you, model, in magazine ads through all seasons/ from dead leaf on the sod/
to red leaf on the breeze ..”
Of course for guys — at least for me — cosmetic surgery is not even an afterthought. But for so many women — especially those that benefitted from their looks when younger — it is a real possibility when getting older.