Daily Archives: April 17, 2022

This week, Alyssa Nakken became the first woman to coach on the field in MLB history, Dolly Partons cake mixes and frosting line became available in stores, and the Kardashians returned.

Heres what NPRs Pop Culture Happy Hour crew was paying attention to and what you should check out this weekend.

I am loving Julia on HBO Max. Its a mini-series following Julia Childs rise from cookbook author to TV personality, and it shows her and her marriage in a light that I havent seen before. Her frustrations, insecurities, ambition, and swearing are all front and center.

The show is also just a feast for the eyes. Its got all those colorful 1960s sets and costumes. Everything is beautiful, the cast is terrific, and I cannot say enough good things about Julia. Kristen Meinzer

Jerrod Carmichaels Rothaniel is his latest stand-up special for HBO, and it is a complete 180 from The Carmichael Show. He leaves himself exposed in a way that I havent seen from him or from most comedians, really.

In the special, as you might have heard, Carmichael comes out as gay. I love the way he talks about his coming out process because I feel like a lot of pop culture treats it as a sort of one-and-done situation. You have the dining room table conversation with your parents and you never have to come out again, you just move on with your life. And thats not his story. And especially as a 34-year-old coming out that adds a whole other level of complication. I just found it so lovely and so breathtakingly honest. And Bo Burnham, who directed the special, adds so many interesting visual departures from what we generally expect of stand-up specials. It was incredible. Inkoo Kang

Everyone needs to watch Everything Everywhere All at Once. Ive watched it maybe three times already and it is one of the best movies Ive seen, maybe ever.

It talks about family, motherhood, love and nihilism. It touches on how maybe nothing matters, but also everything does and it really makes you appreciate the important things in your life. The movie made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me angry, and basically, just feel every emotion Ive ever felt and ever could feel in my entire life. I would highly recommend it. Laura Sirikul

Our Flag Means Death is a fantastic comedy series on HBO Max. Imagine, if you will, the sensibility of What We Do In the Shadows and Wellington Paranormal brought to the genre that is: swashbuckling pirate. Its not a mockumentary, but it does have that Taika Waititi essence to it and is based on a true story, which is maybe the weirdest thing about it.

Rhys Darby, finally getting the spotlight hes always deserved, plays Gentleman Pirate Stede Bonnet, a nobleman who really did wake up one day and decided to become a pirate and did, eventually, meet up with Blackbeard, played in the show by Taika Waititi. This show knows exactly the vibe its going for and nails it from the jump. It is so assured and so smart and so deeply queer, so it gets my highest recommendation. Glen Weldon

NPR intern Fi OReilly adapted the Pop Culture Happy Hour segment Whats Making Us Happy into a digital page. If you like these suggestions, consider signing up for our newsletter to get recommendations every week.

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What's making us happy: A guide to your weekend reading and viewing WABE - WABE 90.1 FM

The parent-child relationship has been the nucleus of 33-year-old Ocean Vuongs writing. The American poets family fled Vietnam to a refugee camp in the Philippines before migrating to the US. His father abandoned them. His mother worked in a nail salon. In one of the most compelling poems in his Forward prize-winning 2017 debut collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, he imagines dragging his fathers body out of the sea, turning him over, and seeing a gunshot wound in his back. His 2019 novel, On Earth Were Briefly Gorgeous, is a series of letters from a Vietnamese-American son to his illiterate mother a tale that mirrors much of Vuongs own life. Time Is a Mother is his second poetry collection, and was written in the aftermath of his mothers death.

Theres something about Vuongs writing that demands all of your lungs. The succinct line arrangement and absence of full stops in poems such as Dear Rose force you to breathe heavy, as throughout this episodic poem Vuong talks tenderly to his dead mother about her journey as an immigrant from Vietnam to the US. He fills the poem with vivid imagery: flying bullets, corpses, Wonder Bread dipped in condensed milk and the fermentation of fish. He also wonders if shes still illiterate:

you bought me pencils reader I couldnot speak so I wrote myself intosilence where I stood waiting for you Ma to read me do you read me now

Being led by urge and compulsion feels central to the emotional landscape of Time Is a Mother, sometimes to the point of recklessness. The painterly opener, The Bull, sets the tone for this sense of wild abandon. The narrator of the poem is bewitched by the bulls beauty; its kerosene-blue eyes and fur so dark it purples the night around it. I had no choice. I opened the door.

Vuong, to varying degrees, illustrates what it means to be out of control. Some of the moments feel like stock images; playing air guitar in a backwards wedding dress as seen in Beautiful Short Loser, or hitting rock-bottom in my fast car going nowhere, in The Last Prom Queen in Antarctica. But its the candid, unphotogenic angles with bad lighting that are the most memorable, as in Rise & Shine, where he touches on drug addiction.

Scraped the last $8.48from the glass jar.Your days worth of tipsat the nail salon. Enoughfor one hit.

Poems like American Legend reveal the heights of Vuongs self-destruction. Here, we see the lengths one might go to for intimacy, as a son crashes his car to get physically closer to his father.

he slammedinto me &we huggedfor the first timein decades.

Still, underneath the macabre scenes is an innocent curiosity and thirst for truth and beauty. These ghost poems are about the cavernous corners of loss, grief, abandonment, trauma and war, but that doesnt result in nihilism or apathy for life; in fact, Vuong approaches death like an entrance rather than an ending. I was made to die but Im here to stay, he asserts in The Last Dinosaur.

Not Even is packed with laconic matter-of-fact sentences that blast. He writes with an audacious energy here. Sentences such as Some call this prayer, I call it watch your mouth, feel like one liners. He fills the poem with pregnant pauses, sometimes suffixing phrases with Ha to inspire awkward laughter. Absurdity is in abundance in this poem, but its the way Vuong uses comedic timing that surprisingly provides the most arresting and evocative moment:

Rose, I whispered as they zipped my mother in her body bag, get out of there.Your plants are dying.

You may have heard these stories about Vuongs life, his family history, and the tragedies of his people who lay mangled under the Time photographers shadow before. You may well hear them again in the future, but because Vuong plays with time by the millisecond slowing down or speeding up old memories or conversations he uncovers new enlightening details that have a life of their own.

He stood alone in the backyard, so dark the night purpled around him.I had no choice. I opened the door& stepped out. Windin the branches. He watched me with kerosene-blue eyes. What do you want? I asked, forgetting I had no language. He kept breathing,to stay alive. I was a boy which meant I was a murdererof my childhood. & like all murderers, my godwas stillness. My god, he was stillthere. Like something prayed forby a man with no mouth. The green-blue lamp swirled in its socket. I didntwant him. I didnt want him tobe beautiful but needing beautyto be more than hurt gentleenough to hold, I reached for him. I reached not the bull but the depths. Not an answer butan entrance the shape ofan animal. Like me.

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Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong review writing that demands all of your lungs - The Guardian

Warning: Spoilers! Moreover, this post wont make a ton of sense if you havent seen the movie.

In the mind-bend-y, meta-narrative, sci-fi/comedy-drama/martial arts extravaganza Everything Everywhere All at Once (which arrived to ecstatic reviews in theaters nationwide Friday), it is perhaps fitting that an everything bagel of all things should be deployed as a doomsday device. Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn, a scatterbrained laundromat owner with mounting debt and a crumbling marriage, who finds herself unwittingly thrust into the multiverse: literally tripping and kung-fu kicking her way across multiple dimensions, tapping into the power of alternate selves via verse jumping and, incidentally, trying to prevent the destruction of reality as we know it. The vehicle for that destruction: an obnoxiously literal bagel created by Evelyns nemesis, the nihilistic god-queen Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu), imbued with the power to suck everything into its black-hole-like vortex of nothingness. Um yeah!

EEAAOs writer-directors, Daniels Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert cram in a truly absurd number of outside cinematic references, visual allusions, non sequiturs, in-jokes, and cultural flotsam harvested from distant fringes of the internet because, as they put it, This movie is about everything. The pair single out Hong Kong cinematic sensualist Wong Kar-wai (for whom Everything Everywhere All at Once co-star Ke Huy Quan formerly served as as an assistant director) for special appreciation, along with the chef-protagonist of the animated rat romp Ratatouille (who is chopped and screwed by Daniels into a deliciously bizarre anthropomorphic animal called Raccacoonie).

The self-described maximalist filmmakers rose to fame directing such sublimely insane music videos as DJ Snakes Turn Down for What (a twerking odyssey starring Kwan) and the Sundance Directors Awardwinning surrealist dramedy Swiss Army Man (in which Daniel Radcliffe stars as a farting corpse). Here, they walk us through their inspirations the magical thinking, scientific calculations, beloved relatives, appreciation for Asian American culture creators, and competency porn that resulted in Everything Everywhere All at Once.

EEAAOunfolds within a multiverse where multiple iterations of the same character exist in separate but parallel planes of time and space but come into dynamic confrontation with one another.

Daniel Scheinert: I started doing research into the multiverse in 2010. I was watching the documentary Shermans March.

Daniel Kwan: In this weird, self-destructive movie, the documentarian/protagonist Ross McElwee is bouncing between women. But one he meets is a linguist and she talks about modal realism. And I started doing more research radical learning about the multiverse theory. Just the idea in almost every single art form or medium that there is a version where theyre trying to tackle infinity. Of course quantum physics has its own version of that. Mathematics has its own. So all these different mediums are trying to point towards infinity. Thats really appealing to us because were maximalist filmmakers. The multiverse became a vessel for us to point at infinity in a way that most other premises probably wouldnt allow for.

Scheinert: As silly as our movies are, we enjoy reading pop science.

Kwan: Then, as we were working on the movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse came out. It was a little upsetting because we were like, Oh shit, everyones going to beat us to this thing weve been working on.

Scheinert: I feel like Rick and Morty was the first.

Kwan: Yeah. It was actually hard to watch because we had already been working on the draft for a while. Watching the second season of Rick and Morty was really painful. I was like, Theyve already done all the ideas we thought were original! It was a really frustrating experience. So I stopped watching Rick and Morty while we were writing this project.

In one alternate universe, the disheveled Evelyn is an A-list movie star and her nerdy, fanny packwearing husband, Waymond, is an illustrious businessman resplendent in a perfectly tailored suit. They meet for a street-corner rendezvous backdropped by falling rain and a saxophone soundtrack conjuring a mood of exquisite romantic yearning that will be instantly recognizable to the Criterion Collection set as touchstones of Hong Kong art-house auteur Wong Kar-wai.

Kwan: We could have easily gone into parody with this. A lot of time when people are doing allusions, theyre usually shooting for the most recognizable references so that everyone can be like, Oh, I know what that is and now Im in on the joke. This was less about parody and more just playing with the genre, playing with all the things that we love and using the multiverse to let them all collide.

Scheinert: Wong Kar-wai leans heavily on imagery, not just dialogue. So we were just trying to create a shorthand for the audience even if they dont get the reference. We wanted to make sure they had some ways to tell the universes apart.

Kwan: We both grew up loving kung-fu movies, loving anime, Wong Kar-wai, all these things. A lof of it just happens to be Asian: Asian stories made by Asian creators.

Scheinert: Those stories, those filmmakers, and those movies felt useful to pair up with these characters.

The movies craziest fight sequence takes place in an IRS auditors office where Evelyn now possessed of high-level kung-fu skills must face off against guards attempting to level up against her by bearing down, rectum first, on IRS trophies shaped like sex toys in order to unleash hidden strength and combat capacities.

Scheinert: Late in the writing process, Dan pointed out that, in this concept of verse-jumping where you have to do something crazy or strange or statistically unlikely to jump, we never had a scene where anyone was fighting over the weird action. We didnt milk the premise as much as we could.

Kwan: The trope is usually two people are fighting and then the gun gets knocked out of the hand and then theyre struggling to fight over the gun.

Scheinert: Its like the doomsday device: What would be the weirdest thing to fight over? We spitballed and settled onto trying to get something into your butt is pretty funny. We could do it very high stakes. But it could also be Jackie Chan playful.

Late in the film, Evelyn and her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu) who is also Jobu Tupaki verse-jump away from the Sturm und Drang of previous scenes to a universe where they can peacefully coexist as small, round boulders overlooking a gorgeous Grand Canyonesque vista. But of course the mother-daughter bickering does not end there.

Kwan: The rock thing comes from a confluence of things. Theres a childrens book called Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. A donkey turns into a rock and basically is isolated from his family. One of our friends is an animator and video-game maker named David OReilly. He made this game called Everything. Its a game where you can literally play as anything. Literally, you can be a toenail clipping, you can be a fire hydrant, you can be an antelope, you can be a rock. And theres maybe a dozen different kind of rocks you can be. Just rolling around

Scheinert: just feels good.

Kwan: It feels good and that is really beautiful. The whole purpose of the game is you have to look at it and not press anything. Its a game where the longer you dont press anything

Scheinert: the more you progress.

Kwan: He called it a relax-em-up instead of a shoot-em-up. The last thing is, I remember when I was really young, my first girlfriend ever said something that always stuck with me. Sometimes I just wish I was a rock. So I didnt have to feel everything. As we were working on this movie about noise and chaos, we realized we needed a moment where we can give people the opposite. And what better place than a universe where life doesnt exist?

Occupying a universe in which she is a hibachi chef, Evelyn uses knife and spatula-wielding prowess to nimbly fend off attackers. Her restaurant rival: a handsome young grill man (Harry Shum Jr.) with a suspicious raccoon tail sticking out from beneath his chefs toque. Turns out an anthropomorphic raccoon named Raccacoonie manipulates his actions behind the stove in much the same way Remy the rat controlled Alfredo Linguini in Ratatouille.

Scheinert: There were a lot of steps in the development of that joke. Our producer Jonathan Wang, his dad was Chinese and an inspiration for the movie. He loved movies but never could remember the names of them. Jons family would collect the different titles that Dad had come up with for movies. One time he was like, Oh I saw a very good movie called Shooky Shylock. They were like, What is Shooky Shylock?! He was like, Its like Iron Man but hes a detective and he solves crimes in London; it was Sherlock Holmes. His favorite one was Outside Good People Shooting and it took him a while to figure out that he had seen Good Will Hunting. So early days, we thought Evelyn could be similar. Then the idea that whatever she got wrong was real was a very exciting way to explore the multiverse.

Kwan: The Waymond character says, If you can imagine it, then somewhere out there it exists. We realized there has to be a scene in which Michelle rides the guy and controls him like Ratatouille. That whole thing becomes its own arc. Thats always when we know a joke is going to be worth pursuing when first the idea is so ridiculous that we cant stop thinking about it. Then we find a way to clean it up and close it off with something thats epic and beautiful and cathartic or whatever. Then the last cherry on top was we always imagined Randy Newman would be the voice.

Scheinert: In the first draft it said, Theres a raccoon on his head voiced by Randy Newman. We never thought wed get Randy but we did!

Scheinert: Initially it was just a chef. Then there was a moment where we started getting self-conscious about some of the Asian American tropes that are in the film. At the same time, so many of them were just true. Dan would be like, That is what my grandads laundromat looked like. Then we started embracing them and just getting excited about complicating them and making them fun and different and taking things that are usually just a punchline and living in them a little longer. Also: Hibachi chefs are awesome!

Kwan: Theyre just badasses as far as the skill goes. French chefs would lose in a fight against a Japanese steakhouse chef, obviously. It was a very visual, fun idea inspired by going to those birthday parties growing up with the flaming onion candles or whatever.

Scheinert: Oh my God, that blew my mind as a kid. I was like, Why isnt every restaurant like this?

With a SWAT team closing in on her and Waymond, Evelyn unlocks her potential as a sign-spinner a.k.a. a human billboard; one of those people you see on street corners dancing and acrobatically flipping their sign like a pair of nunchucks to dispatch and disarm a cohort of heavily armed men.

Kwan: We spend so much time on YouTube or Instagram and all the things that rise to the top are people being exceptional. Theres a term for it: competency porn. People love watching people who are competent at what they do. When we were working on this movie, I could just look up competency-porn montages and see people doing incredible stuff. You see sign-spinners and knife-twirlers and

Scheinert: people who lay bricks perfectly. Theres some people who can do it so fast.

Kwan: That would have been a universe. Someones coming at her and she just builds a wall.

Scheinert: We got excited about specifically tapping into a lot of universes where someone has a really impressive skill but its one that is often overlooked or underpaid. That was more interesting than going to a universe where shes a brilliant mathematician

Kwan: or a CIA agent. It was way more fun to just make the everyday normal person feel like a superpower. Then you pair that with the fact we knew the fight scene was going to be with riot shields and things like that. People have been using shields to fight for a while. Obviously Captain America has been doing that. But we just wanted to have a very playful take. Our choreographers did such a good job with that prompt. Were like, What can you do with the sign?

Scheinert: Michelle really had to practice her human directional skills.

The movies most surreal subplot involves a world in which humanity has evolved to possess comically elongated sausage fingers. Evelyn finds herself in a romantic relationship with her IRS auditor, Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis), in this universe. And as an expression of love, the two shoot ketchup and mustard out of their fingertips into one anothers mouths.

Kwan: Its not an original idea. If you look online, youll see people sticking fake nails on hot dog fingers and stuff like that. I think there is something very funny about the idea that our fingers look like hot dogs. But we werent interested in them until we figured out what the full arc was. Again, theres a funny initial joke but then you have to wonder, Okay, what purpose is it serving? And ultimately, am I going to get something really meaningful or cathartic on the other end of it? We dont really fully commit to an idea until the whole thing starts to come alive.

Scheinert: We wanted to take Evelyn somewhere that would break her brain, somewhere that shed hate. Shed be like, No this universe does not exist, and we threw a lot at the wall. The idea stuck because of the visual and we were like, She will look around herself and she will be like, That is my auditor. I already hate her. And she has gross hands and she is trying to touch me. Then we wanted it to be as challenging as possible to make her accept this universe. So getting her to the place where she consents to the mating ritual and squirts herself with the hot dog and mustard that was the goal. Can we get her there? We had to get Michelle there too. We had to convince her that it was worth doing.

I think she was like, Okay maybe. Ill see. Ultimately, it was Jamie the fact that Jamie agreed to do it gave Michelle the confidence to be like, Alright. Jamie did the final dance first and then was like, Your turn, Michelle.

Kwan: Theres a scientific calculation you can do for any object in the universe called a Schwarzschild radius, an object that when you compress it down to that radius becomes a black hole. It becomes a singularity and its hypothetical. But the idea is, at a certain density, anything will become a black hole. So everyone has their Schwarzschild radius. Wouldnt it be funny if she did that to an everything bagel? Because this movie is about everything. It started as just a throwaway joke.

Scheinert: We spent a while inventing the religion of the bagel followers. So many things didnt stick. Shes a nihilist; should there be dogma? Should there be a book? What should their practices be as a religion? The bagel stuck because it became such a useful, simple symbol that we could point to as filmmakers. And you dont have to explain it much beyond the joke.

Kwan: It did two things. It allowed us to talk about nihilism without being too eye roll-y. And it creates a MacGuffin: a doomsday device.

If in the first half of the movie people think that the bagel is here to destroy the world, and in the second half you realize its a depressed person trying to destroy themselves, it just takes everything about action movies and turns it into something more personal. Again, like all our ideas, it starts as a kernel that just makes us laugh. And then the gravity of that idea starts to pull in all these other things, until it becomes its own thing that we cant even take credit for sometimes. This became what it had to become and I cant imagine it being any different now.

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Everything Everywhere All at Once's Influences, Explained - Vulture

Americas attempt to vaccinate the world against Covid is about to come to an end.

We are at a point now where without additional funding we are going to have to start winding down our programming, said Jeremy Konyndyk, the leader of the United States Agency for International Developments Covid-19 task force. Such funding does not appear to be forthcoming. Our gruesomely dysfunctional politics are going to lead to more illness and death across the globe, and were increasing the odds that a new viral mutation will once again upend American life. If it does, we might call it the filibuster variant.

Even for a body as broken and ineffectual as Congress, this level of self-sabotage is hard to fathom. The biggest risk we face domestically and globally is more new variants, said Konyndyk. Such variants, he said, are most likely to emerge in chronically immunocompromised populations, including people living with diseases like AIDS and tuberculosis; because they have trouble clearing the coronavirus, it lingers and has more opportunities to evolve.

Thats likely where Omicron came from, quite possibly where Delta came from, Konyndyk said. So making sure that we are targeting those populations for vaccination and then targeting them with the rollout of antivirals is the best insurance policy we have against new variants. Its not foolproof, but its the best we can do.

But it seems we are not going to do it. Part of the blame for this lies with House Democrats. Far more belongs to Senate Republicans.

The Democrats miscalculated last month when, amid internal dissension, they stripped a $15.6 billion Covid aid package from the $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill. Senate Republicans had insisted that the Covid aid come from money that was already appropriated but unspent. So congressional leaders devised a scheme drawing $7 billion from funds that had been set aside for state and local governments in last years American Rescue Plan.

House Democrats as well as governors in both parties had good reason to object, because state and local lawmakers had made their budgets with that money in mind. Twenty states got their American Rescue Plan money all at once, but in the remaining 30 states it was supposed to come in two tranches. Those states were suddenly looking at substantial budget cuts.

A bunch of House members said no, were not going to vote to cut our own state budgets and have to go home and explain why weve cut these budgets, said Representative Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

After a revolt among her own members, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forced to pull the Covid aid from the omnibus bill. But if House Democrats thought theyd get another chance to negotiate international Covid funds, they underestimated the nihilism of the Republican Party.

Because of the filibuster, Senate Democrats need 10 Republicans to support a stand-alone Covid bill, and Republicans are balking at more money for international Covid programs. Im frankly struggling, Chris Coons, a Democratic senator known for his commitment to bipartisanship, said of trying to negotiate an agreement. He describes a basic disagreement between the caucuses over the threat posed by Covid. A number of his Republican colleagues, said Coons, have told him, Were done with this pandemic.

Since theyre largely indifferent to whether additional Covid funding passes, some Republicans have used it as leverage in their demand for tougher border policies. Theyre holding up authorization of any more Covid aid unless the administration reinstates Title 42, a policy adopted in 2020 to rapidly expel migrants without letting them apply for asylum, all in the name of protecting public health.

The U.S.A.I.D. funding is not fungible the agency cant simply transfer resources from other programs to keep its vaccine program going, or to start providing antivirals like Paxlovid. As a last-ditch measure, Coons tried to get Republicans to agree to give the agency emergency authority to move its own money around to address the pandemic, but he couldnt get enough of them onboard.

As a result of this intransigence, many of the vaccine doses America already donated could go to waste. At this point, theres no longer a global vaccine shortage the problem is that many countries lack the infrastructure required to transport and administer them. The impasse in the Senate, Coons said, means we arent delivering millions of vaccine shots that weve already paid for.

Coons holds out hope that there could be a breakthrough in the Senate in three or four weeks, after it returns from recess. But its not easy to restart programs once theyve been stopped, and in the meantime, were pointlessly imperiling both our own health and the health of people all over the planet.

Theres also a political cost to abandoning the rest of the world on Covid. At a time of renewed great-power competition, Americas effective vaccines could give us a diplomatic advantage. Last year, said Coons, both Russia and China made big fanfares about delivering planeloads of vaccines to dozens of countries in the developing world. Those vaccines are ineffective against Omicron. Our vaccines are effective. Our Congress, unfortunately, is not.

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Opinion | The Unbelievable Stupidity of Ending Global Covid Aid - The New York Times