Lon

I recently graduated from the California State University Northridge school of Cinema and Television Arts with an emphasis in film production. Currently I'm working for an online jazz station; McQsJazz.com and it's pretty cool. On the side I'm working on breaking into the industry. One step at a time.

‘Jupiter’s Legacy’ Decodes The Superhero Genre Without Subverting It

by Glen Weldon

You’d be forgiven for wondering how Netflix’s Jupiter’s Legacy compares to other recent entries in the glut of “Wait, what if superheroes … but, you know, realistic?” content currently swamping streaming services. (To be fair, this “realistic superheroes” business is something we comics readers have been slogging through for decades; the rest of the culture’s just catching up. Welcome, pull up a chair; here’s a rag to wipe those supervillain entrails off the seatback before you sit down.)

So here’s a cheat sheet. Netflix’s Jupiter’s Legacy is …

  • Less cynical and empty than Amazon’s The Boys
  • Less bright and blood-flecked than Amazon’s Invincible
  • Less weird and imaginative than Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy
  • Less funny and idiosyncratic than HBO Max’s Doom Patrol
  • Less dark and dour than HBO Max’s Titans
  • Less innovative and intriguing than Disney+’s WandaVision
  • Less dutiful and disappointing than Disney+’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier
  • Less thoughtful and substantive than HBO’s Watchmen
  • Less formulaic and procedural than the various CW super-shows (which I include here only out of a sense of completism, not because they’re aiming for the same kind of performative faux-realism that drive most of these other series).

It’s unfair to make these comparisons, sure. But it’s also inevitable, given the crowded landscape of superheroes on TV right now. And in every one of those comparisons, Jupiter’s Legacy doesn’t necessarily come up short (it’s far better than The Boys, especially), but it does come up derivative. 

Makes sense: “Derivative” is a word that got slapped on the comics series it’s based on, by writer Mark Millar and artist Frank Quitely, which kicked off in 2013. Millar and Quitely would likely prefer the term “homage,” of course, and after all, the superhero genre is by nature nostalgic and (too-)deeply self-referential. So the fact that so many story elements, and more than a few images, of Jupiter’s Legacy (comics and Netflix series both) echo those found in the 1996 DC Comics mini-series Kingdom Come is something more than coincidental and less than legally actionable.

JUPITER’S LEGACY (L to R) BEN DANIELS as WALTER SAMPSON and JOSH DUHAMEL as SHELDON SAMPSON in episode 107 of JUPITER’S LEGACY. Cr. Marni Grossman/Netflix © 2021

Showrunner Steven S. DeKnight and his writers’ room have carved out only a thin, much more grounded slice of the comic’s sprawling multi-generational saga, but they’ve retained certain elements of family tragedy and Wagnerian recursiveness, wherein the sins of the father get passed to the son. They’ve also, smartly, retained the multiple-timeline structure of the comic as a whole, though they’ve pared it down and stretched it out over these eight episodes, clearly hoping for a multi-season pickup.

Readers of the comics will likely grow impatient at how little of the overall saga is dealt with here, but this review is aimed at those coming to the series fresh, who will find more than enough in this season to satisfy — it’s a whole story that hints at what’s to come without slighting what’s happening now.

The now in question switches between two eras. In 1929, immediately before and after the stock market crash, brothers Walter (Ben Daniels) and Sheldon (Josh Duhamel) are the sons of a successful steel magnate. Walter’s the diligent numbers guy, Sheldon’s the glad-handing optimist. Sheldon’s rich, smarmy friend George (Matt Lanter) is going full Gatsby, and muckraking reporter Grace (Leslie Bibb) runs afoul of Walter and Sheldon following a family tragedy.

Sheldon becomes beset by visions that will put him and several other characters on a path to their superhero origin story. Be warned: The series doles this bit out even more slowly than the comic — settle in for seven episodes’ worth of Duhamel clutching his head and shouting while trippy images flash by, hinting at his ultimate destiny.

In the present day, Sheldon is the all-powerful hero The Utopian, who is married to Grace, now known as Lady Liberty. Walter is now the telepathic hero Brainwave, and George is … nowhere to be seen.

The series has fun playing with the disconnect between the two timelines — characters from the 1930s story are either missing, or drastically transformed, in the present day, and while later episodes connect some of the dots, many of the most substantial changes are left to be depicted in future seasons.

The present-day timeline instead focuses on the generational rift between heroes of Sheldon and Grace’s generation and those of their children. There’s the brooding Brandon (Andrew Horton) who strives to live up to his father’s impossible example, and the rebellious Chloe (Elena Kampouris), who rejects a life of noble self-sacrifice and neoprene bodysuits for a hedonistic modeling career.

At issue: Sheldon’s refusal to acknowledge that the world has changed, and that the strict superhero code (no killing, no politics, etc.) that he lives by — and forces others to live by — may be obsolete, now that supervillains have escalated from bank robbery to mass slaughter. Younger heroes, including many of Brandon’s friends, feel compelled to protect themselves and the world around them through the use of deadly force.

Clearly it’s a fraught cultural moment to have fantasy characters who can fly and zap folk with eye-lasers deal with that particular all-too-real real-world issue; several scenes land far differently than they were originally intended.

But unlike other entries in the superhero genre, Jupiter’s Legacy is prepared to deal overtly, even explicitly, with something that films like Man of Steel and shows like The Boys too simply and reflexively subvert: The superhero ideal itself. 

The notion that an all-powerful being would act with restraint and choose only to lead by example is what separates superheroes from action heroes. Superheroes have codes; that’s the contract, the inescapable genre convention, the self-applied restriction that tellers of superhero tales impose upon their characters; navigating those strictures forces storytellers to get creative. Or at least, it should. The minute you do what so many many “gritty, realistic” superhero shows and movies do — dispense with that moral code, or pervert it, or attempt to argue it out of existence by portraying a villain so heinous and a world so fallen that murder is the only option, you’re not telling a superhero story anymore. You haven’t interrogated or inverted or interpolated the genre, and you certainly haven’t deconstructed it. You’ve abandoned it.

Say this much for Jupiter’s Legacy — it’s not content to wave the concept of a moral code away, or nihilistically reject it. It instead makes its central theme the need to inspect it, unpack it, and truly and honestly grapple with it. 

Which is not to say it doesn’t stack the deck by portraying a fallen modern world not worth saving — it does do that, usually through the lens of Sheldon’s daughter Chloe, who throws herself into a world of drugs, alcohol, sex and general narcissistic monstrousness. The show attempts to explain her sullen self-destructiveness as a reaction to her father’s unrealistic ideals, but in execution, her scenes prove cliche-ridden and bluntly repetitious. It’s one of several examples where the show’s choice to focus on and pad out one small part of the comic’s overall tale results in leaden pacing.

But even though it takes seven full episodes for the characters in the 1930s timeline to get to the (almost literal) fireworks factory of their superhero origin, it’s hard to argue that it isn’t worth all that extra time, as Duhamel, Bibb, Lanter and especially Daniels have a great time with the period setting. (There are two other actors who get brought into the superhero fold in this timeline, but they 1. aren’t allotted nearly enough screentime to really register and 2. represent spoilers.)

The period details of the 1930s timeline (Lanter was made to wear a waistcoat; Daniels’ pencil-thin mustache should win its own Hairstyle and Makeup Emmy), and the brewing conflict between the younger selves of Sheldon and Walter can’t help but make those scenes much more intriguing to watch than those set in the modern day. 

The ultimate effect is a lot like watching the 2009 film Julie and Julia, in that sense. If you imagine that Julia Child could fly and shoot lasers out of her eye-holes. 

And, really, who’s to say she couldn’t, after all?

CorrectionMay 7, 2021

An earlier version of this story identified Chloe as Walter’s daughter. She is Sheldon’s daughter.

A Black Samurai Fighting Giant Mechas? ‘Yasuke’ Asks, Why Not?

by Andrew Limbong

At first, it’s not clear who’s fighting whom. All you know is that it’s Kyoto, 1582 and dudes are getting absolutely sliced up. Then come in the big mechas, and they have huge guns and swords for arms that contribute to the bloodshed. And then there are the sorcerers summoning beams of arrows that would cut their opponents down if not for those other sorcerers conjuring protective shields.

This is the world of Yasukethe new anime series on Netflix about the real-life Black warrior who served under Oda Nobunaga, one of the great unifiers of feudal Japan. The show’s creator, LeSean Thomas, first read about Yasuke in 1960s children’s bookKuro-suke, by Kurusu Yoshio. It is, of course — with the aforementioned mechas and sorcerers — not a straight take on history. “Knowing that we were going to be Trojan horse-ing the story through the beautiful medium of Japanese anime,” said Thomas in an interview, “why not?”

Thomas, originally from the Bronx, is a Tokyo-based animator who worked with MAPPA, the prestigious animation studio, to bring Yasuke to life. His previous Netflix show, Cannon Busters, was a similarly fantastical and adventurous romp based on his own original comic book series. With Yasuke he didn’t really see the need to do a straight-ahead version of a guy with such a scant historical record. “I don’t think true historical biopics in Japanese anime are popular,” he said. “Historians will like it, but it’s kind of boring for the average viewer.”

Instead, this Yasuke, voiced by LaKeith Stanfield, is a washed up ex-samurai loner, who finds himself in the care of a young girl with special abilities. He’s quiet and standoff-ish at first, like all the great archetypal lone-wolf heroes. He’s tall, scarred, kind of jacked. And, instead of being bald like he is in that ’60s children’s book Thomas read, he’s got dreadlocks. Which was kind of a big deal for musician Flying Lotus, who did the music and served as an executive producer on the show. He’s worked on animation before but this was his first time actually having a hand in crafting the story — which put his lifelong anime fandom to good use. In an interview, he talked about honoring Yasuke’s story while pushing new ideas, new sounds, and “a lot of things we just haven’t seen before, unfortunately.”

Which is as good a place as any to bring up the lack of Black characters in anime. While there have been some (including in Thomas’s Cannon Busters), it’s still few and far between enough that a release like Yasuke, with the Black character being front and center of the narrative, is notable. Flying Lotus told me about seeing Dragon Ball Super: Broly in theaters a while back, with, “nothing but Black kids in the audience. Nothing but,” he said. But when it comes to on-screen representation, “All we got is Piccolo, man. Piccolo don’t count.”

I think platforms like Netflix are trying to make anime spaghetti. Everyone loves spaghetti.

LeSean Thomas

(Real quick: if you’re not a Dragon Ball fan, Piccolo counts as a “person of color,” inasmuch as he’s green — and there’s not enough space here to unpack Mr. Popo — but “Piccolo is Black” is a take that’s gone from meme to almost canon in the Dragon Ball fanbase. As Flying Lotus says, with a hedging tilt to his voice, “he’s kind of a brother? Kind of. Kiiiiind of?”)

But the dearth of Black characters in anime and the rest of Japanese pop culture is changing, says Yoshiko Okuyama. She’s a professor of Japanese studies at the University of Hawaii, who specializes in film and manga. She says current population trends in Japan have made the country more “welcoming” to foreigners — if out of sheer necessity. She says there has been recent interest in portraying the historical figure Yasuke in Japanese pop culture, and “that kind of spotlight is an indication in Japanese interest in multiculturalism.”

Anime is growing as a global, multicultural artform, with the help of platforms like Netflix. As this happens, Yasuke creator LeSean Thomas has seen his fair share of gatekeepers and snobs trying to define what makes real, authentic anime. But he’s seen hip-hop grow from a small scene in the Bronx to becoming the “lingua-franca of youth music culture” around the world right now. No reason why anime can’t be the same. Or to compare it to another medium, “I think platforms like Netflix are trying to make anime spaghetti,” says Thomas. “Everyone loves spaghetti.”

This story was edited for radio by Nina Gregory and adapted for the Web by Andrew Limbong and Petra Mayer.

C. Tangana: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert

by Anamaria Sayre

The Tiny Desk is working from home for the foreseeable future. Introducing NPR Music’s Tiny Desk (home) concerts, bringing you performances from across the country and the world. It’s the same spirit — stripped-down sets, an intimate setting — just a different space.


After more than 13 months amid a global pandemic, C. Tangana’s extended family basking in the warmth of sobremesa with easy smiles and effortless baile looks otherworldly. But considering the Spanish rapper’s past year back home in Madrid, the simplicity feels fiercely authentic. (Check his mama and tía vibing in the corner.)

This first live performance of his latest album, El Madrileño (including a global premiere of a fresh single, “Me Maten”) buzzes with communal energy, spotlighting talent from across Latin landscapes. From Mexican Regional to Spanish flamenco, C. Tangana is simultaneously coming home and reaching out to bridge Latin music boundaries. He’s building a community of cross-cultural collaboration, rooted in a unifying love of language and tradition, making it clear he’s intent on giving everyone a seat at the table.

The entirety of the show, from impromptu harmony to string octet, hums along with a distinctly Spanish cadence, paying homage to the flamenco-infused streets the global superstar came up in. The concert’s star-studded cast of Spanish collaborators, including long-time friends (producers Alizzz and Victor Martínez) and new contributors (rumba legend Kiko Veneno and flamenco-pop icon La Húngara), are each spotlighted for their contributions to the record.

All these parts compound in a room full of people with a shared desire to connect and create juntos, manifesting an authentic joy we’ve seen again and again at the real Tiny Desk. And at the helm is C. Tangana, humming a melody and bringing the room to life: hands, harmonies, heartbeats, perfectly in sync.

SET LIST

  • C. Tangana and Antonio Carmona, “Me Maten”
  • C. Tangana and Kiko Veneno, “Los Tontos”
  • C. Tangana, “Demasiadas Mujeres”
  • C. Tangana, La Húngara and Niño De Elche, “Tú Me Dejaste De Querer”

MUSICIANS

  • C. Tangana: vocals
  • Alizzz: vocoder, keys
  • Victor Martínez : guitar, percussion
  • Antonio Carmona: vocals, percussion
  • Kiko Veneno: vocals, guitar
  • La Hungara: vocals
  • Niño De Elche: vocals, guitar
  • Juan Carmona: guitar
  • Huberto Morales: percussion
  • Lucia Fernada Carmona: vocals
  • Pilar Cerezo: vocals
  • Marina Carmona: vocals
  • África Heredia: vocals
  • María Rubio: vocals
  • Mariola Orellana: vocals
  • Patri Alfaro: vocals
  • Mari Estrada: vocals

STRING OCTET

  • Pablo Quintanilla
  • Paula Sanz
  • Franciso Palazón
  • Marina Arrufat
  • Paloma Cueto-Felgueroso
  • Adrián Vázquez
  • Irma Bau
  • Daniel Acebes

CREDITS

  • Video: Little Spain, Santos Bacana, Maria Rubio, Cris Trenas
  • Audio: Jorge Rodriguez, Sergio Jiménez, Pablo Kohler, Harto Rodriguez, El Madrileño, Alex Cappa
  • Director of Photography: Nauzet Gaspar
  • Art Director: Mariola Viejo
  • Costume Designer: Alex Turrión
  • Hair and Makeup: Miky Vallés
  • 1st AD: Joel Marquez
  • Editor: Maia de Zan Hatch
  • Color: Marti Somoza
  • Production Manager: Yago López Abril
  • Recording Engineers: Jorge Rodriguez, Sergio Jiménez, Pablo Kohler
  • Mixed: Harto Rodriguez, El Madrileño at Metropol Studios
  • Mastering Engineer: Alex Cappa at Metropol Studios

TINY DESK TEAM

  • Producer: Bobby Carter
  • Video Producer: Maia Stern
  • Audio Mastering: Josh Rogosin
  • Tiny Production Team: Kara Frame, Bob Boilen
  • Executive Producer: Lauren Onkey
  • Senior VP, Programming: Anya Grundmann

‘The Falcon And The Winter Soldier’ Finale Makes A Poignant Reveal

by Eric Deggans

Warning: There are spoilers aplenty here regarding the final episode in the first season of Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

It’s tough to imagine a better week for TV fans to meet a Black Captain America. 

Days after the world exhaled in relief as Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd, Marvel unveiled Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson as the new Captain America — in the process, making a poignant argument for why a Black hero would stand up to a defend a country that often mistreats people who look just like him.

The reveal came during the final episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, a Disney+ series that mixed splashy fight scenes and awesome cameos from underused Marvel movie characters with weighty talk about the nature of heroism. 

The consequence of the reveal was underscored by a new series title flashed at the end of the season finale: Captain America and the Winter Soldier. As any real superhero fan knows, the original Captain America — Chris Evans’ blue-eyed dreamboat Steve Rogers — decided to return to the 1940s and live out his life as a normal man at the end of Avengers: Endgame. Rogers’ last act in that movie was to hand his legendary shield over to Sam Wilson as an old man, encouraging his former sidekick to continue its heroic legacy.

But having a Black man step up to be a symbol of America at a time when police brutality and systemic racism are front-page issues couldn’t be a simple matter. 

Even though the first season of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier focused on a complicated plot about super-powered freedom fighters becoming terrorists, the real purpose was to spend six episodes transforming the Falcon. We watched him become a Black hero who could shoulder Captain America’s red-white-and-blue Vibranium shield, fully aware of all the issues he was taking on. 

“Every time I pick this thing up, I know there are millions of people out there who are going to hate me for it,” Wilson says in one poignant speech in the season finale. “Yet I’m still here. No super serum. No blond hair or blue eyes. The only power I have, is to believe we can do better.” At a time when average people are risking their safety to protest police brutality, putting so much on the line for the belief that America can be made better by the hard work of earnest people, that kind of speech feels like a rallying cry.

In the comic books, Marvel’s storytellers realized a long time ago that Captain America had the most impact when he challenged and resisted the nation’s exceptionalist propaganda, rather than reflecting it. So it was particularly satisfying to see this series create a Captain America for a new age – when so much of the nation’s systemic racism is directly challenged. 

This also explains why so much in this series outside of Sam Wilson’s storylines felt so underdeveloped, especially the supposed bad guys, terrorist/freedom fighters, the Flag Smashers. These were average people who had taken a substance similar to the “super soldier serum” which gave the original Captain America his increased speed, stamina and strength. If you need to dig into the complicated backstory of the Flag Smashers, you can read it here. 

Suffice it to say, these villains were so average, they added little beyond motivation for Wilson’s Falcon and Sebastian Stan’s Winter Soldier to bond. The Flag Smashers also gave a reason for the heroes to tap the expertise of a villain dedicated to killing anyone who takes a super soldier serum, Daniel Bruhl’s Baron Zemo.

I wish the show had also spent a little more time with John Walker, the PTSD-suffering ex-soldier initially selected by clueless American officials to be the new Captain America — only to lose the title when he murdered one of the Flag Smashers. Walker, played by blue-eyed celebrity son Wyatt Russell, is seen in the last episode with another compelling character, Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a hint we’ll see more of both.

Black characters accepting a subordinate status always rubs me the wrong way. So it was a revelation to see the argument made in this series that all the performance-enhancing serums, propaganda rallies and traditionally white-bread staffing decisions in the world can’t surpass a dedicated Black man determined to defend his nation while also holding it accountable.

Here, Walker was positioned mostly as a nightmarish example of what happens when an insecure, damaged guy chases the mantle of Captain America – and the super soldier serum – for all the wrong reasons. (I still don’t understand why his only punishment for killing a subdued terrorist suspect in broad daylight was losing a job. Though that does sound familiar.) 

I’ll also jump down the superhero fandom rabbit hole a bit more to complain about one other thing in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: the fight scenes. Marvel’s superhero movies have always been careful about how each hero’s power stacks up against others, even across movies. So it always irritated me a bit that these Flag Smashers, who are essentially average – if desperate – folks given great speed and strength from a serum, could successfully take on the Winter Soldier, a highly trained assassin with matching speed and strength, a Vibranium arm and who fought the original Captain America to a draw several times. OK. I feel better now.

I’ll be honest: As a Black comic book and superhero fan, I wasn’t always in love with Marvel’s big screen version of Sam Wilson/The Falcon. The films had a way of always reminding us he was Captain America’s second fiddle – in ways the character himself, a proud Black man, inexplicably encouraged. “I do what he does, just slower,” Wilson said, nodding toward beefcake white hero Steve Rogers in one memorable line from the 2014 film, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Ugh. 

Black characters accepting a subordinate status always rubs me the wrong way. So it was a revelation to see the argument made in this series that all the performance-enhancing serums, propaganda rallies and traditionally white-bread staffing decisions in the world can’t surpass a dedicated Black man determined to defend his nation while also holding it accountable. 

Pulling off that two-step of defense and accountability might just be the biggest feat this new Captain America achieves. 

And this Black superhero comics nerd can’t wait to see him try.

The 2021 Oscars Recap

by Linda Holmes, Aisha Harris, Glen Weldon, and Stephen Thompon

We are wrapping up this year’s Oscars. It was a big night for Nomadland, which took best picture, best actress for Frances McDormand, and a historic best director win for Chloé Zhao. But there were also huge upsets, most notably in best actor, where Anthony Hopkins won over Chadwick Boseman. And the telecast took some big risks that didn’t always pay off.

The audio was produced by Mike Katzif and edited by Jessica Reedy.

Cinerama Dome Among ArcLight, Pacific Theaters To Close Due To Pandemic Losses

by Bob Mondello

ArcLight Cinemas and Pacific Theaters said late Monday they are ceasing operations, closing all of their roughly 300 screens mostly found in California.

None has inspired more distress among Hollywood notables than the Cinerama Dome on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard.

“After shutting our doors more than a year ago,” the company said in a statement, “today we must share the difficult and sad news that Pacific will not be reopening its ArcLight Cinemas and Pacific Theaters locations.”

“This was not the outcome anyone wanted,” the statement continues, “but despite a huge effort that exhausted all potential options, the company does not have a viable way forward.”

The Cinerama Dome’s concrete geodesic dome was built to house the wide, curved screen required for single-lens Cinerama. It opened in 1963 with the premiere of Stanley Kramer’s extravagantly wide-screen comedy It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World — with its swinging hook-and-ladder finale.


The Dome has since hosted dozens of Hollywood premieres, including Shrek 2, for which it was painted green and fitted out with tubular ears. It has also figured in movies and television shows including Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood.

Hollywood Reacts to Arclight News

And its closing prompted an outpouring of sentiment from Hollywood notables.

“I’m so sad,” tweeted actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. “I remember going to the Cinerama Dome to see Star Trek IV with my dad when I was little. So many memories since then.”

“Sad. HAIR opened in the Cinerama Dome,” tweeted Treat Williams, who starred in that musical.

And Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson wrote on Twitter: “Well this sucks. Every single person who worked at the Arclight loved movies, and you felt it. Sending love to every usher, manager and projectionist who rocked that blue shirt and made it such a special place.”

Long among the highest-grossing theaters in America, according to Deadline, the Dome and Arclight Cinemas are now the latest casualty of a pandemic that has kept many of the world’s cinemas closed for more than a year.

Xavier Omär: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert

by Bobby Carter

Xavier Omär decided to turn his Tiny Desk home concert into a whole Texas affair. Initially, Omär wanted to recreate the look of the Desk: “I wanted to kind of bring the feeling of Tiny Desk back, so I had booked a library,” he said. Ultimately the library didn’t work out, but Rosella Coffee and Wine in his home base of San Antonio proved to be a great match for his sound–spacious and airy.

Omär’s career began in Christian music under the moniker SPZRKT, before he moved into secular R&B and hip-hop. Through his first couple of projects and work with Seattle DJ and producer, Sango, the 27-year-old singer’s heart-on-sleeve approach quickly created a buzz. His latest album, if You Feel, was high on my favorite albums list of 2020.

The Alamo City resident and his cohorts orchestrated a charismatic and vocally rich show. The set list perfectly depicts the emotional arch of if You Feel. For good measure, he plays the song that put him on the map, 2016’s “Blind Man.” This is undoubtedly Xavier Omär’s best live performance on record. He’s on a clear path to greatness in R&B music.

SET LIST

  • “Like I Feel”
  • “Blind Man”
  • “SURF”
  • “So Much More”

MUSICIANS

  • Xavier Omär: vocals
  • Talyce Hays: vocals
  • Jay Wile: vocals
  • Alana Holmes: vocals
  • Billy Ray Blunt Jr.: guitar
  • Justin Crawford: keys
  • Korey Davison: bass
  • Josh Greene: drums
  • Kevin Davison: saxophone

CREDITS

  • Video: Screenville Films
  • Audio: David Gaumé, Alfredo De la Garza, Josef Rodriguez

TINY DESK TEAM

  • Producer: Bobby Carter
  • Video Producer: Maia Stern
  • Audio Mastering: Josh Rogosin
  • Tiny Production Team: Bob Boilen, Kara Frame
  • Executive Producer: Lauren Onkey
  • Senior VP, Programming: Anya Grundmann

PHOTOS: Mumbai Falls In Love All Over Again With Its Forgotten Fountains

by Sushmita Pathak

In a narrow lane near Mumbai’s docks, commuters on bicycles weave through the crowd as workers push wooden carts loaded with heavy burlap sacks into warehouses.

Thirty-eight-year-old laborer Mohammad Yaqoob unloads sacks full of marbles from a truck. When he gets tired and thirsty, he walks to an ornate stone structure in the middle of the bustling street. It’s a drinking fountain, or pyau (sometimes spelled pyaav), as it’s called in the local Hindi and Marathi languages.

“I have a sip of water, rest on the steps for a bit and then get back to work again,” says Yaqoob. “This free water is great.”

During the British colonial era, wealthy Indian philanthropists — in what was then called Bombay — built these fountains in busy market squares and along Mumbai’s tram route as a gift to the community and as memorials for loved ones.

The fountain that Yaqoob says he visits almost every day towers over the street at nearly 30 feet and has an elaborately decorated canopy and pillars. The top of the structure is adorned by an intricate motif of a peacock with its feathers spread out — a symbol of water in Indian culture, says architect Rahul Chemburkar as he gives NPR a tour. It’s known as the Keshavji Nayak fountain, after the man who built it nearly 150 years ago and whose bust is carved on the structure.

More than a century ago, water coming from city pipes would flow out of the fountains’ decorative spouts continuously. But rampant development and an exponential boom in Mumbai’s population — it’s now home to 18.4 million — put a strain on water resources.

“The reason why these pyaus went into a little neglect in the 1960s-70s is because the scarcity of water led to stopping of the [constantly] flowing water,” says Chemburkar. Water was restricted to a few hours each day. Many of the fountains lacked water storage mechanisms and with the erratic water supply, their spouts ran dry.

One was even accidentally demolished during the construction of a monorail, laments Chemburkar.

The water habits of upper and middle-class residents changed too. Municipal water connections started piping water directly into their homes. “Water became a commercial commodity, and plastic bottled water became popular,” says Chemburkar. Most people forgot the fountains.

Now, city officials and conservationists are trying to restore them — an effort driven by a desire to preserve forgotten relics of Mumbai’s history but one that can also improve access to water for the city’s impoverished.

In 2008, Mumbai’s municipal corporation (BMC) commissioned Chemburkar’s architecture firm, Vaastu Vidhaan, to restore two pyaus. And in 2015, the BMC’s heritage unit identified 30 fountains across the city to be revived as part of a pyaucircuit or trail.

The community has embraced the revived Keshavji Nayak fountain renovated in 2015, says Chemburkar. There’s a breakfast stall right beside it. People sit on the fountain’s steps to read their morning newspaper. Chemburkar estimates at least 50 people visit for a drink each hour.

“It’s like a cultural oasis,” Chemburkar says.

Steps flanked by statues of bulls, commonly found in Hindu temples, lead up to earthen pots filled with water — now sourced from a municipal water connection beside the structure. A volunteer hands out a metal glass full of water to anyone who comes, regardless of caste or religion.

“In wide contrast, all over the country you see a lot of discrimination over the ownership of water,” says Chemburkar. Minority Muslims and members of the Dalit community, considered to be at the bottom of the social hierarchy according to India’s ancient caste system, are often beaten up for trying to drink water from a public tap or well. But there’s an implicit understanding that the pyaus belong to the entire community, says Chemburkar.

Some of the fountains are even open to animals. The original designs included troughs near the base to collect water that gets spilled over.

Restoring pyaus can also help address huge inequalities in access to Mumbai’s water supply, says researcher and activist Purva Dewoolkar. She says more than 2 million people in Mumbai are denied legal water access and face severe water uncertainty.

“[In Mumbai] some people have swimming pools in their homes and on the other hand there’s no water to drink,” says Dewoolkar, who works with Mumbai-based non-governmental organization Pani Haq Samiti, the Committee for the Right to Water.

A November 2020 report by Dewoolkar and her colleagues found that the city’s lowest-income residents — people living in slums and those who were homeless — were spending more on water during the pandemic than before. They were consuming more water because everyone was home and the informal water supply systems that they relied on — like a government water connection in a neighboring housing society or workplaces or schools — were no longer accessible because of the lockdown. So these Mumbai residents had no option but to pool their money for an expensive private tanker-truck and queue up in tight spaces, risking infection from coronavirus, to fill their jerry cans when it delivered water about once a week.

“Their incomes had gone down and in spite of that they were spending more money on water,” says Dewoolkar.

“Even as public service announcements were issued reminding people to wash their hands regularly with soap, at least 2 million people in Mumbai wondered how to follow such recommendations without regular, adequate and affordable water access,” the report notes.

One of the report’s recommendations to the city was to “invest in installing and maintaining many more pyaus in public spaces.” That includes less ornate and more recently built fountains too, says Dewoolkar. She sees them as an important public benefit.

In recent years, the city has also installed dozens of water ATMs — metal coolers that automatically dispense drinking water — at railway stations. While they are less expensive than buying plastic bottled water, they’re not free. They’re also not very aesthetically pleasing, says Chemburkar. He says pyaus are special because they’re inviting.

“[The decorative elements] give a lot of dignity to the simple act of drinking water,” he says. “Today we actually miss aesthetics in public architecture.”

Four pyaus, including the Keshavji Nayak fountain, are functional but the rest are in varying states of disrepair. Trash is strewn beside one of the non-functioning fountains located in a historic colonial-era market. The fountain is about 15 feet high and has spires and a distinctly European style. There are red stains from people spitting betel leaf or paan and tobacco on it.

“[People have] used it like a dustbin,” says Chemburkar as he inspects the damage. “I feel agonized but I see opportunity also.”

Chemburkar says Mumbai’s pyaus have the potential to become unique cultural attractions — similar to Rome’s famous waterspouts or nasoni. He says when tourists visit Mumbai, they marvel at its big edifices — grand Gothic architecture with gargoyles and sleek Art Deco buildings — but neglect the small structures that also make the city beautiful.

Chemburkar says pyaus are socio-cultural markers whose architecture is a blend of the many styles found in Mumbai including Victorian and Indo-Saracenic.

The last pyau on Chemburkar’s tour is in one of Mumbai’s oldest botanical gardens. The fountain is square-shaped with beautiful floral motifs and an arch carved over the spout. A plaque tells visitors it was built in memory of Ardeshir Dadabhoy Dadysett who died in 1912.

Chemburkar says it’s next in line to be renovated, with restoration work expected to start within weeks. He says it’s scheduled to reopen for thirsty visitors by the end of this year. And when that happens, he has a special way of celebrating.

“I’m going to make it a point that I come here to have that historic water,” he says.

Emerald Fennell’s ‘Promising Young Woman’ Doesn’t Let Anyone Off The Hook

by Sam Briger

In the dark comedy Promising Young Woman, Cassie (Carey Mulligan) works at a coffee shop by day, and hunts sexual predators by night. She goes to bars, pretends to be falling down drunk — and then confronts the men who try to take advantage of her.

Cassie is avenging the death of her best friend, who, the movie implies, has died by suicide after being raped at medical school. Writer and director Emerald Fennell says the film was inspired, in part, by the messages other movies send about alcohol and consent.

When I was growing up — and I think still probably it’s the case now — in movies, getting women drunk to sleep with them, filling up their drink more than you’d fill your own, waiting at the end of the night to see who’s drunk at the club, girls waking up not knowing who’s in bed next to them — it was just comedy fodder,” Fennell says. “We live in a culture where this sort of stuff is normalized.”

Fennell got her start in television as an actor, then worked as the showrunner for the second season ofKilling Eve. Promising Young Woman is the first film she’s directed. The movie has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Fennell describes the film as “a kind of fantasy — with wish-fulfillment,” but also as something “much darker and, I hope, more honest than that.”

“I always wanted to make a film, I think, that people would really enjoy and emotionally connect to and find gripping and romantic and all of those things, but [that’s] also not a film that lets anyone off the hook,” she says. “That’s a really interesting position for a filmmaker: to make an audience feel that they’re in familiar territory when they’re not.” 


Interview highlights

On the film’s depictions of sexual assault, especially as it relates to alcohol 

In Britain at the moment, the most incredible thing is happening, which is that women and girls are writing about their experiences [with sexual assault] at schools. Honestly, the volume, the sheer volume of these stories shows just how commonplace this stuff is. There’s nothing in this film that isn’t — and regrettably — incredibly normal and certainly was when I was growing up. And I think for anyone who thinks that these things weren’t horribly common, I think, probably never went to a party or a nightclub, or is kidding themselves.

On the character of Cassie

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM– MARCH 08: Emerald Fennell poses at the Ham Yard Hotel for the 2021 Critics Choice Awards on March 8, 2021 in London England. (Photo by Colomba Giacomini via Getty Images)

This is a film about a woman who is trying to find a way forward in a very grief-stricken and angry way. And part of her journey, part of her means of coping is to present herself as incredibly functioning. Like a lot of addicts, I think, she is somewhat addicted to these nighttime excursions, which make her feel kind of fleetingly better. During the day, she wears a lot of pink. Her hair is always immaculate. Her nails are perfect — kind of whimsical pastels. She’s weaponized her femininity, not just in a kind of aggressive way, but as a defense. Like, she knows that people won’t ask too many questions of her if she hides in plain sight like this. 

On why she wanted Cassie’s act of revenge to be scaring men rather than committing acts of violence

I think part of the film for me was taking a genre that I really love, which is the revenge thriller, and seeing if I could … use that structure, which we’re all so familiar with, but do something unexpected with it — and most importantly, do something that felt feasible to me and female, because I think so often in these kinds of films, and particularly when it pertains to violence, it is not feasible that a woman commits acts of violence against men in the night. It’s not a fair thing to expect. And I think this film is very clear about what happens if you were to try. I really started it by thinking: if I was going to go on a journey like this, what could I do? And if I couldn’t shoot a gun and I’m too unfit to kind of wrestle someone, what could I do to effect some kind of change or to punish people or frighten them? I could do what she does, which is scare them.

Anything that gives you that laugh/gasp, sort of, “No! Oh god. Yes!” Is just always going to be such a fun space to be in.

Emerald Fennell

On whether she sees a similarity between Killing Eve and Promising Young Woman, in terms of how they subvert expectations

I think, certainly, this sense of wickedness is something that it shares. Anything that gives you that laugh/gasp, sort of, “No! Oh god. Yes!” Is just always going to be such a fun space to be in. Absolutely, they’re both twists on genres, but I would say they’re both kind of quite different genres, and I’m always kind of quite careful not to make comparisons, just because I think also we do tend to make comparisons between female-led projects much more, just generally all of us as a kind of society. I do think of them as quite markedly different, but certainly, I think, they do share some sort of sense of macabre wickedness and a subversion of the feminine.

On portraying Camilla Parker Bowles in the latest season of The Crown

I definitely don’t think of her as a villain. I think that increasingly what we’re realizing — and certainly on the show — is that anything that touches the royal family, anything that is part of that is so profoundly strange. It’s not like any other world. It’s not like any other family. The circumstances are just completely extraordinary. So that’s kind of the thing that was always interesting to me about Camilla, was that she’s actually very, very private. The Camilla that I was playing, there’s almost no footage, no photographs of her. … She was head girl of her school. She was incredibly popular. Everyone who’s met her from the research says she’s incredibly funny and kind and good fun, and I was just so interested in what happens to that kind of person when they get sucked into this world and then their biography is written for them by other people. I’m certainly not saying that having affairs is a good thing, but a lot of people do it, and it takes more than one person to do it, too. I went at it, to be honest, very much as a fiction. It’s just an amazingly genius drama.

Lauren Krenzel and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the Web.

‘Lovecraft Country’ Creator Aims To Reclaim The Horror Genre For People Of Color

Sam Briger

The HBO series Lovecraft Country takes the real horrors of the Black experience in the 1950s and adds to it the supernatural terrors of the horror genre.

Series creator Misha Green says she sees the show — and the novel by Matt Ruff upon which it is based — as a chance to reclaim “the genre space for people of color and for people who had usually been left out of it.”

“Horror, which is my favorite genre, works best for me when there’s a metaphor,” Green says. “One of my themes I keep coming back to is: What are people willing to do for metaphorical and physical survival? And that’s always the stuff that scares me.”

One episode explores the theme of white privilege through the lens of Ruby, a Black woman who becomes white after taking a potion. After some discussion of what Ruby would do as a white woman, the writers decided that she would enjoy a mundane day at the park.

“That is really what part of the privilege of being white is: You get to live your life uninterrupted,” Green says. “A person of color in America has so many moments daily where they’re interrupted because of their skin color.”

We don’t know yet if there will be a second season of Lovecraft Country, but if there is, Green knows what she’d call it: “This would be the title of it — Lovecraft Country: Supremacy.”


Interview highlights 

On why she loves horror 

I just like to be scared. I think it’s also one of the reasons I feel like we go to drama in the first place, to live vicariously through something. So you get to live your fears on screen and then you go, “OK, I can tackle that, maybe.” You get a little braver in life. … When I was a kid, like watching It, watching Alien, watching those kinds of movies, I was like, “OK, I’m terrified. But now I feel a little braver.” Afterwards, I feel like I can go and tackle the real horrors a little bit more.

On Black representation in genre fiction

I feel like one of my absolute favorites is the original Night of the Living Dead and then The People Under the Stairs [and] Candyman. So there [were] spaces for Black horror, they just weren’t rampant. I feel like that’s all of Black art right now. People are like, “We’re in this huge renaissance!” and I’m like, “I remember in the ’90s I could go on TV and see more all-Black casts than I can see now.” So I feel like it’s always been there, but you have to seek it out. And the mainstream — definitely when it comes to horror, sci-fi and all of these genre fantasy spaces — are all white in a way. And so that was exciting to me, to have this kind of show that could jump to all the places and be like, “Yeah, we can be here and we don’t have to die first, guys.”

That was exciting to me: to have this kind of show that could jump to all the places and be like, “Yeah, we can be here and we don’t have to die first, guys.”

‘Lovecraft Country’ creator Misha Green

On developing the sound for Lovecraft Country, which sources audio from different moments in culture, like a Nike Ad or the poem “Whitey on the Moon”

I wanted to do something different than I had done on Underground with sound. We used contemporary music on [the WGN America show] Underground [which Green co-created] and it was very successful in kind of bringing the past into the present and I wanted to build on that. I want to come in with an audio viewpoint on the show.

One of the things that we were talking a lot about with the show was this idea of it being out of time, that they’re going and doing things, they’re going to space, they’re going back in the past, so how do we break that up? And then that idea of “scource” as we called it, which is source and score, came to me of using these pieces. I had been soaking in things like Beyoncé’s Lemonade and I Am Not Your Negro. And it was hearing those voices in those poems and [James] Baldwin’s voice. And I was going, “Oh, can we do that in Lovecraft Country?” So that was kind of our big audio swing, was this idea of taking found footage audio and placing it wholesale over scenes and using it as [a] score.

On her priorities for developing her own writer’s room 

Diversity and younger writers, I think that it was important to me. It’s one of the things that I said to HBO is that I don’t want upper-level writers. They were really pushing upper-level writers, which was understandable, because it’s a very big, ambitious show, an intricate show. But for me, I was like, I want new voices. Hollywood is the biggest storytelling machine there is and we all live our lives through stories, so it is giving us a story on how to live our lives, and right now it’s a monolith of white men. And I think it’s very important to change that. So when I had my own room, I knew that it was not going to look like the rooms I had been in before and that it was going to be a struggle, too, because I think in a lot of rooms, the minority voices are not there to actually be heard. So figuring out how to encourage everybody to be like, “You have a platform here, speak up! Speak up! Let’s talk. Let’s figure it out.” [That] was also an interesting new turn for me.

Heidi Saman and Kayla Lattimore produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.