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foxgambling694 · 3 years

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Hemingway A Moveable Feast

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Hemingway The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March OTHER NYRB CLASSICS OF INTEREST A Time to Keep Silence Patrick Leigh Fermor Between the Woods and the Water Patrick Leigh Fermor (introduction by Jan Morris) Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece Patrick Leigh Fermor (introduction by Patricia Storace) Mani: Travels in the Southern. The two men discuss Hemingway’s writing, and the fire-eater suggests to Hemingway that the fire eater tell Hemingway stories for Hemingway to write out, and that they split the profits. Hemingway pays for the meal and leaves, saying he will see the fire-eater soon. About The Book “There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other.” —Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast Ernest Hemingway’s classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s remains one of his most beloved works. Ernest Hemingway: A Moveable Feast. Steve Newman Writer. Ernest Hemingway, Cuba, 1960. Image: Abe Books. When you re-read A Moveable Feast today one can feel both the.

Season 8 premiered in November 2020 | Check your local listings.

Come along for a mouthwatering ride and catch the spirit of pop-up cooking with Moveable Feast with Relish. Australia’s top celebrity chef Curtis Stone, stand-up comedian and chef Alex Thomopoulos, and author and James Beard Award-winning chef Michelle Bernstein team up with some of the most innovative chefs and food artisans as they cook up a feast using the best seasonal ingredients and each region’s little-known food treasures. This season, follow along as Alex samples the best of New England cuisine, including an excursion to Martha’s Vineyard.

Sunset feast at the Beach Plum Inn in Martha’s Vineyard, MA, featuring acclaimed chefs, Jessica B. Harris and Jan Buhrman and hosted by Alex Thomopoulos.

Episode Descriptions:

Episode 1: Seattle, Washington

Explore the Pacific Northwest as Moveable Feast with Relish travels to Seattle to get a memorable taste for the region known as Cascadia. Host Curtis Stone jumps aboard a seaplane with Chef Tom Douglas as they head to Coupeville on Whidbey Island. Chef Tom is the winner of three James Beard Awards, and together with Chef Renee Erickson, they are a driving force behind the food scene in Seattle. First stop: a visit to Penn Cove to see where mussels grow in what’s considered the best environment in the region. Next, we meet up with Georgie Smith of Willowood Farm, which is one of the most painted and photographed farms in the Pacific Northwest. With their ingredients in hand, the chefs then collaborate on the creation of a true regional feast that includes steamed mussels; a spiced mussel and saffron soup; and a grilled whole salmon with Walla Walla onions and fava leaves.

Episode 2: Taos, New Mexico

Experience the rich history of Taos, New Mexico as Moveable Feast with Relish samples this mountainous region’s native ingredients. Host Curtis Stone meets Christopher Lujan, who grows ancient heirloom blue corn, highly prized by indigenous cultures, in the high-elevation mountains of Taos Pueblo. Curtis also pays a visit to Romero Farms, known for growing everything from oats to heirloom varietal chilies. All of these ingredients then come together with the help of Chef Andrew Horton and Chef Chris Maher, owner of Taos’ well-known Cooking Studio Taos, as they serve-up the best of New Mexican cuisine which includes beautiful blue corn cakes; local lamb tacos; and a flavorful green chili stew.

Episode 3: Santa Fe, New Mexico

Settled at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Santa Fe, New Mexico is home to a culinary scene of mixed influences and Southwestern flavors and ingredients. In this episode of Moveable Feast with Relish, Host Curtis Stone is joined by Chef Martín Rios, co-owner of Santa Fe’s award-winning Restaurant Martín, and Chef Leslie Chavez, who also has a strong background in catering and pastry in New Mexico. Together, they visit The Rooted Leaf and Celestial Bee, a farm that produces exquisite bee honey and fresh, highly cared-for produce. They also visit a local chile farmer to see how Chimayo chile, a local heritage pepper, is dried and ground. At a colorful hacienda in Santa Fe, Chef Rios makes rosemary-roasted turnips and Chef Chavez makes a sopaipilla with the locally sourced honey.

Episode 4: Carmel, California

Visit the charming seaside town of Carmel, California for this episode of Moveable Feast with Relish. Host Curtis Stone joins Michelin-starred Chefs Justin Cogley and James Syhabout as they forage for seaweed at low tide along the area’s iconic 17-Mile Drive. They then travel to a vineyard in Carmel Valley that specializes in Pinot Noir and learn how its exquisite estate-grown wines benefit from the land’s proximity to the Pacific Ocean. An intimate feast is then prepared at Aubergine at L’Auberge Carmel, where Chef Cogley serves as executive chef. Topping the menu are dishes that feature the locally sourced ingredients: foraged seaweed and vegetables; farm-raised rack of lamb; and Monterey Bay abalone.

Episode 5: San Luis Obispo County, California

In this episode of Moveable Feast with Relish, Chef Curtis Stone heads for San Luis Obispo County, where he jumps into the waters of Morro Bay Oyster Company, known as a hub for oyster farming since the early 1900s. Curtis is joined by internationally-known Chefs David Rosner and Sherry Yard to source local Pacific Gold oysters. Then they head to Rutiz Family Farms, followed by a trip to a local vineyard. Together, the chefs then prepare a grand feast set against the backdrop of the region’s most spectacular volcanic peaks. On the menu are SLO County-sourced ingredients prepared in a variety of ways: raw oysters served with chili and ginger granita; grilled yellowtail tuna and fennel accompanied by roasted oysters; and a dessert of caramelized fennel and fruit strudel a la mode.

Episode 6: Puerto Rico

Chef Michelle Bernstein heads for Puerto Rico, stopping first at Frutos del Guacabo, which provides some of the highest quality fruits and vegetables to chefs in 160 hotels across throughout the island. Michelle also makes a trip to Tommy Forte Seafood Market, known for selling everything from swordfish to shark. Michelle is then joined by Chef Kevin Roth, who combines his love for Puerto Rico with a passion for barbecue, along with Chef Ventura Vivoni, who makes art out of local ingredients. Fresh fruit is used in courses throughout the feast, and a variety of seafood is prepared along the way.

Episode 7: Portsmouth, NH

This week on Moveable Feast with Relish we’re in Portsmouth, New Hampshire to throw a party with James Beard Award nominee Chef David Vargas, known for dishing up some of New England’s best Mexican cuisine, and Chef Will Myska, celebrated for bringing real Texas-style barbecue to the Northeast. Field trips include a stop at Maine Meat Butcher Shop to source local, organic, grass-fed meat, to Big Scott’s Local Grown to source a specialty heritage corn grown exclusively for Chef Vargas, and finally to Vernon Family Farm for pasture-raised chicken and to cook up a harvest feast over an open fire. On the menu: grilled Vernon Family Farm chicken; corn and fire-roasted pumpkin and apple stew; smoked lamb with root vegetable salsa and mezcal gastrique; and an Italian riff on Mexican street corn salad.

Episode 8: Boston, MA: The Food Project

This week on Moveable Feast with Relish, we’re on the road in Boston, where a vibrant and diverse immigrant community is making a delicious mark on the food scene. Among those blazing a trail are multiple James Beard Award-nominee Chef Irene Li and fellow Chef Tamika R. Francis. It’s fall in New England, so the chefs source some of the best the season has to offer, including fresh cranberries and honey! Then it’s off to visit the incredible Food Project, an organization that grows some of the best produce right in the heart of the city, where the chefs also cook a New England feast unlike any you’ve ever seen. On the menu: scallion pancakes with cranberry chutney; braised spiced goat with celery root puree; roasted beet salad with herbs, and cranberry-tequila cocktails with rosemary and lime.

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Episode 9: Ogunquit, Maine

This week on Moveable Feast with Relish we’re in Ogunquit, Maine—a true natural wonder. Host Alex Thomopoulos joins two James Beard Award-winning chefs, Mark Gaier and Clark Frasier, whose restaurant, MC Perkins Cove, helped solidify Ogunquit as a culinary destination. The chefs source Maine's famous cold-water lobsters aboard the Finestkind with local lobsterman Goat Hubbard and pay a visit to Woodland Farms Brewery to source and sample some of the best beer in the region. Then it’s back to Mark and Clark’s private home, nestled in the woods, for an intimate lobster feast. On the menu: chilled lobster salad with tarragon vinaigrette; Maine mahogany clams with dark beer and fermented black beans; Thai-style grilled lobsters; and a wild blueberry tart.

Episode 10: Martha’s Vineyard: Menemsha

This week on Moveable Feast with Relish, we get an insider’s look at this culinary gem of an island, and its thriving farming community. Host Alex Thomopoulos joins two of the island’s great chefs: Jan Buhrman, who has also been voted pretty much “the best at cooking everything” by her fellow islanders, and James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award winner Jessica B. Harris. Field trips include a stop at The Grey Barn and Farm to sample some award-winning cheeses, and a tour of MV Mycological, a shiitake mushroom farm that combines ancient Japanese growing techniques with modern sustainable practices. With ingredients in hand, the next stop is the Beach Plum Inn, one of the most picturesque inns on the island, where our chefs prepare a truly memorable feast. Visual studio c programming. On the menu: leg of lamb with lavender and red wine; mushroom consommé with cheesy popovers; winter squash risotto; and a Grey Barn pear tart.

Episode 11: Martha’s Vineyard: North Tabor Farm

This week on Moveable Feast with Relish we’re headed to Martha’s Vineyard to experience a unique slice of life in a fishing village on this quaint New England island. Joining Host Alex Thomopoulos are two of the island’s favorite chefs, James Beard Award winner Chris Fischer, and Michelin-starred Chef Daniel Eddy. Field trips include a stop at Cottage City Oysters to source some incredibly sweet, briny oysters grown in deep, cold ocean waters. Then it’s off to the legendary Larsen’s Fish Market, where we’ll select fish from the freshest catch of the day. Then it’s time to harvest vegetables and cook up a succulent seafood feast at North Tabor Farm in their custom-made wood-fired oven. On the menu: wood-fired fluke with brown butter and oysters; a classic green salad with shallot vinaigrette; and potato and fennel gratin with green tomatoes and cilantro.

Episode 12: Boston, MA: Gibbet Hill

This week’s episode of Moveable Feast with Relish reveals Boston’s undeniable passion for creating truly epic feasts. Host Alex Thomopoulos is joined by two chefs credited with propelling Boston’s Italian food scene to new heights - James Beard Award-winning Chef Karen Akunowicz and the only Black chef-owner in Boston’s fine dining scene, Douglass Williams. Chef Akunowicz, a pasta guru, takes us to One Mighty Mill to source the secret to her award-winning pasta - local, fresh-milled wheat. Then it’s off to the picture-perfect farm Gibbet Hill for fresh vegetables. Finally, it’s time to cook and feast. On the menu: farro pappardelle with rabbit, figs, prosciutto and mushrooms; roasted duck with farm vegetables and golden raisin-poppy seed sauce; focaccia garlic bread; and blueberry-concord grape shortcakes with mascarpone cream.

Episode 13: Boston, MA: Courtyard

This week on Moveable Feast with Relish, Host Alex Thomopoulos meets up with two of Boston’s most innovative chefs, James Beard Award winner Chef Jamie Bissonnette and rising star Chef David Bazirgan. Field trips include a visit to Lookout Farm to harvest a fruit once reserved for the nobility, the Hosui Asian pear. Then it’s off to the pioneering Boston Smoked Fish to source their famous smoked salmon bacon. With ingredients in hand, the chefs head back to Chef Bazirgan’s restaurant, Bambara, to cook up a courtyard brunch. On the menu: smoked haddock with green papaya and apple salad; classic potato roesti with salmon bacon, cider-poached eggs, and harissa hollandaise; and an Asian pear and cranberry clafoutis.

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Jupiter’s Legacy: Ben Daniels Plays Mind Games as Brainwave

By Ed Gross

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“From Superman and the Justice League to Marvel to British comics—inspired by guys like Alan Moore, and so on, I’ve thrown it in there… it’s got a bit of everything,” he says.

That “everything” extends beyond comic books. Millar drew inspiration from King Kong’s Skull Island, and references the cosmic aesthetic of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which informed the “sci-fi stuff.” The writings of horror author H.P. Lovecraft “were a big thing for me,” when it came to The Island, created by aliens, “that existed before humanity, and that these people are drawn out towards where they get their superpowers.” The character Sheldon Sampson/The Utopian is a Clark Kent/Superman type, but his cohort George Hutchence/Skyfox is more than a millionaire playboy stand-in for Bruce Wayne. Rather, Millar based him on British actors from the 1960s—Peter O’Toole, Oliver Reed, Richard Burton, Richard Harris—who were suave rascals.

“I loved the idea of a superhero having a good time, getting on with girls, drinking whisky, smoking lots of cigarettes,” Millar said.

At the risk of sounding “so pretentious,” Millar jokes, he also pulled from Shakespeare. Indeed, the comics are as much a family saga as a superhero one (and written by the much younger brother of six whose parents died before he was 20). Utopian is a father to his own disappointing children, and a father of sorts to all heroes. He is Lear as much as he is Jupiter, the Roman god of gods. The end of his reign approaches, and various factions have their own appetite for power—such as his self-righteous brother who thinks he should be a leader, or Utopian’s son, born into the family business of being a hero, but who could never live up to his father’s expectations, or his daughter who is more interested in fame than heroism.

He views Jupiter’s Legacy as more thoughtful than Kick-Ass, Kingsman, or Wanted. The plot’s driving action hinges on a debate about the superheroes’ philosophies and moral imperatives. It seeks to address a question Millar asked when he was a kid reading comics.

“Why doesn’t Superman solve the world’s problems?” he recalls thinking. “Why didn’t he interfere and stop wars from even existing?… Is it ethically wrong to stand aside and just maintain the status quo, especially when the status quo creates so many problems for a lot of people?”

On one side of the debate, Utopian believes interfering too much with society’s trajectory is a bad move. It’s not that he is cynical; quite the opposite. He thinks things are actually improving in the world. His viewpoint is there are less people hungry across the globe than ever before, and less people with disease. Millar describes Utopian as a “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” kind of hero, to borrow a phrase associated with Superman, and believes capitalism works. As his hero name suggests, Utopian thinks a better world is within reach, even if it takes generations, and encourages even the heroes to be patient and trust people to do the right thing because they are innately good.

“He says, if you look at the difference somebody like Bill Gates has made in Africa—just one guy—if you look at capitalism taken to the Nth degree, then it pulls everybody up, and poverty in places like India, is massively better just compared to a generation ago.”

Besides, as Utopian says to his impatient brother Walter/Brainwave, in Jupiter’s Legacy #1, being a caped hero doesn’t make them economists and, “Just because you can fly doesn’t mean you know how to balance a budget.” Plus, the notion of using psychic powers or brute force to simply make the world “better” is out of the question. Or is it?

The mainstream awareness of superheroes baked in from more than 80 years of stories, and the shorthand that especially comes with 13 years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe commercial juggernaut, has provided Millar with a set of archetypes to lean into. It was true of the hero proxies in the Jupiter’s Legacy books, and he says it’s true of the show. In fact, he says audiences are so sophisticated with regards to these types of characters they’ll be able to immediately slip into his universe, and that “a lot of the hard work has been done for us.” He adds that audience literacy with superhero tropes also provided him something to push against.

“The Marvel characters lock these guys up in prison at the end of these movies,” Millar says. “Everything’s tied up neatly with a bow, the rich are still the rich, the poor are still starving, and the superheroes aren’t really doing anything for the common man in any very global sense. These guys have just had enough of that.”

Millar’s comics technically kick off in 1932, when Sheldon first brings his friends on a journey to The Island, but his story goes back to 1929 when the stock market crashed, and the Great Depression began. This is likewise when the Netflix series will begin, and Millar says it’s because of the historic parallels between then and 2021.

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“We’ve been in a similar situation as we are now: there’s impending financial collapse coming out of a global pandemic,” he says. “The idea is that history continues and repeats itself, and people make the same mistakes over and over again, and the superheroes are saying, ‘Let’s actually fix everything.’”

Continuing the theme of parallels, when discussing the inception of Jupiter’s Legacy with Millar, The Godfather Part II comes up more than once because of the film’s dual storylines following Vito Corleone and son Michael, separated by decades. However, while the comics contain some flashbacks, the plot doesn’t unfold across different time periods simultaneously. But the Netflix series will shift between eras, with half of the show during the season taking place in 1929, for which Millar credits Steven S. DeKnight, who developed the series.

“The way Steven structured it was really brilliant, because I saw these taking place over two [different] years,” Millar says. “[But] The Godfather Part II track shows you the father and the son at the same age and juxtaposes their two lives.”

As a result, he says the series is a visual mash-up of genres that’s both classical and futuristic.

“It just feels like a beautiful period movie, then when it gets cosmic, and it gets to the superhero stuff, it’s a double wow… it’s like seeing Once Upon a Time in America suddenly directed by Stanley Kubrick doing 2001.”

This is a notable advantage to bringing the story to television, as opposed to making Jupiter’s Legacy three two-hour films as he originally planned with producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura in 2015. Millar says that to tell the Jupiter’s Legacy story properly on screen would require 40 hours, and with a series, what would have been a one-minute flashback in a movie can now be revealed in two hours of its own.

It was another director who has since made a name adapting ambitious comic book properties that extolled to Millar the benefits of television: James Gunn. When Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy, The Suicide Squad) had a chat with Millar about the project, Gunn said it could never be done as a movie. “The smartest guy in the world is James Gunn,” Millar says.

An exciting challenge of adapting his work for television is that the series will expand on the backstories and concepts of the books. For example when Sheldon Sampson and his friends head to The Island in the first issue, it takes up six pages. Within the series, half of the first season is that journey, and what happens when they arrive.

“Six issues of a graphic novel are roughly about an hour and 10 minutes of a movie; for something like an eight-part drama on TV, you really have to flesh it out,” he says. “It just goes a little deeper than what I had maybe two panels do.”

He emphasizes, however, that these flourishes won’t contradict the comics. Though he sold Millarworld to Netflix, he remains president so he can maintain control of his creations.

Overall the series has made the writer realize the value of television, and while a second season has not yet been confirmed, he’s already thinking about a third and fourth, and how it will dovetail with the upcoming Requiem. The story that began in 1929 continued through 2021, and collected in four volumes, will soon continue far into the future in the concluding two volumes.

“We saw the parents, then we have the present, and then we see their children in the next storyline,” he says. “That storyline goes way off into the future where we discover everything about humanity, superheroes, all these things. It’s a big, grand, high-concept, sci-fi thing beyond that.”

Listening to the jovial Millar discuss the scope of his Jupiter universe, which is imbued with optimism, one might not think this is the same person known for employing graphic violence in his works.

He thinks his films especially are violent yet hopeful, and fun. Kingsman is a rags-to-riches story, and “you feel great at the end of Kick-Ass, even though you’ve seen 200 people knifed in the face.” But he doesn’t consider his writing to fit under the dark-and-gritty label, and he’s not interested in angst, which he finds dull. With Jupiter’s Legacy, the comic and the show, he views the tone as complex but not “overtly dark.”

Additionally, Millar says he thinks society needs hopeful characters such as Captain America, Superman, and yes, The Utopian in 2021—as opposed to an ongoing genre trend of heroes drowning in pathos.

“The Superman-type characters are just now something from a pop culture, societal point of view, we need more than ever,” he says. “The last thing you want is seeing the world as dark, as something that makes you feel bad. Never forget Superman was created just before World War II in the midst of the economic depression by two Jewish kids who were just scraping a living together… I just think it’s so important when things are tough to have a character like that that makes you feel good.”

Even though Utopian suffers for his idealism in the comic, Millar says his ideas are passed on. This is The Utopian’s legacy.

“Ultimately, he wins if you think about it,” ponders Millar.

After a successful career spent creating characters and re-shaping superheroes with 80 years of history, the new pantheon of Jupiter’s Legacy may become one of the defining and lasting features of Mark Millar’s own legacy.

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Jupiter’s Legacy premieres on Netflix on May 7. Read more about the series in our special edition magazine!

The post Jupiter’s Legacy: Mark Millar on the Genesis of His Superhero Story appeared first on Den of Geek.

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jehanimation · 7 years

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Celebrating the undersung heroism of The Peanuts Movie

In December 2015, a movie reboot of one of history’s most beloved entertainment brands was released in cinemas, and it took the world by storm. That movie was not The Peanuts Movie.

Not that I’m setting myself up as an exception to that. Like pretty much everyone else, I spent the tail-end of 2015 thoroughly immersing myself in all things Star Wars: The Force Awakens, drinking deeply of the hype before seeing it as many times as I could - five in total - before it left theatres. In the midst of all that Jedi madness, I ended up totally forgetting to see The Peanuts Movie, Blue Sky Studios’ well-reviewed adaptation of Charles M. Schulz’s classic newspaper strip, which I’d been meaning to catch over the festive period. But then, it’s not as though the schedulers made it easy for me; in the US, there had been a buffer zone of a month between the launches of the two films, but here in the UK, Peanuts came out a week after Star Wars; even for this animation enthusiast, when it came to a choice between seeing the new Star Wars again or literally any other film, there was really no contest at all.

A year later, belatedly catching up with the movie I missed at the height of my rekindled Star Wars mania proved an eye-opening experience, and places Blue Sky’s film in an interesting context. With a $246.2 million worldwide gross, The Peanuts Movie did well enough to qualify as a hit, but it remains the studio’s lowest earner to date; in retrospect, it seems likely that going head-to-head with Star Wars and the James Bond movie Spectre didn’t exactly maximise its chances of blockbuster receipts. Yet in an odd way, modest, unnoticed success feels like a fitting outcome for The Peanuts Movie, a film that acts as a perfectly-formed celebration of underappreciated decency in a world of bombast and bluster. Charlie Brown, pop culture’s ultimate underdog, was never fated to emerge victorious in a commercial battle against Han Solo and James Bond, but his movie contains a grounded level of heartfelt sympathy for the small-scale struggles of unassumingly ordinary folk that higher-concept properties don’t have the time to express. The Peanuts Movie is a humbly heroic film about a quietly laudable person, made with understated bravery by underrated artists; I hope sincerely that more people will discover it like I did for years to come, and recognise just how much of what it says, does and represents is worth celebrating.

CELEBRATING... BLUE SKY STUDIOS

Before giving praise to The Peanuts Movie itself, it’d be remiss of me not to throw at least a few kind words in the direction of Blue Sky Studios - a group of filmmakers who I’m inclined to like, somewhat despite themselves, and who don’t always get very kind things written about them. After all, the 20th Century Fox subsidiary have been in the CGI feature animation mix since 2002, meaning they have a more established pedigree than most studios, and their long-running Ice Age franchise is a legitimately important, formative success story within the modern era of American animation. Under the creative leadership of Chris Wedge, they’ve managed to carve and hold a niche for themselves in a competitive ecosystem, hewing close to the Shrek-inspired DreamWorks model of fast-talking, kinetic comedy, but with a physical slapstick edge that marked their work out as distinct, at least initially. Sure, the subsequent rise of Illumination Entertainment and their ubiquitous Minions has stolen that thunder a little, but it’s important to remember that Ice Age’s bedraggled sabretooth squirrel Scrat was the CGI era’s original silent comedy superstar, and to recognise Blue Sky’s vital role in pioneering that stylistic connection between the animation techniques of the 21st century and the knockabout nonverbal physicality of formative 20th century cartooning, several years before anyone else thought to do so.

For all their years of experience, though, there’s a prevailing sense that Blue Sky have made a habit of punching below their weight, and that they haven’t - Scrat aside - established the kind of memorable legacy you’d expect from a veteran studio with 15 years of movies under their belt. Like Illumination - the studio subsequently founded by former Blue Sky bigwig Chris Meledandri - they remain very much defined by the influence of their debut movie, but Blue Sky have unarguably been a lot less successful in escaping the shadow of Ice Age than Illumination have in pulling away from the orbit of the Despicable Me/Minions franchise. Outside of the Ice Age series, Blue Sky’s filmography is largely composed of forgettable one-offs (Robots, Epic), the second-tier Rio franchise (which, colour palette aside, feels pretty stylistically indistinct from Ice Age), and a pair of adaptations (Horton Hears a Who!, The Peanuts Movie) that, in many ways, feel like uncharacteristic outliers rather than thoroughbred Blue Sky movies. Their Ice Age flagship, meanwhile, appears to be leaking and listing considerably, with a successful first instalment followed by three sequels (The Meltdown, Dawn of the Dinosaurs and Continental Drift) that garnered successively poorer reviews while cleaning up at the international box office, before last year’s fifth instalment (Collision Course) was essentially shunned by critics and audiences alike. Eleven movies in, Blue Sky are yet to produce their first cast-iron classic, which is unfortunate but not unforgivable; much more troubling is how difficult the studio seems to find it to even scrape a mediocre passing grade half the time.

Nevertheless, while Blue Sky’s output doesn’t bear comparison to a Disney, a Pixar or even a DreamWorks, there’s something about them that I find easy to root for, even if I’m only really a fan of a small percentage of their movies. Even their most middling works have a certain sense of honest effort and ambition about them, even if it didn’t come off: for example, Robots and Epic - both directed by founder Chris Wedge - feel like the work of a team trying to push their movies away from cosy comedy in the direction of larger-scale adventure storytelling, while the Rio movies, for all their generic antics and pratfalls, do at least benefit from the undoubted passion that director Carlos Saldanha tried to bring to his animated realisation of his hometown of Rio de Janeiro. I’ll also continue to celebrate the original Ice Age movie as a charismatic, well-realised children’s road movie, weakened somewhat by its instinct to pull its emotional punches, but gently likeable nevertheless; sure, the series is looking a little worse for wear these days, but at least part of the somewhat misguided instinct to keep churning them out seems to stem from a genuine fondness for the characters. Heck, I’m even inclined to look favourably on Chris Wedge’s ill-fated decision to dabble in live-action with the recent fantasy flop Monster Trucks; after all, the jump from directing animation to live-action is a tricky manoeuvre that even Pixar veterans like Andrew Stanton (John Carter) and Brad Bird (Tomorrowland) have struggled to execute smoothly, and the fact he attempted it at all feels indicative of his studio’s instinct to try their best to expand their horizons, even if their reach sometimes exceeds their grasp.

Besides, it’s not as though their efforts so far have gone totally unrewarded. The third and fourth Ice Age movies scored record-breaking box office results outside the US, while there have also been a handful of notable successes in critical terms - most prominently, Horton Hears a Who! and The Peanuts Movie, the two adaptations of classic American children’s literature directed for the studio by Steve Martino. I suppose you can put a negative spin on the fact that Blue Sky’s two best-reviewed movies were the ones based on iconic source material - as I’ve noted, the films do feel a little bit like stylistic outliers, rather than organic expressions of the studio’s strengths - but let’s not kid ourselves that working from a beloved source text isn’t a double-edged sword. Blue Sky’s rivals at Illumination proved that much in their botching of Dr Seuss’ The Lorax, as have Sony Pictures Animation with their repeated crimes against the Smurfs, and these kinds of examples provide a better context to appreciate Blue Sky’s sensitive, respectful treatments of Seuss and Charles Schulz as the laudable achievements they are. If anything, it may actually be MORE impressive that a studio that’s often had difficulty finding a strong voice with their own material have been able to twice go toe-to-toe with genuine giants of American culture and emerge not only without embarrassing themselves, but arguably having added something to the legacies of the respective properties.

CELEBRATING... GENUINE INNOVATION IN CG ANIMATION

Of course, adding something to a familiar mix is part and parcel of the adaptation process, but the challenge for any studio is to make sure that anything they add works to enrich the material they’re working with, rather than diluting it. In the case of The Peanuts Movie - a lavish computer-generated 3D film based on a newspaper strip with a famously sketchy, spartan aesthetic - it was clear from the outset that the risk of over-egging the pudding was going to be high, and that getting the look right would require a creative, bespoke approach. Still, it’s hard to overstate just how bracingly, strikingly fresh the finalised aesthetic of The Peanuts Movie feels, to the degree where it represents more than just a new paradigm for Schulz’s characters, but instead feels like a genuinely exciting step forward for the medium of CG animation in general.

Now, I’m certainly not one of those old-school puritans who’ll claim that 2D cel animation is somehow a better, purer medium than modern CGI, but I do share the common concern that mainstream animated features have become a little bit aesthetically samey since computers took over as the primary tools. There’s been a tendency to follow a sort of informal Pixar-esque playbook when it comes to stylisation and movement, and it’s only been relatively recently that studios like Disney, Illumination and Sony have tried to bring back some of that old-school 2D squash-and-stretch, giving them more scope to diversify. No doubt, we’re starting to see a spirit of visual experimentation return to the medium - the recent stylisation of movies like Minions, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Hotel Transylvania and Storks are testament to that - but even so, it feels like there’s a limit to how far studios are willing to push things on a feature film. Sure, Disney and Pixar will do gorgeous, eye-popping visual style experiments in short movies like Paperman, Inner Workings and Piper, but when it comes to the big movies, a more conservative house style invariably reasserts itself.

With the exception of a greater-than-average emphasis on physicality, Blue Sky’s typical playbook hasn’t really differed that much from their peers, which is partly why their approach to adapting Seuss and Schulz - two artists with immutable, iconic art styles of their own - have stood out so much. Their visual work on Horton Hears a Who! was groundbreaking in its own way - it was, after all, the first CG adaptation of Dr Seuss, and the result captured the eccentric impossibilities and flourishes of the source material much better than Illumination managed four years with The Lorax - yet The Peanuts Movie presented a whole new level of challenge. Where Seuss’s worlds exploded off the page with colour and life and elastic movement, Schulz’s were the very model of scribbled understatement, often eschewing backgrounds completely to preserve an expressive but essentially sparse minimalism. Seuss’s characters invited 3D interpretation with their expressive curves and body language; the Peanuts cast, by contrast, make no three-dimensional sense at all, existing only as a limited series of anatomically inconsistent stock poses and impressionist linework that breaks down the moment volume is added. It’s not that Charlie Brown, Snoopy and co are totally resistant to animation - after all, the Peanuts legacy of animated specials and movies is almost as treasured as the comic strip itself - but it’s still worth noting that the Bill Melendez/Lee Mendelson-produced cartoons succeeded mostly by committing fully to the static, spare, rigidly two-dimensional look of Schulz’s comic art, a far cry from the hyper-malleable Chuck Jones/Friz Freleng-produced style of the most famous Seuss adaptations.

Perhaps realising that Schulz cannot be made to adapt to 3D, Blue Sky went the opposite route: making 3D adapt to Schulz. The results are honestly startling to behold - a richly colourful, textured, fluidly dynamic world, populated by low-framerate characters who pop and spasm and glide along 2D planes, creating a visual experience that’s halfway between stop-motion and Paper Mario. It’s an experiment in style that breaks all the established rules and feels quite unlike anything that’s been done in CGI animation on this scale - with the possible exception of The Lego Movie - and it absolutely 100% works in a way that no other visual approach could have done for this particular property. Each moment somehow manages to ride the line of contradiction between comforting familiarity and virtuoso innovation; I’m still scratching my head, for example, about how Blue Sky managed to so perfectly translate Linus’s hair - a series of wavy lines that make no anatomical sense - into meticulously rendered 3D, or how the extended Red Baron fantasy sequences are able to keep Snoopy snapping between jerky staccato keyframes while the world around him spins and revolves with complete fluidity. Snoopy “speaks”, as ever, with nonverbal vocalisations provided by the late Bill Melendez, director of so many classic Peanuts animations; the use of his archived performance in this way is a sweet tribute to the man, but one that hardly seems necessary when the entire movie is essentially a $100 million love letter to his signature style.

I do wonder how Melendez would’ve reacted to seeing his work aggrandised in such a lavish fashion, because it’s not as though those films were designed to be historic touchstones; indeed, much of the stripped-back nature of those early Peanuts animations owed as much to budgetary constraints and tight production cycles as they did to stylistic bravery. Melendez’s visuals emerged as they did out of necessity; it’s an odd quirk of fate that his success ended up making it necessary for Blue Sky to take such bold steps to match up with his template so many decades later. Sure, you can argue that The Peanuts Movie is technically experimental because it had to be, but that doesn’t diminish the impressiveness of the final result at all, particularly given how much easier it would have been to make the film look so much worse than this. It’d be nice to see future generations of CG animators pick up the gauntlet that films like this and The Lego Movie have thrown down by daring to be adventurous with the medium and pushing the boundaries of what a 3D movie can look and move like. After all, trailblazing is a defining component of Peanuts’ DNA; if Blue Sky’s movie can be seen as a groundbreaking achievement in years to come, then they’ll really have honoured Schulz and Melendez in the best way possible.

CELEBRATING... THE COURAGE TO BE SMALL

In scaling up the visual palette of the Peanuts universe, Blue Sky overcame a key hurdle in making the dormant series feel worthy of a first full cinematic outing in 35 years, but this wasn’t the only scale-related challenge the makers of The Peanuts Movie faced. There’s always been a perception that transferring a property to the big screen requires a story to match the size of the canvas; in the animation industry, that’s probably more true now than it’s ever been. Looking back at the classic animated movies made prior to around the 1980s and 1990s, it’s striking how many of them are content to tell episodic, rambling shaggy dog stories that prioritise colourful antics and larger-than-life personalities over ambitious narrative, but since then it feels like conventions have shifted. Most of today’s crop of successful animations favour three-act structures, high-stakes adventure stories and screen-filling spectacle - all of which presents an obvious problem for a movie based on a newspaper strip about a mopey prepubescent underachiever and his daydreaming dog.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that Charlie and Snoopy have had to manage a transition to feature-length narrative, but it was always unlikely that Blue Sky would follow too closely in the footsteps of the four previous theatrical efforts that debuted between 1969 and 1980. All four are characterised by the kind of meandering, episodic structure that was popular in the day, which made it easier to assemble scripts from Schulz-devised gag sequences in an essentially modular fashion; the latter three (Snoopy, Come Home from 1972, Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown from 1977 and Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don't Come Back!!) from 1980) also made their own lives easier by incorporating road trips or journeys into their storylines, which gave audiences the opportunity to see the Peanuts gang in different settings. The first movie, 1969’s A Boy Named Charlie Brown, also features a road trip aspect to its plotline, but in most respects offers the most typical and undiluted Peanuts experience of the four original films; perhaps as a result, it also feels quite aggressively padded, while its limited cast (lacking later additions like Peppermint Patty and Marcie) and intimately dour focus made it a sometimes claustrophobic cinematic experience.

Given The Peanuts Movie’s intention to reintroduce the franchise to modern audiences who may not necessarily be familiar with the original strip’s melancholic sensibilities, the temptation was always going to be to balloon the property outwards into something broad, overinflated and grand in a way that Schulz never was; it’s to be applauded, then, that The Peanuts Movie ends up as that rare CGI animation that tells a small-scale story in a focused manner over 90 minutes, resisting the urge to dilute the purity of its core character-driven comedy material with any of the family adventure elements modern audiences are used to. Even more so than previous feature-length Peanuts movies, this isn’t a film with any kind of high-concept premise; rather than sending Charlie Brown out on any kind of physical quest, The Peanuts Movie is content to offer a simple character portrait, showing us various sides of our protagonist’s personality as he strives to better himself in order to impress his unrequited love, the ever-elusive Little Red-Haired Girl. The resulting film is certainly episodic - each attempt to impress his object of affection sends Charlie Brown into new little mini-storylines that bring different classic characters to the foreground and evoke the stop-start format of Schulz’s strip, even though the content and style feel fresh - but all of the disparate episodes feel unified by the kind of coherent forward momentum and progressive character growth that Bill Melendez’s older movies never really reached for.

Indeed, it’s probably most telling that the film’s sole major concession to conventional cinematic scale - its extended fantasy side-story featuring Snoopy engaging in aerial battles in his imaginary World War I Flying Ace alter-ego - is probably its weakest element. These high-flying action sequences are intelligently conceived, injecting some real visual splendour and scope without intruding on the intimacy of the main story, but they feel overextended and only infrequently connected to the rest of the film in any meaningful way. This would be less of a problem if the Snoopy-centric narrative had effective emotional hooks of its own, but sadly there’s really not much there beyond the Boys’ Own parody trappings; any real investment in Snoopy’s dreamed pursuit of his poodle love interest Fifi is undermined by her very un-Schulz-like drippy damselness, and it becomes hard to avoid feeling that you’re watching an extended distraction from the parts of the movie you’re actually interested in. Of course, it’s arguable that an overindulgent fondness for Snoopy-related flights of fancy drawing attention away from the more grounded, meaningful exploits of Charlie Brown and friends is actually a fair reflection of the Peanuts franchise in its latter years, showing that Blue Sky were faithful to Schulz to a fault, but I wouldn’t like to focus too much on a minor misstep in a film that’s intelligent and committed about its approach to small-canvas storytelling in a way you don’t often see from mainstream animated films on the big screen.

CELEBRATING... LETTING THE ULTIMATE UNDERDOG HAVE HIS DAY

All of these achievements would count for very little, though, if Blue Sky’s movie wasn’t able to adequately capture the intellect and essence of Schulz’s work, a task that seems simultaneously simple and impossible. For such a sprawling franchise, Peanuts has proven remarkably resilient to tampering, meddling or ruination, with each incarnation - whether in print or in animation - remaining stylistically and tonally consistent, thanks to the strict control Schulz and his fastidious estate have kept over the creative direction of the series. On the one hand, this is a blessing of sorts for future stewards of the franchise, as it gives them a clear playbook to work from when producing new material; on the other hand, the unyielding strictness of that formula hints heavily at a certain brittleness to the Peanuts template, suggesting to would-be reinventors that it would take only a small misapplication of ambition to irrevocably damage the essential Schulz-ness of the property and see the result crumble to dust. This has certainly proven the case with Schulz’s contemporary Dr Seuss, one of few American children’s literature writers with a comparable standing to the Peanuts creator, and an artist whose literate, lyrical and contemplative work has proven eminently easy to ruin by misguided adapters who tried and failed to put their own spin on his classic material.

There’s no guesswork involved in saying these concerns were of paramount importance to the Schulz estate when prepping The Peanuts Movie - director Steve Martino was selected specifically on the strength of his faithful adaptation of Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!, and the film’s screenplay was co-written by Schulz’s son Craig and grandson Bryan - but even taking a cautious approach, there are challenges to adapting Schulz for mainstream feature animation that surpass even those posed by Seuss’ politically-charged poetry. For all his vaulting thematic ambition, Seuss routinely founded his work on a bedrock of visual whimsy and adventurous, primary-colours mayhem, acting as a spoonful of sugar for the intellectual medicine he administered. Schulz, on the other hand, preferred to serve up his sobering, melancholic life lessons neat and unadulterated, with the static suburban backdrops and simply-rendered characters providing a fairly direct vessel for the strip’s cerebral, poignant or downbeat musings. The cartoonist’s willingness to honestly embrace life’s cruel indignities, the callousness of human nature and the feeling of unfulfilment that defines so much of regular existence is perhaps the defining element of his work and the foundational principle that couldn’t be removed without denying Charlie Brown his soul - but it’s also something that might have felt incompatible with the needs and expectations of a big studio movie in the modern era, particularly without being able to use the surface-level aesthetic pleasure that a Seuss adaptation provides as a crutch.

I’ve already addressed the impressive way The Peanuts Movie was able to make up the deficit on visual splendour and split the difference in terms of the story’s sense of scale, but the most laudable aspect of the film is the sure-footed navigation of the tonal tightrope it had to tread, deftly balancing the demands of the material against the needs of a modern audience, which are honestly just as important. Schulz may have been a visionary, but his work didn’t exist in a vacuum; the sometime brutal nature of his emotional outlook was at least in part a reaction to the somewhat sanitised children’s media landscape that existed around him at the time, and his work acted as an antidote that was perhaps more necessary then than it is now. That’s not to say the medicinal qualities of Schulz’s psychological insights don’t still have validity, but to put it bluntly I don’t think children lack reminders in today’s social landscape that the world can be a dark, daunting and depressing place, and it feels like Martino and his team realised that when trying to find the centre of their script. Thus, The Peanuts Movie takes the sharp and sometimes bitter flavour of classic Schulz and filters it, finding notes of sweetness implicit in the Peanuts recipe and making them more explicit, creating a gentler blend that goes down smoother while still feeling like it’s drawn from the original source.

The core of this delicate work of adaptation is the film’s Charlie Brown version 2.0 - still fundamentally the same unlucky totem of self-doubt and doomed ambition he’s always been, but with the permeating air of accepted defeat diminished somewhat. This Charlie Brown (voiced by Stranger Things’ Noah Schnapp) shares the shortcomings of his predecessors, but wears them better, stands a little taller and feels less vulnerable to the slings and arrows that life - and ill-wishers like Lucy Van Pelt - throw at him. Certainly, he still thinks of himself as an “insecure, wishy-washy failure”, but his determination to become more than that shines through, with even his trademark “good grief” sometimes accompanied by a wry smile that demonstrates a level of perspective that previous incarnations of the character didn’t possess. Blue Sky’s Charlie Brown is, in short, a tryer - a facet of the character that always existed, but was never really foregrounded in quite the way The Peanuts Movie does. In the words of Martino:

“Here’s where I lean thematically. I want to go through this journey. … Charlie Brown is that guy who, in the face of repeated failure, picks himself back up and tries again. That’s no small task. I have kids who aspire to be something big and great. … a star football player or on Broadway. I think what Charlie Brown is - what I hope to show in this film - is the everyday qualities of perseverance… to pick yourself back up with a positive attitude - that’s every bit as heroic … as having a star on the Walk of Fame or being a star on Broadway. That’s the story’s core.”

It’s possible to argue that leavening the sometimes crippling depression in Charlie Brown’s soul robs him of some of his uniqueness, but it’s also not as though it’s a complete departure from Schulz’s presentation of him, either. Writer Christopher Caldwell, in a famous 2000 essay on the complex cultural legacy of the Peanuts strip, aptly described its star as a character who remains “optimistic enough to think he can earn a sense of self-worth”, rather than rolling over and accepting the status that his endless failures would seem to bestow upon him. Even at his most downbeat and “Charlie-Browniest”, he’s always been a tryer, someone with enough drive to stand up and be counted that he keeps coming back to manage and lead his hopeless baseball team to defeat year after year; someone with the determination to try fruitlessly again and again to get his kite in the air and out of the trees; someone with enough lingering misplaced faith in Lucy’s human decency to keep believing that this time she’ll let him kick that football, no matter how logical the argument for giving up might be.

Indeed, Charlie Brown’s dogged determination to make contact with that damn ball was enough to thaw the heart of Schulz himself, his creator and most committed tormentor - having once claimed that allowing his put-upon protagonist to ever kick the ball would be a “terrible disservice to him”, the act of signing off his final ever Peanuts strip prompted a change of heart and a tearful confession:

“All of a sudden I thought, 'You know, that poor, poor kid, he never even got to kick the football. What a dirty trick - he never had a chance to kick the football.”

If that comment - made in December 1999, barely two months before his death - represented Schulz’s sincere desire for clemency for the character he had doomed to a 50-year losing streak, then The Peanuts Movie can be considered the fulfilment of a dying wish. No, Charlie Brown still doesn’t get to kick the football, but he receives something a lot more meaningful - a long-awaited conversation with the Little Red-Haired Girl, realised on screen as a fully verbalised character for the first time, who provides Charlie Brown with a gentle but quietly overwhelming affirmation of his value and qualities as a human being. In dramatic terms, it’s a small-scale end to a low-key story; in emotional terms, it’s an moment of enormous catharsis, particularly in the context of the franchise as a whole. It’s in this moment that Martino’s film shows its thematic hand - the celebration of tryers the world over, a statement that you don’t need to accomplish epic feats to be a good person, that persevering, giving your all and maintaining your morality and compassion in the face of setbacks is its own kind of heroism. The impact feels even greater on a character level, though; after decades of Sisyphean struggle and disappointment, the ending of The Peanuts Movie is an act of beatific mercy for Charlie Brown, placing a warm arm around the shoulders of one of American culture’s most undeservedly downtrodden characters and telling him he is worth far more than the sum of his failures, that his essential goodness and honesty did not go unnoticed, and that he is deserving of admiration - not for being a sporting champion or winning a prize, but for having the strength to hold on to the best parts of himself even when the entire world seems to reject everything he is.

Maybe that isn’t how your grandfather’s Peanuts worked, and maybe it isn’t how Bryan Schulz’s grandfather’s Peanuts worked either, but it would take a hard-hearted, inflexible critic to claim that any of The Peanuts Movie’s adjustments to the classic formula are damaging to the soul of the property, particularly when the intent behind the changes feels so pure. The flaws and foibles of the characters are preserved intact, as is the punishingly fickle nature of the world’s morality; however, in tipping the bittersweet balance away from bitterness towards sweetness, Martino’s movie escapes the accusation of mere imitation and emerges as a genuine work of multifaceted adaptation, simultaneously acting as a tribute, a response to and a modernisation of Charles Schulz’s canon. The Peanuts Movie is clearly designed to work as an audience’s first exposure to Peanuts, but it works equally well if treated as an ultimate conclusion, providing an emotional closure to the epic Charlie Brown morality play that Schulz himself never provided, but that feels consistent with the core of the lessons he always tried to teach.

In reality, it’s unlikely Peanuts will ever be truly over - indeed, a new French-animated TV series based on the comics aired just last year - but there’s still something warmly comforting about drawing a rough-edged line under The Peanuts Movie, letting Charlie Brown live on in a moment of understated triumph 65 years in the making, remembered not for his failings but by his embodiment of the undersung heroism of simply getting back up and trying again. It’s not easy to make a meaningful contribution to the legacy of a character and property that’s already achieved legendary status on a global scale, but with The Peanuts Movie, the perennially undervalued Blue Sky gave good ol’ Charlie Brown a send-off that a spiritually-minded humanist like Charles Schulz would have been proud of - and in my book, that makes them heroes, too.

#peanuts #peanutsmovie #charles schulz #charles m. schulz #charlie brown #peppermint patty #lucy van pelt #linus van pelt #snoopy #woodstock #blue sky #blue sky studios #animation #film analysis #movies #movie critique #long post

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blockheadbrands · 6 years

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How Cynthia Nixon Changed the New York Cannabis Game

Tricia Romano of Leafly Reports:

On a balmy summer night in late June, the lobby of Galvanize, a chic urban workspace in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood, was filled with young, fashionable women, many donning high heels, sharp dresses, and clutching stylish purses. They were there for a fundraising event for Cynthia Nixon, hosted by a group of cannabis industry leaders in New York City.

'I am Cynthia Nixon,” said the actress-turned-politician, 'and I am the cannabis candidate for New York governor.'

If you squinted, it looked like the kind of crowd that Miranda, her character in Sex and the City, would have hung out with. In reality, though, it was the kind of a celebratory meeting of two rising forces in New York: the city’s hip, young cannabis entrepreneurs; and the television star who suddenly became a serious candidate for governor of New York.

Stars of the industry circulated around the buzzing loft-like space: Lynsey Ayala, creator of the Brooklyn craft botanical line BreadxButta; Marta Freedman and Charlotte Palermino, founders of the cannabis media startup Nice Paper; Mae Karwowski, founder of the marketing tech firm Obviously; and Women Grow pioneer and former CEO Jazmin Hupp.

Unlike some of the other “Cynthia for New York” events I’d attended over the past few months, the crowd had a real energy and excitement to it. Many of the organizers and attendees were women, and there was an upbeat buzz about a female candidate on the side of the cannabis industry. If there was any doubt about that, Nixon erased it with her opening line.

“I am Cynthia Nixon,” she said, taking the microphone to raucous cheers, “and I am the cannabis candidate for New York governor.”

That’s something her opponent, two-term Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has never said. It is a phrase that has likely never crossed the lips of any serious candidate for governor in the 230-year history of the Empire State.

She may not beat Cuomo in the Democratic primary on Sept. 12, but Cynthia Nixon has changed New York.

Four years ago an obscure law professor and political activist named Zephyr Teachout challenged Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York’s Democratic primary. She had a surprising modicum of success, garnering 34 percent of the vote.

Teachout’s performance opened a wormhole in progressive circles in New York. If a no-name (if oddly named) challenger could cut into the base of a powerhouse like Cuomo, who many regarded as being too satisfied with the status quo, maybe a well-liked celebrity with rich friends could do her one better.

Using celebrity to get past the gates is a move straight from Donald Trump’s playbook, of course. But instead of using her star power to inflate her ego, Nixon has used it to illuminate causes that many traditional politicos would not touch.

High on that list is the legalization of cannabis. Though New York state passed a highly restrictive medical marijuana law in 2014, it has yet to go the Full Monte and legalize it for adult use. When asked why the famously liberal state lagged on the issue, most observers pointed to one person: Andrew Cuomo.

The Gov’s Old-School Thinking

An old-school Democratic tough-on-crimer out of the Clinton mold, Cuomo has long been an icon of past-generation liberal thinking on cannabis. New York’s voters and state legislators had to drag him kicking and screaming to allow an ultra-strict medical marijuana system. He didn’t like it, he doesn’t want it, he barely tolerates it. Adult-use legalization? Fuhgettaboutit.

Then, in March of this year, Nixon announced her candidacy. Almost from the beginning, she hammered away at the injustice and nonsense of New York State’s cannabis laws. “I’m absolutely for the legalization of marijuana,” Nixon told Wendy Williamson April 11. “Let’s capture some of that revenue.” When she got knocked for advocating on fiscal grounds alone, she posted a YouTube video to clarify her position:

‘Stop Putting People of Color in Jail’

“There are a lot of good reasons for legalizing marijuana, but for me, it comes down to this: we have to stop putting people of color in jail for something that white people do with impunity,” Nixon said.

“Eighty percent of the New Yorkers who are arrested for marijuana are black or Latino despite the fact that whites and people of color use marijuana and roughly the same rates. The consequences follow people for the rest of their lives making it harder for them to get jobs or housing and for non-citizens putting them directly in the crosshairs for deportation,” she said, pivoting and putting Cuomo in the crosshairs.

“If there was more political courage coming out of Albany we would have done this a long time ago. The simple truth is for white people the use of marijuana has effectively been legal for a long time isn’t it time we legalized it for everybody else.”

In response, Cuomo said—and did—nothing.

Who’s the Progressive Champion?

In April, New York Magazine put Nixon on its cover, declaring that “Cynthia Nixon Has Already Won.”

She repeated the line that would become etched as a campaign mantra: Cuomo “presents himself as a progressive champion, but really nothing could be farther from the truth.”

Nixon continued to hit Cuomo on the issue, on Twitter and in the media. As late as 2017, Cuomo proclaimed cannabis a “gateway drug,” even as more states proved out the success of legalization—and more than 20,000 New York State residents suffered arrest and incarceration due to prohibition. In early 2018, Cuomo signed off on a Department of Health study of legalization, due at the end of the year. “It is a hotly debated topic, pardon the pun,” he said, despite the absence of a pun, “and it would be nice to have some facts in the middle of the debate.”

Nixon preferred straight talk.

“Most Americans now agree: the war on drugs is racist and expensive. If we can admit that, then we can admit that it’s on our government to repair the damage done to communities of color across our country,” she wrote on May 7.

Cynthia Nixon✔@CynthiaNixon

· May 7, 2018

Hey, @thereval. I hear you. Let me share my thoughts on the issue. https://twitter.com/TheRevAl/status/993481594198519808 …

Cynthia Nixon✔@CynthiaNixon

There's no way legalizing marijuana would be a remedy for the legacy of slavery & Jim Crow. But when it comes to repairing the wrongs of a racist drug war, we've got to make sure black and Latino communities are prioritized in the new legalized industry. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/15/legal-marijuana-industry-racism-portland-jesce-horton …

3:29 PM - May 7, 2018

A billion-dollar industry, a racist legacy: being black and growing pot in America

What does it take to succeed as a young black entrepreneur in a sector largely dominated by white men seen as daring trailblazers?

theguardian.com

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As governor, she vowed, it wouldn’t be just “rich white men who make billions off a product that sends thousands of black people to jail. We’re going to create jobs and opportunity in the communities most devastated by the racist War on Drugs.”

The Nixon Tour: Hit-n-Miss

Over the summer, I went to a number of “Cynthia for New York” events in New York: one in Bronx which was supposed to be a launch for her thousands of volunteers setting out to collect signatures; an unveiling of her education policy (24 pages long) at the Borough of Manhattan Community College; and a multi-group rally outside the New York Public Library advocating for affordable housing. Some of the events lacked the energy and buzz that would be expected from Nixon’s glowing press. At the event in the Bronx, which was, politely speaking, underattended, I asked a reporter if Nixon had grassroots support, and he replied… “—ish.”

Nixon’s public events were tightly orchestrated by her handlers. Groups of people showed up more to see the TV star and hear what she had to say, and less to show their unabashed support. I didn’t get the feeling that New York loved the prospect of Cynthia Nixon as governor, so much as the state’s denizens were meh on Cuomo.

At the cannabis industry fundraiser in SoHo, many of the curious and the skeptical came away impressed.

When Tanya Osbourne, founder of CannaDiva and the New York market leader for Women Grow, said that when she heard Nixon was seriously running, “I had a little puzzle face on.” She had initially written off the former Sex and the City star as just another trying on a role in politics. But Osbourne got on board after hearing Nixon talk about cannabis.

Cannabis isn’t her only issue.

“What really struck me for her was her language,” Osbourne told me. “She was using language that other people weren’t using. It was just really forthright about the disparity between black people in the industry and non-black people in the industry,” which resonated with Osborne as a woman of color.

Nixon was “talking about how this market is going to be eaten up by the people who can afford it the most without saying the obvious.” The obvious being the fact that rich white men in legal states are now getting richer doing what poor black men have been arrested for doing since the late 1930s.

“She was just speaking the truth,” Osbourne added, “and I could get behind somebody who was actually using the language that is just the truth. Black people are underrepresented in the market and if you are rich white male you will probably be able to own a dispensary, have a billion companies—and then the people that are in jail look like me.”

Cannabis: Political, Not Personal

For Nixon, cannabis legalization isn’t a personal crusade.

She talks easily and openly about how she’s sampled it in the past. “I tried it twice when I was in college,” she told The Cut. “It wasn’t for me, but I promised a number of people that when we legalize it in New York, I will give it another shot.”

Instead, she works in the tradition of legalization advocates like Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and Rep. Tom Garrett (R-VA), politicians who work to end prohibition based on a variety of principles including social justice concerns, libertarian values, fiscal responsibility, and just plain common sense.

Like Blumenauer, Nixon unabashedly embraces the cannabis connection. Earlier this year she showed up at a 4/20 parade on April 20, added a 4/20 button to her site, and even gave away a Broad City bong with the help of Ilana Wexler and Abbi Jacobson, the two stars of the show.

Cynthia Nixon✔@CynthiaNixon

Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d be typing: You could win a bong signed by @BroadCity's @abbijacobson and @ilazer! This may not be a serious contest, but legalizing weed is no joke. So enter now: http://bit.ly/BroadCity4Cynthia …

1:20 PM - Jul 8, 2018

Going Where Cuomo Wouldn’t

For those staking their money and their careers on the cannabis industry in a state where it’s still not fully legal, Nixon’s outspokenness is personal. It’s a vote of confidence from a public figure who created the role of a strong, bold character on TV—Miranda was in many ways the least retrograde and most relatable of the Sex and the City characters—and then embodied that courage and strength in real life.

In June, Nixon spent much of her time on the campaign trail listening to people of color speak.

And she’s campaigning in ways that always seem to highlight the divide between herself and Cuomo. She uses her white privilege to speak out on behalf of people whose voices are rarely heard.

In June, she spent much of her time on the campaign trail listening to people of color speak. At one event in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Nixon sat in on a roundtable featuring about a dozen high school age kids at The Center for Popular Democracy. Though there were more members of the press than participants (one reporter from The Root remarked that the scene reminded him of covering Trump), it was one of the more compelling campaign events that she held in those early summer weeks.

The kids were all mostly high school aged, a diverse bunch in terms of race and gender. A few identified as trans and went by “they,” their pronouns carefully marked on name tags. (“Cynthia, Her/She.”)

Kesi Foster, a coordinator at Urban Youth Collaborative opened the floor. “Our school systems have put in place policies and practices that criminalize the normal behavior of young people. And that results in young people losing hundreds of thousands of days of instructional time because they’re being suspended. In the most kind of visceral stark outcome, it literally results in young people being pulled out of a classroom and pulled into a courtroom or pulled into our jails and prisons across the state.”

He rattled off statistics—black students represent only about 17 percent of the students across New York state, but they represent 44 percent of students that are referred to law enforcement, and concludes, “We know that having police officers in schools, it makes it more likely that students are going to be referred to law enforcement for normal youthful behavior as disorderly conduct and other minor infractions.”

Real Life in School

One by one, the students told Nixon about how they have to go through metal detectors to get to class, how they have to wait 20 or 30 minutes to get inside, how once inside it feels like they are in a jail, because the police are inside, eyeballing their every move, how their belongings are searched, how they need permission for the smallest things, to get something from the car, for instance. They tell stories about how roughhousing can viewed as a criminal activity by the police and how demoralizing it school as a whole is.

The students' stories illustrate Nixon’s point: Being caught with cannabis as a person of color leads to a domino effect that can hurt for the rest of their lives.

One student explained the psychological effects of so much police presence.

“If your first interaction is a police officer yelling at you to remove things or yelling at you saying,’ you should know better,’ all the rest of your day and sometimes the rest of your week—there’s just a lot of trauma that you’re holding in your body all day long.”

Nixon, wearing a dress with a suit jacket over it, listened intently, and nodded her head earnestly.

Anooj Bhandari, who works with Make the Road New York as a Restorative Justice Coordinator, told a story about two students who were given summonses at school for marijuana possession. To fight the charges, they needed to be in court the same day as an exam required for graduation.

“When we think about the options that are given to young people in those moments, it’s choose: do you want to either have a warrant out for your arrest or do you want to try to move closer to graduation?” he said. “If those are the options that we’re providing for young people, like we’re failing that as, as a system of education.”

It’s a concrete example of Nixon’s point about marijuana and legalization—how being caught with cannabis as a person of color leads to a domino effect that can hurt a person for the rest of their lives.

Optimism in the Air

At the SoHo party, which is more glitz and glamour than Social Justice Warrior, there’s a hum of optimism in the air. Yes, some of that optimism is due to dollar signs—if cannabis is fully legalized, there are a million potential avenues for revenue, new businesses and new technologies to be developed. But, the difference is that in a state like New York, that money, and all that possibility can actually go to the communities of color that Nixon has vowed won’t be left behind under her watch, should she be elected.

'Her vision for New York is beautiful.'

Lulu Tsui, Co-founder of cannatech company Revel

In many of the legal adult-use states, the majority of the population is heavily white. Washington and Oregon, for instance, have populations are more than 80 percent non-Latino white. In Colorado, white people comprise 69 percent of the population. But New York state and New York City, where many of the business owners in a legal market will be located, is much more diverse, with more than 64 percent of the population comprising of people of color —black, Asian, Latinx, and Hispanic.

It’s unlikely that Nixon will overcome her tremendous disadvantage in the polls, despite a scrappy debate against the governor last week. But in early summer, there was still a glimmer of hope in the crowd at Galvanize.

One of the hosts, Lulu Tsui, a cofounder of the cannatech company Revel, was impressed with Nixon’s solutions. Those included pushing for automatic expungement of cannabis arrests, for instance. “I think it was a really great first introduction to having a conversation about cannabis, “ Tsui said. “Just having that time and have her speak and tell us what she believes in, what she envisions.”

“And,” she says, “her vision for New York is beautiful.”

Tricia Romano is the former editor in chief of The Stranger. She previously worked as a staff writer at the Seattle Times, and has been published in the New York Times, Elle.com, Rolling Stone, the New York Post, New York magazine, Slate, Grantland, Spin, and Salon. She covered underground culture in New York City for the Village Voice for eight years in her column “Fly Life.”

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