The return of 'King of the Hill,' and New York's legendary neon shop
Things I Saw This Week — Sunday, June 8
Animation
“King of the Hill” returns on Aug. 4. More on the revived show:
“Hank and Peggy Hill are back in Arlen, Texas, and not just because Hulu is reviving King of the Hill. Turns out they’ve been away from the Lone Star State for a long time, because Hank took his propane-and-propane-accessory talents overseas to a new job in Saudi Arabia. The upcoming season, which premieres all ten episodes on August 4, takes place in the present day as Hank and Peggy return to a somewhat different America.
“We liked the idea that he had been gone for a while, and the most Mayberry kind of freezer that you could put the family in was an Aramco base, which is like an idealized kind of white-picket-fence America,” says show co-creator Greg Daniels. “They had gone to Saudi Arabia and they were just coming back and had missed out on a lot of recent, uh, cultural changes.”’
…
“Perhaps the biggest change, though, is the fact that Bobby Hill is all grown up. Now 21 years old, one of TV’s greatest child characters has become a young man and given up his dream of becoming a world-famous prop comic. Bobby’s adult ambitions have kept him in Texas as the chef and co-owner of a Japanese-German Hill Country fusion BBQ joint in Dallas, close enough for him to visit his parents when they move back into the old family home.”
With the recent death of longtime “The Simpsons” composer Alf Clausen, here’s another look at his best songs from the show.
A look back at “Clerks: The Animated Series,” 25 years later.
Television history is filled with plenty of infamous flops that barely made it to air before the networks gave them the chop: 2012 crossdressing series “Work It,” a 2007 musical drama “Viva Laughin” that the New York Times referred to as possibly “the worst show in the history of television,” and the 1990 British sitcom about Hitler “Heil Honey, I’m Home.” 25 years ago, an animated series adaptation of Kevin Smith‘s 1994 cult film “Clerks” joined that dubious club — and seemed cheerfully aware of its fate the entire time.
In the pilot episode of the ABC adult animated sitcom, which remarkably was not one of the two episodes that were broadcast before the show got canceled and burned off over at Comedy Central, the lead characters Dante and Randal (voiced by Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson) watch an episode of “The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer” — “America’s #1 sitcom,” as they put it. A relatively deep cut reference even in the year 2000, most people now would assume the show, about the Black butler of Abraham Lincoln’s White House, is just a fake show invented as a gag. But it was very real: it premiered in 1998 on UPN, was the subject of boycotts and protests by the NAACP for its insensitive handling of slavery, and ultimately was canned after four episodes aired.
By invoking such a notorious flop, the “Clerks” animated series was practically daring the same fate upon itself — and in the end, it only lasted half as long as “Desmond Pfeiffer.” But that joke also exemplifies why the show, which premiered with its fourth episode on May 31, 2000, was such a weird, delightfully unpredictable hidden gem, and still the best thing Kevin Smith has ever attached his name to.
Art
Two profiles on artists with long careers (both from Pennsylvania):
“At 98, Thaddeus Mosley Is Still Building His Forest of Wood Sculptures"
For seven decades, Mosley has been producing works such as these, making him a legend in Pittsburgh. With his daughter Tereneh, Mosley once appeared on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the famed children’s TV show shot in the city, and he first exhibited his art at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1968. The musician John Coltrane hung out with him when he spent time in Pittsburgh, and he won the Pittsburgh Center of the Arts’s Artist of the Year award before he committed to being an artist full-time.
“Thad is really a hero in Pittsburgh,” Brendan Dugan, the founder of Karma, the New York–based gallery that has shown Mosley since 2020, told ARTnews. “You know, when you walk around with him, it’s like walking around with Elvis.”
Until very recently, however, Mosley went unnoticed just about everywhere else. He has never participated in a Whitney Biennial, a Documenta, or a Venice Biennale; the Museum of Modern Art has never shown or collected his work. But following an appearance in the 2018 edition of the Carnegie International, a closely watched survey of contemporary art curated that year by Ingrid Schaffner, Mosley’s art has gained a wider following.
“The Monument Maker: The World Is Catching Up to Barbara Chase-Riboud”
There are many reasons why Barbara Chase-Riboud should be one of the most famous women in America. But it makes sense that she isn’t. Her ascension coincided with an art world and era that consistently sidelined women and Black artists (and still does). Her response was unflinching vision. Born in Philadelphia, the artist and writer has lived in Paris since 1961, where she has operated as a kind of omniscient narrator, watching America and watching the world. She is a master of abstraction, but also of truth—hard truths that are often difficult to accept
Cities
A roundup of city (and state!) news of note:
Chicago
“Chicago Is The Only City To Host ‘The First Homosexuals,’ An Extensive Collection Of Queer Art”
“Prejudice ‘follows us to the grave’: The segregated past of Chicago cemeteries”
“'She Who Dared,' an opera about women in the civil rights movement, opens in Chicago”
Hawai’i
“Hawaiʻi Makes History As First State To Charge Tourists To Save Environment”
Hawaiʻi has officially become the first U.S. state to enact a so-called “green fee” — a charge added onto hotel room stays and other short-term visits to help protect the local environment and address the growing impacts of climate change.
Gov. Josh Green signed the fee into law Tuesday after years of unsuccessfully urging the Legislature to pass it. Set to take effect next year, the fee could raise around $100 million annually, state officials estimate, a portion of which will go toward Hawaiʻi’s response to future disasters similar to the 2023 Lahaina wildfire.
Los Angeles
“Economy threatens future of Black Market Flea”
New York
“The New York Neon Shop That Became Legendary”
Portland (Oregon)
“This Portland collective keeps the city clean — and helps unhoused people find stability”
Film
The 4K restoration of one of the first independent features directed by a Black American woman will get a theatrical release.
This release from Janus marks the first official theatrical run for [Jessie] Maple’s Will, which was first seen by limited audiences in 1981.
Shot on location in Harlem with a budget of $12,000, Will stars Obaka Adedunyo as a former All-American basketball star who has fallen from grace due to drugs. With the support of his wife (Loretta Devine, making her screen debut), Will (Adedunyo) finds a renewed sense of purpose in the community while mentoring a streetwise 12-year-old (Robert Dean) and coaching a local young women’s basketball team.
A documentary about Archbishop and “I Was Born This Way” singer Carl Bean premiered this week at the Tribeca Festival.
“Six years in the making,” notes a release, “the film follows the little known story of Bean’s life from his turbulent childhood growing up Black and queer, through his surprising music career, including the 1977 Billboard top 10 Disco hit and gay anthem ‘I Was Born This Way,’ and his departure from the music industry to start the prolific Minority AIDS Project and the world’s first LGBTQ+ church for people of color, Unity Fellowship.”
The release continues, “I Was Born This Way also tracks the surprising back-story of the song and the legacy of Bean’s version, which inspired Lady Gaga’s new modern LGBTQ+ anthem, ‘Born This Way.’”
Food (and Drink)
Meet the Michelin-recognized sommelier who has a wine allergy.
Maryland now has an official cocktail: the Orange Crush.
And, from The New Yorker: “How a Hazelnut Spread Became a Sticking Point in Franco-Algerian Relations.”
Last summer, as traffic between France and Algeria underwent its annual spike, influencers, many of them with Algerian connections, started touting the spread. “This thing, it’s sick!” one TikToker raved; another swore that it was “better than Nutella!” Yet another simply plunged an entire baguette into a jar and shoved it, dripping, into his gob. Soon, the presenters of the morning show on BFMTV—one of France’s most watched news channels—were conducting a live tasting, licking El Mordjene straight off the spoon. On playgrounds, a new chant rang out: “Who wants El Mordjene? Woop woop!”
A shopkeeper in Cholet, a midsize town, reported that he had sold a thousand jars of El Mordjene in five hours. In most cities, it became almost impossible to find. The grocery giant Carrefour announced its intention to stock El Mordjene, and Cebon vowed to keep its factories running twenty-four hours a day. Prices soared to ten euros, as word circulated of “Soviet-style rations.” Now people were posting videos of “El Mordjene hunts,” crisscrossing cities for hours in search of a jar. The comedian Youness Hanifi joked, “Is it a hazelnut spread, or is it coke?”
…
‘In early September, customs authorities at the port of Marseille and at Charles de Gaulle Airport, outside Paris, refused to allow two separate shipments of El Mordjene to enter French territory. Both lots—about a dozen pallets total, of eight hundred and forty jars each—belonged to independent importers, who had never before run into trouble. The rationale for the goods’ rejection wasn’t clear. On one form, customs officials wrote that the spread appeared “to infringe the trademark, designs, and model of the Ferrero Group,” the makers of Nutella, who sell tens of millions of jars in France each year.”
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