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      Lord Buffalo drummer removed from plane and detained by US border control

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      The Texas-based rock band Lord Buffalo has cancelled its European tour after its drummer, Yamal Said, was detained by US Customs and Border Protection on Monday.Said was removed from a plane en route to the band’s summer tour and has had no contact with his bandmates for two days, according to a message posted to the band’s Instagram account. Said is a Mexican citizen but a legal permanent resident of the United States, holder of a green card and resident of Austin since the 1980s, according to the Austin Chronicle.“We are heartbroken to announce we have to cancel our upcoming European tour,” the band wrote on Instagram on Wednesday. “Our drummer, Yamal Said, who is a Mexican citizen and lawful permanent resident of the United States (green card holder) was forcibly removed from our flight to Europe by Customs and Border Patrol [sic] at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport on Monday May 12. He has not been released, and we have been unable to contact him. We are currently working with an immigration lawyer to find out more information and to attempt to secure his release.“We are devastated to cancel this tour,” the statement continued, “but we are focusing all of our energy and resources on Yamal’s safety and freedom.”An update to the statement on Wednesday afternoon thanked fans for their support, and said Said had “secured the legal representation he needs”.“We are waiting to hear what comes next,” they added. “We want to reiterate that we truly don’t know what’s going on. We have more questions than answers, but we will keep you posted as much as we can. At this time the family asks for privacy as they navigate the situation.”According to the Chronicle, Said is a longtime staple of the music scene in Austin. He formerly played with the band the Black and works as a music instructor for the Texas School for the Blind.The heavy psychedelic-Americana quartet were to embark on an eight-date European tour in support of their latest album Holus Bolus. The tour, alongside the Swedish band Orsak:Oslo, was scheduled to begin on 15 May in the Netherlands and wrap the following Friday in Iceland.In their own statement, Orsak:Oslo, who will continue with the tour, wrote: “No one should be pulled off a plane and jailed for simply trying to travel and make art with their band. We won’t pretend to understand the full complexity of the situation, but this should not happen anywhere.”Said’s arrest comes amid a broader crackdown on immigration and border entry from the Trump administration, which has included searching phones for text messages critical of Donald Trump. In the four months since the US president took office, several professional musicians have had issues leaving or entering the US.In March, members of the British punk band UK Subs said they were denied entry and detained in the US, reportedly due to incorrect visas and a reason agents were unwilling to disclose. Bassist Alan Gibbs, who was sent back to the UK along with bandmates Marc Carrey and Stefan Häublein, speculated on social media “whether my frequent, and less than flattering, public comments regarding their president and his administration played a role – or perhaps I’m simply succumbing to paranoia”.Additionally Bells Larsen, a trans singer-songwriter based in Montreal, told the Guardian that he was canceling a tour because he could not apply for a visa under new US citizenship and immigration services policies that do not recognize transgender identities. The British singer FKA twigs cancelled several North American dates of her Eusexa tour because of unspecified visa issues. And Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, of the Polish rock band Trupa Trupa told NPR that visa delays forced him and his band to miss out on several North American performance opportunities.The Guardian has reached out to Lord Buffalo’s representatives for comment. More

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      Michelle Obama 2.0 – the reinvention of the former first lady

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      Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, I review Michelle Obama’s new podcast, IMO, which is surprising in the ways it breaks with the Michelle of the past.I came to sneer – and stayed to cheerView image in fullscreenFirst, a disclaimer: I had never fully bought into the Michelle Obama hype. I felt her now legendary line “When they go low, we go high” encapsulated a troubling and complacent form of respectability politics, in which Black people have to maintain coolness and grace under fire to be taken seriously. As the first lady, Michelle often seemed like a sanitising presence, wheeled out so that her national treasure status could serve as a smokescreen to obscure more honest and damning assessments of Barack Obama’s political record.Also, I am not a huge fan of the celebrity podcast genre, which is a vehicle for high-profile figures to chat to their friends in return for huge pay packets. So I was sceptical when Michelle’s podcast was launched in March. Yet when I listened to it, I was immediately charmed and hooked. In truth, I came to sneer and stayed to cheer. She is honest, reflective and vulnerable in ways that are profoundly resonant of a universal Black female experience, something that her icon status had rarely spoken to previously. The irony is that just as Michelle is finding her voice, her popularity appears to be falling – the podcast received poor ratings on launch, though it’s arguably the best thing she’s ever done.A great orator has the conversation of her lifeView image in fullscreenThe most arresting thing about IMO, despite the genuinely interesting high-profile Black guests such as Keke Palmer and the Wayans brothers, is Obama herself. She has always been one of the great orators in US politics – one of the superpowers that made her and Barack, another impressive public speaker, such a compelling couple on the world stage. In her podcast, Michelle uses this talent to reflect on her life and the challenges of ageing, losing her parents and the constant demands placed upon her.The fact that she co-hosts the show with her brother, Craig Robinson – a genial and down-to-earth foil for her confessions – gives the podcast such an intimate air that you feel like you’re in the presence of everyday people, not celebrities. I found myself listening not to hear any snippets of political gossip or insight into the Obamas’ lifestyle, but to receive some exceptionally articulated wisdom from an older Black woman who has seen a lot and gone through milestones we will all experience.She is also funny. Her account of how differently men and women socialise is familiar and hilarious. Michelle describes catching up with her female friends as a “multiday event”, something that leaves Barack perplexed as to why it takes two days for a basic meetup.There is pathos and uncertainty, too. In a recent episode, Michelle talks about the death of her mother, who lived in the White House during the Obamas’ tenure. Michelle says that, at 61, only now does she feel that she has finally become an adult, having had to reckon with her own mortality after the loss of her parents. The former first lady has revealed that she is in therapy, and that she is still trying to navigate this phase of her life.And, in a striking segment, she speaks with barely restrained annoyance about her reasons for not attending Trump’s inauguration, an absence that triggered divorce rumours that have been swirling for months. She says “it took everything in [her] power” to choose what was right for her in that moment. Yet that decision was met with “ridicule” because people couldn’t believe she was saying no to the inauguration for any other reason than she just did not want to be there – they had to “assume my marriage was falling apart”. Oof. It caught my breath.Beyond Black Girl Magicskip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenThis Michelle is worlds away from the Michelle of the 2010s. The publishing juggernaut and icon of Black social mobility, who rose to first lady from a bungalow in the south side of Chicago, was the product of a particular moment in feminist and racial discourse.The start of that decade brought the rise of Black Girl Magic, a cultural movement that focused on the exceptional achievements and power of Black women. It intersected with Black Joy, which moved away from defining the Black experience primarily through racism and struggle. Both unfolded against the backdrop of “lean in” feminism, which glorified hard graft, corporate success and having it all. The result was the marketing of women such as Michelle to promote popular narratives of inspiration and empowerment.That energy has since dissipated, losing steam culturally and overtaken by more urgent battles. The gains of the Black Lives Matter movement triggered a rightwing backlash against diversity and inclusion that is spearheaded by Trump. Now the Obamas seem like relics of a naively optimistic and complacent time.‘We got out of the White House alive – but what happened to me?’View image in fullscreenBut all that change and disappointment seems to have freed Michelle from the expectation that she should project graceful power and guru-like wisdom at all times. The podcast may not be the runaway hit it might have been 10 years ago, but that speaks to its authenticity and refreshing lack of a cynical big marketing campaign. Michelle is not trying to catch a moment – she even looks different. Gone is the silk-pressed hair, the minimalist jewellery and the pencil dresses. She now embraces boho braids, long colourful nails and bold gold jewellery. In an episode of IMO, she asks herself: “What happened that eight years that we were in the White House? We got out alive; I hope we made the country proud. But what happened to me?” There is so much urgency in her voice. And though her high-octane political experience may not be relatable to the average person, that question is one that I and many women of a certain age are asking as we emerge, blinking into the light, from the tunnel of navigating racism, establishing careers against the odds and having families. What happened to me?To receive the complete version of The Long Wave in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here. More

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      Arts groups for people of color steel themselves after Trump’s NEA cuts: ‘They poked the bear’

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      Summertime at the Upijata Scissor-Tail Swallow Arts Company, an artistic program located on Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, is usually bustling. The arts community center, created to help combat high youth suicide rates on the reservation, would normally offer twice-a-week classes to enrolled students. Traditional artists – quilters or beadworkers – would be paid to teach interested participants. It was all a part of Upijata’s mission to emotionally and economically support the vulnerable community, the poorest reservation in the US.But this year Upijata will have to significantly reduce its programming. Classes will now only be held monthly. Instead of hosting 20 students for workshops, Upijata will only be able to accommodate six. The cuts at Upijata come after a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was rescinded last week. The funding, the first time Upijata has received an NEA award since being founded in 2019, made up about half of the company’s budget.Upijata is one of hundreds of groups facing severe budget deficits after the Trump administration swiftly cut millions of dollars in NEA grants. Now, arts organizations nationwide, such as Portland Center Stage and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, are scrambling to cover the shortfall. Groups specifically catering to marginalized communities are also caught in the fallout.“We’re [building] a community where we’re creating a sense of belonging to combat the suicide rates,” said Upijata’s executive director, Shannon Beshears. “If we cannot be that sense of belonging, because we don’t have the consistency, the ability to impact our participants’ lives in a positive way decreases dramatically.”An email sent out to grant recipients on 2 May said that the NEA would “focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President”, several outlets reported. Recipients of rescinded grants were given only seven days to appeal the decision. Several top officials at the NEA have since resigned from the agency following the grant terminations. The NEA did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.Projects being prioritized by the Trump administration instead include initiatives that “elevate the Nation’s HBCUs and Hispanic Serving Institutions, celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster AI competency, [and] empower houses of worship to serve communities”, among others.Grant terminations have affected artistic programming in every corner of the US, and organization administrators have taken to social media to share their shock and outrage. Many of the funded projects are already underway. In the interim, institutions have launched emergency funding campaigns, urging community members to donate. Others say they are appealing to other streams of donation, including private philanthropists. Many have filed appeals with the NEA to have their grants restored. Several of the funded programs are also the signature projects for impacted organizations, such as the annual Uptown Shakespeare in the Park initiative for the Classical Theatre of Harlem (CTH) in New York City.CTH, known for its contemporary takes on Shakespeare classics and Greek tragedies, was only a month out from rehearsals for their production of Memon, a new play about an Ethiopian king who fought with the city of Troy, when they received news that their $60,000 grant had been cancelled. “They sort of signaled that they were going to do something like this a couple of months ago,” said CTH’s producing artistic director, Ty Jones. “Did I think they would follow through? No, I didn’t.”The production is a part of the theatre’s annual Uptown Shakespeare in the Park festival, which sees about 2,000 attendees a performance. The event generates foot traffic for local businesses. Representatives from New York City’s department of health and mental hygiene also provide community members with onsite services, including blood pressure checks and social service references.In Philadelphia, the advocacy group Asian Americans United (AAU) lost a $25,000 grant meant to support their annual mid-Autumn festival ahead of the event’s 30-year anniversary in October. The event was first founded by local youth who couldn’t be with their families for the mid-Autumn celebration, said AAU’s executive director, Vivian Chang. The festival has since grown substantially, exposing upwards of 8,000 attendees annually to more than 100 local performers.“For a lot of people, it’s a very accessible way to reach a new audience. These aren’t groups that will be on a super mainstream stage, or maybe they’re performing an art form that’s undervalued,” said Chang. “Where do they get to celebrate this? Where do they get to display? The festival is one of the few places for that.”For many organizations catering to disenfranchised groups, the alleged reprioritization is especially frustrating and contradictory. Upijata, for example, works with tribal groups and theoretically should be considered eligible under the NEA’s newly outlined goals, which include projects that “support Tribal communities”. “They said supporting tribal communities [in their new priorities], but in their effort to prioritize supporting tribal communities, they are directly taking funding from them,” said Beshears. “It feels like there is so much back and forth, so much dishonesty.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMany affected organizations were not surprised to see the Trump administration’s attack on funding. Prior to last week’s cuts, the NEA was ordered to require grant applicants not to promote “gender ideology”, as a part of a broader executive order.The National Queer Theater (NQT), a non-profit theater based in Brooklyn, New York, had a $20,000 grant rescinded for its Criminal Queerness Festival, a showcase featuring work by queer artists from countries where queerness is criminalized or censored. The group joined a lawsuit in March with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to sue the NEA over its anti-LGBTQ+ policy. As for the latest NEA cuts, NQT’s artistic director, Adam Odsess-Rubin, said he and staff members are “upset by the NEA cuts, but I can’t say we’re surprised”.“These cuts are part of the larger story of how Elon Musk and Doge have tried to gut the federal government and really focused on eliminating any programs they see as potentially counter to this administration’s priorities,” said Odsess-Rubin. “That includes any programming related to LGBTQ+ issues, any programming focused on Black and brown communities, as well as programming around climate change or healthcare”.Many groups are hopeful that they’ll be able to close the gaps in funding, especially given outcry from the community. But questions of how to handle attacks on the arts in a long-term capacity remain.CTH ultimately decided not to request an appeal, instead opting to focus on future actions against NEA attacks. The theatre hopes to work with the other organizations who have also seen their funds stopped, possibly through legal means.In the meantime, CTH is moving ahead with their Memon production and is confident their community will help them raise $60,000 by June. “I’m one of these crazy people that believes that the power of people is stronger than the people in power,” said Jones. “I don’t fear these people. If anything, they poked the bear. It’s a spark that’s put a flame in motion.” More

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      Maren Morris: ‘I never said I’m leaving country music’

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      The year 2023 was a tough one for Maren Morris. The country singer, then 33, reached the end of her tour for her third studio album, Humble Quest, and the end of her rope with the conservative politics of country music industry. Her marriage to fellow country singer-songwriter Ryan Hurd, with whom she shares a young son, fell apart. That summer, her future professional life in question and her personal life imploding, she found herself in the UK touring with the Chicks – three fellow trailblazing, outspoken female artists in a male-oriented music scene who, 20 years earlier, got infamously blacklisted from country radio for daring to criticize George W Bush during a concert at Shepherd’s Bush.“It couldn’t have been a better musical hero backdrop for everything in my life crumbling,” Morris, a five-time Country Music Association Awards winner for such hits as The Bones, tells me in early April. The Chicks, of course, spun the hard-earned wisdom of the outsider’s high road into Grammy gold with 2006’s Taking the Long Way, an album of righteous anger burned to peace. “Any woman who has faced any sort of professional adversity or feeling that betrayal from a community – they just have the perfect album and attitude for it,” says Morris, with typical forthrightness.Morris, too, went her own way that summer. By September, the Texas native – one of the few big country stars willing to call out peers for, say, anti-trans comments, excusing away a video of Morgan Wallen saying the N-word, or general refusal to reckon with racism, homophobia and sexism in Nashville – publicly distanced herself from the industry where she started a decade earlier as a scrappy songwriter. “I thought I’d like to burn it to the ground and start over,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “But it’s burning itself down without my help.” She released the two-track EP The Bridge, signifying her move to Columbia from the label’s Nashville division, with a music video that seemed to call out the racial vigilantism suggested by country star Jason Aldean’s Try That in a Small Town. A month later, she filed for divorce from Hurd after five years of marriage.Two years of turmoil later, at 35, Morris can see a clearer picture. “I tried everything I could to make that part of myself work,” she says of her marriage. “I tried everything I could to make the part of myself within mainstream country work. And I think I was just growing apart from all of it.”Things are much brighter these days, though we have escaped the scorching afternoon sun at Coachella’s record-hot first weekend for an air-conditioned trailer to discuss what emerged from the ashes: Dreamsicle, a honey-hued album of reckoning and healing, out this week. In person, Morris is poised and thoughtful, more circumspect than her past burn-it-down comments would suggest. True to her decade-plus career blurring the line between country and pop, she is dressed somewhere between Nashville and California – crochet halter top, denim cut-offs, cowboy boots, multicolor silk headscarf set. She’s in town for some coveted Coachella guest spots – revisiting her breakout country hit My Church with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, performing her feature on Zedd’s inescapable 2018 party staple The Middle. And also, of course, to take in some wide-ranging sets, from Clairo to Charli xcx – with whom she shares, if nothing else, a career-long interest in the catharsis that is being loud while driving fast; her Grammy-winning single My Church, released in 2016, likened belting in the car to a religious experience, neatly twisting Nashville’s penchant for nostalgic faith into secular gospel.As a debut, My Church evinced Morris’s independent streak, though she came up through the country music system. Raised on 90s female country-pop stars such as Shania Twain, the Chicks and LeAnn Rimes, she had no other plan than to become a singer. Relentless touring as a teen around the state, plus failed auditions for nearly every talent show – American Idol, The Voice, America’s Got Talent, Nashville Star – cemented her country-pop sensibility and vocal chops, if not a route out of Texas. On the advice of Kacey Musgraves, a friend from the Texas honky-tonk circuit, Morris moved to Nashville in 2013 to work as a songwriter for the likes of Kelly Clarkson; she met Hurd the same year, when they co-wrote Last Turn Home for Tim McGraw.This was the height of so-called “bro country”, the prevalent sound of Solo cups, tailgates, cut-off jeans and nameless girls, almost all performed by white male artists occasionally inflected by hip-hop. As an aspiring solo artist, Morris was “deeply respectful to the machine” of Nashville, she told the New York Times Popcast in 2023. Her 2016 debut, Hero, emerged out of a period of questioning who she was writing for, then penning tracks for herself and posting them on Spotify, where she gained enough traction that country’s gatekeepers scrambled to sign her.View image in fullscreenHero immediately shot to No 1 on the country charts and solidified Morris’s precarious outsider-insider status as a new type of Nashville artist – musically voracious, open-minded and social media-literate, where she was unwilling to mince words on racial justice, abortion rights or respect for queer people. With a chameleonic and expansive voice, able to sustain torrential belt, delicate falsetto and a sharp turn of phrase, Morris moved seamlessly between genres and savvy collaborations, duetting with Taylor Swift, Alicia Keys, Hozier, Brothers Osborne and EDM artist Zedd – not to mention the Highwomen, a supergroup with Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires and Natalie Hemby that served as a triumphant, rootsy rebuttal to the country manosphere.Dreamsicle has that all in the rearview, instead preoccupied with present-tense mess given a rose-gold tint familiar to Morris’s ouevre. The album, named for the “perfectly fickle” sweet treat that definitionally cannot last, builds on her longstanding pop-lite sensibilities and stable of collaborators – Greg Kurstin, Jack Antonoff and Julia Michaels, among others – with the roving focus and intensity of someone in the thick of a breakup, broadly construed. “I’m not shying away from the elements of divorce on the record, but I think it’s so much bigger than that,” she says, lightly buffeted by the bass of Coachella’s early sets. “That’s a part of me and will be forever, but it’s not a defining characteristic of me. It’s how you put yourself back together.” Dreamsicle skips through those stops and starts – there is getting by with the help of your friends (grand bouquet), the awkwardness of the morning after with someone new (bed no breakfast), the moment of devastating clarity (this is how a woman leaves), the horniness of the newly liberated (push me over), and the overwhelmed freak-out (cut!).What there is not is any direct jab at Hurd, with whom she co-parents their five-year-old son, Hayes, in Nashville. “We had this amazing love and we do in a different way now,” she says with the tranquility of the therapized. “Now we’re partners in a different sense. We have to be really good, on the same page as much as we can, as co-parents.”Morris also seems intent on distancing herself from the story distancing herself from country music, describing the initial LA Times headline – “Maren Morris is getting the hell out of country music: ‘I’ve said everything I can say’” – as “really unfortunate”.“I never said I’m leaving country music, because that’s not really how I feel at all,” she explains calmly. “You hear country music on this album. You can’t just intentionally take the parts away. There would be nothing left of the sound of me. Because it’s just there. It’s in my bones and it’s in the way I write.”The story “caused a ton of unnecessary drama for me from that community because I was already sort of on the outs. I’m not backtracking what I said, I just never said that,” she adds, noting that she’s lived in Nashville for 12 years – “it’s not going to be some tussle that’s going to make me change my address.” Yes, she moved label divisions, no longer does the country radio circuit, nor submits her music to the CMA or ACM awards, but “I live in Nashville and I work with all my same friends,” she says. “It would be strange to be like: ‘This music isn’t me anymore.’ That makes me feel like I’m shitting on the music I’ve already put out, and that’s not how I feel at all.”“The fans that I’ve made and the communities those fans have made through being a fan of my music is so important to me,” she continues, “so to ever come out of my mouth saying: ‘I’m leaving you behind’ – I’d never be so reckless and stupid.” When I ask what she wished the conversation would have been, a representative interjects – the focus, it’s clear, is onwards and upwards. But Morris clarifies that that was just two years ago, “very much inside the storm that was still brewing” v the “more zoomed-out, healed phase” now. “If you dive deep enough, or if you just listen to the album, it’s very clear that I haven’t left anything behind.”View image in fullscreenMorris may not be up for directly challenging Nashville today, but she is clear on the values it should have, and what history is remembered. We’re in the Cowboy Carter era, where pre-existing mainstream stars from Beyoncé to Chappell Roan, Lana Del Rey to Post Malone, are taking on steel guitars and banjos. “It’s great when people come in and obviously have such a deep respect for the lore and the roots of country music, which people of color started,” Morris says. “Beyoncé telling the history of that in a correct way was so important.” Cowboy Carter’s collaborators, including Shaboozey, Rhiannon Giddens, Linda Martell, Brittney Spencer, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and others, “felt like this amazing melting pot of country music”, she adds. “That’s what it should be.”For a genre, and a country, often so focused on invoking a fictional past, Morris offers a different tradition – the many collaborations between Ray Charles and Nelson, a favorite of hers growing up in Texas and evidence of country music’s multi-racial, genre-porous past. “It’s like, do people remember that that happened? That listen to mainstream country music now?” she wonders. “We’ve been doing this for a very long time. Or at least, really badass artists have.”She offers others – Kris Kristofferson, an army man who advocated for veterans’ aid; Johnny Cash, performing for incarcerated people; Parton’s Imagination Library and status as a gay icon. “These people are famous for this long and this globally for a reason, and it’s not just because they’re from the south,” she says. “It’s because they have an identity and they stand up for the marginalized. They were real outlaws.“If there’s any crisis [in country music], I think it’s that the people that have an issue with any of that forget that their heroes were talking about that stuff before they were born.” And with that, along with one more nod to an album of past heartache – “I hope [audiences] hear themselves in it, whether it’s a past self or who they want to be,” she says – we’re out of trailer, back into the light.

      Dreamsicle is out now More

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      Patricia Clarkson: ‘When women make equal pay, everybody wins’

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      Patricia Clarkson, who portrays late equal pay activist Lilly Ledbetter in a biopic released this week, has a wish.The Oscar-nominated actor hopes her fellow American women collectively withhold sex from their partners – especially men in power – if the second Trump administration’s assault on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives ever takes aim at the gains won by the subject of her new film.“Do not go after this – do not because there will be a Lysistrata moment,” she told the Guardian in an interview recently, alluding to the ancient Greek comedy about women resolving to abstain from sex to compel the men in their nation to stop warring and sign a peace treaty. “We will put chastity belts back on.”Clarkson is only the latest in a long lineage to float the idea of a sex strike as a protest tactic. Nonetheless, what sets the Easy A and Sharp Objects star’s admonition and potential call to action apart is that it comes as her starring turn in Lilly coincides with the first months of a second Donald Trump presidency marked in large part by the rollback of policies meant to widen the professional opportunities of historically underrepresented groups.Directed by Rachel Feldman, Lilly dramatizes the struggles endured by a working-class mother from Alabama who began working at the tire manufacturer Goodyear in 1979 before becoming its only female supervisor and eventually realizing she was paid substantially less than her male colleagues, including much less experienced ones.She sued and at one point had been awarded nearly $4m in damages and backpay. But, in 2007, the US supreme court ruled that she had waited too long to sue, preventing her from ever collecting her award.Ultimately, with lobbying from Ledbetter and supporters that she picked up while pursuing her lawsuit, Congress enacted legislation early in Barack Obama’s presidency that afforded workers greater latitude to sue their employers over unequal and discriminatory pay.Clarkson said she did not get to meet Ledbetter before her death at age 86 in October. So Clarkson said she drew inspiration for her portrayal of the resolute Ledbetter in large part from her mother, Jacquelyn “Jackie” Brechtel Clarkson, who served several terms as a Democratic member of New Orleans’s city council and Louisiana’s state legislature during a political career regarded as legendary in their home town.She marveled at how her mother, who died at age 88 about four months before Ledbetter, never compromised raising five daughters – “all working women” – while facing down countless intense political battles.“They had similar DNA in ways that came to me as I was doing these scenes,” Clarkson said.To say the least, the political climate depicted in Lilly through Clarkson’s acting as well as through archival footage of prominent liberal American political figures who philosophically aligned themselves with her has changed seismically.In between Trump presidencies, the US supreme court eliminated the federal abortion rights established by Roe v Wade, a staggering blow to women’s reproductive rights.Trump has then spent his second presidency pushing his government to withhold funds from institutions which adhere to DEI practices that took hold nationally after the Minneapolis police’s murder of George Floyd in 2020.Less than two weeks before Lilly’s theatrical release, Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, announced his intent to eliminate a program meant to promote women’s contributions and safety in global conflict zones. The announcement raised eyebrows given that it was implemented during Trump’s first presidency and had drawn a ringing endorsement from his daughter, Ivanka.Clarkson made it a point to deliver an impassioned defense of DEI measures in general, urging Americans to stay informed about the topic despite the other fights being stoked by Trump’s second presidency.“When we work with people of every race, creed, color, sexual preference – that’s the best part of this world we live in,” Clarkson said. “I refuse to live in the world” demonizing that concept.Speaking to the Guardian after accepting the New Orleans Film Society’s Celluloid Hero Award and hosting a local screening of Lilly in early April, Clarkson said she honestly could not envision the Trump administration turning its crosshairs on the equal pay progress that has become synonymous with Ledbetter.“Equal pay is not – it’s not a political issue,” Clarkson said. “It’s a human rights issue.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Wherever you live across this great country, whether you are Black or white or brown or young or old or whatever you are, Republican or Democrat – when women make equal pay, everybody wins.”Yet the New York City resident also fears nothing is truly off the table during a second Trump presidency that has already shattered political norms many could not imagine being vulnerable. And if the administration dares to test something as drastic as re-implementing a system where pay is based on gender, she said she hoped the public mounts commensurate resistance – from Ivanka herself trying to talk some sense into her father to a women’s sex strike if necessary.View image in fullscreen“How is it cool for anyone to want their spouse, the love of their life, to be paid less, and you’re still going to ask for sex?” said Clarkson, who once attained digital virality with an appearance in the music video to the Lonely Island song Mother Lover, an irreverent ballad of sorts to desirable moms. “I say, ‘Honey, there must be another bedroom I’m sleeping in.’”Clarkson was quick to point out that she has faith in the willingness of men to step up in the event that Ledbetter’s achievements are ever directly threatened. By way of evidence, Clarkson said she was glad Lilly spent a decent amount of its 93-minute run time exploring how Ledbetter’s husband of 52 years, Charles, steadily supported her professional goals and activism despite the backlash they generated for the couple and their two children.The decorated US army veteran, played by John Benjamin Hickey, never sought to persuade her to settle for less than she believed that she deserved in hopes of easing some of the pressure. He instead remained in her corner until his death at 73 in 2008, a little more than a month before the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for which his beloved battled so hard became the first piece of legislation Obama signed as president.Clarkson said Charles Ledbetter’s unquestioning devotion to Lilly reminded her of the love the actor’s mother shared with her father, Arthur Alexander “Buzz” Clarkson Jr, a former medical school administrator to whom Jackie was married for more than 70 years.“My father wanted my mother to run this city,” Clarkson said while seated in the living room of an 18th-floor suite in downtown New Orleans’s Windsor Court hotel. “My father wanted my mother to make this city better.“Lilly’s husband wanted her to succeed. Charles … got caught up in her journey in realizing what she was sacrificing and the injustice of not being paid” adequately for the time she dedicated to making ends meet for her family.Clarkson has previously said that she chose to be unmarried and not have children. But she said she admired how her father and Charles Ledbetter were “kick-ass husbands that loved every single moment of their [wives’] lives”. And it positioned the women whom each of those men loved to thrive in the face of political adversity, providing an example Clarkson said she hopes more American spouses – especially husbands – emulate.As Clarkson put it: “These remarkable men stood by these women. And they wanted them.”

      Lilly is out in US cinemas now with a UK date to be announced More

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      ‘It’s all very sad’: Trump’s attack on arts funding has a devastating effect

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      On the afternoon of 3 May, arts organizations around the US began receiving cryptic emails from a previously unknown government email account. The missives declared that these organizations’ missions were no longer in line with new governmental arts priorities, which included helping to “foster AI competency”, “empower houses of worship” and “make America healthy again”.Chad Post, a publisher at Open Letter Books, a program of the University of Rochester that specializes in publishing translated literature, got his email just before entering a screening of Thunderbolts*. He put a quick post on Instagram, and when he came out of the movie his phone was full of responses. “I seemed to be the first one to receive this,” he recounted. “But then, all of a sudden, everyone was getting these letters.”Post told me that he had been in touch with 45 publishers who had had their NEA grants terminated, and he suspected that all 51 publishers receiving grants for 2025 supporting the publication of books and magazines had now received the letter. Although Open Letter expects to still receive funding for 2025, Post is convinced that no further money will be forthcoming from the National Endowment for the Arts.“According to rules of the email, we should get the money, although if you come back in two months and they never sent it, I wouldn’t be shocked,” he said. “The chilling part of that email is that they’re eliminating the NEA entirely. It lists all these insane things that are the new priority, and says our venture is not in line with the new priority, so we can’t ever apply again.”The grant termination won’t deal a lethal blow to Open Letter Books, but it will alter the kinds of literature that they are able to publish. Post said that he would have to give preference to books from nations that can offer funding – which tends to favor books from European languages and from wealthier countries.This sentiment was echoed by other arts organizations, who see the loss of NEA money as a significant blow, but not a deadly one. Kristi Maiselman, the executive director and curator of CulturalDC, which platforms artists that often are not programed at larger institutions, shared that NEA grants account for $65,000 of a roughly $1.1m budget. Thanks to proactive work between her team and the NEA, Maiselman received her grant this year, but does not expect any further such money. “It’s a pretty significant chunk of the budget for us,” she told me. “What has been hard for us this year is that we really do provide a platform for artists to respond to what’s going on in the world.” Continuing to promulgate those kinds of artists would be more difficult in future.View image in fullscreenAllegra Madsen, the executive director of the LGBTQ+-focused Frameline film festival, said that her grant funding had been in limbo ever since the inauguration of Donald Trump, and was ultimately terminated last week. “I think we could all kind of sense that it was going to go away,” she told me. “I think these blows that came this week are going to be felt very intensely by a lot of different organizations.”Frameline is housed in the same building as a number of other arts organizations dedicated to film, including the Jewish Film Institute, the Center for Asian American Media and BAVC Media, and it also sits adjacent to SF Film and the Independent Television Service, all of which Madsen says were affected by the termination of NEA grants. “We’ve all been hit, and we’re all just sort of figuring out what our next steps are.”One fear that Madsen raised was that many private funders take cues from the Federal government, and now with NEA grants terminated – and possibly the NEA itself getting axed – she is unsure if other donors will get cold feet. “This year we have a cohort of sponsors that are very much sticking by us, and I am incredibly thankful for those organizations standing up. But it is a bigger ask now, it’s a bigger risk for them.”Despite the often seemingly indiscriminate cuts made to the federal government by the unofficial “department of government efficiency”, the organizations the Guardian spoke with all believed that they had been targeted in some way because of the programming that they offer. “Just because it’s being done in mass, I don’t think that takes away from the idea that this is pointed and intentional,” Madsen told me. “Governments like this try to attack the populations that seem to have the least power, and right now they are mistakenly thinking that’s going to be our trans and gender-nonconforming siblings.”Taking a similar perspective, Maiselman sees these cuts as perpetuating a broader cultural turn away from arts programs, in particular those that significantly represent people of color and the queer community. “Prior to losing the NEA, we had lost about $100,000 in sponsorships this year,” she said. “We’re hearing from our sponsors that there are a lot of eyes on them. They’re not exactly saying no, but they are saying saying, ‘not right now’.”View image in fullscreenPost sees private money as a possible way to make up some of the lost NEA funding but fears that there will be a stampede of indie presses all toward the same few donors. “Everyone is feeling a little more broke and a little more strapped right now,” he said. “Arts orgs writ large are going to be competing for funds from the same few individuals and that just scares me.”He also argued that, while a press like Open Letter will be able to continue functioning without NEA money, organizations that only publish literary magazines may fold without significant infusions of private cash. “Those literary magazines don’t have the opportunity to rely on a book breaking out,” he said. “They’re not suddenly going to have an issue of the magazine take off. This might be a massive blow to literary magazines.”Although some arts organizations appear poised to survive the loss of NEA money, they nonetheless feel existentially frightened by the general turn of the political culture away from diversity and toward authoritarianism. “It’s hard right now to see any light at the end of the tunnel,” said Maiselman. “With the rate at which things are changing, it’s going to take years to course correct – that is, if and when the administration changes.”Maiselman further argued that the cultural shift brought in by the aggressive moves of the Trump administration had the potential to profoundly transform the landscape of the arts world. “There’s going to be a reckoning,” she told me. “A lot of organizations won’t survive this.”For her own part, Madsen struck a defiant tone, placing the current repressive political atmosphere in the context of other such threats to the LGBTQ+ community. “We will survive, we have the privilege of being an almost 50-year-old org,” Madsen said. “The LGBTQ+ community has been down this road before. We got through McCarthyism, we got through the Aids crisis, we’ll survive this.”In hopes of surviving, arts organizations are again turning toward one another, finding a community sentiment that many of the people I spoke to called reminiscent of the Covid years. “There are a lot of conversations right now about how we can help one another,” Maiselman told me. Post echoed that, positioning this as a time of collective grieving. “It feels like the end of something,” he said. “It’s sad, it’s all very sad, but we have to keep going somehow. We are damaged but not defeated.” More

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      Colbert on Trump administration’s ethos: ‘Take full responsibility and dump it on somebody else’

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      Late-night hosts dug into the chaos at Newark airport leading to a cascade of cancellations, Donald Trump’s alleged Hollywood tariffs and the visit of the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, to the White House.Stephen ColbertOn Tuesday’s Late Show, Stephen Colbert looked into the cascade of delays at Newark airport this week, causing the cancellation of hundreds of flights. The culprit was a terrifying 90-second blackout during which air traffic controllers temporarily lost radar and communications with the aircraft under their control, making them unable to see, hear or talk to them. “Those are three fairly important things,” Colbert deadpanned.The blackout was caused by a fried piece of copper wire. “Unlike the other blackouts at Newark, which are caused by the grand coconut margarita at terminal A Chili’s Too,” Colbert joked.In response to the crisis, Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, went on Fox News to, as Colbert put it, “take full responsibility and dump it on somebody else”.Duffy criticized old infrastructure in the US that hasn’t been updated in “30 or 40 years”, but said “this should’ve been dealt with in the last administration. They did nothing.”“Yes, this problem has been going on for years,” Colbert agreed. “Biden should’ve done something about it. Or really, the guy before him should’ve done something about it.”In truth, Biden did do something about it; in the 2021 infrastructure bill, he approved $25bn to improve airports. The upgrades began, but were partially derailed by Trump’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) laying off more than 400 staffers at the Federal Aviation Administration shortly after taking office, including maintenance mechanics and employees who work on electrical issues. “Those are the people who do the stuff!” Colbert exclaimed. “There are plenty of useless people you could’ve fired, like the TSA agent who says you can’t bring in a snow globe. I hate having to chug my snow globe right before security.”Duffy claimed that he was going to spend the money on a new system, but warned that it would take three to four years. “Not exactly what you want to hear in a crisis,” Colbert noted.And it’s a crisis that probably won’t get better soon, as many air traffic controllers are now out on a 45-day trauma leave following the blackout. “Wait a second, there’s such a thing as trauma leave?” Colbert wondered. “Bye! I’m off to the tropics.”Jimmy KimmelIn Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel recapped the visit of the new Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, to the White House, where Donald Trump insisted that “regardless of anything, we’re going to be friends with Canada”.“Poor Mark Carney had a helluva job today,” said Kimmel, noting that Trump keeps referring to Canada as the “51st state”. “It was like an Ewok going to a meeting on the Death Star.”But Carney “handled it well”, according to Kimmel. “In a friendly way, he made sure Trump knows they have no intention of becoming our 51st state.” Carney diplomatically told Trump that Canada is “not for sale, won’t be for sale”, to which Trump interjected: “But never say never!”“He doesn’t take no for an answer – in fact, he was found liable for it in a court of law,” Kimmel said, referring to a May 2023 verdict in which a New York court found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation of the writer E Jean Carroll, and ordered him to pay $5m.Kimmel also addressed Trump’s threat to (somehow) slap a 100% tariff on any movie made outside the US, “which caused every studio executive in Hollywood to double up on their Ativan yesterday,” he quipped. “No one seems to know what’s going on with these tariffs, including our own secretary of the treasury.“Remember how everyone said the main requirement to get a spot in his cabinet was to be good on TV? Well, here is our treasury secretary, Scott Bessent,” Kimmel continued before a clip of Bessent struggling to answer the basic question “who pays tariffs?” before Congress.“Try unplugging him and plugging him back in,” Kimmel laughed. “Scott Bessent has the demeanor of a headmaster at an all-boys school that’s under investigation.”Seth MeyersAnd on Late Night, Seth Meyers opened with Trump’s Truth Social post on Monday in which he claimed that he would order the government to reclaim and reopen the infamous Alcatraz prison. “I love that you can tell from his social media post what movie he watched on the plane,” said Meyers, referring to Clint Eastwood’s 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz, which played on public television in Florida while he was at Mar-a-Lago.Trump also joked with reporters about the possibility of becoming pope and said: “I would not be able to be married, though.”“And it looks like Melania has voted,” Meyers quipped next to a photo of white smoke.The Vatican’s conclave to elect a new pope is set to begin on Wednesday. “So just remember, black smoke means no decision, white smoke means a new pope and pink smoke means it’s a girl!” Meyers joked.The Late Night host also touched on reports that the US army is planning a parade to honor its 250th anniversary as well as Trump’s 79th birthday, including military vehicles, aircraft and nearly 7,000 soldiers. “And to honor Trump’s military service, he won’t be there,” Meyers quipped. 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      No Way Out: the 1987 thriller that prophesied a deeply corrupt US government

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      In 1987 – right before he became the biggest movie star in the world with a five-year hot streak that included Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves and The Bodyguard – Kevin Costner headlined two films that offered very different visions of America. The Untouchables assembles a group of plucky misfits to dole out frontier justice against those who would seek to extort the American dream – it’s brash, gung ho and morally transparent. A guaranteed classic.Far more interesting, though, is No Way Out, Roger Donaldson’s 1987 political potboiler that’s equal parts pulpy spectacle and damning critique of the US project. Functioning as a bridge between the conspiracy flicks of the 70s and the erotic thrillers of the 90s, the film starts with a sex scene in the back of a limo (complete with a perfectly timed cutaway to the Washington Monument) and ends with an unforgettable flourish.Adapted from Kenneth Fearing’s 1946 book The Big Clock (which also became a 1948 film), No Way Out transports its source novel’s action from a New York magazine house to the beating, bloody heart of cold war-era Washington.A baby-faced Costner plays Lt Cmdr Tom Farrell, a navy golden boy summoned to DC to work for the secretary of defense, David Brice (RIP Gene Hackman, fully stepping into his late-career “craven bureaucrat” mode). Brice’s special counsel/whipping boy Scott Pritchard (Will Patton, chewing every piece of available scenery as a textbook 80s “evil gay”) wants Farrell to help them derail an overly expensive stealth submarine program (shades of Aukus).The problem is that Farrell is in love with Brice’s kept woman, Susan Atwell (an infectiously delightful Sean Young, turning a potentially thankless role into the emotional centre of the movie). They happily continue their incredibly horny, incredibly doomed affair under Brice’s nose, until – spoiler warning – Brice learns that there’s another man in Atwell’s life and and lashes out.View image in fullscreenThis prompts Pritchard to go full Iago as he concocts a plan to get his boss off the hook. What if Atwell’s other lover was a long-rumoured Russian mole, codename: Yuri? What if the investigation into the attack on her became a Soviet witch-hunt instead? And what if their new dogsbody, Farrell, was in charge of the case? This is the ingenious narrative engine that propels the rest of the film: Farrell was at Atwell’s that night, right before Brice, making him the prime suspect in his own investigation. With all five walls of the Pentagon closing in on him, Farrell has to sabotage the manhunt and find the real villain before he’s framed.Donaldson (a Ballarat boy done good!) is one of those uber-reliable journeyman directors Hollywood doesn’t make any more; guys you wouldn’t recognise if you passed them on the street but whose films you’ve watched a thousand times at 11pm on 7mate: Cocktail, Species, Dante’s Peak, Thirteen Days. No Way Out is highly competent entertainment but it also portrays a deeply corrupt US forever at war with both the world and itself – a nation where people are thrown under the bus at a moment’s notice to protect the vested interests of powerful men. Perhaps the only thing more impressive than No Way Out’s airtight thriller structure is its profoundly cynical view of US institutions – an outlook that feels almost radical in hindsight, given the chest-beating, self-congratulatory air of so much other Ronald Reagan-era Hollywood fare.You can understand why The Untouchables went on to become a jewel in the crown of Costner’s filmography while No Way Out has sat there, largely forgotten, for close to 40 years. In 2025, though, it’s clear which version of the US rings truer, right down to a defense secretary accused of sexual assault (not to mention those damn submarines). Ten years ago I would have considered parts of No Way Out painfully outdated – today it feels almost too close to the bone.

      No Way Out is streaming on Amazon Prime in Australia, the UK and the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here More