Amazon Announces ‘Lord of the Rings’ TV Series

amazon

Amazon has announced they’ll be producing a new Lord of the Rings TV series. The Hollywood Reporter has more:

The retail giant and streaming outlet announced Monday that it has acquired global television rights to the Lord of the Rings franchise, based on the best-selling novels by J.R.R. Tolkien. Amazon has handed out a multiple-season commitment. The Amazon LOTR series will be produced in-house at Amazon Studios alongside the Tolkien Estate and Trust, publisher HarperCollins and Warner Bros. Entertainment’s New Line Cinema.

Taylor Swift’s ‘Reputation’ Sold 700,000 on First Day in U.S.

Taylor Swift

Billboard:

Taylor Swift’s Reputation is off to a red-hot start. The album sold around 700,000 copies in the U.S. on its first day of release, according to initial sales reports to Nielsen Music.

The set was released at 12 a.m. ET on Nov. 10, through Big Machine Records. Its first day sales figure could grow larger, after all of Nielsen’s retail reporters have submitted their sales for the day.

Hmm, that seems good.

How Picasso Bled the Women in His Life for Art

Picasso

Cody Delistraty, writing for The Paris Review:

Sixteen years ago, Marina Picasso, one of Pablo Picasso’s granddaughters, became the first family member to go public about how much her family had suffered under the artist’s narcissism. “No one in my family ever managed to escape from the stranglehold of this genius,” she wrote in her memoir, Picasso: My Grandfather. “He needed blood to sign each of his paintings: my father’s blood, my brother’s, my mother’s, my grandmother’s, and mine. He needed the blood of those who loved him.”

After Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s second wife, barred much of the family from the artist’s funeral, the family fell fully to pieces: Pablito, Picasso’s grandson, drank a bottle of bleach and died; Paulo, Picasso’s son, died of deadly alcoholism born of depression. Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s young lover between his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, and his next mistress, Dora Maar, later hanged herself; even Roque eventually fatally shot herself.“Women are machines for suffering,” Picasso told Françoise Gilot, his mistress after Maar. After they embarked on their affair when he was sixty-one and she was twenty-one, he warned Gilot of his feelings once more: “For me there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats.” Marina saw her grandfather’s treatment of women as an even darker phenomenon, a vital part of his creative process: “He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them.”

I read this piece this morning and it’s full of things I definitely didn’t learn in art history courses. Then I saw Jason Kottke’s comments on it:

[M]assive chunks of our culture [have] been created by specific men who abuse women but also that so-called “Western culture” in its entirety has been marked and in many ways defined by systemic and institutionalized misogyny that has chewed up women for art and discarded them en masse. Never mind your fave is problematic…the whole damn culture is problematic. This aspect of the creation of culture has been largely written out of history, but going forward, it’s going to be important to write it back in.

Yep. That’s a perfect way to sum up how I feel.

Musical.ly Sells for Almost a Billion Dollars

Money

Musical.ly is being sold for at least $800 million. Recode reports:

The deal hasn’t closed yet, but Bloomberg pegs the price at $800 million, while the Wall Street Journal puts it at “$800 million to $1 billion”, which is the range I’ve heard. Without a public disclosure of the price, you’re generally safe betting on the lower number on deals like these, and assuming that the bigger number includes hard-to-hit earnout targets.

Live Action ‘Star Wars’ TV Series Coming From Disney

Star Wars

Variety is reporting that a live action Star Wars TV series will be coming to Disney’s new streaming service:

Disney chairman-CEO Bob Iger announced the “Star Wars” news during the company’s quarterly earnings call. In addition to the “Star Wars” TV series, Disney is working on TV series adaptations of Pixar’s “Monsters Inc.,” the Disney Channel’s “High School Musical” franchise and an original entry from Marvel.

Woman Accuses Jesse Lacey of Soliciting Nude Photos From Her at 15

Brand New

Last night Brian Keith Diaz, who was in the Long Island band The Reunion Show and guitar tech for Fall Out Boy and a variety of other bands, called out on his Twitter and Facebook feed asking:

So while we are on the topic of outing famous and semi-famous creeps, anyone want to speak up about Jesse Lacey from Brand New?

At that point a woman alleged that when she was fifteen Jesse Lacey solicited nude photos from her, stating:

He solicited nudes from me starting when I was 15 and he was 24. Manipulated the hell out of me, demanded specific poses/settings/clothing, demeaned me, and made it clear that my sexuality was the only thing I had to offer. He knew what he was doing was shitty so he wouldn’t touch me until I was 19. I should’ve known better by then, but he had screwed me up so much psychologically that all I wanted was his approval. It fucked me up to the point that I STILL have nightmares and wakeup in a sweat. I still breakdown and have panic attacks when people play Brand New in a bar.

And:

Oh and yes he made me watch him masturbate on Skype. Apparently that’s a common thing with sexual predators. I took screen shots at some point, they’re probably on a computer in my basement if I ever really wanted to rehash my past that much (I don’t think I do).

I’ve reached out for comment from the band and management, but so far have not heard anything back.

Update #1: Pitchfork have ran an article detailing two alleged victims’ accounts:

Another woman, Emily Driskill, was 16 years old when she first met Lacey in 2002; she’s now 32. A concert photographer, music journalist, and Brand New fan, Driskill says she was given Lacey’s instant messenger screen name by a mutual friend. The first time they met in person was for an interview, during which Lacey stared at her chest and made “lots of comments about [her] body and breasts,” Driskill tells Pitchfork. “He was the first person to ever tell me that I was hot. In hindsight as an adult woman, I know I was preyed on.”

Update #2: A woman has written about an alleged relationship with Jesse that started when she was 17:

Reading the accounts from other women has been heartbreaking, as it has forced me to confront that Jesse used many women for his own selfish, and as he put it, “narcissistic” needs. I felt special and I wasn’t special. I had been duped. What has been more difficult that realizing that I was not the only one who was harmed by his behavior, has been reading the comments of his fans. I have felt so proud and empowered by those who have thanked the women for stepping up and out, which I was too afraid to do alone. After all, he wanted me to keep the secret and I did not want to disappoint him.

Update #3: More details have emerged via Vulture:

A year ago, a friend from Boston reached out to Garey with a similar story. That woman told Garey that Lacey had allegedly masturbated in front of her when she was 19 and that she considered the incident “borderline” nonconsensual because she and Lacey had been talking since she was underage. “It was a similar kind of grooming thing,” Garey says, “in that [it] came off like she did give consent but didn’t really feel like she had a choice, which is how I see my situation too. Of course we all have a choice, but with societal norms and the culture, at some point, you don’t feel like you do in the moment.

Pandora Has Lost $1 Billion in Four Years and Is Worth Less Than Ever

Pandora

Tim Ingham, writing for Music Business Worldwide:

Pandora has posted net losses of $473.6m so far in a ‘transformative’ 2017 – which has seen it part ways with CEO Tim Westergren and other top execs, as well as the sale of its Ticketfly business to Eventbrite.

Although this figure includes a one-time Q2 goodwill impairment write down of $132m related to the net assets of Ticketfly (and other one-time expenses), it’s a very alarming indication of the firm’s long-term sustainability.

As it, it doesn’t have any sustainability.

It now looks almost guaranteed that Pandora, which lost $90m in Q4 2016, will post net losses in excess of half a billion dollars in this calendar year.

That seems bad.

Rian Johnson to Create All-New Star Wars Trilogy

Star Wars

Star Wars:

Lucasfilm is excited to announce that Johnson will create a brand-new Star Wars trilogy, the first of which he is also set to write and direct, with longtime collaborator Ram Bergman onboard to produce.

As writer-director of The Last Jedi, Johnson conceived and realized a powerful film of which Lucasfilm and Disney are immensely proud. In shepherding this new trilogy, which is separate from the episodic Skywalker saga, Johnson will introduce new characters from a corner of the galaxy that Star Wars lore has never before explored.

Louis C.K. Crossed a Line Into Sexual Misconduct, 5 Women Say

Louis CK

The New York Times:

Now, after years of unsubstantiated rumors about Louis C.K. masturbating in front of associates, women are coming forward to describe what they experienced. Even amid the current burst of sexual misconduct accusations against powerful men, the stories about Louis C.K. stand out because he has so few equals in comedy. In the years since the incidents the women describe, he has sold out Madison Square Garden eight times, created an Emmy-winning TV series, and accumulated the clout of a tastemaker and auteur, with the help of a manager who represents some of the biggest names in comedy. And Louis C.K. built a reputation as the unlikely conscience of the comedy scene, by making audiences laugh about hypocrisy — especially male hypocrisy.

His movie premiere and upcoming appearances have been canceled.