Tag: General News

The party may not be over for Parrotheads, even if Jimmy Buffett’s gone.

The majordomo of Margaritaville died Sept. 1 at the age of 76 of complications from Merkel cell carcinoma, a rare skin cancer that was diagnosed back in 2019. It would seem to bring an end to more than five decades of boat drinks, cheeseburgers in paradise, fins to the left and right, and everything else that’s part of Buffett culture.

But members of his Coral Reefer Band may have other plans — as did Buffett himself.

“There’s definitely talk about doing something to keep it going,” says Michael Utley, 76, who worked with Buffett for 50 years, including scripting the annual summer shows. “(Buffett) would’ve wanted that. He always wanted that.”

Mac McAnally, a 45-year Coral Reefer veteran adds that Buffett “wanted that family to keep rolling. We haven’t figured out exactly how to do it, but we love being together too much not to.

“The privilege of riding shotgun with the thing that was Jimmy Buffett … was a joy every single day, and I will carry that with me forever. So whatever form we get to keep going in, we’ll do it.”

That, of course, will be good news to Parrotheads everywhere — especially in the Detroit metro area, where Buffett began playing during the ’60s at the Raven Gallery in Southfield and performed 32 times, starting in 1982, at the Pine Knob Music Theatre, which Buffett called “one of my favorite places to play. It’s just great every time we play there.”

He also headlined Comerica Park twice — in 2012 and 2013.

Utley and McAnally say discussions about what to do moving forward likely will take place early in the new year. In the meantime they’re rolling out “Equal Strain on All Parts,” Buffet’s 32nd studio album, which was recorded earlier this year and finished prior to his death.

Co-produced by the two Coral Reefers, “Equal Strain” features 14 songs, 11 co-written by Buffett (six of those with McAnally), along with an album-closing cover of Bob Dylan’s 1976 track “Mozambique,” a particular favorite of Buffett’s. The set includes guest appearances by Paul McCartney, Emmylou Harris, Angelique Kidjo, Will Kimbrough, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and even Buffett’s dog, Kingston.

“We played last August at Alpine Valley in Wisconsin and (Buffett) had spoken to Mac earlier in the summer and just mentioned he’d like to do another album, maybe in January,” Utley recalls. “No songs had been written. I said, ‘Mac, have you heard any songs yet?’ ‘No.’ ‘So we’re going into the studio in January and nothing’s been written?’”

Not long after, however, Utley and McAnally began getting “these scribbled notes about ideas for songs” that also were sent to other co-writers, including Utley’s son, Mick, and McAnally’s daughter, Erin, who are married, as well as to frequent collaborator Will Kimbrough and to Coral Reefer Band members Pete Mayer and Roger Guth.

“Everybody’s got a sort of assignment,” Utley says, “and we went from there.”

Buffett had been hospitalized during the fall and was being treated for cancer, but neither Utley nor McAnally felt Buffett was motivated by mortality.

“I don’t honestly know if this one was extra-fueled because he felt like it might be the last thing he had to say,” notes McAnally, 66, who will be participating in a special tribute to Buffett at the CMA Awards on Wednesday, Nov. 8, in Nashville. “He never let on how sick he was, which was his nature. He didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for him or worrying about him. He led us and he never showed anything besides ‘Let’s do this and let’s make it the best it can be.’”

Utley, however, noticed that “usually when we do records or projects we’ll get about halfway through and he’s on to the next thing. He didn’t do that this time. He really wanted to finish it and do it right.

“And some really magical stuff happened.”

One particularly charming moment was when McCartney joined Buffett and company in the studio to play bass and record vocals for “My Gummie Just Kicked In,” a song that stemmed from a dinner out with their wives.

“He just nailed it,” recalls Utley, who was in the studio while McAnally was listening in remotely. It was like when I was 17 and listening to the Beatles; (McCartney) played like a kid — and he’s older than we are, y’know?”

“Equal Strain” was finished by May, but had to wait for vinyl production before its Nov. 3 release. Buffett heard the finished product and was talking about it when Utley and McAnally visited him at his home in Sag Harbor, New York, the day before he died. “The first thing he said was, ‘Yeah, we got an album coming out!’,” recalls Utley, 76. “He was always very positive like that.”

The album will be accompanied by some music and lyric videos, as well as some behind-the-scenes footage from the sessions — some of which is already available via YouTube. Utley said he’s satisfied they made an album that’s “sort of a culmination of everything (Buffet) was or is, and McAnally says the Coral Reefer crew is happy to have created a final statement for their leader.”

“He was smiling 24 hours before he left this world, just like he won the Oscar” McAnally remembers. “He put his hand on his heart and said, ‘hell of a ride’ and ‘keep it going.’ He didn’t want a funeral or memorial; he wanted a party that rolls on.”

SAN JOSE – So, how much longer can this continue for the San Jose Sharks?

In the ugliest loss of an already historically awful start to this season, the largely lifeless Sharks allowed three goals in the opening eight minutes and were run out of their own building Thursday in a 10-1 beatdown at the hands of the Vancouver Canucks at SAP Center.

Fabian Zetterlund scored at the 16:12 mark of the third period to break Vancouver’s shutout bid, but it remained the most lopsided home loss the Sharks have experienced since they began operations in 1991-1992.

The ugliness doesn’t end there.

The Sharks’ 10-game losing streak from the start of the season is now tied for the seventh-longest in NHL history. The only teams to lose more consecutive games from the start of a season are the New York Rangers in 1943-44 and the Arizona Coyotes in 2017-2018 and 2021-2022. Those teams all lost 11 straight games to start their respective seasons.

The Sharks (0-9-1) will try to avoid joining that list when they host Erik Karlsson and the Pittsburgh Penguins on Saturday. After that, the homestand continues with games against the Philadelphia Flyers on Tuesday and the Edmonton Oilers next Thursday.

But who knows where this losing skid ends?

Expectations were modest at best for the Sharks after they traded their leading goal-scorer, Timo Meier, in February and Karlsson, their leading point-producer, in August.

But few could have foreseen the Sharks reach these depths. Not only are they on the verge of tying an NHL record for season-opening futility, but they’ve scored just 10 goals in 10 games.

The Sharks as a team have not experienced a win since April 1, when they beat the Arizona Coyotes at Mullett Arena in Tempe 7-2. That was 16 games ago, a stretch in which San Jose has gone 0-14-2.

The Sharks were hoping their three-day break between games would allow them the chance to hit the reset button. For the first time since the end of training camp, San Jose was able to practice on back-to-back days, trying to clean up some of the issues that led to a 0-5-0 road trip.

Instead, it appeared to have no effect.

Sharks center Nico Sturm took a double minor for high sticking just 69 seconds into the first period and allowed power-play goals to Brock Boeser and J.T. Miller.

It was 4-0 by the end of the first period, as the Sharks allowed goals to Quinn Hughes and another power play marker to Boeser.

It was 8-0 by the end of the second period, as the Sharks allowed four straight even-strength goals.

Besides the obvious talent deficiency, Sharks coach David Quinn said Thursday morning that his team’s mindset was interfering with the chance to have success.

Long-distance swimming in open water presents challenges beyond the physical grind. Think sharks. And venomous jellyfish. Those are just two of the potentially fatal problems Diana Nyad must contend with swimming from Cuba to Florida — nonstop and unaided — with only a support boat by her side to monitor her progress and squirt water and other nourishment down her throat every so often. Adapted from her memoir, the Netflix movie “Nyad,” starring Annette Bening, charts her arduous journey.

Your first question might be: Why? The movie struggles to find an answer beyond “because it’s there” and because of some emotional wounds from childhood that she’s looking to mend. But why this goal over any other? Why this stretch of water? We’re left to guess. But it’s a helluva accomplishment, one that no one has completed before or since.

An athlete and sports journalist, Diana is off-putting from the start, the kind of person who doesn’t talk so much as rant: “Laziness is contagious and we’re supposed to just nod along like it’s normal that everyone’s just surrendered to a banal existence?”

She’s restless and directionless, but is she interesting? The real Diana Nyad is; Bening’s self-serious, one-note interpretation less so. As the end credits role, the movie does itself no favors including clips of the real woman, whose personality and sense of humor come through even in those brief moments.

An accomplished long-distance swimmer in her youth, her 60th birthday is the catalyst that gets her back in the water to attempt the 110-mile, two-plus day endurance swim once again, three decades and some change after she first tried — and failed — to complete it at age 28. But she’ll need best friend Bonnie (Jodie Foster) to act as her coach and project manager. Broaching the idea, she has a wild look in her eye. “You said I needed to do something to get out of my funk,” to which Bonnie replies: “I meant you should sign up for speed-dating. Or see a therapist.”

With little else to occupy her time — and repeatedly telling anyone who will listen that her last name means water nymph in Greek — Diana becomes consumed with the idea of finally achieving this goal. She’s living out her own version of “Moby-Dick,” with the Cuba-to-Florida quest — a beast of its own — taunting her all these years and making her as single-minded and destructive in her pursuit as Ahab versus the whale, with Bonnie as her Ishmael.

The training montage comes early. Too early (and too underwhelming) in terms of the story’s pacing but that’s because it will take Diana several attempts over the years before she succeeds in 2013 — fifth time’s the charm — at age 64. She makes incremental improvements each time, learning as she goes and eventually donning a wet suit and mask when swimming through jellyfish-infested waters. (Why she doesn’t wear a wet suit the entire time goes unexplained and remains a dangling question, since one of her concerns while training is just how cold she is.) The logistics are both simple — she eats by treading water next to the boat so that Bonnie can drop pasta into her mouth — and complicated, whether it’s the ocean’s shifting currents or other safety issues.

I would have liked more details from screenwriter Julia Cox, even of the cringey variety. How does Diana deal with emptying her bowels over a two-day journey while wearing a standard swimsuit, or does this bodily function pause while she’s burning through that many calories? How do they ensure she doesn’t fall asleep or pass out? What happens to human skin when it’s submersed in salt water for that long? The movie envisions what it might have been like when she starts to hallucinate, but otherwise her psychological state of mind is given short shrift. Diana creates a mental playlist to occupy her thoughts while swimming, but we get little sense of how that works or if she allows herself other thoughts.

Directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are primarily documentary filmmakers (notably for their 2018 Oscar-winning rock-climbing feature “Free Solo”) and are experienced with stories of people pushing themselves to the limit. But they struggle to adapt some of those skills to a scripted format, relying too heavily on archival footage, which gums up the film rather than deepens it. I wish they had put more trust in cinematographer Claudio Miranda’s gorgeous underwater photography.

Frequent flashbacks to Diana’s childhood offer some insights into her intense drive. But these scenes also suggest she would, in fact, benefit from therapy as Bonnie suggested, particularly around her fraught childhood relationship with her father, and separately, a sexually abusive coach. The film treats these twin memories like ghosts, both haunting her and motivating her to reach her goal. It’s a little too tidy.

There are endless practicalities that need to be attended to for this kind of masochistic project and Diana is supported by team of experts who she persuades to work for free, including a navigator (Rhys Ifans, mirroring Bening’s frazzled blond haircut), and her version of a rousing pre-swim speech is a wonder of narcissism: “You’ve all sacrificed a great deal — no money, no perks, no guarantees. But I can think of no worthier cause for such sacrifice: My life’s mission — dare I say my destiny!”

Bonnie finally calls her out about “all this me, me, me, me crap,” but the film doesn’t explore that any further. Perhaps massive self-involvement is a required personality trait for this sort of thing. I’m sure it helps. But maybe that premise is as reductive as the assumption that only miserable people make great art.

The Diana of the film has tunnel vision. That could be true, but the real Diana Nyad also seems interested in more than just herself. She wouldn’t have been a successful journalist otherwise and it’s curious that “Nyad” omits an interesting detail that would have revealed something about how she views her place in the world: A month after she made it from Cuba to Florida, she swam for 48 hours nonstop in an outdoor pool set up in midtown Manhattan as part of a fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Sandy. She raised more than $100,000.

In an old interview, she’s asked how we can make our daily lives more adventurous. “There’s value to tuning in to what other people are doing and what their experiences are.” A stronger film would have found a way to capture that side of personality as well.

———

‘NYAD’

• 2 stars (out of 4)
• MPA rating: PG-13 (for thematic material involving sexual abuse, some strong language and brief partial nudity)
• Running time: 2:01
• How to watch: On Netflix Friday

The Warriors have been showing such good chemistry in their 4-1 start that Draymond Green compared it to last year’s difficulty developing rapport.

“Last year, we had an awful team as far as chemistry goes, it was pathetic,” Green told reporters after Wednesday night’s 102-101 win over the Kings, won on Klay Thompson’s final-second shot. “But chemistry has been a strong suit here. That’s why Steph (Curry) has been here for 15 years, Klay has been here for 13. I’ve been here for 12 and Loon (Kevon Looney) has been here for nine because chemistry is a strong suit — and Andre Iguodala. The list goes on and on.”

Of course, Green was a key figure in the trouble last year, as he punched Jordan Poole during training camp practice coming off the prior year’s championship run.

The team’s front office traded Poole for Chris Paul this offseason, which is already paying dividends with Paul leading a strong bench unit that has given Golden State a lot of stability they lacked when Curry wasn’t on the floor. It has also given Curry a boost as he’s having one of the hottest starts of his career.

It was a bit ironic for Green to comment on last year’s chemistry as his punch of Poole was seen as a catalyst to their internal issues. But Green is candid when it comes to conveying the read of their room, and cited their first Western Conference playoff series loss under Kerr as the result.

“I don’t look at that as ‘Oh man, like, this is a team that struggled with our chemistry for years.’ It was a one-year thing,” Green said. “Stuff happens and it was an anomaly.”

Green said they are “right back where we need to be in that department,” and said there’s still room to grow this year. But wasn’t shy to say things weren’t good last year.

“It was hard to come to work, not fun,” Green said. “This year, you see the joy on guys’ faces when they come in the building. You got guys like staying over two or three hours after just sitting around and talking and getting here two or three hours early just to be here. You start to see that and you’re like ‘OK, this is a group that likes being together.’”

Thompson, who has been hesitant to discuss last season in any context, didn’t agree with Green.

“I think this year’s great chemistry-wise, and last year was good as well,” he said. “I think just every time you step into an NBA facility to go to work, feels great. So I don’t think too much about chemistry. I think winning solves all.”

Curry toed the line, acknowledging the noise around last year’s playoff flameout and difficulty in the locker room before pointing to offseason work that helped shape this season’s early returns.

“I understand the vibe of how last year went. I know you could waste a lot of breath talking about everything that happened last year,” Curry said. “But the way the season ended and what happened over the summer, I think that the time that we got to spend together as a group, two or three times we all got together were huge, so that you kind of get the elephants out of the room….

“I think it’s translated to some earlier success for sure, because even though we know we’re not playing perfect basketball, there’s nice cohesion and chemistry and trust amongst each other.”