Latest news with #TheSixMillionDollarMan
Yahoo
2 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
The Trend That Is Dating Your Living Room According To Designers
Putting wall-mounted flat-screen TVs over the fireplace has become such a go-to design trend that people have largely forgotten that TVs used to be ornate furniture pieces in their own right. Likewise, fireplace mantels were the stuff that family photos, not TVs, sat on. Over the course of time, as the flat-screened TVs have gotten bigger, fireplace mantels have gone from hulky, to, if not lilliputian, at least a much smaller size. This is so much the case that rooms that still feature those monstrously oversized traditional fireplace mantels look tired, outdated even, like something you'd see on reruns of classic shows from the '70s and '80s, like "Dallas" or "The Six Million Dollar Man." So what's the solution to this dilemma? For the modern flat-screened TV owner, there are other fireplace mantel choices that make more sense than these outdated stone fireplace designs. Mantels that are lower to the ground and less bulky than more traditional mantels come to mind. This design choice allows you to place the TV above the fireplace at a more comfortable height. Here's a good rule of thumb. Sans fireplace, the ideal height for your TV is around 26 inches to 27 inches off the floor, with the middle of the TV, or eye level, being 40 inches off the floor. The average height for a fireplace mantel is around 54 inches to 60 inches above the floor. As such, you may want to think about lowering the mantel's height so that it aligns with those measurements. It's also wise to explore different fireplace and mantel designs because a change in one often necessitates a change in the other. Read more: Ditch These Dated Backsplash Trends For Timeless Alternatives Designs That Work Better For The TV/ Fireplace Combo For many fireplace owners, traditional stone or brick mantels have gone the way of the Dodo, as have traditional fireplace designs. There's almost no way around this problem unless you reconsider the design of both the fireplace and the mantel that sits on top of it. Linear fireplaces, for example, are wider than they are tall and usually sit about 12 inches to 36 inches off the floor. If you work on the lower end of those parameters, you could add a small floating mantel as a visual counterweight between a linear fireplace and the TV. The design of the fireplace also allows you to lower the height of the mantel so that the TV hangs at a more comfortable height for the space and for TV-viewing. It additionally alleviates some of the restrictions that a frame-style fireplace can introduce into a design problem like this one. Floating mantels range in length, width, and height, with some of them being little more than a shelf inserted into the wall above the fireplace – something that would accommodate the TV/ fireplace combo well. Or if your fireplace boasts a more traditional design, consider looking at a custom-designed mantel. This permits you to work within the parameters of the room's architectural elements, and can include space allowances for the TV. Ideally, you can design a mantel that allows the bottom of the TV to hang 3 inches to 4 inches above the top of the mantel. If you don't have that kind of clearance between the mantel and the TV, it could interfere with your view of the TV. What To Do Instead Of The TV/ Fireplace Combo If you're lucky enough to have a new-build home, the problems caused by the TV/ fireplace combo might have already been solved for you with a creative fireplace makeover. For example, your abode might feature a mantel that's already both slimmer and shorter than older mantel/ fireplace set-ups. This arrangement means that the TV will sit lower. You'll avoid neck strain with this arrangement. However, the television still competes with the fireplace for focal dominance, which is one reason why this combo is problematic for many designers. A better option for correcting the problem rethinks the design of the space by moving the TV from directly above the fireplace. One solution could be a faux fireplace mantel that serves as housing for a flat-screen TV. In other words, instead of having a fireplace below the mantel, you build a false mantel and place your TV inside of it where the firebox normally is. This solution also means that you'll still have some mantel space to decorate without the design dilemma caused by the fireplace/ mantel combo. Or, you could embrace a design that features an asymmetrical placement of the TV with the fireplace. This allows you to put the TV and the fireplace on opposite sides of the same wall or even on opposite walls altogether. In both cases, a mantel can be a part of the architectural design of the room, leaving you with plenty of space to decorate a fireplace like a professional. And if you still love those big, bulky mantels of old, this design tactic allows you to embrace this classical style. Enjoyed this article? Get expert home tips, DIY guides, and design inspiration by signing up to the House Digest newsletter! Read the original article on House Digest. Solve the daily Crossword
The Spinoff
5 days ago
- Business
- The Spinoff
Echo Chamber: The big ‘G' word that Luxon doesn't want to say about Palestine
While cabinet spends the next month deciding whether to recognise Palestinian statehood, the opposition is more eager to know if New Zealand's done too little, too late. Echo Chamber is The Spinoff's dispatch from the press gallery, recapping sessions in the House. Columns are written by politics reporter Lyric Waiwiri-Smith and Wellington editor Joel MacManus. The government seemed wholly deflated during Tuesday's question time. Education minister Erica Stanford let the opposition drown her out with heckles while she tried to boast about receiving positive feedback like 'woohoo', building and construction minister Chris Penk bragged about sheds, and Andy Foster showed up with a big bandage on his head. Why? Foster never replied to a text from The Spinoff, so we'll never know. Speaker Gerry Brownlee seemed particularly fed up with the vibes, which was perhaps a bad omen of troubles to come. When Labour leader Chris Hipkins posed his usual starter question (does he stand by his government's statements and actions) to prime minister Christopher Luxon, who replied with just a 'yes', Brownlee asked the House, well, what's the point of that? 'What more can there be?' Brownlee wondered, with an air of desperation. 'Well, if you hold your breath, you'll find out,' Hipkins replied. Give it a go, Brownlee encouraged him, but there are still four more questions on this list that ask the same thing. After Hipkins followed up with a supplementary on whether Luxon stood by finance minister Nicola Willis saying that people who have lost their jobs 'shouldn't take it personally', Brownlee let him know his work was 'skillfully done'. But Luxon didn't want to talk about that. He pointed to a recently released Treasury report, highlighted earlier in the session by housing minister Chris Bishop (who wore three different ministerial hats while two of his caucus mates were away), which put the cost of Aotearoa's Covid-19 response at $66bn. And while Chippy was still keen to chat about employment, Luxon was stuck on the impacts of the Covid hangover, and let Hipkins know everyone should start calling him the '66 billion dollar man!' 'Because when I grew up as a kid, there was a show called The Six Million Dollar Man, and this member is the 66 billion dollar man!' Luxon paused for effect, but when he received very little reaction from his coalition members, Labour's Kieran McAnulty used the moment to outshine him: 'No one laughed!' Next up was Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick, who questioned Luxon over the government's recent announcement that it would consider recognising Palestinian statehood. His position, as he's oft repeated, is that Hamas must release their Israeli hostages, but Swarbrick wanted to know whether he was aware of the attempts to release these hostages, and the 10,000 Palestinians living in Israeli prisons. 'That's not what I've been briefed on,' Luxon replied, while NZ First's Shane Jones was more gung-ho about his point of view on the matter. 'Fiction!' Jones cried repeatedly. And when Swarbrick questioned whether Luxon was aware of Aotearoa's obligations under the Genocide Convention, he warned her not to throw that 'genocide' term around so willy nilly. So, she pressed him on whether he believed that was the appropriate term, but the PM couldn't quite wrap his lips around it, so he went with 'humanitarian catastrophe'. And then deputy prime minister David Seymour, puffed up on his perch next to Luxon, decided to butt in as usual. 'Point of order, Mr Speaker,' Seymour started – this member [aka Swarbrick] has just returned to her seat which is adorned with a Palestinian scarf, and I invite you to consider what this House might look like if everyone took a side in a global conflict and made that visible. 'No member should be allowed to do such a thing, particularly when you yourself have forbidden members from wearing tiny pins on their lapels,' he finished, while his caucus colleague Simon Court hastily removed his Act Party pin. 'I think you make a very good point,' Brownlee began, until a defiant Swarbrick swiped the keffiyeh draped over her seat and wore it around her neck instead. 'Stay warm,' Brownlee told her. 'We'll move on.' In a House where there are clear favourites in the eyes of the speaker, Swarbrick is indefinitely near the bottom of his list. Later, Te Pāti Māori's Debbie Ngarewa-Packer made her own attempt to pull Luxon's heartstrings over Palestine. But her questions on whether the PM could 'justify the targeted killings of journalists in Gaza' were shot down by Brownlee and Luxon, who told her that the prime minister of New Zealand is only responsible for New Zealand, and Seymour let her know she was 'slow on the rules'. Fair (not from Seymour), as question time is the opportunity to hold ministers to account on the issues that fall within their ministerial responsibilities. But a humanitarian catastrophe, as described earlier, can understandably leave a lot of people looking for leadership, and the barracking from the opposition showed that the government's pussyfooting around Israel has made them look, in their eyes, kinda pussy. 'Surely you can condemn that?' cried the Greens' Steve Abel, also adorned in a keffiyeh. 'Genocide apologist!' And when Luxon tried to remind the House the government had already committed $37m in humanitarian aid, the opposition simply wanted to know 'how much of it got in?', but Luxon didn't seem to be briefed on that. Eventually, the heckling from the opposition turned into roars for Luxon to 'grow a spine', 'show some spine' and not be 'spineless' – it's just ironic that the quietest person, who is usually the loudest, was the one later reprimanded for bringing any spine into the conversation at all.
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Richard Johnson: Tom Cruise seems ‘enchanted' by Ana de Armas
NEW YORK — It's hard to tell whether Tom Cruise and Ana de Armas are just friends helping promote their films by hanging out together or something more. Cruise is hawking 'Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning' and de Armas is plugging 'Ballerina.' A source who saw them in a private room at Annabel's in London said, 'He looks enchanted by her, and she looks very happy with him.' But don't forget, they are actors. Cruise, 62, was expected to end the series with this, the eighth 'Mission Impossible' movie, but it's already grossed over $450 million worldwide, so we'll see. Cruise has been working on other ideas, though, including a movie version of the old Lee Majors TV show, 'The Six Million Dollar Man.' It would have to be six billion today. In case you weren't glued to the tube in the '70s, Majors played a grievously injured astronaut, rebuilt by the government with superhuman powers. Cruise's films have grossed billions worldwide, so he'll be back on the big screen soon for sure. **** Elon Musk — who has at least 14 children with four mothers — provided a laugh at the Literacy Partners Annual Gala at Pier Sixty. During her speech, '60 Minutes' star Lesley Stahl asked any women in the audience who had a child by Elon Musk to please raise their hand. 'Statistically, there should be at least six of you,' she quipped. Honoree Bob Woodward recalled Carl Bernstein coming to him in the late 1980s and suggesting they interview Donald Trump. 'Are you f–king serious!' Woodward replied, commenting that Bernstein — who was present in the audience — 'has the best nose in the business.' Also honored were Knopf editor Erroll McDonald, TV correspondent Cynthia McFadden and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Oprah Winfrey slipped into the Literacy Partners gala through a side door, skipping the red carpet and the paparazzi. She gave a speech about the importance of reading before disappearing into the night. **** Christine Mack loves discovering and helping emerging artists. Her Mack Art Foundation provides a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and a nearby apartment so they can work. 'I've never had so much fun,' she told me. 'Art brings people together. Art is not for the rich. It's for everyone.' Mack will be honored Aug. 23 at the Southampton Arts Center Summerfest, where she'll show some of her collection of artists like Rashid Johnson, Kenny Scharf, KAWS and Keith Haring. On June 28, the Center will host its annual kick-off party, 'Whimsy: Motown Magic,' which will feature dancing to the classics — from 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' to 'Superstition' — performed by That Motown Band. Hosts include Jamee and Peter Gregory, Kara Ross, Sylvia Hemingway, Lauren Roberts, Nicole and Allen Salmasi, and the center's co-founder J. Whitney Stevens. Mack, who finances her foundation by buying and selling art, explained how easy it is to help young artists. 'I'd buy their first painting so they can pay their rent.' **** Musicians Grace Jones and Janelle Monáe set tongues wagging as they dirty danced into the wee hours in the club at the Public Hotel on the Lower East Side. The pair had performed earlier in the night at the Blue Note Jazz Festival, where Jones hula-hooped to a song in sheer black tights, a thong, and one of her gigantic signature red and black headdresses. Later at the club, Monáe, who identifies as pansexual and non-binary, wore a black beret with patches, oversized red heart-shaped glasses, and red gloves as the two embraced and danced to the music. Monáe took to the mic several times to serenade the crowd, who went wild as the two mixed and mingled with their fans. Grace told friends that she and Monáe have a song coming out this summer. The pair were out swinging until nearly 5 a.m. **** Grammy-winning guitarist Sharon Isbin, the Orchestra of St. Luke's, and composer Karen LeFrak have released 'Romántico,' a new CD of world premiere recordings. LeFrak, the wife of real estate tycoon Richard LeFrak, has composed over 200 pieces and released 17 albums that have received over 45 million streams since 2021. She has also had her works performed by orchestras around the world, including the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center. Her next work, celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, has been commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., and will be performed next year. The new CD is available on all platforms, including Spotify, Amazon, and at **** Former congresswoman Carolyn Maloney attended her former spokesperson Adrien Lesser's birthday dinner at Shun Lee Cafe along with 'Sex and the City' author Candace Bushnell, designer Julia Haart, CNBC's Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, former NYC nightlife mayor Ariel Palitz and longevity doctor Amanda Khan. **** Out & About: Gurney's, a Montauk favorite with everyone from Scarlett Johansson to Naomi Watts, has a new restaurant, Gigi's, opening this week, headed by chef Justin Lee who was previously at Mina Group and French Laundry … Foursome, a new Turkish restaurant, whose name references its four owners — Haldun Kilit, Kaan Sekban, Tuba Demircioglu and Oya Mungan — is serving up Mediterranean fare at 9 Jones St. The new hot spot is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Their rainbow-colored pancakes, celebrating Pride Month, have gone viral on Instagram … Gallerist Quang Bao from 1969 Gallery gave a dinner for artist Radu Oreian and his solo show 'That Magic Light' at Au Cheval's secret subterranean room on Cortlandt Alley and Walker Street. The show will be up until Saturday. ________
Time Out
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Dead Outlaw
Broadway review by Adam Feldman Elmer McCurdy wanted to be somebody. Born out of wedlock to a teenage mother in late-19th-century Maine, he grew up dreaming of infamy. ('I'm the outlaw Jesse James! Bang bang—!') He got drunk, got in fights, moved out west; he joined a gang of Oklahoma train robbers, and he died in a shootout at the age 31. But that's not where his story ended. McCurdy's corpse got embalmed and wound up traveling the country as a ghoulish sideshow attraction. ('There's something 'bout a mummy that everybody needs.') It changed hands for decades before winding up in a California amusement-park ride, painted DayGlo red and hanging naked from a noose. In 1976, a crewman on TV's The Six Million Dollar Man ripped an arm from it and only then discovered that this prop was once a man. Exactly which man it had been was by that point a mystery; by then it was just some body. The weirder-than-fiction true story of McCurdy's preservation and degradation is the subject of Dead Outlaw, a rowdy and darkly hilarious picaresque musical by the team behind 2016's bittersweet The Band's Visit: book writer Itamar Moses, songwriter David Yazbek (joined here by Erik Della Penna) and director David Cromer. These two shows couldn't seem more different at first pass, but they share a deep curiosity and wry humanity; they embrace the complex and the unknown. 'No one knows if it was cuz of that he started getting into trouble,' Dead Outlaw 's Bandleader (a perfectly gruff and rascally Jeb Brown) says of McCurdy's traumatic childhood. 'Maybe he was just wired that way. Or maybe there was no reason at all.' Dead Outlaw | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy About one thing, though, this musical is certain: Everybody dies, no matter how famous. 'Abe Lincoln's dead / Frank James is dead,' the Bandleader sings in 'Dead,' the hard-driving rockabilly number that opens and closes the show. 'Your mama's dead / And so are you.' The song's net widens to include figures ranging from Gandhi to Zendaya. Some of those named are still alive (for now) but the implication is clear: It doesn't make much difference either way. McCurdy is killed halfway through the musical, but the actor who plays him, Andrew Durand, stays onstage for the remainder of the show, lying motionless on a table or propped up in a coffin. In every stage tableau that ensues, he serves as the memento mori. The flip side of Dead Outlaw 's hate-to-tell-ya candor about mortality is a gimlet-eyed skepticism about the greed for attention built into American culture. The acerbic comic essayist Cintra Wilson has described celebrity as 'a grotesque, crippling disease'; Dead Outlaw extends that to fatality and beyond. The secret to McCurdy's resistance to decay is that his embalming fluid contains arsenic. Fame is laced with poison. Dead Outlaw | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy In a sense, the show is like an anti- Pippin, with the Bandleader as the Leading Player: the devil on the lost boy's shoulder, goading him to self-immolation in the name of glory. In the guise of a bandit named Walter Jarrett, he's the one who recruits McCurdy into his gang when the two share a jail cell. ('You can decide,' 'Decide what?' 'Whether you wanna be remembered.') And McCurdy, who is scared of a life where 'nobody knows your name'—'If I never signify, am I really here?' he sings—can't resist. He meets a pretty girl, Maggie (the excellent Julia Knitel), in small-town Kansas, and has the option of remaking himself into a decent type of fellow: 'An honest man / That you can trust / Like normal people / Who soon return to dust.' He chooses a different road. If the thoroughly original Dead Outlaw has a resemblance to any other musicals at all, it is perhaps to the work of the late Michael Friedman, who also favored documentary material and playful pastiche Americana, and whose Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson had comparable notes of redneck boisterousness. (Moses and Friedman collaborated on 2014's The Fortress of Solitude.) But McCurdy is a more poignant figure than Jackson was. As a would-be safecracker, he's a total screw-up, a rotten yegg: He's bad at being a bad guy. When he grabs the microphone to scream out the furious 'Killed a Man in Maine,' he's just a pathetic drunk; his attempted braggadocio falls flat on its face. Dead Outlaw | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Durand's performance is bisected by McCurty's demise. For the first half of Dead Outlaw, he is a highly active figure, sometimes wistful—he has a beautiful high tenor—but lit by an inner fury; he would fit right in with the violent losers of Assassins or January 6. But then: Bang bang—! His mortal thread is cut, and Durand spends the rest of the show being moved around inertly in what might be the most impressive deadpan performance in history. He's staggeringly still: You can't even catch him blink. That same level of commitment extends to all of Dead Outlaw. The writing is piquant and sly, the songs have verve and resonance, and every element of Cromer's production seems to fit exactly in place. The show premiered last year as part of Audible Theater's Off Broadway programming, which is apt. The whole project has the spirit of a serial podcast, branching off whenever it likes to explore some fascinating tangent with help from Cromer's protean supporting players: Knitel, Eddie Cooper, Dashiell Eaves, Ken Marks, Trent Saunders and crowd favorite Thom Sesma (as a Tinseltown coroner turned crooner). These very fine performers, along with Brown and the onstage band, revolve around Durand's extremely stable center. The 2024–25 season has been strangely full of cadavers; things to do on Broadway when you're dead this year include faking out Nazis in Operation Mincemeat, narrating yourself in Sunset Blvd., getting a makeover in Death Becomes Her and feeding your friends in Swept Away. But Durand takes rigor mortis to new levels of morbid rigor. He's the hardest-working stiff on Broadway.
Los Angeles Times
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Dead Outlaw,' a musical about a famous corpse discovered in Long Beach, makes its way to Broadway
NEW YORK — 'Dead Outlaw,' the offbeat musical from the team behind the Tony-winning musical 'The Band's Visit,' isn't mincing words with the title. The show, which had its official opening Sunday at Broadway's Longacre Theatre, tells the story of the unsuccessful career of a real-life bandit, who achieved more fame as a corpse than as a man. Born in 1880, Elmer McCurdy, a crook whose ambition exceeded his criminal skill, died in a shoot-out with the police after another botched train robbery in 1911. But his story didn't end there. His preserved body had an eventful afterlife all its own. 'Dead Outlaw,' a critics' darling when it premiered last year at Audible's Minetta Lane Theatre, may be the only musical to make the disposition of a body an occasion for singing and dancing. David Yazbek, who conceived the idea of turning this stranger-than-fiction tale into a musical, wrote the score with Erik Della Penna. Itamar Moses, no stranger to unlikely dramatic subjects, compressed the epic saga into a compact yet labyrinthine book. Director David Cromer, whose sensibility gravitates between stark and dark, endows the staging with macabre elegance. Yet Yazbek, Moses and Cromer aren't repeating themselves. If anything, they've set themselves a steeper challenge. 'Dead Outlaw' is more unyielding as a musical subject than 'The Band's Visit,' which is to say it's less emotionally accessible. It's not easy to make a musical about a crook with a volatile temper, an unslakable thirst for booze and a record of fumbled heists. It's even harder to make one out of a dead body that went on exhibition at traveling carnivals and freak shows before ending up on display in a Long Beach fun house, where the mummified remains were accidentally discovered by a prop man while working on an episode of 'The Six Million Dollar Man' in 1976. Stephen Sondheim might have enjoyed the challenge of creating a musical from such an outlandish premise. 'Dead Outlaw' evokes at moments the droll perversity of 'Sweeney Todd,' the cold-hearted glee of 'Assassins' and the Brechtian skewering of 'Road Show' — Sondheim musicals that fly in the face of conventional musical theater wisdom. As tight as a well thought-out jam-session,'Dead Outlaw' also recalls 'Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,' the Michael Friedman-Alex Timbers musical that created a satiric historical rock show around a most problematic president. And the show's unabashed quirkiness had my theater companion drawing comparisons with 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch.' Andrew Durand, who plays Elmer, has just the right bad-boy frontman vibe. The hard-driving presence of bandleader and narrator Jeb Brown suffuses the production with Americana authenticity, vibrantly maintained by music director Rebekah Bruce and music supervisor Dean Sharenow. Elmer moves through the world like an open razor, as the title character of Georg Büchner's 'Woyzeck' is aptly described in that play. A précis of Elmer's early life in Maine is run through by members of the eight-person cast in the bouncy, no-nonsense manner of a graphic novel. The character's criminal path is tracked with similar briskness — a fateful series of colorful encounters and escapades as Elmer, a turbulent young man on the move, looks for his big opportunity in Kansas and Oklahoma. Destined for trouble, he finds it unfailingly wherever he goes. Elmer routinely overestimates himself. Having acquired some training with nitroglycerin in the Army, he wrongly convinces himself that he has the know-how to effectively blow up a safe. He's like a broke gambler who believes his next risky bet will bring him that long-awaited jackpot. One advantage of dying young is that he never has to confront his abject ineptitude. Arnulfo Maldonado's scenic design turns the production into a fun-house exhibit. The band is prominently arrayed on the box-like set, pounding out country-rock numbers that know a thing or two about hard living. The music can sneak up on you, especially when a character gives voice to feelings that they can't quite get a handle on. Durand can't communicate emotions that Elmer doesn't possess, but he's able to sharply convey the disquiet rumbling through the character's short life. There's a gruff lyricism to the performance that's entrancing even when Elmer is standing up in a coffin. But I wish there were more intriguing depth to the character. Elmer is a historical curiosity, to be sure. And he reveals something about the American moneymaking ethos, which holds not even a dead body sacred. But as a man he's flat and a bit of a bore. And the creators are perhaps too enthralled by the oddity of his tale. The show is an eccentric wallow through the morgue of history. It's exhilarating stylistically, less so as a critique of the dark side of the American dream. Julia Knitel has a voice that breaks up the monochromatic maleness of the score. As Maggie, Elmer's love interest for a brief moment, she returns later in the show to reflect on the stranger with the 'broken disposition' who left her life with the same defiant mystery that he entered it. I wish Knitel had more opportunity to interweave Maggie's ruminations. The unassuming beauty of her singing adds much needed tonal variety. The musical takes an amusing leap into Vegas parody when coroner Thomas Noguchi (an electric Thom Sesma) is allowed to strut his medical examiner stuff. Ani Taj's choreography, like every element of the production, makes the most of its minimalist means. Wanderingly weird, 'Dead Outlaw' retains its off-Broadway cred at the Longacre. It's a small show that creeps up on you, like a bizarre dream that's hard to shake.
