Latest news with #Seattle-born
Scottish Sun
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
Huge sitcom star looks worlds away from TV fame with bushy beard as he's spotted at Wimbledon
The actor shunned a celeb box to blend into the crowds at the sporting event celeb spot Huge sitcom star looks worlds away from TV fame with bushy beard as he's spotted at Wimbledon Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) A HUGE sitcom star left fans doing a double take as he took a spot in the packed Wimbledon crowd. The 59-year-old blended into the throngs at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in west London, donning a khaki-coloured bucket hat and navy blue jacket. Sign up for the Entertainment newsletter Sign up 6 An American sitcom star looked unrecognisable as he sported a bushy beard for a day at Wimbledon Credit: Getty 6 The Washington-born screen star blended into the crowds at SW19 Credit: Getty 6 Yet he appeared completely different from his fresh-faced look on The Office US Credit: Alamy Yet it was Rainn Wilson's bushy silver beard and moustache which left fans doing a double take as he arrived at Wimbledon's annual sporting extravaganza. The Seattle-born screen star is most notably known for his hilarious star role in The Office (US) where he played Dwight Schrute. The Office aired on NBC for nine seasons and paved the way for actors such as Steve Carell and John Krasinski to develop into household names. Rainn's character, Dwight, was a paper salesman and a devoted assistant to regional manager, who developed a cult following for his comical act. read more the office UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS Ricky Gervais forced to STOP building £5m mansion after council row He appeared on-screen in glasses and fresh-faced, with his brunette hair in a floppy curtain style over his forehead. Rainn kept a clean-shaven look for his major telly role yet now he looks completely different after embracing the stubble. He blended into the crowds in a casual striped top, shunning the swanky boxeds for a spot in the general admission stands. Rainn - who would have been well-known to many SW19-goers on the day - clutched his phone and glasses in his hand as he watched the action unfold. SCREEN STAR He starred in the show from 2005 to 2013. Despite going off the air more than ten years ago, The Office was the most-watched show on Netflix during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Rainn Wilson would return as Dwight for The Office spinoff if asked and reveals he loves concept of new show Last year, the noughties sitcom cast staged a huge reunion - fuelling suggestions of a reboot, Melora Hardin, famous as businesswoman Jan Levinson, previously teased a show comeback. Speaking about the reboot, she told The U.S. Sun: 'That is up to Greg [writer Greg Daniels], because he is the maestro. "I would certainly show up. I think a lot of us would." Recently, Rainn caused hysterics after filming a plane passenger watching him on The Office while on a flight - completely unaware of his presence. Meanwhile, Rainn has featured in a host of other movies and TV shows, including The Meg, The Rocker and Dark Winds. 6 He pulled on his sunglasses as the action played out Credit: Getty 6 He has embraced his stubble of late Credit: Getty
Los Angeles Times
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Noah Davis' at the UCLA Hammer Museum reveals the brilliant early work of a life cut tragically short
The modest but pungent survey of paintings by Noah Davis at the UCLA Hammer Museum is a welcome event. It goes a long way toward demythologizing the Seattle-born, L.A.-based artist, who was heartbreakingly struck down by a rare liposarcoma cancer in 2015, when he was barely 32. The show affirms his gift for what it was: Davis was a painter's painter, a deeply thoughtful and idiosyncratic Black voice heard by other artists and aficionados, even as his work was in invigorating development. Talented artists often come into a steadily mature expression in their 30s, the moment when Davis' accelerating growth was brutally interrupted. The show's three dozen paintings are understandably uneven, but when Davis was good, he was very good indeed. That intriguing capacity resonates in the first picture, '40 Acres and a Unicorn,' which hangs alone in the show's entry to mark the start of his career. Davis was 24 and had studied at Cooper Union in New York and the artist-run Mountain School of Arts in L.A.'s Chinatown. The 2007 painting is not large — 2½ feet tall and slightly narrower — but it casts a spell. In Western art, a man on a horse is a classic format representing a hero, but here Davis sits a young Black man astride a mythic unicorn — notably white — its buttery beige horn shining amid the painting's otherwise neutral palette. It's easy to see the youth as signifying the artist, and the replacement for an art-historical horse likewise standing in for a mule. That animal was famously promised to thousands of formerly enslaved people near the end of the Civil War, along with 40 acres of Confederate land on which they had worked, uncompensated and abused, making the white planter class rich. The 1865 pledge to redistribute confiscated lands as restitution to African Americans for their enslavement didn't last a year before being annulled — reparations as rare, unique and desirable as a unicorn, offered by an untrustworthy white ruling class. (Had the 1865 redistribution happened, imagine where we might be today, as racist cruelties initiated by the federal government are running rampant.) Davis, placing his at least symbolic self on the unicorn's back, plainly asserts his social and cultural confidence. Art is imagination made real, and as a Black American artist, he's going to ride it forward. Perhaps the canvas' most beautiful feature is the rich skin of black acrylic paint within which he and his steed, both rendered in soft veils of thin gouache, are embedded. The luminous black abstraction dominating the surface was visibly painted after the figures, which feel like they are being held in its embrace. Thirty-nine paintings on canvas and 21 on paper are installed chronologically, the works on paper selected from 70 made during Davis' lengthy hospitalization. The layering of topicality, color sensitivity, art-historical ancestors and figuration and abstraction in '40 Acres and a Unicorn' recurs throughout the brief eight-year period being surveyed. (The traveling show was organized by London's Barbican Art Gallery with Das Minsk, an exhibition hall in Potsdam, Germany.) The most abstract painting is on a wall by itself in the next room, and it demonstrates Davis' unusual exploratory strategies. Titled 'Nobody,' a four-sided geometric shape is rendered in flat purple house paint on linen, 5 feet square. The layered difference in materials — an image built from practical, domestic paint on a refined and artistic support — is notable. The irregular shape, however two-dimensional, seems to hover and tilt in dynamic space. It suggests a 2008 riff on the long, rich legacy of Kazimir Malevich's radical, revolutionary geometric abstractions from 1915. The reference to the Russian avant-garde recalls that Malevich's art was dubbed Suprematism, which bumped aside the academic hierarchy of aesthetic rules in favor of 'the supremacy of pure artistic feeling,' most famously represented as a painted black square. Here, it twists into an inevitable jab at an ostensibly liberal Modern art world, still in fact dominated by unexamined white supremacy. 'Nobody' weaves together art and social history in surprising ways. It's one of three geometric abstractions Davis made, their shapes based on the map contour of a battleground state in the revolutionary election year that brought Barack Obama to the presidency. Colorado, a state whose shape is a simple rectangle, flipped from George W. Bush in 2004, while the secondary color of Davis' choice of purple paint was created by combining two primary pigments — red and blue. The color purple also carries its own recognizable, resonant reference, embedded in popular consciousness for Alice Walker's often-banned Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Steven Spielberg's hit movie of the book, a record holder of dubious distinction, tied for the most Oscar nominations (11) without a single win. Davis' torqued purple rectangle looks to be in mid-flip. That Davis exhibited but ultimately painted over the other two works in his geometric series might suggest some dissatisfaction with their admittedly obscure nature. ('Nobody' almost requires footnotes.) He returned to painting the figure — 'somebody' — but often embedded it in visually sumptuous abstract fields. The hedge behind 'Mary Jane,' a young girl in a striped pinafore, visually a cousin to the little girl engulfed in billowing locomotive steam clouds in Édouard Manet's 'The Railway,' is a gorgeously writhing arena of spectral green, gray and black forms. So is the forest of 'The Missing Link 6,' where a hunter with a rifle sits quietly at the base of a massive tree trunk, virtually secreted in the landscape, like something rustling in the dense foliage in a Gustave Courbet forest. The missing-link title declares Davis' intention to join an evolutionary chain of artists, the hidden hunter adding an element of surprise. Art history is threaded throughout Davis' work. (He spent productive research time working as an employee at Art Catalogues, the late Dagny Corcoran's celebrated bookstore, when it was at MOCA's Pacific Design Center location.) The tension between established and new art, which seeks to simultaneously acknowledge greatness in the past while overturning its rank deficiencies, is often palpable. Nowhere is the pressure felt more emphatically than in the knockout '1975 (8),' where joyful exuberance enters the picture, as folks cavort in a swimming pool. The subject — bathers — is as foundational to Modern art as it gets, conjuring Paul Cézanne. Meanwhile, the swimming pool is quintessentially identified with Los Angeles. (Another fine pool painting, 'The Missing Link 4,' has a Modernist Detroit building as backdrop, painted as a grid of color rectangles reminiscent of a David Hockney, an Ed Ruscha or a Mark Bradford.) Bathers are an artistic signal for life crawling onto shore out of the primordial ooze or basking in a pastoral, prelapsarian paradise. For America, the swimming pool is also an archetypal segregationist site of historical cruelty and exclusion. Davis seized the contradiction. Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration in the wake of civil rights advances happened in countless places. It showed the self-lacerating depth to which irrational hate can descend, as policy advocate Heather McGhee wrote in her exceptional book, 'The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.' People were willing to harm everyone in a community by dismantling a popular public amenity rather than accept full equality. In '1975 (8),' the title's date is within just a few years of the Supreme Court's appalling ruling in Palmer vs. Thompson, which gave official blessing to the callous practice McGhee chronicled. The 2013 painting's composition is based on a photograph taken by Davis' mother four decades earlier. A bright blue horizontal band in an urban landscape is dotted with calmly bobbing heads. A leaping male diver seen from behind dominates the lower foreground, angled toward the water. The soles of his bare feet greet our eyes, lining us up behind him as next to plunge in. Davis suspends the aerial diver in space, a repoussoir figure designed to visually lead us into the scene. Like the unicorn rider, he assumes the artist's metaphorical profile. A moment of anticipatory transition is frozen, made perpetual. Waiting our turn, we're left to contemplate the soles of his feet — a familiar symbol of path-following humility, whether in Andrea Mantegna's Italian Renaissance painting of a 'Dead Christ' or countless Asian sculptures of Buddha. The marvelous painting was made at a pivotal moment. A year before, Davis and his wife, sculptor Karon Davis, joined four storefronts on Washington Boulevard in Arlington Heights to create the Underground Museum. Their aim was to create a self-described family-run cultural space in a Black and Latino neighborhood. (Money came from an inheritance from his recently deceased father, with whom Davis was close.) A year later, the ambitious startup expanded when the project took on the internationally acclaimed Museum of Contemporary Art as an organizing partner. One room in the show includes mock-ups of classic sculptures — imitations — by Marcel Duchamp, Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson and Jeff Koons, which Davis made for an exhibition to reference the classic 1959 Douglas Sirk movie about racial identity, 'Imitation of Life.' The appropriations ricochet off the feminist imitations of Andy Warhol and Frank Stella paintings that Elaine Sturtevant began to make in the 1960s. Not all of Davis' paintings succeed, which is to be expected of his youthful and experimental focus. An ambitious group that references raucous daytime TV talk programs from the likes of Maury Povich and Jerry Springer, for example, tries to wrestle with their trashy exploitation of identity issues as entertainment — DNA paternity tests and all. But a glimpse of 'Maury' with a crisp Mondrian painting hanging in the background just falls flat. The juxtaposition of popular art's messy vulgarity with the pristine aspirations of high art is surprisingly uninvolving. Still, most of the exhibition rewards close attention. It handily does what a museum retrospective should do, securing the artist's reputation. At any rate it's just a sliver of some 400 paintings, sculptures and drawings the artist reportedly made. Whatever else might turn up in the future, the current selection at the Hammer represents the brilliant early start of Davis' abbreviated career. Forget the mythology; the show's reality is better.
New York Post
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
‘Jeopardy!' host Ken Jennings has ‘100% empathy' for contestants' show fails
'Jeopardy!' host Ken Jennings knows it's not easy to compete on the show, having once been a contestant himself. On the opening night red carpet for the TCM Classic Film Festival, Jennings praised his predecessor, the late Alex Trebek, but noted 'one difference' they have. Advertisement 'Alex was a perfect host, but if there's one difference between us is I remember what it was like to be a contestant. My heart just goes out to these people,' Jennings told Fox News Digital. The Seattle-born host began his 'Jeopardy!' career 20 years ago, winning over $2.5 million over the course of 74 consecutive games. He continued, 'It's their first time on TV, and we throw them into this crucible. It's a high-pressure environment, so I'm always thinking, how can I make these people comfortable? Please, please get this right, somebody.' 'I'm 100% empathy out there for these three people,' Jennings added. Advertisement And contestants have made their share of blunders over the course of the show's 40-plus year run. 5 Ken Jennings stands in front of the 'Jeopardy!' board during an episode on Sept. 27, 2024. ABC via Getty Images 5 Ken Jennings attends the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival at TCL Chinese Theater on April 24, 2025 in Hollywood, California. Getty Images Recently, fans online were baffled that all three contestants failed the 'Fictional Characters' final round category, incorrectly answering a 'Wizard of Oz' themed prompt. Advertisement 'Boq is one of these fictional people, 'Not as big as the grown folk… but neither were they very small,' the clue read. All three guessed other fictional little people, but the correct response was 'What is a Munchkin?' 'In the 1939 movie of 'The Wizard of Oz,' the Munchkins are very small, but in the book, the Munchkins are said to be about Dorothy's height,' Jennings told them. 5 Ken Jennings poses with 'Celebrity Jeopardy!' contestants Mo Rocca, Lisa Ann Walter and Katie Nolan on Jan. 23, 2025. Disney 5 Ken Jennings stands behind the host's podium before an episode on Feb. 5, 2025. Disney via Getty Images Advertisement Jennings took over hosting duties in 2020 after the death of Trebek from pancreatic cancer. In a Rolling Stone interview in January, the 50-year-old admitted he was less worried about hosting, but more concerned about the grief and mourning the show's staff was experiencing after the loss of Trebek. 'Everybody there was very emotional, and I had to be the one talking through it, even though I probably knew him least of all 100 people on set, crew and the staff. It was very scary. You're aware that the audience does not want you there. They're like me, they want the other guy, and I was missing him too. I'm like, 'I don't want to be here. I would give anything to not be here right now,'' Jennings told the outlet. 5 Alex Trebek and Ken Jennings pose for a photo on set on July 13, 2004. AP At the TCM Classic Film Festival, Jennings did some additional hosting duties, introducing two films in their line-up, and found another connection with Trebek. '[TCM] is a big part of our process at 'Jeopardy!' because Alex always had TCM on backstage, and he was very knowledgeable, he knew his stuff,' Jennings said.
Fox News
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
‘Jeopardy!' host Ken Jennings has ‘100% empathy' for contestants' show fails
"Jeopardy!" host Ken Jennings knows it's not easy to compete on the show, having once been a contestant himself. On the opening night red carpet for the TCM Classic Film Festival, Jennings praised his predecessor, the late Alex Trebek, but noted "one difference" they have. "Alex was a perfect host, but if there's one difference between us is I remember what it was like to be a contestant. My heart just goes out to these people," Jennings told Fox News Digital. The Seattle-born host began his "Jeopardy!" career 20 years ago, winning over $2.5 million over the course of 74 consecutive games. He continued, "It's their first time on TV, and we throw them into this crucible. It's a high-pressure environment, so I'm always thinking, how can I make these people comfortable? Please, please get this right, somebody." "I'm 100% empathy out there for these three people," Jennings added. And contestants have made their share of blunders over the course of the show's 40-plus year run. Recently, fans online were baffled that all three contestants failed the "Fictional Characters" final round category, incorrectly answering a "Wizard of Oz" themed prompt. "Boq is one of these fictional people, 'Not as big as the grown folk… but neither were they very small," the clue read. All three guessed other fictional little people, but the correct response was "What is a Munchkin?" "In the 1939 movie of 'The Wizard of Oz,' the Munchkins are very small, but in the book, the Munchkins are said to be about Dorothy's height," Jennings told them. WATCH: 'JEOPARDY!' HOST KEN JENNINGS SHARES KEY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HIM AND 'PERFECT' ALEX TREBEK Jennings took over hosting duties in 2020 after the death of Trebek from pancreatic cancer. In a Rolling Stone interview in January, the 50-year-old admitted he was less worried about hosting, but more concerned about the grief and mourning the show's staff was experiencing after the loss of Trebek. "Everybody there was very emotional, and I had to be the one talking through it, even though I probably knew him least of all 100 people on set, crew and the staff. It was very scary. You're aware that the audience does not want you there. They're like me, they want the other guy, and I was missing him too. I'm like, 'I don't want to be here. I would give anything to not be here right now,'" Jennings told the outlet. At the TCM Classic Film Festival, Jennings did some additional hosting duties, introducing two films in their line-up, and found another connection with Trebek. "[TCM] is a big part of our process at 'Jeopardy!' because Alex always had TCM on backstage, and he was very knowledgeable, he knew his stuff," Jennings said.
Miami Herald
22-04-2025
- Business
- Miami Herald
At Seattle's Filson, challenge of reshoring US factory jobs is clear
As U.S. politicians promise to rebuild American manufacturing with tariffs, the transformation of Filson, Seattle-born maker of rugged, high-end apparel, shows just how complicated that task could be. At Filson's flagship store-workshop on First Avenue South, visitors can still watch workers busily assembling the company's $550 Filson Mackinaw Cruisers, $325 Western Vests and $275 Mackinaw Wool Vests. But those three are the only items still made at the shop, out of hundreds in the 128-year-old company's current catalog. And the busy production staff, which was recently transferred from Filson's soon-to-close facility in Kent, numbers just 12 - a fraction of the company's local production team from even a decade ago. In 2016, four years after Filson was acquired by Texas-based Bedrock Manufacturing, it employed roughly 160 production workers in the Seattle area, according to the workers' union. The shrinking of Filson's Seattle-area manufacturing workforce parallels the broader decline in U.S. apparel production as companies have grappled with pandemic-related disruptions and inflation on top of decades of foreign competition. In 2015, The Seattle Times reported that Filson made 90% of its clothes, bags and other products in the United States, including in Seattle workshops. Today, according to Filson, just 35% of its products are made in the U.S., much of that by an outside vendor near Los Angeles, where Filson outsourced two-thirds of its remaining Seattle-area manufacturing, starting in late 2023. Third parties Filson's total Seattle-area workforce has fallen from 369 in 2015 to around 130 today. It will drop under 100 this summer, following the company's decision last month to lay off 31 remaining staff at the Kent facility, which also housed distribution operations. Filson "has changed drastically," said Jon Pryor, 63, a warehouse lead in Kent who has worked for Filson since 2017, when the company still had significant U.S. production, including in Seattle. In recent years, said Pryor, much of his job has involved garment imports from places like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, where wages are a fraction of what companies like Filson pay in the U.S. And even that task will go away when Filson closes the Kent warehouse in August and outsources distribution to a third-party vendor in Mississippi. For Victoria Cortez, 21, who works in the receiving department and had been expecting a promotion, the closure comes as a "shock." But veterans like Pryor said the decision wasn't a surprise, given how Filson and Bedrock have been trying to cut costs. A vendor in Mississippi isn't "going to have to pay what they're paying us here," said Pryor, who is also a member of the bargaining team for United Food & Commercial Workers Local 3000. The union and Filson recently agreed on a severance package for departing workers and a new contract for the dozen or so unionized Filson employees who still work in the Seattle area. Bedrock says cost-cutting isn't the main reason behind Filson's shrinking Seattle presence. Shifting distribution to Mississippi gives Filson access to "more advanced technology and a more central location" and means "improved shipping times and return services to its customers," a Filson spokesperson said this week. Those "efficiency" arguments dovetail with efforts by Bedrock, which also owns watchmaker Shinola, to run the different brands through shared back-office operations, as CEO Steven Katzman told ModernRetail in September. Quality materials, skilled labor Still, rising costs have been a challenge for apparel-makers, and especially higher-end operators like Filson that rely heavily on skilled labor. Founded in 1897 during the Alaska gold rush, Filson became known for high-quality apparel that was tough enough for prospectors, cowboys, loggers and other outdoor workers. By the early 2000s, Filson had leveraged the reputation into an upscale brand for high-end customers who "don't bat an eye at paying $130 for a wool shirt; $219 for a sweater, $22 for a pair of socks," as a 2005 Seattle Times article noted. But beneath the clever marketing, Filson's success has continued to depend on product quality, which relies in turn not just on good materials but skilled labor. Labor makes up roughly half the cost of making outdoor apparel, said Brent Zwiers, a production expert who formerly worked at Filson and two other Seattle-based outdoor apparel companies - Outdoor Research and Feathered Friends. In recent decades, much of that labor has been done by Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants who often brought their skills with them, said Zwiers. But that need for skilled labor is a challenge in a competitive global economy. In the U.S., the median hourly wage for sewing machine operators in "cut and sew apparel manufacturing" is $16.06, or around $32,000 a year, according to a 2023 report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's around 40% below the median U.S. wage. But it's many times higher than what some workers make overseas. In Bangladesh, which has grown into a major supplier for many U.S. apparel brands, the minimum wage for apparel workers was raised in 2023 to the equivalent of just over $1,350 a year, according to media reports and a 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Labor. Tariffs to the rescue? President Donald Trump wants to boost U.S. manufacturing by putting tariffs, or taxes, on imports, thus neutralizing the advantages of lower-cost foreign labor. But that help is complicating life for U.S. apparel companies that now rely on imports for some or all of their products and materials. Today, just 2% of the garments Americans buy are U.S.-made, according to data reported in The New York Times. Tariffs are even more complicated for higher-end brands whose customers are already price-fatigued from recent inflation. Filson is seeing both effects. On the one hand, having 35% of its production still in the U.S. "mitigates impact from tariffs on a meaningful portion of our product line," said Filson's new president, Tim Bantle, in a statement this week. "That said, on the balance of our goods, we need to manage the impact of tariffs," which comes "on top of the inflationary impact of the COVID era and a resetting of consumer spending as a result," added Bantle, who was formerly CEO of Seattle-based outdoor apparel giant Eddie Bauer. Asked about the impacts of the tariffs going forward, Bantle said Filson is "still assessing the situation while staying focused on delivering Filson-level quality and value to our customers." Seattle presence However Filson ends up delivering that quality and value, it's not entirely clear what Seattle's role will be. The company said moving the 12 production workers from Kent to Seattle is "a return to its roots" and added that it plans to expand some production in Seattle. But the company was also careful to note that more Seattle production won't require a larger Seattle-area manufacturing team, which appears to have remained at around a dozen since the big layoff in 2023. More broadly, even if Filson wanted to rebuild its Seattle-area manufacturing team, it might struggle to find enough skilled labor. Many garment workers in immigrant communities are aging out and aren't passing those skills on to their children, Zwiers said. Many "worked really hard to send their kids to school so that they wouldn't have to … work in the factories anymore," Zwiers said. In the Seattle area, skilled apparel labor has become so scarce that when Outdoor Research wanted to expand production, around six years ago, the company had to look elsewhere and eventually settled on the Los Angeles area, which still has a lot of apparel workers, Zwiers said. In Washington, "it's a small pool that keeps getting smaller." Between 2001 and 2024, the number of apparel workers in Washington fell by nearly two-thirds, from 3,086 to just 1,129, with around 778 in King County, according to state data through mid-2024. Reversing that decadeslong trend will likely take more than tariffs. Pay remains low, especially relative to living costs in cities like Seattle. Even with the new union contract, Filson's apparel-makers will earn around $21 to $26 an hour, according to UFCW. The city's minimum wage is $20.76. And to get those wages, job applicants must have skills that have become harder to acquire as the domestic apparel industry has shrunk. Reversing that decadeslong trend will likely take more than tariffs. Pay remains low, especially relative to living costs in cities like Seattle. Even with the new union contract, Filson's apparel-makers will earn around $21 to $26 an hour, according to UFCW. The city's minimum wage is $20.76. And to get those wages, job applicants must have skills that have become harder to acquire as the domestic apparel industry has shrunk. Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
