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The ‘Anyone’ songstress explores the theme of self-acceptance in the clip, which features references to her past, including her ‘Camp Rock’ days and her 2018 overdose.
Mar 6, 2020
AceShowbiz – Demi Lovato is giving her inner demon’s a kick in the back. Days after announcing the release of her newest single, the “Anyone” songstress drops a music video for “I Love Me” that saw her having a fierce spar with one of her two alter egos.
The promo released on Friday, March 6 begins with the 27-year-old spending some down time in an apartment before two different versions of herself popped up. It does not take long before she fights one while her other self watches from the side. When she is finally declared a winner of the match, she steps out to the streets in full confidence.
” ‘Cause I’m a black belt when I’m beating up on myself/ But I’m an expert at giving love to somebody else/ I, me, myself and I, don’t see eye to eye,” she sings. “Oh, why do I compare myself to everyone/ And I always got my finger on the self-destruct/ I wonder when ‘I love me’ is enough? … I’m my own worst critic/ I talk a whole lot of s**t, but I’m a 10 out of 10, even when I forget it.”
Delivering a message of self-love, the music video also sees the “Skyscraper” hitmaker making reference to her past. She bumps into a trio who are likely to be a reference to her “Camp Rock” co-stars, the Jonas Brothers, and comes across a woman on a stretcher who is being rushed into an ambulance, which is most likely a tribute to her near-fatal overdose in 2018.
Near the end of the video, a bride and a groom make a dash away from the “Give Your Heart a Break” singer. It seems to be a reference to her ex-boyfriend Wilmer Valderrama’s engagement to Amanda Pacheco after eight months of dating. She and the former “That ’70s Show” had dated for six years in the past.
After “I Love Me” video made its way out, Demi shares on Instagram what the song is really about. “I can’t put into words just yet what this past year for me has been… but this song focuses on a lot of what’s been going on in my head,” she explains. “We have good days, and we have bad days. The best we can do is be the best version of ourselves and celebrate that with those closest to us. Wanted to also give a special shoutout to all of my lovatics for always being there for me. 2020 is OUR year!”

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To say goodbye to a transformative tenure at the Komische Oper in Berlin, this director staged an “All-Singing, All-Dancing Yiddish Revue.”BERLIN — It’s difficult to pinpoint the most outrageous moment of “Barrie Kosky’s All-Singing, All-Dancing Yiddish Revue,” which opened at the Komische Oper here on Friday. Is it the 1960s-era pilot and flight attendant in drag belting “My Way” (sorry, “Mayn Veg”) under a shower of golden confetti? The subtle camp of an imaginary Choir of Temple Beth Emmanuel singing with straight-faced sincerity? The “message from our sponsors” advertising “delectably light, always right, gefilte fish in jars”?But maybe the evening is less about those moments than about Kosky himself: the Australian-born director who has become an essential figure of the Berlin, not to mention European, opera scene, an erstwhile foreigner who speaks in a fluid blend of German, English and Yiddish and has risen to being addressed on Friday by Claudia Roth, Germany’s culture commissioner, as “lieber,” or dear, Barrie.So much of the “Revue” embodies the ethos of the house he has built during the decade of his leadership, which comes to an end this summer. Queer, Jewish, entertaining and executed at a high level, the show is a quintessential production of the Komische Oper, the city’s most reliably interesting and revelatory opera company.Under Kosky — a showman through and through, who operates with a young idealist’s belief in the power of theater and a brazen disregard for divisions between so-called high and low art — the Komische Oper has been the kind of place where you could see Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron” one night and Mozart the next, followed by a Broadway musical, a Weimar-era operetta and, for good measure, something Baroque.Thankfully, that spirit will survive once he leaves and the house is jointly led by Susanne Moser and Philip Bröking. And, as Kosky said during a curtain call speech on Friday, the “Revue” is “kein Abschied”: no farewell. At 55, and more comfortable working as a freelancer than taking on a new house, he will remain at the Komische in an advisory role and direct one musical each of the next five seasons. His first? Jerry Herman’s “La Cage aux Folles,” given a grand treatment and sharing the calendar, in typical fashion, with Luigi Nono’s avant-garde, borderline strident “Intolleranza 1960.”“That must be the only time in history that the words ‘Nono’ and ‘Jerry Herman’ are in the same sentence,” Kosky said in a recent interview. “It’s even the same orchestra and the same chorus. My God, I mean, that’s just sensational.”Compare this atmosphere with those of the city’s two other major houses: the respectable but relatively stuffy Deutsche Oper and the Berlin State Opera, a company hopelessly wed to a core repertory heavy on Strauss and Wagner. The Komische, fittingly, attracts a varied audience that Kosky — true to my experience over the years — described as “five leather queens” next to “two tattooed lesbians” next to “grandpa and grandmother” next to “four Japanese tourists.”Kosky at the Komische Oper, the company he has run for 10 years, and where he will remain in an advisory role after he steps down this summer.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesKosky’s crowning achievement may be the degree to which he has elevated and restored operetta — a genre “stopped dead in its tracks” by the Third Reich, he said, and “Aryanized” in post-World War II performance — on the Berlin stage. He has either directed or invited guests to mount productions of long-neglected works including Paul Abraham’s “Ball im Savoy,” Oscar Straus’s “Die Perlen der Cleopatra” and Jaromir Weinberger’s “Frühlingsstürme,” which is considered the last operetta of the Weimar Republic.“These pieces were a fundamental, important part of the landscape of Berlin culture before 1933,” he said. “And we’re not just talking about Jewish composers. We’re talking about Jewish librettists, we’re talking about Jewish choreographers, we’re talking about Jewish singers.”It can be tricky to stage an operetta convincingly and compellingly; Kosky and his team have performed some dramaturgical surgery as part of their rescue missions. But above all, he has avoided linking his productions with history. Absent are Nazi intrusions or attempts at “setting the thing in Buchenwald, which a German director might probably do,” he said.“You know, it doesn’t work if you’re going to batter people,” Kosky added. “I feel the audiences have been enabled in the last 10 years to sit here and enjoy it without guilt. What I’ve tried to tell the German audiences, and the Berlin audiences, is, listen: The best way you can honor these people that your grandparents or parents killed or sent into exile is enjoy it.”So he has aimed for humor, charm and, of course, a little subversiveness. And operetta allows him to be “completely ludicrous,” as he said. “I can put in my Mel Brooks Barrie Kosky moments, and then I can be very heartbreakingly real the next moment, and it’s authentic to the pieces. I think most German directors don’t do that. They haven’t watched ‘The Muppet Show.’ I always say to people, if you want to understand my work, it’s basically a combination of the Muppets and Franz Kafka.”For now, Kosky plans to step away from operetta and make room for others: “I’ve opened the sweets shop, and I’ve said, ‘Look, guys, look at these delicious, fabulous things. And I’ve given you the keys. Take over the shop.’”Hence his future directing musicals, which after “La Cage” will include “Chicago” and “Sweeney Todd.” He is committed to opera projects throughout Europe in the coming years, but he would gladly take on Broadway as well. That, however, would entail getting a foothold where he has been woefully underrepresented. Productions by Kosky have traveled to Los Angeles and Houston; in September, his Komische “Fiddler on the Roof” will open at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. But aside from a co-directed, not-truly-his staging of “The Magic Flute” that appeared at the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2019, his work hasn’t found the audience it deserves in New York. (The Metropolitan Opera had planned to present his “Fiery Angel” in fall 2020, but it’s now in pandemic purgatory.)Dagmar Manzel, one of the house’s stars, in a sober turn from her comedic roles, such as the title character of “Die Perlen der Cleopatra.”Monika RittershausFirst, though, Kosky needs to finish the run, through July 10, of the “Revue,” an original creation he arrived at after not wanting his final production to be something expected, like an operetta, and after the pandemic upended his plans for a Stravinsky marathon. Few directors would, or could, dream up the result: a tribute to the Yiddish entertainment common at resorts in the Catskill Mountains during the mid-20th century.“The list of performers who were there — it’s like a who’s who of American culture, all going to this Jewish utopian, sort of summer kibbutz,” Kosky said, mentioning the likes of Joan Rivers, Danny Kaye and Brooks. “I mean, what was the Catskills if not a kibbutz without politics?”Paced like a playlist — with the accompanying ups, downs and, at times, lulls — the show features popular music arranged and conducted by Adam Benzwi (called Adam Benski from the stage) and follies-like choreography, with an eye for physical comedy, by Otto Pichler. Company members and guest stars appear in different guises, none more surprising than Dagmar Manzel in a rendingly sober turn from her riotous Cleopatra earlier last week.Throughout, Kosky — who also hosts the show through prerecorded introductions — is committed to the bit in a delicate balance of irony and camp. Both men and women sing in drag; borscht belt humor (“below the girdle”) abounds; and the performers assume personas on a Marvel Cinematic Universe scale. There’s the “mezzo from Minsk” Sylvie Sonitzki, a boy band of orthodox Jews, and don’t forget the temple choir. In an ending out of something like Verdi’s “Falstaff,” Kosky brings out everyone, an enormous ensemble backed by an enormous orchestra, for a spectacle that, joyous and celebratory, sends off the audience with a command: “Dance!”Kosky couldn’t have said goodbye any other way. More

They held signs and began gathering hours before a hearing in downtown Los Angeles they hoped would end with Britney Spears finally being released from the conservatorship that has governed her life for 13 years.“It’s Her Circus,” said one sign. “What’s Next,” said another.It was clear many of the fans anticipated that the outcome Friday would be good news for the pop star. And their predictions turned out to be right after a judge ruled to end the conservatorship.“We’re very happy this is happening,” said Diego Tamayo, 18. “This is a grass-roots movement that was exactly what was needed to free her. Hopefully she’ll now be able to live freely as a woman.”The “Free Britney” movement has driven public pressure to end the legal arrangement. Some of the fans who gathered outside the Stanley Mosk Courthouse on Friday had also been there on Sept. 29, when a judge suspended Ms. Spears’s father as her conservator.The area on Grand Avenue in front of the courthouse has become the de facto hub for the movement. By 11:30 a.m., it was filled with some 75 fans, many of them dressed in the hot pink shirts that have come to be associated with the star.As in September, some supporters had traveled from across the country to attend the rally. Many had been following Ms. Spears’s conservatorship case and ongoing legal dispute for years, connecting on social media to share information, galvanize support and organize rallies.“This is going to be the end of her conservatorship,” predicted Alexandra Beck, 25, who traveled from Maryland to attend the rally. “This has become a huge movement — not just for her but for anyone suffering from conservatorship abuse.”As the start of the hearing approached, anticipation pulsed through the crowd as a rally stage was being set up on the sealed off avenue in front of the courthouse.“It’s crazy that she would be placed in a conservatorship like this,” said Julius Skestos, 19. “It’s something that seemed to me as being explicitly wrong.”Nearby “Free Britney” had been scrawled in chalk in large letters in the street. More

An investigation by the CBC disputed a key part of Sainte-Marie’s story, saying that a birth certificate shows she was born to a white family in Massachusetts.The parentage of Buffy Sainte-Marie, a folk singer known for her activism on behalf of Indigenous people, was questioned after CBC News reported that it had found a birth certificate indicating that she was born to white parents in Massachusetts, and not on a Piapot Cree reservation in Canada.Sainte-Marie, considered the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar, has said for decades that she was born to an Indigenous mother before being adopted first by a white couple near Boston and then, as an adult, by the Piapot First Nation. The CBC investigation, which was published on Friday, pointed to documentation, including Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate and marriage certificate, to show she was born in Stoneham, Mass., as Beverly Jean Santamaria.Sainte-Marie did not speak to the CBC, but in video and written statements, she said the woman she called her “growing-up Mom” had told her that she was adopted and was Native. In both a 2018 biography and the statements, Sainte-Marie also says she was told she may have been born “on the wrong side of the blanket,” referring to an affair.“I don’t know where I’m from or who my birth parents were, and I will never know,” Sainte-Marie, 81, said in the written statement. “Which is why to be questioned in this way today is painful, both for me, and for my two families I love so dearly.”Sainte-Marie, whose songs include “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” “Universal Soldier” and “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” won an Oscar in 1983 for “Up Where We Belong,” a song from the film “An Officer and a Gentleman.” “I wanted to write songs that would last for generations,” she told The New York Times last year.News of the investigation was particularly surprising to Canadians because Sainte-Marie is such a well-known figure, said Kimberly Tallbear-Dauphine, a professor of Native Studies at the University of Alberta who was quoted in the CBC article.“She’s a celebrity but she’s also somebody a lot of Indigenous people know and have met with, and that makes it more personal,” Tallbear-Dauphine said in an interview with The Times. Emails and text messages she has received show that people are “feeling very emotional about this.”The freelance journalist Jacqueline Keeler said in the CBC investigation that she began looking for Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate after watching an “American Masters” episode about the singer last year. Keeler wrote a column for The San Francisco Chronicle last year that challenged the Indigenous heritage of the actor Sacheen Littlefeather.In their article, CBC reporters described how they obtained Sainte-Marie’s original birth certificate from Feb. 20, 1941, which says she was born to Winifred and Albert Santamaria at 3:15 a.m. The CBC said the Santamarias were of Italian and English ancestry; in her statements, Sainte-Marie said Winifred was part Mi’kmaq, a tribe from eastern Canada.The investigation also cites a 1945 life insurance policy document that says Sainte-Marie was born in Stoneham and a 1982 marriage certificate in which Sainte-Marie certified that she was born in Massachusetts. Also included was a 1964 newspaper article in which an uncle of Sainte-Marie’s disputed her claims that she was Indigenous, saying, “This is all part of the professional build-up.”A lawyer for Sainte-Marie told the CBC that many adoption records had been destroyed by Canadian governments and that children adopted in Massachusetts were commonly issued new birth certificates. “Sainte-Marie is entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy about her personal genealogical and family history,” the lawyer, Josephine de Whytell, told the CBC.After growing up in Massachusetts, Sainte-Marie was adopted by the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan, where she says she was born. In a statement, two members of the tribe, Debra and Ntawnis Piapot, said that “Buffy is our family.”“We chose her and she chose us,” they said. “We claim her as a member of our family and all of our family members are from the Piapot First Nation. To us that holds far more weight than any paper documentation or colonial record keeping ever could.” More

When the guitarist John Mayer takes the stage this week in Las Vegas, to cap Dead & Company’s 10-week residence at the Sphere arena, his wristwatch is bound to loom large on the venue’s massive LED screen.“I happen to have a job where my wrist is naturally looked at,” Mr. Mayer, 46, said last month on a video call from his home in Los Angeles.That suits the longtime watch collector (and downright watch nerd) just fine.“The number of people who come up to me and ask me what I’m wearing is far greater than the number of people who come up to me and say, ‘Love your music, or how’d you write that song?’” he said. “People want to know about watches more than anything. They’ll say, ‘Gotta ask: What do you have on?’ It’s such a great entree to conversation.”One of Mr. Mayer’s favorite talking points is his new collaboration with the Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet (A.P.). After three years of development, in March the brand introduced a Royal Oak perpetual calendar wristwatch designed by Mr. Mayer.Limited to 200 pieces, the $180,700 timepiece, encased in 18-karat white gold, featured a blue metallic dial inspired by the night sky as well as some subtle aesthetic details that Mr. Mayer conceived.“When you look at this perpetual calendar, the first thing you should see is the time,” he said. “You shouldn’t see the vastness of the universe when it comes to timekeeping if you’ve got 15 minutes to get to a meeting.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More