Projected onto the Merchandise Mart, “Footnotes” honors a style that’s become popular around the world but isn’t always given recognition in its hometown.Footwork, the Chicago-born music-and-dance form, is famous for its speed. D.J.s deliver a tense, polyrhythmic mix of stuttering samples at the jacked-up rate of 160 beats per minute, and dancers meet the challenge with an onslaught of swivels, kicks and scissoring steps even more bewilderingly quick and intricate than the music.This summer, that speed is finding a match in size. From Tuesday through Sept. 16, “Footnotes,” a short footwork film, is being projected across the 2.5-acre facade of the Merchandise Mart, a behemoth of a building covering two blocks of downtown Chicago. That’s a screen the size of about two football fields. Each night, the incredibly fast dance grows incredibly large.It’s a boost in visibility for a style, developed by Black youth, that hasn’t always been welcome in the city’s center — a style that has become popular around the world but isn’t always given recognition and respect in its hometown.“It’s about damn time,” said the footwork dancer Jamal Oliver, better known as Litebulb. “Footwork has been part of Chicago for 30 years.”Litebulb, in “In the Wurkz,” a touring show by the Era Footwork Crew.Wills GlasspiegelLitebulb, 31, who dances in the film and helped produce it, said that while appearing on the side of a building is exciting, “what’s more fulfilling is giving that opportunity to kids who would never get that chance.” Paying it forward is part of the mission of the Era Footwork Crew, a collective Litebulb helped found in 2014, and of its offshoot nonprofit organization, Open the Circle.In footwork parlance, “opening the circle” means making a space for dancing when the floor is too packed. Open the Circle seeks to do something similar in the field of social justice, not just making spaces for dancing and dancers but also spreading knowledge through education and funneling resources like grant money into the communities that created footwork.“When most people create these kinds of organizations, they’ve already made a fortune and now they want to give back,” Litebulb said. “But we’re doing it from the grass roots.”By design, the work of the Era and Open the Circle blurs in footwork projects, including public “dance downs,” a summer camp (Circle Up), videos, rap singles, a touring show (“In the Wurkz”) and a feature-length documentary on the way (“Body of the City”). The collectives extend footwork into the world of art galleries, universities and music festivals without losing touch with where it came from.Wills Glasspiegel, working on “Footnotes.”Jason PinkneyBrandon Calhoun, adjusting the camera, with DJ Spinn on the MPC drum machine.Jason Pinkney“Footnotes” is an extension of these efforts, both an advertisement and an upshot. “We’ve been doing a lot of work with the City of Chicago,” said Wills Glasspiegel, the documentary filmmaker and scholar who made the film with the Era dancer and animator Brandon Calhoun. “The city has recognized us as a good partner.” (Glasspiegel and Litebulb are both founders of the Era and executive directors of Open the Circle.)In this case, the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events reached out about its “Year of Chicago Music” project and a partnership with Art on theMart, which has been projecting public art on the building since 2018.Glasspiegel jumped at the chance. “Footwork is emblematic of our city,” he said, “so we tried to make the film as Chicago as possible, expressing the city as we Chicagoans experience it.” The filmmakers brought in musicians with deep local roots: Angel Bat Dawid; Amal Hubert of Hypnotic Brass Ensemble; and the Chicago Bucket Boys, who, Glasspiegel said, “are the sound of Chicago’s streets.” Elisha Chandler, a dancer with “In the Wurkz,” sings.But if the film’s musicians connect footwork to the city, its method of composition connects the musicians to footwork. To create the soundtrack, the Bucket Boys improvised at 160 beats per minute, then the others laid down improvisations in response, riffing on the blues song “Sweet Home, Chicago.” DJ Spinn, a seminal figure in the genre, took all those pieces and treated them as samples, turning them into footwork.Using the music as a map, Glasspiegel edited together footage of the musicians with footage of dancers. The contribution of Calhoun, also known as Chief Manny, was crucial, too: transforming some of that footage into animation. It makes the dancing more legible.Angel Bat Dawid in a scene from “Footnotes.”Wills Glasspiegel and Brandon K. CalhounThat’s particularly important for “Footnotes,” since the Merchandise Mart presents a challenging surface for projection — the facade is perforated with hundreds of windows that may or may not be lighted. But the animation is useful in conveying footwork more generally. “Footwork moves so fast, it taunts the eye,” Glasspiegel said. Calhoun — with his dancer’s inside knowledge — clarifies its phrasing and shape.At one point in the film, an animated DJ Spinn taps an MPC, the sampling device that is the main instrument of footwork music, and an animated dancer bounces on the keys. This image is important, Glasspiegel said, because it’s a metaphor. “That’s a driving theme for us — that footwork is both music and dance — which people might not know if they don’t know the history.”Footwork developed in the late 1980s and early ’90s in dance clubs, community centers and roller-rink discos that played house music. Another important site was the Bud Billiken parade, one of the largest African American parades in the country and one of the oldest, happening every summer since 1929. In these places, foundational footwork moves, like the Holy Ghost (a slack-limbed shaking) and the Erk n Jerk (a sequence of seesawing, sideways kicks), emerged before footwork got its name.Some of the top dance crews of those days — Main Attraction, House-O-Matics, U-Phi-U — included dancers who became D.J.s, most importantly RP Boo and DJ Rashad. And it was these dancers-turned-D.J.s who created the footwork sound, increasing the tempo and stripping things down to ratchet up the tension (or throw off rival dancers) in dance battles — intense, improvisational face-offs that became the core of footwork culture in the early 2000s. Overlapping rhythms gave dancers more options, and competition pushed innovation.As had happened before with hip-hop — when M.C.s, who made money for the music industry, eclipsed b-boys, who didn’t — the music spread without the dance, especially abroad. “People didn’t really see the dance until DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn brought dancers on tour with them in 2010,” Litebulb said.Elisha Chandler, center, a dancer with “In the Wurkz,” who sings in the “Footnotes” film.Wills GlasspiegelLitebulb was one of those dancers, discovering rapturous fans in Europe but finding less recognition back home. “Too often dancers are viewed as background or bodies, not artists,” he said. “It’s important to have the balance, celebrating what the DJs are doing and what the dancers are doing.”“Footnotes” does that, but it also shows other ways that the Era and Open the Circle have been influencing the footwork scene. When footwork moved from clubs, parades and dance groups into more insular battles, women got pushed out. The Era and Open the Circle have been inviting them back in.“In battling culture, women were expected to stand on the side and look cute,” said Diamond Hardiman, a 27-year-old dancer who appears in the film. “You couldn’t get in the circle.”Women of her generation began battling one another. “It was empowering, seeing what we could do with each other to make ourselves better and letting the guys know that us women can do the same thing that y’all doing.”Diamond Hardiman: “In battling culture, women were expected to stand on the side and look cute. You couldn’t get in the circle.”Jason PinkneyWomen like Hardiman made space for themselves, but Open the Circle has also helped by reconnecting footwork with the youth dance groups in which it began. These groups are filled with girls and often run by women. (Women in the family of Shkunna Stewart, who directs the group Bringing Out Talent, have been running groups for four generations.)Members of such groups are the core population of Open the Circle’s summer camps on the South and East Sides of Chicago, camps where women like Hardiman teach. Some of these children appear in “Footnotes.” A girl called Ladybug leaps like a grasshopper, a dozen stories tall.The goal of the camps is broader than correcting the gender imbalance, though. “In our community, footwork is kind of viewed as nostalgia, but if we can get the kids, then footwork can live on,” Litebulb said. “It will be a whole new evolution than what we thought it was.”And it’s about more than perpetuating a style. As some of the camp T-shirts attest, “Footwork saves lives.”“It really did save my life,” Hardiman said, echoing the sentiment of other Era members. “I grew up seeing the stuff I wasn’t supposed to see at a young age, but footwork showed me I didn’t have to do those things.”“I don’t want my child to go through what I had to go through,” she added.That aspiration can be felt in the film as well. “The big kicker for me is showing the kids anything’s possible,” Litebulb said. “Look at yourself on the side of a building now. Who would have thought?” More

Laiona Michelle’s tribute show, now at New World Stages, is more an impressionistic portrait for those familiar with the singer’s life and career.Musicals often rely on familiar patterns — a patter song here, an “I want” number there — and biographical musicals might well be the most predictable of all. The songs are mixed with enough back story to make the audience feel as if they haven’t just paid a lot of money to watch a cover act, and there is traditionally a juicy, awards-baiting tour de force for the lead performer.And so it has gone, successfully so in the case of such hits as “The Boy From Oz” (Hugh Jackman as Peter Allen), “Beautiful” (Jessie Mueller as Carole King) and “Tina” (Adrienne Warren as Tina Turner).Laiona Michelle’s tribute to Nina Simone, “Little Girl Blue,” which recently opened at New World Stages, fits the general format, with some interesting, if not always successfully implemented, idiosyncratic touches. The show’s most distinctive characteristic is its attempt to eschew linear storytelling and its refusal to supply the expected touchstones. This approach befits Simone, who rarely followed predetermined paths, but the resulting impressionistic portrait benefits from a viewer’s familiarity with the basic benchmarks of the subject’s art, personality and life.Each of the evening’s two acts takes place at a concert from a key period in Simone’s career: The first was in Westbury, N.Y., in April 1968, a few days after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; the second was at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, in July 1976. Backed by a snappy onstage trio led by the music director and pianist Mark Fifer, Michelle portrays Simone with a fiery commitment to the musician’s mood swings, prickliness and arch stylings. She emulates some of the banter and the set lists, but not that much. And since the rights to “Mississippi Goddam” could not be secured for this show, she and Fifer wrote the original “Angry Black Woman” as a kind of conceptual homage.Mostly those historical concerts act as springboards for snapshots of an often tormented, always searching artist, just like songs were springboards in Simone’s freewheeling live act. (It is not a coincidence that Justin Vivian Bond and Taylor Mac, whose performances can also go from erratic to brilliant and back again in a second, are both superb Simone interpreters.)If there is a thread, it is the fury of Simone fighting against the expectations placed upon her as a Black female artist. She disliked being labeled jazz, for example. “That is a term invented by white people to identify Black people,” she says in the show. “I. Am. Classical.” But her genius rested in using one to feed the other, leading to some inspired musical juxtapositions by Michelle (who wrote the script with additional material from the director Devanand Janki).At one point, Simone’s piano teacher Muriel Mazzanovich, a.k.a. Miss Mazzy, says, using her young student’s real name: “Eunice Kathleen Waymon, I’d like for you to meet Johann Sebastian Bach.” Michelle’s Simone immediately goes into the line “Ooh-oo child, things are gonna get easier,” from the Five Stairsteps’ “O-o-h Child,” and that beat might well be the most hopeful moment in the show.“Little Girl Blue” loses focus during the Montreux concert, as the push and pull between Simone’s talent and her demons, her activism and the world around her, becomes harder to pin down — it feels as if Michelle was somehow bedeviled by her subject. Then again, she is not the first, nor the last: Liz Garbus’s Oscar-nominated documentary is tellingly titled “What Happened, Miss Simone?”Little Girl BlueAt New World Stages, Manhattan; littlegirlblue.nyc. Running time: 2 hours. More

WENN/Apega

The Migos star and the ‘Icy Girl’ raptress have a messy breakup after the former is accused of domestic abuse following the leak of their elevator fight footage.

Apr 9, 2021

AceShowbiz –
Quavo appears to be having no intention to keep things civil between him and Saweetie following their split. If this is any indication, the Migos star may have caused further strain in their relationship as he appears to diss his ex in a new snippet of an unreleased track.

In the newly-surfaced audio, the Athens-born artist rhymes, “Skrtttt Skrtttt takin back dat Bentley/ F**d dem h**s now I gotta act stingy/ new Huncho & Petro otw.” He is likely referring to the Bentley that he gave his then-girlfriend as a gift in December 2020.

Following their split in February, there were rumors saying that Quavo repossessed the expensive car that he gifted his ex. “Quavo’s no dummy – the Bentley wasn’t in her name,” a source told MTO News at the time. “He’s not being petty or anything, but she’s on Twitter talking s**t. So he took back the car… He got that s**t.”

  See also…

TMZ, however, later debunked the news, claiming that the 29-year-old emcee neither leased the car in his name nor ended the lease early in the wake of his breakup from his ex-girlfriend.

But that wasn’t the ugliest part of their breakup. In late March, a video surfaced of Quavo and Saweetie’s altercation in an elevator. In the footage, the “Best Friend” raptress appeared to lash out at the “Congratulations” spitter and they grappled over a Call of Duty case.

Saweetie tumbled to the floor as her then-boyfriend stood over her. Quavo eventually exited the elevator as his ex gathered herself and got up.

Saweetie later addressed the video, saying that “this unfortunate incident happened a year ago.” She also denied that the physical altercation led to their breakup. “While we have reconciled since then and moved past this particular disagreement, there were simply too many other hurdles to overcome in our relationship and we have both since moved on,” she explained. “I kindly ask that everyone respect my privacy during this time.”

Quavo, meanwhile, denied that he ever laid hands on his ex-girlfriend. “We had an unfortunate situation almost a year ago that we both learned and moved on from,” he told TMZ. “I haven’t physically abused Saweetie and have real gratitude for what we did share overall.”

You can share this post!

Next article

Lisa Rinna Denies Being Upset at Andy Cohen Over ‘WWHL’ Kids Special

Related Posts More

The classically trained South African cellist draws on musical traditions from across the globe for his debut album, “Where is Home (Hae Ke Kae).”MANCHESTER, England — On a recent evening at the Bridgewater Hall here, Abel Selaocoe surveyed the audience from his cello podium. Holding his bow aloft like a staff, the musician asked attendees to add their voices to the strutting groove sweeping the auditorium.This was The Oracle, a touring program built around Selaocoe’s multiplicity: During the concert, the South African artist, 30, best known for his work on the cello, moved swiftly between roles as a singer, improviser, section player and master of ceremonies. During the evening, Selaocoe performed with the chamber group Manchester Collective, covering Stravinsky, Vivaldi and Mica Levi, and with his trio, Chesaba, adding influences from groove-centered improvisation and sounds from across the African continent. In a classical music industry that encourages performers to be either/or, Selaocoe has chosen both — and more.Themes of belonging, journey and history punctuate Selaocoe’s debut album, “Where is Home (Hae Ke Kae),” which arrives Friday on Warner Classics. The genre-blending album harnesses an intimate emotional energy that is disrupted by regular fiery outbursts, as on the hymn-like “Ibuyile I’Africa / Africa is Back” and the spiky “Ka Bohaleng / On the Sharp Side.” (The album’s name and many of the track titles include translations in African languages, including Sotho and Zulu.)In recent years, Selaocoe’s ability to float above rigid genre categories has resulted in a growing influence among a classical music community increasingly conscious of its deference to longstanding traditions. In 2021, he curated a concert at the BBC Proms, one of the world’s largest classical music festivals, and he is an artist in residence at London’s Southbank Center for its upcoming season. Even as he is embraced by these British institutional spaces, his additive approach is deeply rooted in his homeland’s rich musical traditions.“South African tradition doesn’t draw these hard lines between performance music, participative music, music for daily activities,” Gwen Ansell, the author of “Soweto Blues: Jazz, Popular Music and Politics in South Africa,” said in a recent video interview. Instead, music is “just part of what happens,” she added.Born in 1992 in Sebokeng, a township south of Johannesburg, Selaocoe’s journey with the cello began when he followed his older brother, Sammy, to Saturday school at the African Cultural Organization of South Africa in Soweto, another township around 30 miles away.Traveling to class on a packed train, on which passengers resorted to standing in the spaces between carriages, Selaocoe would remove the bridge of his cello, take off the endpin and put both parts in his pocket, standing with the instrument flat against his chest to take up as little space as possible. He began playing on a shared instrument, before teachers spotted his potential and gifted him his own.In a classical music industry that encourages artists to be either/or, Selaocoe has chosen both, drawing on his homeland’s rich musical traditions even as he is embraced by institutional spaces.Leon BarkerGrowing up, his brother, who also works as a musician, “had a philosophy that, if you’re living in a township, in a place that doesn’t have a lot of sustenance, and employment, you have to start looking really early,” Selaocoe said. Selaocoe listened — though he would later come to realize the townships’ own unique artistry — and at 13 won a scholarship to St John’s College, a prestigious boarding school in Johannesburg.At St John’s, Selaocoe dreamed of a move to Europe, and his classmates romanticized the continent as “the mecca of classical music, of musical expression,” he said. After studying with the teacher Michael Masote, who was one of the most influential voices in South African classical music, Selaocoe eventually took the leap in 2010, when he enrolled at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester at 18.Despite his classical training in the cello, everything stems from singing for Selaocoe. “The voice does things my body cannot imagine, but my musicality can,” he said over lunch near his home in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, a suburb south of Manchester.Selaocoe learned to sing the same way one might pick up a language in childhood: “by seeing adults do it and copying them.” Growing up, his parents, a domestic worker and a mechanic, taught him cultural ceremonies and church. About six years ago, a friend gave Selaocoe a grounding in umngqokolo, a form of South African overtone singing, he said, which added a new dimension to the musician’s already charismatic performances.His onstage request at Bridgewater Hall for the audience to join in the performance is typical of Selaocoe’s belief in the connective power of the voice. In rehearsals for a 2018 Manchester Collective show, “Sirocco,” Selaocoe “would sing things to demonstrate to other ensemble members,” Adam Szabo, the chief executive of the group, said in a recent phone interview. “We pushed him to do it in the show, something he hadn’t done much before at all.” Now, Szabo said, he’s refined that singing in his practice, “which is this amazing melting pot of different influences.”Over lunch, Selaocoe returned frequently to idea that “singing is so universal.” But that universality has its limits. For the music journalist and author Ansell, “the song is universal, the fact that people sing is universal, but in fact the language, the meaning, the discourse of that song, isn’t.”Selaocoe said he wanted his work to offer routes to universally felt experiences. “There are things that go beyond language, the things that are just part of the human instinct,” he said. “The first one is movement — the idea of expressing with your body. Then we go even deeper into things like faith.”Selaocoe’s relationship to faith is multifaceted: In addition to attending Methodist and Apostolic churches, he was brought up around traditional medicinal, healing and spiritual practices. “My heart has always stayed with appeasing my ancestors — seeing if I can get in touch with them, to ask for advice,” he said.Themes of belonging, journey and history punctuate Selaocoe’s debut album, “Where is Home (Hae Ke Kae),” which was released Sept. 23. Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesAt Bridgewater Hall, Selaocoe channeled this history through aphoristic pronouncements, telling the audience: “The future is in the past.” Connecting with the past — in and out of his music — is one way Selaocoe has explored the question posed by his album’s title.“‘Where is home?’ is no longer [just] a question of the geographical space,” he said. “It can be an ideology, within artistic practice, or the people I surround myself with.”Artistically, Selaocoe’s current home is in improvisation, a shift confirmed when he was invited to perform with the renowned Art Ensemble of Chicago at the 2019 London Jazz Festival. That concert was a key moment “in understanding that my expression doesn’t always have to be prepared‌,” he said. “Coming from a classical music background, preparation is almost everything.” But with an improvised performance, he added, “I leave the moment on‌ ‌stage and be like, ‘I can never recreate what we did.’”Still, Selaocoe spends a lot of time with classical ensembles, introducing fresh approaches to groove, including techniques informed by Africa’s wealth of stringed instruments. Does he meet resistance to his ideas? “Yes,” he said, “but I think it’s important that you choose your collaborators well. As soon as you have curiosity in the room, that’s 70 percent of the job done.”Selaocoe has also paid attention to how his performances are marketed. “If I’m coming to play a sonata, they’ll call me a classical cellist,” he said. “But if I play something else, I’m no longer that — I’m just, like, an African musician.”His dream, he said, is for his mixed-genre, groove-orientated approach to become intuitive. To be able “to walk into a room, set a groove and people understand what to do with their bows, rather than be told,” he said.“When you put it on a piece of paper, it looks dead simple,” he added. “And it really isn’t.” More

Set off by a scene in a movie, a critic reflects on cultural baggage: “The things you loved when you were young will never be able to make you young again.”The physical objects that represent pop-culture obsessions: A.O. Scott’s books and DVDs at home.Like a lot of other people, I enjoyed Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World,” a young woman’s coming-of-age story that’s also a spiky romantic comedy of sorts. But the reason I can’t stop thinking about this movie (which I can’t discuss further without risking spoilers, so be warned) has to do with its status as a Gen X midlife cri de coeur.The full cry — appropriately laced with self-mockery, self-pity and highly specific pop-cultural references — arrives in a single devastating scene near the end of the film. Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a graphic novelist who like the director is in his mid-40s, is dying of pancreatic cancer. Julie (Renate Reinsve), the film’s official protagonist, who had earlier broken his heart, comes to visit him in the hospital. She finds him playing furious air drums as “Back to Dungaree High” by the Norwegian death-punk band Turbonegro blasts in his headphones.“It’s such a trip just to survive,” the singer howls, and Aksel is preoccupied with matters of life, death and popular culture. He tells Julie that he spends most of his time listening to familiar music and rewatching his favorite movies, including “The Godfather,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and the films of David Lynch. “The world I knew has disappeared,” he laments.What was that world? It was “all about going to stores.”Scott writes, “I’ve surrounded myself with things, the most precious of which have been scratched, scribbled in, lent out or given away.”Or in at least one case, destroyed by something else precious to him.That description isn’t meant to trivialize his youthful pastimes and passions, but rather to convey their magic and meaning to a millennial whose primary experience of shopping is likely to consist of clicking on an icon rather than rifling through bins. Aksel goes on to rhapsodize about the record, comic-book and video emporiums he used to frequent.His pilgrimage stops may be particular to Oslo, but they have counterparts in every city. Julie, who works in a bookstore and dabbles in writing, is hardly oblivious to the utility and charm of physical media. But she doesn’t quite understand the intense emotion — the longing, the meaning, the sense of identity — that Aksel attaches to memories of an earlier style of consumption. This isn’t necessarily a difference of taste or sensibility. It’s more a contrasting relationship with the material aspects of culture, a different way of living in a world of things, and it defines the generational schism between them.I know which side I’m on. I don’t think of myself as a shopper, but the truth is that in my time on this earth I’ve rarely been able to walk past a book or record store without going in, or to walk out empty-handed. I’ve surrounded myself with things, the most precious of which have been scratched, scribbled in, lent out or given away. As Aksel says, “I’ve spent my life doing that — collecting all that stuff,” but not because of its monetary or even its sentimental value. Those objects begin as vessels of meaning and tokens of taste, but their acquisition becomes a kind of compulsion, emptied of its original passion. “I kept doing it when it stopped giving me the powerful emotions,” Aksel reflects. “Now it’s all that I have left: memories of useless things.”The comic books, action figures and artwork collected by George Gene Gustines, a senior operations manager for The Times and our comics correspondent.I don’t completely identify with Aksel. He is kinder, cooler (it took me some Googling to identify that Turbonegro song), a few years younger and a lot better looking than I am. But it isn’t enough for me to say, as people do these days, that watching him made me feel seen. The effect was more intimate, more shocking, more shameful, as if Trier had dumped out a laundry bag full of my favorite vintage band T-shirts on Aksel’s hospital bed for the whole movie-loving world to rummage through. Seen? I felt smelled.Not that this is all about me. What Aksel says to Julie confirms him as an especially sympathetic and self-aware specimen of a recognizable, not always beloved type: not a fan, exactly, but a highly opinionated hybrid of connoisseur, collector and critic. You might know a version of this guy from the novels of Nick Hornby (or the films adapted from them), notably “High Fidelity” and “Juliet, Naked.” Or maybe from movies by Kevin Smith, Noah Baumbach, Judd Apatow and other Gen X auteurs. He could be your older brother, your ex- or current partner, your best friend or the long-lost buddy you’re sort of in touch with on Facebook. Your dad, even. But then again, if you’re like me, the teen spirit you smell may be your ownIn real life, this kind of person isn’t always a guy. Popular culture often assumes as much, and assumes his whiteness, too, which is partly a failure of collective imagination, and partly a matter of whose cultural obsessions are taken as representative. Chuck Klosterman, perhaps the emblematic white male cultural critic of his (which is to say my) generation, somewhat inadvertently makes this point in his new book, “The Nineties,” when he implies that the release of Nirvana’s album “Nevermind” was a more significant world-historical event than the fall of the Berlin Wall.The bootleg concert T-shirts, vintage Macs and VHS tapes collected by Caryn Ganz, The Times’s pop music editor, and Richard the cat.In typical ’90s fashion, the claim is hedged with knowingness and booby-trapped with irony. Klosterman understands that there were plenty of people in the ’90s — and not only in Berlin — who never cared much about “Nevermind.” The appeal and the annoyance value of his book arise from the same source, namely his unapologetic, extravagant commitment to generalizing from his own experience. “The Nineties,” with the modest, generic subtitle “A Book,” is neither history nor memoir, but rather uses each genre as an alibi for the shortcomings of the other. Of course this is just one guy’s recollection of the stuff he saw, thought about, listened to and bought in the last decade of the 20th century. But it’s also, Klosterman periodically insists, an account of what that decade was really like, a catalog of what mattered at the time and in hindsight. You can argue with the second version — how can you write a cultural history of the American 1990s without so much as an index entry for “Angels in America”? — but not so much with the first. What the ’90s meant is open for debate. What the decade felt like, maybe less so.This is what makes Klosterman, who was born in 1972, a cheerful, mainstream American counterpart to Aksel’s gloomy, alternative-minded Nordic intellectual. They are both ’90s guys, driven to explain something that seems in danger of being forgotten or misunderstood to people who weren’t there. To a degree it’s the same something, but not quite the something either one thinks it is. Klosterman seeks to illuminate the reality of a unique and crucial period; Aksel tries to share with Julie the sources of his own sensibility. But the cultural reference points are red herrings. The deep motive is a longing to arrest and reverse the movement of time, to recover some of the ardor and bewilderment of youth.The art at the home of Roberta Smith, The Times’s co-chief art critic, and Jerry Saltz, New York magazine’s senior art critic.The things you loved when you were young will never be able to make you young again. The reluctant acceptance of this fact is the source of nostalgia, a disorder that afflicts every modern generation in its own special way. Members of Generation X grew up under the heavy, sanctimonious shadow of the baby boom’s long adolescence, among crates of LPs and shelves of paperbacks to remind us of what we had missed. Just as baby boomers’ rebellion against their Depression- and war-formed parents defined their styles and poses, so did our impatience with the boomers set ours in motion. But I’m not talking so much about a grand narrative of history as about what Aksel might call the useless stuff — the objects and gadgets that form the infrastructure of memory.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More