Aurelia Butler

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    Cissy Houston Saw Music’s Peaks and Life’s Valleys

    If you’re the sort of person who remains locked in a private, perpetual tug of war over whether the greatest singer this country’s ever known is Aretha Franklin or Whitney Houston, perhaps you’re also the sort of person who then spares a thought for Whitney’s mother, Cissy. Cissy Houston died at 91 on Monday, and she could sing, too. Let me try that again: Cissy Houston sang, first with the clarity of something just Windexed then, later, with a tone that acquired some protective, matured texture, some bark.This thought we “who’s the greatest” vacillators spare for Miss Cissy stems from outrageous misfortune: yes, the unimaginable tragedy of losing a daughter the way she lost Whitney and then losing her daughter’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, almost exactly the same way; but also being Whitney’s mother, plus Dionne Warwick’s aunt and a cousin of the opera legend Leontyne Price, in addition to one of Aretha’s homies. How could a member of that bloodline not be in pursuit of music that could garner the sort of acclaim and career they experienced? But Cissy never found it.Warwick cast her spells with a chardonnay glimmer, singing with low-pulse seduction that had some tooth. Whitney was a fighter jet who could dance Balanchine and Ailey. Miss Cissy had power and range and a knack for put-you-in-your-place phrasing, whether the subject was the Man Upstairs or the man in her bed. But what Cissy lacked was good luck — never had original songs as top-shelf as her niece’s or as humongous as her daughter’s.Houston, at left, with the Sweet Inspirations. The R&B group often supplied backup vocals for Aretha Franklin, as they did here at a 1968 concert in New York.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesAfter a few years of significant group work with the Sweet Inspirations and an underrated solo album in 1970, she was trying disco (the “Think It Over” album, from 1978) and, the year before, choir-robed R&B on “Cissy Houston,” an album studded with covers that for all its heat and arched eyebrows could easily have been titled “Mavis Staples,” too. But look: Cissy is really feeling the tunes on that LP, reshaping, reliving, husking them. There’s weariness and want, some funk. She sounds like a woman who just walked in the front door after nine hours on her feet, who faintly remembers what being swept off them was like.Her career began perched at an upper register whose uncanny inheritor is obviously her daughter — the soprano punch-ups and dessert-for-dinner runs. But by 1977, up there, Cissy was often at her ceiling. You can sometimes hear muscle in her climbs, the labor of singing. Some voices can’t wait to get to the skies of a chorus. The alto Miss Cissy embraced seemed to luxuriate in the verses. She always sounded as if the first-floor was as good as the penthouse.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

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    Is It Too Late Now to Say Sorry? 8 Songs for the High Holy Days.

    Apology, forgiveness, moving on: These are some of humanity’s richest themes, and they have rich songs to match.Bob DylanFiona Adams/Redferns, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,As Lindsay mentioned on Friday, she’s out on book leave for the rest of the month. Starting next week, a series of knowledgeable Times staffers will sub in to provide thoughtfully curated playlists each Tuesday. This week, however, you are stuck with me: a reporter on the Culture desk who has written about Dylan and the Dead, and whose current Spotify rotation includes CoComelon’s “Wheels on the Bus” and the “Encanto” soundtrack (possibly Lin-Manuel Miranda’s finest work).For some of us, this is a week of reflection, repentance and weaning ourselves off caffeine: It’s the Days of Awe, the 10 days between Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which was last Thursday and Friday, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which begins this Friday night. There are more superficially appealing holidays; Yom Kippur in particular is a fast day and is not supposed to be “fun.” But I earnestly don’t know what I would do without this time of year and the space it provides to pause and take stock. You don’t need to belong to any particular faith to find that a useful exercise.A High Holiday playlist might appear a tricky proposition. Popular music is not typically a space for solemnity and self-denial. On Yom Kippur itself, sex and nonessential drugs, to say nothing of rock ’n’ roll, are prohibited. But apology, forgiveness, moving on: These are some of humanity’s richest themes, and they have rich songs to match. While we cannot skimp on some of the most obvious artists — hello, Barbra; nice to see you, Leonard — we are also including Stevie Wonder and Outkast.I hope you reflect and enjoy. And, if you celebrate, have a sweet new year and a meaningful fast.Gut yontif,MarcListen along while you read.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

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    Waiting Hours for 3 Minutes in the Criterion Closet (Well, Van)

    A mobile version of movie fans’ favorite stockroom drew hundreds of New York Film Festival visitors eager to experience what celebrities do in popular videos.The hottest event at this year’s New York Film Festival isn’t a film at all. It’s a van.Parked next to Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, the mobile version of the Criterion Closet — a tiny space stocked with the prestigious DVDs and Blu-rays of films in the Criterion Collection — attracted a line that wrapped around the block.It was a chance for festivalgoers to enact their own version of the Closet Picks videos, in which celebrities like Bill Hader, Ayo Edebiri and Willem Dafoe visit a product-filled closet in the company’s Manhattan office. They pick out their favorite titles and evangelize about their choices while not so coincidentally on tour promoting their latest projects. (Dafoe’s haul included Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard” and the actor’s own “The Last Temptation of Christ”; Edebiri left with Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket,” among other titles, and Hader’s selections included the western “My Darling Clementine.”)Criterion said some 900 people visited the van.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesFor the company’s 40th anniversary, it adapted the experience to the inside of a delivery van and opened it up to the public, starting with the first two weekends of the New York Film Festival (which concludes Oct. 13). The next stop, scheduled for Oct. 26 and 27, will be in Brooklyn Bridge Park in collaboration with St. Ann’s Warehouse.Visitors to the van are invited to film their own Closet Picks videos and pull titles from the shelf to gush about for the camera. Unlike the celebrities, they do have to pay for their picks, but with a 40 percent discount.“It was something no one ever thought we could do,” said Rainna Stapelfeldt, 26, a Bed-Stuy resident who took home “Sid and Nancy,” “Midnight Cowboy” and “Memories of Murder” after a 10-hour wait in line.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

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    The $550 Million Question: How Does David Geffen Hall Sound?

    When the New York Philharmonic English horn player and oboist Ryan Roberts performs at the renovated David Geffen Hall these days, he feels naked and exposed, as if he were appearing on a high-definition television screen.“The sound is honest,” he said. “You hear everything — for better or for worse.”The star violinist Hilary Hahn, a frequent soloist, has a sense of comfort. “You can trust your sound will project,” she said.And John Adams, the composer and conductor, said that gone were the days of a concert hall that felt like Yankee Stadium. “It’s such a breath of fresh air,” he said. “You can go for much greater delicacy and subtlety.”Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, reopened two years ago after a $550 million renovation. By gutting and rebuilding the interior, the project was meant to break, once and for all, the acoustical curse that had plagued the hall for decades. Unveiling the new space, the Philharmonic’s leaders declared a new era, clinking champagne glasses and hailing “our 2,200-seat crown jewel.”So, after two years and more than 270 concerts, how does the hall sound?While the acoustics are still evolving, the reviews of Geffen Hall have largely been positive. The hall is more resonant and enveloping, according to more than a dozen Philharmonic players, guest artists, conductors and audience members. But there are still shortcomings. The hall, some say, can be cool and clinical — and at the highest volumes, blaring.“It’s definitely better than it was,” said Rebecca Young, the Philharmonic’s associate principal viola, who joined in 1986. “But I don’t think it’s perfect.”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

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    The Quick-Witted, Self-Lacerating James Blunt Would Like a Word

    Twenty years after his hit “You’re Beautiful” turned him into an overnight star, the British singer and songwriter takes his music — and his haters — to task.Twenty years ago this month, James Blunt was an unknown singer releasing his first album. The song that rapidly elevated him out of obscurity was “You’re Beautiful,” a lovelorn rhapsody about falling for a stranger on the subway while high on drugs, which hit No. 1 in 15 countries, including the United States. The smash helped turn his 2004 LP “Back to Bedlam” into a triple-platinum success.As Blunt moved from unknown to highly known, there was a surprise reveal: The slight, diminutive man who wrote “You’re Beautiful” had been a captain in the British army, and served in Kosovo. Interviewers soon learned he also had an acid tongue and a quick wit. And in recent years, with evident zest, he’s turned it on people who troll him on social media; his retorts make him sound like a skilled standup comic who specializes in crowd work. (When someone posted on X, “My mom hates James Blunt,” he retorted, “Because I won’t pay the child support?” At this point, only masochists post @ Blunt.)Blunt has released seven studio albums; the most recent, “Who We Used to Be,” arrived in 2023. Later this year, he’s touring Australia, Asia and Europe, with a return to the United States planned for June 2025. An irreverent documentary about him, “One Brit Wonder,” premiered on Netflix UK in June, with distribution in the U.S. still pending.In a recent video interview, he reflected on the 20th anniversary of “Back to Bedlam” from a tiny office in the London pub he owns, the Fox & Pheasant. (The tavern plays his music five minutes before closing, he joked, so people will leave as quickly as possible.) These are edited excerpts from the conversation.In the documentary, there are lots of instances of people insulting you. Your tour manager calls you “a narcissistic psychopath.” Your mother describes you as “politely ruthless.” And you are likened to Marmite.I like Marmite.You’re aware that most people don’t?It’s a highly lucrative company, so they must be doing something right.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

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    Oppenheimer’s Communist Past Draws New Attention

    J. Robert Oppenheimer teemed with contradictions. He was shy and bold, naïve and brilliant, a loyal husband who cheated, a gentle man whose bomb could kill millions.That he loved quantum physics may be no accident. The field holds that some basic phenomena of the material world have opposing features that cannot be observed simultaneously, such as wave and particle behavior. Oppenheimer had a deep affection for these irreconcilable pairs. He called them “the nature of the surprise, of the miracle, of something that you could not figure out.”In a universe of contradictions, the physicist himself grew famous as an American hero and infamous as a red sympathizer. The question of his true loyalties rang alarms 80 years ago as the Federal Bureau of Investigation probed Oppenheimer’s Communist past — and is now — surprisingly — gaining new attention.This fall, months after Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” won seven Oscars, the Journal of Cold War Studies, a quarterly publication of Harvard University, is revisiting the Oppenheimer case.Four historians argue that the physicist was not just a Communist ally but a full-blown member of a secret Berkeley unit who ultimately perjured himself in a federal hearing that had dug into his past. As evidence, they cite a substantial body of letters, memoirs and espionage files, some postdating the movie’s source material.“Historians have to go where the evidence takes them,” said Gregg Herken, who leads the reassessment and is emeritus professor of history at the University of California.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

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    Book Review: ‘From Here to the Great Unknown,’ by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough

    In a new memoir, “From Here to the Great Unknown,” Elvis Presley’s daughter and granddaughter take turns exploring a messy legacy.FROM HERE TO THE GREAT UNKNOWN: A Memoir, by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough“What is the point of an autobiography?”Lisa Marie Presley asks this question toward the end of her incredibly sad memoir, “From Here to the Great Unknown.”Presley died of a bowel obstruction — a complication of bariatric surgery — before she could finish the book, having endured 54 years of intense public scrutiny. Her daughter, Riley Keough, picked up where she left off, listening to interviews her mother had recorded for the project. Their perspectives appear in alternating sections — a haunting harmony that builds to a crescendo of heartbreak.The answer to Presley’s question comes from Keough, who is best known for her star turn in Amazon’s adaptation of “Daisy Jones & the Six”: The point of an autobiography — this one, anyway — is to show the toll of fame and addiction.Anyone who’s skimmed tabloid headlines at the grocery store knows the basics, but here’s a quick summary for online shoppers: Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of Priscilla and Elvis Presley, grew up without stability or peace, hounded by paparazzi, criticized for her looks, her weight, her drug use, her marriage to Michael Jackson. From start to finish, her life took place in the public domain.“I guess I didn’t really have a shot in hell,” Presley writes.“My mom was really affected by what people wrote about her,” Keough tells us. “She had no siblings to share the burden, nobody who understood what it truly felt like. In a way she was the princess of America and didn’t want to be.”The first third of “From Here to the Great Unknown” is full of nostalgic musings about Graceland, the Presley family home in Memphis. We get a peek at the parts that aren’t on the tour. We learn about Lisa Marie’s tonsillectomy and her baby blue golf cart. She is just 9 when we see her father’s body leaving the house on a stretcher — his pajamas, his socks. We see his entourage picking over his belongings.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

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    ‘The Menendez Brothers’ Review: Reframing a Case

    To the extent this documentary about Lyle and Erik Menendez has appeal, it is of the tabloid variety.“The Menendez Brothers” doesn’t so much relitigate the case of Lyle and Erik Menendez as reframe it. In 1996, the brothers were convicted of murdering their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, in Beverly Hills in 1989. That was their second trial. The first had ended in 1994 with two deadlocked juries, each assigned to deliberate over one sibling.This documentary, directed by Alejandro Hartmann and released on Netflix less than a month after the streamer put out Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s dramatization of these events, opens with the hook of “exclusive interviews” with the brothers, who “have not told their story together in nearly 30 years.” But its main contentions break down along two lines.One is that, following the #MeToo movement, the public might be more receptive to the brothers’ claim of “imperfect self-defense”: They had argued that their father had a history of sexual and psychological abuse that led them to an honest but mistaken belief that their parents would kill them.The other is that the context of the trials mattered. The first trial was televised in what the film portrays as a warm-up for the news media circus that would surround the O.J. Simpson case. The second trial began after Simpson had been acquitted of murder; the movie suggests that public criticism of that verdict interfered with the Menendezes’ getting a fair shake.No Netflix documentary could offer sufficient information to assess those claims, and this one, which glosses over even mild complexities like the separate juries in the first trial, feels incomplete. (Last week George Gascón, the Los Angeles County district attorney, announced that he was reviewing the case.) To the extent the film has appeal, it is of the tabloid variety. Betty Oldfield, an alternate juror in the first trial, recalls corresponding with the imprisoned Erik Menendez and receiving an oil painting that he had done. Pamela Bozanich, a deputy district attorney who prosecuted the first trial, says she “couldn’t find anyone to say anything nice about Jose Menendez except for his secretary.”The Menendez BrothersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More