Aurelia Butler

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    Kris Kristofferson’s Stories Were Wonderfully Larger Than Life

    The singer, songwriter and actor, who died on Saturday at 88, found his way into situations and tales that underscored his role as a conscience for country music.Kris Kristofferson was a man to whom myth attached easily.Did he once take control of a National Guard helicopter so he could land it at Johnny Cash’s house to present him with some songs to consider recording? (He sure did, though Johnny apparently wasn’t home.) Did he not know that Janis Joplin, whom he’d been dating, had recorded his song “Me and Bobby McGee” just a few days before her death? (He didn’t; the track, released posthumously, became her lone No. 1 hit.) Did he once confront Toby Keith, country music’s jingoist in chief, about his performative bluster and ask him, “Have you ever taken another man’s life and then cashed the check your country gave you for doing it? No, you have not.” (Depends whose account you believe.)Beginning in the mid-1960s, when he arrived in Nashville as an aspiring songwriter, Kristofferson, who died Saturday at 88, evolved into something of a communal conscience for the town, and the country music business, while also helping to usher it into conversation with the rest of popular music.He was best known as a songwriter, with compositions that bridged folky earthiness with a jolt of literary flair. When sung by some of the biggest country stars of the era — Cash, Ray Price, Roger Miller, Ray Stevens, Bobby Bare — they inexorably moved the genre away from polished and poised singers in sports coats toward thornier territory closer to the folk revival of the 1960s.The protagonists of Kristofferson’s best songs were downtrodden victims of their own poor decisions — “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” the best-known version of which was sung by Cash, finds the singer struggling to find “my cleanest dirty shirt” the morning after a Saturday night bender. “Once More With Feeling,” written with Shel Silverstein and sung by Jerry Lee Lewis, tells the story of a relationship that’s run out of gas through the pleas of a man desperate to be deceived, even for a moment: “Darling, make believe you’re making me/Believe each word you say.”“Me and Bobby McGee” — initially recorded by Miller, but rendered indelible by Joplin — was the tale of two drifters who drift away from each other, anchored in the oft-repeated secular proverb, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”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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    ‘Rust’ Armorer Is Denied New Trial After Dismissal of Alec Baldwin’s Case

    The armorer’s lawyers failed to convince the judge that the same evidence dispute that led her to toss the actor’s manslaughter charge had deprived their client of a fair trial.A judge in New Mexico declined on Monday to grant a new trial to the armorer in the fatal “Rust” shooting, who had accused the prosecution of suppressing evidence.The armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, is serving an 18-month prison sentence and had asked to be retried on an involuntary manslaughter charge in New Mexico after the same judge dismissed the case against Alec Baldwin during his trial in July. Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer found then that the state had withheld evidence that could have shed light on how live rounds got onto the film set.On the afternoon of Oct. 21, 2021, Mr. Baldwin was positioning the old-fashioned revolver for a tight camera framing when the weapon discharged, killing the movie’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and wounding its director. A jury convicted Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, who loaded the gun that day, of manslaughter in March after prosecutors argued that she was reckless in overseeing guns and ammunitions on the set.Judge Marlowe Sommer ruled on Monday that the suppressed evidence that felled the Baldwin case — a set of ammunition that was delivered to law enforcement on the day of the armorer’s conviction — did not warrant dismissal of Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s trial because her lawyer was aware of and had access to the evidence.The judge wrote that the ammunition “does not qualify, as a matter of law, as material evidence because it was available to defendant in advance of and during trial.”The ruling was a moment of relief for the prosecution after its case against Mr. Baldwin, 66, collapsed under an accusation that state investigators had intentionally withheld the ammunition from them by putting it under a new case number. The accusation led to an extraordinary hearing in which the judge examined the ammunition in the courtroom; the lead special prosecutor, Kari T. Morrissey, called herself as a witness; and the other prosecutor on her team resigned.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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    Billie Eilish Brings a Master Class in Intimacy to the Arena Stage

    Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour opened in Canada on Sunday night, showcasing the 22-year-old pop star’s gift for dynamics, dramatics and audience engagement.A few songs into the first night of Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour at the Videotron Center in Quebec City, Billie Eilish challenged the sold-out crowd of 18,000 to play the quiet game. “It’s literally the only time in the entire show I’m going to say this,” assured the superstar, 22, who sat cross-legged on the floor at center stage, “because I don’t want silence, ever.”But there was a practical reason for the request: Eilish was about to record looped layers of her voice, so she could harmonize with herself while singing her hushed early hit “When the Party’s Over.” “I love doing my own vocal production,” she told the obliging audience, “and I thought I would bring that to the stage.”“I love you!” cried an ecstatic fan, who was promptly shushed by the entire arena.As Eilish built a lush bed of backing oohs and ahhs layer by layer, this hypnotic moment served a few purposes. It was a casual way to prove that she was singing live, and a clever means of bringing the intimacy of the bedroom recording studio — a fabled setting in the mythology of Eilish and her brother, the producer Finneas — to a massive, buzzing arena.After ascending from a luminescent cube in the center of the venue, Eilish spent most of the show bopping around a rectangular stage on the center of the floor. Julia Spicer for The New York TimesBut it was also a canny way to replicate a quintessential element of Eilish’s recordings — a whispery, ASMR-inducing hush — that can be difficult to evoke on an arena stage, where impassioned fans obscure the nuances of her voice by screaming every lyric back to her.Both ends of the dynamic spectrum are important to Eilish’s sound, a fact she underscores in the title of her adventurous third album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft.” In this accompanying live show, she modulated them expertly, suddenly transforming acoustic numbers into arena-rocking power ballads and playing the adoring audience like a well-tuned instrument.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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    Kris Kristofferson: 12 Essential Songs

    The country singer and songwriter, who died on Saturday at 88, tucked enduring aphorisms into tales about facing up to loss.Kris Kristofferson, who was 88 when he died on Saturday, embedded enduring aphorisms into his songs. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” he observed in “Me and Bobby McGee.” In “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” he wrote, “Yesterday is dead and gone/And tomorrow’s out of sight.” And in “For the Good Times,” he urged, “There is no need to watch the bridges that we’re burning.”Those are stoic lines, delivered matter-of-factly, often tucked into tales about facing up to some kind of loss: of a lover, a friend, a hope, a chance, fleeting time. Kristofferson’s characters are often isolated, luckless, drunk or high, but they’re still seeking redemption or at least trying to move on — like Casey, in “Casey’s Last Ride,” who was “seeing his reflection in the lives of all the lonely men/who reach for anything they can to keep from going home.”Kristofferson established himself as a songwriter as the 1970s began, and his early songs were his most lasting ones. His willingness to sing unpretty stories and his homey melodies were foundations for the outlaw country movement of the 1970s. Bob Dylan has said, “You can look at Nashville pre-Kris and post-Kris, because he changed everything.”After a detour through 1970s movie stardom, Kristofferson shared the outlaw movement’s victory lap, in the 1980s, when he joined Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in the Highwaymen. He went on to write politically charged songs and the homilies of an elder. His voice was serviceable but not striking in his early years, and it grew much gruffer through the decades. But it was always forthright enough to put across the unvarnished substance of his music.Here, in chronological order, are 12 of Kristofferson’s essential songs. Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.‘Me and Bobby McGee’ (1970)Kristofferson’s own version of this tale of hitchhiking, harmonica-playing lovers, from his debut album, is far more wistful and less cathartic than Janis Joplin’s No. 1 hit version, released in 1971 after her death. Where she turned its outro of “la-da-das” into an ecstatic rave-up, Kristofferson lets them trail off, like a memory receding into the distance.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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    Oasis Adds North American Shows to Reunion Tour

    Liam and Noel Gallagher’s band will stop in three American cities plus Toronto and Mexico City in August and September 2025.In August, when Oasis revealed a slew of reunion dates in Britain and Ireland starting next summer, the group said that plans were still underway for shows in “other continents outside of Europe.” That led to rampant speculation on social media — including purportedly leaked itineraries — about where the Britpop stars might go.Turns out that speculation was pretty close to reality. But not 100 percent right.The band announced on Monday that its world tour would include stops in Toronto, Mexico City, Chicago, Los Angeles and East Rutherford, N.J., outside New York — all of which figured prominently in online guessing, though dates and venues were not all as expected. The Oasis Live ’25 tour, led by Liam and Noel Gallagher, will be the famously combative band’s first since its implosion 15 years ago.Over the weekend, the band teased the announcement with billboards in Times Square and elsewhere pointing to 8 a.m. Eastern time and saying, “Be careful what you wish for.”“America,” the band said in a statement. “Oasis is coming. You have one last chance to prove that you loved us all along.”Fans had speculated about a wider world tour, with presumed dates in Australia and Asia, but none were announced on Monday.Even before the Gallagher brothers confirmed that Oasis would be getting back together, speculation about the Oasis reunion became front-page news in Britain, where the Gallaghers’ fisticuffs and insult trading has been hot copy for decades. After a month, they still have not confirmed any other members of the reunion band.The 19 shows announced so far in Britain and Ireland — including seven nights at Wembley Stadium in London — became immediate sellouts, and led to complaints about prices for some tickets spiking while fans were still in the queue to purchase them. A government agency, the Competition and Markets Authority, said it was opening an investigation into Ticketmaster’s handling of the sale, “including how so-called ‘dynamic pricing’ may have been used.”Registration for tickets to the North American shows was opened on the Oasis website, and the ticket sales will begin on Friday via Ticketmaster. More

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    Kris Kristofferson, Country Singer, Songwriter and Actor, Dies at 88

    Kris Kristofferson, the singer and songwriter whose literary yet plain-spoken compositions infused country music with rarely heard candor and depth, and who later had a successful second career in movies, died at his home on Maui, Hawaii, on Saturday. He was 88.His death was announced by Ebie McFarland, a spokeswoman, who did not give a cause.Hundreds of artists have recorded Mr. Kristofferson’s songs — among them, Al Green, the Grateful Dead, Michael Bublé and Gladys Knight and the Pips.Mr. Kristofferson’s breakthrough as a songwriter came with “For the Good Times,” a bittersweet ballad that topped the country chart and reached the Top 40 on the pop chart for Ray Price in 1970. His “Sunday Morning Coming Down” became a No. 1 country hit for his friend and mentor Johnny Cash later that year.Mr. Cash memorably intoned the song’s indelible opening couplet:Well, I woke up Sunday morningWith no way to hold my head that didn’t hurtAnd the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t badSo I had one more for dessert.Expressing more than just the malaise of someone suffering from a hangover, “Sunday Morning Coming Down” gives voice to feelings of spiritual abandonment that border on the absolute. “Nothing short of dying” is the way the chorus describes the desolation that the song’s protagonist is experiencing.Steeped in a neo-Romantic sensibility that owed as much to John Keats as to the Beat Generation and Bob Dylan, Mr. Kristofferson’s work explored themes of freedom and commitment, alienation and desire, darkness and light.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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    ‘Patrice: The Movie’ Review: At a Crossroads

    The emotional core of this crowd-pleasing documentary concerns a couple who cannot marry without jeopardizing their disability benefits.The title of “Patrice: The Movie” is a little misleading. Although this documentary, directed by Ted Passon, certainly offers a biographical portrait of Patrice Jetter, a school crossing guard, disability rights advocate and Special Olympics athlete from New Jersey, its emotional core concerns her relationship with Garry Wickham. Jetter and Wickham want to marry, but doing so — or even living together — could jeopardize their disability benefits.Their friend Elizabeth Dicker summarizes how this situation is not just cruel, but also apparently illogical: “If two people are having Medicaid benefits, and then those two people get married and then they just don’t lose their benefits, how is the government making or losing any money?” (“Patrice: The Movie” doesn’t delve into the policy specifics, but critics have argued that the limitations on Supplemental Security Income are badly out of date.)It is easy to root for Jetter and Wickham as a couple, and to see Jetter in particular as a joyous creative force. She speaks how she found an outlet in drawing and how she has spent 20 years designing a model train world patterned after Palisades Amusement Park. In the film’s fanciful, Wes Anderson-ian flashbacks, the adult Patrice plays herself opposite child actors, against production design based on her drawings.And while Jetter and Wickham’s political fight is not resolved as of the end of the movie, the thread in which Jetter works to raise money for the new van she needs to commute affordably to her job has a crowd-pleasing finish.Patrice: The MovieNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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    Paris Opera: A Veteran Falstaff Looks Back, and Ahead

    Ambrogio Maestri has sung the title role in Verdi’s comedy hundreds of times, most recently for the Paris Opera. He’s also making room for a Puccini tragedy.For Ambrogio Maestri, a bass-baritone, the title role of Verdi’s opera “Falstaff” has become nothing less than a second skin.“On the days when I’m happy or sad, he takes on a different shape,” he said between rehearsals for the Paris Opera.The Italian singer has performed the role about 400 times and in more than 20 different productions, he said. Falstaff, a gluttonous knight, is humiliated by the married women he courts, including Alice Ford, the ringleader of a plot to have him thrown into the Thames River. His latest performances have been at the Opéra Bastille in Paris, reprising Dominique Pitoiset’s classic 1999 staging.He will return to “Falstaff” at La Scala in Milan from Jan. 16 to Feb. 7 for the Giorgio Strehler production, in which he first appeared as the character in 2001.But Maestri, 54, does not live only for comedy. He has also plunged into the psyche of Scarpia, the sinister police chief in Puccini’s “Tosca,” which he will take on in mid-October at the Hamburg State Opera in Germany and again in February at the Vienna State Opera.He discussed his latest turn as Falstaff, and more, in a recent interview. The following conversation has been translated from Italian, edited and condensed.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