Aurelia Butler

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    The Brooklyn Academy of Music Is Fighting to Regain its Mojo

    It is the sort of buzzy production that was once a staple of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” with its Oscar-nominated lead man, Paul Mescal, has people clamoring for tickets to BAM’s production this month.The excitement recalls a period when the performing arts center consistently drew crowds to see imports like the Royal Shakespeare Company or cutting-edge work by directors like Peter Brook, composers like Philip Glass or choreographers like Pina Bausch and Martha Graham.Over the past decade, though, critics say the academy’s pioneering triumphs have been scarcer, the schedule thinner and the productions more modest.BAM’s financial condition, while improving, is still fragile. In the five years ending in June 2024, the staff declined by more than a third, the endowment lost ground and its nearly $52 million operating budget is still smaller than it was 10 years ago.“Their inability to drive revenues and manage cost escalation makes it harder to pursue their artistic mission,” Declan Webb, a consultant to nonprofit arts organizations, said in a recent interview. “You have to do less and you’re much more risk-averse and that is not a recipe for artistic growth.”In 2016, Mikhail Baryshnikov appeared in “Letter to a Man,” based on the diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky, the dancer, and directed by Robert Wilson.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe 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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    Mayhem Has the Wildest Story in Black Metal. Somehow, It’s Turning 40.

    A few weeks before the pioneering Norwegian black metal band Mayhem set off for a North American tour celebrating its 40th anniversary, the frontman Attila Csihar sounded contemplative.“The band has, of course, a long history, and lots of things happened,” he said in a video chat from his home in Budapest last October, wearing a necklace of skulls from a Kali temple in India.As if to prove the point, Csihar, 53, soon underwent emergency surgery, and the tour was canceled. (“Death is the ultimate glorious crown of life, now he understands it even more,” he wrote in a Facebook post.)Now Mayhem is back on the road (with a New York stop on Monday) to finally deliver its anniversary blowout, this time as the headliner of the Decibel Magazine Tour.Still, this was all a mere hiccup compared to the group’s extraordinary travails. For fans of extreme music, Mayhem released black metal’s defining album, “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas,” in 1994. Everybody else might just vaguely remember lurid early ’90s tabloid headlines.The band, created by a bunch of teenagers in 1984, was starting to make wavelets in its tiny musical niche when its first singer, Per Ohlin (nom de metal: Dead), died by suicide in 1991, at age 22. The first person to turn up at the scene was the guitarist Oystein Aarseth, a.k.a. Euronymous, who posed Dead’s body to snap more dramatic photos. Two years later, Euronymous was murdered by a one-time bandmate, Varg Vikernes. He was 25.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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    Japanese Breakfast’s Shimmering Sadness, and 8 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Marianne Faithfull, the Waterboys featuring Fiona Apple, Debby Friday and more.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Japanese Breakfast, ‘Here Is Someone’Plucked string tones from all directions create a magical, shimmering cascade around Michelle Zauner’s voice in “Here Is Someone” from the new album by Japanese Breakfast, “For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women).” The lyrics hint at tensions and anxieties, but the track radiates anticipation: “Life is sad, but here is someone,” Zauner concludes. Jon ParelesMarianne Faithfull, ‘Burning Moonlight’Marianne Faithfull, who died in January at 78, kept recording almost to the end. She brought every bit of her scratchy, ravaged, tenacious voice to “Burning Moonlight,” a song she co-wrote that holds one of her last manifestoes: “Burning moonlight to survive / Walking in fire is my life.” Acoustic guitars and tambourine connect the music to the 1960s, when she got her start; her singing holds all the decades of experience that followed. Jon ParelesThe Waterboys featuring Fiona Apple, ‘Letter From an Unknown Girlfriend’“Letter From an Unknown Girlfriend” is from the Waterboys album due April 4, “Life, Death and Dennis Hopper,” and was written by Mike Scott. But it is sung and played by Fiona Apple, alone at the piano, delivering a remembrance of an abusive boyfriend: “I used to say no man would ever strike me,” it begins, “And no man ever did ’til I met you.” She admits to the charm of the “satyr running wild in you,” but her voice rises to a bitter, primal rasp as she recalls the worst. It’s a stark, harrowing performance.Jon ParelesTamino featuring Mitski, ‘Sanctuary’Diffidence turns into resolve in the course of “Sanctuary,” a waltzing duet from “Every Dawn’s a Mountain,” the new album by the Belgian songwriter Tamino-Amir Moharam Fouad. In separate verses, Tamino and Mitski sound fragile, contemplating uncertainty and loss; “I reside in the ruins of the sanctuary,” Mitski sings. But when they connect — asking “Is it late where you are?” — and harmonize, an orchestra rises behind them to offer hope. Jon ParelesMorgan Wallen, ‘I’m a Little Crazy’“I’m a little crazy, but the world’s insane,” the disturbed narrator of Morgan Wallen’s new single contends. His character is a drug dealer who keeps a loaded gun nearby. He’s sustaining himself “on antidepressants and lukewarm beers” and yelling at his TV, “but the news don’t change.” Over steadfast acoustic guitar picking and lightly brushed drums, Wallen sings with chilling, sociopathic calm. Jon ParelesWe 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 Power of ‘Two’: An Anniversary Playlist

    Celebrate two years of this newsletter with songs by Dolly Parton, Stacey Q, Mitski and more.Dolly PartonCharlie Riedel/Associated PressDear listeners,Surprise: There’s a birthday party in your inbox! Today we’re celebrating two years of The Amplifier, with — what else? — a themed playlist.On March 21, 2023, I sent out the first installment of this newsletter, introducing myself with 11 songs that explain my musical perspective and asking readers to submit some of their own favorite tracks. In the time since, I’ve sent out nearly 200 playlists, shared thousands of songs and received countless submissions when I’ve asked Amplifier readers to generate their own soundtracks. The community we’ve created together is vibrant and reciprocal: I may have discovered as much new music through your recommendations as you have through mine.Today’s playlist honors the Amplifier’s second birthday with eight tracks that feature the word “two” in the title. In keeping with The New York Times style guide, I stuck with songs that spell out the word “two,” so my apologies to Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” and Beyoncé’s “II Hands II Heaven,” among plenty of other greats that didn’t make the cut. But you will hear classics from the Beatles, Dolly Parton and Bruce Springsteen, as well as more recent and lesser-known tracks from indie singer-songwriters like Mitski and Flock of Dimes.This anniversary is also ushering in a new chapter for this newsletter. Starting next week, I’ll be taking a few months off to finish the manuscript of a book I’ve been working on. I’ll miss making these playlist and corresponding with you all, but I’m incredibly excited to get one step closer to a lifelong goal of publishing my first book. Once I’m back, I’ll update you on my progress — and probably share my writing playlist with you, too.While I’m out, I have a wonderful lineup of guest writers who will be sending out their own newsletters and playlists each Tuesday, and I’m thrilled for you to see (and hear) what they have in store.Thanks to each and every one of you who has read this newsletter, sampled our playlists and reached out to give us feedback. As always, happy listening.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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    Inside the Controversy Surrounding Disney’s ‘Snow White’ Remake

    Disney knew that remaking “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” as a live-action musical would be treacherous.But the studio was feeling cocky.It was 2019, and Disney was minting money at the box office by “reimagining” animated classics like “Aladdin,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Jungle Book” as movies with real actors. The remakes also made bedrock characters like Cinderella newly relevant. Heroines defined by ideas from another era — be pretty, and things might work out! — were empowered. Casting emphasized diversity.Why not tackle Snow White?Over the decades, Disney had tried to modernize her story — to make her more than a damsel in distress, one prized as “the fairest of them all” because of her “white as snow” skin. Twice, starting in the early 2000s, screenwriters had been unable to crack it, at least not to the satisfaction of an image-conscious Disney.“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” which premiered in 1937, posed other remake challenges, including how to sensitively handle Happy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Dopey, Bashful, Grumpy and Doc. (One stalled Disney reboot had reimagined the dwarfs as kung fu fighters in China.)Still, Disney executives were determined to figure it out. They had some new ideas. More important, the remake gravy train needed to keep running.“It’s going to be amazing, another big win,” Bob Chapek, then Disney’s chief executive, said of a live-action “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” at a 2022 fan convention.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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    In Wes Anderson’s World, It’s All About the Details

    When Wes Anderson was just starting out and wanted to reshoot some scenes for his 1996 debut “Bottle Rocket,” the rookie director got a shock. Columbia Pictures had sent all the movie’s props off to a store, which had then sold them for next to nothing.So when he made his next movie, “Rushmore” (1998), Anderson decided the same thing would never happen again. He put everything into an S.U.V. when the shoot was over, then drove the hoard away to look after it himself.That decision ended up helping not just Anderson himself. Over the past two-and-a-half years, curators at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the Design Museum in London trawled Anderson’s storage facility in Kent, England — which contains thousands of items from his movies — to compile a museum retrospective of the director’s work.The show opened at the Cinémathèque Française this week, where it runs though July 27. It will transfer, expanded, to the Design Museum in the fall.Max Fischer’s Academy uniform from “Rushmore.”The fur coat worn by Margot Tenenbaum in “The Royal Tenenbaums.”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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    How ‘Severance’ Uses Old Tricks to Make Its Office Hell

    Contains spoilers about past episodes but not the Season 2 finale.In “Severance,” the Apple TV+ series about a shadowy company where some employees have their consciousness split into two parts, with the “innie” doing all the work and the “outie” remembering none of it, the office is sparse and lifeless.The show reinforces that theme with its cinematography and production design. Here are some of the ways “Severance” invokes and inverts classic film tricks to create its corporate hell.IsolationRepetition Removes IndividualityFrom the earliest days of moving images, filmmakers have used the rigid geometry of desks and cubicles and dense repetition to create images of people together, yet isolated, trapped and stripped of identity by corporate bosses.Films like “The Apartment,” from 1960 (below, top left), and even Pixar’s 2004 animated movie “The Incredibles” (top right) use these repetitive shots to suggest a corporate mass that takes away individual identities to instead create “company men,” said Jill Levinson, a professor at Babson College and the author of “The American Success Myth on Film.”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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    Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Environmental Music Is Enchanting a New Generation

    The Japanese musician, who wasn’t widely known before his death in 2003, has become a beacon for listeners on YouTube and beyond.When listeners discover the Japanese musician and visual artist Hiroshi Yoshimura for the first time, the experience is often a revelation. “I noticed how it activated everything,” said Dustin Wong, the experimental guitarist. “It was extremely generous.”Patrick Shiroishi, the inventive Los Angeles-based instrumentalist, called Yoshimura a “god-level composer and musician who sits with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Christian Vander and John Coltrane and Bela Bartok for me. They are so themselves.”Yoshimura released most of his gentle and reflective albums of kankyō ongaku, or environmental music, during the 1980s and ’90s. A descendant of Erik Satie’s furniture music and a cousin to Brian Eno’s ambient explorations, Yoshimura’s work put more of an emphasis on melody and warmth than its Western contemporaries. His compositions are often grounded by a soothing, vibrating hum underscoring largely electronic notes that fall like a pleasant weekend rainstorm. The spaces he created in his minimal, synthesizer-laden compositions allowed sounds from the outside world to exist harmoniously within the pieces. It’s music that doesn’t demand too much of your attention, but rewards close listening.During his lifetime, Yoshimura remained a relatively obscure figure to those outside Japan. In recent years, his global audience has grown significantly, thanks in part to a series of reissues that have brought his music to streaming platforms for the first time. The latest, “Flora,” arrived on Thursday, the first day of spring, in a fitting tribute to how devotion to Yoshimura’s music and philosophy continues to bloom.As contemporary listeners seek relaxing or meditative sounds, YouTube’s algorithm has turned unofficial uploads of Yoshimura albums like “Wet Land” and “Green” into favorites.Nuvola Yoko YoshimuraMany of Yoshimura’s recordings were created to be played at specific sites, like the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, or inside a range of prefabricated homes. “Flora” is a bit of mystery within his catalog. It was released only on CD in 2006, three years after his death at 63, from skin cancer. The scant information Yoshimura left behind about it included only its title, the song names and that it was from 1987 — the year after he released two of his most beloved collections, “Surround” and “Green.”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