Aurelia Butler

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    With Stickers on Phone Cameras, Clubs Defend the Party Vibe

    It’s standard practice in Berlin, and camera covering is catching on in London, Ibiza and New York as clubs seek to protect an anything-goes atmosphere.On a recent Sunday afternoon, the line outside Berghain, the Berlin techno club, stretched for hours. Hundreds of visitors, sweating in black outfits, lined the dusty path to the door, hoping to be allowed into the former power station, which is known worldwide for its tough door policy, starry D.J. lineups and hedonistic parties lasting nearly 36 hours.The club is also notorious because, despite its reputation as one of the world’s pre-eminent techno venues, its parties aren’t documented online. Clubgoers are warned at the door that photos and videos are banned: Any violation will result in expulsion. To ensure compliance, door staff place stickers on the front and back of patrons’ smartphones, covering their cameras.Although this may seem excessive to visitors, such camera policies have become standard practice in Berlin clubs as a crucial tool for maintaining an anything-goes atmosphere, and clubs elsewhere are increasingly following Berlin’s lead.Respected venues, including Fabric in London and Radion in Amsterdam have all brought in similar sticker rules in recent years. Pikes Ibiza, on the Spanish island famous for its nightlife, announced last month that all visitors must now cover their cameras, so that “what happens at Pikes stays at Pikes.”Téa Abashidze, a founder of Basement, a Brooklyn techno club that has been stickering visitors’ phones since 2019, said in an email that it was part of a “cultural shift” toward “genuine, distraction-free experiences.” The club rigorously enforced the rule, she said, sometimes throwing several rule-breakers out per night.On a recent Sunday night, people lining up to enter R.S.O. were uniformly in support of the club’s stickering policy.Gordon Welters for 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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    Jack DeJohnette, One of Jazz’s Great Drummers, Has a Surprise

    At 82, the musician known for his work with Miles Davis and Keith Jarrett will perform a rare solo concert on his first instrument: the piano.In the early 1960s, Jack DeJohnette, a pianist from Chicago, took a weeklong gig at the Showboat club in Philadelphia with the saxophonist Eddie Harris and played his second instrument: the drums. (A bandmate had left a set at his house.) At one point, Harris, an older player whose career was starting to gain steam, took DeJohnette aside.“Eddie said to me, he said, ‘Man, you play nice piano,’” DeJohnette recalled last month, sitting at the kitchen table of the cabin-style home near Woodstock, N.Y., where he and his wife, Lydia, have lived for around 50 years. “‘But something about your drumming — you’re a natural on drums. And you’ve got to decide which one’s going to be your main instrument.’”To anyone who has followed jazz the past 50-plus years, his eventual choice will be obvious. DeJohnette, now 82, is drumming royalty.Starting in the mid-60s, he fearlessly tackled the era’s new hybrid sounds, anchoring a quartet led by the saxophonist and flutist Charles Lloyd that became a surprise crossover success. He then moved on to the game-changing early fusion outfits of Miles Davis, who wrote in his autobiography that DeJohnette “gave me a certain deep groove that I just loved to play over.” Later, he excelled in a wide variety of contexts, including the state-of-the-art traditionalism of Keith Jarrett’s so-called Standards Trio — which endured for more than three decades — and the expansive explorations of the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, summoning hurtling energy or impressionistic calm as needed.“He is in the pantheon of our greatest drummers,” Lloyd wrote of DeJohnette in an email. “From the first time we played together there was a deep simpatico.” In a phone interview, Jarrett, who also shared time with DeJohnette in Lloyd’s and Davis’s bands, described the drummer’s contributions as “just a natural flow of what needed to be done.”As his reputation on drums grew, DeJohnette never stopped playing piano, a fact he will underscore at a rare solo concert on Sept. 28 at the Woodstock Playhouse, where he will perform on the instrument. As heard on “Return,” a 2016 vinyl-only LP that was his first unaccompanied piano full-length and featured mostly his own compositions, his style is unhurried and luminous, technically sound but primarily focused on finely honed mood-setting.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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    Woman Accuses Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs of Raping Her in Filmed Attack

    In a new lawsuit, the woman said Mr. Combs and his bodyguard drugged and assaulted her in his recording studio in 2001.A woman accused the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs of drugging and raping her at his recording studio in Manhattan in 2001 in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, saying that she learned last year that the assault had been recorded and shown to others.The lawsuit was filed about a week after Mr. Combs, 54, was arrested on charges of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking, to which he has pleaded not guilty. Six other women have accused Mr. Combs of sexual assault in lawsuits in the past year, while three additional lawsuits have accused him of sexual misconduct.The plaintiff in the suit filed on Tuesday, Thalia Graves, said in her complaint that she was 25 at the time of the assault and knew Mr. Combs through her boyfriend at the time, who was working for Bad Boy, Mr. Combs’s record label. The lawsuit said that in or around the summer of 2001, Mr. Combs called her and asked to meet in person. After arriving in an S.U.V. to pick her up, the lawsuit said, he offered her a glass of wine that made her feel “lightheaded, dizzy and physically weak.”When they arrived at the recording studio, the suit said, Ms. Graves lost consciousness and later woke up to find herself naked and her hands tied behind her back with “what felt like a plastic grocery bag.” She said in the court filing that a bodyguard of Mr. Combs’s had lifted her up and slammed her down onto a table, after which she recalled Mr. Combs raping her.“Plaintiff was unable to move, totally overpowered physically, in addition to being drugged and bound,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Manhattan.Representatives for Mr. Combs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Ms. Graves’s suit also names the bodyguard, Joseph Sherman, as a defendant, saying that he assaulted her and forced her to give him oral sex. Mr. Sherman said in an interview that he stopped working with Bad Boy in 1999 and had “nothing to do” with Mr. Combs by 2001.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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    Woman Accuses Sean Combs of Raping Her in Filmed Attack

    In a new lawsuit, the woman said Mr. Combs and his bodyguard drugged and assaulted her in his recording studio in 2001.A woman accused the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs of drugging and raping her at his recording studio in Manhattan in 2001 in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, saying that she learned last year that the assault had been recorded and shown to others.The lawsuit was filed about a week after Mr. Combs, 54, was arrested on charges of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking, to which he has pleaded not guilty. Six other women have accused Mr. Combs of sexual assault in lawsuits in the past year, while three additional lawsuits have accused him of sexual misconduct.The plaintiff in the suit filed on Tuesday, Thalia Graves, said in her complaint that she was 25 at the time of the assault and knew Mr. Combs through her boyfriend at the time, who was working for Bad Boy, Mr. Combs’s record label. The lawsuit said that in or around the summer of 2001, Mr. Combs called her and asked to meet in person. After arriving in an S.U.V. to pick her up, the lawsuit said, he offered her a glass of wine that made her feel “lightheaded, dizzy and physically weak.”When they arrived at the recording studio, the suit said, Ms. Graves lost consciousness and later woke up to find herself naked and her hands tied behind her back with “what felt like a plastic grocery bag.” She said in the court filing that a bodyguard of Mr. Combs’s had lifted her up and slammed her down onto a table, after which she recalled Mr. Combs raping her.“Plaintiff was unable to move, totally overpowered physically, in addition to being drugged and bound,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Manhattan.Representatives for Mr. Combs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Ms. Graves’s suit also names the bodyguard, Joseph Sherman, as a defendant, saying that he assaulted her and forced her to give him oral sex. Mr. Sherman said in an interview that he stopped working with Bad Boy in 1999 and had “nothing to do” with Mr. Combs by 2001.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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    Willie, Waylon and the Boys: the Ultimate Outlaw Country Primer

    Hear songs from Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash and more, inspired by a new book.In 1985, four icons of outlaw country — from left, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash — formed the supergroup the Highwaymen.Mark Humphrey/Associated PressDear listeners,I’m a sucker for anything remotely related to country music’s outlaw movement, and I recently tore through the audiobook of Brian Fairbanks’s tome “Willie, Waylon, and the Boys: How Nashville Outsiders Changed Country Music Forever,” an informative page-turner that inspired today’s playlist.Coined in the 1970s to classify a certain kind of country music rebel, the term “outlaw” can be a little nebulous, and there’s endless debate about which artists were (and weren’t) a part of that club.* I appreciated Fairbanks’s decision, though, to focus primarily on the four artists who would form the country supergroup The Highwaymen: Texas’s braided sage Willie Nelson; the deep-voiced, country-rocking maverick Waylon Jennings; the legendary father figure Johnny Cash; and the Rhodes Scholar-turned-Nashville janitor-turned-songwriting superstar Kris Kristofferson.In telling the stories of these four artists and the ways their careers intersected, Fairbanks also traces the larger arc of outlaw country — from its beginnings as a genuinely countercultural movement that flew in the face of the Nashville establishment, to its transformation into an empty marketing term, and its eventual rebirth in subsequent generations of freethinking country artists.It’s difficult to distill the first wave of outlaw country down to just 10 tracks, but for this playlist, I gave it my best shot. You’ll hear songs from the aforementioned four, as well as tunes from Jessi Colter, Billy Joe Shaver and David Allan Coe. And as for those waves of outlaws who have recently revived the spirit of the Highwaymen? Stay tuned for a playlist dedicated to them in the coming weeks.Almost busted in Laredo, but for reasons that I’d rather not disclose,Lindsay*Merle Haggard, for example, is sometimes grouped in with the outlaw movement. While the self-proclaimed Okie from Muskogee was the only one of the above mentioned artists to do significant jail time, there were other aspects of his career and philosophy that put him at odds with artists like Nelson, Cash and Kristofferson. Regardless of how you label him, Haggard is one of the greats — and worthy of a playlist all his own.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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    Review: A Devastated Drone Pilot Opens the Met Opera’s Season

    Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s bloodless “Grounded,” about a fighter pilot turned dissociating drone operator, stars the mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo.On a fall evening in 1883, the Metropolitan Opera opened its doors for the first time with a performance of “Faust,” the classic tale of a man who sells his soul to Mephistopheles to gain power and pleasure.On Monday, 141 years later, another Met season began with Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s “Grounded,” a bloodless new opera on that same old theme of making an ill-advised deal with the devil.The same old theme, but with 21st-century trappings — a plot about advanced weapons technology; a libretto loaded with words unprintable in this newspaper — that are still unusual in the tradition-bound opera world, particularly on the Met’s most important night of the year. There is an assumption that operas on charged contemporary themes must be risky and important. “Grounded,” which doesn’t risk much, politically or musically, shows this isn’t so.Its protagonist, Jess, is a hotshot fighter pilot who falls in love with a rancher she meets while on leave in Wyoming. When she gets pregnant, she is pulled out of her beloved F-16 cockpit, and out of combat in the Middle East. With a loyal husband and daughter, she is without the sense of freedom and mastery she had soaring through — and dropping bombs from — what she calls “the blue.”A few years later, her old boss, the U.S. military, has a proposal: Would she apply her gifts to operating a missile-bearing Reaper drone, thousands of miles away from her targets? It’s much less glamorous than her former “Top Gun” life, but she’ll be able to go home and hug her child at the end of the day.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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    ‘We Will Dance Again’ Review: Remembering Oct. 7

    In this documentary by Yariv Mozer, Israelis who attended the Nova music festival near the Gaza border describe how they survived the attack last year.“We Will Dance Again” reconstructs the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 from the perspectives of attendees of the Nova music festival. At least 360 people were killed at the event that was near the border with Gaza, according to Israeli authorities. Directed by Yariv Mozer, this documentary opens with an acknowledgment of the fraught subject matter. “The human cost of the Hamas massacre in Israel and the war that followed in Gaza has been catastrophic for both Israelis and Palestinians,” the text says. Citing death tolls from both sides of the conflict, it adds, “This film cannot tell everyone’s story.”That caveat also hints at why assessing “We Will Dance Again” as a movie is so difficult. Impassioned viewers will undoubtedly have their own opinions, and it would be disingenuous to say that a film released in advance of the attack’s anniversary — and in the middle of an active war — could somehow be seen apart from the divisive politics surrounding the region.Through phone videos, interviews with festivalgoers and, eventually, footage attributed to Hamas fighters, “We Will Dance Again” assembles a timeline of how the attack was experienced at the festival, where people had gathered to attend a multiday rave. Some remember spotting rocket fire as the sun rose on the morning of Oct. 7. “Wow, Lali, there’s fireworks!” one interviewee, Liel Shitrit, known as Lali, quotes a friend as saying. “They really went all out this year!” Soon after, over images of streaks in the sky, we hear an off-camera voice speculate that “the drugs are kicking in.”But the interviewees explain how the reality of the situation became clear. As the film’s narrative unfolds, we hear from witnesses like Noa Beer, who recounts a harrowing escape by car and a call to the police, who she says didn’t yet understand the situation. Elinor Gambarian, a single mother, hid inside a refrigerator.Two of the interviewees, Eitan Halley and Ziv Abud, recall a grenade attack on a roadside shelter where they had taken refuge; both commend efforts by Aner Shapira, who was killed, to toss back grenades before they exploded. Halley says he saw Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was taken hostage by Hamas and whose body was later recovered, in the immediate aftermath of the blast.While the fluid editing of such disparate source material is impressive, some of Mozer’s aesthetic choices tend to cheapen the testimonies. (The rave-like electronic scoring as Shitrit describes looking for circling birds to see where gunfire was coming from seems particularly unnecessary.) But if the shock of that day’s violence has faded after a year, “We Will Dance Again” aims to keep it visible, and to memorialize it viscerally.We Will Dance AgainNot rated. In Hebrew, English and Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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    Strange Cellmates in a Brooklyn Jail: Sean Combs and Sam Bankman-Fried

    Mr. Combs is sleeping in the same dormitory-style room as Mr. Bankman-Fried, the crypto mogul who was convicted of fraud.Sean Combs is living in the same unit of a Brooklyn jail as Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto mogul convicted of fraud, sleeping in a dormitory-style room with a group of other defendants assigned to the same section, according to a person familiar with the living arrangements.Mr. Combs has been held in the jail, the Metropolitan Detention Center, for nearly a week, since federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging him with racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking in what the government has called a “decades-long pattern of physical and sexual violence.”He has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and his lawyers argued strenuously for him to be released on bail, proposing to a judge that he put up a $50 million bond and hire a security team to monitor him at all hours. The judge rejected the proposal, saying that he had concerns about Mr. Combs attempting to witness tamper, landing him in a special housing unit that often holds high-profile inmates.A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons said the agency “does not provide information about conditions of confinement, including housing assignments or internal security practices for any particular incarcerated individual.”Mr. Bankman-Fried has been housed in the jail, known as M.D.C., since last year, when his bail was revoked after a judge ruled that he had violated conditions of his release. In the lead-up to his trial, his lawyers complained that he had only intermittent internet access and could not adequately prepare for his case. They said that Mr. Bankman-Fried, a vegan, was subsisting on a diet of water, bread and peanut butter.Mr. Bankman-Fried, who founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, was convicted of masterminding a sweeping fraud in which he siphoned billions of dollars of his customers’ money into venture capital investments, political contributions and other lavish spending. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.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