Aurelia Butler

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    Why Is Hollywood Obsessed With Architects? ‘The Brutalist’ Gives Us a Hint.

    The trope of the embattled auteur exerting their will is too tempting for filmmakers to ignore.Now that the White House has decreed that all new government structures be made in a classical style, let’s cue up the original film of buildings and hubris — King Vidor’s “The Fountainhead” (1949), based on the 1943 novel by Ayn Rand.In the film’s final shot, the architect Howard Roark (Gary Cooper) stands squinting atop his latest skyscraper, the tallest in the world, with the wind popping his shirt. Inspired in part by Rand’s admiration for Frank Lloyd Wright, Roark has battled decades of herd mentality and bland neoclassical buildings in order to assert his vision of a gleaming, geometric Modernism upon America’s skyline. He has behaved ruthlessly, even sexually assaulting his eventual wife (Patricia Neal) in her mansion on the outskirts of a quarry. As he surveys Manhattan from his new perch, Roark seems a terrible demigod of will.What he doesn’t seem is an actual designer. Like the novel, Vidor’s film (which Rand wrote the screenplay for) spun an influential but misleading myth of architects as solitary artists. In the interwar period, conceptual-minded architects — from Wright in America to the Bauhaus school in Germany — turned the formerly public language of pediments and arches into a canvas for non sequiturs of personal expression. For decades that evolution helped turn the profession into a shorthand for greatness. The Museum of Modern Art began exhibiting models and plans in 1932: Buildings had become sculptures. Paul Simon was able to write a convincing (and spine-tingling) paean to Frank Lloyd Wright without any deep knowledge of his work. Time magazine put Philip Johnson, a Roark incarnate, on a 1979 cover, looking like a Batman villain.Lately that world seems to want reappraisal. A housing crisis, an epidemic of cheap development and luxury glass, red tape and a postpandemic “return to office” movement have called into question the use and feasibility of new construction. A recent play, opera and exhibition on New York’s most influential master builder, Robert Moses, decry the toll bridges and expressways he erected at the expense of the people they were meant to serve. In various outlets, the debate has resurged over the human effects of brutalism, the imposing concrete style that possessed architects from the early 1950s to the late 1970s but alienated more of its users than perhaps any modern style. (See: the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building in D.C., by Marcel Breuer, or Boston’s City Hall.)In a world where building seems difficult at best and oppressive at worst, what’s the point of being an architect at all? That question unites two of last year’s most talked-about movies: Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis.” To be sure, both films peddle the trope of the embattled auteur. In “Megalopolis,” the gloomy genius Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) battles philistines in his quest to renovate New Rome, a thinly-veiled Manhattan. (There is even a skyscraper scene to match Vidor’s.) Corbet’s tortured architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), too, a Jewish-Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust based roughly on Breuer, obsesses over a bunkerlike civic chapel that will brood over 1950s Pennsylvania in reinforced concrete, again recalling Roark, who in Rand’s “The Fountainhead” (the book, but not the film) builds a secular Temple of the Human Spirit for a rich financier. When Tóth’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), finds his blueprints and tells him, “I’m just looking at you,” she’s voicing the old belief: Buildings are extensions of their authors.But these movies flip that formula, as if to explain how we’ve changed our minds about it — one bleakly, the other romantically.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 ‘The Electric State,’ Jolting a Robot to Life

    How the makers of a new Netflix science fiction movie enhanced the look of the cute, round-headed bot at its center.Kid Cosmo’s head is enormous, as robot heads go. The primary nonhuman hero of the film “The Electric State” (on Netflix March 14), Cosmo has a bright yellow globe of a head the size and shape of an exercise ball, propped atop an incongruously spindly frame.Cute? Yes. Mechanically feasible? Not really.Cosmo’s character was inspired by Skip, the similarly bigheaded hero of Simon Stalenhag’s graphic novel. A cult hit when it was first published in 2018, the book “The Electric State” is set in an alternate 1990s universe after a mysterious war has ravaged the California landscape, leaving the husks of enormous drones and robots in its wake.“Simon Stalenhag’s work is what attracted me to this movie to begin with,” said Matthew E. Butler, the film’s visual effects supervisor. “But his designs are often aesthetically cool and engineeringly impossible.”In the film, Cosmo and his young companion, Michelle, played by Millie Bobby Brown, embark on a journey across the American West to find Michelle’s brother. Along the way, they meet up with scores of other robots, many just as improbably designed as Cosmo.Of course, Cosmo doesn’t really need to make mechanical sense in either the graphic novel or the feature film, given the flights of physics fancy regularly found in both mediums. But Anthony and Joe Russo, the film’s directors, wanted to ground their movie in reality, even more so given the story’s 1990s setting (think Orange Julius and MTV News with sci-fi enhancements), and the film’s fanciful robots, which include a midcentury postal carrier (voiced by Jenny Slate) and an urbane Mr. Peanut (Woody Harrelson).Millie Bobby Brown as Michelle, with Cosmo (voiced by Alan Tudyk)NetflixWe 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 Wizard of Vinyl Is in Kansas

    Hydraulic machines whooshed in a sprawling Kansas factory as melted vinyl squeezed through molded stampers like pancake batter, turning out fresh new albums about once a minute. Workers inspected the grooves for imperfections, fed album jackets into a shrink-wrapper and stacked the finished products on tall dollies for shipping.Acoustic Sounds occupies a hodgepodge of squat industrial buildings in Salina, a city of about 50,000 near the geographic center of the 48 contiguous states, where grain elevators and a gigantic frozen pizza plant jut out from the flat plains landscape. Over the last 15 years, this unassuming complex has become a leading manufacturer of the music industry’s most surprising hot format: vinyl LPs.Pacing the floor was Chad Kassem, the company’s founder, who was bit by the audiophile bug as a 22-year-old who’d run into trouble with the law and now, four decades later, is a top player in the booming business of vinyl. Speaking in a slow drawl, but moving quickly on the ground, Kassem, 62, explained his obsession with making the best-sounding records possible — a never-ending pursuit that involves hunting down decades-old master tapes and making minute adjustments to tweak the temperature of an embryonic wad of polyvinyl chloride by a degree or two.Chad Kassem in his studio at Acoustic Sounds, where he keeps two turntables by his desk to check records.David Robert Elliott for The New York TimesThe control room of a recording studio operated by Acoustic Sounds at a former church in downtown Salina that Kassem bought in 1996.David Robert Elliott for The New York Times“What I’m all about,” he said, “is saving the world from bad sound.”Introduced in 1948, vinyl LPs seemed destined for extinction by the early 2000s, if not before, as the music industry went digital. But over the last decade or so, the format has been reborn, embraced by fans as a physical totem in an age of digital ephemera, and by increasing ranks of analog loyalists who swear by its sound. Today, the symbol of the vinyl craze may be a rainbow of collectible LPs by pop stars like Taylor Swift or Billie Eilish, which young fans snap up by the millions (though many may never be played). But on a chilly recent afternoon, Acoustic Sounds’ assembly lines were humming with albums by the likes of John Coltrane, Steely Dan and Lightnin’ Hopkins, in deluxe packages that go for up to $150 apiece.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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    French Cinema Celebrates Its Covid Recovery

    The French movie industry has been celebrating statistics that show an increase in movie attendance.Ronald Chammah, who owns a pair of small cinemas on the Left Bank of Paris, remembers well the grim days in 2022, when he wondered whether the French passion for moviegoing — a pastime that France invented 130 years ago — had been irreparably diminished by pandemic lockdowns.But that was then. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Chammah was sitting in a packed Parisian cafe happily describing the Sunday in late November when he sold out screenings from a roster of Armenian art-house directors — Inna Mkhitaryan, Artavazd Pelechian, Sergueï Paradjanov — known mostly to hard-core film buffs.“That day, we broke the record for our theaters,” Mr. Chammah said with a note of astonishment. “It was full, all day long — sold out, sold out, sold out.”The global movie business had a disappointing 2024, thanks in part to Hollywood strikes. At the Oscars on Sunday, Sean Baker, winner of best director for “Anora,” used his acceptance speech to lament the pandemic-era loss of hundreds of American movie screens. “And we continue to lose them regularly,” Mr. Baker said. “If we don’t reverse this trend, we’ll be losing a vital part of our culture.”But in France, there has been a more celebratory feeling of late, with fresh statistics suggesting that its audiences are leading the way in returning to what are lovingly known as “les salles obscures” — the “dark rooms” of their movie theaters.That celebration was infused with a very French idea about citizens’ moral obligation to support the arts and to do so somewhere other than at home. The Institut Lumière, a film society based in Lyon, declared that last year’s French admissions numbers amounted to a triumph over both the pandemic era and the “invasive digital civilization” of scrolling and swiping.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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    Chris Jasper, Who Helped Revitalize the Isley Brothers, Dies at 73

    A classically trained pianist turned songwriter, he was a cornerstone of the soul group’s sound during its fertile second act in the 1970s.Chris Jasper, a Juilliard-trained keyboardist, singer and songwriter who brought an expansive musical vocabulary to the long-running R&B group the Isley Brothers, helping push them into a new hit-making era in the 1970s and ’80s with singles like “That Lady” and “Fight the Power,” died on Feb. 23. He was 73.His death was announced in a statement on his Facebook account, which noted that he had been diagnosed with cancer in December. The statement did not say where he died.Mr. Jasper, who was also a producer, started his decade-long run as an official member of the Isley Brothers in 1973. He added musical complexity to the long-running R&B group as it took on a richer, funkier style for a new decade.Looking back on the Isley Brothers’ sound in a 2020 interview with Rockin’ Hot Radio, a Delaware-based station, he said, “It’s R&B, of course,” but added that he borrowed “voicings that were used in classical music, and in particular the Romantic period, with composers like Debussy, even 20th-century composers like Gershwin.”Mr. Jasper, far left, with other members of the Isley Brothers in a mid-1970s publicity photo. Seated are Ronald, left, and Rudolph Isley; standing are, from left, Marvin, O’Kelly and Ernie Isley. T-Neck RecordsDuring his tenure, the group lodged more than a dozen singles on the Billboard Hot 100 and more than a dozen albums on the Billboard 200 — six of them in the Top 10, including “The Heat Is On,” which reached No. 1 in 1975.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 Music Took Over This Year’s Oscars

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeIn seemingly every crevice of the 97th Academy Awards, there was music, or a reminder of it. It was a song from a nominated film being performed, like Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande delivering one of their “Wicked” duets; or it was the best score winner Daniel Blumberg, a onetime indie-rock hero now on a second musical act; or it was the musical sections of the host Conan O’Brien’s stand-up bits.And even when there was no music performed, there was music in the air: Timothée Chalamet, who did not take the stage, nominated for the role of Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown”; nods to how music functioned in the night’s big winner, “Anora,” and in the polarizing nominee “Emilia Pérez”; and the appearance of Mick Jagger, gamely making an age joke at his own expense.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how the Oscars incorporated music into this year’s ceremony, in manners both smooth and bumpy; whether music made for movies can ever be cool; and whether O’Brien should be making jokes about Drake and Kendrick Lamar.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More

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    My Favorite Concerts I Saw This Winter

    Hear music from Father John Misty, Mustafa and other artists our critic caught onstage so far this year.Father John MistyEmma McIntyre/Getty Images for AbaDear listeners,Even during this long, often bitterly cold winter, I sometimes made it out of my apartment — please clap — to see live music. To commemorate this monumental human achievement, today I’m offering you a playlist of some of the best artists I’ve caught onstage so far this year.They include a one-woman band with a flair for electronic wizardry (Time Wharp), a young poet turned songwriter with a gorgeously heavy-hearted voice (Mustafa) and a sharp satirist who knows exactly when to get unexpectedly sincere (Father John Misty). I intend for these occasional reports from live shows to become a new recurring Amplifier feature, so look out for more of them in the near future — once the weather turns temperate enough that I am compelled to leave my home even more frequently. Spring: Please hurry!I spent a hundred bucks on gas, baby, let’s just have a good time,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Father John Misty: “She Cleans Up”Last Wednesday, the singer-songwriter Father John Misty played Manhattan’s storied Beacon Theater for the first time. Toward the end of the sold-out show, he told the crowd he wanted to commemorate the occasion with a tribute: “Here’s five minutes from Jerry Seinfeld’s set from his Beacon run last year.” Classic Father John Misty banter — and not true at all, since he immediately launched into another of his own wryly incisive tunes. FJM (whose real name is Joshua Tillman) certainly has a way with a Harry Nilsson-style ballad, as he demonstrated throughout the Beacon set, but one of my favorite moments of the night came when he played this verbose rocker from his latest album, the wide-ranging 2024 release “Mahashmashana.” Elaine Benes dance optional.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube2. Time Wharp: “Lupron”It remains by far the most imaginative, technically impressive live cover I’ve seen so far this year: One late January night at Berlin, a small venue in the East Village, the experimental musician Kaye Loggins, who records as Time Wharp, used loop pedals and a distorted electric guitar to build a completely singular instrumental rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “Coyote.” You will, unfortunately, just have to take my word for it, since that seems to have been a one-off performance. But this luminous, hypnotic track from Time Wharp’s excellent 2022 album “Spiro World” gives a sense of Loggins’s style and her inventive virtuosity.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 ‘Moby-Dick’ Opera at the Met Cuts the Blubber

    Streamlining Melville’s sprawling novel, Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s moody, monochromatic 2010 adaptation has come to the Metropolitan Opera.The opening line of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” is one of the most famous in literature. But Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer, whose moody, monochromatic 2010 adaptation arrived at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday, conspicuously avoid placing those classic three words at the start.It’s an early declaration of independence, the kind that artists have always had to make when turning a well-known novel — especially one as sprawling and shaggy as Melville’s — into singing. Heggie, who also composed the well-traveled opera “Dead Man Walking” (2000), and Scheer, an experienced librettist, have narrowed one of the canon’s most overflowing works to its core plot.For readers who enjoyed “Moby-Dick” but yawned through the rambling digressions about whaling, do I have an opera for you.The compressed adaptation is direct and clear, at least. Some contemporary operas, of which the Met has offered a burst over the last few seasons, lean heavily on confusing devices: complicated flashbacks; characters shadowed by doubles; singers playing metaphorical qualities like Destiny and Loneliness; split-screen-style scenes crossing place and time.“Moby-Dick” wants none of that. It stretches across a year or so, but in a linear way. It never leaves the ship Pequod and its salty surroundings. Its characters are flesh-and-blood people.Yet the opera only rarely takes on flesh-and-blood urgency. While the story is streamlined and straightforward — a ship’s crew struggles with the demanding whims of a vindictive captain — Heggie and Scheer also want to capture Melville’s brooding grandeur, philosophical profundity and portentous language.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