Aurelia Butler

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    Why Morgan Wallen’s Abrupt ‘S.N.L.’ Exit Is Being Dissected

    The pop-country superstar followed his departure from the stage with a social media post about needing to get “to God’s country.”At the end of every “Saturday Night Live” episode, the host, the musical guest and cast members assemble onstage to say goodbye to the audience and viewers at home. While the music plays and the credits roll, they make small talk, shake hands and say their farewells.There’s not much to think about.Usually.Social media has been abuzz since Morgan Wallen, the pop-country superstar who was the musical guest on Saturday, walked offstage while the end credits rolled, leaving behind the host, Mikey Madison, and the rest of the “S.N.L.” cast. It is not clear whether his sudden exit was an intentional message.Here is what we do know.What happened?After Madison made her closing remarks, she turned to Wallen and hugged him. They shared a few words off mic before he walked offstage into the audience past the camera. Shortly after the show ended, Wallen posted a picture to his Instagram stories of a jet with the caption, “Get me to God’s country.”It was unclear what Wallen, who in recent years was rebuked by music industry’s gatekeepers after a video surfaced of him using a racial slur, meant by the statement or why he left the stage.Representatives for Wallen, who performed two songs from his upcoming album “I’m the Problem,” and “S.N.L.” did not immediately return requests for comment on Monday. (Variety cited anonymous sources to say that the exit was an “oops” moment and that it was the route Wallen had used all week.)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 Kronos Quartet Glow Up: New Players, Newly Lustrous Sound

    The venerable quartet returned to Zankel Hall with a typically eclectic program and a newfound emotional intensity.The Kronos Quartet was at Zankel Hall on Friday with a typically eclectic program that included new works drawing on jazz, psychedelic rock and Nordic folk music. The vibrant performance was not only the ensemble’s return to a space it reliably fills with devoted fans; with the quartet’s ranks refreshed by three brilliant new players, it also felt like a comeback.In recent years, the aging ensemble — founded in 1973 by David Harrington, who continues to lead it as first violin — sometimes seemed to have had slid into an identity crisis. The Kronos brand was still strong: Ambitious commissions kept pushing the boundaries of quartet music, resulting in more than 1,000 new works and arrangements drawing on every imaginable style. In the run-up to its golden jubilee, the ensemble initiated a commissioning project, 50 for the Future, and made the sheet music to all 50 pieces available free online.But the quality of the playing had become inconsistent. And the spoken introductions the players offered at concerts felt perfunctory and tired. When the violinist John Sherba and the violist Hank Dutt, who had been in the lineup since 1978, retired last year, the quartet might have disbanded. Instead, Harrington brought in fresh talent and — judging by the music-making on Friday — strong personalities. The quartet’s middle voices now belong to the violinist Gabriela Díaz and the violist Ayane Kozasa, who join the composer and cellist Paul Wiancko, who came onboard in 2022.During the kaleidoscopic first half of the concert the two women asserted themselves as the quartet’s engines of emotional intensity and a newly lustrous, rich sound. This came through most powerfully in Aleksandra Vrebalov’s incantatory “Gold Came From Space,” which gradually grows in sonic density and expressive intent from tremulous whispers. Time and again, Kozasa’s viola stole the spotlight with its absorbing mixture of lyricism and throaty candor. She channeled Nina Simone’s tough-nosed tenderness in Jacob Garchik’s arrangement of “For All We Know” (composed by J. Fred Coots) and set the tone for Wiancko’s arrangement of Neil Young’s protest song “Ohio.”Two songs by Sun Ra, “Outer Spaceways Incorporated” (wittily arranged by Garchik) and “Kiss Yo’ Ass Goodbye,” in a psychedelic arrangement by Terry Riley and Sara Miyamoto, sparkled with experimental glee. That exploratory zest had always been a hallmark of Kronos. But the heart-on-sleeve directness the group brought to Viet Cuong’s stirring “Next Week’s Trees,” in which the quartet sometimes sounds like a giant harp, felt new.The second half was taken up by a single work, “Elja,” by Benedicte Maurseth and Kristine Tjogersen. Maurseth, who joined the Kronos players for the performance, is a master on the Norwegian hardanger fiddle, a violin-like instrument with four extra resonating strings and a curved neck and carved scroll that evokes the bow of an ancient ship. For the 45-minute piece, which also featured recorded nature sounds, the Kronos players switched to hardanger versions of their own instruments. (The viola and cello fiddles were specially built for Kronos by the Norwegian luthier Ottar Kasa.)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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    Time to Get Over Eurovision? ‘Hell No!’ Says Joost Klein, a Disqualified Contestant Says.

    Joost Klein was thrown out of last year’s contest after being accused of threatening a camerawoman. On a new album, he’s still stuck in that moment.In the run-up to last year’s Eurovision Song Contest final, Joost Klein was amped for victory.Klein, a Dutch pop star, was a favorite to win with “Europapa,” a madcap song in which he raps over a bouncy beat and circling piano riff about a journey through Europe. The track ends in a hyperfast dance break, but the upbeat song also has a melancholy side: Klein wrote it as a tribute to his father, who died when Klein was 12.Then, just hours before the finale, Klein’s chance to honor his father vanished when Eurovision organizers threw the singer out of the contest, saying he had threatened a camerawoman. When Klein learned he was in trouble, he was backstage and dressed up in a comically large blue suit for a rehearsal. He begged to talk to the upset camerawoman, in a desperate bid to change his fate. But his pleas went nowhere: Klein was out.Nearly a year has passed, and the incident doesn’t appear to have hurt Klein’s career. He now has over three million monthly listeners on Spotify, and in February, he released a new album, “Unity,” to rave reviews in the Netherlands. After finishing a string of large European dates, this week he is embarking on his debut U.S. tour, including two shows at Irving Plaza in New York.Still, in a recent interview in London before a show, Klein, 27, was stuck under the cloud of his Eurovision misadventure. “Everyone’s like, ‘Hey, your career grew,’” Klein said. “I don’t care.”“Everyone’s like, ‘Hey, your career grew,’” Klein said. “I don’t care.”Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesThe disqualification still “stings,” he said, and he didn’t expect to get over it soon. Klein said that both his parents died before he was 14, and it took him more than a decade to process their deaths. He feared that shrugging off the Eurovision fiasco could take just as long. His new album features several tracks brooding on the incident.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 Conductor Joana Mallwitz Mixes Intensity With Approachability

    Joana Mallwitz, one of Germany’s fastest rising stars, makes her Metropolitan Opera debut in “The Marriage of Figaro” on Monday.The conductor Joana Mallwitz rehearsing at the Met.The conductor Joana Mallwitz apologized for arriving late for her interview at the Metropolitan Opera House last week, but she had needed to catch her breath after rehearsal. “Conducting is sweaty business,” she said, as she settled into a straight-backed posture on a sofa in the press lounge, her striking hands with long fingers elegantly crossed at the wrists.On Monday, Mallwitz, 39 — the music director of the Konzerthaus Berlin and one of the fastest rising classical stars in her native Germany — makes her Met debut with Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” She has been in close relationship with that opera since her first job, at 19, at Theater Heidelberg, a small house where her duties included “everything that one does as Kapellmeister,” she said: rehearsing singers, playing the continuo part on the harpsichord and, when needed, jumping in at short notice to conduct a performance.“You develop a relationship with such a work,” she said of “Figaro.” “You get to know each other.”“You develop a relationship with such a work,” Mallwitz said of “The Marriage of Figaro.” “You get to know each other.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesAt the end of that afternoon’s rehearsal she had worked with the orchestra on minute details in the overture, finessing dynamic contrasts and highlighting the shock value — “like rock music,” she told the musicians — of the loud outbursts that interrupt the garrulous bubbling fast notes. The key, she said afterward, was to “bring a certain energy into the sound that doesn’t become hard when the playing gets louder.”Working with the Met musicians, she said, was a joy because after fine-tuning a small section, “they are able to feel what my style is and transfer it” to the rest of the piece. “They’re able to pick it up because mentally, too, they are virtuosos,” she said. “It’s incredible what this orchestra is able to deliver in terms of tempo and transparency and diversity of effects. You want to draw on all of that but also achieve a combination of lightness and drama.”Lightness and drama, approachability and uncompromising seriousness in her approach to a score — these are at the heart of Mallwitz’s striking rise to prominence in a profession long dominated by men. In 2014, at 28 she became the music director of Theater Erfurt, the youngest conductor to hold such a position in Europe. In 2018, she took over the leadership of the Nuremberg State Theater, an institution that had also served as a springboard for the conductor Christian Thielemann when he was 23. In her second season there she was voted best conductor of the year by a jury of German critics. A celebrated run of Mozart’s “Cosí Fan Tutte” at Salzburg in 2020 catapulted her to international attention.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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    Linda Williams, Who Introduced Pornography to Academia, Dies at 78

    One of the first to write seriously about a fraught subject, she also played a major role in developing the field of film studies and feminist film theory.Linda Williams, a trailblazing scholar whose research was foundational to the field of film studies and to feminist film theory, and who wrote extensively about pornography, died on March 12 at her home in Lafayette, in Northern California. She was 78.Her husband, Paul Fitzgerald, said the cause was complications of a hemorrhagic stroke she had five years ago.“Linda was there before there was any such thing as feminist film studies,” B. Ruby Rich, the former editor in chief of the journal Film Quarterly, said in an interview. “She played a pivotal role in its development, but she was not orthodox.”Ms. Rich continued: “She did not stay in her lane at a time when people were really guarding boundaries and really policing what others were doing. She was fearless about following her inquiries wherever they would lead. In any branch of academics or scholarship, that is really, really unusual.”A longtime professor of film and media at the University of California, Berkeley, Ms. Williams wrote and edited articles and books on subjects as diverse as surrealism, spectatorship and the television series “The Wire.”She was keenly interested in how various film genres affected the body — for example, the way horror movies could induce shivers — and in her 2002 book, “Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White From Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson,” she explored how the tropes of melodrama figured in widening and narrowing America’s racial divide.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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    Johnny Mathis Is Retiring From Touring After Almost 70 Years of Crooning

    Mr. Mathis, 89, a pioneer of romantic ballads, is leaving the stage because of his age and memory problems, his website said.Johnny Mathis, a pop music singer and one of the best-selling recording artists of the 20th century, said this week that he would perform only four more live concerts before retiring from touring after nearly 70 years.Known for his “velvet voice” on romantic ballads like “It’s Not for Me to Say” and “Wonderful! Wonderful!” Mr. Mathis has been singing standards and soft rock since his teenage years, but he started touring professionally after his debut album was released in 1956.Mr. Mathis, 89, will pick up the microphone for shows in April and May, but his concerts scheduled for the summer and fall have been canceled.“It’s with sincere regret that due to Mr. Mathis’s age and memory issues which have accelerated, we are announcing his retirement from touring and live concerts,” a statement posted on his website said.Mr. Mathis’s final concert is scheduled for May 18 at the Bergen Performing Arts Center in Englewood, N.J. The other concerts are April 10 in Shippensburg, Pa.; April 26 in Shipshewana, Ind.; and May 10 in Santa Rosa, Calif.Some tickets remain available for his final concerts, his website noted, and refunds will be issued for the ones that were canceled.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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    Sean Kingston and His Mother Are Convicted in $1 Million Fraud Scheme

    Mr. Kingston, who is best known for his 2007 hit single “Beautiful Girls,” and his mother were charged with defrauding sellers of high-end vehicles, jewelry and other goods, prosecutors said.A jury in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., convicted the rapper Sean Kingston and his mother on Friday in a scheme involving more than $1 million worth of fraud, according to prosecutors.Mr. Kingston, 35, whose real name is Kisean Anderson, and his mother, Janice Turner, 62, both of Southwest Ranches, Fla., had been charged with five counts of wire fraud.They essentially took possession of high-end vehicles, jewelry and other goods by pretending to have paid for them through the use of fraudulent documents, according to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida.Each faces a maximum of 20 years in prison on each count, prosecutors said. The defendants are scheduled to be sentenced in July.Ms. Turner, who testified during the trial, was taken into federal custody on Friday. Her lawyer, Humberto Dominguez, said on Saturday morning that they will appeal the verdict.Mr. Kingston, who did not testify, was allowed to post bond of a home valued at $500,000 and $200,000 in cash, but will remain in home detention with electronic monitoring. His lawyer, Zeljka Bozanic, said on Saturday that she was thankful that Mr. Kingston was allowed to remain out on bond but added that they will also file an appeal.As a 17-year-old, Mr. Kingston became known for his debut single, “Beautiful Girls,” which used a sample from Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.” It was ranked at No. 1 for four weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 2007.“He spent his childhood in Jamaica, which gave him his stage name and his command of patois,” the critic Kelefa Sanneh wrote in The New York Times in 2007, “but his version of thug love (‘Girl, I know it’s rough, but come with me/We can take a trip to the ’hood’) makes it sound as if he’s trying too hard, or not hard enough.”Mr. Kingston’s home in Southwest Ranches, Fla., west of Fort Lauderdale.Amy Beth Bennett/The South Florida Sun Sentinel, via Associated PressAccording to prosecutors, Mr. Kingston and Ms. Turner “unjustly enriched themselves” by falsely claiming that they had executed bank wire or other monetary transfers as payment for vehicles, jewelry and other high-end items when no such transfers had taken place.It added up to a property haul of more than $1 million, prosecutors said.Mr. Kingston and Ms. Turner were accused of an “organized scheme to defraud” establishments, including a car dealership and a jeweler, of more than $50,000, according to arrest warrants for them.Mr. Kingston and Ms. Turner were also accused of stealing a Cadillac Escalade from the dealership and $480,000 in jewelry from an individual, according to the warrants.Ms. Turner pleaded guilty in 2006 to charges of bank fraud and filing fraudulent loan applications and was sentenced to 16 months in prison, according to court records. She was released in March 2007. More

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    How to Live in the Mall

    Want your living space a stone’s throw from the Aéropostale and Hot Topic? A new documentary, “Secret Mall Apartment,” will show you the way.When the artist Michael Townsend first told the documentarian Jeremy Workman about the time he and his friends lived in a secret apartment tucked inside the Providence Place Mall, Workman thought he was being punked. Then Townsend pulled out a cracked iPad to show Workman some grainy video. “I just was dumbfounded and blown away,” Workman said in a video interview alongside Townsend. “Then I was, like, instantly, ‘I got to figure out how I could convince him to let me make a documentary on this.’”The result is the new film “Secret Mall Apartment,” which recounts how, between 2003 and 2007, eight artists created a homey apartment in an abandoned space in a shopping center. Using footage the residents had filmed on a tiny camera, Workman places the stunt in the context of the rapid gentrification happening at the top of the 21st century while at the same time relying on some heist-movie conventions. So how did they do it? Here are six steps.1. Find an abandoned space.The Providence Place Mall, in Rhode Island, home to an architectural anomaly, an unused space that caught the eye of an artist while construction was going on.Jeremy WorkmanWhen the mall was being built, Townsend noticed what he called a “nowhere space,” an “anomaly in the architecture” that served no purpose. So when Townsend and his friends decided to camp out at the mall after seeing an ad teasing that the place was so well stocked that it had everything a person needed to live, he sought out that corner as a place to sleep. How did Townsend clock it in the first place? He credited that to a fixation with the notion of space that arose as the mall was going up, part of the gentrification of his Providence, R.I., neighborhood that also resulted in the artists’ space where he lived being demolished.“It’s not just losing the home, it’s also losing historical vertebrae of the neighborhood,” Townsend said. As for the mall, “You couldn’t help but internalize that there was a lot of dead space in that structure,” he said. And thus, the notion of an apartment was born.2. Get a couch.“If you can pick one thing you’re going to move into a space, I’d pick a couch over a mattress, any day,” Michael Townsend said of the apartment where, from left, Colin Bliss and Greta Scheing are relaxing.Michael TownsendWe 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