Aurelia Butler

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    Brian Wilson Wrote the California Dream, but He Didn’t Live It

    An artist nearly synonymous with Los Angeles made his name crafting songs playing up his home state’s beachy vibes. His inner life, however, was anything but sunny.Even though Brian Wilson grew up only five miles from the Pacific Ocean, he rarely went to the beach. He’d felt scared by the size of the ocean on his first visit. Being light-skinned, he also feared sunburns. He tried surfing, but got hit on the head by his board and decided once was enough.And yet, in songs like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “California Girls” and “Good Vibrations,” Wilson did as much as anyone to depict Los Angeles and California as a land of bikinis and warm, honey-colored sunsets. The songs he wrote about the West Coast, he said in “I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir,” were “more about the idea of going in the ocean than they were about actually going in the ocean.” Wilson didn’t like waves, but realized how they could serve as a metaphor for life.Wilson, whose death at 82 was announced by his family on Wednesday, was as closely associated with Los Angeles as anyone in music history. In 1988, The Los Angeles Times polled a passel of industry veterans and asked them to name the greatest L.A. band of all time; the Beach Boys came in second. (The Doors won, a dubious choice.) When Randy Newman wanted to mock the city in “I Love L.A.,” his covertly acerbic 1983 hit, he shouted, with almost-convincing enthusiasm, “Turn up the Beach Boys!”Wilson’s fantasia of California — a Zion where everyone wore huarache sandals and drove deuce coupes — thrilled millions of people worldwide and aligned with a period in the state’s growth. Between 1962 and 1970, the Beach Boys’ heyday, the population of California increased by three million people. Wilson couldn’t claim credit for the boom, but no tourism board or corporate recruiter could design a better pitch. The songs were specific and local, but also universal. How else to explain “Surfin’ Safari” topping the singles chart in Sweden?When they recorded their first 45, “Surfin’,” the local record label Candix suggested the band change its name from the Pendletones to the Beach Boys, to emphasize the surf theme. Dennis, the outgoing, often reckless Wilson brother, surfed regularly in South Bay, and told Brian it was a popular and emerging trend. The first single was successful, so Brian stuck with the theme. The beach was their brand. Four early Beach Boys singles and every one of their first three albums had the word surf in their titles.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 Movies

    Enzo Staiola, Who Starred in ‘Bicycle Thieves’ as a Child, Dies at 85

    Discovered on the street in Rome, he had a brush with stardom when he was cast in what many consider one of the greatest films of all time.Enzo Staiola, who played the staunch 8-year-old accompanying his father on a quest to recover a stolen bicycle in Vittorio De Sica’s classic 1948 film, “Bicycle Thieves,” died on June 4 in Rome. He was 85.His death, in a hospital, was widely reported in the Italian press.The father’s character, played by a sad-eyed real-life factory worker, Lamberto Maggiorani, is the star of the film, which was originally released in the United States as “The Bicycle Thief” and is routinely cited as one of the greatest films of all time.But Mr. Staiola (pronounced STY-ola), who played the child, Bruno, is in many ways the emotional center of De Sica’s work, which is considered a founding document of Italian neorealism and “a fundamental staging post in the history of the European cinema,” the film historian Robert S.C. Gordon wrote in his 2008 book, “Bicycle Thieves.”The story, set in impoverished postwar Rome, revolves around Antonio Ricci, Mr. Maggiorani’s struggling character, who must get his bicycle back to keep his new job hanging advertising bills around the city. The job requires the use of a bicycle. But he must also retrieve the bike to avoid disappointing his trusting son.The character of Bruno is portrayed with poise and vulnerability by a little boy who, until then, had been more interested in playing soccer in his working-class Roman neighborhood than in acting.The father’s quest, unfolding through a series of sharply etched mishaps in the streets of the city, takes on weight for the audience as the despair becomes not just that of an adult but also of a plucky boy with expressive eyes, the young Mr. Staiola.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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    ‘Sex’ Review: Two Men Talk About and Around the Subject

    A chimney sweep and his colleague get deep on the roofs of Oslo in Dag Johan Haugerud’s curious meditation on marriage and masculinity.The two men who circle each other in the serious, deliberate Norwegian talkathon “Sex” chat about different things, including life, love, desire, freedom and fidelity. Their discussions are searching, at times surprisingly intimate — especially for male characters — sometimes naturalistic and often sufficiently self-consciously mannered to make you aware of just how written the material is. At once specific and general, the story charts the lives of these two, who while they appear contentedly married to women, are each experiencing difficulties that, for all their words, neither can fully articulate, including to themselves.The men are colleagues in Oslo, which is never identified in the movie. They and their wives are similarly unnamed, although a smattering of other characters do have proper names. The men work as chimney sweeps, a strikingly novel profession, at least in American cinema; the only other one who comes easily to mind is Dick Van Dyke’s sooty charmer in the original “Mary Poppins.” At one point, the men in “Sex” sit on a roof together after one suffers a dizzy spell, but they simply talk and talk some more. The only fires that they seem to be trying to prevent are their own.“Sex” is a curious movie, with a mix of moods and intentions that are, by turns, inviting and seriously off-putting. Its strengths are the largely appealing performances from the two principals, Jan Gunnar Roise (called “sweep” in the end credits) and Thorbjorn Harr (“department head”). Tall and lean, with a blond mustache to match his hair, Harr’s character is thoughtful, interested and religious. He’s also a committed, solicitous father to his only child, Klaus (Theo Dahl), a sweet teenager. His wife (billed as “social worker” and played by Birgitte Larsen) is a secondary character who registers as an afterthought.The movie’s first long conversation begins during some place-setting images of Oslo, with geometric shots of buildings, sweeps working on roofs and cars zipping on a freeway. As if tethered to a drone, the camera drops down and pushes toward a building window that frames two obscured figures. Inside, Harr’s character is telling Roise’s about a recent, unsettling, if amusing dream. David Bowie, he explains while seated before the window, appeared to him with some gnomic utterances, starting with the mysteriously fragmentary: “If you, as a human being, have the capacity to recognize goodness and beauty, and be excited by it.”It’s fuzzy which iteration of Bowie (Ziggy Stardust? The Thin White Duke?) graced the department head’s dreams. He isn’t a fan, and he isn’t entirely sure, he admits, if it was even the musician. “I thought it was God,” he says (a fair assumption). As he continues talking, he explains that what made the dream so unsettling for him was that Bowie looked at Harr’s character as if he were a woman. The other man, the sweep, asks if the dream was sexual. It wasn’t, but shortly thereafter, the camera pans to the sweep, who tells his colleague that the day before, he had sex with a man for the first time. And then, the sweep says, he told his wife.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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    Paul McCartney, Carole King and Others Pay Tribute to Brian Wilson

    Wilson, whose death was announced on Wednesday, leaves behind an immense musical legacy that spans several decades. King and others share how his music shaped them.Brian Wilson, the leader of the Beach Boys who death at 82 was announced on Wednesday, provided a joyous soundtrack for beach vacations and summer road trips for generations of people.Among pop and rock musicians he will also be remembered as a talented songwriter and studio pioneer whose music has had an immense influence for decades on those who followed him.The Beach Boys had 13 singles in the Billboard Top 10, with three of them reaching No. 1. Their influence on the surf rock genre and on popular music generally was recognized by the variety of people who paid respects on social media to Wilson on Wednesday.Here’s what some of Wilson’s friends had to say about his death and legacy.Paul McCartney, a Wilson contemporary, noted that there was a chorus of tributes from other musicians, saying Wilson had a “mysterious sense of musical genius” that made his songs special. “The notes he heard in his head and passed to us were simple and brilliant at the same time,” McCartney said. “I loved him, and was privileged to be around his bright shining light for a little while. How we will continue without Brian Wilson, ‘God Only Knows.’”Carole King, also a contemporary, wrote on Facebook that Wilson was her friend and brother in songwriting. “We shared a similar sensibility, as evidenced by his 4 over 5 chord under ‘Aaaah!’ in ‘Good Vibrations’ and mine under ‘I’m Into Something Good,’” she said. “We once discussed who used it first, and in the end we decided it didn’t matter.”Elton John, whose artistry is equally revered in the industry, said on Instagram that he grew to love Wilson and that he was “the biggest influence on my songwriting ever.” John added that Wilson was a “musical genius” who moved the goal posts when it came to writing songs and shaping music. “A true giant,” he added.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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    Met Opera’s ‘Diva Whisperer’ Retires After 18 Years

    Suzi Gomez-Pizzo, wearing a tangerine sweatshirt and sneakers, barreled down the backstage corridors of the Metropolitan Opera on a recent afternoon, a trolley full of clothes behind her.It was the first act of John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” and Gomez-Pizzo, who supervises costumes for female leads at the Met, was lining up a series of quick changes for the soprano Julia Bullock, the opera’s Cleopatra. In the span of minutes, Gomez-Pizzo had to help Bullock change from a sleek burgundy gown to a slinky watercolor dress to a bejeweled pharaoh’s outfit.“You got this,” Gomez-Pizzo told Bullock, handing her a water bottle. “You look stunning.”After 18 years, Gomez-Pizzo, 64, a fast-talking native New Yorker, is retiring this month from the Met. She has garnered a reputation as a calm troubleshooter with a knack for defusing last-minute sartorial snafus: broken shoes, missing earrings, ripped gowns.“Before I even think of it, she anticipates the needs,” said the soprano Jullia Bullock, here with Gomez-Pizzo. “I know that no matter where my mind is, or feelings are, I’ve got this totally secure, reliable person.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesBut perhaps her most important role has been as confidante and cheerleader to the stars. She meets opera singers at their most vulnerable, casually asking them to strip down and sit for fittings. She is often the last person they see before heading onto the Met’s stage, one of the grandest in opera. It is a critical moment when doubts, fears and yearnings — for water, chocolate or moral support — are particularly urgent.At the Met, Gomez-Pizzo is known simply as the diva whisperer. Over the years, she has befriended some of opera’s biggest stars, including Anna Netrebko, Lise Davidsen, Angel Blue, Elza van den Heever, Deborah Voigt and Natalie Dessay.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 “Pet Sounds” Became the Beach Boys Masterpiece

    Brian Wilson’s 1966 masterpiece is now considered a crowning achievement of music. The album’s reputation grew over time.Making a list of the best rock albums ever is easy: Something old (the Beatles), something new (or newer; perhaps Radiohead), something borrowed (the Rolling Stones’ blues or disco pastiches) and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue.”And, of course, bursting into the Top 10 — and often higher — of any respectable list: “Pet Sounds.”The overwhelming brainchild of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ chief songwriter whose death at 82 was announced on Wednesday, “Pet Sounds” is beautiful — with gorgeous vocal harmonies, haunting timbres and wistful lyrics of adolescent longing and estrangement. It was a landmark in studio experimentation that changed the idea of how albums could be made. But one thing that stands out about the Beach Boys’ masterpiece is how gradually it came to be widely celebrated, compared with many of its peers.“When it was released in the United States,” said Jan Butler, a senior lecturer in popular music at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom, “it did pretty well, but for the Beach Boys, it was considered a flop.”Released in the spring of 1966, “Pet Sounds” represented a break from the catchy tunes about surfing, cars and girls that the group had consistently rode to the top of the charts. The opening track is called “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” but previous Beach Boys songs had described how nice it was.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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    Brian Wilson and Sly Stone: Pop World Builders Dogged by Darkness

    Two of music’s powerful visionaries died this week. The songs they meticulously constructed offered an escape their makers struggled to realize in their own lives.In a cruel coincidence, this week has brought the deaths of two pop world builders at 82: Sly Stone and Brian Wilson. Both were exemplars of 1960s California, with Sly & the Family Stone representing psychedelic San Francisco as a diverse, utopian commune and Wilson’s Beach Boys (with members of his own family) bringing the world a Southern California teen mythos of sun, surf, girls, cars, dancing and romance.As producers and songwriters, both were architects of joy. They devised irresistible pop hits that were ingenious, eclectic and full of vital details. Those studio masterpieces were beautiful, indelible artifacts. But the humans behind them led troubled lives.Wilson had barely reached his 20s when he emerged as the Beach Boys’ songwriter and producer, commandeering not only his band members but seasoned studio musicians to execute his pop innovations; the pros took him seriously. At first Wilson latched onto a sport he didn’t participate in — surfing — as a peg for his increasingly sophisticated musical constructions. But he quickly outgrew the connection — and bade it a cosmic farewell in “Surf’s Up,” with lyrics by Van Dyke Parks, in 1966.Wilson’s early songs lifted guitar licks from Chuck Berry, but they also reveled in vocal harmonies derived from both doo-wop, with its basic chords and its rhythmic nonsense syllables, and from the Four Freshmen, who sang intricate arrangements with chromatic jazz chords. With “I Get Around,” in 1964, Wilson cut loose with multiple key changes, a cappella sections, sudden instrumental interjections and exultant falsetto wails; it was a No. 1 hit. His innovative side had paid off.In 1965, Wilson decided to stop touring with the Beach Boys in order to concentrate on songwriting and studio recording — an unconventional but brilliant choice, one he had foreshadowed with a song from 1963, “In My Room.” It’s an introvert’s confession, closely harmonized by Wilson with the Beach Boys, savoring the sanctuary where he can “lock out all my worries and my fears.”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 ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Ex-Girlfriend Will Return for 22nd Hour of Testimony

    “Jane,” taking the stand under a pseudonym, is expected to face her final questions from the mogul’s lawyers on Thursday.On the 22nd day of Sean Combs’s federal trial, the defense is scheduled to complete its cross-examination of “Jane,” an ex-girlfriend who has testified about the affection and passion she once shared with the famed music producer — as well the degrading sex marathons with hired men that she says she endured to please Mr. Combs and retain financial support from him.Mr. Combs is charged with sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy; prosecutors have said that he directed bodyguards and executives at his company to enable and cover up his crimes — including coercing women into sex — as part of a “criminal enterprise.” Jane, who is appearing under a pseudonym, is the second woman the government has put forth as a victim of sex trafficking, after Casandra Ventura, the singer known as Cassie, who testified for four days last month.Mr. Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and has strongly denied that any of his sexual activities were nonconsensual.On Thursday, Jane, who was in a relationship with Mr. Combs from 2021 until his arrest in 2024, will get on the stand for a sixth day; since she first began testifying a week ago she has been questioned for about 21 hours. Even with the torrent of details she has provided, Jane’s testimony has centered on one of the key aspects of the case: whether she was coerced into sex, or acted as a willing participant.During her time on the stand, Jane has recounting grueling experiences about what she and Mr. Combs called their “hotel nights,” in which she had sex with male escorts while Mr. Combs watched. She said she once vomited after having sex with two of them, and then was encouraged by Mr. Combs to have sex with a third. She said she developed urinary tract infections as a result of the frequent encounters. And after a violent brawl with Mr. Combs that started with an argument over another woman he was dating, Jane testified, she took part in yet another sexual encounter with an escort, wearing makeup to cover up her black eye and welts.In cross-examination, Teny Geragos, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, focused on dozens of text exchanges between Jane, Mr. Combs and others in which Jane appeared to express excitement about hotel nights and took an active role in planning them. In an exchange from 2021, a pornographic actor who took part in many of these encounters wrote about the “roughest sex we ever had.” Jane called it “def one for the books” and added a “mind-blown” emoji.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