Aurelia Butler

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    Peggy Caserta, Who Wrote a Tell-All About Janis Joplin, Dies at 84

    Her Haight-Ashbury clothing store was ground zero for the counterculture. But she was best known for a tawdry book — which she later disavowed — published after Ms. Joplin’s death.Peggy Caserta, whose funky Haight-Ashbury clothing boutique was a magnet for young bohemians and musicians, and who exploited her relationship with Janis Joplin in a much-panned 1973 memoir that she later disavowed, died on Nov. 21 at her home in Tillamook, Ore. She was 84.Her partner and only immediate survivor, Jackie Mendelson, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.The Louisiana-born Ms. Caserta was 23 and working at a Delta Air Lines office in San Francisco when she decided to open a clothing store for her cohort, the lesbians in her neighborhood. She found an empty storefront on Haight Street, near the corner of Ashbury, which she rented for $87.50 a month.At first Ms. Caserta sold jeans, sweatshirts and double-breasted denim blazers that her mother made. Then she added Levi’s pants, which a friend turned into flares by inserting a triangle of denim into the side seams. When the friend couldn’t keep up with the orders, Ms. Caserta persuaded Levi Strauss & Company to make them.She named the place Mnasidika (pronounced na-SID-ek-ah), after a character in a poem by Sappho. “It’s a Greek girls’ name,” Ms. Caserta told The San Francisco Examiner in 1965, for an article about the “new bohemians” colonizing the Haight-Ashbury district.Ms. Caserta was 23 when she opened a clothing store, Mnasidika, in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.via Wyatt MackenzieWe 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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    Yunchan Lim Plays Chopin With the New York Philharmonic

    Performing with the New York Philharmonic and Kazuki Yamada, Lim played Chopin’s F minor Concerto with imperturbable calm and eloquence.David Geffen Hall is very nearly sold out for the New York Philharmonic’s performances this Friday, Saturday and Sunday. So jump, if you can, at the vanishing chance to hear Yunchan Lim play Chopin’s Piano Concerto in F minor.In the spirit of the season, let’s give thanks for this 20-year-old pianist from South Korea. On Wednesday at Geffen Hall, Lim played in the spotlight as if he’d been doing it for decades, with such imperturbable calm and eloquence that it was hard to believe that two and a half years ago he was essentially unknown.It was June 2022 when he burst onto the international scene as the youngest ever winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition with a rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto that became a YouTube sensation. The two blockbuster Rachmaninoff concertos have been early calling cards for Lim, but this year has included a lot of Chopin, including an astonishing traversal of all 24 études at Carnegie Hall and on a new recording.Chopin, with his restrained refinement, is an even more natural fit for Lim than Romantic warhorses like Rachmaninoff. Lim’s playing never feels seething or sweaty; he seems like he has all the time in the world, without ever giving a sense of showboating or indulgence.In the first movement of the concerto on Wednesday, he was dreamily flexible in his phrasing without ever losing the music’s pulse. The slow central Larghetto was achingly poised, its 10 minutes framed by two perfect notes, both A flats: the first deep and softly buttery, the last a pinprick of starlight.This movement is an opera aria without voices and, like a great bel canto singer, Lim understands that coloratura ornaments mustn’t distract from, but actually emphasize, the long, sustained central line of the music. In the finale, he exuded graciousness, attentive to details of touch, as in a passage whose texture moved swiftly from silvery to steely without ever losing smoothness.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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    Kendrick Lamar’s Never-Ending Battles

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicLast week, Kendrick Lamar released his sixth album, “GNX,” with no advance notice, unless you count the heavy anticipation that has been hovering around him since the apex of his battle with Drake earlier this year. A squabble over hip-hop ethics became a cultural touchstone, leaving Lamar with a No. 1 hit and Drake with spiritual and professional bruises.“GNX” extends the tension but doesn’t necessarily deepen it. Mostly, Lamar wants to get back to business as usual: making concept songs and albums that are musically complex and lyrically dense. The beef elevated him even higher into the stratosphere, but he doesn’t want it to define him or his career.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Lamar’s long wrestle with saviorhood, how his new album showcases both his loosest and stiffest tendencies, and the ways in which Drake is still grappling with the fallout of their battle.Guest: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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    Jim Abrahams Brought Timeless Gags to “Airplane!” and More

    With the death of Jim Abrahams, one third of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker writing and directing trio, a looks at some of the funniest moments from their key films.It’s almost hard to believe that at one point Leslie Nielsen was thought of as a serious actor who was an odd choice to play a comic role like the deadpan doctor in the disaster movie spoof “Airplane!”But casting the unflappable Nielsen to deliver lines like “I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley” in response to the completely reasonable phrase, “Surely you can’t be serious,” was part of the brilliance of Jim Abrahams, who died Tuesday at the age of 80. Along with David and Jerry Zucker, his pals from his youth in Wisconsin, Abrahams was a pioneer of some of the most beloved, gleefully over-the-top comedies in cinema history.Nielsen delivering his “don’t call me Shirley” line in “Airplane!”Paramount Pictures, via Everett CollectionThe Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker movies took their extreme silliness extremely seriously. Their actors, like Nielsen, were as committed to the bit as they were. With a few exceptions — like the kidnapping comedy “Ruthless People” (1986) — the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker mode was parody, taking genres that audiences loved and deliciously skewering them. But their humor was so undeniable that even if you didn’t know what they were making fun of you could lose your breath laughing.When my parents sat me down at a young age to watch “Airplane!,” I had never seen any of the flicks it was riffing on, like “Airport” (1970) or “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), the latter of which also featured Nielsen. Instead, I was captivated by the sheer absurdity and sometimes perplexing strangeness. The quotable lines are legion, but the bizarrely funny images are also why “Airplane!” lingers so large in the cultural memory.For me, it’s the eggs. During the flight where nothing can seem to go right, Nielsen’s Dr. Rumack attends to a woman who is feeling ill. With ominous music in the background he starts gently, but firmly extracting a series of eggs from her mouth. After the third one comes out, he cracks it against the side of a cup. A little bird flies out. The tension that exists in the scene is real and almost frightening, the woman’s face contorting like something out of a horror film, but the end result is just so ridiculous.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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    ‘Sweethearts’ Review: Friends Without Benefits

    Two college freshmen conspire to simultaneously dump their exes in Jordan Weiss’s unremarkable debut feature.Bright, breezy and requiring little in the way of close attention, the teen rom-com “Sweethearts” is perfect for those who prefer their movies to be barely more than background noise. Otherwise, the lame plotting (by Dan Brier and Jordan Weiss, who also directs) and lack of jokes soon become painfully obvious.Even so, this direct-to-streaming bauble benefits from two leads whose charm effortlessly outshines the material. Kiernan Shipka and Nico Hiraga play Jamie and Ben, friends since childhood and now freshmen at the same college. Both are feeling hobbled by their high-school sweethearts, whose incessant sexting is ruining their enjoyment of college life. Deciding to dump these millstones, Ben and Jamie head home to Ohio for Thanksgiving and a spectacularly convoluted plan to free themselves from their romantic pasts.Though embodying a rather sweet message about finding community and healing the scars of high school, “Sweethearts” is more often vulgar than funny. A gentle but unnecessary subplot involving the public coming-out of a close friend (Caleb Hearon) at least allows the fine Tramell Tillman to low-key capture some scenes as a gay football coach. Likewise the talented comedian Sophie Zucker, who makes the most of her too-brief appearances as Jamie’s mouthy hometown nemesis.Like so many movies these days, “Sweethearts” languishes for the want of a decent screenplay. You can’t just shoehorn in clips from “When Harry Met Sally” (1989) and hope some of that film’s magic rubs off.SweetheartsRated R for flying urine and a flaccid full-frontal. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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    ‘Reinas’ Review: Memories of Lima

    The political turmoil of Peru in the 1990s serves as the backdrop for this intimate domestic drama about growing up and learning to let go.To this day, political violence continues to be an issue in Peru, though the ‘80s and ’90s — when the Maoist guerrilla movement Shining Path waged bloody conflicts against the Peruvian government before being crushed by President Alberto Fujimori — are considered the country’s rock-bottom.“Reinas,” by the Swiss-Peruvian filmmaker Klaudia Reynicke, takes place during this tumultuous period. For most of the running time, it keeps politics on the margins, like a phantom presence looming over the members of one bourgeois family’s everyday lives.The principal characters are two sisters, the teenage Aurora (Luana Vega) and her younger sister, Lucia (Abril Gjurinovic), both of whom can’t entirely wrap their heads around why their mother, Elena (Jimena Lindo), wants so desperately to leave Lima.Preventing their departure is the girls’ estranged father Carlos (Gonzalo Molina), a taxi driver who decides to reconnect with his daughters on hearing that Elena might soon whisk them away to the United States. Both parents must sign a notarized form for their children to leave the country, but Carlos stalls, and his renewed interest in the family gives Aurora (whose world seems to revolve around her friends and the beach) hope that she might be able to stay behind with him.More compelling than this somewhat unconvincing family dynamic, structured around the coming-of-age arc and the trite theme of learning to let go, is the film’s intimate sense of time and place, and the subtly effective manner by which the grim social context is made known (such as a citywide curfew and sugar shortage). Seemingly inconsequential moments — like a cozy house party scene — shine with loving specificity, making the perpetual return to the Carlos drama feel dutiful. In this case, thematic focus is bit of a buzz kill, pulling an otherwise unique portrait onto generic grounds.ReinasNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Nutcrackers’ Review: A Bumpy Ben Stiller Christmas

    Ben Stiller stars in a tonally bumpy comedy with genre roots in Hallmark territory.If you tilt your head and squint, “Nutcrackers” resembles a Hallmark movie, though it certainly is not one. Michael (Ben Stiller), a big-city real estate guy, is on the verge of closing the deal of a lifetime when he’s called away from Chicago to rural Ohio. There, his estranged sister and her husband have died tragically, leaving behind four feral nephews to whom he is now technically guardian. He intends to stay just long enough to get them placed in foster homes, but mischief of all kinds ensues. Also, Christmas is in three weeks. You can see where this is going.The best part of “Nutcrackers,” directed by David Gordon Green, is those four kids, whose easy demeanor with one another makes them feel less like child actors, more like a pack of little hooligans who happened to wander onto set. They come by it naturally, presumably, since in real life, they’re brothers (delightfully named Homer, Ulysses, Atlas and Arlo Janson). The movie’s most clever line readings and funniest bits are all them, and I’d love to know how much they improvised and deviated from the screenplay.That screenplay, by Leland Douglas, lacks imagination. It’s a mash-up of the often feminine-coded Hallmark formula and its closest variants are “Garden State” or “Elizabethtown,” in which a world-weary guy finds himself in small town life. So two minutes into the movie, it’s obvious what will happen: This mean metropolitan man will come to grudgingly enjoy, then love, both his nephews and small-town life; a lady will happen along (in this case, the social worker, played by Linda Cardellini); and probably they’ll figure out how to save Christmas or enjoy its true meaning or whatever. The pattern is set in stone, seemingly since the dawn of time.There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a formula, especially one that has been so richly successful and beloved as the Hallmark one. Clearly the idea of the urbanite who can only regain their soul away from the hustle and bustle taps into some vein of desire or anxiety in audiences. It’s what makes the movies comfort viewing: You always know what will happen, and they make you feel like the world is a safe and good place.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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    ‘Beatles ’64’ Review: They Wanted to Hold Their Hands

    This documentary, directed by David Tedeschi, comes up with a solid compendium of the band’s arcana from their first trip to the United States, when fans went wild.Few cultural events of the 20th century have withstood as much scrutiny as the Beatles’ first trip to the United States, but the documentary “Beatles ’64,” directed by David Tedeschi, a frequent collaborator of Martin Scorsese’s, comes up with a solid compendium of Beatlemania arcana.Tedeschi (“The 50 Year Argument”) revisits the excitement surrounding the Fab Four’s arrival through the eyes of early fans. Among the more unlikely Beatles enthusiasts who appear is the filmmaker David Lynch, who attended the band’s 1964 concert at Washington Coliseum and remembers music that could inspire “tears of happiness.”The writer Jamie Bernstein recalls a childhood crush on George Harrison. Her ardor surely helped convince her father, the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, to weigh in on the merits of rock ’n’ roll: “I think this music has something terribly important to tell us adults,” he says in an archival clip. The musician Smokey Robinson describes being “elated” when the Beatles covered “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” even though, he says, he didn’t know about it until the record came out. “There are a billion songs on earth, man,” he says. “To just have somebody like the Beatles, who are great songwriters themselves — out of that billion songs, to take one of my songs and record it? I can’t beat that as a songwriter.”The present-day footage can seem self-reflexive to the point of parody: Paul McCartney gives the documentary team a tour of the Brooklyn Museum’s Paul McCartney exhibition. Ringo Starr is shown hanging out with Scorsese, a producer on this documentary and the director of a previous one on Harrison.But with respect to Harrison’s status as the quiet Beatle, the quiet star of “Beatles ’64” is superb footage by the brothers Albert and David Maysles, to whom the film is dedicated, and who trailed the Beatles during those two weeks. (They made their own 1964 documentary, “What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A.,” out of the material.) Watching the band in the Plaza Hotel and fans in the streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of their idols, you can’t help but get swept up in a 60-year-old fervor.Beatles ’64Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More