Aurelia Butler

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    Max Romeo, Leading Voice in the Heyday of Roots Reggae, Dies at 80

    His early hits were filled with sexual innuendo. But he later switched to a soulful political message that resonated in 1970s Jamaica and beyond.Max Romeo, a reggae singer whose earliest hits dripped with sexual innuendo, but who then switched to a soulful, politically engaged message that provided a soundtrack to the class struggles of 1970s Jamaica and made him a mainstay on the international tour circuit, died on April 11 outside Kingston, the capital of Jamaica. He was 80.Errol Michael Henry, a lawyer who represented Mr. Romeo, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was heart complications.Mr. Romeo, whose real surname was Smith, was among the last of a generation of Jamaican musicians who came to prominence in the 1970s, among them Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Burning Spear. Their sound, known as roots reggae, centered on the lives of ordinary people in Jamaica, blended with a heavy dollop of Black liberation and Rastafarianism.Until then, reggae had been seen, at least beyond Jamaica, as a musical novelty focused on fleeting love and sex. But the 1970s musicians’ political message and laid-back sound, combined with their open marijuana use, gave reggae a new and lasting cultural resonance.Mr. Romeo, a veteran of the reggae tour circuit, performing in Switzerland in 2023. His tour that year took him to 56 cities.Valentin Flauraud/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Romeo’s career tracked that transition. He began as a clean-cut crooner in Jamaica, part of a trio called the Emotions. After setting out on his own, he found success with raunchy songs like “Wet Dream,” a 1968 track so explicit that many radio stations refused to play it. Nevertheless, it spent 25 weeks on the British singles chart, peaking at No. 10.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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    David Cronenberg Lost His Wife and the Will to Make Movies. Then Came ‘The Shrouds’

    In 2017, during the funeral of his wife and longtime collaborator Carolyn Zeifman, the director David Cronenberg found himself struck by an unusual impulse: As the coffin holding her dead body was lowered into the ground, he wanted more than anything to get into that box with her.That reluctance to let go is taken to even more morbid extremes in Cronenberg’s new movie, “The Shrouds,” about a high-tech cemetery where the ongoing decomposition of a corpse can be viewed through a video livestream meant for the loved ones left behind. When those graves are mysteriously vandalized, it’s up to the cemetery owner Karsh (Vincent Cassel) to determine the culprits, who he suspects may have something to do with the death of his own wife (Diane Kruger).The 82-year-old Cronenberg has always been guided by a unique point of view as a filmmaker, and his classics like “Scanners,” “Videodrome” and “The Fly” helped establish the body-horror genre. Still, he admitted in an interview via Zoom this month that “The Shrouds” could be considered one of his most personal films: It’s not for nothing that Cassel is costumed to look like his director, donning dark suits and teasing his gray hair upward in a familiar manner.Cronenberg movie moments, from left: Stephen Lack in “Scanners”; Debbie Harry in “Videodrome” and Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly.”Canadian Film Development Corporation; Universal Pictures; Twentieth Century Fox, via Getty ImagesEven so, Cronenberg cautioned against drawing too many links between himself and his lead character.“As soon as you start to write a screenplay, you’re writing fiction, no matter what the impetus was in your own life,” Cronenberg said. “Suddenly, you’re creating characters that need to come to life. And when you start to write them, they start to push you around if they’re really alive.”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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    Walton Goggins on the Song in His ‘White Lotus’ Character’s Head

    The actor, also seen in “The Righteous Gemstones” and the new movie “The Uninvited,” on dirt biking, his father’s clothing advice and the music that makes him think of Rick Hatchett.These days it seems as if Walton Goggins is everywhere.He’s Rick Hatchett, consumed with avenging his father’s murder, in “The White Lotus.” Baby Billy Freeman, shilling in the name of God, in “The Righteous Gemstones.” The nose-less bounty hunter, known as the Ghoul, in “Fallout.”But Goggins didn’t initially make the cut for “The Uninvited,” a film written and directed by his wife, Nadia Conners, about an older woman who shows up at the home of an actress and her agent husband just as their big Hollywood party has started.Conners originally envisioned “The Uninvited” as a play and staged readings in Los Angeles, New York and London. “I wasn’t invited to be Sammy in any of them,” Goggins said of the husband character.Then Conners turned her script into a screenplay. “I texted her from the plane when I finished it — crying emojis, crying emojis, crying emojis,” Goggins recalled. “And I said, you’ve really cracked this for yourself.” The role was his.In a video call from Los Angeles, Goggins — who lives in New York in the Hudson Valley — talked about shaking off the work day, never washing raw denim and joyriding with his son, Augustus. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Drinking Wine by the FireplaceThis fireplace is a hundred years old and the centerpiece of this living room that has hosted Edna St. Vincent Millay, Walt Disney, Babe Ruth and even members of the House of Windsor. I end every night in the same spot, sitting on the same stool, with a bottle of wine created by Arianna Occhipinti that we found when we were vacationing in Sicily.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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    There’s a Feeling We’re Not in Hollywood Anymore

    Movies and TV productions are rapidly leaving California to film outside the United States, where labor costs are lower and tax incentives greater. Industry workers are exasperated.It would have been simple to shoot the game show “The Floor” in Los Angeles. The city has many idle studios that could have easily accommodated its large display screen and the midnight-blue tiles that light up beneath contestants.But Fox flies the show’s host, Rob Lowe, and 100 American contestants thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean to answer trivia questions about dogs, divas and Disney characters at a studio in Dublin. It makes more financial sense than filming in California.In the past few years, as labor costs have grown after two strikes, producers of reality shows, scrappy indie movies and blockbuster films have increasingly turned away from Los Angeles to filming locations overseas.Those business decisions have considerable consequences for the industry’s thousands of middle-class workers: the camera operators, set decorators and lighting technicians who make movies and television happen. Frustration has reached a boiling point, according to more than two dozen people who make their living in the entertainment industry. They say that nothing short of Hollywood, as we know it, is at stake.“This is an existential crisis — it’s an extinction event,” said Beau Flynn, a producer of big-budget movies like “San Andreas,” which despite being about an earthquake in California was filmed mostly in Australia. “These are real things. I am not a dramatist, even though I’m in the drama field.”Productions have been filmed outside the United States for decades, but rarely has Hollywood work been so bustling overseas at a time when work in Hollywood itself has been so scant. Studios in European countries are bursting at the seams, industry workers say. And film and television production in Los Angeles is down by more than one-third over the past 10 years, according to FilmLA data.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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    Under Trump, Kennedy Center Fires More Staff Members

    At least a half-dozen staff members at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts were dismissed on Friday, according to two people with knowledge of the changes, as the Trump administration continues to strengthen its control of the institution.The fired employees worked on the center’s government relations, marketing, social media and rentals teams, said the two people, who were granted anonymity because the dismissals had not been publicized. They said roughly 20 employees had been dismissed since President Trump took over the institution in February.The Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Trump stunned the cultural and political worlds when he made himself chairman of the Kennedy Center and purged its previously bipartisan board of Biden appointees. He ousted the longtime chairman — the financier David M. Rubenstein, who was the center’s largest donor — and stacked the board with his own aides and allies. Deborah F. Rutter, the center’s president for more than a decade, was fired and replaced with a Trump loyalist, Richard Grenell.The president’s actions have prompted an outcry, leading some artists to cancel engagements there in protest. The musical “Hamilton” scrapped a planned series of tour performances there next year.Mr. Grenell, a former ambassador to Germany, has moved swiftly to cull the Kennedy Center’s ranks, saying the institution faces serious financial problems. He has promised to cut executive pay and reduce the staff “where possible.” He has also denounced some of the center’s efforts to embrace diversity, saying the center should promote “common sense programming.”Last month, Mr. Grenell fired several employees who had been part of a community outreach program known as Social Impact. The program had worked to expand the audience for opera and symphony performances, to commission works by underrepresented voices and to “advance justice and equity.”Critics say that the Trump administration is exaggerating the Kennedy Center’s financial problems and that the cuts are meant to help advance the president’s political agenda. The center has been in relatively stable condition in recent years, though like many arts organizations, it has faced financial woes. While fund-raising has been robust recently, the endowment, at $163 million, is relatively small for an institution of its size. More

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    Mac Gayden, Stellar Nashville Guitarist and Songwriter, Dies at 83

    Heard on Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” among other albums, he also sang and was a writer of the perennial “Everlasting Love.”Mac Gayden, the co-writer of the pop evergreen “Everlasting Love” and an innovative guitarist who recorded with Bob Dylan and helped establish Nashville as a recording hub for artists working outside the bounds of country music, died on Wednesday at his home in Nashville. He was 83.His cousin Tommye Maddox Working said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.Strangely enough, Mr. Gayden’s most illustrious achievement — his percussive electric guitar work on “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” a track on Mr. Dylan’s 1966 opus, “Blonde on Blonde,” most of which was recorded in Nashville — went uncredited for decades. It was only recently, when a new generation of researchers discovered the omission, that he received his due.Mr. Gayden, who was self-taught, had a knack for inventing just the right rhythm or mood for an arrangement. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, when Nashville was just beginning to break out of its conventional country bubble, he had a particular affinity for collaborating with cultural outsiders, among them Linda Ronstadt and the Pointer Sisters.“Mac Gayden was a genius, genius, genius — the best guitar player I ever heard,” Bob Johnston, the producer of “Blonde on Blonde,” was quoted as saying in “Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City,” a 2015 exhibition at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville.Mr. Gayden in 2015 at the opening of the exhibition “Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City” at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville.Jason Davis/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumOn J.J. Cale’s 1971 Top 40 single “Crazy Mama,” Mr. Gayden played bluesy slide guitar with a wah-wah pedal, creating an uncanny sound later employed to droll effect on the Steve Miller Band’s chart-topping 1973 pop hit “The Joker.” Decades later, the steel guitarist Robert Randolph, a Pentecostal-bred star in jam-band circles, adopted the technique as well.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 Hudson, N.Y., Even the Opera Is Locavore

    The director R.B. Schlather gathered the cast of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare” for a quick pep talk before running through the opera last weekend. Not all the costumes were ready, and not everyone in the orchestra could be there, but they were about to see whether the show they had been rehearsing for several weeks even worked.“You’re getting to go through this thing for the first time,” Schlather told them, speaking also to the creative team and crew of his new “Cesare” production, which opens at Hudson Hall in Hudson, N.Y., on Saturday. “Don’t worry. I encourage you today to just go for it.”There was a bit of applause from the balcony: The rehearsal was open to the public, and some locals had shown up to get a taste of the work in progress. Staff of the production and hall left their perches to say hello to people they knew, some of whom were just passing through with their to-go coffees, shopping bags and dogs.Boundaries between artists and audiences aren’t always so porous, but in Hudson, locals are as represented onstage as off. Partly out of necessity, but also because of Schlather’s ethos, opera here is something more like community theater, executed at the level of a major company.R.B. Schlather, center, the director of “Cesare,” talking to musicians, from left, Coleman Itzkoff, Clay Zeller Townson and Elliot Figg.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesSome of the “Cesare” performers are commuting from a residency at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park nearby; others are just driving in from their houses. When they come together, it’s in a luxurious way that would be unimaginable 120 miles south in New York City. The artists have more freedom and, crucially, more time.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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    Lana Del Rey’s Foreboding Lullaby, and 7 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Madison McFerrin, Ana Tijoux, Matmos and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Lana Del Rey, ‘Bluebird’“Bluebird” — the latest single from Lana Del Rey’s country-infused 10th album — has a homey, retro sound: a relaxed waltz tempo, acoustic guitar picking, dulcet strings and an innocent warble in her voice. Behind it is worry. She’s warning someone — a child? a friend? — to escape while they can, while she stays behind to shield them from abuse: “We both shouldn’t be dealing with him,” she sings. It’s an alarm that’s delivered as a lullaby: “Find a way to fly,” she urges, oh so sweetly. “Just shoot for the sun, ’til I can finally run.”Madison McFerrin, ‘I Don’t’Madison McFerrin transmutes a failed engagement into a wry but dramatic self-assessment: “Did I make a mistake in choosing who / to say ‘I do’ to?” she sings with crisp syllables. Syncopated piano chords and sympathetic backing vocals hint at the archness of a show tune, but a crescendo of distorted electric guitars suggests some feelings still unresolved.Grumpy featuring Claire Rousay and Pink Must, ‘Harmony’A mid-tempo, boom-chunk beat is the only relatively stable component of “Harmony,” a collaboration by four electronics-loving experimenters from pop’s fringe. (Pink Must is a duo.) “Harmony” is a hyperpop ballad that somehow stays winsome despite its filtered, pitch-shifted, overlapping vocals, warped instrumental sounds and angular bits of melody. “When I pray for harmony, it’s for you,” Grumpy sings, no matter how skewed the harmonies are at the moment.Morgan Wallen featuring Post Malone, ‘I Ain’t Comin’ Back’Released on Good Friday, “I Ain’t Comin’ Back” offers peak posturing and allusions to faith, along with brand placements for booze, tobacco and a vintage car. “There’s a lot of reasons I ain’t Jesus, but the main one is that I ain’t comin’ back,” Morgan Wallen and Post Malone sing with sullen pride. There’s some clever wordplay — “Go throw your pebbles, I’ll be somewhere getting stoned,” Malone taunts — but sour self-righteousness prevails.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