Aurelia Butler

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    Park Avenue Armory Will Host Yoko Ono’s ‘Wish Tree’ and Jamie xx

    The Armory’s upcoming season also includes the world premiere of “DOOM,” a new work from the Golden Lion winner Anne Imhof.The Park Avenue Armory announced its 2025 season on Monday, which includes the North American tour debut for the musician and producer Jamie xx’s new album “In Waves” and the largest ever North American installation of the artist Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree,” a grove of almost 100 trees that will arrive at the Armory for visitors to attach wishes to.“This season, some of the most cutting-edge artists of our time will be invited to the Armory to illuminate complex histories, contemporary society and visions of the future,” Rebecca Robertson, the founding president and executive producer of Park Avenue Armory, said in a news release.The season opens on Jan. 9 with “In Waves.” The show is a return for Jamie xx, one-third of the British electro-pop band the xx, after that group took over the Armory for 25 performances in 2014. “In Waves,” Jamie xx’s first solo album in nine years, was released this September, and will feature in the four-night residency along with some of his early solo music and songs from “In Colour” (2015).A “Wish Tree” installation in Germany. The ongoing work by Yoko Ono invites people to tie personal wishes to trees; 92 of them will be installed at the Armory.Klaus Ohlenschlaeger/Alamy“Wish Tree,” Ono’s ongoing participatory work where visitors are invited to tie personal wishes to a tree, will have 92 trees in honor of Ono’s 92nd birthday on Feb. 18. It will start on Feb. 14 and run for four days. A two-day symposium with panels and performances will celebrate Ono’s work during the installation.The Armory’s season will also include the world premiere of “DOOM,” a new durational performance piece from the cross-disciplinary artist Anne Imhof, who won the Golden Lion, the top prize, at the 2017 Venice Biennale for her installation “Faust.” The performance, which opens on March 3 and is curated by Klaus Biesenbach, will take over the Wade Thompson Drill Hall with performers, sound and scenery to explore the balance between apathy, activism and resistance.In addition to those productions, the Armory’s upcoming season includes:The North American premiere of “Constellation,” an exhibition of more than 450 prints of the photographer Diane Arbus’s work, some of which are still unpublished.“The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” a musical theater adaptation from the composer Philip Venables and the writer-director Ted Huffman of a cult favorite gay liberation fantasy novel, self-published by the activist Larry Mitchell.The North American premiere of “Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow,” a hybrid work from the choreographer and dancer Trajal Harrell that uses the form of a dancing runway show on a catwalk to juxtapose everyday gestures and extravagant poses with historical references, pop culture and political rhetoric. More

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    Tales of 19th-Century A.I.: Don’t Fall in Love With a Singing Robot

    Love me, love me, pretend that you love me.One of today’s most popular artificial intelligence apps is Replika, a chatbot service whose users — many millions of them — converse with virtual companions through their phones or on VR headsets. Visually, the avatars are rudimentary. But each Replika offers personal attention and words of encouragement, and gets better at it with each update. There are dozens of A.I. services like this now: imitation humans who promise, via text or voice, to console, to understand, to adore.Many users (men and boys, mostly) are developing long-term bonds with these simulated lovers (“women,” mostly). Some fall into ruin. A young man in Britain tried to assassinate the former queen after plotting with a Replika avatar; and last month a mother filed a lawsuit against Character.AI, another of these apps, after her son killed himself with the encouragement of his virtual “girlfriend.”It all sounds new. It all sounds alarming. Yet these online lonely-hearts are brushing against anxieties at the core of modern art and philosophy — anxieties, as Sigmund Freud wrote more than a century ago, that things not alive may yet have spirits, and that our animistic ancestors were onto something.One of the most famous musical automatons of Enlightenment Europe: a female organist, designed by the Swiss inventor Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz in 1774.Grisel/RDB/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesIntricate gearwork drives the automaton’s fingers, which play the organ’s keys. Her eyes move back and forth, and her chest rises and falls as if breathing.Grisel/RDB/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesThis fall I’ve been thinking about lovers and robots, erotics and mechanics — ever since seeing two performances, both at Lincoln Center, that resonated with all our contemporary worries about art, sex and technology. One was Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” (1881) at the Metropolitan Opera, which puts an android musician at center stage: the automaton Olympia, whose song and dance captivate and then devastate her human paramour. The other, next door at New York City Ballet, was “Coppélia” (1870), a merry comedy featuring not only dancing machines but also, more troublingly, humans pretending to dance like machines.Is our projection of life onto technology a sign of derangement? Or is it more like wish fulfillment? In both “Hoffmann” and “Coppélia,” grown men fall hard for female contraptions, only to discover the gears and grease that power their music and movement. Singing and dancing, in particular, seem to awaken these men’s archaic passions and juvenile needs, and shatter their rational skepticism about gadgets.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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    Paramount Takes Promotional Stunt to New Level for ‘Gladiator II’

    The studio plans to air the same 60-second trailer on 4,000 TV, radio and digital channels on Monday.For a snapshot of what movie marketers think it now takes to get the public’s attention — even for a sequel to a popular movie — consider the astounding stunt that Paramount Pictures has planned for “Gladiator II.”On Monday at 9 p.m. Eastern, Paramount will debut a final 60-second trailer for the film on more than 4,000 television networks, digital platforms, local stations, Spanish-language outlets and radio stations simultaneously.Based on average audience totals for a Monday evening, the trailer could reach roughly 300 million potential customers, according to Marc Weinstock, Paramount’s president of worldwide marketing and distribution. “We aimed to create a big moment to match the scope and grandeur of Ridley Scott’s epic film,” Mr. Weinstock said.The promotional tactic is known as a roadblock, and marketers have used them for decades. But the number of channels is typically much smaller. In what was described by Variety magazine in 2009 as the largest roadblock ever, Sony Pictures Entertainment simultaneously aired ads for the disaster movie “2012” on 450 television networks.Mr. Weinstock would not say how much Paramount is spending on Monday’s stunt. According to a “Gladiator II” producer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid conflict with the studio, the airtime was relatively inexpensive to purchase — about $2 million in total, with a spot during “Monday Night Football” as the most expensive. Wavemaker, a media agency, helped Paramount coordinate the effort.Marketing a movie used to require little more than buying ads on NBC on a Thursday night when millions tuned in to watch shows like “ER” and “Friends.” With the intense fracturing of the media landscape, however, studios have been forced to conjure up ever more provocative ways to grab attention. A single premiere? How quaint. Paramount staged “Gladiator II” red carpets in Australia, Japan, Ireland, France, Denmark and Britain in recent weeks. On Monday, a premiere in Los Angeles will involve the construction of a faux coliseum on Hollywood Boulevard.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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    Cher Can, and Does, Turn Back Time

    In the first volume of her memoir (which she hasn’t read), she explores her difficult childhood, her fraught marriage to Sonny Bono and how she found her voice.Twice during a 90-minute interview about her memoir, Cher asked, “Do you think people are going to like it?”Even in the annals of single-name celebrities — Sting, Madonna, Beyoncé, Zendaya — Cher is in the stratosphere of the one percent. She’s been a household name for six decades. She was 19 when she had her first No. 1 single with Sonny Bono. She won an Oscar for “Moonstruck,” an Emmy for “Cher: The Farewell Tour” and a Grammy for “Believe.” Her face has appeared on screens of all sizes, and her music has been a soundtrack for multiple generations, whether via vinyl, eight track, cassette tape, compact disc or Spotify.But wrangling a definitive account of her life struck a nerve for Cher. There were dark corners to explore and 78 years of material to sift through. And — this might have been the hardest part — she had to make peace with the fact that her most personal stories will soon be in the hands of scores of readers.“This book has exhausted me,” she said of the first volume of her two-part eponymous memoir, out on Nov. 19. “It took a lot out of me.”“Cher” is a gutsy account of tenacity and perseverance: Cher’s childhood was unstable. Her marriage to Sonny Bono had devastating aftershocks. The book is also a cultural history packed with strong opinions, boldface names and head-spinning throwbacks: Cher’s first concert was Elvis. Her first movie was “Dumbo.” (She was so rapt, she wet her pants.) One of the first cars she drove was a ’57 Chevy stolen from her boyfriend.On the page, Cher’s voice reverberates with the grit and depth that made her famous.“I learned early that most adults were unpredictable, so I couldn’t count on them and had to be constantly vigilant,” Cher writes of her parents, pictured here in New Mexico in the 1950s.via CherWe 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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    Shel Talmy, Who Produced the Who and the Kinks, Dies at 87

    Though he was American, he helped define the sound of the British Invasion after settling in London in the early 1960s.Shel Talmy, a Chicago-born record producer who helped unleash the id of the British Invasion with a raw, grinding sound on proto-punk salvos like “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks and “My Generation” by the Who, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.His death was announced on his Facebook page, where he had been sharing reminiscences about many of his past recordings with a long list of acts, which also included Manfred Mann, Chad & Jeremy, the Easybeats and a teenage David Bowie, who at the time was using his given surname, Jones.Mr. Talmy’s climb to the top of the British music scene actually began in Los Angeles, where he had lived since his teens. In 1962, he was working as a recording engineer at a studio in Hollywood when he headed for London for what he expected would be a five-week vacation, hoping he might scrape together enough work there to pay for the trip.Before he left, his friend Nick Venet, who produced the Beach Boys for Capitol Records, offered him the acetates of some of his hit records to help Mr. Talmy drum up work. In a 2012 interview with Finding Zoso, a fan site devoted to the Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, whom Mr. Talmy used on many sessions, he recalled that Mr. Venet had told him: “Help yourself to my discs, whatever you want to use you can use. You can tell them it was yours.”Once in London, Mr. Talmy passed off hit records like “Surfin’ Safari” as his own in a meeting with Dick Rowe of Decca Records. “I thought, what the hell,” he said in an interview with the music writer Richie Unterberger, “I’m not going to be here long. I might as well be as brash as possible.” By the end of the meeting, he said, Mr. Rowe had told him, “You start next week.”Mr. Talmy had already notched his first hit, “Charmaine,” a country-inflected number by the Irish vocal trio the Bachelors, when his ruse became obvious. But by that point he was on his way.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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    Prosecutors Accuse Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs of Trying to Contact Witnesses From Jail

    The government said the music mogul had been attempting to obstruct federal prosecutors by instructing others to make three-way calls and securing help from other inmates.Prosecutors accused Sean Combs of continuing efforts to obstruct the federal racketeering and sex trafficking case against him from a Brooklyn jail, alleging in court papers filed on Friday night that the music mogul had been trying to evade government monitoring by seeking to arrange three-way phone calls and to buy the use of other inmates’s phone privileges.The government’s account came a week before another hearing to decide whether Mr. Combs would be granted release on bail. Since September, he has been incarcerated at Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, inside a special housing unit where high-profile inmates are often assigned.In the court filing, the government accused Mr. Combs of “relentless efforts” to contact potential witnesses, including by attempting to use three-way calls to contact associates whom prosecutors consider part of his “criminal enterprise.” Prosecutors also accused Mr. Combs of making unauthorized calls by using the telephone accounts of at least eight other inmates, instructing others to pay them — sometimes through their commissary accounts — to secure their cooperation.“The defendant has demonstrated an uncanny ability to get others to do his bidding — employees, family members, and M.D.C. inmates alike,” prosecutors wrote.Details of the recipients and substance of the phone calls were redacted in the court documents. The calls generated using other inmates’ privileges were not identified as being directed at witnesses, but prosecutors said they were evidence of Mr. Combs’s disregard for the jail’s regulations and were part of what they described as obstruction efforts.Representatives for Mr. Combs, who is known as Diddy, did not immediately respond to the allegations about Mr. Combs’s communications. He has pleaded not guilty and vehemently denied the criminal charges, arguing that the drug-fueled sexual encounters called “freak offs” at the heart of his case were all consensual.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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    Shaboozey Seeks ‘Good News’ in Another Bar, and 7 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Yola, Julia Holter, Angel Olsen 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.Shaboozey, ‘Good News’On his new single, “Good News,” Shaboozey doesn’t stray far from the basics of his No. 1, Grammy-nominated hit, “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” Once again he leans into his troubles with a guitar-strumming verse, a chorus with hearty male singalongs and a familiar setting; the singer is “the man at the bar confessing his sins.” But this time, there’s no consolation, not even temporary, in whiskey and dancing. The chorus is rowdy but there’s no happy ending; the good news he needs never arrives. JON PARELESYola, ‘Symphony’The English vocal powerhouse Yola spells out her pleasure principle on “Symphony,” a funky, upbeat celebration of sensuality that will appear on her forthcoming EP, “My Way.” “Play my heartstrings with both your hands,” she commands, “and I’ll sing like a symphony for you.” Then, on a passionately belted bridge, she makes good on her word. ZOLADZSalute and Jessie Ware, ‘Heaven in Your Arms’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