Aurelia Butler

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    Coming Soon to Trump’s Kennedy Center: A Celebration of Christ

    President Trump took control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington only last week. But his administration is already making plans for reshaping the institution’s programming.Chief among them: a celebration of Christ planned for December. Richard Grenell, whom Mr. Trump named as the Kennedy Center’s new president, told a conservative gathering on Friday that the “big change” at the center would be that “we are doing a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas.”“How crazy is it to think that we’re going to celebrate Christ at Christmas with a big traditional production, to celebrate what we are all celebrating in the world during Christmastime, which is the birth of Christ?” Mr. Grenell said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md.The Kennedy Center has long held Christmas-themed events.Last December, the center hosted “A Candlelight Christmas” by the Washington Chorus; “A Family Christmas” by the Choral Arts Society of Washington; and “Go Tell It,” a Christmas celebration by the Alfred Street Baptist Church, a prominent Black church in Virginia. (On Sunday, the church said it would cancel its Christmas concert there this year because the Kennedy Center’s new leaders stood in opposition to the “longstanding tradition of honoring artistic expression across all backgrounds.”)Mr. Grenell’s comments were his first public remarks in which he discussed his plans as the Kennedy Center’s new leader. His appointment was part of a series of extraordinary actions Mr. Trump took to solidify control over the Kennedy Center, which has been a bipartisan institution throughout its 54-year history.Mr. Trump, who stayed away from the Kennedy Center Honors during his first term after some of the artists being honored criticized him, stunned the cultural world when he decided this month to purge the center’s board of all Biden appointees and install himself as chairman, ousting the financier David M. Rubenstein, the center’s largest donor. The new board fired Deborah F. Rutter, the center’s president for more than a decade, and the post was given to Mr. Grenell, a Trump loyalist who was ambassador to Germany during the president’s first term.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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    Tate McRae Dances in and Out of Love, and 10 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Ledisi, Perfume Genius featuring Aldous Harding, Smerz 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.Tate McRae, ‘Revolving Door’A lack of instantly recognizable, stylistically defining hits — aside from the slinky, irresistible 2023 smash “Greedy” — has somehow not stopped the 21-year-old singer and dancer Tate McCrae’s star from rising over the past few years. She dips into a more promising and vulnerable sound on the moody, pulsating “Revolving Door,” the latest single from her just-released third album, “So Close to What.” “I keep coming back like a revolving door,” she sings on a chorus that thumps like an anxious heartbeat, “saying I couldn’t want you less, but I just want you more.” A McCrae single is still only as good as the choreography in its accompanying music video, and by that measure, it’s one of her strongest yet. LINDSAY ZOLADZPerfume Genius featuring Aldous Harding, ‘No Front Teeth’Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) and Aldous Harding share “No Front Teeth,” a surreal excursion that seesaws between pretty folk-Baroque pop and noisy, neo-psychedelic rock. Perfume Genius sings about being shattered; Harding answers him with a high, angelic call for “better days.” The video just adds more layers to the conundrum. JON PARELESHurray for the Riff Raff, ‘Pyramid Scheme’On this heartfelt one-off single, Alynda Segarra returns to the gentle folk-rock sound they honed on “The Past Is Still Alive,” the excellent album they released last year as Hurray for the Riff Raff. “This is not a scene, it’s a pyramid scheme,” they sing, pointing to a larger feeling of social collapse that, as the song progresses, dovetails with personal struggle. “I don’t know who you want me to be,” Segarra sings. “And I don’t know, and that terrifies me.” ZOLADZSleigh Bells, ‘Bunky Pop’The latest blast from the Sleigh Bells album due in April, “Bunky Becky Birthday Boy,” memorializes Alexis Krauss’s dog, who died in 2023. “Nights are long here without you,” she sings. But the song is manic and upbeat, swerving from electro to power-chorded pop, with eruptions of thrash drumming and tangents of dissonance — mourning by celebrating. PARELESMamalarky, ‘#1 Best of All Time’Mamalarky makes musicianly antics sound nonchalant on its new album, “Hex Key.” The singer and guitarist Livvy Bennett breezes through the self-satisfaction of “#1 Best of All Time,” declaring, “I always win even when I fall.” Her voice stays casual (and doesn’t worry about being a little flat) while the beat hurtles ahead and the chords take unlikely chromatic turns. The biggest boast is making it sound so easy. PARELESWe 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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    Jerry Butler, Singer Known as the Iceman, Dies at 85

    Jerry Butler, the graceful singer and songwriter who served as the first leader of the Impressions before launching a long, hit-heavy solo career, died on Thursday at his home in Chicago. He was 85.His death was confirmed by his assistant, who said that Mr. Butler had Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Butler’s resounding baritone voice, though gritty in timbre, was animated by gentility and charm; he approached a lyric with an almost courtly level of sensitivity. His poise explained, in part, how he came to be known as the Iceman.Mr. Butler scored his first hit in 1958 with “For Your Precious Love,” a song he recorded with the Impressions and wrote with two other members of the group. It reached No. 11 on Billboard’s pop chart. Its lyrics stressed perseverance and loyalty, themes Mr. Butler would revisit throughout his career.Immediately after leaving the group in 1960, he reached the Billboard Top 10 with “He Will Break Your Heart,” which he wrote with his bandmate Curtis Mayfield and Calvin Carter. The song proved durable: A reworked version by Tony Orlando and Dawn, “He Don’t Love You (Like I Love You),” would become a No. 1 hit more than a decade later.Mr. Butler’s version of “Moon River,” the Henry Mancini-Johnny Mercer song from the movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” climbed to No. 11 on the pop chart in 1961. The next year, his interpretation of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Make It Easy on Yourself” reached No. 20.Two years later, he reached the Top 10 again with “Let It Be Me,” a duet with Betty Everett. It performed even better than the Everly Brothers’ version, widely considered a classic: The Butler-Everett version reached No. 5, two points higher than the Everlys had reached in 1960.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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    A Playlist Packed With Crossword Clues

    Sia! Abba! ELO! Let us help you solve some puzzles with this compilation of songs by crossword-famous musicians.Sia, pictured without cheap thrills.Kevin Winter/BBMA2020, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,In 2012, shortly after the death of the legendary blues musician Etta James, the writer Matt Gaffney provided a somewhat unconventional eulogy on the website Slate, remembering James as “a woman whose handy, four-letter first name has gotten us out of many tough corners and spared us countless painful rewrites.”Gaffney is a crossword puzzle writer, and in this article he amusingly defined a specific type of renown: James was a perfect example of someone who was “crossword-famous.”If you do enough crossword puzzles (as I certainly do; shout out to my esteemed colleagues in The New York Times Games department for enabling my habit), you start to see certain names over and over. (Brian) Eno. (Yoko) Ono. And yes, Etta (James). Why these and not others? Gaffney explained, “short groupings of common letters are the lifeblood of crosswords, and you’ll need a lot of them if you want to make things work. For that reason, crossword-famous names are likely to be three, four or five letters long, with as many 1-point Scrabble letters as possible.”Today’s playlist is a compilation of songs by crossword-famous musicians. You’ll hear the aforementioned Eno, Ono and Etta, as well as a few more recent entrants into the pantheon of crossword fame: Sia, Adele and Ariana Grande. A certain Guthrie is also on this playlist, though avid crossword solvers know that the most famous folk singer with that last name is not necessarily the most crossword-famous.If you’re new to the art of solving crossword puzzles, I hope today’s playlist gives you some pointers — along with some enjoyable tunes. And if you’re more of an advanced puzzler who doesn’t pay much attention to popular music, this playlist should teach you a thing or two. Grab a pencil (or if you’re feeling especially confident, a pen), load up today’s New York Times crossword and press play.I feel like I win when I lose,LindsayWe 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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    At the Berlin Film Festival, Anxious Movies for Dark Times

    At the Berlin International Film Festival, the onscreen mood was downbeat, but the program still held some gems.The skies are typically gray and gloomy at the Berlin International Film Festival, but this year’s edition, which runs through Sunday, began with snow for days. The wintry weather gave the event — known as the Berlinale — a magical glow at first, but it wasn’t enough to keep the demons at bay. Looming over the festival were anxieties over the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, as well as the upcoming German elections. The films also radiated an air of shame, despair and powerlessness, asking: How to trust ourselves to make the world better when we’ve already screwed up so spectacularly?Tom Tykwer’s visually dazzling, but comically misguided liberal drama, “The Light,” opened the event last week, submitting festivalgoers to 162 minutes of angst and attrition (and one too many “Bohemian Rhapsody” needle drops) about a German family spiritually cleansed by their Syrian housekeeper.For many of us on the ground, however, the first real epic-of-interest was the “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho’s science-fiction caper “Mickey 17” — a film that induces nervous laughter about society’s abysmal moral standards. In this high-concept action movie with a zany dark heart, labor exploitation hits a new low when workers, or at least their physical forms, become literally disposable. Robert Pattinson stars as one such “expendable,” a dopey spaceman whose co-workers treat him like a lab-rat, knowing that his body can be reprinted.A scene from “Mickey 17.”BerlinaleBong’s bids at timeliness are staler than usual. (Mark Ruffalo plays a grandstanding demagogue whose followers wear red caps.) But the film’s dull political edge doesn’t diminish the joy ride’s momentum, nor the flashes of genuine weirdness that keep us guessing. If, god willing, superhero movies are destined to go the way of the dodo, “Mickey 17” is a reminder that directors like Bong keep the dream of the blockbuster alive.President Trump’s ramped-up campaign of mass deportations infiltrated my viewing of Michel Franco’s “Dreams,” a competition entry that filled me with much ambivalence, but also moved and infuriated me. This intentionally provocative psychodrama by one of Mexico’s most divisive directors sees Jessica Chastain as a tightly wound philanthropist from San Francisco who has a tempestuous relationship with an undocumented ballet dancer from Mexico — whom we first see, like the survivor at the end of a brutal horror film, emerging from a van full of smuggled migrants.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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    Seong-Jin Cho Tackles a Ravel Piano Marathon in New York

    Performing in New York, Seong-Jin Cho presented a marathon survey of Ravel’s solo piano works and appeared in Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto.A skilled musician can play pretty much anything. But notes on the page of a score are just a starting point. Beyond that, what makes an artist well suited to a specific sound or style? Age? Personality? Experience?These are complicated, elusive questions that loomed over the young pianist Seong-Jin Cho’s recent appearances in New York. Earlier this month, he played a marathon of Ravel’s complete solo piano works at Carnegie Hall, and on Thursday he joined the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall as the soloist in Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. (The program continues through Saturday.)If these concerts share anything, it’s sheer athleticism. The Ravel survey makes for a three-hour evening of intense focus and finger work; the Prokofiev concerto probably crams the same amount of notes into about 35 minutes.The similarities end there, though. And it’s in the differences that Cho revealed the state of his artistry at 30, a decade on from his career-making first prize at the International Chopin Piano Competition.There was a remarkable difference, too, between his readings of the Ravel works in concert and his recording of the same material, released on Deutsche Grammophon last month to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. (A related album of his, of Ravel’s two piano concertos with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, came out on Friday.) His interpretations of these wide-ranging pieces were freer and more expressive at Carnegie; it would be interesting to hear Cho revisit them again.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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    Watch Austin Butler in Battle in ‘Dune: Part Two’

    The director Denis Villeneuve narrates a sequence from his film, which is nominated for five Academy Awards, including best picture.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two,” much like the first film, is loaded with ambitious sequences. But one of the stark visual standouts is this battle scene in the Harkonnen arena, where Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), for his birthday celebration, is pitted against a group of enslaved men.The sequence is rendered in heightened black andwhite. Narrating the scene, Villeneuve said he wanted to create a specific kind of atmosphere for the planet Giedi Prime, in which the Harkonnen have destroyed a lot of their natural resources. He said, “As my cinematographer, Greig Fraser, and I were brainstorming together how to bring an alien sunlight that would be black and white to the screen, Greig had the idea to test infrared.”The filmmaker said that infrared is usually blocked from cameras because it is considered noise. But in this case, they “modified the cameras to let only that wavelength come through.” The result is the atmosphere Villeneuve said he was dreaming of, one in which “we see almost through skin. The eyes become piercing like insects.”Read the “Dune: Part Two” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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    Five Free Movies to Stream Now

    Don’t overlook ad-supported platforms like Tubi, Plex and PlutoTV. They’re surprising repositories for great films like “Gunda” and “Farha.”Maybe Big Tech hasn’t delivered on its disruptive promise for movies after all: We’ve cut our cable cords for price and convenience only to pay just as much (if not more) to jump through hoops and across platforms, with diminishing returns in quality.But there’s always good work being made. This new column, then, is not about free stuff, but about discovery. It’s a curation of good and great films on free, ad-supported platforms like Tubi, Plex and Pluto TV that often fall through the cracks of our numbingly plentiful, overly content-ified entertainment complexes.This inaugural column’s picks take us from a small farm to a cramped Japanese apartment, from a restaurant kitchen to an urgent historical record of memory. These are movies that you can watch, contend with and ponder for free.‘Gunda’ (2020)Stream it on Tubi.An undersung trend in recent movies is the artful animal picture, from “EO” (about a donkey) to “First Cow” (a cow) to “Cow” (you get it). “Gunda” is perhaps the simplest and quietest of them all, but somehow contains a stirring, stealthily profound inquiry into human and animal nature.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