Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 150 Shares183 Views

    in Music

    Nino Tempo, Who Topped the Charts With ‘Deep Purple,’ Dies at 90

    He was a busy session saxophonist, but he is probably best known for the Grammy-winning pop hit that he sang in 1963 as half of a duo act with his sister, April Stevens.Nino Tempo, an accomplished tenor saxophonist whose harmonious foray into pop singing with his sister, April Stevens, produced a chart-topping, Grammy-winning version of “Deep Purple” in 1963, died on April 10 at his home in West Hollywood, Calif. He was 90.The death was confirmed on Tuesday by his friend Jim Chaffin.Mr. Tempo’s career traced an early arc of pop music, from big-band jazz to the rise of rock and funk, before boomeranging back to jazz in the 1990s. As a child he sang with Benny Goodman’s orchestra; he later played saxophone on records by Bobby Darin and Frank Sinatra; and he released a funk album, with a studio band called Nino Tempo & 5th Ave. Sax, during the genre’s ascent in the 1970s.But to many aficionados of 1960s pop music, what rings out in memory is his harmonizing with his sister on “Deep Purple,” a jazz standard originally written for piano by Peter DeRose, with lyrics later added by Mitchell Parish.“Deep Purple” was recorded in 14 minutes and originally considered “unreleasable” by Atlantic Records executives, Mr. Tempo recalled. It was released in September 1963 and reached No. 1 two months later.Atco, via Vinyls/AlamyThe song, given a laid-back arrangement by Mr. Tempo and played by a studio ensemble that included Glen Campbell on guitar, was recorded in just 14 minutes at the end of a session produced by Ahmet Ertegun, a founder of Atlantic Records, who had signed Mr. Tempo and Ms. Stevens to his Atco Records imprint.In one part of “Deep Purple,” Ms. Stevens speaks the refrain and Mr. Tempo sings it back in falsetto:“When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls/And the stars begin to twinkle in the night/In the mist of a memory, you wander back to me/Breathing my name with a sigh.”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

  • 150 Shares178 Views

    in Movies

    Robert E. McGinnis, Illustrator Behind Classic ‘James Bond’ Posters, Dies at 99

    Robert E. McGinnis, an illustrator whose lusty, photorealistic artwork of curvaceous women adorned more than 1,200 pulp paperbacks, as well as classic movie posters for “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” featuring Audrey Hepburn with a cigarette holder, and James Bond adventures including “Thunderball,” died on March 10 at his home in Old Greenwich, Conn. He was 99.His family confirmed the death.Mr. McGinnis’s female figures from the 1960s and ’70s flaunted a bold sexuality, often in a state of semi undress, whether on the covers of detective novels by John D. MacDonald or on posters for movies like “Barbarella” (1968), with a bikini-clad Jane Fonda, or Bond films starring Sean Connery and Roger Moore.1968‘Barbarella’Paramount, via Corbis/Getty ImagesBeginning in 1958, he painted book covers for espionage, crime, Western, fantasy and other genre series — generally cheap paperbacks meant to grab a male reader’s eye in a drugstore, only to be quickly read and discarded.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

  • 113 Shares178 Views

    in Music

    Playboi Carti and His Offspring Ponder Life After Rage-Rap

    As rap continues to move in chaotic directions, the Atlanta M.C. Ken Carson and the electro-pop singer 2hollis are harnessing the power of music that moves bodies.What does it mean that the most meaningful and galvanic artist in contemporary rap music often appears to be retreating from the throne?Playboi Carti recently released his fourth full-length release, “Music,” which has spent most of the last month atop the Billboard album chart. “Music,” which aggregates 30 songs even if it doesn’t quite stitch them together, is a vivid of-the-moment document of the ways hip-hop has been splintering, lyrically and musically, over the past few years.Carti is a deconstructionist, the latest in a line of Atlanta rappers taking the genre in increasingly chaotic directions. He’s maybe the truest and loudest exponent of the post-Drake realignment of hip-hop — indebted to Travis Scott’s amplified yelps, the skittishness of several microgenerations of SoundCloud rap, the growth of rap festival culture and its emphasis on physicality, and the way fans on the internet now aggregate around obscurity as much as ubiquity.For these tumultuous times, Carti is a king, even if he’s more often in hiding from than courting the spotlight. “Music” is a reflection of his ambivalence about that fate. In part, it’s a doubling down on the things that have made him so special — vocal tics, insistent shards of rhyme, a sense that he’s retreating even as he’s moving forward. But it also reflects his growing profile and the obligations, or at least opportunities, that come with it, with the addition of several well-known guests.Playboi Carti’s latest music reflects the growth of rap festival culture and its emphasis on physicality.Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressWhereas his last album, the scene-defining “Whole Lotta Red” from 2020, had a single-mindedness that verged on hardcore, “Music” is less focused, and attempts to solve several problems at once.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

  • 125 Shares112 Views

    in Movies

    ‘The Ugly Stepsister’ Review: Nipped, Tucked and Royally Fussed Over

    This deliciously nasty reworking of the Cinderella fairy tale imagines how far one of the stepsisters would go to marry her prince.During the opening credits of “The Ugly Stepsister,” the camera pans slowly across an abandoned wedding feast, the food gooey and gluttonous. The aging groom has dropped dead and his new wife, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), has learned that the fortune she expected does not exist. Instead, she has acquired a stunning stepdaughter, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess), and the immediate need for a replacement benefactor.To that end, Rebekka’s elder daughter, Elvira (Lea Myren), must marry the picture-book Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth). Unlike Agnes, Elvira is gawky and gauche, her teeth wrapped in metal braces and her body less than lithe. But with the help of a cocaine-snorting plastic surgeon (Adam Lundgren), she can be remade in time for the grand ball where Julian will choose his bride. All that’s needed is a hammer, a chisel and a hungry tapeworm.Like last year’s “The Substance,” this fleshy folk horror forces us to look — in unsparing, often revolting close-up — at the physical agony of aesthetic conformity. Yet the movie, adapted by the Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt from the Cinderella story, is the opposite of didactic: Slyly funny and visually captivating (the luscious cinematography is by Marcel Zyskind), its scenes move with ease from gross to gorgeous, and from grotesque to magical. One minute, a tribe of maggots is feasting on the expired groom’s rotting corpse; the next, they’re weaving a silken ball gown.And oh, those gowns! Designed by Manon Rasmussen (a favorite of Lars von Trier), the film’s costumes are delicious. At the ball, mothers display their preening, bedazzled daughters like show dogs; but the camera’s real interest lies in the flesh beneath the finery, in the plump swellings of belly and buttocks and the defenseless innocence of soon-to-be-chopped toes.Contrasting the freshness of youth with the decay of a world where beauty is the only currency and romance an illusion, “The Ugly Stepsister” strikes gold in Myren’s extraordinary performance. As Elvira’s dreams are dashed and her body mutilated, we feel for her: Like all of us, she just wants to be loved. And, of course, rich.The Ugly StepsisterNot rated. In Norwegian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

  • 150 Shares187 Views

    in Music

    Gloria Gaynor Hit Hard Times After ‘I Will Survive.’ Now She’s Back.

    The disco queen was in the doldrums before she decided to take control of her life and career. Now, at 81, she’s reaping the rewards.Seated on a piano bench in her bright, contemporary home in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Gloria Gaynor was talking over plans for her next concert.For years, she said, she stood alone onstage, singing over prerecorded audio tracks. No more. At the upcoming show, Ms. Gaynor, 81, would be performing with a 10-piece ensemble that included a horn section and a trio of background singers — a level of professionalism she insists on in her contract.“Gloria Gaynor is a luxury item,” she said. “Either you can afford her or you can’t.”It has taken Ms. Gaynor a lifetime to deliver such a diva line. The singer who became the embodiment of standing up for yourself — thanks to her signature anthem, “I Will Survive” — said she struggled for years with low self-esteem. As a result, she ended up adrift.Since making the decision to take charge of her life and career, she has finally become a match for the self-assured vocalist heard on so many recordings, including her latest single, “Fida Known,” a song that harks back to disco’s golden years while sounding very much of the moment.“I feel like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon,” Ms. Gaynor said.Born Gloria Fowles, she was raised in a large family in Newark. She didn’t know her father, a nightclub singer. Her mother, whom everybody called Queenie May, was a big-hearted, blunt-speaking woman with a beautiful voice. At age twelve, Ms. Gaynor was molested by one of her mother’s boyfriends, she has said in interviews. She kept the abuse a secret for decades, including from the readers of her 1995 memoir, “Soul Survivor.”When Ms. Gaynor was a teenager, her mother recognized that she had real talent when she heard her singing the jazz standard “Lullaby of the Leaves.” Queenie May gave her daughter plenty of encouragement back when she was working a string of day jobs while singing in clubs at night, but she didn’t live to see her grand success. She died of lung cancer in 1970, when Ms. Gaynor was 27 and still struggling to make a name for herself.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

  • 88 Shares112 Views

    in Music

    The Hype at Coachella This Year? Billboards.

    By most accounts, the 130-mile drive from Los Angeles to the first weekend of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival last week was hot, congested and generally unpleasant.But there has been at least one bright spot for the 200,000 or so dehydrated, impatient and aggrieved fans who make the trek for one or both of the three-day events each year: clever billboards.Artists have advertised their sets on the giant placards that dot the route into Indio, Calif., for years. But the 2025 event reached critical mass, in terms of quantity and creativity.“This year was an absolute explosion,” said Morgan Rose, a director of client partnerships at Wilkins Media, who has been doling out highly coveted space on the boards since last fall. “Eleven months out of the year they are completely worthless,” he added.But not this one.Those who bother to look out the windows while slogging down the 10 East may see a billboard for Charli XCX that features her signature shade of green and wonder, “Why did she cross out ‘Brat?’” Or one for Tyla, who is all wet, asking “Got water?” Or one informing all comers in all-caps, “It’s Pronounced Djo.”“Not particularly helpful,” Djo’s manager, Nick Stern, conceded. (The artist in question is the actor Joe Keery, who put out his third album this month.) “But it does lead people to ask and go look.”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

  • 100 Shares140 Views

    in Movies

    ‘The Wedding Banquet’ Review: The Family You Find

    A retelling of Ang Lee’s classic of queer cinema comes at the same farcical situation in a new way.Though it’s as modern as can be, there’s a touch of something Shakespearean about “The Wedding Banquet.” The plot, on paper, is just straight-up farce: Trying to solve a complicated set of problems, a lesbian agrees to marry her best friend’s boyfriend — but then his grandmother comes to town, intending to throw them a huge traditional celebration.That premise is a 21st-century twist on Ang Lee’s 1993 queer classic, written by James Schamus. In that film, a Taiwanese American man marries his female tenant, rather than his own male partner, both to hide his real relationship from his parents and to help her get a green card. This version, directed by Andrew Ahn and written by Ahn and Schamus, gets more knotty, mostly because same-sex marriage is now legal in the United States, so the characters face a different series of snags. Both films explore how someone from a traditional Asian family navigates queer identity, highlighting the comedy and discomfort and discovery that result when cultures collide. But in this new “Wedding Banquet,” the focus shifts too.In this story, Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone) are deeply in love, living in the Seattle house that Lee inherited from her mother. Angela’s mother (Joan Chen) is an exuberant ally to Seattle’s queer community, in a manner so performative that it seems like she might be making up for something. The pair are feeling the strain as Lee tries to conceive through a second round of expensive in vitro fertilization. When it doesn’t work, they start to give up hope: They just don’t have the money for a third round, and Lee is beginning to wonder if her age has something to do with it.Their lives are tightly entwined with those of Angela’s best friend, Chris (Bowen Yang), and his artist boyfriend, Min (Han Gi-Chan), who live in a guesthouse in Lee and Angela’s backyard. Min also happens to be the wealthy heir to a large corporation that his grandmother (Yuh-Jung Youn) expects him to run. He does not wish to do this. He could escape it if he had a way to renew his visa, and thus he proposes to Chris. But Chris is scared of commitment, and so Min, desperate to avoid his fate, concocts a plan.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

  • 88 Shares187 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Sinners’ Review: Ryan Coogler’s Southern Horror Fantasia

    The director goes boldly out there in his fifth feature, a genre-defying, mind-bending shoot-em-up that stars Michael B. Jordan as twins.Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” is a big-screen exultation — a passionate, effusive praise song about life and love, including the love of movies. Set in Jim Crow Mississippi, it is a genre-defying, mind-bending fantasia overflowing with great performances, dancing vampires and a lot of ideas about love and history. Here, when a Black musician plays the blues at a juke joint, he isn’t just performing for jubilant men and women. He is also singing to the history that flows through them from generations of ancestors to others not yet born. Like Coogler, the musician is a kind of time traveler, blasting off into horizonless possibilities.Few American filmmakers in recent memory have risen with the dizzying speed of Coogler, who a decade ago vaulted to attention with “Creed,” his franchise rethink that took the “Rocky” series off life support. With his ensuing “Black Panther” superhero movies, Coogler rose higher still, proving that he could retain both a distinct aesthetic sensibility and a sense of human proportion (and stakes) even in the Marvel movie factory. His vision of Wakanda, the otherworldly country that the Black Panther calls home, works in part because of its far-out visions and technological wonders. Yet if it’s persuasive it’s because in Coogler’s Wakanda, you are also never far from the reality that’s roiling right outside the cinematic frame.That reality is even more vividly present in the dusty roads and bustling vibrancy of “Sinners,” which takes place in 1932 in and around Clarksdale, Miss., a Delta town tucked in the northwest corner of the state. There, amid endless fields of cotton, Sammie (the appealing newcomer Miles Caton), a sweetly sincere son of a preacher man, yearns to play music. He gets a break when his cousins, the identical twins Smoke and Stack — both played with luminous feeling by Michael B. Jordan — transform a derelict building into a juke joint. There, Sammie all but burns the place down with his resonant voice and twangy dobro, a guitar with a provenance as devilish as that of the bluesman Robert Johnson.Coogler, who also wrote the screenplay, gets his game on early in “Sinners,” which opens with a grabber of a scene and a dazed, bloodied Sammie bursting into his father’s church mid-sermon, a jaggedly broken-off guitar neck clutched in one hand. A few beats later and the story skips back to the recent past. Such temporal scrambling is overused; presumably because “Citizen Kane” continues to cast its shadow over film schools. But as intros go, this one is enough of a question mark to stir your curiosity, which only intensifies with the entrance of Smoke and Stack, syncopated dandies with high style and a heavy past, who’ve endured war, survived Al Capone’s Chicago and held fast to smoldering romances.Smoke and Stack are two sides of the same charismatic coin; it’s hard not to see the filmmaker and his star in similar terms. The first time you see the twins they’re waiting on the building’s owner. Stack has on a sharp reddish fedora and tie, a handkerchief neatly tucked in a breast pocket. There’s a hint of gold in his ready smile, and more than a suggestion of malice. His brother is wearing a blue cap and soon dragging on a cigarette, tendrils of smoke wafting across his sterner, more melancholic face. The effect of these lookalikes is lightly destabilizing, and when Stack leans across to light Smoke’s cigarette, you may find yourself leaning toward the screen, mesmerized by the synchronicity of bodies and digital wizardry.Once the twins seal the deal, the other narrative pieces begin falling in place. There are many, some of which fit together better than others. Delroy Lindo shows up as another bluesman, Delta Slim, as do Li Jun Li and Yao as the grocer wife and husband, Grace and Bo Chow. Each brother reconnects with an old lover — Smoke with Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Stack with Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) — mirrored romances that never line up as neatly as Coogler seems to intend. Annie breaks your heart; Mary works your nerves. That would be less of a problem if Mary, a woman with a fraught identity, wasn’t burdened with so much symbolism. Mosaku, by contrast, is playing a flesh-and-blood woman, not a conceit, and her reunion with Jordan’s Smoke is so beautifully felt (and smokin’ hot) it deepens the emotional texture.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