Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 100 Shares154 Views

    in Music

    6 (Up-tempo) New Songs You Should Hear Now

    Get your blood pumping with the latest tracks from Chappell Roan, J Noa, Illuminati Hotties and more.Chappell RoanMario Anzuoni/ReutersDear listeners,It’s Lindsay’s editor, Caryn, here to kick off a round of guest newsletters with around 19 minutes of upbeat music from March. (If you missed Friday’s newsletter celebrating The Amplifier’s second birthday, a reminder that Lindsay will be taking a few months away to work on a book. The Amp will still arrive every Tuesday.)I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I sequence the Friday Playlists that provide the raw material for these monthly entries spotlighting new music, and one of my big challenges is tempo: With the critics Jon Pareles and Lindsay picking so many different types of tracks, folding them into a coherent mix is not always a cinch.So I’m cheating a little today, choosing a selection of songs at what I’ll call “walking in Manhattan” pace. (Whatever the Google Maps estimate is, I can beat it.) This rundown could provide some rapid strolling music, or maybe soundtrack a cycle on the treadmill accompanied by some spirited air guitar-ing. Either way, trust that this six-pack of songs is a worthy addition to your 2025 collection.Work it,CarynListen along while you read.1. J Noa and Lowlight: “Traficando Rap”The Dominican rapper J Noa spits at breakneck speed in Spanish, and it’s a lot of fun trying to keep up with her. This track, on which she pairs with her producer Lowlight, contains boasts comparing her rhymes to other addictive substances over horn blasts that, as Jon Pareles wrote, “hark back to Sugar Hill Gang’s ‘Apache’ and its source, the Incredible Bongo Band’s version of ‘Apache.’” The 19-year-old sounds bold and gleeful, “la-la-la”ing along to a head-spinner of a beat.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

  • 138 Shares183 Views

    in Music

    Girls to the Front: Punk Pioneers Are Coming to Lincoln Center

    The institution’s annual American Songbook series honors “singer outsiders” including Fanny and Poly Styrene in events curated by Kathleen Hanna and Tamar-kali.For more than 65 years, Lincoln Center has hosted virtuoso concert musicians, opera singers and ballet stars.But a noise queen with ripped tights and a screeching guitar?Enter Kathleen Hanna and Tamar-kali, musicians with big bootprints in the punk scene, and curators of the latest iteration of Lincoln Center’s venerable American Songbook series. Their version honors “singer outsiders,” which includes a series of concerts and tributes to acts like the Slits, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex and more, this month and next. It’s the first time Lincoln Center has celebrated the raw, propulsive D.I.Y. genre of punk, let alone the women who kicked their way through.The idea was to introduce an uptown audience to “our canon,” as Hanna, the Bikini Kill and Le Tigre frontwoman, and riot grrrl originator, put it. They booked contemporary artists to showcase punk’s elasticity, and to highlight styles that have historically been overlooked.“As a songwriter, there’s a lot of delegitimizing of aggressive music,” Tamar-kali said. But curating for Lincoln Center offered validation: “It just feels like I’m real musician now,” Hanna said, and they both laughed.Tamar-kali, a Brooklyn singer and composer (born Tamar-kali Brown), helped found the New York collective Sista Grrrl Riot, an outlet for feminist Afropunk, in the late ’90s; she and Hanna met in the early aughts and have been seeking ways to work together since.“As a songwriter, there’s a lot of delegitimizing of aggressive music,” said Tamar-kali, one of the series’ curators.Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesWe 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 Shares117 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Being Maria’ Review: The Muse’s Side of the Story

    Starring Anamaria Vartolomei and Matt Dillon, this French drama chronicles the life of the actress Maria Schneider after her traumatic experience on the set of “Last Tango in Paris.”When it comes to telling stories about the victims of abuse, filmmakers are often faced with a dilemma: to show or not show the act of violence. Showing could mean exploiting the victim’s pain to satisfy viewers’ curiosity; not showing could mean hedging around a hard truth.Jessica Palud’s “Being Maria” — a biopic of Maria Schneider, a French actress perhaps best known for playing the mistress of Marlon Brando’s character in “Last Tango in Paris” — chooses to show.In 1972, when the 19-year-old Schneider was shooting one of the film’s many sex scenes, Brando (with the director Bernardo Bertolucci’s blessing) improvised without telling her his intentions, using a stick of butter to perform what on-screen looks like anal penetration.“Being Maria” recreates the scene — and it’s a tough watch. Anamaria Vartolomei, who plays Schneider, conveys shock, discomfort, fear and shame in distressing close-ups. When the scene cuts, Brando (Matt Dillon), who had previously been chummy with Maria, looks sheepish. Bertolucci (Giuseppe Maggio) is unapologetic; he tells Maria the scene was meant to be intense.Loosely adapted from the memoir “My Cousin Maria Schneider,” by Vanessa Schneider, the film doesn’t stick around too long on Bertolucci’s set. Benjamin Biolay’s treacly string score adds an unsavory sentimental touch, but the rest of the film is quite sober as it moves through the decade of Schneider’s life after “Last Tango.”Showing how Schneider’s trauma festered over time — and eventually calloused over — the film moodily weaves together scenes of her struggles with addiction, nights at the discothèque and experiences on other movie sets, relying on Vartolomei’s edgy, delicate performance to signal Maria’s underlying anxieties. If the meandering nature of the film makes the psychic fallout seem tonally scattered, it nevertheless conveys the sense that she’s sleepwalking through life — and always fighting to snap out of it.Being MariaNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

  • 125 Shares126 Views

    in Music

    How the Dutch National Opera Is Trying to Go Green

    Opera is an art form made of other art forms: music, theater, dance, visual art, film. It brings together performers, creative teams and audiences from around the world for what, at its finest, is a glorious but ephemeral experience.Imagine, then, the carbon footprint for this grandest of performing arts.It’s not just about the globalized nature of opera today. If companies want to go green, they have to think beyond plane tickets to how productions are made, what materials are used in costumes and sets, and how the theater operates. They have to think about what food they serve, what dishes they use, and whether water comes from glass or plastic bottles. They even have to think about how audience members, often thousands at a time, travel to and from performances.In an age of tighter budgets and rising expenses, it can be difficult for houses to know where to start. But the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam is setting an example with the great leaps it has made in recent years toward sustainability. The dream, distant for now, is carbon neutrality; the reality may still be a work in progress, yet changes have been adopted with remarkable speed.Under the banner of its Green Deal program, the opera house has brought sustainability to virtually every corner of its operation. This year, it even updated its contracts for creative teams to include a commitment that their productions use at least 50 percent recycled material.The Dutch National Opera has in recent years changed the way its theater operates by calculating the carbon footprints of not only each production, but also each visitor.Jussi Puikkonen for The New York Times“If an artist says, ‘Sorry, but I’m not interested in your Green Deal,’ that’s fine,” said Sophie de Lint, who has been the director of the Dutch National Opera since 2018. “We shake hands and move on. But that hasn’t happened. People are actually really open and want to go there.”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 Shares146 Views

    in Movies

    The Comedian Who Anticipated Our Reality-Bent World

    You’re in a comedy club, and the guy onstage has gone quiet. He looks down at his feet, fidgets with the microphone, smiles a queasy, tight-lipped smile and, after nearly a minute of this, looks as if he might be about to cry.Listen to this article, read by Eric Jason MartinHis name is Andy Kaufman, and it’s 1977. Maybe you’re unfamiliar with him, or maybe you’ve heard he’s an up-and-coming comedian with a gift for prankish anti-bits. He has performed on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and “Saturday Night Live,” and he killed on those shows. But tonight, taping his part in an HBO “Young Comedians Special,” he has told one stinker after another, and the people who have laughed have laughed in the wrong places: at him, not with him. Other people have started to groan and boo, and Kaufman seems to be breaking down. “I don’t understand one thing,” he finally says. People laugh again, sure it’s a put-on, or hoping it is, because the alternative would be too embarrassing. He goes on: “No, seriously, why everyone is going booo, on, like, when I told some of the jokes, and then when I don’t want you to laugh, you’re laughing? Like right now.”He continues to stammer, and then he’s sobbing outright, scolding the crowd through tears. “You really showed me where I’m at tonight,” he says, emitting a raw, ugly sound, like the honk of a sick goose: Heegh-heegh. “I was just trying to do my best heegh-heegh.” He keeps scolding and honking, but as he does, the honks form a rhythm. With one hand, then both hands, he begins to play bongos in time with the honks, shaping it all into a ridiculous song. The crowd laughs harder at this twist than they’ve laughed all night, and their delight seems mixed with gratitude — for this reassurance that Kaufman wasn’t really upset, for this slippery return to terra firma.In the history of comedy, no one has shown a fuller commitment to cultivating silence, awkwardness, concern, bewilderment and vitriol than Andy Kaufman. Any comedian trades in misdirection on the way to the surprise of a punchline. But Kaufman, as much of a performance artist as he was a stand-up, saw misdirection as the main event. “I’ve never told a joke in my life,” he once said. Laughter was one among many responses he sought to engineer. “He just behaved strangely, in order to get a reaction of any kind,” Jay Leno, who worked the same clubs as Kaufman in the ’70s, has recalled. “Even hostile.”Trading against his air of childlike sweetness, Kaufman scrambled the line between entertainment, tedium, self-indulgence and combativeness. For years, he assumed the persona of a snarling misogynist and wrestled women in clubs and on TV. Some of the women were plants, some were volunteers. Kaufman beat them all. This routine, along with his belligerent lounge-act alter ego, Tony Clifton, proved so unpopular that Kaufman’s manager feared it was ruining his career. But Kaufman, more interested in provocation than adulation, only dug in more.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 Shares195 Views

    in Music

    Branford Marsalis and Steve Lehman Rethink the Jazz Cover Album

    Marsalis leads a take on Keith Jarrett’s 1974 LP “Belonging,” and Lehman interprets “The Music of Anthony Braxton,” revealing fresh lessons.Great jazz composers are legion. But the list of great jazz composers whose work gets played by other artists with any regularity? That’s a far more exclusive club.So when a jazz musician devotes an entire record to the work of a less-celebrated figure, it reads like a deliberate, even courageous, act of advocacy. The soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy did this for Thelonious Monk in 1959, releasing “Reflections,” the first-ever tribute album to the pianist, which paved the way for a wider engagement with Monk’s sui generis songbook; likewise, in the ’80s and ’90s, the pianist Misha Mengelberg, the trombonist Roswell Rudd and the collective known as the Herbie Nichols Project each made strong cases on record for the work of the once obscure Nichols.Two new jazz releases find a pair of saxophonists taking similar stands. On “Belonging,” Branford Marsalis leads his working quartet through a full-album take on Keith Jarrett’s 1974 LP of the same name. And on “The Music of Anthony Braxton,” Steve Lehman and his longtime trio mates, with the guest tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, play a live set heavy on material by Braxton, the unorthodox, genre-transcending visionary who was also Lehman’s personal mentor and former collaborator. Both records showcase the potency of the material at hand while achieving a certain kind of expressive liftoff that makes them more than just rote covers.Jarrett’s “Belonging” places unusual demands on the would-be interpreter. It’s an album of emotional extremes that encompasses ecstatic exuberance and prayerful yearning. It also seems almost inextricable from the idiosyncrasies of its maker, revered as an improviser but still undervalued for his prolific writing, which peaked in the ’70s with bespoke works for both a stateside quartet and the European one heard on “Belonging.”Marsalis has tackled imposing jazz masterworks before, covering the entirety of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” in the studio and onstage in the early 2000s, but at its best, his “Belonging” goes deeper. On the original album, the title track is a brief, reflective interlude, played as a solo-free duet between Jarrett on piano and Jan Garbarek on tenor. Marsalis takes his time with the piece, stating the theme on soprano saxophone and leaving space for the rhythm section — the pianist Joey Calderazzo, the bassist Eric Revis and the drummer Justin Faulkner — to set up a lovely rubato ballad texture. Re-entering, Marsalis starts out playing gentle, aqueous phrases, then steadily crescendoes to a piercing intensity for the final theme statement, the band swelling to match him as his tone grows ever more urgent. It’s a performance that both honors and amplifies the somber beauty of the source material.“The Windup” represents the other pole of “Belonging.” A rollicking, acrobatically twisty theme, it suggests boogie-woogie gone prog, conjuring a mood of infectious delight. Marsalis’s quartet has embraced it as a favorite in recent years, and an earlier version appeared on the band’s 2019 live album, “The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul.” Like in that performance, Faulkner is the driving force on the new studio take. Here he pushes even harder, complementing the opening piano-and-bass vamp with a busily festive beat marked by a barrage of syncopations on snare and cowbell.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

  • 188 Shares126 Views

    in Movies

    Hamdan Ballal, Palestinian Director of ‘No Other Land,’ Is Attacked in West Bank, Witnesses Say

    Hamdan Ballal was assaulted by masked attackers in his home village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, witnesses said. The Israeli military said he had been detained for questioning.A Palestinian director of the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land” was beaten bloody near his home by Israeli settlers and detained by the Israeli authorities in the occupied West Bank on Monday evening, witnesses said.The director, Hamdan Ballal, was set upon in Susya, his home village, by at least 20 masked people, mostly teenagers armed with rocks, sticks and knives, according to Joseph Kaplan Weinger, 26, who said he had come upon the attack after it began. Mr. Weinger is part of a volunteer initiative that provides protection in areas vulnerable to settler violence.It was not clear what prompted the attack, but Mr. Weinger, who is also a doctoral student in sociology at the University of California in Los Angeles, said the group had descended on Susya, which is south of Hebron, and assaulted West Bank residents as they were breaking the fast during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan. Some mockingly shouted holiday blessings as they did so, he said.Mr. Weinger said that he began honking the car horn in an attempt to alert nearby Israeli soldiers to the attack, but that the Israeli forces prevented him and two companions from reaching Mr. Ballal’s home.“Soldiers just stood around,” he said. “Later, when we got there, we saw his blood on the ground.”Mr. Ballal, 37, was one of three Palestinians detained, according to witnesses and the Israeli military. Leah Zemel, a lawyer representing the detainees, said that she had been informed that they were being held in a military center for medical treatment ahead of questioning, but that she did not know the reason for their detention.The Israeli military said in a statement that “several terrorists” had hurled rocks at Israeli citizens, damaging their vehicles near Susya and prompting a “violent confrontation” that involved “mutual rock hurling between Palestinians and Israelis.” The military said that when its forces and the police arrived, “terrorists” threw rocks at them.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 Shares195 Views

    in Music

    NewJeans Had Planned a Rebirth. The Performance Ended in Tears.

    K-pop’s most imaginative group has been battling its powerhouse label. Our critic watched as its first concert in months was upended by a court ruling.For most of the last three years, the most clever, artful and progressive act in K-pop has been NewJeans, a five-member girl group — Danielle, Haerin, Hanni, Hyein and Minji — with an almost preternatural musical and aesthetic sophistication. With one elegantly rendered chart-topping single after another, the artists, who range in age from 16 to 20, seemed invincible.Which is why the group’s announcement, last November, that it wished to terminate its contract with its label and management agency, Ador — a sublabel of the K-pop conglomerate Hybe — was such a watershed moment. NewJeans said that its differences with the company were irreconcilable, and that it would move on separately.Ador took exception, leading to back-and-forth legal fusillades. (A lawsuit about the validity of the contract will begin with a hearing on April 3.) Last month, NewJeans’ members announced they were taking on a new name, NJZ, and that the group would perform for the first time under that moniker at ComplexCon Hong Kong, which took place this past weekend.Two days before the performance, though, the Seoul Central District court approved an injunction requested by Ador that precluded NewJeans from participating in or initiating any new commercial activity as NJZ. A representative for the group said that it would appeal.Ominously, a statement from Ador said it would have representatives at the Hong Kong show: “We will be fully present at ComplexCon this weekend to guarantee the performance is presented under the NewJeans name. We eagerly anticipate meeting with the artists for a heartfelt conversation at the earliest opportunity.”Minji performed Upsahl’s “Smile for the Camera,” a charged pop-rock song about chafing at authority. Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesWe 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