Aurelia Butler

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    Tom Prasada-Rao, Whose Song Elegized George Floyd, Dies at 66

    His 2020 lament “$20 Bill” was covered by scores of artists and, a fellow musician said, might well be destined for the folk music canon.In late May 2020, Tom Prasada-Rao, a veteran of the contemporary folk scene, was recovering from the “chemo fog,” as he put it, that was the debilitating aftermath of his cancer treatment, when he turned on CNN and saw the protests over the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police.He was exhausted, but the protests broke his heart, and he felt compelled to write an elegy for Mr. Floyd. He called it “$20 Bill” — a reminder that Mr. Floyd died while being arrested for buying a pack of cigarettes with what might have been a counterfeit 20. It’s a tuneful lament, the gentlest of protest songs, and when Mr. Prasada-Rao recorded himself playing it on Facebook, his soft baritone muted by his illness, “$20 Bill” took off.He then posted the guitar chords and the lyrics, and more than 100 other musicians, at his request, began recording it. (The original video now has over 40,000 views.) The singer-songwriter Dan Navarro, one of many in the folk community who did so, called it “the song of a lifetime.” NPR included it in its list of 50 protest songs that defined 2020, along with Usher’s “I Cry” and Beyoncé’s “Black Parade.” Jake Blount, a musician and ethnomusicologist, wrote that it was easy to imagine “$20 Bill” entering the folk canon.The song begins:Some people die for honorSome people die for loveSome people die while singingTo the heavens aboveSome people die believingIn the cross on Calvary’s hillAnd some people die in the blink of an eyeFor a $20 bill.Mr. Prasada-Rao — folk music’s “quiet giant,” as Mr. Blount called him — died on June 19 at his home in Silver Spring, Md. He was 66.Early in 2019 he had been diagnosed with cancer of the salivary gland, which had metastasized to his lungs, said his sister Patty Prasada-Rao, who confirmed the death.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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    Popcast (Deluxe): Will There Ever Be Another Global Pop Icon?

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes discussion of:The current Hot 100, which features newcomers like Tommy Richman, Shaboozey, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan and othersWho has emerged, besides Taylor Swift, as a true cross-platform pop superstar in the last decade — Bad Bunny? Drake?How centrist pop has become an aggregation of several styles rather than one coherent soundHow pop superstars of the ’80s and ’90s aggregated superfans and casual fansWhether there is a path for a new star to get famous enough to play something like the Super Bowl halftime show a decade from nowConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ at 20: Revisiting the Fear and Anger

    Michael Moore’s hit documentary isn’t a prosecutor’s brief but a political and emotional appeal, rooted in the ways in which the country’s burdens are unequally borne.Michael Moore’s 2004 documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11” opens with a dazed look at the 2000 presidential election, when it seemed that Vice President Al Gore might defeat George W. Bush, then the governor of Texas. “Was it all just a dream?” Moore’s voice-over intones, before going on to chronicle Bush’s first year in office, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.The opening might remind some viewers of witnessing election night 2016 and Donald Trump’s surprise victory, but that’s only one echo of several in Moore’s blockbuster documentary. Twenty years ago, “Fahrenheit 9/11” landed in an era facing similar challenges to today: wars abroad that divide people at home, worries that the country was losing sight of long-cherished principles, fears about presidential abuses of power. It felt like a do-or-die moment, much as 2024 does, and Moore embraced the roles of truth-teller, fire-starter, satirist, confidant, and man-of-the-people bullhorn.The movie was a popular phenomenon: It became the top-grossing documentary domestically, according to Box Office Mojo, making $119 million. This was years before streamers pumped out hours and hours of nonfiction features and series. Controversy erupted even before it was released, when Disney tried to block its distribution out of political concerns. After a Palme d’Or win in Cannes, a June release followed.The groundswell showed that Moore was tuning into a national mood. As Bush sought re-election in the thick of the Iraq occupation and terrorism alerts, Moore’s film vented about the toll of the Iraq War and the administration’s overall response to the 9/11 attacks. (Cue the infamous Aug. 6, 2001, C.I.A. warning to Bush: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”) Whipping up sympathy and outrage over the deaths of young U.S. soldiers and Iraqis, and the perceptions of Bush as out of touch, Moore stirs up a potent cocktail of damning news clips, filmed confrontations and tag-alongs, and plain old ridicule (for instance, Attorney General John Ashcroft bellowing a patriotic song of his own composition).It’s all less preachy than polemical, with doses of Mark Twain showmanship and heartstring-pulling. Moore’s feature managed to capture a popular political narrative about recent U.S. history without feeling out of date as soon as it was released. It’s a feat that today’s constant EKG of social media response has made more difficult (along with evolving trends in how movies are made and released). In a time before YouTube, Moore’s documentary performed a service in surfacing footage of casualties or abuses in Iraq, or insensitive presidential gaffes, that was not always available to see.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 Night Out in New York With Sabrina Fuentes of the Band Pretty Sick

    Hitting New York’s East Village with Sabrina Fuentes, the 24-year-old frontwoman of the band Pretty Sick.It was a Tuesday night in June, and Sabrina Fuentes, the frontwoman of the band Pretty Sick, was about to make her usual Tuesday night rounds in Lower Manhattan. That meant hitting a bar or two with the idea of ending up at Studio 151, a sushi restaurant above the nightclub Nublu.As the night got started in earnest, Ms. Fuentes, 24, was having a glass of orange wine at a sidewalk table outside Time Again, a bar on Canal Street co-owned by the Queens rapper Despot, né Alec Reinstein. Ms. Fuentes was wearing low-cut Issey Miyake jeans, a black tank top and Repetto ballet flats. On her right shoulder was a temporary tattoo featuring a butterfly and the words “Bite me.”The actor Reza Nader joined her at the table. He mentioned that he had recently filmed a scene for an episode of “Law & Order: SVU.” Then he asked her for some advice on a problem he was having in his romantic life.Mr. Reinstein stopped by to ask Ms. Fuentes if she needed anything before turning his attention to the rapper Lil Yachty, who had arrived with a group of friends in a compact SUV.Ms. Fuentes is a lifelong Manhattan resident who lives with her parents on the Upper East Side. She formed Pretty Sick when she was a teenager, and its first album, “Makes Me Sick, Makes Me Smile,” came out in 2022. Pitchfork had nice things to say about it, though it took a slight dig at Ms. Fuentes for doing very little to disguise her musical influences (Nirvana, Hole, the Breeders, Blondie and Iggy Pop, among others).This month Pretty Sick is releasing an EP, “Streetwise.” At the same time Ms. Fuentes will put out a limited line of clothing, P.S. by Pretty Sick, to be sold on a website and in several Heaven by Marc Jacobs stores.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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    Alec Baldwin’s Long Journey to Court After ‘Rust’ Shooting

    It’s been a challenge to follow the case. Here are its many twists and turns. The actor Alec Baldwin is scheduled to go on trial next month for involuntary manslaughter in Santa Fe, N.M.Baldwin’s long journey to the courtroom started on Oct. 21, 2021, on the set of the western movie “Rust,” when the gun he was holding while blocking out a shot discharged, firing a live round that injured the movie’s director, Joel Souza, and killed its cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.It was an almost unimaginable tragedy, but Baldwin soon found himself in legal jeopardy, too. The subsequent saga has amounted to a high-stakes version of a familiar Baldwin ritual: He does or says something controversial; then, in an attempt to be understood, he doubles down on whatever he said or did, inviting further scrutiny; finally, feeling victimized and aggrieved, he vows to stop engaging with the media. He was in this third stage by the time I started reporting a few months ago. To trace the improbable arc of his prosecution, I interviewed more than 30 people in New York and Santa Fe, reviewed numerous public court filings, police records and videos, and obtained additional documents under New Mexico’s freedom-of-information act.It’s been a challenge to follow the case through all of its many twists and turns. Here’s what you need to know as the trial approaches.Troubling details quickly emerged about the film’s set.The shooting occurred at 1:46 p.m. at the Bonanza Creek Ranch, a family-owned Old West movie set about 20 miles southeast of Santa Fe. 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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    Celine Dion Can Only Be Herself

    The singer’s over-the-top sincerity and expressiveness were once seen as irredeemably uncool. In the new documentary “I Am: Celine Dion,” they have become her superpowers.“I always envy people who smoke and drink and party and don’t sleep,” Celine Dion tells her physical therapist with an exaggerated sigh, midway through the new documentary “I Am: Celine Dion.” “Me, I have water and I sleep 12 hours.”This monastic constraint has long been a core part of the Celine Dion legend. A professional singer since 12, she spent decades meticulously caring for her voice as though it were an endangered hothouse flower, committing to long stretches of vocal rest, complicated warm-up rituals and a lifestyle of exacting discipline — all so she could leap octaves and belt soaring notes with gobsmacking precision.In a cruel twist of fate, though, even the ceaseless care Dion devoted to her voice could not preserve it. In 2022, she revealed in an emotional Instagram post that she has stiff person syndrome, a rare and incurable neurological disorder that causes painful muscle spasms and affects roughly one in a million people. After watching “I Am: Celine Dion,” a remarkably candid portrait directed by Irene Taylor on Amazon Prime Video, it is difficult to imagine a disease that would be more personally devastating to Dion, whose entire career has been one long exercise in control, sacrificing all for the ecstatic release of live performance.Since her emergence as a Québécois child star with a precociously huge voice, something about Dion’s essential nature has remained constant, impervious to both changing trends and scathing critique. Whether power ballads were in fashion or not — and by and large, they were not — she sang them with the conviction of someone who’d never even heard the word “restraint.” “At her best,” wrote Elisabeth Vincentelli in a Times review of Dion’s most recent New York performance in February 2020, “Dion projects a sense of bigness — besides fairly simple graphics, the background videos in her show often showed cosmic images, as if they were the only thing measuring up on the Dion scale.” This bombastic approach gained her a worldwide fan base and a requisite backlash that she may have finally outpaced.In 2007, the music critic Carl Wilson used Dion’s 1999 blockbuster album “Let’s Talk About Love” as the inspiration for an insightful, ultimately sympathetic book-length examination of musical taste, the assumption being that (at least 17 years ago) Dion’s name was a symbol for all things gauche, sincere and uncool. (The book’s subtitle? “A Journey to the End of Taste.”) “Schmaltz rots faster than other ingredients in the musical pantry,” Wilson wrote, “which may be why we doubt the possibility of a Celine Dion revival in 2027.”Dion allows cameras to follow her as she struggles with stiff person syndrome in a new film.Amazon StudiosWe 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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    The Long, Strange Road to Alec Baldwin’s Manslaughter Trial

    On the afternoon of Oct. 21, 2021, Mary Carmack-Altwies, the district attorney for New Mexico’s First Judicial District, was driving along a lonely stretch of the mountain highway connecting Santa Fe and Taos when her cell service abruptly returned and her phone started pinging — message after message. She pulled over to the side of the road and began scrolling: Alec Baldwin had accidentally shot two people on a movie set in her jurisdiction. Carmack-Altwies had planned to spend the next couple of days alone in the mountains before celebrating her 43rd birthday with her wife, a retired investigator for the state, and their two children. Clearly that was not going to happen.Listen to this article, read by Pete SimonelliThe shooting occurred at 1:46 p.m. that day at the Bonanza Creek Ranch, a family-owned Old West movie set about 20 miles southeast of Santa Fe that had been rented out by “Rust,” an independent film that Baldwin was both starring in and producing. The bullet he inadvertently fired passed through the upper body of the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and lodged near the spine of Joel Souza, the director. Souza was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Santa Fe; Hutchins was airlifted to a trauma center in Albuquerque and died a short time later.Carmack-Altwies was nearing the end of her first year in office. She had been an assistant district attorney specializing in violent crimes when her boss made a bid for Congress. She ran to succeed him — her first foray into electoral politics — and won easily, inheriting a jurisdiction that covers three counties: Los Alamos, Rio Arriba and Santa Fe. She’s a Democrat in a Democratic district, though the label connotes something very different in New Mexico, a rural hunting state whose voters tend to place a high value on the Second Amendment, than it does in, say, New York or California. Carmack-Altwies turned around and went back to her office in Santa Fe, where she spent most of the night on the phone with the local police, trying to make sure that the movie set, now a potential crime scene, was properly secured. In the days that followed, reporters from all over the world descended on Santa Fe. Carmack-Altwies held her first news conference about the incident six days later outside the Sheriff’s Department. She was asked if she intended to prosecute anyone. “I do not make rash decisions, and I do not rush to judgment,” she said. “All options are on the table at this point.”Bonanza Creek Ranch, the movie set where Alec Baldwin fatally shot the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins with a prop gun in October 2021, leading to his indictment on charges of involuntary manslaughter.Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal, via ZUMA/AlamyWe 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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    Kino Film Collection, a Streaming Alternative to Netflix and Hulu

    The service is an art house answer to what’s missing on some of the more popular streamers.Even those who swear by Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and their ilk must admit that the platforms leave something to be desired when it comes to art house titles.Netflix is perpetually chasing nostalgia or algorithmic trends. Prime is going for crowd-pleasers and classics. And Hulu can devote only so much energy to its film selection when most people still think of it as a TV service. So streaming consumers seeking independent films, foreign cinema and documentaries (other than true crime) may have to look elsewhere. We previously highlighted Mubi as one option; the new Kino Film Collection service is another.Like Shout! TV, Kino is tied to a brand beloved by cinephiles: Kino Lorber began as a film distributor in the late 1970s, and it is one of the most reliably high-quality home video labels, with particular emphasis on classic American cinema. It took some time to find the right formula for its streaming service, starting first, in 2019, with the à la carte Kino Now (an “arthouse iTunes”) before introducing Kino Film Collection late last year. Initially only available as an Amazon Prime Video channel, it became a stand-alone service in May, with its own app on Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV and Android TV.So what does it offer? Well, foremost and unsurprisingly, there are Kino Lorber’s own theatrical and home video titles, an impressive array of contemporary indies that includes “Martin Eden,” “Bacurau,” “Close to Vermeer,” “La Syndicaliste,” “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of ‘Midnight Cowboy’” and the Oscar-nominated “Four Daughters.” Several of these are found in a selection highlighting Critic’s Picks from these very pages, a wise organizing principle if there ever was one.Other sections are similarly well curated. As has (thankfully) become de rigueur for the streamers, a selection of “LGBTQ+ Stories” highlights queer cinema, past and present, for Pride Month. The Cannes Film Festival concluded a few weeks back, but the “Cannes Favorites” sidebar is still up, and well worth exploring. “Thought-Provoking Documentaries” includes explorations of everything from jazz music to the hedonism of Studio 54 to the history of the Great White Way. But the highlight may well be the robust selection of “Classics,” which runs the gamut from German Expressionism to nunsploitation.The Kino Film Collection interface is easy to use, and the image is excellent, with streams (of new releases in particular) frequently Blu-ray quality. The price is similarly nice: A monthly subscription is only $5.99 per month, or $59.99 annually, and a current promotion offers 20 percent off that annual rate. The service’s total number of available films is smaller than that of its art house streaming competitors Mubi and the Criterion Channel, but the price point is proportionately lower. (Mubi is currently $14.99 monthly, while Criterion charges $10.99 per month.)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