Aurelia Butler

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    “Inside Out 2” Understands How Anxiety Effects Me

    In a way that’s both cathartic and devastating, Pixar’s latest portrays how anxiety can take hold, our critic writes.At the climax of Pixar’s “Inside Out 2,” Riley, a freshly pubescent teen with a gaggle of new personified emotions, becomes so overwhelmed with anxiety that she has a panic attack.In the theater, I whispered to my friend that I’d forgotten to bring my panic attack medication. I’d said it as a joke — but at the sight of this anxious animated teenager, my whole body’s choreography changed. My muscles tensed. I pressed my right palm down hard to my chest and took a few deep yoga breaths, trying to cut off the familiar beginnings of an attack.This depiction of how quickly anxiety can take hold was overwhelming. I saw my own experiences reflected in Riley’s. “Inside Out 2” felt personal to me in a way that was equally cathartic and devastating: It’s a movie that so intimately understands how my anxiety disorder upends my everyday life.“Inside Out 2” picks up two years after the 2015 film “Inside Out,” as Riley is about to start high school. With puberty comes a group of new emotions, led by Anxiety. A manic orange sprite voiced by Maya Hawke, Anxiety bumps out the old emotions and inadvertently wreaks havoc on Riley’s belief system and self-esteem as she tries to manage the stress of a weekend hockey camp.When an emotion takes over in the “Inside Out” movies, a control board in Riley’s mind changes to that feeling’s color; Anxiety’s takeover, however, is more absolute. She creates a stronghold in Riley’s imagination, where she forces mind workers to illustrate negative hypothetical scenarios for Riley’s future. Soon, Riley’s chief inner belief is of her inadequacy; the emotions hear “I’m not good enough” as a low, rumbling refrain in her mind.I’m familiar with anxiety’s hold on the imagination; my mind is always writing the script to the next worst day of my life. It’s already embraced all possibilities of failure. And my anxiety’s ruthless demands for perfection often turn my thoughts into an unrelenting roll-call of self-criticisms and insecurities.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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    Russell Crowe’s in 2 Exorcism Films? Yes, and Here’s Why the Roles Work

    In a three-decade career, he’s developed an impressive range without forgetting how to have fun.Russell Crowe is going through a religious phase.In 2023, “The Pope’s Exorcist” showcased the actor as — you guessed it — the Vatican’s official exorcist. In “The Exorcism,” released Friday, he’s at it again, this time playing a washed-up movie star cast in the role of an exorcist. The set is cursed and Crowe’s Tony, an emotionally tormented single father and recovering addict, is ripe for demonic possession.Aside from the obvious, the two unrelated movies couldn’t be more different. “The Pope’s Exorcist” leans into schlock, with Crowe sporting a delightfully hammy Italian accent. “The Exorcism” is a relatively somber affair, generating thrills by relying on Crowe’s explosive, fevered performance. In both cases, he fits seamlessly into the world of satanic menace, which, per the genre’s blueprint, trades in questions of faith and repentance, and sees imperfect yet noble souls waging spiritual warfare against supernatural forces of evil. Why is Crowe so suited to these ungodly movies?In “The Pope’s Exorcist,” Crowe, with Daniel Zovatto, is an emissary from the Vatican.Jonathan Hession/Screen GemsOne might ask why Crowe is starring in these B-movies in the first place. In the 2000s, Crowe was nominated for a best actor Oscar three years in a row, but at the height of his fame he was associated with the kind of midbudget adult dramas that have become endangered in today’s theatrical landscape. He is getting older, too. At 60, he’s not the strapping It Boy who rallied the Roman masses in “Gladiator” (2000), or the same hunk who made headlines for his on-set romance with Meg Ryan, his “Proof of Life” (2000) co-star. Like many actors of his generation, he’s now playing showbiz with a different set of cards in an industry that looks radically different than when he started out.Crowe’s exorcism-themed movies may seem like lesser gigs. In both “The Pope’s Exorcist” and “The Exorcism,” he’s convincingly loony, playing it straight within the films’ unrealistic conceits while also, somehow, never losing sight of the ridiculousness that makes a good horror movie fun. At the same time, this pocket of horror makes surprisingly inventive use of his dramatic powers and the range he’s developed over the past 30-plus years.Crowe’s Hollywood breakout role, as Bud White, a gruff policeman with his own moral code in “L.A. Confidential” (1997), established him as a dramatic heavyweight; a quintessentially masculine leading man who infused real angst and vulnerability into brutish characters. Just look at the concentration in Crowe’s eyes when White raids a rapist’s home and shoots him dead, planting a gun in his hand to make it look like self-defense.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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    Jeremy Tepper, Alt-Country Impressario, Dies at 60

    As a journalist, singer, label owner and radio producer, he fostered a community of musicians on the outskirts of Americana.Jeremy Tepper, who over a long and varied career as a journalist, singer, label owner and radio producer championed the anarchic, high-energy music that straddled the lines separating country, rock, punk and plain old Americana, died on June 14 in Queens. He was 60.His wife, the musician Laura Cantrell, said the cause of death, at Elmhurst Hospital, was a heart attack.Born in upstate New York and educated in Manhattan, Mr. Tepper was perhaps an unlikely apostle for a style of music variously called alt- or outlaw country, but which he preferred to call “rig rock” — the sort of sounds favored by long-haul truck drivers. Far from the big hats and ostrich-skin boots of Nashville’s Lower Broadway, it is the music one might hear coming from honky-tonks, jukeboxes, truck stops and big-rig radios, the corners of Americana that Mr. Tepper celebrated with unironic joy.“It is taking all that truck-driving music — streamlined, guitar-based country rock — and dragging it onto the modern interstate,” he told Newsday in 1990.Mr. Tepper was rig-rock’s greatest fan and biggest booster. He wrote about it for publications like Pulse and The Journal of Country Music, and for his own magazine, Street Beat, which was dedicated to jukeboxes and the music one found in 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

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    Listening Through the Life of George Crumb

    It’s rare for a composer to quickly find a broad audience. It usually takes years, or even decades, and sometimes doesn’t happen at all.The American composer George Crumb, though, who was born in 1929 and died two years ago, reached wide prominence within a decade. He found his musical voice in the early 1960s, and by 1968 had won the Pulitzer Prize, not to mention a bevy of grants and fellowships. Perhaps most important, his premieres were seen as genuine events, such as the pandemonium that was said to have greeted “Ancient Voices of Children,” his 1970 setting of poems by Federico Garcia Lorca for soprano, boy soprano and chamber ensemble.What explains Crumb’s near-immediate assimilation to the musical mainstream?There was, first and foremost, his dizzying sonic imagination. Crumb took the extended techniques that originated with Henry Cowell and John Cage and exploded them, plying instruments for virtually any sound they would yield and creating a vast new timbral universe.His scores — created by hand and themselves works of art — are rife with exacting instructions to performers: how to thread paper between the strings of a harp, or how string players should use the thimbles on their fingers. In “Ancient Voices,” there is an 86-word note instructing the pianist how to use a chisel (Crumb specifies the size) to create a glissandos on the piano strings that last well under a minute. He insisted that his extended techniques were not mere sound effects, as some listeners believed, but essential elements of musical expression.In addition, Crumb was largely untouched by the rift between serialists and tonal composers that split the music world in the 1960s and ’70s. His writing was so original, it seemed to sidestep that whole fiasco. Indeed, there was something both timely and timeless about Crumb’s music. His pieces had titles that evoked distant worlds and had deep, primordial resonances, but they were unmistakably of their day. In “Black Angels,” one of his most famous works, symmetries, numerology and religious allusions in the score were accompanied, Crumb said, by “vibrations from the surrounding world, which was the world of the Vietnam time.” The score is inscribed as having been completed on “Friday the Thirteenth, March 1970 (in tempore belli),” or “in time of war.”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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    Kevin Costner Will Not Return to ‘Yellowstone’

    The actor and director is turning his attention to his ambitious film series about post-Civil War America.It’s official: Kevin Costner will not be returning to television’s hit neo-western “Yellowstone” for its final episodes or for any future “Yellowstone” offshoot, ending speculation about his involvement with one of TV’s biggest hits in recent years.In a video posted to social media on Thursday evening, Costner said that after a year-and-a-half working on his upcoming multi-film epic “Horizon” and thinking about “Yellowstone,” which he called a “beloved series that I love that I know you love,” he realized that he would not be able to continue. The second half of Season 5, the show’s last, is set to debut on Nov. 10.“It was something that really changed me,” Costner said about “Yellowstone,” which premiered on Paramount Network in 2018 and became an instant and durable standout. It was TV’s highest-rated drama of the 2021-22 TV season, and its Season 4 finale was the most-watched scripted prime-time telecast in 2022, Variety reported.“I just wanted to let you know that I won’t be returning,” Costner, 69, continued, telling fans that he has loved the relationship they have been able to develop. “I’ll see you at the movies,” he added.A representative for Costner did not immediately reply to a request for further comment on Friday.The announcement comes after will-he-or-won’t-he rumors about whether Costner would continue in the role of the ruthless Montana rancher John Dutton, which earned Costner a Golden Globe for acting in 2023. Tensions between Costner and the show’s creative team had been reported for more than a year — to the point that it was largely expected that Costner would not be involved in the conclusion of “Yellowstone.”In an emailed statement on Friday, a representative for Paramount Network said that those at the network wished him the best with the film series and that they had hoped that they would continue working with him. “Unfortunately,” the statement read, “we could not find a window that worked for him, all the other talent and our production needs in order to move forward together.”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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    Charli XCX and Lorde End the Rumors on a Refreshing Remix

    Lorde adds guest vocals to Charli XCX’s “Girl, So Confusing,” a song that muses on the complexities of female friendship, and helps create something revelatory.To a lot of people these days, “ambivalent pop music” is an oxymoron. Catchy hooks tend to streamline complex emotions into universal, legible sentiments, temporarily dividing the world into teams: the heartbreakers vs. the victims, the happy vs. the sad, the boys vs. the girls. Infectious as they are, many of the songs on Charli XCX’s incisive sixth album, “Brat,” refuse to take sides, making them difficult to discuss in the explainer-generating, SEO-baiting grammar of modern pop standom. How refreshing.Charli never mentioned Lorde by name on the album’s knotty ninth track, “Girl, So Confusing,” but all signs pointed to her being the somewhat socially awkward, poetry-loving doppelgänger to whom the song is addressed. (“People say we’re alike, they say we’ve got the same hair,” Charli sings, winking at those of us who remember when an interviewer asked her about writing Lorde’s “Royals.”)It was less clear how we were supposed to understand this song in the limited and polarized language of 2020s musical fandom, which pits female pop stars against one another like pro athletes while still insisting that they “support women” at all times with a benevolent grin. “Sometimes I think you might hate me, sometimes I think I might hate you,” Charli babbles atop a strobe-lit A.G. Cook beat, one of the many “wait, are you even allowed to say that anymore?” moments on “Brat.” The song strains the vocabulary of clickbait. Is this a “diss track” or the start of a “feud”? Are the girlies fighting? And if they are, what could Lorde possibly be doing in the V.I.P. section of Charli’s recent show?It’s complicated, and — blessedly — so is the surprise remix on which Lorde appears, firing off her first new lyrics in three years. After Charli unloads her feelings and projections in that first verse, Lorde responds with the run-on intensity of a late-night voice note: “You’d always say, ‘let’s go out,’ but then I’d cancel last minute,” the New Zealander confesses, “I was so lost in my head and scared to be in your pictures.” She then reveals, devastatingly, that she’s been “at war with my body,” insecure about fluctuations in her weight, and that the enigmatic aura she’s created is actually a stifling defense mechanism. That she does it all so succinctly in a cadence that effortlessly matches Cook’s beat should make everyone excited for her next album, whenever it arrives.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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    Gracie Abrams and Taylor Swift’s Duet, and 8 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Mavis Staples, Jamie xx featuring Robyn, Rakim 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.Gracie Abrams featuring Taylor Swift, ‘Us.’The title of the singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams’s second album, “The Secret of Us,” comes from this feverish duet with her friend and onetime tour mate Taylor Swift. “If history’s clear, someone always ends up in ruins,” Abrams, 24, sings breathily through a thicket of fingerpicked notes, the signature sound of her and Swift’s mutual collaborator Aaron Dessner, who co-produced the track with Jack Antonoff. (Dessner’s band the National gets a shout out toward the end of the song, when Abrams sings of being “mistaken for strangers.”) Midway through, the wise elder Swift swoops in to put Abrams’s youthful heartbreak in perspective. “If history’s clear, the flames always end up in ashes,” she sings. “And what seemed like fate, give it 10 months and you’ll be past it.” LINDSAY ZOLADZJamie xx featuring Robyn, ‘Life’The latest single from Jamie xx’s long-awaited second album “In Waves” pairs playful and effortlessly cool vocals from Robyn with a thumping, skittish beat intercut with lively horn samples. Her personality shines brightest on the bridge, when she throws out some vampy non-sequiturs and dissolves into giggles at one of them: “You’re giving me strong torso.” Whatever you say, Robyn! ZOLADZMavis Staples, ‘Worthy’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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    10 Standout R.E.M. Deep Cuts

    Hear a pick from each of the band’s first 10 albums.R.E.M., from left: Bill Berry, Michael Stipe, Mike Mills and Peter Buck.Paul Natkin/Getty ImagesDear listeners,Last week R.E.M. was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, an event that sparked a lot of FOMO from me, your guest newsletter writer (the band briefly reunited in New York; I was out of town) and text conversations with my fellow R.E.M. devotees. (Does this fandom have a name? The Sleepyheads?)My friend Kris Chen sent over this query from a fan account: “Imagine that R.E.M. were going to reunite but only to play in your kitchen and only one song. Which song?” He selected “Fall on Me” from “Lifes Rich Pageant,” the band’s 1986 album, which is my favorite despite its lack of an apostrophe. I gave it some real thought and came back with “These Days.” I was amused when I realized those two songs are neighbors on the LP. And then I was struck by my own consistency: I quoted from it in my high school yearbook in 1995.So: R.E.M. One of the greatest bands of all time (this is not debatable). But I am willing to argue over the group’s best deep cuts. It has 15 studio albums, so let’s set some rules: I am going to limit myself only to records recorded with the band’s original lineup (Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe), before Berry’s departure from the group after a brain aneurysm. That’s 10 LPs, “Murmur” from 1983 up through “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” in 1996. And I didn’t let myself look at the band’s own picks for its members’ 40 favorites until I finished!The only thing to fear is fearlessness,CarynListen along while you read.1. “Pilgrimage”Chiming guitars, cheery Beach Boys-y backing vocals, lyrics I could never quite decipher: This is the R.E.M. I would have first fallen for, had I heard its 1983 debut, “Murmur,” when it arrived.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe 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