Aurelia Butler

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    Elton John Says a Serious Eye Infection Limited His Vision in One Eye

    The entertainer said on social media that it would “take some time” before sight returned to his eye.Elton John said he was recuperating from a severe eye infection that limited his vision in one eye, but that he was optimistic about his recovery.“Over the summer, I’ve been dealing with a severe eye infection that has unfortunately left me with only limited vision in one eye,” the entertainer wrote in a statement posted to Instagram on Tuesday. “I am healing, but it’s an extremely slow process and it will take some time before sight returns to the impacted eye.”Thanking a team of nurses, doctors and family members who have cared for him, he added that he was “feeling positive about the progress I have made in my healing and recovery thus far.”John, 77, has faced other medical challenges recently.In January, he won an Emmy for outstanding variety special for his live streamed farewell concert at Dodger Stadium, making him the 19th person to secure an EGOT, or win all four prestigious entertainment awards: an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. But he was not present at the ceremony because of a knee operation.The “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour, billed as his last, stretched across 330 concert dates from its start in 2018 to 2023. Some of the tour dates were postponed while he underwent hip surgery after a fall and when he contracted the coronavirus.He decided to stop touring to spend more time with his husband and children, who live in Britain, his representatives have said.John, a longtime leader in gay rights activism, was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Joe Biden in 2022. More

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    Pedro Almodóvar, Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton on ‘The Room Next Door’

    The director’s first English-language feature inspires talk of beauty, hope and more collaborations.At Monday night’s Venice after-party for “The Room Next Door,” Pedro Almodóvar beamed at his leading ladies as they beamed back.I’m not just speaking of the affection shared between Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton and their director, though it was tangible. I’m talking about the actual beams of light that bounced off the women’s sequined gowns and back at their besotted director as we huddled in a room to discuss the Spanish director’s first feature film in English, a long-held goal that allowed him to cast two big Hollywood stars.“They are not actors now, they are like monuments,” Almodóvar said. Certainly, that’s how Moore and Swinton are presented on the poster for the film, which arranges their famous faces in profile as though they were massive mountain ranges.“Big peaks,” joked Moore.“Big sparkly peaks,” Swinton added, nodding to their dresses. “We can only wear sequins for the rest of our lives.”Adapted from the novel “What Are You Going Through” by Sigrid Nunez, “The Room Next Door” casts Moore as Ingrid, a successful author who hears that her former colleague Martha (Swinton) is in the hospital with inoperable cervical cancer. They reunite, swap catch-up stories and once again become fast friends, but Martha has a weighty request to make.With her experimental treatments failing and another taxing round of chemotherapy to come, Martha has booked a vacation house in upstate New York and bought a drug off the dark web. Might Ingrid be willing to accompany her on the trip, knowing that at some point, her friend will kill herself in the room next door?Though Almodóvar is fairly fluent in English, he had long been wary of shooting a feature film in the language. (Even as we spoke, he kept a translator close by for moments when his second language failed him.) Two recent shorts made in English — the gay western “Strange Way of Life” and the extended Swinton monologue “The Human Voice” — convinced Almodóvar to finally write his first feature-length screenplay in the language.But Almodóvar’s films have aesthetic pleasures that go beyond words, and “The Room Next Door” offers so much to look at — whether it’s a lavender sweater, an olive couch or a precisely chosen shade of burgundy lipstick — that is as satisfying as any line of dialogue. A sequence where the two women ransack Martha’s apartment reveals pulled drawers filled with the most beguiling knickknacks, and the upstate vacation house where much of the movie takes place is an architectural stunner. (Like Martha, I’d die to live there, too.)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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    Joaquin Phoenix and the Big Question at the ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Premiere

    At the Venice Film Festival with his co-star, Lady Gaga, would the actor answer questions about dropping out of a Todd Haynes movie?Joaquin Phoenix has never been eager to face the press. The 49-year-old actor grants few interviews, speaks with great reluctance about his process, and once walked out on a journalist when asked whether his film “Joker” might inspire copycat violence.Knowing all that, you could already expect tension at the Venice news conference for “Joker: Folie à Deux,” a sequel to the 2019 hit that has Phoenix reprising the comic-book role that won him the Oscar. Still, this meeting with the media was expected to be particularly fraught as Phoenix has not done any press since August, when he dropped out of a film from the director Todd Haynes just days before it was supposed to shoot, scuttling the production and exposing the star to potential legal action.Hollywood has been buzzing about Phoenix’s murky motivations for weeks, not least because the project — a sexually explicit gay romance co-starring the “Top Gun: Maverick” actor Danny Ramirez — was based on an original idea by Phoenix, who brought the project to Haynes and co-wrote it with the “May December” director.Would Phoenix be willing to shed any light on the situation while in Venice or would he skip the news conference entirely, as “Don’t Worry Darling” star Florence Pugh did two years ago amid rumors of a feud with that film’s director, Olivia Wilde? While waiting for the conference to begin on Wednesday afternoon, journalists placed bets on whether Phoenix would bail twice.They were surprised, then, when Phoenix bounded into the room smiling, followed by his director, Todd Phillips, and co-star Lady Gaga. “First of all, hi everyone!” he told the press. “It’s nice to see you.”Phoenix remained upbeat and unexpectedly willing to answer questions until several minutes into the news conference, when a journalist asked whether he would share his reason for leaving the Haynes film. The actor began to answer, then paused, thinking it over.“If I do, I would just be sharing my opinion from my perspective, and the other creatives aren’t here to share their piece,” Phoenix said, referring to Haynes and his partners.He continued: “It doesn’t feel like that would be right. I don’t think that would be helpful, so I just don’t think I will.”Then he added brightly, “Thank you!”Since Phoenix dropped out of the Haynes film, it’s been reported that the actor often gets cold feet and nearly bailed on making the first “Joker.” Phillips implied as much when he talked about how he convinced Phoenix to star in a sequel. “If we were really going to do it, it had to scare him in the way the first one did,” Phillips said.The director admitted to his own nerves in bringing “Folie à Deux” to Venice, since the first film won the festival’s prestigious Golden Lion. “It’s easier to come in as the insurgent instead of the incumbent,” Phillips said.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 New ‘Red Hot’ Album Tackles a Hot Topic: Transgender Awareness

    “Transa,” with 46 tracks due Nov. 22, brings together artists including Sam Smith, Sade, André 3000 and Jayne County.Over a soft piano riff wafts the unmistakable voice of Sade, singing a song to her son. The lyrics she wrote for the piece — her first new track in 14 years, titled “Young Lion” — are steeped in empathy and regret. “Young man, it’s been so heavy for you/You must have felt so alone,” she sings. “I should have known.”She’s addressing her real-life son, Izaak, whose identity as a transgender man escaped her perception for some time. “Shine like a sun,” she sings to him. “You have everything you need.”Massima Bell, a musician, model and activist who is transgender, said she’d never heard a song like that before. “It’s amazing to hear a legendary musician like Sade sing about her heartfelt experience as the parent of a trans child,” she said in an interview. “It’s incredibly powerful.”It’s also humanizing, nailing a key goal for the sprawling new musical project that contains it. Titled “Transa,” the album, which Bell worked on as a creative producer, is the latest venture from Red Hot, the organization co-founded 35 years ago by John Carlin at the peak of the AIDS epidemic. The organization started with a star-studded album titled “Red Hot + Blue,” designed to raise funds for the fight against the disease.In the decades since, Red Hot has released more than two dozen sets, involving hundreds of top musicians, to benefit a wealth of related causes. (The organization said it has given away $15 million over its lifetime, primarily raised by record sales.) Still, it’s been years since it has focused on an issue with the topicality of “Transa,” a project due Nov. 22, which was partly inspired by the death of the producer Sophie in 2021.Beverly Glenn-Copeland, left, and Sam Smith. Both musicians contribute to “Transa.”Eleanor PetryWe 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 First Movie About Pop Music to Nail Its Mediocrity

    This summer’s “Trap,” from M. Night Shyamalan, works hard to turn its fictional star — and her fans — into heroes.Last fall, I went with friends to see a popular British rock band at Madison Square Garden. I went in a fan of the group, but with every interchangeable song, every self-important gesture, I grew farther apart from the crowd around me: The more they enjoyed the music, the more it bored me. I had been pulled into a conversation with 20,000 other people, but I had nothing to say. By the first set break, I wanted to leave; by the third, I needed to escape.Cooper (Josh Hartnett), the protagonist of M. Night Shyamalan’s recent thriller “Trap,” probably knows how I felt. A hunky, hopelessly square man in his 40s, Cooper has taken his teenage daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to see her favorite musician, Lady Raven. Cooper is a model dad, bringing his daughter to the special matinee and searching for the perfect concert T-shirt — but whatever his desire to support her fandom, he can’t share it. Instead he spends the concert wandering the arena halls, surreptitiously listening to something else.Lady Raven is played by the independent pop musician (and daughter of the director) Saleka Shyamalan, who wrote a full album of original songs for the film. She has been cast as the kind of blandly contemporary pop star who might reasonably appeal to teenagers. Glimpsed in brief, her music comes across as snappy, dutiful and necessarily muted, each melody just memorable enough to register without pulling our focus from Cooper.This being a Shyamalan film, there must also be a twist. The model dad is in fact a notorious serial killer with a victim in his safe house. The concert has been set up to trap him. Yet you don’t side with the police: Listening to Lady Raven with him, you sympathize with Cooper’s need to get out.“Trap” is hardly the first film to make use of fictional music — fake pop songs that let directors and musicians create alternate cultural realities in the shadow of our own. Many of cinema’s made-up hits are genuinely catchy. But they rarely transcend pastiche: Mostly, they convince us via their similarity to songs we already know.Some of the best come from spoofs. In “This Is Spinal Tap,” from 1984, the titular metal group is captured in a low moment — failing albums, low ticket sales — but a survey of their past hits, like “(Listen to the) Flower People” and “Gimme Some Money,” reveals how absurd their popularity has been all along. (The music, though, is easy to believe in: Silly as they seem, Spinal Tap rocks.) Similarly, the Lonely Island’s songs from “PopStar: Never Stop Never Stopping” (2016) combine undeniable hooks with ridiculous content: a braggadocio anthem about humility, a sex jam about a woman with an Osama bin Laden fetish. The punchlines wouldn’t land if the songs supporting them were not fluent in the language of contemporary pop-rap; to properly spoof this kind of music, you have to love it, at least a little.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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    5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Big Band Jazz

    Big bands were built in the 1920s and ’30s to blast young dancers with layers of rhythm, but creative composers seeking a larger canvas have kept the form alive. Hear 12 big selections.“Big band music” isn’t everybody’s first thought when they’re pondering what to punch into Spotify, we’ll grant you that. But if all big bands make you think of is “jazz hands” and flappers and early black-and-white films, let’s take five minutes to change that.Of course, the best way to experience a jazz orchestra is not on a streaming platform — it’s live. The format was first built in the 1920s and ’30s to satisfy Lindy hoppers and other young dancers across the country. The real point of getting more than a dozen horn players together with a rhythm section is to blast you with layers of rhythm: A big band is a sonic engine, with interlocking gears and heat and pulse.Still, with great writing, jazz orchestras can also be fun to hear up close on recordings. At this point, it’s been over half a century since most big bands made actual dance music, anyway. What has really kept the big band alive is its attractiveness to creative jazz composers seeking a larger canvas. The big band has been embraced over the years by jazz’s left wing (David Murray, Sam Rivers, Carla Bley, Horace Tapscott and of course Sun Ra), by innovators after something closer to a Third Stream fusing classical and jazz (Toshiko Akiyoshi and Maria Schneider), and recently by a veritable movement of under-50 composer-bandleaders like Darcy James Argue, Miho Hazama, Igmar Thomas and Anna Webber.For a primer on the big band canon, look no further than the 12 picks below, courtesy of musicians and writers who know the medium well. You can find a playlist at the end of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Ted Nash, saxophonist and composer“A Tone Parallel to Harlem” by Duke Ellington“Sing sweet, but put a little dirt in it.” Duke Ellington could say so much with very little. With “A Tone Parallel to Harlem,” a long-form piece that evokes vibrant neighborhoods in New York City, Duke, in just under 14 minutes, expresses everything I love about music: swing, grooves, simple themes, development, complex harmony, tension, release, expressive dynamics, featured soloists and the blues. Though it was originally commissioned by Arturo Toscanini in 1950, as part of a larger New York City-inspired orchestral suite, Toscanini never conducted it. In his memoirs, Duke describes composing “Harlem” on a sea voyage from Europe to the United States. I can’t help thinking about Duke’s reflections on returning to his home while composing this poignant masterpiece.In 1999, a year after I joined the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, we celebrated Duke’s centennial by playing exclusively his music for that whole year. As we started the season, I was skeptical — which exposed my ignorance. Over that year I learned not only about Duke Ellington but about music. When I first heard “Harlem,” it changed me. It allowed me to discover the power of musical expression. Through his music, Duke teaches us about being human. When we listen with our hearts, we have the opportunity to become better people.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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    Mk.gee, an Unlikely Guitar God, Chases the Promise of Pop

    On first listen, or even fourth, the songs of Michael Gordon, a guitarist, producer and vocalist who performs as Mk.gee, are not the sort one imagines generating a modern frenzy.Cracked, shrouded and fuzzy, with jazz, AOR and classic rock DNA — far from the trendiest of building blocks — Mk.gee’s music can feel like a strange whisper or a brief tantrum. Its hooks are sneaky, the payoff more often implied than obvious. And it’s never one thing for very long before warping into something else or stopping altogether.His breakout album, “Two Star & the Dream Police,” which Mk.gee considers his official debut, is just over 30 minutes long. At concerts, he has taken to playing a track called “Candy” twice. With repeat exposure, it all starts to click.“This record was supposed to feel like a little forest fire,” said Gordon, a boyish 27, with greasy hair and an understated murmur, from the porch of his Silver Lake, Calif., home and studio, in a rare interview. “Little refractions of perfect songs amid a lot of chaos and weird atonal moments,” he added, calling it “a new recipe” that he hasn’t quite perfected.Yet since the independent release of “Two Star & the Dream Police” in February, and especially since the sold-out spring tour where the album’s 12 songs blossomed, that fire, stoked by word of mouth, has been spreading wildly. And it’s putting Mk.gee’s status as a connoisseur’s cult figure — your favorite musician’s favorite musician’s favorite musician — at risk.Michael Gordon, who performs as Mk.gee, is bringing guitar music into unexpected places.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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    James Darren, Actor, Singer and ‘Gidget’ Heartthrob, Dies at 88

    His role as a surfer in that trendsetting hit movie led to success on television shows like “The Time Tunnel” and “T.J. Hooker,” and on the pop charts.James Darren, an actor and singer whose starring role as a California surfer in the “Gidget” movies made him one of the most popular heartthrobs of the late 1950s and early ’60s, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 88.His son Jim Moret said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was congestive heart failure.Mr. Darren, a Philadelphia native who didn’t surf and wasn’t even a particularly strong swimmer, had been a contract player with Columbia Pictures when he was cast as an aspiring surf bum in “Gidget,” which also starred Sandra Dee in the title role and Cliff Robertson as the Big Kahuna, the leader of a surfing gang.Released in 1959, the movie told the story of a high school girl who befriends that gang in Malibu and develops a crush on Mr. Darren’s character, Moondoggie. It was a hit, and it became one of the first signs of the surfing craze that would soon include the music of the Beach Boys and the “Beach Party” films.Mr. Darren and Sandra Dee in a scene from “Gidget,” the 1959 movie that made him a star.Columbia Pictures, via Getty ImagesMr. Darren went on to play the character in two more “Gidget” films, “Gidget Goes Hawaiian” (with Deborah Walley in the title role) and “Gidget Goes to Rome” (with Cindy Carol); land a role in the acclaimed 1961 World War II drama “The Guns of Navarone”; carve out a long career in prime-time television, including a starring role on the 1966-67 time-travel series “The Time Tunnel”; and release a number of singles and albums, first as a purveyor of lightweight pop tunes and later as a lounge singer whose repertoire consisted mostly of standards.Before he was cast as Moondoggie, a character with a prominent singing role, Mr. Darren had never sung professionally. At first the studio considered having him lip-sync to someone else’s voice.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