Aurelia Butler

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    Eurovision Fans Are Hungry for News. These Superfans Are Here to Help.

    A cottage industry of blogs and social media accounts, run by Eurovision obsessives in their spare time, satisfies a seemingly endless demand.Magnus Bormark, a longtime rock guitarist in Norway, said his band had gotten used to releasing music with little publicity. So nothing prepared him for the onslaught of attention since the band, Gåte, was selected to represent Norway at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.The phones have not stopped ringing, Bormark said — not just with calls from reporters from mainstream media outlets, but also from the independent bloggers, YouTubers and podcast hosts who provide Eurovision superfans with nonstop coverage of Eurovision gossip, backstage drama and news about the contest.Casual Eurovision observers may tune in once a year to watch the competition, in which acts representing 37 countries compete in the world’s most watched cultural event. But for true fans, Eurovision is a year-round celebration of pop music, and since the winner is decided by viewer votes as well as juries of music industry professionals, fan media hype can help boost those artists’ profiles.The rise of websites and social media accounts dedicated to Eurovision news follows a broader trend in media, where nontraditional media organizations, like fan sites, podcasts, newsletters, new video formats and publications dedicated to niche interests, are expanding in size and influence.Members of the band Gåte, representing Norway at this year’s song contest, have been surprised by the attention they have received from Eurovision fans.Per Ole Hagen/Redferns, via Getty ImagesA report published last year by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat users paid more attention to social media personalities, influencers and celebrities than journalists when it came to news.“Someone can sit in their bedroom, being passionate about Eurovision, but suddenly they have 40,000 followers,” Bormark said.One of the most followed Eurovision news sites, Wiwibloggs, was founded by William Lee Adams, a Vietnamese American journalist who works for the BBC.“The fan media is sort of covering this year round, breathlessly, because they recognize that it’s an underserved topic,” said Adams, whose site’s YouTube channel got more than 20 million view last year. “This is the World Cup of music, this is the Olympics on steroids, and it deserves attention.”A lot has changed since Adams founded the site 15 years ago. At the Eurovision Song Contest in Baku, Azerbaijan in 2012, Adams said he and a friend, dressed in hot pink pants and tight white shirts, were among a small number people in the media room who were not representing traditional outlets.“Things kind of snowballed from there,” he said. Today, Wiwibloggs has a volunteer staff of more than 40 writers, editors, videographers and graphic designers from 30 countries.As a Eurovison blogger, Lucas has attended the competition many times.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesThis year, about 300 members of the fan media, representing nearly 200 publications, social media channels and podcasts, are registered to cover the Eurovision finals in Malmo, Sweden. Another 200 fan journalists have access to the competition’s online media room, according to the European Broadcasting Union or E.B.U., which oversees the event. That’s in addition to the more than 750 journalists from traditional media outlets expected to attend, including one reporter from The New York Times.Alesia Lucas, a Eurovision commentator from the Washington, D.C., area, said she started a YouTube channel in 2015 as a way to find with other people who were passionate about Eurovision — not easy for an American. As her audience has grown, so has the role of bloggers in setting the tone of conversations about the artists, she said.“We start banging the drum earlier than even the E.B.U. to start getting Eurovision back into the zeitgeist and highlight the moments that are notable,” said Lucas, who uses the name Alesia Michelle for her YouTube channel. She records content at 6 a.m., before her daughter wakes up, and edits video after she’s finished her day job of handling communications for a labor union.The Eurovision commentator Gabe Milne produces videos for his YouTube channel when he’s not at his day job at London City Hall. “Often I’ll do eight or nine hours there, come home, and then spend six or seven hours of research, getting everything ready,” he said. Compared to past years, “you’re seeing a lot more professional-style content,” he said.Lucas records content at 6 a.m., before her daughter wakes up, and edits video after she’s finished her day job of handling communications for a labor union. Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesYet fan media has mostly stayed away from a topic that mainstream media outlets have covered extensively: a campaign to exclude Israel from the competition because of the mounting civilian death toll in Gaza.“We’re not journalists,” said Tom Davitt, an Irish physical therapist who records Eurovision YouTube videos on evenings and weekends. “We’re not even amateur journalists, we’re just amateur content creators, so wading into this kind of stuff — we’re just not trained for it.”While reporters from mainstream media outlets tend to be impartial observers of the competition, many fan media are not aiming for neutrality. When USA Today hired a dedicated Taylor Swift reporter who was also a self-proclaimed Swiftie, it raised questions: Is it possible for a fan to maintain objectivity? Would someone who is not a fan understand the subject well enough to cover it?Charlie Beckett, the head of a think tank focused on journalism at the London School of Economics, said objectivity was not the goal in Eurovision.“The whole point of Eurovision is that you’re incredibly biased according to your nationality and which singer you like,” Beckett said. The growing numbers of fan media sites reflected the growth in hype around Eurovision, even nearly 70 years after its first edition. “It seems to ride out any kind of fashion reversal,” he said.Lucas, from the D.C. area, said that while mainstream media outlets report on Eurovision as a circus, it was now more mainstream than people credit. “Yeah, it’s camp, a little bit,” she said, “but you can’t tell me that Katy Perry’s halftime show was not camp either.” More

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    An Online Radio Station Where Everything Is Eclectic

    Music played by D.J.s like Flo Dill on NTS encompasses obscure ambient tracks and timeworn dad rock. The approach has won it fans far beyond its London home.On a gloomy Tuesday this past March, a cohort of trendy young Britons was waking up to the sounds of underground ’80s R&B. And Swedish space disco. And the folk singer John Martyn.Flo Dill, host of “The Breakfast Show” on the online radio station NTS, was floating around in a small East London studio, quietly back-announcing those tracks and laughing at messages in the station’s lively online chat room. Like most morning radio hosts, she tries to ease listeners into their day, slowly bringing up the tempo. But unlike most morning radio hosts, Dill plays tracks in a mixture of styles that can run the gamut from obscure ambient music to timeworn dad rock.The NTS studios in the Dalston neighborhood of London.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“The Breakfast Show” encapsulates the spirit of NTS, an eclectic revamp of traditional radio that draws listeners — and on-air talent — from across the globe. Since it was founded in 2011, NTS has grown into a big fish in underground music’s small pond: You could maybe go for an entire day listening to NTS and not recognize a single artist, and, even in Britain, the average person on the street would never have heard of it.But the station’s devoted fans are drawn to its shows, most of which are structured like D.J. mixes, with no talking between tracks; others play like Dill’s: modern, casual updates on classic radio formats, with genre-agnostic programming.Dill said in an interview that NTS works because, unlike traditional radio, which “spoon feeds” its audience, it doesn’t patronize or treat the listener as “a moron.” (NTS’s tagline is “Don’t Assume.”) She started volunteering at NTS in 2016, at a time when there were hardly any full-time staff members. Now, there are around 45 working across the station and its related businesses, which include putting on festivals and events and creating marketing campaigns for brands like Carhartt, Netflix and Sonos.“The Breakfast Show” should be a respite from the “relentless pursuit of beige stuff” in today’s culture, Dill said. The program is broadly accessible — she sees it as a portal into the broader NTS ecosystem, which can be “so specialist” — but considered and particular in its tastes.That spirit has thrived since NTS’s beginning, when the London D.J. and blogger Femi Adeyemi spun it off from a music blog he was writing called “Nuts to Soup.” In an interview, Adeyemi said he conceived of NTS as a cross between U.K. pirate radio — a fixture of the country’s music scene that he admired, but found “very restrictive” — and American college radio, which “had that free-form approach that I hadn’t really heard much of in the U.K.”Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“I feel really proud that people trust me enough to put me on in the morning,” Dill said.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesIn 2015, NTS expanded, opening a studio in Manchester and one in Los Angeles the following year. Currently, NTS hosts around 700 shows a month — roughly 600 from residents, who host weekly, biweekly or monthly shows, and 100 or so from guest D.J.s — which come in from cities across the world, including Beirut, Lebanon; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Melbourne, Australia. NTS broadcasts without advertising, instead relying on income from its commercial activities and a membership program called “NTS Supporters” to keep the station afloat. In March, the station averaged 360,000 listeners a day, according to its chief executive, Sean McAuliffe.Tabitha Thorlu-Bangura, the director of music and programming at NTS, said that the station “was the first platform in London that really reflected the breadth” of her taste as a young Black music fan with a genre-agnostic mind-set. It was that boundary-dissolving character that brings people to the station, she added.Dill said the station could also act as a bulwark against the idea that listening to music is a passive experience. “I want people to not think that music is just a background thing that’s on Spotify, that rolls into the next song and they all sound vaguely the same,” she said. (Around 40 percent of the music played on NTS is not available on the streaming service, McAuliffe noted.) “I want people to think that music is a really valuable, amazing art form, like a painting or a sculpture,” Dill added.Although it is based in London, NTS has global appeal. Nabihah Iqbal, who has been broadcasting on NTS for over a decade, said that she once received a message from a man in the Nubian Desert who listened to her show from the one spot in his Sudanese village where he could get cell signal.“What NTS reflects is the way that music consumption and connecting through music has changed because of the internet,” she said. “Listening to the station live, and being part of the chat room and connecting to people that way is a very real way of feeling like you’re part of a community.”The station’s listenership ballooned during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, and McAuliffe said there were now plans to “amplify NTS more.” It has never spent any money on marketing, for example, but plans to in the future. McAuliffe also said NTS would roll out a new feature of its app and website that “will enable more people to have a better music discovery experience” and “will get a lot more musicians and music rights holders paid at a time when they’re not getting paid enough.” He declined to give further details.With the platform getting bigger, Dill said she didn’t want its core identity to get lost. Adeyemi recently sold part of his stake in the company to Universal Music Group, the major label conglomerate that releases music by Taylor Swift and Drake, among others. (McAuliffe, Dill and Adeyemi all said that the company has no influence on the music that’s played on NTS, and has no seats on the company’s board.) The money from Universal would mean that NTS won’t get subsumed into a streaming service like Apple Music, Dill said, as happened to other independent radio operations, including “Beats in Space,” the beloved radio show hosted by the D.J. Tim Sweeney, which moved from WNYU-FM to Apple Music in 2021.“I have seen, over the course of my time, many things I loved go away because they can’t continue,” Dill said. “If someone wants to give us money, I’m fine with that.”Dill said that if the station were to professionalize too much, or stray too far from its intended goals, then it wouldn’t be for her anymore. “I get satisfaction from representing the station that I really believe in and I’m proud of,” she said. “I guess it comes back to trust. I feel really proud that people trust me enough to put me on in the morning.”Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times More

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    ‘Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story’ Review: A Sweet Jerry Seinfeld Comedy

    Starring Jerry Seinfeld in his feature directing debut, “Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story” is the only corporate saga whose main ingredient is high-fructose sarcasm.Pop-Tarts were invented over four hectic months in 1964. Jerry Seinfeld has been developing jokes about them for over 10 years, first in his stand-up act, and now as a full-fledged, fully ridiculous feature comedy targeted to the audience’s sweet-and-salty dopamine receptors. “Unfrosted,” directed by Seinfeld with a script by him and longtime collaborators Spike Feresten, Andy Robin and Barry Marder, gives the comic his first-ever live action leading film role as Bob Cabana, a fictional cereal flack who revolutionizes the breakfast industry. (William Post, the real-life person who helped create Pop-Tarts, died in February at the age of 96.) Cinema has endured branded biopics on everything from Air Jordans to the BlackBerry to Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. This is the only corporate saga whose main ingredient is high-fructose sarcasm.Should we care about the history of the Pop-Tart? Seinfeld postures that the Kellogg’s launch of a mylar-wrapped, shelf-stable, heatable pastry is a technological innovation on the scale of the space race and the Manhattan Project. One pivotal move comes when Cabana hires Donna Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy) away from NASA’s beakers of Tang. As the launch date nears, the cinematographer William Pope shoots close-ups of scorching toaster springs with the drama of a roiling booster rocket.The film is as estranged from the facts as Pop-Tarts are from genuine fruit. Still, it’s true that Battle Creek, Mich. — “cereal’s Silicon Valley,” Seinfeld once cracked — was ground zero of a Cold War rivalry between Kellogg’s and General Foods to sell a breakfast that broke free from the need for a bowl and spoon. Here, the General Foods’ owner Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer), once the richest woman in America, swans about in jewel-toned turbans and jets off to Moscow to enlist Nikita Khrushchev (Dean Norris) in her cause. At the same time, the dimwitted head of Kellogg’s (Jim Gaffigan) allows his company to align with President John F. Kennedy (Bill Burr), Chef Boy Ardee (Bobby Moynihan), the celebrity fitness guru Jack LaLanne (James Marsden), and the early computer Univac who acts up in ways that recall Bing’s sexually charged A.I. chatbot. Things take an even darker turn with the entrance of a vengeful milkman (Christian Slater) and a threatening figure named El Sucre (Felix Solis) who’s aware that millions of dollars hinge on access to his addictive white powder.As junk food goes, “Unfrosted” is delightful with a sprinkle of morbidity. Building on last December’s publicity stunt where an anthropomorphic Pop-Tart cooked and served itself to the Kansas State Wildcats, we’re here treated to a funeral where the deceased is given Full Cereal Honors. I will spoil nothing except to say Snap, Crackle and Pop have a ceremonial duty.The jokes spill forth so fast that there’s no time for the shtick to get soggy. Yet, the film also crams its running time with goofy detours, like a subplot where the voice of Tony the Tiger (Hugh Grant, once again seizing any opportunity to wear a fatuous cravat) leads his fellow mascots in a rebellion. Despite all these famous faces splashing into the frame, the scene stealer is the child actor Eleanor Sweeney making her debut as an opinionated taste tester. She’s g-r-r-reat.UnfrostedRated PG-13 for some suggestive references and language. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    Frank Wakefield, Who Expanded the Mandolin’s Range, Dies at 89

    A bluegrass innovator, he recorded numerous albums as a leader, and his list of collaborators included both Leonard Bernstein and Jerry Garcia.Frank Wakefield, an innovative bluegrass mandolinist whose sweeping musicality led to collaborations with the New York Philharmonic and Jerry Garcia, and whose unique voicings and technique expanded the parameters of his instrument, died on Friday at his home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. He was 89.Marsha Sprintz, his companion of 47 years, said the cause was complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.In a career that spanned seven decades, Mr. Wakefield played with a host of bluegrass luminaries, including Jimmy Martin and the Stanley Brothers.He first made his mark in the early 1950s after joining a band led by the singer and guitarist Red Allen as a vocalist and mandolin player. Working in Ohio and the Upper Midwest and, by 1960, the Baltimore-Washington area, the band developed a hard-driving, harmony-rich brand of bluegrass that inspired not only other musicians in the genre, but also bluegrass-inclined rock bands like New Riders of the Purple Sage.While still a teenager, Mr. Wakefield mastered the heavily syncopated “chop” chord of the bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, whom he met in 1961 and who immediately recognized Mr. Wakefield’s prowess as a mandolinist.Mr. Wakefield in 2010. Despite suffering from emphysema for years, he toured and recorded well into the 2000s.Michael G. Stewart“You can play like me as good — or near as good — as I can,” Mr. Wakefield, in a 2022 interview with the Hudson Valley Bluegrass Association, recalled Mr. Monroe saying at their initial meeting. “Now you’ve got to go out and find your own style.”Heeding Mr. Monroe’s advice, Mr. Wakefield did exactly that. He devised his own sound by alternating up and down strokes on his instrument with equal force to produce a clear, ringing tone and sustained rhythm, which he likened to a sledgehammer striking a steel rail in a 1998 interview with the bluegrass website Candlewater.com.At other times, plucking the strings with multiple fingers, he produced a richly textured effect suggestive of two or three mandolins playing together.David Grisman, a student of Mr. Wakefield’s and a mandolin virtuoso in his own right, said in an often quoted passage from Frets magazine that Mr. Wakefield had “split the bluegrass mandolin atom” by taking the instrument beyond where Mr. Monroe had.The 1964 album “Bluegrass,” which Mr. Wakefield recorded with the singer and guitarist Red Allen, pushed the boundaries of the genre.Folkways Records“Bluegrass,” the album that Mr. Wakefield made with Mr. Allen for Folkways Records in 1964 (and that a 19-year-old Mr. Grisman produced), proved ample confirmation of that claim: It featured versions of two of Mr. Wakefield’s most enduring originals, “New Camptown Races” and “Catnip,” both of which, with their developments in melody, tunings and chord changes, pushed the limits of what then constituted bluegrass.Mr. Wakefield’s innovations didn’t stop there, though. By the mid-1960s he had begun composing sonatas for the mandolin and arranging classical pieces for traditional bluegrass ensembles. He performed with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1967 and made a guest appearance with the Boston Pops orchestra the next year.The Greenbriar Boys (from left, Bob Yellin, Mr. Wakefield and John Herald) in performance at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. David Gahr/Getty ImagesMr. Wakefield’s forays outside bluegrass extended into pop territory as well, including a mid-1960s stint with the Greenbriar Boys, an urban folk revivalist group. During this period, he also performed with country bluesmen like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Son House and, later, rock acts like the Grateful Dead.Franklin Delano Roosevelt Wakefield was born on June 26, 1934, in the Emory Gap enclave of Harriman, Tenn., the 10th of 12 children of Simpson and Bertie (Isham) Wakefield. Growing up poor, he was forced to leave school after second grade to help work on the family farm.Enthralled by DeFord Bailey’s performances on “The Grand Ole Opry,” young Frank took up the harmonica at an early age and soon also became adept at playing the guitar.His father, who worked as a brakeman to supplement the family income, froze to death in a local railyard when Frank was 13. Several of his sisters moved 300 miles north to Dayton, Ohio, as part of a Depression-era migration. Frank and his brother, Ralph, were left to move between orphanages until Frank finally ran away to join his sisters in Dayton, where a brother-in-law introduced him to the mandolin.Billing themselves as the Wakefield Brothers, Frank and Ralph, who played guitar, made their first public appearances at house parties and on local radio in 1960. Two years later, Frank joined Red Allen’s band, and his path as a musician was set.However, his tenure with Mr. Allen was fraught with conflict, much of it brought on by Mr. Allen’s abusive behavior, especially when he was drinking. Nevertheless, apart from a period with the Detroit-based Chain Mountain Boys in the mid-1950s, Mr. Wakefield persevered with him until 1965, when he joined the Greenbriar Boys to replace Ralph Rinzler, who had left the band to become Bill Monroe’s manager.Mr. Wakefield in a New York recording studio in 1966, at around the time he embarked on a solo career.David Gahr/Getty ImagesAfter recovering from a near-fatal automobile accident in the late 1960s, Mr. Wakefield moved to Saratoga Springs and embarked on a solo career. Over the next five decades, he released albums for a variety of bluegrass-aligned record labels, including Takoma, Flying Fish and Patuxent Music. His 1972 Rounder album, called simply “Frank Wakefield” and featuring the New York bluegrass band Country Cooking, is widely regarded as a touchstone of the movement known as newgrass, which incorporated elements of rock, jazz and classical music into traditional bluegrass.Despite suffering from emphysema for years, Mr. Wakefield continued to tour nationally and to record well into the 2000s.Besides Ms. Sprintz, Mr. Wakefield’s survivors include a sister, Susie Norton; a son, Greg Wakefield; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.Despite his musically omnivorous appetites, Mr. Wakefield was unfamiliar with Mr. Garcia, who would later produce the 1976 album “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” a string-band collaboration between Mr. Wakefield and others, when they started playing shows together.“Whenever Garcia played with me and David,” Mr. Wakefield explained, referring to David Nelson of New Riders of the Purple Sage in a 2006 interview with candlewater.com, “we would always have a full house. I thought it was because of me.”“It took me a while,” he added, “to realize that people were coming to the shows because Jerry was playing with us.” More

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    ‘Evil Does Not Exist’ Review: Nature vs. Nurture

    Ryusuke Hamaguchi follows up his sublime drama “Drive My Car” with a parable about a rural Japanese village and the resort developer eyeing its land.Late in “Evil Does Not Exist,” a man who lives in a rural hamlet an easy drive from Tokyo cuts right to the movie’s haunting urgency. He’s talking to two representatives of a company that’s planning to build a resort in the area that will cover a deer trail. When one suggests that maybe the deer will go elsewhere, the local man asks, “Where would they go?” It’s a seemingly simple question that distills this soulful movie’s searching exploration of individualism, community and the devastating costs of reducing nature to a commodity.“Evil Does Not Exist” is the latest from the Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who’s best known for his sublime drama “Drive My Car.” This new movie is more modestly scaled than that one (it’s also far shorter) and more outward-directed, yet similar in sensibility and its discreet touch. It traces what happens when two Tokyo outsiders descend on a pastoral area where the spring water is so pure a local noodle shop uses it in its food preparation. The reps’ company intends to build a so-called glamping resort where tourists can comfortably experience the area’s natural beauty, a wildness that their very patronage will help destroy.The story unfolds gradually over a series of days, though perhaps weeks, and takes place largely in and around the hamlet. There, the local man, Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a self-described jack-of-all trades, lives with his daughter, Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), in a house nestled amid mature trees. Together, they like to walk in the woods as she guesses whether that tree is a pine and this one a larch, while he carefully warns her away from sharp thorns. A photograph on their piano of Hana in the arms of a woman suggests why melancholy seems to envelop both child and father, although much about their past life remains obscure.Hamaguchi eases into the story, letting its particulars surface gradually as Eiko Ishibashi’s plaintive, progressively elegiac score works into your system. The company’s plans for a glamping site give the movie its narrative through line as well as dramatic friction, which first emerges during a meeting between residents and the company reps, Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) and her brash counterpart, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka). The company — its absurd name is Playmode — wants to take advantage of Covid subsidies for its new venture. During the meeting, it emerges that the site’s septic tank won’t be large enough to accommodate the number of guests; the locals rightly worry that the waste will flow into the river.The scene, one of the longest in the movie, is emblematic of Hamaguchi’s understated realism, which he builds incrementally. The meeting takes place in a basic community center crowded with residents — some had dinner at Takumi’s home the night before — who sit in chairs facing the reps, who, armed with technology, are parked behind laptops and seated before a projector screen. As the reps play a video explaining “glamorous camping,” there’s a cut to Takumi intently watching the promo. The scene soon shifts to a tracking shot of deer tracks in snow and images of Hana playing in a field as a bird soars above; it’s as if Takumi were thinking of his joyful, distinctly unglamorous daughter. The scene shifts back to the meeting.The site will become “a new tourist hot spot,” Takahashi sums up, badly misreading his audience. “Water always flows downhill,” a village elder says in response, his thin, firm voice rising as he sweeps an arm emphatically downward. “What you do upstream will end up affecting those living downstream,” stating a law of gravity that’s also a passionate, quietly wrenching argument for how to live in the world.Lapidary, word by word, detail by detail, juxtaposition by juxtaposition, “Evil Does Not Exist” beautifully deepens. For the most part, the movie is visually unadorned, simple, direct. Hamaguchi tends to move the camera in line with the characters, for one, though the exceptions carry narrative weight: images of nearby Mount Fuji; a rearview look from inside a car at a fast-disappearing road; and a lovely traveling shot of soaring treetops, their branches framed against the sky. The canopied forest echoes an image in a short film by Masaki Kobayashi, who began directing after World War II; the title of his trilogy, “The Human Condition,” would work for every Hamaguchi movie I’ve seen.I have watched “Evil Does Not Exist” twice, and each time the stealthy power of Hamaguchi’s filmmaking has startled me anew. Some of my reaction has to do with how he uses fragments from everyday life to build a world that is so intimate and recognizable — filled with faces, homes and lives as familiar as your own — that the movie’s artistry almost comes as a shock. The dreamworld of movies often feels at a profound remove from ordinary life, distance that brings its own obvious pleasures. It’s far rarer when a movie, as this one does, speaks to everyday life and to the beauty of a world that we neglect even in the face of its calamitous loss. When Takumi asks “where would they go,” he isn’t just talking about deer.Evil Does Not ExistNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Review: A Conductor Surprises by Embracing the Ordinary

    Esa-Pekka Salonen is known for unusual, ambitious projects. But at the New York Philharmonic this week, he succeeded with standard repertory works.The conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen tends to get noticed for his ambitious, even outlandish projects.Perfume cannons puffing out scent alongside the music. A rare performance of one of the piano’s most gargantuan concertos. Contemporary opera in the concert hall. A roboticist being included among his artistic collaborators. Ample helpings of his own works. (Salonen is the rare maestro who is also a successful composer.)But once all the perfume has dissipated, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Salonen, who led the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall, is, at core, simply an excellent conductor.The Philharmonic program was unusual for him in that it was so, well, uncreative. No premieres, no stagings, no intriguing juxtapositions. Just two classic pieces — Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 and Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” — that, in the style of old-fashioned orchestra programming, seemed to have been thrown together arbitrarily. And yet it was a terrific concert, overseen by Salonen with his characteristic fiery clarity.Fiery clarity is a good way of describing his most recent career move, too. Classical music is, outwardly at least, meticulously polite. Few musicians leave positions amid publicly verbalized anger.But in March, when Salonen announced he wouldn’t renew his contract as the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, he told the truth — or at least his truth. He had made his decision, he said, “because I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does.”By the industry’s standards, this was an expletive-ridden rant. It quickly became clear that the problem was money. The San Francisco Symphony has hobbled out of the pandemic even more deficit-laden than it was before; its expensive promises to Salonen — like that team of artistic collaborators, roboticist and all — were going to need to be curtailed.The funny thing about Wednesday’s concert in New York is that it was exactly the kind of program that would be his future had Salonen chosen to remain in San Francisco: meat and potatoes repertoire, without the fancy trimmings.But even without them, the Philharmonic played beautifully for him on Wednesday. The Shostakovich concerto was dotted with eerily mellow rips of brass near the start, a hushed dusk in the strings at the start of the second movement and characterful pierces from the winds in the final Allegro. Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the soloist, played with a rich yet focused tone, and he didn’t indulge in excessive emotion. This resulted in a performance that was modest, straight-faced and fundamentally serene — but also a little cool, a little efficient. The piece seemed to sail by briskly.It was hard to remember the concerto at all after the monster that is Berlioz’s “Symphonie.” Last year, I wrote that the Philharmonic’s rendition of this score under Herbert Blomstedt was “leisurely, mellow, thoroughly pastoral.” That could hardly have been further from Salonen’s neurotically unsettled, icy-hot take, which grabbed every opportunity to emphasize off-kilter rhythms and changeable textures.The opening “Reveries, Passions” section had a dewy freshness to the sound that could shift, in a moment, to intense fullness, and then back again. Salonen couldn’t keep the long central “Scene in the Fields” section from feeling like it lingers. But it had quietly been building tension, with an undercurrent of anxiety — an anticipation of the trembling violas a little later on — even in Ryan Roberts’s quiet, plangent English horn shepherd calls.Salonen embraced the sudden swerves and floodlit brashness of the “March to the Scaffold,” which was, as it is too rarely, genuinely scary. And the finale, “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” was raucous but never messy — a ferocious, fantastic party.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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    Palestinian Flags Fly at Protests Worldwide. They Won’t Be at Eurovision.

    The organizers of the glitzy singing contest said that attendees would be allowed to wave only the flags of participating nations — including Israel’s.Protesters are waving Palestinian flags on American college campuses and in cities around the world to put pressure on Israel to end the war in the Gaza Strip. But there is one place where that symbol will be absent next week: inside the Eurovision Song Contest.Attendees at this year’s event in Malmo, Sweden, which starts on Tuesday, will not be allowed to bring Palestinian flags or wave banners with slogans about the war between Israel and Hamas, a spokesperson for the European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the contest, said on Thursday.Ticket buyers at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest are allowed to bring and display only flags representing the 37 participating countries, the spokesperson said in an email. That includes Israel. The only exceptions are rainbow and pride flags representing L.G.B.T.Q. people, the spokesperson added.Eurovision has long billed itself as an apolitical contest. The spokesperson said although the flags policy was reviewed every year, it had not changed since the last edition, held in Liverpool, England. But the rule has upset some Eurovision fans who for months have been calling for the event’s organizers to ban Israel from taking part because of its military campaign in Gaza.Inga Straumland, an Icelandic fan, called the decision to disallow Palestinian flags “appalling” and said in an interview that the move was “a strong limit on freedom of expression,” especially given that the flag of Israel, a Eurovision contestant, would be present.Although Israel is not in Europe, the country is eligible to compete because its broadcaster is a member of the European Broadcasting Union. The country has won Eurovision four times since first entering in 1973.This year, the 20-year-old singer Eden Golan will represent Israel with the song “Hurricane.” Until European Broadcasting Officials intervened, its original title was “October Rain,” and Eurovision fans have widely interpreted it as a statement about Israeli grief after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks that Israeli officials say killed about 1,200 people.The Eurovision Song Contest is the world’s most watched cultural event. Last year, over 56 million viewers tuned into the competition final live on television, with some 7.6 million more watching on YouTube.Since Eurovision began in 1956, the European Broadcasting Union has banned political statements from the stage, insisting the contest should unify countries rather than dividing them. But this year it has struggled to stop the war in Gaza from making its presence felt.In the months after Israel began its military campaign in Gaza, thousands of musicians and fans from countries including Iceland, Ireland and Sweden signed petitions urging Eurovision’s organizers to ban Israel from the event over the high rate of civilian deaths and the widespread destruction in the occupied territory, where the United Nations says the population is now on the brink of famine.The campaigners say that Eurovision’s ban on Russia participating after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine set a precedent. But Eurovision’s organizers reject the comparison. “We understand the concerns and deeply held views around the current conflict in the Middle East,” the broadcasting union said in a statement in January. Still, it added, Eurovision is “not a contest between governments.”In a more recent statement on its website, the broadcasting union said it would not clamp down on pro-Palestinian demonstrations outside the arena during this year’s finals. The union “is a firm advocate for freedom of speech,” the statement said, adding: “We understand that people may wish to make their voices heard and support the right of those who wish to demonstrate peacefully.”Dean Vuletic, an author of a book on Eurovision’s political history, said in a telephone interview that its organizers had clamped down on flags in 2016, in part to prevent the display of the symbols of terrorist groups like the Islamic State. They also banned flags from disputed territories and those promoting separatist causes — much to the annoyance of fans from Kosovo and Catalonia. Even the European Union’s flag, which was previously allowed, is now not permitted, Vuletic added.Some fans said they accepted the policy. Sophia Ahlin, the chair of a Swedish Eurovision fan club, said in a text message that “it’s nothing unusual” to allow only flags from participating nations.But others said the contest’s decision had turned them off. Straumland, the Icelandic fan, said she would not be watching this year’s event because of Israel’s involvement, even though Eurovision was “the biggest source of happiness in my life along with my son.” Instead, she said, she would be going to an alternative party, where drag and burlesque acts would cover old Eurovision hits.And, she added, she would be taking a Palestinian flag. More

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    Universal Music Artists Will Return to TikTok

    The two companies reached a new licensing deal, ending a three-month stalemate that kept some of pop’s biggest stars off the platform.TikTok and Universal Music Group have reached a new licensing deal, ending a three-month stalemate that had blocked songs from some of pop’s biggest stars from the influential social media platform.In a joint announcement early Thursday, the two companies said that they had agreed to a “multi-dimensional” new deal that included “improved remuneration” for Universal’s roster of artists and songwriters, and would address the label’s concerns over the growth of A.I.-generated content on the app.In statements that accompanied the announcement, Shou Chew, the chief executive of TikTok, called music “an integral part of the TikTok ecosystem.” Lucian Grainge, the chief executive of Universal — the world’s biggest music company, with a roster of artists including Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, Drake and U2 — called the deal a “new chapter in our relationship with TikTok” that “focuses on the value of music, the primacy of human artistry and the welfare of the creative community.”In an internal email to Universal employees, a copy of which was seen by The New York Times, Grainge said that under the new agreement, “artist and songwriter compensation will be greater than under our prior TikTok deal.”The agreement ends the music industry’s biggest and most contentious dispute with a tech platform in years. Both companies hurled public accusations at each other, and artists from across the spectrum worried about whether their careers would be hurt by the absence of their music from TikTok, which has become a vital promotional platform and boasts more than 170 million users in the United States alone.But the deal also comes amid wider uncertainty for TikTok as the app faces a possible ban or sale in the United States because of national security concerns over the app’s Chinese owner, ByteDance. Last month, President Biden signed a bill that would allow TikTok to continue to operate in the United States if it was sold in nine months, though the company is expected to challenge the law in court.Universal began to withdraw permission for its music from TikTok on Feb. 1, after an impasse in negotiations to renew its previous licensing agreement. At the time, Universal said that TikTok “attempted to bully us into accepting a deal worth less than the previous deal, far less than fair market value and not reflective of their exponential growth.”Millions of videos that included Universal music — including many artists’ own official music videos — were muted on the platform. TikTok said that by withdrawing its songs, Universal had “put their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters.”TikTok and Universal have not commented on their negotiations since then. But the dispute seemed to shift three weeks ago, when Swift — the biggest and most influential artist on Universal’s roster — broke ranks with the label and returned her music to TikTok, ahead of the release of her most recent album.Her move may have weakened Universal’s leverage. But since the ban took effect, fans noticed that songs from many other Universal artists, including Grande and Camila Cabello, had returned, often in sped-up or slowed-down versions that may have been uploaded to the platform by fans.In their announcement, TikTok and Universal did not offer any specifics about the financial terms of their deal. The companies’ statement says they will work together to “realize new monetization opportunities” through e-commerce, and that TikTok will “invest significant resources” in building tools like data analytics and ticketing.The companies added that they were “working expeditiously” to return Universal’s music to the platform. That could take a matter of days or weeks. More