Aurelia Butler

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    To Live Long and Prosper, Do What George Takei Does

    For the “Star Trek” actor and author of the new children’s book “My Lost Freedom,” it’s all about green tea and antioxidants. “I drink it every day, all day. I am an addict,” he says.When George Takei talks about his childhood, he speaks of both anguish and beauty.The actor best known as Sulu from “Star Trek” was only 5 when he and his family — like thousands of Japanese American citizens during World War II — were relocated from their Los Angeles home to a string of incarceration camps.Takei captured some of his family’s wartime experiences — in a horse stall in Arcadia, Calif., a camp in Rohwer, Ark., another one in Northern California — in his picture book, “My Lost Freedom,” due out April 16. “This is an American story that Americans need to know about,” he said in a video call.The book continues his mission to shed light on a dark chapter in U.S. history. It follows his 1994 autobiography “To the Stars,” his 2019 graphic memoir “They Called Us Enemy” and the 2015 musical production “Allegiance,” which was inspired by his life.Takei, 86, discussed meeting dignitaries with his husband, Brad, as well as the keepsakes he treasures and his one healthy addiction. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Seeing Your Work in LightsI got a phone call that the marquee for “Allegiance” was going up at 8 a.m. Our apartment was so close to Longacre Theater, in Manhattan, we ran down there to see the letters being put there. It was thrilling — a life landmark experience! I wished both my parents could be there.2Big BandAt Rohwer, my father arranged to borrow a record player from the camp administration every couple of months, and after dinner, the tables were dragged away, the benches were put off to the side, and the teenagers got to have a dance. My bedtime music was the music from the mess hall. I still get a lump in my throat when I hear big band music from the 1940s.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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    ‘Zone of Interest’ Oscars Speech Is Defended by Jewish Film Artists

    Remarks about Israel that the director Jonathan Glazer made as he accepted an Oscar for “The Zone of Interest” drew a letter of support after facing criticism last month.More than 150 Jewish actors, filmmakers and other artists signed an open letter that was published on Friday in defense of remarks about Jewishness and the war in Gaza that the director Jonathan Glazer made in his Oscars acceptance speech for “The Zone of Interest,” his film about the Holocaust.Glazer’s speech has become one of the most hotly debated in Oscars history, drawing an open letter of strong denunciation from other Jewish film professionals last month and now one of support.“Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people,” Glazer, who is Jewish, said at the Academy Awards on March 10. “Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”The new letter expresses support for Glazer. “In his speech, Glazer asked how we can resist the dehumanization that has led to mass atrocities throughout history,” it says. “For such a statement to be taken as an affront only underscores its urgency.”Its signatories included the actors Joaquin Phoenix, Hari Nef and Debra Winger; the directors Joel Coen, Nicole Holofcener and Boots Riley; the playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard; and the artist Nan Goldin, according to Variety, which reported the existence of the letter on Friday. Its signatories were confirmed by Sarah Sophie Flicker, an artist and cultural organizer who helped organize the letter.“We stand with all those calling for a permanent cease-fire, including the safe return of all hostages and the immediate delivery of aid into Gaza, and an end to Israel’s ongoing bombardment of and siege on Gaza,” the letter says.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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    Margaret Tynes, Soprano Who Soared in Verdi and Strauss, Dies at 104

    Because there were few opportunities for Black singers in the U.S., she became a powerhouse in Europe, performing in operas like “Tosca” and “Carmen.”Margaret Tynes, an American soprano who was acclaimed in Europe but neglected in the United States at a time when Black singers were newly breaking into the operatic world, died on March 7 in Silver Spring, Md. She was 104.The death was confirmed by her nephew Richard Roberts, who said Ms. Tynes died in a nursing home.In the 1960s and ’70s Ms. Tynes, with her incendiary, full-throated voice, in roles like Aida and Salomé, sang at opera houses in Vienna, Prague and Budapest, earning high praise on the continent — “an exceptional voice, intense in every coloring, vibrant and dramatic,” Milan’s Corriere della Sera newspaper wrote — even while U.S. critics were cooler. The Süddeutsche Zeitung of Munich wrote of her performance in Benjamin Britten’s “The War Requiem” that “What Britten expects of a woman’s voice can only be achieved by a singer of Margaret Tynes’s caliber.”But she did not make her Metropolitan Opera debut until 1974, when she was 55, in a run of three performances as the title role in Janacek’s “Jenufa” that began and ended her career there.Ms. Tynes, right, in 1957 with Joya Sherrill and Duke Ellington when they recorded “A Drum Is a Woman,” for which Ms. Tynes gained a measure of American fame.Everette CollectionMs. Tynes grew up in the segregated South and gained a measure of American fame in the 1950s, recording “A Drum Is a Woman” with Duke Ellington, singing heartfelt renditions of “Negro Spirituals” on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and appearing with Harry Belafonte in the musical “Sing, Man, Sing.” She also sang at the funeral of the musician W.C. Handy and toured the U.S.S.R. with Mr. Sullivan’s show in 1958.Her breakthrough in opera, the genre that defined her career, came in Europe in 1961, when she sang Salomé in Luchino Visconti’s production at the Spoleto Festival in Italy. Time magazine described her as “moving about the stage with catlike grace, her rich, ringing voice zooming with ease through the high, precarious lines,” and as a “girl with veins of fire.”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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    Why Is Cardi B Fighting With Raymonte?

    The rapper exchanged heated remarks with the social media personality Raymonte Cole after he suggested that her skin color was the reason brands consider her “marketable.”The rapper Cardi B found herself embroiled in a sharp back-and-forth with a social media personality this week after he brought up her social class, upbringing and skin color. A quarrel soon erupted over colorism and questions of who gets to profit over which public affect.Of course, Cardi B isn’t one to shrink from a fight, and it wasn’t even the first spat this year to involve a high-profile rapper. But the argument is notable for the difficult issues it broached having to do with colorism — the way prejudice can vary based on someone’s skin color, and how it can lead to stereotypes and differential policing of behavior.Here’s what we know about the charged exchange.What happened?In a TikTok video posted on Wednesday, the social media personality Raymonte Cole lamented being labeled too “ghetto” to be marketable while someone like Cardi B is still able to claim social status and brand deals.“What bothers me as a Black person, you guys say that I’m ghetto,” Mr. Cole said in the video, which he has since removed from his TikTok account. But Cardi B, he said, “is very, very ghetto. She’s way ghettoer than me.”The rapper fired back on X on Wednesday afternoon. “It’s crazy because when I became famous people said I’m ghetto,” she wrote.“To this day no matter what I accomplished I still get called a stripper all because I’m from the ghetto,” she continued. “People misinterpret me because apparently I’m LOUD AND GHETTO.”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 Solar Eclipse Soundtrack

    Songs from TV on the Radio, Brian Eno, Julianna Barwick and others than could well accompany the celestial event on Monday.TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe.Chad Batka for The New York TimesDear listeners,As you have probably heard, on Monday most people in the United States will be able to witness a solar eclipse that will plunge an ordinary afternoon into otherworldly darkness. Such events require planning. Where are you going to watch the eclipse? Who are you going to watch it with? And, most crucially for Amplifier purposes, what will you listen to during it?Today’s playlist aims to get you in the mood for this rare cosmic event. It features atmospheric ambient music from Brian Eno and Julianna Barwick as well as ethereal jazz from Alice Coltrane and Amaro Freitas. I also included a few songs that refer to moons and darkness, from Cat Stevens and Will Oldham, a.k.a. Bonnie “Prince” Billy, though I stopped just short of adding Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” because I have at least some restraint.As far as solar eclipses go, this one is relatively long: Along the totality line, the moon will block out the sun for about four minutes and 28 seconds. A few songs on this playlist run for approximately that duration, so if you press play on, say, Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” as soon as the eclipse begins, it can soundtrack the entire experience. If you want to take in the moment in reverent silence, though, I fully support that; this playlist will be here when the eclipse is over, if you want to extend the astronomical vibe. And if you want to spend your eclipse listening to “Total Eclipse of the Heart”? Well, that’s your decision, not mine.I do love the feeling of human interconnectedness that occurs during an eclipse, though. There’s something powerful about knowing that millions of people in all sorts of locations will be stopping what they’re doing and perhaps reflecting on the fact that, for all our differences, we’re all living under the same sky. Who knows? Maybe some of us will even be listening to the same music.I’m being followed by a moonshadow,LindsayListen along while you read.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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    Making Films About Outsiders, Increasingly in the Mainstream

    Goran Stolevski, who is from North Macedonia and grew up partly in Australia, has made three features in three years, all teeming with unruly emotion.Periods of personal crisis have often yielded writing sprees for Goran Stolevski, a Macedonian filmmaker who has made three critically acclaimed features in three years.Although his recent spate of theatrical releases — all by Focus Features — could make it seem as if success has been quick to come by for the filmmaker, it has been proceeded by long seasons of debilitating professional uncertainty.Right after turning 30, Stolevski wrote four feature screenplays in a nine-month period he spent living in Bristol, England. Writing gave shape to his days as an unemployed artist who couldn’t get any of his projects off the ground. Two of those screenplays became his recent features “You Won’t Be Alone” and “Housekeeping for Beginners.”Then, after his 2017 short film “Would You Look at Her” won a prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Stolevski was out of work for another two years, and wrote four more screenplays.Stolevski, now 38, had written at least 10 scripts before making his 2022 feature debut, “You Won’t Be Alone.” An evocative tale about a shape-shifting witch in a 19th-century Macedonian village, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. His sophomore effort, the 1990s-set Australian gay romance “Of an Age,” opened in U.S. cinemas in early 2023.“I wouldn’t make every film I’ve written, but there are some I’m obsessed with; they need to exist outside of my head,” he said in a video call in January from this year’s Palm Springs International Film Festival where his third feature, “Housekeeping for Beginners,” screened.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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    When a Sasquatch Comes to Central Park

    A publicity effort for the movie “Sasquatch Sunset” had one of the film’s cast members in full sasquatch costume, wandering through Central Park.If you were near the Ramble in Central Park on Thursday afternoon, you might have thought you were in a “Planet of the Apes”-themed episode of “What Would You Do?”Because you may have witnessed a 6-foot-7 longhaired sasquatch slowly traversing tall rocks and promenading through thickets, grunting at the sky and scaring children and dogs silly.But what you saw wasn’t Bigfoot. It was a big gimmick.The sasquatch sighting was a gorilla — sorry, guerrilla — publicity effort for “Sasquatch Sunset,” a new film directed by the brothers David and Nathan Zellner that opens in New York on April 12.Conceptually, the promotional shenanigans in Central Park were in line with the film’s irreverent sensibility. A mix of bro comedy, National Geographic documentary and emotional family drama, it stars Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg as members of a pack of kind-eyed sasquatches who brave life and death in the wilderness.Nathan Zellner, who plays the male alpha, was the human underneath the hairy suit on Thursday. A natural grunter, he was greeted by big laughs and phones aloft the moment he stepped out of a van across from the American Museum of Natural History.Inside the park, Trey Hope stopped to gawk and take a snapshot. What was it and why was it there? He wasn’t sure.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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    The Era of Klaus Mäkelä, Conducting Phenom, Begins in Chicago

    On Thursday, the richly talented 28-year-old maestro led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the first time since being named its next music director.On Thursday evening, when Klaus Mäkelä came onstage to lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the first time since being named its next music director, he seemed at pains not to bask in the roar that greeted his entrance.He smiled, bowed and quickly turned to give the downbeat. The orchestra had already released a video of the moment on Tuesday when the players were told he got the job. Many maestros would take the opportunity to wax a little eloquent before getting down to business; Mäkelä spoke for less than 20 seconds before raising his baton to start the rehearsal.Mäkelä, just 28, clearly wants to avoid seeming like a vain, spotlight-craving young man. He is already the topic of much discussion for being what some consider far too early in his career for such an august position — the Chicago Symphony has been among America’s finest for well over a century — especially when he has already taken on daunting responsibilities with European orchestras.His rise has been one of the most meteoric in modern music history. After completing his education in his native Finland, Mäkelä began his international career in earnest a mere six years ago; the pandemic was for him a period of unnatural acceleration.He is not, however, the first 20-something conductor to burst onto the classical scene. Gustavo Dudamel was Mäkelä’s age when he became the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Leonard Bernstein was 25 when his surprise New York Philharmonic debut, broadcast nationwide, made headlines.And Willem Mengelberg was just 24 when he took on the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the eminent ensemble at which Mäkelä is currently artistic partner. He will become chief conductor there in 2027, the same year he will officially become music director in Chicago. (And the same year that his current podium contracts, in Paris and Oslo, will lapse.)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