Aurelia Butler

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    Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Jury to Decide if He Led an Entourage or a Criminal Enterprise

    Selection of jurors is to begin Monday in a federal case that accuses the music mogul of deploying his employees to help him commit crimes.Running the life of Sean Combs has long involved a large retinue of employees, including security guards, personal assistants, household staff and higher-ranking supervisors.At the music mogul’s trial on charges of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking, the jury will be confronted with the question of whether Mr. Combs led a typical celebrity entourage or, as prosecutors will argue, a criminal enterprise responsible for enabling years of sexual exploitation and other crimes.The selection of that jury begins on Monday as prosecutors and defense lawyers work to choose a 12-member panel for a sprawling case that will put much of Mr. Combs’s life on trial and focus particular scrutiny on the conduct of his employees over two decades.The government says employees set up hotel rooms, procured drugs and arranged for male prostitutes ahead of what prosecutors have described as “drug-fueled coercive sex marathons.” They paid women to keep them under Mr. Combs’s financial control, investigators say, and when Mr. Combs became violent, they managed the aftermath.“They facilitated the cover up of those assaults,” prosecutors wrote of Mr. Combs’s staffers in court papers, “by helping the defendant bribe witnesses, arranging treatment for the victims, secreting the victims away from the public until their injuries healed, and contacting victims in the aftermath of the defendant’s assaults.”In a search of Mr. Combs’s home in Miami, prosecutors said, law enforcement seized firearms and ammunition, including two AR-15s with defaced serial numbers in his bedroom closet.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesWe 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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    Wim Wenders on Where the War in Europe Really Ended 80 Years Ago

    Wim Wenders, the renowned German film director, is nearly 80 years old, as old as the peace in Europe that followed the capitulation of the Nazi regime.“From my childhood onward, I have lived 80 years in peace,” he says in a short film he has directed to commemorate the end of World War II. But now, with a war in Ukraine that he calls “a war against Europe,” Wenders says that the stakes have rarely been higher.“Eighty years after the liberation of our continent, we Europeans are realizing again that peace cannot be taken for granted,” he says in the film. “It is now up to us to take the keys to freedom into our own hands.”In an interview in his Berlin office, Wenders said that the decades of peace “defined my life,” as the war had defined the life of his parents. His father, an army surgeon, spent five years at the front and was the only one of his class who did not die there, Wenders said. “I had the privilege to be among the first generation of Germans who lived for 80 years in peace,” he said. “None of my ancestors had that privilege.”Europe and Germany are crammed with varied efforts to remember the end of the war this week, including somber memorial events at concentration camps like Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. But Wenders’ film is a rare personal and political testament from the man behind award-winning movies including “Paris, Texas,” “Wings of Desire” and “The American Friend.”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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    Cora Sue Collins, a Busy Child Actress in the 1930s, Dies at 98

    She was in films with Greta Garbo, who became a friend, and Myrna Loy, Bette Davis and others. She ended her career after being sexually harassed.Cora Sue Collins, who as a dimpled, chubby-cheeked child actress in the early 1930s appeared opposite A-list stars like Greta Garbo, Myrna Loy and Merle Oberon, but who cut her career short after being sexually harassed by a screenwriter, died on April 27 at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 98.Her daughter, Susie McKay Krieser, said the cause was complications of a stroke.Miss Collins made about 50 pictures over 13 years, including 11 in 1934 and another 11 in 1935. She was one of the era’s galaxy of child stars, a list that included Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, but she did not become as famous as they did. In her first movie, the 1932 comedy “The Unexpected Father,” she played a waif whose newly wealthy adoptive father (Slim Summerville) hires a nurse (ZaSu Pitts) to care for her. Praise for 4-year-old Cora Sue came quickly.Miss Collins made her movie debut in “The Unexpected Father,” a 1932 comedy in which Slim Summerville played her adoptive father and ZaSu Pitts played a nurse.Universal PicturesA critic for The Richmond News Leader in Virginia labeled her a “baby star” with “amazing acting ability and an appeal that walks right into your heart.” The Kansas City Journal wrote, “The little Collins girl walks away with the picture.”Miss Collins played Garbo as a child in “Queen Christina,” the acclaimed 1933 movie about the Swedish monarch. At the time, she told one newspaper that Garbo “ was so friendly and liked my new teeth a lot.”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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    Komische Oper Berlin Turns ‘Don Giovanni’ Into a Requiem

    In Berlin, the director Kirill Serebrennikov’s new production dispenses with the opera’s final sextet and leads directly into Mozart’s Requiem.Partway through the dissident Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s new production at the Komische Oper in Berlin that pairs Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Requiem, text is projected across an abstract set piece representing a graveyard. “Here,” it says, “the dead teach the living.”At this point in the opera, the statue of a murdered man is about to come to life to confront his killer. But there is perhaps another meaning to be found in the text. “It’s a requiem,” Serebrennikov said in an interview, “for all of us.”His production, which runs through May 23 before returning next season, follows a pre-20th-century performance tradition of dispensing with the final sextet of “Don Giovanni,” a pat moral lesson sung after its title character is dragged to hell. Instead, the hellfire blaze of D minor and major leads directly into the soft, D-minor chords of the Requiem.That work was left unfinished at Mozart’s death, in 1791. Serebrennikov, together with the choreographers Evgeny Kulagin and Ivan Estegneev, stages the roughly 20 minutes of music that Mozart completed as dance theater. Don Giovanni’s soul, embodied by the former Pina Bausch dancer Fernando Suels Mendoza, struggles against and finally accepts death as the chorus and soloists perform last rites.“The Requiem is not only a funeral Mass,” Serebrennikov said. “It was written, like ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead,’ not just for those still living, but also for the dead: to help them find a condition for themselves after death.”Serebrennikov’s production — the final in his cycle of the Mozart-Da Ponte operas at the Komische Oper — opens with Don Giovanni’s funeral, and transforms the plot into a nonlinear series of scenes set in the bardo, the Tibetan transitional space between life and death. He leans into the enigmas of the title character and the work as a whole, starting with its label as a “dramma giocoso”: “funny tragedy,” Serebrennikov said, “the mixture of all genres, all intentions.”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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    Where Would Hollywood Find Its Guillotines or Pay Phones Without Them?

    When the Netflix series “Wednesday” needed a guillotine recently, it did not have to venture far. A North Hollywood prop house called History for Hire had one available, standing more than eight feet high with a suitably menacing blade. (The business offers pillories too, but the show wasn’t in the market for any.)The company’s 33,000-square-foot warehouse is like the film and television industry’s treasure-filled attic, crammed with hundreds of thousands of items that help bring the past to life. It has a guitar Timothée Chalamet used in “A Complete Unknown,” luggage from “Titanic,” a black baby carriage from “The Addams Family.”Looking for period detail? You can find different iterations of Wheaties boxes going back to the ’40s, enormous television cameras with rotating lenses from the ’50s, a hair dyer with a long hose that connects to a plastic bonnet from the ’60s, a pay phone from the ’70s and a yellow waterproof Sony Walkman from the ’80s.History for Hire’s 33,000-square-foot warehouse has aisles and aisles of items grouped together by topic or theme.Need a guillotine? They can help.They have a large collection of vintage cameras.History for Hire, which Jim and Pam Elyea have owned for almost four decades, is part of the crucial but often unseen infrastructure that keeps Hollywood churning, and helps make it one of the best places in the world to make film and television.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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    David Harbour Is Conflicted About Becoming a Morning Person

    Working on the new movie “Thunderbolts*” and the TV series “Stranger Things,” he said, “You’re up early at 6 in the morning. But I still have that beast inside me that wants to sleep till 1 p.m.”The Red Guardian never made the varsity squad of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but that’s more than OK with David Harbour.“Of the people that do love these movies, we are not the favorite,” he said of the antiheroes in the new Marvel film “Thunderbolts*.” “But we really poured our hearts into this movie and tried to make something that is about isolation in modern society and light and the darkness that is within all of us.”During what Harbour called a bit of a nightmare, he worked on “Thunderbolts*” at the same time he was shooting the final season of the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” in which he plays Hopper, the heroic small-town police chief. He is currently working on “DTF St. Louis,” an HBO limited series and the first thing he has produced, with Jason Bateman and Linda Cardellini.In a video call from Los Angeles, he elaborated on the headphones, sunglasses and Zen mantra that he considers essential. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.An AmericanoI drink it all day long. My doctor has told me to knock it off, but it is the last vice I have. I have an assistant and she does a lot of great things for me, but probably the No. 1 job is she brings me too many Americanos throughout the day.Wired HeadphonesI love a tangled cord. I used to carry a CD player back in the early 2000s and I would put on headphones and walk around the East Village and have my little soundtrack to my life. Just sort of float through.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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    AriAtHome Walks the Streets, Making Beats (and New Friends)

    On the SoHo corner where Prince and Elizabeth Streets meet, dog walkers, errand runners and lunch breakers squinted through the April sun at the part man, part beat-emanating automaton approaching them.Ari Miller, 25, known by his artist name AriAtHome, is a New York-based wayfaring musician who turns heads with his mobile beat-making rig. Donning a get-up that looks like a cross between a Ghostbusters proton pack and a ballpark-vendor tray, he dishes out on-the-spot hip-hop, neo-soul, funk and house beats throughout the city’s streets, all created entirely from scratch without breaking stride.“I built the rig with New York City in mind,” Miller said. “When you make a good song with a stranger in the street it’s like, ‘Whoa, did we just become best friends?’”Ari Miller (a.k.a. AriAtHome) at work, with his videographer Dylan Goucher capturing the scene and livestreaming. Miller making his way up subway stairs wearing 55 pounds of gear.The guts of the machinery Miller and a friend assembled for his mobile music project.Crammed with keyboards, a looper, six speakers and a controller with dozens of knobs and faders, Miller’s Frankenstein instrument offers a buffet of drum, keyboard and bass sounds, interfaced through the music software Ableton. In the back, a mess of cables hides a Mac Mini M4, a modem and the hot-swappable camera batteries that power it all.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 Uncertain Future of South Carolina’s “Porgy and Bess” House

    When George Gershwin visited a cottage in Folly Beach, S.C., in 1934, “Porgy and Bess” came to life. But will it remain a historic artifact or become just another beach house?The scholars, preservationists and historians had been strategizing for about an hour inside the salon of the charming cypress cottage they were trying to save.They all agreed that magic had been conjured in this very spot nearly a century ago. That’s when the writers DuBose and Dorothy Heyward invited the composer George Gershwin to visit their retreat, nicknamed Follywood, on the cozy barrier island of Folly Beach.Gershwin was writing an opera based on DuBose Heyward’s novel “Porgy,” which was adapted into a play co-written with his wife. The story depicted Black life in Charleston, S.C., and the Heywards thought Gershwin should see firsthand the place, people and culture he was writing about. Although Gershwin composed some of the music in New York, his South Carolina visit resulted in eternal anthems like “Summertime.”“That does bring up the elephant in the room,” said Harlan Greene, an author and historian who has done extensive research on the Heywards and the opera. He looked at those around him in mid-March, taking note that there were no Black people among the hopeful preservationists. “Here we are, a bunch of white people in a very diverse economy and you know, cultural appropriation.”The historic Folly Beach house stands out among more modern constructions. Elizabeth Bick for The New York Times“Porgy and Bess” is largely celebrated as the Great American Opera. It is also weighted by the country’s historical baggage. The opera is an elevated piece of culture that explores the dynamics of segregated African Americans; in depicting Blacks as fully formed people nearly a century ago — and not as mammies or Mandingos by performers wearing blackface — it was an outlier. Yet it also faced significant criticism for reinforcing degrading stereotypes.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