Aurelia Butler

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    Los Angeles Mayor Seeks to Lure Filming Back by Cutting Red Tape

    With film and TV production in Los Angeles down by roughly one-third in recent years, Mayor Karen Bass took steps to make it easier to shoot at top locations.Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles said Tuesday that she was taking steps to make filming in the city easier as local, state and federal officials have grown concerned about the exodus of film and television production to other states and nations.The mayor issued an executive directive to streamline city processes, lower the costs of filming in the city and make it easier for productions to shoot at well-known city-owned locations like the Griffith Observatory. The mayor also reaffirmed her support for a massive funding increase for the state’s film tax credit program.“We are going to fight now,” Ms. Bass said at a news conference on Tuesday morning. “While we push for the tax credits to be passed in Sacramento, we need to do what we can today to impact building in Los Angeles.”Though the specific changes detailed in the directive are somewhat technical, the move by Ms. Bass represents a signal of her support for the film industry at a time it faces something of a existential crisis. Filming in the region is down roughly a third in recent years, lured away by massive subsidies in other states and other countries, which often offer cheaper labor. The exodus has left tens of thousands of middle-class union workers without jobs.At the news conference inside SAG-AFTRA’s headquarters, Ms. Bass — flanked by more than a dozen members of the film and television industry — also reiterated her support for a proposal by Gov. Gavin Newsom of California to dramatically increase the size of the state’s tax credit program for film and television to $750 million annually from $330 million.Lawmakers in Sacramento are expected to finalize the state budget next month. Mr. Newsom’s plan appears to have wide support, but exactly how much money lawmakers will ultimately allot to Hollywood at a time the state faces a $12 billion deficit is unclear.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 7-Song, 130-Minute Jam Band Primer

    Listen to noodling tracks by Dave Matthews Band, Grateful Dead, Goose and more.Dave MatthewsAmy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,It has become a joke among a few friends and colleagues that I am the newspaper’s jam band correspondent. I have written (and Popcasted!) about the Grateful Dead, Phish’s wizard-like lighting director and, last month, Goose. I do these stories because I like this music, and in some cases love it. Now, it is time for me to make my case. If you’ve ever found yourself even a little jam-band curious, then this one is for you.A jam band borrows the grammar the Grateful Dead set more than a half-century ago: concerts with ever-shifting set lists; songs with ample room for extensive improvisation; eclectic musical roots encompassing bluegrass, gospel, jazz and rock (Southern, prog, classic, indie); fans who treasure live recordings over studio albums; and an ethos that is laid-back and, though sometimes serious, rarely self-serious.Roll your eyes if you must. But jam bands aren’t going anywhere. Goose and the virtuosic guitarist Billy Strings are on the cusp of mainstream moments. Suddenly, somehow, the Dead became a little bit cool. Jam bands might be perfectly suited to our era, in which an artist’s best bet is developing intimate relationships with core groups of passionate fans who will pay for tickets, merch and subscriptions.What follows is a 101-level syllabus. Live tracks only, of course. If you get confused, listen to the music play.We play bebop in the band,MarcListen 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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    Spike Lee May Be in Cannes, but His Heart Is Courtside With the Knicks

    The director brought his latest collaboration with Denzel Washington, “Highest 2 Lowest,” to the festival, but he really wanted to talk basketball.Few things could pull Spike Lee away from a courtside seat for the New York Knicks, but the Cannes Film Festival trumps all.Lee is in France to support his new film, “Highest 2 Lowest,” which means he’ll miss the opening games of the Knicks’ playoff series. Still, he has left no doubt where his heart really lies. At the premiere on Monday, the director paid tribute to his beloved basketball team by wearing a suit in the Knicks’ signature blue and orange. He doubled down at the news conference on Tuesday, showing up in Knicks gear from head to toe.“Knicks in how many?” a journalist asked him.Lee didn’t hesitate: “We only need four.”The director said that even during the production of “Highest 2 Lowest,” which stars Denzel Washington as a wealthy New Yorker whose son is involved in a kidnapping, his filming schedule revolved around the Knicks.“When people know the Knicks are playing that day, they know they get to come home early,” he joked. “They’re calling home like, ‘Honey, I’ll be home for dinner tonight!’”To the chagrin of the baffled French news media, basketball came up again and again in the hourlong news conference. At one point, the director took a question from journalist Chaz Ebert, who introduced herself by noting that she hailed “from the home of the Chicago Bulls.”Lee perked up, ready to do battle. “Can I ask you a question?” he responded. “When’s the last time Michael Jordan played?”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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    On TikTok, ‘Propaganda’ Lists Go Viral

    TikTok users are building eye-catching lists of their dislikes and are labeling them as propaganda that they’re “not falling for.”Lip filler, people who aren’t cat people, the societal expectation for women to shave their legs, working a 9-to-5 job. On TikTok, users have recently begun lining up their dislikes and branding them with an eye-catching term: propaganda.In thousands of videos, many of which are set to a snippet of Charli XCX’s “I think about it all the time featuring bon iver,” users present a list of things they have deemed “propaganda I’m not falling for.” With the context of only a few words of text on a screen, the topics span across genres, with common examples including milk (both plant-based and from cows), Labubus, artificial intelligence, politics, run clubs and the male loneliness epidemic.Delaney Denton, 22, said when she first saw one of the videos she thought it was “kind of iconic” and was inspired to make her own, which now has nearly a million views.“I think it’s putting a spin on things that just feel a little off in our society but aren’t necessarily propaganda,” Ms. Denton said of the trend.

    @delaneydenton #fyp ♬ I think about it all the time featuring bon iver – Charli xcx & Bon Iver The concept isn’t exactly new. Social media aficionados will probably remember the “in” and “out” lists that were an inescapable start to 2024. And people are often looking for new ways to classify their opinions, as is the case with the recent rise of “coded” language online.

    @maya81802 I could make so many of these I have 10,000 opinions (they’re all right) #fyp #propoganda ♬ I think about it all the time featuring bon iver – Charli xcx & Bon Iver 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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    ‘Lilo & Stitch’ Review: Creature Chaos

    The live-action remake of the hit 2002 Disney film is mostly serviceable and often adorable, even if the best parts of the original got left behind.An interesting facet of this age of Disney live-action remakes is how the style and tone of these updates to children’s classics, reimagined decades later, can personify exactly how the sensibilities of mass entertainment have shifted since. From the opening moments of “Lilo & Stitch,” which mostly mirrors the content of its 2002 animated predecessor, the difference is clear: more speed, more noise and more hand-holding for the audience.To be fair, that is all particularly enhanced by a movie whose entire engine (and marketing) is fueled by a critter that wreaks mayhem and destruction at every turn. Here, things move at warp speed, even as the movie constantly trips over itself trying to pluck at the next heart string. But there’s just enough to make for a moderately fun, mostly serviceable and often adorable revamp that will probably satisfy fans of the original.Save for a couple characters added and subtracted, along with an amped-up climax, this update, directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, is largely faithful to the original, tracking the bond between Lilo (Maia Kealoha), an orphaned girl being raised by her older sister, Nani (Sydney Agudong), and Stitch (a returning Chris Sanders, who was one of the directors of the 2002 film), an incorrigible alien lab experiment that crash-lands in the jungles of Hawaii.On the run from the United Galactic Federation, Stitch poses as a dog and goes home with Lilo and Nani, using them as human shields against Jumba (Zach Galifianakis) and Pleakley (Billy Magnussen), two aliens tasked with capturing Stitch. As Nani struggles to raise her sister on her own and tries to prevent child services from taking Lilo away, Stitch only adds to the chaos. But for Lilo, a desperately lonely girl still grieving the loss of her parents, Stitch quickly becomes “ohana,” i.e. family, i.e. “nobody gets left behind.”This early aughts romp didn’t seem like an obvious candidate for Disney’s ongoing live-action redo campaign, other than the opportunity it presented to let such a memorable (and moneymaking) creature loose in the real world; the studio giant’s other remakes have been partly justified by either recreating vast and fantastical universes (“The Little Mermaid,” “The Lion King”) or dusting off classic storybook properties for a new century (“Dumbo,” “Pinocchio”). In this case, the unique visual splendor of the original — rendering Hawaiian landscapes in a gorgeous and idiosyncratic watercolor animation — is replaced by the easy blandness of a Disney Channel movie.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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    Shane Doyle, Founder of a Storied East Village Venue, Dies at 73

    An Irish expatriate, he created Sin-é, a bare-bones cafe that became an unlikely magnet for stars like Sinead O’Connor, Bono of U2 and Iggy Pop.Shane Doyle, the Irish expatriate who founded Sin-é, a matchbox of a cafe and music venue in New York City that in the 1990s became a retreat for the likes of Sinead O’Connor and Shane MacGowan of the Pogues and a springboard for the shooting-star career of Jeff Buckley, died on April 22 in Manhattan. He was 73.The cause of his death, in a hospital, was septic shock after a series of unsuccessful lung surgeries, his wife, Mimi Fisher, said.Mr. Doyle opened Sin-é (pronounced shih-NAY) in 1989 at 122 St. Marks Place in the East Village, in an era when that neighborhood was still known for beer-soaked punk clubs, outsider art galleries and squatters in abandoned tenements who would soon be immortalized by the hit Broadway musical “Rent.”“Sin-é” means “that’s it” in the Irish language, and that pretty well summed it up. With sparse décor and secondhand wood furniture, the venue (a cafe by day) was about the size of an East Village living room, as Ms. Fisher put it. There was no stage and, in the early days, no P.A. system, which forced guitar-based solo acts to stand against a wall and strum behind a microphone stand, looking more like indoor buskers than marquee toppers.“I remember people coming in from other countries and going, ‘Where’s the rest of it?,’” Tom Clark, a singer-songwriter who had a weekly gig there, said in an interview.Nor did Sin-é have a liquor license, although it did sell beer on the sly, and food options were limited. Mr. Doyle would occasionally whip up a pot of Irish stew in his apartment on East Seventh Street and lug it over for patrons. (He also owned a nearby bar called Anseo — Irish for “here.”)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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    How Grace Potter Lost (and Found) a Solo Album, and a New Life

    In May 2009, Hollywood Records announced that T Bone Burnett — the producer of the Robert Plant and Alison Krauss LP “Raising Sand,” which dominated the Grammys earlier that year — had recently entered the studio with Grace Potter and the Nocturnals to produce the band’s new album. The LP, which would be the Vermont-based bluesy roots-rock group’s third, was slated to come out that fall.The label didn’t mention that the album was in fact a solo vehicle for Potter, then 25, that she recorded with a team of renowned session musicians: the drummer Jim Keltner, the guitarist Marc Ribot, the bassist Dennis Crouch and the keyboardist Keefus Ciancia. “She was like a ball of fire,” Keltner recalled of Potter in a phone call, “and she was really fun to follow.”During an interview in March at her eclectically decorated villa in Topanga, Calif., Potter — a multi-instrumentalist whose soulful voice has earned her comparisons to Bonnie Raitt, Janis Joplin and “a grittier Patty Griffin” — recounted her sense of anticipation over the release of the LP, “Medicine.”“It really felt like something exciting on the horizon,” Potter said, sitting on the couch in her living room dressed in a stylish forest-green jumpsuit. “It was like the secret that we got to keep until it all came out.” Sixteen years earlier, she had described the record as “more of a storyteller, kind of tribal, Motown, voodoo thing” than her earlier output.Then Hollywood shelved the album. The label wanted Potter and the Nocturnals to rerecord the songs with the producer Mark Batson, known for his work with Alicia Keys, the Dave Matthews Band and Dr. Dre. Potter blamed an A&R executive, whom she declined to name, for the decision.She also said that Bob Cavallo, then the chair of the Disney Music Group, which distributes the Hollywood label, was “concerned that the record would age me.” She added, “I’m a young, hot thing. He was like, ‘We don’t want her to seem like she’s 46.’” (In a phone interview, Cavallo, now 85 and retired, couldn’t recall the particulars of the label’s move, but expressed regret that he couldn’t help Potter “get a giant career, because I thought she deserved one.”)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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    Timothee Chalamet Was a Knicks Superfan Before He Was Famous

    Tim Chalamet, an unknown teenager, was with the Knicks in the hard times. Timothée Chalamet, the famous actor, is loving every second of the team’s deep playoff run.Timothée Chalamet, the Academy Award-nominated actor, has been impossible to miss during the New York Knicks’ feisty run through the N.B.A. playoffs. A courtside staple at Madison Square Garden, Mr. Chalamet seemed to get nearly as much screen time as Jalen Brunson, the team’s star guard.Mr. Chalamet, 29, was particularly animated as the Knicks eliminated the Boston Celtics in their second-round series. He embraced Bad Bunny. He dapped up Karl-Anthony Towns, the Knicks’ starting center. He posed for the cameras with Spike Lee, the self-appointed dean of Knicks fandom. He leaned out the window of a sport utility vehicle on Friday to celebrate with other fans in the shadow of the Garden after the Knicks’ series-clinching win.He even earned praise on X for getting Kylie and Kendall Jenner, both famous Angelenos, to cheer alongside him at the Garden, in a post that has been viewed more than 23 million times. (That he is dating Kylie undoubtedly helped win them over.)A focus on celebrities at N.B.A. games is nothing new. For years, the Knicks have pushed the concept of the Garden’s Celebrity Row — their answer to the star-studded floor seats at Los Angeles Lakers games. But while Jack Nicholson spent decades holding court at Lakers games, and Drake has been a sideline fixture for the Toronto Raptors, the Knicks of Mr. Chalamet’s childhood often filled out the floor seats with lower-rung celebrities and entertainers who just happened to be in town. And Mr. Lee, of course.These days, Celebrity Row at the Garden delivers on its name. And in that group of A-listers, Mr. Chalamet has the fan credentials to hang with any of them.Evidence of Mr. Chalamet’s longstanding loyalty is apparent in social media posts from November 2010, around the time that Mr. Chalamet, then 14, was attending LaGuardia High School in Manhattan. He was not yet a star. His breakout role in the Showtime series “Homeland” was a couple of years away.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