Aurelia Butler

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    How Usher Arrived at the Super Bowl Halftime Show

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIn a 30-year career, Usher has been many things — an R&B prodigy, a history-minded technician, a legitimate crossover pop star, an EDM experimenter and lately, a consummate showman with a Las Vegas residency that prompted untold viral videos of a performer extraordinarily at ease with his gifts.And yet Usher, 45, has long felt curiously undervalued, which perhaps explains why it is only now that he has been offered what might be music’s biggest stage: the 2024 Super Bowl halftime show. (He was a guest during the 2011 show.)On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Usher’s long career path through several generations of R&B, how he was received at his pop peak, and what he might do on the halftime stage.Guests:Thomas Hobbs, who writes about music for The Evening Standard, The Telegraph and othersDanielle Amir Jackson, editor in chief of The Oxford AmericanConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    ‘The Monk and the Gun’ Review: A Satirical Fable in a Faraway Land

    This feature follows two monks in Bhutan, often portrayed as a Shangri-La, as the country readies for its first democratic elections.“The Monk and the Gun,” a modestly scaled, lightly comic and blithely ingratiating tale set in Bhutan takes place in the recent past, when the country held mock elections.In 2005, the Bhutanese monarch announced that he was stepping down in 2008, a move that helped clear the way for the country’s transformation to a democracy. While the abdication went smoothly by all accounts, the mock elections — a nationwide practice run for parliamentary voting to come — are disturbing the citizenry in this fictional movie, a smooth piece of work with grand landscapes, nonprofessional actors, toothless politics and a story as contrived as just about anything you’d find at your local multiplex (or at Sundance).There are two monks in the movie, and several more guns than the title indicates. One monk is a wizened, unnamed lama (Kelsang Choejey, an actual lama), with a wispy white beard who spends his days meditating in a temple and is given to gnomic comments. One day, he orders his disciple, a sturdily built young monk, Tashi (Tandin Wangchuk), to procure two guns. “I need them by full moon,” the older lama says, adding that they will allow him to set things right. He doesn’t explain what exactly he means by that; largely, it seems so that his instructions can give the story a touch of mystery as Tashi sets off on his feature-length quest.That journey is at once literal and metaphoric, sluggishly paced and filled with pretty scenery. It brings Tashi in contact with other characters, including some with separate plotlines that function like little discrete stories and eventually converge. Among the more vibrant ones is a young city dweller with a sick wife and money problems, Benji (Tandin Sonam), who’s trying to broker a deal with an American gun buyer, waggishly named Ronald Coleman (Harry Einhorn). A different Ronald Colman starred in Frank Capra’s 1937 adventure “Lost Horizon,” an Orientalist fantasy about a diplomat who crash-lands in the Himalayas, finds Shangri-La and meets a high lama played by the American actor Sam Jaffe.The gun dealer’s name is a winking detail, if one that probably works best for movie critics of a certain age (ahem). The West’s fetishization and exploitation of countries like Bhutan — regularly described as the world’s last Shangri-La — informs the movie ever so gently. To that end, the American character is stupid and predictably greedy, which allows the writer-director Pawo Choyning Dorji (“A Yak in the Classroom”) to take a few pokes at the United States. However sincere and justified, the digs are so innocuous that their main purpose seems to flatter Western viewers who will nod along as they coo at the landscapes and chuckle knowingly about ugly truths they think have nothing to do with them, but do.The Monk and the GunRated PG-13 for — I kid you not — “some nude sculptures and smoking.” There are also guns. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Review: Vikingur Olafsson’s ‘Goldbergs’ Mesmerize Carnegie Hall

    In his debut on the main Carnegie stage, Olafsson gave a spectacular reading of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations.On Wednesday night at Carnegie Hall, the pianist Vikingur Olafsson’s performance of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations had everyone in a trance — including him.Playing from memory in his debut on Carnegie’s main stage, he swayed in a gentle reverie and hunched over the piano so intently that he almost touched his forehead to the keys. After the final movement, audience members applauded robustly as they got up to stand shoulder to shoulder. But hardly anyone moved to leave.The “Goldbergs,” which Bach “prepared for the soul’s delight of music lovers” according to the score’s title page, employ a circular logic. A graceful aria in the style of a sarabande goes through 30 variations. Each movement has two sections, and each section repeats once. Every third variation is a canon — itself a looping form — and the whole, massive work closes with the same aria that started it. The variations, all but three in the same major key, utilize roughly the same harmonic progression, so listeners are lulled by the shared cadence but also dazzled by the inventiveness that masks it. The overall effect is mesmeric.It’s a 75-minute summit of the piano literature, and Olafsson gave a spectacular concert of it. He already has an elegantly accomplished recording of the piece, and a live setting only revealed new layers in his interpretation: intensely emotional and intelligently paced, immaculate in its technique and organic in its phrasing. It was an artistic feat of contradictions that, in the end, felt deeply human. As he told The New York Times last fall, “Bach is not one thing; he’s everything at the same time.”With a malleable, mellow tone and bouncy bass lines, Olafsson was true to his word, exploring a tension between introversion and extroversion and giving each piece a dynamic topography.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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    Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Timeline

    All the Times That People Have Hyperventilated About Taylor and TravisThe planet’s biggest pop star met America’s biggest sport, and heads collectively exploded. Here are the moments people got happy, sad, angry or annoyed.Emmanuel Morgan and Way back in July, Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs’ star tight end, publicly offered himself as a potential suitor for Taylor Swift, whose Eras Tour had catapulted her beyond her already stratospheric fame.Few could have imagined that on the eve of the Super Bowl, we’d all be here.During the six months between Travis’s metaphorical Hail Mary and Sunday’s very real sports contest, most of America — and much of the world — has been horse-collared into their romance. There is a relentless, inescapable and, sometimes fatiguing quality to this Swift-Kelce monocultural vortex. Boy met girl, football fans met Swifties and each new development became a cause for hyperventilation.Now, as kickoff approaches, we look back at some of the key meetings and the extreme emotions those meetings have engendered.♥ ♥ ♥Sept. 24 and Oct. 1Taylor meets footballTaylor Swift at Arrowhead Stadium for the first of many games this season. Jason Hanna/Getty ImagesSurprise! Taylor shows up at Arrowhead Stadium for a Chiefs Game. Yay for Travis! Taylor and Travis leave together after the game in a “Getaway Car.” A “seemingly Ranch” frenzy ensues.Taylor shows up again in New Jersey the following week for Sunday Night Football. She brings her friends and meets the parents.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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    Dick Waterman, Promoter and Photographer of the Blues, Dies at 88

    A “crackpot eccentric Yankee” from Massachusetts, he revived the careers of long-forgotten Southern artists during the blues boom of the 1960s.Dick Waterman, a beacon in the world of blues who as a promoter, talent manager and photographer helped revive the careers of a generation of storied purveyors of that bedrock American art form while lyrically documenting their journeys with his camera, died on Jan. 26 in Oxford, Miss. He was 88.His niece Theodora Saal said the cause was heart failure. A native of Massachusetts, he had lived in Oxford for nearly four decades.Through his company, Avalon Productions, which was considered the first management and booking agency devoted primarily to Black blues artists, Mr. Waterman provided overdue exposure — and income — to early blues luminaries like Mississippi John Hurt, Son House and Skip James.He also shepherded the careers of a younger blues cohort, including Buddy Guy and Otis Rush, as well as one young white artist, the singer-songwriter and future Grammy Award winner Bonnie Raitt.Mr. Waterman in 2003 in Oxford, Miss. A native of Massachusetts, he lived in Oxford for nearly four decades.Bruce Newman“Dick Waterman just may be the most knowledgeable man on the history of blues,” the music writer Don Wilcock wrote in 2019 on the website American Blues Scene. Mr. Waterman, he added, “sought out the originators of the genre, pulled them out of ‘retirement’ and presented them to a folk audience that to that point considered blues to be a footnote in the American musical history.”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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    ‘Here’ Review: A Celebration of Connection

    In Bas Devos’s muted and luminous Belgian drama, two lonely souls repeatedly encounter each other.One-word titles like that of the Belgian writer and director Bas Devos’s “Here” can create a minuet of meaning. In this hushed drama that gently rebuffs the beats of a love story even as it hints at one, the word is a call for the viewer’s attention and an acknowledgment of place.“This is my home,” Stefan (Stefan Gota), a Romanian construction worker, says to himself, looking out over the city from his apartment in the Jette commune, northwest of Brussels.Sitting in front of his refrigerator, Stefan pulls out vegetables and sniffs containers. He makes a soup that he’ll deliver to friends before he leaves on vacation. But he also alludes to leaving the city for a longer spell. Did we mention he’s struggling with an insomnia that keeps him walking the streets in the still hours, paying heed to things that might be lost in the daylight’s bustle?Across the city, a graduate student named Shuxiu (Liyo Gong) describes a state of being at a loss for words before being fully awake, as images of the natural world unfold. Stefan is observant because he’s sleepless, and Shuxiu, a bryologist who studies moss, is attentive by calling.When Stefan first encounters Shuxiu, he is sitting, soaked, in a Chinese restaurant. When they meet again in a wooded area, it is coincidental and freighted with possibility. What will become of them isn’t the purview of the film, or its point, exactly. And, yet, in this painstakingly muted, luminously photographed testimony to connection, nothing much and everything happens — or could.HereNot rated. In Dutch, French, Romanian and Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Mojo Nixon, Who Mixed Roots and Punk Rock, Dies at 66

    A self-styled voice of “the doomed, the damned, the weird,” he was known for satirical songs including “Elvis Is Everywhere” and “Destroy All Lawyers.”Mojo Nixon, the psychobilly musician and radio host who gained cult status for his rabble rousing and celebrity spoofs like the 1987 hit “Elvis Is Everywhere”, died on Wednesday aboard a country music cruise that he was co-hosting. He was 66.His death was confirmed by Matt Eskey, the director of a 2020 documentary film about Mr. Nixon. He said that Mr. Nixon had a “cardiac event” while he was asleep as the Outlaw Country Cruise was docked in San Juan, Puerto Rico.A statement posted by the film’s official Facebook page said that Mr. Nixon had died “after a blazing show, a raging night, closing the bar, taking no prisoners.”Mr. Nixon was best known for his celebrity spoofs, like “Don Henley Must Die” and “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child,” and for satirical tirades like “I Hate Banks” and “Destroy All Lawyers.”“All of it was performed in maximum overdrive on a bed of rockabilly, blues, and R&B, which earned Nixon some friends in the roots rock community but had enough punk attitude — in its own bizarre way — to make him a college radio staple during his heyday,” the All Music Guide wrote.“I’m a rabble-rouser who does humorous social commentary within a rock-and-roll setting,” he told The New York Times in 1990. In another interview with the paper, he described himself as a voice of “the doomed, the damned, the weird.”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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    ‘They Called Him Mostly Harmless’ Review: Digital Sleuthing

    In this schematic HBO true-crime documentary, amateur detectives take the lead in the quest to identify the body of a male hiker.In 2018, an emaciated male body was found in the Florida wilderness. Blood work showed that he was healthy, with no drugs in his system beyond Tylenol. Among his belongings were food and money, but no phone. The man had been hiking the Appalachian Trail. Several hikers recalled encountering him within the eight months before his death — he was handsome — but they only knew him by his trail name, Mostly Harmless.Mostly Harmless did not want to be found.Directed by Patricia E. Gillespie, the HBO true-crime documentary “They Called Him Mostly Harmless” is, on one level, about the quest to identify the body. Hikers, a detective, and the Wired journalist who wrote the articles that inspired the documentary, feature as talking heads.But the other, arguably more unsettling, half of the story centers on the amateur detectives who helped crack the case — all middle-age women involved in a Facebook group dedicated to the cause.This artless documentary, composed primarily of interviews and B-roll footage (of walks along the trail from a first-person perspective; the amateur detectives looking at their computers, brows furrowed), mechanically pieces together the mystery. It’s a film for those who don’t know the outcome, playing upon the viewers’ thirst for answers as it chips away at a clearer portrait of the man.More interesting is the film’s meta-true-crime dimension, which links the case’s obsessive amateurs to a broader fascination with the genre and its fraught form of escapism. Dead ends and false leads aggravate the digital sleuthing hive (a cancer survivor testifies to the online harassment he faced after being falsely identified as Mostly Harmless), and petty rivalries ensue between the Facebook group’s leaders. The documentary doesn’t treat them with outright mockery, but the tone is mildly condescending — a feeling heightened by an outcome that points to the futility of it all.They Called Him Mostly HarmlessNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Max. More