Aurelia Butler

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    Kenneth Force, the ‘Toscanini of Military Marching Bands,’ Dies at 83

    Captain Force was part of the pomp and ceremony at 10 presidential inaugurations, and for 45 years he taught midshipmen to revere traditional military music.Kenneth Force, who as the leader of the Merchant Marine Academy Regimental Band from 1971 to 2016 was one of the nation’s foremost experts in the art of military pomp, died on Oct. 7 in Rye, N.Y. He was 83.A former student of his, Marianne Lepre, said the death, at a long-term nursing facility, was caused by respiratory failure brought on by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Military music arose historically as a means of communicating orders to troops, but it has long since become a ceremonial custom, with trumpet-tooting and drum-rolling tunes like “Hail to the Chief” and “The Red, White and Blue.”A military man might say that Captain Force exerted full-spectrum dominance over this territory.At one time or another, he conducted the U.S. Marine Corps Band, which performs for the president; the band of the Black Watch, a Scottish infantry battalion; the bands, in Britain, of Her Majesty’s Grenadier Guards, Welsh Guards and Royal Marines; and the Dutch Royal Military Band.He performed at 10 presidential inaugurations, from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s to George W. Bush’s.“It’s not likely anyone is keeping score,” Peter Applebome of The New York Times wrote in an Our Towns column in 2009, “but there can’t be too many people who have participated in more inaugurations than Captain Force, now 68 and something of a Toscanini of military marching bands.”Captain Force at the Merchant Marine Academy on Long Island in 2009. He lived on its grounds for decades.Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesHe earned that distinction principally as director of music at the Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, N.Y., on Long Island. His band members were not aspiring musicians; they were midshipmen training to receive Bachelor of Science degrees, U.S. Coast Guard licenses and officers’ commissions. At inaugurations, the student musicians got to play while marching past a presidential reviewing stand.“I always tell the midshipmen that you will never forget the memory of passing the president of the United States,” ” Captain Force told The Times.At each inauguration, his band blared the classic 19th-century song of the marines, “A Life on the Ocean Wave.”“What we do doesn’t change,” he said. “In many ways we’re a walking museum, something from another age.”Captain Force kept tradition alive in several ways. He rearranged old band tunes for modern instruments — work he compared to repairing antiques — and he composed new political homages, including “First Lady March” and “Presidential Pets March” (which includes barks and meows).Captain Force composed marches of his own, including the “Presidential Pets March,” complete with barks and meows.Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesHe and his band were sought after by organizers of great American events. They played at Miss America pageant parades, atop the Brooklyn Bridge for its 100th anniversary, on the field during World Series, on the courts of the U.S. Open after 9/11, and aboard the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2 when it carried World War II veterans to Normandy in 1994 for the 50th anniversary of D-Day.In 1989, The Times credited Captain Force with making his band sound like “a giant walking organ.”Kenneth Richard Force was born on March 24, 1940, in Queens, where he grew up, to Alvina and George Force. His father was a banker.Ken got his musical training playing trumpet in the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra, in Broadway pit bands and in the band of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus.His fascination with military music dated to one night in 1959, when he was in the First Army Band, headquartered on Governors Island in New York. His bandmaster instructed the group to play louder than usual, since three British bands were coming to visit. They began blasting away on “Colonel Bogey on Parade.”Over the din, Captain Force clearly heard a British drum major shout, “By the cen-terr! Quick march!”Then a band of Royal Marines appeared in pith helmets, each stomp of their marching feet clearly audible.Captain Force was in awe, he later told The Times. He asked a British band director if he had a manual.“Manual?” the man responded. “It’s 300 years of tradition!”Captain Force received a bandsman’s diploma from the U.S. Naval School of Music in Washington in 1958, a bachelor of music degree from the Manhattan School of Music in 1964, and a master’s degree from the same institution the next year. He wrote his master’s thesis on British military bands.Captain Force in an undated photo. “In many ways we’re a walking museum, something from another age,” he said. United States Merchant Marine AcademyOn one occasion, in the late 1990s, he waged a battle that united his passions for military music history, preservation and teaching.He had long considered “Over There,” George M. Cohan’s ode to the American doughboys of World War I, the second-best patriotic song of the 20th century, behind only Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” As it happened, Cohan’s former home, where he had written “Over There,” lay just a few minutes away from the Merchant Marine Academy — but the old mansion was about to be demolished.Captain Force began what Newsday in 1999 called a “zealous campaign” to have Cohan’s home designated a landmark.“If you tear down the house, you’d be tearing down part of the soul of America,” he told The Times the same year.He had the midshipmen play “Over There” in view of people filing into a local landmarks commission hearing, and he inspired his students to show up at meetings to espouse his cause.They saved the property.“Now I can take my kids here someday when I come back for homecoming,” Lester J. Snyder, a senior from Illinois and a midshipman trumpeter, told The Associated Press shortly afterward. “I’ll be able to share this with the next generation, and maybe they will get to know something about the feeling of duty and honor to your country.”Captain Force’s three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by a stepson, John Uribe, and two step-grandchildren. He lived on the grounds of the Merchant Marine Academy for decades and in recent years lived in an apartment across Long Island Sound in Port Chester, N.Y.Captain Force generally did not criticize United States leaders in public. But he did make an exception for Jimmy Carter’s decision in 1977 to abjure the traditional pomp of an inauguration parade by walking along Pennsylvania Avenue rather than riding in a limousine.“I know he didn’t want ruffles and flourishes and ‘Hail to the Chief,’” Captain Force told The Times in 2009. “He said it was too pompous. And the country didn’t like that. People think the president deserves special music.“People like ceremony,” he continued, “and no one does it better than a band. When you lose your ceremony, you lose a lot.” More

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    ‘The Persian Version’ Director Has Always Lived in the In-Between

    In her new film, Maryam Keshavarz finds both gravity and levity in the struggle to reconcile her Iranian heritage and her life in the United States.When Leila, the central character in the new comedy-drama “The Persian Version,” sashays across the Brooklyn Bridge and into a Halloween party carrying a surfboard and wearing a burkini — niqab on top, bikini on the bottom — while Wet Leg’s cheeky anthem “Chaise Longue” plays, it’s clear that what’s to come will be a boundary-pushing take on straddling cultures that are at odds in the real world.Maryam Keshavarz wore a similar burkini costume once upon a time, and her semi-autobiographical film — which spans decades and moves between Iran and the United States — won an audience award and a screenwriting prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it had its world premiere. The film, written and directed by Keshavarz, will have a limited theatrical release in the United States on Friday.“The reality is, I’ve never really followed the rules,” Keshavarz, 48, who was born in New York to Iranian parents, told me in a video call earlier this month. “It’s also the reason that probably I’ve been able to get to where I am, because there’s no real path for us, is there? There’s no straight path if you’re an immigrant kid, if you’re queer, if you’re an outsider.”Keshavarz was an adult when she grasped that immigrants and women could be directors. “I thought that was stuff for white Americans,” she said. “Even the idea that we have a right to tell our story and to take up space is huge.”Women who follow the rules “would be crushed,” she came to understand. “It’s a society that doesn’t allow us to get what we need to survive and flourish. So we have to take things into our own hands.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation. Light spoilers ahead.Your film is arriving at a time when there’s heightened attention on the oppression Iranian girls and women face: The imprisoned Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi, who focuses on women’s rights in Iran, recently received the Nobel Peace Prize, and this month, a 16-year-old girl entered a subway car in Tehran with her hair uncovered and was later dragged out unconscious. How does your film fit with this larger picture?Of course, we are so grateful that the international voices have been used to amplify what’s going on in Iran in the last year, but this has been an ongoing issue ever since I can remember, we’ve been fighting against in Iran — all the morality police and, at every level, women, because they’re the symbol of the Islamic culture with the hair-covering and everything — have been on the forefront of pushing back.If you look at my film, my mother in the ’60s, she’s fighting against cultural norms to have her place in society. It’s not a battle that’s won in a day. And particularly young women, I’m in awe of them. The young girl who plays my mother at 14 (Kamand Shafieisabet), she lives in Iran, and she could have stayed in America, but she decided to go back after Sundance. She said, “It’s my duty to fight in my country.”More than anything, this is an international issue. The reason it’s caught fire around the world is because it’s not just about Iran. We also have issues here in the U.S. I think finally we understand that there’s more of an interconnectivity in our struggles.A scene from “The Persian Version.” Niousha Noor, in green, plays the mother, Shireen, who is based on Keshavarz’s own parent.Yiget Eken/Sony Pictures ClassicsKamand Shafieisabet has the film’s most dramatic moments. What was casting like for you, since you were essentially casting your own family?Everyone is Iranian. I was really dedicated to have actual Iranians. It didn’t matter what diaspora they were in, and it was so meaningful for them because all of us grew up in different countries.[Shafieisabet] lived and breathed this character, and she joked, “I’m giving birth to a child, and I’ve never kissed a boy.” She’s never acted. She was literally a freshman in high school. I wanted someone that was that innocent to play my mother, because my mother truly was at that time.When my mother met her — and my mom’s very verbose — I said, “Mom, you’re so quiet. What’s wrong?” And she said, “You know what? I never realized how young I was until I saw this girl. I was her age. I was a child. I was always struggling so hard to survive. I never had a moment to reflect.”Why is it important for you to elevate the stories of those who exist in that very particular space between cultures?To me, that’s quintessentially what it means to be American. You come to America and you’re allowed in many ways to continue your original national identity and still become American, and preserve those two things side by side. Also I wanted to take back the narrative of what it meant to be American. But more than anything, when you’re from two different places, you’re a bit of an outsider of both. And you do see the absurdity of both sides in some ways, and you understand it probably more than others would. So in some ways you become a translator of both cultures.Even Leila being a lesbian who gets pregnant by a man, as you did, plays in that in-between space.My family was so confused. That’s really the truth. Because I’ve been so adamantly with a woman and had been married and queer. We went out for drinks, and I was about to wimp out. Then the father of my daughter was like, “You’ve got to tell them.” I was like, “I’ll send them email.” And I did blurt it out just like that. Then they thought he was gay. They were so confused. The story of my life. As confused as me. [Laughs]That was very hard for me even to say “bisexual” for a long time. I was like, no, I’m queer. Also because of politics. It’s important that we have a sense of gay rights, regardless of the spectrum that you’re on. I’m from an older generation; my daughter’s generation has a completely different perspective on it. It was very important for me just to be adamant about our political rights as a community. But I realized life is more messy than the political movements allow us to be.Layla Mohammadi as Leila and Noor in a dancing scene from the movie. Yiget Eken/Sony Pictures ClassicsYou balance a lot of opposing themes: duality of identity, of course, but also comedy and drama, as well as different cinematic tones as we move through time and locales. Was it a struggle to bite off so much?I struggled with two things. One was the balance of the comedy and the drama. Another was to have an epic tale that was so intimate. That was very important for me, not to get lost in the period detail but to know that this is a story of essentially three women and to really ground it. And to do that, I decided that each character would have a different genre that’s reflective of who they are: So that the daughter is more ’80s-’90s pop. The grandmother is a tall teller of tales, as all grandmothers are, so she gets a spaghetti western. And then the mother, who, even though she’s created a new identity, is still traumatized by an old past — what you typically think of Persian films, which is like [an Abbas] Kiarostami sort of film.For me, it was important that all three women get to tell at least their version of the story. When I was writing it, I couldn’t crack the story until I realized my mother was the other writer. Because she came to this country to write her own future, rewrite her life. Once I got that, everything else fell into place. I realized all the men are just a chorus to our stories. And typically, it’s the other way around.On that note, do you really have eight brothers?In real life, I have seven brothers. In the story, I have eight. But I did grow up with one bathroom. I’m very traumatized to this day. I just have to have my own bathroom. [Laughs]The chaos of many siblings adds levity for sure. The movie, despite tackling serious topics, is also largely a comedy packed with big food scenes, choreographed dance sequences and tons of music, including Wet Leg at the start, but also Cyndi Lauper and Gagoosh.Certainly when I was a kid, Iran was synonymous with terrorist. And that was not my experience of Iran or Iranians. I’m like, “We’re so lazy. How can we be terrorists? We like to take long naps after lunch.” But honestly, it’s not the people I know; it’s not the culture and the celebration, the music, food. That’s a real political thing, too, what aspects of our culture are shown. I mean, if we can dehumanize people, it’s so much easier to invade them and to kill them and to take their oil and to create nameless wars, faceless wars. So I think the reason I went into cinema post-9/11 was to create a more nuanced view of our world. This film is in some ways a culmination of my entire career. I don’t believe in all this divisive rhetoric, and I feel like humor is a way that we can connect. More

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    The 45 King, Who Produced for Jay-Z and Eminem, Dies at 62

    The 62-year-old Bronx native infused a distinctive jazzy flavor in his beats. He contributed tracks to Queen Latifah’s debut album and produced Eminem’s “Stan,” among other hip-hop classics.The 45 King, the influential New York City hip-hop producer who worked with Queen Latifah, Eminem and Jay-Z, died on Thursday. He was 62.Born Mark Howard James, he took the moniker The 45 King because of his fondness for sampling old, obscure records. His death was announced on social media Thursday afternoon by a fellow hip-hop producer, DJ Premier.Information on the cause or place of death were not immediately available. An inquiry sent to James’s manager was not immediately returned.“His sound was unlike any other from his heavy drums and his horns were so distinct on every production,” DJ Premier wrote, referring to James as DJ Mark The 45 King.James, born on Oct. 16, 1961 in the Bronx, was a pioneer in the 1980s New York hip-hop scene and worked with early rap stars like the Funky 4, according to his website. He was known for his jazzy beats, showcased on his first hit track, the highly sampled “The 900 Number,” released in 1987. He slowed down a saxophone solo, “dropped the results over an irresistibly funky break” and the result exploded, according to AllMusic, adding that the horn line was “forever ingrained in the collective hip-hop psyche.”James worked closely with Queen Latifah, a fellow member of the music crew known as the Flavor Unit. James produced the hit song “Wrath of My Madness” on her debut album “All Hail the Queen” in 1989 and also contributed other tracks.“Thank you for teaching me taking me under your wing, teaching me about this thing called hip-hop, and so much more,” Queen Latifah wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday.James also produced Eminem’s “Stan,” released on the 2000 album “The Marshall Mathers LP.” The rap tells the story of a perturbed superfan named “Stan” and is set to a throbbing beat sampling Dido’s 1998 track “Thank you.”“I took a first verse and made into an eight-bar hook for Eminem,” James said in a 2021 interview clip posted to social media by Eminem on Thursday.“Legends are never over,” Eminem wrote on X, formerly Twitter.James’s other hits included Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” which sampled the musical “Annie” and a remix of Madonna’s “Keep It Together.”James credited much of his success and production style to the time he spent in the 1980s working for DJ Breakout, a Bronx hip-hop luminary.“I like to say I got lucky,” James said in the 2021 interview with the YouTube channel Unique Access Ent. “I was in the right place at the right time.” More

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    ‘Old Dads’ Review: Bill Burr Rails Against Modern Life as a Dad

    A curmudgeon, starting fatherhood late, has lots to say about the world.Don’t get your hopes up: This is not a documentary about Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Mick Jagger. “Old Dads” is the feature directorial debut of Bill Burr, a popular 50-something comedian with a shaved head and a light beard who plays Jack, who came to fatherhood late.Jack narrates in a voice not unlike that of Burr’s standup persona, responding to the issues that confound the contemporary straight white male with profane non-sequiturs. Jack muses that he can’t leave his child in the car to pop into a convenience store, but that said store is free to sell hormone-packed junk foods, and that nobody cares because they’re addicted to internet pornography. I’m paraphrasing.As is customary in today’s Guy Comedies, Jack is part of a trio — with Bokeem Woodbine and Bobby Cannavale, who play his business partners, Mike and Conner. They’ve just sold their successful concern to an unctuous young start-up bro (Miles Robbins) whose “disrupter” shtick provides fodder for more modern-life-is-rubbish humor.The movie emphasizes Jack’s near-constant indignation about adult scooter riders and parking as much as it does his parenting concerns. Jack and his wife, Leah, are currently worried that their son might not get a proper kindergarten recommendation. As such, Jack locks horns with a principal (Rachael Harris) who, like many of the parents who surround Jack and Leah, is a parody of both 1980s-style New Age bromide-spouters and insipid practitioners of today’s “woke” philosophies.Many scenes are predicated on Jack’s eye-rolling, then shouty reactions to phrases like “inclusive adjacent” or “check your privilege.” Burr is skilled at this, for sure. And Woodbine and Cannavale, who are better actors overall, slide into Burr’s mode with ease. The results will prove satisfactory and maybe cathartic for his fans.Old DadsRated R for language themes, nudity, more language. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    After Nearly Five Decades, Waltraud Meier Takes Her Final Opera Bow

    The famed singer, known for her captivating presence, intellectual approach and distinctive sound, is retiring from the stage with “Elektra.”“Orest and I are very nice to one another,” the opera star Waltraud Meier said during an interview at her light-filled penthouse in West Berlin. “This time around, we’re going to do everything differently.”She was speaking not about the mythical character, but about her small black cat, which she adopted in Greece. In Richard Strauss’s “Elektra,” Orest returns home to kill his mother, Klytämnestra, avenging the murder of his father, Agamemnon.And the role of Klytämnestra is how Meier will bring her 47-year stage career to a close at the Berlin State Opera on Friday.She will retire in the Patrice Chéreau production of “Elektra” that she originated at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France in 2013. Chéreau’s “Elektra,” the last of his series of acclaimed opera productions, adopts his typical classical, humanist style.Klytämnestra is one of the roles that have defined her career. Known for her captivating stage presence, intellectual approach and distinctive, tonally complex mezzo-soprano voice, Meier first made her mark in Wagner operas: as Ortrud in “Lohengrin,” Kundry in “Parsifal” and Venus in “Tannhäuser.” A daring leap into the dramatic soprano repertoire in the early 1990s made her a generation’s defining Isolde.As Orest occasionally nuzzled her, Meier discussed her career, her work with music and text, and the importance of listening onstage. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.How do you approach a new role?First, I read the text. Everyone’s text: It’s more important to really know what the other people onstage are saying. Then I listen to the music as a whole. I ask myself, What do I want to say? What could I be in this role? And then I decide if I should do it, and how I’ll do it. The conversation about how to do it vocally comes after.What have you learned about the role of Klytämnestra over the years?Patrice Chéreau and I had the strong feeling that we wanted to give her back her dignity. The story is a tragedy. There are two sources for the Electra story: Euripides and Aeschylus. Patrice based his direction more on Aeschylus. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto is so influenced by Freud — so in Hofmannsthal’s “Elektra” we get too much of the point of view of Elektra, of how she sees the story.But that’s not necessarily the real story. Clytemnestra is not just this man-murderer. She had a reason to murder her husband. Her daughter was sacrificed, and Agamemnon came back with a lover. Not that it’s justified, but she had a reason. And she knows her destiny is to be killed by her son. In Greek tragedy, it’s always the son who avenges the father. And his son avenges him. And so it goes for generations and generations. Clytemnestra did what she thought was right, to regain her dignity and some justice.The story for Klytämnestra [in the opera] is really tragic. She comes in; she has the strong need to finally talk to her daughter. But in the whole conversation — that half-hour scene between Klytämnestra and Elektra — they don’t talk about what happened. She wants to talk about it, she comes in for that, to talk, so that her nightmares can disappear. But they are not able to talk about it. It’s really sad.And you get the character away from Grand Guignol.That would be so banal. This other way goes much deeper. And it’s much more true.What did you learn most from your years of work with Chéreau?I learned to be true and natural. To take every word seriously. To believe what I am saying. How to walk. Patrice always hated that singer walk that doesn’t express anything. He didn’t like singers just facing the audience. He liked the diagonal; it gives more tension in the body.He took music seriously. He prepared us by first reading the role, just the text, at a table, like a play. We spoke it in our language. Then we learned the music, and then we went onstage. That’s not what other directors do, unfortunately.How do you overcome a production that hurts a piece? Do you try to bring something you learned from before?Yes. You can’t totally step out of the “regie” [“direction”], but I always wanted to at least give my role, my interpretation — or incarnation, as I prefer to call it — a stronger truth. In general, I tried to avoid productions like that. And then there is that wonderful word: no.What creates truth onstage?Seriousness. Taking the words and the music seriously. Not mocking yourself, not interpreting it. No irony. As I said about Klytämnestra: Believe her! Be it! Don’t make a comment on it. I did several productions with the director Klaus Michael Grüber, who told me to imagine the whole audience was 11 years old. An 11-year-old knows already everything about love, hate, hope, betrayal, all those feelings, but he doesn’t like irony and sarcasm.Are there roles you considered singing that you didn’t, and regret?No. There were two occasions when I had signed contracts and then decided not to, and it was the right choice. I had a signed contract to do Brünnhilde in “Die Walküre” at La Scala. Daniel Barenboim thought I could have conveyed new things in the role, and I agreed, but couldn’t figure out how to sing it.I also had a contract for Salome at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, when Götz Friedrich was the intendant [artistic director], conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli. But looking at the music, I thought, No, I am not Salome. To sing it — that’s soprano soprano. You have to have a silver voice. I’m copper. Of course, you don’t hear those silvery Strauss voices as much now.Did you ever wish you could sing something for a different voice type — a tenor, or a baritone?The Ingemisco in the Verdi Requiem! And seriously, in “Don Carlo,” Philip’s aria from the fourth act, “Ella giammai m’amò.” But, you know, if you have the chance to listen to it when it’s sung by someone that is touching you deep down in your soul, then it’s better you have not sung it yourself.What are your reflections on your years singing at the Metropolitan Opera?Well, let’s not talk about the “Carmen”! I always loved the Met. I always felt I had the support of people there. Joe Volpe was the best intendant ever. “Only a happy singer is a good singer,” he said. He made us feel comfortable, feel good showing our best.It’s a big house. It’s different to sing there. You have to act bigger, sing with more sound. Real theater-making is maybe not the thing you should ask for at the Met. A subtle gesture like I might make at the house here in Berlin will maybe be perceived up to Row 10, and then be lost.You mentioned earlier that the silvery Strauss voices are not as often heard now.For me, there is a sad trend of singing too loud. I miss the nuance. What makes it difficult to go back is that the audience loves when it’s loud. When singers give too much volume, the success misleads them. For me, that’s not music. Music is something else. Music is so refined, signing can be so refined. It’s much more interesting to really sing piano, mezzo piano, mezzo forte and not always fortissimo.Do you imagine yourself teaching after retirement?I don’t have the patience for real vocal teaching. If I did a master class, then I’d do it not in the sense that it’s done now, where you have two days, and singers have an hour here and there, and they work on an aria. That’s not what I’m interested in. I’d prefer a master class with a team of singers where we can really work on a scene. Then I could teach them how to listen. Listening is much more important onstage. More

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    Fugees’ Pras Says Lawyer Used A.I. for ‘Ineffectual’ Defense

    Prakazrel Michel was convicted in April in an illegal foreign influence scheme. In a motion for a new trial, he said his lawyer’s closing argument was “frivolous.”A founding member of the hip-hop group the Fugees has requested a new trial for a foreign influence scheme after arguing in part that his lawyer used artificial intelligence software to craft a “frivolous and ineffectual” closing argument.In April, the rapper Prakazrel Michel was found guilty in federal court of orchestrating an illegal international conspiracy, in which he took millions of dollars from Jho Low, a Malaysian financier who was seeking political influence in the United States. Mr. Michel, known as Pras, was convicted on 10 criminal counts that included money laundering and witness tampering. He faces up to 20 years in prison.In a motion for a new trial this week, Mr. Michel’s new legal team said the lawyers who defended him during the trial in U.S. District Court in Washington had been “deficient throughout.” They singled out the lead lawyer, David E. Kenner, saying that he had misunderstood the facts of the case and ignored “critical weaknesses” in federal prosecutors’ arguments, and that he used an experimental A.I. program to create a closing argument that made “frivolous” claims.Mr. Michel’s lawyers also wrote that Mr. Kenner and another lawyer, Alon Israely, “appear to have had an undisclosed financial interest” in the program, EyeLevel.AI. The motion cited a news release from EyeLevel that mentioned a partner company, CaseFile Connect, the website of which lists the same Los Angeles address as Mr. Kenner’s law firm.Mr. Kenner did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday. Neither Mr. Israely nor CaseFile Connect could be reached for comment.Neil Katz, the founder and chief operating officer of EyeLevel.AI, said on Thursday that it was “categorically untrue” that the trial lawyers had had an undisclosed financial interest in the company. He added that neither CaseFile Connect nor the lawyers at Mr. Kenner’s firm had a financial stake in his company.Regarding the role his company’s software played in the case, Mr. Katz said that it merely allowed the lawyers to conduct research and analysis in real time based on trial transcripts.“The idea here is not that you would take what is outputted by a computer and walk it into a courtroom and read it into the record,” he said. “That’s not what happened here,”“Human lawyers take this as one important input that helps them get to the ideas faster,” he added. “They ultimately write the legal arguments that they present in a court.”The motion also took aim at the Justice Department and the federal court itself. It said government prosecutors had improperly used an F.B.I. agent at trial, “usurping the role of the jury and influencing the jury’s verdict.” It added that court had prejudiced the jury by ruling in front of them that Mr. Michel had conspired with others in the foreign influence scheme.The Justice Department declined to comment on Thursday. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia did not immediately responded to requests for comment.Erica Dumas, Mr. Michel’s publicist, said in a brief statement that his new legal team had identified areas of the case “where justice may not have been properly served.”“After careful examination of the facts and circumstances around Pras Michel’s previous trial, it has become evident that there were inconsistencies and errors in the case,” she said. She did not elaborate and declined to comment further.It was unclear whether the motion would be granted. More

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    Vincent Patrick, Chronicler of Hustlers and Mobsters, Dies at 88

    A novelist and screenwriter, he wrote “The Pope of Greenwich Village” and “Family Business” and brought them both to the big screen.Vincent Patrick, an author and screenwriter who set pins at a bowling alley, peddled Bibles door to door and helped start a mechanical engineering firm before finding critical success with his first novel, “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” at 44, died on Oct. 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.The cause was complications of Lewy body dementia, his son Richard said.The son of a Bronx pool-hall owner and numbers runner, Mr. Patrick was raised in a milieu sprinkled with the grifters, hustlers and mobsters who would eventually become characters in his novels, which also included “Family Business” (1985) and “Smoke Screen” (1999).In manner and accent, Mr. Patrick seemed like a character he might have dreamed up himself. A 1999 profile in The Los Angeles Times noted that “his voice has that subterranean rumble of an accent, a sound that good character actors try to emulate when playing retired cops or tough but fair patriarchs.”“The Pope of Greenwich Village,” published in 1979, told the story of Charlie, the down-on-his-luck night manager of a Manhattan saloon, whose cousin Paulie sucks him and a locksmith friend into a perilous plot to crack a safe filled with what turns out to be mob money.“The connective thread is the sad state of their lives, their disenchantment and the curse of being dreamers,” Joe Flaherty wrote in a review in The New York Times. The novel, he added, “mines territory rarely encountered in fiction and, in the vernacular of his tough, streetwise characters, delivers a sweetheart of a book.”“Family Business,” the tale of three generations of hustlers from an ethnically mixed New York family, also explored the psychological allure of the big score. Jessie McMullen, the con-man grandfather; Vito, his son, who is in the wholesale meat business; and Adam, his M.I.T.-educated grandson, all find themselves drawn into a risky caper to swipe a plant cell from a California laboratory and sell it to a rival genetic engineering company.“Mr. Patrick could have drawn these characters with broad strokes, concentrating on the heist, and still have come up with a decent thriller,” Arthur Krystal wrote in The Times. “Instead he chose to provide them with interesting lives and, in the cases of Vito and Adam, with the intelligence and self-doubts of men uncomfortable with their moral upbringing.”Mr. Patrick himself was quoted by The Times: “There’s a colorfulness about their value systems that makes them attractive to a writer,” he said, “a willingness to take risks and an ability to meet life sort of head-on and wrestle with it and not retreat into a very secure position.”Some critics were less kind to the feature film versions of both books, which Mr. Patrick himself adapted. “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (1984), starring Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts, was “less a story than a display of acting mannerisms,” the critic Vincent Canby wrote in The Times.Reviewing “Family Business” (1989), directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick, Mr. Canby found a paucity of wit. He also found the idea that three actors so physically dissimilar could be blood relatives to be a stretch.Still, Mr. Patrick understood the compromises required to make it in Hollywood, his son Richard said in a phone interview. His father, he said convinced the producer Scott Rudin that he would not treat his novels as sacrosanct works of literature, telling him, “I have no compunction at all about cannibalizing my own work in order to bring it to the big screen.’”“The Pope of Greenwich Village,” published in 1979, told the story of a down-on-his-luck saloon night manager who gets sucked into a perilous plot to crack a safe filled with what turns out to be mob money.Seaview BooksVincent Francis Patrick was born on Jan. 19, 1935, in the Bronx, the middle of three children of Vincent and Angela (Hunt) Patrick. His mother was a legal secretary. Growing up, he dreamed of being a writer, and he churned out short stories during his teens.School, however, was another matter. He chafed at the strict discipline at the Roman Catholic schools he attended, and he dropped out of Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx after his junior year. In order to make ends meet, he set pins at a Bronx bowling alley before taking a job selling Bibles door to door in Bronx apartment buildings.As he recounted in a 1999 performance at the storytelling series staged by the Moth, he abandoned the job after watching his sales partner persuade a housewife to raid her 7-year-old daughter’s piggy bank for the $7 down payment on a fancy leather-embossed Bible. “I didn’t know yet who I was,” he told the audience. “But I knew who I was not.”In 1954 he married Carole Unger, and the couple had two sons. With a family to support, Mr. Patrick earned his high school diploma and put himself through New York University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. He and a partner then started a successful firm that designed, among other things, an assembly line for caskets.By his mid-30s, however, the call of a literary career had become too loud to ignore, so he left engineering to take another stab at writing professionally. “I wasn’t really happy, and I knew if I didn’t begin to write something, it wasn’t going to be written,” he told People magazine in 1979.Mr. Patrick hammered out a draft of his first book while working as a bartender at an Italian restaurant near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, where his son said he drew inspiration by rubbing elbows with the underworld types from Little Italy who would hang out there.From left, Mickey Rourke, Daryl Hannah and Eric Roberts in the film version of “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (1984), for which Mr. Patrick wrote the screenplay.MGM, via Everett CollectionWhile he was initially drawn to screenwriting as a means to adapt his own work, Richard Patrick said, it soon became a successful side career. Among other projects, he contributed to the script for “The Devil’s Own” (1997), starring Harrison Ford as a police officer and Brad Pitt as an Irish Republican Army member hiding out in Staten Island, and wrote the two-part television movie “To Serve and Protect” (1999).He was also hired to write early treatments for “Beverly Hills Cop” and “The Godfather III,” although both projects ended up in other hands.In addition to his son Richard, Mr. Patrick is survived by his wife; another son, Glen; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.Hollywood, Mr. Patrick once said, was both a fabled land of opportunity and a trap. “Once you start,” he told The Los Angeles Times, “it’s hard to get out.” Discussing his third novel, “Smoke Screen,” a thriller involving international terrorism and a deadly virus, he admitted that his screenwriting work had slowed his literary output.“Yeah, this is my third novel in 20 years,” he said. “But I think when you look at it, from the point of sheer craft, I’ve gotten better. And that’s because, Hollywood or not, I write every day. It’s different writing, but it all boils down to plot and characters.” More

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    The Shindellas, an R&B Girl Group With an Unlikely Story

    The trio, brought together by a writing and production team and based just outside Nashville, are hoping for a breakout moment with their second album, “Shindo.”The home base of the pop-R&B girl group the Shindellas is a yellow two-story house that’s been standing for more than a century in a pastoral Tennessee town. Inside, the group’s vision board fills an entire wall with its goals — for radio airplay, industry awards, television appearances, movie roles, high-profile collaborations and brand deals. On a slip of paper in the middle, the words “household name” are printed in marker.“That’s probably the biggest one,” said Tamara Chauniece, one of its three members. “Because with that comes all of this.”The Shindellas, which also include Stacy Johnson and Kasi Jones, stand out in the 2023 pop landscape: a vocal trio of women over 30, brought together by a writing-production team, trying to reach the masses with songs that recall the glory of powerhouse girl groups — 20 miles south of Nashville, in the shadow of the country music industry.The group came to town in January 2017 to become part of Weirdo Workshop, a small music company started by the writing and production team Claude Kelly and Chuck Harmony, whose credits include Mary J. Blige, Bruno Mars and Miley Cyrus. The Shindellas each hailed from very different performing backgrounds, but were drawn by Kelly and Harmony’s vision for the trio — a concept dating back to a session in the late 2000s, where they found themselves reminiscing about the Supremes and wondering, “‘Where are the girl groups right now?’” Kelly recalled.Their 2019 “Genesis” EP and 2021 debut, “Hits That Stick Like Grits,” remained below the radar, but the elaborately staged shows they did alongside Harmony and Kelly’s duo Louis York helped establish their poised, polished reputation in Tennessee. Their new album, “Shindo,” out Friday, has the potential to bring them to larger stages: It is their first release to receive an outside push from a label partner, the Nashville indie Thirty Tigers, and first to generate a radio hit: “Last Night Was Good for My Soul,” a day-after-the-party jam with a disco groove, reached the Top 10 on Billboard’s Adult R&B Airplay chart.The Shindellas onstage in May. In their rehearsal room, they practice projecting stadium-scale energy and their original choreography.Paras Griffin/Getty ImagesThe group has been preparing for a breakout moment. Coordinated stage costumes pack a walk-in closet. (The aesthetic they request from stylists is “Afrofuturist and just classy, elegant,” Johnson said.) In their rehearsal room, the Shindellas often perform before a mirror, scrutinizing themselves while they practice projecting stadium-scale energy and their original, crisply synchronized choreography.Though Harmony and Kelly assembled the Shindellas, they and the group all agreed on a crucial point early: that the women should be in control of their destiny, well aware of the erasure that minimized contributions from generations of female pop and R&B acts, especially those featuring Black women. “To act as if a group of women who have a powerful sense of style and artistry and songwriting and ideas should just be puppets for you doesn’t work,” Kelly said in an interview. “It didn’t work then,” he added, “and it definitely doesn’t work now.”Before they came together, all of the trio’s members had developed skepticism of the Faustian bargains of the music industry. Johnson, 36, spent her youth in Chicago working with a family-run music company, singing jingles, then graduated to dance tracks. She briefly joined a girl group, but quit when she became uncomfortable with how she was asked to present herself. When Harmony, who previously had hired her to sing demos, pitched her on the concept of a trio built on demanding respect, she was intrigued.“My little sister could listen to this. My grandma could listen to this. I could sing this and turn it up,” she recalled thinking of the idea. She dove into helping find the group’s other voices.Jones, 40, stood out. She had done musical theater and theme park work and booked her own overseas tours as a neo-soul singer-songwriter. But she said she had experienced predatory behavior from some producers in Los Angeles: “People being sexually aggressive, going into a situation with someone you think you know well, and it turns into another thing,” she said. Warily, Jones flew out to visit Weirdo Workshop, where she found the safe space she’d been looking for.Chauniece, 33, spent her childhood on the Texas gospel circuit, managed by her mother. Appearing on Season 5 of “The Voice” boosted her profile, but afterward she felt lost, posting videos of herself singing online that sometimes went viral before resolving to work with a small label. “I don’t want to be on a major label roster, get lost in the sauce,” she said of her mind-set at the time.Initially, the Shindellas would tell Kelly and Harmony what they wanted to sing about and sound like, and gathered around the piano to weigh in on song ideas. Then, Chauniece said, the three women would contemplate how to interpret their parts: “Anytime you hear me, it’s me,” she said of that work. “People don’t consider that authorship, or they don’t consider that your creative property. But it is.”On “Genesis,” they tried out vintage sensibilities, recalling the swinging effervescence of the Motown era and the Pointer Sisters’ knowing invocations of World War II-era vocal jazz. “Hits That Stick Like Grits” covered more stylistic territory and featured an interlude with writing credits for all three Shindellas. But on “Shindo,” named for a made-up word they use in the studio describing “that overwhelming feeling of chills,” Jones said — the group puts its charisma, attitude and personality up front.The Shindellas sing about taking the lead in lust and lasting romance: announcing what they are looking for from a partner in the sleek, funky “Up 2 You,” demanding a lover’s discretion in regard to a hook up in the slow-burning “Kiss N Tell,” and playfully instructing a man how to give pleasure in the bass-driven “Juicy.” (They helped write the latter two.) The video for “Juicy” is all moisturized lips and ripe fruit — except for shots of Jones reading Angela Davis’s book “Women, Race & Class,” a reminder that the Shindellas are always paying attention to power dynamics.“Last Night Was Good for My Soul” showcases Jones’s near-rapping and theatrical warmth, and she and Johnson also take their turns in the spotlight; however, the Shindellas have no lead singer. They combine their voices with pinpoint precision, often singing in softened yet self-possessed unison, then spreading into radiant, jazzy intervals.Their recordings typically begin with piano, and Harmony later wraps exuberant dance floor rhythms or silken slow jam textures around their voices, using a combo of hand-played instruments, ’80s synthesizers and drum machines, and digital sharpening.“Musically, I think to create the future, you need a healthy balance of the past and the present,” he said. “And I feel like live instrumentation mixed with technology is the dance in my head that I’m always doing with the Shindellas. And it’s intricate, because I want them to be formidable. I want them to be a legacy act.”Right now, the Shindellas are focused on expanding their reach. “We know that we’re doing music that’s for everybody,” Chauniece said. “But when you actually see the faces of what that everybody is, it’s still like …”Johnson finished her thought: “Literally everybody.” More