Aurelia Butler

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    Dolly Parton Memorializes Her Husband, Carl Dean, in a New Song

    “Like all great love stories, they never end,” Parton wrote on Instagram before releasing the ballad “If You Hadn’t Been There.”Over their nearly 60-year marriage, Carl Dean inspired his wife, the country music superstar Dolly Parton, to write several songs.There was “Just Because I’m a Woman” in 1968, about the disappointment of a man learning his new wife was more complex than just the “angel” he’d first thought; the 2012 love ballad “From Here to the Moon and Back”; and, of course, the 1973 hit “Jolene,” one of Parton’s most enduring songs, about a flirtation Dean had with a bank teller who took interest in him early in their marriage.Late Thursday, the 79-year-old Parton announced that he had inspired another one: “If You Hadn’t Been There.”“I fell in love with Carl Dean when I was 18 years old,” Parton wrote in an Instagram post about her husband, who died on Monday at 82. “Like all great love stories, they never end. They live on in memory and song. He will always be the star of my life story, and I dedicate this song to him.”Shortly after her post, she released a new single, a stirring tribute to the man she’d met outside a Nashville laundromat the day she moved to the city in 1964. “I wouldn’t be here, if you hadn’t been there,” she sings. “Holding my hand, showing you care / You made me dream, more than I dared.”Dean, an asphalt paver who went on to own an asphalt-paving business, was a man so private that rumors persisted that he didn’t really exist — rumors that Parton slyly toyed with over the years.In a rare statement to Entertainment Tonight in 2016, he recalled that day at the laundromat as “the day my life began.”“My first thought was ‘I’m gonna marry that girl,’” he added. “My second thought was, ‘Lord, she’s good-looking.’” More

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    Jason Isbell’s Bare-Bones Breakup Tune, and 7 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by I’m With Her, Nathy Peluso, Car Seat Headrest and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Jason Isbell, ‘Eileen’Jason Isbell’s new album, “Foxes in the Snow,” is decisively unadorned: just Isbell singing over his acoustic guitar. It arrives following his divorce from Amanda Shires, who has her own songwriting career and was a member of his band. Over bare-bones fingerpicking in “Eileen,” Isbell sings about separation, regrets, self-deception and how “It ended like it always ends / Somebody crying on the phone.” He contends, “Eileen, you should’ve seen this coming sooner,” but adds, almost fondly, “You thought the truth was just a rumor, but that’s your way.” It’s not about blame — it’s about getting through.I’m With Her, ‘Ancient Light’The virtuoso string-band supergroup I’m With Her — Sarah Jarosz, Aiofe O’Donovan and Sara Watkins — has reconvened with the intimately ambitious “Ancient Light.” The verses are in a gently disorienting 7/4; the instruments mix acoustic and electric, juxtaposing fiddle tune and math-rock; the lyrics lean into the metaphysical. As the song begins, Jarosz sings, “Better get out of the way / Gonna figure out what I wanna say / I been a long time comin’,” and it only gets more cosmic from there.Car Seat Headrest, ‘Gethsemane’Will Toledo’s band Car Seat Headrest has announced its first album since 2020, “The Scholars,” and it’s a full-scale rock opera. The first single, “Gethsemane,” is an 11-minute suite that ponders faith, morality, creativity, free will and love as the music unfurls with stretches of kraut-rock keyboard minimalism and roaring power chords that echo the Who’s “Tommy.” Toledo sings, “A series of simple patterns slowly build themselves into another song / I don’t know how it happened,” but the structure is ironclad.Illuminati Hotties, ‘777’Sarah Tudzin — the songwriter and producer behind Illuminati Hotties — cranks up distorted guitars and harnesses quiet-LOUD grunge dynamics in “777,” a song that nearly explodes with joyful anticipation. “I wanna figure you out,” she declares, but she’s already sure that she’s won any gamble: “You’re my spade / lucky 777.” All the noise doesn’t hide the pop song within.The Ophelias, ‘Salome’​​”I want your head on a stake / I want your head on a platter,” sing the Ophelias, an indie-rock band from Cincinnati, turning “I” into a peal of vocal harmony. “Salome” adapts an incident from the Bible into a seething, churning, implacable crescendo of guitars, drums and voices, calmly announcing, “The knife sways heavy in my hand.”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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    Review: A New York Philharmonic Evening of Small Epiphanies

    Marin Alsop led the orchestra in a program of works by Beethoven, Brahms and Stravinsky, as well as a new violin concerto by Nico Muhly.Near the end of the lullaby that gives way to the blazing finale of Stravinsky’s “Firebird” Suite, the music slows and thins to a whisper.In the ballet, this is the moment when an evil sorcerer and his minions fall into a deep sleep. In some renditions, it registers as little more than a pause. But at David Geffen Hall on Thursday, the New York Philharmonic, under the baton of Marin Alsop, restored fairy-tale mystery to that transition.Just moments earlier, she had coaxed some of the most opulently sensual playing of the evening from the ensemble, including a voluptuous bassoon solo and swooning strings. Then, as the texture tapered, she appeared to drain the music of its pulse with medicinal deliberation. An unnerving trance settled over the room. When the finale’s horn solo emerged — noble, transcendent — it felt as if it arose from a place deep inside the subconscious.There were small epiphanies like that throughout the concert, which also included works by Beethoven and Brahms, and a new violin concerto by Nico Muhly. Alsop has an ability to manipulate time to expressive effect, and the sound she drew from the Philharmonic was cohesive and malleable, the playing poised between discipline and individual dazzle.In Beethoven’s “Leonore” Overture No. 3, she leaned into the uncertainty of the opening phrase, shaping each swelling chord with its own gradient from quiet to louder, its own testy relationship to the beat. When the music erupted and rushed onward, the release felt all the more liberating for having gone through such visceral hesitation.Brahms’s work Variations on a Theme by Haydn requires forensic attention to balance with ever new iterations that often need to be adjusted and contained in such a way that they just barely shine through the finicky business of the rest of the score. Alsop led a transparent reading that patiently marshaled its forces for a majestic finale.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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    Like ‘Mickey 17?’ Watch These Movies About Clones Next.

    Mickey is the latest addition to the world of expendable doppelgängers created to perform all sorts of dangerous and unpleasant tasks humans would rather not do.In “Mickey 17” (in theaters) Robert Pattinson plays a former pastry chef and an amiable dimwit who applies for a lousy, inevitably lethal job on a contaminated ice planet. As an Expendable, Mickey goes into the worst sorts of situations, dies in some horrible way — you know, for the mission — then gets cloned over and over again to take on the next awful task. At various points he’s irradiated, instructed to breathe in a deadly space virus, left for dead in a cave full of space bugs, used as a guinea pig in a series of failed experiments, and fed bad meat.In many Hollywood movies about clones, the doppelgängers are just as expendable as Mickey, created to perform all sorts of dangerous and unpleasant tasks humans would rather not do. They work on lunar mines (“Moon”) and in theme parks (the cloned assassins in “Futureworld”); they labor as super soldiers (the clone troopers of the Star Wars franchise) and organ donors (“Parts: The Clonus Horror”).Most don’t know they’re expendable, of course, and aren’t all that keen about their situations if they do. “Mickey 17” is an outlier here: an expendable who becomes one willingly, actually writing “expendable” on his job application. Eventually, however, Mickey tires of the drudgery of dying painfully day after miserable day. Who wouldn’t?Movies about these genetic sad sacks run the gamut of genres, from horror and sci-fi to action films and dramedies. Filmmakers use clones to ponder questions about fate and free will and what it means to be human; various films have examined such disparate topics as the nature of sentience (“Blade Runner”); U.S. race relations (“They Cloned Tyrone”); and the very ethics of cloning itself (“Never Let Me Go”). Here are five notables from an admittedly fringe genre.The Island (2005)Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson in “The Island.”Doug Hyun/DreamworksWhere to watch: Stream “The Island” on Pluto TV.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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    ‘Mickey 17’ and the Long Line of Movie Clones

    Mickey is the latest addition to the world of expendable doppelgängers created to perform all sorts of dangerous and unpleasant tasks humans would rather not do.In “Mickey 17” (in theaters) Robert Pattinson plays a former pastry chef and an amiable dimwit who applies for a lousy, inevitably lethal job on a contaminated ice planet. As an Expendable, Mickey goes into the worst sorts of situations, dies in some horrible way — you know, for the mission — then gets cloned over and over again to take on the next awful task. At various points he’s irradiated, instructed to breathe in a deadly space virus, left for dead in a cave full of space bugs, used as a guinea pig in a series of failed experiments, and fed bad meat.In many Hollywood movies about clones, the doppelgängers are just as expendable as Mickey, created to perform all sorts of dangerous and unpleasant tasks humans would rather not do. They work on lunar mines (“Moon”) and in theme parks (the cloned assassins in “Futureworld”); they labor as super soldiers (the clone troopers of the Star Wars franchise) and organ donors (“Parts: The Clonus Horror”).Most don’t know they’re expendable, of course, and aren’t all that keen about their situations if they do. “Mickey 17” is an outlier here: an expendable who becomes one willingly, actually writing “expendable” on his job application. Eventually, however, Mickey tires of the drudgery of dying painfully day after miserable day. Who wouldn’t?Movies about these genetic sad sacks run the gamut of genres, from horror and sci-fi to action films and dramedies. Filmmakers use clones to ponder questions about fate and free will and what it means to be human; various films have examined such disparate topics as the nature of sentience (“Blade Runner”); U.S. race relations (“They Cloned Tyrone”); and the very ethics of cloning itself (“Never Let Me Go”). Here are five notables from an admittedly fringe genre.The Island (2005)Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson in “The Island.”Doug Hyun/DreamworksWhere to watch: Stream “The Island” on Pluto TV.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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    Jonas Mekas, Master of Avant-Garde Film, Shows His Tender Side

    Mekas’s diaristic film clips, left behind when he died, fuel a new documentary that renders an intimate portrait of a man who often trafficked in the abstract.For 70 years Jonas Mekas, widely seen as the godfather of American avant-garde film, created nearly daily visual documents that showed elements of his life.He called them “film diaries.” They were recorded on film reels and tapes that were stored in cardboard sleeves with labels like “angry dog,” “small memorabilia” and “Warhol.” Those were stacked throughout Mekas’s loft in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, organized in a way that only he fully understood.After Mekas died in 2019 at 96, a re-creation of the cluttered loft was installed on the fifth floor of an arts center in New Jersey, including the recordings and other possessions: Mekas’s old film editing equipment. A cardboard box with trimmings from the beard of his longtime friend Allen Ginsberg. A scarf he brought when fleeing his home country, Lithuania, in the 1940’s and held onto while surviving a Nazi labor camp.In the summer of 2020, the filmmaker KD Davison started sifting through those archives to create a documentary about Mekas. That film, “Fragments of Paradise,” will begin streaming on Amazon Prime Video on March 13.The documentary draws heavily from Mekas’s visual diaries, which Davison said seemed to reflect the rootlessness he experienced as a refugee during World War II and his enduring search for moments of beauty or calm.“I began to see this melancholy that I think isn’t often associated with Jonas,” she said. “It was like watching someone through the course of their life reconcile themselves with loss and begin to find freedom and joy just in the present moment.”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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    ‘Housewife of the Year’: Contestants Look Back in Dismay

    Ciaran Cassidy’s film revisits an Irish television show that judged stay-at-home moms on budgeting and appearance.There’s a temptation, when making a documentary about some obviously retrograde practice from the past, for filmmakers to treat their subject like something to gawk at. Can you believe how backward earlier generations were? Let’s all point and stare and wince.“Housewife of the Year” (in theaters), directed by Ciaran Cassidy, could very easily have gone in that direction. The film is about (and named after) a live, prime-time televised competition that took place from 1969 to 1995 in Ireland — and it’s pretty much what it sounds like. Women, generally married and raising a large family, were judged on qualities ranging from sense of humor and civic-mindedness to budgeting, preparing a simple meal and, of course, keeping up their appearance. All of this, the movie briefly explains via text onscreen, can be seen as an effort to prop up the social order in a deeply religious, deeply traditionalist country where it was virtually impossible for a married woman to maintain many kinds of employment. “The state shall endeavor to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home,” Article 41.2 of the Irish Constitution proclaims. The competition helped reinforce those values.As Irish society changed, especially with respect to women’s rights and reproductive freedoms, the competition eventually turned into “Homemaker of the Year,” open to all genders. But that’s not the focus of the documentary, nor is there ponderous narration explaining to us what happened. Instead, “Housewife of the Year” focuses on two main ways of telling its story. The first is archival footage from the competition, which reinforces how much of it focused on patronizing and even belittling the women as they participated, via the male host, Gay Byrne, interviewing them onstage. It’s remarkable to watch.But woven throughout are present-day interviews with many of the participants, now much older, who see things differently than they probably did back then. They tell stories of what was really going on in the background: alcoholic or deadbeat husbands, economic catastrophes, backbreaking labor. One woman, Ena, talks about having given birth to 14 children by the time she was 31, owing largely to the ban on contraception.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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    ‘Chaos: The Manson Murders’ Review: All You Ever Knew is Suspect

    Errol Morris returns to his main obsessions — evil and delusion — in a new Netflix documentary about the famous murders.Two recurring inquiries — scary ones, entwined — characterize Errol Morris’s decades-long directing career, which includes landmark documentaries like “The Thin Blue Line,” “Mr. Death,” “The Fog of War” and “Standard Operating Procedure.” The first question regards the nature of evil: what it is, where it comes from, whether it’s invited into a man’s heart or chooses to takes up residence there. The other is the fine membrane between truth and fiction, which dictates how we become deluded, by others and by self, and how those delusions come to rule the world.In Morris’s more recent work, those themes are brought together most sharply in “American Dharma,” a 2019 chiller in which Morris feeds ample rope to the Trump adviser Steve Bannon to explain his vision of the world and, in so doing, expose a kind of cruelly pompous vapidity. But other contemporary works by Morris — “Separated,” about policies that tear migrant children from their parents; “The Pigeon Tunnel,” about what the spy novelist John le Carré never really revealed about himself — are also held together mostly by these questions. At their heart is some primal fear: that evil, or evil people, can control us without our even realizing it. And for Morris, this is not a religious question so much as an existential and political one.Little surprise that his latest project, the Netflix documentary “Chaos: The Manson Murders,” returns to the same arena. Based, sort of, on the hair-raising book by the journalist Tom O’Neill, the film winnows its central question to one recurring baffler: Why are we, as a culture drenched in true crime narratives, so obsessed with this particular set of murders, which occurred over 55 years ago?Most likely you know the outline of the case: Charles Manson, the failed musician and wild-eyed hippie, ordered his “family” — drug-addled runaways, mostly, who had been living with him at a ranch full of old movie sets — to carry out a series of gruesome murders on the evenings of Aug. 8 and 9, 1969. Among the victims was the actress Sharon Tate, then eight and a half months pregnant with her first child. Her husband, the director Roman Polanski, was out of town at the time.The story includes all kinds of weird spiky bits, well-documented, from accidents and coincidences (who was there that night, who wasn’t) to Manson’s connections to Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys and his worship of the Beatles to the bizarre behavior he and his acolytes exhibited during the sensationalized trial. O’Neill, in his book, goes deeper, raising the specter of various conspiracy theories about potential covert government operations that seem, with the space of time and some well-placed Freedom of Information Act requests, to at least have the potential of maybe being linked to the case.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