Aurelia Butler

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    An Operatic Mess at the San Carlo Theater

    The San Carlo in Naples is at the center of an offstage drama in which each of two respected figures believes he is the house’s rightful leader.It’s hard to gauge whether the drama currently playing out behind the scenes at the San Carlo Opera House in Naples will end as “opera seria” (serious) or an “opera buffa” (comedy).Italy’s oldest opera house currently has two respected figures, each of whom believes he is its rightful general director after a convoluted dispute that critics say has cast the theater, and Italy, in an unflattering light.It has all the elements of high drama — conflict, tension, perhaps even vendetta — and is playing out like a farce, or, in the words of some Italian news outlets, “un pasticcio”: a mess.A quick plot synopsis:Act I. In May, Italy’s government passed a law that said general directors of the country’s 13 state-run opera theaters could not serve beyond their 70th birthday. That immediately terminated the contract of Stéphane Lissner, who had turned 70 in January, midway through his term as the general director of the San Carlo.He was the only general director immediately affected by the law, and there was open speculation in the news media that the law, which was passed as an urgent measure, had been drafted to specifically single him out.The French-born Lissner, who ran La Scala in Milan for a decade and the Paris Opera for six years, warned the board of the theater that he would challenge his termination.Act II. In August, the theater hired Carlo Fuortes, 64, as a replacement, not long after he resigned as the chief executive of Italy’s national broadcaster, RAI.Fuortes is an experienced manager who was praised for turning around the Rome Opera during a stint there as general director from 2013 to 2021. Italian news outlets widely reported that the hard-right government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wanted to replace Fuortes in the broadcast position with its own nominee. It was said that the San Carlo was meant to be a consolation prize for Fuortes, who began there on Sept. 1.Stéphane Lissner was the general director at San Carlo until May, when the Italian government passed a law stating that general directors at opera theaters could not serve beyond age 70.Pascal Le Segretain/Getty ImagesMr. Lissner was replaced by Carlo Fuortes, who before he was hired at the San Carlo, was the head of Italy’s national broadcaster, RAI.Ettore Ferrari/EPA, via ShutterstockAct III. On Sept. 12, a labor court reinstated Lissner, after his lawyers challenged the grounds for his dismissal. The culture ministry told the theater board to reinstate him, which it did on Monday evening, according to his lawyer. (The board declined repeated requests for comment.) Lissner is expected to return to Naples from Paris, where he has been since June, as soon as this week. But the board has also announced it would file appeal the court’s decision.What happens in Act IV remains to be seen. A review panel within the same labor court will now examine the decision to reinstate Lissner, who is again legally the theater’s general director. His lawyer, Pietro Fioruzzi, pointed out the “irony” that his client had been reinstated by the same theater board that was appealing that decision.“What happened is certainly not worthy of the history of Naples and the history of the San Carlo,” said Riccardo Realfonzo, an economics professor who sits on the board.Realfonzo had contested several management decisions at the theater, including some hirings and Lissner’s remuneration, which Realfonzo said was too high. He has also refused to sign off on the theater’s last two budgets, because they were not balanced, he said.As a representative of a regional government that funds the theater, he was concerned about the potential financial fallout in the event that the theater had to end up paying both general directors, or paying off one of them. He protested by not attending meetings.Alberto Mattioli, an opera critic who just published a book about Italy’s opera houses and their history, said the hastily passed law that ended Lissner’s run was also in line with Italy’s hard-right nationalist government drive to “put Italians first” at the top of the country’s cultural institutions, pointing out that the people it initially affected both happened to be French.Dominique Meyer, who runs La Scala and is also from France, would have to leave in 2025 when he turns 70. Officials at the Milan theater said legal experts were examining the new law to determine whether it would apply at La Scala, which is governed by a different statute than other opera theaters.Mattioli said that by using the San Carlo as a pawn in political deal-making the government had diminished the standing of the theater, one of Italy’s most prestigious institutions. “Everything that’s happened confirms that Italy is a really incomprehensible country,” Mattioli said.Fuortes has not spoken publicly about the situation and his lawyer declined to comment. His standing at the theater after Lissner’s reinstatement is unclear, but he has threatened legal repercussions if he is dismissed, according to a letter from his lawyer to the San Carlo board that was shared with The New York Times by a third party.It could take weeks for the review panel to hear the appeal. In the meantime, the drama is certain to continue. More

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    Doja Cat’s Hit and 7 More Ways of Seeing Red

    Hear songs by Willie Nelson, TLC, King Crimson and more.Doja Cat, painting the MTV Video Music Awards stage red.Dia Dipasupil/Getty ImagesDear listeners,This Friday, the rapper and singer Doja Cat will release her highly anticipated fourth album “Scarlet,” which features the ubiquitous No. 1 hit “Paint the Town Red.” That is, to quote Playboi Carti, a whole lotta red.Doja Cat’s crimson era got me thinking about all the other musicians who have used that evocative color to conjure all sorts of images — wine, ballet shoes, luftballoons. Red sometimes signifies love, but it also suggests anger, passion and danger. Red is the color of blood and roses. It’s the musical connection between artists as disparate as Taylor Swift and King Crimson. Clearly, it calls for its own playlist.Doja Cat’s vampy hit kicks off this mix, but you hardly need to be familiar with her music to listen. (My boyfriend has admitted that, until recently, he thought Doja Cat was “a cryptocurrency.”) It pulls from a variety of decades and genres, featuring artists including TLC, Willie Nelson and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. I omitted some of the more obvious choices, like “Lady in Red” or “Red Red Wine,” because I assume we’ve all heard those enough for several lifetimes. I couldn’t resist adding a well-known Prince song, though, because, well … it’s Prince!So pour yourself a glass of cabernet or cranberry juice, cue up this playlist, and get ready to paint the town red.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Doja Cat: “Paint the Town Red”Built around a sample of Dionne Warwick’s wistful 1963 hit “Walk on By,” which was co-written and produced by Burt Bacharach, Doja Cat’s first solo No. 1 has a strutting swagger and a puffed-chest confidence. It’s the perfect soundtrack for striding off into the sunset, leaving doubters in the dust — or perhaps performing a viral TikTok dance that has added to the song’s popularity. (Listen on YouTube)2. Prince: “Little Red Corvette”The second single from Prince’s 1983 album “1999,” “Little Red Corvette” hit No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 — making it his highest charting pop hit up until that point. While red isn’t the color most commonly associated with Prince, here it provides a memorably vivid image, suggesting passion, excitement and even a little danger. (Listen on YouTube)3. Willie Nelson: “Red Headed Stranger”Willie Nelson’s 1975 breakthrough album was more than just a commercial and critical success: It also gave the Red Headed Stranger his enduring nickname. This plaintive, sparsely arranged title track reworks “The Tale of the Red Headed Stranger,” a 1953 story-song written for Perry Como, and imbues it with Nelson’s own inimitable melancholy. (Listen on YouTube)4. Taylor Swift: “Red (Taylor’s Version)”This 2021 reworking of the country-rocking, lightly synesthetic title track from Swift’s 2012 release “Red” — still my favorite of her albums — contrasts the cool, muted hues of heartbreak (“Losing him was blue like I’ve never known/Missing him was dark gray, all alone”) with the bright, Technicolor memories of better times: “Loving him was red.” (Listen on YouTube)5. The Cyrkle: “Red Rubber Ball”Co-written by a not-quite-yet-famous Paul Simon, this bouncy folk-pop hit from 1966 finds optimism — and a memorably colorful simile — at the end of a bad relationship: “The worst is over now/The morning sun is shining like a red rubber ball.” (Listen on YouTube)6. TLC: “Red Light Special”If you thought the Prince song was going to be the sultriest moment of this playlist … think again! (Listen on YouTube)7. King Crimson: “Red”“Red”? From the album “Red”? By King Crimson? This six-minute prog-rock epic from 1974, written by Robert Fripp shortly before he disbanded King Crimson, just might be the reddest song of all time. (Listen on YouTube)8. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: “Red Right Hand”This slinky, atmospheric single from the Australian art-rockers’ 1994 album “Let Love In” takes its title from a line in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” Used prominently in the “Scream” movie franchise and later as the theme song to the TV show “Peaky Blinders,” “Red Right Hand” has a dark, cinematic quality. It also brings this playlist full circle: Like Doja’s “Paint the Town Red,” it’s the perfect soundtrack for slowly sauntering down the street. (Listen on YouTube)I said what I said,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“8 Red Songs” track listTrack 1: Doja Cat, “Paint the Town Red”Track 2: Prince, “Little Red Corvette”Track 3: Willie Nelson, “Red Headed Stranger”Track 4: Taylor Swift, “Red (Taylor’s Version)”Track 5: The Cyrkle, “Red Rubber Ball”Track 6: TLC, “Red Light Special”Track 7: King Crimson, “Red”Track 8: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, “Red Right Hand” More

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    Roger Whittaker, Balladeer With an International Following, Dies at 87

    A Briton with a rich baritone, he charmed audiences, mostly in Europe and America, with sentimental songs, like his signature hit, “The Last Farewell.”Roger Whittaker, a British singer whose easy-listening ballads and folk songs caught the sentiments of perfect summer days and last farewells, touching the hearts of mainly older fans across Europe and America for four decades, died on Sep. 12 in a hospital near Toulouse, in the south of France. He was 87.His longtime publicist Howard Elson said the cause was “complications following a long illness.” Mr. Whittaker had retired to the region.Born to British parents in Nairobi, Kenya, Mr. Whittaker grew up there with the infectious rhythms of East African music in his bloodstream. His grandfather had been a club singer in England, and his father, a Staffordshire grocer who played the violin, had been disabled in a motorcycle crash and moved his family to Kenya for the warm climate.Roger learned to play the guitar at 7 and developed a rich baritone in school choirs, where he sometimes sang in Swahili. At 18, he was drafted into the British colonial Kenya Regiment, and for two years he fought Mau Mau rebels in the struggle that led to Kenyan independence. He then studied medicine in South Africa and science in Wales, intending to become a teacher.But music intervened. He had played club dates to pay for college, and he also recorded songs on flexible discs distributed with the campus newspaper, The Bangor University Rag. A record company liked them and in 1962 released his first professional singles, including “Steel Men,” his cover of a Jimmy Dean hit about bridge builders.“Steel Men” leaped onto the British charts, the opening wedge in a career of international tours and record albums that celebrated ethnic and working-class pride, the passing seasons and family gatherings at Christmas. Over the years Mr. Whittaker recorded for various labels, including EMI, RCA Victor and his own Tembo (Swahili for elephant) Records.Tours took him repeatedly to Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, a concert grind that often exceeded 100 gigs a year and outlasted the millennium. He learned to fly small planes and sometimes used them on his tours.He wrote much of the music he performed, made a documentary film about Kenya, wrote an autobiography, appeared frequently on television and radio and sold a reported 60 million albums worldwide. One of them, “‘The Last Farewell’ and Other Hits,” recorded in 1971 and forgotten, became a sensation later, reaching No. 1 on the pop charts in 11 countries and eventually selling 11 million copies.“‘The Last Farewell’ is an ersatz show tune about a British man-of-war, love, heartache and heroism,” Henry Edwards wrote in The New York Times in 1975. “Released four years ago, the tune was discovered by an Atlanta disc jockey while idly going through a pile of discarded LPs. He liked the song, played it on the air, and soon Atlanta was liking it too. That affection soon spread to Nashville, then to the entire country-music market, then to the pop audience at large.” It became Mr. Whittaker’s signature song.In 1980, Mr. Whittaker invited children to submit lyrics and poems about peace for a songwriting contest. It drew a million entries from 57 countries. He wrote and recorded music for the winning entry, written by Odina Batnag, 13, of Manila. She was flown to New York and introduced, with her song, “I Am But a Small Voice,” at Radio City Music Hall. Proceeds went to a UNESCO program for disabled children.By the 1980s Mr. Whittaker was performing in 50 to 70 American cities regularly. Boston was a stronghold.In addition to singing, he whistled, yodeled and had audiences sing along. Critics called it schmaltzy, but crowds loved it and joined in, especially on hits like “Durham Town (The Leavin’)” (1969) and covers of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” and Jethro Tull’s “Too Old to Rock ’n’ Roll, Too Young to Die.”Mr. Whittaker performing on television in about 1965 in Germany, where he had a big following.Gunter Zint/K & K Ulf Kruger OHG, via Redferns, via Getty Images“Whittaker’s audience is mostly white and middle-class, probably daytime TV watchers who enjoy the kind of plain, folksy charm he projects,” Thomas Sabulis wrote in The Boston Globe. “He’s no great singer or songwriter; he doesn’t have Neil Diamond’s talent, Tom Jones’s sex appeal or Barry Manilow’s knack for milking the obvious. What he does have is a steady, unspectacular baritone and an avuncular, almost evangelical tone as comforting as it is mediocre.”Tragedy struck in 1989. Mr. Whittaker’s parents, still living in Kenya, were victims of a brutal home invasion by four robbers. His mother was tortured for eight hours and his father murdered. The killers were never caught. His mother moved back to England.“It will affect me for the rest of my life,” Mr. Whittaker told reporters, “but I believe we should all live without hate if we can.”After a period of mourning, Mr. Whittaker resumed recording and touring. In 1995, he sang at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville at a 50th-anniversary party for former President George Bush and his wife, Barbara, who were fans. In 1997, despite a surgical knee replacement, he kept some 100 concert dates in Europe and America.He stopped touring in 2013, at 77, and retired to the south of France after years living in England and Ireland.Roger Henry Brough Whittaker was born in Nairobi on March 22, 1936, to Edward and Viola (Showan) Whittaker, who, after his motorcycle accident in 1930, had settled on a farm in Thika, outside Nairobi. His father recovered and became a successful builder and businessman in Kenya. His mother managed theaters.After graduating from the Prince of Wales School in Nairobi in 1954 and finishing military service in 1956, Roger began premedical studies at the University of Cape Town, but he dropped out after 18 months. He became an apprentice teacher but, needing more education, enrolled in 1959 at University College of North Wales (now Bangor University), and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1962.Still uncertain about his future, he consulted a faculty adviser, who, he later recalled, told him, “Have a try in show business and if you haven’t made it in 10 years, come back here and teach.” Mr. Whittaker soon landed a singing job at a resort in Northern Ireland and began his career.In 1964, he married Natalie O’Brien, who became his manager and co-author of his 1986 memoir, “So Far, So Good.” She survives him, as do their five children, Emily Kennedy and Lauren, Jessica, Guy and Alexander Whittaker; 12 grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and an elder sister. A documentary film, “Roger Whittaker in Kenya: A Musical Safari,” which related a history of Kenya and revisited settings of the singer’s early life there, was released in 1982.Mr. Whittaker found his greatest European success in Germany. While he admitted he could not speak German at first, he sang and recorded in German “phonetically,” as he put it, until he became more fluent. He matured into one of Germany’s favorite singers, selling 10 million albums there.He also had a devoted following in the United States, where he was best known for “I Don’t Believe in ‘If’ Anymore” (1970); his version of “Wind Beneath My Wings” (1982); and “New World in the Morning” (1971), the title track of an album that also included “The Last Farewell” and “A Special Kind of Man.”“Women do not throw underclothes or room keys onstage at his concerts,” Diane White said in a sweet-and-sour appreciation in The Boston Globe. “No one gets high. No one gets hysterical with excitement. And yet Roger Whittaker is one of the most popular entertainers in the world.”Alex Marshall More

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    Shakira, Karol G, Édgar Barrera Lead Latin Grammy Nominations

    Barrera, the Mexican American producer, has the most nods with 13 ahead of this year’s ceremony, which will be held on Nov. 16 in Seville, Spain.At a moment of artistic vibrancy, widespread collaboration and commercial dominance for music sung in Spanish and Portuguese, international stars including Shakira, Karol G, Camilo and Bad Bunny are among the most nominated acts for the 24th annual Latin Grammy Awards. Leading all of the headliners, however, is the behind-the-scenes Mexican American hitmaker Edgar Barrera — a songwriter, producer and engineer also known as Edge — who earned 13 total nominations, according to an announcement on Tuesday by the Latin Recording Academy.Barrera, who has worked with Camilo, Maluma and Karol G, is nominated in the three top categories: record, album and song of the year, where he is nominated twice — once for “NASA” by Camilo and Alejandro Sanz and also for “Un X100to” by Grupo Frontera featuring Bad Bunny. In best tropical song and best regional song, Barrera is nominated three separate times in each category.The singers Camilo, Karol G and Shakira are tied with the reggaeton songwriter Kevyn Mauricio Cruz Moreno for the second-most nominations, with seven. All four will compete with Barrera for song of year, where the nominees also include: Shakira’s “Acróstico”; “Amigos,” as performed by Pablo Alborán and María Becerra; Natalia Lafourcade’s “De Todas Las Flores”; “Ella Baila Sola” by Eslabon Armado and Peso Pluma; Lasso’s “Ojos Marrones”; “Shakira: Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53” by Bizarrap featuring Shakira; “Si Tú Me Quieres” by Fonseca and Juan Luis Guerra; and “TQG” by Karol G featuring Shakira.Shakira, in addition to her three appearances in the song category, is also nominated for record of the year and best pop song for “Shakira: Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53,” plus best urban fusion/performance for “TQG.”Also up for record of the year are “No Es Que Te Extrañe” by Christina Aguilera; “Carretera y Manta” by Alborán; “Déjame Llorarte” by Paula Arenas and Jesús Navarro; “Si Tú Me Quieres”; “Mientras Me Curo Del Cora” by Karol G; “De Todas Las Flores”; “Ojos Marrones”; “La Fórmula” by Maluma and Marc Anthony; “Despechá” by Rosalía; and “Correcaminos” by Sanz featuring Danny Ocean.Album of the year includes releases by Alborán, Arenas, Camilo, Andrés Cepeda, Juanes, Karol G, Lafourcade, Ricky Martin, Fito Páez and Carlos Vives. The nominees for best new artist are Borja, Conexión Divina, Ana Del Castillo, Natascha Falcão, Gale, Paola Guanche, Joaquina, León Leiden, Maréh and Timø.For the first time since the Latin Grammys started in 2000, the academy will present awards for songwriter of the year, best singer-songwriter song and best Portuguese-language urban performance. The first nominees for songwriter of the year include Barrera, Cruz, Felipe González Abad, Manuel Lorente Freire, Horacio Palencia and Elena Rose.The awards cover music released during the eligibility period of June 1, 2022, to May 31, 2023. The nominated music must contain a majority of its lyrics in Spanish, Portuguese or any native regional dialect. Winners are voted on by members of the Latin Recording Academy, which include artists, songwriters, producers and other music creators in all genres.The ceremony will be held on Nov. 16 in Seville, Spain, and air on Univision in the United States. More

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    ‘The Saint of Second Chances’ Review: Baseball Inferno

    This documentary from Morgan Neville and Jeff Malmberg reconsiders the troubled career of Mike Veeck, a son of the M.L.B. impresario Bill Veeck.Bill Veeck, a scrappy, showmanship-savvy Major League Baseball impresario who survived grave injuries as a Marine during World War II, would make a hard act for any child to follow. But you can’t say that one of his sons hasn’t tried. That would be Mike Veeck, the subject of the peppy new documentary “The Saint of Second Chances.”Now in his seventies, Mike is an engaging onscreen presence in this story, whether appearing as himself or as played in re-enactments by Charlie Day (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”). The movie was directed by Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”) and Jeff Malmberg (“Marwencol”), and is a tad more fanciful than their prior work.But fancy is a good fit for the Veecks, it turns out. We see that Bill believed that “the most delightful way to spend an afternoon or evening” was at the ballpark. In the 1970s, reigning over Chicago’s Comiskey Park with the town’s second-banana MLB team, the White Sox, he was a ramshackle marketing innovator. Mike tried to match him: A disastrous 1979 gathering at Comiskey called Disco Demolition Night, where a record-burning stunt turned into a riot that resulted in dozens of arrests, was Mike’s idea. The fiasco got deserved blowback, which sent the younger Veeck into a long tailspin.This movie’s feel-good narrative essentially hinges on whether you buy Mike’s assertion that he wouldn’t have done the event if he “thought it would hurt anyone.” Once Mike got back in the game years later — through the Independent League ball organization — he brought the fun in eccentric ways, including a ball-carrying pig. Darryl Strawberry testifies here that Mike helped him love the game again. And the story of a personal tragedy in Mike’s family life is affecting.The Saint of Second ChancesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    Want to Enjoy Music More? Stop Streaming It.

    Build a real music collection. Reintroduce intimacy to the songs you care about.The only music-streaming account I’ve ever had lasted less than 72 hours in 2012. In 2023, I’m still building a non-streaming music collection, shelling out hard cash for what the streaming industry has convinced consumers should be free. As a very online millennial, that makes me somewhat of an anomaly among my peers. I know it’s a privilege for me to pooh-pooh streaming — after all, for those with less disposable income than I have, it offers access to enormous music libraries at little to no cost. But even for those who can afford to purchase music, the concept of paying for songs is a foreign one to many of us.People like me, who came of age in the decade after Apple introduced iTunes and before Spotify took over the market, belong to what is probably the last generation to remember what it was like to own a music collection that doesn’t live in the cloud. Maybe that’s why I never latched onto streaming services — I didn’t like depending on a third-party platform, or being part of a social experiment that feeds Spotify data that it then sells to advertisers. There’s also the matter of fair pay: Streams are the slowest way for musicians to earn money, at fractions of pennies per stream. Most important, though, I don’t like how streaming feels — like I’m only borrowing something for a while, rather than having a handpicked library of albums (digital or physical) that I’ve vetted and can keep forever.I was still using iTunes until 2019, when Apple decided to sunset the app and replace it with a new media player called Music (not to be confused with Apple Music, the streaming service). The appeal of the app remains the same: a media player where I can see my entire music library hosted on my local machine rather than in the cloud. In fact, I have several libraries across different devices and drives that — much to my dismay — all differ from one another slightly. What I lack in portability, I make up for in security. Once I add something to my iTunes library, I have it forever. I have no fear of platforms’ removing artists, or of artists’ removing themselves.When I started this journey in grade school, I, like many of my peers, got around the new order via dubious means. I started by importing CDs I found at the library (the “Juno” soundtrack, anyone?) to my hard drive. I graduated to downloading MP3s online in the heyday of music blogs (“Bitte Orca,” by the band Dirty Projectors, darlings of the hype machine) and searching Google for compressed files. I was a D.J. at my college’s radio station, where we shared files and browsed the station’s racks for CDs we could rip, all to fatten up our iTunes libraries.These days I’m paying for nearly all my music, and have become more selective when adding to my collection. I lean into Bandcamp for MP3s. The platform’s low barrier to entry allows nearly anyone to share and sell their music, whether they have a distributor or not — a limiting requirement for most major streaming platforms. Bandcamp is also possibly the best way to give the most money to small artists, aside from picking up a T-shirt from the merch table. If something isn’t available on Bandcamp, I’ll scope out used CDs to buy and rip. If I love something enough, I’ll try to get the record. If it’s out of print, I’ll throw it on my wish list and cross my fingers for a reissue. At the end of the day, the goal is to have something to hold onto: a digital file, a CD, a record, anything other than an ephemeral stream.This isn’t always convenient: Depriving myself of streaming means there’s no easy way for me to repeatedly listen to a song without a deeper monetary commitment; but for me, listening to music is not about convenience so much as engagement. Resisting Spotify pushes me to actively find new music, as opposed to sitting through Discover Weekly playlists generated by an algorithm. I tune into local college stations, or online stations like the London-based NTS Radio network, and go down rabbit holes on YouTube, whose algorithm can still surprise me as long as I give it the right seeds. YouTube can be the most reliable platform for obscure finds, like live sets or rips of small-production seven-inches lost to time (I’m still trying to find out more about Naming Mary, a not-so-S.E.O.-friendly ’90s shoegaze band with little to no internet presence that surfaced after several recommended videos).This process of discovery has created a stash of albums that is dwarfed by Spotify’s bloated world of curated playlists and anarchic algorithmic “radio stations.” I prefer it that way. When everyone has access to everything, nothing is stamped with the personal memories — the particulars that hold our experience of music together. I don’t need the entirety of recorded music at my fingertips. I just need the few curated albums that I cared enough about to collect. Having my own library means I can distinctly remember the context of every find, and that makes my intimacy with the songs I care about — the ones I can mentally fill in when one earbud falls out as I’m tying my shoes — feel especially rich.Denise Lu is a visual journalist at Bloomberg News. She has previously worked for The New York Times and The Washington Post. More

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    Brooke Shields Does Cabaret

    In story and song at the Café Carlyle in Manhattan, the star makes sense of a career that has included chaste nights with George Michael and drama with her mother.“Most of the time, I’m halfway content.”Those words are Bob Dylan’s, and they were delivered one night last week by Brooke Shields during her sold-out debut show at the Café Carlyle, the intimate Manhattan supper club where Bobby Short, Elaine Stritch and Debbie Harry have performed.It was five months after Ms. Shields had returned to the spotlight with “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields,” an acclaimed documentary that chronicled the ups and downs of a career that got its start in the 1970s, when she was a child model and actress marketed as a sex symbol.A number of celebrities came out to see her at the venue, which is blocks away from the Upper East Side apartment where she grew up. At a table close to the stage were the actors Naomi Watts, Billy Crudup and Laura Dern. Nearby sat Mariska Hargitay, with whom Ms. Shields has worked with on “Law & Order: SVU.” The crowd also included two men who had done cabaret at the Carlyle: Isaac Mizrahi, who designed the loosefitting orange dress Ms. Shields was wearing, and Alan Cumming.Whether by design or chance, Ms. Shields, 58, has reflected the mood of the times across her nearly five-decade career. In the louche, druggie ’70s, she starred (at age 11) in “Pretty Baby,” the Louis Malle film about a romantic relationship between an adult man and a child prostitute. In the striving, just-say-no ’80s, she graduated from Princeton and wrote a self-help book for teenagers in which she discussed her decision to remain a virgin.The celebrity guests at the show included, from left, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup and Naomi Watts.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIn the next decade she starred on Broadway (in a revival of “Grease”), displayed a talent for pratfalls in a hit sitcom (“Suddenly Susan”), and married and divorced a tennis star (Andre Agassi). In 2001, she married the comedy writer and filmmaker Chris Henchy, with whom she has had two children, and returned to the Broadway stage in “Chicago.” She has also found time to write memoirs and host a podcast, “Now What.”And Ms. Shields pointed out during the show that somewhere along the course of her varied career: “I performed at Sea World. With Lucille Ball.”Her Café Carlyle residency is scheduled to run through Sept. 23. Every night is sold out. On Tuesday, she opened with “I Think We’re Alone Now,” making it into an ironic lament about how she has rarely felt alone since her mother decided she would be a star.“I practically came out of the womb famous,” she said, during a spoken-word interlude. “They tell me the doctor asked for a selfie.”She also went through periods when career seemed to be over: “The other day,” she said from the stage, “I was in the airport and the flight attendant came up to me and said, ‘Oh my God, you’re Caitlyn Jenner!’”In “Fame Is Weird,” a song written for the show by Matthew Sklar and Amanda Green, she moved from her encounters with the public to her experiences with fellow celebrities. In the intro, she said she had turned down Donald J. Trump when he asked her out on a date, but soon conceded that she had consented to Elizabeth Taylor’s request that she pre-chew her gum.“I chewed it first,” Ms. Shields said, “so I got the better end of the deal.”Mariska Hargitay, seen here speaking with the actor Beth Ostrosky Stern, worked with Ms. Shields on the show “Law & Order: SVU.” Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesShe also recounted being mean girl-ed by some of he world’s best-known women. When she met Bette Davis at the Oscars, she said, “Hi, I’m Brooke Shields,” to which the star replied, “Yes, you are.” A similar encounter occurred when Ben Stiller brought her to Madonna’s house, Ms. Shields said. The greeting she received from Madonna was curt: “Oh, you.”In many ways, the show seemed like an effort by Ms. Shields to work through her ambivalence about having fallen closer to earth after the years of childhood and teenage stardom. In the second half, she roasted and paid tribute to her mother, Teri Shields, who in the ’70s and ’80s became a focal point for the culture’s misgivings about stage parenting and the sexualization of children in Hollywood.“She has been in the press almost more than I have,” Ms. Shields said, “and, probably, you all have your opinions of her.”She went on to note that life with her mother, who died in 2012, wasn’t all bad.“There was a lot of laughter and so much fun,” she said. “She would do really crazy things. She would see a dog tied outside of a store, waiting for their owner to come back, and she would get right down in front of the dog to say, ‘They’re never coming back.’ It was just so sick. It’s dark. But really funny.”She also acknowledged her mother’s alcoholism. “We named a cocktail at the bar for her. Actually, we named several for her,” Ms. Shields said, before getting serious about how much she missed her. She added that one reason she wanted to play the Carlyle was that it was a place her mother had taken her when she was young. “She would be really proud,” she said.With that, she launched into Mr. Dylan’s melancholy “Most of the Time.”Ms. Shields donned a cowboy hat to sing the Dolly Parton hit “9 to 5.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesMs. Shields, who appeared to have a cold, sounded a bit like Bob Dylan as her throat began to give out. She then moved into material about the trials and tribulations of being a wife tot Mr. Henchy, who was seated in the audience, and the mother of two teenage daughters, Rowan and Grier. While delivering Tina Dico’s “Count to Ten,” she apologized to a man seated close to the stage, who was catching much of her spit.Toward the end, she sang “Faith,” a 1987 hit by someone she knew, George Michael. She delivered the lyrics with conviction while also using the song to make a cheeky reference to the nights when she stepped out before the paparazzi in the role of the public girlfriend to Mr. Michael and Michael Jackson.After the applause, the fashion designer Christian Siriano offered a quick review: “She was great, even though she clearly has Covid.”Moments later, Ms. Shields emerged from her dressing room and went through some quick hellos with friends and well-wishers. A waiter asked her what she would like to drink. “Tequila,” she said, before moving to a corner table for a chat with a reporter.Told of Mr. Siriano’s thoughts, she said, “I don’t have Covid!” But she said she did have a respiratory ailment that had landed her in the hospital a few days before the show.Her vocal coach brought her cough drops. Publicists hovered. Ms. Shields explained that her cabaret show began taking shape in the spring. Working with the writer and director Nate Patten, as well as with the musical director Charlie Alterman, she said she wanted to put together an evening that would involve telling her own story truthfully while making it a source of comedy.Alan Cumming in the company of Ms. Dern.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesShe was aware that this was a difficult moment to humanize the people who decided it was appropriate for her to appear in a movie at age 11 as someone whose virginity was auctioned off. Yet her mother was still her mother, and she loved her.“Ambivalence is where real life happens,” she said. “I mean, the point of it all is that we’re not one thing or the other. We’re human beings, and we’re fraught.”Ms. Shields was asked about her experience with Mr. Trump.“I was making some movie in the late-90s,” she said. “My phone rang and it was him. He said, ‘You and I should date. You’re America’s sweetheart, and I’m the world’s richest man. People will love it.’ At which point I stifled laughter and said, ‘Thank you, I’m very flattered, but I have a boyfriend and I don’t think he would appreciate me stepping out on him.’ And he said, ‘Well, I think you’re making a big mistake.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m going to have to take my chances.’”Did she not know that George Michael was gay? And did they really go on a date?“A few,” she said. “He was very respectful of my virginity.”“Read the book!” a publicist yelled, referring to “There Was a Little Girl,” the 2014 memoir in which she tells the tale.Ms. Shields added that, despite the appearance that her relationships with Mr. Michael and Mr. Jackson seemed merely for show, she had real bonds with both of them.“We had so much fun,” she said. “I wasn’t just a purpose, as a beard. It actually was more than that. The conversations, the fears, the discussions.”The talk turned to her podcast — in which she has spoken with Stacey Abrams, Rosie O’Donnell, Chelsea Handler and Kris Jenner — and the one person she has been itching to get: Britney Spears, who hasn’t given in an interview in years.“I tried very hard to find a way to be the first actual interview,” Ms. Shields said. “And I haven’t gotten it. But I am the only person who could do justice to the reality of the story. Whatever it is.” More

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    The Girlies Know: ‘Oppenheimer’ Was Actually About Us

    Yes, it’s a film about a famous middle-aged scientist. But it also captures the primal dissonance of being a young woman.R.I.P. to the “girlbosses” and “ladies” who dominated the internet of the 2010s. Now taking their place in the canon is the “girlie” — the tongue-in-cheek sobriquet used by so many young women chronicling their lives online. The summer that just blazed by belonged unequivocally to the girls and girlies, cultural archetypes who embodied, in their despondency and their delight, the incongruities of being young and female in America. Unlike the always-hustling girlboss, the girlies do not dream of labor. They pick at “girl dinners,” go on “hot-girl walks” or rot in bed with Sylvia Plath and Ottessa Moshfegh paperbacks. On TikTok, the incubator from which new varieties of “girl” emerge daily, they sort themselves into “city girls” (who know that romance is a game and make their peace with its cruelty) or “lover girls” (who are destined for eternal heartache but won’t let that deter them from searching for love). Their shared vision of tortured femininity and undefinable malaise is not constrained by age. You can be in your 20s or 30s and still very much one of the “girls.”Given that I myself am an extremely online woman in my 30s and thus the target audience for all forms of girl-discourse, it was predictable enough that I would find myself deeply moved by the most girl-coded movie I watched this summer. But that film was not “Barbie,” Greta Gerwig’s cinematic testament to the conundrums of womanhood. It was the other blockbuster released on the same July day: “Oppenheimer,” the three-hour Glum Nerd in Suspenders Destroying the World film that has been criticized for, supposedly, glorifying an oblivious white man who talks too much about the superiority of science and his intellect while building a weapon meant to cause mass death.This feeling of betrayal at the hands of the same system that once adulated you is not solely the domain of men.I have now been to the theater four times to watch J. Robert Oppenheimer manufacture and then wallow in his own unhappiness, and at some point along the way, I came to realize that this film is, as they say, “for the girlies.” At first, this was simply a private joke I enjoyed making to myself, counting up all the parallels between this midcentury scientist and the types of young women who treat Instagram stories like a literary medium. He is nicknamed Oppie. He reads metaphysical poetry. He wears impeccably tailored pants with fancy belt buckles and flirts with the unshakable confidence of a city girl who has never known rejection. (Misquoting Marx, being corrected and then smirk-shrugging, “Sorry, I read it in the original German” is, I’m afraid, peak hot-girl behavior.) Played by a cadaverous Cillian Murphy — who supposedly girl-dinnered on something like one almond each night to achieve optimum hollow-cheekboned haggardness — Oppenheimer first appears as he’s being mildly disciplined by a physics professor at Cambridge, to which he retaliates by trying to poison his professor’s apple with cyanide. Movie-Oppenheimer’s great malaise, we’re shown — between shots of him lying listlessly in his dormitory bed — is the burden of his own brilliance, lessened only as he coasts through the halls of great universities to finally find, in quantum physics, the challenge that all-consuming brilliance so desperately craves. His hero’s journey will eventually lead him to the building of the atomic bomb in New Mexico and the cover of Time magazine, though he will also find time to cheat on his wife and conduct a rather calisthenic sex life. From afar, the film has all the makings of a Bildungsroman, the coming-of-age form that depicts a passage from callow youth into maturity. But in Oppenheimer’s case, age arrived long before wisdom. A story by Murray Kempton in the December 1983 issue of Esquire describes how the real Oppenheimer was, as a precocious young man, so blessedly sheltered from the demands of real life — “protected from the routine troubles, discontents and worries that instruct even while they are cankering ordinary persons” — that he was “transported to his glittering summit innocent of all the traps that every other man of affairs has grown used to well before he is 42 years old.” It is only when Oppenheimer is already middle-aged, a man whose faith has only ever been in his own intelligence, that he gets his first reality check, at the hands of a once-adoring government bureaucrat named Lewis Strauss. This is an experience any self-identifying girlie will recognize: a profound betrayal from a friend-turned-frenemy.Here the girlhood parallels move beyond the facetious to acquire a darker quality, as shame begins to erode Oppenheimer’s sense of self. As he’s accused of being a Communist sympathizer and publicly ridiculed in a kangaroo trial, the once-venerated scientist finds each of his beliefs collapsing. The great Oppenheimer realizes that no amount of personal brilliance can counter the force of the state. He finally sees that he has devoted his intellect to a system that was rigged against him, one that took advantage of his brilliance and then punished him for it. The same man who once earnestly referred to himself as a prophet is now paralyzed by his inability to either have or act on any firm conviction; the veneer of his certainty in his own power has been stripped away. Near the film’s end, Oppenheimer silently reckons with visions of what his brilliance has wrought: unimaginable suffering and fire as the invention he fathered wipes out civilization itself. Even on my fourth viewing, the sight of Murphy’s frosty blue stare elicited in me a deep familiarity, making me recall a line from Annie Ernaux’s “A Girl’s Story”: “To have received the key to understanding shame does not give the power to erase it.” In theory, I have little in common with this man. But shame — living with it, drowning in reminders of it, never being free from your own inadequacy and failure — is a great equalizer. Being plagued by the squandering of your abilities, condemned to a lifetime of uncertainty, forever wondering where you went wrong or whether you were always set up to go wrong. This is the precondition of girlhood that “Barbie” tried to portray — the dual shock and dissonance of navigating a world that seems to vilify your existence, imbuing it with persistent and haunting shame while also demanding that you put on a show for the hecklers. But it was while watching a helpless Oppenheimer, stunned at being forced to participate in his own public degradation by the U.S. government, that I averted my eyes in dread and recognition. For a Great Man like him, it took the twin shames of the bomb’s destruction and public disgrace to have this life-altering yet basic realization about his own powerlessness. But this feeling of betrayal at the hands of the same system that once adulated you is not solely the domain of men who reach a certain age and come to the uncomfortable realization that after a lifetime of revolving around them, the world is now moving on, indifferent or even hostile to their existence. This is a rule and a warning that life has drilled into girls from age 13, if not sooner. The same powers that have displayed you like a trophy will not hesitate to spit you out the moment you have ceased to be useful.Oppie needed greatness to understand that. But the girlies? We have always known.Iva Dixit is a staff editor for the magazine. She last wrote a profile of the Jamaican dancehall star Sean Paul. Source photographs for illustration above: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures; Universal Pictures; Aidon/Getty Images; Joe Raedle/Getty Images; CoffeeAndMilk/Getty Images. More