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    Popcast (Deluxe): Lizzo, Travis Scott and the Limits of Persona

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:How a star’s public persona, varnished or unvarnished, can dictate what they can get away with in the eye of their followers. Lizzo, who for years has emphasized personal kindness as her brand, has seen her career derailed by allegations that she mistreated her backup dancers. Cardi B threw a microphone at an audience member in reaction to getting splashed with water, but has emerged unscathedTravis Scott’s No. 1 album “Utopia,” its many guest appearances and its oxygen-swallowing hugenessThe resilience of Playboi Carti, who has built a growing cultlike career while releasing no new musicRemembering the life and work of Sinead O’Connor and Angus CloudNew songs from Cowgirl Clue and B-Lovee featuring Luh TylerSnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    Justin H. Min, Travel Writer? The Path Not Taken for a Rising Star

    Success came relatively easy — until he tried acting. For a moment, journalism seemed more viable. But now he’s the lead in “Shortcomings.”Five years after Justin H. Min began pursuing acting by Googling “how to pursue acting,” he thought he was getting the hang of it. He had made a viral commercial, and he was in contention for three major roles.He landed none of them.“I was not nervous and I did everything I wanted to,” Min recalled of the auditions. “And that’s the most devastating because you’re like, ‘I guess I just don’t have it.’”It was in this less-than-healthy head space that Min decided to pivot to a different unstable profession: travel writing. He had caught on with a British magazine and it seemed he might cobble together full-time work as a freelance writer if he got on a plane to London.So Min told his manager he was moving. But rather than beg him to stay (as Min had secretly hoped), the manager gave his full blessing. Before Min could head for the airport, though, a fellow actor urged him to reconsider — timely encouragement that set Min, now 34, on the path to “a star-making performance,” as a critic for The Times put it, in the new comedy “Shortcomings,” as well as fan-favorite turns in the Netflix series “Beef” and “The Umbrella Academy.”“This sounds absurd, but I don’t think I’ve really ever struggled with failure until I started to pursue acting,” Min said in a prestrike interview. “So I will absolutely savor this.”INDEED, EVERYTHING IN the first 20-ish years of Min’s life had come to him with relative ease. He concedes this only very sheepishly and with many disclaimers about how fortunate he feels.In Cerritos, Calif., the predominantly Asian suburb where he grew up, Min felt little sense of difference. He found that most success was attainable through application. Min was class president all four years of high school and elected king of the winter formal. He was so good in speech and debate competitions that he won thousands of dollars in prize money that helped pay for a Cornell education. Given his gifts, he thought he might become a lawyer — or maybe a politician.But on the day Min was to graduate from college, he woke up to nine missed calls. His grandfather, who had flown in for the occasion, had died that morning. And so Min’s commencement walk ended in a teary embrace with his family.The death of Min’s grandfather pushed him to reflect during a solo, cross-country road trip back home to Cerritos.“What do I really want to do?” Min recalled asking himself. Life was fleeting, he now understood. Becoming a lawyer or a politician just didn’t feel right anymore. He liked public speaking, writing and storytelling. And back under his parents’ roof, he was near Los Angeles anyway. He decided to give acting a shot.“I think everybody saw something in Justin and I did, too,” said his fellow actor Amy Okuda.Tracy Nguyen for The New York TimesHe soon discovered, however, how hard the business of acting really was and that applying himself would not be enough.When he ran into college friends and they asked about his acting career, “I remember feeling so shattered and so lost in terms of what to say or how to present myself because I no longer could stand on accomplishments,” he said. “I didn’t have that anymore.”IT WAS SLOW going at first. Min dove into Reddit threads, took classes, searched for agents and discovered Wong Fu Productions, a content company run by young Asian Americans that would become a popular part of Asian American media as YouTube blossomed in the 2010s. The guys running it asked Min to audition for what he said they called a “narrative thing, but like branded content.”The “narrative thing” was essentially an eight-minute advertisement for a Simplehuman trash can. But it was built around an exploration of adulting, and the video received tens of millions of views.That work didn’t pay much, and Min began to dabble in journalism as a side hustle. He was a good writer and his photography, like most things in his life, had drawn praise.He traveled to Mexico City to interview the chef Enrique Olvera at Pujol; and to Chicago to pick the brain of Grant Achatz at Alinea. What was not to like about work trips to two of the world’s most acclaimed restaurants?Which helps explain why Min was willing to give writing a full go when he got those back-to-back-to-back acting rejections. But as he pondered his next move, Min had dinner with a friend, the actress Amy Okuda. She tapped the brakes on his travel plans.“I think everybody saw something in Justin and I did, too,” Okuda said in a prestrike interview. So she sent a note about Min to her own manager, Joshua Pasch, who got in touch with him almost immediately; Pasch even had Min submit an audition tape for “The Umbrella Academy” before the pair met.“The rest is history,” Pasch said. “He was on the show a month later.”MIN HAD LANDED THE ROLE of Ben Hargreeves on what would become a hit for Netflix. His part was modest at first — a dead brother in a superhuman sibling squad who occasionally shows up as a ghostlike figure that only the drug-addled sibling, Klaus, can see. The character had very little screen time, and Min was not a series regular initially.Min, left, on “The Umbrella Academy.” He landed the role after a friend urged him to stick with acting.NetflixBut Ben became surprisingly popular in Min’s hands. Steve Blackman, the showrunner, came up with a way to expand the role and even bring Ben back to life as a different, meaner version of himself in later seasons.“The character of Ben doesn’t really exist that much in the graphic novel” on which “Umbrella Academy” is based, Blackman said. “I wrote Ben in to be someone that Klaus could talk to and only Klaus could see.”But, he added, “the minute Justin embodied the character, I’m like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do so much more.’”“The Umbrella Academy,” which premiered in 2019, was an “I made it” moment for Min. But he would also earn acclaim two years later for his thoughtful, sincere portrayal of the titular robot in “After Yang,” a quiet sci-fi drama starring Colin Farrell.“He had such a rich life before he became an actor,” Kogonada, who directed “After Yang,” said of Min. “Like all the great actors, he is consumed with his craft. But I feel like I’m getting to know him better through the different roles that he plays.”Then came “Beef,” and the part of Edwin, an irritatingly perfect leader of a Korean church.Lee Sung Jin, the director of “Beef,” was best friends with Min’s brother, Jason, in college. Lee said in an interview that he had called Jason Min, an admired praise leader, into the writers’ room to help craft the character of Edwin. It was a role Lee said he had always intended for Justin to fill.Both Min and Lee recalled being in Las Vegas years earlier for Jason’s bachelor party and promising each other that they were going to make it in Hollywood, and that they would work together when they did.“Drunk confidence,” Lee said.NOW MIN IS PLAYING another Ben. This one, the main character in “Shortcomings,” is not a ghost but a very flawed would-be filmmaker who, in the words of a girlfriend, is brimming with “anger, depression, your weird self-hatred issues and just the relentless negativity.”Min “is probably the only person who could have played him in the way that he did, with such nuance,” Ally Maki, who plays the girlfriend, Miko, said in a prestrike interview.Min recalled reading the script and saying to himself: “I understand this guy because I was this guy” and “parts of me are still this guy.”When he initially read the first scene — in which Ben complains about a “Crazy Rich Asians”-style movie that everyone else liked — Min said the words felt natural tumbling out of his mouth.Ben is dealing with the gap between his elevated tastes and his lack of career success, he said, “and that disparity is crippling. I remember when I started off in this business, I felt the same disparity. I felt such a chasm between the projects I was doing and the projects that I wanted to do.”“It results in a lot of dissatisfaction. It results in a lot of cynicism,” he continued, recalling how, at one point, “I sort of prided myself in being sort of this funny, cynical, dry kind of guy the way that Ben is. And then through many years of therapy, I realized that that was simply a defense mechanism for me to hide and shield myself from the actual pain of feeling like I had failed at this industry that I so wanted to succeed in.”Min holds onto one particular memory from the movie. Ben is sprinting through the West Village — that classic movie moment when the hero tries to salvage the relationship before it’s gone forever. In the midst of the scene, he thought, “This is crazy that I am in New York in the middle of this busy West Village street, running as the lead of this movie,” he said. And he remembered how some of his favorite movies had iconic running shots. “I never thought that I was going to be the guy who was running.” More

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    Salzburg Festival Remains a Crammed Summer Stage

    No other festival matches the sheer profusion of classical music, opera and theater offerings at the Salzburg Festival.Early in 1779, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sulked back to Salzburg, Austria, having failed to land a permanent job abroad. In a letter to a family friend, he sneered at the city he was returning to.“Salzburg is no place for my talent,” he wrote, adding: “One hears nothing; there’s no theater; no opera! — and even if they wanted to stage one, who is there to sing?”If only Mozart could see his hometown now.I read those words last weekend in a program note at the Salzburg Festival, which, over the past century, has been largely responsible for giving this place perhaps the richest, densest musical offerings in the world for six weeks each summer.Salzburg’s bounty of nearly 200 opera, concert and theater performances, continuing this year through Aug. 31, is so intoxicating that it can lead to some dizzying sprints.Last Tuesday, I left one concert early — squeezing past the confused people in my aisle right after Jean-Guihen Queyras played Kodaly’s Cello Sonata at 7 p.m. — so that I could make it to the baritone Christian Gerhaher’s lieder recital. And had Gerhaher’s haunting Schumann not felt quite so conclusive, I would have run, at 10:15, to try and make the second part of a third program.Salzburg has competition. The Aix-en-Provence Festival in France has more varied spaces and a commitment to new work; in Germany, Bayreuth has a laser focus on Wagner and, as in this year’s augmented reality “Parsifal,” an experimental spirit. Glyndebourne, in England, has pastoral grace; Lucerne and Verbier, in Switzerland, vibrant orchestras and chamber intimacy.But Salzburg is still the annual stage, crammed to bursting.Cecilia Bartoli, standing, starred in “Orfeo ed Euridice,” the annual production at Salzburg programmed as a vehicle for her.Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg FestivalAnd currently in some flux. There have been reports of internal tensions as Kristina Hammer, who last year replaced the festival’s longtime president, settles in. A big-budget renovation project looms, as Europe’s economic situation is unsettled by war and inflation. (The cost of paper has risen so high that Salzburg no longer prints opera librettos in its programs.)Heated controversy last summer over the ties to Russia of the conductor Teodor Currentzis, a recent stalwart here, has largely eased. And tickets have been selling briskly.Yet the pressure is always on to justify Salzburg’s reputation and its often sky-high prices, which can reach north of $500. As Jürgen Flimm, an old artistic director here, is said to have put it, “People don’t come to the Salzburg Festival to watch us save money.”The staged operas I saw during my six days here didn’t seem cheap, but they looked and felt too much the same: all gloomily sleek. Best was Martin Kusej’s rueful production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” set in a series of anonymous, sterile, nearly empty spaces populated by the rootless members of a contemporary crime syndicate.The druggy opening promised a too-broad mafioso approach, but Kusej settled in with action that was sly, surreal and sensual, muted without being chilly, full of casual, bloody violence but also melancholy tenderness. The cast was strong, particularly a trio of female leads — Adriana González, Sabine Devieilhe and Lea Desandre — with light, precise voices and a Mozartian blend of wistfulness and energy.And Raphaël Pichon’s conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic, the festival’s eminent house band, was remarkable. While Pichon often does Mozart with his period-instrument ensemble, Pygmalion, he embraced the Philharmonic’s more traditional warmth. Detailed without being finicky, this was a grand but dashing, controlled but vibrant “Figaro.”Christof Loy’s staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice” had one of Loy’s typical airy sets — wood-paneled but otherwise as blank as the rooms in “Figaro” — as well as his wan, sometimes swooping, sometimes sullen venture into choreography.With Gianluca Capuano serenely leading Les Musiciens du Prince, Monaco, this was one of the annual vehicles for the star singer Cecilia Bartoli, who premiered it this spring at the Salzburg Whitsun Festival, the sister event she runs. Dressed in a men’s suit with a long ponytail, Bartoli’s Orfeo had impassioned dignity, but her voice was less persuasive and juicy — sounding sharp-edged at the top of its range, colorless at the bottom — than in her other recent appearances here.Both of these works were done in the modest-size Haus für Mozart, while Krzysztof Warlikowski’s dreary take on Verdi’s “Macbeth” — interpreting the action as the internal drama of a couple driven mad by their inability to conceive a child — sprawled across the expanse of the main festival theater’s stage.The soprano Asmik Grigorian was a highlight as Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s “Macbeth.”Bernd Uhlig/Salzburg FestivalIn an unfocused production busy with neorealist-style film, movie theater seats and children wearing oversize bobblehead Banquo masks, the soprano Asmik Grigorian, Salzburg’s reigning prima donna of late, alone managed to seize attention with her clear, focused singing and convincing sobriety. Under Philippe Jordan, the Philharmonic sounded vague and limp; this was a performance full of imprecise coordination between pit and stage, in a work that needs to be taut to fully speak.Far tauter, more delicate and more potent was Currentzis’s conducting of Peter Sellars’s wrenching, decade-old completion of Purcell’s “The Indian Queen.” Adding some of that composer’s religious choruses alongside harrowing spoken excerpts from Rosario Aguilar’s novel “The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma,” exploring the impact of Spanish colonization on Central Americans, Sellars created a hypnotically solemn meditation on that corrosive, ambivalent colonial encounter — here semi-staged under somber light.Utopia — the orchestra and choir Currentzis has been touring with since he and his MusicAeterna ensemble came under fire for their partnership with a state-owned Russian bank — performed with exquisite sensitivity. In a superb cast, the soprano Jeanine De Bique stood out with a voice and presence of unaffected directness.Also narcotic and stark, but in a more maximalist mode, was “Nathan the Wise,” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 18th-century parable of religious tolerance, one of the festival’s spoken theater productions and the most exciting directorial work I saw at Salzburg.It was staged in darkly industrial style by Ulrich Rasche on one of his characteristic turntable stages, over which his actors ceaselessly walk — rhythmically swaying into slowly shifting configurations, while hurling out their lines with stylized aggression. The showmanship, the physical virtuosity, the intensity and clarity of the text have all been hard to forget.The soprano Jeanine De Bique stood out in a semi-staged presentation of Purcell’s “The Indian Queen.”Marco Borrelli/Salzburg FestivalIt has not been unusual in recent years to find the fully staged operas — in theory, Salzburg’s glory — uneven, and the drama offerings more adventurous. While the festival’s artistic leader, Markus Hinterhäuser, has excellent taste in musicians, his choices in opera directors can tend iffy.So can some repertory decisions. With just five full stagings, for example, does it make sense for two to be Shakespeare adaptations by Verdi? (After “Macbeth,” “Falstaff” opens on Saturday.)And Hinterhäuser has stubbornly resisted premieres and contemporary work, instead showcasing modernist rarities like Enescu’s “Oedipe,” Nono’s “Intolleranza 1960” and Martinu’s mid-20th-century refugee drama “The Greek Passion,” which opens on Sunday. These are invaluable projects, but surely 21st-century music does not have to be so completely exiled from Salzburg.Hinterhäuser has been a steady, intelligent hand, though, and many would like to see him extend his contract, which runs through 2026. He demurred when asked in an interview if he hoped to stay longer, saying that he and the festival’s board will discuss the matter this fall. But recent tweaks to the administrative hierarchy have led to speculation about friction between him and Hammer, the new president.The festival’s president serves as a kind of global ambassador, networker and fund-raising chief, and Hammer, a German-Swiss marketing executive and consultant, was an unexpected choice from outside the usual Salzburg circles. (Her predecessor, Helga Rabl-Stadler, came from a prominent Austrian family and had been a politician, journalist and businesswoman before her quarter-century as president.)There can be advantages to having someone in the position with deep connections at the highest reaches of government — as in 2020, when the festival leveraged its influence to put on a robust event amid worldwide pandemic closures.But it’s also important to remember that Rabl-Stadler went through her own difficulties early on. In an interview, Hammer presented herself as an underestimated outsider, patiently learning the ropes.“I swallow it if somebody runs me over because they think: ‘Who is the blonde? Certainly not the president,’” she said. “I don’t care. If people need time to get used to me, I understand.”She has been buoyed by the fact that the festival’s corporate sponsors, among the president’s prime responsibilities, have remained stable. And this spring, Hammer secured a 12 million euro ($13.1 million) private gift — unusually large for a festival financed so generously by the government — for a new visitor center.That project will be a prologue to the main renovation, which, organized by the festival’s well-liked business manager, Lukas Crepaz, will cost an estimated 480 million euros ($527.2 million) and last until 2032. It will increase the comfort for audiences, update outdated backstage facilities and add more behind-the-scenes space by pushing further into the adjoining mountain.“It creates a lot of question marks for the festival,” Hinterhäuser said. “But we have to do it.”The construction schedule has been planned to keep all the theaters open each summer. So the fire hose of performances will remain on — with no end to the need to choose, for example, between two memorable 11 a.m. concerts: the sumptuous, detailed Philharmonic under Andris Nelsons, or the Mozarteum Orchestra, exuberantly fresh with its incoming chief conductor, Roberto González-Monjas.Where else but at this festival could you hear “Le Nozze di Figaro” and then, the following morning, Mozart’s “Coronation Mass,” whose Agnus Dei gives the soprano soloist a melody its composer would later crib from himself for the time-stopping “Dove sono” in “Figaro”?At Salzburg, the bounty — the extravagance, the sheer profusion — is the point. More

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    Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Through the Eyes of a Dance Critic

    The choreography on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour doesn’t ask her to do too much, but she knows how to use her simple moves to her advantage.Since it’s an understatement to call Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour the dominant pop concert of the year, it isn’t surprising that snippets of the show, captured by fans on their phones, have been flooding social media sites for months. Watch a few of these clips, and it might strike you that the dance moves, in contrast to the designer costumes and visual effects, are rather simple and unoriginal, the sort of thing anyone might be able to pull off.At least that’s what I thought before seeing the Eras Tour live. Experiencing it in Los Angeles, at the end of its first United States leg, I changed my mind. As dance, the show is simple and unoriginal — yet exceptionally effective.Swift is a pop superstar who dances but is not known for her dancing. Even many of her admirers will admit that in this respect she’s no Beyoncé, no Britney Spears — that as hard as she tries, she’s a little stiff and awkward. Be that as it may, body language is crucial to how the three-hour-plus performance works.Swift’s Eras Tour is wrapping up its initial U.S. leg with a run of shows in Los Angeles.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOn Friday, at the second of six Los Angeles concerts, the most significant gesture came early, between songs. Basking in the deafening roar of 70,000 fans, Swift struck a coy “Who, me?” pose and said she wanted to try something. She pointed at a section of SoFi Stadium, and the cheering from that section somehow got louder.“I feel so powerful,” she said, kissing a bicep. But the power she was flexing wasn’t muscular. It was her ability — with the magnification of giant video screens — to connect with every member of the crowd. The choreography helped keep that connection a live wire.I don’t just mean the dance numbers, though there are plenty of those, choreographed by Mandy Moore (“La La Land,” “So You Think You Can Dance?”). The backup dancers sometimes contributed to the spectacle. They handled the billowing floral parachutes that concealed and revealed Swift at the start. They wielded glowing orbs during “Willow,” clouds on ladders during “Lavender Haze,” umbrellas during “Midnight Rain.” Not especially imaginative, this was all just something big enough to see.Elsewhere, the dancers helped suggest the situations of the songs. The bicep kiss was a segue to “The Man,” a complaint about gender double standards that was staged as an ascent up the stairs and levels of an office set populated by chest-thumping workers. In other songs, a few dancers played roles: the boyfriend that Swift berates for emotional neglect across (and atop) a long dinner table in “Tolerate It,” or the scandalizing socialite protagonist of “The Last Great American Dynasty.”Backup dancers help suggest the situations of some Swift songs, but mostly serve as a friend group or party guests.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut really, the concert has only one character, Swift. In “Look What You Made Me Do,” the dancers were costumed as earlier versions of her, trapped in transparent boxes like dolls. Mostly, though, they served as a friend group or party guests. A happy, diverse bunch, they did a little ballroom dancing to evoke the romantic fantasy of “Lover,” a little vogueing to give “Bejeweled” some shimmer.And then they left. Which is to say, they left the audience alone with Swift, again and again, re-establishing the thrill of mass intimacy. Other pop stars use this effect, but it’s especially potent with Swift because she’s also a singer-songwriter, who can sit at a piano or tap into the iconography of a guitar-slinging truth teller.The most intense moments of the show were in this mode: the 10-minute extended version of “All Too Well” and the acoustic mini-set of “secret songs” that differ from night to night. This is almost pointedly not dancing, but it requires a particular physicality at which Swift excels. She has the wide stance, both confident and confiding. She looks grounded, comfortable, at home.The tour will begin its international leg later this month in Mexico.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat’s generally true when she isn’t dancing. She can strut or skip around the huge catwalk and stage that extend across the stadium floor without looking small. She can strike over-the-shoulder poses for the camera. She can inhabit her many sparkly costumes — rolling her hips in fringe dresses and Louboutin boots, using the flowy sleeves on her “Folklore” dress the way Stevie Nicks uses scarves.So does it matter that in the cafe chair burlesque routine for “Vigilante ___,” a homage to louche Bob Fosse dances, she’s imprecise and physically uncommitted to the pleasures and dangers of sex? (She caresses her body like she’s afraid to.) It doesn’t, because her fans love her anyway. And it does, because this imperfect dancing is, I think, part of her nonthreatening Everywoman image. It makes her easier to identify with.And that is what the whole concert is about, the identification between Swift and the fans she continually thanks and flatters, the fans who know every word to every song. Swift told the L.A. crowd that when those fans sing her lyrics along with her, she takes that as a sign that they too have felt what she felt.It makes sense, then, that she moves the way anyone might move. So that anyone might imagine being her — just pointing and feeling powerful. More

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    ‘Winter Kills’ Returns in New Print at Film Forum

    Part black comedy, part paranoid thriller, the 1979 movie returns after four decades in a new 35 mm print at Film Forum.A madcap riff on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, “Winter Kills,” adapted by the director William Richert from Richard Condon’s 1974 best seller, is part black comedy, part paranoid thriller and — an evocation of cosmic conspiracy that boasts its own conspiratorial back story — part carnival hall of mirrors.The movie, first released in 1979, and then again in 1983 (with its ending supposedly altered), returns after four decades in a new 35 mm print.The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known as the Warren Commission and established in 1963, was still hotly contested when Condon wrote his novel, a precursor to literary treatments of Kennedy’s death like Don DeLillo’s “Libra” and James Ellroy’s “American Tabloid.” The movie is redolent of Watergate-era films like “The Parallax View” from 1974, but in the age of QAnon it scarcely seems dated. One of the novel’s favorable reviews quotes Condon to the effect that, in contemporary America truths are less important than “the illusion of truths.”Jeff Bridges plays Nick, the younger half brother of a charismatic president murdered by a lone assassin in downtown Philadelphia. Given evidence, years later, of a second gunman, Nick is dragged down a rabbit hole, at once aided and thwarted by his all-powerful father (John Huston, essentially reprising his role in “Chinatown”).A greater mystery than the plot may be the cast assembled by Richert, directing his first nondocumentary, and his shady producers, whose major credit was the soft-core movie “Black Emanuelle.” The always sympathetic Bridges and the ineffably sleazy Huston are supported by the veteran heavies Richard Boone, Sterling Hayden and Ralph Meeker; the international stars Tomas Milian and Toshiro Mifune; and the reliable wackos Anthony Perkins and Eli Wallach, plus the ’50s melodrama queen Dorothy Malone, with the supermodel Belinda Bauer as the requisite woman of mystery. Elizabeth Taylor (uncredited and silent save for a single angry word) was canny enough to take payment upfront. The rest of the cast seems to have been strung along for the duration of the start-stop shoot.As chronicled by Condon in a 1983 Harper’s article no less sensational than the movie, as well as a documentary found on the Blu-ray release, “Winter Kills” was six years in production, during which it was repeatedly shut down for lack of cash. (Drug money was involved. One producer was later murdered, his partner wound up in jail.) While these travails may not be evident onscreen, knowledge of the saga adds to the movie’s sense of imperial hubris — the “Game of Thrones”-style credits announcing the stellar cast, the spectacularly superfluous locations shot by Vilmos Zsigmond (between “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “The Deer Hunter”!?).“Winter Kills” is not always easy to follow — Condon’s convoluted plot has been simplified and the film is consequently riddled with narrative lacunae — but from beginning to end, the gist is always clear. The movie “doesn’t make a bit of sense, but it’s fast and handsome and entertaining,” Janet Maslin wrote in her 1979 review in The Times. Preposterous as it is, its vision of total surveillance, constant subterfuge and plutocracy run amok has a measure of social realism.If paranoid thinking is the antidote to chaos, “Winter Kills” demonstrates its appeal. The movie is an article of faith. That it exists at all is something of a miracle.Winter KillsAug. 11-24 at Film Forum, Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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    Too Short’s Long (and Very Raunchy) Life in Rap

    When Too Short walks onstage, before he says anything else, he asks: “What’s my favorite word?” And audiences of thousands shout: “Biiiiiitch!”When Too Short says “biiiiiitch,” it’s less of a word and more of an incantation. He stretches it out, savors its taste. He always sounds unflappable on record, but when he belts out that particular word, it lands with a slight electric charge. It sounds playful, arrogant, angry, disgusted, maybe even amazed; you hear a vast spectrum of human emotions in it. He knows the word is rude and offensive. Since the mid-80s, he has been pushing hip-hop’s coarser edges to their logical conclusion, rapping legends of his own sexual prowess: phantasmagorical erotic adventures, set in a blaxploitation-inspired East Oakland full of pimps and prostitutes, delivered in the lingo of X-rated ’70s comedians like Richard Pryor and Rudy Ray Moore. “Biiiiiitch!” isn’t the only thing that he says, but it’s his signature. On “Rappers’ Ball,” a 1996 track from his longtime friend E-40, he explained his relationship with the word in one economical punchline: “They always said I couldn’t rap, I just say ‘bitch’/I guess the bitch made me rich.”Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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    Jon Batiste Has Got the Whole Wide Music World in His Hands

    Nothing is simple when it comes to Jon Batiste, the pianist, television personality, New Orleans musical scion and jazz-R&B-classical savant.He spent seven years as the smiling, melodica-toting TV bandleader on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” yet found some of his widest acclaim for solemn protest performances in Brooklyn after the murder of George Floyd.He beat Olivia Rodrigo, Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish for album of the year at the Grammys in 2022, despite his “We Are” having just a fraction of their sales — and then presented “American Symphony,” a Whitmanesque canvas of funk, Dixieland jazz, operatic vocals and Native American drums at Carnegie Hall.Now comes Batiste’s most commercial project yet: “World Music Radio,” an album with guest appearances by Lana Del Rey, Lil Wayne and the K-pop girl group NewJeans, made with a team of producers behind hits for artists like Justin Bieber and Drake, with tightly woven hooks that were engineered to fit on any Top 40-style streaming playlist.But of course “World Music Radio,” which comes out Aug. 18, is no standard pop release. It’s also a fantastical concept album that challenges music’s provincial genre borders, with a message of open-armed inclusivity for a fractured political era. The album’s central character, a timeless interstellar being named Billy Bob Bo Bob, curates a potpourri of the far-flung musical languages of Earth and transmits it to the cosmos with chuckling, Daddy-O commentary, like Doctor Who crossed with Wolfman Jack.“He’s a D.J., he’s a griot, he’s a storyteller, he’s a unifier, he’s a rebel,” Batiste told me, describing the character of Billy Bob Bo Bob. “He’s a disrupter.”That’s also as good an encapsulation as any of the 36-year-old Batiste himself, who can’t easily be pinned down to any single role, or genre, or corner of the music market.Batiste wrote most of the album in Rick Rubin’s beachside studio in Malibu, Calif., generating kernels of upward of 125 songs.Andre D. Wagner for The New York TimesIn his own eccentric way, “World Music Radio” is Batiste’s interpretation of what mainstream pop is or should be, in which high-energy electronic dance beats coexist with reggae, Afropop and old-fashioned piano torch ballads. “Be Who You Are,” the first single, has lyrics in English, Spanish and Korean, and its high-tech, partially animated music video, produced through a brand deal with Coke, features Batiste, the Latin pop star Camilo, the rapper JID and the members of NewJeans all vibing alongside each other.Yet in discussing the album, Batiste was almost totally cerebral, speaking in long, eloquent, practically unsummarizable paragraphs about his mental and creative processes. The album’s origin, he said, was partly philosophical, as he mused on the connections and divergences between “the horrendous idea of what we call ‘world music’” — local traditions viewed through a condescending Western lens — “and the narrow diameter of what’s considered popular music.”“So then, world music,” Batiste added, shifting professorially on the living room sofa of his airy and immaculate Brooklyn brownstone. “What if we could reimagine that term? What if we could reinvent? What if we could use it as a prompt to expand the diameter of popular music?”In conversation, he mentioned influences that included some of the most popular cultural productions of modern times, like Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon” and the “Godfather” films. Jamie Krents, the president of his label, Verve, said that Batiste had cited Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” as another reference point.“He wanted to make music that was approachable to the largest possible audience without compromising,” Krents said.Still, it is hard to imagine Jackson summarizing his goals for “Billie Jean” or “Beat It” in quite the same way that Batiste does for “World Music Radio”: “By listening to it and experiencing it,” he explained, “you have a realization about self, about community, about humanism, that leaves you in a state of bliss and a hyper-consciousness.”AS BATISTE SEES IT, “World Music Radio” is the culmination of a career that has long snaked through supposedly disparate traditions and audiences.Batiste grew up in Kenner, La., part of a family with deep musical roots in New Orleans, and he spent his teenage years playing late-night gigs in the French Quarter with his friend Trombone Shorty, then rushing to high school classes in the morning. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Juilliard and became a fixture around New York with his band Stay Human, especially for what he called “love riots”: spontaneous, Pied Piper-like performances of “You Are My Sunshine” or Lady Gaga songs that took place on the street or in the subway, interrupting the daily grind with flashes of joy.At the same time, with his 2013 album “Social Music,” he began to develop a brand of activism that emphasized music’s power to find common ground amid ever-widening political polarization.“Inclusive is not even the right word,” Batiste said of his approach. “It’s more, OK, we’re coexisting as human beings on Earth. We’re not a monolith. But underneath it all, we’re the same. That’s not something that can be interpreted in the binary climate that we’re in now.”In 2015, Batiste and Stay Human became the house band on Colbert’s new CBS show, where Batiste performed comedic musical skits but had little outlet to express his broader political or social views. And, with over 200 shows a year, he also couldn’t tour — something that, incredibly, Batiste has never done as a headlining act.“We Are,” which was begun in late 2019 and completed the following year at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, became Batiste’s vehicle for protest and for communicating the wider social ambitions of his music. Although the album had barely registered in the marketplace, Batiste became the surprise top nominee for the 64th annual Grammy Awards, getting eight nods for “We Are” and three more for the movie soundtrack “Soul.” (The score for “Soul” also won Batiste, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross an Oscar.)At the same time, Batiste’s longtime partner, Suleika Jaouad, had spent years struggling with cancer and writing about it in The New York Times. The day the Grammy nominations were announced, Jaouad began a round of chemotherapy. “At certain points of her treatment,” Batiste said, “her immune system was so compromised that we couldn’t be in the same room.”Batiste onstage at the Newport Folk Festival in July. Because of other obligations, he has not yet toured as a headlining act.Douglas Mason/Getty ImagesThey married last year, and after a bone-marrow transplant, Jaouad’s health has improved enough that they recently took a vacation in Europe. “A major, major milestone,” Batiste said.When “We Are” took album of the year, Batiste became the latest piñata for critics of the entire Grammy system, who pointed to his victory as a sign of an insider-controlled process out of touch with music’s dominant trends. Yet it also represented a necessary tension between artistic excellence, as judged by fellow musicians, and the pressure to reward commercial success. For another example, just look at the last Black man before Batiste to take the top prize: Herbie Hancock, back in 2008.After his Grammy and Oscar wins, Batiste decided to leave Colbert’s show. Freed of that work, he now describes “World Music Radio” as his return to the concepts he explored a decade ago on “Social Music” — and imagined himself as Odysseus from Homer’s “Odyssey.”“It’s the hero’s journey we always talk about,” Batiste said. “It feels kind of like, wow, I came back to where I was 10 years before, but now everything’s different, even though I’m in the same place that I was. I’m home, so to speak. But everything’s different.”Colbert, in an interview, said that when Batiste approached him about leaving, “he didn’t have to tell me why.”“But I did say I can understand why you would want to take this opportunity at this moment and go full-bore,” Colbert added. “I know that feeling very well: Give me the ball and see how fast I can run.”THE MUSIC ON “World Music Radio” had its genesis, Batiste said, when he crossed paths with the producer Rick Rubin in Italy a few months after the Grammys. Rubin offered him use of Shangri-La, his beachside studio in Malibu, Calif., and Batiste headed there in August 2022 for a month of immersive work with a crew of producers and artists who came and went, generating what Batiste said were the kernels of upward of 125 songs.Among Batiste’s collaborators there was Del Rey, who worked with Batiste on “Candy Necklace,” from her latest album, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd,” and she joins him on “Life Lesson,” a melancholy duet on “World Music Radio.”The producer Rogét Chahayed, who has worked with Doja Cat, Drake and others, said he headed to Shangri-La after getting a surprise invitation from Batiste via Instagram. The sessions, he said, were spontaneous and fruitful, with Batiste sometimes kicking off hours of improvisatory jams after simply being inspired by a synthesizer tone.“It was just like magic in the room,” Chahayed recalled. “It was right around evening time, the sun was setting over the ocean. I was like, this doesn’t happen often, in the kind of sessions that we usually have in these freezing cold studios with no windows.”After those sessions, Jon Bellion, a pop performer and producer who has worked with Maroon 5 and the Jonas Brothers, collaborated with Batiste on a process he dubs “Batistifying” the material — combing through piles of half-finished material and whittling it down to a finished, coherent product.With a deadline from his label looming, Batiste said, he felt that the album was not coming together until he sat in his basement studio in Brooklyn and listened to a vocal track sent by a Spanish singer, Rita Payés. She contributes to “My Heart,” a sepia-toned Latin ballad in waltz time on which Batiste channels Ibrahim Ferrer of the Buena Vista Social Club. Hearing Payés’s voice transmitted over a speaker, Batiste said, instantly suggested the album’s concept.The album’s origin, Batiste said, was partly philosophical, as he mused on the connections and divergences between pop music and “the horrendous idea of what we call ‘world music’.” Andre D. Wagner for The New York Times“It sounds like it’s coming out of a radio that’s sitting on top of the bar at a cafe in Catalonia, Spain,” Batiste said. “The working title up until that point was ‘World Music.’ And it was like, ohhh, ‘World Music Radio.’” He worked through the night to put together a rough version of the album, dreaming up Billy Bob Bo Bob as a narrator who segues between tracks and sometimes chirps in with an approving voice-over.Another collaborator that Batiste pursued was the smooth-jazz saxman Kenny G. Batiste described him with a certain detached curiosity as a fellow artist who has one foot in jazz and another in pop, who has carved out a hugely successful niche but faced unending waves of critical vitriol.“Anybody who’s talked about with that kind of extreme disdain,” Batiste said, “I always want to study.”On the track “Clair de Lune,” which opens with an obscure sample from an old French folk album, Kenny G contributes a minute-long solo that is busier and more harmonically dense than his usual hooks, but with a singing tone that is instantly recognizable.In an interview, Kenny G said that Batiste had asked him about the polarized reactions to his work.“You’ve got to play what sounds good to you, and feels good to you,” Kenny G recalled telling him. “Lucky for you, there’s a big audience that seems to like what you do. Then you really don’t have to apologize for that.”WHEN ASKED ABOUT his commercial hopes for “World Music Radio,” Batiste was typically circuitous and nuanced, saying that on one hand, he wants to compete with stars like Taylor Swift for top chart positions, but he also recognizes that his take on popular culture is more conceptual and abstract. He was most straightforward in saying he couldn’t wait to head out on tour.He seems most prepared for any reaction to his social commentary on the album. “Love Black folks and white folks,” Batiste sings on “Be Who You Are.” “My Asians, my Africans, my Afro-Eurasian, Republican or Democrat.”Even that simple message of openness and acceptance is relatively rare in an era when many pop stars shrink away from any social commentary at all, out of fear of alienating part of their audience and sacrificing clicks. It’s a risk Batiste is determined to take.“To say I love everybody, including Republicans — as a Black guy, I don’t know how that could go,” he said. “That shouldn’t be something that’s frowned upon or looked at in a way that probably to some seems like, ‘Oh, he’s not really clear on what’s important.’”“It’s radical today to love everybody,” he added. “We are in a time that there’s more of a pressure to make people into the other, and to dehumanize them in the process. But the act of removing a certain baseline of humanity in how we approach living amongst each other, that should be radical. That should be the thing that is disruptive.” More

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