Aurelia Butler

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    8 Songs About August

    The dog days are over. Here are some tunes to celebrate.Florence + the Machine, escaping the dog days.Jose Sena Goulao/EPA, via ShutterstockDear listeners,Happy August. It’s the month of out-of-office auto replies, finally breaking heat waves, and — if the songs about August are to believed, anyway — waning summer romances.After an especially brutal July, we’re finally enjoying some pleasant summer weather here in New York. I’m celebrating by going for runs in nearby parks, venturing into parts of my apartment that are not directly in front of the air-conditioner, and, of course, putting together a playlist in honor of this lazy, hazy, hopefully milder month.Songs about August tend to be languid, wistful and suffused with the feeling that Lana Del Rey once named, with appropriate vagueness, “that summertime sadness.” Some of us look forward to summer all year, but by August that sense of too-much-dessert can set in, leaving us secretly pining for the first rustles of September — or at least that unseasonal cold wind in August that sets the scene for Van Morrison’s entry on this playlist.In addition to Van the Man, today’s selections include a weepy country standard, a detour into early psych-pop from a once and future Bee Gee and yet another Taylor Swift song about the cruelty of summer. (Not that one, though.) The dog days are over. Maybe not yet for good, but at least for now, and I’d say that’s reason enough to rejoice.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Carole King: “The First Day in August”“On the first day in August, I wanna wake up by your side/After sleeping with you on the last night in July,” Carole King begins this gorgeous ballad from her 1972 album, “Rhymes and Reasons.” A chill of melancholy quivers through the piano-driven song, but the resonant yearning in King’s voice provides warmth. (Listen on YouTube)2. Taylor Swift: “August”The dreamy, anguished eighth track on Swift’s 2020 album “Folklore” has become a feverishly beloved fan favorite among Swifties (and even some Swift skeptics). “August” is part of a trio of “Folklore” songs that depict a love triangle from different characters’ perspectives, and given that it’s told from the vantage point of “the other woman,” it’s the most gloriously melodramatic of the three: “So much for summer love and saying ‘us,’” Swift sings, “’cause you weren’t mine to lose.” (Listen on YouTube)3. Waxahatchee: “Summer of Love”Though Katie Crutchfield doesn’t specifically mention August on this acoustic lament from “Ivy Tripp,” her 2015 album as Waxahatchee, something about its rueful sense of nostalgia evokes the pathos of summer’s end. “I can’t make out a face in the picture of palm trees,” she sings in a keening wail. “The summer of love is a photo of us.” (Listen on YouTube)4. Rilo Kiley: “August”Now, from Crutchfield to a band that inspired her so profoundly that she has a tattoo of its second album: Rilo Kiley. Though Jenny Lewis sang many of the Los Angeles group’s best-known songs, the guitarist Blake Sennett takes the lead on the gently buoyant “August,” from its 2001 debut album, “Take Offs and Landings.” (Listen on YouTube)5. Van Morrison: “Cold Wind in August”Released to high expectations in 1977, Van Morrison’s “Period of Transition” was, as its title suggests, a bit of a departure from his more blistering, mystical albums of the early 1970s. An undeniable highlight is its closing track, the soulful “Cold Wind in August,” which features inspired piano playing from the album’s co-producer, Dr. John. (Listen on YouTube)6. Robin Gibb: “August October”In 1969, Robin Gibb briefly quit the Bee Gees and embarked upon a solo career. A year later, he released the baroque, delightfully strange album “Robin’s Reign,” his only solo LP of the 1970s. The mournful “August October,” an ode to the stasis of heartbreak, opens the album, and was later covered by a huge fan of “Robin’s Reign,” none other than Elton John. (Listen on YouTube)7. Waylon Jennings: “The Thirty Third of August”The country singer-songwriter Mickey Newbury penned this down-and-out tear-jerker, but Waylon Jennings was the first to make it more widely known, when he recorded it for his 1970 album, “Waylon.” Countless other artists have covered it since, though if you want to hear what is perhaps the most gut-wrenching rendition, check out David Allan Coe’s. (Listen on YouTube)8. Florence + the Machine: “Dog Days Are Over”Well, let’s at least hope. (Listen on YouTube)Meet me behind the mall,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“8 Songs About August” track listTrack 1: Carole King, “The First Day in August”Track 2: Taylor Swift, “August”Track 3: Waxahatchee, “Summer of Love”Track 4: Rilo Kiley, “August”Track 5: Van Morrison, “Cold Wind in August”Track 6: Robin Gibb, “August October”Track 7: Waylon Jennings, “The Thirty Third of August”Track 8: Florence + the Machine, “Dog Days Are Over”Bonus TracksPour one out for one of my first favorite movie stars, Pee-wee Herman. Preferably: “Tequila!”Speaking of movies, if you’re looking for a reason to enjoy some theater air-conditioning that is not that pair of summer blockbusters you have almost certainly heard about, I’d highly recommend “Afire,” the latest from the German director Christian Petzold, who happens to be one of my favorite working filmmakers. “Afire” is like a bleaker and more biting Éric Rohmer movie — just as many enviable summer-vacation vibes, plus some dark twists. (The Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, liked it too.) More

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    At Bayreuth, the Work on Wagner’s Operas Is Never Done

    At the festival that Wagner founded, a new “Parsifal” looks different depending on how you see it, and a workshop model refreshes revivals.After the enormous risk of its beginning, the Bayreuth Festival in Germany was for a long time a place where the stagings of Richard Wagner’s operas were encased in amber.When his four-opera “Ring,” which inaugurated the festival in 1876, was brought back for the first time 20 years later, Wagner’s widow, Cosima, stuck with a vision essentially identical to the one her husband had overseen. “Parsifal” was even more static: After premiering at Bayreuth in 1882, it returned there as an unchanging ritual until 1934.But in Bayreuth’s modern era, perpetual workshopping prevails. New productions usually play for five summers before cycling out, and the expectation is that directors will keep futzing through that time. Sets change; sequences are adjusted and eliminated; details are added and subtracted.Now, it’s Valentin Schwarz’s turn to tinker.His “Ring” opened last summer. It was a caustic, contemporary-dress interpretation that compressed the work’s sprawling settings to a single estate and eliminated the mythological magic, the dragons, potions and instant transformations. The “Ride of the Valkyries” was a waiting room of wealthy women strutting in cosmetic surgery bandages. The world-ending conflagration Wagner intended for the ending was a fire-free anticlimax at the bottom of an empty pool.On Monday, though, as the sweeping music of that ending played, a backdrop lowered to reveal the theatrical lighting behind, and the body of Wotan, the king of the gods, was seen hanging from the grid, dripping wet — the death of divinity, “Sunset Boulevard”-style. It was a fresh addition to the staging, if still something of a letdown, a mild finale after 15 keyed-up hours.There were more tweaks to this “Ring.” The kidnapping and hoarding of children — an obsession with youthfulness; a sense of violence passed through generations — is one of Schwarz’s themes. So it makes sense for girls we saw drawing in “Das Rheingold” to now return to pay their respects at a coffin in “Die Walküre.” The hard-partying decadence of the characters in “Götterdämmerung” is even harsher this year, and the suicide of a goddess earlier in the “Ring” is more strongly telegraphed in the final moments of “Rheingold.” The child of Brünnhilde and Siegfried, not in Wagner’s libretto, died in last year’s version but now escapes the apocalyptic finale.You can tell Schwarz intended these revisions to heighten certain aspects of his interpretation. But their impact is generally minor. And the most important change from last summer isn’t onstage — it’s in the pit.Last year, Cornelius Meister conducted the premiere because Pietari Inkinen had to drop out with a case of Covid late in the rehearsal process. Meister’s work ended up being blandly neutral, not quite compatible with Schwarz’s vivid, provocative staging.Newly volatile and fierce under Inkinen, the orchestra now matches, and feeds, the curdled, unsettled mood of this “Ring”; the sound is often forceful, but it’s stubbornly anti-grandeur. Sometimes that means brash playing that even verges on unbeautiful. The winds were almost wild in a grinding, grim account of the introduction to “Siegfried” on Saturday, and gawkily reedy — at once sinister and whimsical — as Hagen and Gutrune plotted in “Götterdämmerung” on Monday.The pacing is tauter this year, and more tense. Inkinen propelled scenes forward, giving and receiving from the singers during long narratives. The “Todesverkündigung,” the dreamlike scene in “Die Walküre” in which Brünnhilde appears to Siegmund in a vision, was steadily, hauntingly built. All in all, the orchestra was, as Wagner intended, a character in its own right, one as anxious, unstable and fascinating as Schwarz’s conception at its best.As Hagen, the production’s linchpin, the bass Mika Kares, a newcomer to the cast, was most memorable: aggressive and doleful, stony and agonized, shambling around the set like the overgrown child he is.Another newcomer, the soprano Catherine Foster, an alert actress and proud presence, sang with clean tone and slicing high notes as Brünnhilde in “Die Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung.” Sounding gruff as Wotan — a role he shared last year with another singer — and acting with overkill, even by this staging’s standards, the bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny settled in as a meditative, wry Wanderer in “Siegfried.”Tobias Kratzer’s 2019 staging of “Tannhäuser,” revived this year, features a performance within a performance of the opera.Enrico NawrathOver a week at the festival, the quality of the singing was consistently high. And pre-opening cancellations provided the opportunity for some heroics.The uncannily pure-toned tenor Klaus Florian Vogt and the sensitive, easily vulnerable soprano Elisabeth Teige sang in “Die Walküre” one day, and “Tannhäuser” the next. Even more remarkable, the tenor Andreas Schager sang the title roles in “Siegfried” on Saturday and “Parsifal” on Sunday, and then Siegfried in “Götterdämmerung” on Monday — all with clarion enthusiasm. This is the kind of Wagnerian Everest-climbing you get only at Bayreuth.In Tobias Kratzer’s crowd-pleasing 2019 production of “Tannhäuser,” the title character abandons the bohemian high life of Venus and her road-tripping pals for a sober, rule-based order: a performance at Bayreuth of, yes, “Tannhäuser.” (Referencing Bayreuth and its past productions in new stagings is almost de rigueur at the festival.)Metatheatrical collisions ensue — Ekaterina Gubanova is laugh-out-loud funny as Venus infiltrates the “Tannhäuser” within the “Tannhäuser” — before a tragic final act strains to tie up a lot of thematic loose ends.But the production is an endearing party, one that extends outside during the first intermission to a pond near the festival theater, for a gleefully messy, proudly queer, highly eclectic performance ranging among the likes of “I Am What I Am,” “Part of Your World” and “Ol’ Man River.” Back inside, Nathalie Stutzmann conducted a warmly effusive performance, with just a slightly chaotic ending to Act II.It was a superb vehicle for the festival’s chorus, directed by Eberhard Friedrich — but quite possibly outdone by the group’s powerful, elegant work in “Parsifal,” from ethereal to mighty to ferocious and back again.Georg Zeppenfeld, left, and Andreas Schager in Jay Scheib’s new production of “Parsifal,” which is designed to be seen in augmented reality but which can also be viewed as a more straightforward staging without the technology.Enrico NawrathPablo Heras-Casado led that opera with a calm confidence that never felt rigid. The selling point of this “Parsifal” — new this year and directed by Jay Scheib — is the incorporation of augmented reality, or AR. But because of internal conflicts over funding, less than a fifth of the audience is provided with the glasses that superimpose over the live action a panoply of floating, moving digital images.On opening night, I and other critics saw the staging with the AR glasses. But then I returned to see the show as the vast majority of visitors will: without them.Some things about the inoffensive, unilluminating, unmoving live staging are clearer without the busy AR imagery. I now caught that desert mining seems to be going on in Act III, and that, at the end, Gurnemanz and a female lover, who embraced guiltily at the opera’s start, are happily reunited.But the use of live video onstage — highly effective in an unsparing perspective on Amfortas’s bloody wound being probed and dressed — elsewhere just shows us close-ups of what we can already see, as at a stadium concert. The fallen sorcerer Klingsor wears high heels, a nod toward gender blurring that goes otherwise unexplored.As a traditional production, this “Parsifal” was nothing special; it felt palpable that most of the staging’s resources were going into developing the AR. But even if the results of that venture weren’t satisfying artistically or emotionally, the technology worked. And its ambition was true to the spirit of experimentation — and, these days, revision — that has coexisted with reverent tradition at Bayreuth for almost 150 years. More

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    Review: In ‘Amour,’ Putting a Palme d’Or Winner Onstage

    An adaptation of Michael Haneke’s 2012 movie at the Salzburg Festival eschews cinematic realism, instead taking a highly stylized approach.“How can I speak of love when I’m dead?” runs a powerful line in “Amour,” a stage adaptation of Michael Haneke’s 2012 film that premiered on Sunday at the Salzburg Festival, in Austria.Love and death are, of course, the two great themes of art, but rarely have they been brought together so hauntingly as in Haneke’s film, a portrait of an elderly couple forced to confront the issue of when life is no longer worth living. Told in Haneke’s characteristically severe style, the film earned the Austrian director both a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar for best foreign language film.Karin Henkel, the adaptation’s director, eschews the film’s realism, opting instead for a highly stylized and self-consciously artificial staging that achieves its visceral impact through a combination of Brechtian estrangement techniques, emotionally naked performances and biographical monologues written by onstage extras.Henkel scored a triumph in Salzburg two summers ago with “Richard the Kid and the King,” a sweeping epic of Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty monarch that ran to four hours. The German director’s “Amour” — a co-production with the Münchner Kammerspiele theater, in Munich, where it will run in late October — is as affectingly tender as her earlier Salzburg outing was grimly savage.At the beginning of the production, the stage is dominated by a white tunnel, whose pristine, antiseptic interior is progressively sullied: Its walls written on with watery black paint, its floor stained by thick black ink that trickles onto the performers, and mounds of dry earth that fall in heaps from the ceiling. One of the characters reclines on a metal-frame hospital bed that begins to resemble a medieval torture device when operated by a zealous nurse.The tunnel, with its clinical associations, is eventually dismantled, revealing an unadorned stage strewn with an assortment of chairs, a piano, microphone stands and stage lights. Muriel Gerstner’s stage design is a constant negotiation between sterile everyday objects (harshly lit by Stephan Mariani) and elemental imagery of earth, water and flowers.Like the film, however, this reimagining of “Amour” is anchored by its two central performances. Unlike the film, which starred two aging French cinema greats, the stage version is ignited by a dose of counterintuitive casting.Jung is 69 and Bach, 38. In Haneke’s movie, the actors who played their characters were in their mid-80s. Matthias HornKatharina Bach, who is just 38, brings unexpected vitality and deep pathos to her portrayal of Anne, an elderly music teacher who is paralyzed by a stroke. (Emmanuelle Riva was in her mid-80s when she played the same role in Haneke’s movie.) Bach’s is a fitful and tormented performance, marked by intense physical and dramatic control. As Georges, Anne’s still-vigorous husband, André Jung, 69, brings an embittered and defiant spirit that is a thoughtful departure from Jean-Louis Trintignant’s pained and subtle performance in the film.The German-language stage adaptation, by Henkel and the dramaturg Tobias Schuster, hews closely to the French screenplay. At the same time, they employ strategies to defamiliarize the piece. The dialogue is heightened by frequent, often uncanny repetition. And many of the script’s stage directions are read out loud by two actors, Joyce Sanhá and Christian Löber, whose limber performances — as narrators, nurses and other characters — add to the production’s anxious, off-kilter energy.Henkel’s greatest gamble is including a twelve-person chorus of nonprofessional extras. Each of them is old, infirm or in mourning, and, although they don’t speak much onstage, they have written moving testimonies about living with health conditions, or losing loved ones to illness that are recited as monologues by the main cast. In the wrong directorial hands, this sort of intervention could easily have curdled into sentimentality. Here, however, the emotional charge of these testimonies is balanced by understatement and restraint. By a similar token, the production’s depiction and discussion of euthanasia, while sometimes shocking, resists moralizing.Hovering somewhere between the cast of extras and the main performers is the actress Nine Manthei, a little girl who acts as an ambiguous intermediary. Is she a protecting angel? The personification of Anne’s soul? Along with Bach’s skillful performance, Manthei’s poise and onstage presence suggests a double exposure of Anne as an old woman and a child.“Old age might be tragic, but it is not individual,” we hear Haneke’s voice say in an excerpt from an interview about “Amour” that plays during the production.More than a decade ago, Haneke employed his formal austerity and emotional restraint to immerse us in one elderly couple’s tragedy. But where film encourages realism, theater can embrace allegory and abstraction. With her sensitive, at times idiosyncratic, approach to this same material, Henkel uses her theatrical artistry to reach the universal.AmourThrough Aug. 10 at the Salzburg Festival, in Salzburg, Austria; salzburgerfestspiele.at. More

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    Paul Reubens Was More Than Pee-wee. Here are 8 Great Performances.

    He played dozens of memorable roles on big and small screens throughout his career. We’ve rounded up what to watch and where to watch it.Paul Reubens, who died on Sunday at age 70, will always be remembered for his beloved alter ego, the perpetually childlike Pee-wee Herman — a character so popular that it was able to carry a stage show, movies and a TV series. But Reubens also made memorable impressions playing a variety of supporting characters of the big and small screens — like Penguin’s father in “Batman Returns” and the turtleneck-wearing fixer Mr. Vargas in “The Blacklist,” just to name a few out of dozens.Looking for more? Here is a list of Reubens’s greatest hits and how to watch them. (Note that his recurring Emmy-nominated turn on “Murphy Brown” as the network president’s nephew is not included because that series’s original run is not streaming. Start the petition!)‘Pee-wee’s Big Adventure’ (1985)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.This film may well be one of the most extravagantly weird comedies of the 1980s — and possibly ever. A breakthrough for both Reubens and the director Tim Burton, the film built on the Reubens’s live show, which had been captured for an HBO special in 1981 (and is available on Max). Strapped into a fitted gray suit with a bright red bow tie, his face a collection of sharp angles in a kid’s idea of Kabuki makeup, Pee-wee is simultaneously innocent and crafty, unencumbered by social mores and deliciously arch, accessible to all and cultishly weird. And Reubens brought him to life in a performance of utter physical and verbal precision.‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse’ (1986-1990)Buy it on several major platforms.Like the finest children’s shows, this series delighted both the younger set and its parents. The first could laugh at Pee-wee’s antics and his gallery of wacky friends, while the second would get a kick out of the double entendres, the brilliant art direction and the surreal guest stars — like Grace Jones turning up to sing “The Little Drummer Boy” in a Christmas special. The show, which aired for five seasons on CBS on Saturday mornings, remains one of the oddest productions to ever land on American televisions.‘Flight of the Navigator’ (1986)Stream it on Disney+.Reubens had distinctive intonations, and he put them to good use in extensive voice work, especially during the 2010s. An earlier example is this family friendly science-fiction film from 1986 in which he voiced Max, the computer helming the Trimaxion Drone Ship on which the pint-size hero, David (Joey Cramer), found himself. Sadly, Reubens’s second outing with the movie’s director, Randal Kleiser, did not turn out quite as charmingly: It was “Big Top Pee-wee,” the disappointing sequel to “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.” (The final entry in the movie trilogy, “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday,” premiered on Netflix in 2016.)‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ (1992)Stream it on Max.The year after Reubens’s career was temporarily derailed by indecent exposure charges in 1991, he began quietly making his way back with small, quirky roles like Amilyn, the henchman of a vampire kingpin (Rutger Hauer), in the original “Buffy” movie. Sporting a dashing goatee and looking as if he’d just escaped from a prog-rock band, Reubens chewed the scenery with gusto. He fully embraced camp in a death-by-stake scene that went over the top, and then did not even stop there. (It continued after the end credits.)‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ (1993)Stream it on Disney+.Reubens reunited with Burton for this stop-motion classic in which he voiced Lock, who with Shock (Catherine O’Hara) and Barrel (the composer Danny Elfman, who did the music for “Big Adventure”) forms a trio of minions who are “Halloween’s finest trick-or-treaters.” Together, they assist the villain Oogie Boogie (Ken Page) and, most important, sing “Kidnap the Sandy Claws.” Reubens and his team even went on to perform the song live.‘30 Rock’ (2007)Stream it on Hulu and Peacock.Reubens’s gift for the, shall we say, unusual found one of its most outlandishly grotesque outlets with the simultaneously funny and unsettling Prince Gerhardt — an inbred royal with a terrifying left hand who felt as if a John Waters character had suddenly invaded a prime-time sitcom. Sadly, Gerhardt appears only in Episode 12 of the show’s first season.‘Portlandia’ (2015)Stream it on AMC+; rent or buy it on most major platforms.As the lawyer defending a couple of Goths played by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein in the series’s Season 5 finale, Reubens gets a fitting speech that includes the line “Being weird is not a crime!” He turns it into a statement of pride and a rallying cry, as well as a moment of, well, weirdness.‘Mosaic’ (2018)Stream it on Max.Reubens was terrific as the gay best friend of a successful author and illustrator played by Sharon Stone in this Utah-set murder drama from Steven Soderbergh and Ed Solomon. Sardonic and supportive, his character, J.C. Schiffer, was the dream confidante, and Reubens beautifully underplayed him. For some insights into his sensibility, you can read his account of shooting the series on his official website, complete with candid photos. More

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    Book Review: ‘A Pocketful of Happiness,’ by Richard E. Grant

    The Oscar-nominated actor’s new memoir is at once a Hollywood air kiss and a moving tribute to a happy marriage that ended too soon.A POCKETFUL OF HAPPINESS, by Richard E. GrantRichard E. Grant is a wonderful actor and, it seems, a rather wonderful (goofy, talented, loving) man. His new memoir, written in diary form, is about his terrific 38-year marriage-of-opposites to Joan Washington (he the eternal adolescent, star-struck optimist and gifted actor, she a sharp-tongued, no-nonsense and equally gifted dialect coach) and her painful death from cancer. (It is she who, while dying, instructs him to seek a “pocketful of happiness” every day after she is gone.)Grant writes: “Am wondering, at the age of 63, and 11 months, if I am ever going to be a proper grown-up.” It’s not a question I asked myself while reading this book. He is so open, so filled with feelings and giddy with delight when loved, noticed and/or praised. (He not only writes about every exciting detail of being Oscar-nominated for his extraordinary performance in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” he then quotes various journalists and publicists about the charm and disarming candor of his enthusiasm. And then there are a few more quotes from friends who tell him how gifted and wonderful he is, as he ultimately does not win the Academy Award.) But he is too thrilled with all this to hold any of it against him, even as the Hollywood sections take away from the intensity of the book.If Richard E. Grant were writing a review of this moving memoir, there would be many, many fond and admiring adjectives used to describe almost everyone who appears in the pages: witty, forthright, feisty, silky-soft, button-bright, hilarious, loving, generous, heartbreaking, warmhearted, inclusive, brilliant, sparky, amazing, charming, gilded, entertaining.He lavishes these adjectives on his friends, famous and otherwise. Nigella Lawson seems as warm and lovely and sensitive as I’ve always thought she must be. Rupert Everett is gallant and delightful. So is King Charles, as it turns out. And Queen Camilla is thoughtful and generous. Cate Blanchett sends gardenias. Gabriel Byrne brings charm and kind attention. A frail Vanessa Redgrave provides ice cream and recites poetry. (It is a certain pleasure when Grant makes a very rare negative remark, usually about someone he tactfully does not name.)Washington and Grant at a 2016 awards ceremony.Getty ImagesThere are two women at the center of this sweet and openhearted book. One is Joan Washington, whom we get to know as passionate and commanding, a great teacher, a wonderful mother, a smartass and a woman who understood and loved her husband, deeply. I would have been happy to go on reading about their life and their marriage, and even their shared adoration of their “longed-for, miracle, baby,” Olivia, who seems to be an impressive woman, very supportive of them both, during the fears and misery of Washington’s Stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis and the “tsunami of grief” that Grant describes. I was not happy to read the details of Joan’s diagnosis and dying, but those sections of the book are genuine and compelling.The woman in the book whom I could easily do without is … Barbra Streisand. Barbra Streisand comes off well: shy, thoughtful, wildly gifted and a genuine mensch. To be clear, I make no complaints about her, and neither Grant nor I criticize anything she does in this book. It is not her fault that Richard E. Grant has adored her since he wrote her a fan letter when he was 14. Not her fault that he commissioned a “two-foot-tall sculpture of Streisand’s face” for his garden. Not her fault that there are far too many pages about his adoration, his ruses to meet her and those meetings, in which — let me say again — she was the soul of grace.I could have done without all of that, because, like Richard E. Grant, I just wanted more of the feisty, unvarnished, irritable, generous, wise, unimpressed Joan Washington. You cannot read this book and not miss her very much.Amy Bloom’s most recent books are “Flower Girl” and “In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss.”A POCKETFUL OF HAPPINESS | By Richard E. Grant | 336 pp. | Simon & Schuster | $28.99 More

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    I’ve Listened to This Breakup Song a Million Times

    Why does it feel so good to cry this hard?I’m mobbing through Bushwick, Brooklyn, in the back of a cab, listening to Lady Wray’s “Piece of Me” for the 12th time in a row, and I’m crying — very, very hard — and no, it’s not ugly crying. In fact, I’m pretty sure I look beautiful right now.There is no greater balm in the universe than a Black woman singing (I said what I said). I remember being a young gay boy in San Francisco, hanging out at the Eagle bar in SoMa, when an older white gay explained to me that he only talks to Black women therapists. He went on: “I like my health care like I like my house music — I want a beautiful Black woman telling me that everything is going to be OK.” I was 23 and literally balked at the nerve of this man. I hate to admit it, but now that I’m 41 and I finally — maybe — understand what things like heartbreak are about, I completely agree with him.There has to be a reason it’s called soul music, right? Perhaps because that’s where it grips you the most? In my short lifetime, I feel like I’ve seen every nationality, age group and social class of singer do their jarring impersonation of a Black woman singing soul, but, cultural erasure be damned, it’s like Tammi and Marvin sang: Ain’t nothing like the real thing, goddamn it.Why this song? I wasn’t even breaking up with anybody the first time I heard it in an Oakland bar and the opening lines cut like a knife: “You’ve been the best at times/You walk me through my darkest days/Why must it turn around?” A few months later I was in New York, on what I thought would be my final rock ’n’ roll tour. I had been playing music since I was 12 and had achieved two goals I’d had since I was a kid: signing to the legendary indie label Sub Pop, and opening for Bikini Kill. My lifelong obsession with music had seemed to reach its logical conclusion. I decided it was time to get a new hobby — like baking, or veganism. I was saying goodbye to a part of my life, and I felt an internal shift: What next? Eventually I ended up in the back of a cab in Bushwick, listening to the song on repeat.Her voice transfixes me because she’s got that element of soul — hell, of singing in general — that one cannot reach by just ‘hitting the right notes.’I have been listening to Nicole Wray (before the “Lady” days) — a California-born soul singer with that kind of irresistible, honey-dipped voice one can only be born with, no doubt — since the 1990s, when Missy Elliott gave her a vote of confidence by rapping on her debut single, “Make It Hot.” But the thing I think I love most about “Piece of Me” — and really about every soul song about heartache, heartbreak or love lost — is that its conviction is all in the delivery. You’ve either lived through loss or you haven’t, and no amount of frenzied vocal trilling can make it otherwise. You can’t fake this: “I’ll let you take a piece of me. … And if that’s not enough/I’ll let you go peacefully.” I tear up as I type it. What Lady Wray did here is both genuine and colossal. Her voice transfixes me because she’s got that element of soul — hell, of singing in general — that one cannot reach by just “hitting the right notes.” That is only a small part; one must also land the character one is invoking. The perfect breakup song must also be a sort of theater, where the singer becomes the character fully. The very cadence of the song, her voice, sonically pristine, still spells out a certain longing and despair. Remember the definition of “soul”: the spiritual part of both human being or animal regarded as simultaneously immaterial and immortal. I am transformed every time I hear “Piece of Me,” which by the end of the night will probably be close to 30 times.“Piece of Me” gives that throwback feel — it’s heavy. The digital world exists in a cloud, and the music itself feels as ethereal. For all our complaints about A.I. “taking over music” (I would like to point out that this was foreshadowed more than a decade ago when autotune became omnipresent, condensing all emotion into that tinny computer sound), “Piece of Me” sits in counterpoise, a song mixed through tape reels and heavy wooden machinery. It feels as if the song were creating its own black hole when it was made. Who can escape the condensed emotional singularity of a breakup song?I grew up in Alabama, and though I defected to punk rock as a teenager, I was a child of the blues. My great-grandfather, Hard Rock Charlie, played the chitlin’ circuits from Chattanooga to Chicago in the 1930s. His son J.J. Malone, who came to California in his youth to play music (much like I did), worked alongside the likes of Big Mama Thornton, John Lee Hooker and Creedence Clearwater Revival. It’s in my blood to understand a very true, very sad and very beautiful song. But who among us has not experienced deep loss yet still found a way to keep going? “Piece of Me” taps into that universal fact, reiterating the troubled paradox of both love and life: We are forever heartbroken, and forever hopeful.Brontez Purnell is a California-based writer whose books include “100 Boyfriends” (FSG, 2021), which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction. More

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    In Pee-wee Herman, Joy and Fun Got Flat-Out Weird

    Paul Reubens committed to profound silliness without ever going mean or dark — though some peers were disappointed that he focused on one character.Of all the great flesh-and-blood cartoons of 1980s popular culture — Hulk Hogan, Madonna, Mr. T — the one easiest for small children to relate to was Pee-wee Herman. He made the same kind of obnoxious jokes we did (“I know you are but what am I?”), in a similar, if more overtly nasal, squeak while capturing an un-self-conscious exuberance that felt deeply familiar.That’s how it felt. In reality, Pee-wee Herman was nothing like us at all, a dreamy man-child in a red bow tie whose sugary smile could curl into a punky scowl. A singular piece of comic performance art for a mass audience, Pee-wee Herman stood out in every form he appeared in, from improv theaters to late-night talk shows to the movies to Saturday morning television.That this character could be so easy to identify with and so singularly, slyly alien at the same time is the stupendous magic trick of his creator, Paul Reubens, a true original who died on Sunday at 70.The first time I saw him do Pee-wee was on “Late Night With David Letterman,” where he was one of the oddballs the show’s executives would spotlight when they couldn’t book real stars. Unlike Brother Theodore, Harvey Pekar or Andy Kaufman, Pee-wee introduced no hostility or even conflict to the show. His appearances on that most ironic of late-night shows were like invasions from Candy Land. He brought toys and disguises, and he would get up and dance even before the music played. There was a joy in his presentation that was bracing. You laughed not because the jokes were funny, but because they were told with such commitment to the fun of it all.Letterman didn’t know what to make of him. You did get the sense that the host enjoyed his guest’s adolescent jerkiness. But there was more there. Even though Pee-wee was a broad character, something about him seemed more real than any conventional comic slinging punchlines or movie star selling a movie. This was a Bugs Bunny level of charisma, built to last.Paul Reubens (born Paul Rubenfeld) started his career doing many characters for the sketch group the Groundlings, and he went on to embody even more extreme characters, including the monocled father of the Penguin in “Batman Returns” and an Austrian prince with an ivory hand in “30 Rock.”But once Pee-wee became a hit with crowds in the 1970s, he mostly abandoned his other roles, to the frustration of Phil Hartman, his improv peer and a future “Saturday Night Live” star, who thought he was wasting his talent focusing on just one part.By the time he was starring in a Pee-wee movie directed by Tim Burton, Reubens was credited only as the writer. Pee-wee Herman played himself. This blurring of character and actor added a sense of mystery, and odd authenticity, to this stylized performance. A natural outsider, Pee-wee excelled at fish-out-of-water comedy. In “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” (1985) a classic comedy that is still Burton’s best movie, Pee-wee finds himself winning over unlikely people in a quest narrative about his search for his bike.He accidentally knocks over the motorcycles of a bunch of grizzled Hells Angels types, before charming them by jumping on the bar and dancing to the Champs’ surf tune “Tequila.” In another bit, he is talking in a telephone booth and trying to explain where he is, so he peeks his head out to sing, “The stars at night are big and bright.” A team of cowboys responds in unison: “Deep in the heart of Texas!”The world of Pee-wee is full of this loopy surrealism that could veer into innuendo but never got dark. It was always welcoming, wildly diverse, profoundly silly. The movie, along with his anarchic Saturday morning children’s show, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” melded a child’s energy with a love of show business. Reubens, who grew up in Sarasota, Fla., nearby the winter headquarters of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, managed to imbue such entertainment with the spirit of performance art, while never taking the easy route of going mean or dark. His work just got weirder.Pee-wee’s television stint ended in infamy when Reubens was arrested on a charge of indecent exposure in a porn theater. Late-night hosts pounced, and so did the news media. CBS took reruns of his show off the air. The controversy now seems preposterously overblown. That happened just one year before Sinead O’Connor’s career suffered a blow from her protest on “Saturday Night Live” against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church — an episode that has come under new examination after her death last week. It’s clear that dopey moralizing scandals are far from a hallmark of our age alone.The one time I talked with Reubens, around seven years ago in an interview, he was, not surprisingly, quite different from his character: thoughtful, reserved, sober-voiced. He was modest about Pee-wee, who eventually returned.No character that beloved, that meme-able, would not be pulled back to action in our current nostalgia-driven culture. There was a Pee-wee Herman Netflix movie and a Broadway show, and, while there were small updates here and there, the character remained in essence the same: giddy, exuberant, singularly strange and primally tapped into childhood.Pee-wee got older but he never grew up. His career is an update on the Peter Pan story, except no one in Neverland would say: “That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.” More

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    Woman With ‘Doomsday’ Beliefs Gets Life Without Parole in Her Children’s Deaths

    In May, Lori Vallow Daybell was convicted in the murders of two of her children and of conspiring to murder her husband’s previous wife in Idaho’s district court.An Idaho judge sentenced Lori Vallow Daybell on Monday to three consecutive terms of life in prison without parole for the murders of two of her children and for conspiring to murder her husband’s former wife in a case that drew national attention for what prosecutors described as her “doomsday” beliefs.Judge Steven Boyce of the Seventh Judicial District said at the sentencing, which was streamed online from a packed Fremont County Courthouse in St. Anthony, Idaho, that Ms. Vallow Daybell “chose the most evil and destructive path possible.”“The most unimaginable type of murder is to have a mother murdering her own children, and that’s exactly what you did,” Judge Boyce said, adding that allowing Ms. Vallow Daybell to serve her terms concurrently “would not serve the interest of justice.”In May 2021, a grand jury indicted Ms. Vallow Daybell, 50, and her husband, Chad Daybell, 54, in connection with the deaths of two of Ms. Vallow Daybell’s children, Tylee Ryan, 16, and Joshua Vallow, 7, known as J.J.Before she was sentenced, Ms. Vallow Daybell told the court that she has had “many communications with Jesus Christ” and that because of those communications she knows that her children are “happy and busy in the spirit world.”Rob Wood, the prosecuting attorney, read a statement written by Colby Ryan, Ms. Vallow Daybell’s only surviving child, who said that “Tylee will never have the opportunity to become a mother, wife or have the career she was destined to have,” and that “JJ will never be able to grow and spread his light with this world the way he did.”“My siblings and father deserve so much more than this,” Mr. Ryan wrote. “I want them to be remembered for who they were, and not to be just a spectacle or a headline to the world.”The sentencing followed a jury’s guilty verdict in May in the murders and the conspiracy. Ms. Vallow Daybell had initially been declared not competent to stand trial and was required to undergo psychiatric treatment. The trial in Boise, Idaho, began on April 3 after years of delays.At the start of the trial, prosecutors described Ms. Vallow Daybell as a negligent mother who believed that her “religious mission” took precedence over caring for her children.Ms. Vallow Daybell, according to prosecutors, believed that her children were “zombies” possessed by evil spirits.About 60 witnesses were called by prosecutors to testify, according to Fox 10, a Phoenix news station.Ms. Vallow Daybell pleaded not guilty but did not testify in her own defense, and her lawyers rested their case without calling a single witness, Boise State Public Radio reported. Her lawyers told the judge that they did not believe the state had proved its case. The verdict was streamed online.Ms. Vallow Daybell was also found guilty of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in the death of Tammy Daybell, Mr. Daybell’s former wife. Mr. Daybell, who also pleaded not guilty, has been charged with first-degree murder in that case. Mr. Daybell’s trial was set for April 2024.In November 2019, Tylee Ryan and J.J. Vallow were reported missing by J.J.’s grandparents, who had become concerned when they were unable to reach him by phone.Officers with the Rexburg Police Department in Idaho tried to conduct a welfare check and later executed search warrants at the apartment complex where Ms. Vallow Daybell and her husband lived. The authorities said the couple seemed unconcerned with the children’s whereabouts.In February 2020, Ms. Vallow Daybell was arrested in Hawaii on a warrant issued by the authorities in Idaho, after, they said, she had not cooperated with the effort to find the missing children.In June 2020, investigators found human remains buried on Mr. Daybell’s property in Idaho that were later identified as belonging to his wife’s missing children. He was arrested and charged with concealing evidence.At the trial, Detective Ray Hermosillo of the Rexburg Police Department described photographs of the children’s remains. A DNA analyst testified that a hair found stuck to duct tape used to wrap J.J.’s body matched his mother’s, according to The Associated Press.Detective Hermosillo also said at the trial that Tylee’s remains had been burned and packed into a bucket that was buried elsewhere on Mr. Daybell’s property.Both Mr. Daybell and Ms. Vallow Daybell have been in custody since the arrests.In October 2019, Tammy Daybell was found dead in her Idaho home. The authorities had initially said that she appeared to have died of natural causes, but her body was exhumed that December after the authorities began to question the circumstances of her death and its potential connection to the disappearances of Ms. Vallow Daybell’s children.At the start of the trial, prosecutors revealed in court that an autopsy determined that Ms. Daybell died of asphyxiation.The murders were the focus of a Lifetime movie, “Doomsday Mom: The Lori Vallow Story,” and a Netflix documentary series, “Sins of Our Mother.”Michael Levenson More