Aurelia Butler

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    Dead & Company Fans React to John Mayer’s “Guitar Face”

    For some fans of Dead & Company, which just finished its Final Tour, the faces made by John Mayer while performing are almost as memorable as the music.During the final show of Dead & Company’s so-called Final Tour on Sunday night, the crowd at Oracle Park in San Francisco swayed and bobbed like the current of a turning river.People in flower crowns grooved through the shimmying mass on the stadium’s field. A man in cowboy regalia cupped his hands around his ears and two-stepped to the beat. A woman in face glitter who gave her name as Honey Bee regaled strangers with the tale of how she came with a man she had met two days before, who happened to have an extra ticket. Other fans, who were not as lucky, danced on the sidewalk outside of the park.And onstage, the band’s lead guitarist, John Mayer, leaned back, sucked his lips inside his mouth and scrunched his eyes closed as he wailed on a guitar while playing the song “Althea.” Shortly after his impassioned solo, footage of it started spreading on Twitter.Mr. Mayer has been a member of Dead & Company, an offshoot of the Grateful Dead, since it formed in 2015. Though he is not the band’s face, the faces he has made while performing — which can cover the full spectrum of human emotion, from despair to sweet relief to sublime pleasure — have for some been almost as unforgettable as the music itself.Fans have made YouTube compilations, photo collages, a meme with a giant slug and niche Instagram accounts dedicated to Mr. Mayer’s expressive “guitar face,” which is not exactly an anomaly in the world of rock ’n’ roll. “I feel a little bit uncomfortable with people thinking that I made up the guitar face,” he told Rolling Stone in 2017. “God, wouldn’t it be great to go to the jungles of Borneo and give a tribe Fender Stratocasters and have them listen to Jimi Hendrix — but not show them Jimi Hendrix — and come back five years later and see if there’s any guitar face? I have a feeling there would be.”Mr. Mayer, through a representative, declined to comment for this article. The faces he made during the last leg of the Final Tour appeared to reflect the mood of its tie-dye-wearing fans, which alternated between grief and ecstasy as the music that seemingly would never stop finally did. (Dead & Company members have said the tour would be its last, but have not ruled out the possibility of a future for the band.)From far left, Mr. Mayer, Jay Lane, Bob Weir and Mickey Hart performing at the final show of Dead & Company’s Final Tour on July 16.Miikka Skaffari/Getty Images“The thing I love about him is he’s fully enjoying it — he’s in the music,” Tony Seigh, from Valparaiso, Ind., said of Mr. Mayer. “For those three, four hours, that guy is just in a different zone. And haters beware, he’s going to be making some very strange faces.”Mr. Seigh, 33, runs Holy Moly Mischief, which sells Dead-themed T-shirts, fanny packs and a bumper sticker that reads: “KEEP HONKING! I’m on my way to see JOHN MAYER and what’s left of the GRATEFUL DEAD.” Mr. Seigh, who used to work for Tesla, said he had seen Dead & Company 86 times, and he described Mr. Mayer’s faces using a word many others did: orgasmic.“It’s like a close-up of his face in an adult film,” he said. “There are moments where it’s like, Oh my gosh, something is happening to him. Like, is a ghost … massaging him?”Mr. Seigh, who was wearing a yellow “Always Grateful” hat that matched his yellow-painted toenails, added that Mr. Mayer’s expressions were one of many visual elements of live performances by Dead & Company, whose members have included Bob Weir, Oteil Burbridge, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Jeff Chimenti and Jay Lane.“Bob looks like a gray werewolf, and Oteil has, like, pro-wrestler face paint on, and Mickey looks like ET playing some drum thing,” he said. “And then you look at John, and he looks like pictures of old Catholic saints when they’re getting visited by an angel.”Clif Edwards, 60, a graphic designer from Sacramento whose hair was styled into a long gray ponytail, said that as a guitarist himself, he knew how playing could be a full-body experience. Of Mr. Mayer’s facial expressions, he said, “I approve.”“But it’s odd to watch,” added Mr. Edwards, who said he had seen the original Grateful Dead play some 340 times.A man in a tie-dye bucket hat who was standing near Mr. Edwards chimed in: “You know you’re in the thick of the jam when he’s got the face going.”Susan Marston, 58, a program manager from Boise, Idaho, said that unlike some longtime Dead fans who were skeptical when Mr. Mayer joined Dead & Company, she knew from the very beginning that he would bring something unique to the spinoff band.“There’s a lot of crusty people who said, ‘Oh, I can’t see John Mayer,” Ms. Marston said. “But if you knew anything about John Mayer prior to joining Dead & Company, then you knew the guy could freaking rip the blues.”“Sometimes his eyes are rolling back in his head,” added Ms. Marston, who was wearing a black top covered with photos of Mr. Mayer. “It elevates everybody because he’s so into what we’re into — it’s our synchronization with the band.” As she spoke, a man with a fake scarlet begonia tucked into his hat interrupted her to show off a sticker that featured Mr. Mayer’s face flashing a particularly euphoric expression and surrounded by a highly suggestive lyric from the song “The Weight.”A few Dead & Company fans said they had never noticed Mr. Mayer’s expressions. Kim Holzem, 52, from Three Rivers, Calif., scoffed in disbelief when her husband, Tim, mentioned that he had never registered the guitarist’s faces before.“Sometimes he looks like he’s in pain, other times he looks like he’s blissed out,” said Ms. Holzem, who saw Dead & Company three times last weekend in San Francisco with her husband and two teenage sons.Mr. Mayer, she added, “makes some weird-ass faces, but he’s still adorable.”Skyler McKinley, 31, a bar owner from Denver who was standing not far from the stage at the last show of the tour, said Mr. Mayer’s face was “inescapable” at live performances, in part because it is often “blown up, to skyscraper size” on massive screens. He added that Mr. Mayer had the “sex energy of a rock star” while performing, and compared his facial expressions to the dance moves of Mick Jagger.“At first I thought it was absurd, these lewd faces,” Mr. McKinley said. “But this is his aspect of communing with Grateful Dead music, the same way we all do, in a religious sense.”“I have no idea what my face looks like when I’m at one of these shows,” he added, “but I bet I look pretty ridiculous, too.” More

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    Jerry Bradley, Who Helped Remake Country Music, Dies at 83

    A longtime Nashville executive, he was the driving force behind “Wanted! The Outlaws,” the 1976 album that sold a million copies and shook up the status quo.Jerry Bradley, a record executive who apprenticed with two of the most storied producers in country music — his father, Owen Bradley, and the guitarist Chet Atkins — before challenging that legacy and shaking up the industry, died on Monday at his home in Mount Juliet, Tenn., near Nashville. He was 83.His death was announced by Elice Cuff-Campbell, senior director of media relations for BMI Nashville. No cause was given.Mr. Bradley was best known as the driving force behind “Wanted! The Outlaws,” the groundbreaking 1976 compilation featuring music by Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Tompall Glaser and Mr. Jennings’s wife, Jessi Colter.Rowdy and irreverent, the record was an out-of-left-field success, certified by the Recording Industry Association of America as the first million-selling album in the history of country music. It also ruffled the Nashville status quo, posing a threat to the hegemony of the smooth Nashville Sound associated with the work of Mr. Bradley’s father and Mr. Atkins.The term “outlaw” had been gaining traction in country circles since the early 1970s, when the publicist Hazel Smith and others started using it to describe the do-it-yourself, anti-establishment ethos of Mr. Nelson and Mr. Jennings. But it was Jerry Bradley, then head of the Nashville division of RCA Records, who had the foresight to package the emerging outlaw aesthetic and promote it to a wider public.That included modeling the album’s cover after a Western-style “most wanted” poster sporting mug shots of the four singers on the record. And in a nod to the outlaw movement’s younger, more rock-oriented audience, Mr. Bradley enlisted the Rolling Stone journalist Chet Flippo to write the liner notes.“The appearance and the marketing of the album were extremely important in making Nashville look hip for the first time,” Mr. Flippo said in discussing Mr. Bradley’s achievement in a segment of the 2003 BBC documentary series “Lost Highway: The Story of Country Music.”Mr. Bradley was the driving force behind “Wanted! The Outlaws,” which the Recording Industry Association of America certified as the first million-selling album in the history of country music.Building on the unprecedented success of “Wanted!,” Mr. Bradley would go on to sign future superstars like Ronnie Milsap, Eddie Rabbitt and the band Alabama during his nine-year tenure at RCA. Each of those acts would release numerous No. 1 hits for the label while reinvigorating the country airwaves with more wide-ranging pop, rock and soul sensibilities.Mr. Bradley also directed the careers of several established country stars while at RCA. He produced chart-topping late-1970s hits for Charley Pride and supervised the making of “Here You Come Again” (1977), Dolly Parton’s first million-selling album. He was even involved in Elvis Presley’s mid-’70s return to the top of the country charts after an almost 20-year absence, re-establishing his connection with his core country audience shortly before his death.“I wasn’t so much a musical leader,” Mr. Bradley said, assessing his legacy in an interview commemorating his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2019. “I was more of a coach.”Jerry Owen Bradley was born in Nashville on Jan. 30, 1940, one of two children of William Bradley, known as Owen, and Mary (Franklin) Bradley, known as Katherine. His father, a former orchestra leader, became one of the chief architects of the Nashville Sound through his work as a producer for the likes of Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn. His mother was a homemaker.Jerry graduated from Hillsboro High School and as a teenager raced sports cars at the Nashville speedway.In the early 1960s, after attending Peabody College, he began working at Forest Hills Music, the family’s music publishing company. He also started spending time at the Bradley’s Barn recording studio, where, under the tutelage of his father and his Uncle Harold (both are also members of the Country Music Hall of Fame), he observed sessions by the likes of Joan Baez, Brenda Lee and Dinah Shore and on occasion contributed to them.In 1970, eager to forge his own path in the music business, Mr. Bradley went to work for Chet Atkins at RCA, where he became a liaison with the label’s headquarters in New York. Three years later, when cancer curtailed Mr. Atkins’s activities, Mr. Bradley succeeded him as head of RCA’s Nashville operations.Mr. Bradley left RCA in 1982 and, after a brief hiatus, became general manager of the Opryland Music Group, which had recently acquired Acuff-Rose, the music publisher whose holdings included the catalogs of luminaries like Hank Williams, Roy Orbison and the Everly Brothers. Not one to rest on his laurels, Mr. Bradley recruited a new generation of songwriters, including Kenny Chesney, before his retirement in 2002.Mr. Bradley in 2019, the year he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.Donn Jones/CMAA longtime board member of the Country Music Association, Mr. Bradley played a crucial role in the development of the CMA Music Festival. Held annually in Nashville since the early 1970s (when it was called Fan Fair), the event showcases some 400 artists performing for 100,000 or so fans over four days.Mr. Bradley is survived by a daughter, Leigh Jankiv; a son, Clay; five grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; and a sister, Patsy Bradley. Connie (Darnell) Bradley, his wife of 42 years and a prominent executive in the country music industry, died in 2021. His marriage to Gwynn Hastings Kellam, the mother of his children, ended in divorce; she died in 2001.“Greatness doesn’t come through blood; it is achieved through action and invention,” Kyle Young, chief executive of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, said, reflecting on Mr. Bradley’s entrepreneurship at the Bradley Hall of Fame induction.“Jerry Bradley had his father, Owen, and his uncle, Harold, as north stars,” Mr. Young went on. “He understood that he could not imitate or reproduce their gifts or their manners. He would have to find his own path.” More

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    Steve Pieters, Pastor Who Spoke of AIDS in Famed Interview, Dies at 70

    He had the disease and was interviewed on the PTL network in 1985 by Tammy Faye Bakker, a broadcast that was said to have changed minds and hearts.In 1985, when fear and homophobia were still driving much of the conversation surrounding AIDS, the Rev. A. Stephen Pieters, a gay pastor who had the disease, was a decidedly different voice.That May, at the St. Augustine by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica, Calif., presiding at a mass for people with AIDS attended by hundreds, he declared: “Rather than feel deserted by God, I have never been more sure of God’s love for me. God did not give me this disease. God is with me in this disease.”That September, he spoke to The Los Angeles Times about the ostracism people with AIDS were encountering.“Some people ask, ‘How is it different from cancer?’” he said. “Well, most people with cancer aren’t asked not to use the bathroom in a friend’s house or served dinner on paper plates. I’ve had more meals on paper plates in the last year than I’ve had in my whole life.”One appearance he made that year had a particularly profound impact: In November 1985 he was interviewed by Tammy Faye Bakker on the PTL (Praise the Lord) television network, which reached millions of Christian viewers, most of them conservative.It was a sympathetic interview in which Mr. Pieters spoke forthrightly about being gay and about his illness, and Ms. Bakker (who was then married to the televangelist Jim Bakker) urged her audience to be governed by compassion rather than intolerance and fear.“How sad,” she said, “that we as Christians, who are to be the salt of the earth, and we who are supposed to be able to love everyone, are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care.”The PTL network had an audience of millions, and in the years since, that interview has been credited with helping to change at least some viewers’ perceptions of gay people, AIDS and faith. Some televangelists had been implying or stating outright that AIDS was divine retribution for homosexuality. Ms. Bakker (who after a divorce and remarriage was later known as Tammy Faye Messner) called on Christians to instead show empathy.Among those impressed with her stand, many years later, was the actress Jessica Chastain, who won an Oscar last year for her role as Ms. Bakker in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” in which the interview with Mr. Pieters, portrayed by Randy Havens, was a pivotal scene. (A stage musical, “Tammy Faye,” which opened last year in London, also incorporated the 1985 interview.)“That interview was why I needed to make the movie,” Ms. Chastain told Variety at the movie’s New York premiere in 2021. “It was rebellious and brave and courageous and badass. I’m 100 percent convinced that there were people — conservative Christians watching at home — who realized that they had judged their family members unlovingly. I’m convinced that that interview saved families and saved lives.”If Ms. Bakker defied expectations with that interview, Mr. Pieters long defied AIDS, surviving for decades despite repeated health struggles. He died on July 8 at a hospital in Glendale, Calif., near Los Angeles. He was 70.His spokesman, Harlan Boll, said the cause was a sepsis infection.Mr. Pieters, who had continued his ministry and since 1994 had performed with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, was looking forward to the publication next year of his book, “Love Is Greater Than AIDS: A Memoir of Survival, Healing, and Hope.” In it, he said he was often asked why he thought he survived AIDS when so many others didn’t.“Whatever the reason,” he wrote, “I feel deeply grateful to be alive. So many gay men of my generation did not get to grow old. What a privilege to have reached the age of 70, still dancing with joy.”Albert Stephen Pieters was born on Aug. 2, 1952, in Lawrence, Mass. His father, Richard, was a mathematics teacher and wrestling coach at Phillips Academy, and his mother, Norma (Kenfield) Pieters, was a tax accountant and homemaker.“I knew that I was different from the time that I was about 3,” Mr. Pieters told Ms. Bakker in the 1985 interview, “and I grew up feeling like I didn’t quite fit in.”When he was a teenager, he said, he recognized that he was gay and talked to his pastor at a Congregational church about it.“He was freaked out,” he said. “He told me, ‘Don’t tell anybody; never say anything to anybody about it.’”He said that after graduating from Northwestern University in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in speech, he joined the Metropolitan Community Church in Chicago and felt called to a ministry focused on gay people, that church’s main audience. He earned a master of divinity degree at McCormick Theological Seminary in 1979, then became pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church of Hartford, Conn., before moving to Los Angeles in the early 1980s. There he took a post at the Metropolitan Community Church of North Hollywood and, in 1984, received a diagnosis of AIDS, although he had been showing symptoms as early as 1982.He faced numerous health problems over the years, but just being around to face them was something of a victory: He said he’d been told in 1984 that he wouldn’t live out that year. The next year he spoke before a task force on AIDS in Los Angeles convened by Mayor Tom Bradley and Ed Edelman, a county supervisor, urging officials not to write off those who had already been diagnosed.“If I had succumbed to the hopelessness I constantly hear about AIDS,” he said, “I might have given up and not lived to see 1985.”Mr. Pieters is survived by a brother.At the 2021 opening of “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” Mr. Pieters commented on the impact of his 1985 interview.“I’ve had so many people over the years come up to me and say, ‘I saw your interview live, because my mother always had PTL on, and it changed my life because I realized I could be gay and Christian at the same time,’” he said. “Or, ‘It changed my life because I realized that AIDS was a reality, and I had to start taking care of myself.’”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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    ‘Oppenheimer’ Review: A Man for Our Time

    Christopher Nolan’s complex, vivid portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” is a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms.“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s staggering film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” condenses a titanic shift in consciousness into three haunted hours. A drama about genius, hubris and error, both individual and collective, it brilliantly charts the turbulent life of the American theoretical physicist who helped research and develop the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II — cataclysms that helped usher in our human-dominated age.The movie is based on “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the authoritative 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Written and directed by Nolan, the film borrows liberally from the book as it surveys Oppenheimer’s life, including his role in the Manhattan Engineer District, better known as the Manhattan Project. He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico, not far from a cabin that Oppenheimer had, he and many other of the era’s most dazzling scientific minds puzzled through how to harness nuclear reactions for the weapons that killed tens of thousands instantly, ending the war in the Pacific.The atomic bomb and what it wrought define Oppenheimer’s legacy and also shape this film. Nolan goes deep and long on the building of the bomb, a fascinating and appalling process, but he doesn’t restage the attacks; there are no documentary images of the dead or panoramas of cities in ashes, decisions that read as his ethical absolutes. The horror of the bombings, the magnitude of the suffering they caused and the arms race that followed suffuse the film. “Oppenheimer” is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan’s filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates.The story tracks Oppenheimer — played with feverish intensity by Cillian Murphy — across decades, starting in the 1920s with him as a young adult and continuing until his hair grays. The film touches on personal and professional milestones, including his work on the bomb, the controversies that dogged him, the anti-Communist attacks that nearly ruined him, as well as the friendships and romances that helped sustain yet also troubled him. He has an affair with a political firebrand named Jean Tatlock (a vibrant Florence Pugh), and later weds a seductive boozer, Kitty Harrison (Emily Blunt, in a slow-building turn), who accompanies him to Los Alamos, where she gives birth to their second child.It’s a dense, event-filled story that Nolan — who’s long embraced the plasticity of the film medium — has given a complex structure, which he parcels into revealing sections. Most are in lush color; others in high-contrast black and white. These sections are arranged in strands that wind together for a shape that brings to mind the double helix of DNA. To signal his conceit, he stamps the film with the words “fission” (a splitting into parts) and “fusion” (a merging of elements); Nolan being Nolan, he further complicates the film by recurrently kinking up the overarching chronology — it is a lot.It also isn’t a story that builds gradually; rather, Nolan abruptly tosses you into the whirl of Oppenheimer’s life with vivid scenes of him during different periods in his life. In rapid succession the watchful older Oppie (as his intimates call him) and his younger counterpart flicker onscreen before the story briefly lands in the 1920s, where he’s an anguished student tormented by fiery, apocalyptic visions. He suffers; he also reads T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” drops a needle on Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and stands before a Picasso painting, defining works of an age in which physics folded space and time into space-time.This fast pace and narrative fragmentation continue as Nolan fills in this Cubistic portrait, crosses and recrosses continents and ushers in armies of characters, including Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), a physicist who played a role in the Manhattan Project. Nolan has loaded the movie with familiar faces — Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Gary Oldman — some distracting. It took me a while to accept the director Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, the theoretical physicist known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” and I still don’t know why Rami Malek shows up in a minor part other than he’s yet another known commodity.As Oppenheimer comes into focus so does the world. In 1920s Germany, he learns quantum physics; the next decade he’s at Berkeley teaching, bouncing off other young geniuses and building a center for the study of quantum physics. Nolan makes the era’s intellectual excitement palpable — Einstein published his theory of general relativity in 1915 — and, as you would expect, there’s a great deal of scientific debate and chalkboards filled with mystifying calculations, most of which Nolan translates fairly comprehensibly. One of the film’s pleasures is experiencing by proxy the kinetic excitement of intellectual discourse.It’s at Berkeley that the trajectory of Oppenheimer’s life dramatically shifts, after news breaks that Germany has invaded Poland. By that point, he has become friends with Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), a physicist who invented a particle accelerator, the cyclotron, and who plays an instrumental role in the Manhattan Project. It’s also at Berkeley that Oppenheimer meets the project’s military head, Leslie Groves (a predictably good Damon), who makes him Los Alamos’s director, despite the leftist causes he supported — among them, the fight against fascism during the Spanish Civil War — and some of his associations, including with Communist Party members like his brother, Frank (Dylan Arnold).Nolan is one of the few contemporary filmmakers operating at this ambitious scale, both thematically and technically. Working with his superb cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan has shot in 65-millimeter film (which is projected in 70-millimeter), a format that he’s used before to create a sense of cinematic monumentality. The results can be immersive, though at times clobbering, particularly when the wow of his spectacle has proved more substantial and coherent than his storytelling. In “Oppenheimer,” though, as in “Dunkirk” (2017), he uses the format to convey the magnitude of a world-defining event; here, it also closes the distance between you and Oppenheimer, whose face becomes both vista and mirror.The film’s virtuosity is evident in every frame, but this is virtuosity without self-aggrandizement. Big subjects can turn even well-intended filmmakers into show-offs, to the point that they upstage the history they seek to do justice to. Nolan avoids that trap by insistently putting Oppenheimer into a larger context, notably with the black-and-white portions. One section turns on a politically motivated security clearance hearing in 1954, a witch hunt that damaged his reputation; the second follows the 1959 confirmation for Lewis Strauss (a mesmerizing, near-unrecognizable Downey), a former chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission who was nominated for a cabinet position.Nolan integrates these black-and-white sections with the color ones, using scenes from the hearing and the confirmation — Strauss’s role in the hearing and his relationship with Oppenheimer directly affected the confirmation’s outcome — to create a dialectical synthesis. One of the most effective examples of this approach illuminates how Oppenheimer and other Jewish project scientists, some of whom were refugees from Nazi Germany, saw their work in stark, existential terms. Yet Oppenheimer’s genius, his credentials, international reputation and wartime service to the United States government cannot save him from political gamesmanship, the vanity of petty men and the naked antisemitism of the Red scare.These black-and-white sequences define the last third of “Oppenheimer.” They can seem overlong, and at times in this part of the film it feels as if Nolan is becoming too swept up in the trials that America’s most famous physicist experienced. Instead, it is here that the film’s complexities and all its many fragments finally converge as Nolan puts the finishing touches on his portrait of a man who contributed to an age of transformational scientific discovery, who personified the intersection of science and politics, including in his role as a Communist boogeyman, who was transformed by his role in the creation of weapons of mass destruction and soon after raised the alarm about the dangers of nuclear war.François Truffaut once wrote that “war films, even pacifist, even the best, willingly or not, glorify war and render it in some way attractive.” This, I think, gets at why Nolan refuses to show the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, world-defining events that eventually killed an estimated 100,000 to upward of 200,000 souls. You do, though, see Oppenheimer watch the first test bomb and, critically, you also hear the famous words that he said crossed his mind as the mushroom cloud rose: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” As Nolan reminds you, the world quickly moved on from the horrors of the war to embrace the bomb. Now we, too, have become death, the destroyers of worlds.OppenheimerRated R for disturbing images, and adult language and behavior. Running time: 3 hours. In theaters. More

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    Popcast (Deluxe): Fans Misbehaving at Concerts, and Pinkydoll’s NPC TikTok

    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:The recent scourge of concertgoers throwing things at pop stars onstage and how Adele, Harry Styles, Bebe Rexha, Drake and others have responded; plus the ways in which the stage/crowd barrier has become more porous in recent years, in both directionsThe TikTok streamer Pinkydoll, who has honed an NPC-style of performance that has been earning her thousands of viewers, and thousands of dollarsNew songs from Troye Sivan and Militarie Gun (as performed by Post Malone)Whether there’s still a Mason-Dixon line divide in pop music consumption, especially as it relates to hip-hop and countrySnack 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. More

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    Barbie: Reviews of Greta Gerwig, Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling

    Some critics viewed the highly-anticipated movie as satirically capitalistic, while others saw it as capitalistically satirical.As reviews for “Barbie” rolled out ahead of its weekend opening, a critical divide emerged.Some thought that Greta Gerwig, the acclaimed director of “Lady Bird” and “Little Women,” had met the expectations for a more subversive take on the 11.5-inch Mattel phenomenon. They thought Gerwig’s script, which she collaborated on with her partner, Noah Baumbach, succeeded in acknowledging the criticisms that the Barbie brand has received over the years — including unrealistic representations of women’s bodies and, up until recent years, a lack of diversity in its collection — while presenting a comedy that leans into the delightful weirdness of the Barbie universe. Others felt that the director did not go far enough in dinging her corporate sponsors, keeping the critiques of consumerism and female beauty standards at surface level.Critics tended to be unified in their praise of the movie’s stars, however, celebrating Margot Robbie’s surprising emotional depth as the so-called stereotypical Barbie who embarks on an eye-opening journey outside of the meticulously manufactured dolls’ world, as well as Ryan Gosling’s deadpan comedy as a Ken who delights in his discovery of the patriarchy.Read on for some highlights.‘Barbie’ May Be the Most Subversive Blockbuster of the 21st Century [Rolling Stone]The movie does more than avoid delivering a two-hour commercial for Mattel, David Fear writes, suggesting that the movie could be “the most subversive blockbuster of the 21st century to date.”“This is a saga of self-realization, filtered through both the spirit of free play and the sense that it’s not all fun and games in the real world — a doll’s story that continually drifts into the territory of ‘A Doll’s House,’” Fear writes. “This is a movie that wants to have its Dreamhouse and burn it down to the ground, too.”We Shouldn’t Have to Grade Barbie on a Curve [Vulture]In one of the most critical reviews of the movie’s approach to gender politics, Alison Willmore writes that “it’s not a rebuke of corporatized feminism so much as an update,” noting “a streak of defensiveness to ‘Barbie,’ as though it’s trying to anticipate and acknowledge any critiques lodged against it before they’re made.”“To be a film fan these days is to be aware that franchises and cinematic universes and remakes and other adaptations of old IP have become black holes that swallow artists, leaving you to desperately hope they might emerge with the rare project that, even though it comes from constrictive confines, still feels like it was made by a person,” she writes. “‘Barbie’ definitely was. But the trouble with trying to sneak subversive ideas into a project so inherently compromised is that, rather than get away with something, you might just create a new way for a brand to sell itself.”There are limits to how much dimension even Greta Gerwig can give this branded material [New York Times]Manohla Dargis, the chief film critic for The Times, offers high praise to Gerwig as a director, writing that her “directorial command is so fluent she seems born to filmmaking,” but she asserts that the movie largely dodged the “thorny contradictions and the criticisms that cling to the doll.”“While Gerwig does slip in a few glints of critique — as when a teenage girl accuses Barbie of promoting consumerism, shortly before she pals up with our heroine — these feel more like mere winks at the adults in the audience than anything else,” Dargis writes.A doll’s life is richly, unexpectedly imagined by Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie [The Chicago Tribune]“Any $145 million studio movie based on a doll, accessories sold separately, no doubt comes with a few restrictions,” Michael Phillips writes. “And yet this one actually feels spontaneous, and fun.” Giving the film 3.5 starts out of 4, he contends that Mattel “could have played things far more safely” and that “a lot of the biggest laughs in ‘Barbie’ come at Mattel’s expense.”Ryan Gosling is plastic fantastic in ragged doll comedy [The Guardian]Peter Bradshaw was among the critics who felt that Gosling steals the show with Barbie herself reduced to the “bland comic foil.” He was in the more cynical camp of reviewers when it came to the film’s self-awareness, calling the film “entertaining and amiable, but with a softcore pulling of punches: lightly ironised, celebratory nostalgia for a toy that still exists right now.”Welcome to Greta Gerwig’s fiercely funny, feminist Dreamhouse [Entertainment Weekly]Describing the movie as “packed with winking one-liners,” Devan Coggan acknowledges the praise of Gosling but contends that Robbie “remains the real star.”“Physically, the blonde Australian actress already looks like she stepped out of a Mattel box (something the film itself plays on during one particular gag), but she gives an impressively transformative performance,” she writes, “moving her arms and joints like they’re actually made of plastic. Robbie has brought a manic physicality to previous films including ‘Babylon’ and ‘Birds of Prey,’ but she now embraces physical comedy to the max.”Greta Gerwig’s World of Plastic Is Fantastic [Collider]Ross Bonaime writes that “Barbie” could have been “little more than a toy ad,” but it instead became an “existential look at the difficulties of being a woman, the terrifying nature of life in general, the understanding that trying to be perfect is absurd, while also encapsulating everything that Barbie has meant to people — both good and bad.”Calling Gerwig’s work behind the camera “vibrant and bold,” Bonaime also praises the narrative work of the popstar-packed soundtrack, which includes songs from Lizzo, Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice.Margot Robbie doll-ivers [Los Angeles Times]Describing the film as a “conceptually playful, sartorially dazzling comic fantasy,” Justin Chang suggests that “Barbie” succeeds in making the arguments both for Barbie haters and Barbie lovers.“Gerwig has conceived ‘Barbie’ as a bubble-gum emulsion of silliness and sophistication, a picture that both promotes and deconstructs its own brand,” he writes. “It doesn’t just mean to renew the endless ‘Barbie: good or bad?’ debate. It wants to enact that debate, to vigorously argue both positions for the better part of two fast-moving, furiously multitasking hours.” More

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    Can’t Decide Whether to See ‘Barbie,’ ‘Oppenheimer’ or Both? Our Barbenheimer Quiz Can Help.

    Barbenheimer is upon us, and moviegoers must decide between two chisel-cheeked midcentury marvels: “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s three-hour biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb,” or “Barbie,” Greta Gerwig’s Day-Glo feminist-magical realist take on Mattel IP. While box office trackers say “Barbie” is likely to far outpace Oppie, at least 40,000 fans have already bought tickets for both. Should you opt for a head-snap of a double feature? Or see just one – and which one, at that? Answer these five questions to find out if you’re a Barbie girl, an Oppie nerd or a bona fide Barbenheimie.3 of 5Warner Bros. PicturesIs there an opposite-gender character who serves as a lesson on sexism? Oh boy, is there! In “Oppenheimer,” it’s one female scientist, played by Olivia Thirlby. In “Barbie,” it is, of course, just Ken. (A lot of Kens, who belatedly learn about the patriarchy.) More

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    Ghibli Park Celebrates “Totoro” And Other Miyazaki Movies

    One of our first infractions at Ghibli Park was hoisting our 1-year-old onto the polyester tummy of a woodland spirit creature. Another was letting him slip under a barricade and shelter inside a furry bus with cat eyes for headlights.“He’s not following the protocol,” I told my wife, as the staff overseeing the cat-bus play zone looked on anxiously.“He’s making a mockery of it,” she said. But we didn’t stop him.Ghibli Park, which opened in November outside Nagoya, Japan, pays homage to the eccentric, enchanting films of Studio Ghibli, a company co-founded in the 1980s by the director Hayao Miyazaki. We took our two toddlers there because their favorite movie is “My Neighbor Totoro,” a beloved 1988 Miyazaki film starring the spirit creature and its cat-bus sidekick.As parents, we thought it would be fun for our boys, 3 and 1, to experience a “Totoro” immersion. And as longtime Ghibli fans, we were keen to see what the place looked like.Ghibli Park has said that a clock tower on the premises was influenced by the “late 19th century sci-fi architecture” that features in some Ghibli movies.Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesThe park includes a recreation of an antiques shop that features in the 1995 Ghibli film “Whisper of the Heart.”Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesAmerican visitors may wonder how Ghibli Park compares with Disney World. It doesn’t really. It feels much lower-key and has no rides, exotic animals, jumbo turkey legs or animatronic American presidents, among other things. The main point is to wander around soaking up Miyazaki vibes.Also, the park is not finished. Grafted onto an existing municipal park, it opened late last year, but as of early July only three of five planned ticketed sites were open. When I booked for a June visit, tickets to only one of those sites — a building called “Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse” — were available to international visitors reserving through the park’s website. (It was possible to book the other two sites through Japanese travel agencies, but I only learned that much later, from a Japanese speaker.)Susan Napier, a biographer of Mr. Miyazaki at Tufts University who visited Ghibli Park in April, told me that it had struck her as a “work in progress.” She also described the ticketing process, which has included lotteries and long online queues, as “byzantine and not fun.”Maybe this is why Studio Ghibli itself seems ambivalent about promoting Ghibli Park. In Japan, it has run advertisements advising fans to “take your time” visiting.A hypothetical theme park celebrating Nintendo or Pokemon, two other iconic Japanese creative brands, would almost certainly feel more Disney World-like, said Matt Alt, the author of the 2021 book “Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World.” But he added that the park’s diffuse layout and low-key marketing were in character for a studio co-founded by Mr. Miyazaki, a director who has never hidden his anticapitalist politics.Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse is the size of a modest mall or sports arena, with replicas of structures from the films, and long lines to get close to them. Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesGhibli Park is not a place to “turn your brain off,” Mr. Alt told me. “It demands a level of intellectual engagement that most parks do not.” When I booked our visit, in March, a bit of mental stimulation sounded nice. I imagined wandering the grounds in dappled sunlight, musing on Mr. Miyazaki’s cinematic oeuvre as our boys paused to collect acorns — just as the two sisters who star in “Totoro” do. (The boys, who are Anglo-American, love the acorn scenes so much that they learned the Japanese word for the nut, donguri, before the English one.)In reality, we arrived just before our three-hour afternoon visiting slot at Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse, and our intellectual capacity was limited. Our parental nerves were fraying from the hourlong journey from Nagoya and the general struggle of moving tiny, diapered humans around an unfamiliar place.Our morning in Nagoya had already been tarnished by a 4 a.m. wake up and some public displays of unchecked toddler emotion. On the grounds of the 17th century Nagoya Castle, for example, our 3-year-old, nicknamed T, burst into tears when he learned that the castle was closed for renovation.To break his mood, we took the emergency measure of buying him and his brother, nicknamed B, ice cream cones as a second breakfast. That stopped the crying, but our mounting fatigue had raised the stakes for our visit to Ghibli Park. Would the trip to meet our favorite magical creatures make all the time, money and energy that it entailed worthwhile?The park lets visitors interact with their favorite characters, including Marnie from “When Marnie Was There.”Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesA visitor catches Sheeta from “Castle in the Sky.”Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesGhibli Park may see a bump in domestic tourism this summer because Mr. Miyazaki released a new film in Japan this month. But, for my family, making a pilgrimage there was all about seeing Totoro and the cat bus.“Totoro” follows the two sisters, Mei, 4, and Satsuki, 10, as they settle into a spooky house in the Japanese countryside with their father, an archaeologist. Their mother is stuck in a nearby sanitarium, suffering from an undisclosed illness.After Mei meets Totoro by stumbling into its lair inside a giant camphor tree (and falls asleep on its tummy), she and her sister encounter the creature a few more times and learn more about its magical powers. Eventually, as their mother’s condition appears to worsen, they call in some very important favors from Totoro and the wild-eyed cat bus.Professor Napier told me that “Totoro” illustrates an aesthetic that runs through the Ghibli catalog, and which tends to be more ambiguous and subtle than Disney’s. She described it as “the immersive, low-key magic of being a human being connected with other things.”“It’s a world that you like,” Professor Napier, who is writing a book comparing Ghibli with Disney, said of Mr. Miyazaki’s animated universe. “But it’s also full of the unexpected and complex, and sometimes scary.”Totoro and the cat bus can indeed be a little frightening, especially when they flash their teeth. But the movie is much sweeter than it is scary. It’s set in “a time before television,” as Mr. Miyazaki once told an interviewer, and infused with sublime, hand-drawn pastoral imagery — pastel sunsets, a snail crawling up a plant stalk — that makes you want to be a kid growing up in rural idyll.The face of the cat bus, a magical creature that figures in the 1988 Ghibli film “My Neighbor Totoro.”Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesNo Face, a character from the Oscar-winning 2001 Ghibli film “Spirited Away,” sits in a recreation of a train car.Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesThe film also celebrates a child’s sense of wonder. Mr. Miyazaki created “Totoro” with kids in mind — he said he hoped it would make them want to pick acorns — and many critics have seen it as an ode to childhood innocence. It’s no accident that Totoro and the cat bus are visible only to the sisters, not adults.Maybe this is why I still cry every time I watch the final credits roll: “Totoro” reminds me that my boys will never be this young or innocent again.In our Seoul apartment, they play with Totoro and cat-bus dolls, sleep in Totoro pajamas and sit on a Totoro potty. Their fandom is so intense that my mother-in-law bought us tickets to a “Totoro” stage adaptation at the Barbican Theater during our last trip to London.In Nagoya, before we left for Ghibli Park, B demonstrated his enthusiasm by bringing a plastic cat bus to the hotel buffet — and feeding it a breakfast of whipped cream. He also showed the toy to a man in a ninja costume who posed for a selfie with us outside the castle.The ninja cracked a knowing smile, indicating that he, too, was a “Totoro” fan. “Cat bus,” he said in Japanese, as if the phrase were a code word.In Children’s Town, a fuzzy Totoro lies sleeping in its carpeted lair.Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesA robot from the Studio Ghibli movie “Laputa: Castle in the Sky”Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesGhibli Park lies in Nagakute, a small city in the hills outside Nagoya, a few stops down a highway from an Ikea. There’s no Ghibli entrance gate, exactly; you just wander into an unremarkable municipal park and look around for the Ghibli sites for which you have reserved tickets months in advance.The Grand Warehouse is a sleek, multistory building the size of a modest mall or sports arena, with plenty of sunshine streaming in through skylights. It sits near a grassy lawn, an ice rink and some future Ghibli sites that are under construction.Inside, there are replicas of structures from the films, including the towering bathhouse from the Oscar-winning 2001 film “Spirited Away,” and dozens of made-for-Instagram tableaux of Ghibli scenes and props.The attention to detail is striking. In an area devoted to the Ghibli film “Arietty,” I saw a giant drop of plastic dew affixed to a giant fake flower, for example. Nearby was an intricately detailed replica of the castle from “Howl’s Moving Castle,” my older son’s favorite Miyazaki film after “Totoro.”“The castle, daddy!” Three-year-old T said with delight. At last, a Japanese castle that didn’t make him cry.The problem was that most of the tableaux were mobbed with Ghibli fans — and lines that we didn’t have time to stand in with restless toddlers. The building’s only restaurant was similarly oversubscribed. We eventually found a kiosk advertising cake, but the staff said that the cake had run out.Yubaba, a character from “Spirited Away,” sits at a wooden desk.Andrew Faulk for The New York Times After about an hour of canvassing the warehouse, we headed for “Children’s Town,” a play area devoted to scenes from “Totoro” and other Ghibli films.Children’s Town has three rooms. The first is a labyrinth combining scenes from more Ghibli films than I could count: The orange train from “Laputa: Castle in the Sky,” the bakery from “Kiki’s Delivery Service” and so on. The boys loved it, even if daddy thwacked his head following them through a crawl space.The other rooms were devoted to “Totoro” and had mercifully higher ceilings. There was the house where Mei and Satsuki live with their dad. Over there was the camphor tree, where a giant Totoro lay regally beside some oversize donguri. And in the far corner sat the majestic, furry cat bus.It all looked fun, kid-friendly and immersive — almost, in fact, like something you’d find at Disney World. The boys were in heaven.“Toe-toe-row! Toe-toe-row!” B said, standing inside the tree, with the same intonation as the movie’s rousing, marching-band-style theme song.“Hey, Totoro!” said T, who had been carefully inspecting the giant acorns. “Wake up!”But even though Children’s Town seemed designed to nurture the child’s sense of wonder that Mr. Miyazaki celebrates in his movies, the warehouse staff informed us of several rules that dampened the vibe. Notably, it was forbidden to put children on Totoro’s plush tummy, or to allow them to play inside the cat bus zone for longer than three minutes — even if the zone was not crowded, which it wasn’t.The staff members were friendly, but their rules made little sense for kids as small as ours. I wondered if that was another sign that Ghibli Park was still a bit rough around the edges. Take your time visiting, as the studio says.We grudgingly agreed to the no-tummy policy, but B wished to play nowhere else but inside the cat bus. We were with him. We had spent several months — a good chunk of his life! — waiting for this moment.The staff, sensing our resolve, suggested a compromise. A special time extension could be granted under the circumstances, they said. Rather than the usual three minutes, our B could have six.Make that nine. Then 12. Et cetera. At 5 p.m., he was among last, and smallest, Ghibli fans to leave the building.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023. More