Aurelia Butler

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    A Finnish Official Plays the Cello to Support Ukraine, Irking Russia

    Anders Adlercreutz’s recording of a patriotic Ukrainian song was widely circulated online, and prompted a response from Moscow.Anders Adlercreutz, Finland’s minister for European affairs, has long been a critic of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, denouncing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for leading a “crazy war” and calling on Western governments to send tanks to Kyiv.On Sunday, Mr. Adlercreutz tried a different tactic: he posted a video of himself on social media playing a patriotic Ukrainian song on the cello to mark the conflict’s 500th day. The video also shows images of bombed buildings, juxtaposed with phrases like “unspeakable aggression,” as well as hopeful symbols like sunflower fields and a dove in flight.500 days of unprovoked aggression, countless war crimes, lost futures – but also of encouraging success. Ukraine fights for its independence, but also for Europe’s. Finland stands by you, today and tomorrow.В пам’ять про тих, хто віддав своє життя за свободу. pic.twitter.com/P5D9WpPH39— Anders Adlercreutz (@adleande) July 9, 2023
    “I wanted to provide comfort to Ukrainians here in Finland and in other countries,” Mr. Adlercreutz said in an interview, “and to make clear that they are not ignored, and their culture, their music and their language is not forgotten.”To his surprise, the video garnered more than a million views across a variety of platforms, and he received a flood of comments from Ukrainians moved by the performance.Russian officials tried to portray the video as part of an effort by Western countries to sway public opinion ahead of a NATO meeting this week that was attended by President Biden and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. (Finland became the alliance’s 31st member state in April, a strategic defeat for Mr. Putin.)In a television appearance this week, Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry, denounced the NATO meeting as a “colorful performance” that was “in the worst traditions of Western manipulation,” according to Russian news reports. She went on to say that “Finnish government ministers are recording cello solos in support of Ukraine.” Russia has in recent months been highly critical of Finland for joining NATO, saying it has “forfeited its independence.”The video features the Ukrainian song “The Red Viburnum in the Meadow,” written during World War I, which has long been associated with Ukraine’s fight for independence.Since the invasion, the song has emerged as a popular anthem for the Ukrainian cause. A few days into the war, the Ukrainian musician Andriy Khlyvnyuk, from the band Boombox, recorded a defiant rendition with a rifle slung across his chest.Last year, Pink Floyd released a reworked version of the song, featuring Mr. Khlyvnyuk, to raise money for the people of Ukraine, its first new track in almost three decades.Since the invasion, Ukrainians have used music to bring attention to suffering, following in a tradition of impromptu performances by ordinary citizens in war zones, in the Balkans, Syria and elsewhere. A cellist last year performed Bach in the center of a deserted street in Kharkiv, with the blown-out windows of the regional police headquarters behind him.Mr. Adlercreutz, who began studying cello as an 11-year-old, said he had been inspired by Ukrainian musicians, including Mr. Khlyvnyuk. He recorded “The Red Viburnum in the Meadow” in February at the Parliament House in Helsinki, playing different musical lines that he later mixed together.He said it was important to use culture to bring attention to Ukraine.“I want to send the message to Ukrainians that we see you, we recognize you, we support you, and we don’t forget where you are coming from and what you are going through,” he said. “We can easily forget the war, but this is a message that we really have to repeat.” More

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    Popcast (Deluxe): Britney Spears’s Wembanyama Run-In and Taylor Swift’s ‘Revenge’

    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 unfortunate incident between the pop queen Britney Spears and soon-to-be N.B.A. rookie sensation Victor WembanyamaTaylor Swift’s rerecording of her 2010 album “Speak Now,” an altered lyric and ongoing fan chatter about her songs’ true targetsThe new No. 1 album from Lil Uzi Vert, “Pink Tape”The latest Wes Anderson film, “Asteroid City”New songs from NewJeans and Rylo RodriguezSnack 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 [email protected]. More

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    A Revival of ‘The Who’s Tommy’ Seeks a New Generation of Followers

    In staging the storied rock opera in Chicago, its creators argue that the show’s exploration of celebrity worship and childhood trauma is more relevant than ever.Thirty years ago, when the Who’s 1969 concept album “Tommy” was transformed into a rock opera for Broadway, it was hailed as a triumph of the form — a production that had finally managed to authentically marry theater and rock ’n’ roll.Fueled by the spiritual exploration of a 23-year-old Pete Townshend, the Who guitarist and songwriter, the original production of “Tommy” drew crowds of baby boomers primed with adolescent nostalgia for the story of a boy who discovers a superhuman aptitude for pinball despite not being able to see, hear or speak.The Broadway show raked in a record number of ticket sales the day after opening night, ran for nearly 900 performances and won five Tony Awards, including one for its director, Des McAnuff.With its depictions of rebellion against authority and analogies to spiritual enlightenment, the show was firmly rooted in the youth culture of the 1960s. So why would McAnuff, for whom “Tommy” was a career-defining success, take the risk of reimagining the work for today’s audiences?“Sometimes you just don’t get things out of your system,” McAnuff said in an interview shortly after his new production of “The Who’s Tommy” opened last month at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. “I felt like it was time to make it contemporary.”In resurrecting “Tommy,” McAnuff and Townshend, who wrote the book together, sought to prove that the work was not simply of an era, but carried the promise of timelessness.In 2023, McAnuff argues, Tommy’s transformation from catatonic schoolboy to a kind of charismatic cult leader resonates even more strongly when considering the modern-day culture of celebrity worship. And the show’s exploration of trauma — including post-traumatic stress disorder, sexual abuse and bullying — is something that audiences now have a much deeper understanding of.The reimagining of “Tommy” is not so much in story but in style, with McAnuff opting for futuristic austerity over 1960s nostalgia. Tommy displays his skill not on a kitschy pinball machine but a spare set piece (designed by David Korins) in which the outline of a machine is represented by narrow panels of light. The personality cult that encircles Tommy feels more sinister than in the original production.A 1972 concert staging of “Tommy” at the Rainbow Theater in London brought together, from far left, Merry Clayton (whose back is to the camera), Peter Sellers, Sandy Denny, Graham Bell, Steve Winwood and Roger Daltrey.Getty ImagesThe production, which runs through Aug. 6, has received rave reviews in Chicago, with the critic Chris Jones of The Chicago Tribune calling it a “ready-for-prime-time stunner.” The Goodman says the show is on track to be its highest-grossing production ever, a boon for the organization during a time of high anxiety around regional theater’s post-pandemic return. The show’s commercial producer, Stephen Gabriel, said several options for the production’s future are being weighed, including a Broadway run.The story at the center of this production is much the same as the one the Who told when it played its new album at Woodstock in 1969.A 4-year-old Tommy watches as his father — a British Army captain believed to have died while on duty — shows up at the family’s home, ultimately killing the mother’s new lover during the ensuing fight. Tommy then loses his senses, becoming the victim of sexual abuse by his uncle, relentless bullying by his cousin and medical exploitation by an army of invasive doctors. After the world discovers his stunning talent for pinball, he becomes a messiah-like figure with a band of devoted followers.Whether “Tommy” can become a national phenomenon again, and not just a nostalgic tribute, depends, in part, on its ability to capture a new audience.McAnuff sees Ali Louis Bourzgui, the 23-year-old lead, as the show’s “doorway to Gen Z” — though not long out of college and largely unknown, he is viewed by the director as a natural star who will be appealing to a new generation of prospective “Tommy” fans.To Bourzgui, Tommy’s meteoric rise has parallels to the frenzy over certain social media influencers, artists or tech gurus.“He gets filled up by his followers,” Bourzgui said. “He keeps feeding off that, getting more gluttonous with power, until he realizes they’re following him because they want to feed off his trauma.”Bourzgui was born 30 years after the release of “Tommy” the album, but he has his own memory of his first listen — to the vinyl, in fact — in a friend’s apartment his freshman year. He remembers feeling moved by the music, if not a little bit befuddled by the plot. (McAnuff likes to call the story a “fable,” gesturing at the suspension of disbelief required to accept Tommy’s arc from silent child to pinball wizard to cult leader.)In preparation for the role, Bourzgui pored over performance videos of the Who on YouTube, finding himself in awe of the band’s magnetism. Wary of falling into mimicry, he hasn’t watched videos of the earlier production.“We’re not in the business of presenting museum pieces,” said Roche Schulfer, the Goodman’s executive director, who was approached about staging “Tommy” before the pandemic upended the theater world.Schulfer was persuaded by McAnuff and Townshend’s ideas for an update as well as their consideration of how certain themes and language might translate onstage today.The Who performing “Tommy” in Los Angeles in August 1989. Des McAnuff developed the show for the stage in the early 1990s.Ebet Roberts/Redferns, via Getty ImagesThe question is one that theater makers across the country are grappling with: Should revived works be altered to align with the worldviews and sensitivities of present-day audiences?In “Tommy,” McAnuff and Townshend’s answer was, largely, no.For example, the lyrics “deaf, dumb and blind” are central to some of the album’s hits, including its most famous: “Pinball Wizard.” When Townshend originally wrote “Tommy” in the 1960s, the word “dumb” was commonly used to refer to someone who was nonverbal, but it is now considered to be an offensive and archaic term. McAnuff said that he and Townshend did not seriously consider changing that language, viewing it as too much of a lyrical departure in foundational songs such as “Amazing Journey.”“‘Sensory impaired’ — I don’t think it would work,” McAnuff said. “I think it’s a song that has a certain amount of pedigree and dignity.”The story behind the concept, Townshend told an interviewer in the 1970s, came from his devotion in his early 20s to the writings of the Indian spiritual leader Meher Baba — also an inspiration for one of the Who’s biggest hits, “Baba O’Riley” — who taught, as he put it, that as humans, “there are whole chunks of life, including the whole concept of reality, which escapes us.”Over the years, Townshend has described the character of Tommy as autistic, explaining that his condition was a metaphor for humanity’s limited view of reality.Revivals over the years, including one by McAnuff a decade ago in Ontario, Canada, have given the book writers the opportunity to re-examine the show’s handling of sensitive issues. Around that time, Townshend acknowledged in an interview that the rock opera does not allow for explanation or discussion around serious issues such as sexual abuse, but that audiences can consider those topics themselves in a modern context.“We have to live with the rock opera version that we did 20 years ago,” Townshend said at the time. “We also have to live with the fact that ‘Tommy’ started as a rock opera in 1968, ’69. And yet times have changed. Attitudes have changed.”In the 1990s, McAnuff, who first developed the show at La Jolla Playhouse in California, staged the sexual abuse scene in such a way that had little need for alterations today. A revolving bed suggests the violation without any significant physical touch — an approach the director views as key to protecting the child actors involved in the show.After the Broadway debut, there were some complaints that the scene was less daring than the one in Ken Russell’s provocative 1975 film, to which McAnuff responded, “That’s a real little boy up there. Does anyone actually need me to abuse that child to get the idea across?”The most significant change in the Chicago production on the issue of abuse is the removal of a short song, “Tommy’s Holiday Camp,” that brings back the sexually abusive uncle in a way that no longer seemed necessary, McAnuff said. There is also some toned-down staging in “The Acid Queen,” the wailing barnburner — performed by Tina Turner in the film version — in which Tommy’s father takes him to a prostitute and con artist who promises to cure his condition with drugs.Without being too heavy handed in any moralistic messaging, McAnuff hopes the audience sees what the intent of the work has been since the beginning.“At the end of the day, we portray what happens to him not to condone it but to condemn it,” McAnuff said. “And I think that’s the point of view of the whole piece.” More

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    Zayn Malik Talks Life Since One Direction in His First Interview in Years

    The “Pillowtalk” singer speaks candidly of his departure from the group: “We’d got sick of each other.”After a hiatus from public life and interviews, Zayn Malik, the former One Direction member, appeared on a podcast that aired on Wednesday and talked about his decision to leave the group, what life has been like since then and his new single in his first interview in years.“There were great experiences, I had great times with them, but we’d just run our course,” Mr. Malik said of his time in the band on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, hosted by Alex Cooper.Mr. Malik was the first to leave One Direction in 2015, after the group had steadily put out chart-topping songs like “What Makes You Beautiful,” “Story of My Life” and “Best Song Ever.” The boy band, assembled through the British musical competition show “The X Factor,” was together for about six years and developed a feverish following among its young fans, who were known for their shrieking and devotion to the five members.One Direction continued to make music after Mr. Malik’s departure, but the group officially disbanded in 2016. Mr. Malik put out his debut solo single “Pillowtalk” that same year.During the interview, Mr. Malik told Ms. Cooper that around the time of his departure, the bandmates were beginning to clash.“We’d been together every day for five years and we’d got sick of each other, if we’re being completely honest,” Mr. Malik said, adding: “I look back on it now in a much fonder light than I would’ve as I’d just left. There were great experiences, I had great times with them, but we’d just run our course.”He began to see signs that it might be time to go and that others might be doing the same, he said, and he wanted to “get ahead of the curve” and “be the first” to release his own record.“I don’t want to go into too much detail, but there was a lot of politics going on. People were doing certain things. Some people didn’t want to sign contracts, so I knew something was happening,” he said.Ms. Cooper also broached the topic of a reported confrontation between Mr. Malik and Yolanda Hadid, the mother of his former girlfriend, the supermodel Gigi Hadid, with whom he shares a daughter, asking about his decision to largely remain silent on the issue. In response, Mr. Malik said he believed that the issue should stay within the family.“I just keep to myself. I knew what the situation was, I knew what happened and the people involved knew what happened, too,” Mr. Malik said. “I just didn’t want to bring attention to anything.”In recent years, he has lived a much quieter life in suburban Pennsylvania, he said. He said he was happy to get away from the bustle of New York City, enjoying a life mostly free from paparazzi and spending many of his days in the studio, writing and making music.He said he enjoyed spending time with his cats, dogs, turtles and chickens. (Mr. Malik noted that he got too attached to one chicken that died and decided to stop naming them.)Being out of the public eye also allows for his daughter to live a more private life, should she choose to do so, he said.“I’m just trying to give her an option,” Mr. Malik said. “If she wants to be away from it, she can be out here.”Mr. Malik said there was a constant stream of fans following the band around when it was together. He recalled one day before the band had ever released a single when fans hid in trash bins outside of a studio in Sweden waiting for the performers to emerge, then popped out and grabbed at them. “I think I had a mini heart attack,” he said, jokingly.One Direction’s hit song “What Makes You Beautiful” was on Billboard’s Hot 100 list for 34 weeks, peaking at No. 4 in 2012. In 2013, “Story of my Life” had a similar staying power, with 32 weeks, and peaked at No. 6 in 2013. “Best Song Ever,” however, climbed the highest — it reached the No. 2 spot in 2013 and spent 21 weeks on the chart.The group held four world tours, performing in North America, Asia, Europe and South America, and sometimes sold out shows in minutes. More

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    In ‘The Lesson,’ With Richard E. Grant, It’s a Bad Writer Who Steals

    Richard E. Grant and Daryl McCormack star as writers with similar source material in a feature tracing the limits of literary authorship.In “The Lesson,” an amusingly taut British thriller playing now in American movie theaters, two novels result from the same events at an opulent country estate.This chamber piece — a debut feature from both the director Alice Troughton, a regular of episodic television, and the comedian turned screenwriter Alex MacKeith — asks, both tacitly and explicitly: Can any creative endeavor be honestly attributed to a single source?One of the film’s writers, J.M. Sinclair (a ferocious Richard E. Grant) is a consummate literary star, who hasn’t published a novel since his firstborn son’s suicide. The unscrupulous Sinclair, however, is about to write the final chapter in a new novel, “Rose Tree,” while staying true to his favorite aphorism, “Great writers steal.”J.M. Sinclair (Richard E. Grant) is a celebrated, and ruthless writer, willing to betray anyone in his life for his own success.Anna Patarakina/Bleecker StreetThe other scribe, Liam Somers (the Irish actor Daryl McCormack), is a young upstart with writing ambitions of his own. Hired as a live-in tutor to Sinclair’s youngest child, Bertie (Stephen McMillan), to help him gain admission to Oxford University, Somers soon begins taking copious notes on the family, and becomes entangled with their secrets.The larger narrative we witness — of a monstrous father willing to betray anyone in his life for a self-aggrandizing pursuit, and a stranger entering this isolated family unit to solve the central mystery around the elder son’s death — will eventually become Liam’s first book.“I’d never been offered a part quite like that before,” Grant said recently by phone. “Playing anybody who has that amount of entitlement and monstrous ego, you long for them to fall apart.”Given Sinclair’s twisted sense of ownership over his children, Troughton, the director, described the character as a toxic parent certain that “there’s nothing that your children can do that doesn’t belong to you, or come from you.” Francisco Goya’s graphic painting “Saturn Devouring His Son” served as the director’s key reference for understanding Sinclair’s behavior, she said in a video interview.Yet the most influential scribe may be one who never puts pen to paper, nor fingers to keyboard, but orchestrates the events that help both the movie’s literary works come to fruition: Hélène Sinclair, a curator and wife to the overbearing patriarch, played by the French actress Julie Delpy. Hélène’s objective in allowing Liam inside the home is to unveil her husband’s secrets.“She essentially functions as the detective with Liam operating as a vector for her,” MacKeith said. “When you underlay that with her motive of discovery, but also vengeance, her agency in the film and her orchestration does make her the author.”For Delpy, who described her character as a “mother fatale,” answering the question of who deserves credit when a writer creates a story from actual events is less clear-cut.Hélène Sinclair (Julie Delpy) uses Liam unveil her husband’s secrets.Gordon Timpen/Bleecker Street“When you tell stories about people around you, are you using them, or are they partly authors, since you’re telling their story?” she asked in a recent phone interview. “Is the story solely the writer’s writing, even if based on someone else? What’s the limit between inspiration and coauthorship?”Delpy, a writer-director herself, said she believed that the need for attribution depends on what’s being borrowed. She admitted to having stolen single lines, or small situations from strangers’ conversations she overhead in restaurants, which she then has transformed into stories.The kind of intellectual theft Sinclair is happy to engage in, on the other hand, is far more insidious. Even his repeated aphorism is purloined from T.S. Eliot.Inspiration for Sinclair’s ruthless appropriation of others’ writing, MacKeith said, came from the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in which a writer plagiarizes Miguel de Cervantes’ masterwork word for word, and then claims it as his own.The taut thriller asks, both tacitly and explicitly, can any creative endeavor be honestly attributed to a single source?Anna Patarakina/Bleecker StreetOver the course of the film, it becomes hard to decipher precisely who is responsible for each story within the story. Liam’s novel is only possible as a side effect of Hélène’s machinations, and, early on, Sinclair decides to enlist Liam in his writing process for “Rose Tree.”As for whose work “The Lesson” itself is, MacKeith said that after their close five-year collaboration to bring the film to screen, he and Troughton were joint authors. The seasoned director brought touches of horror, as well as the idea of redemption, to the piece, MacKeith said, which were in turn elevated by the ensemble cast and crew in every tense scene.“As an actor, you have to create something beyond the script itself,” McCormack said. “I always hope that when I’m working alongside other people, that I can have a sense of being a co-author to the story in what I can do.”For MacKeith, this idea of collective ownership of the movie extended to the viewers, who must draw their own conclusions from “The Lesson,” especially after an unsettling plot twist.“The product itself is picture-locked,” he said, “but our discussion about it means that we as the audience can also have authorship of it in our interpretation.” More

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    Ellen Hovde, ‘Grey Gardens’ Documentarian, Dies at 97

    She worked with the Maysles brothers on the groundbreaking film about two Long Island recluses, and she later shared an Emmy for a mini-series about Ben Franklin.Ellen Hovde, a documentarian who was one of the directors of “Grey Gardens,” the groundbreaking 1975 movie that examined the lives of two reclusive women living in a deteriorating mansion on Long Island and inspired both a Broadway musical and an HBO film, died on Feb. 16 at her home in Brooklyn. She was 97.Her death, which had not been widely reported, was confirmed last week by her children, Tessa Huxley and Mark Trevenen Huxley, who said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.Ms. Hovde (pronounced HUV-dee) worked on several films with the Maysles brothers, Albert and David, in the late 1960s and ’70s, when they were expanding the documentary form with cinéma vérité techniques, eschewing sit-in-a-chair interviews in favor of recording life and events as they happened.In 1969 she was a contributing editor on “Salesman,” a documentary by the Maysleses and Charlotte Zwerin that followed four salesmen as they peddled $49.95 Bibles door to door in New England and Florida. The next year she was an editor on “Gimme Shelter,” the documentary by the Maysleses and Ms. Zwerin that captured a Rolling Stones tour, including the concert at Altamont Speedway in Northern California in late 1969 at which a concertgoer was killed by a Hells Angel.In 1974 she was credited as a director, along with the Maysleses, on “Christo’s Valley Curtain,” which was about an environmental art project the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude erected in Colorado in 1972. That film was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary short.The mother and daughter known as Big Edie and Little Edie Beale in a scene from the documentary “Grey Gardens,” directed by Alfred and David Maysles, Ms. Hovde and Muffie Meyer.Criterion CollectionThe next year came “Grey Gardens.” That film, which garnered considerable attention at the time and in 2010 was named to the National Film Registry of culturally significant movies, took a close-up, often uncomfortable look at the lives of Edie Beale and her mother, Edith Beale, relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who had dropped out of high society and were living in East Hampton, N.Y., in a crumbling mansion along with assorted cats and raccoons.The film came about somewhat by accident when Lee Radziwill, Ms. Onassis’ sister, suggested that the Maysleses and Ms. Hovde make a documentary about her childhood. Among the people she suggested they talk to were the Beales — Little Edie and Big Edie, as they were known. The documentary Ms. Radziwill had suggested fell through, but the Maysleses and Ms. Hovde were intrigued by the Beales and proposed a film to them.“Big Edie didn’t really want to do it at first,” Ms. Hovde said in a 1978 interview with Film Quarterly. “Little Edie did.”Soon Muffie Meyer, who would partner with Ms. Hovde on numerous films in the ensuing years, joined the project. Ms. Hovde and Ms. Meyer received directing credits on the film along with the Maysles brothers, but they, in addition to Susan Froemke, were also its editors, which to Ms. Hovde was the pivotal role.“The person who is doing the editing is doing something very like a mix of writing and stage directing,” she told Film Quarterly. “That person is shaping, forming and structuring the material, and making the decisions about what is really going to be there on the screen — what the ideas are, what the order of events will be, where the emphasis will be.”For “Grey Gardens,” that involved going through dozens of hours of film and shaping a portrait that revealed the codependent relationship between the two eccentric women. Ms. Meyer said that, if portable cameras and tape recorders made the type of filmmaking used in “Grey Gardens” possible, the other crucial element was the editing.“Essentially, massive amounts of footage (usually upwards of 60 hours), unscripted and with little or no direction, was dumped in the editing room,” she said by email. “The editor’s job was to screen it, organize it, take careful notes, and then find the story and the structure. Ellen was a master at all of this, and there are not many masters (Charlotte Zwerin was another).”The team behind “Grey Gardens,” clockwise from top left: David Maysles, Ms. Hovde, Albert Maysles, Susan Froemke and Ms. Meyer. Ms. Hovde, Ms. Froemke and Ms. Meyer were the film’s editors, which to Ms. Hovde was the pivotal role.Marianne Barcellona“Grey Gardens” drew both acclaim and disapproval from critics. The film critic Roger Ebert called it “one of the most haunting documentaries in a long time.” But in The New York Times, Richard Eder, while acknowledging that there was “no doubt about the artistry and devotion” involved in making the film, said that “the moviegoer will still feel like an exploiter.”The debate over whether “Grey Gardens” and other films in the same style exploit their subjects or invade their privacy has been an ongoing one, and there was a chorus of such complaints when the movie was released. But Ms. Hovde, in the Film Quarterly interview, said the Beales themselves disputed that interpretation.“In the months when there was a lot of controversy about it,” she said, “it was Mrs. Beale and Edie who called us and said: ‘You know there has been this criticism — don’t worry. It’s all right. We know that it is an honest picture. We believe in it. We don’t want you to feel upset.’ That was their attitude, and they never wavered from that.”A musical based on the documentary opened on Broadway in 2006 and won three Tony Awards, and in 2009 HBO’s “Grey Gardens” movie, with Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as the Beales, won six Emmy Awards.In 1978 Ms. Hovde and Ms. Meyer formed Middlemarch Films, which went on to make scores of documentary features and videos in various styles and on a wide range of subjects. Some explored subjects from the age before film and photography and used actors to re-create scenes. One of those, a television mini-series about Benjamin Franklin directed jointly by Ms. Meyer and Ms. Hovde in 2002, won an Emmy for outstanding nonfiction special.Ms. Meyer said that in those types of projects, Ms. Hovde was a stickler for accuracy.“One example was her insistence on the accuracy of the bird tweets and frog sounds in our colonial-period films,” she said. “She drove the sound editors to distraction (and in one late-night session, to tears): ‘Was this frog endemic to the Northeast and did it croak in late fall?’ ‘Was this bird tweet that was added to the soundtrack really a bird that could be found in Virginia in the 18th century?’”Richard Easton was one of two actors who played the title role in “Benjamin Franklin,” an Emmy-winning PBS mini-series directed by Ms. Hovde and Muffie Meyer that used actors to re-create historical scenes.PBS, via Associated PressEllen Margerethe Hovde was born on March 9, 1925, in Meadville, Pa. Her father, Brynjolf (known as Bryn), was president of the New School for Social Research from 1945 to 1950, and her mother, Theresse (Arneson) Hovde, was a nurse.Ms. Hovde grew up in Pittsburgh and earned a degree in theater in 1947 at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, after which she studied for a time at the University of Oslo. In 1950 she married Matthew Huxley, son of the author Aldous L. Huxley. The marriage ended in divorce, but Ms. Hovde’s son said that she and Aldous Huxley remained close until his death in 1963, and that as his eyesight began to fail, she would sometimes read books into a tape recorder for him.Ms. Hovde had hoped for a career as a stage director, but, after not finding work, she took a job as an administrative assistant at a film school. By the early 1950s she was learning editing. Her credits before she began working with the Maysles brothers included editing “Margaret Mead’s New Guinea Journal” (1968) for the New York public television station WNET and a Simon and Garfunkel television special broadcast on CBS in 1969.Ms. Hovde’s second marriage, to Adam Edward Giffard in 1963, also ended in divorce. In addition to her children, she is survived by two grandchildren.Ms. Meyer said Ms. Hovde’s homes were gathering places for documentarians in the 1970s, and she once helped organize a filmmakers’ cookbook, a photocopied collection of everyone’s favorite recipes.“Most of us still use it,” she said. More

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    ‘Canon Event’ TikToks Use a ‘Spider-Verse’ Phrase That Almost Didn’t Make the Film

    The “canon event” videos play on the film’s idea of certain events in life being immutable. But the directors nearly went a different way with the concept.In one video, an older brother watches with dread as his younger brother gets a perm. In another, a girl agonizes while her 10-year-old sister buys a maroon lifeguard hoodie.“I can’t interfere, it’s a canon event,” read the captions on the videos, as an ominous audio clip plays in the background.Those TikToks, a mixture of concern and schadenfreude, are a few of the thousands of videos powering a trend that has catapulted a new phrase into the pop culture lexicon: the “canon event,” a pivotal moment that must happen in order for people to mature into their future selves. It’s a concept that draws on the music and plot of the animated blockbuster “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” But that language almost didn’t make it into the film.“A canon event is something that’s unfortunate at the time it happens, that turns out to have happened for a reason,” said John Casterline, a 19-year-old creator who has three and a half million followers on TikTok.

    @h1t1 character development ♬ Libets Delay by The Caretaker – Alt Tik Tok Sounds The videos play with this concept by spotlighting those disappointing, mortifying or simply weird moments that we wish we could change: breaking up with a high school sweetheart, getting kicked out of a friend group, adopting an embarrassing hairstyle.Choosing to see these events as immutable canon and posting about them on TikTok is a form of group catharsis — a recognition that it’s precisely because of those moments that we’ve become who we are today.“Since you get to know that people have this shared cringey, awkward experience, you don’t feel alone,” said Josh Referente, a 20-year-old creator on TikTok who has more than one million followers and who has posted several canon event videos. “It helps you process it a lot better. It was a step in your life that helps you move toward the right direction.”The phrase “canon event” isn’t entirely new — in comics culture and superhero fandom, canon has long meant those elements of a character’s story that are part of a shared fictional universe.But the phrase was popularized by “Across the Spider-Verse,” which has topped $600 million at the box office worldwide. In the film, Miles Morales travels to a universe full of other Spider-People and learns that each one is destined for a series of “canon events,” including the loss of a parental figure and the death of a police captain. To interfere with any of these canon events is to invite the destruction of the entire multiverse.

    @itsteresasong its me, im the girl #canonevent #toweltime ♬ Spider-Man 2099 (Miguel O’Hara) – Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse – Daniel Pemberton Originally, the film wasn’t going to include any mention of a canon event, Kemp Powers, one of the film’s three directors, said in an interview. The team had settled on “convergence event,” but that term confused the early focus groups who saw the movie, so they switched to canon instead.“One of the funny things about it is the whole idea of the canon event was something that we were worried people weren’t going to understand right till the last minute,” Powers said. “So the fact that not only did they understand this concept but that it took on a life of its own, I thought was really entertaining.”Powers, who does not have a TikTok account, said that for a while he didn’t know social media was running with the concept. After the film’s release, he was sitting in Los Angeles International Airport when he heard two people cracking jokes about canon events.“And I’m like, ‘That can’t be about our movie.’ You know what I mean? I was just like, that’s weird,” he said.But soon friends and even his two children started sending him TikToks.

    @benesherick You must let it happen, it is a Canon Event🗣️ #Inverted ♬ blue hair – 𓆩❤︎𓆪 “If you’re so lucky to put something out in the world that connects to people, it’s a reminder that it immediately doesn’t belong to you anymore,” he said. “You have no idea what they’re going to do with it.”The canon event videos follow a specific formula. They feature a scene or a caption that captures an awkward or regrettable real-life moment accompanied by a snippet from a portion of the score, “Spider-Man 2099 (Miguel O’Hara),” and include the parenthetical phrase: “It’s a canon event. I can’t interfere.”The score was composed by Daniel Pemberton, who said that segment was the product of a synthesizer being run through a variety of algorithms to end up with a “punchline” bit of audio.He said he faced his own canon events while composing the music.“I had to fail a lot within this score with ideas that didn’t work until I found ideas that really did,” he said.For Pemberton, it’s natural that the idea of a canon event has resonated with so many people.“I don’t really do a lot of social media but I think there has always been a projection of unattainable or unrealistic lifestyle that I found quite toxic, and the thing I like about canon event is, it’s giving people a bit more ownership over the truth of their lives,” he said. More

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    Ticketmaster Pauses Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Sale in France

    Fans trying to purchase tickets to six of the pop superstar’s concerts faced long queues and technical issues before the company said that a new on-sale time would be announced.Ticketmaster has once again cracked under the weight of a Taylor Swift ticket sale — this time in France.As French fans prepared on Tuesday to purchase tickets to six concerts in May and June 2024 on Swift’s Eras Tour — four shows in Paris, two in Lyon — Ticketmaster’s website displayed a gigantic queue of customers ready to buy; one screenshot appeared to tell a fan that 1,023,504 shoppers were in line ahead of them.Soon, Ticketmaster announced that sales for those shows had been placed on “pause.” The company said that a new on-sale time would be announced, and that “all codes not already used will remain valid.” But some fans’ social media posts seemed to show technical errors on Ticketmaster’s website, including a progress icon that “keeps spinning and spinning and spinning,” as one fan — speaking English with an American accent, but with 762 euros’ worth of tickets in their shopping cart — put it.A few hours later, the French branch of Ticketmaster offered some more detail on social media, blaming the problem on a “third-party provider” that the company did not identify, and adding that tickets were still available. A representative of Live Nation Entertainment, Ticketmaster’s corporate parent, said that the provider works with Ticketmaster only in France.The situation in France appeared to be a frustrating repeat of the problems that plagued Swift’s North American presale in November, when an influx of millions of fans — and bots — overwhelmed Ticketmaster’s systems, and fans reported issues like tickets in their shopping carts disappearing before they could be purchased. Ticketmaster shut down its public sale as a result, though the company also said it had sold more than two million tickets to the tour in a single day.Problems like those at Swift’s presale in November — as well as long-simmering concerns over Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s market dominance — led to a brutal Senate Judiciary hearing in January. Senators from both parties flatly called the company a monopoly and were skeptical of an executive’s explanation that Ticketmaster was unable to defend itself against an onslaught of bots during Swift’s presale.“This is unbelievable,” Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said at the hearing. “Why is it,” she added, “that you have not developed an algorithm to sort out what is a bot and what is a consumer?”Yet the demand for Swift tickets has been extraordinary, with Swift selling out stadiums everywhere she plays and tickets going for thousands of dollars on the secondary market. She is scheduled to complete the North American leg of her tour next month, then play in Latin America, Asia and Europe.The Justice Department has separately been conducting an antitrust investigation of Live Nation. The Justice Department has not confirmed that investigation, but Live Nation’s chief executive, Michael Rapino, has spoken about it openly. More