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      A Night With FunkFlex, New York Rap Historian and Booster

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      What happens when various generations of rappers end up in the same room? The radio D.J. and local connector, craving hometown pride and action beyond the algorithm, put out the call.“Where you find the energy to be on this type of time?”Fat Joe had been awake since 5 a.m. to prepare for a CNN segment, and now it was almost 10 p.m., and he was fading. But FunkFlex, the New York radio mainstay, had requested his presence at a small gathering of the New York rap tribes a couple of nights before Thanksgiving, and so Joe was holding on just as Flex was revving up.For more than three decades, Flex has been the carnival barker-in-chief of New York rap, a nighttime radio fixture on Hot 97 (WQHT-FM) — the rare D.J. whose hysteric chatter can merit real-time listening — and a stalwart of nightclubs throughout the city and the tristate area. He is a humorist and an antagonist, sometimes with a target in mind, and sometimes simply for the theater.In the main, he is a booster, a barometer for how New York understands itself through its hip-hop — a bridge from the 1980s to the present day. In the era when New York rap was at the center of hip-hop globally, Flex (then Funkmaster Flex) was at the center of New York rap. But those are bygone days now; even with the rise of drill, New York rap remains a regional concern. And so lately, Flex, 55, has been wondering how he might bring New York back — if not to the center of the conversation, then at least to a sense of hometown pride.B-Lovee, one of the most promising drill rappers from the Bronx, chats with Flex in the studio.Tim Barber for The New York TimesLast week, he put out a call to see what might happen if various generations all ended up in the same room, the studio on West 25th Street where he usually films his freestyle series for YouTube. He put the call out to some of the city’s young rising drill stars, and also into the group chat he has with some of the city’s elders: N.O.R.E., Busta Rhymes, the Lox, Fabolous, Fat Joe and more.From the beginning of the night, dividends were being paid. B-Lovee, one of the most promising drill rappers from the Bronx, was telling Fat Joe, three decades older, about his neighborhood. “That’s the first place I ever seen KRS-One in person,” Joe told him. “Van Cortlandt Park, South Bronx, block party.” Sheek Louch, one-third of the Yonkers rap crew the Lox, looked on. Flex turned to B-Lovee and said he couldn’t tell him who had been supplying him with his music that hadn’t yet come out, but that it was in good hands.Roddy Ricch, left, came by to record his freestyle for Flex’s YouTube series.Tim Barber for The New York TimesFor the last few months, Flex has been setting aside time on his Thursday night show to play unreleased music, a means of pushing back against the algorithmization of hip-hop. Local radio D.J.s were tastemakers once, but playlists are far more powerful now. Flex knew this, because he himself had fallen victim to them.“I was going the easy route — Apple, Spotify Rap Caviar. I was picking my music through there for a while,” he told Jim Jones later that night. “I called you one morning like 7 a.m. It’s Thursday, things are being released and my phone ain’t ringing. Nobody’s asking me to play [expletive]. It bothered me — I ain’t hot? What I feel don’t [expletive] matter?”Flex had to accept that he’d lost a little bit of his gusto over the years. And so he recalibrated, digging in and seeking out music no one had heard — songs that hadn’t yet hit streaming services (even if just a few hours in advance of their official release), or more excitingly, old unreleased songs languishing on hard drives. “I’m getting a lot of songs that had samples that didn’t clear,” Flex said. “I’m getting a song that didn’t make ‘Paid in Full,’” the classic 1987 album by Eric B. & Rakim.FunkFlex greeting Jim Jones. The two shared a conversation about the early days of the Diplomats.Tim Barber for The New York TimesAs he was saying this, there was a light commotion at the door as Roddy Ricch, in town from Los Angeles to promote his “Feed tha Streets III” album and the only non-New York rapper in attendance, came by to record his freestyle for Flex’s YouTube series. When all three members of the Lox — Jadakiss, Styles P, Sheek — entered the studio after he laid down his verse, he melted just a bit: “They done put the pressure on,” Ricch said. “Real spitters in the building.”After Ricch left, the hot seats went to Jim Jones, in a lavender Moncler puffer jacket and a tangle of chains, topped off with one featuring a diamond portrait of the Mexican drug kingpin El Chapo, and Dyce Payso, one of Jones’s protégés. After Dyce Payso rapped a verse, Jones caught a feeling and murmured his way through some untested lines. “Everyone came up here with bars,” he said sheepishly. “I’m just breathing.”Flex and Jones got to talking about the golden era of the Diplomats, when Flex was perhaps a tad late in playing their music on the radio. Cam’ron, the crew’s leader, brought him to West 140th and Lenox Avenue to see the potency of the movement firsthand. “Did I catch up fast?” Flex asked Jones. “Very fast,” Jones concurred.Now, New York was starting to feel familiar to Jones again. “Shout out to all my drillers out there,” Jones said. “It’s feeling like ’02 when I step outside. It’s feeling like the Tunnel.”Dyce Payso, one of Jones’s protégés, dons headphones to rap a verse.Tim Barber for The New York TimesTo Flex, Jones added, “You got the city looking forward to Thursday again.”Following the success of his Thursday night anti-algorithm sessions, this gathering was the first step Flex was planning toward providing New York with a sturdier foundation. He described a plan to put out an old-fashioned mixtape — physical copies only — featuring unreleased songs and freestyles that aren’t otherwise available on the internet or streaming services.Just after midnight, he was discussing his upcoming club schedule while picking at a Tupperware container filled with cucumber and cherry tomatoes. “Every three months, we gonna do a clubhouse session like this,” he said to Tat Wza, his longtime consigliere, who had been manning the boards all night.B-Lovee had been there all night, mostly quiet, mostly listening. When he finally got up to leave, Flex told him to pull up to the New York-centric Thanksgiving party he was hosting, featuring local royalty French Montana and Lil’ Kim, and also the drill stars Fivio Foreign and Ice Spice. “We gonna set a tone,” he assured him. More

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      A Not-Quite-Star Maestro Has a Starry Season at the Met

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      Carlo Rizzi, a Met Opera regular sometimes taken for granted, opened the company’s season this fall and has juggled “Medea,” “Tosca” and “Don Carlo.”Deep in Verdi’s opera “Don Carlo,” an impassioned solo cello line embroiders a bass aria with a vein of feeling.On a recent evening, the conductor Carlo Rizzi was leading the work at the Metropolitan Opera. Rizzi isn’t demonstrative on the podium; his gestures tend to be controlled, focused, professional. But from a seat at the back of the pit, it was possible to see him, at the end of the aria, smile slightly and blow a subtle kiss down in the direction of the orchestra’s principal cello, Rafael Figueroa.It was an affectionate, familial gesture from a man who has become family at the Met. “Don Carlo,” which runs through Saturday, is part of a three-production fall for Rizzi — along with Cherubini’s “Medea,” the season opener, and Puccini’s “Tosca” — that brings his number of performances with the company to more than 250 since his debut in 1993.“I am not 20 anymore,” Rizzi, 62, said in an interview the morning after a “Don Carlo” and before a “Tosca” that evening. “Particularly after the pandemic, I want to enjoy what I’m doing. That’s why I’m happy about these three works at the Met. Each one, in a different way, has been rewarding.”Rizzi is among the stars of the Met’s not-quite-stars, in company with conductors like Nello Santi (who led some 400 Met performances between 1962 and 2000) and Marco Armiliato (nearly 500 since 1998). These are not famous names, just musicians experienced and respected enough to allow the company’s vast repertory factory to function, particularly when it comes to core Italian works like “La Bohème,” “Rigoletto” and “La Traviata” that must be put on with perilously little rehearsal time.His name and face familiar to Met regulars — from the side, with his toss of silver hair and chin stubble, he looks a little like Plácido Domingo — Rizzi is the kind of artist who can be entrusted with “Medea,” a rarely performed opera that he had never done or even seen, late in the game, in addition to his long-scheduled “Tosca” and “Don Carlo.”“He did three operas at once,” said the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who sang the title role in “Medea.” “Who else can do that? And not just get through them: These were three spectacularly conducted operas. In my opinion, he is one of the best Italian conductors living right now.”Sondra Radvanovsky sang the title role in “Medea,” which Rizzi conducted to open the Met’s season.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I find him academic, in a good way,” said Michael Fabiano, here singing Cavaradossi in “Tosca” under Rizzi, with Aleksandra Kurzak. “He’s very studied and highly informed.” Karen Almond/Met OperaYet many descriptions of Rizzi include variations on the apologetic phrase “but in a good way.” “It’s going to sound pejorative,” the tenor Michael Fabiano, who starred in “Tosca,” said, “but I find him academic, in a good way. He’s very studied and highly informed.”Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, added, “He’s considered to be really strong, really solid, really reliable — solid in a good way.”The takeaway is that the soft-spoken Rizzi embodies qualities of patient, unshowy craft and dependability that are often overlooked, sadly old-fashioned and definitely unsexy. But they should not be taken for granted.“It’s underestimated how difficult it is for a conductor to succeed at the Met,” Gelb said. “There aren’t so many who have the degree of expertise and level of musicality when it comes to Italian repertoire that he has. We’re fortunate to have a conductor of his quality willing to come here to do the standard repertory.”Born in 1960 in Milan, Rizzi didn’t grow up in a musical family; his father was a chemist and his mother an accountant. But he was shy as a young child, and his parents tried to draw him out with piano lessons; he flourished. (His two siblings ended up with musical careers, too.)On top of his studies, Rizzi spent many nights watching opera at the Teatro alla Scala. These were Claudio Abbado’s years as music director there, and the productions and casts were regularly superb.“I was a pianist, and at the time I was very good at sight-reading,” Rizzi said. “That means that every clarinetist, bassoonist, singer and double bass player was coming to me. And making music together started to become more interesting than just the piano.”He conducted chamber orchestras, and Mozart concertos from the keyboard, and in his late teens began working as a repetiteur — the opera rehearsal assistant position that was the main root of old-school conducting careers.Rizzi did well in a couple of competitions, and began to find work in regional capitals like Palermo and Trieste. Word spread among singers. He was invited to conduct the Donizetti rarity “Torquato Tasso” at the Buxton Festival in England in 1988; that led to an engagement at the Royal Opera in London, and a broadcast reached Brian McMaster, then the leader of Welsh National Opera, who hired Rizzi as music director in Cardiff.Matthew Epstein took over for McMaster just as Rizzi was starting his tenure. (Rizzi served in the role from 1992 to 2001, then again, after his successor resigned, from 2004 to 2008.)“Let’s be honest: Carlo, with his name, is going to be used around the world mostly for the Italian repertory,” Epstein said. “But in Wales he did ‘Elektra’; he did ‘Rosenkavalier’; he did ‘Peter Grimes’ and ‘The Rake’s Progress.’ He’s a superb theater conductor, in the smallest of small groups of people who really work in the theater.”His Met debut was in “La Bohème,” which he has since done more than 60 times with the company. He led a new “Lucia di Lammermoor” in 1998, a new “Il Trovatore” in 2000 and two new stagings of “Norma,” in 2001 and, starring Radvanovsky, on opening night in 2017. “Medea” was his third time opening a Met season.Yet he remains under the radar in New York. His work this fall has been like his Met career in general: nothing fancy, nothing fussy, just clear, compelling readings. “It’s not anything new or different, just the idea of being musically aware with every dramatic beat,” said the tenor Russell Thomas, who sang the title role in “Don Carlo.” “This is maybe my fourth production, and I never had anybody go into that much detail.”Under Rizzi, “Don Carlo” was sober and weighty.Ken Howard/Met OperaRizzi’s “Medea” had the formality of Gluck, who influenced Cherubini, mixed with hints of the tumultuous “Sturm und Drang” movement to come. “Tosca” was colorful and propulsive; “Don Carlo,” sober and weighty.“The way they play ‘Medea’ is not the way they play ‘Tosca,’” he said. “The flexibility is one of the great things about this orchestra.”Among Rizzi’s upcoming projects is to record orchestral suites he has drawn from “Madama Butterfly” and “Tosca.” In future seasons at the Met, he’s slated to return for, yes, Puccini and Verdi — including more “Bohème” and a revival of “Un Ballo in Maschera.”“I really feel, since we did the ‘Norma’ opening night to now, he’s a much different person,” Radvanovsky said. “He’s more relaxed; I feel he’s more comfortable in his baton skill, his skill with the orchestra. His musical language has really relaxed and grown.”Rizzi said: “I don’t want to sound like an old sage, but I’m always in development. I learn more about conducting every day.” Perhaps unexpectedly, given that he is best known for leading the most familiar works in the repertory, in 2019 he became the artistic director of Opera Rara, a London-based company devoted to underperformed titles.“Carlo is incredibly knowledgeable, musicologically and dramaturgically,” Epstein said. “That’s why this Opera Rara thing is good for him. But he should be the music director of an opera house in Italy. It’s silly he hasn’t. And he should have had a go in this country as music director in one of the main houses. He’s not the ordinary Italian conductor — he’s just not. He’s better.”Fabiano, the tenor, locates in Rizzi “the spirit of these older conductors — Votto, Fausto Cleva, Gavazzeni — who had an inherent knowledge of the repertory and knew deeply the needs of the singer. An understanding of what singers need, and the deep care for the letter of the music, the construction of the music, makes for a very terrific maestro.”And while Rizzi is not the most breathlessly marketed baton, Donald Palumbo, the Met’s chorus master, put it simply: “For me, he’s a star.” More

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      After Covid, Playing Trumpet Taught Me How to Breathe Again

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      The benefits of group (music) therapy.Our director stepped onto the podium, and the auditorium stilled to an expectant silence. The black sequins on her conducting dress flared in the stage lights; the audience behind her was lost to the glare. With a glance and a whispered word, she gave us final instructions. As she raised her baton, we all breathed in time; on the downbeat, we exploded into sound. The song was “The Hounds of Spring,” by Alfred Reed, and I can still hear the opening bars. That concert, the entirety of which felt downright enchanted, propelled me into music college, where I studied music education, learning the basics of a dozen instruments so I could teach them someday. After a year, I turned in my loaner instruments, transferred to a new school and changed my major. At 18, I wanted to save the world, and I thought I could do it better some other way.Two decades later, in November 2020, worn out by lockdown, I longed to use my mind for something other than worry, to fill my living room with a sound that wasn’t the tinny, competing voices of my children’s virtual school. I played the trumpet for only a couple of months during college, after working with woodwinds and strings in high school, and I imagined studying fingering charts again and summoning a sense memory of correct embouchure. I messaged my middle-school band director, a brass player, and we swapped listings until I sent her the model number of a solid, beginner-level trumpet for $70. Two minutes later, her reply: “Oh, yes! Grab it!” Reconnecting with the trumpet was a delight, but playing alone in my living room was a discipline I didn’t keep for long.Covid caught up to me in May of this year. My symptoms were not dangerous, but they were persistent; I counted 12 days, 14, 16, and I still couldn’t eat normally or function for more than a few hours without exhaustion and physical pain. My mental-health symptoms, meanwhile, were devastating and worsened as the days passed. I couldn’t see the point of anything; I couldn’t stop crying; I couldn’t imagine a time when these things would change.I left the house, in those days, only to go to my daughter’s softball games, a five-minute drive from home, where I could prop myself in a camp chair yards from anyone else, sip Gatorade and feel the sun on my back. If life is pointless, I thought, thank God for softball. And then I thought, OK — if life is pointless, then why not do some things just because they’re fun?Seventy of us count and breathe and quite literally vibrate together.So I decided to relearn trumpet in a more committed way: by joining a community band. I found a no-audition ensemble near me and filled out the online interest form. I received a welcome text from my new section leader and a card in the mail, telling me how the band was sure to be better because I had joined. The first time I attended rehearsal, I played a single note, badly, then spent the rest of the 90 minutes listening. Throughout the following week, I practiced at home every day, switching on the metronome and playing long tones until my lips gave out. When the next Tuesday evening rolled around, I could play. Not well, but well enough. It felt astonishing, a revelation: Sometimes, things get better instead of worse.The trumpet only has three keys, called valves, which are played in seven combinations to make all of the possible notes. Depressing the first valve, for instance, can produce a low B-flat, an F, a higher B-flat, a D and several other notes I can’t reach. The difference between one and another depends on the frequency of the lips’ buzz. It is equal parts science and art. And it’s more difficult than I remembered.Nonetheless, on Tuesday nights, I grab my $70 trumpet and load my backpack with music, stand, mute, fingering chart, valve oil and slide grease, plus a towel to catch the mix of spit and condensation that brass players insist on calling “water.” I slip in the door, nodding to my fellow third trumpets as I set up and warm up. When the conductor — the volunteer director of this band for 42 years — raises his baton, I count like mad, leave out the notes I know full well I can’t hit and do my best on the others. I spend rehearsal listening, hard, to try to merge myself into the whole. Seventy of us — blue-collar workers and office administrators and retirees, woodwinds and brass and percussionists — count and breathe and quite literally vibrate together. We’re often out of tune or unpracticed. We sometimes dissolve into chaos, and then laughter. When time is up, I pack my bag, nod to my section mates again and slip back out the door into the night.In the months following my Covid infection, the most severe depression of my life gave way to the most severe anxiety. Normal days were rife with triggers: the car, the office, meetings, therapy, food, the doctor, social engagements. Community-band rehearsal was no exception, but I went anyway.I wasn’t always sure why. It was, as I had hoped, fun. But it was also more. Tracking the notes, counting the beats, linking the notes on the page to the correct fingering, frequency, breath and duration — it seems like a miracle that it ever works. Multiply that by 70 players, and it can feel like witnessing the impossible. Somehow community band did what I knew music could do when I enrolled in college, before I changed my mind about my future: It saved me. It drew me out — of my home, of my head. It taught me how to breathe again.Shea Tuttle is the author of “Exactly as You Are: The Life and Faith of Mister Rogers,” co-author with Michael G. Long of “Phyllis Frye and the Fight for Transgender Rights” and co-editor of two collections on faith and justice. More

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      Adeem the Artist, Crafting a Country Music of Their Own

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      Adeem Bingham has wrestled for decades with their identity as a Southern, Christian, queer songwriter. Can modern country music make space for them and their experiences?Hannah Bingham understood that the blouse she had bought for her spouse of six years, Adeem Bingham, who was turning 32 in 2020, would be more than a mere garment or birthday present. Deep green silk and speckled with slinking tigers and glaring giraffes, it was Hannah’s tacit blessing for Adeem to explore beyond the bounds of masculinity.“Adeem had expressed an interest in dressing more feminine, but they went in the opposite direction — boots, trucker hats, canvas work jackets,” she said in a phone interview from the couple’s home in Knoxville, Tenn., as their 5-year-old, Isley, cavorted within earshot. “I thought, ‘If you’re not doing this because it might change our relationship, I’m going to help you.’”The blouse proved an instant catalyst. Incandescent red lipstick followed, as did a svelte faux fur coat — another gift. Adeem donned the outfit for family photos on Christmas Eve, and a week later, announced online they were nonbinary. At the time, Adeem the Artist, as they’ve been known since 2016, was finishing a country album, “Cast-Iron Pansexual,” about the complications of being queer — bisexual, nonbinary, trans, whatever — in Appalachia.“That record became therapy, helping me understand and explain myself,” Adeem, 34, said, speaking slowly by phone during one of a series of long interviews. “But I didn’t have in mind to explain my queer experience to straight people. I had in mind to tell my stories to queer people.”“Cast-Iron Pansexual,” though, slipped through the crevices in country’s straight white firmament, which have been widened in the past decade by the likes of Brandi Carlile, Orville Peck, Rissi Palmer and even Lil Nas X. Adeem self-recorded and self-released the LP in a rush to satisfy Patreon subscribers. Galvanized by its surprise success, they returned to a half-finished set of songs that more fully explored the misadventures and intrigues of a lifelong Southern outlier.Those tunes — cut in a proper studio with a band of ringers for the album “White Trash Revelry,” out Friday — sound ready for country radio, with their skywriting ballads swaddled in pedal steel and rollicking tales rooted in honky-tonk rhythms. Adeem culled its cast of tragic figures and hopeful radicals from their own circuitous story.On her radio show, Carlile recently called Adeem “one of the best writers in roots music.” In an interview, B.J. Barham, who fronts the boisterous but sensitive barroom country act American Aquarium, suggested Adeem might be the voice of a country frontier.“People aren’t coming to shows because of a nonbinary singer-songwriter. They’re coming because of songs,” said Barham, who asked Adeem to join him on tour the moment he heard Adeem’s trenchant Toby Keith sendup, “I Wish You Would’ve Been a Cowboy.” “If your songs are as good as Adeem’s, they transcend everything else.”Before the blouse, Adeem struggled with discrete phases of intense doubt about identity, rooted in Southern stereotypes. First came the realization they were a “poor white redneck,” they said, a seventh-generation North Carolinian whose parents had a one-night stand while their mom worked late at a Texaco and married only after realizing she was pregnant. The family were pariahs, accused of spreading lice in a Baptist church and lambasted by an elementary-school teacher for teaching young Adeem to swear.“I was this misfit in the small-town South, really into hip-hop and metal, with long, bleached-blond hair,” Adeem said. “I was beyond that cultural sphere.”When Adeem was 13, the family moved to Syracuse, N.Y. Adeem tried to drop their drawl. “Everybody thought I was stupid no matter what I said,” Adeem recalled by video from their cluttered home studio, gentle waves of a mahogany mullet cascading across a tie-dye hoodie. “I wanted to be cerebral and poetic, words that seemed wholly incompatible with the accent.”“I imagine these songs getting on a playlist beside Luke Bryan,” Adeem said, “articulating a full scope of the country experience.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThough their family attended church sporadically in North Carolina, Adeem began to pine for religion in New York, hoping for a kind of literal instruction manual for life. They moved to Tennessee to become a worship pastor, writing and performing songs (in nail polish, no less) that sometimes bordered on heresy. Months later, “hellbent on living life like people in the Scripture,” Adeem shifted to Messianic Judaism.Nothing stuck, so they gave up on God entirely. (“That felt really great,” Adeem said and chuckled. “Big fan of leaving.”) Still, soon after marrying in 2014, Adeem and Hannah decamped to an Episcopal mission in New Jersey, where queer folks, trans friends and people of color prompted Adeem to face the ingrained racism, sexism and shame of their childhood. “I met my first person who used they/them pronouns,” Adeem said. “It put language to so much I struggled with.”Years later, that experience helped Adeem, a new parent back in Tennessee, address gender at last. Adeem’s father had jeered the flashes of femininity, which Adeem cloaked in masculine camouflage, continuing the practice even as they realized they were bisexual, then pansexual.Working on a construction crew in Knoxville, surrounded by casual misogyny, Adeem broke. They listened to Carlile’s “The Mother,” a first-person ode to atypical parenthood, until working up the nerve to walk off the job. A year later, the silk blouse appeared.A poor Southerner, a proselytizing Christian, a performative man: Adeem once thought they could change those models from within before abandoning them altogether, at least temporarily. Country music represented another avenue of progress, one they now have no intention of leaving.Adeem came to country when their parents decided their firstborn should not be singing the Backstreet Boys. Adeem fell hard for Garth Brooks and the genre’s ’90s dynamo women — Deana Carter, Reba McEntire, Mindy McCready. Adeem’s own music later flitted among angular rock and ramshackle folk, but for “Cast-Iron Pansexual” country represented a powerful homecoming. “Using the vernacular of country, I got to showcase my values with the conduit of my oppression,” Adeem said, laughing at how high-minded it all seemed.Where “Cast-Iron Pansexual,” which opened with the winking “I Never Came Out,” indeed felt like a coming-out manifesto, “White Trash Revelry” expresses a worldview built by reconciling past pain with future hope. Adeem addresses the grievances of poor white people they have called kin with empathy and exasperation on “My America.” They mourn American militarism and state-sponsored PTSD on “Middle of a Heart.” They fantasize about a revolution of backwoods leftists on “Run This Town.”“I was this misfit in the small-town South, really into hip-hop and metal, with long, bleached-blond hair,” Adeem said of their childhood.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“I am passionate about not wanting to be the Toby Keith of the left,” Adeem said. “I imagine these songs getting on a playlist beside Luke Bryan, articulating a full scope of the country experience. The stories of queer Appalachians and Black activists in the rural South are part of this culture, too.”There are signs it could happen. To record “White Trash Revelry,” Adeem started a “Redneck Fundraiser,” asking donors for just a dollar, as if it were a community barn-raising. They quickly raised more than $15,000, including cash from the actor Vincent D’Onofrio. For Adeem, the campaign revealed “how many people feel estranged by the culture of country.” They’ve since landed a distribution deal with a big Nashville firm and played a coveted spot at the city’s iconic venue Exit/In during AmericanaFest. “Middle of a Heart,” even before the album was released, netted more than 300,000 streams, a stat that stunned Adeem.“Country should be this giant quilt work of people, of stories that let me see different struggles,” said American Aquarium’s Barham. “Excluding any of those stories, for gender or religion or race, is not country. Folks like Adeem remind you of that.”Adeem seemed less sanguine about the prospect of moving beyond country’s margins, of infiltrating a genre and lifestyle chained to obdurate mores. Still, they beamed talking about widening queer acceptance, despite recent tragedies and political setbacks. Might it be possible for Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry and New York’s Gay Ole Opry, a decade-old showcase of queer country, to one day overlap?“Every part of me thinks there’s no way I’m going to make it in the country industry,” said Adeem, pausing to swig from a giant Dale Earnhardt mug before continuing, drawl intact. “But no part of me thought Brandi Carlile would call me one of the best songwriters in roots music, so I have no idea anymore.” More

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      With No Major Releases to Challenge Her, Taylor Swift Sticks at No. 1

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      “Midnights” logs a fourth week leading the Billboard 200, while Drake and 21 Savage, Bad Bunny and Lil Baby also hold their spots in the Top 5.Squint and you might mistake the latest Billboard album chart for last week’s: Almost all of the top slots are unchanged, led by Taylor Swift at No. 1 for a fourth time with “Midnights.”With no major new releases rising to challenge it, “Midnights” remains at the top with the equivalent of 177,000 sales in the United States, including 156 million streams and 57,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. Since its blockbuster release last month, “Midnights” has moved the equivalent of 2.6 million copies, including 1.4 billion streams.The next three spots on the chart are also unchanged: Drake and 21 Savage’s “Her Loss” (No. 2), Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” (No. 3) and Lil Baby’s “It’s Only Me” (No. 4). Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” rises one spot to No. 5 in its 98th week on the chart, all but one of them spent in the Top 10.The highest-charting new release is “Jupiter’s Diary: 7 Day Theory,” an eight-track EP by the Florida rapper and singer Rod Wave, arriving at No. 9.Among the few other notable changes in the Top 10 this week are Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” which rises 108 spots to No. 7 after the release of an expanded edition for the classic album’s 40th anniversary, and the return of holiday music with Michael Bublé’s “Christmas” — a seasonal hit each year since its release in 2011 — which lands at No. 10. More

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      Louise Tobin, Jazz Vocalist Who Put Her Career on Hold, Dies at 104

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      She stopped performing to raise children, at the request of her first husband, the bandleader Harry James. After remarrying, she resumed singing decades later.With the big band era in full swing in 1939, Louise Tobin, a jazz vocalist with Benny Goodman’s orchestra, was on the cusp of nationwide fame. But she soon put her career on hold at the request of her husband, the trumpeter and bandleader Harry James.Mr. James had begun touring with his own band, leaving Ms. Tobin to care for their two sons, Harry Jr. and Tim. And after the couple divorced in 1943, Ms. Tobin devoted herself to raising them for the next 20 years or so.Over time her melodic voice was largely forgotten — until she was invited onstage for an impromptu performance at a New Orleans nightclub in the late 1950s.A recording of that appearance helped jump-start her career, and she soon joined the band of Michael (Peanuts) Hucko, a clarinetist and bandleader. The two became an item, and married in 1967.Ms. Tobin, who spent the next decades traveling the world and making music with Mr. Hucko, died on Saturday at the home of a granddaughter in Carrollton, Texas, her son Harry said. She was 104.The newspapers of her day often compared Ms. Tobin’s warm voice to that of a young Ella Fitzgerald. She became a professional singer as a teenager, after winning a radio talent contest in Dallas in 1932. She was the fourth youngest of 11 siblings, and she eagerly left behind household chores to tour the state with different jazz ensembles.“I was thrilled,” she told The Dallas Morning News in 2010. “My fulfillment was not to have to wash dishes.”In 1934, she joined a local big band, where she met Mr. James, who played first trumpet. They eloped in 1935, shortly after the orchestra split up, and traveled around the country looking for work.By 1937, Mr. James had joined Benny Goodman and His Orchestra, and in 1939 he left to start his own band, which endured for four decades and was the first orchestra to employ Frank Sinatra.By Ms. Tobin’s account, she heard the young Sinatra sing on a local radio show and suggested that Mr. James visit him at the New Jersey restaurant where Sinatra worked as a singing waiter.Ms. Tobin was performing in New York at the time, and she joined Mr. Goodman’s band after a talent scout saw her perform in a Greenwich Village nightclub.She released hit records with Mr. Goodman’s orchestra, like a rendition of “There’ll Be Some Changes Made,” which became one of the most popular songs in the country. But as her career gained momentum, so did that of Mr. James, who became one of the most popular bandleaders of the swing era: In 1942, Columbia Records attributed a shortage of shellac to demand for his records.“We were more trying to establish Harry than we were trying to establish me,” Ms. Tobin said in 2010. “I didn’t juggle it very well.”Mr. James’s success kept him on the road, where he was surrounded by temptation. Shortly after he and Ms. Tobin divorced in 1943, he married the actress Betty Grable.Ms. Tobin was still popular when she quit Mr. Goodman’s band in the early 1940s and returned to Texas with her sons, but music became an afterthought as she raised them. She stayed out of the spotlight until after they had graduated from high school, when she went to see the Dixieland trumpeter Al Hirt play in New Orleans.Mr. Hirt recognized Ms. Tobin and asked her to sing with the band. A recording of the show made its way to the jazz critic and producer George Simon, who asked her to record more songs and sing at jazz festivals.Ms. Tobin was reluctant, but Mr. Simon persuaded her to sing at smaller venues in New York until she felt up to performing before a large audience. In time her confidence returned, and she gave a stirring performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1962.The jazz clarinetist Peanuts Hucko and Ms. Tobin at their wedding in 1967 in Littleton, Colo. He became her most enduring collaborator.Steve Larson/The Denver Post, via Getty ImagesWhile she rebuilt her career, Ms. Tobin began singing with Mr. Hucko’s ensemble. Mr. Hucko, who was best known for his stints alongside Louis Armstrong and Glenn Miller and his appearances on Lawrence Welk’s television show, became her most enduring collaborator.After their marriage, they owned and ran a jazz club in Colorado, recorded tribute albums to Mr. Goodman and Mr. Armstrong and toured in Europe, Japan and Australia, where they performed for Prince Charles and Princess Diana. They often sang duets onstage, including a version of “When You’re Smiling,” which was on the 1992 album “Swing That Music,” their final studio recording together.Mr. Hucko died in 2003, after which Ms. Tobin retired.Mary Louise Tobin was born on Nov. 11, 1918, in Aubrey, Texas, north of Dallas, and grew up nearby in Denton. Her father, Hugh, died in a fuel truck crash when she was young, and her oldest brother, Ray, opened a drugstore to help support the family. The children often sang together, but Ms. Tobin was the only one who became a professional singer.She went on the road before completing high school, first traveling with an older sister as a chaperone. Her family was initially shocked by her marriage to Mr. James, but in time they accepted him.After their divorce, Ms. Tobin lived on alimony and what she earned from the occasional show or recording. But she spent most of her time caring for her two sons, including during a worrisome time. Mr. James had received threats that his children could be kidnapped, prompting Ms. Tobin to stay on the move. She lived with her boys in California for a time and enrolled them in military school. She spent two years traveling with them to places like Hawaii, India and Egypt.In addition to her sons she is survived by many grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren.In interviews, Ms. Tobin expressed little regret about her interrupted career and often said that she felt grateful that she had a part in big band jazz at the height of its popularity.“I feel like that was a real era of contribution to the culture of the world,” she said.Jack Kadden contributed reporting. More

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      Review: In ‘KPOP,’ Korean Pop and Broadway Meet (Too) Cute

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      The worldwide sensation and American-style musical theater form an awkward alliance onstage.“A lot of people come to these things and they don’t even understand the language,” says Harry, a filmmaker who passes for the villain in the noisy yet skimpy new musical “KPOP.” “So what are they watching for?”Good question.For the record, the answer provided by Tiny, a member of a Korean pop group called RTMIS, is delivered, unlike a lot of the show, in English: “Perfection, Mr. Harry. OK?”And it’s true that if you enjoy the precision-drilled dancing, meticulous melisma and auto-tuned sentiments that have turned K-pop into a worldwide sensation over the past 10 years, you are likely to be among those cheering the musical’s Broadway incarnation, which opened on Sunday at Circle in the Square.But those who aren’t hard-core fans of the genre or don’t understand Korean — let alone those who saw the radically different and far superior Off Broadway version in 2017 — will have a harder time enjoying this one. For them, the musical is less an eye-opener than an ear-pounder, assiduously drowning out any ambitions it may once have had to be more.It can’t be lost on the creative team that in adapting their Off Broadway hit for a bigger and more conventional audience they courted the same fate as their fictional counterparts. Both then and now, the book of “KPOP,” by Jason Kim, concerns the efforts of a Seoul hit factory to push its stable of custom-groomed artists into crossover success in the United States. To do so, they are willing to sacrifice almost anything.That theme was given edgy, immersive expression in Teddy Bergman’s 2017 staging, produced by the experimental theater incubator Ars Nova in association with Ma-Yi Theater Company and Woodshed Collective. It imagined the audience as members of an itinerant focus group who, serving as emissaries of American taste, were led in small packs from space to space and given glimpses of what those sacrifices might mean.If some seemed silly, others were trenchant; an especially disturbing encounter involved a plastic surgeon. But by the time everyone assembled in one last room for a concert-cum-party, the giddy fun of the bubble-gummy songs (by Helen Park and Max Vernon) felt earned — even if the reversal was dramatically perplexing. Were we now celebrating what the rest of the show had encouraged us to disparage?That problem remains, with new ones added. To begin with, Bergman, directing again, faced an overwhelming difficulty in the fact that no Broadway theater could accommodate the immersive concept. Gabriel Hainer Evansohn’s set provides a partial solution: Instead of the audience moving, a tongue-shaped stage does, sliding back and forth bearing performers. And video screens mounted everywhere (Peter Nigrini is the projection designer) allow us to eavesdrop on the backstage action captured when Harry the filmmaker (Aubie Merrylees) goes rogue.Instead of the audience moving, a tongue-shaped stage does, sliding back and forth with the performers. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe narrative frame was rebuilt less successfully. The audience, no longer a focus group, merely watches as a K-pop impresario named Ruby (Jully Lee) prepares for a concert that will introduce her stable of acts to America. There are three of them: the five-woman RTMIS (pronounced Artemis), the eight-man F8 (pronounced fate) and the solo diva MwE (pronounced mu-WEE) — an orphan Ruby has raised, Mama Rose-style, for stardom.MwE (played by the actual K-pop star Luna) has been reconfigured entirely. Her problem is no longer that she is aging out of pop credibility but that she wants creative freedom and a normal life with her boyfriend (Jinwoo Jung). Ruby ruthlessly tries to quash those dangerous ideas — love and creativity are not things a K-pop star can afford, she says — even as she complains about MwE’s failure to perform from the heart.This is familiar material, thinly delivered, and so is the dissatisfaction of the members of RTMIS, which is so vague and hastily resolved I barely caught what it was. Only among the members of F8 does the conflict feel fresh and worthy of exploration in song: Its seven longtime members resent the “new kid,” Brad, brought in to juice their American rollout. Biracial and Connecticut-raised, Brad (Zachary Noah Piser) is seen by the others as inauthentic; he isn’t even fluent in Korean.The songs, unfortunately, do not take up the challenge of investigating that issue, or any other. They are all diegetic — actual numbers performed by the characters — and are thus connected to the story, as in a jukebox musical, by only the feeblest of threads. When Brad tells the filmmaker that he grew up neither Korean enough for some nor American enough for others, and proceeds to sing a song called “Halfway,” we may expect an exploration of those feelings. But no, it’s a love ballad, addressed to a girl: “Can you meet me halfway, baby?”The same problem derails “Korean Man,” a song for F8 that you may think from the setup will express their assertion of national pride. As we learn from the parts of it that are performed in English, though, it’s mostly about having the “baddest swagger” and “bein’ a bad, bad boy.”Jully Lee, left, plays a K-pop impresario named Ruby, and the real-life K-pop star Luna plays MwE.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith their link to the drama severed, and the drama in any case attenuated, the songs cease to function as they normally do in musical theater and collapse into a concert. That’s true even before the final 20 minutes of the show, when the filmmaker plot is summarily abandoned and, with it, any pretense of plot.So that flashback scene in which Ruby tells MwE, at 13, that she’s a “disaster” with “tree trunk legs,” and a choreographer shouts that she’s shaming her parents? Forget about it. Come hear the band. (Actually, there are only three instrumentalists.)By then, if you are not a fan, you may feel worn out by the aggressive mimicry of the K-pop performance style, not just in the mostly electronic arrangements but also in the minutely detailed choreography by Jennifer Weber, the squint-inducing lighting by Jiyoun Chang and the hundreds of can-you-top-this costumes by Clint Ramos and Sophia Choi. In that environment it’s hard to say whether Brad’s “Halfway” and MwE’s “Mute Bird” — acoustic songs simply staged and feelingly delivered — are actually lovely or merely a relief.In its remaking for Broadway I wish “KPOP” had preserved more moments like that: moments that allow you to consider what the excitement of K-pop (for those who feel it) and the expressiveness of American musical theater (likewise) can profitably say to each other. Both have their fans and no doubt their glories, as well as their limitations. But it seems to me that in introducing the two, a good place to have met would have been, well, halfway. “KPOP” still has far to go to get there.KPOPAt Circle in the Square, Manhattan; kpopbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      A Scruffy Guitar Shop Survives the Chelsea Hotel’s Chic Makeover

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      After a costly renovation, a landmark of Manhattan that was once home to Patti Smith and Bob Dylan is drawing a different crowd. Dan Courtenay, the proprietor of Chelsea Guitars, is fine with that.Ever since the Chelsea Hotel emerged from a long and costly renovation to become one of Manhattan’s trendiest playgrounds, the old hole-in-the-wall guitar shop on the ground floor has become an unlikely link to the building’s fabled bohemian past.Opened in the late 1980s, Chelsea Guitars has sold picks and strings to Patti Smith and Dee Dee Ramone. It started out as one of the hotel’s many street-level mom-and-pop shops. Now it’s the last one standing, a cluttered den of rare and vintage guitars that seems out of step with its chic surroundings. Hotel guests and out-of-towners who stumble into it, sometimes with one of the Lobby Bar’s signature $28 martinis swirling around in their bellies, are smitten by its scruffiness.Mr. Courtenay’s store occupies the small street-level space between the red awning of the freshly scrubbed bohemian landmark and the El Quijote restaurant.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesA mannequin of Marilyn Monroe strumming a ukulele sits outside the shop’s entrance on West 23rd Street. The narrow interior has cracked marble floors, a slow-spinning ceiling fan and brick walls lined with pictures of Albert King, Elmore James and other blues greats.Emerging from one wall, trompe l’oeil style, is the head of a Tyrannosaurus rex nicknamed Stanley — a homage to the Chelsea Hotel’s former manager Stanley Bard, who sometimes accepted paintings in lieu of rent checks from the building’s eccentric tenants.After the hotel was closed to guests in 2011, the 12-story Gilded Age era building was shrouded in scaffolding and netting for years, as a faction of its rent-stabilized tenants tried to thwart a top-to-bottom renovation. BD Hotels, a boutique hotel firm in New York that operates the Bowery and the Jane, ultimately prevailed, and its sleekly reimagined Hotel Chelsea opened in the summer. The more than 40 tenants who remain in the building can now order room service.The hotel’s well-scrubbed appearance might have startled the artists who lived there when drug dealers roamed the stairwells and cheap rooms provided sanctuary for Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Robert Mapplethorpe. Suites start at around $700 a night.The elegant Lobby Bar serves the Edie ’67, a cocktail mixed partly with mezcal and Lapsang tea named after the Andy Warhol “superstar” Edie Sedgwick. El Quijote, the Spanish restaurant that was once the hotel’s sleepy canteen, has been overhauled into a culinary hot spot. The Bard Room, named in honor of Mr. Bard, who died in 2017, has been the site of parties for The New Yorker and the British fashion company Mulberry.Mr. Courtenay walks through the newly renovated lobby.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesWhen two tourists from Poland, Irena Sierakowska and Przemyslaw Gulda, made a pilgrimage to the Chelsea on a recent day, they saw a doorman in a beanie cap and red gloves who greeted guests carrying shopping bags into the building. But they found the grit they were looking for when they walked into Chelsea Guitars.“When you live in Poland, your connection to New York is movies,” Mr. Gulda said. “But here, I walk in and feel like I’m in that movie. I think: This is it!”Ms. Sierakowska said she came to see the Chelsea Hotel because of a Leonard Cohen song, “Chelsea Hotel #2,” a 1974 ode to Janis Joplin written by Mr. Cohen, who lived for a time in Room 424.Behind the cluttered counter, a 68-year-old-man with long silvery hair and tinted glasses looked up from his bento box lunch. It was Dan Courtenay, the longtime owner of Chelsea Guitars. He told the couple that he once had a customer who recorded a famous cover of Mr. Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”“Jeff Buckley? Yeah, he used to come by here,” he said. “We’d do work on his guitars.”“Did you meet Marilyn?” he continued, referring to the kitsch statue out front. “I found her behind a trash can in Long Island. She’s pretty helpful, because I can tell anyone trying to find me, ‘Look for Marilyn.’”“People from all around the world, just like you guys, come to see the Chelsea Hotel, and then they end up in my shop,” he added. “To them, seeing the magical Chelsea Hotel, it’s like visiting what was once Oz — a downtrodden Oz.”As the couple, giddy from their contact high with a crustier New York, prepared to leave, Mr. Courtenay scribbled his number on a card and handed it to them.“If you get lost, or have any problems taking the subway,” he said, “call us.”If Chelsea Guitars has accrued cultural significance as an unkempt holdout in the newly pristine hotel, then Mr. Courtenay is its resident bard, eager to pass on the building’s mythology to anyone who enters his store, whether or not they buy a $6,000 1964 Epiphone Riviera or the other worship-worthy rare guitars on the walls. If you get him going, he’ll tell tales about what he says he has seen running the shop for more than three decades.Joan Baez once stopped by and gave him her Chinese takeout leftovers for lunch, he said. When the band Oasis was in town, Noel Gallagher came in and asked to see a rare Gibson acoustic stored away in the back of the shop. Mr. Courtenay was in a grumpy mood that day, so he told Mr. Gallagher to go fetch him a cup of coffee while he retrieved it.During Patti Smith’s brief residence in the hotel in the mid-1990s, her teenage son, Jackson, used to hang out in the shop playing Green Day riffs. And there was the time Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top dropped in before heading to El Quijote, where a confrontation ensued when the restaurant asked him to take off his signature tasseled cap.“They told him, ‘You’ve got to take off the hat,’” Mr. Courtenay recalled. “Billy said, ‘I don’t take this hat off when I’m sleeping.’”There was also the guitar busker named Vlad, who seemingly knew only a few chords and sang about his woes in a thick Eastern European accent at a nearby subway station, becoming known as the Polish Bluesman of Chelsea. There was also the mysterious woman who lived in the hotel, and who was rumored to come from wealth, whom Mr. Courtenay observed for years as she hailed invisible cabs outside the building. And there was the shop’s resident cat, a Russian blue named Boris.In addition to rare vintage guitars, Chelsea Guitars sells the small necessities.Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times“Boris had one tooth, no nails and one ear shot off,” Mr. Courtenay said. “He’d belonged to a troubled lady who lived upstairs. We kidnapped him to save his life.”“Boris despised dogs,” he continued. “He’d sit atop a Marshall amp and then leap onto any dog that came into the shop. He’d also take the elevator to visit people in the hotel. He’d go into El Quijote to say hello to customers. When I went to Paris, I discovered a postcard being sold to tourists, and to my shock, it was a picture of Boris at the Chelsea Hotel.”Rosanne Cash lives nearby with her husband, the musician and producer John Leventhal. In an email, she wrote: “We both appreciate the total anomaly Chelsea Guitars is in the current shiny, hip version of what Chelsea has become. We moved to Chelsea in ’96, and Dan’s blessed little hovel was a beacon and still connects us to the glorious grit.”Mr. Leventhal said: “Dan runs a freewheeling and almost improvisational kind of space. I often go there just to talk with him about life.”Mr. Courtenay grew up in Queens Village. His father was a police chief, and his mother worked as a secretary. He briefly lived in the hotel, in a terrace apartment just above his shop about two decades ago. “I used to go downstairs in my pajamas with a cup of coffee and I was still late for work,” he said. “I’ve been late my whole life.” He eventually moved to the nearby Penn South co-op houses, where he has lived ever since.He has no children and lives alone. He walks four blocks to work, rarely arriving before the princely hour of 2 p.m. And as far as he’s concerned, rock ’n’ roll died in 1971, when Duane Allman perished after a motorcycle crash — which explains why he had no clue who Nirvana were when the band walked into his shop at the height of their fame.But Mr. Courtenay’s Lebowski-like demeanor belies the determination that has allowed him to keep his shop in the hotel. He has survived two close calls so far.A smoker rests a hand on the old Marilyn Monroe statue outside his shop.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesA photo in Chelsea Guitars shows the proprietor’s father, Daniel J. Courtenay, who was a police chief with the New York Police Department.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesOriginally, Chelsea Guitars occupied a bigger space a few doors down from its current location. After the hotel’s board ousted Stanley Bard in 2007, however, many of the building’s artistic tenants felt that they had lost their protector. Then the families that had long owned the Victorian Gothic palace put it up for sale, resulting in the chaotic succession of ownership turnovers that transformed the hotel into an embattled construction site.In 2009, Mr. Courtenay learned that his lease wouldn’t be renewed. After the man who ran the building’s ground-floor Balabanis Tailor shop retired, he brokered a deal to move into the newly vacated space. El Quijote waiters helped carry his wares to the tiny new location.Four years ago, Chelsea Guitars was imperiled again. BD Hotels, the group that oversaw the renovation, reportedly planned to convert his shop into a building entranceway. This time, Mr. Courtenay took his plight to the press, and the resulting coverage in a neighborhood newspaper, Chelsea Now, created a groundswell of community support for his cause.BD Hotels offered him a five-year lease and didn’t raise his rent. Mr. Courtenay taped the newspaper’s follow-up article to his shop window. “Chelsea Guitars to Remain in Iconic Location” is the headline.Nevertheless, Mr. Courtenay — who stressed that he maintains amicable relations with his landlord — wonders what the fate of his shop will be in the chic haven that has risen around him, which is set to include a spa, a Japanese restaurant and a cafe.“I don’t know what will happen when my lease ends,” he said. “I like to think that they see we come with the hotel, but who knows. People have told me, ‘You could leave and start elsewhere.’ But to me, it’s all about the Chelsea Hotel or nothing. If I went elsewhere, I’d just be a guitar store.”Ira Drukier, the hotelier who owns the Hotel Chelsea with Sean MacPherson and Richard Born, said that Chelsea Guitars is a welcome holdout in his establishment.Stanley the T. Rex minds the store.Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times“The hotel has a long history, and he’s part of it in his own way,” Mr. Drukier said. “It just seems like the right thing to do is let him stay here and do what he’s been doing for so many years.” He added: “His spot is a tiny hole-in-the-wall. It’s not like I can fit some big restaurant in it.”One recent evening — not long after Michael Chaiken, who was the first curator of the Bob Dylan Archive, stopped by to drop off his Fender Telecaster — Mr. Courtenay needed to use the bathroom. Because his shop doesn’t have one, he stepped outside and went into the Hotel Chelsea.As he passed the grand double doors that lead to the Lobby Bar, a rowdy din emerged, so he decided to check out the scene. In the lounge, the host looked on as hotel guests had uni toasts and dirty martini oysters while telegenic 30-somethings waited for a seat at the bar.Mr. Courtenay’s customers have included Jeff Buckley, Rosanne Cash, Noel Gallagher, John Leventhal, Dee Dee Ramone and Patti Smith.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesAs people brushed past Mr. Courtenay’s shaggy and lumbering figure, he mused on how the city’s nostalgists liked to dwell on the ghosts of the Chelsea Hotel.“There are people who still want this place to be closed up and for it to be the 1950s again,” he said. “Do I wish Stanley Bard was here? And that it was still the zany 1950s and that I was talking to Jackson Pollock? Yeah, I do. But I look at it now, and it’s full of life and people again, and that’s a wonderful thing.”“I already wept for this hotel’s past a long time ago,” he said. “And you can’t bring back the past.” More