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    ‘The Gilded Age’ Enriches Its Portrait of Black High Society

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    The air felt different as I sat across from Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald and Denée Benton. I was lifted simply by being with these women, three generations of Broadway royalty. (Of course, as the former Clair Huxtable, Rashad qualifies as TV royalty as well.)Now they are together on “The Gilded Age,” the HBO drama about late 19th-century New York City and the old-money elites, arrivistes and workers who live and clash there.I was initially worried about the show when it debuted in 2022. As a long-term fan of the creator Julian Fellowes’s more homogenous hit “Downton Abbey,” I feared this American counterpart would similarly overlook the racial dynamics of its era. But I was pleasantly surprised by the nuance of the character Peggy Scott (Benton), an aspiring journalist and secretary for Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) and a member of Brooklyn’s Black upper-middle class.An early version of Peggy had the character posing as a domestic servant to gain access to Agnes. But Benton and the show’s historical consultant, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, pushed for a more multifaceted exploration of the lives of Black New Yorkers, who often interacted with Manhattan’s white elite even as they lived separately. (Dunbar and I were colleagues at Rutgers University.)This season, “The Gilded Age” has its most diverse and in-depth portrayal of Black high society yet, often pitting Peggy’s mother, Dorothy (McDonald), against the aristocratic Elizabeth Kirkland (Rashad), who arrived on the show on Sunday. Like other wealthy mothers on this show, Elizabeth spends most of her time trying to control the marital fate of her children and discriminating against other families, like the Scotts, that she believes to be socially inferior.Audra McDonald, left, and Denée Benton in the new season of “The Gilded Age,” which includes the show’s most in-depth portrayal of Black high society yet.Karolina Wojtasik/HBOWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Danielle Deadwyler on ’40 Acres and Balancing Brutality and Family

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      The star plays a stoic matriarch raising a militant brood to protect their land and each other against cannibals in R.T. Thorne’s new horror indie.Onscreen, the actress Danielle Deadwyler has become known for expressing with her eyes what words rarely do. She can appear at once steely and heartbroken, fierce and fragile.She has used this ability to great effect in the HBO Max dystopian drama “Station Eleven”; in Jeymes Samuel’s 2021 western, “The Harder They Fall”; and in Chinonye Chukwu’s 2022 historical drama, “Till,” in which she played the doting mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose gruesome murder in Mississippi in 1955 helped spark the civil rights movement.Now, Deadwyler, 43, is applying her skill to R.T. Thorne’s first feature, the horror indie “40 Acres,” which is set in the near future. She plays a mother and former soldier, Hailey Freeman, who, alongside her partner, an Indigenous man named Galen (Michael Greyeyes), is preparing her brood for the harsh truths of their famine-decimated postapocalyptic life. They must fight threats from all sides, the scariest of which are bands of ferocious cannibals.The family tries to balance survivalist reality, including grisly encounters, with serene farm life. Days are spent training the four children to be warriors while also honoring their heritage and their land, finding surprising joy in the small things. In his critic’s pick review for The Times, Robert Daniels wrote that “Deadwyler’s forceful energy fills the frame” and that she “lends power and humor to this lovingly stern mother.”Hailey and her family are the descendants of African American farmers who settled in Canada after the Civil War, when the United States failed to fulfill Gen. William T. Sherman’s promise of 40 acres of land for Black Americans freed from enslavement.“It’s a unique family — R.T. said he hadn’t seen Black and Indigenous families together onscreen,” Deadwyler told me in a video interview in June. “I hadn’t either, like this.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares76 Views

      in Music

      Cannonball With Wesley Morris: My Love Affair With Bruno Mars

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      Wesley Morris has a confession to make: He loves Bruno Mars. Nothing wrong with that, right? With the help of the culture writer Niela Orr, Wesley untangles his crush from his discomfort with the pop star’s cozy relationship to Blackness.You can listen to the show on your favorite podcast app, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and iHeartRadio, and you can watch it on YouTube:Cannonball is hosted by Wesley Morris and produced by Janelle Anderson, Elyssa Dudley, and John White with production assistance from Kate LoPresti. The show is edited by Wendy Dorr. The show is engineered by Daniel Ramirez and recorded by Maddy Masiello, Kyle Grandillo and Nick Pitman. It features original music by Dan Powell and Diane Wong. Our theme music is by Justin Ellington.Our video team is Brooke Minters And Felice Leon. This episode was filmed by Alfredo Chiarappa, and edited by Jamie Hefetz and Pat Gunther.Special thanks to everyone who helped launch this show: Daniel Harrington, Lisa Tobin, Sasha Weiss, Max Linsky, Nina Lassam, Jeffrey Miranda, Mahima Chablani, Katie O’Brien, Christina Djossa, Kelly Doe, Shu Chun Xie, Dash Turner, Benjamin Tousley, Julia Moburg, Tara Godvin, Elizabeth Bristow, Lynn Levy, Victoria Kim, Jordan Cohen, Clinton Cargill, Bobby Doherty, Dahlia Haddad, Paula Szuchman, and Sam Dolnick.And an extra special thanks to J Wortham. More

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      in Television

      Lynn Hamilton, a Steady Presence on ‘Sanford and Son,’ Dies at 95

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      A former Broadway actress, she was a no-nonsense foil for the unruly Fred Sanford. She also warmed hearts with a recurring role on the “The Waltons.”Lynn Hamilton, who became a familiar presence in American living rooms in the 1970s playing Donna Harris, the elegant and unflinching girlfriend of Redd Foxx’s irascible Fred Sanford, on “Sanford and Son,” and Verdie Foster, a dignified matriarch, on “The Waltons,” died on Thursday at her home in Chicago. She was 95.Her death was confirmed by her former manager and publicist, the Rev. Calvin Carson.Before landing her breakout television roles, Ms. Hamilton had considerable experience onstage and onscreen. She made her Broadway debut in 1959 in “Only in America,” in a cast that also included Alan Alda. She appeared in John Cassavetes’s first film as a director, “Shadows” (1958); two films starring Sidney Poitier, “Brother John” (1971) and “Buck and the Preacher” (1972); and “Lady Sings the Blues,” the 1972 Billie Holiday biopic starring Diana Ross.Still, almost no experience could have prepared her for working with Mr. Foxx, a hallowed comedian who grew up on the streets — he palled around Harlem with the young Malcolm X during their hustler days — and made his name with nightclub routines that were socially conscious and unapologetically dirty.“Sanford and Son,” a groundbreaking NBC hit, broke racial barriers. A predominantly Black sitcom, it starred Mr. Foxx as Fred Sanford, a cantankerous and wholly unfiltered Los Angeles junk man, and Demond Wilson as Lamont, his sensible, long-suffering son.Ms. Hamilton was originally cast, as a landlady, for only one episode during the show’s first season. She made enough of an impact to earn a regular role later that season as Donna, Fred’s girlfriend and, eventually, fiancée.Ms. Hamilton’s character and Mr. Foxx’s came close to getting married, but they never did. Tandem Productions/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares156 Views

      in Music

      How ‘Boots on the Ground’ Two-Stepped Onto Everyone’s Summer Playlist

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      Black Southern line dance culture, and a co-sign from Beyoncé, has helped to popularize the song and its fan-snapping moves.Wagener, S.C., is home to a population of 631, a proud history of asparagus crops and now an unlikely dance phenomenon.To write “Boots on the Ground,” the stomping, midtempo anthem with a wailing chorus, also known as “Where Them Fans At?,” the singer 803Fresh, born Douglas Furtick, lifted a bit of vernacular from the dancers who attend trail rides in the area. Those rides — part horsemanship display, part social gathering — frequently culminate in field parties, where line dancers and steppers show off choreographed moves to Southern soul and country anthems.“I heard a lot of the steppers: They were like, ‘Hey, we got boots on the ground tonight,’” 803Fresh said, describing how they would hype up a trail ride to friends and neighbors. The song’s central query was a genuine one. At one outing, he saw steppers wielding fans and tried to buy one — to no avail. Writing the lyrics, he said, he did not yet fully understand the significance of the fans that were ubiquitous.“It’s a functional piece that’s now being used as part of a cultural statement but it’s always been with us historically,” said DaLyah Jones, a historian and cultural critic who has studied Black Southern arts. She cited their use as a fashionable accessory carried to church, in queer and ballroom culture, and as a functional way to beat the heat at these outdoor gatherings. Items such as napkins and handkerchiefs have also been used as fans and an extension of the dancing.803Fresh performing “Boots on the Ground” at a Juneteenth event in Lancaster, S.C.Nora Williams for The New York TimesSince the release of “Boots on the Ground” in December, the song has steadily spread in an unusual way: Its accompanying line dance has made it a sensation both of social media and the I.R.L. gatherings where a community of Black Southerners could care less about outside trends. It has traveled beyond field dances to TikTok and back out into the world, most notably landing on the stage of Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” tour, where the pop superstar performs part of the line dance during a section of her show.

      @demkuntryfolks Okayyy okayyy, I can get Jiggy with this 🪭🪭🪭🐎 #trailridersoftiktok #linedance #backyard #cowgirls #newlinedance #georgia #linedancing #southcarolina #northcarolina ♬ original sound – Djpayme We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Why Beyoncé and BET Keep Calling Jesse Collins

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      There’s a memorable scene in Beyoncé’s “Homecoming” documentary about her headlining performance at Coachella in 2018, when she asks a production crew member for a 30-foot-wide camera track. He tells her it doesn’t exist. She then proves him wrong.The Emmy-winning television producer Jesse Collins remembers that moment well, so when the pop superstar called on him to produce her Christmas Day N.F.L. halftime extravaganza “Beyoncé Bowl” for Netflix, he was ready to meet her demands.“Hell no, I will never tell her something doesn’t exist unless it really doesn’t exist,” he said recently with a laugh, “because she’ll Google it and she keeps up with technology. If it can’t happen, I am 1,000 percent certain it can’t happen.”Collins, 54, has worked closely with Beyoncé on awards show performances, including her raucous rendition of “Freedom” at the 2016 BET Awards, when she danced and kicked in a shallow pool of water.“The water was one of the most complicated things that I’ve ever done on any award show,” Collins recalled in a video interview from his office in Burbank, Calif., in a comfy black hoodie as the sun beamed behind him. “Most people try to get away from water,” he said, but an executive had promised it. “When you start the conversation with, ‘This was promised to Beyoncé,’ everybody’s like, ‘We’re going to make this happen.’”Making things happen is Collins’s specialty, and it’s why heavyweights like Oprah Winfrey and Jay-Z have recruited him for their projects.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Sacha Jenkins, Filmmaker Who Mined the Black Experience, Dies at 53

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      Shaped by early hip-hop culture, his documentaries put race in the foreground, whether the topic was hip-hop fashion, the Capitol riots or Louis Armstrong.Sacha Jenkins, a fiery journalist and documentary filmmaker who strove to tell the story of Black American culture from within, whether in incisive prose explorations of rap and graffiti art or in screen meditations on Louis Armstrong, the Wu-Tang Clan or Rick James, died on May 23 at his home in the Inwood section of Manhattan. He was 53.The death was confirmed by his wife, the journalist and filmmaker Raquel Cepeda-Jenkins, who said the cause was complications of multiple system atrophy, a neurodegenerative disorder.Whatever the medium — zines, documentaries, satirical television shows — Mr. Jenkins was unflinching on the topic of race as he sought to reflect the depths and nuances of the Black experience as only Black Americans understood it.He was “an embodiment of ‘for us, by us,’” the journalist Stereo Williams wrote in a recent appreciation on Okayplayer, a music and culture site. “He was one of hip-hop’s greatest journalistic voices because he didn’t just write about the art: He lived it.”And he lived it from early on. Mr. Jenkins, raised primarily in the Astoria section of Queens, was a graffiti artist as a youth, and sought to bring an insider’s perspective to the culture surrounding it with his zine Graphic Scenes X-Plicit Language, which he started at 16. He later co-founded Beat-Down newspaper, which covered hip-hop; and the feisty and irreverent magazine Ego Trip, which billed itself as “the arrogant voice of musical truth.”Nas on the cover of the first issue of Ego Trip magazine, which billed itself as “the arrogant voice of musical truth.”Ego TripWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      The Patti LuPone Drama With Audra McDonald and Kecia Lewis, Explained

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      The offstage tensions between three Broadway stars became public after a dispute over sound levels, an Instagram post and a much-talked-about magazine article.Patti LuPone and Audra McDonald are two of the biggest Broadway stars of recent decades. So when LuPone pointedly referred to McDonald as “not a friend” in a new interview with The New Yorker, it caused quite a stir.LuPone made the comment when she was asked about some supportive emojis McDonald added last November to a social media post by another Broadway star, Kecia Lewis. Lewis had accused LuPone of being “racially microaggressive” after she objected to the sound levels at her Broadway show.Here’s what we know.It began with a Broadway noise dispute.When LuPone was on Broadway last year, starring with Mia Farrow in a play called “The Roommate,” she grew concerned about sounds audible from the Alicia Keys musical playing next door, “Hell’s Kitchen.” Noise is a frequent phenomenon on Broadway, and is especially noticeable at plays, where the sound levels tend to be lower than at musicals. LuPone said that she asked for help from the Shubert Organization, which operates the theaters, and that it was taken care of.Kecia Lewis, who won a Tony Award for playing a piano teacher in “Hell’s Kitchen,” posted an Instagram video in November criticizing LuPone’s actions. In what she called an “open letter” about LuPone’s complaints about the musical’s noise levels, she said, “These actions, in my opinion, are bullying, they’re offensive, they are racially microaggressive, they’re rude, they’re rooted in privilege.”She added: “Referring to a predominantly Black Broadway show as loud can unintentionally reinforce harmful stereotypes.”What does that have to do with McDonald?McDonald, a founding member of Black Theater United, a coalition formed to combat racism in the theater world, added supportive emojis to Lewis’s Instagram post. While comments on the post appear to have been removed, People magazine reported at the time that McDonald “simply commented with a series of emojis, writing: ‘❤️❤️👏🏾👏🏾’. ”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Sinners’ and Beyoncé Battle the Vampires. And the Gatekeepers, Too.

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      This moment might call for excessive, imaginative Black art that wants to be gobbled up. That’s Ryan Coogler’s new movie. That’s “Cowboy Carter.” Let’s throw in some Kendrick, too.When Beyoncé wails, in the opening moments of her “Cowboy Carter” album, that “them big ideas are buried here,” I’ve imagined “big” standing in for “racist” but have never hit pause to wonder about the GPS coordinates. That song’s called “Ameriican Requiem,” so the cemetery is everywhere. And yet partway through Ryan Coogler’s hit “Sinners,” I thought, Oh, this is where ‘here’ is, inside a movie about a 1932 juke joint whose music is so soulful that vampires, who are also a white minstrel trio, want to suck its blood.She’s envisioning utopia — a place where a Black woman feels free to make any kind of music she wants, including country. He’s imagined a nightmare in which Black art is doomed to be coveted before it’s ever just simply enjoyed. She’s defying the gatekeepers. He’s arguing that some gates definitely need to be kept. To that end, the movie keeps a gag running wherein vampire etiquette requires a verbal invitation to enter the club, leading to comic scenes of clearly possessed, increasingly itchy soul junkies standing in a doorway begging to be let in. People have been calling certain white performers interested in Black music vampires for years. Here’s a movie that literalizes the metaphor with an audacity that’s thrilling in its obviousness and redundancy.There’s never a bad time for good pop art. There’s never a bad time for Black artists to provide it. But these here times? Times of hatchet work and so-called wood-chipping; of chain saws, as both metaphor and dispiriting political prop; a time of vandalistic racial gaslighting. These times might call for an excessive pop art that takes on too much, that wants to be gobbled up and dug into, an art that isn’t afraid to boast I am this country, while also doing some thinking about what this country is. These here times might call for Black artists to provide that, too, to offer an American education that feels increasingly verboten. That’s not art’s strong suit, pointing at chalkboards. But if school systems are being bullied into coddling snowflakes, then perhaps, on occasion, art should be hitting you upside the head and dancing on your nose.Beyoncé on the opening night of her “Cowboy Carter” tour in Los Angeles last month.The New York TimesNow, it’s true that the knobbiest moments on “Cowboy Carter” and in “Sinners” are the equivalent of diagramed sentences. The album uses elders to do its explaining. Before “Spaghettii” gets underway, the singer and songwriter Linda Martell stops by to dissertate on the limitation of genres; Dolly Parton connects her “Jolene” to the home-wrecker in Beyoncé’s now nine-year-old “Sorry”; and Willie Nelson, as the D.J. on KNTRY, Beyoncé’s fictional broadcast network, turns his dial past some real chestnuts to tee up “Texas Hold ’Em.” They’re vouching for the validity of her project’s scope and sincerity, while, especially in Martell’s case, spelling everything out.The spelling in “Sinners” happens right in the middle of its young protagonist’s first big blues number. Earlier, we’d gotten a taste of what Sammie (Miles Caton), a preacher’s boy, could do. Caton’s molasses baritone and impaling guitar work were really doing it for me when the sound muffles, and in come not one but two micro lectures about this music’s power to “pierce the veil between the present and the past.” And as these explanations of Black music tumble forth, I was surprised to find a very Funkadelic fellow making love to an electric guitar right next to Sammie. Over by the kitchen twerks a woman arguably conjured from some extremely City Girls place. The temperature of instruments changes from live drums to what sound like drum machines. And I soon spy dashikied tribesmen, b-boys, a ballerina and, I’m pretty sure, a decked-out Chinese folk singer, and they’re all gettin’ in the way of the blues.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More