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      36 Hours in Melbourne, Australia: Things to Do and See

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      12 p.m.
      Explore a lane that’s gone from rags to riches
      Flinders Lane was the center of Melbourne’s rag trade, as its textile industry was known, until production moved offshore starting in the 1960s. Today, it’s home to a number of gorgeous shops and restaurants. The city’s most beautiful retail space must belong to Alpha60, a local brother-sister fashion label (think boxy shirts and breezy culottes), whose store inside the Chapter House building occupies a cathedral-like space with lofty, vaulted ceilings, pointed-arch windows and a baby grand piano. Across the road, Craft Victoria, a subterranean gallery and store, features experimental Australian ceramics and textile art. After your shopping, drop into Gimlet at Cavendish House, a glamorous restaurant where crisply dressed waiters sail by with caviar and lobster roasted in a wood-fired oven, but you don’t have to go all out: Squeeze in at the bar right after the doors open at noon for an expertly made gin martini (29 dollars) before the lunch rush. More

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      Two New Books Consider Comedy and the Culture Wars

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      The authors of “Comedy Book” and “Outrageous” argue that culture-war worries about what’s a laughing matter have been overplayed.COMEDY BOOK: How Comedy Conquered Culture — and the Magic That Makes It Work, by Jesse David FoxOUTRAGEOUS: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, by Kliph NesteroffDid you hear the one about cancel culture?Of course you did, several times over, if you’ve paid any attention to modern comedy and its purveyors, many of whom have groused about how hard it is to be funny in today’s climate. But two new books share an exasperation with the common sentiment that there’s never been a worse time to express oneself than the present. Taking them, well, seriously can liberate us from repeating the past.Kliph Nesteroff’s fact-packed “Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars” finds American entertainers in a perpetual state of despair over the censorious climate of their day — whatever day it happens to be. Steve Allen, the original host of “The Tonight Show,” complained about the “very touchy times” in 1955; in 2015, Jerry Seinfeld said he’d been warned away from playing colleges because of students’ sensitivities.Social media “gives the impression that people are more irrational, humorless and overly sensitive than in the past,” Nesteroff writes, but vintage letters to the editor contain “remarkably similar” sentiments.To Jesse David Fox, the author of “Comedy Book,” the risk of backlash is part of the point. Fox, a senior editor at New York magazine’s Vulture and a podcaster who regularly interviews comedians, puts it this way: “Does political correctness make comedy harder to do? Sure, in the sense that it would be easier to run for a touchdown if you didn’t have to worry about holding the ball, but that’s the game. It’s what makes it more exciting than watching a bunch of men sprinting with helmets on.” This is just one example of Fox’s keen insight in his energetic and wise book, which focuses on the ’90s and beyond, when, the author reckons, comedy became an “ever-present, important, valued societal force.” (Fox points out that before “Seinfeld” premiered in 1989, no comedian had ever headlined a show at Madison Square Garden’s arena, yet by the time he wrote his book, 18 had.) Within broadly named chapters (“Truth,” “Context,” “Audience”), he crams vivid examples; his “Timing” section, which explores 9/11 jokes and the notion of “too soon,” is particularly adept at illustrating the use of humor in the face of tragedy.Like many of his subjects, Fox knows his way around a pointed one-liner. “A roast might sound mean, but it’s another way of saying ‘I see you’” is one. “If you are saying supposedly offensive things and the audience is instantly all onboard, it is not a comedy show, it’s a rally” is another. That such rigorous thinking should at one point lead him to defend an Adam Sandler poop joke is a great gag in itself.Fox is allergic to the kind of snobbery directed at broad comedy, maintaining that “if it’s funny to anyone, it’s funny.” Still, he’s interested in parameters — how “8:46,” Dave Chappelle’s Netflix monologue inspired by the murder of George Floyd, functions as “a piece of work in conversation with the history of comedy,” and why the same comedian’s jokes targeting queer people fall short.Comedy, Fox writes, is fundamentally play, and in his deft hands, the analysis of comedy can be playful, too. Fox knows that grand pronouncements on what makes funny things funny is dicey territory: “The sense of what is funny is so subjective — so completely built into your person — that it feels objective,” he writes.His own life experiences and tastes are integral to his reporting. The first and last chapters of the book recount the deaths of immediate family members, which, he says, comedy helped him process. “Comedy Book” is not the definitive history of the past three-plus decades. It’s Fox’s history, and better for it.“Outrageous,” the product of herculean research, has a wider purview than just comedy. Nesteroff touches on rock ’n’ roll, talk radio, the initial blowback received by early critics of Hitler and more.However, what does and doesn’t, should and shouldn’t, make us laugh does take up a lot of space (Nesteroff’s 2015 “The Comedians” is a full-fledged history of the form). Sometimes the laughs are inadvertent, as in a 1959 complaint from a viewer of the TV series “Lassie” who compared its portrayal of a litter of puppies to a sex show.In no-frills prose, Nesteroff races through some two centuries of expression and backlash — from blackface minstrelsy (criticized early on by Frederick Douglass) to the (formerly Dixie) Chicks (the country music trio whose titanic profile shrank several sizes after its lead singer publicly criticized President George W. Bush) — rarely pausing for analysis and sometimes breezing by useful context. The book tends to home in on the moment when each brouhaha reached a fever pitch, which can give a distorted picture of the controversies and their ensuing fallouts.“Outrageous” is nonetheless a useful compendium. Placing so many outrages next to one another exposes a call-and-response pattern, in which both sides of the political divide have tried to dictate acceptable speech for all. We may be partial to the intentions of one side, but the mechanics often look identical.Unsurprisingly, it’s those already in power who often succeed. If there is a main character in Nesteroff’s sea of stories, it’s Paul Weyrich, a John Birch Society alum who helped build “an elaborate Culture War infrastructure” with corporate cash and evangelical muscle, eventually cofounding the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority.In sometimes clandestine ways, those groups have had a major impact in seeding American culture with conservative ideology, raging against what Weyrich called “the Cultural Marxism of an elite few to dictate words, language and opinions” while, Nesteroff writes, doing precisely that.“Outrageous” portrays a country divided; there’s no shortage of strife in Fox’s book, but he believes fundamentally in the unifying power of comedy, which “smooths conflicts and unites disparate groups.” His faith is contagious. Comedy is not stifled, he argues, but has “enmeshed itself in how millennials and now Gen Z communicate.” Superstars like Chappelle and Amy Schumer are endowed with the kind of trusted status once reserved for those in the purported truth business, like journalists, public intellectuals and politicians.“Can comedy make everything all better?” Fox asks in conclusion. “Of course not. But it makes it easier.”COMEDY BOOK: How Comedy Conquered Culture — and the Magic That Makes It Work | More

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      Suleika Jaouad Revisits Bone Marrow Transplant in “American Symphony”

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      This month, writer Suleika Jaouad revisits her second bone marrow transplant in the documentary “American Symphony.”In the months following her second bone marrow transplant, Suleika Jaouad’s TikTok algorithm started serving her videos of bearded dragons shedding their skin. For a writer whose work deals in ambiguities, that metaphor was tidier than she’d have preferred.Ms. Jaouad quotes Joan Didion and Emily Dickinson in casual conversation. She is the author of “Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of Life Interrupted,” a best seller which documents her first bone marrow transplant and its aftermath. Diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2011, Ms. Jaouad recorded the experience in real time for a column in this paper.“Why am I drawn to these?” Ms. Jaouad, now 35, wondered of the reptilian videos. She posed the question while settling into the crook of her couch at her home in Brooklyn, with a lunch spread laid out over a low table in front of her. Her dog River ogled some baba ganoush from his perch near her feet.More than time-tested sonnets and snippets of Buddhist wisdom, it was molting bearded dragons that seemed to tell the truth about what Ms. Jaouad called, “the experience of forced renewal.” She too had molted — twice now. And like the lizards, she had no choice but to be vulnerable. “I was so stripped bare, I felt larval,” said Ms. Jaouad.Diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2011, Ms. Jaouad recorded the experience in real time for a column in The New York Times.via Penguin Random HouseThis month, Ms. Jaouad will revisit the raw period of her cancer recurrence and second transplant when the feature documentary “American Symphony” premieres on Netflix in collaboration with Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground. The work follows Ms. Jaouad and her husband, the musician Jon Batiste, as the couple faces what Ms. Jaouad has called their “life of contrasts.” Both Ms. Jaouad and Mr. Batiste serve as executive producers.Just how stark are the contrasts? In November 2021, Ms. Jaouad learned her cancer had returned. That same week, Mr. Batiste earned 11 Grammy nominations — the most of any artist. The night before Ms. Jaouad checked into the hospital for her transplant, the two — who met as middle schoolers at band camp and later reconnected — married at home and swapped twist-tie rings.Meanwhile, Mr. Batiste continued both to serve as bandleader on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and to compose a one-time performance at Carnegie Hall in New York (also called “American Symphony”) that would distill the whole of American history into sound. In her sterile room, Ms. Jaouad started to paint and papered her walls in vibrant, sometimes gruesome watercolor.None of this was supposed to happen.As in the lead-up to her initial diagnosis, Ms. Jaouad had been negotiating persistent fatigue for months when she went to see her doctors for tests.It had been over a decade since Ms. Jaouad’s first bone marrow transplant. Her own medical team was so convinced of her durable health that the biopsy she insisted on was deemed a kind of indulgence. Minutes before the procedure, a nurse told her she didn’t have to do it. “I felt embarrassed,” Ms. Jaouad said. “I felt like I was being a hysterical, melodramatic hypochondriac.” She almost backed out, but the writer Elizabeth Gilbert — a friend and mentor — had driven her to the appointment. She didn’t want Ms. Gilbert to feel she had wasted her time.“I was right to push for the biopsy,” said Ms. Jaouad. “I wish I hadn’t been.”Netflix“She’s able to transform darkness, alchemize darkness, and transmutate darkness into light,” Mr. Batiste said of his wife.NetflixDoctors ground into Ms. Jaouad’s spine to extract a sample of her marrow. Ms. Gilbert stood watch, calling the ordeal “grisly as hell.” The relapse “simply wasn’t supposed to happen,” she wrote in an email. “There was no template for it, which was why nobody was looking for it.”“I was right to push for the biopsy,” said Ms. Jaouad. “I wish I hadn’t been.”The filmmaker Matthew Heineman had already started production on what would become “American Symphony” when Ms. Jaouad’s results came in. Mr. Heineman, who directed “Cartel Land” and “A Private War,” had been interested in shadowing Mr. Batiste as he devised the Carnegie Hall piece. Ms. Jaouad’s recurrence necessitated — as Mr. Heineman put it — a “pivot.”Ms. Jaouad was not sure she wanted to function as a plot twist.“I never want to be flattened into ‘the sick girl,’” Ms. Jaouad said of her deliberations. “I said to Matt outright, ‘I don’t want to be the dramatic counterpoint to Jon’s meteoric success.’” Mr. Heineman insisted he too was uninterested in the tropes of the illness plot. In “American Symphony” no one feels an errant lump. Ms. Jaouad doesn’t have a dramatic phone call with her oncologist. Viewers discover she has cancer in the middle of a fierce snowball fight in which Ms. Jaouad — struck and faux-outraged — protests: No hitting the girl with leukemia.Ms. Jaouad came around on the project as she did on “Between Two Kingdoms.” Then too, she had been hesitant. Ms. Jaouad recalled an encounter with the writer Cheryl Strayed not long after her first transplant. She told Ms. Strayed she wanted to write a book, but not one about illness. Ms. Strayed told her she had once been determined to avoid writing about the death of her mother. Then she turned in the manuscript for “Wild: Lost and Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.”“It’s about the hike, but it’s all about her dead mother,” Ms. Jaouad said with a smile.Ms. Jaouad’s book, and to some extent, “The Isolation Journals,” a popular newsletter she launched at the outset of the pandemic, explores how to re-enter the world after devastation. “American Symphony” follows up: How to keep going when there’s no straightforward “after.”So when it came time to watch an initial cut of the film (drawn from 1,500 hours of footage), Ms. Jaouad queued it up alone. “I feel a bit desensitized to it now,” she said. “That specific time is not representative of how I live or who I am.” But she has “no qualms” about her depiction or the decision to let Mr. Heineman film the crucial appointment three months post-transplant in which she would learn if her transplant worked. Mr. Heineman thus found out at the same time she and Mr. Batiste did that the procedure had been a success — and that Ms. Jaouad would have to be in treatment to outwit her cancer for the rest of her life.Lately, Ms. Jaouad is forcing herself to make plans. She sees it as an act of, “necessary optimism,” that she has committed to write two more books. Dana Golan for The New York Times“To describe it as a roller coaster would be an insult to roller coasters,” Ms. Jaouad said of her emotional whiplash. “The idea of indefinite treatment thrust me into a whole different kind of in-between place, and it’s one that I’m still learning to swim in.”“She’s able to transform darkness, alchemize darkness, and transmutate darkness into light,” Mr. Batiste said in a phone interview. (He called hours after still more Grammy nominations. This year, he earned six, including one for “Butterfly” — the song that plays in the “American Symphony” trailer and which he wrote for Ms. Jaouad.) “She’s able to look into what she’s facing and see not only how she can find God and find healing through it, but also provide that insight to hundreds of thousands and millions of other people out there whom she’s never met.”Necessary OptimismAfter the film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, Ms. Jaouad recalled that someone in the crowd approached her and said how relieved she was: “You’re still here.”“When it comes to illness stories, we tell them from the vantage point of having survived,” Ms. Jaouad said. In that sense, “American Symphony,” which stops short of a white-text-black-screen epilogue and offers no update on Ms. Jaouad’s health, is a corrective. “It wasn’t clear that I was going to survive the shooting period of this,” she said. The credits roll, but there is no neat ending for Ms. Jaouad and Mr. Batiste.“None of us know if we’re going to exist in the future, but I have a heightened fear of not existing in the future,” Ms. Jaouad said.In “Between Two Kingdoms” Ms. Jaouad writes about her exchanges with a man named Quintin Jones. Mr. Jones, who introduces himself to her as “Lil GQ,” read her columns while on death row. He’d written from a place of recognition — one trapped person to another. After her transplant, she visited him in prison. But the week her book was released, he was given an execution date. Ms. Jaouad was devastated. She threw herself into the movement to get his death sentence converted into a life sentence. It didn’t work.On the morning of his execution, Mr. Jones was granted four hours of phone calls. He spent them with Mr. Batiste and Ms. Jaouad. “It was unbelievable because we were talking in the future tense, knowing that the future wasn’t going to come to pass,” Ms. Jaouad said. “He talked about coming to visit us, hanging out in our garden. We were all just choosing to live in that space.” She tried to explain the suspension. Their conscious decision to be outside of time.Lately, Ms. Jaouad is forcing herself to make plans. She sees it as an act of, “necessary optimism,” that she has committed to write two more books. One will be a work of painting and prose that Ms. Jaouad has titled “Drowning Practice.” The second will be a book about journaling, incorporating writing prompts. She will show her work at the art center ArtYard next summer.A few weeks ago, Ms. Jaouad traveled to Seattle and was walking outside, suddenly under a torrential rain. Someone rushed to offer her an umbrella. “I was like, ‘No, I’m good,’” Ms. Jaouad remembered. She wanted to feel the rain on her face. Back in New York, she let herself fantasize. Not about prizes or red carpets, but about some unspecial rainstorm a decade from now. How incredible it would be not to feel new, she said. “If I’m around, I’ll want the umbrella.” More

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      Your Next 10 Steps After Watching the New ‘Napoleon’ Film

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      If you want to read his biography, or even see his horse, you can.With the new Ridley Scott film “Napoleon,” starring Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby, hitting theaters this week, General Bonaparte is having a cultural moment.Another one.As historical figures go, Napoleon maintains a ubiquity 200 years after his death that far exceeds influential contemporaries like James Madison, Emperor Kokaku or Czar Alexander I. That’s in part because of his historic importance and military feats. But maybe also it’s that hat. (One just sold for $2 million.)Here are 10 more ways to immerse yourself in Napoleana before, after or in lieu of seeing the film.1. Read a biography“Napoleon: A Life,” an “epically scaled” biography.Napoleon has fascinated biographers for two centuries. Andrew Roberts’s “Napoleon: A Life” (2014) is a comprehensive look at the rise and fall of a man who made it from Corsica to the Palace of Versailles to (nearly) mastery of all of Europe.In The New York Times Book Review, Duncan Kelly called it “epically scaled” and said, “Roberts brilliantly conveys the sheer energy and presence of Napoleon the organizational and military whirlwind.” At 900-plus pages, it will admittedly take you longer to read than watching the 157-minute film.2. Listen to a podcastOn “Noble Blood,” the host Dana Schwartz takes a closer look at royals of all stripes. One episode, “Dumas and Napoleon,” reveals an unexpected link with Thomas-Alexandre Dumas (the father of the “Three Musketeers” author Alexandre), a Creole general who served under, but also clashed with, Napoleon.3. Go to a museumThe final resting place of Napoleon in Paris. The skeleton above is a modern work of art depicting one of his horses.Stephane De Sakutin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Musée de l’Armée at Les Invalides in Paris has room after room of Napoleonic banners, uniforms and memorabilia, enough to overload the most ardent fan.Somewhat more ghoulishly, you can see the bed in which Napoleon died in exile on the island of St. Helena. And then there’s his horse, Vizir, and his dog, both stuffed and on display.Afterward, head to Napoleon’s tomb under the Dôme des Invalides.4. See a painting“Le Sacre de Napoléon” by Jacques-Louis David, at the Louvre.Martin Bureau/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSince you’re already in Paris to see that horse, stop by the Louvre for one of Jacques-Louis David’s masterworks: “Le Sacre de Napoléon” (1807).At a massive 33 by 20 feet, and packed with historical characters, the painting depicts the moment in 1804 when Napoleon, in the presence of the Pope, crowned himself emperor at Notre Dame.5. Read a novelIn Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece “War and Peace,” Napoleon not only preoccupies the minds of the Russian characters as his Grande Armée bears down on Moscow, but he also appears as a major character himself. Far from a stock figure, he is a fully realized person in the novel, displaying egotism, anger and a liking for snuff.Don’t be put off that upon its release in 1886, The Times panned it.If that famously thick book is too much, there are several film versions. Herbert Lom plays Napoleon in a 1956 Hollywood film starring Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda. And Prokofiev wrote an opera that was last seen at the Met in 2008, but is readily available on streaming services.Napoleon’s towering influence on his era means he looms over many other novels, including William Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” and Stendhal’s “Le Rouge et le Noir.” And it is no coincidence that the pig who becomes a dictator in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” is named Napoleon.6. See a silent filmWorking on the reconstruction of the Napoleon movie of 1927.Stephane De Sakutin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere are many other films based on Napoleon’s life, but one of the classics was made 10 years before Ridley Scott was born. Of his 1927 silent epic “Napoléon,” the director Abel Gance boasted: “I have made a tangible effort toward a somewhat richer and more elevated form of cinema.”The film has innovations to spare: Wide-screen formatting, quick editing and hand-held camerawork all took big steps forward with its release. It can be found for viewing at home, but it also pops up in revival houses from time to time.7. Have a laughNapoleon, played by Terry Camilleri, struggled with bowling in “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”AlamyNapoleon, with his distinctive (and usually ahistorical) mannerisms, turns up as a supporting character, or easy joke, in a wide range of films. Marlon Brando plays him in “Désirée” (1954) and Rod Steiger in “Waterloo” (1970).His appearance in the time-travel comedy “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” (1989) is a lot lighter: Terry Camilleri’s Napoleon, collected from a battlefield and thrust into 1980s Southern California, bowls, devours ice cream and enjoys a waterslide at a park called (what else?) Waterloo.8. Play a gameHistory buffs can reshape the world in the long-running computer game Civilization. (“There may not be a game franchise I have enjoyed more consistently over the last two decades than Civilization,” the Times reviewer Seth Schiesel wrote in 2010.)Napoleon appears only as a general in the latest iteration, Civilization VI, but in Civilization V, he leads the French forces. Here’s a chance to finally win the Battle of Waterloo and maybe conquer the world.9. Watch a cartoonIn the Bugs Bunny short “Napoleon Bunny-Part” (1956), Bugs encounters Napoleon and quickly infuriates the easily infuriated caricature, as only Bugs Bunny can, while narrowly eluding the guillotine. A highlight is when he disguises himself as Josephine and rather easily fools the little general. “What’s up, Nappy?”10. Eat dessertA mille-feuille at the West Village restaurant Noortwyck.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesAfter all the tomes, films and traveling, reward yourself. You could make a delicious mille-feuille, the puff pastry with cream, using the New York Times recipe. Or just buy one at the namesake pâtisserie Mille-Feuille on LaGuardia Place in Greenwich Village.Oh, yes — the mille-feuille is commonly known as a Napoleon. Bon appétit, mon général. More

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      Black Thought of the Roots Is Here for ‘The Gilded Age’ and ’1883’

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      Tariq Trotter, the Roots frontman and author of the new book “The Upcycled Self,” loves a period drama when it’s done right.Despite earning worldwide acclaim as the frontman of the Roots and achieving a degree of ubiquity when they became the house band for “The Tonight Show,” Tariq Trotter, also known as Black Thought, is an introvert and a bit of an enigma. There’s a good chance that fans who know every Roots verse still know little about the man behind them.That could change with the release this month of his memoir, “The Upcycled Self.” In it, Trotter, 50, reflects on growing up in Philadelphia during the 1970s and ’80s, zeroing in on how experiences like losing both parents by the age of 16 hardened him, and how his passion for the arts gave him much-needed direction. “The final frontier was to delve deeper into myself and become more introspective,” he said during a phone interview.Looking back, even to revisit his most painful memories, helped Trotter to move forward. He shared a few sources of creative inspiration, favorite works of art and timeless fashion pieces. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1DocumentariesThere’s a historical aspect to whatever story I’m telling, whether it’s my own or I’m talking about the world. My inspiration often comes from documentaries. Anything that Ken Burns touches — I just appreciate that style of storytelling. I’ll get a nugget from something in there that will spark the bar that leads to the song or whatever the composition evolves from. I recently watched “The American Buffalo,” and it makes you think about how much of the history of this country meets at that intersection.2‘The Source of Self-Regard’ by Toni Morrison“The Source of Self-Regard” is one of my go-tos. It really helped me get through the pandemic when the world shut down. It’s one of the first books that I took off the shelf, and in it, Toni Morrison said something about the role of the artist during turbulent times. It really put a battery in my back.3My Mom’s MusicGeorge Benson; Earth, Wind & Fire; Marvin Gaye. If I hear any of that stuff, or funk music like Parliament, Rick James, Teena Marie — anything post-disco through the ’80s is the music that really impacted me. The same stuff that I listen to when I’m making a meal, we’re having guests over or during a long drive, the sonic safe space for me is the music my mom used to play.4Stevie Wonder AlbumsIt’s definitely “Songs in the Key of Life” as an adult. But the Stevie album I heard the most growing up was probably “Hotter Than July.” Then, sometimes, you have to take a deep dive and do “Fulfillingness’ First Finale.” But in just talking about these three compositions, I appreciate the fact that there was space within the artist for all three to exist. The fact that that much range could exist within one person gives me hope as an artist and compels me to create more.5FunkI’m going to gravitate more toward Sly and the Family Stone and then maybe more toward Ohio Players. Midwest funk? Yeah. I think there’s something avant-garde; it’s almost like organized chaos. It feels very improvised and scattered sonically in a way that might seem all over the place to the untrained ear. But when you’re able to recognize those elements and tap all the way into them, it’s the ultimate liberty.6Historical Drama, When Done RightI really rock with shows like “The Gilded Age” or even some of the Westerns that are coming out. I’m not a huge “Yellowstone” fan, but I am a huge fan of both “1883” and “1923.” Because they’re done right, I feel like I’m transported to a place that I may have never seen.7Spike Lee JointsSometimes, I feel like “Mo’ Better Blues” is my favorite Spike joint. That, “Malcolm X,” “Do the Right Thing” and “Jungle Fever” are probably my favorites from him. You know how people say, “in no particular order”? If you asked me tomorrow, I might give you that exact same list in a different order.8Scorsese Movies Starring De NiroIf you’re talking about Martin Scorsese, strangely enough, “Cape Fear” is one of my favorites, if not the favorite. I’m also a huge Robert De Niro fan, and I feel he’s often underutilized. “Cape Fear” was a rare instance of us seeing De Niro moving in a different way. It was a much-needed curveball.9HeadwearI have a bunch of fedoras that were made by a brother named Isaac Larose who used to have a company called Larose Paris. The tan fedora that people see me wearing on that Funkmaster Flex freestyle? I have multiple versions.10Vintage ShirtsI’ve got this olive green military Gucci shirt with epaulets on the shoulders. It’s hand-painted with butterflies, flowers and all types of leaves. I’ve had it since 2000 and still rock it to this day. My wife does not like it, but I love it and feel like it’s never going out of style. More

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      12 African Artists Leading a Culture Renaissance Around the World

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      In one of his famed self-portraits, Omar Victor Diop, a Senegalese photographer and artist, wears a three-piece suit and an extravagant paisley bow tie, preparing to blow a yellow, plastic whistle. The elaborately staged photograph evokes the memory of Frederick Douglass, the one-time fugitive slave who in the 19th century rose to become a leading […] More

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      Book Review: ‘Living the Beatles Legend,’ by Kenneth Womack

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      A new biography resuscitates the colorful, tragic life of Mal Evans: roadie, confidant, procurer, cowbell player.LIVING THE BEATLES LEGEND: The Untold Story of Mal Evans, by Kenneth WomackHe was a “gentle giant.” A “teddy bear” who once posed with a koala. A “lovable, cuddly guy.” Of all the people in the Beatles’ entourage, Mal Evans was indisputably the most Muppet-like.You may have seen the 6-foot-3 Evans looming over shoulders in “Get Back,” Peter Jackson’s blockbuster 2021 documentary. That was him in a green, suede, fringed jacket, helping Paul McCartney puzzle out “The Long and Winding Road,” and banging an anvil on “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” with boyish joy in his bespectacled eyes.He was with the band almost from the beginning — first as a bouncer at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, and then as their driver, roadie and general guy Friday — and all the way to the very bitter end. He was rarely called the fifth Beatle, as was his comrade in factotum-dom, Neil Aspinall, but certainly could have qualified as the sixth or seventh.Unlike Aspinall and so many other Beatles associates, however, Evans did not receive an obituary in The New York Times when he died at 40 on Jan. 5, 1976. Nor was there a news story about the sensational cause: a fusillade of bullets from the police, summoned after he, who idolized cowboys as well as rock stars, brandished a loaded Winchester rifle in his girlfriend’s Los Angeles apartment.At the time, Evans was under contract from Grosset & Dunlap to write a long-planned (and Beatles-authorized) memoir about his time with the group, originally called “200 Miles to Go” after the night he punched out a dangerously cracked windscreen and chauffeured his charges for hours through the freezing cold. Almost 50 years later, after the manuscript and other materials were discovered languishing in a storage basement by a publishing temp and returned to Evans’s family with Yoko Ono’s help, Kenneth Womack has finished the job, with rigor and care if not a sparkling prose style. (In his pages, emotions are always reaching a “fever pitch” and the “winds of change” can actually be glimpsed.) A practiced Beatlesologist, he cleans the floors nicely, but doesn’t dance with the mop.“Living the Beatles Legend,” its wan title taken with perhaps too much respect from a later iteration of the Evans project, is an interesting case study of two matters: the collateral damage of fame and the difficult process of life writing. Reprinted journal entries and previously unseen (at least by me) snapshots, like of McCartney sunning himself on a car in the Rocky Mountains, offer the voyeuristic excitement of leafing through a private scrapbook, though many of the stories are standards.Born in 1935, Evans was a little older and posher than the Fab Four. His family waited out the Blitz in Wales; he was issued a Mickey Mouse gas mask. Nicknamed “Hippo” during a shyness-plagued school career — “I didn’t mind,” he wrote, “because it always seemed to be a fairly amiable, vegetarian type of animal, not doing anybody any harm” — he already had a wife, toddler and respectable position as a telecommunications engineer for the General Post Office when he began visiting the Cavern.There, he’d request Elvis covers that the Beatles would dedicate teasingly — and cruelly, in retrospect — to “Malcontent,” “Malfunctioning” or “Malodorous,” before hiring him for 25 pounds per week, not all expenses paid.Evans would both revel in and chafe at his subordinate role, devoting himself completely to the whims of these infantilized musicians; John Lennon need only yell “Apples, Mal” at 3 a.m., for example, and a box of Golden Delicious would materialize from Covent Garden.George Harrison, who also gets a new biography this season, once recalled Evans — a determined athlete who was chased by a stingray and risked hypothermia playing Channel Swimmer in “Help!” — leaping from a boat to buy a “groovy-looking cloak” off the back of a fan. He’d go to spectacular lengths to recover Harrison’s treasured red guitar, “Lucy,” from a thief.Evans’s reward, and ultimate punishment, for loyal service to the Beatles was sharing in their sybaritic habits. In their orbit he met scores of celebrities: Marlene Dietrich, exposing her pubic hair; Burt Lancaster, whose swim trunks he borrowed; a trouserless Keith Moon. His responsibilities included occasionally spraying overzealous fans with a garden hose and tossing them over his shoulder before ejection and — more consistently — procuring women and drugs, of which he also partook.Like a Mary Poppins of vice, Evans came to carry around a doctor’s bag filled with plectra, cigarettes, condoms, snacks and aspirin. The gentle giant was also, Womack makes plain, a clumsy compartmentalizer. His long-suffering wife, Lily, would find notes (and sometimes knickers) from groupies in his suitcases. Their children once overheard him being fellated by his girlfriend after he sent a birthday message to one of them on recycled cassette tape. An illegitimate son he sired with a fan was given up for adoption. More than the other underlings, and irritatingly to some, he insinuated himself into public photographs. He became a fan favorite. “Everybody knew Mal,” Heart’s Ann Wilson, one of Womack’s many supplemental interviewees, observed of the roar when he came onstage to set up at a Seattle concert.Increasingly, he angled for recognition and promotion. Sometimes, he was cheated of credit, as in his contributions to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”; sometimes, he overreached, claiming that he helped arrange songs on the debut album of the Iveys, later Badfinger. One of the great sadnesses of Evans — along with his oft-abandoned family — is that he longed to perform himself. “Road manager for the Beatles was, for me, the next best thing,” he wrote. Like the Will Ferrell character in the deservedly famous “Saturday Night Live” sketch about Blue Öyster Cult, he did get the chance to play cowbell, on “With a Little Help From My Friends.”There’s a poignant stiffness to the diaries Evans kept, possibly for posterity, and the poetry he attempted. An ordinary man who took an extraordinary ride that ended with a terrible crash — aspiring toward honor but submitting to appetites — he is here dusted off and given a proper salute, a place on the groaning shelf of Beatles books.Though tellingly, even if by accident, his name is left off the spine.LIVING THE BEATLES LEGEND: The Untold Story of Mal Evans | More

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      Barbra Streisand Is Ready to Tell All. Pull Up a Seat.

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      Maybe it’s her grandkids, maybe it’s being 81, but Barbra Streisand is open to new stuff. Take sharing. Well, take sharing herself. “My Name Is Barbra,” her first memoir, is upon us. It’s 970 pages and billows with doubt, anger, ardor, hurt, pride, persuasion, glory and Yiddish. I don’t know that any artist has done more sharing.And yet, last month, after lunch at her home in Malibu, Calif., Streisand shared something else, a treasure she guards almost as much she’s guarded the details of her life. And that’s dessert. There’s a lot in this book — tales of film and television shoots, clashes and bonds with collaborators, a whole chapter on Don Johnson (it’s short) and another called “Politics,” her unwavering preference for big blends of the masculine and the feminine. But food is so ubiquitous that it’s practically a love of Streisand’s life, especially ice cream.So when it’s time for dessert at Streisand’s, despite any choice you’re offered, there’s truly only one option. And that’s McConnell’s Brazilian Coffee ice cream. She writes about it with an orgasmic zeal comparable only, perhaps, to her stated zests for Modigliani and Sondheim. How much does Streisand love Brazilian Coffee? In the book, she’s in the middle of a sad story about a dinner with her buddy Marlon Brando at Quincy Jones’s place, when she interrupts herself to rhapsodize over its flavor and reminisce on the lengths she has gone to get some. So I wanted to have what she’s having.“Okaaayyyy,” Streisand said. She gave her longtime assistant, Renata Buser, a deep, knowing look.“We’ll trade. You give a good review.”Panic, panic, panic. Stammer, stammer, stammer.She was grinning. Buser was smiling.“I love to laugh right now,” said Streisand, who said she’s been in a funk over the state of the planet.Buser agreed: “You really needed a laugh.”But Streisand wasn’t entirely kidding — well, about the good review she was. But not about the ice cream.See, sometimes, they explained, like two girls talking about an ornate but dire piece of cafeteria gossip, there’s a situation with how available it is. (Basically, McConnell’s sometimes takes Brazilian Coffee off the market, leaving Turkish Coffee and sometimes just … “Coffee.”) When she gets her hands on some, she all but password-protects it. “My husband happens to like Turkish Coffee. Thank God,” Streisand says of the actor James Brolin, her spouse of 25 years. “So he doesn’t take my stash.”To be clear: They’re not the same?“Noooo,” Streisand and Buser said together. Streisand was shrugging that “are you serious right now?” shrug: “Turkey is not Brazil.”It goes on like this for another minute until something crucial suddenly occurs to Streisand.“Are you a fan of coffee ice cream?”Crickets …She didn’t have time for this. “We have vanilla.” More kidding. “I’ll give you a scoop — well, how about half a scoop? He’ll have half a scoop. I’ll take the other half.”Eventually, Buser arrives with a bowl, and I get it.If Loro Piana made dessert, this is how it would taste, like money. Buser had lodged Streisand’s demiscoop inside a wafer cone just the way she likes. Mine was gone in about 90 seconds. Streisand, though — she made the eating of this ounce of ice cream a discreet aria of bliss. Little nibbles of cone, then one spin around her mouth. Nibble, nibble, spin. I’ve seen one other person make love to a dessert this way, and she gave birth to me. Otherwise, no one will ever quite have what they’re having.THIS MEMOIR OF STREISAND’S encompasses her girlhood in working-class Brooklyn in the 1940s, her big break on Broadway in “Funny Girl” in 1964, a movie career that made her the biggest actress of the 1970s, her popular albums and top-rated TV specials, the awards, the snubs, her hangups, terrors and passions, her close girlfriends, the men she’s loved and, yes, the foods she might adore more. “My Name Is Barbra” is explanatory and ruminative and enlightening. It’s shake-your-head funny and hand-to-mouth surprising. The lady who wrote it is in touch with herself, loves being herself. Yet she disliked memoir-writing’s ostensible point. “I’ve been through therapy many, many years ago, trying to figure these things out,” she told me. “And I got bored with that. Trying to get things out. I really didn’t want to relive my life.”Streisand in her dressing room when she starred in the 1964 Broadway musical “Funny Girl.”John Orris/The New York TimesWriting the book forced Streisand not only to relive it, but to do the synthesizing between the present and the past. For instance, she frequently reckons with how losing her father at a young age and living for decades with her mother’s glass-half-empty approach to maternity set her up for a journey of approval.Those 970 pages also turn the book into a piece of exercise equipment. Streisand doesn’t like the heft. “I wanted two volumes,” she said. “Who wants to hold a heavy book like that in their hands?”Rick Kot, an executive editor at Viking who oversaw production on the book, told me, “Publishing books in two volumes is difficult just as a commercial venture. And nobody seems to have any issue with how long” Streisand’s is.The bigness of it makes literal the career it contains. Streisand is poring over, pouring out, her life. She’s feeling her way through it, remembering, sometimes Googling as she types. It’s not a book you inhale, per se. (Unless, of course, you’ve got a pressing lunch date with the author.) Nor does it inspire the “five takeaways” treatment that juicy new memoirs by Britney Spears and Jada Pinkett Smith have. Not that there weren’t requests for spicier material. Streisand said that Christine Pittel, her editor, told her “that I had to leave some blood on the page.” So feelings are more deeply plumbed; names are named.And she did do some hemming and hawing. “I was very late in delivering the book,” she said. “I think I was supposed to deliver it in two years.” It took her 10. And as she went, she thought about her legacy. “If you want to read about me in 20 years or 50 years, whatever it is — if there’s still a world — these are my words. These are my thoughts.” She also considered those other Streisand titles, the ones by other people. “Hopefully, you don’t have to look at too many books written about me. You know, whenever I was told about what they said, certain things, I thought, like, who are they talking about?”There are takeaways. But they’re too chronic to qualify as “current.” Mostly, they involve Streisand’s hunger for work and her endless quest to maintain control over it. Singing and acting made her famous. This insistence on perfection made her notorious. Sexism and chauvinism are on display throughout the book. But what becomes apparent is that the woman who has a “directed by” credit on just three films (“Yentl,” “The Prince of Tides” and “The Mirror Has Two Faces”) had been a director from the very start of her career. Here is the book’s grand revelation — for a reader but for the author, too. “I didn’t know about it,” she said, of this proclivity for management, planning, vision, authority and obeying her instincts. “But writing the book, I discovered it. Basically, I was doing that, you know, when I was 19 years old — or even showing my mother how to smoke.”Streisand is unsparing about the treachery she faced at work, collaborating with men. Sydney Chaplin (one of Charlie’s kids) played the original Nick Arnstein during her “Funny Girl” Broadway run; they shared a flirtation that Chaplin wanted to consummate and that Streisand wanted to keep professional. (For one thing, she was married to Elliott Gould.) So, she writes, Chaplin did a number on her. In front of live audiences, he’d lean in to whisper put-downs and profanity. When it came time to shoot “Hello, Dolly!,” Streisand couldn’t understand why her co-star Walter Matthau and their director, Gene Kelly (yes, the Gene Kelly) were so hostile toward her. She confronts Matthau, and he confesses: “You hurt my friend,” meaning Chaplin, his poker buddy. Throughout her career, she’s up against what one surly camera operator, on the set of “The Prince of Tides,” boasts is a boys’ club.That’s the sort of blood that gives this book its power — not the prospect of a bluntly louche Brando and a doting Pierre Trudeau being honest-to-God soul mates, not whatever her byzantine thing with Jon Peters was about. It’s that Barbra Streisand endured a parade of harsh workplaces yet never stopped trying to make the best work. That experience with Chaplin left her with lifelong stage fright. But what if it also helped sharpen her volition to get things — in the studio, on a film set, before a show — exactly, possibly obsessively, right?“When I was younger, I think they had a preconception, you know, because maybe I was aloof or something, because I was a singer but I wanted to be an actress. And then as an actress, I wanted to be a director,” she said to me. “In other words, take another step. Be the actress as well as the singer. To me, it was so much easier to look at the whole. But even when I was an actress, I would care about the whole.” Like that scene in Sydney Pollack’s “The Way We Were,” from 1973, where Streisand touches Robert Redford’s hair while he’s sleeping, a personal choice she made by instinct.Over and over again — with TV specials, live concerts, musical arrangements — she was executing ideas. The execution earned her a permanent reputation. And she knows it. In the book, she tells a story about making some staging suggestions for her 1980 Grammys performance with Neil Diamond and muses, “This kind of incident may be why I’m called ‘difficult.’”Streisand directed and starred in “Yentl” (1983) with Mandy Patinkin and Amy Irving.Hulton Archive/Getty Images“Difficult” is in the work. Streisand’s characters constitute this cocktail of “mercurial” and “determined” with a couple squirts of “feral.” They’re multitaskers, consumed with both busyness and learning how to do something. She was perfect for romantic comedies during second-wave feminism: Her drive drove men nuts. My favorite performance from this ’70s run of hers is in “The Main Event,” a frothy, filthy, solidly funny screwball hit from 1979. She’s in high expressive form and at peak curls, playing Hillary Kramer, a fragrance mogul forced to sell her company after her accountant runs off with all her money. But she discovers a surprise asset: a terrible boxer, Eddie “Kid Natural” Scanlon (Ryan O’Neal), whose career she tries to turn around. The movie, which Howard Zieff directed, sums up the Streisand experience: her tenacity; her outrageous comfort as both a comedic actor and as a version of herself; her exasperation with men who exploit her and count her out.Eddie doesn’t want to work with Hillary and bets that the sight of his battered face will disgust her right out of boxing management. The violence of boxing does send Hillary vomiting during the drive home from one of his fights. What it doesn’t do is deter her. “I hope this taught you a lesson,” says Whitman Mayo, who plays Eddie’s pal and trainer, Percy. “It has,” Streisand says. “Get him in shape.”The two men share a sinking feeling, seemingly typical when it comes to Streisand. “She’s not giving up, Percy,” Eddie says to his trainer, who must concur: “That’s a problem.” People who’ve negotiated with her probably recognize the look of worry and fatigued resignation on O’Neal’s face. He’s going to lose.It’s reasonable to suspect that Tom Rothman, the head of Sony Pictures, knows the feeling. When the company was planning to release an anniversary edition of “The Way We Were” this year, Streisand argued for him to include two scenes that, she was pained to discover, had been omitted from the original. For Rothman, the trouble with granting Streisand her wish was that, as “a filmmaker’s executive,” as he put it in an interview, he didn’t want to change anything without Pollack’s input. But Pollack’s been dead for 15 years. They agreed to release two versions: Pollack’s and, essentially, Streisand’s extended cut.This, she writes, is a triumph of her relentlessness. “The word she uses in the book, that’s 100 percent accurate,” Rothman told me. “She’s relentless.” Her being right about the scenes didn’t matter to his bottom line, which required him to do justice to Pollack’s memory while assuaging Streisand’s worries over creative injustice. “She would say: ‘This is better, this is better! This is why it’s good!’ And I would say: ‘But Sydney Pollack didn’t want it!’”The reason Rothman wanted to land at a happy solution was because of the person he was negotiating with. “Barbra broke a lot of not just artistic boundaries but boundaries for female artists in the movie business, in Hollywood, in terms of taking control of her career,” he said. “I have boundless respect for her.”“If you want to read about me in 20 years or 50 years, whatever it is — if there’s still a world — these are my words,” Streisand said. “These are my thoughts.”Harry Benson/Express, via Getty Images)Streisand’s boundlessness, her capaciousness — the lack of precedent for her whole-enchilada ambitions, the daffiness, the sexiness, the talent, orchestration, passion, originality; her persistence and indefatigability; the outfits; the hair — were a watershed. She was always adapting, if not to what was cool or “current,” per se, then certainly to whom she felt she was at a given moment. “You know me,” she writes, late in the book. “I’m the version queen.”The line is straight from Streisand to Madonna, Janet Jackson, Jennifer Lopez, Queen Latifah, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift — version queens of different kingdoms. That’s just a list of the obvious people who followed her into showbiz and makes no mention of the less famous folks whom Streisand inspired into a thousand other achievements. She’s “to thine own self be true” in neon. This might be the real Streisand Effect. And now she can take a step back and appreciate it.“That gives me real joy, that I affected some people into doing what they wanted to do,” Streisand said. “That I gave them some sort of courage. Or if they felt different, you know, I was somebody who felt different. That’s a reward for me. That makes me feel great.”THIS HOME OF STREISAND’S has been called a compound. But even with the ocean overlook, it’s too rustic, cozy and deceptively modest for the geologic or ego-logical footprint that “compound” connotes. There’s an active farm and enough rose varieties to hijack a flower show. It’s neither Xanadu nor Neverland Ranch. There’s some reality to Streisand’s place, some soul.This is to say that paintings are everywhere, outside the bathroom, up the main staircase, in the bathroom. There are oils by John Singer Sargent and Thomas Hart Benton, portraits by Ammi Phillips and Mary Cassatt. A wall holds one of Gilbert Stuart’s George Washingtons. She loves Klimt and adores Tamara de Lempicka and Modigliani, adores them with an awe the world reserves for her. Some of the paintings are by Streisand, including a portrait of Sammie, her late Coton de Tulear, whose fur is affixed to the canvas. One, her son, Jason Gould, did.Streisand’s fans know what’s on her property and the labor she personally devoted to realizing it — that there’s a mill with a functioning waterwheel, that she’s dedicated a room to her collection of dolls and that another’s maintained for the display and storage of her stage and screen costumes. They’d know because, in 2010, Streisand put it all in a book called “My Passion for Design.” Nevertheless, people have concluded that Streisand lives at her own personal Grove. They’ll ask: Are you going to see the mall? But there is no mall to see. Nothing’s for sale, nothing is open to the public.Streisand at home in 2018.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesLess known is how it might feel to stand here, in a living room at Streisand’s house, to gaze over her shoulder at the ocean and stop yourself from saying out loud, “On a clear day you really can see forever.” It’s strange to move from the bulk of her book to the lightness of the woman who wrote it, to the one-of-a-kind incandescence that’s kept her a star. No memoir can quite contain that. An odd effect of that stardom is how that person can start to seem an uncanny sort of familiar. One of the mightiest, most Olympic performers we Americans have ever experienced, is, on a Tuesday at lunchtime — and I mean this from the bottom of my heart — just some lady. The one behind you at a Gelson’s, maybe, who might notice the cottage cheese in your cart and get moony over how creamy it is. (“I love going to the supermarket,” she told me.)After lunch, Streisand was ready to relax and needed to stretch her back, which lately has been acting up. Relaxing meant letting loose her three Cotons de Tulear, dogs as white as snowflakes, whiter in fact, like bleached teeth. It meant retreating to the family room. So off I went down a wallpapered hallway paneled with more framed art and into another section of the house that felt different from the airs of presentation and preservation that typify the rest of the home. The kitchen was here, for one thing. For another, hunched over a round table was James Brolin. Streisand calls him Jim, and Jim was in a T-shirt and sweatpants, cross-referencing information on an iPad with what he was writing on a sheet of paper. He was jotting down film titles to watch later for movie night. They had just had a Scorsese marathon.There’s life all over the property. But here in the family room is where everybody lives, including that portrait of Sammie, which, at the moment, was propped up on the floor because “I don’t have any places to hang anything anymore,” she said. This way she can see it from the sofa while she watches TV. This part of the house seems like the only place where anything gets strewn. “It’s not that orderly,” she told me. “Meaning, I have the things I need around me.” Like her pets, like Jim. “It’s a playroom. We watch TV, we have the dogs on our laps. It’s more disordered.”It felt, in many ways, like a secret, the comfy chaos of this zone feeling preferable to the control on display everywhere else. Streisand seemed at home here because she was. She took a seat and proceeded to ply the dogs, Fanny and Sammie’s lab-bred clones, Scarlet and Violet, with a treat. They looked up at her with expectant patience. I’ve seen scores of dogs anticipate a treat. It’s as if Streisand’s had heard about the bonkers approach of those other dogs and zigged, sitting patiently as Streisand doled a morsel or two to each. Even she seemed impressed. Here is another of stardom’s odd effects. Without us, it’s Tuesday. More