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      in Music

      For Jann Wenner, the Music Never Stopped

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      In his memoir, the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine is serenaded by Springsteen, nursed by Midler and breaks bread with Bono. There’s journalism, too.LIKE A ROLLING STONEA MemoirBy Jann S. Wenner592 pages. Little, Brown. $35.Jann Wenner’s new memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone,” is the literary equivalent of a diss track: a retort to Joe Hagan’s biography, “Sticky Fingers,” which was published five years ago, after Wenner’s initial cooperation curdled into public repudiation. This it accomplishes with that ultimate diss, the silent treatment — acting like Hagan’s book never existed.Also, perhaps, by being a little longer, if not more searching. Hagan interviewed scores of intimates, plenty disgruntled; Wenner is fond of quoting laudatory letters and speeches, supplemented with color candids and a cover portrait by his longtime colleague Annie Leibovitz.Not counting Robert Draper’s 1990 “uncensored history” of Rolling Stone magazine, which Wenner co-founded and headed for five decades, the reading public now has over 1,100 heavily annotated pages on the guy, a print publisher who calls the internet “a vampire with several hundred million untethered tentacles” and curses the iPhone from his hospital bed. Generation Spotify might be baffled.One thing Wenner didn’t like about Hagan’s book was the title, a homage to the Rolling Stones album, of course, but perhaps too redolent of thievery and salaciousness for his taste. Choosing “Like a Rolling Stone” instead implies “I’m just as good friends with Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize-winning poet, as that naughty, bum-wiggling sensualist Mick Jagger.” One of the revelations in this overwhelmingly male tale is that each singer has a limp handshake, though Dylan wins this particular contest, his paw tending to “stay motionless in your palm as if you were holding a dead fish.”But the new title also strikes a note of melancholy. Wenner sold the majority stake in his flagship publication in 2017, a couple of months after the disdained biography came out. How does it feel, how does it feel, to be without a home (luxury real estate in Sun Valley, Montauk, etc. notwithstanding)?This devoted and daring sportsman — he also founded Outside magazine — had a triple coronary bypass, valve replacement and hip surgery that year. Candidly, he notes that fluid retained during the procedures made his scrotum swell “to the size of a head of cauliflower — not a grapefruit, not two papayas.” He “dramatically undraped” it for the amusement of Bette Midler.This isn’t the only time Wenner gets clinical. He describes his ex-wife Jane’s cesarean section for their second of three sons, Theo, and being “spellbound by how they pulled out various organs and laid them on her stomach.” (The third son, Gus, is currently C.E.O. of Rolling Stone.)Years later, as an unnamed gestational carrier is delivering twins to Wenner and his new partner, Matt Nye — the man who ushered him out of the closet in the ’90s — her organs are placed on cheesecloth. “It didn’t bother me,” the author writes coolly, as if playing the old battery-powered game Operation. Well, my buzzer went off.“Like a Rolling Stone” is about birth, the origin of a scrappy San Francisco music rag and its development into a slick, bicoastal boomer bible. But that story has always been intertwined with untimely death, starting with Otis Redding’s a month after its founding in 1967. The magazine’s coverage of the Altamont Free Concert in 1969, where an 18-year-old Black student, Meredith Hunter, was killed by one of the Hells Angels paid in beer to do security, helped put it on the map. Curiously for someone so associated with the epochal events of his generation, Wenner decided at the last minute not to attend; nor was he at Woodstock. When he did show up, the experience was often blurred or oversharpened by recreational drugs: pot, LSD, cocaine.Narcotics were what took Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison — all at the age of 27. When Elvis goes, it’s “our equivalent of a five-alarm fire,” Wenner writes, four days before deadline, after a move to New York offices in 1977. The murder of John Lennon, a Wenner favorite, is what finishes his ’60s idealism, and he continues to bathe the Beatle in white light here, glossing over the harm to their friendship caused by his publishing the acidic interview “Lennon Remembers” in book form, and the magazine’s partisan mistreatment of Paul McCartney’s brilliant early solo efforts.“Like a Rolling Stone” does gather moss, it turns out: celebrities in damp clumps — from when Jann, born Jan in January 1946 and a real handful, is treated by Dr. Benjamin Spock, to “the black-tie family picnic” of his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame he helped erect.His father was a baby formula magnate; his mother helped with the business but was also a novelist and free spirit whom he compares to Auntie Mame; and the newspaper young Wenner ran at boarding school had a gossip column. A career headline spinner who hired and fired with gusto, he writes here in crisp sentences more descriptive than introspective, giving résumés for even minor characters.“The apple cart was balanced,” he shrugs of the double life he long led — till Nye’s declaration of love, and the times a-changin’, tips it over.Though his journalists regularly championed the downtrodden, Wenner proudly recounts a life of unbridled hedonism, and seems disinclined to reconcile any contradiction. His staffers aggressively cover climate change while he revels in his Gulfstream (“My first flight was alone, sitting by myself above the clouds listening to ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’”). At the 60th-birthday party he throws at Le Bernardin, the fancy Manhattan fish restaurant, Bruce Springsteen gets up and sings of the honoree that “Champagne, pot cookies and a Percocet/Keep him humming like a Sabre jet.” A private chef makes pasta sauce for the Wenner entourage at Burning Man. Wenner and Bono wave to each other from their Central Park West terraces, and join McCartney for a midnight supper by the “silvery ocean.” (“Stars — they’re just like us!,” per another former Wenner property, Us Weekly.)Were there better ways for Johnny Depp to spend a million dollars than shooting the longtime Rolling Stone fixture Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes out of a cannon the height of the Statue of Liberty, as Wenner watched approvingly? Surely.“Like a Rolling Stone” is entertaining in spades but only sporadically revealing of the uneven ground beneath Wenner’s feet. Long sections of the book read like a private-flight manifest or gala concert set list. You, the common reader, are getting only a partial-access pass. More

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      in Movies

      Mentors Named for Next Class in Rolex Arts Initiative

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      El Anatsui, Bernardine Evaristo and Dianne Reeves are among those pairing up for the program.The Ghanaian-born visual artist El Anatsui, the British writer Bernardine Evaristo, the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke, the French architect Anne Lacaton and the American jazz singer Dianne Reeves are the new mentors in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, a program started by Rolex in 2002 to foster new generations of outstanding talent.The names of the new mentors and their protégés, who will collaborate for two years, were announced Friday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the Arts Initiative is celebrating the culmination of its current program cycle. This cycle included Lin-Manuel Miranda, the first mentor in a recently added open category to incorporate multidisciplinary artists.The protégés are the architect Arine Aprahamian, the writer Ayesha Harruna Attah, the visual artist Bronwyn Katz, the filmmaker Rafael Manuel and the singer and composer Song Yi Jeon. The protégés each receive a stipend of about $41,000 in addition to funds for travel and expenses.The new group of mentors and protégés hail “from nine different countries in Asia, Africa, North America, Europe and the Middle East,” Rebecca Irvin, the head of philanthropy at Rolex, said in an email. “And their artistic work reflects many of the most pressing issues of our day, including sustainability, diversity and social change.”Evaristo, who wrote in a statement that she had her eye on the program “ever since Toni Morrison was a mentor 20 years ago,” said that the “very close and personal attention” that the protégé receives is very different than attending workshops or writing courses. “It might also involve career guidance and personal development, as well as opening up conversations around creativity and society, and looking to other art forms for inspiration,” she said.Twenty years after it began, the Arts Initiative, which calls on influential advisers to select the mentors and protégés, now has a boldface list of alumni, including David Adjaye, Alfonso Cuarón, Brian Eno, Lara Foot, Stephen Frears, Nicholas Hlobo, David Hockney, Joan Jonas, Anish Kapoor, Spike Lee, Mira Nair, Crystal Pite and Tracy K. Smith. More

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      in Theater

      An Inscrutable Monarch, Endlessly Scrutinized Onstage and Onscreen

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      Queen Elizabeth II was portrayed in plays and highbrow films, in made-for-TV movies and broad comedies and, of course, in “The Crown.” Many sought to answer the question: What was she like?She was the most opaque of celebrities, a silent film star somehow thriving in a TikTok world. If no one except her closest friends and family knew what Queen Elizabeth was really like, that’s exactly how she wanted it.Her regal reserve, her impassive expressions, her resistance to personal revelation — all of it made the queen, who died Thursday at 96, an irresistible object of imaginative speculation. She was an outline of a woman that people could fill in however they fancied. And fill it in they did. Over the years, Elizabeth was a character in an endless stream of feature films, made-for-TV movies and television series — biopics, satires, dramas, comedies, you name it — as well as in the occasional documentary, play, musical and novel.Her life was remarkable for being long, her reign remarkable for encompassing so much history. But no one was beheaded, no one was plotted against, no one was imprisoned in a tower. Dramas about her predecessors in the job — Elizabeth I, Henry V, Henry VIII, Richard II, to name a few — are full of grand plots and high stakes. Dramas about Elizabeth II were more inward-looking, all trying to address the tantalizing and unanswerable question about her: What sort of person was she?In “The Crown,” three actors played Elizabeth at different ages. From left, Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton. From left, Alex Bailey/Netflix; Sophie Mutevelian/Netflix; Alex Bailey/NetflixThe actors who have wrestled with that issue are too many to count. “The Crown” alone needed three different women to portray Elizabeth at different eras of her life: Claire Foy in her early life, Olivia Colman in the middle years, and Imelda Staunton as the queen in winter.Here are some additional highlights of the portrayals of Queen Elizabeth on film and onstage, and occasionally in fiction, over the years.As PrincessIn the 2010 film “The King’s Speech,” a very young Princess Elizabeth was played by Freya Wilson, right.The Weinstein Company, via AlamyElizabeth’s early years were marked by two cataclysmic events: her uncle King Edward VIII’s abdication, in 1936, from the throne, which automatically catapulted her fragile father into the job of king and put her next in the line of succession; and World War II, which took place when she was still a teenager.In “The King’s Speech” (2010), the young Princess Elizabeth, played by Freya Wilson, appears briefly in the backdrop of the drama about the efforts of her father, now King George VI, to overcome his stutter and address the nation with confidence and authority when Britain enters the war, in 1939. (The real-life queen was said to have found the movie “moving and enjoyable.”)“A Royal Night Out” (2015) takes place amid the euphoria of V-E Day in London in 1945. Sprung from Buckingham Palace to mingle, incognito, with the ecstatic crowds, Princess Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon) and her younger sister, Princess Margaret (Bel Powley), indulge in a wild night of drinking, dancing, flirting, wading in a fountain and riding a city bus.Some Key Moments in Queen Elizabeth’s ReignCard 1 of 9Becoming queen. More

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      in Theater

      A New ‘Christmas Carol’ for Broadway

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      Jefferson Mays will bring his adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic to the Nederlander Theater starting in November.A virtuosic one-man production of “A Christmas Carol,” in which a single actor plays more than 50 roles, including a potato, will be staged on Broadway during the coming holiday season.The actor is Jefferson Mays, a Tony Award winner with a lifelong passion for the Charles Dickens story (like many) who has been honing this production for years. In 2018, he first performed it at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles; in 2020, when the pandemic precluded in-person performances, he made a filmed version shot at the United Palace in Upper Manhattan.Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, called Mays’s performance in the film “astonishing” and said the adaptation was “an opportunity to make what was already a classic story feel new, while also making it feel as if it should matter forever.”The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews on Nov. 8 and to open on Nov. 21 at the Nederlander Theater; the shelf-life of “Christmas Carol” productions tends to be short, and this one is slated to close on Jan. 1.Mays is a gifted shape-shifter — in 2004 he won a Tony Award for playing 35 characters in the solo show “I Am My Own Wife,” and in 2014 he was nominated for another Tony Award for playing eight roles, in the musical comedy “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.” (He was nominated again in 2017, for playing a Norwegian diplomat in a political drama, “Oslo.”)Mays is now on Broadway playing Mayor Shinn in a lavish revival of “The Music Man”; he will leave that production some time this fall to prepare for “A Christmas Carol.”The Dickens novella, with memorable characters including Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim and four ghosts (don’t forget Jacob Marley!), is a widely staged, and frequently adapted, redemption story; the last version on Broadway was in 2019.The new version was adapted by Mays and his wife, the actor Susan Lyons, along with Michael Arden, who is directing the production. The idea was conceived by Arden and Dane Laffrey, who is the production’s scenic and costume designer; the producers are Hunter Arnold and Kayla Greenspan. More

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      in Music

      New Yorker Festival, which runs Will Host Bono and Rep Jamie Raskin

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      The three day-festival beginning on Oct. 7 will also include conversations with stars like Ben Stiller, Chloe Bailey and Sandra Oh.The New Yorker Festival returns for its 23rd edition, featuring conversations with Bono, Quinta Brunson, Ben Stiller, Chloe Bailey, United States Representative Jamie Raskin and more, and will run from Oct. 7-9.Bono, the Irish rock star and more recently the motorbike-riding lion in “Sing 2,” will be in conversation with The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, about his new memoir and his decades as an activist and musician. The book, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” will be released in November.“Like so many memoirs that I’ve read, the most intriguing part is how someone becomes himself or herself,” Remnick said in an interview.Quinta Brunson, who plays the chirpy yet clumsy elementary school teacher in “Abbott Elementary,” will speak with the magazine’s television critic, Doreen St. Félix. And Chloe Bailey (of the R&B sister duo Chloe x Halle) will perform live at the festival after a conversation.Remnick said that politically driven conversations can be had by artists, authors and actors, as well as lawmakers. Raskin, a Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Jan. 6 House select committee, along with three of the magazine’s writers, will join a live taping of The New Yorker’s “The Political Scene” podcast.The political conversation will continue with a talk about Asian American culture and representation, with the chef David Chang, the filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung, the writer Min Jin Lee and the actor Sandra Oh. And the climate activists Sara Blazevic and Molly Burhans, and the climate expert Leah Stokes, will delve into the future of the environment.“All of these people in cultural life are also in many ways connected to the political,” Remnick said.The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will return to the festival, where Hari Kunzru, Elif Batuman, Gary Shteyngart, Rachel Kushner and Ottessa Moshfegh will also appear.As for comedy, Molly Shannon and Vanessa Bayer, the actresses and comedians who star in the Showtime series “I Love That for You,” will chat with Susan Morrison, an editor at the magazine. And the comedians Hasan Minhaj, Phoebe Robinson, Billy Eichner and Jerrod Carmichael will also participate in festival conversations, along with the directors Stiller, the duo Daniels, Sharon Horgan and Maggie Gyllenhaal.Remnick said that with the return to theaters and the arrival of vaccine boosters, he feels confident sharing a room with readers, thinkers and performers, and the festival will hold select events virtually.“Part of cultural lifestyle was taken from us, and now it’s bounced back,” he said. More

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      in Television

      Fantasy Face-Off: ‘The Rings of Power’ vs. ‘House of the Dragon’

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      Which has the better dragons? Which has the better swords? Now that we’ve seen a few episodes of each, here’s an early comparison.Comparisons between HBO’s “House of the Dragon” and Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” — both new epic fantasies, both prequel series, both with huge budgets and ready-made fan bases — were probably inevitable. And indeed the internet has already been more than happy to oblige.But should we compare them? Possibly not.The “Thrones” author, George R.R. Martin — whose work was heavily influenced by the original “Rings” author, J.R.R. Tolkien — wants only peace in the realm. “It’s not a death match or anything,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “We don’t have to be bracketed together.”Still, few seem able to resist the urge. And what are we made of, Valyrian stone?Instead of comparing industry stats, though — ratings, budgets, and so on — let’s look at where the two shows overlap. Which one has the coolest swords? The best dragons? The most formidable heroine? Granted, initial observations are based on only the first few episodes (three so far for “Dragon”; two for “Rings,” which premiered on Thursday). But we’ve seen enough to get the discussion started. (Some spoilers lie ahead.)Pop culture cred  It’s not entirely fair to compare J.R.R. Tolkien to George R.R. Martin, who is often referred to as “the American Tolkien.” The two authors are not in competition. Martin takes inspiration from much of what Tolkien did, especially in the areas of magic and world-building; but he has also expanded on Tolkien’s achievements. Tolkien has sold more books than Martin (they’ve both sold tens of millions), but Tolkien’s have been around much longer.A better comparison might be the previous adaptations of their work: HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” to which “Dragon” is a prequel, versus Peter Jackson’s film versions of “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit.”It could be said that the early seasons of “Game of Thrones” were in some ways comparable to the first three (and much-loved) Jackson films, while the derided later seasons of “Thrones” resembled more the polarizing “Hobbit” movies. Each series got off to a great start, but each tested viewers’ patience. Tolkien fans are already finding things to gripe about with the new series, but they’ve have had much more time to get over the “Hobbit” movies. If the monster ratings seen thus far for “Dragon” are any indication, “Thrones” fans seem prepared to forgive (if not forget) for now. But it’s still early, fan reaction to the end of “Thrones” was truly bitter, and the franchise still has a lot of ground to make up.Edge: “The Rings of Power” Heroes As prequels go, “Rings of Power” has another advantage because some of its characters are immortal. The trick, of course, is that new actors have to measure up to those playing previous incarnations, some of whom were widely beloved. Morfydd Clark, as an adventurous young Galadriel in “Rings” (played by Cate Blanchett in the movies) manages this quite nicely.“Dragon” might have taken a similar route if the showrunners had been willing to revisit such long-living “Thrones” characters as Melisandre (Carice van Houten) or the Children of the Forest. But that would have required wedging those characters into the story in places where they didn’t really fit.Instead, “Dragon” implicitly asks viewers to identify Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock) with Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) and therefore support her claim for the throne. As causes go, that’s not as noble as Galadriel’s quest to extinguish the ultimate evil, or even Dany’s early fight against oppression. Rhaenyra wants only her birthright; and perhaps there’s something heroic in fighting the patriarchy to get it, but so far she’s no Galadriel, even if the blonde wigs make the Targaryens resemble elves.Edge: “The Rings of Power” Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith), wielder of Dark Sister, in “House of the Dragon.”HBOSwords’Tis said the sword makes the man — or the woman, or the elf. And sometimes a legendary sword can do more to fuel fear and awe than the individual wielding it.In “The Rings of Power,” we will presumably get to see some of these storied blades — the sword of Isildur (Maxim Baldry), for example, which is known as Narsil and is weighted with destiny. Meanwhile, what about the broken black hilt that Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin) secretly keeps? It’s a weapon that seems capable of reforging itself and of drinking in blood as well. It resembles the sword Anglachel, also called Gurthang, and that’s not a good thing.In “House of the Dragon,” we’re in a Golden Age of legendary Valyrian weaponry. King Viserys (Paddy Considine) grips the mighty sword of kings, Blackfyre, when he wants to exert authority, and he holds a familiar dagger when he wants to impart prophecy. (Given the special properties of that dagger’s Valyrian steel, it also has destiny written all over it.) Daemon (Matt Smith), meanwhile, uses the slimmer Dark Sister to cut his way to glory.Then there’s the Iron Throne, which is made of countless swords and could easily bring down a king with a well-placed nick. Legend has it that this is the way the throne “rejects” those not fit to rule.  A parallel to Valyrian steel in Tolkien’s world is mithril, the rare and precious metal found only in Khazad-dûm and Númenor — both places visited in “Rings of Power.” Mithril is said to be stronger than steel but also lighter — which raises the obvious question: Why has no one thought to make a mithril sword?    Edge: “House of the Dragon” Magic treesIn the beginning — in “The Rings of Power,” at least — there were the Two Trees of Valinor, growing side by side in a mingled glow, until the Dark Lord Morgoth poisoned them. Then, making things worse, Morgoth stole the Silmarils, three jewels containing the unsullied light of those two now-vanished trees. We have also learned that a gift of a sapling continues to blossom even in the deep underground of Khazad-dûm. How? Love? Magic? (Is there a difference?) There are other significant trees, as well, some of them symbolizing the friendship between different species. (Look for one of these if we go to Númenor’s capital.)So far, the white weirwoods in “House of the Dragon” are little more than a backdrop, a source of soothing shade in the godswood. But it seems likely that these trees are being utilized by someone as some kind of Westerosi surveillance system. (We know there has been a series of Three-Eyed Ravens and greenseers keeping watch.) We probably won’t learn much about that in this season.Edge: “The Rings of Power”DragonsDragons are the ultimate weapons of war. In the prologue to “The Rings of Power,” we see the evil Morgoth make pioneering use of the winged beasts in battle.One of his mounts appears to be Ancalagon the Black, an obvious model for another familiar behemoth, Balerion the Black Dread, whose preserved skull is an object of reverence in “House of the Dragon.” Tolkien’s dragons are not pets; taking them out for joy rides would be inadvisable. And they’ll have a more serious role to play in the story once the dwarves get their power jewelry.But to settle the core issue between the two franchises, which dragons are better? We know from the loquacious Smaug, in the 2013 movie “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” that Tolkien’s dragons are sentient and thoughtful. One on one, they have serious intellectual assets; but as a group, their meager numbers in Middle-earth during this Second Age are no match for the fire-breathing horde in “House of the Dragon.”Rhaenyra’s Syrax and Daemon’s Caraxes are just the first of those beasts to be introduced on the show — there’s a whole dragonpit more of them we still haven’t seen.  Edge: “House of the Dragon” Invented languagesGiven that Tolkien was an actual linguist who created his own Elvish language (Quenya, it’s called), “The Rings of Power” starts off with a distinct advantage over “House of the Dragon” in this category.In the “The Rings of Power,” Owain Arthur plays Prince Durin, who leads a clan of dwarves.Amazon Studios, via Associated PressMartin (for the books) and the language creator David J. Peterson (for “Dragon”) made valiant effort to achieve something close to what Tolkien did, most notably with High Valyrian, the mother tongue of the Targaryen rulers. If we were to judge each show solely by the artistry of its languages, Tolkien’s Quenya would surely win.But “Rings of Power” squanders that advantage by barely using Quenya when the elves speak to one another, or Khuzdul among the dwarves, at least in the first two episodes. We hear Elrond (Robert Aramayo) mutter a few words of Elvish to himself when he is writing something, but he switches to the common tongue seconds later.By contrast, “House of the Dragon” uses High Valyrian to establish a relationship between a Targaryen uncle and niece, and the actors speak it so fluently that the bond feels real.Edge: “House of the Dragon”Language, periodBoth shows are based on pre-existing material. For “House of the Dragon,” it is Martin’s imaginary history, the book “Fire & Blood.” For “The Rings of Power,” it is mostly appendices to “The Lord of the Rings,” which are essentially story outlines.Both shows have had to invent quite a bit in order to fill narrative gaps, and here “House of the Dragon” benefits from Martin’s direct involvement as one of the show’s creators. Also, the “House of the Dragon” writers seem much more aware of how to use lines and scenes to stir watercooler discussion and to crank up the old “Thrones” meme factory again. Rhaenyra’s “I never jest about cake” was a bit strained, but people are still talking about the C-section murder from Episode 1.“The Rings of Power,” so far, is not putting meat back on the menu, boys — and it’s not serving second breakfast, either. But we know Daemon Targaryen will always give us the GIFs.Edge: “House of the Dragon” More

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      in Television

      David Milch Still Has Stories to Tell

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      LOS ANGELES — The door to a room at an assisted-living facility swung open, and out darted one of its occupants: a cat named Mignonne, who was eager for some fresh companionship. Then, with more deliberation, came the apartment’s primary resident, David Milch, who was similarly happy to have visitors.“I’m so grateful,” he said, allowing entrance to the quarters where he has lived for nearly three years, but which still feel to him like an intermediate space. “As you may imagine, things are all in a state of flux.”To television viewers who have followed the medium’s resurgence of erudition and artistic credibility, the 77-year-old Milch is a towering figure. A onetime writer-producer on the influential 1980s police drama “Hill Street Blues,” he went on to help create boundary-busting programs like “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and his personal masterpiece, the uncompromising HBO western “Deadwood.”Betty Thomas as Lucy Bates in Hill Street Blues, an influential television drama from the 1980s.Shout! Factory/20th Century FoxIn his industry, Milch is well known for his writing style, which blends articulate grandeur with defiant obscenity, and for his appetites. He is a recovered drug addict and a compulsive gambler who, by his own admission, lost millions of dollars on horse racing and other wagers.Now he rises each day in his modest accommodations here, decorated with family photos, some Peabody Awards near a sink and some Emmy statuettes on a shelf, and furnished with a bed, a small TV and a refrigerator containing a single can of LaCroix sparkling water. This is where he has lived since the fall of 2019, a few months after publicly disclosing that he had been given a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.Having welcomed me and his wife, Rita Stern Milch, into the room, Milch explained that he has not lost the powers of observation and articulation that have served him as a writer. Instead, he has found himself training those abilities on his own life as he navigates his experience with the disease.“When you’re in transition, there’s a sense that life lives you,” he said, fiddling with an elastic bracelet that he wore to keep his room key attached around his wrist. “You’re holding on and trying to accommodate all of the impositions and uncertainties.”Describing his present relationship to life and the way he once lived it, he added, “I’m estranged. I can kid myself, but I ain’t a regular.”Preserving what he can remember about himself and sharing it with an audience are already demanding tasks for Milch, and now they have taken on a particular urgency. In the years since he received his diagnosis, he has been working on a memoir called “Life’s Work.”The book, which will be published by Random House on Sept. 13, offers a poetic but unvarnished account of his personal history, abundant with the barbarity and grace that have animated Milch’s fictional characters.The project is a quintessentially Milchian lesson in accurately depicting a life, even one composed of events that he may not always be proud of having lived.As Rita explained, the memoir showed there was beauty in “how he took his life and turned it into art — all the experiences he had, which seemed so wild, he was able to tame in narrative and take back.”David saw an even more fundamental value in the project: “I have felt the blessing of feeling like I know who I am,” he said.A few days before the visit, Rita — who lives about 20 minutes away — had cautioned that he has bad days and good days; even on good days, he can be discursive in his thinking or unaware of his surroundings.“He still thinks like a storyteller,” she said. “And maybe because I love him, but I just find it fascinating. Even when it doesn’t make a lot of sense, there’s something in it that’s just Dave.”On a Tuesday morning in July, David Milch was in a genial mood and voluminous in his affectionate praise for Rita. He said something elliptical about the difficult work that lay ahead, now that it was time for students to enroll in their classes. He saw me admiring a trophy he’d won for a racehorse he once owned and asked, with a gleam in his eye, if I liked going to the track.Milch is happiest “when he’s figuring out a story,” said his wife, Rita Stern Milch. “Sometimes people talk about him as if he’s dead already. Wait a minute, he’s very much alive. And he’s still got something to offer.”Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesAt the start of 2015, amid other health problems and difficulties with his memory, Milch received a neuropsychological evaluation and was told he had dementia; a few years later he was given a diagnosis of “probable Alzheimer’s.”By the summer of 2019, he was becoming confused on car rides where he was a passenger and fighting with Rita over car keys he had forgotten he was no longer allowed to use. On one exit from his house, he had a particularly nasty, face-first fall on the steps. That October, he moved into the facility where he now resides.Milch was already in the habit of composing his screenplays through dictation and had been recording his speeches at work for the past 20 years. His family members and colleagues expanded that process, recording his personal remembrances and reaching out to others for stories that could stimulate Milch’s memories, all in the service of creating “Life’s Work.”“There were days where the recordings are a lot more wading through confusion,” said his daughter Olivia Milch. “And then there are days where he just rolls and it’s stunning, how he’s able to talk about the disease and what he’s going through.” The book’s prologue was essentially transcribed verbatim, she said, including her father’s ethereal opening words: “I’m on a boat sailing to some island where I don’t know anybody. A boat someone is operating, and we aren’t in touch.”“Life’s Work” is by turns a brisk and brutal memoir, beginning with its author’s upbringing in Buffalo, N.Y., at the hands of his father, Elmer, an accomplished surgeon as well as a relentless gambler and philanderer. Elmer operated on mobsters, scammed Demerol prescriptions for himself and enlisted David, while he was still a child, to run his bets for him.The author himself grew up to develop his own crippling vices — he recalls being introduced to heroin as a high-school senior — as well as a prodigious writing talent. As an undergraduate at Yale, Milch studied with the Pulitzer Prize winners Robert Penn Warren and R.W.B. Lewis, and he vacillated between futures at Yale Law School and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop while he made L.S.D. in Mexico and continued to use drugs. “I loved heroin,” Milch writes in the memoir. “I loved checking out. You were here and you were not here at the same time. That has appeal.”Milch was a writer-producer on “Hill Street Blues,” then helped create “N.Y.P.D. Blue,” and “Deadwood.”20th Century FoxIn television, Milch writes that he found a constructive outlet for his energies and learned to open his “imagination to the particular truths of a different person and a different environment.” He was hired at “Hill Street Blues” by its co-creator Steven Bochco, and together they created “N.Y.P.D. Blue,” whose sophisticated storytelling and then-unprecedented use of nudity and explicit language influenced decades of prestige TV that followed.Milch continued to gamble, betting tens of thousands of dollars on individual horse races; he had a heart attack, received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and got sober at the age of 53. Then in 2004, he created his magnum opus, “Deadwood,” a drama set in the Dakota territory in the 1870s, a merciless era of American frontier expansion.On that show, Milch writes, “It was time to listen, to find the characters up and walking and hear who they were and what they had to say.” He adds, “The actors told me their characters’ deepest truths. They gave themselves up, and they inhabited the parts they had come to.”Paula Malcomson, who played the saloon prostitute Trixie, said that Milch maintained a daily presence on the “Deadwood” set as a kind of wandering, salty-tongued philosopher.“He granted us permission to be ourselves,” she said. “He let us bring forth the things that most people would say, ‘That’s too much. This is uncouth.”Robin Weigert, who played Calamity Jane on the series, said her portrayal of the disenchanted sharpshooter was influenced by Milch’s own language and physical demeanor.“I will always feel that there is a little piece of David’s soul that I got to dwell inside of,” Weigert said. “It creates a different feeling than when you just work for somebody. I felt like I worked inside of him.”But “Deadwood” was canceled at HBO after only three seasons; other shows Milch made for the network, like “John From Cincinnati” and “Luck,” had even briefer runs and still others weren’t picked up at all.In 2011, Milch writes, his wife went to their business advisers and learned that he had spent about $23 million at racetracks in the previous 10 years. They had $5 million in unpaid taxes and were $17 million in debt, she found.A yearslong period of downsizing followed for the Milches, during which David was able to complete the story of “Deadwood” in an HBO movie that aired in 2019. He has been open about his disease with his colleagues and co-stars, many of whom remain in his life, and say that Milch has retained his fundamental expressiveness.Many in the original cast of the series “Deadwood” gathered again for the movie, which completed the story.Warrick Page/HBOWeigert visited Milch while he was still living at his home. He had forgotten the names of some of his dogs, she said, and where his bedroom was, but “we had this high-level conversation about the transmigration of souls.”W. Earl Brown, who was an actor and writer on “Deadwood,” visited Milch after he moved to the care facility. As Brown recalled, “Dave takes a long look around the room, leans into me and says, ‘I have to tell you something, Earl: The indignities of decrepitude are boundless.’ That quote perfectly encapsulates David Milch.”Malcomson described Milch as “the most human of anyone I’ve ever known.”“I comfort myself a little bit, thinking he burned so bright and there was so much life lived, and maybe that was his exact quota,” she said. “I’m not saying he’s not living life now, but I’m saying that it is a different version of it.”As the publication of “Life’s Work” approaches, Rita Stern Milch said she was anxious about seeing so many intensely personal stories about her husband and their family shared with a wide readership. Having worked as a film producer and editor, she said, “I’m a background person, a behind-the-scenes person. It doesn’t make me comfortable.”But she said those concerns were less important than allowing David to tell readers what he has experienced while he still can. “It’s a horrible diagnosis and it ain’t fun,” she said. “But life goes on. You don’t have to hide people away. They don’t have to disappear.”“This is the game,” Milch said. “This is what’s going on. You can tell yourself it’s something else. But you know that you’re, in many ways, holding on.”Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesOver a pizza lunch at an outdoor restaurant near the facility, David and Rita explained that they continue to work together on writing projects, whether they end up getting produced or simply provide David with a means of keeping his mind active. (As he writes in the memoir, “I still hear voices. I still tell stories.”)They had revisited an early screenplay of David’s called “The Main Chance,” which takes places at the Saratoga Race Course, but Rita said they backed off once David became agitated, thinking he was back at the track. They have also continued to develop a biographical series about the late-night host Johnny Carson.On the car ride back from lunch, they listened to a radio station that was broadcasting news updates about Major League Baseball.“Did we bet on baseball games?” David asked from a passenger’s seat.“No,” Rita answered as she steered the car.David smiled and seemed glad for the admonishment. “Nor are we going to,” he said happily. More

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      ‘Loving Highsmith’ Review: The Patricia You Didn’t Know

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      A new documentary makes the case that under her hardened exterior, the novelist Patricia Highsmith was a longing romantic.“Loving Highsmith,” a constrained documentary by the filmmaker Eva Vitija, tries to make the case that author Patricia Highsmith was prodigious in both writing and romance.When Highsmith died in 1995 at the age of 74, she left behind several lifetimes-worth of words, according to her biographer: 22 novels, including the best-sellers “Strangers on a Train,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” and “Carol” (originally titled “The Price of Salt”), plus over 200 unpublished manuscripts and over 8,000 pages of personal journals.Her handwritten entries, snippets read aloud here by the actress Gwendoline Christie, burn with the grievances — class, racial, familial, romantic, professional — that fed her fictional characters’ homicidal impulses and the public’s image of Highsmith as a coldblooded loner who preferred the company of her pet snail, Hortense. Even her sometime publisher called her “a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being.”Such comments are not included in Vitija’s tale, which is intended to be a counterpoint. “Loving Highsmith” reveals Highsmith’s squishy bits under her shell, the dalliances she tucked into her diaries during an era where queer women like her exited the subway one stop early, lest strangers suspect they were headed to a lesbian nightspot.Highsmith was something of a playgirl, Vitija finds, an assertion confirmed by several former girlfriends interviewed in the documentary who recall the novelist partying with David Bowie in Europe or outfitting herself in men’s wear and grandly buying a round for the bar. Most of her exes’ memories stop short of being psychologically insightful. Strung together, however, these tender confidences shape an outline of a woman who never trusted anyone with her heart. Again and again, Highsmith’s craving for connection is thwarted by her competing desire to be an emotionally invulnerable workaholic.The film builds its conception of Highsmith selectively from her mercurial notebooks, highlighting excerpts that support its argument that her lovelorn disappointments drove her into isolation (“I am the forever seeking”) while omitting those that conflict (“One situation — one alone, could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness”).To make her adventures feel alive, the editor Rebecca Trösch stitches clips from Highsmith’s Hollywood adaptations alongside recently shot B-roll of glitter-strewn drag shows. Slow-motion footage of a cowboy roping a baby steer is paired with Highsmith’s turn to gay conversion therapy in a failed attempt to please her conservative Texan family, particularly her mother, Mary, a figure as cruel as any character she imagined.It’s hard to imagine the author herself would have approved of the documentary’s flowery narration and sentimental acoustic score. More impactful is the realization that Highsmith’s chilliest calculation was correct: She’d inspire more acclaim — and less moral outrage — exposing her murderous hatreds than her strangled loves.Loving HighsmithNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More