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      in Music

      David Dalton, Rock Writer Who Lived the Scene, Dies at 80

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      An early writer for Rolling Stone, he traveled in the same circles as the Beatles, Janis Joplin and other stars, witnessing and documenting a time of cultural transformation.David Dalton, who chronicled the rock scene as an early writer for Rolling Stone and brought firsthand knowledge to his biographies of rock stars from having lived the wild life alongside them, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 80.His son, Toby Dalton, said the cause was cancer.Beginning in the 1960s, Mr. Dalton showed a knack for being where cultural moments and evolutions were happening. Before he was 20 he was hanging out with Andy Warhol. In the mid-1960s he photographed the Yardbirds, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits and other rock groups that were part of the British Invasion. He was backstage at the Rolling Stones’ infamous 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway in California. He was hired, along with Jonathan Cott, to write a book to accompany a boxed-set release of the Beatles’ 1970 album, “Let It Be.” He traveled with Janis Joplin and James Brown and talked about Charles Manson with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.As his career advanced, he gravitated toward writing biographies and helping celebrities write their autobiographies. His books included “Janis” (1972), about Joplin, revised and updated in 1984 as “Piece of My Heart”; “James Dean: The Mutant King” (1975); and “Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan” (2012). Autobiographies that he helped their subjects write included Marianne Faithfull’s “Faithfull: An Autobiography” (1994), “Meat Loaf: To Hell and Back” (1999), Steven Tyler’s “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?” (2011) and Paul Anka’s “My Way” (2013). He collaborated with Tony Scherman on “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol” (2009).Lenny Kaye, the guitarist in the Patti Smith Group and a writer who collaborated with Mr. Dalton on the 1977 book “Rock 100,” said Mr. Dalton, early in his career, was among a group of writers who took a new approach to covering the music scene.From left, the actress Edie Sedgwick, the poet and photographer Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol, Mr. Dalton, the artist Marisol and an unidentified man in 1965. Mr. Dalton was hanging out with Andy Warhol before he was 20.David McCabe“In those days of rock journalism, there was not a lot of separation between writers and artists,” he said in a phone interview. “The writers aspired to create the same kind of artistic illumination as those they wrote about.”“David got to be very friendly with many people,” Mr. Kaye added, “and I believe that helped enhance his writing style. He had a way of assuming the persona of the person he was writing about.”Mr. Dalton’s wife of 44, years, Coco Pekelis, a painter and performance artist, said Mr. Dalton fell into writing almost by accident. He had read that Jann Wenner was starting a new music magazine, Rolling Stone, in 1967 and began sending in some of the pictures of bands that he had been taking.“He was taking photographs of groups like the Shangri-Las, and Jann wanted captions,” Ms. Pekelis said by email. “So David started writing. And wrote and wrote and wrote. I asked him the other day when he knew he was a writer, and he said, when his captions got longer and longer.”Mr. Dalton assessed his voluminous output in an unpublished autobiographical sketch, explaining how his work had changed over the decades.“When I wrote rock journalism I was younger,” he noted. “I was involved in the scene as it was happening, evolving. I went anywhere at the drop of a hat. When I got into my 30s I began writing about the past and have lived there ever since.”Janis Joplin was among the many people whose biographies Mr. Dalton wrote. He also helped celebrities like Meat Loaf and Marianne Faithfull write their autobiographies.John David Dalton was born on Jan. 15, 1942, in wartime London. His father, John, was a doctor, and his mother, Kathleen Tremaine, was an actress. His sister, Sarah Legon, said that during German air raids, David and a cousin, who grew up to be the actress Joanna Pettet, would be put in baskets and sheltered under a staircase or taken into the Underground, the London subway system, for protection.David grew up in London and in British Columbia — his father was Canadian — and attended the King’s School in Canterbury, England. He then joined his parents in New York, where they had moved, and he and his sister became assistants to Warhol, Ms. Legon said, helping him edit an early film, “Sleep.” In 1966, Mr. Dalton helped Warhol design an issue of Aspen, the multimedia magazine that came in a box or folder with assorted trappings.“Coming from England at the beginning of the sixties,” Mr. Dalton wrote in “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol,” “I encountered Pop Art with the same jolt of excitement and joy I’d experienced on first hearing the blues. I was fortunate enough to meet Andy Warhol at the beginning of his career, and through his X-ray specs I saw America’s brash, bizarre and manic underworld of ads, supermarket products, comics and kitsch brought to garish, teeming, jumping-out-of-its-skin life.”In the middle and late 1960s and the early ’70s, Mr. Dalton spent time on the East Coast, on the West Coast and in England, rubbing elbows with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and more. In California, he spent time with Dennis Wilson, who, he said, once expressed admiration for Charles Manson.After Manson had been charged in some brutal 1969 murders, Mr. Dalton began looking into the case for Rolling Stone with another writer, David Felton.“Like most of my hippie peers,” he wrote in an unpublished essay, “I thought Manson was innocent and had been railroaded by the L.A.P.D. It was a scary awakening for me to find out that not every longhaired, dope-smoking freak was a peace-and-love hippie.”His thinking turned when someone in the district attorney’s office showed him photographs of victims of Manson’s followers and the messages written in blood at the crime scenes.“It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” Mr. Dalton is quoted as saying in “Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine” (2017), by Joe Hagan. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.”For Rolling Stone, Mr. Dalton also wrote about Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Little Richard and others. By the mid-1970s he had moved on and was focusing on books, though still applying his full-immersion approach. For “El Sid: Saint Vicious,” his 1997 book about Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, who died of an overdose in 1979, “I actually started to hear Sid’s voice talking to me,” he wrote. David Nicholson, reviewing the book in The Washington Post, found it compelling.“There is a certain hypnotic quality to the story that is akin to watching someone standing in the path of an onrushing train,” he wrote. “The writing throughout is graceful and intelligent, even when it is in your face.”Mr. Dalton once described his biography technique this way:“Essentially you distill your subject into a literary solution and get high on them, so to speak. Afterwards, one needs brain detergent and has to have one’s brain rewired.”Mr. Dalton lived in Andes, N.Y. His wife, son and sister are his only immediate survivors.Mr. Kaye said Mr. Dalton had been both present for a sea change and part of it.“It was a fascinating time,” he said, “and David was one of our most important cultural spokespersons.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Hollywood Ending,’ a Cradle-to-Jail Biography of Harvey Weinstein

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      Ken Auletta looks for Weinstein’s Rosebud in this dispiriting account of the former movie mogul’s life.HOLLYWOOD ENDINGHarvey Weinstein and the Culture of SilenceBy Ken AulettaIllustrated. 466 pages. Penguin Press. $30.As you might expect, there aren’t a whole lot of laughs in “Hollywood Ending,” Ken Auletta’s cradle-to-jail new biography of Harvey Weinstein, the movie mogul convicted of third-degree rape and another sex felony in New York and awaiting trial on further charges in California. When Auletta calls Weinstein’s relationship with his brother Bob “Shakespeare-worthy,” he is placing the story squarely in the tragedy column of the ledger.But then the Broadway star Nathan Lane makes a brief appearance, like Puck cartwheeling onto the set of “Coriolanus.”The year was 2000, and Weinstein’s cultural capital was perhaps at its peak. He was still running Miramax, the prestigious studio that he and Bob had started in 1979, albeit now under Disney’s incongruous but lucrative oversight. He’d recently founded Talk magazine with the editor Tina Brown, then New York’s nimblest puppeteer of high and low culture. He was hobnobbing with politicians, co-chairing a lavish birthday party and fund-raiser for then-Senate candidate Hillary Clinton at Roseland Ballroom. And he didn’t like some of the jokes that Lane, anyone’s dream M.C., had written for the occasion.“I’ll ruin your career,” Weinstein threatened, in Auletta’s retelling, as he “bellied” the elfin actor into a corner.“You can’t hurt me,” Lane retorted. “I don’t have a film career.”Onstage, Lane tauntingly said: “I’m going to do all the jokes Harvey Weinstein wanted me to cut.”This wasn’t the last time that theater, of a sort, would win the day over the producer’s preferred medium. Auletta attended every day of Weinstein’s trial in 2020, narrating the experience here in four chapters. “Trials are not movies, shot under controlled conditions and subject to revision in the editing room,” he writes. “They are live productions, dependent on the chemistry of their participants, and not a little bit of luck.”Books, of which Weinstein is demonstrably fond — his media mini-empire included a publishing imprint — can be like movies. Auletta effectively, if maybe a little too elegiacally, frames this one in the lengthy shadow of “Citizen Kane.” Auletta is, of course, Jerry Thompson, the reporter looking for his antihero’s Rosebud: the mysterious missing object or influence that will explain his personality. But he is also Citizen Ken, magnanimous and avuncular when he encourages his boss at The New Yorker, David Remnick, to publish the young journalist Ronan Farrow’s investigation of Weinstein’s misdeeds. The New York Times’s Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the story five days before Farrow’s piece was published.Ken Auletta, whose new book is “Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence.”via the authorThe well-connected Auletta draws on the work of those journalists and his own interviews with major players, including many surely fascinating hours with the beleaguered brother Bob. As for Harvey, he emails some terse responses to questions, and his representatives haggle over possible interview conditions before ghosting his biographer — but “Hollywood Ending” also mines an extensive profile Auletta wrote of him 20 years ago, and its outtakes. At that time, he had heard of Weinstein’s sex crimes, an open secret for years, but was unable to get victims on the record, and so focused on his subject’s bullying and prodigious appetites. (“Kane” is famous for its breakfast montage. Weinstein’s montage would show him mainlining junk food: peanut M&Ms, French fries when interviewing a defense lawyer — ketchup “creating what looked like bloodstains” — Mentos at the trial and, more recently, contraband Milk Duds.)Weinstein’s reputation for sexual trespass had started early, when he was a concert promoter in Buffalo. As he aged, his influence waned — the whole movie industry waned — just as he was seeking younger prey, from a cohort that “increasingly spent their free time on social networks like Facebook,” Auletta reminds, “rather than going to the movies.”After the producer, then in his 60s, lunged from his office couch at Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, a 22-year-old Miss Italy finalist, in 2015 — “when he reached for her breasts like he was at an all-you-can-eat buffet,” as Auletta puts it — she did what many previous women who had been in her position, scared of Weinstein’s towering power, had been loath to do: She called the police. A publicist’s attempt to discredit Gutierrez was met with indignant cries that she was being “slut-shamed.” The fourth wave of feminism had arrived with a big splash, pulling Weinstein and his ilk into the undertow.And yet the male foreman of the jury that convicted Weinstein, Auletta points out, cited the testimony and behavior of male witnesses, not female victims — “suggesting,” Auletta writes, “that ‘believe women’ may face a steep uphill climb.’” He proposes instead “listen to women”; but one key woman’s voice is cast as soul-crushingly loud.Searching for Rosebud, Auletta alights, for lack of better explanations, on the Weinstein brothers’ flame-haired and apparently flame-tempered mother, Miriam (for whom their company was named, along with their milder father, Max, a diamond cutter who died of a heart attack at 52). A childhood friend told Auletta that Harvey referred to Miriam as “Momma Portnoy,” after the shrill character in Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint.”Bob, who somehow avoided growing into a “beast,” as Harvey is repeatedly described here, allows for the possibility of Miriam’s frustration at her life’s limitations. “She could have been Sheryl Sandberg or one of these C.E.O.s of a company. She had that kind of smarts,” he told Auletta. Instead, she proudly brought rugelach to her sons’ headquarters, and had an epitaph worthy of Dorothy Parker: “I don’t like the atmosphere or the crowd.”As there was a roving “fifth Beatle,” so there were a series of Miramax executives nicknamed the “third brother” — loyalists who helped to enable bad behavior — and, chillingly, a sort of “conveyor system to funnel women” to Weinstein’s hotel suites. If you’re not interested in the NC-17 and often disgusting particulars of what happened in those suites, nor in the headsmacking convolutions of nondisclosure agreements, perhaps you’d prefer one of the disgraced protagonist’s recommendations from the more tasteful era he worshiped, Elia Kazan’s autobiography, “A Life,” or a book Weinstein was often seen carrying during trial preparation: “The Brothers Mankiewicz,” by Sydney Ladensohn Stern. Herman Mankiewicz is credited with the screenplay for “Citizen Kane”; his brother, Joe, wrote “All About Eve.”Recalling those great movies, and even some from Miramax’s glory days in the ’90s, feels dispiriting, as the pictures, to paraphrase “Sunset Boulevard,” continue to get smaller. Going along for the ride of Weinstein’s slow rise and fall, even with the able Auletta at one’s side, can feel even more dispiriting, like getting on one of those creaky roller coasters at a faded municipal playland. More

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      in Theater

      Kenward Elmslie, Poet and Librettist, Dies at 93

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      He collaborated on operas with Jack Beeson and Ned Rorem and published numerous poetry books. Late in life, he was victimized by theft.Kenward Elmslie, who wrote poetry, opera librettos and stage musicals, and who late in life made headlines when his chauffeur bilked him out of millions of dollars and several valuable artworks, including one by Andy Warhol, died on June 29 at his home in the West Village. He was 93.The poet Ron Padgett, a friend since the 1960s, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. Mr. Elmslie had been dealing with dementia for many years.Mr. Elmslie, a grandson of the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, became interested in musical theater while in high school, and in 1952 he met and became a lover of John Latouche, a lyricist who worked with Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington and others and had numerous Broadway credits. Mr. Elmslie is said to have helped Mr. Latouche on some of his projects, generally uncredited.After Mr. Latouche’s death in 1956, Mr. Elmslie continued to live in the house they had shared in Vermont, alternating between there and Manhattan. And he began to have success himself as a lyricist and librettist.He provided the libretto for the Jack Beeson opera “The Sweet Bye and Bye,” which was first performed by the Juilliard Opera Theater in New York in 1957. In 1965 he worked with Mr. Beeson again, on “Lizzie Borden,” an embellished version of the famed ax-murder case, which premiered that year at City Center in New York. It was probably Mr. Elmslie’s biggest success in opera.“The performers, the composer, the librettist, the designer and the director shared the bows at the end,” Howard Klein wrote in his review in The New York Times. “Many bravos were heard.”Ellen Faull and Richard Krause in a scene from the Jack Beeson opera “Lizzie Borden,” for which Mr. Elmslie wrote the libretto. It was probably Mr. Elmslie’s biggest success in opera.NET Opera, via PhotofestMr. Elmslie’s other opera credits included the libretto for Ned Rorem’s “Miss Julie” (1965). He also dabbled in songwriting — his “Love-Wise,” written with Marvin Fisher, was recorded by Nat King Cole in 1959 — and in theater, even accumulating a Broadway credit as book writer and lyricist for “The Grass Harp,” a musical based on a Truman Capote novel that opened in 1971 but, unloved by critics, closed days later.W.C. Bamberger, in the introduction to “Routine Disruptions,” a 1998 collection of Mr. Elmslie’s poems and lyrics, wrote that it was during lulls in his opera and lyric-writing work that Mr. Elmslie began trying his hand at poetry. He was plugged into the New York art and literary scene and had befriended Barbara Guest, John Ashbery and other poets. His first collection, “Pavilions,” appeared in 1961, followed by more than a dozen others, including “Motor Disturbance” (1971) and “Tropicalism” (1975).In the 1970s, as editor of Z Press and its annual Z Magazine, Mr. Elmslie published many of the poets he admired. His own work defied categorization. There was plenty of wit, as in “Touche’s Salon,” which shamelessly dropped names to evoke a 1950s gathering at Mr. Latouche’s penthouse:Meet Jack Kerouac. Humpy and available.His novel On The Road is unreadable. And unsalable.John Cage is sober, Tennessee loaded.Better not ask how his last flop show did.But his more serious poetry could be ambitious, as well as dense. Mr. Ashbery once said that it was like the notes of “a mad scientist who has swallowed the wrong potion in his lab and is desperately trying to get his calculations on paper before everything closes in.”Mr. Elmslie came to combine his various hats — librettist, songwriter, poet — both in his books, some of which were collaborations with visual artists, and in his poetry readings, which might find him in costume delivering a song in addition to reading his verses. Susan Rosenbaum, reviewing his 2000 book, “Blast From the Past: Stories, Poems, Song Lyrics & Remembrances,” in Jacket magazine, noted that the printed page didn’t do justice to his wide-ranging interests.“For an artist as multitalented as Elmslie, the book is a limiting format: One wants to see and hear his musical works in performance, to visit the galleries where his visual collaborations are displayed,” she wrote. “But the very ability to elicit this desire — to reveal poetry’s affinities with song, theater and visual art — is a measure of the talent of this unique poet.”Kenward Gray Elmslie was born on April 27, 1929, in Manhattan. His father, William, met Constance Pulitzer, Joseph Pulitzer’s youngest daughter, when he was working as a tutor for another of the Pulitzer children. They married in 1913.Kenward grew up in Colorado Springs and Washington, D.C., and graduated from Harvard University in 1950 with an English degree. In New York in the 1950s and ’60s, he mixed easily with an artsy crowd. A 1965 article in The Times about a trendy party in the Bowery had him among the guests, with Warhol, the photographers Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, the pioneering electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and others, all gathered to hear a reading by William S. Burroughs.The year before that party, Warhol had given Mr. Elmslie one of his Heinz ketchup box sculptures, a classic example of Warholian Pop Art. More than four decades later, in 2009, the work was stolen, along with other valuable items and several million dollars. “Pulitzer kin hit in pop art scam,” the headline in The Daily News read.In 2010, James Biear, who had been Mr. Elmslie’s chauffeur and caretaker, was indicted in the thefts. News accounts at the time said he took advantage of Mr. Elmslie’s dementia, which was already in its early stages. In 2012 Mr. Biear was sentenced to 10 years in prison.In 1963 Mr. Elmslie began a long relationship with Joe Brainard, an artist and writer with whom he also collaborated on various projects. Mr. Brainard died in 1994. Mr. Elmslie is survived by a half sister, Alexandra Whitelock. More

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      in Movies

      Ni Kuang, Novelist and Screenwriter for Martial Arts Films, Dies at 87

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      Best known for fantastical thrillers that doubled as political allegories, he also wrote hundreds of martial arts films for Bruce Lee and others.HONG KONG — Ni Kuang, a prolific author of fantasy novels imbued with criticism of the Chinese Communist Party and a screenwriter for more than 200 martial arts films, died here on Sunday. He was 87.His death was announced by his daughter-in-law, the actress Vivian Chow, on social media. She did not state the cause but said he died at a cancer rehabilitation center.Best known for his fantastical thrillers, Mr. Ni wrote the screenplays for many of the action movies produced by the Shaw Brothers, who dominated the Hong Kong market. He also created the story lines and central characters for Bruce Lee’s first two major films, “The Big Boss” (1971) and “Fist of Fury” (1972), although the screenwriting credit for both films went to the director, Lo Wei.In the Chinese-speaking world, Mr. Ni was perhaps best known for the “Wisely” series, a collection of about 150 adventure stories first published as newspaper serials. The stories told of the title character’s encounters with aliens and battles with intelligent monsters, but they sometimes also contained pointed political criticism.Born in 1935 to a working-class family in Shanghai, Mr. Ni was given two names at birth, as was the custom: Ni Yiming and Ni Cong. Information on his parents was not immediately available, but it is known that he had six siblings.He began working in his teens as a public security official during China’s land-reform movement, believing in the Communist Party’s promise of a more egalitarian future. But he quickly grew disillusioned after being given the task of writing daily execution notices about landowners, who were blamed for China’s rural poverty and persecuted as public enemies. When he questioned whether they had committed other crimes to warrant a death sentence, his superiors rebuked him.Bruce Lee in “Fist of Fury” (1972), for which Mr. Li created the story line and the central characters. He did not receive screenwriting credit, but he did for more than 200 other martial arts films.Golden Harvest Company“That was the beginning of my distaste for the party,” he said in a 2019 interview with Paul Shieh, a prominent lawyer and television host, for RTHK, the Hong Kong public broadcaster.His troubles did not end there. While stationed in Inner Mongolia, Mr. Ni mated a crippled wolf with two dogs, then raised a pack of their cubs in secret. When the cubs attacked a more senior official, he was punished and made to write long essays of contrition. In public sessions where so-called class enemies were denounced, he got in trouble for giggling. He was also branded as an anti-revolutionary after being caught dismantling wooden planks from a footbridge to burn as fuel during a cold spell.A friend had warned Mr. Ni that he could face heavy penalties for his transgressions and helped him steal a horse so he could escape, Mr. Ni said in the RTHK interview. He returned to Shanghai, where he paid smugglers to help him stow away on a boat to Hong Kong in 1957.At first, Mr. Ni made less than 50 cents a day doing factory work and odd jobs. In interviews, he described in great detail the first meal he had paid for with his earnings: a bowl of rice topped with glistening slabs of fatty barbecued pork.Mr. Ni soon found a vocation as a writer of serialized fiction when The Kung Sheung Daily News accepted a manuscript he wrote, “Buried Alive,” about land reform in mainland China. He threw himself into writing full time, saying in interviews that at the peak of his career he wrote as many as 20,000 words a day. He published the first installments of the “Wisely” saga in the newspaper Ming Pao in 1963.“Back then, I wrote novels as a living, to feed mouths and get through the day, so I had no way of writing exquisitely,” he said, adding that he had time for neither research nor revision while writing. “I could only rely on what was in my head.”Although he never returned to the mainland, his early life experiences there often figured into his writing, even as his fiction became more supernatural. “Old Cat,” a “Wisely” novel first published in 1971, was inspired by a gray-blue Persian cat that had kept Mr. Ni company when he was locked in a hut as punishment. He had spent hours untangling its knotted, matty hair, he said in an interview. The cat in the novel battled aliens.In a speech at the Hong Kong Book Fair in 2019 about his legacy as a science-fiction writer, Mr. Ni argued that his work did not really fit into that genre as it is traditionally defined. He had once avoided writing about aliens, he said, but found them to be convenient narrative devices when he was stuck on a plot.“My science fiction is completely different from Western science fiction or what most people would consider ‘hard’ science fiction,” he said.Having completed only junior high school, he added, he lacked a proper understanding of science. He drew more from ancient Chinese myths and legends.Mr. Ni also brought his imagination to the big screen, earning screenwriting credits for movies that included “One-Armed Swordsman,” which broke Hong Kong box-office records in 1967.Mr. Ni married Li Guozhen in 1959. She survives him. His survivors also include their daughter, Ni Sui, and their son, Joe Nieh. Over the years, Mr. Ni did not hold back in his critiques of the Chinese Communist Party, and he described Hong Kong as a refuge for free thinking. But he was pessimistic about the city’s future under Beijing’s tightening grip.His 1983 novel, “Chasing the Dragon,” was widely cited as a prescient description of the political backdrop that prompted pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019, followed by a sweeping crackdown.In the book, Mr. Ni writes about an unnamed metropolis that is reduced to a shell of itself:There’s no need to destroy the architecture of this big city, no need to kill any of its residents. Even the appearance of the big city could look exactly the same as before. But to destroy and kill this big city, one only needs to make its original merits disappear. And all that would take are stupid words and actions coming from just a few people.When asked by Mr. Shieh of RTHK what disappearing merits he meant, Mr. Ni said, “Freedom.”“Freedom of speech is the mother of all freedoms,” he continued. “Without freedom of speech, there is no other freedom at all.” More

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      in Music

      Richard Taruskin, Vigorously Polemical Musicologist, Dies at 77

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      Author, critic, teacher and public intellectual, he was an unabashed flamethrower who challenged conventional thinking about classical music.Richard Taruskin, a commanding musicologist and public intellectual whose polemical scholarship and criticism upended conventional classical music history, died early Friday in Oakland, Calif. He was 77.His death, at a hospital, was caused by esophageal cancer, his wife, Cathy Roebuck Taruskin, said.An emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a specialist in Russian music, Mr. Taruskin was the author of a number of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the sweeping six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. He was also a contributor to The New York Times, where his trenchant, witty, and erudite writings represented a bygone era in which clashes over the meaning of classical music held mainstream import.“He was the most important living writer on classical music, either in academia or in journalism,” said Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, in a recent interview. “He knew everything, his ideas were potent, and he wrote with dashing style.”At a time when the classical canon was considered sacrosanct, Mr. Taruskin advanced the philosophy that it was a product of political forces. His bête noire was the widespread notion that Beethoven symphonies and Bach cantatas could be divorced from their historical contexts. He savagely critiqued this idea of “music itself,” which, he wrote, represented “a decontaminated space within which music can be composed, performed and listened to in a cultural and historical vacuum, that is, in perfect sterility.”Mr. Taruskin was the author of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the sweeping six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University PressHis words were anything but sterile: Mr. Taruskin courted controversy in nearly everything he wrote. In the late 1980s, he helped ignite the so-called “Shostakovich Wars” by critiquing the veracity of “Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov” (1979), which portrayed the composer as a secret dissident. (Mr. Volkov is a journalist, historian and musicologist.) Drawing on a careful debunking by the scholar Laurel Fay, Mr. Taruskin called the book’s positive reception “the greatest critical scandal I have ever witnessed.”In a contentious 2001 Times essay, Mr. Taruskin defended the Boston Symphony’s cancellation of a performance of excerpts from John Adams’s “The Death of Klinghoffer” after Sept. 11 that year, arguing that the opera romanticized terrorism and included antisemitic caricatures. Even in advocating for what some criticized as censorship, he underscored a central component of his worldview: that music was not neutral, and that the concert hall could not be separated from society.“Art is not blameless,” he wrote. “Art can inflict harm.” (His writings, too, could inflict harm; Adams retorted that the column was “an ugly personal attack, and an appeal to the worst kind of neoconservatism.”)Mr. Taruskin’s most consequential flamethrowing was his campaign against the movement for “historically authentic” performances of early music. In a series of essays anthologized in his 1995 book “Text and Act,” he argued that the use of period instruments and techniques was an outgrowth of contemporary tastes. He didn’t want conductors like Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Roger Norrington to stop performing; he just wanted them to drop the pretense of “authenticity.” And many did.“Being the true voice of one’s time is (as Shaw might have said) roughly 40,000 times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of history,” he wrote in The Times in 1990. “To be the expressive medium of one’s own age is — obviously, no? — a far worthier aim than historical verisimilitude. What is verisimilitude, after all, but correctness? And correctness is the paltriest of virtues. It is something to demand of students, not artists.”Mr. Taruskin had a no-holds-barred approach to intellectual combat, once comparing a fellow scholar’s advocacy for a Renaissance philosopher to Henry Kissinger’s defense of repression at Tiananmen Square. He faced accusations of constructing simplistic straw men, and lacking empathy for his historical subjects. Following a 1991 broadside by Mr. Taruskin contending that Sergei Prokofiev had composed Stalinist propaganda, one biographer complained of his “sneering antipathy.” Mr. Taruskin’s response? “I am sorry I did not flatter Prokofiev enough to please his admirers on his birthday, but he is dead. My concern is with the living.”But his feuds were often productive: They changed the conversation in the academy and the concert hall alike. Such hefty arguments, Mr. Taruskin believed, might help rescue classical music from its increasingly marginal status in American society.“I have always considered it important for musicologists to put their expertise at the service of ‘average consumers’ and alert them to the possibility that they are being hoodwinked, not only by commercial interests but by complaisant academics, biased critics, and pretentious performers,” he wrote in 1994.Mr. Ross said: “Whether you judged him right or wrong, he made you feel that the art form truly mattered on the wider cultural stage.” Mr. Taruskin’s polemics, he added, “ultimately served a constructive goal of taking classical music out of fantasyland and into the real world.”Richard Filler Taruskin was born on April 2, 1945, in New York City, in Queens, to Benjamin and Beatrice (Filler) Taruskin. The household of his youth was liberal, Jewish, feistily intellectual and musical: His father was a lawyer and amateur violinist, and his mother was a former piano teacher. He took up the cello at age 11 and, while attending the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & the Arts), voraciously consumed books on music history at the New York Public Library.At Columbia University, Mr. Taruskin studied music along with Russian, partly to reconnect with a branch of relatives in Moscow. He stayed for his Ph.D., with the music historian Paul Henry Lang as his mentor, as he researched early music and 19th-century Russian opera. He also began playing the viola da gamba in the New York freelance scene and, while subsequently teaching at Columbia, led the choral group Cappella Nova, which gave acclaimed performances of Renaissance repertoire. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1986.Mr. Taruskin conducting the choral group Cappella Nova in 1983. The group, which he led, was acclaimed for its performances of Renaissance repertoire.Keith Meyers/The New York TimesIn the 1970s, musicology was still largely focused on reviving obscure motets and analyzing Central European masterworks. Mr. Taruskin participated in the “New Musicology” movement, a generation of scholars that shook up the discipline by drawing on postmodern approaches, feminist and queer theory, and cultural studies.“Richard had a very keen sense of the political stakes of music history,” said the scholar Susan McClary, a pioneer of New Musicology, in an interview. “He also was an extraordinary musician. And so he was not going to sacrifice the music itself for context; these always went together for him.”While researching Russian composers for his doctorate — at a time when scholars largely dismissed them as peripheral figures — Mr. Taruskin realized how 19th-century politics had insidiously shaped the classical canon. It was no coincidence, he forcefully argued, that Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were so well-regarded: Their popularity and acclaim represented the aftereffects of a long-unacknowledged, and deeply rooted, German nationalist ideology. His monographs on Russian opera and Musorgsky redefined the study of music in Eastern Europe, chipping away at longstanding myths.In 1984, Mr. Taruskin began writing for the short-lived Opus Magazine at the invitation of its editor, James R. Oestreich. After Mr. Oestreich moved to The New York Times, Mr. Taruskin contributed long-form essays to the paper’s Arts & Leisure section that poked at composers who were often treated as demigods; the section’s mailbag soon filled with irate readers. (He had no qualms about sending letters of his own, mailing curt postcards to prominent music critics to lambast their errors or logical fallacies.) His writings for The Times and The New Republic were later collected in the books “On Russian Music” and “The Danger of Music.”Mr. Taruskin attending an international conference in his honor at Princeton University in 2012. He was a larger-than-life figure at conferences of the American Musicological Society, and his presentations were blockbuster events. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York TimesTeaching a Stravinsky seminar at Columbia inspired the two-volume “Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions,” a seminal 1996 study that upended the cosmopolitan image that the composer and his acolytes had long cultivated. Mr. Taruskin drew attention to traditional Slavic melodies that Stravinsky had embedded within “The Rite of Spring,” and how the composer himself had deliberately obscured the folk roots of his revolutionary ballet.The Oxford History of Western Music, published in 2005, grew out of Mr. Taruskin’s undergraduate lectures at Berkeley and his dissatisfaction with textbooks that presented a parade of unassailable masterpieces. In more than 4,000 pages, he wove intricate analyses alongside rich contextualization, revealing musical history as a fraught terrain of argumentation, politics, and power.Critiques of the “Ox” abounded — that it betrayed its author’s personal grudges, that it unfairly treated modernists like Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez. But it remains a central, seemingly unsurpassable text. “This is the last time anyone’s going to tell this story,” Dr. McClary said. “And it was told in a way that was just as good as it ever possibly could have been.” (Her own criticism of the Ox is perhaps the most enduring: Mr. Taruskin’s survey almost entirely ignores Black musical traditions.)Garbed in a purple blazer, Mr. Taruskin was a larger-than-life figure at conferences of the American Musicological Society, where his presentations were blockbuster events. In recent years he refrained from giving papers in favor of attending talks by his many former pupils.He married Cathy Roebuck, a computer programmer at Berkeley, in 1984 and lived in El Cerrito, Calif. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son, Paul Roebuck Taruskin; his daughter, Tessa Roebuck Taruskin; his sister, Miriam Lawrence; his brother, Raymond; and two grandchildren. Among Mr. Taruskin’s numerous awards was Japan’s prestigious Kyoto Prize, which he received in 2017. His most recent book was the 2020 compilation “Cursed Questions: On Music and Its Social Practices.” When he died, he was working to complete a book of essays that would serve as an intellectual biography.Despite his highhanded persona, Mr. Taruskin had a soft side known to colleagues and students. For years he sparred with the music theorist Pieter van den Toorn over the meaning of Stravinsky’s music — Mr. Taruskin arguing that it could not be separated from the politics of the 20th century, Mr. van den Toorn seeing such concerns as extrinsic to the scores.Nevertheless, Mr. Taruskin dedicated one of his books to Mr. van den Toorn. The inscription: “Public adversary, private pal.” More

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      in Theater

      Boston Revisits ‘Common Ground’ and Busing, Onstage

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      The Huntington Theater Company is staging a play based on the seminal J. Anthony Lukas book, reconsidering the legacy of the busing crisis.BOSTON — It’s been nearly half a century since a federal judge ordered the city schools here desegregated by busing, and 37 years since the writer J. Anthony Lukas plumbed the resultant turmoil in his Pulitzer-winning tome, “Common Ground,” which entered the canon of seminal Boston texts.Now a leading nonprofit theater here, arguing that the shadow of busing and the depictions in “Common Ground” continue to shape this city’s reputation and its race relations, is staging a reconsideration of the book, filtered through the prism of a diverse group of contemporary artists.The play, “Common Ground Revisited,” which opened June 10 at the Huntington Theater Company, has been 11 years in the making, begun as a thought experiment in a classroom at Emerson College, and delayed, like so many stage projects, by the coronavirus pandemic. The cast is made up of Boston actors, and the work layers their observations on top of the events in the book, which follows the busing crisis through the lives of three families.“This book has a strong, vibrant legacy in Boston — many people have read it, and there are varying opinions about it and what it means,” said the playwright Kirsten Greenidge, who developed the project with Melia Bensussen; Greenidge wrote the adaptation, and Bensussen, who is the artistic director of Hartford Stage, directed it.“We’re insistent on the ‘revisited’ part,” Greenidge said. “It’s not a straight up adaptation of the book — it’s having the book be in conversation with us, in the present day.”The play, bracketed by several alternative ways of staging — and seeing — a final high school encounter between two students, one Black and one white, is not a takedown of the book, but does gently suggest that there are other historical figures whose stories also matter to Boston’s history, or, as one actor says during the play, “There’s more than one book.”The play, like the book on which it is based, depicts three families affected by busing. Cast members include Lyndsay Allyn Cox, Shanaé Burch, Omar Robinson, Elle Borders and Kadahj Bennett. T Charles Erickson“Boston, to me, as it was sold: Revolutionary War, maybe a little bit of busing, and then somehow we’re here, with ‘The Departed,’ ‘The Town’ and ‘Good Will Hunting’ sprinkled in there,” said Omar Robinson, a Baltimore native who relocated to Boston and is one of the actors in the cast. “But our actual history is so rich and multicultural and Black, and that is very frequently overlooked. Maybe not anymore, hopefully.”That history can sometimes feel very present, and sometimes very distant. The play is being staged in the city’s South End, described in “Common Ground” as “a shabbier, scruffier part of the city,” but now polished and pricey. The city, long led by white men, now has its first Asian American mayor, Michelle Wu; she followed an acting mayor, Kim Janey, who was the first Black person to hold that office, and who had been among those bused for desegregation purposes when she was a child.The school district’s demographics have also changed enormously: Today, just 14.5 percent of students in the Boston public schools are white, down from 57 percent in 1973. And the school system is about half the size it was: There are currently 48,957 students, down from 93,647. (By comparison, in New York City there are about 1 million public school students, of whom 14.7 percent are white.)Although many in the 12-person Huntington ensemble are too young to have lived through the busing crisis, it still looms large. During that era, the actress Karen MacDonald’s stepfather taught at the city’s Hyde Park High School; the actor Michael Kaye’s friend’s father was a state trooper assigned to Charlestown High School, where busing had been greeted by walkouts, protests and an attempted firebombing of the building.Kadahj Bennett, another member of the cast, noted that the events of those days had changed the course of his own schooling a generation later. “My father is an immigrant from Jamaica, moved here and he was involved in busing — he got bused to West Roxbury High and had a miserable time,” he said. “With that, my parents decided I wasn’t going to go to public school.”Theodore C. Landsmark, a city planner and scholar who now directs an urban policy research center at Northeastern University, was on his way to a meeting at Boston City Hall in 1976 when he was attacked by a man wielding an American flag. This photograph, by Stanley Forman, won a Pulitzer Prize.StanleyFormanPhotoOne striking aspect of performing a play about recent history in the city where it took place: Many people in the audience have memories of the scenes depicted, or even know some of the characters. Some nights, the actors say, patrons come up to tell them what they got wrong, or right, in portraying the city and its struggles, and to share their own memories.Some still have deeply personal connections to the history being depicted.Tito Jackson, a former Boston city councilman and mayoral candidate who now runs a cannabis company, has a particularly remarkable link: He learned a few years ago that his birth mother was Rachel E. Twymon, who was a child in one of the families featured in the book. Twymon became pregnant at age 12, and her mother insisted that the child be given up for adoption. Just last year, The Boston Globe reported that Jackson had discovered he was that child.“I read the book four or five times when I was in college — I was a history and sociology major — so finding out that my birth was in the book was a huge surprise and pretty emotional,” Jackson said in an interview. The book describes the pregnancy that led to Jackson’s birth as the result of sexual experimentation and “foolin’ around,” but Twymon said the truth is she was raped, and Jackson credits the Huntington play with making that clear.“Her life was indelibly stamped, and often framed, by this book, and, frankly, the short shrift that the book gave to a pregnancy and the birth of a child,” Jackson, who is now 47, said. “Then the folks at Emerson questioned how a 12-year-old, in 1975, with one of the strictest moms ever, got pregnant.”Jackson said of the play, “I’m very touched, and I feel that Rachel’s story — her perspective as well as her truth — was finally acknowledged.”His mother, who is now 60, is less enthusiastic, feeling that the play doesn’t sufficiently capture the horrors of the busing era. “You’re talking about a time when things were very hectic, and very unstable,” Twymon said. “The play was told nicely, and that’s not how Boston was at that time.”“Boston, to me, as it was sold: Revolutionary War, maybe a little bit of busing, and then somehow we’re here, with ‘The Departed,’ ‘The Town’ and ‘Good Will Hunting’ sprinkled in there,” said the actor Omar Robinson (foreground). T Charles EricksonAnother intense personal connection to the play is that of Theodore C. Landsmark, who now directs an urban policy research center at Northeastern University. Landsmark has had a distinguished career, but will forever be known as the Black man who was set upon by a white man wielding an American flag as a weapon in Boston’s City Hall Plaza in 1976; Stanley Forman’s photograph of the assault won a Pulitzer Prize, and came to symbolize the racism and violence of the busing era.“Initially I found it off-putting to have all of my life defined by that one moment,” Landsmark, 76, said. “Over time I’ve gotten used to it, and I recognize it’s an opportunity to talk about things I care about — the inequalities that continue to exist in Boston, particularly within our professional ranks.”Landsmark said “Common Ground” remains hugely influential. “The book is assigned to all kinds of high school and college classes as a point of entry into understanding Boston, and I know that many people look at Boston through the prism of ‘Common Ground’,” he said. “People who have never been to the city will immediately raise either the book or the photograph as a reason for their reluctance to relocate from places that are easily as racist as Boston is.”Bensussen, the director, said she wasn’t sure whether the play would have a life outside Boston, given its intensely local focus, but noted that local students were more likely to study the national Civil Rights movement than the Boston busing crisis, and said she was hopeful that the play might prompt some rethinking of that. Landsmark said he could imagine excerpts from the play being staged in a variety of settings to spark discussion about ongoing forms of segregation.As for the actors, several of them said they wanted to feel optimistic that progress is underway, but were torn about whether that is realistic given the state of the nation today.“I want there to be hope, but it’s not a thing I see every day — it’s not a thing I’ve encountered during my nearly 20 years in the city,” Robinson said. “Reading this book, working on this, it shined a bright light on its past, and therefore its present, in a lot of ways for me. Not just here in Boston — this country has got a loaded history. But I hope for hope.” More

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      in Movies

      Book Review: ‘The Twilight World,’ by Werner Herzog

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      In “The Twilight World,” the filmmaker Werner Herzog vividly reconstructs the personal war of Hiroo Onoda, who stayed in the jungle for years after World War II ended.THE TWILIGHT WORLD, by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael HofmannTwenty-five years ago in Tokyo, where he had come to direct the world premiere of the opera “Chushingura,” the German filmmaker Werner Herzog received an enviable invitation. At a dinner of the cast and crew, the opera’s composer greeted Herzog with the thrilling news that the emperor of Japan would welcome a private audience with him. “My goodness, I have no idea what I would talk about with the emperor,” Herzog responded. The room froze. “I wish to this day that the earth had swallowed me up,” Herzog recalls dramatically in his first novel, “The Twilight World” — a book in which, his epigraph explains, “most details are factually correct; some are not.” When a guest broke the silence to ask if there was anyone in Japan he would, in fact, like to meet, Herzog answered: “Onoda.” He elaborated: “Hiroo Onoda.”Unless you are a World War II buff with a passion for the Pacific theater, you may ask: Who? Hiroo Onoda was the Imperial Japanese Army lieutenant who landed on the Philippine island of Lubang late in the war, as Japanese forces were retreating, and hid in its jungles until 1974, refusing to believe the war had ended. Camouflaging his clothing and weapons with clay, leaves and bark, he emerged sporadically from the trees like “an ambulating piece of the jungle” to attack perceived foes. In December 1944, Onoda’s commanding officer, Maj. Yoshimi Taniguchi, had ordered him to “hold the island until the Imperial Army’s return” and to “defend its territory by guerrilla tactics, at all costs.” Onoda obeyed. “Your base of operations will be the jungle,” the major said. He added: “You will be like a ghost, elusive, a continuing nightmare to the enemy.” Onoda fulfilled that superhuman assignment.These details and quoted words come from encounters Herzog had with Onoda in Japan after he turned down the emperor’s invitation. Herzog understood the thrall that the jungle holds on a man who has entwined a fanatical mission with that treacherous terrain. Fifty years ago, Herzog entered the Amazonian rainforests of Peru to film masterworks about monomaniacal dreamers. First came “Aguirre: The Wrath of God” (1972), a historical fiction about a 16th-century explorer who led a doomed expedition to find a fabled city of gold. Next came “Fitzcarraldo” (1982), a drama about an opera-mad entrepreneur who hauled a steamship over a mountain to finance the construction of an opera house in the Amazon. In the early 1890s, the real Carlos Fitzcarrald transported a boat that weighed some 30 tons over a mountain in pieces. Herzog (and his cast and crew) magnified that feat beyond reason (and safety), hauling a steamship that weighed 10 times more — intact — over that same mountain to achieve Herzog’s cinematic vision.In “Burden of Dreams” (1982), a documentary on the making of “Fitzcarraldo,” Herzog mused on the “articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity” of the jungle. “The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain,” he said, continuing, “We are cursed with what we are doing here.” And yet, he affirmed, he loved the jungle, “against my better judgment.” With Onoda, he was able to share what Joseph Conrad called “the peculiar blackness of that experience.” In “The Twilight World,” Herzog explains, “I had worked under difficult conditions in the jungle myself and could ask him questions that no one else asked him.” This long-steeped book distills their conversations into a potent, vaporous fever dream; a meditation on truth, lie, illusion and time that floats like an aromatic haze through Herzog’s vivid reconstruction of Onoda’s war.In the jungles of Lubang, first with other Imperial Army holdouts, later on his own, Onoda subsisted on stolen rice, scavenged fruit and, on occasion, water buffalo meat (smoked under cover of fog). When a leaflet landed on the forest floor in the fall of 1945, announcing the war’s end, Onoda took it as forgery, “the work of American agents.” When one of his band, Yuichi Akatsu, surrendered to the Philippine Army in 1950, loudspeakers appeared on a mountaintop, playing a recording of Akatsu assuring Onoda that he was being treated well. Onoda decided that the voice was a simulation or that, if genuine, Akatsu had been tortured to produce it.As days melted into months, decades, Herzog writes, time slowed, congealed, evaporated: “A night bird shrieks and a year passes. A fat drop of water on the waxy leaf of a banana plant glistens briefly in the sun and another year is gone.” Michael Hofmann’s resonant translation conveys the portentous shimmer of Herzog’s voice. Sometimes, Herzog writes, Onoda had doubts; not of his duty but of the reality of his experience. “Is it possible that I am dreaming this war?” he asked himself. “Could it be that I’m wounded in some hospital and will finally come out of a coma years later, and someone will tell me it was all a dream? Is the jungle, the rain — everything here — a dream?”But more than a quarter-century into his campaign, when a plane looped above the island, broadcasting a direct appeal to Onoda from President Ferdinand Marcos, assuring him of amnesty, he suspected a trap. And when his own brother recorded a message that echoed across the treetops for weeks, begging “Hiroo, my brother” to come out of hiding, Onoda’s self-deluding mind recast it as a cryptic hint that the Imperial Army was about to retake the island.It was not until February 1974 that a hippie Onoda stan, Norio Suzuki, flushed the soldier out. Spotting Suzuki, Onoda leaped at him and pointed a gun at his chest. “How could I be an American agent?” Suzuki protested. “I’m only 22.” Many men in mufti had tried to take him before, Onoda responded. “I have survived 111 ambushes,” he said, adding: “Every human being on this island is my enemy.” Suzuki had to promise to fly in a commanding officer from 1944 before he would stand down.When Major Taniguchi arrived on Lubang two weeks later and told Onoda, face-to-face, “Lieutenant, your war is over,” Onoda still hoped it might be an elaborate ruse, a loyalty test. He handed over his rifle to a Filipino general nonetheless, and then his family sword, which he had preserved from rust with palm oil he had made himself. The general handed it back. “The true samurai keeps his sword,” he told Onoda. Later, Herzog writes, “he will admit that inside everything in him was bawling.”Onoda, who died in 2014 at age 91, lived in the jungle for almost 30 years; Herzog arguably has never left it. Only a few years back, he returned to the Amazon to induct four dozen budding filmmakers into his mythic practice. He told them, “It is the job of the filmmaker to jump out of the window into the boat even if he has no confidence there is water beneath it.” Onoda surely would have agreed. In “The Twilight World,” Herzog presents a kind of dual libretto to the operas both men conducted in their different jungles. They worked on different continents, in different eras and to different ends, but they served the same inexorable impulse: to lead a life of archetype in the modern day, outside of time, eternal.Liesl Schillinger is a critic and translator and teaches journalism at the New School in New York City. Her translation of the novel “Stella,” by Takis Würger, came out in paperback this year.THE TWILIGHT WORLD, by Werner Herzog. Translated by Michael Hofmann. | Penguin Press | 144 pp. | $25 More

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      in Music

      Review: ‘Everything I Need I Get From You,’ by Kaitlyn Tiffany

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      EVERYTHING I NEED I GET FROM YOU: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, by Kaitlyn TiffanyOne Direction was a British boy band that was cynically assembled for the reality television competition “The X Factor” in 2010, and went on to release five albums of catchy if unremarkable pop songs before going on indefinite hiatus in 2016. (For reasons that are somewhat mysterious even to myself, I love the band.) As the internet culture reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany charts in “Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It,” the band’s cultural impact might have been unexceptional were it not for its fans, who built a bizarrely powerful online community featuring subversive fan-fiction narratives, absurdly funny memes and occasionally distressing coordinated campaigns that grew so influential they managed to destabilize “1D” itself.Tiffany counts herself as a fan (she is the same age as Harry Styles, the band’s youngest member), though she approaches her subject with a wry critical distance — which is actually, she argues, an underappreciated but common fan characteristic. It is a persistent sexist attitude that flattens the fangirl’s perspective into inarticulate shrieking. “Though the criticism of fangirls is that they become tragically selfless and one-track-minded,” Tiffany writes, “the evidence available everywhere I look is that they become self-aware and creatively free.” She argues that One Direction’s blandly corporate beginnings formed an inviting blank canvas for the band’s fans, who marshaled their generative powers to challenge the music industry’s scripts about what women and girls want — or simply to amuse themselves. Following internecine fandom battles, Tiffany writes, can be “vicious and exhilarating, like college football except interesting.” She tracks down one fan who was ridiculed on television for creating a “shrine” to a spot on the 101 freeway where Styles once vomited and finds the young woman perplexed at the media freakout over “a comedy routine she was performing, primarily with herself as the audience.”Through data points like these, Tiffany traces the shifting status of fangirls in the culture at large — once dismissed as hysterical teeny-boppers, they were later rehabilitated by the empowering winds of poptimism before stan culture complicated their role yet again, establishing pop music fans as among the internet’s most powerful and feared operators. The 1D fandom would eventually splinter along two lines — those who believe that Styles and his bandmate Louis Tomlinson are secretly in love and who are obsessed with “proving” the truth; and those who believe that is an inappropriate thing to aggressively insist on a story line about real people in a band you ostensibly love. The conflict culminated in a 2016 conspiracy that Tomlinson’s newborn baby was, preposterously, fake.The Dreamy World of Harry StylesThe British pop star and former member of the boy-band One Direction has grown into a magnetic and provocative performer.New Album: The record-breaking album “Harry’s House” is a testament to Harry Styles’ sense of generosity and devotion to the female subject.Styler Fashion: Stylers, as the pop star’s fans are called, love to dress in homage to their idol. Here are some of the best looks seen at a concert.Solo Debut: Styles’ self-titled first solo album was almost bold in its resistance to pop music aesthetics, our critic wrote in 2017.Opening Up: For his solo debut, the singer agreed to a Times interview. He was slippery in conversation, deflecting questions with politeness.But the fandom taketh away, and the fandom giveth: Tiffany is at the height of her powers when she is describing, with touching specificity, why it might make sense for a person to invest serious time and money into a bunch of cute boys singing silly love songs. She contextualizes fandom as a culturewide coping mechanism and creative outlet; it can be a lifeline for a lonely and powerless teenager, a site of reflection for a middle-aged mom or a wonderful excuse for anyone to scream into the void. Ten years after she discovered the band, Tiffany’s favorite 1D inside joke — “We took a chonce”; if you know you know — still “smacks me with a lingering hit of dopamine,” she writes, “like a gumball-machine-sticky-hand landing on a windowpane.”On the internet, fandom can be a route toward cyberbullying a baby, or it can be a way of figuring some things out about yourself. Sometimes, it can even forge a writer as funny and perceptive as Kaitlyn Tiffany.EVERYTHING I NEED I GET FROM YOU: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, by Kaitlyn Tiffany | 304 pp. | MCD x FSG Originals | Paper, $18 More