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      California Lost 175,000 ‘Creative Economy’ Jobs, Study Finds

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCalifornia Lost 175,000 ‘Creative Economy’ Jobs, Study Finds“There is no economic recovery in our area unless a working creative engine is driving it,” said Representative Karen Bass of California.The Broad Museum in Los Angeles. Job loss in the “creative economy workforce” reached 24 percent in Los Angeles County, according to a report released Thursday by the Otis College of Art and Design.Credit…Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated PressFeb. 25, 2021, 4:44 p.m. ETArts advocates and elected officials in California called on Thursday for additional government spending to avert what one organization leader called a “pending cultural depression” brought on by the pandemic.“There is no economic recovery in our area unless a working creative engine is driving it,” Karen Bass, a U.S. Congresswoman representing part of Los Angeles, said in a video prerecorded for a panel discussion.“Congress must provide additional assistance to the creative economy and its million of employees,” she continued, saying that her district could not fully recover unless the arts community there led the way.The calls for more aid were aired during a video conference hosted by Otis College of Art and Design, which released a report it commissioned on the creative economy. Two economic impact surveys Thursday by the advocacy group Californians for the Arts were also discussed.The Otis College report said that between February 2020 and December 2020, total job loss in the “creative economy workforce” reached about 13 percent statewide and 24 percent in Los Angeles County.During that period, the state lost 175,000 jobs in that economy, which was said to include architecture and related services, creative goods and products, entertainment and digital media, fashion and fine arts, the report said.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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      ‘This Is the Life’ Review: A Valuable Part of Hip-Hop History

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘This Is the Life’ Review: A Valuable Part of Hip-Hop HistoryAva DuVernay’s 2008 documentary, now streaming on Netflix, is a personal love letter to a slice of Los Angeles’s 1990s hip-hop scene.Medusa is one of the hip-hop artists featured in Ava DuVernay’s 2008 documentary “This Is the Life.”Credit…ArrayFeb. 23, 2021This Is the LifeNYT Critic’s PickDirected by Ava DuVernayDocumentary1h 37mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Ava DuVernay’s 2008 debut feature, the documentary “This Is the Life,” is a refreshing portrait of a 1990s California hip-hop subculture that thrived separately from gangsta rap. DuVernay’s documentary, now available to stream on Netflix, is a personal project. She performed as part of the rap duo Figures of Speech at the Good Life Cafe — a South Central Los Angeles health food cafe that became a mecca for the underground rap community.Throughout the ’90s, the modest space’s open-mic nights fostered a bevy of young, raw, untainted lyrical voices telling stories of everyday life in L.A. DuVernay combines performer interviews with VHS footage and audio clips of their shows to retell a magical period in the hip-hop scene.In its intertitle graphics and visual typography, “This Is the Life” often mirrors VH1’s “Behind the Music” documentaries. When staging her interviews, however, DuVernay imprints unique compositions onto the familiar music-doc style by using the respondents’ spacious surroundings to frame them. To paint the cafe’s milieu, she identifies the institute’s stalwarts, such as supportive fans lovingly referred to as “Jean in the front row” and “Big Al.” Not only does DuVernay feature the cafe’s Black male M.C.’s like Abstract Rude and Chillin Villain Empire, she underscores the white, Latino and female artists who also appeared on the Good Life stage.[embedded content]The venue’s traditions are also outlined: No leaving gum on the floor; no leaning on the paintings; avoid the phrase “wiggidy wiggidy” in freestyles; and no profanity — meant to ensure a clean space and substantive rhymes. Audiences at the Good Life wanted to hear idiosyncratic freestylers using distinct techniques to tell unique stories. Rappers who failed to meet crowd expectations, in scenes akin to an amateur nightat the Apollo, were booed off the stage. In recalling the night the rapper Fat Joe bombed at the cafe, DuVernay creatively soundtracks the audio from the event over a time lapse of a chalk artist sketching the scene.Word of mouth inspired record deals for some Good Life performers. Jurassic 5, for instance, became gold record-certified in Britain. By 1994, the cafe had built such a reputation that artists like Ice Cube and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony came to listen. And it is claimed (by the rapper Abstract Rude) that those artists incorporated the underground style into their work. When DuVernay plays the Good Life M.C. Myka Nyne’s verse on Freestyle Fellowship’s “Mary” (1993) next to Bone Thugs-n-Harmony’s “Tha Crossroads” (1996), it’s a difficult assertion to dispute.Outside of the film’s director, however, few from the Good Life became household names. But in the illuminating “This Is the Life,” DuVernay not only fills in an important formative gap in California’s hip-hop history, she displays the inventive eye that would later lead to her future cinematic successes.This Is the LifeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Netflix.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Chuck Johnson’s Ode to What’s Been Lost in California’s Fires

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyChuck Johnson’s Ode to What’s Been Lost in California’s FiresHis pedal steel album “The Cinder Grove” is a eulogy for landscapes that are still being razed, but holds on to hope for what comes next.Chuck Johnson used measurements of a specific home lost to fire and a burned redwood forest to build and borrow software that mirrors their natural reverb. Credit…Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesFeb. 10, 2021, 5:31 p.m. ETThe guitarist Chuck Johnson had already tucked himself into bed at a German hostel when his partner, the multi-instrumentalist Marielle Jakobsons, called from California with news that could not wait until he returned from tour: She had finally found their rural wonderland.Jakobsons and Johnson had daydreamed for years of relocating into the woods with fellow Bay Area artists to start a modern commune — a sunny spot for gardening, an inviting studio for recording, a little grove for performing. “The quintessential California dream,” Jakobsons said recently by phone, laughing.The place they found in November 2018 was perfect: a hundred miles north of Oakland, across the San Francisco Bay, with a picturesque A-frame and an avocado-colored cottage. But before they could close, they discovered a daunting contingency: The nearby forests were so susceptible to California’s metastasizing wildfires they couldn’t insure the property. In 2020, just a year after they let the dream go, fire nearly jumped the property line.“It’s still hard to process how much was lost this last fire season, but it gave us clarity that we’re not willing to risk everything,” Johnson said from the small east Oakland home Jakobsons bought in 2012. “We were so close to making this huge life change. That’s a loss we grieved.”That bittersweet sense of knowing paradise only long enough to lose it permeates “The Cinder Grove,” Johnson’s second album for pedal steel guitar, released last week. Its five absorbing pieces not only contemplate the spate of intensifying natural disasters but also the rising costs the musicians say are pushing their peers out of Oakland. A eulogy for landscapes that are still being razed, “The Cinder Grove” and its luxuriant tones hold fast to hope for what comes next.“In spite of the destruction, we all know these areas are resilient. Something will grow back there, even if it’s not what was there before,” Johnson said haltingly, as if tiptoeing the divide between sounding naïve and nihilistic. “Look at all the chaparral on California’s coast — it’s all about surviving that kind of fire cycle.”Johnson often employs such California imagery, extolling the state’s bucolic rivers or the mysterious Mojave. Several tracks on “The Cinder Grove,” like “The Laurel” and “Serotiny,” employ botanical metaphors familiar to a budding naturalist. But he was actually a late arrival to the state, heading west when he was 39 to attend the heralded electronic music program at Mills College.For two decades, he had been an imaginative mainstay of North Carolina’s rich indie rock ecosystem. In the ’90s, he made agitated instrumental rock with his band, Spatula, in a moment when it was hardly fashionable. He later pivoted from brittle acoustic abstraction to warped folk exotica to modular synthesizer exploration. Johnson was a restless music lifer, searching for the sound that suited his story.Johnson moved to California at 39 to attend music school, and the state quickly became a muse.Credit…Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesMills and California gave him time to find it. A year into school, Johnson moved into a space known as the “Totally Intense Fractal Mindgaze Hut,” a massive brick warehouse divvied into tiny apartments, performance areas and arts studios. It caught fire in 2015, killing two people. For years, Johnson lived in a 100-square-foot hovel there, his bed crammed into what he calls a cubbyhole. After spending 14 hours a day at Mills working on music, he would return home to find others rehearsing or recording.“Everyone was working on the same thing or tied into the same spaces,” remembered Johnson, now 52. “It was what I wanted from school, to be immersed in things I had been interested in for so long.”Johnson spent his days pondering electronic music, but, by night, he would play the acoustic guitar, a lifetime love since watching his step-grandfather pick country songs at family gatherings. Then, in 2011, Cynthia Hill — a documentary filmmaker Johnson had worked with in North Carolina — asked him to contribute to a new television show about a chef who had left the state for New York and returned to open a restaurant in her post-industrial hometown. During five seasons on PBS, “A Chef’s Life” won an Emmy and a Peabody; Johnson scored every episode.The show gave Johnson a steady postgraduate paycheck and afforded him the chance to work on music more immediate than what he’d done at Mills. More important, it prompted him to consider how best to frame a story through sound. He was scoring scenes familiar from his Southern childhood, like little farms or big pig pickins. He could put himself back there and, hopefully, take along the audience.“Sometimes just communicating a mood is sufficient, all an instrumental piece needs to do,” Johnson said. “But it can also convey this complex array of associations and images. It can be melancholic and uplifting at the same time, the holy grail.”Several tracks on “The Cinder Grove” employ botanical metaphors.Credit…Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesHe began applying that sensibility to a string of albums for solo acoustic guitar and “Balsams,” his 2017 breakthrough for pedal steel. Johnson’s sense of instrumental storytelling is now so nuanced that, for “The Cinder Grove,” he used measurements of his lost warehouse home and a burned redwood forest to build and borrow software that mirrors their natural reverb. You hear his acoustic memories of spaces he’s memorializing.“Fingerpicking and pedal steel are so connected to very specific traditions of music-making,” said the composer Sarah Davachi, who met Johnson after moving from Canada to California to attend Mills. “But Chuck undoes a little bit of that so that you don’t know what you’re supposed to be feeling. His music is not about the pedal steel — it’s a tool for creating an environment.”Davachi plays piano on “Constellation,” the centerpiece of “The Cinder Grove.” While staying at Davachi’s home in Los Angeles, Johnson fell for her Mason & Hamlin upright, a 135-year-old oddity that’s always out of tune. During “Constellation,” it emerges by surprise four minutes into the somber hymn. Elsewhere, Jacobsons anchors a Bay Area string ensemble, adding drama to Johnson’s austere tone.Johnson played every note on “Balsams,” as if it were a self-made panacea for anyone within earshot. But the collaborative moments on “The Cinder Grove” suggest he is trying to hold on to what he loves about California that has yet to vanish — the artistic network he has fostered. His friends may no longer live together in a warehouse or be scheming about their redwoods-bound collective, but he sees promise in finding new ways to build relationships, even through requiems for what’s already gone.“The reason I am still here is the community I found, including people who appreciate the beauty outside the city,” Johnson said. “And as I’ve been more interested in collaborative ways of living, that seemed like the natural way to expand my sound.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      What Defines Domestic Abuse? Survivors Say It’s More Than Assault

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhat Defines Domestic Abuse? Survivors Say It’s More Than AssaultThe Congresswoman Cori Bush and the musician FKA twigs describe how manipulative, isolating conduct known as “coercive control” helped trap them in abusive relationships. Lawmakers are starting to listen.Congresswoman Cori Bush of Missouri has been sharing her story as a survivor of domestic abuse to help “normalize the conversation.”Credit…Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesMelena Ryzik and Jan. 22, 2021Updated 5:16 p.m. ETIt was, at first, the kind of dreamily romantic attention that Cori Bush craved. She was 19 or so, barely making ends meet working at a preschool, and a new boyfriend was spooning on affection. He lavished her with gifts, too. “He would spoil me, he would spoil my friends, my sister — whoever was near me,” she said.But quickly, she said, the high-watt beam of his attentiveness became an unyielding glare. He monopolized her time and curbed her independence.“He would answer my phone,” Ms. Bush said. “I thought it was cute at first — he wanted to answer my phone and talk to my friends. But then it turned into him screening my calls.”When she tried to end things, he hit her, she said. It was the first of many instances in which he was physically violent. “He would pinch me so hard, he would take off not only skin, but flesh,” she said. “He would cut me with knives, box cutters.” She couldn’t leave, she said, because he threatened to turn the weapons on himself. And then the cycle began anew: “He would come back so sweet and so kind and so loving — and so sorry,” she said.Days into her freshman term as a Democratic Congresswoman from Missouri, Ms. Bush, 44, emerged as a public force; as her first action, she introduced legislation to investigate and expel members of Congress who voted to overturn the election and supported the riot in the Capitol.But even before she was sworn in, she shared her experiences as a survivor of domestic abuse, in hopes of reframing the issue. “I’ve allowed myself to be vulnerable about it,” she said in an interview last month, “because I feel like if we don’t normalize the conversation — people are still being hurt, especially right now, with Covid, and the lockdown,” when calls to support networks are spiking.Ms. Bush’s candor comes as some state lawmakers, working with researchers, have begun to reshape the law to acknowledge that the controlling and isolating behaviors she cites, often referred to as “coercive control,” are not only steppingstones to violence, but can be criminally abusive in their own right. Activists hope that by broadening the definition of abuse, they can help victims reclaim their autonomy, and catch perpetrators before cases spiral toward hospitalization — or worse.In September, California passed a law that allows coercive control behaviors, such as isolating partners, to be introduced as evidence of domestic violence in family court. That month, Hawaii became the first state to enact anti-coercive control legislation. A similar law was introduced in the New York legislature.The efforts address what experts say is a common, long-held misperception that an abusive situation is only a partner throwing a punch, rather than an incremental constricting of someone’s life, to dominate them.“By the time you see a broken bone, the person has experienced a lot of other damaging behaviors,” said Lynn Rosenthal, who was the first White House adviser on violence against women and served on the Biden transition team.Of course the violence itself has not abated. In the United States, one in four women and one in seven men experience severe violence in their relationships in their lifetimes, and it’s the leading cause of homicides for women, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.But as gender-based inequities surfaced in the wake of the #MeToo movement, and more women — and therefore more survivors — entered government, they and others have been vocal about how much more complicated the calculus of abuse can be, how yawning the gaps in protection and how damaging the belief that victims can just leave.Though they may suffer injuries, many survivors say that what keeps them in the relationship, and what makes the trauma last, is mental and emotional abuse. The musician FKA twigs, 33, who filed a lawsuit last month accusing her former boyfriend, the actor Shia LaBeouf, of sexual battery, assault and inflicting emotional distress, said in the suit that his constant “belittling and berating” shrunk her self-esteem and made her easier to control. A year later, she said in an interview, she was still suffering the repercussions: “I have panic attacks almost every single night.”The musician FKA twigs, born Tahliah Debrett Barnett, filed a lawsuit accusing her former boyfriend, the actor Shia LaBeouf, of abuse.Credit…Ana Cuba for The New York TimesThe term coercive control is embraced by some researchers to describe the dynamics of abuse because it encompasses acts like creeping isolation, entrapment, denigration, financial restrictions and threats of emotional and physical harm, including to pets or children, that are used to strip victims of power. Mild but frequent bodily aggression — pushing and grabbing, or increasing roughness during sex in a way the partner does not like — is another hallmark, experts said.As destructive as those behaviors may be, they are not often treated by law enforcement or courts as improper on their own, sharpening the belief that victims must be battered and hospitalized before their accounts might be taken seriously. Doubt about how the justice system would treat them is not unfounded: About 88 percent of survivors surveyed by the ACLU said the police did not believe them or blamed them for the abuse.The new laws to address coercive behaviors have raised some concerns from advocates who worry that — in court proceedings that lawyers in the field say are already stacked against survivors — the standard of proof might be too high, especially when officials don’t have the tools to identify and prove patterns of risky behavior. “Researchers understand coercive control as something that can help predict the outcome of a dangerous situation that becomes deadly,” said Rachel Louise Snyder, author of the 2019 book “No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us.” But, she added, “law enforcement doesn’t necessarily recognize that.”Coercive control has been illegal in England and Wales since 2015, but 2018 saw the highest number of domestic violence-related killings in five years, according to the BBC. The Center for Women’s Justice, a British watchdog group, filed complaints in 2019 and 2020 alleging “systematic failure” on the part of police to safeguard victims. “Officers on the ground don’t understand” coercive control, said Harriet Wistrich, the center’s director. Though there has been some training, she emphasized that for the law to be most effective, police, social workers and the courts need to have a shared understanding of how emotional abuse can become criminal.Others are concerned that, in the United States, adopting and implementing new laws could drain resources from survivors’ pressing logistical needs, or from other pathways to justice. A growing faction of advocates say the best response lies not in the criminal courts, with their racial and economic inequities, but in dialogue-based alternatives like restorative justice.Judy Harris Kluger, a retired New York judge who is executive director of the nonprofit Sanctuary for Families, said she agreed that coercive control is important as a concept. As a judge, though, “I’d rather have energy put into enforcing the laws that we have,” she said, “but also focusing on other things besides litigation to address domestic violence,” like funding for prevention, housing and job programs for survivors.Still, supporters say that legally acknowledging how pernicious the problem is will make it easier to fight — and help force a reckoning over its pervasiveness.They point to Scotland as a potential model. Its domestic abuse laws enacted in 2019 focus on coercive control and include funding for training; a majority of its police and support staff has taken mandatory courses to understand the issue, said Detective Superintendent Debbie Forrester, Police Scotland’s lead for domestic abuse. The judiciary got lessons too. Alongside a public campaign explaining that controlling behavior is illegal, the authorities put abusers on notice that they would be scrutinized: “We will speak to previous partners,” a police statement warned.In the year following the law, the number of charges reported for prosecution related to domestic abuse jumped nearly 6 percent, according to the Scottish government. Though they could always prosecute violence, previously “there was nothing that was actually called domestic abuse,” Ms. Forrester said. “That has been really important for victims — they understand that the laws and the structure is there to support them.”Susan Rubio, 50, the state senator from California who headed the effort to adopt new legislation there, said she was motivated partly by her own experiences. In 2016, during divorce proceedings, she accused her husband, Roger Hernández, a California state assemblyman, of domestic violence, describing instances in which he punched her in the chest and attempted to strangle her with a belt, court documents say. The judge granted her a restraining order. Mr. Hernández, who was gearing up for a congressional primary, denied the allegations. Rebuked by his statehouse colleagues, he disappeared from his congressional race. (Mr. Hernández did not respond to requests for comment.)The law Ms. Rubio proposed, which allows coercive control to be used as evidence of domestic violence in family court, went into effect this month. It defined those behaviors as instances in which one party deprived, threatened or intimidated another, or controlled, regulated or monitored their “movements, communications, daily behavior, finances, economic resources or access to services.”Susan Rubio, a state senator from California, headed the effort to adopt legislation that allows coercive control behaviors to be used as evidence of domestic violence in family court.Credit…Lorie Shelley, California Senate Rules PhotographyIn Hawaii, the definition of domestic violence was expanded to acknowledge coercive control, including name-calling and degradation. The law was shaped in part by a researcher, Barbara Gerbert, and a local police officer, May Lee. “Domestic violence is a complex issue, but at the heart of it is the need for power and control,” Ms. Lee wrote to the legislature.The term coercive control was popularized around 2007 by Evan Stark, a researcher and forensic social worker whose work was cited by governments in the United Kingdom.The laws, in the United States and other countries, recognize an evolution in thought and research about domestic abuse, once normalized and minimized as an unfortunate outgrowth of bad relationships. Experts say research has increasingly shown the insufficiency of law enforcement approaches that treat domestic assaults as isolated incidents, akin to being punched by a stranger in a bar fight, and ignore the experiences of those for whom the abuse was often broader in scope and not always marked by violence, but debilitating, repetitive and no less damaging.“We have failed to connect the dots until very recently in all these other ways,” Ms. Snyder, the author, said. “Coercive control laws are a first attempt to address some of that — the unseen dynamics that are so, so dangerous.”Those who study domestic abuse say it follows a pattern: Ardent, rapid courtship that gives way to tests of loyalty, isolation from loved ones, belittling and deprivation of resources, whether it’s money, time, sleep or food — all in service of breaking down and controlling another person.At the outset of a relationship, “love-bombing,” as it’s sometimes called, is a classic warning sign, experts say. “Showing up early to give the partner flowers. Picking her up when she doesn’t expect it,” said Chitra Raghavan, a forensic psychologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.The gestures may seem sweet, thoughtful, but they’re a test: Monopolizing a partner’s time and attention sows isolation and shows the abuser “that he can control her,” Dr. Raghavan said.If a partner protests, an abuser may ratchet up the charm, experts said. The cycle gives the victim an illusion of control, and the perpetrator an excuse to mete out punishment: just don’t hang out with those friends, wear that outfit, cook that meal. But the boundaries for correct behavior keep shifting.“Every time we see that someone died at the hands of their partners, that’s something we could’ve stopped, as a society,” Ms. Bush said.Credit…Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesMs. Bush’s former boyfriend had rules about how and when she could wash the dishes or use the stove, she recalled. FKA twigs, whose given name is Tahliah Debrett Barnett, said that Mr. LaBeouf was feverishly jealous, and would also grow angry if she handed him his toothbrush when he was in the shower, even though that’s when he liked to brush his teeth. “He said that I was controlling, because I had given him the toothbrush with toothpaste,” she recalled.(Mr. LaBeouf did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement to The New York Times when Ms. Barnett’s lawsuit was filed, he said: “I have been abusive to myself and everyone around me for years. I have a history of hurting the people closest to me. I’m ashamed of that history and am sorry to those I hurt.” He added that “many” of the allegations by Ms. Barnett and another former girlfriend were not true, but gave no further details.)Jennifer Spivak, 31, the founder of a digital advertising agency whose ex-boyfriend pleaded guilty in 2011 to felony strangulation, said that he more often used threats than physical violence. During the early wave of affection, she gave into requests like forgoing the gym to spend more time with him. She relinquished her privacy, showing her boyfriend her texts and emails. But he wasn’t satisfied.“I became obsessed with figuring out how to keep things nice, moment to moment,” Ms. Spivak said. He would escort her to the bank and force her to cash her paychecks and relinquish the money, which complicated her ability to leave him.Jennifer Spivak said her ex-boyfriend forced her to hand over money from paychecks. Now she makes a point to work with women, to boost others’ financial independence.Credit…Meghan Marin for The New York TimesFor the most part, she said he didn’t hit her; rather she said he “psychologically tortured” her for small infractions like not answering his call at work, berating her for hours while she stood in the tub naked and he held an iron above the water.“I would wonder, am I being abused if I don’t have any bruises?” said Ms. Spivak, whose isolation exacerbated her self-doubt. As a survivor, she makes a point to work with women, to boost others’ financial independence.Ms. Barnett said that once she could finally see how bad things were with Mr. LaBeouf, she was too ashamed to admit it: “I just couldn’t connect with my old life, because it was a reminder of how far away I was from myself.” She filed the lawsuit, she said, to highlight the patterns in her relationship, and to show how anyone, no matter their status, can be ensnared.The most dangerous moment for victims of domestic violence, experts say, is when they decide to end their relationship; on average, it takes seven attempts to leave an abuser, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Shame and fear — coupled with economic insecurity, racial and social justice concerns, and worries about destabilizing the household, especially with children — keep many from reporting their assaults or the terrors they live with, advocates say.Ms. Rubio, the California lawmaker, resisted calling authorities during her marriage — despite her resources, she didn’t have the courage, she said, and worried about public scrutiny. “Coercive control, it paralyzes a victim,” she said.Ms. Bush said her boyfriend’s violence escalated to the point that he once shot at her with a gun. She never called the police. “I didn’t want him to go to jail,” she said. “So I couldn’t figure out how to say what happened. And I didn’t want people to look at me like I was stupid — like, why are you with this guy? Because I’m smarter than what they’re going to think.”As she enters Congress, Ms. Bush said she thinks of combating domestic violence as building a social movement to save lives. “Every time we see that someone died at the hands of their partners,” she said, “that’s something we could’ve stopped, as a society.”If you or someone you know is being abused, support and help are available. Visit the hotline’s website or call 1-800-799-7233.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Pat Loud, Reality Show Matriarch of ‘An American Family,’ Dies at 94

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPat Loud, Reality Show Matriarch of ‘An American Family,’ Dies at 94A mother of five, she unapologetically laid bare the drama of her family life as a star of the first reality show.The Loud family (clockwise from top): Kevin, Lance, Michele, Pat, Delilah, Grant and Bill.Credit…John Dominis/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty ImagesJan. 11, 2021Updated 5:11 p.m. ET Before “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” before the Kardashians, before the idea of living large and unscripted on camera became a TV staple, there was a startling program on public television called “An American Family” with a startling female character named Pat Loud.Ms. Loud was a California mother of five. She drank, she plotted her divorce, she adored, and accepted, her openly gay son. She did it all in Santa Barbara and all on camera — in 1973. Loving, boisterous, witty, resilient and sometimes angry and hurt, she did not act like most women on television at the time. But she was ostensibly not acting at all. She was the first reality television star on the first reality show — and she paid a price for breaking new ground.Critics called her materialistic and self-absorbed. An “affluent zombie,” one said. What wife and mother would do such a thing? Newsweek put Ms. Loud, her husband, Bill, and their children on its cover with the headline “The Broken Family.”Many others, however, saw her as honest and brave, uninhibited and unconditional in her love for her children.Ms. Loud died on Sunday at her home in Los Angeles, her family said in a Facebook post. She was 94. She was 47 when the show that made her famous first aired, and she spent much of the rest of her life explaining why she had done it and how it had changed her family. She made few apologies.She told the talk show host Dick Cavett in no uncertain terms that she had no problem with her son Lance’s homosexuality. She wrote in her autobiography, “Pat Loud: A Woman’s Story” (1974), that given how she felt that her family had been mistreated after the show aired, “now we are all unabashedly trying to get anything we can from the instant fame.”But life went on. Once a homemaker and Junior League volunteer, Ms. Loud found new work with Ron Bernstein, a literary agent, and later with the fashion designer Rudi Gernreich. She moved to New York, then England, before returning to California in the late 1990s to be with Lance after he became sick with H.I.V. in 1987. (He died of complications of hepatitis C in 2001.) She divorced her husband, though they reunited many years later.Ms. Loud with her son, Lance, in 1990. She was forthright in asserting her acceptance of his open homosexuality when “An American Family” was generating wide publicity in the 1970s.Credit…Ann Summa/Getty ImagesBy the time she was in her 80s, public perception of her had shifted. Where once she had been seen as an unmitigated self-promoter, now she was a wise, refined matriarch of a genre gone astray.Speaking of the “Real Housewives” franchise, Ms. Loud told The New York Times in 2013, “It just seems like all these beautiful blond girls, all made up, with stem glasses of white Chablis, and they’re all just fighting at dinner somewhere.”Critics of “An American Family” accused it of being contrived, but the Louds long maintained that they had behaved as normally as they could with cameras constantly trailing them. Craig Gilbert, a producer for WNET, chose the Louds for his subject because the family had lots of children — and because they said yes.“We asked the kids, and they all agreed,” Ms. Loud told The Times in 2013. “It seemed like a fun thing to do.”The family expected the filming to last for just a few weeks and doubted that the final product would find many viewers. In the end, more than 300 hours of film captured over seven months was reduced to 12 one-hour episodes.“They just went for the sensational stuff,” Ms. Loud said.The most sensational involved scenes from Lance Loud’s flamboyant life in New York — where he performed in a rock band and where his mother visited him, accompanied by cameras — and the breakup of the Louds’ marriage.Bill Loud had been unfaithful for years, and his wife knew it. In one wine-saturated conversation captured on film, she complained about his affairs to her brother and sister-in-law. She told The Times in 2013 that she had been “coerced” into letting the scene be filmed. Mr. Gilbert rejected that assertion.“I said, ‘Pat, we must shoot that,’” he told The Times in 2013. “She said, ‘I do not want you to.’ I said, ‘We must, Pat, because otherwise it’s going to come out of the blue. No one will understand it.’ She finally agreed, and her brother and sister-in-law were in the room when she agreed to it. And now she says she was coerced.”In a later episode, Ms. Loud told her husband that she wanted a divorce. “By the time she asked Dad for a divorce, she didn’t care if the entire city of Santa Barbara was watching or the whole world,” her daughter, Delilah, said in an interview for this obituary in 2014. “She just wanted Dad out.”Ms. Loud in 2013. By the time she was in her 80s, public perception had recast her from a self-promoter into a wise matriarch of a genre, reality TV, that had gone astray.Credit…Robert Caplin for The New York TimesPatricia Claire Russell was born Oct. 4, 1926, in Eugene, Ore., the daughter of an engineer. Her family was close with another family that had a little boy named Bill Loud. They met when she was about 6. Years later, when she was studying history as an undergraduate at Stanford, Mr. Loud would visit her from the University of Oregon.“He would drive down and pick her up and then go to Tijuana to see bull fights,” Delilah Loud said. “They had quite a courtship.”Ms. Loud graduated from Stanford in 1948. The Louds eloped to Mexico in March 1950. By the time the cameras showed up, in 1971, Mr. Loud had built a successful business making parts for mining equipment, and the family was living an affluent life. They had a house with a pool and a Jaguar in the driveway. They took long vacations to Europe.Ms. Loud was widely read, and she talked with her children about art, music and books. Life was bigger than Santa Barbara, she told them.“They were adventurous types,” Delilah Loud said, recalling the family conversation about whether to participate in “An American Family.” “They wanted us to experience the world and they thought, ‘Well, what the heck, it’ll be a new experience.’’’Bill Loud, with whom Ms. Loud reunited in 2001 at the request of Lance, died in 2018 at 97.Ms. Loud’s is survived by Delilah and another daughter, Michele, as well as two sons, Kevin and Grant, according to the family’s Facebook post.Ms. Loud moved to New York with her daughters in 1974 and lived in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for more than a decade while working as a literary agent and doing other work.She lived in Bath, England, in the early 1990s before moving back to California to live with Lance. In 2001, Lance, who had led the rock band the Mumps and was a freelance writer, asked the original camera and sound equipment operators of “An American Family” to document his final days. He did not tell his mother that the cameras would show up.“I don’t know why Lance did that, but he wanted to do it,” she told The Times.In 2003, public television aired “Lance Loud! A Death in an American Family.”Alex Marshall and Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Surging Virus Prompts Call to Halt In-Person TV and Film Production

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySurging Virus Prompts Call to Halt In-Person TV and Film ProductionSAG-AFTRA, the union representing 160,000 people who work in the industry, seeks a “temporary hold” in Los Angeles.A film crew in Los Angeles on Nov. 6. Credit…Etienne Laurent/EPA, via ShutterstockJan. 4, 2021Seven people working on “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” which was being shot at an NBC Universal stage in Studio City, Calif., tested positive for the coronavirus this fall. So did nine people working on the Netflix series “Colin in Black & White” in Gardena. And the Los Angeles County Public Health Department reported that a dozen people working on the sitcom “Young Sheldon” in Burbank got the virus, too.The entertainment industry is so vital to Los Angeles that film and television production were both allowed to continue even after outdoor dining was banned. But now, with the coronavirus surging across California and overwhelming hospitals, unions and industry groups are calling for in-person production to be suspended.“Southern California hospitals are facing a crisis the likes of which we have never seen before,” Gabrielle Carteris, the president of SAG-AFTRA, the union representing 160,000 people who work in film, television and radio, said in a statement. “Patients are dying in ambulances waiting for treatment because hospital emergency rooms are overwhelmed. This is not a safe environment for in-person production right now.”The union was joined in its call for a “temporary hold on in-person production in Southern California” by groups representing producers and advertisers.The recommendation, which was announced on Sunday, came as officials said that major studios in the area had already extended a standard holiday-related pause in production until at least mid-January in the hope that the number of new cases would subside by then, freeing up space in hospitals and intensive care units.By Monday night, “The Late Late Show” announced in a tweet that it had moved its production back into James Corden’s garage until it was “safe to return to our studio.” And a spokeswoman for “Jimmy Kimmel Live” confirmed a Deadline report that the Los Angeles-based late show would film remotely for the next two weeks. Officials from the groups calling for a pause — which also included a committee representing commercial advertisers and advertising agencies — said that they were encouraging their members to stay at home and not accept any on-set employment for several weeks. They noted that even workers who do not contract the virus put themselves at risk of becoming injured by stunts, falls or other mishaps, and that they could find it difficult to get treatment at hospitals.“It is too hard to say right now when the situation may improve,” said David White, national executive director of SAG-AFTRA.The Producers Guild of America said in its own statement that it was encouraging everyone “to delay production until the county health officials indicate it’s safe to resume.”Like sports, theater and much of the entertainment industry, film and television production has been forced to endure a turbulent year of stops and starts. The pandemic caused what was essentially a global shutdown in March, followed by a gradual phased reopening over the summer with a laundry list of new safety protocols in place that forced executives to reimagine how to make blockbuster movies safely, or how to finish uncompleted television seasons.The measures they have taken could not entirely stop the spread of the virus, however, and throughout the summer and fall, stars including Robert Pattinson and Dwayne Johnson tested positive. Mr. Pattinson’s positive test forced filming of “The Batman” at studios outside London to shut down. And last month, an audio recording of Tom Cruise emerged in which the actor could be heard scolding crew members on the set of “Mission: Impossible 7” for not following Covid-19 protocols.The restart, uneven and incomplete, has also forced the industry to slash budgets and lay off employees. FilmLA, the official film office for the city and county of Los Angeles, reported that filming in the area fell by more than 54 percent from July to September compared with the same period the previous year. (In New York City, only 35 of the nearly 80 series that were filming or planning to film were back at work by early November.)Then came the wave of infections that have staggered California since Thanksgiving. More than 35,000 new cases were reported in the state on Sunday, and the weekly average of new cases per day in Los Angeles County exceeded 16,000 last week — roughly 12 times higher than it was averaging on Nov. 1.The crisis has stretched the health care system so thin that at one Los Angeles hospital, incoming patients were recently being instructed to wait in an outdoor tent because the lobby was being used to treat patients, and gurneys filled the gift shop.The lack of hospital capacity prompted public health officials in Los Angeles to reach out to some members of the production industry on Dec. 24 to ask them to “strongly consider pausing work for a few weeks during this catastrophic surge in Covid cases,” FilmLA said. (An official at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said only that it had “recommended a voluntary pause on production activities” during a phone call with industry officials, but did not specify a time frame.)A database maintained by the county health department lists locations tied to CBS, NBC, Netflix and Warner Bros. as among the more than 500 workplaces, restaurants and stores that have reported three or more positive coronavirus cases. Officials for the studios declined to comment on the record.With the standard holiday break now expanded until mid-January because of the surge in cases and concerns about hospital capacity in Los Angeles, several shows that had been slated to resume production this week will not return until next week at the earliest, officials said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More