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    The Wizard of Vinyl Is in Kansas

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    Hydraulic machines whooshed in a sprawling Kansas factory as melted vinyl squeezed through molded stampers like pancake batter, turning out fresh new albums about once a minute. Workers inspected the grooves for imperfections, fed album jackets into a shrink-wrapper and stacked the finished products on tall dollies for shipping.Acoustic Sounds occupies a hodgepodge of squat industrial buildings in Salina, a city of about 50,000 near the geographic center of the 48 contiguous states, where grain elevators and a gigantic frozen pizza plant jut out from the flat plains landscape. Over the last 15 years, this unassuming complex has become a leading manufacturer of the music industry’s most surprising hot format: vinyl LPs.Pacing the floor was Chad Kassem, the company’s founder, who was bit by the audiophile bug as a 22-year-old who’d run into trouble with the law and now, four decades later, is a top player in the booming business of vinyl. Speaking in a slow drawl, but moving quickly on the ground, Kassem, 62, explained his obsession with making the best-sounding records possible — a never-ending pursuit that involves hunting down decades-old master tapes and making minute adjustments to tweak the temperature of an embryonic wad of polyvinyl chloride by a degree or two.Chad Kassem in his studio at Acoustic Sounds, where he keeps two turntables by his desk to check records.David Robert Elliott for The New York TimesThe control room of a recording studio operated by Acoustic Sounds at a former church in downtown Salina that Kassem bought in 1996.David Robert Elliott for The New York Times“What I’m all about,” he said, “is saving the world from bad sound.”Introduced in 1948, vinyl LPs seemed destined for extinction by the early 2000s, if not before, as the music industry went digital. But over the last decade or so, the format has been reborn, embraced by fans as a physical totem in an age of digital ephemera, and by increasing ranks of analog loyalists who swear by its sound. Today, the symbol of the vinyl craze may be a rainbow of collectible LPs by pop stars like Taylor Swift or Billie Eilish, which young fans snap up by the millions (though many may never be played). But on a chilly recent afternoon, Acoustic Sounds’ assembly lines were humming with albums by the likes of John Coltrane, Steely Dan and Lightnin’ Hopkins, in deluxe packages that go for up to $150 apiece.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hamilton Leithauser, an Indie-Rock Hero in a Very Fancy Room

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      Even by Manhattan real estate standards, Café Carlyle is an intimate venue. The storied Upper East Side cabaret is just 988 square feet and seats 90 patrons, which means a performer can hear an audience member’s cutlery, not to mention their whispers.When Hamilton Leithauser first played there in 2018, that cozy ambience posed an unexpected challenge: He had to be not just a performer, but also an entertainer. That meant talking to the audience, something he hadn’t been inclined to do when onstage as the frontman of the indie-rock doyens the Walkmen, who relied on reverberating guitars and clever wordplay to catapult to the forefront of the early 2000s New York music scene.“People are right in front of you, and you want to talk to them between songs,” he said in a recent video interview. “I really wanted to let people in on what I was actually singing about, because I spend so much time on my words.” He’s been a fixture ever since.Leithauser returns to the Carlyle this month for the seventh go-round of what’s become an annual residency (he missed a year during the Covid-19 pandemic), playing a slate of 15 shows from March 6-29. This time, he has a new album, “This Side of the Island,” to trot out too. Compared to his last few solo releases, “This Side of the Island” sounds a bit more frenetic and urgent, which he is aware will bring an interesting dimension to the snug confines of the Carlyle, which was bought by Rosewood Hotels & Resorts in 2001 for $130 million and regularly hosts artists like Isaac Mizrahi and John Pizzarelli.“That room doesn’t see that much of that kind of music,” he said of his new songs. “I’ve got to do my own thing. I’m not ready to grow up fully, you know?”For the record, Leithauser, 46, is married to Anna Stumpf, an audio executive with whom he occasionally performs, and is the father to two daughters. Still, the sentiment stands: Leithauser has built a successful career largely by following his own instincts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      The ‘Parasite’ Director Brings Class Warfare To Outer Space

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      Bong Joon Ho sent a text message a bit past noon, naming a subway station in Seoul and asking me to meet him there at 7 p.m. In his imperfect English, he signed off with a cryptic tease: “I’ll show you some ordinary but strange area. See you in front of GATE No. 4.”It was the summer of 2023, and I’d gone to South Korea to watch Bong work on his seventh feature film, “Mickey 17,” a sci-fi action-adventure featuring Robert Pattinson, Mark Ruffalo, Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie and Toni Collette. Bong — or Director Bong, as he’s known among Koreans and collaborators — is his country’s highest-profile filmmaker, at home and abroad. His last movie, “Parasite” (2019), won four Academy Awards, including best picture and best director.Bong is drawn to confrontational, tone-scrambling material. “Irony and paradox,” he told me at one point, are “the driving force for me when I make films.” His style is to deploy genre conventions while subverting them in audacious and ingenious ways. As he once put it to a Korean interviewer, “Whatever genre I choose, I intend to destroy it.”His movies are also fun, which explains why Bong has enjoyed a long run not only of critical acclaim but also commercial success. His 2006 monster-movie deconstruction, “The Host,” broke all Korean box-office records. Among its champions is no less of a genre-subverter than Quentin Tarantino, who likened Bong to “Spielberg in his prime.” “Parasite,” a home-invasion deconstruction, earned even more, planting him firmly in the pantheon of bankable contemporary auteurs.Originally conceived for the stage, “Parasite” was a tightly focused Korean-language suspense story with an achingly ambiguous ending, no supernatural creatures and, unless you count its operatically grisly climax, zero action sequences. “Mickey 17” is a different beast entirely. Based on a 2022 novel by Edward Ashton, called “Mickey7,” the film is about a desperate loser named Mickey Barnes, played by Pattinson, who signs onto the crew of a spaceship as part of a campaign of intergalactic colonization. He’s tasked with the crushing work of an “Expendable”: His memories are uploaded so that his consciousness can be installed, as often as needed, into endlessly reprintable replicas of his body. These come in handy, because his job includes gulping down lung-liquefying airborne viruses and bathing himself in radiation, among other torturous and fatal work. At its core, Bong said, “it’s a story about working-class people. And I was attracted by the idea that his job is dying.”Social stratification has been the dominant theme in Bong’s films since he was a student. Whether he is working in more-realist registers or more-fantastical ones, he situates his heroes within superstructures of class and power that determine, and frequently deform, their lives. “Quite many of my characters are confused,” he said. “They’re in the middle of a situation and don’t know what’s going on. It’s sad and comic at the same time.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      The Fairy Tale Night of Sean Baker, Director of Dreams Gone Awry

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      Baker’s four Oscars for “Anora” are validation of his sensitive portrayals of people on the margins who always seem to come up short.Sean Baker came equipped with extra speeches, and that was wise: On the night of the Oscars, he wound up onstage four times to receive four statues.That’s not just unusual. It’s almost unheard-of.Baker’s film “Anora,” about a sex worker in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn who marries the son of a Russian oligarch and then watches it all go sideways, earned five Oscars overall on Sunday. One went to its ingénue star, Mikey Madison, and four to Baker: best director, best original screenplay, best editing and best picture.By taking home four Oscars on a single night, Baker joins just one other luminary: none other than Walt Disney, who pulled off the same trick in 1954. That year, Disney won best documentary feature (“The Living Desert”), best documentary short subject (“The Alaskan Eskimo”), best cartoon short subject (“Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom”) and best two-reel short subject (“Bear Country”).But even Disney didn’t pull off Baker’s feat: earning four Oscars on one night for the same movie. Doing so requires wearing a lot of hats, and Baker, who started his career in ultra-low-budget independent films, has a deep hatrack.Movies are a collaborative art, and even the most hands-on filmmakers work with a team of artists and craftspeople. But writing, directing, editing and producing a film leaves a distinctive personal mark. Disney, who was heavily involved with his studio’s projects, certainly did so. Similarly, “Anora” audiences who know Baker’s work probably spotted his fingerprints from the moment the film starts. (And not just because Baker emulates John Carpenter, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson by sticking with one typeface for the titles of all his films — Aguafina Script Pro, if you were wondering.)One of Baker’s hallmarks, the one people most often associate with him, is a focus on people who live on the margins of society, especially but not exclusively sex workers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      My Red Carpet Quest: A Two-Year Search for Steve

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      Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Steve Olive was my white whale.I had been trying for two years to write a profile of Mr. Olive, the co-founder of Event Carpet Pros, the California-based company responsible for custom-making the colorful, though not always red, carpets for thousands of movie premieres, the Golden Globes, the Grammy Awards, the Super Bowl and, since 1997, the Academy Awards.I learned about Mr. Olive in 2023, while reporting an article about why the organizers of the Oscars were rolling out a champagne-colored carpet that year. My editor, Katie Van Syckle, and I had found the Event Carpet Pros website and we took turns calling the listed number in an effort to reach someone. Finally, Katie connected with Mr. Olive, and briefly interviewed him.But this mysterious, matter-of-fact, low-key man at the heart of the glitz and glamour of awards season stuck in my mind. I wanted to know more about him. How does one become a rug guy? What had he wanted to be when he grew up? Had he ever attended an award show himself?Last year, when the Oscars returned to a classic red carpet, Katie and I again agreed that I should pursue a story on Mr. Olive, but he was hesitant. But this year, with the encouragement of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he agreed. It was three weeks before the ceremony.Mission: Steve, as I termed it, had officially begun.I sent a barrage of frantic texts and placed several calls to Brooke Blumberg, a publicist for the academy, trying to nail down when the carpet, which was manufactured at a mill in Dalton, Ga., would arrive at the company’s warehouse in La Mirada, Calif., a city in Los Angeles County.My goal was to be there when the approximately 30 rolls, each weighing 630 pounds, were unloaded in the Event Carpet Pros parking lot, from a truck that had been driven about 35 hours, from Dalton. The scene, I imagined, would be akin to the arrival of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree in New York City.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Geoffrey Rush Lives for the Roar of the Crowd

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      “If you sit at home, you are not sharing your own private experience of what the general pulse of the world is,” said the actor, who stars in the horror film “The Rule of Jenny Pen.”Geoffrey Rush has rarely met a physical task he didn’t want to attempt, be it sword fighting for “Pirates of the Caribbean” or playing the piano for his Oscar-winning role in “Shine.”The new horror movie “The Rule of Jenny Pen,” starring Rush as a supercilious former judge living in a nursing home, required yet another unfamiliar skill set: He had to use a motorized wheelchair.“I got very good at getting up to speed, but in narrow corridors, it was not the same story,” Rush, 73, said of the feature directed by James Ashcroft and also starring John Lithgow as a psychopathic fellow resident. A lot of the final day’s goof reel “was punctuated by me running into staircases or James leaping over furniture because I went, ‘It’s just not responding.’”In a video call from his native Australia, Rush discussed his cultural essentials, many of them — to his surprise — from his childhood and early professional life. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The TreniersThey were the first band to use the words “rock” and “roll” in lyrics, way back in the late ’40s and early ’50s, when they were a blues band hovering between swing and boogie-woogie. Their energy was definitely sexy and audacious. They beat Bill Haley by about a half decade. My mum was a great jiver during my childhood, and she loved Little Richard. She used to dive onto the dance floor.Silent Film ClownsBob Monkhouse, who was an English comedian, had a show that I used to watch every Saturday night called “Mad Movies.” I got introduced to silent film and not necessarily the big guns. He looked at a lot of the minor characters, and I became obsessed by that.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      How Patina Miller, of Starz’s ‘Power’ Series, Spends Her Sundays

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      Patina Miller may play a fearless New York City drug queenpin inspired by 50 Cent’s mother on television, but for a long time, something scared her: having a child of her own.“I thought maybe I wouldn’t be good at it,” said Ms. Miller, 40, who plays the indomitable Raquel Thomas on the crime drama “Power Book III: Raising Kanan.” (The fourth season premieres Friday on Starz.)“I was always afraid of holding other people’s babies because I thought I’d break them,” she said.But now that she is a mother — to a 7-year-old daughter, Emerson Harper Mars, with her husband, the venture capitalist David Mars — she couldn’t imagine her life any other way.“Sundays are about being comfy, being with family,” said Ms. Miller, whose 15-year-old niece, Alanna Miller, also lives with her. She added, “It’s nice to sit and talk to each other without being on our phones.”Ms. Miller was born in Pageland, S.C., and raised by a single mother who encouraged her love for gospel music. She has lived in New York since 2007, when she moved from South Carolina after college and subsequently landed her breakout role as the nightclub singer Deloris Van Cartier in the Broadway adaptation of “Sister Act.” She won a Tony Award in 2013 for her performance as a circus artist in the musical “Pippin.”She has called the Upper West Side home for the past three years. Her family lives in a brownstone between Central Park and Riverside Park with their English bulldog, Maddie.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      “The Royal Tenenbaums” Introduced Gene Hackman to a New Generation

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      His performance in Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums” introduced Hackman to a new generation, and his presence helped define the film.When the director Wes Anderson and the actors Anjelica Huston, Bill Murray and Gwyneth Paltrow took the stage in 2011 for a panel celebrating the 10th anniversary of Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums,” there was no need for small talk before addressing the elephant in the room.“So, no Gene Hackman?” began the director Noah Baumbach, the panel’s co-moderator, introducing an apparently genuine nervousness into the discussion.Hackman, who was found dead on Wednesday afternoon with his wife at their home in Santa Fe, N.M., at the age of 95, loomed over “The Royal Tenenbaums” in every possible sense.Within the film, of course, he is the paterfamilias — he is Royal Tenenbaum, “the displaced patriarch,” as Hackman put it in an on-set interview — of the remarkable, scattered family at the center of Anderson’s third film, the one that took him from art houses to the mainstream.That 2011 panel dived into Hackman’s presence, particularly an off-camera gruffness, that distinguished him from the whimsy typical of Anderson’s work. Here was the avatar of 1970s grit and paranoia — who had won an Oscar playing the bad-boy narcotics detective Popeye Doyle in “The French Connection” — dropped into a very different type of cinematic vision, from a very different generation.The tone throughout the panel, particularly from Anderson, was respectful and appreciative. But it was clear that Hackman stood out on set. At the time of filming “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Hackman was already considering a retirement that just a few years later he announced and stuck to, Anderson said. None of the panelists had been in touch with Hackman during the intervening years, they said. And they all remembered him being terse with Anderson.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      For Gene Hackman, a Jarring End to a Quiet, Art-Filled Life in Santa Fe

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      Mr. Hackman, who was found dead with his wife and one of their dogs, had written novels and painted since leaving Hollywood behind for retirement in New Mexico.Years after Gene Hackman retired from acting, he was at dinner with a friend in New Mexico who wanted to know how actors were able to cry on cue.“He put his head down at the table for about 30 seconds and raised his head up and there are tears coming down,” the friend, Doug Lanham, recalled. “He looked at me and goes, ‘How do you like that?’”After a long career in movies that won him two Oscars and the admiration of generations of film lovers, Mr. Hackman left Hollywood behind for Santa Fe, where he spent his final decades enjoying its striking scenery, trying his hand at painting and writing novels while living what appeared to be a quiet but full life with his wife, Betsy Arakawa.He played an active role in the city’s civic and social life during his early years there before slowing down and growing a bit more reclusive as he entered his late 80s and then his 90s, friends said. Some had been expecting to get word of his death from Ms. Arakawa one of these days.So it was shocking for them to learn this week that Mr. Hackman, 95, had been found dead in the mud room of his home in Santa Fe and that Ms. Arakawa, 65, had been found dead in a bathroom near an open prescription bottle and scattered pills. One of the couple’s dogs, a German shepherd, was found dead in a nearby closet.The caller described seeing a body on the floor and urged emergency services to quickly send help.Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More