Content Type: Personal Profile

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares32 Views

    Zendaya, Luca Guadagnino, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist on ‘Challengers’

    by

    Can trash talk be a love language?It is in the world of Luca Guadagnino’s new film “Challengers,” which pits two best-friend tennis players, Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist), against each other in a bid to win the heart of the superstar Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). What begins as innocent teasing becomes more charged once an injury cuts short Tashi’s career: Forced to pivot to coaching, she weds Art and goads him to demolish her former lover Patrick on the court, though both men continue to nurse their own hidden agendas.“I find them all really likable and charming — and terrible also,” Zendaya said with a grin. The complicated adult stakes of “Challengers” offer a new pursuit for this 27-year-old actress, who shot to fame as a teenager on the Disney Channel and is now best known for her Emmy-winning role on HBO’s “Euphoria” and the big-budget movie franchises “Spider-Man” and “Dune.” Though she is aware that “Challengers” will test her box-office draw as a solo star, she didn’t overthink her decision to make the movie, which comes out in theaters on Friday.“I wanted to do it because it’s brilliant,” she said. “It’s not like I sat in my room and had this master board: ‘OK, this is how I’m going to make my big transition for my first lead theatrical role.’”Last week at a Beverly Hills hotel, I met Zendaya, her co-stars O’Connor (“The Crown”) and Faist (“West Side Story”), and Guadagnino for an hour of freewheeling conversation about “Challengers” and the pressure of forging a life and career in the public eye. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.“The triangle is not just two people after one,” Luca Guadagnino, the director of “Challengers,” said, “but the corners touch together all the time.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesThis movie poses a lot of questions about ambition and drive. Zendaya, has your relationship to your own ambition changed over 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

    More stories

    • 138 Shares42 Views

      in Music

      Kathleen Hanna Reveals the Story of Her Life in ‘Rebel Girl’

      by

      The first draft of Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, “Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk,” was 600 pages long. As she worked to cut the manuscript, Hanna found herself excising page after page of male violence. “It’s pretty sad, if you read the book, because there’s still a lot in there,” she told me. “I had a joke with my editor about it.” Like, she’d already removed a rape and a kidnapping and a guy who threw a wine glass at her head! “What more do you want from me?”Hanna is super funny. When she takes the stage as the frontwoman of Bikini Kill, Le Tigre or the Julie Ruin, she plays a kind of punk trickster, shifting her voice to resemble a bratty Valley Girl, a demonic cheerleader, an obnoxious male fan. She is always subverting femininity and disarming bad guys with her spiky and irreverent lyrics. But when it came time to write her life story, she realized that she could not playfully twist away from her past.“I keep trying to make my rapes funny, but I have to stop doing that because they aren’t,” she writes in the book, which comes out on May 14.Kathleen Hanna at home with her dog, Terry. While writing her memoir, she was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.OK McCausland for The New York Times“Rebel Girl” documents Hanna’s long career as an underground artist and musician, and its striking intersections with the mainstream. In the 1990s, she helped instigate the riot grrrl movement, calling girls to the front of punk venues and setting off a D.I.Y. feminist ethos that was later assimilated into a girl-power marketing trend. She was a friend of Kurt Cobain’s who scrawled the phrase “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” on his bedroom wall, inspiring the anthem that exploded into a global phenomenon.Nineties nostalgia applies an appealingly gritty filter to that era’s underground rock scene, but it could be punishing for those who stood in opposition to its white male standard. Hanna has sometimes worried that if she put it all out there, she would be disbelieved. “I’ve been told by men: Oh, you’re just the kind of woman these things happen to, as if I have some sort of smell I’m emanating,” she said. “But I knew that other women would understand.”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

    • 75 Shares48 Views

      in Music

      Kamasi Washington Wants to Remain Unstoppable

      by

      Before Kamasi Washington unveiled his breakthrough opus, he admits, he second-guessed it.“The Epic” (2015) was a major moment, not just for the Los Angeles saxophonist and composer, but for jazz at large. Arriving on the heels of Kendrick Lamar’s seismic “To Pimp a Butterfly” — an album featuring contributions from Washington and his tight-knit hometown coterie — it contained nearly three hours’ worth of surging, spiritually charged music, spearheaded by Washington’s roaring tenor sax. Despite its daunting scope and operatic grandeur, it resonated broadly, serving as a gateway to jazz and the thriving scene orbiting Washington’s label at the time, Brainfeeder.But in the long interval between its recording — most of which took place in 2011 — and its release, Washington toyed with the idea of trimming it down to make it more palatable. “I had so much time, sitting on it for a good little minute, so I made edited versions,” he said with a sheepish laugh during a recent video interview from his Inglewood, Calif. home, sporting a black-and-gold striped knit hat and a flowing, floral-embroidered shirt. But, inspired in part by the boldness of “To Pimp a Butterfly,” and the way it further challenged Lamar’s audience following the rapper’s 2012 multiplatinum hit “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City,” he decided to honor his original vision, keeping “The Epic” epic.“I’m just going to let it be what it is,” he recalled thinking at the time. “And I’m cool with whatever that does.”Washington onstage in 2022. The saxophonist and his close collaborators have helped bring a thrilling West Coast jazz scene into the spotlight.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIn the years since “The Epic,” that principle has continued to serve Washington well. His new album out May 3, “Fearless Movement,” includes high-profile guest spots from George Clinton, who sings on the woozy, grinding “Get Lit,” and André 3000, who contributes blissed-out flute textures to the relaxed jazz-funk excursion “Dream State.”Overall, it finds Washington, 43, adhering to his longstanding vision, presenting sprawling, eclectic tracks — 12 in just shy of 90 minutes — that refute any notion of jazz as a cloistered musical zone and showcase the chemistry of his core musical crew, a decades-strong friend group that started taking shape in early childhood.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

    • 150 Shares62 Views

      in Music

      Taylor Swift Has Given Fans a Lot. Is It Finally Too Much?

      by

      Swift has been inescapable over the last year. With the release of “The Tortured Poets Department,” her latest (very long) album, some seem to finally be feeling fatigued.Four new studio albums. Four rerecorded albums, too. A $1 billion oxygen-sucking world tour with a concert movie to match. And, of course, one very high-profile relationship that spilled over into the Super Bowl.For some, the constant deluge that has peaked in the past year is starting to add up to a new (and previously unthinkable) feeling: Taylor Swift fatigue.And it is a feeling that has only solidified online in the days following the release of “The Tortured Poets Department,” which morphed from a 16-song album into a 31-song, two-hour epic just hours after its release.Many critics (including The New York Times’s own) have suggested that the album was overstuffed — simply not her best. And critiques of the music have now opened a sliver of space for a wider round of complaint unlike any Swift has faced over her prolific and world-conquering recent run.“It’s almost like if you produce too much… too fast… in a brazen attempt to completely saturate and dominate a market rather than having something important or even halfway interesting to say… the art suffers!” Chris Murphy, a staff writer at Vanity Fair, posted on X.Which is not to say nobody listened to the album; far from it. Spotify said “Poets,” which was released on Friday, became the most-streamed album in a single day with more than 300 million streams.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

    • 138 Shares66 Views

      in Music

      Mdou Moctar’s Guitar Is a Screaming Siren Against Africa’s Colonial Legacy

      by

      “Funeral for Justice,” the musician from Niger’s album due next month, amps up the urgency in his work: “I want you to know how serious this is.”“Funeral for Justice,” the new album by the African musician Mdou Moctar, opens with a blast of angry, snarling guitar and an accusation raised like a fist against the rulers of his native Niger and beyond.“African leaders, hear my burning question,” Moctar sings, as his band churns with a ragged intensity reminiscent of vintage White Stripes. “Why does your ear only heed France and America?”Over about a decade of touring in the West, Moctar, 40, has carved out a niche as a modern African guitar hero and one of the very few voices in the pop world calling attention to the struggles of the Tuareg people, a historically nomadic ethnic group in the Sahara region. On the guitar, he is a spellbinding psychedelic soloist, with a style that draws as much from Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen as from traditional Tuareg wedding dances, and he has earned an awed respect from some of rock’s most famous axe-wielders.“Us guitar players in the West, we all have the same base vocabulary, the same handful of stereotypical licks,” Kirk Hammett of Metallica said in an interview. “But Mdou’s music, it’s almost free of that stuff. And because of that, it sounds more spontaneous. It sounds fresh. It’s amazing.”Moctar’s band plays hypnotic grooves built on the harmonic foundations that West African music shares with the blues, lit up by his own pyrotechnic solos.Johnny Louis/Getty Images)Moctar’s last album, “Afrique Victime,” was on many music critics’ year-end lists in 2021, with Jon Pareles of The New York Times saying it “expands the sonic possibilities of Tuareg rock.” But “Funeral for Justice,” due May 3, amps up the urgency in his work. It is a cri de coeur of screaming guitars and lyrics decrying the legacy of colonialism in Niger and throughout Africa, where Western powers retain a strong but not always welcome influence, and political and economic instability are endemic hazards.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

    • 150 Shares71 Views

      in Music

      A Man Hailed as Cindy Birdsong’s Rescuer Is Accused of Exploiting Her

      by

      The son of the former Supreme says in court papers that the man who sought to help his mother after she became incapacitated also took advantage of her financially.Just last year, Brad Herman, a longtime behind-the-scenes aide to celebrities, drew praise from the family of Cindy Birdsong, an ailing former member of the Supremes. He was credited with helping to rescue her from what they described as a friend’s undue influence over her care and finances.But now, Mr. Herman has been named in a petition brought by Ms. Birdsong’s son, who is accusing him in court papers of financial elder abuse and misappropriation of her money.The son, Charles Hewlett, who has been appointed the conservator of his mother’s affairs, is seeking damages and the return of what his petition describes as missing funds.The allegations follow months of court proceedings over who should control a conservatorship overseeing the finances and medical decisions of Ms. Birdsong, 84, who was once part of a Motown group that became music royalty.Today, Ms. Birdsong is not able to communicate and is on a feeding tube after a series of strokes. She has lived at nursing facilities and hospitals since 2021 and a judge ultimately put Mr. Hewlett in charge of her affairs late last year.“Mr. Herman used his position of trust and confidence to take advantage of Ms. Birdsong’s dependency and exercised care, custody and control over Ms. Birdsong’s property,” argues the petition filed in Los Angeles Superior Court this month by Susan Geffen, a lawyer for Mr. Hewlett.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

    • 163 Shares41 Views

      in Music

      Judith Hill Sang With Pop Royalty. Now She Is Composing Her Own Story.

      by

      The singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist was close to Michael Jackson and Prince. After their deaths, her world crumbled and she had to rebuild on her own.The first time the musician Judith Hill performed her anguished requiem “Black Widow” for an audience, she wept, right onstage.The song’s title is an epithet that has been directed at her for years by tabloids and trolls because as a vocalist and artist, she had been close with two of pop’s biggest stars shortly before their deaths. She was Michael Jackson’s duet partner and performed at his televised memorial in 2009. And for two years before Prince’s fatal overdose in April 2016, she was his protégée, collaborator and more. They shared what she has called “an intense relationship”; he told her he loved her.Prince’s sudden, accidental death derailed her promising career — which he had been guiding — and she spiraled into deep grief, depression and self-doubt as online cruelty rained down. It took years before she was able to face what happened, personally or musically.“It was a deep wound,” she said onstage at a recent showcase at Mercury Lounge in Lower Manhattan, after the soulful, fierce “Black Widow.” Then she brushed her tears away — “enough of that” — and soon started another number, “Dame De La Lumière,” a detailed tribute to her mother and grandmother, with a rippling, urgent chorus that has become her anthem: “Bad times make strong women.”Both songs are on “Letters From a Black Widow,” her new record, due Friday. It is a concept album that reckons forcefully with her past — not just the boldfaced part, but also the myriad woes and distortions that conspired to make her feel fearful and less-than. The dozen tracks that finally tumbled out chart her path of self-reflection and forgiveness, with achingly personal lyrics paired with muscular funk, soul and blues, and backed by her shredding, soaring guitar. It’s a new reach for an artist known mostly for her acrobatic and emotional vocals; she wanted her determined message to resonate, too.“I felt unmuted,” she said, “like I was free to say something now, because I felt like I had really put a muzzle on myself for so long, and was just afraid. And it was very, very liberating to do 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

    • 138 Shares79 Views

      in Theater

      Peter Morgan Turns His Pen From ‘The Crown’ to the Kremlin

      by

      His new play “Patriots,” now on Broadway, follows Putin’s rise to power and the Russian oligarchs who mistakenly thought he’d be their puppet.Going from Princess Diana, a lovely icon who generated waves of sympathy, to Vladimir Putin, an icy villain who generates waves of disdain, might be difficult for some writers.Not Peter Morgan.After pulling back the curtain on the British royal family for six seasons of “The Crown,” Morgan was keen to move on. He had an idea for a play about the oligarchs who, in the 1990s, helped propel an obscure Putin to power and then had to watch as their Frankenstein changed the course of Russian history in a disastrous way.The resulting drama, “Patriots,” which opens on Broadway on April 22, offered Morgan a different way to approach recent history, and a new challenge: switching from the royals, who are household names but not ultimately very powerful, to oligarchs, who are super powerful but not generally household names.Morgan enjoys writing about the vilified, giving them a fighting chance. In “Patriots,” he creates a jigsaw of four Russian men, their fates intertwining in the post-Soviet era, who represent a Byzantine spectrum of moral values.“It’s just a delicious combination of characters,” Morgan, 60, told me, in an interview at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in Times Square. “There’s a sort of violence, whereas in ‘The Crown,’ there’s this politeness and there’s repression, and it’s very female. There’s something very male, very violent about this play. It felt like a natural thing to do, having spent so much time in the one world to go into another world just to relax a little.”Will Keen, left, as Vladimir Putin and Michael Stuhlbarg as Boris Berezovsky in “Patriots,” at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe 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

    • 163 Shares50 Views

      in Theater

      Alfred Molina on the Museum He Never Misses When He’s in New York

      by

      “Every time I’m in the city, I make a visit,” said the actor, who is performing on Broadway in “Uncle Vanya.”After more than 30 years in Los Angeles, Alfred Molina is enjoying his newly minted status as an Upper West Sider.“My wife and I have bought an apartment here, and we’re slowly transitioning to New York,” he said last month at Lincoln Center Theater before a rehearsal for the Chekhov classic “Uncle Vanya,” which opens on Broadway on Wednesday.Molina, 70, has been nominated for three Tony Awards, for “Art,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and, most recently, “Red,” in which he starred as the painter Mark Rothko in 2010. “Vanya,” in which he plays the pompous professor Alexander Serebryakov, is his return to a New York stage after nearly 15 years.The play is “a chance to work with some fantastic people,” he said of the cast, which includes Steve Carell as Vanya, Jayne Houdyshell as Vanya’s mother, and William Jackson Harper as the local doctor Astrov. It is directed by Lila Neugebauer, and after Molina saw two other plays she worked on this year, “Appropriate” and “The Ally,” he said, “they both just knocked me out, so it was a no-brainer.”Molina, who is originally from London, shared his favorite walk in New York, why he loves the subway, and a Jonathan Groff-inspired song lyric that he came up with seemingly on the spot. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Jazz in the MorningI like to start my day with something bright and fast, like Art Pepper or Dexter Gordon. I’ve listened to jazz since I was a teenager — I wasn’t good at sport or popular with the girls, but I loved music, particularly Black American music. I used to read the music papers — the weekly Melody Maker, the New Musical Express — and whenever a review of a band or album used the word “jazz,” I would try to listen to it.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