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      Rajan Mishra, Classical Indian Vocalist, Dies at 69

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      Part of a famous duet with his brother, he brought traditional ragas to generations of young musicians. He died of Covid 19-related complications.This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.NEW DELHI — On a floating stage draped with garlands of marigold and rose petals, the brothers Rajan and Sajan Mishra, both wearing white kurtas and pajamas, sang verses of a meditative, melodious ancient raga as the Ganges River lapped around them.Their performance, for a short documentary film about their musical family, was seamless after decades of singing together, each brother picking up where the other left off with perfect intuition.“In Benares, the tradition was not just to listen to music but to consume it,” Rajan Mishra said in the film, using an alternative name for their hometown, Varanasi.Despite settling in New Delhi in a joint household of 14 relatives, the Mishra brothers always longed to return to Varanasi, and, in a manner of speaking, they will when India’s catastrophic second wave of the coronavirus recedes: Sajan Mishra, 64, plans to take his brother’s ashes back to the Ganges there and, as is Hindu custom, let the river consume them.Rajan Mishra died on April 25 at St. Stephen’s Hospital in New Delhi. He was 69. The cause was complications of Covid-19, his daughter-in-law, Sonia Mishra, said. She said the hospital’s lack of ventilators had led to his death. No one immediately answered calls to the hospital on Wednesday seeking comment.In recent weeks, amid the surge in Covid-19 cases, health care in much of India has all but collapsed, with hospitals in New Delhi, the capital, out of beds, medical equipment and even oxygen. Officials blame an even more infectious variant of the virus.“He was a national treasure,” Sonia Mishra said. “If we cannot arrange the basic facilities for such people, a common man will never be able to get those facilities, and we will keep losing lives like this.”Rajan Mishra was born in Varanasi, considered by Hindus to be the spiritual center of the world, on Oct. 28, 1951, a member of his family’s fifth generation of Indian classical musicians. (His grandson is in the seventh.)His father, Hanuman Prasad Mishra, was considered one of India’s greatest players of the sarangi, a bowled, short-necked string instrument that is often featured in Indian classical music. His mother, Gagan Kishori, was a member of Nepal’s royal family and sometimes accompanied her husband and sons as a vocalist and tabla player.Rajan Mishra studied arts and sociology at Benares Hindu University. He and his wife, Bina, a homemaker, had a daughter, Rithu, and two sons, Ritesh and Rajnish. The sons also are musicians. In addition to them, Mr. Mishra is survived by his wife and daughter as well as a sister, Indumati, and three grandchildren.Trained to accompany their father’s sarangi, Rajan and Sajan agreed as children always to sing together.When, in 2007, India’s prestigious Padma Bhushan prize was awarded to Rajan Mishra, he refused to accept it, saying it would have to be given to both him and his younger brother or not at all.The brothers, who achieved global renown, established a school in Uttarakhand State, in the foothills of the Himalayas, where they welcomed students from around the world to immerse themselves in Indian classical music. The more extroverted of the two, Rajan was the school’s public face.The brothers also traveled across India to promote the art among young people.Rupinder Mahindroo, a friend who teaches Indian classical music outside New Delhi, recalled hearing the brothers sing for the first time in 1979 in Lucknow, India. She had traveled to the city as a member of the national women’s cricket team. No sooner had her match finished than, still in her cricket uniform, she took an auto rickshaw to attend their recital.“I was so transported by their divine music that life was never the same after that,” Ms. Mahindroo said.Rajan likened music to an ocean, she said: “The more deep you delve into it, the more beautiful it is, and the closer it brings you to your spiritual being.” More

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      Paul Oscher, Blues Musician in Muddy Waters’s Band, Dies at 74

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      He played harmonic, guitar and piano, often all at the same time. He died of complications of the coronavirus.This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Paul Oscher was 20 when he started playing harmonica for Muddy Waters. It was 1967, and he was a rare sight for the times: a white man playing in a Black blues band of such prominence. He more than held his end up for Mr. Waters, the legendary star. Mr. Oscher later recalled his old boss saying, “I don’t care what color he is as long as he plays the soul I feel.”Rick Estrin, a harmonica player from San Francisco, in a phone interview, recalled seeing Mr. Oscher play behind Mr. Waters in Chicago, baby faced but sounding like he’d been born decades earlier.“He had an emotional intensity to his playing that he could turn up and down like a preacher,” Mr. Estrin said. “An internal rhythmic groove, relaxed and seductive. The blues were like a religion to him.”Mr. Oscher died on April 18 at a hospital in Austin, Texas. He was 74. The cause was complications of Covid-19, Nancy Coplin, his former manager, said.Mr. Oscher had been living in Austin since 2013, playing locally and on tour. His most recent album, “Cool Cat,” was released in 2018.“You know, the one thing about playing the blues is the older you get, the more respect you get,” Mr. Oscher told the filmmaker Jordan Haro, who made a short film about him in 2017. “It’s not like a rock star who’s seen and then he’s gone. I just play low-down blues, and I play it the same way I played it 50 years ago.”Paul Allan Oscher was born on Feb. 26, 1947, in Brooklyn, N.Y., and grew up in the East Flatbush section. His father, Nathan Abraham Oscher, owned a factory that made false teeth; his mother, Mildred Marie (Hansen) Oscher, was a homemaker who later worked in local and state politics. An uncle gave Paul a harmonica when he was 12, but he didn’t learn how to make the most of it until one day, in his after-school job delivering groceries, a customer who just happened to be a blues musician overheard him trying to play “Red River Valley” and proceeded to teach him the ropes.By 15 he was playing in Black clubs in Brooklyn and had become part of a network of musicians in that scene. He was 17 when he was introduced to Mr. Waters one night after a Waters show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem; three years later, when Mr. Waters returned for a gig in New York City and was short of a harmonica player, he invited Mr. Oscher to sit in. At the end of the show, Mr. Waters offered him a job.For a time Mr. Oscher lived in the basement of Mr. Waters’s Chicago house, sharing the space with Otis Spann, the noted Chicago blues pianist and member of Mr. Waters’s band. Mr. Oscher later said that he had learned his blues timing from Mr. Spann.He toured with the band throughout Europe and the United States, often clad like his bandmates in a red brocade Nehru jacket. (Mr. Waters wore a black suit.) When they hit the segregated South, he was typically not allowed to stay in the same hotel as his bandmates, and he remembered how the group fell silent one day on the road as they passed a sign declaring, “You Are Entering Klan County.”Mr. Oscher left the band in the early 1970s to pursue a solo career back home in New York City. Over the years he performed with Eric Clapton, Levon Helm, T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker and many others.In addition to the harmonica, he played the piano and the guitar, often all at the same time — his harmonica in a neck rack, his guitar on his lap and one hand on the keyboard. He also played the accordion and the vibraphone.In the late 1990s, Mr. Oscher was playing at Frank’s Cocktail Lounge in Brooklyn when he met Suzan-Lori Parks, the playwright and author, and she asked him to teach her to play harmonica. They married in 2001 and parted amicably in 2008, later divorcing but remaining friends. Mr. Oscher had no immediate survivors.“Paul was a righteous guy, a real sweetheart and a real blues man,” Ms. Parks said in an interview. “That meant there were a lot of blues. He’d learned how to be an adult by hanging out with blues cats. The older Black men in Muddy’s band helped him become whole.”When she was working on her Pulitzer Prize-winning play Topdog/Underdog, a darkly comic fable of sibling rivalry and Black manhood that uses three-card monte as a narrative spine, Mr. Oscher taught her the mechanics of the card game. He just happened to be a whiz at that street hustler’s old standard. More

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      She’s Marianne Faithfull, Damn It. And She’s (Thankfully) Still Here.

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      The British musician has had several brushes with death in her 74 years. But Covid-19 and its long-haul symptoms didn’t derail her latest project: a spoken-word tribute to the Romantic poets.Several times in her 74 years of life, Marianne Faithfull has boomeranged from the brink of death.First there was the summer of 1969, when she overdosed on Tuinal sleeping pills in the Sydney hotel room she was sharing with her then-boyfriend, Mick Jagger; as she slipped under, she had a long conversation with his recently deceased bandmate, Brian Jones, who had drowned in a swimming pool about a week prior. At the end of their spirited talk, Jones beckoned her to hop off a cliff and join him in the beyond. Faithfull declined, and woke up from a six-day coma.That was before she became addicted to heroin in the early 1970s: “At that point I entered one of the outer levels of hell,” she writes in her 1994 autobiography “Faithfull.” It took more than a decade to finally get clean. Since then she’s survived breast cancer, hepatitis C and an infection resulting from a broken hip. But, as Faithfull told me on the phone from her London home one afternoon in February, her recent bout with Covid-19 and its lingering long-term aftereffects has been the hardest battle she’s fought in her entire life.“You don’t want to get this, darling,” she said. “Really.”She said it, of course, in That Voice, coated with ash but flickering with lively defiance underneath. As it’s matured — cracked and ripened like a well-journeyed face — Faithfull’s voice has come to possess a transfixing magic. It’s a voice that sounds like it has come back from somewhere, and found a way to collapse present and past. She can find the Weimar Berlin decadence in Dylan, or breathe William Blake’s macabre into a Metallica song.Right before she contracted the virus in March 2020, Faithfull was working on an album she’d dreamed of making for more than half a century: “She Walks in Beauty,” due April 30, a spoken-word tribute to the Romantic poets, who had first inflamed her imagination as a teenager. In the mid-1960s, the demands of Faithfull’s burgeoning pop career pulled her out of her beloved Mrs. Simpson’s English literature course, “but I went on reading the books,” Faithfull said. And through the ups and downs of her life, those poems stayed with her like well-worn talismans: “If you’ve ever read ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ ‘The Lady of Shalott’ — you’re not going to forget it, are you?”Faithfull had recorded recitations of seven Romantic poems, from Byron (“She Walks in Beauty”), Shelley (“Ozymandias”) and Keats (“Ode to a Nightingale”). After she was hospitalized with Covid-19 and fell into a coma, her manager sent the recordings to Faithfull’s friend and frequent collaborator Warren Ellis, to see if he would compose music to accompany them. Neither was sure Faithfull would live to hear the finished product.Ellis was told, “‘It’s not looking good,’” he recalled, on a video call from his Paris home. “‘This might be it.’”But — ever the Lady Lazarus — Faithfull pulled through. Only once she began to recover did her son, Nicholas, tell her what they’d written on the chart at the foot of her bed: “Palliative care only.”“They thought I was going to croak!” Faithfull said, likely for not the first time in her life.“But,” she added with a wizened chuckle, “I didn’t.”Faithfull said she wanted to attend Oxford and immerse herself in literature. But she was discovered by the music manager Andrew Loog Oldham instead.John Pratt/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesMARIANNE’S FATHER, Glynn Faithfull — yes, that improbably perfect surname is real — was a British spy in World War II, and the son of a sexologist who invented something called “the Frigidity Machine.” Her mother, just as improbably, was the Austrian Baroness Eva von Sacher-Masoch — the great-niece of the man who wrote the sensationally scandalous novella “Venus in Furs” and from whose name we are blessed with the word masochism. Put all those things together and you get their only child, born a year after the end of the war.Her parents split when she was 6, and at 7, her mother sent her to boarding school at a Reading convent. (“Glynn begged her not to,” she writes in “Faithfull.” “I remember him saying, ‘This will give her a problem with sex for the rest of her life.’”) When she visited her father, who was living and teaching in a commune, she got a glimpse of the polar opposite end of the spectrum. At 18, she married the artist John Dunbar and gave birth to Nicholas shortly after.“I wanted to go to Oxford and read English literature, philosophy, and comparative religion. That was my plan,” she said. “Anyway, it didn’t happen. I went to a party and got discovered by bloody old Andrew Loog Oldham.”Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ first manager, hadn’t heard Faithfull sing a note; he just took a long look at her and decided this striking young blonde was destined to be a pop star. He had Mick Jagger and Keith Richards write a song for her, the melancholy ballad “As Tears Go By.” It was, in her words, “a commercial fantasy” that pushed “all the right buttons.”Which is to say she didn’t take this accidental pop career of hers that seriously, not at first. On her debut tour, she always seemed to have her nose buried in a book, “poring over my reading list for English literature as if I were going back to school.”But that wasn’t happening. In swinging, psychedelic London, Faithfull was a beautiful girl suddenly in the eye of a cultural hurricane. She met everybody. She left her husband and child behind, dabbling in everything the men did without apology. She and Richards dropped acid and went looking for the Holy Grail. She wrote in her autobiography that Bob Dylan tried to seduce her by playing her his latest album, “Bringing It All Back Home,” and explaining in detail what each track meant. (It didn’t work. “I just found him so … daunting,” she wrote. “As if some god had come down from Olympus and started to come onto me.”)Jagger had more luck, and for a few seemingly glamorous years they were a generational It Couple. But there were tensions from the start, and Faithfull wasn’t sure she was cut out for the wifely muse role that, even in such bohemian circles, she was expected to play. Then there was the Redlands drug bust.Tipped off by a sanctimonious British tabloid in February 1967, the police raided Richards’s Sussex home during a small party, and found a modest amount of drugs. Faithfull had just taken a bath when the cops arrived, and the only clothes she brought were dirty, so without thinking too much about it she flung a rug over herself.Jagger and Richards’s subsequent drug trial is now generally seen as a pivot in mainstream acceptance of certain countercultural behaviors. But Faithfull bore the brunt of the backlash. One headline blared in all caps: Naked Girl at Stones Party. “I was slandered as the wanton woman in the fur rug,” Faithfull wrote, “while Mick was the noble rock star on trial.” It certainly wouldn’t be the last rage-inducing double standard she’d endure. “If you’ve ever read ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ ‘The Lady of Shallot’ — you’re not going to forget it, are you?” Faithfull said.Danny Kasirye for The New York TimesA FEW YEARS ago, over a Christmas dinner, Faithfull gave Ellis’s teenage children a long, anecdote-filled talk about why they should stay away from drugs. She spoke about the infamy at Redlands as though it was something they would be familiar with.“My kids had no idea what she was talking about,” Ellis said. “But when I drove her home, my son just looked at me and goes, ‘[Expletive], she’s awesome.’”Ellis — who Faithfull affectionately described to me as “a sexy old thing” — conducted his interview from a low-lit, brick-walled room that looked like it may or may not be a dungeon. This is where he was holed up for long hours last spring, listening to the voice of his dear friend, who may or may not have been dying, read him Romantic poetry.He said he found the poems “so incredibly beautiful and uplifting, a total balm for all this turmoil and sadness that was going on in the world.” This was new: When he read them as a schoolboy in Melbourne, Ellis had found the Romantics mostly “impenetrable.” But listening to a masterful interpreter like Faithfull intone them, he said, “suddenly they felt ageless. They felt freed of the page. Because of this authority and absolute belief in them. She believes what she’s reading.”In composing the tracks, Ellis wanted to shy away from the expected “lutes and harpsichords” approach. Instead he studied some of the records he thought most successfully blended spoken-word and music, like Gil Scott-Heron’s “I’m New Here,” Sir John Betjeman’s “Late-Flowering Love” and Lou Reed and Metallica’s “Lulu.” Like Faithfull’s fiery readings, Ellis’s meditative compositions — featuring contributions from Nick Cave and Brian Eno — accentuate the poets’ enduring modernity. (The Romantics might not have yet lived to see rock ’n’ roll, but they certainly knew a thing or two about sex and drugs.)Before Ellis was finished, he got the news that Faithfull had woken up from her coma, left the hospital — and, in time, recorded four more poems. “She survived Covid, came out, and recorded ‘Lady of Shallot,’” Ellis said shaking his head, referring to the 12-minute Tennyson epic. “She’s just the best, Marianne.”The remarkable — and even fittingly spooky — thing about the record is that you cannot tell which poems Faithfull recorded before or after her brush with death. Perhaps only Faithfull herself can hear the difference. “I was quite fragile, but I didn’t start to do it until I was better,” she said. “And I liked it very much, because I sound more vulnerable — which is kind of nice, for the Romantics.”Faithfull has fashioned sticking around into a prolonged show of defiance — a radical act, for a woman. She did not come into her own musically until her mid-30s, with the release of her punky, scorched-earth 1979 masterpiece “Broken English.” In the subsequent decades, her artistry has only deepened, and she has gradually, grudgingly earned her respect (“I’m not just seen as a chick and a sexy piece anymore — though I should think not, I’m 74!”). Her anger about the industry and the media subsided a great deal in the time between her 1994 and 2007 memoirs. What happened?“Just time, you know. From everything I know about life in general — which is probably not much — is that you have to get over those things, or they eat you up,” she said. “And I’m not going to let that happen. So I let it go. I don’t hold resentment anymore about the press.” She laughed, genially. “But of course I don’t let them near me, really!”She has a lighter attitude, but Faithfull has not made it out of her latest battle without some lingering scars. She lost her dear friend and collaborator Hal Willner to the virus. And after initially feeling better, a few months ago she started feeling worse. She has since been experiencing the stubborn symptoms of long-haul Covid, which for her include fatigue, memory fog and lung problems.She has been working diligently on her breathing; a close friend comes by weekly with a guitar to lead her in singing practice — her own version of the opera therapy that has shown promising results in long Covid patients. She’s been spending quality time with her son and grandson, reading (Miles Davis’s autobiography, among other things), and counting the days until she can once again go to the movies, the opera, the ballet. When she first got out of the hospital — après Covid, as she likes to call it — it seemed like Faithfull may never sing again. Now, she is looking forward to writing new songs, and envisioning what a return to the stage might look like.“I’m focusing on getting better, really better — and I’m beginning to,” she said. “I’ll certainly never be able to work as hard as I was, and long tours are not going to be possible. But I do hope to do maybe five shows. Not very long — 40 minutes perhaps.” Still, she admitted, “It’s a long way away.”Ellis said, “If anyone can do it, it’s Marianne, because she just doesn’t give up. She constantly surprises you.”Sometimes she even surprises herself. Earlier in our conversation, Faithfull had let me know, in her admirably no-nonsense way, that she hadn’t called me up to chat for fun, but because she had an album to promote. But she ultimately admitted to finding it vivifying to talk about her life, her art, her past and future. “It’s good for me to remember who I really am, not just an old sick person,” she said.“Of course,” I replied. “You’re Marianne Faithfull, damn it!”She mulled it over for a long moment. “It’s true, I am.” Then, with an unexpected surge of strength, like a hammer’s blow, she added, “Damn it.” More

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      ‘Peter Grimes’ Sails on Choppy Seas of Brexit and the Pandemic

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      A production of Benjamin Britten’s opera at the Teatro Real in Madrid highlights the difficult new conditions for British artists working in the European Union.MADRID — In a new production of “Peter Grimes” that premiered at the Teatro Real opera house here on Monday, the people of an English seaside town wave the British flag, and pack into a pub seeking shelter from a sudden downpour.Benjamin Britten’s 1945 opera about an ill-fated fisherman is one of the most quintessentially English works in the opera repertoire, but Britain’s recent exit from the European Union, coupled with a travel ban and other restrictions triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, has made staging it in Madrid a journey across choppy and uncharted waters.“Having to deal with Brexit and the pandemic at the same time was diabolical,” Joan Matabosch, the artistic director of the Teatro Real, said in an interview.Allan Clayton as Peter Grimes, left, and the dancer Juan Leiba in the Teatro Real production.Javier del Real/Teatro RealA chorus representing the townspeople surrounding Clayton, lying on the stage floor.Javier del Real/Teatro RealThe show is a coproduction with three other theaters, including the Royal Opera House in London, where it is scheduled to play next March, and 17 people had to travel from Britain to Madrid for rehearsals and performances. Almost all the production’s lead singers are British, as is its director, Deborah Warner.Until Jan. 1, while Britain was in a transition period after its departure from the European Union, British performers could work throughout the bloc without visas. Since then, they have to apply country by country for entry visas and short-stay work permits. Each E.U. member state has set its own requirements, making it even more complex for artists who want to tour the continent.Rehearsals in Madrid started two weeks late, because of difficulties getting visas and a travel ban introduced after a new variant of the coronavirus was identified in England late last year. The performance schedule had to be shortened by one show, with fewer rest days, to allow the British members of the cast to leave Spain within the 90-day limit of their visas. Gregorio Marañón, the Teatro Real’s president, said that he personally spoke with three Spanish ministers to help with the paperwork required for the British visitors.Matabosch said that many of the production’s difficulties arose “because nobody really seemed to know how the new Brexit rules applied. So we had some people who had to make three attempts to reach Madrid, but at least finally everybody got here.”The auditorium of the Teatro Real at the premiere on Monday.Emilio Parra Doiztua for The New York TimesPlastic screens have been set up in the orchestra pit between the conductor’s podium and the musicians.Emilio Parra Doiztua for The New York TimesUshers at the theater are also taking extra safety precautions.Emilio Parra Doiztua for The New York TimesOpera productions are planned well in advance. Four years ago, when the Teatro Real decided to schedule “Peter Grimes” for 2021, Britain had recently voted in a referendum to leave the European Union, “but nobody imagined it would take so long for Brexit to actually happen,” Matabosch said.Negotiations between the British government and the European Union dragged on because Brussels did not want Britain to cherry-pick benefits that apply to its member states while freeing itself of membership obligations. Even after an overall deal was completed, the specifics of many issues were left unresolved, including how travel visas would work for artists.In Britain, a parliamentary inquiry is underway, spurred by a chorus of criticism about the post-Brexit situation for performers, with complaints from major pop stars like Elton John and Dua Lipa. In February, Britain’s culture minister, Oliver Dowden, blamed Brussels for rejecting a British proposal to grant British artists eased access to the 27 remaining E.U. nations. “It is worth noting that what we put forward was what the music industry had asked for,” Mr. Dowden argued before Parliament. But Michel Barnier, Brussels’ chief negotiator, has insisted that it was London that rejected last year an E.U. offer to agree special terms for traveling musicians and other artists.Warner was scathing about the lack of a deal for British artists, saying that the production’s visa problems were the result of “the scandalous negligence of the U.K. negotiators who have failed utterly the music world.”Deborah Warner, the production’s director, said: “I had my doubts about how likely this was, and, at certain moments before I got here, how wise this was.”Emilio Parra Doiztua for The New York Times“Having to deal with Brexit and the pandemic at the same time was diabolical,” said Joan Matabosch, the artistic director of the Teatro Real.Emilio Parra Doiztua for The New York TimesSpain was among the countries worst hit at the start of the pandemic, when hospitals in Madrid overflowed with Covid-19 patients. But after a national state of emergency was lifted last summer, Madrid’s opera house reopened, alongside many other theaters across Spain.Since then, the regional authorities governing Madrid have kept Spain’s capital among the most bustling cities in Europe, even though the number of coronavirus cases has recently been creeping up again. While the Teatro Real had to cancel some ballet and orchestra shows, it has staged several operas successfully.The opera house said it had spent about €240,000 — nearly $290,000 — on regularly testing employees and guest workers and that around 20 had to go into self-isolation last month, including cast members for “Peter Grimes.”In an interview before Monday’s opening night, Warner, the director, said: “I had my doubts about how likely this was, and, at certain moments before I got here, how wise this was.” She said she felt “there was a craziness” to the Teatro Real’s plan to stage “Peter Grimes,” which is about a close-knit community and could not be done with social distancing onstage.But looking back, she also said that key themes in Britten’s “shocking opera,” including its references to English nationalism, resonated with “the stress of these times.”The opera house said it had spent about €240,000 on regularly testing employees and guest workers.Emilio Parra Doiztua for The New York TimesIn Madrid, the British singers welcomed the chance to perform in a major “Peter Grimes” production involving about 150 artists, at a time when most opera houses in Europe and the United States are closed, but they also sounded anxious about what would come afterward.James Gilchrist, who sings the part of a priest in Britten’s opera, said that 90 percent of his work had been in the European Union rather than in Britain, which made him worried not only about his own future but also the prospects for younger artists. “If you are a promoter in Frankfurt or somewhere like that, you are not going to want to put a British artist at the top of your list, because it is just such a hassle,” he said.“For very well-established artists, that is probably less of a problem because their name on the poster will bring people in, but if you are more at the beginning of your career, I think this is going to be very, very hard.”Matabosch said the Teatro Real was committed to having the best possible lineups, irrespective of nationality. He forecast that the post-Brexit travel rules would become easier to navigate, but he acknowledged that British performers risked losing substitution work, which is an important part of their incomes.“I’m sure that we will end up knowing exactly how to bring over a British singer, just as people also come here from Australia or Canada. But the problem is that if you need a last-minute replacement and have to fly somebody over that very morning, this is not really doable from Britain at the moment,” Matabosch said.Another British member of the “Peter Grimes” cast, John Graham-Hall, thanked the Teatro Real for helping overcome travel hurdles that left him with “the very nasty feeling that the British government does not care about the arts.” He also gave a succinct summary of the twin hurdles raised by Brexit and the pandemic: “It’s a bloody nightmare.”Alex Marshall More

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      Gina Prince-Bythewood: Movies Won't Be the Same Without the ArcLight

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      For the director Gina Prince-Bythewood, seeing her movie premiere there or just a poster for it on display was a sign that her work mattered. News of the closure hit hard.As the rest of the film industry begins its tentative return to prepandemic normalcy, the announcement that Los Angeles’s ArcLight Cinemas, a chain that includes the Cinerama Dome, would close came as a shock to loyal moviegoers and filmmakers alike. Here, the director Gina Prince-Bythewood (“The Old Guard,” “Love & Basketball”) explains why the news was so devastating. These are edited excerpts.The ArcLight is a place for people who love movies. If you’re a filmmaker, if you love movies, you just appreciated everything that [the ArcLight] put into making it a curated moviegoing experience. They always had the films that we wanted to see, but they also had special screenings of movies that hadn’t been out for years, and a balance between big blockbusters and independent films. They made it an event. We never had to go anywhere else but the ArcLight — because you knew it was an experience every time, and you just didn’t want to cheat on your theater. There was no reason to go anywhere else.Ours was ArcLight Sherman Oaks, which was beautiful. The second you walk in, it’s about film. To the left was this very cool gift shop, which had film memorabilia and books, and then there would be the bar with mixed drinks but also great hot chocolate and coffee. There was a whole costume display from whichever film they were focused on, whether it be “Star Wars” or a period piece. [The concessions stand] was always packed because the food was really good — but there were tons of people working, so the lines moved fast.They had this entire wall of movie posters, and as a filmmaker, you’re always hoping that your poster would show up there. “Love & Basketball” premiered at the Cinerama Dome, and that was incredible to have my first film be at this iconic theater, with the red carpet and the excitement of it, and to see my film up on the marquee. My husband’s film, when he wrote “Get on the Bus,” also played there. To take a picture of the marquee, to have your movie poster be on rotation, it was exciting. And it made you feel like you’re working on something.Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps in “Love & Basketball,” which had its premiere at the Cinerama Dome.New Line CinemaMy husband and I, when we were dating, would go to the movies once a week. Nobody else at the time had assigned seating. You know when you used to go to the theater, and you’d have to get there super early, searching for two spots, and you knew where you’d like to sit and those seats are never available because someone’s there already, and you’re — you know, “Excuse me, pardon me, excuse me”? Here, you picked your favorite seat, you walked in and you sat down. Once we had kids, all of us would go to the exact same seats every time: F25, 24, 23, 22. They allowed us to be near the end, but also to put our feet up on a metal bar right below us. And as you wait, they always have great trivia going up on the screen and movie music playing, and then the usher would come and the experience will begin.All the ushers and everybody who worked there clearly love movies: You could ask them which film they would recommend, and they would go into detail why they loved it. Right before the movie would start, an usher would come to the front of the theater and announce what movie you’re about to see, the running time, the rating and some little tidbit of information about the film. And it was always fun because there would be ushers who were completely shy, and it was probably horrifying for them that they have to do this; others would give these long explanations and you could tell that this was just their moment in the sun.When “Black Panther” came out, we got our seats that we loved two weeks in advance. We knew that it was going to be packed. And the audiences there, there’s just a love of film. So you just knew that you were going to have fun with the crowd as well, because people clap at the end of movies they love and cheer during trailers they’re hyped about. I loved seeing other families going for that same experience, and then being able to talk about it afterward in the lobby. You knew the people were there to see the movie and they respected the filmmaking.To hear that the ArcLight, of all theaters, was shutting down was a shock. It was kind of a blow to that fantasy that we were going to get back to where we were. Streaming has been great during this time, and it was incredible for “The Old Guard” to reach the global audience that it did. But I still love theaters. I love the collective experience of watching a film with people I don’t know who are all feeling the same things.I’m just staying optimistic that someone is going to step up and purchase the theaters. It’s too important to the industry; it’s too important to the audiences; the meaning of it is just too important for it to just go away. I have this fantasy that Netflix or Apple or George Clooney is just going to step up and save it, because it needs to be here. Oprah! We need Oprah. More

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      in Television

      How Do You Write an Anthony Bourdain Book Without Anthony Bourdain?

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      After the author and TV personality’s death, his longtime assistant was left to finish his last book, a world travel guide.In March 2017, Anthony Bourdain had an idea for a book, but no time to write it. Since he started traveling and eating on camera with the Food Network’s “A Cook’s Tour” in 2000, the chef, frequent dropper of f-bombs and insatiable eater of delicious things had spent the majority of his time in the field, most recently for his CNN show “Parts Unknown.” Mr. Bourdain and his team decided he would carve out some time to write in the summer of 2018, when he would have a few rare continuous weeks at home during a break in filming. That, of course, never happened, as Mr. Bourdain died by suicide in June 2018.Nevertheless, next week, almost three years after his death, and after a pandemic that almost completely shut down international travel, Ecco will publish “World Travel: An Irreverent Guide” by Mr. Bourdain and his longtime assistant (or “lieutenant” as he often referred to her), Laurie Woolever.“To me, there was no question that the book would go on,” Ms. Woolever said in a recent video call from her home in Queens. “As long as I had the blessing of his estate, which I did, I wanted to finish it as a way to serve his legacy.”“World Travel” is built out of a somewhat amorphous vision, an “atlas of the world as seen through his eyes,” as Ms. Woolever writes in the book’s introduction. It is the second book, after 2016’s “Appetites,” that includes Ms. Woolever’s name on the cover just under Mr. Bourdain’s, albeit smaller. It speaks to the power of Mr. Bourdain’s legacy and the singularity of his point of view that his name still sits so boldly on the book’s cover despite the fact that he contributed not a single new written word to its 469 pages.Laurie Woolever outside Gray’s Papaya on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which makes an appearance in “World Travel.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesThe book is built to read like a travel guide, even if it would be a stretch to use it as one. It covers 43 countries, with Mr. Bourdain’s recommendations for restaurants, hotels and other attractions in each one drawn mostly from his various TV shows. In between, Ms. Woolever, who was archivist, fact checker and editor on the book, as well as its co-author, has inserted context and, for each destination, a section on airports, public transportation and taxi costs. Occasionally she adds in her own recommendations based on her travels and knowledge of Mr. Bourdain’s favorite off-camera spots: one particularly charming section includes a delivery request that Mr. Bourdain emailed to Ms. Woolever, for Pastrami Queen, a kosher deli on New York’s Upper East Side.The book comes at a pivotal moment in travel, just after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that Americans who are vaccinated can travel internationally, and as closed borders between countries are slowly and fitfully reopening. The timing is fortuitous, though not intentional: The book was originally scheduled to publish in the fall of 2020 and Ms. Woolever said the publication was delayed because of production issues, not the coronavirus.Edward Ash-Milby, the lifestyle book buyer at Barnes & Noble, said in an email that the bookstore chain has put in an order similar in size to that for past best sellers by Mr. Bourdain: “We’ve ordered it for all 600-plus stores and we are all very excited about it.”After the travel book market took a major hit over the past year, Mr. Ash-Milby said in his email that he has started to see it coming back in the United States, especially when it comes to domestic travel. “World Travel,” he said, was perfectly positioned to take advantage of American readers’ pent-up wanderlust for places further afield. “I love the publication date of Anthony Bourdain’s ‘World Travel,’” he wrote. “It feels perfectly timed to meet the imagination of today’s travelers who are primed to explore.”Mr. Bourdain never professed to being a fan of travel guides and, before this book, he had never really expressed much interest in writing one. In an interview during South by Southwest in 2016, he admitted that he rarely read them: “I like atmospherics,” he said. “I don’t want a list of the best hotels or restaurants; I want to read fiction set in the place where you get a real sense of what that place is like.”Despite this, Ms. Woolever said there was also an understanding between the two of them that a guide could be exactly what his fans wanted. “I would like to think that even if someone has seen every episode, even if they’ve read every book, there is the possibility of fresh discovery with this book,” she said.The choice of what to include — which Singaporean hawker stalls, Spanish tapas restaurants or American dive bars made the list — mostly came out of one hourlong, recorded conversation in the spring of 2018 between Ms. Woolever and Mr. Bourdain held at Mr. Bourdain’s Manhattan high-rise apartment, which he had, according to Ms. Woolever, decorated to mimic one of his favorite hotels, Los Angeles’s Chateau Marmont.“I prepared ahead of time for this meeting with Tony by making a list of every place he had been,” Ms. Woolever said. Then, as Mr. Bourdain chain-smoked and free-associated, she took notes. “He would just, off the top of his head, say ‘We’ve got to include this market stall, and this place with the chicken,’” she recalled. “He had a pretty astonishing level of recall for somebody who had done so much.”“World Travel” contains essays by Mr. Bourdain’s friends, colleagues and family, but no new contributions from him.EccoIn that quiet summer of 2018, Mr. Bourdain was planning to go through the curated list of countries and cities and write new, original essays about them. From his work on television it isn’t hard to imagine what they could have been: an effusive, profanity-laced ode to the decadent and delicate noodle soups of Vietnam perhaps, or an examination of why he loved old colonial hotels in the tropics so much despite their often problematic histories.The conversation, meant to be the first of many brainstorming sessions, became Ms. Woolever’s only blueprint. Facing all of the unwritten essays, she reached out to Mr. Bourdain’s friends, family members and former colleagues to fill that space: His younger brother, Christopher Bourdain, writes about traveling to the Jersey Shore and Uruguay for episodes of “Parts Unknown” and “No Reservations”; the record producer Steve Albini provides a lengthy list of his favorite where-would-Bourdain-eat spots in Chicago; the Toronto restaurateur Jen Agg recounts how the stunt that made her restaurant famous (a “bone luge” shot, in which bourbon is poured down a hollowed out veal bone) was concocted for an episode of “The Layover,” the relatively short-lived Travel Channel show that was, before this book, the closest Mr. Bourdain ever came to making a “how to” guide.“It’s a hard and lonely thing to co-author a book about the wonders of world travel when your writing partner, that very traveler, is no longer traveling that world,” Ms. Woolever admits in the book’s introduction.Ms. Woolever first worked with Mr. Bourdain in 2002, when her former employer, the chef Mario Batali, recommended her as a recipe tester and editor for “Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook.” She became his assistant in 2009 after working as, among other things, an editor and a private chef. As Ms. Woolever recounts it, Mr. Bourdain happened to be looking for an assistant at the precise time that she had a child and was looking to do something new. “It was such a lucky coincidence of timing for both of us,” she said.Ms. Woolever knew Mr. Bourdain well after so many years, and it was that closeness that helped her get through some of the hard decisions in putting together the book, she said.Much of that decision-making process involved talking to others: members of his close circle of confidantes, his production team and past fixers who offered updated information on old spots Mr. Bourdain might have visited. “I never want to speak for Tony, but if I had to speculate — and I think we all agreed — I think he would want these things that had been set in motion to go on,” she said. She ran decade-old “No Reservations” picks by past collaborators to make sure they were still good. She pored over transcripts of past shows and spent days contacting chefs in the French countryside or along the Mozambique coast to make sure they were still operating.Anthony Bourdain filming “Parts Unknown” in Butte, Mont., in 2015. CNNThat fact-checking process took on a new level of intensity, of course, with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, as restaurants globally were hit hard. “I did check to see that all the listed venues were still open just before the window closed to any new edits,” she told me. She knows of just one establishment — Cold Tea bar in Toronto — that has closed since, but doesn’t regret its inclusion in the book. “I am happy to have its listing remain in the text, because Tony loved it, and I hope that the business owners may be able to resurrect it in the future,” she said.Over the course of the book, Ms. Woolever never makes the claim that the guide is comprehensive — and the end result does feel incomplete and unbalanced. The countries of Ghana, Ireland and Lebanon get three pages apiece; the United States gets nearly 100. There is a chapter on Macau, but nothing on Indonesia or Thailand. These are somewhat predictable shortcomings, dependent as the book is on voice-over transcripts spanning decades and the impossible task of stringing them together across time.Some of the inclusions feel at odds with Mr. Bourdain’s avoid-the-tourists approach to travel, as well. In the Tokyo section, recommendations include the Park Hyatt hotel (made famous by “Lost in Translation,”); Sukiyabashi Jiro, the restaurant at the center of the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”; the bizarre kitsch-fest that is the Robot Restaurant; and a bar in the tourist-clogged Golden Gai neighborhood. These may be all appealing attractions to a first-timer in Tokyo, but there is nothing in that selection that you wouldn’t find at the top of an algorithm-generated TripAdvisor list.When I asked Ms. Woolever about these recommendations, she agreed they were perhaps obvious choices, but said Mr. Bourdain wanted to include them because of how much they meant to him, after so many visits to the city. “He wasn’t always (or, arguably, ever) about cool for cool’s sake, or obscurity as its own reward,” she said in an email.If it’s a guide they are after though, travelers may be left wanting. In Cambodia, you get recommendations for three hotels, two markets for dining and a suggestion to check out the temples of Angkor Wat, the country’s most famous attraction by a long shot. It isn’t exactly the list of hole-in-the-wall spots with no addresses that fans of Mr. Bourdain may be hoping for. What those fans will find though is Mr. Bourdain’s word-for-word rant against American military involvement in Cambodia (“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”) Having those passages — the no-holds-barred monologues that were a hallmark of his television shows — in one place might be the book’s greatest strength.Over the decades that Mr. Bourdain spent traveling the world, there was a lot of talk of the “Bourdain Effect”: how a culinary gem, previously only frequented by those in the know, could be “ruined” by being included in his show. When I asked Ms. Woolever whether she thought this book could amplify that effect, she emphasized that most business owners knew what they were in for when approached by producers. “People call it the ‘Bourdain Effect,’ but Tony didn’t invent it,” she said. “It’s something that business owners have to weigh out for themselves.”As I read the book, I was thinking of a different Bourdain Effect, one that feels more vital than ever right now, as travel begins to take its first baby steps back after a year of lockdowns. Seeing so much of Anthony Bourdain’s work in one place and being able to compare his impressions country-by-country in a tightly packed medium, makes it easier to see what he stood for. A traveling philosophy emerges: his utter disdain for stereotypes, his undying commitment to challenging his own preconceptions, his humility in the face of generosity.Because of tragic circumstances following its inception, “World Travel” may feel more like an anthology of greatest hits than a new, original guidebook. But read cover to cover, country by country, it is an enduring embodiment of Anthony Bourdain’s love for the whole world and a reminder of how to stack our priorities the next time we’re able to follow in his footsteps.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places list for 2021. More

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      in Music

      Cultural Venues’ Quest for Billions in Federal Aid Is Halted by Glitch

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      On the first day nightclubs, movie theaters and other arts organizations hurt by the pandemic could apply for $16 billion in federal aid, the system malfunctioned. No applications got through. As the government prepared on Thursday to start taking applications for a $16 billion relief fund for music clubs, theaters and other live event businesses, thousands of desperate applicants waited eagerly to submit their paperwork right at noon, when the system was scheduled to open.And then they waited. And waited. Nearly four hours later, the system was still not working at all, sending applicants into spasms of anxiety.“This is an absolute disaster,” Eric Sosa, the owner of C’mon Everybody, a club in Brooklyn, tweeted at the agency. Shortly after 4 p.m., the Small Business Administration — which runs the initiative, the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program — abandoned its effort to salvage the broken system and shut down it down for the day. No applications were processed. “Technical issues arose despite multiple successful tests of the application process,” Andrea Roebker, an agency spokeswoman, said in a written statement. After discussions with the vendors that built the system, the agency decided “to shut down the portal to ensure fair and equal access once reopened, since this is first-come, first-serve,” Ms. Roebker said. “This decision was not made lightly as we understand the need to get relief quickly to this hard-hit industry.”In social media forums and Zoom calls, frustrated applicants vented and shared their anger. “It’s hard to keep hearing ‘help is on the way’ and then not be able to apply,” said Tom Weyman, the director of programing at the Columbus Theater in Providence, R.I. “I don’t think any of us thought the application process would be totally smooth, but this is life and death for our venues.” The meltdown echoed problems the agency had last year in taking applications for the Paycheck Protection Program, which it also oversees. When that program opened, the agency’s overwhelmed systems seized up — and the same thing happened again, weeks later, when a new round of funding became available. Applicants for the grant program were incredulous that the agency was not better prepared — especially because the funds are to be distributed based on the order in which people apply. Those who get their applications in early have the best chance of getting aid before the money runs out. “It pits venues against each other because we’re all mad-dashing for this,” Mr. Sosa, the Brooklyn club owner, said in an interview. “And it shouldn’t be that way. We’re all a community.” For businesses like Crowbar, a music club in Tampa, Fla., getting a grant is a matter of survival. Tom DeGeorge, Crowbar’s primary owner, took out more than $200,000 in personal loans to keep the business afloat after it shut down last year, including one using its liquor license as collateral.More than a year later, the club has reopened with a smattering of events at reduced capacities, but the business still operates in the red, Mr. DeGeorge said.“We lost an entire year of concerts in the blink of an eye, which was close to $1 million in revenue,” Mr. DeGeorge said. “That’s why we need this grant so badly.”The aid was authorized by Congress late last year after months of lobbying by an ad hoc coalition of music venues and other groups that warned of the loss of an entire sector of the arts economy.For music venues in particular, the last year has been a scramble to remain afloat, with the proprietors of local clubs running crowdfunding campaigns, selling T-shirts and racking their brains for any creative way to raise funds. For the holidays, the Subterranean club in Chicago, for example, agreed to place the names of patrons on its marquee for donations of $250 or more.“It’s been the busiest year,” Robert Gomez, the primary owner of Subterranean, said in an interview. “But it’s all been about, ‘Where am I going to get funding from?’”As it struggled to make ends meet, the Chicago club Subterranean decided to place the names of patrons on the club’s marquee for donations of $250 or more. Robert Gomez, its primary owner, said, the year has “all been about, ‘Where am I going to get funding from?’”Lyndon French for The New York TimesEven before Thursday’s fiasco, the opening of the shuttered venue program was riddled with complexity and confusion.The Small Business Administration posted a 58-page guide for applicants late Wednesday night, then quickly took it offline. A revised version of the guide was posted just minutes before the portal opened on Thursday. (An agency spokeswoman said the guide had to be updated to reflect “some last-minute system changes.”)And less than two hours before the agency was supposed to start accepting applications, its inspector general sent out an alert warning of “serious concerns” with the program’s waste and fraud controls. The Small Business Administration’s current audit plan “exposes billions of dollars to potential misuse of funds,” the inspector general wrote in a report. Successful applicants will receive a grant equal to 45 percent of their gross earned revenue from 2019, up to $10 million. Those who lost 90 percent of their revenue (compared to the prior year) after the coronavirus pandemic took hold will have a 14-day priority window for receiving the money, followed by another 14-day period for those who lost 70 percent or more. If any funds remain after that, they will then go to applicants who had a 25 percent sales loss in at least one quarter of 2020. Venues owned by large corporations, like Live Nation or AEG, are not eligible.The application process is extensive, with detailed questions about venues’ budgets, staff and equipment.“They want to make sure you’re not just setting up a piano in the corner of an Italian restaurant and calling yourself a music venue,” said Blayne Tucker, a lawyer for several music spaces in Texas.Technical glitches marred the beginning of the first day of submitting applications for the grant program. Empty chairs were seen in Crowbar.Zack Wittman for The New York TimesEven with the grants, music venues may be facing many dry months before touring and live events return at anything like prepandemic levels. The grant program also offers help for Broadway theaters, performing arts centers and even zoos, which share many of the same economic struggles.The Pablo Center at the Confluence, in Eau Claire, Wis., for example, was able to raise about $1 million from donations and grants during the pandemic, yet is still $1.2 million short on its annual fixed operating expenses, said Jason Jon Anderson, its executive director.“By the time we open again, October 2021 at the earliest, we will have been shuttered longer than we had been open,” he added. (The center opened in 2018, at a cost of $60 million.)The thousands of small clubs that dot the national concert map lack access to major donors and, in many cases, have been surviving on fumes for months.Stephen Chilton, the owner of the 300-capacity Rebel Lounge in Phoenix, said he had taken out “a few hundred thousand” in loans to keep the club afloat. In October, it reopened with a pop-up coffee shop inside, and the club hosts some events, like trivia contests and open mic shows.“We’re losing a lot less than we were losing when we were completely closed,” Mr. Chilton said, “but it’s not making up for the lost revenue from doing events.”The Rebel Lounge hopes that a grant will help it survive until it can bring back a full complement of concerts. And if its application is not successful?“There is no Plan B,” Mr. Chilton said. More