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    Emma Corrin and Maggie Nelson on the Strength in Vulnerability

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    Admiration Society brings together two creative people from two different fields for one wide-ranging conversation.Emma Corrin first encountered Maggie Nelson’s work three summers ago, when the actor was in Brighton, England, filming 2022’s “My Policeman,” a British drama about postwar sexual repression. At the time, Corrin, now 28, was grappling with their gender identity, and a friend recommended “The Argonauts” (2015), Nelson’s memoir about queer desire and making a family with her partner, the artist Harry Dodge. The book appealed so deeply to Corrin that, when that production ended, they decided to remain at the flat they’d rented during filming to finish reading it.Nelson, 51, was born in Northern California and moved in the 1990s to New York, where she worked as a waitress, trained as a dancer and took workshops with the poet Eileen Myles before getting her Ph.D. in English at the City University of New York. In addition to “The Argonauts,” Nelson, who’s now based in Los Angeles, is the author of “Bluets” (2009), a meditation on love and loss in the form of a treatise on the color blue; “Like Love” (2024), her latest collection of essays and conversations; and eight other books that include scholarly criticism, autobiography, true crime and poetry.Corrin’s career has also spanned genres. After earning a degree in education, English and drama at the University of Cambridge, the London-based actor gained sudden acclaim as Princess Diana on “The Crown” in 2020, and then went on to star in the historical romance “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (2022), the psychological thriller “A Murder at the End of the World” (2023) and in the 2022 stage adaptation of “Orlando: A Biography,” Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel. Once billed as an ingénue, Corrin brings a fierce physicality to their roles, the next of which will be in Robert Eggers’s gothic horror film “Nosferatu,” an update of the vampire classic that will be released next month.For Corrin, who recently wrote a screenplay with a friend, Nelson’s work remains a touchstone. After wrapping “A Murder at the End of the World,” the co-creator Zal Batmanglij presented the actor with a copy of “The Red Parts,” Nelson’s 2007 memoir of following a murder trial. Earlier this year, Corrin saw the playwright Margaret Perry’s adaptation of “Bluets,” starring Emma D’Arcy, Kayla Meikle and Ben Whishaw, in London. It was the first time that Nelson’s work had been performed onstage.This past summer, Corrin, who was in Los Angeles to promote their turn in “Deadpool & Wolverine,” met Nelson for the first time in a Hollywood photography studio, where the actor and the writer discussed vulnerability, the dangers of self-editing for social media and the pleasure of bringing a sense of play to their work.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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      Pedro Almodóvar, Master of Mystifying Films, Wrote a Book He Can’t Classify

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      Pedro Almodóvar is widely considered Spain’s greatest living filmmaker, but he sees himself as a writer first — a “fabulist,” in his telling. His extravagant plots took twists that were hard to predict or even pin down. The tale of two men who form a bond looking over two comatose women in “Talk to Her.” The story of a plastic surgeon who operates on a captive man, changing him to a woman against his will in “The Skin I Live In.”Of his more than 20 feature films, Almodóvar wrote or co-wrote nearly all of them. He had probably spent more days at a writing desk than on a set.As it turned out, he had been writing many other things, too — short stories, diary entries, a few unclassifiable essays — nearly the entire time he was making films. The tales sat in several mysterious blue folders, collected by his assistant Lola García over the course of the director’s many moves to different apartments in Madrid. In 2022, at the urging of the Spanish literary editor Jaume Bonfill, Almodóvar had a look at what had been saved over the years.“It was like seeing a dimension of Pedro that I didn’t know,” said Bonfill, adding that the manuscripts they sorted through contained writings the director had composed as a teenager as well as items Almodóvar had seemingly written decades later. The collection, “The Last Dream,” will be published in English on Sept. 24 by HarperVia.“The Last Dream” is due out Sept. 24 in the United States.HarperVia, via Associated PressJust what this collection is exactly is as much of a mystery as the folders were. Was this a memoir? (One piece was a journal entry written a couple of years back.) Was it fiction — or sketches of ideas that could be fiction — unfinished stories the director never turned into a film? (There is a tale about Count Dracula joining a monastery in Spain.) Much like with his films, Almodóvar feels little need to clarify his output into any defined genre.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

      Everyone Who Made This Happen: Meet the Many People It Takes to Produce One Thing

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      The act of creation is rarely a solo affair. Here are five outsize teams behind projects ranging from a performance piece to a new pizza.Even works of art that we think of as coming from the minds of lone creative geniuses were group efforts: Michelangelo, for example, recruited some 11 painters to assist him with the Sistine Chapel. The contemporary land artist Michael Heizer, who makes sculptures out of dirt, rocks and negative space in the Nevada desert, and whom The Times once called “art’s last, lonely cowboy,” has relied on a crew of construction workers to help execute his vision. Still, it’s only in the past few decades that attitudes around labor and the power of collectivism have shifted, making artists not only quicker to collaborate but also to give credit where credit is due. Reflecting on “Womanhouse,” the multiroom feminist art installation that debuted in Los Angeles in 1972 and was created by Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and over 20 California Institute of the Arts students and local artists, Schapiro told the writer Judith E. Stein, “Collaboration was taking place right then and there in my brain and liberating me from the idea of being solitary.”Then there are the creative disciplines or undertakings, such as theater or architecture, being in a band or running a restaurant, that tend to preclude solitude. No matter the field, though, certain projects require an outsize number of bodies. We picked five projects that illustrate just how many people it can take to create a single object or artistic work, going behind the scenes of a performance piece, a work of puppet-led theater, an intricate chair, a leather handbag and a high-concept slice of pizza. “When producers first say they want puppets,” says the British puppetry director and designer Toby Olié, “I ask, ‘How many people have you got?’”Collaboration can be hard work, with multiple opportunities for conflict. It’s also a luxury. When the Canadian artist Miles Greenberg was starting out, he says, “I was just showing up alone with a duffel bag to an underground art space or club and painting myself in the bathroom mirror, and that’s still who I am and what I do in my head.” At the same time, he’s grateful to feel understood by his artistic partners, and for the time to focus on making art that his other collaborators afford him. Then, too, there’s the practical if unstated fact that, as artists and creative types, these people are in the business of pursuing perfection. Often, combining forces is the only way to get them closer to it.How Many People Does It Take to Make …… a ‘Spirited Away’ Puppet?The puppetry designer and director Toby Olié (standing, center), photographed at the London Coliseum on June 20, 2024, with some of the cast and crew of “Spirited Away,” including (clockwise from left) Yoshiki Fujioka, Ryo Sawamura, Miffy and Hayato Takehiro, puppeteers who operate the dragon Haku; the associate director Makoto Nagai; Maoko Imai, the director John Caird’s co-adapter and wife; and Dan Cook and Georgia Dacey from the puppet stage management team.Will SandersFor the director John Caird’s stage adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved 2001 animated film, a design team created 65 puppeteered elements, including a nearly 20-foot-long dragon. Read more here.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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      10 Artists on Living and Creating Through Grief

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      Sigrid Nunez, authorConor Oberst, musicianBridget Everett, performerBen Kweller, musicianJesmyn Ward, authorJustin Hardiman, photographerJulie Otsuka, authorLila Avilés, filmmakerRichard E. Grant, actorLuke Lorentzen, filmmakerWhen Jesmyn Ward was writing her 2013 book, “Men We Reaped,” she could feel the presence of her brother, who had been killed years earlier by a drunk driver. She still talks to him, as well as to her partner, who died in 2020.“This may just be wishful thinking, but talking to them and being open to feeling them answer, that enables me to live in spite of their loss,” she told me.While filming the HBO series “Somebody Somewhere,” Bridget Everett, playing a woman mourning the loss of her sister, was grieving the loss of her own. Working on the show was a way to still live with her, in a way, she said: “There’s something that’s less scary about sharing time with my sister when it’s through art or through making the show or through a song.”One of the many things you learn after losing a loved one is that there are a lot of us grieving out there. Some people are not just living with loss but also trying to create or experience something meaningful, to counter the blunt force of the ache.We talked to 10 artists across music, writing, photography, film and comedy about the ways their work, in the wake of personal loss, has deepened their understanding of what it means to grieve and to create.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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      How to Begin a Creative Life

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      Alice McDermott, 70, writer There are three kinds of novels I’ve never taken to heart: science fiction, murder mysteries and novels about novelists. So I’ve decided to try my hand at each. If I fail, they’re probably not books I’d want to read anyway. Thurston Moore, 65, musician and author I’m putting the final touches […] More

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      A Drummer Showing the Way to ‘the Freest Musical Universe’

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      BUENOS AIRES — The crowd at a recent concert exploded into rapturous cries as the group’s frontman walked onto the stage and began setting a drum beat, launching his band on an improvised journey across musical genres that culminated an hour later in a standing ovation.Over a 30-year career, Miguel Tomasín has released more than 100 albums, helped turn his Argentine band into one of South America’s most influential underground acts, and helped hundreds of people with disabilities express their voices through music.Mr. Tomasín has achieved this in part because of a distinctive artistic vision that comes, his family, fellow musicians and friends said, from having been born with Down syndrome. His story, they say, shows how art can help someone overcome social barriers, and what can happen with an effort to elevate a person’s talents, rather than focusing on their limitations.“We make music so that people enjoy it,” Mr. Tomasín said in an interview at his home in the windswept Argentine city of Rio Gallegos, near the country’s southern tip. Music is “the best, magical,” he added.Though his prolific output has not achieved commercial success, it has had a significant impact on how people with disabilities are perceived in Argentina and beyond.At a recent sold-out Reynols concert in Buenos Aires, Miguel Tomasín sang and played all the instruments on the stage in front of 600 fans.Video by Centro Cultural KirchnerIt has also inspired members of his band, Reynols, to establish long-running music workshops for people with disabilities. And other musicians they have worked with have started more bands whose members include those with developmental disabilities.“Thanks to Miguel, many people who had never interacted with a person with Down syndrome were able to become aware of their world through music,” said Patricio Conlazo, an occasional Reynols member who, after playing with Mr. Tomasín, started music projects for people with disabilities in southern Argentina.Reynols’s unconventional approach to music has also inspired established musicians.“I was reminded by him that you can play music as you like,” said Mitsuru Tabata, a veteran Japanese experimental musician who has recorded with Reynols.But the band’s freewheeling sound has its detractors, too.A prominent British music journalist, Ben Watson, called their music “annoying racket,” in his 2010 book “Honesty Is Explosive!” where he suggested that Mr. Tomasín’s presence in the band was a publicity stunt.The members of Reynols, from left; Alan Courtis, Patricio Conlazo, Mr. Tomasín and Roberto Conlazo in their dressing room before a concert in Buenos Aires.Mr. Tomasín playing the drums during the concert in Buenos Aires.In its first years, the band struggled to find venues and labels interested in their improvisational sound. A turning point came nearly a quarter century ago, in 1998, when they unexpectedly became a house band on an Argentine public television program, which exposed them to a new audience.The job made Mr. Tomasín the first Argentine with Down syndrome to be employed by a national broadcaster.“It was revolutionary, because people with these conditions were largely hidden from public view,” said Claudio Canali, who helped produce the program.A New York Times reporter and a photographer spent a week in Argentina to interview Mr. Tomasín and document his life, both in Buenos Aires and Rio Gallegos. Mr. Tomasín speaks in short phrases that are largely understandable to a Spanish speaker, but sometimes require an accompanying relative to put them in context.Mr. Tomasín is 58, though, like many other artists he lowers his age, insisting he is 54.He was born in Buenos Aires, the second of three children of middle-class parents. His father was a Navy captain, his mother a fine arts graduate who stayed home to raise the children.In the 1960s, most Argentine families sent children with Down syndrome to special boarding schools, which in practice were little more than asylums, according to his younger sister, Jorgelina Tomasín.After visiting several of them, his parents decided to raise Mr. Tomasín at home, where he was treated no differently than his siblings.Mr. Tomasín posing with a fan after the show in Buenos Aires.Mr. Tomasín improvising on the piano while wearing his favorite Reynols T-shirt.He started showing interest in sounds as a toddler, banging on kitchen pots and playing with a family piano, prompting his grandparents to buy him a toy drum kit.Later, after coming home from school, Mr. Tomasín would go straight to his room and play all three cassettes that he owned from beginning to end, making the crooners Julio Iglesias and Palito Ortega an inescapable house presence for years, Ms. Tomasín said.By the early 1990s, the close-knit household began to separate, as his siblings grew up and left home, leaving Mr. Tomasín, by then a young adult, feeling isolated.To fill the void, his parents decided to send him to a music school, but struggled to find one that would accept him.One day, in 1993, they tried an unassuming place they came across while shopping in their Buenos Aires neighborhood, the School for the Comprehensive Formation of Musicians, which was run by young avant-garde rockers who taught classes to subsidize their rehearsal space.“‘Hi, I’m Miguel, a great famous drummer,’” Roberto Conlazo, who ran the school with his brother Patricio, recalled Mr. Tomasín saying at their introduction, despite his having never, up to that point, touched a professional drum kit.Mr. Tomasín checking his drums.From left, Patricio Conlazo Mr. Tomasín and Roberto Conlazo during a rehearsal.The school became an unexpected artistic home for Mr. Tomasín. In a country that remains deeply divided by the legacy of a military dictatorship and a Marxist insurgency, it was rare for a military family to even associate with bohemian artists, let alone entrust a child with them.But Mr. Tomasín’s family and the artists ended up becoming lifelong friends, an early example of how his lack of social prejudices has influenced others to reconsider long-held assumptions. His spontaneity and lack of insecurities made Mr. Tomasín a natural improviser, and an ideal fit for the school’s goal to create music without preconceived ideas.“We were looking for the freest musical universe possible,” said Alan Courtis, who taught at the school. “Miguel became the alarm that woke up the dormant side of our brains.”Roberto Conlazo and Mr. Courtis had already been playing in a group that eventually would become Reynols, a name loosely inspired by Burt Reynolds.After giving Mr. Tomasín some drumming lessons, they decided to bring him into the band. Their collaboration, however, got off to an uncertain start.Mr. Tomasín in the dining room at his brother’s home in Rio Gallegos, Argentina.Mr. Tomasín with his brother, Juan Mario Tomasín, and a neighborhood dog on the banks of the Rio Gallegos River.During one of their first shows, in 1994, a crowd of high school students broke into a mosh pit, which Mr. Courtis and Roberto Conlazo stoked by spraying deodorant into the audience’s faces, pulling out guitar strings with pincers and emitting bloodcurdling noise from primitive loudspeakers.When Mr. Tomasín’s father, Jorge Tomasín, approached the band after the show, they were resigned to never seeing Miguel again, sure his father would disapprove.“‘Lads, I didn’t understand a lot of what you played,” Roberto Conlazo recalled the father saying, “‘but I saw Miguel very happy. So go right ahead.’”Those words were a green light for the ensuing three decades of creativity that has produced around 120 albums, American and European tours, and collaborations with some of the world’s most respected experimental musicians. Reynols splits proceeds from shows and music sales equally, making Mr. Tomasín one of the few professional musicians with Down syndrome in the world.The band first came to broad national attention with the afternoon TV gig. A popular host, Dr. Mario Socolinsky, had interviewed Reynols on his daytime program, “Good Afternoon Health,” in which he gave health tips. Impressed with Mr. Tomasín’s integration into the band, he invited them to be the show’s house musicians, giving Reynols an unlikely job of playing to a mainstream audience five times a week for a year.Reynols’s next break came in 2001, when Mr. Courtis and Roberto Conlazo went on the band’s first U.S. tour. Although Mr. Tomasín decided not to join them, the tour introduced his work to the global underground music network that has supported the band’s subsequent career.Mr. Tomasín playing guitar during a concert.Juan Mario Tomasín, left, Miguel’s brother, and his bandmate Patricio Conlazo after a rehearsal.In the following years, the band’s focus on improvisation drove its extraordinary output of albums. Because each jam session with Mr. Tomasín could result in a different sound, the band has released dozens of them as albums on small record labels in runs of a few hundred copies.After seeing Mr. Tomasín’s performance on TV, families across Argentina started contacting the band, asking them to teach music to their children with disabilities. That led Mr. Courtis and Roberto and Patricio Conlazo to create a collective, called Sol Mayor, which brought together people with various physical and developmental disabilities to play music.Their approach, they believe, puts a spotlight on the beauty of music that does not follow Western norms, like playing in an octave scale.Inspired by work with Reynols, other musicians have started bands for people with disabilities in Norway and France.“We make music so that people enjoy it,” Mr. Tomasín said. Music is “the best, magical,” he added.Mr. Tomasín in his bedroom at his brother’s family home in Rio Gallegos.Mr. Tomasín’s family say they were able to give him the support to develop his creativity thanks in part to their relatively well-off economic position, acknowledging the social inequalities that prevent many people with disabilities from reaching their potential.At a recent sold-out Reynols concert in Buenos Aires, Mr. Tomasín sang and played all the instruments on the stage in front of 600 fans, posing for selfies with admirers after the show.Earlier this year, Mr. Tomasín moved from Buenos Aires to Rio Gallegos to live with his brother Juan Mario, a former Army officer who now teaches English. In the afternoons, Mr. Tomasín dances to Argentine folk music, cooks and gardens at a local center for people with disabilities, often wearing his favorite Reynols T-shirt.Mr. Tomasín’s bandmates say one of his greatest gifts is helping people become better versions of themselves without even being aware of his influence.“He teaches without teaching, by simply enjoying his life,” Roberto Conlazo said.Mr. Tomasín’s big plan for the near future is to stage a concert in his new town, bringing his bandmates from Buenos Aires, 1,600 miles away, and inviting his new friends.“Let them come to my school,” he said, “so we can all play together.”Mr. Tomasín participating in a folk dance class at the René Vargas Day Center in Rio Gallegos.Hisako Ueno More

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      California Bill Could Restrict the Use of Rap Lyrics in Court

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      The bill, which applies more broadly to other forms of creative expression, has unanimously passed the Senate and Assembly and could become law by the end of September.A California bill that would restrict the use of rap lyrics and other creative works as evidence in criminal proceedings has unanimously passed both the State Senate and Assembly, and could soon be signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom.The bill, introduced in February by Assemblyman Reginald Jones-Sawyer, a Democrat who represents South Los Angeles, comes amid national attention on the practice following the indictment of the Atlanta rappers Young Thug and Gunna on gang-related charges. Prosecutors have drawn on the men’s lyrics in making their case.The California measure, however, would apply more broadly to any creative works, including other types of music, poetry, film, dance, performance art, visual art and novels.“What you write could ultimately be used against you, and that could inhibit creative expression,” Mr. Jones-Sawyer said Wednesday in an interview. He noted that the bill ultimately boiled down to a question of First Amendment rights.“This is America,” he said. “You should be able to have that creativity.”Mr. Newsom has until Sep. 30 to sign the bill into law. If he neither signs nor vetoes the bill by that date, the measure would automatically become law. The law would then go into effect on Jan. 1, 2023, Mr. Jones-Sawyer said.When asked whether Mr. Newsom planned to sign the bill, his office said that it could not comment on pending legislation. “As will all measures that reach the governor’s desk, it will be evaluated on its merits,” it said.Though the bill’s genesis is in preventing rap stars’ lyrics from being weaponized against them, the measure loosely defines “creative expression” to include “forms, sounds, words, movements, or symbols.”It would require a court to evaluate whether such works can be included as evidence by weighing their “probative value” in the case against the “substantial danger of undue prejudice” that might result from including them. The court should consider the possibility that such works could be treated as “evidence of the defendant’s propensity for violence or criminal disposition, as well as the possibility that the evidence will inject racial bias into the proceedings,” the bill says.“People were going to jail merely because of their appearance,” Mr. Jones-Sawyer said. “We weren’t trying to get people off the hook. We’re just making sure that biases, especially racial biases toward African Americans, weren’t used against them in a court of law.”The bill would require that decisions about the evidence be made pretrial, out of the presence of a jury. For decades, prosecutors have used rappers’ lyrics against them even as their music has become mainstream, with critics and fans arguing that the artists should be given the same freedom to explore violence in their work as were musicians like Johnny Cash (did he really shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die?) or authors like Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote “American Psycho.”In other cases, though lyrics were not used as evidence, they were discussed in front of the jury, which “poisoned the well” by allowing bias to enter the court, according to Mr. Jones-Sawyer’s office. It also noted that while country music has a subgenre known as the “murder ballad,” it is only the lyrics of rap artists that have been singled out.Charis E. Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, who has extensively researched the use of rap lyrics in criminal proceedings, said that the way prosecutors have used defendant-authored lyrics in court was unique to rap.The practice, she said, essentially treated the lyrics as “nothing more than autobiographical accounts — denying rap the status of art.” The California bill is significant, Dr. Kubrin said, because it would require judges to consider whether the lyrics would inject racial bias into proceedings. “This is bigger than rap,” she said.Among the first notable times the tactic was used was against the rapper Snoop Dogg at his 1996 murder trial, when prosecutors cited lyrics from “Murder Was the Case.” The rapper, whose real name is Calvin Broadus, was acquitted.Snoop Dogg entering a Los Angeles court in 1996, where a prosecutor cited his lyrics during a murder trial. He was acquitted.Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressMost recently, the charges against Young Thug and Gunna have called national attention to the tactic. Both men, who have said they are innocent, were identified as members of a criminal street gang, some of whom were charged with violent crimes including murder and attempted armed robbery.Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams, co-wrote the Grammy-winning “This is America” with Childish Gambino and is one of the most influential artists to emerge from Atlanta’s hip-hop scene.In November, two New York lawmakers introduced a similar bill that would prevent lyrics from being used as evidence in criminal cases unless there was a “factual nexus between the creative expression and the facts of the case.” It passed the Senate in May.In July, U.S. Representatives Hank Johnson of Georgia and Jamaal Bowman of New York, both Democrats, introduced federal legislation, the Restoring Artistic Protection Act, which they said would protect artists from “the wrongful use of their lyrics against them.”The California bill is supported by several other music organizations and activist groups, including the Black Music Action Coalition California, the Public Defenders Association and Smart Justice California, which advocates criminal justice reform.In a statement of support from June, the Black Music Action Coalition, an advocacy organization that battles systemic racism in the music business, said that prosecutors almost exclusively weaponized rappers’ lyrics against men of color.“Creative expression should not be used as evidence of bad character,” the organization said, maintaining that the claim that themes expressed in art were an indication of the likelihood that a person was violent or dishonest was “simply false.”Harvey Mason Jr., the chief executive of the Recording Academy, which runs the Grammy Awards, said that the bill was intended to protect not only rappers, but also artists across all genres of music, and other forms of creativity.“It’s bigger than any one individual case,” Mr. Mason said. “In no way, at no time, do I feel that someone’s art should be used against them.” More

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      Kid Cudi Aspires to Guide the Kids

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      5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More

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      The Peerless Imagination of Greg Tate

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      For four decades, he set the critical standard for elegantly intricate assessments of music, art, literature and more, writing dynamically about the resilience and paradoxes of Black creativity and life.There are sentences, and then there are the writings of Greg Tate, who died on Tuesday at the age of 64. A critic and historian of music, art and so much more for over four decades, he was a singular voice, a fount of bravura essays on the fantastical creativity, determined resilience and wry paradoxes of Black creativity and life.His writing froze and shattered time, supercharged neurons, unraveled familiar knots and tied up beautiful new ones. It contained uncanny, elevated descriptions of sound and performance, offered grounded philosophical inquisitions and sprinkled in wink-nudge personal asides. It could have the cadence of smack talk, or a conspiratorial whisper. And it was patient, unfurling at exactly the pace of gestation, while somehow containing turns of phrase that appeared to be moving at warp speed.It doesn’t matter which page you open to in his crucial 1992 anthology “Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America” — just open it. Eruptions of style — of pure intellectual vigor and unhurried swagger — are everywhere.Page 123, leading into a review of Public Enemy: “Granted, Charlie Parker died laughing. Choked chicken wing perched over ’50s MTV. So? No way in hell did Bird, believing there was no competition in music, will his legacy to some second-generation be-boppers to rattle over the heads of the hip-hop nation like a rusty sabre.”Page 221, on Don DeLillo: “DeLillo’s books are inward surveys of the white supremacist soul — on the run from mounting evidence that its days are (as the latest in Black militant button-wear loves to inform us) numbered.”“When you’re younger, it’s all about expressionism, it’s all about trying to make as much noise as possible,” Tate said in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2018. “I was trying to literally approximate music on the page.”To read Tate was to be awed by a gift that verged on the extraterrestrial. But he was as meaningful and influential for the words he wrote as for the possibilities he made room for. Aspiring critics, this one included, understood: You almost certainly could not do what Tate did, but what a revelation nonetheless to learn about all the available space between the ground where mortals pecked away at keys and wherever he resided. There were whole galaxies of possibility to explore, so many fertile places you might land.Fearless isn’t exactly the word for how Tate approached his subjects — that would imply that to honor one’s own intellectual truth was in some way contingent on, or mindful of, the acquiescence of others. Maybe boundless is better. He rightly understood that the scope of criticism extended far beyond the borders of the subject work. The subject was the pretext, the intro, the foyer to a whole house.Tate began writing in the late 1970s, and began contributing in The Village Voice in 1981. He moved to New York from Washington, D.C., soon after, and sought out the city’s creative spasms: jazz, art, literature, newly emergent hip-hop.In that era, the alt-weekly was the medium most comfortable publishing writing with high stakes, open ears, indelible flair, infinite possibility. And in that ecosystem, Tate was the lodestar. Take “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke,” a visionary essay which appeared in The Voice in 1986 that called for a “popular poststructuralism — accessible writing bent on deconstructing the whole of Black culture.” It was a call to critical arms to rise to the “postnationalist” output of the time — in short, Tate wanted peers as ambitious and wild-minded as the culture he was covering..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}When he loved something, he was bracing. On Miles Davis: “‘Bitches Brew’ is an orchestral marvel because it fuses James Brown’s antiphonal riffing against a metaphoric bass drone with Sly’s minimalist polyrhythmic melodies and Jimi’s concept of painting pictures with ordered successions of electronic sounds.”When he was frustrated by something, he was bracing. In a roasting of Michael Jackson’s “Bad,” and in a way, of Jackson himself: “Jackson’s decolorized flesh reads as the buppy version of Dorian Gray, a blaxploitation nightmare that offers this moral: Stop, the face you save may be your own.” (When Jackson died, in 2009, Tate’s memorial tribute loudly affirmed Jackson’s place in the soul pantheon while still agonizing over the personal choices Jackson made, especially in his later years.)And he planted flags early. Critics before Tate had written about rap music, of course, but his early pieces on Eric B. & Rakim, Public Enemy, De La Soul and others stand as the definitive critical engagements of their day. They also made the case not just for a hip-hop canon but for hip-hop as canon.Not long after “Flyboy” came out in 1992, Tate brought his pen to Vibe magazine, which in its infancy was underpinned by a downtown New York cosmohemian sensibility that he helped shape with his mere presence.His column, “Black-Owned,” was a staple and a megaphone trumpeting the most progressive creators across disciplines. In the October 1993 issue, one of the magazine’s first, he wrote a dynamic full-page poem called “What Is Hip-Hop?”: “Hip-hop is inverse capitalism/Hip-hop is reverse colonialism.”In 1995, he sat with Richard Pryor: “You literally have to go to Shakespeare, James Joyce, or James Baldwin to find readings of human folly as incisive as Pryor’s. Yet Pryor has it one up on those masters of the word: He didn’t need exclamation points — his body movement was his punctuation.”On D’Angelo’s “Voodoo,” in 1999: “There are times when the music on this disc sounds so raw, so naked and exposed, you’ll be tempted to throw a blanket over its brittle, shivering bones.” On TV on the Radio, in 2006: “Lead singer Tunde Adebimpe has a wandering tenor wail that seems undecided between Catholicism’s four-part chorales, doo-wop’s street-corner symphonies and New Wave’s girly-man blues.”Full disclosure — I assigned the TV on the Radio review, one of my first decisions when I joined the magazine as music editor. The opportunity to bring Tate back into those pages was a gift. (He also was a relentless mentor and connector — he introduced me to one of the first people I hired there.) By that point, Tate’s sui generis brilliance was widely acknowledged in our circles, and still barely touched by others. Showcasing his critical pirouetting was meant to serve as a beacon, and also a simple acknowledgment of the way he affected every writer I cared about and learned from — we’re all Tate’s children. I still buy “Flyboy” every time I see it in a bookstore. I never want to be too far away from it, lest I forget how vast the cosmos is. More