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      in Movies

      ‘My Darling Supermarket’ Review: Cosmic Tales From the Checkout Lane

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘My Darling Supermarket’ Review: Cosmic Tales From the Checkout LaneThe director Tali Yankelevich applies an experimental flair to her documentary about supermarket workers in Brazil.A scene from the documentary “My Darling Supermarket.”Credit…Cinema TropicalFeb. 25, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETSomewhere in São Paulo, Brazil, there’s a supermarket that looks awfully familiar. It has white fluorescent lights and endless shopping lanes. Every day, there’s bread to bake and meat to grind. It’s the kind of store you might find anywhere in the world. Yet, by the end of the slight but intriguingly strange documentary “My Darling Supermarket,” it might as well be on Mars.“Just ordinary people doing their jobs — would anyone want to watch that?” chuckles a manager.The director Tali Yankelevich tackles this challenge to mixed results, moving spryly between interviews with employees and observational footage, captured with experimental flair, of the store’s many rote operations.[embedded content]There’s a forklift operator who spends his free time building cities on a cellphone game; a custodian with some decent pipes; a flirty bread maker interested in quantum physics. A standout character is an ebullient baker with dreams of Tokyo, who sometimes wanders the aisles in full anime cosplay.Yankelevich occasionally glimpses deeper truths from her subjects, but it’s easy to wonder what such unfocused portraits communicate beyond the obvious fact that grocery-store workers are humans with personalities, too! Meanwhile, potentially interesting, distinguishing details about Brazilian culture are muted by the director’s commitment to abstraction.Better late than never, the film’s spiritual thrust becomes clear by the third act. The stark symmetry of the shelved merchandise and the eerily dissonant score assumes an otherworldly, ritualistic power when our subjects begin musing on faith and the nature of existence. The cinematographer Gustavo Almeida’s camera glides around the store like a satellite drifting through the interdimensional cosmos. For a spell, I was reminded of what supermarkets felt like as a child: vast alien playgrounds.My Darling SupermarketNot Rated. In Portuguese, with subtitles Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. Watch on Film Forum’s virtual cinema.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Music

      Report: New York City’s Arts and Recreation Employment Down by 66 Percent

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeBake: Maximalist BrowniesListen: To Pink SweatsGrow: RosesUnwind: With Ambience VideosAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyReport: New York City’s Arts and Recreation Employment Down by 66 PercentThe New York State comptroller’s office details the effects of the pandemic’s devastation and says a full recovery would be made only with government assistance.The arts, entertainment and recreation sector had seen the largest drop of all the parts of the city’s economy, the report says.Credit…David S. Allee for The New York TimesFeb. 24, 2021, 1:59 p.m. ETEmployment in New York City’s arts, entertainment and recreation sector plummeted by 66 percent from December 2019 to December 2020, according to a report released on Wednesday by the New York State Comptroller’s office that detailed the economy’s devastation from the coronavirus and the serious obstacles to recovery.The report from Thomas DiNapoli’s office said that the sector had seen the largest drop of all the parts of the city’s economy. A full comeback, it said, would depend upon significant government assistance.The sector “is a cornerstone of the city’s ability to attract businesses, residents and visitors alike,” the report said. “Yet the sector relies on audiences who gather to take part in shared experiences, and this way of life has been significantly disrupted by the pandemic.”Although nearly all business has been affected by the pandemic, its impact on arts, entertainment and recreation entities has been particularly striking.From 2009 to 2019, employment in the sector — which in this report includes performing arts, spectator sports, gambling, entertainment, recreation, museums, parks and historical sites — grew by 42 percent, faster than the 30 percent rate for total private sector employment.In 2019, according to the report, more than 90,000 people in 6,250 establishments were employed in the arts, entertainment and recreation. Those jobs had an average salary of $79,300 and provided $7.4 billion in total wages. In addition to businesses with employees, the report said, there are a large number of people who were self-employed, including artists and musicians.In February 2020, just before the pandemic shutdown in New York City, nearly 87,000 people were employed in the arts, entertainment and recreation sector there, the report said. Many major institutions announced closures on March 12. A statewide stay-at-home order went into effect on March 22. By April, employment in the sector stood at 34,100 jobs.Budgets at arts and recreation establishments have been “decimated,” the report said, and some organizations and facilities have struggled even as they were able to reopen, saying reduced revenues because of capacity restrictions, as well as diminished ticket sales, have limited income and necessitated budget cuts.Many performing arts venues are still closed. Most Broadway theaters do not expect to reopen until June at the earliest, the report noted, adding that the Metropolitan Opera and the New York City Ballet announced they would not be reopening until September.“Arts and recreation face an uphill climb to recover from the damage wrought,” the report said, adding: “The challenges facing the arts and entertainment sector require direct and impactful support from policymakers to maintain the city’s extensive cultural offerings.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Television

      What Frustrated Workers Heard in That Dolly Parton Ad

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyScreenlandWhat Frustrated Workers Heard in That Dolly Parton AdA protest song about degrading work becomes a rousing call to do even more work after that.Credit…Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-GhadbanFeb. 18, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETWe open to shades of gray and beige and what must be the world’s dullest office. In case you didn’t notice the overwhelming tedium, though, there’s help: One actor’s heavy eyelids are dragging his whole body downward, and another, slumped onto one elbow, seems to be collapsing so thoroughly into his desk that he might merge with it. By the time we see papers thudding into the inbox of a young woman — the camera loses focus as she contemplates the files, as if it shares her despair — we’ve gotten the message: Work is where joy goes to die.Then a flicker of hope crosses the woman’s face. She has looked up at the clock, which is moments away from striking 5. She opens her laptop, where we see our first glimpse of real color, in the website for a dance-fitness business she’s starting. After one last edit, she hits publish, then closes the laptop to an office transformed. Her gray sweater is now a red tank top, and she dances past her officemates, all now in bright outfits, converting their cubicles into creative small businesses: an art studio, a bakery, a woodworking shop, a landscaping business that seems to specialize in topiary sculptures, something involving scuba. Their life force is restored, because their jobs and their dreams are now one.The message is familiar, and classically American: bootstraps and businesses, Horatio Alger for the Instagram generation. If this ad — aired by Squarespace, a service for building and hosting websites, during this year’s Super Bowl — had only had a different soundtrack, it might well have been forgotten by Monday.But all this was set to Dolly Parton singing a reimagined version of her famous “9 to 5,” originally written for the hit 1980 comedy of the same name. In that movie, Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin play office workers who semiaccidentally kidnap their sexist boss and, in his absence, transform their office, offering flexible hours, on-site child care and equal pay for men and women. The movie, in turn, was inspired by real women: a group of Boston secretaries who banded together in 1973 to fight against degrading and unfair working conditions. They are the ones who named their cause after the eight daily hours of their lives they wanted to make better.The updated song moves work into the remaining hours: It’s called “5 to 9,” and it is, according to Squarespace, “a modern rallying cry for all the dreamers working to turn an after-hours passion or project into a career.” The two songs are bizarro images of each other: both feisty and plucky, the same tune with very different messages. In the original lyrics: “They let you dream just to watch them shatter,” and “It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it/And you spend your life putting money in his wallet.” Now Parton offers that you could “Change your life, do something that gives it meaning/With a website that is worthy of your dreaming.” By the end, she’s belting: “5 to 9, you keep working, working, working, working.” Where once was righteous outrage at a broken system, there is now self-help. And grinding.After the ad aired, as Squarespace tried to promote the hashtag #5to9, a counterversion appeared: #9to5ShouldBeEnough. The ad clearly felt, to many of its viewers, like yet another glorification of an economy in which people must work more jobs, for ever longer hours, just to survive to the next paycheck — often for gig-economy companies that classify them as “independent” contract laborers, instead of offering the sorts of protected, benefited, living-wage jobs for which the women of the original 9to5 group continue to fight. It didn’t help that the gig-economy mainstays DoorDash and UberEats aired their own Super Bowl ads branding themselves as genial supporters of small businesses. DoorDash used the “Sesame Street” song “People in Your Neighborhood”; UberEats resurrected the tongue-in-cheek anti-corporate message of “Wayne’s World.” Both companies have taken in billions during the pandemic, skimming hefty fees off the struggling local restaurants whose food they deliver.Squarespace’s ad was a little different: Starting your own business is not the same as working in the gig economy, no matter how much gig-economy companies like to frame working for them as “being your own boss.” Still, it’s striking that the jobs in the ad — the sorts of creatively fulfilling jobs that characters have in romantic comedies — are also the sorts that are ever rarer and more untenable in our increasingly corporatized economy. Rather than reflecting the work most people actually do in their second shifts, they offer a dream that papers over reality.‘5 to 9, you keep working, working, working, working.’This was a poor message, AdWeek chided, at a time when “hustle culture feels downright toxic.” Inevitably, though, debate about the ad landed not on Squarespace, but on the shoulders of Parton herself. Was she profiting off the fetishization of an exploitative economy, or was she just another hard-working American with her own side hustle? (There’s an ad within the ad, for Parton’s new fragrance line, which uses a Squarespace site). A Washington Post headline referred to the ad as “Dolly Parton’s betrayal,” while one in Newsweek argued that the ad “Shows We Live in a Dystopia” — but only after cautiously averring that “Dolly Parton Is Awesome.”Parton is beloved for her music, her savvy, her generosity — but also for being the rare celebrity who has managed to rise above the polarization of a country that seems to agree on little except its admiration of her. She is careful not to appear to choose sides in our culture wars, and that circumspection creates a space for us to project, ardently, our own politics onto her choices. Perhaps she was surprised to learn how many people found an ad about hustling after your dream job — the real story of her own hardscrabble-to-superstardom life — to be political. But viewers of the ad saw it in the context of their own experiences: endlessly working, working, working, working.What’s interesting about the two versions of the song isn’t what they tell us about Parton. It’s what they show us about how, four decades later, our economy is still broadly failing the people who toil inside it. The original lyrics offer frustration and disbelief — “What a way to make a living!” — and a clear diagnosis of the problem: companies that aren’t required to respect or take care of their workers. In Squarespace’s hands, the words become “a whole new way to make a living” — a dream of escape, of going out on your own because you’ve given up on an economy that refuses to look out for you.But listeners reacting online kept mishearing that new line. They detected something a lot closer to how they actually experience our economy. Endless hustling, they heard, now offers neither solution nor escape; it is, simply, “the only way to make a living.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Movies

      A ‘Great Cultural Depression’ Looms for Legions of Unemployed Performers

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA ‘Great Cultural Depression’ Looms for Legions of Unemployed PerformersWith theaters and concert halls shuttered, unemployment in the arts has cut deeper than in restaurants and other hard-hit industries.Soon after the pandemic struck, a year’s worth of bookings vanished for the acclaimed violinist Jennifer Koh, who found herself streaming concerts from her apartment.Credit…Elias Williams for The New York TimesDec. 26, 2020Updated 5:32 a.m. ETIn the top echelons of classical music, the violinist Jennifer Koh is by any measure a star.With a dazzling technique, she has ridden a career that any aspiring Juilliard grad would dream about — appearing with leading orchestras, recording new works, and performing on some of the world’s most prestigious stages.Now, nine months into a contagion that has halted most public gatherings and decimated the performing arts, Ms. Koh, who watched a year’s worth of bookings evaporate, is playing music from her living room and receiving food stamps.[embedded content]Pain can be found in nearly every nook of the economy. Millions of people have lost their jobs and tens of thousands of businesses have closed since the coronavirus pandemic spread across the United States. But even in these extraordinary times, the losses in the performing arts and related sectors have been staggering.During the quarter ending in September, when the overall unemployment rate averaged 8.5 percent, 52 percent of actors, 55 percent of dancers and 27 percent of musicians were out of work, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. By comparison, the jobless rate was 27 percent for waiters; 19 percent for cooks; and about 13 percent for retail salespeople over the same period.In many areas, arts venues — theaters, clubs, performance spaces, concert halls, festivals — were the first businesses to close, and they are likely to be among the last to reopen. “My fear is we’re not just losing jobs, we’re losing careers,” said Adam Krauthamer, president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians in New York. He said 95 percent of the local’s 7,000 members are not working on a regular basis because of the mandated shutdown. “It will create a great cultural depression,” he said.The new $15 billion worth of stimulus aid for performance venues and cultural institutions that Congress approved this week — which was thrown into limbo after President Trump criticized the bill — will not end the mass unemployment for performers anytime soon. And it only extends federal unemployment aid through mid-March.The public may think of performers as A-list celebrities, but most never get near a red carpet or an awards show. The overwhelming majority, even in the best times, don’t benefit from Hollywood-size paychecks or institutional backing. They work season to season, weekend to weekend or day to day, moving from one gig to the next.The median annual salary for full-time musicians and singers was $42,800; it was $40,500 for actors; and $36,500 for dancers and choreographers, according to a National Endowment for the Arts analysis. Many artists work other jobs to cobble together a living, often in the restaurant, retail and hospitality industries — where work has also dried up.They are an integral part of local economies and communities in every corner of rural, suburban and urban America, and they are seeing their life’s work and livelihoods suddenly vanish. Terry Burrell, an actor and singer in Atlanta, saw the tour of her show “Angry, Raucous and Gorgeously Shameless” canceled after the virus struck.Credit…Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York Times“We’re talking about a year’s worth of work that just went away,” said Terry Burrell, whose touring show, “Angry, Raucous and Gorgeously Shameless,” was canceled. Now she is home with her husband in Atlanta, collecting unemployment insurance, and hoping she won’t have to dip into her 401(k) retirement account.Linda Jean Stokley, a fiddler and part of the Kentucky duo the Local Honeys with Monica Hobbs, said, “We’re resilient and are used to not having regular paychecks.” But since March hardly anyone has paid even the minor fees required by their contracts, she said: “Someone owed us $75 and wouldn’t even pay.”Then there’s Tim Wu, 31, a D.J., singer and producer, who normally puts on around 100 shows a year as Elephante at colleges, festivals and nightclubs. He was in Ann Arbor, Mich., doing a sound check for a new show called “Diplomacy” in mid-March when New York shut down. Mr. Wu returned to Los Angeles the next day. All his other bookings were canceled — and most of his income.Mr. Wu, and hundreds of thousands of freelancers like him, are not the only ones taking a hit. The broader arts and culture sector that includes Hollywood and publishing constitutes an $878 billion industry that is a bigger part of the American economy than sports, transportation, construction or agriculture. The sector supports 5.1 million wage and salary jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. They include agents, makeup artists, hair stylists, tailors, janitors, stage hands, ushers, electricians, sound engineers, concession sellers, camera operators, administrators, construction crews, designers, writers, directors and more. “If cities are going to rebound, they’re not going to do it without arts and cultural creatives,” said Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and School of Cities.Steph Simon, a hip-hop artist from Tulsa, had been booked to perform at South by Southwest when the virus hit and eliminated the rest of his gigs for the year. Credit…September Dawn Bottoms/The New York TimesThis year, Steph Simon, 33, of Tulsa, finally started working full time as a hip-hop musician after a decade of minimum-wage jobs cleaning carpets or answering phones to pay the bills.He was selected to perform at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, played regular gigs at home and on tour, and produced “Fire in Little Africa,” an album commemorating the 1921 massacre of Black residents of Tulsa by white rioters.“This was projected to be my biggest year financially,” said Mr. Simon, who lives with his girlfriend and his two daughters, and was earning about $2,500 a month as a musician. “Then the world shut down,” he said. A week after the festival was canceled, he was back working as a call center operator, this time at home, for about 40 hours a week, with a part-time job at a fast-food restaurant on the weekends.In November, on his birthday, he caught Covid-19, but has since recovered.Performers on payrolls have suffered, too. With years of catch-as-catch-can acting gigs and commercials behind her, Robyn Clark started working as a performer at Disneyland after the last recession. She has been playing a series of characters in the park’s California Adventure — Phiphi the photographer, Molly the messenger and Donna the Dog Lady — several times a week, doing six shows a day.“It was the first time in my life I had security,” Ms. Clark said. It was also the first time she had health insurance, paid sick leave and vacation.In March, she was furloughed, though Disney is continuing to cover her health insurance.“I have unemployment and a generous family,” said Ms. Clark, explaining how she has managed to continue paying for rent and food.Many performers are relying on charity. The Actors Fund, a service organization for the arts, has raised and distributed $18 million since the pandemic started for basic living expenses to 14,500 people.“I’ve been at the Actors Fund for 36 years,” said Barbara S. Davis, the chief operating officer. “Through September 11th, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 recession, industry shutdowns. There’s clearly nothing that compares to this.”Higher-paid television and film actors have more of a cushion, but they, too, have endured disappointments and lost opportunities. Jack Cutmore-Scott and Meaghan Rath, now his wife, had just been cast in a new CBS pilot, “Jury Duty,” when the pandemic shut down filming.“I’d had my costume fitting and we were about to go and do the table read the following week, but we never made it,” Mr. Cutmore-Scott said. After several postponements, they heard in September that CBS was bailing out altogether.Many live performers have looked for new ways to pursue their art, turning to video, streaming and other platforms. Carla Gover’s tour of dancing to and playing traditional Appalachian music as well as a folk opera she composed, “Cornbread and Tortillas,” were all canceled. “I had some long dark nights of the soul trying to envision what I could do,” said Ms. Gover, wholives in Lexington, Ky., and has three children.She started writing weekly emails to all her contacts, sharing videos and offering online classes in flatfoot dancing and clogging. The response was enthusiastic. “I figured out how to use hashtags and now I have a new kind of business,” Ms. Gover said.But if technology enables some artists to share their work, it doesn’t necessarily help them earn much or even any money.The violinist Ms. Koh, known for her devotion to promoting new artists and music, donated her time to create the “Alone Together” project, raising donations to commission compositions and then performing them over Instagram from her apartment.The project was widely praised, but as Ms. Koh said, it doesn’t produce income. “I am lucky,” Ms. Koh insisted. Unlike many of her friends and colleagues, she managed to hang onto her health insurance thanks to a teaching gig at the New School, and she got a forbearance on her mortgage payments through March. Many engagements have also been rescheduled — if not until 2022.She ticks off the list of friends and colleagues who have had to move out of their homes or have lost their health insurance, their income and nearly every bit of their work.“It’s just decimating the field,” she said. “It concerns me when I look at the future.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Theater

      Actors and Writers and Now, Congressional Lobbyists

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyStanding Up For TheaterActors and Writers and Now, Congressional LobbyistsBe an #ArtsHero started with a failed effort to extend unemployment benefits. It’s gone on to be a prime proponent of the message: Cultural work is labor.The founding members of the advocacy group Be an #ArtsHero, clockwise from top left: Jenny Grace Makholm, Carson Elrod, Brooke Ishibashi and Matthew-Lee Erlbach.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDec. 23, 2020Art is what binds us. It illuminates the human condition. It’s good for the soul.Those are the kind of arguments you usually hear when artists and cultural institutions ask for money. The advocacy group Be an #ArtsHero, which was created this summer by four New York theatermakers, takes a different approach.“We are an industry, not a cause,” one of the volunteer group’s four organizers, the writer-director Matthew-Lee Erlbach, said of the arts sector in a recent video interview. “According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, we generated $877 billion. It’s more than agriculture and mining combined.” Yet, he pointed out, there’s no federal department of arts and culture, while transportation and agriculture have spots in the cabinet.Erlbach and his Arts Hero founding colleagues — the actors Carson Elrod and Brooke Ishibashi and the writer-director-performer Jenny Grace Makholm — are not cultural mucky-mucks used to the corridors of power. When the performing arts shut down, what was on their mind was their own survival.Ishibashi said the campaign began simply as a way to rally the sector to advocate for the extension of Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation that was due to expire in August.“We started by cold-calling people and building out assets and saying, ‘Here’s a tool kit, please spread the word.’ We lobby differently because we lobby for ourselves and our own desperate need. We are all worried about how we’re going to pay our rent and our mortgages.”The unemployment compensation wasn’t extended at the time, but Be an #ArtsHero forged ahead. They started creating economic reports for members of Congress — in a joint conversation, Ishibashi and Erlbach referred casually to relief efforts the group is backing, an alphabet soup of acronyms like CALMER (Culture, Arts, Libraries and Museums Emergency Relief) and DAWN (Defend Arts Workers Now).Following up on the lobbying efforts of long-running organizations like Americans for the Arts, the group has pushed to help shape legislative language so bills include relief to artists and workers, not just institutions. Erlbach’s widely circulated open letter to the U.S. Senate arguing for emergency relief drew 16,000 signatories, including rank-and-file members of the culture sector and celebrities, institutional and union leaders, and advocacy groups.The letter hammered the group’s essential point: The arts matter because they represent a lot of money and they create jobs.“We’re here to change the conversation so arts workers can understand their intrinsic value because it’s tied to an economic worth, a dollar amount,” Ishibashi said. “Those numbers are unimpeachable.”Erlbach added, “Ironically, the arts has a story problem in this country.”“We are here to become a legislative priority, and part of doing that is reframing the paradigm that we are labor,” he said. “Whether you’re an usher, a milliner, a museum docent, an administrator or a publicist, you’re an arts and cultural worker. ”Erlbach, who leads the group’s political-outreach team, says that Be an #ArtsHero has met with representatives from dozens of House members and over 60 Senate offices.“It felt like the legislative process is something someone else does,” he said. “Now that’s something that we do.”The stimulus bill just passed by Congress delivered some good news for the arts, including weekly unemployment supplements. “At $300, what passed was not enough,” Be an #ArtsHero said in an email statement. “But it was something, and we are proud to have lent our voice to the cause of getting it.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More