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      in Television

      Brooklyn Man Finds New Life in Crime (Writing)

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      It was over lunch in 2013 that the literary agent Eric Simonoff asked Jonathan Ames, “So what do you want to do with your writing career?”Ames replied, “Have you read Richard Stark?”Simonoff confessed that he had not. Moreover, he had no idea who Richard Stark was.“Well,” Ames explained to his old friend and new agent, “I’d like to be like Richard Stark.”Richard Stark is one of the pseudonyms for the prolific writer Donald Westlake who, under that name, published over 20 novels centered on a character named Parker. The Parker series, with titles like “The Hunter,” “Butcher’s Moon” and “Nobody Runs Forever,” features a classic antihero: a no-nonsense criminal who speaks tersely and acts decisively, most often with his fists.Ames, in his 20-year writing career, had written perhaps most frequently about a character named “Jonathan Ames.” Before he departed New York for a television job in Los Angeles in 2014, he was well known in his hometown as an essayist, novelist, performer and bon vivant. “Jonathan Ames” turned up as the lead in his comedic confessional essays, collected in books like “What’s Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer,” and in the short story “Bored to Death,” which in 2009 became an HBO comedy series starring Jason Schwartzman. On that show, Schwartzman is a neurotic Brooklyn writer who dreams of writing pulp novels and who, inspired by his love of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, decides to advertise his services as an amateur private detective.“We were shooting the first season and we were coming up with the graphics for the opening, which showed a pulp novel called ‘Bored to Death’ opening up and showing the actual words of my story,” Ames, 57, said this month over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “I said, ‘Oh my God, this is so cool. I wish I was writing books with covers like that.’ And one of the writers said to me, ‘Jonathan, you have a TV show now.’”The implication, of course, being that whatever rung on the literary ladder that involves writing pulp fiction, Ames, a newly minted HBO showrunner, had long since climbed past it. “But he picked up on something,” said Ames. “The fact that, even then, my Holy Grail was to be writing crime novels.”This month, Ames has captured his personal Holy Grail, in the form of a detective novel titled “A Man Named Doll.” Published by Mulholland Books, it is the first in a proposed series (there’s already a Netflix film in the works) about a Los Angeles-based ex-cop and private detective named Happy Doll. (No spoilers, but suffice to say that the circumstances leading to his unusual first name are not, themselves, happy.)“A Man Named Doll” comes out on April 20.Crime readers may notice some superficial similarities between Doll and the kind of fabled gumshoes that Ames has long been enamored with — figures like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, or quick-fisted pulp avatars like Parker or Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. But it quickly becomes clear that Happy owes more to the rumpled Marlowe played by Elliott Gould in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” than to any hard-boiled toughs inhabited by Humphrey Bogart.Doll, for example, may be the first private detective in Los Angeles who’s in Freudian analysis five days a week. He is certainly the first one to describe his relationship with his beloved dog as “disturbed,” saying, “We’re like two old-fashioned closeted bachelors who cohabitate and don’t think the rest of the world knows we’re lovers.” Doll is less Jack Reacher than, well, Jonathan Ames.“He’s a neurotic Reacher with the soul of a poet,” said Joshua Kendall, the editorial director of Mulholland. When he received “A Man Named Doll,” he said, he recognized it as perfect for Mulholland, an imprint that specializes in both contemporary and classic genre fiction. But he also realized that “one of the great pleasures of the book is seeing the Ames pop out.”Of Ames’s detour toward crime writing, Simonoff, his literary agent, said, “He was clearly called in this direction. But the novel also exhibits the charm and quirkiness of classic Jonathan Ames. There’s a sweetness to it that isn’t there in the typical Parker novel.” (Since their lunch, Simonoff has happily brushed up on his Westlake.)Ames has spent most of his decades-long literary career bed-hopping promiscuously between forms and mediums: He’s been genre-fluid but pulp-curious.“Bored to Death” was a warmly satirical take on hard-boiled themes, set against a hipster Brooklyn backdrop. And on assignment from the online publication Byliner, Ames wrote a novella-length story, “You Were Never Really Here,” which was adapted into a dark and violent film directed by Lynne Ramsay and starring Joaquin Phoenix that premiered at Cannes in 2017. With that story, Ames said, “I did have this goal of not being funny at all. I just wanted to write something really lean and dark.” He loved the challenge of creating “an express train of a plot, where you can’t put it down.”There is a well-worn piece of writing advice, often traced to Aristotle, that contends that the perfect ending of any story should be surprising yet inevitable, and the fact that Ames has written a detective novel seems exactly that: surprising yet inevitable.“At a certain point in my life, starting back in the ’80s, I began to read almost entirely crime fiction,” Ames said. “You’re studying the form — you’re kind of doing an apprenticeship.”Adam Amengual for The New York TimesOther authors have veered unexpectedly into crime writing, either as a commercial diversion or out of love for the form. Graham Greene famously classified certain of his novels as “entertainments.” (Ames said, “I often liked the entertainments best of all.”) Denis Johnson wrote the pulp homage “Nobody Move,” and the Booker Prize winner John Banville wrote crime fiction as Benjamin Black.Yet for Ames, “A Man Named Doll” is not a dalliance with detective fiction so much as the consummation of a decades-long courtship. “At a certain point in my life, starting back in the ’80s, I began to read almost entirely crime fiction,” he said. “You’re studying the form — you’re kind of doing an apprenticeship.”“A Man Named Doll” feels both like the culmination of that apprenticeship and the logical successor to his comedic autobiographical writing, in which, after all, he cast himself as a lone figure roaming in the naked city, a broken romantic embroiled in adventures that often veered toward the illicit.Ames’s former teacher, Joyce Carol Oates, once gave a quote to The Paris Review that has stuck with him. Oates, he recalled, had said that, in “Ulysses,” James Joyce had used the structure of the “Odyssey” as “his bridge to get his soldiers across.”For him, pulp has become that bridge, he said.“The soldiers being my wish as a writer to observe, to describe, to form sentences, to entertain and to share my fears, my hopes, my, you know, despair — and maybe some of my courage. It’s important,” Ames added, “to try and pass on courage to the reader.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. More

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      in Music

      Rusty Young, Country-Rock Pioneer, Is Dead at 75

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      As a founding member of the band Poco, he helped define a genre and establish the pedal steel guitar as an integral voice in West Coast rock.Rusty Young, a founding member of the popular country-rock group Poco and a key figure in establishing the pedal steel guitar as an integral voice in the West Coast rock of the late 1960s and ’70s, died on Wednesday at his home in Davisville, Mo. He was 75.His publicist, Mike Farley, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Young played steel guitar with Poco for more than a half-century. Along with other Los Angeles-based rock bands like the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, Poco was among the architects of the country-rock movement of the late ’60s, which incorporated traditional country instrumentation into predominantly rock arrangements. The Eagles and scores of other bands would follow in their wake.Formed in 1968, Poco originally included the singer-guitarists Jim Messina and Richie Furay — both formerly of Buffalo Springfield, another pioneering country-rock band from Los Angeles — along with Mr. Young, the drummer George Grantham and the bassist Randy Meisner, a future member of the Eagles. (Timothy B. Schmit, another future Eagle, replaced Mr. Meisner after he left the band in 1969.)Poco initially came together for a high-profile show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, not long after Mr. Furay had invited Mr. Young to play pedal steel guitar on his composition “Kind Woman,” the closing track on Buffalo Springfield’s farewell album, “Last Time Around.” The music that Poco made generally employed twangier production and was more populist in orientation than that of Buffalo Springfield, a band that had at times gravitated toward experimentalism and obfuscation.Mr. Furay’s song “Pickin’ Up the Pieces,” the title track of Poco’s debut album in 1969, served as a statement of purpose:Well there’s just a little bit of magicIn the country music we’re singin’So let’s begin.We’re bringin’ you back down home where the folks are happySittin’ pickin’ and a-grinnin’Casually, you and meWe’ll pick up the pieces, uh-huh.Poco in 1973, clockwise from left: Paul Cotton, Mr. Young, Richie Furay, Timothy B. Schmit and George Grantham.Gijsbert Hanekroot/RedfernsAt once keening and lyrical, Mr. Young’s pedal steel work imbued the group’s music with its rustic signature sound and helped create a prominent place for the steel guitar among roots-conscious California rock bands.“I added color to Richie’s country-rock songs, and that was the whole idea, to use country-sounding instruments,” Mr. Young explained in a 2014 interview with Goldmine magazine, referring to Mr. Furay’s compositions.But Mr. Young, who also played banjo, Dobro and mandolin, was not averse to musical experimentation. “I pushed the envelope on steel guitar, playing it with a fuzz tone, because nobody was doing that,” he told Goldmine. He also played the pedal steel through a Leslie speaker, much as a Hammond B3 organist would, causing some listeners to assume he was indeed playing an organ.Mr. Young was not among Poco’s original singers or songwriters. But he emerged as one of the group’s frontmen, along with the newcomer Paul Cotton, after the departure of Mr. Messina in 1971 and Mr. Furay in 1973. Mr. Young would go on to write and sing the lead vocal on “Crazy Love,” the band’s biggest hit, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard adult contemporary chart (and No. 17 on the pop chart) in 1979.He also wrote and sang lead on “Rose of Cimarron,” another of Poco’s more enduring recordings from the ’70s, and orchestrated the 1989 reunion of the group’s original members for the album “Legacy,” which, like the 1978 platinum-selling “Legend,” yielded a pair of Top 40 singles.Norman Russell Young was born on Feb. 23, 1946, in Long Beach, Calif., one of three children of Norman John and Ruth (Stephenson) Young. His father, an electrician, and his mother, a typist, took him to country music bars, where he was captivated by the steel guitar players as a child.He grew up in Denver, where he began playing the lap steel guitar at age 6. As a teenager, he worked with local psychedelic and country bands.After moving to Los Angeles, but before joining Poco, he turned down an invitation to become a member of the Flying Burrito Brothers, which at the time featured Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, formerly of the Byrds.Mr. Young performing at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles in 2018.Timothy Norris/WireImageAfter Mr. Cotton’s departure from Poco in 2010 over a financial dispute, Mr. Young became the group’s sole frontman. The band made its final album, “All Fired Up,” in 2013, the same year Mr. Young was inducted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in St. Louis. He released his first solo album, “Waitin’ for the Sun,” in 2017, and performed sporadically with the most recent version of Poco until the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020.Mr. Young is survived by his wife of 17 years, Mary Brennan Young; a daughter, Sara; a son, Will; a sister, Corine; and three grandsons. His brother, Ron, died in 2002.Mr. Young’s emergence as a singer and songwriter in Poco in the late ’70s, after almost a decade as a supporting instrumentalist, was as opportune as it was fortuitous.“The band didn’t need another singer-songwriter when Richie and Jim were in the band,” he explained, referring to Mr. Furay and Mr. Messina, in his 2014 Goldmine interview. “My job was to play steel guitar and make the music part of it. So when my job changed, it opened up a whole lot of opportunity for me. So I liked the way things went.” More

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      in Movies

      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 Music

      Screamers, a Missing Link of Los Angeles Punk, Is Missing No More

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      An archival release marks the technical debut of a band that helped build a scene, 44 years later.K.K. Barrett hadn’t spoken to Tommy Gear in two decades when he reached out about releasing a secret stash of their old music. There were no hard feelings — the two had simply grown apart over the years — but it was tricky business, regardless. Their band, Screamers, was something of a phantom in the history of Los Angeles punk rock.Despite being one of the most popular acts of the scene’s budding years in the late ’70s, routinely packing shows alongside peers like X and Germs, there had never been an official Screamers release. No LPs, no EPs — not even one measly single. To a certain subset of punk fans, Barrett may as well have been suggesting that he and Gear release the true contents of Area 51. But a five-song, 15-minute 12-inch called “Screamers Demo Hollywood 1977” will be out on Friday.“It wasn’t meant to have an afterlife,” said Barrett, 68, who’s best known as a production designer (“Being John Malkovich,” “Her”), on a video call. “It was just something we did. You document things.”The set was recorded at the band’s then-headquarters, a charming Craftsman in Hollywood dubbed “the Wilton Hilton,” solely as a means to get gigs early on. But after the music was recovered from Barrett’s archives 40-plus years later, and dusted off by the label Superior Viaduct, Gear relented.“Honestly, it wasn’t as if we were adverse to a record per se,” said Gear, the group’s main architect and songwriter, along with the vocalist Tomata du Plenty, in a phone interview. “We actually had conversations with managers and record company people at the time, because they clearly thought we were drawing people to clubs and getting press. But frankly, they didn’t know what to do with us. We didn’t fit their paradigm. And, of course, they were making offers that were useless, anyway.”Gear was speaking on the record about his former band for the first time in at least 30 years, by his estimation. Any lack of promotion on his part aside, though, the shadow of Screamers has been growing substantially since the rise of internet-aided bootlegs and YouTube. These “Hollywood 1977” demos are among the hissy, unauthorized recordings already out there, but hearing a cleaned-up version, transferred from the original reel-to-reel tape, is like stepping into the Wilton Hilton after years of being stuck outside, listening from the street.“It’s not always easy/To get what you deserve,” du Plenty howls on “Punish or Be Damned,” over dueling distorted keyboards, one played by Gear, the other by David Brown, who left the group in late 1977. (He went on to co-found the seminal underground label Dangerhouse; du Plenty died of cancer in 2001, at 52, his illness having been complicated by a long battle with H.I.V.) Barrett anchors the group on drums, playing in tandem with a drum machine. There were no guitars, then or ever, in the band. “We’re talking about a period before ‘punk’ became a bin at a record store,” said Gear.Gear, right, with Barrett in 1978, said the band was an experiment. “You know how chemistry experiments are: They’re going to be a panacea or they’re going to blow up in your face.” Ruby Ray/Getty ImagesThe Screamers story takes place in Southern California, but Gear and du Plenty met in Seattle, as part of the queer performance-art troupe Ze Whiz Kidz, and soon formed a heavy glam band, the Tupperwares, ultimately deciding to try their luck in Hollywood. Barrett was an aspiring visual artist from Oklahoma, and left for Los Angeles with $100 in his pocket. The quartet adopted the Screamers name and were immediate icons among the sea of misfits flocking to the city. (The artist Gary Panter designed their logo of a hair-spiked punk, roaring full tilt.)“Was there something in the water?” said John Doe, the singer and bassist for the band X, who also felt a calling to move West on a whim in 1976. “Yeah, it was cheap rent. And people could own cars — and a sense of freedom.”A clique of “50 people, 60 tops,” according to Barrett, constituted the entirety of the initial Los Angeles punk scene. Concerts were just as much a social event as a musical one, and the nascent Slash magazine served as a “newsletter” for those who were hanging out. At that point, the crowd was notably diverse and free thinking, particularly in terms of sexuality.“I thought it was very inclusive,” said Joan Jett, who was one of those 50 or 60 people, and whose group the Runaways was a source of inspiration to many soon-to-be punks. She also produced the only Germs album, “(GI)” from 1979. “It was wonderful, actually. Some of the best times of my life I remember — or don’t remember — are from that time period.”It would prove to be a fleeting moment. By 1980, the scene’s music was transforming into something else entirely: faster, angrier. Eventually, conceptual acts like Screamers faded away. (A contentious, drawn-out film project known as “Population: 1,” made by the filmmaker Rene Daalder, drove the group apart as well.)Gear said the band was an experiment. “You know how chemistry experiments are: they’re going to be a panacea or they’re going to blow up in your face.” Since moving on, he has lived a private life — he cited his age as “ageless” — working mostly in the “personal computer world,” he said.The arrival of the first-ever Screamers release, almost a half-century late, seems to tie a bow on the band’s saga — but it may reopen it more than anything else. As to whether there’s any danger in ripping away the mystique that was so central until now, Barrett isn’t worried.“Whenever you try to dig out something from artistic scenes, you end up with crumbs that get you a flavor of what it might’ve been,” he said. “Those documents add up to tell a new truth, because the real truth is missing a lot of parts. So I feel like we’ve left some bread crumbs. And this is a pretty good one.” More

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      in Theater

      LA Stage Alliance Disbands After Awards Ceremony Blunder

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      The organization that runs the annual competition honoring theater work in Los Angeles imploded after it misidentified an Asian-American actor.Jully Lee, an actor and director, had a bad feeling about this year’s Ovation Awards, the annual competition honoring stage work in greater Los Angeles. She was a voter who had never been told when the ceremony would be, and she learned she was a nominee only when she was given 48 hours to submit a pretaped acceptance speech for use in the event that she won.She watched anyway.What she saw was not good. The awards ceremony, streamed online last week, showed a picture of a different Asian-American actress when announcing her category. And it mispronounced her name.Lee laughed, reflecting a lifetime of trying to be a good sport. But her boyfriend grabbed a screenshot, and posted it on social media, and he was not the only one.The reaction was swift, and furious, as long-simmering frustration over the functioning of the LA Stage Alliance, which administers the awards, combusted with the pain and anger of an Asian-American community devastated by a wave of anti-Asian violence.Forty-six theaters resigned from the alliance — about a third of its members. And on Monday, the organization, which for nearly a half-century had been the main coalition for a sprawling theatrical ecosystem in the nation’s second largest city, announced that it was disbanding.“It is with deep regret that the board of governors has unanimously decided to cease all operations,” the group said in a statement posted on social media.The rapid implosion was precipitated, most recently, by East West Players, the Asian-American theater that co-produced “Hannah and the Dread Gazebo,” the play in which Lee performed. (In another slight, the Ovation Awards attributed the production only to the Fountain Theater, saying it would not credit co-producers.)The morning after the ceremony, Snehal Desai, the producing artistic director for East West Players, announced that his theater was revoking its membership in the alliance, and urged others to do the same.“I felt like I needed to make a strong statement, because we were paying to be part of this organization that was diminishing us,” Desai said. “And I did call on other theaters to join us, because I wanted more than statements of support. Statements don’t do anything.”Many of the region’s theaters, which had been speaking up in support of diversity, equity and inclusion, first in response to the unrest over racial injustice last summer, and then again in response to hate crimes this spring, followed suit.“This was an inexcusable, terrible, unfortunate act, but it was also emblematic of a bigger failure of the LA Stage Alliance in the past few years,” said Danny Feldman, the producing artistic director at Pasadena Playhouse, who said the organization’s inadequacy had become more clear during the pandemic. “They lost the confidence of the community, and this was the tipping point.”The LA Stage Alliance was a nonprofit, dating back to 1975, that sought to support theater in Los Angeles. In addition to overseeing the Ovation Awards, it maintained onStage:LA, a website with listings and ticket discounts and published a digital arts magazine called @This Stage.Last summer the organization furloughed its staff; emails to the executive director, Marco Gomez, were answered by a publicist, Ken Werther, who said the leadership was declining to make any further comments.Lee, in an interview on Monday, said she was uncomfortable being seen as the face of the controversy, but also upset about the events that had transpired..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1pd7fgo{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-1pd7fgo{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1pd7fgo:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1pd7fgo{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 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:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“I was trying to be brave, and trying not to make it a big deal,” she said. “But then, reading all the posts — all the anger and pain that was being expressed — I had to acknowledge that this is angering and painful and hurtful. And there have been so many attempts to try and get the LA Stage Alliance to be more inclusive, and they’ve largely been ignored.”Deaf West Theater, the nation’s leading sign language theater, sought unsuccessfully to have this year’s Ovation ceremony interpreted for the deaf. “All of these oppressions go hand in hand,” said DJ Kurs, the theater’s artistic director. “We are all fighting the same fight, and we are fighting it together.”Los Angeles has a robust theater community that is often overshadowed by the city’s film and television industries, and includes not only a handful of big-budget nonprofits, but also a large number of small organizations, many of which were facing financial stress even before the pandemic.Throughout the pandemic, 65 of the “intimate theaters” have been meeting collectively as Alternative Theaters of Los Angeles to compare notes and support one another.Gary Grossman, an organizer of the group and the producing artistic director of Skylight Theater Company, called the collapse of the stage alliance “the right outcome.”“They have not represented the community,” he said. “It needs to be rethought from the ground up.”A variety of Los Angeles theater industry leaders interviewed Monday said the stage alliance was already in trouble financially before the latest conflagration, and its future had seemed uncertain throughout the pandemic.And several described a number of grievances with the organization, citing insufficient diversity in its leadership and programming, an ineffective response to the pandemic, high membership dues that made it harder for some theaters to participate, and a “pay to play” system in which theaters were supposed to pay a fee for each production they wanted considered for an award.“There’s been a fraught relationship from the perspective of most theater companies,” said Meghan Pressman, the managing director and chief executive at Center Theatre Group, which is the biggest of the Los Angeles nonprofits. Pressman said many theater administrators have already begun talking about what happens next.“I do think the community can come together to craft what we need in an organization,” she said. “And I don’t know if these awards will continue, but I feel strongly that some awards should, because it’s an important way to celebrate the theater community.” More

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      in Television

      ‘Kid 90’ and the Days When Even Wild TV Teens Had Privacy

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      A documentary from Soleil Moon Frye, star of “Punky Brewster,” and a reunion of “The Real World” remind us that Gen X didn’t curate themselves for mass consumption.Sometimes I remember the clunky devices of my youth — the boxy Polaroid cameras, the bricklike car phones, the shrill answering machines, the pagers that could be made to spell an angular, all-caps “BOOBS.” This was the personal tech of the early-to-mid-1990s, in the years before AOL Instant Messenger provided an internet on-ramp, which means it was pretty much the last time an American teenager could behave with some expectation of privacy.Still, camcorders existed back then and Soleil Moon Frye, the child star of “Punky Brewster,” rarely turned hers off. In “Kid 90,” a documentary now streaming on Hulu, an adult, manicured Moon Frye — filmed in the kind of all-white room usually associated with near-death experiences — revisits her endless home movies, as well as related ephemera: diaries, voice mail messages and photographs. If you are a young Gen Xer or an old millennial, “Kid 90” may provide the uncanny and not entirely welcome experience of having your childhood returned to you — the syntax, the celebrities, the fashions that haven’t come back around (the backward baseball cap, the vest as a bustier). Revisiting your youth culture when your own youth has mostly fled is an exercise in estrangement and mild humiliation, like running into your therapist at Victoria’s Secret.In the 1980s sitcom “Punky Brewster,” Moon Frye starred as a girl being raised by a foster father.Gene Arias/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty ImagesBefore I clicked play, I asked an editor how many drinks I might need to make it through the documentary. “A 40 of Mickey’s malt liquor,” she wrote.The early ’90s also reappear on “The Real World Homecoming: New York,” a Paramount + show that reunites the cast members from the first season of MTV’s flagship unscripted series. Seven people, strangers no more, return to the New York loft (well, one is waylaid by a positive Covid-19 test) where their teen and 20-something lives were taped for a few months in 1992. It wasn’t the first reality show, but its wild popularity and subsequent franchise profoundly influenced what came after. “We didn’t know what it was going to be,” the journalist and activist Kevin Powell, one of the original roommates, says in the first episode of “Homecoming.” “We were just ourselves.”To watch the series and the documentary is to dilate, helplessly, on what has changed (or not) in the past 30 or so years. It’s to realize that Moon Frye, by cheerfully surveilling her own life, and those first Real Worlders, by agreeing to the constant presence of producers and cameras, were the harbingers of today’s culture, in which self-image is shaped in the expectation of a lens and personhood collates with brand identity.“The Real World Homecoming: New York” reunited the cast of the hit reality show, which premiered on MTV in 1992; from left, Norman Korpi, Kevin Powell, Julie Gentry and Heather B. Gardner, with Andre Comeau looking on.Danielle Levitt/MTVMoon Frye seems to have known every other child star in Los Angeles and its outlying counties: Sara Gilbert, Emmanuel Lewis, Brian Austin Green, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Joey Lawrence, Jenny Lewis (hilarious) and at least a dozen more. These were children valued less for who they were and more for the fandom and ads they could generate, the tickets they could sell. Today, that’s everyone with an Instagram account, potentially.“Kid 90” also reminds us that until pretty recently, the dumb things teenagers wore and the dumber things they did and said didn’t have an afterlife, because there were few ways to record them and even fewer ways to disseminate those recordings. A crucial aspect of adolescence is performance — trying on different outfits and identities — and seeing if they feel OK. (The comedy of adolescence is that it’s practice for adulthood. The tragedy is that adolescents practice on one another.)I was a teenager in the ’90s, and I’m unutterably grateful that my own mortifications — lines like, “I’m not a feminist, I’m really more like a humanist,” and a grunge-adjacent look that my high school bestie still calls the Lumberjack Sexpot — persist only on the bloopers reel in my head. Until young adults achieve some reasonable sense of self (and style), why get the internet involved?When Moon Frye moved to New York, she fell in with a group of skaters, some of whom were in the movie “Kids.”Soleil Moon Frye/HuluThe kids in “Kid 90” are filmed during their off hours: poolside, at house parties, high on mushrooms in a field somewhere. They sometimes perform for the camera — winking, pontificating, flashing a don’t-tell-mom pack of cigarettes — but they perform confident that almost no one will ever see it. “We never thought, ‘Oh, well, she’s going to use that in a way that’s going to come back and haunt us,’” Gosselaar says in the documentary.Back in 1992, those “Real World” participants knew that MTV would eventually air the footage, but not how that footage would be organized. They didn’t know that the producers would fabricate a will-they-or-won’t-they story line for Julie Gentry and Eric Nies, or that Kevin Powell would be edited to seem like a “politically angry Black man,” as he said in a recent interview. “We all thought it was a documentary about seven artists,” Rebecca Blasband says in “Homecoming.” If she and her loftmates didn’t act entirely naturally, they don’t seem to have spent the series trying to build a marketable brand.The producers and editors did the building for them, giving each a type (naïf, himbo, rock god, firebrand), which the cast members then spent years trying to live up to — or live down. “I had this notoriety, but I had no idea how to utilize it,” Gentry says in “Homecoming.”Moon Frye as a teenager; she is now appearing in a “Punky Brewster” reboot on Peacock.Soleil Moon Frye/HuluMoon Frye seems to have also struggled with her image and with how the industry treated her when her body began to diverge from Punky’s. In an agonizing section of the documentary, she talks about going through puberty, developing breasts and being seen, at 13 and 14 years old, only for bimbo-esque roles. Peers called her Punky Boobster.“It’s hard when you’ve got boobs and you can’t work in this business,” a teenage Moon Frye says. “I just want people to see me for the person I am inside.” Here’s a thought: What if the business is the problem and not children’s bodies?She wanted serious roles, so at 15, she had breast reduction surgery. But the serious roles never came. After years in the entertainment wilderness, she is now starring in a “Punky Brewster” reboot, now streaming on Peacock. “Kid 90” presents this comeback as a chirpy capstone, but it feels darker. The documentary honors a slew of friends who didn’t make it to their 40s (including Jonathan Brandis and Justin Pierce, a star of the movie “Kids”) and mentions the addictions suffered by those who did. Some of that pain must have originated in the space between what the industry (and the fans) told these actors they had to be and who they felt they were. Maybe Moon Frye is Punky once more because “the business” wouldn’t let her be anyone else.I was, unconvincingly, so many people as a teenager — a rebel, a sophisticate, a drama nerd, a go-getter, a witch. I could try on a persona for size and then return it, tags on. There was no social media then and no one wanted me on any reality series, so I never had to curate a self before I had one. But I did stupid things for love. What would I have done for likes? What would that have made me?Like Moon Frye and a lot of girls with big feelings and poetic inclinations, I kept diaries as a teenager. I’ve never gone back and read them. Why? I’m afraid that I might be embarrassed by my younger self or that she might be embarrassed by boring, wine-mom me. But I hope we’d get along. And then we could take a kiss-face selfie together, filter it, Facetune it, post it with some cute caption and watch the little hearts roll in. More

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      in Music

      Lady Gaga’s Dog Walker Recalls Being Shot and Cradling ‘Guardian Angel’ Dog

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLady Gaga’s Dog Walker Recalls Being Shot and Cradling ‘Guardian Angel’ DogRyan Fischer wrote on Instagram about his “recovery from a very close call with death.”Ryan Fischer posted this image of himself on Instagram in 2017.Credit…Ben AlfonsoMarch 1, 2021Lady Gaga’s dog walker recounted in a vivid Instagram post on Monday his frantic thoughts in the moments after he was shot in Los Angeles last week by two men who stole two of the singer’s French bulldogs and left him in a pool of blood.Referring to Asia, a third dog owned by the singer, the dog walker, Ryan Fischer, wrote that as “blood poured from my gun shot wound, an angel trotted over and laid next to me. My panicked screams calmed as I looked at her, even though it registered that the blood pooling around her tiny body was my own.”Mr. Fischer, who did not immediately respond to a message on Instagram, wrote that he was “still in recovery from a very close call with death” and “will write and say more later.”The Feb. 24 shooting took place around 9:40 p.m. local time as Mr. Fischer was walking north on Sierra Bonita Avenue in Hollywood, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.As of Monday, the Police Department had not announced an arrest in the case, nor released information about the woman who returned the dogs, unharmed, to the police two days later.“Investigators are still working the case, and the investigation is still ongoing,” Capt. Stacy D. Spell, a spokeswoman for the department, said in an email on Monday. She also referred to a statement the police released last week, saying they would not discuss the woman who returned the dogs, nor the location of where they were found, “due to the active criminal investigation and for her safety.”A report by The Associated Press on Friday quoted Capt. Jonathan Tippett of the department as saying that the woman who took the dogs to the police station appeared to be “uninvolved and unassociated” with the attack.Mr. Fischer’s Instagram posts, which accompanied pictures of him in a hospital bed, included praise for family and friends, as well as for emergency personnel and health care workers: “you literally saved my life and helped me take newborn walks, I can’t thank you enough.”What exactly led to the attack is not clear. Most of what is publicly known comes from surveillance video from a nearby home.On it, Mr. Fischer is seen walking on a sidewalk, which is partly obscured by a fence, as a white car pulls up next to him. Two men exit the car and tussle with Mr. Fischer. He screams repeatedly and moments later, a gunshot is heard. “Help me, I’ve been shot,” Mr. Fischer can be heard saying just after the car drives away. “I’ve been shot. Oh my god.”Mr. Fischer recalled that exact moment, writing on Instagram, “I cradled Asia as best I could, thanked her for all the incredible adventures we’d been on together, apologized that I couldn’t defend her brothers, and then resolved that I would still try to save them… and myself.”“I looked backed at my guardian angel. I smiled at her shaking form, thankful that at least she would be ‘okay,’” he added.When emergency medical workers treated Mr. Fischer, he was cradling the dog, according to KABC-TV, which had a helicopter over the scene.Officer Jeff Lee, also a spokesman for the Police Department, said last week that a semiautomatic handgun was believed used in the attack.The once-stolen dogs are named Koji and Gustav and belong to Lady Gaga, who had offered a $500,000 reward for information about them, a representative for the singer said. Lady Gaga, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, announced in 2016 that she had added a black-and-white puppy to her family of dogs, which included two named Koji and Asia.At the time, she named the puppy “cowpig and moopig” before naming it Gustav. She has featured the dogs in her social media posts over the years.In his Instagram post on Monday, Mr. Fischer included a message to Lady Gaga: “your babies are back and the family is whole… we did it!”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How to Watch the Golden Globes 2021: Date, Time and Streaming

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Awards SeasonHow to Watch the GlobesWhat to ExpectOur Movie PredictionsGolden Globe NomineesGolden Globes SuitAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow to Watch the Golden Globes 2021: Date, Time and StreamingHere’s a quick guide with everything you need to know for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association film and television awards. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are the hosts of this year’s ceremony.Credit…Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesFeb. 27, 2021, 9:27 a.m. ET More