Subterms
Pandemic tensions led HBO to make a new version of the therapy drama, which stars Uzo Aduba and aims to reduce stigmas about mental health care.The writer Jennifer Schuur (“My Brilliant Friend,” “Unbelievable”) has seen the same therapist every week for 17 years. “It is one of the most significant relationships of my life,” she said. Sometimes friends and family question that longevity. More
Backstage music crews were set adrift by the pandemic. For some, a weekly Zoom group has been the answer.LONDON — William Frostman, a lighting supervisor who has toured with the Rolling Stones and Queen, has just spent a whole year at home, the longest time in his decades-long career.“I just want to wake up on a bus,” Frostman, 60, told dozens of his fellow roadies on a recent Zoom call.Nostalgic as he was for life on the road, there were a few fears at the back of his mind, he said: Would anyone employ him? How would a vaccine passport work?There was another big issue, too, Frostman added. He loved seeing his family every day during the pandemic. “Am I going to be mentally ready to wake up on a bus each morning and go, ‘They’re not here’?” he said.In the Zoom grid onscreen, several roadies nodded in agreement.In the popular imagination, those skilled crew members who make music tours work are taciturn figures, dressed in all black, who talk about music, but not much else. We don’t think of roadies opening up about their feelings. But the tour managers, sound engineers, lighting technicians and others who call into the Back Lounge support group every Wednesday couldn’t be further from that outdated image.The crew of a European tour by Katie Melua and the Gori Women’s Choir that Green organized, at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool, England, in 2018.Simon SchofieldThe group’s members weren’t there to chat about bands, but to check in on each other’s mental health.A year into the coronavirus pandemic, many are hoping that cultural life will soon restart. Concerts are set to resume in New York next month, albeit with tiny audiences. In England, the government has said entertainment events will be allowed again from May 17, if infection levels are under control.But for many roadies — who often rely on monthslong world tours to make a living — a return to full-time work feels a long way off.“My fear is being disappointed again,” said Suzi Green, a veteran tour manager who set up the group, adding that she was concerned restrictions would be reimposed.Other members had their own worries. Some were scared that they wouldn’t get work when concerts returned. One said she feared if she did find work, she’d go back to unhealthy on-the-road habits, like surviving solely on pizza.The mental health impact of the pandemic on touring crew members has been widespread. Last November, the Production Services Association and other British organizations representing live events workers surveyed its membership on the issue. Half the 1,700 respondents said they had suffered depression, and nearly 15 percent said they had experienced suicidal thoughts.Green, who has run tours for musicians including PJ Harvey and James Blake, started the Back Lounge last June after finding herself, “really depressed, in a real state” she said in a telephone interview.When events were canceled last March, she felt as if she’d lost her whole identity, she said. “As a lifestyle, you’re away nine, 10 months a year,” she said. “It’s your whole life.”One of Green’s friends, a teacher, told her that they had benefited from attending a professional support group during the pandemic, and she wondered if there was anything out there for people in her own line of work. She did a search online and found Backline, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit group that promotes mental health in the music industry.An online meeting that she attended organized by Backline Care was “a lifesaver,” she said. So Green decided to create something similar for British and European music crews who would find it difficult to join the U.S. meetings because of the time difference.The first Back Lounge — named after the area at the rear of a tour bus where staff members chill out after shows — took place one Wednesday last June, at 6 p.m. It has been running at the same time every week since, attracting attendees ranging from industry veterans who run stadium shows, to up-and-coming tour managers who drive small bands around Europe.Green has brought in guests including therapists and personal trainers, but the focus is always on the roadies talking about what’s on their mind, Green said.Clockwise from top left: Nathalie Candel, a tour manager who attends the Back Lounge, backstage in Oslo in 2019; Debbie Taylor, another regular attendee, at the Forum in Los Angeles; William Frostman, right, at a show in London with the show’s lighting designer.Rob Gwin; via Debbie Taylor; via William Frostman“I didn’t know I needed it, but I needed it,” Frostman, the lighting supervisor, said later in a telephone interview, adding that he has been working as a mail carrier to make ends meet. “It’s nice being on a call where people understand you,” he added.Simon Schofield, 52, who is usually in charge of film and graphics displays on major tours, said the Back Lounge had helped him to deal with a host of emotions during the pandemic. There was a point last year, he said, when he couldn’t listen to the radio, because he’d hear “every single band I’d toured with, and it’d be a bombardment of reminding of what my life used to be like.”As well as attending the Back Lounge, he said, he has been having therapy and taking antidepressants, but the group has been helpful, too. “It’s such a weight off your mind, off your soul, to know other people are feeling and suffering the way you are,” he said.Said Schofield: “Our industry is terrible when it comes to mental illness. You don’t talk about it until it’s too late, and we need to be more compassionate.”Nathalie Candel, 29, a tour manager who regularly attends the Back Lounge, said she hoped the group would continue to meet once the industry got back on the road. “We need to look at what we put people through on tour,” she said. Some crew members, including herself, had boasted about working 19-hour days, she added, and that clearly was not healthy.One recent Wednesday, the Back Lounge was back in session, to discuss the theme of “being left behind.”Some of the roadies said they feared that the music industry had moved on without them or that their contacts had moved into new lines of work. “The fear of being left behind is very real,” said Debbie Taylor, who manages the crew for Guns N’ Roses world tours. “It’s something I have nightmares about,” she added.The tone was serious, but then Keith Wood, a stadium tour manager, brightened the mood.“I’ll tell you a story about being left behind,” Wood said, before launching into a tale about the time one of Suzanne Vega’s tour buses drove off without him at a truck stop in Nebraska. That was before cellphones, he said, and he only made it to the tour’s next stop with the help of a friendly local pilot.Everyone laughed, and, for a moment, their worries were relieved. But then came the longing for the road.“I miss being on a bus so much,” Taylor said.“You and me both,” added Frostman. More
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Britney Spears’s Legal BattleControl of Spears’s Estate‘We’re Sorry, Britney’Justin Timberlake ApologizesWatch ‘Framing Britney Spears’ in the U.S.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Sorry, Britney’: Media Is Criticized for Past Coverage, and Some Own UpConversations about the relentless focus on the pop star’s mental health, mothering and sexuality have begun anew following The New York Times documentary “Framing Britney Spears.”Media outlets and fans are re-examining how Britney Spears was questioned and written about during the years leading up to her personal crises.Credit…Martin Bureau/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFeb. 12, 2021Updated 1:50 p.m. ET“Help Me,” the cover of Us Weekly blared in all caps, below a photo of Britney Spears with her hair partly buzzed off. People Magazine promised to take readers “Inside Britney’s Breakdown,” teasing details of “wild partying, sobbing in public, shaving her head.” OK! Weekly tempted potential buyers with a firsthand account of an “emotional cry for help.”In 2007, the celebrity magazines stacked up in dentists’ waiting rooms or on the racks by supermarket checkout lines had a favorite cover story: the trials and tribulations of a 25-year-old Britney Spears. That breathless, wall-to-wall coverage of her travails by glossy magazines, supermarket tabloids, mainstream newspapers and television shows alike is now being re-examined in the wake of a new documentary about Spears and her troubles by The New York Times.Fourteen years after Spears’s most publicized crises, some see the hypercritical fixation on her mental health, mothering and sexuality as a broad public failing.“We’re sorry, Britney,” read a post on Glamour’s Instagram this week. “We are all to blame for what happened to Britney Spears.”Spears was a frequent cover star on celebrity weeklies in the mid-2000s.The tabloids had been obsessed with Spears since her days as a teenage bubble-gum pop sensation, but the coverage reached a new level of intensity during her mid-20s. There seemed to be a vicious cycle at play: The relentless paparazzi that followed Spears nearly everywhere left her exasperated and helped fuel public displays of frustration, which magazines then covered aggressively, interviewing a host of tangential characters, including the owner of the hair salon where she shaved her head and a psychologist who had never treated her.“Her story hit at a time when print magazines were hunting for the story of the week,” said Jen Peros, a former Us Weekly editor, “and when you found a celebrity — I hate to say it — spiraling or acting abnormally, that was the story. And we knew it would sell magazines.”A new episode of The New York Times Presents, on FX and Hulu, coming Friday, Feb. 5, at 10 p.m.CreditCredit…Ting-Li Wang/The New York TimesSome are now asking for direct apologies from people who made jokes at Spears’s expense or interviewed her in ways now viewed as insensitive, sexist or simply unfair. On social media, there have been calls for apologies from prominent media figures, including Diane Sawyer, who, in a 2003 interview grilled Spears on what she might have done to upset her ex, Justin Timberlake; Matt Lauer, who pointed to questions about whether she was a “bad mom”; and the comedian Sarah Silverman, who made off-color jokes about Spears at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards.These demands are encapsulated in another phrase spreading on social media: “Apologize to Britney.”Silverman, who had joked on MTV that Spears’s children were “the most adorable mistakes,” did just that on an episode of her podcast that was released on Thursday, saying that, at the time, she had not understood that big-time celebrities could have their feelings hurt.“Britney, I am so sorry. I feel terribly if I hurt you,” Silverman said. “I could say I was just doing my job but that feels very Nuremberg Trial-y, and I am responsible for what comes out of my mouth.”And on Friday Timberlake issued an apology to Spears on Instagram, writing that he was “deeply sorry for the times in my life where my actions contributed to the problem, where I spoke out of turn, or did not speak up for what was right.” (He also apologized to Janet Jackson, with whom he appeared in 2004 at the Super Bowl halftime show.) The new documentary, “Framing Britney Spears,” which premiered on Hulu and FX last Friday, traces the origins of Spears’s conservatorship, the legal arrangement that has mandated that other individuals — primarily her father — have had control over her personal life and finances for the past 13 years, following her 2008 hospitalization after a three-hour standoff involving her two toddler sons and her ex-husband Kevin Federline.It wasn’t just the paparazzi and the tabloids that reported — sometimes breathlessly — on Spears’s marriages, children, substance abuse issues and mental health challenges: So did The New York Times, as well as other newspapers, television news outlets and late-night comedy programs. Even the game show “Family Feud” found a way to work Spears in, asking contestants to list things that she had lost in the past year (“her hair,” “her husband”).In an interview, Samantha Barry, the editor in chief of Glamour, said of society’s treatment of Spears, “Hopefully we’re in a place where we won’t do that again, where we won’t lift up these celebrities — in particular women — and then proceed to rip them down.”Spears onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2016. In 2007, the comedian Sarah Silverman joked about the singer’s children at the awards show; this week, she apologized in a podcast.Credit…Charles Sykes/Invision, via Associated PressPeros, who started as a reporter for Us Weekly in 2006 and ultimately became editor in chief, believes that with a decade and a half of hindsight, the media would treat Spears differently now. Weekly magazines are “much more sensitive and handle stories like this more delicately,” she said, pointing to coverage of celebrities like Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato, who have spoken more openly about mental health and substance abuse. Part of the evolution stems from the fact that these subjects are less stigmatized, but it’s also the result of journalists and editors understanding that aggressive media coverage would inevitably receive backlash now, Peros said.Us Weekly was one of the magazines that poured resources into relentlessly covering Spears. In a March 2007 cover story that read like a play-by-play of a natural disaster and its aftermath, the magazine interviewed a diner at a sushi restaurant that Spears’s mother visited, a clubgoer at a karaoke party Spears dropped in on, and cited an anonymous source in Antigua, where Spears briefly checked into a rehab clinic.“That was a time when she was making so much money for these magazines that we had the money to send a reporter to Antigua,” Peros said.Back then, it was Peros’s job in New York to search for nuggets of insight into Spears’s life by interviewing dancers or lighting assistants on her tour, searching through the Yellow Pages for their contact information and typically granting them anonymity to share things that they probably shouldn’t. If the reporters had the same awareness about mental health that they have today, they might not have dug so aggressively, she said.The main difference between then and now is the rise of social media, which has diluted the power of weekly magazines as the primary way to learn about celebrities’ personal lives. In some ways, social media can give celebrities more control over what people see: For Spears, her Instagram account is a repository for improvisational dancing, photos of her and her boyfriend, silly skits and random curiosities — all blasted out to an audience of 27.7 million followers.There may be fewer professional photographers following celebrities like Spears around now, but at the same time, almost everyone is armed with a smartphone and has the potential to become an amateur paparazzi. Instead of sending a reporter to go to Antigua to find out what Spears was up to, Us Weekly would now be scouring social media for photos of her there walking around town or eating at restaurants.Dax Holt, who was a producer at TMZ for over a decade and now co-hosts a podcast about Hollywood, said that he doesn’t necessarily blame the media for Spears’s breakdown but rather an American public that had an incessant curiosity for all things Britney. Still, Holt, who used to sift through paparazzi photos of Spears in his time at TMZ, said it made him sad to watch the documentary and see all that Spears had to endure.“I can’t even imagine what it would be like being a focal point of the world’s attention for so many years,” he said. “One little misstep and the whole world is laughing at you.”So far, the public has heard little from Spears herself about the documentary and the reactions to it. On Tuesday, she seemed to indirectly address the film in social media posts when she wrote, “I’ll always love being on stage …. but I am taking the time to learn and be a normal person.”This time, more people seem to be accepting that she is one.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
