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      in Television

      When I Get Anxious, These Videos Help Calm My Mind

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      Tunnel through time with vintage B-roll.It was a grainy video, autoplaying in my Facebook feed, that first grabbed my attention. It seemed vaguely familiar — like a home movie from my childhood in suburban Boston but without the main characters, leaving only a warm, generic 1980s ambience. In the clip, kids in wide-collared shirts amble around a school cafeteria with burgers, tater tots and little square boxes of chocolate milk served by lunch ladies in those big buglike eyeglasses my grandmother used to wear. The video ended after about two minutes. Next, I watched a street glide by from the window of a moving vehicle: Kenmore Square, Boston, January 1977. The camera panned across storefronts — Strawberries, Paperback Booksmith, College Donuts — but I didn’t recognize anything until it zoomed out and the famous Citgo sign was revealed, perched atop the building where it still sits today.Discovering these videos felt like time-traveling back to some precise moment when nothing of note happened. They are just short, contextless clips of old B-roll — the background film cut into broadcasts to break up the main footage — culled from the collections of WGBH, a 69-year-old Boston public-television station. In 2018, James Auclair, a station employee, began regularly posting the videos to social media. They infiltrated my own Facebook algorithm in the fall of 2023, which, it turns out, was just when I needed them. That August, I eagerly applied for a dream-job faculty position at a university, and I knew I was in for months of consistent, nagging anxiety about my professional future. When I came across the footage Auclair was posting under the handle GBH Archives (they dropped the “W” a few years ago), I was hooked: Here, finally, was a reprieve from the swirl of negative thoughts in my head.I’ve devoured, by now, countless hours of B-roll. I’ve watched shoppers peruse CDs at the long-shuttered Tower Records on Newbury Street in the ’90s, transporting me back to Saturdays in high school when my friends and I browsed the rap and hip-hop racks for hours. Cars as big as boats — station wagons, sedans and vans like my parents drove — roll over the Tobin Bridge in 1979; drivers reach out their arms to pass cash and coins to toll attendants. I’ve watched ice skaters gliding over the frozen Charles River in the late ’70s and hairsprayed teenagers in leather and oversize sweaters smoking cigarettes outside their high school in the ’80s.I’m not the only one hooked on these B-roll clips: YouTube is full of “retro B-roll” material, and GBH Archives alone has more than 200,000 combined followers on Facebook, X and Instagram. For some viewers, the appeal is pure nostalgia — many comment wistfully on the absence of cellphones or the predominance of suits and ties and dresses. Others note changes in the ever-evolving cityscape. Every so often, someone recognizes their younger self in a video.Where the format of television news can crowd out thought, these videos create space for it.What I love most is that the videos contain no narrative; they feel like ambient music — hypnotic, meditative. Rather than tell you what to think or fear, they just show you things. There’s a funny intellectual twist here: Television is an entertainment medium, and the primary purpose of these B-roll clips was to keep viewers visually engaged so they wouldn’t get bored watching a single shot of a newscaster talking. Watching this remediated B-roll subverts that purpose. There are no quick shots and snappy edits, no breaking news alerts or sensational chyrons, just slow and boring slices of life. Where the format of television news can crowd out thought, these videos create space for it. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Review: ‘The Righteous’ Brings Stirring Prayer to Santa Fe Opera

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      Gregory Spears and Tracy K. Smith’s new work about an ambitious minister’s rise in the 1980s is that rarity in contemporary music: an original story.We’ve had “The Shining” and “Cold Mountain,” “The Hours” and “Dead Man Walking,” and works based on the lives of Steve Jobs, Malcolm X and Frida Kahlo. “Lincoln in the Bardo” and “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” are coming soon.Opera audiences, traditionalists even before the pandemic, have ventured back warier than ever about buying tickets for anything other than the standards. So as companies try to present contemporary pieces alongside “Aida” and “La Bohème,” they bank on familiar titles and subjects.Many classic operas were adaptations; “Bohème,” for example, was inspired by a collection of stories. But lately the results have tended to feel less like great art than like bending over backward to coax a cautious public. Something special comes from being truly original: It’s no coincidence that perhaps the best opera of our time, Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence” (2021), was that rarity, a brand-new story.So is “The Righteous,” commissioned by Santa Fe Opera from the composer Gregory Spears and the poet Tracy K. Smith. Spears and Smith also created from scratch their first full-length collaboration, “Castor and Patience” (2022). They deserve great credit for this. These days it’s remarkable to sit at a premiere and be able to think, with admiration, “Here are imaginations at work” instead of “I’d rather be watching the movie.”Taking place over a few weeks, “Castor and Patience” was an intimate family drama — though one with larger societal implications. While a family is also at the center of “The Righteous,” which opened on July 13, the new opera is in every way a more sprawling piece, stretching from 1979 through the early 1990s, with a large cast and chorus and booming climaxes to match its impassioned lyricism.At its core is a man’s progress from youthful idealism to profound moral compromise. The main character, David, is a talented, devoted preacher who’s grown up close to a wealthy, well-connected oil family in the American Southwest. He marries the family’s daughter and, as his scrappy ministry grows in size and influence, he’s tempted more and more by the prospect of political power. As he climbs, he leaves betrayals both personal and ideological in his wake.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      He Wrote Michael Jackson’s ‘Human Nature’ and Has 2 More in the Vault

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      Steve Porcaro of Toto, who played on some of the biggest hits of the ’80s, has sold the rights to his music, including a pair of unreleased tracks with the superstar.After more than four decades, Steve Porcaro is still amazed that his song ended up on the biggest-selling album of all time.In 1982, when he was a keyboardist in Toto — the band of studio insiders that dominated rock radio with sleekly crafted hits like “Africa” and “Hold the Line” — Porcaro was tinkering with a new tune, a mid-tempo ballad inspired by his attempt to comfort his young daughter after a playground quarrel. The rest of the group wasn’t into it.But Porcaro kept working on the song at the studio of his Toto bandmate David Paich, the group’s primary songwriter, who was pitching Quincy Jones some rock-oriented material for Michael Jackson’s next album. One day, they put two of Paich’s songs on a cassette for Jones; on the flip side was a rough demo of Porcaro’s ballad.When Jones heard that tape, it was Porcaro’s tune that entranced him, with its mellow mood and searching chorus: “Why, why?/Tell her that it’s human nature.” With lyrics added by John Bettis, “Human Nature” became a key cut on “Thriller,” which sold 34 million copies in the United States alone and transformed pop music in the 1980s.“It was a total, absolute fluke,” Porcaro recalled in a recent video interview from his home studio in Los Angeles, which is lined with gold and platinum albums by Toto and Jackson.“Human Nature” is now part of the latest in the music industry’s big catalog transactions. This week, Porcaro signed a deal, estimated in the low eight figures, to sell the rights to his music to the Jackson estate and the independent music company Primary Wave, they confirmed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Richard Simmons, the Original Queer Eye

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      In an era of high machismo and casual homophobia, he was a cheerleader for self-acceptance.Richard Simmons, the ebullient paterfamilias of aerobics instruction who died on Saturday at 76, never publicly addressed his sexuality. But during his long run as a leading figure in American cultural life, the way he defined himself for others was perhaps less important than how he presented himself.More than 20 years before the fashion stylist Carson Kressley dispensed tips to finance bros on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and Tim Gunn rescued aspiring designers from nervous breakdowns on “Project Runway” with the instruction to “make it work,” Mr. Simmons guided the average and the out-of-shape toward a loving embrace of the bodies they already had.In the process, he navigated the end of disco culture and the advent of the AIDS epidemic by making himself as nonthreatening as possible.“Confidence is contagious,” Mr. Kressley said in an interview on Sunday. “That was his brand.”Mr. Simmons became nationally famous with “The Richard Simmons Show,” a syndicated daytime program that combined sketch comedy with celebrity interviews, cooking segments and fitness routines.At a time when Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone were top male stars, Mr. Simmons baked cakes with Betty White and did kooky exercise segments in which shopping carts doubled as fitness equipment. Although he wasn’t open about his sexuality, he managed nevertheless to “really be himself on camera, and people could take it for what it was,” Mr. Kressley said.Mr. Simmons had grown up in New Orleans, La., where he said he had been a “fat kid” who avoided sports and kept mostly to himself. In the mid-1970s, he opened an exercise studio in Beverly Hills, Calif. The idea, as Mr. Simmons wrote in his 1993 book, “Never Give Up,” one of his many best sellers, was that weight loss should be fun.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Cigarettes After Sex and Gen Z’s Passion for Dream-Pop

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      The buzzy band that makes woozy, sensual music is releasing its third LP and starting an arena tour. It’s part of a wave reviving the fuzzed-out aesthetic of shoegaze.In 2016, a four-year-old track by a struggling Brooklyn band called Cigarettes After Sex blew up on YouTube, and soon the group’s brand of crisp, lovesick minimalism was selling out clubs all over Europe. At a tour stop in Prague, Greg Gonzalez, its leader, saw unticketed fans weeping in the street.“OK, this is bizarre,” Gonzalez remembered thinking. “But that showed me that this is doing what it’s supposed to do. This is music that’s meant for emotional people that are in love. That’s what music did for me. So I thought, that’s what I want my music to do for somebody else.”Eight years later, that pattern has repeated for Cigarettes After Sex, on a far grander scale. Although largely ignored by the mainstream media, the band’s spare, crystalline ballads have again caught fire online — this time on TikTok — racking up almost 10 billion streams around the world. Its third album, “X’s,” will be released on July 12 via the indie label Partisan, and an exhaustive global tour includes sold-out stops at Madison Square Garden as well as the Kia Forum near Los Angeles, and arenas throughout Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South Africa and Australia. By stealth, Cigarettes After Sex has become one of the biggest cult bands in the world.Its success is also a high-water mark in rock’s latest retro revival, for shoegaze and dream-pop — appropriately nebulous terms for a range of music from the 1980s and early ’90s, when groups like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Cocteau Twins and Lush cloaked melodies in waves of shimmering guitar or synthesizers, along a sonic scale from gauzy reverie to caustic noise. Long a recurrent strain in indie-pop, the sound has been catapulted by TikTok to a new level of popularity among Gen Z acts like Wisp, Sign Crushes Motorist and Quannnic that are posting millions of streams and dotting festival lineups.Cigarettes After Sex represents one end of this spectrum, with a carefully calibrated, almost cinematic approach: a hushed, dark landscape punctuated by splashes of color from Gonzalez’s guitar, topped by his whisper-soft, almost feminine singing voice. But in an interview in an East Village hotel bar, Gonzalez — who in person speaks in an easy, rapid-fire baritone — said he sees Cigarettes After Sex as fitting more in a tradition of classic, moody love songs, referencing Marvin Gaye, Françoise Hardy and Al Green.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Benji Gregory, Child Star on ‘ALF,’ Dies at 46

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      Mr. Gregory was found dead on June 13 in his car, along with his service dog.Benji Gregory, who starred as a child in the hit television series “ALF” in the 1980s, has died. He was 46.His death was confirmed by his sister, Rebecca Pfaffinger, who said that an official cause of death was still pending.According to Mrs. Pfaffinger, Mr. Gregory and his service dog, Hans, were found dead in his car on June 13 at a bank’s parking lot in Peoria, Ariz. She said in a Facebook post that he had fallen asleep in the vehicle and had died of heatstroke.Mr. Gregory was best known for his role as Brian Tanner on “ALF,” an NBC sitcom that premiered in September 1986, when he was 8.The show featured a suburban family whose world is thrown upside down when a back-talking, pointy-eared alien from the planet Melmac crash-lands through their garage. The Tanner family calls the alien ALF, short for Alien Life Form, and he stays with them, causing mischief and voicing his observations about humankind. Brian and ALF soon become the best of friends. “ALF” was a hit and aired for four seasons.“It became quite natural to interact with ALF,” Mr. Gregory said of the experience in a 2022 interview with BTM Legends Corner, a show on YouTube.Benji Gregory was best known for his role as the young Brian Tanner on “ALF,” a hit NBC sitcom in the late 1980s.InstagramHe was born Benjamin Gregory Hertzberg on May 26, 1978, in the Los Angeles area, according to his IMDB profile.Alongside “ALF,” Mr. Gregory appeared in a string of other hit shows in the 1980s, including “The A-Team,” “Punky Brewster” and “Amazing Stories.”Mr. Gregory’s film credits include “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” a 1986 comedy about a lonely computer programmer in Manhattan played by Whoopi Goldberg, and the 1993 animated movie “Once Upon a Forest.”He eventually moved on from acting and in 2004 became an aerographer’s mate for the U.S. Navy stationed in Biloxi, Miss., according to IMDB.He had lived with bipolar disorder and depression and received care for both, his sister said. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Brats’: What to Know About the Brat Pack Documentary

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      A new documentary revisits the group of young actors that helped define the decade. Here are some of its most interesting moments.In the documentary “Brats,” Andrew McCarthy attempts to come to terms with being part of the Brat Pack, the group of young actors who were ascendant in ’80s movies. Turns out, many of them didn’t like the nickname, or the association. “I lost control of the narrative of my career overnight,” McCarthy said of the period after the writer David Blum coined the immediately catchy term, in a 1985 New York Magazine profile of Emilio Estevez.He and other actors, like Estevez and Rob Lowe, who had been frequently cast together in ensemble coming-of-age dramedies (“St. Elmo’s Fire”), scattered, fearful that appearing together would be a career liability. In the documentary, streaming on Hulu, McCarthy, an actor, director and travel writer, checks in, after many years of absence, to see how they processed this pop culture twist.Some — like Demi Moore, a “St. Elmo’s” co-star — handled it all a lot better than others.In a phone interview from his Manhattan home, McCarthy, 61, said his impulse was not nostalgia — though he knows that’s what might draw an audience — but an excavation of how time and memory collide with youthful expectations. It was a leap: He walked around New York and cold-called Brat Packers he hadn’t seen in decades, with a camera crew trailing. “I thought, if anyone calls me back, I have a movie,” he said.Prompted by McCarthy’s low-key, conversational style, Moore, Lowe, Estevez and others turned up; Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald did not. In kitchen table and couch-side interviews that also serve as a kind of celebrity home tour — Ally Sheedy’s Upper West Side apartment ranks as the most relatable — the movie cracks the time capsule of the Brat Pack’s appeal. Here, some takeaways.McCarthy, right, with Emilio Estevez, who was the main subject of the original article that gave the Brat Pack its name. ABC News StudiosWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Listen to 8 Songs From the Bewitching Françoise Hardy

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      From her start in the yé-yé 1960s to the depths she plumbed as a singer-songwriter, Hardy, who died Tuesday, continued to entrance new generations of listeners.When she first broke through in the early 1960s, the bewitching French pop star Françoise Hardy, who died on Tuesday at 80, was initially lumped in with the yé-yés, the commercially minded rocking and twisting French singers of the era.She later came to see many of her early recordings, including her first hit, “Tous les Garçons et les Filles,” as sappy and lightweight. Hardy went on to forge her own path, becoming one of the rare singer-songwriters of her generation (and even rarer women in that category) — an immediately identifiable performer who unleashed emotion by, counterintuitively, refusing to over-emote.Her brand of cool has continued to beguile new listeners. A new generation of arty-minded Americans was introduced to her when the Wes Anderson film “Moonrise Kingdom” (2012) prominently featured her hit “Le Temps de l’Amour,” with its catchy, sinewy bass line.Here is a selection of songs — some of them famous, others less so — that provide entry points into Hardy’s extensive career.“Et Même” (1964)It bears repeating that Hardy was an anomaly in the 1960s as a female pop star writing and performing her own material. Starting in the 1970s she tended to stick to lyrics, but in the previous decade she often also composed the music, as on this gem from her 1964 album, on which she wrote or co-wrote almost all the tracks.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More