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      in Television

      ‘God Is in the Details’: Embracing Boredom in Art and Life

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      The Netflix show “Adolescence” and asks audiences to be OK with slower moments and small talk. Is that possible in 2025?The Netflix drama “Adolescence” requires its audience to linger — to sink into the mundane.Each of its four hourlong episodes was shot in one continuous take, allowing its harrowing story — centered on a 13-year-old boy accused of killing a classmate — to unfold in real time. As the visual point of view shifts, its audience is invited to eavesdrop on interactions that are extraneous to the plot, as characters loiter in hallways and cars, and make small talk with strangers.“Adolescence” is unusual because, as a character study without a propulsive plot, it requires its audience be OK with being in the moment. It stands in contrast to most modern television shows, which are increasingly geared toward a smartphone-addicted viewership of people who scroll while watching (think fast-moving shows like “Reacher”).It also stands in contrast to how we live our lives, with shortening attention spans, increasing isolation and an inability to sit still. “Adolescence” challenges us to be OK with small talk and boredom, even if our impulse is to disappear into our screens.“We’re becoming conditioned for these fast filtered interactions that involve constant stimulation,” said Fallon Goodman, the director of the Emotion and Resilience Laboratory at George Washington University. “So the consequences of that are shorter attention spans, making us more impatient with the natural flow of an in-person interaction.”Early in the fourth and final episode of “Adolescence,” Eddie (Stephen Graham, also a creator of the series), drives to a hardware store with his wife, Manda (Christine Tremarco), and daughter, Lisa (Amelie Pease), to buy paint. The ride lasts eight minutes — an eternity in television time. Viewers ride along, too, watching as the family tries to maintain the illusion of normality, even as the couple’s young son, Jamie (Owen Cooper), is sitting in jail. As Eddie puts it, they are “solving the problem of today.” They discuss their love of the band a-ha and how Eddie and Manda met, and they make plans to celebrate Eddie’s birthday.The sequence does not affect the central story line in a meaningful way, and one can imagine a less ambitious show condensing this scene, focused strictly on character work, to a minute or two, or cutting it entirely. But from the passenger seat, viewers learn Eddie and Manda are in therapy and observe the heaviness under which the family is living, despite their smiles as “Take On Me” plays in the background.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

      Jill Sobule, Singer of ‘I Kissed a Girl,’ Dies in House Fire

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      Ms. Sobule, 66, died Thursday morning in Woodbury, Minn., her publicist said. She had been scheduled to perform songs from her musical later in the week.Jill Sobule, the singer and songwriter whose hit “Supermodel” and gay anthem “I Kissed a Girl” were followed by three decades of touring, advocacy and a one-woman musical, died on Thursday morning in a house fire in Woodbury, Minn., according to her publicist. She was 66.The Public Safety Department in Woodbury, a Minneapolis suburb, said that firefighters had responded at 5:30 a.m. to a house that was engulfed in flames. The homeowners said one person was possibly still inside. Firefighters found the body of a woman in her 60s inside the house, the department said.The cause of the fire was not immediately clear.Ms. Sobule was scheduled to perform songs from her one-woman musical, “F*ck7thGrade,” on Friday at the Swallow Hill Music venue in her hometown, Denver, according to her publicist. She was staying with friends in Minnesota while she rehearsed for the musical, the publicist said.A free, informal gathering will be held in Ms. Sobule’s honor instead.On her 1995 self-titled album, Ms. Sobule, who was bisexual, featured “I Kissed a Girl,” which tells the story of a woman kissing her female friend. The song came out when it was “dicey” to be a queer musician, Ms. Sobule recalled. But it broke into the mainstream, making its way onto the Billboard charts.“Supermodel,” a rebellious rock song from the same album, was included on the soundtrack of the romantic comedy “Clueless” and further cemented Ms. Sobule’s popularity.“People call me a one-hit wonder,” Ms. Sobule said in a 2022 interview with The New York Times. “And I say, ‘Wait a second, I’m a two-hit wonder!’”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

      Stan Love, Athlete and Father of Heat’s Kevin Love, Dies at 76

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      A former N.B.A. player and the father of the All-Star Kevin Love, he was also the brother of the pop group’s Mike Love and a caretaker for its troubled leader, Brian Wilson.Stan Love, a former professional basketball player who was the brother of the singer Mike Love of the Beach Boys and a onetime bodyguard and caretaker of the band’s brilliant but troubled leader, Brian Wilson, has died at 76.His death was announced on Sunday on Instagram by his son Kevin Love, the five-time N.B.A. All-Star who plays for the Miami Heat. He did not say when his father died or specify the cause or location, although he did say that Mr. Love died after a long illness and that his longtime wish was to die at home. He was known to live in Lake Oswego, Ore.Stan Love, a 6-foot-9 forward who had been a star player for the University of Oregon, was selected ninth overall in the 1971 National Basketball Association draft by the Baltimore Bullets, the predecessors of the Washington Wizards. He averaged 6.6 points and 3.9 rebounds a game with modest playing time over four seasons with the Bullets and the Los Angeles Lakers of the N.B.A. and the San Antonio Spurs, then of the American Basketball Association.Mr. Love, then with the Los Angeles Lakers, being guarded by Steve Mix of the Philadelphia 76ers in a game in Philadelphia in 1975.Rusty Kennedy/Associated PressAs his basketball career ended, Mr. Love became Brian Wilson’s caretaker in the 1970s and ’80s, during a turbulent period for Mr. Wilson, his cousin, whose innovative songwriting and flair for sophisticated harmonies were complicated by drug use and mental illness.Mr. Love said he toured with the Beach Boys for roughly five years. He described that period to The Portland Tribune in 2019 as chaotic.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

    • 125 Shares88 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Pavements’ Blurs Fact and Fiction to Reimagine a Band’s Legacy

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      The director Alex Ross Perry said Stephen Malkmus of Pavement told him to “avoid the legacy trap.” The result is a music documentary with made-up elements that really existed. What?The Bob Dylan Center gathered some 6,000 items from the musician’s archive in an Oklahoma museum. Green Day’s “American Idiot” album was adapted into a Broadway show. The Queen biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody” won four Oscars and was nominated for best picture.If these artists could burnish their legacies and become part of a wider cultural conversation outside of music, then why not Pavement, the beloved ’90s indie-rock band that was about to reunite for its first concerts since 2010?That’s the animating spirit behind “Pavements,” the director Alex Ross Perry’s audacious documentary about the band, which opens Friday. Perry did, in fact, write and direct a stage show called “Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical” that played for two nights in Manhattan in 2022. A museum touting “rumored relics of the band’s real and imagined history” popped up in TriBeCa that fall, coinciding with the initial Brooklyn run of the group’s (very real, and very successful) reunion tour. And Perry filmed portions of a fictionalized Pavement biopic — starring Joe Keery (“Stranger Things”), Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker, among others — then staged a “premiere” for it in Brooklyn.“Pavements” covers, clockwise from top left, the band’s reunion tour, a museum of its memorabilia, a made-up Hollywood biopic and a jukebox musical, sometimes presented in split screen.UtopiaIn “Pavements,” all of this is intercut with archival imagery from the band’s history and footage from the reunion tour’s rehearsals and performances, sometimes presented in two-, three- or even four-way split screen. (The plural title is quite literal.) Overall, the effect is about as far from the typical rock documentary as you could get.“I was told, ‘They want nothing traditional,’” Perry said in a video interview last month, adding that the group’s frontman, Stephen Malkmus, texted him, “‘Avoid the legacy trap.’ Possibly in all capitals.” At this point in the life cycle of Pavement or any other band, Perry said, the question becomes: What else do we do with our story? A documentary, a series, an exhibition, what? “So that, for me, became the actual text of the movie,” he said.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

      What the Cult Singer Daniel Johnston Left Behind

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      Electric Lady Studios, in Greenwich Village, is a working music museum. The Fender Twin amplifier that the studio’s onetime owner Jimi Hendrix brought to work before his 1970 death remains, as does an electric piano Stevie Wonder used on an astounding run of records. There’s a keyboard Bob Dylan played in Muscle Shoals and several lurid murals by the painter Lance Jost, originals depicting interstellar travel and Aquarian-age sexual exploration.But Lee Foster — the former intern who became the space’s co-owner in 2010, after helping rescue it from financial ruin — keeps his drawings by the singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston in a small safe in the corner of his office, each page bound in plastic in a lime-green three-ring binder.Daniel Johnston’s drawing desk in his Texas home.Several 3D-printed versions of Johnston’s frog character, Jeremiah.The shelves in Daniel Johnston’s kitchen are completely filled with figurines and keepsakes. The house remains largely as he left it before his 2019 death.“It has nothing to do with financial value,” Foster said in his art-lined room last month, as afternoon slipped into evening. “It is so meaningful that, even if it was for that hour or three when he was sitting down to draw, it was all he was thinking about. There’s a little bit of his soul in there.”Soon after Johnston’s death in 2019, at 58, Foster became the unexpected custodian of Johnston’s unexpectedly enormous art archive. His career hamstrung by bipolar disorder and stints in psychiatric hospitals, Johnston first found acclaim as an unguarded and guileless songwriter in the late ’80s with tunes that cut instantly to the emotional quick.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

    • 163 Shares101 Views

      in Music

      What Comes After Trauma and a TikTok Hit? Gigi Perez Is Finding Out.

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      The artist, 25, struck platinum with “Sailor Song.” Her debut album is a tribute to her lost sister, and an attempt to make sense of a few rudderless years.Gigi Perez walked into a Brooklyn restaurant last week with a toothpick wedged in her mouth, stood up after dinner and slid in another one. She had glanced at a clear box of them sitting on the table periodically, like she was seeking comfort or reinforcement. But for two hours, she mostly kept her gaze fixed to the side, avoiding eye contact while she spoke — as she often finds herself doing — about death.“Getting older, watching the people in your family get older — I feel like I’m on a conveyor belt that’s going to this inevitable end,” she said.At 25, Perez speaks with a weariness of someone at least twice her age. She was at one of her favorite Japanese spots in Williamsburg, not too far from where she used to live; she was days away from releasing her debut album and 10 hours from a brutally early wake-up call for “The Today Show.”Like many young musicians, Perez is figuring out what comes next after virality. Her lilting, guitar-powered anthems have blazed through TikTok, amassing millions of streams and a fervent fan base. “Sailor Song,” a ballad about lusting after a girl who looks like Anne Hathaway (yes, it was based on a real woman), went platinum and has been planted on Spotify’s most-streamed songs in the United States for months; it became a No. 1 single in the United Kingdom last fall. But Perez’s career hasn’t been built on celebration. She is carving a catalog out of grief.“When you’re a kid, music is verbalizing things you don’t know how to say — you don’t have the vocabulary to understand. You’re discovering how you feel in real time,” Perez said. OK McCausland for The New York TimesOne of her first songs to garner attention on SoundCloud, “Sometimes (Backwood),” took off six months after her older sister, Celene, died suddenly in 2020. Perez’s LP, “At the Beach, in Every Life,” released less than a week ago, is largely a tribute to her. It is also an attempt to shape and sharpen the last, often rudderless years of her own life.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

    • 163 Shares87 Views

      in Music

      Beyoncé Cowboy Carter Tour Review; The Star Remixes American History, and Her Own

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      The last time Beyoncé performed “Daddy Lessons,” the stomping, biting number from her 2016 album, “Lemonade,” was at that year’s C.M.A. Awards, in a blistering rendition alongside the Dixie Chicks (now the Chicks).Not everyone in country music embraced Beyoncé’s experimentation. “I did not feel welcomed,” she wrote in album notes leading up to the release last year of “Cowboy Carter,” her eighth solo album, an exploration of the many tendrils of American roots music and their connections to Black music of all stripes and generations.So it was meaningful, and pointed, that at the opening night of the Cowboy Carter Tour at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., on Monday, Beyoncé played “Daddy Lessons” for the first time since that rejection. It came right after she sang her renovated version of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” — approved by the country royal herself — while soaring over the rapturous crowd in a flying horseshoe.At almost three hours long, her seventh solo headlining concert tour was a characteristic Beyoncé epic.The New York TimesBeyoncé’s Cowboy Carter show featured the debut of many of the album’s songs, but also brought back tracks from across her catalog.The New York TimesFull-circle moments don’t just happen — they are the products of intention and diligence and allergy to loose threads. Throughout this roisterous and clever show, there were suggestions that loop-closing has been very much on Beyoncé’s mind, along with culmination.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

      6 (Genre-Smashing) New Songs You Should Hear Now

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      Hit play on Sleep Token, Cortisa Star, Bon Iver and more.Sleep TokenAndy FordDear listeners,This is Joe Coscarelli, a music reporter at The New York Times and Lindsay’s colleague on the Culture desk, filling in for this Amplifier. Luckily, I’ve had playlists on my mind recently, because I had the pleasure of hosting a workshop called “How to Make the Perfect Playlist” at The Times’s annual Take Our Kids to Work Day celebration last week.As a group, we talked about the importance of mood, flow, genre and discovery when it comes to making a good mix, but I (mostly!) followed the kids’ lead when it came to actually choosing what was on our perfect, themed playlists. (You can check out the results of our two sessions here and here; they’re pleasantly deranged.) The truth is, despite having spent a decade in this music-intensive job and the previous decade as an obsessive fan and collector, I’m not super into making a bunch of playlists to suit my every vibe or situational need.Instead, I tend to just keep a quarterly depository of all the songs I find myself returning to throughout a given season, so I can easily time-travel back to any chunk of my recent life and have the relevant and transporting — if disjointed — soundtrack all in one place.Now that the weather is finally turning for good in New York (… right?), I have a new one going for spring that trends loosely toward a spirit of renewal and release. Here are some new songs that are original, addictive and hopeful enough to fit.xoxo,JoeListen along while you read.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