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      5 Places to Visit in Baltimore, Maryland, With John Waters

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      The writer and director, famous for making theatergoers squirm in their seats, says he feels most at home wherever the outsiders gather in his native city.The 1998 John Waters film “Pecker” ends with an unlikely crowd carousing in a seedy basement bar/impromptu photo gallery in Baltimore. Strippers and one busty, enthusiastic art collector dance on tables as a talking Virgin Mary icon watches. It’s a jubilant, chaotic and naughty party open to anyone with a sense of humor, just the way the director likes it.Mr. Waters, 78, gained a cult following in the 1970s with delightfully shocking films like “Multiple Maniacs,” “Female Trouble” and, of course, the raunchy “Pink Flamingos” before breaking big with “Hairspray,” in 1988.Since then, Mr. Waters has built an empire of camp, now comprising more than a dozen films, spoken-word shows and numerous books, including his 2022 debut novel, “Liarmouth,” which has been optioned for a movie that Mr. Waters hopes will star Aubrey Plaza.Mr. Waters, a Baltimore native, grew up in Lutherville, Md., a suburb he described in a recent phone interview as “upper-middle-class everything.” Yearning for escape, he had his mom drop him off at a Baltimore beatnik hangout called Martick’s, even though he was underage. “She said, ‘Maybe you’ll meet your people here,’” he recalled.“I did find my people — bohemia!” he said.Since those days, Mr. Waters has become an unofficial spokesman for all things Baltimore, which was one of The New York Times’s 52 Places to Go in 2024. The city has embraced him, too. It honored him with an official day, Feb. 7, 1985 (it was a one-off), and the all-gender restrooms at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the institution to which he has bequeathed his sizable art collection, are named for him.Though Mr. Waters has apartments in San Francisco and New York and spends summers in Provincetown, Mass., he lives primarily in North Baltimore and has no plans to change that. “If I had to give up everywhere,” Mr. Waters said, “this is where I’d live.”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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      Michael Jackson Died With $500 Million in Debt

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      Jackson owed about $40 million to the tour promoter A.E.G. in 2009, his estate’s executors said in a court filing. They said all the debts have been eliminated.Michael Jackson’s debts and creditor’s claims at the time of his death in 2009 totaled more than $500 million, according to a court filing by the pop superstar’s estate that provides details of his financial woes toward the end of his life.Jackson owed about $40 million to the tour promoter A.E.G., according to the filing, which was made in Los Angeles County Superior Court this month and earlier reported by People magazine. The filing said that 65 creditors made claims against the singer after his death, some of which resulted in lawsuits, and that some of his debt had been “accruing interest at extremely high interest rates.”A representative for the Jackson estate, which is executed by John Branca and John McClain, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The estate filed the court papers as a request to authorize the payment of about $3.5 million to several legal firms for their work in the second half of 2018.In the court filing, the executors say that they have eliminated the estate’s debt and that almost all of the creditors’ claims and litigation have been resolved.Jackson earned hundreds of millions of dollars throughout the 1980s and 1990s as the creator of some of the biggest-selling albums of all time, along with dazzling concert tours that filled stadiums around the world. He bought the Beatles’ song catalog for $47.5 million in 1985 and later sold it to Sony/ATV Music in exchange for a 50 percent share in the company. Sony bought back the estate’s share for $750 million in 2016.But when Jackson died at the age of 50, shortly before he was supposed to embark on a tour called This Is It, he left behind a tangled web of assets and liabilities.Jackson was famous for his lavish lifestyle and spent money with abandon. He incurred millions of dollars in debt from his Neverland Ranch estate in Southern California and had a penchant for expensive art, jewelry and private jets. He was paying more than $30 million annually on interest payments, a forensic accountant testified during a 2013 wrongful-death trial in which A.E.G. prevailed.The Jackson estate is currently in a dispute with the I.R.S. after a tax audit. In a separate court filing this year, the estate said that the federal agency accused it of undervaluing its assets and said it owed “an additional $700 million in taxes and penalties.”Kirsten Noyes More

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      Girl Groupers Gone (Successfully!) Solo

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      With two new albums from members of Fifth Harmony out now, a look back at other pop singers who took off on their own.Diana RossJoe Castro/European Pressphoto AgencyDear listeners,This is not exactly a boom time for American girl groups*. The last high-profile one to have any chart success was Fifth Harmony, who formed on the 2012 season of “The X Factor” and went on an indefinite hiatus in 2018. I bring this up because, strikingly, two former members of Fifth Harmony have released solo albums in the past two weeks: The R&B chanteuse Normani put out her long-gestating “Dopamine” on June 14, and today the Cuban-born pop star Camila Cabello is unleashing her bold, outré fourth solo album, “C, XOXO.”In honor of this rare phenomenon in the pop cosmos, I thought it would be fun to put together a playlist of songs by former members of all-female vocal groups — past and present — who flew the coop and went solo. Yes, this mix features Beyoncé. And Kelly Rowland too! It also includes tracks from the Supreme Ms. Diana Ross, the multitalented Dawn Richard and the eternally cool Ronnie Spector, among others.Also, a programming note: I will be on vacation for the next two weeks, but as always I’ll be leaving you in good hands. Expect a fresh Amplifier written by a very special guest to arrive in your inbox each Tuesday while I’m gone, and get ready for an especially eclectic record haul playlist when I return from my travels. Til then!Respectfully I say to thee,Lindsay*The girl group is, of course, still alive and well in the K-pop world. If I had to guess, I’d predict that the next major, global, post-girl-group superstar will come from South Korea.Listen 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

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      Towa Bird’s Bouncy Revenge Rock, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Camila Cabello, Wilco, Xavi and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Towa Bird, ‘Deep Cut’Towa Bird — a rock songwriter, guitarist and prolific TikToker who was born in Hong Kong and grew up there, in Thailand and in Britain — uses “Deep Cut” to take lucrative revenge on an ex. “I’ll take your words, turn ’em into a verse and get my check,” she announces, going on to declare, “I wish you the worst/I’ll make sure that it hurts ’cause I’m bitter.” With splashy cymbals and a nyah-nyah guitar hook, it’s victoriously spiteful.Pom Pom Squad, ‘Downhill’Mia Berrin, the singer who leads Pom Pom Squad, balances between regrets and the perverse pleasures of self-destruction in “Downhill.” Over a bouncy beat that carries punk-pop guitars and neatly stacked vocal harmonies, she sings, “All my worst traits every worst case playing in my head/Overwhelm me — heaven help me, I’m in love with it.” At least for the moment, she’s incorrigible: “I never said I was done,” she vows. “I’m coming back from the dead.”Wilco, ‘Hot Sun’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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      Buzz Cason, Songwriter Best Known for ‘Everlasting Love,’ Dies at 84

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      As a performer, he was a leading figure in the early days of Nashville rock ’n’ roll. He later found success as a writer, producer and publisher.Buzz Cason, a guiding force in the early days of Nashville rock ’n’ roll and a writer of the pop standard “Everlasting Love,” a surging profession of undying devotion that reached the pop Top 40 in four consecutive decades, died on June 16 at his home in Franklin, Tenn. He was 84.His death was announced by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. The announcement did not specify a cause.A pivotal figure in Nashville’s evolution as a recording hub, Mr. Cason had a hand in virtually every facet of the music industry. He sang, wrote and published songs, as well as producing records and operating his own recording studio.He had his biggest success as the writer, with Mac Gayden, of “Everlasting Love.” The R&B singers Robert Knight (1967) and Carl Carlton (1974) recorded hit versions of the song, as did Gloria Estefan (1995) and the ad hoc pop duo Rex Smith and Rachel Sweet (1981). U2 released a stripped-down take of “Everlasting Love” as one of two B-sides of the 1989 single “All I Want Is You.”“We didn’t know what we had,” Mr. Cason said of the song in an interview at an event held in his honor at the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2014. “It was a really great radio song.”“Everlasting Love,” in its many versions, has received more than 10 million plays to date, according to the music rights organization BMI. It is among the most successful songs in any genre to come from Nashville.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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      A Night Out in New York With Sabrina Fuentes of the Band Pretty Sick

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      Hitting New York’s East Village with Sabrina Fuentes, the 24-year-old frontwoman of the band Pretty Sick.It was a Tuesday night in June, and Sabrina Fuentes, the frontwoman of the band Pretty Sick, was about to make her usual Tuesday night rounds in Lower Manhattan. That meant hitting a bar or two with the idea of ending up at Studio 151, a sushi restaurant above the nightclub Nublu.As the night got started in earnest, Ms. Fuentes, 24, was having a glass of orange wine at a sidewalk table outside Time Again, a bar on Canal Street co-owned by the Queens rapper Despot, né Alec Reinstein. Ms. Fuentes was wearing low-cut Issey Miyake jeans, a black tank top and Repetto ballet flats. On her right shoulder was a temporary tattoo featuring a butterfly and the words “Bite me.”The actor Reza Nader joined her at the table. He mentioned that he had recently filmed a scene for an episode of “Law & Order: SVU.” Then he asked her for some advice on a problem he was having in his romantic life.Mr. Reinstein stopped by to ask Ms. Fuentes if she needed anything before turning his attention to the rapper Lil Yachty, who had arrived with a group of friends in a compact SUV.Ms. Fuentes is a lifelong Manhattan resident who lives with her parents on the Upper East Side. She formed Pretty Sick when she was a teenager, and its first album, “Makes Me Sick, Makes Me Smile,” came out in 2022. Pitchfork had nice things to say about it, though it took a slight dig at Ms. Fuentes for doing very little to disguise her musical influences (Nirvana, Hole, the Breeders, Blondie and Iggy Pop, among others).This month Pretty Sick is releasing an EP, “Streetwise.” At the same time Ms. Fuentes will put out a limited line of clothing, P.S. by Pretty Sick, to be sold on a website and in several Heaven by Marc Jacobs stores.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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      Celine Dion Can Only Be Herself

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      The singer’s over-the-top sincerity and expressiveness were once seen as irredeemably uncool. In the new documentary “I Am: Celine Dion,” they have become her superpowers.“I always envy people who smoke and drink and party and don’t sleep,” Celine Dion tells her physical therapist with an exaggerated sigh, midway through the new documentary “I Am: Celine Dion.” “Me, I have water and I sleep 12 hours.”This monastic constraint has long been a core part of the Celine Dion legend. A professional singer since 12, she spent decades meticulously caring for her voice as though it were an endangered hothouse flower, committing to long stretches of vocal rest, complicated warm-up rituals and a lifestyle of exacting discipline — all so she could leap octaves and belt soaring notes with gobsmacking precision.In a cruel twist of fate, though, even the ceaseless care Dion devoted to her voice could not preserve it. In 2022, she revealed in an emotional Instagram post that she has stiff person syndrome, a rare and incurable neurological disorder that causes painful muscle spasms and affects roughly one in a million people. After watching “I Am: Celine Dion,” a remarkably candid portrait directed by Irene Taylor on Amazon Prime Video, it is difficult to imagine a disease that would be more personally devastating to Dion, whose entire career has been one long exercise in control, sacrificing all for the ecstatic release of live performance.Since her emergence as a Québécois child star with a precociously huge voice, something about Dion’s essential nature has remained constant, impervious to both changing trends and scathing critique. Whether power ballads were in fashion or not — and by and large, they were not — she sang them with the conviction of someone who’d never even heard the word “restraint.” “At her best,” wrote Elisabeth Vincentelli in a Times review of Dion’s most recent New York performance in February 2020, “Dion projects a sense of bigness — besides fairly simple graphics, the background videos in her show often showed cosmic images, as if they were the only thing measuring up on the Dion scale.” This bombastic approach gained her a worldwide fan base and a requisite backlash that she may have finally outpaced.In 2007, the music critic Carl Wilson used Dion’s 1999 blockbuster album “Let’s Talk About Love” as the inspiration for an insightful, ultimately sympathetic book-length examination of musical taste, the assumption being that (at least 17 years ago) Dion’s name was a symbol for all things gauche, sincere and uncool. (The book’s subtitle? “A Journey to the End of Taste.”) “Schmaltz rots faster than other ingredients in the musical pantry,” Wilson wrote, “which may be why we doubt the possibility of a Celine Dion revival in 2027.”Dion allows cameras to follow her as she struggles with stiff person syndrome in a new film.Amazon 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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      Mary Timony Is an Indie-Rock Hero. Her Other Gig? Mentor.

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      The songwriter and guitarist has long been a staple of the Washington, D.C., scene. Teaching guitar to young students helped her realize she has even more to offer.In the dining room of her cozy home in Washington, D.C., Mary Timony retrieved her lute from an instrument case that, she joked, “looks like a cat coffin.” Timony, 53, has been on a learning kick recently. “Literally all I’m working on is this,” she said, demonstrating how the so-called thumb-under fingerpicking method strays from traditional guitar technique.Timony is well known as a guitarist and frontwoman: In the 1990s she headed up the bands Autoclave and Helium, then released solo records before joining Wild Flag, an indie-rock supergroup. Ex Hex, her classic rock and power-pop trio known for catchy songs and rafter-reaching guitar solos, has released two albums since 2014; her latest solo LP, “Untame the Tiger,” written and recorded in the midst of a breakup as she cared for her dying parents, arrived earlier this year.But to many young people of D.C., Timony is highly regarded as something else: a mentor to the next generations of women pursuing their passion for indie rock.From left: Timony, Rebecca Cole and Carrie Brownstein of Wild Flag onstage in 2011.Chad Batka for The New York TimesFor more than two decades, Timony has instructed students how to play licks from classic rock songs (among other things) in the guitar- and amp-filled basement of her 1920s home on a tree-lined street, where a framed portrait of a young Joe Walsh watches on. Early pupils remember the experience fondly.“She was super supportive and made me feel excited about playing guitar,” Anna Wilson, 24, said. “She put me in my first band when I was 10.” She now plays guitar and pedal steel in Timony’s touring band.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