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      in Music

      At the Kennedy Center, a Send-Off to Biden and Questions About the Future

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      A bipartisan crowd honored Francis Ford Coppola, the Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt, Arturo Sandoval and the Apollo Theater. Some wondered if Donald J. Trump would attend next year.The arrival of the president to the center box is typically a pro forma affair each year at the Kennedy Center Honors. But President Biden’s arrival on Sunday night carried the tinge of a Washington on the verge of change.President-elect Donald J. Trump did not attend any of the honors events during his first term, in a sharp break with tradition. So the question of whether Sunday night might be the last time the commander in chief attends for the next four years was front and center as celebrities, artists and officials gathered to pay tribute to the arts.“I was talking to people backstage, and they’re going to try to get as many of these Honors in place now before the inauguration,” David Letterman joked as the audience roared with laughter.This year the center honored the filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, the beloved rock band the Grateful Dead, the Cuban American jazz trumpeter and composer Arturo Sandoval, the singer and songwriter Bonnie Raitt and the landmark Apollo Theater, in Harlem.Queen Latifah, hosting the celebration, said, “We find hope in heartache and hard times, and now more than ever, we need artists to help us uncover our shared truths, one story, one rhythm, one lyric at a time.”Bonnie CashThe host, Queen Latifah, told the crowd that artists “find hope in heartache and hard times, and now more than ever, we need artists to help us uncover our shared truths, one story, one rhythm, one lyric at a time.”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

      How Will Popular Culture Change in Trump’s Second Term?

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIn the months leading up to the election, Donald J. Trump appeared on several podcasts with young male audiences. Whether or not they tilted the outcome, they helped increase Trump’s visibility and appeal with a notoriously hard-to-reach demographic. And following his victory, Trump culture moved out of these comfort spaces and began seeping out in unexpected places: Trump danced in N.F.L. end zones, there were TikTok videos of people wearing MAGA hats in New York City.In many ways the cultural legacy of the first Trump administration was more visible in backlash and protest. But it’s possible the second time around, the impact will be an affirmative one.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the long tail of cultural response to political change, the de-monopolization of centrist broadcast and cable television and the different directions pop culture might take in Trump’s second term.Guest:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More

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      in Television

      Trump’s Win Unfolded on TV as a Muted Reboot

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      Election night on 2024 played like an enervated replay of 2016. Was it a harbinger of how the culture will respond to a second Trump term?If you stayed up into the early morning hours to watch the Blue Wall gradually bleed red and Donald J. Trump give a rambling victory speech surrounded by an entourage, you might have thought that you had seen this show before.You had. But not quite in this way.The long election night unfolded on TV much the way Mr. Trump’s first two did — similar stakes, similar battleground states. But it played very differently. His win in 2016, after a campaign in which he was often covered as an outrageous novelty who would never really win, landed in news studios like an asteroid. In 2020, networks were prepared to fact-check his defiant, false claim of victory after a night that ended up surprisingly close for him.His re-election, on the other hand, was unusual but not unanticipated. It was within the range of possible outcomes suggested by polling, and networks went on the air with the presumption that both he and Vice President Kamala Harris had a solid chance to end up president-elect.So the re-election of a president who had attempted to overturn the results of the last contest — and the return to top billing of America’s most divisive media star — was covered, at least in its first hours, largely as a matter of math.There were seven battleground states, and within them, layers and layers of numbers and variables to unpack. On channel after channel, guys in shirtsleeves with smart-screens — Steve Kornacki, Bill Hemmer, John King — zoomed into America’s electoral anatomy. A CNN map showed in shades of brown which areas of the country had suffered most from recent inflation, a vista of amber waves of pain.The percentages were plentiful but the broader perspective elusive. In the early hours, it could be tough for a channel hopper to get a sense of who was doing well and poorly. On Fox News, Jesse Watters gloated over the “cannonball” splash of Mr. Trump’s win in Florida, while ABC saw early hope for Harris in Pennsylvania.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 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      What to Know About ‘The Apprentice,’ the Controversial Trump Biopic

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      The film, now available on demand, followed a thorny path to distribution — including the threat of a lawsuit by its subject.If you know one thing about the new Donald Trump biopic “The Apprentice,” it’s likely this: The former president doesn’t want you to see it.The drama, which debuted to mostly positive reviews at the Cannes Film Festival in May, follows a young Trump (Sebastian Stan) as he meets — and falls under the spell of — the lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong); brashly courts, then quickly tires of his first wife, Ivana Trump (Maria Bakalova), and becomes single-mindedly obsessed with winning, at everything, at all costs.Despite praise for Stan and Strong, the film, directed by the Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi and written by the author Gabriel Sherman, struggled to secure distribution, and Trump threatened to file a lawsuit to block its release.But in August, Briarcliff Entertainment, a distributor founded by Tom Ortenberg, a producer on “Spotlight” and “W,” acquired the theatrical rights and announced plans to release the film ahead of the presidential election. After debuting in cinemas on Oct. 10 (again drawing largely positive reviews but just $3.5 million at the box office), it is debuting on demand this weekend.Here’s what to know about the offscreen saga and the onscreen story.What period in Trump’s life does the film cover?It chronicles Trump’s younger years as a New York real estate developer, though the title comes from the TV series Trump later hosted for 14 seasons.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

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      What It Means to Make Art About Nazis Now

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      And is the culture telling the right stories about them, at a time when it’s never felt more urgent?A MAN IN a tie and suspenders smokes a cigar thoughtfully, its ash end hot orange in an otherwise cool blue shot. Its fiery pock is the most lurid thing we see in Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” even though there’s a crematorium next door.“The Zone of Interest,” winner of the 2024 Academy Award for best international feature, imagines the domestic life of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife (Sandra Hüller), who for a time lived mere yards from the ovens built to burn the bodies of hundreds of Jews a day. The screenplay might have been ghostwritten by Hannah Arendt, so banal is its portrait of evil. Höss fishes with his children, worries about a promotion, enjoys his garden, conducts an affair. We see no victims, nor, other than that cigar, any flame: just a pretty, smoky glow from the furnaces at night.It’s not as if the movie’s intentions could be misread. Without depicting horror itself, Glazer, who is Jewish, wants to show how easily middle-class values like diligence and ambition were adapted by Nazis to horrible ends. But in avoiding what the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, in response to Roberto Benigni’s 1997 movie “Life Is Beautiful,” called Holokitsch — the sentimental exploitation of victims’ suffering to dredge up drama — “The Zone of Interest” approaches it anyway, only now from the other direction, drawing its aesthetic power from detachment instead of engagement.Is that better?Tear-jerking as they may have been, works like “Life Is Beautiful,” the 1979 mini-series “Holocaust” and Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993) had no trouble plainly acknowledging the murder of six million, which “The Zone of Interest” does only obliquely. If, as the German philosopher Theodor Adorno asserted in 1951, it became “barbaric” to write poetry after Auschwitz, it also, for many, became barbaric not to. What else can artists do with atrocity but make art from it?At the same time, and especially in our time, they are faced with a paradox. The appalling resurgence of antisemitism has made it more important than ever to remind the world of the great crime against the Jews. Yet the names and symbols of Adolf Hitler’s regime — and of Hitler himself, the big rhetorical nesting doll that contains the rest — have been emptied of real meaning by years of overuse as sitcom punch lines (the Soup Nazi from “Seinfeld” nearly three decades ago) and zingers for politicians (Donald Trump called out Joe Biden’s “Gestapo administration” in May). To try to reinvest these ideas with awfulness is to risk aesthetic failure. Not to try is to risk the moral kind.Still, the “Sieg Heil” salutes, SS lightning bolts and swastikas keep coming, even if in most contexts their omnipresence has rendered them not just objectionable but trite. In political discourse, Nazi name-calling almost always diminishes the unique evil of the originals. The words themselves, like amulets, may even burnish the twisted self-respect of those who trade in them. JD Vance, who in 2016 wrote that Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” has had a convenient change of heart, but it’s not clear that Trump minded anyway. That he might just as easily have been called America’s Idi Amin or Joseph Stalin emphasizes the emptiness of the insult.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

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      Jimmy Kimmel: ‘Tonight’s Monologue Is for Republicans’

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      Kimmel made a 19-minute case against Donald Trump on Tuesday, asking viewers to “send it to a Republican you love.” (He did throw in a Biden joke.)Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Crossing the Aisle“Tonight’s monologue is for Republicans,” Jimmy Kimmel said on Tuesday. He then made a 19-minute case against Donald Trump, asking his viewers to send the clip to “a Republican you love and respect.” “Ask them to watch this whole thing as a personal favor to you,” he said. Then, after promising no “liberal virtue-signaling” and throwing in a Biden joke, he introduced himself to “those of you who don’t ever watch.”“I’m Jimmy Kimmel. Maybe you remember me from ‘The Man Show.’ We had a pretty good relationship back then — the beer, the trampolines. Good times, right? We had fun. But now times are less fun.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“We are very divided, and not just because of Donald Trump, because of people like, if I’m being honest, me. I do a lot of mocking and belittling, and it isn’t always productive.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Am I biased against Donald Trump? Yes. Do I think I have good reasons for being biased against him? Yes. And I’m probably wrong, but I think when you hear some of those reasons, you might agree with me, even just a little bit.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Maybe there’s a little voice in the back your head saying, ‘I might not want this guy driving the bus.’ And if you’re one of those people who think Democrats are controlling the weather or Beyoncé eats baby skin, forget it. This is not going to help at all.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Donald Trump is the exact meeting point between QAnon and QVC. You remember when Ronald Reagan was selling high-tops in the 1980s? No, you don’t, because he wasn’t.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Not to mention the 34 felony convictions. Will he be president from jail? I mean, how do you see that working?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Anyway, if you made it this far, thank you for listening.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (What a Joke Edition)“It’s rare to tell a joke so bad that it alters the course of human history.” — STEPHEN COLBERT, on the backlash over the comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally who compared Puerto Rico to garbage“Today, following his disastrous rally at Madison Square Garden, former President Trump defended the event and called it an ‘absolute lovefest.’ Then Kamala Harris looked at the polls and said, ‘Well, I’m certainly loving it.’” — JIMMY FALLONWe 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

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Television

      Why Trump Uses Comics Like Tony Hinchcliffe to Spread His Message

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      Like the former president, these stand-ups loathe the news media, delight in transgression and harbor a deep-seated love of cruel insult jokes.The stand-up of Tony Hinchcliffe, a popular insult comic, became an immediate issue in the presidential campaign on Sunday after his racist lines at a Donald J. Trump rally earned immediate blowback and criticism from, among others, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz.As Hinchcliffe has done in the past when embroiled in controversy, he doubled down. On X, he wrote that Walz had found the time to “analyze a joke taken out of context to make it seem racist.” Walz didn’t do that. But to the extent that there was a relevant context to Hinchcliffe’s dopey, trolling punchlines, it’s this: They were delivered at a Trump campaign event nine days before the election.There was a time not long ago when people wondered why there weren’t more conservative comedians or why there wasn’t a right-wing version of “The Daily Show.” These questions have always been a little naïve. Comedy has long had a conservative streak, and anyone who ever attended middle school knows that jokes can be as effective at reaffirming the status quo as challenging it.But comedy has become more partisan over the years; late-night TV’s move from neutral Johnny Carson to anti-Trump hosts is only one example. In this election, a forceful new Trump-friendly contingent has emerged, one dominated by male comics, many from Joe Rogan’s orbit. Whereas the biggest names in pop music have come out aggressively for Vice President Kamala Harris, the artists who have provided the most support for Trump have been comedians.Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have made comedy podcasts a regular stop, aiming to win over young male voters dissatisfied with mainstream news outlets. Just in the past week, Vance has appeared on the podcasts of Tim Dillon, a satirical comic who specializes in booming nihilistic rants, and the oddly poetic, bro-ish comic Theo Von. After much public speculation over whether Trump would be invited to sit down with Rogan — the most popular comedy podcaster and the one who gave a boost to many of these comics — it happened. (Trump has also appeared on podcasts with Von and with the New York standup Andrew Schulz, a podcaster so popular he headlined Madison Square Garden this year.)This doesn’t even count Greg Gutfeld, who as Fox’s highly rated right-wing answer to late night has had Trump on as well.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

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      Without Another Debate, the Campaign Became a Duel of TV Scenes

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      As the candidates raced to claim different corners of the national screen this week, it was “Undercover Boss” vs. “Roll the clip.”In a typical election season — remember those? — right about now we would be preparing for, or recovering from, the final presidential debate. But Oct. 23, the date of a proposed CNN showdown that Kamala Harris accepted and Donald J. Trump declined, came and went without one.Instead, as Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump raced to claim different corners of the national screen, they were essentially staging a virtual debate, presenting competing versions of themselves on strikingly different stages.Mr. Trump substituted the debate podium with a takeout window, performing a shift on the fry cooker at a closed McDonald’s franchise and violating the occasional job protocol. It was a familiar kind of reality-TV stunt for a reality-TV candidate.This time, however, he was not emulating “The Apprentice” but staging a political version of “Undercover Boss.”On the CBS reality series, which aired 11 seasons from 2010 to 2022, company executives went incognito to work low-level jobs at their companies. The premise was to show bigwigs how the grunts lived. But it also served, in the years after the financial collapse and Great Recession, as a form of prime-time crisis P.R. Chief executives were people too, it told us; they shared common purpose and mutual respect with the rank and file.Mr. Trump’s shift, which lasted less time than a single “Undercover Boss” episode, had different aims. Most overtly, it was a way of using virality — what news producer can resist footage of Donald Trump shoveling fries into a container? — to spread his unsubstantiated claim that Ms. Harris had lied about working at McDonald’s while in college. (As with his birtherism campaign against Barack Obama, media coverage generally noted that his charges were baseless, but the dust still got kicked up, the doubts potentially sown.)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