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      in Movies

      ‘Judy Blume Forever’ Review: The Y.A. Author Who Went There First

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      The documentary, streaming on Amazon Prime Video, features Blume narrating the milestones of her life and career, along with interviews of her famous fans.There are few living children’s authors who have connected as deeply to their readers as Judy Blume. That’s the argument of “Judy Blume Forever,” a new documentary from Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok that pays unwavering tribute to Blume and her imprint on young adult literature. The film, streaming on Amazon Prime Video starting Friday, features the 85-year-old writer narrating the major milestones of her life and career, cut together with interviews of famous Blume acolytes such as the writer and director Lena Dunham, the comedian Samantha Bee, the writer Jacqueline Woodson and Anna Konkle, the co-creator of “PEN15.”Since the publication of her breakthrough novel “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” in 1970, while she was a young housewife in suburban New Jersey, Blume has maintained a fiercely devoted audience that has found enlightenment and understanding through her preteen and teenage characters. It’s not uncommon to hear fans of Blume’s work say that reading her books felt as though she was speaking directly to them through the pages. This is thanks, in no small part, to her frank discussion of mature themes that, at the time she was writing, were considered unusual for what we now call Y.A. novels: adolescent sexuality, religion, disability, bullying, and — in many of her books — the unfair expectations of purity and obedience that parents and society place on children.“Judy Blume Forever” does a fine job of synthesizing the influences that Blume’s life had on her writing — in particular her father’s death when she was 21, as well as the marriage and divorce that inspired her first adult-oriented novel, “Wifey.” Blume, a longtime free-speech advocate, also has no qualms about drawing parallels between the Reagan-era book censorship campaigns she endured and the hundreds of attempts to ban books in just the past year.In a successful showcase of what might be lost if Blume’s books were removed from libraries and schools, the film returns to one of the most compelling aspects of career: her correspondence with thousands of children, whose letters to her span 50 years and are now archived at Yale. Pardo and Wolchok interview two of Blume’s pen pals, now adults themselves, and their recounting of her impact on their lives encompasses some of the film’s most moving portions.At times, “Judy Blume Forever” can resemble a highlight reel of Blume’s bibliography, with large sections dedicated to her books’ most memorable excerpts, such as the masturbation sequence in “Deenie.” Given her vast literary output, it’s hard to give complex stories like “Blubber” and “Forever” the nuance they deserve in a short documentary, especially one this preoccupied with showing Judy Blume the person, jogging on the beach and owning a small bookstore in Key West. Compared with her most obvious predecessor, Maurice Sendak, who led an intensely private life, Blume has always been an open book, despite the flurry of controversy around her. That may not make for the most exciting documentary, but it does make Blume herself even more endearing.Judy Blume ForeverNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      in Music

      What Salt-N-Pepa and Issa Rae See in One Another

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      Cheryl “Salt” James: I remember Issa creating a Kickstarter account in 2011 to raise money so she could finish the first season of her YouTube series “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl” (2011-13). That always struck me as savvy and bold. I had the privilege of watching her build her audience, then take them with her to HBO for “Insecure.”When you’re an artist, people are always questioning your vision. Ideas can get stretched and pulled in different directions, and they can become diluted. Issa has always, from what I can see, followed her gut.On the CoverCheryl “Salt” James wears a Vince dress; Zana Bayne belt; Christian Louboutin boots; David Webb earrings, necklace and cuff; and Tabayer ring. Rae wears a Proenza Schouler dress; Stuart Weitzman sandals; Lisa Eisner earrings; Bulgari cuffs; and her own ring. Sandra “Pepa” Denton wears a Versace dress; Bottega Veneta shoes; Van Cleef & Arpels necklace and bracelet; and David Webb ring.Photograph by Renee Cox. Styled by Ian BradleySandra “Pepa” Denton: In her memoir [2015’s “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl”], Issa mentions struggling with not feeling Black enough. I can relate to that. When Salt-N-Pepa was selling millions of records, they called us “crossover,” which meant that we weren’t Black or hip enough. Now everyone wants to be pop. It means you’ve gone global. Like us, Issa stayed strong and was smart about her struggle, turning it into comedy. She kept it real, too.Issa Rae: I grew up on Salt-N-Pepa. I’ve always admired their collaboration as partners and the way they complement each other. It’s so hard for a group to last in this business, but they continue to be unapologetic about who they are and what they’re about. So much of my inspiration as a writer comes from female rappers. I write to rap music. When I was in middle school, I even tried to start rap groups because of Salt-N-Pepa. I had no business doing that, but they made me think I could.Photograph by Renee Cox. Styled by Ian BradleyPhotograph by Renee Cox. Styled by Ian Bradleyculture banner More

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      in Theater

      How Lynn Nottage and Her Daughter Are Exploring Their Relationship in Writing

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      Can you collaborate with your mother, a Pulitzer-winning playwright, and develop your own voice too? Ruby Aiyo Gerber wasn’t too scared to try. Ruby Aiyo Gerber: For so long, I rebelled against wanting to be a writer, fearing that admiring any part of you was to be forever in your shadow. I had a lot of fear when starting the collaboration [on the opera “This House,” with the composer Ricky Ian Gordon, which premieres next year at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis; based on a play that Gerber wrote, it’s about a brownstone in Harlem and its inhabitants over a century] that I wouldn’t be able to be my own writer, that I’d be like a version of you, that my words would turn into yours. Lynn Nottage: In both librettos we’re collaborating on right now [for “This House” and another forthcoming opera tentatively called “The Highlands,” with the composer Carlos Simon], we’re dealing with intergenerational trauma, intergenerational love. A daughter grappling with her legacy, a daughter grappling with her relationship to her mother, a daughter trying to decide if she wants to take this gift that her mother has offered her. Embedded in the themes we’re exploring is our relationship.culture banner More

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      in Theater

      A Connection That Began When Sarah Ruhl Made Paula Vogel Cry

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      Paula Vogel: In my advanced playwriting class at Brown, there was an exercise where I asked people to write a play with a dog as protagonist, and Sarah wrote about the dog waiting for the family to return home after her father’s funeral. That was my introduction to her — on the page. I remember weeping at the end of the five pages, running into the next room and handing them to my wife, who also started to cry. I looked at her and said, “This woman is going to be a household name.” And then I discovered she was 20.What’s followed has been 30 years of exchanging writers, books, first drafts. I’m always perplexed when people teach writing and they ask the writers to be insular. Every time we write a play, we’re talking back to Aristotle: We shape the clay of our own work by responding to colleagues who are no longer with us. It’s a much different path for women playwrights — things that our male colleagues like Tom Stoppard or Tony Kushner may get praised for (using poetic language; challenging an audience emotionally) often get resisted when a woman’s voice presents those same virtues.culture banner More

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      in Television

      Laurie Simmons and Lena Dunham Argue About Earrings, Not Art

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      Laurie Simmons: My father was a first-generation American small-town dentist on Long Island with an office off our kitchen and a darkroom in the basement; I’d sit at his feet as he developed his dental X-rays. I see his work ethic in you — you’re relentless in your desire to keep making things — but I’d like to think that came from me, too.Lena Dunham: Well, it did. I’ve seen you go into your studio and come out 12 hours later in the same outfit looking confused, like you don’t know when you went in. Growing up, I spent a lot of time in that space. My favorite thing to do was to look through the loupe at slides on the light box. And then you’d take the red pen and X out the ones that weren’t good.L.S.: I can’t believe you remember that.culture banner More

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      in Music

      Why Madhur Jaffrey and Michelle Zauner ‘Fell Toward Each Other’

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      Madhur Jaffrey: I learned about Michelle through my granddaughter. I read her book [“Crying in H Mart,” 2021] and listened to her music, and I thought she seemed like me. Our relationships to our mothers are in many ways similar — when she said in her book that her mother used to watch QVC and buy face creams, I thought of my own mother, who would have my sisters and me rub the cow’s milk from our own cows into our faces because she heard that Cleopatra bathed in the milk of an ass for her milky complexion. Our fathers were similar, too: Michelle’s father never took her music seriously, which reminded me of my father, who told the president of India that acting was just my hobby.culture banner More

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      in Television

      Blair Tindall, Whose Music Memoir Scandalized, Dies at 63

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      Her 2005 book, “Mozart in the Jungle,” lived up to its subtitle, “Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music,” and was later made into an Amazon TV series.Blair Tindall, a freelance oboist and journalist who drew on both of those abilities to write “Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music,” an eyebrow-raising 2005 memoir that became an award-winning television series, died on April 12 in Los Angeles. She was 63.Her fiancé, the photographer Chris Sattlberger, said the cause was cardiovascular disease.Ms. Tindall had played in various ensembles and Broadway pit orchestras and was writing regularly for publications including The New York Times when “Mozart in the Jungle” appeared. Any reader holding a pristine view of the people who make classical music was quickly relieved of it: The book opens with Ms. Tindall’s visit to a cocaine-fueled party of musicians and goes on to detail assorted escapades, among them her own sexual liaisons, including an early one, with a middle-aged instructor, when she was a teenager studying at the North Carolina School of the Arts.“I got hired for most of my gigs in bed,” she wrote.The book set tongues wagging in the classical music world and divided critics.“Written with pop culture-savvy flair — a feat for a musician who, at one point, admits to being ‘proud that I couldn’t identify a pop song from Beatles to Blondie’ — ‘Mozart’ is a delightfully unlikely page-turner,” Ali Marshall wrote in Mountain Xpress, an alternative newspaper in North Carolina. “And, even if it doesn’t encourage readers to listen to classical music, it’s sure to instill in them an unprecedented admiration of this deviant art.”But the music writer Anne Midgette, in The New York Times, was not impressed.“The book’s biggest weakness is that it smacks of sour grapes,” she wrote. “By writing it as an autobiography, Ms. Tindall seems to be saying that everything that went wrong in her life is the fault of the classical music world.”Ms. Tindall’s book set tongues wagging in the classical music world. It also divided critics.In interviews after the book came out, Ms. Tindall was unapologetic about the salacious parts.“I did notice when I became involved in a relationship with someone in the business that my work picked up,” she told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2005. “You need all the friends you can get. The music world is very incestuous.”Speaking with The Daily News of New York the same year, she was matter-of-fact.“People always seem shocked that musicians would have sex,” she said. “I mean, where do little musicians come from?”The sensational content drew much of the attention, but Ms. Tindall said she was making serious points in the book about dysfunction in the classical-music world — pay inequities, for instance, that had a few star conductors and musicians making big money while musicians like her scraped by, and music schools that built up false hopes among students.“If you take all the major orchestras in America together, there are jobs for only 100 full-time oboists,” she told The Daily Telegraph. “Yet there are 300 union oboists in the New York area alone.”And the wild times she chronicled, she said, weren’t quite the same as the better-known excesses of rock ’n’ roll.“Sex and drugs are a show of exuberance in rock,” she said. “In the world of classical music, they are more of an escape from a sense of confinement and depression.”She told The Daily Telegraph that she hoped the book might interest someone in Hollywood. But she said she wasn’t optimistic: No actress would want to play her, since drawing music from an oboe requires puffed-out cheeks and leaves the musician bug-eyed.“Unfortunately, nobody looks good playing the oboe,” she said.Lola Kirke and Gael García Bernal in an episode of “Mozart in the Jungle,” the Amazon TV series based on Ms. Tindall’s book.Amazon StudiosYet nine years later, she got her wish: Amazon, still relatively new to the business of making television shows, used “Mozart in the Jungle” as the basis for a series of the same name that premiered in 2014 and ran for four seasons. Lola Kirke played a young oboist, Gael García Bernal was the sexy conductor of a New York orchestra, and the show became a talking point for musicians everywhere. It won the Golden Globe in 2016 for best television series, comedy or musical.Blair Alston Mercer Tindall was born on Feb. 2, 1960, in Chapel Hill, N.C. Her father, George B. Tindall, was a noted historian who taught at the University of North Carolina, and her mother, Carliss Blossom (McGarrity) Tindall, had a master’s degree and assisted her husband in his research.Her parents made her study piano when she was young, though she wasn’t overly enthusiastic about the instrument. One day, she recalled in her book, someone from a music store brought instruments to her elementary school, and the band teacher allowed each student to choose one, going alphabetically.“By the time he got to Tindall, my options had narrowed to two unfamiliar instruments, oboe and bassoon,” she wrote. She chose the oboe.As she grew increasingly proficient on the instrument, she realized it had its advantages.“Composers wrote juicy solos for oboes that sent band directors into ecstasy,” she wrote. She also got excused from class for band competitions and tours.After finishing high school at the School of the Arts in 1978, Ms. Tindall earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Manhattan School of Music. She played in the pit orchestras of “Miss Saigon” and “Les Misérables” and performed with the ensembles Orpheus and Music Amici, the all-oboe trio Oboe Fusion and various orchestras. In 1991, at Weill Recital Hall in Manhattan, she played “a clever, stylistically varied debut program,” as Allan Kozinn put it in a review in The Times.In 1999, Ms. Tindall, who was becoming disenchanted with the musician’s life, received a fellowship to study journalism at Stanford and relocated to the West Coast. She earned a master’s degree in journalism there and worked for West Coast newspapers, including The Contra Costa Times and The San Francisco Examiner.In 2006, newspapers reported that Ms. Tindall had married Bill Nye, TV’s “Science Guy,” though seven weeks later the license was declared invalid and the union dissolved.Mr. Sattlberger said he and Ms. Tindall had planned to marry on May 1. She leaves no other survivors.Ms. Tindall wrote for numerous publications on a variety of subjects. Her articles for The Times were most often about music.When Broadway musicians went on strike in March 2003 over the efforts of producers to reduce the number of musicians required at shows and replace them with digital music, Ms. Tindall wrote in an essay for The Times about her final night in the pit of “Man of La Mancha” before the walkout.“This night, the music responded to the actors — and the audience,” she wrote. “If virtual orchestras take over, it will be mechanical and unyielding — measured by keyboard velocity, musical software interfaces, and the zeros and ones of digital musical samples.“We looked around the pit, grabbed our instruments, and shut out the lights.” More

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      in Theater

      In Her New Show, Rita Indiana Confronts All Kinds of Ghosts

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      “Tu nombre verdadero” (“Your Real Name”), which debuts Friday in New York, is a spiritual multimedia performance from the 45-year-old novelist and musician.“In the time you dropped a chorus, I wrote five novels.”It’s the kind of shot that only Rita Indiana could fire off in a song. The lyrics — which appear in “Como un dragón,” the lead single from the musician and writer’s last album, “Mandinga Times” in 2020 — encapsulate the interdisciplinary abundance she has cultivated over the last 20 years. They also show off a slick-talking, Caribbean kind of realness, which lives in the characters that populate her world.On a recent Friday afternoon, Indiana was running around at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, posing for photos and working on set decorations with an assistant. She and her wife, the Puerto Rican filmmaker Noelia Quintero Herencia, were putting the final touches on a multimedia performance called “Tu nombre verdadero” (“Your Real Name”), which debuts on Friday at the Clemente’s Flamboyán Theater.Indiana, who sports a huge tattoo of an American buffalo on her right hand, sighed as she paused to rest on a bench. Tufts of gray sprouted from her shaggy pixie cut. “I’m a punk abuela,” she said, laughing. Not quite your average grandma.Over the last two decades, the 45-year-old Dominican artist has transformed into one of the Caribbean’s foremost cultural agitators. Indiana’s repertoire unsettles deeply entrenched cultural norms — she’s not afraid to write queer sex scenes in her award-winning books, or condemn corrupt politicians in her genre-shattering songs. In 2010, she and her band Los Misterios released the blistering “El juidero,” a record about diasporic longing and Dominican identity that shredded up merengue, rock and Afro-Dominican folk styles.Indiana’s early works were almost documentarian, exploring the everyday joys and contradictions of Caribbean life. In recent years, she has journeyed into freakier, more fantastical universes. For “Mandinga Times,” which was nominated for a Latin Grammy, she developed a demonic nonbinary alter ego, meant to symbolize all kinds of marginalized bodies.Her 2015 novel “La mucama de Ominculé,” a dystopian tale set in Santo Domingo, follows a transgender protagonist who travels back in time via a divine sea anemone to save the world from nuclear catastrophe. Scholars praise Indiana’s constellatory style, particularly the way she integrates tropical futurism, queer poetics and the buoyancy of Dominican speech to imagine the liberatory possibilities of the present. The acclaim has made her a literary superstar; she is currently serving as the acting director of New York University’s Creative Writing in Spanish M.F.A.At the Clemente, Quintero Herencia, who designed the sets for “Tu nombre verdadero,” whittled disembodied clay fingers while Indiana traced the creative process behind the show. It features her first new music since “Mandinga Times,” the LP that ended a 10-year hiatus during which she focused on writing. It’s also Indiana’s first piece as a New York resident. (The couple spent 14 years in Puerto Rico.)The show’s nonlinear story immerses the audience in experiences of death and illness, particularly as they relate to artists. Indiana said it explores the weight that an artist’s name has when they die. She cited the photographer, painter and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz; the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat; and the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca as some of the figures that shaped the spirit of the performance. Indiana herself goes by a shortened version of her birth name (Rita Indiana Hernández Sánchez), and said she chose it not to Anglicize her identity, but because she felt Indiana was more interesting.The theatricality of “Tu nombre verdadero” draws on Indiana’s teenage years in the independent Dominican theater group Teatro Guloya, where she studied alongside the visionary actors Claudio Rivera and Viena González. Quintero Herencia has worked as a director, prop designer and set builder in most of Indiana’s films and music videos, and said the piece will feature dreamlike visual projections. “Tu nombre verdadero” is the “inevitable fate of our practices,” Indiana added.While conceptualizing the show, commissioned by the Americas Society, the couple navigated a wave of death, both personal and collective. They mourned the millions lost in the pandemic, as well as close friends, relatives and beloved musicians, like Quintero Herencia’s mother, the Dominican painter Jorge Pineda and the merengue icon Johnny Ventura. In part, the performance is a way to guide “our ghosts” to a better place and process our memories of them, Indiana said.The couple’s longstanding fascination with death and ancestral energies has surfaced in their previous work. “I never separate my art from my spiritual world and the world of my ancestors,” Quintero Herencia said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a movie, a documentary or a drawing. There’s always a channel that I open, that I know is connected to the ancestral world.” Indiana, whose father died violently when she was around 12, explained that death has intrigued her for as long as she can remember. She often wonders how a body “that we love with, fight with, work with, understand with, cry with” suddenly becomes nothing.It’s a subject that has also emerged from Caribbean colonial wounds. The island of Hispaniola, home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was the first New World colony settled by Spain in 1493. Indiana said the region is still confronting its sordid past — the massacre of native Taínos, the cruel violence of the Atlantic slave trade — and all the cultural knowledge and traditions that were annihilated in the process. “Colonialism is a machine of death,” she said. “We are a part of that — of all that pain and that whole factory of bones.”Indiana tapped a small crew of musicians for the show, including the composer and frequent collaborator Luis Amed Irizarry, who arranged the songbook for piano and drums. Efraín Martínez, a drummer who has toured with the merengue idol Olga Tañón and recorded with the reggae group Cultura Profética, also joined the lineup.The theatricality of “Tu nombre verdadero” draws on Indiana’s teenage years in the independent Dominican theater group Teatro Guloya.Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesIndiana described the compositions as “bare bones,” far removed from the conventional structures of popular music. “It’s a more poetic language, more absurd,” she said. “The references are from my childhood, the music I heard when I was very small.” She recalled the influence of her great-aunt Ivonne Haza, a decorated soprano, who was a vocal coach for some of the Dominican Republic’s most renowned singers, including Fernandito Villalona and Sonia Silvestre. Haza would give lessons at Indiana’s grandparents’ house, where Indiana lived until she was 7.“That was like the soundtrack to my homework — four hours, five hours of that,” she explained, chuckling.The songbook is impressionistic, sculpting Dominican gagá, Spanish copla, Cuban son and other genres into abstract shapes. There is even an experimental merengue, inspired by Danny Elfman’s Tim Burton scores, and an English-language satirical country number that addresses the brutality of Latin American dictatorships. Indiana burst into the chorus of the song, adopting a Southern twang: “He’s our strong man, he’s our puppet, he’s our pawn/You should see how he trips/Over our banana splits/When we choose his killers from among his own.”Indiana’s fearlessness helped inspire the Dominican artist La Marimba to fuse and tinker with disparate genres — to not be afraid to “have your own identity and show it.” She called Indiana a key figure in a movement of Dominican musicians who adapted the country’s folk traditions for the contemporary moment.A generation of young Dominican writers also identifies Indiana as a lodestar. Johan Mijail, who appeared in a 2018 anthology of contemporary Dominican literature that Indiana edited, said that Indiana’s novels permitted Mijail’s own writing to “offer a view of Santo Domingo and its outskirts where music, popular culture and the urban could be taken as possible horizons for sexual diversity to bloom.”With “Tu nombre verdadero” almost behind her, Indiana is working on her own books, too. “I wrote a novel last year that’s in a drawer right now,” she said, describing it as a “gender horror novel” she will revisit later. Another book, set in Puerto Rico and related to the Vietnam War, is coming later this year.No matter the medium, Indiana’s work is nourished by endless interrogation. She noted that the commitment to scrutiny — both of self and community — is grounded in her lived reality. “As a queer person, I’m questioning my identity until I’m dead,” she said. “In this perpetual transitional state,” she added, “what is my real name?” More