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      in Television

      Noah Hawley Keeps Changing Lanes

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      AUSTIN, Texas — Noah Hawley tries never to approach a story the same way twice.When FX asked if he’d like to make an X-Men television series, Hawley came up with “Legion,” a surrealist mind-bender in which the protagonist hears and sees things that aren’t real.He has made four seasons of “Fargo,” a show loosely — very loosely — based on the Coen brothers’ film. Every season, he replaces the characters, picks a new setting and still calls it “Fargo.”His sixth novel, “Anthem,” out this week from Grand Central Publishing, is an exploration of contemporary America laced with magical realism. It features vicious political divisions, climate change, an insurrection and a study of what it’s like to be young in a collapsing world. It also includes a witch who is impossible to kill, a teenager who has regular chats with God and an outbreak of teenage suicides.Hawley, as you see, is busy. An author, show runner and director, he even sang on the soundtracks for “Legion” and “Fargo.” These days, he said, he just calls himself a storyteller.“A big part of what I’m trying to do,” he said over iced tea in Austin last month, “is to bypass that part of your brain that’s been trained by the thousands of stories that you’ve consumed in your lifetime.”A composed presence, with some salt in his chocolate-colored hair, Hawley, 54, started out wanting to be a musician. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1989, he moved to Brooklyn with his band and got a day job as a paralegal for the Legal Aid Society. His band, Bass Nation (the name “came off looking like the fish,” he said), played gigs and toured a bit — Hawley played guitar and sang — but it didn’t feel like it was going anywhere. So he started writing.“What’s it adding up to if I’m playing Limelight on Thursday night at nine o’clock?” he recalled of an old club in New York City. “Am I making progress? Am I not making progress? If you write 10 pages, you’ve got 10 pages. There’s something very literal about it, and I could do it myself. It didn’t involve living in a van with three filthy, penniless men.”“A big part of what I’m trying to do,” Noah Hawley said, “is to bypass that part of your brain that’s been trained by the thousands of stories that you’ve consumed in your lifetime.”Lauren Withrow for The New York TimesA few years later, when he was living in San Francisco, he sold his first novel, “A Conspiracy of Tall Men.” His mother, Louise Armstrong, was also an author, and through her, Hawley said, he found an agent. (“I asked him once what his accent was,” Hawley recalled, “and he said ‘pure affectation.’”)One of Hawley’s first attempts at a novel, set at a college, had been sent around to editors but never sold. One editor, he was told, felt Hawley was reluctant to make changes. That was news to him.“I will change anything you want!” he remembered thinking. But in the intervening years, that perception about his openness to feedback doesn’t seem to have changed much.“What I’ll hear is, ‘Oh, the network has a note, but they’re afraid to give it to you,’” Hawley said. “Which is so interesting because I never yell at anybody about anything. But that’s good because I don’t necessarily want the note,” he joked — or he seemed to be joking.“I can be difficult to read sometimes,” he said. “But on some level, that can be good, too, because a lot of this is a poker game.”After his first book was published, Hawley wrote a screenplay and an adaptation of his novel, and from there started writing TV pilots. Three of his pilots were bought and never made. In 2004, he moved to Los Angeles and took a job on the procedural series “Bones” so he could learn how to make a show.It was a good move, so good that he didn’t have to stay in L.A. for long. Five years later, Hawley and his family moved to Austin, where they have lived off and on ever since.Today he and his wife, Kyle, live on a sort of mini-compound on a half-acre with their two kids, who are 9 and 14, his wife’s aunt and three dogs. The property originally held four small cottages, built as housing for workers at a lumber company, two of which have been connected to make the main house.Two cottages remain, one of which is Hawley’s office. It has an area that can be transformed into an editing bay, a few instruments (a guitar, a bass and a mini drum set for his son) and a big roll of brown paper mounted near his desk. He started thinking about stories visually a few years ago, he said, and sometimes likes to lay them out using bubbles, arrows and grids.Natalie Portman, who starred in the movie “Lucy in the Sky,” which Hawley directed and co-wrote, said she was struck by how he balanced work and life.“It felt like he was prioritizing his family,” she said in an interview, “in a way that is not very common for directors.” If they weren’t in town during shooting, for example, he’d fly back to Austin over the weekend, she said. His decision to make his home there, she added, helped him to keep a bit of distance from the world of his work.“Even while, obviously, being incredibly successful in Hollywood, he’s been deliberately maintaining an outsider perspective, which is wonderful,” she said. “You feel it. It feels like friends of mine, not like people I work with. He feels very much of the world, and not of the entertainment industry.”“Anthem” is the latest book from Noah Hawley.Despite his many years in TV, Hawley said he has a love-hate relationship with writers’ rooms. “I tend to think of them as a group of very different people with very different brains, and the only common language they speak is plot,” he said. “That’s not necessarily how I tell the story.”People are trained that back story equals front story, he explained. Say a character’s mother left when he or she was very young; traditionally, that’s going to take the wheel of the narrative. But it doesn’t have to. What you want to avoid, he said, is getting to a point where you, as a writer, are just “holding on while the plot plays itself out.”The kernel that became “Anthem” started percolating about five years ago. Hawley had published his previous novel, “Before the Fall,” with Hachette, and Michael Pietsch, the company’s chief executive, was eager to sign him up for another. Hawley’s editor had just left the company, so Pietsch offered to edit the book himself.“You could do worse than the guy who edited ‘Infinite Jest,’” Hawley said of Pietsch.During the summer of 2019, Hawley was planning to work on the book during a two-month family vacation in Europe. At a bookstore in London, he collected a stack of novels that had been “eureka moments” for him, he said, including “The New York Trilogy,” by Paul Auster; “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” by Milan Kundera; “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” by Gabriel García Márquez; and “Song of Solomon,” by Toni Morrison.“And now you’re traveling around with a box of books, and you’re like, ‘Why didn’t I just buy two?’” he recalled. “But it felt critical that I get them all.”“Anthem” is woven together using a number of contemporary threads, mostly seen through the eyes of teenagers who are battling to save themselves and one another. One of the main characters, Simon, is the scion of a pharmaceutical fortune made by selling opioids. A culture war descends into armed conflict, in a way that reads like it must be a riff on Jan. 6 — except that Hawley wrote it the previous October.“One of the ideas explored in the book is what unifies us now when there are so many things that tear us apart,” Pietsch said. “Imagine being a kid, hearing that the oceans are dying, that the bees are dying, reading about the opioid epidemic, seeing these political battles and reading about sexual predation. This sense that the world you’re growing into is being destroyed before your eyes, and what’s going to be there for you? What must that be like, and what can you do?”The book feels cinematic and at times fantastical. An insurrectionist points a gun at one of the protagonists and says, “There is no God,” and then a missile explodes behind him. An enchanted Amazon truck magically supplies materials for our heroes’ needs, whether it’s to hogtie an adversary or stitch up a wound.“The magic realism of the book,” Hawley said, “it was a relief, because magic realism has a way of making ugly things beautiful. Think about Márquez and ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ and the amount of tragedy in that book that’s offset by the whimsy, and the beauty of just not knowing what could happen next.”Hawley hasn’t started thinking yet about another book, but he has been sketching out ideas for the next season of “Fargo” on those big sheets of brown paper.“I have the luxury of when I have ideas, I think, ‘Well, what is it?’” he said. “‘Is it a show? Is it a movie? Is it a book?’ But for something to be a book, it means you’re going to live with it for three or four or five years. There has to be enough there. It has to be about things — for me — that are more than just: ‘Is he going to get the girl? Are they going to get away?’” More

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      in Theater

      Neil Marcus, Whose Art Illuminated Disability, Dies at 67

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      A playwright and actor, he saw his life as performance art. He was best known for his play “Storm Reading.”At each performance of his play “Storm Reading,” the writer and actor Neil Marcus offered his audience a reminder: “Disability is not a brave struggle or courage in the face of adversity. Disability is an art. It’s an ingenious way to live.”Mr. Marcus, who had dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary muscle contractions and affects speech, starred in the play, which comically illuminated how he passed through the world in a typical week, through vignettes of him conversing with grocery shoppers, doctors and passers-by.In 1988, when the show had its premiere at the Lobero Theater in Santa Barbara, Calif., people more often than not looked away from those with disabilities. “We’ve always been taught as kids we don’t point, don’t laugh, just basically ignore them,” Rod Lathim, the director of “Storm Reading,” said in an interview.In contrast, “Storm Reading” encouraged audiences to laugh with Mr. Marcus about his experiences.“Neil invited and welcomed, and in some cases demanded that people look,” Mr. Lathim said. “And so he brought them into his reality, which was not a reality of disability; it was a reality of his definition of life.”The success and longevity of the play, which toured throughout the country until 1996, turned Mr. Marcus into a pioneer of the disability culture movement. He called his work a reclamation of personhood in a world determined to deny people with disabilities their autonomy.Mr. Marcus died on Nov. 17 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 67.His sister Kendra Marcus said the cause was dystonia.In 1987, Mr. Marcus and his brother Roger contacted Mr. Lathim, the director of Access Theater, a Santa Barbara company that regularly mounted plays featuring disabled artists. Neil Marcus sent over samples of his writing and asked Mr. Lathim if the theater would be interested in adapting them.Their conversation led to the genesis of “Storm Reading.” Mr. Marcus, his brother and Mr. Lathim worked together to draft the play, whose cast of three originally also included Roger as “The Voice,” who portrayed Neil’s thoughts during his interactions (the role was later played by Matthew Ingersoll), as well as a sign language interpreter.The show was physically taxing for Mr. Marcus. But it also invigorated him.“There’s no drug, there’s no treatment, that is, in my opinion, as powerful as the interaction between a live audience and an artist on the stage,” Mr. Lathim said. “And watching Neil transform from that was astounding.”Scenes from “Storm Reading” were filmed for NBC as part of a 1989 television special about disability, “From the Heart,” hosted by the actor Michael Douglas. The cast reunited in 2018 for a performance at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.Neil Marcus was born on Jan. 3, 1954, in Scarsdale, N.Y., the youngest of five children of Wil Marcus, who worked in public relations, and Lydia (Perera) Marcus, an actor. When Neil was 6, the family moved to Ojai, Calif.Neil was 8 when he learned he had dystonia, and he attempted suicide at 14 after a taxing series of surgeries, he said in a 2006 oral history interview for the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.But counseling gave him confidence. He attended Ojai Valley School, where he was often spotted zooming around in a golf cart. After graduating from high school as valedictorian in 1971, he traveled to Laos; when he returned, he hitchhiked around the West Coast and eventually took classes at Fairhaven College, part of Western Washington University, and elsewhere. He moved to Berkeley in 1980 and became active in the disability activist community there.He explored art through various partnerships. With professional dancers, he participated in “contact improvisation” performances, which eschewed formal choreography and instead followed the seemingly frenetic movements of Mr. Marcus’s dystonia.He also wrote widely. He worked with the University of Michigan professor and activist Petra Kuppers on the Olimpias Performance Research Project, an artist collective that spotlights performers with disabilities in performances and documentaries. Their conversations on disability as art were published in a 2009 essay, “Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance.” The two also wrote a book, “Cripple Poetics: A Love Story” (2008), which features poetry and photography highlighting the physicality and sensuality of disability.The Neil Marcus Papers, including his essays, poems and correspondence, are held at the Bancroft Library.In addition to his sister Kendra, Mr. Marcus is survived by another sister, Wendy Marcus, and his brothers, Roger and Russell.In 2014 the Smithsonian National Museum of American History commissioned Mr. Marcus to write a poem dedicating its online exhibition “EveryBody: An Artifact History of Disability in America.”His poem began: “If there was a country called disabled, I would be from there./I live disabled culture, eat disabled food, make disabled love,/cry disabled tears, climb disabled mountains and tell disabled stories.” More

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      in Movies

      Five Joan Didion Movies You Can Stream Right Now

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      The writer, working with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, saw Hollywood as a way to make cash to support her art. It did and didn’t work out.“This place makes everyone a gambler,” Joan Didion sniped of Hollywood, nine years after she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne left Manhattan to make their fortunes as a screenwriting team.When the newlywed magazine writers rolled the dice on a career change in 1964, neither had even read a script, let alone written one. Luckily, one tipsy night in Beverly Hills, they spotted a TV actor hurling one at his girlfriend. They stole it, diagramed how its story was pieced together, and resolved that unlike that drunken louse — and unlike the drunks they admired, such as Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had been jaded about the dream factory — they would never let Los Angeles make them lose their cool.How hard could Hollywood be? Didion had a steady gig as a film critic for Vogue, where she championed teeny-bopper beach flicks (“All plot is incidental; the point is the surf”) and panned “The Sound of Music” for being a musical, a genre she found insulting. (“Think you can get me with some fat Technicolor chrysanthemums, just think again.”) Meanwhile, Dunne’s clinical interest in the movie industry would soon result in his landmark nonfiction book, “The Studio,” which covered, among other things, how a 20th Century Fox publicist flogged the 1967 “Doctor Dolittle” in an awards race where it earned nine Oscar nominations despite middling reviews.Yet, Didion and Dunne’s get-rich scheme wasn’t as easy to pull off as they had hoped. In 25 years, the couple saw their names credited on the big screen just six times. Didion vowed to protect her heart from Hollywood. She never wagered more optimism than she could afford to lose. But screenwriting was supposed to afford her the freedom to write serious art, not waste her time on endless unpaid draft revisions.Worse still were the movies they didn’t write. Over repetitive lunches of white wine and broiled fish, producers pitched the pair a disco-era remake of “Rebel Without a Cause,” a reworking of Fitzgerald’s tragedy “Tender Is the Night” with a happy ending, a U.F.O. flick for the ’80s blockbuster titans Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and this three-word brainstorm: “World War II.”“What do you want to do with it?” Dunne asked.“You’re the writers,” the producer replied.The irony is that the more the couple mocked Hollywood in essays, the higher their script fees rose. Slamming the businessmen in suits could have made Didion and Dunne personae non grata at the Polo Lounge. Instead, cynicism made them look savvy. Here were two smart people who knew exactly what they’d signed up for. They got it, or as Dunne joked, “I have never been quite clear what Going Hollywood meant exactly, except that as a unique selling proposition, it’s a lot sexier than Going University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.”It’s hard to argue that Didion and Dunne’s films are palpably them any more than one can touch an actor onscreen as he coils his tongue around Didion’s diction. (Or at least, the traces of her sharp precision that remain after being massaged into studio submission.) Yet, in honoring Didion’s creative life, it’s worth making time for the work that fills out our image of her as not only an uncompromising prose stylist, but also an ambitious artist who knew exactly when to compromise in service of her greater goals.Here is a look at five films by or about Didion that are available to stream.1972‘Play It as It Lays’Available on YouTubeBefore Didion and Dunne learned to play the Hollywood game, the fledgling screenwriters made the rookie mistake of optioning books that they found interesting — not John Q. Public. With James Mills’ heroin-addled paperback “The Panic in Needle Park,” Didion explained, “It just immediately said movie to me.” The film, with its mediocre box office receipts, served as a launching pad for the star Al Pacino’s career, but didn’t do much for hers. (It’s not available to stream.) At least the paycheck let Didion complete her own hazy, dispassionate novel, “Play It as It Lays,” about an actress untethering herself from a cold and callous Los Angeles by taking drugs, having sex and speeding down the highway in a convertible that functions as a motorized fugue. When the novel was a minor hit, Didion and Dunne turned it into their second film, with Tuesday Weld as the lead and “The Swimmer” director Frank Perry at the helm. Critics liked the film; Didion (and audiences), less so. “Everything was different,” she said, “even though I wrote the screenplay.”1976‘A Star Is Born’Stream it on HBO MaxIt was time to make some real dough. So for their third film, the pair pitched a rock ’n’ roll refresh of “A Star Is Born” featuring Carly Simon and James Taylor. The truth was Didion and Dunne had never seen the previous versions. They just wanted to go with musicians on the road, where their research included talking to groupies about injecting adrenaline and following Led Zeppelin to Cleveland, where they amused themselves by calling a for-a-good-time number scrawled on the dressing-room wall. When Barbra Streisand announced her interest in the project, the couple was finally forced to watch the 1937 original at the recording star’s house while their daughter, Quintana Roo, played with Streisand and Jon Peters’s pet lion cub. Neither writer was passionate enough about the project to stick with it once Streisand seized the reins. Their draft was reworked by 14 subsequent screenwriters before the star was satisfied she had an awards contender. Streisand took home a Golden Globe for the film, making her the third actress in a row to win a prize for a role that Didion originated on the page. (Weld won best actress at the Venice Film Festival for “Play It as It Lays,” while Kitty Winn claimed best actress at Cannes for “Panic.”)1981‘True Confessions’Rent it on major platforms.For 15 years, Didion and Dunne took turns trying to squeeze money out of studios. One would do the first draft of a script; the other would edit and revise. Now it was Dunne’s turn to adapt one of his novels, his best-selling crime noir, “True Confessions,” inspired by the Black Dahlia murder. Robert Duvall and Robert De Niro play siblings: Duvall is a detective; De Niro, a Roman Catholic monsignor whose future in the church depends on how his brother handles the case. While reviewers mostly enjoyed the thriller, some found the plot vague and confusing. The mixed response echoed the feedback on Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” before it was later deemed a classic, which might have made Didion smile. After all, not only did she buy her wedding dress at Ransohoff’s, the same shop where Jimmy Stewart made over Kim Novak, she and Dunne even got married at Mission San Juan Bautista under the bell tower where Novak leapt to her death.1996‘Up Close and Personal’Rent it on major platforms.There was only one reason Didion and Dunne signed on to adapt a biography of the NBC News anchor Jessica Savitch, who died in a car accident in 1983 shortly after broadcasting a segment in which she appeared intoxicated: They needed the Writers Guild health insurance. The trade-off might not have been worth it given the stress of writing 27 drafts until Disney, the financier of the film, was satisfied that all traces of Savitch’s drug use, divorces, abortions and suicide attempts had been scrubbed out of what was now a wholly fictional Michelle Pfeiffer workplace romance about a successful journalist who survives through the end credits. “Up Close and Personal” took eight years to complete, and the best thing about it is the brutal memoir Dunne wrote about the ordeal, titled “Monster: Living Off the Big Screen.” Savitch never got her biopic, but a documentary about her struggle to be taken seriously in a mostly male workplace — a struggle Didion understood as studio executives’ assistants would frequently refuse to patch through phone calls from their boss without Dunne on the line — did inspire Will Ferrell to make his own film about chauvinism in local news, “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.”2017‘Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold’Stream it on Netflix.Even though Didion and Dunne escaped Hollywood to move back to New York, the movie business remained the family business. Her brother-in-law Dominick, a film and TV producer, raised a family of actors, including the“Poltergeist” star Dominique Dunne and the actor-director Griffin Dunne, who in 2017 convinced his famous aunt to let him film an interview with her for a documentary about her life. Their familiarity allows them both to speak candidly. Dunne thanks Didion for not laughing when his testicles fell out of his swimsuit as a boy; Didion confesses to him that stumbling across a 5-year-old girl on LSD, an encounter that led to one of the darkest scenes in her book “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” gave her a thrill. Didion admits: “You live for moments like that, if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad.” The moment isn’t comforting, but it’s honest — a truly Didion-esque revelation finally immortalized on film. More

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      in Movies

      The Artists We Lost in 2021, in Their Words

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      This year, as pandemic deaths ebbed and flowed, a distinctive, eternal beat — that of artist’s deaths — played on as usual, bringing its own waves of collective grief. Some, such as Cicely Tyson and Stephen Sondheim, held the spotlight for generations. Others, like Michael K. Williams and Nai-Ni Chen, left us lamenting careers cut short. Here is a tribute to just a small number of them, in their own words.Cicely TysonAssociated Press“I’m not scared of death. I don’t know what it is. How could I be afraid of something I don’t know anything about?”— Cicely Tyson, actress, born 1924 (Read the obituary.)Melvin Van PeeblesMichael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“I want people to be empowered and also have a damn good time.”— Melvin Van Peebles, filmmaker, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“I want my steps to speak.”— Liam Scarlett, choreographer, born 1986 (Read the obituary.)“I remember my childhood often, I remember a lot of the past. But when it comes to music, I always look forward.”— Nelson Freire, pianist, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)Bob AvianKarsten Moran for The New York Times“When my parents went out, I would push back the furniture, clear an open space, turn on the record player and leap around the apartment.”— Bob Avian, choreographer, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)“School was a crashing bore and a terrible chore, until one day when I was cast as the girl with the mandolin in ‘Sleeping Beauty.’”— Carla Fracci, dancer, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)“As I grew up in Kyoto, the wood of the Buddhist statues, trees, the grain of the wooden pillars, the patterns on the floor, the stones in the gardens, the bamboo, trees and plants in Kyoto are all a part of me — and as I read a script, I borrow from all these things.”— Emi Wada, costume designer, born 1937“I still feel sky-deprived when in the forested places. Many, many people born to the skies of the plains feel that way.”— Larry McMurtry, novelist, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)Ed AsnerWally Fong/Associated Press“My father told me, ‘You didn’t make a success as a student, you’re not going to make a success as an actor.’ I said, ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’”— Ed Asner, actor, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Olympia DukakisAbramorama“I came to New York with $57 in my pocket.”— Olympia Dukakis, actress, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Charlie WattsEvening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“When I first went to New York with the Stones, the first thing I did was to go to Birdland. And that was it. I’d seen America. I mean, I didn’t want to see anywhere else.”— Charlie Watts, drummer, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)Jacques D’AmboiseJohn Dominis/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images“Spread me in Times Square or the Belasco Theater.”— Jacques D’Amboise, dancer, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“If you have a leading character, they should be in a hurry. You can slow it down when you’re shooting, but it helps in the writing: Even if they’re not moving, they’re thinking about moving on, or getting away from the scene they’re in.”— Robert Downey Sr., filmmaker, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)Joe AllenJim Cooper/Associated Press“I always said I lacked ambition — but that does not mean I was lazy.”— Joe Allen, theater district restaurateur, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t assume an audience’s interest. I assume the opposite.”— Charles Grodin, actor, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Jerry PinkneyJoyce Dopkeen/The New York Times“I solve problems — visual problems.”— Jerry Pinkney, children’s book illustrator, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Larry KingAlberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images‘‘If you’re combative, you never learn.”— Larry King, TV host, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)Anna HalprinSam Falk/The New York Times“I started to teach people how the body actually works. I looked at the skeleton. I did human dissection. I did all these things to understand the nature of movement, not just my movement.”— Anna Halprin, choreographer, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)“I’m not interested in the intentions of artists; I’m interested in consequences.”— Dave Hickey, art critic, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)Nai-Ni ChenStephanie Berger for The New York Times“My thirst for expressing myself, both East and West, could only happen through creating my own company.”— Nai-Ni Chen, choreographer and dancer, born 1959 (Read the obituary.)Virgil AblohDavid Kasnic for The New York Times“When I studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, it was the humanities classes that I had put to the side that ultimately started me on this path of thinking about creativity in a much more cultural context — not designing for design’s sake, but connecting design to the rhythm of what’s happening in the world.”— Virgil Abloh, designer, born 1980 (Read the obituary.)Yolanda LópezAlexa Treviño“Those of us who make images must always be very conscious about the power of images — about how they function — especially in a society where we are not taught our own history.”— Yolanda López, artist, born 1942 (Read the obituary.)“You’re more anarchic onstage than you are anywhere else.”— Helen McCrory, actress, born 1968 (Read the obituary.)Michael K. WilliamsDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times“The characters that mean the most to me are the ones that damn near kill me. It’s a sacrifice I’ve chosen to make.”— Michael K. Williams, actor, born 1966 (Read the obituary.)bell hooksKarjean Levine/Getty Images“We cannot have a meaningful revolution without humor.”— bell hooks, writer and scholar, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)Norm MacdonaldMargaret Norton/NBC, via Getty Images“Making people laugh is a gift. Preaching to them is not a gift. There are people who can do that better. Preachers.”— Norm Macdonald, comedian, born 1959 (Read the obituary.)“The thing that everybody thinks is going to work will not. The thing that nobody thinks will work will.”— Elizabeth McCann, theater producer, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)“The success of my books is not in the characters or the words or the colors, but in the simple, simple feelings.”— Eric Carle, author and artist, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“I think children want to read about normal, everyday kids.”— Beverly Cleary, author, born 1916 (Read the obituary.)Young DolphPaul R. Giunta/Invision, via Associated Press“My whole thing is about giving these folks the real.”— Young Dolph, rapper, born 1985 (Read the obituary.)“I try to use words that fit a pattern, that are musical and expressive, but do not sound mechanical. Above all it should have a speech rhythm that is like the rhythms that the audience would speak.”— Carlisle Floyd, composer, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)“Birds were the first composers. They like to sing in spring. Purely serving of the beauty — that’s what we try to do.”— Louis Andriessen, composer, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Cloris LeachmanAssociated Press“I don’t have a lot of trappings, I think, in my personality. I’m just a simple person, with a silly bone.”— Cloris Leachman, actress, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)“I’m a witness of my time, you know, of a history.”— Hung Liu, artist, born 1948 (Read the obituary.)“Technology is changing the way people work. With electronic mail, the internet, teleconferencing, people are starting to ask, ‘What is a headquarters or office environment?’”— Art Gensler, architect, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Christopher PlummerTom Jamieson for The New York Times“I’ve made over 100 motion pictures, and some of them were even good. It’s nice to be reborn every few decades.”— Christopher Plummer, actor, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“After you see your work, you always want to go right back and do it all over again.”— Lisa Banes, actress, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“I think of the art as dead when it leaves my studio. I don’t even own it anymore. Installing in a museum or a show that’s coming up, I’m not allowed to touch my own work ever. It just seems strange to me. If somebody puts me in front of my drawings, I’d put more text in it. It’s never finished, but none of my work is ever finished.”— Kaari Upson, artist, born 1970 (Read the obituary.)SophieFrazer Harrison/Getty Images For Coachella“I don’t have the need to bring any more clutter into the physical world. And I like the fact that musical data is weightless and spaceless in that way.”— Sophie, pop producer and performer, born 1986 (Read the obituary.)Etel AdnanFabrice Gibert, via Galerie Lelong & Co.“My paintings are not usually titled. Art should make people dream, and when you have a title, you condition the vision.”— Etel Adnan, author and artist, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)Michael NesmithMichael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“We’re a couple of old men, but we sound the same when we play this music — and it nourishes us the way it nourishes you.”— Michael Nesmith, musician, born 1942 (Read the obituary.)“We always put music first and marriage second. One night after dinner, for instance, I was going to do the dishes and Jerry said, ‘Forget the dishes. Let’s practice. I’ll do the dishes later.’”— Dottie Dodgion, drummer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Jessica WalterDove and Express, via Hulton Archive/Getty Images“Even my ‘leading ladies’— you know, in air quotes — were characters. They were not Miss Vanilla Ice Cream. They weren’t holding the horse while John Wayne galloped into the sunset.”— Jessica Walter, actress, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)“The last note, the high last note — it must say something.”— Edita Gruberova, soprano, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)DMXChad Batka for The New York Times“I’m going to look back on my life, just before I go, and thank god for every moment.”— DMX, rapper, born 1970 (Read the obituary.)Stephen SondheimFred R. Conrad/The New York Times“Life is unpredictable. It is. There is no form. And making forms gives you solidity. I think that’s why people paint paintings and take photographs and write music and tell stories that have beginning, middles and ends — even when the middle is at the beginning and the beginning is at the end.”— Stephen Sondheim, composer and lyricist, born 1930 (Read the obituary.) More

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      in Theater

      Continuing ‘The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe’

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      Lily Tomlin, who first performed this comically cosmic play, and Jane Wagner, its author, discuss a new production with Cecily Strong and Leigh Silverman, its new star and director.Should you ever have the chance to converse with Lily Tomlin, you don’t have to tell her it’s an honor. “Believe me, it’s not,” Tomlin said recently in her distinctive deadpan.At 82, Tomlin is not precious about her reputation or the esteem she enjoys as a comedian and actor. But she remains fiercely proud of “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” the one-woman play that was written for her by Jane Wagner, her wife and longtime creative collaborator.“Search for Signs,” which had its Broadway debut in 1985, is a comedic and philosophical whirlwind in which Tomlin Ping-Ponged across 12 roles, including the sullen teen punk Agnus Angst; the feminist activists Edie, Lyn and Marge; and the wealthy, urbane Kate. Their scenes are framed and interwoven by the character of Trudy, an enlightened vagrant who believes she is in communication with aliens.Tomlin’s performance in the Broadway production of “Search for Signs” won her the Tony Award for best actress in a play. That production ran for more than a year, and the play became an emblematic entry in the careers of its author and its star; Tomlin continued to perform it in other cities, in a 1991 film adaptation and in a Broadway revival that ran from 2000-1.Lily Tomlin in “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” in 2000.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Search for Signs” has become a treasured work to performers like Cecily Strong, the “Saturday Night Live” cast member, and directors like Leigh Silverman (“Well,” “Violet”). As Silverman, 47, said, “This play gives us a sense of purpose and a meaning while telling us all the time how meaningless it is. It holds us up and supports us and loves us. It cherishes the audience in a way that no other theater experience I’ve ever had does.”Now Silverman is directing Strong in a new production of “Search for Signs” that will be presented at the Shed. This incarnation, which is choreographed by James Alsop, begins performances Dec. 21 and opens Jan. 11; its limited run is scheduled to end Feb. 6.While they are still working through the play’s ambitious and ample material, Strong and Silverman said their preparations are testing them to their fullest extents. “There’s no plan to this,” Strong, 37, explained. “I said nobody else bug me until February — all of my time and my brain and my heart and my soul is here, and that’s where it has to be.”Tomlin and Wagner, who are executive producing, are content to observe these rehearsals from afar, weigh in when needed and reflect on what the play has meant to them. (Or simply to kibitz affectionately, as in one moment when Tomlin turned to her wife and audibly observed, “We’ve lived a long time, sister.”)Wagner, 86, said she was confident in the approach that Silverman and Strong were taking. “I have such a feeling of security, really, with the two of them,” she said. “But now that you mention it, I’ll start feeling pressured again, I’m sure.”Tomlin, Wagner, Strong and Silverman gathered earlier this month for a video interview in which they spoke about their individual and collective journeys on “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.” These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Lily and Jane, can you recount the origins of “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe”? How was it created?JANE WAGNER I was in a New Age phase. I was reading some philosophy and I began to be aware that I was being aware. [Lily Tomlin laughs.] That’s an insight that I hadn’t even thought about having.LILY TOMLIN I was on the road a good part of that time.WAGNER Which was very good for us.TOMLIN She would send me a load of pages every now and then. I remember the first packet I got, I was playing in Lexington and she sent me a huge stack of papers all about Trudy. Every line, one after another, was so observant and perceptive. I read them at a show one night and there was a raucous and wonderful response. When I read Trudy saying, “Frankly, I think they find us quite captivating,” I knew where the play was headed. But I had no idea how she was going to get there.Tomlin, right, and Jane Wagner in 2001 with their Tony Award nominations for the revival of “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.”Henry Ray Abrams/Agence France-PresseCecily and Leigh, how did you each discover the play?CECILY STRONG The first time I encountered it was in my library in high school, looking for monologues. I was very serious about being an actor and I remember finding this cover with a long crazy name. What could this show be? I looked at a couple of Trudy monologues and I wanted to do something like this. This is a stupid thought, but I had it: I’ve got to marry a writer. I need to have someone write this show for me. I certainly never thought it would be a possibility to do this.LEIGH SILVERMAN I saw it at the Kennedy Center [after the show’s original Broadway run]. I was 11. My mother took me and we were sitting in the front row. It really sent me on a journey to see a performance like Lily’s. It was radical — written by a woman, performed by a woman who played all kinds of characters. Lily was so masculine, androgynous, highly feminine — she was all of it, the full package. I felt like my whole being was rearranged and maybe for the first time put into place.Lily, you continued to perform the play for many years in different settings. Does it remain in your body from production to production?TOMLIN You have a lot of muscle memory from it. When you start working on it again — this doesn’t feel right, I must have moved over here — then it falls into place. It comes back to you very quickly.WAGNER I’ve gotten by as a writer with no muscles. All my life, I’ve never had muscles.TOMLIN She’s at an age where the muscles would come in handy.Would the play change depending on the time and place where you were doing it?TOMLIN In 2001, right after the 9/11 attacks, we opened in San Francisco. Jane used to collect a lot of old Whole Earth Catalogs from her hippie days, and she cited this quote from Whole Earth Catalog. I used to end the production in San Francisco with this same quote because I felt it was so meaningful. It’s anonymous: “Humans are finally the bits of earth that leap up from the planet’s surface, tell what they see to each other, and then die. The sum total of all this seeing and telling is the story of one planet waking up to itself.” We loved that. That’s how we felt at that time.Did you get protective when other people would ask to put on the play? There were solo shows and versions with larger casts playing all the characters.WAGNER We did once we saw one of the productions you just described. It was pretty awful.TOMLIN In the old days, the requests would come in and I would deal with the agent. He’d say it’s a good theater or whatever, and we’d let them do it. Sometimes they would send us a film of what they’d done.WAGNER That’s where it went wrong, I think. [Laughter.] I’m more easily beaten down than she is.TOMLIN That’s why we keep her from the theater. She stays locked in a hotel room and I go, “I’ll be back in three or four hours”WAGNER I’m thinking about us doing it when we had no producer.TOMLIN I was the producer!WAGNER Well, I didn’t know that. I’d send you pages and you’d do them or toss them.TOMLIN Very often in the development process, I’d come in from a night at the theater and I’d talk to Jane about some monologue. I’d say, “If you can just make it — blah blah blah.” Instead of just adjusting some small phrase, she’d just write another monologue. I had like six or seven drafts of some monologues in my head, and I would move sections around, trying to find what the key would be. I was so steeped in it, I was able to just put it out and fly with whatever I could fly with. That’s what an actor really hopes for.“Of course I wanted to do this. The biggest reason to say no is, why would you ever put yourself in a position to be compared to Lily Tomlin?” said Strong, who’s been rehearsing with Silverman at the Shed. Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesLeigh, what got you interested in reviving the play?SILVERMAN When we were in the darkest moments of the pandemic, I was feeling so lost. I have done a lot of solo plays in my career. Most recently I did “Harry Clarke” with Billy Crudup. We were actually supposed to do it again during the pandemic and it was canceled. I had this moment where I thought I never want to do another solo show, ever, ever, ever again. I had a conversation with the Shed and they said, “We want to reopen and we’re looking for the right theatrical experience to do that with. Do you have any ideas?” I said no. And then I had a second call and I said, “I really don’t want do another solo show. But I do think this play should be done, and this is the time.”How was Cecily chosen? How did everyone get comfortable with that choice?SILVERMAN When we were talking about people, very serendipitously, there was the finale of “S.N.L.” last season and I was watching Weekend Update, where Cecily dove headfirst into a giant box of wine and drank her way out. Watching that, I had this moment where I was like, she can do it. She had the combination of the stamina, the skill, the courage and deep, deep empathy. The wild curiosity to just be outrageously funny.STRONG Of course I wanted to do this. The biggest reason to say no is, why would you ever put yourself in a position to be compared to Lily Tomlin? But you hear Leigh talk about it and you start tearing up. It’s like, yes, yes, let’s do this. Just the way the show feels, physically — I get to go through this wonderful catharsis every time we run it.WAGNER Lorne [Michaels, the creator and executive producer of “Saturday Night Live”] has an uncanny ability to understand talent, and he believed in you so much. You wouldn’t have been on “S.N.L.” if you weren’t pretty great.TOMLIN I was totally for it because I wanted Jane’s authorship to stand. So often, I’m thrown into the mix as her collaborator. It’s just not true. Jane is a solitary writer and that’s all there is to it. She writes pages and pages, and if you asked her now to write about this bottle of water, she’d probably come up with 2,000 words.Cecily, you recently performed a Weekend Update character, a clown named Goober who tells jokes about abortion, that felt like she could have fit into this play. Was that piece inspired by your work on this show?STRONG Not consciously writing it. It came from, I’m going to take Ambien and I’m going to write essays to myself every night, or I’m going to remain frustrated and do weird things. Obviously this is something I wanted to get out. I kept posing it to people — I’m thinking it’s about a clown talking about her abortion — and everybody was like, okaaay. I certainly felt scared, and then I felt like I came closer to earning this show. [Speaking to Tomlin] To your bravery, your courage, and what a bombastic, badass thing it is.Jane and Lily, were you ever criticized for your depictions of feminist characters in this play? They are affectionately rendered but still allowed to be laughed at and joked about.WAGNER Oh, yeah. We heard that a little bit.TOMLIN What was there?WAGNER Do you want me to name names?TOMLIN No, you don’t have to name names.WAGNER There are always people that say you shouldn’t. One time somebody insisted we shouldn’t have a monologue that was a half an hour long.TOMLIN Oh, yeah, well, that’s old stuff. You have to make those decisions yourself. Don’t be influenced.WAGNER When I went to a consciousness-raising session — and I only went to one, because I was kind of in shock — I knew that I had to talk about it. People looking at their genitalia and everything like that, there was something satirical there that you could use. I still love the movement and believe in the movement.Cecily and Leigh, how do you begin to tackle a play like this, where one actor is responsible for this much material?SILVERMAN There’s so much that you put down one coat of paint and then you keep going.STRONG I don’t think I’ve ever taken on anything like this, where I’ve been so challenged. How do I put on a coat and I’m trying to sing and I’m trying to quote Buckminster Fuller? It’s so many things but the minute we get one thing right it just feels so good. I feel like my brain is changing a little.Do you allow yourself to have favorite characters within the play?STRONG Something new tickles me every day. Leigh just gave me a big cart of stuff and was like, put it somewhere. What do you do with this thing? It was a great way to enter into Trudy. The other day, I was talking to a plant. I was like, ooh, I like the sound of how that plant shakes.Do you seek notes or input from Lily and Jane? Do they just weigh in when they want to, like the voice of God?STRONG I’ll take anything I can get.WAGNER We like the voice of God concept. [Laughter.]TOMLIN We’re trying to come [in person].WAGNER I have trouble with my leg. Loss of muscle memory, I guess. SILVERMAN We send them video and they’re with us always. There’s a line in the play where Trudy says that she puts some time aside each day to do “awe-robics,” and I will say that so much of working on the play is an exploration of “awe-robics.”WAGNER They’re wonderful, the way you communicate. I think you’re going to do something that actually makes our brains crack. Which could be good for the run of the show. More

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      in Music

      Greg Tate, Influential Critic of Black Culture, Dies at 64

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      His writing for The Village Voice and other publications helped elevate hip-hop and street art to the same planes as jazz and Abstract Expressionism.Greg Tate, a journalist and critic whose articles for The Village Voice, Rolling Stone and other publications starting in the 1980s helped elevate hip-hop and street art to the same plane as jazz and Abstract Expressionism, died on Tuesday in New York City. He was 64.His daughter, Chinara Tate, confirmed the death. No cause was given.Mr. Tate exploded onto the New York cultural scene in the early 1980s, soon after graduating from Howard University, when he began contributing freelance music reviews to The Voice. Although he didn’t join the weekly newspaper’s staff until 1987, he almost immediately became its pre-eminent writer on Black music and art, and by extension one of the city’s leading cultural critics.New York at the time was an ebullient chaos of cultures, its downtown scene populated by street artists, struggling writers, disco D.J.s and punk rockers living in cheap apartments and crowding into clubs like Paradise Garage and CBGB. The Village Voice was their bible, and Mr. Tate was very often their guide.His tastes varied widely, as did his style; his whirlwind sentences might string together pop culture, French literary theory and the latest slang. He was equally at home discussing Chuck D or assessing the latest work of the theorist Edward Said, all deployed with a casual candor that left readers wanting more.He quickly graduated from reviews to cultural criticism. Among his most famous articles was “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky Deke,” an incisive attempt, published in The Voice in 1986, to find a middle ground between the austere aesthetics of Black nationalist intellectualism and the emancipatory pandemonium of artists like James Brown.Mr. Tate could be both generous and exacting: He praised Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” as one of the best albums ever made but called the follow-up, “Bad,” one of the worst. He eviscerated Jackson’s “blanched skin and disfigured African features” as the sad, inevitable result of white America’s ongoing appropriation of Black culture.“Jackson was the under-weaned creation of two Black working-class traditions,” Mr. Tate wrote in The Voice in 1987: “That of boys being forced to bypass childhood along the fast track to manhood, and that of rhythm and blues auctioning off the race’s passion for song, dance, sex and spectacle.”But he was less interested in castigation than in celebration and exploration. A single, clear thread ran through all his work: a belief that Black culture was fresh and innovative but at the same time deeply rooted in history, and that its disparate forms could be understood as emanations from a common heritage.“I marvel at hip-hop for the same reasons I marvel at Duke Ellington, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X and Michael Jordan: a lust for that wanton and wily thing called swing and an ardor for Black artists who make virtuosic use of African-American vernacular,” he wrote in The New York Times in 1994.Mr. Tate’s first book catalyzed a generation of young writers of color with its vivid language, easy erudition and kaleidoscopic range.Mr. Tate’s first book, “Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America,” was published in 1993. A compendium of his articles from The Voice, it catalyzed a generation of young writers of color with its vivid language, easy erudition and kaleidoscopic range.“His best paragraphs throbbed like a party and chattered like a salon,” one of those young critics, Hua Hsu, wrote in 2016 in The New Yorker, where he is now a staff writer. “They were stylishly jam-packed with names and reference points that shouldn’t have got along but did.”Some critics like to remain aloof from their subjects; not Mr. Tate. He palled around with the rapper Fab Five Freddy and the guitarist Vernon Reid, a founder of the band Living Colour, and he went out of his way to promote rising young Black artists, especially women.After a series of meetings in 1985 to discuss the racial disparities in New York’s music scene, he joined Mr. Reid and several others to form the Black Rock Coalition, which promotes Black musicians. Mr. Tate wrote the group’s manifesto.“Rock and roll,” he wrote, “like practically every form of popular music across the globe, is Black music, and we are its heirs. We, too, claim the right of creative freedom and access to American and International airwaves, audiences, markets, resources and compensations, irrespective of genre.”He wrote as both a music fan and a musician; he played guitar, and in 1999 he formed Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, a genre-blending band of indeterminate size. Anywhere from 12 to 40 members might be onstage at a time, with Mr. Tate often playing the role of conductor.He left The Voice in 2005, became a visiting professor at Brown and Columbia and wrote a series of books, including a sequel to “Flyboy” and a critical assessment of Jimi Hendrix. Both the pace and the style of his writing slowed down and became more deliberate as he shifted his attention to visual art and national politics.“When you’re younger, it’s all about expressionism, it’s all about trying to make as much noise as possible,” he told The L.A. Review of Books in 2018. “You realize, after a while, your thoughts are incendiary enough; the language doesn’t have to also be on fire all the time.”Mr. Tate in 2014. After he left The Village Voice in 2005, both the pace and the style of his writing slowed down and became more deliberate.Alan NahigianGregory Stephen Tate was born on Oct. 14, 1957, in Dayton, Ohio. Both his parents, Charles and Florence (Grinner) Tate, were active in the city’s civil rights movement as members of the Congress of Racial Equality, and their home served as a gathering place for fellow organizers.On weekends, as the family cleaned the house, his father would play jazz albums and his mother would play recordings of speeches by Malcolm X, followed by Nina Simone.Mr. Tate’s omnivorous nature emerged early on. His family moved to Washington when he was 13, and among their new friends was the playwright and poet Thulani Davis. In an interview, she remembered Greg coming to her apartment to listen to records and grilling her about music, art and literature. He read Amiri Baraka and Rolling Stone in equal measure.“When he discovered a new sound or set of ideas,” Ms. Davis said, “he would listen to or read them obsessively.”In addition to his daughter, Mr. Tate is survived by a brother, Brian; a sister, Geri Augusto; and a grandson, Nile.He studied journalism and film at Howard, where he also hosted a radio show and began trying his hand at music criticism. Eventually Ms. Davis recommended that he submit something to The Village Voice, whose music editor, Robert Christgau, she knew.Just before moving to New York permanently, Mr. Tate struck up a friendship with Arthur Jafa, another Howard student, who was at the beginning of his own illustrious career as a video artist. A chance encounter outside the Howard library, just before Mr. Tate moved to Harlem, turned into an eight-hour conversation, ranging over Greek drama, avant-garde film and the latest sounds coming out of New York.The two remained close, bouncing ideas off each other and becoming famous for their public gab sessions. When Mr. Jafa needed an essay for an exhibition catalog, Mr. Tate wrote it in a night. On another occasion, Mr. Jafa joined Mr. Tate for an event in Minneapolis, where they ended up talking for 10 hours, becoming a sort of accidental performance art.“He didn’t accept false boundaries,” Mr. Jafa said in an interview. “It’s hard to describe what it’s like having the voice of a generation as your friend.” More

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      in Music

      The Peerless Imagination of Greg Tate

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      For four decades, he set the critical standard for elegantly intricate assessments of music, art, literature and more, writing dynamically about the resilience and paradoxes of Black creativity and life.There are sentences, and then there are the writings of Greg Tate, who died on Tuesday at the age of 64. A critic and historian of music, art and so much more for over four decades, he was a singular voice, a fount of bravura essays on the fantastical creativity, determined resilience and wry paradoxes of Black creativity and life.His writing froze and shattered time, supercharged neurons, unraveled familiar knots and tied up beautiful new ones. It contained uncanny, elevated descriptions of sound and performance, offered grounded philosophical inquisitions and sprinkled in wink-nudge personal asides. It could have the cadence of smack talk, or a conspiratorial whisper. And it was patient, unfurling at exactly the pace of gestation, while somehow containing turns of phrase that appeared to be moving at warp speed.It doesn’t matter which page you open to in his crucial 1992 anthology “Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America” — just open it. Eruptions of style — of pure intellectual vigor and unhurried swagger — are everywhere.Page 123, leading into a review of Public Enemy: “Granted, Charlie Parker died laughing. Choked chicken wing perched over ’50s MTV. So? No way in hell did Bird, believing there was no competition in music, will his legacy to some second-generation be-boppers to rattle over the heads of the hip-hop nation like a rusty sabre.”Page 221, on Don DeLillo: “DeLillo’s books are inward surveys of the white supremacist soul — on the run from mounting evidence that its days are (as the latest in Black militant button-wear loves to inform us) numbered.”“When you’re younger, it’s all about expressionism, it’s all about trying to make as much noise as possible,” Tate said in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2018. “I was trying to literally approximate music on the page.”To read Tate was to be awed by a gift that verged on the extraterrestrial. But he was as meaningful and influential for the words he wrote as for the possibilities he made room for. Aspiring critics, this one included, understood: You almost certainly could not do what Tate did, but what a revelation nonetheless to learn about all the available space between the ground where mortals pecked away at keys and wherever he resided. There were whole galaxies of possibility to explore, so many fertile places you might land.Fearless isn’t exactly the word for how Tate approached his subjects — that would imply that to honor one’s own intellectual truth was in some way contingent on, or mindful of, the acquiescence of others. Maybe boundless is better. He rightly understood that the scope of criticism extended far beyond the borders of the subject work. The subject was the pretext, the intro, the foyer to a whole house.Tate began writing in the late 1970s, and began contributing in The Village Voice in 1981. He moved to New York from Washington, D.C., soon after, and sought out the city’s creative spasms: jazz, art, literature, newly emergent hip-hop.In that era, the alt-weekly was the medium most comfortable publishing writing with high stakes, open ears, indelible flair, infinite possibility. And in that ecosystem, Tate was the lodestar. Take “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke,” a visionary essay which appeared in The Voice in 1986 that called for a “popular poststructuralism — accessible writing bent on deconstructing the whole of Black culture.” It was a call to critical arms to rise to the “postnationalist” output of the time — in short, Tate wanted peers as ambitious and wild-minded as the culture he was covering..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}When he loved something, he was bracing. On Miles Davis: “‘Bitches Brew’ is an orchestral marvel because it fuses James Brown’s antiphonal riffing against a metaphoric bass drone with Sly’s minimalist polyrhythmic melodies and Jimi’s concept of painting pictures with ordered successions of electronic sounds.”When he was frustrated by something, he was bracing. In a roasting of Michael Jackson’s “Bad,” and in a way, of Jackson himself: “Jackson’s decolorized flesh reads as the buppy version of Dorian Gray, a blaxploitation nightmare that offers this moral: Stop, the face you save may be your own.” (When Jackson died, in 2009, Tate’s memorial tribute loudly affirmed Jackson’s place in the soul pantheon while still agonizing over the personal choices Jackson made, especially in his later years.)And he planted flags early. Critics before Tate had written about rap music, of course, but his early pieces on Eric B. & Rakim, Public Enemy, De La Soul and others stand as the definitive critical engagements of their day. They also made the case not just for a hip-hop canon but for hip-hop as canon.Not long after “Flyboy” came out in 1992, Tate brought his pen to Vibe magazine, which in its infancy was underpinned by a downtown New York cosmohemian sensibility that he helped shape with his mere presence.His column, “Black-Owned,” was a staple and a megaphone trumpeting the most progressive creators across disciplines. In the October 1993 issue, one of the magazine’s first, he wrote a dynamic full-page poem called “What Is Hip-Hop?”: “Hip-hop is inverse capitalism/Hip-hop is reverse colonialism.”In 1995, he sat with Richard Pryor: “You literally have to go to Shakespeare, James Joyce, or James Baldwin to find readings of human folly as incisive as Pryor’s. Yet Pryor has it one up on those masters of the word: He didn’t need exclamation points — his body movement was his punctuation.”On D’Angelo’s “Voodoo,” in 1999: “There are times when the music on this disc sounds so raw, so naked and exposed, you’ll be tempted to throw a blanket over its brittle, shivering bones.” On TV on the Radio, in 2006: “Lead singer Tunde Adebimpe has a wandering tenor wail that seems undecided between Catholicism’s four-part chorales, doo-wop’s street-corner symphonies and New Wave’s girly-man blues.”Full disclosure — I assigned the TV on the Radio review, one of my first decisions when I joined the magazine as music editor. The opportunity to bring Tate back into those pages was a gift. (He also was a relentless mentor and connector — he introduced me to one of the first people I hired there.) By that point, Tate’s sui generis brilliance was widely acknowledged in our circles, and still barely touched by others. Showcasing his critical pirouetting was meant to serve as a beacon, and also a simple acknowledgment of the way he affected every writer I cared about and learned from — we’re all Tate’s children. I still buy “Flyboy” every time I see it in a bookstore. I never want to be too far away from it, lest I forget how vast the cosmos is. More

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      Brandon Kyle Goodman, a Nonbinary Voice of ‘Big Mouth’

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      The actor and writer also stars in the spinoff “Human Resources.”Name: Brandon Kyle GoodmanAge: 34Hometown: New York CityNow lives: In a one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood with his husband, Matthew Raymond-Goodman, and their dog, Korey.Claim to fame: Mr. Goodman is an actor and writer best known for “Big Mouth,” an adult animated sitcom on Netflix about preteens surviving puberty. He is the voice of Walter, a bisexual lovebug.Mr. Goodman is also a Black and queer activist who hosts a weekly podcast, “Black Folx,” which features conversations about diverse Black voices. “Being a nonbinary gay Black person in Hollywood is an uphill battle” he said. “As a storyteller, I, too, want the chance to play with all the colors in the crayon box of humanity instead of being sidelined as a trope.NetflixBig break: After graduating from the Tisch School of Arts at New York University in 2009, Mr. Goodman began writing a pilot about three queer friends in New York City in search of love called “Sweet Boys,” filled with poignant observations about modern romance drawn from his own journey.His agent submitted it to “Big Mouth.” “They loved it and thought that it fit with their world,” he said. “I remember one of the creators of the show, Jennifer Flackett, saying the characters in my pilot reminded them of the ‘Big Mouth’ kids as grown-ups.”Latest project: Mr. Goodman just finished playing Walter again, this time on “Human Resources,” a spinoff of “Big Mouth” set in a workplace. His co-stars include Randall Park, Keke Palmer and Aidy Bryant. “It’s a dream to be part of the ‘Big Mouth’ universe as a writer, and then to be trusted to join its legendary roster of comedic icons as a voice on the show is nothing short of an honor,” he said. “I’m still pinching myself.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesNext thing: Mr. Goodman is working on his first book, a collection of essays on Black queerness to be published next fall by Legacy Lit Books, a division of Hachette Books focused on BIPOC authors. “My hope is that, if you’re white, cis and het, you’ll have a really candid look into what it is to be Black and queer,” he said. “And if you’re Black and queer, or you’re living in the intersections, you’ll have language that articulates your experience because that’s what I missed growing up — language that articulated my experience.”Going Live: Every week, Mr. Goodman goes live on Instagram to answer questions about queer sex. “I know that to the outside this all could look raunchy, but to me, it’s activism because sex positivity and talking about how much shame there is around sex is super-important, and I wanted to create a safe space to do that,” he said. More