Writing and Writers

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Netflix to Debut Italy’s First TV Show With a Majority Black Cast

      by

      The creators of “Zero,” including the co-writer Antonio Dikele Distefano, say they hope viewers enjoy it so much that the characters’ racial identity becomes irrelevant.ROME — While much of the world spent 2020 in lockdowns of varying severity, the 28-year-old Italian author Antonio Dikele Distefano had the busiest year of his life.Along with working on his sixth novel and interviewing Italians of different ethno-cultural backgrounds for a television program, he spent months on the set of “Zero,” a show inspired by one of his novels that premieres on Netflix on April 21.This is Dikele Distefano’s first time co-writing a television show. Until now, he has been best known for his books, gritty coming-of-age fiction, with classic themes of heartbreak, friendship and uncertainty about the future, which have become a publishing sensation in Italy. But the work of Dikele Distefano, whose parents migrated from Angola, also integrates his experiences of being a Black Italian.And “Zero,” which refers to the nickname of the lead character, is the first Italian television series to feature a predominantly Black cast.Center from left, Giuseppe Dave Seke, Daniela Scattolin and Dylan Magon shooting an episode of “Zero.”Francesco Berardinelli/NetflixVirginia Diop and Dave Seke, who plays Omar, the lead character in the show.Francesco Berardinelli/NetflixDikele Distefano says he hopes that fact will only briefly be a talking point. He likes to cite “Coming to America,” the 1988 Eddie Murphy comedy that made more than $288 million at the box office worldwide, as an inspiration. “The film is so entertaining that you don’t even think about” the fact that the cast is all Black, he said of that movie in a Zoom interview this week. “For me, that is a victory.”In his novels, Dikele Distefano takes a similar tack, throwing light on the lives of young people, the children of immigrants, who are not considered citizens even when they are born in Italy, speak the language and share the same cultural references. They can apply for Italian citizenship only when they turn 18.The desire to change society motivates much of his work, he said, including “the idea of, in the future, having a country where my nieces and nephews can say, ‘I feel Italian.’” So far, growing calls to change the law and grant citizenship to anyone born in Italy have not gotten far in Parliament.Dikele Distefano’s raw and emotionally open approach to his writing has struck a chord with readers of his novels. While his books are shaped by his background, they home in on universal emotional truths.“People often say that we need beautiful stories,” he said. “I’ve always been drawn to real stories. Truth appeals to me.”He added, “I wouldn’t be able to tell a story far from me, something that I haven’t lived or that doesn’t belong to me.”Dikele Distefano in the Barona district on the outskirts of Milan, where “Zero” was largely filmed. His raw and emotionally open approach to writing has struck a chord with readers of his novels.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesIt was Dikele Distefano’s “authentic voice” and “clear language” that caught the attention of Netflix, said Ilaria Castiglioni, the streaming service’s manager for Italian original series. She said that he was the first to bring to Netflix Italy the experiences of second-generation immigrants in Italy and that “we were drawn to how he narrated his experience so naturally.”“Zero” is the sixth made-in-Italy series for Netflix, after the crime drama “Suburra: Blood on Rome,” now in its third season; the teenage drama “Baby,” also in its third season; the historical fantasy “Luna Nera”; the supernatural drama “Curon,” and “Summertime,” whose protagonist is a woman of Italian and Nigerian descent.Castiglioni said Netflix had seen a need to better represent Italy’s changing society. “A very important theme for us is representation, to create empathy, so that as many people as possible find themselves reflected in what they see onscreen,” she said.But “Zero” is not overtly about the struggles and discriminations faced by Black Italians, she added.“We tried to tell a story that was universal,” while recognizing the greater difficulties that Black Italians have to deal with, she said. “Our objective is to create entertainment,” she added, “and if that entertainment creates a debate, it’s a plus, but we leave that aspect to our public.”“Zero” explores the metaphorical invisibility felt by many young people facing an uncertain future. In the figure of the main character, Omar (Giuseppe Dave Seke) an often-ignored pizza delivery guy, the metaphor is made literal: He can actually will himself to become invisible. Attempting to save his neighborhood from greedy property investors, the mild-mannered Omar becomes a community superhero, joining a group of other young people who have their own useful skill sets.Characters in the show, such as Sara (played by Scattolin) and Momo (Magon), have their own useful skill sets.Francesco Berardinelli/NetflixOmar (Dave Seke) can will himself to become invisible and becomes a community superhero.Francesco Berardinelli/NetflixAngelica Pesarini, a professor at NYU Florence who focuses on issues of race, gender, identity and citizenship in Italy, said, “The fact that the main character is a dark-skinned Black man — already I think it’s revolutionary in the Italian landscape.”Though racism is rife in their country, Italians are loath to admit it to themselves, Pesarini said.“Netflix is doing a series with an almost entirely Black cast and then on the national channels you have horrific instances of racism that wouldn’t be imaginable in the United States,” she noted.Among recent examples, an Italian actress used a racist slur during an interview on the national broadcaster in March. A few days later, a satirical program on the private broadcaster Mediaset aired an old parody of a lawmaker that also used the slur. In another skit, which aired this month, the same program was again accused of racism after the hosts made fun of Chinese people. On Wednesday, one of the hosts posted a video to apologize for that episode.Pesarini, the NYU Florence professor, said, “I was thinking of all the Black Italian kids watching these programs,” and “hearing the N-word referred to them.”“It was so violent for me as an adult, I can’t imagine the damage this does for someone growing up in this country as a nonwhite Italian,” added Pesarini, who is of Italian and East African heritage.Pesarini and other activists have started a campaign, #cambieRAI (a play on the national broadcaster’s name that translates as “you will change”). She said that they had sent a letter to RAI “explaining why we were shocked and fed up and frustrated” with how Black people were represented on television in Italy. So far, there has been no response, she added.The coronavirus set the production of “Zero” back an entire year. When Italy went into national lockdown in March 2020, the cast and Dikele Distefano decided to remain ensconced in a hotel in Rome, giving them an unexpected opportunity to bond, a chemistry that is manifest in the actors’ onscreen interactions.Dikele Distefano said he was motivated in part by “the idea of, in the future, having a country where my nieces and nephews can say, ‘I feel Italian.’”Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times“We became best friends, we still speak every day,” Dikele Distefano said. That said, the tension of working within the restraints imposed by the pandemic is something he hopes never to repeat. “I would like to work in a more relaxed way,” he said, laughing.“Zero” has a carefully selected soundtrack. Dikele Distefano’s first forays into writing came via his passion for music, he said, and in his teens, he rapped under the name “Nashy.” In 2016, he founded Esse Magazine, a digital publication about Italian music and urban culture. “Rap was a school for me, the possibility to express what I was feeling in four-four time,” he said. When he discovered books, he gave up rap, he added, but without the music, “I wouldn’t be writing.”Dikele Distefano worked on the script for “Zero” alongside the writers Carolina Cavalli, Lisandro Monaco, Massimo Vavassori and Stefano Voltaggio. The eight initial episodes end in a cliffhanger that seems to beg for a second season.But Castiglioni said that Netflix had made no decision about any continuation. “For now, we’re concentrated on this series,” she said. “Let’s see how it goes and then look to the future.” More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      The Brief, Brilliant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

      by

      The curtain rises on a dim, drab room. An alarm sounds, and a woman wakes. She tries to rouse her sleeping child and husband, calling out: “Get up!”It is the opening scene — and the injunction — of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun,” the story of a Black family living on the South Side of Chicago. “Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of Black people’s lives been seen on the stage,” her friend James Baldwin would later recall. It was the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway. When “Raisin” won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best play, Hansberry — at 29 — became the youngest American and the first Black recipient.How often the word “first” appears in the life of Hansberry; how often it will appear in this review. See also “spokeswoman” or “only.” Strange words of praise; meretricious even, in how they can mask the isolation they impose. Hansberry seemed to anticipate it all. At the triumphant premiere of “Raisin,” at the standing ovation and the calls for playwright to take the stage, she initially refused to leave her seat. “The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all,” she later wrote, “is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”Hansberry died in 1965, at 34, of cancer. The fact still feels intolerable, almost unassimilable — her death not merely tragedy but a kind of theft. “Look at the work that awaits you!” she said in a speech to young writers, calling them “young, gifted and Black” — inspiring the Nina Simone song of the same name. Look at the work that awaited her. She goaded herself on, even in the hospital: “Comfort has come to be its own corruption.”But a flurry of recent renewed interest attests to how much Hansberry did accomplish — the range of her interests and seriousness of her political commitments. There has been Imani Perry’s 2018 book “Looking for Lorraine” and Tracy Heather Strain’s 2017 documentary “Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart.” The pre-eminent Hansberry scholar Margaret B. Wilkerson has a book in the works.To this Soyica Diggs Colbert, a professor of African American Studies and Performing Arts at Georgetown University, adds her contribution with “Radical Vision,” positioned as the first scholarly biography. Here is Hansberry resurrected from the archives, from her scripts, scraps and drafts. Through a series of close readings, Colbert examines “how her writing, published and unpublished, offers a road map to negotiate Black suffering in the past and present.”.To quote Simone de Beauvoir, an important influence, Hansberry could not think in terms of joy or despair “but in terms of freedom.” And she could not think of freedom as a destination but as a practice, full of intervals, regressions. It is the same idea one encounters in radical thinkers today, in Mariame Kaba’s notion of abolitionist feminism as a practice of freedom.A central aim of Colbert’s biography, as with Perry’s book and Strain’s documentary, is to reclaim Hansberry as the radical she was.In the public eye, she was the slim and pleasing housewife, the accidental playwright featured in a photo spread in Vogue. “Best Play Prize Won By a Negro Girl, 28,” The New York Herald Tribune declared. “Mrs. Robert Nemiroff,” The New York Times profiled her, “voluble, energetic, pretty and small.”Studies of Hansberry excavate her behind-the-scenes activism. There is the now famous story of her confrontation with Robert Kennedy, who as attorney general in 1963 convened a group of Black activists and intellectuals. Hansberry demanded Kennedy acknowledge racism as a moral problem, not a purely social one, before walking out in disgust.Colbert adds detail and dimension to Hansberry’s work — covering, for instance, the years she spent writing for Paul Robeson’s newspaper Freedom, reporting on the Mau Mau Uprising and child labor in South Africa. She held fund-raisers, and studied alongside Alice Childress and W.E.B. Du Bois. The mythos of “the first” obscures so much of the communality of Hansberry’s thinking. “We never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together,” Nina Simone wrote of Hansberry in her memoir. “It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution — real girls’ talk.”A small interlude. Imagine another opening scene. Another dim, drab room. The alarm sounds. A woman wakes, tries to rouse a sleeping child. This is the beginning of another story set on Chicago’s South Side — Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” published in 1940. The parallels to me have always felt too uncanny for it not to be homage. Hansberry reviewed Wright’s fiction — a little uncharitably, to my mind. She had no patience for despair, for victims, really; her plays hinge on a decisive moment in which a character fends off complacency and takes a stand (quite often while making a thunderous speech about the necessity of taking a stand). There’s an odd narrowness to her vision. Her commitment to realism was absolute, a matter of moral principle. Interest in anomie, absurdity or paralysis was dismissed as liberal silliness, and an abdication of artistic responsibility.This stringency is curious, given Hansberry’s openness when it came to tactics, her insistence that the movement required a multipronged approach. “Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and nonviolent,” she wrote. “The acceptance of our present condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children.” This belief, Colbert argues, was her inheritance.Soyica Diggs Colbert, the author of “Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry.”Paul B. Jones/Georgetown UniversityHansberry was born on May 19, 1930, in the first Black-owned and -operated hospital in the nation. She was a “movement baby,” Colbert writes. Her father built a real estate empire by chopping up larger apartments into smaller units to provide housing for the waves of Black migrants who fled the South only to encounter deeply segregated Chicago.In 1937, the family moved to a white neighborhood — the story she revisits in “Raisin.” A segregationist landowners’ association challenged the sale of the house. White mobs harassed the family, on one occasion throwing a concrete mortar through the window. It narrowly missed Hansberry, who was 7 years old.These years taught Hansberry the necessity of fighting on all fronts. Her father filed a lawsuit, and Hansberry recalled her “desperate and courageous mother,” home without him, “patrolling our house all night with a loaded German Luger, doggedly guarding her four children.”Colbert’s study is loving, lavishly detailed, repetitive and a little stilted in the telling. (The notes, however, are splendid — fluent, rich and full of a feeling of discovery; here she permits herself to speak more freely.) The book circles a few points very dutifully — even as we feel Colbert itching to rove. She has a habit of making arresting asides and then refusing to follow their trail: “Hansberry’s writing suggests that she understood Blackness to implicitly include what we would now describe as queerness.”It’s not incidental, I think, that these asides often have to do with desire. Colbert pays forensic attention here to scripts, articles and stories, but takes less intellectual interest in the jottings and journals — to the self that was feverish, exultant, wary in its sexuality. The thinking gets pleasantly tousled and unsure here; Hansberry is off the podium and on her second glass of Scotch, wondering at her attraction to femininity — “the rather disgusting symbol of woman’s oppression.” And yet: “I am fond of being able to watch calves and ankles freely.” She divorced her husband in 1964 (they remained artistic collaborators) and began to move in lesbian circles that included Patricia Highsmith and Louise Fitzhugh, the author of “Harriet the Spy.” For years, she kept annual inventories of her loves and hates. (“My homosexuality” made both at age 29.) To read these notes, their shame and their thrill (At 32, under “I like”: “the inside of a lovely woman’s mouth”) recalls some of the pleasures of the private writing of Virginia Woolf and the fragmented diaries of Susan Sontag — two other writers capable of caginess about their attraction to women.Hansberry exhorted students to “write about our people, tell their story. Leave the convoluted sex preoccupations to the convoluted.” And yet out of her own convolutions, a new self was emerging, a new understanding. “I feel I am learning how to think all over again,” she wrote anonymously to a lesbian magazine.What would this thinking have wrought? Her impatience, her greed for work, for thought — for more life — is palpable until the end. The final journal entries burn. She is desperate for her lover (“I consumed her whole”) stuck in the hospital, she is hungry to return to her play. “The writing urge is on,” she wrote. “Only death or infirmity can stop me now.” More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Miami Outdoor Theater Hit Announces a New York Arrival

      by

      “The Seven Deadly Sins,” a theatrical anthology series, will start off on June 23 at a series of storefront windows in the Meatpacking District.After enjoying a successful run in Miami Beach from late November through January, “The Seven Deadly Sins,” an outdoor theatrical anthology series that explores humanity’s basest impulses, will come to New York. Performances are scheduled to begin on June 23 and will take place in storefront windows in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.“I think it was important for us to do it in this moment of transition,” said Moisés Kaufman, the founder and artistic director of Tectonic Theater Project, which is producing the show with Madison Wells Live in association with Miami New Drama. “We wanted to be able to create something while the pandemic is still with us because it feels more like an act of defiance.”The New York version of “The Seven Deadly Sins” will feature short new plays by Ngozi Anyanwu, Thomas Bradshaw, MJ Kaufman, Jeffrey LaHoste, Ming Peiffer and Bess Wohl. Moisés Kaufman will also contribute a piece to the anthology and direct the production. Each playwright’s work will address a particular “sin”: pride, greed, wrath, envy, gluttony, sloth or lust.“We really wanted the event to not be a revival of an existing play,” Kaufman said in an interview on Wednesday. After having been through a pandemic, “the idea that new art can be born on the streets of Manhattan is something that excites us.”The 10-minute-long plays will be viewable from the street — by a masked, socially distanced audience, who will be provided with disposable earbuds to hear the actors in the storefronts. Escorted by a guide, they will watch the seven pieces in different orders. Before viewing the artistically rendered debauchery, ticket holders will have the opportunity to grab a drink at a pop-up bar called Purgatory.The Meatpacking District Business Improvement District is pitching in to identify performance venues and manage the production’s use of public space.Dael Orlandersmith and Nilo Cruz were among the writers who contributed plays to the twice-extended inaugural production, which was conceived of by Michel Hausmann, a co-founder of Miami New Drama with Moisés Kaufman.Storefront performances have cropped up in New York periodically since the pandemic began, but none so far have matched the scale or complexity of “The Seven Deadly Sins.” In March, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that live indoor and outdoor shows could resume in the state at limited capacity beginning April 2, paving the way for more ambitious projects to take root in the city this spring and summer.Tickets go on sale May 14. Casting information will be released soon. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      How Do You Write an Anthony Bourdain Book Without Anthony Bourdain?

      by

      After the author and TV personality’s death, his longtime assistant was left to finish his last book, a world travel guide.In March 2017, Anthony Bourdain had an idea for a book, but no time to write it. Since he started traveling and eating on camera with the Food Network’s “A Cook’s Tour” in 2000, the chef, frequent dropper of f-bombs and insatiable eater of delicious things had spent the majority of his time in the field, most recently for his CNN show “Parts Unknown.” Mr. Bourdain and his team decided he would carve out some time to write in the summer of 2018, when he would have a few rare continuous weeks at home during a break in filming. That, of course, never happened, as Mr. Bourdain died by suicide in June 2018.Nevertheless, next week, almost three years after his death, and after a pandemic that almost completely shut down international travel, Ecco will publish “World Travel: An Irreverent Guide” by Mr. Bourdain and his longtime assistant (or “lieutenant” as he often referred to her), Laurie Woolever.“To me, there was no question that the book would go on,” Ms. Woolever said in a recent video call from her home in Queens. “As long as I had the blessing of his estate, which I did, I wanted to finish it as a way to serve his legacy.”“World Travel” is built out of a somewhat amorphous vision, an “atlas of the world as seen through his eyes,” as Ms. Woolever writes in the book’s introduction. It is the second book, after 2016’s “Appetites,” that includes Ms. Woolever’s name on the cover just under Mr. Bourdain’s, albeit smaller. It speaks to the power of Mr. Bourdain’s legacy and the singularity of his point of view that his name still sits so boldly on the book’s cover despite the fact that he contributed not a single new written word to its 469 pages.Laurie Woolever outside Gray’s Papaya on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which makes an appearance in “World Travel.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesThe book is built to read like a travel guide, even if it would be a stretch to use it as one. It covers 43 countries, with Mr. Bourdain’s recommendations for restaurants, hotels and other attractions in each one drawn mostly from his various TV shows. In between, Ms. Woolever, who was archivist, fact checker and editor on the book, as well as its co-author, has inserted context and, for each destination, a section on airports, public transportation and taxi costs. Occasionally she adds in her own recommendations based on her travels and knowledge of Mr. Bourdain’s favorite off-camera spots: one particularly charming section includes a delivery request that Mr. Bourdain emailed to Ms. Woolever, for Pastrami Queen, a kosher deli on New York’s Upper East Side.The book comes at a pivotal moment in travel, just after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that Americans who are vaccinated can travel internationally, and as closed borders between countries are slowly and fitfully reopening. The timing is fortuitous, though not intentional: The book was originally scheduled to publish in the fall of 2020 and Ms. Woolever said the publication was delayed because of production issues, not the coronavirus.Edward Ash-Milby, the lifestyle book buyer at Barnes & Noble, said in an email that the bookstore chain has put in an order similar in size to that for past best sellers by Mr. Bourdain: “We’ve ordered it for all 600-plus stores and we are all very excited about it.”After the travel book market took a major hit over the past year, Mr. Ash-Milby said in his email that he has started to see it coming back in the United States, especially when it comes to domestic travel. “World Travel,” he said, was perfectly positioned to take advantage of American readers’ pent-up wanderlust for places further afield. “I love the publication date of Anthony Bourdain’s ‘World Travel,’” he wrote. “It feels perfectly timed to meet the imagination of today’s travelers who are primed to explore.”Mr. Bourdain never professed to being a fan of travel guides and, before this book, he had never really expressed much interest in writing one. In an interview during South by Southwest in 2016, he admitted that he rarely read them: “I like atmospherics,” he said. “I don’t want a list of the best hotels or restaurants; I want to read fiction set in the place where you get a real sense of what that place is like.”Despite this, Ms. Woolever said there was also an understanding between the two of them that a guide could be exactly what his fans wanted. “I would like to think that even if someone has seen every episode, even if they’ve read every book, there is the possibility of fresh discovery with this book,” she said.The choice of what to include — which Singaporean hawker stalls, Spanish tapas restaurants or American dive bars made the list — mostly came out of one hourlong, recorded conversation in the spring of 2018 between Ms. Woolever and Mr. Bourdain held at Mr. Bourdain’s Manhattan high-rise apartment, which he had, according to Ms. Woolever, decorated to mimic one of his favorite hotels, Los Angeles’s Chateau Marmont.“I prepared ahead of time for this meeting with Tony by making a list of every place he had been,” Ms. Woolever said. Then, as Mr. Bourdain chain-smoked and free-associated, she took notes. “He would just, off the top of his head, say ‘We’ve got to include this market stall, and this place with the chicken,’” she recalled. “He had a pretty astonishing level of recall for somebody who had done so much.”“World Travel” contains essays by Mr. Bourdain’s friends, colleagues and family, but no new contributions from him.EccoIn that quiet summer of 2018, Mr. Bourdain was planning to go through the curated list of countries and cities and write new, original essays about them. From his work on television it isn’t hard to imagine what they could have been: an effusive, profanity-laced ode to the decadent and delicate noodle soups of Vietnam perhaps, or an examination of why he loved old colonial hotels in the tropics so much despite their often problematic histories.The conversation, meant to be the first of many brainstorming sessions, became Ms. Woolever’s only blueprint. Facing all of the unwritten essays, she reached out to Mr. Bourdain’s friends, family members and former colleagues to fill that space: His younger brother, Christopher Bourdain, writes about traveling to the Jersey Shore and Uruguay for episodes of “Parts Unknown” and “No Reservations”; the record producer Steve Albini provides a lengthy list of his favorite where-would-Bourdain-eat spots in Chicago; the Toronto restaurateur Jen Agg recounts how the stunt that made her restaurant famous (a “bone luge” shot, in which bourbon is poured down a hollowed out veal bone) was concocted for an episode of “The Layover,” the relatively short-lived Travel Channel show that was, before this book, the closest Mr. Bourdain ever came to making a “how to” guide.“It’s a hard and lonely thing to co-author a book about the wonders of world travel when your writing partner, that very traveler, is no longer traveling that world,” Ms. Woolever admits in the book’s introduction.Ms. Woolever first worked with Mr. Bourdain in 2002, when her former employer, the chef Mario Batali, recommended her as a recipe tester and editor for “Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook.” She became his assistant in 2009 after working as, among other things, an editor and a private chef. As Ms. Woolever recounts it, Mr. Bourdain happened to be looking for an assistant at the precise time that she had a child and was looking to do something new. “It was such a lucky coincidence of timing for both of us,” she said.Ms. Woolever knew Mr. Bourdain well after so many years, and it was that closeness that helped her get through some of the hard decisions in putting together the book, she said.Much of that decision-making process involved talking to others: members of his close circle of confidantes, his production team and past fixers who offered updated information on old spots Mr. Bourdain might have visited. “I never want to speak for Tony, but if I had to speculate — and I think we all agreed — I think he would want these things that had been set in motion to go on,” she said. She ran decade-old “No Reservations” picks by past collaborators to make sure they were still good. She pored over transcripts of past shows and spent days contacting chefs in the French countryside or along the Mozambique coast to make sure they were still operating.Anthony Bourdain filming “Parts Unknown” in Butte, Mont., in 2015. CNNThat fact-checking process took on a new level of intensity, of course, with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, as restaurants globally were hit hard. “I did check to see that all the listed venues were still open just before the window closed to any new edits,” she told me. She knows of just one establishment — Cold Tea bar in Toronto — that has closed since, but doesn’t regret its inclusion in the book. “I am happy to have its listing remain in the text, because Tony loved it, and I hope that the business owners may be able to resurrect it in the future,” she said.Over the course of the book, Ms. Woolever never makes the claim that the guide is comprehensive — and the end result does feel incomplete and unbalanced. The countries of Ghana, Ireland and Lebanon get three pages apiece; the United States gets nearly 100. There is a chapter on Macau, but nothing on Indonesia or Thailand. These are somewhat predictable shortcomings, dependent as the book is on voice-over transcripts spanning decades and the impossible task of stringing them together across time.Some of the inclusions feel at odds with Mr. Bourdain’s avoid-the-tourists approach to travel, as well. In the Tokyo section, recommendations include the Park Hyatt hotel (made famous by “Lost in Translation,”); Sukiyabashi Jiro, the restaurant at the center of the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”; the bizarre kitsch-fest that is the Robot Restaurant; and a bar in the tourist-clogged Golden Gai neighborhood. These may be all appealing attractions to a first-timer in Tokyo, but there is nothing in that selection that you wouldn’t find at the top of an algorithm-generated TripAdvisor list.When I asked Ms. Woolever about these recommendations, she agreed they were perhaps obvious choices, but said Mr. Bourdain wanted to include them because of how much they meant to him, after so many visits to the city. “He wasn’t always (or, arguably, ever) about cool for cool’s sake, or obscurity as its own reward,” she said in an email.If it’s a guide they are after though, travelers may be left wanting. In Cambodia, you get recommendations for three hotels, two markets for dining and a suggestion to check out the temples of Angkor Wat, the country’s most famous attraction by a long shot. It isn’t exactly the list of hole-in-the-wall spots with no addresses that fans of Mr. Bourdain may be hoping for. What those fans will find though is Mr. Bourdain’s word-for-word rant against American military involvement in Cambodia (“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”) Having those passages — the no-holds-barred monologues that were a hallmark of his television shows — in one place might be the book’s greatest strength.Over the decades that Mr. Bourdain spent traveling the world, there was a lot of talk of the “Bourdain Effect”: how a culinary gem, previously only frequented by those in the know, could be “ruined” by being included in his show. When I asked Ms. Woolever whether she thought this book could amplify that effect, she emphasized that most business owners knew what they were in for when approached by producers. “People call it the ‘Bourdain Effect,’ but Tony didn’t invent it,” she said. “It’s something that business owners have to weigh out for themselves.”As I read the book, I was thinking of a different Bourdain Effect, one that feels more vital than ever right now, as travel begins to take its first baby steps back after a year of lockdowns. Seeing so much of Anthony Bourdain’s work in one place and being able to compare his impressions country-by-country in a tightly packed medium, makes it easier to see what he stood for. A traveling philosophy emerges: his utter disdain for stereotypes, his undying commitment to challenging his own preconceptions, his humility in the face of generosity.Because of tragic circumstances following its inception, “World Travel” may feel more like an anthology of greatest hits than a new, original guidebook. But read cover to cover, country by country, it is an enduring embodiment of Anthony Bourdain’s love for the whole world and a reminder of how to stack our priorities the next time we’re able to follow in his footsteps.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places list for 2021. More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      Jeremy O. Harris's Grad School Reunion

      by

      Standing, from left: SOHINA SIDHU, actress, 29; JULIAN SANCHEZ, actor, 25; JONATHAN HIGGINBOTHAM, actor, 33; MAIA MIHANOVICH, actress, 24; AMAUTA M. FIRMINO, screenwriter, 29; HUDSON OZ, actor, 30; JEREMY O. HARRIS, playwright, writer, producer and performer, 31; and SYDNEY LEMMON, actress, 30. Seated, from left: PATRICK FOLEY, actor and playwright, 30; EDMUND DONOVAN, actor, 30; […] More

    • 63 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      40 Acres and a Movie

      by

      Disney owns a piece of every living person’s childhood. Now it owns Marvel Studios, too. The co-hosts Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris look at depictions of racist tropes and stereotypes in Disney’s ever-expanding catalog. The company has made recent attempts to atone for its past. But can it move forward without repeating the same mistakes?On Today’s EpisodeThe Marvel Cinematic UniverseLetitia Wright as Shuri in “Black Panther” (2018).Disney/Marvel Studios, via Associated PressTeyonah Parris portrayed Monica Rambeau in the 2021 Disney+ series “WandaVision.”Marvel Studios/Disney PlusEarlier this year — during “season three of the pandemic” — Jenna binged the M.C.U., the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While she appreciated the moral messaging of the movies, which are centered on a fight against evil forces, she was appalled by the lack of nonwhite characters. “You mean to tell me they’ve been making these movies for over a decade — 12 years — and you have still not managed to decenter the whiteness of this universe?” she exclaimed.Jenna and Wesley talked about these offerings from the Marvel universe: “Avengers: Endgame” (2019), “WandaVision” (2021) and “The Eternals” (2021).The Disney of Your Childhood and NowWesley and Jenna discussed how rewatching classic Disney movies with adult eyes has been unsettling, from the colonial undertones in “The Little Mermaid” (1989) to the Orientalist tropes peddled in “Lady and the Tramp” (1955).Disney, however, has tried to atone for its history. On the Disney+ streaming service, some older movies, such as “Dumbo” (1941) and “The Aristocats” (1970), contain warning labels about “negative depictions” and “mistreatment of people or cultures.” And one musical, “Song of the South” (1946), does not appear on the platform at all.Still, the labeling effort isn’t comprehensive and seems to address only movies with instances of blatant racism, Jenna noted. “It’s worth interrogating how all of these movies reinforce the ideas that are so harmful in the formation of this country,” she added.In recent years, Disney has started to make movies that feature more diverse casts and story lines, such as “Coco” (2017), “Moana” (2016) and “Soul” (2020). They’ve also remade classics, including the live-action “Mulan” (2020) and a super-realistic version of “The Lion King” (2019).“Moana” (2016) is about a Polynesian girl who embarks on a journey to save her island from destruction.DisneyBlack FuturesJenna mentioned the essay, “Fandom, Racism, and the Myth of Diversity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” which unpacks how Black and Asian stereotypes are employed in Marvel comics.She also pointed to Alisha Wormsley’s art project “There are Black People in the Future,” which began as “a response to the absence of nonwhite faces in science-fiction films and TV.”Alisha’s project gets at the importance of thriving representation in popular culture. “What is on our screens matters so much,” Jenna said, and “has a huge impact on how we see ourselves.” She added: “We have to be able to imagine ourselves whole, happy and healthy in the future for that to be possible today.”Hosted by: Jenna Wortham and Wesley MorrisProduced by: Elyssa DudleyEdited by: Sara Sarasohn and Sasha WeissEngineered by: Corey SchreppelExecutive Producer, Shows: Wendy DorrExecutive Editor, Newsroom Audio: Lisa TobinAssistant Managing Editor: Sam DolnickSpecial thanks: Nora Keller, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani and Desiree IbekweWesley Morris is a critic at large. He was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his criticism while at The Boston Globe. He has also worked at Grantland, The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner. @wesley_morrisJenna Wortham is a staff writer for The Times Magazine and co-editor of the book “Black Futures” with Kimberly Drew. @jennydeluxe More

    • 150 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Arthur Kopit, Whose ‘Oh Dad’ Shook Up the Theater, Dies at 83

      by

      A three-time Tony nominee, he first became known for avant-garde works, many of them christened with rambling titles, that sparked spirited reactions.Arthur Kopit, the avant-garde playwright who thrust Off Broadway into a new era with the absurdist satirical farce “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad” and earned Tony Award nominations for two wildly different plays, “Indians” and “Wings,” and the musical “Nine,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.His death was announced by a spokesman, Rick Miramontez, who did not specify the cause.In 1962, when “Oh Dad, Poor Dad” opened at the 300-seat Phoenix Theater on East 74th Street, American popular culture was shifting. Julie Andrews was between the idealistic “Camelot” and the wholesome “Mary Poppins”; Lenny Bruce, the hot comic of the moment, was known for what came to be called “sick humor.” Broadway was dominated by “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and “A Man for All Seasons.”Along came a 24-year-old playwright with a script about an older woman who liked traveling with her virginal adult son and her husband’s preserved corpse. The New York Times critic, Howard Taubman, had reservations — he called it “funny” and “stageworthy” but “nonsensical” — but it won the Drama Desk Award (then the Vernon Rice Award) and even transferred to Broadway for a few months in 1963.There was often vehement disagreement about Mr. Kopit’s work. Before “Indians” (1969) — a dreamlike production that positioned Buffalo Bill Cody as the first guilty white American liberal and prominently featured his 19th-century Wild West show — arrived on Broadway, there was a production in London, where critical reaction was decidedly mixed. The script included the rape of one Native American and the casual murder (for sport) of another.Clive Barnes, writing in The Times, called the Broadway production, starring Stacy Keach, “a gentle triumph” and praised Mr. Kopit for “trying to do something virtually no one has done before: the multilinear epic.” But Walter Kerr, his Times colleague, compared it to “bad burlesque.”John Lahr, writing in The Village Voice, summarized “Indians” as “never less than scintillating” and called it the “most probing and the most totally theatrical Broadway play of this decade.” “Indians” received three Tony nominations, including for best play.Mr. Kopit professed a very specific social conscience. “I’m not concerned in the play with the terrible plight of the Indians now — they were finished from the moment the first white man arrived,” he told a London newspaper in 1968. “What I want to show is a series of confrontations between two alien systems.” Many saw parallels to the Vietnam War, then at its peak.When Mr. Kopit returned to Broadway a decade later, his subject could not have been more different. “Wings,” which opened at the Public Theater in 1978 and moved to Broadway the next year, followed the journey of a 70-year-old woman (played by Constance Cummings) having a stroke and reacting to it with fear, determination and kaleidoscopic verbal confusion. As The Washington Post reported, when the main character is asked to repeat the sentence “We live across the street from the school,” she replies, “Malacats on the forturay are the kesterfacts of the romancers.”Mr. Kopit in 1999. “When I wrote a play,” he once said, “I found that I lost myself as Arthur Kopit and I just wrote down what the characters said.”Jack Mitchell/Getty ImagesRichard Eder of The Times called “Wings,” which had been inspired by the post-stroke rehabilitation experiences of Mr. Kopit’s stepfather, “a brilliant work” — “complex at first glance,” he wrote, “yet utterly lucid, written with great sensitivity and with the excitement of a voyage of discovery.”The play was nominated for three Tonys. Ms. Cummings won the Tony and Drama Desk awards for best actress and an Obie for her performance.Mr. Kopit discovered his gift for writing plays almost by accident. In a 2007 interview with The Harvard Gazette, the official news outlet of his alma mater, he looked back at his initial reaction when he switched from short stories to scripts. “I was having a lot of trouble with the narrative point of view,” he recalled. “When I wrote a play, I found that I lost myself as Arthur Kopit and I just wrote down what the characters said. I wasn’t anywhere in the play, and I liked that.”Arthur Lee Koenig was born on May 10, 1937, in Manhattan, the son of Henry Koenig, an advertising salesman, and Maxine (Dubin) Koenig. His parents divorced when he was 2, and his mother’s occupation was listed in the 1940 census as millinery model. He took on his stepfather’s name after his mother married George Kopit, a jewelry sales executive.Arthur grew up and attended high school in Lawrence, an affluent Long Island community. He was already writing by the time he left Harvard in 1959 with an engineering degree. As he began a graduate fellowship in Europe, he heard about a Harvard playwriting contest. He wrote, entered and won the $250 prize with “Oh Dad,” which he said he never believed had any commercial potential.Mr. Kopit was at first fond of wordy, rambling titles. “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad” even had a subtitle: “A Pseudo-Classical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition.” He followed that success with a collection of one-acts, including “The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis,” set at a suburban country club. “On the Runway of Life, You Never Know What’s Coming Off Next” was another early work.His last Tony nomination was for the book of the musical “Nine” (1982), based on Federico Fellini’s film “8½.” That same year, he adapted the book of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” for a Broadway revival. More

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      With Open Ears, Indian Ragas and Western Melodies Merge

      by

      Amit Chaudhuri charts his musical journey in a new book, “Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music.”Amit Chaudhuri, an author and vocalist, blends memoir and music appreciation in “Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music,” out now from New York Review Books. In it, Chaudhuri charts a personal journey that began with a Western-oriented love for the singer-songwriter tradition, followed by a headlong immersion into Indian classical music.That heritage remained supreme for him until an accident of what he calls “mishearing” made him conscious of the elements shared by ragas and Western sounds — a realization that led to his ongoing recording and performance project “This Is Not Fusion.”In the book, Chaudhuri reflects on the raga, the framework of Indian classical music. Resisting the urge to find an analogue to Western tradition, he writes: “A raga is not a mode. That is, it isn’t a linear movement. It’s a simultaneity of notes, a constellation.” Elsewhere he adds that it is neither a melody nor a composition, neither a scale nor the sum total of its notes. In an interview, Chaudhuri gave a brief introduction to the raga and described the evolution of his musical life, from childhood to “This Is Not Fusion.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.One of the first musical experiences I had was my mother singing Tagore songs. Growing up in Bombay, I remember the tranquil energy of her style; it wasn’t sentimental, but it was vibrant. Without realizing it, I was being drawn deeply into the sensuous immediacy of tone and tempo, and also a style that is precise, whose emotion lies in tone rather than in added sentiment.Of course, there was also “The Sound of Music” and “My Fair Lady.” I spent a while infatuated with Julie Andrews. Then, when I was 7 or 8, my father bought a hi-fi record player, which came with a couple of complimentary records that I probably played a part in choosing without being informed in any way. I think one of them was by the Who, which I liked a lot; “I Can See for Miles” was one of my favorite songs. I also had a taste for the early Bee Gees, and of course the Beatles.At 12, I started to play the guitar, and by the time I was 16, I was composing songs in a kind of singer-songwriter mold. Yet at the same time I began to be drawn to Hindustani classical music for the first time.There were a few reasons. I had a teenage attraction to difficulty, and I was becoming more interested in complex tonalities. I was listening to Joni Mitchell, and I loved the fact that she could be melodious, kind of open-ended in her harmonic compositions, while at the same time quite complex. I also knew of people like Ravi Shankar, partly because of the Beatles. When we thought of Indian classical music, we basically thought of instrumental music: tabla players playing really exciting rhythmic patterns, getting applause at the end of their improvisatory spells, and of course the sitar and sarod. Vocal music seemed to be a little out of the way, arcane.But then I heard Vishmadev Chatterjee — what an amazing voice. And at this time, there was also this man, Govind Prasad Jaipurwale, who began teaching my mother Hindi devotionals. I realized that while teaching her, he was doing tiny improvisations with his voice, which pointed to a different kind of imagination and training. I began to be receptive to the kind of Indian classical music that had always been there, but which I had shut out. I asked my mother whether I could learn classical music.For some time, different types of music lived alongside one another. I played a bit of rock guitar. And I worked on an album that I thought was my way of becoming a singer-songwriter. My song “Shame” comes from that time. Its tune begins with the note C-sharp, then with the word “shame” in the chorus returns to C-sharp. It goes to that note after touching C — so chromatic notes are introduced at the end of the chorus, with a degree of estrangement, as the chords are C major and A major. Here, I think I was already responding to the way notes in North Indian classical music create a hypnotic effect through small shifts.Then I began to practice Indian classical music a lot, about four and a half hours a day. And I spent a lot of time listening to music, trying to comprehend what is happening with the time cycles, then trying to sing to them and improvise. So obviously that began to take over some of the other musical activity.I should say that a raga is not a tune. It’s not a note, not a scale, not a composition — although the raga is sung in the framework of a composition. But you can identify the raga from a particular arrangement of notes that have to do with the way they’re ascending and descending; a particular pattern in the ascent and a particular pattern in the descent identifies the raga.You cannot introduce notes which aren’t there in the raga, but you can slow it down. You can evade presenting the delineation immediately. That evasion is partly where the imagination and the creativity lie. You could climb up to the octave, and then you are done with what’s basically a cluster of notes that could be sung in a minute in a song. But doing this over 30, maybe even 40, minutes — that becomes an expansive idea of creation, not just delineating or stating, but finding different ways of saying. That’s what’s at work here, in the khayal form especially.The expanded time cycle allows you to explore these notes, to make the ascent and descent very slowly. The ear might recognize the fast version of the ektaal rhythmic system, which sounds like the normal version.The fast ektaalAmit ChaudhuriNow, when that added space occurs, you don’t keep time in an ordinary sense, but you are aware that the 12 beats of the ektaal have been multiplied, each one by four beats, until it ends, and you come back to the beginning.The slow ektaalAmit ChaudhuriSo there’s this kind of time remaining to sing and elaborate a bit on the progression. That’s an extraordinary modernist development. You can hear it in the raga Darbari by Ustad Amir Khan. It’s an amazing recording.Ragas are basically found material. Indians might say there are 83 of them, or a thousand; I don’t know. No more than maybe 50 ragas are sung today in the North Indian classical tradition. And maybe there are 30 that you hear over and over again, taking into account the fact that we don’t hear the morning and afternoon ragas because concerts are in the evening.That’s because ragas have specific times and seasons. The raga Shree is associated with twilight and evening.And the raga Basant, which has almost the same notes, is sung in the spring.If architecture is a language with which to understand space and time, so is the raga. It’s also like language. For instance, you don’t use the word evening to refer to morning. Similarly, you don’t sing the morning raga Bhairav in the evening. With recordings, though, you can, if you wish, listen to ragas at any time of the day. Until the recording studios came along, ragas came to life only ephemerally.So this was primarily the music that I practiced. The singer-songwriter had gone into permanent retirement. But by the late 1990s, that zeal of the convert that had possessed me when I was younger had passed, and I began to return to my record collection and listen to Jimi Hendrix. Bent notes, the blues, the raga Gujri Todi — all of that came together as I was listening. A moment of “mishearing” occurred when I thought I heard the riff to “Layla” in that raga.A week or two later, it happened again. I was standing in a hotel lobby and someone was playing this Kashmiri instrument, and suddenly it seemed to launch into “Auld Lang Syne.” Of course, it wasn’t. But then I thought: Is it possible to create a musical vocabulary — not to bring things together consciously, East and West, but to capture the kind of instability of who I am and the richness of what I had discovered in that moment. And that’s why I call it “not fusion.”“Summertime” happened around the time that I was creating these pieces. In it, I’m improvising on the raga Malkauns, but within the form of “Summertime,” an early kind of jazz composition based on the blues. I’m showing that it’s possible to improvise on Malkauns according to this form, which is what a jazz pianist does. But I’m bringing in another tradition.The same thing is happening in “Norwegian Wood.” I’m taking the raga Bageshri and improvising on the space that each bit gives me. “I once had a girl, or should I say she once had me” — that gives me space to improvise on those notes. What I’m doing is a feature of khayal. That’s why I would say again, it’s not fusion, because fusion artists don’t do that. What they do is, they sing their own stuff in a Western setting.Exploring these ideas has been deeply satisfying. Has my musical journey come full circle? I have not gone back to becoming a singer-songwriter, but I have brought together everything I know. If you’re a creative artist, the things you know tend to come back to you in some way. I’m very lucky that happened to me. More