Uncategorized

In a ‘Sea Change,’ Women of the Philharmonic Now Outnumber the Men

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

When the New York Philharmonic moved to Lincoln Center in 1962, its new hall had no women’s dressing rooms. That’s because there were no women in the orchestra.

But this fall, as the Philharmonic opens its newly renovated home, David Geffen Hall, its players have returned not only to more equitable facilities backstage, but to a milestone onstage: For the first time in its 180-year history, the women in the Philharmonic outnumber the men, 45 to 44.

“It’s a sea change,” said Cynthia Phelps, the principal viola, who joined the orchestra in 1992. “This has been a hard-won, long battle, and it continues to be.”

The orchestra’s new female majority could prove fleeting — it currently has 16 player vacancies to fill, in part because auditions were put on hold during the pandemic — but it still represents a profound shift for an ensemble that had only five women at the beginning of the 1970s. That was the decade it began holding blind auditions, with musicians trying out by playing behind screens.

The pipeline now teems with female candidates: At the Philharmonic, 10 of the 12 most recent hires have been women.

“This certainly shows tremendous strides,” said Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive and a pioneer in the field of orchestral management. “Women are winning these positions fair and square.”

“All we seek is equity,” she said, “because society is 50-50.”

Women now make up roughly half of orchestra players nationwide, but they are still substantially outnumbered by men in most elite ensembles, including in Boston, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

Jaap van Zweden conducting the women and men of the Philharmonic this month at the newly-renovated David Geffen Hall. Credit…Fadi Kheir

The Philharmonic still falls short by several measures. Women hold only about a third of its leadership positions, including its principal positions and assistant or associate principals, which are the best-paid positions for players. The orchestra has never had a female music director. Some sections remain noticeably divided by gender: 27 of its 30 violinists are now women, for example, while the percussion section is made up entirely of men. There is still a glaring lack of Black and Latino members.

Still, many artists hailed the new prevalence of women in the Philharmonic as a significant development. Symphony orchestras were long seen as the dominion of men. And turnover is generally extremely slow at leading ensembles like the Philharmonic, whose players are tenured and can remain in their posts for many years. Meaningful demographic change can take decades.

“It’s more of a family now,” said Sherry Sylar, associate principal oboe, who joined the orchestra in 1984. “There are moms and pops both.”

For much of its history, the Philharmonic, the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States, was closed off to women. At the time of its founding in 1842, women were not only discouraged from pursuing careers in music — it was rare for them to attend evening concerts unless they were with men. (In “Philharmonic: A History of New York’s Orchestra,” Howard Shanet wrote that during the 19th century, the ensemble’s public rehearsals on Friday afternoons were popular with “unaccompanied ladies who could venture forth by day with more propriety than they could by night.”)

It was not until 1922 that the Philharmonic hired its first female member, Stephanie Goldner, a 26-year-old harpist from Vienna. She departed in 1932, and the orchestra became an all-male bastion again for decades.

Then, in 1966, Orin O’Brien, a double bassist, was hired as the Philharmonic’s first female section player. Often described as the first woman to become a permanent member of the orchestra, she was at the vanguard of a pioneering group of female artists who opened doors for other women to join. The orchestra’s move toward blind auditions in the 1970s was seen as making the process fairer. By 1992, there were 29 women in the orchestra.

Even as representation increased, however, female musicians often faced discrimination. Sexism was widespread in the industry (the maestro Zubin Mehta, who opined in 1970 that he still did not think women should be in orchestras because they “become men,” was named the orchestra’s music director six years later). Fewer women got the best-paid principal positions, and some who did found that they earned far less than their male counterparts. In 2019, the Boston Symphony settled a lawsuit in which the principal flutist of the orchestra said she was being paid less than a male colleague, the principal oboist.

Judith LeClair became the first woman to take over a first chair at the Philharmonic when she joined as principal bassoon in 1981, at the age of 23. She described her early days in the orchestra, when she was one of 17 women, as lonely. She said she had to fight to be paid as much as her male colleagues, hiring a lawyer to help negotiate contracts. It took at least 20 years, she said, before she reached parity.

Sheryl Staples, the orchestra’s principal associate concertmaster; Qianqian Li, its principal second violinist; and Lisa Eunsoo Kim, the associate principal second violinist, during a recent rehearsal. Credit…Calla Kessler for The New York Times

“I did feel I was taken advantage of in the very beginning because I was a woman, and young and naïve,” she said. “It felt humiliating and demeaning.”

Some male colleagues took to calling the women in the orchestra “the skirts.”

“It minimized the role that we played in the orchestra,” said Sylar, the oboist. “It felt like you had to be better to gain the respect of the other musicians. It was just a constant struggle of always pushing myself to be better.”

The nickname was not her only encounter with sexism. Shortly after she joined the orchestra, she recalled that Erich Leinsdorf, a frequent guest conductor, during a meeting in his dressing room, asked why she did not wear dresses during rehearsal (she preferred pants).

“It just sort of floored me,” she said.

It was not until 2018 that the Philharmonic changed its dress code to allow women to wear pants at its evening concerts. Before that they were required to wear floor-length black skirts or gowns.

In recent years, as women have taken on more leadership roles in the orchestra, the climate has become more inclusive, several players said.

“It’s so welcoming and warm and it feels just like a big family,” said Alison Fierst, who joined as associate principal flute in 2019, and had been moved by getting the chance to get to play alongside some of the pioneering women who had broken barriers in the orchestra.

There are some outliers — the St. Louis Symphony, for example, has had a female majority for a decade — but men still outnumber women at most leading orchestras in the United States. Elsewhere, progress has been slower: The Vienna Philharmonic did not allow women to audition until 1997. It is now about 17 percent female.

When the orchestra moved to Lincoln Center 60 years ago, it had no women in it. Now, it is majority female. Credit…Calla Kessler for The New York Times

The lack of women in leadership roles in orchestras — the principal players in each section can earn much more than their colleagues — has also drawn criticism. The vast majority of principal positions still go to men, and the conducting field is overwhelmingly male: Only one of the 25 largest ensembles in the United States is led by a woman, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, whose new music director is Nathalie Stutzmann.

Michelle Rofrano, a conductor who is a founder of Protestra, an orchestra and advocacy group focused on social justice, said that more needs to be done to ensure that women rise to leadership roles.

“Diversity shouldn’t be just a box to check; it requires mentorship and support,” she said. “We’re missing out on perspectives and an array of people who bring their unique talent.”

The Philharmonic has sought to play a role in promoting change, including by hiring more women as guest conductors in recent years and by commissioning works from 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which barred states from denying women the right to vote (one of the works it commissioned, “Stride,” by Tania León, won the Pulitzer Prize). Some of its players have privately urged the Philharmonic’s leaders to select a woman to replace the orchestra’s outgoing music director, Jaap van Zweden, who is set to step down in 2024.

After spending decades in an industry in which men have been so dominant, some Philharmonic members say they are still getting used to the sight of so many women onstage.

This fall, as the orchestra celebrates its remodeled home and the Philharmonic makes history with its female majority, some feel that a new chapter has begun.

Sylar said she was struck by the artistry of the women who have recently joined the ensemble.

“I’m not saying I want this to be an all-women orchestra either,” she said. “It just nice to see that women are being recognized for their talent.”

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Uncategorized

Review: In This Solo ‘Christmas Carol,’ the Night Is Never Silent

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

Has Jefferson Mays ever met a role — or a root vegetable — that he hesitated to take on? In the noisy, excitable one-man version of “A Christmas Carol” on Broadway, in a production that opened Monday at the Nederlander Theater, Mays stars as Ebenezer Scrooge, spirits of Christmas, assorted Cratchits, street folk, partygoers. He even plays a boiling potato, straining against a pot lid. At the festive board, Mays is side dish, main course, everything.

Creepy and antic, gloomy and giddy, Michael Arden’s production capitalizes on every trick in Dickens’s story and then pulls a few new ones out of Scrooge’s top hat. Peace on earth? Mercy mild? Please. There are moments when you would swear that Mays couldn’t possibly be unaccompanied, so raucous is this “Carol.” But he is, more or less. (Danny Gardner briefly joins as a wordless specter.) Happily, Mays — who has also triumphed in multiple roles in “I Am My Own Wife,” for which he won a Tony Award, and “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” — is a master of manifold parts. If he were left alone, without lights, sound, projections or Dane Laffrey’s curving, swerving set, he might put across this fable even more convincingly.

Dickens’s story was last seen on Broadway in 2019, in a production that had originated in London at the Old Vic. That version wasn’t perfect. (Jack Thorne wrote a script freighted with his usual psychologizing.) But under Matthew Warchus’s direction, that version emphasized community, how we might all join together — actors, audience members, even the people in the cheap seats — to furnish the holiday table. The show emphasized giving and receiving, literalizing the story’s message of generosity and care.

This “Carol,” adapted by Mays, Arden and Mays’s wife, the actress Susan Lyons, and live-captured for streaming two years ago, is a lonelier affair. The script hews closely to the version that Dickens himself toured, with passages of prose narration that cut the goose-fat sentimentality with keen wit and gimlet detail. The broad outlines remain familiar: On Christmas Eve, Scrooge, an ungenerous money lender, is visited by several spirits who help him to understand the boy he was, the man he became and the ways in which his miserliness may reverberate into the future. It’s a kind of spectral exposure therapy. And fast-acting, too. A lone night cures him. In place of a communal gathering, we have one man’s journey toward self-actualization. Scrooge, at last, becomes an integrated person.

Mays has always been a performer of incandescence and originality, our critic writes.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Can we say the same of Mays, a man who makes multiple personalities seem like a boon rather than a disorder? He has always been a performer of incandescence and originality. His red-cheeked flame typically burns too bright for realism, though he does sometimes adapt to a slightly lower voltage, as in the fact-based political drama “Oslo.” With his wide forehead and a broad, elastic face, he is an actor of unusual precision, but there’s a vein of waywardness to him, too, a wildness only barely contained. He can sketch a character lightly, with only a half turn and a flutter of his lashes, or debauch himself in orgies of gesture and expression. Rarely can he leave the set or props alone. Cutlery, curtains, the belt of his dressing gown: He makes exuberant use of them all.

The production, conceived by Arden and Laffrey, magnifies that exuberance. Reviewing the 2020 streaming version, Jesse Green described it as “vastly effective as spooky entertainment.” And it is. But in person rather than onscreen, the eerie production elements often overwhelm. It begins with a fog-shrouded coffin and then a thunderclap — an abrupt sound effect that set many in the audience laughing. It also frightened a baby that some parent had unwisely brought. (This is not that kind of “A Christmas Carol.” Leave the babies and the under-12s at home.) The baby screamed so lustily that I missed a lot of the first scene and then had to race to catch up, so swiftly did Mays move through the text, sometimes narrating, sometimes embodying.

And yet the design outpaces him. Ben Stanton’s lighting, flashy and subdued, bathes the stage in crepuscular tones. Joshua D. Reid’s sound design, some of it effective, much of it redundant, rarely ceases. Lucy Mackinnon supplies both highly original production design, like a flash of a ghostly horse, and superfluous embellishments, like a video of party guests glimpsed through a window. (The hair, wig and makeup design are by Cookie Jordan, but as with Laffrey’s costumes, they are barely visible in the murk.) Laffrey’s set is a whirling turntable. Several turntables? Beds, banquets, staircases and cemeteries swing in and out of view — Victoriana at a gallop and a risk for anyone inclined toward motion sickness.

This “Carol” is a breathless entertainment. Is breathing such a bad thing? It might have been nice to have had more respite to appreciate Mays’s closefisted Scrooge, his liberal Cratchit and sweet Fan. But even at this velocity — Mays must run miles each show — he manages to particularize each of the Cratchit children and most of the guests at the Christmas party of Fred, Scrooge’s nephew. At the curtain call, Mays appears spent, but also deeply contented. Like Scrooge, he has had his catharsis and a workout besides. He can rest merry. The rest of us can escape to the relative quiet of Times Square.

A Christmas Carol
Through Jan. 1 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; achristmascarollive.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Uncategorized

‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’ Review: Another Clue for You All

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

It starts as a game for the amusement of a tech billionaire. Miles Bron, a would-be master of the universe played with knowing exuberance by Edward Norton, invites a small group of friends to a party on his private island. The weekend’s entertainment will be a make-believe murder mystery, with Miles himself as the victim and center of attention. By the end, real homicides have been committed and the fun has become democratic, as rank-and-file ticket buyers and Netflix subscribers enjoy themselves at the expense of imaginary members of the economic, political and cultural elite.

“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” revives the antic, puzzle-crazy spirit of the first “Knives Out,” which was also written and directed by Rian Johnson. This time the satirical stakes have been raised. Miles Bron is a riper target with more recognizable real-world analogues than the eccentric novelist played by Christopher Plummer the first time around. A lone musketeer of disruption, he spouts mantras about the glory of “breaking stuff,” and cloaks his bottomless greed and shallow narcissism in showy messianic robes. He’s not just a rich guy: He’s a visionary, a genius, an author of the amazing human future.

Miles’s friends are all bought and paid for: a model-turned-fashion mogul (Kate Hudson); an idealistic scientist (Leslie Odom Jr.); a pumped-up, over-inked men’s rights YouTube influencer (Dave Bautista); and the governor of Connecticut (Kathryn Hahn). The people named in those parentheses have a grand time sending up contemporary archetypes, and are joined in the whodunit high jinks by Madelyn Cline as Bautista’s girlfriend and by Jessica Henwick, quietly stealing scenes as Hudson’s assistant.

Two other guests show up for the murder game, though they don’t seem to be there in the same hedonistic spirit as the rest. One is Cassandra Brand (Janelle Monáe), known as Andi, Miles’s erstwhile business partner. She is a familiar figure in tech mythology, the genius present at the creation who is cast out by a more ambitious, unscrupulous or media-savvy co-founder. The Eduardo Saverin to Miles’s Mark Zuckerberg, you might say, or maybe the Wozniak to his Jobs.

Andi’s presence on the island is something of a surprise, as is — though not to “Knives Out” fans — the arrival of Benoit Blanc, the world’s greatest detective. Blanc is once again played by a floridly post-Bond Daniel Craig, now sporting an absurd but somehow appropriate collection of neckerchiefs and pastel shirts, and speaking in what was once described as a “Kentucky Fried Chicken Foghorn Leghorn” accent. My ear also picks up undertones of Truman Capote and a sprinkling of Adam Sandler’s “Cajun Man” character from “S.N.L.”

A descendant of Lieutenant Columbo, Hercule Poirot and Edgar Allan Poe’s genre-creating C. Auguste Dupin, Blanc is both a diviner of hidden meanings and a master of the obvious, the soul of discretion and a hogger of the spotlight. He is uncompromising in matters of taste, ethics and English usage, as well as a wet-eyed sentimentalist and a man who likes to have a good time.

From left, Kathryn Hahn, Madelyn Cline, Edward Norton, Leslie Odom Jr. and Kate Hudson in the film. The core ensemble does what amounts to superior sketch-comedy work, our critic writes.Credit…John Wilson/Netflix

In that way, he may be Johnson’s avatar. A pop-culture savant with technique to spare, Johnson approaches the classic detective story with equal measures of breeziness and rigor. The plot twists and loops, stretching logic to the breaking point while making a show of following the rules. I can’t say much about what happens in “Glass Onion” without giving away some surprises, but I can say that some of the pleasure comes from being wrong about what will happen next.

Which means that, by the end, when Blanc wraps it all up and the party disperses, you may feel a little let down. That’s in the nature of the genre, but as in “Knives Out” Johnson turns the committing and solving of crimes into a trellis to be festooned with gaudy characters. The core ensemble does what amounts to superior sketch-comedy work, rising enough above caricature to keep you interested. Monáe goes further, turning what at first seems like the least complex, most serious character into — but I’m afraid if I told you, you would have to kill me.

I also won’t give away any jokes. It’s been a while since I’ve laughed out loud in a movie theater, but I did, partly because a lot of people around me were laughing, too. (I don’t know if the effect would be the same watching the movie at home on Netflix.) “Glass Onion” is completely silly, but it’s not only silly. Explicitly set during the worst months of the Covid pandemic — the spring of 2020 — “Glass Onion” leans into recent history without succumbing to gloom, bitterness or howling rage, which is no small accomplishment. One way to interpret the title is that a glass onion may be sharp, and may have a lot of layers, but it won’t make you cry.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Rated PG-13. Murder, for laughs. Running time: 2 hours 19 minutes. In theaters.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
technology

A Jewelry Designer Finds a Scent as Unique as Her Latest Avant-Garde Ring

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

On a mild fall morning in Paris, Gaia Repossi, the 36-year-old artistic director of the Italian fine jewelry house Repossi, was sitting at a long tatami-topped table in front of a woman in a lab coat who was diligently taking notes. The setting was Kaori, a small sanctuary-like space dedicated to the making and enjoyment of incense that opened in April within Ogata Paris, the three-floor Japanese store, tearoom and restaurant in the city’s Marais neighborhood. Lining the old stone walls of the room, which is situated in the basement of Ogata’s imposing 17th-century building, were apothecary cabinets filled with glass jars. The air smelled earthy and fresh, like a forest.

The incense counselor, as the woman had introduced herself, was quizzing Repossi on her current mood, sleep cycle and appetite; she asked about her preferred season (Repossi was nostalgic for summer, she said) and her favorite scents (florals such as ylang-ylang, jasmine and rose). This is the first step of Kaori’s Yoka (kanji for “lingering” and “scent”) Sur Mesure experience: a 60- to 90-minute private consultation during which a client is led through the creation of a bespoke fragrance. Once a person has discovered their ideal base note and top notes, through a guided conversation and the sampling of various raw ingredients, the store’s in-house incense master — who trained at the centuries-old incense manufacturer Shoyeido in Kyoto — blends the scent on-site from a mix of dry herbs, plants and essential oils. The resulting fine potpourri can be worn as a personal fragrance, tucked into clothes in a small linen sachet or left in an uncovered vessel to permeate the home.

The room is housed in a vaulted former cellar of Ogata’s 17th-century building.Credit…Matthew Avignone
Kaori’s raw ingredients are sourced from all over the world, and each personalized scent is mixed and ground by an in-house incense master.Credit…Matthew Avignone
Special tools designed for sampling incense by Shinichiro Ogata, the Japanese architect and founder of Ogata.Credit…Matthew Avignone

“Scent doesn’t exactly play a role in my creative process because I’m primarily a visual person,” said Repossi, sipping from a cup of warm water infused with sandalwood, a calming tonic served at the beginning of each session to prime the senses. “But it’s something I like because of its spiritual dimension.” The designer burns Tibetan incense — typically with notes of sandalwood, agar wood and amber — at her apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement during both her daily dawn Ashtanga yoga sequence and meditation, which she has practiced since her teenage years. (For a period during high school, she spent four hours a day in meditation at the Zen dojo temple in Nice. “After six months, it got too hard to sustain because I also had to go to classes,” she said.)

When the interview process was over, it was time for Repossi to select her base note. She leaned over the table to pick up one of five ceramic vessels the counselor had placed in front of her — each filled with a different mix of natural materials inspired by the five agents of Eastern cosmology: wood, fire, earth, metal and water. These are the set base notes of Kaori’s incenses, composed by Shinichiro Ogata, the Tokyo-based chef, architect and designer who founded the store in 2020. “It’s potent at first,” Repossi said of the wood blend, closing her eyes to breathe in the notes of hinoki cypress, camphor and palo santo. She wavered between her choices of this or the water blend — a warm scent spiced with cinnamon, cloves and musky patchouli — ultimately settling on the latter. “It smells almost edible,” she said.

Repossi wears the Transient ring, the first piece in her new Limited Edition series of one-off designs.Credit…Matthew Avignone

Since Ogata’s opening, Repossi has become a regular, dropping by the restaurant for lunch — a four-course meal that begins with kobachi (Japanese small bowls) and ends with delicate French-inflected desserts — or picking out porcelain cups from the shop as gifts for friends. “I admire his vision,” she said of Ogata. “It follows my idea of what real luxury is, as a refined and minimalist statement.” And so, when it came to selecting a venue for her high jewelry collection presentation during haute couture week in July, Ogata was a natural choice. She showed her graphic, sculptural designs in the building’s monochromatic two-story gallery, where they stood out on mirror-topped tables or against black backdrops on shelves. “It gave the jewelry a strong visual statement, and it allowed for contemplation,” she said.

Among the pieces she debuted was the Transient ring — a wide yellow gold twisted band sliced perpendicularly by a thin yellow gold bar inset with diamonds — which she was wearing for the Yoka experience. “It’s pure design because it’s not working around the stones,” she said, adding that she’d drawn inspiration from a tattoo of a cross she’d seen on a model’s finger in a backstage image from a Maison Margiela show. Tattoos and body paint, along with architecture and modern art, have informed Repossi’s minimalist design language since she took over the artistic direction of the brand from her father, Alberto Repossi, in 2007, when she was just 21 (the house was founded by her grandfather Costantino Repossi in 1957).The ring, on sale next month, is one of just 15 and is the first style in a new series of limited-edition statement pieces that will allow Repossi to experiment beyond the bounds of her regular, thematic collections. “It can be just about an idea, something abstract that doesn’t necessarily match with anything else,” she said.

The artistic director with her custom scent, a woody blend with fresh citrus notes and a kick of shiso.Credit…Matthew Avignone

Behind Repossi, at a marble-topped workbench, the incense master was assembling a selection of jars containing raw ingredients — possible top notes to complement the jewelry designer’s base. He had two very different suggestions: a floral blend featuring lavender, chamomile and a dash of peppery shiso, and an option comprising kuromoji, a wood with citrus notes, and the dried peel of Japanese tachibana oranges, which added a caramel-like sweetness. “I like this last combination best,” Repossi said, “but can we add the shiso?”

Each ingredient was then carefully weighed on a set of scales, according to the incense master’s intuitive recipe (which included just the smallest amount of shiso as it tends to overpower), before being ground in a yagen, a large wheel-like version of a mortar and pestle used in traditional Japanese herbal medicine. The finished scent, Repossi said, was “elegant and unconventional, subtle and strange. It’s completely different from anything else I have.” It was different, too, from any scent chosen by previous customers — none of whom, the counselor noted, had ever selected the exact combination of ingredients Repossi had.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Business

A Huge Merger’s Collapse Breaks a Pattern of Consolidation in Publishing

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

After two years of regulatory scrutiny and heated speculation in the publishing world, after a hard-fought court battle and hundreds of millions of dollars in expenses, Penguin Random House’s deal to buy Simon & Schuster officially collapsed on Monday.

The unraveling of this agreement stopped the largest publisher in the United States from growing substantially larger. It also paused consolidation in an industry that has been profoundly reshaped by mergers and acquisitions, with little regulatory intervention.

The implosion of the deal came three weeks after a federal judge ruled against Penguin Random House in an antitrust trial, blocking the sale from going forward on the grounds that the merger would be bad for competition and harmful to authors. In order to appeal the Oct. 31 ruling, Penguin Random House needed Paramount Global, Simon & Schuster’s parent company, to extend the purchase agreement, which expires on Tuesday. Instead, Paramount decided to terminate the deal, leaving Penguin Random House out of legal options and obligated to pay them a termination fee of $200 million.

“Penguin Random House remains convinced that it is the best home for Simon & Schuster’s employees and authors,” Penguin Random House said in a statement. “We believe the judge’s ruling is wrong and planned to appeal the decision, confident we could make a compelling and persuasive argument to reverse the lower court ruling on appeal. However, we have to accept Paramount’s decision not to move forward.”

The outcome of the trial came as a shock to many in publishing, who have watched the number of big firms dwindle to five, even as those five — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Hachette and Simon & Schuster — got larger by buying small and midsize publishing houses. Many feared that the further reduction in the number of big publishing houses to four would leave authors and literary agents with fewer buyers for their books, and would make it even harder for smaller publishers to compete.

Many were especially wary of Penguin Random House — already by far the largest publisher in the United States — getting even bigger by absorbing a rival. Penguin Random House has about 100 imprints; together they publish more than 2,000 titles a year. The merger would have given it Simon & Schuster’s approximately 50 imprints, as well as the company’s vast and valuable backlist of older titles.

As it turned out, the Justice Department and the judge who heard the case had similar concerns and blocked the deal, an outcome that some authors and industry organizations celebrated as a necessary check on consolidation.

“The market is already too consolidated,” said Mary Rasenberger, chief executive of the Authors Guild, an advocacy group for writers that opposed the purchase. “A healthy publishing ecosystem is one that has many publishers with different tastes and interests and degrees of risk they’re willing to assume.”

This extends a period of uncertainty at Simon & Schuster, but it is one they are in a good position to navigate. The company’s recent performance has been strong, even as the results have sagged at other major publishers. Its profits for the first nine months of the year were up 29 percent compared to the same time last year, putting it on its way to a having a record-breaking year.

Among its successes are several novels by Colleen Hoover, who has dominated the fiction best seller lists, and a surprise best selling memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” by Jennette McCurdy, which has sold a million copies since it was published in August, the company said.

In a statement released Monday afternoon, Paramount indicated that it views Simon & Schuster as not a good fit for its broader strategy. “Simon & Schuster is a highly valuable business with a recent record of strong performance, however it is not video-based and therefore does not fit strategically within Paramount’s broader portfolio,” it said.

It’s unclear, however, whether the headache and the legal expense of the trial could dampen the enthusiasm of other publishers. During the trial, executives for two other major publishing houses, Hachette and HarperCollins, testified that they would like their own companies to buy Simon & Schuster. It is also unclear how the Justice Department would view such an acquisition. Concerns about market share would be less pronounced — particularly for Hachette, which is significantly smaller than Penguin Random House — but the number of publishers big enough to compete on the most expensive books would still drop from five to four.

Some antitrust experts said that any deal to sell Simon & Schuster to another Big Five publisher would likely face intense scrutiny from regulators.

“If somebody else wants to put in a bid, they should put into their calculation, here’s the cost of litigating this with the government,” said Erik Gordon, a professor of business at the University of Michigan.

The end of the deal also signals a period of uncertainty for Penguin Random House. Penguin Random House revealed at trial that it has been losing market share in recent years. It had hoped that buying Simon & Schuster would make up for that slippage. Now, it will have to find another way.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Uncategorized

Jeremy Pope Is Telling Himself ‘Yes’

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

I’ve interviewed my fair share of leading men, and I know how often that conversation turns into a war of attrition. Can I convince these famous, fortified actors to drop their walls before our time is up? Some of them are so skittish about introspection that it’s a challenge to even earn their eye contact.

Jeremy Pope is not that kind of leading man. When we met one Sunday evening in October to discuss his starring role in the new military drama “The Inspection,” the 30-year-old actor sped right past the small talk to speak without reservations about his emotional inner life. And when I went to sit on a couch, expecting Pope to perch a few feet away for our interview, he instead lay down next to me, his head beside my lap, and spent the next 90 minutes gazing upward with an expression so open and tender that I found my walls dropping, too.

That beguiling mix of vulnerability and bravado is Pope’s primary asset as a performer. On Broadway, where his roles in “Choir Boy” and “Ain’t Too Proud” made him the first Black actor to earn two Tony nominations in the same year, and on the TV mini-series “Hollywood,” in which he played an ambitious, romantic screenwriter, Pope hoped to share something unguarded about himself with as much boldness as he could muster. It’s a mission statement that motivates him in real life, too.

“We live in a world where it’s harder for people to be vulnerable and honest than to just give you a version of themselves,” he told me, lying supine in an oversized Bianca Saunders suit that he picked because its patterns reminded him of the military fatigues he wore during filming. “I think the outfit informed my energy today,” he said, “like, ‘You’re going to be strong, you’re going to be swag, you’re going to be sexy, and it’s OK for you to be that version of yourself today.’”

Based on the writer-director Elegance Bratton’s life story, “The Inspection” casts Pope as Ellis French, a young gay man who’s been kicked out of the house by his mother, Inez (Gabrielle Union), a flinty prison guard who won’t accept his sexuality. With few options left, French enlists in the Marine Corps, but he is hazed so mercilessly by his drill sergeant (Bokeem Woodbine) and fellow recruits that boot camp becomes a struggle to simply survive.

Pope is sensitive and gripping in his first major film role; even now, he can hardly believe he’s leading a movie distributed by A24, the hot specialty studio he’d long hoped to work with. (It was in their Los Angeles offices we were speaking.) When Pope first moved from Orlando, Fla., to New York to pursue acting, he feared he would never be given this sort of opportunity.

Pope said the tan suit informed his energy, “like, ‘You’re going to be strong, you’re going to be swag, you’re going to be sexy, and it’s OK for you to be that version of yourself today.’”Credit…Erik Carter for The New York Times

“I feel so blessed that I’m able to do this fully in my Blackness and in my queerness,” Pope said. “I spent so many years shameful of that, thinking that because I am those things that I wouldn’t be able to have maximum success, that there would always be a ceiling, like, ‘Ooh, can’t go that far. Can’t be a movie star.’”

In the week that I met Pope, he was busy celebrating “The Inspection” at the New York Film Festival, participating in a “10 Actors to Watch” panel for Variety, and shooting his next film, “The Collaboration,” which casts him as Jean-Michel Basquiat opposite Paul Bettany’s Andy Warhol. (The two actors performed “The Collaboration” as a play in London earlier this year and will bring that production to Broadway this winter.) But Pope doesn’t take any of this whirlwind success for granted: He remembers the lean years when work was so hard to come by that he wondered if he would have to hide his sexuality to succeed.

“There was so many times where I wasn’t eating, when I was scared to go home and have my parents see I’m struggling,” he said. “I was like, I’ve got to keep trying, because I don’t want to believe the ‘no.’ I can’t go home, because I feel a fire within me; I’ve got to be a ‘yes.’”

Though his career began to take off when he was cast as a queer teenager in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play “Choir Boy,” the most important change came from within as Pope began to accept himself and live without apology, he told me. That’s a lesson his conflicted character in “The Inspection” must learn, too: French enlists hoping to win his estranged mother’s love, but he eventually realizes that his own self-worth is the only prize that matters.

“What I’ve learned over the years is you just have to start telling yourself ‘yes,’ and creating that ‘yes’ for yourself,” Pope said.

Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

“The Inspection” is your first major film, and a lot of its themes line up with things you’ve gone through in your own life. Did it feel like destiny?

This was a story and a project I was supposed to be a part of, but a lot of months went by after I met with Elegance. With so many artists, we want something so bad and it feels like all the things line up, but I just wasn’t hearing anything. Realistically, what I think was happening was I wasn’t a movie star yet. Elegance has told me I was always his first choice, and that he had to fight for me. He had to remind people what the story was about and why it was imperative to have an openly queer Black man play this role.

I knew this job was going to be healing for him, and I was like, “I want to protect that. Choose me to go on the journey, and I can probably carry some of this with you.” And then in that, I found my own healing with things I hadn’t dealt with, things that had rubbed me the wrong way for many years that I pushed down to the side.

What sort of things?

Just that thing of, “Am I enough?”

Enough to who?

To the world, to people, to love, to success, to happiness. When you’re running from a flight to an event and people are praising you, you’re so high, so happy. But who’s calling when you don’t have a show on Netflix, or when you don’t have a premiere? Who’s sending flowers just because?

Pope opposite Raúl Castillo in “The Inspection,” based on the writer-director Elegance Bratton’s life.Credit…Patti Perret/A24 Films

Before you came on board this movie, what did Gabrielle Union mean to you as an actress?

Gab is royalty to Black people — she’s like Michelle Obama. She’s been in the business for so many years and has navigated so much, so the community of Black actors has so much respect for her. And over the years, we’ve been able to have an insight into what she does for her family and protecting her trans daughter: She’s really doing the work in the streets, it’s not just for clout. She has to take hits from people that see the world through a different lens and can’t find the space to love their kids and would rather abandon them, which is very aligned with Inez, this character she’s playing.

It must have been fraught to act out those arguments between French and Inez in front of Elegance, who really lived them.

Elegance made a lot of space for those scenes because the hurtful things that were said to French are things that were said to him. Those days would be very emotional for him and he would direct and give us as much as he could, but me and Gab definitely stepped up and tried to unpack this complex relationship. There’s this longing on both sides, but his mom has this conditional love: “I can love you so much, under these conditions.”

Have you gone through anything like that, where you worried how your family would react to your sexuality?

My version of that is my relationship with my dad, who was a pastor. I didn’t want to lose this person in my life who was happy for me, loved on me, bought me Barbies when I was a kid, was there at my track meets. My parents were separated, and my dad would drive hours to see me — he wanted to be a good Black father — but it’s hard to hear your dad preaching in the pulpit about gay people and what happens to them, and not feel like he’s talking at me and to me.

So what was it like when you started working as an actor in New York but you still weren’t out to him?

It was hard. There were times where I wouldn’t invite my dad to a certain show in New York because it had a gay theme. But I had to go, “You’ve got to be fully free, J.” I knew that it might take some time for my dad to come around and adjust, but very similar to French, it was like, “When you’re ready, I’ll be here.” And I feel like now we get each other in such a real, vulnerable, honest way. This man is a work in progress. This man is in therapy. This man is open to transformation, to evolution, to being loved. And now I feel like I’m a free man.

“When I’m talking to other artists, I want them to know, ‘Don’t abandon the things that make you unique,’” Pope said.Credit…Erik Carter for The New York Times

When do you feel the most free?

I’ve been in this space of moving so freely that when I don’t feel free, I can almost identify those moments more. Sometimes industry things can trigger those things. Someone came up to me at the Variety event and was like, “Devotion”? She thought I was Jonathan Majors. I’m sure this white woman meant no harm, but listen, all Black people are not the same. And she was near these people that felt like industry bigwigs, and you start to do this dance for them. I didn’t feel free. I felt like I was on their time and having to move in a way that didn’t feel real to my soul and my heart.

Then I’m sure you could relate to the boot camp in “The Inspection,” and the way it tries to flatten French and make him conform to a certain idea.

When I first started [in drama school, the American Musical and Dramatic Academy], I was hearing from teachers, “If you’re going to be an artist, you’ve got to look like this, you’ve got to speak like this.” I spent so many years trying to be some version of what I thought people wanted, and because I wasn’t out, it was also, “Don’t be effeminate, don’t let people see that piece of you. Make women desire you.”

So for young Jeremy at 17, skinny and scrawny in New York, I wasn’t seeing myself represented. A lot of the time, people are asking you to abandon your truth and the things that make you unique, and if I’m coming out of a vulnerable place where I don’t even know who I am, you’re not giving me a chance to develop. I have a love-hate relationship with [drama] school because it does give you a lot of tools and teach you about the business, but I think sometimes it beats out these imperfections that make you so special.

How did you feel when you wrapped “The Inspection”?

Relieved that I made it out alive, literally. I almost drowned on set. That’s not something I want to talk about — that’s not my campaign, that it was “so rigorous and hard.” But I fought for my life on this film at times, and I was in a dark place personally because I was giving so much of myself to this project. So when I finished, it was definitely a feeling of relief, and I needed to start to build Jeremy back up again, emotionally and physically.

At one point in your life, you didn’t see a career path that would represent the real you. But now, in theater, TV and film, you’ve found projects so suited to you that they almost feel bespoke.

Right, and when I’m talking to other artists, I want them to know: Don’t abandon the things that make you unique, because the more you love those things and lead with them in your truth, the more you’ll find yourself in art where they’re catering to that. I get to lead, I get to trust, I get to show, I get to tell. And that goes back to little Jeremy, who was so scared to share out of this idea of, “Will it be good enough?” The stuff that I’ve been doing is good enough for an Elegance to want me to portray him in a film. There’s people out there who will love you for who you are.

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Uncategorized

‘The Hours’ Becomes an Opera. Don’t Expect the Book or Film.

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

“I think it needs to be more surreal,” the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin said from the orchestra pit of the Metropolitan Opera on a recent afternoon.

The scene onstage was nothing but surreal — fragmented light beams suggesting a proscenium; towering, billowing curtains lit in dreamy shades of blue, their translucence revealing the impression of a building facade beyond. Yet Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, was more interested in another element: the chorus, offstage and coloristic, an otherworldly fixture of an otherworldly environment.

None of that is reminiscent of “The Hours” in its earlier iterations: Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel; or the 2002 Stephen Daldry film, which was defined as much by its tensely churning Philip Glass score as by its Oscar-bait trio of leading stars, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep.

But this is “The Hours” as adapted from both the book and the film by the writer Greg Pierce and the composer Kevin Puts. It is rendered as only opera can be: with an interplay of divas — Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato — who are enveloped by a restless and lush orchestra, and share a dream space with an ensemble of dancers who guide and observe them in Phelim McDermott’s staged premiere of the work, which opens at the Met on Tuesday.

Renée Fleming — joined here by chorus members, the stage manager Scott Moon, kneeling, and the actress Andrea Lucaciu — said she “loved, loved, loved” Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film adaptation of “The Hours.”Credit…Dina Litovsky for The New York Times

“When I met Michael Cunningham,” Nézet-Séguin recalled, “he said that as a writer, words for him have to be sequential. You can’t superimpose words. But that’s where opera can melt and create parallels with the stories in real time.”

AS A NOVEL, “The Hours” contains three interwoven stories, each unfolding for the most part quietly, over the course of a single day: Virginia Woolf struggles with depression while writing “Mrs. Dalloway”; Laura Brown, a homemaker in Southern California in 1949, feels oppressed by small tasks like baking a cake while just wanting to read that novel; and Clarissa Vaughan, an editor living in New York City half a century later, seems to embody “Mrs. Dalloway” as she prepares a party for her friend and former love Richard, a poet ravaged by AIDS.

Fleming “loved, loved, loved” the Daldry film, she said in an interview over the summer. Some had thought she had made her farewell to staged opera in 2017, as the Marschallin in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” one of her signature roles. But she was quickly looking for a new project at the Met, and her right-hand man, Paul Batsel, suggested an adaptation of the story by Puts. Fleming was into the idea; so was Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager.

The work would require three singers on the level of the film’s stars. Fleming took on Streep’s role, as Clarissa; then came DiDonato as Virginia Woolf (played by Kidman in the movie); and, Kelli O’Hara as Laura (Moore). O’Hara has made a career as a decorated Broadway star but is such an opera natural that she was the highlight of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 2018.

O’Hara has made a career as a decorated Broadway star.Credit…Dina Litovsky for The New York Times

“I remember reading the book so hungrily,” she said. “The commentary on this time period, the survival, mental health, which I think is so appropriate right now. It just spoke to me so deeply.”

In writing the opera, Pierce and Puts exploited what previous forms of the story couldn’t. “Some films have tried simultaneity,” Puts said. “But because of the nature of harmony and rhythmic notation, you can have things overlap here, and that’s very exciting. What you have to decide on is one sort of primary backdrop, musically, that unifies them. And that became interesting for me.”

Puts’s score — which is written through, eclectic and soaringly lyrical — contains dreamy touches befitting the fluid nature of Pierce’s text, which has nearly 30 scenes that dissolve in and out of one another. A countertenor role, sung at the Met by John Holliday, in which the singer appears in different guises, can be seen as something like an angel of death or ferryman. A children’s chorus that Richard, the dying poet, hears in his head turns out to be the nieces and nephews of Virginia Woolf, holding a funeral for a bird. Other recursive phrases include music associated with Virginia that Clarissa overhears from a church choir.

“What’s the meaning of that?” Puts said. “I’m not even sure what the answer is, but I think that’s what can be interesting.”

From left, William Burden, Fleming and Kyle Ketelsen in rehearsal.Credit…Dina Litovsky for The New York Times

Haunting the music is Glass’s Minimalist soundtrack for the “Hours” film. Puts called it “a beautiful score,” and recognized the danger in putting up his own work against it. “It’s almost like, would you write a ‘Star Wars’ opera?” he said, referring to John Williams’s famous music for that franchise. “No, I wouldn’t. It would be the dumbest thing in the world because it’s so iconic.”

But, Puts added, while there are suggestions of a Minimalist style in the “Hours” opera — not for the first time in his compositional career — the work organically developed into something else. “The opera is so different that it’s its own thing,” he said. Nézet-Séguin described the score as having “just enough Minimalism,” but bringing “it to another, more lyrical, approach.”

With the cast in place early, Puts tailored the score to Fleming, DiDonato and O’Hara. “I imagine if you’re writing a screenplay and you know Robert De Niro is going to play this character,” he said, “then every line you write, you imagine him delivering it.” And, he added, he is happy to reflect the specificity of their sounds and revise accordingly during rehearsals rather than plan for later productions and casts: “In a case like this, I’m not as concerned about the future.”

All three stars have responded positively to the way their roles sit in their voices. This summer, DiDonato said that while reading through the score, she would tell herself, “Oh, Kevin, that’s the money note.” And Fleming, who has worked with Puts before — “He knows my voice really well” — said that his writing was singer friendly, with phrases separated, “so you’re not really stuck in a high register or a challenging tessitura consistently.”

Kelli O’Hara, who sings the role of Laura, said: “I remember reading the book so hungrily, The commentary on this time period, the survival, mental health, which I think is so appropriate right now.”Credit…Dina Litovsky

Puts developed a sound world for each woman. Clarissa’s, he said, is quintessentially American. Virginia’s draws on piano and an ornamental language befitting an earlier time in the English countryside, but with a winding harmony that, he hopes, evokes Woolf’s writing. Laura’s music, however, is more like that of her husband — of darkly cheery post-World War II domesticity that becomes something of a prison for her to escape from. All three come together in the finale, in a succession and layering of style.

Nézet-Séguin conducted the world premiere with the Philadelphia Orchestra in March, and felt, hearing it for the first time, that “Kevin got so much right.” A few things have changed between then and now: the tessitura of the chorus, for instance, and some cuts along with additions. Crucially, the Met’s presentation is different simply for being staged.

McDERMOTT, whose Met credits include blockbuster productions of Glass’s “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten,” had been told that the opera’s constant shifting of time and place would make it “impossible” to direct. Yet he took it on, joined by the choreographer Annie-B Parson, the mind behind the infectiously exuberant movement in David Byrne’s “American Utopia.”

“It’s like directing three operas on top of each other,” McDermott said. “There are so many scenes, and it’s filmic, so you need to get from place to place in a way that’s enjoyable rather than holding weight.”

All three stars have responded positively to the way their roles sit in their voices. This summer, DiDonato, right, said that while reading through the score, she would tell herself, “Oh, Kevin, that’s the money note.” Credit…Dina Litovsky

McDermott and Parson have long been at work on “The Hours,” including a workshop over the summer, months before the singers arrived for rehearsals. “I was given time with the dancers first,” Parson said, “which was very luxurious.” She didn’t end up using everything but experimented with having them “defy the weight of the architecture” in magical ways that included blowing sets with their breath to move them, or occupying the set like cats — observational and impossible to read.

Parson said she has been guided in part by Woolf herself. “Experimentation was the heart of work,” she said. “That was always on my mind — gender fluidity, feminism — and I wanted to start with her.”

The dancers, McDermott said, “set the atmosphere of the scenes.” They are involved with maintaining the action’s momentum, but they also move with a vocabulary that is sometimes in harmony with scenes across time, like spirits. The choreography, Parson said, is “an embroidery of these worlds.”

A week before opening night, the opera’s many moving parts were still finding their places. There was talk of many tears during rehearsals, but there has also been laughter. An emotional high point — Richard’s suicide by falling out a window — was a clunky comedy of errors that had DiDonato, who was watching from a seat in the auditorium, joking, “Guffman called.”

McDermott referred to this as the moment that comes in any rehearsal process when it’s difficult to avoid thinking, “Oh my God, we’ve taken on too much.”

Then, he added, something tends to happen. “You want all the performers and musicians to be resonating with each other in a perfect, beautiful way,” he said. “Then the piece begins to speak to itself. But what I’ve noticed is, it doesn’t really turn up until the audiences comes. That’s when you’ll see how strong the atmosphere can be.”

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Uncategorized

This Mars Documentary Required Many Sols

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

Early in the documentary “Good Night Oppy,” footage from late 2002 shows Steve Squyres, clad in scrubs, staring down in quiet awe, his eyes welling up as he shakes his head in disbelief. Squyres, the principal investigator for NASA’s first Mars rover mission, is watching his babies take their first steps.

That at least is the sense one gets from the improbably sentimental journey at the core of this movie (which begins streaming Wednesday on Amazon Prime Video) about the Mars exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity (a.k.a. Oppy). Squyres vividly remembers experiencing this exact moment from the film.

“The first time it sort of came to life, it was a very, very moving experience,” he said recently over Zoom.

Squyres had long awaited the moment. A former geologist, he had worked on Mars exploration proposals for 10 years, including three failed submissions to NASA, before spending another six years, including three cancellations and revivals of the mission, building the machines.

As much as “Good Night Oppy” chronicles the depth of the human achievement behind the Mars rover mission — which was initially planned for a roughly 90-day stretch but instead lasted 15 years — the film is anchored most of all by a kind of pure devotion and connection to the rovers.

“We projected all of our hopes and our aspirations and our dreams into these machines,” Squyres said. “We built them so lovingly. You use a word like lovingly advisedly when you’re talking about a hunk of metal, but we put everything we had into those things.”

The film tracks a 90-day mission that ultimately lasted 15 years.Credit…Prime Video

This is particularly evident in the film’s tense stretches in the control room after the rovers begin to encounter the trials of life on Mars. The director Ryan White and his team had free rein to sift through nearly 1,000 hours of footage, a good portion of which documented the mission’s tumultuous first 90 days, when cameras were constantly rolling. As the years went on, cameras were brought in primarily for emergency situations.

“NASA is smart enough and story-driven enough to know that they need to cover those beats, even if it’s not going to be immediately used,” White said over Zoom. “But the public was also along for this journey, so whenever Spirit or Opportunity was in a crisis, the public also felt like they were in a crisis. So NASA, from a PR perspective, needed to be covering that.”

While the movie rifles through this archival footage, the backbone of “Good Night Oppy” was built around a screenplay White wrote, a new concept for the longtime documentary filmmaker. He drafted a script based on dozens of preliminary interviews with the rover teams. Those early conversations, which occurred only a year or so after Oppy was officially declared dead in 2019, gave White the affecting sweep that would guide his film.

The interviews “were very therapeutic for people to get to return to that mission and get to talk about it,” White said. He used those talks as a guide to help imbue the film with the kinds of emotions expressed by the teams, aiming to make “far more than just a science film or an educational film,” he said.

The final component, though, that triggers the audience’s own visceral connection to Spirit and Oppy came from a collaboration with the visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic. The viewer’s glimpse of the rovers’ mission comes mostly through simulated sequences that were based on the rovers’ own photographs, satellite imagery of Mars and various data from NASA, which consulted on the process.

“From the very beginning the idea was, if we’re gonna do this, we want to put the audience on Mars in a way that’s never been done before in a film,” White said. The animated scenes were rendered to be cinematic and immersive, while also adhering precisely to the realities of the Martian terrain and geography.

The filmmakers sifted through nearly 1,000 hours of footage from NASA.Credit…Prime Video

The simulated rovers themselves, from their exact look to their movements and capabilities, were carefully designed to mirror Spirit and Oppy, while also lending them a humanlike air.

“‘Wall-E’ came up because it was such an endearing film about this little rover that’s trying to do stuff, so we kept that in our periphery,” Abishek Nair, one of the visual effects supervisors who guided the animation, said in a Zoom interview. “But at the same time we did not want to make it cartoony.”

The rovers’ real ability to toggle between filtered lenses, for instance, was animated to resemble blinking eyes. The result creates a strange bond that mirrored the experience for those at NASA.

Rover team members experienced the early days as “more of a mission,” White said. “The longer the robot survived,” he said, “the more that emotional attachment grew to them, where they were seeing a child or a living, breathing thing.”

Parents cried in screenings, White noted, seeing the rovers as a version of their children. For older viewers, it can be a moving story about aging and the gradual breakdown of a body.

Squyres remembered those final moments vividly. After Spirit died in 2011, the crew gathered for an Irish wake of sorts, drinking beer and reminiscing. “We were actually in pretty good spirits because we finished the party and then the next day we went back to work operating Opportunity,” he recalled.

Oppy’s death years later was different, though, bringing a true finality to the family that had formed around it. As the final wake-up song — a start-of-the-day tradition for the team chronicled in the film — Squyres chose Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You,” which looks back fondly on the end of a relationship, before one last failed attempt to make contact with Oppy.

“That was it,” Squyres said, still appearing emotional years later. “There was no party afterward.”

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Uncategorized

Buffy Sainte-Marie Broke Boundaries in Folk. A Documentary Tells Her Story.

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

One evening in 1962, a recent college graduate fresh to New York City took the stage for an open mic night at Gerdes Folk City in Greenwich Village. Her name was Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Like most of the audiences at the folk coffeehouses, the crowd — which that night included another aspiring musician named Bob Dylan — was largely white; she was of Cree descent. She strummed a few plaintive chords on her guitar and, in a strong, clear voice that quivered with emotion, addressed her listeners in a song called “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” which was both a history lesson and an urgent plea for justice regarding concerns like the recent construction of the Kinzua Dam, which had displaced hundreds of Seneca families in Pennsylvania and New York.

“There would be very intelligent New Yorkers sitting there hearing, for the first time, about something that was going on in upstate New York, right in their neighborhood,” Sainte-Marie said last week, on a video call from her home in Hawaii. At 81, the singer-songwriter, who is the subject of an American Masters documentary debuting on PBS on Tuesday, is full of wit and spry energy; her fingernails were painted a vivid, peacock-feather blue. “When it came to my songs about Indigenous issues, the smartest people in the room didn’t have a clue. They had no idea that the oldest treaty in Congressional archives was being broken in their state.”

But, she added with an irrepressible glint in her eye, “I was singing about it.”

Dylan liked what he heard that night, and he told Sainte-Marie she should start playing at the storied Gaslight Cafe. Her buzzy performances there led to a deal with Vanguard Records; a year later, she released her indelible debut album, “It’s My Way!,” which featured “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” along with a few other songs that were destined to be covered by countless artists across generations: the stirring antiwar ballad “Universal Soldier” and the harrowing “Co’dine,” an early and unfortunately still relevant tale of opiate addiction. Plenty more modern standards would follow later in her career, including romantic fare like “Until It’s Time for You to Go” (Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding song, apparently) and the ’80s pop hit “Up Where We Belong” from “An Officer and a Gentleman,” for which Sainte-Marie won an Oscar — the first ever awarded to a Native American.

Still, Sainte-Marie said, “It wasn’t about careerism at all.”

“I wanted to write songs that would last for generations,” she said. “I didn’t care whether I ever had a hit. I was trying to write songs that were meaningful enough to enough people so that, like an antique chair, people would dig it, appreciate it, take care of it and pass it on, because it had value and wasn’t going to fall apart.”

In one sense, that has certainly happened. Sainte-Marie has become incredibly influential to artists of many different ages and genres: Joni Mitchell, Robbie Robertson, Neko Case, the Indigo Girls, Steppenwolf’s John Kay and the classical musician Jeremy Dutcher are all vocal admirers. “She’s a massive bright light and a guide to so many,” the Polaris Prize-winning Indigenous musician Tanya Tagaq, who collaborated with Sainte-Marie on a 2017 song, said in a phone interview. “She was that even when she was young, but now that she’s older, it’s almost like she’s laid the foundation to let us raise our voices so that we can be heard.”

But many of Sainte-Marie’s fans also believe she hasn’t quite gotten her due, especially in the United States. Emily Sailers of the Indigo Girls — whose rollicking cover of Sainte-Marie’s 1992 anthem “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” has long been a staple in their set list — said in a phone interview, “To me, she’s a household name.”

“But she didn’t get that career that Dylan or Joni or even Joan Baez and some of the other folk singers of her era did,” she continued.

Sainte-Marie was born in Saskatchewan and adopted by a white family who raised her in Massachusetts. In the early 1960s, she began singing in folk coffeehouses.Credit…Andrew Putler/Redferns

The director Madison Thomas’s lively new documentary “Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On,” though, makes the case for Sainte-Marie’s continued importance and offers a welcoming primer on Sainte-Marie’s life as a songwriter, performer and activist. Sailers said the timing is fortuitous for a new audience to come to Sainte-Marie’s music: “She started recording in the ’60s, but we need her now more than ever. I think that people in this country are seeking meaning in their music in a way that they haven’t for a long time.”

Sainte-Marie was chatting from “an unidentified island in Hawaii,” a refuge from the spotlight where she first made a home in the mid-1960s. She has everything she needs there: a recording studio, a place to paint and make digital art, cats, books (“I’m a biblio-holic”), fresh produce, and, depending on the season and how far they roam, “between zero and 33 goats.” That’s not to say she doesn’t miss New York, though. When she learned I was calling from Brooklyn, she replied, “That makes me hungry for Junior’s!”

Sainte-Marie was born in Saskatchewan and adopted by a white family who raised her in Massachusetts. The only other Indigenous person in town was the letter carrier. “I grew up with real self-esteem problems, real bad self-identity problems,” she says in the film, noting that she was also sexual abused as a child. Her mother taught her to dream of an escape. “She made it possible for me to go to college,” Sainte-Marie adds. “She always pointed to the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Sainte-Marie’s contract with Vanguard didn’t give her much power, and though her first few records remain remarkable documents of her blazing talent, she didn’t feel like she had much creative control over them. (In a rare new on-camera interview in “Carry It On,” Joni Mitchell says that the grueling pace of Sainte-Marie’s contract convinced her to decline signing with the label.)

That changed in 1968, when the country legend Chet Atkins invited Sainte-Marie to record with him in Nashville. “Up until then, I had never recorded with musicians of that caliber,” she said of the session veterans who backed her on the subsequent album “I’m Gonna Be a Country Girl Again.” The experience inspired her to delve into genres even farther from folk on her next albums, the pioneering synthesizer experiment “Illuminations” (1969) and the rock-oriented “She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina” (1971), which features her soulful cover of Neil Young’s “Helpless.”

By that time, music wasn’t Sainte-Marie’s only outlet. She was cast in an episode of the popular western TV series “The Virginian,” but she declined to appear unless all of the Indigenous roles were filled by Indigenous actors. (The producers initially resisted, assuring Sainte-Marie, horrifyingly, “Our makeup people are fantastic — they can turn a dog into a cat!,” she recalls in the film. She didn’t back down, though, and they eventually complied.) In 1975, Sainte-Marie was invited to appear on “Sesame Street,” and she soon became a fixture on the program. During a 1977 episode, she nursed her young son and is believed to be the first person to breastfeed on television. (“Lots of mothers feed their babies this way,” she explained to an inquisitive Big Bird.)

Tagaq, who is 47, remembers seeing Sainte-Marie for the first time on “Sesame Street” as a child. “Back then there wasn’t a lot of representation of Indigenous people just being normal,” she said. “It was always a cowboy-and-Indian movie or something like that. But the first time I saw her on TV, she was just being a person, which was great.”

From the late-60s on, Sainte-Marie was also involved in activism with the American Indian Movement — an association that, though she didn’t realize it at the time, was partially responsible for her fading impact in the United States. Years later, before an American radio interview, a D.J. apologized to her for pulling her music from his programming in that era. He then showed her a letter, on White House stationery, commending him for having suppressed Sainte-Marie’s music. She was flabbergasted. A lawyer later helped her get access to an F.B.I. file on her, which was longer than she ever imagined.

“I was having a heck of a time in other countries,” Sainte-Marie said, “and when I came back to the U.S. everything had kind of gone away and my records weren’t played.” It “never occurred” to her that there was a government-supported ban of her music. “I just thought, singers come, singers go.”

Despite all of the challenges of her life, Sainte-Marie’s infectiously hopeful energy and radiant smile seem impermeable to cynicism and despair. “I don’t like misery of any kind,” she said. “So if something starts bothering me, I either put up an umbrella or I go inside. I do something about it, because I’m really uncomfortable being unhappy. I try to keep my nose on the joy trail.”

0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Uncategorized

Greenwich Village, Storied Home of Bohemia and Gay History

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

The fountainhead of American bohemia, Greenwich Village has always departed from the straight and narrow. Its entanglements of winding streets, defying the city grid, include remnants of cow paths and property lines from when the area was a sprawl of Dutch, then English, farms.

The Village as a historically gay neighborhood has long been a source of local pride, but it seemed mostly unremarkable to me and to my childhood friends who were native Villagers because it was simply another fact of daily life. Long before our time, MacDougal Street had been an early hub for L.G.B.T.Q. clubs and tearooms like the Black Rabbit. By the 1970s, the neighborhood’s gay epicenter had shifted toward Christopher Street, the oldest street in the Village, its irregular route tracing the border of what had been the British admiral Peter Warren’s Colonial-era estate.

Not long ago I asked Andrew Dolkart, an architectural historian at Columbia University, to construct an L.G.B.T.Q. tour of the Village. Dolkart is a co-founder of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project and a co-author of the nomination for Stonewall to the National Register of Historic Places. What follows is an edited excerpt of our conversation, which appears in my new book, “The Intimate City: Walking New York.” The book grew out of walks I organized across the city with various architects, historians and others during the early months of Covid-19, a number of which were published by The Times. This Village walk was one of several written for the book.

MICHAEL KIMMELMAN Andrew,during the summer of 1969, police raided a bar at 51-53 Christopher Street called the Stonewall Inn.

ANDREW DOLKART In the 1960s, the Stonewall Inn was a Mafia-controlled bar, as were almost all gay and lesbian bars, because the State Liquor Authority decreed that the mere presence of a homosexual in a bar constituted disorderly conduct. The Mafia ran these bars and paid off the police. But there were still raids every now and then. In June of 1969, there was one on Stonewall. Usually with these raids the police arrested a few people, everybody left and things went back to normal. But in this case, the patrons of the bar fought back and a crowd developed outside. People started throwing things. Some police eventually had to barricade themselves in the bar. Demonstrations continued for several nights. The authorities didn’t really know how to handle the situation.

In July 1969, a group of people gathered in the area around the Stonewall Inn during the days of the uprising.Credit…Larry C. Morris/The New York Times

Why there and then?

There had been earlier incidents in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where L.G.B.T.Q. people fought back. They were clearly fed up and saw all of these other liberation movements in the country gaining traction — women’s liberation, civil rights, the antiwar protests. David Carter, who wrote a book about Stonewall and helped us get Stonewall on the National Register, pointed out that the police tactical group that raided the bar that night was not familiar with the layout of Greenwich Village, and so when officers tried to clear the crowd, the crowd simply ran down all these irregular streets and circled right back, which kept the action going. That’s why the National Register listing includes the Stonewall building, Christopher Park, and all of the streets around it, as far east as Sixth Avenue.

The register in a sense nods to the Village at large as a gay haven.

Its gay history goes back at least to the early 20th century, when Greenwich Village was becoming a bohemian capital. Back then, there were lots of unmarried people living together in the Village, which made it attractive to same-sex couples because they could live more openly.

Christopher Park, which features a sculpture by George Segal, is still a neighborhood gathering spot.Credit…Zack DeZon

Was there something distinct about the architecture or the physical layout of the Village that attracted outliers?

The Village’s housing stock was a big factor. We now think of multimillion-dollar sales of old rowhouses in the Village, so it’s hard for some people to imagine that the Village used to be cheap and rundown. Those old rowhouses were not always beloved, and a lot of them were subdivided into cold-water flats or had become rooming houses. The associated low rents, of course, are why the bohemians initially gravitated to Greenwich Village.

The Fine Arts & Exhibits Special Section

  • Bigger and Better: While the Covid-19 pandemic forced museums to close for months, cut staff and reduce expenses, several of them have nevertheless moved forward on ambitious renovations or new buildings.
  • A Tribute to Black Artists: Four museums across the country are featuring exhibitions this fall that recognize the work of African and African American artists, signaling a change in attitude — and priorities.
  • New and Old: In California, museums are celebrating and embracing Latino and Chicano art and artists. And the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum is working to engage visitors about the realities of climate change.
  • A Cultural Correction: After removing all references to Columbus from its collections the Denver Art Museum has embraced a new exhibition on Latin American art.
  • More From the Special Section: Museums, galleries and auction houses are opening their doors wider than ever to new artists, new concepts and new traditions.

For the same reasons, the Village also became a magnet for immigrants and working people escaping disease and overcrowding in Lower Manhattan.

You can still see some of these early houses on streets like Grove and Bedford, where affluent people moved during the early 19th century after outbreaks of malaria and yellow fever farther downtown. Then came waves of development in the 1830s and ’40s, and with it, increasing class stratification. Fifth Avenue and the northern side of Washington Square become prestigious. Then houses become increasingly more modest as you approach the Hudson River waterfront.

The waterfront had Newgate Prison. There were taverns and lumberyards and meat processing warehouses. I’ve always been struck by how the Village remained fairly isolated from the rest of the city partly because for a long time it was not connected to uptown districts by the big north-south avenues.

Seventh and Sixth Avenues sliced through the neighborhood only with the construction of the subways, which is why there are now all these crazy little triangle sites where you see the backs of old houses facing onto the avenues. We’ll get to them later. You mentioned immigrants. The Village morphed into a neighborhood for Italians in the South Village, Germans and others to the west, with clusters of African Americans in the so-called Minettas and around Cornelia Street. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were several very different Villages.

It was still an Italian, working-class neighborhood where I grew up. We were talking about the Stonewall Inn and I led us off track. What was that building before it was a bar?

It was a pair of two-story horse stables. Then in 1930, the facade was redone, with brick on the bottom, stucco and flower-box balconies on top, which you see in old photographs. In 1934, it became Bonnie’s Stonewall Inn, a restaurant and bar, which closed in 1964. Shortly after, the gay bar that took over adopted the old name and kept the exterior signage.

A bar for both men and women?

Occasionally women, mostly younger men, some of whom were gender nonconforming. Lesbians patronized various Mafia-run lesbian bars elsewhere in the Village, like the Sea Colony and Kooky’s.

The Stonewall Inn, on Christopher Street, in 1966.Credit…Larry C. Morris/The New York Times
The Stonewall Inn is now a city landmark.Credit…Zack DeZon

Stonewall is now a landmark but clearly not for its architecture.

Another way to say this is that buildings have lives. When we advocated for the city to designate Stonewall a landmark, I remember a guy speaking up at a public hearing, saying he was in favor of designation, but that we should not forget that Stonewall was in fact a dreary dump.

But as Lillian Faderman, a historian of lesbian history, has put it, Stonewall “sounded the rally for the movement,” leading to the founding of organizations like the Gay Liberation Front, the Gay Activists Alliance, and the Radicalesbians. The Christopher Street Liberation Day march, on the one-year anniversary of Stonewall, became the annual Pride Parade, which now happens in dozens of countries.

Just west of Stonewall, I also want to point out 59 Christopher Street, a building that housed the last headquarters of the New York City chapter of the Mattachine Society, an early national gay rights organization — at the time the phrase was “homophile organization” — founded in Los Angeles in 1950. After Stonewall, the Mattachine Society was supplanted by more radical groups, but it was important pre-Stonewall for doing many significant things, as we will see when we get to Julius’ bar, just up the street. I want to stop first at 15 Christopher, where the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop relocated in 1973.

The Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, at 15 Christopher Street, around the 1970s.Credit…Edmund Vincent Gillon/Museum of the City of New York, via Getty Images
The facade of 15 Christopher Street now.Credit…Zack DeZon

A Federal rowhouse. I would pass it on my way to and from P.S. 41, my elementary school.

The casement windows on the second floor were probably added in the 1920s — casement windows became popular then — and those very large ground-floor picture windows came later. They made the bookstore welcoming, but vulnerable. Someone threw a brick through them at one point. The shop had been founded in 1967 by Craig Rodwell, originally in a tiny storefront on Mercer Street, near Waverly Place. Then Rodwell moved it to Christopher to make it more conspicuous and central to the gay community. The goal was to be a relaxed, friendly place where young people would feel comfortable, where everybody was welcome. Among his papers at the New York Public Library are touching letters from people who describe standing outside the bookshop for an hour trying to get up the courage to go in. It became a second home for many gay people. Alison Bechdel said that she came to the shop as a young lesbian, not sure what she wanted to do with her life, and saw all these gay and lesbian comic books, and that inspired her to become a graphic novelist.

Rodwell also hired a multiracial staff, which was a statement in itself at the time.

It lasted until 2009, when the internet was beginning to kill independent bookstores, and general-interest bookshops were selling L.G.B.T.Q. literature.

Julius’, just a few steps away, is at the corner of Waverly and 10th Street.

Julius’, at the corner of Waverly and West 10th Street, is one of the oldest gay bars in the city.Credit…Zack DeZon

One of the oldest gay bars in New York.

In the mid-60s the Mattachine Society decided to challenge the New York State Liquor Authority policy that a bar could be closed down if it knowingly served a homosexual. Dick Leitsch, the Mattachine Society president; Rodwell, the bookstore owner, who was its vice president; and John Timmons, another society member, decided to go to bars along with newspaper reporters, announce they were gay, ask for a drink, and wait to be denied. They went to a Ukrainian American place on St. Marks Place that had a sign: “If you are gay, please go away.” One of the reporters apparently tipped off the bar beforehand, so it closed before the group arrived. Then they went to a Howard Johnson’s on Sixth Avenue.

I remember that Howard Johnson’s.

They sat down, asked to see the manager, said “We’re homosexuals,” and then ordered drinks. The manager just laughed and served them. So that didn’t work. They tried a Polynesian-themed bar called Waikiki and the same thing happened. Finally, they decided to go to Julius’ because Julius’ had recently been raided, and they figured the bar owners would probably be wary. They were right. There’s a photograph of the bartender refusing to serve them.

In 1966, a bartender at Julius’ bar refusing to serve members of the Mattachine Society, a gay rights group.Credit…Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images

Fred McDarrah’s famous picture. In the photo you see the bartender with his hand over one of the glasses.

Heading west on Christopher toward Seventh Avenue South, there’s the wonderful 1930s “taxpayer” at the corner, which was once home to Stewart’s Cafeteria.

What’s a taxpayer?

A building built to cover the site’s property taxes until the owner could afford to construct something more extravagant. There had been a plan to put up an apartment house on this corner, designed by George & Edward Blum, but with the Depression it was never built and instead we still have this wonderful two-story Art Deco building, whose first tenant was Stewart’s Cafeteria. Stewart’s was a popular chain of the era and this branch became a famous haunt for a flamboyantly gay and lesbian crowd, performing for tourists who would sometimes stand three or four people deep, staring through the windows. Further west, down Christopher Street, I wanted to point out 337 Bleecker Street, where Lorraine Hansberry wrote “A Raisin in the Sun.”

The playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry in her apartment at 337 Bleecker Street in 1959.Credit…David Attie/Getty Images

A simple, three-story Italianate-style building from the 1860s.

The building is fine, but I mention it because of Hansberry. She was a writer and also a civil rights activist. She moved into the apartment on the third floor with her husband in 1953, and when they separated in 1957, she privately comes out among a circle of lesbians, writing under a pseudonym for a journal called “The Ladder,” which was the national monthly magazine of the Daughters of Bilitis, the lesbian equivalent of the Mattachine Society. Hansberry’s social circle at the time included lesbian writers like Patricia Highsmith, who lived with her parents from 1940 to 1942 at 48 Grove Street while she was a student at Barnard. A few blocks from there, the journalist Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins, a fellow labor reformer, lived in an apartment at 85 Bedford Street from 1924 through Anna’s death in 1966, until Grace’s death in 1969. Rochester and Hutchins had what historians now would refer to as a Boston marriage, a term that derives from Henry James’s “The Bostonians” — they were women from affluent backgrounds who lived together in very close, loving relationships. A few doors down from their building, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay lived at 75½ Bedford, a tourist attraction today because it’s just about nine feet wide. Millay lived there during the 1920s with her husband when she was openly bisexual.

The narrowest house in the Village, 75 1/2 Bedford, center, is just about nine feet wide.Credit…Zack DeZon

And around the corner from 75½ Bedford is the Cherry Lane Theater, in a former brewery on Commerce Street, which over the years became closely associated with gay playwrights like Edward Albee.

The Cherry Lane Theater, which occupies a former brewery on Commerce Street, is associated with gay playwrights like Edward Albee.Credit…Zack DeZon

You said you wanted to talk about all those vestigial triangles and other remnants along Seventh Avenue South.

They were created when the avenue was cut through the neighborhood, exposing the rear facades of buildings like 70 Bedford Street, whose back became 54 Seventh Avenue South. That’s where the Women’s Coffeehouse, a lesbian-owned coffeehouse, opened in 1974. Judy O’Neil and Shari Thaler were its owners. They wanted to provide a feminist alternative to the Mafia-controlled lesbian bars. They were committed to issues around women and children, especially the rights of lesbian mothers in divorce cases involving custody. Across the street was another lesbian bar called Crazy Nanny’s, which occupied the ground floor of 21 Seventh Avenue South.

An unadorned brick building from the mid-1950s, on one of those triangular sites. The bar advertised itself as “100 percent women owned and 100 percent women managed,” and like the Oscar Wilde bookshop its staff and clientele were racially diverse.

That was significant because back then Black women didn’t feel welcome at a lot of lesbian bars (or Black men at men’s bars, for that matter). Crazy Nanny’s advertised itself as “a place for women, biological or otherwise,” meaning it welcomed trans women, at a time when that was controversial in lesbian circles. During the AIDS epidemic, lesbians also really stepped up — Crazy Nanny’s was a prime example — in ways that helped bring the gay and lesbian communities together.

Andrew, may I ask, do you have a Village story of your own?

I grew up in Midwood, Brooklyn, and I had no notion that gay communities existed in the world. I went to the Village to look at buildings and saw all these gay people on the street. I hadn’t come out yet. But this got me thinking. So I made up a story for my parents, and I went back to explore the neighborhood at night.

And that was transformative?

It was an awakening.

“Intimate City: Walking New York,” by Michael Kimmelman, will be published on Nov. 29 by Penguin Press.

A row of brownstones on St. Luke’s Place. Credit…Zack DeZon
0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Newer Posts
Older Posts