John Powers
Appearances
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
How the hunt for gangster Al Capone launched the IRS to power.
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Billie Eilish & Finneas
Every December, I look at my list of the things that I've read, watched, and listened to during the year. And every December, I come across things that I flat-out loved yet somehow never got around to talking about. Well, I want to share these pleasures now. Although they're a far cry from raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, these are a few of my favorite things.
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Billie Eilish & Finneas
I gasp in surprise at all fours. Miranda July's hilariously unpredictable novel about a middle-aged artist who leaves her family to drive to New York from Los Angeles, but only gets to the L.A. suburbs before she falls for a young rental car worker, checks into a cheap motel, and spends a fortune redecorating her room there.
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Billie Eilish & Finneas
All Fours is sometimes described as a book about perimenopause, the transitional stage before menopause. Yet this flattens it into sociology and self-help. July's Mind is far too unruly and interesting for that. Perverse, unrepentant, sometimes dirty, and often laugh-out-loud funny. I couldn't stop reading passages to my girlfriend.
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Billie Eilish & Finneas
It's a one-of-a-kind book about a woman cannonballing into her search for a new self and a new life. you never know where it's headed.
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Billie Eilish & Finneas
You know exactly where things are headed in Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, an inventive documentary about the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the elected prime minister of the newly independent Congo, who was killed at the behest of the American and Belgian governments.
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Billie Eilish & Finneas
This is no grimly realistic sermon, but a jaunty montage film, blending fabulous archival footage, amazing interviews, CIA machinations, and oodles of black music from the likes of Louis Armstrong and Nina Simone. Along the way, Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimenprez quotes poet Octavio Paz's line, When history sleeps, it speaks in dreams. Grimenprez's movie unfolds like one of those dreams.
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Billie Eilish & Finneas
Life has turned giddily surreal in the Hulu series Interior Chinatown, based on the National Book Award-winning novel by Charles Yu. Its high point is the star-making performance by Ronnie Chiang, the Malaysian comedian you may know from The Daily Show. Chiang is uproarious as Fatty Choi, a low-ambition restaurant worker who's suddenly forced into waiting tables.
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Billie Eilish & Finneas
He treats the customers so rudely that, ironically, he becomes a sensation. Here, he approaches a white couple at a table. What?
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Billie Eilish & Finneas
The humor is slyer in my favorite mystery novel this year, The Lover of No Fixed Abode, by Carlo Frutero and Franco Lucentini, a hugely popular Italian literary team.
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Billie Eilish & Finneas
Set in Venice, it's about a middle-aged signora who's an art scout for big auction houses, who finds herself attracted to an enigmatic tour guide leader, Mr. Silvera, who seems to know everything and greets every situation with a different inflection of the word ah. The mystery is, who is he?
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Billie Eilish & Finneas
Shimmering with wit and bursting with an insider's knowledge of Venice, The Lover of No Fixed Abode builds to a solution so unexpected that not one person in a million will guess it. It's a minor classic. Two big classics are the 50s movies that got theatrical re-releases this year.
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Billie Eilish & Finneas
Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, in which a village hires seven swordsmen to protect them from bandits, and The Wages of Fear, Henri-Georges Clouseau's excruciatingly suspenseful story of four exiles in a poor Latin American town who must transport a shipment of nitroglycerin in ramshackle trucks. Both movies are magnificent in themselves. Their action scenes are still breathtaking.
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Billie Eilish & Finneas
But they possess a special interest because in them you can see a Japanese director and a French one laying down the template for today's Hollywood blockbusters. And they're better than our current action pictures in one crucial way. From their white-knuckle stunts to their revelations of character, everything in them is human scale.
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Billie Eilish & Finneas
My favorite sports movement this year was also Alive with Humanity. It featured Simone Biles, whose all-around gold medal at the Paris Olympics confirmed her as the greatest woman gymnast of all time. Yet what I loved wasn't her style in winning, which was, of course, phenomenal, but her grace in losing.
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Billie Eilish & Finneas
In the final event, the floor exercise, where she normally reigns supreme, she was bested by Rebecca Andrade, the superb Brazilian gymnast who'd spent her career losing over and over to Biles. And what did Biles do when she lost? She didn't cry, I'm still the GOAT. She didn't whine that the judges had cheated her. She didn't say that Andrade was lucky or actually no good.
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Billie Eilish & Finneas
Instead, on the medal stand, she and teammate Jordan Childs, who won bronze, literally bowed to Andrade. They bowed to her skill, to her bravery in overcoming multiple surgeries, to her always being a worthy opponent. It was a gesture of respect that, far from diminishing Biles, only made her greatness more incandescent. A valuable lesson as we entered the new year.
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Ramy Youssef Animates A Muslim Family's Post-9/11 Life
Congratulations to my friend Conan O'Brien on receiving the 26th and final Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
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Adrien Brody Was Made For 'The Brutalist'
Ever since silent film audiences swooned for Rudolph Valentino and the vamp Theda Berra, the movies have packed a sexual charge. but filmmakers have always had trouble dealing with sex head-on. While there have been scads of hot love scenes, movies addressing sexual desire nearly always feel bogus, exploitative, moralistic, or unintentionally funny.
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Adrien Brody Was Made For 'The Brutalist'
Even Stanley Kubrick foundered in Making Eyes Wide Shut, a dreamlike movie in which Tom Cruise was a husband haunted and roused by the possible infidelity of his wife, played by Nicole Kidman. We enter a similar dreamland in Baby Girl, a new film by Dutch filmmaker Helena Rijn that boasts a thrillingly haywire performance by Kidman, who's our bravest, most wrist-kicking actress.
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Adrien Brody Was Made For 'The Brutalist'
Set during a seemingly eternal Christmas season, Baby Girl begins with a classic cliché, the high-powered career woman who secretly yearns for sexual submission to a man. and transforms it into a strange fantasy of empowerment. Kidman stars as Romy Mathis, the CEO of a high-tech shipping company in New York.
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Adrien Brody Was Made For 'The Brutalist'
She's got a country house, two cool daughters, and a husband, Jacob, who's so attractive he's played by Antonio Banderas. But, and it's a decisive but, their sex life has never worked for Romy. Nineteen years into her marriage, she fakes extravagant orgasms, then sneaks away to satisfy herself while watching dodgy domination porn.
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Adrien Brody Was Made For 'The Brutalist'
All that changes one morning when, walking to work, she watches a striking young man tame a big, out-of-control dog. As in a dream, this same striking young man immediately turns up in the company offices as a new intern, Samuel. He's played by Harris Dickinson. At once mumbling and aggressive, like a 50s method actor, Samuel somehow sees straight into Romney's roiling psyche.
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Adrien Brody Was Made For 'The Brutalist'
Their early meetings always have a sexual edge, starting when they talk in the company kitchen when she asks him to bring her a cup of coffee.
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Adrien Brody Was Made For 'The Brutalist'
No. Samuel senses that Romy fantasizes about being ordered what to do. And though she initially resists his inappropriate forwardness, getting involved with interns is, after all, strictly forbidden, we know it's only a matter of time. After a bit of verbal sparring, he has Romy doing his bidding in the bedroom. He calls her baby girl and helps her achieve the pleasure she's longed for.
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Adrien Brody Was Made For 'The Brutalist'
Given the unusual dynamic of this relationship, she's his boss at work, he's her boss in bed, Baby Girl promises a daringly grown-up look at both sexuality and power. Yet for all the early talk about the movie being transgressive, to use a played-out buzzword, I was struck by how tame it is.
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Adrien Brody Was Made For 'The Brutalist'
Even as Romy says she needs sexual danger, none of her desires take her, or the movie, any place truly dark, or even Fifty Shades of Grey. Now, to her credit, Rain makes a point of not trying to turn us on. She dishes up none of the laughable nudie sleaze found in movies like Nine and a Half Weeks.
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Adrien Brody Was Made For 'The Brutalist'
Yet, in her fixation on Romy's inner life, whose every throb and flicker Kibben heroically registers, she makes the classic Hollywood mistake of shortchanging everything else. For starters, we have no sense of who Samuel actually is or what he wants. This matters in a film where both Romy and Samuel keep using the word power. Romy may run the company, but she's also an HR nightmare.
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Adrien Brody Was Made For 'The Brutalist'
Samuel could shipwreck her career with a few well-chosen words. I kept waiting to find out what Samuel is after and what tough choices their dangerous liaison will force her to make.
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Adrien Brody Was Made For 'The Brutalist'
That's precisely what happens in Catherine Briand's great new film Last Summer, in which another successful middle-aged woman commits a far greater transgression than Romy, then fights, even cruelly, to get herself out of the mess. There's no such reckoning here. Rain is so eager not to punish Romy for her sexual tastes that the film raises questions of power, only to duck them.
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Adrien Brody Was Made For 'The Brutalist'
Baby Girl's problem is not Romy's desire to be dominated. It's making her erotic liberation so triumphant that the story's sexual politics don't matter. All of which feels out of touch with our post-MeToo era. After all, if a male CEO had kinky sex with a young female intern, I don't think current audiences would give him a pass, just because she made him happier in bed than his wife.
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'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
One of the most exquisitely cynical lines in 20th century literature comes in the Italian novel The Leopard. A young aristocrat is telling his uncle, the prince, why he's joined up with Garibaldi's revolutionaries. This is precisely the thinking behind successful TV franchises, which try to change things just enough to seem fresh, while still serving up what the audience loved the first time.
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'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Except for maybe Fargo, no show tackles this challenge more honorably than The White Lotus, the Emmy-grabbing HBO series in which rich, entitled white folks cause trouble at enviably gorgeous beachfront resorts.
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'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Written and directed by Mike White, The White Lotus doesn't merely introduce new characters and locales every season —the latest one is set in Thailand— but also shifts its tone and preoccupations. Still, it follows a template. Like its predecessors, season three begins with an unidentified dead body and then flashes back to show us who's dead and why.
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'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
We watch the guests arrive at the White Lotus, a wellness-centered resort on the island of Koh Samui. These include the well-heeled Ratliff family from North Carolina. The parents are played by Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey. There are three 40-something girlfriends led by Jacqueline, a TV star played by Michelle Monaghan.
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'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
There's gloomy Rick, that's Walton Goggins, a scruffy dude who's here with his far younger girlfriend Chelsea. And as always in paradise, there's a serpent. it would take an hour to tell you the plot. Suffice it to say that after a low-key start, the show becomes a stir-fry of financial secrets, dark family histories, drug abuse, kinky hijinks, poisonous snakes, scary gunfire, and oddball comedy.
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'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
White loves to shove his characters and audiences out of their comfort zone. We often can't be sure whether something is supposed to be funny or serious or both. We don't know which characters are actually nice, are deeper than they first seem, or are blithely headed toward bad things. Take, for instance, the Ratliff family, Timothy and Victoria and their three grown-up kids.
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'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Their provincial complacency is on display when they arrive at the White Lotus and meet the hotel managers.
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'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
If you've seen either of the two seasons, you know that Victoria and her kin are likely to face trickier issues than the rivalry between Duke and the Tar Heels. In truth, season three is less effervescent than one or two. Yet the show still superbly acted by its stars, and White stuffs his scenes with pleasures.
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'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
I love the comedy of the Ratliff's alpha male son, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger's son Patrick, driving everyone crazy by obsessively making protein shakes in a deafening blender. I love the increasingly fraught dynamics of Jacqueline and her friends. The others are played by Carrie Coon and Leslie Bibb, by the way.
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'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Whenever two of them get together, they grow catty about the one who's not there. I was especially knocked out by the scene in which Rick meets an old friend, who launches into a monologue about his sexcapades in Bangkok. It is, I promise you, the most surprising thing you're going to hear on TV this year.
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'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
The White Lotus takes it as a given that its privileged characters have no interest in the culture they're visiting, be it Hawaii or Sicily or now Thailand. They treat it as a theme park or a stage on which they can act out. White clearly hopes to avoid doing that himself, although he does glamorize Thailand. Conspicuous luxury is one of the show's selling points, after all.
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'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
He treats Buddhism respectfully, and he makes a point of trying to incorporate Thai characters. The two best are the hotel's owner, a silver-haired diva, and a sympathetic security guard whose factlessness makes us constantly worry for him.
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'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Now, over the course of the six episodes available to screen, there are eight in all, White repeatedly shows us two very different things, monkeys and Buddhas. This motif is fitting, for White's theme here is the tension between our animal nature and our yearning for a deeper, more spiritual existence, one free from the values and egotisms that imprison us.
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'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
pushing its characters toward questions of life's meaning, this is the most soul-conscious of the three seasons. No matter how safe and comfortable things might seem, White suggests, there comes a time of reckoning when we have to face how alone we really are.
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The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
In the decades after World War II, America was flooded with novels, movies, and hot-button studies pondering the nature of suburbia, its comfort in consumerism, its safety and soullessness. Nobody explored these themes any better than John Cheever, whose elegantly devastating stories captured suburban life in both its sunlit splendor and shadowy desolation.
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The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Take, for instance, his famous 1956 story, The Housebreaker of Shady Hill. Its hero, Johnny Hake, loses his prosperous job and, needing dough, begins robbing his friends' houses. You could have 2025 riff on that same idea in the new Apple TV Plus series, Your Friends and Neighbors.
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The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Created by Jonathan Tropper, who made his name with a series of novels in the Tom Parada and Nick Hornby vein, this comic drama stars John Hamm as a hedge fund hotshot whose cushy suburban existence goes curflewy. Yet the show isn't merely about the flamboyant crisis of a handsome, privileged guy, but about a culture in which wealth comes lined with rage and melancholy.
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The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Ham plays our hero and narrator Andrew Cooper, known as Coop, who gets canned for a sexual indiscretion and finds his career in ruins. He's already lost his family, which happened when he caught his wife Mel, that's Amanda Peet, in bed with one of his friends, an ex-NBA player. Outwardly, Coop pretends that nothing has happened, but internally he's changed.
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The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Where he once thought of his luxurious town of Westmont Village as paradise, he's now cynical about its values. He starts breaking into his friends' houses, stealing things like Patek Philippe watches worth $250,000, and in the process, discovering their secrets.
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The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
From there, the show expands outwards, introducing many other characters, such as Coop's sometime lover Sam, that's Olivia Munn, who's caught in a nasty divorce, his money manager Barney, played by Hoon Lee, his wife's Dominican house cleaner Elena, played by Aimee Carrero, and his musician sister Allie, that's Tony winner Lena Hall, whom Coop has taken in after her breakdown.
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The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
They all figure in a storyline chock-full of betrayal, theft, infidelity, and murder. Juicy stuff. Not to mention Koop's sardonic voiceover, mocking the country club fees and fetishized brands of scotch that define the suburban enclave he now disdains. The show's emotional center is Koop's struggle to cope with his ex-wife and disaffected teenage children.
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The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Here he's just dropped his son off after school when Mill rebukes him because this isn't one of the days he's supposed to see the kids. What are you doing here?
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The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
In recent years, we've grown used to shows in which alpha males like Coop all but wear a tattoo that reads, Toxic Masculinity.
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The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
I'm pleased that Tropper takes the show someplace subtler, juggling the truth that his hero can be at once a wounded soul with whom one often identifies and a self-centered man who oozes entitlement from his Princeton degree in Maserati to his discovery that the world's unfair, only after it's been unfair to him.
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The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
It's a perfect role for Ham, who carries with him our memories of Don Draper's dark-souled charisma, then takes this sort of character in a new direction, funnier, sadder, and more sympathetic. He's never been better. Although his coup starts out as a self-described jerk, his character grows wiser and more self-aware as the episodes unfold.
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The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Trouble is, robbery is a risky business that requires expertise more than self-knowledge. As his fence Lou warns him, nothing is so dangerous as somebody who doesn't know what they don't know. Watching your friends and neighbors, I found myself thinking that in some huge ways, today's suburbs are undeniably better than they once were.
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The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
They're less exclusively white, and the wives have fulfilling careers. But in other ways, they feel worse. Tropper offers little of the tender lyricism that makes Cheever's suburbs so seductive. It's not just that Coop's world is more grossly materialistic than before, with Rolls Royces and 40-gram bottles of wine—
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The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
but that its denizens are far more cut off from one another and from any sense of nobler values. In The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, Johnny Hake steals $900 from a friend and spends the story feeling guilty and ashamed that he's become a thief. In the far flashier Your Friends and Neighbors, Coop suffers little such remorse. Not in the first six episodes, anyway.
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The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Nor does the show judge him harshly for his thefts. He's got an expensive life to pay for, after all. And besides, his victims are just rich jerks like him.
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A Cultural History Of Hypochondria
Ever since I saw my first James Bond movie as a kid, I've had a thing for spy stories. They always draw me in, be they nuanced like John le Carré, witty like Slow Horses, or pot-boiling like Homeland. I love their labyrinthine plots, their bubbling menace, their deep-dish paranoia. Never trust what you see on the surface."
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A Cultural History Of Hypochondria
I'm happy to report that the year is ending with two good new spy series, Black Doves on Netflix and The Agency on Paramount+. They make an interesting pair, for while both are compelling and feature top drawer talent, each takes a radically different approach to the espionage genre. Where one flashes with pop energy, the other is a slow burn.
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A Cultural History Of Hypochondria
Set in London, the mecca of spy stories, Black Dove stars Keira Knightley as Helen Webb, the wife of Britain's defense minister, who secretly works for the Black Doves, a private espionage firm that sells information to the highest bidder. When her lover is murdered, Helen vows revenge, much to the disapproval of her boss, Reed. That's Sarah Lancaster of Happy Valley fame.
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A Cultural History Of Hypochondria
To keep her safe, Reed enlists Helen's dear friend Sam Young, a gay contract killer played by Ben Whishaw. Soon Helen and Sam are sucked into a bloody maelstrom that touches everyone from the Chinese embassy and the CIA to No. 10 Downing Street and the world's most powerful criminal gang. Telling a complete story in an admirably brief six episodes, the show starts fast and just keeps coming.
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A Cultural History Of Hypochondria
Jokes and plot twists and fight scenes and flashbacks. Heck, even Tracy Ullman turns up. Black Doves was created by Joe Barton, who did Geary Haji, an exhilaratingly original Netflix series about a Tokyo cop in London. While this new show is more conventional, you can feel Barton's sensibility in its deft shifting from violence to comedy to surprisingly deep emotion.
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A Cultural History Of Hypochondria
Even the villains have more dimension than you'd expect. Of course, it's the heroes who hold us, especially since Knightley and Wishaw play off each other with such ease. Here, for example, Sam and Helen are driving to kill one of the men who murdered her lover, and she thinks he's acting a bit odd.
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A Cultural History Of Hypochondria
Helen and Sam are so enjoyable in such scenes, and their friendship so palpable, that it's easy to lose sight of the immorality of what they do, especially as both are capable of profound love and generosity. The human cost of spying is less breezy in the agency, whose provenance could hardly be finer.
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A Cultural History Of Hypochondria
It's an American transposition of maybe the best spy show of all time, the French series The Bureau. Based in a CIA outpost in London and dealing with issues torn from our headlines, it centers on the spies who live for years in foreign lands under fake identities and the desk jockey agents who run them. ambiguously handsome Michael Fassbender stars as the crack agent known as Martian.
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A Cultural History Of Hypochondria
As the series begins, he's suddenly called back to London from Addis Ababa, forcing him to leave behind his Ethiopian lover Sami. That's Jodie Turner-Smith. He tells his superiors, played by the likes of Jeffrey Wright, Katherine Waterston, and Richard Gere, that he and Sami are over, but he's actually still in love with her.
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A Cultural History Of Hypochondria
In the spy world, this lie is profoundly compromising, and it sets in motion all manner of trouble. You see, not only is he training a young woman agent, played by Saura Lightfoot-Leone, for an undercover job in Tehran, he's helping endangered assets in Ukraine. If Black Doves gallops forward like a racehorse, the agency is quieter and more precise, like dressage.
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A Cultural History Of Hypochondria
Although I've only been able to preview the first few episodes, the show closely follows the Bureau's template. It carefully lays out the agency's daily life, with its strong personalities, office politics, and murky missions. Then it starts tightening the screws of suspense. Like most spy stories, the agency taps into our modern obsession with identity.
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A Cultural History Of Hypochondria
As Martian tries to juggle his romantic passion and his sworn duty, the show offers a heightened version of something universal. The gap between our public selves that act in the world and who we feel we really are inside. For all their differences, Black Doves and the agency address the same fundamental questions. Can you be a spy and still keep your humanity?
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A Cultural History Of Hypochondria
At what point does your mask become your actual face? And at what point, if any, do you start saying no?
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Best Of: Education & A.I. / Having A Child In The Digital Age
Suits me fine. What are your favorite programs? I just like TV, you know. To me, it replaced the fireplace when I was a child. And if you want to know what 20 million Americans are talking about on Saturday night, it's what they saw on Friday night on TV. It's a window on the world. Whatever it is, that's that image of ourselves that we're portraying.
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Best Of: Education & A.I. / Having A Child In The Digital Age
For Lennon, it was a time of reinvention, both musically and in terms of his political involvement.
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Best Of: Education & A.I. / Having A Child In The Digital Age
People say their phones are bugged. First of all, I thought it was paranoia. I've been reading all these, you know, conspiracy theory books. You can hear things going on on the phone every time you pick it up. People clicking in and out and... There was a lot of repairs going on downstairs to the phones every few days down in the basement.
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Best Of: Education & A.I. / Having A Child In The Digital Age
I started taking my own phone calls too, so I don't know why, but at least I'll have a copy of whatever they're going to try and say I'm talking about.
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Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
It's one measure of Latin America's arduous history that it spawns so many books and movies about dictatorship. Over the years, I've been through scads of them, from novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa to the landmark documentaries of Patricio Guzman to Hollywood thrillers like Missing and Under Fire. What they share is the awareness that history hurts.
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Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Few films have shown this with more delicate intelligence than I'm Still Here, a moving new drama set during Brazil's military dictatorship that began with an American-backed coup in 1964 and ended in 1985. Based on a memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Walter Salas's movie is no political tract or manipulative tearjerker, although it may make you cry.
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Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Exploring the dictatorship indirectly, I'm Still Here tells the heroic true story of a wife and mother who steers her family through the rapids of tyranny. The story begins idyllically on Ipanema Beach in 1970, when we first meet the Paiva family. The father is Rubens, played with easy charm by Sultan Melo, a warm-hearted man who was a congressman before the coup.
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Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And by Eunice, that's Fernanda Torres, a rather traditional-seeming wife who bakes great soufflés and wrangles their five high-energy children. Theirs is a happy upper-middle-class family whose home is a kind of Eden, complete with a view of the beach.
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Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Buzzing with openness to friends, to ideas, to laughter, to music —the movie's soundtrack is fabulous— their house is Brazil, as we might dream of it being. Yet such openness is precisely what the junta mistrusts. It tortures or disappears anyone it considers a threat to its notion of an orderly, anti-communist society.
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Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Even as the family dances, plays foosball, and amiably bickers, we await the dreaded knock on the door. It comes. Rubens is taken away for questioning, security men occupy the house, and Eunice herself is called in for a nasty interrogation. Rubens' disappearance is the turning point in Eunice's life.
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Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Over the next months, in fact the next decades, she transforms her practical maternal virtues into something mighty. Channeling her grief, she becomes a stronger, tougher, wiser person who protects her kids, digs into the cruel facts of her husband's fate, and learns to fight for other people's rights as well.
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Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
From the start, Eunice is a woman of impressive self-command, and the movie shares that virtue. Salas has always been a gifted director, but earlier films like Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries were so busy being artful and important, they often felt impersonal. Here, you feel his profound emotional engagement. Salas grew up in the same milieu as the Paivas.
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Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Indeed, he hung out with the kids, and you feel his affection for that family and its values. He captures them, and 1970 Rio, in a way that feels loving and true. Salas does a superb job of depicting how the dictatorship colored daily life. We see how things could often appear normal, with fun at the beach and happy visits to the ice cream shop.
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Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Yet without laying on the violence or heavy-handed moralism, even the secret policemen we meet aren't monsters, Salas also conjures a pervasive atmosphere of anxiety.
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Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
We feel it in the sounds of helicopters hovering overhead, the TV newscasts filled with lies, the spasms of fearful mistrust that grow between friends, and the way that once your family is singled out, you're treated differently out in the world. Like Brazil, their house of freedom is now in lockdown.
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Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
The counterweight to the dictatorship is the unglamorous strength of Eunice, who goes from making soufflés to becoming at 48 a lawyer who helps make Brazil a better place to live. She's played with surpassing brilliance by Torres, whose performance is so subtle, so internal, and so quietly shattering, that in a just world, she'd win all this year's big acting awards.
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Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Registering each flicker of emotion as precisely as a seismograph, Torres captures Eunice's pain and horror at her husband's fate, but also her endurance, her faith that life goes on. a faith that time vindicates. Even as it's buffeted by misfortune, the family survives and thrives. At one point, a newspaper photographer comes to take a picture of the family and tells them to look somber.
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Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
After all, Rubens is missing. But Eunice insists that everyone smile. She will not let them face the world looking beaten.
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Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
In the decades after World War II, America was flooded with novels, movies, and hot-button studies pondering the nature of suburbia, its comfort in consumerism, its safety and soullessness. Nobody explored these themes any better than John Cheever, whose elegantly devastating stories captured suburban life in both its sunlit splendor and shadowy desolation.
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Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
Take, for instance, his famous 1956 story, The Housebreaker of Shady Hill. Its hero, Johnny Hake, loses his prosperous job and, needing dough, begins robbing his friends' houses. You get a 2025 riff on that same idea in the new Apple TV Plus series, Your Friends and Neighbors.
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Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
Created by Jonathan Tropper, who made his name with a series of novels in the Tom Parada, Nick Hornby vein, this comic drama stars John Hamm as a hedge fund hotshot whose cushy suburban existence goes kerflooey. Yet the show isn't merely about the flamboyant crisis of a handsome, privileged guy, but about a culture in which wealth comes lined with rage and melancholy.
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Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
Ham plays our hero and narrator Andrew Cooper, known as Coop, who gets canned for a sexual indiscretion and finds his career in ruins. He's already lost his family, which happened when he caught his wife Mel, that's Amanda Peet, in bed with one of his friends, an ex-NBA player. Outwardly, Coop pretends that nothing has happened, but internally he's changed.
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Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
Where he once thought of his luxurious town of Westmont Village as paradise, he's now cynical about its values. He starts breaking into his friends' houses, stealing things like Patek Philippe watches worth $250,000, and in the process, discovering their secrets.
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Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
From there, the show expands outwards, introducing many other characters, such as Coop's sometime lover Sam, that's Olivia Munn, who's caught in a nasty divorce, his money manager Barney, played by Hoon Lee, his wife's Dominican house cleaner Elena, played by Aimee Carrero, and his musician sister Allie, that's Tony winner Lena Hall, whom Coop has taken in after her breakdown.
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Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
They all figure in a storyline chock-full of betrayal, theft, infidelity, and murder. Juicy stuff. Not to mention Koop's sardonic voiceover, mocking the country club fees and fetishized brands of scotch that define the suburban enclave he now disdains. The show's emotional center is Koop's struggle to cope with his ex-wife and disaffected teenage children.
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Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
Here he's just dropped his son off after school, when Mill rebukes him because this isn't one of the days he's supposed to see the kids. What are you doing here?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
In recent years, we've grown used to shows in which alpha males like Coop all but wear a tattoo that reads, "'Toxic Masculinity.'"
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
I'm pleased that Tropper takes the show someplace subtler, juggling the truth that his hero can be at once a wounded soul with whom one often identifies, and a self-centered man who oozes entitlement from his Princeton degree in Maserati to his discovery that the world's unfair, only after it's been unfair to him.
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Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
It's a perfect role for Ham, who carries with him our memories of Don Draper's dark-souled charisma. then takes this sort of character in a new direction, funnier, sadder, and more sympathetic. He's never been better. Although his coop starts out as a self-described jerk, his character grows wiser and more self-aware as the episodes unfold.
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Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
Trouble is, robbery is a risky business that requires expertise more than self-knowledge. As his fence Lou warns him, nothing is so dangerous as somebody who doesn't know what they don't know. Watching your friends and neighbors, I found myself thinking that in some huge ways, today's suburbs are undeniably better than they once were.
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Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
They're less exclusively white, and the wives have fulfilling careers. But in other ways, they feel worse. Tropper offers little of the tender lyricism that makes Cheever's suburbs so seductive. It's not just that Coop's world is more grossly materialistic than before, with Rolls Royces and 40-gram bottles of wine—
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Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
but that its denizens are far more cut off from one another and from any sense of nobler values. In The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, Johnny Hakes steals $900 from a friend and spends the story feeling guilty and ashamed that he's become a thief. In the far flashier Your Friends and Neighbors, Coop suffers little such remorse. Not in the first six episodes, anyway.
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Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
Nor does the show judge him harshly for his thefts. He's got an expensive life to pay for, after all. And besides, his victims are just rich jerks, like him.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
Okay, so normally I'd apologize for such a crack comment.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
Listen, Gene, I know you think you're Gene Simmons, man, but Richard, if you're in there somewhere, please, just give me a sign.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Perhaps the most famous line in ancient Greek thought comes from the philosopher Heraclitus, who said, You cannot step into the same river twice. That's because reality is not a static thing, but an ever-changing flux. The fluidity of life runs through flow, a marvelous animated movie from Latvia, which has already been showered with acclaim.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Directed by Gintz Zalbalotis, it takes a simple premise, a sundry crew of animals get caught in a flood, and without a single word being uttered, transports us into a radiant fantasy. At once fun and affecting, Flo made me think of everything from Spirited Away and The Incredible Journey to the story of Noah and the recent floods in North Carolina.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Flo centers on a slate-gray cat whose home is a big house in the forest surrounded by larger-than-life feline sculptures. It sleeps upstairs in a double bed whose emptiness offers our first inkling that there are no people about. And indeed, no humans will appear in the film.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Instead, we follow this watchful, eloquent-eyed loner as it prowls around and gets chased by a pack of dogs, a pursuit interrupted by a deluge that comes whooshing towards them. the water keeps rising higher and higher. And just as the cat is about to be washed away, it's able to jump on a sailboat occupied by, of all things, a capybara.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Soon they're joined by a scene-stealing lemur, who has scavenged various human knickknacks, like the mirror it keeps looking at itself in. It's like the opening of a joke. A cat, a capybara, and a lemur walk into a bar.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
As the three float together on their small ark, they're joined by a golden retriever and a predatory secretary bird, which boasts a crazy beautiful headdress of feathers and a body like an eagle's glued onto a heron's legs.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
This odd band of survivors seeks to ride out the flood, a dangerous enterprise that forces them to work together and leads them to rescue others in distress, even if they don't always want to. So Belotus pays these animals the respect of observing them closely.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
He deftly captures the cat's yawns, the movements of the lemur's ringed tail as it's preening, and the amiable torpor of the capybara, a creature whose meme-inducing cuteness was recently celebrated in The New Yorker by Gary Steingart. Forgoing all dialogue but using genuine animal sounds, Flo is a long way from Zootopia or Eddie Murphy's smart aleck donkey in Shrek.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
While it does humanize its characters a bit, my own beloved cat Nico would sooner drown than team up with a lemur, Flo captures the way animals behave in the wild, as in the ruthless fight for dominance between two secretary birds, which leaves one of them unable to fly. The movie weaves together bursts of adventure. Your heart may pound as the cat has to swim for dear life.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
With poetic moments of transcendence, I won't spoil by describing. Like Miyazaki, Zobo Lotus uses animation to conjure a big, thrilling world of imagination. Where too much American animation feels frantic, desperate to keep our attention, Flo's images possess a kinetic elegance.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
They have the alluring immersiveness of a video game, complete, alas, with a few visual glitches you won't find in Pixar. Then again, this is not a big-budget Hollywood project. It was made on the open-source software Blender and cost just $3.7 million. To put this in perspective, that's less than one-fiftieth the budget of Inside Out 2.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Flow is conceived as a universal story that weaves together magic and realism. While the cat and dogs could live in our own neighborhood, the rest of the cast comes from the likes of Latin America, Africa, and Madagascar. There's even a whale from the briny deep that surges up, almost biblically, from the floodwaters.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
This whale's appearance inland is one of the film's suggestions, melancholy but never overt, that the great flood we're seeing may be a product of climate change. Yet flow is far from a political tract. Rather, it's a classic fable about learning to adapt to life's ever-changing flow, no matter how dire things may sometimes get. And like most classic fables, it offers an enduring lesson.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
A group of creatures overcome their differences and learn to help one another. It's solidarity, not selfishness, that will save them.
Fresh Air
How Trauma Shapes Us
I was raised by sensible Midwesterners who believed that no good could come of psychology or introspection. That may be why I get impatient with memoirs that dwell on their writers' inner lives. What I want are memoirs that go beyond the personal, to offer a portrait of something larger, a culture, a historical period, a whole way of living.
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How Trauma Shapes Us
You find that in The Golden Hour, a story of family and power in Hollywood, a new book by Matthew Spector, a child of the movies who happens to be a really terrific writer. Spanning more than half a century and speckled with the caviar of famous names, this isn't a tell-all, pity party, or diatribe.
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How Trauma Shapes Us
Mixing things up with the brio of an expert bartender, Spector serves an invigorating cocktail of family saga, cultural criticism, fictionalized biography, Hollywood history, and lament for a vanishing world. The main action begins in the mid-1960s when his parents meet. His father, Fred Spector, is a low-level agent, eager to make it, but devoted to his clients.
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How Trauma Shapes Us
His mother, Catherine McGaffey, is one of those beautiful L.A. women who might have been a successful actress or model. But she's short on drive. What she has is high literary taste. When she and Fred meet, a book by James Joyce spills from her purse. Obviously mismatched, the two could be a metaphor for Hollywood's collision between commerce and art.
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How Trauma Shapes Us
But like so many others, they get carried away by the intoxications of the movie biz and a 60s culture that's cracking the industry wide open. Early in his career, Hollywood was so square that Fred can't find work for even Jack Nicholson. Too weird, casting directors thought.
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How Trauma Shapes Us
But after the groundbreaking success of Bonnie and Clyde, the industry suddenly wants the off-center actors that Fred champions. His career takes off. Matthew is born. Catherine thinks of doing screenplays. The golden future shimmers before them. And yet, it's an insidious thing, this industry of theirs, Spector writes. Its illusions are too quick to become one's own.
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How Trauma Shapes Us
Fred's last girlfriend was Stella Stevens, who'd co-starred with Elvis. Once you've watched your partner kiss the king on screen and then come home to kiss you, it changes things, redraws the boundaries of your reality. It deforms you and renders you vulnerable to boredom, makes you impatient with a life that is merely human-sized. As Fred rides the crest of 70s movies, the family flounders.
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How Trauma Shapes Us
Catherine is a lost soul, struggling with her identity and sliding under the bottle. Fred, predictably enough, finds a new woman and moves out. As for Matthew, he has long periods of estrangement from a father whose shallowness he can never quite grasp, and from the alcoholic mother whose sensibility he shares, but finds himself forced to look after.
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How Trauma Shapes Us
Eventually he heads east to college, where he takes a writing class from James Baldwin, the book's implicit hero, of whom he writes wonderfully, and he finds work in a corporate-owned movie business that's a far cry from the one that launched his dad.
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How Trauma Shapes Us
Now, like any good Hollywood book, The Golden Hour has its share of movie star stories, from being mooned by Bruce Dern to a hilarious phone message from Marlon Brando. David Lynch pops in to do a nifty cameo. Yet much of Spector's best writing deals with two super-agents turned power brokers, MCA's Lou Wasserman and CAA's Mike Ovitz, whose mere names made other industry big shots quake.
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How Trauma Shapes Us
Fred worked for both. Taking us fictionally inside their heads, Spector captures how their near-visionary brilliance serves soulless values, transforming Hollywood into a place about making deals rather than about making movies. Still, my favorite parts of the book have to do with Fred and Catherine. He finds in them a mythic dimension we often feel in thinking about our own parents.
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How Trauma Shapes Us
Even as we can grasp the shape of their lives, there remains some sort of irreducible mystery. Fred and Catherine feel larger than life, like characters in an old Hollywood movie. By comparison, Spector's chapters about himself, though well-written, feel a tad prosaic, like a low-budget indie. And in a way, this is fitting.
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How Trauma Shapes Us
You see, for all of Spectre's verve, The Golden Hour tells a story of diminution, about the loss of youthful hopes, the corporatization of Hollywood, the movie's dwindling ability to feed our dreams, and the decline of the egalitarian America, imperfect but promising, that so many of us grew up with.
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How Trauma Shapes Us
It's a book about how the soft golden light of magic hour, which makes everything look so beautiful, eventually makes way for the darkness.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Last week I had dinner with friends who'd lost everything in the recent L.A. fires. They spent their days filling out forms, being put on hold, and assembling the ordinary stuff they and their kids need to live. By night they did something different. They played events over and over in their heads, agonizing about what-ifs. What if there'd been less flammable stuff in their yard?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
What if they hadn't forgotten to save certain important papers? What if they'd been warned to evacuate hours earlier, like the people on the other side of town? Such stewing, with its mix of regret, self-recrimination, and anger, is a profoundly human response to catastrophe.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
It achieves some sort of apotheosis in Brigitte Giraud's haunting book Live Fast, which won France's top literary prize in 2022. a work of autofiction, Live Fast looks back at the death of Giraud's husband Claude in a motorcycle accident 20-odd years earlier and ponders the many things that might have prevented this calamity.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
In the process, Giraud wanders the maze of life's great conundrum, the dance between chance and destiny. The basic facts are simple. On June 22, 1999, Claude, a 41-year-old music librarian, borrowed the ultra-powerful Honda CBR 900 Fireblade that his brother-in-law had left in his and Brigitte's garage while on vacation. Heading to pick up his son after school, Claude stopped at a red light.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
When it turned green, he hit the gas, and the monster engine caused it to pop an unexpected wheelie, flinging Claude into oncoming traffic. Jarrell explores this tragedy not with a straightforward narrative, but like someone taking apart one of those Rube Goldberg contraptions that uses crazy, convoluted ways to accomplish a simple task.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Each chapter explains a step that, if it only hadn't happened, might have stopped the accident. These steps include everything from her grandfather's suicide, to her brother taking a sudden holiday, to the development of the Honda CBR 900, which she calls a bomb for kamikazes. This motorcycle was invented in Japan, but was considered so dangerous it couldn't be sold there.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
But it could be exported to Europe. If only it hadn't been. Now, some of Giraud's if-onlys are far-fetched, like thinking that things might have been different if Stephen King, one of Claude's favorites, had been killed in his famous auto accident three days earlier.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Others are self-punishing, like asking what if she hadn't wanted to buy the house that contained the garage that stored her brother's motorcycle that Claude would die on. It's always important to blame something or someone, she writes wryly, even if that someone is you. Giroux gives all this what-if-ing a lucidity that might feel forensic, except for one big thing. It's not cold-blooded.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
In Corey Stockwell's fine translation, live fast takes what could seem like an intellectual exercise, a strange sort of catechism, and slowly, touchingly infuses it with emotion. we start feeling Giraud's enduring love for her husband, a soulmate who becomes more real the more she writes.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
She knows him so well, adoring both the elegant, refined, discreet, modest Claude and his dark side, his B-side, who enjoyed bombing along on a motorbike. Of course, there's a slightly nutty side to Giroux's obsessive attempts to rewrite the past. Yet, I think every single reader will understand her. It's a desire we've all felt.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
A desire that's inspired everything from Greek ideas of the fates to cheesy episodes of Star Trek to Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Giroux understands that we can't roll back time and have a do-over. There's no such thing as if-only, she says. But thinking about such things offers a form of distraction, if not consolation.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
We gain a saving illusion of control over losses that feel less random when we can weave them into a kind of story that seems to explain them. Such weaving helps fight a crushing sense of meaninglessness until we're able to move on. which is how Giroux comes off the other side of her grief and why Live Fast is not a downer.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Clocking in at a snappy 159 pages, this is one of those rare books that works in two directions. It pulls you completely into its reality. Believe me, it's a page-turner, but also sends you back out into the mystery of living. It gets you pondering your own losses and how you deal with all those what-ifs that rise up in every life.
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Richard Kind Is Glad He's Not That Famous
I've looked at the score You owe me a life A life of my own I wanted to glide like you Before I do Please leave me alone Get out of my life So I can live it Just go away
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Richard Kind Is Glad He's Not That Famous
Okay, so normally I'd apologize for such a crass comment. Gentlemen!
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Richard Kind Is Glad He's Not That Famous
Listen, Gene, I know you think you're Gene Simmons, man, but Richard, if you're in there somewhere, please, just give me a sign.
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Richard Kind Is Glad He's Not That Famous
from the corner of Sunset and Gower in Los Angeles. It's everybody's live with John Mulaney. And now here's your host, John Mulaney.
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'Righteous Gemstones' Creator Danny McBride's Love Letter To The South
Of course. I just, I'm out here. I'm trying to wrestle with things. I'm trying to figure out what I need.
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'Righteous Gemstones' Creator Danny McBride's Love Letter To The South
We meant no disrespect, Daddy. Oh, Daddy.
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'Righteous Gemstones' Creator Danny McBride's Love Letter To The South
Oh, slice. That was a good one. It was Prince Eric, for your information. Thank you. Prince Eric? Who the is that?
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'Righteous Gemstones' Creator Danny McBride's Love Letter To The South
Oh, I don't know. How about Mickey Mouse?
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'Righteous Gemstones' Creator Danny McBride's Love Letter To The South
Judy, I don't want to discuss the mermaid wedding.
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'Righteous Gemstones' Creator Danny McBride's Love Letter To The South
What can I do for you kids?
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'Righteous Gemstones' Creator Danny McBride's Love Letter To The South
Yeah, well, I'm not going to make it. What? Why come? It's for Mama, Daddy.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Yeah. I mean, that's what they said. I don't know if I believe that, but that's what. then they kind of left me alone until junior year, a little bit.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
They didn't really leave me alone, but until junior year, I got to the point where the things I was doing outside of school, I was touring and I was playing shows and I was coming in and I was doing the work, but I also was not following the pattern of the ideal student. And it became a question of Is my ambition going to pull me out of school before they kick me out of school?
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
My mother, she's, you know, the reason I play the piano. She's the one who's kind of always there to see me through if I have a question about, you know, this is something that I believe in, but doesn't seem like it's clicking. She was like, you know, you got to think with your own mind. Nobody has... Anything that they know that is more than you, you respect people and you learn from folks.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
But if you know something, then you know it and believe it and follow through and don't quit. So she just told me all of these different ways of affirming the things I believed about music and the ways that I wanted to approach giving that to the world and uplifting folks and healing folks. And, you know, my dad is my first musical mentor.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
And he's someone who, through his experience playing on the Chitlin circuit, doing all these incredible performances from, you know, the likes of Isaac Hayes. And I remember they played the same bill as the Jackson 5 at one point early on. And just his stories of...
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
you know traveling he'd always wished that he could go to a school like Juilliard and do something like that so you know it's for the legacy of my family and um I mean now fast forward a decade later I'm on the board and I'm helping to change the place for folks who come in there like me who are maybe not the uh the the typical conservatory musician student
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Oh, yeah. This is one of the things I love the most. I'll just start with the first chord. It's D minor. All intents and purposes, D minor, okay? So now I'm going to voice this chord with the same notes, but it's going to sound completely different based upon what voices I bring out. Now this is one element of a world of nuance that I learned from my mentor, William Doglian.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Now, pressing the key, all of your sound comes from this very inside baseball. All of your sound comes from the first joint of your finger. So these are different sounds that you can get just using that first joint.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Well, there's certain aspects of it that are for show and certain aspects of it that are real. You know, there's a... a beauty in developing your own technique at the instrument. You know, I learned a lot from William, and I learned a lot from Monk, and I learned a lot from a lot of the different pianists that I grew up listening to in New Orleans, and you develop your own pedagogy.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
You know, I like to play with rings on. There's something about the equilibrium of my hand that when I have a pinky ring on, it really establishes a certain sort of attack and balance, and there's a certain ictus to the sound that I like.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Absolutely. piano plays softly A piece full of nuance.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
She's doing great. She's really something else. She's a very special person.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
There's a deep sense of connectivity that you have. with your soulmate, whether you meet somebody who just gets you, you look them in the eye and they see you and you see them and then you come inches away from the veil, you almost lose that person.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
And that's in the back of your mind when you're doing everything, when you're on television, when you're accepting an award that everyone in the world is telling you you should want more than anything else. And that is a force that it ransacks your psyche in a way that I didn't realize the power of creativity as an antidote until then.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
And through our shared creativity, there was a lot of light that we created together and apart from each other. I sent her lullabies. She would paint, as you see in the documentary. She couldn't write. Her vision was blurred from all the medication. this incredible, renowned writer, but she couldn't write, so she began to paint.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
And just that practice alone was a form of transformative healing power and light that gave me the motivation to be able to leave her, because I didn't want to leave her aside.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Exactly. And it's funny to say, going to a Grammy ceremony where you're nominated 11 times is work, but it puts things in perspective. But for me at that time, creativity was the power that allowed for us to stay connected and for me to have the will to go out and do all the things that you saw me doing at that time.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Oh, wow. Yeah, so... These were originals, and they were just as the paper. They were daily. I would send them, and she would have her laptop playing these lullabies that I would send. I would record them on Logic, which is a software program on a laptop, and I would send them. She would listen to them on loop as she painted. One of them became a song.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
That's in the world called butterfly, but there are dozens of these lullabies. But butterfly started like this.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Oh, well, you know, there's something about the themes that Beethoven was able to
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
It's something that brings people together around the piano. It's that thing that if you're at a party and you had a piano lesson once or twice in your life and you're having fun that night, you might go and play or somebody plays it and it's just so ubiquitous. It connects to something that is rare for us to have all of us in our collective memory, a song, a melody, a theme like that.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
No, no. It's something about the themes he was able to manifest that are all sitting right there. It's pre-written by the divine source or the creator. It's just sitting there in the divine stream of consciousness waiting for someone to pull it down. And he was a vessel for so many of those things that we all feel and we all want to hear, but nobody had played yet. Just that theme of thinking about
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
a minor chord, you know? And the second inversion was... Just that idea is so simple, it seems like it would be right under our nose, but the way he was able to pull it down for all time is what's exciting for me about his music in general. It has all these things that are so universal, so hardwired into our mainframe, and when you hear it, Now that to me sounds like blues.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
That feeling is connected to the human condition. It is the human condition made into sound. It's something about his music that is always reflective of our collective state and how we deal with our internal world and how we either transcend or how we fall into despair and how we then come back up again like a phoenix it just is it's connected to something that's very very fundamental in humanity
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Right. It's very foreboding. It has that sense.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
No, no, it really, I speak about his music in that way because it's not that I was thinking about him directly or his music. It's more that his music represents something that is bigger than him in the way that all of that one percentile of greats, their work represents this thing that is a universal idea that no one had pulled down from the divine subconscious yet.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
I learned as a kid, you know, one of the first things that I learned, and then I had this habit, which as evidenced by this album, I still do, of being in conversation with the composer. And once I learned something, changing things, adding themes, adding chords, and really making it my own in that way.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Well, there's a couple of things there. I think that I'm associated with joy because... i do it to a level that is is hard to come by it's i do it well and it's not something that you see often in particular when you think of performers who are in the mainstream there's there's this sense of um joy that i bring that is very very singular
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
And I enjoy that, and I think it's very important to have joy in your expression, in the expression of black American artists and artists across all cultures. But I also think that there's always been this... this underpin in my music that's coming from struggle and coming from many things that, you know, maybe transmute into joy later, but don't start that way.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
And I think there's a lot of reasons why the choice to latch on to the joyous aspects of what I presented, me to continue to deliver that to the people as an antidote to the times that we're in
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
That's one example of something that certainly leads to joy but comes from deep, deep pain and unresolved duress that our country is founded upon and many of the things that we are in debate around and the the culture clashes of our time and the the shift that is occurring right before our eyes in our time and really just thinking about
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
a theme that cuts through all that and really speaks to it at the same time. This melody, it could be a chant, it could be a prayer, it can be a hymn, it can be a war cry. It's a theme that is using the pentatonic which is the scale that I mentioned earlier that has this sort of connection to so many other cultures around the world.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
And I knew I wanted to have a sound that if I had the indigenous musicians sing it or if I had the kora players play it or if I had the slide guitar play it or if I had the violin section play it or whatever way that I wanted to orchestrate that theme, it would communicate a different layer of the story, a different part of this experience. And you hear this throughout the symphony.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
I like to call it spontaneous composition, which is this difference between improvisation and spontaneous composition. You frame it in your mind first. You map it out and you create a form and then you allow for surprise. But you're really just executing on this thing that you compose before sitting at the piano. And it can be different every time.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
it's a traveler's theme as well it's moving you know every time we perform it i don't imagine it being the same i imagine it being something that molds and shifts and and evolves with the ensemble and who's joining the orchestra and the orchestra being something that is constantly evolving it's not just a symphony orchestra it's orchestra plus and and um
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Putting this theme on the Beethoven album was something that is an ode to Beethoven and the tradition of how he transformed the symphonic tradition and brought in all of the different sounds that he brought in and the rhythmic concepts that we talked about and the melodic ubiquity of all these themes that we know and love.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
And just thinking about this, my first symphony, American Symphony, being in that tradition and in a tradition of the greats who are maybe unsung, who also wrote in connection to the American experience, William Grant Still, James Reese Europe, Florence Price, all the composers who are speaking to this over time. It's just something that is very important to me.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Yes, Terry, it was a sign because... we were doing something that needed to be done. Every time you do something that you're supposed to be doing, you're going to face some form of attack, some form of pushback. And this is the first time in the history of the hall, of Carnegie Hall, that that's happened. You know, things like that will happen.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
And that's how you know you're doing the thing that you need to be doing.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Oh, my goodness. It's funny because I looked up in the balcony in the audience and I looked down at the folks that were right near the stage and I could look in people's eyes and I could see nobody really knew me. they could sense maybe something was happening, but the majority of folks didn't know that the power went out because it was only on stage.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
So this is a moment where we're cueing the orchestra through the analog synths and the modular synthesizers, but they can't cue the orchestra because the power's out. So no one on stage, you have all these, you know, over 100 musicians sitting there looking to me for direction. No one knows what to do. So what I thought at that moment was, okay, I'll play.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
And I improvised, you know, maybe it was a true spontaneous composition that bridged to the movement that we were just about to start. It bridged to it without knowing how long I'd need to create this interlude, this bridge. I did it just the piano alone, which was completely acoustic. and then the orchestra comes in.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
So this has a bit of a structure that is on the album, but every time I play it, it's going to be different.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
No one knows that we had this complete disastrous mishap, but I was already in this mindset where, Nothing is going to stop me.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
And that's probably why I was able to play the thing that I played and not skip a beat, because there was just this series of constant pushback from the time we decided to do this piece, coupled with the fact that it's just a complete unknown whether or not Suleikha was going to make it. There was all this hoopla around my career and these incredible milestones that we worked so hard for.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
And then this ability to just now, after it all, come on stage and play this piece. Nothing was going to stop that.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Well, when you think about the blues and Beethoven's music, his music was actually deeply African, you know, rhythmically. There was this thing that's happening in his music that I really love, where he's playing in two different times at once. He's composing, and it's in a two-meter, one, two, one, two, which is like a march. And waltzes.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. So if you put the march... And the waltz together, you get a two against three, an odd against an even, which is the West African rhythm, the 6-8 rhythm that comes from Africa that leads to the American shuffle rhythm, which is the clave of the blues, if you will.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
It's the base rhythm for so many popular styles of music and styles of music since the beginning of rhythm.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
There's polyrhythms. Even in that short theme, you're hearing the two and the three. Short, short, short, long, short, short, short, long. When you put those together, it creates something that is infectious that whether he was referencing that or not, it's something that's a universal, connective, magnetic truth in music.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
It's like things that make you cry every time you hear them, things that make you dance every time you hear them. It's just something in the DNA of that sound.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Penta. You hear that in music all across time. And something about that sound gives you the feeling of the blues already. Now, when Beethoven has this. That right there. That's what we call the blue note.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
And that hadn't been invented, that hadn't been codified yet, but when I heard that in this piece as a kid, it immediately made me think about the blues that I was learning downtown from my classical lessons. So I would think about, okay, well... The blues scale that we all learn when we're children is the pentatonic scale with that added blue note.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Now, that's just one very small example of perhaps the idea that Beethoven, if he were around in the 21st century today, he probably would take these sounds, most likely would incorporate them in the music that he'd be composing today, which is a very exciting proposition.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
The rhythmic underpin of this melody carries so much musical information. It's full of inspiration. And that rhythm, that two and the three, that sound of the polyrhythm that is of the African diaspora that continues through all these different forms of music, I heard it, and I just wanted to bring it out. I wanted to take those implications and bring them out further.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
I mean, I may have. One of the things, I had this instrument.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Yes, I have my melodica everywhere I go. I did in those days, at least. It's like a harmonica and a keyboard put together. I would carry it around school all the time. And, you know, I was just a very, very ambitious, precocious teenager in New York from Louisiana in the big city now. And the world literally was my oyster. I felt like I could...
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
go out and put bands together and, you know, sometimes I'd even put acting troops together and I would combine the divisions to do projects that I dream up, you know, where I'd get dancers and actors and musicians and we would go down into the subways and we'd play for folks. I just don't think at that time they could understand the bigger vision that I saw in my head.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
So, you know, things started to get to a point where they felt I wasn't focused enough, I guess.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
Well, you know, I had a fairly easy time with some of the assignments that would, you know, I guess take some others a longer period of time to master, and I would basically sometimes sit in class, and this time I'd be there hearing music in my head, and I'd sing out loud, and These are just things that I didn't really know I was doing.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
It's part of this sort of this world that I was living in, I guess, as a defense mechanism. You know, I'd hear music and it'd sing out loud in the middle of class. And then they would think, well, what's wrong with this guy? And he's got this lot of good he's carrying around and he's doing all of these zany projects and he's. You know, he's really unique, to say the least.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
And at one point, one of my teachers had a conversation with the dean. And then there was a whole thing where everybody kind of co-signed this notion that maybe he should see someone. Maybe there's something up with this kid. He needs to go. And so I sat down. And I had an evaluation with the counseling department at Juilliard.
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Jon Batiste Almost Got Kicked Out Of Juilliard
And it was a beautiful exchange that I didn't really see as an evaluation or any sort of problem. It just was a conversation for a long time that led to the conclusion that I didn't have any issues other than that. You know, they and I mean, I'm still humbled to hear. But he says this guy is a genius. The likes of Charlie Parker, which we have haven't seen here and we're lucky to have.
Fresh Air
At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
I keep learning again and again that hope is the right response to the human condition. And I have to learn this over and over again because despair is an incredibly powerful force in my life.
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Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Perhaps the most famous line in ancient Greek thought comes from the philosopher Heraclitus, who said, You cannot step into the same river twice. That's because reality is not a static thing, but an ever-changing flux. The fluidity of life runs through flow, a marvelous animated movie from Latvia, which has already been showered with acclaim.
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Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Directed by Gintz Zalbalotis, it takes a simple premise, a sundry crew of animals get caught in a flood, and without a single word being uttered, transports us into a radiant fantasy. At once fun and affecting, Flo made me think of everything from Spirited Away and The Incredible Journey to the story of Noah and the recent floods in North Carolina.
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Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Flo centers on a slate-gray cat whose home is a big house in the forest surrounded by larger-than-life feline sculptures. It sleeps upstairs in a double bed whose emptiness offers our first inkling that there are no people about. And indeed, no humans will appear in the film.
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Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Instead, we follow this watchful, eloquent-eyed loner as it prowls around and gets chased by a pack of dogs, a pursuit interrupted by a deluge that comes whooshing towards them. the water keeps rising higher and higher. And just as the cat is about to be washed away, it's able to jump on a sailboat occupied by, of all things, a capybara.
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Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Soon they're joined by a scene-stealing lemur, who has scavenged various human knickknacks, like the mirror it keeps looking at itself in. It's like the opening of a joke. A cat, a capybara, and a lemur walk into a bar.
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Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
As the three float together on their small ark, they're joined by a golden retriever and a predatory secretary bird, which boasts a crazy beautiful headdress of feathers and a body like an eagle's glued onto a heron's legs.
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Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
This odd band of survivors seeks to ride out the flood, a dangerous enterprise that forces them to work together and leads them to rescue others in distress, even if they don't always want to. Zobelotus pays these animals the respect of observing them closely.
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Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
He deftly captures the cat's yawns, the movements of the lemur's ringed tail as it's preening, and the amiable torpor of the capybara, a creature whose meme-inducing cuteness was recently celebrated in The New Yorker by Gary Steingart. Forgoing all dialogue but using genuine animal sounds, Flo is a long way from Zootopia or Eddie Murphy's smart aleck donkey in Shrek.
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Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
While it does humanize its characters a bit, my own beloved cat Nico would sooner drown than team up with a lemur, Flo captures the way animals behave in the wild, as in the ruthless fight for dominance between two secretary birds, which leaves one of them unable to fly. The movie weaves together bursts of adventure. Your heart may pound as the cat has to swim for dear life.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
With poetic moments of transcendence, I won't spoil by describing. Like Miyazaki, Zobo Lotus uses animation to conjure a big, thrilling world of imagination. Where too much American animation feels frantic, desperate to keep our attention, Flo's images possess a kinetic elegance.
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Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
They have the alluring immersiveness of a video game, complete, alas, with a few visual glitches you won't find in Pixar. Then again, this is not a big-budget Hollywood project. It was made on the open-source software Blender and cost just $3.7 million. To put this in perspective, that's less than one-fiftieth the budget of Inside Out 2.
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Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Flow is conceived as a universal story that weaves together magic and realism. While the cat and dogs could live in our own neighborhood, the rest of the cast comes from the likes of Latin America, Africa, and Madagascar. There's even a whale from the briny deep that surges up, almost biblically, from the floodwaters.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
This whale's appearance inland is one of the film's suggestions, melancholy but never overt, that the great flood we're seeing may be a product of climate change. Yet flow is far from a political tract. Rather, it's a classic fable about learning to adapt to life's ever-changing flow, no matter how dire things may sometimes get. And like most classic fables, it offers an enduring lesson.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
A group of creatures overcome their differences and learn to help one another. It's solidarity, not selfishness, that will save them.
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Remembering David Lynch
They tell me you want to be a picture maker. Um, yes sir, I do. Why? This business, it'll rip you apart. Well, Mr. Ford, I... So what do you know about art, kid?
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Remembering David Lynch
At the top of the painting. All right, get over here. Now remember this. When the horizon's at the bottom, it's interesting. When the horizon's at the top, it's interesting. When the horizon's in the middle, it's boring as shit. Now, good luck to you, and get the f*** out of my office.
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Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
Pop culture has long had a tendency toward bloat. The catchy two-minute singles of the 1950s gave way to the laborious concept albums of the 60s. the slim, mind-blowing novels of Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, led to the doorstops of Stephen King and Neal Stephenson.
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Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
And then there's Mission Impossible, which began in 1966 as a tautly unpretentious hour-long TV series with a fantastic theme by Lalo Schifrin. In 1996, it became a 110-minute movie with a megastar actor, Tom Cruise, and an auteur director, Brian De Palma, who larded its silly story with big, gaudy action scenes.
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Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
Now, seven sequels and three decades later, we have Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning, the two-hour and 49-minute conclusion to the nearly as long Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1. Pictures so grandiose, they require a colon and an em dash just to write their titles.
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Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
Predictably, this new movie is overblown, inanely plotted, clotted with expository dialogue, and boundlessly self-congratulatory. But you know, it's also fun to watch. Flaunting its big budget, we zoot from tourist London to Norwegian snowscapes to sun-blasted South Africa, this souped-up thriller offers the irresponsible escape that most of us want from Hollywood blockbusters.
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Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
As the action begins, the world is being threatened by the Entity, a nasty piece of AI that's going to annihilate humanity in four days' time. Naturally, our hero Ethan Hunt, that's Cruise, wants to stop both the entity and the velvety villain Gabriel, played by Isai Morales, who seeks to control it. Ethan enlists his impossible mission team.
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Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
There's tech whiz Luther, that's Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg's jokey field agent Benji... and the recent addition Grace, a one-time thief played by Hayley Atwell, who joins the stream of talented B-list actresses that Cruise seems comfortable with. The story is mainly racing around, toward a gizmo hidden in a submarine, away from the CIA, which foolishly wants to stop Ethan.
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Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
Still, there's plenty of time for bombastic dialogue. Here, the righteous Luther reassures Ethan that he's doing good work. Not that Ethan needs reassuring. Reporting directly to President Angela Bassett, he's confident as ever. I need you to trust me. One last time.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
Because this is purportedly the last installment, unless it makes a fortune, of course, the final reckoning works hard to make the whole series cohere and give it emotional heft. We see flashbacks to stunts from earlier movies, Cruise looks so young, and callbacks to deaths of characters who've been lost along the way.
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Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
Yet because Mission Impossible storylines have always been unabashedly harebrained, such stabs at depth ring hollow. This isn't like the second season of Andor, in which we feel the weight of characters dying because they're sacrificing themselves for a cause. Nor does the Mission Impossible series possess any perceptible cultural resonance.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
James Bond was an icon of both the British Empire and a certain dated brand of masculinity. He helped shape our culture. Not so Ethan. Although Bond had no real inner life, sorry Daniel Craig, compared to Ethan, he's positively Dostoevskian. We at least knew 007's snobberies, cruelties, and pleasures. Gambling in Monaco, drinking martinis shaken not stirred, sleeping with women, then killing them.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
What Cruise, and therefore Ethan, lives for is eye-popping stunts. And it's been so since the first Mission Impossible had him clinging to the outside of a high-speed train, roaring through the channel from England to France.
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Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
The final reckoning boasts two gigantic action sequences, an underwater bit that could have been spectacular were Christopher McQuarrie a better director, and a genuinely bravura climax that finds Cruise holding onto the wing of a biplane as it buzzes through and above the Blyde River Canyon in South Africa. It's this scene that everyone will remember.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
And, of course, they'll talk about Cruise doing this stunt himself. Cruise has been on top for over 40 years, as long as John Wayne, longer than Cary Grant. He's not a great actor, but he is a terrific movie star. Though starting to look his age at 62, he still possesses the boyish energy and commitment of his younger self.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
Whether sprinting past Big Ben, diving into icy waters without a wetsuit, or simply letting the movie idolize him, Cruise is playing hero ball. And you know what? He's really good at it.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
No, it's a very good point. And they behave that way a lot of the time because they're not trying to get elected to anything. They're not trying to sell a program to anything. They just have to perform on the field, on the court, wherever they might happen to be, the And there is a great disdain for the media among many, if not most, in sports. And the locker room is their domain.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Now, things have changed since the 80s in that for the most part, we're pretty much banned from locker rooms nowadays. The creation of the interview room, I think, is one of the worst things that's ever happened to sports journalism. Because if you think the answers in a locker room are rehearsed and canned and cliched,
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
stepping up, giving 110%, wanting to win for my teammates, it's 50 times worse in an interview room. At least in a locker room, if you have the time and or the patience and kind of outweigh the hordes and can get with a guy one-on-one, especially if you know him a little bit, you might be able to get a little better answer than that.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
But more and more now, teams on the college level, certainly, and more and more on the professional level, are banning the media from the locker rooms after games and saying, go to an interview room and we'll bring you somebody and put them behind a microphone.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Well, I think it goes back to my first days as a reporter when I was still in college.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
It became apparent to me that the more you could see what was real as opposed to what was served up to you, whether it was in a locker room or in a practice or if you could get somebody to let you into a team meeting or if you could get an athlete away from their domain and put them in a restaurant for lunch or dinner or anything –
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
But I think I really learned about that not covering sports but covering news. When I was first at The Washington Post, I spent several years covering cops and courts and politics. And I learned from that that the less formal – The situation was the more you learned. And I do some of my best reporting without a notebook in my hands.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
When I'm just talking to someone and I ask about their family or about last night's ball game and then eventually work my way towards a real question rather than just walking up with a notebook or a tape recorder in my hands. Because when you do that, that's what you are. You're a notebook or a tape recorder. You're not another person. When you walk up and say,
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
hey, can you believe what happened in last night's game? Then you establish common ground and you become a person rather than just a reporter.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
You know, it's never been for me because what I have always done is if someone says something to me that I think might be controversial in some way or it's something I didn't know that would thus be news, I'll usually at that point I'll take out a notebook or something and I'll say, let me make sure I have this – get this right or – Do you mind if I quote you on that?
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
I don't want there to be any doubt. I don't want anybody I'm working with to be surprised. And I have only once in my career had an athlete claim that he thought he was off the record with me. And that was 30 years ago when I was a young reporter at The Post. I got sent to the home of John Riggins, the star running back who was holding out
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And he was in Lawrence, Kansas, and he was refusing to talk to anybody in the media. And I was the low guy on the totem pole at the Post. And my boss said, just go knock on John Riggins' door and see if he'll talk to you, which I did. And John Riggins basically said, get out of here. I'm not talking to anybody. And I said to him, look, John, if I go back with nothing, I'm going to be fired. Right.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And he looked at me, said, I'll call your boss and tell him that I wouldn't talk to you. And I said, that's not good enough. Can't you just tell me what it is you want? And he started talking about that it was the Redskins move and Bobby Beathard, the general manager, needed to do this and that. And I never took out a notebook. And I stood there and I asked him more questions.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And we talked for, I don't know, 10 or 12 minutes. And I went back to my car, wrote down everything I could remember and Didn't quote him specifically, but paraphrased everything that he had said to me in the story. And when another TV reporter called Riggins the next day and said, why would you talk to that guy when you're friends with us and you don't even know him?
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Riggins said, well, I thought we were off the record. And when the guy called me from the TV station and said, John said he thought you were off the record. I said, did he really think I flew to Lawrence, Kansas because I was personally curious about his contract? And that's the only time anybody has ever said to me, geez, I thought we were off the record.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
It's the hardest thing you have to do, at least for me. And I have run into it specifically, as I wrote about in the book, with Jim Valvano, who I had a very close relationship with. I would sit in his office when he was the coach at North Carolina State and had won the national championship at three o'clock in the morning and listen to him talk about looking for the next thing in his life.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And he felt as if he'd done coaching at the age of 37. And then came this scandal, for lack of a better word, at North Carolina State where the NCAA came in and investigated and Jim eventually was forced to resign. And I wrote at one point that he sounded Nixonian when he was making his excuses for what had gone on at NC State. And he was furious with me. And he said, how could you
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Write that about me. And I said, because I thought, A, I thought it was true, Jim. But beyond that, if I just blindly defended you, then when I legitimately defend you, it'll have no meaning. And he said it would have meant something to me. And that hurt because I liked Jim Valvano. And I understood the point he was making. I thought you were my friend.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And then you turned around and called me Nixonian. And it was a very hard thing for me emotionally to deal with. And we did before he died of cancer in 1993. We mended the fence. And in fact, Jim, the last time I ever spoke to him said, you were probably a better friend to me than the people around me who were telling me I hadn't done anything wrong.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
But it is a very hard line to figure out which side of it you belong on.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
You know, I don't think anybody who does what I do has ever really known Tiger. I do vividly remember the first time I ever saw Tiger Woods because it turned out to be a little bit of a harbinger in a way. He was still an amateur. He was just a kid. He was 18. He probably looked 12 at the time. He was playing in Arnold Palmer's tournament down at Bay Hill in 1994.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And I was working on A Good Walk Spoiled, my first golf book. And I was standing on the range with three players, Davis Love, Billy Andrade, Jeff Sluman. And Billy Andrade kind of tapped me on the shoulder and said, see that kid down there? And I looked down and there was this skinny kid hitting balls. And I said, yeah. And he said, that's the next one. That's Tiger Woods. And I'd heard the name.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
But I wasn't that interested, to be honest, Dave, because you hear all the time about this guy's the next one in sports. This guy's the next one in sports. I always tend to be skeptical and say, OK, show me. And as luck would have it, I happened to walk off the range a little while later. about 10 yards behind Tiger Woods.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
He was walking alone with his caddy, and there were maybe 15 or 20 kids standing behind the ropes trying to get the autographs of any player walking on or off the range. It was a practice day, and most players will stop in that circumstance and sign a few autographs. Tiger Woods put his head down and walked right between the kids, never looked left or right, and just kept going.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And I remember thinking to myself, who does this guy think he is? Well, as it turned out, he thought he was Tiger Woods. So I think he had it right. But my early memories of Tiger are that he was always programmed and his golf was overwhelming. But I remember feeling disappointed because he was obviously... very bright. He'd gone to Stanford for a couple of years.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
You could tell just by the way he reacted to things that he got things quicker than most athletes did. But he wasn't giving anything up. His father, Earl, had programmed him, don't give away anything for free. So you remember those cliches I talked about that you get in the interview room? He was a cliche machine. And if you tried to talk to him one-on-one, he really had no interest.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And the only time I really ever had a lengthy one-on-one conversation with him was in 1998 after he'd won the Masters and had become a superstar at 21. And he actually reached out to me because he was, I think, surprised, I guess, that I was one of the very few people
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
members of the media who was at all critical of his behavior none of us could criticize his golf and other players had told him look John's a pretty fair guy if you've got a problem with him you should sit down and talk to him about it and to his everlasting credit he did he went to dinner at a restaurant in San Diego and talked for about four hours
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And it was very intense because Tiger was very smart, came right at you when he disagreed with you. We argued a lot about his father.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Yes, exactly. And in fact, what I had done was I had compared him in a piece I'd written in Newsweek to Stefano Capriati, who was the father of Jennifer Capriati, who you might remember years ago came on the tennis tour, took it by storm. She was going to be the next Chris Everett. Her father was making deals for her left and right when she was 13 years old.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And I compared Earl Woods to Stefano Capriati, which infuriated both Tiger and Earl. And I remember saying to him, if your father doesn't like the spotlight, why did he write a book about how he made you into Tiger Woods? And Tiger said, well, you know, so many people asked him about it. He thought it'd be easier just to write a book. And I said, really? Then why did he write the second book?
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Because there was a sequel. Tiger looked at me and he smiled. He said, okay, you got me on that one. But it was one of the few concessions he made the entire evening. We argued about a lot of different things, but it was a fascinating experience. And I hoped...
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
that it would sort of be a jumping off point where Tiger and I would have a relationship where even if we disagreed, we would talk about it. And it lasted for a little while that way. And then I really believe to this day that his father said to him, you stay away from him. I don't like him. I don't want you talking to him.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And that was really kind of the end of any one-on-one other than hi, Tiger, hi, John, between the two of us.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Well, more accurately, I think it was that I knew back in those days that I could go into the locker room. And because Barry Lorge, my colleague from The Washington Post, was writing a lead and I was doing the secondary story, the sidebar, I had a little more time. And John had come in. He just won the U.S. Open. He'd beaten Bjorn Borg in five sets.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
This was a few months after their historic five-set match at Wimbledon. And Borg had come back from two sets down to tie it at two sets apiece. And I'll never forget sitting there in New York City. John McEnroe grew up less than five miles from the stadium in Flushing. And the entire crowd was on its feet cheering for Borg. And I couldn't imagine what that felt like for McEnroe.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And he somehow won the fifth set consistently. came in, gave kind of a desultory press conference. Even McEnroe can be desultory in a press conference. And I thought, well, maybe if I go back to the locker room, I can get something. I just wanted to ask him one question.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
How did that feel at that moment at the end of the fourth set when 20,000 people were cheering for a guy from Sweden in New York City? And I walked back in and McEnroe was the only guy in the locker room because the tournament was over. Borg had left by car as soon as the award ceremony was over. And it was just McEnroe and me in the locker room. At that point, I hadn't met him. I was very young.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
You know, the kid reporter at The Washington Post. And I introduced myself and John kind of looked at me like, yeah. And I said, I just want to ask you one question. And I asked him the question about how it felt at the end of that fourth set. And Dave, he just went off. He said, could you believe that? Could you? Do you think if that match was in Sweden, there'd be one person pulling for me?
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
I know I misbehave and I understand why people get up. I didn't ask another question for 30 minutes. The only challenge was I didn't have a tape recorder was trying to write everything down because he was talking so fast. So I ended up I was supposed to write a 16 inch sidebar. And I came back and told Barry Lorge what I'd gotten.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And he called the desk and said, you got to get John some more space. And I ended up writing 40 inches and they ran every inch of it. So a lot of times people have asked me, well, how did you get Knight to give you the access? How did you get this guy to give you the access? The answer almost always is because I asked. It's really that simple.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Absolutely, yes. But there's an element of no. And the absolute yes is, of course, they're just games. And it's not life and death. And I wince every time there's a genuine tragedy connected to sports when people say, well, this puts life in perspective. Because you know what? It doesn't. The next day, fans are going to be screaming about a losing coach or a bad call or something like that.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
It's human nature. It's sports human nature. And yes, I want to say enough already. But there's another part of me, Dave, that believes sports does play a very important role in our society because it does give people a place to go away from the often harsh realities of life. And I... This was driven home to me in a very personal way when my mother died in 1993.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And she died very suddenly and she died young. And it was the worst thing I've ever been through in my life. And I went to bed every night and I couldn't sleep. I just couldn't possibly sleep. And the only thing that distracted me from thinking about my mom was to think about games, to think about games.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Games I'd played in as a kid or swim meets I'd been in as a kid and games I'd covered and stories I'd been a part of and people I'd met in sports and trying. I would literally sit there and try to remember every single play in game five of the 1969 World Series when my beloved and now pathetic Mets beat the Baltimore Orioles. And that got me through that period in my life.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Okay, let's continue. Hands on buzzers. Mayor of New York. Yes, yes, yes. He's a Jew, Bob. Yes. That's right. Ed Koch is a Jew. Ten points.
Fresh Air
'Hacks' Returns! With Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Paul W. Downs
I keep learning again and again that hope is the right response to the human condition. And I have to learn this over and over again because despair is an incredibly powerful force in my life.
Fresh Air
Remembering British Singer Marianne Faithfull
It's one measure of Latin America's arduous history that it spawns so many books and movies about dictatorship. Over the years, I've been through scads of them, from novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa to the landmark documentaries of Patricio Guzman to Hollywood thrillers like Missing and Under Fire. What they share is the awareness that history hurts.
Fresh Air
Remembering British Singer Marianne Faithfull
Few films have shown this with more delicate intelligence than I'm Still Here, a moving new drama set during Brazil's military dictatorship that began with an American-backed coup in 1964 and ended in 1985. Based on a memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Walter Salas's movie is no political tract or manipulative tearjerker, although it may make you cry.
Fresh Air
Remembering British Singer Marianne Faithfull
Exploring the dictatorship indirectly, I'm Still Here tells the heroic true story of a wife and mother who steers her family through the rapids of tyranny. The story begins idyllically on Ipanema Beach in 1970, when we first meet the Paiva family. The father is Rubens, played with easy charm by Sultan Melo, a warm-hearted man who was a congressman before the coup.
Fresh Air
Remembering British Singer Marianne Faithfull
And by Eunice, that's Fernanda Torres, a rather traditional-seeming wife who bakes great soufflés and wrangles their five high-energy children. Theirs is a happy upper-middle-class family whose home is a kind of Eden, complete with a view of the beach.
Fresh Air
Remembering British Singer Marianne Faithfull
Buzzing with openness to friends, to ideas, to laughter, to music —the movie's soundtrack is fabulous— their house is Brazil, as we might dream of it being. Yet such openness is precisely what the junta mistrusts. It tortures or disappears anyone it considers a threat to its notion of an orderly, anti-communist society.
Fresh Air
Remembering British Singer Marianne Faithfull
Even as the family dances, plays foosball, and amiably bickers, we await the dreaded knock on the door. It comes. Rubens is taken away for questioning, security men occupy the house, and Eunice herself is called in for a nasty interrogation. Rubens' disappearance is the turning point in Eunice's life.
Fresh Air
Remembering British Singer Marianne Faithfull
Over the next months, in fact the next decades, she transforms her practical maternal virtues into something mighty. Channeling her grief, she becomes a stronger, tougher, wiser person who protects her kids, digs into the cruel facts of her husband's fate, and learns to fight for other people's rights as well.
Fresh Air
Remembering British Singer Marianne Faithfull
From the start, Eunice is a woman of impressive self-command, and the movie shares that virtue. Silas has always been a gifted director, but earlier films like Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries were so busy being artful and important, they often felt impersonal. Here, you feel his profound emotional engagement. Salas grew up in the same milieu as the Paivas.
Fresh Air
Remembering British Singer Marianne Faithfull
Indeed, he hung out with the kids, and you feel his affection for that family and its values. He captures them, and 1970 Rio, in a way that feels loving and true. Salas does a superb job of depicting how the dictatorship colored daily life. We see how things could often appear normal, with fun at the beach and happy visits to the ice cream shop.
Fresh Air
Remembering British Singer Marianne Faithfull
Yet without laying on the violence or heavy-handed moralism, even the secret policemen we meet aren't monsters, Salas also conjures a pervasive atmosphere of anxiety.
Fresh Air
Remembering British Singer Marianne Faithfull
We feel it in the sounds of helicopters hovering overhead, the TV newscasts filled with lies, the spasms of fearful mistrust that grow between friends, and the way that once your family is singled out, you're treated differently out in the world. Like Brazil, their house of freedom is now in lockdown.
Fresh Air
Remembering British Singer Marianne Faithfull
The counterweight to the dictatorship is the unglamorous strength of Eunice, who goes from making soufflés to becoming at 48 a lawyer who helps make Brazil a better place to live. She's played with surpassing brilliance by Torres, whose performance is so subtle, so internal, and so quietly shattering, that in a just world, she'd win all this year's big acting awards.
Fresh Air
Remembering British Singer Marianne Faithfull
Registering each flicker of emotion as precisely as a seismograph, Torres captures Eunice's pain and horror at her husband's fate, but also her endurance, her faith that life goes on. a faith that time vindicates. Even as it's buffeted by misfortune, the family survives and thrives. At one point, a newspaper photographer comes to take a picture of the family and tells them to look somber.
Fresh Air
Remembering British Singer Marianne Faithfull
After all, Rubens is missing. But Eunice insists that everyone smile. She will not let them face the world looking beaten.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And do you think it was being made even stronger by the fact there were four of you bouncing off one another?
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
I did audition, and I remember the process was – very wild for me because I was a huge fan of the English version. I watched it all the time. And when they asked me to audition for this, they actually sent the sides for Dwight. And there was something very weird. Again, I hadn't done anything, but there was something in me that just said, if I go in, I want to go with my best foot forward.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
I don't feel like I'm Dwight. I feel like I'm more Jim. And so my manager at the time called and said, you know, he doesn't want to go in for, Dwight, he wants to go in for Jim. And they said, great, then he won't come in at all. And so there was about three weeks there where I thought the role was gone, the opportunity was gone.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
And then they called and they said, okay, he can come in and read for Jim, which was pretty amazing. And the first audition went pretty well. And then they flew in the producers from LA to New York. And I'll never forget this day. I was sitting in line. It was a It was a bit of a bizarro alternate universe feeling sitting next to six other people who looked exactly like you.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
And we were all going in for the role of Jim. And they went through the line of the six guys and I was the last person. And the casting director came up and said, you know, we're just going to take a break for lunch. And in my head I thought, oh, just one more would be great. I was so nervous. So I watched, you know, 50 to 60 people go downstairs. It was at 30 Rock.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
And so they went down to the restaurant, came back up with salads and sandwiches. All these people came back. And one guy sat across from me and said, are you nervous? And I said, oh, no, you either get these things or you don't. What I'm really nervous about is them screwing up a perfect show. The Americans always have the ability to screw up these amazing British shows.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
And I'm afraid this is going to be another one of them. And he said, oh, great. I'm Greg Daniels. I'm the executive producer. And I genuinely almost threw up right on his shoes.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
No, he later said honesty is the best policy. It's the reason you got the role, which I think he's still just being nice. I won't dare try it again by going into auditions now saying I think this movie is going to be horrible and then see if they give me the role.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
That's a really good question. I mean, I think we were so honored to be a part of that relationship because we have a weird relationship with our fans because a lot of people say, We are our fans, everything. But we literally get to say that because we were going to be canceled the first two seasons, definitely.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
Every week, I remember this guy, Jeff Engold, who worked at NBC, he came every week to say, listen, I love this show. It's just not working. We're going to cancel it. And it was at the time of iTunes. And I remember our fans were actually buying the show when they could watch it for free, which was a huge revelation, obviously.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
So because they were buying the show and not watching it on NBC, it showed people that there was a whole new audience that was loving the show so much that they'd actually spend money. So all that to say, we were so involved with our fans from the very beginning. And when I went around and bumped into people who were always so kind about the show, I They were genuinely moved by this relationship.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
There was something that everybody was connecting to this sort of will he won't he type of thing of whether or not I get up the guts to ask her out in the beginning and then followed us along as if we were part of their family or living some version of their lives. For me, I think it was a big responsibility to be a member of that couple. And I loved every single moment of it.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
It will always be one of the most, if not the most, special relationship I will have on screen.