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"content": "\u003cp>Cue “Changes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Warner Chappell Music has bought the publishing rights to David Bowie’s catalog of songs for what may be more than $250 million, according to some reports. The musician died almost exactly five years ago, on Jan. 10, 2016, after a diagnosis of liver cancer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This fantastic pact with the David Bowie estate opens up a universe of opportunities to take his extraordinary music into dynamic new places,” enthused WCM’s co-chair and COO, Carianne Marshall \u003ca href=\"https://www.wmg.com/news/warner-chappell-acquires-david-bowie-music-publishing-catalog-36046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">in a statement\u003c/a>. “This isn’t merely a catalog, but a living, breathing collection of timeless songs that are as powerful and resonant today as they were when they were first written.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13898899']The announcement follows a string of similar ones over the past two years; Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Stevie Nicks and Neil Young are just some of the stars who have recently sold off substantial rights to their music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(It should be noted: There are huge differences between royalties for songwriting and performance. Some of these deals are just for publishing, as with the Bowie deal; others also include the original recordings, known as masters.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Springsteen sold his entire back catalog—including songwriting and recordings—to Sony Music Group, according to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.sonymusic.com/sonymusic/smg-announces-acquisition-of-bruce-springsteens-music/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Dec. 16 announcement\u003c/a>. Industry reports placed the purchase at north of $500 million.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even before the official announcement of the purchase in May, Sony Music Group’s chairman, Rob Stringer, told investors he’s spent about $1.5 billion just on music acquisitions since the beginning of the year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Including rights to some of the most iconic artists of all time, such as Paul Simon,” he gloated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13907684\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13907684\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2022/01/gettyimages-1352185071_slide-d75ec374d0205a842bd02f672bca8400d540b918-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/01/gettyimages-1352185071_slide-d75ec374d0205a842bd02f672bca8400d540b918-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/01/gettyimages-1352185071_slide-d75ec374d0205a842bd02f672bca8400d540b918-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/01/gettyimages-1352185071_slide-d75ec374d0205a842bd02f672bca8400d540b918-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/01/gettyimages-1352185071_slide-d75ec374d0205a842bd02f672bca8400d540b918-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/01/gettyimages-1352185071_slide-d75ec374d0205a842bd02f672bca8400d540b918-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/01/gettyimages-1352185071_slide-d75ec374d0205a842bd02f672bca8400d540b918-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/01/gettyimages-1352185071_slide-d75ec374d0205a842bd02f672bca8400d540b918-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bruce Springsteen onstage in New York, November 2021. \u003ccite>(Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for SUFH)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://people.miami.edu/profile/selton@miami.edu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Serona Elton\u003c/a> used to work with the major labels. Now she’s a professor and associate dean at the \u003ca href=\"https://www.frost.miami.edu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">University of Miami Frost School of Music\u003c/a>. She compares being a celebrity musician with a catalog of hits to owning property someplace like Austin, Texas. “It’s scorching hot,” she exclaims. “Hot, hot, hot!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All of a sudden the market is crazy and everyone’s paying ridiculous sums of money,” she says. “And people worry it’s a bubble. Maybe it’s the right time to sell.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But we’re talking about huge musicians who are not exactly starving artists, and famously careful about creative control. Why sell off so much of their precious back catalogs?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The pandemic is part of it,” explains \u003ca href=\"http://www.tatianacirisano.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Tatiana Cirisano\u003c/a>, a music analyst at \u003ca href=\"https://www.midiaresearch.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">MIDiA Research\u003c/a>. “Touring has been stalled for some time. It could be stalled again. ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_12168401']Even Springsteen took a hit when it came to revenues from live performances and touring last year. And, Cirisano points out, these musicians’ accountants know very well that capital gains taxes may change unfavorably for people holding such assets. Moreover—to be blunt—many of these musicians are senior citizens. They’re planning their estates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When \u003ca href=\"https://www.universalmusic.com/universal-music-publishing-group-acquires-bob-dylans-entire-catalog-of-songs/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Bob Dylan sold his entire songwriting catalog\u003c/a> to Universal Music Publishing Group last year, it included music he’d written more than 50 years ago. So he’s taking a lump sum now, rather than counting on royalties from whenever “Mr. Tambourine Man” goes viral on whatever platform might be most popular in a few decades. Even younger artists like Shakira and Calvin Harris recently sold parts of their back catalogs because corporations are paying so much for them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rob Stringer of Sony Music Group told investors this spring not to worry about the price of these acquisitions. Stocks go up and down, but lucrative music rights feel safer, he noted, due to Spotify, Apple and other streaming and subscription services.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The number of users of paid music streaming services went up by almost 100 million in 2020 to 443 million globally, ” he explained. “Many research analysts are projecting this figure to well exceed one billion by 2030. In the music publishing market, streaming is driving similar sustained growth. The publishing industry achieved its seventh straight year of consecutive expansion, rising 5.2 percent in 2020,” he continued.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Synergy is also the name of the game here; when Sony buys up Springsteen’s music, they can use it more easily in movies and TV made by Sony studios. Other artists on Sony labels can sample or cover his songs, and whenever a Bruce Springsteen biopic comes out, you can bet a Sony movie studio will make it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=David+Bowie+joins+constellation+of+stars+selling+off+back+catalogs+for+galactic+sums&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Nicks recently sold off their back catalogs. Why forgo creative control?",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Cue “Changes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Warner Chappell Music has bought the publishing rights to David Bowie’s catalog of songs for what may be more than $250 million, according to some reports. The musician died almost exactly five years ago, on Jan. 10, 2016, after a diagnosis of liver cancer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This fantastic pact with the David Bowie estate opens up a universe of opportunities to take his extraordinary music into dynamic new places,” enthused WCM’s co-chair and COO, Carianne Marshall \u003ca href=\"https://www.wmg.com/news/warner-chappell-acquires-david-bowie-music-publishing-catalog-36046\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">in a statement\u003c/a>. “This isn’t merely a catalog, but a living, breathing collection of timeless songs that are as powerful and resonant today as they were when they were first written.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The announcement follows a string of similar ones over the past two years; Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Stevie Nicks and Neil Young are just some of the stars who have recently sold off substantial rights to their music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(It should be noted: There are huge differences between royalties for songwriting and performance. Some of these deals are just for publishing, as with the Bowie deal; others also include the original recordings, known as masters.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Springsteen sold his entire back catalog—including songwriting and recordings—to Sony Music Group, according to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.sonymusic.com/sonymusic/smg-announces-acquisition-of-bruce-springsteens-music/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Dec. 16 announcement\u003c/a>. Industry reports placed the purchase at north of $500 million.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even before the official announcement of the purchase in May, Sony Music Group’s chairman, Rob Stringer, told investors he’s spent about $1.5 billion just on music acquisitions since the beginning of the year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Including rights to some of the most iconic artists of all time, such as Paul Simon,” he gloated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13907684\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13907684\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2022/01/gettyimages-1352185071_slide-d75ec374d0205a842bd02f672bca8400d540b918-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/01/gettyimages-1352185071_slide-d75ec374d0205a842bd02f672bca8400d540b918-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/01/gettyimages-1352185071_slide-d75ec374d0205a842bd02f672bca8400d540b918-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/01/gettyimages-1352185071_slide-d75ec374d0205a842bd02f672bca8400d540b918-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/01/gettyimages-1352185071_slide-d75ec374d0205a842bd02f672bca8400d540b918-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/01/gettyimages-1352185071_slide-d75ec374d0205a842bd02f672bca8400d540b918-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/01/gettyimages-1352185071_slide-d75ec374d0205a842bd02f672bca8400d540b918-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/01/gettyimages-1352185071_slide-d75ec374d0205a842bd02f672bca8400d540b918-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bruce Springsteen onstage in New York, November 2021. \u003ccite>(Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for SUFH)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://people.miami.edu/profile/selton@miami.edu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Serona Elton\u003c/a> used to work with the major labels. Now she’s a professor and associate dean at the \u003ca href=\"https://www.frost.miami.edu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">University of Miami Frost School of Music\u003c/a>. She compares being a celebrity musician with a catalog of hits to owning property someplace like Austin, Texas. “It’s scorching hot,” she exclaims. “Hot, hot, hot!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All of a sudden the market is crazy and everyone’s paying ridiculous sums of money,” she says. “And people worry it’s a bubble. Maybe it’s the right time to sell.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But we’re talking about huge musicians who are not exactly starving artists, and famously careful about creative control. Why sell off so much of their precious back catalogs?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The pandemic is part of it,” explains \u003ca href=\"http://www.tatianacirisano.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Tatiana Cirisano\u003c/a>, a music analyst at \u003ca href=\"https://www.midiaresearch.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">MIDiA Research\u003c/a>. “Touring has been stalled for some time. It could be stalled again. ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Even Springsteen took a hit when it came to revenues from live performances and touring last year. And, Cirisano points out, these musicians’ accountants know very well that capital gains taxes may change unfavorably for people holding such assets. Moreover—to be blunt—many of these musicians are senior citizens. They’re planning their estates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When \u003ca href=\"https://www.universalmusic.com/universal-music-publishing-group-acquires-bob-dylans-entire-catalog-of-songs/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Bob Dylan sold his entire songwriting catalog\u003c/a> to Universal Music Publishing Group last year, it included music he’d written more than 50 years ago. So he’s taking a lump sum now, rather than counting on royalties from whenever “Mr. Tambourine Man” goes viral on whatever platform might be most popular in a few decades. Even younger artists like Shakira and Calvin Harris recently sold parts of their back catalogs because corporations are paying so much for them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rob Stringer of Sony Music Group told investors this spring not to worry about the price of these acquisitions. Stocks go up and down, but lucrative music rights feel safer, he noted, due to Spotify, Apple and other streaming and subscription services.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The number of users of paid music streaming services went up by almost 100 million in 2020 to 443 million globally, ” he explained. “Many research analysts are projecting this figure to well exceed one billion by 2030. In the music publishing market, streaming is driving similar sustained growth. The publishing industry achieved its seventh straight year of consecutive expansion, rising 5.2 percent in 2020,” he continued.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Synergy is also the name of the game here; when Sony buys up Springsteen’s music, they can use it more easily in movies and TV made by Sony studios. Other artists on Sony labels can sample or cover his songs, and whenever a Bruce Springsteen biopic comes out, you can bet a Sony movie studio will make it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=David+Bowie+joins+constellation+of+stars+selling+off+back+catalogs+for+galactic+sums&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Betty White, a Beloved Icon and Actress Since the Beginning of TV, Has Died at Age 99",
"headTitle": "Betty White, a Beloved Icon and Actress Since the Beginning of TV, Has Died at Age 99 | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Betty White was on TV since \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2014/11/02/360425512/betty-white-the-golden-girl-from-the-golden-days-of-television\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the beginning of TV\u003c/a>. And in an industry where it’s often about being young and hot, White got more popular the older she got. White’s agent, Jeff Witjas, first confirmed the death of the widely beloved actress to \u003ca href=\"https://people.com/tv/betty-white-the-golden-girls-and-hot-in-cleveland-star-dead-at-99/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>People\u003c/em>\u003c/a> magazine on Friday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>White was best known for two characters: The first was Sue Ann Nivens from the \u003cem>Mary Tyler Moore Show\u003c/em>. White called the character “your sickeningly sweet neighborhood nymphomaniac.” And then there was the naïve Rose Nylund on \u003cem>The Golden Girls\u003c/em>, whose greatest disappointment was losing her hometown’s Butter Queen pageant due to “churn tampering.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>White often played characters that seemed innocent on the surface. But underneath, there was something mischievous, even sexual going on. Hosting \u003cem>Saturday Night Live\u003c/em>, she dropped double entendres during a spoof of NPR called “Delicious Dish,” joking that “my muffin hasn’t had a cherry since 1939.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_tVJ2rHHSA\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>White was like a maiden aunt who loved to cut loose and say something outrageous, says Barry Monush. He’s a researcher at the Paley Center for Media. “I mean, that’s the type of relative, everybody loves relatives like that, the aunt who comes over and speaks her mind, you know, and yet is sweet at the same time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And White had been a part of the family—so to speak—for a long time. She was born January 17, 1922, into a family that loved outdoor activities like camping and hiking. Her parents also loved animals, and White was passionate about animal advocacy work throughout her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a young woman she got involved with local theater, radio, and eventually the brand new medium of television, co-hosting a live variety show in LA in the late 40s—for five hours a day. In the 1950s White helped create a sitcom called \u003cem>Life with Elizabeth\u003c/em>; she was the star and the producer. And all through her career, she had a constant side-gig as “the first lady of game shows.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I love games and I love game shows,” she once said. “I think it’s good mental exercise. I think it keeps everybody kind of alert and kind of on his toes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She was charming, funny, and a good improviser on shows like \u003cem>What’s My Line\u003c/em>, \u003cem>Password\u003c/em>, \u003cem>The Match Game\u003c/em>, and \u003cem>Pyramid\u003c/em>. She even found love on the game show circuit, marrying the host of \u003cem>Password\u003c/em>, Allen Ludden.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Getting older was good for White’s career. She got her role on \u003cem>The Mary Tyler Moore Show\u003c/em> at age 51. From 63 to 70 she was one of the Golden Girls. And she never stopped after that, doing TV shows, sitcoms, movies, commercials, and live celebrity appearances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Towards the end of her life you could say she cashed in big on another role—the role of Betty White. She was in her late 80s when she did a commercial for Snickers during the 2010 Super Bowl. In it, White is playing some rough and tumble football with the guys. She’s a mess on the field; she misses a throw and makes a rude remark about her opponent’s girlfriend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MbXGDKFC4A\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That commercial launched her most recent success, and it showed that people of all ages seemed to be wild about White. In fact, she got the gig hosting \u003cem>Saturday Night Live\u003c/em> because of her younger fans, who launched a Facebook campaign to get her on the show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Barry Monush says White had a certain coolness factor. “There’s just something about her where people are on her side. And they love that she’s in there kicking it at 90 years old.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that long career did have a down side. She’d been a widow since her husband’s death in 1981. And she outlived many of the people she knew and loved; in 2010, she choked up during an interview for \u003cem>Inside the Actors Studio\u003c/em> when the conversation turned to the three other Golden Girls, who have all died. “You lop three members of your family off and you just… you never get over it,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite that sadness, White almost always kept things funny and upbeat. In a memoir, White wrote that humor is all about rhythm. And she had outstanding timing—in her individual performances, and with her entire career.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That helped her roll with the punches throughout the decades, and made her popular and well-loved from her 20s to her 90s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHEcaz-L7LA\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Betty+White%2C+a+beloved+icon+and+actress+since+the+beginning+of+TV%2C+has+died+at+age+99&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "TV favors the young, but Betty White only got more famous—and more beloved—as she got older.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Betty White was on TV since \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2014/11/02/360425512/betty-white-the-golden-girl-from-the-golden-days-of-television\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the beginning of TV\u003c/a>. And in an industry where it’s often about being young and hot, White got more popular the older she got. White’s agent, Jeff Witjas, first confirmed the death of the widely beloved actress to \u003ca href=\"https://people.com/tv/betty-white-the-golden-girls-and-hot-in-cleveland-star-dead-at-99/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>People\u003c/em>\u003c/a> magazine on Friday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>White was best known for two characters: The first was Sue Ann Nivens from the \u003cem>Mary Tyler Moore Show\u003c/em>. White called the character “your sickeningly sweet neighborhood nymphomaniac.” And then there was the naïve Rose Nylund on \u003cem>The Golden Girls\u003c/em>, whose greatest disappointment was losing her hometown’s Butter Queen pageant due to “churn tampering.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>White often played characters that seemed innocent on the surface. But underneath, there was something mischievous, even sexual going on. Hosting \u003cem>Saturday Night Live\u003c/em>, she dropped double entendres during a spoof of NPR called “Delicious Dish,” joking that “my muffin hasn’t had a cherry since 1939.”\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/F_tVJ2rHHSA'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/F_tVJ2rHHSA'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>White was like a maiden aunt who loved to cut loose and say something outrageous, says Barry Monush. He’s a researcher at the Paley Center for Media. “I mean, that’s the type of relative, everybody loves relatives like that, the aunt who comes over and speaks her mind, you know, and yet is sweet at the same time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And White had been a part of the family—so to speak—for a long time. She was born January 17, 1922, into a family that loved outdoor activities like camping and hiking. Her parents also loved animals, and White was passionate about animal advocacy work throughout her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a young woman she got involved with local theater, radio, and eventually the brand new medium of television, co-hosting a live variety show in LA in the late 40s—for five hours a day. In the 1950s White helped create a sitcom called \u003cem>Life with Elizabeth\u003c/em>; she was the star and the producer. And all through her career, she had a constant side-gig as “the first lady of game shows.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I love games and I love game shows,” she once said. “I think it’s good mental exercise. I think it keeps everybody kind of alert and kind of on his toes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She was charming, funny, and a good improviser on shows like \u003cem>What’s My Line\u003c/em>, \u003cem>Password\u003c/em>, \u003cem>The Match Game\u003c/em>, and \u003cem>Pyramid\u003c/em>. She even found love on the game show circuit, marrying the host of \u003cem>Password\u003c/em>, Allen Ludden.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Getting older was good for White’s career. She got her role on \u003cem>The Mary Tyler Moore Show\u003c/em> at age 51. From 63 to 70 she was one of the Golden Girls. And she never stopped after that, doing TV shows, sitcoms, movies, commercials, and live celebrity appearances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Towards the end of her life you could say she cashed in big on another role—the role of Betty White. She was in her late 80s when she did a commercial for Snickers during the 2010 Super Bowl. In it, White is playing some rough and tumble football with the guys. She’s a mess on the field; she misses a throw and makes a rude remark about her opponent’s girlfriend.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/3MbXGDKFC4A'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/3MbXGDKFC4A'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>That commercial launched her most recent success, and it showed that people of all ages seemed to be wild about White. In fact, she got the gig hosting \u003cem>Saturday Night Live\u003c/em> because of her younger fans, who launched a Facebook campaign to get her on the show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Barry Monush says White had a certain coolness factor. “There’s just something about her where people are on her side. And they love that she’s in there kicking it at 90 years old.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that long career did have a down side. She’d been a widow since her husband’s death in 1981. And she outlived many of the people she knew and loved; in 2010, she choked up during an interview for \u003cem>Inside the Actors Studio\u003c/em> when the conversation turned to the three other Golden Girls, who have all died. “You lop three members of your family off and you just… you never get over it,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite that sadness, White almost always kept things funny and upbeat. In a memoir, White wrote that humor is all about rhythm. And she had outstanding timing—in her individual performances, and with her entire career.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That helped her roll with the punches throughout the decades, and made her popular and well-loved from her 20s to her 90s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/cHEcaz-L7LA'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/cHEcaz-L7LA'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Betty+White%2C+a+beloved+icon+and+actress+since+the+beginning+of+TV%2C+has+died+at+age+99&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "50 Wonderful Things From 2021: The Great Cultural Moments We’ll Remember",
"headTitle": "50 Wonderful Things From 2021: The Great Cultural Moments We’ll Remember | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>I’ve been making 50 Wonderful Things lists since 2010. These are lists of big and small things, important and fleeting things, things that stuck with me and things I almost forgot until I looked back on the year. Both last year and this year, it has been challenging to put together a list like this, because the world in general and the art world in particular still struggle with the effects of the pandemic and all manner of resulting, cascading challenges. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it seemed more important than ever to remind myself that however I felt in 2021, other people’s creativity—whether profound or profoundly silly—kept me company, lifted me up, taught and changed me. So here are 50 Wonderful Things (and, as always, these are pop-culture things only) from 2021.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside tag='2021-recapped' label='2021 Recapped']1. Troy Kotsur’s performance as the father in the charming \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/08/13/1027033602/coda-will-yank-shamelessly-on-your-heartstrings-but-its-very-good-at-it\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">film festival favorite\u003c/a> \u003cem>CODA\u003c/em>is a funny, warm, fresh presentation of a loving parent who is flawed, devoted and mischievous. And, not for nothing, it presents him as still having a great sex life with his wife, played by the also wonderful Marlee Matlin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>2. The \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/01/13/956017123/need-a-break-the-pets-and-vets-of-all-creatures-great-and-small-might-hit-the-sp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">purely calming pleasures\u003c/a> of the PBS update of \u003cem>All Creatures Great And Small\u003c/em> were a moment of deep exhalation at a time in January when everything was cold and isolated and I was hanging on by a thread. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>3. Very few people got to see the pilot of a series called \u003cem>These Days\u003c/em>, in which William Jackson Harper and Marianne Rendón played a pandemic pair flirting over Zoom. But I saw it at Sundance, and I am here to tell you that while it seems not to have gone anywhere, before Harper was blowing minds with his performance as a sexy romantic comedy lead in \u003cem>Love Life\u003c/em> on HBO Max, he was just divine in this little experimental project that I didn’t forget all year. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_13899714']4. \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13899714/summer-of-soul-celebrates-a-1969-black-cultural-festival-eclipsed-by-woodstock\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Summer of Soul\u003c/a>\u003c/em> is easy to love and admire just for its richness as a historical document and for the opportunity to watch so many brilliant performers work. But something about its particular mix of performers across generations and genres made it even more than that—it’s a piece about the nature of art and community. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>5. I could not imagine a successful film adaptation of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/01/22/959305116/in-of-itself-is-a-study-of-identity-and-magic\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Derek DelGaudio’s magic-storytelling-interactive theater piece \u003cem>In & Of Itself\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. But the adaptation that aired on Hulu is beautiful and makes the points that the show makes, even if it has to come at them in a different way. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>6. I watched a \u003cem>ton\u003c/em> of Rachael Ray this year. So much. (So very much.) And I found her at all times to be easy to follow, friendly, great company, and—not for nothing—awfully good at explaining how to make simple but satisfying food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>7. My friend Alan Sepinwall came up with a swell idea for a podcast: \u003cem>Too Long; Didn’t Watch\u003c/em>. In it, he sits down with various actors who have never seen a particular show and has them watch only the very first and very last episodes of the series. If I could only recommend one episode, it would be the \u003ca href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/paul-scheer-watches-dexter/id1547322974?i=1000512226328\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">first-season finale\u003c/a>, in which Paul Scheer watches the first and last episodes of \u003cem>Dexter\u003c/em>. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>8. A keeper from almost the precise moment of transition from last year to this year: a (seemingly) (allegedly) very drunk Andy Cohen \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/lindaholmes/status/1345009723809161218?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ripping a strip off Mayor Bill de Blasio\u003c/a> on New Year’s Eve on CNN was one of my true highlights. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>9. Danielle Henderson’s memoir \u003cem>The Ugly Cry\u003c/em> is one that I expected to love, because I know Danielle a bit, enough to know she is smart and funny and very wise. But still, the book surprised me with its blend of profound love (especially for her grandmother, maybe the most indelible and unforgettable character I met in a book all year) and deep pain and belly laughs. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>10. I had a deeply complicated relationship with the Apple TV+ drama \u003cem>The Morning Show\u003c/em>. Much of its second season was messy and weird and very strangely written. But! In the first few minutes of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1051579864/morning-show-recap-season-2-episode-8-after-a-crash-a-lot-of-questions\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the eighth episode\u003c/a>, it delightfully displayed the show it tries to be and sometimes is: strange and darkly funny, full of bad people presented as the comic weirdos they are. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>11. This year, NPR endeavored to fix the problem of a very specific listener: Leo, who thought \u003cem>All Things Considered\u003c/em> needed \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965953078/8-year-old-calls-out-npr-for-lack-of-dinosaur-stories\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">more dinosaurs\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>12. The movie \u003cem>Together Together\u003c/em>, starring Ed Helms and Patti Harrison as an aspiring single dad and the surrogate he hires, got a lot of things right. But one of its most refreshing qualities is its focus on how the setting and enforcing of boundaries can, perhaps counterintuitively, be a critical part of becoming and remaining close to people. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_13891309']13. Like most television that’s genuinely ambitious, \u003cem>WandaVision\u003c/em> didn’t manage to do everything right. But in exploring the way that television, as a form, could be \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/03/05/973989043/wandavision-wraps-a-season-that-was-never-what-it-seemed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">satirized and played with as a way to talk about trauma\u003c/a> and its aftereffects, it continued the ongoing experimentation with what a superhero show can be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>14. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The weird moments from the televised ceremony were the only reasons to keep the Golden Globes around. So let us all pause to appreciate Jane Fonda yelling, “Happy birthday, Tommy Tune!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>15. It’s been interesting to watch the very different reactions to the fourth season of \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em>, particularly given the widespread critical sense that the show has lost steam steadily over its run. For me, while I have often found \u003cem>Handmaid’s\u003c/em> flawed and frustrating, the catharsis of the eighth episode of the season, called “Testimony,” was a moment I would not have missed. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>16. A \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/tropical_toxic/status/1385698382589698048?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">thread on Twitter\u003c/a> started by someone who said he gave his illustration students an assignment to design a post-COVID \u003cem>New Yorker\u003c/em> cover resulted in a bunch of beautiful drawings being widely shared. Some of them will really stick with you. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>17. \u003cem>Great Performances\u003c/em> on PBS aired a version of \u003cem>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/em> that \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/04/23/989790371/a-pandemic-romeo-juliet-finds-a-new-language-of-love-and-loss\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">dove deeply into physical theaters themselves\u003c/a>, using their physical spaces to make the story about both the young and tragic lovers and the isolation of being separated from art. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>18. Every year, I like to look back on one thing that made me remember why Twitter is occasionally not a giant mess. This year, it was \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/lindaholmes/status/1381798593439395848?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a tweet\u003c/a> in which I noted that there’s a good actor I always think is an older Anthony Michael Hall who is not an older Anthony Michael Hall, and it turns out … I was not alone. (His name is Terry Serpico. Thank you for your service, sir.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>19. I \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/05/30/1001577416/mare-of-easttown-your-finale-questions-answered\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">admired many things\u003c/a> about the HBO series \u003cem>Mare of Easttown\u003c/em>, but the performance of veteran character actor Julianne Nicholson as Mare’s friend Lori—complete with a spookily good accent—was perhaps the most heartening. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>20. The TCM podcast \u003cem>The Plot Thickens\u003c/em> brought in writer Julie Salamon to create an audio adaptation of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2014/05/12/311841677/the-comb-the-thrill-and-the-flop\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">her wonderful 1992 Hollywood history book\u003c/a> \u003cem>The Devil’s Candy\u003c/em>, which is about the tumultuous production process behind the famously disastrous film adaptation of \u003cem>The Bonfire Of The Vanities\u003c/em>. Salamon revisited her old interviews, her old interview tapes, and a movie that people don’t talk about very much anymore. But the story feels timeless, and many of its lessons about celebrity, art and commerce are as true now as they were 30 years ago. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>21. The Netflix animated film \u003cem>The Mitchells vs. The Machines\u003c/em> contains my favorite movie sequence ever located inside a mall. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>22. I discovered Ryan Ken this year, and they made some of the \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/Ryan_Ken_Acts/status/1408077548639211529?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">funniest, sharpest, most poignant and sometimes pointed comedy\u003c/a> I saw. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://youtu.be/Bx8RKOSLIyI\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>23. Lin-Manuel Miranda took some criticism that was well deserved this year (and he agreed) for the colorism that infused the casting of \u003cem>In the Heights\u003c/em>. But he also proved a couple of different times that despite his flaws, he takes seriously the obligation to try to be an ambassador for Broadway, and especially musicals. This was evident in his \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx8RKOSLIyI&ab_channel=TheTonightShowStarringJimmyFallon\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">appearance on Jimmy Fallon\u003c/a> to promote Broadway reopenings, and in the “Sunday” number he staged for \u003cem>Tick Tick … Boom!\u003c/em>, and in the Times Square gathering he helped organize to remember Stephen Sondheim. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>24. When Bo Burnham released the Netflix special \u003cem>Inside\u003c/em> in late spring of this garbage year, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/06/04/1002491153/bo-burnhams-inside-is-a-musical-fantasy-about-terrible-realities\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">my immediate reaction to it\u003c/a> was only partly that it was brilliant, that it was funny and weird and wildly creative. Mostly, I felt the familiarity that this, \u003cem>this\u003c/em>, was a painful and specific vision of how isolation had felt to me, as a person who lived alone and spent a lot of time trying to find ways to be creative. It was like watching a dark fairy tale about my own brain, and while I’m not sure I want to rewatch it very often (these are not \u003cem>fun\u003c/em> things about isolation), it gave me a way to explain the effects of all this to myself. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>25. It is \u003cem>very\u003c/em> difficult to pick out the moment I most loved in the second season of \u003cem>Ted Lasso\u003c/em> (I am not among the people who was ever disappointed in it). If I had to choose one indelible element, it would be Sarah Niles as Dr. Sharon Fieldstone. But if I had to choose the tiniest moment that made the biggest impression, I am going with the disappointed little “mmm” noise that Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) makes in the “Rainbow” episode about four and a half minutes in. I watched it over and over, and it never stopped making me laugh out loud. “I believe in communism!” Ted says. Beard’s eyes widen in curiosity and maybe even excitement. Then, Ted adds, “Romcommunism, that is.” A bummed-out Beard grumbles and wrinkles his nose in distaste. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>26. The Netflix series \u003cem>Maid\u003c/em>, starring Margaret Qualley as a young single mom trying to survive via a tattered social safety net, was one of the few high-profile projects I saw on TV this year that tried to reckon with the traps we set for poor people: can’t get housing without a job, can’t get a job without a place to live, can’t keep a job without a car, can’t afford a car without more money than the job pays. The performances are top-notch, but the series, based on Stephanie Land’s book, also has a lot to say about how even for a relatively fortunate poor person—an able-bodied, conventionally attractive, cisgender white woman—our systems are designed to inflict misery—and to prevent escape. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>27. In the great divide of \u003cem>The White Lotus\u003c/em>, I was mostly in favor of its acidic take on the people you’ll run into at many hotels, let alone fancy resorts. And one thing I found the most widespread agreement about is that Natasha Rothwell’s performance as Belinda was revelatory and beautiful. Along with her long history on other shows like \u003cem>Insecure\u003c/em>, it should lead to much, much more from her. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>28. John Moe relocated his essential mental-health podcast \u003cem>Depresh Mode\u003c/em> to the network Maximum Fun this year. No episode made more of an impression than \u003ca href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/joel-kim-booster-is-in-a-pit/id1557803544?i=1000527854951\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">his conversation with the brilliant comic and writer Joel Kim Booster\u003c/a>. Booster’s willingness to talk about his depression while he was feeling it very acutely, rather than waiting until he felt a lot better and a lot more hopeful, was a service to everyone who feels alone when darkness descends. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>29. The FX series \u003cem>Reservation Dogs\u003c/em> set its second episode at the Indian Health Service clinic, where the four lead characters have very different experiences inside and outside. Not only is it a look at a system rarely shown on television, it’s a very, very funny episode featuring standout guest performances from Jana Schmieding (also wonderful on this year’s \u003cem>Rutherford Falls\u003c/em>) as the receptionist and Bobby Lee as Dr. Kang. A just about perfect episode from beginning to end. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13907614\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Two runners hold their countries' flags and run on track.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1920\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13907614\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Gold medalists Mutaz Barshim, left, of Qatar, and Gianmarco Tamberi, of Italy, who tied Barshim for gold, celebrate on the track after the final of the men’s high jump at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Sunday, Aug. 1, 2021, in Tokyo, Japan. \u003ccite>(Christian Petersen/Pool Photo via AP)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>30. The Olympic Games are such a messed-up system in many ways that it can be hard to let yourself enjoy them. But this summer, when Gianmarco Tamberi of Italy and Mutaz Barshim of Qatar—high-jump athletes who are also friends—decided to share the gold medal rather than have a jump-off, and when \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pzFZqUVjb4&ab_channel=Olympics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">they celebrated\u003c/a> with one of the best hugs of the year, it almost felt like the whole thing had some merit after all. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>31. Brittany Luse and Eric Eddings are kind enough to join us on Pop Culture Happy Hour on occasion. But this year, what mattered most was the return of their podcast \u003ca href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/for-colored-nerds/id957205646\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>For Colored Nerds\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, which is where we first got to know them. Nothing—\u003cem>nothing\u003c/em>—is quite like a passion project made and controlled by the people whose passion it represents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://youtu.be/Y6gFoIHdOn0\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>32. I watched a lot of YouTube series this year, and a lot of cooking stuff. But maybe my favorite was “Mystery Menu with Sohla and Ham,” in which Sohla El-Waylly and her husband Ham took a mystery ingredient and made a whole menu out of it. \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6gFoIHdOn0&ab_channel=NYTCooking\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">It’s a hoot\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>33. Drew Magary’s book \u003cem>The Night the Lights Went Out\u003c/em> is a memoir about his difficult recovery from a brain injury. While it’s not uncommon for journalists like Magary to try to apply journalistic techniques to their own lives, the oral history he creates of the night he collapsed at a \u003cem>Deadspin\u003c/em> function and was rushed to the hospital is a riveting, weird, frightening story of a time when he himself was mostly out of commission and is reliant on others to fill in what happened. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>34. There was a lot of terrific acting in \u003cem>Hacks\u003c/em>, but no performer left a bigger impression on me than Carl Clemons-Hopkins as Marcus, second in command to Deborah Vance (the brilliant Jean Smart). In the show, Marcus bore a lot of Deborah’s lousy behavior, and Clemons-Hopkins brought that complex relationship to life with an often understated but unforgettable performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>35. From time to time, a Twitter feed arrives that the world has gone without for too long. This year, it was SNL Hosts Introducing The Musical Guest, one that does nothing except … well, put up \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/snlhostsintro\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">clips of hosts on \u003ci>Saturday Night Live\u003c/i> introducing the musical guest\u003c/a>. It might seem like small potatoes, and it is, but occasionally you get to see how the hosts manage to introduce bands they’d clearly never heard of until they hosted. You also get combinations of host and band that perfectly capture a particular moment in time. \u003cem>Melrose Place\u003c/em>’s \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/snlhostsintro/status/1446309096483799046?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Laura Leighton saying “Rancid!”\u003c/a> is somehow my favorite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>36. Not everybody is a TikTok person, and not everybody needs to be a TikTok person. But I do sometimes find it a fascinating place to dip into and then quickly dip back out of. A few very different accounts I appreciated this year: \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@hi.this.is.tatum?lang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Tatum\u003c/a>, a dog who gets a little help from his mom and dad in expressing his feelings; \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@dutchdeccc?lang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Dutch\u003c/a>, a New Yorker who tells stories about his day and sometimes serves up some pretty serious truths about the world as he sees it; and \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@annrussell03?lang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Ann Russell\u003c/a>, who specializes in cleaning tips and economic and racial justice. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>37. Antoine Wilson’s book \u003cem>Mouth to Mouth\u003c/em>, which \u003ca href=\"https://antoinewilson.com/wotwhat/mouth-to-mouth/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">comes out \u003c/a>January 11, unfolds as an encounter in an airport lounge between two men who once knew each other, one of whom decides to pass the time telling the long story of how he came to have the life he has. Psychologically complex and suspenseful until the literal last sentence, it uses every word of its 200 or so pages to the fullest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>38. The \u003cem>Slate\u003c/em> podcast \u003cem>Slow Burn\u003c/em> has been consistently excellent over its six seasons, with perhaps a higher batting average than any similarly made show (outside of public radio, \u003cem>of course\u003c/em>). But this year, host \u003ca href=\"https://slate.com/podcasts/slow-burn/s6/the-la-riots\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Joel Anderson tackled the 1992 L.A. uprisings\u003c/a> following the verdicts in the police beating of Rodney King. It’s a vital look at a city gradually seeing decades and decades of simmering problems explode at once, and while the story has been covered a lot, it’s rarely been done better. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>39. Kelsey McKinney’s novel \u003cem>God Spare The Girls\u003c/em>, about two sisters whose father is a popular and charismatic preacher, is highly readable and absorbing. But it also does something that’s all too rare in contemporary fiction both on the page and on screen: it considers in a serious way what it means to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kelseymckinney.com/book\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">have faith and to love God\u003c/a>, in a way that’s respectful and accessible to both people who go to church and people who don’t. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>40. Laura Lippman’s \u003cem>Dream Girl\u003c/em> is only one of the novels this year that explored the relationship between writers and the fiction they create. But it’s also a \u003ca href=\"http://www.lauralippman.net/dream-girl\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">twisty, claustrophobic, quite funny mystery\u003c/a> for people who enjoy a story in which it’s entirely unclear who can be trusted. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>41. \u003ca href=\"https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-178-the-experiment-requires-that-you-continue-12-3-2021/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">An episode\u003c/a> of the podcast \u003cem>Criminal \u003c/em> took a fresh look at the famous Milgram experiments, which are often cited as proof that people will unthinkingly obey authority, even when they know they are harming others. Based on \u003ca href=\"https://thenewpress.com/books/behind-shock-machine\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a book by Gina Perry\u003c/a>, the episode was a great example of questioning the history we think we know, no matter how famous and handy it may be. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>42. The third season of HBO’s \u003cem>Succession\u003c/em> appeared at times to be reshuffling its cast of the hateful and rich while only incrementally changing the trajectory of the story. But just when it appeared that it was a tale of slow decline and the curdling of family relationships, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/12/12/1063561827/succession-recap-season-3-finale\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">last half-hour of the season\u003c/a>—like the final acts of the two seasons before—fundamentally changed the dynamics going forward in a bunch of crucial ways. It’s hard to find new ways to praise one of the best shows and best casts on television, but over and over, they keep earning their spot at or near the top of a lot of our lists. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>43. It’s hard to justify, at this point, another fictional take on Princess Diana. But in Pablo Larraín’s \u003cem>Spencer\u003c/em>, Diana—played masterfully by Kristen Stewart—gets not just another version of her story but a different atmosphere. Unlike most staid and soapy versions of her life, this one is \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/11/03/1051108440/princess-diana-movie-spencer-kristen-stewart\">really a horror movie\u003c/a>, complete with spooky hallways, visions, and looming figures who barely speak. Replanting a well-known princess into a new genre did something that might have seemed impossible: It said something new about one of our most familiar public figures. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>44. Jane Campion’s \u003cem>The Power Of The Dog\u003c/em> is a western, it’s a story about domestic abuse, and it’s tense and frightening. Campion’s mastery of dread, in collaboration with her leads (Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee), makes the film as much about the mind’s eye and its hunger to anticipate the result of evident menace as it is about the plot elements themselves. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>45. The movie \u003cem>Plan B\u003c/em> is a \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/05/28/1000975656/plan-b-is-a-winning-comedy-with-some-painful-truths\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">raunchy teenage friendship comedy\u003c/a> about two girls named Sunny and Lupe who go on an adventure. But the nature of the adventure—Sunny needs a morning-after pill after a birth-control mishap and the pharmacist in her hometown refuses to give her one—gives it an added layer of tension. In a year in which reproductive health care was so much a part of public conversations, it’s an achievement that this film is smart and insightful, funny and endearing, honest and painful. And on top of that, it has one of the most satisfying—and, in retrospect, one of the simplest—endings of the year. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13907615\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Black and white image of a boy holding audio recording equipment.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1920\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13907615\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Woody Norman as Jesse in ‘C’mon C’mon.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Julieta Cervantes / A24)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>46. Okay, this is a niche pick. But can I just acknowledge for a moment how refreshing it was, in Mike Mills’ \u003cem>C’mon C’mon\u003c/em>, to see an accurate depiction of audio journalism? Audio people everywhere have lamented the cinematic visions of creators supposedly making podcasts who would in reality be collecting garbled and unlistenable tape because they don’t know how to hold a microphone. Here, perhaps in part because Mills hired actual \u003cem>Radiolab\u003c/em> correspondent Molly Webster to play Joaquin Phoenix’s co-worker, you will see the uncomfortable and weirdly intimate process of sticking microphones in people’s faces, which may not always make neat-looking film, but which is an integral part of what podcasting actually looks like. (And they gather ambient sound!)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>47. Not everything about the very experimental AMC show \u003cem>Kevin Can Go F*** Himself \u003c/em> worked. But the concept—the wife on a corny dumpy-guy/hot-wife sitcom is seen both on that show and in separate dramatic scenes that show her misery and isolation—was, like \u003cem>WandaVision\u003c/em>, part of an exciting moment in which TV showed some willingness not only to experiment with traditional forms but to comment on them. \u003cem>Kevin\u003c/em> didn’t always succeed, but in its best moments, it looked at the idea of the “lovable bad husband” with the skepticism it deserved. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>48. Thank goodness romantic-comedy limited series are getting some traction. The second season of \u003cem>Love Life\u003c/em> (starring William Jackson Harper) and the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/07/06/1013430144/starstruck-follows-a-meet-cute-with-fame\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">first season\u003c/a> of \u003cem>Starstruck\u003c/em> (starring Rose Matafeo) both aired on HBO Max this year. And it turns out that the moderately-sized season is actually a very good format for following a love story from beginning to … well, not to end, but to one of the many places of rest where relationships find themselves along the way. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>49. The HBO Max sci-fi series \u003cem>Made For Love\u003c/em> sometimes seemed to have bitten off a little more than it could chew, as we followed Cristin Milioti’s Hazel through the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/04/13/986809740/does-made-for-love-earn-our-affection\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">nightmarish experience of being surveilled\u003c/a> by her husband from inside her head. But Milioti is an outstanding, sympathetic, inventive and skilled lead. And, as she did in \u003cem>Palm Springs\u003c/em> early in the pandemic in 2020, she helped ground a tricky premise in real feeling. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>50. \u003cem>The Lost Daughter>\u003c/em>, directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal in her feature debut, is not an easy movie to watch. But the film, based on a book by Elena Ferrante, has a respect for silence, for leaving space in which characters are simply observing the world around them, that make it feel almost like a trance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Copyright 2021 \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>I’ve been making 50 Wonderful Things lists since 2010. These are lists of big and small things, important and fleeting things, things that stuck with me and things I almost forgot until I looked back on the year. Both last year and this year, it has been challenging to put together a list like this, because the world in general and the art world in particular still struggle with the effects of the pandemic and all manner of resulting, cascading challenges. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it seemed more important than ever to remind myself that however I felt in 2021, other people’s creativity—whether profound or profoundly silly—kept me company, lifted me up, taught and changed me. So here are 50 Wonderful Things (and, as always, these are pop-culture things only) from 2021.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>1. Troy Kotsur’s performance as the father in the charming \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/08/13/1027033602/coda-will-yank-shamelessly-on-your-heartstrings-but-its-very-good-at-it\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">film festival favorite\u003c/a> \u003cem>CODA\u003c/em>is a funny, warm, fresh presentation of a loving parent who is flawed, devoted and mischievous. And, not for nothing, it presents him as still having a great sex life with his wife, played by the also wonderful Marlee Matlin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>2. The \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/01/13/956017123/need-a-break-the-pets-and-vets-of-all-creatures-great-and-small-might-hit-the-sp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">purely calming pleasures\u003c/a> of the PBS update of \u003cem>All Creatures Great And Small\u003c/em> were a moment of deep exhalation at a time in January when everything was cold and isolated and I was hanging on by a thread. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>3. Very few people got to see the pilot of a series called \u003cem>These Days\u003c/em>, in which William Jackson Harper and Marianne Rendón played a pandemic pair flirting over Zoom. But I saw it at Sundance, and I am here to tell you that while it seems not to have gone anywhere, before Harper was blowing minds with his performance as a sexy romantic comedy lead in \u003cem>Love Life\u003c/em> on HBO Max, he was just divine in this little experimental project that I didn’t forget all year. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>4. \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13899714/summer-of-soul-celebrates-a-1969-black-cultural-festival-eclipsed-by-woodstock\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Summer of Soul\u003c/a>\u003c/em> is easy to love and admire just for its richness as a historical document and for the opportunity to watch so many brilliant performers work. But something about its particular mix of performers across generations and genres made it even more than that—it’s a piece about the nature of art and community. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>5. I could not imagine a successful film adaptation of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/01/22/959305116/in-of-itself-is-a-study-of-identity-and-magic\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Derek DelGaudio’s magic-storytelling-interactive theater piece \u003cem>In & Of Itself\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. But the adaptation that aired on Hulu is beautiful and makes the points that the show makes, even if it has to come at them in a different way. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>6. I watched a \u003cem>ton\u003c/em> of Rachael Ray this year. So much. (So very much.) And I found her at all times to be easy to follow, friendly, great company, and—not for nothing—awfully good at explaining how to make simple but satisfying food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>7. My friend Alan Sepinwall came up with a swell idea for a podcast: \u003cem>Too Long; Didn’t Watch\u003c/em>. In it, he sits down with various actors who have never seen a particular show and has them watch only the very first and very last episodes of the series. If I could only recommend one episode, it would be the \u003ca href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/paul-scheer-watches-dexter/id1547322974?i=1000512226328\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">first-season finale\u003c/a>, in which Paul Scheer watches the first and last episodes of \u003cem>Dexter\u003c/em>. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>8. A keeper from almost the precise moment of transition from last year to this year: a (seemingly) (allegedly) very drunk Andy Cohen \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/lindaholmes/status/1345009723809161218?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ripping a strip off Mayor Bill de Blasio\u003c/a> on New Year’s Eve on CNN was one of my true highlights. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>9. Danielle Henderson’s memoir \u003cem>The Ugly Cry\u003c/em> is one that I expected to love, because I know Danielle a bit, enough to know she is smart and funny and very wise. But still, the book surprised me with its blend of profound love (especially for her grandmother, maybe the most indelible and unforgettable character I met in a book all year) and deep pain and belly laughs. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>10. I had a deeply complicated relationship with the Apple TV+ drama \u003cem>The Morning Show\u003c/em>. Much of its second season was messy and weird and very strangely written. But! In the first few minutes of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1051579864/morning-show-recap-season-2-episode-8-after-a-crash-a-lot-of-questions\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the eighth episode\u003c/a>, it delightfully displayed the show it tries to be and sometimes is: strange and darkly funny, full of bad people presented as the comic weirdos they are. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>11. This year, NPR endeavored to fix the problem of a very specific listener: Leo, who thought \u003cem>All Things Considered\u003c/em> needed \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965953078/8-year-old-calls-out-npr-for-lack-of-dinosaur-stories\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">more dinosaurs\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>12. The movie \u003cem>Together Together\u003c/em>, starring Ed Helms and Patti Harrison as an aspiring single dad and the surrogate he hires, got a lot of things right. But one of its most refreshing qualities is its focus on how the setting and enforcing of boundaries can, perhaps counterintuitively, be a critical part of becoming and remaining close to people. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>13. Like most television that’s genuinely ambitious, \u003cem>WandaVision\u003c/em> didn’t manage to do everything right. But in exploring the way that television, as a form, could be \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/03/05/973989043/wandavision-wraps-a-season-that-was-never-what-it-seemed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">satirized and played with as a way to talk about trauma\u003c/a> and its aftereffects, it continued the ongoing experimentation with what a superhero show can be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>14. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The weird moments from the televised ceremony were the only reasons to keep the Golden Globes around. So let us all pause to appreciate Jane Fonda yelling, “Happy birthday, Tommy Tune!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>15. It’s been interesting to watch the very different reactions to the fourth season of \u003cem>The Handmaid’s Tale\u003c/em>, particularly given the widespread critical sense that the show has lost steam steadily over its run. For me, while I have often found \u003cem>Handmaid’s\u003c/em> flawed and frustrating, the catharsis of the eighth episode of the season, called “Testimony,” was a moment I would not have missed. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>16. A \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/tropical_toxic/status/1385698382589698048?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">thread on Twitter\u003c/a> started by someone who said he gave his illustration students an assignment to design a post-COVID \u003cem>New Yorker\u003c/em> cover resulted in a bunch of beautiful drawings being widely shared. Some of them will really stick with you. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>17. \u003cem>Great Performances\u003c/em> on PBS aired a version of \u003cem>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/em> that \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/04/23/989790371/a-pandemic-romeo-juliet-finds-a-new-language-of-love-and-loss\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">dove deeply into physical theaters themselves\u003c/a>, using their physical spaces to make the story about both the young and tragic lovers and the isolation of being separated from art. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>18. Every year, I like to look back on one thing that made me remember why Twitter is occasionally not a giant mess. This year, it was \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/lindaholmes/status/1381798593439395848?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a tweet\u003c/a> in which I noted that there’s a good actor I always think is an older Anthony Michael Hall who is not an older Anthony Michael Hall, and it turns out … I was not alone. (His name is Terry Serpico. Thank you for your service, sir.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>19. I \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/05/30/1001577416/mare-of-easttown-your-finale-questions-answered\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">admired many things\u003c/a> about the HBO series \u003cem>Mare of Easttown\u003c/em>, but the performance of veteran character actor Julianne Nicholson as Mare’s friend Lori—complete with a spookily good accent—was perhaps the most heartening. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>20. The TCM podcast \u003cem>The Plot Thickens\u003c/em> brought in writer Julie Salamon to create an audio adaptation of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2014/05/12/311841677/the-comb-the-thrill-and-the-flop\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">her wonderful 1992 Hollywood history book\u003c/a> \u003cem>The Devil’s Candy\u003c/em>, which is about the tumultuous production process behind the famously disastrous film adaptation of \u003cem>The Bonfire Of The Vanities\u003c/em>. Salamon revisited her old interviews, her old interview tapes, and a movie that people don’t talk about very much anymore. But the story feels timeless, and many of its lessons about celebrity, art and commerce are as true now as they were 30 years ago. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>21. The Netflix animated film \u003cem>The Mitchells vs. The Machines\u003c/em> contains my favorite movie sequence ever located inside a mall. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>22. I discovered Ryan Ken this year, and they made some of the \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/Ryan_Ken_Acts/status/1408077548639211529?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">funniest, sharpest, most poignant and sometimes pointed comedy\u003c/a> I saw. \u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/Bx8RKOSLIyI'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/Bx8RKOSLIyI'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>23. Lin-Manuel Miranda took some criticism that was well deserved this year (and he agreed) for the colorism that infused the casting of \u003cem>In the Heights\u003c/em>. But he also proved a couple of different times that despite his flaws, he takes seriously the obligation to try to be an ambassador for Broadway, and especially musicals. This was evident in his \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx8RKOSLIyI&ab_channel=TheTonightShowStarringJimmyFallon\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">appearance on Jimmy Fallon\u003c/a> to promote Broadway reopenings, and in the “Sunday” number he staged for \u003cem>Tick Tick … Boom!\u003c/em>, and in the Times Square gathering he helped organize to remember Stephen Sondheim. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>24. When Bo Burnham released the Netflix special \u003cem>Inside\u003c/em> in late spring of this garbage year, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/06/04/1002491153/bo-burnhams-inside-is-a-musical-fantasy-about-terrible-realities\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">my immediate reaction to it\u003c/a> was only partly that it was brilliant, that it was funny and weird and wildly creative. Mostly, I felt the familiarity that this, \u003cem>this\u003c/em>, was a painful and specific vision of how isolation had felt to me, as a person who lived alone and spent a lot of time trying to find ways to be creative. It was like watching a dark fairy tale about my own brain, and while I’m not sure I want to rewatch it very often (these are not \u003cem>fun\u003c/em> things about isolation), it gave me a way to explain the effects of all this to myself. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>25. It is \u003cem>very\u003c/em> difficult to pick out the moment I most loved in the second season of \u003cem>Ted Lasso\u003c/em> (I am not among the people who was ever disappointed in it). If I had to choose one indelible element, it would be Sarah Niles as Dr. Sharon Fieldstone. But if I had to choose the tiniest moment that made the biggest impression, I am going with the disappointed little “mmm” noise that Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) makes in the “Rainbow” episode about four and a half minutes in. I watched it over and over, and it never stopped making me laugh out loud. “I believe in communism!” Ted says. Beard’s eyes widen in curiosity and maybe even excitement. Then, Ted adds, “Romcommunism, that is.” A bummed-out Beard grumbles and wrinkles his nose in distaste. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>26. The Netflix series \u003cem>Maid\u003c/em>, starring Margaret Qualley as a young single mom trying to survive via a tattered social safety net, was one of the few high-profile projects I saw on TV this year that tried to reckon with the traps we set for poor people: can’t get housing without a job, can’t get a job without a place to live, can’t keep a job without a car, can’t afford a car without more money than the job pays. The performances are top-notch, but the series, based on Stephanie Land’s book, also has a lot to say about how even for a relatively fortunate poor person—an able-bodied, conventionally attractive, cisgender white woman—our systems are designed to inflict misery—and to prevent escape. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>27. In the great divide of \u003cem>The White Lotus\u003c/em>, I was mostly in favor of its acidic take on the people you’ll run into at many hotels, let alone fancy resorts. And one thing I found the most widespread agreement about is that Natasha Rothwell’s performance as Belinda was revelatory and beautiful. Along with her long history on other shows like \u003cem>Insecure\u003c/em>, it should lead to much, much more from her. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>28. John Moe relocated his essential mental-health podcast \u003cem>Depresh Mode\u003c/em> to the network Maximum Fun this year. No episode made more of an impression than \u003ca href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/joel-kim-booster-is-in-a-pit/id1557803544?i=1000527854951\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">his conversation with the brilliant comic and writer Joel Kim Booster\u003c/a>. Booster’s willingness to talk about his depression while he was feeling it very acutely, rather than waiting until he felt a lot better and a lot more hopeful, was a service to everyone who feels alone when darkness descends. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>29. The FX series \u003cem>Reservation Dogs\u003c/em> set its second episode at the Indian Health Service clinic, where the four lead characters have very different experiences inside and outside. Not only is it a look at a system rarely shown on television, it’s a very, very funny episode featuring standout guest performances from Jana Schmieding (also wonderful on this year’s \u003cem>Rutherford Falls\u003c/em>) as the receptionist and Bobby Lee as Dr. Kang. A just about perfect episode from beginning to end. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13907614\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Two runners hold their countries' flags and run on track.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1920\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13907614\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap21213483743369-79bd9dbed094b1f1ed716d94de106c0aee3d4085-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Gold medalists Mutaz Barshim, left, of Qatar, and Gianmarco Tamberi, of Italy, who tied Barshim for gold, celebrate on the track after the final of the men’s high jump at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Sunday, Aug. 1, 2021, in Tokyo, Japan. \u003ccite>(Christian Petersen/Pool Photo via AP)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>30. The Olympic Games are such a messed-up system in many ways that it can be hard to let yourself enjoy them. But this summer, when Gianmarco Tamberi of Italy and Mutaz Barshim of Qatar—high-jump athletes who are also friends—decided to share the gold medal rather than have a jump-off, and when \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pzFZqUVjb4&ab_channel=Olympics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">they celebrated\u003c/a> with one of the best hugs of the year, it almost felt like the whole thing had some merit after all. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>31. Brittany Luse and Eric Eddings are kind enough to join us on Pop Culture Happy Hour on occasion. But this year, what mattered most was the return of their podcast \u003ca href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/for-colored-nerds/id957205646\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>For Colored Nerds\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, which is where we first got to know them. Nothing—\u003cem>nothing\u003c/em>—is quite like a passion project made and controlled by the people whose passion it represents.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/Y6gFoIHdOn0'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/Y6gFoIHdOn0'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>32. I watched a lot of YouTube series this year, and a lot of cooking stuff. But maybe my favorite was “Mystery Menu with Sohla and Ham,” in which Sohla El-Waylly and her husband Ham took a mystery ingredient and made a whole menu out of it. \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6gFoIHdOn0&ab_channel=NYTCooking\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">It’s a hoot\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>33. Drew Magary’s book \u003cem>The Night the Lights Went Out\u003c/em> is a memoir about his difficult recovery from a brain injury. While it’s not uncommon for journalists like Magary to try to apply journalistic techniques to their own lives, the oral history he creates of the night he collapsed at a \u003cem>Deadspin\u003c/em> function and was rushed to the hospital is a riveting, weird, frightening story of a time when he himself was mostly out of commission and is reliant on others to fill in what happened. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>34. There was a lot of terrific acting in \u003cem>Hacks\u003c/em>, but no performer left a bigger impression on me than Carl Clemons-Hopkins as Marcus, second in command to Deborah Vance (the brilliant Jean Smart). In the show, Marcus bore a lot of Deborah’s lousy behavior, and Clemons-Hopkins brought that complex relationship to life with an often understated but unforgettable performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>35. From time to time, a Twitter feed arrives that the world has gone without for too long. This year, it was SNL Hosts Introducing The Musical Guest, one that does nothing except … well, put up \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/snlhostsintro\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">clips of hosts on \u003ci>Saturday Night Live\u003c/i> introducing the musical guest\u003c/a>. It might seem like small potatoes, and it is, but occasionally you get to see how the hosts manage to introduce bands they’d clearly never heard of until they hosted. You also get combinations of host and band that perfectly capture a particular moment in time. \u003cem>Melrose Place\u003c/em>’s \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/snlhostsintro/status/1446309096483799046?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Laura Leighton saying “Rancid!”\u003c/a> is somehow my favorite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>36. Not everybody is a TikTok person, and not everybody needs to be a TikTok person. But I do sometimes find it a fascinating place to dip into and then quickly dip back out of. A few very different accounts I appreciated this year: \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@hi.this.is.tatum?lang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Tatum\u003c/a>, a dog who gets a little help from his mom and dad in expressing his feelings; \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@dutchdeccc?lang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Dutch\u003c/a>, a New Yorker who tells stories about his day and sometimes serves up some pretty serious truths about the world as he sees it; and \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@annrussell03?lang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Ann Russell\u003c/a>, who specializes in cleaning tips and economic and racial justice. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>37. Antoine Wilson’s book \u003cem>Mouth to Mouth\u003c/em>, which \u003ca href=\"https://antoinewilson.com/wotwhat/mouth-to-mouth/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">comes out \u003c/a>January 11, unfolds as an encounter in an airport lounge between two men who once knew each other, one of whom decides to pass the time telling the long story of how he came to have the life he has. Psychologically complex and suspenseful until the literal last sentence, it uses every word of its 200 or so pages to the fullest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>38. The \u003cem>Slate\u003c/em> podcast \u003cem>Slow Burn\u003c/em> has been consistently excellent over its six seasons, with perhaps a higher batting average than any similarly made show (outside of public radio, \u003cem>of course\u003c/em>). But this year, host \u003ca href=\"https://slate.com/podcasts/slow-burn/s6/the-la-riots\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Joel Anderson tackled the 1992 L.A. uprisings\u003c/a> following the verdicts in the police beating of Rodney King. It’s a vital look at a city gradually seeing decades and decades of simmering problems explode at once, and while the story has been covered a lot, it’s rarely been done better. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>39. Kelsey McKinney’s novel \u003cem>God Spare The Girls\u003c/em>, about two sisters whose father is a popular and charismatic preacher, is highly readable and absorbing. But it also does something that’s all too rare in contemporary fiction both on the page and on screen: it considers in a serious way what it means to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kelseymckinney.com/book\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">have faith and to love God\u003c/a>, in a way that’s respectful and accessible to both people who go to church and people who don’t. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>40. Laura Lippman’s \u003cem>Dream Girl\u003c/em> is only one of the novels this year that explored the relationship between writers and the fiction they create. But it’s also a \u003ca href=\"http://www.lauralippman.net/dream-girl\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">twisty, claustrophobic, quite funny mystery\u003c/a> for people who enjoy a story in which it’s entirely unclear who can be trusted. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>41. \u003ca href=\"https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-178-the-experiment-requires-that-you-continue-12-3-2021/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">An episode\u003c/a> of the podcast \u003cem>Criminal \u003c/em> took a fresh look at the famous Milgram experiments, which are often cited as proof that people will unthinkingly obey authority, even when they know they are harming others. Based on \u003ca href=\"https://thenewpress.com/books/behind-shock-machine\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a book by Gina Perry\u003c/a>, the episode was a great example of questioning the history we think we know, no matter how famous and handy it may be. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>42. The third season of HBO’s \u003cem>Succession\u003c/em> appeared at times to be reshuffling its cast of the hateful and rich while only incrementally changing the trajectory of the story. But just when it appeared that it was a tale of slow decline and the curdling of family relationships, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/12/12/1063561827/succession-recap-season-3-finale\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">last half-hour of the season\u003c/a>—like the final acts of the two seasons before—fundamentally changed the dynamics going forward in a bunch of crucial ways. It’s hard to find new ways to praise one of the best shows and best casts on television, but over and over, they keep earning their spot at or near the top of a lot of our lists. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>43. It’s hard to justify, at this point, another fictional take on Princess Diana. But in Pablo Larraín’s \u003cem>Spencer\u003c/em>, Diana—played masterfully by Kristen Stewart—gets not just another version of her story but a different atmosphere. Unlike most staid and soapy versions of her life, this one is \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/11/03/1051108440/princess-diana-movie-spencer-kristen-stewart\">really a horror movie\u003c/a>, complete with spooky hallways, visions, and looming figures who barely speak. Replanting a well-known princess into a new genre did something that might have seemed impossible: It said something new about one of our most familiar public figures. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>44. Jane Campion’s \u003cem>The Power Of The Dog\u003c/em> is a western, it’s a story about domestic abuse, and it’s tense and frightening. Campion’s mastery of dread, in collaboration with her leads (Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee), makes the film as much about the mind’s eye and its hunger to anticipate the result of evident menace as it is about the plot elements themselves. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>45. The movie \u003cem>Plan B\u003c/em> is a \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/05/28/1000975656/plan-b-is-a-winning-comedy-with-some-painful-truths\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">raunchy teenage friendship comedy\u003c/a> about two girls named Sunny and Lupe who go on an adventure. But the nature of the adventure—Sunny needs a morning-after pill after a birth-control mishap and the pharmacist in her hometown refuses to give her one—gives it an added layer of tension. In a year in which reproductive health care was so much a part of public conversations, it’s an achievement that this film is smart and insightful, funny and endearing, honest and painful. And on top of that, it has one of the most satisfying—and, in retrospect, one of the simplest—endings of the year. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13907615\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Black and white image of a boy holding audio recording equipment.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1920\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13907615\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/mm_01867_bw_r-38a34ccfb502f9336270e5ab89a77a685f2e1793-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Woody Norman as Jesse in ‘C’mon C’mon.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Julieta Cervantes / A24)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>46. Okay, this is a niche pick. But can I just acknowledge for a moment how refreshing it was, in Mike Mills’ \u003cem>C’mon C’mon\u003c/em>, to see an accurate depiction of audio journalism? Audio people everywhere have lamented the cinematic visions of creators supposedly making podcasts who would in reality be collecting garbled and unlistenable tape because they don’t know how to hold a microphone. Here, perhaps in part because Mills hired actual \u003cem>Radiolab\u003c/em> correspondent Molly Webster to play Joaquin Phoenix’s co-worker, you will see the uncomfortable and weirdly intimate process of sticking microphones in people’s faces, which may not always make neat-looking film, but which is an integral part of what podcasting actually looks like. (And they gather ambient sound!)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>47. Not everything about the very experimental AMC show \u003cem>Kevin Can Go F*** Himself \u003c/em> worked. But the concept—the wife on a corny dumpy-guy/hot-wife sitcom is seen both on that show and in separate dramatic scenes that show her misery and isolation—was, like \u003cem>WandaVision\u003c/em>, part of an exciting moment in which TV showed some willingness not only to experiment with traditional forms but to comment on them. \u003cem>Kevin\u003c/em> didn’t always succeed, but in its best moments, it looked at the idea of the “lovable bad husband” with the skepticism it deserved. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>48. Thank goodness romantic-comedy limited series are getting some traction. The second season of \u003cem>Love Life\u003c/em> (starring William Jackson Harper) and the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/07/06/1013430144/starstruck-follows-a-meet-cute-with-fame\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">first season\u003c/a> of \u003cem>Starstruck\u003c/em> (starring Rose Matafeo) both aired on HBO Max this year. And it turns out that the moderately-sized season is actually a very good format for following a love story from beginning to … well, not to end, but to one of the many places of rest where relationships find themselves along the way. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>49. The HBO Max sci-fi series \u003cem>Made For Love\u003c/em> sometimes seemed to have bitten off a little more than it could chew, as we followed Cristin Milioti’s Hazel through the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/04/13/986809740/does-made-for-love-earn-our-affection\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">nightmarish experience of being surveilled\u003c/a> by her husband from inside her head. But Milioti is an outstanding, sympathetic, inventive and skilled lead. And, as she did in \u003cem>Palm Springs\u003c/em> early in the pandemic in 2020, she helped ground a tricky premise in real feeling. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>50. \u003cem>The Lost Daughter>\u003c/em>, directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal in her feature debut, is not an easy movie to watch. But the film, based on a book by Elena Ferrante, has a respect for silence, for leaving space in which characters are simply observing the world around them, that make it feel almost like a trance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>American novelist, journalist and essayist Joan Didion died on Thursday at her home in New York the age of 87 from Parkinson’s Disease, according to Knopf publicist Paul Bogaards. The best-selling writer began describing her home state, California, for magazines in the 1960s and broadened her subjects over the decades in nonfiction, fiction and films.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Didion spoke about the act of writing more astutely than pretty much anybody else. “I write entirely to find out what is on my mind; what I’m thinking,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_13901803']The writing itself was a path to understanding and clarification. Her definition of a writer was “a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.” She said that in a 1976 speech at her alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley. By then, Didion had published \u003cem>Slouching Towards Bethlehem\u003c/em>, a collection of reportage about life in the chaos of 1960s America. She’d also published two novels: \u003cem>Play It as It Lays\u003c/em>, which could have been subtitled “Lost in Las Vegas and Most Other Places,” and \u003cem>Run River\u003c/em>, her first novel. Here’s an excerpt from the latter:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“There was a sense that to close one’s eyes on a Valley town was to risk opening them a moment later on dry fields, the sun bleaching out the last traces of habitation, a flowered straw hat, a neon advertisement which had blinked a moment before from a wall no longer visible: \u003cem>More Yield from Every Acre with Seeds from Northrup-King.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a great comfort, watching the towns come and go through the tinted window of the Greyhound bus. The heat drained the distinctions from things—marriage and divorce and new curtains and overdrafts at the bank, all the same—and Lily could not at the moment imagine any preoccupation strong enough to withstand the summer.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>That excerpt, from 1963, is the essence of Didion’s writing style: terse, polished, elegant and piercing. Reviewer John Leonard \u003ca href=\"http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2005/oct/20/the-black-album/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">said\u003c/a> her sentences were like “icepick laser beams.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Novelist and nonfiction writer Francine Prose says it’s a style—and a voice—that Didion pioneered in the ’60s. “It’s hard to remember how important it was to see evidence of real female intelligence on the page,” Prose says. “She put a certain kind of voice—Western, female, anxious—on the page that hadn’t been there before.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Writing With ‘Electric Anxiety’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Prose has a list of all the places and subjects Didion dealt with in her writing lifetime. It includes California, New York, Hawaii, El Salvador, Las Vegas, Miami, John Wayne, Patty Hearst, Vietnam, the Central Park jogger, the Black Panthers, presidential elections, Newt Gingrich, Doris Lessing, feminism, hippies, films, books and journalism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_13891888']But there’s also death. She wrote about her husband’s 2003 death in \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/books/titles/138331636/the-year-of-magical-thinking\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003ci>The Year of Magical Thinking\u003c/i>\u003c/a>, and when their daughter, Quintana, died two years later, Didion struggled with that subject in \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/books/titles/141691807/blue-nights\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003ci>Blue Nights\u003c/i>\u003c/a>. Behind all those topics and places was the writer’s steady, astute, mournful, anxious voice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s just thrumming with anxiety,” Prose says. “Every sentence has a kind of electric anxiety and it’s partly what makes you pay such close attention. I mean, you’re just waiting for something to explode and then it doesn’t and you keep reading.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, Didion kept writing with her nervous pen. It was itself an act of bravery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Everything makes her anxious,” Prose says. “And yet she goes to [El] Salvador; she goes to Miami; she goes to Las Vegas; she travels all around California; she visits the Panthers; she visits the hippies. It’s anxiety and it’s at the same time transcending the anxiety, which pretty much describes what it takes for any of us to get through the day.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Didion recognized that the physical and psychological landscapes she described were desolate. “I am more attracted to the underside of the tapestry,” she said. “I tend to always look for the wrong side, the bleak side. I mean, I have since I was a child.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She once said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” and the ones she told were dark truths. “I’m rather a slow study and I came late to the apprehension that there was a void at the center of experience.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13907552\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Black and white photo of woman and man smiling\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13907552\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, pictured here in California in 1977, wrote screenplays together before moving to New York in the ’80s. \u003ccite>(AP)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>An Unlikely Member Of The Hollywood Establishment\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Before moving to New York City in the 1980s, Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, spent years in Los Angeles. There, they wrote screenplays together: \u003cem>The Panic in Needle Park\u003c/em>, the Barbra Streisand remake of \u003cem>A Star is Born\u003c/em>, \u003cem>Up Close & Personal\u003c/em> with Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As screenwriters, as well as novelists and journalists, Didion and Dunne were part of the Hollywood establishment. But Prose says you never feel the movie star-ness of Southern California in Didion’s writing—especially not in her personal essays.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You \u003cem>do\u003c/em> feel that neurotic presence,” she says. “The person struggling to meet the deadline; the person with the migraine; the person who can barely get out of bed in the morning; the person for whom writing is a kind of torment; the person for whom just the California light is almost too much to bear.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It all sounds so “down,” but until the last years Didion denied any personal fragility assumed by her readers. In real life, she was small, thin, pale and un-California-looking. But in 1977 she said her physical size was deceptive: “I’m very healthy. I eat a lot. I don’t cry a lot.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And she \u003cem>wrote\u003c/em> a lot. In her fiction, she relied on images that she said came into her mind. Then Didion the writer had to figure out what was going on in them. “If you lie low enough and stay quiet enough,” she said, “and if you don’t talk to very many people and you keep your central nervous system from shorting out, these pictures come to you. And then you try to find out what they mean.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A generation of journalists were influenced by those explorations, and a generation of fiction and memoir readers were drawn in and enlightened. Didion, a chronicler of cultural truths and fictions, observed her world intensely. She provided clarity. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Copyright 2021 \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>American novelist, journalist and essayist Joan Didion died on Thursday at her home in New York the age of 87 from Parkinson’s Disease, according to Knopf publicist Paul Bogaards. The best-selling writer began describing her home state, California, for magazines in the 1960s and broadened her subjects over the decades in nonfiction, fiction and films.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Didion spoke about the act of writing more astutely than pretty much anybody else. “I write entirely to find out what is on my mind; what I’m thinking,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The writing itself was a path to understanding and clarification. Her definition of a writer was “a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.” She said that in a 1976 speech at her alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley. By then, Didion had published \u003cem>Slouching Towards Bethlehem\u003c/em>, a collection of reportage about life in the chaos of 1960s America. She’d also published two novels: \u003cem>Play It as It Lays\u003c/em>, which could have been subtitled “Lost in Las Vegas and Most Other Places,” and \u003cem>Run River\u003c/em>, her first novel. Here’s an excerpt from the latter:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“There was a sense that to close one’s eyes on a Valley town was to risk opening them a moment later on dry fields, the sun bleaching out the last traces of habitation, a flowered straw hat, a neon advertisement which had blinked a moment before from a wall no longer visible: \u003cem>More Yield from Every Acre with Seeds from Northrup-King.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a great comfort, watching the towns come and go through the tinted window of the Greyhound bus. The heat drained the distinctions from things—marriage and divorce and new curtains and overdrafts at the bank, all the same—and Lily could not at the moment imagine any preoccupation strong enough to withstand the summer.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>That excerpt, from 1963, is the essence of Didion’s writing style: terse, polished, elegant and piercing. Reviewer John Leonard \u003ca href=\"http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2005/oct/20/the-black-album/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">said\u003c/a> her sentences were like “icepick laser beams.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Novelist and nonfiction writer Francine Prose says it’s a style—and a voice—that Didion pioneered in the ’60s. “It’s hard to remember how important it was to see evidence of real female intelligence on the page,” Prose says. “She put a certain kind of voice—Western, female, anxious—on the page that hadn’t been there before.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Writing With ‘Electric Anxiety’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Prose has a list of all the places and subjects Didion dealt with in her writing lifetime. It includes California, New York, Hawaii, El Salvador, Las Vegas, Miami, John Wayne, Patty Hearst, Vietnam, the Central Park jogger, the Black Panthers, presidential elections, Newt Gingrich, Doris Lessing, feminism, hippies, films, books and journalism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>But there’s also death. She wrote about her husband’s 2003 death in \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/books/titles/138331636/the-year-of-magical-thinking\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003ci>The Year of Magical Thinking\u003c/i>\u003c/a>, and when their daughter, Quintana, died two years later, Didion struggled with that subject in \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/books/titles/141691807/blue-nights\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003ci>Blue Nights\u003c/i>\u003c/a>. Behind all those topics and places was the writer’s steady, astute, mournful, anxious voice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s just thrumming with anxiety,” Prose says. “Every sentence has a kind of electric anxiety and it’s partly what makes you pay such close attention. I mean, you’re just waiting for something to explode and then it doesn’t and you keep reading.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, Didion kept writing with her nervous pen. It was itself an act of bravery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Everything makes her anxious,” Prose says. “And yet she goes to [El] Salvador; she goes to Miami; she goes to Las Vegas; she travels all around California; she visits the Panthers; she visits the hippies. It’s anxiety and it’s at the same time transcending the anxiety, which pretty much describes what it takes for any of us to get through the day.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Didion recognized that the physical and psychological landscapes she described were desolate. “I am more attracted to the underside of the tapestry,” she said. “I tend to always look for the wrong side, the bleak side. I mean, I have since I was a child.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She once said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” and the ones she told were dark truths. “I’m rather a slow study and I came late to the apprehension that there was a void at the center of experience.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13907552\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Black and white photo of woman and man smiling\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13907552\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/ap771201012_slide-c98017a70bb274a4dfaa71a72681c065dde79b67-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, pictured here in California in 1977, wrote screenplays together before moving to New York in the ’80s. \u003ccite>(AP)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>An Unlikely Member Of The Hollywood Establishment\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Before moving to New York City in the 1980s, Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, spent years in Los Angeles. There, they wrote screenplays together: \u003cem>The Panic in Needle Park\u003c/em>, the Barbra Streisand remake of \u003cem>A Star is Born\u003c/em>, \u003cem>Up Close & Personal\u003c/em> with Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As screenwriters, as well as novelists and journalists, Didion and Dunne were part of the Hollywood establishment. But Prose says you never feel the movie star-ness of Southern California in Didion’s writing—especially not in her personal essays.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You \u003cem>do\u003c/em> feel that neurotic presence,” she says. “The person struggling to meet the deadline; the person with the migraine; the person who can barely get out of bed in the morning; the person for whom writing is a kind of torment; the person for whom just the California light is almost too much to bear.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It all sounds so “down,” but until the last years Didion denied any personal fragility assumed by her readers. In real life, she was small, thin, pale and un-California-looking. But in 1977 she said her physical size was deceptive: “I’m very healthy. I eat a lot. I don’t cry a lot.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And she \u003cem>wrote\u003c/em> a lot. In her fiction, she relied on images that she said came into her mind. Then Didion the writer had to figure out what was going on in them. “If you lie low enough and stay quiet enough,” she said, “and if you don’t talk to very many people and you keep your central nervous system from shorting out, these pictures come to you. And then you try to find out what they mean.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A generation of journalists were influenced by those explorations, and a generation of fiction and memoir readers were drawn in and enlightened. Didion, a chronicler of cultural truths and fictions, observed her world intensely. She provided clarity. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Copyright 2021 \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "‘I, Too, Was Living a Double Life’: Why Trans Fans Connect to ‘The Matrix’",
"headTitle": "‘I, Too, Was Living a Double Life’: Why Trans Fans Connect to ‘The Matrix’ | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Erin Reed was 13 when she watched \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> for the first time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the mornings, she would log into internet chat rooms with a feminine screen name and talk to her online friends. Then she would return to school and her real life, where everyone knew her as male.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s a quote in the original \u003cem>Matrix\u003c/em> movie where basically Agent Smith sits down and says, ‘Mr. Anderson, it seems that you’ve been living two lives,’” Reed explains, referencing a scene where the protagonist’s hacker persona Neo is uncovered. “I remember that line stuck with me as a teenager because I, too, was living a double life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, Reed was just beginning to understand that she was transgender. When she got back from school, the first thing she would do was run to her computer, where she was allowed to be herself again. This was back when you had to compete with a landline to load a web page, and her mom eventually bought a separate phone line because she was online so often.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> follows computer hacker Neo, who discovers the shocking truth that the life he knows is really a complex computer simulation designed by intelligent machines to enslave humanity. He has always questioned his reality, but now he must choose whether or not to embrace his role in humanity’s battle to destroy the illusion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the approximately two decades following the release of the first movie in 1999, \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> has endured in pop culture for its portrayal of internet culture, philosophical themes, revolutionary special effects, and slick leather-clad fashion–just to name a few. A highly anticipated and unexpected fourth sequel, \u003cem>The Matrix Resurrections\u003c/em>, is now out in theaters and streaming on \u003ca href=\"https://play.hbomax.com/page/urn:hbo:page:GYbD1_wnm3mDCwgEAAAPM:type:feature\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">HBO Max\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But beyond its legacy in pop culture, \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> has long held a special place in the hearts of many trans people for the way it so perfectly encapsulates many essential facets of their identities.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Why ‘The Matrix’ resonates with trans people\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> was written and directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, two trans women who, at the time of movie’s release, were not publicly out. Ever since both sisters came out to the public in the 2010s, people have \u003ca href=\"https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2017/04/10/the-matrix-and-dysphoria-blues\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">long\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.themarysue.com/decoding-the-transgender-matrix-the-matrix-as-a-transgender-coming-out-story/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">speculated\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://ellienottifa.medium.com/lon-why-the-matrix-and-its-meaning-matter-to-transgender-politics-today-39d75b2ee7d4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">about\u003c/a> the trans themes in \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_13906221,arts_13870056,arts_13872364']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it wasn’t until very recently that one of the Wachowskis publicly confirmed their guesses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m glad that people are talking about the movies, \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> movies, with a trans narrative,” said Lilly Wachowski in an \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adXm2sDzGkQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">interview\u003c/a> with Netflix last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m glad that it has gotten out that, you know, that was the original intention, but the world wasn’t quite ready–the corporate world wasn’t ready for it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She added that she didn’t know how present her transness was in her mind as they were writing the movie, but that much of the desire for transformation in the films stemmed from her closeted point of view at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But long before this was confirmed, many of their trans fans were latching onto the movie anyways.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A couple of the more overt parallels have garnered attention over the years. For example, Neo is offered a choice between a red and blue pill. The red pill will open his eyes to the truth that he is living in a simulation. The blue pill will allow him to continue in ignorance. The red pill that Neo ends up taking is similar to what estrogen pills, used for hormone replacement therapy, looked like in the \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/NetflixFilm/status/1291442930717097985\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">90s\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another example: \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=137&v=adXm2sDzGkQ&feature=emb_title\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the Wachowskis wanted the character Switch\u003c/a> to present as male in the real world while presenting as female in the Matrix, as an explicit nod to the idea of transness in an online world. In an \u003ca href=\"https://ew.com/movies/the-matrix-resurrections-keanu-reeves-carrie-anne-moss-cover-story/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">interview\u003c/a> with \u003cem>Entertainment Weekly\u003c/em>, Keanu Reeves, who played Neo in the movies, recalled an early draft of the script that was later changed. “I think the studio wasn’t ready for that,” he said. The character ended up presenting as a woman in both dimensions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But crucially, it’s the spirit of self-actualization that resonates so strongly with many trans people–the existence of a true identity beyond your physical form, an ideal self that you can seize control of via the internet from an uncaring system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nowadays, the internet is inextricably meshed with our lives to a degree where we might take its self-discovery possibilities for granted. Log on and one can pick from a glut of increasingly specific identity tests, or find a community of like-minded people for any niche interest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> came out in 1999, the internet was only starting to resemble the force for self-discovery that it is today. It wasn’t until the \u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/chart/broadband-vs-dial-up-adoption-over-time/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">late 2000s\u003c/a> that the majority of American households had access to a broadband connection. Many of the people turning to the internet in that early era were people like Erin, who couldn’t find the answers they wanted anywhere else.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13907507\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Sci-fi film still with woman looking down at man in chair.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1920\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13907507\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Carrie-Anne Moss and Keanu Reeves in ‘The Matrix.’ \u003ccite>(Photo by Ronald Siemoneit; Sygma via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>She remembers finding message boards targeted towards trans people, offering early glimpses into gender-affirming medical care.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was no way that I was ever going to learn about that from my parents or from school or from any resources that would have ever been given to me,” she recalls. “But on the internet, it was like this is possible, and nothing could stop me from knowing it was possible. That knowledge in and of itself was enough for me to be like, yes, this is what I want. I want this in the future. One day I’m going to have it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many trans people in that generation turned to the internet for those reasons. Erin often hears stories of other trans people today who went through very similar journeys as teenagers, even frequenting the same sites that she visited.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even for some folks who didn’t realize they were transgender at the time, the movie stuck with them for reasons they couldn’t fully explain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Calista Termini watched \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> when it was first released in theaters. In the years since, it’s one of the few movies she’s rewatched over a dozen times.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Termini recalls the story sticking with her after she left the movie theater. “I was lying there in bed, thinking to myself: this is exactly how I feel,” she says. “I feel like there is something wrong with the world and I don’t know what it is, but I feel this way and I’ve always felt this way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a famous quote from Morpheus, Neo’s mentor in the movie. “What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it,” he says as he introduces the idea of the Matrix to Neo. “You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When she first watched \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em>, Termini didn’t know she was trans. But she credits the movie as one of the influences that provoked her to search for answers about why she felt so out of place in the world, eventually leading to the realization that she was trans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That feeling, of knowing something is out of place in the world, can be a common one for trans folks. Often, the feelings of discomfort can come from the way other people perceive them or knowing that their body doesn’t align with their gender–a form of gender dysphoria.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you are a trans person, there is sort of this idea that you are living in a muffling cocoon that is keeping you from seeing the reality of yourself,” Emily VanDerWerff, the critic at large for Vox, tells NPR. VanDerWerff wrote an \u003ca href=\"https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/30/18286436/the-matrix-wachowskis-trans-experience-redpill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">article\u003c/a> about the trans themes in \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> in 2019. Like Termini, she cites the movie as one of the rare films that she has rewatched over 20 times.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And that cocoon, to some degree, is the idea of fixed gender identity, which is one that society is very like built atop. And to be trans, you have to sort of assail that idea. And in the process of doing so, you may question other things about reality, including whether you live in a computer simulation, which is robots using humans as a way to power their existence.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13907509\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Still from sci-fi film of two men flying at each other in fight scene.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1920\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13907509\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Keanu Reeves and Hugo Weaving face each other in a scene from ‘The Matrix.’ \u003ccite>(Photo by Ronald Siemoneit; Sygma via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The universality of ‘The Matrix’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In many ways, this struggle of self-actualization against a dominant system is a universal one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though the concept of “redpilling” has been co-opted by groups who are often virulently opposed to trans identity, the fluidity of \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em>’s central themes is arguably one of its strengths.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>VanDerWerff agrees. “It does weirdly speak to this movie’s cultural ubiquity, to this movie’s ability to speak to all sorts of people in a similar way but to different ends, that I think often marks the most important and greatest movies ever made.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some trans people, especially those in the early stages of questioning their gender, can have trouble putting words to their experiences. These experiences can also be difficult to understand for people who have never questioned their gender. But \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> can provide a common shorthand to bridge either gap.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite the term being co-opted, an example of this can be the red pill metaphor. Termini remembers a moment in her life where she had to finally accept her own trans identity, and equates that to her “red pill moment.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Take the red pill, and you take the first steps toward living a more authentic existence, but at the potential end cost of upending your current life–potentially facing \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/09/09/1035457004/the-pervasiveness-of-transgender-health-care-discrimination\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">obstacles to accessing gender-affirming medical care\u003c/a>, disproportionately higher rates of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/09/01/641571680/transgender-killings-spur-calls-for-police-reform\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">homicide\u003c/a>, systemic \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2017/11/21/565327959/poll-majority-of-lgbtq-americans-report-harassment-violence-based-on-identity\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">discrimination\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/05/26/1000589842/americans-strongly-support-trans-rights-in-some-cases\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">cultural prejudice\u003c/a>. Take the blue pill, and live in the relative safety of the establishment–but is that comfort worth the isolation of suppressing who you are?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s a hard choice that many trans people still have to make when choosing to accept their identity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>VanDerWerff concurs, adding that it can be a difficult process to talk about, but \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> can give us language to describe it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that shorthand can be important in terms of conveying the trans experience to outsiders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Zoe Wendler, an associate professor at Ferris State University, agrees. “One of the cool things about \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> and the way it talks about this trans allegory is that it does connect with cisgender people so extensively,” Wendler said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wendler first saw \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> as a young teenager, shortly after it was released on DVD. She could never get the idea of the splinter, of something being wrong with the world, out of her head afterwards. Her appreciation for the film has evolved since then, especially since coming out and transitioning in recent years. She recalls a recent watch party with a bunch of other trans friends, where they excitedly screamed over the obvious parallels in the movies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think it’s a really healthy thing, both for trans people and cis people, because it helps break down this idea that there’s this incredible division between what makes a person trans or cis, because there isn’t.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Trans themes and representation in ‘The Matrix’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The nuance here is that \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> is so beloved by many trans people not because it’s solely a trans allegory, but also because the movie is so many other things–a critique of capitalism, a philosophical meditation on identity and an expertly crafted science fiction action movie. Though the trans themes are undeniable, they do not make up the entire backbone of the movie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In essence, it’s a great story that also happens to be about being trans, which is the kind of nuanced trans representation that is still rare in mainstream media today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even now, over 20 years after its release, \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> remains arguably the biggest piece of media ever made by trans creators. While more movies are starting to include trans characters and stories, many of them focus on or even define their trans characters by extreme tragedy or hardship. Others lean on offensive stereotypes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That is, if they include trans characters at all–a \u003ca href=\"https://www.glaad.org/sites/default/files/GLAAD%20-%202021%20STUDIO%20RESPONSIBILITY%20INDEX.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">2020 GLAAD study\u003c/a> reported that no film from a major studio included trans or non-binary characters that year, for the fourth year in a row.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many \u003cem>Matrix\u003c/em> fans wish the film franchise would break this pattern.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It would mean the world,” says Karen R. Karen first saw \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> with friends, some time after it had come out. She had already known she was trans, but she was and is still closeted to the majority of her friends and family, so she couldn’t admit to them the fantasy of wanting to be woken up from her own Matrix.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The stuff I want to read, the movies I want to see, are movies like the original Matrix, that can speak to our experience, but don’t fetishize our suffering or our hardships,” Wendler adds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wendler, who came out publicly this year and started teaching while presenting as a woman, described her transition as a time of “overflowing joy,” despite any obstacles along the way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We struggle, we grow, but we don’t do this because it hurts. We do this because it makes us really, really, really happy.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>NPR’s Victoria Whitley-Berry contributed to this piece. Copyright 2021 \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Erin Reed was 13 when she watched \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> for the first time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the mornings, she would log into internet chat rooms with a feminine screen name and talk to her online friends. Then she would return to school and her real life, where everyone knew her as male.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s a quote in the original \u003cem>Matrix\u003c/em> movie where basically Agent Smith sits down and says, ‘Mr. Anderson, it seems that you’ve been living two lives,’” Reed explains, referencing a scene where the protagonist’s hacker persona Neo is uncovered. “I remember that line stuck with me as a teenager because I, too, was living a double life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, Reed was just beginning to understand that she was transgender. When she got back from school, the first thing she would do was run to her computer, where she was allowed to be herself again. This was back when you had to compete with a landline to load a web page, and her mom eventually bought a separate phone line because she was online so often.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> follows computer hacker Neo, who discovers the shocking truth that the life he knows is really a complex computer simulation designed by intelligent machines to enslave humanity. He has always questioned his reality, but now he must choose whether or not to embrace his role in humanity’s battle to destroy the illusion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the approximately two decades following the release of the first movie in 1999, \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> has endured in pop culture for its portrayal of internet culture, philosophical themes, revolutionary special effects, and slick leather-clad fashion–just to name a few. A highly anticipated and unexpected fourth sequel, \u003cem>The Matrix Resurrections\u003c/em>, is now out in theaters and streaming on \u003ca href=\"https://play.hbomax.com/page/urn:hbo:page:GYbD1_wnm3mDCwgEAAAPM:type:feature\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">HBO Max\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But beyond its legacy in pop culture, \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> has long held a special place in the hearts of many trans people for the way it so perfectly encapsulates many essential facets of their identities.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Why ‘The Matrix’ resonates with trans people\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> was written and directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, two trans women who, at the time of movie’s release, were not publicly out. Ever since both sisters came out to the public in the 2010s, people have \u003ca href=\"https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2017/04/10/the-matrix-and-dysphoria-blues\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">long\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.themarysue.com/decoding-the-transgender-matrix-the-matrix-as-a-transgender-coming-out-story/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">speculated\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://ellienottifa.medium.com/lon-why-the-matrix-and-its-meaning-matter-to-transgender-politics-today-39d75b2ee7d4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">about\u003c/a> the trans themes in \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it wasn’t until very recently that one of the Wachowskis publicly confirmed their guesses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m glad that people are talking about the movies, \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> movies, with a trans narrative,” said Lilly Wachowski in an \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adXm2sDzGkQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">interview\u003c/a> with Netflix last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m glad that it has gotten out that, you know, that was the original intention, but the world wasn’t quite ready–the corporate world wasn’t ready for it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She added that she didn’t know how present her transness was in her mind as they were writing the movie, but that much of the desire for transformation in the films stemmed from her closeted point of view at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But long before this was confirmed, many of their trans fans were latching onto the movie anyways.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A couple of the more overt parallels have garnered attention over the years. For example, Neo is offered a choice between a red and blue pill. The red pill will open his eyes to the truth that he is living in a simulation. The blue pill will allow him to continue in ignorance. The red pill that Neo ends up taking is similar to what estrogen pills, used for hormone replacement therapy, looked like in the \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/NetflixFilm/status/1291442930717097985\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">90s\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another example: \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=137&v=adXm2sDzGkQ&feature=emb_title\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the Wachowskis wanted the character Switch\u003c/a> to present as male in the real world while presenting as female in the Matrix, as an explicit nod to the idea of transness in an online world. In an \u003ca href=\"https://ew.com/movies/the-matrix-resurrections-keanu-reeves-carrie-anne-moss-cover-story/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">interview\u003c/a> with \u003cem>Entertainment Weekly\u003c/em>, Keanu Reeves, who played Neo in the movies, recalled an early draft of the script that was later changed. “I think the studio wasn’t ready for that,” he said. The character ended up presenting as a woman in both dimensions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But crucially, it’s the spirit of self-actualization that resonates so strongly with many trans people–the existence of a true identity beyond your physical form, an ideal self that you can seize control of via the internet from an uncaring system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nowadays, the internet is inextricably meshed with our lives to a degree where we might take its self-discovery possibilities for granted. Log on and one can pick from a glut of increasingly specific identity tests, or find a community of like-minded people for any niche interest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> came out in 1999, the internet was only starting to resemble the force for self-discovery that it is today. It wasn’t until the \u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/chart/broadband-vs-dial-up-adoption-over-time/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">late 2000s\u003c/a> that the majority of American households had access to a broadband connection. Many of the people turning to the internet in that early era were people like Erin, who couldn’t find the answers they wanted anywhere else.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13907507\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Sci-fi film still with woman looking down at man in chair.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1920\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13907507\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-590691556-f01a5534216df01b1ecbae107974ea08fd42e729-2-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Carrie-Anne Moss and Keanu Reeves in ‘The Matrix.’ \u003ccite>(Photo by Ronald Siemoneit; Sygma via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>She remembers finding message boards targeted towards trans people, offering early glimpses into gender-affirming medical care.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was no way that I was ever going to learn about that from my parents or from school or from any resources that would have ever been given to me,” she recalls. “But on the internet, it was like this is possible, and nothing could stop me from knowing it was possible. That knowledge in and of itself was enough for me to be like, yes, this is what I want. I want this in the future. One day I’m going to have it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many trans people in that generation turned to the internet for those reasons. Erin often hears stories of other trans people today who went through very similar journeys as teenagers, even frequenting the same sites that she visited.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even for some folks who didn’t realize they were transgender at the time, the movie stuck with them for reasons they couldn’t fully explain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Calista Termini watched \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> when it was first released in theaters. In the years since, it’s one of the few movies she’s rewatched over a dozen times.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Termini recalls the story sticking with her after she left the movie theater. “I was lying there in bed, thinking to myself: this is exactly how I feel,” she says. “I feel like there is something wrong with the world and I don’t know what it is, but I feel this way and I’ve always felt this way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a famous quote from Morpheus, Neo’s mentor in the movie. “What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it,” he says as he introduces the idea of the Matrix to Neo. “You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When she first watched \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em>, Termini didn’t know she was trans. But she credits the movie as one of the influences that provoked her to search for answers about why she felt so out of place in the world, eventually leading to the realization that she was trans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That feeling, of knowing something is out of place in the world, can be a common one for trans folks. Often, the feelings of discomfort can come from the way other people perceive them or knowing that their body doesn’t align with their gender–a form of gender dysphoria.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you are a trans person, there is sort of this idea that you are living in a muffling cocoon that is keeping you from seeing the reality of yourself,” Emily VanDerWerff, the critic at large for Vox, tells NPR. VanDerWerff wrote an \u003ca href=\"https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/30/18286436/the-matrix-wachowskis-trans-experience-redpill\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">article\u003c/a> about the trans themes in \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> in 2019. Like Termini, she cites the movie as one of the rare films that she has rewatched over 20 times.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And that cocoon, to some degree, is the idea of fixed gender identity, which is one that society is very like built atop. And to be trans, you have to sort of assail that idea. And in the process of doing so, you may question other things about reality, including whether you live in a computer simulation, which is robots using humans as a way to power their existence.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13907509\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Still from sci-fi film of two men flying at each other in fight scene.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1920\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13907509\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/gettyimages-583900608-7686935a0878ba49736b5dfb5a8bf661d0f08ca1-2-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Keanu Reeves and Hugo Weaving face each other in a scene from ‘The Matrix.’ \u003ccite>(Photo by Ronald Siemoneit; Sygma via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The universality of ‘The Matrix’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In many ways, this struggle of self-actualization against a dominant system is a universal one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though the concept of “redpilling” has been co-opted by groups who are often virulently opposed to trans identity, the fluidity of \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em>’s central themes is arguably one of its strengths.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>VanDerWerff agrees. “It does weirdly speak to this movie’s cultural ubiquity, to this movie’s ability to speak to all sorts of people in a similar way but to different ends, that I think often marks the most important and greatest movies ever made.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some trans people, especially those in the early stages of questioning their gender, can have trouble putting words to their experiences. These experiences can also be difficult to understand for people who have never questioned their gender. But \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> can provide a common shorthand to bridge either gap.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite the term being co-opted, an example of this can be the red pill metaphor. Termini remembers a moment in her life where she had to finally accept her own trans identity, and equates that to her “red pill moment.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Take the red pill, and you take the first steps toward living a more authentic existence, but at the potential end cost of upending your current life–potentially facing \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/09/09/1035457004/the-pervasiveness-of-transgender-health-care-discrimination\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">obstacles to accessing gender-affirming medical care\u003c/a>, disproportionately higher rates of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/09/01/641571680/transgender-killings-spur-calls-for-police-reform\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">homicide\u003c/a>, systemic \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2017/11/21/565327959/poll-majority-of-lgbtq-americans-report-harassment-violence-based-on-identity\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">discrimination\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/05/26/1000589842/americans-strongly-support-trans-rights-in-some-cases\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">cultural prejudice\u003c/a>. Take the blue pill, and live in the relative safety of the establishment–but is that comfort worth the isolation of suppressing who you are?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s a hard choice that many trans people still have to make when choosing to accept their identity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>VanDerWerff concurs, adding that it can be a difficult process to talk about, but \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> can give us language to describe it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that shorthand can be important in terms of conveying the trans experience to outsiders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Zoe Wendler, an associate professor at Ferris State University, agrees. “One of the cool things about \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> and the way it talks about this trans allegory is that it does connect with cisgender people so extensively,” Wendler said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wendler first saw \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> as a young teenager, shortly after it was released on DVD. She could never get the idea of the splinter, of something being wrong with the world, out of her head afterwards. Her appreciation for the film has evolved since then, especially since coming out and transitioning in recent years. She recalls a recent watch party with a bunch of other trans friends, where they excitedly screamed over the obvious parallels in the movies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think it’s a really healthy thing, both for trans people and cis people, because it helps break down this idea that there’s this incredible division between what makes a person trans or cis, because there isn’t.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Trans themes and representation in ‘The Matrix’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The nuance here is that \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> is so beloved by many trans people not because it’s solely a trans allegory, but also because the movie is so many other things–a critique of capitalism, a philosophical meditation on identity and an expertly crafted science fiction action movie. Though the trans themes are undeniable, they do not make up the entire backbone of the movie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In essence, it’s a great story that also happens to be about being trans, which is the kind of nuanced trans representation that is still rare in mainstream media today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even now, over 20 years after its release, \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> remains arguably the biggest piece of media ever made by trans creators. While more movies are starting to include trans characters and stories, many of them focus on or even define their trans characters by extreme tragedy or hardship. Others lean on offensive stereotypes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That is, if they include trans characters at all–a \u003ca href=\"https://www.glaad.org/sites/default/files/GLAAD%20-%202021%20STUDIO%20RESPONSIBILITY%20INDEX.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">2020 GLAAD study\u003c/a> reported that no film from a major studio included trans or non-binary characters that year, for the fourth year in a row.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many \u003cem>Matrix\u003c/em> fans wish the film franchise would break this pattern.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It would mean the world,” says Karen R. Karen first saw \u003cem>The Matrix\u003c/em> with friends, some time after it had come out. She had already known she was trans, but she was and is still closeted to the majority of her friends and family, so she couldn’t admit to them the fantasy of wanting to be woken up from her own Matrix.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The stuff I want to read, the movies I want to see, are movies like the original Matrix, that can speak to our experience, but don’t fetishize our suffering or our hardships,” Wendler adds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wendler, who came out publicly this year and started teaching while presenting as a woman, described her transition as a time of “overflowing joy,” despite any obstacles along the way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We struggle, we grow, but we don’t do this because it hurts. We do this because it makes us really, really, really happy.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>NPR’s Victoria Whitley-Berry contributed to this piece. Copyright 2021 \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Prolific Feminist Author, Critic and Activist bell hooks Has Died at 69",
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"content": "\u003cp>The author, poet, feminist, cultural critic, and professor bell hooks died Wednesday at age 69. Her death was first \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/Enter_Ebony/status/1471153931027980291?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">announced\u003c/a> by her niece, Ebony Motley, who said that she had died at home surrounded by family and friends. No cause of death was reported, but Berea College in Kentucky, where hooks had taught since 2004, said in a \u003ca href=\"https://www.berea.edu/news/statement-on-the-death-of-bell-hooks/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">press release\u003c/a> that she had suffered from an extended illness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/Enter_Ebony/status/1471153931027980291?s=20\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>hooks, who preferred to spell her name with no capital letters as a way of de-emphasizing her individual identity, was born Gloria Jean Watkins as the fourth of seven children in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, on Sept. 25, 1952. Her pen name was a tribute to her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She attended segregated schools in her native Christian County, Kentucky, before earning her undergraduate degree at Stanford University in California, a master’s degree in English at the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate in literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She taught at Stanford University, Yale University, Oberlin College in Ohio and The City College of New York before returning to Kentucky to teach at Berea College, which now houses the \u003ca href=\"https://www.berea.edu/bhc/about/\">bell hooks Institute\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_13877670']The author of more than three dozen wide-ranging books, hooks published her first title, the poetry collection \u003cem>And There We Wept\u003c/em>, in 1978. Her influential book \u003cem>Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism\u003c/em> followed in 1981. Three years later, her \u003cem>Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center\u003c/em> explored and criticized the feminist movement’s propensity to center and privilege white women’s experiences.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Frequently, hooks’ work addressed the deep intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality and geographic place. She wrote about her native Appalachia, and growing up there as a Black girl, in the critical-essay collection \u003cem>belonging: a culture of place\u003c/em>, and in the poetry collection \u003cem>Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a 2000 interview with \u003cem>All Things Considered\u003c/em>, hooks \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2000/03/19/1071796/all-about-love\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">spoke\u003c/a> about the life-changing power of love—that is, the act of loving, and how love is far broader than romantic sentiment. “I’m talking about a love that is transformative, that challenges us in both our private and our civic lives,” she said. “I’m so moved often when I think of the civil rights movement, because I see it as a great movement for social justice that was rooted in love and that politicized the notion of love, that said: Real love will change you.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She went on:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“Everywhere I go, people want to feel more connected. They want to feel more connected to their neighbors. They want to feel more connected to the world. And when we learn that through love we can have that connection, we can see the stranger as ourselves. And I think that it would be absolutely fantastic to have that sense of ‘Let’s return to kind of a utopian focus on love, not unlike the sort of hippie focus on love.’ Because I always say to people, you know, the 60s’ focus on love had its stupid sentimental dimensions, but then it had these life-transforming dimensions. When I think of the love of justice that led three young people, two Jews and one African-American Christian, to go to the South and fight for justice and give their lives, Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner. I think that’s a quality of love that’s awesome … I tell this to young people, you know, that we can love in a deep and profound way that transforms the political world in which we live in.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Additional reporting contributed by Steve Smith. Copyright 2021 \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The author, poet, feminist, cultural critic, and professor bell hooks died Wednesday at age 69. Her death was first \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/Enter_Ebony/status/1471153931027980291?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">announced\u003c/a> by her niece, Ebony Motley, who said that she had died at home surrounded by family and friends. No cause of death was reported, but Berea College in Kentucky, where hooks had taught since 2004, said in a \u003ca href=\"https://www.berea.edu/news/statement-on-the-death-of-bell-hooks/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">press release\u003c/a> that she had suffered from an extended illness.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>hooks, who preferred to spell her name with no capital letters as a way of de-emphasizing her individual identity, was born Gloria Jean Watkins as the fourth of seven children in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, on Sept. 25, 1952. Her pen name was a tribute to her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She attended segregated schools in her native Christian County, Kentucky, before earning her undergraduate degree at Stanford University in California, a master’s degree in English at the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate in literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She taught at Stanford University, Yale University, Oberlin College in Ohio and The City College of New York before returning to Kentucky to teach at Berea College, which now houses the \u003ca href=\"https://www.berea.edu/bhc/about/\">bell hooks Institute\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The author of more than three dozen wide-ranging books, hooks published her first title, the poetry collection \u003cem>And There We Wept\u003c/em>, in 1978. Her influential book \u003cem>Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism\u003c/em> followed in 1981. Three years later, her \u003cem>Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center\u003c/em> explored and criticized the feminist movement’s propensity to center and privilege white women’s experiences.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Frequently, hooks’ work addressed the deep intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality and geographic place. She wrote about her native Appalachia, and growing up there as a Black girl, in the critical-essay collection \u003cem>belonging: a culture of place\u003c/em>, and in the poetry collection \u003cem>Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a 2000 interview with \u003cem>All Things Considered\u003c/em>, hooks \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2000/03/19/1071796/all-about-love\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">spoke\u003c/a> about the life-changing power of love—that is, the act of loving, and how love is far broader than romantic sentiment. “I’m talking about a love that is transformative, that challenges us in both our private and our civic lives,” she said. “I’m so moved often when I think of the civil rights movement, because I see it as a great movement for social justice that was rooted in love and that politicized the notion of love, that said: Real love will change you.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She went on:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“Everywhere I go, people want to feel more connected. They want to feel more connected to their neighbors. They want to feel more connected to the world. And when we learn that through love we can have that connection, we can see the stranger as ourselves. And I think that it would be absolutely fantastic to have that sense of ‘Let’s return to kind of a utopian focus on love, not unlike the sort of hippie focus on love.’ Because I always say to people, you know, the 60s’ focus on love had its stupid sentimental dimensions, but then it had these life-transforming dimensions. When I think of the love of justice that led three young people, two Jews and one African-American Christian, to go to the South and fight for justice and give their lives, Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner. I think that’s a quality of love that’s awesome … I tell this to young people, you know, that we can love in a deep and profound way that transforms the political world in which we live in.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Additional reporting contributed by Steve Smith. Copyright 2021 \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Michael Nesmith—Considerably More than a Monkee—Dies at 78",
"headTitle": "Michael Nesmith—Considerably More than a Monkee—Dies at 78 | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Musician and producer \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/15167272/michael-nesmith\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Michael Nesmith\u003c/a> has died. He rose to fame initially as a member of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/15398067/the-monkees\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Monkees\u003c/a>, but went on to have a long and influential career in music, television and movie production. Nesmith died of heart failure on Friday at his home in Carmel Valley, Calif. He was 78.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“With Infinite Love we announce that Michael Nesmith has passed away this morning in his home, surrounded by family, peacefully and of natural causes,” his family writes in a statement posted on Nesmith’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.videoranch3d.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">website\u003c/a>. “We ask that you respect our privacy at this time and we thank you for the love and light that all of you have shown him and us.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Along with his bandmate, Micky Dolenz, Nesmith recently completed a Monkees’ farewell tour. “I’m heartbroken,” Dolenz said, in a statement provided by a spokesperson. “I’ve lost a dear friend and partner. I’m so grateful that we could spend the last couple of months together doing what we loved best—singing, laughing, and doing shtick. I’ll miss it all so much. Especially the shtick.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xzUNldsmmM\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nesmith was born in Houston, Tex., in 1942. His parents divorced when he was only four, and his mother Bette supported the family with her wages as a secretary: a job that led her to \u003ca href=\"https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=wHshAAAAIBAJ&sjid=S4oFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4613,3284045&dq=bette+nesmith+graham&hl=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">invent the correction fluid Liquid Paper\u003c/a>, to deal with mistakes caused by early electric typewriters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nesmith started writing and performing music after a stint in the Air Force, recording under the name “Michael Blessing” and finding some success as a songwriter for acts such as \u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/different-drum-the-power-of-linda-ronstadts-voice\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Linda Ronstadt\u003c/a> and the \u003ca href=\"https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-monkees-our-life-in-15-songs-w435214/mary-mary-1967-w435250\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Paul Butterfield Blues Band\u003c/a> (who recorded “Mary, Mary” before the Monkees made it a hit). In late 1965, a friend from the Los Angeles music scene pointed him to a magazine ad seeking “four insane boys” to play in a Beatles-inspired band on a new TV show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Monkees\u003c/em> is mostly remembered today as a show about a band that didn’t play their own instruments—but it was genuinely ahead of its time, jam-packed with avant-garde film techniques (\u003cem>The Monkees\u003c/em> never met a fourth wall it wouldn’t break) and musical “romps” that are the direct ancestors of today’s music videos. \u003ca href=\"http://articles.latimes.com/1992-02-07/entertainment/ca-1573_1_music-video-clips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Nesmith himself later helped develop the format\u003c/a> that eventually morphed into into MTV.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A talented singer and multi-instrumentalist, Nesmith was the only one of his bandmates who had prior recording experience. If you watched \u003cem>The Monkees\u003c/em>, you probably heard his songs—including “Mary, Mary,” “You Just May Be the One” and “What Am I Doing Hangin’ Round”—without even realizing they were his. Nesmith clashed repeatedly with music publisher Don Kirshner over creative control of the band, once even \u003ca href=\"http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-don-kirshner-20110119-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">putting his fist through a wall\u003c/a>. He won; Kirshner was fired, and went on to work with another fictional band called The Archies (who, as cartoons, were considerably less likely to argue with him).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMNize7s8nc\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1969, as The Monkees phenomenon was fizzling out, Nesmith formed his own act, Mike Nesmith and the First National Band, which made three albums and had a \u003ca href=\"https://www.billboard.com/music/michael-nesmith-the-first-national-band\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">modest chart hit\u003c/a> with “Joanne” in 1970. While Nesmith never matched his Monkees-era musical successes—and other musicians were reluctant to accept him because of his association with the Pre-Fab Four—his pedal-steel-soaked First National records are regarded today as pioneering cuts of country-rock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the ’70s went along, Nesmith turned more towards production, founding the Pacific Arts Corporation to manage his music and television projects, including, in 1979, a show called \u003cem>PopClips\u003c/em>, which combined music videos with commentary from a “veejay,” which later became one of the models for MTV.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few years later, he won the first video of the year Grammy for \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU_ycxo-Q7PspWqZCya2VD0mQbXMuO-sA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Elephant Parts\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>,\u003c/em> a TV special with a similar format: music videos, parody commercials and comedy sketches. (Fun fact: the beloved Canadian band The Tragically Hip took their name from one of the sketches in \u003cem>Elephant Parts\u003c/em>). Another notable Pacific Arts production was the cult hit \u003ca href=\"https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087995/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Repo Man\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, which starred Emilio Estevez as a young punk and Harry Dean Stanton as a repo man in pursuit of a 1964 Chevy Malibu with a possibly-alien secret in its trunk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pacific Arts became a pioneer in the field of home video, before a legal dispute with PBS forced Nesmith to shut it down in the early 1990s; there was a blizzard of suits and countersuits over the home video rights to properties like \u003cem>Masterpiece Theater\u003c/em> and Ken Burns’ \u003cem>The Civil War\u003c/em>, and a jury sided with Nesmith, awarding him more than $40 million in damages. “It’s like finding your grandmother stealing your stereo,” \u003ca href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/271357.stm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">he told the BBC at the time\u003c/a>. “You’re happy to get your stereo back, but it’s sad to find out your grandmother is a thief.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nesmith continued to record and perform—even, occasionally, showing up onstage with The Monkees, after a 20th-anniversary revival (itself sparked by a marathon run of the band’s show on MTV) catapulted them back into the public consciousness. Always the most reserved and hard-to-find of the four, he was dogged for years by rumors that he didn’t get along with his bandmates, or that he wanted to distance himself from the whole phenomenon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But as the band approached its 40th anniversary, Nesmith began to open up. “The Monkees reside in my life like a little nugget, a gem I enjoy,” he told \u003cem>Uncut\u003c/em> magazine in 2016. “The struggles, the victories are long gone. What has continued has been the remnant light of it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Michael+Nesmith+%E2%80%94+considerably+more+than+a+Monkee+%E2%80%94+dies+at+78&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Musician and producer \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/15167272/michael-nesmith\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Michael Nesmith\u003c/a> has died. He rose to fame initially as a member of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/15398067/the-monkees\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Monkees\u003c/a>, but went on to have a long and influential career in music, television and movie production. Nesmith died of heart failure on Friday at his home in Carmel Valley, Calif. He was 78.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“With Infinite Love we announce that Michael Nesmith has passed away this morning in his home, surrounded by family, peacefully and of natural causes,” his family writes in a statement posted on Nesmith’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.videoranch3d.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">website\u003c/a>. “We ask that you respect our privacy at this time and we thank you for the love and light that all of you have shown him and us.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Along with his bandmate, Micky Dolenz, Nesmith recently completed a Monkees’ farewell tour. “I’m heartbroken,” Dolenz said, in a statement provided by a spokesperson. “I’ve lost a dear friend and partner. I’m so grateful that we could spend the last couple of months together doing what we loved best—singing, laughing, and doing shtick. I’ll miss it all so much. Especially the shtick.”\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/5xzUNldsmmM'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/5xzUNldsmmM'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Nesmith was born in Houston, Tex., in 1942. His parents divorced when he was only four, and his mother Bette supported the family with her wages as a secretary: a job that led her to \u003ca href=\"https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=wHshAAAAIBAJ&sjid=S4oFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4613,3284045&dq=bette+nesmith+graham&hl=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">invent the correction fluid Liquid Paper\u003c/a>, to deal with mistakes caused by early electric typewriters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nesmith started writing and performing music after a stint in the Air Force, recording under the name “Michael Blessing” and finding some success as a songwriter for acts such as \u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/different-drum-the-power-of-linda-ronstadts-voice\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Linda Ronstadt\u003c/a> and the \u003ca href=\"https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-monkees-our-life-in-15-songs-w435214/mary-mary-1967-w435250\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Paul Butterfield Blues Band\u003c/a> (who recorded “Mary, Mary” before the Monkees made it a hit). In late 1965, a friend from the Los Angeles music scene pointed him to a magazine ad seeking “four insane boys” to play in a Beatles-inspired band on a new TV show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Monkees\u003c/em> is mostly remembered today as a show about a band that didn’t play their own instruments—but it was genuinely ahead of its time, jam-packed with avant-garde film techniques (\u003cem>The Monkees\u003c/em> never met a fourth wall it wouldn’t break) and musical “romps” that are the direct ancestors of today’s music videos. \u003ca href=\"http://articles.latimes.com/1992-02-07/entertainment/ca-1573_1_music-video-clips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Nesmith himself later helped develop the format\u003c/a> that eventually morphed into into MTV.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A talented singer and multi-instrumentalist, Nesmith was the only one of his bandmates who had prior recording experience. If you watched \u003cem>The Monkees\u003c/em>, you probably heard his songs—including “Mary, Mary,” “You Just May Be the One” and “What Am I Doing Hangin’ Round”—without even realizing they were his. Nesmith clashed repeatedly with music publisher Don Kirshner over creative control of the band, once even \u003ca href=\"http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-don-kirshner-20110119-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">putting his fist through a wall\u003c/a>. He won; Kirshner was fired, and went on to work with another fictional band called The Archies (who, as cartoons, were considerably less likely to argue with him).\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/AMNize7s8nc'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/AMNize7s8nc'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>In 1969, as The Monkees phenomenon was fizzling out, Nesmith formed his own act, Mike Nesmith and the First National Band, which made three albums and had a \u003ca href=\"https://www.billboard.com/music/michael-nesmith-the-first-national-band\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">modest chart hit\u003c/a> with “Joanne” in 1970. While Nesmith never matched his Monkees-era musical successes—and other musicians were reluctant to accept him because of his association with the Pre-Fab Four—his pedal-steel-soaked First National records are regarded today as pioneering cuts of country-rock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the ’70s went along, Nesmith turned more towards production, founding the Pacific Arts Corporation to manage his music and television projects, including, in 1979, a show called \u003cem>PopClips\u003c/em>, which combined music videos with commentary from a “veejay,” which later became one of the models for MTV.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few years later, he won the first video of the year Grammy for \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU_ycxo-Q7PspWqZCya2VD0mQbXMuO-sA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Elephant Parts\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>,\u003c/em> a TV special with a similar format: music videos, parody commercials and comedy sketches. (Fun fact: the beloved Canadian band The Tragically Hip took their name from one of the sketches in \u003cem>Elephant Parts\u003c/em>). Another notable Pacific Arts production was the cult hit \u003ca href=\"https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087995/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Repo Man\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, which starred Emilio Estevez as a young punk and Harry Dean Stanton as a repo man in pursuit of a 1964 Chevy Malibu with a possibly-alien secret in its trunk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pacific Arts became a pioneer in the field of home video, before a legal dispute with PBS forced Nesmith to shut it down in the early 1990s; there was a blizzard of suits and countersuits over the home video rights to properties like \u003cem>Masterpiece Theater\u003c/em> and Ken Burns’ \u003cem>The Civil War\u003c/em>, and a jury sided with Nesmith, awarding him more than $40 million in damages. “It’s like finding your grandmother stealing your stereo,” \u003ca href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/271357.stm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">he told the BBC at the time\u003c/a>. “You’re happy to get your stereo back, but it’s sad to find out your grandmother is a thief.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nesmith continued to record and perform—even, occasionally, showing up onstage with The Monkees, after a 20th-anniversary revival (itself sparked by a marathon run of the band’s show on MTV) catapulted them back into the public consciousness. Always the most reserved and hard-to-find of the four, he was dogged for years by rumors that he didn’t get along with his bandmates, or that he wanted to distance himself from the whole phenomenon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But as the band approached its 40th anniversary, Nesmith began to open up. “The Monkees reside in my life like a little nugget, a gem I enjoy,” he told \u003cem>Uncut\u003c/em> magazine in 2016. “The struggles, the victories are long gone. What has continued has been the remnant light of it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Michael+Nesmith+%E2%80%94+considerably+more+than+a+Monkee+%E2%80%94+dies+at+78&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Steven Spielberg's 'West Side Story' Will Make You Believe in Movies Again",
"headTitle": "Steven Spielberg’s ‘West Side Story’ Will Make You Believe in Movies Again | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>A lot of us had our doubts when we heard that \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/tags/456833620/steven-spielberg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Steven Spielberg \u003c/a>would be directing a new version of \u003cem>West Side Story\u003c/em>, and not just because of Hollywood remake fatigue. In the decades since it first appeared on Broadway in 1957, the \u003cem>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/em>-inspired story of two warring New York street gangs has generated more than its share of criticism, especially over the writing and the casting of its Puerto Rican characters. Even the beloved 1961 movie inspires groans now for having cast Natalie Wood in the lead role of María, and for forcing \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/06/07/1003905260/rita-moreno-on-west-side-story-and-becoming-the-role-model-she-needed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Rita Moreno\u003c/a>, the only Puerto Rican in the cast, to wear dark brown makeup as Anita.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sixty years later, Moreno is an executive producer on Spielberg’s \u003cem>West Side Story\u003c/em>. She also gives a poignant performance in the new role of Valentina, the widow of Doc, the drugstore owner. By her presence, Moreno teaches us how to approach this movie, as both an affectionate tribute and a gentle corrective.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13898635']Spielberg and his regular screenwriter of late, the playwright \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2013/02/15/172007880/kushners-lincoln-is-strange-but-also-savvy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Tony Kushner\u003c/a>, give us a tougher, grimier vision of the Upper West Side in the 1950s. We see the working-class neighborhood of San Juan Hill, home to mostly Black and Latino residents, being demolished to make way for new developments like Lincoln Center. There’s a heightened sense of hostility between the Puerto Rican gang known as the Sharks and their white rivals, the Jets, and their rumbles are startlingly violent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Adding to the realism is the fact that the Sharks are played by actors of Latino descent. They include David Alvarez as Bernardo, the brash leader of the Sharks, and Ariana DeBose as his girlfriend, Anita. Both actors are superb, as is Rachel Zegler, making a fine screen debut as Bernardo’s little sister, María.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story hasn’t changed: María falls into an ill-fated romance with Tony, a former member of the Jets, played by Ansel Elgort. Early in the film, the two meet surreptitiously on María’s fire escape, singing “Tonight,” one of the many classic \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2018/08/24/641208843/the-complex-life-of-leonard-bernstein-a-once-in-a-century-talent\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Leonard Bernstein\u003c/a>–\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/15871266/stephen-sondheim\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Stephen Sondheim\u003c/a> songs gloriously revived in the movie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5GJLwWiYSg\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s remarkable about this and the other numbers is how brilliantly Spielberg directs them. \u003cem>West Side Story\u003c/em> is the first musical he’s ever made, but it’s no surprise that he’s a natural at it: Few other American filmmakers have a more instinctive sense of rhythm and visual flow, or more direct access to your emotions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Spielberg stages the numbers like an old-school Hollywood classicist, with none of the overly jumpy editing that might distract from the dancing. When the Jets and the Sharks meet up at a school dance, their clashing tempers and bodies pull you in with an almost physical force. And when Anita and Bernardo sing “America,” their rousing song about the pleasures and perils of assimilation, the scene builds from a domestic squabble to a joyous party in the streets, which Spielberg shoots in a vibrant whirl of color and movement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Tony-winning choreographer Justin Peck wrings some clever variations on Jerome Robbins’ original dance moves, whether it’s the Jets wreaking havoc in a police station house during their big comic-relief number, “Gee, Officer Krupke,” or Tony and his friends tossing around a pistol during a tense performance of the song “Cool.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='pop_13021']Speaking of Tony’s friends: As Riff, the leader of the Jets, Mike Faist gives one of the movie’s standout performances. The weak link in the cast is Elgort: He can sing and dance, but there’s an emotional flatness to his acting that doesn’t quite gel with the much livelier Zegler.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Spielberg can’t solve everything that’s creaky and dated about \u003cem>West Side Story\u003c/em> as a text. But he knows that the show still has something resonant to say about racism and violence in any era, including ours. The reason the movie works so well stems, I think, from a curious paradox: This \u003cem>West Side Story\u003c/em> may be grittier and more realistic than the original movie, but it also feels more thrillingly old-fashioned than anything a Hollywood studio has released in ages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By the end, I wasn’t moved so much by Tony and María’s sweet, somewhat drippy romance or the fatalistic drama between the Jets and the Sharks. I was moved by Spielberg’s conviction, his sheer faith in the transporting power of movies. For two-and-a-half hours, he makes you a believer again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Steven+Spielberg%27s+%27West+Side+Story%27+will+make+you+believe+in+movies+again&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>A lot of us had our doubts when we heard that \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/tags/456833620/steven-spielberg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Steven Spielberg \u003c/a>would be directing a new version of \u003cem>West Side Story\u003c/em>, and not just because of Hollywood remake fatigue. In the decades since it first appeared on Broadway in 1957, the \u003cem>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/em>-inspired story of two warring New York street gangs has generated more than its share of criticism, especially over the writing and the casting of its Puerto Rican characters. Even the beloved 1961 movie inspires groans now for having cast Natalie Wood in the lead role of María, and for forcing \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/06/07/1003905260/rita-moreno-on-west-side-story-and-becoming-the-role-model-she-needed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Rita Moreno\u003c/a>, the only Puerto Rican in the cast, to wear dark brown makeup as Anita.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sixty years later, Moreno is an executive producer on Spielberg’s \u003cem>West Side Story\u003c/em>. She also gives a poignant performance in the new role of Valentina, the widow of Doc, the drugstore owner. By her presence, Moreno teaches us how to approach this movie, as both an affectionate tribute and a gentle corrective.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Spielberg and his regular screenwriter of late, the playwright \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2013/02/15/172007880/kushners-lincoln-is-strange-but-also-savvy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Tony Kushner\u003c/a>, give us a tougher, grimier vision of the Upper West Side in the 1950s. We see the working-class neighborhood of San Juan Hill, home to mostly Black and Latino residents, being demolished to make way for new developments like Lincoln Center. There’s a heightened sense of hostility between the Puerto Rican gang known as the Sharks and their white rivals, the Jets, and their rumbles are startlingly violent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Adding to the realism is the fact that the Sharks are played by actors of Latino descent. They include David Alvarez as Bernardo, the brash leader of the Sharks, and Ariana DeBose as his girlfriend, Anita. Both actors are superb, as is Rachel Zegler, making a fine screen debut as Bernardo’s little sister, María.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story hasn’t changed: María falls into an ill-fated romance with Tony, a former member of the Jets, played by Ansel Elgort. Early in the film, the two meet surreptitiously on María’s fire escape, singing “Tonight,” one of the many classic \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2018/08/24/641208843/the-complex-life-of-leonard-bernstein-a-once-in-a-century-talent\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Leonard Bernstein\u003c/a>–\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/15871266/stephen-sondheim\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Stephen Sondheim\u003c/a> songs gloriously revived in the movie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/A5GJLwWiYSg'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/A5GJLwWiYSg'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>What’s remarkable about this and the other numbers is how brilliantly Spielberg directs them. \u003cem>West Side Story\u003c/em> is the first musical he’s ever made, but it’s no surprise that he’s a natural at it: Few other American filmmakers have a more instinctive sense of rhythm and visual flow, or more direct access to your emotions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Spielberg stages the numbers like an old-school Hollywood classicist, with none of the overly jumpy editing that might distract from the dancing. When the Jets and the Sharks meet up at a school dance, their clashing tempers and bodies pull you in with an almost physical force. And when Anita and Bernardo sing “America,” their rousing song about the pleasures and perils of assimilation, the scene builds from a domestic squabble to a joyous party in the streets, which Spielberg shoots in a vibrant whirl of color and movement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Tony-winning choreographer Justin Peck wrings some clever variations on Jerome Robbins’ original dance moves, whether it’s the Jets wreaking havoc in a police station house during their big comic-relief number, “Gee, Officer Krupke,” or Tony and his friends tossing around a pistol during a tense performance of the song “Cool.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Speaking of Tony’s friends: As Riff, the leader of the Jets, Mike Faist gives one of the movie’s standout performances. The weak link in the cast is Elgort: He can sing and dance, but there’s an emotional flatness to his acting that doesn’t quite gel with the much livelier Zegler.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Spielberg can’t solve everything that’s creaky and dated about \u003cem>West Side Story\u003c/em> as a text. But he knows that the show still has something resonant to say about racism and violence in any era, including ours. The reason the movie works so well stems, I think, from a curious paradox: This \u003cem>West Side Story\u003c/em> may be grittier and more realistic than the original movie, but it also feels more thrillingly old-fashioned than anything a Hollywood studio has released in ages.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By the end, I wasn’t moved so much by Tony and María’s sweet, somewhat drippy romance or the fatalistic drama between the Jets and the Sharks. I was moved by Spielberg’s conviction, his sheer faith in the transporting power of movies. For two-and-a-half hours, he makes you a believer again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Steven+Spielberg%27s+%27West+Side+Story%27+will+make+you+believe+in+movies+again&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Don’t be scared off by the epic running time of\u003cem> Drive My Car\u003c/em>; it may run just shy of three hours, but it flies by like a dream. The director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi has adapted and significantly expanded a 2014 short story by \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/04/06/984447978/haruki-murakami-ive-had-all-sorts-of-strange-experiences-in-my-life\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Haruki Murakami\u003c/a>, but nothing about it feels belabored or drawn out. There’s more going on in any five minutes of \u003cem>Drive My Car\u003c/em> than in some movies in their entirety. It’s an intricately structured drama about love and loss, and the ways in which art can and can’t compensate for some of life’s disappointments. I’ll be surprised if I see a more absorbing movie this year, or a better one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13905751']The story follows a middle-aged Tokyo stage actor named Kafuku, superbly played by Hidetoshi Nishijima. He’s a calm, mild-mannered guy who’s been married for two decades to a screenwriter named Oto. We get a sense of their mutual devotion when we see Kafuku driving around in his bright red Saab, rehearsing his lines by listening to audio tapes that Oto has painstakingly recorded for him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But their relationship is more complicated than it appears. Years ago, Kafuku and Oto experienced an agonizing loss that has led her to find solace—and perhaps something more—in relationships with other men. Kafuku has deep compassion for his wife, which doesn’t make her betrayal any less painful. And then another tragedy strikes when Oto dies suddenly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BPKPb_RTwI\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If that sounds like a lot, \u003cem>Drive My Car\u003c/em> is just warming up. Two years later, as he tries to move on with his life, Kafuku accepts an arts residency at a theater festival in Hiroshima, where he will direct an experimental production of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17614112\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chekhov\u003c/a>‘s \u003cem>Uncle Vanya. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But when he gets there, he learns that, per safety regulations, the festival has assigned him a personal driver: a quiet 20-something woman named Misaki, played by Tôko Miura. Kafuku is at first reluctant to hand over the keys to his car, but Misaki turns out to be an excellent driver. She maintains a respectful silence during their rides while Kafuku goes over the play by listening to Oto’s cassette tapes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It may not surprise you to learn that Kafuku and Misaki become friends, or that Misaki turns out to be guarding some sad secrets of her own. But nothing about \u003cem>Drive My Car\u003c/em> feels obvious. Both Nishijima and Miura give revelatory performances as two people who are in no hurry to reveal themselves—to each other, or to the audience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While their characters’ relationship is the heart of the movie, it’s only one part of it. There have been countless films about the porous boundaries between life and art, but offhand I can’t remember too many that so rigorously dramatized the life of an artist. Hamaguchi immerses us in Kafuku’s audition, casting and rehearsal process, which is especially fascinating because this \u003cem>Uncle Vanya \u003c/em>is a multi-lingual production. It may sound challenging for a bunch of actors to connect onstage while performing in a mix of Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and Korean sign language. Then again, Hamaguchi seems to suggest, how much do people speaking the same language really understand each other?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13906308']Things get even juicier when Kafuku casts a popular young actor named Takatsuki, who Kafuku knows had an affair with his wife. But characteristically, Hamaguchi sets up a potentially melodramatic situation, only to take a less predictable route. The two men have a couple of tense but polite conversations, revealing the contrast between the impulsive, hot-headed Takatsuki and the cooler, more measured Kafuku. He’s resentful of this young man, but also intrigued: He’s trying to learn something about his wife that he couldn’t figure out on his own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ryûsuke Hamaguchi has been one of the most exciting new talents in world cinema for a few years now. In movies like \u003cem>Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy\u003c/em>, which came out earlier this year, he pulls us deep into the mysteries and ambiguities of his characters’ relationships. The emotionally overwhelming \u003cem>Drive My Car\u003c/em> brings him to a new level of mastery. Its sensibility is a wonderful marriage of the two authors that shaped it: It has Murakami’s feel for loneliness and alienation and Chekhov’s compassion for human frailty. It’s a rare filmmaker who can take a theatrical stage or the inside of a car—and turn them both into spaces of profound human connection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27Drive+My+Car%27+may+be+the+most+absorbing+ride+you+take+all+year&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Don’t be scared off by the epic running time of\u003cem> Drive My Car\u003c/em>; it may run just shy of three hours, but it flies by like a dream. The director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi has adapted and significantly expanded a 2014 short story by \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2021/04/06/984447978/haruki-murakami-ive-had-all-sorts-of-strange-experiences-in-my-life\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Haruki Murakami\u003c/a>, but nothing about it feels belabored or drawn out. There’s more going on in any five minutes of \u003cem>Drive My Car\u003c/em> than in some movies in their entirety. It’s an intricately structured drama about love and loss, and the ways in which art can and can’t compensate for some of life’s disappointments. I’ll be surprised if I see a more absorbing movie this year, or a better one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The story follows a middle-aged Tokyo stage actor named Kafuku, superbly played by Hidetoshi Nishijima. He’s a calm, mild-mannered guy who’s been married for two decades to a screenwriter named Oto. We get a sense of their mutual devotion when we see Kafuku driving around in his bright red Saab, rehearsing his lines by listening to audio tapes that Oto has painstakingly recorded for him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But their relationship is more complicated than it appears. Years ago, Kafuku and Oto experienced an agonizing loss that has led her to find solace—and perhaps something more—in relationships with other men. Kafuku has deep compassion for his wife, which doesn’t make her betrayal any less painful. And then another tragedy strikes when Oto dies suddenly.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/6BPKPb_RTwI'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/6BPKPb_RTwI'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>If that sounds like a lot, \u003cem>Drive My Car\u003c/em> is just warming up. Two years later, as he tries to move on with his life, Kafuku accepts an arts residency at a theater festival in Hiroshima, where he will direct an experimental production of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17614112\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chekhov\u003c/a>‘s \u003cem>Uncle Vanya. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But when he gets there, he learns that, per safety regulations, the festival has assigned him a personal driver: a quiet 20-something woman named Misaki, played by Tôko Miura. Kafuku is at first reluctant to hand over the keys to his car, but Misaki turns out to be an excellent driver. She maintains a respectful silence during their rides while Kafuku goes over the play by listening to Oto’s cassette tapes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It may not surprise you to learn that Kafuku and Misaki become friends, or that Misaki turns out to be guarding some sad secrets of her own. But nothing about \u003cem>Drive My Car\u003c/em> feels obvious. Both Nishijima and Miura give revelatory performances as two people who are in no hurry to reveal themselves—to each other, or to the audience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While their characters’ relationship is the heart of the movie, it’s only one part of it. There have been countless films about the porous boundaries between life and art, but offhand I can’t remember too many that so rigorously dramatized the life of an artist. Hamaguchi immerses us in Kafuku’s audition, casting and rehearsal process, which is especially fascinating because this \u003cem>Uncle Vanya \u003c/em>is a multi-lingual production. It may sound challenging for a bunch of actors to connect onstage while performing in a mix of Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and Korean sign language. Then again, Hamaguchi seems to suggest, how much do people speaking the same language really understand each other?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Things get even juicier when Kafuku casts a popular young actor named Takatsuki, who Kafuku knows had an affair with his wife. But characteristically, Hamaguchi sets up a potentially melodramatic situation, only to take a less predictable route. The two men have a couple of tense but polite conversations, revealing the contrast between the impulsive, hot-headed Takatsuki and the cooler, more measured Kafuku. He’s resentful of this young man, but also intrigued: He’s trying to learn something about his wife that he couldn’t figure out on his own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ryûsuke Hamaguchi has been one of the most exciting new talents in world cinema for a few years now. In movies like \u003cem>Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy\u003c/em>, which came out earlier this year, he pulls us deep into the mysteries and ambiguities of his characters’ relationships. The emotionally overwhelming \u003cem>Drive My Car\u003c/em> brings him to a new level of mastery. Its sensibility is a wonderful marriage of the two authors that shaped it: It has Murakami’s feel for loneliness and alienation and Chekhov’s compassion for human frailty. It’s a rare filmmaker who can take a theatrical stage or the inside of a car—and turn them both into spaces of profound human connection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27Drive+My+Car%27+may+be+the+most+absorbing+ride+you+take+all+year&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Kieran Culkin is Having Fun With 'Succession'—and He Hopes You Are Too",
"headTitle": "Kieran Culkin is Having Fun With ‘Succession’—and He Hopes You Are Too | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/series/1045640636/succession-recaps\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Succession \u003c/em>\u003c/a>co\u003cem>–\u003c/em>star Kieran Culkin has grown up on screen. His first gig (when he was 6) was in a commercial, followed by a small part in the 1990 film \u003cem>Home Alone\u003c/em>, which his brother, Macaulay, starred in. But it was only recently, nearly 30 years into his acting career, that something clicked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I can’t remember if it was Season 1 or 2 [of \u003cem>Succession\u003c/em>], but I remember coming home from work one day and telling my wife, ‘It’s going really well. … I think I know what I want to do with my life. I think I want to be an actor,'” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13903591']HBO’s \u003cem>Succession \u003c/em>is a comedy disguised as a drama about corporate power and greed. Culkin’s character, Roman Roy, is one of three self-involved adult siblings vying to take over Waystar Royco, the family-run media conglomerate, after their elderly father retires or dies. Roman, the youngest brother, is known for his slimy sense of humor and casual zingers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Everything is dancing on a line,” Culkin says of his character. “This guy grew up never having to suffer consequences, and so he doesn’t really know what that means to suffer consequences.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With previous projects, Culkin wasn’t so invested in audience reception. He’d finish a film or play and move onto the next thing. But with \u003cem>Succession\u003c/em>, it’s different.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I kind of hope people like the show I’m on because I’m having such a good time doing it, so I want to keep doing it,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuDpjl-gJ9A\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003ch3>Interview highlights\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On feeling ambivalent about being an actor \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve been doing it since I was a kid, and I don’t think when you’re 6, 7 years old and you say, “Hey, mom, dad, I want to be an actor” that you’re actually really making a decision for your future. You’re just a kid. So I felt like I’d just been doing it since I was a kid and never actually made the choice to do it. And I think around the age 18, 19, 20, I found that suddenly I had a career that I never decided I wanted, and didn’t really like that. So I kind of tried to stay out of the limelight as much as possible while I figured out what I want to do with my life and, in the meantime, \u003cem>I’ll just do this acting thing as long as I like it and as long as I find a project that I like.\u003c/em> I didn’t necessarily pursue the acting career or success or anything like that. I just enjoy doing work from time to time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On working with such a talented ensemble cast in \u003c/strong>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Succession\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>, especially Brian Cox, who plays patriarch Logan Roy \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It just sort of rubs off on you. … Just being in a scene with someone like Brian, there’s a lot less work for me to have to do. … Brian is a force to be reckoned with as a person, so he just brings so much that there isn’t much effort I have to put forward. That’s also really interesting on the show. I agree there’s a lot of extremely talented actors on the show, and a lot of them just work very, very differently and you get to see people’s different approaches and how they can all make it work. … There’s elements of the real [actors] in the character, so it gets blurred a bit. Brian has Logan-y in moments, but for the most part, he’s just a wonderful guy and Logan is obviously not. But you see these little things going, “Is that Logan or is Brian just hungry? Can someone get him a sandwich? He’s about to snap at you.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how all the cursing in the show has affected his real speech \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I would say the F-word just slides out of me. I mean, I think in general, that’s always been a sort of natural word for me. But since doing the show, it’s every sentence, more or less. I’m trying to be careful now because my two-year-old daughter actually has become a mimic. So that one’s been tough. She hasn’t said it yet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13906873 aligncenter\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/2021-12-06-d08ffa0d10b0b4e87e222b7fd448ded7c3b41e06-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/2021-12-06-d08ffa0d10b0b4e87e222b7fd448ded7c3b41e06-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/2021-12-06-d08ffa0d10b0b4e87e222b7fd448ded7c3b41e06-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/2021-12-06-d08ffa0d10b0b4e87e222b7fd448ded7c3b41e06-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/2021-12-06-d08ffa0d10b0b4e87e222b7fd448ded7c3b41e06-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/2021-12-06-d08ffa0d10b0b4e87e222b7fd448ded7c3b41e06-1536x1151.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/2021-12-06-d08ffa0d10b0b4e87e222b7fd448ded7c3b41e06.jpg 1705w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On witnessing child stardom via his brother, and how toxic fame is \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was pretty nuts. And I think what people sometimes fail to remember, too, is that he was a kid. He didn’t really choose that. It’s something that happened to him. And I think when you’re a kid, you obviously don’t have the tools to handle something like that. So I think it might have been pretty tough. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13894392']For me, I got to sort of experience it secondhand as a child. So to me, I always have known this is not something one would want to pursue. It’s not a very nice thing, fame. No anonymity, it’s terrible. I have friends that are very famous. They can’t walk down the street without several people stopping them. Forget trying to board a plane. It’s ridiculous. They can’t go out to a restaurant with friends because people are going to come to the table saying, “Oh, I never do this,” or “Sorry to interrupt.” …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some people probably enjoy it, and they probably have been able to figure out life with it. But I think for the most part, it comes to people and they go, “Oh, I’ve made a horrible mistake,” and now they have to manage it. That’s the way I look at it. Any reasonable person would not, could not, look at fame and go, “I want that!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On rejection in the industry \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I never and still don’t pay attention to that. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been doing it for a long time. I never looked at it as losing a part. … I’m just not right for it or I am. If the job doesn’t happen, great. If it happens, great. And that’s sort of always the way it’s been. I do kind of remember my father teaching me, like, in an audition, “You work really hard for the audition and the moment you leave that room, you forget about it because it’s not your job. You let it go. If it comes back to you, then great, and you get to do the work again, but you don’t think about that stuff.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On being surprised by how much he loves parenthood \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was never something I considered until we did it. Now it is quite actually the greatest—way better than I could have imagined! It doesn’t matter how hard it gets. Like with anything else, you have a job that’s too difficult or a relationship that’s too hard, you just end it. It’s like, done, move on. [With parenthood] it doesn’t matter how hard it gets. It’s always fulfilling and always wonderful. And I’m only two years into it. So who knows, but it’s the greatest thing, way better than I could have imagined.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On his ability to memorize lines very quickly \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That is something that I can credit towards my childhood acting, because I memorize lines extremely fast. It’s almost like a parlor trick. … I can look at a speech like once or twice, and I can repeat it back pretty quickly. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13868208']I also don’t like running lines, which I know a lot of actors like to do. … I actually don’t like saying the words. I don’t say them out loud when I’m working on them the night before or the day of. I don’t like saying it until I’m in the room saying it. And there was one day … it was a big scene with a big group of us and [Brian Cox] yelled, “We’re running lines!” And then he started in the scene and everybody’s doing it. It came to my part and he looked at me and I said, “Well, I haven’t actually looked at the scene yet.” So I grabbed the sides and I just sort of read it once and then we were called to set and we came in and we just shot it. And he goes, “When did you learn those lines? Just now?” I went, “Oh yeah, just now.” And he went, “Goddamn it!!” And he got so mad because he had to work the night before and try to learn the lines and I looked at it twice and I knew it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Heidi Saman and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Natalie Escobar adapted it for the Web.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Kieran+Culkin+is+having+fun+with+%27Succession%27+%E2%80%94+and+he+hopes+you+are+too&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/series/1045640636/succession-recaps\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Succession \u003c/em>\u003c/a>co\u003cem>–\u003c/em>star Kieran Culkin has grown up on screen. His first gig (when he was 6) was in a commercial, followed by a small part in the 1990 film \u003cem>Home Alone\u003c/em>, which his brother, Macaulay, starred in. But it was only recently, nearly 30 years into his acting career, that something clicked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I can’t remember if it was Season 1 or 2 [of \u003cem>Succession\u003c/em>], but I remember coming home from work one day and telling my wife, ‘It’s going really well. … I think I know what I want to do with my life. I think I want to be an actor,'” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>HBO’s \u003cem>Succession \u003c/em>is a comedy disguised as a drama about corporate power and greed. Culkin’s character, Roman Roy, is one of three self-involved adult siblings vying to take over Waystar Royco, the family-run media conglomerate, after their elderly father retires or dies. Roman, the youngest brother, is known for his slimy sense of humor and casual zingers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Everything is dancing on a line,” Culkin says of his character. “This guy grew up never having to suffer consequences, and so he doesn’t really know what that means to suffer consequences.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With previous projects, Culkin wasn’t so invested in audience reception. He’d finish a film or play and move onto the next thing. But with \u003cem>Succession\u003c/em>, it’s different.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I kind of hope people like the show I’m on because I’m having such a good time doing it, so I want to keep doing it,” he says.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/iuDpjl-gJ9A'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/iuDpjl-gJ9A'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003chr>\n\u003ch3>Interview highlights\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On feeling ambivalent about being an actor \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve been doing it since I was a kid, and I don’t think when you’re 6, 7 years old and you say, “Hey, mom, dad, I want to be an actor” that you’re actually really making a decision for your future. You’re just a kid. So I felt like I’d just been doing it since I was a kid and never actually made the choice to do it. And I think around the age 18, 19, 20, I found that suddenly I had a career that I never decided I wanted, and didn’t really like that. So I kind of tried to stay out of the limelight as much as possible while I figured out what I want to do with my life and, in the meantime, \u003cem>I’ll just do this acting thing as long as I like it and as long as I find a project that I like.\u003c/em> I didn’t necessarily pursue the acting career or success or anything like that. I just enjoy doing work from time to time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On working with such a talented ensemble cast in \u003c/strong>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Succession\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>, especially Brian Cox, who plays patriarch Logan Roy \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It just sort of rubs off on you. … Just being in a scene with someone like Brian, there’s a lot less work for me to have to do. … Brian is a force to be reckoned with as a person, so he just brings so much that there isn’t much effort I have to put forward. That’s also really interesting on the show. I agree there’s a lot of extremely talented actors on the show, and a lot of them just work very, very differently and you get to see people’s different approaches and how they can all make it work. … There’s elements of the real [actors] in the character, so it gets blurred a bit. Brian has Logan-y in moments, but for the most part, he’s just a wonderful guy and Logan is obviously not. But you see these little things going, “Is that Logan or is Brian just hungry? Can someone get him a sandwich? He’s about to snap at you.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On how all the cursing in the show has affected his real speech \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I would say the F-word just slides out of me. I mean, I think in general, that’s always been a sort of natural word for me. But since doing the show, it’s every sentence, more or less. I’m trying to be careful now because my two-year-old daughter actually has become a mimic. So that one’s been tough. She hasn’t said it yet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13906873 aligncenter\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/2021-12-06-d08ffa0d10b0b4e87e222b7fd448ded7c3b41e06-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/2021-12-06-d08ffa0d10b0b4e87e222b7fd448ded7c3b41e06-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/2021-12-06-d08ffa0d10b0b4e87e222b7fd448ded7c3b41e06-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/2021-12-06-d08ffa0d10b0b4e87e222b7fd448ded7c3b41e06-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/2021-12-06-d08ffa0d10b0b4e87e222b7fd448ded7c3b41e06-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/2021-12-06-d08ffa0d10b0b4e87e222b7fd448ded7c3b41e06-1536x1151.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/2021-12-06-d08ffa0d10b0b4e87e222b7fd448ded7c3b41e06.jpg 1705w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On witnessing child stardom via his brother, and how toxic fame is \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was pretty nuts. And I think what people sometimes fail to remember, too, is that he was a kid. He didn’t really choose that. It’s something that happened to him. And I think when you’re a kid, you obviously don’t have the tools to handle something like that. So I think it might have been pretty tough. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>For me, I got to sort of experience it secondhand as a child. So to me, I always have known this is not something one would want to pursue. It’s not a very nice thing, fame. No anonymity, it’s terrible. I have friends that are very famous. They can’t walk down the street without several people stopping them. Forget trying to board a plane. It’s ridiculous. They can’t go out to a restaurant with friends because people are going to come to the table saying, “Oh, I never do this,” or “Sorry to interrupt.” …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some people probably enjoy it, and they probably have been able to figure out life with it. But I think for the most part, it comes to people and they go, “Oh, I’ve made a horrible mistake,” and now they have to manage it. That’s the way I look at it. Any reasonable person would not, could not, look at fame and go, “I want that!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On rejection in the industry \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I never and still don’t pay attention to that. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been doing it for a long time. I never looked at it as losing a part. … I’m just not right for it or I am. If the job doesn’t happen, great. If it happens, great. And that’s sort of always the way it’s been. I do kind of remember my father teaching me, like, in an audition, “You work really hard for the audition and the moment you leave that room, you forget about it because it’s not your job. You let it go. If it comes back to you, then great, and you get to do the work again, but you don’t think about that stuff.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On being surprised by how much he loves parenthood \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was never something I considered until we did it. Now it is quite actually the greatest—way better than I could have imagined! It doesn’t matter how hard it gets. Like with anything else, you have a job that’s too difficult or a relationship that’s too hard, you just end it. It’s like, done, move on. [With parenthood] it doesn’t matter how hard it gets. It’s always fulfilling and always wonderful. And I’m only two years into it. So who knows, but it’s the greatest thing, way better than I could have imagined.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On his ability to memorize lines very quickly \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That is something that I can credit towards my childhood acting, because I memorize lines extremely fast. It’s almost like a parlor trick. … I can look at a speech like once or twice, and I can repeat it back pretty quickly. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>I also don’t like running lines, which I know a lot of actors like to do. … I actually don’t like saying the words. I don’t say them out loud when I’m working on them the night before or the day of. I don’t like saying it until I’m in the room saying it. And there was one day … it was a big scene with a big group of us and [Brian Cox] yelled, “We’re running lines!” And then he started in the scene and everybody’s doing it. It came to my part and he looked at me and I said, “Well, I haven’t actually looked at the scene yet.” So I grabbed the sides and I just sort of read it once and then we were called to set and we came in and we just shot it. And he goes, “When did you learn those lines? Just now?” I went, “Oh yeah, just now.” And he went, “Goddamn it!!” And he got so mad because he had to work the night before and try to learn the lines and I looked at it twice and I knew it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Heidi Saman and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Natalie Escobar adapted it for the Web.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Kieran+Culkin+is+having+fun+with+%27Succession%27+%E2%80%94+and+he+hopes+you+are+too&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "These Kids Have Written the History of an Overlooked Black Female Composer",
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"content": "\u003cp>For decades, it was almost impossible to hear a piece of music written by \u003ca href=\"https://www.wisemusicclassical.com/composer/4938/Florence-Price/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Florence Price\u003c/a>. Price was a Black, female composer who died in 1953. But a group of New York City middle school students had the opportunity to quite literally write Florence Price’s history. Their book, titled \u003ca href=\"https://www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/mch/event/florence-price-book-launch-concert/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Who Is Florence Price?\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, is now out and available in stores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13906807\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13906807\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/Screen-Shot-2021-12-03-at-12.04.27-PM-800x1084.png\" alt=\"Book cover featuring an illustration of a Black woman wearing a green dress playing the piano.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1084\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/Screen-Shot-2021-12-03-at-12.04.27-PM-800x1084.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/Screen-Shot-2021-12-03-at-12.04.27-PM-160x217.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/Screen-Shot-2021-12-03-at-12.04.27-PM-768x1041.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/Screen-Shot-2021-12-03-at-12.04.27-PM.png 986w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Who Is Florence Price?,’ by students of the Special Music School at Kaufman Music Center, New York..\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The kids attend \u003ca href=\"https://www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/sms/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Special Music School\u003c/a>, a K-12 public school in Manhattan that teaches high-level music instruction alongside academics. Shannon Potts is an English teacher there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our children are musicians, so whether or not we intentionally draw it together, they bring music into the classroom every day in the most delightful ways,” Potts says. “So if you’re talking about themes and poetry, immediately a child will qualify it with the way that a theme repeats in music.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Potts assigned her sixth, seventh and eighth grade students to study Florence Price—a composer born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887. She was the first Black woman to have her music played by a major American orchestra: the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed her Symphony No. 1 in 1933 and her Piano Concerto in One Movement the next year. In 1939, at her \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/08/30/748757267/lift-every-voice-marian-anderson-florence-b-price-and-the-sound-of-black-sisterh\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">famed Lincoln Memorial concert\u003c/a>, the contralto Marian Anderson included Price’s arrangement of the spiritual “My Soul is Anchored in the Lord.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite Price’s talent and drive, most classical music performers and gatekeepers put her aside, and her work failed to gain traction with the large, almost exclusively white institutions that could have catapulted her to mainstream renown. As she herself wrote in a letter to famed conductor Serge Koussevitzky, “I have two handicaps—those of sex and race.” She was not wrong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t5nMxqxTO4\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recently, though, there’s been a blossoming of interest in Price’s work. A recording of her symphonies by the Philadelphia Orchestra was just \u003ca href=\"https://www.grammy.com/grammys/news/2022-grammys-complete-winners-nominees-nominations-list\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">nominated\u003c/a> for a Grammy. In the months ahead, \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfsymphony.org/Buy-Tickets/2021-22/MORGAN-CONDUCTS-PRICE-3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">her music will be performed by the San Francisco Symphony\u003c/a>, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the students began researching Price, however, they realized that although there were a \u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/the-rediscovery-of-florence-price\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">few materials\u003c/a> written about her life for grown-ups, there was nothing aimed at kids.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That gave Potts had an idea: She would have her students write and illustrate their own book about Florence Price, and about how her music was rediscovered. As the kids’ book begins:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“In 2009, a couple bought an old house outside of Chicago. In the attic, they found boxes filled with yellowed sheets of music. Every piece was written by the same woman, Florence Price. ‘Who is Florence Price?’ they wondered…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Florence’s mind was filled with music, but she had a big question. She was a girl and her skin was a different color than so many of the composers she knew about. Could she grow up to be a famous composer, too? When Florence was only 11, her first piece was published. Was it possible that Florence’s music could change things?”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>Special Music School is a partnership between the New York City Board of Education and a performing arts center called the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Kaufman Music Center\u003c/a>, whose executive director is Kate Sheeran. Sheeran was extremely enthusiastic about the students’ work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This beautiful book emerged that they wrote together, 45 of them together,” Sheeran recalls. “I found out about it when they brought it down to my office, and I was just floored.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sheeran was so impressed that she ordered a small, self-published print run of their work. She sent it around to various people in the classical music community—including Robert Thompson, the president of \u003ca href=\"https://www.wisemusicclassical.com/composer/4938/Florence-Price/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">G. Schirmer, the company that publishes Florence Price’s music\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_13881675,arts_13892514,arts_13874853']“I think it’s one of the few moments in my job where I had to cancel the next meeting and I was just kind of filled with tears,” Thompson recalls. “It was just an incredibly beautiful moment.” Thompson agreed to publish the book; all royalties will go to Kaufman Music Center, which is a non-profit organization.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iYxGHhCuqg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Rebecca Beato\u003c/a> is a 14-year-old violinist from Queens. She was also one of the lead illustrators of \u003cem>Who Is Florence Price?\u003c/em> and she says that Price has been a personal inspiration. “Her music has been out there, performed by major orchestras,” Beato says, “and she’s a woman of color, which even now—it’s like difficult to get your music shown to the world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Writing the book was a process of discovery, says \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlUudUD2Vkk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Cobie Buckmire\u003c/a>, a 13-year-old pianist from Brooklyn. “I didn’t even know who she was before I started this,” he notes. “All the other famous composers are white men like Mozart, Beethoven, Bach.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hazel Peebles, a 13-year-old violist from Harlem, says that you can hear Price’s personal history in her music. “It really is beautiful,” Peebles observes. “She worked in some of her history, some of her Black background into the music. I really just love that and appreciate that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What the students learned in creating this book goes far beyond music, Kate Sheeran says. “They’re also seeing that they can have a voice in shaping who writes history and who tells stories,” she says, “and that we don’t have to just accept the way music is presented to us or the way music history is presented to us—that they too can shape that. And that, to me, is the most exciting thing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSmTa8hvd5U&t=1s\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We talk about representation in literature all the time,” Potts observes. “For kids to be able to become authors and activists in a way, to disrupt the story of the way that classical music is being told. They no longer, as a diverse population, become victims of a largely white society. They control the narrative. They can rewrite it. And this project, in the way it’s been received, really shows them that when they speak up, the world is ready to hear them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Potts says that the very last lines of her students’ book have already come true, thanks to their hard work and creativity. “Today, Florence’s music can be heard all around the world just like she dreamed of when she was young,” Potts reads. “If someone asks, ‘Who is Florence Price?’, you can tell them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=These+NYC+kids+have+written+the+history+of+an+overlooked+Black+female+composer&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>For decades, it was almost impossible to hear a piece of music written by \u003ca href=\"https://www.wisemusicclassical.com/composer/4938/Florence-Price/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Florence Price\u003c/a>. Price was a Black, female composer who died in 1953. But a group of New York City middle school students had the opportunity to quite literally write Florence Price’s history. Their book, titled \u003ca href=\"https://www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/mch/event/florence-price-book-launch-concert/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Who Is Florence Price?\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, is now out and available in stores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13906807\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13906807\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/Screen-Shot-2021-12-03-at-12.04.27-PM-800x1084.png\" alt=\"Book cover featuring an illustration of a Black woman wearing a green dress playing the piano.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1084\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/Screen-Shot-2021-12-03-at-12.04.27-PM-800x1084.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/Screen-Shot-2021-12-03-at-12.04.27-PM-160x217.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/Screen-Shot-2021-12-03-at-12.04.27-PM-768x1041.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/12/Screen-Shot-2021-12-03-at-12.04.27-PM.png 986w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Who Is Florence Price?,’ by students of the Special Music School at Kaufman Music Center, New York..\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The kids attend \u003ca href=\"https://www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/sms/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Special Music School\u003c/a>, a K-12 public school in Manhattan that teaches high-level music instruction alongside academics. Shannon Potts is an English teacher there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our children are musicians, so whether or not we intentionally draw it together, they bring music into the classroom every day in the most delightful ways,” Potts says. “So if you’re talking about themes and poetry, immediately a child will qualify it with the way that a theme repeats in music.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Potts assigned her sixth, seventh and eighth grade students to study Florence Price—a composer born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887. She was the first Black woman to have her music played by a major American orchestra: the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed her Symphony No. 1 in 1933 and her Piano Concerto in One Movement the next year. In 1939, at her \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/08/30/748757267/lift-every-voice-marian-anderson-florence-b-price-and-the-sound-of-black-sisterh\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">famed Lincoln Memorial concert\u003c/a>, the contralto Marian Anderson included Price’s arrangement of the spiritual “My Soul is Anchored in the Lord.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite Price’s talent and drive, most classical music performers and gatekeepers put her aside, and her work failed to gain traction with the large, almost exclusively white institutions that could have catapulted her to mainstream renown. As she herself wrote in a letter to famed conductor Serge Koussevitzky, “I have two handicaps—those of sex and race.” She was not wrong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/5t5nMxqxTO4'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/5t5nMxqxTO4'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Recently, though, there’s been a blossoming of interest in Price’s work. A recording of her symphonies by the Philadelphia Orchestra was just \u003ca href=\"https://www.grammy.com/grammys/news/2022-grammys-complete-winners-nominees-nominations-list\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">nominated\u003c/a> for a Grammy. In the months ahead, \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfsymphony.org/Buy-Tickets/2021-22/MORGAN-CONDUCTS-PRICE-3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">her music will be performed by the San Francisco Symphony\u003c/a>, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the students began researching Price, however, they realized that although there were a \u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/the-rediscovery-of-florence-price\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">few materials\u003c/a> written about her life for grown-ups, there was nothing aimed at kids.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That gave Potts had an idea: She would have her students write and illustrate their own book about Florence Price, and about how her music was rediscovered. As the kids’ book begins:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“In 2009, a couple bought an old house outside of Chicago. In the attic, they found boxes filled with yellowed sheets of music. Every piece was written by the same woman, Florence Price. ‘Who is Florence Price?’ they wondered…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Florence’s mind was filled with music, but she had a big question. She was a girl and her skin was a different color than so many of the composers she knew about. Could she grow up to be a famous composer, too? When Florence was only 11, her first piece was published. Was it possible that Florence’s music could change things?”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>Special Music School is a partnership between the New York City Board of Education and a performing arts center called the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Kaufman Music Center\u003c/a>, whose executive director is Kate Sheeran. Sheeran was extremely enthusiastic about the students’ work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This beautiful book emerged that they wrote together, 45 of them together,” Sheeran recalls. “I found out about it when they brought it down to my office, and I was just floored.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sheeran was so impressed that she ordered a small, self-published print run of their work. She sent it around to various people in the classical music community—including Robert Thompson, the president of \u003ca href=\"https://www.wisemusicclassical.com/composer/4938/Florence-Price/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">G. Schirmer, the company that publishes Florence Price’s music\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“I think it’s one of the few moments in my job where I had to cancel the next meeting and I was just kind of filled with tears,” Thompson recalls. “It was just an incredibly beautiful moment.” Thompson agreed to publish the book; all royalties will go to Kaufman Music Center, which is a non-profit organization.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iYxGHhCuqg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Rebecca Beato\u003c/a> is a 14-year-old violinist from Queens. She was also one of the lead illustrators of \u003cem>Who Is Florence Price?\u003c/em> and she says that Price has been a personal inspiration. “Her music has been out there, performed by major orchestras,” Beato says, “and she’s a woman of color, which even now—it’s like difficult to get your music shown to the world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Writing the book was a process of discovery, says \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlUudUD2Vkk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Cobie Buckmire\u003c/a>, a 13-year-old pianist from Brooklyn. “I didn’t even know who she was before I started this,” he notes. “All the other famous composers are white men like Mozart, Beethoven, Bach.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hazel Peebles, a 13-year-old violist from Harlem, says that you can hear Price’s personal history in her music. “It really is beautiful,” Peebles observes. “She worked in some of her history, some of her Black background into the music. I really just love that and appreciate that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What the students learned in creating this book goes far beyond music, Kate Sheeran says. “They’re also seeing that they can have a voice in shaping who writes history and who tells stories,” she says, “and that we don’t have to just accept the way music is presented to us or the way music history is presented to us—that they too can shape that. And that, to me, is the most exciting thing.”\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/pSmTa8hvd5U'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/pSmTa8hvd5U'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>“We talk about representation in literature all the time,” Potts observes. “For kids to be able to become authors and activists in a way, to disrupt the story of the way that classical music is being told. They no longer, as a diverse population, become victims of a largely white society. They control the narrative. They can rewrite it. And this project, in the way it’s been received, really shows them that when they speak up, the world is ready to hear them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Potts says that the very last lines of her students’ book have already come true, thanks to their hard work and creativity. “Today, Florence’s music can be heard all around the world just like she dreamed of when she was young,” Potts reads. “If someone asks, ‘Who is Florence Price?’, you can tell them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=These+NYC+kids+have+written+the+history+of+an+overlooked+Black+female+composer&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"marketplace": {
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
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"mindshift": {
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"order": 12
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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},
"perspectives": {
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"order": 14
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"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
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"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
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"possible": {
"id": "possible",
"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Possible-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.possible.fm/",
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"source": "Possible"
},
"link": "/radio/program/possible",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/730YpdUSNlMyPQwNnyjp4k"
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},
"pri-the-world": {
"id": "pri-the-world",
"title": "PRI's The World: Latest Edition",
"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 2pm-3pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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},
"radiolab": {
"id": "radiolab",
"title": "Radiolab",
"info": "A two-time Peabody Award-winner, Radiolab is an investigation told through sounds and stories, and centered around one big idea. In the Radiolab world, information sounds like music and science and culture collide. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show is designed for listeners who demand skepticism, but appreciate wonder. WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, Death, Sex & Money, On the Media and many more.",
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},
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