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    Paul McCartney, Carole King and Others Pay Tribute to Brian Wilson

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    Wilson, whose death was announced on Wednesday, leaves behind an immense musical legacy that spans several decades. King and others share how his music shaped them.Brian Wilson, the leader of the Beach Boys who death at 82 was announced on Wednesday, provided a joyous soundtrack for beach vacations and summer road trips for generations of people.Among pop and rock musicians he will also be remembered as a talented songwriter and studio pioneer whose music has had an immense influence for decades on those who followed him.The Beach Boys had 13 singles in the Billboard Top 10, with three of them reaching No. 1. Their influence on the surf rock genre and on popular music generally was recognized by the variety of people who paid respects on social media to Wilson on Wednesday.Here’s what some of Wilson’s friends had to say about his death and legacy.Paul McCartney, a Wilson contemporary, noted that there was a chorus of tributes from other musicians, saying Wilson had a “mysterious sense of musical genius” that made his songs special. “The notes he heard in his head and passed to us were simple and brilliant at the same time,” McCartney said. “I loved him, and was privileged to be around his bright shining light for a little while. How we will continue without Brian Wilson, ‘God Only Knows.’”Carole King, also a contemporary, wrote on Facebook that Wilson was her friend and brother in songwriting. “We shared a similar sensibility, as evidenced by his 4 over 5 chord under ‘Aaaah!’ in ‘Good Vibrations’ and mine under ‘I’m Into Something Good,’” she said. “We once discussed who used it first, and in the end we decided it didn’t matter.”In 2015, “Love & Mercy,” a biopic about Wilson’s life starring John Cusack was released. On Wednesday, Cusack said that the “maestro” had died, adding that the hitmaker was an open heart with two legs “with an ear that heard the angels.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How “Pet Sounds” Became the Beach Boys Masterpiece

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      Brian Wilson’s 1966 masterpiece is now considered a crowning achievement of music. The album’s reputation grew over time.Making a list of the best rock albums ever is easy: Something old (the Beatles), something new (or newer; perhaps Radiohead), something borrowed (the Rolling Stones’ blues or disco pastiches) and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue.”And, of course, bursting into the top 10 — and often higher — of any respectable list: “Pet Sounds.”The overwhelming brainchild of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ chief songwriter whose death at 82 was announced on Wednesday, “Pet Sounds” is beautiful — with gorgeous vocal harmonies, haunting timbres and wistful lyrics of adolescent longing and estrangement. It was a landmark in studio experimentation that changed the idea of how albums could be made. But one thing that stands out about the Beach Boys’ masterpiece is how gradually it came to be widely celebrated, compared with many of its peers.“When it was released in the United States,” said Jan Butler, a senior lecturer in popular music at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom, “it did pretty well, but for the Beach Boys, it was considered a flop.”Released in the spring of 1966, “Pet Sounds” represented a break from the catchy tunes about surfing, cars and girls that the group had consistently rode to the top of the charts. The opening track is called “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” but previous Beach Boys songs had described how nice it was.The album peaked at No. 10 — low for one of the most popular acts at the time — and was the first Beach Boys album in three years not to reach gold status, Butler wrote in a chapter of an academic book. The Beach Boys’ record company, Capitol, rushed out a greatest-hits that outsold the album of original music.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Broadway Dreams Were Dashed, Then Rob Madge Knocked on Some Doors

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      The British performer is bringing “My Son’s a Queer (but What Can You Do?)” to City Center this week, after an earlier run was canceled.“Everybody needs a good setback in their life and gosh, 2024 did that for me.”That was Rob Madge, speaking on video last month from their London home. A theater maker who identifies as nonbinary, Madge smiled wide into the camera and, wearing a crisp white guayabera-style shirt that was mostly buttoned, looked as if they were on their way to a “White Lotus” resort happy hour.But Madge wasn’t talking about cocktails and island intrigue. They were recalling dashed Broadway dreams.In February 2024, the Broadway run of Madge’s autobiographical show “My Son’s a Queer (but What Can You Do?)” was postponed just weeks before it was to begin preview performances at the Lyceum Theater. There was talk of opening on Broadway the following season, but that never materialized.In a statement last month, the show’s producers, Tom Smedes and Heather Shields, said “the heartbreaking decision” to call off a Broadway run was because “the risks of launching and sustaining the production were simply too great” for the show’s “long-term health.”The actor in the production, which incorporates projected scenes from the “living room shows” that Madge performed as a kid.Mark SeniorMadge, 28, said having Broadway fall through prompted them to consider difficult and dueling questions, the likes of which plague any theater artist putting work into the world.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rosana Paulino, a Brazilian Artist Who Wields Poetry and Persistence

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      Rosana Paulino, one of Brazil’s most influential artists, works from a narrow three-story house in Pirituba, a neighborhood of simple homes and shops that huddle along the hillside in the northwest outskirts of São Paulo. Her small balcony looks toward a pocket park, a railway line and a nature preserve on a ridge that belies the urban sprawl beyond.The daughter of a cleaner and a house painter, Paulino has pushed her way with stubborn insistence from modest origins in the Black working class into Brazil’s top institutions — at one time working clerical jobs for three years to pay for prep classes to get into the best universities. But she remains rooted in São Paulo’s north-side neighborhoods, where Black culture formed around the rail yards and the warehouses where laborers transferred coffee and other crops before shipping them abroad.“Espada de Iansã,” watercolor and graphite on paper, from the Senhora das Plantas series. Paulino’s female figures seem to merge with Brazilian plants that carry ecological or spiritual symbolism.Gabriela Portilho for The New York Times“It’s very important for me to stay here,” Paulino, 58, said, on a muggy afternoon in April, as a tropical rainstorm gathered. “It’s that old story — you start to have a name and money and so you move out of your community. No, no, no. That’s absolutely not for me.”She emerged as an artist when bourgeois tastes and Modernism dominated the museums and schools, making little space for the work and perspectives of artists from Brazil’s Black majority.Lately the climate has changed. A survey at the prestigious Pinacoteca de São Paulo museum in 2018 and participation in the 2023 São Paulo Biennial cemented Paulino’s hometown recognition; her inclusion in the 2022 Venice Biennale, with some two dozen large-scale drawings of part-human, part-plant female figures, brought visibility abroad.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tesla Protesters Claim a Victory as Elon Musk Leaves Trump’s Side

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      The activists behind the Tesla Takedown campaign say they intend to expand beyond protests at the company’s showrooms.Elon Musk left the Trump administration with a White House send-off on Friday. That was a victory of sorts for a group of activists who have spent much of the last four months organizing protests against Mr. Musk’s right-wing politics by targeting his electric car company, Tesla.A day later, on Saturday, hundreds of people showed up at more than 50 Tesla showrooms and other company locations to continue their protests.The campaign at Tesla sites began in February after Joan Donovan, a sociology professor at Boston University, gathered friends to hold a demonstration at a Tesla showroom in Boston, and posted a notice about her plan on Bluesky using the hashtag #TeslaTakedown. She said she had been inspired by a small protest at Tesla’s electric vehicle chargers in Maine soon after President Trump’s inauguration.“That first one on Feb. 15 was me and like 50 people,” Ms. Donovan said. “And then the next week it was a hundred more people, and then a hundred more after that, and it’s just grown.”Tesla Takedown has since expanded into an international movement, staging demonstrations at Tesla factories, showrooms and other locations in countries including Australia, Britain, France and Germany as well as across the United States. The campaign’s U.S. growth has been fueled in large part by anger over Mr. Musk’s leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency, which has slashed government spending and dismissed tens of thousands of federal workers while gaining access to sensitive personal data.Mr. Musk departed the administration after his involvement in politics hurt his companies, especially Tesla. Sales of the company’s cars have tumbled since Mr. Trump took office and the start of protests against the company.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tommy Dorr, a Veteran Vintage Dealer, Brings His Shop Mothfood to Manhattan

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      Tommy Dorr, the owner of Mothfood, has been in the business for more than two decades. But it wasn’t until this month that he brought the shop to his most discerning shoppers: New Yorkers.“The New York eye is the best,” said Tommy Dorr, the owner of Mothfood, a vintage clothing business that this month opened a showroom in Lower Manhattan. “I mean, people here have the best taste in clothes.”Mr. Dorr, 43, is originally from Michigan, where he got his start as a vintage seller working at a bowling alley turned flea market in the late 1990s. Since then, he’s started a few of his own ventures, including Lost and Found, a shop he has kept open just outside Detroit since 2003.Mothfood is probably the project for which New Yorkers know him best, largely because of the Instagram account Mr. Dorr used to establish the brand more than a decade ago under the same name.“I don’t even remember why I picked it, but it’s just a great tongue-in-cheek kind of name,” said Mr. Dorr, who considers it a good litmus test for customers. Are you in on the joke, or do you find the notion of moth-eaten clothing kind of, well, gross?He likes garments that are well worn — sun-bleached jackets, paint-splattered denim and hole-y T-shirts. Historically, they have not been everyone’s thing. But over the years, Mr. Dorr has found a devoted following that counts celebrities, stylists, designers and everyday vintage hunters among its ranks. They are accustomed to ordering from his e-shop or visiting him in Los Angeles, where he opened the first Mothfood showroom in 2015.“I’ve been wanting him to come to New York,” said Emily Adams Bode Aujla, a New York designer and friend of Mr. Dorr’s who has been buying vintage pieces from him both for personal use and for her brand, Bode, for longer than either of them can remember. “I think that I always have thought his business would do so well here, but I’m selfish,” she added with a laugh.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Last Lucille Roberts

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      All that remains of the Lucille Roberts gym empire is a modest location in Queens.At its height, the brand had more than 50 locations in the New York area and its commercials aired non-stop on local television.The gym helped set off the fitness craze that would revolutionize women’s health.The most loyal Lucille Roberts devotees have little interest in working out anywhere else.The Last Lucille RobertsOn a busy thoroughfare in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens sits a women-only gym with faded hot pink signage. It is the last surviving location of Lucille Roberts, a chain of women’s health clubs that once thrived in New York, leading a trend that fused fitness with feminism. Now that it has dwindled down to just one location, its most loyal members have ended up here.Women in their 50s and 60s who have worked out for decades at Lucille Roberts now take classes including Zumba and “Brazilian Butt and Gutt” in a fluorescent-lit studio. They have little interest in going anywhere else. Signs on the walls remind members not to leave their purses and handbags unattended when they’re using the machines. A magenta poster announces: “Strong Women Work Out Here.”On a recent afternoon at this gym on Austin Street, members explained why they have stuck with Lucille Roberts long after it was a leader in its field, with more than 50 locations in the New York area.Marguerite Toussaint pumped some iron after finishing her morning shift as a hotel pastry cook at the Park Hyatt in Manhattan. She has been a Lucille Roberts member since the mid-1990s, when she signed up at a location in Brooklyn, not long after she moved from Haiti to New York. She wakes up each workday before dawn and trains here on her way home.“All of us hope this gym never closes,” Ms. Toussaint said. “It’s not like other gyms. It’s a community for women. We care about each other here. If you don’t see somebody, you call and find out. ‘Hey, why didn’t I see you today?’ I don’t see that at Planet Fitness.”Marguerite Toussaint has been a Lucille Roberts member since the mid-1990s.A member stretches at the chain’s last location.

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      How Grace Potter Lost (and Found) a Solo Album, and a New Life

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      In May 2009, Hollywood Records announced that T Bone Burnett — the producer of the Robert Plant and Alison Krauss LP “Raising Sand,” which dominated the Grammys earlier that year — had recently entered the studio with Grace Potter and the Nocturnals to produce the band’s new album. The LP, which would be the Vermont-based bluesy roots-rock group’s third, was slated to come out that fall.The label didn’t mention that the album was in fact a solo vehicle for Potter, then 25, that she recorded with a team of renowned session musicians: the drummer Jim Keltner, the guitarist Marc Ribot, the bassist Dennis Crouch and the keyboardist Keefus Ciancia. “She was like a ball of fire,” Keltner recalled of Potter in a phone call, “and she was really fun to follow.”During an interview in March at her eclectically decorated villa in Topanga, Calif., Potter — a multi-instrumentalist whose soulful voice has earned her comparisons to Bonnie Raitt, Janis Joplin and “a grittier Patty Griffin” — recounted her sense of anticipation over the release of the LP, “Medicine.”“It really felt like something exciting on the horizon,” Potter said, sitting on the couch in her living room dressed in a stylish forest-green jumpsuit. “It was like the secret that we got to keep until it all came out.” Sixteen years earlier, she had described the record as “more of a storyteller, kind of tribal, Motown, voodoo thing” than her earlier output.Then Hollywood shelved the album. The label wanted Potter and the Nocturnals to rerecord the songs with the producer Mark Batson, known for his work with Alicia Keys, the Dave Matthews Band and Dr. Dre. Potter blamed an A&R executive, whom she declined to name, for the decision.She also said that Bob Cavallo, then the chair of the Disney Music Group, which distributes the Hollywood label, was “concerned that the record would age me.” She added, “I’m a young, hot thing. He was like, ‘We don’t want her to seem like she’s 46.’” (In a phone interview, Cavallo, now 85 and retired, couldn’t recall the particulars of the label’s move, but expressed regret that he couldn’t help Potter “get a giant career, because I thought she deserved one.”)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      With a Pace Gallery Show, Robert Mangold Demonstrates His Consistency

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      At 87, the abstract artist Robert Mangold will exhibit 19 recent paintings and works, including one of his largest in decades.The abstract artist Robert Mangold has been so remarkably consistent and disciplined with his approach to painting and drawing that he makes pretty much everyone else look capricious and changeable.Mangold has been exploring geometry, form and color for more than 60 years, with a half-century of that time on a charming property here in the Hudson Valley with an old farmhouse and a barn.Now 87, Mangold has definitely slowed down. But he is still working, and he has a show of recent paintings and works on paper at Pace Gallery in Chelsea that opens on Friday.“Robert Mangold: Pentagons and Folded Space” is timed to coincide with the busy spring art season in New York and remains on view until Aug. 15.The exhibition has 19 works, and some have multiple components — including “Four Pentagons” (2022), a four-panel work that is one of his largest in decades — so it may seem even bigger, and it spreads over two floors. (“Four Pentagons” and a few other works are on loan from museums or private collections, in this case from the Art Institute of Chicago.)Mangold can spend years iterating on a shape. Circles and semicircles are forms that he has returned to again and again, sometimes embedded with or embedded in rectilinear forms, as in “Circle Painting #4” (1973), which sold for $365,000 at Christie’s in 2014.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More