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Irish Times
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Lana Del Rey in Dublin review: By far the strangest performance the Aviva has hosted
Lana Del Rey Aviva Stadium, Dublin ★★★☆☆ Lana Del Rey's Aviva Stadium show is a blockbusting love letter to following your muse and playing by your own rules – even when those rules include reciting an Allen Ginsberg poem offstage while a hologram entertains the 50,000-capacity audience. Which is what happens three-quarters of the way through this bizarre set. A southern gothic rhapsody featuring burning houses and dancers who look as if they've just escaped from a cult, plus Del Rey's new husband, the alligator tour guide Jeremy Dufrene, waving from the wings, it is by far the strangest performance the Aviva has hosted. I stagger away as if emerging from a weird dream I can't shake. But if this is a strikingly capricious concert, it has to be asked whether it is value for money. Of the 14 songs performed, five are from Del Rey's unreleased new country album (title to be revealed) and another two are covers. Which would be fine if Del Rey were playing an intimate venue, as she did when she made her Irish debut, at Vicar Street, in 2013. But given the effort involved in getting to the Aviva and the ticket prices – you won't get in the door for less than €100 – the gig, at a trim 80 minutes or so, raises the question of where artistic expression ends and doing right by your fans begins. READ MORE Because whatever else this bizarre and often brilliant performance is, it never tickles the punters under the chin. There are crowd-pleasers, for sure. Nobody could quibble with Del Rey's fantastic renditions of Summertime Sadness and Born to Die. Here are hazy bangers as all-American as a cheerleader's pyramid yet shot through with David Lynch -style glimmerings of menace, like razor blades in a pompom. Yet the singer signals from the start that this is not going to be a ramble through her hit parade, as she opens with Stars Fell on Alabama, a baroque number from that forthcoming LP, which namechecks Tennessee Williams and Clint Eastwood . It also doubles as an address to her new spouse, explaining why a prenup would kill the romance ('Husband of mine / don't let them put all this paper between us'). She's only warming up. Another new track, Quiet in the South, features Del Rey singing from the porch of a shack that bursts into flame (which is to say dry ice and video projection). It is followed by Del Rey reciting all of Ginsberg's Howl off camera as that hologram mouths the words. Lana Del Rey performing at Aviva Stadium, Dublin. Photograph: Debbie Hickey Lana Del Rey performing at Aviva Stadium, Dublin. Photograph: Debbie Hickey If her production values are out there, the banter at least is sincere. 'My sister, my dad and my family, we've had a good couple of days here, really feeling the magic. All of the beautiful greenery, everything Ireland is about,' Del Rey says at the end (just after 10pm). 'I'm so grateful.' She then embarks on a wafting take on John Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads, a tune surely not heard echoing around an Irish amphitheatre since Denver played Páirc Uí Chaoimh , as part of the Siamsa Cois Laoí festival, in Cork in 1986. Stadium pop is full of slick, soulless soundalikes, and you have to applaud Del Rey for trying something different. That said, time and money have never been more precious, and you do have to wonder about the wisdom of such an eccentric set. Good on Del Rey for chasing her creative impulses down the rabbit hole. But maybe next time she might consider charging a bit less for the privilege.
The Guardian
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Lana Del Rey review – mid-century melodrama as mindblowing stadium spectacle
Lana Del Rey is standing in a blue-on-white summer dress in front of a wood-panelled house, crying real tears next to plastic weeping willows, momentarily overcome by the size of the audience staring back at her. This sort of tension, the push-pull between genuine vulnerability and an exploration of aesthetics, has always been there in her music, and her wonderfully ambitious first stadium tour runs on it. Its theatrical staging and big ideas are all the more remarkable thanks to some very human moments of doubt. Opening with Stars Fell on Alabama, one of several new songs foreshadowing a country record that might be around the corner, Del Rey's voice is barely there, with its final notes followed by a dash to the wings to kiss her husband. But she stays on the rails. During Chemtrails Over the Country Club and Ultraviolence, she falls to the floor in Busby Berkeley-esque arrangements alongside her dancers, her vocals now steely as power chords and pulsing red lights ratchet up the drama. At the heart of the concert is a remarkable set piece following Quiet in the South. The house starts to burn, its air of Douglas Sirk melodrama and stultifying domesticity tumbling into Hitchcockian mania. A section of Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score plays and Del Rey answers it with an off-stage recitation from Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which becomes the intro to Young and Beautiful. It's bravura stuff, capped by her gradual rise from a secondary stage as the track ends, now clad in a cocktail dress. The crowd comes unglued. Famously, though, the problem with big swings are the misses. There are a few here, notably a hologram Lana sitting in a window while snippets of Norman Fucking Rockwell and Arcadia ring from the speakers. Aside from wasting two killer songs, it creates an unwanted break in the dialogue she maintains between artist and audience elsewhere – there aren't many stadium spectacles driven by the gut-level understanding found in Del Rey's plea to the room during a mesmerising Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd: 'Don't forget me.' Not a chance. Touring the UK and Ireland until 4 July 2025
Business Insider
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
Vintage photos show how people lived, partied, and protested during the 'Summer of Love'
Held in January 1967, San Francisco's Human Be-In event was a precursor to the Summer of Love. The Human Be-In event took place in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967, and is considered a key moment that led to the Summer of Love. Featuring counterculture figures including psychologist and psychedelic-drug advocate Timothy Leary and writer Allen Ginsberg, the event drew as many as 30,000 attendees, who gathered to meet like-minded young people, play music, dance, recite poetry, and in many cases trip out on psychedelics. It would inspire later iterations, such as the Colorado Human Be-In in July 1967. The movement began in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. By spring break in 1967, young people began to flock to the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco. From dropout high school and college students to runaway minors, they began to fill the streets in what became a never-ending gathering. The Summer of Love was defined by a strong ideological movement. While masses would gather at music events and bond over their shared love for rock bands, the most significant part of the summer was the political movement that spread across the country and drew young people to the West Coast. With some members of a historically large generation — the baby boomers — entering their teenage years in 1967, the youth movement rapidly gained momentum. The hippie culture that erupted in the Haight-Ashbury district held an anti-war stance and preached about peace and love as a new way of life. They stood against consumerism and were distrusting of the government, setting up free shops and clinics within the district. Some of the largest gatherings happened at music festivals headlined by acts like the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix. At some of the summer's most populous events, like the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival and the Monterey Pop Festivals, up to 60,000 people gathered to hear acts like the Who, Otis Redding, the Grateful Dead, the Mamas & the Papas, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin play live. With thousands of hippies traveling from other states for the music festivals, California became the center of one of the largest cultural exoduses in American history. PBS reported that it was "the largest migration of young people in the history of America." That summer, The Beatles released "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," a soundtrack of the scene. Encapsulating the spirit of the times, which was influenced by the growing popularity of psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin, The Beatles released their eighth studio album, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." The album was released on May 26, 1967, ahead of the Summer of Love. With lyrics speaking of peace, love, and surrealism, it resonated with the growing hippie communities in the US and Europe. Use of psychedelic drugs was widespread and a significant element of the movement. Discovered in 1943, the synthetic psychedelic drug LSD became a defining element of the Summer of Love. Psychologist Timothy Leary was an advocate for psychedelic drug use and research. His speeches, which encouraged young people to "turn on, tune in, drop out," became a mantra through which the hippie youth shaped their spiritual experimentation, aided by the drugs. Protesters often faced police resistance. Mass protests across the country, whether it was spreading the hippie ideals of peace and love, or rejecting racial injustice, popped up in major cities like New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Local authorities were overwhelmed by the thousands of young people migrating to San Francisco. On March 24, 1967, a headline ran in the San Francisco Chronicle announcing the mayor's "war on hippies." Despite the authorities' opposition to the movement happening in the Haight-Ashbury, the hippies ultimately outnumbered them. Meanwhile, in Detroit and Newark, New Jersey, people were protesting racial injustice. While the hippie youths gathered in California, the greater Civil Rights Movement continued spreading in the Northeastern states, where thousands protested the racism that persisted after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The riots peaked during what became known as the " long hot summer of 1967" in cities including Detroit and Newark, over issues including police brutality and racial injustice. The riots, which went on for days at a time, often saw the involvement of the US National Guard and Army troops, which heightened tensions. On July 24, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson invoked the Insurrection Act to help suppress riots in Detroit. Hippies and draft dodgers began seeking refuge in communes separate from the rest of society. Seeking to escape the authority of the US government and the structure of life they saw as damaging to society, many hippies — among them, Vietnam draft dodgers — moved to rural communes, where they could live outside commercialism. Preaching self-reliance, these communes aimed to "return to the land." The "back-to-the-land" movement in 1967 focused on a detachment from power structures rather than revolting against them. Self-reliance through independent farming led to the rise of organic food, vegetarianism, and holistic medicine, as reported by But not everyone's commitment to the movement endured, and by fall, some began to return home. The far-reaching impact of the "Summer of Love" was partly due to mass media representation of the movement, including a Time cover dedicated to the hippies. Over the course of the summer, the movement achieved dominance in the music charts, with songs like "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" by Scott McKenzie spreading the idea of a cultural movement promoting love taking place in San Francisco. By the peak of the summer, Haight-Ashbury had become a hot spot not only for young people seeking to connect with like-minded souls but also for tourists wanting to witness the crowds that had taken over the city. However, as the summer came to an end and the new school year started, young people began leaving, with some returning to their work or studies. The "Summer of Love" ended with a symbolic funeral. On October 6, 1967, a mock funeral was held in the Haight-Ashbury district. The deceased? "Hippie, devoted son of Mass Media," read flyers around the city. The event was meant to give an official end to the "Summer of Love" in San Francisco that had become plagued by addiction, per the University of California San Francisco. "We wanted to signal that this was the end of it, to stay where you are, bring the revolution to where you live and don't come here because it's over and done with," Mary Kasper, who organized the event, told PBS, as reported by the Saturday Evening Post.
Telegraph
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Are we too obsessed with the Sixties?
J Hoberman's opening sentence in Everything is Now serves as his manifesto: 'Cultural innovation comes from the margins and is essentially collective.' This book, about the New York avant-garde between 1959 and 1971, proceeds from the idea that art is the product of the scene that incubates it, not the individual who creates it. Divided into sections titled 'Subcultures' and 'Countercultures', Everything is Now covers revolutions in jazz, the Beats, minimalist art and experimental film. Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Yayoi Kusama, Jonas Mekas, Bob Dylan and Amiri Baraka are among the cast, together responsible for what Hoberman, a veteran journalist and critic, calls 'the normalisation of cultural craziness that characterised the 1960s'. Everything is Now attempts to make sense of that craziness. Hoberman's handling of the material, based on interviews and archival research, is cleverly, strictly chronological, giving us a sense of the wider shifts being enacted through an accumulation of minute details. History takes place in the everyday: film screenings, late-night happenings, unlicensed concerts in venues 'so subterranean one expects Jean Valjean to be their waiter,' as it's put in one (negative) contemporary review that Hoberman quotes. He also persistently establishes the closeness of New York's artistic and political organisers in the 1960s, their shared hangouts, aspirations and troubles with the police. As such, Everything is Now often reads like a catalogue of events, meticulously documented and rapidly narrated. Hoberman's prose is taut, jittery, almost psychedelically compressed. Other writers might have lingered on individual artworks or tried to tell the story of '60s New York through lyrical essays on beloved artists. But Hoberman's voice is more of a sub-machine gun, riddling 400 pages with details of the scene and barely stopping to reload. There's a trade-off to this style. The reading experience can be dizzying, and his scene-setting awkward. 'Ten months after the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show and certainly by the time LBJ trounced Goldwater,' begins one sentence. A harsh critic would read the many footnotes as a lack of discipline: as a feat of research it's impressive, but Everything Is Now occasionally gives the impression of celebrating a scene without really explaining why. More importantly, it often risks losing sight of its subject's significance. Hoberman is more interested, at least here, in the connections between the principal actors of the '60s than he is in the works of art they produce. We get more than enough on the apartments John Cale lived in when he moved to New York, but little on what The Velvet Underground actually sounded like. Given the depth of Hoberman's knowledge and his clear love of the material, I found myself wishing he would stop for breath more often. When he lets himself, it's great: he can't help himself from digressing on Bringing It All Back Home (who can?) and its 'fusion of Buddy Holly and Arthur Rimbaud'. And I would have liked to read more about his own history with this stuff; a passage recounting a stay with director Alejandro Jodorowsky in Mexico is one of the most entertaining in the book. Obliquely, Everything is Now works best as a book about real estate and how it changed hands. The artistic 'scenes' Hoberman illustrates wouldn't have been possible without their DIY basement cafes, 30-dollar-a-month 'cold-water apartments' and artists' co-operatives in disused factories. From Robert Moses's urban 'renewal' projects to Hans Haacke's censored artwork Shapolsky et al (a collection of photographs documenting corporate slumlordism in Manhattan), one of the book's strongest undercurrents is the transformation of these spaces from artistic incubators to cash machines for developers. But ultimately, reading Everything is Now, it's hard not to ask: who is this for? Does this particular scene need any more canonising? You can buy Kusama mugs at the Tate; James Mangold recently directed the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown (previous credits: the Indiana Jones and X-Men franchises). Hoberman came of age during the 1960s, alive but too young to have really participated (he considers the book 'a memoir, although not mine'). The resulting image he creates is something part remembered, part invented, part exhumed. This is the status the decade has for all of us, really – mythic in the good and bad senses. But let's not give Dylan up to Hollywood just yet.
CBS News
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
San Francisco's famed Sam Wo Restaurant may have closed for good
A venerable San Francisco Chinese restaurant with an extensive history has officially closed its doors for the foreseeable future. The Sam Wo Restaurant is believed to have served its first meal soon after the 1906 earthquake at its original location at 816 Washington St. The Chinatown institution has been run by the same family for generations and was reportedly a late-night hangout during the 1950s frequented by such Beat generation poets as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Known for its late hours, no-frills food and surly service, the restaurant gained fame in the '60s as the home of Edsel Ford Fong, who earned a reputation as the "world's rudest waiter." The Sam Wo Restaurant has been featured in numerous San Francisco guidebooks and during its history hosted such notable visitors as China's president, David Letterman and a host of other celebrities. The restaurant's original Washington St. location was shut down due to health code violations and fire safety issues in 2012. It eventually reopened in 2015 on nearby Clay Street. According to reports last fall, the restaurant's lease was set to end in January of 2025. With no buyers stepping up to acquire the business and main chef and part owner David Ho retired, it appears that the establishment had its last day in operation on Sunday. So far, there is no word on the restaurant continuing at the 713 Clay location or elsewhere.
