CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Patrick Halgren, the self-proclaimed “rock star” of the Milan Cortina Paralympics, said he could feel the presence of his late twin brother in his silver medal-winning Para alpine ski run on Monday.
“He made this happen for real. He is the ski god and he has blessed me with speed today,” Halgren said of his brother Lucas Sven Halgren.
Lucas Sven died in a motorcycle accident in New Zealand in 2016, three years after Patrick nearly died and lost most of his left leg in another motorcycle accident.
Patrick has been plastering blue-and-yellow stickers that read “ SvendIt ” around Cortina d’Ampezzo, a play on “send-it,” which is Patrick’s mantra on life and a reference to his brother who went by Sven.
“He’s the reason I’m here. I’m just a vessel to cram love and combat hate down your throats. He inspired me to live life, but life is fragile. You can die,” Patrick said. “It’s all for him. It’s for my family. It’s for the people that have struggled. He’s dead. I’m here living, talking to you guys. I’m going to have who knows how many women and champagne after this. He liked that, too, but he doesn’t get that, and I do. I recognize that.”
Halgren celebrated in front of his parents, Peter and Kathy, which he said was “pretty cool.”
“But also, it sucks not having Sven here, so ups and downs,” the 33-year-old Halgren said after winning his first medal in his second Paralympics appearance.
“They went to Tijuana, Mexico, for their honeymoon 50 years ago. They picked up their dead kid in New Zealand, and they’ve watched me win the Paralympics at the most beautiful ski valley in the world,” Halgren told the Olympics website. “This is a surreal moment for them. This is an experience that will create a memory lasting a lifetime and such a good moment.”
Halgren said it was Sven who steered him to Para alpine skiing after the 2013 crash that nearly killed him and resulted in the above-the-knee amputation of his left leg.
“I died myself. I was in a coma for a month. I died four times,” he said. “They used a defibrillator to start my heart. Blood transfusion. I get it, and I’m lucky that I have that because I know what it’s like. Not many people do.”
Now it’s hard not to miss Halgren, and not only because of his long braids that are dyed red, white and blue. Always entertaining and joking with those around him, the outspoken American has taken on a showman personality at the Games.
At the podium ceremony, he performed an air guitar solo using his crutch. He said it was just “another Monday” for him.
“I am a rock star,” he added. “I always wanted to be this guy, Jim Brown, he was my idol. He was a professional football player, played lacrosse at Syracuse. I did both those sports, and he retired at the peak of his career and became basically the first Black action movie star. I always wanted to be him, and now I am him.”
Halgren said he “learned to be un-irritable, un-embarrassable.”
“It’s about being vulnerable in this life. It’s about trying things and failing. It’s OK to be embarrassed. It’s OK to look weird.”
As he talked to the media, Halgren was congratulated by nearly every rival that passed by. He was second to Switzerland’s Robin Cuche in the men’s super-G standing.
“Medals don’t mean anything to me. The love from all the people supporting me is what means anything to me,” he said. “I can feel, I can literally feel all the people who have ever given me well wishes and ‘Thanks’ and ‘Good lucks.’ I can feel them loving me and they’re the reason I won.
“You celebrate the victories the same as the defeats. I’ve been blessed to have to develop my character over the last 11 years, losing my leg and could either roll over and die, or I could become the greatest Patrick Halgren on Earth, and that’s what you’re seeing.”
His future plans?
“I would like to dominate the Earth in every category with one leg.”
Los Angeles has a secret magic to which you have to earn access, and the way you earn it is by making it, becoming a contributor to the city’s misapprehended culture of spectacle and soul, diversity and monolithic elitism. It’s a get-in-where-you-fit-in or get-edged-all-the-way-out kind of city, wherein a deceptively laissez-faire game of musical chairs can determine your fate. Kahlil Joseph has a private magic to which you have to earn access, and you earn it by resonating with the untapped nerve centers of Black culture that animate this city, and even then you might be denied.
Joseph is like the city (Los Angeles, not Hollywood), and the city enforces confidentiality, drive, wit, style and devotion often mistaken for diva-ism. The filmmaker and video artist moved to Los Angeles from Seattle for university, and was quickly followed by his brother, the painter Noah Davis, who would found the Underground Museum, a venue and near-speakeasy with West Coast casual gravitas and pan-African rigor and breadth, which became as important to the zeitgeist of Black Los Angeles as both brothers have.
Movie still from Kahlil Joseph’s film “Blknws: Terms & Conditions.” Funmilayo Akechukwu (Kaneza Schaal) channels a 93-year-old W.E.B Dubois, 200 years in the past.
In somewhat rapid succession, Joseph lost his father, Keven Davis, an accomplished attorney who represented the likes of the Williams sisters and Wynton Marsalis, in 2012, and his brother Noah in 2015. Joseph navigated those years in the wake with unadorned reverence, while starting a family of his own and directing some of the most transcendent music videos of the 2010s. As testament to his resilience and that of the community around him, grief sharpened Joseph’s purpose and became a kind of grace he transmuted into moving images so saturated with feeling, sans easy pathos, they offered new ways of seeing. The stakes were higher and layered with the existential absurdity of abrupt shifts, which he carried with an elegant, slightly seething temperament that has found its expression in the work. It’s relevant that he shares a birthday with Miles Davis — this is Los Angeles, where it’s customary for a person to request your cosmic DNA before asking your name — and it’s relevant that like Miles, Joseph’s vocal tone is whisper-pitched, toward the mode of retreat that begets echo; you lean in and hear him twice. His quiet tone is not shyness or false modesty but circumspection and a sense of boundaries that imply respect and love for real communication. You sense this in his work ethic and what it produces, an intimacy of form that implies an almost ritualistic attentiveness to the world around him on its own terms. In the 2012 Flying Lotus music video “Until the Quiet Comes,” directed by Joseph and set in Los Angeles, death and rebirth are addressed as a duet, companions in the expansion of collective consciousness instead of foils or adversaries, as a fallen child leaves his body and returns more alive than before he was bloodied on screen. And the violent scenes aren’t grotesque or didactic — think of Miles’ muted trumpet sound reconfigured as resurrection visuals, of his ability to play and stage ballads so well that their uptempo momentum moves into territories too macabre to mute. Like Miles, Joseph tests and stretches his range.
With the closure of the family-run Underground Museum, first in 2020 and then officially in 2022, the path uptempo was visited by more obstacles and disappointments, a shift, if temporary, in Joseph’s role in the local community, as he became more private and distant from public elegy. On the phone recently, Joseph and I discussed the trauma economy, how much of a trap it is for Black art and artists, especially in this post-BLM, post-Obama, post-neoliberal dominance, post-nonprofit industrial complex dominance territory we’re all in now, whether we face it or not. As antidote and balm to the market for repackaged abjection, Joseph adapted the sensibility that makes his music video landscapes so lush and transgressive for the art world with “Blknws,” which debuted in 2019 as an imagined syndication or television network, a nonlinear merger of digitized Black archival material pulled from the center to the margins and the radical academic avant-garde — an infinitely looping ensemble wherein Fred Moten enters into conversation with memes of ghetto-fabulous street gymnasts doing backflips into a fried chicken spot, for example, collapsing so-called high and low into an endless woodshed for an impossible concert.
The result was so compelling that the project was commissioned by A24 as a feature film sans script, then purchased from them by Rich Spirit and released last year as “Blknws: Terms & Conditions.” In this longer and more structured form, what began as an intentional scattering of ashes becomes an elegiac letter home mediated by shipwreck. Joseph weaves together an imaginary “Transatlantic Biennial” and W.E.B. Dubois’ “Encyclopedia Africana” — a project that Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah transformed into a book, which Joseph’s father had given his brother before they passed. In this way, the film becomes a manifesto for alternate destinies within the Black experience, and a semi-formal goodbye letter to the delusional but politically expedient optimism of the 2010s, wherein the end of the neoliberal order becomes a gateway to renewed self-possession and agency. Since our grief is less of a ready-made commodity lately, we can reorient it around ourselves, a little safer and more sovereign from the gnawing public gaze. And we can be more honest about its paces and paths in that more autonomous landscape. “Blknws” arrives how a successful jazz album does, belligerently inconclusive about the next stylistic leaps the music might make but clearly in the process of launching in that unknown or unspeakable (perhaps secret) direction. The film is agitation made vivid and precise in the dialectic between theorized “Black Study” and practical applications of Black marronage, where we realize that big disembodied ideas are no more sophisticated than what can be danced and gestured at and spoken in our real and virtual conversations. Here, the multiverse becomes one transcendental, transatlantic consciousness where past and present, life and afterlife, blur the way they do in Joseph’s interpretation of “Until The Quiet Comes” to give us a film with a song-like hook and an album’s non-sequitur whimsy.
Movie still from Kahlil Joseph’s film “Blknws: Terms & Conditions.” The underwater study of Funmilayo Akechukwu (Kaneza Schaal) located in the hold of the ship.
Over the last several months, I’ve discussed with Joseph what might become of the momentum propelling “Blknws: Terms & Conditions,” after the film’s run, as speculators enclose searching for clues and stake in his next project. He’s considered its potential evolution into a media company, a real paper, a production house, a series of related films, or a hybrid of all of these endeavors. Alongside his experience on all sides of the art world, he has an acute awareness of the wayward state of print and digital culture, writing and production, the constant closure or downsizing of veteran media outlets, the aftermath of diversity fever in the form of shrinking major magazines often starting with those who cover culture explicitly, the mass turn toward brand-name digital platforms that become extractive monopolies and diminish what can be covered and produced as writers and artists are overworked, understaffed and undervalued. Galleries are also closing and downsizing, and films that don’t oblige the content farm aren’t solicited as readily as influencer-helmed or easily digestible projects that can be played as background noise for scrolling.
After a screening last December of “Blknws: Terms & Conditions” at 2220 Arts + Archives, a space I co-curate, the rapt audience of local cinephiles seemed eager for some magic-bullet insight into Joseph’s path to creative breakthrough and relative creative freedom. Rather than hacks and shortcuts, he shouted out collaborators and inspirations — Wales Bonner, who hand-stitched garments for the film’s Ghana-based scenes; British composer Klein, who helped score the film; Joseph’s time in Brazil, where his father was from and where he went to high school. Sensibility and natural eclecticism, rather than unchecked ambition, is what propels Joseph; he has an innate knack for assembling bands and ensembles, good taste and good timing.
Kahlil Joseph with friends at the screening of “Blknws: Terms & Conditions.”
“I found the encyclopedia at the Underground,” he explains, of the DuBois work that became central to “Blknws.” “It seemed no one had looked through it, as if my dad and brother left it for me in the future.” And instead of ruminating on the weight of that inheritance, he integrates it into his film, whose refrain-as-question is do you remember the future? As if his father and brother are awake in some scenes, asking him to remember. Another resurrection. “I just want to make films,” Joseph reaffirms as a personal coda when the questions get too meta or abstract, never conflating the material conditions of the craft with the magical thinking that can unfold in scripts and on screen. Most everyone in attendance at 2220 seemed to be there to meet or support one of their favorite artists, one of the devout purists of our time who manages to remain that without getting smug, lazy or feral, all common pitfalls.
Last October, I gave Joseph a copy of Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast,” which I’d just finished reading myself for the first time. I was impressed to the point of restlessness with the authority of Hemingway’s memory, his recall; it’s one of those books you wanna throw at the wall and absorb word for word at the same time. Hemingway seemed to effortlessly savor and store every detail of his days, while remaining agile and present enough within them to focus on writing one true thing after another, in his daily sessions at the typewriter, as if possessing two coterminal minds and the capacity to access or silence both at will. A juggler too advanced for the circus, language’s great folk hero. Joseph is kind of like this, capable of intense simultaneous focus on both creative and mundane tasks without complaint, and he took to the book as I expected he might, sharing my sense of awe over the writer’s command of time and scene. They are both among the artists who have a polite way of making those around them feel like a team and want to work a little harder and little less aggressively (more communally) at the same time. Editors at his post-production studio have come from all over the country to work with him based on that leadership.
Joseph’s next feature, he suggests, will certainly be more narrative, more of a linear beginning-middle-end story, more Hemingway-esque in its commitments to the blunt daily reality that “Blknws” blurs with Black myth. He and his family have sacrificed unquantifiably in effort to defy stale archetypes and outdated patterns of art practice, and it might be his time or turn to be reciprocated for having endured those risks, time to give his family unequivocal and vivid afterlives on and off screen.
The huge music star was seen jamming at a local boozerHe appeared as part of a cover bandCredit: TikTok/christopher.g29The star in question is Sam Fender who appeared with his musician brother and dad on stageCredit: TikTok/christopher.g29
Sam Fender has had three Brit Awards and his albums Hypersonic Missiles and Seventeen Going Under also topped UK charts.
But the Geordie star took to covering other people’s songs as he got together with his family in a social club.
A fan took to TikTok and posted a video of the star performing and captioned it: “Rare .. Sam Fender playing and singing with his dad and brother on keyboard.
“All for a good cause #teamjanine raising awareness for MND . Real canny lads!”
The award-winning singer took part in the event to raise funds for MND in memory of the late Janine Turnbull, joining his dad and brother on stage as part of band The Pirates.
In another video shared of the same event, fans rushed to the comments section to praise the star: “The vocals are absolutely insane, fair play.”
A second said: “They’re a talented bunch those Fenders.”
While a third wrote: “I love how humble Sam is and doing this.”
A fourth stated: “Was great that he was able to do that and just be Sam local lad again.”
He’s built formidable music connections from a collaboration with rising US star Noah Kahan to supportingBruce Springsteenand The Killers and hanging out with the late guitar virtuosoJeff Beck. and Johnny Deppwhen the actor was in the North East with his Hollywood Vampires band.
Sam was not fancied by the bookies, so his victory was something of a shock, and the crowd went ballistic at his name.
The Geordie name-checked fellow nominees during his acceptance speech and thanked an ecstatic crowd.
He said: “We did not expect this at all. I want to say thank you,” before declaring: “This region is the best region in the country.”
Sam then grabbed his guitar and launched into a rendition of his album’s titular track, People Watching.
He also paid tribute to the late actress Annie Orwin, the inspiration behind the song, who he described as like a “surrogate mother”.
Sam added that his win on home turf was “really, really important” because the music scene in Newcastle had “always been in an isolated bubble”.
Last year, Sam hoped to toast his global success with his own range of booze.
The star had been granted permission by the UK’s Intellectual Property Office to use his name to sell a range of goods.
The documents revealed he could market “Beers, Alcoholic beverages, and Non-alcoholic beverages; Retail services connected to the sale of Beers, Alcoholic beverages, Non-alcoholic beverages, Mineral and aerated waters, Fruit beverages and fruit juices.”
The application stays in place for ten years now that it has been rubber-stamped.
Sam has earned a legion of fans for his vocal abilityCredit: Getty
Today it’s an Italianate apartment building wedged between an Indian restaurant and a Target. But what stood half a century ago at 1454 5th Street in downtown Santa Monica was the Beach Boys’ Brother Studio, a former porn theater turned recording complex where the preeminent American rock band of the 1960s sought to coax its resident genius, Brian Wilson, back into the fold after a long stretch in the wilderness.
Nobody would consider the albums the Beach Boys made at Brother in the mid-70s — among them “15 Big Ones,” “The Beach Boys Love You” and the long-shelved “Adult/Child” — the band’s most successful. (Well, nobody except for Wilson, who frequently cited the synthed-up “Love You” as his fave.) A decade after 1966’s “Pet Sounds,” which so blew the Beatles away that they had to answer with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the burly, bearded Beach Boys were far from the center of pop music; Wilson, in particular, had largely withdrawn from public life as he struggled with the effects of drugs and his fragile mental health.
Yet Brother offered the setting for a creative reflowering — arguably the band’s final moment of unity before the start of years of more serious infighting.
“It was like we all got back together and became Beach Boys again,” says Al Jardine, who founded the group in suburban Hawthorne in 1961 with Wilson, Wilson’s brothers Dennis and Carl and the Wilsons’ cousin Mike Love. Now, eight months after Brian Wilson’s death in June at age 82, a new box set looks back at the era as an expressive outpouring led by the band’s rejuvenated visionary.
“We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years” collects 73 tracks from 1976 and ’77, including outtakes, demos, a remastered version of the “Love You” LP and the first official release of the widely bootlegged “Adult/Child,” which puts Wilson’s touchingly emotive singing amid orchestral arrangements in a glossy big-band style. Among the set’s highlights are a voice-and-piano rendition of “Still I Dream of It,” which, according to legend, Wilson wrote in the hopes that Frank Sinatra would perform it, and a majestic take on “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” that shows how brilliant a record-maker Wilson remained despite all the well-documented turmoil.
“Brian was healing from his personal life, and he was ready to go in the studio again,” says Jardine, 83, whose latest tour with the members of Wilson’s road band will stop Friday night at L.A.’s United Theater on Broadway for a complete performance of “The Beach Boys Love You.” With quirky but heartfelt tunes about Wilson’s daughter Carnie (“I Wanna Pick You Up”) and Johnny Carson (uh, “Johnny Carson”) — not to mention the propulsive “Honkin’ Down the Highway,” on which Jardine sang lead — “Love You” has become something of a cult classic among Wilsonologists.
Says Jardine of the LP: “Brian’s spirit — his songwriting soul — is really strong on that one.”
The Beach Boys opened Brother Studio around 1974 near the corner of 5th Street and Broadway, just a few blocks from the beach. They’d traveled to the Netherlands to record their most recent album, “Holland”; before that, they cut several records at Wilson’s home on Bellagio Road in Bel-Air, though the group’s erstwhile mastermind spent as much time upstairs in his bedroom as he did recording music with his bandmates.
Wilson’s retreat after the flameout of his notoriously ambitious “Smile” project made space for the other Beach Boys to shape the band’s music, as on 1970’s fondly remembered “Sunflower.” But the lack of hits eventually took its toll: With a laugh, Love, 84, says one reason they started up Brother was that Wilson’s wife, Marilyn, eventually “threw in the towel after years of having her house flooded with people” to less-than-spectacular returns. “It was sort of like a self-preservation thing,” he adds.
The Beach Boys backstage at New York’s Central Park in 1977.
(Richard E. Aaron / Redferns)
In “We Gotta Groove’s” liner notes, engineer Stephen Moffitt, who designed Brother after working earlier at L.A.’s Village Recorders, recalls clearing out “all the porn crap” from the building and installing a circular stained-glass window to establish the right vibe. A vintage magazine ad boasts of the studio’s high-end gear as well as its “large screen video lounge” and “a playroom with pong, pinball and bumper pool.”
“It was a respite,” Love says. “A place to go and be creative.”
Just as the band was getting Brother up and running, the Beach Boys scored an unexpected smash with 1974’s “Endless Summer,” a double-LP compilation of the group’s early material — “Surfin’ Safari,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” “California Girls” — that topped the Billboard album chart on its way to sales of more than 3 million copies. A similar hits collection issued in the U.K., “20 Golden Greats,” did just as well there. “An enormous success,” says Love. “One in every five families had it.”
Suddenly, having more or less ignored group-minded efforts like “Holland” and “Carl and the Passions — ‘So Tough,’ ” the world remembered what it loved about the Beach Boys, and that was songs written and produced by Brian Wilson.
The band got to work at Brother recording “15 Big Ones,” which featured a mix of Wilson originals and covers of oldies like “Chapel of Love” and “Blueberry Hill.” The first Beach Boys album since “Pet Sounds” to carry a solo production credit for Wilson, it came accompanied by an aggressive marketing campaign known as “Brian Is Back!”; Wilson appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone — “The Healing of Brother Brian,” the cover line read — and took part in a Beach Boys television special that showed his return to the concert stage at Anaheim Stadium.
Earle Mankey, an engineer at Brother in the mid-70s, says “15 Big Ones” was less Wilson’s attempt to relight the flame than it was “everyone else’s attempt to relight the flame.” He recalls Wilson looking like a “scared rabbit” when he walked into the studio to find some of the session musicians who’d worked with the Beach Boys back in the old days. (This was the time of Wilson’s first dalliance with the psychologist Eugene Landy, who would reenter Wilson’s life to much controversy in the early ’80s.)
Fans watch the Beach Boys perform at Anaheim Stadium on July 3, 1976.
(Tony Korody / Sygma via Getty Images)
Even Love admits that “Brian Is Back!” was a little overblown. “Brian was back to some degree,” Love says now. “One hundred percent? Perhaps not.”
Yet the campaign worked: “15 Big Ones” went to No. 8 on the Billboard 200 — the highest for a Beach Boys studio album in more than a decade — while the LP spun off the band’s first Top 5 single since “Good Vibrations” with a rendition of Chuck Berry’s “Roll and Roll Music.”
More important, the commercial success set up Wilson for a true artistic comeback with “The Beach Boys Love You,” which can still startle you with the purity of its emotion and the strange textures of Wilson’s production. Check out the beautifully lopsided groove of “Mona,” which Dennis sings with a bleary smoker’s rasp, or the lonely-sounding electric-guitar lick floating over the Wilson brothers’ harmonies in “The Night Was So Young”; listen to Brian and Marilyn trading marital assurances in their almost painfully guileless duet, “Let’s Put Our Hearts Together.”
“Of all Brian’s stuff, I’d say it’s his most personal album after ‘Pet Sounds,’ ” says Darian Sahanaja, who played with Wilson for the last couple of decades of his life. “Maybe even more than ‘Pet Sounds,’ because Tony Asher wrote most of the lyrics on ‘Pet Sounds’ and Brian wrote most of the lyrics on ‘Love You.’ The Brian that I knew is very much living and breathing in these songs.”
Unlike “15 Big Ones,” “Love You” was not a hit, peaking at No. 53 — even lower than “Holland.” As much as he adores the album, Sahanaja finds it amusing that anyone in the Beach Boys’ camp might have expected Wilson to try to give rock fans what they wanted.
“He wasn’t listening to the Top 40 at the time,” he says. “He just wrote whatever came out of him. There was no, ‘I wonder what Fleetwood Mac’s up to…’ ”
Indeed, Wilson went even further out with “Adult/Child,” for which he commissioned orchestral arrangements by Dick Reynolds, who’d worked in the ’50s with Wilson’s beloved Four Freshmen. Both Love and Jardine say they can’t quite remember why the album didn’t come out; Love says “it may not have suited the record company at the time” and points out that even “Pet Sounds” got the group’s A&R rep wondering “if maybe we could do something more like ‘I Get Around.’ ”
Whatever the case, “Adult/Child’s” mothballing led to another withdrawal by Wilson, who had far less to do with the band’s next few records and who eventually turned to a solo career. In 2012, Wilson produced a so-so Beach Boys reunion record — minus Dennis, who died in 1983, and Carl, who died in 1998 — but for much of the ’00s he and Jardine toured under Wilson’s name while Love toured as the Beach Boys. (Love’s band will play three shows at the Hollywood Bowl in July.)
Asked what it’s been like performing with Wilson’s band since his death, Jardine says, “I just feel like he’s still around.” Sahanaja says he’s seen Jardine tear up as they’ve been working up songs from “Love You” on the road ahead of Friday’s show. But he’s also been gratified to see the excitement among younger fans regarding what he views as the Beach Boys’ last great album.
“The reaction has been more insane than I’ve ever seen for any of the shows we ever did with Brian,” he says. “It’s like they feel they found this secret thing that they really identify with.” He laughs. “I’m telling you, these kids are freaking out — jumping up and down, singing along to all the words. They’re, like, pogo-ing.”
Jared Grindlinger, considered one of the top high school baseball prospects from the class of 2027, is reclassifying and will graduate as part of this year’s class, making him eligible for the 2026 amateur draft, Huntington Beach coach Benji Medure confirmed on Thursday.
Grindlinger is a left-handed 16-year-old pitcher who throws 93 to 95 mph. His brother, Trent, is a freshman at Tennessee, so that option of joining his brother at the end of this season is also possible. He’s uncommitted, but his decision to graduate this spring will add another top pitching talent for pro scouts to evaluate.
Medure said he was already receiving numerous calls on Thursday after word became known, and increased scrutiny is something with which Grindlinger will have to deal.
Loyola coach Keith Ramsey on Huntington Beach Junior pitcher Jared Grindlinger: “He’s one of the best arms I’ve seen coaching high school baseball.”
Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, the former UK prince and younger brother of King Charles, has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office as police investigate claims he shared confidential material with convicted sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein.
