down

Dearest gentle reader, Lady Whistledown — voiced by Julie Andrews — is back.

Netflix released a trailer for the fourth season of “Bridgerton” on Monday, and the Ton’s resident gossip columnist promised to have all the delightful details. The teaser also revealed that the next chapter of the Regency-era romance will be released in two parts on Jan. 29 and Feb. 26.

The eight-episode season will follow Benedict Bridgerton’s (Luke Thompson) fairy tale-inspired romance. The beloved second-eldest sibling of the Bridgerton brood is is known for being commitment averse and uninterested in marriage, but, if the trailer is to be trusted, it seems a masked mystery woman he brushes past on a staircase might change that.

“With each passing season, one is known to experience plenty of ups and downs,” Whistledown says in the teaser footage. “So then we must ask ourselves, do we rise to the occasion? As always, time — and this author — will tell.”

Unbeknownst to Benedict, the mystery woman, also known as the Lady in Silver, is Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha). According to Netflix’s in-house blog Tudum, the staircase encounter featured in the trailer is the first time the pair cross paths during Lady Bridgerton’s masquerade ball.

Benedict and Sophie’s romance is based on the events in “An Offer From a Gentleman,” the third book in Julia Quinn’s “Bridgerton” book series. Much like the wicked matriarch in “Cinderella,” Sophie’s stepmother (Katie Leung) is more concerned about her two daughters’ (Michelle Mao, Isabella Wei) societal debut and marriage prospects than whatever her stepdaughter is getting up to.

“Bridgerton” showrunner Jess Brownell previously told The Times that Benedict’s character arc “has a lot to do with being someone who is learning how to exist between society and and being unconventional.”

“Benedict [is] trying to figure out what his place is in the world and how to circumvent certain rules, which is something Tilley Arnold (Hannah New) [taught] him [in Season 3],” she said last year. “I think we will continue telling the story of his [sexual] fluidity going forward.”

The brief “Bridgerton” Season 4 teaser focuses solely on Benedict and Sophie. Those interested in updates about the state of Penelope’s writing career or what Francesca, John and Michaela Stirling have been up to since the end of the third season will have to keep waiting.

Fans of System of a Down desperately hoping the Armenian American alt-metal band will one day release a full-length follow-up to their chart-topping 2005 companion albums “Mezmerize” and “Hypnotize” can at least seek some solace in the latest offering from band co-founder Daron Malakian. “Addicted to the Violence,” the third album from his solo project Daron Malakian and Scars on Broadway, may lack System frontman Serj Tankian’s mellifluous singing, iconoclastic rants and feral screams, but its eclectic structure, melodic earworms, fetching vocal harmonies and poignant themes are sonically and structurally similar to System of a Down — and with good reason.

“All of my songs can work for either Scars or System because they come from my style and have my signature,” Malakian says from his home in Glendale. “When I wrote for System, I didn’t bring guitar riffs to the band. Like with [System’s 2002 breakthrough single] ‘Aerials.’ That was a complete song. I wrote it from beginning to end before I showed it to them.”

Malakian — who tackled vocals, guitar and bass — assembled “Addicted to the Violence” (out Friday) during the last five years, using songs he’d written over roughly two decades. The oldest track, “Satan Hussein,” which starts with a rapid-fire guitar line and features a serrated verse and a storming chorus, dates to the early 2000s, when System’s second album, “Toxicity,” was rocketing toward six-times platinum status (which it achieved nine months after release).

With Scars, Malakian isn’t chasing ghosts and he’s not tied to a schedule. He’s more interested in spontaneity than continuity, and artistry takes precedence over cohesion. None of the tracks on the band’s sporadically released three albums — 2008’s self-titled debut, 2018’s “Dictator,” and “Addicted to the Violence”— follow a linear or chronological path. Instead, each includes an eclectic variety of songs chosen almost at random.

“It’s almost like I spin the wheel and wherever the arrow lands, that’s where I start,” he explains. “I end up with a bunch of songs from different periods in my life that come from different moods. It’s totally selfish. Everything starts as something I write for myself and play for myself. I never listen to something I’ve done and say, ‘Oh, everybody’s gonna love this.’ For me, a song is more like my new toy. At some point, I finish playing with it and I go, ‘OK, I’m ready to share this with other kids now.’”

Whether by happenstance or subconscious inspiration, “Addicted to the Violence” is a turbulent, inadvertently prescient album for unstable times — a barbed, off-kilter amalgam of metal, alt-rock, pop, Cali-punk, prog, Mediterranean folk, alt-country and psychedelia — sometimes within the same song. Lyrically, Malakian addresses school shootings, authoritarianism, media manipulation, infidelity, addiction and stream-of-consciousness ramblings as dizzying as an hour of random, rapid-fire channel surfing.

Is writing music your way of making sense out of a nonsensical world?

I like to think of it as bringing worlds together that, in other cases, may not belong together. But when they come out through me, they mutate and turn into this thing that makes sense. In that way, music is like my therapist. Even if I write a song and nobody ever hears it, it’s healthy for me to make and it helps me work stuff out. When I write a song, sometimes it affects me deeply and I’ll cry or I’ll get hyped up and excited. It’s almost like I’m communicating with somebody, but I’m not talking to anyone. It’s just me in this intimate moment.

Is it strange to take these personal, intimate and therapeutic moments and turn them into songs that go out for the masses to interpret and absorb?

I want people to make up their own meanings for the songs, even if they’re completely different than mine. I don’t even like to talk about what inspired the songs because it doesn’t matter. No one needs to know what I was thinking because they don’t know my life. They don’t know me. They know the guy on stage, but they don’t know the personal struggles I’ve been through and they don’t need to.

Was there anything about “Addicted to the Violence” that you wanted to do differently than “Dictator”?

Different songs on the album have synthesizer and that’s a color I’ve never used before in System or Scars. Every painting you make shouldn’t have the same colors. Sometimes I’m like, “Will that work with the rest of the songs? That color is really different.” But I’m not afraid to use it.

[Warning: Video includes profanity.]

“Shame Game” has a psychedelic vibe that’s kinda like a hybrid of Strawberry Alarm Clock and Blue Oyster Cult, while the title track has a prog rock vibe redolent of Styx, Rush and Mars Volta.

I love all that stuff. I spend more time listening to music than playing guitar. It’s how I practice music. I take in these inspirations and it all comes out later when I write without me realizing it.

In 2020, System released the songs “Protect the Land” and “Genocidal Humanoidz,” which you originally planned to use for Scars on Broadway.

At that time, I hadn’t recorded “Genocidal Humanoidz” yet, but I had finished “Protect the Land,” and my vocals on the song are the tracks I was going to use for my album. Serj just came in and sang his parts over it.

Why did you offer those songs to System when every time you tried to work on an album with them after 2010, you hit a creative impasse?

Because [the second Nagorno-Karabakh War] was going on in Artsakh at that time between [the Armenian breakaway state Artsakh and Azerbaijan], and we decided we needed to say something. We all got on the phone and I said, “Hey, I got this song ‘Protect the Land,’ and it’s about this exact topic.” So, I pulled it off the Scars record and shared it with System.

You released the eponymous Scars on Broadway album in 2008, almost exactly two years after System went on a four-year hiatus. Did you form Scars out of a need to stay creative?

At the time, I knew that if I wanted to keep releasing music, I needed a new outlet, so Scars was something that had to happen or I would have just been sitting around all these years and nobody would have heard from me.

You played a few shows with Scars before your first album came out in 2008, but you abruptly canceled the supporting tour and only released one more Scars song before 2018.

That was a really strange time. I wanted to move forward with my music, but we had worked so hard to get to the point we got to in System, and not everyone was in the same boat when it came to how we wanted to move forward. I just wasn’t ready to do a tour with Scars.

Was it like trying to start a new relationship after a bad breakup?

I might have rushed into that second marriage too quick. I had [System drummer] John [Dolmayan] playing with me, and I think that was [a sign that] I was still holding onto System of a Down. That created a lot of anxiety.

A few years later, you announced that you were working on a new Scars album and planned to release it in 2013. Why did it take until 2018 for you to put out “Dictator”?

I was writing songs and thinking they were amazing, but in my head I was conflicted about where the songs were going to go. “Should I take them to Scars? Is that premature? Would System want to do something with them?” I underwent this constant struggle because Serj and I always had this creative disagreement. I finally moved past that and did the second album, but it took a while.

“Everything we’ve experienced has brought us to where we are now. And now is all we’ve got because the past is gone and the future isn’t here yet. So, the most important thing is the present,” Malakian said.

(Travis Shinn)

System of a Down played nine concerts in South America this spring, and you have six stadium gigs scheduled in North America for August and September. Is there any chance a new System album will follow?

I’m not so sure I even want to make another System of a Down record at this point in my life. I’m getting along with the guys really well right now. Serj and I love each other and we enjoy being onstage together. So, maybe it’s best for us to keep playing concerts as System and doing our own things outside of that.

The cover art for “Addicted to the Violence” — a silhouette of a woman against a blood-red background holding an oversize bullet over her head, and standing in front of a row of opium poppies — is the work of your father, Iraqi-born artist Vartan Malakian. Was he a major inspiration for you?

My approach to art and everything I know about it comes from my dad, and the way we approach what we do is very similar. We both do it for ourselves. He has never promoted himself or done an art exhibition. The only things most people have seen from him are the album covers. But ever since I was born, he was doing art in the house, and he’s never cared if anyone was looking at it.

Do you seek his approval?

No, I don’t. He usually is very supportive of what I do, but my dad’s a complicated guy. I admire him a lot and wish I could even be half of the artist that he is. And if he and my mom didn’t move to this country, I would not have been in System of a Down. I would have ended up as a soldier during Desert Storm and the Second Gulf War. That’s my alternative life. It’s crazy.

Have you been to Iraq?

When I was 14 years old, I went there for two months to visit relatives and it was a complete culture shock. I’m a kid that grew up in Hollywood, and I went to Baghdad wearing a Metallica shirt and I was a total smart aleck. Everywhere we went, I saw pictures and statues of Saddam Hussein. I turned to my cousin and said, “What if I walked up to one of the statues and said, ‘Hey Saddam, go f— yourself?’” Just me saying that made him nervous and scared. Talking like that was seriously dangerous and I had no idea. That was a definite learning experience of what I could have been. And it inspired me later to write “Satan Hussein.”

You had a glimpse of life under an authoritarian regime. Do you have strong feelings about the Trump administration and the way the president has, at times, acted like a dictator?

I don’t hate the guy and I don’t love the guy. I’m not on the right, I’m not on the left. There are some things both sides do that I agree with, but I don’t talk about that stuff in interviews because when it comes to politics, I’m not on a team. I don’t like the division in this country, and I think if you’re too far right or you’re too far left, you end up in the same place.

Is “Addicted to the Violence,” and especially the song “Killing Spree,” a commentary on political violence in our country?

Not just political violence, it’s all violence. “Killing Spree” is ridiculous. It’s heavy. It’s dark. But if you listen to the way I sing, there is an absolutely absurd delivery, almost like I’m having fun with it. I’m not celebrating the violence, but the delivery is done the way a crazy person would celebrate it. So, it’s from the viewpoint of a killer, the viewpoint of a victim, and my own viewpoint. I saw a video on social media of these kids standing around in the street, and one of them gets wiped out by the back end of a car and flies into the air. These kids are recording it and some of them are laughing like’s it’s funny. I don’t want to say that’s right or wrong, but from what I’m seeing, a lot of people have become desensitized to violence.

You’re releasing “Addicted to the Violence” about six weeks before the final six System of a Down dates of 2025. Have you figured out how to compartmentalize what you do with System of a Down and Scars on Broadway?

There was a time that I couldn’t juggle the two very well, but now I feel more confident and very comfortable with where System and Scars are. I love playing with System, and I want to do more shows with Scars. I couldn’t tell you how either band will evolve. Only time will tell what happens and I’m fine with that as long as it happens in a natural way. Everything we’ve experienced has brought us to where we are now. And now is all we’ve got because the past is gone and the future isn’t here yet. So, the most important thing is the present.

When an author decides to tackle the story of a popular and important band like Talking Heads, the contours of which are familiar to many of its fans, the remit should be to illuminate the unexplored corners, the hidden details and anecdotes that provide a more full-bodied narrative and ultimately bring the band into sharper relief than ever before. Unfortunately, Jonathan Gould has almost completely ignored this directive in “Burning Down the House,” his new Talking Heads biography. This lumpy book, full of redundant stories and unnecessary detours that provide little illumination but plenty of needless bulk, lacks participation by the group’s members and is not the biography that this great and important band deserves.

As fans of the Heads already know, three of the four members met as students at the Rhode Island School of Design in the mid-’70s, children of privilege with artsy aspirations and not much direction. David Byrne came from Baltimore by way of Scotland, a socially awkward dabbler in conceptualist experiments with photography and a veteran of various mediocre cover bands. It was drummer Chris Frantz who enlisted Byrne to join one such band; bassist Tina Weymouth, Frantz’s girlfriend and the daughter of a decorated Navy vice admiral, played bass. They were an anti-jam band and pro-avant; the first decent song they came up with was a shambolic version of what became “Psycho Killer,” with Weymouth contributing the French recitatif in the song’s bridge.

For the emergent Heads, timing was everything. When Frantz signed the lease on a spacious loft on Chrystie Street in East Village in October 1974, he had unwittingly found the practice space where the three musicians would hone their craft. The loft was also a short walk to CBGB, soon to become the proving ground of New York’s punk revolution and the Heads’ primary live performance venue at the start of their career.

In March 1975, Byrne, Weymouth and Frantz attended a gig by Boston’s Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers at the Kitchen, an arts collective space in Soho, and it showed them a new way to approach their music. Richman, “who dressed like a kid that everyone laughed at in high school,” influenced the band’s preppy visual template and Byrne’s clenched singing voice. Within a year of moving to the city, Talking Heads had found its look, sound and favored club. When Frantz bumped into Modern Lovers bassist Ernie Brooks in a West Village Cafe, Frantz inquired about keyboardist Jerry Harrison; Brooks gave him Harrison’s number, Harrison joined the band and the classic Talking Heads lineup was complete.

What followed was a contract with Seymour Stein’s label Sire and the band’s collaboration with producer Brian Eno, beginning with its second album, “More Songs About Buildings and Food.” By the time the band released 1980’s groundbreaking “Remain in Light,” Eno’s role had expanded beyond his production duties. He was now writing songs with Byrne, which created friction within the band. When Byrne allegedly reneged on songwriting credits (the album listed “David Byrne, Brian Eno and Talking Heads,” rather than the individual band members), it created a rift that never healed, even as the band was selling millions of copies of its follow-up “Speaking in Tongues” and the soundtrack to the Jonathan Demme concert film “Stop Making Sense.” The final act was recriminatory, as Byrne commanded an ever greater share of the spotlight while the other members quietly seethed. The band’s final album, “Naked,” was its weakest, and Talking Heads dissolved in 1991, after Byrne removed himself from the lineup to explore outside projects.

Author Jonathan Gould

(Richard Edelman)

Gould does a serviceable job of telling the Heads’ story in a book that arrives 50 years after the band’s first gig at CBGB. Curiously, for someone who has tasked himself with explaining Manhattan’s late ‘70s downtown renaissance, Gould regards many of the key players in that scene with derision bordering on contempt. Gould refers to Richard Hell, a prime architect of New York punk, as a mediocrity whose “singing, songwriting and bass playing remained as pedestrian as his poetry.” Patti Smith’s music “verged on a parody of beat poetry,” while the vastly influential Velvet Underground, a band that made New York punk possible, is hobbled by its “pretensions to hipness, irony and amorality.” Even Chris Frantz’s drumming is “exceptionally unimaginative.” Gould is also careless with his descriptors. Jonathan Richman’s band displays a “willful lack” of commercial instinct, the Heads assert a “willful conventionality” to their stage appearance, Johnny Ramone is a “willfully obnoxious” guitarist and so on.

It’s hard to fathom how a biographer intent on cracking the code of one of rock’s seminal bands can do so with so much contempt for the culture that spawned it. An inquiring fan might want to go to Will Hermes’ 2011 book “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire” for a more nuanced and knowledgeable portrait of the creative ferment that made the Heads possible. As for a biography of Talking Heads, we are still left with a lacuna that Gould has unfortunately not filled.

Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”

Bill Plaschke, thank you for your very informative column about Parkinson’s disease and your boxing exercise program. I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s about five years ago and joined Rock Steady boxing in Burbank six months ago. We do Tai Chi, dancing, speech, the gym machines and boxing. We also work on stretching and floor exercises. My family has noticed a difference in my gait and my endurance. I hope that everyone with Parkinson’s will take heed and find an exercise program specific to their needs. I never had a right jab before, but I have a good one now.

Sandy Kaufman
North Hollywood

I’m often in the mood to punch him after reading one of Plaschke’s columns, but after reading Sunday’s column I wanted nothing more than to give him a hug. It reminds me that everyone is fighting a battle none of us can see. Be kind.

Bill Hokans
Santa Ana

Years of using Bill Plaschke’s notoriously incorrect Super Bowl predictions for betting guidance has led me to believe that Bill owes me, as well as his many devoted readers, a significant debt. His brave and inspiring column revealing his ongoing battle with Parkinson’s disease repays that debt, and then some.

Rob Fleishman
Placentia

Don’t mind admitting I was in tears reading about Bill Plaschke’s advancing Parkinson’s and the therapy that might slow the “motion-melting nightmare” down. A 78-year-old former rugby player with arthritis and a bum knee, I’m fortunate in not having to face the dreaded Parky (yet?). If it happens, I know where to go.

Rock on, Bill, and your truly inspiring gym mates. Kudos, also, to staff photographer Robert Gauthier … every picture, indeed, tells a story.

John D.B. Grimshaw
Lake Forest

I too am living with Parkinson’s disease. Plaschke’s column helped to remind me that I am not alone and this dreaded disease indeed takes no prisoners no matter who you are. I wanted to thank Bill for his column bringing awareness, insight and hope to those of us diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Bill’s humanitarian columns with a tie-in to the world of sports showcase his best writing. Bill, your observations as a Parkinson’s suffer truly hit the mark and deeply resonated with me. I wish you, and all of us afflicted with this condition, the willingness and determination to move forward and to use the power of sport and exercise to combat this devastating disease.

Mike Feix
Chino Hills

Champion Bill Plaschke goes toe to toe against challenger “Parky!” Plaschke delivers a vicious uppercut to his opponent. “Down goes Parky, Down goes Parky!”

Rob Parra
Rowland Heights