Month: March 2019

Twelve years after the inaugural Earth Hour observance in Australia, countries around the world continue joining the grassroots gesture against manmade CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions. This year in the Philippines, armed with lightsabers, fans of the movie Star Wars joined the world with a nod to a galaxy far, far away. Arash Arabasadi has more.
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On a Sunday morning, a crane lowered a rusty remnant of the Holocaust onto tracks outside Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage — a vintage German train car like those used to transport men, women and children to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.

The windowless boxcar is among 700 Holocaust artifacts, most never before seen in the United States, which are being prepared for one of the largest exhibits ever on Auschwitz — a once ordinary Polish town called Oswiecim that the Nazis occupied and transformed into a human monstrosity.

The New York exhibit opens May 8, the day in 1945 when Germany surrendered and the camps were liberated.

German-made freight wagons like the one in the exhibit were used to deport people from their homes all around Europe. About 1 million Jews and nearly 100,000 others were gassed, shot, hanged or starved in Auschwitz out of a total of 6 million who perished in the Holocaust.

That fate awaited them after a long ride on the kind of train car that’s the centerpiece of the New York exhibit.

“There were 80 people squeezed into one wooden car, with no facilities, just a pail to urinate,” remembers Ray Kaner, a 92-year-old woman who still works as a Manhattan dental office manager. “You couldn’t lie down, so you had to sleep sitting, and it smelled.”

She and her sister had been forced to board the train in August 1944 in occupied Poland, after their parents died in the Lodz ghetto where Jews were held captive.

The Germans promised the sisters a better new life.

“We believed them, and we schlepped everything we could carry,” she said. “We still had great hope.”

Once in Auschwitz, “they took away whatever we carried,” and prisoners were beaten, stripped naked and heads shaved bald.

Titled “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away,” the upcoming exhibit will transport visitors into the grisly faceoff between perpetrators and victims.

On display will be concrete posts from an Auschwitz fence covered in barbed and electrified wires; a gas mask used by the SS; a desk belonging to Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss; and a dagger and helmet used by Heinrich Himmler, the chief architect of Hitler’s “final solution.”

The collection of prisoners’ personal items includes a comb improvised from scrap metal; a trumpet one survivor used to save his life by entertaining his captors; and tickets for passage on the St. Louis, a ship of refugees whom the United States refused to accept, sending them back to Europe where some were killed by the Nazis.

The materials are on loan from about 20 institutions worldwide, plus private collections, curated by Robert Jan van Pelt, a leading Auschwitz authority, and other experts in conjunction with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland and Musealia, a Spanish company that organizes traveling shows.

The New York one will run through Jan. 3.

The eight-decade-old box car brought to New York on a cargo ship came from a German auction, in terrible condition. Van Pelt’s team bought it and restored it.

“The dark, smelly car represents that moment of transition from the world of the living that people understood and trusted to the radically alien world of the camps where the doors opened and families were separated forever,” said van Pelt, whose relatives in Amsterdam lived down the street from Anne Frank’s family.

“The Nazis wanted to wipe out every last Jew in the world,” and at the end of a train trip, “this is where the last goodbyes were said.”

The exhibit items all belonged to somebody — most now gone, either because they were murdered in camps or survived and have since died. Some people who inherited artifacts came forward with stories attached to them.

Thousands of survivors live in New York City, among the last who can offer personal testimony.

And that’s why the exhibit is important, said real estate developer Bruce Ratner, the chairman of the museum’s board of trustees.

“While we had all hoped after the Holocaust that the international community would come together to stop genocide, mass murder and ethnic cleansing, these crimes continue and there are more refugees today than at any time since the Second World War,” said Ratner. “So my hope for this exhibit is that it motivates all of us to make the connections between the world of the past and the world of the present, and to take a firm stand against hate.”
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U.S. donors and Cuban builders have completed one of the longest-running joint projects between the two countries at a low point in bilateral relations.

Officials from the Boston-based Finca Vigia Foundation and Cuba’s National Cultural Heritage Council cut the ribbon Saturday evening on a state-of-the-art, $1.2 million conservation center on the grounds of Ernest Hemingway’s stately home on a hill overlooking Havana.

 

The center, which has been under construction since 2016, contains modern technology for cleaning and preserving a multitude of artifacts from the home where Hemingway lived in the 1940s and 1950s.

 

When he died in 1961, the author left approximately 5,000 photos, 10,000 letters and perhaps thousands of margin notes in roughly 9,000 books at the property.

 

“The laboratory we’re inaugurating today is the only one in Cuba with this capacity and it will allow us to contribute to safeguarding the legacy of Ernest Hemingway in Cuba,” said Grisell Fraga, director of the Ernest Hemingway Museum.

U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, spoke at the ceremony and called it a sign of the potential for U.S.-Cuban cooperation despite rising tensions between the Communist government and the Trump administration.

 

McGovern, who met with President Miguel Diaz-Canel and other Cuban officials during his visit, said that despite tensions over Venezuela, a Cuban ally, he still believed respectful dialogue was the most productive way of dealing with Cuba’s government.

 

The Trump administration has said it is trying to get rid of socialism in Latin America.

 

 
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The streets around The Stonewall Inn are quiet now.

But 50 years ago in June 1969, this popular gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village was the site of violent confrontation when an unprovoked police raid triggered widespread outrage, resulting in several days of riots and demonstrations.

Many believe the uprising was the catalyst for the modern gay rights movement.

Now, a groundbreaking new exhibit titled “Rise Up: Stonewall and the LGBTQ Rights Movement” at the Newseum in Washington explores that tumultuous period in American history.

Exhibit writer Christy Wallover says the numerous displays focus on the courageous efforts of everyday Americans.

“This big movement was spurred on by people who wanted to make a change, whether that’s fighting for the right to work and serve, whether that’s parading in the streets and celebrating who you are, or whether that’s winning the right to marry.”​

WATCH: New Exhibit Commemorates 50 Years of Gay Rights Movement

​Marriage equality

Jim Obergefell was one of those people. He fought for marriage equality in the state of Ohio for him and his longtime partner, John Arthur.

They had been together for 18 years when Arthur was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and within two years was in at-home hospice care.

“Because we lived in Ohio, we were not able to get married,” Obergefell explained. So, the two chartered a medical jet and flew to Baltimore, Maryland, where same-sex marriage had become legal Jan.1, 2013.

They were married that year inside the airplane on the tarmac at Baltimore Washington International Airport by Arthur’s aunt Paulette Roberts.

Arthur died a few months later.

But Ohio did not recognize their marriage. Upon Arthur’s death, Obergefell could not be listed as Arthur’s surviving spouse. Obergefell sued the state.

The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Obergefell won. On June 26, 2015, marriage equality became the law of the land.

​Symbolic artifacts

Obergefell loaned some of his most prized possessions to the Newseum to illustrate his story: the couple’s wedding rings that he had fused together after Arthur’s death; the jacket Obergefell wore when they married; and the bowtie he wore when the Supreme Court decision was announced.

Fighting back tears, Obergefell explained why he did it.

“Because it’s my marriage. It’s the love of my life. It’s the man I was willing to do anything for and to fight all the way to the Supreme Court to defend, and to protect, and to live up to my promises to him.”

Other items featured in the exhibit represent trailblazers such as Frank Kameny, who many consider the father of the LGBTQ rights movement.

His portable typewriter — on view in a display case — was used to create memos, pamphlets, “and everything he used to petition and protest the government,” Wallover explained.

There are also items from several U.S. politicians.

A red suit from Tammy Baldwin, who in 1998 became the first openly gay woman elected to Congress, and artifacts from Congressman Barney Frank, who revealed he was gay in an interview with The Boston Globe in 1987 after having served for three terms.

Also prominently featured is Harvey Milk, a leading human rights activist who became one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States, and who was assassinated in 1978 after only a year in office.

There’s a letter of his that was in his jacket pocket when he was shot, according to Wallover.

For many, it’s personal

John Lake, who works for one of the sponsors of the exhibit, found it deeply personal.

“The 50th anniversary of Stonewall is so important to me personally, because I look back and all of the progress that’s been made has really happened within the course of my lifetime,” he explained.

Walking through the exhibit, he says he saw things that impacted his life “in a very real way.”

“Like seeing Jim Obergefell’s jacket that he was married in — that happened around the same time that I proposed to my husband,” he said. “So, to get that kind of grounding and to see those moments really coming to life for the community, it just really brings it home.”

While there have been great strides made in the gay rights movement over the past 50 years, many acknowledge there’s still much work to be done for the 4.5 percent of Americans — roughly 10 million people — who identify as LGBTQ, or Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer or Questioning.

“In the exhibit, we highlight the strides and the setbacks,” Wallover explained, pointing out that challenges remain for members of the LGBTQ community who are still striving for equality, such as transgender people.

“We talk about the transgender ban that’s currently in effect that the Supreme Court just upheld, and we also talk about the violence against that group, primarily transgender women of color,” she added. “So, we still have work to do.”

The exhibit, which will travel nationally after its run at the Newseum, includes educational resources for students and teachers.
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The Rolling Stones are postponing their latest tour so Mick Jagger can receive medical treatment.

 

The band announced Saturday that Jagger was told by doctors “he cannot go on tour at this time.” The band added that Jagger “is expected to make a complete recovery so that he can get back on stage as soon as possible.”

 

No more details about 75-year-old Jagger’s condition were provided.

 

The Stones’ No Filter Tour was expected to start April 20 in Miami.

 

Jagger says in the statement he hates letting the fans down but he’s “looking forward to getting back on stage as soon as I can.”

 

Tour promoters AEG Presents and Concerts West advise ticketholders to hold on to their existing tickets because will be valid for the rescheduled dates.
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Stevie Nicks, who became the first woman inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Janet Jackson, the latest member of the Jackson clan to enter the hall, called for other women to join them in music immortality on a night they were honored with five all-male British bands.

Jackson issued her challenge just before leaving the stage of Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” she said, “in 2020, induct more women.”

Neither Jackson or Nicks were around at the end of the evening when another Brit, Ian Hunter, led an all-star jam at the end to “All the Young Dudes.” The Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs was the only woman onstage.

Five British bands

During the five-hour ceremony, Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music thanked multiple bass players and album cover designers, the Cure’s Robert Smith proudly wore his mascara and red lipstick a month shy of his 60th birthday and two of Radiohead’s five members showed up for trophies.

 

During Def Leppard’s induction, Rick Allen was moved to tears by the audience’s standing ovation when singer Joe Elliott recalled the drummer’s perseverance following a 1985 accident that cost him an arm. 

​Jackson wanted to be a lawyer

Jackson followed her brothers Michael and the Jackson 5 as inductees. She said she wanted to go to college and become a lawyer growing up, but her late father Joe had other ideas for her.

 

“As the youngest in my family, I was determined to make it on my own,” she said. “I was determined to stand on my own two feet. But never in a million years did I expect to follow in their footsteps.”

 

She encouraged Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, producers of her breakthrough “Control” album and most of her vast catalog, to stand in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center for recognition, as well as booster Questlove. She thanked Dick Clark of “American Bandstand” and Don Cornelius of “Soul Train,” along with her choreographers including Paula Abdul.

Jackson was inducted by an enthusiastic Janelle Monae, whose black hat and black leather recalled some of her hero’s past stage looks. She said Jackson had been her phone’s screen-saver for years as a reminder to be focused and fearless in how she approached art.

 

Nicks blueprint for success

Nicks was the night’s first induction. She is already a member of the hall as a member of Fleetwood Mac, but only the first woman to join 22 men, including all four Beatles members, to have been honored twice by the rock hall for the different stages of their career.

 

Nicks offered women a blueprint for success, telling them her trepidation in first recording a solo album while a member of Fleetwood Mac and encouraging others to match her feat.

 

“I know there is somebody out there who will be able to do it,” she said, promising to talk often of how she built her solo career. “What I am doing is opening up the door for other women.”

Radiohead

David Byrne inducted Radiohead, noting he was flattered the band named itself after one of his songs. He said their album “Kid A” was the one that really hooked him, and he was impressed Radiohead could be experimental in both their music and how they conduct business.

 

“They’re creative and smart in both areas, which was kind of a rare combination for artists, not just now but anytime,” he said.

 

With only drummer Philip Selway and guitarist Ed O’Brien on hand, Radiohead didn’t perform; there was a question of whether any of them would show up given the group’s past ambivalence about the hall. But both men spoke highly of the honor.

 

“This is such a beautifully surreal evening for us,” said O’Brien. “It’s a big (expletive) deal and it feels like it. … I wish the others could be here because they would be feeling it.”

 

The Cure

The Cure’s Smith has been a constant in a band of shifting personnel, and he stood onstage for induction Friday with 11 past and current members. Despite their goth look, the Cure has a legacy of pop hits, and performed three of them at Barclays, “I Will Always Love You,” “Just Like Heaven” and “Boys Don’t Cry.”

 

Visibly nervous, Smith called his induction a “very nice surprise” and shyly acknowledged the crowd’s cheers. “It’s been a fantastic thing, it really has,” he said. “We love you, too.”

 

Def Leppard

 

Def Leppard sold tons of records, back when musicians used to do that, with a heavy metal sound sheened to pop perfection on songs like “Photograph” and “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” They performed them in a set that climaxed the annual ceremony.

 

Singer Joe Elliott stressed the band’s working-class roots, thanking his parents and recalling how his father gave them 150 pounds to make their first recording in 1978.

 

Besides Allen’s accident, the band survived the 1991 death of guitarist Steve Clark. Elliott said there always seemed to be a looming sense of tragedy around the corner for the band, but “we wouldn’t let it in.”

Roxy Music 

 

Roxy Music, led by the stylish Ferry, performed a five-song set that included hits “Love is the Drug,” “More Than This” and “Avalon.” (Brian Eno didn’t show for the event).

 

Simon LeBon and John Taylor of Duran Duran inducted them, with Taylor saying that hearing Roxy Music in concert at age 14 showed him what he wanted to do with his life.

 

“Without Roxy Music, there really would be no Duran Duran,” he said.

 

The soft-spoken Ferry thanked everyone from a succession of bass players to album cover designers. 

“We’d like to thank everyone for this unexpected honor,” he said.

The Zombies

 

The Zombies, from rock ’n’ roll’s original British invasion, were the veterans of the night. They made it despite being passed over in the past, but were gracious in their thanks of the rock hall. They performed hits “Time of the Season,” “Tell Her No” and “She’s Not There.”

 

Zombies lead singer Rod Argent noted that the group had been eligible for the hall for 30 years but the honor had eluded them.

 

“To have finally passed the winning post this time — fantastic!”
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Agnes Varda, the French New Wave pioneer who for decades beguiled, challenged and charmed moviegoers in films that inspired generations of filmmakers, has died. She was 90.

Varda’s production company, Cine-Tamaris, said Varda died early morning Friday at her home in Paris from cancer.

With a two-tone bowl haircut, the Belgian-born Varda was a spirited, diminutive figure who towered over more than a half century of moviemaking. Her first film, made at the age of 27, “La Pointe Courte,” earned her the nickname Grandmother of the New Wave, even though she — the sole woman among the movement — was a contemporary of its participants, including Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Demy, whom she later married.

A photographer-turned-filmmaker, Varda’s films fluctuated between fiction and documentary, often blurring the line in between. Her 1962 breakthrough, “Cleo From 5 to 7,” followed a glamorous woman (Corinne Marchand) in real time across Paris while she awaited results of a cancer exam. In her 2017 Oscar nominated road trip “Faces Places,” she traversed the French countryside with the street artist JR, pasting giant images of people they encountered on building facades.

“Life comes through the frame and through the stock. It’s like a filter,” Varda said in an interview in 2017. “I feel I am an artist but I am a movie maker. I make a film with my hands. I love the editing, I love the mixing. It’s a tool to make other people exist. It’s giving understanding between people.”

Varda worked almost right up to her death, releasing the scrapbook documentary “Varda by Agnes” earlier this year. She had originally intended her 2008 cinematic memoir “Beaches by Agnes” to be her swan song but, to her surprise, ended up with another decade of work. “I’m 90 and I don’t care,” she says into the camera in “Varda by Agnes.”

In 2015, Varda was given an honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2017, she was given an honorary Academy Award. But she was more content, she said, “in the margins.” “I’m flattered,” she said of the Oscar, “but not that much.”

Varda’s films quickly became feminist landmarks and she a champion of women behind the camera. One of the only female filmmakers in France when she started, she led an insurgency that continued, in greater number, through her life. At the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, she helped preside over a protest for gender equality on the red carpet steps of the festival’s central Palais with 81 other women.

At the premiere of what she called her “feminist musical,” “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t,” in 1977, she introduced “a film about women who were also people.” Her “Vagabond,” which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1985, followed a young female drifter (Sandrine Bonnaire) discovered dead in a freezing ditch.

“When I started, my point was not to be a woman,” said Varda. “I wanted to do radical cinema.”

Varda’s death was immediately felt across the movie industry. The Cannes Film Festival said: “The place she occupied is irreplaceable. Agnes loved images, words and people. She’s one of those whose youth will never fade.” “Moonlight” filmmaker Barry Jenkins recalled a legend whose “life and work were undeniably fused.”

 

Arlette Varda was born in Brussels, Belgium on May 30, 1928 to a French mother and Greek father. Varda, who later changed her name to Agnes, started as a photographer after studying literature and arts. In 1951, she was appointed official photographer of the Theatre National Populaire, and remained in that position for the next decade.

In 1954, well before Godard and Francois Truffaut became the emblematic figures of the New Wave, Varda’s first movie, “La Pointe Courte,” followed a couple going through a crisis in the small port of Sete on the Mediterranean coast. The movie was cut by Alain Resnais but was regarded as too radical at the time and only had a limited release. Varda contrasted the young couple’s story with the local villagers’ struggle to survive, eventually linking the two seemingly disparate ways of life.

She deliberately used a real fishing village, wanting to give the film the look of a documentary. “I’ve always been using reality as a texture to understand better,” she said. “I like for stories to look true.”

She made several documentary shorts, but inadequate funds prevented Varda from making her next feature, “Cleo From 5 to 7,” until 1961. Backed by French businessman Georges de Beauregard, who had supported Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” the film studied Cleo’s evolvement from a shallow pop star to an authentic human being capable of understanding pain in herself and others.

“I obliged myself to follow the time. Ninety minutes, one after another. Real time and real geography,” said Varda. “I filmed all the steps, all the streets. What she does, it could be retraced. I gave myself something difficult because inside the difficulty, I wanted to hear her heart beating.”

The widely hailed “Cleo” built anticipation for her next film, “Happiness,” which won the Silver Bear award at the 1965 Berlin Festival.

Varda married Demy, the “Umbrellas of Cherbourg” director, in 1962 and two were married until his death in 1990. They worked separately but alongside each other, regularly occupying opposite sides of the courtyard of their Paris home.

The filmmaking couple also spent several years in Hollywood in the late `60s. Demy made “Model Shop” there while Varda befriended Jim Morrison of the Doors (she was one of just a handful of people to attend Morrison’s 1971 funeral in Paris’ Pere Lachais cemetery), filmed the Los Angeles-set “Lions Love” and interviewed the imprisoned Black Panther leader Huey Newton for the 1968 documentary “Black Panthers.”

She and Demy had two children together: Mathieu Demy and Rosalie Varda, who both found career in French filmmaking. Varda is survived by both.

Demy’s death fueled Varda’s late period of documentaries, including several heartfelt tributes to her husband including 1991’s “Jacquot de Nantes.”

“I had to stay alive even though he died. I made two films about him. Then I went off and I did cinema. Fiction films are beautiful but documentaries put you at peace with the world. You try to make the world understandable, make the people come near to you.”

One of those documentaries, the 2000 film “The Gleaners and I,” is considered by some her masterwork. Documenting people who live off the garbage thrown out by others, it’s a meditation on waste and reuse, art and death.

“Filming, especially a documentary, is gleaning,” Varda told IndieWire. “Because you pick what you find. You bend. You go around. You are curious.”
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Once stigmatized and banned across the United States, marijuana is now legalized in many parts of the country, primarily for medicinal use, but increasingly also for recreation. As cannabis becomes mainstream, Americans in their 70s and 80s who used to get high on marijuana in their youth, are now using cannabis-infused products to relieve old age aches and pains. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has this report.
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