Author: Ohart

Kayra Martinez took calligraphy paper and pens into refugee tents in Greece last year. “That was the first time I had actually seen the children really calm,” Martinez said. “And I realized that this is something that they really love to do.”

As a flight attendant for United Airlines, Martinez is often in Greece, where she was drawn to the refugee camps and began volunteering there in 2015.

Focusing her efforts on Nea Kavala in northern Greece, she is now the first point of contact for many families in need.

“It’s very, very actually challenging to be able to leave Greece, because you have urgent needs every day,” she said. “Every day you have a family writing to you.”

The paper and pens presented a whole new opportunity. Martinez put one of the pieces of art on Facebook and instantly received offers to purchase it. Since then, Martinez has provided canvases, watercolors, pencils, markers, calligraphy paper and sketchpads to adults and children in the refugee camps.

She collects their art and takes it to cities around the U.S. and Europe, selling each piece for $25 to $150. She then uses the money to help the refugees in the camps through her new organization, Love Without Borders — for Refugees.

Many of the pieces sold are from children as young as 3.

“I’m really focused on what the children want to draw, more than telling them what they need to draw, because they have a lot of feelings, a lot of trauma that hasn’t been worked out,” Martinez said. “So, we just let them take their time and draw whatever they would like.”

Therapy and independence

Many of the pictures displayed at a recent show in a small gallery in Washington were done in black and gray. The young artists drew their homes burning, their cities being bombed, their families crying.

“There was one that was kind of a row of buildings and a bomb above it — ‘Syria,’ ” said Niyati Shah, who attended the art show. “This is what this kid sees every day. You see it in the news, but then you see children’s depiction of their reality, and it’s certainly moving.”

Other pictures were colorful and bright, showcasing the hope and resilience of the refugee artists. Each piece had an accompanying note about the artist, telling his or her story

“It’s just also nice to be somewhere where you’re not just getting the tragic images, but it’s kind of a more positive way and constructive way to look at the conflict,” said attendee Julieta Jakubowicez. “Very humanizing.”

Martinez sold 122 pieces of art in three hours, about 60 percent of the collection she brought with her from Greece. She raised $17,503, most of which will go back to the refugees.

At least one of the refugees Martinez helps was an accomplished artist before being displaced by war.

“And now he’s having his first exhibition in Greece. We’re selling his art all over the U.S.,” Martinez said. “It got back his independence. He’s empowered, he’s motivated, and also he can now create a better environment for his family when he has his own money.”

In addition to providing cash to refugees, Martinez also teaches them how to make jewelry and baby clothes to sell so they don’t have to rely on fickle government and NGO services.

“They are really tired of having to ask for everything and then be disappointed at the end by not getting it,” Martinez said.

Filling in the aid gaps

Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, hundreds of thousands of refugees have arrived in Greece. Many continued to other countries in Europe, but many remain — something Greece was not prepared for.

Despite financial assistance from the European Union, Martinez said, help from large aid organizations was not getting to the refugees.  Volunteers and smaller organizations, including Love Without Borders — for Refugees, fill in the gap.

“We’re doing a lot of work that a lot of organizations cannot do, but we are very innovative. We have a lot of ideas, and we’re a little bit more independent to be able to make things happen a lot quicker,” Martinez said.

She volunteers with refugees and hosts art show fundraisers around the world, while still working as a flight attendant for United.

“I think basically I’ve given up my social life. I don’t go out with my friends anymore,” Martinez said. “I don’t; I can’t.”

She doesn’t sleep much, but she doesn’t regret anything.

“I’ve loved to learn languages, and I’ve loved to learn cultures by traveling around the world. So I get to do what I love to do in a different sort of way.”
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This is the Top Five Countdown! We’re detonating the five most popular songs in the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles chart, for the week ending Sept. 23, 2017.

Sometimes the Top Five can lull you to sleep with its slowness … and then there are weeks like this.

Number 5: Logic Featuring Alessia Cara & Khalid “1-800-273-8255”

It all starts in fifth place, where we welcome newcomer Logic, who surges four slots to fifth place with “1-800-273-8255” featuring Alessia Cara and Khalid.

What’s with that song title? 

Logic hails from Gaithersburg, Maryland, not far from Washington, D.C. The song title is the telephone number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Logic says the inspiration for this song came on a recent tour, when he stayed in fans’ homes. Logic says some told him his music helped save their lives … which showed him his power as an artist.

Number 4: Taylor Swift “Ready for It?”

No artist is more aware of her own power than our fourth-place newcomer. Taylor Swift is back, and she came to play with “Ready For It?”

Taylor maintained a low profile for much of the past year, then last month re-emerged in a burst of activity on social media. Her sixth album “Reputation” arrives on November 10.

“Ready For It?” features songwriting and production from the solid-gold team of Max Martin and Shellback. It appeared on September 3, immediately becoming Taylor’s 13th number one single on the Billboard Digital Songs chart.

Number 3: Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee Featuring Justin Bieber “Despacito”

Ms. Swift isn’t finished with us yet, but right now let’s bring on Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber: “Despacito” backs off a notch to number three.

On September 16, Luis gave a special private performance in San Antonio, Texas. He stopped by the Children’s Rehabilitation Institute of TeleTon USA. He sang for the young patients, who battle musculoskeletal and neurological disorders.

Number 2: Cari B “Bodak Yellow (Money Moves)”

Cardi B gets serious this week, as “Bodak Yellow” moves into the runner-up slot.

The Bronx rapper was previously on track to drop her debut album in October, but now says she may need a bit more time to finish it.

Number 1: Taylor Swift “Look What You Made Me Do”

November 10 is the day Taylor Swift delivers her “Reputation” album, and the lead single remains atop the Hot 100. Ruling the roost for a second week: “Look What You Made Me Do.”

 

This marks the first time in nearly three years that two solo women control the Hot 100. It last happened in December 2014: Taylor Swift was again in the driver’s seat with “Blank Space,” while Meghan Trainor was the runner-up with “All About That Bass.”

We’re all about those hits, and we’ll have more for you next week — so join us if you can.

 
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More than 150 pieces of art made by refugees from Greece are part of the collection at Love Without Borders – For Refugees’ art show in Washington D.C. Many of the pieces sold are from children, as young as three years old.
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On April 13, 2015 the world watched as two homemade bombs exploded at the finish line of the iconic Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring more than 264 others. Jeff Bauman was one of those badly hurt. Both his legs were blown off. Hours later, when he awoke from surgery, Bauman helped the FBI identify Tamerlan Tsarnaev as one of the suspects.

Now, a film titled Stronger — based on Bauman’s memoir by the same name —  recounts how that terrorist attack changed his life forever and for the better.

Actor Jake Gyllenhaal portrays Bauman.

During the interview, Gyllenhaal and Bauman were completely in sync, like two people who seemed to have known each other for a long time and deeply, even exchanging chummy jabs.

​Gradually, the tone of our interview became more serious as the focus turned to Stronger, the film directed by David Gordon Green. The film follows Jeff Bauman, a Costco employee showing up at the Boston Marathon, big sign in hand, to express his support for one runner — a former girlfriend he hopes to woo back.

Within seconds, Jeff Bauman turns from an enthusiastic spectator waiting at the finish line, to a front line terror victim. As soon he opens his eyes in the hospital, both legs amputated, Jeff Bauman, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, has to relearn how to live in his own body. His relationship with girlfriend Erin Hurley, played by Tatiana Maslany, is resumed but tested. His mother Patty, played by Miranda Richardson, is portrayed as loving but erratic.

Jake Gyllenhaal told me this was the most challenging role he has ever played.

“You know the great irony of this, I’ve played people who are professional athletes and there has been nothing that’s come close to as difficult physically as this role,” he said.

“Understanding the difficulty of just taking a few steps is what we thought and we’ve always believed the movie to be about – about a man who learns how to take a few steps and the extraordinary journey that he goes through to do that, so yes, it was difficult but it was an honor!” he said emphatically.

Gyllenhaal said his journey of interpreting Bauman and his life story brought him closer to a whole community of amputees. “As painful as it was to understand what he went through, I think it was incredibly inspiring,” he said.

 

Asked about his advisory role to Gyllenhaal, Bauman said he showed him how he works and moves as an amputee. “I showed him how to take off the legs, how to get in and out of a car perfectly,” he said. “He watched me getting in and out of chairs.” He chuckled “When it came to acting, he did not need any coaching.”

Gyllenhaal’s gritty portrayal informs not only Bauman’s battle to stand on his prosthetic legs but his emotional struggle against Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“I always think that you need a very long runway whenever you try to create any character,” he said. “But when you are trying to play a character that is actually in existence, who is living an incredible life themselves and has been through as much and is right next to you, it’s a whole other experience, like understanding what it is like to have an amputation above the knee in both legs, it’s the same thing to understand the concept of PTSD.”

“I have over the years met many different people in the process of making movies, members of the military, police officers, a number of people who have suffered from PTSD in many different forms,” he continued. “And I always feel like you kind of carry the characters you’ve played with you into other characters. But in terms of understanding Jeff and what he went through, it’s pretty much impossible. I know we talked a lot about feelings. I think [turning to Jeff], you are not shy about struggles. So, we spoke. I got to know him, his fears, and it was a slow long runway like I said.”

Bauman shared his experience and thoughts on how it feels to experience a terrorist attack.

“I felt like I was sucker punched,” he said. “You are just not ready for something like that, especially an IED attack. And then afterwards, I did research on IEDs and the person that did this to me and why they did it, what the motives were. And then you start reading about different things in history and different bombings. Since it’s personal to me, I kind of attach myself to what’s going on in Barcelona, and Syria —  anywhere, Moscow, it happens all over the world, every day. It makes my stomach tighten up. Then I also take a step back and say, Why are we doing this to each other?'”

Bauman said the movie is not about the trauma but about survival and recovery.

“I want people to see it and realize that you can get through something like this, and you can live a positive life after,” he said. “My life is nothing but positive now. But I still have trauma. I do. I live with it”

“Stronger” depicts how Jeff Bauman became “Boston’s Strong” because his recovery symbolized the recovery of the whole city and beyond. Six weeks after losing both his legs in the Boston Marathon bombings, he was wheeled onto the Fenway Park infield by Carlos Arrendondo, the man who rescued him, where he pitched the first ball at a Red Sox game.

Jake Gyllenhaal delivers a powerful performance as Jeff Bauman where the latter’s day-to-day struggle is in the details. Gyllenhaal said despite Bauman’s unfathomable experience and grueling rehabilitation, this film is about hope.

“This is a film that is not about an event. This is a film about a human being,” he said.

“And I think Jeff himself said it best the other day: ‘it doesn’t have to make headlines to be hard.’ And I think what Jeff’s story tells us is that no matter what you’re going through, be it an event like he went through, which is unfathomable, or be hurricanes that are affecting so many different cities and towns and people all over the world, whatever it might be, Jeff’s story tells us that we can get through it,” he said.

“And like he says in the movie, if he can do it, you can do it,” added Gyllenhaal. “I think that’s very important. When events are tragic as they are, we tend to focus on the event itself and the people who did the event, not the people who survive. This movie is about the people who survive, who go on to live, and who go on to live a better life than they thought they would even before and that’s why Jeff inspires me.”
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An elderly woman seeks a romance with her swimming coach in the Hindi film Lipstick Under My Burqa, which battled the Indian censors ahead of its release in theaters last month and is now going strong on streaming service Amazon Prime.

In another Bollywood film this year, Anaarkali of Aarah, inspired by a true story, a dancing girl who sings innuendo-laden songs at functions in a small town called Aarah takes on a powerful official who molests her in public.

A fresh crop of Hindi films — or Bollywood, as the industry is popularly known — are telling stories of ordinary women seeking sexual and financial freedom.

“Bollywood is a male-dominated industry, but there is a sudden influx of women-oriented films that are also doing well,” Avinash Das, writer-director of Anaarkali of Aarah, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Triggering the change in Bollywood’s narrative was the brutal gang rape of a 23-year-old woman on a bus in New Delhi in 2012, which led to massive protests across the country and put a spotlight on women’s safety in India.

Bollywood films, often characterized by their song and dance sequences and male-dominated story lines, are influential in India and beyond, and objectification of women and their use in titillating songs is often blamed for stoking sexual crime in the country.

India has only 10 cinema screens per million people, compared with 124 in the United States and 90 in China for the nearly 1,000 films Bollywood churns out every year, but it has the largest number of people going to the cinema.

The films that tell women’s stories, though still perceived as commercially unviable, have done well at the box office.

Alankrita Shrivastava, director of Lipstick Under My Burqa, said viewers were drawn to her film as “an honest story about them” and that the film remains the most watched since Amazon Prime’s launch in India last December.

The makers of Anaarkali too could prove naysayers wrong when the film did commercially well, and even a movie exploring lack of sanitation as a women’s rights violation — Toilet: A Love Story — has been a major hit this year.

“When issues matter to people … they are bound to come into popular entertainment media,” said veteran filmmaker Shyam Benegal, whose award-winning films explored India’s caste divide and told stories of ordinary women. “Films like Toilet: A Love Story ring a bell with a large section of the audience who identity with the problem, and that explains why they are doing well.”

Off-screen voices

In April, popular actor Abhay Deol took on fellow actors for endorsing skin-whitening creams and slammed the popular Indian belief of “fairer is better” as racist.

This off-screen voice of leading actors is creating awareness on subjects that were never discussed, be it fairness creams or even sex trafficking, campaigners said.

“Celebrities have a huge following and the message goes out to people that campaigners would never be able to reach out to,” said Samarth Pathak, spokesman at U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

Pathak interviewed Bollywood heartthrob John Abraham on World Day Against Trafficking in July, when he described trafficking as a “serious threat to humanity.”

“This was our first interview with a film star, and it created quite a buzz. A lot of young people are reaching out [to understand] trafficking, which is unprecedented,” Pathak said.

A couple of days before the interview, Bollywood’s most sought-after actor, Akshay Kumar, who plays the male lead in Toilet and is now working in a film on menstrual hygiene, spoke at an international sex trafficking conference in Mumbai about the need to protect children from abuse.

These star voices matter as Bollywood’s handling of prostitution had been restricted to portraying women as “call girls” without delving into the problems of sex trafficking and modern-day slavery, said Sanjay Macwan, regional director of the anti-trafficking charity International Justice Mission.

“When Bollywood celebrities speak against sex trafficking, exploitation and bonded labor, it brings the issue before every Indian,” Macwan said.

‘Fashionable again’

Last year’s release, Dangal, which shows an aging father train his two daughters to become wrestlers, defying social norms in conservative Haryana state in northern India, is among Bollywood’s biggest hits, beating fluffy romances and epic revenge dramas in box office collections.

While arthouse films in the 1980s and a crop of independent filmmakers have tackled social issues, gender and small-town India in their films, the backing of such projects by major studios seems a recent phenomenon — but in some ways is simply following an old Bollywood tradition.

“Hindi cinema has been dealing with social issues since the 1920s, even in the silent era,” Meenakshi Shedde, South Asia consultant to the Berlin and Dubai film festivals and festival curator, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

A 1937 film, Duniya Na Mane (The World Does Not Agree), showed a young schoolteacher from a poor family refusing to consummate her marriage with an old man.

Some of India’s most successful filmmakers from the 1930s to ’60s such as V Shantaram and Bimal Roy had social themes at the center of their stories.

“Bollywood is often perceived as monolithic, masala films with stars, six songs and a happy ending. But it is many different things,” Shedde said. It is wonderful that social issues are becoming fashionable in Bollywood again.”
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The new Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa is, in a word, ambitious.

 The museum opens its doors Friday, Sept. 22, 2017. The building is itself a work of art, a century-old grain silo on Cape Town’s historic waterfront that has been slickly overhauled by star British architect Thomas Heatherwick to house the continent’s largest collection of contemporary art — in the case of this museum, all of it made after the year 2000.

The nine-floor museum strives to show that African contemporary art — so long overlooked on the international stage — is worthy of appreciation and attention. It attempts to thrill visitors with its array of exhibits. Some are inventive, some confrontational, some whimsical, and some, puzzling.

But, says curator Mark Coetzee, the museum’s true ambitions are grander still.

“I think the first and foremost gesture of the museum is a political one,” he told VOA. “And that is to say that for a very long time, the narrative of Africa and the representation of Africans has been defined by others, by outsiders. And the museum’s motivation is to say, let’s create an institution where people from Africa, whether we were born here thousands of years or whether we immigrated yesterday, can contribute to the writing of our own history. Let us also define how we want to be represented to the world.”

He says their work gives rise to many pressing issues in the modern world.

“What contemporary art museums do is, basically, they give us the tools to be able to negotiate the time that we are living in,” Coetzee said. “So, artists ask very difficult, complex questions of society: ‘Why is there separation of wealth and power? Why does the ability to represent culture or represent people rely on a few people’s input and  and not a holistic group of people? How do we negotiate difference in society when we have different religions, or different genders, or different orientations?’

“And so what a museum does is, it’s a very safe space to discuss very difficult issues which impact all of us in the 21st century.”

Dragons, Zebras and Cows

But, Coetzee says, if you’re not inclined toward deep thought, the art is pretty cool too. The museum houses the private collection of Jochen Zeitz, a German art collector and philanthropist, and former CEO of athletics brand Puma.

Visitors will be greeted by a massive dragon, made of bicycle inner tubes, with a 100-meter-long tail, the work of South African artist Nicholas Hlobo. They’ll be dazzled by the whimsical, eye-searingly bright images of zebras and balloons and richly costumed figures, composed by South African photographer Athi-Patra Ruga.

They will be dragged into the undertow of “Ten Thousand Waves” — a video exhibition by of British installation artist Isaac Julien that assaults the senses on nine screens. They’ll be able to touch — and take home — prints of the stark, bold images of Angolan photographer Edson Chagas. And they’ll be haunted by room after room of ghostly cow hides, plastered into ethereal shapes by Swaziland’s Nandipha Mntambo.

Time for African Art

What visitors will not be able to do — at least not on opening weekend — is linger. That’s because when the museum offered 24,000 free passes for two-hour blocks during the grand opening, they were snapped up in just nine minutes.

In the last few years, African contemporary art has started to receive its due, says Hannah O’Leary, head of modern and contemporary African art for international auction house Sotheby’s. While the market is still new, she says, and African artists have yet to command top dollar price, the auction house’s first auction earlier this year brought in $3.8 million (2.8 million pounds).

In doing do, it broke multiple records, including the highest sales in a single auction of contemporary African art. While South Africa has always had a vibrant art scene, she says other African countries are on the rise — both in making art, and in consuming it.

“From the results of our first sale, we had buyers from 29 different countries, in six different continents,” she told VOA, from London. “And that’s really very significant. We’re not talking about just selling South African art to South African buyers. We are taking the greatest art from across the continent and we know that that has an international appeal, so we are are selling to collectors in Africa , but also in North America and Europe. Anyone who is a collector and can appreciate great contemporary art should also be looking at Africa.”

Coetzee says visitors should not be intimidated, though, by the museum’s $38-million renovation, its untold millions of dollars worth of art, or its elegant exterior. Nor, he says, should they be scared away by the $13 ticket — citizens of African nations get free admission every Wednesday, and children’s passes are always free. That’s because, he says, art is something everyone needs.

“The thing that separates us from animals, the thing that makes us unique is our identity. It’s the pride in who we are. And I think that if you remove cultural representation, and say it’s not a basic need, where does that leave us? What meaning does that give us in life?”

Deep questions, indeed. And one that the museum hopes to provoke — if not to answer — when it opens its doors.
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Twenty strangers have gathered in the dining room of a New York City apartment as a woman with long dark curly hair putters around the kitchen, putting a package of meat in the fridge, sauteing pine nuts.  They settle into chairs, and she begins to speak.

“Since I came back,” she tells them, “I make kubah, again and again, as if I want to close a hole in my soul.”

Welcome to Off Off-Broadway, and the one-woman play “Oh My Sweet Land.”  It is a harrowing story of a Syrian-American woman who follows her Syrian lover to the Middle East, and actress Nadine Malouf whips up meat croquettes as she tells it.

An attack on a way of life

The play, written and directed by Amir Nazir Zuabi, was produced in London in 2014, and is now being performed in different kitchens all around New York. 

Zuabi, a Palestinian, got the idea for the play several years ago, when he traveled to Syrian refugee camps in Jordan.  He adapted several of the stories he heard and, since food and hospitality are a cornerstone of Arab culture, he included cooking.

“I didn’t want to do a horror show.  It’s important to remember that this is an attack on a culture; not just the political situation, it’s an attack on the way of life.  And the loss in Syria is also this – it’s the loss of normality, of just the ability to break bread together and meet.”

Malouf, an Australian actress of Middle Eastern and European descent, says it’s a challenge to deal with the emotions of the story while cooking.

She compares it to rubbing your belly and tapping your head at the same time, adding, “I have nicked myself a few times, I’ve burnt myself with oil.  You know, wounds.  War wounds.”

No safe space

Watching the play in this setting becomes almost painfully intimate, for both the audience and the actor.

“You tell immediately, you know, who doesn’t want you to look at them,” Malouf says.  “And I understand that because there’s, you know, a safety in the audience being in the dark and the actors on stage.  That’s very safe for both parties.  Here no one is safe,” she notes with a small laugh.

Watch: Nadine Malouf in a scene from Amir Nizar Zuabi’s play, Oh My Sweet Land at a home in Brooklyn. (By The Play Company)

After the show, audience members milled outside on the sidewalk to chat and enjoy some baklava.  Among them was Michael Yuen-Killick, the host for this evening’s performance.  He had to clean out his kitchen and dining room for the event, but was happy to open his personal space to 20 strangers.

“It’s a fantastic opportunity,” he insisted.  “I mean, how often do you get to have a show performed in your house?  Not very often.”

One of those strangers, Allison Martin, a nurse practitioner, called the experience “incredibly visceral.”  “Being in the small space and the smell of the onions midway through … It really brings the far away to right here in front of us.”

And that’s the point of “Oh My Sweet Land” – to have the onions, spices and stories linger long after the final bow.
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Judi Dench is not tired.

 

“I’ve had one of those pep-up drinks,” Dench, beaming as she sits down for a recent interview. “I feel rather sparky.”

 

Caffeinated or not, Dench, 82, remains fully energized. As Stephen Frears, the director of her latest film, “Victoria & Abdul,” marvels: “She’s the biggest female star in Britain” — a statement that takes a moment to realize how true it is. “It’s phenomenal at her age.”

 

Dench’s eyesight had deteriorated in recent years due to macular degeneration, so scripts need to be read to her. But that’s done little to slow her down or dim her ferocious, mischievous intelligence. On her right wrist is a tattoo of her personal motto, “Carpe Diem” (“Seize the Day”). She had it done for her 81st birthday.

 

“The process of learning is quite difficult,” she says of her eyes. “I can do it. I just have to adjust in a different way. You do what you can, don’t you?”

 

It’s a spirit of undaunted inquisitiveness that Dench shares with her latest character, Queen Victoria. In Frears’ film, which Focus Features will open in limited release Friday, Dench returns to the monarch she memorably played 20 years ago in her big-screen breakthrough, John Madden’s “Mrs. Brown.” Dench has credited that film — and the indie distributor who picked it up for nationwide release (Harvey Weinstein) — with birthing her film career.

 

“Victoria & Abdul” shares some DNA with “Mrs. Brown.” The latter chronicled Queen Victoria’s friendship with the Scottish servant John Brown (Billy Connolly) after the death of Victoria’s beloved husband, Prince Albert, in 1861. “Victoria & Abdul” takes place about 15 years later and concerns another unorthodox relationship Victoria struck up, one only relatively recently discovered.

Letters and diaries uncovered in Shrabani Basu’s 2010 book revealed the depth of the Queen’s friendship with Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal in the film), a 24-year-old Indian clerk when he arrived in 1887, four years after Brown’s death. Despite the staunch disapproval by the royal court of a Muslim being Victoria’s close confidant, he became her teacher, or munshi, and stayed close to her side up until her death in 1901.

 

Though Victoria was the Empress of India, she knew little of the colony Britain was busy ruthlessly exploiting. Karim taught her Urdu and Hindi, and exposed her to curry. Victoria even stipulated that Abdul was to be one of the principal mourners at her funeral.

 

“I certainly never expected to be playing her again,” says Dench. “Suddenly all the work I had done on that all came back and filled up the character. You have a character and you have to find out the details of them, it’s like coloring them in. All that had been done, so that stood me a very good stead. I did feel I understood about her previous life.”

 

“I hope there’s something in the end of [‘Mrs. Brown’] that you can join up with this,” Dench adds.

 

It’s not hard to see a commonality between the Victoria of both films and Dench. It’s the queen’s “need for living” and “vital passion” that she most adores about her. “I want to learn something new every day,” says Dench. “I try to. I learn new words. I love it.”

 

“Victoria & Abdul” is Dench’s fifth film with Frears, who last directed her in 2013’s “Philomena,” which earned Dench her seventh Oscar nomination. (Her sole win was for her Queen Elizabeth I in 1999’s “Shakespeare in Love.”) She and Frears share an unfussy, workmanlike attitude.

 

“I love his monosyllabic quality,” she says, laughing. “Sometimes he says, ‘Would you like to go again?’ and you know that he means he would like to go again. Sometimes he just walks away and laughs. I love that.”

 

“She’s clocked that one,” Frears says of his subtle directions. “She’s a highly intelligent woman.”

 

Frears, the veteran director of “The Queen” and “Dangerous Liaisons,” said he would only make “Victoria & Abdul” if Dench agreed.

 

“I didn’t know if she would,” says Frears. “It’s possible she turned it down. We organized a reading, so we lured her into the trap.”

Dench was speaking shortly after the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of “Victoria & Abdul,” which may well return the highly decorated actress to the Academy Awards. Her last visit to Toronto, she remembers, was in 1958 on a six-month tour for the Old Vic, playing “Henry V” and “As You Like It.” Dench’s stage career — just as illustrious as her film one — has spanned just about every Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekov play.

There is no Shakespeare role she’s still pining to play, but Dench does think time has given her a greater understanding of some of her classic roles.

 

“When I look back now I know I could play Lady Macbeth better now,” says Dench. “I know I could play Juliet better now, too. But it’s too late.”

 

Yet Dench is hardly backward looking. She’ll also co-star later this fall in Kenneth Branagh’s old-fashioned mystery, “Murder on the Orient Express.”

 

“It was glorious,” she says of the production. “We were on the train. It was just a lot of good jewelry to wear. A couple dogs to control.”

 

Dench planned to spend the afternoon at a gallery to “look at some pictures quietly.” She remains on the lookout.

 

“I look for work,” says Dench, matter-of-factly. “Something to keep me occupied. Learn. Learn. Learn.”
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Emma Stone admits she’s never played sports, so when she was asked to play former world tennis No. 1 Billie Jean King in the movie Battle of the Sexes, the Oscar-winning actress approached it from a different direction: dancing.

King, by contrast, who pioneered the fight for equal pay in tennis more than 40 years ago, pictured herself in Stone’s position as she worked with the actress to portray her character.

“I tried to put myself in Emma’s shoes. That’s really taking a risk, portraying someone who is still alive. I’m like, ‘God, that’s a little pressure,’ ” King said.

Stone, 28, and the 73-year-old tennis legend became good friends while making the movie that tells the story behind King’s 1973 exhibition match against former men’s champion Bobby Riggs (portrayed by Steve Carell) to fight sexism in the sport and society at large. It opens in U.S. movie theaters on Friday.

Stone, who won an Oscar in February for song and dance musical La La Land, had never played tennis, so her early sessions with King focused on footwork and choreography.

“I danced, so footwork was good. [And] I had been on stage before, and when Billie Jean went out onto the tennis court, it felt like her stage, so she really keyed in on that,” Stone said.

Simplest things

Later came weeks of practice on serves and cross-court backhands, but for Stone, even the simplest things were tough.

“We went to the U.S. Open … and I was sitting next to Billie Jean, and Sloane Stephens was catching balls and tucking them in her skirt and bouncing them with the racquet.

“It’s just little in-between stuff, but that took me months to learn!” Stone said.

Professional players were hired to reproduce the shots in the match against Riggs, which was watched by more than 50 million on television.

For her part, King worked for weeks with screenwriter Simon Beaufoy recalling her experience in the early 1970s, when she not only established the breakaway Women’s Tennis Association and took on Riggs but also was wrestling with her own sexual identity. She came out as gay in 1981.

More than 40 years after beating Riggs, women are still fighting for equal pay and rights on and off the tennis court, not that it comes as any surprise to King.

“If you read history, you realize how slow progress is and that it’s each generation’s job to try and move the ball forward.

“We’ve come further, but we’ve a lot further to go,” King said.
…

Lillian Ross, the ever-watchful New Yorker reporter whose close, narrative style defined a memorable and influential 70-year career, including a revealing portrait of Ernest Hemingway, a classic Hollywood expose and a confession to an adulterous affair, has died at age 99.

Ross died early Wednesday at Lenox Hill Hospital after suffering a stroke, New Yorker articles editor Susan Morrison said Wednesday.

In an email statement to The Associated Press, New Yorker editor David Remnick called Ross a groundbreaking writer.

“Lillian would knock my block off for saying so, she’d find it pretentious, but she really was a pioneer, both as a woman writing at The New Yorker and as a truly innovative artist, someone who helped change and shape non-fiction writing in English,” Remnick said in a statement.

Hundreds of Ross’ “Talk of the Town” dispatches appeared in The New Yorker, starting in the 1940s when she wrote about Harry Truman’s years as a haberdasher, and continuing well into the 21st century, whether covering a book party at the Friars Club, or sitting with the daughters of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II as they watched a Broadway revival of “South Pacific.”

After the death of J.D. Salinger in 2010, Ross wrote a piece about her friendship with the reclusive novelist and former New Yorker contributor.

 

Her methods were as crystallized and instinctive as her writing. She hated tape recorders (”fast, easy and lazy”), trusted first impressions and believed in the “mystical force” that “makes the work seem delightfully easy and natural and supremely enjoyable.”

 

“It’s sort of like having sex,” she once wrote.

 

Ross’ approach, later made famous by the “New Journalists” of the 1960s, used dialogue, scene structure and other techniques associated with fiction writers. She regarded herself as a short story writer who worked with facts, or even as a director, trying to “build scenes into little story-films.” In 1999, her 1964 collection of articles, “Reporting,” was selected by a panel of experts as one of the 100 best examples of American journalism in the 20th century. The group, assembled by New York University, ranked it No. 66.

 

“She is the mistress of selective listening and viewing, of capturing the one moment that entirely illumines the scene, of fastening on the one quote that Tells All,” novelist Irving Wallace wrote in a 1966 New York Times review of her work.

 

Short and curly-haired, unimposing and patient, Ross tried her best to let the stories speak for themselves, but at times the writer interrupted.

 

In the late 1940s, Hemingway came to New York for shopping and socializing and Ross joined him as he drank champagne with Marlene Dietrich, bought a winter coat and visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, flask in hand. She presented the author as a volatile bulk of bluster and insecurity, speaking in telegraphic shorthand (”You want to go with me to buy coat?”) and even punching himself in the stomach to prove his muscle.

Ross was friendly with Hemingway — she liked most of her subjects — but her article was criticized, and welcomed, as humanizing a legend. “Lillian Ross wrote a profile of me which I read, in proof, with some horror,” Hemingway later recalled. “But since she was a friend of mine and I knew that she was not writing in malice she had a right to make me seem that way if she wished.”

 

Not long after, Ross went to Hollywood to report on director John Huston as he worked on an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel “The Red Badge of Courage.” She soon realized that the movie was more interesting than any one person: She was witness to a disaster. Ross’ reports in The New Yorker, released in 1952 as the book “Picture,” were an unprecedented chronicle of studio meddling as MGM took control of the film and hacked it to 70 minutes.

 

Praised by Hemingway among others, “Picture” was a direct influence on such future Hollywood authors as John Gregory Dunne (”Studio”) and anticipated the nonfiction novel that Truman Capote perfected a decade later with “In Cold Blood.” Huston’s daughter, actress Anjelica Huston, became a lifelong friend.

“My parents loved and respected her, and trusted her. She was, they would say, different from other reporters,” Huston wrote in the foreword to the book’s 50th anniversary edition.

Deeply private even around her New Yorker colleagues, Ross did step out in 1998 when she published “Here But Not Here,” a surprising and explicit memoir of her long-rumored, 40-year liaison with New Yorker editor William Shawn, a mating of secret souls allegedly consummated in a bedroom once used by Dietrich as a clothes closet.

 

“We were drawn to each other from the first by all the elusive forces that people have been trying to pin down from the beginning of time,” Ross wrote.

 

William Shawn had died six years earlier, but his widow was still alive when the book was published, leading New York Times writer (and former New Yorker deputy editor) Charles McGrath to call it “a cruel betrayal of the Shawns’ much-valued privacy — a tactless example of the current avidity for tell-all confessions.”

 

While involved with Shawn, Ross adopted a son, Erik, who in later years would accompany his mother on assignments. Her New Yorker work was compiled in several books, most recently “Reporting Always.”

 

She was born in Syracuse, New York, and was always more comfortable as an observer and played hooky just to hang around professional newspaper offices. She graduated from Hunter College, worked at the liberal New York City daily PM, then was hired by The New Yorker in the mid-1940s, when the magazine was looking for women writers because so many men were serving in World War II.

 

“We have sent her on stories ranging from in subject matter from politics to uplift brassieres, and she’s done splendidly by both,” PM editor Peggy Wright Weidman wrote to Shawn. “Another baffler is that she likes to work and does so, at any hour of the day, night, or weekend, with concentration and no nonsense.”
…

It, based on Stephen King’s novel about a demonic clown that kills children, was the top-grossing movie this past weekend in the U.S. Audiences seem to want to be scared, and creepy clowns have been popping up everywhere. But traditional clowns say audiences want to be entertained, and they continue to do what they can to present a different image. Faith Lapidus reports.
…

Michael Phelps wondered if watching others compete at the world championships would pique his desire for another comeback.

Nope.

Phelps said Tuesday he has “no desire” to return to competitive swimming, but he is eager to stay involved with the sport and cheer on those who follow in his enormous wake.

In an interview with The Associated Press while promoting a healthy pet food campaign, Phelps said he is excited about having his second child and building a life beyond swimming.

“For me, it’s about being happy where I am and happy where my family is,” Phelps said. “We have more goals we want to accomplish outside the sport.”

It was around this time four years ago when Phelps got serious about ending his first retirement, but he now seems content with his decision to step away again after the Rio Olympics.

His wife, Nicole, is about four months pregnant. The couple already have a 16-month-old son, Boomer.

“I’ve got no desire — no desire — to come back,” the 32-year-old Phelps said flatly.

Phelps has attended a handful of swimming meets since the Rio Games, where the winningest athlete in Olympic history added to his already massive career haul by claiming five gold medals plus a silver. A few months ago, he conceded to the AP that he wasn’t sure how he would feel about a possible comeback after watching the worlds in Budapest, Hungary.

“We’ll see if I get that itch,” he said in April.

Turns out, it had no impact.

Phelps said the second-biggest meet after the Olympics “truly didn’t kick anything off or spike any more interest in coming out of retirement again.”

He is excited to follow the development of his heir apparent, Caeleb Dressel, who emerged as the sport’s newest star by winning seven gold medals at Budapest.

The 21-year-old Floridian joined Phelps and Mark Spitz as the only swimmers to accomplish that feat at a major international meet.

“I’m happy Caeleb decided to go off this year instead of last year,” quipped Phelps, who won 23 golds and 28 medals overall in his Olympic career. “I’m kind of happy to see him swimming so well when I’m not there.”

While he still travels extensively for his many sponsors, Phelps said he’s much more involved in his wife’s second pregnancy than he was before Boomer’s birth, when he was consumed by full-scale training for the Olympics.

“It’s definitely different going through it again,” he said.

Boomer, meanwhile, is a chip off the old block.

“He skipped the walking part and went right to running,” Phelps said, chuckling. “He just scoots around the house. It’s funny when we get him in the pool. He basically just splashes around the whole time. He’s literally nonstop. As soon as he wakes up from a nap or his night’s sleep, he’s just go, go, go. There’s no time for slow moving in our family. He likes to go fast. I guess that’s a good thing.”

Boomer is even starting to show some good form in the pool. His mom and Phelps’ longtime coach, Bob Bowman, have detected a bit of the stroke that was his father’s strongest.

“Nicole and Bob both say he’s got a good butterfly technique that he’s working on,” Phelps said. “I guess he’s seen his dad doing it a couple of times and kind of picks it up. He’s also now in a stage where it’s like all five senses are coming together. He feels everything, recognizes everything. It’s really fun to watch, as a dad, just watching these transitions in his life.”

In his latest business endeavor, Phelps is spearheading a marketing campaign for Nulo Pet Food, which he describes as a healthy alternative for dogs and cats. He’s an investor in the company and accompanied in ads by his French bulldogs, Juno and Legend.

“Our bodies are like a high-performance car. You have to make sure you’re putting the correct fuel in your body,” Phelps said. “We obviously treat our pets like human beings. I’d like my animals to be fed in the right way, with good nutrition and healthy foods. If we can do that with a company that’s putting good, natural ingredients into a pet food, it makes sense for me with what I’m doing in my own life. It’s something that goes hand in hand.”

With Dressel and Katie Ledecky now leading the American team, the U.S. is expected to remain the world’s dominant swimming country heading into the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Even without Phelps.

“It’s time to kind of move on,” he said, “and watch other people come into their own.”
…

Actress Jamie Lee Curtis will reprise her role as the resilient protagonist in 2018’s Halloween, Universal Pictures says, 40 years after she made her movie debut in the original horror movie of the same name and became Hollywood’s “scream queen.”

The studio said Friday that Curtis, 58, will again play Laurie Strode, the baby sitter who faced the deadly masked serial killer Michael Myers in John Carpenter’s 1978 horror Halloween. The 2018 film will see Curtis’ Strode face “her final confrontation” with Myers, Comcast Corp.-owned Universal said.

Carpenter will return to executive produce and consult on the new film.

Halloween has become one of Hollywood’s most famous slasher film franchises, with nine sequels and reboots over the years, the last being Rob Zombie’s 2009 Halloween II.

Curtis’ last appearance in the franchise was in 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, in which her character was killed.

Universal said the 2018 film “carves a new path from the events in the landmark 1978 film,” suggesting that it will ignore the events in the 2002 film.
…

Lady Gaga on Monday called off the European leg of her world tour, saying she was suffering from severe physical pain and was seeking medical treatment.

The “Born This Way” singer, 31, who says she suffers from fibromyalgia, also canceled an appearance at a music festival in Rio de Janeiro last week and posted pictures of herself in a hospital with a drip on her arm.

She said on her social media accounts on Monday she was disappointed at comments from people online that “suggest that I’m being dramatic, making this up, or playing the victim to get out of touring. If you knew me, you would know this couldn’t be further from the truth.”

“I have always been honest about my physical and mental health struggles,” Gaga added. “It is complicated and difficult to explain, and we are trying to figure it out.

“As I get stronger and when I feel ready, I will tell my story in more depth, and plan to take this on strongly so I can not only raise awareness, but expand research for others who suffer as I do, so I can help make a difference,” the singer added.

Fibromyalgia is a musculoskeletal pain disorder, often accompanied by fatigue and mood issues, that can be triggered by physical trauma or psychological stress.

Gaga’s European tour to promote her latest album “Joanne” was due to start on Sept. 21 in Barcelona, Spain, and continue for six weeks. The dates have been postponed until 2018.

“She plans to spend the next seven weeks proactively working with her doctors to heal from this and past traumas that still affect her daily life, and result in severe physical pain in her body,” promoters Live Nation said in a statement.

The singer was hospitalized in 2013 for a hip injury, and a new documentary, “Lady Gaga: Five Foot Two,” documents her struggles with chronic pain.
…

The Emmy statuette depicts a winged woman, and this year’s Emmy telecast celebrated a TV season in which women, as never before, were able to soar.

 

Strong roles about strong women abounded. And they were rewarded. The winning drama series and limited series (”The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Big Little Lies,” respectively) focused on issues of women — rather than defaulting to the male point of view — as a vivid way to explore the human condition. “Veep,” which stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the former president of the U.S., won best comedy series.

 

Women also made inroads behind the camera, with Lena Waithe winning best comedy writer Emmy for “Master of None.” She’s the first woman winner ever in that category.

 

For many of the winners as well as many fans who were cheering them on, the Emmycast unfolded as a bracing rebuttal at a time when surveys continue to expose unfair representation by women in Hollywood.

“Let’s hope that this is the beginning of something even better in our country and the world,” said Louis-Dreyfus, savoring her record-breaking sixth win as Selina Meyer on “Veep.” “I think the world would be a better place if more women were in charge.”

 

“We’ve made incredible progress, obviously,” said Elisabeth Moss, who won the best actress Emmy for her starring role in “The Handmaid’s Tale” as one of the few fertile women left in a world ruled by a totalitarian regime that treats women as property.

 

But she added, “There’s still a lot of work to be done. There are still meetings you walk into and wonder if they say ‘no’ because it’s a show by or about a women.”

 

The answer, Moss said, is “not only women in front of the camera but it’s women behind the camera.”

 

“Feud: Bette and Joan,” starring Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange in a robust saga of clashing queens of the silver screen, was a promising entry in the Limited Series category.

 

But “Feud” was edged out by another woman-centric drama, “Big Little Lies,” which followed a group of mothers who each have secrets threatening to crash down upon her. The series collected eight Emmys also including best actress (Nicole Kidman), best supporting actress (Laura Dern) and best supporting actor Alexander Skarsgard, who, in accepting his trophy, thanked his colleagues for letting him be “one of the girls.”

Indeed, two of the series’ executive producers were Kidman and her co-star Reese Witherspoon.

Backstage, Witherspoon voiced delight that “we created four roles for women, and all got nominated.”

 

The characters those women portrayed “were complicated. They were complex,” she noted. “They were good and bad.”

 

“What was so wonderful,” said Kidman, “is that we had so many people, men and women of different ages, watching the show that went far beyond what we expected. As much as it was about women, it was for everyone.”

 

In accepting her Emmy as one of the series’ producers, Kidman implored the industry to create “more great roles for women, please.”

 

But Witherspoon pointed out that “it’s great to be the architect of your own destiny, and create material for yourself and . so many roles for women — award-winning roles. It turns out we know how to do it for ourselves!”
…

Canada-born designer Erdem Moralioglu has turned the Old Selfridges Hotel into a glamorous speakeasy for his London Fashion Week show.

 

With classics “Stormy Monday” and “My Funny Valentine” playing, the fashion house named Erdem on Monday displayed glamorous, full-length evening gowns with full-length gloves and sparkly accessories.

 

Many had floral themes and remarkable detailing, adding to the show’s exuberance and opulence.

 

While many designers are showing more and more skin, Erdem opts for a subtle celebration of feminine beauty. There were some sheer and lacy outfits, but most were more modest, with either high necklines or sweetheart ones.

 

The effect was entrancing. Nostalgia was in the air – the program featured a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II meeting Duke Ellington in 1958.

 

London Fashion week continues later Monday with Christopher Kane, and others.
…

The Tottori sand dunes, on Japan’s west coast, attract some two million visitors a year. Many come to see the huge sand sculptures created for an annual exhibit hosted by the Tottori Sand Museum, the world’s first indoor sand museum. With the recurring theme of Touring the World in Sand, previous exhibitions featured iconic images from Africa, southeast Asia, Italy and Russia, among other locales. This year, for its 10th exhibit, Tottori had sand artists explore American history and culture. Faiza Elmasry tells us how. Faith Lapidus narrates.
…

Martin McDonaugh’s “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” took the Toronto International Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award on Sunday, an early bell-weather for Hollywood’s coming awards season.

 

Piers Handling, chief executive and director of the festival, announced the awards for the 42nd annual Toronto festival.

 

The People’s Choice Award, voted on by festival audiences, went to the British playwright’s third feature film, which stars Frances McDormand as a mother who goes to war with police in her town after her daughter’s murder.

 

“As much as we had a lovely time in Canada, and as much it seemed like the audiences had a good time, too, you never really know if a story that’s as heartfelt but also as outrageous and funny and unusual as ours has really connected to, you know, real people,” said McDonaugh (“In Bruges,” “Seven Psychopaths,”) said in a statement. “So it’s brilliant to hear that it has.”

Not since 2007’s “Eastern Promises” has a Toronto People’s Choice winner failed to score an Academy Awards best-picture nomination. Many People’s Choice winners have also gone on to win the Academy Awards’ top honor, including “12 Years a Slave,” “The King’s Speech” and “Slumdog Millionaire.”

 

“La La Land” last year took Toronto’s big prize but Damien Chazelle’s musical ultimately lost to “Moonlight” for best picture.

 

Fox Searchlight will release “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” on Nov. 10.

 

This year’s runner up went to Craig Gillespie’s Tonya Harding tale “I, Tonya,” starring Margot Robbie as the former Olympic ice skater. In one of the festival’s biggest sales, “I, Tonya” was acquired by Neon and 30West for $5 million.

 

The second runner up was “Call Me By Your Name,” Luca Guadagnino’s Italy-set coming-of-age story.

 

That film, which also drew raves at the Sundance Film Festival earlier in the year, is due for release Nov. 24 from Sony Pictures Classics.
…

Familiar names and a surprise familiar face were the early highlights of the 69th annual Emmy awards Sunday night in Hollywood.

Veteran actor John Lithgow won his 6th Emmy Sunday, this time as Best Supporting Actor for playing Winston Churchill in the Netflix series the The Crown.

Another veteran performer, Laura Dern, won her first Emmy as Best Supporting Actress in a TV movie or limited series for Big Little Lies.

Alec Baldwin, whose now iconic impersonation of President Donald Trump became a weekly feature on Saturday Night Live, won a Best Supporting Actor in a comedy

The Best Supporting Actress for comedy award was given to Kate McKinnon, also from Saturday Night Live. It was her second win for her role in the late-night weekly comedy institution.

The 42-year old series also won for best variety show.

 

Comic Stephen Colbert was this year’s Emmys host. He peppered his opening monologue with numerous jokes about Trump, and recalled the president’s angry comment in the past that he had never won for hosting his former TV series, Celebrity Apprentice.

Colbert teased the Emmy audience, telling them Trump never would have run for the White House if he had scored the top award in U.S. television. And in a reference to the vote turnout last November, when Trump won the presidency despite getting nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, Colbert said that, unlike the presidential race, Emmys go to the winners of the popular vote.

The president’s former spokesman, Sean Spicer, made a surprise appearance, rolling out on to the stage on a motorized version of the White House podium. Spicer pronounced this year’s show the most-watched Emmy telecast in history, lampooning his own discredited assertion of a record audience for Trump’s inauguration in Washington eight months ago.
…

Beginning this weekend, “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA,” presents a wide variety of Latin American art exhibitions, music events and film screenings to Southern California audiences through January 2018. Arturo Martinez has the story from Los Angeles.
…

After leaving the majesty of the Grand Canyon in the American Southwest, national parks traveler Mikah Meyer headed north to the cooler climes of the Pacific Northwest. Along the way, he stopped by some of the region’s most picturesque and historic national parks.

“I kind of fit along the way these random parks that were out in the middle of nowhere that I could string together to make a route to Washington [State],” he said.

Natural highs … and lows

He was soon standing in the shadow of the tallest freestanding mountain in the state of Nevada — Wheeler Peak, in Great Basin National Park. The mountain stands 3,982 meters (13,065 feet) high and is named for George Wheeler, who led a survey of the Western U.S. in the 1870s.

“It’s really in the middle of nowhere and there’s no other National Park Service site anywhere near it, and so I asked one of the rangers ‘Why is this a National Park Service site?’ And she told me that Nevada has more complete mountain ranges than any other state in the United States, including Alaska,” he said.

That fact, along with the snow-capped peaks amid lush surroundings, surprised Mikah. “I feel like if you ask most people what Nevada looks like, this is not the answer they would give you!”

People usually associate Nevada with a desert landscape. But beyond the barren land and the lights and glitter of the state’s most famous city, Las Vegas, travelers like Mikah can find many natural wonders.

“I went to a place called Stella Lake, a mountain lake which gives you a gorgeous view of Wheeler Peak,” he said. To get there, he walked through a forest of aspen trees. “They were all just budding their spring light green colors. The wind was blowing so strong and these new-growth aspen trees were waving in the wind. It was a really ethereal experience.”

Great Basin National Park is also known for Lehman Cave, one of the best places in the world to see hundreds of limestone shield formations.

On its website, the National Park Service describes the cave as an excellent example of a limestone solution cavern.

“Its beginning can be traced back 550 to 600 million years ago when a warm shallow sea covered most of what is now Nevada and Utah. Over the next 400 million years, sea creatures lived and died, piling layers of calcium carbonate-rich sediment on the ocean floor. These sediments gradually solidified into limestone rock.”

“It was definitely pretty … very fascinating shapes of all sizes and forms,” Mikah said. “So all within this park you can go underground and see this amazing cave and you can hike to the highest point in Nevada,” he said.

Fascinating science and surreal scenery

As Mikah headed north to Oregon, he came across another surreal landscape — Painted Hills, one of three units of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.

“It’s these really cool, dried-out looking mountains that have red stripes that cut across the rocks horizontally,” he explained. “Rocks of orange and yellow and red, juxtaposed with super blue lakes, was completely another planet.”

Noted American paleobotanist Ralph W. Chaney once said, “No region in the world shows a more complete sequence of tertiary land populations, both plant and animal, than the John Day Basin.”

Historic duo

Also in Oregon, Mikah visited the Lewis and Clark National Historical Park. The site commemorates an expedition led by explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark from 1804 to 1806, to cross what is now the western part of the U.S.

President Thomas Jefferson directed the men and their “Corps of Discovery” to map the territory, find a practical route across it to the Pacific Ocean and establish an American presence before European powers tried to claim it. Lewis and Clark were also to study the geography, plant and animal life along the way, and establish trade with Native American tribes.

“It’s funny for me to look at this large historic expedition and realize these were men in their early 30 as they were doing this, and now here I am in my early 30 doing something similar,” Mikah said. “And so it’s a parallel, age-wise.”

Visitors to the park can step into the Fort Clatsop replica for a sense of what the Corps of Discovery experienced more than 200 years ago.

But it was the natural beauty that impressed Mikah the most … especially the Pacific coastline.

“It’s hard to describe the feeling of looking over one of these jagged cliffs and seeing the sun beating on these rocks, and the waves crashing up against the jagged rock cliffs, and boy, I was just blown away by the beauty.”

Journeying through the Pacific Northwest, Mikah had a chance to steep himself in history and some of the most stunning landscapes in the country — always a winning combination for a national parks traveler.

Mikah invites you to follow him on his epic journey by visiting him on his website TCBMikah.com, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
…

For more than 60 years, Harry Dean Stanton played crooks and codgers, eccentrics and losers.

He endowed them with pathos and compassion and animated them with his gaunt, unforgettable presence, making would-be fringe figures feel central to the films appeared in.

The late critic Roger Ebert once said no movie can be altogether bad if it includes Stanton in a supporting role, and the wide cult of fans that included directors and his fellow actors felt the same.

“I think all actors will agree, no one gives a more honest, natural, truer performance than Harry Dean Stanton,” director David Lynch said in presenting Stanton with the Inaugural “Harry Dean Stanton Award” in Los Angeles last year.

Stanton died Friday of natural causes at a Los Angeles hospital at age 91, his agent John S. Kelley said.

Lynch, a frequent collaborator with the actor in projects like “Wild at Heart” and the recent reboot of “Twin Peaks,” said in a statement after Stanton’s death that “Everyone loved him. And with good reason. He was a great actor (actually beyond great) — and a great human being.”

When given a rare turn as a leading man, Stanton more than made the most of it. In Wim Wenders’ 1984 rural drama “Paris, Texas,” Stanton’s near-wordless performance is laced with moments of humor and poignancy. His heartbreakingly stoic delivery of a monologue of repentance to his wife, played by Nastassja Kinski, through a one-way mirror has become the defining moment in his career, in a role he said was his favorite.

“‘Paris, Texas’ gave me a chance to play compassion,” Stanton told an interviewer, “and I’m spelling that with a capital C.”

The film won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival and provided the actor with his first star billing, at age 58.

“Repo Man,” released that same year, became another signature film: Stanton starred as the world-weary boss of an auto repossession firm who instructs Estevez in the tricks of the hazardous trade.

He was widely loved around Hollywood, a drinker and smoker and straight talker with a million stories who palled around with Jack Nicholson and Kris Kristofferson among others and was a hero to such younger stars and brothers-in-partying as Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez.

He appeared in more than 200 movies and TV shows in a career dating to the mid-1950s. A cult-favorite since the ’70s with roles in “Cockfighter,” ″Two-Lane Blacktop” and “Cisco Pike,” his more famous credits ranged from the Oscar-winning epic “The Godfather Part II” to the sci-fi classic “Alien” to the teen flick “Pretty in Pink,” in which he played Molly Ringwald’s father.

While fringe roles and films were a specialty, he also ended up in the work of many of the 20th century’s master auteurs, even Alfred Hitchcock in the director’s serial TV show.

“I worked with the best directors,” Stanton told the AP in a 2013 interview, given while chain-smoking in pajamas and a robe. “Martin Scorsese, John Huston, David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock. Alfred Hitchcock was great.”

He said he could have been a director himself but “it was too much work.”

By his mid-80s, the Lexington Film League in his native Kentucky had founded the Harry Dean Stanton Fest and filmmaker Sophie Huber had made the documentary “Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction,” which included commentary from Wenders, Sam Shepard and Kristofferson.

More recently he reunited with Lynch on Showtime’s “Twin Peaks: The Return” where he reprised his role as the cranky trailer park owner Carl from “Fire Walk With Me.” He also stars with Lynch in the upcoming film “Lucky,” the directorial debut of actor John Carroll Lynch, which has been described as a love letter to Stanton’s life and career.

Stanton, who early in his career used the name Dean Stanton to avoid confusion with another actor, grew up in West Irvine, Kentucky and said he began singing when he was a year old.

Later, he used music as an escape from his parents’ quarreling and the sometimes brutal treatment he was subjected to by his father. As an adult, he fronted his own band for years, playing western, Mexican, rock and pop standards in small venues around Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. He also sang and played guitar and harmonica in impromptu sessions with friends, performed a song in “Paris, Texas” and once recorded a duet with Bob Dylan.

Stanton, who never lost his Kentucky accent, said his interest in movies was piqued as a child when he would walk out of every theater “thinking I was Humphrey Bogart.”

After Navy service in the Pacific during World War II, he spent three years at the University of Kentucky and appeared in several plays. Determined to make it in Hollywood, he picked tobacco to earn his fare west.

Three years at the Pasadena Playhouse prepared him for television and movies.

For decades Stanton lived in a small, disheveled house overlooking the San Fernando Valley, and was a fixture at the West Hollywood landmark Dan Tana’s.

Stanton never married, although he had a long relationship with actress Rebecca De Mornay, 35 years his junior. “She left me for Tom Cruise,” Stanton said often.

In listing Stanton’s survivors, the statement announcing his death said only:

“Harry Dean is survived by family and friends who loved him.”
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An American dentist’s killing of Cecil the lion, a collared 13-year-old lion monitored by the University of Oxford in Zimbabwe, sparked widespread outrage and condemnation of big-game hunting.  But Trophy, a new documentary by filmmakers Shaul Schwarz and Christina Clusiau, offers a more complex perspective on trophy hunting as an industry that blurs the lines between big-game hunting and wildlife conservation.

Every year, Safari Club International holds the largest big-game hunt convention in the world in Las Vegas. Conservationist and adventurist Joe Hosmer describes the process: “You can just pick whatever animal you want from the menu that they offer, you see the price and book the kill.”

Watch: Killing to Conserve? ‘Trophy’ Raises Difficult Questions

Prices range from $8,000 for a buffalo to $45,000 for an elephant and $350,000 for a rhino. This big-money industry helps the local communities where the hunts take place and discourages poaching, says Chris Moore, an anti-poaching campaign manager from Zimbabwe.

Moore says while poachers destroy 30,000 African elephants a year just for their tusks, trophy hunters kills 1,100 elephants annually, providing local communities with their meat and revenue. “Half of that trophy fee goes back into building a clinic or school or whatever the community decides. They have committees and a trust, which organizes where that goes.”

An adventure for the rich

Filmmaker Christina Clusiau says big-game hunting caters to the rich, most of them Americans. “I couldn’t believe that it was so vast that you could buy hunts, and you can buy your insurance, and you can buy your clothing and gear, everything for the safari.”

Filmmaker Shaul Schwarz says he made Trophy because he wanted to understand the hunters and why they do what they do.

“The fact that you had to pay so much money is kind of more angering to some degree because you are saying, ‘Oh, look at these rich white people and they are going to go and take from Africa in an almost colonial way.’ You could just get angry about that and I see why, but the funny flipside is that this money hopefully will trickle down to what actually enables conservation. So,” he concludes, “to some degree, if there wasn’t a lot of money in the industry then it wouldn’t make sense.”

Trophy shows how this billion-dollar big-game industry is financing the breeding of endangered species by exploiting a small percentage of these animals for the thrill of the kill, while conserving the rest and restoring their numbers in ranches.

“That’s kind of the idea of utilizing animals in this ‘if it pays, it stays’ way.  Now, is that the answer?” Schwarz asks. “I don’t know. I’m here to raise questions, but I think what we should do in this subject is be less quick to judge and scream.” He knows that he is tackling a polarizing subject, and asks audiences to keep an open mind.

PETA doesn’t agree

But the animal rights organization PETA does not see both sides. The group’s Associate Director of Campaigns, Ashley Byrne, condemns the big-game industry.

“Selling an endangered animal’s life to raise money for conservation is like selling a child on the black market to raise money for an anti-trafficking organization. The logic is absurd! The best way to promote conservation is to protect animals’ natural habitat and to invest in eco-tourism, in non-invasive forms of tourism that do make these animals commodities but alive, not dead!” she insists.

Anti-poaching activist Chris Moore agrees that in an ideal world, the wealthy would pay just as much to go and see the animals, but he adds we don’t live in an ideal world, and the film shows that these hunters who want a trophy want their money’s worth.

Moore suggests that if trophy hunting were banned, the animals would no longer be seen as commodities to preserve, and poaching would increase.

“When you are struggling to feed your child, you look for alternative means. I think if society maintained certain levels of prosperity, I don’t think we would really see poaching.”

Tough to film

The film offers a vivid cinematic experience of wildlife in Africa, but filming was tough, says Clusiau.

“When you look at these majestic creatures from afar they are majestic. They are beautiful. You want to go up and touch them and pet them and what you don’t realize is how dangerous they actually are. So, when you are in that environment, you do feel very vulnerable. So, we were lucky to have guides and trackers to kind of act as a shield to these environments.”
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Imagine having a butler to keep you home in perfect order. Well, you don’t have to be a blueblood anymore to get that kind of service. As VOA’s Olga Loginova shows us, a British butler with royal references is available for hire.
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Harry Dean Stanton, the shambling, craggy-face character actor with the deadpan voice who became a cult favorite through his memorable turns in Paris, Texas and Repo Man, as well as many other films and TV shows, died Friday at age 91.

Stanton died of natural causes at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, his agent, John S. Kelly, told The Associated Press. Kelly gave no further details on the cause. 

Never mistaken for a leading man, Stanton was an unforgettable presence to moviegoers, fellow actors and directors, who recognized that his quirky characterizations could lift even the most ordinary script. Roger Ebert once observed that “no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.”

He was widely loved around Hollywood, a drinker and smoker and straight talker with a million stories who palled around with Jack Nicholson and Kris Kristofferson among others and was a hero to such younger stars and brothers-in-partying as Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez. “I don’t act like their father, I act like their friend,” he once told New York magazine.

Nicholson so liked Stanton’s name that he would find a way to work his initials, HDS, into a camera shot.

Almost always cast as a crook, a codger, an eccentric or a loser, he appeared in more than 200 movies and TV shows in a career dating to the mid-1950s. A cult-favorite since the ’70s with roles in Cockfighter, Two-Lane Blacktop and Cisco Pike, his more famous credits ranged from the Oscar-winning epic The Godfather Part II to the sci-fi classic Alien to the teen flick Pretty in Pink, in which he played Molly Ringwald’s father. He also guest starred on such TV shows as Laverne & Shirley, Adam-12 and Gunsmoke. He had a cameo on Two and a Half Men, which featured Pretty in Pink star Jon Cryer, and appeared in such movies as The Avengers and The Last Stand.

Fitting for a character actor, he only became famous in late middle age. In Wim Wenders’ 1984 rural drama Paris, Texas, he earned acclaim for his subtle and affecting portrayal of a man so deeply haunted by something in his past that he abandons his young son and society to wander silently in the desert.

Wiry and sad, Stanton’s near-wordless performance is laced with moments of humor and poignancy. His heartbreakingly stoic delivery of a monologue of repentance to his wife, played by Nastassja Kinski, through a one-way mirror has become the defining moment in his career.

“Paris, Texas gave me a chance to play compassion,” Stanton told an interviewer, “and I’m spelling that with a capital C.”

The film won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival and provided the actor with his first star billing, at age 58.

Repo Man, released that same year, became another signature film: Stanton starred as the world-weary boss of an auto repossession firm who instructs Estevez in the tricks of the hazardous trade.

His legend would only grow. By his mid-80s, the Lexington Film League in his native Kentucky had founded the Harry Dean Stanton Fest and filmmaker Sophie Huber had made the documentary Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, which included commentary from Wenders, Sam Shepard and Kristofferson.

More recently he reunited with director David Lynch on Showtime’s Twin Peaks: The Return where he reprised his role as the cranky trailer park owner Carl from Fire Walk With Me. He also stars with Lynch in the upcoming film Lucky, the directorial debut of actor John Carroll Lynch, which has been described as a love letter to Stanton’s life and career.

Last year, Lynch presented Stanton with the Harry Dean Stanton Award — the inaugural award from the Los Angeles video store Vidiots presented first to its namesake.

“As a person, Harry Dean is just so beautiful. He’s got this easygoing nature. It’s so great just to sit beside Harry Dean and observe,” Lynch said at the show.  “He’s got a great inner peace. As a musician, he can sing so beautifully tears just flow out of your eyes. And as an actor, I think all actors will agree, no one gives a more honest, natural, truer performance than Harry Dean Stanton.”

Lynch also directed Stanton in Wild at Heart and The Straight Story.

Stanton, who early in his career used the name Dean Stanton to avoid confusion with another actor, grew up in West Irvine, Kentucky and said he began singing when he was a year old.

Later, he used music as an escape from his parents’ quarreling and the sometimes brutal treatment he was subjected to by his father. As an adult, he fronted his own band for years, playing western, Mexican, rock and pop standards in small venues around Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. He also sang and played guitar and harmonica in impromptu sessions with friends, performed a song in Paris, Texas and once recorded a duet with Bob Dylan.

Stanton, who never lost his Kentucky accent, said his interest in movies was piqued as a child when he would walk out of every theater “thinking I was Humphrey Bogart.”

After Navy service in the Pacific during World War II, he spent three years at the University of Kentucky and appeared in several plays. Determined to make it in Hollywood, he picked tobacco to earn his fare west.

Three years at the Pasadena Playhouse prepared him for television and movies.

For decades Stanton lived in a small, disheveled house overlooking the San Fernando Valley, and was a fixture at the West Hollywood landmark Dan Tana’s. He was attacked in his home in 1996 by two robbers who forced their way in, tied him up at gunpoint, beat him, ransacked the house and fled in his Lexus. He was not seriously hurt, and the two, who were captured, were sentenced to prison.

Stanton never married, although he had a long relationship with actress Rebecca De Mornay, 35 years his junior. “She left me for Tom Cruise,” Stanton said often.

“I might have had two or three [kids] out of marriage,” he once recalled. “But that’s another story.”
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After an exhilarating time exploring the land and whitewater rapids of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, national parks traveler Mikah Meyer headed north, to experience other scenic, historic and geological wonders within the national park system. He shared his highlights with VOA’s Julie Taboh.
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