Daily Archives: July 11, 2022

Theres plenty going on here, she says. There are wonderful people who share the same values as us.

As an alumnus, she plans to spend as much time as she can absorbing the atmosphere and the performances at this years festival, which runs from Monday through July 31. Thats the kind of hobnobbing for aficionados of new music that Bang on a Can cofounders Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe envisioned long before they launched the summer festival 20 years ago.

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We knew lots of people involved in experimental music, but we felt wed met them all by accident, says Lang, another onetime trombonist whose choral work The Little Match Girl Passion won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2008. We felt there should be a place where people interested in experimental culture could meet on purpose.

Having launched Bang on a Can with a marathon concert in 1987, the cofounders spent years looking to the art world for cues on how best to implement their ideas for the summer institute.

The art world is constantly renewing and questioning itself, Lang says.

Conversely, he notes, in contemporary classical music, new work is typically evaluated in terms of whether it stands a chance of joining the pantheon of the classical tradition.

I love that music, Lang says. Im not saying I dont love that music. But in the art world, all the industry is already saying we believe in the people who are working right now, and we believe their work should be challenging, should be seen and talked about and appreciated.

This years new music utopia at Mass MoCA will feature more than two dozen young composers and players working with the summer faculty. Each day begins with a movement class, segues into workshops and rehearsals, and ends up with late-afternoon recitals (free with a museum admission) in Mass MoCAs wide array of industrial spaces.

Participants are encouraged to explore the massive complex and draw inspiration from the art installations. Visitors to the galleries during the weeks of Banglewood (as the festival is affectionately nicknamed) will encounter musicians collaborating and practicing throughout the day.

We and the students figure out how to take advantage of every single space at Mass MoCA, Lang explains. It is, he thinks, a good lesson for an aspiring musician: Dont fence yourself in.

We talk to them about how to work with electronics, how to improvise, how to collaborate with each other, how to design a program, how to sign a contract, how to decide what your mission is. We talk to them about what you want to do more of, and what you want to do less of.

This years festival will conclude with the return of LOUD Weekend, a three-day program presenting some of the fellows alongside a curated selection of new music. The bill includes works by George Crumb and Steve Reich, a solo set by the keyboardist Yuka Honda, the electric guitar duo of filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and composer Phil Kline performing a live soundtrack to films by Thomas Edison, and the world premiere of Can Dance, a commissioned series of films created by renowned choreographers set to the live accompaniment of the Bang on a Can All-Stars.

For Lang, Bang on a Can represents an invitation to explore.

I think people should be entitled to have as narrow or wide an experience as they want, he says. I dont have any problem with someone saying My whole life is Mozart symphonies. But I think the thing that happens sometimes in music is that youre encouraged to find your box. And then it becomes very difficult to find things outside of your box, even if only slightly.

To me, the point of Bang on a Can is that its a way of listening for what is new in music. You can apply that questioning to everything you hear in classical, but also in jazz, or popular music, or world.

Its a philosophy of life, he says: An attitude of how you wake up in the morning and want to be refreshed.

BANG ON A CAN SUMMER FESTIVAL

At Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams. July 11-31. bangonacan.org/summer_festival

James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.

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At Bang on a Can's summer festival, musical explorations are instrumental - The Boston Globe

The Marvel Cinematic Universe had never seen anything likeBlack Panther.The movie wasnt a success solely because of Ryan Cooglers filmmaking or the collective brilliance of the ensemble cast. For Black audiences, it was the fulfillment of a dream left unrealized far too often.

Black Panthersdepiction of an Afro-Futurist utopia untouched by racial animus was deeply inspiring to moviegoers young and old. But the movie remains grounded enough to provide social commentary without becoming preachy. In one scene, Coogler uses a conversation about masksto make viewers think about the lineage of colonialism that shapes the collections of every major museum.

What makes Killmonger such an effective villain is that his pain is rooted in something familiar: the mistreatment of Black people and Black culture worldwide.His methodology is extreme, but his criticisms are rooted in truth.

One scene that best exemplifies his point of view is when he orchestrates the violent theft of a Wakandan artifact from a museum. It begins with Killmonger talking to a white expert on an exhibit of African masks and tools about the origins of these objects before revealing his true nature.

Dont trip, Im gonna take it off your hands for you, he says casually before the curator informs him that the items arent for sale. Killmonger bites back with a retort that the expert has no real answer for.

How do you think your ancestors got these? You think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it, like they took everything else? It is a line of dialog that delivers more impact than the blows in Killmonger and TChallas CGI-laden climactic fight in the third act.

So many totems of African history were taken overseas as a result of American and major European countries pillaging the continent for bodies and less sentient resources. According to The New York Times, a 2018 study by the French government found that 90% of Africas material heritage is housed in Western museum collections. That cultural loss is entwined in the disenfranchisement of Africa and the global diaspora, something that greatly undersells the rich history of the region.

In a video for Vanity Fair, Peter Meineck, Professor of Classics in the Modern World at New York University, explained how Wakandas status as a hidden kingdom allowed it to resemble the version of the region that was highly influential on Greek and Roman mythology in earlier centuries. (The Black Panther segment begins at the 8:47 mark.)

Whats happened is that through enslavement and colonization, we have a view of the continent of Africa that is completely false, particularly its history and its rich culture. We cant just look at the Greeks and Romans in isolation, Meineck says. Its got much wider connotations across the networks of that entire region.

The use of masks in the museum scene is particularly notable. These were not ornamental items. In their original cultures, they played a fundamental part in rituals honoring the elder statesmen in their society.

The old had very high status in ancient societies because they were the fountain of knowledge, Meineck explains.

The Romans actually would take death masks of their ancestors, clay versions of them, and then at certain festivals, they would wear the mask of their ancestors and they would parade through the streets in them.

Removing them from their cultures strips them of their power and communal relevance, transforming the masks into just another item in a museum to be looked at by visitors, most of whom will never fully understand the original context.

To take that mask and put it in a glass case in a museum is the worst thing you can do to that mask. That masks supposed to be worn by a performer whos been imbued in a whole culture of dancing and performing and telling those stories over centuries. And now its become like an aesthetic object with a price on it, and I think this movie actually shows that really well.

All museums hold significant value for showing people pieces of the world that theyll never have the chance to visit in their lives, and theres no reason to doubt that the curator in Black Panther has done all the work she can to learn about the items in the exhibit. But the question is whether these artifacts can ever be fully represented if they stay in places that are completely divorced from their origins.

There have been movements to repatriate certain objects. In 2021, the Brooklyn Museum returned 1,305 pre-Hispanic artifacts to Costa Rica, and some European museums have given items back to various African countries, but these are still only drops in the bucket for a longstanding issue. Marvel movies are sometimes criticized for paying lip service to real-life problems, so it was gratifying for many to see Black Pantherexplore these ideas so seamlessly.

Meineck is a big fan of the scene and what it represents. Its about access, right? And I think one of the things this does is it shows us how if you remove an object from the stories that are told about it and the way its performed, is that object still operating the same way?

He also notes the moment when Killmonger takes a mask with him at the end of the scene.He uses it for ill, but the sense of belonging he gets from the mask is palpable and unavailable to most people. I think often we see these objects in museums, but we dont think about them in their real cultural context. Black Panthermakes people think about that, concludes Meineck.

RELATED: Chadwick Boseman Would Want TChalla Recast Claims His Brother Amid Drama on the Set of Black Panther 2

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'Black Panther' Shows 1 of the 'Worst' Things You Can Do With an Ancient Mask, Mythology Expert Explains - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Venture capitalist Matthew Ball first wrote about the metaverse in 2018 and his essays have become essential reading for entrepreneurs and tech watchers who are attempting to understand or profit from the network Mark Zuckerberg and many others are anticipating will supersede the internet. Ball is former head of strategy at Amazon Studios and his first book, The Metaverse: How It Will Revolutionize Everything, is published later in July.

What is the metaverse?It is a persistent network of 3D spaces. Almost everything online today all applications, digital operating systems, webpages works on common protocols and technology that connects them. The metaverse is a 3D elevation of the online world, which spans augmented reality unseen virtual simulations in the world around us as well as much of consumer leisure and socialising.

So the metaverse doesnt imply virtual reality (VR)?I think its important to separate access devices and specific experiences from the metaverse at large. A good analogy would be to talk about the mobile internet: apps are not the mobile internet. Not only can you access the mobile internet from a web browser, but you can do so without any visual interface at all. You can say: Hey Siri, what time is it? and youre accessing the mobile internet from your phone. VR or AR (augmented reality) headsets may be a popular way to access the metaverse, but they are not a prerequisite.

Would you describe anything that exists today as a metaverse?The closest examples would be consumer leisure-oriented gaming platforms such as Minecraft or Roblox: popular experiences reaching tens of millions of people daily, that are tightly integrating millions of different virtual worlds. But thats still quite modest and it would be a little bit like characterising a GeoCities or Yahoo or AOL portal from the 1990s as a manifestation of the internet as we know it today.

Taking it back even further than Minecraft, online virtual world Second Life is often held up as a proto-metaverse. What distinguishes it from the real thing?It is a good example. Second Life points to the fact that this is not a new idea. In my book, I talk about the fact that the term comes from 30 years ago, but the theory and early literature around it spanned nearly a century. Second Life was an early, and one of the most important and successful, examples of it; it had a relatively free-standing economy where users could make transactions between one another paying a tax rather than being intermediated by the platform. It was designed around unstructured play, there was no game objective. It was about what you wanted to do and express with the people around you.

But whats also important is comparing it with today. Second Life at its peak around 2006 had a few million monthly users. Its quite possible that right now Roblox has more on the platform. Part of that reflects substantial improvements in the ease of creation: weve gone from something that amateur and professional hobbyists can do to something that an infant can do. And so in Second Life, we see not just the lineage of the metaverse, but we can also track the trajectory. Over time, the capabilities of these platforms grow, the time and reach of these platforms grow, as does their economic value.

Should we expect the metaverse to be an anarchist utopia? There are some who believe that this is the end of nation-state civilisation and community, but I think thats unlikely. A combination of increasing influence of regional players plus increasing governmental regulation is actually more likely to produce a stronger regional identity.

The internet relies on tubes in the ground, and tubes in the ground are physical infrastructure held in national boundaries. Thats why Kuwait can turn off the internet should it so choose. Thats why Middle Eastern governments and Asian governments can choose to block certain opportunities and access to information platforms. Regulation [of the internet] is getting stronger and more different globally every year. As more culture moves online, we tend to find that the companies best able to satisfy related business opportunities are local.

What problems need to be solved before we see something that begins to approach your vision?Were at a stage in which we dont have conventions. Theres no English, theres no USD, theres no metric system, theres no intermodal shipping container. And so when we want to share in the virtual world, we often cant. Expanding that is seen as one of the most important priorities now.

What real-world problems does the metaverse actually solve?In many cases, if not nearly all, having a 3D immersive environment is a more intuitive and productive way to communicate information and ideas. Humans did not evolve for thousands of years to touch 2D interfaces.

We know in education, for example, that Zoom school was not particularly compelling and that YouTube videos are not the best way to learn. So we can understand the possible advantages of an immersive education: going into a circulatory system, building a Rube Goldberg machine [one that accomplishes a simple task in the most complicated way possible], traversing different gravitational environments, or learning physiotherapy, not by watching a video screen, but with haptic sensors with 3D representation and gait analysis. We can certainly surmise that certain elements of that will enrich our experience, and have better impact, than the current internet.

I work hard in the book to talk about the underlying technologies and their potency. And thats because technology is fundamentally recursive. There was no understanding of TCP/IP [transmission control protocol/internet protocol] or the internet in 1995 that would lead you to cleanly understand, believe in or visualise life in 2022: the role of TikTok on the Billboard charts; the criticality of ephemeral messaging, filters and emojis to one of the worlds largest communication platforms; the role of commission-free trading stocks during a pandemic. And thats because what happens in all technological eras is, a new technology is created that either manifests or reveals an underlying behaviour.

Will people be doing their banking and applying for a mortgage in the metaverse? Or are there some things that you think will stick around as the 2D internet only?Well continue to do a ton in 2D. In fact, we have a clear case study for that, which is how much we still do on PCs rather than mobile, how much we do using the fixed-line internet rather than mobile. Its quite likely that emails, phone calls, quick text messages are still better in 2D, or at least for the foreseeable future will be, but when it comes to digital banking, or applying for a permit, there are already areas in which we can see some of that advance. Volumetric video, or what many would describe as holography, is here. Theres a classic line from Neuromancer, one of the early science fiction novels to focus on metaverse ideas, that says the future is already here its just not very evenly distributed. Holography is here and the returns from it are extraordinary. We see 30-50% increases in memory retention through holographic video, 30-50% increases in nonverbal communication, 20-30% increases in eye contact. And so in the years to come, we shouldnt be surprised to find holographic displays in a DMV [local office of the US department of motor vehicles], in a high-end fashion retailer and more.

Are there are there any ethical concerns that we should be thinking about now, rather than after there are a billion users?In 2022, we are still contending with many fundamental problems from the mobile and cloud era: data rights, data security, data literacy, platform power, platform regulation, mis- and disinformation, radicalisation, the role of algorithms in our daily life, online happiness, toxicity and harassment. And theyre all going to become exacerbated in the metaverse.

In many instances, the few lessons that we have learned will become more difficult. Moderation in a 3D space requires different technologies and different policies to moderation in 2D text. One of the challenges here is that many of the biggest problems in the social era werent predictable and actually required quite a bit of testing.

One of the underlying objectives of my book is to give voters, users, developers, consumers and regulators a better view of what the future is likely to be so that we can positively affect that outcome. Big tech is rushing to the metaverse because we know what happens during a platform shift: the companies that lead, change; the business models that thrive, change; the philosophies that are supported, change. And if they know that that future is on the horizon, then at this point, during a platform shift, we as consumers have the opportunity to choose who leads and how. Thats a very difficult intra-cycle. Very few of us are going to change smartphone provider, very few of us are going to change social networking companies, very few of us are going to change the content networks that we consume from. But during platform shifts, we have that chance.

How confident are you that this future is going to come to pass?There are things we can be certain about. Im absolutely certain that we will increasingly use 3D simulations to build and operate the world around us. Were already using it to design and operate cities, airports and more today. The Ready Player One-esque version of the future, where were going to school, collecting virtual coins, wearing our favourite skin thats the least important and the least predictable aspect of our future.

We may find that most of what I wrote comes to pass but its very likely that we dont use the term metaverse: we may just talk about the internet, we may say the 3D internet, we may talk about an entirely different word altogether. I am also sure that an ever-growing share of our time, labour, leisure, spend, wealth, happiness, activities and learning will take place inside virtually simulated environments or virtually supported environments. Thats the fundamental revolution. Exactly what that means on a day-to-day basis, exactly what that means for 5pm when you get home from work thats uncertain.

The Metaverse: How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball is published by WW Norton & Co on 19 July (22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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Exit the internet, enter the metaverse your online future is in 3D - The Guardian

PRESENTER: You may have heard Alison Bechdel's name from the feminist film tool, the Bechdel test, or through her memoir turned Tony-Award-winning Broadway musical called Fun Home. But, even before those achievements, Bechdel wove herself into the fabric of lesbian cultural identity when she started publishing her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For in Minneapolis back in 1983. And the strip had gained a worldwide cult following for its game-changing portrayal of American queer life. It went on hiatus in 2008, but it's still getting attention to this day.

Alison Bechdel is a MacArthur Genius Award recipient, the author of a New York Times best-selling graphic memoir, and a Tony Award winner. OK. Wow. She sat down with Minnesota Now producer Ellen Finn to look back on the roots of her work.

ELLEN FINN: Alison, I am so excited to talk to you.

ALISON BECHDEL: Oh, thank you.

ELLEN FINN: Let me just say, I was a teenager growing up in northern California when I first read the comic Dykes to Watch Out For. I was 17. I was barely out of the closet, and the strip portrayed Minneapolis as some sort of lesbian utopia.

So, when I moved here a few years ago, I was surprised to see the tight-knit queer community that you depicted was very real.

ALISON BECHDEL: Oh, cool. So it's still happening? I haven't been back in a while.

ELLEN FINN: Yeah. How did you come up with the name Dykes to Watch Out For?

ALISON BECHDEL: Oh, gosh, that was something I didn't even think about. It just came out of my head one day, back in the very early '80s, when I was drawing these silly pictures of lesbians to amuse my friends. I just started giving them numbers, like as if I had a whole series of them. And then I, in fact, created a whole series.

But that title just came out of nowhere. And it was funny to me because it had a double meaning. Like, keep your eye out because these people are exciting, but also they might be dangerous, too.

ELLEN FINN: (LAUGHS) For folks who don't know, give a little synopsis of the strip's premise and characters.

ALISON BECHDEL: Dykes to Watch Out For was a sort of soap opera kind of strip in gay and lesbian newspapers, and it centered around a women's bookstore where many of the characters worked. And we followed their lives and loves. But, at the same time, we followed current events as they were unfolding and the characters were responding to things going on in the news and politics.

ELLEN FINN: Can you tell me more about how, specifically, the Twin Cities colored the strip?

ALISON BECHDEL: The big thing was Amazon Bookstore. You know, it's kind of hard to talk about Amazon Bookstore anymore because of how completely the online Amazon wiped it off the map along with countless other independent bookstores across the country, but long before the giant internet monopoly named for the biggest river in the world there was Amazon Bookstore, named for the mythological tribe of women warriors. And it was on Loring Park in [? Minneapolis. ?] It was the gravitational hub of this subculture, of this gay and lesbian community that I was discovering.

Authors would come through town and read. We were all very engaged with the writers and poets who were speaking there. There was the bulletin board, which did all the stuff we now do online-- you know, roommate and housing notices and announcements for political meetings and actions, all kinds of clubs and organizations.

There were the books themselves, of course, and the very knowledgeable and compassionate staff who were often a literal lifeline for people. So I found much of my real life revolving around this great bookstore, so I put that into my comic strip. I created a fictional bookstore called Madwimmin Books, and that's where a lot of the stuff that happens in the comic strip world originates.

ELLEN FINN: Hmm. It sounds like so much of the city informed the strip. I'm curious, what role did you want the strip to play in the city? Were you thinking about that at the time?

ALISON BECHDEL: No, I was not thinking that at all. It was a really different world then, and it's hard to explain it to younger people now because there just was-- we weren't part of the mainstream. We were really, really sidelined, and that was fine with us at that time. I mean, we were starting to think about wanting more access and wanting people to see us, wanting to have more visibility. But, for the time being, we were, like, building up our strength in this parallel subculture.

And, to me, that was all that my comic strip was about. It was like I was showing the lives of people like me and my friends to people like me and my friends. It never occurred to me that it would go further than that. Maybe I had a dim little hope of that, but it was not part of my agenda. I just wanted to help people like me to see themselves as whole human beings, citizens, members of the community.

ELLEN FINN: I'm curious, Dykes to Watch Out For explores lesbian humanity at a time when mainstream images of queer women were one-dimensional at best and hateful at worst. Your strip made life visible and especially highlighted lesbians at the forefront of political movements, but also trying to start a family, navigate a career, and love. What role did you want your strip to play?

ALISON BECHDEL: Well, when I started doing this, people were openly hostile toward gay men and lesbians. And not just hostile, but even worse than that in some ways was the mockery and humiliation. Like, it was just people making fun of us-- or lesbians especially were just thought to be these ridiculous figures, these crazy old spinsters or I don't even know what.

But I felt really indignant about that. I was just as much a regular person as anyone, and I felt like I wanted to show that in my work. Like, me and my friends, we're deeply humane people actively engaged in changing the world, and I just wanted to create a record of that. Can I tell you a little side story?

ELLEN FINN: Please.

ALISON BECHDEL: When I moved to Minneapolis in 1986, I had been drawing Dykes to Watch Out For for a couple of years, but it didn't have those regular characters. It just had-- like, I would invent new characters for each episode because I wanted to have regular characters, but I didn't feel like I had the skill to do that, either to draw them recognizably from panel to panel and episode to episode or to create a really rich, believable, dense world for the characters.

But it was soon after I moved to Minneapolis that I felt ready to take that plunge, and I think it was directly a result of living in that incredibly rich, thriving subculture where there was so much going on, so much support for my crazy alternative lifestyle. I started writing about a set of characters. I started with Mo, who was this young woman who kind of looked like me; her best friend, who was like the sort of Don Juan character of the strip; their friends, the couple, Clarice and Toni. And then this whole little community of people started forming a constellation, and I just kept writing about them for many years.

ELLEN FINN: Wow. What do you make of people who say your characters are maybe not only the first lesbians that they met in their life, but their role models?

ALISON BECHDEL: (LAUGHS) I smile. I always was a little disturbed by that. Like, wow, that's a lot of responsibility, so I just tried not to think about that. But, it would-- definitely, I would hear from people who claimed that was true, and certainly people in small towns. This was way before we had gay and lesbian characters on TV, so it was just helpful, I think, for us to see a reflection of the kind of lives we were all leading.

ELLEN FINN: Yeah. It's pretty clear from your graphic memoir, Fun Home, and even just the bold title of your strip-- you know, Dykes to Watch Out For-- that you've been out as a lesbian from a young age and didn't shy away from the complexity and intimacy of your gay identity in your work. I'm just curious, do you have any advice for people who are struggling to be out these days?

ALISON BECHDEL: Honestly, Ellen, I don't know what to tell anyone. I feel like the world is really changing rapidly, and I don't know what's really happening. You know, it seems like we're very much on the brink of possibly moving backwards in many bad ways.

I've always felt like coming out is important, and that's what changes people's minds and makes the world safe for everyone. But I'm not making any pronouncements, right now.

ELLEN FINN: Do you think you'll ever return to those characters, Mo and the crew?

ALISON BECHDEL: You know, I am returning to them in a funny way. Right now, I'm working on another project where-- not a memoir, but a sort of auto-fictional story about my life where those characters are my actual friends.

[LAUGHTER]

It's funny because, when I first created those characters, in a way, I was making them just for myself. Just, they were my imaginary friends, the community I wished that I had. And so I'm kind of resurrecting them now as my friends in late middle age. They're all much older now, of course.

ELLEN FINN: That's fantastic. I can't wait to see that. Well, thanks so much for the work that you've done. It really has changed my and many people I know lives. So thank you so much, Alison.

ALISON BECHDEL: Thank you, Ellen. Lovely to talk with you.

PRESENTER: That was cartoonist Alison Bechdel speaking with our producer Ellen Finn.

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Why Alison Bechdel's 'Dykes to Watch Out For' is still popular after nearly 40 years - MPR News

Neville Lodge cartoon Evening Post 1958.

by Felicity WongIt was two big wins and a draw for Wellingtonians in last weeks transport and urban development package: a second tunnel through Mt Victoria, a traffic solution for the Basin Reserve, and a new rapid transit corridor to Island Bay.

Mayor Foster was excited about the huge package of transformational investment for the city ($7.4b). Deputy Mayor Free was glad it had been approved by Cabinet and the Regional Council, and now, she said, it would almost unanimously be rubber stamped by the City Council. Cr Pannett celebrated 25 years since Campaign for a Better City demanded a city for people not cars.

The LGWM package moved towards resolving two long standing and contentious issues, while leaving at least one important urban development aspect open.

Second Tunnel

The second tunnel has been on the books since the urban motorway was put through in the 1960s (destroying a good part of Thorndons land and buildings). As Cr Rush noted: while its unclear if it will be parallel or diagonal, there will be one.

The Greens new arithmetic was that two lanes for cars plus two lanes for public transport, in a new four lane tunnel, definitely does not equal four lanes to the planes. Because that was rejected in a past mayoral campaign. So Crs Foon and Paul quietly joined support for the package.

More principled (and independent) Cr Pannett voted against the preferred option saying she could not in good conscience vote for more roads.

Cr Condie was happy that extra funds could be spent future proofing the tunnel so it could take rapid transit if necessary in some decades time. Cr Young suspected the strategy for most was to accept the arrangement on offer and change it later.

Its yet to be known if the second tunnel will avoid destroying the historic south end of Mt Vic, but if a diagonal tunnel is accessed from the south side of the existing tunnel it would be a promising win for Wellington.

Basin Reserve

Mayor Foster also welcomed the elegant and beautiful solution for traffic navigating the Basin Reserve. It keeps a much loved cricket ground intact and easier to get to, while traffic will smoothly and quickly transit the area. Alluding to previous litigation against the hideous flyover that was once proposed by NZTA, Cr Fitzsimons reflected on the fraught history of Wellington transport involving the politics of stopping projects. Cr Foon thanked those involved in Save The Basin which defeated the flyover.

Weve also heard it with the St James, she said. Those who put their hand up and said lets not remove it have given us something that we really treasure now so theres two sides to that story.

Assuming Cr Pannetts concerns for further discussions to improve the plan are met, this could be the second big win for Wellington.

MRT Led Urban Development

The jurys out however on the third big component: the urban development led rapid transit corridor to Island Bay. The focus of the $120m business case will be on light rail (LRT), or bus (BRT) if LRTs too expensive.

Cr Young said LRTs cost would likely be $10b, (given the blow out for Auckland LRT from an initial $2b to over $29b). LRT, she said, was a tooth fairy prospect and everyone except light rail fundamentalists favoured BRT which the city should have done years ago. She said the package being adopted had the highest costs, embedded carbon and effect on Mt Victoria, Newtown and the Basin Reserve. It was also the least flexible & least extendable, and the lowest resistance to natural disaster with the highest reliance on high density housing.

Cr Calvert saw LRT as a Utopia. (Its one that LGWM has regularly illustrated for young green urbanists, with lovely artist renditions of LRT in Wellington streetscapes.)

No doubt the general election will sort the politics of LRT, given the lack of depth of political support for tracked LRT in Wellington (the Regional Councils ex Green Cnr Lee favours trackless trams).

In the meantime, Cr Free got important clarification from LGWM that if it was to be LRT to the south, then it would be bus priority to the east. If it was BRT to the south, that would allow BRT to the east also, but this would be resolved by the business case.

Urban Development

In any event, the current politics that LGWM reflects has coalesced around rapid transit to Island Bay. The basis for that is 20,000 more homes cant be built in low-lying eastern suburbs but could theoretically be built in Te Aro, Newtown, Berhampore and Island Bay.

Mayor Foster said be very clear, this is an integrated project not just a transport project, and relies on the densification around it because if you dont get the density around it you dont get a decent benefit cost ratio and youd be wasting money.

The mass transit he said supports the density by providing the capacity for a lot of people in that area to move around. The projects about housing, urban renewal and ensuring a lowest possible carbon future.

Cr Fitzsimons optimistically said this will make life in our city better and better for the planet. Cr Rush however pointed out there was no credible carbon analysis comparing the options, and no explanation of how any LGWM-inspired carbon-reduction fitted into NZs Emissions Trading Scheme (under our ETS, carbon saved in Wellington is available to be emitted elsewhere in NZ).

The Mayor reiterated his long term goal of restricting scattered higher carbon emitting development further out, saying we need to drive as much development as possible into that corridor because if we dont its not going to stack up and thats why I was comfortable taking a step back on housing in other areas (referring to recent voting on the district plan).

Cr Rush cautioned that it needed the private sector also but their interest was in CBD development and creating nice suburbs for families in Whitby next to Transmission Gully. Cr Young was dubious about increased population projections, and conscious of empty shops and the new long term pattern of working from home.

The other issue, the Mayor said, was his pitch to the Ministers of housing and transport, that we cant just passively zone and wait for the market. We need to be active and we need to be pushing that. He was, he said, doing some really good work with Kainga Ora through the Regional Leaders Forum. The need was to go out and engage with communities along that corridor and ask what that development looks like and how do we do it in the best possible way?

Cr Foon said for the comfortable, connected, even sleepy communities, this is going to be really quite a big change for them and Im comforted that officers have an engagement and comms plan underway because theres still many not up to speed with whats being proposed here.

We need to gain and keep their support as this is being planned and implemented, echoed Cr Fitzsimons.

The LGWM package notes (para 171) that the proposed district plan will allow for six-storey development in suburbs around the corridor, and much higher if they make city contributions. It also states that the district plan will be further changed to enable high-density mixed-use redevelopment around the future MRT stations once the station locations are confirmed. The report notes (at para 173) that for increasing urban development towards the intensified scenario, land use rules need to enable building heights greater than 6 stories near future MRT stations in areas where constructing 5-8 storey buildings is typically not commercially feasible, and because some tall apartment towers would be needed to maximise housing around MRT stations.

LGWM also envisages (para 176) setting up a joint Specified Development Project which would demonstrate the partners level of ambition for an integrated transport and urban development approach to be used for LGWM and the desire for more formal involvement from Kinga Ora in achieving this.

If new additional social housing underpins better public transport, and if LGWM gets poorer Wellingtonians comfortably housed, it could be another big win. But if random development results in clear-felling old suburbs and destroying the heritage and amenity of local communities, the politics of stopping things may become attractive.

Funding and Governance

Mayor Foster said an immense amount of work was required in the next phase: geotech, the exact layout of the road space, and assessment of which properties needed to be acquired (Waka Kotahi will fund $70m of the business case and WCC/GWRC $24m each). He also welcomed the broad political support for using congestion pricing as a new funding tool.

LGWMs report notes targeted rates could be applied to suburbs benefitting from MRT-induced value uplift. It concludes however that funding for urban development is a critical issue which still needs to be worked through.

Cr Calvert attempted to ensure better governance of the project. Expressing concern about the blank cheque being given to LGWM, she proposed that any delegation for signing off the IBC should include the Mayor and not just be given to the CE Barbara McKerrow. David Dunlop (LGWMs recent Acting CE) explained that the delegation to the CE alone was specifically designed to fit around the elections. WCCs Moana Mackey (ex Labour MP and WCC lead for LGWM) added that the delegation was necessary to respond to the timing of the election and potential changes getting in the way.

It was a big call for this Council to fully delegate decision making (blocking input by new elected members), but Cr Calverts proposal that the IBC be delegated to the Mayor and CE failed.

Cr Calvert pressed on with efforts for good governance, proposing that LGWM make regular formal reports to council (not just behind closed doors to the governance group).

Cr Condie (who campaigned on transparency) didnt speak up when Cr Fitzsimons explained away opposition to reporting to councillors as it would enable those opposed to a project to destabilise it by having a say. Dunlop agreed to provide regular updates, noting the goal was to avoid multiple rounds of agreeing the same thing which weve encountered in earlier business cases.

Localism

Local voices [are] being squeezed out in relation to health, polytechs, roads and public transport, water and sewage and even the rules governing the scale and location of houses wrote Tim Brown (2021 Wellingtonian of the Year, Business) in this months Capital magazine (Council Puckerooed?). Announcing a possible run for the Council, he pointed to shrinking relevance of local influencers and decision-makers and the resulting decline in voters interests.

Cr Calvert recently commented (on Wellington.Scoop) that the big decisions the Council has made over the past few years- Long Term Plan, Spatial Plan, District Plan and Lets Get welly Moving have not addressed the needs of most Wellingtonian. We are seeing the result of this with a record low 12% satisfaction level.

There are two parts to this issue. First, both elected members and Council management need to take responsibility for this declining result which now shows that 9/10 Wellingtonians are not satisfied with the decisions made. Secondly, we need to agree on what actions we are going to take to start to win back trust and confidence she wrote.

A wide and pragmatic approach, when roads, tunnels and public transport have always been highly contested here. It could be good, but will almost certainly be bad if local communities are not on board.

LGWMs full report to Council is here.

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Wellington.Scoop Two wins and a draw? - Wellington Scoop

On June 15, 1215, in a field called Runnymede by the banks of the river Thames, the English barons and the archbishop of Canterbury looked on as the king of Englands seal was affixed to the Magna Carta. King John, having lost Normandy to France and facing a French claim to his throne, as well as having undergone a damaging dispute with Pope Innocent III over ecclesiastical elections, found himself forced to concede to the demands of his barons to secure his throne.

This week, 806 years later, in the shadow of Big Ben, the United Kingdom Foreign Office hosted a fourth ministerial gathering focused on religious freedom, and the first such in-person gathering to happen outside of the United States. A ministerial is an official gathering of foreign ministers to address an issue of general concern. The conference brought government officials, religious leaders, and activists from around the world to London to raise cases of persecution based on religion or belief.

Attending this gathering, two stark realities emerged. First, governments around the world are perpetrating horrific persecution against people of faith. But second, it is clear that there is a dedicated community of people from all walks of life relentlessly pressuring their governments to defend victims of religious persecution.

The ministerial sessions included a litany of reports on states around the world and their oppression of people of faith. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has some two million Uyghurs in concentration camps to advance the partys thinly veiled goal of sanitizing the region of the Uyghur Muslim faith, which they see as a threat to their ability to wield complete control over the people of Xinjing. Christians and Falun Gong are also being targeted for their faith by the CCP.

In Pakistan, the government uses the court system to enforce draconian anti-blasphemy laws against non-Muslims. In Afghanistan, the new Taliban religious regime is ruthlessly hunting down members of religious-minority groups like Hazara Muslims.

In Nigeria, Christians who simply want to pray on Sunday are the target of organized radical Islamic terrorism that the countrys government seems unwilling to effectively combat. Even in the West, a place where religious freedom has been assumed safe, a member of Finish Parliament has been taken to court by her own government for publicly stating her orthodox Christian beliefs about gender and marriage.

In fact, government violations of religious freedom are so ubiquitous that listing governments that are not violators is a considerably simpler task than listing those that are. Yet, while governments are often the worst perpetrators of religious persecution, governments can also be made to protect and promote religious freedom. Indeed, without support from government, this core right would be unable to stand against those powers that wish to limit it. But state power will not do so naturally, it must be made to defend this right.

British Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, Elizabeth Truss, the U.K. foreign minister, spoke to the ministerial gathering on Tuesday invoking the first clause of the Magna Carta, which states:

FIRST, THAT WE HAVE GRANTED TO GOD, and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired.

This extraordinary first clause is an example of how concerted effort can be used to bend government institutions to protect religious freedom. The ministerial hosted in London this week is an example of this in action. It was not a project eagerly embraced by the Foreign Office. Quite the opposite; it was a handful of dedicated members of Parliament with a small army of civil-society advocates that gained the support of the prime minister and brought the project to successful completion. It is a demonstration yet again that governments must be swayed to protect religious freedom.

By the same token, it was not the good will of a U.S. president that created a State Department International Religious Freedom Ambassadorship, but an act of Congress. The State Department had never held an International Religious Freedom ministerial when Secretary Pompeo and Ambassador Sam Brownback directed their staff to organize and host the first one in 2018. The second in 2019 was the largest human rights event ever held at Foggy Bottom.

The United Nations had never hosted a religious-freedom-focused session as part of the General Assembly before President Trump decided to host such a session, much to the chagrin of many bureaucrats. There is now a multilateral alliance of 36 countries to protect and promote freedom of religious belief around the world. Such a partnership was only reluctantly accepted by international institutions and members of the international system.

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It is agency of critical individuals, guided by a commitment to freedom of conscience, that is needed to promote and protect religious freedom.

This has been a long journey for many in the international religious-freedom movement, from being generally disregarded to having a seat at the foreign-policy table. It took champions in Congress like Rep. Frank Wolf, with the vision to build government infrastructure through legislation. It took bold scholars and activists like Katrina Lantos Swett, Mary Ann Glendon, and Robby George serving on the U.S. International Religious Freedom Commission, a government-established watchman to report on the status of religious freedom around the world, to build the Commission into a powerful voice to the U.S. government on behalf of the persecuted. Now there is an apparatus within the U.S. government and the international community that is collectively elevating this fundamental right.

Members of the international system, who are much happier talking about sustainable development, find themselves confronted with concerns of conscience. The Brazilian government has recently announced it will host a 2023 ministerial, demonstrating that yet another government has been brought to support religious freedom. Though we will never achieve utopia in this world, U.K. Foreign Minister Liz Truss was right to see a through-line between the signing of the Magna Carta on banks of the Thames so many years ago and the gathering this week by that same river.

Originally posted here:

The Growing International Movement for Religious Freedom - The American Conservative

Nyle DiMarco is a teacher.

He is. Its something hes wanted to be for a long time. Yes, he did make history when he won Americas Next Top Model cycle 22, and he did go on to win Dancing With the Stars season 22 after that. Its also true that he walked the Oscars red carpet this year as a nominated producer for his Netflix documentary Audible. But at his core, the 6-foot-2, steely blue-eyed beauty is a teacher. And he went to college to do just that.

After Americas Next Top Model, I actually was planning on going back to teaching math, he says in a phone call through an interpreter. And teach he has, though math has not been the subject.

In the span of a few years, the now-33-year-old has wielded the platform hes built through his competition show appearances as a chisel, carving out a foothold for himself in Hollywoods landscape. And instead of continually pushing himself, returning to his role as model, actor, and face, hes used that foothold as stability to give others a leg up and a path into the limelight. DiMarco has become a living portkey: a breathing and vocal touchpoint through which the world can access deaf culture and vice versa.

The star has made it his mission to support his culture in whatever way he can be it through creating jobs, becoming a role model within the community, or serving as a prism to shine light in all of its various shades. But, as demonstrated when he taught Tyra Banks a few words in American Sign Language during his Top Model introduction, the march toward that goal often starts with a lot of teaching.

The world has just become a bigger classroom for me, he says. Now Im not working with students, Im working with audiences.

Raised initially in New York City, DiMarco is the fourth generation of his Italian-American family to be born deaf the fifth generation has already started with the birth of his nephew earlier this year. Growing up, he had more than 25 family members who were deaf surrounding him 90 percent of deaf babies are born to hearing parents which made for a normalcy that the star dubbed a deaf utopia in his memoir.

This utopia was in part due to his mother, who not only ensured that he and his two brothers had access to language via ASL but advocated for changing the school system to better accommodate deaf and hard of hearing students.

New York City in the 90s was not kind to deaf kids, DiMarco recalls. The system was focused on oralism. Ironically, I was going to a deaf school with other deaf students and the hearing teachers couldnt sign as well as I could. As a result, his mother campaigned to empower deaf educators to be leaders.

Eventually, the family relocated, and DiMarco and his brothers attended the Maryland School for the Deaf. Its against this backdrop that DiMarco grew up, understanding the importance of language and seeing himself not as disabled but simply different. He found himself drawn to math as a result of a professor who became a close friend, as well as his love of problem solving. He would go on to enroll at Gallaudet University, the worlds only deaf college, for a degree in mathematics. That led to a recruiting role where DiMarco helped to provide more exposure for the university. He also picked up a few acting gigs while modeling on the side. In 2015, he was scouted for Top Model from a growing portfolio of photos he was posting on Instagram. The rest, as they say, is history.

In his memoir, Deaf Utopia a title, as he cheekily noted on Twitter prior to the books release, that can easily be mistaken for Deaf Top from the cover design DiMarco details coming to terms with his sexuality. He came out to the world a few months before winning Top Model in 2015. At the time, he simply responded to a fan asking if hes more into boys or girls with the word fluid and a link to an article about sexual fluidity. But in the memoir, he writes that it was in part a response to someone trying to out him within the deaf community.

It was on a backpacking trip through Europe during his senior year at Gallaudet that DiMarco had his first kiss with a man. He was fresh off a breakup with a girlfriend of seven years and, with encouragement from two lesbians he met in Colombia, kissed a Frenchman with square-rimmed glasses named Alphonse outside of a bakery in Reims. As he explains in a chapter titled Exploration, prior to that he had kept any thoughts of men at bay because he didnt identify with the feminine gay stereotype ubiquitous in media at the time.

After the kiss, though, DiMarco let himself explore a little, slowly finding himself. And while he had initially been doing that at his own pace, his role on Top Model added fame and accompanying tabloid scrutiny to his name. While DiMarco was on the show, a gossip blogger within the deaf community published a story in an attempt to out the budding celebrity.

In his post, he claimed that he discovered me on a gay dating app, DiMarco writes in a chapter titled Fluid from the memoir. Someone had Photoshopped the picture of me in the biker hat onto a screenshot of a user profile on the gay dating app the vlogger referred to, making it look as if Id created it.

Though the evidence was manufactured, DiMarco decided it was time to come out. He chatted with a friend who provided him with the term fluid; for DiMarco, it describes a sexuality in which he goes through periods of being more into men and others of being more into women. And then, in a tweet, he came out to the world. (Shortly thereafter, the admission prompted his aunt to come out to him in a funny exchange.)

Access to language is really, truly what helps you to analyze, helps you to critique, its what helps you to identify, he says. (Before the term sexually fluid, he had trouble identifying, as he didnt quite see himself represented in his conception of bisexuality.) Without access to language, its impossible.

But sometimes its more than the language; its also access to representation. For DiMarco, that meant seeing a basketball player at Gallaudet who was gay, who challenged the version of queerness he had seen in media. DiMarco has now become that for others.

I actually have one friend who I grew up with whose parents pretty much disowned her because she was queer, because she came out, he reveals. According to DiMarco, the friend, who is deaf, tried to explain that she was figuring out her own sexuality, and the family couldnt make sense of it and didnt want to. It was actually the visibility that I had when I came out that really changed their minds. That if I, as this aspirational figure, also identified as queer, maybe it wasnt such a terrible thing. We might laugh about it for a moment now, but her family actually reached out to her and made amends because I was able to use my platform to help them get a bit more understanding, a little bit more insight into what it is.

I hope Im having that impact with other families, and I hope kids are having a better experience coming out.

All of this has led DiMarco to this moment. Over the past five years, after fashioning himself into a public-facing force, hes stepped behind the camera as a producer, where his love for problem solving comes into play daily. First was on Broadway with the 2018 revival of Children of a Lesser God, which nabbed a Tony nomination for Lauren Ridloff, the deaf actress who portrayed Sarah Norman, a young deaf woman who works at a New England school for the deaf. And then he headed to television with projects like Deaf U and Audible for Netflix, all in an effort to bring cultural awareness and nuance to deaf stories that he didnt see before.

Deaf U was a fantastic place to really open up a discussion about the different types of deaf people that belong to this community, and also show theres an incredibly diverse array of people who come from all different backgrounds, all different genders, races, and abilities, he says. That project followed a crush of students at Gallaudet doing the things college kids do: dating, partying, hooking up, and trying to find their place in the world while navigating the hierarchies of school. As seen in the production, those hierarchies sometimes pertain to a familys legacy of deafness as opposed to income. I wanted to show that we are not a monolith, DiMarco says.

Relying on his experiences on the sets of earlier shows, the changemaker, now in the producer chair, has insisted on hiring more deaf and hard of hearing people behind the camera. Many of them have been queer. On Deaf U, members of the deaf community made up 30 percent of the crew, 50 percent of the story department producers, and 30 percent of the edit team.

And this isnt happening in a vacuum. Chella Man, the deaf, Jewish, and Asian-American trans man who made history when he was signed as a model to the prestigious management company IMG, starred as the superhero Jericho on the DC Universes Titans. Ridloff has gone on to star in Marvels Eternals and more. In fact, when DiMarco went to the Oscars red carpet earlier this year for his project Audible, it was one of a few productions featuring deaf talent nominated in five categories.

I never really saw myself represented on-screen growing up, he reflects on the importance of Audible, his short documentary about the football program at the Maryland School for the Deaf, and projects like it. We had Marlee Matlin [the first deaf actor to win an Oscar, for 1986s Children of a Lesser God] but she was the only spot of representation for a spectrum that represents millions and millions of people globally right now. If you look at the most recent Oscars season, 35 years was too long to wait. (Matlin, who stars in the Best Picture-winning CODA, campaigned for deaf actors in deaf roles on the project, which led to the casting of Troy Kotsur, who won the 2022 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.)

And he doesnt plan to wait. In 2020, DiMarco quietly launched Clerc Studios, which is named after Laurent Clerc, a French deaf man who was a founder of the first school for the deaf in America and is considered by many to be the father of deaf culture. Through that company billed as a production house committed to amplify the stories of disabled people, which make up the worlds largest minority hes working on multiple projects. Theres Look at Me, a drama featuring a multigenerational deaf family living under one roof and inspired in part by his life. Theres also the effort to turn Deaf President Now! The 1988 Revolution at Gallaudet University, a book that chronicles a week of protests at the school that resulted in the universitys first deaf president, into a feature film. Hes also set to return to the screen in a half-hour comedy currently in development about being a deaf man in America.

And then theres Deaf Punk, which I think is the most exciting, he says, referring to another planned drama series. Were really trying to break the tropes that we see in Hollywood movies where the deaf person cant hear music and its this sad sob story because they want to. Deaf Punk is a story about how deaf people have essentially reclaimed music and how they really became a part of the punk scene.

Yet another lesson from Professor DiMarco.

NYLE and CHELLA MAN are bothwearing PRADA Pants and BERNARDJAMES Jewelry

Creative Direction MIKELLE STREET mikelledstreet.com @mikellestreetAssistant MILAN GARCON @milangarconPhotographer MYLES LOFTIN mylesloftinphotography.com @mylesloftinPhoto Assistant Light Tech EVADNE GONZALEZ @evadnegonzalezPhoto Assistant ANDREW ESPINAL @andrewespinal and JIN JINDigitech MERLIN VIETHEN and JOSH ROBINSONProduction Director TIM SNOW @snowmgzProduction Manager STEVIE WILLIAMS x2production.com @beingstevie of X2 Production ProductionAssistant TOBY TEITEL @toby_teitelVideo AUSTIN NUNES austinunes.com @austinunesCreative Conception STUART BROCKINGTON, ANNA CARIAS, MIKELLE STREETHair CHARLIE LE MINDU charlielemindu.com @charlieleminduHair Assistant JET KEEFE @jetkeefebeautyMakeup LARAMIE laramiemakeup.com @laramiemakeupMakeup Assistant ARPITA BRAHMBHATTStylist RASAAN WYZARD @monsieur_wyzardStylist Assistant MELINDA GRIFFITH

Related |Nyle DiMarco and Chella Man Are the New American Idols

This article is part of Out's July/August 2022 issue, appearing on newsstands July 12. Support queer media and subscribe or download the issue through Amazon, Kindle, Nook, or Apple News.

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Cover Star Nyle DiMarco Wants to Teach You Something - Out Magazine