Category Archives: New Utopia

A handful of Arabian silver coins found in New England may be the last surviving relics of history's most notorious act of piracy and perhaps one of the most famous pirates who ever lived.

Evidence suggests the distinctive coins were spent as common silver in the American colonies in the late 1690s by the fugitive pirate crew of Henry Every, also known as John Avery, who had fled there after plundering the Mughal treasure ship Ganj-i-sawai as it was returning pilgrims from the Muslim Hajj.

Researchers aren't certain that the coins are from the Ganj-i-sawai, but their origin, their dates and their discovery in such a distant region suggest they were seized by the pirates and spent in the Americas.

Related: 30 of the world's most valuable treasures that are still missing

The coins may have been handled by Every himself, who disappeared a few years later but who came to be portrayed as an almost heroic figure from what some have called the "Golden Age of Piracy."

Their discovery has also cast new light on Every's whereabouts shortly before he vanished with his loot. "We can prove beyond a doubt that he actually was in the mainland American colonies," Rhode Island metal detectorist Jim Bailey told Live Science.

Bailey found one of the first of the Arabian silver coins, called a comassee, in 2014 at the site of a colonial settlement on Aquidneck Island, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Providence.

More than a dozen similar coins thought to be from the pirate raid on the Ganj-i-sawai have now been discovered by metal detectorists and archaeologists elsewhere in Rhode Island, and in Massachusetts, Connecticut and North Carolina maybe the last evidence of one of the greatest crimes in history.

In 1695, Every and his cutthroat crew on board their ship Fancy joined a pirate raid on a convoy in the Red Sea that was returning to India from Mecca.

Every's ship chased and caught the convoy's flagship, the Ganj-i-sawai, which belonged to the Grand Mughal Aurangzeb, the Muslim emperor of what is now India and Pakistan. Reports say the pirates tortured and killed its crew and 600 passengers, before making off with gold and silver, including thousands of coins, said to be worth between 200,000 and 600,000 British pounds the equivalent of between $40 million and $130 million in today's money.

Related: In photos: Pirate ship discovered in the UK

After an outcry led by the British East India Company, whose profits on the riches of India were threatened by the raid, Britain's King William III ordered what is regarded as the first international manhunt to capture Every and the other pirates.

By this time, however, Every and his crew had escaped to the New World. They lived for several months in the Bahamas, possibly with the collusion of the British governor of the islands; but they fled in late 1696 as the Royal Navy closed in.

Some of Every's crew went to live in the mainland colonies, where they were eventually tried and acquitted, possibly as a result of bribery; but there were no further sightings of Every. Later reports suggested he had sailed to Ireland while still on the run and that he died there, impoverished, a few years later. Since his loot from the Ganj-i-sawai was never accounted for, rumors long persisted that the treasure had been buried somewhere in secret.

Bailey is an amateur archaeologist who worked on the recovery of the wreck of the Whydah, a pirate ship discovered off Cape Cod in 1984.

Related: The most notorious pirates ever

In 2014, his metal detector picked up the first of the mysterious coins in a meadow on Aquidneck Island that was once the site of a colonial township.

"You never field-clean a coin, because you could damage it," he said. "I had to run to my car and get a big bottle of water the mud came off, and I saw this Arabic script on the coin and I was amazed, because I knew exactly where it'd come from," he said. "I was aware that the American colonies had been bases of operation for piracy in the late 17th century."

Studies of the Arabic writing on the coin showed it had been minted in Yemen in southern Arabia in 1693, just a few years before the pirate attack on the Ganj-i-sawai. Another 13 have been found, mostly by metal detectorists, but the latest in 2018 by archaeologists in Connecticut; two Ottoman Turkish silver coins thought to be from the same hoard have also been unearthed in the region.

Bailey has carefully studied each of the discoveries, while researching historical sources about the pirates who might have brought the coins to the Americas; and in 2017, some of his work was published in the Colonial Newsletter, a research journal published by the American Numismatic Society.

Several of the coins show the year they were minted, while some are marked with the names of rulers at the time, which can be used to date them. "None of the coins date after 1695, when the Ganj-i-sawai was captured," Bailey said.

Every is thought to have sailed directly to Ireland after his time in the Bahamas, but Bailey's research suggests Every first spent several weeks on the American mainland, trading in African slaves he had bought with the loot from the Ganj-i-sawai.

Historical records relate that a ship Every had acquired in the Bahamas, Sea Flower, sold dozens of slaves on the mainland, and Bailey's research suggests that Every was on board, he said.

Bailey thinks Every probably died in Ireland eventually, as described by some chroniclers. But others portrayed him as a swashbuckling "king" who ruled for years over a fictional pirate utopia in Madagascar.

There's no way to know if Every handled the New England coins himself, but Bailey thinks they were almost certainly part of the hoard looted from the Mughal ship (Some coin specialists, however, are not convinced by his theory.)

While most of the loot was probably melted down to hide the origins, "what we're finding basically are the coins that were being used by the pirates when they were on the run: coins for lodgings, coins for meals, coins for drinking," he said.

Astonishingly, the coins may also have been referred to in the manhunt proclamation by King William, which stated that Every and the other fugitives had looted many "Indian and Persian" gold and silver coins from the captured ship.

"How often do you find a coin that's mentioned in the proclamation for the capture of a pirate and the subject of the first worldwide manhunt?" Bailey said. "It's just fantastic."

Originally published on Live Science.

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Silver coins unearthed in New England may be loot from one of the 'greatest crimes in history' - Livescience.com

Discovering a thread in the nonlinear course of history is a difficult task, especially by the exacting and rigorous academic standards. Tim Harper is a rare historian-storyteller who has uncovered several interconnected strands over a large landscape. In a strange coincidence, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire was published just when some scholars argued that the vestiges of the Empire are still shaping the world.This unique research by Harper, a journalist-cum-academic, explores the subversive campaigns in Asia that often extended to Europe, America, Canada and other distant parts of the world in the early 20th century. Each was varied in its context, but they were all sustained and bound by one sentiment to overthrow imperialism. The bombing at Chandni Chowk in Delhi in 1911 on Lord Hardinges procession to the Red Fort by Rash Bihari Bose, or, the Muzaffarpur bombing by Khudiram Bose turns out to be intricately linked to the bombings at Canton and other parts of Southeast Asia.This wave of insurrection in Asia drew its sustenance from a new generation of intellectuals (who) sought to weave together seemingly irreconcilable doctrines anarchism, nationalism, communism, even religious revival in the name of unity and opposition to Western Imperialism. Most of the men and women involved in it were truly internationalists but driven simultaneously by the urge to create a utopia in their homelands. Tan Malaka, known as the father of the republic of Indonesia, was a Marxist guerrilla who clamoured for 100 per cent freedom from the yoke of Dutch imperialism. Similarly, MN Roy from India was wedded to Marxism and Leninism, and travelled across the globe chasing his dream. Over a period of time, ironically, most of these activists slipped into oblivion and their footprints were washed away. Yet, in many ways, they were pathfinders for a world without empire and for an Asian future, writes Harper.The first three decades of the 20th century were marked by an incredibly fast pace of political and social changes in the world. In 1905, the Russia-Japan war had conclusively disabused the notion of Western superiority in warfare. Similarly, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 conjured up the dream of an ideal nation whose philosophical moorings lay in proletarian internationalism until it mutated into authoritarianism of the worst kind under Joseph Stalin. In China, Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek were fighting for the independence and reunion of a divided China. Subsequently, Chiang was driven to Taiwan by the redoubtable Communist Party of China chief, Mao Tse-tung, as he evolved a new mutant of parochial nationalism in the garb of a communist revolution.In this global context, Asia was indeed the battleground for revolutionary ideas. Despite his London education and familiarity with India House, the hub of subversive thinking, Mahatma Gandhi ploughed his lonely furrow and stuck to non-violence and truth to dislodge the Empire. Of course, Gandhis political course was quite at variance with the prevalent political ideologies that either condoned or justified violence to attain a greater objective. But there is hardly any doubt that violence weaves a seductive logic that attracts younger and idealist people who were fighting for their ideas of the nation. Take, for instance, the manner in which Madan Lal Dhingra justified his act of shooting in London by saying, a nation held down by foreign bayonet is in perpetual state of war The only lesson required in India at present is to learn how to die, and the only way to teach is by dying ourselves. These words found resonance in anti-colonial movements across India that compelled a section of the youth to take to violence to challenge the British Raj.The best part of the book is that it weaves its narrative around the global events without tainting them with the authors subjectivity. In those tumultuous times, when the boundaries of nations were not rigid and western empires were overlapping in certain parts with emerging powers such as the United States in the Philippines and Japan in China and Korea, the movement of people from one place to another was not so difficult. Therefore, the book details the pathways of three important figures of that era Nguyen Ai Quoc alias Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, Malaka of Indonesia and MN Roy of India. Fired by the revolutionary zeal of Marxism, they travelled to many parts of the world to forge an international coalition against the Empire. At the end of it, the deception of their dream became evident as the USSR and China started imitating the empires in their worst form.Roy returned to India and spent his last days as a radical humanist, having become politically irrelevant during his lifetime. The book paints a poignant picture of the revolution when he is quoted as saying, I came to the conclusion that the civilised mankind was destined to go through another period of monasticism, where all the treasures of past wisdom, knowledge and learning will be rescued from the ruins to be then passed on to a new generation engaged in the task of building a new world and a new civilisation. Towards the end of his life, at his Dehradun residence, he kept a photograph of Stalin on his mantelpiece, though he was shunned by the mainstream Left parties.Interesting anecdotes propel a powerful story that lends credence to the belief that the empires were quite rattled by the audacity of these groups of men and women who could not be repressed into submission. In the Indian context, the illusion of the mighty British Raj and its administrative stranglehold over the country was substantially dispelled by these romantic revolutionaries who considered Asia to be a beacon of hope for the world. For them, the idea of the nation, instead of being a rigid concept, was integrated into internationalism without the dominance of empires. While writing a farewell note from the Andaman cell to his friends, Veer Savarkar evocatively summed up the story of those who crossed the ocean and took to revolutionary paths: As in some oriental play sublime, all characters, the dead as well as living, in Epilogue they meet: thus actors we innumerable all-once more shall meet on Historys copious stage before the applauding audience of Humanity This book has truly brought alive all those characters who were either erased or faded away from memory and paid them a tribute they richly deserved.

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Revolutionaries and their shadowy networks come alive in Tim Harpers new book - The Indian Express

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA Norma was 20 years old and homeless when the police took her to a psychiatric hospital, where she has lived for the past five years. She was pregnant at the time and gave birth to a son a few months later.

Because Norma was in the mental health system, however, a court determined that she could not keep her baby, and he was given up for adoption. She is petitioning the court for permission to see her son and asked that her last name not be published, out of fear that it could jeopardize her case. Now she wears a necklace with a pendant of a child, as a way to remember him.

He was very small, and he would laugh when I bathed him, Norma says, her face lighting up.

What Norma didnt know until a few months ago is that the court didnt just force her to give up custody it also prevented her from having any more children. By court order, when Normas doctors delivered her son by cesarean section, they also tied her fallopian tubes.

Nobody asked her if it was what she wanted.

At the end of December, after years of protests and campaigning by womens rights groups, Argentina became the largest South American country to legalize abortion without restriction in early pregnancy. Yet even as millions of women have rallied around the slogan my body, my choice, many Argentine women with mental disabilities are still denied the opportunity to make their own reproductive decisions.

Doctors may sterilize women who are legally declared incompetent, according to a 2006 law, substituting their consent with authorization by the courts at the request of a family member or legal guardian. This is despite the fact that in 2008 Argentina signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which states that the will of a person with disabilities cant be taken away.

A temporary court-appointed legal guardian requested Normas tubal ligation. A public curator, appointed by the state, has legal responsibility for Norma now.

Lucila Pellettieri, GPJ Argentina

Norma wears a necklace with a pendant of a child to remember her son, whom she was forced to give up for adoption.

There is no official record of how many people have been sterilized by court order in Argentina, but Normas experience is hardly an isolated case. Marcela Gasic, a social worker at a neuropsychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires, says she has worked with several women who were sterilized against their will. One of them was told of the tubal ligation when she woke after doctors performed a C-section.

They told her that theyd tied her tubes so she wouldnt have to go through the same thing again, Gasic says. As if they had done her a favor.

Women who use the mental health system are also sometimes forced to use birth control pills or contraceptive implants, says Macarena Sabin Paz, a psychologist and coordinator of the mental health team at the Center for Legal and Social Studies, a human rights organization.

Sexual rights, reproductive rights and the right to not reproduce are still a utopia inside of mental health institutions, she says.

Alicia Alvano, a member of the Assembly of Mental Health Patients, a patient advocacy group, experienced firsthand this lack of autonomy after she was committed to a mental health facility and medicated against her will.

They dont generally ask for your consent that doesnt apply, Alvano says. I didnt even know what kind of medication I was taking. The nurse puts medicine in your mouth, and then checks to make sure that you swallowed it.

They told her that theyd tied her tubes so that she wouldnt have to go through the same thing again. As if they had done her a favor.Marcela GasicA social worker in Buenos Aires, describes a woman who was sterilized against her will

According to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, medical care is supposed to be provided on the basis of free and informed consent. Argentinas national mental health law also specifies that involuntary hospitalization may be carried out only in cases where there is imminent risk of harm.

But women with disabilities are often viewed with prejudice, according to Carolina Buceta, a member of the Network for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, another advocacy group.

Society considers us asexual beings, completely innocent, or the opposite, to have an exacerbated sexuality, Buceta says. Theres still the belief that disabled women wont be able to take charge of their birth control methods.

Constanza Leone, a spokesperson for the Directorate of Sexual and Reproductive Health at the Ministry of Health, says that all parts of society hold preconceptions about people with disabilities including the state. She says the directorate supports efforts to reform Argentinas law to guarantee that people with disabilities have autonomy over their reproductive choices. The directorate is also working with people with disabilities and reproductive rights organizations to train health professionals to be more aware of the rights of people living with disabilities.

Were fighting for each individuals informed decision over their own body to be respected, despite their age, their gender or their condition, Leone says. We must provide the necessary resources so that they can receive the information and choose a reversible birth control method on their own.

Disability rights advocates are also pushing for changes to Argentinas law to make it clear that people with disabilities are free to make their own reproductive choices, and that sterilization can be performed only with the consent of the individual.

Let the law be changed, Norma says. It makes me want to cry.

As she waits to hear whether the court will allow her to see her son, she and her primary care doctor are trying to determine whether another operation could reverse her tubal ligation.

I want them untied, Norma says. Id like to have a girl.

Originally posted here:

A New Front in the Fight for Reproductive Rights - Global Press Journal

China looked to the heavens when it named its first Mars rover calling it Zhurong, after a mythical god of fire and war.

Its in keeping with Chinas ambitious plans for the Red Planet which they call Huo Xing, or Fire Star that include becoming the third country after the US and the former Soviet Union to send a robot there, the China National Space Administration announced Saturday.

The rover is already en route to Mars aboard the Tianwen-1 probe, which is due to land in May and will look for evidence of life, the Associated Press reported.

Zhurong is revered as the earliest god of fire in traditional Chinese culture, symbolising the use of fire to illuminate the earth and bring light,space administration officialssaid Saturday.

The first Mars rover was named Zhurong, and it means to ignite the fire for interstellar exploration in our country, and guide mankind to continue exploration and self-transcendence in the vast starry sky.

Chinas space plans involve more than Mars exploration, however. The country plans a crewed orbital station, and intends to land a human on the moon. In 2019 it became the first country to land a space probe on the far side of the moon. Last year it brought back lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the 1970s.

Tianwen-1 will probably alight upon Utopia Planitia, a rock-riddled flat area where the U.S. lander Viking 2 touched down in 1976. The rover will then help fulfill the mission goals of mapping out the Martian surface and analyzing its geology.

Chinese officials say they hope to look for evidence of water ice and plan to study the climate and surface environment.

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China invokes mythic god of war and fire for its Mars rover name - New York Post

The pandemic has been a devastating health issue for more than a year. But it has also impacted the movie industry and even forced the Motion Picture Academy to push back its Oscar ceremony to April 25. The late date for the Academy Awards this Sunday prompted me to compose my own list of the best films of 2020.

Aired 4/23/21 on KPBS News

Listen to this story by Beth Accomando.

2020 was most decidedly a crazy year. The pandemic impacted everyone and it also changed the way we watched films. With cinemas closed, people streamed more movies than ever at home including first run Hollywood blockbusters. Drive-ins even saw a resurgence as a safe place to watch movies.

For me, the caution I exercised to avoid getting COVID-19 made me hungry for films that were anything but cautious. So, my 10-best list mostly highlights smaller films that pushed the envelope and displayed something unexpected.

Honorable mentions

In many ways, this was a great year because smaller films could compete more equally with big Hollywood films. This was a year that I could have done a 10-best list of just documentaries or just horror.

So to start, I want to do an honorable mentions list of truly clever and inventive indie horror films starting with the Zoom inspired "Host," the Rod Serling influenced "Vast of Night," and the wicked fun of "Wolf of Snow Hollow" and "Anything for Jackson."

The documentary honorable mentions go to the inspiring "Danny Trejo: Inmate Number 1," the enlightening Bruce Lee doc "Be Water," and the just insanely absurd tale of "Red Penguins." Also noteworthy were "Crip Camp" and "David Byrne's American Utopia" directed by Spike Lee.

Foreign film highlights include "Another Round" (Denmark/Sweden), "Martin Eden" (Italy), "Night of Kings" (France/Cte d'Ivoire/Canada/Senegal), and "La Llorona" (Guatemala/France).

And a few films that didn't really push the envelope but which excelled at what they did were the lush black and white Hollywood tale of "Mank," the surprising romantic comedies "Palm Springs" and "Spontaneous," and the compelling humanity of "Minari" and "The Mauritanian."

Lastly, I just want to highlight an amazingly talented group of women filmmakers that all deserve attention and more importantly more financing to make more films. The women are Chloe Zhao for "Nomadland," Regina King for "One Night in Miami," Emerald Fennell for "Promising Young Woman" and Eliza Hittman for "Never rarely Sometimes Always."

Cinema Junkie Acting Awards

I also want to highlight some individual talent here.

Best actress was perhaps the fiercest competition in years. I was thrilled to see so many films driven by female protagonists and/or created by women writers and directors. What really thrilled me was that the women were diverse and flawed and complex. That is exciting! There were so many to choose from but these actresses just went the extra mile.

Best Actress: Viola Davis, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom"

Runners up: Morfydd Clark in "Saint Maud," Azura Skye in "Swerve" and Haley Bennett in "Swallow"

The best actor category was not quite as exciting but for me there was only one hands down winner.

Best Actor: Delroy Lindo, "Da 5 Bloods"

Runners up: Steven Yeun in "Minari," Willem Dafoe in "Tommaso" and "Chadwick Boseman in "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom"

Top 10 films of 2020

Starting at number 10: Im always excited by new voices and "His House" marks the debut feature of Remi Weekes. He brilliantly uses African culture and folklore to give fresh flavor to a familiar haunted house formula. Plus he endows the film with an underlying social commentary.

At number nine is the first of a quartet of documentaries that just exploded expectations with creativity and energy. "Dick Johnson is Dead" is a daughters film about her father. Filmmaker Kirsten Johnson stages her fathers funeral before he dies and before he succumbs to dementia. The film is unexpectedly hilarious as well as poignant, always gracefully navigating between the two, so tears of laughter blur into tears of sadness.

A radically different documentary comes in at number eight, "Collective." Starting with a fire in a Bucharest club that leads to horrific health care scandals, this searing investigative documentary plays out like a Romanian "All the Presidents Men."

Coming in at number seven: While "Collective" serves up riveting cinematic journalism, "Time" is all about an expressionistic sense of artistry. Filmmaker Garret Bradley makes thoughtful, beautiful and provocative choices as she pleads for a more compassionate legal system. As the title implies, time is a key element and Bradley creates an ebb and flow thats exquisite.

The final documentary on my list is "The Truffle Hunters" at number six. This is a film in which simplicity and minimalism become sublime as we look at a dying breed of men and their dogs who hunt for truffles in Italy.

The next two films are both from debuting filmmakers who display intoxicating talent. At number five, Carlos Mirabella-Davis "Swallow" plays out like a Hitchcock thriller in which a woman (Haley Bennett) feels trapped in her elegant home and decides to swallow objects as her only means of controlling her life. Not a hair is out of place and the production design is rendered in terrifying perfection.

Then at number four: First time feature director Rose Glass delivers the ferociously bold and original "Saint Maud." From its opening score and fevered images, the film announces itself as an audaciously unsettling look at the dangerous intersection of madness and religion. Morfydd Clark is riveting as a young woman desperate to find purpose and meaning in her lonely life.

The most mainstream film on my list is "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" at number three. It won this spot almost exclusively on the jaw-dropping performance of an unrecognizable Viola Davis as the title character. Director George C. Wolfe adapts August Wilsons period play with vigor to remind us that the past is not some creaky ole thing to be viewed through sepia toned nostalgia. Wolfe makes us feel the heat and sweat of a past that informs the present.

I see my top two picks as comfort food. Theres nothing like dread to make me feel better about a scary and often infuriating real world. At number two is "Im Thinking of Ending Things," Charlie Kaufmans deliciously baffling film that refuses to explain anything. Kaufmans puzzle box requires you spend time examining it. In our culture of instant gratification it's nice to have something to savor long after its been consumed.

And my favorite film of 2020 is Brandon Cronenbergs relentless and disturbing "Possessor Uncut." It manages to be both cerebral and visceral. Cronenbergs father David once told me in an interview that hes not interested in comfortable cinema. Neither is his son, and while I sit at home trying to stay safe from a pandemic, neither am I.

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Beth Accomando Arts & Culture Reporter

I cover arts and culture, from Comic-Con to opera, from pop entertainment to fine art, from zombies to Shakespeare. I am interested in going behind the scenes to explore the creative process; seeing how pop culture reflects social issues; and providing a context for art and entertainment.

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Before the Oscars On Sunday Check Out This Top 10 List - KPBS

In Women and Women, translated by Daniel Joseph, men are a deviant strain of humanity, utterly unmanageable creatures who arrived in the populace, invented all manner of hostility, then mysteriously began to die off. Any remaining men have been exiled to the GETO, that is, the Gender Exclusion Terminal Occupancy zone. The civilization that remains is both lesbian utopia and police state. To doubt this world is a crime, so our unnamed narrator, naturally, does just that when she meets an escaped boy who teaches her the unexpected, dreadful truth about human life. Readers in 2021 will likely see a trauma in that ending, but the character is simply changed and unhappy.

That Suzukis prose has been described as punk has more to do with her disaffected narrators than her formal choices. Her plots are straightforward, even slightly predictable, though that may be a generational matter; what passed for speculative warning in the 1970s and 80s, now seems more directly descriptive of our present ills. In the collections title story, the most disturbingly contemporary piece, two ex-lovers idle around a plaza. Unfettered spaces scare me, the narrator admits, Im not used to scenes that arent in a frame. The world is overpopulated and underemployed. They were saying on the news that more and more young people were forgetting to eat, starving to death, so the uneasy pair stop for soup, sitting side by side, gazing at the video screen.

Later, back out on the plaza, they witness a gruesome killing. Cops in flying ships violently apprehend loiterers, but theyre slow to respond to an actual murder. Gazing at the bloody aftermath of the attack, the man observes: That was so intense. Almost like the real thing. When he notices that a bystander has been filming the scene, he asks for a copy.

As bleak as it is, Terminal Boredom may be the most hopeful story in the collection, as the female narrator slightly resists (albeit unsuccessfully) the violent, numb culture in which shes confined. The work and messages of Ursula K. Le Guin, the authors longer-lived contemporary, come to mind. Both Suzuki and Le Guin knew that gender roles are a matter of costume or control, affect or affliction. The terms we use to define humanity are often inhumane.

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Where Every Coupling Depends on Lies, and Men Are Aliens - The New York Times

John Szweds magisterial 1997 biography of Sun Ra Space Is The Place opened the floodgates of books and articles about Ra and his Arkestra. Every element of Ras music and philosophy has since been explored and examined, but William Sites has managed to find another avenue to wander down, which leads to some interesting investigations about Ras time in Chicago from 1945 to 1961.

Sitess book is certainly academic he is the associate professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and the 228-page text comes with a further 62 pages of notes, or more accurately, a reading list to fill a lifetime. But his book is also highly readable, accurately siting Ra in the racial politics and unorthodox religious and cultural activism of Chicagos black-dominated South Side.

Along with business partner Alton Abraham, Ra issued a series of polemical broadsheets from their secret society, Thmei Research, devoted to the study of the origins and identity of black Americans. They did so jostling for attention alongside the Nation of Islam and others sects, all seeking a black utopia among the segregated communities of Chicago. Sites treats these broadsheets respectfully, even though their message is often hard to divine, and points out that such activism preceded the foundation of El Saturn Records and Ras slow attempt to find his musical path. Only after the philosophy did the music properly come.

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What Sites is good at is the detail of the period, notably about the territory bands Ra encountered when he lived in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was born and which forms the introductory chapter to this book. He is good, too, on the economics of segregation, the racial divisions of the American working class, and the role of the black establishment the churches, schools, voluntary societies, masonic clubs, and more that held black society together. He is also good about the divisions within black society, the urban adjustment problems of rural migrants now living in crowded cities. But best of all, especially to musicians and jazz fans, he is great about the musical life of Chicago, the Pershing and Du Sable venues, and the Jim Crow squalor of Calumet City, the sin suburb of Chicago.

Where this book really scores is in its investigation of the sheer otherness of Sun Ra. His arcane philosophies, his odd musical mixture of swing, Latin dance, doo-wop and jazz experimentation, his community involvement, all set him aside from the black mainstream of the day, although links to the later AACM and other groups are evident. For Ra was involved in building a new black utopia, a modernist vision built on a wayward reading of black African history that allowed him to see the possibilities of urban life in new ways.

Ra is now associated with Afrofuturism, although that term was unknown to him, as it was only coined in 1994. But he did bring ancient Africa and outer space to Chicago to give musical shape to this future world, thus Africanising outer space to stake a claim in a newly liberated zone. Ra might have been an errant and confusing traveller, but as the years roll on after his death, the importance of Ra continues to grow, thanks to books like this.

Sun Ras Chicago: Afrofuturism And The City by William Sites. University of Chicago Press, pb, 313 pp including illustrations, notes and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73210-7

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Sun Ra's Chicago: Afrofuturism And The City - Jazz Journal

These are good times for the Offspring -- even if the California punk group's new album is called "Let the Bad Times Roll."

It's actually been nine years since the quartet's last studio album, albeit with an EP and some singles in between. "Bad Times," due out Friday, April 16, was recorded over the course of that interim with producer Bob Rock, and was previewed during 2015 with the single "Coming For You."

In addition to the album, the Offspring has launched a new video series, "How To: With the Offspring," which will share "a vast amount of useful knowledge -- starting with an episode in which frontman Bryan "Dexter" Holland and guitarist Kevin "Noodles" Wasserman teach viewers how to surf...

Despite the long gap between albums Noodles says the Offspring was never concerned about getting "Let the Bad Times Roll" finished and out. "We always knew we were gonna get to it eventually. It might seem like a saga from an outsider's standpoint, but it's really just something we've been working on when we're not touring, or when one of us (Holland) isn't working on his Ph. D. There's a lot of reasons why it took this long to get it done, but honestly the majority of this record, and I think some of the better parts of this record, came together in the last couple years. We just had a real creative time, and things started clicking."

The official music video for The Offsprings Let The Bad Times Roll.

Get the new song and pre-save the upcoming album LET THE BAD TIMES ROLL now at https://found.ee/OffspringBadTimesRoll

While "Bad Times" is not a concept record, Noodles says the title and title track, as well as songs such as "This is Not Utopia," were inspired by recent and current events. "It's kind of look at where we find ourselves in the world right now. Our country just went through four crazy years, politically and societally, and it's not over. We're still going through it. Then throw a pandemic on top of that. Things haven't changed that much in nice years since (the Offspring's last album). There's still plenty of (bad stuff) going on in the world that makes people go, 'Omigod!'"

"Bad Times" includes a stripped-down, acoustic version of the Offspring's 1997 single "Gone Away," an arrangement that's been part of the band's live set in recent years. "It really works live. We thought, 'Let's strip it down a little bit. Let's purify it, keep it to its simplest emotions.' It's really a dramatic moment in the show, and our fans really took to it. They've been asking, 'When can we get a studio version?' and eventually we thought, 'OK, we should try it. It's a great idea. Let's dee if we can pull it off,' and this is the result."

Noodles says the "How To" video series is "something that's just fun for us to do when we can't go out and play shows. We don't take it that seriously; It's like, 'Yeah, I know a little something about this...' Some of them are going to be more serious than others, but we want it short, sweet and easily digestible, but also something we know the fans are gonna dig."

With plans to tour the U.K. during November pending, the Offspring is using videos and interviews to promote "Bad Times'" release. Meanwhile the band is continuing to work on material with hopes that it won't take as long to release its next album. "There are some songs that we were working on that we can't put all the pieces together yet. You don't just trash 'em. We probably have four or five songs I want to say are done or close to done for the next record. Right now we're just focusing on getting this record out and touring some, but the next record is also in the back of our heads. We're definitely thinking about that."

The rest is here:

Offspring's first new album in nine years, 5 Things to Know - The Oakland Press

Michael Kors love of theater is a close second to his love of fashion.

He has been to hundreds, probably thousands, of live performances over the past 50-plus years, starting at age five, and has been deeply concerned about the shutdown of Broadway, which he calls the beating heart of New York, and how it has impacted some 87,000 jobs.

Our office is close to the Theater District so we feel part of the community, said Kors, who dedicated his 40th anniversary runway show to Broadway, including making a donation to nonprofit The Actors Fund. When people hear The Actors Fund they think actors, and its for them but also to support the entire army of talent behind the scenes that brings a show to light.We dont want this pool of talent to disappear.

While Kors has been trying to get his fix by streaming theater during quarantine, its not the same, he said. Recently, as New Yorks COVID-19 restrictions have eased, he was able to see Rufus Wainwright perform live as part of an audience of 40. I felt like someone had reconnected a body part that was missing, he said of the thrill, which he is sharing with viewers of his 40th collection film Tuesday, featuring Wainwright and appearances by a cavalcade of Broadway legends, including Chita Rivera and Billy Porter.

As a curtain raiser, WWD dished with the designer about his favorite opening nights, diva crushes, the show hed like to revive and design costumes for.

WWD: What was your first Broadway show?

Michael Kors: Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun. Of course, I was five, so I had no way to know this was not the norm. My mom never took me to see the clunkers. To see Hair, she had to lie to my father and tell him we were going shopping. He thought it was not a good show for an 11-year-old.

WWD: Mine was Annie, and one of my classmates was an orphan, so we were all so jealous.

M.K.: Thats big.

WWD: Who are the divas youll always love? Besides Bette, because thats a given.

M.K.: When I was working at Lothars the hottest ticket was seeing Patti LuPone doing Evita, and you literally felt like you were blown out of your seat backward. Bernadette Peters Sunday in the Park With George, when the first act was finished, I had tears rolling down my face. Anyone who is in the creative world, that show knocks you out. And her voice broke my heart. Angela Lansbury in Sweeney Todd. How did Stephen Sondheim even conceptualize we were going to sit through a show about a mass murderer and find it entertaining? Watching Audra McDonald do Billie Holiday on the stage by herself in Lady Day at Emersons Bar & Grill, you are so riveted. Anything Goes is one of my favorites. When Sutton Foster finished the big tap number, and the audience is feeding off the energy on stage and each other, you cant recapture that on Zoom, streaming or film.

WWD:Did you see Starlight Express with the roller skaters? I loved that.

M.K.: [My husband] Lances first show was Starlight Express, it was Audra McDonalds first show, and Jane Krakowski was in Starlight Express. We were all at a dinner and they looked at me and said, You didnt go see it? I said No, roller skating was not meant to happen on Broadway.

WWD: What about Glenn Close in Sunset Boulevard? That was a moment.

M.K.: We saw it with Glenn, with Betty Buckley, then we saw it in London with Rita Moreno, and Rita let me go onto the stage and got them to press the hydraulic lift, so I got to experience walking down the staircase when it was moving.

Actress Glenn Close in Sunset Boulevard in New York, 2017.Greg Allen/Invision/AP

WWD: Thats big. Craziest experience in the seats?

M.K.: Opening night of revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, we sat down and the person in front of us was dressed all in white with an enormous picture hat on. Even though she was very fabulous from behind and I loved what she was wearing, I kept thinking she was going to ruin the show for me, so I leaned over to say something and realized it was Yoko Ono.

WWD: When I went to see Slave Play, they held the show 25 minutes because Rihanna was late.

M.K.: Did she get a standing ovation?

WWD: Oh no.

M.K.: At Lincoln Center for a celebration for Sondheims 80th birthday, we got there just as the lights were going down, and realized Sondheim was sitting directly across from us. I was knocked out being that close to him as he was experiencing all his work.

WWD: Soundtrack you listen to on repeat?

M.K.: A Chorus Line. I know every word, and I use some of the lyrics in life. All of them are taken from the recordings of the dancers, so they are often the perfect comeback or thought.

Lena Hall and Neil Patrick Harris on opening Night of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 2014.McMullan/Sipa USA

WWD: Best song in A Chorus Line?

M.K.: I love the song, I Can Do That. In life, even if you think you cant, you figure it out. If you said to me, after 40 years what have you learned, its this: Know that things change thats the point and you have to say, I can do that. When I told them I didnt want to do Project Runway, then they said you are a critic at Parsons, you work with students at FIT, I said, I can do that.

WWD: And you did. Worst Broadway behavior youve witnessed? I remember seeing M Butterfly, and at the pivotal moment right before the characters identity is revealed, someone in front of me blurted it out.

M.K.: Thats terrible. We were in the theater the night Patti LuPone stopped the show because someone was using their cell phone. Watching her admonish that man was something. The night we saw Bruce Springsteen on Broadway, his fans were so rabid and started screaming Bruce, Bruce, Bruce and he very gentlemanly said, There will be a moment for that later. And later he let everyone take out their phones, cheer and take photos. The audience is not used to unplugging. Its the same with fashion shows, which people are now often watching through their phones. Backstage in the 80s, I didnt even have a monitor, I had a peep hole.

WWD: Do you remember the before times when you couldnt bring drinks and snacks to your theater seats? Are you team seat snacks or no?

M.K.: Never, ever. Intermission only. Give me a vodka on the rocks at the bar at Sardis during intermission and I run back in time for the second act.

WWD: Last show you saw before the COVID-19 shutdown?

M.K.: David Byrnes American Utopia. If it had to be my last memory, it was a spectacular one. And I dont want to sound like a shallow fashion person but that show was so chic. Chic! Chic! Chic! Everything about it.

David Byrne on opening night of American Utopia in New York, 2020.Greg Allen/Invision/AP

WWD: Fashion-wise, any other shows that have echoed with you?

M.K.: I remember seeing Lauren Bacall in Applause when I was young. It was so big city glamorous. Sign me up for black sequins for days.

WWD:Have you done costumes for Broadway?

M.K.: Not Broadway, but when I was designing Celine in Paris, I got a call from costume designer Arianne Phillips, she was working on the play Up for Grabs in London. She said, well, Madonna is starring, she plays a very powerful art dealer, and I thought the clothes you showed for Celine would be perfect for her character, who is very successful but not the nicest person the world. So she wore a lot of Celine.

WWD: You should do a Broadway show.

M.K.: Id love to redo A Chorus Line.

WWD:What are you excited to see after Broadway reopens? Ahem, Game of Thrones?

M.K.: To be honest with you, we will be so excited well go to things we dont even care about. I will go to a musical version of Designing Women.

WWD: Thats a great idea, you should produce that.

Read more:

Michael Kors Fall 2021 Collection is a Broadway Smash

Michael Kors Will Light Up Broadway for his 40th Anniversary

A Chorus Line, 1987.AP Photo

Excerpt from:

Broadway Baby: Michael Kors on 50 Years of Opening Nights, Diva Crushes and a Dream Revival - WWD

Grunge. Wu-Tang Clan. Radiohead. Wonderwall. The music of the 90s was as exciting as it was diverse. But what does it say about the eraand why does it still matter? On our new show, 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, Ringer music writer and 90s survivor Rob Harvilla embarks on a quest to answer those questions, one track at a time. Follow and listen for free exclusively on Spotify. Below is an excerpt from Episode 25, which explores Bjrks Hyperballad with help from Rumaan Alam.

Bjrk Guomundsdttir was born in Reykjavk, Iceland, in 1965. Technically she recorded her first album as an 11-year-old; she sings the Beatles The Fool on the Hill in Icelandic. A decade or so later, she joined the Sugarcubes, Icelands premiere art-rock band. They sounded like Twilight Zone Roxette. The first and best Sugarcubes record, Lifes Too Goodits got Motorcrash on itcame out in 1988, the year they played Saturday Night Live. Matthew Broderick was the host.

The Sugarcubes put out two more records and had a beguiling junk-drawer chemistry to them, but anytime Bjrks voice pulled into anything past second gear, it was obvious where she was headedor, lets say it was obvious that only she knew where she was headed. And thus, in 1993, did her real first solo album arrive. She called it Debut. In her first music video as a solo artist, for her first single, Human Behavior, she is eaten by a bear. Beavis and Butt-head reacted accordingly.

High praise.

A quick word on genre, if I may. On the show, Im gonna talk about a bunch of other artists whose Venn diagrams overlapped with Bjrks, starting here in the early 90s, in terms of vibe, in terms of fearless experimentation, in terms of a cutting-edge collision of the organic and the synthetic, in terms of a mellow but slippery ominousness. All of that sounds vague, I realize, but can we agree that trip-hop is the dumbest name for a musical genre that emerged in the 1990s? Can you imagine yourself saying the words trip-hop to the face of an artist you associate with trip-hop? Not even Bjrk can redeem the words trip-hop. Debut has some legit house-music jams, some bangers. One of which is called Violently Happy. Its got avant-garde jazz. Its got 23rd-century synth pop. Its got a harp ballad called Like Someone in Love that makes it sound like nobody had ever written about being in love before. Sometimes the things I do astound me.

Debuts genre, if you gotta assign a genre to it, is Bjrk. Bjrk makes Bjrk music. Theres a needle to thread here though, as her star ascends in 1993, and as we gird ourselves for the decades of Bjrk excellence and flamboyance to come. A quick summary of the last 25, 30 years of Bjrk. The truly extraordinary run of mind-bending music videos. Bachelorette especially, shout-out Michele Gondry. The increasingly avant-garde album covers. Utopia especially. The titanic avant-pop influence of the albums themselves, Post and 1997s Homeogenic especially. The Timbaland album. The beatboxing album. The phone-app album. The starring role in Dancer in the Dark. (Terrible movie. Terrible movie. That movie does Bjrk dirty in every conceivable respect. Do not talk to me about Dancer in the Dark.) The Oscars swan dress. The coffee-table book. The other book. The other other book. Like 400 box sets and compilations and so forth. Lotta box sets. The MOMA exhibit nobody liked. The multimedia magical-realist universe that revolves around her. The needle to thread here, the challenge to accept here, is to marvel at the inimitable Bjrk-ness of Bjrk without infantilizing her or merely caricaturing her. Theres a tendency to reduce her to a woodland-fairy-type late-night-comedy routine. Remember when Winona Ryder did a Bjrk impression on Saturday Night Live, in a Celebrity Jeopardy! skit, in 2002? Thats the exact moment the 90s truly ended, just FYI.

You gotta hold in your head two conflicting ideas here: Bjrk is not of this earth, and yet Bjrk is very much of this earth. Very few people in history are more of this earth than she is. Takes a while to wrap your head around this. I lived in Bjrks neighborhood, in Brooklyn, for many years, but I never wouldve put it that way at the time: I wouldve insisted that Bjrk lived on the moon, or on the rings of Saturn. But this does her a disservice; this denies her humanity. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of her art. Theres a difference between respecting her as an outlandish visionary and dismissing her as some sort of baffling space alien. Thats the needle to thread. As a generator of madcap ideas and highfalutin concepts, shes superhuman, but as a singer of songs, as a fount of emotions, she is profoundly human. She sings the words Im a fountain of blood because thats literally what she is. A fountain of blood is literally what you are, while were at it. No one delivers words quite the same way Bjrk delivers words, but the intent, the sentiment of those words, quite often, couldnt be plainer. This is the miracle of Bjrk, but shes not a miracle. Shes just a girl, vamping in the showroom of a tire store, spinning amidst a sea of twirling umbrellas, dancing with a mailbox, and ascending on a crane until shes dominating the frame of Spike Jonzes camera with her finger to her lips, standing in front of you, asking you to love her.

To hear the full episode click here, and be sure to follow on Spotify and check back every Wednesday for new episodes on the most important songs of the decade. This excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Read the original:

'60 Songs That Explain the '90s': How Bjrk Became a Genre Unto Herself - The Ringer