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carolinemillerbooks · 4 years ago

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New Post has been published on Books by Caroline Miller

New Post has been published on https://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/social-concerns/prisoners-of-ourselves/

Prisoners Of Ourselves

When war is declared, people know what to expect: death, destruction, and a society descending into the chaos. Shortages follow–food and medical supplies, clean water, power… Next, come the stories of loved ones lost. The wounds of war never heal but leave a residue of hatred time won’t assuage. Many of us in the United States sense a coming crisis, one that could lead to war. The signs are everywhere and frightening because some of our leaders choose to use democracy as a weapon against us, leaders who have sworn to uphold the law yet defy court orders. Shall we have free and fair elections? Our president presumes to decide that question, depending on whether his wins or losses. If the vote goes against him, he does not commit to a peaceful transition and hints that war will come. Similar to Germany before World Ward 11, those who feel oppressed are looking to escape the advancing bedlam. Some African Americans admit they are making plans to leave the country. That’s bad news for America as those who make the transition are likely to be educated and with enough financial wherewithal to do so. Their cohorts they leave behind, more vulnerable and condemned to hide in the shadows of curtained windows while Proud Boys march in the streets. James Baldwin took the path of self-exile at age 24, having described his life in the United States as one of “watching and outwitting white people.” (“Is It Time To Get Lost?” by Karl Taro Greenfield, Town&Country, October 2020, pg. 88.) Even so, he never cut ties with his homeland and admitted he was uncomfortable with his life as a “transatlantic commuter.” Having lived as an expert, I know the pull of home. Wherever I wandered, I was always an American. Heritage can’t be shed like a suit of old clothes. The same was true for the African Americans I met in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Most of them were on their way back to places like Georgia, Texas, or Alabama. Their African experiences hadn’t turned out as planned. Retracing their roots hadn’t brought them home. In Africa, they faced a different prejudice: hostility to their money, to their expectations, and to their presumption they were better informed. If a society exists without prejudice, I’ve yet to discover it. Flee to Canada and it exists. Or France, or most countries in the world. As far as I can tell, the human race has always been at war with itself. Other species turn against their kind. The difference for humans is that we’ve weaponized our hostilities and are capable of endangering life as we know it on this planet. Making sense of our violent impulses should be our prime directive. Unfortunately, the times aren’t right for reflection. We are too busy battling a pandemic and attempting to salvage what’s left of our tattered social structures. Bombs may not be falling, but the guns are here. Faced with an apocalypse whom can we look to for guidance? To politicians? To the healers? To those who would have us pray? They’ve done their work and yet, we find ourselves standing at the edge of a black hole. In this case, even science is impotent. It can describe the universe with accuracy, but it is unable to tell us how to live peacefully in it. Ordinary people will have to lead where others have failed. Their sanity must be strong enough to drag the demented with them, those who have grown deaf, dumb, and blind to the corruption that threatens our democracy. They point to a good economy. What matters is our values. Whether ordinary people succeed or not in their mission, the final reckoning will be left to the artists. Making sense of human recklessness has ben their charge since Homer and carried forward through time, creating masterworks like Erich Maria Remarque‘s World War 1 epic, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Pablo Picasso’s painting, Guernica— a lacerating portrait of what seemed to have become World War 11’s banal atrocities. Yes, the arts can be relied upon to cast an unforgiving eye upon our species, to examine the wreckage of our existence like forensic investigators. Yet, I grow old. I begin to fear their discerning eyes will never explain why our species, though inventive, has never found the means to escape our destructive impulses. Perhaps Nature requires the brutality within us, a fail-safe to end an experiment when it no longer entertains.

#A coming war?#America in a time of a pandemic #art as history's interpreters #Betrayal of our leaders #citizens immigrating #democracy turned against us #Karl Taro Greenfield #Proud Boys

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thealistart-blog · 7 years ago

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Mega-Collector Judith Neilson on her Passion for Contemporary Chinese Art and Future Projects

If you happen to bump into Judith Neilson while exploring Sydney’s amazing White Rabbit Gallery of Contemporary Chinese Art, you would be forgiven for thinking that she was just another one of the many visitors who tour the gallery’s much-anticipated exhibitions each year. Although she is the founder of the White Rabbit Gallery and one of the richest women in Australia, the Zimbabwe-born art collector and philanthropist is amazingly humble, unassuming, and down-to-earth – the antitype of the clichéd wealthy art collector stereotype.

Judith opened the White Rabbit Gallery in 2009 to showcase her ever-growing collection, which currently consists of around 2500 works by more than 500 artists, making is one of the world’s largest and most significant collections of contemporary Chinese art. The gallery presents two new exhibitions a year, each involving a full rehang, with the next exhibition, titled “The Sleeper Awakes,” due to open on 9 March. Taking its titled from HG Wells’s novel The Sleeper Awakes, the exhibition shines a spotlight on the dichotomous characteristics of Chinese society.

Judith was inspired to establish the White Rabbit Gallery during a trip to Beijing in 2001. She was so impressed with the “creative energy and technical quality” of the works she encountered, that she wanted to share the works with people outside of China. Judith continues to contribute to the development of the cultural fabric of Sydney and Australia with new projects such as the Dangrove storage facility as well as the AUD$41 million “Phoenix” performance space, sculpture garden, and gallery which is due to open this year.

In the interview below, Judith talks about her passion for art and architecture as well as the development of her new Dangrove Project – a new state-of-the-art storage and education facility.

When did you first start collecting art and what inspired and motivated you to start collecting?

I have collected art since I was a child. Our home was filled with art and art-making, and collecting was a natural extension of that.

Why and how did you develop such an interest and focus on Chinese contemporary art?

I'd collected art from many places, but when I first went to China, in the late 1990s, I was really struck by the quality of the art and the enthusiasm of the artists. As a lifelong collector I am not that easy to impress, yet I saw one artwork after another that I wanted to buy. The contemporary art scene in China had an excitement about art and its possibilities that I hadn’t come across in a long time.

How would you describe your approach and philosophy when it comes to collecting art?

I am not collecting for resale and profit, so I don’t worry about auction prices and artist popularity. I’ve seen a vast number of artworks over the years, so my eye is pretty well educated. And it’s my eye that determines what I collect—I buy what I genuinely like.

What made you decide to open the White Rabbit Gallery and what is your vision for its future?

I wanted to share my collection of Chinese contemporary art with as many people as possible, especially people who’d never visited an art museum or gallery before. White Rabbit has succeeded far beyond my expectations. I hope it will continue to show people that contemporary art at its best is beautiful, challenging, exciting. And I hope it will let people view and appreciate art in their own way, without being told what they should and shouldn’t like.

How do you choose which artists and artworks to include in your collection?

I don’t pay attention to names, it’s the artwork I care about. It’s all visual. The work has to grab me and stay with me. For me, art isn’t an intellectual exercise, it’s a kind of romance.

Tell us a bit about your new Dangrove project – your goals and aims for the project and your vision for its future?

Dangrove is a huge facility on the site of a former warehouse. It will house the entire White Rabbit Collection, which is growing all the time. It's specially designed by the architect Alec Tzannes and due for completion by the end of this year. It will be a world leader in art storage. Everything about it is state-of-the-art, from individually climate-controlled spaces to conservation areas.

What are some of your recent acquisitions?

I’d rather not single anything out, because I like everything I buy and the White Rabbit Collection is growing all the time. I also prefer not to give the impression that I’m promoting particular artists.

How did your childhood and your experiences growing up influence and effect your love of art and the way you view and perceive art?

My sisters and I grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Our parents were very creative, and they encouraged us in a huge range of artistic activities—sculpture, weaving, pottery, screen printing, batik, calligraphy, watercolour painting. And of course we also saw and collected basketwork, pottery and paintings made by ordinary Africans. So I grew up with a love of art and a very broad conception of what art meant. That was further extended when I worked as a graphic designer.

What has been your most memorable experience as an art collector and why?

It’s hard to single out just one. One of the first things I ever collected was a bell. I loved its shape and I loved looking at it. I had brass bells just like it buried in the foundations of Indigo Slam. One of my most treasured memories is of meeting the South African artist Dumile Feni, who painted life in the black townships in the 1960s. I have two of his paintings and will never forget him.

You also have a passion for architecture. Could you explain how this is reflected in Indigo Slam and the Judith Neilson Chair in Architecture?

With Indigo Slam, I was starting from scratch, so I wanted to make something great. The architect, William Smart, designed the White Rabbit Gallery, so he knows how I think and vice versa. One inspiration for Indigo Slam was the Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza, who uses concrete in a sculptural way. I also wanted the building structure to do some of the work that furnishings normally do. So instead of curtains there are vertical timber blinds operated by a built-in mechanism. And the building shell has slits and skylights that bring this wonderful soft light into the whole house.

Having a lovely secure home made me extra conscious of the plight of people who find themselves suddenly ejected from their homes and forced to live in tent cities and the like. My main aim in establishing the Chair in Architecture at the University of New South Wales was to fund research on innovative ways to house people displaced in large numbers by wars and natural disasters.

#china #chinese #chineseart #phoenix #phoenixrising #whiterabbitgallery #whiterabbitcollection #judithneilson #sydney #australia #art #artist #gallery #museum #dangrove

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bigyack-com · 5 years ago

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Notable Deaths in 2019: A World of Women Who Shattered Ceilings

Almost all were born between the world wars, one even before women had the right to vote. They came from white-collar homes and blue-, from black households and white. But when they died this year, they had something in common besides the final leveling that death brings. They had all found a place in a world that rarely, if ever, had been open to women.Whether one or the other was the absolute first to break a glass ceiling could be open to debate. But let’s say, at the least, that each planted a foot inside a door that had long been closed to women and then shouldered her way in — to a roomful of men.Ruth Abrams was one. In 1977 she became the first woman to take a seat on the highest court in Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court. It had taken 285 years (that is not a typo) — since the court’s founding in 1692. (Another notable juridical event that year was the start of the Salem witch trials.)Ellen Bree Burns overcame similar obstacles in Connecticut, also in the 1970s — a signal decade in which feminism’s second wave was just beginning to build strength. She became the first woman to rise to the bench of her state’s major trial court and the first woman to be named to a federal court there.Patricia M. Wald, too, was not to be denied a black robe, even after taking a decade-long detour to raise five children at home. In 1979, she became the first woman to serve on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, by most reckonings the second most influential court in the country. A kindred progressive spirit, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, soon joined her on that bench.In a quite different arena but one no less fueled by testosterone, Bonnie Guitar, born Bonnie Buckingham, had one of the earliest records (“Dark Moon”) by a female country singer to cross over to the pop chart. Even more significant was her work away from the mic. Crashing another men’s club, she became a force in the studio, engineering records, scouting talent and starting her own label.Barbara Gardner Proctor had to force open two doors before finding a place in the “Mad Men” advertising world of the 1960s: one blocking women, the other African-Americans. But she pushed anyway, becoming, according to the industry, the first black woman in America to establish her own agency, Proctor & Gardner, in Chicago. (There actually was no Gardner; she added the name to reassure wary prospective clients that “her partner” was a man.)Before 1972, an educational institution could discriminate against women and still receive federal funding, no questions asked. That changed with the passage of Title IX that year, encoding equity in law. And if there was one person to thank for that sea change, it was Bernice Sandler, who had once been told, in being denied a full-time university teaching job, “You come on too strong for a woman.”She did come on strong. Through scholarly writings, tireless lobbying and persuasive advocacy in the courts, she was, more than anyone, the catalyst behind Title IX.There were others: Barbara Low, one of the few women in scientific research in the 1940s, advanced our understanding of penicillin, leading to a cornucopia of antibiotics that continue to save lives. Rosemary Mariner, a baby boomer pilot, became the first woman to command a naval aviation squadron and then led a successful fight to get Congress to lift a ban on women serving in combat. And Florence Knoll Bassett, a designer and businesswoman, gave the modern office its streamlined shape and feel. Ms. Knoll ran a thriving company with her husband, but one look at a grainy black and white photo that ran with her obituary in these pages last January will tell you everything you’d need to know about the world she had to navigate: There she was, in 1953, the lone woman seated at a large conference table ringed by white men in white shirts and ties.For every glass ceiling broken, however, there was an untold number of women who in reaching higher came up empty-handed. By all accounts, Geraldyn M. Cobb had the right stuff to become an astronaut in the early years of the American space program. A veteran pilot, she held records in speed, altitude and distance before sailing through a battery of demanding physical and psychological tests that put her in the top 2 percent of all the program’s aspirants, including men. She was nevertheless left behind as a group of NASA pioneers, all men, paraded off into history. Though she lived a rewarding life — notably as a humanitarian flying medicine, food and clothing to indigenous people in the Amazon — she died, in her eyes, forever earthbound.

Athletic Firsts, Too

Not all the barrier breakers who died in 2019 were women, of course. The N.B.A. lost one in Wat Misaka, a son of Japanese immigrants who became the league’s first nonwhite player, and Major League Baseball lost three. Elijah “Pumpsie” Green is not much remembered for his career on the diamond, mediocre as it was, but he made a bit of history just by striding onto the field for the Boston Red Sox in July 1959, becoming the first black player on a team that was the last in the major leagues to breach the color line, 12 years after Jackie Robinson had made the Brooklyn Dodgers the first.Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field was also home to Don Newcombe, widely regarded as the major leagues’ first outstanding black pitcher, a Cy Young winner and a National League M.V.P. As fate would have it, his death, in February, came just 12 days after that of an even grander man of the game, Frank Robinson, who stayed in baseball after a Hall of Fame career in Baltimore to become the major leagues’ first black manager.They are on a long roster of sports stars who died this year. The N.B.A. mourned the loss of John Havlicek, a basketball dynamo who tasted championship glory in two distinct eras with the Boston Celtics. The N.F.L bade farewell to Bart Starr, the Green Bay Packers’ champion quarterback, whose sterling execution on the field was a visible manifestation of Coach Vince Lombardi’s genius.Athletes give us drama about human struggle, determination and excellence, but they also entertain us, and in that they share something with all those who mount stages and appear in front of cameras. Broadway typically (and wonderfully) dims its lights when one of its own has gone. But when it did so for Carol Channing last January, the gesture was never more apt. It may be falling back on press-agentry boilerplate to say that the star of “Hello, Dolly!” and “Gentleman Prefer Blondes” lit up stages with her irrepressibly high-spirited performances over an impossibly long career. But, really, more than almost anyone, didn’t she?Equally incandescent was the ballerina Alicia Alonso, who overcame near-blindness to become a globe-trotting star and ambassador of Cuban ballet; Norma Miller, the “Queen of Swing,” who cut rugs, stages and even Harlem sidewalks with her spectacularly acrobatic Lindy Hopping; and Jessye Norman, the magnificent American soprano who seemingly collected as many laurels — Grammy Awards, Kennedy Center honors — as curtain call bouquets.Like Ms. Channing, Doris Day, too, bridged singing and acting. But she did it in Hollywood, becoming its biggest box-office star in diverting romantic comedies opposite leading men like Rock Hudson and Cary Grant, all while earning a reputation, deserved or not, for sugary wholesomeness to rival that of apple pie.And Albert Finney found a kind of trans-Atlantic crossover appeal by bouncing between Hollywood and the stage in his native England, where he had gotten his start as one of the fabled “angry young men” of British postwar theater.The year saw a host of familiar faces from television’s past become instantly recognizable once more — only now in photos accompanying their obituaries: Diahann Carroll (“Julia”), Valerie Harper (“Rhoda”) and Luke Perry (“Beverly Hills, 90210”), to name just three. (By contrast, Caroll Spinney, under all those feathers, was faceless to his viewers, but his alter ego, Big Bird, as bright as sunshine, needed no introduction.)Popular music lost the likes of the drummer Ginger Baker, one of the rock gods of the ’60s; João Gilberto, the Brazilian guitarist and singer and a founding father of bossa nova; Dr. John, the rollicking, gravelly voice of New Orleans; and Ric Ocasek, the singing engine of the Cars, the hit-making band that arrived with rock’s new wave in the late ’70s. And practically every genre of music could claim the death of the restlessly versatile André Previn as its own particular loss; a composer, conductor and pianist, he had crisscrossed boundaries in a peripatetic career that brought him a clutch of Oscars and a shelf of Grammys — half of them in classical music, half of them not. Behind every performer, of course, is someone who provides the stage, and few impresarios had as much boffo success as Hal Prince, the king of Broadway; Franco Zeffirelli, whose opera stagings were as extravagant as he was colorful; and Robert Evans, the Hollywood executive who essentially greenlighted a new film era while leading so cinematic a life, of downfalls and comebacks, that it will doubtless one day resurface in a biopic script.The world at large offered a different stage, with all too real dramas, to the likes of Robert Mugabe, the liberator-turned-tyrant of Zimbabwe; Jacques Chirac, the French president who embraced European unity when that was still a bold idea; Yasuhiro Nakasone, who could still recall the embers of war in championing Japan’s return to international influence; Moshe Arens, the politician and statesman and one of the last of Israel’s founding Zionists; and Mohamed Morsi, who, speaking of barrier breakers, became Egypt’s first democratically elected president after all those millenniums, only to be ousted within a year in favor of more autocracy.In Washington, Elijah Cummings’s lawmaking was cut short. As the powerful, principled and full-throated chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, charged with protecting the integrity of government, he was in the thick of investigating actions by President Trump when he died at 68 in his beloved Baltimore, a little more than two months before his fellow Democratic House members voted for impeachment.His death was followed 10 days later by that of his colleague John Conyers, the longest-serving African-American in congressional history (52 years).

IX, 18 and 25 = Impact

The Senate, too, lost pillars. Birch Bayh, the liberal Democrat from Indiana, had as impactful a career as any in that chamber, attaching his name to landmark legislation identifiable by numbers: enforcing fairness through Title IX, lowering the voting age to 18, and providing for the removal of a president through a constitutional mechanism other than impeachment, the 25th Amendment.Within about six weeks of his death, in March, two former colleagues, Senate lions both, were gone: Ernest Hollings (Fritz to almost everyone), a South Carolinian and Democratic civil rights champion who had his eye on the White House at one point; and the courtly Republican Richard Lugar, another Hoosier, who had as much clout in foreign affairs as any modern-era senator ever had.In July, the 99-year-old body of Justice John Paul Stevens lay in state across the street from the Capitol in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court of the United States, where he arrived in 1975 as a former Republican antitrust lawyer and left 35 years later a changed man — a stalwart of the court’s liberal wing.And in early December it was Paul Volcker who was remembered — for shaping his country’s economic policy and taming inflation from the corridors of another marble-clad Washington institution, the Federal Reserve, where he was chairman under Presidents Carter and Reagan.If Mr. Volcker was at heart a public-spirited man of business, a well-paid product of Wall Street who took a cut in salary to work for his country, Ross Perot was a politically minded one who would have gladly given up his executive suite in Texas for the Oval Office. A billionaire force in the computer services industry, he became an unlikely and surprisingly strong independent populist candidate for president in the ’90s, a folk hero to some and a folksy odd duck to others.For all the publicity Mr. Perot received, however, his influence on American politics paled before that of the industrialist David H. Koch, who went about his work far less noisily. He and his brother Charles tapped their vast energy and chemicals fortune to finance a right-wing libertarian movement that by all indications will far outlive both.The most powerful of business leaders inevitably acquire a public face, and none did so more successfully than Lee Iacocca. More than running two of the nation’s biggest automakers, he “came to personify Detroit as the dream factory of America’s postwar love affair with the automobile,” as his obituary said. A son of a hot-dog vendor, he was a gregarious self-made man who became a household name as an industry titan, television pitchman and best-selling author.Felix Rohatyn, too, became a public man after scaling the heights of Wall Street, summoned to rescue New York City in the gritty, scuffling ’70s as it teetered on the edge of a fiscal abyss. And while we’re thinking about New York (command central for eruptions of “Auld Lang Syne”), let’s not forget Robert Morgenthau, a patrician son of the city who chased every known sort of criminal as Manhattan D.A. for so long that one might be forgiven for mistaking his age at his death, 99, for the number of years he served.Other giants fell. The world of letters lost Toni Morrison, still another groundbreaker as the first African-American woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, honored for her powerfully moving novels that sang of an often brutal, racially torn America in the resilient cadences of the black oral tradition.And Harold Bloom, the prodigious literary critic who, in championing the Western canon in an ever more multicultural world, endured ample criticism himself, earning a characterization seldom attached to a scholar: America’s most notorious.And Mary Oliver and W.S. Merwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning poets who earned the added distinction of being widely read.And Herman Wouk, the prolific, best-selling, movie-inspiring author who practically died writing, mid-book, leaving a sheaf of blank pages.

The Last Survivors

Journalism — and the Washington that reared her — lost Cokie Roberts, who brought a tough, knowing take on American politics to television audiences for decades, and Russell Baker, the New York Times humorist (and “Masterpiece Theater” host) who, with his wry observations on politics and other arenas of national life, didn’t so much bash his targets as poke them.Elsewhere, three of the most renowned architects of the last half of the 20th century died in 2019: I.M. Pei, Kevin Roche and Cesar Pelli. And Karl Lagerfeld, that indefatigable definer of high fashion, and Gloria Vanderbilt, who poured a generation of women into designer jeans, left their most stylish of scenes.The art world lost, among others, Robert Frank, who changed the course of documentary photography with his 35-millimeter Leica and a penetrating eye that saw an increasingly disjointed world in a new, strikingly off-kilter way, and Carlos Cruz-Diez, a towering figure of postwar Latin American art whose deep immersions in brilliant color seemed to evoke the dazzling sunlight of his native Venezuela.The sciences, too, were drained of immense brainpower — for one, that of the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel laureate who glimpsed the structure of the universe through its tiniest particles of matter the way a geologist might comprehend the Earth in a grain of sand.Which, in a free-associating sort of way, brings to mind an hourglass — one that might measure the passing of an era’s few remaining survivors: grains of sand, pulled by gravity, trickling away until all are gone.The scholar Charles van Doren was one, his death evoking the distant quiz show scandals of the 1950s. Edward Nixon was another, carrying the unwelcome burden — familiar to overshadowed siblings everywhere — of forever reminding us, by his very facial features, of Richard. Edda Goering and Rudolf von Ribbentrop carried pedigrees that harked back to the evil of Hitler, while Dick Churchill (no relation to Hitler’s nemesis) recalled a bracing moment for the Allies in World War II, the “Great Escape” from a prisoner-of-war camp. He was the last survivor of the 76 who had made the attempt. But he had been a survivor before: After only three men had made it to freedom, and after the Germans had executed 50 of those who had failed, Churchill was somehow spared. He lived another 75 years.And then there was Julia Ruth Stevens. It’s been 71 years since her “Daddy,” Babe Ruth, died, but over those many decades she remained a living link to him, showing up at old-timers’ games to accept the cheers of baseball fans to whom the Sultan of Swat was more legend than flesh and blood. Ms. Stevens reminded us that, yes, he put his pinstripes on the same way the ball boys did.“I miss him even to this day,” she said not too many years ago.Who among his intimates is left to say that as 2020 is about to dawn? To hazard a guess, no one. The last grain of sand has fallen.William McDonald is the obituaries editor of The Times Read the full article

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biofunmy · 5 years ago

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In a Year of Notable Deaths, a World of Women Who Shattered Ceilings

They had all found a place in a world that rarely, if ever, had been open to women.

Whether one or the other was the absolute first to break a glass ceiling could be open to debate. But let’s say, at the least, that each planted a foot inside a door that had long been closed to women and then shouldered her way in — to a roomful of men.

Ruth Abrams was one. In 1977 she became the first woman to take a seat on the highest court in Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court. It had taken 285 years (that is not a typo) — since the court’s founding in 1692. (Another notable juridical event that year was the start of the Salem witch trials.)

Ellen Bree Burns overcame similar obstacles in Connecticut, also in the 1970s — a signal decade in which feminism’s second wave was just beginning to build strength. She became the first woman to rise to the bench of her state’s major trial court and the first woman to be named to a federal court there.

Patricia M. Wald, too, was not to be denied a black robe, even after taking a decade-long detour to raise five children at home. In 1979, she became the first woman to serve on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, by most reckonings the second most influential court in the country. A kindred progressive spirit, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, soon joined her on that bench.

In a quite different arena but one no less fueled by testosterone, Bonnie Guitar, born Bonnie Buckingham, had one of the earliest records (“Dark Moon”) by a female country singer to cross over to the pop chart. Even more significant was her work away from the mic. Crashing another men’s club, she became a force in the studio, engineering records, scouting talent and starting her own label.

Barbara Gardner Proctor, who died just before the year began, had to force open two doors before finding a place in the “Mad Men” advertising world of the 1960s: one blocking women, the other African-Americans. But she pushed anyway, becoming, according to the industry, the first black woman in America to establish her own agency, Proctor & Gardner, in Chicago. (There actually was no Gardner; she added the name to reassure wary prospective clients that “her partner” was a man.)

Before 1972, an educational institution could discriminate against women and still receive federal funding, no questions asked. That changed with the passage of Title IX that year, encoding equity in law. And if there was one person to thank for that sea change, it was Bernice Sandler, who had once been told, in being denied a full-time university teaching job, “You come on too strong for a woman.”

She did come on strong. Through scholarly writings, tireless lobbying and persuasive advocacy in the courts, she was, more than anyone, the catalyst behind Title IX.

There were others: Barbara Low, one of the few women in scientific research in the 1940s, advanced our understanding of penicillin, leading to a cornucopia of antibiotics that continue to save lives. Rosemary Mariner, a baby boomer pilot, became the first woman to command a naval aviation squadron and then led a successful fight to get Congress to lift a ban on women serving in combat. And Florence Knoll Bassett, a designer and businesswoman, gave the modern office its streamlined shape and feel.

Ms. Knoll ran a thriving company with her husband, but one look at a grainy black and white photo that ran with her obituary in these pages last January will tell you everything you’d need to know about the world she had to navigate: There she was, in 1953, the lone woman seated at a large conference table ringed by white men in white shirts and ties.

For every glass ceiling broken, however, there was an untold number of women who in reaching higher came up empty-handed. By all accounts, Geraldyn M. Cobb had the right stuff to become an astronaut in the early years of the American space program. A veteran pilot, she held records in speed, altitude and distance before sailing through a battery of demanding physical and psychological tests that put her in the top 2 percent of all the program’s aspirants, including men. She was nevertheless left behind as a group of NASA pioneers, all men, paraded off into history. Though she lived a rewarding life — notably as a humanitarian flying medicine, food and clothing to indigenous people in the Amazon — she died, in her eyes, forever earthbound.

Athletic Firsts, Too

Elijah “Pumpsie” Green is not much remembered for his career on the diamond, mediocre as it was, but he made a bit of history just by striding onto the field for the Boston Red Sox in July 1959, becoming the first black player on a team that was the last in the major leagues to breach the color line, 12 years after Jackie Robinson had made the Brooklyn Dodgers the first.

Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field was also home to Don Newcombe, widely regarded as the major leagues’ first outstanding black pitcher, a Cy Young winner and a National League M.V.P. As fate would have it, his death, in February, came just 12 days after that of an even grander man of the game, Frank Robinson, who stayed in baseball after a Hall of Fame career in Baltimore to become the major leagues’ first black manager.

They are on a long roster of sports stars who died this year. The N.B.A. mourned the loss of John Havlicek, a basketball dynamo who tasted championship glory in two distinct eras with the Boston Celtics. The N.F.L bade farewell to Bart Starr, the Green Bay Packers’ champion quarterback, whose sterling execution on the field was a visible manifestation of Coach Vince Lombardi’s genius.

Athletes give us drama about human struggle, determination and excellence, but they also entertain us, and in that they share something with all those who mount stages and appear in front of cameras. Broadway typically (and wonderfully) dims its lights when one of its own has gone. But when it did so for Carol Channing last January, the gesture was never more apt. It may be falling back on press-agentry boilerplate to say that the star of “Hello, Dolly!” and “Gentleman Prefer Blondes” lit up stages with her irrepressibly high-spirited performances over an impossibly long career. But, really, more than almost anyone, didn’t she?

Equally incandescent was the ballerina Alicia Alonso, who overcame near-blindness to become a globe-trotting star and ambassador of Cuban ballet; Norma Miller, the “Queen of Swing,” who cut rugs, stages and even Harlem sidewalks with her spectacularly acrobatic Lindy Hopping; and Jessye Norman, the magnificent American soprano who seemingly collected as many laurels — Grammy Awards, Kennedy Center honors — as curtain call bouquets.

Like Ms. Channing, Doris Day, too, bridged singing and acting. But she did it in Hollywood, becoming its biggest box-office star in diverting romantic comedies opposite leading men like Rock Hudson and Cary Grant, all while earning a reputation, deserved or not, for sugary wholesomeness to rival that of apple pie.

And Albert Finney found a kind of trans-Atlantic crossover appeal by bouncing between Hollywood and the stage in his native England, where he had gotten his start as one of the fabled “angry young men” of British postwar theater.

The year saw a host of familiar faces from television’s past become instantly recognizable once more — only now in photos accompanying their obituaries: Diahann Carroll (“Julia”), Valerie Harper (“Rhoda”) and Luke Perry (“Beverly Hills, 90210”), to name just three. (By contrast, Caroll Spinney, under all those feathers, was faceless to his viewers, but his alter ego, Big Bird, as bright as sunshine, needed no introduction.)

Popular music lost the likes of the drummer Ginger Baker, one of the rock gods of the ’60s; João Gilberto, the Brazilian guitarist and singer and a founding father of bossa nova; Dr. John, the rollicking, gravelly voice of New Orleans; and Ric Ocasek, the singing engine of the Cars, the hit-making band that arrived with rock’s new wave in the late ’70s.

And practically every genre of music could claim the death of the restlessly versatile André Previn as its own particular loss; a composer, conductor and pianist, he had crisscrossed boundaries in a peripatetic career that brought him a clutch of Oscars and a shelf of Grammys — half of them in classical music, half of them not.

Behind every performer, of course, is someone who provides the stage, and few impresarios had as much boffo success as Hal Prince, the king of Broadway; Franco Zeffirelli, whose opera stagings were as extravagant as he was colorful; and Robert Evans, the Hollywood executive who essentially greenlighted a new film era while leading so cinematic a life, of downfalls and comebacks, that it will doubtless one day resurface in a biopic script.

The world at large offered a different stage, with all too real dramas, to the likes of Robert Mugabe, the liberator-turned-tyrant of Zimbabwe; Jacques Chirac, the French president who embraced European unity when that was still a bold idea; Yasuhiro Nakasone, who could still recall the embers of war in championing Japan’s return to international influence; Moshe Arens, the politician and statesman and one of the last of Israel’s founding Zionists; and Mohamed Morsi, who, speaking of barrier breakers, became Egypt’s first democratically elected president after all those millenniums, only to be ousted within a year in favor of more autocracy.

In Washington, Elijah Cummings’s lawmaking was cut short. As the powerful, principled and full-throated chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, charged with protecting the integrity of government, he was in the thick of investigating President Trump’s conduct in office when he died at 68 in his beloved Baltimore, a little more than two months before his fellow Democratic House members voted for impeachment.

His death was followed 10 days later by that of his colleague John Conyers, the longest-serving African-American in congressional history (52 years).

IX, 18 and 25 = Impact

Within about six weeks of his death, in March, two former colleagues, Senate lions both, were gone: Ernest Hollings (Fritz to almost everyone), a South Carolinian and Democratic civil rights champion who had his eye on the White House at one point; and the courtly Republican Richard Lugar, another Hoosier, who had as much clout in foreign affairs as any modern-era senator ever had.

In July, the 99-year-old body of Justice John Paul Stevens lay in state across the street from the Capitol in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court of the United States, where he arrived in 1975 as a former Republican antitrust lawyer and left 35 years later a changed man — a stalwart of the court’s liberal wing.

And in early December it was Paul Volcker who was remembered — for shaping his country’s economic policy and taming inflation from the corridors of another marble-clad Washington institution, the Federal Reserve, where he was chairman under Presidents Carter and Reagan.

If Mr. Volcker was at heart a public-spirited man of business, a well-paid product of Wall Street who took a cut in salary to work for his country, Ross Perot was a politically minded one who would have gladly given up his executive suite in Texas for the Oval Office. A billionaire force in the computer services industry, he became an unlikely and surprisingly strong independent populist candidate for president in the ’90s, a folk hero to some and a folksy odd duck to others.

For all the publicity Mr. Perot received, however, his influence on American politics paled before that of the industrialist David H. Koch, who went about his work far less noisily. He and his brother Charles tapped their vast energy and chemicals fortune to finance a right-wing libertarian movement that by all indications will far outlive both.

The most powerful of business leaders inevitably acquire a public face, and none did so more successfully than Lee Iacocca. More than running two of the nation’s biggest automakers, he “came to personify Detroit as the dream factory of America’s postwar love affair with the automobile,” as his obituary said. A son of a hot-dog vendor, he was a gregarious self-made man who became a household name as an industry titan, television pitchman and best-selling author.

Felix Rohatyn, too, became a public man after scaling the heights of Wall Street, summoned to rescue New York City in the gritty, scuffling ’70s as it teetered on the edge of a fiscal abyss. And while we’re thinking about New York (command central for eruptions of “Auld Lang Syne”), let’s not forget Robert Morgenthau, a patrician son of the city who chased every known sort of criminal as Manhattan D.A. for so long that one might be forgiven for mistaking his age at his death, 99, for the number of years he served.

Other giants fell. The world of letters lost Toni Morrison, still another groundbreaker as the first African-American woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, honored for her powerfully moving novels that sang of an often brutal, racially torn America in the resilient cadences of the black oral tradition.

And Harold Bloom, the prodigious literary critic who, in championing the Western canon in an ever more multicultural world, endured ample criticism himself, earning a characterization seldom attached to a scholar: America’s most notorious.

And Mary Oliver and W.S. Merwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning poets who earned the added distinction of being widely read.

And Herman Wouk, the prolific, best-selling, movie-inspiring author who practically died writing, mid-book, leaving a sheaf of blank pages.

The Last Survivors

Elsewhere, three of the most renowned architects of the last half of the 20th century died in 2019: I.M. Pei, Kevin Roche and Cesar Pelli. And Karl Lagerfeld, that indefatigable definer of high fashion, and Gloria Vanderbilt, who poured a generation of women into designer jeans, left their most stylish of scenes.

The art world lost, among others, Robert Frank, who changed the course of documentary photography with his 35-millimeter Leica and a penetrating eye that saw an increasingly disjointed world in a new, strikingly off-kilter way, and Carlos Cruz-Diez, a towering figure of postwar Latin American art whose deep immersions in brilliant color seemed to evoke the dazzling sunlight of his native Venezuela.

The sciences, too, were drained of immense brainpower — for one, that of the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel laureate who glimpsed the structure of the universe through its tiniest particles of matter the way a geologist might comprehend the Earth in a grain of sand.

Which, in a free-associating sort of way, brings to mind an hourglass — one that might measure the passing of an era’s few remaining survivors: grains of sand, pulled by gravity, trickling away until all are gone.

The scholar Charles van Doren was one, his death evoking the distant quiz show scandals of the 1950s. Edward Nixon was another, carrying the unwelcome burden — familiar to overshadowed siblings everywhere — of forever reminding us, by his very facial features, of Richard. Edda Goering and Rudolf von Ribbentrop carried pedigrees that harked back to the evil of Hitler, while Dick Churchill (no relation to Hitler’s nemesis) recalled a bracing moment for the Allies in World War II, the “Great Escape” from a prisoner-of-war camp. He was the last survivor of the 76 who had made the attempt. But he had been a survivor before: After only three men had made it to freedom, and after the Germans had executed 50 of those who had failed, Churchill was somehow spared. He lived another 75 years.

And then there was Julia Ruth Stevens. It’s been 71 years since her “Daddy,” Babe Ruth, died, but over those many decades she remained a living link to him, showing up at old-timers’ games to accept the cheers of baseball fans to whom the Sultan of Swat was more legend than flesh and blood. Ms. Stevens reminded us that, yes, he put his pinstripes on the same way the ball boys did.

“I miss him even to this day,” she said not too many years ago.

Who among his intimates is left to say that as 2020 is about to dawn? To hazard a guess, no one. The last grain of sand has fallen.

William McDonald is the obituaries editor of The Times

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kevinselders99-blog · 5 years ago

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Finest Safaris in Zambia

Along with welcoming and also accepting folks, Zambia is acknowledged through several being one of the most safe countries on the continent to visit. Zambia is actually the property of the epic African walking safari and is actually house to the earth's most significant waterfall; Victoria Falls. It is actually honored with bush Zambezi River, impressive lakes and also wetlands, a wealth of birds, and also a wealth of wildlife as well as wilderness. Zambia is actually additionally property to some of the finest trips and lodges in Southern Africa, producing this the best place for the veteran as well as brave tourist.

https://absolutezambiasafaris.com/

Some of the most effective safaris in Zambia are actually walking trips which supply a distinct chance to enter into the African bush walking and to acquire closer to the animals in an eco-friendly fashion. On a strolling safari listed below you might see such places as South Luangwa National Park where you may observe pantheras pardus, hippos, zebras and also baboons amongst various other creatures types.

Other popular trips in Zambia consist of camping trips where you can easily acquire near to attributes and definitely experience the African wild, catch trips where you can easily take pleasure in all the journey of a conventional safari but oversleep convenience every evening, overland trips where you can view the highlights and also creatures of several wonderful African nations, and family trips where kids can see unusual animals, join especially planned kids tasks and fulfill kids from a regional college in Luangwa.

If you are searching for a substitute to the principal African safari locations you simply can not pound the trips in Zambia

A Wonderful Safari in Zambia

Discover Zambia's hidden treasure.

I was actually blessed just recently to devote 4 evenings on safari in Zambia, in the excellent splendour of the Lower Zambezi Valley. It's a location I understand effectively, as well as I was actually coming back to a lodge I had actually loved some years formerly. Nevertheless the lodge had been lately taken over and also entirely updated right into what I may now place as one of best resorts I've ever experienced. My company remains in tourism so I have travelled fairly a great deal in Africa and have actually been actually fortunate to have a taste of a few of the greatest cottage available Chipata.

My place - Royal Zambezi Lodge - exists settled on the financial institutions of the Zambezi River in the Lower Zambezi Valley, which is actually component of the Great Rift Valley of Africa. This impressive, unspoilt region is the perfect location to chill out yet it's only 30 moments by lightweight airplane from brimming Lusaka. And the house is actually just 3 kilometres from the Lower Zambezi National Park, which is actually teaming along with video game. With the mighty river extending out in face, the bush as well as the background of the escarpment responsible for, the setup is ideal for a peaceful few times in the bush.

Accommodation is in incredibly luxurious "outdoors tents" on the banks of the river, where the dawn and the daybreak are your get up call each morning. The 8 rooms and 4 sets are really personal, being neighbored through plant, thus there is actually no requirement to use the blinds, and also an uninterrupted photo of daybreak over the Zambezi greets you every morning. This location is kilometers coming from "civilisation" as we know it - there are actually no roads, cars, telephones, cellular phones - only the large elegance of the African bush. The silence is actually broken merely by hippos crying, birds vocal and also, if you are blessed, the sound of hyena and cougar in the evening.

Whilst this location is the ultimate in luxury chill-outs, there are lots of activities where to pick - activity rides as well as strolls, sportfishing for the combating Tiger Fish, boating as well as canoeing. There is actually additionally a remarkable health facility where you could be indulged unacceptable with massages and charm procedures Chipata.

The team are actually incredibly really good - enchanting, welcoming, experienced and also ready. And also the meals is actually exceptional also. Altogether this incredibly unique retreat will definitely introduce you in the best possible way to the "real" Africa. Such luxury arrives at a cost but, for a when in a life time experience of unaffected Africa, this is actually absolutely the place to indulge your own self.

British Airways ideally speed coming from London straight to Lusaka 3 opportunities a full week, and Lusaka is likewise simply available from Johannesburg as well as Nairobi. So it is actually extremely effortless for you to experience a safari in Zambia for on your own!

Seek Adventure on an African Safari in Zambia.

Why Choose Zambia for an African Safari?

If you want your African safari to become full of adventure and adrenaline pushing activities, decide on Zambia as the place. Zambia is actually typically forgotten when travellers want to take trips in Africa, but it is certainly some of the best safaris you can easily take. The nation possesses an unique yard and the wild animals and birdlife is actually extremely excellent, with lots of ordinaries video game and predators all the time. Zambia is not as created as other African nations however this doesn't mean you need to jeopardize on luxurious. Minority camping grounds as well as lodges that there are actually all supply higher comfort, a high quality company and profit from some great positions in activity books as well as about to the country's very most well-known national forests. The excitement of an African safari in Zambia exists within its own wonderful walking trips as well as exciting tasks at the Victoria Falls as well as on the Zambezi River, two of Africa's most famous sites 510338.

Knowledge the Zambezi and the Falls

The Zambezi, one of the planet's greatest streams and Africa's 4th most extensive. The globe well-known stream has its source in Zambia as well as circulates via far eastern Angola, by means of the borders of Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and also Zimbabwe as well as on to Mozambique where it drains right into the Indian Ocean waters. Near to the river lies The Lower Zambezi National Park, the perfect area to experience an African safari. Here there are actually big herds of elephant and also buffalo, and also antelope, zebra and wildebeest reside in great quantity. The major feline loved ones can also be actually found listed here. The Zambezi's very most noticeable attribute is actually the Victoria Falls, the world's most extensive curtain of water as well as one of the planet's most famous spots. The water plummets over the edge every minute casting a smoky roaring spray that could be observed coming from miles away. Listed here you may experience specifically what you pertained to Zambia for; experience! Participate in white colored water rafting at the foot of the falls, abseil on the edge of the Batoka Gorge, experience a helicopter flight over the becomes, or if you're bold sufficient, bungee dive off the Victoria Falls Bridge.

An African Safari in the South Luangwa

The South Luangwa is yet an additional of Zambia's fantastic safari regions. Here you'll locate the most effective walking safaris in Africa, along with the option to check out the un-spoilt wild and also track the likes giraffe, antelope, buffalo, big kitties and elephant. This African safari area is where the walking safari originated so you recognize you're put together for a memorable excursion. A safari in Zambia may also consist of going to the Kafue National Park, Liuwa National Park and also the Bangweulu Swamps Chipata.

An Action Packed Africa Safari in Zambia

An Africa safari in Zambia

An Africa safari in Zambia will launch visitors to an authentic wilderness knowledge in several of Africa's finest national forests as well as reserves. A Zambia safari is actually for those than definitely desire to engage themselves in truth soul of Africa, join exciting activities as well as observe remarkable natural miracles. Listed here you can easily view all the significant 5 throughout the year and also an entire stable of African wildlife. This is actually performed using activity rides, water located activities and walking safaris, which are in fact the ideal on the continent. This country is where the strolling safari started as well as with skilled leading to support you, you'll obtain the quite greatest Africa safari feasible! The country's premier safari location is actually the South Luangwa National Park however there are actually a lot of other amazing regions where safaris are actually also great featuring the Lower Zambezi National Park and also Kafue National Park. Opting for Zambia likewise suggests you possess the splendid Zambezi River within close reach and naturally, the amazing Victoria Falls. Zambia is the best selection for households seeking an energetic rupture, pairs searching for an one-of-a-kind honeymoon as well as journey travelers seeking thrill and adrenalin 510338.

Go To the South Luangwa

If you enjoy the tip of a safari surrounded by stunning wild as well as compelling creatures, head to the South Luangwa National Park for your Africa safari. The South Luangwa deals with a region of 9,000 sq. kilometres and is among the best visited locations in the nation. The wildlife listed here is actually rich, the strolling safari was actually emerged below and also the holiday accommodation is actually exceptional, sufficient reasons to explore? The video game viewing is exceptional with guaranteed glimpses of elephant, buffalo grass, kudu, impala, giraffe, lion and also panthera pardus, not to discuss a range of birdlife. The finest time to get a safari in the South Luangwa is between June as well as October and as the dry period approaches, animals could be found in wealth as they count on the Luangwa River for water. A walking safari within this region of Zambia is highly encouraged. You can also invest a devoted multi-day experience walking various trails in the national forest.

Zambia Safari

Zambia is a nation in Southern Africa that neighbors Congo, Tanzania, Malawi, and Angola. Zambia is actually a desirable nation aside from being actually a service center as it is actually the very first African country to create cellular phone. Her capital city, Lusaka is lovely as well as occupied as a facility of profession thereby enticing a lot of her occupants to reside below. A Zambia safari will take you on an experience via Africa where you will definitely obtain the possibility to experience and also look into the special creatures as well as lifestyle of the African people. Zambia is actually a nation wealthy in wild animals and this brings in that Zambia safari a sensation for several tourists.

Another characteristic that creates Zambia stick out is her wonderful woodlands which behave as a habitat for this remarkable animals and those safari walks will definitely open your eyes to Africa's finest flora. Zambia is actually identified along with untamed waterways, which are no question an adventure on this African safari. Also to view in Zambia are her incredible marshes that comprise her one-of-a-kind garden. To include in these, Zambia has wonderful lakes where you will certainly hang around sportfishing on this fantastic African property. Waterfalls compassion this gorgeous property as well as you will have countless shots coming from your camera, as you simply may not acquire enough of the Zambia safari.

Amongst her other tourist attractions are her rich video game parks where many of these pets are preserved. These parks include the Lower Zambezi National Park, the South Luangwa National Park, as well as the Kafue Game Reserve. The fantastic truth concerning a Zambia safari is actually that it possesses variety and also this makes sure that you acquire the most ideal of this particular property. You will definitely possess several choices that feature taking a stream cruise, a safari stroll, or an activity drive by means of her untamed. As an example, Kafue game reserve is actually the largest and this implies that you are going to possess the chance to look at many of her wildlife. This national forest participates in house to a lot of cheetahs and also you will definitely be actually captivated by their elegance and also speed 510338.

Accommodation in Zambia is actually top of variety and you will acquire an odds of spending your whole safari at one of her many luxurious hotels. There are actually additionally a lot of resorts as well as camping grounds where visitors put up for the night. The solution in these friendliness facilities is of a 5 star attribute and also you will definitely get the option of obtaining an English-speaking overview to take you by means of the a lot of lifestyles of this hub. Strolling trips are popular in Zambia as well as this has actually birthed the Classic Zambia Walking Safari. This safari entails trekking by means of bush for a full week and also resting in mobile camping grounds, which are actually a residence out of house.

A Zambia safari is actually not total without a drive to the world-famous Victoria Falls, which develop a terrific viewpoint along with their amazing charm. The greatest opportunity to take this safari resides in the months of May as well as October as these are actually the dry months. Individuals of Zambia are actually extremely congenial and also will certainly offer you a cozy welcome as well as ensure your convenience up until your retirement. Reaching discover their intriguing society will certainly be excellent and this gives you good enough reasons to take that Zambia safari periodically.

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martin9395 · 5 years ago

Text

Finest Safaris in Zambia

If you are searching for a substitute to the principal African safari locations you simply can not pound the trips in Zambia

A Wonderful Safari in Zambia

Discover Zambia's hidden treasure.

Seek Adventure on an African Safari in Zambia.

Why Choose Zambia for an African Safari?

Knowledge the Zambezi and the Falls

An African Safari in the South Luangwa

An Action Packed Africa Safari in Zambia