Syria Fest debuted in Washington on Sept. 3, bringing to the nation’s capital an immersive outdoor cultural experience promoting Syrian food, music, art, dance, history and culture.
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By artist Sharon Hayes’ count, Philadelphia has more than 1,500 sculptures honoring male historic figures — heroes on horseback, visionaries with arms folded and eyes looking forward, the usual roundup of Founding Fathers.

By contrast, there are only two sculptures dedicated to women — religious martyrs Joan of Arc and Mary Dyer.

The realization prompted, “If They Should Ask,” as assemblage of nine pedestals encircled by the names of more than 80 women that Hayes thought were worthy of being memorialized.

The exhibit is part of Monument Lab, a citywide public art and history project that asks people to join a conversation about “history, memory and our collective future.” Temporary monuments by 20 different artists, including Hayes, are popping up around the city that answer the question posed to the artists: “What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia?”

“A monument claims a space. It’s trying to say, `This is who we celebrate and this is who we think is important,”‘ Hayes said. “I think the current climate is showing us they are meaningful.”

Monument Lab, produced by the city’s Mural Arts Program, has been in the works for years but comes in the midst of a national debate on the meaning of monuments.

While the topic has long been controversial, it has turned deadly after a woman was run down in Charlottesville during a rally by white nationalists, who were angry about the planned removal of a Confederate General Robert E. Lee statue.

The fact that statuary can stir such passion is “a reminder of how powerful things are in a public space,” mural arts executive director Jane Golden said. “This project is aimed at building civic dialogue, stirring people’s imaginations as a force for positive change.”

The project grew out of one of Paul Farber’s classes at the University of Pennsylvania. Farber, managing director of Penn’s Program in Environmental Humanities, asked students to note which famous Philadelphians were immortalized in sculpture and which were not. 

They found very few honoring specific women and no public art honoring a person of color. However, this fall, the city plans to unveil a statue of Octavius V. Catto, a black Philadelphia writer, educator and activist. Monument Lab organizers say it’s the first to honor a lone African-American in Philadelphia.

“Monuments are reflections of power dynamics and power possibilities,” said Farber, the project’s artistic director. “We’re seeking a public reckoning with not just what is present but what is absent.”

Farber stressed that this project is not about removing monuments. It’s about “what we know and what we believe in today,” he said.

Interactive art

The artists’ work varies in medium and in what issues they address. Hayes’ work addresses gender inequity.

In one city square, artist Kara Crombie installed an interactive boom box sculpture honoring the city’s music history that also asks participants to create their own musical compositions.

In another park, artist Marisa Williamson created a scavenger hunt for people to learn forgotten stories from African-American history.

Elsewhere, artist Karyn Olivier covered a towering sculpture memorializing the 1777 Revolutionary War Battle of Germantown with mirrored plexiglass. Now it reflects the current neighborhood, reminding residents they are the monument’s keepers.

“Monuments only function if we engage them. I asked myself what it means to have a monument that is shrouded and concealed, but in that invisibility you pay attention to it again,” Olivier said. “Monuments should commemorate, celebrate, but they should also make you challenge, investigate and interrogate history.”

Audrey Buglione, who lives a few blocks from the park, visited Olivier’s work recently.

“I’ve walked through this park before and I could not tell you what this monument looked like,” Buglione said. “I like that this is reflexive, representing the community.”

Olivier explained that she’d chosen to cover that specific monument because of its proximity to another which honors German settlers who in 1688 signed the first petition against slavery in the British colonies.

During World Wars I and II, the German surnames at the front base of the statue were covered, Olivier said. Today, the names are visible. There is also a relatively new addition to the monument: “To the memory of the hundreds of thousands of German volunteers in the American wars.”

“It’s amazing to me what fear can do,” Olivier said.
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In the midst of a long-running and ruinous war, millions of Syrians may finally have something to be joyful about.

Syria’s national soccer team has a chance to qualify for next year’s World Cup — what would be the Arab nation’s first-ever appearance in the sport’s most prestigious event. The team, referred to by many Syrians as the “Qasioun Eagles” after a mountain overlooking the capital Damascus, has been on an impressive run despite being forced to play all its games in other countries.

The Syrians beat Qatar 3-1 on Thursday in Malaysia, moving into third place in Group A of Asian qualifying. The top two finishers in the six-team group will automatically qualify for next year’s tournament in Russia, while the third-place team will enter a playoff.

If the Syrians beat Iran in Tehran in their final group match Tuesday, they would be guaranteed to finish at least third. But Syria could finish second and qualify directly depending on the result of the match between South Korea and Uzbekistan.

“Our team is ready to achieve victory and qualify Syria for the first time to the World Cup,” Muwaffaq Fathallah, the chief administrator of the Syrian team, said by telephone from the Iranian capital. “We want the Syrian people to be happy.”

The qualification would come as a welcome surprise for millions across the war-torn country, which has been devastated by the conflict. More than 400,000 people have been killed and half the country’s prewar population displaced since the conflict erupted in March 2011. It will also be a boost for President Bashar al-Assad, who is eager to project strength and normalcy on the world stage while his forces continue to recapture territory on the ground.

Government-approved players

The war has negatively impacted the country’s soccer industry, the country’s most popular sport. As the nation descended into conflict, sports stadiums were trashed and many of the national team’s players moved to Arab or Asian countries to play.

The national team is made up of government-approved supporters, although at least one player was an opposition activist. Striker Firas al-Khatib, who was often seen attending fundraising events for the opposition during his years in exile, returned to Damascus last month for the first time in five years, receiving a VIP welcome at the airport.

“There is no better feeling than returning home,” al-Khatib, who once said he would never again play for the government team until it stops its bombardment of opposition-held areas, said upon his arrival.

Another player who has been outside Syria for years but never expressed support for the opposition is Omar al-Soma, who joined the national team before the match against Qatar last week.

The team’s captain, Ahmad al-Saleh, plays for Chinese club Henan Jianye, while Omar Khribin, who scored a goal in each half against Qatar, plays for Saudi Arabian team Al-Hilal. Al-Soma, who recently joined the national team, plays for Saudi club Al-Ahli.

Al-Khatib, who played for Kuwaiti team Qadsia and later Al-Arabi, will be returning to his mother club of Al-Karamah in the central city of Homs.

‘Team of the regime’

Opposition activists are divided over the team.

Ahmad al-Masalmeh, an activist based in the southern province of Daraa, said that he supports the team because “they are carrying the name of Syria.”

He said will watch the game against Iran, as he did with previous ones.

But an opposition fighter in northern Syria who goes by the name of Abu Dardaa al-Shami said he has no respect for the national soccer team.

“This is the team of the regime, not the team of our nation,” al-Shami said.

Syrian state news agency SANA said the national team began its training in Tehran on Saturday in preparation for Tuesday’s match against Iran.

In the Syrian capital on Monday, workers were setting up giant screens in at least three squares for public viewing, while businessmen will be offering food and drinks for those planning to watch. State-run television, which is planning to broadcast the game live, has lined up special programs for the event.

Politics of soccer

The politics of Syria’s run has not been lost on anyone.

For Syria to qualify for the World Cup in Russia, its chief international ally, it must defeat Iran, its regional political ally. Both countries have provided crucial political and military support to shore up Assad’s forces in the war.

On social media, some predicted that Iran, which has already qualified for the tournament, may let Syria win the match based on the political closeness of the two countries.

Iran coach Carlos Queiroz, rejected any match-fixing plans and the state-owned IRAN daily reported Monday that Iran midfielder Ashkan Dejagah said his team is determined to win Tuesday’s match.

Mowaffak Joumaa, the head of Syria’s Olympic committee and sports federation, told The Associated Press in Damascus that “every citizen has become a soldier in his own profession” and the soccer players are doing their best for the country.

“We are hopeful,” Joumaa said, “that they will achieve a good result in the match against Iran and would bring happiness to all Syrians on Tuesday.”
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Miranda Lambert leads her peers with five Country Music Association nominations, followed closely by Little Big Town and Keith Urban with four each.

Lambert was nominated Monday for song and single of the year for Tin Man, and also earned nods for album, female vocalist and best video of the year. Nominations for the 51st annual awards were announced on Good Morning America. The ceremony is scheduled for Nov. 8 in Nashville.

The inescapable song of the summer, Sam Hunt’s Body Like a Back Road, earned nominations for top single and song.

Entertainer of the year nominees were Garth Brooks, Luke Bryan, Eric Church, Chris Stapleton and Keith Urban.
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A rock and roll fan with a penchant for harmony and obtuse references, Walter Becker, the guitarist, bassist and co-founder of the 1970s rock group Steely Dan, which sold more than 40 million albums and produced such hit singles as “Reelin’ In the Years,” “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” and “Deacon Blues” died Sunday. He was 67.

His official website announced his death Sunday with no further details.

Donald Fagen said in a statement Sunday that his Steely Dan bandmate was not only “an excellent guitarist and a great songwriter” but also “smart as a whip,” “hysterically funny” and “cynical about human nature, including his own.”  

“I intend to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band,” Fagen wrote.

Becker had been sidelined

Although Steely Dan had been touring recently, Becker had missed performances earlier in the summer in Los Angeles and New York. Fagen later told Billboard that Becker was recovering from a procedure. Fagen said at the time he hoped that Becker would be fine soon.

Musicians were quick to mourn Becker on social media Sunday. Mark Ronson tweeted that Becker was “one half of the team I aspire to every time I sit down at a piano.”

Both Ryan Adams and the band The Mountain Goats tweeted that Becker changed their lives. Slash posted a photo of Becker on Instagram, writing “RIP (hash)WalterBecker.”

Started with saxophone

A Queens native who started out playing the saxophone and eventually picked up the guitar, Becker met Fagen as a student at Bard College in 1967.

“We started writing nutty little tunes on an upright piano in a small sitting room in the lobby of Ward Manor, a mouldering old mansion on the Hudson River that the college used as a dorm,” Fagen recalled in his statement. “We liked a lot of the same things: jazz (from the twenties through the mid-sixties), W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, science fiction, (Vladimir) Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Berger, and Robert Altman films come to mind. Also soul music and Chicago blues.”

They played with the 1960s pop group Jay and the Americans and penned the song “I Mean to Shine,” performed by Barbara Streisand in 1971 before moving to California and founding the band, which they named after a sex toy in William S. Burroughs’ 1959 novel “Naked Lunch.”

“Like a lot of kids from fractured families, he had the knack of creative mimicry, reading people’s hidden psychology and transforming what he saw into bubbly, incisive art,” Fagen recalled.

First album in 1972

Their first album as Steely Dan, “Can’t Buy Me a Thrill” was released in 1972, and featured both “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ In the Years.” A lukewarm Rolling Stone review from the time said it contained “three top-level cuts and scattered moments of inspiration.”

The band continued producing albums throughout the 1970s, Boasting songs penned by Fagen and Becker and music provided by some of the best session musicians in the business.

“It wouldn’t bother me at all,” Becker said in an interview, “not to play on my own album.”

In their music, Steely Dan offered an idiosyncratic combination of rock and jazz, backed with subversive and literary lyrics that neither expected many fans to understand — and which they themselves sometimes claimed to not understand. They scored a big hit with “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” in 1974 before hitting a high point in 1977 with the album “Aja.”

‘Musical antiheroes’

“What underlies Steely Dan’s music — and may, with this album, be showing its limitations — is its extreme intellectual self-consciousness, both in music and lyrics,” wrote critic Michael Duffy in Rolling Stone in 1977 of the album. “Given the nature of these times, this may be precisely the quality that makes Walter Becker and Donald Fagen the perfect musical antiheroes for the Seventies.”

But it wasn’t quite enough to sustain Steely Dan past their next studio album, “Gaucho.” They broke up in 1981 after the album’s release.

Becker had suffered some personal hardships during this time, including addiction, his girlfriend’s death by overdose and a resulting lawsuit, and a serious injury he sustained after being struck by a cab. When Steely Dan disbanded, Becker retreated to Maui and began growing avocados, while Fagen attempted a solo career.

Honored in 2001

Becker eventually reunited with Fagen and, after a nearly 20 year hiatus, released two albums: “Two Against Nature,” which won four Grammys, including album of the year in 2001, and “Everything Must Go.” 

They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.

Ever sardonic and ornery, when they got back together and started touring again, Becker joked in an NPR interview that they were going to be wearing defibrillator backpacks during their performances just in case something went wrong.

When the interviewer asked about bands touring past their prime, Becker just said: “People were already thinking that about us in the `70s. It would be a shame if they didn’t continue to think that.”
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John Ashbery, an enigmatic genius of modern poetry whose energy, daring and boundless command of language raised American verse to brilliant and baffling heights, died early Sunday at age 90.

Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, died at his home in Hudson, New York. His husband, David Kermani, said his death was from natural causes.

Few poets were so exalted in their lifetimes. Ashbery was the first living poet to have a volume published by the Library of America dedicated exclusively to his work. His 1975 collection, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” was the rare winner of the book world’s unofficial triple crown: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize. In 2011, he was given a National Humanities Medal and credited with changing “how we read poetry.”

Among a generation that included Richard Wilbur, W.S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich, Ashbery stood out for his audacity and for his wordplay, for his modernist shifts between high oratory and everyday chatter, for his humor and wisdom and dazzling runs of allusions and sense impressions.

“No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery,” Langdon Hammer wrote in The New York Times in 2008. “Ashbery’s phrases always feel newly minted; his poems emphasize verbal surprise and delight, not the ways that linguistic patterns restrict us. ”

But to love Ashbery, it helped to make sense of Ashbery, or least get caught up enough in such refrains as “You are freed/including barrels/heads of the swan/forestry/the night and stars fork” not to worry about their meaning. Writing for Slate, the critic and poet Meghan O’Rourke advised readers “not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music.” Writer Joan Didion once attended an Ashbery reading simply because she wanted to determine what the poet was writing about.

“I don’t find any direct statements in life,” Ashbery once explained to the Times in London. “My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness comes to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don’t think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation.”

Interviewed by The Associated Press in 2008, Ashbery joked that if he could turn his name into a verb, “to Ashbery,” it would mean “to confuse the hell out of people.”

Ashbery also was a highly regarded translator and critic. At various times, he was the art critic for The New York Herald-Tribune in Europe, New York magazine and Newsweek and the poetry critic for Partisan Review. He translated works by Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel and numerous other French writers. He was a teacher for many years, including at Brooklyn College, Harvard University and Bard College.

Starting at boarding school, when a classmate submitted his work (without his knowledge) to Poetry magazine, Ashbery enjoyed a long and productive career, so fully accumulating words in his mind that he once told the AP that he rarely revised a poem once he wrote it down. More than 30 Ashbery books were published after the 1950s, including poetry, essays, translations and a novel, “A Nest of Ninnies,” co-written with poet James Schuyler.

His masterpiece was likely the title poem of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” a densely written epic about art, time and consciousness that was inspired by a 16th century Italian painting of the same name. In 400-plus lines, Ashbery shifted from a critique of Parmigianino’s painting to a meditation on the besieged 20th century mind.

I feel the carousel starting slowly

And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,

Photographs of friends, the window and the trees

Merging in one neutral band that surrounds

Me on all sides, everywhere I look.

And I cannot explain the action of leveling,

Why it should all boil down to one

Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.

Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927 and remembered himself as a lonely and bookish child, haunted by the early death of his younger brother, Richard, and conflicted by his attraction to other boys. Ashbery grew up on an apple farm in the nearby village of Sodus, where it snowed often enough to help inspire his first poem, “The Battle,” written at age 8 and a fantasy about a fight between bunnies and snowflakes. He would claim to be so satisfied with the poem and so intimidated by the praise of loved ones that he didn’t write another until boarding school, the Deerfield Academy, when his work was published in the school paper.

Meanwhile, he took painting lessons and found new meaning in Life, the magazine. An article about a surrealist exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art so impressed him that he kept rereading it for years. At Harvard University, he read W.H. Auden and Marianne Moore and met fellow poet and longtime comrade, Kenneth Koch, along with Wilbur, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara and Robert Creeley. He would be grouped with O’Hara and Koch as part of the avant-garde “New York Poets” movement, although Ashbery believed what they really had in common was living in New York.

His first book, “Some Trees,” was a relatively conventional collection that came out in 1956, with a preface from Auden and the praise of O’Hara, who likened Ashbery to Wallace Stevens. But in 1962, he unleashed “The Tennis Court Oath,” poems so abstract that critic John Simon accused him of crafting verse without “sensibility, sensuality or sentences.” Ashbery later told the AP that parts of the book “were written in a period of almost desperation” and because he was living in France at the time, he had fallen “out of touch with American speech, which is really the kind of fountainhead of my poetry.”

“I actually went through a period after ‘The Tennis Court Oath’ wondering whether I was really going to go on writing poetry, since nobody seemed interested in it,” he said. “And then I must have said to myself, ‘Well, this is what I enjoy. I might as well go on doing it, since I’m not going to get the same pleasure anywhere else.'”

His 1966 collection, “Rivers and Mountains,” was a National Book Award finalist that helped restore his standing and “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” raised him to the pantheon. In 2011, he was given an honorary National Book Award for lifetime achievement and declared he was “quite pleased” with his “status in the world of writers.”

His style ranged from rhyming couplets to haiku to blank verse, and his interests were as vast as his gifts for expressing them. He wrote of love, music, movies, the seasons, the city and the country, and was surely the greatest poet ever to compose a hymn to President Warren Harding. As he aged, he became ever more sensitive to mortality and reputation. “How to Continue” was an elegy for the sexual revolution among gays in the 1960s and ’70s, a party turned tragic by the deadly arrival of AIDS, “a gale (that) came and said/it is time to take all of you away.”

Reflecting on his work, Ashbery boasted about “strutted opinion doomed to wilt in oblivion,” but acknowledged that “I grew/To feel I was beyond criticism, until I flew/Those few paces from the best.” In the poem “In a Wonderful Place,” published in the 2009 collection “Planisphere,” he offered a brief, bittersweet look back.

I spent years exhausting my good works

on the public, all for seconds

Time to shut down colored alphabets

flutter in the fresh breeze of autumn. It

draws like a rout. Or a treat.

 
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The Grand Canyon — one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World — is one of nature’s most stunning creations.

Located in the southwestern state of Arizona, the majestic site has inspired adventurers, poets and painters for hundreds of years. Whether looking down from its massive rim or up from the rushing waters of the Colorado River, it’s easy to see how it got its name.

National parks traveler Mikah Meyer, who’s on a mission to see all 417 National Park Service sites, can see why.

“It’s grand! That’s the right word to use for it,” he said. “Because whether standing at the rim and overlooking it or being down on the river, you just get a sense of how massive the Grand Canyon is.

Shaped by millions of years of erosion, the distinctly colored canyon is 446 kilometers (277 miles) long and averages about 1,220 meters (4,000 feet) deep — the length of 11 football fields.

Unique geology

“What’s so unique is that you have all these layers of the earth that were once underground that have been uplifted and then eroded away so scientists can see millions and millions and millions of years of earth’s crust history,” he said.

Scientists and visitors both can explore the massive canyons by foot … and by boat.

Which is what Mikah did on an eight-day, 362 kilometer (225 mile) rafting trip on the Colorado River, courtesy of Grand Canyon Whitewater.

“I wouldn’t call it ‘glamping,’ but definitely, if you’re going to float down the Colorado River and be stuck in the Grand Canyon with no access to anything from the outside world, then this was a great way to do it!”

The Colorado River is a massive stretch of water that passes through seven states and has carved the land in four of them.

One of Mikah’s favorite experiences was a side trip to the Little Colorado River, a tributary just off the main river.

“What made this Little Colorado so special is that it was an almost baby blue, light blue-white color, and you see the moment where it converges with this dark gray Colorado River, and these two vastly different colors coming together.”

Mikah described how he and his fellow travelers, “who were mostly in their 50s,” were “giggling and laughing like 10-year-olds” as they hooked their feet under each other’s armpits so they could float down the Little Colorado in a chain.

The group also took turns standing under one of the river’s many waterfalls, which they could access from the front and through a narrow passageway from the back.

“It was just this amazing side trip that showed you the wonders of the Grand Canyon that are hidden deep within, that you won’t discover unless you go in it,” he said.

Nature’s roller coaster

And while there are places on the river where the water is still, and where you can see mist rising from naturally formed springs, the highlight for Mikah was navigating the whitewater rapids that the river is famous for, including Lava Falls, the scariest rapids in the park.

“It is one of three ‘10s’ in the Grand Canyon, meaning the most difficult to navigate for the guides and by and large considered the most epic of all the whitewater,” Mikah explained.

“So we’re all zipped up in rain jackets and rain gear because the water is actually really cold … and so when it hits you, it’s kind of a shock to the system…”

They were hit with several large waves.

“The first one kind of got everybody wet with a decent amount, and then the second wave felt like a brick wall hitting you … and there’s just this moment where everyone’s like ‘what just happened?’ and then everyone starts giggling and laughing and cheering and worrying and screaming because it’s just so much fun! You’re basically on a roller coaster except it’s a raft and you’re going through water and you don’t know what will happen next.”

“It’s not like a Disney-designed ride where you’re guaranteed to be safe,” Mikah added. “You could be thrown off the raft.

“There’s a great triumphant experience to say you conquered the biggest rapid of this 225-mile stretch … it was just a really magical moment.”

Still waters and magic

During calmer moments, visitors can also learn about the river’s rich history. The National Park Service describes on its website how people “have been part of Grand Canyon’s history and culture from 10,000 years ago through today.”

Based on archeological evidence, the park service explains that hunter gatherers “passed through the canyon 10,000 or more years ago. The ancestral Puebloan people have lived in and around the canyon for several thousand years, leaving behind dwellings, garden sites, food storage areas, and artifacts. Modern tribes still consider the Grand Canyon their homeland.”

During their river tour, Mikah and his fellow rafters had great views of historic Native American food storage granaries that have been carved into the canyon walls.

And there were opportunities to see some of the wildlife … like the endangered California condor, the largest flying bird in North America.

“They brought them to the Grand Canyon to try to provide a habitat that they thought would help them thrive and thus far it’s been doing pretty well,” Mikah said.

“It was just so many of these little side hikes and experiences that brought this group of mainly retired people to acting like children again, and I think that’s the magic of the Grand Canyon,” he added.

Glamping

In the evenings, Mikah and his group camped on the shore, where they had a chance to relax, put their feet into the water and enjoy hot meals like chicken fajitas and vegetables, specially prepared for them by their guides.

A perfect way to end each day in one of the world’s most beautiful — and natural — playgrounds.

“The world could have gone to nuclear war for all we would have known,” Mikah reflected. “It was just this amazing moment to truly be in nature, truly be void of the distractions of the world and enjoy that splendor of nature, enjoy the people you’re around in a way that is so rare today.”
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