Jason Aldean, Luke Bryan, Miranda Lambert and pop singer Bebe Rexha with Florida Georgia Line will be performing at the Academy of Country Music Awards in April.

The ACMs announced the first round of performers Wednesday, which also included Kelsea Ballerini, Dierks Bentley, Maren Morris and Thomas Rhett.

Rexha and Florida Georgia Line will be performing their hit crossover duet “Meant to Be,” which has been a top hit on Billboard’s Hot Country chart for 14 weeks straight.

The leading nominees this year include Chris Stapleton with eight nominations and Rhett with six nominations.

The 53rd ACM Awards will be broadcast live on CBS from the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas on April 15.
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Architect and educator Balkrishna Doshi, best-known for his innovative work designing low-cost housing, has been awarded the 2018 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the first Indian to win architecture’s highest honor in its 40-year history.

The award was announced Wednesday by Tom Pritzker of the Chicago-based Hyatt Foundation.

Doshi has been an architect, urban planner, and educator for 70 years. The foundation called the 90-year-old’s work “poetic and functional,” and noted his ability to create works that both respect eastern culture and enhance quality of life in India.

Among Doshi’s achievements: the Aranya low-cost housing project in Indore, which accommodates over 80,000 people, many of them poor, through a system of houses, courtyards and internal pathways.

Reached at home in the western city of Ahmedabad, Doshi said his life’s work has been “to empower the have-nots, the people who have nothing.”

The housing itself, he said, can transform how residents see their world. “Now, their life has changed. They feel hopeful,” he said. “They have ownership of something.”

He called the prize an honor both for for himself and for India.

“What I have done for close to the last 60 years, working in rural areas, working in low-cost housing, worrying about India’s future. Now all this comes together and gives me a chance to say “Here we are!” he said.

Doshi was influenced early by two of the great 20th-century architects, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, and Louis Kahn.

The prize citation noted how their influence “can be seen in the robust forms of concrete which he employed.”

But he grew into his own. “With an understanding and appreciation of the deep traditions of India’s architecture, he united prefabrication and local craft and developed a vocabulary in harmony with the history, culture, local traditions and the changing times of his home country India,” the citation read.

Doshi’s work ranges from the blocky, concrete Life Insurance Corporation Housing buildings in Ahmedabad to the naturalist curves of that city’s Amdavad ni Gufa underground art gallery.

“My work is the story of my life, continuously evolving, changing and searching . searching to take away the role of architecture, and look only at life,” the prize announcement quoted him as saying.

While the work of Pritzker winners are often scattered across the globe, Doshi is known for working almost completely in his homeland, designing buildings for government offices, companies and universities.

Born in 1927 in the city of Pune, Doshi studied architecture in Mumbai and later worked under Le Corbusier, overseeing his projects in the cities of Chandigarh and Ahmedabad. He was the founding director of Ahmedabad’s School of Architecture and Planning, which is now known as CEPT University.

He founded his own practice in 1956, and lives and works in Ahmedabad.

Doshi will be formally awarded the prize in a May ceremony at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto.
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After Chinese New Year in Cambodia, Cambodians believe powerful spirits ascend to possess the living.
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Ava DuVernay didn’t pick up a camera until the age of 32.

It’s an extraordinary fact, considering the trajectories of most Hollywood directors. Orson Welles filmed Citizen Kane at 25. Steven Spielberg was 27 when he made Jaws. A 23-year-old John Singleton directed Boyz N the Hood.

It was already doubtful that DuVernay could jump from a career in film marketing and publicity so late and without even a film degree to back her up. That she is also a black woman made it even more unlikely.

But in just 13 years, DuVernay has successfully and improbably risen to the upper echelons of the entertainment industry, as a filmmaker, producer and agent of change, breaking down barriers and smashing ceilings wherever she sets her sights. 

Now, at 45, she has an Oscar-nomination (for the documentary The 13th), a historic Golden Globe nomination (for Selma, she was the first black female director to get that recognition) and has also become the first woman of color to get over $100 million to make a live-action movie. That film, A Wrinkle in Time, with its $103 million production budget, opens nationwide Friday.

The Walt Disney Co. acquired the rights to Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbery Medal-winning 1962 novel in 2010, and it went through various writers and budget points. The story about an awkward 13-year-old girl, Meg Murry, who travels through time and space, was a notoriously unwieldy one that carried the dreaded “un-filmable” stigma.

“I was shocked that they called me,” says DuVernay. “I’d done Selma and The 13th. How did they even think that would work? But they did. And when they said I could make her a girl of color, it just grabbed my whole heart.”

DuVernay set off to do the impossible — make a big budget, kids-targeted sci-fi blockbuster with an unknown 13-year-old black actress (Storm Reid, now 14) as the lead.

“I think it’s incredible that Disney made the decision to hire Ava on this and gave her the creative control to cast whoever she wanted,” says Reese Witherspoon, who co-stars in the film as one of the mystical “Mrs.” alongside Oprah Winfrey and Mindy Kaling.

‘Film is forever’

Winfrey, Witherspoon and Kaling, all hardworking multi-hyphenates themselves, marveled at DuVernay’s tireless work ethic and attention to detail. Once she even sent costume designer Paco Delgado back to hand paint hundreds of eyes on one of Winfrey’s costumes because that’s what she had seen in the concept drawing.

“I was like, ‘I think it’s fine without the eyes? I think it’s OK!’ Winfrey recalled.

DuVernay laughed that Winfrey recounted that moment.

“She came out and everyone applauded for the dress and it was extraordinary,” DuVernay explains. “But I looked and I said, ‘Well on the sketch there were little eyes. Where are those?’ And he was like, ‘Well this looks good too.’ And I’m like, ‘Well let’s go take a look at that anyway.”

Asking for what she needs, and wants, is something DuVernay has learned as she’s gotten older.

“Film is forever,” she says. “It’s cemented. You’ve got to do it right now and it’s got to be the best it can be. So, let’s go back and put the eyes on the dress.”

Witherspoon says she has never met a director who spends so much time talking about others: Acknowledging everyone’s contributions in a cast and crew of hundreds, and then spending weekends talking about other people’s work too, from Patty Jenkins to Ryan Coogler.

DuVernay always has something in the works. She’s afraid if she slows down, it might all go away.

“I just feel like I have a short window in this industry. There is no precedent for a black woman making films consistently. There are beautiful black women directors but there are seven-year, six-year gaps between them,” she says. “Even though people tell me it’s OK, I think it’s all going to stop tomorrow. I want to do as much as I can do when I can. It’s not unreasonable, you know? Tomorrow they can say, ‘No we don’t want you to make movies anymore.”‘

And, indeed, there is still that idea that female filmmakers are not given second chances, even when they succeed. It’s something DuVernay thinks about often.

“I look at Guy Ritchie. That guy is bulletproof,” she says. “He can make something that doesn’t work. The next week he’s the director of another thing. I look at him and I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s fantastic.’ But that wouldn’t have been Patty Jenkins and it won’t be me.”

Planting a seed

Initial tracking suggests that A Wrinkle in Time may open in the mid-$30 million range, which might not even be enough to unseat Disney’s “Black Panther” (which DuVernay passed on directing) from the No. 1 spot.

Wrinkle, however, is film that is first and foremost for children ages 8 to 12, DuVernay says. Before a screening she asked the audience to try to watch it through the eyes of a child — an unusual request for something from an already very kid-friendly studio like Disney which makes films for the younger set that nonetheless appeal to a wide swath of ages.

Critics reviews are under embargo until Wednesday, and social media reactions so far have been unusually sparse for a film this big. DuVernay says of the critics that, “Some of them will see what we tried to do. Some of them, it’s not [going to be] for them. It is what it is.”

And it’s the film she wanted to make, for the 12-year-old her, and for someone like Kaling, who says that she always loved sci-fi but that it never loved her back.

“I’ll always direct things but who knows if that price point ever comes again. I’m OK with that. This is a big swing,” DuVernay says. “But the chance to put a black girl in flight? I will risk it. I risk it for those images. It may not hit now, but somewhere a Mindy Kaling, a chubby girl with glasses and brown skin will see it and it will mean something. Or, a Caucasian boy will see how a black girl says, ‘Do you trust me’ and the Caucasian boy says, ‘I trust you,’ and he follows her. Just to plant that seed and say that’s OK, you can follow a girl? Those images? I’ll risk it. I’ll risk it for that.”
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She is known as “nonna” in Italian, “abuelita” in Spanish and “Grandma” in English. But across cultures, the grandmother is the matriarch and foundation on which the family unit is built.

In ethnically diverse East Boston, home to a large immigrant community, a new mural serves as a visual tribute to grandmothers and the values that residents of what is known as “Eastie” share across ethnic lines.

“It makes me feel identified,” Salvadoran-native Guadalupe Gonzalez said of the mural, known as “Immigrant Grandmothers,” which stands tall underneath an overpass along a park known as the East Boston Greenway.

“I identify with these grandmothers that came with nothing, [like me], that came with a dream,” said Gonzalez, a 59-year-old mother of two and grandmother of four. She shares a powder-blue, triple-decker home with two other immigrant families from El Salvador in what is now an area comprising mainly immigrants from Latin America.

Gonzalez’s East Boston neighborhood, located about a kilometer from the mural, reflects the changing demographics throughout the port city’s history. 

Heidi Schork, director of the Mayor’s Mural Crew of the City of Boston, conceived of the idea for the mural after noticing more elderly women on the streets than in other areas of the city — “going to market, sweeping the sidewalks and going to medical appointments.”

“I noticed, in looking over a lot of reference photos, that the posture of making tortillas and making pasta is exactly the same,” Schork said, an example that transpired into three centerpiece grandmothers.

Among other motifs are local churches, a topic Schork said “broke the ice immediately” among Italian and Central American grandmothers, along with polka-dotted dresses — “the international grandmother outfit.”

Left of the mural’s center, one such immaculately dressed older woman stands proudly beside her young granddaughter, who is wearing an organza dress to celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation, a rite of passage in the Catholic Church.

“It had these little pleats in the front of it, and you had the little white gloves,” Diane Modica, an East Boston-based lawyer, said of an outfit she once wore when she was a child, in the company of her grandmother. “My grandmother standing next to me, it evokes such memories.”

WATCH: Women with Ties to Mural Discuss its Significance

​United by purpose

Modica, the granddaughter of early 20th-century Sicilian immigrants, lives in the same house that her family bought in 1922. Although the immigrants of her diverse neighborhood come from vastly different origins than a century ago, Modica says they are united by their reasons for settling.

“They’re not doing anything different than what we did,” Modica said, “which is come over, work hard, raise their family, take care of their family and hope for a better future.”

The completed artwork presents typical East Boston homes, together with villages of southern Italy and Central America. It is one of a series of City of Boston mural projects inspired by a larger national campaign “To Immigrants With Love.”

“People here are really linked to where they came from, even if it was generations ago,” Celina Barrios-Millner, Immigration Integration Fellow at the Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement, told VOA.

“We want to connect that pride and that love for today’s immigrants, as well.”

Like the women in the mural and near her Boston home, Gonzalez believes in the value of hard work, and looks up to labor leaders and civil rights activists such as Dolores Huerta and the late Cesar Chavez.

She credits her achievements as a house cleaner to provide for her youngest son’s education in El Salvador, and now — she hopes — the next generation, too.

But for those achievements to be possible, she counts longevity among her blessings.

“[Life] doesn’t take years away,” Gonzalez said. “The years give you life!”
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Jimi Hendrix, “Both Sides of the Sky” (Experience Hendrix/Sony Legacy)

 

Elvis has left the building but Jimi is still busy in the studio. Or so it would seem from the staggering number of posthumous Hendrix albums that record labels, bootleggers and — for the past two decades — his family have been releasing since his death in 1970.

 

“Both Sides of the Sky” is billed as the last in a trilogy gathering assorted Hendrix studio recordings, following 2010’s “Valleys of Neptune” and 2013’s “People, Hell and Angels.” Nearly the full batch comes from sessions at New York’s Record Plant between Jan. 1968 and Feb. 1970.

 

Ten of the 13 tracks are billed as previously unreleased, though several are alternate or instrumental versions of known Hendrix tracks.

 

A take on Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock,” recorded just 42 days after the end of the festival, features Hendrix on bass, with vocals and organ by Stephen Stills. It sounds like a demo of the track released by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young some five months later. Hendrix switches to guitar on another Stills tune, “$20 Fine,” which also sounds very CSN&Y. Or, rather, CSNY&H.

 

Lonnie Youngblood sings and plays the sax on “Georgia Blues,” while Johnny Winter contributes his usually excellent slide guitar to “Things I Used to Do.”

 

“Sweet Angel,” the oldest track here and the only one recorded in London, is an instrumental version of “Angel,” a beautiful ballad and close relation to “Little Wing.”

 

“Power of Soul” was mixed by Eddie Kramer and Hendrix at his own Electric Lady Studios just weeks before his death. Hendrix was known to be a perfectionist and maybe he’d have continued tweaking the complex, upbeat, optimistic song, but it seems to provide the clearest sample of what may have come next.
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