Sweden’s king wants to change the statutes of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Literature Prize each year, to allow its life-appointed board members to resign.

Academy head Sara Danius stepped down last week amid turmoil at the academy over the alleged sexual misconduct of a man married to an academy board member, Swedish poet Katarina Frostenson.

The latter left the academy when Danius withdrew. A week earlier, three male members had resigned over the academy’s vote not to remove Frostenson.

King Carl XVI Gustav — the body’s patron who must approve any of its secret votes — said Wednesday “that anyone who no longer wishes to be a member of an association should be able to withdraw.”

Members of the 18-seat board now are not technically permitted to leave.
…

your ads here!

British theater critics are praising a new stage musical about the life of Tina Turner – and it also has the approval of the star herself.

Turner was in the audience for the opening night of “Tina” at London’s Aldwych Theatre. After the show Tuesday, she joked that “I’ve found a replacement” in Adrienne Warren, who plays the brassy singer in the musical.

The show charts Turner’s roots in small-town Tennessee, her musical apprenticeship alongside abusive husband Ike Turner and her solo breakthrough in the 1980s with hits such as “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”

It’s a gritty tale with powerhouse tunes and a performance by Warren that the Guardian newspaper called “simply astonishing.”

Turner said the message of the show is that “it’s possible to turn poison into medicine.”
…

your ads here!

When you think of Florida, the colored stone walls of the Grand Canyon don’t come to mind. Neither do cowboys, wolves or Native American silver-and-turquoise jewelry.

In downtown St. Petersburg, all of those icons of the American West are on display in a new museum.

It’s called the James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art, and it opened this month. The 80,000-square-foot (7,400-square-meter) space is two blocks from the glittering blue waters of Tampa Bay. But at the museum’s front door, visitors are transported west. For vacationers in the Gulf Coast city, it will be a fascinating cultural respite from sun, sand and palm trees.

The building

The entrance is through a sandstone sculptural exterior evoking mesas of the American Southwest. That aesthetic of cliffs and cave dwellings and vertical forms runs throughout the museum. A two-story black granite waterfall is the centerpiece of the entrance.

A high ceiling and cubist angles frame a bank of windows at the entrance, allowing Florida’s sun to shine through. Through the gift shop, a massive wooden bar that looks like something out of a Nevada saloon is the centerpiece for the cafe. It’s a 19th century antique in itself, from a hotel in San Francisco.

​The art

There are 400 pieces on display, from large sculptures of Native Americans on horseback to pop-art conceptual paintings of the pioneer spirit. It’s unusually earthy and rustic fare, especially for a state that’s known for beaches, alligators and sanitized theme parks. Even the gallery walls are painted in earthy, Southwestern colors.

All of the art was collected over decades by billionaire Thomas James, chairman emeritus of the Raymond James financial services company, and his wife, Mary. Much of the art once decorated the corporate offices of the company, which is based in St. Petersburg.

“The collection is inspired by Tom’s fascination with cowboy lore,” museum director Bernice Chu said.

Many Western-themed collections in other parts of the country showcase works from the 19th and early 20th centuries, like Frederic Remington’s famous depictions of the Old West. What’s different about this collection is that nearly all the artists featured are still alive.

The collection is organized in six themes. Native American life includes artwork that tells the story of the complicated and often brutal history of how Native Americans were treated. A room called “The Jewel Box” in the Native American artists area displays contemporary Native American jewelry owned by Mary James, who has “free rein” to dip into the collection and take out “anything she wants” to wear, Chu said.

A wildlife exhibition is the only one that’s not dedicated to the West. That display includes paintings and sculptures of animals from around the globe, which will delight younger visitors.

St. Pete, arts hub

The Museum of Western & Wildlife Art is the latest museum in a city that’s increasingly becoming known as an arts hub.

One of the museum’s architects, Jann Weymouth, created another unique local institution: the nearby Dali museum, which is devoted to works of Spanish artist Salvador Dali.

In 2019, the Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement is expected to open, housing businessman Rudy Ciccarello’s collection of furniture, pottery, tile, metalwork, lighting, photography and other decorative arts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
…

your ads here!

Steven Spielberg is flying into the DC Universe with the World War II action adventure “Blackhawk.”

 

Warner Bros. Chairman Toby Emmerich says Tuesday that the legendary filmmaker will produce and may direct the film for the studio.

 

The “Blackhawk” series started in 1941 and follows a group of ace WWII-era pilots as they fight evils, including the Axis powers.

 

“Jurassic Park” and “War of the Worlds” screenwriter David Koepp is writing the script.

 

Spielberg recently collaborated with Warner Bros. on the futuristic adventure “Ready Player One” which has made over $476 million worldwide.

 

The Oscar-winning director has a few projects on his plate first, however, including the fifth “Indiana Jones” and “West Side Story.”

 

No release date has been set for “Blackhawk.”
…

your ads here!

Diane Kacprowski showed up at 57th Street Books in Chicago early on Tuesday on a mission to be one of the first to snap up a copy of James Comey’s scalding memoir about his time at the helm of the FBI and his abrupt firing by President Donald Trump.

“A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership” went on sale at midnight, and customers scrambled to bookstores around the country to buy the tell-all book that sparked a Twitter war between Trump and the man he fired.

“I’m buying it for the same reason I bought ‘Fire and Fury,'” Kacprowski, a 62-year-old airline employee and realtor said, referring to Michael Wolff’s scathing book about the Trump White House. “To stick it to Trump.”

She was fortunate to have arrived early. The bookstore sold out all its stock within 20 minutes of opening for business. At other bookstores, owners said sales were slower and the publisher, Macmillan, would not release initial sales figures.

Conservative commentators, such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have attacked Comey as partisan and indecisive in his handling of the email scandal that dogged Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Others, like former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, have denounced Comey for leaking memos about his discussions with Trump.

Macmillan, Comey’s publisher, ordered 850,000 copies to meet expected demand compared with Wolff’s first print run of 150,000.

At some stores, however, early sales of Comey’s book were slower than Wolff’s blockbuster.

“I was very concerned that we wouldn’t have enough,” said Judy Hirsch, a saleswoman at a small, independent bookstore in New York’s Greenwich Village. It ordered 25 books but had sold only four copies by late afternoon.

In the nation’s capital, shopper Phillip Carlisle rushed to buy the book at Washington’s Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe when it was released just after the stroke of midnight.

“I was excited to read a book by somebody who I think is a fundamentally honest person,” said Carlisle, who described himself as a “pretty far-left person.”

Comey’s firing by Trump last year led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate allegations that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion between Russians and the Trump campaign.

In the memoir, Comey described an intelligence briefing in which Trump and his team were told about evidence of Russia’s interference in the election. In response, the president-elect had only one question, Comey writes: “But you found there was no impact on the result, right?”

The release capped a weeklong media blitz to publicize the book. In an ABC News interview on Sunday, Comey said Trump was a dangerous and “morally unfit” leader doing “tremendous damage” to U.S. institutional and cultural norms.

For his part, Trump repeatedly hurled insulting tweets at Comey in the run-up to the release, challenging accusations made in the book and the author’s integrity.

“Slippery James Comey, a man who always ends up badly and out of whack (he is not smart!), will go down as the WORST FBI Director in history, by far!” Trump wrote early on Sunday in one of five Twitter posts aimed directly at Comey.

At The Strand in New York, Denise Thomas grabbed a copy of the book, which features a staid black cover with silver lettering, saying she hoped it would make sense of the barrage of news from Washington.

“I’m hoping to be able to sift through just one person’s telling,” said Thomas, 52, an administrative assistant from Longmeadow, Massachusetts, vacationing in New York.

“Every day there’s not only one scandal, there’s multiple scandals that are just flying at us,” she said.
…

your ads here!

Mohammad Hafez, a Syrian-born artist in exile, saves memories of his home country through dioramas depicting life in Syria before and during the war. His miniature pieces made of scraps of metal, wood and marble create images of life in the war-torn nation.

Hafez, who now lives in Connecticut, relies on recorded voices and images of everyday life in Syria that he captured through his camera before the war started in 2011.

“I recorded everything I could get my hands on. People’s conversations in cafes, the calling for prayers in mosques, the bells of churches, the conversation of a taxi driver and voices of children playing in the courtyard of Umayyad Mosque,” Hafez told VOA.

“All of this reflects spontaneous moments of life in Syria,” he added.

WATCH: Syrian Artist Keeps Alive the Spirit of his Country, People

Reconstruct spirit of Syria

Hafez says he believes art would help him reconstruct the spirit of Syria’s past and present and that it would help him preserve the beauty and diversity of his culture.

One year after the conflict erupted in his country, Hafez found the recordings and images he once captured.

He says he felt he found a new purpose in life and that was to tell the story of his country to the world and preserve memories of his war-torn country for the next generation of Syrian.

“I wanted people to see, feel and hear the buzzing life in each and every artifact,” Hafez said.

“As an artist, my role is to instill hope among my people so we can rebuild our homeland and live in peace and harmony. On this earth there is something worth living for,” Hafez added.

Hafez, a 2018 Yale University Silliman College Fellow, came to the U.S. on a student visa in 2003 and studied architecture at Iowa State University. Once in the U.S., It took him several years to go back to his home country of Syria.

Refugees

The ongoing war in Syria has led millions of Syrians to become refugees or to be internally displaced. In his spare time, Hafez advocates for refugees and their rights.

“You do not need to be a refugee to understand the memories and the feelings of them. We should understand that circumstances forced these people to leave their homes,” Hafez said.

“We should treat them as real humans who share the same feelings as we do,” he added.

Hafez says he wants to represent a common human denominator that connects the Syrian refugees with the rest of the world.

“Many people know [them] as abstract numbers in news. I am trying to tell the stories of the refugees from all religions and backgrounds,” Hafiz said.

Syria remains the country with the highest number of refugees in the world. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates the number of Syrian refugees in neighboring countries reached 6 million, more than 3 million of whom are in Turkey.

“Syria is the biggest humanitarian and refugee crisis of our time, a continuing cause of suffering for millions which should be garnering a groundswell of support around the world,” Filippo Grandi, UNHCR High Commissioner said recently.

Mehdi Jedinia contributed to this report.
…

your ads here!

Asia Argento said he raped her during the Cannes Film Festival. Mira Sorvino said he chased her around a hotel room at the Toronto International Film Festival. Rose McGowan’s encounter happened at the Sundance Film Festival. 

Just as Harvey Weinstein did at the Oscars, the disgraced movie mogul lorded over the festival world, which provided the glitzy, champagne-flowing setting for many of his alleged crimes. And in the aftermath of Hollywood’s sexual harassment scandals, film festivals have done some soul searching.

Codes of conduct have been rewritten, selection processes have been re-examined and, in many cases, gender equality efforts have been redoubled.

When the curtain goes up on the 17th annual Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday, the festival will boast more female filmmakers than ever before. After last year accounting for a third of the slate, films directed by women make up 46 percent at this year’s festival.

Jane Rosenthal, co-founder of the festival and chief executive of Tribeca Enterprises, particularly wanted to launch this year’s festival with the premiere of a film directed by a woman, about a woman. Lisa Dapolito’s Love, Gilda, about the comedienne Gilda Radner, will kick things off Wednesday at New York’s Beacon Theatre. The first episode of Liz Garbus’ Showtime documentary series The Fourth Estate, about The New York Times covering the first year of the Trump administration, will close the festival. On April 28, the festival will hold a day’s worth of conversations with Time’s Up, including Ashley Judd and Julianne Moore, to benefit the legal defense fund and gender equality initiative.

‘Fairly easy’ results

“For us it was, on one hand, business as usual,” said Rosenthal, pointing to previous efforts Tribeca has made to promote female filmmakers, like its Nora Ephron Award. “But we tasked ourselves early on with: Can you get to 50-50? Can we have 50 percent women filmmakers at the festival? We got to 46. I would say that it was fairly easy for us. Those pictures would probably have been in the festival without that kind of mandate.”

Efforts to improve the movie business’ record on gender equality have been ongoing at many, though not all, major film festivals in recent years. Pursuing parity has seemed at times like an arms race, with various festivals touting their male-to-female ratios. The festival world is far ahead of the industry (only eight of last year’s top 100 films at the box office were directed by women) and the Academy Awards (where Greta Gerwig became just the fifth woman ever nominated for best director this year).

Thirty-seven percent of the 122 features at this year’s Sundance were directed by women, including Seeing Allred, about women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred. For the first time, all four of the festival’s directing prizes went to female filmmakers. The festival’s top prize, the Grand Jury Prize, went to Desiree Akhavan’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post.

At SXSW in March, eight of the 10 films in the narrative competition were directed by women. At last fall’s Toronto film festival, one third of entries were made by female filmmakers and a five-year, $3 million campaign dubbed “Share Her Journey” was launched to support female filmmakers.

Hot Docs

The Hot Docs Festival, a well-regarded documentary festival held annually in Toronto, reached gender parity for the first time this year. A year after a program in which 48 percent of the projects were directed by females, this year’s 246 films and 16 interdisciplinary projects are 50/50 on gender. The festival on Tuesday also added the premiere of Barry Avrich’s Weinstein documentary The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret.

Shane Smith, director of programming at Hot Docs, which begins April 26, said reflecting the diversity and the demands of the audience is imperative for “cultural gatekeepers” like film festivals.

“We were hoping we could get to gender parity,” said Smith. “Once we started screening the work that was coming in, and the quality of the films and the stories that were being told by female filmmakers, we saw that it was a goal that was achievable this year,” Smith said. “We weren’t going to force this to happen if the work wasn’t there. But given the strides that have happened in the last few years, it was easy, actually.”

The Cannes Film Festival, which opens May 8, has applied a different strategy. Its artistic director, Thierry Fremaux, has regularly responded to complaints about the number of female filmmakers selected for its prestigious Palme d’Or competition by saying it’s not a festival’s place to consider anything but a submission’s merit — that progress can only come further up the pipeline at studios and production companies.

Critics say Cannes’ track record (only one female filmmaker, Jane Campion, has ever won the Palme) speaks for itself. Fremaux last week announced Cannes’ main slate with three female filmmakers — Nadine Labaki, Alice Rohrwacher and Eva Husson — disappointing some who thought Cannes might adapt in the age of #MeToo.

“The question of a quota in no case concerns the artistic selection of a festival. Films are chosen for their quality,” Fremaux said at a news conference last week. “There will never be a selection made by positive discrimination.”

Weinstein, who has denied allegations of sexual assault, was for years a dominant wheeler-and-dealer at Cannes. His fall was felt acutely there. “The Cannes Film Festival will never be the same again,” said Fremaux, who vowed to re-examine the festival’s own gender parity in salaries and jury selections.

Backlash at Austin

Other festivals have had even tougher questions to answer. Last September’s Fantastic Fest, the Austin-based genre film festival, caused a backlash after it was revealed that the festival’s host, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, had rehired blogger Devin Faraci a year after he stepped down following an accusation of sexual assault. Fox Searchlight pulled Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri from the festival.

Weinstein had less of a connection with the Tribeca festival, but the scandal still hit close to home. The Weinstein Co. is based in the same Tribeca building as the Tribeca Enterprises headquarters. “It was: ‘Who’s the stranger next door?’ ” said Rosenthal, Robert De Niro’s longtime producing partner.

But as a Time’s Up member herself, Rosenthal is hopeful that the industry is waking up to overdue change. Festivals don’t have direct sway over what gets made and what sells, but they can play a vital role in showcasing filmmaking talent and sparking conversation.

“I’ve had a women’s lunch for 15 years at the festival,” said Rosenthal. “Now, it’s going to be very crowded.”
…

your ads here!