An American woman has won the women’s title at the Boston Marathon for the first time since 1985.

Desiree Linden, a two-time Olympian and runner up in the 2011 Boston Marathon, finished the 42-kilometer race in two hours, 39 minutes, 54 seconds – a full four minutes faster than the second-place runner.

The last American woman to win the Boston Marathon was Lisa Larsen Weidenbach.

Japanese runner Yuki Kawauchi won the men’s title Monday, winning his fourth marathon this year and earning Japan’s first Boston Marathon win since 1987.

 

 
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Evictions have been called a silent threat to America’s cities. Every week, thousands of Americans are forced from their homes, for non-payment. An exhibit on U.S. housing evictions opens in Washington D.C. this weekend, based on a book by Princeton University professor Matthew Desmond, which explores the problem by following the lives of several families in Milwaukee, Wisconsin as they struggle to pay the rent. From Washington, VOA’s Jill Craig takes a look at the exhibit.
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Betty Rosenbaum was only 2 years old when her mother and brother were sent to a concentration camp in eastern Poland in 1943. She never saw them again. Today, a new digital exhibition at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum, features a treasured letter her mother wrote to her more than 75 years ago. VOA Correspondent Mariama Diallo reports.
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Bon Jovi, the Cars and four first-time nominees, including Nina Simone, will be inducted Saturday night as the 2018 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame class.

Dire Straits, The Moody Blues and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who died in 1973, will also earn the prestigious honor at the organization’s 33rd annual ceremony at Public Auditorium in Cleveland, where the Rock Hall is based.

Bon Jovi, who have sold more than 120 million albums and launched multiple No. 1 hits, was first nominated in 2011. Jon Bon Jovi will be inducted alongside current bandmates David Bryan and Tico Torres, as well as former members Richie Sambora and Alec John Such. Sambora left in 2013; Such left in 1994.

The frontman said though he and the other current members haven’t spoken to Sambora since he left the group, he invites the performer, along with Such, to be part of the Rock Hall festivities. The band will be inducted by Howard Stern.

Brothers Mark and David Knopfler, of English rockers Dire Straits, won’t attend the event, according to bassist John Illsley.

“He just didn’t feel like coming, it’s as simple as that,” Illsley, in an interview with Billboard, said of Mark Knopfler. “It just didn’t appeal to him, and I appealed to him on several occasions.”

Tharpe will be inducted with the “Award for Early Influence,” while the other five acts will be inducted as performers. She was a pioneering guitarist who performed gospel music and was known to some as “the godmother of rock ‘n’ roll.” She will be inducted by Brittany Howard, of blues rock band Alabama Shakes.

The jazzy and soulful Simone, who died in 2003, was a leader in pushing for civil rights and influenced the likes of Alicia Keys and Aretha Franklin. Mary J. Blige will induct Simone, while Andra Day will sing in her honor.

​Rock Hall voters have recently opened their hearts to progressive rockers, which benefited “Nights in White Satin” singers The Moody Blues, to be inducted by Ann Wilson of Heart. The Cars, founded in Boston in 1976, combined New Wave and classic rock sounds. This year marked the band’s third nomination; Brandon Flowers, of The Killers, will induct the band.

The 2018 class were chosen from a group of 19 nominees, including Radiohead, who were expected to enter in the Rock Hall in their first year of eligibility, but didn’t make it.

Each year, between five and seven acts usually make it into the Rock Hall following a vote by 1,000 people, including performers, music historians and industry experts. Fans also were able to vote on the Rock Hall’s website. All of the inductees had to have released their first recording no later than 1992 to be eligible.

The event will air May 5 on HBO and will also be heard on SiriusXM Radio.
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When she was 11, Bonna Neang woke daily at first light to a Khmer Rouge tune broadcast over a public speaker in a hamlet in Cambodia’s rural Banteay Meanchey province.

“The bright, fresh red blood was spilled all over the towns and over the plains of Cambodia, our motherland. … ”

The child of a Phnom Penh family well-versed in classical Khmer music and appreciative of youngsters’ at-home dance performances, Bonna Neang Weinstein, now 53, still recalls the lyrics to “Build a Revolution.”

Today, the mother of three sons and stepmother of three daughters, owns a Philadelphia gallery, Khmer Art, which is dedicated to the revival of Cambodian work. She describes it as a portal to a culture the Khmer Rouge, who captured Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, attempted to eradicate over the next four years.

Among the 1.7 million people who died in a population of 6 million were 90 percent of the nation’s artists, felled by revolutionaries with the motto “To keep you is no gain; to lose you is no loss.”

“The Khmer Rouge is a dark episode” in Cambodia’s history, Weinstein said. The regime also wiped out the educated, the skilled, the city dwellers and the intellectuals. She said she believes the revival of the arts allows Cambodians to reclaim their heritage because “the Khmer Rouge is not us … that’s not who we are.”

For the world

Ethnomusicologist Sam Sam-Ang, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” said “[Khmer] arts do not only belong to Cambodia, they belong to all human beings in the world.”

Today, there is evidence such as Prumsodun Ok’s Ted Talk on Khmer classical dance that Cambodia’s traditional cultural life is undergoing a robust renaissance after the Khmer Rouge suppression.

“Beauty is the most resistant thing,” Ok said in the October talk, which also discusses the intergenerational transfer of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, among Cambodians from Khmer Rouge survivors to their offspring. “Beauty is what connects people to time and place.”

As those connections strengthen, Khmer artists are taking the traditional into new areas.

“Cambodian art is rebuilding and that means both the traditional art, so people who do the classic paintings of Angkor Wat and carving and Buddhist images,” said anthropologist Judy Ledgerwood, adding there is “a growing body of art that combines traditional themes with modern ideas, and more recently, some very modern work, but still with a Cambodian theme and idea.”

Weinstein is one of the many Cambodians determined to use traditional arts, such as dance, music, carving and painting, to revive a rich culture. It is a point of pride.

From the ninth to the 14th century, Khmer culture flourished. Its lasting legacy, the Angkor Wat complex, at its full glory was about the size of Los Angeles. “Nonskilled, noneducated people cannot make that,” Weinstein said.

Well into the mid-20th century, the Angkor complex anchored a cultural life that was one of the most vibrant southeast Asia, attracting such people as the late Jacqueline Kennedy and inspiring creatives such as the late architect Vann Molyvann.

There was even a vibrant local rock ’n’ roll scene featuring the likes of Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Serey Sothea recalled today by the Cambodian Space Project.​

​Human expression

That Cambodia’s cosmopolitan heritage could not be eradicated by the Khmer Rouge dream of creating an agrarian utopia speaks not only to Cambodians’ resilience but to something that makes us all human.

“There is no culture without artistic expression,” said anthropologist Ledgerwood, who has been conducting research on Khmer culture since 1989.

Think of the cave paintings by early homo sapiens in France, Indonesia and Spain, and recent findings that even Neanderthals may have expressed themselves artistically.

“Human beings always look for ways to express themselves through textiles, painting, sculpture, music, dance, even in language itself in the way that we structure our speech,” Ledgerwood said.

Which is why authoritarian regimes like the Khmer Rouge target artists.

Joseph Melillo, who brought Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia to New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in December, says art “allows individual people to think freely and to feel emotionally. … If you remove artists and intellectuals from your society, that means political power could dictate the style of life and the thinking of the people, because there is no ( group) in other parts of the society that are able to offer an alternative to what artists and intellectuals are articulating.”

Creating a role model

Cambodian composer Him Sophy, a Khmer Rouge survivor, built Bangsokol, which is named after a ceremony performed at Cambodian funerals, on Khmer traditional music enhanced by a Western orchestra and a Taiwanese chorus.

“Because of my pain during the Khmer Rouge that I cannot forget, I try to express my feelings, emotion and thoughts through the music I compose,” said Him Sophy, who lost two older brothers to the regime.

Sam Sam-Ang told VOA that “Bangsokol” represents “Cambodian pride. We created an international art production, and it is a role model for our next generations to show them that we are capable to do it like any other nations in the world.”

Cambodian Living Arts (CLA), a nonprofit group that works to support the revival of traditional art forms, commissioned Bangkosol.

Prim Phloeun, CLA’s executive director, told VOA that of the Khmer traditional musical instruments played in the performance, the ancient Khmer harp called a “pin,” attracts the most attention from audiences, in part because it “disappeared” nearly 900 years ago.

Khmer musician Keo Sonan Kavei, and French ethnomusicologist Patrick Kersalé joined Him Sophy to build a pin in 2014, using inscriptions and sculptures on Angkor Wat and Sambo Prey Kok temples as their blueprints.

Sngoun Kavei Sereyroth, one of the two harpists who performed in Bangsokol, is also Him Sophy’s first harp student.

“I play harp because five or six generations of my family are artists. I have art in my blood,” said Sngoun Kavei Sereyroth, who started to play the pin when she was 14 years old.

“We contribute to the rebirth of Khmer musical instruments and prevent them from disappearing because we have shown those instruments to the young generations,” Him Sophy added.

Masters of the arts

Not all artists and artisans use the bas reliefs of Angkor Wat for instructions.

Weinstein, who left Cambodia in 1979 when she was 14, has been able to use family connections to find masters who survived the Khmer Rouge.

“During four years under the Khmer Rouge, people say Khmer arts were dying, but that’s not true,” Weinstein said. “For me, I think our Khmer arts were only dormant.”

The late Kikuo Morimoto, a Kyoto kimono painter and self-described silk fanatic, traveled throughout Cambodia in 1995, “asking from village to village if silk weaving still occurred,” according to the Institute of Khmer Traditional Textiles (IKTT).

Morimoto found a “very few old grandmothers left with the knowledge and skill to produce fine silk” and persuaded them to forgo chemical dyes for the plant-based dyes they no longer used. Today, the IKTT trains apprentices who spend a decade learning the spinning, dying and weaving techniques to become master artisans.

“My father was a government officer and an artist and culture lover,” said Weinstein, who returned to Cambodia for the first time in the early 1990s. “His circle was interconnected. I knew how to ask, and how to keep in touch with that group. One friend leads to another friend.”

Weinstein found a wood-carving master who was released from a Khmer Rouge labor camp when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1979. He salvaged “as much wood as possible, from temples, big houses, pagodas that the Khmer Rouge had ordered demolished … to save the past, use it in the present and present it to the future.”

The wood carving master took on apprentices and, using a book of old drawings, taught them how to carve “using the old ways … and by practice,” Weinstein said, adding that she saw the same process repeated with coppersmiths, painters and other craftspeople.

“The copper pieces we commissioned in Cambodia are hand-chiseled, hand-hammered” in a foundry with an open fire. “There’s no modern technology at all.”

Tapping into these traditions, connects Cambodians, Weinstein said. 

“The arts, the performing arts, I don’t know how we could show our identity without the performing arts, the visual arts,” she added.

Ethnomusicologist Sam Sam-Ang suggests the revival of Cambodian arts has an importance that transcends the country, saying if these arts are lost, “the world also loses something, and we lose more because we are the owners of our arts.”
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Two recent Western films on Russia, one a Hollywood spy thriller, the other an independent historical satire, depict the country’s dark political underbelly. How much of that portrayal is an exaggeration for entertainment’s sake and how much is a take from reality? Experts and filmmakers say it’s a little bit of both. VOA’s Penelope Poulou set out to find out.
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Milos Forman, the Czech-born movie director who found fame in Hollywood with the Oscar-winning classics One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus has died at the age of 86, Czech news agency CTK reported Saturday.

Forman died Friday in the United States after a short illness, his wife, Martina, told CTK.

“His departure was calm and he was surrounded the whole time by his family and his closest friends,” she said.

Forman was born in the Czech town of Caslav on Feb. 18, 1932, but moved to the United States after the Communist crackdown on the “Prague Spring” uprising in 1968. He became a U.S. citizen in the 1970s.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in which a psychiatric institution becomes a microcosm of the contemporary world, and Amadeus, the life of 18th-century composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart through the eyes of his rival Antonio Salieri, earned 13 Oscars between them, including those for best director to Forman.

His other notable work included the rock musical Hair in 1979, Ragtime in 1981 and The People vs Larry Flint in 1996, which was nominated for an Academy Award that year.
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