A chubby red toadstool glides back and forth on a mountain ledge while a row of spinning golden coins levitate nearby, hovering above a line of brick blocks. Turtles waddle along the surrounding clifftops, like lookout guards patrolling the valley below, while a tower of angry brown blobs with big frowns teeters to and fro on another precipitous ledge. Elsewhere, gigantic red plants snap their hungry jaws at passersby, a serrated stone block slams down with a great “thwomp!” and a big castle crowned with horns looms on a hilltop, providing a menacing backdrop to the trippy scene.
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Welcome to Super Nintendo World, the closest thing you can get to diving head-first inside a video game and experiencing the likely effects of swallowing one of Mario’s magic mushrooms. It is the latest attraction to open at Universal Studios Hollywood, the sprawling Californian theme park that began over a century ago as a humble studio backlot tour on a former chicken ranch.
German-born film producer Carl Laemmle first welcomed visitors to his “movie city” in 1915 – four decades before Disneyland was established – to marvel at the million-dollar film-making paradise, complete with a zoo, post office and police department, as well as a community of Native Americans who lived in tepees on site and performed in his cowboy films. For a 25-cent admission fee, visitors could watch westerns being shot, gawp at stunt shows, see a simulated flash flood and enjoy a chicken lunchbox for a nickel.
Tunnel vision … the warp pipe entrance to Super Nintendo World. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright
A century later, the stunt shows and flood simulators remain, in souped-up form, but the surrounding park has been transformed beyond recognition. The Universal complex now rambles across more than 400 acres, three-quarters of which are still dedicated to film studios, although they make up an ever-shrinking proportion. The theme park is gradually nibbling away at the studio’s soundstages to make room for ever more elaborate rides and immersive worlds. In the age of the experience economy, fantasy thrill-seeking is big business: with resorts in Florida, Osaka and now Beijing, NBCUniversal’s theme park division reported record revenues of over $2bn in the third quarter of 2022. Post-pandemic, the appetite for physical, immersive experiences is stronger than ever.
Announced in 2015, Nintendo’s partnership with Universal Studios came in response to several years of declining gaming revenue and console market share. After a foray into physical toys, in the form of its Amiibo line, the theme park was seen as a way to monetise the Nintendo brand outside of the screen. For Universal, it represents the first expansion beyond film- and TV-themed rides, and a step up in designing a total environment – with the opening timed to capitalise on the release of an animated Super Mario Bros movie this spring. Super Nintendo World (a larger version of which opened in Osaka in 2021) is the theme park’s most complete, all-encompassing world yet, an entire work of real-life video game architecture. It is an astonishing place to explore, for Nintendo fans and the uninitiated alike.
The journey begins by walking through a green warp pipe, the familiar tubular tunnel that transports Mario around his various lands (complete with the sound effect from the game), which drops you in the porch of Princess Peach’s castle – the heroine that Mario spends his life trying to save from the big baddie dragon-turtle, Bowser. From here, the castle gates open into a spectacular saturated landscape where every last detail has been transported from the Super Mario games, pixel for pixel. It looks as if the entire world might have been 3D-printed, but the technology is surprisingly low-fi: most of what you see has been hand-carved from plaster and painted on site by an army of fastidious set decorators.
Virtual reality … Super Nintendo World. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright
Steep cliffs of pixelated earth, their cartoonish sedimentary layers exposed, rise up to blocky terraces of bright green grass, where the various creatures from the games patrol back and forth, their springy, waddling gait meticulously simulated IRL. Yellow question mark blocks project out from the walls, some within striking height: whack their rubbery undersides and they flash and chime with the classic coin-winning sound effect. Interactive games are scattered around the landscape, Mario theme tunes are piped through hidden speakers, while cutouts of rolling green hills cleverly block out the surrounding rides and neighbouring buildings, creating the effect of being completely immersed in the Mushroom Kingdom.
“It is one of the most complex and varied worlds we have ever built here,” says Jon Corfino, vice president of Universal Creative, who also oversaw the Simpsons-themed Springfield attraction, the Despicable Me Minions ride, and the recent revamp of the blockbuster Jurassic World. “We’ve spent the last six years layering together animation, physical effects and new digital technology to bring the video game to life.”
Developed in close collaboration with Nintendo’s design team in Japan (and overseen by Mario’s creator, 70-year-old Shigeru Miyamoto, himself) the attraction follows the story that Bowser’s son, Bowser Jr, has stolen a golden mushroom from Princess Peach, and you are tasked with getting it back. You must complete a series of simple challenges – which range from cranking a handle to dislodge an angry Goomba, to whacking a set of alarm clocks to keep a Piranha Plant snoozing – before you can attempt the “boss battle” with Bowser Jr in an interactive projection-based game.
Plant life … keep the flora (or is it fauna?) snoozing. Photograph: Hamilton Pytluk/Universal Studios Hollywood
The catch is that, in order to collect the various digital stamps, keys and coins that are dotted around the world, you must first buy a $40 Power-Up RFID wristband (on top of the $109 theme park admission fee), which lets you track your progress in an app. Just like the $60 interactive wands sold in The Wizarding World of Harry Potter next door, it is another gimmick to keep visitors coming back, tempting you to beat your high scores and see your rank on a public leader board. It’s a clever use of tech, but it also makes you long for the simpler, cheaper days of Laemmle and his nickel lunchbox.
The novelty culinary stakes have been upped in the form of the Toadstool Cafe, housed inside a colossal red mushroom. Here, a $16.99 Mario Burger (with a moustache stamped on the bun) and $9.99 Princess Peach cupcake can be washed down with a drink from a $20 collectible mushroom cup. You can momentarily forget the hole being burned in your wallet with dreamy views out through the windows, which are actually digital screens that play animations depicting life in the bucolic Toad world outside, and chaotic scenes in the Toad-staffed kitchen.
Mock turtle … a statue of Bowser in his villain’s lair. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright
All of the intricate scenography and narrative detail makes it easy to forget there is an actual ride here too, themed around the Mario Kart racing game. Queueing has long been elevated to an art form at both Universal and Disney’s theme parks, and this is one of the most elaborate environments for waiting in line yet. The queue takes you through a sequence of rooms in Bowser’s Castle, a brilliantly conceived villain’s lair, complete with bomb-making workshop, a library of self-help books (including How to Talk to Princesses and Sibling Rivalries and How to Exploit Them), and a gigantic statue of Bowser himself, looming at the centre of a rotunda. With its sense of menace combined with unbridled kitsch, it feels a lot like walking the halls of the palace of Kim Jong-il.
The ride itself is Universal’s first experiment with augmented reality technology, with visitors donning a plastic Mario cap, to which an AR visor is magnetically clipped. Rather than a fast and furious race, the ride is more of a sedate crawl through a series of environments, with an interactive shoot-em-up element overlaid on the visor. Buttons on the steering wheel allow you to fire shells at various baddies along the way, to accrue points and extra ammo. But with four people to a kart, it’s tricky to work out who is shooting what, if the steering has any effect, and what exactly you’re supposed to be doing. There are moments where the AR comes into its own – such as when you accelerate into hyperdrive on the Rainbow Road – but a lot of the time it’s a confusing distraction from the impressive animatronics and physical sets around you.
“It’s designed for repeat rides,” says Corfino. “Each time, you will have a different experience, gain more rewards, and understand more about how the game works.” It sounds like a good idea in principle, a ride that gets more sophisticated the more you play it, but it makes less sense when it takes an hour and a half to queue up again for the fleeting frisson of a four-minute experience.
Park and ride … the Mario Kart ride features augmented reality. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright
Still, there’s a lot more to enjoy back out in the psychedelic surrounds of the Mushroom Kingdom. Dedicated explorers will discover a series of stairs that lead to raised vantage points, where binoculars allow you to look down at the teeming world below, overlaid with more weird and wonderful AR things from the Mario games, like gliding bullets and flying turtles.
It feels fitting that, in this city of fakery and simulacra – where, as Noël Coward once put it, “there is always something so delightfully real about what is phony, and something so phony about what is real” – Universal has conjured the ultimate synthetic landscape. And you’ll have that pesky theme tune ringing in your ears for days to come.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
The Colombian navy has rescued a man from Dominica who says he survived 24 days adrift in the Caribbean on a sailboat by eating ketchup, garlic powder and seasoning cubes.
Elvis François, 47, had scrawled the word “help” in English on the boat’s hull, which officials said was key to his rescue.
The sailboat was spotted from the air 120 nautical miles north-west of the Guajira peninsula and François was taken to the port city of Cartagena by a passing container ship, the Colombian navy said in a statement on Wednesday.
François told Colombian authorities that his ordeal began in December when currents swept the sailboat out to sea while he was making repairs off the island of St Martin in the Netherlands Antilles, where he lives.
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“I called my friends, they tried to contact me, but I lost the signal. There was nothing else to do but sit and wait,” François recalled in a video released by the navy.
He said subsisted on a bottle of ketchup, garlic powder and Maggi cubes.
Carlos Urbano Montes said that François said he collected rainwater with a cloth. He said François was found in good health, but told official he had lost weight.
François said on the videotape that he had to constantly remove water from the boat to prevent it from sinking. He also tried to light a fire to send a distress signal without success.
Finally, a plane passed by and he signaled with a mirror. He said the navy told him that he was spotted when the plane passed again.
“At some point I lost hope and thought about my family, but I thank the coast guard. If it weren’t for them I wouldn’t be telling the story,” François said.
Urbano Montes said the sailboat was abandoned at sea when François was picked up by the merchant ship.
The navy said François received a medical check on shore and then was handed over to immigration authorities for his return home to Dominica.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
SRINAGAR: Jammu and Kashmir Waqf Board here has launched a comprehensive exercise for valuation of its hundreds of commercial properties across the Union Territory.
“Continuing with its reformative agenda initiated under the leadership of Chairperson, Dr Darakhshan Andrabi, J&K Waqf Board has started an exhaustive Valuation exercise of its hundreds of commercial assets spread across the UT of Jammu & Kashmir,” news agency KNO quoted a statement as having said.
Interestingly, despite being the second largest asset-rich organisation in the UT after the Govt itself, no significant efforts have been made till date for assessment of Commercial Properties by the previous authorities at the helm of affairs in Waqf over the last several decades, revealed the sources in Waqf, it said.
In an order issued by Executive Magistrate, Tehsildar J&K Waqf Board, it has been revealed that, in absence of proper valuation, “random assessment values have been used to insure commercial properties in the past and that has also created difficulties in settlement of claims with insurers”.
The move is also expected to “result in creation of a permanent data base for smooth rent assessment of structures in future”.
The Administrators and other Waqf Supervisory staff have been directed to facilitate and provide all necessary support & manpower for smooth conduct of the exercise, the order said.
Jacinda Ardern has no gas left in the tank to continue as the prime minister of New Zealand. Her resignation speech was the sort of rare and dignified moment that we have come to expect from her, as a woman who presented the world with the kind of leadership that uniquely lent on her emotional intelligence. I’ll miss her tone and grace. She leaves a legacy she can be proud of.
I have been thinking about what burned the fuel that she relied on to govern.
Firstly I have no doubt that she felt the constant guilt that pretty much every woman in the world feels the moment they evacuate their womb of a child. Even the Mary Poppins-style perfect, Instagram-polished mothers of the world fret that something they do will harm their child in some way. I asked my husband, who has always been our son’s primary carer, if he ever felt guilty for missing a school play or staying late at work. He looked at me baffled; the concept was lost on him. He just thinks, “I had to go to work,” and that’s the beginning and end of that moral maze for him. For me, there is a constant torture and self-loathing about how my choices might affect them. No matter how I try to push away the societal grooming, it is always there. For Ardern there will have been column inches aplenty to keep the torture prickling her skin.
This is not to say that most working women don’t just push through this: they do so every single day in every single workforce in the country. It just burns up fuel, fuel that others don’t need to spend. It is tiring and saps our bandwidth.
The pressure pushed on to working women is tiring enough without it being amped up by being a public woman – and the worst of all offences, to some, a political woman. The thing that burns my fuel to the point of a flashing emergency light and a blaring alarm is the abuse and threat of violence that has become par for the course for political women. Jacinda Ardern will have suffered this mercilessly. Today, colleagues and admirers discussed the extent to which that constant threat of abuse contributed to her burnout.
Those threats came from many sources, too: people who hate progressive women and believe they are damning masculinity; anti-vaxxers outraged by her tough Covid stance; those with a general loathing of all politicians.
Combine the two fuel burners and what you end up with is the terrible guilt, fear and shame that decisions you have made in your career, or your political stances (no matter how much you believe in them), put your children, loved ones and employees in danger.
Moments before I started writing this, I spoke to a woman who works for me who told me she wouldn’t be in work on a particular day because she had to give evidence in court after an incident in my office. She was not the target: it was me. When my children at school have to answer questions from their classmates about stances I have taken, or are told hateful and untrue things that have been published about me, or when they act hyper-vigilantly in public crowds, aware of the threat to us, my heart breaks and more fuel burns up.
No doubt this is something all men and women in political life experience. However, studies show that the level of violence – often sexualised violence – and the threat that female politicians face is incomparable. I am used to it. I wish I wasn’t; but I also wish I was a size 10. but I will also never get used to the effect it has on other people; it is so very tiring. It’s just something else I have to consider on top of worrying about policy and details, and fallout, and loyalties. It burns fuel.
What can we do about it? Like Jacinda, I believe the answer is being honest about the fact that politics is an emotional not a bureaucratic game. And constantly pushing for a more empathetic political environment, which will be brought about by having more female leaders and politicians, not fewer.
I am not so idealistic as to think politics is going to change its stripes in my time. But we must build the structures into our politics and our media that damn and criminalise the perpetrators of this abuse, and those who make massive profits from spreading it. We must create support structures female politicians and activists can lean on without being seen negatively or as weak.
Alas, even as I pen my suggestions for change, I know that it is women who will have to do the labour to achieve it, just like we always do. This work takes more fuel – fuel others don’t have to use up in the pursuit of a political life. No wonder Jacinda’s knackered.
Jess Phillips is Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
David Crosby, who has died aged 81, was a premier-league rock’n’roll star twice. In the mid-1960s he was a founder member of the Byrds, the Los Angeles band often credited with inventing the genre “folk-rock”. This was defined by their shimmering recording of Bob Dylan’s Mr Tambourine Man, its distinctive harmonies and chiming 12-string guitar carrying it to the top of the charts in Britain and the US in 1965.
Arrogant and argumentative, Crosby was sacked from the Byrds in 1967, but, after producing Joni Mitchell’s debut album, Song to a Seagull, he found an ideal berth with Crosby, Stills and Nash. It was a group of distinct individuals who wrote their own songs, but together they created one of the great harmony-singing blends in pop history. Their debut album, Crosby Stills & Nash (1969), was an immediate smash, and proved hugely influential on a rising generation of west coast artists. Crosby’s long hair, walrus moustache and buckskin jacket made him look like a frontiersman for the Age of Aquarius. Their second album, Déjà Vu (1970), with the addition of Neil Young, and the band becoming Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY), felt like the crowning moment of a California golden age. It topped the US chart, reached No 5 in the UK and has sold 14m copies.
The members then embarked on solo ventures and their reunions grew increasingly rare, though they reformed for a stadium tour in 1974, a lavishly wasteful affair that Crosby nicknamed “the Doom tour”. A major obstacle was that Crosby, a regular marijuana and LSD user, would succumb to a ferocious addiction to crack cocaine, with near-fatal consequences. This came to a head on 28 March 1982, when he was arrested by the California Highway Patrol after he crashed his car into the central divider on the Interstate 405 highway. Police found freebasing paraphernalia and a .45-calibre pistol in the car, and it was later determined that Crosby had suffered a seizure from “toxic saturation”.
The Byrds in 1965, the year they topped the charts with Mr Tambourine Man. From left, Chris Hillman, David Crosby, Michael Clarke, Jim (later Roger) McGuinn and Gene Clark. Photograph: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis/Getty Images
A couple of weeks later he was arrested again on similar charges, this time at a Dallas nightclub where he was performing. A spell in a rehab facility in New Jersey failed when Crosby fled the premises. His decline from prince of west coast rock aristocracy to struggling addict was halted only when he was jailed in Texas in 1986, following yet another drugs-and-firearms arrest.
In 1985, Spin magazine had told its readers “The Tragic Story of David Crosby’s Living Death”, but after being paroled from Huntsville prison in August 1986, Crosby staged a remarkable comeback. He marked his return with the enthralling autobiography Long Time Gone (1988) and the solo album Oh Yes I Can (1989). He would make six further solo discs, in addition to Crosby & Nash (2004), two albums with Stills and Nash (Live It Up in 1990 and After the Storm, 1994) and American Dream and Looking Forward with CSNY (1988 and 1999). In 1987 he married Jan Dance, who had survived her own addiction purgatory alongside him. Shortly after being diagnosed with hepatitis C, in 1994 he underwent a liver transplant, the operation paid for by Phil Collins (Crosby had sung on Collins’s 1989 hit Another Day in Paradise), and bounced back with renewed energy.
Born in Los Angeles, he was the second son of the cinematographer Floyd Crosby and his first wife, Aliph Van Cortlandt Whitehead, a scion of the influential Van Cortlandt dynasty. Floyd came from an upper-class New York background, his father having been the treasurer of the Union Pacific Railroad, and his mother the daughter of a renowned surgeon. He had tried his hand at banking in New York before working on documentary films in the South Pacific (including FW Murnau’s Tabu, for which he won an Oscar) and eventually moving to Hollywood, where he won a Golden Globe award for his work on Fred Zinnemann’s western High Noon and made numerous films with Roger Corman.
The Byrds play Mr Tambourine Man on the Ed Sullivan Show
David’s early musical influences included classical music and jazz as well as the Everly Brothers and bluesman Josh White, and he recalled how he would take the harmony parts when the family would gather to sing extracts from The Fireside Book of Folk Songs. A trip with his mother to hear a symphony orchestra “was the most intense experience I can remember from my early life” (as he wrote in Long Time Gone), because it illustrated how musicians could collaborate “to make something bigger than any one person could ever do”.
He attended the exclusive Crane school in Montecito, California, then Cate boarding school in Carpinteria. Though intelligent, he regarded academic work with contempt and refused to apply himself. One area where he did shine was in musical stage shows, such as his performance as the First Lord of the Admiralty in Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. He subsequently attended Santa Barbara City College, but quit and moved to LA to study acting. However, music was becoming his true focus, and he began playing in folk clubs with his elder brother Ethan (who would take his own life in 1997). When a girlfriend became pregnant, Crosby hastily left town and worked his way across the country towards the folk-singing mecca of Greenwich Village, New York, where the likes of Peter, Paul and Mary, Phil Ochs and Joan Baez were breaking through, while Dylan was about to transform the musical climate entirely.
Crosby formed a partnership with the Chicago-born folk singer Terry Callier and they performed frequently together, before Crosby travelled down to Florida in 1962 to sample the folk scene in Miami’s Coconut Grove district. He then worked his way back to Los Angeles via Denver, Chicago and San Francisco. In LA he met Jim (later Roger) McGuinn and Gene Clark, all of them fascinated by the Beatles and the idea of mixing folk with rock’n’roll. They became the Jet Set, which evolved into the Byrds with the addition of the bassist Chris Hillman and drummer Michael Clarke.
Signed to Columbia, the Byrds had already built an enthusiastic local following by playing in clubs such as Ciro’s on Sunset Strip by the time Mr Tambourine Man was released in April 1965, and its success was followed up by their debut album, released in June. Crosby’s distinctive tenor voice was integral to the band’s vocal blend, and he began to develop an idiosyncratic songwriting style.
Influenced by jazz as much as rock, his songs used unusual chords and unconventional melodies. On the band’s third album, Fifth Dimension (1966), one of his most significant contributions was co-writing Eight Miles High. This psychedelic milestone gave them a Top 20 US hit, and also reflected Crosby’s infatuation with the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. Their next album, Younger Than Yesterday (1967), featured Crosby’s ethereal Everybody’s Been Burned as well as his self-indulgent sound experiment Mind Gardens, while the song Why reflected his admiration for the sitar maestro Ravi Shankar. When the Byrds met the Beatles, Crosby’s enthusiasm for Shankar helped spark George Harrison’s interest in Indian music.
Crosby’s green suede cape and Borsalino hat had made him a Hollywood Hills style icon, but his days as a Byrd were numbered. He had irked his bandmates at the Monterey pop festival in June 1967 by making rambling speeches about LSD and the assassination of John F Kennedy, and also by getting on stage with Stills’s band Buffalo Springfield in place of the absent Young. Crosby’s song Lady Friend (1967) flopped as a single, and during the making of the album The Notorious Byrd Brothers he was fired after arguments over the choice of material. His song Triad, depicting a menage-a-trois, was vetoed by his bandmates as being too risque (Jefferson Airplane subsequently recorded it). Nonetheless, Crosby played on and co-wrote several tracks, and The Notorious Byrd Brothers is arguably the Byrds’ finest album.
Crosby, Stills and Nash play Long Time Gone
Borrowing $25,000 from Peter Tork of the Monkees, Crosby bought a 74ft schooner called Mayan, where he would write some of his best-known songs including Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Wooden Ships. The obvious potential of CSN immediately won them a deal with Atlantic Records, which released their debut album in May 1969. Their second-ever live appearance was at the Woodstock festival that August. Though dominated by the all-round wizardry of Stills, the album showcased the different writing skills of each member. Crosby’s Guinnevere demonstrated his fondness for unusual scales and harmonies, while the bluesy Long Time Gone was a heartfelt response to the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and indicated the group’s willingness to embrace political and social issues.
Déjà Vu, released nine months later, brought another strong showing from Crosby. The hanging chords and mysterious time changes of his title track made it one of his most mesmerising compositions, while Almost Cut My Hair was his battle cry for the counterculture. However, personality clashes within the group while on tour in 1970 prompted them to split.
All the members made solo albums, including Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name (1971). Additionally, he formed a successful duo with Nash, which brought them US Top 10 hit albums with Graham Nash David Crosby (1972, also UK No 13) and Wind on the Water (1975), and they reached No 26 with Whistling Down the Wire (1976). In 1973 Crosby reunited with his previous band for the album Byrds, and in 1977 Crosby, Stills and Nash released CSN, which reached No 2 on the US album chart and outsold the trio’s debut. However, by the time they made Daylight Again (1981), another US Top 10 hit, Crosby was in the throes of addiction. Allies (1983), a patchwork of live and studio material, was the group’s last effort before he was jailed.
Crosby’s post-prison renaissance continued with regular tours with CSN, who went on the road almost annually from 1987, with Young joining them in 2000, 2002 and 2006. He released the solo album Thousand Roads (1993), which gave him a minor hit single with Hero, then picked up the pace dramatically in the new century with Croz (2014), Lighthouse (2016), Sky Trails (2017) and Here If You Listen (2018). For Free, featuring Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen and Michael McDonald, came out in 2021. His final release, in December, was David Crosby & the Lighthouse Band Live at the Capitol Theatre.
Bob Dylan and David Crosby playing at a Roy Orbison tribute in Universal City, California, in 1990. Photograph: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc
One of his regular musical collaborators was James Raymond, his child with Celia Crawford Ferguson, whom Crosby had left pregnant in California in the early 60s, and who had given her baby up for adoption. She later moved to Australia. Raymond met his birth mother in 1994, then in 1995 introduced himself to his biological father at UCLA medical centre, where Crosby was having treatment following his liver transplant. An accomplished musician and composer, Raymond played in the jazz-rock band CPR with his father and Jeff Pevar (they released four albums between 1998 and 2001), was music director for Crosby’s solo live shows and also became a member of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s touring band from 2009.
Yet Crosby’s creative rebirth coincided with a calamitous breakdown in relations with his old comrades. In 2014 Young said CSNY would never tour again after Crosby described his new partner, Daryl Hannah, as “a purely poisonous predator”, and in 2016 Nash, who had always gone the extra mile for Crosby throughout his addiction years, also announced his estrangement from him.
In 1991 Crosby was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Byrds, and in 1997 with Crosby, Stills and Nash. He won the 2019 Critics’ Choice movie award as the “most compelling living subject of a documentary” for AJ Eaton’s film David Crosby: Remember My Name.
Crosby continued to be plagued by health problems. He suffered from type 2 diabetes, and in 2014 was left with eight stents in his heart following major cardiac surgery.
He was the sperm donor for the children of Melissa Etheridge and her partner Julie Cypher: their son, Beckett, who died in 2020, and daughter, Bailey.
Jan and their son, Django, survive him, as do James, a daughter, Erika, by Jackie Guthrie, and a daughter, Donovan, by Debbie Donovan.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
SRINAGAR: A search operation was launched by security forces after observing suspicious movement in Damhal Hanjipora village of south Kashmir’a Kulgam district on Friday, police said.
Quoting an official the news agency KNO reported that suspicious movement was reported in the late afternoon in main town of DH Pora.
He said cordon and search operation was launched while some speculative shots were also fired.
The official said searches were going on when reports last came in.
By all accounts, including his own, David Crosby could be a tricky and difficult character. His career was regularly punctuated by angry arguments, bitter fallings-out, sackings, general discord. Joni Mitchell once waspishly suggested he was “a human-hater”. His former bandmate Roger McGuinn described his behaviour while a member of the Byrds as that of a “little Hitler”. Perhaps the best way to describe him was mercurial. He could be utterly charming and mischievously funny – fans gave him the affectionate nickname the Old Grey Cat – and incredibly generous to other musicians: Mitchell, among others, owed him a great deal. He could also be impossible: overbearing, mouthy, convinced of his own brilliance.
The thing was, he was right: Crosby genuinely was brilliant. He was blessed with a beautiful voice and an uncanny gift for harmony: in the early years, when the nascent Byrds were still blatant Beatles copyists called the Beefeaters, his vocals could make even their weakest material sparkle. He was a fantastic, forward-thinking songwriter. The jazz-influenced Everybody’s Been Burned sounded impressively sophisticated – a cutting-edge example of pop’s increasing maturity – when the Byrds recorded it in 1966. It turned out that Crosby had written it in 1962 while still a struggling folkie. Listening back to the multi-platinum albums of Crosby Stills & Nash (CSN), what’s striking is how original and idiosyncratic his songwriting contributions were.
Yet the Byrds had initially demurred from recording his material: it was hard to find room in among the souped-up folk songs and Dylan covers and the work of the band’s frontman McGuinn and chief songwriter Gene Clark. But almost as soon as Crosby got space on their albums, he changed the band. He forced his fellow Byrds to listen to a collection of Ravi Shankar ragas and John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass over and over again while touring the UK: the two albums inspired the groundbreaking Eight Miles High, widely considered to be the first psychedelic single ever released. He was also the Byrds’ most enthusiastic chronicler of the LSD experience, which informed the frantic I See You and the suitably dazed-sounding What’s Happening?!?! on 1966’s Fifth Dimension.
Emboldened, Crosby didn’t just fight for more room on its follow-up, Younger Than Yesterday, he insisted the band record some of his most adventurous and outre material: not just Everybody’s Been Burned but Mind Gardens, which ventured into freeform territory, “neither rhymed or had rhythm” in Crosby’s words, and, in truth, wobbled a little unsteadily along the line that separates adventurousness from self-indulgence. He successfully lobbied for his song Lady Friend to be released as a single: it was both a flop and a superb song, richly melodic, boasting an intricate brass arrangement and complex vocal harmonies. Crosby performed the latter alone, wiping his bandmates’ contributions and replacing them with his own multi-tracked voice.
Stephen Stills, David Crosby and Graham Nash AKA Crosby Stills & Nash. Photograph: JLS/AP
That didn’t go down terribly well with the other Byrds, becoming a symbol of increasingly strained relations between Crosby and the rest of the band. The others hated celebrity, remaining surly and taciturn in interviews. Crosby loved fame, rarely missing the opportunity to offer his lengthy thoughts on drugs, politics or free love to journalists or indeed live audiences. Then there was his increasingly domineering attitude in the studio: “I was,” Crosby later said, “a thorough prick.” The band fired him midway through the making of their next album, The Notorious Byrd Brothers, although tellingly they kept his songs: Draft Morning, Tribal Gathering and Dolphin’s Smile were all flatly brilliant, although clearly not brilliant enough for the band to endure his presence any longer.
Crosby seemed uncertain what to do next. He encountered Mitchell performing in a coffee shop and kickstarted her career, helping her land a recording contract and producing her debut album. And he stockpiled new songs, waiting for the opportunity that finally presented itself when the Hollies’ Graham Nash turned up at a house in LA where Crosby and Stephen Stills, formerly of the Buffalo Springfield, were jamming, and added a third harmony to the duo’s vocals.
Crosby Stills & Nash: Long Time Gone – video
Everything clicked perfectly on CSN’s eponymous 1969 debut. The trio’s harmonies, usually arranged by Crosby, were astonishing. All writers, they had a surfeit of great material: even in such exalted company, Crosby’s Guinnevere, an expansive product of his obsession with finding new tunings for his guitar, stood out. And the album’s sound and mood, relaxed even on rockier tracks such as Crosby’s Long Time Gone, fitted the moment: music to soothe listeners as the 60s party drew to a messy conclusion. It was a huge hit, establishing CSN as the premier example of that most late 60s of concepts, the supergroup. But there were issues. Relations in the band could be volatile, a state of affairs not much helped by their increasing enthusiasm for cocaine. They became more volatile still when Stills’ brilliant but erratic former Buffalo Springfield bandmate Neil Young joined, and Crosby’s girlfriend Christine Hinton was killed in a car accident: Nash opined that Crosby was “never the same” after identifying her body.
Still, for a while at least, the music continued to flow from him. Not just Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s (CSNY) multi-platinum album Déjà Vu – home to Crosby’s twitchily paranoid Almost Cut My Hair – but the frankly extraordinary 1971 solo album, If I Could Only Remember My Name: haunting, richly atmospheric, the vocals frequently wordless and, on closer I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here, authentically unsettling, it might be the fullest expression of Crosby’s restless sense of adventure.
Crosby pictured with Joni Mitchell, whose career he kickstarted. Photograph: Sulfiati Magnuson
Said adventurousness was there again on 1972’s Graham Nash David Crosby, recorded by the duo when CSNY proved incapable of holding together long enough to follow-up to Déjà Vu. The album’s poppier material was Nash’s work, while Crosby came up with more expansive and exploratory exercises in mood and atmosphere of which Games was a particularly great example. The duo would reconvene, making the beautiful Wind on the Water, after CSNY’s famously turbulent 1974 tour came to a premature conclusion. The quartet had been lured back together by the prospect of making vast sums of money, although the omens were there – they had already tried and failed to record a new album. Proceedings swiftly degenerated into a bacchanal of coked-out excess and off-key vocals that Crosby dubbed “the doom tour”.
But things were even more doom-laden than Crosby thought, or the sunlit tone of Wind on the Water suggested. His increasing addiction – he moved from snorting cocaine to freebasing and using heroin – began to affect his writing, at least in terms of quantity. A man who had battled the Byrds to get as many of his songs as possible on their albums managed only three compositions on 1977’s CSN, an album that sold 6m copies: if the sense of exploratory magic that sparkled throughout Crosby Stills and Nash’s debut had been replaced by solid professionalism, its sound fitted neatly with that year’s vogue for smooth, Californian rock (tellingly, it was at No 2 in the US charts when Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours was at No 1). Thereafter, he stopped writing almost entirely. He cobbled together a solo album from unreleased songs he had written in the 70s. Rejected by his record label, it nevertheless provided the source for his solitary contribution to CSN’s next album, 1982’s Daylight Again: that the implausibly lovely Delta was one of its scattered highlights only underlined the talent that Crosby seemed intent on throwing away.
Crosby Stills & Nash: Delta – video
Just how intent he was is laid out in his 1988 autobiography Long Time Gone, a book that spares few details in documenting his descent: the open sores that covered his face and body, the squalid conditions in which he and partner, Jan Dance, lived, the crowd of dealers and fellow addicts he surrounded himself with – so sinister that even the musicians still willing to work with him dubbed them “the Manson Family” – the endless string of drug and firearms busts. At one juncture, Crosby had a drug-induced seizure while driving a car at 65 miles an hour. At another, Dance was held hostage by a dealer to whom Crosby owed money while he was out on the road. His addiction was such that he refused to let go of his freebase pipe even when a policeman was arresting him backstage. Nash began publicly expressing the view that Crosby was going to die; Young responded to his plight with the scathing Hippie Dream, a song that depicted Crosby in his ruin, “capsized in excess”. His deterioration was made very publicly visible during a chaotic CSNY performance at Live Aid. Running unsteadily through their brief set, Crosby looked decades older than his fellow musicians. “A 14-year addiction to heroin and cocaine has left David Crosby looking like a Bowery bum,” wrote Spin magazine.
Backstage at Live Aid, Young had suggested he would consent to a new CSNY album if Crosby cleaned up. After Crosby emerged from a nine-month stretch in prison on drugs and weapons charges – a sentence that almost undoubtedly saved his life – Young proved true to his word. Soulless and stilted, American Dream was a largely awful album – Compass, which Crosby had written in prison, was a rare highlight among a dearth of decent material – and, if anything, the subsequent CSNY album Live It Up was even worse, a hopeless attempt to marry their harmonies to the booming drums and glossy synth production that was still mainstream US rock’s default setting. It was a problem that also afflicted his post-prison solo albums Oh Yes I Can and Thousand Roads, although anyone prepared to dig deep would find a scattering of songs suggesting his skills were undiminished – the reflective and rueful Tracks in the Dust, the wordless Flying Man on the former, the Mitchell co-write Yvette in English on the latter. And, as Crosby put it: “I was just glad to be there at all.”
Crosby with his wife, Jan Dance, in 2014. Photograph: Michael Nelson/EPA
Meanwhile, CSN remained a huge live draw – even more so when Young could be inveigled to join them – while Crosby’s solo career began to blossom. He formed the jazzy trio CPR with James Raymond, who had only found out he was Crosby’s son when he was 30. Raymond also worked on his father’s strong 2014 solo album Croz. Mischievous as ever, Crosby was an enthusiastic participant in CSNY’s confrontational 2006 Freedom of Speech tour, its setlist weighted in favour of Young’s recent Living With War, an album that protested against the George Bush administration and the conflict in Iraq. Their performances provoked boos and walk-outs from conservative fans, but Crosby remained gleefully unrepentant: “Who are these people who come to a CSNY show and complain that we’re political?”
Age and sobriety didn’t diminish Crosby’s capacity to cause trouble. A projected CSN album with Rick Rubin had to be abandoned because Rubin couldn’t get along with him. Next, he fell out very publicly with both Young and Nash – he criticised both for leaving their wives for younger women – which brought both CSN and CSNY to a permanent conclusion. Crosby occasionally expressed regret, but in reality seemed energised by the finality of their split.
Certainly there was a noticeable upswing in the quality of his music. Recorded with much younger musicians, 2018’s Here If You Listen was the best and certainly the most consistent album Crosby had made since the early 70s. On its opener Glory or the poignant Your Own Ride (“I’ve been thinking about dying, how to do it well,” sang Crosby, who was plagued by ill health) it suggested an artist enjoying an unexpected creative Indian summer, an impression underlined by last year’s Live at the Capitol Theatre, which melded CSN classics, songs from If I Could Only Remember My Name and more recent material into an impressive summation of his career.
He also became an enthusiastic user of Twitter – he was still tweeting the day before he died – on which he was variously funny, provocative, infuriating, generous, wilfully argumentative, clearly obsessed with music, and never above reminding the world of his own talent. He was still tweeting right up to his death: his anger about US politics and the environment, praise for photographs of particularly well-rolled joints, approving retweets of fans praising his music – and of an old quote from his former bandmate Stills, a final moment of consensus about their motivation: “The joy of making a wonderful noise together.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Republicans have vowed not to raise the federal government’s borrowing capacity unless Biden makes steep cuts to federal spending, potentially impacting social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare. Trump’s video is a warning to his fellow party members not to go there. Instead, he suggests targeting foreign aid, cracking down on migration, ending “left wing gender programs from our military,” and “billions being spent on climate extremism.”
“Cut waste, fraud and abuse everywhere that we can find it and there is plenty there’s plenty of it,” Trump says. “But do not cut the benefits our seniors worked for and paid for their entire lives. Save Social Security, don’t destroy it.”
The video message was shared in advance of its release with POLITICO.
Trump’s position echoes his long-held, albeit unorthodox, conviction that the Republican Party should stay away from attaching themselves to entitlement reform. Prior to being elected president, Trump was highly critical of then-Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) for pushing austerity budgets during the Obama years. As a candidate for president, he insisted he would preserve both Medicare and Social Security. There was never any serious discussion of doing so during his time in office, though he obliquely hinted he may consider it in a second term.
Nevertheless, in issuing his statement now, Trump places his fellow Republicans in a political corner. Several of them have openly discussed using the looming debt ceiling standoff to extract cuts in non-discretionary spending, though party leadership has not fully embraced such a demand.
Over the last few months Trump himself has insisted that congressional Republicans use the debt ceiling as a leverage point to achieve policy objectives, despite having done no such thing during any of the times the debt ceiling was lifted when he was president. But his statement makes clear he views certain pursuits as off limits. And it puts him at least partially on the same page as Biden, who has not only insisted he won’t cut Social Security or Medicare but excoriated Republicans for suggesting they would.
The statement is among a series of policy-specific videos Trump has released since formally launching his third bid for the White House. And it suggests that the ex-president is looking to enhance his footprint on the current political landscape following weeks of criticisms that his campaign was off to a sluggish start.
Trump is slated to be in South Carolina next Saturday to make announcements related to campaign hires at an event his aides have described not as a rally but a more “intimate” gathering. Since announcing his third presidential run, Trump has not held any rallies and has remained at his properties in South Florida.
But Trump’s team has said they are at work behind the scenes from the campaign headquarters in West Palm Beach, and the ex-president will soon start making more public appearances, including a speech at the upcoming CPAC conference outside Washington, D.C.
Trump’s team has also asked Facebook to allow him back on the platform after he was thrown off of it following the Jan. 6 insurrection he helped foment. The social media platform has played an important role in fundraising and voter outreach, according to aides, and Meta is set to decide if it will lift Trump’s suspension this month.
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#Trump #GOP #Dont #touch #Medicare #Social #Security #debt #ceiling #fight
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
My children are blessed to have been raised in a country different from the Germany of the 1930s and the Poland of the immediate postwar era. Both of my parents are refugees from European antisemitism, and my mother’s comments about her experiences in Poland can seem mysterious to my kids. They haven’t been raised with material exhibitions of antisemitism, and our discussions about it over the years have seemed more like lessons in history.
But antisemitism is on the rise again in the United States. Harmful tropes have returned to explicit politics, with help from the last president. Meanwhile, remarks by Kanye West and Nick Cannon echo ancient conspiratorial themes.
My two children are seven and 11. They are Black and Jewish and have to understand racism and antisemitism when most adults don’t or won’t understand either. How do we address these issues with them?
Black children growing up in America absorb much about race from their environment. Many live in largely segregated cities and experience largely segregated spaces – they see what is happening from an early age. The repeated instances of police violence and Black protest, followed by white backlash – what the historian Elizabeth Hinton calls “the cycle” – do not go unnoticed by Black children.
Meanwhile, leading Republican candidates talk in antisemitic stereotypes – the “dual loyalty” trope that Jewish Americans have a primary loyalty to Israel, or conspiracy theories such as QAnon that resemble the ancient Christian antisemitic conspiracy theory of blood libel. My 11-year-old likes Ye’s music, and now feels bad listening to it. But it’s important that my kids recognize that the narratives he and others share are already embedded in American society.
For some Jewish Americans, remarks and posts by Ye, Cannon and Kyrie Irving come together in a concept that one could, very tendentiously, label “Black antisemitism”. But we must be vigilant to the fact that what could be mislabeled as such is instead antisemitism of other varieties. If Ye describes Jewish financial domination, or control of the media, it is not “Black antisemitism”. It is garden-variety American antisemitism. Christian nationalism is the view that the US was founded as a Christian nation, and its exceptional nature is a testament to the abiding Christian character of its founding laws and culture. Christian nationalism is also a traditional source of antisemitism, the blame for which can hardly be placed on Black Americans.
Even when we look at antisemitic comments made by Black Hebrew Israelites, or some of the leaders of the Nation of Islam, we need to ask whether the antisemitism has anything to do with being Black American, or rather some other source (eg certain forms of Christianity or Islam). There are a variety of sources of antisemitism. None of them are specifically Black.
It is tempting for Jewish Americans to displace the threat of antisemitism on to another minority group. But the real threats we Jewish people face in America have nothing to do with Black Americans, who generally have been and always will be our allies.
US anti-Black racism, unlike antisemitism, is at the heart of the policies that formed our country. The legacy of slavery runs deep in our institutions, culturally and otherwise. Antisemitism, on the other hand, is less intrinsic to the American identity.
James Baldwin in 1985. Photograph: Associated Press
As Black Americans are to the United States, Jews were to many European nations – for centuries, their national minority. Elections swung on their issues. The Nazis killed two out of three European Jews. Even in Poland, a country where we numbered for centuries 10% of the national population, it is as if we were never there.
As James Baldwin powerfully argued, in his 1967 essay Negroes Are Antisemitic Because They’re Anti-White, this European past, as horrific as it was, has not prevented many Jewish Americans from claiming the privileges of whiteness here. Baldwin aptly writes: “One does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering. It isn’t, and one knows that it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it is.” Even my Black Jewish American children, as young as they are, are keenly aware of these facts. They also know that unlike most American Jews, they cannot escape into whiteness.
The reality is that the fate of Black and Jewish Americans are linked, as Jewish people are characteristically targeted by conspiracy theories that are at the heart of white ethnonationalism and fascism. “Until we see antisemitism as a toxic species of the white supremacy that threatens Black security,” Michael Eric Dyson has written, “none of us are truly safe.”
My kids’ strong sense of social justice is, I recognize, in large part personal – for example, the journeys of all refugees from hatred and discrimination remind them of my parents’ similar flights. Antisemitic conspiracy theorists, however, have a quite different view of the source of Jewish support of refugees. According to classic Nazi thinking, Jews were instead drawn to supporting refugees because it was a method to dilute and weaken native white Christian populations. “The Jews will not replace us,” uttered in Charlottesville, Virginia, in a very different political and historical context, is a clear reference to this; it also fueled the murder of Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018.
In Nazi and KKK ideology, Jews are the secret agents behind social justice movements. But even recent attacks on critical race theory (CRT) target Jews and Blacks together, albeit covertly. Attacks on CRT are a version of the old “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory, and as such appeal to antisemites, who will make the racist assumption that the “theorists” behind it are Jews. There are clear overlaps in the multiple conspiracy theories behind European fascism and those animating the far right in the US. Both target Black people and Jewish people simultaneously.
We owe to Black writers and thinkers very early recognition of these parallels. As the historian Matthew Delmont has memorably put it, Langston Hughes in 1937 essentially described fascism as Jim Crow with a foreign accent. The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the main Black newspapers in the US, had a “Double V” victory campaign in the 1940s – victory was to be fought abroad against fascism and here against racism. Black Americans knew that Nazism was a racist project, since antisemitism is a form of racism. As I see it, and tell my children, Black Americans are Jewish Americans’ greatest allies against the forces facing both of us here. More generally, fascist antisemitism is simultaneously mixed with threats to other minorities and marginalized groups and we need to stand against it together.
Mourners hug last year after lighting a candle in memory of Melvin Wax, one of 11 Jewish worshippers killed at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Photograph: Gene J Puskar/AP
Some prominent Black American intellectuals, as well as the movements their work has helped spark, have directed ire against actions taken by the state of Israel, which subjects Palestinians to mass over-policing, over-incarceration, and unjust imprisonment. The ubiquitous intrusive checkpoints remind many of the straight line between Jim Crow, Ferguson and Palestine. But my kids are being raised as American Jews, not as citizens of another nation. They are similarly critical of these actions of the state of Israel, and its current direction, as are many other young American Jews.
All talk of “Black antisemitism” is therefore nothing more than a dangerous distraction. Here is the reality.
The most specific threat as a group we Jewish people face in America is the omnipresent threat we Jews will always face, the threat of Christian nationalism, including forms of Christianity that are deeply and sophisticatedly based on Christian teachings. It’s Christian nationalism that maintains that Jews must play a subordinate role in the workplace and elsewhere to Christians. These forms of Christianity have for countless centuries been our most dedicated ideological enemy. As Christian nationalism rises, you will see more antisemitism of the variety that grants that while Jews shouldn’t be exterminated, they need to take a cultural and political backseat to Christians.
Christian nationalists see Israel as belonging, at least for now, to Jewish people – but they feel the US is theirs. They explicitly want American Jews to be second-class citizens. This is Ye’s real beef, and it’s an ancient one. His claim that Jews should work for Christians is not “Black antisemitism” (whatever that would be) – it is rather a traditional, perpetually threatening form of antisemitism.
I invite my children to embrace the remarkable American promise of a multiracial, multireligious democracy, inclusive and fully accepting of the many identities that make up a free society. But it would be foolish to leave them ignorant about the very real obstacles to this ideal.
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#Black #Jewish #children #Kanye #West #antisemitism #race #Jason #Stanley
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
