Month: June 2017

National parks traveler Mikah Meyer left Texas and headed to southern New Mexico, just in time to celebrate a milestone; he’s exactly one-third of the way through his 3-year journey to visit all 417 sites within the U.S. National Park Service.

He didn’t realize what spectacular beauty awaited him at his first two sites.

Geological wonders

While in Texas, Mikah had explored the natural beauty among the mountains and canyons of the Chihuahuan Desert, but he soon discovered other natural gems, this time hidden beneath the desert in southeastern New Mexico: the 119 limestone caves in Carlsbad Caverns National Park.

They were formed millions of years ago, when sulfuric acid dissolved the limestone along fractures and folds in the rock, leaving behind caves of all sizes.

Land of enchantment

As he explored one of the largest, Mikah said it was like looking up at the sky. “And in this case the sky that you’re looking at is full of stalactites. It’s basically this incredibly filled cave with stalactites and stalagmites everywhere, in crazy designs.”

Stalactites hang like icicles from the roof of a cave. They are made up of calcium salts and other minerals deposited by water seeping from cracks in the roof. Stalagmites form in the same way, rising up from water that drips to the floor of a cave. The two often meet and fuse into a single column, creating a picturesque form.

WATCH: White Sands, Mystical Caves Mesmerize Parks Traveler

“I have a picture of one that looks like Jabba the Hutt; it looks like a Star Wars character with nasty teeth,” Mikah said. “There is other one that looks like a bunch of spider webs hanging from the ceiling and others that look like chandeliers.”

Outside of the cave, Mikah noticed a huge flock of birds flying around. Come evening, the skies fill with thousands of bats — specifically, Brazilian (or Mexican) free-tailed bats. The 9-centimeter long creatures are among the most abundant North American mammals and reported to be the fastest flyer in the animal kingdom.

Experiencing the wonders of the cave helped Mikah understand why New Mexico’s nickname is the Land of Enchantment. “It’s one of the most otherworldly places I’ve been to on this entire journey so far,” he said.

Desert snow?

Heading north from the ethereal world of the caves, Mikah found himself in another surreal place… driving on a road covered with something that looked like snow…

“Growing up in Nebraska, this is what it looks like after a really heavy snow,” he noted.  

Except he wasn’t in Nebraska… he was in the middle of a desert. And what he was driving on, wasn’t snow.

It was white sand. Lots and lots of white gypsum sand, covering 712 square kilometers of desert, the largest gypsum dunefield in the world. White Sands National Monument preserves a major portion of this unique dunefield, along with the plants and animals that live there.

“The reason this white sand exists is partially because there used to be a lake,” Mikah explained. As the ancient lake dried up, it left behind the sand. “And because the sand is in between two mountain ranges, that’s what’s helped allow it to stay there,” he added. “So it’s a very, very unique opportunity to see a different ecosystem.”

Ocean of sand

Mikah had fun exploring those dunes, running up and down the glistening white sand in the white hot sun. At one point, he even swapped his sneakers for a snow saucer, using it to sled down the dune as he would have on a snowy hill.

Mikah also enjoyed a hike on the Alkali Flat Trail, a strenuous, 8 kilometer round trip. Despite its name, the trail isn’t flat, the National Park Service warns. Mikah hiked up and down dunes the entire way, with no shady refuge from the sun.

“When you’re in the main part of the park where you’re driving around, the sands have some bushes and green trees in them, so it’s not just like this pure field of sand,” Mikah said. “But when you go on the Flats Trail it really becomes nothing but basically an ocean of white sand.”  

“White Sands was a really big place for me because it was my 139th park site which marked exactly one third of the way through this journey,” Mikah said. He stamped his National Park Service “Passport” with a cancellation stamp to commemorate the milestone.

He ended his day at the site with a fitting tribute.

“I made it a goal to get there for sunset because I’d heard the sunsets there were magical, and I’m proud to say I made it… it was really just another otherworldly place.”

That may be one of the reasons the site is one of Mikah’s top four favorite parks so far.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park and White Sands National Monument are just two of 15 national park sites in New Mexico. Mikah, invites you to learn more about his journey through those enchanted lands by visiting him on his website, Facebook and Instagram.
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National parks traveler Mikah Meyer recently celebrated a milestone. He’s exactly one-third of the way through his three-year journey to visit all 417 sites within the U.S. National Park Service. He spent it exploring white sand dunes and mystical caves at two of New Mexico’s many national park sites. He shared highlights of his visits with VOA’s JulieTaboh.
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One year ago today, Muhammad Ali — arguably the greatest and most unforgettable athlete of the 20th century — lost his decades-long fight with Parkinson’s disease, dying at age 74.

‘I am the greatest’

Originally named Cassius Clay, Ali was in Kentucky during an era of harsh segregation, and confronted its indignities from the start, carrying himself with confidence and pride despite the racist world around him.

He learned to box at the age of 12, motivated by the theft of his red Schwinn bike, which left the skinny youth humiliated — and determined.

‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’

From the start, Clay — who would later change his name to Muhammad Ali after joining the Nation of Islam — was driven, creating a punishing gym routine that he rarely deviated from.

He was a natural.

The young athlete possessed unmatched speed, agility and physical power. His signature was a kind of mental strength or attitude that he used to outwit his opponents.

Outside the ring, Ali was witty, charismatic, even vain (of his opponents, he would often say ‘He isn’t as pretty as me!”), and often spoke like hyped up poet:

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. His hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see. Now you see me, now you don’t. George thinks he will, but I know he won’t. 

I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.

I’ve wrestled with alligators. I’ve tussled with a whale. I done handcuffed lightning. And throw thunder in jail.

Although he had already made a name for himself, his big moment came in 1964, when he stepped into the ring for his first title fight against then heavyweight champ Sonny Liston. Ali taunted the champion mercilessly, once appearing unexpectedly at his home to goad him into the ring.

Ali instantly became a worldwide star after knocking out Liston in just six rounds. 

​Despite his brash charm, originality in the ring and stunning physical prowess, not everyone took to Ali.  Many publicly expressed their hatred.

By joining Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam and adopting a Muslim name, he alienated many Americans who were not ready to accept a black Muslim boxing star. 

“He threatened a sense of the racial order; he was, in his refusal to conform to any type, as destabilizing to many Americans. … He was, for many years, a radical figure for many Americans,”  wrote David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker Magazine and author of the 1998 biography “Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero.” ​

By 1967, Ali had won 29 title fights in six and a half years, an extraordinary record. But an unexpected turn of events was to keep the champ out of the ring for the next three years. 

Vietnam

When he refused to be inducted into the armed forces during the Vietnam War, the state boxing commission suspended him, stripping him of his title.  

Ali would not fight the Vietcong in Vietnam.

That move endeared him to many, African-Americans in particular, who watched as the heavyweight champion of the world courageously gave up his hard-won heavyweight boxing title in exchange for principles.

Ali returned to the ring in 1970, after a federal court upheld his petition for a state license.

He would triumph over and over again in the years to come: reclaiming his title in 1974 in a fight with Joe Frazier; the famed “Rumble in the Jungle” in what was then the country of Zaire, where he won a masterful fight against George Foreman; losing his title and winning it back; and, finally, losing it for the last time in 1980 to Larry Holmes.

He retired a year later. By then, the early effects of Parkinson’s disease on Ali’s body were clearly evident in his slurred speech.

As he grew increasingly more ill, he was rarely seen in public, living out the rest of his life quietly with his family in Kentucky and Arizona.

 
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The private studio of glass artist Dale Chihuly reflects his long obsession with collecting. Sheets of stamps cover one table; pocket knives are marshaled on another. Carnival-prize figurines from the first half of the 20th century line shelves that reach the ceiling.

Amid the ordered clutter, some items hint at more than Chihuly’s eclectic tastes: a long row of Ernest Hemingway titles in one bookcase, and in another an entire wall devoted to Vincent van Gogh — homages to creative geniuses racked by depression.

Chihuly, too, has struggled with his mental health, by turns fragile and luminous like the art he makes. Now 75 and still in the thrall of a decades-long career, he discussed his bipolar disorder in detail for the first time publicly in an interview with The Associated Press. He and his wife, Leslie Chihuly, said they don’t want to omit from his legacy a large part of who he is.

“It’s a pretty remarkable moment to be able to have this conversation,” she said. “We really want to open our lives a little bit and share something more personal. … Dale’s a great example of somebody who can have a successful marriage and a successful family life and successful career — and suffer from a really debilitating, chronic disease. That might be helpful for other people.”

Chihuly, who began working with glass in the 1960s, is a pioneer of the glass art movement. Known for styles that include vibrant seashell-like shapes, baskets, chandeliers and ambitious installations in botanical gardens and museums, he has said that pushing the material to new forms, creating objects never before seen, fascinates him.

Even in the past year he has found a new way of working with glass — painting with glass enamel on glass panes, stacking the panes together and back-lighting them to give them a visual depth. He calls it “Glass on Glass,” and it’s featured for the first time in the new Chihuly Sanctuary at the Buffett Cancer Center in Omaha, Nebraska, and at an indoor-outdoor exhibit opening June 3 at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.

But the flip side of that creativity has sometimes been dark. He began suffering from depression in his 20s, he said, and those spells began to alternate with manic periods beginning in his late 40s.

“I’m usually either up or down,” Chihuly said. “I don’t have neutral very much. When I’m up I’m usually working on several projects. A lot of times it’s about a six-month period. When I’m down, I kind of go in hibernation.”

He still works but doesn’t feel as good about it. His wife noted that if he only went into the studio when he was up, he “wouldn’t have had a career.”

Asked what his down periods are like, Chihuly took a long pause. “Just pretty tough,” he said. “I’m lucky that I like movies. If I don’t feel good, I’ll put on a movie.”

Leslie Chihuly, who runs his studio, is more loquacious about the difficulties his condition has posed in their 25-year relationship.

They’ve tried to manage it as a family with various types of counseling, medication and a 1-to-10 scale system that allows him to communicate how he’s feeling when he doesn’t want to talk about it, she said.

Chihuly gave up drinking 15 years ago, and it’s been more than a decade since he was “life-threateningly depressed,” she said, though he’s never been suicidal.

“Dale has an impeccable memory about certain things, but there have been certain periods of time when he’s been hypomanic, as we call it, or depressed, and I’ll be the keeper for our family and our business around those difficult times,” she said.

She met him in 1992 after a mutual friend set them up. He was in a near-manic period, talking about an idea for bringing glassblowers from around the world to Venice, Italy, to display their art in the city’s canals. He had no plan and no funding, but she was eager to help him realize his vision — one that would eventually be depicted in the public television documentary “Chihuly Over Venice.”

Six months later, they traveled to an exhibit opening at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

“It was like the lights went out,” she said, choking back a sob. “All of a sudden the guy who was interested in everything … that guy wasn’t there.”

Dale Chihuly remained quiet as his wife described that moment. A tear fell from beneath the recognizable eyepatch he has worn since he lost sight in his left eye in a 1976 car crash.

Though the mood swings were new to Leslie Chihuly at the time, they were familiar to the other artists Chihuly worked with. Joey Kirkpatrick met him in 1979, when she attended Pilchuck Glass School, which Chihuly founded in the woods north of Seattle in 1971. It was a small summer workshop; the students constructed their own shelter. She and her partner, Flora Mace, spent many hours watching movies with him during his down periods.

“What amazed me about it is his persistence at picking the thing, his creative life, that would pull him along or keep him going through those times,” she said. “When he was up, he could call you up at Pilchuck on a Sunday night and say, ‘Meet me at the airport at 10 tomorrow, we’ve got a flight to Pittsburgh to go to some demonstration.’ It was always exciting. When he was down, there wasn’t that. It was quieter.”

Chihuly said the message he’d have for others struggling with the condition would be to “see a good shrink” and to “try to live with it, to know that when they’re really depressed, it’s going to change, before too long. And to take advantage when they do feel up to get as much done as they can.”
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New York’s Museum of Modern Art is boldly expanding its midtown Manhattan home that draws more than 3 million visitors annually from around the world — including those who came Friday to see the first completed phase of the $450 million project.

Spread over three floors of the art mecca off Fifth Avenue are 15,000 square-feet (about 1,400 square-meters) of reconfigured galleries, a new, second gift shop, a redesigned cafe and espresso bar and, facing the sculpture garden, two lounges graced with black marble quarried in France.

Still under construction are 50,000 square-feet (about 4,600 square-meters) of new galleries opening in 2019, bringing MoMA’s total art-filled space to 175,000 square-feet (about 16,000 square-meters) on six floors. The expansion will allow more of the museum’s collection of nearly 200,000 works to be displayed.

The project also will provide 25 percent more space for visitors to relax or have a sit-down meal.

The museum building, which opened in 1939, now nearly fills an entire city block and showcases works by artists including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Andy Warhol, Vincent van Gogh and Frida Kahlo, to name just a few from the permanent collection. The complex fuses original architecture by Philip Goodwin and Edward Stone with Philip Johnson-designed additions in 1951 and 1964 and a new section by Argentine native Cesar Pelli in 1984, topped in 2004 by Yoshio Taniguchi’s $425 million expansion and renovation.

“We’re riffing off the DNA of MoMA’s history,” said Elizabeth Diller, whose Boston-based firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, was hired for the project, working with the Gensler firm in San Francisco. “This work has required the curiosity of an archaeologist and the skill of a surgeon.”

MoMA director Glenn Lowry wants to achieve much more than augmenting square footage. MoMA curators are embracing ethnic and cultural diversity that transcends established European artists through shows including, for instance, black and women artists. MoMA also is highlighting art tracing certain social periods — for example, female creativity in the decades after World War II that spawned feminism.

“The Museum of Modern Art’s renovation and expansion project will seek to reassure and surprise,” Lowry said.

Architecturally, he said, MoMA is “opening up, so you’re aware of the city” — by bringing the urban turf closer to visitors through an all-glass facade facing West 53rd Street, more window panels elsewhere and a rooftop lounge with a terrace.

Some galleries will be pliant, with partitions that can drop or be lifted, and ceilings of varying heights, depending on exhibition needs. Added studios and galleries will be set up for performances or film screenings.

The current, double-height entrance lobby will be reconfigured to ease visitor congestion that often results in lines reaching out onto the sidewalk. Demolition starts this month, and visitors will have to use alternative entrances.

Providing easier access inside is the historic Bauhaus staircase that was extended to reach down to the first floor.

The ongoing work includes some unseen improvements, with energy and water conservation that puts MoMA on track for the LEED Gold certification, a rating system that evaluates a building’s environmental performance.

MoMA has raised private funds for the nearly half-a-billion-dollar project; entertainment magnate David Geffen alone donated $100 million.

Admission is $25, but the ground level with its galleries is open to the public free of charge.

In the newly completed area, the first exhibition opens June 12. “Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive” will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the American architect’s birth.
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American Comedian Kathy Griffin responded to mounting criticism against her after she published a photo of herself holding what resembled the severed head of U.S. President Donald Trump, accusing “a bunch of old white guys” of trying to silence her.

During a news conference Friday, a teary-eyed Griffin accused the president and his allies, whom she referred to as “nut jobs,” of launching a campaign to get her fired from her jobs, simply because she is a woman.

“This wouldn’t be happening to a guy. This is a female thing,” Griffin said, when asked if she thought a male comic would be treated the same way.

The entertainer lost a television appearance on CNN and had five performance dates on her tour cancelled following the release of the photo showing her holding a reproduction of a bloody head that looked like Trump.

When asked about her loss of work Friday, Griffin called it “hurtful” that so many entities had chosen to distance themselves from her. Her attorney, Lisa Bloom, said Griffin had been a victim of “censorship.”

Trump, on Wednesday, reacted to Griffin’s photo on Twitter, calling it disturbing – particularly to his children.

First Lady Melania Trump, in a rare move, also issued a statement Wednesday, questioning “the mental health” of a person who would take such a photo.

“As a mother, a wife, and a human being, that photo is very disturbing,” she said.

Griffin initially apologized for the photo after it received widespread criticism across the political spectrum, saying she had “moved the line” and then “crossed it.”

She changed her tone Friday, though, calling Trump a “fool” and accusing him of attacking her in an effort to distract from other issues currently facing his administration.

“They have mobilized their armies or their bots, or whatever they do,” she said. “I don’t think I will have a career after this. I’m going to be honest, he broke me. He broke me.”

Griffin said she “put about five minutes of thought into this” before posing for the photo and her intention was to cause a controversy.

“I said: ‘let’s get in trouble. Let’s give them something to talk about,’” she said.

Further, she called releasing the photo: “The right thing to do.”

Dmitry Gorin, a criminal defense attorney hired by Griffin, confirmed Friday that Griffin is the subject of a U.S. Secret Service investigation for her role in the photo, but said “there really wasn’t a threat” and called the photo “a bad joke.”

“We’re going to fully cooperate with the Secret Service in their investigation,” he said.
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