Day: February 10, 2019

The Louvre Abu Dhabi, the first museum to carry the famed name outside of France, announced Sunday it will roll out works by Dutch masters Rembrandt and Vermeer this month.

Works by the two artists are part of the gallery’s first exhibition this year, entitled “Rembrandt, Vermeer and the Dutch Golden Age: Masterpieces from The Leiden collection and the Musee du Louvre.”

The exhibit, on display in the United Arab Emirates capital from February 14 to May 18, is dedicated to Rembrandt, Vermeer and the famed “fijnschilders” — fine painters known for their detailed work — of the Netherlands.

“Rembrandt is a master of the Golden Age,” museum head Manuel Rabate told AFP.

“He’s a universal genius, he’s connected to the world.”

The exhibition features 95 works, including Vermeer’s “Young Woman Seated at a Virginal” alongside Rembrandt’s “Portrait of a Man” and “Study of the Head and Clasped Hands of a Young Man as Christ in Prayer”.

The museum has also acquired Rembrandt’s “Head of a young man, with clasped hands: Study of the figure of Christ” as part of its permanent collection.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi was inaugurated with great pomp in November 2017 — nearly five years behind schedule — by French President Emmanuel Macron and Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan.

It was marketed as “a universal museum” celebrating cultural exchange and tolerance.

The museum has reportedly cost the UAE around $1 billion, including upwards of $500 million to use France’s “Louvre” brand.

Officials have not confirmed the price tag.
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Some 6,000 languages are spoken in the world, and nearly half of them are endangered, according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger.

One of them is Theron Musuweu Kolokwe’s native tongue, Subiya, a Bantu language spoken by more than 30,000 people along the Zambezi River in Namibia, Zambia and Botswana.

“I think in my language,” he said. “I dream in my language. It’s the language that I was born into. I didn’t have the choice to speak it.”

That’s because, like other educated young people in Windhoek, the 33-year-old speaks a number of other languages on a daily basis, especially English and Afrikaans.

Two years ago, Kolokwe started documenting Subiya. The idea came to him while he was watching YouTube.

“Randomly, a video of someone speaking their native tongue popped up,” he recalled. “Then, when I opened it, it caught my curiosity. Then, I was like, I want to also hear my tongue and languages from my country and southern Africa in particular.”

Kolokwe is one of dozens of volunteers working with Wikitongues, a nonprofit in New York City that helps people from around the world preserve native languages that have been disappearing.

​Colorful vs. gray

When a language becomes extinct, says Wikitongues co-founder Daniel Bogre Udell, a culture disappears and a community loses its identity. That’s happening more often than many can imagine.

Udell, however, says language loss is not a natural culmination of progress.

“That’s really not an accident of history,” he explained. “It’s because, over the 1800s and 1900s, roughly every country in the world relentlessly worked to forcefully assimilate minorities’ cultures. I think no one would suggest that we need to be religiously or culturally or ethnically homogeneous. So, why would we be linguistically homogeneous? It’s a question about what kind of a world we want to live in: a colorful one or a gray one?”

The volunteer-based group began in 2016 as an open internet archive of every language in the world. Nearly 1,000 volunteers have submitted videos in more than 400 languages and dialects on Wikitongues’ YouTube channel. Some, like English, Farsi and Mandarin, are spoken by hundreds of millions of people. Others are unfamiliar, like Bora, spoken by a few thousand people in the Amazonian regions of Peru and Colombia, and Iraqw, spoken in Tanzania.

Inspiration and hope

The vision behind Wikitongues is simple and clear. It’s all about providing the tools and support people need to save their languages.

“Language revitalization at the end of the day is something that has to be done by the community, from the ground up,” Udell said. “There is no way an outsider organization can save someone’s language for them. We’ve had over 1,500 contributors and videos from 70 different countries. We have people from India who record dozens of languages, which is beyond their own. We have another volunteer from Scotland who is one of the last speakers of a variety of Scottish dialects. He’s in the process of reclaiming them, revitalizing, (and) building a dictionary for them.”

Wikitongues is also where volunteers from around the world can be inspired by the proof that reviving disappearing indigenous languages is possible. Hebrew is a good example.

“Hebrew went extinct in the 4th century BC, and was revived in the 1800s and now once again it’s the mother tongue of half of the world’s Jewish population,” Udell said. “One of our tribe partners here in the U.S., the Tunica-Biloxi tribe in Louisiana, has over the past couple of years built a really lively language revival on their community. Their language went extinct in the 1940s. We’ve had contributors from the Cornish community whose language went extinct in the 1700s and was brought back in the 1900s. Their movement really got geared up when the internet arrived and new generations of Cornish speakers find each other online and use the language on a daily basis.”

Such revival success stories give volunteers like Theron Musuweu Kolokwe hope that his efforts can save Subiya and other African languages from extinction. Kolokwe’s goal is to create a dictionary, and a curriculum so it can be taught in school.

“I want the world to know about my language,” he sais. “I want to promote it, so that generations to come can speak it fluently because there is a huge influx of Western languages around here, especially in Namibia. We all learn [English] in school. It’s the business language, the language of government, and people are neglecting their native languages. So, I want to promote it so more and more people can speak it. And children can be proud of where they come from.”

With awareness and technology, Wikitongues puts people in a better position to save and revive their native languages, making the world more colorful and culturally diverse.
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Rappers Kendrick Lamar and Drake may lead the nominations, but Sunday’s Grammy Awards looks set to be a showcase for girl power.

Outspoken rapper Cardi B, whose music and personal life has dominated pop culture for the past two years, leads the charge on music’s biggest night with a live performance and five Grammy nominations, including for album and record of the year.

R&B singer Alicia Keys will host the Grammys for the first time, while Miley Cyrus, Janelle Monae, Camila Cabello and Kacey Musgraves are also among the performers at the Los Angeles ceremony.

Adding to the star power, Motown legend Diana Ross will take the stage to mark her 75th birthday in March, and hopes are high that Lady Gaga will perform her Grammy- and Oscar-nominated song “Shallow” from the movie “A Star is Born.”

​Eyes on Cardi B

Yet Cardi B is likely to grab most of the attention. The 26-year-old New York artist is one of only a handful of female rappers and has captured attention with her message of female empowerment, on and off marriage to rapper Offset, and a string of hit records and collaborations, including “I Like It,” “Girls Like You” and “Taki Taki.”

“Cardi B is a very strong woman who is in control of her career. She is really talented and has something to say and she is just fun. She is like a breath of fresh air,” said Melinda Newman, West Coast editor for Billboard magazine.

“Between Alicia Keys and all the female nominees, I think we will have a very female-leading show. That’s not necessarily by design, that’s just how it’s shaking out this year,” Newman added.

Uproar in 2018

It is a far cry from 2018, when the dearth of female nominees and performers caused a media uproar and prompted the Recording Academy, whose members choose the Grammy winners, to expand the number of nominees in the top four categories to eight from five.

This year five of the eight nominees for the coveted album of the year award are women: Cardi B’s “Invasion of Privacy”; Janelle Monae’s “Dirty Computer”; folk singer Brandi Carlile’s “By the Way, I Forgive You”; country artist Kacey Musgraves’ “Golden Hour”; and R&B newcomer H.E.R.’s self-titled “H.E.R.”

Six of the eight musicians competing for best new artist are also women, including “New Rules” British singer Dua Lipa, Chloe & Halle, Bebe Rexha and H.E.R.

While the show may give the impression that girls run the world, there is no guarantee how many will take home a Grammy.

Lamar leads with eight nods, many of them for writing most of the “Black Panther” movie soundtrack album, which is up for album of the year. Drake, the most commercially successful artist of 2018, follows with seven nominations, including for his album “Scorpion” and single “God’s Plan.”

It is not yet known whether either of the rappers will perform on Sunday.

The Grammy Awards take place in Los Angeles, Feb. 10, and will be broadcast live on CBS television at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT (0100 GMT).
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Americans have not needed iceboxes to keep food cold for nearly a century, ever since refrigerators became widely available. But that doesn’t stop folks in Holderness, N.H., from carrying out a winter task that’s been done for more than 120 years — harvesting ice for the summer months. Faith Lapidus reports.
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How do editorial cartoons fit into the U.S. political realities? What can they change, and who can they inspire or shame? Anna Rice talked with seasoned editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes who, for more than two decades, has been drawing Washington’s political players and bringing attention to their political blunders.
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