Guilty Pleasures
By Associated Press
Dissident Russian rock band in Israel after deportation from Thailand
TEL AVIV, Israel | A dissident Russian rock band angered by Moscow’s war in Ukraine has arrived in Israel after being deported from Thailand under suspected pressure from the Kremlin, the performers said Thursday.
The seven members of the band Bi-2 were arrested last week after playing a concert on the southern resort island of Phuket, reportedly for not having proper working papers. On Facebook, they said all their concerts “are held in accordance with local laws and practices.” Phuket is a popular destination for Russian expats and tourists. After paying a fine, the band members were sent to an immigration detention center in Bangkok.
Speaking in the arrival hall of Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, guitarist and singer Aleksandr “Shura” Uman of Bi-2 said the band was doing well and very tired after their ordeal. He also called the conditions he and his band faced in a Thai jail as “horrible.”
“We are free and we will keep moving forward,” Uman said.
Uman thanked the Israeli, American and Australian diplomats, as well as human rights organizations, for their work to bring them to Israel. A handful of supporters met their early-morning flight with signs to welcome them to Israel.
Russia has denied it had a hand in trying to get the band deported. However, Moscow has a reputation for cracking down on artists critical of the war, even those working abroad. The Kremlin had previously singled out Uman and another member of Bi-2, Yegor “Lyova” Bortnik.
On Wednesday night, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz praised diplomatic efforts that enabled all the musicians to leave Thailand for Israel. One band member with Israeli citizenship had returned earlier Wednesday morning.
Kanchana Patarachoke, a Thai Foreign Ministry spokesperson, acknowledged all the band had left the country in “accordance with their wishes and Thai immigration laws and regulations.”
Five of the seven Bi-2 musicians entered Thailand using Russian passports, police Lt. Pakpoom Rojanawipak told The Associated Press. At least four of the members are reportedly Israeli nationals, including the two founders, Uman and Bortnik. The latter is also an Australian citizen.
Bi-2 has 1.01 million subscribers to its YouTube channel and 376,000 monthly listeners on Spotify.
Andrei Lugovoi, a member of the lower house of Russia’s parliament, had called the band members “scum” for their criticism of the war in Ukraine. Britain has accused Lugovoi of involvement in the death of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London in 2006 after being poisoned with tea laced with radioactive polonium-210.
The decision to allow the band to go to Israel was applauded by activists.
“Bangkok was right to refuse Moscow’s demands to send these activist artists back to face certain persecution and worse in Russia,” said Phil Robertson, Human Rights Watch’s deputy Asia director.
Street artist of ‘Super Pope’ fame gets new stamp of Vatican approval
ROME | Street artist Maupal, whose cartoon-like depictions of Pope Francis as a “Super Pope” have graced buildings around the Vatican for a decade, got an official stamp of approval on Thursday when he appeared at a Vatican news conference.
Maupal, in life Mauro Pallotta, designed a series of posters to illustrate Francis’ 2024 Lenten message, which this year emphasizes the need for the faithful to let go of hopelessness and bondage to find a path of inner freedom. The posters will be released weekly over the course of this Lenten season leading up to Easter.
Sitting next to one of Francis’ closest advisers, Cardinal Michael Czerny, Maupal said he never sought out official recognition from the Vatican but was “proud and honored” to have been asked to depict Francis’ message in art.
“Representing Christian values via art has always been one of the greatest goals of painting and sculpture,” Maupal told reporters. “I have tried to synthesize the profound concepts expressed by the Holy Father through pictorial language in a simple, easily readable style.”
In the first poster released on Thursday, Francis is shown walking through a desert field of upturned nails, hauling a wheel barrel with a heavy sack and the word “Faith” written on the sack. “Through the desert, God leads us to freedom,” reads the text, taken from the title of the pope’s message.
Maupal gained broad attention a year after Francis was elected in 2013, with the first graffiti art of the pope as a flying, white caped “Super Pope,” — a spinoff on Hollywood’s Superman — clutching his black satchel with the word “Values” on it. The graffiti appeared on buildings of the Borgo Pio neighborhood near the Vatican.
Initially, Rome’s “decorum” police scrubbed the images away.
But they continued to appear, each more embracing of Francis’ message than the last.
In one, Francis is shown on a ladder playing a game of tic tac toe, using peace signs for the zeroes, as a Swiss Guard peers around the corner to keep watch. In another, Francis is shown dangling from a harness like a window-washer, trying to clean the sky of pollution.
Over time, Maupal became somewhat part of the establishment as far as the Vatican was concerned. In 2022, Francis met with him, and that same year Maupal started collaborating with the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano. On Thursday, in addition to his place on the podium, the Vatican released a short biographic note about his art and his work in schools and prisons.
Asked about his evolution, Maupal said he never considered himself a “rebel artist,” or the type of graffiti artist who remains anonymous because his artwork is, legally speaking, defacing a public space. Each mural is signed “Maupal,” but the artist has never hidden his identity.
“If I do something on the street, I recognize that it’s an invasion, because the street belongs to everyone,” he said. “So convinced of this, from my very first work, everyone knew my first name and my last name.”
“Without seeking out officialness, I’ve followed my path, and now I find myself here,” he said.
Bening named Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. | Annette Bening, a two-time Golden Globe winner who recently received her fifth Oscar nomination, was named Thursday as the 2024 Woman of the Year by Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals.
The Pudding is the oldest theatrical organization in the nation and one of the oldest in the world. Since 1951, it has bestowed this award annually on women “who have made lasting and impressive contributions to the world of entertainment.” Other winners have included Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer Coolidge.
The festivities, including a celebratory roast of Bening, will take place Tuesday night. Bening will attend a performance of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals’ 175th production, “Heist Heist Baby.”
“We’re absolutely thrilled to honor Annette Bening in this milestone 175th anniversary year for the Hasty Pudding,” said Josh Hillers, the organization’s president. “Hot off her Oscars nomination for Best Actress, we’re excited to present her with the most prestigious award in the entertainment industry.”
Bening, who also has won a Screen Actors Guild Award and starred in “The Grifters” and “American Beauty,” earned her fifth Oscar nomination, this one for best actress, for playing the prickly long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad in the movie “Nyad.”
Barry Keoghan, best known for his roles in “Saltburn,” “Dunkirk,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” “Eternals,” and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” is the recipient of its 2024 Man of the Year Award. He will honored Friday night.
Bruce Springsteen’s mother Adele Springsteen
dies at 98
NEW YORK | Adele Zerilli Springsteen, the longtime legal secretary, musical muse and concert dance partner who captured countless hearts in her son Bruce Springsteen ‘s E Street Nation and beyond, has died at 98.
Bruce Springsteen announced in an Instagram post that his mother died Wednesday. He shared a video of the two of them dancing to the Glenn Miller swing-era standard “In the Mood” with the caption “Adele Springsteen — May 4, 1925-January 31, 2024.” He then quotes at length from the lyrics for “The Wish,” one of his songs that invokes her.
“I remember in the morning mom hearing your alarm clock ring. I’d lie in bed and listen to you getting ready for work, the sound of your makeup case on the sink,” the post says.
The cause and other details were not immediately revealed, but Springsteen said in 2021 that she had been struggling with Alzheimer’s disease for a decade and could no longer speak or stand.
The mother of three — and the last of three Italian-American Zerilli sisters — was a cornerstone of Bruce Springsteen’s anthem “American Land,” which honors “The McNicholases, the Posalskis, the Smiths, Zerillis too.”
The New York City native moved as a child to Freehold, never fathoming she’d someday bear offspring who’d turn New Jersey into lyrical legend.
Adele Springsteen’s joyful, spirited charm made her a fan magnet in her own right. “Video evidence of Adele rocking out onstage with Bruce dates back to 1992,” according to Rolling Stone magazine.
She was “real smart, real strong, real creative,” with a “refusal to be disheartened,” Bruce told biographer Dave Marsh.
And her influence ran deep.
She “held our family together” through years of hardship, the musician said in a 2010 Ellis Island speech, sharing the stage with his beaming mother and aunts.
“I took after my mom in a certain sense. Her life had an incredible consistency, work, work, work every day, and I admired that greatly,” he told “Uncut” magazine in 2002, praising her “noble” juggling of work and home.
“I’d visit her at her job sometimes, and it was filled with men and women who seemed to have a purpose,” he said. “I found a lot of inspiration in those simple acts.”
When Bruce was a kid, his mom scraped together some money — a story sweetly portrayed in another section of “The Wish,” which he recorded in 1987 and quoted from on Instagram Thursday.
“Little boy and his ma shivering outside a rundown music store window.
That night on top of a Christmas tree shines one beautiful star. And lying underneath a brand-new Japanese guitar.
…Well it was me in my Beatle boots, you in pink curlers and matador pants — pullin’ me up on the couch to do the twist for my uncles and aunts.”
When her boy hit the bigtime she worked much larger rooms, from America to Europe.
Though well-versed in the audience-cameo ritual “Dancing in the Dark,” she happily played the musical field.
In 2012 she danced and sang background on “Twist and Shout” at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. In March 2016, when she was 90, mother and son hip-wiggled to the raucous “Ramrod” at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
E Street Band member Steven Van Zandt tweeted Thursday that Adele Springsteen was the “Matriarch of our family and an unrelenting source of inspiring positive energy. One of a kind. She will always be there for us. Dancing in the audience.”
She lost her husband, Bruce’s father Douglas, who inspired songs, too, in 1998.
Survivors include their daughters, Pamela Springsteen and Virginia Shave, and a bountiful extended family.
They no doubt share the sentiments Bruce expressed that day on Ellis Island.
“Thank you, Mom,” he said. “I love you very much.”
Gilchrist, 1984 National Book Award winner for ‘Victory Over Japan,’ dies at 88
JACKSON, Miss. | Ellen Gilchrist, a National Book Award winner whose short stories and novels drew on the complexities of people and places in the American South, has died. She was 88.
An obituary from her family said Gilchrist died Tuesday in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, where she had lived in her final years.
Gilchrist published more than two dozen books, including novels and volumes of poetry, short stories and essays. “Victory Over Japan,” a collection of short stories set in Mississippi and Arkansas, was awarded the National Book Award for fiction in 1984.
Gilchrist said during an interview at the Mississippi Book Festival in 2022 that when she started writing in the mid-1970s, reviewers would ridicule authors for drawing on their own life experiences.
“Why?” she said. “That’s what you have. That’s where the real heart and soul of it is.”
Gilchrist was born in 1935 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and spent part of her childhood on a remote plantation in the flatlands of the Mississippi Delta. She said she grew up loving reading and writing because that’s what she saw adults doing in their household.
Gilchrist said she was comfortable reading William Faulkner and Eudora Welty because their characters spoke in the Southern cadence that was familiar to her.
Gilchrist married before completing her bachelor’s degree, and she said that as a young mother she took writing classes from Welty at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. She said Welty would gently edit her students’ work, returning manuscripts with handwritten remarks.
“Here was a real writer with an editor and an agent,” Gilchrist said of Welty. “And she was just like my mother and my mother’s friends, except she was a genius.”
During a 1994 interview with KUAF Public Radio in Arkansas, Gilchrist said she had visited New Orleans most of her life but lived there 12 years before writing about it.
“I have to experience a place and a time and a people for a long time before I naturally wish to write about it. Because I don’t understand it. I don’t have enough deep knowledge of it to write about it,” she said.
She said she also needed the same long-term connection with Fayetteville, Arkansas, before setting stories there. Gilchrist taught graduate-level English courses at the University of Arkansas.
Her 1983 novel “The Annunciation” had characters connected to the Mississippi Delta, New Orleans and Fayetteville. She said at the Mississippi Book Festival that she wrote the story at a time when she and her friends were having conversations about abortion versus adoption.
“It wasn’t so much about pro or con abortion,” Gilchrist said. “It was about whether a 15-year-old girl should be forced to have a baby and give her away, because I had a friend who that happened to.”
Her family did not immediately announce plans for a funeral but said a private burial will be held.
Gilchrist’s survivors include her sons Marshall Peteet Walker, Jr., Garth Gilchrist Walker and Pierre Gautier Walker; her brother Robert Alford Gilchrist; 18 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
—From AP reports
