Culture

UC Irvine and Orange County Museum of Art have signed a nonbinding letter of intent, which, if approved by the University of California Board of Regents in the fall, would bring the museum under the university’s control, effectively merging it with UC Irvine’s Langson Institute and Museum of California Art.

The news comes two months after OCMA’s CEO, Heidi Zuckerman, announced her intention to step down in December, and a week before the museum launches its 2025 California Biennial, “Desperate, Scared, But Social,” set to run Saturday though Jan. 4.

“This represents a thoughtful next step in OCMA’s evolution,” said OCMA board chair David Emmes in an email. “Partnering with UC Irvine would offer new opportunities to strengthen our mission, expand educational impact, and position the museum as a lasting and dynamic cultural anchor for the region. We look forward to next steps and the possibilities of this collaboration.”

The $93-million, 53,000-square-foot OCMA building, designed by Morphosis, debuted in October 2022 as the crown jewel of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa — a full 35 years after it was announced as an ambitious plan by the small Newport Harbor Art Museum.

Its opening drew more than 10,000 visitors in its first 24 hours, and admission for the first decade of operation was made free thanks to the financial largesse of Newport Beach’s Lugano Diamonds. Cracks soon began to appear, though, as architectural critics and columnists, including The Times’ Carolina Miranda, noted that the pricey building did not seem to be fully finished.

OCMA’s contemporary collection has a broader scope than UC Irvine’s, which focuses on California art, including early 20th century California Impressionism. If the merger happens, UC Irvine would no longer build a planned new museum on its campus and instead fold that effort into OCMA. UC Irvine is in the early stages of searching for a director for its museum, but the parameters of that search are likely to change, too. OCMA has not yet launched its search for Zuckerman’s replacement, so the two efforts would probably be combined. No logistics for how that might work are yet available.

A merger would add the impressive Buck Collection to OCMA’s treasures, which real estate developer Gerald Buck bequeathed to UC Irvine upon his sudden death in 2017. Buck had amassed more than 3,200 paintings, sculptures and works on paper by some of the state’s most important artists, including Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, Richard Diebenkorn, David Hockney and Ed Ruscha.

“OCMA has long contributed to the cultural vibrancy of our region, and UC Irvine is honored to explore this promising partnership,” said UC Irvine Chancellor Howard Gillman in an email. “As a university committed to discovery, creativity, and public service, we see great potential in combining our strengths to expand access to the arts, deepen engagement with California’s artistic legacy, and support new generations of creators and scholars.”

The Board of Regents will vote on the merger in the fall. In the meantime, both institutions are in the exploratory stages of figuring out how a merger would work.

I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt looking to merge with some vacation time this summer. Here’s this week’s arts roundup.

Best bets: On our radar this week

Actor Peter Weller, left, and author William Burroughs, right, with director David Cronenberg on the set of the 1991 movie “Naked Lunch,” loosely based on Burroughs’ drug-infused novel of the same title.

(Jean-Louis Atlan / Sygma via Getty Images)

Naked Lunch
Vidiots hosts the local premiere of a new 4K remastering of David Cronenberg’s 1991 adaptation of William S. Burrough’s quasi-autobiographical novel. “I’m not trying to do ‘Naked Lunch’ literally,” Cronenberg told The Times upon the film’s release. “I’m doing something else. I’m writing about writing, so in a way I’m writing about the process of writing ‘Naked Lunch.’ ” But even that is motivated by something Burroughs says in the book: “There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing … I am a recording instrument … I am not an entertainer.” The film’s star, Peter Weller, will be in attendance, signing his new book, “Leon Battista Alberti in Exile.”
7:30 p.m. Monday. Vidiots, Eagle Theater, 4884 Eagle Rock Blvd. vidiotsfoundation.org

Chris Shyer, Alison Ewing and the national touring company of “Parade,” opening at the Ahmanson Theatre on June 17.

(Joan Marcus)

Parade
Michael Arden’s triumphant Tony-winning 2023 Broadway revival of Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown’s musical drama proved that one of more challenging works in the modern musical repertory is an indisputable classic. This breathtakingly ambitious show tells the story of the 1913 trial of Leo Frank, a gross miscarriage of justice that culminated in his antisemitic lynching. While parsing the social and political context, the musical never loses sight of the protagonist and his wife, finding room for the heartbreaking personal side of an American tragedy that reveals the dark side of our collective past.
Tuesday through July 12, Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. centertheatregroup.org

Gay Liberation March on Times Square, 1969. Gelatin silver print.

(Diana Davies/Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

Queer Lens
With a provocative title that centers queer imagery within established photographic history since the mid-19th century, this exhibition will examine the ways in which the accessibility and immediacy of camerawork have shaped perceptions of LGBTQ+ people. Organized chronologically, “Queer Lens” spans from “Homosocial Culture and Romantic Friendships, 1810-1868” to “The Future is Queer, 2015-2025,” with sections covering language and identity, the gay liberation movement, the AIDS crisis and more.
Tuesday through Sept. 28. J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A. getty.edu

Culture news

President Trump stands in the presidential box as he tours the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington on March 17.

(Associated Press)

President Trump made a grand red carpet appearance at the Kennedy Center premiere of “Les Misérables” on Wednesday. This marked the first time the president has attended a show at the theater since firing its board and installing himself as chairman. With First Lady Melania Trump on his arm, the president took his seat in the president’s box. The Washington Post reported that he was greeted by boos before “cheers and chants of ‘U.S.A.!’ sought to compete.” The following day, the White House Office of Communications issued a press release titled “President Trump, First Lady Met with Standing Ovation at Kennedy Center,” which went on to describe “thunderous applause.” A video in the Post story depicts a different reality.

The SoCal scene

Miami City Ballet’s “Swan Lake.”

(Alexander Iziliaev)

Miami City Ballet is bringing Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” to the Segerstrom Center for the Arts’ Segerstrom Hall for five performances June 20-22. It’s a special version of the classic ballet choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky — the former director of Moscow Bolshoi Ballet who left Russia in in 2008 and later became an artist in residence at both American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet. Ratmansky reimagined “Swan Lake” using historical information and archival documents dating to an 1895 premiere at St. Peterberg’s Mariinsky Theatre, choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. That revival, based on an 1877 ballet titled “The Lake of the Swans,” became the favored version going forward, and Ratmansky has used this historical context to anchor his interpretation, with music played live by Pacific Symphony. Tickets are available at scfta.org.

Orange County Museum of Art is throwing a free block party from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Saturday, to celebrate the opening of its 2025 California Biennial, ”Desperate, Scared, But Social.” The event will feature a curator-led tour of the exhibit as well of plenty of food trucks and artist-themed snacks at the museum’s cafe Verdant. Guests are also invited to make their own risograph posters and zines and to craft screen printed tote bags and shirts. A concert for the whole family will kick off at 7 p.m. with performances by the Linda Lindas, Seth Bogart & The Punkettes and Brontez Purnell, as well as a reunion by Emily’s Sassy Lime.

“In the Pocket Painting,” Jonas Fisch.

(Jonas Fisch / Saatchi Art )

Saatchi Art, an online gallery with two L.A.-based executives, is celebrating its 15th anniversary. CEO Sarah Meller and Director of Sales and Curation Erin Remington have built the platform into an online marketplace that helps launch careers including that of Jackie Amezquita, who started out with Saatchi and last year won the Audience Award at the Hammer’s Made in LA Biennial.

With curfew exemptions from L.A. City Council, performances resumed Thursday night at the Music Center but audiences were reluctant to return downtown. L.A. Opera said attendance at “Rigoletto” was 554, roughly 1,000 less than its projected attendance. Center Theatre Group said slightly more than 300 ticket holders showed up for “Hamlet” at the Mark Taper Forum, which seats 739 and had been at 85% capacity (about 630 seats filled) prior to the introduction of a curfew. A representative said the company heard no reports of problems getting in or out of downtown.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

Times music writer August Brown interviewed Beach Boys co-founder Al Jardine about Brian Wilson, who died last week at 82. “I just lost my best friend and mentor. It’s not a good feeling, but I’m going to carry on and continue to play our music and perform with the Pet Sounds Band,” Jardine told Brown.

The Getty announced a $420,000 grant to the L.A. Conservancy for a cultural asset mapping project that will help track, chronicle and maintain Altadena’s cultural, historic and architectural heritage in the wake of January’s devastating Eaton fire.

Community participation will be crucial to the effort as the conservancy works to document buildings and sites, as well as more ephemeral heritage such as local traditions, oral histories and cultural practices. There is also interest in cataloging longtime businesses that contributed to the social fabric of Altadena’s various neighborhoods. The results of this work will be used in collaboration with the L.A. County Department of Regional Planning to ensure that policy discussions and decisions take Altadena heritage into account when it comes to building back what was lost.

Rebuilding efforts in Altadena — an unincorporated section of Los Angeles County — have been complicated by the lack of concrete cultural mapping, including sites of historic interest. By contrast, Pacific Palisades, another area that was brutalized by fire, had already established an official record of its cultural heritage via SurveyLA, a historic resources survey conducted by the city.

“Tackling this incomplete record of Altadena’s cultural resources, both built and intangible, is critical for the community as it contemplates rebuilding,” Joan Weinstein, director of the Getty Foundation, said in a news release. “L.A. Conservancy is an excellent partner to lead an alliance of community-based organizations and preservation professionals who are working to ensure that Altadena’s vibrant cultural history is not lost in redevelopment efforts.”

L.A. Conservancy has a special interest in historic preservation and the grant will allow for a complete inventory of Altadena’s heritage sites — to be made available in an online map.

Related to this effort is the news that Artists at Work, which provides artists with employment, benefits and a steady salary for 18 month terms, has released its list of 2025-26 participants. Four Los Angeles artists are among them, including Altadena resident Alma Cielo, who is set to collaborate with L.A. Conservancy during her term. Cielo, a ceramicist, lost her home in the Eaton fire and plans to focus on post-fire recovery.

I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt marveling at the resilience of Altadena residents in the face of their losses, and firmly invested in supporting them as they rebuild. Here’s this week’s arts and culture news.

Best bets: On our radar this week

“Self-Portrait as a Female Martyr,” about 1613-14, by Artemisia Gentileschi (Italian, 1593-1654). Oil on panel. 12 1/2 by 9 3/4 inches. Private collection, United States.

(Bridgeman Images)

Artemisia’s Strong Women: Rescuing a Masterpiece
Five years ago, a massive explosion ripped through the port of Beirut, killing more than 200 people and injuring thousands more. The aftermath of the tragedy revealed a previously unknown painting by the great 17th century Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi amid the rubble. “Hercules and Omphale,” an oil-on-canvas work that manifests Gentileschi’s penchant for classical subjects, was severely damaged and sent to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles for restoration. That painstaking conservation process is now at the center of an installation featuring four other paintings by the artist, who has become a modern feminist icon. In 2022, when the Getty acquired another painting, “Lucretia,” that is part of the new exhibition, Times art critic Christopher Knight wrote of Gentileschi, “Happily, in the last two decades, the study of her paintings has been widening in productive and exciting ways, giving us a fuller understanding of her challenging involvement with social, political, literary and intellectual currents of her day. There’s a long way to go, and more discoveries are inevitable.”
Through Sept. 14 . J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A. getty.edu

Mumford & Sons performing at a Kamala Harris rally in October 2024.

(Morry Gash / Associated Press)

Mumford & Sons
It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly 17 years since Mumford & Sons made their local debut at the Hotel Cafe. Since then, the British folk-rock band — Marcus Mumford, Ted Dwane and Ben Lovett — have toured the world several times over, crafted hit songs such as “Little Lion Man,” “The Cave” and “I Will Wait,” and won a best album Grammy for 2012’s “Babel.” This week, the group is back in L.A. (minus longtime member Winston Marshall, who left in 2021 following controversial social media posts) and playing the Hollywood Bowl in support of their latest album, “RUSHMERE.” The English indie rock duo Good Neighbours — Oli Fox and Scott Verrill — will open the show.
7:30 p.m. Thursdays. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood. hollywoodbowl.com

Culture news

“Purpose” actor Glenn Davis, left, who commissioned the play for Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins accept the award for best play during the 78th Tony Awards on Sunday, June 8, 2025, at Radio City Music Hall in New York.

(Charles Sykes / Charles Sykes/invision/ap)

The 2025 Tony Awards honored Broadway’s best and brightest last night at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. The surprise hit “Maybe Happy Ending” won best musical and led all productions with six wins, while the musical “Buena Vista Social Club,” inspired by the legendary Cuban ensemble, earned four. Earlier in the week, Times theater critic Charles McNulty made a prescient arument for why Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Purpose” deserved to win the Tony for best play over Cole Escola’s, “Oh, Mary!” The campy melodrama had a wave of giddy popularity at its back, but “Purpose” is the more complex piece of writing and could more readily benefit from the prestige of a Tony win when it comes to rallying support for future productions, wrote McNulty. “There was a time not so long ago when the future of the Broadway play was in serious doubt. The threat hasn’t gone away, and Tony voters shouldn’t pass up an opportunity to honor true playwriting excellence.” Escola did not go home empty-handed, however, winning the Tony for best lead actor in a play and drawing what may have been the largest applause of the night.

The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

(Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)

The business outlook is not good for the Kennedy Center in the wake of President Trump’s takeover. The Washington Post recently reported that subscriptions were down by about $1.6 million, or 36%, from the previous year — with the hardest hit coming in theater subscriptions, which are down 82%. “At this time in last year’s subscription campaign, the center had generated $1,226,344 in revenue from selling 1,771 subscriptions. This year it has sold 371 subscriptions, totaling $224,059, a difference of more than $1 million,” the Post reported. The numbers were leaked to the paper by former Kennedy Center employees and confirmed by a current staff member, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution.

Journalist Stephanie Elizondo Griest has a new book coming out this month through Beacon Press titled “Art Above Everything,” which chronicles the lives — and countless sacrifices — made by more than 100 female artists around the world in service of their vocations. At the core of Griest’s explorations in Rwanda, Romania, Qatar, Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, Cuba and the U.S., is the question: What is the pursuit of art worth?

The SoCal scene

Quinn Kelsey as Rigoletto in Los Angeles Opera’s new production of Verdi’s opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

(Corey Weaver / L.A. Opera)

”L.A. Opera unveiled a violent, politically disquieting production in which a tortured jester faces mob rule,” Times classical music critic Mark Swed writes in his review of the company’s season closer, Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” L.A. Opera has tackled the show before, usually to lackluster effect, Swed notes. This show, however, is different. Thanks to outgoing music director James Conlon’s deft approach to Verdi, this production — featuring a truly terrifying clown suit — sizzles with visceral energy. “After 32 years of failed attempts, L.A. Opera has finally moved the ‘Rigoletto’ needle in the right direction,” Swed says.

Cynthia Erivo poses for a portrait October 28, 2024, in New York.

(Victoria Will/For The Times)

Once you’ve read Times music critic Mikael Wood’s recent interview with Cynthia Erivo about her new album “I Will Forgive You” and what she’s doing during her break from “Wicked,” be sure to check out the talented multiplatform artist’s lengthy June 2 profile in Billboard. Erivo discusses the world’s reaction to her being queer. For the most part, she says, she didn’t experience much difficulty in the wake of her decision to come out. But there was a major exception, she told Billboard: a massive conservative backlash earlier this year after the Hollywood Bowl announced that Erivo would play Jesus in its summer production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.” “You can’t please everyone. It is legitimately a three-day performance at the Hollywood Bowl where I get to sing my face off. So hopefully they will come and realize, ‘Oh, it’s a musical, the gayest place on Earth,’ ” Erivo says in the article.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

There are 600 L.A. landmarks on the National Register of Historic Places, and lifelong Angeleno Etan Rosenbloom is determined to visit them all. Thankfully, for us, Rosenbloom has highlighted his picks for the top 10 in a handy map.

Prince, also known by his recording name Dellyswagz, heard about the choir through a friend who was a member when he first moved to Venice in 2017. He was a singer in Nigeria, and his friend told him it was a good community, that they could help him get settled. When he first arrived, they gave him clothes, helped him find work and provided him with legal assistance to begin the process of getting a visa.

He is now 38, soft-spoken, but when he sings, he sways with feeling, and belting the lyrics, his voice strains and nearly breaks. He dresses in blue-tinted sunglasses, a black leather newsboy cap and a full denim outfit. “Like a king,” he says, smiling.

Shortly after he was born, his parents split up, and his primary caregiver was his mother’s father, who he was very close to. When his grandfather died in 2011, Prince no longer had ties to the Lagos suburb where he grew up and in 2015 decided to cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean in search of a better life.

“Growing up a boy, your mom have to really pray a lot for you,” he explains. “Either you become a thug or a mafia.”

He lives in a shared apartment in Padua, 40km (25 miles) outside Venice, where he moved after losing his job in a factory and being evicted because he didn’t have his papers yet. His bedroom doubles as his recording studio, where on a cluttered desk with a large monitor, he is recording and producing Afrobeats songs for his first album.

In Nigeria, he was a professional dance teacher, by most accounts successful, yet he felt there was no future there. Friends and family had already left, including his father, who lived in the United Kingdom, yet he didn’t consider leaving until his uncle, who was living in Austria, called and suggested he make the trip with his uncle’s wife and three cousins. Prince gave away his speakers, clothes and sneakers to his students. Along with his family, he saved up thousands of dollars. He brought nothing with him and told his parents he’d already made up his mind.

“The journey was deadly,” he says with a serious expression. “My story comes with a lot of pain and loss.”

The first three weeks were spent on a large open-backed truck packed with dozens of people. They drove across the Sahara and slept on the sand each night. Some had to drink their own urine, he recounts, because they hadn’t brought enough water, and along the way, he saw bodies left in the sand. “I can’t count how many we buried,” he says without emotion, referring to the people who died on the journey. “We used sand to cover them up. There’s no details of a name or family to call.”

From Libya, he and his family members tried to cross the Mediterranean by boat eight times. The entire journey to Italy took him two years. Once, they were kidnapped by pirates when they were on a boat and released two months later after paying a ransom. Another time, he was held in a Libyan prison for four months. At one point, they ran out of money, and he worked as a security guard for seven months in a compound holding refugees and migrants.

Then, in October 2016, he and his family members tried to cross the Mediterranean again. They crowded onto a wooden boat with more than 200 passengers on board. In the middle of the night, water began to enter the boat, and it started to sink. As it capsized, people fell into the water. Prince jumped in to save his cousins. The sea was freezing, and everyone was shouting and screaming around him, and he remembers the dark water lit by stars. By the time he located his 14-year-old cousin Sandra, it was too late. She had drowned because she didn’t know how to swim.

He held her lifeless body floating on his chest with a life vest propped behind his neck for what he estimates was 25 hours before he and other survivors, including the rest of his family, were rescued by fishermen and brought back to Libya.

“I didn’t even know I was rescued because I was so tired,” he says. “My eyes were just seeing white. I wasn’t seeing any more because of the sea, the salt. I was so tired.” Prince and his family were never able to bury Sandra because he says her body was stolen by people smugglers.

In Libya, a fisherman from The Gambia taught him how to use a compass, and on his final voyage, he was the navigator, telling the boat captain in which direction to steer. Their boat was intercepted by a rescue boat off the coast of Lampedusa. “The journey is not something I would wish upon my worst enemy,” he says, shaking his head. The rest of his family, who had gone ahead separately, went to different parts of Italy and Austria.

Prince tried to live with his sister-in-law in Austria, but when the authorities threatened to deport him, he was brought back to Italy, where his asylum case was pending. His flight landed him in Venice. He doesn’t know why.

Life in Italy has been hard, he says. His father had warned him about living as an immigrant, telling him before he left, “It’s better to be a free man in your own country than a slave abroad.” Prince is starting to agree with him. When he was evicted from his apartment, he was homeless for seven months, sleeping on friends’ couches and in a garage.

For him, there’s nothing special to Venice. “All I do is go to work and come home, go to work, come home,” he says. If he could do it all again, he says, he would have stayed in Nigeria.

These days, he has a new job, but it is an exhausting night shift with a long commute that cuts into the time he has to make music. To save money, he has learned to subsist on one meal a day and has stopped painting, another favourite hobby. The choir is the only time he enjoys himself. “When I’m singing with them, I’m always smiling,” he says, “because that’s the only time I can be myself.”

On May 21, as they left the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were fatally shot, and because they were employees of the Israeli Embassy and the suspect was associated with pro-Palestinian politics, the story was reported in the familiar mode of Middle East politics.

The questions that reporters and pundits have been asking are: “Was this antisemitic?” “Was this killing a direct result of Israel’s starving of Palestinians in Gaza?” “Was this another act of pro-Palestinian terrorism?” “Is this the direct result of ‘globalizing the intifada’?” While these are valid questions, they miss a central part of the story.

Only in the eighth paragraph of the New York Times report are we told that the night before the shooting, according to officials, the suspect “had checked a gun with his baggage when he flew from Chicago to the Washington area for a work conference” and, further, that officials said “The gun used in the killings had been purchased legally in Illinois.” (The Los Angeles Times article does not mention these facts.) This tragic shooting, however, is not unique.

In November 2023, a Burlington, Vt., man was arrested and charged with shooting three Palestinian college students without saying a word to them. (He has pleaded not guilty.)

In October 2018, a gunman entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and shot and killed 11 Jews at prayer.

In 2015, three Muslim students were shot and killed by their neighbor in Chapel Hill, N.C.

This brief and very incomplete list of the literally hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed by guns in the U.S. in the last decade does not include the racist mass shootings in Buffalo, N.Y., and at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C.; the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.; or the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, at a music festival in Las Vegas in 2017. This macabre list also leaves out the thousands of people who have been shot and killed by law enforcement.

The elephant in the room — so fundamentally accepted that it largely goes unmentioned — is the deeply ingrained culture of violence in the United States. Gun ownership, police violence and abuse, and mass shootings are symptoms of that culture. However, the militaristic approach to international conflict (from Vietnam to Ukraine) and the disdain for nonviolent solutions are also grounded in this culture, as are the manosphere and the cruelty of predatory capitalism. Now we have a presidential administration that embodies this culture.

Kristi Noem, the secretary of Homeland Security, personifies this ethos of cruelty and violence when she is photographed in front of a cage full of humans in a Salvadoran jail known for torturous treatment of inmates or writing casually about killing her dog. Noem is a key player in the theater of cruelty, but she is not the only one, and the unparalleled star is of course President Trump.

Trump’s policy agenda is based on vengeance. He revels in the theatricality of violence of the world of mixed martial arts, and he signs executive orders that aim to destroy individuals, law firms and universities that have not bent the knee, and the economics of his “Big Beautiful” budget moves money from those in need to those who need for naught.

Now, the president wants a military parade on his birthday that will include tanks, helicopters and soldiers. Although Trump himself evaded the draft, and he reportedly called American soldiers who were killed in war suckers and losers, he likes the strongman aesthetic of an army that is at his beck and call. He exulted in the fact that “we train our boys to be killing machines.”

Although some want to draw a dubious line from pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations to the killings of Lischinsky and Milgrim, the direct line that should be drawn is the one that everyone seems to have agreed to ignore: a culture of violence coupled with the widespread availability and ownership of guns inevitably leads to more death.

The only way we get out of this cycle of violence is by addressing the elephant in the room.

Aryeh Cohen is a rabbi and a professor at American Jewish University in Los Angeles. @irmiklat.bsky.social

BONNIE Blue has been slammed for “promoting rape culture” and labelled “vile” after revealing her sickest ever sex stunt.

The adult ‘star’ has already hit headlines with previous desperate stunts including apparently breaking the world record by sleeping with 1,057 men in just 12 hours.

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She then challenged Spring Break ‘barely legal’ college boys to see who could give her the best orgasm – with a pledge to pay for the tuition of the ‘winner’.

But now Bonnie has announced her most depraved stunt to date, immediately sparking disgust from people online.

She revealed her next challenge during an interview on Kat Baker’s podcast – leaving the interviewer lost for words as she did so.

“What challenges do you have next?” Kat asked Bonnie during their conversation on The Kat Baker Show.

With Bonnie replying that she’s called it “Bonnie Blue’s petting zoo”, and said it will be taking place on June 15.

Explaining the sickening idea, she said that she’s going to be naked and tied up in a glass box, which would be “open for the public” to do basically whatever they want to her.

When Kat asked “where” the box was going to be, Bonnie continued that she’ll be in “the centre of London” but “in a house”.

“Oh ok, because I was thinking like David Blaine,” Kat said, referring to the U.S. illusionist’s stunt in 2003, when he was confined in a transparent glass box, suspended 30ft over the River Thames, for 44 days.

While Bonnie said that she’d love to be in the box on the back of a lorry, with the abhorrent sex acts performed on her as she travelled through London, she mused that it was “probably illegal”.

Making the planned event even more repulsive, Bonnie told Kat that she wanted to beat her own record by “doing 2,000”.

Unsurprisingly, the comments on the Instagram video of Kat and Bonnie’s conversation took aim at the abominable plan – and even questioned the 26-year-old’s mental state to have come up with such a vulgar concept.

While another insisted she was “promoting rape culture” – which Fabulous Digital writer and rape survivor Kate Kulniece agreed with, as she said Bonnie’s latest stunt ends up “pushing victims like myself deeper into the abyss of trauma”.

“Her twisted antics are damaging impressionable young teenage boys – half of whom have been exposed to pornography by the age of 13.

“These very same boys will grow up thinking this is normal, this is what women want – and what we’re here for.”

In the comments on the Instagram post, one person insisted Bonnie has “no soul”

Sometimes I wonder if Satan is actually Bonnie in disguise

Instagram commenter

“She has no soul,” one wrote, while someone else called Bonnie an “attention craving sicko”, and another said she’s the “most disgusting in the world … by far”.

“She really needs help,” another agreed, adding: “For f**ks sake, it’s vile!”

“Her value as a woman is so low that she is offering her entire body for free,” someone else sighed.

“And we’re ok glorifying prostitution on media platforms for kids to see….? I genuinely think the future’s done,” someone else wrote.

“Sometimes I wonder if Satan is actually Bonnie in disguise,” another slammed.

Why Bonnie Blue MUST be banned from social media

By Kate Kulniece, Fabulous Digital writer and rape survivor

When it comes to sex, I like to consider myself open-minded – and non-judgemental.

But the vile, attention-seeking OnlyFans porn star Bonnie Blue makes me sick to my stomach.

When the 26-year-old first hit the headlines with her gruesome stunts in March 2024, I’ll admit – I didn’t pay much attention to her.

But as the challenges became more perverted and she eventually bedded over 1,000 men in just 12 hours, I became not just disappointed – but angry.

Her most recent – and most disgusting – stunt to date, of being tied up in a glass box for men to fulfil their sick desires, is wrong and worrying on so many levels.

The number of rapes being reported to police are at a record high, with a shocking 1 in 4 women, 1 in 6 children and 1 in 18 men falling victim to this horrific crime.

It’s an alarming rise and many believe, as I do, that the sexual assaults are fuelled by access to toxic online culture – with Bonnie seemingly leading the way with her vile sex marathon stunts.

As a young woman who is a survivor of two rapes – aged just 13 and 23 – and who has been sexually harassed on countless occasions, I feel sick and enraged.

In a society where sexual abuse, violence against women and misogyny have become a widespread pandemic, we should ban people like Bonnie from social media.

Her foul and obscene challenges, which are becoming worse every time, are a slap in the face to millions of rape survivors like myself.

Not only are her videos a constant reminder of the trauma and pain that was forced upon us, but she also teaches perverts that women are a piece of meat – and nothing else.

Despite repeatedly insisting she empowers women, Bonnie promotes a culture in which women are passed around by men like toys.

She also plays into the narrative that our husbands, fathers and sons can’t control their sexual urges – or shouldn’t have to.

As a vocal multi millionaire, Bonnie may think this is all harmless fun, paying her many assistants to keep her out of real harm’s way.

But in reality, the sex-insatiable Bonnie is promoting dangerous rape culture and pushing victims like myself deeper into the abyss of trauma.

Her twisted antics, and those of rival Lily Phillips and Aussie OF star Annie Knight, are damaging impressionable young teenage boys – half of whom have been exposed to pornography by the age of 13.

These very same boys will grow up thinking this is normal, this is what women want – and what we’re here for.

There are countless things I look forward to, but the day the sick content creator finally gets banned from platforms cannot come soon enough.

However, someone else questioned why Bonnie was even being allowed to speak.

“Why the f**k is she being given platforms like podcasts and broadcasts to act like she is some kind of trailblazer or icon?” they raged.

“She is sitting there saying her next challenge is to be tied up in public so people can touch her and another woman is sitting across from her acting like that is something worth clapping for.

“That alone is disgusting and degrading…

“This is dragging us backwards.

“And any woman who claps for this kind of behaviour has failed as a woman.”

“Never been so revolted in my life,” another agreed.

Even more shockingly, there were also some comments from monstrous people saying they were keen to get inside the box with Bonnie.

“I’ll be in the box,” one boasted.

“See you there,” another added.

As a third questioned: “Are girls welcome to join in too?”

6

6

NEW YORK — Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as “A Boy’s Own Story” and “The Beautiful Room Is Empty,” has died. He was 85.

White’s death was confirmed Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg.

Along with Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin and others, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became bards for a community no longer afraid to declare its existence. He was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in New York’s Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement and for decades was a participant and observer through the tragedy of AIDS, the advance of gay rights and culture and the recent backlash.

A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist. “A Boy’s Own Story” was a bestseller and classic coming-of-age novel that demonstrated gay literature’s commercial appeal. He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet, along with books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates.

“Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,” cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in the New York Times in 1995. “A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.”

White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but at age 7 moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer and his mother was a psychologist. Feeling trapped and at times suicidal, White sought escape through the stories of others, including Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” and a biography of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

“As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn’t the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,” he wrote in the 1991 essay “Out of the Closet, on to the Bookshelf.”

As he wrote in “A Boy’s Own Story,” he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be “normal.” Even as he secretly wrote a “coming out” novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from “A Boy’s Own Story” told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection.

“For the next few months I grieved,” White writes. “I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?”

Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would head out to bars. A favorite stop was the Stonewall, where he would down vodka tonics and try to find the nerve to ask a man he had a crush on to dance. He was in the neighborhood on the night of June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall and “all hell broke loose.”

“Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term,” wrote White, who soon joined the protests. “Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.”

White’s debut novel, the surreal and suggestive “Forgetting Elena,” was published in 1973. He collaborated with Charles Silverstein on “The Joy of Gay Sex,” a follow-up to the bestselling “The Joy of Sex” that was updated after the emergence of AIDS. In 1978, his first openly gay novel, “Nocturnes for the King of Naples,” was released and he followed with the nonfiction “States of Desire,” his attempt to show “the varieties of gay experience and also to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people — to show that gays aren’t just hairdressers, they’re also petroleum engineers and ranchers and short-order cooks.”

His other works included “Skinned Alive: Stories” and the novel “A Previous Life,” in which he turns himself into a fictional character and imagines himself long forgotten after his death. In 2009, he published “City Boy,” a memoir of New York in the 1960s and ’70s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels. Other recent books included the novels “Jack Holmes & His Friend” and the memoir “Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris.”

“From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling,” he told the Guardian around the time “Jack Holmes” was released. “It’s on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature — the holy book. There’s nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious and it should be totally transparent.”

Italie writes for the Associated Press.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o loved to dance. He loved it more than anything else – even more than writing. Well into his 80s, his body slowed by increasingly disabling kidney failure, Ngugi would get up and start dancing merely at the thought of music, never mind the sound of it. Rhythm flowed through his feet the way words flowed through his hands and onto the page.

It is how I will always remember Ngugi – dancing. He passed away on May 28 at the age of 87, leaving behind not only a Nobel-worthy literary legacy but a combination of deeply innovative craft and piercingly original criticism that joyfully calls on all of us to do better and push harder – as writers, activists, teachers and people – against the colonial foundations that sustain all our societies. As for me, he pushed me to go far deeper up river to Kakuma refugee camp, where the free association of so many vernacular tongues and cultures made possible the freedom to think and speak “from the heart” – something he would always describe as writing’s greatest gift.

Ngugi had long been a charter member of the African literary canon and a perennial Nobel favourite by the time I first met him in 2005. Getting to know him, it quickly became clear to me that his writing was inseparable from his teaching, which in turn was umbilically tied to his political commitments and long service as one of Africa’s most formidable public intellectuals.

Ngugi’s cheerfulness and indefatigable smile and laugh hid a deep-seated anger, reflecting the scars of violence on his body and soul as a child, young man and adult victimised by successive and deeply intertwined systems of criminalised rule.

The murder of his deaf brother, killed by the British because he did not hear and obey soldiers’ orders to stop at a checkpoint, and the Mau Mau revolt that divided his other brothers on opposite sides of the colonial order during the final decade of British rule, imbued in him the foundational reality of violence and divisiveness as the twin engines of permanent coloniality even after independence formally severed the connection to the metropole.

More than half a century after these events, nothing would arouse Ngugi’s animated ire more than bringing up in a discussion the transitional moment from British to Kenyan rule, and the fact that colonialism didn’t leave with the British, but rather dug in and reenforced itself with Kenya’s new, Kenyan rulers.

As he became a writer and playwright, Ngugi also became a militant, one devoted to using language to reconnect the complex African identities – local, tribal, national and cosmopolitan – that the “cultural bomb” of British rule had “annihilated” over the previous seven decades.

After his first play, The Black Hermit, premiered in Kampala in 1962, he was quickly declared a voice who “speaks for the Continent”. Two years later, Weep Not Child, his first novel and the first English-language novel by an East African writer, came out.

As he rose to prominence, Ngugi decided to renounce the English language and start writing in his native Gikuyu.

The (re)turn to his native tongue radically altered the trajectory not just of his career, but of his life, as the ability of his clear-eyed critique of postcolonial rule to reach his compatriots in their own language (rather than English or the national language of Swahili) was too much for Kenya’s new rulers to tolerate, and so he was imprisoned for a year without trial in 1977.

What Ngugi had realised when he began writing in Gikuyu, and even more so in prison, was the reality of neocolonialism as the primary mechanism of postcolonial rule. This wasn’t the standard “neocolonialism” that anti- and post-colonial activists used to describe the ongoing power of former colonial rulers by other means after formal independence, but rather the willing adoption of colonial technologies and discourses of rule by newly independent leaders, many of whom – like Jomo Kenyatta, Ngugi liked to point out – themselves suffered imprisonment and torture under the British rule.

Thus, true decolonisation could only occur when people’s minds were freed from foreign control, which required first and perhaps foremost the freedom to write in one’s native language.

Although rarely acknowledged, Ngugi’s concept of neocolonialism, which owed much, he’d regularly explain, to the writings of Kwame Nkrumah and other African anti-colonial intellectuals-turned-political leaders, anticipated the rise of the now ubiquitous “decolonial” and “Indigenous” turns in the academy and progressive cultural production by almost a generation.

Indeed, Ngugi has long been placed together with Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as the founding generation of postcolonial thought and criticism. But he and Said, whom he’d frequently discuss as a brother-in-arms and fellow admirer of Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad, shared a similar all-encompassing focus on language, even as Said wrote his prose mostly in English rather than Arabic.

For Said and Ngugi, colonialism had not yet passed, but was very much still an ongoing, viscerally and violently lived reality – for the former through the ever more violent and ultimately annihilatory settler colonialism, for the latter through the violence of successive governments.

Ngugi saw his link with Said in their common experience growing up under British rule. As he explained in his afterword to a recently published anthology of Egyptian prison writings since 2011, “The performance of authority was central to the colonial culture of silence and fear,” and disrupting that authority and ending the silence could only come first through language.

For Said, the swirl of Arabic and English in his mind since childhood created what he called a “primal instability”, one that could be calmed fully when he was in Palestine, which he returned to multiple times in the last decade of his life. For Ngugi, even as Gikuyu enabled him to “imagine another world, a flight to freedom, like a bird you see from the [prison] window,” he could not make a final return home in his last years.

Still, from his home in Orange County, California in the United States, he would never tire of urging students and younger colleagues to “write dangerously”, to use language to resist whatever oppressive order in which they found themselves. The bird would always take flight, he would say, if you could write without fear.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The sculptor Robert Therrien had a deep connection with the Broad museum. He was among the first L.A. artists that founders Eli and Edythe Broad began collecting almost half a century ago, and the museum holds 18 of his works in its collection. Those pieces, along with more than 100 others, will go on view at the Broad beginning in November in “Robert Therrien: This Is a Story,” the largest-ever solo museum show of the artist’s work.

Therrien, who died of complications from cancer in 2019, is best-known for his monumental sculptures of everyday objects. His sculpture of a giant table and chairs, “Under the Table,” is among the Broad’s most photographed — and Instagrammed — pieces. Intimate work — drawings of birds, snowmen and chapels — will be on view, as will a reconstruction of Therrien’s downtown L.A. studio.

The Broad’s founding director Joanne Heyler once told The Times that Therrien’s studio was among the most fascinating she had ever visited. In an email shortly after Therrien’s death, she described the ground floor as “the ultimate tinkerer’s den, with endless tools, parts and found objects awaiting their role in his work, while upstairs were these perfectly composed galleries, every surface painted a warm, creamy white, including the floor, which charged the sculptures, paintings and drawings he’d install there with a dreamy, floating, hallucinogenic effect. That studio was his dreamland.”

An L.A. story

Like his studio, Therrien’s work exists in a liminal space — where memory fades into time. Standing beneath one of his giant tables evokes vague recollections of what it feels like to be a very small child in a world of legs and muffled adult activity above. A ruminative melancholy arises when viewing a precarious stack of white enamel plates. Therrien’s artistic voice is at once singular and universal — and specific to art history in L.A.

Robert Therrien, no title, (stacked plates, white), 1993.

(The Broad Art Foundation)

Exhibition curator Ed Schad summed up Therrien’s importance to this city in an email.

“Los Angeles is one of the most dynamic places in the world to make sculpture, and for 40 years, Robert Therrien was vital to that story while also hiding in plain sight,” Schad wrote. “From the spirit of experimentation and freedom in the 1970s, to the rise of fabrication and the expansion of scale in the 1980s and 1990, to Los Angeles’s ascendant presence on the global stage of contemporary art in recent decades, Therrien’s work has not only mirrored every shift but also has maintained a singular, unmistakable voice. This exhibition aims to show both the Therrien people know and love — his outsize sculptures, tables and chairs, and pots and pans, rooted in memory — and the Therrien that is less often seen: the brilliant draftsman, photographer, and thinker, whose work in these quieter forms is just as enchanting.”

I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt, remembering the time I spent an entire meal hiding under a table in Nogales, Ariz., when I was five. Or was that a dream? Here’s this weekend’s arts headlines.

Here come the Tony Awards

Director Michael Arden photographed in New York.

(The Tyler Twins / For The Times)

Times theater critic Charles McNulty sat down in New York City with the directing powerhouse Michael Arden, 42. In a wide-ranging profile, McNulty discusses Arden’s path to becoming among the most sought-after directors on Broadway — and why his latest Tony-nominated musical, “Maybe Happy Ending,” is the season’s “most surprising and heartwarming.” He also writes about Arden’s new company, At Rise Creative, which he founded with scenic designer Dane Laffrey. Their production of “Parade” begins performances at the Ahmanson Theatre on June 17.

McNulty also checks in with L.A. Theatre Works, which celebrated its 50th anniversary and has found fresh opportunities for its radio plays through the rise of podcasts and on-demand streaming. “Currently, LATW’s program airs weekly on KPFK 90.7 in Southern California and on station affiliates serving over 50 markets nationwide. But the heart and soul of the operation is the archive of play recordings,” writes McNulty. This archive has almost 600 titles that can be accessed via a recently launched monthly subscription service.

The SoCal scene

Times art critic Christopher Knight examines the curious case of the art museum that wasn’t. Despite having a social media presence and a webpage, the Joshua Tree Art Museum has not manifested as an actual space for art. This is because, writes Knight, “the charitable foundation sponsoring the project was issued a cease and desist order two years ago by the California attorney general’s office. All charitable activity was halted, a prohibition that has not been lifted.”

“Forest Therapy Class” led by therapist Debra Wilbur at the Huntington.

(Yuri Hasegawa / For The Times)

Along with other organizations across the country, the Huntington recently lost its National Endowment for the Humanities grants. The money funded the Huntington’s research programs, and the institution is nonetheless determined to honor its awards to this year’s recipients. The Huntington will welcome more than 150 scholars from around the world this year and next, granting nearly $1.8 million in fellowships — a notable achievement in a climate of shrinking opportunity for research and innovation. “Supporting humanities scholars is central to the Huntington’s research mission. Here, scholars find the time, space, and resources to pursue ambitious questions across disciplines. The work that begins here continues to shape conversations in classrooms, publications, and public discourse for years to come,” Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence said in a statement.

Skirball Cultural Center has announced its 2025 season of Sunset Concerts. The popular series began in 1997 and takes place at the Skirball’s Taper Courtyard. This summer will feature two acts each night, including Brazilian singer-songwriter Rodrigo Amarante, the Colombia-based all-female trio La Perla and the Dominican band MULA. Click here for the full lineup and schedule.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles announced that it has acquired Cynthia Daignault’s “Twenty-Six Seconds.” The artwork is a series of frame-by-frame paintings based on Abraham Zapruder’s famous 26-second 8mm color film capturing the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Through 486 painted frames, Daignault’s work further interrogates the tragedy, imbuing it with modern context.

And last but not least

This past weekend I took my daughter to the Summer Corgi Nationals at Santa Anita Park. It was more adorable and more ridiculous than you could imagine — with the short-legged dogs racing for the finish line in a chaotic competition that sometimes found contenders chasing one another back to the starting line.

On a recent morning inside San Quentin prison, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman and more than a dozen other prosecutors crowded into a high-ceilinged meeting hall surrounded by killers, rapists and other serious offenders.

Name the crime, one of these guys has probably done it.

“It’s not every day that you’re in a room of 100 people, most of whom have committed murder, extremely violent crimes, and been convicted of it,” Hochman later said.

Many of these men, in their casual blue uniforms, were serving long sentences with little chance of getting out, like Marlon Arturo Melendez, an L.A. native who is now in for murder.

Melendez sat in a “sharing circle,” close enough to Hochman that their knees could touch, no bars between them. They chatted about the decrease in gang violence in the decades since Melendez was first incarcerated more than 20 years ago, and Melendez said he found Hochman “interesting.”

Inside San Quentin, this kind of interaction between inmates and guests isn’t unusual. For decades, the prison by the Bay has been doing incarceration differently, cobbling together a system that focuses on accountability and rehabilitation.

Like the other men in the room, Melendez takes responsibility for the harm he caused, and every day works to be a better man. When he introduces himself, he names his victims — an acknowledgment that what he did can’t be undone but also an acknowledgment that he doesn’t have to remain the same man who pulled the trigger.

Whether or not Melendez or any of these men ever walk free, what was once California’s most notorious lockup is now a place that offers them the chance to change and provides the most elusive of emotions for prisoners — hope.

Creating that culture is a theory and practice of imprisonment that Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to make the standard across the state.

He’s dubbed it the California Model, but as I’ve written about before, it’s common practice in other countries (and even in a few places in the United States). It’s based on a simple truth about incarceration: Most people who go into prison come out again. Public safety demands that they behave differently when they do.

“We are either paying to keep them here or we are paying if they come back out and harm somebody,” said Brooke Jenkins, the district attorney of San Francisco, who has visited San Quentin regularly for years.

Jenkins was the organizer of this unusual day that brought district attorneys from around the state inside of San Quentin to gain a better understanding of how the California Model works, and why even tough-on-crime district attorneys should support transforming our prisons.

As California does an about-face away from a decade of progressive criminal justice advances with new crackdowns such as those promised by the recently passed Proposition 36 (which is expected to increase the state inmate population), it is also continuing to move ahead with the controversial plan to remake prison culture, both for inmates and guards, by centering on rehabilitation over punishment.

Despite a tough economic year that is requiring the state to slash spending, Newsom has kept intact more than $200 million from the prior budget to revamp San Quentin so that its outdated facilities can support more than just locking up folks in cells.

Some of that construction, already happening on the grounds, is expected to be completed next year. It will make San Quentin the most visible example of the California Model. But changes in how inmates and guards interact and what rehabilitation opportunities are available are already underway at prisons across the state.

It is an overdue and profound transformation that has the potential to not only improve public safety and save money in the long run, but to fundamentally reshape what incarceration means across the country.

Jenkins’ push to help more prosecutors understand and value this metamorphosis might be crucial to helping the public support it as well — especially for those D.A.s whose constituents are just fine with a system that locks up men to suffer for their (often atrocious) crimes. Or even those Californians, such as many in San Francisco and Los Angeles, who are just fed up with the perception that California is soft on criminals.

“It’s not about moderate or progressive, but I think all of us that are moderates have to admit that there are reforms that still need to happen,” Jenkins told me as we walked through the prison yard. She took office after the successful recall of her progressive predecessor, Chesa Boudin, and a rightward shift in San Francisco on crime policy.

Still, she is vocal about the need for second chances. For her, prison reform is about more than the California Model, but a broader lens that includes the perspectives of incarcerated people, and their insights on what they need to make rehabilitation work.

“It really grounds you in your obligation to make sure that the culture in the [district attorney’s] office is fair,” she said.

For Hochman, a former federal prosecutor and defense lawyer who resoundingly ousted progressive George Gascón last year, rehabilitation makes sense. He likes to paraphrase a Fyodor Dostoevsky quote, “The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.”

“In my perfect world, the education system, the family system, the community, would have done all this work on the front end such that these people wouldn’t have been in position to commit crimes in the first place,” he said. But when that fails, it’s up to the criminal justice system to help people fix themselves.

Despite being perceived as a tough-on-crime D.A. (he prefers “fair on crime”) he’s so committed to that goal of rehabilitation that he is determined to push for a new Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles County — an expensive (billions) and unpopular idea that he says is long overdue but critical to public safety.

“Los Angeles County is absolutely failing because our prisons and jails are woefully inadequate,” he said.

He’s quick to add that rehabilitation isn’t for everyone. Some just aren’t ready for it. Some don’t care. The inmates of San Quentin agree with him. They are often fiercely vocal about who gets transferred to the prison, knowing that its success relies on having incarcerated people who want to change — one rogue inmate at San Quentin could ruin it for all of them.

“It has to be a choice. You have to understand that for yourself,” Oscar Acosta told me. Now 32, he’s a “CDC baby,” as he puts it — referring to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation — and has been behind bars since he was 18. He credits San Quentin with helping him accept responsibility for his crimes and see a path forward.

When the California Model works, as the district attorneys saw, it’s obvious what its value is. Men who once were nothing but dangerous have the option to live different lives, with different values. Even if they remain incarcerated.

“After having been considered the worst of the worst, today I am a new man,” Melendez told me. “I hope (the district attorneys) were able to see real change in those who sat with them and be persuaded that rehabilitation over punishment is more fruitful and that justice seasoned with restoration is better for all.”

Melendez and the other incarcerated men at San Quentin aspire for us to see them as more than their worst actions. And they take heart that even prosecutors like Jenkins and Hochman, who put them behind bars, sometimes with triple-digit sentences, do see that the past does not always determine the future, and that investing in their change is an investment in safer communities.

The film is inspired by dissident director Jafar Panahi’s own experience in jail.

An Iranian thriller film that explores corruption and state violence in the country has won the the Palme d’Or, the coveted top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

It Was Just an Accident, directed by dissident Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, was crowned at the world-famous festival on Saturday, hours after a power outage briefly threw the event off course.

The festival’s crowd burst into a roaring standing ovation for Panahi, who has endured years of travel bans and prison terms in Iran due to his provocative cinema, often produced in secret. He had been banned from leaving Iran for more than 15 years.

“Art mobilises the creative energy of the most precious, most alive part of us. A force that transforms darkness into forgiveness, hope and new life,” said jury president Juliette Binoche when announcing the award.

On stage, Panahi said what mattered most was the future of his country.

“Let us join forces,” Panahi said. “No one should tell us what kind of clothes we should wear, or what we should or shouldn’t do.”

Partly inspired by Panahi’s own experience in jail, It Was Just An Accident follows a man named Vahid (played by Vahid Mobasseri), who kidnaps a man with a false leg who looks just like the one who tortured him in prison and ruined his life.

Vahid sets out to verify with other prison survivors that it is indeed their torturer, and then decide what to do with him.

Critics have praised the film as a clever, symbolic exploration of justice that blends dark humour with its intense themes.

Iraqi film “The President’s Cake” wins Best First Film

The festival’s Grand Prix, or second prize, was awarded to Joachim Trier’s Norwegian family drama, Sentimental Value, his lauded follow-up to The Worst Person in the World.

Kleber Mendonca Filho’s Brazilian political thriller, The Secret Agent, won two big awards: best director for Fihlo and best actor for Wagner Moura.

The jury prize was split between two films: Oliver Laxe’s desert road trip, Sirat and Mascha Schilinski’s German, generation-spanning drama, Sound of Falling.”

Best actress went to Nadia Melliti for The Little Sister, Hafsia Herzi’s French coming-of-age drama.

Cannes also honoured Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake with a best first film award, marking the first time an Iraqi film has won an award at the festival.

The Cannes closing ceremony took place after a major power outage struck southeastern France on Saturday, knocking out traffic lights and forcing businesses to close along the main shopping street in the Alpes-Maritimes holiday region. Police suspect arson as the cause.

Geopolitical tensions were also a constant backdrop at the festival, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza and US President Donald Trump’s proposal of tariffs on foreign-made films fuelling discussion.

More than 900 actors and filmmakers signed an open letter denouncing the genocide in Gaza, according to the organisers.

Among the geopolitical dynamics of the Southeast Asian region, cultural heritage has become a battleground of identity that presents both challenges and opportunities for ASEAN regional solidarity. As a manifestation of national identity inherent in a nation’s collective identity, claims over cultural heritage often trigger diplomatic tensions when they intersect with nationalistic sentiments. The case of the Cambodia-Thailand dispute over Phra Viharn Temple is clear evidence of how cultural heritage can transform a simple conflict into a multidimensional sovereignty issue. But behind its destructive potential, nationalism also holds constructive power that can strengthen ASEAN cultural integration through respect for diversity and diplomacy based on cultural exchange. This article explores the complex role of nationalism in the dynamics of ASEAN cultural cooperation, offering perspectives on how such sentiments can be managed and directed to strengthen the region’s collective identity without compromising the cultural uniqueness of each member state.

Based on cases of conflict related to cultural heritage that have occurred in the ASEAN region, it can be said that nationalist sentiment has a major effect on exacerbating conflict. The reason is, as is known, that cultural heritage itself is the “identity” of a nation that represents the nation, which provides meaning for individuals and groups in understanding the world and their position in it. The presence of this culture also distinguishes it from other nations, which is the point of an identity itself. If the identity is claimed by other parties, of course this becomes a sensitive issue because the identity itself is already an ownership that reflects the characteristics of the nation.

Cultural heritage becomes a national identity, which will build its own pride for a nation. As happens in Indonesia, which consists of various provinces with their respective cultural identities, these differences make people from different cultures unite to represent Indonesia as a nation that has many cultures. This form of pride then creates a sense of “nationalism,” where a nation will love and preserve its identity.

Then what if the cultural heritage that is the identity of this nation is claimed by another party? It will certainly bring up feelings like losing self-identity. This feeling then triggers conflict when a nation fights for its identity in the form of cultural heritage, as in the Cambodia-Thailand dispute over the Phra Viharn Temple claim, where both parties have different views regarding the claimed cultural heritage. Preah Vihear Temple is located on Mount Dangrek, Preah Vihear Province, in the northern part of Cambodia and Sisaket Province in southwestern Thailand, which has led to unclear boundaries between the two countries. Preah Vihear Temple was named a world heritage site in 2007, triggering a territorial dispute over the temple’s claim. This claim issue then shifted into a more serious political issue that threatened national sovereignty with the support of nationalist demonstrations. Thus, nationalist sentiments can be influential in exacerbating conflicts and creating issues that spill over into the realm of politics and sovereignty for the reasons explained earlier.

Is nationalism always an obstacle to cultural cooperation in ASEAN? Not always. There will be a role for nationalism in both directions, either as an obstacle or a driver of cultural cooperation in ASEAN, depending on how the sentiment is “expressed.” If seen from the cases that have occurred, it is true that there are times when nationalism is an obstacle. Where the impact of this conflict affects cultural cooperation, such as the refusal to recognize sovereignty and cultural development, as done by Thailand against Cambodia. It also affects cultural exchange policies, which, as we know, can be a platform for diplomacy between countries. With cases related to nationalism, there can be a feeling of fear of pollution of national culture by foreign influences so that cultural exchanges are limited on the grounds of “protecting” local culture. In ASEAN itself, nationalism affects cultural cooperation, which is a regional vision, which in turn creates competition rather than cultural collaboration.

Considering these things, it is evident that nationalism is an obstacle. However, the role of nationalism as a driver cannot be denied and ignored. The existence of nationalism also plays a role in encouraging cultural cooperation in the ASEAN region, such as strengthening cultural cooperation itself by respecting mutual forms of identity between nations in the ASEAN region. Nationalism also strengthens cultural cooperation through cultural exchanges where the cultures of each country are introduced to each other. Within the ASEAN framework, this cultural exchange is a forum for cultural diplomacy, which is soft power. In addition, each country can also support cultural collaboration so as to create an ASEAN image that supports the preservation of ASEAN culture and identity diversity.

Because of the two-way influence of nationalist sentiment, it proves that it is not always an obstacle. What needs to be done is to have countries and nations turn the sentiment of nationalism into a driver of cultural cooperation in ASEAN, for example, by viewing the sentiment as a cultural interaction rather than a threat that must be limited to foreign cultures or by strengthening ASEAN integration, where its role is to facilitate cultural cooperation in the ASEAN region.

Bangkok, Thailand – Over several years in the mid-1960s, the crumbling ruins of an ancient temple in northeast Thailand were picked clean by local looters.

Possibly hundreds of centuries-old statues that were long buried beneath the soft, verdant grounds around the temple were stolen.

To this day, all the known artefacts from the pillaging spree, collectively known as the Prakhon Chai hoard, sit scattered thousands of miles away in museums and collections across the United States, Europe and Australia.

In a matter of weeks, though, the first of those statues will begin their journey home to Thailand.

The acquisitions committee of San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum recommended the release last year of four bronze statues from the hoard, which had been held in its collection since the late 1960s.

San Francisco city’s Asian Art Commission, which manages the museum, then approved the proposal on April 22, officially setting the pieces free.

Some six decades after the late British antiquities dealer Douglas Latchford is suspected of spiriting the statues out of the country, they are expected to arrive back in Thailand within a month or two.

“We are the righteous owners,” Disapong Netlomwong, senior curator for the Office of National Museums at Thailand’s Fine Arts Department, told Al Jazeera.

“It is something that our ancestors … have made, and it should be exhibited here to show the civilisation and the belief of the people,” said Disapong, who also serves on Thailand’s Committee for the Repatriation of Stolen Artefacts.

The imminent return of the statues is the latest victory in Thailand’s quest to reclaim its pilfered heritage.

Their homecoming also exemplifies the efforts of countries across the world to retrieve pieces of their own stolen history that still sit in display cases and in the vaults of some of the West’s top museums.

From Thai temples to the Acropolis in Athens

Latchford, a high-profile Asian art dealer who came to settle in Bangkok and lived there until his death in 2020 at 88 years of age, is believed to have earned a fortune from auction houses, private collectors and museums around the world who acquired his smuggled ancient artefacts from Thailand and neighbouring Cambodia.

In 2021, Latchford’s daughter, Nawapan Kriangsak, agreed to return her late father’s private collection of more than 100 artefacts, valued at more than $50m, to Cambodia.

Though never convicted during his lifetime, Latchford was charged with falsifying shipping records, wire fraud and a host of other crimes related to antiquities smuggling by a US federal grand jury in 2019.

He died the following year, before the case against him could go to trial.

In 2023 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York agreed to return 16 pieces tied to Latchford’s smuggling network to Cambodia and Thailand.

San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum has also previously returned pieces to Thailand – two intricately carved stone lintels taken from a pair of temples dating back to the 10th and 11th centuries, in 2021.

While Thailand and Cambodia have recently fared relatively well in efforts to reclaim their looted heritage from US museum collections, Greece has not had such luck with the British Museum in London.

Perhaps no case of looted antiquities has grabbed more news headlines than that of the so-called “Elgin Marbles”.

The 2,500-year-old friezes, known also as the Parthenon Marbles, were hacked off the iconic Acropolis in Athens in the early 1800s by agents of Lord Elgin, Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which controlled Greece at that time.

Elgin claimed he took the marbles with the permission of the Ottomans and then sold them in 1816 to the British Museum in London, where they remain.

Greece has been demanding the return of the artefacts since the country’s declaration of independence in 1832 and sent an official request to the museum in 1983, according to the nongovernmental Hellenic Institute of Cultural Diplomacy.

“Despite all these efforts, the British government has not deviated from its positions over the years, legally considering the Parthenon marbles to belong to Britain. They have even passed laws to prevent the return of cultural artefacts,” the institute said.

‘Colonialism is still alive and well’

Tess Davis, executive director of the Antiquities Coalition, a Washington-based nonprofit campaigning against the illicit trade of ancient art and artefacts, said that “colonialism is still alive and well in parts of the art world”.

“There is a mistaken assumption by some institutions that they are better carers, owners, custodians of these cultural objects,” Davis told Al Jazeera.

But Davis, who has worked on Cambodia’s repatriation claims with US museums, says the “custodians” defence has long been debunked.

“These antiquities were cared for by [their] communities for centuries, in some cases for millennia, before there was … a market demand for them, leading to their looting and trafficking, but we still do see resistance,” she said.

Brad Gordon, a lawyer representing the Cambodian government in its ongoing repatriation of stolen artefacts, has heard museums make all sorts of claims to defend retaining pieces that should be returned to their rightful homelands.

Excuses from museums include claiming that they are not sure where pieces originated from; that contested items were acquired before laws banned their smuggling; that domestic laws block their repatriation, or that the ancient pieces deserve a more global audience than they would receive in their home country.

Still, none of those arguments should keep a stolen piece from coming home, Gordon said.

“If we believe the object is stolen and the country of origin wishes for it to come home, then the artefact should be returned,” he said.

Old attitudes have started breaking down though, and more looted artefacts are starting to find their way back to their origins.

“There’s definitely a growing trend toward doing the right thing in this area, and … I hope that more museums follow the Asian Art Museum’s example. We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go,” Davis said.

Much of the progress, Davis believes, is down to growing media coverage of stolen antiquities and public awareness of the problem in the West, which has placed mounting pressure on museums to do the right thing.

In 2022, the popular US comedy show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver dedicated a whole episode to the topic. As Oliver said, if you go to Greece and visit the Acropolis you might notice “some odd details”, such as sections missing from sculptures – which are now in Britain.

“Honestly, if you are ever looking for a missing artefact, nine times out of 10 it’s in the British Museum,” Oliver quips.

Gordon also believes a generational shift in thinking is at play among those who once trafficked in the cultural heritage of other countries.

“For example, the children of many collectors, once they are aware of the facts of how the artefacts were removed from the country of origin, want their parents to return them,” he said.

Proof of the past

The four bronze statues the San Francisco museum will soon be returning to Thailand date back to the 7th and 9th centuries.

Thai archaeologist Tanongsak Hanwong said that period places them squarely in the Dvaravati civilisation, which dominated northeast Thailand, before the height of the Khmer empire that would build the towering spires of Angkor Wat in present-day Cambodia and come to conquer much of the surrounding region centuries later.

Three of the slender, mottled figures, one nearly a metre tall (3.2 feet), depict Bodhisattva – Buddhist adherents on the path to nirvana – and the other the Buddha himself in a wide, flowing robe.

Tanongsak, who brought the four pieces in the San Francisco collection to the attention of Thailand’s stolen artefacts repatriation committee in 2017, said they and the rest of the Prakhon Chai hoard are priceless proof of Thailand’s Buddhist roots at a time when much of the region was still Hindu.

“The fact that we do not have any Prakhon Chai bronzes on display anywhere [in Thailand], in the national museum or local museums whatsoever, it means we do not have any evidence of the Buddhist history of that period at all, and that’s strange,” he said.

The Fine Arts Department first wrote to San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum about the statues’ illicit provenance in 2019, but started to make progress on having them returned only when the US Department of Homeland Security got involved on Thailand’s behalf.

Robert Mintz, the museum’s chief curator, said staff could find no evidence that the statues had been trafficked in their own records.

But they were convinced they had been looted and smuggled out of Thailand – and of Latchford’s involvement – once Homeland Security provided proof, with the help of Thai researchers.

“Once that evidence was presented and they heard it, their feeling was the appropriate place for these would be back in Thailand,” Mintz said of the museum’s staff and acquisition committee.

‘Pull back the curtain’

The San Francisco Asian Art Museum went a step further when it finally resolved to return the four statues to Thailand.

It also staged a special exhibit around the pieces to highlight the very questions the experience had raised regarding the theft of antiquities.

The exhibition – Moving Objects: Learning from Local and Global Communities – ran in San Francisco from November to March.

“One of our goals was to try to indicate to the visiting public to the museum how important it is to look historically at where works of art have come from,” Mintz said.

“To pull back the curtain a bit, to say, these things do exist within American collections and now is the time to address challenges that emerge from past collecting practice,” he said.

Mintz says Homeland Security has asked the Asian Art Museum to look into the provenance of at least another 10 pieces in its collection that likely came from Thailand.

Tess Davis, of the Antiquities Coalition campaign group, said the exhibition was a very unusual, and welcome, move for a museum in the process of giving up looted artefacts.

In Thailand, Disapong and Tanongsak say the Asian Art Museum’s decision to recognise Thailand’s rightful claim to the statues could also help them start bringing the rest of the Prakhon Chai hoard home, including 14 more known pieces in other museums around the US, and at least a half-dozen scattered across Europe and Australia.

“It is indeed a good example, because once we can show the world that the Prakhon Chai bronzes were all exported from Thailand illegally, then probably, hopefully some other museums will see that all the Prakhon Chai bronzes they have must be returned to Thailand as well,” Tanongsak said.

There are several other artefacts besides the Prakhon Chai hoard that Thailand is also looking to repatriate from collections around the world, he said.

Davis said the repatriation of stolen antiquities is still being treated by too many with collections as an obstacle when it should be seen, as the Asian Art Museum has, as an opportunity.

“It’s an opportunity to educate the public,” Davis said.

“It’s an opportunity to build bridges with Southeast Asia,” she added, “and I hope other institutions follow suit.”