Northern Lights: A Journey Through Canada's History and a Must-See Summer Attraction on Parliament Hill

Northern Lights - Banner (Via Sound and Light Show on Parliament Hill)

The opening performance of the fourth season of Northern Lights—the free bilingual sound and light show presented against the backdrop of the Peace Tower and the Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings—will take place at 10 p.m. on July 9, 2018. 

Residents and visitors to Canada's Capital Region will be able to enjoy a unique sensory experience as they learn more about Canada's history and culture. Thirty minutes of spectacular effects and dazzling images will highlight the inspiring stories of the men and women who helped build our country.

The fourth season of the show will run from July 9 to September 3, 2018, with performances every night at 10 p.m. in July, 9:30 p.m. in August, and 9 p.m. in September. 

⏩ This perfect evening activity is sure to delight audiences of all ages.

Quote:

"Every year, Northern Lights offers a memorable experience for residents and visitors to Canada's Capital Region. Parliament Hill is the ideal setting for this unique show, thanks to its history and what it represents. This summer, get together with family and friends to discover our country's history, and let yourself be transported by the magic of the show."

The Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Canadian Heritage

Quick Facts:

• Northern Lights broke records last year, during the Canada 150 celebrations. More than 314,400 people saw the show in 2017.
• The show is expected to welcome its millionth visitor in its fourth season—a milestone that previous shows did not reach until their fifth season.
• For the 2018 show, the national anthem has been updated with the new, gender-neutral version of "O Canada."
• Manulife is the exclusive sponsor of Northern Lights.

⏩ Follow Northern Lights on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and with hashtag #NorthernLights.

Northern Lights (Via Sound and Light Show on Parliament Hill)

More About Northern Lights: 

(Via Sound and Light Show on Parliament Hill)

The show
Northern Lights is a free bilingual show presented nightly from July 9 to September 3, 2018. Show times: in July at 10:00 p.m., in August at 9:30 p.m., and in September at 9:00 p.m.

This experience of sound and light is a thrilling thematic journey through Canada’s history. Combining bold digital technology with the architectural splendour of the Parliament Buildings, the show illuminates Canadian stories of nation-building, partnership, discovery, valour, pride and vision at the heart of our country.

Audiences have been captivated by sound and light shows on Parliament Hill for more than 30 years.

Key figures, events and achievements from Canadian history are brought to life using five distinct artistic styles. All are presented in spectacular detail, with stirring narration and an original score, against the backdrop of the Centre Block and Peace Tower.

⏩ The narrative unfolds through five thematic “books”:

Book One: Foundations of the Nation. 
A fluid ink-in-water style is used to paint stories of how people from all over the world have expanded our foundations. From traditional indigenous ways of life and early European settlements to modern citizenship ceremonies, these stories are linked by our desire to call Canada “home”.

Book Two: Strength in Partnership.
Partnership and determination have made Canada strong. Using an illustration style inspired by classical paintings, this book explores alliances that have shaped our country.

Book Three: Discovery and Adventure.
A lithographic style takes us on a voyage showcasing the achievements of explorers, scientists and innovators whose quests into the unknown continue to inspire us to follow our dreams.

Book Four: Valour.
This powerful book combines dramatic performances with archival materials and charcoal drawings to honour the men and women who have served their country, both at home and abroad, in military conflicts since the First World War.

Book Five: Pride and Vision.
Inspired by the stained glass windows of the Memorial Chamber in the Peace Tower, this intensely colourful book celebrates the natural grandeur of our country and the diversity of her people.

⏩ For more info, visit Sound and Light Show on Parliament Hill

SOURCE: Canadian Heritage

Northern Lights – teaser:

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The Dreadful History Of Children In Concentration Camps

Child survivors of Auschwitz are seen in this 1945 photograph. (Creative Commons)

Children and family have been central to the institution of the concentration camp from its beginnings 120 years ago. Wikipedia has now added the notorious American border detention centres to its list of concentration camps, and the #FamiliesBelongTogether Twitter hashtag has brought up frequent comparisons.

The merits of the comparison between detention centres and concentration camps have been debated elsewhere, but can we learn anything from this dreadful history of children behind barbed wire, even as the Trump administration finally moved to end the practice?

The British constructed camps during the 1899-1902 South African War in order to divide families. They hoped that Boer men who were fighting British forces would give up once they discovered that their wives and children were held in camps.

A deceased young girl is seen at a concentration camp where the British housed Boer women and children during the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. (Creative Commons)

Similar to the Trump administration’s apparent hope that the breakup of families would deter unwanted migration, the British sought to deter Boer fighters. British parliamentarians critical of the policy labelled these “concentration camps,” alluding to the Spanish policy of the “reconcentration” of civilians during the Spanish-American War (1898).

Conditions in the British-run camps were horrific, particularly for children, with mortality rates upwards of 25 per cent. An epidemic of measles accounted for roughly 40 per cent of childhood deaths in these camps, and other diseases such as typhus and dysentery were also devastating.

Families broken up in former Soviet Union
The Soviet Union’s system of camps that reached their peak during Joseph Stalin’s rule from the 1930s to the 1950s also reveals the destruction of families. While mass arrests broke up the family, and children of “enemies of the people” were separated from their parents, there were also many children in the Gulag itself.

Prison camps developed an infrastructure that, on the surface, supported pregnancy and childbirth. There were maternity wards in some camp clinics, as well as nurseries, and pregnant women and nursing mothers officially received increased rations.

In practice, the system was regularly a nightmare. Children born in the camps were separated from their mothers, who only managed to see them at set times for nursing.

Hava Volovich, whose own daughter died in the camps, remembers that hundreds of camp children died each year, meaning that there were “plenty of empty beds in the infants’ shelter even though the birth rate in the camps was relatively high.”

At the age of two, many of the surviving children were sent either to orphanages or to relatives — a forced redistribution of children away from their parents, who, as Gulag prisoners, were at best stigmatized, and at worst seen as a major threat to Soviet society.

The Gulag also held camps for young offenders, where teenagers worked as forced labourers and faced horrific living conditions.

Nazis crushed families
Nazi policy included both large-scale deportations and large-scale importations of population groups, with major implications for families.

The Nazis removed citizenship from German Jews then, during the Second World War, sent most Jews, from Germany and elsewhere, to camps outside the borders of pre-war Germany. Yet, as the war progressed, Germany brought in huge numbers of forced labourers from all over Europe (U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ claim that German-run camps were designed to keep Jews in, rather than out, is unfounded).

Nazi family policy was a pivotal part of the concentration camp. Once the death camps were operational, the Nazis crushed the family unit among undesirable populations, focusing on Jews.

The selection process at Auschwitz could result in the temporary survival of one or both parents, if they were physically fit (or just lucky), but children were usually sent directly to their deaths.

The late Elie Wiesel is seen in this 2012 photograph. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

Jewish writer Elie Wiesel lost his mother and sister right away, and only survived selection because he lied about his age, claiming he was 18 and not 15, his actual age.

The unimaginable cruelty of many practices —the smashing of babies’ heads against walls, the medical experimentation, particularly on twins —reveals an extreme dehumanization.

Even at the show camp of Terezin, which included a family camp, only 150 of the roughly 15,000 children sent there survived.

High mortality rates
What do these historical cases have in common? All involved the separation, either immediate or eventual, of children from one or both parents, and all involved horrific conditions and extremely high mortality rates for the children.

In all cases, the dehumanization of the unwanted population was a key starting point. As historian Aidan Forth writes of the South African case, Gen. Herbert Kitchener referred to the Boers as “savages with only a thin white veneer,” and British officials often described the Afrikaners as “dirty, careless, [and lazy.]”

Former Gulag prisoners frequently reported that guards and officials referred to them as animals or as “scum.” As one former prisoner wrote, quoting a camp boss: “A person? … There aren’t any here! Here are enemies of the people, traitors of the motherland, bandits, crooks. The dregs of humanity, scum, riff raff, that’s who is here!”

The dehumanization of the Nazi camps is well known, as Nazi propaganda frequently likened the Jews to vermin or to an infectious disease, making Trump’s tweet about asylum seekers particularly chilling:

Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 19, 2018

Another commonality can be found in the experiences of the victims.

In all cases, children separated from parents could not have known if they would ever see their parents again, or under what circumstances. The children of the camps had to rely, for the most part, on other children, for any support or security. Often, the separation was permanent.

These comparisons only take us so far, however. Some commentators have looked not at European powers, but to a long North American history — including slavery and residential schools — of separating non-white children from their parents.

Children at a residential school in Fort Resolution, Northwest Territories, are seen in this undated photo. (National Archives of Canada)

If there is any optimism to be found in the historical examples of children in concentration camps, perhaps the history of public reactions can provide some hope.

In South Africa, reports by Emily Hobhouse and then the Fawcett Commission, particularly on starving children, galvanized public pressure to force the British government to improve conditions at the camps.

Outcry helped end practice
In contrast, in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, there could be neither public nor parliamentary discussion of inhumane internment conditions.

Bu today, some U.S. reporters and lawmakers have visited the American detention centres, and non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International and even the Methodist Church, as well as many elected officials, maligned the policy.

The public discussion, and the public outcry against the separation of children from their parents that eventually caused U.S. President Donald Trump to cave and end the policy, perhaps makes the American case more similar to that of South Africa than either the Nazi or Soviet camps.

This similarity, however, depends on the actions now of the Trump administration, which for several weeks before its reversal included denial, deflecting blame and even justification.

But with reports of children being torn away from their mothers’ arms while breastfeeding, the more notorious concentration camps of the 20th century must serve as a stark reminder that the act of dehumanization is a slippery slope towards violence and further atrocities.

About Today's Contributor:
Wilson T. Bell, Assistant Professor of History and Politics, Thompson Rivers University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

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Based on the Real Life Story of Jack Parsons, 'Strange Angel' Explores the Intersection Between Genius and Madness, Science and Science Fiction

STRANGE ANGEL - Poster

CBS All Access announced today that its latest original drama series, STRANGE ANGEL, will launch on its service in Canada on Thursday, June 14. 

⏩ New episodes of STRANGE ANGEL's 10-episode first season will be available on demand weekly on Thursdays exclusively for CBS All Access subscribers in Canada, mirroring the series' roll-out in the U.S.

STRANGE ANGEL, a drama series created by Mark Heyman ("Black Swan," "The Skeleton Twins") and based on George Pendle's book of the same name, is inspired by the real life story of Jack Parsons and explores the dramatic intersection between genius and madness, science and science fiction.

Jack Parsons (Jack Reynor), a brilliant and ambitious blue-collar worker in 1930s Los Angeles, works as a janitor at a chemical factory but dreams of building rockets that will take mankind to the moon. As he helps pioneer the unknown discipline of rocket science by day, by night Parsons is pulled into a new occult religion created by Aleister Crowley, performing sex magick rituals to bend the world to his will and make his fantastical dreams a reality.

The cast of STRANGE ANGEL includes Jack Reynor, Rupert Friend, Bella Heathcote, Peter Mark Kendall, Michael Gaston, Greg Wise, Rade Šerbedžija, Zack Pearlmanand Keye Chen.

STRANGE ANGEL is produced by CBS Television Studios in association with Scott Free Productions. Mark Heyman, David DiGilio, Ridley Scott and David W. Zuckerserve as executive producers. Clayton Krueger serves as co-executive producer, and David Lowery ("A Ghost Story," "Pete's Dragon") directs and executive produces.

Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons - book cover

About the book the TV series is based on:

(via GoodReads)

Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

ROCKET SCIENTIST KILLED IN PASADENA EXPLOSION screamed the headline of the Los Angeles Times. John Parsons, a maverick rocketeer who helped transform the rocket from a derided sci-fi plot line into a reality, was at first mourned as a scientific prodigy. But reporters soon uncovered a more shocking story: Parsons had been a devotee of black magic.

George Pendle re-creates the world of John Parsons in this dazzling portrait of prewar superstition, cold war paranoia, and futuristic possibility. Fueled by childhood dreams of space flight, Parsons was a leader of the motley band of enthusiastic young men who founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a cornerstone of the American space program. But Parsons's wild imagination also led him into the occult- for if he could make rocketry a reality, why not magic?

With a cast of characters including Howard Hughes, L. Ron Hubbard, and Robert Heinlein, Strange Angel explores the unruly consequences of genius.

STRANGE ANGEL  (image via BoingBoing)

SOURCE: CBS Corporation

"Strange Angel" - Trailers:

Florence + The Machine's North American Fall Headline Tour Confirmed

Florence + The Machine Confirm North American Leg Of Global Tour

Florence + the Machine have confirmed today a 23 city North American fall headline tour, produced by Live Nation, kicking off August 5 in Montreal, QC and including stops at Los Angeles' Hollywood Bowl and New York's Barclays Center. 

Further dates  include Seattle, Portland, Nashville, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago and more.

Tickets are on sale to the general public beginning this Friday, June 1 at 10 a.m. local time at Ticketmaster.com. American Express Card Members can purchase tickets for select dates before the general public beginning Tuesday, May 29 at 12 p.m. local time, through Thursday, May 31 at 10 p.m. local time. 

⏩ Visit florenceandthemachine.net for more information.

Florence + the Machine's hugely anticipated fourth studio album High As Hope—co-produced by Florence and Emile Haynie and featuring contributions from Kamasi Washington, Sampha, Tobias Jesso Jr, Kelsey Lu and Jamie xx—is out June 29 on Republic Records. 

Watch the A.G. Rojas-directed video for first official single "Hunger":

About Florence + The Machine:

(Via Wikipedia)

Florence and the Machine (stylised as Florence + the Machine) are an English indie rock band that formed in London in 2007, consisting of vocalist Florence Welch, keyboardist Isabella Summers, and a collaboration of other musicians. The band's music received praise across the media, especially from the BBC, which played a large part in their rise to prominence by promoting Florence and the Machine as part of BBC Introducing. At the 2009 Brit Awards they received the Brit Awards "Critics' Choice" award. The band's music is renowned for its dramatic and eccentric production and also Welch's powerful vocal performances.

The band's debut studio album, Lungs, was released on 6 July 2009, and held the number-two position for its first five weeks on the UK Albums Chart. On 17 January 2010, the album reached the top position, after being on the chart for twenty-eight consecutive weeks. As of October 2010, the album had been in the top forty in the United Kingdom for sixty-five consecutive weeks, making it one of the best-selling albums of 2009 and 2010. The group's second studio album, Ceremonials, released in October 2011, entered the charts at number one in the UK and number six in the US. The band's third album, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, was released on 2 June 2015. It topped the UK charts, and debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200, their first to do so. The album reached number one in a total of eight countries and the top ten of twenty. Also in 2015, the band was the headlining act at Glastonbury Festival, making Florence Welch the first British female headliner this century.

Florence and the Machine's sound has been described as a combination of various genres, including rock and soul. Lungs won the Brit Award for Best British Album in 2010. Florence and the Machine have been nominated for seven Grammy Awards including Best New Artist and Best Pop Vocal Album. 

⏩ Additionally, the band performed at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards and the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Concert.

Florence + The Machine (Still from 'Hunger' video)

FLORENCE + THE MACHINE LIVE

August 5	Montreal, QC, Canada	Osheaga^
August 9	Lake Tahoe, NV	Lake Tahoe Outdoor Arena at Harveys*+
August 11	San Francisco, CA	Outside Lands^
September 8	Vancouver, BC, Canada	Skookum Festival^
September 10	Seattle, WA	KeyArena†
September 11	Portland, OR	Moda Center†
September 14	Salt Lake City, UT	Maverik Center†
September 15	Denver, CO	Grandoozy Festival^
September 22	Las Vegas, NV	Life Is Beautiful^
September 23	San Diego, CA	Viejas Arena at Aztec Bowl San Diego State University‡
September 25	Los Angeles, CA	Hollywood Bowl‡
September 29	Dallas, TX	The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory‡
September 30	Houston, TX	The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion‡
October 2	Nashville, TN	Bridgestone Arena§
October 3	Charlotte, NC	Spectrum Center§
October 5	Washington, D.C.	The Anthem**+
October 9	New York, NY	Barclays Center
October 12	Boston, MA	TD Garden
October 13	Uncasville, CT	Mohegan Sun Arena††
October 14	Philadelphia, PA	Wells Fargo Center††
October 16	Toronto, ON, Canada	Air Canada Centre††
October 19	Chicago, IL	United Center‡‡
October 20	Minneapolis, MN	Target Center‡‡

• *with Wet
• †with St. Vincent and Lizzo 
• ‡with Kamasi Washington 
• §with Billie Eilish 
• **with Beth Ditto 
• ††with Grizzly Bear 
• ‡‡with Perfume Genius 
• +not a Live Nation date 
• ^Festival date

FLORENCE + THE MACHINE - HIGH AS HOPE 
1. June
2. Hunger
3. South London Forever
4. Big God
5. Sky Full of Song
6. Grace
7. Patricia
8. 100 Years
9. The End of Love
10. No Choir

SOURCE: Live Nation Entertainment

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