Established 1961 13 Lifestyle Features Wednesday, February 24, 2021

ne of the era’s defining dancefloor More Time” and “Harder, Better, Faster, acts hung up their helmets on Stronger”. There were some distinctive- OMonday, as stars ly left-field choices in the years that fol- announced their retirement in lowed, including producing the 2003 typically enigmatic fashion with a video film “Interstella 5555” by Japanese ani- showing one of them exploding in a me master Leiji Matsumoto, which fea- desert. The French duo released an tured music from “Discovery”. If their eight-minute clip titled “Epilogue”, using next in 2005, a more sombre footage from their cult 2006 film “”, received mixed “Electroma” in which one of the robots reviews, these were quickly forgotten sets other to self-destruct mode. After amid the euphoria of their live shows the explosion, a cutaway reads “1993- over the next two years. 2021” with two robot hands making a cir- This included a headline appearance cle around a sunset. at US festival Coachella in 2006, per- Their publicist, Kathryn Frazier, con- formed inside a giant LED pyramid. firmed the news to AFP by email, without EDM fans still speak about it with an giving a reason for the split. From “Da almost religious reverence. In 2010, Funk” in 1995 to “Get Lucky” in 2013, In this file photo nominee For Best Album Of The Year “Random In this file photo Daft Punk performs at the Coachella Music they released a soundtrack to the Daft Punk became the torch-bearers for Access Memories” Daft Punk arrive on the red carpet for the 56th Fesival in Indio, California. — AFP photos Disney reboot of Tron, which picked up French house music across the globe, Grammy Awards at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California. a Grammy nomination. But no one pre- winning six Grammy awards and pio- dicted the massive success of “Random neering the monumental sound-and-light Access Memories”, for which they gave shows that came to characterize the wave of tributes to Daft Punk’s hit-making the year for “Get Lucky”, the millions- review in the British music press dis- up their usual makeshift home rig for a electronic dance movement (EDM) of influence. “They always cultivated a taste selling lead single featuring Pharrell missed the band as “daft punky thrash”- full commercial studio-and used entirely recent years. They did so while almost for the paradoxical,” electro pioneer Williams and Nile Rodgers. But the which struck a chord with them. live instruments. The resulting work never revealing their faces-the ubiqui- Jean-Michel Jarre told AFP, praising the much hoped-for return to touring never Reemerging as an electronic outfit, they dominated album-of-the-year lists and tous helmets became another much- duo’s “extremely elegant manner of say- took place. They showed up one more met with instant success. Early singles helped lift their total worldwide sales to copied trope of EDM stars, but also ing goodbye to their fans”. “Eternally time for the Grammies in 2017. Despite “” and “Around the World” 12 million. afforded , 46, and grateful,” tweeted Christine and the the Twittersphere erupting in excite- became club fixtures, and led to mas- In December, Strokes frontman Julian Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, 47, free- Queens singer Chris. Star music produc- ment last month amid rumors they sive sales for their debut album Casablancas told music website The dom from the fame that quickly encircled er Marc Ronson also hailed the “gor- would appear alongside The Weeknd “Homework” in 1997. It was in the video Needle Drop that he’d been “trying to do them. “We have daily lives that are a lot geous French robots”, writing on Twitter: for the Super Bowl half-time show, that for “Around the World” that they first something” with Daft Punk after collabo- more normal... than the lives of artists “Daft Punk left the game with a flawless did not materialize. donned the helmets that would become rating with them on their 2013 single who have the same level of fame as us, legacy.” Despite endless rumors of an their signature look. “”. But he was told they but who might be attached to being imminent new tour or album, Daft Punk ‘Daft punky thrash’ It mirrored the tight control they exer- were “not doing music right now”, with physically recognised,” Bangalter said in had been quiet for several years. Bangalter and Homem-Christo met at cised over every part of their career, one of the duo “focused on video stuff” a 2015 BBC documentary. Their last album, 2013’s “Random school in Paris before an inauspicious which included ownership of their mas- and the other “obsessing with ancient Access Memories”, was a phenomenal start in music with the rock band Darlin’, ter recordings. They followed up with aliens or something”. — AFP ‘A flawless legacy’ success, winning them four Grammies which also featured a future member of the even more successful “Discovery” in Monday’s announcement set off a the following year including record of the French indie band Phoenix. One 2001, which spawned the hits “One

recording what they remembered and how they lived was the important thing to do.” His interviews with Bedouin citizens of Israel and in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, which Israel occupied for more than a decade after the 1967 Six- Day War, yielded around 350 hours of recordings. The content includes Bedouin poetry, legal issues, religion, history and environment. Bailey, who in 1994 won a human rights award from the Association for eading Bedouin scholar Clinton Israeli researcher Clinton Bailey shows his collection of audio tape recordings of inter- Civil Rights in Israel for his advocacy, Bailey has amassed hundreds of has also penned books, including a hours of recordings about the views with members of the Bedouin commu- L nity at his home in Jerusalem. tome of 113 Bedouin poems. To com- nomadic society’s poetry, history and plete its three-year digitization project, legal system, in a career that began area we are trying to fill in gaps and the library has hired members of while jogging through Israel’s Negev document all aspects of Israeli society,” Israel’s Bedouin community to help, desert. Bailey’s unique Arabic audio she said. among other things, transcribe the In this undated handout image, a curator at the National Museum of Norway uses an archive is now being transcribed and recordings using their knowledge of the infrared scanner in the quest to reveal author of hidden graffiti on Edvard Munch’s origi- digitized by Israel’s National Library, a ‘Going to disappear’ local dialect. nal painting of The Scream in Oslo. — AFP photos project aimed at enriching Bedouin Bailey was teaching political science Ukeles said the library would make scholarship in Israel, the Arab world and at New York’s Columbia University in the the archive accessible online, enabling well as events that happened in 1895, beyond. “I find that in understanding late 1960s when he decided to move to Bedouins in the Sinai to access the rare when Munch showed the painting in Bedouin culture... you understand Israel to teach English on a southern kib- cultural record by mobile phone. The Munch wrote Norway for the first time, all point in the human nature, how people adjust to liv- butz. An Arabic speaker, he was fre- library is also seeking collaboration with same direction.” ing under very difficult circumstances,” quently invited by Bedouins into their scholars in the Gulf, a prospect made ‘madman’ tag on Bailey told AFP. There are some 250,000 tents as he jogged in the surrounding easier by recent agreements with the Bedouins living in Israel, part of the area. Eventually, he bought a jeep to vis- United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to mainly Palestinian-Arab community that it Bedouin communities further afield. establish ties with Israel. “It’s a high ‘Scream’ painting, stayed in the Jewish state following its Now in his early 80s, he recalled thinking quality, rare oral history of a culture” that creation in 1948. that Bedouin society was at a transition was very important “in the rainbow of Impoverished and often living on the point. Watching them use radios and cultures here in Israel,” said Ukeles. museum rules margins, Bedouin culture is understud- plastic containers was a harbinger of ied in Israel, a problem Bailey’s record- encroaching modernity that would Rights advocate ings will help address, said Raquel inevitably infringe on their traditional Israel’s Bedouins once laid claim to mysterious inscription on Edvard Ukeles, head of collections at the library. ways, he said, adding he feared much of the Negev desert, but the minor- Munch’s famed painting “The The national library has consistently pri- Bedouin culture “was going to disap- ity community now survives on the mar- AScream” has baffled the art world oritized material on Islam, but focused pear”. gins of Israeli society and often in pover- for years, but Norwegian experts have less on the culture and history of indige- In order to preserve it, Bailey decided ty. Land ownership is one of main bones now concluded it was written by none nous Arab communities, she told AFP. to chronicle the Bedouins orally-based of contention between the Bedouins and other than the artist himself. Barely visi- “This collection enables us to preserve culture. The first step was to acquire a Israeli authorities. “We decided not to ble to the naked eye, the phrase “Can This undated handout image, shows an image and document Bedouin culture, in an tape recorder. “My senses told me that recognize their claims to any plots or any only have been painted by a madman” made by a curator at the National Museum of areas they held in common, because is written in pencil in Norwegian in the Norway while using an infrared scanner. they had no written deeds,” Bailey said, upper left corner of the iconic artwork. faulting Israeli policy makers for alienat- The dark painting from 1893, now a sym- The first showing of the work to the ing the Bedouins. Bedouin property bol of existential angst, depicts a public in Oslo-then known as Kristiania- rights are codified in their oral legal sys- humanlike figure standing on a bridge, provoked furious criticism and raised tem, and as a result tensions over land clutching its head in apparent horror questions about Munch’s mental state, issues have persisted. against the backdrop of a swirling sky. which, according to Guleng, likely Israeli authorities have repeatedly tried The author of the phrase has long prompted Munch to write the inscription to relocate Bedouins from some villages been a mystery, with the main theory on the canvas shortly afterwards. A pio- to build new towns and demolished struc- until now holding that it was a disgrun- neer of expressionism, Munch was tures they deemed illegal. If Israel does tled viewer who penned it at the begin- haunted by the premature deaths of sev- not address the community’s grievances, ning of the 20th century on one of the eral family members, including his moth- it will become “more restive, more bel- four versions made by Munch. But, er and his sister Johanne Sophie, due to ligerent... and it will be more difficult to using infrared technology to analyze the illness. In 1908, he was temporarily com- deal with them,” warned Bailey. —AFP handwriting, experts at Norway’s mitted to a psychiatric hospital. This ver- National Museum have now concluded sion of “The Scream” was stolen in 1994, that it was the artist himself. “The writing the opening day of the Winter Olympic is without a doubt Munch’s own,” muse- Games in Lillehammer.—AFP Israeli researcher Clinton Bailey shows books he authored on the Bedouin community at um curator Mai Britt Guleng said in a his home in Jerusalem. — AFP photos statement. “The handwriting itself, as

of original rock artworks, many of them 600 generations ago an important part of Australia’s history.” The images were mostly depictions of worked and reworked over millennia. She said partnerships could weave In total, the team dated 27 mud wasp animals, including a snake, a lizard-like Kangaroo painting “The main challenge, globally, in dating together traditional knowledge with west- nests around 16 different paintings from figure, and three macropods-marsupials ancient paintings is that they very rarely ern science, adding that the dating of eight rock shelters, and found that the including kangaroos, wallabies and Australia’s oldest employed a pigment that can be dated the oldest known rock shelter painting artworks in this same naturalistic style quokkas. “This is a significant find as with any of the current, quantitative dat- “holds a great deal of significance for were produced between around 17,000 through these initial estimates, we can ing techniques,” lead author Damien Aboriginal people and Australians and is and 13,000 years ago. understand something of the world these Aboriginal rock art Finch, a geochronologist at the ancient artists lived in,” said Finch in a University of Melbourne, told AFP. To get statement, adding that the environment around this the researchers identified a would have been cooler and drier than kangaroo painting created over way to work out the age of the painting today. 17,000 years ago by Aboriginal using ancient mud wasp nests. “We can never know what was in the Aartists has been identified-with a Finch and his colleagues found that mind of the artist when he/she painted little help from some ancient wasps-as some of the rock paintings had the this piece of work more than 600 gener- Australia’s oldest intact rock art. The remains of these nests-which can be ations ago, but we do know that the two-meter-long (six-feet) artwork on the radiocarbon dated-above and below the Naturalistic period extended back into sloped ceiling of a rock shelter in images. They estimated that the kanga- the Last Ice Age.” The research, part of Western Australia’s Kimberley region roo painting was between 17,500 and Australia’s largest rock art dating proj- was painted in an early naturalistic style, 17,100 years old, the oldest discovered ect, was published in the journal Nature which often features life-sized render- to date. “It’s important that Indigenous Human Behavior. — AFP ings of animals, according to research knowledge and stories are not lost and published Monday. continue to be shared for generations to Scientists worked with the local come,” said Cissy Gore-Birch, head of Traditional owner Ian Waina inspecting a Aboriginal community, who can trace the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, painting of a kangaroo that is at least their heritage in the region back tens of in a statement from the University of 12,300 years old, based on the age of wasp thousands of years, to establish the age Western Australia. nests over the paint. — www.abc.net.au