It’s rare that a TV program, especially a miniseries, can actually have a lasting impact on the fabric of a nation. But thirty years after it first aired on ABC, Roots, the powerful drama about the life of American slaves, is still seen as a major cultural flashpoint. Not only did it change television’s willingness to tackle tough issues, “it changed historical research… partly because it focused on African-Americans and partly because it focused on the stories of everyday people.”
Author: sbergman
PBS Bows To Activist Pressure, Amends Burns Doc
“PBS promised yesterday to amend Ken Burns’ coming documentary series on World War II to include stories about Latino veterans after activists complained he ignored their contributions to the U.S. effort. Burns has also agreed to hire a Latino producer to help create the additional content.”
Why Argue When You Can Attack?
In an unusually public spat, two prominent professors are trying to destroy one another’s careers amid charges of shoddy scholarship, anti-Semitism, and plagiarism. Alan Dershowitz and Norman Finkelstein have been at each other’s throats for years, but their battle was taken to a new level this year, when Dershowitz, who teaches at Harvard, began actively advocating against Mr. Finkelstein receiving tenure at DePaul University.
Arkansas Museum Snaps Up Another Philly Eakins
“Less than four months after Philadelphians thwarted its bid to buy ‘The Gross Clinic,’ an 1875 masterpiece by Thomas Eakins, an Arkansas museum founded by the Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton has quietly purchased another much-loved Eakins painting from the Philadelphia medical school that sold the first.”
Kurt Vonnegut, 84
“Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan,” several weeks after suffering brain injuries in a fall.
Meeting The Unwashed Masses Halfway
It wasn’t too long ago that the very idea of a large English-speaking audience embracing a film in a foreign language was laughable. But recent successes prove that “the subtitled film is no longer rooted in notions of esoteric creative worth, tortured self-expression or the possibility of enduring duff movies for a paltry provocative glimpse of Euro-flesh. Instead, the subtitled movie has met the masses, and vice versa.”
Shattering Glass
Philip Glass has long since passed from the realm of controversial minimalist into compositional elder statesman, but that doesn’t mean that his music is any less polarizing than it ever was. Rupert Christiansen’s response to being forced to sit through a Glass opera this week: “There are times in the opera house when the tedium reaches such a peak that I am hit by a vertiginous urge to leap out of my seat, strip off my clothes and run on to the stage screaming like a banshee.”
Salivating Over China’s Movie Boom
Singapore’s small but rapidly expanding film industry is looking to capitalize on China’s growing appetite for film. “Cracking the nascent Chinese film market is becoming a holy grail for many Asian production houses as the Chinese are going to the movies in record numbers. In 2006, box office revenues rose by nearly a third to $336 million.”
Such A Thing As Too Many Disciplines
Are young, hip theatre companies in the UK trying to be too many things to too many audiences? “The artistic policies of recently established fringe companies are becoming depressingly uniform, with every new group laying claim to multidisciplinary territory and announcing the use, for instance, of ‘various combinations of movement, text, mask, music, puppetry and mime’. And, naturally, circus skills.”
Inherit The Quagmire?
It’s little remembered these days, but the classic American play, Inherit The Wind was actually intended not just as a rehash of the Scopes Monkey Trial, but as an allegory for the McCarthy witchhunts of the 1950s. Now, a revival is opening on Broadway, and this time around, the subtext behind the evolution debate concerns… can you guess?