UCLA’s Chicana and Chicano Studies 188 is “billed as the first university-level course focusing entirely on the works of Culture Clash, the provocative Chicano trio that for 22 years has carried the banner of barrio-based theater, a form traced to Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino. Many students have enrolled in the weekly seminar … to satisfy a history requirement, using the trio’s work as an academic window on Chicano life and times.”
Tag: 02.27.07
From Child Soldier To Starbucks’ Star
Ishmael Beah’s memoir of his life as a child soldier might seem an awkward match for coffee and pastries. But “with Starbucks’ decision to promote and sell his book in more than 6,000 stores, the 26-year-old author has been thrust into the role of spokesman for child soldiers worldwide. He’s become an overnight celebrity, with a 10-city book tour scheduled for the coffee chain. In a life filled with some truly shocking reversals, this new chapter may be just about the last thing he ever expected.”
Technology Enables A Narcissistic Generation
“All the effort to boost children’s self-esteem may have backfired and produced a generation of college students who are more narcissistic than their Gen X predecessors, according to a new study led by a San Diego State University psychologist. And the Internet, with all its MySpace and YouTube braggadocio, is letting that self-regard blossom even more, said the analysis, titled ‘Egos Inflating Over Time.'”
Did Advanced Math Guide Medieval Islamic Art?
“In the beauty and geometric complexity of tile mosaics on walls of medieval Islamic buildings, scientists have recognized patterns suggesting that the designers had made a conceptual breakthrough in mathematics beginning as early as the 13th century. A new study shows that the Islamic pattern-making process … appears to have involved an advanced math of quasi crystals, which was not understood by modern scientists until three decades ago.”
Music Wasn’t Hatto’s, But It Was Good
Now that Joyce Hatto’s widower has admitted he was behind the plagiarized recordings bearing her name, former Boston Globe critic Richard Dyer wonders about the pianists whose work won attention for her. “‘The best ones are really superb,’ Dyer said by phone yesterday. ‘Which is why I’m still interested in them. I want to know who really made them now.'”
Industry No Longer Shut Out By Indies
“The victory of ‘The Departed’ at the Oscars on Sunday night represented many things,” David Carr opines, and one of them is this: “Old-line Hollywood studios, confronted over the last few years by indifferent audiences and an insurgent collection of independent film makers, declared dominion over the industry’s crowning event.”
An Anthem To Apartheid Or A Nod To A Proud Past?
“De la Rey,” a hit South African rock song about an Afrikaner general in the Second Boer War, has inspired some white fans to wave the old, apartheid-era South African flag. “A dozen years after the end of an Afrikaner government that invented apartheid, the mere concept of Afrikaner pride remains an exquisitely sensitive issue among whites and blacks alike. … ‘De la Rey’ has become a vessel for those aspirations and fears and, for the last month, the object of a caustic, often racially tinged national debate.”
Husband Admits Being Behind Hatto CD Fakes
After initially denying involvement, the widower of pianist Joyce Hatto has admitted to passing off recordings of other pianists as hers in the years leading up to her death. “He said he wanted to give her the illusion of a great end to an ‘unfairly overlooked career.'”
Using Theatre To Attack The UK’s Societal Gaps
“The working class no longer has any strategic presence in British politics – it was defeated in the 1980s and no parliamentary party is its champion. Nothing on the political horizon will make a significant difference to its relative conditions of existence.” So say two British playwrights, who decided to make the growing class gap, and those who have created and perpetuated it, the subject of their latest work. “Today, theatre, rather than parliament, is one of the places where politics is being rediscovered.”
Murdoch’s Empire May Have To Keep Its Hand Off ITV
British authorities have launched an investigation into the purchase of a significant stake in the ITV network by media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s satellite TV company, BSkyB. The cabinet minister in charge of the investigation says that the purchase “”raises public interest concerns about the number of different owners of media enterprises,” but BSkyB officials are said to be furious at the apparent effort to block their expansion.