Word: backgrounder
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Tennis for H.I. Lindsay found himself hung up between the need to placate the suspicious, entrenched municipal employees and the need to fulfill the newly awakened aspirations of Negroes and Puerto Ricans. Parents of whatever background or color simply wanted their children back in school, and increasingly blamed the mayor for not making this possible at once...
...easiest way to avoid the problems of portrayal is what Negro Actor Robert Hooks calls the "copout: Put the Negroes in the background-blurred and slightly out of focus-and show them for just a split second." Indeed, despite the trend toward integrated ads, the agencies are often too reluctant to let the Negro step front and center. In one study of 8,279 ads shown over a three-week period late last year, only 199 contained nonwhite performers, and of that number just 16 had lead or speaking roles. By showing a few black faces on the fringe...
...sociologist, an economist, a political scientist, and maybe a psychologist or historian (although history is officially in the humanities at FCC), conduct the courses. The things they planned to stress, one faculty member said in an interview this summer, were things that were directly related to the student's background. The hope is to make students aware of the problems of the ghetto and able to do something about them...
Basically, it is music for the man who likes the plays of Samuel Beckett, the paintings of Marcel Duchamp and the films of Antonioni. It begins in a mood of tension: excerpts from Claude Levi-Strauss's writings on Brazilian mythology are read against a highly dissonant background. In the haunting second part, the name Martin Luther King is recited and sung over and over again, the syllables spilled out here, squeezed there, so that the name is uttered in an endless variety of permutations. In the impassioned third section, the vocalists speak and sing excerpts from Beckett...
...crow" before Hortense's death scene become ravaging parasites themselves at the scene's end, even before their victim finishes her last gasps. As if this weren't enough, Prince shows the women hideously climbing up the platform, evil beasts holding Hortense's gaily colored parasols against the background of lighting designer Richard Pilbrow's mournful grey...