Word: civilization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Saturday Night with Connie Chung is at least less tacky. Its story on civil rights leader Johns glided smoothly between interviews with real-life colleagues and re-enacted scenes from his life. Forthcoming episodes will use re-creations to focus on such issues as AIDS, abortion and capital punishment. Chung has asserted that her show's re-creations stand apart from those on other programs. "Ours," she says, "will be of motion-picture quality...
...good as or better than Hollywood's; the question is whether they should. Journalists are in the business of conveying reality; re-enactments convert reality into something else -- something neater, more palatable, more conventionally "dramatic." Mental institutions are filled with raving loonies; murderers move in grainy, horrific slow motion; civil rights leaders look like James Earl Jones. There was no better drama on TV last week than the joint appearance on ABC's Nightline of Dr. Elizabeth Morgan and the ex-husband she has accused of molesting their daughter. No re-creation could possibly capture that. Let's hope...
...drama Playing for Time. Politics also excluded her from being cast in the Broadway drama Plenty. That same year, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, allegedly fearful of disruptions and of losing donor support, dumped Redgrave from scheduled performances as narrator of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex. She brought a civil rights suit pleading that "people's livelihoods should not depend upon their holding 'correct' political views." The U.S. Supreme Court last January rejected her bid for a punitive-damages award, although it let stand a judgment of $39,500 to cover lost employment -- an amount far smaller than the legal fees...
...fooling the eye, but by making the mind more aware of the ways in which it reads marks and constructs them as things. When you look at a Velazquez, you do not look at an illusion of reality. You are inducted into a relationship with the painter's civil candor about what he does. You are invited to think about how paintings come to mean what they say. Brought to the fore, embodied on the surface ever more boldly, this is the great conceptual theme of Velazquez's work, its binding ethic. It precludes all sentimentality and rhetoric...
...meeting outside the country to avoid being intimidated by Syrian troops, who have occupied Beirut for the past three years. The session's goal: to enact political reforms called for in an Arab League peace plan that produced a cease-fire two weeks ago in the six-month-old civil war pitting Lebanon's Christians against the Syrians and their Muslim allies. The meeting will continue, said one member, "however long that takes...