Word: mao
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...FREDERICK DOUGLAS Book Store at 49 Mass. Ave. in Boston is an odd place to set up shop for a Presidential campaign. Old torn posters--some from the days of the Russian Revolution--are on the walls, together with newer ones of Che and Mao. The shelves are stacked high with used, decaying paperbacks, works of Balzac, Stendahl, and Marx. An old wooden table, painted blue, runs along the middle of the store. On it sit a stack of copies of "The Daily World" and some paper cups half filled with stale coffee...
...hard in history-conscious China. But they do die, as devotees of the highly stylized form of music drama called Peking opera are beginning to learn. The death is especially painful when the executioner is China's cultural queen, Chiang Ching, the wife of Communist Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung...
...applaud with shouts of "Hao!" Realism, not Ritual. After the Communist takeover in 1949, Peking opera, like most of the arts, was subjected to "selective reform." Still, until recently, a limited repertory of traditional Peking operas was being performed regularly in most of China's theaters. Then Madame Mao got busy undermining the works. Convinced that the arts should "protect our socialist economic base," she personally supervised the creation of new "revolutionary" librettos that would convert the opera stage from esthetic to political purposes...
Arias, not Action. The most radical of all these works is The Red Lantern, which recounts the heroism of a family in the Communist underground during the war against Japan. Madame Mao has ordered drastic changes for the production. She has banished the traditional Chinese orchestra of wind and string instruments. The singers merely stand up before a lone grand piano and a percussion section and intone arias ("I Am Filled With Courage and Strength") while the action takes place offstage. The scene is bizarre because only two years ago the piano was condemned as an instrument for "bourgeois spiritual...
...been made into a 35-minute film for showing inside and outside China. It is about as ex citing as a Communist indoctrination lecture-which is what it is. Even the workers and peasants who have been marshalled into showings have shown enthusiasm only when a picture of Mao himself has appeared. In response to Chinese critics who compared her new style to "insipid water," Madame Mao replied: "What's wrong with insipid water? It is with such water that wine is made." As yet, no trace of wine has appeared...