Word: shang
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Attleboro Mayor Kai Shang won a second term, beating Charles Adler...
...script is based on a conflict that exploded in the late '70s on the Texas Gulf Coast. In the film town of Port Alamo, "Anglo" shrimp fishermen battle the current, the depressed prices and the influx of Vietnamese refugees plying an old trade in a new land. Shang (Ed Harris) is one such rowdy all-American, working his ancestral fishing grounds and feeling threatened by the Asians he fought to defend a world and a war ago. Dinh (Ho Nguyen) is a bright, ambitious immigrant who wants a chance to make a living in Port Alamo, whatever the odds...
Screenwriter Arlen has a fine ear for Texas cadences: "Darlin', these biscuits are old enough to vote." More impressive, she creates in Shang an American hero whose every good impulse--pride, the work ethic, a need to stand firm for what he figures is his--turns him into a monster with a red neck. The script would have been even stronger if Dinh had been allowed some convulsive ambiguities of his own. Instead, he must simply endure, selfless and sexless. Such is the yellow man's burden in films of the liberal persuasion...
...most part, Shang craftsmen from the area near the Yellow River tried to make their decorative designs blend with and enhance the vessel's shape. Artisans in more remote regions-Shang influence ranged over a geographical area the size of the whole eastern U.S. from Maine to Florida and inland as far as Ohio -were more adventurous, as shown in one vessel whose corners become rams' heads supported by thrusting foreshoulders and incised feet. Not content, the artist decorated the rams' haunches with crested birds, and set snakelike dragons coiling around the vessel's shoulder...
Late in the 11th century, Shang rule was supplanted by the Zhou dynasty, and one of the museum's outstanding exhibits is a stolid bronze vessel whose inscription records that it was cast on the eighth day after the Zhou victory. The Met is still amazed that the Chinese agreed to let it leave the country. "It's like lending the original copy of the Declaration of Independence," says Assistant Curator Maxwell Hearn. Over the next eight centuries, Zhou craftsmen became increasingly uninhibited in adding figures to their vessels, as handles or simply as decoration. One massive vase...