Word: tragic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When it comes to publicity stunts, it doesn't get much more desperate - or dangerous - than a hunger strike. From college campuses in the Midwest to the oil fields of Kazahstan, the practice has become a daily, global phenomenon that has been by turns successful, gruesome, tragic and sometimes all of the above. In 1981, a 27-year-old member of the Irish Republican Army named Bobby Sands led a hunger strike at Her Majesty's Prison Maze in Belfast, where he was serving time for gun possession, and used the attention to win a seat in the British parliament...
...Italian neo-realism, curated and introduced by Martin Scorsese. (One disappointment: in the recent month dedicated by Sophia Loren, only five of the 23 films were Italian.) A season on Asian faces in Hollywood movies veered eastward for two extremely rare Chinese silent films starring Shanghai's original tragic movie diva Ruan Lingyu...
...market, now extinguished, where one of his triptychs sold for $86 million. By bringing together almost five decades of his work into a collective cry, this show makes you realize how rare it is to see contemporary art that attempts, much less achieves, what used to be called a tragic dimension. Irony you can find in any gallery these days, as well as low comedy, puerile cool and enigma. But in a time that has its share of suffering, where is the art that tries to strike an equivalent note? What we have almost no language for anymore, at least...
...banks of the Yellow River, where a soldier has been sent to collect folk songs to be used for promoting the Communist Revolution. His primary source is a young girl named Cuiqiao, who longs to escape her village and the arranged marriage that awaits her. Through haunting, tragic songs the girl communicates to the soldier—and, it is implied, to the country that surrounds them—the misery and oppression of life in rural China...
...border suffers the bulk of the drug war's carnage - and perhaps because of that, it's where some of the freshest ideas for fighting the war can be found. A tragic wisdom has emerged at this dusty junction of developed and developing worlds. On one side of the Rio Grande is Juárez, whose maquiladora assembly plants fuel dreams of modernity but which is now one of the hemisphere's most dangerous cities. On the other side is El Paso, which is one of the U.S.'s safest communities (16 murders last year, compared with Ju?...