50 Years with Akira Kurosawa: An Evening with Teruyo Nogami
For half a century, from Rashomon (1950) to Madadayo (1993), Teruyo Nogami stood by Akira Kurosawa as a script supervisor and principal assistant. She is the author of Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa (2006). In this candid discussion, she recalls Kurosawa’s creative power on and off the set, and how she [...]
Breaking Ground with Bill T. Jones: Harlem, Cultural Capital: Naming The Future
What is the future of Harlem as a cultural capital? Bill T. Jones moderates the third in Breaking Ground, a series of Harlem community dialogues. Bill T. Jones is the co-founder and artistic director of the Arnie Zane Dance Company. Participants include Omar Freilla, Green Workers Cooperative founder; Bakari Kitwana, author; Voza Rivers, executive producter [...]
China’s Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges
When Beijing first sought to host the Olympics, China was still recovering from the upheavals of Maoist rule and adapting to a market revolution. Today, in a time of rapid transition in China, human rights have emerged as a central concern around the 2008 Beijing Olympics. How are China’s leaders managing the Olympic process and [...]
From Soundbites to Solutions Part Two: How the Media Influence and Reflect Political Realities
The 2008 presidential primaries brought race, gender and age issues to the front page, whether warranted or not. This second of two panels focuses on the roles and responsibilities of both the media and the public, in how they both react to and shape the political climate. Panelists include Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent [...]
From Soundbites to Solutions Part One: Candidates, Campaigns and the Politics of Bias
The 2008 presidential primaries brought race, gender and age issues to the front page, whether warranted or not. In public and in private, Americans hashed out what an election should and could look like, and in what ways this one fell short. This first of two panels focuses on the problems, realities and conundrums faced [...]
Julia Child, Culinary Revolutionary
Julia Child didn’t start cooking until she was 39, but no other chef influenced late-20th-century American cooking more than she did. Forty-five years after the debut of her groundbreaking PBS show, The French Chef, four panelists will discuss the profound effects of her books, television shows, and entertaining and accessible persona on our cuisine and [...]
Opposites Attract: Ed Fella & Post Typography
Ed Fella worked as a commercial graphic designer for thirty years in Detroit, and is famed for his contribution to contemporary typography. Post Typography, consisting of Nolen Strals and Bruce Willen, was founded in 2001 as “an avant garde anti-design movement” specializing in “graphic design, conceptual typography, and custom lettering/illustration with additional forays into art, [...]
The Impact of Listening and Being Heard
For some veterans it takes years before they choose to speak about their war experiences. And some veterans never do. What happens when veterans finally share their stories? How does it feel to be heard? And how are we, as listeners, affected? This discussion is moderated by Philip Napoli, curator of the oral history exhibit [...]
Burma’s Agony: The International Humanitarian Response
On May 2 and 3, 2008, Cyclone Nargis devastated large swathes of Burma, leaving more than 134,000 people dead or missing. Offers of assistance from the international community poured in immediately, but Burmese military leaders largely barred foreign aid workers from reaching the hardest hit areas for three weeks, at which point workers were allowed [...]
The development of the “underclass” in American life and the simultaneous beginnings of what we now call pop culture both date back to the Lower East Side of nearly two centuries ago. In the early 19th century, the Five Points, a tiny area near today’s Chinatown, became America’s first slum. The pastimes and diversions of [...]
