【Native Speaker 每日训练计划】No.2897【文史哲】

枣糕兔

内容：Smiling Sima 编辑：Sirrena Lai


Wechat ID: NativeStudy  / Weibo: http://weibo.com/u/3476904471

Part I: Speaker

Fascism Scholar Says U.S. Is 'Losing Its Democratic Status'

All Things Considered, September 6, 2020
[Rephrase: 10:56]






Source: NPR
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/06/910320018/fascism-scholar-says-u-s-is-losing-its-democratic-status

Part II: Speed

The Boys Is the Only Show Nihilistic Enough to Capture America in 2020
In its second season, the Amazon series finally finds the zeitgeist.


By MATTHEW DESSEM
Sep 5, 2020


[Time 2]
Hollywood didn’t start making political satires about Adolf Hitler until 1940, when it released two: The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin’s beloved and enduring masterpiece, which famously ends with a stirring plea for peace and harmony, and You Nazty Spy!, a mostly forgotten nonmasterpiece that ends with the Three Stooges getting eaten by lions. Both movies take a pretty dim view of fascism, but only one of them embodies the Nazis’ bottomless cruelty and stupidity in every frame, and it isn’t the one where Chaplin gracefully bats around an inflatable globe. Some people, systems, and ideologies can be effectively satirized by skewering them, delicately and precisely drawing out hidden contradictions and faulty logic. Others are so obviously moronic that spending any time on subtlety means treating them with more dignity than they deserve and that it’s time to call in the Stooges. America in 2020 is definitely a Stooges situation, and in its second season, The Boys, Eric Kripke’s terrifically entertaining television adaptation of the comic book series by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, is the only TV show nihilistic enough to even come close to capturing it.
The Boys is a satire of superhero entertainment set in a world in which superheroes are real, and it follows two groups of characters: a Justice League–style superhero team known as the Seven, and a ragtag crew of non-superheroes trying to take them down. That frame lets The Boys take aim at the other aspects of American culture superheroes have colonized, which is to say all of them, and the results are as brutal as the slapstick gore that regularly punctuates the show. The comic book series began in the Bush years, and in its first season, the TV version suffered from the same problem most political satires would have if you transplanted them to the Trump era: They’re built around premises that are no longer credible, like the idea of a scandal that could bring down a president.
[341 words]


[Time 3]
The second season, much like life in these United States, is structured around a leadership vacuum, and it’s an enormous improvement. No one on the show is in charge or knows who is; as in Brazil, it’s deputies and undersecretaries all the way to the top. (The president makes exactly one decision all season, and it’s bypassing the FDA to personally approve a dangerous and untested drug.) As for corporate power, the head of Vought Industries (Giancarlo Esposito), the nefarious multinational corporation that sponsors the Seven, can’t cross his shareholders, regardless of his personal wishes. In short, everyone in the world of The Boys knows that they’re cogs in a machine that manufactures anger and misery, everyone is angry and miserable about it, and no one thinks they have any power to change things, even if they have superpowers. It feels very familiar, except for the part about superpowers.
So which particular misery machines are in The Boys’ crosshairs this time around? The first season focused on three interlocking systems: the military-industrial complex, evangelical Christianity, and the entertainment industry. Only the entertainment industry comes under sustained attack this time around, courtesy of a pinkwashing subplot centered on the production of a Justice League knockoff called Rise of the Seven. In place of the evangelicals, The Boys introduces the Church of the Collective, a Scientology doppelgänger that aggressively recruits the Deep, the Aquaman type played by Chace Crawford. As for the military-industrial complex, it’s still around, but in keeping with the show’s theme of power vacuums, this season it’s mostly irrelevant. In its place, The Boys has introduced two new characters whose power comes from their fans and supporters instead of their position or their superpowers: an AOC stand-in played by Claudia Doumit who wants to hold congressional hearings about Vought, and an internet-savvy superhero from Portland who can shoot lightning from her fingers, played by You’re the Worst’s Aya Cash. Her name is Stormfront, and you can probably guess her secret identity.
[353 words]


[Time 4]
The Boys is not the first or even the millionth piece of art to take shots at any of these institutions, but it has a superpower that sets it apart: a deep and abiding misanthropy. Civilians barely figure in the series at all, appearing as brain-dead focus-group subjects, screaming fans, angry protestors, commenters on Stormfront’s Instagram livestreams, or collateral damage, and not much else. The Seven know they are manufacturing a toxic and stupid product, the Boys know the Seven are psychopaths, and none of them think very highly of the fans lining up to buy Vought’s bullshit.
The show isn’t completely unsympathetic to people on the outside—one episode has a showstopping cold open that tracks a college student as right-wing propaganda slowly poisons his mind—but it’s impossible to effectively satirize a product without having a little contempt for its consumers, especially when that product is a death cult. It’s never been more obvious that that’s exactly what the United States has become—we’re letting thousands and thousands of people die of COVID-19 to keep stock prices up—and The Boys is just flip and nihilistic enough to capture the full range of the suck, from the parasocial relationships we use to replace human connections to the active shooter drills with which we traumatize our children. As a result, it’s the first thing I’ve watched since the pandemic began that provided any meaningful catharsis. The Boys strikes a tone that Chaplin missed but the Stooges understood: If you want to satirize a sick culture, speeches about the brotherhood of man won’t cut it. Sometimes you’ve gotta unleash the lions.
[297 words]


Source: Culture
https://slate.com/culture/2020/09/the-boys-season-2-review-amazon-series-captures-2020.html

Demystifying the Museum
Kimberly Drew on how arts institutions can be more welcoming.

By RUMAAN ALAM
SEPT 07, 2020


[Time 5]
On this week’s episode of Working, Rumaan Alam spoke with writer and art curator Kimberly Drew, whose new book, This Is What I Know About Art, was published in June. They discussed the role art has played in her life, her groundbreaking social media activism, and how museums and galleries can attract new visitors. This partial transcript of their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Rumaan Alam: Your professional awakening around art, about 10 years ago, came when you were interning at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and you made a Tumblr page called Black Contemporary Art. Can you talk about why you started that blog?
Kimberly Drew: I guess the thing that feels most urgent to say, though, is that I don’t think anyone grows up ignorant to art. We live in houses, we live on streets, we eat food. There’s so much art in and around our lives, and I think the most lucky of us are those who have guidance and caregivers who understand and nourish that relationship.
I specifically made that blog because so much had been poured into me from other people. the only natural response was to continue to present things for other people. So much of my life—especially as a kid who comes from a lower-income family, and you name an intersection of marginalization, and I have it—there were so many ways that I was dependent on the state, dependent on donors, dependent on all these different systems. That generosity, no matter where it came from, birthed something in me to understand that when you have something good, you share it.
The work of building it was cathartic. I spent so many hours researching artists, researching works, posting. I dedicated so much energy and time and love into that project. I was so well fed and nourished that recording it on a platform that felt good to my millennial brain was the next logical step.
You built a pretty passionate audience.
There’s so many people who are really curious about art, but because of the way that art is taught, the way that art is displayed, the way that our institutions function, people don’t feel like they can access them. In many ways, the blog met a community of people who were already really enthusiastic and people were able to do with it what they needed. It wasn’t like I reinvented the wheel. There were so many art blogs before mine, it was just the timing, and I think the platform really worked well for a group of people who were needing something like it.
[450 words]




[Time 6]
Museums fall within the larger field of GLAM—art galleries, libraries, and museums—where you’re not supposed to go there knowing everything. That’s the myth of museums. You don’t have to know every single book when you go into a library. You go to a library to gather information, and we should be looking at museums in the same way. We go into museums or enter museum websites to garner information, and hopefully we leave knowing more than what we came in with. But somewhere along the line, it became like, “I don’t get it,” or, “If I don’t know this, this, or this, then I shouldn’t go.” That’s one of the greater barriers to access. The blog was saying, Here’s this thing, and if you come back, even in two hours, there’ll be a new thing, and tomorrow there’ll be 10 new things.
You went on to have a career working in social media. How do you see the role of social media in art?
At the most base level, social media is one of the first instances in which constituents and institutions can be dialogical. You can have question and exchange: Are you open today? Who made this work? There are fun things like ask a curator day, where you can really be in conversation. Then on the other side, it’s a way to have a somewhat passive learning experience. If you’re really following a museum page, you can get updates about programming, updates about the collection, be able to access talks. YouTube is an incredible resource. You can watch an artist make a work on YouTube. Many museums have those types of educational resources.
You talk about the stairs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where you were later working in a social media capacity. Those grand stairs represent grandeur—it’s a beautiful, beautiful building—but they also represent a literal barrier.
Museums are sometimes seen as scary, but it’s not like a trip to the dentist’s office. The thing you’re scared of is that you might not know something. That is definitely a fear, but more than anything, it’s announcing a vulnerability. I hope through images, through sound, through different programming that I’ve done over the years, that it helped to demystify it for those who couldn’t imagine themselves in those spaces. Museums really are innovating, and if you don’t know that innovation is happening, then you won’t go, and the programs will fail. Any museum fails without its audience. That’s what museums are built for.
[473 words]

Source: Culture
https://slate.com/culture/2020/09/kimberly-drew-museums-art-galleries-access.html

Part III: Obstacle

The New “Mulan” ’s Uncomfortable Relationship with China’s Past and Present


By Jane Hu
September 8, 2020


[Paraphrase 8]
Early in Maxine Hong Kingston’s book “The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts,” from 1976, the narrator asks, “What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” “The Woman Warrior” is told from the perspective of a second-generation Chinese-American girl, growing up amid her Chinese immigrant mother’s ghost stories. She comes to understand her history by narrating the fifteen-hundred-year-old legend of Fa Mu Lan, the folk hero who fought in her aging father’s stead out of filial duty. Mu Lan’s story has been told and retold in China, and, starting with Kingston’s novel, it circulated widely in America as well, most prominently in a Disney animated version, released in 1998. The new, live-action “Mulan,” which recently premièred on the Disney+ streaming platform, begins by acknowledging its predecessors. “There have been many tales about the great warrior Mulan,” its opening voice-over says, “but ancestors: this one is mine.”
Oddly, perhaps, “Mulan,” directed by the New Zealander Niki Caro and credited to four screenwriters, gives the voice-over a body in Mulan’s father. Although most Americans associate the folktale with its proto-feminist heroine, this movie is framed as her father’s story—he is the film’s definitive narrator. It is not the only dissonance in the new “Mulan.” The film is, put crudely, an Americanized celebration of Chinese nationalism, on a two-hundred-million-dollar budget. In the film, a courageous Chinese imperial army fights and defeats the proto-Mongol invaders—a triumph of border control. Offscreen, Liu Yifei, the Chinese actress who portrays Mulan, has openly supported the Hong Kong police against protesters; her stance clashes with her portrayal of a feminist underdog and has galvanized boycott campaigns, including one by the #MilkTeaAlliance, a cohort of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, Thailand, and Taiwan. When the twenty-three-year-old activist Agnes Chow was detained in Hong Kong, a meme took flight anointing her as “the real Mulan.” And, this week, viewers of the film noticed that the credits offer thanks to government agencies in Xinjiang, where parts of “Mulan” were filmed, and where hundreds of thousands of Uighur Muslims have been held in internment camps. (At one point, a title card presents “Northwest China”—that is, Xinjiang—as “an inalienable part of China that Mulan must defend for her father, her family, and her emperor,” as Jeannette Ng writes in Foreign Policy. “That’s not the historical reality—or even the reality of the original poem the stories are based on.”)
No one could have foreseen that Liu, the film’s star, would create so much P.R. grief. Disney reportedly auditioned more than a thousand actresses before settling on Liu, who was born in Wuhan and lived in Queens for part of her childhood, as exactly what we want our contemporary female superheroes to be: quietly courageous, uninterested in sex, and possessed of perfectly blown-out hair that somehow never gets in her eyes, even when she’s shooting arrows or briskly mounting horses. When she transitions from her male persona into “Hua Mulan,” the film tracks her in slow motion as she undoes her bun, wavy locks cascading, armor falling away: she is Oriental Wonder Woman. If only she weren’t played by a supporter of police brutality.
It is somewhat customary for adaptations of “Mulan” to rework the heroine’s filial piety into national commitment. The Shanghai film “Mulan Joins the Army,” from 1939, made during Japan’s occupation of China, became a popular sensation and launched the actress Chen Yunshang into national stardom. (As Weihong Bao writes in her book “Fiery Cinema,” the film caused its own controversy: during a screening in 1940, in Chongqing, Nationalist China’s wartime capital, audience members stormed the projection room and set the reels on fire.) In 1964, the famous Shaw Brothers Studio, in Hong Kong, made a musical version titled “Lady General Hua Mulan,” which instructed residents of Hong Kong, which the British had recently colonized, to remember their Chinese roots. These films were often exported to America for a Chinese-American diasporic community, including San Francisco’s Chinatown. Before Disney tried to export Mulan back to Chinese audiences, China was already sending its Mulan remakes to Chinese-Americans.
Some of these Chinese film versions of “Mulan” as the literary critic Colleen Lye has argued, likely influenced Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior,” which conveyed the myth to an American readership in the political context of the Cultural Revolution. (Disclosure: Lye is my academic adviser.) Initially marketed as a memoir based on Kingston’s own girlhood, “Warrior” bends and blurs genres, incorporating Mu Lan’s mythical upbringing into Kingston’s own autobiographical narration. The early section “White Tigers” opens by explaining how Mu Lan enters the narrator’s imagination through a range of sources, and, incidentally, doubles as a fairly accurate description of the opening scene in the live-action “Mulan”:
Night after night my mother would talk-story until we fell asleep. I couldn’t tell where the stories left off and the dreams began, her voice the voice of the heroines in my sleep. And on Sundays, from noon to midnight, we went to the movies at the Confucius Church. We saw swordswomen jump over houses from a standstill; they didn’t even need a running start.
“The Woman Warrior” is arguably still Asian-America’s definitive text, with Mulan framed as its orienting plot for the Asian-American experience. In the decades following its publication, it was one of the single most-taught books in American colleges. David Henry Hwang’s first play, “F.O.B.,” which premièred at the Public, in 1980, centered the Mu Lan of Kingston’s book specifically as a Chinese-American, not Chinese, literary character. Kingston herself expected the book to be read in largely political terms, “from the women’s lib angle and the Third World angles, the Roots angle,” as she put it. If Disney’s “Mulan” feels ideologically overburdened today, so, too, was Kingston’s fictional one when it was published. The intergenerational mother-daughter plot stages a central dynamic of contrast and contradiction, which was key to Mao’s vision for China’s revolutionary future. And although China’s influence on far-left politics in America might feel distant today, in the mid-seventies, the notion of radical American politics borrowing from Maoist revolutionaries was still fresh in readers’ minds.
Much of the discussion around the live-action “Mulan” has focussed on its covid-19-induced straight-to-streaming distribution model, and how it might affect the film’s clear ambitions for the box-office in China, where theatres have reopened. The animated version bombed when it arrived in China, in 1999, at a time when Disney badly needed a hit: in 1997, Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun,” about the Dalai Lama, who is exiled from Tibet, ruffled enough feathers that the Chinese Communist Party began to pull much of its business with Disney. When they relented by permitting the release of “Mulan,” Disney hoped that the film might function as a kind of peace offering, appealing specifically to China’s nationalist interests. Yet while the movie enjoyed worldwide success—dubbed into thirty-five languages and popularizing the myth at an unprecedented scale—it failed in mainland China, where it was seen as an overly slapstick and Americanized perversion of Mulan’s story. It grossed only one-sixth of its anticipated box-office revenue there—a mere $1.3 million.
In appealing to today’s Chinese market, the Disney+ version has leaned toward something like magical realism—no one sings in this rendition, though falcons do transform into women warriors—but nothing like historical accuracy: those tulou houses in the trailer are about a thousand years out of date. The movie is pure commodity, but, then again, so are most movies. This commodity might have been easier to sell, though, if it had connected with anything that makes the Mulan myth so vital to twentieth-century Chinese political history.
[1416 words]


Source: Culture
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-new-mulanandnbsps-uncomfortable-relationship-with-chinas-past-and-present

vivi16_Yu

OB：13’17[1416w]

Jasmine.yj

花木兰那篇作者夹带私货了吧？

Beckyheihei

t2:3'10"
t3:2'18"
t4:2'50"
t5:3'10"
t6:3'12"
moronic 弱智
slapstick 闹剧
crosshairs 十字柱