Hello Flash,
I'm sure we would but I'm glad we have the fantastic variety of art that we do. And much of our art comes from people who got 'useless degrees.' Art is such an intangible contribution to society that a lot of people can't connect the dots between art and it's relevance to our culture and nation. And I would hazard a wild guess that among those who don't appreciate art, would be found a lot of conservative Trump fans.
Beginning Sunday, Sept 15th, on PBS, a new film by Ken Burns will document a uniquely American art form called
Country Music. Ken Burns' films and documentaries are widely acclaimed and cherished.
If you're not familiar with the work of
Ken Burns discovering him will be like an awakening. What an artist:
" 1982 nomination, Academy Award for Documentary Feature: Brooklyn Bridge (1981);
1986 nomination, Academy Award for Documentary Feature: The Statue of Liberty (1985);
1995 Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational Series: Baseball (1994);
2010 Emmy Award for Outstanding Non-fiction Series: The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009).
The Civil War received more than 40 major film and television awards, including two Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards (one for Best Traditional Folk Album), the Producer of the Year Award from the Producers Guild of America, a People's Choice Award, a Peabody Award, a duPont-Columbia Award, a D. W. Griffith Award, and the $50,000 Lincoln Prize.[33][34][35]
In 2004, Burns received the S. Roger Horchow Award for Greatest Public Service by a Private Citizen, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards.[36]
In 2010, the National Parks Conservation Association honored him and Dayton Duncan with the Robin W. Winks Award for Enhancing Public Understanding of National Parks. The award recognizes an individual or organization that has effectively communicated the values of the National Park System to the American public.[37] As of 2010, there is a Ken Burns Wing at the Jerome Liebling Center for Film, Photography and Video at Hampshire College.[38]
In 2012, Burns received the Washington University International Humanities Medal.[39] The medal, awarded biennially and accompanied by a cash prize of $25,000, is given to honor a person whose humanistic endeavors in scholarship, journalism, literature, or the arts have made a difference in the world. Past winners include Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk in 2006, journalist Michael Pollan in 2008, and novelist and nonfiction writer Francine Prose in 2010.[40]
In 2013, Burns received the John Steinbeck Award, an award presented annually by Steinbeck's eldest son, Thomas, in collaboration with the John Steinbeck Family Foundation, San Jose State University, and The National Steinbeck Center.[41]
Burns was the Grand Marshal for the 2016 Pasadena Tournament of Roses' Rose Parade on New Year's Day in Pasadena, California.[42] The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Burns to deliver the 2016 Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, on the topic of race in America.[43] He was the 2017 recipient of The Nichols-Chancellor's Medal at Vanderbilt University.[44]
Burns worked as a cinematographer for the BBC, Italian television, and others, and in 1977, having completed some documentary short films, he began work on adapting David McCullough's book The Great Bridge, about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.[12] Developing a signature style of documentary filmmaking in which he "adopted the technique of cutting rapidly from one still picture to another in a fluid, linear fashion [and] then pepped up the visuals with 'first hand' narration gleaned from contemporary writings and recited by top stage and screen actors",[17] he made the feature documentary Brooklyn Bridge (1981), which earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary and ran on PBS in the United States.
Following another documentary, The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984), Burns was Oscar-nominated again for The Statue of Liberty (1985). Burns frequently collaborates with author and historian Geoffrey C. Ward, notably on documentaries such as The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, and the 10 part TV series The Vietnam War (aired September 2017).
Burns has gone on to a long, successful career directing and producing well-received television documentaries and documentary miniseries on subjects as diverse as arts and letters (Thomas Hart Benton, 1988); mass media (Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, 1991); sports (Baseball, 1994, updated with 10th Inning, 2010); politicians (Thomas Jefferson, 1997); music (Jazz, 2001); literature (Mark Twain, 2001); war (the 15-hour World War II documentary The War, 2007); environmentalism (The National Parks, 2009); and the Civil War (the 11-hour The Civil War, 1990, which All Media Guide says "many consider his 'chef d'oeuvre'").[17]
Burns was born on July 29, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Lyla Smith (née Tupper) Burns,[6] a biotechnician,[7] and Robert Kyle Burns, at the time a graduate student in cultural anthropology at Columbia University in Manhattan.[6] The documentary filmmaker Ric Burns is his younger brother.[8][9]
Burns' academic family moved frequently. Among places they called home were Saint-Véran, France; Newark, Delaware; and Ann Arbor where his father taught at the University of Michigan.[7] Burns' mother was found to have breast cancer when he was three and she died when he was 11,[7] a circumstance that he said helped shape his career; he credited his father-in-law, a psychologist, with a significant insight: "He told me that my whole work was an attempt to make people long gone come back alive."[7] Well-read as a child, he absorbed the family encyclopedia, preferring history to fiction.
Upon receiving an 8 mm film movie camera for his 17th birthday, he shot a documentary about an Ann Arbor factory. He graduated from Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor in 1971.[10] Turning down reduced tuition at the University of Michigan, he attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where students are graded through narrative evaluations rather than letter grades and where students create self-directed academic concentrations instead of choosing a traditional major.[7] He worked in a record store to pay his tuition. Living on as little as $2,500 for two years in Walpole, New Hampshire[11] he would study under photographers Jerome Liebling, Elaine Mayes, and others.
Burns earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in film studies and design[12] in 1975.[7]
To produce work for the network well into the next decade, Burns made an agreement with PBS in 2007.[18] According to a 2017 piece in the New Yorker, Burns and his company, Florentine Films, have selected topics for documentaries slated for release by 2030. These topics include country music, the Mayo Clinic, Muhammad Ali, Ernest Hemingway, the American Revolution, Lyndon B. Johnson, Barack Obama, Winston Churchill, the American criminal justice system, and African-American history from the Civil War to the Great Migration.[19] "
wiki
If you don't like Country Music yet, this would be a fantastic time to discover it through this film. Of course, I have not even seen it yet, (nobody has) but I am familiar with his work and greatly looking forward to it. Nobody tells a story like Ken Burns. I am sure that watching this film will be like a peek into the heartbeat and soul of America.
Bookmarks