Rev. Danny Fisher

The new documentary from Academy Award-nominated director Scott Hicks (Shine) has just been released in New York. Entitled Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, its subject is modern composer and Buddhist practitioner Philip Glass.

Glass is perhaps best known in the classical music world for his Violin Concerto and works for solo piano. Fans of theater music will know his staggeringly brilliant “Portrait Trilogy”: three operas that include the currently revived Satyagraha, as well as Einstein on the Beach and Akhnaten. He has also distinguished himself as one of the great contemporary film scorers, producing evocative original soundtracks for Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy, Errol Morris’ documentaries The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War, Paul Schrader’s Mishima, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (for which he shared a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score with Burkhard Dallwitz), Martin Scorsese’s Dalai Lama biopic Kundun (for which he earned his first Oscar nomination), Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (for which he earned Oscar nod number two and the Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts), Richard Eyre’s Notes on a Scandal (Oscar nod number three), Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream, and many others.

In addition to all of this work, Glass is also Vice President of Tibet House and chair of the board of directors for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. His contributions to the development of Buddhism in America have been large and important.

I first became acquainted with Glass and his work through Kundun, which I recently listed among my favorite movies about Buddhism. I have since become something of a Philip Glass super-fan. I’ve even seen him in concert on more than a couple of occasions. (Once on a birthday I lucked into a front row seat for a solo performance of his at the Boulder Theater.) And I was also very fortunate to meet him years ago at Tricycle‘s 2001 conference in New York.

I can’t wait to see Mr. Hicks’ film. It’s currently playing at the IFC Center in New York. It will also screen soon in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C. You can find out more about upcoming showtimes at http://www.glassthemovie.com.

The trailer is below. It includes a snippet of Martin Scorsese talking about the score for Kundun. And look quick for Glass’ Buddhist teacher, Kyabje Gelek Rimpoche.

My anthropologist pal Erick (who is practically co-author of the blog at this point) checks in this week with some goodies on a couple of different subjects.

One of those subjects is the history of Tibetan sovereignty. Erick sends along this excellent piece from National Public Radio about the “long, disputed history” of Tibet’s sovereignty. He also forwards this guest editorial for the New York Times from Elliot Sperling, director of the Tibetan Studies program at Indiana University’s department of Central Eurasia Studies. Sperling evaluates both the Chinese and Tibetan sides of the argument and concludes:

There is something less to the arguments of both sides, but the argument on the Chinese side is weaker. Tibet was not “Chinese” until Mao Zedong’s armies marched in and made it so.

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Erick also sends along this very disturbing story about the harassment of a young Chinese student at Duke University.

…One mainland Chinese woman now studying at Duke University was seen by other overseas Chinese students participating in a Free Tibet protest. What was possibly for her just an attempt to bridge some sort of discussion has led to torrents of horrid abuse and at least one lengthy human flesh search engine witch hunt, on popular forum website Tianya, which began on April 10.

A friend of Wang’s wrote in directly to GlobalVoices to say the following:

I am meeting with Duke’s president this afternoon, and it looks like the FBI will become involved. Her parent’s apartment in Qingdao was attacked with rocks, and they are in hiding (I have confirmed this in direct communication with her mother). This all started on the Duke Chinese Students and Scholars Association website. They started posting “TIBET WAS, IS AND ALWAYS WILL BE CHINA’S” messages a month ago.

[…]

Because all the information about her and her parent’s addresses and calls to do violence were posted on the Duke list, it is being considered criminal incitement to violence. What a mess. The saddest thing is that she’s a sweet naive kid, and she did nothing but cross over to “enemy lines” and talk to her Tibetan dorm mate, and try to initiate some kind of dialogue…

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Lastly, Erick sends in a segment from Minnesota Public Radio on the violence in Tibet. Lobsang Sangay, a senior fellow at the East Asian Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School, and Rob Schmitz, Los Angeles Bureau Chief for KQED, discuss Sangay’s contention that the Chinese government “continues to underplay an uprising that has spread throughout Tibet and to surrounding provinces.”