Cultural Exchange

In something of a classic immigrant story, the boy from Nepal arrived in America at age 19, attended Cal State Long Beach, studied computer science and got a job in the early 1980s at then-struggling Disney, which was just beginning to use computer graphics. Over the next two decades, Kiran Joshi rose through the animation ranks, working on "Beauty and the Beast," "The Lion King," "Aladdin," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and "Atlantis" until he was eventually made Disney's head of production for several digital projects.

Bassem Youssef is barefoot, pacing around the dining room of his apartment in the tony Maadi neighborhood where he has assembled a crack team of twentysomething bloggers and activists. They are hunched over their laptops in Conan O'Brien and "Family Guy" T-shirts, plotting Egypt's comedy revolution. To Youssef, 37, the actual revolution was hilarious. Much of the January uprising that unseated Egypt's longtime president was fueled by online media: social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter , but also clips posted on YouTube — images of Tahrir Square, of protesters and security forces and former President Hosni Mubarak addressing the nation on state television.

Editors' note: With this report, Sunday Calendar launches a new, weekly feature, "Cultural Exchange. " In it, Times foreign correspondents will explore cultural and entertainment trends, developments, personalities and debates around the world. The phone can ring all it wants when Meg Donovan is listening to the radio. If she's tuned in to a play or to the nightly installment of "The Archers," a soap opera that's been on the air in Britain for nearly 60 years, her callers can wait.

In what may be the first such tie, the city of Pinole is proposing a sisterhood with an American Indian tribe. Mayor Ann Williams, who is suggesting a cultural exchange program similar to a sister-city plan, said it appears to be the first time a California city has proposed such a relationship. The mayor said she will contact leaders of the American Indian community and the Northern California Tribal Council to see what they think of the idea.

Despite increased tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union in the wake of the U.S. air raid over Libya earlier this week, talks are continuing as part of the recently re-established cultural exchange program between the two countries. One of the fruits of the agreepment signed by President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Geneva in November is an appearance by the Kirov Ballet in Los Angeles in May.

It's supposed to be a routine interview with three young Soviet artists. It turns out to be an education. The occasion is the first important museum exhibition sampling Soviet contemporary art in the age of glasnost. A cultural-exchange affair, it is titled "10 + 10" because it is composed of 10 noted Americans of the stripe of Donald Sultan and Ross Bleckner and an equal number of painters who work in Moscow, all utterly unknown in these parts.

Tender blossoms of a new U.Soviet cultural exchange agreement will unfold Thursday at the County Museum of Art in a much-heralded exhibition of 41 classic French Impressionist and early modern paintings. Whatever else may befall, the combination of international prestige, beloved painting styles and a rare look at pictures from the fabled Pushkin and Hermitage museums is bound to make the exhibition the most popular--and crowded--art event of the L.A. summer.

Michael Jackel wanted to cut through the cultural barrier as quickly as he could Thursday when he met Noriko Nanbu from Maebashi, Japan. So the Patrick Henry High School junior asked whether Noriko and her classmates knew Michael Jackson and other music idols of today's teen-agers. They did. For her part, Noriko took out a 10,000-yen bill (about $66) and held it up to the light to show Jackel and friends the note's hidden watermark portrait of a 19th-Century Japanese statesman.

When Ashokkumar Patel and Sirvart Kassabian entered the ballroom for their wedding reception this month, they followed the beat of their hearts -- and two drummers. There was the barefoot and turbaned dholi, or traditional Indian drummer, who escorted them into the room. And there was the Armenian dance music, which drew both sides of the family onto the floor.

Gloria Barden-Ching, a fledgling African-American composer, could almost hear soothing musical chords resonate from her piano as she read poetic verses written by renowned Korean poet Han Yongun. In a month, a 40-piece orchestra will enliven her musical interpretation of the poet's words before thousands of Korean-Americans and African-Americans gathered for an evening dedicated to ethnic understanding.