Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits

You're cruel, Britannia: Robin Rhode's art attack

Robin Rhode spent quite some time in London in the months leading up to his show now on at the Hayward Gallery. He cycled along the Embankment, he strolled about the West End. It reminded him of all the times when, as a child, he had visited the city from his native South Africa - and it irked him. “My first language is English,” he says. “I played cricket, watched football, yet I'm a person of mixed race and I was brought up under the colonial system. So I've always felt a friction with British

Tate 'turned down Rothko paintings worth $1 billion'

Trustees at the Tate Gallery turned down 21 paintings by the American artist Mark Rothko in the late 1960s which could now be worth as much as $1 billion (£630 million), according to notes written by its late director. Rothko was in talks with Sir Norman Reid to bequeath 30 works to the London gallery, but in the end Tate took only nine, according to The Art Newspaper. Now it has emerged that the abstract artist, who painted vast canvases of reds, mauves, blacks and greys, "to

18th century obits created modern celebrity culture

Public fascination with celebrity figures such as Kerry Katona and Jade Goody can be traced back to the rise of newspapers and magazines in the 18th Century and their popular obituaries section. Obituaries provided an insight into the lives of high profile personalities who became the objects of scandal and public fascination, or the first "celebrities", according to findings published in the International Journal of Cultural Studies. Researchers from Warwick

Rare Beatles film fetches 4,100 pounds

A rare 8mm film reel of a gig by The Beatles in the US has sold at auction for £4,100. The two-minute long footage, taken in Kansas City during the Fab Four's first tour of the US in 1964, went under the hammer in Reading, Berkshire. It was found in a drawer by fan Drew Dimmel who, as a boy, smuggled the movie camera into the concert hall. The silent footage shows John, Paul, George and Ringo playing at the Municipal Stadium in Kansas City.

Never too late: Cops crack 25-year-old clock theft

It took time, but Israeli police detectives have cracked one of the country's greatest crimes — the legendary heist of a priceless clock collection from a Jerusalem museum a quarter century ago. The 1983 theft, the costliest in Israel's history, saw 106 timepieces worth millions of dollars disappear from the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art. Among them was a pocket watch made for French queen Marie Antoinette that museum officials value at more than $30 million. Altho

Cast your eyes over priceless ancient treasures in the UK

Arts Editor Joe Riley reveals the treasures of Liverpool World Museum’s new Egyptian Gallery which opens next month HEAVILY guarded in a north Liverpool ware-house, within a special container power-sealed with a dozen rivets, there lies a treasure greater than either of its counterparts from Tutan-khamen’s tomb. The battle girdle worn by the last of Egypt’s great battling pharaohs, Rameses III, is delicately coiled on a bed of layered tissues: a 3,000-year- old gem as p

Edvard Munch work sells for record 25 million pounds

Vampire, seen by many as the sister of Munch's fabled painting The Scream, went under the hammer for the first time in New York after more than 70 years in the hands of a private collector. It fetched 38.2 million dollars (£24.3m), including the buyer's premium, and broke the existing Munch record of 30.8 million dollars (£19.6m), which was set by Girls on a Bridge in May, a Sotheby's spokesman said. He added that the work represented love, sex and death" and that

Original Pooh sketch under hammer

An original sketch of favourite AA Milne character Winnie the Pooh, featuring Tigger and Piglet, is expected to fetch £20,000 at auction. The pencil drawing of the bear dipping a paw in a honey pot is being sold at Bonhams auction rooms in London by the family of the artist, EH Shepard. A specialist at Bonhams said it will appeal to five generations of readers. The sale on Tuesday also includes a first sketch for Kenneth Grahame's story The Wind in the W

Painting by Italian Master Turns Up in Texas After 300-Year Journey

A painting by Italian master Sebastiano Ricci, long presumed to be lost, has turned up in Texas after a 300-year journey from the hands of a European nobleman playboy to a fur trader and finally through generations of one family. Ricci's "The Vision of St. Bruno" will be offered by Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries on Nov. 20. Heritage officials say the painting has been conservatively estimated to fetch at least $600,000. The family that owns the work

House Packed With Stuff Is Annual Draw in Nevada

LAS VEGAS — Sandy Hammargren is the definition of a patient, long-suffering wife, except when it comes to Big Bertha. Her husband, Dr. Lonnie Hammargren, built Big Bertha, a black 10-foot-tall model locomotive, in their backyard from a disparate collection of parts: a rail car believed to have brought Howard Hughes to Las Vegas, part of a road girder, a piece of an 1890 steam tractor, a boiler “from something entirely different, I can’t remember what,” Dr. Hammargren said. The wheel

Archie Bunker, Mr. Clean, and more of history's greatest fictional presidential candidates.

One of the top story lines of the 2008 campaign has been a possible surge of fake voters. But as we concern ourselves with voter fraud, let us not forget our country's long history of fake presidential candidates. The San Diego-based Museum of Hoaxes just named its top 20 satirical political candidates of all time, noting that comedians Will Rogers (1928), Gracie Allen (1940), and Pat Paulsen (1968) paved the way for this year's ill-fated bid by Stephen Colbert—and perhaps even Al Franken's seri

Chevy Chase: I wanted Carter to win

Chevy Chase didn't look like Gerald Ford and didn't sound like Gerald Ford. But in the mid-1970s, when"Saturday Night Live" first went on the air, Chase -- then a writer and cast member of the show -- made his impression of the president, rife with pratfalls and slapstick, the talk of the country. He also made the president a butt of jokes, which was intentional, Chase told CNN in an interview."[Ford] was a sweet man, a terrific man -- [we] became good friends after, but ... he just

Papa Hemingway’s Gift to the Fire-in-the-Belly Crowd

Robert Jordan is a left-wing radical, or was modeled after several of them. He palled around with terrorists, or at least people whom many Americans, of his era and beyond, so thought. His specialty is blowing things up for a cause. He is at minimum a socialist, someone so eager to spread wealth around that he’d lose his life to do it. Robert Jordan is also honorable, steadfast, selfless, determined, stoic, generous, tolerant, courageous, conscientious, forgiving, altruistic, tender

"Frost/Nixon": The Interview That Was a Play Becomes a Film

THE details don’t really matter. What matters is that a few years before his screenplays for “The Queen” and “The Last King of Scotland” propelled him to the head of the class, Peter Morgan was so fed up that he was ready to try anything — anything! — that wasn’t a film script. He considered bungee jumping and mountain climbing, he said not long ago from his home in London. But he chose something even riskier. He wrote a play about the landmark 1977 television interviews that David

Soviet diehards see red over 'betrayal' by 007 girl Olga Kurylenko

Bond girls often come to a sticky end but Olga Kurylenko will be hoping that the Communists never get hold of her. Kurylenko, the Ukrainian actress who plays Bond's sidekick in Quantum of Solace, has been condemned by the Communist Party of St Petersburg for aiding “the killer of hundreds of Soviet people and their allies”. Apparently oblivious to Bond's fictional nature, it accused her of assisting “a man who worked for decades under the orders of Thatcher and Reagan to destroy th

Writer's voices: listen to rare recordings from the British Library

To hear Florence Nightingale pronounce her own name with such precise, emphatic enunciation — “Florence [dramatic pause] Nightingale” — takes you straight into her living presence and tells you in an instant what a powerfully self-possessed character she must have been. The speech she is giving, In Aid of the Light Brigade Relief Fund, recorded in 1890, is just one among the British Library’s unrivalled sound archives, running to a mind-boggling 1m discs and 200,000 tapes. The library has releas

Hardy miniature theatre story plays out at auction

As a Victorian realist writer Thomas Hardy captured the lives of characters struggling with passion and circumstance against the backdrop of rural England. Now a miniature theatre, used by a troupe of amateur actors to create the backdrops for plays of the author's works, is up for auction in Hardy's home town - much to the marvel of one of the troupe's original players, who is now 102. The Hardy Players, who performed between 1908 and 1928, used the 9.5 x 9.5in model

A Holocaust movie unlike any other

Let me describe the first two scenes, and in fact the first two shots, of Israeli director Amos Gitai's new film "One Day You'll Understand." They should be shown to aspiring filmmakers, under the heading of "this is how much you have to learn." In the first shot, a 40ish man in a suit (it's the French actor Hippolyte Girardot) crosses a busy street in Paris and approaches some kind of large horizontal stone monument, evidently rather new. He appears to be looking for a parti

Who Wrote 'Frankenstein'? New Edition Is Present at the Creation

Nobody shouts "It's alive!" in the novel that gave birth to Frankenstein's monster. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, does not feature mad scientists messing around with beakers in laboratories, nor does it deliver any bug-eyed assistants named Igor. Hollywood has given us those stock images, but the story of the monster and his maker owes its essential power to the imagination of an 18-year-old woman and the waking nightmare she had by the shores of Lake Geneva one rainy summer

Oliver Stone's W. inspires Slate to consider Bush's role in history

This week, Slate is featuring a conversation about George Bush's presidency, prompted by Oliver Stone's film W. Participants are Oliver Stone; Bob Woodward, author of The War Within; Ron Suskind, author of The Way of the World; and Jacob Weisberg, author of The Bush Tragedy.