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

US Civil War museum to share surprising collection

RICHMOND, Virginia: With surgical gloves, S. Waite Rawls III pulls out a large drawer in the basement of the Museum of the Confederacy to reveal a startling display: dolls the size of children, neatly lined up like small bodies on a morgue slab. The dolls are among what the museum calls the "world's most comprehensive collection of Confederate artifacts," a trove valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Rawls, the museum's president and CEO.

How One President Might Have Altered a War (Documentary)

The title of the documentary “Virtual J F K.: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived” pretty much says it all, though the movie itself says not nearly enough. Directed by Koji Masutani, this speculative, provocative, frustrating and finally unpersuasive historical gloss races quickly and all too lightly over the major political crises that John F. Kennedy faced during his aborted presidency — Laos, Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam — in what may be the most aggressive big-screen shine job since Oliver Stone’s much de

Matthew Shepard: 10 years later (Laramie Killing Given Epilogue in Play About His Murder)

LARAMIE, Wyo. — Near the end of “The Laramie Project,” the widely praised and frequently staged play about how this small city grappled with the notorious murder of the gay college student Matthew Shepard, one of the characters wonders if the convictions in the killing will help Laramie heal. “Maybe now we can go on and we can quit being stuck, you know?” says Reggie Fluty, a local policewoman. She is one of the real-life characters whose words, collected on tape, make up the actors

Linz Tackles Its Past as a 'Führer' City

Linz is to be Europe's Capital of Culture in 2009. Before the Austrian city takes on that mantle it is showing an exhibition about how Hitler had wanted to make Linz a "Culture Capital for the Führer." Linz is taking on a lot. On New Year's Eve the Austrian city will kick off a three-day opening festival with fireworks and drum rolls, to celebrate its year as Europe's 2009 Capital of Culture. Under the direction of Martin Heller, it's planning an intensive program of exhi

Picasso at the National Gallery

The National Gallery is to stage its first Picasso exhibition as it moves into territory recently dominated by the Tate. Some 60 paintings and sculptures by the Modernist master, including some of his best known works, will comprise Picasso: Challenging the Past. It will be the National Gallery's first ever exhibition dedicated to the artist, and the first major British exhibition on him since 2002. Christopher Riopelle, curator of post 1800 paintings, s

The Wave: A film of how a teacher carried out an experiment in fascism with his class

How could German citizens claim, after the war, to have known nothing about the Holocaust? Ron Jones's attempt to answer this question as a new teacher in 1960s California led to a risky experiment in fascism that has intrigued successive generations ever since. It is the subject of a major new German film, Die Welle (The Wave), released this week. Teachers dream of making a difference to their students' lives. It's part of the joy of teaching. Former students of Jones describe his

Art in the glow of Amsterdam red lights

Never have its gracious enfilades and echoing halls witnessed anything like it: the National Gallery, repository of the nation's finest Old Masters, is to re-create a red-light district, complete with scantily clad prostitutes, sinister alleyways and shop windows filled with human wares. This walkthrough installation is Ed and Nancy Kienholz's work Hoerengracht - Dutch for "whores' canal" - which will take its place in the gallery next autumn. The idea is to

Agatha Christie used her grandmother as a model for Miss Marple, new tapes reveal

Lying undisturbed for more than 40 years, audio tapes bearing the unmistakeable voice of Agatha Christie have been discovered that show how she modelled Miss Marple on her own grandmother. Her grandson Mathew Prichard stumbled upon 27 of the half-hour long tapes in a dusty cardboard box as he cleaned out a storeroom in Greenway, the Georgian property overlooking the Dart estuary in Devon that Christie called "the loveliest place in the world". The tapes, which

HBO Developing Lincoln Mini

HBO is developing Manhunt, a miniseries from David Simon and Tom Fontana about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the frantic 12-day hunt for his killer, John Wilkes Booth. The project reunites the network with the creative forces behind two of its former critical hit series—Simon created The Wire and Fontana created Oz—as well as the two writers themselves. Simon and Fontana have not collaborated since Fontana turned Simon's book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets into t

Oldest Bowling Alley in America Turns 100

MILWAUKEE — The walls of this tiny bowling alley are so close together you'd think a bowler would feel claustrophobic. But stand before this pair of lanes, in the same spot where bowlers have been lacing up since before World War I, and the strongest reaction you feel is captivation. The lanes are real wood, not the synthetic wood of modern lanes, and it's so resilient it's never been changed since it was set in place 100 years ago. Pin boys reload the manual pin mecha

A Dallas orchestra reimagines LBJ's duel wars

A haunted tenor voice will sing out in Dallas on Thursday. It will lament that a terrible war was based on a hollow threat, and that millions might have died because of a"mistake." The Dallas Symphony Orchestra wanted a grand piece of music to commemorate Lyndon B. Johnson, born 100 years ago, and it may have gotten more than it bargained for: a 70-minute oratorio with implicit reverberations about another war propelled by faulty intelligence, prosecuted by another Texan. The

Gunter Demnig lives out of a van as he assembles a massive monument to Holocaust victims: stones

I first heard about the project in Israel, when based there. I first encountered it a couple of days after arriving in Berlin, literally tripping over in Mitte's Gipsstrasse. This morning I finally got to see Gunter Demnig in action, laying down his 'stolpersteine', or stumbling stones. They are small brass plaques, about the size of a beer mat, laid into pavements, cobbled paths, driveways and squares all over Germany. On each is recorded the name of a victim of the Nazis - usually

Madame Tussaud's returns wax Hitler to Berlin

Madame Tussaud's said Saturday it had returned a wax figure of the Nazi dictator to its newly opened Berlin branch weeks after the statue was beheaded by a 41-year-old German. Hitler's figure can be viewed sitting at a desk in a replica of his bunker, Madame Tussaud's, the British waxworks maker, said. Hitler committed suicide in the bunker in 1945 as the Red Army converged on Berlin. The Berlin branch said it does not allow visitors to enter the replica of the bunker,

Charlie Chaplin was a child pauper, website proves

Fascinating details of Charlie Chaplin's early years growing up in a grim Victorian workhouse can be revealed for the first time. Fans of the legendary silent film star can now see the stark scrap of paper that details his incarceration in the squalid building. Chaplin was admitted to the workhouse in London at the age of seven, along with his older brother Sydney, after his alcoholic father abandoned him when his mother was committed to an asylum in 1896.

Writing the Myth of Moses (Robert Moses)

ARTHUR NERSESIAN, a 49-year-old playwright, poet and novelist whose wavy gray hair gives him the look of a 1960s English professor, rummaged through the black messenger bag lying next to him in a booth at the Moonstruck Diner in the East Village. Then he gleefully pulled out what appeared to be three coverless, battered paperbacks and slid them across the table. Closer analysis revealed these volumes to be, in fact, three parts of one eviscerated book, taped together and covered wit

Myth world: ancient Babylon visits Britain

A tower which has haunted the imagination of artists and writers for thousands of years will rise again in the first exhibition devoted to the art, archaeology and dreams of ancient Babylon. "When we asked people about Babylon many weren't quite sure whether it was a real place or a kind of fairytale, but what they had heard of was the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens," said Irving Finkel, curator of the British Museum exhibition. "We have lavish evidence for on

Mahatma Gandhi's 'mobile toilet' recreated

A replica of the mobile lavatory used by Mahatma Gandhi has been recreated at his Sabarmati retreat in western India. The lavatory was built after tourists visiting the house, which holds memorabilia and artifacts from Gandhi's life, asked to know where he attended the call of nature. It will now be placed at a prominent spot in the ashram-turned-museum in Ahmedabad in Gujarat state from where it was removed over two decades ago after being deemed inappropriate for the

A Trove of Golden Broadway Images, Stuck in a Tangled History

It was a modern-day Romeo and Juliet story set amid the rumbling gangs of New York, and Leo Friedman had an idea how he might capture it, grit, romance and all. Half of a legendary Broadway partnership, Mr. Friedman, then a 38-year-old former war photographer, positioned the young lovers holding hands on a street of tenements, fire escapes and garbage cans near his studio. “I’m going to make a mark on the sidewalk,” he recalled telling them. They were to run toward it.

Academy of the Fine Arts shows the art of war (Philadelphia)

From slogans of"taxation without representation" to paintings of noble patriots dying in battle for the greater good, words and images have long served as powerful tools to influence American public opinion during wartime. A new exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts tracks the course of the second-longest conflict in U.S. history — the American Revolutionary War — and the ways art helped rally support for independence from the British and promote the values of the eme

Mahatma Gandhi's 'mobile toilet' recreated

The lavatory was built after tourists visiting the house, which holds memorabilia and artifacts from Gandhi's life, asked to know where he attended the call of nature. It will now be placed at a prominent spot in the ashram-turned-museum in Ahmedabad in Gujarat state from where it was removed over two decades ago after being deemed inappropriate for the surroundings. The museum authorities believed it "spoilt" the ashram's ambience. Gandhi, who