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

Queen Patricia And The Abdication Crisis Of 1936

The Constitutional Crisis of 1936, when King Edward VIII abdicated to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson, has been in discussion again. A revived play about it, called Crown Matrimonial, by Royce Ryton completes its first run this weekend. Queen Mary, who was King Edward's bolt upright mother is played by Patricia Routledge and she magnetises us into her drawing room, where the family discuss and witness the inevitable end of one king's reign and the start of another, by the you

Atlanta Cyclorama gets some competition from Gettysburg

The Atlanta Cyclorama, a mammoth, in-the-round depiction of the July 22, 1864, Battle of Atlanta, is billed as the largest oil painting in the world. But now there is a new kid on the block. The newly renovated Gettysburg Cyclorama, which will open to the public at the historic Pennsylvania battlefield in September, has been restored to its original 42 feet in height and 377 feet in circumference. That trumps the Atlanta painting by about 798 square feet. Atlanta's cyclorama wa

Ford Model T reaches 100

It was available in "any colour you want as long as it is black," according to Henry Ford, although in fact, the very first Model T Ford, which was launched 100 years ago, came in a choice of colours. It was only when Ford shifted production of his iconoclastic car to a moving production line in 1914, that he restricted customers to having their cars finished in black japan enamel paint, because it was the only colour that dried fast enough to keep up with the production l

She Says It’s True, Her Memoir of Forging

“The Letters of Noël Coward,” a critically acclaimed book published by Alfred A. Knopf last year, includes a short, gossipy note from Coward on the subject of Julie Andrews. “She is a bright, talented actress,” Coward writes. “And quite attractive since she dealt with her monstrous English overbite." But the letter, and another much like it, were actually written by Lee Israel, a biographer and editor in New York who spent two years writing forgeries from her studi

Berliners Get a Crash Course in Glittery Celebrity Culture (Exhibit)

BERLIN — Aside from Romy Schneider hanging out naked on the Riviera and an aged Marlene Dietrich hiding her face from a nosy photographer on an airplane, the most prominent German in a hugely diverting paparazzi show at the Helmut Newton Foundation here through mid-November is Albert Einstein. He’s now surrounded by the Sean Penns and Brigitte Bardots of the world, looking as out of place as he must have felt when he arrived in New Jersey in 1933. In a picture from three years earli

Would 'Rathergate' Make a Good Movie? Hollywood Insiders Working on Screen Adaptation

The Media Mob has learned that a team of Hollywood insiders is currently working on a screen adaptation of Truth And Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power—the 2005 book by former CBS News producer Mary Mapes, in which she defends the 60 Minutes II story by Dan Rather about President George W. Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard, which ran on CBS in September 2004 and eventually led to her ouster from the network. Who would want to turn "Rathergate&q

Jerome Holtzman: Hall of Fame former Tribune reporter was game's official historian and a true original (obit.)

Jerome Holtzman, who went from copy boy to Hall of Famer in a distinguished career as a Chicago sportswriter, died Saturday after a long illness. He was 81 and was affectionately known to colleagues as "the Dean," a term reflecting his stature as a baseball-writing "lifer" and his numerous accomplishments over four decades. "It's a sad day for everybody in baseball," Commissioner Bud Selig said. "Jerome was a Hall of Famer in everything he did, in

Iran donates stamps commemorating Iranian martyrs to Belarus museum

The Cultural Center of Khorramshahr Sacred Defense recently donated a dozen stamps to the Brest Fortress Defense Museum, Belarus. Head of the center, Nader Daryaban, said that the stamps bear the images of Iranian martyrs and aim to transfer the concept and values of Iran’s Sacred Defense era (Iran-Iraq 1980-1988 war), the Persian service of IRNA reported. “The stamps bear images of the commanders including Mohammad-Ali Jahan-Ara, Abdorreza Musavi, Behruz Moradi, Ahma

New documentary tells the story of Ellis Island hospital

The final chapter in the Ellis Island story has at last been told. Lorie Conway's film and companion book, Forgotten Ellis Island, are the first to examine the extraordinary immigrant hospital on Ellis Island. As immigrants from Germany and other countries in Europe came to America's shores a century ago, they underwent a medical examination that determined whether they would be allowed to stay. Those judged to be too ill or infirm to enter were sent to the Ellis Island hospital. In

The BM’s Hadrian show couldn’t be more timely. His political problems were just like ours

The British Museum has always been a fabulous resource. Look what it owns. Not even the line-up of seven dwarfs who preceded St Neil MacGregor in the director’s chair could seriously damage the clout and width of this magnificent hoard of global treasures. Yes, much of it was stolen or inveigled from its rightful owners. (But when it comes to the acquisition of great art nobody, ever, has been entirely innocent.) Yet for all the splendour of its ill-gotten gains, the BM has had considerable diff

Hadrian's soldiers writing home

The hulking great highlight of the Hadrian exhibition opening this week at the British Museum is a mammoth head of the emperor. Excavated in Turkey last year, it has never been shown to the public before. You can make out not only his beard - he was the first Roman emperor to sport this Hellenistic look - but also his creased earlobes, a curious genetic giveaway to the heart condition that killed him at the age of 62, in 138AD. The real highlight, though, will be some

Global touring takes its toll on Picasso picture

Curators at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid are conducting x-ray, infrared and other hi-tech studies of Picasso's famed anti-war masterpiece Guernica, which has revealed severe wear and tear from its journeys around the word. A team of 30 technicians have identified 129 changes to the painting, named after the small Basque town bombed by German fighter planes backing General Francisco Franco during the Spanish civil war. The painting is now in a "serious but stabl

Rediscovering treasures of Bamiyan

A tour of Afghan caves housing the world's oldest oil paintings When the Buddhas of Bamiyan were carved out of the mountainside, the Roman Empire still held sway. They towered over a rich valley in what is now central Afghanistan, where caravans of traders would stop and rest on the Silk Road as they transported goods between east and west. For centuries the two huge statues stood guard over Bamiyan. But in 2001, just months before they were forced from power, the

How bad was J.M. Barrie?

[Justine Picardie is a journalist working most recently at Vogue and as editor of the Observer Magazine. She is now a full-time freelance writer and lives with her husband and two sons in London.] An obsessive stalker, an impotent husband, a lover of young boys... to some, the creator of 'Peter Pan' was an evil genius; to others, a misunderstood ingenue. Ever mindful of the J.M. Barrie 'curse', Justine Picardie investigates 'May God blast anyone who writes a biography o

Zurich exile shaped Wagner's creative genius

Wagner composed much of his opera epic, The Ring Cycle, during his stay in the city and wrote a number of essays – including "Judaism in Music" that was later adopted by the Nazis. Wagner fled to Zurich in 1849, at the age of 36, having narrowly avoided arrest for his political involvement in the May uprising in Dresden, where he had been living. His arrival marked the beginning of a transformation during which the young composer redefined his ideas of art and

Paintings Depict Jesus Christ in Korea

Imagine if Jesus Christ was born not in a manger in Bethlehem, but in a stable during the Joseon Kingdom in Korea. This is exactly what the late master artist Woonbo Kim Ki-chang did in the series of exquisite ``sacred'' ink paintings that depict the life of Christ in a Korean setting. In ``The Birth of Jesus Christ,'' Mary is shown wearing hanbok or traditional Korean dress, while her husband Joseph is wearing the gat or traditional Korean hat. This wor

Central Paris treasure awaits discovery

Tucked away in a corner of the church of Saint-Eustache in Paris is a colorful if not particularly attractive bas-relief dating from 1969. The work of British sculptor Raymond Mason, it depicts a crowd of boisterous market porters bearing fruit and vegetables and pushing laden handcarts. Occasionally, you will catch an older visitor pausing quietly in front of the piece and heaving a little sigh. That is because it captures the moment when the great food market of Les Halles was exiled to

Hadrian at the British Museum

We all know the wall: that long line of stone that rises and falls across rough northern landscapes. It is one of the wildest and loveliest of our tourist spots. But the Romans who once paced its bleak ramparts with their spiked wooden pila were protecting the northernmost perimeter of the world's greatest empire: the empire that - stretching from Scotland to the Sahara, from the Atlantic to the Euphrates - was ruled from AD117 to AD138 by Hadrian. But what do we know about him? Th

Louvre draws a veil over artistic neglect with bold new Islamic wing

It is known as the Veil and is described by its architects as a giant glass Muslim headscarf in the heart of Paris. The former French president Jacques Chirac saw it as one way to avert a clash of civilisations in the run-up to the Iraq war. President Nicolas Sarkozy calls it the symbol of France's friendship with the Arab world. The Louvre's bold new Islamic art wing had its first stone laid by Sarkozy yesterday , launching the museum's most daring project since IM Pei created the

Hooch: The Greeks worshipped it; the Aztecs were a little more conflicted

The popular history of a humdrum object—that faddish genre in which the most boring items on your dining-room table (salt, cod, potatoes, bananas, chocolate) are revealed to be secret juggernauts of profound social change—has recently become so popular that it’s probably time for someone to write a popular history of it. If I were forced, I’d diagnose the trend as yet another symptom (like $4 gas or home foreclosures) of our current flavor of late-phase capitalism—a commercialism so far advanced