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

From Nazi Bunker to Artistic Haven

At first it stood as a defense against Allied bombs. In the 1950s it was used to store imported fruit from Cuba, and in the 1990s it became the location for the hottest techno-parties around. On Thursday an old Berlin bunker revealed its latest transformation: It now houses a private collection of contemporary art. Walking through the massive five-storey concrete bunker that houses the Boros Collection on Reinhardstrasse in Berlin, you wouldn't guess that it had a far more sinister

Florida Senate approves Old Folks as state song

- After updating its lyrics to eliminate offensive words like "darkies," the Florida Senate on Thursday voted to make "Old Folks At Home" the official state song and adopted a more modern tune written by a Broward music teacher as the state anthem. The proposed anthem, "Florida, Where the Sawgrass Meets the Sky," was the winner of a statewide contest sponsored by the Florida Music Educators Association last year to find a replacement to the 1851 tune wr

"Secrets of the Dead": Going for the Grisly Gives TV Show Staying Power

The discovery of a grisly twist in the relationship between the Aztecs and the conquistadors; a largely unknown story of two Jewish men who escaped from Auschwitz; the true tale of the illegal drugs given to East German athletes. Without high-tech graphics or extravagant claims, the PBS series “Secrets of the Dead” has thrived for seven seasons (a dowager in TV years) by blending history, science, archaeology and other disciplines with old-fashioned detective work. The series, produ

The Nazi Plot That's Haunting Tom Cruise and United Artists

When United Artists said this month that it would again delay the release of “Valkyrie,” in which Tom Cruise plays a German officer who tries to kill Hitler, the Web went into obituary mode. One Hollywood Internet site, thehotblog.com, flatly declared, “Valkyrie is dead.” Another, defamer.com, said that the revival of United Artists had effectively died with it. Meanwhile, Roger Friedman, a widely read Web reporter with a column on foxnews.com, had some career advice fo

Philadelphia Raises Enough Money to Retain a Masterpiece by Eakins

It’s taken a citywide fund-raising effort and the sale of two paintings and two drawings by Thomas Eakins, but the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts have now managed to raise the entire $68 million needed to keep an Eakins masterpiece, “The Gross Clinic,” in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Museum announced on Wednesday that it had sold the Eakins painting “Cowboy Singing” to the Denver Art Museum and the Anschutz Collection, also in Denver. The

Mark Burnett of "Survivor" fame to produce series about Dr. Livingston

If we can presume that David Livingstone — he of the 19th-century expedition to find the source of the Nile — was the original survivor of popular imagination, then why shouldn’t Mark Burnett — he of the television phenomenon “Survivor” — find common ground with him? In an intriguing new example of unscripted television, Mr. Burnett will recreate the expedition of Henry Morton Stanley to find the missing Dr. Livingstone in a series he will produce for the History Channel.

Grateful Dead archives going to UC Santa Cruz

The archives of the Bay Area rock band the Grateful Dead - a treasure trove of more than 30 years of memorabilia that includes the band's first recording contract, life-size skeletons of band members and artwork hand-made by its fans - are headed to UC Santa Cruz, where they will be displayed at McHenry Library. Few bands are more associated with San Francisco, and the images connected with many of the archive items are instantly recognizable to millions of fans around the world. Th

Harvard Acquires Papers of Norman Mailer's Mistress

Norman Mailer, Harvard Class of 1943, shut his alma mater out of the contest for his literary remains. The Mailer papers went to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which opened them to the public in January. But Harvard just made its own score in the Mailer-memorabilia market. The university has spent an undisclosed sum to acquire the papers of Carole Mallory, the writer’s mistress from 1983 until the early 1990s, according to a report in The New York Obse

John Patrick Diggins on the Final Hour of 'John Adams'

[John Patrick Diggins, author of John Adams: The American Presidents Series, Steven Waldman, author of Founding Faith, and Kirk Ellis, writer and co-executive producer of the HBO miniseries "John Adams," are discussing the show on TNR.com. Alan Taylor, author of Writing Early American History, has joined the discussion. This is the fifteenth entry in their conversation.] Dear Steve and Kirk, "There is no vocabulary/for love within a family," wrote T.

Asian history inspires new online games

After exhausting just about every elf, dragon and knight featured in Western cultures, makers of popular online games are turning to ancient Asian history and war heroes for new inspiration. Chief among their sources is "Romance of the Three Kingdoms," an epic Chinese novel whose plots and characters are familiar to most Asians. "Romance," which long existed in oral form before it was put together in writing in the 14th century, covers a chaotic two-

Czech medieval crown jewels go on rare display

The Czech nation's most precious treasure — medieval crown jewels — will soon be put on display for the first time in five years. President Vaclav Klaus decided to show the priceless treasures at Prague Castle with no admission charge on April 19-29 to mark the 90th anniversary of the establishment of the independent Czechoslovak state.

'Basic Instinct' Director Paul Verhoeven: Jesus Was Son of Mary and Roman Rapist

In his upcoming biography of Jesus, "Basic Instinct" director Paul Verhoeven will make the shocking claim that Christ probably was the son of Mary and a Roman soldier who raped her during the Jewish uprising in Galilee. An Amsterdam publishing house said Wednesday it will publish the Dutch filmmaker's biography of Jesus, "Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait," in September. It will be translated into English in 2009, Marianna Sterk of the publishi

China's Terracotta Army Covered in Egg

China's terracotta army, a collection of 7,000 soldier and horse figures in the mausoleum of the country's first emperor, was entirely covered with beaten egg when it was constructed, according to German and Italian chemists who have analyzed samples from several of the figurines. According to the research team, the egg served as a binder for colorful paints, which went over a layer of lacquer. Co-author Catharina Blaensdorf, a scientist at the Technical University of M

Stolen painting of General Sherman has been recovered, restored

Lancaster native William Tecumseh Sherman is coming home. A rare original portrait of a youthful Sherman, stolen from the Sherman House Museum in Lancaster in 1982, has been recovered, restored and will be returned to the museum in a March 29 ceremony. Sherman, a Civil War general who was appointed commander of the U.S. Army after Ulysses S. Grant became president, probably had the painting of him in civilian clothes done when he was superintendent of what would later b

Sad chapter of Canadian history (Exhibit)

It's a small exhibition, but it packs a punch. Out from Under consists of 13 items in a single gallery at the Royal Ontario Museum. Yet it exposes a part of Canada's history that has been away locked in trunks, silenced by stigma and held in people's hearts. It tells the story of disability. Some of the objects – a ventilator used in the polio epidemic of the 1950s, a public health poster from the 1920s warning of the danger posed by "morons," a 1948 Shriner's

Elvis's secret visit to London revealed, 50 years on

Rock'n'Roll legend Elvis Presley did in fact visit Britain, it was revealed on Tuesday, with a secret visit to London accompanied by another rocker. For more than half a century it was generally accepted the "King" only made a fleeting transit visit to Scotland in 1960 -- much to the disappointment of his legion of UK fans. But theatre producer Bill Kenwright has revealed in a radio interview that Presley, then 23, managed to go sightseeing in London with Cock

Jack Rakove says: Sorry, HBO. John Adams Wasn't That Much of a Hero.

[Mr. Rakove is a professor of history at Stanford.] Here's one scene that did not make it into the epic HBO miniseries on the life of John Adams that ends tonight. It is June 23, 1775, and members of the Continental Congress accompany George Washington as he sets off to command the provisional army outside Boston. Adams rides along, then returns to his Philadelphia digs and writes in self-pity to his wife Abigail: I "must leave others to wear the Lawrells which I have sown; oth

60 Minutes: The Lost Leonardo Da Vinci

In the art world, there is perhaps no mystery more enduring than the fate of a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest mind of the Renaissance. It was an immense unfinished mural known as "The Battle of Anghiari." For centuries, it has been assumed the work was destroyed, painted over or simply faded away long ago. Now, after three decades of battling skepticism and bureaucratic resistance, an art detective named Maurizio Seracini believes he's close to solvin

Modern artist uses old-fashioned tin-type photography to record the lives of modern cowboys

ONE fairly reliable way to tell if you are in a part of the country where people still herd cattle for a living is the frequent and unself-conscious use of the word cowboy as a verb. For more than 20 years the photographer Robb Kendrick, a longtime contributor to National Geographic, has traveled around the United States, Canada and northern Mexico visiting just such places, increasingly rare ones where development has been kept at bay and discouraging words seldom are heard, at lea

“My Boy Jack”: PBS Masterpiece Theater production

IN discussions of Kipling, no word comes up more often than paradox: he was the prophet of both empire and its decline, a white supremacist and a connoisseur of exotic cultures, a fabulist and a master of realistic detail, a friend of the common man and a foe of democracy. But never had his conflicted nature caused him so much grief as when he used personal influence to wheedle a commission in the Irish Guards for his severely myopic son John, known as Jack. With tragic inevitability, Jack, who