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

Museum admits real-life Indiana Jones handed over a dud 'relic' 130 years ago

As Indiana Jones gets set to hit cinema screens with a new death-defying adventure in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a Paris museum acknowledged yesterday its star exhibit crystal skull was not what it was cracked up to be. One of only a dozen such skulls known to exist worldwide, the Quai Branly museum's piece was acquired in 1878 from an Indiana Jones-type explorer, Alphonse Pinart, as an Aztec masterpiece believed to be hundreds of years old. Yesterday the museum admitted it was probably m

Ian Fleming Exhibit in London

The first major exhibition on the creator of James Bond in the centenary of his birth has opened in London. For Your Eyes Only at the Imperial War Museum focuses on the author Ian Fleming’s early life and later career in wartime intelligence, which provided real-life inspiration for his spy character 007. Props from the films, such as Rosa Klebb’s deadly shoes in From Russia With Love, to Halle Berry’s bikini in Die Another Day, are interspersed with material on the author’s life. The naval jack

Films revisit the black Kent State shootings

Two years before the deadly Kent State shootings, state troopers opened fire on a student protest on the campus of South Carolina State College. Three people died, and 28 were wounded. The incident, which became known as “the Orangeburg Massacre,” never pierced the nation’s collective memory of the 1960s, and academics and survivors say that one reason was shoddy, racially biased press coverage: those killed were black. But new media coverage may give the shootings thei

The Relay of Fire Ignited by the Nazis (Courtesy: Leni Riefenstahl)

If you want to know how the Olympic torch really began its “Journey of Harmony,” as the Chinese call its current relay, if you want to see why the torch has had to pass through a human obstacle course composed of protesters, SWAT teams and police in San Francisco, Paris and London, then do not look to Tibet’s grievances against China. Look to the opening of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 film, “Olympia.” In that homage to Berlin’s 1936 Olympic Games the origins of this ritual are revealed.

Vidal Sassoon: Anti-fascist warrior-hairdresser

Vidal Sassoon, the hairdresser, has recounted his early days as a foot-soldier for an underground anti-fascist group dedicated to wiping out Sir Oswald Mosley's far-Right movement after the Second World War. Sassoon was a teenage member of the 43 Group, an organisation formed in 1946 by Jewish ex-servicemen who returned from the frontline only to discover that Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists and an admirer of Adolf Hitler, was spreading his message of hatred on t

Sherlock Holmes rarity among Oxfam finds

A book handed into an Oxfam shop which contained the first Sherlock Holmes stories is set to be sold for £9,000. Study in Scarlet, which features Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's first two Holmes tales, was donated to a Harrogate, North Yorkshire, branch of the charity. It will be the star lot in an auction made up of books given to Oxfam shops at Bonhams in Oxford on 20 May.

Historical Stalemate: Chess Book May Have Leonardo Illustrations (or Not)

Reported discoveries of lost works by Leonardo da Vinci are almost as common as, well, images of the Mona Lisa. The latest attribution to be proposed involves the design for the illustrations in a chess book from around 1500. The book, “De Ludo Scachorum,” or “The Game of Chess,” is by Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar and Renaissance mathematician who was a friend and collaborator of Leonardo. One of the earliest chess books, it contains 114 diagrams of chess problems drawn in red a

How epidemics helped shape the modern metropolis (N-Y Historical Society/Exhibit)

On a Sunday in July 1832, a fearful and somber crowd of New Yorkers gathered in City Hall Park for more bad news. The epidemic of cholera, cause unknown and prognosis dire, had reached its peak. People of means were escaping to the country. The New York Evening Post reported, "The roads, in all directions, were lined with well-filled stagecoaches, livery coaches, private vehicles and equestrians, all panic-struck, fleeing the city, as we may suppose the inhabitants of Pompeii f

History Channel teams with Library of Congress

A&E Television Networks' History brands, which include the History channel and its Web site, have teamed up with the Library of Congress on a multimedia partnership that will encompass on-air and online content. The goal of the partnership -- which also reaches across History International, History en Espanol and Military History Channel -- is to bring the Library of Congress' collections to the "next generations of users" on the platform of their choice, be it mobile,

FBI Marilyn Monroe sex flick sells for $1.5 million

Some really like it hot. In the sordid tradition of peddling raunchy video footage of celebrities a la Paris Hilton, a long-buried sex movie of Marilyn Monroe recently hit the market, a top collector told The Post. An illicit copy of the steamy, still-FBI-classified reel - 15 minutes of 16mm film footage in which the original blond bombshell performs oral sex on an unidentified man - was just sold to a New York businessman for $1.5 million, said Keya Morgan, the well-kn

Lawrence of Arabia negatives go for £6,572

ORIGINAL negatives of Welsh First World War hero Lawrence of Arabia were sold at auction yesterday for £6,572 after being discovered by a collector who bought them for £32. The pictures show him posing in India in the 1920s and were estimated to sell for £1,500 at Duke’s Auction House in Dorchester, Dorset. A spokeswoman said the negatives were sold to a UK-based private collector over the phone. The price included the buyer’s premium.

A Toronto ensemble tours Europe with a program called Music in Exile, featuring work the Nazis labelled 'degenerate'

The 75th anniversary of Hitler's rise to power doesn't, at first glance, look like an attractive subject for commemoration with a concert series. Yet Toronto's Artists of the Royal Conservatory ensemble has found a fitting way to observe the occasion, touring in Europe with a program called "Music in Exile." The music they're playing was all written by composers who fled Germany following the establishment of the Nazi government there in 1933. Many were Jewish, - but not a

Wagners end feud over Bayreuth festival

The battle for control of Germany's most celebrated opera festival has ended with the feuding descendants of Richard Wagner agreeing to work together. The struggle over the Bayreuth opera festival, celebrated for its sell-out performances of Wagner's music, has been fought for years by three female scions of the composer's family. They were each determined to run the festival, a major social event for Germany's rich and powerful, once Wagner's grandson, 88-year-old Wolf

Holy Islamic key sets sale record

A 12th Century key to Islam's holiest shrine has sold at auction in London for £9.2m ($18.1m). The key to the Kaaba - the ancient cube-shaped shrine in Mecca - went to an anonymous bidder at Sotheby's. The auction house said the price set a record for the sale of an Islamic work of art. Made of iron and measuring 37cm (15in) in length, the key is engraved with the words "This was made for the Holy House of God".

Lucien Freud's sleeping nude 'paid £20'

Lucian Freud's one-time muse was paid £20 a day to sit for a painting expected to fetch more than £17m. But Londoner Sue Tilley said she did not do it for the money and had "lovely lunches" with the artist. Freud's 1995 work, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, looks set to become the most expensive painting by a living artist when it is sold in New York next month. Ms Tilley - who is now a job centre manager - joked she had now become a broadsheet pin-up.

A Bloody Era of Syria’s History Informs a Writer’s Banned Novel

Syria | PEOPLE still talk about what happened here in the 1980s as “the Events,” as if they were too awful to describe. The Syrian military’s bloody struggle with militant Islamists left at least 10,000 dead in the city of Hama, and produced a trauma the authorities do not like to hear discussed. So when Khaled Khalifa decided to write about it in his latest novel, “In Praise of Hatred,” he knew he was touching a taboo subject. The book, a Balzacian tale full of romance and murder t

NYT praises new Library of Congress exhibit

“When in the course of human events,” the well-known text begins, “it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained ...” Wait a minute. That’s not quite right. And Thomas Jefferson must have known it too, which is why brackets surround the unfamiliar words. Two lines are drawn through them and, above, with a firm hand, are written the corrections: “it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected the

Bob Dylan Finally Gets His Pulitzer. His What?

Perhaps you were thrilled Monday when Bob Dylan earned a special award from the Pulitzer board for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” Or perhaps you were ambivalent, or even uneasy, and fretted that the grizzled troubadour’s authenticity was being co-opted by a body known for recognizing journalists, authors and playwrights — an institution that would steal a shot of hipness from its association

Norman Mailer-William F. Buckley Jr.: Requiem for a Champion

Every now and again, the jostling frenzy of intellectual life in New York City, with its relentless fixation on the newest, the hottest, the coolest, the ins and the outs, pauses for a moment and the speed slows to a stately, reflective pace. A striking example of this occurred when, in the space of a week, two of the city’s cultural giants received tribute, each in one of Manhattan’s most hallowed venues. On April 4, a memorial mass was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for William F

Big Ben Marks 150th Birthday

One of Britain's last bell foundries on Thursday marked the 150th anniversary of its biggest creation — the massive bell whose bongs sound the hour at the Houses of Parliament. It was made by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which also made Philadelphia's Liberty Bell and the Bell of Hope, given to New York by Londoners on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The 15-ton Big Ben was cast on April 10, 1858, at the foundry in east London, although it was anot