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

At Tribute, Mailer Children Recall a Family Man

There were plenty of celebrities, like Sean Penn and Joan Didion, at Norman Mailer’s memorial at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday afternoon. But the highlights of the tribute by far were the intimate glimpses of the outsize novelist presented by his large and sprawling family. “What’s that like, having Norman Mailer as a father?” his stepson, Matthew Mailer, said he was constantly asked as a child. “It was like they were asking, ‘What’s it like being raised by wolves?’ ” If t

Smithsonian's American History Museum To Reopen In November

The National Museum of American History, closed for an extensive renovation since September 2006, will reopen in November, Smithsonian Acting Secretary Cristián Samper announced yesterday. The opening was originally scheduled for this summer, then pushed back to this fall and finally, yesterday, to November. "It did slide a few months from the original time," Samper said at a House appropriations hearing on President Bush's proposed 2009 budget for the Smithso

Ice-cream stick ship sails for England

A Viking ship made from ice-cream sticks set sail for England from the Netherlands on Tuesday. The 15-metre (50-foot) long ship, named after the Norse god Thor, is made from 15 million recycled ice-cream sticks glued together by U.S.-born stuntman Robert McDonald, his son and more than 5,000 children. "If you can dream it you can do it ... I want to teach children that anything is possible," McDonald said.

In a Czech city, '30s modernism lives on

BRNO, Czech Republic: The first thing I bought on a recent trip to Brno was a pack of souvenir photos from the 1933 Chicago World's Fair that I found in a little antique shop I dipped into while waiting for a tram. It turned out to be an oddly fitting purchase. The pictures showed how the Chicago Fair, dubbed a Century of Progress, had projected a futuristic vision through striking examples of sleek, Modernist architecture. Brno, the capital of Moravia and

Norman Mailer-Requiem for a Champion

[ Reprinted with permission from the Nation. For subscription information call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week's Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com.] Don DeLillo described him as a writer who "gave America a literature worthy of her vastness." Joan Didion spoke of his 1000 page nonfiction masterpiece "The Executioner's Song" (it was a "novel" she believes, as were

History Channel moves into Central Europe

The History Channel is making its Central European debut with a roll-out in Poland and Hungary. The channel, which is being launched through The History Channel UK, a joint venture between A&E Television Networks (AETN) and BSkyB, will be available in both Polish and Hungarian. The channel will be made available in both countries as a standard and high-definition service.

Are we living in American comic books' true golden age?

In this TNR debate, Douglas Wolk, the author of Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, and David Hajdu, music critic for The New Republic and author of the new book The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, discuss Hajdu's book, the potentially malevolent effects of lurid horror comics on '50s teenagers, and the current state of the art form.

James Bond Creator's Preposterous Plan to Outwit Nazis Revealed

The plot cooked up by Ian Fleming in September 1940, more than a decade before he created James Bond, was so brilliantly preposterous that it can now be seen as the prototype 007 mission. Fleming, in his role as a naval intelligence officer during the Second World War, was the architect of Operation Ruthless, a daring scheme to seize a German codebook that may have inspired the plot to "From Russia With Love." His plan, involving a staged plane crash and disgu

Bush biographers mixed on script for Oliver Stone's 'W'

President George W. Bush is a foul-mouthed, reformed drunk obsessed with baseball, Saddam Hussein and a conflicted relationship with his dad. Or at least that's how he's portrayed in the script for Oliver Stone's upcoming feature "W." But how accurate is that depiction? As the film preps for its April 21 start date, The Hollywood Reporter sent a copy of the screenplay to four Bush biographers for their comments. The draft is dated Oct. 17, 2007, and has recent

Feigenbaum Hall of Innovation (Review/NYT)

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Among the many visionaries celebrated in the Feigenbaum Hall of Innovation, which opened here last weekend at the Berkshire Museum, one figure, Zenas Crane Jr., is not fully given his due. It isn’t that he was too local a figure to warrant notice. In fact, this 3,000-square-foot exhibition space in Berkshire County’s oldest museum is explicitly devoted to local innovators, ranging from Herman Melville, who wrote “Moby-Dick” not far from the institution, to Willia

The Red Baron flies back into role of the hero in Germany

It was chocks away last night for a film that aims to shatter a taboo of more than half a century by openly celebrating a German war hero: the fabled flying ace known as the Red Baron. The €18 million (£14 million) adventure epic Red Baron feeds into a new national mood that has become less hesitant about honouring German battlefield bravery. The Government is even talking of bringing back a modern version of the Iron Cross, the gallantry medal awarded in the First and Second World

In the trenches restoring Gettysburg's cyclorama (video)

The first three days of July 1863 saw the bloodiest hours of the Civil War, in a battle that spilled across the fields and hills surrounding Gettysburg, Pa. The fighting climaxed in the bright, hot afternoon of the third day, when more than 11,000 Confederate soldiers mounted a disastrous assault on the heart of the Union line. That assault—Pickett's Charge, named for the general who led it—marked the farthest the South would penetrate into Union territory. In a much larger sense, it marked the

Charlton Heston, Epic Film Star and Voice of N.R.A., Dies at 84

Charlton Heston, who appeared in some 100 films in his 60-year acting career but who is remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut-jawed portrayals of Moses, Ben-Hur and Michelangelo, died Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 84. His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the family, Bill Powers, who did not specify a cause. In August 2002, Mr. Heston announced that he had received a diagnosis of neurological symptoms “consistent with Alzheimer’s disease.”

Savage Pastimes: Entertaining Violence

Toward the end of his 1995 epic Braveheart, Mel Gibson, playing the great Scottish hero William Wallace, finds himself in most unpleasant circumstances: having been beaten and tormented by Edward I’s sneering toadies, he’s stretched out on a rack until his joints begin to pop, then slit like a chicken and beheaded. He had it easy. In 1305, the real William Wallace was hanged to the point of unconsciousness, revived, tortured, hanged some more, castrated, gutted, and beh

FBI: Parachute isn't hijacker Cooper's

A tangled, torn parachute found buried last month last month is not the one used by plane hijacker D.B. Cooper when he bailed out of a plane over the Pacific Northwest, the FBI said Tuesday. Investigators reached that conclusion after speaking with parachute experts, including Earl Cossey, who packed the chutes provided to Cooper that rainy November night in 1971. "From the best we could learn from the people we spoke to, it just didn't look like it was the right kind of parac

John Patrick Diggins disappointed HBO John Adams series skirted debates about the Constitution

... The political chronology of Adams's life requires that Part 4 of the series proceed from the end of the Revolution and the peace treaty to his stay in England and then Washington's inauguration. But given the amount of time spent on the Declaration, the Constitution gets rather lost in the story, and it is the latter document that shaped American history. Now while it is true that Adams was in London and had no direct hand in drafting the Constitution, he was at the same time writing volumes

Anne Boleyn: The real Tudor queen was more complex than seen in contemporary portrayals

Last spring, encouraged by the success of HBO's Rome and trying to exploit the Sunday-evening vacuum soon to be left by The Sopranos, Showtime offered us its own mix of sex, politics, and history: The Tudors. The sexy opening montage made it clear this was not going to be A Man For All Seasons. Unlaced bodices, vigorous men on horses, and various absurdly good-looking actors (no one had consulted a historical portrait, it seemed) stared at the viewer with penetrating seriousness and

Britain's National Gallery says Old Master painting was once owned by Adolf Hitler

Britain's National Gallery said Thursday that an Old Master painting in its collection was once owned by Adolf Hitler and was taken from Germany by an American journalist at the end of World War II. Art historian Birgit Schwartz says she recognized "Cupid Complaining to Venus" by Lucas Cranach the Elder in a photograph of the Nazi leader's private gallery that is held in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The gallery said it believed Schwartz's ident

Mystery of discarded Picasso worth millions

Three paintings, including a rare Picasso, discovered lying in a house and estimated to be worth £3 million will be sold at auction next month. An auctioneer, invited to assess part of a multi-millionaire's collection, found the works hidden in a corner. The owner's identity is a mystery after the auctioneer was sworn to secrecy, but is believed to be a member of an international royal family.

Schiller relatives exhumed to identify poet's skull

Anthropologists have exhumed the graves of Friedrich Schiller's family in an attempt to positively identify the skull of the German dramatist and poet and end a 180-year-old debate. "The remains of the bodies were in good enough condition for a DNA examination," said Egon Moehler, a spokesman for the German city of Stuttgart, where the bodies of three relatives who died in the 19th century were unearthed. To obtain DNA samples for testing, the city has opened