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

The Other Hollywood sign

There's the Hollywood sign everyone knows -- white letters 50 feet high, recognized the world over as the landmark of Tinseltown. And then there's the other Hollywood sign, the hidden one, whose red neon letters were once as familiar as the larger sign just across the canyon. The sign that read "Outpost" in neon letters 30 feet high was, like the original "Hollywoodland" sign, raised up to publicize a new housing development, Hillside Homes of Happin

Art Looted by Nazis During World War II to Go on Display in Jerusalem

Israel's national museum opened two new exhibits Monday of paintings with a tragic history: They were stolen from museums and salons by the Nazis and never reclaimed because many of the rightful owners perished during World War II. The exhibits, which include paintings by masters like Henri Matisse, Claude Monet and Georges Seurat, are meant to bring to life the dramatic stories behind the art — and perhaps reunite the works with the owners or heirs. Visitors who recognize a paintin

"Katyn"--New movie tells taboo tale of Polish massacre

Until now, no one has managed to force open the darkest corners of Poland's "sealed memory." Andrzej Wajda's new World War II drama, "Katyn," succeeds. It tells the long-taboo tale of the roughly 14,500 Polish military officers murdered by the Soviet army in 1940. When "Katyn" opened in Poland last fall, a nation remembered its dead. Polish students were obliged to see it, and a candlelit vigil was held at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw.

HBO Inaugurates 'John Adams' in March

The long-awaited "John Adams" miniseries has a premiere date at HBO. The seven-part miniseries will debut Sunday, March 16, a week after the series finale of "The Wire." Parts one and two will air back-to-back, with subsequent installments debuting on each of the next five Sundays. Based on David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, the miniseries stars Paul Giamatti ("Sideways," "Cinderella Man") as the second president

Costumes star in The Other Boleyn Girl

The first thing you notice is the frocks. They glow and shimmer most desirably, as the ladies swirl and pose in furs, filigrees, embroideries and jewel-bright satins. Not just on the red carpet, but also in the film: The Other Boleyn Girl, which had its world premiere in Berlin last night. It's the tale of two sisters at the court of the Tudor king: the clever, scheming, brunette Anne and her younger sibling, the quieter, more unworldly blonde Mary. Played, respectively, by Natalie

Exhibition in Venice rehabilitates Vandals, Goths and Huns

HISTORY has been unkind to the Barbarians. Some 1,600 years have passed since they began to redraw the boundaries of Europe, yet their names are best remembered for the anti-social and savage behaviour always associated with Vandals, Goths and Huns. Now an exhibition in Venice seeks to help rehabilitate them. The Vandals? They took Carthage when the locals were watching a circus. Huns? Attila was not always as bad as he is painted; he forbore, after all, to sack Rome. As for the Goths, they were

James Conlon's mission: Revive operas banned by Hitler

In a city that often shows scant regard for history, the Los Angeles Opera is undertaking an extraordinary project of reclamation. Under the banner "Recovered Voices," James Conlon, in his second season as the company's music director, is reviving operas suppressed by the Nazis. Next Sunday Conlon, 57, is to conduct the project's first fully staged production, a double bill of "Der Zwerg" ("The Dwarf") by Alexander Zemlinsky and "Der Zerbrochene Kr

Where Lincoln Sought Refuge in His Dark Hours (NYT museum review of Lincoln's summer cottage))

If you look out the windows of President Lincoln’s Cottage at the Soldiers’ Home — the idiosyncratic and intriguing museum that is opening to the public on Tuesday after a ceremonial event on Monday — you have to imagine what Abraham Lincoln might have seen during those summer evenings when he stood here. The cottage is on a hilltop, the third highest in the area. And when Lincoln first came here, seeking a respite from the summer heat, the swampy air and the incessant bustle of the White House

Reed College Howls With Landmark Recording by Beat Poet

Reed College’s archives have turned up a true gem of 20th-century poetry history, a high-quality recording of Allen Ginsberg reading his epochal long poem, “Howl,” that was taped a few months before it was published and became the subject of a landmark obscenity trial. The recording was made on reel-to-reel tape in front of a group of students in a Reed dormitory lounge in February 1956, during Ginsberg’s visit to the college on a hitchhiking trip with a fellow poet, Gary Snyder, a

Tolkien classic to be auctioned

The 1937 first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is to be auctioned in London with an estimated value of £30,000. The Bonhams sale in London on March 18th includes the first foreign language edition of the book, translated into Swedish ten years later, and the last photograph taken of the author. The first issue of the The Hobbit is inscribed by Tolkien to his friend, Elaine Griffiths. The book, which is the prequel to The Lord of the Rings and features the adventures of hobbit Bilbo Baggin

Anniversary of DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

[Randy Lewis teaches American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of two books on documentary film, the co-editor of a book on James Joyce, and the co-producer of several documentary films including Texas Tavola: A Taste of Sicily in the Lone Star State.] Film history has a grim anniversary today. On February 8, 1915, D.W. Griffith released The

Doris Lessing: Obama 'would be killed'

The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing says she believes Barack Obama would be assassinated if he were elected president. Asked if she supported Hillary Clinton or Mr Obama, Lessing told the Stockholm daily Dagens Nyheter "it doesn't matter," but suggested the two should join forces in the election. "It would be best if they ran together. Hillary is a very sharp lady. It might be calmer if she wins and not Obama," Lessing was quoted as saying

Gunmen grab $163m in art at Swiss museum

Three gunmen in ski masks and dark clothes burst into a museum just before closing time. After a quick run through the building, they hustled out the door and sped off with paintings by Cezanne, Degas, van Gogh and Monet valued at $163.2 million. Authorities appealed Monday for any witnesses to help reconstruct the robbers' getaway from the E.G. Buehrle Collection, a private museum of Impressionist works whose founder had his own troubled history with stolen art. "

Cash luring filmmakers to Germany

It was more than just the historic settings in Berlin that drew Tom Cruise to Germany last summer to film his $80 million epic "Valkyrie," about a failed 1944 attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. It was also the cash. The German government was able to show Cruise the money - writing a check for €4.8 million, or $7.1 million, for the MGM/United Artists production. A fresh source of film subsidies has injected new vigor into Germany's rich cinematic

Robert Frost is hardly the first to give editors trouble

Robert Frost has been having a hard winter. First the remote Vermont farmhouse where he summered from 1939 to 1963 was vandalized by partying teenagers. Windows were smashed, dishes broken, a chair split up for firewood, precious artwork and antiques splattered with beer and bodily fluids. Then last month, charges were raised against a scholarly edition of Frost's private notebooks. The work, first published in early 2007, had been heralded as offering a rare glimpse into the reclusive poet's cr

Hemingway, Your Letter Has Arrived

THOUGH no one talks about them much, Ernest Hemingway wrote two plays. The first, finished in 1926, was “Today Is Friday,” a forgettable one-acter set on the evening of the original Good Friday, when three Roman centurions get together at a tavern to discuss memorable crucifixions they’ve seen, including the one that afternoon. Not surprisingly, they sound a lot like Hemingway’s Nick Adams. “He looked pretty good to me in there today,” one of them says admiring Jesus’ stoicism. His

Critics: Down With the Newseum!

Of all the slow-moving targets that bleed profusely when you hit them, can there be a fatter, slower, juicier bull's-eye to sight your scope on than the $450 million Newseum, the four-years-in-the-building, seven-story, steel-and-glass monument to journalistic vanity just a nine iron away from Washington, D.C.'s National Mall? One of the most expensive museums ever built, according to the New York Times' Kit Seelye, the Newseum contains 250,000 square feet of exhibit space, including 15 t

Meditation on the Man Who Saved the Beatles

“Maharishi — what have you done? You made a fool of everyone.” That was the opening line of a sarcastic song about Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who died on Tuesday, that John Lennon wrote in 1968, not long after the Beatles abruptly left the maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh, India, and declared themselves no longer his spiritual disciples. It wasn’t released that way. In the end the other Beatles, particularly George Harrison, argued that whatever disagreements they had with the maharishi,

Early history of the Republic of Texas mirrored our own difficulties (Exhibit)

A worldwide financial panic fueled by tight credit and the collapse of the real estate boom spread from country to country. Meanwhile, the president promised to veto any legislation he considered inflationary and damaging to the economy. That's the way things were 170 years ago for the fledgling Republic of Texas. "It was eerily similar to today," said Merrill Lynch vice president James Bevill, who is president of the Texas Numismatic Association.

The 50th anniversary of a plane crash that devastated the Manchester United soccer team has occasioned a wave of nostalgia (UK)

Just about everyone in Britain old enough to remember events of 50 years ago can recall the moment on Feb. 6, 1958, when the baleful news came through. At 3:04 p.m. that day, on its third attempt to take off from a slushy runway in Munich, the aircraft carrying the Manchester United team home from victory in a European Cup quarterfinal in Yugoslavia crashed through the airfield perimeter fence, broke apart and burned. Of the 43 aboard, 23 died, including eight members o