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

Gauguin’s teeth found in well

. An archaeological dig on the remote Marquesan island of Hiva Oa has uncovered the secrets of the water well used by Paul Gauguin. The buried objects range from a New Zealand beer bottle to four human teeth. Gauguin lived in the village of Atuona from 1901 until his death two years later. He built his own Maori-style hut, “la Maison du Jouir” (house of pleasure), and dug a well just outside. The Marquesans did not use wells, but springs, and after Gauguin died it was filled with ru

Scholars use art to study climate change

The vivid sunsets painted by J.M.W. Turner are revered for their use of color and light and for their influence on the Impressionists. But could they also help global warming experts track climate change? A group of scientists has studied the colors in more than 500 paintings of sunsets, including many of Turner's 19th-century watercolors and oils, in hopes of gaining insights into the cooling effects caused by major volcanic eruptions. By better understanding past cha

Movie to be made about U-boat discovery

Richie Kohler wanted to become an astronaut and explore outer space after seeing man land on the moon. Instead, he became a diver, exploring inner space and helping to uncover a mystery dating back to World War II. Kohler, a Brick resident, recounted to an audience of about 80 people at Ocean County Library's Lacey branch the experience of helping to identify the German submarine U-869. The boat was thought to have been sunk near Morocco in 1945, but was located in 1991

Polka: A rural dance tradition in twilight

It was a Sunday afternoon at the South Omaha Eagles Hall, a Czech stronghold in an increasingly Hispanic neighborhood here. Under a low ceiling and fluorescent lights, Lila Dvorak, 74, danced a two-step polka to the music of a three-piece combo. Dvorak is Czech-American, and a child of the Great Depression, like almost all of the 150 or so people present. She is a regular at the dances and wore a fancy magenta dress for the occasion. "Polka people are happier people," she

"There are poor adaptations of great works of the past--and then there is the latest film version of 'Beowulf.' "

To solicit from a medievalist a review of Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf is to pick a quarrel unlikely to be evaded. The eminent Cambridge classicist Richard Bentley famously put down Alexander Pope's translation of Greek epic with a single sentence: "It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer." "Pretty" is not the first adjective I would choose to describe Zemeckis's Beowulf. Fantastic, amazing, preposterous, corny from springing leaf to ripening ear, technical

A Song That Helped Define the Depression, and Can Still Be Sung Today

He crouched by a corner newsstand on the Upper West Side, a pathetic figure with his hand out. You’ve seen him a thousand times, him or countless other street people like him. You’ve also heard his cry: “Can you spare any change?” Nobody is likely to write a song about that man, certainly not those rappers who say they are social commentators yet seem obsessed with the baubles they wear and the women they bed. Seventy-five years ago, though, a couple of tunesmiths heard

"True Grit" -- the great, unsung novel of the American frontier -- celebrates its 40th anniversary

The 40th anniversary reissue of Charles Portis' "True Grit" is the third go-around for the novel since its publication and simultaneous serialization in the Saturday Evening Post. In a saner world, it wouldn't have to be reissued, it would have always remained in print. Why it hasn't is one of the unsolved mysteries of modern American literature. Conventional wisdom blames the hugely successful 1969 film with John Wayne (for which he won his only Oscar). Potential readers,

In hit Iranian TV drama, Holocaust no 'myth'

For seven months, millions of Iranians have turned on their television sets Monday at 10 p.m. to watch a World War II drama that challenges stereotypes about Iran and Judaism. The story line could not be less likely in the Islamic Republic, whose president calls the Holocaust a "myth": An Iranian-Palestinian student in France helps save his love – a French Jew – and her family from the Nazis and from becoming victims of the Holocaust. This week the 30-part love story come

Günter Grass: Nobel Laureate Sues Publisher

Günter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning author, has sued Random House over a claim in a new biography that he volunteered to serve in the Nazis’ Waffen SS unit, Agence France-Presse reported yesterday, citing the online edition of the German magazine Der Spiegel. Mr. Grass, right, is seeking an injunction against the publishing house over a phrase in a biography by Michael Jürgs, which reads: “Günter Grass admitted ... that as a 17-year-old he willingly joined the Waffen SS.” Mr. Grass wrote last

Detroit’s Latest Model: A Retooled Museum

The Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the country’s small but classic encyclopedic museums, could be on an open prairie rather than in the center of a city, so faint is the urban buzz around it. Little commercial energy warms the nearby streets. Residential neighborhoods are at a distance. Traffic on the broad thoroughfare running past the museum is sparse, even as this institution, closed for the last six months, celebrates a reopening on Nov. 23 that is being advertised as a resurrection.

Peter Siskind: Paradoxes Upon Complexities ... Mailer's Urban Vision

[A native New Yorker, Peter Siskind lives in Fairmount and is a professor of history at Arcadia University in Glenside. You can email directly with him siskindp@arcadia.edu.] "Only a great city provides honest spectacle, for that is the salvation of the schizophrenic soul," says Norman Mailer in Miami and the Siege of Chicago. If Mailer, who died last week at the age of 84, was only occasionally a writer of cities, his urban relig

Early Elizabeth I portrait fetches $5.3 million

The earliest known full-length portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, thought to have been commissioned to help the English monarch "advertise" herself to potential suitors, sold on Thursday for 2.6 million pounds ($5.3 million). The life-sized painting by Antwerp artist Steven van der Meulen, who went on to become an important English court painter in the 1560s, had been expected to fetch between 700,000 and one million pounds, auctioneer Sotheby's said. "Like h

War through the eyes of a PoW in Japan (Exhibit)

Sketches by a Second World War Serviceman, tracing his experiences from RAF bases to a Japanese prisoner of war camp, are to be exhibited for the first time. Fred Goodwin began the war servicing aircraft. After the Battle of Britain he was sent to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) with 605 Squadron. They were to try to halt the Japanese advance, but were under-prepared. Mr Goodwin was captured. As a prisoner he witnessed unspeakable horrors. However, th

Spanish Civil War, This Time Fought in Pixels

A new video game that invites players to rewrite the course of Spain’s devastating civil war has touched a nerve in a country that is often reluctant to revisit its past, let alone play with it. “Shadows of War” bills itself as the first video game based on the 1936-39 war, which erupted after right-wing forces loyal to Gen. Francisco Franco staged a coup against the elected Republican government. General Franco’s subsequent dictatorship lasted 40 years until his death in 1975.

Thanksgiving Movies, Light and Dark

Though an official holiday for just about as long as Hollywood has been in business, Thanksgiving hasn’t inspired quite the same body of movies as Christmas or even Halloween. Those films that do touch on Tha

Wharton Letter Reopens a Mystery

Literary biography is never finished, Hermione Lee, the Goldsmiths’ professor of English at Oxford and author of acclaimed books about Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, said the other day. New information keeps turning up. In the case of Wharton, what has just turned up is a letter that casts new light on the vexing question of what exactly happens at the end of her 1905 novel, “The House of Mirth.” Does Lily Bart, the novel’s heroine, kill herself or die of an accidental overdose?

Found: Early photos by Diane Arbus of sideshow performers

“We had our awe and our shame in one gulp,” Diane Arbus wrote of watching the assorted freaks and sideshow performers who populated Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus, a celebrated basement phantasmagoria on 42nd Street in Manhattan where she began shooting in the late 1950s as she was beginning to hone her stark signature style. In a poignant 1966 obituary about the museum, which had mostly closed the previous year, Arbus added, “What if we couldn’t always tell a trick from a mir

Newly renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery maintains integrity of original building

However entertaining you may find its cutthroat political atmosphere, this city has long been a backwater in terms of contemporary architecture. More often than not, when anyone here tinkers with old landmarks, they turn them into kitsch. So I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of visiting the newly renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery. The museums reside in the venerable Patent Office Building, one of this country’s finest examples o

Storied Rembrandt to Be Shown at the Getty

An early Rembrandt portrait that has not been on public view for more than two decades and has a lively criminal past — it was stolen at gunpoint from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, more than three decades ago — will re-emerge for several months, beginning on Tuesday at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The 1632 painting, “Portrait of a Girl Wearing a Gold-Trimmed Cloak,” has been lent to the museum by an anonymous New York collector, the museum said yesterday, and will be

Nureyev: Pop star AND classical dancer

When Rudolf Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union in 1961, he became a legend overnight. He was a great dancer; but he was also a Russian, our Russian, and the instant he threw himself into the arms of the French authorities and declared, in English, "I would like to stay in your country," the cultural cold war seemed for a brief moment to have been won. If Nureyev himself appeared stunned by the international media blitz that followed, gazing glassy-eyed into the flashing cameras, he