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

Leonardo painting has coded 'soundtrack'

It's a new Da Vinci code, but this time it could be for real. An Italian musician and computer technician claims to have uncovered musical notes encoded in Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper," raising the possibility that the Renaissance genius might have left behind a somber composition to accompany the scene depicted in the 15th-century wall painting. "It sounds like a requiem," Giovanni Maria Pala said. "It's like a soundtrack that emphasizes the passion of

Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With a Matching Ego, Dies at 84

Norman Mailer, the combative, controversial and often outspoken novelist who loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation, died early yesterday in Manhattan. He was 84. The cause was acute renal failure, his family said. Mr. Mailer burst on the scene in 1948 with “The Naked and the Dead,” a partly autobiographical novel about World War II, and for six decades he was rarely far from center stage. He published more than 30 books,

At Billy Graham Library, Man and Message Are One and the Same

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — When the Billy Graham Library opened here last spring, its 88-year-old namesake, who had preached the Gospel to more than 210 million people on six continents, who had prayed in the Oval Office with 11 consecutive presidents and who had brought evangelical Christianity into the heart of American political life, had one main complaint: “It was too much Billy Graham.” He had envisioned the $27 million library, with its 40,000-square-foot exhibition space, as an exten

Giving Up the Memorabilia, but Not the Belief: Elvis Lives

WRIGHT CITY, Mo., Nov. 6 — The 16-foot-tall likeness of Elvis Presley that stands sentry here at the Elvis Is Alive Museum, a fading outpost of Americana, has seen better days. White paint is peeling from the plywood cutout. The wood at Elvis’s left hip is starting to rot, and many faded blue and yellow poker chips that once formed his bejeweled belt have vanished in the dust of 18-wheelers passing through this town 45 miles west of St. Louis. For 17 years, Bill Beeny —

When Barnum Took Manhattan

SINCE 1766 St. Paul’s Chapel at Broadway and Vesey Street has been one of the best-known and most revered landmarks in Lower Manhattan, associated with events from George Washington’s inauguration in 1789 to the destruction of the World Trade Center just behind it in 2001. For almost a quarter of a century in the 1800s it shared the intersection with another extremely popular, and not altogether welcome, landmark. Opposite the church, in more ways than one, was P. T. Barnum’s Americ

Poster relates Che's dark side

One of the most famous faces of communism is getting a makeover this week, with a new poster designed to teach students the whole story about Cuban revolutionary icon Ernesto "Che" Guevara. "The Victims of Che Guevera" poster, produced by the Young America's Foundation, centers on a collage that uses tiny photos of those killed by Cuba's communist regime to compose the face of the Marxist guerrilla, who has become a popular T-shirt icon. "Che

Irish firm pays €246,000 for iconic Grace Kelly dresses

An Irish company has just forked out $355,000 (€246,000) at a New York auction for two dresses worn by Hollywood icon Grace Kelly. Newbridge Silverware, more renowned for its classic tableware and jewellery products, has just added another two items to its own special collection in its museum of style icons, which opened earlier this year. One of the outfits bought by the Co Kildare company for $135,000 is a vivid green Givenchy-designed sleeveless dress with matching f

Tarzan lawyers battle to trademark cry

Lawyers attempting to trademark Tarzan’s distinctive battle cry have vowed to continue their fight in the bureaucratic jungle of the EU after one bid to register the sound fell flat. The rousing call might have scared off Lord Greystoke’s beastly enemies, but it fell on deaf ears at the Union’s Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) (Trade Marks and Designs). The estate of Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs wants to trademark the yell believing millions

Wilfred Owen: The soldiers' poet

For me, he is the greatest of all the war poets. But there is nothing original in my enthusiasm. I don't suppose there's a thoughtful student in the land who is unaware of Wilfred Owen's best-known poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est". Indeed, it tells us something about our pervading cynicism that Horace's words are now taken more readily as sarcasm than at face value. It is often assumed – as a student, I made the mistake myself – that the poem's author

Kremlin wives brought to life in new Moscow exhibition

From a sumptuous gown of the last Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna to a peasant-style smock worn by Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, a new exhibition on the wives of Kremlin leaders illuminates a turbulent century. The exhibition,"Russian First Ladies in the 20th Century" -- just opened at Moscow's Museum of Contemporary History -- displays clothes, jewelry, photographs and furniture relating to these women who stood, mostly silently, by their husbands, but also symbolised their time

Germany’s Black Years Seen From the Inside (Art Exhibit/Paris)

It can be argued that Impressionism killed off historical painting, and with it the tradition of portraying military victories on canvas. Yet the genre was not quite dead. Early in the 20th century history painting made another appearance in art, and this time, stripped of glory and heroism, war was finally shown in all its ugliness. In a sense it could not be otherwise. Before World War I, most major conflicts had been wars of movement, climaxing in set-piece battles resolved in a

Albums cataloging Nazi-looted art presented to National Archives

The discovery of two albums detailing stolen French art that the Nazis were to take to Germany for Adolf Hitler's personal collection was announced Thursday at the National Archives. The leather-bound albums created by a special unit of the Third Reich contain photographs of art by Hubert Robert and Francois Boucher. Allen [Weinstein], chief archivist of the United States, called it, "One of the most significant finds related to Hitler's premeditated theft of art a

Court lets Taylor keep Van Gogh

The US Supreme Court has upheld the decision to let Elizabeth Taylor keep a Van Gogh painting that may have been seized by the Nazis in World War II. An appeal was made by descendants of a Jewish woman who said she was forced to sell it before fleeing Germany in 1939. Judges refused to review a US appeals court ruling that dismissed the case because it was deemed too late to bring further action. The actress bought the painting, worth $10-15m (£5-8m), in 1963.

Iran Hides Western Masterworks

Paintings by van Gogh, Picasso, Renoir, Monet and Gauguin are among an estimated $5 billion worth of Western art locked in a basement beneath the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, The Guardian of London reported. Acquired in the 1970s, the collection includes “Mural on a Red Indian Ground,” one of the most valuable Jackson Pollock paintings, as well as Andy Warhol portraits. There are no plans to display them. All paintings the museum does exhibit are by Iranian artists. Habibollah Sadeghi, dir

Diary reveals feisty side of Katharine Hepburn

Katharine Hepburn was as strong-willed and prickly as the characters she played, previously unreleased diaries and private letters have revealed. The papers, covering her theatre career and donated by the trustees of her estate to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, show the late actress as the sort of woman prepared to call a policeman a "moron" to his face and to fight for the right to utter expletives on stage. The 22 boxes of papers, which

Films no longer wait for history

Phil Donahue is getting in the last word. One of the first television personalities to speak out against America's hapless adventure in Iraq, Donahue was also among the war's earliest media casualties. He lost his MSNBC talk show back in 2003 when, according to an internal memo, his bosses had begun worrying that he would turn his show into "a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." Donahue, for

What Hillary can learn from the movie about Elizabeth

Queens are meant to be looked at, not touched. Early in the new film "Elizabeth: The Golden Age," England's Elizabeth I, played by Cate Blanchett, is bored by a bad date. Watching, at close range, is a flock of curious courtiers; her suitor, a stuttering continental royal, is clearly terrified by the mob. Ever gracious, the queen offers some advice. Her secret for life in the public eye, she tells her companion, is to pretend she lives behind "a pane of glass." It keeps her s

The Theatrical Katharine Hepburn, in Journals and Letters

The letter to George C. Tyler, a theatrical producer in New York, suggests a young actress that he “might keep in mind” for a part. “She has had a variety of experience,” it says, and “she comes from a good family.” The well-bred lady was Katharine Hepburn, and the undated letter, from a family friend, is part of a cache of theater-related photographs, scrapbooks, journals, scripts and more. Four years after Hepburn’s death, the material forms a gift from her estate to the New York

NYT raves about Bernard Tschumi's New Acropolis Museum (Rome)

NO sane architect, one can assume, would want to invite comparisons between his building and the Parthenon. So it comes as little surprise that the New Acropolis Museum, which stands at the foot of one of the great achievements of human history, is a quiet work, especially by the standards of its flamboyant Swiss-born architect, Bernard Tschumi. But in mastering his ego, Mr. Tschumi pulled off an impressive accomplishment: a building that is both an enlightening meditation on the Pa

Why are they publishing so many of the rough drafts of great writers' works?

WE are a nation of grad students, or that’s what people in the book business seem to be hoping as they race to sell us not only the finished work of famous authors but also the rough drafts. To compete with Knopf’s new translation of “War and Peace,” by the husband-and-wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, for example, HarperCollins has brought out a translation, by Andrew Bromfield, of an earlier version of the novel, completed three years before the final text but n