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

World War I Veterans Face Sweet and Fitting Lie (Play/NYC)

Two young men who have just returned from war meet one night at a college party and discover that their mutual abhorrence of what they have been through has led them to a deep loathing of the politicians who caused it. In Stephen Massicotte’s excellent new play, “The Oxford Roof Climber’s Rebellion,” the two veterans are T. E. Lawrence and Robert Graves, and it takes no leap of the imagination to translate their World War I experiences into stories from today’s newspaper. The play,

Dye in the Trevi: Some Romans See Red, but Others Cry ‘Art!’

One day a vandal, the next an artist. That is the story of the baseball-capped culprit who dumped a bottle of dye into the famed Trevi Fountain here on Friday, turning the waters blood-red for a day. As soon as it was clear that the 18th-century Baroque fountain had not been seriously damaged, intellectuals and art critics began reconsidering the gesture as something nearing genius. “Once the indignation had died down, we rediscovered the Fountain of Trevi,” said Rober

Saving a Folk Artist’s Paradise, Lost to Weeds and Ruin, Is a Tangled Affair (GEORGIA)

PENNVILLE, Ga., Oct. 21 — To understand how Howard Finster, a Baptist preacher and bicycle repairman, became one of the most notable folk artists in the world, it is worth a visit to where it all started: the tiny white wooden house in this hamlet, tucked into the state’s northwestern corner. It was in the Howard Finster Vision House, a name it has acquired since his death in 2001, that Mr. Finster said he was directed by God to stop repairing bicycles and paint “sermon art.” And it

Laurence Fishburne as Thurgood Marshall (PLAY/NYC)

Laurence Fishburne is going to Broadway next spring in a production of “Thurgood,” the one-man play by George Stevens Jr. about the former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. The producer Bill Haber’s company, Ostar Productions, started making plans for Broadway after the show’s brief, sold-out run at the Westport Country Playhouse in 2006 with James Earl Jones in the title role. “Thurgood” will open on April 20 at the Booth Theater, with previews beginning on March 30.

Ellis Island’s Forgotten Hospital (Documentary)

When most New Yorkers think of Ellis Island, they probably recall the Great Hall where 12 million immigrants were processed, which opened to the public in 1990 after three decades of neglect and disrepair. But unknown to most people is the fact that Ellis Island contains a long-forgotten 22-building hospital complex, which during its busiest years, from 1902 to 1930, was one of the largest public health undertakings in United States history, and a place of heartbreak and hope, sickn

30 episode series on King Farouk

Ramadan TV is over, but one serialised drama lives on: Hala Sakr seeks out informed opinion regarding the controversy surrounding the monarch's portrayal in King Farouk, which though restricted to the Saudi satellite channel during Ramadan is now being screened again on national television It's been 55 years since King Farouk I, Egypt's last monarch, left the country and the throne, and 40 years since his death in Italy. Having kept a more or less low profile since then, the regent

Lone Bidder Buys Strands of Che's Hair at U.S. Auction

The hair itself looked unexceptional, dark with sun-burnished tips, perhaps 100 strands, wrapped in a piece of notebook paper. But when the final gavel fell Thursday in a bizarre auction conducted under high security here, the hair and the sheaf of historical documents that accompanied it sold for $100,000, the minimum bid. The lock of hair on auction was taken 40 years ago from the corpse of Che Guevara, the famed revolutionary and cultural icon, by one of the men who had tracked

French Debate: Is Maori Head Body Part or Art?

Since 1875, the mummified, tattooed head of a Maori warrior has been part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Natural History at Rouen in Normandy. But when Rouen’s mayor arranged recently to return it to New Zealand as an act of “atonement” for colonial-era trafficking in human remains, the national Ministry of Culture stepped in to block him. The ministry contends that the head is a work of art that belongs to France and that its return could set an unfortuna

Da Vinci Code fans can pay £4,000 to show innocence of the Knights Templar

Fans of The Da Vinci Code may think that £4,000 is a small price to pay for an exclusive document that clears the good name of the mysterious Knights Templar. The Templars were rumoured to have found the Holy Grail. The Vatican is selling a limited edition of life-sized replicas of a giant forgotten parchment that absolves the mysterious knights of their status as heretics. Only 799 copies of the document, which is the size of a small dinner table, will be

Camera 'reveals' Mona Lisa's missing eyebrows

Art historians have come up with countless theories over the years to explain why the Mona Lisa appears to have no eyebrows. But now Pascal Cotte, a Parisian engineer, claims to have the answer after spending 3,000 hours studying digital scans of Leonardo Da Vinci's enigmatic 16th-century portrait. Using a high-definition camera, he claims to have uncovered the fine brush strokes of eyebrows and lashes Leonardo originally gave the Florentine merchant's wife.

The Relief of Belsen (UK Documentary Review)

Some years ago, I walked around Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. It’s an astonishing building, based on a deconstruction of the Star of David. A lot of Berliners had paid to look at it, proud that this beautiful edifice representing modern, liberal, cultured Germany coming to terms with its past was there. Nobody mentioned, or seemed to notice, that it was empty. They hadn’t put the exhibit in. Berlin’s Jews were absent from Berlin’s Jewish Museum, as they were from Berlin. It was a m

Heroic Lafayette: French Founding Father at NY Historical Society (Exhibit)

New-York Historical Society President and CEO Louise Mirrer, curator Richard Rabinowitz and historian and Lafayette in Two Worlds author Lloyd Kramer will provide members of the media with an in-depth preview of the Historical Society’s new exhibition, French Founding Father: Lafayette’s Return to Washington’s America, on Thursday, November 15 from 10 a.m. to Noon at the New-York Historical Society (170 Central Park West at 77th Street). On the occasion of Gilbert du Motier Lafayet

New documentary about Jimmy Carter

JONATHAN DEMME is a bit of an opportunist. Other less-alert types might have visited Scotty’s Fish and Chips in a rough-and-tumble part of town here, been impressed by the oxtail stew, the friendly staff and the humble but spotless surroundings, and then come back for lunch. But Mr. Demme, the director of more than two dozen films, liked the restaurant so much he decided to rewrite a scene previously set in an arcade in “Dancing With Shiva,” a feature film starring Anne Hathaway he’

NYT Raves About ... King-Size Stories, Woven for the Ages (NY/Exhibit)

No one was fully prepared for the hullabaloo over “Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence” five years ago at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tapestry? Doesn’t that come under home furnishings? Isn’t it, basically, rugs on the wall? A specialty item? The show was a sensation. New Yorkers came, they saw, they plotzed, they came back in droves. As word spread, international visitors flew in to take a peek and ended up staying for days. I suspect that the current follow-up, “

25 Secrets of Mona Lisa Revealed

New images uncover 25 secrets about the Mona Lisa, including proof that Leonardo da Vinci gave her eyebrows, solving a long-held mystery. The images are part of an exhibition, "Mona Lisa Secrets Revealed," which will feature new research by French engineer Pascal Cotte and debut in the United States at the Metreon in San Francisco. The Mona Lisa showcase is part of a larger exhibition called "Da Vinci: An Exhibition of Genius." Cotte, founder of Lumi

Deneuve's father accused of collaborating with Nazis

The father of the iconic French film star Catherine Deneuve was a low-level Nazi collaborator during the Second World War, according to an unauthorised biography published yesterday. Mme Deneuve, who is 64 on Tuesday, emerges from the biography, which she tried to block, as a calculating and unhappy person, driven by money and an obsessive need for privacy and independence. The actress, who has been described on numerous occasions as the most beautiful woman in the worl

A history of the American snapshot

Click [on the SOURCE link] to read a slide-show essay about the history of the American snapshot. [HNN Editor: To watch the slide show look for the link at the top left of your screen. Don't hit the "play" button. That brings up the advertisement.]

Dizzy Gillespie: Happy Birthday

Back in the late 1930s, Cab Calloway, the bandleader whose songs “Reefer Man” and “Sportin’ Life” gave a just-say-yes nod to drugs, seemed pretty exotic fare to the mainstream audiences he courted. John Birks Gillespie, nicknamed Dizzy for his constant clowning, thought otherwise. In his early 20s, he considered Calloway a square for preferring Jonah Jones’s mellow, accessible swing to Dizzy’s dissonant bebop, a style that Calloway branded “Chinese music.” When Calloway made Jones h

Ready or Not, France Opens Museum on Immigration

Immigration is the big, unavoidable issue not just in the United States but across Europe now, and nowhere more obviously than here in France. The latest proof arrived last week in the form of a new museum, the National Center of the History of Immigration. On the edge of the city’s Bois de Vincennes, in a comfortable neighborhood, it has opened far from the poor suburbs where Muslim youths rioted a couple of summers ago, burning thousands of cars partly in protest against Nicolas Sarkozy, then

New Dreyfus Affair exhibit (NY)

A new exhibition, “Alfred Dreyfus: The Fight for Justice,” at the Yeshiva University Museum, won’t fully explain the Affair — and, indeed, the show is flawed by a lack of an explanatory narrative and by much untranslated French in handwritten documents. Perhaps the facts were considered so familiar that they didn’t need to be put in context, as was probably the case when the exhibition was unveiled in Paris at the Museum of the Art and History of Judaism in 2006. But that said, if