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

NYT gives unflattering review of renovated Federal Hall (NYC)

It is somewhat eerie when everything about a place declares that it is a center, but there is nothing for it to be the center of. We sense this in the cavernously grand railway terminals of once-thriving cities, in the government buildings of once-great empires, and, on a modest scale, in the newly renovated Federal Hall National Memorial, which this week became home to the new Federal Hall Visitor Center. The place itself — at 26 Wall Street, opposite the New York Stock Exchange in

A Northern City's Southern Shame (Exhibit/N-Y Historical Society)

President Bush won only 24% of the vote in New York City in 2004. Abraham Lincoln did not do much better. In 1860, the president many of us regard as America's greatest won less than 35% of the city's vote. In 1864, he won even less — about 33%. Why most New Yorkers did not care for Lincoln is a question that will be answered to most visitors' satisfaction in "New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War," a well-designed, richly informative exhibition opening today at the New-York Hist

Historians Resurrect ‘Cartoon Medicine’ for a New Generation

“Private Snafu vs. Malaria Mike” was among the animated films presented on Oct. 25 and 26 at the Cartoon Medicine Show at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. The show featured animated public health films from the 1920s to the ’60s — some well known, others rarely screened in the last 40 or 50 years — from the collection of the National Library of Medicine. The films cover such topics as personal hygiene, malaria prevention, cancer detection, tuberculosis screening and t

NYT raves about History Boys movie but concludes it's not great art

The current of intellectual energy snapping through “The History Boys,” the ferociously engaging screen adaptation of Alan Bennett’s Tony Award-winning play, set in a boys’ school in northern England in 1983, feels like electrical brain stimulation. As two teachers jockey for the hearts and minds of eight teenage schoolboys preparing to apply to Oxford and Cambridge, their epigrams send up small jolts of pleasure and excitement. How to teach and interpret history is the question. On

Exhibit teaches children about slavery, abolition

RAMONA – Andrea Martinez and Brenden Farley are only 8 years old, but they know the meaning of abolition and are learning about the Emancipation Proclamation thanks to a traveling history exhibit that opened at their school this week. The exhibit was sent to Ramona Elementary from the New York-based Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The 50-foot traveling panel exhibit traces the history of the movement to abolish slavery from the framing of the Constitution to abolition

Artist reunited with his hated other half

An astonishing discovery in a provincial saleroom in America has revealed the last hateful rites of the marriage of Francis Hayman, one of the most prominent artists in early Georgian England, a founder-member of the Royal Academy and the man who taught and inspired Thomas Gainsborough. If every picture tells a story, it is fair to say that art historians have been flummoxed by Hayman's earliest known self-portrait, done around 1735. He painted himself at work – with palette and bru

‘Rocky’ Statue Makes Comeback at Museum

On a recent windy Saturday, a half-dozen groups waited patiently outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art for their turn to have their pictures taken with a statue. It may not be great art, but the sculpture of Rocky, the fictional boxer portrayed by Sylvester Stallone in what seems like an endless series of movies, is definitely a great draw. “I only came for Rocky, but, heck, why not go inside?” said Miller Redpath, a visitor from Minneapolis, there with his two sons. “

Why Vietnam's best-known author has stayed silent

It was a soldier's story, set in battlefields of rotted corpses and the tortured soul of a young teenager who went off to serve his country, and when the novel was published in 1991 it brought Bao Ninh the closest thing in Vietnam to instant literary celebrity. Ninh never published again - although he is believed to have finished another novel about the war, called Steppe, that he has hesitated to submit for publication. 'I stopped myself. I kept holding myself back,'

Fury at Holocaust exhibit ban in Berlin

It was her first trip by train, and she will never forget it. German SS-men were yelling outside, and the cattle wagons had bare wooden floors instead of seats, with observation slits instead of windows. Edith Erbrich remembers how an SS man ordered her father to lift her and her sister up because her mother, standing outside the train, wanted to see her once more. 'My father told us that mummy cannot join us, she has to take care of the house,' she said. Erbrich was seven years ol

Castle Where Couple Wed Has Rich History

BRACCIANO, Italy -- The romantic 15th-century castle where Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes exchanged vows in a lavish ceremony Saturday belongs to a family whose ancestors include a former pope and once hosted princes, though in modern times it has seen its share of celebrity wedding. The medieval Odescalchi Castle belongs to the noble Odescalchi family, whose ancestors include Benedetto Odescalchi, the 17th century pope Innocent XI. It once hosted princes but is used nowad

American History's Greatest Hits Play In a New Venue

Sometimes a good de-cluttering is just what the home of an insatiable collector needs. In the case of the National Museum of American History, its curators have taken a hard look at their millions of objects and set out just 150 of the best in an illuminating display. The extreme culling was needed because the museum on the Mall closed Sept. 5 for a two-year renovation. It has borrowed a rambling gallery at the National Air and Space Museum for a new exhibit called "Treasures o

In Glitter and Glory, the Rock of All Ages (Exhibit/NYC)

Gold,” a mostly riveting exhibition that opens today at the American Museum of Natural History, is the museum’s latest show-and-tell about a precious natural material. Its predecessors have been devoted to amber, diamonds and pearls. Taken together, these exhibitions form a genre at which the museum excels. The formula, executed here by James D. Webster, overseeing curator of the exhibition and chairman of the museum’s division of earth and planetary sciences, and Charles S. Spencer

Solzhenitsyn lives to see his writings honoured in motherland

HE IS the greatest living Russian writer, a Nobel laureate whose exposé of the Soviet labour camps symbolised intellectual resistance to tyranny. Now, in the twilight of an extraordinary life, the complete works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn are to be published in his homeland for the first time. The first of 30 volumes were released this week in a project that will be completed in 2010. The former dissident, 88 next month and in failing health, hinted that he did not exp

Ellis Island adds ghostly photo exhibit of old hospital

"Shadow and Memory" a collection of Christopher Barnes photographs of Ellis Island’s un-restored buildings will soon go on display at the immigration center, highlighting the effort to rehabilitate the 30 dilapidated structures on the island's south side. When Ellis Island closed as an Immigration Center in 1954, many of its buildings were left to rot. The main building was finally restored and opened as a museum in 1990, but most people don't realize the other half of the island rem

Toying with science from King George III to Barbie (Exhibit)

A rare picture game dating back to 1760 shares center stage with plastic ducks, antique chemistry sets and Barbie dolls in a new exhibit showing how adults and children engage with science through toys. "Playing with Science...Your Favorite Toys" includes curiosities from the London Science Museum's medical, science, engineering and computing collections and treasured objects from individuals including a Space Rescue game made by British-born astronaut Nicholas Patrick long before he j

New Kennedy Museum in Berlin Draws Emotional Responses

Tears rolled down Marianne Monjau's cheeks as she watched a short film of John F. Kennedy's famous 1963"Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in West Berlin at a new permanent exhibition to the slain U.S. president. Monjau, 64, had been a student in Communist East Berlin when she heard a live radio broadcast of Kennedy's stirring affirmation of support to the city trapped precariously in the middle of Communist Eastern Europe, and watching his speech at the new museum brought back a flood of

Volumes of first full Solzhenitsyn collection published in Russia

The wife of Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn on Thursday presented the initial three volumes of the first full collection of his works to be published in Russia — a country still struggling with the legacy of the oppressive era he documented. It was a cherished moment for the aging writer, who has been through prison camps and exile and, Natalya Solzhenitsyn said, feels the "draining of the life force" as his 88th birthday approaches. He was not at the presentation.

The History Channel’s “Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower”

Here’s a message for premium-cable auteurs. For your next gritty series, forget organized criminals, Old West horse-traders, even agents in Hollywood. Instead, consider a truly radical clique: the Puritans. That odd little band, whose eccentric and sine-qua-non American accomplishments we celebrate next week, gets a tantalizing hearing Sunday on the History Channel’s “Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower.” The show is nominally a documentary, but it i

007: the spy who never dies

ACCORDING TO The Times yesterday, scientists are predicting that 50 years from now we will all be living on anti-ageing drugs and communicating with fish. This is, of course, speculation, so let me offer a safer prediction: half a century from now we will all still be watching James Bond films. And so will the fish. As long as they are British fish. And male. Bond was born with an anti-ageing drug in his fictional veins that is unique in our culture. Sons, as they grow up, progress

New exhibit on slavery and New York at the New-York Historical Society wins rave review in the NYT

When the New-York Historical Society opened an extensive exploration of slavery in New York last year with an ambitious exhibition, it began to transform how New York remembers itself. The city, of course, always had its riots, its social traumas, its eruptions of unrest, but wasn’t New York (at least in our cosmopolitan imaginations) immune from systematic associations with history’s more deplorable practices? If not always a model of tolerance, didn’t its growth as a port, its importance as a