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

British former colonies showing great interest everything empire-ish

For nearly 50 years, everybody has tiptoed around the subject but hardly dared to mention it by name.   Now, the Empire is being brought out of the shadows by the people who were once its subjects. So great is the interest from Commonwealth subjects keen to know more about their heritage, that the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol is to put the private photographic collections of hundreds of former British colonists on line as part of its new Images of

Reaction mixed on Flight 587 memorial

Hundreds of relatives and friends of the victims in the nation's second deadliest air accident dedicated a much-awaited memorial Sunday with mementoes and mixed emotions. Wearing their loss on T-shirts, scarves and buttons, families clutching red roses and photographs gathered on a foggy beachfront to look up the names of 265 loved ones killed when American Airlines Flight 587 crashed five years ago. "It's something that we can come to and pray," said Ana Lora

You Can Make ’Em Like They Used To (Movies)

N 1989 an unknown 26-year-old filmmaker from Louisiana delivered what might have been the final blow to the shaky edifice known as the Hollywood studio system. Steven Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies and Videotape,” an independently financed tale of love and adultery, won the grand prize of the Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d’Or, as well as an acting prize for one of its stars, James Spader. Acquired by the fledging distribution company Miramax, the film, made with a reported budget of $1.

The late music promoter Bill Graham's trove of souvenirs and recordings strikes a chord online

With their long hair and scruffy jeans, the rock fans queued up outside the Fillmore Auditorium could almost be mistaken for the throngs that flocked to this concert palace in the 1960s. And just like in the old days, the bands they've come to see — a heavy-metal triple helping of Goatwhore, High on Fire and Venom — might trigger a few tsk-tsks from the over-30 crowd. Goatwhore? Whatever happened to bands with class, like Foghat? There are differences, to b

Richard Burton's village pays tribute to 'exiled' actor

The Welsh village of Pontrhydyfen lies in a hollow rather than a valley. It is a cosy toad-in-the-hole sort of place, surrounded by wooded hills and crossed by two tall viaducts built in the industrial age. In the shadow of one of the structures stands the terraced house where Richard Burton was born. Two tiny plaques record the fact of his birth inside a recently built glass porch at the front. One, barely visible, pays tribute to a "world star". It has bee

Art Deco star shined brightly and briefly

In 1911 the St. Petersburg banker Maurice Stifter held a fancy dress ball. His young niece by marriage, Tamara, came as a Polish peasant, with a goose on a lead. She was probably not more than 13 or 14, but managed to attract the attention of one of the city's most eligible bachelors, Tadeusz Lempicki, a handsome, titled Polish lawyer in his early twenties. Five years later he married her. By the time she launched herself as an artist at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1922, Tamara'

National Gallery Scores Masterpiece by Eakins

The National Gallery of Art has co-purchased one of the 19th century's best-known American paintings, "The Gross Clinic" by Thomas Eakins, for $68 million. The price was a record for a work by the famous and once-scandalous Philadelphia artist. "This is the most important sale of a 19th-century American painting ever," said Marc Porter, president of Christie's Americas, which facilitated the sale. He said the previous records for Eakins paintings were $5.4 millio

HBO's Big Love ... And Polygamy

Big Love, HBO’s fictional take on a Mormon family living in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, has ignited the latest round of polygamy debate. The show paints a benign picture of a Viagra-popping husband happily juggling three wives and seven children. Although the Mormon Church renounced plural marriage in 1890, it’s estimated that nearly 37,000 fundamentalist Mormons still practice polygamy today, most of them living in isolated communities in Utah, Arizona, and Colorado. But is polygamy a

For a Shipwreck of Legend, the Spotlight Dims a Bit (Edmund Fitzgerald)

Thirty-one years after it occurred and almost as long since it was immortalized in a popular song, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald will finally recede into the ranks of other Great Lakes maritime disasters at an annual memorial service here. The rector of the Mariners’ Church of Detroit, as well as families of the 29 men lost on the ship, say it is time to de-emphasize the wreck, particularly now that Canadian officials have put it off limits to divers, a goal of those who have h

The Queen finds a Caravaggio in her storeroom (UK)

She has one of the world's greatest art collections, an unrivalled set of hundreds of Leonardo drawings, almost 30 Canalettos and paintings by most of western art's greatest figures including Tintoretto, Vermeer, Holbein and Dürer. Yesterday the Queen acquired her first Caravaggio, worth £50 million or more if she could ever sell it. The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew, owned by the Royal Family for almost 400 years, has lain unloved and seldom seen in a storeroom at

Collective puts Marx's Das Kapital on stage

There is no wedding, no romantic interest and no plot to speak of. Instead the reader of Karl Marx's epic work, Das Kapital, is treated to a lengthy treatise on the division of labour and capitalist modes of production, offered up in long, convoluted sentences. Yet none of this has deterred a German theatre group from achieving the seemingly impossible: bringing the huge classic on economic theory to the stage. Not since Proust was serialised has a dramatist faced suc

Avant-garde, surreal, gothic - who would have thought cartoonist Walt Disney had such a dark side?

Walt Disney warped my mind. It was the first time I visited a cinema, to see Sleeping Beauty. That forest of thorns enveloping the castle has haunted me ever since; in my dreams for years, a great chasm opened up before the prince, an impossible yawning space full of spikes and twisting briars. Last night, I watched it with my daughter. What will it become in her mind? It felt like passing on a folk tale by the fire, and yet some people are wary of exposing their children to the genius of Disney

A piece of rock'n'roll history: 75 years of Abbey Road

It is a solid Georgian house, almost anonymous, in an unremarkable but busy north London road. A few cars are always parked on the frontage. Otherwise, its significance is only indicated by the daily gaggle of tourists, photographing each other on the nearby zebra crossing and adding their names to the graffiti on the wall. But to go inside the doors of No 3, once you have passed underneath the small black sign that says Abbey Road, is to enter a place that is somehow more than jus

Italy Has Regained Many Stolen Antiquities, but Its Talks With the Getty Stall

A year after putting an American museum curator on trial on charges of acquiring antiquities illegally, the Italian government has had some impressive results. Relying on court evidence and aggressive public diplomacy, it has persuaded the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to surrender some of their finest artifacts. And ancient artworks at other museums are now firmly in Italy’s sights. Yet negotiations have stalled with the very institution that has b

National Museum of the Marine Corps: NYT Review

Triangle, VA: I may not be alone in my reaction to the National Museum of the Marine Corps, which is opening on Friday adjacent to the Marine base in Quantico, outside Washington. In making my way through its 118,000 square feet of exhibitions, timelines, sound-and-light shows, historical videos, battle accounts and fighting machines, I felt a little like an alien visitor getting to know another culture. I am not among those for whom these packaged experiences (executed with great skill in the c

Athens Dedicates New Museum to Nobel

The Greek capital hardly springs immediately to mind as the home for a shrine to the 19th century Swedish industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel. But letters from Victor Hugo, Russian oil field maps and explosives factory share certificates will be among the items going on display next year in Athens in a new museum dedicated to Nobel, the museum's founder announced this week. Greek historian Giorgos Marcou's family donated the funds for the project, and bought documents an

From a Survivor of Nagasaki, Insight on the Nuclear Future

As Iraq devolves into chaos, and North Korea strives to join the nuclear nations, the exhortations of “The Last Atomic Bomb” ring with an uncomfortable currency. Directed by the veteran documentarian Robert Richter, the movie is an unvarnished emotional plea for nuclear disarmament voiced primarily by Sakue Shimohira, a survivor of Nagasaki. Just 10 when a plutonium bomb exploded over that city on Aug. 9, 1945, Ms. Shimohira now devotes herself to disseminating her harrowing story

Louis Masur: What a Historian Thinks of Flags of Our Fathers

[Louis P. Masur is director of the American-studies program at Trinity College, in Connecticut.] Photographs hold us in their spell. We stare and study and think, So this is what happened. But we know full well that a picture represents only an instant, and that it can misrepresent the event it captures, sometimes even become the event itself. Photographs not only tell stories, but they also have stories. And behind those stories, as Clint Eastwood reminds us in the latest film he h

Recreating an Aerial Duel Over Guadalcanal, Mystery on Board (TV Documentary)

Earlier installments of the entertaining PBS series “Secrets of the Dead” have looked at assassinations, zeppelin explosions and other historical incidents with “CSI”-style precision to determine why lives were lost. Tonight’s offering tries to determine why one life was spared. It’s called “Dogfight Over Guadalcanal,” and it features some dandy re-creations of an aerial duel fought in August 1942 during that World War II battle. Two hotshots chased after each other in the sky: Sabu

Cowboys and Indians Reconsidered: The Mythic West, Lassoed In by Reality

LOS ANGELES — Breakaway bottles used as props in fake saloon fights, posters for grade-B movies, a Hopalong Cassidy board game, Annie Oakley’s pistols, Gary Cooper’s toupee and a diorama of the O.K. Corral shootout: this is what you might expect to find in a museum founded by America’s Favorite Singing Cowboy, Gene Autry. And here, at the Museum of the American West (formerly the Autry Museum of Western Heritage) in Griffith Park, nostalgic film buffs and aficionados of cowboy cult