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

Moonshine returns

The fabled liquor of outlaws and gangsters is making a comeback with craft distillers. Too bad it's still illegal. Standing in the middle of the room at the Sweetwater Distillery in Petaluma, Calif., Bill Owens held a feedbag full of stale donuts high in the air. With a crowd gathered around him, he dumped its contents -- chocolate glazed, jelly-filled, iced with sprinkles -- into a tank filled with hot water and plunged an industrial mixer into the liquid, splattering warm,

'Manson' on History channel

The horror of the Tate-La Bianca murders 40 years ago last month is revisited in this two-hour, dramatically reenacted documentary, but there's little new to learn. The term "crime of the century" has been worn thin by overuse, but the slaughter of seven people in two days by members of the Manson family in August 1969 still requires its hyperbolic ring. The Tate-LaBianca murders scared Los Angeles witless and horrified an already deeply unsettled nation. Forty years later

Old Masters Picture Gallery Announces Fundraising to Restore Masterpiece by Canaletto

“View of Dresden from the Right Bank below the Augustus Bridge”, by Bernardo Bellotto, Canaletto (1721-1780), is in need of urgent restoration. The painting is one of the most popular in the Dresden Collection housed at the Old Masters Picture Gallery. The view of Dresden is second to none, it has been shown for over 200 years and is now in need of restoration. The Friends of the Museum have started a campaign to raise money for the painting to undergo the restoration needed. Painter and sculpto

Beaconsfield to Mark the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948

To mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, one woman – artist Monica Ross – aims to carry out 60 solo, collective and multi-lingual recitations of the Declaration in different contexts and with different groups of people. This is number 13. On 19 September the collective recitation, from memory, of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, at Beaconsfield, will be made exclusively by artists. New confirmations to co-recite ar

Stefan Kanfer: Memo to the Führer, A report on Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

[Stefan Kanfer, a contributing editor of City Journal and a former editor of Time, is the author, most recently, of a biography of Marlon Brando, Somebody.] TO: Adolf Hitler FROM: Julius Streicher DATELINE: Hell Mein Führer: Much excitement to report! The good news is piling up like copies of Der Stürmer in the good old days, when I published caricatures of the International Jew as predator and violator. Remember what we discovered in the 1930

Choreographers Bill T. Jones Salutes His Friend Lincoln

Bill T. Jones is fond of saying that when he was growing up, Abraham Lincoln was the one white man he was allowed to love unconditionally. Sometimes he includes John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert as well. It’s a catchy sound bite, the sort that comes in handy for people who often find themselves in the spotlight. And it has served Mr. Jones well over the last two years, as he has undertaken one of the most ambitious and challenging projects of an ambitious and challenging career

Fairy tales have ancient origin

They have been told as bedtime stories by generations of parents, but fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood may be even older than was previously thought. A study by anthropologists has explored the origins of folk tales and traced the relationship between varients of the stories recounted by cultures around the world. The researchers adopted techniques used by biologists to create the taxonomic tree of life, which shows how every species comes from a common ances

Fighting over Frida Kahlo

Policing the legacy of artists can be a tough business. Nowhere is it tougher than in Mexico, where the magnetic, self-mythologizing painter Frida Kahlo (1907-54) shot from relative obscurity to iconic status only in the last quarter-century. Now, a festering dispute over a little-known archive of ephemera attributed to Kahlo has erupted into open warfare. Despite the tantalizing possibility that some or maybe even all the material is authentic, a sharp line has been drawn in the ar

A Tribute to the Man, Beyond Just the Mouse

At first glance the Walt Disney Family Museum, which opens on Oct. 1, would seem a serious, even scholarly endeavor. Financed by the Walt Disney Family Foundation and run by Richard Benefield, the former deputy director of the Harvard University Art Museums, it is dedicated not to Disney the entertainment behemoth but to Disney the man, from his birth in Kansas City, Mo., to his role as a powerful studio boss in 1960s Hollywood. But the museum is likely to defy expectations of sober restraint. A

Amazon.com Offers to Replace Copies of Orwell Book

Amazon invited some unflattering literary analogies earlier this summer when it remotely erased unlicensed versions of two George Orwell novels from its customers’ Kindle reading devices. Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, apologized to customers for the deletions in July. And late Thursday, the company tried to put the incident behind it, offering to deliver new copies of “1984” and “Animal Farm” at no charge to affected customers. Amazon said in an e-mail mes

Smithsonian Institution Libraries Unveils "Darwin's Legacy"

The Smithsonian Institution Libraries opens its new exhibition “Darwin’s Legacy” in the National Museum of Natural History Sept. 10. The exhibition features the first edition of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” (1859), a revolutionary book that changed the course of modern science. November 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the book’s publication. This exhibition will be on display through Sept. 12, 2010. “On the Origin of Species” is widely heralded as the foundation

Brooklyn Museum Announces Special Exhibition of Body Part Fragments of Egyptian Sculpture

Body Parts: Ancient Egyptian Fragments and Amulets features thirty-five representations of individual body parts from the Brooklyn Museum’s ancient Egyptian collection, many of which will be displayed for the first time. This special exhibition will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum from November 19, 2009, through October 2, 2011. This exhibition uses objects created as distinct body parts, as well as fragments of sculpture, to highlight the realistic portrayal of individual body p

New Book Reveals Secrets About Nazi-Plundered Treasures

In World War II, the Allies fought a Germanic threat intent on taking over the world. Beyond the familiar history lesson lies the untold story of the Nazi plot to also seize the world’s greatest cultural treasures, thwarted by one tiny band of soldiers as detailed in the new book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (Center Street, September 2009, $26.99). This overlooked story from WWII is relevant today in that irreplaceable historical artif

Photos: In Revolutionary Color: Russian photos taken a hundred years

... Between 1907 and 1915, Prokudin-Gorskii rode through even restricted parts of pre-revolutionary Russia in his specially fitted dark-room rail car, shooting color photos (a technology still in its infancy) by a method of his own invention. He took three consecutive photographs of his subjects with three separate filters—red, green, and blue—and then combined them into full-color projections, thereby capturing a huge range of architecture, infrastructure and people. After the cza

African American Museum's Lonnie Bunch Is on a Mission

The discoveries can come through late-night e-mails, conversations with elderly black women over weak tea, or at a community center where someone brings in their great-grandfather's diploma. Such is life at the moment for Lonnie G. Bunch III, the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, who is working diligently to bring essential documents and artifacts of the black American story to the public. So far he has a Selmer trumpet once owned by j

Sherlock Holmes: Martial Artist

He’s played Iron Man and Charlie Chaplin, but Oscar-winner Robert Downey Jr. says his greatest challenge may be his next role: Sherlock Holmes. The 44-year-old actor will star as the great sleuth in the Guy Ritchie film "Sherlock Holmes," opening on Christmas Day. Scottish-born author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote four novels and 56 short stories about Holmes, and over the years there have been countless stage and screen portrayals of the detective, who first appeared in p

Charles T. Pinck: 'Basterd'ized history

[Charles T. Pinck is president of the OSS Society, an organization of OSS veterans and their descendants in McLean.] Given the very close relationship between Hollywood and World War's II Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces, whose ranks included director John Ford and actors Robert Montgomery and Sterling Hayden, it's troubling that Hollywood has distorted the history of the OSS in two recent major motion pictures, "The G

Waiting for William, seeing history's greatest writer for the first time

If it's him, we're going to have to rethink the hair. The styled courtier who gazes out of the portrait is undeniably a seducer, and that much was true of William Shakespeare: He was an arch-persuader with language. But we didn't reckon he was such a looker. Frankly, we always thought he was a bald pudge. Whereas this man is bouffant and handsome, complicatedly so, with his doily of a collar and come-hither expression. The fellow is clearly no earl -- he lacks the arrogant jaw -- b

Obama photo evokes Kennedy moment

The US White House has released a photograph of President Barack Obama's daughter Sasha sneaking up on her father as he works in the Oval Office. The image has drawn comparisons

John Nichols: Auden's Love Poem for Humanity

[John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written The Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.] Seventy years ago today, the military might of Nazi Germany was thrown against the free state of Poland. Hitler's planes, troops and tanks swept across the northern, southern and western borders of the nation that had through treaties allied itself with Great Britain, France and ot