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

Beatle's schoolboy photo auction

A schoolboy Paul is seen engrossed in a comic surrounded by classmates from Joseph Williams School, Liverpool, in the picture, taken in 1952. A woman recently took it into The Beatles Shop - a few metres away from the original Cavern Club in Liverpool. It will be among 315 items of Beatles memorabilia auctioned on 29 August. 'Truly amazing' The haul also features a class photograph of drummer Ringo Starr, aged eight, sitting smartly dressed

“Trafficked” exhibition at International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, UK

“Slavery has never been absent from the record of human civilisation,” William Hague writes in his biography of William Wilberforce, published in the bicentenary of the slave trade’s abolition. “Human ingenuity is such that illegal trading will always take place if a sufficient profit is to be had from the end-user,” the British Member of Parliament concludes “as the twenty-first-century traffic in drugs, arms and people continues to demonstrate.” So as we approach the 250th annive

Frankk Rich: 'Mad Men' Crashes Woodstock’s Birthday

[Frank Rich is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times.] IN our 24/7 mediasphere, this weekend’s misty Woodstock commemorations must share the screen with Americans screaming bloody murder at town hall meetings. It’s a vivid reminder that what most endures from America, 1969, is not the peace-and-love flower-power bacchanal of Woodstock legend but a certain style of political rage. The angry white folk shouting down their congressmen might be — literally in some cases — those angr

1969 "Bed-In for Peace" exhibition opens in Liverpool, UK

"Laurel and Hardy, that’s John and Yoko. And we stand a better chance under that guise because all the serious people like Martin Luther King and Kennedy and Gandhi got shot." -- John Lennon From the 1957 photograph of John Lennon playing in his skiffle band, The Quarrymen to the 1971 photograph of the former Beatle performing “Imagine”—exhibited at the opening and closing stages of the Beatles Story respectively—Lennon’s journey from artist to activis

Pivotal Works by Beckmann, Ernst, Munch, Picasso, Warhol and Others on Offer at Christie's

The Christie’s London bi-annual sale of Old Master, Modern and Contemporary Prints in September will feature a fantastic variety of original prints from the Renaissance to the present day including well-known artists such as Dürer, Rembrandt, Picasso, Beckmann, Matisse, Miro, Bacon, Warhol, Lichtenstein and Hockney. A leading highlight from the sale is Les Deux Femmes Nues, an important and rare series of 22 lithographs from 1945 by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), including five previou

Big Shots: Andy Warhol, Celebrity Culture, and the 1980s Opens at the Spencer Museum of Art

Joan Collins and Wayne Gretzky. Jean-Michel Basquiat and Liz Taylor. Chris Lawford and William S. Burroughs. What do these seemingly dissimilar individuals have to do with each other? The answer is simple: They were among the many celebrities whose images were captured by Andy Warhol with either his Big Shot Polaroid or a pocket-sized 35mm camera. And now, those photographs are coming together at the Spencer along with a host of others in a big, bold celebration of Warhol, celebrity, and the 198

National Museum of the American Indian Celebrates Four Landmark Anniversaries

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian inaugurates a season-long celebration of four landmark anniversaries through special exhibitions, events and family programming from September through November 2009. This fall marks the 20th anniversary of the signing of the legislation that created the museum, the 15th anniversary of the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, the 10th anniversary of the state-of-the-art collections facility in Suitland, Md., and the fifth anniversary

Michael Jackson Opus to include unseen lyrics and pictures

The only new official Michael Jackson book is being compiled after weeks of legal wrangling. It will include lyrics never seen before, plus drawings and pictures from the singer’s personal archives. The Michael Jackson Opus will be handbound in leather in a silk clamshell case and is being produced by the team behind several other Opus books, including one on Manchester United that changed hands this year for £1 million, making it the most expensive sports publication on record.

Charles Dickens was also accused of dumbing down

It must be a tough job running the Edinburgh International Festival. Quite apart from arranging all those performances of Wagner and Purcell, there is the stress of handling the multi-million-pound budget and the pressure of hundreds of thousands of expectant visitors. And on top of all that is the gnawing frustration, the sheer injustice, of knowing that even while you are putting the finishing touches to your radical reinterpretation of Handel's Judas Maccabaeus, most people think the real Fes

Robert Stone's documentary "Earth Days"

Much of Robert Stone's new documentary "Earth Days" feels like a Thomas Pynchon-style alternate-universe history of the United States, except that it all really happened: One-tenth of the American population demonstrated against pollution and environmental destruction; a 36-year-old ex-Jesuit seminarian whose platform included "exploring the universe" was elected governor of California and appointed an astronaut-turned-hippie as his science advisor; a female college student b

Apocalypse Now: A Classic Film and Its Sources, 30 Years On

Somewhere a soldier, or journalist, or bodyguard, or civilian contractor is writing the ultimate account of an Iraq War in which rock ’n’ rollers with one foot in the grave come of age while killing and being killed. It may be a memoir, it may be a novel. It is likelier a screenplay, since movies are where so much of literature can be found these days. Whatever its format, that writer has a powerful model in the Anthony Swofford’s death-haunted, heavy metal–tinged Jarhead, which, wi

Ole Christian Madsen reignites history in 'Flame & Citron'

After the end of World War II, all Danish boys wanted to be Flame and Citron -- two of the county's famed resistance fighters who died during the war. Bent Faurschou-Hviid and Jorgen Haagen Schmith were members of Denmark's Holger Danske resistance group. Faurschou-Hviid was named Flame due to his red hair; Schmith was called Citron because while working at the Citroën car factories in Copenhagen, he would sabotage the German trucks and cars. But over the decades, their

Fears stolen Natural History Museum birds will be used as fishing lures

Detectives fear that almost 300 rare and "irreplaceable" tropical birds stolen from the Natural History Museum's ornithological collection could be ripped to shreds for use as fishing lures, dress adornments and costume jewellery. Curators at the museum's bird collection in Tring, Hertfordshire, noticed that dozens of specimens had gone missing following a break-in on 24 June. Although the thieves left behind more than 8,000 "specimen types", includi

World first historical thesaurus to be published after 45 years' work

The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary will contain almost every word in English from Old English to the present day. It will contain nearly 800,000 meanings, organised along similar lines to Roget's Thesaurus, into more than 236,000 categories and subcategories. It is the first time such a thesaurus has been undertaken in any language. Professor Christian Kay, now 68, has dedicated almost her whole career to the task, compiling the ef

10 Places to Relive the '60s

Many of the most crucial events of the 1960s—including the civil rights victories, antiwar protests, and the sweeping cultural revolution—left few physical traces. All but a handful of the decade's famous counterculture hangouts shuttered their doors long ago, and you won't find any monuments where major student uprisings took place. Sure, you can drive up to Woodstock to see where you once reveled in the mud, but there will be no public intoxication, tents, fires, or camping. As th

The humble currywurst gets its own museum

Germans eat more than 800 million currywurst a year. To celebrate the country's 60-year love affair with the sausage doused in ketchup and spices, the currywurst is getting its very own museum. Tucked away behind the infamous Checkpoint Charlie border crossing that marked the beginning of the Soviet-sector in occupied Berlin, the city's newest museum dedicates its 600 square meters (6,460 square feet) to the currywurst. The German Currywurst Museum is set to throw open its doors to

Man claims Bronte portrait find (UK)

An art collector claims he has uncovered a rare portrait of the Bronte sisters painted by one of Britain's most famous Victorian artists. James Gorin von Grozny, from Devon, paid £150 for the work which he believes was painted by Sir Edwin Landseer in 1838. But art experts say Landseer would have had no call to paint the sisters who were not famous at that date. The only known portrait of the sisters was painted by their brother, Branwell.

A New Wing, a New Direction (Cleveland, Ohio)

This city 's Museum of Art has accomplished Phase I of an eight-year, $350 million renovation and expansion that—if completed as planned in 2013—will be the largest cultural project in Ohio's history. The first phase includes an impressive renovation of both the original 1916 beaux-arts building and Marcel Breuer's modernist 1971 addition. It culminated in June with the opening of architect Rafael Viñoly's first of two proposed gallery wings... ...Cleveland's museum is anything but

What Puzo Godfathered 40 Years Ago

In 1969, an obscure middle-aged novelist and pulp magazine journalist named ­Mario Gianluigi Puzo hit the literary jackpot. He wrote "The Godfather," he later told Larry King, "to make money." By his own admission, it wasn't well written. "If I'd known so many people were going to read it," he famously said, "I'd have written it better." How many people have read it? It can be said with some certainty that having sold between 20 million and 30

National Gallery of Victoria Announces European Masters from the Stadel Museum Exhibition

Premier John Brumby today announced a new blockbuster exhibition, European Masters: Städel Collection 19th – 20th Centuries will come to the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in 2010 as part of the hugely successful Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series. Mr Brumby said the exhibition comprises more than 100 works from the internationally renowned Städel Museum in Germany by artists including Monet, Cézanne and Renoir, and is the first time this collection of works will be displayed