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

Source: NYT
April 14, 2009

Architects Chosen for Black History Museum

A dream almost a century old moved another step closer to reality on Tuesday as the Smithsonian Institution chose a team led by David Adjaye, the celebrated Tanzanian-born architect, to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture, scheduled to open on the National Mall in Washington in 2015. The winners of the design competition — which also include the Freelon Group, Davis Brody Bond and SmithGroup — were chosen over five others, including well-known architec

Source: Tuaw--the unofficial Apple weblog
September 14, 2009

On this Day is an iPhone app for the history buff

I admit I wasn't much of a history nut when I was very young, but as I got older I found the subject more and more fascinating. Heck, I even wound up writing a book about a producer of historical epic films. I think a good perspective on history helps you understand the present, so I welcome On this Day [App Store link] for the iPhone/ iPod touch. For $0.99US it's a pretty good way to find out wha

Source: Perspectives on History (AHA mag.)
April 1, 2009

New Film on Secret Meetings of World War II Will Premiere on PBS in May

The dramatic story of the secret meetings during the Second World War between Joseph Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill is sought to be told afresh in a new film, WWII Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis, and the West, which has been coproduced by KCET, Los Angeles, and the BBC. The six-hour program will be broadcast in three episodes of two hours each on PBS TV, starting on May 6, 2009. Using documents that became available only recently from archives in Ger

Source: Cynthia Herrup in Perspectives on History (AHA mag.)
April 1, 2009

The Hot Dynasty: The Tudors on Film and TV

The Tudors are a hot dynasty. This has happened, of course, not thanks to historians of Tudor-Stuart England like me, but thanks to Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman and a range of other 30-something stars who have appeared in recent high profile depictions of the Tudor monarchs. The last decade has seen a veritable Tudor-mania—not just in films and television dramas, but also in historical romances, detective stories, graphic novels, and children’s stories. This is not the f

Source: Michael Korda at TheDailyBeast.com
April 12, 2009

History Channel documentary on Patton panned

The History Channel’s new ten-part series on George S. Patton—which began, inappropriately enough, on Friday, April 10, just in time for Easter—is an ambitious attempt to recast the age-old formula of the “war documentary” with the methods and computer-generated visual tricks of “war games,” the digitized kind that fascinate and even obsess male teenagers and some adults on computers and PlayStation. Carl Lindahl, of Flight 33 Productions, is to be congratulated for trying to breathe new life in

Source: National Security Archive
April 14, 2009

"Torturing Democracy" Wins RFK Journalism Award

Washington, DC - Today, the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights announced that "Torturing Democracy" has won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for domestic television and is a finalist for the grand prize. Produced and written by eight-time Emmy winner and National Security Archive fellow Sherry Jones, the RFK Center called the documentary film on the Bush administration's interrogation and detention policies "the definitive broadcast account of a deeply troub

Source: http://www.editorandpublisher.com
April 13, 2009

Eddie Haskell and Howard Beale -- Go Home! Journos Are Alienating Readers With 'Retro' References

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is often compared to Eddie Haskell. This is fine if you realize that Haskell was the know-it-all neighbor of Beaver Cleaver on "Leave it to Beaver." Those who grew up watching that show might also get the recent Los Angeles Times reference to the “Cleaverization” of Michelle Obama, or Rachel Maddow’s characterization of herself as “a bit of a Wally Cleaver.” Members of an even earlier generation may even know what one auto industry analyst m

Source: Jean Loh at China Beat (blog)
April 13, 2009

Startling photographs of the Cultural Revolution by Solange Brand

In 2002, the cofounder of the Pingyao International Photography Festival, Alain Jullien, invited an unknown amateur photographer to participate in the annual visual feast that went on to become the landmark of Chinese photography today. Solange Brand, then the Art Director of the newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique, mentioned in passing to Alain that she had been in China from 1966 to 1968, and had not set foot on the Mainland since. When Alain asked if she had taken any pictures of China; that inno

Source: TheDailyBeast.com
April 14, 2009

HBO orders 2008 election film

This is sooner than expected: HBO has optioned the upcoming book by Time Editor-at-Large Mark Halperin, and New York writer Jacob Heilemann about the 2008 election. The network has hired Blood Diamond writer Charles Leavitt to adapt Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime. "It's funny to call Obama and Hillary characters, but that's how I have to look at them," Leavitt said. "To me, the primary was one of the greatest title fights

Source: Times (UK)
April 14, 2009

Textile Conservation experts face the sack in a material world (UK)

Bagpuss, Freddie Mercury’s fake leather trousers and Henry VIII’s football boots would all be in a much worse state without a British group of conservation experts. Now the Textile Conservation Centre, which has restored thousands of historically significant bits of fabric and trained about half the leading textile conservators in the world, faces becoming history itself. The centre at the University of Southampton is to shut its doors on October 31. The university, w

Source: BBC
April 14, 2009

Grapes of Wrath, a classic for today?

Steinbeck's epic novel, which traces the harrowing exodus of Tom Joad and his family from blighted Oklahoma (where they are evicted from their farm), across the rugged American south-west via Highway 66, and on to what they mistakenly hope will be a more promising future in California, is considered by many readers to be the quintessential Depression-era story, and an ironic reversal of the rags-to-riches tale favoured by many optimistic Americans. The Grapes of Wrath treats as a n

Source: Geoffrey K. Pullum is head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh and co-author (with Rodney Huddleston) of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, 2002) in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
April 13, 2009

A professor takes on Strunk and White

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released. I won't be celebrating. The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American stud

Source: NYT Lede blog
April 12, 2009

A Wild Cossack Rides Into a Cultural Battle

MOSCOW — Russia’s latest action hero galloped onto movie screens here this month, slicing up Polish noblemen like so many cabbages. Taras Bulba, the 15th-century Cossack immortalized in Nikolai Gogol’s novel by that name, disdains peace talks as “womanish” and awes his men with speeches about the Russian soul. When Polish soldiers finally burn him at the stake, he roars out his faith in the Russian czar even as flames lick at his mustache. A lush $20 million film adapta

Source: AFP
April 13, 2009

China to build subway to terracotta warrior museum

China's ancient capital of Xian is to build an underground line to the museum of the famed terracotta warriors, one of the nation's most prized tourist attractions, state press said Monday. The 30-kilometre (18-mile) line will extend from Xian's city centre to the museum that houses the clay warriors that were buried more than 2,200 years ago near the tomb of China's first emperor, Qin Shihuang, Xinhua news agency said. The army of warriors and horses of the Qin emperor

Source: Independent (UK)
April 13, 2009

Ideas America won't entertain: Why a London theatre season on Afghanistan couldn't happen in the US

During rehearsals for my new play Blood and Gifts, for the Tricycle Theatre's The Great Game: Afghanistan I've been irritated by a question I didn't have the answer to. Back home in New York City, when a colleague asks me what I'm working on, I tell them I'm contributing to a 12-play cycle of works set against seminal events in Afghan history. I tell them the cycle will be performed by a cast of 20 and run in rep over three nights, augmented by a film festival and lecture series. And they look a

Source: Times (UK)
April 12, 2009

The story behind theft of the Mona Lisa

On a mundane morning in late summer in Paris, the impossible happened. The Mona Lisa vanished. On Sunday evening, August 20, 1911, Leonardo da Vinci’s best-known painting was hanging in her usual place on the wall of the Salon Carré, between Correggio’s Mystical Marriage and Titian’s Allegory of Alfonso d’Avalos. On Tuesday morning, when the Louvre reopened to the public, she was gone. Within hours of the discovery of the empty frame, stashed behind a radiator, the story broke in a

Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 13, 2009

Turner and Italy: National Gallery Edinburgh, exhibition review

Turner & Italy begins in 1802, when the Peace of Amiens made travel on the Continent possible for British artists, and J M W Turner crossed the Alps for his first, brief glimpse of the country that was to play such a crucial role in his art. What is so striking about the first oil paintings resulting from this early contact with Italy is how relatively conventional they are, at least by comparison with what was to come. Take, for example, Château de St Michael, Bonneville, Savo

Source: BBC
April 12, 2009

How Handel played the markets

I am a bit old now for scoops, but I seem to have run into one the other day, deep behind the scenes at the Bank of England. BBC Radio 3 asked me to take part in the extensive commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the death of the great Anglo-German composer, George Frideric Handel. They wanted to know about Handel's money and how he made it, ending up with a fortune (maybe £3m in today's money) in financial times no less tumultuous than our own day.

Source: NYT
April 10, 2009

'Seeing History Through Indians’ Eyes (PBS/Documentary)

IN his two-decade career as a filmmaker Ric Burns has made histories of the exploration of the American West and the settlement of New York City without resorting to the use of dramatic re-creations. In the passionate debate among filmmakers over the documentary form he sides with those who find the acting and low-budget effects too often cheesy and distracting. Dramatic re-creations were as alien to him as documentary and period work were to Chris Eyre, an American Indian director

Source: Observer (UK)
April 12, 2009

New film 'may give IRA dissidents ammunition'

One of Ireland's foremost historians has warned that a Hollywood take on the 1916 Easter Rising might be exploited by dissident republicans in their campaign against the peace process. Easter Sixteen stars Guy Pearce as James Connolly, the Irish Marxist who took part in the rising and was executed at Dublin's Kilmainham jail, and Ian Hart as Thomas Clarke, another key figure in the uprising. Paul Bew, a professor of Irish politics and a leading historian, has expressed