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

Honus Wagner baseball card sells for $2.35m

The "Holy Grail of baseball cards," the famous 1909 Honus Wagner tobacco card once owned by hockey great Wayne Gretzky, has sold for a record-setting $2,350,000, the seller of the card said Monday. The anonymous buyer has only been identified as a Southern California collector. SCP Auctions Inc., a company that holds sports memorabilia auctions, said it bought a small share of the card. It is scheduled to be shown at a news conference at Dodger Stadium Tuesday.

Did John Wilkes Booth survive? Theory is that Lincoln’s killer had escaped to Tennessee

SEWANEE, Tenn. — A signature in the Franklin County Courthouse and a mummy last seen in 1975 convinced two Tennessee men that John Wilkes Booth, the killer of Abraham Lincoln, escaped capture, traveled South and lived into the 20th century. Now one of those men is hoping to use DNA evidence to prove it. The other man, Arthur Ben Chitty, a historiographer at the University of the South who died in 2002, spent 40 years amassing anecdotal evidence that Mr. Booth married a

Amazing Grace gets thumbs up review in New Yorker

Written by Steven Knight (“Dirty Pretty Things”) and directed by the veteran Michael Apted, the movie is upbeat in tone, conventional in form, and often reminiscent of earlier inspirational pictures about heroes who overcome defeat and go on fighting against impossible odds. Yet, as square as this movie is, it has been made with eloquence and jaunty high spirits, and it tells a good story that is virtually unknown here. If Americans recognize the name Wilberforce at all, they are p

'30's government propaganda films on behalf of social causes (DVD sale)

NEVER in American history, many argue, have political parties and administrations been more brazen about image manipulation and message control than they are now. But recent examples — the “Mission Accomplished” carrier landing, the new Democratic leadership team’s victory lap packaged as a listening tour — seem hapless in comparison with “The Plow That Broke the Plains” and “The River,” two government-financed documentaries from the 1930s that were shameless propaganda efforts. The

The Eisenhower Decade Is Back, at Least Onstage

IN various pockets of the fashion and design worlds, the years of the new millennium have been characterized by a return to the visual language of the 1950s. We have seen the arch-frump style of Prada, the housewife-at-the-country-club dresses from various American designers, the pink KitchenAid mixers that might have come from the cabinets of Ozzie and Harriet. Sometimes the take has been wistful, sometimes cheeky. Often the players involved hope to call our attention to some of the more insidi

What the new movie covers up about William Wilberforce

It is rare that a Hollywood film takes up a subject like William Wilberforce (1759-1833), the British parliamentarian who devoted nearly his entire 45-year political career to banning the British slave trade. Alas, a lot of people watching"Amazing Grace," Michael Apted's just-released film, may get the impression--perhaps deliberately fostered by Mr. Apted--that Wilberforce was a mostly secular humanitarian whose main passion was not Christian faith but politics and social justice. A

Collector of £1m in autographed stars who wanted Garbo's so badly he borrowed £100,000

With Oscar night looming, a list of nominees ranging from Helen Mirren to Forest Whitaker are keeping their fingers crossed this weekend. Closer to home, however, a collector who has spent more than 30 years gathering the autographs of Hollywood stars who have picked up the awards is confident he is on to a winner. Alan Robinson is expected to make as much as £1 milllion when the bulk of photographs signed by every actor to win an Oscar since the awards began in 1929 is

Breathless headline about the bones of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph

JERUSALEM -- In a scene worthy of a Dan Brown novel, archaeologists a quarter of a century ago unearthed a burial chamber near Jerusalem. Inside they found ossuaries, or boxes of bones, marked with the names of Jesus, Joseph and Mary. Then one of the ossuaries went missing. The human remains inside were destroyed before any DNA testing could be carried out. While Middle East academics doubt that the relics belong to the Holy Family, the issue is about to be

Five decades on, one of Picasso's muses steps out as an artist

Picasso only saw the shy 17-year-old girl, whose head was bowed with her hair high in a ponytail, for a few fleeting moments. But that was enough for him to become entranced by her beauty... It was the young woman's sultry Brigitte Bardot look that captivated the Spanish artist. The encounter [in Provence] led to a year-long friendship in which Lydia Corbett, then known as Sylvette David, became the painter's model and posed for hours at his studio in the Cote d'Azur town of Vallaur

Ring-a-king idea wins tech prize

Tourists may soon be able to call up a virtual Macbeth on their mobiles to get the true history behind William Shakespeare's tragic Scottish king. The idea has won Seabridge Consultants in Forres, Moray, a £40,000 share of a £120,000 technology prize. The company intend to use the money to develop a system where people will hear an actor's voice or receive a text telling the story of the real Macbeth. He became king in the 11th Century after killing Duncan I in b

Wilberforce and the Roots of Freedom (Movie)

William Wilberforce is one of the great forgotten men of history. That will change, and Wilberforce will be simply one of the great men of history, when the remarkable new film Amazing Grace opens nationwide this weekend. Amazing Grace commemorates the bicentennial of the British ban on the slave trade (1807), an antislavery movement led by Wilberforce. Without him, there would have been no end to the slave trade, certainly not in his time. And, without his conversion to Christianit

Wendy's chain to close first restaurant

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Wendy's International Inc. said Friday that sagging sales will force it to close the restaurant where the nation's third-largest hamburger chain began in 1969. The iconic restaurant, filled with memorabilia and photographs of the late Wendy's founder, Dave Thomas, will close March 2. "This is a very difficult decision, but the truth is we kept it open for sentimental reasons much longer than we should have," company spokesman Denny Lynch said.

Exhibit sets record straight: Tiffany lamps were designed by women

NEW YORK -- With evocative names like Wisteria, Dragonfly, Peony, Arrowhead and Peacock and their fanciful shapes of colorful leaded glass, Tiffany lamps have enchanted art lovers for more than a century. The epitome of art nouveau, thousands of lamps were designed and handmade in the New York workshops of Louis C. Tiffany largely between 1898 and 1909 from the iridescent opaque glass he patented. But despite his sterling label, Tiffany had only a minor role in these ma

Replaying the saga of opening Tut's tomb

NEW YORK -- Of all the cold cases in the art world thrillers, none beats the story of Tutankhamun's funerary chamber and the saga of the art treasures it held, recovered in what turned out to be the most important excavation ever relating to the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt. Yet it took more than 80 years for the visual evidence to go on display under the title "Discovering Tutankhamun: The Photographs of Harry Burton," first at the Oriental Institute Museum (at the Universit

Create your own WW II war game

Strategy First today announced that the PC game "MAKING HISTORY: The Calm & the Storm" developed by Muzzy Lane Software, has officially gone gold. "MAKING HISTORY: The Calm & the Storm" is due to hit stores in North America March 13th, 2007. "MAKING HISTORY" puts players in control of global conflict, combining a highly sophisticated AI with rich historical detail. The game is unique among World War II games in the way it challenges gamers to ac

The Imperfect Soul Who Helped Bring an End to the Slave Trade (NYT Review/Amazing Grace)

“Amazing Grace,” a prettified take on the life and times of the 18th-century reformer William Wilberforce, carries a strong whiff of piety. It isn’t a bad smell; there are notes of roses and treacle in the mix, but also elements of sweat and pain. Wilberforce, born in 1759, was an abolitionist for much of his adult life and helped bring about the end of the slave trade in the British Empire and then slavery itself. He was an evangelical Christian and social conservative who rallied for animal ri

Remembering Warhol: A Tomato Soup Can and a Pocketful of Coins

BETHEL PARK, Pa., Feb. 22 — For 20 years, it has appeared every month: one Campbell’s tomato soup can and a pocketful of change left on the plain black granite tombstone. Claire Gibson, who has tended Andy Warhol’s grave since he died 20 years ago Thursday, said she has never figured out who is leaving the items at this Byzantine-Catholic cemetery alongside Route 88 just outside Pittsburgh. “I have my theories,” she said, “but we don’t know.” The silk-screens, Brillo pa

Tibetan Exhibition Draws Criticism (Berlin)

BERLIN -- A new exhibit of Tibetan art in Berlin offers a rare chance to see treasures from ancient Buddhist monasteries, but is also being criticized as whitewashing China's treatment of Tibet's ancient culture. Curator Jeong-hee Lee-Kalisch said the exhibit at the Museum of Asian Art was a unique opportunity to see masterpieces that are not found in other museums. "There has never been an exhibition in which the objects came directly from the monasteries in centr

NY exhibit remembers Latin America's 'disappeared'

NEW YORK -- In Latin America, the memory of the "disappeared" never went away. In the United States, they were hardly ever known. Now some of the tens of thousands who vanished during Latin America's so-called dirty wars will be introduced to New York on Friday when a stark exhibit, "The Disappeared (Los Desaparecidos)," opens at the Museo del Barrio for its first stop on a U.S. tour. With works such as Arturo Duclos's Chilean flag made from 75 human

Memory Lane Is Bittersweet in Hometown of the Champ (Ali)

LOUISVILLE, Ky., Feb. 21 — Forty years after a draft board here rejected his bid for conscientious objector status, Muhammad Ali plans to return to live in the city where he was born and where resentment engendered by his refusal to be drafted into the Vietnam War has not entirely died away. “He’s nothing more than a draft-dodger to me, and I’d say that’s the consensus around here,” said Wayne Love, 61, who tends bar here at the Veterans of Foreign War post in a mostly white neighbo