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

Film Festival With Truths to Tell

TELLURIDE, Colo. — A film festival held almost 9,000 feet above sea level on a holiday weekend may not be the likeliest setting for philosophical speculation, but for the past four days the Telluride Film Festival has offered something like a seminar on the nature of truth. In an age of reality television, journalistic fakery and political mendacity everyone knows that words and images can distort and mislead. And film is a particularly unstable medium, alluring us with a promise of honesty while it feeds us ever more elaborate fantasies....

New Rolling Stones documentary to take fans through band’s storied history

LONDON — A documentary with newly-released historic footage will trace The Rolling Stones’ 50-year journey from teenagers to rock icons, publicists for the band said Thursday.The film, titled “Crossfire Hurricane” — from a lyric in “Jumping Jack Flash” — is due for release in some British cinemas in October.The documentary includes footage showing the band’s first road trips and the chaos of early tours, accompanied by commentaries by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Ronnie Wood and former Stones Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor.“This is not an academic history lesson,” director Brett Morgen said in a statement. Instead, the film invites the audience to experience “the Stones’ nearly mythical journey from outsiders to rock and roll royalty,” he said....

Ann Hyde: "Deadwood" as History

Ann Hyde teaches American history at Colorado College.All Westerns are stories of people attempting to impose order on a chaotic, lawless, and savage environment. Deadwood, the HBO series that aired from 2004 until 2006, derived tremendous narrative power by exploring the moral quandaries that arise in such circumstances. In the show, otherwise good people lie, commit sabotage, sell drugs (and their bodies), and kill -- just as they did during the 1870s in the real Deadwood, the mining town in present-day South Dakota from which the series took its name.

Historical Society Exhibit to Focus on World War II and New York City

Helping to fill the seemingly endless appetite for information about World War II, the New-York Historical Society is planning a major exhibition on the conflict’s effect on the homefront this fall.Titled “WWII & NYC,” the exhibition is scheduled to open Oct. 5 and run through May 27. Among the documents scheduled for display is a rare copy of the original Instrument of Surrender, Japan’s formal surrender to the Allies on Sept. 2, 1945, that will be exhibited starting on Sept. 21, before the rest of the exhibition opens. The document, one of 20 copies of the surrender agreement created at the time, has not been displayed in New York since 1945....

Joseph Rezek: PBS Takes on the War of 1812

Joseph Rezek is assistant professor of English at Boston University. He was the 2009-2011 Barra Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His work focuses on early nineteenth-century British and American literature and history, with an emphasis on aesthetics, nationalism, and the transatlantic book trade.

At the Buffalo Bill Museum, a Showdown Between History and Myth

If you want to make sense of the impressive immensity of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center here, or even take the full measure of its reconceived $3 million Buffalo Bill Museum, which opened in June, it might help first to turn away from this $75 million, seven-acre building with its 50,000 artifacts, five distinct “museums” and research library.Just down the road, you will find the decidedly more humble Cody Dug Up Gun Museum, where more than 800 rusted, jammed and half-ruined pistols, revolvers and other weapons are displayed in the kind of dirt in which they were originally discovered. It’s an eccentric archaeological collection that includes a still-loaded Colt found in a Nevada ghost town — a gun, we learn, that was probably used as part of a 19th-century jailbreak.

After Protest, Madonna Shows Clip of Warsaw Uprising at Concert

Responding to critics in Poland, Madonna showed a World War II-era newsreel about the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis during her concert on Wednesday in the city on the anniversary of that 1944 revolt, Agence France-Presse reported.  Thousands of fans applauded as the two-and-a-half minute film played.The city authorities had asked Madonna to screen the film after the Youth Crusade, a Roman Catholic group, started a petition to halt the concert and gathered more than 50,000 signatures.  The group argued that it was inappropriate for Madonna to perform during the Polish capital’s annual remembrance of the doomed 63-day uprising against Nazi occupiers, in which an estimated 200,000 civilians died.

After Protest, Madonna Shows Clip of Warsaw Uprising at Concert

Responding to critics in Poland, Madonna showed a World War II-era newsreel about the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis during her concert on Wednesday in the city on the anniversary of that 1944 revolt, Agence France-Presse reported. Thousands of fans applauded as the two-and-a-half minute film played.The city authorities had asked Madonna to screen the film after the Youth Crusade, a Roman Catholic group, started a petition to halt the concert and gathered more than 50,000 signatures. The group argued that it was inappropriate for Madonna to perform during the Polish capital’s annual remembrance of the doomed 63-day uprising against Nazi occupiers, in which an estimated 200,000 civilians died.But the Youth Crusade’s objections went beyond questions of decorum during the remembrance, as they also accused Madonna of promoting homosexuality, pornography and of “attacking the Catholic faith.” #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }

Toyo Miyatake's photos tell story of displaced lives at Manzanar

Toyo Miyatake was an accomplished Los Angeles photographer in the 1930s and '40s. The immigrant, who had come to the United States at age 14, was among the more than 110,000 Japanese Americans sent to internment camps during World War II.In 1942 when he and his family were forced to move to the military-style Manzanar relocation camp near Lone Pine, Calif., Miyatake used his skills to tell the story of day-to-day life for these displaced families -- no easy task considering cameras were not allowed in the camp.

David Remnick: Bruce Springsteen at Sixty-Two

David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since July 1998Nearly half a century ago, when Elvis Presley was filming “Harum Scarum” and “Help!” was on the charts, a moody, father-haunted, yet uncannily charismatic Shore rat named Bruce Springsteen was building a small reputation around central Jersey as a guitar player in a band called the Castiles. The band was named for the lead singer’s favorite brand of soap. Its members were from Freehold, an industrial town half an hour inland from the boardwalk carnies and the sea. The Castiles performed at sweet sixteens and Elks-club dances, at drive-in movie theatres and ShopRite ribbon cuttings, at a mobile-home park in Farmingdale, at the Matawan-Keyport Rollerdrome. Once, they played for the patients at a psychiatric hospital, in Marlboro. A gentleman dressed in a suit came to the stage and, in an introductory speech that ran some twenty minutes, declared the Castiles “greater than the Beatles.” At which point a doctor intervened and escorted him back to his room....

"Hidden Treasure" at the National Library of Medicine

The 175-year-old National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Md., is best known these days for its PubMed database, the pre-eminent digital catalog of the biomedical literature. But like many digital giants, the library has its dusty analog past — otherwise known as a closet full of stuff....Many of the 450 color prints in “Hidden Treasure” record the efforts of generations of anatomists to recreate the body in two-dimensional printable form. In 1543, the great Vesalius thought a pair of statuesque paper dolls might do the trick; his readers could cut out little paper organs and paste them in the right places. An 1835 British obstetric text used paper flaps instead, with one set coyly tracing the progress of a pregnancy under a woman’s dress; at the end of the volume, a pair of pop-up hands performs a forceps delivery....

Why is Google honoring Gustav Klimt with a golden doodle?

Google adorned its homepage today with a Doodle commemorating the 150th birthday of Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, known for his elaborate and beautiful Art Nouveau paintings, his rejection of the prevailing conservative art styles of the day, and his sometimes controversial, frank depictions of eroticism. Most of Klimt's best-known work, and the inspiration for today's Doodle, come from his so-called "Golden Phase," a period marked by Klimt's extensive use of gold-leaf, and his greatest career successes. Google has incorporated into its logo a detail of The Kiss (1907-1908), a gilded square painting that depicts a couple embracing, entwined in decorative yellow robes, inspired by the 19th century's Arts and Crafts movement, as well as the newer Art Nouveau style.

New exhibit serves up a history of lunch in NYC

An exhibition on the history of lunch in New York City over the past 150 years serves up some delicious tidbits.But don't rush to see it on your lunch hour. You'll want much more time to digest all the visually appetizing props and displays at the free exhibition at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue."Lunch Hour NYC" transports visitors back in time with sections and artifacts from the library's vast collection on street foods, home lunches, school lunches and the once popular Horn & Hardart Automats. The first gallery sets the stage with a wooden cart filled with white (faux) oysters, an aluminum 1960s hot dog stand with a red-and-blue umbrella, a basket piled high with pretzels and a delivery bicycle purporting to carry Chinese takeout...

The Plague Behind the Zombies

'I hereby resolve to kill every vampire in America" writes the young Abraham Lincoln in the best-selling 2010 novel "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter." Honest Abe doesn't quite make good on his promise, and the grim results are all around us. Today, vampires spring from the shadows of our popular culture with deadening regularity, from the Anne Rice novels to the Twilight juggernaut to this year's film adaptation about the ghoul-slaying Great Emancipator. Lately we've also endured a decadelong bout with the vampire's undead cousin, the zombie, who has stalked films from "28 Days Later" to "Resident Evil" (the next sequel of which is due out this fall) and the popular TV show "The Walking Dead."Purists will hold forth on the differences between vampire and zombie, but the family resemblance is unmistakable. Both are human forms seized by an animal aggression, which manifests itself in an insatiable desire to feed on the flesh of innocents. (Blood, brains, whatever; it's a matter of taste.) Moreover, that very act of biting, in most contemporary versions of both myths, transforms the victims into undead ghouls themselves....

No Reason To Get Excited, Dylan Says: PBS Has The Wrong Guitar

The sleuths at PBS' History Detectives show think they've had their hands on the guitar Bob Dylan played when he famously (or infamously?) "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.Dylan, though, says otherwise. According to his lawyer, The Associated Press reports, the singer-songwriter says he still has the Fender Stratocaster he played on stage that day.The story doesn't end there, though. The guitar that History Detectives is going to report about on Tuesday reportedly was left on a plane Dylan sometimes flew on between gigs back in the '60s (though Dylan remembers driving, not flying, to the '65 festival). The pilot, Victor Quinto, is long dead. It's his now-adult daughter, Dawn Peterson, who brought the instrument to History Detectives' attention....

David Hajdu: The Surprising Queer Roots of the Blues

David Hajdu is the music critic for The New Republic and a professor of arts journalism at Columbia...R&B, a music that’s for and about romantic seduction, tends in its lyrics to trade in the corny formulas of hetero sex roles, though the groove and the atmosphere of the music carry far more weight than the words, which, one assumes, the listeners are too busy at romance to listen to. Hip-hop, wrapped up as it is in tropes of male prowess, conquest, domination, and acquisition, has never been particularly gay-friendly. Yet, the music that both R&B and hip-hop grew from, the blues of the early 20th century, was far from homophobic. In fact, it's probably accurate to say that the breakthrough blues of the 1920s, the material that established the blues in the public consciousness, was the gayest music in America.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: How an American Became a 'Revolutionary' in Mao's China

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is author of China in the 21st Century (2010) and co-editor of Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land (2012). He is an Asia Society Associate Fellow.The Revolutionary, a new documentary that has begun showing on university campuses and at cultural centers, looks at the life of Sidney Rittenberg, a 90-year-old man who has had an extraordinary variety of experiences. Born into a well-to-do South Carolina family in 1921, he became a labor organizer while in college, began to study Chinese during a stint in the army, traveled to China soon after World War II — and didn’t come back to the United States for 35 years.

A history of Ireland in 100 objects: Pike, 1798

No Irish event of such consequence is more powerfully symbolised by a single object than the 1798 insurrection and the pike. Pikes had been a standard weapon of medieval and early modern armies, but by the 18th century they were much more strongly associated with revolutionary violence. Every village had a blacksmith, and pikes were cheap to make. So symbolic of popular insurrection has the weapon become that it is generally forgotten that crown forces in Ireland in 1798 used pikes as well.The first seizure of hidden pikes was in Dublin in 1793. Four years later the directory of the United Irishmen ordered all members who could not afford firearms to equip themselves with pikes. They were made in vast numbers: more than 70,000 were found in government searches in Leinster and Ulster in 1797 alone. When fighting finally began, charges by massed ranks of pike-wielding men were the main rebel tactic. The rebel leader Joseph Holt claimed that “the pike, in a charge, was much superior to any other weapon”. Jonah Barrington, an independent observer, noted “the extreme expertise with which the Irish handled the pike”. But even this expertise was seldom sufficient for very long against trained troops....

Pablo Escobar resurrected in hit TV series in Colombia

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA — Colombians have wanted to forget Pablo Escobar since his reign of terror in the 1980s.But in what some are calling a form of catharsis, a Colombian television network is examining the darkest episode in the country’s tumultuous history with a true-life series about the flamboyant drug lord’s rise and fall.“Pablo Escobar: Boss of Evil” is mesmerizing television viewers in this country of 46 million. But it is sparking a debate over whether the series does too much to humanize Escobar, who won legions of admirers by building homes for the poor but also blew up an airliner and coolly ordered the killings of thousands....

To Lure ‘Twilight’ Teenagers, Classic Books Get Bold Looks

Teenagers are still reading the classics. They just don’t want them to look so, well, classic.That is the theory of publishers who are wrapping books like “Emma” and “Jane Eyre” in new covers: provocative, modern jackets in bold shades of scarlet and lime green that are explicitly aimed at teenagers raised on “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games.”The new versions are cutting edge replacements for the traditional (read: stuffy, boring) covers that have been a trademark of the classics for decades, those familiar, dour depictions of women wearing frilly clothing. In their place are images like the one of Romeo in stubble and a tight white tank top on a new Penguin edition of “Romeo and Juliet.”...