Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ...
Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits
This page features links to reviews of movies, documentaries and exhibits with a historical theme. Listings are in reverse chronological order. Descriptions are taken directly from the linked publication. If you have articles you think should be listed on the Pop Culture page, please send them to the editor editor@historynewsnetwork.org.
SOURCE: NYT (12-2-10)
When the Oakland Museum of California was founded in 1969 as a “museum for the people,” there was no question about who would pay for it. The museum’s land was owned by the city, its building was operated by the city and its collection belonged to the city. Admission, now $12, was free.
But the fiscal crisis affecting governments across California is changing the way museums operate. The Oakland museum recently announced that it would seek to radically alter its relationship with Oakland by having its nonprofit arm, the Oakland Museum of California Foundation, take over operations from the city.
Currently, about 60 percent of the museum’s operating costs are absorbed by the private foundation, and 44 of the 100 or so museum employees are city employees. Until the 1990s, the museum did not even have a private fund-raising body, but the institution was able to raise over $60 million for a capital renovation of its building, which made its debut last spring....
But the fiscal crisis affecting governments across California is changing the way museums operate. The Oakland museum recently announced that it would seek to radically alter its relationship with Oakland by having its nonprofit arm, the Oakland Museum of California Foundation, take over operations from the city.
Currently, about 60 percent of the museum’s operating costs are absorbed by the private foundation, and 44 of the 100 or so museum employees are city employees. Until the 1990s, the museum did not even have a private fund-raising body, but the institution was able to raise over $60 million for a capital renovation of its building, which made its debut last spring....
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SOURCE: The Root (12-2-10)
[Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, at Harvard University.]
Visitors to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 were introduced to escalators, pictorial panoramas, the Paris Metro and the first films with sound. They also encountered -- in a section of the vast world's fair aptly titled exposé nègre, or Negro exposition -- an unusual photo exhibit: hundreds of images of black professionals and college students.
Mounted to counter stereotypes of blacks as backward and culturally bankrupt, the photographs in W.E.B. Du Bois' two albums, Types of American Negroes and Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A., at the Paris Expo focused on successful African Americans who thoroughly embodied American middle-class values. These albums constituted a political act, a declaration of inherent nobility in the war over the politics of respectability and the nature of the Negro....
Revisiting these images today serves to remind us both of the history of the struggle for control of the black image in American society and the necessarily political discourses into which all black art at the time was drawn. But the photographs also make vivid the age-old class divisions within the African-American community -- class divisions born in slavery, first, and then made even more pronounced by the markedly different status of slaves and freed people over the course of slavery.
These class divisions persisted despite pointed reminders such as the Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court decision in 1857 and the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s, which identified all black people before the law as members of one class -- a class that we might think of as the "class of Negroes," a class as defined by "all Negroes shall" or "all Negroes shan't."...
Visitors to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 were introduced to escalators, pictorial panoramas, the Paris Metro and the first films with sound. They also encountered -- in a section of the vast world's fair aptly titled exposé nègre, or Negro exposition -- an unusual photo exhibit: hundreds of images of black professionals and college students.
Mounted to counter stereotypes of blacks as backward and culturally bankrupt, the photographs in W.E.B. Du Bois' two albums, Types of American Negroes and Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A., at the Paris Expo focused on successful African Americans who thoroughly embodied American middle-class values. These albums constituted a political act, a declaration of inherent nobility in the war over the politics of respectability and the nature of the Negro....
Revisiting these images today serves to remind us both of the history of the struggle for control of the black image in American society and the necessarily political discourses into which all black art at the time was drawn. But the photographs also make vivid the age-old class divisions within the African-American community -- class divisions born in slavery, first, and then made even more pronounced by the markedly different status of slaves and freed people over the course of slavery.
These class divisions persisted despite pointed reminders such as the Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court decision in 1857 and the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s, which identified all black people before the law as members of one class -- a class that we might think of as the "class of Negroes," a class as defined by "all Negroes shall" or "all Negroes shan't."...
SOURCE: NYT (11-26-10)
If the cost of digging a trench is 9 gin, and the trench has a length of 5 ninda and is one-half ninda deep, and if a worker’s daily load of earth costs 10 gin to move, and his daily wages are 6 se of silver, then how wide is the canal?
Or, a better question: if you were a tutor of Babylonian scribes some 4,000 years ago, holding a clay tablet on which this problem was incised with cuneiform indentations — the very tablet that can now be seen with 12 others from that Middle Eastern civilization at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World — what could you take for granted, and what would you need to explain to your students? In what way did you think about measures of time and space? How did you calculate? Did you believe numbers had an abstract existence, each with its own properties?...
Spend some time at this modest yet thoroughly intriguing exhibition, “Before Pythagoras: The Culture of Old Babylonian Mathematics,” and you begin to realize that the answers can be far more cryptic than these tablets were before great scholars like Otto E. Neugebauer began to decipher them during the first half of the 20th century....
Or, a better question: if you were a tutor of Babylonian scribes some 4,000 years ago, holding a clay tablet on which this problem was incised with cuneiform indentations — the very tablet that can now be seen with 12 others from that Middle Eastern civilization at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World — what could you take for granted, and what would you need to explain to your students? In what way did you think about measures of time and space? How did you calculate? Did you believe numbers had an abstract existence, each with its own properties?...
Spend some time at this modest yet thoroughly intriguing exhibition, “Before Pythagoras: The Culture of Old Babylonian Mathematics,” and you begin to realize that the answers can be far more cryptic than these tablets were before great scholars like Otto E. Neugebauer began to decipher them during the first half of the 20th century....
SOURCE: Newsweek (11-21-10)
In Shanghai’s super-modern Grand Theater, a fashionable, mainly young audience applauds enthusiastically as Guo Yong takes center stage. He acknowledges the semicircle of musicians around him and prepares to play a solo. But Guo does not raise a flute, trombone, or oboe to his lips; instead, he proudly holds aloft a large bushy tree branch covered in leaves. Blowing on one of the leaves, he produces a sound that mimics the twittering of birds as he plays a traditional Buyi folk song. The other musicians on the stage include a Mongolian throat singer, an ethnic Kazakh from northwestern Xinjiang playing a two-stringed banjo, and a four-member Miao minority singing troupe from a village in southwestern Guizhou.
It’s the first time such music has ever been performed in the Grand Theater, a formal venue more accustomed to large Western symphonies playing Beethoven. But these musicians are all playing traditional songs from their various ethnic groups. The songs are interspersed with new, specially composed pieces inspired by these traditions, sung in lilting, ethereal tones by Zhu Zheqin, the Cantonese-born singer whose vision this concert embodies. Zhu, better known abroad as Dadawa, has always stood out in China’s contemporary music scene; in the 1990s she became the first Chinese musician to win international acceptance in the “world music” field with her Tibetan-inspired albums Sister Drum and Voices From the Sky. Now she has made it her mission to help preserve China’s traditional ethnic music....
It’s the first time such music has ever been performed in the Grand Theater, a formal venue more accustomed to large Western symphonies playing Beethoven. But these musicians are all playing traditional songs from their various ethnic groups. The songs are interspersed with new, specially composed pieces inspired by these traditions, sung in lilting, ethereal tones by Zhu Zheqin, the Cantonese-born singer whose vision this concert embodies. Zhu, better known abroad as Dadawa, has always stood out in China’s contemporary music scene; in the 1990s she became the first Chinese musician to win international acceptance in the “world music” field with her Tibetan-inspired albums Sister Drum and Voices From the Sky. Now she has made it her mission to help preserve China’s traditional ethnic music....
SOURCE: NYT (11-22-10)
The BBC and the Discovery Channel, which collaborated in the past on “Planet Earth” and “Life,” are starting work on another joint documentary, “History of the World.”
They said on Monday that the series would cover 20,000 years of humanity in eight episodes, or roughly 2,500 years an episode.
Their prior series have used state-of-the-art cameras to capture natural habitats, but that’s not an option in “History of the World,” so they will instead rely on re-enactments and computer graphics....
They said on Monday that the series would cover 20,000 years of humanity in eight episodes, or roughly 2,500 years an episode.
Their prior series have used state-of-the-art cameras to capture natural habitats, but that’s not an option in “History of the World,” so they will instead rely on re-enactments and computer graphics....
SOURCE: NYT (11-23-10)
Papyrus, parchment, paper ... videotape, DVDs, Blu-ray discs — long after all these materials have crumbled to dust, the first recording medium of all, the cuneiform clay tablet of ancient Mesopotamia, may still endure.
Thirteen of the tablets are on display until Dec. 17 at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, part of New York University. Many are the exercises of students learning to be scribes. Their plight was not to be envied. They were mastering mathematics based on texts in Sumerian, a language that even at the time was long since dead. The students spoke Akkadian, a Semitic language unrelated to Sumerian. But both languages were written in cuneiform, meaning wedge-shaped, after the shape of the marks made by punching a reed into clay.
Sumerian math was a sexagesimal system, meaning it was based on the number 60. The system “is striking for its originality and simplicity,” the mathematician Duncan J. Melville of St. Lawrence University, in Canton, N.Y., said at a symposium observing the opening of the exhibition....
Thirteen of the tablets are on display until Dec. 17 at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, part of New York University. Many are the exercises of students learning to be scribes. Their plight was not to be envied. They were mastering mathematics based on texts in Sumerian, a language that even at the time was long since dead. The students spoke Akkadian, a Semitic language unrelated to Sumerian. But both languages were written in cuneiform, meaning wedge-shaped, after the shape of the marks made by punching a reed into clay.
Sumerian math was a sexagesimal system, meaning it was based on the number 60. The system “is striking for its originality and simplicity,” the mathematician Duncan J. Melville of St. Lawrence University, in Canton, N.Y., said at a symposium observing the opening of the exhibition....
SOURCE: NDTV Movies (11-21-10)
Hollywood star Daniel Day-Lewis will play 16th US president Abraham Lincoln in a biopic to be directed by Oscar-winner Steven Spielberg
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Lincoln, adapted by playwright Tony Kushner from Doris Kearns Goodwin book Team of Rivals. Spielberg has been attached to the project for years and earlier Liam Neeson was attached to star as Lincoln.
Kushner and Spielberg had earlier teamed up for Oscar-nominated Munich. Spielberg will begin filming the movie next year. He is also producing the biopic with Kathleen Kennedy, the Hollywood Reporter said....
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Lincoln, adapted by playwright Tony Kushner from Doris Kearns Goodwin book Team of Rivals. Spielberg has been attached to the project for years and earlier Liam Neeson was attached to star as Lincoln.
Kushner and Spielberg had earlier teamed up for Oscar-nominated Munich. Spielberg will begin filming the movie next year. He is also producing the biopic with Kathleen Kennedy, the Hollywood Reporter said....
SOURCE: Salon (11-18-10)
It's not like "Made in Dagenham" marks the first time a fascinating historical episode has been made into mediocre melodrama. Moviemakers have ransacked history since the medium was invented, but the combination too often results in bad movies and bad history. You can't even call "Made in Dagenham" bad -- it's a competent entertainment, built around an enjoyable performance by the superb English actress Sally Hawkins (Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"). But it does manage to take a crucial turning point in feminist and labor history -- an event loaded with ambiguous significance -- and render it into one of those gang-of-gals movies full of bicycles, reggae songs, underwear shots and scenes of emotional growth. (Memo to producers: You can't use Jimmy Cliff's "You Can Get It if You Really Want" in your movie. You just can't. It is against the law.)
There can be no doubt that the story of the female machinists' strike in 1968 at the Ford plant in Dagenham, England, is worth telling. That event in an east London industrial suburb had social consequences that were arguably a lot more meaningful and far-reaching than, say, the invention of Facebook.... It was a moment that suggested class politics wasn't just for guys and feminism wasn't just for well-bred university girls.
All that stuff, the complicated social and political reverberations of the Dagenham strike, is totally fascinating -- but it's also just packing material around the edges of a standard-issue female-empowerment ensemble drama, complete with kicky period costumes, rapid Cockney chatter and shots of the women stripping down to their brassieres and slips for a day in the hot factory....
SOURCE: NYT (11-18-10)
Lincoln Center could have been forgiven if it had gone a little crazy in celebrating the reinstallation of the lovable Kuhn organ in the renovated Alice Tully Hall, now the only pipe organ in a major concert hall in New York. From the time of the instrument’s removal in 2006 until it was finally put back in place in recent months, fearful, not to say paranoid, organ fanciers greeted the center’s repeated assurances that the instrument would return in all its glory, and then some, with unalloyed skepticism.
Now here it was, on Tuesday evening, restored and fitted out with the latest technology to make it more user friendly and give it greater sonic heft. But from the moment the inaugural concert was announced, with the young wizard Paul Jacobs playing the third book of Bach’s “Clavierübung” (“Keyboard Exercise”) as part of Lincoln Center’s new White Light Festival, it was clear that this would be a dignified affair. And if the choice of repertory — a single, daunting 100-minute work familiar in its entirety only to organ buffs and Bach devotees — was not an obvious one, it was in some ways ideal.
As one of Bach’s great late compendiums, ranking alongside the B minor Mass, “The Art of Fugue” and “A Musical Offering” (and part of a larger compendium, the other books of the “Clavierübung” encompassing the six keyboard partitas, the “Italian Concerto” and “French Overture,” and the “Goldberg” Variations), the work merits broader exposure. And written, in Bach’s words, “for the refreshment of the spirit,” it meshed perfectly with the White Light Festival’s cause, spirituality in music....
Now here it was, on Tuesday evening, restored and fitted out with the latest technology to make it more user friendly and give it greater sonic heft. But from the moment the inaugural concert was announced, with the young wizard Paul Jacobs playing the third book of Bach’s “Clavierübung” (“Keyboard Exercise”) as part of Lincoln Center’s new White Light Festival, it was clear that this would be a dignified affair. And if the choice of repertory — a single, daunting 100-minute work familiar in its entirety only to organ buffs and Bach devotees — was not an obvious one, it was in some ways ideal.
As one of Bach’s great late compendiums, ranking alongside the B minor Mass, “The Art of Fugue” and “A Musical Offering” (and part of a larger compendium, the other books of the “Clavierübung” encompassing the six keyboard partitas, the “Italian Concerto” and “French Overture,” and the “Goldberg” Variations), the work merits broader exposure. And written, in Bach’s words, “for the refreshment of the spirit,” it meshed perfectly with the White Light Festival’s cause, spirituality in music....
SOURCE: NYT (11-15-10)
For the next generation of Beatles fans, the wait could soon be over.
Apple is expected on Tuesday to announce that it has finally struck a deal with the Beatles, the best-selling music group of all time, and the band’s record company, EMI, to sell the band’s music on iTunes, according to a person with knowledge of the private deal who requested anonymity because the agreement was still confidential.
Depending on the terms of the deal, customers for the first time will be able to buy “Please Please Me,” “Hey Jude” or “A Day in the Life” online rather than on a CD and perhaps even as individual tracks. While the move to digital downloads does not quite rival the band’s first trip across the Atlantic to appear on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, it is an acknowledgment that online purchases dominate the music industry’s sales strategy....
Apple is expected on Tuesday to announce that it has finally struck a deal with the Beatles, the best-selling music group of all time, and the band’s record company, EMI, to sell the band’s music on iTunes, according to a person with knowledge of the private deal who requested anonymity because the agreement was still confidential.
Depending on the terms of the deal, customers for the first time will be able to buy “Please Please Me,” “Hey Jude” or “A Day in the Life” online rather than on a CD and perhaps even as individual tracks. While the move to digital downloads does not quite rival the band’s first trip across the Atlantic to appear on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, it is an acknowledgment that online purchases dominate the music industry’s sales strategy....
SOURCE: NYT (11-12-10)
THE story of what is often called New Hollywood, the era of the easy riders, raging bulls, to borrow the title of Peter Biskind’s 1998 best seller, has been told numerous times. It goes something like this: By the early 1960s the old studio system was in shambles, run by old men who, out of touch with the times-they-are-a-changin’, were churning out pricey duds like “Cleopatra” to shrinking, indifferent audiences.
Just in the nick of time a new movie-savvy generation of directors, influenced by European art cinema, stormed the studios and reinvigorated American cinema with their independent visions. “Now,” the director John Milius exulted, “power lies with the filmmakers.” Alas, that power went to their heads, and filmmakers indulged themselves into a creative dead ends (“At Long Last Love”) and financial calamities (“One From the Heart”). The Age of Aquarius and the auteurs gave way to high-concept hits driven by the corporate bottom line and toy tie-ins. The rest is history and the end of times known as Michael Bay.
Over this past decade New Hollywood — usually bracketed by the bloody sensational wow of “Bonnie and Clyde” in 1967 and the two-blockbuster punch of “Jaws” and “Star Wars” in the mid-1970s — has been the subject of so much popular adulation and academic scrutiny as to become a veritable fetish. This was the era, or so its enthusiasts insist, when American movies grew up (or at least started undressing actresses); when directors did what they wanted (or at least were transformed into brands); when creativity ruled (or at least ran gloriously amok, albeit often on the studio’s dime). Needless to say, there’s more to this rise-and-fall saga, one worth revisiting with the release of a new DVD box from Criterion, “America Lost and Found: The BBS Story.”...
Just in the nick of time a new movie-savvy generation of directors, influenced by European art cinema, stormed the studios and reinvigorated American cinema with their independent visions. “Now,” the director John Milius exulted, “power lies with the filmmakers.” Alas, that power went to their heads, and filmmakers indulged themselves into a creative dead ends (“At Long Last Love”) and financial calamities (“One From the Heart”). The Age of Aquarius and the auteurs gave way to high-concept hits driven by the corporate bottom line and toy tie-ins. The rest is history and the end of times known as Michael Bay.
Over this past decade New Hollywood — usually bracketed by the bloody sensational wow of “Bonnie and Clyde” in 1967 and the two-blockbuster punch of “Jaws” and “Star Wars” in the mid-1970s — has been the subject of so much popular adulation and academic scrutiny as to become a veritable fetish. This was the era, or so its enthusiasts insist, when American movies grew up (or at least started undressing actresses); when directors did what they wanted (or at least were transformed into brands); when creativity ruled (or at least ran gloriously amok, albeit often on the studio’s dime). Needless to say, there’s more to this rise-and-fall saga, one worth revisiting with the release of a new DVD box from Criterion, “America Lost and Found: The BBS Story.”...
SOURCE: NYT (11-11-10)
Imagine growing up in the Estonian capital city, Tallinn, during the cold war and discovering “Dallas” transmitted by television from Helsinki across the Gulf of Finland. Life in the 1970s was drab in Estonia, then a Soviet republic under the thumb of Moscow.
In the eyes of the Communist leadership, that American serial with its jousting millionaires epitomized the creeping allure of capitalist decadence.
In the facetiously lighthearted documentary “Disco and Atomic War,” the director Jaak Kilmi, who grew up in Tallinn in those days, recalls how the exploits of J. R. Ewing and company mesmerized his city in the far north of the country, where the broadcast infiltrated the Iron Curtain....
In the eyes of the Communist leadership, that American serial with its jousting millionaires epitomized the creeping allure of capitalist decadence.
In the facetiously lighthearted documentary “Disco and Atomic War,” the director Jaak Kilmi, who grew up in Tallinn in those days, recalls how the exploits of J. R. Ewing and company mesmerized his city in the far north of the country, where the broadcast infiltrated the Iron Curtain....
SOURCE: WaPo (11-11-10)
"Wartorn," HBO's depressing yet revealing Veterans Day exploration of post-traumatic stress disorders as experienced by American soldiers throughout history, carries a telling subtitle: "1861-2010."
Sending men and women off to war has been a consistent way of derailing our national mental well-being over generations. In the name of winning our freedoms -- to use the patriotic parlance -- we get back a lot of messed-up people and then almost cruelly ignore their despair.
In fact, when it comes to the shock of war and the residual madness it can cause, "Wartorn" dials all the way back to Homer's "Odyssey" for its opening note: "Must you carry the bloody horror of combat in your heart forever?"...
Sending men and women off to war has been a consistent way of derailing our national mental well-being over generations. In the name of winning our freedoms -- to use the patriotic parlance -- we get back a lot of messed-up people and then almost cruelly ignore their despair.
In fact, when it comes to the shock of war and the residual madness it can cause, "Wartorn" dials all the way back to Homer's "Odyssey" for its opening note: "Must you carry the bloody horror of combat in your heart forever?"...
SOURCE: LA Times (11-10-10)
For the first time in its history, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is presenting one of its coveted annual honorary awards to a film preservationist. Kevin Brownlow, the revered British film historian, documentarian, author and preservationist, was chosen by the academy's Board of Governors for his "wide and devoted chronicling of the cinematic parade."
"He is such a global ambassador for film restoration and film history," says Caroline Frick, curator of the George Eastman House film archive. "The award is a celebration of scholarship, understanding the value of film history and how film history changes over time."
Visual effects supervisor Craig Barron, who nominated Brownlow, says that Brownlow "devoted his life to preserving and celebrating the silent era and the artists who made the films. He is universally recognized as the silent film historian."...
"He is such a global ambassador for film restoration and film history," says Caroline Frick, curator of the George Eastman House film archive. "The award is a celebration of scholarship, understanding the value of film history and how film history changes over time."
Visual effects supervisor Craig Barron, who nominated Brownlow, says that Brownlow "devoted his life to preserving and celebrating the silent era and the artists who made the films. He is universally recognized as the silent film historian."...
SOURCE: NYT (11-9-10)
The French film critic Georges Sadoul called it “an unknown masterpiece” and once flew all the way to Brazil, in vain, in hopes of seeing a complete version. Orson Welles, in Brazil in the early 1940s to make a movie of his own, did view it in its entirety and pronounced the experience “fabulous.” More recently, both David Bowie and Caetano Veloso have also promoted it.
Over the years, the Brazilian experimental silent film “Limite,” made in 1930 by the director Mário Peixoto, has become something of a legend among film enthusiasts, a movie more talked about than seen. But a complete, newly restored two-hour version now exists, and its showing is one of the highlights of the World Cinema Foundation festival that begins at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday and will continue for two weeks.
“ ‘Limite’ is a great work in world cinema in the sense that it is a completely independent film that has a unique place in Brazilian and film history,” said Kent Jones, executive director of the foundation. “It’s a glorious film, a work of exquisite, handcrafted visual beauty that exceeds its reputation.”...
Over the years, the Brazilian experimental silent film “Limite,” made in 1930 by the director Mário Peixoto, has become something of a legend among film enthusiasts, a movie more talked about than seen. But a complete, newly restored two-hour version now exists, and its showing is one of the highlights of the World Cinema Foundation festival that begins at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday and will continue for two weeks.
“ ‘Limite’ is a great work in world cinema in the sense that it is a completely independent film that has a unique place in Brazilian and film history,” said Kent Jones, executive director of the foundation. “It’s a glorious film, a work of exquisite, handcrafted visual beauty that exceeds its reputation.”...
SOURCE: NYT (11-10-10)
In the beginning, there was just Rick Norsigian, a California man who announced in July that he believed that he had purchased “lost negatives” of Ansel Adams for $45 at a garage sale.
His art dealer put the value of the find at $200 million, and the story made news around the world.
Then an 87-year-old woman surfaced to say that she had three prints that looked a lot like Mr. Norsigian’s images — one was hanging in her bathroom — and that they had been shot, she said, not by Adams, but by Earl Brooks, her uncle, who was a little-known photographer....
His art dealer put the value of the find at $200 million, and the story made news around the world.
Then an 87-year-old woman surfaced to say that she had three prints that looked a lot like Mr. Norsigian’s images — one was hanging in her bathroom — and that they had been shot, she said, not by Adams, but by Earl Brooks, her uncle, who was a little-known photographer....
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (10-27-00)
Made in Germany in the 18th century it features, near the hilt, the legends "Prosperity to Schottland" and "End the Union".
The weapon is part of the "Rebels With a Cause" exhibition in Holyrood that examines the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 and the influence they had on the history of Scotland as well as the wider world.
The sword is part of a fascinating display that is also the harbinger of a series of lectures on the Jacobites and both deserve the widest public attention for the simple reason that nearly three centuries later their story still has relevance, if only for the fact that nearly everyone knows a version of it....
The weapon is part of the "Rebels With a Cause" exhibition in Holyrood that examines the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 and the influence they had on the history of Scotland as well as the wider world.
The sword is part of a fascinating display that is also the harbinger of a series of lectures on the Jacobites and both deserve the widest public attention for the simple reason that nearly three centuries later their story still has relevance, if only for the fact that nearly everyone knows a version of it....
SOURCE: NYT (11-1-10)
Those of us who hold Turner Classic Movies dear — who consider it the one indispensable channel among the 200 or 500 or 1,000 snaking into our televisions — don’t necessarily watch it very often. It can be enough to know it’s there, commercial-free and aspect-ratio-conscious, showing a silent movie in the wee hours of every Monday morning or classing up Halloween with “The Leopard Man” and “Cat People” (Jacques Tourneur, 1942, as if you had to ask).
That may represent food for the soul, but it’s not much of a business model for TCM. So you really can’t complain when the channel does something a little different to drum up publicity, exploiting the finite resource of its movie library — as in the mostly dreary 31 Days of Oscar programming stunt each February — or creating its own content, like original documentaries about Chuck Jones or Clint Eastwood.
Or when it does something a whole lot different, like “Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood,” a seven-week series (beginning Monday night) that represents the channel’s most ambitious venture yet into original programming.
The prominence of the word “Moguls” (it’s twice as tall as “Movie Stars” in the program’s logo) is no mistake: this is a business history of Hollywood, and even more than that it’s a kind of family album of the men, mostly hard-driving Eastern European immigrants, who created the American film industry and dominated it well into the 20th century....
SOURCE: The Atlantic (11-1-10)
[Jack Hamilton is a writer and student in the History of American Civilization program at Harvard University.]
If Scott Fitzgerald was right and American lives are bereft of second acts (and somewhere he tires of hearing that quoted), British rock stars have eagerly picked up our slack. From the cockroachish longevity of the Rolling Stones and The Who to the tireless re-makings of David Bowie and Elvis Costello to the lucrative rushes to the Starbucksian middlebrow by Elton John and Paul McCartney: if these figures haven't aged uniformly gracefully they've at least managed to not fade away, to borrow from their adopted lexicon.
Recently we've seen one of the most unexpected reinventions of all, that of former Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant, one of music's most recognizable voices who nonetheless spent the better part of 25 years following his band's 1980 breakup on a quixotic search for himself. In late 2007 Rounder Records released Raising Sand, a collaboration between Plant and the sumptuously talented bluegrass musician Alison Krauss. Sparkling reviews and unexpectedly robust sales finally culminated in Raising Sand being awarded Album of the Year at the 2009 Grammys, and last month Plant released his own sequel of sorts, Band of Joy, a gorgeous, 12-track collection of far-flung cover songs rendered in his newfound wheelhouse of rootsy Americana....
The great irony of Led Zeppelin is that a band so deeply, even pathologically obsessed with African American music was perhaps more responsible than any other for refiguring post-Hendrix rock music as the seeming birthright of white men. It's a dubious achievement that wasn't entirely their own fault but one for which they shouldn't be entirely let off the hook, either. Perhaps the two most indelible Western associations with black music have been eroticism and violence, the sex informing the fear that in turn enhances the sex, and if you think the Brits have been exempt from these fantasies then Mick Jagger has a bridge he'd like to sell you. Zeppelin elaborated this to epic proportions: theirs was a vision of the blues that simultaneously mystified and coarsened the music, abstracting it to a feverish realm to swing like some phallic metronome between the phantasmagoric and the pornographic....
If Scott Fitzgerald was right and American lives are bereft of second acts (and somewhere he tires of hearing that quoted), British rock stars have eagerly picked up our slack. From the cockroachish longevity of the Rolling Stones and The Who to the tireless re-makings of David Bowie and Elvis Costello to the lucrative rushes to the Starbucksian middlebrow by Elton John and Paul McCartney: if these figures haven't aged uniformly gracefully they've at least managed to not fade away, to borrow from their adopted lexicon.
Recently we've seen one of the most unexpected reinventions of all, that of former Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant, one of music's most recognizable voices who nonetheless spent the better part of 25 years following his band's 1980 breakup on a quixotic search for himself. In late 2007 Rounder Records released Raising Sand, a collaboration between Plant and the sumptuously talented bluegrass musician Alison Krauss. Sparkling reviews and unexpectedly robust sales finally culminated in Raising Sand being awarded Album of the Year at the 2009 Grammys, and last month Plant released his own sequel of sorts, Band of Joy, a gorgeous, 12-track collection of far-flung cover songs rendered in his newfound wheelhouse of rootsy Americana....
The great irony of Led Zeppelin is that a band so deeply, even pathologically obsessed with African American music was perhaps more responsible than any other for refiguring post-Hendrix rock music as the seeming birthright of white men. It's a dubious achievement that wasn't entirely their own fault but one for which they shouldn't be entirely let off the hook, either. Perhaps the two most indelible Western associations with black music have been eroticism and violence, the sex informing the fear that in turn enhances the sex, and if you think the Brits have been exempt from these fantasies then Mick Jagger has a bridge he'd like to sell you. Zeppelin elaborated this to epic proportions: theirs was a vision of the blues that simultaneously mystified and coarsened the music, abstracting it to a feverish realm to swing like some phallic metronome between the phantasmagoric and the pornographic....
SOURCE: NYT (10-25-10)
...As “The Spill,” a documentary that is a joint presentation of “Frontline” and ProPublica, so compellingly details, the company’s history of flagrantly violating safety standards made lethal personal injuries and horrific accidents practically inevitable.
The film (to be shown on Tuesday on PBS) is an old-school, dig-deep production that could have been improved upon only if it had been longer. An hour somehow seems insufficient....
“The Spill” travels back, looking at BP’s bleak environmental and safety record, and unpacks in riveting outline the company’s March 2005 disaster. At the time, an explosion in a refinery in Texas City, Texas, acquired by BP six years earlier as a result of its takeover of Amoco, killed 15 people and injured 170....
The film (to be shown on Tuesday on PBS) is an old-school, dig-deep production that could have been improved upon only if it had been longer. An hour somehow seems insufficient....
“The Spill” travels back, looking at BP’s bleak environmental and safety record, and unpacks in riveting outline the company’s March 2005 disaster. At the time, an explosion in a refinery in Texas City, Texas, acquired by BP six years earlier as a result of its takeover of Amoco, killed 15 people and injured 170....
