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 (8-12-10)
But the dramatic heart of the film consists of scenes that, in plain moviegoing terms, transform “Neshoba” from an earnest courtroom chronicle into something much more fascinating and troubling. These are interviews with Mr. Killen himself. A member of the Philadelphia Coalition observes that a lot of white Southerners who hold racist views tend, nowadays, to express them “in code.” Mr. Killen is not one of them. His passionate defense of segregation is startling now, though it would have been unremarkable in 1964.
“I’m not a Jew hater,” he says at one point, after having explained how Jews and Communists control the media, and he is unguarded and outspoken in defending his loathing for the “outsiders” and local troublemakers who threatened his Christian, racially pure way of life 40 years ago....
SOURCE: Tablet (8-11-10)
Months before the Warsaw Ghetto was to be liquidated, Joseph Goebbels commissioned a documentary about Ghetto life. The project was never completed, but the surviving raw footage forms the backbone of a new documentary, Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished, which opens in New York and Los Angeles next week and nationwide thereafter.
The footage, shot by German cameramen in April and May of 1942 and stored away for decades in an East German film archive, shows elaborately choreographed scenes of Jewish ritual and practice. Some feature what are supposed to be well-off Jews living alongside (and in a state of indifference to) their starving coreligionists. All the scenes are carefully staged, as we see from the multiple takes. One of the most painful shows well-fed women and starving men reluctantly taking a dip in a mikveh.
The footage itself, which Hersonski, a 33-year-old Tel Aviv native, says has never before been presented as comprehensively, is maddeningly inconclusive. Was it meant to further convince the German public of the Jews’ degeneracy? Was it to be an ethnographic document of a vanished race after the Nazis had solved the Jewish Question? Why was the project shelved? There is no script, no narration—nothing but an hour of silent black-and-white footage.
This is certainly not the Nazi filmmaking we know. It doesn’t trumpet the beauty and purity of the Volk as in Triumph of the Will; nor does it melodramatically stir up hatred, as in Jud Süß....
SOURCE: NYT (8-10-10)
“Three of the best jokes you’ve ever heard in your life,” he said. “Gone forever.”
Now, nearly two decades later, that gag and more than 3,500 hours of Carson’s “Tonight Show” have been preserved digitally and will begin making their way onto the Web.
On Wednesday the Carson Entertainment Group is expected to announce the start of two new projects that will give Carson an Internet presence he has never had before.
The first is a rejuvenated Carson Web site, at johnnycarson.com, that will feature video clips from the 30-year history of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.”...
SOURCE: CS Monitor (8-3-10)
Oliver Stone is the director of some of Hollywood’s most famous films, from “Platoon” to “Wall Street” to “JFK.” Last week he sat down in the Los Angeles offices of his production company, IXTLAN, to talk with Global Viewpoint Network editor Nathan Gardels about his recent documentary, “South of the Border,” and his upcoming release, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.”
"South of the Border"
Nathan Gardels: As you show in your recent documentary, “South of the Border,” US diplomacy and the American media have reacted with general hostility to the empowerment of the poor and indigenous in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay and, to some extent, in Brazil. Why is that?
Oliver Stone: I suppose it comes from the old imperial impulse of the US toward Latin America going back to the Monroe Doctrine, Teddy Roosevelt, the protection of American business interests, and support for military dictators throughout the cold war. The US remains hostile to anyone on the left coming to power in their “backyard,” anyone who thinks the resources of a country belong to its people.
As Argentine president Cristina Kirchner points out in the film, for the first time since the Spanish Conquest, Latin America’s leaders look like the people they govern. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez was raised in poverty. Bolivia’s Evo Morales is an indigenous Indian labor leader. [Brazil’s] Lula was a labor union leader who was not well educated. All three of these men were imprisoned at various times.
For the first time in modern history, much of South America is beyond US control, with the notable exception of Colombia under [Álvaro] Uribe, who has allowed seven US bases in the country. That is a big deal for the rest of the countries.
It is also beyond the influence of the US-dominated IMF [International Monetary Fund]. In 2003, the IMF had [more than] $20 billion in loans outstanding to Latin American countries. Today, it’s about $1 billion. Lula tells in the film how he resisted the IMF’s effort to get him to roll over Brazil’s loans. He wanted out of the dependence.
The US media tend to ignore the fact that so many of the poor today are better off than under previous regimes. From 1980-2000 when neo-liberal policies reigned, growth was dismal, the gap between rich and poor grew far larger. Yet, until the Wall Street-induced recession, growth has been high across the region under this new breed of leftist leaders. From 2003-2008, for example, Venezuela’s economy nearly doubled in size. After [former Argentine President] Nestor Kirchner got rid of the IMF loans [after he came to power], unemployment dropped from 20 to 8 percent, and the economy grew 63 percent over 6 years.
SOURCE: NYT (8-2-10)
Late on Sunday night, in a subterranean exhibition space on West 44th Street, a group of gloved art handlers — under the wary supervision of Sanaa Ahmed Ali, director of the Luxor Museum in Egypt — opened a wooden crate, unpacked the left wheel and slowly slid it onto the axle where it had once turned. An hour later they did the same with the right wheel. Then everyone in the room fell silent for a moment, looking at the result, before breaking into applause.
“Boy, that’s amazing,” said Mark Lach, a senior vice president of Arts and Exhibitions International. “Really just amazing.”
Though there were much fancier ceremonial chariots among the six discovered, in 1922, in the tomb of King Tutankhamen (as his name is often spelled), this one — to be unveiled on Tuesday as a late, crowd-luring addition to “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” the commercial exhibition of Tut treasures at the Discovery Times Square Exposition — is considered uniquely amazing by scholars because it is the only one that shows signs of wear and tear. So it has long been thought that it was the chariot actually used by the boy king for battle or, more likely, for hunting....
SOURCE: The Root (8-1-10)
Would it be proper to describe Mad Men as ''cool''? Well, yes and no, but before answering that question, let's ponder the often misunderstood properties of cool.
Cool has a history, believe it or not. It is the lack of historical knowledge about cool's origins that has allowed for the rampant and unfettered exploitation of this concept and its rather elusive properties in modern times. Cool, detached from its history, is style without substance, in the worst way. It is a free-floating signifier of emptiness, unmoored from its complicated birth in a more repressive era.
Cool has been around in one form or another for years. Yet cool, as we know it, is a product of the conformity, paranoia and racism of that which defined the early Cold War era through the mid 1960s. While it is difficult to label a lone inventor of cool, there are the pioneers, and the pioneers of cool all tended to come from the same place: the world of jazz. Imagine luminary cool figures, like the suave Duke Ellington; the debonair baritone ''Mr. B,'' Billy Eckstein; and the original black ''Prez'' himself, Lester Young, as just a few of these pioneers.
John Burkes ''Dizzy'' Gillespie, another progenitor of cool, rocked a beret and horn-rimmed glasses, while making up his own bebop language in the process. Charlie ''Bird'' Parker was never cool in the way these other cats were cool, his slovenly appearance being the primary culprit. But what he lacked in style, he more than made up for through his horn and his transcendent iconic status. The influence he would have on others helps explain why cool has always had a large pool of potential imitators. Bird's legend stretched far and wide, inspiring, among others, a generation of disaffected post-war white boys who came to be known as the Beat Generation, as they went about converting Bird's intellectual and artistic ethos into their own form of literary lifestyle energy; thus making the phrase ''Bird Lives'' a signature moment along the historic cool timeline.
Yet no figure came to embody this notion of Cold War cool more than that cultural behemoth Miles Dewey Davis III, as the title of his album Birth of the Cool would imply. It was during this phase of his lengthy career that the ''Cool Miles'' emerged as a new kind of black celebrity in the 1950s. As someone who moved freely through both black and white cultural spaces, the ever-stylish East St. Louis native came to embody the very definition of cool. He was uniquely suited to do so.
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (6-13-10)
Hidden under layers of varnish and paint was the original painting of the same woman, only this time she has a suggestive sideways glance and was dressed in a more revealing bodice.
The painting is featured in a new exhibition, Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes & Discoveries, which reveals the stories behind more than 40 paintings.
When the gallery acquired the Renaissance painting Woman at a Window in the 19th century, the painting depicted a modest young brunette woman looking out from behind a curtain....
SOURCE: WaPo (8-1-10)
An important new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, titled "Edvard Munch: Master Prints," explores a dozen or so emotive subjects from Munch's repertoire, sampled from the gallery's excellent Munch holdings as well as from the Epstein Family Collection, whose owners are longtime donors to the gallery, and from the important New York collection of Catherine Woodard and Nelson Blitz Jr. That sampling shows how Munch could use sequences of woodblock prints and lithographs, slightly or significantly varied over time, to come to grips with his favorite subjects....
SOURCE: Newsweek (7-30-10)
All that pales, however, beside the worst crime ever committed against children in the name of Twain: the Claymation version of No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger. In this 1986 film, Twain’s nihilistic little novel gets boiled down to a brief episode in a movie that also extracts material from several other Twain works, including Tom Sawyer and Letters From the Earth. But The Mysterious Stranger outdoes them all. In less than five minutes a Claymation Satan visits with Tom, Becky Thatcher, and Huck; builds them a village; then destroys it with lightning and an earthquake that swallows up all the cute little clay villagers, farmers, soldiers, and one particularly pitiful cow. It is altogether terrifying. One can only shudder at the thought of countless impressionable, unsuspecting children curled up in front of the television and being scarred for life after blithely stumbling across this ink-dark work. Anyone who thinks that there is no such thing as too much Twain has not seen it. Sometimes you truly can take a good thing too far....
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (7-28-10)
Giuseppe Veneziano's show entitled 'The Zeitgeist' opened this month in Pietrasanta, Tuscany, Italy, featuring among others a work featuring Hitler as a child cuddling up to the Virgin Mary.
The picture titled 'The Virgin of the Third Reich' is just one of many paintings featuring famous figures including Jesus Christ and Pope Benedict XVI.
Veneziano's art has stoked controversy in the Catholic and Jewish world with many calling them offensive....
SOURCE: Culture Kiosque (7-23-10)
[Antoine du Rocher is Managing Editor of Culturekiosque.]
In Gosford Park (2001), Robert Altman's stylish evocation of the British Upper Class, Hollywood film producer Morris Weissman (Bob Balaban), a short, self-important, culturally tone-deaf, gay American, who produces Charlie Chan mystery movies, gamely describes his latest project, Charlie Chan in London during dinner at a shooting weekend at a country estate. When Mr. Weissman declines to reveal how the film ends, suggesting that he would not want to spoil it for the other dinner guests. Constance, Countess of Trentham (Maggie Smith) quips, without missing a beat,"Oh, none of us will see it."
While manifestly a withering insult to the oblivious Mr. Weissman, it just might be the appropriate snub for this year's much ballyhooed summer blockbuster, Inception.
A science fiction thriller of staggering pretension and awfulness (think Angels and Demons on designer steroids), Inception tells the improbable tale of Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a consummate thief in the creepy art of extraction: stealing valuable secrets from other people's minds by surreptitiously slipping into their dreams. Cobb's rare ability has made him a coveted player in this treacherous new world of corporate espionage, but it has also made him an international fugitive and cost him everything he has ever loved, notably his late wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard) and two surviving children (Les Fleurs du Mal) in America. One last, highly-lucrative job could give him his life back but only if he can accomplish the impossible — inception. Instead of the perfect heist, Cobb and his team of specialists have to pull off the reverse; their task, should they accept (à la Mission Impossible), is not to steal an idea but to plant one."This tape will self-destruct in five seconds". Pitifully, Inception self-destructs in less time than that.
The extraordinary sophistication and weightlessness required to convince a well-informed movie audience of this conceit is simply beyond the craftsmanship of those involved. Neither director (Christopher Nolan), nor actors manage to dominate the badly written material, much less create the necessary suspension of dis-belief needed to conjure the utterly fantastic for two and a half hours. Clearly, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ken Watanabe, both gifted artists, but miscast in this inglorious affair, don't believe a word of what they are saying. The dialogue is simply too ludicrous.
The female characters are of little or no interest and plagued by inaccurate cultural references such as architecture prodigy, Ariadane (Ellen Page), more of a mournful little nymph than the Mistress of the Labyrinth as her name would suggest, who, incidentally, flashes a gold and crocodile Cartier wrist watch as a very young architecture student at the"collège" in Paris. In France, a collège is a middle school for pubescent children, not a faculté at a university. If the filmmakers are alluding to the prestigious Collège de France in Paris, this is a free, public institution where distinguished French scholars of the humanities, applied and social sciences dispense year-long univerisity level seminars for non-matriculating public auditors; it is not a degree-granting school of architecture. Be that as it may, well brought up girls of the French bourgeoisie are unlikely to wear such visible signs of wealth or luxury as students unless they are the daughters of rich foreigners, notably Middle Easterners, or the mistress of a much older man. In either case, peu fréquentable.
Despite the significance of urban architecture as metaphor for human dream construction, Tokyo, Los Angeles and especially Paris have been reduced to little more than banal opera sets for the film's aesthetic, social and intellectual posturing. The irony here is that the city of Molière was not only the birthplace of symbolism (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine) and surrealism, but in more recent times a hot bed of polemical critique over la science onirique (dream science) where organic chemists and budding neuroscientists matched wits with eminent research physicians such as Michel Jolivet, controversial psychoanalysts such as Jacques Lacan or the brilliant philosopher Michel Foucault (who held a chair at the Collège de France) over concepts such as le génie onirique, and la structure nocturne. Instead, one is treated to a confusing, at times risible cocktail of pseudo physics and psycho babble between Mr. DiCaprio, his mentor (Michael Caine) and a dicey, but presumably ingenious Mombassa-based psycho-pharmacologist (Dileep Rao) cast and played to sterotype by a young south Asian (in scenes beautifully shot in the narrow alleyways of the Grand Souk in Tangiers, Morocco). Soon after, when the film attempts to speculate about death and the Mediaeval Christian, specially Roman Catholic, belief of limbo, one shudders at the shallowness of thought.
In matters of conception and visual art, so much of this film is blatantly derivative, referncing earlier and vastly superior works in this genre such as Blade Runner (1982) and Black Rain (1989) or Grade B cult science fiction films such as Flatliners (1990), Altered States (1980) and Forbidden Planet (1956), where the"monsters from the id" of a highly intelligent alien race, the Krell, and their IQ-boosting technology, eventually bring their species to extinction in a single night; or even Fred Astaire's mesmerizing elegance in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's 1951 comedy Royal Wedding where he, free from the confines of gravity, is seen to dance on a hotel room's floor, walls and ceiling. The illusion is flawless and a far cry from the heavy-footed effects of Inception.
So, no matter what the trailer and Internet hype promise, Inception is hardly more than the standard Hollywood scherzo about money, power, redemption and showing off. The layering of historical images of myth and allegory, as shown in the film, is badly constructed and the Eureka strategy of mirroring —i.e., the dream within the dream — functions less as a framing narrative and more as a stage for a vulgar barrage of gratuitous visual violence, special effects and bad music.
On that note, Hans Zimmer's brutal and deafening score is mostly Fascist industrial dead weight stitched together with a soupçon of Goldfinger and The Omen. An otherwise talented film composer (Gladiator, Mission Impossible 2, The Thin Red Line, Driving Miss Daisy), surely Mr. Zimmer could have sought inspiration from better sources such as Hungarian composer György Kurtag's Grabstein für Stephan (Gravestone for Stephen) (1989), a rich, dark work scored for spaced groups of keyboards, tuned percussions, gongs, football supporters' alarm signals and whistles, reeds and brass, and low strings, all positioned around a solo guitar, or Kurtag's equally compelling Stele (1994), a perfectly chilling three-movement funeral symphony. In a pinch, the German composer could have considered the Royal Drummers of Burundi. Instead, Mr. Zimmer and IMAX technology seek to obliterate the human ear-drum with the relentless poundings of trite symphonic techno- trivialities.
For those Culturekiosue subscribers with a little time this summer, two hours would be better spent at the Edward Hopper exhibition at the Fondation de l’Hermitage in Lausanne. The American painter addresses the same existential concerns as Inception — minus the gigantism — with far more insight and aesthetic power (not to mention considerably less noise). If travel is not an option at this time, Skira in Italy has published a superb monograph / catalogue on Edward Hopper to accompany the show's viewings in Milan, Rome and Lausanne. Equally relevant and fascinating, are the shows of the Tanzania-born British architect David Adjaye currently on view at the Design Museum in London, Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa's installation, No Way Out, on view at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and the ambitious designs of the young Mexican architect Fernando Romero and his practice, LAR (Laboratory of Architecture) in Mexico City.
SOURCE: The New Republic (7-24-10)
I have just had a sensational night at the movies, and the picture was only 83 years old. At the Silent Film Festival in San Francisco, the Castro Theater was packed for a showing of a “complete” Metropolis. Moreover, the screening was graced by the presence of the two Argentineans—scholar Fernando Pena and archivist Paula Felix-Didier—who discovered the previously lost footage in Buenos Aires a couple of years ago. I honor their work, and their amusing commentary on the discovery—they were a couple once, then separated, then back together with the excitement of the find. Still, “complete” needs quotation marks.
To make a long story comprehensible: when Metropolis opened in Germany in 1927, it was 150 or so minutes. Very soon thereafter, and despite the impact of the picture, the German distributor, Ufa, shortened it. Thus, over the years, this classic has played short by around 25 minutes—it was enough to make its director, Fritz Lang, weep....
SOURCE: WaPo (7-27-10)
The "Martyrdom of St. Lawrence" will now be subjected to X-rays and other analyses to ascertain its attribution. But art officials and scholars attending the unveiling agreed the painting did not look like a Caravaggio - but rather like the work of one or more of his followers.
"It's a very interesting painting but I believe we can rule out - at least for now - that it's a Caravaggio," said art superintendent Rossella Vodret. "The quality of the painting doesn't hold up."...
SOURCE: NYT (7-23-10)
Now a particularly enduring Catholic practice is on prominent display in, of all places, Florence’s history of science museum, recently renovated and renamed to honor Galileo: Modern-day supporters of the famous heretic are exhibiting newly recovered bits of his body — three fingers and a gnarly molar sliced from his corpse nearly a century after he died — as if they were the relics of an actual saint.
“He’s a secular saint, and relics are an important symbol of his fight for freedom of thought,” said Paolo Galluzzi, the director of the Galileo Museum, which put the tooth, thumb and index finger on view last month, uniting them with another of the scientist’s digits already in its collection....
SOURCE: Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed (7-21-10)
To prime the consumer market, habits and attitudes left over from the Great Depression had to be liquidated. Desire must be set free -- or at least educated into enough confidence to be assertive, Advertising meant selling not just a product but a dream. There was, for example, the famous ad campaign portraying women who found themselves in public, in interesting situations while wearing little more their Maidenform undergarments. The idea was to lodge the product in the potential consumer’s unconscious by associating it with a common dream situation.
But my sense is that "Mad Men" is poised to enter a new, post-Packardian phase. At the end of the third season, several characters left the established firm of Sterling Cooper and set out to create their own advertising “shop” – all of this not very long after the Kennedy assassination. Trauma seldom stalls the wheels of commerce for long. And we know, with hindsight, that American mass culture was just about to undergo a sudden, swift de-massification – the proliferation, over the next few years, of ever more sharply defined consumer niches and episodic subcultures.
Stimulating consumer desire by making an end run around the superego was no longer the name of the game. The new emphasis took a different form. It is best expressed by the term “lifestyle” -- which, as far as I can tell, was seldom used before the mid-60s, except as a piece of jargon from the Adlerian school of psychoanalytic revisionism....
SOURCE: Houston Chronicle (7-21-10)
As Season 4 cranks up Sunday, it’s Thanksgiving 1964. President Lyndon Johnson, elected by a landslide, has ordered the first bombings in North Vietnam. The slaying of three civil-rights activists in Mississippi lingers in the news. There’s talk of a “generation gap.”
Still — while the lives of the show’s characters may be in turmoil — the outlook isn’t totally bleak yet, suggests Rice University history professor Allen Matusow, author of The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (University of Georgia Press). A lot brews under the surface, he says, but cultural revolution hasn’t arrived. (The first anti-war protests and race riots occurred in 1965.)
“All the movements of the 1960s that brought turmoil hadn’t actually begun,” Matusow says. “People were still wearing ties.”...
SOURCE: NYT (7-20-10)
The horns are the oldest items in the museum’s collection, and something about the juxtaposition of contemporary social consciousness, ancient ceremony and prehistoric beast summed up the museum’s refocused mission as it completes a three-year, $100 million renewal. As described by the director, James S. Snyder, the museum offers a series of unexpected aesthetic links across cultures and their histories, like the way 2,000-year-old carved ritual cups that are on view in the museum near the Dead Sea Scrolls are somehow evocative of Brancusi.
For the last 45 years, the Israel Museum has been both the crown jewel of this country’s cultural heritage and a bit of a mess. It has the most extensive holdings of land-of-Israel archaeology anywhere (including a heel bone pierced by an iron nail with wood fragments, the world’s only physical evidence of crucifixion), an encyclopedic collection of Judaica and an exceptional group of Modernist artworks. It sits on a 20-acre campus atop a hill at Jerusalem’s western entrance, holding pride of place along with the architectural and national landmarks that surround it, including the Knesset, or parliament, and the Supreme Court....
SOURCE: National Review (7-19-10)
Mad Men is a show about an unbending generation on the cusp of dissolution; Matthew Weiner, the show’s head writer, has often said that the majority of America in the early ’60s was still, by and large, living in the domestic ’50s. Weiner, a Baby Boomer, has a conflicted relationship with this time period. Because it is thegeneration of his parents, he wants to explore it and pore over it; because it’s the generation that, through Weiner’s specific political prism, reflects a hypocritical façade, he’d like it to form a gangway for the liberation to come. This ambivalence creates a divide in the audience’s responses to the show, which tend to fall along political lines.
Conservatives and liberals just can’t help but see Mad Men differently: the former with apprehension, the latter with anticipation. The show inspires a certain self-satisfaction in the type of viewers who would observe each instance of sexism, racism, and general prejudice as just more foundation for an interpretation many critics have arrived at: “The show explains why the ’60s had to happen.” Rod Dreher says, “For unreflective liberals, Mad Men is only temporarily tragic. It has a happy ending. Deliverance from all this sexism and repression and cigarette smoke draws nigh.”...
Which brings us again to the main political schism for viewers of this show: Conservatives and liberals cannot see the inevitability of the ’60s the same way. The hedonism, the “licentious fury” set up in these soldiers of such terrible, soul-destroying consumerism, is about to give way to the tortured emoting of Frank O’Hara and reggae-inspired coffee commercials, both of which have been featured in the past few seasons. But conservatives understand that the hedonism is only just beginning. The Me Generation is about to swing into full effect, after which we lose both the unrepentant ambition and charming earnestness of the American Dream — a phrase never to be uttered without a small smirk again....
SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer (7-20-10)
In 1980, he joined the conservation department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was thrown into preparations for the large retrospective of Thomas Eakins' work the museum would be mounting in 1982.
That's when he first encountered Eakins' 1875 masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, owned at the time by Jefferson Medical College.
"I did a very, very minor treatment on it," Tucker said the other day. "It had surface grime on it and I removed that. So I had my nose up close to the painting at a very early point."
Even then, he sensed that a more extensive treatment might someday be warranted. That day has come....
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (7-18-10)
The Surfing Heritage Foundation, based in the southern Californian town of San Clemente, is seeking to collect the oral history of the sport by talking to its oldest living practitioners. It wants to find people who remember a time when waves were still uncrowded and surfing was seen as the preserve of a few crazy, dangerous wild men and women.
It will look at the sport before it became popular in the 1950s and 1960s, when it inspired California's beach culture of girls in bikinis and the music scene that went with it.
The foundation is interviewing surfers in their 70s, 80s and 90s to preserve the story of the sport's beginnings and its early culture. It is also sending out oral history kits to surfing groups across America and the world, asking anyone interested in the sport to join the effort....
