Ken Burns has just started editing "The War," a 14-hour epic about World War II in seven parts that PBS plans to air in 2007. He's also working on "America's Best Idea: Our National Parks," which is scheduled for release in 2009.

Q. The late historian Stephen Ambrose said, "More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source." What makes your work so popular?

A. I think that the word "history," when you say it to most people, it's homework. To me, the word "history" is mostly made up of the word "story." If there is an explanation for why the films are so successful, it's that we're telling stories, which is how human beings at their essence relate to one another.

I also think that we're interested in not just excavating the dry bones, the pottery shards of the past, but are interested in pursuing a deeply emotional story that reminds people, without kind of consciously engaging any politics or contemporary commentary, imbues people with a present. Paradoxically, by understanding the past you have a sense of where you are, too.

Q. Because many of your documentaries deal with subjects before the invention of movie film and video, much of your work utilizes old paintings and photographs. How will future filmmakers use e-mail letters, digital photos, YouTube videos and other electronic data?

A. A lot of stuff will be lost in the ether. There will be too much stuff and not enough. Just as there is, in the past, not enough stuff. Here, there will be too much and not enough, because you'll be almost drowned under a tsunami of choice. But at the same time, sometimes those things that we can count on, say a diary from the 19th century, even if there's an e-mail trail, it might not be accessible. It might not be retrievable. We may be on such different systems that it may be impossible to read information that we made in the '70s and '80s.

I think it provides all of us storytellers with daunting challenges. Basically, you have to work with the tools that you have, whatever they may be, to try and tell a story.

Q. What is the best documentary you've ever done?

A. Up until now, I've steadfastly, like a good parent, said, "I love them all the same," and that's still true. Another way of doing it is, when I was working on the jazz film a few years ago, Duke Ellington was once asked what was his most important composition. He said, "The one I'm working on now."

Q. What will capture the imagination and attention of documentary storytellers a century from now? How will they interpret the impact of 9-11?

A. I'm finishing the biggest work of my life right now on the Second World War. Of course, that has as its sort of signal moment, Dec. 7, 1941. I think Sept. 11 will be kind of that all-encompassing date that everything that came before it is before and everything after it is after.

As we look back on the first Gulf War and the second Gulf War, we might be saying that this was the period of the petroleum wars. We might have a perspective and an honesty and a self-critical ability to say, "Perhaps that's what this whole thing was about." We hopefully will be looking back from a position of having not ruined ourselves with it, as so many other great empires have done out of hubris and arrogance.

Q. Give us a sneak preview of "The War" series.

A. It's a bottom-up look at the American experience in the Second World War. We don't have any experts in the films. They're all people who lived through it, about 40 of them. They are so-called ordinary people whose tales are interwoven, kind of like a complicated Russian novel. The intertwining of these ordinary lives allows us to not be distracted by celebrity, which is the new replacement for the great men theory of everything.

In point of fact, in all wars, it's the privates that do the fighting and the dying. So we have ball turret gunners in B-17s and grunts landing at Omaha Beach and Marines landing on a whole host of Pacific islands and the pilots and the nurses and Navy men and you name it. We spend about 20 percent of the film in the homefront and the other 80 divided horrifically between the European and the Pacific theaters.

This is no longer the good war of our imagination and subsequent public relations, but in fact the worst war that ever happened. It happened to be unambiguous in its size and in its raison d'etre. But everything else about it was the worst of all possible wars. We have not blinked or flinched from showing that.

Two “lost” paintings by the Renaissance artist Fra Angelico have been discovered hanging behind a door in a modest two bedroom terraced house in Oxford.

The discovery has been hailed as one of the most exciting for a generation

The paintings of the Dominican saints, which are expected to fetch a combined total of more than £1 million at auction, belonged to a 77-year-old spinster who died earlier this year.

The discovery, hailed as one of the most exciting for a generation, has solved a 200-year-old mystery.

In 1974, a cheerful, androgynous man-child named Telly was used to teach grade schoolers phone etiquette and dialing technique. The character wore all white: tights, gloves, heeled boots, belted shirtdress; and sang his lessons in a cloying timbre. Best of all, Telly lived in Telezonia, a place that could only be reached through a tinfoil tunnel, accessible only through the rotary dial of an enormous pink telephone.

Sixteen millimeter short films like " Telezonia <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5844452338623457489>; ," once used to educate American schoolchildren and workers, are now reappearing in art-house theaters and online. Time and technology have transformed earlier generations' lessons into a younger audience's entertainment. But beneath unbelievably campy surfaces, these vintage films encapsulate a sort of lay anthropology, a window onto the collective fears and convictions of past generations that is as illuminating as any documentary - and far more droll.

Just off the interstate, a couple of junctions down from Cincinnati's international airport, over the state line in rural Kentucky, the finishing touches are being put to an impressive-looking building. When it is finished and open to the public next summer, it may, quite possibly, be one of the weirdest museums in the world.

The Creation Museum - motto: "Prepare to Believe!" - will be the first institution in the world whose contents, with the exception of a few turtles swimming in an artificial pond, are entirely fake. It is dedicated to the proposition that the account of the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis is completely correct, and its mission is to convince visitors through a mixture of animatronic models, tableaux and a strangely Disneyfied version of the Bible story.

Its designer, Patrick Marsh, used to work at Universal Studios in Los Angeles and then in Japan before he saw the light, opened his soul to Jesus, and was born anew. "The Bible is the only thing that gives you the full picture," he says. "Other religions don't have that, and, as for scientists, so much of what they believe is pretty fuzzy about life and its origins ... oh, this is a great place to work, I will tell you that."

So this is the Bible story, as truth. Apart from the dinosaurs, that is. As you stand in the museum's lobby - the only part of the building approaching completion - you are surrounded by life-size dinosaur models, some moving and occasionally grunting as they chew the cud.Beside the turtle pool, two animatronic, brown-complexioned children, demurely dressed in Hiawatha-like buckskin, gravely flutter with movement. Behind them lurk two small Tyrannosaurus Rexes. This scene is meant to date from before the Fall of Man and, apparently, dinosaurs.

Theological scholars may have noticed that there are, in fact, no dinosaurs mentioned in the Bible - and here lies the Creationists' first problem. Since there are undoubtedly dinosaur bones and since, according to the Creationists, the world is only 6,000 years old - a calculation devised by the 17th-century Bishop Ussher, counting back through the Bible to the Creation, a formula more or less accepted by the museum - dinosaurs must be shoehorned in somewhere, along with the Babylonians, Egyptians and the other ancient civilisations. As for the Grand Canyon - no problem: that was, of course, created in a few months by Noah's Flood.

But what, I ask wonderingly, about those fossilised remains of early man-like creatures? Marsh knows all about that: "There are no such things. Humans are basically as you see them today. Those skeletons they've found, what's the word? ... they could have been deformed, diseased or something. I've seen people like that running round the streets of New York."...

A nephew of John F Kennedy attended the inauguration Saturday of a small Berlin museum devoted to the late US president and his iconic 1963 visit to the city at the time when it was a western outpost behind the Iron Curtain. The show, set up by the Berlin art dealership Camera Work just a few steps from the Brandenburg Gate, displays images, documents and manuscripts from Germany as well as some of the president's possessions lent by the Kennedy family.

Five months before his November 1963 assassination, Kennedy visited West Berlin and gave a speech on June 26, 1963 in which he proclaimed his unity with the people of Berlin in the struggle against the communists.

The city, secured by US, British and French troops, was surrounded by communist East German territory.

Anthony Kennedy Shriver, who attended the opening, is the nephew of John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Ted Kennedy.

THE naturalist Sir David Attenborough has been trawling through the Queen’s collection of paintings to put together an exhibition of some of the first wildlife studies.

The paintings are from the Age of Discovery when naturalists sailed the world to explore newly discovered lands and unearthed tens of thousands of species of animals and plants.


Many are the first-known images of newly discovered plants and animals and were the means by which previously unknown species were introduced to the public in Britain and Europe.

They come from an era when wildlife was first studied in detail and include species, such as the passenger pigeon, that have become extinct.

Hundreds of relatives and friends of the victims in the nation's second deadliest air accident dedicated a much-awaited memorial Sunday with mementoes and mixed emotions.

Wearing their loss on T-shirts, scarves and buttons, families clutching red roses and photographs gathered on a foggy beachfront to look up the names of 265 loved ones killed when American Airlines Flight 587 crashed five years ago.

"It's something that we can come to and pray," said Ana Lora, who placed a model car near the name of her brother, Jose Francisco Lora, who collected cars. "This is something that, really, we need."

The memorial marks years of effort to create a tangible remembrance of the crash, which killed all 260 people on board and another five in the quiet Queens neighborhood where the jet fell. The National Transportation Safety Board eventually determined that the tail of the Airbus A300 had fallen off, and the agency blamed pilot error, inadequate pilot training and overly sensitive rudder controls.

The disaster jarred a city still raw and fearful after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center two months before. The loss was also felt heavily in the Dominican Republic, where Flight 587 was bound from John F. Kennedy International Airport. Many passengers were of Dominican heritage.

Designed by a Dominican artist, the $9.2 million memorial is a curved wall inscribed with the names of the dead. Cutouts, where weeping relatives placed roses, wreaths and photographs, provide a view of the sea.

"Your ideas and your memories have been woven into it," Mayor Michael Bloomberg told those gathered Sunday.

But the memorial also was shaped by tensions over its location _ a seaside park, rather than the residential street where the plane crashed _ and some victims' relatives were still coming to terms with the outcome Sunday. After the city-sponsored ceremony, mourners flocked to an impromptu memorial around a tree at the crash site.

With their long hair and scruffy jeans, the rock fans queued up outside the Fillmore Auditorium could almost be mistaken for the throngs that flocked to this concert palace in the 1960s.

And just like in the old days, the bands they've come to see — a heavy-metal triple helping of Goatwhore, High on Fire and Venom — might trigger a few tsk-tsks from the over-30 crowd.

Goatwhore? Whatever happened to bands with class, like Foghat?

There are differences, to be sure — rock fans in 2006 carry cellphones — but entrepreneur Bill Sagan sees the similarities and is capitalizing on them.

Nearly 40 years after the Woodstock era, its music is enthralling legions of high-school and college-age fans who have Jimi Hendrix on their iPods and Neil Young T-shirts on their backs.

The leftover garments, concert posters and ticket stubs from rock's heyday are bringing top dollar, as a quick spin on EBay will attest.

Though scores of merchants and collectors are selling these remnants, Sagan has an inventory of unmatched provenance — the posters, T-shirts, photos and paraphernalia amassed by the late Bill Graham, rock's leading promoter from the 1960s until his death in a 1991 helicopter crash.

Three years ago, Sagan launched a San Francisco-based company called Wolfgang's Vault to sell over the Internet the multitude of items Graham squirreled away over the years. Sagan used Graham's given name for the company to avoid confusion with evangelist Billy Graham.

Now, Sagan has something fresh to offer: thousands of hours of unreleased audio, video and film recordings from concerts Graham staged at the Fillmore and other venues as well as an archive of King Biscuit Flower Hour concerts broadcast on the radio.

In 1911 the St. Petersburg banker Maurice Stifter held a fancy dress ball. His young niece by marriage, Tamara, came as a Polish peasant, with a goose on a lead. She was probably not more than 13 or 14, but managed to attract the attention of one of the city's most eligible bachelors, Tadeusz Lempicki, a handsome, titled Polish lawyer in his early twenties. Five years later he married her.

By the time she launched herself as an artist at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1922, Tamara's married name had gained the aristocratic-sounding French particle "de," and she was signing her works Lempicka, or sometimes in the masculine form Lempicki, which left the first critic ever to mention her in print under the impression that she was a man.

"Italy gave me a lot," Lempicka told a Polish journalist in 1932. And despite her tireless networking in Paris, where she built up excellent contacts in the artistic and literary worlds, it was Italy that provided her with the opportunity for her first one-woman exhibition, in Milan in November 1925. The Palazzo Reale is now the venue for an enlightening, entertaining, well-researched reassessment of her life and works, curated by Gioia Mori (until Jan. 14).

Rewriting of personal history, self-aggrandisement, sexual ambiguity - she was a dedicated, indeed voracious bisexual - economy with the truth, the birthdate she claimed would have made her younger than her younger sister, were to characterize her long life. Her pyrotechnic career as a painter burned brightly for scarcely more than a dozen years.

But for the Bolshevik revolution, Lempicka would probably never have become a professional artist. She fled Russia in 1918, and she, Kizette (her daughter born shortly after her marriage) and Tadeusz were reunited in Paris later that year. The family, like many other refugees, found lodgings in a cheap hotel. Initially a low-level existence was sustained by the sale of her jewelry, but this was decidedly not the kind of longer-term lifestyle that Lempicka had in mind.

At the prompting of her sister, by then also in Paris, Lempicka, who had shown natural artistic talents since childhood, set about transforming herself into a portraitist. The principal bankable asset she had was her fortuitously acquired knowledge of Italian art, ancient, Renaissance and modern. She drew on some aspects of other modern movements, notably Cubism and Picasso's monumental figures of the early '20s. She had been taken on regular visits to the peninsula since at least 1907, expanding her familiarity with its art in the great collections of St. Petersburg, London and Paris.

The contemporary Italian scene Lempicka found herself being measured against at her first solo show in Milan was undergoing its own version of what Cocteau had styled the "return to order," the going back to classical forms after what had come to be seen as the excesses of certain kinds of modernism....