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: Lee P Ruddin (11-12-09)
It’s 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the extraordinary moment when the Cold War symbolically ended. The anniversary was covered extensively by the BBC: from television and radio to a magazine. And this by an organization Winston Churchill once mused was “honeycombed with Socialists – probably with Communists.”
Watching, listening and reading the material on events as they transpired in Berlin, it becomes clear that the producers and editors had a choice between one of two routes to go down: personal or political. Whichever route they chose, though, each sketched the creation, evolution and demise of what Henry A. Kissinger called “a symbol of Communist inhumanity” admirably.
Albeit misleading titled, The Secret Life of the Berlin Wall (BBC Two) chronicles the secret lives east of the wall dramatically. The 90-minute documentary is a visually stunning production illuminating the psychological barriers encountered by those in Soviet-controlled East...
Watching, listening and reading the material on events as they transpired in Berlin, it becomes clear that the producers and editors had a choice between one of two routes to go down: personal or political. Whichever route they chose, though, each sketched the creation, evolution and demise of what Henry A. Kissinger called “a symbol of Communist inhumanity” admirably.
Albeit misleading titled, The Secret Life of the Berlin Wall (BBC Two) chronicles the secret lives east of the wall dramatically. The 90-minute documentary is a visually stunning production illuminating the psychological barriers encountered by those in Soviet-controlled East...
Friday, November 13, 2009 - 10:42
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SOURCE: The Washington Post (11-8-09)
The visitors comment book at the Smithsonian American Art Museum's exhibition "1934: A New Deal for Artists" has taken on a distinct note of nostalgia. "America needs another public works art program now," wrote Gene, from Maryland, after looking at paintings created for President Franklin Roosevelt's Public Works of Art Project, the first of several New Deal programs that supported artists during the Great Depression.
"Do we need another public art program for the 2009 great recession?" asked someone named Robbie. "Yes."
Open for comment since the show was unveiled in February, the book sits surrounded by a colorful display of paintings created from 1933 to 1934 during a short-lived phase of the alphabet soup of 1930s arts programs. The voices calling for another "new deal" for artists are found among generic comments about the prettiness of the art, and they echo a question that came up when Morris Dickstein...
"Do we need another public art program for the 2009 great recession?" asked someone named Robbie. "Yes."
Open for comment since the show was unveiled in February, the book sits surrounded by a colorful display of paintings created from 1933 to 1934 during a short-lived phase of the alphabet soup of 1930s arts programs. The voices calling for another "new deal" for artists are found among generic comments about the prettiness of the art, and they echo a question that came up when Morris Dickstein...
Friday, November 13, 2009 - 01:15
SOURCE: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11-11-09)
November 11 is Armistice Day, which marks the cessation of Great War hostilities in 1918. (Here in the United States, of course, this is now Veterans Day.) In honor of the day and the dead, the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, housed at the University of Oxford, chose today to unveil its Siegfried Sassoon Collection.
Although it contains photographs and other materials, the collection centers on manuscripts of Sassoon's poems, drawn from holdings at Oxford's Bodleian Library and at the University of Cambridge, the New York Public Library, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. A draft of Sassoon's poem "Standing With the Dead" turns up in a June 19, 1918, letter to his friend Robert Nichols.
"Here's my only poem in ages -- is it any good?" Sassoon asks Nichols. Then comes the poem: "I stood with the Dead, so forsaken & still./ When dawn was grey I stood with the dead. And my slow heart said, 'You...
Although it contains photographs and other materials, the collection centers on manuscripts of Sassoon's poems, drawn from holdings at Oxford's Bodleian Library and at the University of Cambridge, the New York Public Library, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. A draft of Sassoon's poem "Standing With the Dead" turns up in a June 19, 1918, letter to his friend Robert Nichols.
"Here's my only poem in ages -- is it any good?" Sassoon asks Nichols. Then comes the poem: "I stood with the Dead, so forsaken & still./ When dawn was grey I stood with the dead. And my slow heart said, 'You...
Friday, November 13, 2009 - 00:05
SOURCE: NYT (11-11-09)
Past, present, future. History, memory, experience. The recasting of history through memory and experience. All of these slippery subjects are the matter of Bill T. Jones’s “Serenade/The Proposition,” an hourlong work that reaffirms this artist’s gift for creating powerful theater but reveals little of sustained choreographic interest.
Perhaps that’s because the dance never quite feels like the point of the piece, which opened at the Joyce on Tuesday night. “Serenade,” a Joyce commission that was created last year, is one of three works Mr. Jones has made recently to honor the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.
Unlike “Fondly Do We Hope ... Fervently Do We Pray,” created for the Ravinia Festival in Illinois, “Serenade” makes little direct mention of its subject. But it is framed and shaped by a series of spoken texts, mostly drawn from writings and speeches by Lincoln. These are interspersed and layered with recorded voices offering their own notions...
Perhaps that’s because the dance never quite feels like the point of the piece, which opened at the Joyce on Tuesday night. “Serenade,” a Joyce commission that was created last year, is one of three works Mr. Jones has made recently to honor the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.
Unlike “Fondly Do We Hope ... Fervently Do We Pray,” created for the Ravinia Festival in Illinois, “Serenade” makes little direct mention of its subject. But it is framed and shaped by a series of spoken texts, mostly drawn from writings and speeches by Lincoln. These are interspersed and layered with recorded voices offering their own notions...
Thursday, November 12, 2009 - 23:45
SOURCE: WSJ (11-12-09)
Which composer exerted the greatest influence on 20th-century American classical music? Thursday and Friday, Other Minds, a San Francisco-based organization dedicated to such music, will make the case for Henry Cowell.
Cowell, who died in 1965, was a prolific composer whose own music was eclipsed by the works of his students. Other Minds director Charles Amirkhanian discovered Cowell through the pioneering percussion music of the composer's famous pupils John Cage and Lou Harrison. "I found that a lot of the experimentation on the West Coast emanated from him," he said. "The more I looked at it, the more he seemed like a key figure who gave American music an original vision when it had none."
Born in Menlo Park, Calif., in 1897, Cowell toured the world in the 1920s as a pianist, winning amazed reviews and publicity when he, for example, smashed rows of adjacent piano keys with a forearm or played directly on the piano strings and sound...
Cowell, who died in 1965, was a prolific composer whose own music was eclipsed by the works of his students. Other Minds director Charles Amirkhanian discovered Cowell through the pioneering percussion music of the composer's famous pupils John Cage and Lou Harrison. "I found that a lot of the experimentation on the West Coast emanated from him," he said. "The more I looked at it, the more he seemed like a key figure who gave American music an original vision when it had none."
Born in Menlo Park, Calif., in 1897, Cowell toured the world in the 1920s as a pianist, winning amazed reviews and publicity when he, for example, smashed rows of adjacent piano keys with a forearm or played directly on the piano strings and sound...
Thursday, November 12, 2009 - 23:22
SOURCE: NYT (11-12-09)
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — The question of where the old Route 66 officially ended in the West has been the subject of debate among history buffs and roadsters. On Wednesday it was resolved in a quintessentially American way, by placing the terminus in a place where it can best be monetized.
A Route 66 sign embossed with “end of the trail” was dedicated at the Santa Monica Pier, a popular tourist destination, marking the 83rd anniversary of the road’s opening and what James M. Conkle, the chairman of the Route 66 Preservation Foundation, called the “spiritual,” if not precisely historically accurate, end of the famed roadway.
U.S. Highway 66 — coined the “Mother Road” by John Steinbeck in “The Grapes of Wrath” and later popularized by Hollywood before becoming a casualty of the interstate system — opened in 1926, connecting Chicago to Los Angeles through hundreds of rural and urban miles of winding road in eight states. Originally, the route terminated on Seventh...
A Route 66 sign embossed with “end of the trail” was dedicated at the Santa Monica Pier, a popular tourist destination, marking the 83rd anniversary of the road’s opening and what James M. Conkle, the chairman of the Route 66 Preservation Foundation, called the “spiritual,” if not precisely historically accurate, end of the famed roadway.
U.S. Highway 66 — coined the “Mother Road” by John Steinbeck in “The Grapes of Wrath” and later popularized by Hollywood before becoming a casualty of the interstate system — opened in 1926, connecting Chicago to Los Angeles through hundreds of rural and urban miles of winding road in eight states. Originally, the route terminated on Seventh...
Thursday, November 12, 2009 - 23:20
SOURCE: NYT (11-11-09)
Past, present, future. History, memory, experience. The recasting of history through memory and experience. All of these slippery subjects are the matter of Bill T. Jones’s “Serenade/The Proposition,” an hourlong work that reaffirms this artist’s gift for creating powerful theater but reveals little of sustained choreographic interest.
Perhaps that’s because the dance never quite feels like the point of the piece, which opened at the Joyce on Tuesday night. “Serenade,” a Joyce commission that was created last year, is one of three works Mr. Jones has made recently to honor the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.
Unlike “Fondly Do We Hope ... Fervently Do We Pray,” created for the Ravinia Festival in Illinois, “Serenade” makes little direct mention of its subject. But it is framed and shaped by a series of spoken texts, mostly drawn from writings and speeches by Lincoln. These are interspersed and layered with recorded voices offering their own notions...
Perhaps that’s because the dance never quite feels like the point of the piece, which opened at the Joyce on Tuesday night. “Serenade,” a Joyce commission that was created last year, is one of three works Mr. Jones has made recently to honor the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.
Unlike “Fondly Do We Hope ... Fervently Do We Pray,” created for the Ravinia Festival in Illinois, “Serenade” makes little direct mention of its subject. But it is framed and shaped by a series of spoken texts, mostly drawn from writings and speeches by Lincoln. These are interspersed and layered with recorded voices offering their own notions...
Thursday, November 12, 2009 - 23:07
SOURCE: NYT (11-11-09)
The ancient Greeks had a shorthand for the mental anguish of war, for post-traumatic stress disorder and even for outbursts of fratricidal bloodshed like last week’s shootings at Fort Hood. They would invoke the names of mythological military heroes who battled inner demons: Achilles, consumed by the deaths of his men; Philoctetes, hollowed out from betrayals by fellow officers; Ajax, warped with so much rage that he wanted to kill his comrades.
Now officials at the Defense Department are turning to the Greeks to explore the psychic impact of war.
The Pentagon has provided $3.7 million for an independent production company, Theater of War, to visit 50 military sites through at least next summer and stage readings from two plays by Sophocles, “Ajax” and “Philoctetes,” for service members. So far the group has performed at Fort Riley in Kansas; at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Md.; and at last week’s Warrior Resilience Conference in Norfolk, Va.
Now officials at the Defense Department are turning to the Greeks to explore the psychic impact of war.
The Pentagon has provided $3.7 million for an independent production company, Theater of War, to visit 50 military sites through at least next summer and stage readings from two plays by Sophocles, “Ajax” and “Philoctetes,” for service members. So far the group has performed at Fort Riley in Kansas; at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Md.; and at last week’s Warrior Resilience Conference in Norfolk, Va.
Thursday, November 12, 2009 - 23:06
SOURCE: NYT (11-11-09)
IT’S usually easy to distinguish between clothes and costumes: either you’re Spider-Man, or you’re not.
Drawing the line between polish and pretension is trickier, especially when last year’s costume can be this year’s classic, and next year’s yawn. Just consider the steady infiltration of 19th-century haberdashery into the 21st-century wardrobe. Garment after garment has arrived on the scene that one might think more Gilbert and Sullivan than Bergdorf and Goodman, only to be taken up by the young beards.
Not long ago, big brass-buttoned military coats looked a bit extreme. So did high-button, high-lapel vests and slim tweed trousers. And so did guys who tucked said trousers into high, old-fashioned hunting boots. Now these clothes (along with those ever-present beards and mustaches) look like downtown defaults compared with fall runway looks like cardinal-red tailcoats at Ralph Lauren, capes and bowlers at Alexander McQueen and knee breeches at Robert Geller....
Drawing the line between polish and pretension is trickier, especially when last year’s costume can be this year’s classic, and next year’s yawn. Just consider the steady infiltration of 19th-century haberdashery into the 21st-century wardrobe. Garment after garment has arrived on the scene that one might think more Gilbert and Sullivan than Bergdorf and Goodman, only to be taken up by the young beards.
Not long ago, big brass-buttoned military coats looked a bit extreme. So did high-button, high-lapel vests and slim tweed trousers. And so did guys who tucked said trousers into high, old-fashioned hunting boots. Now these clothes (along with those ever-present beards and mustaches) look like downtown defaults compared with fall runway looks like cardinal-red tailcoats at Ralph Lauren, capes and bowlers at Alexander McQueen and knee breeches at Robert Geller....
Thursday, November 12, 2009 - 23:04
SOURCE: CNN (11-11-09)
(CNN) -- Some reviewers have called "Saving Private Ryan," Steven Spielberg's World War II film about D-Day and the search for a soldier, one of the greatest war movies.
Military historian Antony Beevor begs to differ.
Not only is it not the greatest war movie, it's not even the best cinematic depiction of D-Day, says Beevor, author of the newly published "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy" (Viking).
He admires the famed Omaha Beach opening -- "Probably the most realistic battle sequence ever filmed," he said -- but described the rest of "Saving Private Ryan" as "ghastly."
"It's sort of a 'Dirty Dozen' cliche of the worst form," he said.
He has expanded on the criticism in a lecture. "Spielberg's basic story line had great potential. It shows the tension between patriotic and therefore collective loyalty, and the struggle of the individual for survival: those...
Military historian Antony Beevor begs to differ.
Not only is it not the greatest war movie, it's not even the best cinematic depiction of D-Day, says Beevor, author of the newly published "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy" (Viking).
He admires the famed Omaha Beach opening -- "Probably the most realistic battle sequence ever filmed," he said -- but described the rest of "Saving Private Ryan" as "ghastly."
"It's sort of a 'Dirty Dozen' cliche of the worst form," he said.
He has expanded on the criticism in a lecture. "Spielberg's basic story line had great potential. It shows the tension between patriotic and therefore collective loyalty, and the struggle of the individual for survival: those...
Thursday, November 12, 2009 - 02:16
SOURCE: WSJ (11-11-09)
A few blocks from where the Wall stood is the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, which commemorates the more than 1,000 people who died trying to cross the deadly East German border. A group of important Berliners gathered over the weekend to inaugurate a new exhibit on the Gipper and his famous efforts to end the division of Berlin.
The collection tells a fascinating story of just how focused Ronald Reagan was on tearing down the Wall. He first visited Berlin in November 1978, and spent many minutes surveying the wall's "death strip" from the penthouse offices of the conservative Axel Springer publishing house that stood right on the border between the two cities. "You could tell from the set of his jaw and his look," recalls former aide Peter Hannaford, "that he was very, very determined that this was something that had to go."
Reagan, then a private citizen, asked if he could visit East Berlin. Told that he needed only a one-day visa...
The collection tells a fascinating story of just how focused Ronald Reagan was on tearing down the Wall. He first visited Berlin in November 1978, and spent many minutes surveying the wall's "death strip" from the penthouse offices of the conservative Axel Springer publishing house that stood right on the border between the two cities. "You could tell from the set of his jaw and his look," recalls former aide Peter Hannaford, "that he was very, very determined that this was something that had to go."
Reagan, then a private citizen, asked if he could visit East Berlin. Told that he needed only a one-day visa...
Thursday, November 12, 2009 - 02:02
SOURCE: NYT (11-10-09)
Ian McKellen had already read the script of a new version of the late-1960s cult television series “The Prisoner” when he met the author, Bill Gallagher, last year at a London restaurant to discuss the project. As Mr. Gallagher recalls their first encounter, Mr. McKellen hugged him, then gently patted him on the head and asked, “What goes on in that mind of yours, Bill?”
Don’t be surprised if television viewers have a similar reaction when the resulting six-part mini-series, “The Prisoner,” begins on Sunday on AMC. Led by Mr. Gallagher’s reimagining of themes and characters, the new production offers a thoroughly revamped take on one of the most enduring television artifacts of the counterculture era.
“The challenge of doing this show was to pay homage and yet be different,” Mr. Gallagher said. As a 12-year-old, he added, “I remember being mesmerized and beguiled by the mystery and menace of ‘The Prisoner,’ disturbed in ways that I couldn’t explain then. For...
Don’t be surprised if television viewers have a similar reaction when the resulting six-part mini-series, “The Prisoner,” begins on Sunday on AMC. Led by Mr. Gallagher’s reimagining of themes and characters, the new production offers a thoroughly revamped take on one of the most enduring television artifacts of the counterculture era.
“The challenge of doing this show was to pay homage and yet be different,” Mr. Gallagher said. As a 12-year-old, he added, “I remember being mesmerized and beguiled by the mystery and menace of ‘The Prisoner,’ disturbed in ways that I couldn’t explain then. For...
Thursday, November 12, 2009 - 00:47
SOURCE: WSJ (11-11-09)
For many visitors, the nation's capital has two notable and distinct aspects. On the one side there is the business of government, and on the other a wealth of art and historical museums. However, like everything else in Washington, the distinctions often get blurred. All three branches of government have extensive art, antique and artifact collections—with curators in charge of them, to boot—that probably add more ambience than cultural enlightenment to visitors. But, of course, who expects the Treasury Department to be a place of culture?
"We have 5,000 to 7,000 objects in the collection, depending on how you count objects," Richard Cote, the Treasury Department's curator, said. Among the notable pieces in the collection are portraits of Treasury secretaries, dating back to Alexander Hamilton ("That's our core collection," he said), and various artworks produced for the federal government during the New Deal. There are also archival photographs (of...
"We have 5,000 to 7,000 objects in the collection, depending on how you count objects," Richard Cote, the Treasury Department's curator, said. Among the notable pieces in the collection are portraits of Treasury secretaries, dating back to Alexander Hamilton ("That's our core collection," he said), and various artworks produced for the federal government during the New Deal. There are also archival photographs (of...
Thursday, November 12, 2009 - 00:07
SOURCE: NYT (11-8-09)
Guitars, keyboards and drums did not topple the Berlin Wall. But for the young people who helped bring down Communist regimes across Eastern Europe in the fall of 1989, pop music was a profoundly subversive force, inspiration and vital tool of protest for challenging and undermining a totalitarian state stricter than any parent.
Now middle aged, some of the musicians who played in ostracism during those last gray years of Communist rule gathered in New York over the weekend for the festival Rebel Waltz: Underground Music From Behind the Iron Curtain. Performing at Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village on Friday and Saturday, bands from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia commemorated the 20th anniversary of the wall’s fall with cascades of sound in the grand tradition of the British and American pop that first motivated them.
Stylistically, the groups, some of which will be playing later this week in Chicago, Cleveland, Toronto and...
Now middle aged, some of the musicians who played in ostracism during those last gray years of Communist rule gathered in New York over the weekend for the festival Rebel Waltz: Underground Music From Behind the Iron Curtain. Performing at Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village on Friday and Saturday, bands from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia commemorated the 20th anniversary of the wall’s fall with cascades of sound in the grand tradition of the British and American pop that first motivated them.
Stylistically, the groups, some of which will be playing later this week in Chicago, Cleveland, Toronto and...
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - 02:35
SOURCE: NYT (11-8-09)
For decades the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been the subject of passionate debate. His critique of Western thought and technology has penetrated deeply into architecture, psychology and literary theory and inspired some of the most influential intellectual movements of the 20th century. Yet he was also a fervent Nazi.
Now a soon-to-be published book in English has revived the long-running debate about whether the man can be separated from his philosophy. Drawing on new evidence, the author, Emmanuel Faye, argues fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy. As a result Mr. Faye declares, Heidegger’s works and the many fields built on them need to be re-examined lest they spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as “the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.”
First published in France in 2005, the book, “Heidegger: The...
Now a soon-to-be published book in English has revived the long-running debate about whether the man can be separated from his philosophy. Drawing on new evidence, the author, Emmanuel Faye, argues fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy. As a result Mr. Faye declares, Heidegger’s works and the many fields built on them need to be re-examined lest they spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as “the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.”
First published in France in 2005, the book, “Heidegger: The...
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - 02:34
SOURCE: NYT (11-9-09)
When the Wehrmacht hanged 18 civilians in a World War II reprisal killing in Serbia, tugging on the victims’ ankles to hasten death, a German propaganda cameraman dutifully recorded the grisly sequence on color movie film. When Russian partisans executed a suspected German spy deep in the forest, that killing, too, was caught on camera.
Nearly 65 years after the Allied victory, long-lost or overlooked film footage — some in unexpected color and almost all raw and unedited — continues to emerge from military archives and family trunks worldwide, adding new dimensions to history’s most exhaustively covered conflict.
Two documentaries featuring such finds — “WWII in HD” on History and “Apocalypse” on the Smithsonian Channel — make their debuts this week and next on American television, keyed to Veterans Day. And one, “Apocalypse,” comes with a dose of controversy, as its filmmakers have colorized black-and-white reels, rekindling debate about a practice usually...
Nearly 65 years after the Allied victory, long-lost or overlooked film footage — some in unexpected color and almost all raw and unedited — continues to emerge from military archives and family trunks worldwide, adding new dimensions to history’s most exhaustively covered conflict.
Two documentaries featuring such finds — “WWII in HD” on History and “Apocalypse” on the Smithsonian Channel — make their debuts this week and next on American television, keyed to Veterans Day. And one, “Apocalypse,” comes with a dose of controversy, as its filmmakers have colorized black-and-white reels, rekindling debate about a practice usually...
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - 02:02
SOURCE: The Age (Australia) (11-10-09)
WHEN intimate colour film of Adolf Hitler cuddling a pet dog and smiling tenderly like a baby was shown for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival 36 years ago, a scuffle broke out in the audience and the screening had to be abandoned.
The documentary, Swastika, contained extraordinary, never-before-seen footage of Hitler entertaining friends, family and his inner circle — including Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels. Much of it was shot by his girlfriend, Eva Braun, at Hitler's Bavarian mountain retreat, the Berghof in Obersalzberg.
The colour vision of Hitler as a human being rather than a long-dead monster depicted in grainy black and white so outraged some audience members that fisticuffs broke out and the German distributors panicked. The movie later opened in other countries, including the US, Britain and France, but despite widespread critical acclaim, it was mothballed and Germany banned it.
Last week, however, Swastika — and its...
The documentary, Swastika, contained extraordinary, never-before-seen footage of Hitler entertaining friends, family and his inner circle — including Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels. Much of it was shot by his girlfriend, Eva Braun, at Hitler's Bavarian mountain retreat, the Berghof in Obersalzberg.
The colour vision of Hitler as a human being rather than a long-dead monster depicted in grainy black and white so outraged some audience members that fisticuffs broke out and the German distributors panicked. The movie later opened in other countries, including the US, Britain and France, but despite widespread critical acclaim, it was mothballed and Germany banned it.
Last week, however, Swastika — and its...
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - 01:07
SOURCE: The Daily Beast (11-10-09)
Should Dmitri Nabokov, son of Vladimir, have published his father’s final, unfinished work, The Original of Laura? “In many respects, the release of a rudimentary version of his last novel does a disservice to a writer who deeply cherished precision and was practiced in the art of revision,” Michiko Kakutani writes. “Yet, at the same time, these bits and pieces of Laura will beckon and beguile Nabokov fans, who will find many of the author’s perennial themes and obsessions percolating through the story of Philip.” The novel, written on Nabokov’s death bed, “explores the subjects of death and the otherworldly with contemplative urgency,” Kakutani writes.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - 01:00
SOURCE: Artdaily.org (11-9-09)
Japanese manga artist Hoshino Yukinobu has brought his popular character Professor Munakata to London's British Museum, featuring some of the collection's most famous treasures in his drawings.
In a single-room display near the entrance to the famous museum, a giant picture of folklore expert Munakata donning his trademark bowler hat and black cape includes the Sutton Hoo helmet dating from the 7th-century.
One reason the British Museum wanted to work with Hoshino was because of its exhibition of dogu, ceramic figures from ancient Japan which runs until November 22.
"One of the aspects of that project was exploring how the prehistoric figurines have been rediscovered and re-enjoyed in contemporary culture," said curator Tim Clark.
"A lot of his Professor Munakata stories have shown him touring around Japan to archeological sites and having encounters with the dogu, so it was actually the dogu project that brought us to...
In a single-room display near the entrance to the famous museum, a giant picture of folklore expert Munakata donning his trademark bowler hat and black cape includes the Sutton Hoo helmet dating from the 7th-century.
One reason the British Museum wanted to work with Hoshino was because of its exhibition of dogu, ceramic figures from ancient Japan which runs until November 22.
"One of the aspects of that project was exploring how the prehistoric figurines have been rediscovered and re-enjoyed in contemporary culture," said curator Tim Clark.
"A lot of his Professor Munakata stories have shown him touring around Japan to archeological sites and having encounters with the dogu, so it was actually the dogu project that brought us to...
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 - 10:13
SOURCE: Artdaily.org (11-9-09)
A 16th-century Hebrew Bible looted by the Nazis six decades ago was returned to Vienna's Jewish community Monday.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials turned over the two-volume Bible to two Austrian emissaries during a repatriation ceremony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan.
Published in Venice in 1516-17, the Bible once was part of the well-known medieval manuscripts collection of S.H. Halberstam, officials said. In 1908, it was donated to the Vienna Jewish community library.
In 1938, during the annexation of Austria, Nazi soldiers confiscated the Bible in a seizure of the Jewish community's library, and the Bible later wound up in Berlin.
It was illegally imported into the United States in March, authorities said...
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials turned over the two-volume Bible to two Austrian emissaries during a repatriation ceremony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan.
Published in Venice in 1516-17, the Bible once was part of the well-known medieval manuscripts collection of S.H. Halberstam, officials said. In 1908, it was donated to the Vienna Jewish community library.
In 1938, during the annexation of Austria, Nazi soldiers confiscated the Bible in a seizure of the Jewish community's library, and the Bible later wound up in Berlin.
It was illegally imported into the United States in March, authorities said...
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 - 10:11
