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 (6-14-12)
MICHAEL ARENELLA is at an open-air flea market in Lambertville, N.J., his fedora-topped head leaning over a gramophone. He winds the crank, lifts the arm and places the needle on a 78. Out of the old oak box comes a voice from the past: Arthur Fields singing “In My Tippy Canoe” in 1921. Mr. Arenella stands silently, hands in his pockets, taking in every crackly note.
Other shoppers stop to figure out where the music is coming from. To their delighted surprise, they see Mr. Arenella, a 34-year-old jazz musician and bandleader from Brooklyn who looks as if he had stepped through some wormhole in the space-time continuum. He is 6-foot-1 and dressed in windowpane-checked pants, a blue paisley ascot, a red-and-white checked shirt, a herringbone vest, a blazer with a blue pocket handkerchief, cap-toe...
SOURCE: NYT (6-27-12)
Teenagers are still reading the classics. They just don’t want them to look so, well, classic.
That is the theory of publishers who are wrapping books like “Emma” and “Jane Eyre” in new covers: provocative, modern jackets in bold shades of scarlet and lime green that are explicitly aimed at teenagers raised on “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games.”
The new versions are cutting edge replacements for the traditional (read: stuffy, boring) covers that have been a trademark of the classics for decades, those familiar, dour depictions of women wearing frilly clothing. In their place are images like the one of Romeo in stubble and a tight white tank top on a new Penguin edition of “Romeo and Juliet.”...
SOURCE: NYT (6-26-2012)
A lot was riding on the new production of Berlioz’s epic opera “Les Troyens” that opened at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, on Monday night. This staging by the director David McVicar is a co-production with the Vienna State Opera, Teatro Alla Scala in Milan and the San Francisco Opera. The Royal Opera’s “...
SOURCE: NYT (6-8-12)
The orotund proclamations will be unavoidable at the new exhibition “Churchill: The Power of Words,” at the Morgan Library & Museum, because at the center of the gallery is a semi-enclosed theater. And from it, however muted, will emerge recordings of Winston Churchill’s voice, speaking to Parliament, to British radio listeners and to American audiences, breaking on the ear like waves, rising and falling with every breath, sometimes suspended unexpectedly in midair, other times rushing forward with renewed vigor.
If you enter that small theater to hear excerpts from eight of his...
SOURCE: NYT (6-8-12)
CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND — “The Search for Immortality: Tomb Treasures of Han China” on view at the Fitzwilliam Museum through Nov. 11 is one of those landmark shows that shed new light on a crucial historical period in one of the world’s great civilizations.
The discoveries made in the past three decades by Chinese archaeologists have yielded so much datable evidence that books dealing with Han China must be rewritten.
The tour de force achieved by the curator of the show, James Lin, with the backing of the director of the museum, Timothy Potts, is to have brought to the West some of the art treasures that lay the foundations on which our understanding rests of the Han age in the second and first centuries B.C....
SOURCE: NYT (6-2-12)
The Cambodian government is convinced that two life-size 10th-century statues that have anchored the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Southeast Asian galleries for nearly two decades were looted from a jungle temple and plans to ask for their return.
“The government is very serious about moving this forward, and we are getting much legal advice,” said Im Sokrithy, a director of Apsara, the Cambodian agency that oversees heritage and land management at the sprawling temple complex where, archaeologists say, the statues stood for centuries. “We are taking a forceful position, and we hope they can be returned.”...
