Culture Watch

Somebody Forgot to Mention that the Ships the Artists Painted Carried Slaves

by Pearl Duncan

The well-reviewed show of paintings by lesser known artists, “The Golden Age of Dutch Seascapes,” a showcase of paintings by contemporaries of Rembrandt and Vermeer, at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts was a refreshing addition to art history, but a disappointing deletion of history. The omission of a major historical reference and motivation for the paintings stood out. This summer, the show of 17th century maritime art was reviewed by authors in the

My Woodstock

by Jim Castagnera

       All the attention to the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival makes me feel like it was the party of a lifetime --- and my invitation got lost in the mail.        More accurately, “Jim Castagnera regrets that he cannot attend your weekend of love and peace, because he has a previous engagement.”  In fact, I had chosen to spend my summer at the Jersey shore, a paid vacation compliments of my uncl

Bruno’s American Dream

by Jim Cullen

In a culture that honors -- often to the point of self-flattery -- the virtues of tolerance, it's hard to be genuinely outrageous. But Sacha Baron Cohen is working at it as hard as anybody out there today. As is often the case with cultural transgressors, the locus of his appeal is the young. (I myself was introduced to The Ali G Show by my students on a long bus ride back from a field trip a few years ago.) That's not to say all young people embrace him, any more than he will offend ev

Does the New Dillinger Movie Speak to Our Worries?

by Ron Briley

           It is difficult to view director Michael Mann’s new film Public Enemies, featuring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger and Christian Bale as F.B.I agent Melvin Purvis, without thinking of the classic 1960s film Bonnie and Clyde (1967).  Public Enemies probably deserves some credit for taking fewer liberties with the historical record than Bonnie and Clyde, but as a film text the 1967 picture dir

Will Moviegoers Want the Real Story of John Dillinger?

by Elliott J. Gorn

I just finished a book called Dillinger’s Wild Ride about the famous depression era bank robber. In the past, I’ve written about brawlers, labor rebels, and outlaws. In oth

The Best History of Country & Western Music. Ever.

by Kirk Bane

Published in November, 1977, Nick Tosches’s Country holds a prominent place in the pop culture canon; it is an unflinching, brilliantly rendered history of the genre’s depraved underbelly.  Critics lauded the work early on.  The Houston Post called it an “absolute steamroller of a book…with some of the juiciest, grittiest passages ever found in any C&W study.”  High Fidelity declared that “tales of drug abuse,

'Rap Music Invented in Scotland'? Nonsense! Rap Music Is American, of African Roots

by Pearl Duncan

This past week the news broke in many media, including the New York Times, that American rap music derives from Scotland's medieval pubs. The BritishTelegraph newspaper quoted an American professor who cited, "an American civil war poem, printed in the New York Vanity magazine on November 9, 1861, as the first recorded ex

Ronald Reagan and the Day the Earth Stood Still

by Robert Brent Toplin

Hollywood’s current sci-fi thriller, The Day the Earth Stood Still, features Keanu Reeves as a visitor from outer space who warns earthlings about impending ecological disaster and senses he must destroy mankind to save the earth. The movie is drawing a lot of young patrons to the theaters to enjoy the special effects along with popcorn and drinks. Can this Hollywood flick arouse viewers’ thinking about substantive issues while also entertaining them? It is too early to judg

Another Reason for Remembering Dock Ellis

by Rodger Citron

Dock Ellis, the former pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates and several other teams, died on December 19.  He was 63-years old and his death was reported on sports pages across the country.  The obituaries recorded his 138-119 record as a major leaguer, recalled his 1970 no-hitter (which Ellis later said he threw while under the influence of LSD), and paid tribute to his tendency to speak freely.  However, none of the obituaries that I read noted Ellis’ collaboration with D

What's Wrong with HBO's Dramatization of John Adams's Story

by Jeremy Stern

            In the last episode of HBO’s recent and much-lauded miniseries, “John Adams,” the aged former president is taken to see artist John Trumbull’s enormous new painting, depicting the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  Adams scoffs at its distortion of the real event’s complexity, warning that it falsifies history for the sake of dramatic presentation.  “Do not,” he chides the artist, “let our posterity be deluded with fictions under the guise of poetical or graphical license.”

W.: History and Psychology from Oliver Stone

by Robert Brent Toplin

Oliver Stone’s W. has received considerable praise in the national media for offering a surprisingly complex and rather sympathetic portrai

Why Ernie Davis Matters

by Yanek Mieczkowski

 “The Express,” which opened nationwide October 10, profiles Ernie Davis, who in 1961 became the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy.  Davis might seem an odd subject for a movie.  He is little-known.  Despite a stellar college football career, no NFL record books mention him.  But he is a symbol of a time, and his life offers enduring lessons in humanity and courage. A spectacular athlete at Syracuse University, Davis followe

The Dark Knight: An Allegory of America in the Age of Bush?

by Ron Briley

As the news media prepares for its coverage of the political conventions and the selection of Vice-Presidential running mates, the conventional wisdom is that it is now time to replace such trivial concerns as the summer blockbuster at the local multiplex with a serious examination of Presidential and Congressional politics.  A closer scrutiny of this summer’s film viewing, however, may reveal some troubling undercurrents within the culture which are worthy of more intellectual con

The Legacy of Pulitzer-Prize Winning Cartoonist Bill Mauldin: An Interview with Biographer Todd DePastino

by Robin Lindley

Bill Mauldin couldn’t help himself. Ever since his hardscrabble childhood in the Southwest, the renowned cartoonist championed the oppressed, the underdog. As an enlisted soldier in Europe during World War II, Mauldin

"Recount": Fact and Fiction

by Mark Weisenmiller

As one of the numerous correspondents who reported on some of the stories spawned from the 2000 Presidential dispute here in Florida, I was interested to see how Home Box Office (HBO)'s film about the historical event, entitled "Recount" and which made it's broadcast debut on Sunday, would present the matter. Overall, this reporter would have to pair the film with the play (and later, the 1960 film) "Inherit The Wind." To wit: both "Recount" and "Inherit T

Johnny Cash's Folsom at Forty

by Kirk Bane

In a year of landmark musical statements (think, for example, of the Beatles’ White Album, the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and the Stones’ Beggars Banquet), Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison stands proud. Recorded on January 13, 1968, and released four months later, the album featured such unforgettable Cash tracks as “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Jackson,” “I Got Stripes,” “Orange Blossom Special,” &ldquo

Year One of the Empire: Why We Wrote a Play About the Spanish-American War

by Joyce Antler and Elinor Fuchs

Year One of the Empire, a documentary drama written by Elinor Fuchs and Joyce Antler, about the “splendid” little war with Spain in 1898 and the horrific Philippine-American War that followed, has its New York City premiere Feb. 29 – March 30 at the Metropolitan Playhouse in Manhattan’s East Village. The play chronicles the moment when America literally became an empire and the “American Century” began: after the war with Spain, the U.S. annexed the

Ridley Scott's American Gangster and the Myths of the Vietnam War

by Jeremy Kuzmarov

            The Vietnam War was fought by the United States in violation of the 1954 Geneva Convention on behalf of a series of corrupt client regimes against a popularly backed revolutionary movement that had led the liberation struggle against French colonialism. It resulted in the deaths of an estimated 3.4 million people (Robert S. McNamara’s numbers), the crippling and maiming of countless others and destruction of millions of

The Color Line: Why Whites and Blacks Measure Black Progress Differently

by Leonard Steinhorn

Perhaps the only thing certain about race relations in America today is that whites and blacks sharply disagree about how far we’ve come and how far we have to go. Whites tend to believe that race relations have never been better and we have largely eliminated racism from mainstream American life. To most blacks, anyone making such a claim doesn’t know what it’s like to be black. The sources for this disagreement are many, but among the most important may be the most unlikely: the great co

Charlie Wilson’s War, the Culture of Imperialism and the Distortion of History

by Jeremy Kuzmarov

In his provocative 1993 book, Culture and Imperialism, Edward W. Said examines how cultural representations in the West have historically helped to stereotype Third World peoples as being passively reliant on foreign aid for their social and political uplift, thus engendering support for imperial interventions ostensibly undertaken for humanitarian purposes. This was true, he argued, even in works critical of Western interventions, like Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Dark