Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits

Illuminating Hadrian's Wall--A Line of Light from Coast to Coast

Plans have been unveiled to create a spectacular line of light from coast to coast, along the length of Hadrian’s Wall, next year. This once in a lifetime event will take place on Saturday 13th March 2010 and will follow the route of the 84 mile long Hadrian’s Wall Path National Trail. There will be around 500 individual points of light, placed at 250 metre intervals. The first one will be illuminated at Wallsend in the North East, with the line of light then making it

When Dusk Finally Settled on the Emperor: Alexander Sokurov's 'The Sun'

At one point in the Russian director Alexander Sokurov’s beautiful and eccentric movie “The Sun,” the emperor Hirohito begins enthusing about a preserved hermit crab, the sounds of war planes having subsided. “What a miracle!” Hirohito (Issey Ogata) marvels, staring at the pale, pickled, seemingly unremarkable crustacean as an assistant transcribes the emperor’s comments. “What heavenly beauty!” As Hirohito gazes at the crab, you sense that he is acknowledging a fellow specimen, a communion acce

Smithsonian Pop Quiz: How old was Elvis when he got his first guitar?

Answer: On October 3, 1945, ten-year-old Elvis made his first public performance in at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show. Dressed as a cowboy, Presley had to stand on a chair to reach the microphone as he sang Red Foley's "Old Shep." He came in fifth, winning $5 and a free ticket to all the fair's rides. A few months later, on his 11th birthday, Elvis got his first guitar as a present from his mother. When you enter one of our 19 museums, a world of discovery awa

Leonardo da Vinci Exhibit Opens in Times Square

An interactive exhibit featuring life-size models of Leonardo da Vinci's 500-year-old inventions and machines is opening in New York City's Times Square. Although best known for painting the masterpiece "Mona Lisa," da Vinci also designed a fantastical array of futuristic flying machines, robots, weapons and mechanical devices. Highlights of the exhibit opening Friday include the "Great Kite" flying machine, a working prototype of his "Self-Pr

Museum of the History of Science in Florence to Show Fingers, Tooth Said to be Galileo's

A Florence museum says two fingers and a tooth believed to belong to Galileo Galilei have been found and will go on display next spring. Three fingers and a tooth were taken from the astronomer's body in 1737 and placed in a container. Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Museum of the History of Science, said a private collector had bought a container at auction containing two fingers and a tooth. The collector contacted Florence cultural officials and the parts and the c

Pompeii and the Roman Villa Exhibition Arrives in Mexico

Two centuries before our era, the region of Campania became the favorite place of Roman emperors-from Julius Caesar to Nero- and aristocrats to relax, due to the beauty of the Bay of Naples. Pompeii, Herculaneum and nearby villages represented leisure for some and work for others, like artists. A hundred pieces, which reveal the luxury and sophistication that this Mediterranean zone reached before the Vesuvius erupted in 79 of the Common Era, arrive to Mexico as part of the exhibit

Dickens's Original 'A Christmas Carol' on View at the Morgan Library

Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Mr. Fezziwig, Bob Cratchit, the Ghost of Christmas Past—in the age of film and television these characters from Charles Dickens’s 'A Christmas Carol' are universally familiar. The story has been told as a stage musical, a serious dramatic film, and a modern comedy, and this November will be adapted once again in a new Disney movie starring Jim Carrey. But, in the end, it all comes back to a magical book written by Dickens in a six-week flurry of activity

Oprah's Kremlinologist

Since news broke Thursday of Oprah Winfrey’s looming retirement from daytime TV, much has been made about how this could traumatize the Queen of Talk’s vast empire: her fans, her network, the publishing industry, Dr. Oz. But where is the concern for Janice Peck? “My life is over now,” Peck says, from her home in Denver, where she’s taking the day off to care for Elie, her Border Collie, who has a broken foot. Peck is perhaps the world’s leading Oprah Kremlinologist. An

Maybe Your Great-Grandmother Really Was Cherokee

A new exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian traces black-Native American relations from the 1500s to the present. Black folks who always heard that grandma was an Indian—Cherokee, you say?—will get a sense of affirmation from a museum exhibit that just opened at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Called “IndiVisible,” the exhibit was inspired by the Cherokees vote two years ago to exclude most members of African descent, a con

Saints at a Cultural Crossroads

At monasteries on Mount Athos in northern Greece, you wake in the night to the sound of Greek Orthodox monks chanting Byzantine prayers. It’s an unforgettable sound, distant and unearthly, but also inside you, like a buzz in the blood. The painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos, better known as El Greco, almost certainly heard it growing up far to the south on the island of Crete. You can hear it today when you visit “The Origins of El Greco: Icon Painting in Venetian Crete,” a lustrous

An Unlikely African-American Music Historian

One hundred years ago this past Friday, a bandleader named Polk Miller put together an unusual recording session. Miller — who was white — recorded seven songs with a black vocal quartet. These groundbreaking records have been reissued, offering a rare chance to hear an almost unknown part of African-American musical history. But the man who led these sessions was no civil rights activist. Engineers from the Edison company hauled their equipment from New Jersey to Richmond, Va., whi

Rembrandt's murder mystery

Peter Greenaway, the British director who was educated as a painter, first came to wide attention in 1982 with The Draughtsman’s Contract, a silky comedy about seventeenth-century aristocrats. Greenaway then promptly set out not to build on this success, undertaking one eccentric film project after another. It was almost as if he were determined not to grow cumulatively, as most of the best directors have done. Of the Greenaway works that I have seen, only two of them--quite unlike each other--s

Robert Hilburn, the dean of newspaper rock-and-roll critics, is worried these days

He's the author of the terrific new memoir "Cornflakes with John Lennon," which describes his three decades as the rock-music critic of the Los Angeles Times, where he worked until early 2006. But now, the kind of "revolutionary" music that he grew up listening to in Louisiana and writing about in Los Angeles is a vanishing breed. The 70-year-old Hilburn commands real respect from media colleagues, readers and musicians. "You had to read what I wrote if you

"FDR's Brain Trust" on view now

THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY EXPLORES THE CONTROVERSIAL BEGINNINGS OF THE USE OF WHITE HOUSE ADVISORS IN THE NEW EXHIBITION FDR’S BRAIN TRUST NEW YORK, NY – With unemployment soaring and many of the nation’s banks in uncertain straits, a newly elected President adopts the activist agenda of “wooly-headed professors” and soon is being bitterly accused of seeking dictatorial power. This scenario, which has its uncanny echoes in today’s political scene, was played out

Petersburg National Battlefield tells the story of pivotal battle in Civil War

The Petersburg National Battlefield recently opened a major new addition that will significantly expand the ability to tell the story of one of the pivotal battles during the Civil War. Last month, the National Park Service unveiled a new $3 million visitor contact station at the Five Forks Battlefield. The 2,400-square-foot center offers much more exhibit space than the previous center, and a new 8-mile trail system allows visitors a chance to see the battlefield by foot, bicycle o

Museum of Chinese in America opens in New York

New York - New York boasts a brand-new museum, the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), which is noticeably different from others. Many of the artifacts were salvaged from the detritus of Chinatown: straw sandals from Mott Street, an eight-foot sign advertising a Chinese laundry, and shelves from a general store being dismantled on the Bowery. Forget bidding at auction for precious items like jade and lacquer. Dumpster diving was one tactic to assemble the collection. "We don't have spectac

'The Americans' Revisited, the photography of Robert Frank

In the summer of 1955, Robert Frank saw an elderly man with a cane and dark suit standing beneath a wooden staircase at a Los Angeles rooming house. There was enough in the scene that the Swiss photographer pressed the shutter on his 35mm Leica three times before moving on, an encounter that probably lasted no more than a minute. On the black-and-white contact sheet little distinguishes the three frames from each other. In the first, the man is close to a white pillar; in the second

A tour of L.A.'s rich rail history

It didn't take much, by modern standards, to dazzle the first movie audiences. Some of the earliest films were simply footage of trains running along their tracks. The locomotives were vast and dramatic, churning their wheels and spewing steam. As the trains roared toward the camera, looking as if they were about to burst through the screen, panicked moviegoers were said to have screamed and fled the theater. The 12-minute-long "The Great Train Robbery," relea

William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe (2009)

For William Kunstler, the wild-haired, radical civil rights lawyer with the raspy voice who became a left-wing political star in the late 1960s, Michelangelo’s statue of David symbolized how he saw himself. A photograph of the statue that morphs into a drawing of David twirling his slingshot is a recurrent image in the crisply made, largely admiring documentary “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe.” To him, it embodied the moment everyone faces at some time or other when one has to stand u

Linda C. Eneix: How to be Remembered After 5,000 Years

[Linda C. Eneix, researcher and writer/director of an original Documentary entitled: “Legacy of a Lost Civilization: the Extraordinary People of the Temples of Malta.”] If you wish to be remembered after five thousand years, the most important thing you must do is strive to escape devastation. Obviously, something must survive. If it is too small a thing, it could be overlooked or discounted. So you must achieve greatness in some way. Here lies the glory of the monumen