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

Source: Telegraph (UK)
9-23-08

Van Gogh painting uncovered by new Xray machine

A new technique promises to reveal hundreds of masterpieces hidden beneath later works. Harry de Quetteville reports It amounts to the biggest single art find: a host of unseen works by masters old and new, from Rembrandt to Van Gogh and Picasso. But these works can't be seen on the walls of any gallery or museum. And they are hidden not in a safe or bank vault, but on canvases which the artists themselves painted over. Now, however, scientists are employing a revolutio

Source: Humberto Fontova at worldnetdaily
9-19-08

Celebrate the new movie about Che? Why?

At this year's Cannes Film Festival, Benicio Del Toro won "best actor" for his role as Che Guevara in Steven Soderbergh's film glorifying the Argentine-born "revolutionary," also known by acquaintances as a sniveling coward, an insufferable prig, a military doofus, a Stalinist and a psychotic mass-murderer. "The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind!" raved Che Guevara in 1961. "If the nuclear missiles had remained, we would have fired them against th

Source: Telegraph (UK)
9-23-08

Council sells Constable sketch for 17,400 pounds

The charcoal drawing, commissioned in the early 1800s, has been sitting in storage at Solihull Council since it bought it in the early 1990s. Council chiefs refused to put it on public view in case it got damaged. With mounting debts they put the drawing, a sketch of Malvern Hall, near Solihull, West Mids, up for auction. The drawing was commissioned by the then owner of the hall, Henry Greswolde. A priceless oil painting based on the sketch ha

Source: Guardian (UK)
9-24-08

History repeats itself: a 100-year-old play about a very modern political crisis

Like a theatrical equivalent of David Dimbleby, Harley Granville-Barker's play Waste has a habit of popping up at times of great political importance. The last major British revival of the 1907 drama - in which a party leader's attempt to form a government is thwarted by factionalism and scandal - took place in 1997, as the collapsing Major adminstration was replaced by Blair. A Broadway production in 2000 coincided with the disputed Bush-Gore election. And now, confirming the work's record as h

Source: Tehran Times
9-24-08

Sinaii receives Polish Order of Merit

Iranian filmmaker Khosro Sinaii received the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for his documentary “The Lost Requiem”. President Lech Kaczynski presented the medal to director Sinaii in a ceremony held on the sidelines of the Polish Film Festival in the city of Gdynia last Saturday. “The Lost Requiem” tells the story of the wartime exodus to Iran by thousands of Polish citizens after being released from the Soviet labor camps of Siberia du

Source: Guardian (UK)
9-23-08

Library brings medieval classics into digital age

Literary treasures written in Middle English are to be put into a digital archive by John Rylands Library in Manchester. A major element of the In the Bigynning project will reunite a leaf from Chaucer's The Miller's Tale with a matching piece at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia from which it has been separated for more than a century. Carol Burrows, assistant librarian, said: "It will act as a pilot for an ambitious Manchester Medieval Digital Library which will contain dig

Source: Tehran Times
9-23-08

Farewell! Photo exhibtion commorates 28th anniversary of Iran-Iraq war

An Iranian combatant bids farewell to his martyred fellows in an undated photo taken at a frontline in western Iran during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. An exhibition of photos commemorating the 28th anniversary of the war is currently underway at Tehran’s Palestine Museum of Contemporary Art.

Source: Independent (UK)
9-23-08

Power of the rouble lures RSC

The Royal Shakespeare Company is to launch a series of four specially-commissioned plays about Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union in Stratford-upon-Avon next year, in a move it is hoped will attract international billionaire investment. Michael Boyd, the RSC's artistic director who trained in Moscow early in his career, told The Independent yesterday that he wants Russian money to flow into theatre in the way that it has helped the visual arts to prosper. Lo

Source: Independent (UK)
9-23-08

Munch's 'Vampire' comes out of the dark after 70 years

One of the most sensational and shocking images in European art, Edvard Munch's painting of a man locked in a vampire's tortured embrace – her molten-red hair running along his soft bare skin – created an instant outcry when unveiled a century ago. Some believed the Norwegian artist's anguished 1894 masterpiece, Love and Pain – since known as Vampire – to be a reference to his illicit visits to prostitutes; others interpreted it as a macabre fantasy about the death of his favourite

Source: Times (UK)
9-21-08

The National Gallery’s new show of Renaissance portraits contains some strikingly modern faces.

The portraits brought together for Renaissance Faces are in one sense a window on the past, revealing sitters from half a millennium ago who range from courtier to commoner. Yet, far from appearing as if they come from an entirely different world, if you look closely, some of these people seem incredibly familiar. Many of the pictures bear striking resemblance to some of the contemporary celebrities who adorn our newspapers, suggesting that, in 500 years, certain facial types have

Source: Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Story by Rick Wartzman, director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book is 'Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's '
9-21-08

Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath more relevant than ever

After storms ravaged Iowa last summer, devastation wasn't the only thing that people found amid the flood waters. Scores of out-of-work electricians from Michigan, hard hit by auto industry cutbacks, spied opportunity. Trekking hundreds of miles from home, where the unemployment rate of 8.5 percent is the highest in the United States, they were eager to scoop up jobs rewiring Cedar Rapids -- even if it meant sleeping in a tent for weeks on end. To some observers, the

Source: Telegraph (UK)
9-22-08

Princess Diana's dance with John Travolta made her feel like elephant, letters show

She famously twirled around the dancefloor with John Travolta, but Diana, Princess of Wales confided in a letter: "Watching me dance is like watching an elephant." Previously unseen correspondence between Diana and her former nanny, Mary Clarke, provides a fascinating insight into the young princess's life. She writes guilelessly of her love for the Prince of Wales, the frantic preparations for their wedding day and her happiness in the early years of marriage

Source: Telegraph (UK)
9-22-08

Cold War Modern: superpowers slugging it out (Exhibit)

Alastair Sooke finds great art and design being created in the shadow of nuclear annihilation at the V&A's new show Cold War Modern: Design 1945-70 When the V&A decided to mount its big new autumn exhibition, Cold War Modern, four years ago, the museum could scarcely have anticipated how relevant it would seem by the time that it opened. After Russia's tanks rolled into Georgia last month, relations between Moscow and the West feel sub-zero once again.

Source: Telegraph (UK)
9-22-08

Collins dictionary asks public to rescue outdated words

Collins dictionary has given the public the chance to save some of the English language's more obscure and antiquated words such as fusby, vilipend and embrangle. The introduction of 2,000 new words into the forthcoming edition of the dictionary has meant that some of the lesser known and used words have become endangered and face being lost from the publication. A list of 24-threatened words has been drawn up and some celebrities have taken up the challenge of rescuing a wor

Source: NYT
9-21-08

Some demand that Russia put the kibosh on "Hitler Kaput!"

The new addition to the Russian pantheon of cinematic World War II heroes, a Soviet agent who has infiltrated the SS, has an unfortunate habit of waving around his passport, which is stamped with gold letters reading “Working Spy of the Soviet Union.” Pavel Derevyanko, the star of “Hitler Kaput!,” a low-brow farce that opened Thursday in Moscow cinemas, dozes off while stealing top-secret documents, accidentally photocopying his face. He launches into a sentimental rendition of “Ka

Source: Independent (UK)
9-21-08

Turned out nice again! George Formby Society celebrates in Blackpool, UK

Eeh, champion! George Formby was beaming in Blackpool yesterday, as men and women, boys and girls, took their little ukuleles in their hands and joined their hero on stage to sing and play, "When I'm cleaning windows..." He wasn't really there, of course. The Lancashire lad with the cheeky grin and surprisingly saucy songs has been dead for years, but a black-and-white photograph stood in for him at the Winter Gardens, where the George Formby Society was holding its annual conference.

Source: Independent (UK)
9-22-08

Da-da-da-dum! Beethoven sales soar

When Beethoven stood up to conduct the first performance of his Fifth Symphony in 1808, he did little to encourage its popularity. While an under-rehearsed orchestra struggled to play the music, the audience, sat in a freezing concert hall, was too cold to care. But 200 years on, the work is enjoying a revival after an unlikely pair of celebrity conductors directed Ludwig van Beethoven's masterpiece during the BBC's reality television series, Maestro. Sales of Sym

Source: Guardian (UK)
9-22-08

Truth after 42 years: Beatles banned for fear of influence on youth

Forty-two years after Israel banned John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr from playing to the nation, the truth about its Beatlephobia has finally been revealed. Still reeling from the sight of Israeli teenagers swooning to the tunes of Cliff Richard in 1963, Israel's publicly appointed guardians of good taste and morality, the interdepartmental committee for authorising the importation of foreign artists, refused their entry. Determined to preven

Source: Telegraph (UK)
9-22-08

British actor: 'I've fallen in love with Aristotle Onassis'

Nobody panics quite like Robert Lindsay. For more than 30 years he has portrayed men with less grip on things than they choose to believe. Wolfie, his gobby Tooting Trot in Citizen Smith, was a forerunner of Michael Murray, the manic Labour militant he played in Alan Bleasdale's GBH. Even the paterfamilias in My Family, the sitcom role to which he has been largely confined in recent years, has ceded control of his own home. Lindsay's Fagin has met his comeuppance both

Source: Times (UK)
9-18-08

William Wallace was a genocidal coward, says historian

Fans of the film Braveheart should look away now. A newly published book on Scottish history declares that William Wallace, immortalised by Mel Gibson, was nothing more than a genocidal maniac. Instead of lauding Wallace, the author of the new work says, the Scots should disown him and transform his monument at Stirling into a national museum to educate the public about the dangers of ethnic cleansing. Edwin Moore, who was a senior editor for the Collins reference divis