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

Jacob Lawrence art review

Jacob Lawrence painted “The Migration of the Negro,” 60 small pictures in tempera on hardboard panels, in what seems like a flash. The series was completed in 1941, after about a year of work in a cold-water studio at 33 West 125th Street in Harlem. Lawrence was 24. With its visual tact and deep emotion, it was instantly recognized as a tour de force, a new American epic. It made his career. The series is about the shift of African-American populations from a poor and repressive rur

Max Boot loves Charlie Wilson's War

I once wrote a column congratulating a well-known Hollywood liberal—George Clooney—for making “neocon” movies, i.e., movies like “Three Kings,” “The Peacemaker,” and even “Syriana” that support active American intervention in the world in support of our ideals as well as our strategic interests.Now we can add some more Hollywood liberals to th

The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies

... the film industry is wrestling again with the possibility that its most precious assets, the pictures, aren’t as durable as they used to be. The problem became public, but just barely, last month, when the science and technology council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the results of a yearlong study of digital archiving in the movie business. Titled “The Digital Dilemma,” the council’s report surfaced just as Hollywood’s writers began their walkout. Busy walking, or dodging, the picket lines, industry types largely missed the report’s startling bottom line: To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master. Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is “born digital” — that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film — pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault. All of this may seem counterintuitive. After all, digital magic is supposed to make information of all kinds more available, not less. But ubiquity, it turns out, is not the same as permanence....

NYT writer memorializes the Cloisters in NYC

THE first thing I see every morning is the Cloisters tower, gray and severe, perfectly framed by the living room window of my apartment. The Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum’s medieval outpost, is about a quarter-mile to the south, on a hill a little higher than the one my building is on, near the stony tip of northern Manhattan. In between is a valley of rooftops, garages and streets. Above, open sky, clouds, the moon, stars. For 20 years I’ve seen the Cloisters from this vantage

Denzel Washington's new movie giving hope to black college revival

It isn’t every day that a financially struggling institution finds itself the subject of a much-hyped movie. The resulting buzz about the small college has already led to an initial outpouring of pledges from donors, many of whom had never heard of it before — and the movie won’t even come out until Christmas. Even more unusual is the subject matter: Rather than a by-the-book tale chronicling the rise of an underdog athletic team or Ivy League intrigue, the film examines a true stor

The fiction sold in Charlie's War gives the CIA a free pass

[Melissa Roddy, like several of the principals in the saga of Afghanistan, is a native Texan. An actress based in Los Angeles, she is currently producing and directing a documentary film on the history of Afghanistan from 1979 to 9/11 entitled The Square Root of Terror.] Charlie Wilson's War purports to be the true story of a hard-partying U.S. congressman from Texas who engineered the defeat of the Soviet Union by the Afghan Mujahiddin. Now there are true stories, and there are true-ish s

'The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd: The Life and Times of an Urban Legend'

THERE is seemingly nothing on the subject of the tale of Sweeney Todd -- from its roots in reality, to its finding its way into folklore and subsequently literature, and then onto innumerable stages and the screen -- which Robert L. Mack has not explored in "The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd: The Life and Times of an Urban Legend." It is an immensely detailed and far-reaching book that might be considered the last word in program notes to Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wh

Russia halts London art display

Russian authorities have halted a major London exhibition of French and Russian art over claims Britain has failed to guarantee the paintings' return. Russia's culture agency said the show could not go ahead unless the British government took further steps to ensure legal protection for the paintings. British Culture Secretary James Purnell told BBC Radio 4 he would push through legislation offering better guarantees. The exhibition had been due to open at the Ro

Alice Walker Placing Lit Papers at Emory

Pulitzer Prize winning author Alice Walker is placing her literary archive at Emory University's library. The author of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Color Purple," "By the Light of My Father's Smile" and other works visits Emory every couple of years for readings and meetings with faculty members. That relationship was key in her decision to place her archive at the institution, university officials said Tuesday. "I can imagine in years

Norman Mailer Papers Open To Researchers, Students and Public on Jan. 3

AUSTIN, Texas — The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin opens the "Norman Mailer Papers," more than 1,000 boxes of materials, to researchers, students and the public on Thursday, Jan. 3. When lined-up side by side, the boxes of materials would run more than one length of an American football field from end zone to end zone—120 yards. The Mailer materials, the Harry Ransom Center's largest single-author archive, includes

Preserving history, frame by frame: At Harvard Film Archive, focus is on saving the past

Liz Coffey has a motto. "Film takes up a lot of space and a lot of money," notes the Harvard Film Archive conservator with a rueful grin. Invested with the responsibility of preserving and restoring a wedge of film history, Coffey and the staff of the HFA are well aware of the effort and expense required to save even a single film from the ravages of time. Nonetheless, they press on in their dual role as preservationists and exhibitors at Boston's leading venue for the scr

Painting by Caravaggio on display in Italy after historian figured out it WAS a Caravaggio

A painting believed to be an early work by Caravaggio goes on public display in the Sicilian town on Trapani, Saturday. A casual glance at an auction catalogue set a British art historian on the path to discovering the true origins of the painting. The painting previously had been attributed to an anonymous follower of the Baroque master. Experts in Italy believe Caravaggio's "The Cardsharps" is an earlier version of the artist's 1594 painting, now on display at the Kimbel

"Sweet Dreams: The Life and Times of Patsy Cline" (Academic conference)

The Virginia Historical Society will present a symposium that surveys the life, times, and influence of Patsy Cline through a day of paper presentations capped with an evening musical performance. [April 4, 2008] 9:30 am – 9:00 pm Please visit the web site:http://www.vahistorical.org/news/patsycline.htm

Savoy puts history under the hammer

Art deco lovers, celebrity-addicts and couples who still cherish the memory of their honeymoon night at the Savoy will descend on the Strand over the next three days to outbid one another for a piece of the hotel’s 118-year history. Having closed its doors on Saturday for a 16-month refit, the Savoy is auctioning off more than 3,000 pieces of furniture, fittings and artwork deemed surplus to the renovation but evoking decades of grandeur. Someone will have a new home fo

Pieces of Hollywood history go on sale

The coat worn by Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins went on sale alongside a life-sized robot from the Terminator films at a huge auction of Hollywood memorabilia. Just in time for those seeking an unusual gift for Christmas, the eclectic sale attracted film fans prepared to spend up to six-figure sums on a piece of movie history.

New play about Darwin (NYC)

Given the furor he feared it would unleash, it is not surprising that Charles Darwin sat on his “great idea,” refusing to publish “The Origin of Species” until 1859, more than 20 years after he first devised the theory of evolution. “If I finish the book, I’m a killer,” he said. “I murder God.” At least that’s what Peter Parnell has Darwin say in his new play, “Trumpery,” which opened this month at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York. In the play, as i

Secret War in the Skies Over Korea (PBS/TV Documentary)

The Korean War has been called “the forgotten war,” and “Missing in MIG Alley,” on PBS on Tuesday night, illustrates a little-known chapter. It describes the rivalry in the sky between two types of fighter jets then on the cutting edge of military aviation: the Soviet MIG-15, used by the North Koreans, and the F-86 Sabre, flown by the Americans and the British. The bulk of the dogfights took place south of the Yalu River on the border between North Korea and China, in a track of spa

Secret War in the Skies Over Korea (PBS/TV Documentary)

The Korean War has been called “the forgotten war,” and “Missing in MIG Alley,” on PBS on Tuesday night, illustrates a little-known chapter. It describes the rivalry in the sky between two types of fighter jets then on the cutting edge of military aviation: the Soviet MIG-15, used by the North Koreans, and the F-86 Sabre, flown by the Americans and the British. The bulk of the dogfights took place south of the Yalu River on the border between North Korea and China, in a track of spa

A Big Gift for the Met: The Arbus Archives

The estate of Diane Arbus has presented an intimate chronicle of the photographer’s life to the Met as a gift, along with hundreds of early and unique photographs.

A Lawsuit Will Determine the Fate of 2 Picassos

You might begin by picturing a spring day in Berlin, two months after the rise of Adolf Hitler. It is late March 1933, and a man has called upon an art transporter, Gustav Knauer, to hire him for a job. His name is Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, a banker and scion of a wealthy Jewish family of philanthropists and financiers and patrons of the arts. At 58, and in failing health, Herr Mendelssohn-Bartholdy is known throughout Berlin — indeed throughout all Europe — for his luminous c