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

A Beat Poet’s Colorful Crew, in Black and White

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was a great poet but not a great photographer. So while “Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg” at the Grey Art Gallery is an interesting exhibition, it is in certain ways disappointing. The best you can say about the pictures Ginsberg took during two periods in which he dabbled in the medium — the ’50s and early ’60s and the ’80s and ’90s — is that they are the works of a competent amateur. The bigger disappointment, however, is that much of the history that Ginsberg lived through and did so much to alter as a countercultural activist is missing.The exhibition was organized by Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photography at the National Gallery of Art, where it had its debut in 2010.

Bill DeMain: How Dashiell Hammett Invented The Modern Detective Novel

The mysterious femme fatale. The tough private eye who seeks justice at any cost. The rare object worth killing for. Dashiell Hammett coined all of these classic elements of noir fiction with his 1930 breakthrough novel The Maltese Falcon. But how did Hammett dream up this dark, new world of literature? By writing from experience.In the 1920s, American fiction desperately needed its own private detective. It was overrun with Sherlock Holmes imitators–erudite puzzle solvers who refused to get their hands dirty. Enter Dashiell Hammett, a former private investigator turned writer. In The Maltese Falcon, Hammett took the detective out of the drawing room, dumped him in a dark alley and created an American classic in the process.Lauded upon publication for its lean prose and how it captured the sex and violence of urban America, The Maltese Falcon has soared to greater critical heights with each passing decade. Hammett’s descendant Raymond Chandler praised the book for “scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” And Ross McDonald called it “the greatest mystery novel ever.”

‘The Civil War in America’ at Library of Congress

WASHINGTON — In the pursuit of justice, what is unjustified? Are there limits to what may be done in service to a righteous cause? Abstract philosophical questions, perhaps, but also political ones. And in thinking about the Civil War, the answers affect our understanding of that bloody conflict.This is one reason the Library of Congress exhibition “The Civil War in America,” which opened late last year in honor of the war’s sesquicentennial, is so fascinating. It doesn’t explicitly ask questions about means and ends, but we can’t help thinking about them as the letters, diaries, documents and images accumulate....We may like our heroes unchained, prepared to transcend ordinary restrictions, but history is another matter. What were the ends sought? How were they pursued? And what effects did that have? The Library of Congress exhibition tries to see the conflict from different perspectives. Its displays of over 200 items, we are told, “attest to the valor, sacrifices, emotions and accomplishments of those in both the North and South whose lives were affected by the bitter conflict of 1861-65.”

Art, Propaganda and Death in Ancient Rome

ROME — “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus,” Edward Gibbon wrote in “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”....At first glance, by its very title “The Age of Equilibrium, 98-180 A.D.: Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius,” the third in a series of exhibitions on art and society in ancient Rome at the Capitoline Museums, seems to be endorsing this traditional historical assessment that stretches from Pliny the Younger through Machiavelli and Gibbon into modern times.But a strength of this latest show, curated by Eugenio La Rocca and Claudio Parisi Presicce with Annalisa Monaco, and especially of its catalog, is that, while achievements are recognized, darker aspects are not whitewashed and the dominant role played by propaganda in public art of the era is highlighted....The Age of Equilibrium, 98-180 A.D. Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius. Capitoline Museums, Rome. Through May 5.

Lawrence D. Bobo: Slavery on Film: Sanitized No More

Lawrence D. Bobo is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. (The Root) -- Not many films keep me thinking for days on end. Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, about a slave-turned-bounty hunter in the antebellum South, accomplished this and then some. As a result, I have to classify it as a great film. A truly great film should stay with you, and Django certainly does....Django is the most cinematically and culturally important film dealing with race since Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989). For too long American cinema has presented -- and American audiences have accepted, digested and largely tacitly embraced -- a hopelessly sanitized version of slavery in the South.The defining image, of course, is that of Scarlett O'Hara and family enjoying the "good life" before "the War." Slavery has been often rendered just a benign backdrop to the beauty, elegance and, indeed, virtue of the plantation elite. That is why this movie sticks with me. It literally blows to pieces this ridiculously inaccurate "collective memory."...

Jon Wiener: 'Django Unchained' ... Quentin Tarantino’s Answer to Spielberg’s 'Lincoln'

Jon Wiener teaches US history at UC Irvine.Two films about American slavery in the Civil War era are currently playing in theaters.Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln begins with a black soldier reciting the Gettysburg Address.Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained begins with a black slave being recruited to kill two white murderers.In Spielberg’s film, the leading black female character is a humble seamstress in the White House whose eyes fill with tears of gratitude when Congress votes to abolish slavery.In Tarantino’s film, the leading black female character (Kerry Washington) is a defiant slave who has been branded on the face as a punishment for running away, and is forced—by Leonardo di Caprio—to work as a prostitute.In Spielberg’s film, all the black people are good.Tarantino’s film features “the biggest, nastiest ‘Uncle Tom’ ever”—played by Samuel Jackson—who is insanely loyal to his evil white master, and savage in his treatment of fellow slaves.In Spielberg’s film, old white men make history, and black people thank them for giving them their freedom.In Tarantino’s, a black gunslinger goes after the white slavemaster with homicidal vengeance....Related Links

Hendrik Hertzberg: “Lincoln” v. Lincoln

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer for The New Yorker. His work is collected in two books, “Politics” and “Obámanos.”...The great bulk of the movie industry’s evocations of the American past have been Westerns—that is, escapist adventure stories set in a vague time more or less identifiable as the eighteen-seventies or eighties, a vague semi-desert or mountainous region somewhere between the Mississippi and the Rockies, and a vague economy based on cattle-raising, saloon-keeping, and banditry. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But Westerns lack context—political, social, historical. There’s conflict aplenty, but it’s between cowboys and Indians, cattlemen and sheepherders, outlaws and sheriffs, not between armies or nations or ideas. Even when the conflict is a little broader—say, between doomed nomads on horseback on one side (be they aboriginal tribesmen or Eastwood-style individualist paladins) and, on the other side, agents of encroaching modernization (like railroad barons or the U.S. Cavalry)—the stakes are fuzzy, a lot less than world-historical.

New York Public Library unveils renovation plan

The New York Public Library is moving forward with a $300 million renovation of its landmark Fifth Avenue building that will more than double its public space and fireproof the majestic main reading room, the library president said Wednesday.But the plans he presented at a news conference have drawn withering criticism from some respected architecture experts, including Ada Louise Huxtable, who says the grand Beaux Art edifice is embarking on "its own destruction."Library President Tony Marx has a different vision for the building completed in 1911."The driver of this project is to create the single greatest circulating and research library in the most beloved building here in the crossroads of New York," he said...

Witch costume from Broadway’s ‘Wicked’ will join Dorothy’s ruby slippers in Smithsonian

WASHINGTON — A witch hat, dress and broom from Broadway’s “Wicked” will join Dorothy’s ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz” in the collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.Tony Award-winning costume designer Susan Hilferty will sign over the costume of Elphaba from “Wicked” on Monday.“Wicked” opened in 2003 and tells the story of the witches of Oz, based on the novel by Gregory Maguire. It follows two friends who grow to become the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good....

"Django Unchained": Tarantino tackles slavery

Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained," which opens Christmas Day, would make a terrific double feature with Steven Spielberg's latest, "Lincoln." Each movie burns down the old slave plantation in its own way."Lincoln" dramatizes the Civil War and the political maneuvering needed to pass the slavery-abolishing 13th Amendment, but it doesn't show the horrors of slavery those battles were waged over. "Django Unchained" is an explosive revenge fantasy that puts slavery's evils on gruesome display and turns freed slave Jamie Foxx into a western-style gunslinger seeking retribution. It skips the "malice toward none" part.It's unusual for there to be two movies in theaters at once dealing with the American tragedy of slavery. It has been a subject of movies almost since there have been motion pictures; D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" hit theaters in 1915, when Civil War veterans were still alive. But there haven't been a lot of films about American slavery, compared with, say, space travel or baseball....

The untethered decadence of Led Zeppelin

In Led Zeppelin’s heyday, the early 1970s, I noticed that certain women of my acquaintance seemed to shake with a near-visceral disgust when the band’s name was mentioned. Now I know why. At first, rock journalist Barney Hoskyn’s oral history of the band, “Led Zeppelin,” captivates, and then slowly it begins to horrify. Not everyone described in it is a villain, but enough of the main characters become so grotesque that it’s hard to avoid a sickly feeling that worsens as one turns the pages. As a group, the musicians and their entourage are like star athletes who turn up in the headlines as thugs; you can’t forget the thrills they gave you, but you’ll never feel the same about them again.

A Museum Full of Antiquities Embraces Modernity

PHILADELPHIA — Visitors to the Penn Museum might never see the red clay tablet. Little bigger than the palm of a hand, it sits on a metal cart in a back room.Covered with indented rows of tiny characters, the Sumerian tablet dates from about 2700 B.C., and it is the world’s first known written account of the biblical flood. When not on its cart for visitors to see and handle, it is stored, like many of the museum’s one million other objects, in stacks of metal drawers accessible only to academics and other researchers.The museum, formally called the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, has over the years become an internationally renowned treasure trove for scholars researching ancient civilizations. Now to mark its 125th anniversary, and its founding on Dec. 6, 1887, the museum is undertaking an ambitious effort to become more accessible to the public....

‘A Civil War Christmas,’ by Paula Vogel, Set at White House

The divisions plaguing a strife-torn country are not the only ones depicted in “A Civil War Christmas,” a beautifully stitched tapestry of American lives in transition in the fraught winter of 1864. Although the holidays are traditionally a time for festive coming together, most of the characters depicted in Paula Vogel’s song-trimmed drama, which opened on Tuesday night at New York Theater Workshop, are in search of loved ones lost in the fog of war or separated from family by the cruel finality of death.Written with an embracing expansiveness by Ms. Vogel (a Pulitzer Prize winner for “How I Learned to Drive”), and featuring handsomely sung hymns and carols of the period, this unusual holiday pageant represents an illuminating alternative to the often garish or sentimental holiday fare foisted on theater audiences. Instead of a stocking full of sugar-shock-inducing candy, the show offers some real sustenance, even as it gently accentuates the spirit of hope and good will that even professional Scrooges try to embrace as the year winds down.

Peggy Noonan: Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln’

Peggy Noonan is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” is not a great film, and people shouldn’t feel muscled, in the general approbation, into saying it is. But it’s a good one, which is always a surprise and delight these days, and it is good it’s being so widely appreciated. This is Hollywood taking history seriously, taking political history seriously, and even showing respect for politics itself. That should be encouraged.The film has a dark palette. Spielberg got a little carried away with Victorian darkness, when even then they had a sun. The period detail, how people dressed and rooms looked, is exquisite, and must have cost a lot. The direction is somber, maybe heavy and slow. Sometimes when Spielberg is trying to show he’s serious it’s an awkward thing to witness. The screenplay seems like chunks of a longer and maybe better work that had to be edited down and jammed into a reasonable run- time. There is a lot of one-speech-after-another, one-bit-of-jammed-in-exposition-after-another. But the script meets the challenge of communicating, as theatrically as possible, complex political calculations that couldn’t be shown and had to be spoken....Related Links

Paris spreads the Louvre

In its heyday in the 19th and 20th centuries, the industrial town of Lens in northern France sent its wealth to Paris in the form of coal. Now, with Lens's mines gone and its economy in decline, Paris is returning the favor by sending Lens masterpieces from the Louvre—and with them, a large chunk of the museum's global brand.On Tuesday, when French President François Hollande arrives to inaugurate the Louvre-Lens, the first satellite of the Paris original, he will find hundreds of the Louvre's most important works waiting for him. Among them: Leonardo da Vinci's "The Virgin and Child with St. Anne" (around 1508); Raphael's portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (1514-15); and Eugène Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People" (1830), revered as a symbol of the French nation.The $194 million project opens to the public Dec. 12....

Jon Wiener: The Trouble With Steven Spielberg’s 'Lincoln'

Daniel Day Lewis deserves the Oscar for best actor for his wonderful portrayal of Lincoln in the new Steven Spielberg movie. But while the acting is great, there’s a problem with the film: it is dedicated to the proposition that Lincoln freed the slaves. Historians say that’s not quite right. The end of slavery did not come because Lincoln and the House of Representatives voted for the Thirteenth Amendment.The best work I know about the end of slavery is Eric Foner’s unforgettable book The Fiery Trial: Lincoln and American Slavery, published in 2010, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize and the Lincoln Prize. Foner and many other historians over the last couple of decades have emphasized the central role played by the slaves themselves, who are virtually invisible in this movie. During the three weeks that the movie deals with, Sherman’s army was marching through South Carolina, where slaves were seizing plantations. They were dividing up land among themselves. They were seizing their freedom. Slavery was dying on the ground, not just in the House of Representatives. You get no sense of that in the movie.

'The Central Park Five': This Is Why Documentaries Exist

Jason Bailey is the film editor at Flavorwire, and has also written for Slate, Salon, and the Village Voice.The night before the media screening of The Central Park Five, an extraordinary new documentary from Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, I was telling my wife about it, based on the summary I was sent by the publicist. "Have you heard of the Central Park Five?" I asked. She hadn't. I barely had myself, mostly thanks to the email. "Well, back in 1989, this jogger in Central Park was raped and beaten—"She interrupted, nodding. "Oh, the Central Park jogger. I remember that."Our little playlet says a lot about the need for this particular documentary, about how vital and important the film is—because, while even those who didn't live in New York in 1989 heard the terrifying story of the 28-year-old white investment banker who was raped and nearly killed by a gang of young black and Latino thugs, there are still very few aware that a serial rapist confessed to that attack 13 years later. His DNA matched, and the five men's convictions were vacated. As historian Craig Steven Wilder notes, "Their innocence never got the attention that their guilt did." Now, McMahon and the Burnses are looking to remedy that....

Kevin M. Levin: Historians Need to Give Steven Spielberg a Break

Kevin M. Levin is a Civil War historian based in Boston.  He is the author of the book Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder and can be found online at Civil War Memory. Historians are stakeholders in anything that attempts to represent the past. The vast majority of these stories pass us by innocently enough, but when the most popular Hollywood director makes a movie about Lincoln we watch and listen closely. We also feel a strong need to educate the general public and point out interpretive shortcomings in popular films.Over the past few days I've read numerous reviews of Spielberg's Lincoln by professional historians, both in print and in my circle of social media friends. All of them are informative, even if they tend to reflect individual research agendas much more than the movie itself.Beyond nitpicking specific moments such as the roll call in the House or whether Lincoln ever slapped Robert, my fellow historians have pointed out the lack of attention on women and abolitionists, as well as the free black community in Washington, D.C. Do any of these critiques help us to better understand the movie? No. They simply reinforce what we already know, which is that Hollywood will never make a movie that satisfies the demands of scholars. Nor should it....

Ron Radosh: NYT Takes on Stone for His "Untold History"

Ron Radosh is a PJ Media columnist and Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute.Oliver Stone and his co-author Peter Kuznick are not going to be happy this week. After making scores of media appearances in which he heralded the supposedly great reception for his new TV series and accompanying book, Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, which airs each week for 10 episodes on the CBS-owned network Showtime, Stone is finally getting the negative response he feared.First, Stone was hit hard by Michael Moynihan at Newsweek/The Daily Beast. Declaring Stone and Kuznick’s film “junk history,” Moynihan called Stone’s work “swivel-eyed, ideological history,” based on “dubious quotes and sources,” a veritable “marvel of historical illiteracy.” Coming on the heels of my own debunking of Stone, “A Story Told Before: Oliver Stone’s Recycled History of the United States,” Stone and Kuznick received two substantive critiques in one week.

Harold Holzer: What’s True and False in “Lincoln” Movie

Harold Holzer is one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. His new book is Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America: A Companion Book for Young Readers to the Steven Spielberg Film Lincoln, published this month by Newmarket Press for It! Books, an imprint of HarperCollins....To be sure, there is no shortage of small historical bloopers in the movie. First Lady Mary Lincoln, for example, never planted herself in the House Gallery to observe the final tally on the amendment. (Michelle Obama may routinely attend the State of the Union address each year, but such a visit would have been unthinkable in 1865.) Nor did congressmen vote by state delegations—a device that conflates the traditions of national political conventions with those of the House of Representatives. (Until the advent of machine voting, the House voted alphabetically by name; this I know from experience—I once worked for Representative Bella Abzug, number two on the roll call, and it was always a challenge to move her considerable frame from her congressional office to the House floor in time to answer the roll right after James Aboureszk.)...