Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits
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Robert Hilburn, the dean of newspaper rock-and-roll critics, is worried these days
Petersburg National Battlefield tells the story of pivotal battle in Civil War
Sen. Joseph McCarthy exhibit opens Saturday at History Museum at the Castle
Brooklyn Museum to Show Civil War-Related Artworks and Historical Objects
Tormented Italian Master Caravaggio and Francis Bacon Connect in Rome Show
Information Highway: Camel Speed but Exotic Links (Silk Road Exhibit NY)
Siegfried Sassoon Collection unveiled at the University of Oxford
Friday, November 20, 2009
An Unlikely African-American Music Historian
Source: NPR (11-17-09)
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., which was a big deal in 1909. There, they documented one of the first interracial recording sessions in American history.
"He put together the first truly integrated vocal band that was recorded," says record collector Ken Flaherty.
Flaherty produced the CD reissue of these recordings. He says you'd have a hard time finding a more unlikely champion of African-American music than Polk Miller.
"He glorified black music, while at the same wearing the stars and bars, standing up for the legacy of the Confederacy," Flaherty says.
Miller fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. He even made his quartet accompany him on a confederate marching song, "The Bonnie Blue Flag."
Miller's First Love
Miller grew up on his father's plantation in Virginia, where he learned how to play banjo from listening to slaves. He made a fortune in the pharmacy business after the war. In the 1890s, when he was in his 50s, Miller handed the business over to his son and went back to his first love: African-American music. Flaherty says he took it seriously.
"Nobody at the time was really trying to collaborate with blacks," Flaherty says. "It was all cake-walking, minstrel-singing, blackface comedy."
Miller didn't play black music and culture for laughs, as most white performers did at the time. His performances were an anomaly, says Tim Brooks, author of the book Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry.
"He was the leader. He would play a song, and he'd have the quartet sing a song. Then he'd talk about it — where this song came from," Brooks says. "It was a combination of education and entertainment, I guess you'd say."...
Rembrandt's murder mystery
Source: The New Republic (11-7-09)
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--stand out in memory. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover was a modern comedy that revealed how sex can be achieved in restaurant restrooms. Prospero’s Books, a slanted view of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, put the future in debt to Greenaway by preserving John Gielgud’s exquisite reading of Prospero.
Now Greenaway turns to the Golden Age of Dutch painting. Rembrandt’s J’Accuse is a study of that painter’s most famous work, The Night Watch, and though it certainly is a study, it is also--or primarily--a fascinating film. Greenaway has a thesis, possibly stated previously in the mountain of publications about Rembrandt. The painting, familiar to millions, shows a group of civilian militiamen in Amsterdam rousing to an alarm. Greenaway’s film sets out to prove that the painting is really an exposé of a murder--of one officer by another. Twenty points, all visual, are made to support this thesis.
He embeds his inquiry in an attractive style, decked with dramatized expeditions into Rembrandt’s life, with scrutiny of details in the painting that makes us realize we have never looked carefully enough. In the low center of the screen through most of the picture is Greenaway himself, speaking about what we are seeing. He is always lucid and crisp, never didactic. Meanwhile, the screen keeps fragmenting around him into various shots of Night Watch details, or overriding him as we go back to Rembrandt’s Amsterdam and the creation of this painting...
Robert Hilburn, the dean of newspaper rock-and-roll critics, is worried these days
Source: Market Watch (11-18-09)
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 lived in L.A. in 1975 and cared about pop music," he explains.
A different era of celebrity
Stars, usually wary when it comes to being interviewed, often grant Hilburn unusually close access because they know he will be knowledgeable, enthusiastic and, above all, fair-minded.
Over the years, he's been a confidante of rock-and-roll luminaries like Lennon, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, Bono, Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson. In fact, U2 front man Bono wrote in the introduction to Hilburn's book: "Bob's role as critic was to encourage suspension of disbelief not just in the audience, but in the artist as well. That is an environment in which music grows. He made us better."
These days, though, Hilburn is lamenting the fact that so many Americans are heavily influenced by such television shows such as "American Idol" -- being thoughtful and realistic enough to fret that the public's fascination with celebrities has resulted in a triumph of style over substance.
"Editors today would give better play to a story about Britney Spears missing a plane than they would to an interview with Bob Dylan because it would get more" page views on a Web site, Hilburn pointed out glumly.
Plus, the Web has forever changed the way critics cover the entertainment industry. In his heyday, Hilburn had the luxury of measuring his copy and taking great care with the tone and substance of his reviews.
"It's a different world because of the Internet and bloggers," Hilburn notes. "Now, every editor is concerned about speed because every minute counts. Speed is more important than content. Whoever gets a review out first becomes the authority." ...
Thursday, November 19, 2009
"FDR's Brain Trust" on view now
Source: New-York Historical Society (11-17-09)
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 beginning in 1932 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the circle of Columbia University scholars who became his close advisors. The story of this epoch-making alliance between the White House and academia is told in the New-York Historical Society exhibition FDR’s Brain Trust, on view now through March 1, 2010.
"No President in the past century took office in such difficult circumstances as did Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and no President moved ahead more quickly and forcefully," said Dr. Louise Mirrer, President and CEO of the New-York Historical Society. "This new exhibition explores how Roosevelt, while still a candidate for President, did something that was unprecedented at the time and sought counsel from academics. We see how this decision led directly to the daring innovations that became known as the New Deal, and that remain with us to this day.”
Curated by Jean W. Ashton, Executive Vice President and Director of Library division, the exhibition is designed to evoke both the desperation of the Great Depression and the hope and energy of a nation rebuilding itself. FDR’s Brain Trust presents rarely seen photographs, cartoons, documents, artifacts, and newsreels drawn from the New-York Historical Society collection and the archives of Columbia University. These materials bring to life the personalities, convictions and circumstances of FDR and the people who were at first known jokingly as his “Privy Council”—Columbia University professors Raymond Moley, Adolf Berle and Rexford G. Tugwell. Dubbed “The Brains Trust” in July 1932 by a New York Times reporter—the “s” was eventually dropped—these men were eventually joined in the new Roosevelt administration by Harry Hopkins, founder of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and Frances Perkins, who as Secretary of Labor became the first female cabinet member.
Highlights of the exhibition include:
· an etching by Martin Borne titled Hooverville on Hudson (1934), showing a camp of the unemployed and homeless that would have been visible from the Columbia University campus
· a map from the Real Estate Record and Guide (March 25, 1933) showing the spread of foreclosed properties across Manhattan
· broadsides depicting street demonstrations
· an executive order requiring that all gold be deposited in a Federal Reserve Bank
· editorial cartoons from the Chicago Tribune and Des Moines Register depicting FDR and his advisors as Soviet-style socialists
Despite the vehemence that the Brain Trust aroused, the speed and scope of the New Deal they advocated were unprecedented. Less than four months after Roosevelt took office, his administration stabilized the banks and the economy, saved homes and farms from foreclosure, and began to institute a vast range of programs (including Workmen’s Compensation, a federal minimum wage, child labor laws and Social Security) to address the dire needs of Americans.
About the New-York Historical Society
Established in 1804, the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS) comprises New York's oldest museum and a nationally renowned research library. N-YHS collects, preserves and interprets American history and art; its mission is to make these collections accessible to the broadest public and increase understanding of American history through exhibitions, public programs, and research that reveal the dynamism of history and its impact on the world today. N-YHS holdings cover four centuries of American history and comprise one of the world's greatest collections of historical artifacts, American art, and other materials documenting the history of the United States as seen through the prism of New York City and State.
N-YHS Library
The Society's library is a principal source of primary materials for the study of New York history, and one of the foremost American history research institutions in the world. The library collections total 4 million items, including manuscripts; books and pamphlets; prints and photographs; maps; atlases; newspaper titles; sheet music; and more. Among these are items from the Colonial, Revolutionary War, and Civil War periods, including letters, diaries, battle reports, and sketches documenting the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant's handwritten terms of surrender for Robert E. Lee, and much more.
N-YHS Museum
The Society's museum contains some 60,000 items that include: paintings, sculpture, furniture, clothing, toys, tools, textiles, ceramics, glass, and assorted artifacts ranging from George Washington's camp bed to items from Ground Zero after the September 11 World Trade Center attacks. Other important Museum holdings include landscapes of the Hudson River School by Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand and others; genre paintings and portraiture by Gilbert Stuart, Benjamin West and Charles Willson Peale; one of the world's largest collections of Tiffany lamps; and John James Audubon's preparatory watercolors for The Birds of America.
CONTACT
Laura Washington
Vice President Communications
New-York Historical Society
phone# 212-873-3400 ext. 263
email: LWashington@nyhistory.org
New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West
New York, NY 10024
phone# 212-873-3400
www.nyhistory.org
Petersburg National Battlefield tells the story of pivotal battle in Civil War
Source: Petersburg Progress-Index (VA) (11-17-09)
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 or horse.
It took decades of effort to first secure the battlefield itself and then to build a visitors center. In 1962, federal legislation was passed to obtain ownership of the battlegrounds. But it wasn't until 1989 that the National Park Service became the new owner. It took about 19 years to for the new visitors center to become a reality.
Much of the credit goes to Chris Calkins, former chief of interpretation at Petersburg National Battlefield and now park manager of Sailor's Creek Battlefield Historical State Park. He was instrumental in securing the battlefield grounds as federal property and a strategic planner for the visitor center,
In some ways, the Five Forks Battlefield and visitor contact center is Calkins legacy. But in greater ways, the battlefield is the legacy of all of us. "This is our legacy, and it is our legacy that we have to worry about," Calkins said. "Preserving the battlefields is very important to me."
The importance of the new facilities at the battlefield, and the fact the battlefield is part of the National Park Service, cannot be understated.
Museum of Chinese in America opens in New York
Source: The Christian Science Monitor (11-16-09)
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 spectacular pieces that fetch a lot of money at Christie's," says S. Alice Mong, MOCA's director, "but letters and things that are memories, stories, and histories."
MOCA began 30 years ago as a grassroots organization founded by Charles Lai, a community activist who grew up in Chinatown, and historian John Kuo Wei Tchen. "When Charlie and I started," Mr. Tchen says, "there was no place to find true stories of the Chinese in New York, although there were plenty of places to find stereotypes."
The Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang agrees. When researching Chinese history for his plays like the 1988 hit "M. Butterfly," the lack of documentation, he says, showed "a vacuum of information about this important group and important piece of the American story."
The facts to fill in the blanks resided in old-timers' memories. The two founders conducted oral history interviews with elderly residents of Chinatown. Now the relics and stories are housed in a handsome space designed by famed architect Maya Lin. In an opening ceremony Sept. 22 featuring a traditional lion dance, Mayor Michael Bloomberg "dotted the eye" of the lion with a red mark, symbolically awakening it and bringing the new facility to life.
What brings the collection to life are the stories collected by Mr. Lai and Tchen. It's a narrative of hardship and struggle that includes 200 years of history of Chinese in the United States. It is not, for the most part, a pretty story.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
'The Americans' Revisited, the photography of Robert Frank
Source: WSJ (11-18-09)
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, he has emerged squarely into view; in the third, he has almost disappeared behind the staircase, as if trying to hide from the photographer. Mr. Frank circled with red grease pencil only the third and, mysteriously, from the more than 27,000 pictures he took in 1955-56, chose it to be one of 83 that appeared in his canonic book, "The Americans," published in France in 1958 and in the U.S. a year later.
The contact sheet and finished print are among numerous revealing artifacts dug up for "Looking In: Robert Frank's 'The Americans.'" Organized by Sarah Greenough, senior curator at the National Gallery of Art, which houses Mr. Frank's archives, and edited for the Met by curator Jeff L. Rosenheim, the exhibition boasts a massive catalog (Steidl) that details the background to the creation of this 20th-century masterwork.
Those unfamiliar with its contents can admire the prints on the walls, hung in the same sequence as the book. "The Americans" is a daring and, in many respects, bleak portrait of a land that Mr. Frank was in large part experiencing for the first time. Born in 1924, he had arrived in New York in 1947 from Switzerland, where his teacher Michael Wolgensinger had advised him to group photographs by theme. This training proved crucial to the editing of "The Americans," a crazy quilt of images unified by visual motifs such as crucifixes, jukeboxes, automobiles, motorcycles and cowboys.
As a young Jew in Zurich during World War II, Mr. Frank needed to be inconspicuous. That wasn't necessary in the U.S., and he hit the ground running. His Swiss portfolio earned him jobs from glossy fashion magazines in New York, while his artistic ambitions were aided by friendships with photographers Louis Faurer, with whom he shared a darkroom, and Walker Evans, who touched up the application for a Guggenheim grant that started Mr. Frank on his cross-country trips in 1955-56. His affectionate letters to Evans, sometimes addressed as "Mon cher professeur," are on display at the Met. New research by Ms. Greenough offers convincing proof that the younger artist also carried a copy of Evans's 1938 book, "American Photographs," on his 10,000 mile journey.
Much has been written about the outrage that publication of "The Americans" incited from native-born reviewers and other photographers. Minor White, founder of Aperture, was not alone in dismissing it as "a degradation of a nation." The consensus is that Mr. Frank showed America incontrovertible evidence of ugly truths—about social inequality, especially race—that it could not accept at that time...
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
A tour of L.A.'s rich rail history
Source: LA Times (11-17-09)
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," released in 1903, "was the 'Titanic' of its day," says Marc Wanamaker, a Hollywood historian who owns and curates the Bison Archives, a production and research consulting organization. "Going all the way back to the beginning of the film industry . . . many films had plots that involved trains or used trains for crucial scenes. There's a constant fascination with trains. In some films, the train itself was the star."
Such movies will be the focus of a Tuesday presentation, led by Wanamaker, in conjunction with the debut of the new exhibit "Hollywood -- Trains, Streetcars and the Movies" from the Los Angeles Railroad Heritage Foundation. The night starts about 5 p.m. at Philippe's, in the rear dining room (a.k.a. the train room), where the exhibit -- a 16-foot long display case filled with 14 archival pictures and 26 models of freight cars, passenger cars, street cars and locomotives -- is located. That will be followed by a 7 p.m. presentation at the MTA Metro Board Room in downtown L.A.
As one of the few railroad enthusiast organizations dedicated to public outreach, the foundation has installed similar displays at six other locations in Los Angeles and Orange counties over the past decade.
"Ten years ago, no one in Los Angeles was reaching out to the public about railroads," president Josef Lesser says. "And the movies are one of the most common places, especially nowadays, that people see trains."
Nowhere did the mythography of America's railroads come into sharper focus than in Los Angeles. While trains hauled in lumber that was crucial for building the burgeoning city isolated by desert, sea and mountains, L.A.'s nascent film industry cemented the train as a symbol of adventure and freedom. All that iconic potential came to a head in the city's train and trolley stations...
William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe (2009)
Source: NYT (11-13-09)
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 up to injustice or keep silent.
A refresher course on the history of American left-wing politics in the 1960s and ’70s as well as an affectionate personal biography of Kunstler, “Disturbing the Universe” was directed by Sarah and Emily Kunstler, his two daughters from his second marriage. Although the film, with its home movies and family reminiscences, portrays him as a heroic crusader for justice, it is by no means a hagiography of a man who earned widespread contempt late in his career for defending pariahs.
The metamorphosis of Kunstler, who died in 1995, from armchair liberal to middle-aged hippie revolutionary reflected the volatile political climate of the era. A general-practice lawyer who lived in Westchester County, he became involved in the civil rights movement through a local housing lawsuit in 1960; the following year he flew to Mississippi at the behest of Rowland Watts, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, to support the Freedom Riders.
Later he defended the Catonsville Nine — Roman Catholic activists, including Daniel and Philip Berrigan — who burned draft files to protest the Vietnam War. He achieved national notoriety as the lead counsel in the theatrical trial of the Chicago Seven, who were accused of conspiracy and inciting to riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Linda C. Eneix: How to be Remembered After 5,000 Years
Source: The Old Temples Study Foundation (11-14-09)
[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 monument. Build something very large in stone, and you will have a chance; the larger, the better. Use the largest stones that can possibly be moved and manhandled. Stones that are easily moved will be taken down by later people who are too lazy to quarry for themselves. Your memory could easily be lost in a rubble wall or vanish into the structure of the flashy temples of foreigners who are sure to come after you are gone.
If you wish to be remembered well, do not be defeated by an enemy. No one will speak about you if you lose, and the victors of war will take credit for all that you have achieved. That will happen if they like what you have achieved. If they do not like it, they will destroy it and you will be forgotten forever. Or they might say terrible things about you and your memory will turn into something dark. If you must leave, the best thing is to hide your greatness in isolation so that it is forgotten for a while. You can expect that it will fall apart somewhat. Don’t worry. If you have done it greatly and properly, someone will find it.
But don’t expect them to understand what they find after five thousand years. It is not possible. It will help somewhat if you decorate your greatness. Paint it. Carve it. Fill it with your things. Leave something of detail with which to more fully remember you.
Five thousand years will eat up wood and textiles and skins and hairs and fingernails. These will not be remembered. If you have pressed a leaf or an object into wet clay and baked that clay, however, and if that baked pottery is protected in your greatness, it will be a good memento.
Statues are wonderful mementos. Carve them from stone and hide them. They may be animals or people. One clever idea is to have your best artists carve actual portraits of you in stone. This has been extremely effective. If they are beautiful, it will be better. If they are small, it will be better. A statue that is too large may be lost, even if it is beautiful. Foreign people coming after you do not want your statues and will not value them, although they may be afraid of them. This is a very difficult truth which must be twice stated. If you want to be remembered after five thousand years, it is best to be forgotten for at least one thousand years; sometimes more.
We must speak of gold. Things that shine are very attractive, but they are risky things, likely to be stolen before anyone wants to remember you. It has worked for some, but if you have things of gold, you may as well take them with you. People will obliterate you to get at your shiny things.
Be cautious of what you bury in soil and what you place where soil can gather. If you put your things too deeply in soil, they may be confused with the things of people who came before you. (Almost always, even if you don’t remember them, other people came before you.) Also, do not mix the mementos of others with your things. This can make someone who finds your things look like a fool and your memory could be reduced or diluted. If you put things in a cave or in an underground chamber or in a sealed tomb, it is better. Don’t worry. Nobody will really know what you did with these things, although you may be amused to know what they will think you did..
Oh yes…
If you can leave your bones in a dry place that is not too hot, it will be very good. When they find them, for sure you will be remembered, even after five thousand years.
A Shtick With a Thousand Lives: Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner
Source: NYT (11-12-09)
MEL BROOKS and Carl Reiner have been cracking each other up for nearly 60 years. The two met while working on Sid Caesar’s early television series “Your Show of Shows,” when they cooked up a routine in which Mr. Reiner played an earnest, unnamed TV interviewer, and Mr. Brooks, the 2,000 Year Old Man.
In a Yiddish accent, the old guy held forth on the questionable wisdom of an absurdly long life, touching on topics including parenthood (“I have over 42,000 children — and not one comes to visit me”), Shakespeare (“He was a dreadful writer.” “Every letter was cockeyed, he had the worst penmanship I ever saw in my life!”) and the Black Plague (“Too many rats, not enough cats”).
The shtick yielded five comedy albums, television appearances with Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen and a 1975 animated television special, all of which are included in Shout! Factory’s remastered 50th anniversary four-disc reissue (three CDs and one DVD), “The 2000 Year Old Man: The Complete History,” in stores Nov. 24. Mr. Brooks and Mr. Reiner even won a Grammy in 1999 for the fifth album, “The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000.” Their wry satire of pop culture influenced a generation of comedians while it helped make Jewish humor American humor. There are hints in the albums of their own later work, like Mr. Brooks’s bits on the Spanish Inquisition in his 1981 movie “History of the World: Part One.”
Of course Mr. Brooks, 83, and Mr. Reiner, 87, have had long, rich, diverse careers beyond “The 2000 Year Old Man.” Mr. Brooks wrote, directed and starred in movies like “High Anxiety,” “Blazing Saddles” and “Silent Movie,” created the TV series “Get Smart” with Buck Henry and turned two of his movies, “The Producers” and “Young Frankenstein,” into Broadway musicals. Mr. Reiner created “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” directed the movies “Oh, God,” “The Jerk” and “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” and has published eight books.
But it’s their friendship — and the bond of the 2,000 Year Old Man routine — that has helped sustain the two men through the bad times (Mr. Brooks’ wife, the actress Anne Bancroft, star of “The Graduate,” died in 2005; Mr. Reiner’s wife, Estelle, best known for her one line in “When Harry Met Sally” — “I’ll have what she’s having” — died in October 2008) as well as the good. (See career highlights above.) And they don’t seem to be slowing down...
Sen. Joseph McCarthy exhibit opens Saturday at History Museum at the Castle
Source: PostCrescent (11-13-09)
APPLETON — The History Museum at the Castle, 330 E. College Ave., invites the public to tour the museum free of charge from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday as it opens a new exhibit on Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
The permanent exhibit, “Why McCarthy?” includes a bronze bust of the late Republican senator, who would have been 101 years old Saturday. Visitors can use a touch-activated screen to view historic images and learn about McCarthy’s life and career.
Born and raised in the Appleton area, McCarthy became the figurehead of anti-communist persecutions in the 1950s. An icon of the Cold War era, his controversial role in the Red Scare led to the blacklisting of hundreds of Americans.
Thieves steal Munch piece in Norway
Source: Google News (11-13-09)
OSLO — Thieves stole a valuable artwork by Edvard Munch from an Oslo art dealer in the latest of a string of art heists targeting work by the famous Norwegian expressionist, police said Friday.
One or more thieves stole "Historien" — or "History" — from Nyborgs Kunst in downtown Oslo after smashing one of the dealership's windows with a rock, police spokeswoman Unni Groendal said.
The hand-colored lithograph, printed in 1914, is worth "in the millions" of kroner (hundreds of thousands of dollars), dealership owner Pascal Nyborg said. It was the only item stolen in the heist late Thursday.
The thieves were seen fleeing in a stolen van, which was later found abandoned near the British Embassy in Oslo's wealthy Frogner neighborhood, Groendal said.
Police had no suspects as of Friday afternoon. Groendal said evidence suggested the heist was carefully planned and orchestrated by a criminal organization.
Munch artworks are a popular target for art thieves in Norway.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
London Museum Asks Public What to Pitch
Source: Time (11-14-09)
If you're the type of person who has trouble throwing anything out, then the job of collections reviewer at the University College London's museums might not be for you. The college is embarking upon a purge of its assorted collections, some 250,000 items in total, only 2% of which are currently on display. A gargantuan task, surely, but the college is not doing it on its own — officials have taken the unusual step of opening the process up to the public. They're asking visitors what they should keep, what they should give away to other museums — one institution's trash is another's treasure — or, as a last resort, what they should just throw away.
"Disposal is still a dirty word. Most museum people are too scared to use it," says Jayne Dunn, UCL's collections manager. "We work for the public, but no one's ever thought of asking them what they want."
Many of the items in the university's collections, which range from ancient archeological artifacts to outdated scientific instruments to radioactive geological samples, were acquired over the years by professors who used them in their research. Other items were donated by other museums or private individuals. Now, the university's museums, like many institutions today, are looking to clear some space so they can continue collecting. And not everything in its collections are treasures — hence, the artifact cull.
Consider the boring old picnic basket known as the "Agatha Christie basket," which contains fragments of pottery of unknown origins. If it had belonged to the author, as its nickname would suggest, it would undoubtedly be a keeper; however, it turns out it belonged to her second husband's second wife, and the university has no idea under what circumstances it was donated. Or what about a giant rhinoceros skull? Is that worth keeping? How about the samples of earth dug up from the English Channel, pre-Chunnel? Hundreds of beautiful hand-drawn lecture slides made by the scientist Sir Ambrose Fleming, inventor of the diode? Or the slides of microscopic fossils, which don't seem to take up much space until you consider there's a quarter million of them in storage?
Last month, the university put these items and many more together as part of an exhibition called Disposal? Visitors were asked which artifacts they'd pitch, and, more vitally, for what reasons. The collections reviewers are now poring through hundreds of visitor feedback forms to learn how the public would go about thinning the university's collections. Armed with that information, they'll soon start the lengthy process of deciding what will stay or go. (The Agatha Christie basket should get a reprieve — officials admit they've grown quite fond of it.)...
Brooklyn Museum to Show Civil War-Related Artworks and Historical Objects
Source: Artdaily.org (11-14-09)
An exhibition of nearly thirty artworks and historical objects celebrating the contributions of Union women to a Civil War relief effort known as the Sanitary Movement is the subject of the latest exhibition in the Herstory Gallery of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Healing the Wounds of War: The Brooklyn Sanitary Fair of 1864, on view from January 29 through September 12, focuses on one of the many sanitary fairs held in Northern cities to raise money to aid the Union troops, each seeking to outdo the others.
The Herstory Gallery is dedicated to exhibitions that relate to the lives and histories of the 1,038 women named in The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago, which is on permanent view in the adjacent gallery. Represented in Chicago’s iconic work is Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States and a leader of the Sanitary Movement.
Although the U.S. Sanitary Commission, an official government agency signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, was headed by men, much of its work to support the Federal army with funds and supplies was accomplished by thousands of women volunteers. They helped to organize sanitary fairs, marking the first time during the Civil War that women expressed their patriotism in the public sphere rather than the domestic arena.
In Brooklyn, women’s organizations produced the successful Brooklyn and Long Island Sanitary Fair, featuring dances, parades, merchandise sales, auctions, and a cattle show. The event lasted two weeks and raised a remarkable $400,000, four times more than anticipated...
Panama Canal Collection Exhibit To Be Shown At Adelphi
Source: Press Release (11-14-09)
Adelphi University will showcase *Global Passage: Selections from the Robert R. McMillan Panama Canal Collection,* beginning Wednesday, December 2, 2009 and ending Sunday, January 10, 2010, in the Ruth S. Harley University Center Gallery, 1 South Avenue, Garden City, NY. The timing of the exhibit coincides with the tenth year from the transfer of the Canal to Panama per the Torrijos-Carter Treaties. The exhibit will feature holdings from the Robert R. McMillan Panama Canal Collection in University Archives and Special Collections, curated by Special Collections Librarian Elayne Gardstein and Project Archivist Claudia Lemlich. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, December 3, 2009 in the Ruth S. Harley University Center from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., to be followed by a brief presentation by Robert R. McMillan *57. The event is free and open to the public.
The Panama Canal Collection offers a historical perspective of Panama, the Panama Canal, and the Panama Canal Commission. It includes documents, books, and other items dating back to the initial attempts to build the Canal by the French government in the late nineteenth century and the success of the United States effort in the early twentieth century. There are materials related to the strategic and economic importance of the Canal in today*s global economy. The collection consists of correspondence created by Robert R. McMillan, former board member and chairman of the Panama Canal Commission, official letters written by other board members and important figures. There are essays, articles, and chapters included in Mr. McMillan*s book Global Passage, as well as a selection of manuscripts centering on the Panama Canal, dating from 1989 to 1999. The papers document the transitional period prior to the changeover of control from the United States to the Republic of Panama in 1999. Other items featured in the collection are reports on educational and employment practices, administration, regulations, presentations, financial reports, government reports, audits, newsletters, press releases, proposals, proceedings, tourist guides, certificates, photographs, maps, memorabilia, and media.
Mr. McMillan, of counsel to Bee Ready Fishbein Hatter & Donovan, LLP, has served on various boards of the government, community, and private sectors and is a former member of Adelphi*s Board of Trustees. An advocate of community service with a distinguished legal career, Mr. McMillan founded Long Island Housing Partnership, Inc. for affordable housing in 1987. He was appointed to the board of the Panama Canal Commission by President George H.W. Bush in 1989, and served as chairman from 1993 to 1994-the only non-member of the Department of Defense to hold this position. In 2002, he became the first non-physician member on the Board of Trustees of the American Medical Association. Mr. McMillan is an alumnus of Adelphi and earned his juris doctor degree from Brooklyn Law School. In 2004, he received the inaugural Ruth S. Harley Distinguished Alumni Award.
To R.S.V.P. for the reception in the Ruth S. Harley University Center Gallery, please contact Stephanie Alois at (516) 877-3520 or alois@adelphi.edu. For more information about this event, please visit http://libraries.adelphi.edu/bar/panama/ or contact Special Collections Librarian Elayne Gardstein at 516877.3563.
About Adelphi University: Adelphi University, chartered in 1896, was the first institution of higher education for the liberal arts and sciences on Long Island. Through its schools and programs-The College of Arts and Sciences, Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies, Honors College, Ruth S. Ammon School of Education, University College, and the Schools of Business, Nursing, and Social Work-the co-educational university offers undergraduate and graduate degrees as well as professional and educational programs for adults. Adelphi University currently enrolls nearly 8,500 students from 41 states and 63 foreign countries. With its main campus in Garden City and centers in Manhattan, Hauppauge, and Poughkeepsie, the University maintains a commitment to liberal studies in tandem with rigorous professional preparation and active citizenship.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Tormented Italian Master Caravaggio and Francis Bacon Connect in Rome Show
Source: Artdaily.org (11-13-09)
Portraits by Italian master Caravaggio and Irish-born 20th-century painter Francis Bacon stand side-by-side in new exhibition connecting their tormented views of humanity despite contrasting approaches to realism.
The show at Rome's Galleria Borghese marks 400 years since Caravaggio's death and 100 years since Bacon's birth and at its heart lies their shared fascination with the human form and their predilection for the expressive portrait.
Both were radical for their times: against the distorted idealism of high mannerism, Caravaggio was driven by obsessive attention to the real, while Bacon was derided for his refusal to relinquish the human figure in favor of abstraction.
"Bacon can be compared to Caravaggio above all in terms of intensity," said art historian Michael Peppiatt, co-curator of the exhibition and Bacon's close friend and biographer.
Both painters have been seen as icons of gay, tormented genius and their tragic natures and lives marked by violence -- Bacon's lover committed suicide and Caravaggio was condemned to death after killing a man -- are echoed in their works.
"They were both conscious of the shortness of life and of the fragility of humanity, and each powerfully conveys this consciousness through his art," said Peppiatt in a statement.
Seventeen works by Bacon are featured alongside 14 paintings by Caravaggio, six of which, including the "Madonna with the Serpent" and the "Sick Bacchus," belong to the Borghese's permanent collection...
Information Highway: Camel Speed but Exotic Links (Silk Road Exhibit NY)
Source: NYT (11-12-09)
“You are about to make an unusual journey,” a wall label proclaims at the beginning of an exhibition that opens on Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History. Normally that promise would provide reason enough to be wary. But this is something different.
You are welcomed by life-size camels laden with worn canvas sacks, their bodies framed by sand dunes stretching into the distance. A while later, near a 17-foot-long wooden Chinese loom, you find bowls filled with mulberry leaves on which scores of white worms are gnawing. You see, too, what kind of cocoons they soon will weave, and how these sacs might then be boiled and unwound into silk threads. And later still, you seem to arrive in an outdoor market in evening as the sounds of footfalls and animal cries mix with the murmur of voices; stalls are piled with produce, furs and spices, including a leopard skin, a yak tail, pheasant feathers, lapis lazuli and barrels whose smell suggests that they are filled with rose petals, jasmine oil and patchouli.
Museum exhibitions often aspire to theater, but the stagecraft of this show, “Traveling the Silk Road: Ancient Pathway to the Modern World,” succeeds with compelling vividness. Designed and produced by the museum, under the direction of David Harvey, vice president for exhibition, it is meant to suggest a journey over the Silk Road in its prime, covering “the entire distance from East to West — from Xian, the capital of China, to Baghdad, the heart of the Islamic world.”
The Silk Road, which has now become part of folklore, was a loose network of Central Asian trade routes that made up the most dangerous, exotic and economically valuable overland passages in the ancient and medieval worlds. And while you never really believe that your own “unusual journey” is anything comparable, that is just as well. As the exhibition points out, the Silk Road trek was accomplished on foot or by stumbling camel train through unrelenting desert and over steep mountain passes. It is some 4,600 miles long and takes at least half a year to traverse. And it passes through regions whose temperatures range from minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit to more than 120. In ancient times (as in our own) weapon-wielding robbers ambushed travelers, and tribal armies clashed over shifting frontiers.
And the point of it all, particularly during the era focused on here — from the years 600 to 1200 — was to trade the products of human invention, cultivation and belief: the luxuries of spices and silk, the pleasures of music and image, the convictions of religion and science. “Traveling the Silk Road” really does give you an idea of what was involved, how valued the cloth, manuscripts and pottery must have been, and how vital, too, the resulting cultural cross-fertilization must have seemed in a world of daunting obstacles...
FDR's stimulus package for artists: No cause for nostalgia
Source: The Washington Post (11-8-09)
The visitors comment book at the Smithsonian American Art Museum's exhibition "1934: A New Deal for Artists" has taken on a distinct note of nostalgia. "America needs another public works art program now," wrote Gene, from Maryland, after looking at paintings created for President Franklin Roosevelt's Public Works of Art Project, the first of several New Deal programs that supported artists during the Great Depression.
"Do we need another public art program for the 2009 great recession?" asked someone named Robbie. "Yes."
Open for comment since the show was unveiled in February, the book sits surrounded by a colorful display of paintings created from 1933 to 1934 during a short-lived phase of the alphabet soup of 1930s arts programs. The voices calling for another "new deal" for artists are found among generic comments about the prettiness of the art, and they echo a question that came up when Morris Dickstein came to town in late October to promote his new book, "Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression," at the District of Columbia Jewish Community Center: Will there ever again be a government-supported arts program like those funded by the New Deal?
The short answer is no, but are these voices asking the right question?
Although stimulus funds allocated to the National Endowment for the Arts (which received $50 million) may eventually make it to individual artists through a system that disperses federal money to state and local arts agencies, this is a far cry from the rapid flow of support to individual artists during the short-lived PWAP. Between December 1933 and June 1934, about 3,000 artists were put to work on art that captured "the American scene," a project that resulted in more than 15,000 works of art. By contrast, the $50 million for the NEA is earmarked "for projects that focus on the preservation of jobs in the arts." Which means it will aid people who work for arts institutions, and only indirectly to artists themselves.
There have been tectonic political and cultural shifts since the art on view at the Smithsonian was created. The culture wars of the 1990s, which saw the NEA under constant assault for isolated artworks deemed offensive by conservatives, essentially neutered the government's ability to directly fund artists. The culture wars also came with significant collateral damage to the general perception of artists. A handful of them, often attacked because of their sexuality, became symbolic of artists in general. And by focusing on particularly cerebral or confrontational artists, critics of the NEA managed to make it seem as if artists simply didn't do constructive work. In the current climate, it's hard to imagine any government official saying that artists deserve funding because "they eat like other people," as the New Deal's Harry Hopkins once did...
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Siegfried Sassoon Collection unveiled at the University of Oxford
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11-11-09)
November 11 is Armistice Day, which marks the cessation of Great War hostilities in 1918. (Here in the United States, of course, this is now Veterans Day.) In honor of the day and the dead, the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, housed at the University of Oxford, chose today to unveil its Siegfried Sassoon Collection.
Although it contains photographs and other materials, the collection centers on manuscripts of Sassoon's poems, drawn from holdings at Oxford's Bodleian Library and at the University of Cambridge, the New York Public Library, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. A draft of Sassoon's poem "Standing With the Dead" turns up in a June 19, 1918, letter to his friend Robert Nichols.
"Here's my only poem in ages -- is it any good?" Sassoon asks Nichols. Then comes the poem: "I stood with the Dead, so forsaken & still./ When dawn was grey I stood with the dead. And my slow heart said, 'You must kill, you must kill;/ Soldier, soldier; morning is red.'"
At the top of the letter the poet has scrawled, "Write again, write again -- I'm not dead yet -- I've got weeks and weeks to live." As it turned out, Sassoon was one of the luckier ones; he surrived the war and lived until 1967.
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