| Unwrapping Middle East youth - and failing to see what's there
BEIRUT: Amid the mass demonstrations in Lebanon in the spring of 2005, the first round of post-Saddam elections in Iraq and Kuwait giving women the right to vote, BBC producer Allegra Stratton traveled to the Middle East to tell a different story - about the preoccupations of young Arabs and the culture by which they choose to define themselves. Titled like a one-hit wonder, "Muhajababes: Meet the New Middle East, Cool, Sexy and Devout" is Stratton's first book, published in London eight months ago and a visible fixture at Beirut bookstores now. It opens with her realization that the population of the Middle East is younger and more educated than ever, but due to economic stagnation across the region, there simply aren't enough jobs to go around. In one of the many sound bites filling "Muhajababes," Stratton describes this this phenomenon as "a collective quarter-life crisis." As Stratton portrays it, "the space between the video-clipper and the veiled-again" is diminishing as popular stereotypes of both the East and West meet.
New Spielberg interview in Rolling Stone
Steven Spielberg is featured in a new interview with Rolling Stone on the event of the magazine's 40th anniversary. Founded in 1967, the periodical is celebrating its four decades in rock and pop culture journalism through chats with baby boomer luminaries and notables including Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Jack Nicholson, Jane Fonda, and many more musicians, writers, and artists.The Spielberg interview is a terrific read, as he touches on his life in the late 1960s (making films, avoiding the Vietnam draft), the influence of music and Rolling Stone in his life and work, his generation's influence on cinema (in which Spielberg respectfully puts the late Pauline Kael in her place for accusing Spielberg and George Lucas for infantilizing American film), politics in the 1960s and today, and the future of film production and presentation.The 40th anniversary issue of Rolling Stone is now available at local booksellers everywhere.
Who can you trust? Wiki-truth a tricky subject
One of the last remaining virtues of newsprint is that once I attribute that quote to Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men" (the greatest bad movie of all time), no one can alter that statement after black ink meets white paper. If this were a Wikipedia entry, any jerk could type a rebuttal that would have you believe Jack Nicklaus said that during a few good Masters' rounds. Welcome to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that evidently is devoted to being the world's most detailed and exhaustive rumor mill. Go to Wikipedia.com if you want to read their defense on how standards of fairness and accuracy are maintained. But the truth is that any journalist who uses "I double-checked it on Wikipedia" as a defense will soon be selling scented candles at the strip mall. Still, Wikipedia is an entertaining and not entirely unreliable source for pop culture minutiae.
Morgan's the One!
Of writing royalty and royalties: From "The Queen" to "The Last King of Scotland" to the imperial presidency of Richard M. Nixon, writer/raconteur Peter Morgan courts jesters and palace potentates with the aplomb of an insider with insight. On a filmic first-name basis with Queen Elizabeth and "Idiot" Amin -- two real-life "regals" who captured Oscars just two months ago for the actors who portrayed them -- Morgan more than manages to move regally, majestically, gliding gracefully onto the Great White Way with an acclaimed play that has given double-sided significance to the acclamation: Nixon's the one! "Frost/Nixon," opening this Sunday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on Broadway, uses "tale of the tapes" as a terrific measure of the tail ends of two formidable careers of opportunistic opponents preparing a bout that would buffet America around as a reminder of the sport that was Watergate in the 1970s.
Kudos for helping kids cope
Don't know if Deb Feigenbaum had time to dip her toes in the surf at Newport Beach when she and husband Ira visited the upscale California coastal town recently. We do know, however, that Feigenbaum did spend time at the National ALS Association Leadership and Clinical Conference, where she picked up the organization's Outstanding Innovation in Patient Services Award.Best known to family and friends as the long-time (long-suffering?) president of the Bess and Paul Sigel Hebrew Academy PTO, on the flip side the West Hartford mother of four is a social worker who tends to patient families at the University of Connecticut Health Center ALS Clinic (a disease more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's Disease.)Feigenbaum earned her award for creating the ALS Kids' Project Backpack, designed to help kids cope with the experience of watching a loved one suffer from the devastating disease.
The Role of the US Govt. in Art Restitution
Thank you, Professor Schoeps, for the opportunity to speak at this conference and to meet with people who have been and remain deeply engaged in the field of art restitution. This is a subject that has drawn increasing public attention in the last few years as prominent cases have been resolved or have reached the stage where they have become newsworthy. The vibrant and active art market of today has added a new dimension to the subject of looted art. .
Let pop culture be a stepping-off point to an invaluable past
I don't know why, but it was really important to me that my children watch the Sharks' and Jets' playground dance-off in West Side Story. I guess I wanted them to know where Michael Jackson got the idea for Beat It.
And I wanted my daughter to see Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet, too, if she was going to see Claire Danes' 1996 version. I wanted her to see the huge role that costumes alone can play in a movie.
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'Grindhouse' Reviewed by Nick Schager
In a pop culture landscape as hungrily cannibalistic as today's, cinematic nostalgia and homage has lost much of its once enticing luster. The indulgent fun of referencing and rehashing the past has worn so thin that even VH1's gaggle of third-rate Best Week Ever and I Love the [Insert Decade] talking heads seem barely capable of mustering enthusiasm for the latest derogatory smack-down on their own industry brethren. The cultural infatuation with retro navel-gazing is now pronounced to the point that it brings into question whether the practice hasn't seriously debilitated our collective imaginations, which have become so narrowly focused that it sometimes feels as if half of our mainstream entertainment takes as its primary influence mainstream entertainment. It's an inward circle that -- at least in the cinematic arena -- proceeds with no clear direction and even less of a meaningful destination, with deconstruction often taking a back seat to regurgitation as countless filmmakers prove themselves stunted adolescents whose worldview is primarily confined to the movies and TV shows of their youths.
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