The FBI was convinced that composer Aaron Copland was a Communist and spent “two decades and more monitoring Copland’s whereabouts, analyzing his comments and taking note of his friends and associates. The result is an inch-thick FBI file, replete with blacked-out passages, released to The Associated Press in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from late 1997. The papers make clear that the government’s interest in Copland did not end with his 1953 testimony at Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist hearings – transcripts of which were released this month.”
Tag: 05.10.03
When Book Clubs Need Help
The very words ‘book club’ can bring to mind the peace of a bright living room, where women balance plates on their knees, listening eagerly to one another’s opinions, not letting anything distract them from serious literary discussion. The reality is something different. As in any leaderless group, people do what they want: show up or not, read the book or not, talk the entire time or sit mute, or ignore the book and do a lot of just plain catching up with one another.” Enter the paid book club facilitator.
Has Ingmar Bergman Made His Last Film?
Has Ingmar Bergman made his last film? “The last day, the way he was, and the way he said goodbye, he didn’t only say goodbye because the film was over. He said goodbye in a way I knew meant ‘this is the last time I leave a film set as a film director’.”
Sorting Out What’s Missing At Iraqi Museum
Reports of what’s missing from Iraq’s National Museum after looters got done have been contradictory. “The number of items stolen during and after the war from one of the world’s premier collections of early-civilization antiquities appears now to be much smaller than first suspected. Thousands of pieces, however, are missing. Although many of the thefts are being attributed to looters, some appear almost certainly to be the work either of insiders or experts.”
Western Scholars, Curators Offer To Help Iraq Museum
Concerned archeologists, scholars, conservators and arts administrators in the West have been meeting in recent weeks to try to find ways to help Baghdad’s National Museum, which was looted in April. There still isn’t enough information about losses at the museum to take definitive definitive action, but “we are also very concerned that the inventory of the museum’s collection be done by individuals with academic and museum qualifications, not the military, and that guards and other people who worked in the museums be rehired.”