H.L. Mencken was proud to have coined the term word “smuthound.” He avoided shampoo and lied to women. He felt hangovers not as headaches but as “pains in the legs” and preferred beer to scotch, which made him “vaguely uneasy.”
“I drink exactly as much as I want,” he wrote, “and one drink more.”
He Read More
The Smithsonian has acquired Van Halen’s guitar. That’s right–the guitar Eddie Van Halen used during the band’s 2007-08 tour (the band’s heyday). But why stop there? Following, a few more items the curatorial team at the collection of museums known as “America’s Attic” might want to acquire next, before they’re lost to history.
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After the much-decried removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in my Belly from a Smithsonian exhibition earlier this fall, the New Museum decided to screen the work in its lobby for a month and a half. The Museum of Modern Art did them one better: they bought it.
MoMA Read More
The Smithsonian Channel is getting all historical on us (that’s just what they do!) with The True Story. They’ll partner with Showtime to produce the five-hour series. It will look at the real-life roots of popular films and characters, including Indiana Jones, Ian Fleming’s James Bond, Eliot Ness of Untouchables fame and the Amityville house, Read More
T.J. Kelleher is leaving his senior editor position at the book publishing arm of The Smithsonian Institution for a job at science culture magazine Seed.
Mr. Kelleher’s last day at Smithsonian will be on Friday; he started there in the spring of 2005, soon after the company entered into a contract Read More
If the Smithsonian Institution, which is apparently mounting an ambitious exhibition on New York City, really wants to give museum-goers a slice of life in the Big Apple-not just its Gershwin-style grandeur, but also its bitterness and barely repressed rage-there’s probably no better place to start than the average supermarket-checkout line, as a June 14 Read More
