Blog Posts by Subject: Popular Culture

A thing of beauty is a joy forever... — Keats

(quoted in opening night program, B. S. Moss' Coliseum Theatre, 1920)

The end of 2011 also brought the quiet demise of the last movie theater in Washington Heights, Coliseum Cinemas. Known to most residents as the RKO Coliseum, the large theater, occupying the entire corner of 181st and Broadway, has been a fixture of the neighborhood for over 90 years. As the community now debates the future of the Coliseum and nostalgia starts to kick in, let’s open this theater's historical file, found among the rich collections of the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the New York Public 

Music is the language that we all understand. Whether it be rock, opera, jazz or hip-hop, it's all music if it causes you to tap your foot, sing along, or makes you feel emotions you can't explain. I don't really know of anyone who doesn't enjoy some type of music. Lately, I must confess, I've been listening to corny Christmas tunes like Dominck The Donkey and Alvin and the Chipmunk's "Christmas Hula Hoop" song. But now that "Auld Lang Syne" and "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve" have been put away until next December 31, it's time to reflect on the best music from this past year.

In the late 1800s Harvey Wilcox and his wife Daeida purchased 160 acres in the rolling California hills for a housing subdivision. They called it Hollywood. In 1911 the first filmmakers arrived from New Jersey; in Hollywood they could shoot outdoors without electrical lighting for over 100 days each year. Others from the east coast soon followed, coming not only for the sunny climate but to escape the clutches of the Motion Pictures Patents Company, or the Edison Trust, which licensed Thomas Edison's patents and often violently enforced their monopoly on cameras, projection equipment, and film distribution. By the time the Trust was successfully prosecuted and dissolved 

In Sex and the City: The Movie, Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) ascends the iconic marble steps of The New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street wearing a stunning Vivienne Westwood wedding gown. Her bridesmaids Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) — all wearing vibrant designs by Zac Posen — are at Carrie's side as she enters the landmark building and prepares to exchange vows with Mr.

Action!

Cameras are rolling.....

Damn it! Jenn-it!

This has been the come back year for mega superstar Jennifer Lopez. Not only has she graced the pages of some of the top-selling magazines such as Vogue, People and Glamour to name a few, she has also become a judge in the award winning reality television show American Idol.

What do The Rolling Stones, The Supremes, The Beach Boys, Elvis Presley, The Velvet Underground, and Woodstock have in common?  They were cultural symbols and products of the Sixties. The Sixties gave birth to a popular culture in film and music that reflected and influenced the decade's social upheavals: the rise of Cold War politics, civil rights movements, student protests, and the Vietnam war all profoundly affected American society and culture. 

When I was a child in the 1960s and 70s, I was convinced that everybody was having a good time but me... As it turns out, I was right!

In the spirit of Halloween, I decided to avoid the typical horror films of vampires, zombies, ghosts, werewolves, ghouls, the Devil, Frankenstein, witches, masked murderers, psycho killers, aliens, predators, possessed dolls, haunted houses, undead creatures, serial murderers, paranormal activities and the likes and just settle with a different film that most people would not associate the holiday with — I re-watched one of my favorite films: Spirited Away (for the fifth time since it debuted in 2001) directed by Hayao Miyazaki. (Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of horror films but I am a bigger fan of Miyazaki's films.)

Until the advent of recorded sound, the indigenous music of England, Scotland, and Wales was passed down through the generations by word of mouth.

This week the New York Comic Con is in town! From October 13 through 16, the New York Comic Con will be held in the Javits Center in Midtown Manhattan. This annual convention is dedicated to comics, graphic novels, anime, manga, toys, video games, movies, and television!

At NYPL, we also celebrate comics and comic books. From the first issue of Captain America to Archie Comics, NYPL collects comics for leisure reading and for research. We also offer programs on anime shows and workshops on how to draw manga. Comics and comic books are one of the most pervasive and influential media forms of 20th-century popular culture. A survey of current scholarly 

"And she proceeded to burn perfume..." [Gulnare of the sea].
Picture Collection, NYPL. Digital ID: 1704102.From ghost-hunting reality-TV shows to feature films like The Hereafter, the paranormal has gone mainstream. Book publishing, too, has jumped on the paranormal bandwagon.

Lincoln Center is all abuzz as it ramps up for another Fashion Week. Fashion luminaries, hovering press reps, and harried show staff walk briskly across the Plaza towards the next scheduled event. The sense of anticipation is accompanied by the throbbing bass from the show tent, where models strut their stuff. For the in-crowd, the new look of tomorrow eclipses the desire to reflect on what has come before. But the scholars just next door in The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts relish the past. While Lincoln Center has always been considered the locus of cultural history as-it-happens, it also harbors cultural artifacts of yesteryear stored nearby in the archives of LPA. 

Hey... looks like that soft-hitting journalist is back at it again! You better watch out! I heard her articles are like cotton candy — they're sweet but they don't exactly leave you satiated.

Jennifer Jane from down on the lane is here again with everyone's favorite anarchist, Bobby Pins! Today's interview is based on a photo of Pins in a KISS costume. Is he a young boy struggling with fandom or a future leader of America?

Once again it's Jennifer "More Gaeta than a Crocodile" here with some hard hitting journalism. Get your citronella candle ready Chucky—gotta keep away those mosquitoes, because today it's all about the Beatles!

My interview requests to Paul and Ringo went unanswered, so I will be interviewing Ella-Nor Rugbee!

Don't forget to checkout the links... they'll call you on and on across the universe.

I would say that I am rather familiar with Tina Fey’s work and I would declare myself quite a fan of her talent. From watching her in Mean Girls on the big screen and laughing at her hilarious Sarah Palin impressions to officially making Date Night one of the top five movies to make me laugh so hard I had tears streaming down my face — she is indeed amazing. So how is her New York Times best-selling book Bossypants? Well, a good book is in the eye of the reader, but here's my take on it.

It was way back in 2004, at the Donnell Library's Teen Central room, when a bunch of librarians, myself included, came up with the idea for Anti-Prom. At the time, a bunch of teen books about prom and prom-related activities were being published and we were all sharing our own (somewhat anti-climatic) prom experiences. Then someone said, "We should throw a prom here." There was laughter as we imagined decorating the library with streamers, crepe paper and a disco ball and then someone said, "Forget prom we should throw an anti-prom," and thus an award-winning library tradition was born.

Ohio is not that far from New York... two or three states away, depending how you drive. But you wouldn't know it by talking to any native New Yorker. It might as well be Iowa, or Idaho, they all kind of sound the same. "Flyover country."

For some reason, I’ve been feeling a lot of '90s nostalgia lately. The music, the movies, the fashion ... for me it was the decade of youthful freedom, so it is no wonder I would look back with longing. Luckily for me I have NYPL’s catalog at my disposal, which provides a huge amount of '90s books, movies, music, and resources to help me relive my glory years.