Pop Culture

The celebration of Polynesian pop culture known as Tiki Oasis is billed as "the largest and longest running Tiki Event on planet Earth." It grew even larger in its ninth year, according to organizers, when it filled the grounds of the Crowne Plaza Hotel in San Diego with nearly 2,000 Tiki aficionados over four days in mid-August. Mixed in with the symposiums on rum and chocolate, screenings of "Tikimentary," book signings and a car show was what many would consider the visual highlight of the weekend: a tiki fashion show produced by Melissa Gruenhagen, owner of the Retro Diva website, including vintage looks from her stockpile of Hawaiian fashions.

When Lester Glassner died of pancreatic cancer Aug. 9 in hospice care at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City at age 70, he left behind a major part of his life that he had spent nearly 50 years accumulating. The one-time picture editor, designer and art librarian for CBS Records had a massive collection of vintage movie memorabilia, dime-store merchandise and other pop-culture artifacts numbering in the hundreds of thousands. For more than three decades, Glassner's large and diverse collection filled his four-story 19th century brownstone home on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Tikam Chand wheels up on a rusty bicycle, navigates past a tangle of pedestrians, the odd beggar, a pile of garbage and kiosks selling Coke in battered green bottles, and unties a 50-pound camera that took its first photograph around the time President Lincoln was assassinated. It's been doing daily duty ever since, much of it on this stretch of sidewalk in front of the maharaja's palace -- used first by Chand's grandfather, and then by his father and now, for the last three decades, by Chand.

She doesn't want to be known as that "chick from that girl group." Or the actress who played Lil' Kim. Naturi Naughton wants you to remember her name. And to help ensure the name recognition sticks, she's starring in the revamped production of "Fame," which hits theaters Sept. 25. She plays Denise, a singer-pianist whose parents disapprove of her attending the New York City High School of Performing Arts. Sure, the 1980 Oscar-winning hit musical about gifted students with ambitions of being famous came out before Naughton was born.

The strange little retreat called Troutdale in Agoura Hills could best be described as a cross between Clifton's Cafeteria and Disneyland's Country Bear Jamboree. A tiny shotgun shack, which looks as if it belongs in the backwoods of "Deliverance," is nestled beside its dirt-road entrance. And once inside, anglers can grab bamboo poles to fish in its two murky concrete ponds, stocked with nearly 1,200 trout and surrounded by carved wooden bears and Indians. It's hard to believe that such a place exists just 37 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles on the 101 Freeway.

The independent film "The Room" didn't exactly make a splash when it opened six years ago. Critics panned it -- the few who reviewed it, that is -- and moviegoers stayed away in droves. So why, on a Saturday night, are hundreds of people lined up around the second-floor space of Laemmle's Sunset 5 theater on Sunset Boulevard, waiting to see it? And why are many of them lugging bags full of plastic spoons? "The Room" has become the latest cult movie sensation, complete with its own rituals and rules of engagement.

The French, who have spent much of the post-World War II era bemoaning the infiltration of American pop culture into their own, are about to import some of the contemporary hallmarks of American museum culture: "hands-on" displays aimed at making museums more attractive to kids, and educational outreach programs that will augment public schools' art instruction with museum resources and know-how. And it's France's greatest bastion of art, the Louvre, that is leading the way -- accepting a grant of about $1.3 million from the Philadelphia-based Annenberg Foundation to add kid-friendly multimedia displays and other gizmos to some of its own exhibits, and to create DVDs, online features and lessons that can circulate in the schools.

Nearly every day you can find an example of someone rushing a story into the blogosphere that turns out to be, well, not really true, as I noted in a post when the showbiz press was full of reports that Summit Entertainment had hired a new director for one of its "Twilight" sequels, when in fact the company hadn't even finished interviewing possible candidates. Now we have the depressing example of the ghoulish swarm of coverage of Natasha Richardson's horrific skiing accident, which reached its nadir with this post from Time Out NY's theater blog, which prematurely killed off the actress, running the headline: "RIP Natasha Richardson 1963-2009."

Do you know any of these phrases: "think of England," "a gun in your pocket," "go nuclear," "rough and tumble," "knock-down, drag-out" or "at the drop of a hat"? Do you know what it means to "go to the mattresses"? It's no skin off my nose if you don't. There's no doubt that great American cliches are, well, cliches. Whether we speak in street slang or have a broad, beautiful vocabulary, we all use little bits of language that come from another time and place. However you like to talk, it can be funny and fun to discover the origins of classic phrases and what popularized them.

I read your article on the hit HBO series "True Blood" with a slight sense of not-quite-supernatural deja vu. ["Fans Can't Stem Their Lust for More 'Blood,' " June 7.] The attraction of that program's blend of Gothic romance with vampires in a serialized format which commands a large and loyal audience, particularly female, is nothing new. It all happened before, back in the 1960s when the late television producer-director Dan Curtis created the spooky ABC daytime drama "Dark Shadows," a pop-culture phenomenon that remains undead decades later on DVD and in an upcoming feature film project starring Johnny Depp.