Who Has the Coolest Record Collection?

The Library of Congress, of course...

Library of Congress builds the record collection of the century
Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times
May 8, 2011
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-library-congress-packard-20110508,0,4929059,full.story

The National Film Registry 2010 Picks

The Library of Congress has made its annual picks for the 25 films added to the National Film Registry, and as always, it's an entertaining, eclectic mix. Here's this year's choices:
• "Airplane!" (1980)

• "All the President's Men" (1976)

• "The Bargain" (1914)

• "Cry of Jazz" (1959)

• "Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB" (1967)

• "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980)

• "The Exorcist (1973)

• "The Front Page" (1931)

• "Grey Gardens" (1976)

• "I Am Joaquin" (1969)

• "It's a Gift" (1934)

• "Let There Be Light" (1946)

• "Lonesome" (1928)

• "Make Way For Tomorrow" (1937)

• "Malcolm X" (1992)

• "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" (1971)

• "Newark Athlete" (1891)

• "Our Lady of the Sphere" (1969)

• "The Pink Panther" (1964)

• "Preservation of the Sign Language" (1913)

• "Saturday Night Fever" (1977)

• "Study of a River" (1966)

• "Tarantella" (1940)

• "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" (1945)

• "A Trip Down Market Street" (1906)

Films selected to the National Film Registry
Tue Dec 28, 2010
http://movies.yahoo.com/news/movies.ap.org/films-selected-national-film-registry-ap

Latest movies added to National Film Registry

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2009/12/heres-the-2009-list-of-films-added-to-the-national-film-registry/

Dec 30, 2009
Latest movies added to National Film Registry

Dog Day Afternoon, Jezebel and The Muppet Movie are among the 25 films being added to the National Film Registry this year, the Library of Congress announces.

The NFR annually selects films that it considers to be "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Here's the full list:

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
The Exiles (1961)
Heroes All (1920)
Hot Dogs for Gauguin (1972)
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
Jezebel (1938)
The Jungle (1967)
The Lead Shoes (1949)
Little Nemo (1911)
Mabel's Blunder (1914)
The Mark of Zorro (1940)
Mrs. Miniver (1942)
The Muppet Movie (1979)
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Pillow Talk (1959)
Precious Images (1986)
Quasi at the Quackadero (1975)
The Red Book (1994)
The Revenge of the Pancho Villa (1930-36)
Scratch and Crow (1995)
Stark Love (1927)
The Story of G.I. Joe (1945)
A Study in Reds (1932)
Thriller (1983)
Under Western Stars (1938)

(Posted by Doug Stanglin)

Nat'l Film Registry gets deep, weird, good

http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/blog/2009/01/natl_film_regis.html

Nat'l Film Registry gets deep, weird, good
Ty Burr
January 6, 2009

Every year the Library of Congress' National Film Preservation Board selects up to 25 movies as part of the National Film Registry, a list of (to quote the press release) "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" works "to be preserved for all time." These aren't necessarily the best American movies but, rather, the most crucial, to the medium, to our history, to our national sense of self.

The 2008 list, announced December 30, brings the registry up to an even 500 titles, and while earlier editions have played it fairly safe ("Casablanca," "Citizen Kane," and "Star Wars" were included in the first batch back in 1989), Librarian of Congress James H. Billington -- the man who picks the final 25 -- has expanded his purview with admirable, even eccentric, originality.

So, yes, the 2008 line-up includes classics of the Hollywood studio era like "The Asphalt Jungle" (1950), "The Invisible Man" (1933), and "Sergeant York" (1941). It tosses bouquets to silents (Keaton's "One Week" and Von Stroheim's "Foolish Wives"), film noir ("The Killers"), and the New Hollywood of the 70s ("Deliverance"). It honors brave, unique souls like Ray Harryhausen ("The 7th Voyage of Sinbad") and Nicholas Ray (the wonderfully nutty Freudian western "Johnny Guitar"). Ahnuld even made it in with "The Terminator." (He said he'd be back.)

Solid citizens all. But what are we to make of "Disneyland Dream," a 1956 half-hour home movie shot by the Barstow family of Wethersfield, CT? "Dream" is an inspired choice in its grainy, unshakeable mid-50s optimism, but it's about as left field as you can get and the list is much the better for it. Or "No Lies," a harrowing 1973 NYU student short that's the granddaddy of today's genre-blurring reality fiction? Or the entirety of the footage that Hollwyood director George Stevens shot as part of the U.S. Army Signal Corps under General Eisenhower during WWII? Or "White Fawn's Devotion," a 1910 short by the pioneering Native American filmmaker James Young Deer?

This is a list. It honors the entirety of the urge to document and/or fictionalize on film and shows where that urge has dovetailed with and crystallized key moments in American popular culture. The National Film Preservation Board has sponsored several DVD collections of fascinating archival material, and video dealer Facets Multi Media has pointers to all the available National Film Registry titles. Is it too much to ask for a compilation of some of the lesser-known titles, so the Barstow family and James Young Deer can fan out across America once again?

The full 2008 list follows:

1) The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
2) Deliverance (1972)
3) Disneyland Dream (1956)
4) A Face in the Crowd (1957)
5) Flower Drum Song (1961)
6) Foolish Wives (1922)
7) Free Radicals (1979)
8) Hallelujah (1929)
9) In Cold Blood (1967)
10) The Invisible Man (1933)
11) Johnny Guitar (1954)
12) The Killers (1946)
13) The March (1964)
14) No Lies (1973)
15) On the Bowery (1957)
16) One Week (1920)
17) The Pawnbroker (1965)
18) The Perils of Pauline (1914)
19) Sergeant York (1941)
20) The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)
21) So’s Your Old Man (1926)
22) George Stevens WW2 Footage (1943-46)
23) The Terminator (1984)
24) Water and Power (1989)
25) White Fawn’s Devotion (1910)

Map that named America is a puzzle

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071203/ts_nm/usa_map_dc

Map that named America is a puzzle for researchers
By David Alexander
Mon Dec 3, 2007

The only surviving copy of the 500-year-old map that first used the name America goes on permanent display this month at the Library of Congress, but even as it prepares for its debut, the 1507 Waldseemuller map remains a puzzle for researchers.

Why did the mapmaker name the territory America and then change his mind later? How was he able to draw South America so accurately? Why did he put a huge ocean west of America years before European explorers discovered the Pacific?

"That's the kind of conundrum, the question, that is still out there," said John Hebert, chief of the geography and map division of the Library of Congress.

The 12 sheets that make up the map, purchased from German Prince Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg for $10 million in 2003, were mounted on Monday in a huge 6-foot by 9.5-foot (1.85 meter by 2.95 meter) display case machined from a single block of aluminum.

The case will be flooded with inert argon gas to prevent deterioration when it goes on public display December 13.

Researchers are hopeful that putting the rarely shown map on permanent display for the first time since it was discovered in the Waldburg-Wolfegg castle archives in 1901 may stimulate interest in finding out more about the documents used to produce it.

The map was created by the German monk Martin Waldseemuller. Thirteen years after Christopher Columbus first landed in the Western Hemisphere, the Duke of Lorraine brought Waldseemuller and a group of scholars together at a monastery in Saint-Die in France to create a new map of the world.

The result, published two years later, is stunningly accurate and surprisingly modern.

"The actual shape of South America is correct," said Hebert. "The width of South America at certain key points is correct within 70 miles of accuracy."

Given what Europeans are believed to have known about the world at the time, it should not have been possible for the mapmakers to produce it, he said.

The map gives a reasonably correct depiction of the west coast of South America. But according to history, Vasco Nunez de Balboa did not reach the Pacific by land until 1513, and Ferdinand Magellan did not round the southern tip of the continent until 1520.

"So this is a rather compelling map to say, 'How did they come to that conclusion,"' Hebert said.

The mapmakers say they based it on the 1,300-year-old works of the Egyptian geographer Ptolemy as well as letters Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci wrote describing his voyages to the new world. But Hebert said there must have been something more.

"From the writings of Vespucci you couldn't have prepared the map," Hebert said. "There had to be something cartographic with it."

MISGIVINGS ABOUT AMERICA

Waldseemuller made it clear he was naming the new land after Vespucci, describing how he came up with the name America based on the navigator's first name.

But he soon had misgivings about what he had done. An atlas Waldseemuller produced six years later shows only part of the east coast of the Americas, and refers to it as Terra Incognita -- unknown land.

"America has gone out of his lexicon," Hebert said. "(No) place in the atlas -- in the text or in the maps -- does the name America appear."

His 1516 mariner's map, on the same scale as the 1507 map, steps back even further, showing only parts of the new continents and reconnecting the north to Asia. South America is labeled Terra Nova -- New World -- and North America is labeled Terra de Cuba -- Land of Cuba.

"Essentially he's reconnecting North America to the Asian mainland, suggesting a continual world of land mass rather than separated by those bodies of water that separate us from Europe and Asia," Hebert said.

Why the rollback? No one knows.

In writings accompanying the 1516 map, Waldseemuller comes across as if he "has seen the better of his error and is now correcting it," Hebert said.

He speculated that power politics played a role. Spain and Portugal divided the globe between them in 1494, two years after Columbus, with territory to the east going to Portugal and land to the west to Spain.

That demarcation line is oddly absent from the 1507 Waldseemuller map, and flags marking territorial claims in South America suggest Portugal controls the region's southernmost land, even though it is in Spain's area of influence. On the later map, the southernmost flag is Spanish, Hebert said.

"It is possible one could say the 1507 map is influenced strongly by Portuguese sources and conceivably the 1516 map may be influenced more by Spanish sources," he said.

Although the map conceals many mysteries, one thing is clear: it represents a revolutionary shift in the way Europe viewed the world.

"This is ... essentially the beginning or first map of the modern age, and it's one that everything builds on from that point forward," Hebert said. "It becomes a keystone map."

(Editing by Eddie Evans)