January 2011

Contact New Brunswick’s Department of Investment and Transport for travel information (800-561-0123) or go to www.tourismnbcanada.com . Air Nova, a subsidiary of Air Canada, flies into New Brunswick’s main cities. According to tourism officials, most people think of New Brunswick more as a “pass-through” destination to nearby Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island than as a goal in itself. They hope to counter this by exploiting the popularity of “adventure travel,” with a series of one-day programs offering sailing, hiking, whale watching, horseback riding, or kayaking. This last is especially rewarding along the Bay of Fundy’s dramatic coastline, where the tides rise nearly 50 feet twice a day. Another natural wonder worth exploring is the seven-mile length of protected sand dune near the Acadian community of Bouctouche, run by the Irving Eco-Centre. It is one of the few remaining extensive stretches of dune in North America, and you can trek much of its length on a boardwalk raised above the sand.

New Brunswick, the oldest province in Eastern Canada, shares a long border and just as long a history with the state of Maine. Over centuries, the region saw plots, raids, and wars, as France and Britain and later the nascent United States fought for control of a land rich in the bounties of forest and the sea.

Roosevelt Campobello International Park, on Campobello Island at the southwestern tip of the province, reflects the more harmonious Canadian-American relations of the last century. At the heart of the park, the carefully preserved summer home of Franklin Roosevelt draws about 150,000 visitors each year to a patch of “Canadian soil that has become part of America’s heritage,” as the late Sen. Edmund Muskie once put it.

Perhaps nothing so separates the world of today from that of our ancestors before the Industrial Revolution as do standards. Yet most of the time, we don’t even know they are there. A standard is simply “something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value or quality.” Correct spelling is a standard, made possible by the dictionary. So are clothing sizes, right-hand driving, electrical voltages and cycles, and one mouse click to do one thing and two mouse clicks to do another.

Pow!!! Once again, the innocent citizens of Gotham City have been rescued from the clutches of modern art by their mild-mannered mayor, Rudy Giuliani. The latest menace to civilization? A reworking of the Last Supper, shown by the mayor’s arch-nemesis, the Brooklyn Museum. Entitled Yo Mama’s Last Supper, the offending picture features a naked black woman—the artist—in the place of Jesus.

Holy, uh, blasphemy! After the fiendish image was zapped by Mr. Giuliani as “anti-Catholic,” the mayor launched a renewed campaign against pornography and called for the creation of a “commission on decency standards” to police any cultural institution that receives public funding.

“The sun never sets on a Disney theme park,” wrote the Disney chairman and CEO Michael Eisner in 1996. That empire, from the first Disneyland, in California, to Tokyo Disney, is the subject of The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks , which runs until August 5 at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. (202-2722448; www.nbm.org ). The exhibition uses 350 objects from the archives of lmagineering—the group Walt Disney assembled in 1952 to plan the parks—including preliminary models, advertisements, and film clips. The museum’s galleries are laid out to follow the scheme of the original park, though thankfully without the four-hour lines or endless broadcasts of “It’s a Small World.”

This is what America’s most glamorous First Lady saw every time she went to the closet in her White House dressing room after she had the place redecorated in 1962. The artist Pierre-Marie Rudelle covered a pair of ordinary white closet doors with two trompe-l’oeil paintings of treasured belongings of hers, including, at left, two flowers her sister, Lee, gave her as a child and, above them, a watercolor she herself did of the White House, and at right, a spread in Life magazine that opened with her getting thrown by her horse. The doors are showing through July 29 in the exhibit “Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. From September 12 through February 28, the exhibit will be at the Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston, where the doors will remain on display thereafter. Replicas are for sale at the Metropolitan Museum’s store.

Roger E. Kislingbury has spent a good deal of his adult life hanging out in bars—vanished ones. And now you can join him, through the 170-odd photographs in his very handsome book, Saloons, Bars, and Cigar Stores: Historical Interior Photographs (Waldo and VanWinkle Publishers, $65.00). For the author, a saloon is a “rustic wooden-floor barroom, usually in the West or a mining district, with oil lamps, primitive fixtures, and a back bar with a ‘diamond dust mirror,'” while a bar has “a more finished or refined appearance,” often with an ornate backbar gleaming under the owner’s pride, electric lights. There are plenty of both to be found here. These places were meant to offer comfort, and thanks to the big, crisply reproduced photographs in Kislingbury’s book, even 80 years after Prohibition worked its havoc on them, they still do. To order a copy, e-mail the publisher at waldovan@earthlink.net.

Nostalgic for the untroubled moral righteousness of the good-versus-evil world of 1960s radicalism? Take yourself back with The Best of Broadside, 1962-1988 , a lovingly produced book and five-CD boxed set from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings ($69.99). Broadside was a mimeographed newsletter full of protest songs published by a couple in an apartment on New York City’s Upper West Side from 1962 to 1988; Folkways Records started putting out LPs of the songs in 1963. The selection here includes Pete Seeger singing “Mack the Bomb"; Tom Paxton, “Train for Auschwitz”; the Fugs, “Kill for Peace”; Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddam”; and Phil Ochs, “We Seek No Wider War”—89 songs in all.

CUSTER’S LAST STANDS

This June marks the 125th anniversary of the destruction of George Armstrong Custer’s command, an event well remembered cinematicaliy. Custer’s film debut came in 1912 with Custer’s Last fight , directed by Thomas H. Ince and inspired largely by the famous Anheuser-Busch lithograph that graced thousands of beer halls across the nation. Since then, the general has made his last stand at least three dozen times, and that doesn’t even count such thinly disguised retellings as John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948), with Henry Fonda as the martinet Colonel Thursday, who leads his regiment into the fatal valley.