Archive for the ‘Lifestyle’ Category

New York’s Tuthilltown Gristmill is a long way from Nasmyth Road, a quiet, nondescript Victorian terrace in the suburbs of West London. Around 3,500 miles, if you had to put a figure on it. But the spirit of the Hudson Valley farm distillery isn’t far from a small, disused garage near the River Thames where a 2½-year-old copper still lies gently hissing away, distilling one of London’s newest gins.

Drinking Now

From everyday drinking to a treat from the cellar, three gins perfect for tasting today.

That gin is Sipsmith, praised for its zesty aromatics and dry “London style.” Such is its success—it is now stocked in a swathe of upscale bars, including London’s Savoy Hotel, Boca Grande restaurant in Barcelona and Soho House in Berlin—that Sipsmith has added sloe gin, vodka, damson vodka and a summer cup to its portfolio. There are also plans for a second still and a U.S. export deal. For a brand that began life barely three years ago, it’s been quite a ride.

The story goes back to 2002, when, in a Lower Manhattan coffee bar, childhood friends Stamford Galsworthy and Fairfax Hall found themselves thinking of home. The drinks business had led them from England to the East Coast of America, where Mr. Galsworthy was working in the export department of U.K. brewer Fuller Smith & Turner PLC in New York and Mr. Hall held a job with Diageo PLC’s strategy department in Philadelphia. Inspired by the small distilleries they encountered on their travels around America, such as Tuthilltown, Hangar One Vodka near San Francisco and Bluecoat Gin in Philadelphia, they had the genesis of an idea: to create their own microdistillery in London.

 

Wine Accessories to Make Wine Even More Fun

2:39

WSJ Wine Columnist Lettie Teague scans the wine accessories market and finds a few good tools and many destined-for-the-drawer toys on Lunch Break.

“There were so many things about the microdistilling culture in America that were great,” says the 35-year-old Mr. Galsworthy. “The quality of production was so much better. There was a real energy around all these little microdistilleries popping up everywhere, and we saw how consumers loved the buzz of an artisanal product.” But it took them five years, says Mr. Hall, 36, to “talk themselves into it.” After quitting their jobs, they moved back to England and set up shop in a West London premises that once belonged to the late whisky writer Michael Jackson. Employing the services of master distiller Jared Brown and commissioning a copper still from Germany’s oldest producers, Christian Carl, they set about creating a classic London-style gin, with unique botanical flavorings—a nod to the long-lost recipes of England’s West Country gins.

“It was a dream project,” admits Mr. Brown. “The evening I met Sam and Fairfax, we got talking about our general philosophy and what made a good gin, and we all agreed that the best that could possibly be done in the modern age is to take today’s better equipment, better-controlled ingredients and apply those to the formulas and understandings that came up over the centuries of making gin.”

Gin’s origins stretch back to the Middle Ages, when it was served as a remedy for various ailments. The modern form is said to have been introduced to Britain by soldiers who had drunk it in Holland during the Eighty Years’ War (hence the expression “Dutch Courage”). It grew in popularity, reaching its height in the mid-18th century, when its distillation was so widespread the era became known as the Gin Craze. An increase in taxes, licensing requirements and a change in taste eventually led to the closure of many distilleries, leaving Beefeater as London’s major premium producer.

The process used to create gin—distilling spirit, water and juniper berries and various citrus botanicals such as coriander and cinnamon—hasn’t really changed since 18th century. But despite the one-time proliferation of stills in England, “Prudence” (the name Messrs. Hall and Galsworthy, inspired by a favored phrase of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, gave their still) was the first to be launched in London in nearly 200 years.

In order to create a unique taste, Jared Brown went through a raft of historical recipes from the 1,000-drinks-book library at his home in Gloucestershire, and started experimenting with ingredients such as Italian orris root and Chinese cassia bark. “The whole process took around six months,” he says. “The challenge was not the recipe, but tailoring it to the still.” And a desire to create a bit of gin-making history as well.

Corrections & Amplifications

The modern form of gin is said to have been introduced to Britain by soldiers who had drunk it in Holland during the Eighty Years’ War. An earlier version of this article said it was introduced during the Thirty Years’ War.

Write to Will Lyons at wsje.weekend@wsj.com

By MELANIE GRAYCE WEST

Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal

Ray Darmstady pours at City Swiggers at 320 E. 86th St.

Wine has long enjoyed the spotlight in New York, with specialty shops and restaurants designed for choosy oenophiles. Now, a traditionally more humble beverage has begun to get similar attention.

Over the past year, a host of shops have emerged catering to “beeroisseurs”—devotees who can debate hops content with the fervor of a political contest and spend hours tracking down an obscure Trappist ale.

To be sure, there have been stores and bars throughout the five boroughs for years that offer rare and sometimes very expensive brews.

But this new breed of beer shop more closely follows the model of a boutique retailer, where beer buffs can often sample before buying and drink a pint at the bar with paired bites. Customers can take home a mixed six-pack and fill a growler—a refillable jug container—straight from the tap. Some stores even host book-signings and lectures.

Unlike the corner bodega, the shops offer enormous selections of craft or specialty beers—small production beers from around the world made from premium ingredients—that can range in price from roughly $1.25 for a single bottle to $25 for a 750-milliliter bottle (about 25 ounces), and up.

Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal

A sampling of the beer selection at City Swiggers in Manhattan.

At the new City Swiggers on the Upper East Side, customers can plunk down $41.99 for Drie Fonteinen Oude Kriek, a sour cherry Belgian beer aged in oak. Or for $25.89, they can take home Nebraska Brewing Co.’s Apricot au Poivre Saison beer brewed with, of course, apricots and pepper.

The rise of specialty beer shops is reflected in growing numbers of state-issued tavern wine licenses, which allow holders to serve wine and beer—but not hard liquor—and to sell beer to-go. Since 2005, the number of tavern wine licenses issued in the city has nearly doubled, to 157 from 82, according to data from the New York State Liquor Authority.

The marketplace for beer in New York is now at a “tipping point,” said Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at the Brooklyn Brewery and editor of “The Oxford Companion to Beer.”

“What’s really happening is that craft beer is not a trend or a fad,” according to Mr. Oliver. “It’s a return to normality.”

Historically, it’s abnormal to “have three [kinds of] beers for 300 million people,” Mr. Oliver said. Now, “people are looking at beer for what it is: which is food.”

But at the same time, those getting into the specialist beer business have a much higher threshold to succeed because the average New York bar now has a pretty wide selection of specialty brews, Mr. Oliver said.

To be unique, he said, a store now has to stock “sufficiently obscure” beers.

“Everybody’s got great beer now,” Mr. Oliver said, but “there’s an arms race on the geeky end of things.”

Major grocery stores and first-time business owners alike are now opening up shops to cater to beer devotees.

In November, the Whole Foods Market at Columbus Circle opened a tavern-like space within its store, replacing what had at one time been a wine shop and later an area for personal-hygiene products.

It’s a first-of-its-kind tap room and café for the Northeast region, with 10 beers and eight wines on tap and another 150 bottled beers. The location was the “perfect space,” said Michael Sinatra, a spokesman for Whole Foods Markets in the Northeast region, for capturing “the enthusiasm that’s out there among shoppers in trying different beers and trying local beers.”

This month, Ted Kenny, a former Wall Street trader, will open Top Hops on the Lower East Side. The store and tasting room will sell some 700 to 800 beers in bottles and offer 20 beers on tap, with a stock evenly split between domestic and imported brews.

Mr. Kenny, 42 years old, has worked in the beer industry and began his plans for a specialty beer store a few years ago. Seeing others successfully get into the retail business encouraged him to open Top Hops with his cousin and business partner, Bryan Weadock, co-head of global fixed-income commodities for Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

“I wanted to do a place that really celebrates beer,” said Mr. Kenny, who is planning to make education and proper pouring a cornerstone of his store. “I feel very fortunate that I’ve found a way to hopefully make a living at something that I’m very passionate about.”

Also new to the beer shop industry are Alan and Pamela Rice, who spent three years brewing up the idea for City Swiggers, their two-month-old shop and tasting room.

So far, the neighborhood response has been “overwhelming,” Ms. Rice said. “We’re trying our best to keep up.”

Mr. Rice, 48, previously worked in the financial-services industry, and City Swiggers is his first retail store. Beer has long been his passion and he’d been active in the city’s beer community as president of Brooklyn’s Malted Barley Appreciation Society.

City Swiggers carries some 500 beers hand-picked by Mr. Rice. The couple designed the store to be approachable to people just learning about beer and those coming in with strollers. Still, Mr. Rice said, a fair number of customers are serious connoisseurs willing to travel for something unusual. He said beer blogs and online forums have fueled the local “craze” for exotic beers.

“I hope this isn’t just a fad and that this is a true trend,” he said.

By MARION ISSARD

The quiet Parisian suburb of Asnières-sur-Seine has become an essential stop for serious food lovers in recent years. There, the window of Le Couteau d’Argent shows pictures of its famous owner, Yves-Marie Le Bourdonnec, posing naked with meat. But Mr. Le Bourdonnec isn’t a controversial chef or the owner of a hipster restaurant: He’s a butcher.

“No one in France can compare his meat to mine,” he said recently, sporting his organic-cotton butcher’s apron. “My côte de boeuf is one of a kind. No one here dry-ages it for 60 days.” His Christmas order book was full in August.

France has been known for its three-star chefs for decades. Now, French foodies are name-dropping their suppliers, moving a step down the food chain to crown celebrity food providers. From foie gras producer Robert Dupérier to star butter-maker Jean-Yves Bordier, being able to cite the name of food providers has become proof of traceability and quality.

“You want to be sure that what you eat is not going to kill you, but with a trendy touch,” says Caroline Champion, the head of restaurant consultancy Convergences Culinaires. “Food providers are increasingly seen as artists, with signature products.”

“The Bohemian Butcher,” as Mr. Le Bourdonnec calls himself on his business cards, is the most eccentric of the new celebrities. Besides the naked pictures, featured in a charity calendar, he is known for turning down Michelin-starred chefs who want to buy his beef. Next month, he’s scheduled to open a steak house in Paris—part of ambitious expansion plans just four years after buying his business out of bankruptcy court.

When he restarted his business, Mr. Le Bourdonnec focused on local customers instead of high-profile chefs. Selling to restaurants “turned into a business thing, everything started to be too expensive. If you tell me my meat is too expensive, I get angry,” he says. (He sells his iconic cut, the côte de boeuf, for €75 a kilo.) Now, 80% of his business comes from the Paris region, 10% from the rest of France and the remainder from abroad.

“People today want quality products,” says Mr. Le Bourdonnec, “and they’re willing to pay what it’s worth.” A recent study by market research company Ifop showed that 90% of French people today pay attention to the quality of the food they buy, compared with 58% in 2004, and they favor local products.

The son of a former priest, Mr. Le Bourdonnec grew up on his aunt and uncle’s farm in Brittany, where he raised goats and a pony. Though he hated to slaughter animals, by age 9 he decided he wanted to be a butcher. Ten years later, he bought Le Couteau d’Argent (“The Silver Knife”) from his boss. Today, the 43-year-old butcher still has the same tiny, old-fashioned shop, open only four days a week.

Though his shop was out of the way of Paris’s best restaurant suppliers, a few years after taking over the butchery he was discovered by France’s most famous chef, Alain Ducasse. Mr. Ducasse had tasted a steak cut by Mr. Le Bourdonnec and contacted him. The young butcher began inventing new cuts of meat for Mr. Ducasse, which gained him early credibility among France’s haute cuisine. He later gained other high-profile clients such as Le Meurice’s Yannick Alléno.

Mr. Le Bourdonnec has plenty of expansion on his plate. With partners, he is set to open his first restaurant, the Beef Club, in Paris next month. It will only serve British meat, which he argues is raised more ecologically than French cows.

Elsewhere, he uses French beef. With a French breeder, he recently bought a historical butchery in Paris, set to reopen in March.

A third shop, in Montreal, is in the works for summer, and will deal in American and Canadian beef. His 17-year-old son Paul, the second of five, will run it. “I was so hoping he would become a butcher,” Mr. Le Bourdonnec smiles.

By DARRELL HARTMAN

Alexander Mustard

DIVE JOINT | The U.S.S. Kittiwake in Grand Cayman.

Underwater diving trips have a way of taking on the slip-away quality of a dream. That’s especially true if you’re inexperienced, as I am—but also when a foray unfolds as easily as a vision.

After a five-minute boat ride from Seven Mile Beach, on the western coast of Grand Cayman, I splashed into Kool-Aid-blue water. In moments I was in a flurry of silver bar jacks, with the shimmering fish swirling all around me. When the cloud of marine life cleared, my breath stopped. Just 50 feet ahead was a mighty ship at rest on the seafloor, as clear and whole and well-lit as a museum specimen.

The U.S.S. Kittiwake, a 251-foot submarine rescue ship, plied the seas between 1945 and 1994. It once “shouldered” a recalcitrant Greenpeace boat, and was the first support ship on the scene when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. After retirement the vessel could have been sold for scrap metal, but last January it was sent to sleep with the fishes in a scuttling that made international headlines. It was dramatic video footage, to be sure, but also the first time a U.S. naval ship had been re-purposed for diving outside the country’s waters.

Resting on the ocean floor, ironically, the Kittiwake may be at its most accessible. Grand Cayman is a 90-minute flight from Miami and a four-hour nonstop from New York; Seven Mile Beach is five miles from the airport. And because its upper decks are some 20 feet down in clear water, the wreck can be explored by beginner scuba divers and even snorkelers.

Clinging to one of the site’s anchor ropes for the first few feet, I descended with my DiveTech guide, Jeni Chapman. We finned along the port deck, passing through shoulder-scraping doorways and into the denuded galley and mess hall, recognizable by the topless table bases. Ms. Chapman pointed out an iron press the crew would have used to spiff up its uniforms. Though we didn’t need flashlights, there was a ghostly feel in the cramped, dimmer quarters where my exhalations created masses of wriggling bubbles on the ceilings. When I caught sight of my own arm in a rusty mirror, my heart jumped.

But there was life there, too. We found a spindly-legged arrow crab wedged into a corner of the pilothouse. An orange squirrelfish flashed its spiny fins as it darted behind a bollard. Horse-eyed jacks circled the mast like creatures on a child’s mobile. A dozen or so snorkelers kicked across the surface above.

Most wrecks don’t become popular dive sites right away—it can take years for colorful sponges, fans and corals to appear, as well as the fish that like them. But the Kittiwake was an almost instant hit, surprising even the local dive operators who led the charge to acquire the ship from the U.S. Maritime Administration.

“People were telling me they’d dive it in a few years,” said Stephen Broadbelt, owner of Ocean Frontiers and part of the Kittiwake committee. “Then they go to the website and see the videos, and they’re saying they’re going to dive it every year.”

By our second dive, some 45 minutes after we’d surfaced from the first, the sun was behind the clouds and the snorkelers had left. I got no greeting from giddy fish. Instead of going deep, I drifted over the ship’s smokestack, whose depths are perhaps the one part of this stage-lit wreck that is completely devoid of daylight.

Gazing into that void, I could feel how gutted the Kittiwake was. In time, though, the emptiness should become rich profusion: Lobsters and octopodes will move into shadowy nooks, cleaning shrimp will set up work stations where sailors once did, extending an invitation of sorts to hungry garden eels and the eagle rays that eat the eels. The Kittiwake will become a coral-encrusted possession of the sea.

The Lowdown: Grand Cayman

Getting There: You can fly direct from many major U.S. cities to Grand Cayman’s Owen Roberts International Airport.

Staying There: Cobalt Coast, on the northwest shore, is a low-frills resort with tidy oceanfront rooms and an outdoor restaurant; it’s also home to DiveTech (from $230 per night, cobaltcoast.com

). The six-year-old Ritz-Carlton Grand Cayman is a plusher alternative on Seven Mile Beach (from $299 per night, ritzcarlton.com
).

Diving There: More than 30 operators offer Kittiwake excursions. DiveTech’s owner led the effort to create the wreck site ($120 per person for a two-tank trip, divetech.com

). Ocean Frontiers, in the secluded East End, runs a weekly trip for $95 per person (
oceanfrontiers.com
).

By NANCY DEWOLF SMITH

Even the best comedians can’t explain where jokes come from, and it’s probably better that way. So David Steinberg’s new interview series with 19 famous comics only takes us partway behind the curtain. The mystery, the tiny, glittering surprise at the heart of every gag, remains hidden from view.

Almost everyone on “Inside Comedy”—from Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner to Billy Crystal and Martin Short, to Jane Lynch and Steve Carell (this week’s pair of guests) and many more—got their start doing stand-up. But genre is not the most important common denominator. Neither is the way these people get laughs. In a broad sense, what’s funny about Jonathan Winters or Tim Conway is nothing like what makes us laugh at Sarah Silverman or Garry Shandling.

Yet all of these comics are exactly alike in at least one respect: Each faces the same essential audience every time he or she goes on. Whether by accident or editing—and during often hilarious trips down memory lanes—most of the people here are the most interesting, and the most revealing about their art, when they talk about their relationship with us.

Mr. Steinberg, a comedian who is now also an admired television director, is the ideal interviewer. He does not focus on himself but is exquisitely tuned in to his subjects, many of whom he knows well. This seems to have relaxed some of his guests to the point where they appear more natural, and less switched on—as entertaining as that can be—than they are with other interviewers.

Larry David, for instance, recounts a story—most amusing for “Seinfeld” fans—about the time he loudly quit his job as a writer for “Saturday Night Live,” bitterly regretted it and showed up the next workday as if nothing had happened. Yet Mr. David seems more real when he elaborates on the discovery early in his stand-up career that being yourself on stage is not an option. “I tried to be the person I was with my friends” who always laughed at him, he explains. But “the audience was not my friend…. I couldn’t ingratiate myself with them.”

Ellen DeGeneres also remarks on the impossibility of performing without artifice. As much as she enjoys doing comedy, she says—and even after the liberation of coming out as a gay woman—it is only now, on her TV talk show, that she can be, at last “completely myself.”

Many of Mr. Steinberg’s guests talk about the origins of their style. Ms. Silverman, for instance, says she became “addicted” to attention when she was a tot, after she noticed that the swear words her father had taught her produced “shock and feedback” among adults.

Don Rickles has some great stories, including one about being in a bar in Monte Carlo with Frank Sinatra in the wee small hours when a big lightening storm broke out. Mr. Sinatra, always on the lookout for journalists to hate, mistook the lightening for the flash bulbs of celebrity photographers and sent Mr. Rickles out into the rain to chase the SOBs away. As for the distinctive Rickles style, he says that when he began, he was bad at impressions and couldn’t tell jokes so he talked to the audience. Here, as elsewhere in the series, old film reveals the comics in nearly forgotten past incarnations.

Mr. Winters honed his craft as an obscure radio host in the Midwest. Unable to countenance another show about the alfalfa harvest, he announced to his Dayton, Ohio listeners one night that his guest was a British Air Force officer who had just flown to their city on a secret aircraft. And how was your flight? Mr. Winters asked his guest. Oh, I have flown over Germany, over India and over Cairo, the wing commander told the good folk of Ohio in an impossibly plummy British accent. “But flying into Dayton was like flying over millions of diamonds on a black velvet carpet.”

After the show a puzzled station executive rushed up to Mr. Winters:

“Who was that guy you interviewed?”

“Me.”

“Don’t do that anymore.”

The comics are busting with insights on how to work a room, a vulgar word to avoid, and the way to keep moving on stage so you aren’t such an easy target for hecklers. Yet heckling has not always been as brutal and nasty as it can be today. Robin Williams remembers working in San Francisco’s folk-music bars, where a coffeehouse crowd shouted critiques like no others. “Interesting concept” someone might yell. “Talk more about your early years.”

Jerry Seinfeld says that there is nothing more “intimate” and “intense” than stand-up, because nothing stands between the comic and his audience. This should mean that over time comics learn a lot about what makes us tick. And what do audiences respond to the most? Chris Rock answers: “Political stuff gets the most attention,” because it’s easy for the media to write about. “But the relationship stuff sells tickets…. You got to get into the complexities of men and women.” The same relationship jokes work in every country too, from Europe to Australia, he chuckles. “It’s primal stuff.”

***

There is something primal about Discovery’s “Bering Sea Gold,” too. This “reality” series taps into the treasure-hunting urge that’s hard-wired in our brains. It’s set in the waters off Nome, Alaska, where glaciers have washed gold into the sea and where, for three months a year, the weather permits people to dredge or vacuum sediment from the seafloor. In the first two episodes one barge has scooped up a total of more than $150,000 in gold dust and particles.

Primeval best describes the assorted screw-ups and oddballs enlisted for the cast. One fellow says he needs $150,000 to pay child support and other debts. Another man caps a good day on the sea by getting stabbed in the back in a drunken bar fight. More baffling is the apparently literate couple who live in a shabby yurt, while she—a soi-disant “dredge slave”—dreams of earning the tuition to study opera in Europe. As for the barely floating “fleet,” it makes the postapocalyptic boats in “Waterworld” look like Chris-Craft Corsairs. Week after week, it’s like watching an accident in slow motion. We’re wired for that too.

“This isn’t me,” says the 17-year-old heroine of “Pariah,” a remarkable debut feature, by Dee Rees, that opens today in national distribution. One of the two things she’s talking about is a dress her mother wants her to wear to church. The other is an essence of self—an irreducible Me—that she has already identified but can’t yet declare. Alike—she pronounces her name ah-LEE-kay—is a black lesbian living in Brooklyn. She’s played by Adepero Oduye, who gives a performance, first heartbreaking and later thrilling, that swings between the darkness of spiritual isolation and the incandescence of self-discovery, with quiet interludes of affecting earnestness. Alike’s religious mother, Audrey (Kim Wayans), refuses to credit the evidence of her eyes and heart. “I know God doesn’t make mistakes,” she insists. But there’s no mistaking the nature of Alike’s struggle, or the abundance of talent that’s gone into the making of Ms. Rees’s semiautobiographical film. (Bradford Young did the fine cinematography.)

“Pariah” is genuinely original, even though the theme of a gay person’s coming out is familiar, and the title, along with the setting and milieu, suggests a similarity to “Precious.” The similarity, though, is barely skin-deep. Unlike the illiterate, obese and inarticulate Precious, this heroine is vivacious, attractive and constantly out there seeking love and acceptance. (Alike is also portrayed as such a gifted writer that the film’s resolution feels like a bit of a cheat.) The originality lies in the details, and the dramatic energy that sustains almost every scene.

Watch a clip from the film “Pariah,” starring Adepero Oduye. Video courtesy of Focus Features.

Charles Parnell is seductive and obtuse as Alike’s father, Arthur, an NYPD detective who, in an abject failure of detection, insists on seeing her as daddy’s little girl. Pernell Walker is her best friend, Laura, and Aasha Davis is Bina, the supposedly straight daughter of one of Audrey’s co-workers. It’s not fair to say that Ms. Davis steals scenes—one of the movie’s strengths is its ensemble cast—but she supercharges every scene she’s in.

‘Swastika’

The description on Amazon reads like a bizarre joke: “Swastika, starring Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun, Josef Goebbels et al.” It’s bizarre, but no joke. Hitler, his mistress and some of his henchmen are the real-life subjects, if not the stars, of Philippe Mora’s controversial 1973 documentary. The film was denounced when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival almost four decades ago, then was banned in Germany for 37 years; only this week has it become available on DVD. Some of the scenes, intercut with Nazi propaganda films and ominous newsreel footage of the Nazis’ rise to power in the 1930s, were shot by Braun in 16mm color. They’re home movies, with all the cheerfulness and awkwardness the term implies, except that the home is Obersalzberg, Hitler’s Bavarian mountain retreat, where Hitler is seen giving a persuasive—unless you pay close attention—impression of a full human being.

That appearance of humanity—not just on the part of the Führer, but of Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler and lesser monsters appearing briefly—is at the root of the controversy. And it’s a fascinating question. Is our understanding of history served well or ill by the spectacle of Hitler playing with dogs, making nice with bright-faced children, chatting up his secretaries, posing stiffly in various uniforms, deploring Göring’s shooting of a boar (“What kind of courage is that? He should go into the forest with a spear”), admiring a visitor’s Bolex movie camera (“Ah, color film,” he says, “the future belongs to color film”), or talking amiably with guests about “Gone With the Wind”?

(Braun, in her turn, picks flowers, does gymnastics, cuddles a bunny, muses about Clark Gable—he’s “clever as well as handsome”—and smiles wood-nymphishly in scenes shot by someone else using her camera, which was loaded, we are told in the DVD’s accompanying material, with Kodak Ektachrome film that was available in Nazi Germany only with a special import license.)

The film makes a preliminary case for itself in an eloquent preface: “If the human features of Hitler are lacking in the image of him that is passed on to posterity, if he is dehumanized and shown only as a devil, any future Hitler may not be recognized, simply because he is a human being.” But it makes a better case with the scorching ironies of its substance.

A harvest festival, staged for the newsreel cameras with insistent joy, is intercut with scenes of Nazi thugs smashing the windows of Jewish-owned shops. One notably noxious moment in which a fawning Hitler sits an adorable little girl on his lap is juxtaposed with a Nazi soldier kicking a pregnant woman. The triumphalism of the propaganda films produced by Goebbels’s ministry gives way to particularly horrific scenes of death-camp corpses, and seemingly endless vistas of a Berlin reduced to rubble by Allied bombing. And just in case those ironies aren’t strong enough, a couple of music cues are troweled on: Helen Morgan singing “What Wouldn’t I Do for That Man?” over shots of an ardent Braun, and Noël Coward singing “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans” as the camera pulls up, Google Earth-like before its time, from an aerial photograph of Berlin that widens into a panorama of all of Europe.

Paying close attention to the Hitler of these home movies gives one a deepened sense of who he was. His smile is mirthless. His gaze is unsteady, or furtive. His eyes are dead, as if he’d been filmed in the sort of cheap motion-capture animation that turns faces into glove puppets. He smoothes his hair with a repetitiveness that amounts to a tic. He gives children ritual pats on the cheek, but reveals his emotional detachment during a 1938 Munich “celebration for dead comrades” when, confronted by a girl convulsed with grief—presumably for her dead father—he administers a pat that amounts to the kind of whack one would give a playful dog. And when a group of puppies first surround him and then ignore him, he seems puzzled and put off. “They don’t appreciate a friend,” he says to no one in particular. With a friend like Hitler, the puppies must have sniffed something in the wind.

‘It’s About You’

MPI Media Group

John Mellencamp (with a photo of the ‘Million-Dollar Quartet’) in ‘It’s About You.

As an advocate of seeing feature films on a big screen, I try to practice what I preach—seeing movies for review in screening rooms rather than on DVD screeners, even though I have a flat-panel display in my living room that transcends anything I could have imagined before these gorgeous megagizmos became as common as, well, flat-panel displays. That said, I have a confession to make. I watched “It’s About You” on a screener, and justified doing so by the fact that this documentary about John Mellencamp was shot on blurry Super 8 film; blowing it up to fill a theatrical screen could only make it look worse. I must also confess that several times during the first few minutes I reached for the remote to turn it off. Yet my finger never hit the stop button.

“It’s About You” was made by the noted photographer Kurt Markus with his son Ian. Its ostensible—and often actual—purpose was to follow the unquenchable Mr. Mellencamp on his 2009 tour and document the making of his album “No Better Than This” in historic locales. The main thing that put me off was the use of Super 8. This struck me as an affectation in the digital age, and one that imposed a practical penalty: no accurately synchronized sound (though the filmmaker’s son did, in fact, record the music digitally).

But the Mellencamp band was also using relatively primitive equipment—an old mono tape recorder from the 1950s and a single microphone. Soon I realized that the real subject of this film, with its philosophical voice-overs by the filmmaker and its haunting shots of decayed American downtowns, is the passage of time and the toll it takes. The effect of the Super 8 is to give present moments historical weight by making them look primitive; it’s a kind of instant oldening that seems to pause time if not to stop it. “It’s About You” is an odd and touching little film. I’m glad I stuck it out.

Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com

By SIDNEY LAWRENCE

George R. Stroemple Collection/Alexis Rockman

‘Evolution’ (1992), by Alexis Rockman.

Columbus, Ohio

The art of illustration is a respected genre arising most famously from fiction—Sir John Tenniel’s “Alice in Wonderland,” for instance—and science, as in John James Audubon’s “Birds of North America.”

Art that is illustrative is another matter. Purists distrust it because, they say, even the most realistic, topical or narrative artwork must be grounded in aesthetics, not facts, which can deaden the transcendence at the core of great art. This schism keeps the work of Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish and even Salvador Dalí in art-world limbo. You might as well pick up a magazine or look at a photograph, say the detractors. Chill out and open up to the artistry of depiction, say the revisionists.

The work of Manhattan-based painter Alexis Rockman, 49, hovers somewhere between these extremes. In the mid-1980s, Mr. Rockman made his gallery debut with quirky, washy paintings of creature life that some mistook for Conceptual Art but, more accurately, reflected the art world’s embrace of image-based painting and storytelling. Astutely aware of nature displays, with which he grew up visiting New York’s American Museum of Natural History, Mr. Rockman also turned to 19th-century landscapes, sci-fi movies and vernacular culture for inspiration while honing his skills in the studio. His best-known works are sweeping narratives in tune with the ecological movement.

A major Rockman retrospective at the Wexner Center for the Arts features nearly 40 paintings and works on paper that the artist has created since 1986. “Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow” was organized and first presented last fall by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. Slightly condensed for the Columbus showing, it brings into even sharper focus Mr. Rockman’s strengths, and weaknesses, as an artist whose ambition is to be illustrational, personally expressive and didactic at the same time—a tall order.

The earliest paintings on wood (Mr. Rockman’s preference to canvas) look great in the hyperdramatic, elongated galleries of the Wexner. “Amphibian Evolution” (1986), based on a textbook diagram, features branches, roots and Botero-fat frogs and crocodiles above and below a waterline in a bold, free-form composition of controlled chaos that feels very art-world contemporary.

On the other hand, Mr. Rockman’s large-scale “Evolution” (1992) is as old-fashioned looking as the museum-dinosaur murals that inspired it. It’s also crazy fun. This luminously rendered, 8-foot-by-24-foot tropical panorama is jam-packed with meticulously rendered details and fanciful touches. For starters, the smoking volcano in the background is a near-perfect replication of “Cotopaxi,” an expedition-based Latin American painting completed in 1862 by Hudson River master Frederic Edwin Church. The species depicted number 214—among them a Mallard duck and Holstein cow, plus a “Rat-Bat Spider” and three-eyed “Garbage Freak,” hybrids as bizarre as Hieronymus Bosch’s medieval inventions. A bulbous-brained, almond-eyed sci-fi humanoid with male and female attributes surveys the teeming scene. Is this where humanity is headed?

In 1994, Mr. Rockman spent several months in Guyana, vowing to paint only what he saw. “Drainage Ditch: Georgetown” (1995) is a cross-section of that city’s eccentric ecology, including a filthy-looking underwater habitat full of discarded tires and dog-faced fish, one with newborns—gross but poignant. His smaller insect studies, while witty, have a wince-inducing technical quality. But “Bromeliad: Kaieteur Falls” (1994), a cutaway view of the red and green plant (plus curious frogs and worms) with an idyllic rain forest behind, is gloriously poetic.

Humans are largely unrepresented in this exhibition, but our species becomes an irrefutable presence in “The Farm” (2001), a large painting so vivid and satirical you can’t help but love it. This not-so-subtle slam at the dangers of genetic engineering depicts a Grant-Wood-Iowa country-fair display of square tomatoes, a multiteated cow and other oddities in an unmodified soybean field, plus a pathetically overbred Chinese Crested dog, presented on an oval insert like a blue-ribbon prize.

Even more compelling is the cutaway, 3-D miniature diorama “Golf Course” (1997). Under several layers of resin, an actual putter blade taps a golf ball into a cup. Artificial turf and a painted fairway and country club complete the illusion, but below, instead of dirt, is actual trash (cans, bones, plastic bottles, wrappers, etc.) from which emerges a yellow-eyed cartoon monster eating someone’s finger. Yikes!

“Manifest Destiny” (2003-4) is a grandiose shocker, a mural-scaled depiction of Brooklyn in ruins, under water, several centuries hence. This well-researched, humid-seeming, yellowish tableau of crumbling architecture, broken systems and surviving organisms deliberately invokes the final, ravaged landscape of Thomas Cole’s “Course of Empire” (1836). The Brooklyn Bridge is as picturesque as any Romantic ruin but also right out of a postapocalyptic sci-fi film. One also thinks of National Geographic illustrations of lost cultures, the Titanic videos, and global-warming flood maps. It’s pretty eerie.

But is this painting all gloom-and-doom? Not at all. It is an aquarium of catfish, sharks, seals, a giant jellyfish and a notorious northern snakehead (which nibbles on a swimming rat), an aviary for pelicans and gulls, and a garden sprouting healthy vegetation above and below water. It’s all very theatrical and actually rather soothing. In its own way, this is edgy art.

Mr. Rockman’s most recent large-scale opus, “South” (2008), seems dull by comparison. Recounting his sojourn to the Antarctic, the work pays homage to a Church painting of 1861 and marks a departure for the artist, who moves into a more experimental, improvisational mode. Mammoth icebergs are rendered with a palette knife, the polar weather is in gray washes, and drips and drops may—or may not—indicate ice-cap melting. But the 30-foot-wide, seven-paneled work on paper is too big, chopped up, and thematically vague to stir the soul.

Wherever he is headed artistically, Mr. Rockman will remain a passionate illustrator of nature. He interprets current dangers to the natural world and refuses to let us look the other way, prodding us—sometimes gently, sometimes not—to pay attention to their perils. Some people might find this exhibition depressing, but if you like bravado, over-the-top fantasy and God’s cosmos, you’ll come out smiling. It’s a fable, after all. Who cares whether it’s art or illustration?

Correction: An earlier version of this story said that Alexis Rockman was based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Mr. Lawrence is an artist and writer in Washington.

By ERIC GIBSON

New York

It’s not the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fault that its expanded and renovated galleries of American painting, sculpture and decorative arts are opening after similar efforts on the part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ark., and the New-York Historical Society. Still, museumgoers might well wonder what, if anything, the Met can offer that the others haven’t. The answer: Way more than you can imagine.

This mammoth, multiyear project involved reinstalling its enormous collection across 26 galleries in an institution that, because it is barred by law from building out, had to cadge what extra space it could from within the existing envelope. Given the collection’s riches, department chairman Morrison H. Heckscher could have opted for a “trophy hang,” an installation highlighting its masterpieces and relegating everything else to also-ran status. Instead he chose education over institutional vanity, using the collection as a textbook that tells the story of American art.

Thus in the very first gallery, two works by John Singleton Copley hang amid works by other Colonial portraitists. There’s never any doubt who is the superior artist—Copley’s technical mastery, revolutionary naturalism and psychological depth put him in a class by himself. But the point here is to begin at the beginning and provide context, so that even as we admire the Copleys we are equally drawn to the humbler efforts of his contemporaries and predecessors, such as the self-taught painter Joseph Badger’s honest and forthright 1760 image of his grandson. So when, in the next gallery, Copley gets the stage to himself in a display of five portraits, it seems completely fitting, as much a statement about the development of American art as his mastery.

Thereafter the narrative unfolds in a series of galleries tracing the major phases, themes and figures of American art: the Revolution, the Hudson River School, Western art, Homer and Eakins, and the like, concluding with the early 20th-century Ashcan School of urban realists.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

‘Moonlight Marine’ (1870-90) by Albert Pinkham Ryder

One challenge Mr. Heckscher and his team faced is that given the layout of the galleries it’s hard to tell the story sequentially. But they have deftly compensated by making each one a self-contained chapter, allowing you to dip in anywhere without too much confusion. Perhaps because the story of American art is also the story of America itself, two such installations, “Era of the Revolution, 1776-1800″ and “Civil War Era, 1860-80,” are particularly memorable. The former documents George Washington’s transformation from flesh-and-blood general in Charles Wilson Peale’s c. 1780 portrait to symbol of the nation’s purpose and values in Gilbert Stuart’s 1795 work. In the latter grouping, the steady rhythm of national progress and optimism we have so far witnesssed is temporarily checked, as Winslow Homer, Sanford R. Gifford and others strive to come to terms with the searing national trauma of the War Between the States.

Mr. Heckscher’s installation bucks recent museum practice by not mingling fine- and decorative-art displays, and by not using the increased square footage for a significant increase in the number of works on display. Here he has a luxury not afforded most curators, because one floor down is the Henry R. Luce Center, where collection overflow is housed on glass-fronted racks and shelves accessible to visitors. That’s where aficionados of American art went to get their fix when the galleries were closed for renovation, and it’s still an Aladdin’s cave of treasures, among them “Man Cub,” Alexander Stirling Calder’s 1902 life-size portrait-statue of his 4-year-old son and sculptor-to-be, Alexander.

But it’s in the area of education that Mr. Heckscher’s traditionalism is most noticeable. Of late museums have, with some success, been helping their visitors connect with the artworks through technology such as touch screens, as well as targeted labeling that directs the visitor’s attention to a telling detail or two. By contrast, Mr. Heckscher has stuck with the wall-label format. Each gallery has a brief introductory text, and every work in it has an explanatory label of its own.

And it works, chiefly because the writing is superlative. When you read, about George Caleb Bingham’s “Fur Traders Descending the Missouri” (1845), that “The scene is impenetrable and bewitched, marked by mist and silence,” you’re taken beyond the standard wall-label fare of basic facts and historical context into the emotional heart of the picture. This is something museums almost never do, yet it immeasurably enriches one’s understanding and appreciation.

The one weak link in this chain is the gallery dedicated to “Images of Women, 1880-1910.” Beginning with three saccharine mother-and-child portraits by Mary Cassatt and some sculpture that likewise would have been better left out, there are too many indifferent works here to justify giving them so much valuable real estate. Doing so smacks of special pleading, a fist-bump to the Sisterhood.

There’s also the problem of how to end the story. Closing with the early 20th-century Ashcan School makes sense chronologically, but since this isn’t an area of collection strength, it’s something of an anticlimax. And since Robert Henri, William Glackens and the others had little influence after their lifetimes, it also provides no hint of what comes next in American art.

Though it would have broken the chronology to do so, a better ending would have been to move Albert Pinkham Ryder here from the “Cosmopolitan Spirit, 1860-1900″ gallery. While Ryder (1847-1917) is very much a 19th-century artist, the simplified forms and visionary outlook of his landscapes and seascapes prefigured and in some cases directly influenced such early American modernists as Marsden Hartley, whose work can be seen a couple of hundred yards to the south in the museum’s 20th-century wing.

Still, these are modest cavils about what is, all in all, an exemplary installation. Having gone from one end to the other—or even having taken in only a fragment—you leave buoyed, with a renewed appreciation of the works by these artists and, let it be said, of the country that produced them.

Mr. Gibson is the Journal’s Leisure & Arts features editor.

Sony Pictures Classics

Some of the creative team behind ‘Take Shelter’ will speak in L.A. Above, star Michael Shannon.

Obsolete Laws: Does Government Need A Spring Cleaning?

How do old laws and regulations hem in policy changes today? Legislators including Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.) will join with law school professors and others. Sponsored by Common Good and the Bipartisan Policy Center. Tuesday at 8:30 a.m., Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington. commongood.org.

Sound Advice: Moving Beyond the Picture

Jeff Nichols, director of “Take Shelter,” will talk about designing a soundtrack with his composer and sound designer. (The well-reviewed 2011 film stars Jessica Chastain and Michael Shannon.) Produced by Film Independent at Landmark Theater, West Los Angeles. Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. $35. filmindependent.org.

Harvard Thinks Big

Eight professors will speak for 10 minutes each on an idea they’re passionate about—among them, Shakespeare authority Stephen Greenblatt (“Will in the World”), evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman and historian Jill Lepore. Webcast: harvard.edu/livestream. Thursday at 8 p.m., Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, Mass.

China: The Power And Glory of the Ming Dynasty

The art and culture of the era (1368-1644) will be the focus of two lectures on Friday, starting at 7:30. There will be music. From 10 a.m. Saturday, four professors look at Ming-era violence and sea exploration, and the roles of the intelligentsia and theater. Herbst Theatre, San Francisco. A Humanities West event. Full program: $65-$115.

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