Today is the release date for "American Visions," Keith Lockhart's second CD with the Boston Pops (BMG/RCA Victor). The eyes of the troubled recording industry will follow its fortunes closely because the first Lockhart Pops CD, "Runnin' Wild," went to the top of...

It turns out that television Mafia boss Tony Soprano and the rest of the U.S. pop-culture crew, not the Bush administration, are more likely to blame for the dislike of the United States outside its borders--at least among global youth. Or so...

___Wrede H. SmithSIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) _ Wrede H. Smith, who helped oversee the growth of American Pop Corn Co. in Sioux City, has died. He was 85.Smith died at his home Thursday, his family said. The retired chairman and longtime president of the company,...

Four of the the biggest U.S. microwave popcorn makers are working to remove a flavoring chemical from their products linked to a lung ailment in popcorn plant workers.Several of the companies discussed their plans Wednesday, a day after a leading lung research hospital warned that...

American Pop is not a Hester Street nor a Mean Streets, films which deliberately develop ethnic themes and settings as their central focus. On the contrary, it is a film which incorporates ethnic material in a subplot, but the subplot of the melting pot and the call of the American Dream is so essential to the history of American popular music that the subject actually provides the narrative core for the entire film…. American Pop is more than music; it is about nothing less than the Great American D...

American Pop is the product of a mature Bakshi. The anger, frustration, and intensity of Traffic and Coonskin are more controlled and focused. Bakshi's vision of America, while still ambivalent, reflects the changes that have occurred in both the filmmaker and his society in the last decade. Bakshi equates his personal and fantasy life with the recent American experience, synthesizing the two in this dramatic history of four generations of an immigrant family trying to make it in America. He understa...

["American Pop"] is a Pop vision of American life since the turn of the century, seen in the stories of four generations of one family of would-be American musicmakers. Though the film is animated, it makes free use also of old newsreels, still photographs and pencil sketches, as well as work in the manner of dozens of recognizable artists from George Grosz and Reginald Hopper to Andy Warhol, with passing references to Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent and Norman Rockwell, among others…. &#x...