Taking Names

The write stuff

American soldiers returning from service abroad will be encouraged to write about their wartime experiences courtesy of a new National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) program dubbed Operation Homecoming.

NEA Chairman Dana Gioia announced the initiative in a news conference yesterday at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial in Arlington.

“Operation Homecoming will preserve personal accounts of the wartime experiences of our troops and their loved ones,” said Mr. Gioia. The program will also offer writing workshops headed up by such distinguished writers as Mark Bowden (“Black Hawk Down”) and Tom Clancy (“The Hunt for Red October.”)

— T.L. Ponick

Best of the worst

E! Online

“Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and “Dancing on the Ceiling” may have been catchy tunes and big hits, but they still stink, says Blender magazine.

The music journal is publishing its list of the 50 worst songs in its May issue. The songs were selected if they were poorly performed, had poor melodies, or just didn’t make any sense to the folks at the publication.

The entry most likely to peeve fans is Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence.”

Starship’s “We Built This City,” from 1985 topped the list. “The truly horrible sound of a band taking the corporate dollar while sneering at those who take the corporate dollar,” the magazine said of the tune.

Billy Ray Cyrus’ “Achy Breaky Heart” was second, followed by Wang Chung’s “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.” “If this song was a party, you’d lock yourself in a bathroom and cry,” quipped Blender.

Rounding out the top 10 worst songs ever are Huey Lewis and the News with “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” by Bobby McFerrin, Eddie Murphy’s “Party All the Time,” “American Life” by Madonna, and “Ebony and Ivory,” the duet by Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney.

Seeing red

Reuters News Agency

Spanish artist Pablo Picasso applied for French citizenship just before German troops invaded France in 1940, but he was turned down because police saw him as a communist sympathizer, a new exhibition shows.

Mr. Picasso’s brief letter of application, featuring his instantly recognizable signature, is the highlight of an exhibition of 40 years of police surveillance of the celebrated artist, which opened yesterday at the Paris Police Museum.

The records, among hundreds of files stolen by the Nazis during World War II and seized by the Russians in 1945, lay in KGB vaults in Moscow for decades before being returned to France in 2000.

Claude Charlot, director of the Police Museum, said Mr. Picasso’s close friend and biographer Pierre Daix was stunned to discover the artist had applied for French naturalization.

The exhibition shows authorities kept tabs on Mr. Picasso from his arrival in Paris in 1901, starting with a domestic intelligence report that said he was staying with a suspected anarchist and concluded that he must share the same politics. The report painted the 19-year-old artist as a rebel who “sometimes stays out all night.”

By the late 1930s, Mr. Picasso was world famous and paid a fortune in taxes to the French state.

Mr. Picasso, renowned for his fierce pride, never forgave the slight and, although he never again set foot in Spain, he proclaimed he would die Spanish. The artist, who joined the Communist Party after the liberation of France in 1945, died in 1973 without seeing democracy restored in Spain.

Crazy in love

San Francisco Chronicle

Hip-hop supercouple Beyonce Knowles and Jay-Z are reportedly set to tie the knot on Saturday in a lavish ceremony, says the Chronicle, quoting a report by World Entertainment News Network.

According to insiders close to the hit makers, 22-year-old Beyonce will wed her 34-year-old lover in a romantic Caribbean wedding on the island of Anguilla. The nuptials can’t come soon enough for devoutly religious Beyonce, who has never confirmed to the media that she and Jay-Z are together.

Beyonce’s younger sister, Solange, recently married at the tender age of 17.

Compiled by Robyn-Denise Yourse from staff and wire reports