Free Republic

If Mormons’ “HBO moment” was not bad enough, it seems that Hollywood, Broadway and the publishing world aren't likely to give up on portrayals of Latter-day Saints on screen, on stage and in books any time soon. Such Mormon portrayals, often stereotypical, have been showing up since the 1800s. For example, When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduced detective Sherlock Holmes in the story, “A Study in Scarlet.” It was set against the backdrop of anti-Mormon inaccuracies about Latter-day Saints and their beliefs popular in England at the time. On a later visit to Utah he apologized for the inaccuracies. Here...

Roger ScrutonBeauty and Desecration We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness. Spring 2009 At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, “beauty” would have been the answer. And if you had asked what the point of that was, you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed hardly distinguishable from them. Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw beauty as a way in which lasting moral and spiritual values acquire sensuous form....

X-Men star Patrick Stewart in foul-mouthed tirade at fan who took picture in theatre Apr 16 2009 By Jane Hamilton HOLLYWOOD star Patrick Stewart launched a foul-mouthed tirade at a fan who took a picture of him onstage. He called the man an "a***hole" as he queued to get the actor's autograph following a stage performance.The 68-year-old X-Men star is touring with acting legend Sir Ian McKellan in Samuel Becket's classic play Waiting For Godot.As the fan waited outside the King's Theatre in Edinburgh afterwards, Stewart pointed his fingers and shouted: "Can you sleep at night?" His co-star Sir Ian looked...

"If you telephone me on the mobile, I would be able to speak to you through my 'ear.'"

TUESDAY'S GREGALOGUE: EMINEM So in Eminem's comeback video, there's a scene featuring him in bed with a Sarah Palin clone, post-coital presumably - but here's the real cool part: he breaks wind.How edgy. How in your face. Way to speak truth to power - even if it came out your ass.Seriously, this is not bad for a white, balding rapper quickly approaching forty and desperately clinging to a shred of relevance - not unlike his white, balding fans already over forty desperately clinging to jobs in telemarketing. I mean, is it any wonder he's resorting to material reused and reheated...

Rap Is CrapPosted By Ben Shapiro On March 29, 2009 @ 7:05 am In Entertainment, Featured Story, Politics | 2 Comments Today, [1] Grammy-winning rapper T.I. (Total Imbecile? Thug Idiot?) was sentenced to 18 months behind bars for illegally owning machine guns and silencers.  In the aftermath of his arrest, prosecutors informed T.I. that he could serve two decades in prison; he quickly agreed to 1000 hours of community service, touring around the U.S. talking to teens about the problems with drugs and gangs.  MTV made a show about him called “[2] T.I.’s Road to Redemption.”  This from a guy...

Tony-winning actress Natasha Richardson was killed by a blunt trauma to the head and her death was ruled an accident, the city Medical Examiner reported Thursday. Richardson sustained an epidermal hematoma - a blood clot that forms upon impact and starts growing between the brain and the skull - after wiping out Monday on the bunny slope while skiing at a Canadian resort. "This is a very treatable condition if you're aware of what the problem is and the patient is quickly transferred to a hospital," Dr. Keith Siller of New York University Langone Medical Center said. "But there is...

President Barack Obama has established a new staff position in his White House with the task of overseeing arts and culture, Kareem Dale. Dale, a partially-blind lawyer previously served as national disability director for Obama's campaign and served on the arts policy committee for Obama in Illinois. No details have been provided about the specific job duties as of yet, but it's been described as "a big step forward in terms of connecting cultural and goverment with mainstream administration policy."

The most ubiquitous woman in fashion — she’s everywhere, everywhere these days — Lara Stone imitates a young Brigitte Bardot for Jean Paul Gaultier’s S/S 09 ad campaign.

Several years ago, after I emerged from the fog of knee-jerk Liberalism that envelops most of the entertainment business, I began to wonder why it was that so many of my colleagues remained mired in the magical thinking that so often seems to characterize the Left. After all, many of my colleagues were reasonable, kind, and intelligent people. Among my friends, were musicians, actors, photographers, and writers - all of whom were highly creative and dedicated to their craft yet, as is typical of those on the Left, they couldn’t be swayed by facts if those facts contradicted the prevailing...

A call for President-elect Barack Obama to give the arts and humanities a Cabinet-level post -- perhaps even create a secretary of culture -- is gaining momentum. By yesterday, 76,000 people had signed an online petition, started by two New York musicians who were inspired by producer Quincy Jones. In a radio interview in November, Jones said the country needed a minister of culture, like France, Germany or Finland has. And he said he would "beg" Obama to establish the post. Listening in New York, Jaime Austria, a bass player with the New York City Opera, and Peter Weitzner,...

The transition team of President-elect Barack Obama is keeping a firm hand on any appointment news, but the buzz in art-and-politics precincts has the new administration seriously considering the idea of an official White House Office of the Arts, overseeing all things having to do with the arts and arts education.

HUGH Jackman has a funny way of selling Australia - both his movie and his country - to Americans. I mean, likening us to Nazis? Let’s check the transcript of the actor’s extraordinary rant this week on The View, a popular women’s TV chat show in the US hosted by Barbara Walters and Whoopie Goldberg. And let’s check if, at the end of it, you’d want to see either the Baz Lurhmann movie in which Jackman stars or the evil country which spent $40 million on tourism ads meant to piggyback the film’s “success”.

Mention the name Moby Grape to a roomful of rock critics, and you'll hear nothing but praise for the 1960s San Francisco rock band. But aside from fans and critics, few people today have ever heard of Moby Grape. Why? Bad advice, bad breaks and bad behavior are three short reasons. Now that a label is trying to right these wrongs by reissuing the group's first five records, old problems still stand in the way. The name Moby Grape comes from an absurdist punch line: What's big, purple and swims in the ocean? But the band that influenced groups ranging...

Keeping with the arts theme, I went back to Staud for these two images of the Yellow Mountains of China. The linked page has a few more.

snip A bomb goes off in a Greenwich Village townhouse, killing three members of the militant Weather Underground. Afraid of being arrested, several of their comrades go on the run. The year is 1970. The latter comes from his own life: Dohrn's parents, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, were two of the Weathermen who fled. While there are similarities between the incidents, Dohrn insists he's not drawing on his parents' experience to tell the tale of two married radicals from a century before. snip "Like most writers today I felt like I needed to respond to what's going on in...

CAMP VICTORY, Iraq, June 17, 2008 – Army Staff Sgt. Dimas Estrada uses taekwondo to keep himself and other soldiers busy, teaching classes in the sport five days a week at the Paul R. Smith Fitness Center here. Army Staff Sgt. Dimas Estrada, left, engages Ukrainian Army 1st Lt. Andrey in a sparring match during a taekwondo class June 10, 2008, on Camp Victory, Iraq. Estrada, an air and missile defense operations sergeant for Task Force Mountain, is carrying on his family's taekwondo tradition while deployed. U.S. Army photo by Spc. Sophia Lopez  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. While...

(WARNING: This story contains graphic descriptions of artwork that is offensive.)(CNSNews.com) - Federal taxpayers are subsidizing a college in New York whose art school is currently displaying works that include a drawing of a man with a crucifix coming out of his rectum, a drawing of a man with a rosary coming out of his rectum, and rosaries decorated with penises. Over the last eight years, at least $4.6 million in federal tax dollars have been provided to the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, which is displaying the controversial artworks. Some of the money has come...

And The Winners Are....

Poppy lovers flocked to the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve on Lancaster's west side during the weekend, enjoying the orange blossoms and the great weather. And Judy Elgin, senior park aide at the State Parks Mojave Information Center in downtown Lancaster, can finally tell callers there are poppies to see. "There are scattered blooms throughout the park and there are more poppies coming out each day," Elgin told an information center visitor in the middle of last week. "And there's much variety in the blooms." The 1,800-acre reserve, on Lancaster Road at about 150th Street West, is a chief destination...