Note: when I began A Motley Vision last summer, I promised myself that I wouldn’t recycle material that I had written for the AML List except for this essay (polemic). But then I couldn’t find it anywhere — not in my e-mail, not on my hard drive — and the AML archives were down for [...]
“Family,” a new play by Eric Samuelsen, associate professor of theatre at BYU, opens next month.
Samuelsen is one of the premiere LDS playwrights and any new work by him is not-to-be-missed by those who who are interested in the world of Mormon arts and culture. I will, of course, miss it [unless someone wants [...]
Excel’s marketing team has done a pretty good job hyping the film version of “The Work and the Glory” as it continues to open in theatres across the country. The film’s opening has been mentioned and even reviewed in quite a few newspapers. And although the film has so far only met — not exceeded [...]
This week’s Bloggernacle A&E column has been posted at The Bloggernacle Times.
Topics include Mormon folklore, aesthetics vs. (or perhaps in coordination with) the spirit, the return of The Sugar Beet and J.R.R. Tolkien and the Book of Mormon.
IndieWire has posted an article on the world of LDS cinema.
The title of the article — Latter-day Cinema: Like Everyone Else, Looking for the Next “Napolean Dynamite” — is interesting because it reframes the narrative of LDS film a bit. Prior to ND’s success, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” was usually the break-out hit that [...]
Although it was published in Oct. 2004 (by St. Martin’s Press), “Wives and Sisters,” a novel by former Salt Lake Tribune reporter Natalie R. Collins, was reviewed recently by the Indianapolis Star and the Salt Lake Tribune. The result is an interesting exercise in how people outside the Mormon corridor don’t understand Mormonism and how [...]
The Harvard Crimson has posted a review of a recent Low concert. It follows the typical story line of Low’s music reflecting the band’s native Dultuh and the Mormonism of two of its three members — the husband-wife team Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker. What’s interesting about the review, though, is that the way it [...]
The BYU Museum of Art has put together what looks to be a very interesting exhibit Thoroughly Modern: New Exhibition of Early 20th Century Women Artists (hat tip to Meridian Magazine). The exhibit opens Feb. 25 and features the work “of the women art students of Robert Henri —- widely regarded as the most important [...]
I like writing first lines for stories. They aren’t ‘real’ first lines, of course. That is, I don’t intend to turn them into stories. They encapsulate, say too much (some of it said in what isn’t said). They tend to be glib and even humorous. Think of them as short-short stories but without the story [...]
In an interview with the top-tier literary blog Blookslut, Brian Evenson discusses in brief what the dark muse has cost him.
This is the last post I’m going to make in this style — the previous one was on Neil LaBute — because I find this theme too depressing and at the same time reductionist. But [...]
Update 3/4/05: SFist Review (hat tip Times & Seasons).
Excerpt:
“While reviews of Sons of Provo, a mockumentary about a Mormon boy band, compared it to This is Spinal Tap, we found it much more reminiscent of Zoolander. We think this is a good thing – in Spinal Tap, the characters are mainly static and cartoonish, while [...]
American public discourse has been atwitter the past week over PBS’s decision to not distribute an episode of the children’s TV series “Postcards from Buster,” that features the animated rabbit Buster visiting a sugar farm in Vermont run by a same-sex couple. Some local stations are choosing to air the episode anyway. According to a [...]
Mormon Wasp posted back in October that Mormon studies scholar Terryl Givens has a forthcoming book title Fair as the Moon and Clear as the Sun”: A Cultural History of the Mormon People.
Now in his Times & Seasons Q&A, Givens reveals that the project will focus on how “a number of powerful tensions and paradoxes [...]