Here' s what happens a lot: I'll be in a discussion of the Gospel and the Arts, or Literature, or Music or Theatre or whatever, and the same binary comes up.  There are two kinds of art: 'worldly' art and 'spiritual' art.   We're to avoid the one and embrace the other.  Art can invoke the Spirit, but art can also offend the Spirit.  Art can embrace darkness or light.  If we realize the movie we're watching is 'worldly' (the word we mostly use is 'inappropriate'), we should walk out of the theater, turn off the DVD player.  Walk out. Leave.  Erase that song from your I-Pod, turn that book back in to the library, leave the museum.  We're in the world, but we're not of the world.  We should follow a higher standard.  Those are the metaphors: light and dark, up and down.  We even have all those wacky object lessons we remember so fondly from Seminary or Sunday school.  My favorite is the dog poop brownie one.  A teacher brings in some brownies--ask the kids if they want one.  Mentions, oh so casually, that they're really good brownies, except for just a little dog poop that got in the bowl.  Of course, nobody wants them then.  Well, isn't that what we do when we see a movie, say, with just that one inappropriate scene.  Aren't we polluting our minds and spirits, just like we'd be polluting our bodies if we ate those brownies? More...

Annette and I have this show we like to watch--the Inspector Lynley mysteries.  I gather it was popular on PBS a couple of years back, but we discovered it via Netflix.  It's about a British aristocrat-turned-detective, Inspector Lynley, and his lower class partner, Sgt. Barbara Havers. So there's all this British class system stuff, the nuances of which probably escape us. Nathaniel Parker plays Lynley, and we honestly don't like him that much, especially in the third season, when he got a new hair style that somehow made him act like a total prat, instead of just looking like one.  But we love Sharon Small, who plays Havers. More...

The recent Utah execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner via firing squad became national news, and led to inevitable editorializing pro and con the death penalty.  Because Utah is the only state that allows for firing squad executions, Utah is presented, by those who oppose the death penalty, as a particularly benighted state, and the discredited doctrine of blood atonement usually gets attention.  Blood atonement is, as Scott Card once put it, "a doctrine never taught in the Church, especially by Jedediah M. Grant."  But Gardner's execution had, for me, a personal historical context unrelated to blood atonement.  Only three Utahns have been executed via firing squad in the last 70 years.  Gardner's one; Gary Gilmore (of Executioner's Song fame) was another.  The third was a man named Donald Condit, who was executed in 1940 for murdering my grandfather. More...

In baseball, it's possible for a pitcher to achieve perfection.  A perfect game is one in which no batters are allowed to reach base, either via error, walk, or basehit. Every single batter is retired: twenty seven up and twenty seven down.  Perfect games are very rare at the major league level, with only twenty since major league baseball began its record-keeping.  And yet, there have been, improbably, three so far this season.  (Bear with me on this: a relevance to Mormon literature may yet emerge.)

The first took place on May 9, pitched by Oakland A's lefthander, Dallas Braden.  When scouts talk about young pitchers, they differentiate between 'stuff' and 'command.'  'Stuff' refers to raw talent--how fast can this young man throw the ball, with what kind of diabolical movement.  'Command' refers to control.  A pitcher with good stuff and poor command may be able to throw the ball 98 miles per hour, but with little idea where it's going, for example. Dallas Braden epitomizes a pitcher with mediocre stuff but superior command.  His fastball tops out at 85 mph, but it  goes exactly where he wants it to go, and he changes speeds admirably.  He's otherwise known as a fun-loving and admirable young man--still trying to solidify his position as a big leaguer, but a guy who's known for running out on the field during rain delays and sliding on his belly on the wet grass.  May 9 was Mother's Day, and it turns out Braden's own mother passed away when he was a senior in high school.  He dedicates all his games to her, offering a little prayer at game's end. More...

A few years ago, when my oldest daughter was in fifth grade, she asked us one day if we wanted to see her school play.  She didn't seem very excited about it; kept saying things like "you don't have to if you don't want to," and "honestly, it isn't very good," but we wanted to support her and so we went.  This 'play' was called, if memory serves, Tommy the Traffic Sign.  My daughter played a yield sign. None of the kids had any lines or anything--they lip synced to a pre-recorded sound track, and from time to time would hold up a traffic sign. We parents didn't even have to provide the signs--apparently, the school bought some kind of do-it-yourself kit from some company that did this. The theatre version of paint-by-numbers.  No harm, no fuss, no sacrifice.  And absolutely no fun at all, for anyone.

I was so horrified by the whole thing, I went to the principal and offered to direct a play of her choosing the next year.  More...

There's a musical playing right now at BYU that I'm not going to see.  Casey at the Bat it's called, and already I'm cranky.  I'm on the committee that decides these things--I've read the script.  That's why I'm boycotting it.  It's not just a bad book for a mediocre musical.  Lots of musicals have bad books--'book' means 'script' in musicalese--including some really popular ones.  My favorite is the Elton John Aida.  Okay, at the end of the musical, Radames, the Egyptian prince, and Aida, the Nubian princess/slave he's fallen in love with are running from the cops/Egyptian army.  There's this bridge.  If they cross the bridge, they're safe.  If they don't cross the bridge, they'll be captured and tortured to death.  They stand on the bridge.  They sing a very long love duet, which goes on long enough for the cops/Egyptian army to catch up with them.  Honestly, I'm not kidding, that's what happens. They sing and sing and sing and get their silly butts caught. Apparently, it never occurs to them to sing once they're across the bridge; nope, that song's gotta get sung right that very second.  I laughed out loud in the theater, earning the eternal enmity of many many weeping coeds.  When they die together--tragically, so tragically--I kept thinking about the Darwin awards, how killing these two dunces just improved the gene pool something considerable.  I mean, that's bad writing. Right?  Well, Casey at the Bat is worse than that. More...

Last Saturday, at the AML Annual meeting, we had the privilege of seeing a public screening of Corianton, probably the first Mormon feature film.  Based on the play by Orestes Utah Bean (if there were ever a perfect name for a Mormon playwright, it would be Orestes Utah Bean), the film was produced in 1931 by Lester Park, who, as it happens, is also Orson Scott Card's grandfather.  It was long thought that no prints of Corianton existed, but the Card family did have one, and it's now been digitally restored and can be seen at the BYU library.  James D'Arc, who oversaw the restoration, was kind enough to allow AML members to see the film.  It's a corker.  Of course, it's old fashioned to our eyes; reminiscient of the early silent Bible epics of Cecil B. DeMille, in particular his 1923 Ten Commandments.  The acting style is one we make fun of today--everyone in the film sounds like Margaret Dumont (Groucho Marx's comic foil), and they do blather on.  And the film really has alarming amounts of skin.  Of course, the story of Corianton is also the story of his seduction by the harlot Isabel, which in the film is accomplished with the aid of numerous half-naked dancing girls, cavorting about in what appears to be a 1931 attempt to capture Native American dance. More...

Our ward Christmas program was essentially a talent show. We had refreshments, of course, and a tree and Santa showed up at the end, but mostly, we all performed for each other. I’ve always thought that much of James Arrington’s comic genius comes from this insight: Mormons are essentially performers. And you see it in his one man Farley Family plays—the Farleys love to perform, and they’re also pretty bad at it. Our ward party featured as many performers as the Farley Family Christmas, except, honestly, we were all pretty good.

For the Christmas show, we heard Silent Night performed on hammered dulcimer, Silver Bells on harp, Jingle Bells on accordion, a brass trio Christmas medley, and many, many piano duets. My wife and daughter’s duet was Coventry Carol and Pot a Pan, and was wonderful. They were all wonderful. We saw a teenage ventriloquist/puppeteer singing The Little Drummer Boy in the voices of her puppets, including three cats, two dogs, a walrus and a ferret. One of our more outgoing ward members served as MC, and between acts told many many jokes, all of them clean, and all of them terrible.

For my part, I was asked to tell a story to the children. More...