Devil

You do a disservice to this nationally recognized school, Mission Viejo, and a fine outgoing principal by running this kind of non-news article (Diablos Having a Devil of a Time). Bob Metz has done an excellent job for many years presiding over a campus filled with the challenge of today's teen-agers and their parents. You also do a disservice to our incoming principal, Duffy Clark, beginning his administration on a publicly negative note. Times Orange County sports would be a better news service to our community by publishing positive news articles on our youth rather than dredging up old problems that are in the process of being solved.

The neglected winner of the 1987 World Series was a fellow called Joe Hardy. Joe represents all the suffering baseball fans of Washington, who once gave their hearts to a baseball club called the Senators, and oh, what old Joe would have given to have waved a Homer Hanky last week. He would have sold his soul to the devil for one. Joe Hardy was the armchair martyr who sacrificed himself for the needy Senators in the Broadway musical "Damn Yankees."

Call it "slow horror," "art horror," "indie horror," even "hipster horror" if you must, but in "The House of the Devil," filmmaker Ti West is definitely doing something that stands apart from the usual guts and gore of most contemporary horror movies. Preferring the slow burn to fast thrills, West somehow transforms the mundane into the macabre, and when his film finally takes a step into the supernatural, it comes as even more of a shock because of the muted atmosphere that precedes it. Already available on video-on-demand, "Devil" opens in Los Angeles, New York and Austin, Texas, theaters on Friday.

Despite a protest by scores of parents and students about the nickname for Mission Viejo High School--Diablo, or the devil--school officials said Friday that the name will stick. "The Diablo name is going to remain," said Jeff Herdman, director of testing, research and community relations for the school district. "But there's going to be a new drawing, a new design" for the school logo. About 400 parents attended a school board meeting this week to debate a possible nickname change.

Does the devil exist? Sure enough, says Unitarian Pastor F. Forrester Church. And how can he be so certain? It takes one to know one, he confesses without flinching. The reason many of the rest of us remain obstinately unconvinced is that we're determined to look for the Evil One in all the wrong places. This, of course, is the scoundrel's No. 1 ruse.

The first page of "Horns" sets up the novel so neatly that it's almost a shame to recapitulate it here. But this much you need to know: Joe Hill's new book is about a man named Ignatius Perrish (most of the time, he's called Ig) who wakes up hung over and unable to remember the bad things he did the night before. Also, he now has a pair of horns growing out of his head. What Ig learns quickly is that most people don't notice the horns, or if they do, they tend to forget they saw them.

It is hard to imagine any actor anywhere having a juicier selection of roles over the past 12 months than Jay Fraley has had while starring at the Empire Theater in Santa Ana. In November 1999 he opened as Jesus in Terrence McNally's gay passion play, "Corpus Christi." Next he was Robert Falcon Scott, doomed Antarctic explorer, in "Terra Nova" by Ted Tally--a role that demanded the heroism, hubris and elicitation of pity and terror that are the classic requisites of tragedy.

The best thing about "The Faust Projekt," now at the Odyssey Theatre, is its utter refusal to treat Goethe's formidable life's work like a big deal. It is one, of course: Uncut, its two parts taken together plus intermissions, the cosmically searching piece spans nearly 20 hours of stage time. In spirit, however, Goethe's treatment of the Faust legend is a lark. It subverts the tidier Christopher Marlowe "Doctor Faustus," while transcending it.

It's an old story. The angel Lucifer is a bad boy, and gets kicked out of heaven by the boss. He settles on Earth and establishes his version of paradise, but it's pretty raunchy and evil. He's devious and lecherous and, well, devilish. But then he decides he's bored with it all, and files a lawsuit for forgiveness and a chance to return to heaven.

California has had two constitutional conventions. The first one, in 1849, produced a document that hustled Gold Rush territory into statehood before anyone had even figured out the state's eastern boundary (many residents of present-day Nevada and Utah believed they were Californians). The second one, in 1879, was a vehicle for racist xenophobes to deny people of Chinese descent the right to work for a living or vote in California. That convention produced the Constitution under which we operate today, now absent the racial provisions and modified by more than 500 amendments.