Lucifer

In Arnold Schwarzenegger's new loud, goofy, roller-coaster ride of a movie, Satan shows himself to be such an incompetent boob that, if these truly are the last days, we at least know the devil isn't to blame. In "End of Days," Lucifer travels to Manhattan in search of his chosen bride but has a hard time finding her. (Neither he nor his minions think to check the phone book.) Then when he finally lays hands on her, he lets Schwarzenegger come and take her away. The problem may be that he's spreading himself too thin.

In her long and illustrious career, Jamaica Kincaid has tackled many genres of literature. So best believe her when she says that her 2013 work "See Now Then" is a novel and a work of fiction. Period. That's why, she said in a discussion with Hector Tobar on Sunday at the Festival of Books, "the most irritating thing" about the reaction to the book has been the insinuation that it is really a roman-a-clef, a memoir disguised as a fiction. "I will assert that if I were a white man this would not be the conversation," Kincaid told the audience at the Embassy Room Auditorium, who responded with a round of applause.

This beautifully written, sumptuously illustrated, and elegantly printed work on Matthias Grunewald's famous altarpiece is an auspicious first volume in the new Discovery Series in art history from California Press. Edited by Walter Horn and James Marrow, the series is designed to publish short monographs requiring extensive illustration to develop their arguments. In this volume, Ruth Mellinkoff, a distinguished art historian and author of "The Mark of Cain," concentrates on one of the more puzzling figures of the famous altarpiece at Isenheim, painted by Grunewald about 1512-1516.

Offering moderately scary Roman Catholic "gotcha!"s to a global film audience of all creeds, "The Rite" comes from the director Mikael Hafstrom, whose previous film was the stylish supernatural thriller "1408. " This one's more conventional, but that's the exorcism sub-genre for you. The crucifix-shaped shadow of "The Exorcist" hangs heavy over each new contributor to the mythology. At one point in "The Rite," Rome's most aggressive devil exterminator, played by Anthony Hopkins, answers his young protege's mutterings with the retort: "What did you expect?

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.

A 10-foot, 45-pound Colombian boa constrictor named Lucifer remained loose Wednesday in Boise after it slithered out of the front door of a house on Sunday when its owner was napping, officials said. As police officers searched for the snake, the owner warned that the 5-year-old female reptile was a threat to small children and animals. "I feed her every Sunday, but she hadn't been fed before she left, so she's hungry," said Snow Collett, 20. The snake's diet consists of pigeons, chickens and rats, she said, but it has been known to attack people.

The idea that sexually transmitted diseases are a punishment from an anthropomorphic God gets a full-length satirical treatment in Oskar Panizza's "Love Council" at the Odyssey Theatre. Ron Sossi's staging of this curiosity from 1894--freshly pertinent in the age of AIDS--is intoxicating. But the play's central conceit is so overextended that its intellectual edge eventually becomes dulled.

Offering moderately scary Roman Catholic "gotcha!"s to a global film audience of all creeds, "The Rite" comes from the director Mikael Hafstrom, whose previous film was the stylish supernatural thriller "1408. " This one's more conventional, but that's the exorcism sub-genre for you. The crucifix-shaped shadow of "The Exorcist" hangs heavy over each new contributor to the mythology. At one point in "The Rite," Rome's most aggressive devil exterminator, played by Anthony Hopkins, answers his young protege's mutterings with the retort: "What did you expect?

In her long and illustrious career, Jamaica Kincaid has tackled many genres of literature. So best believe her when she says that her 2013 work "See Now Then" is a novel and a work of fiction. Period. That's why, she said in a discussion with Hector Tobar on Sunday at the Festival of Books, "the most irritating thing" about the reaction to the book has been the insinuation that it is really a roman-a-clef, a memoir disguised as a fiction. "I will assert that if I were a white man this would not be the conversation," Kincaid told the audience at the Embassy Room Auditorium, who responded with a round of applause.

I was all prepared to hate Seymour Chwast's graphic novel of Dante's "Divine Comedy. " Even though we're talking about Chwast here — colleague of Milton Glaser and Edward Sorel's, cofounder of Push Pin Studios, premiere American illustrator and designer of all things, whether magazine covers, typefaces or postage stamps — I couldn't help it. You're going to turn the great 13th century masterpiece of Catholic theology, Italian history and...

I was all prepared to hate Seymour Chwast's graphic novel of Dante's "Divine Comedy. " Even though we're talking about Chwast here — colleague of Milton Glaser and Edward Sorel's, cofounder of Push Pin Studios, premiere American illustrator and designer of all things, whether magazine covers, typefaces or postage stamps — I couldn't help it. You're going to turn the great 13th century masterpiece of Catholic theology, Italian history and...

Something wicked this way comes. Fortunately, the rough beast slouching toward Los Feliz doesn't signal the end of times. It's just Lucifers Pizza, a devilish spicy-pizza restaurant opened by a 27-year-old Kiwi named Adam Borich. Located on Hillhurst's Drakkar Noir-scented restaurant row, Lucifers cops the kind of Dark Lord-in-a-smoking-jacket vibe that many Santa Monica-based Goth clubs only dream about.

DURING the Rwandan genocide, the level of participation by ordinary, normally peaceful citizens was greater than the world had ever seen. I spent time there as a reporter in the mid-1990s, just after the slaughter of 800,000 members of the Tutsi minority, largely by their Hutu neighbors. I tried to imagine how I would have acted if I had been born a Hutu in Rwanda and had grown up in a culture that put a high value on pleasing authority, demonizing Tutsis and planning their extermination.

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.

A 1995 fire that destroyed the Sunday school building of South Shore American Baptist Church in Dana Point was deliberately set by a man who called himself a missionary of Lucifer, federal authorities said Tuesday. Jay Scott Ballinger, 38, of Yorktown, Ind., pleaded guilty in federal court in Indianapolis on Tuesday to setting the Dana Point and 25 other church fires across the nation during a five-year spree that ended last year.

In Arnold Schwarzenegger's new loud, goofy, roller-coaster ride of a movie, Satan shows himself to be such an incompetent boob that, if these truly are the last days, we at least know the devil isn't to blame. In "End of Days," Lucifer travels to Manhattan in search of his chosen bride but has a hard time finding her. (Neither he nor his minions think to check the phone book.) Then when he finally lays hands on her, he lets Schwarzenegger come and take her away. The problem may be that he's spreading himself too thin.

"Lucifer's Child," William Luce's one-woman bio-play on Danish storyteller Isak Dinesen," may have been extremely listenable on Broadway, but it is extremely unwatchable on television. Like Luce's other solo plays designed for actor Julie Harris (most notably "The Belle of Amherst"), a free-thinking, eccentric woman out of history appears before us and talks, talks, talks to us about her life and loves and ideas.

Here's the ultimate statement for our era of diminished expectations: "Heaven isn't heaven anymore," laments the angel Simon (Eric Stolz) early on in the frankly bizarre religious thriller "The Prophecy." Seems even God has trouble finding good help these days. The angel Gabriel (Christopher Walken), upset that God doesn't hold him in such high favor anymore (apparently, heaven isn't above office politics), is planning a palace coup.

The idea that sexually transmitted diseases are a punishment from an anthropomorphic God gets a full-length satirical treatment in Oskar Panizza's "Love Council" at the Odyssey Theatre. Ron Sossi's staging of this curiosity from 1894--freshly pertinent in the age of AIDS--is intoxicating. But the play's central conceit is so overextended that its intellectual edge eventually becomes dulled.