Marc

The effect of Sunday's solar eclipse was slightly evident at Dodger Stadium in the fifth and sixth innings, the day's fading sunlight growing even dimmer across the ballpark's right-field corner. Then matters suddenly brightened for the Dodgers when rookie Scott Van Slyke slugged a pinch-hit, three-run home run that erased a St. Louis Cardinals lead and led the Dodgers to a 6-5 victory and a sweep of their three-game series. Van Slyke homered in only his ninth big league at-bat and after getting the green light from Manager Don Mattingly to swing at a 3-and-0 pitch from reliever Marc Rzepczynski.

“Robert Overby: Paintings and Drawings from the 1970s” takes visitors back to a time when sex was sexy. At Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Overby's nine oils on canvas and four works on paper bespeak an age when sex had more atmosphere than it does today. Although sex seems to suffuse nearly every image we see, its presence has been sanitized and streamlined - cleaned up to boost sales of everything from perfume to pharmaceuticals, phones to French fries. Overby (1935-1993) got a late start in art. Turning to it in 1969, after an award-winning career in graphic design, he worked fast and furiously.

Marc Gasol has awakened, and that's bad news for the Clippers. The All-Star center poured in 23 points and pulled down nine rebounds Friday, spinning, slicing and generally frustrating Clippers big men all night during the Grizzles' 90-88 Game 6 victory at Staples Center. It was Gasol's second consecutive 23-point game after an abysmal start to the playoffs that rivaled the current slump of his brother, Lakers power forward Pau Gasol. In his first four games, Gasol averaged just more than 10 points, and the Grizzles lost three of four.

On the front line, Memphis offers a duo that few can match, the Clippers included. But for a good chunk of their Western Conference first-round playoff series, including Monday night's Game 4 at Staples Center, the Clippers have outmatched the Grizzlies in that area, bullying Zach Randolph and Marc Gasol into irrelevance. The Clippers took a 3-1 series lead with a 101-97 overtime win Monday, and Gasol and Randolph, who combined to average 26.2 points and 16.9 rebounds during the regular season, watched most of it from the bench, each saddled with foul trouble.

COMEDY At this point if you're a fan of comedy and haven't tuned into Marc Maron's deliriously addictive WTF podcast it's time to seriously question your life choices. Sharp, self-effacing and sometimes jarringly honest, Maron isn't just a remarkable interviewer in his DIY Internet operation, he's also a one-of-a-kind stand-up comic. Joined by the incomparably twisted mind of fellow Northeast L.A.-dweller Maria Bamford, Maron offers a raw, real brand of comedy that's as much about human connection as it's about the laughs.

Whenever the Lakers play the Grizzlies, Pau Gasol follows a customary routine with brother Marc, Memphis' starting center. T he brother in the host city treats the other to dinner before or after the game, a custom Lakers Coach Mike Brown jokingly has asked Pau to follow with a certain spice.  "I keep trying to tell Pau to invite Marc over to cook something and put something in his food," Brown said an hour before the Lakers-Grizzlies game...

Was it a conspiracy that went all the way to the top of ABC? Or was it the case of an exaggerating actress out for revenge? Nicollette Sheridan's wrongful-termination suit against the creator of "Desperate Housewives" and a studio wound toward a conclusion Wednesday as jurors heard closing arguments offering vastly different interpretations of the case. As the tall, blond actress and Marc Cherry, the balding, bespectacled writer who invented the world of Wisteria Lane, looked on from opposite sides of the courtroom, their attorneys debated for hours over what led to the 2008 death of Sheridan's character.

"Desperate Housewives" creator Marc Cherry testified Wednesday that he killed off Wisteria Lane seductress Edie Britt in the fifth season because there were simply no more male characters for her to bed. "We had played out as many romantic complications with each of the women's husbands" as possible, Cherry told a Los Angeles jury in a wrongful-termination suit brought by Nicollette Sheridan, the actress who played Edie. The character had dalliances with the spouses or former spouses of three of the main housewives — played by Teri Hatcher, Eva Longoria and Marcia Cross — and the husband of the fourth — played by Felicity Huffman — "would never cheat," Cherry said.

The creator of "Desperate Housewives" testified Monday that his decision to kill off the character Edie Britt was made months before the actress who portrayed her accused him of battery. Marc Cherry told jurors in a wrongful-termination suit brought by actress Nicollette Sheridan that he plotted the promiscuous Wisteria Lane real estate agent's demise to "shake things up" creatively on the ABC show and not as retribution. But, in a daylong turn on the witness stand, Cherry acknowledged that eliminating Edie had the added benefit of ridding the show's budget of Sheridan's $4-million salary and him of what he described as a disruptive and unprofessional presence on the set. "It wasn't the primary reason for my decision, but it was something I was aware of," Cherry said under questioning by an attorney for Sheridan.

The floor sculptures that Mel Bochner made in the early 1970s now rank as classics of conceptual art. Arrangements of stones, coins and on occasion hazelnuts on the ground, they were designed to lay bare the first principles of sculpture. "I was trying to find out what the minimum definition of a sculpture was — what could be a sculpture and only a sculpture. It has to be three-dimensional," the artist said, reached by phone in New York. "And I wanted it to be a useless thing. A lot of pebbles you could put in your driveway; an individual pebble has no exchange value.