Opus

Composer Wadada Leo Smith will unleash his magnum opus — a three-night abstract investigation of American racial struggle — at REDCAT next weekend. As an African American born in Mississippi in 1941, he's qualified. "When you live in the South, you're constantly part of the civil rights movement," he says. Although he's talking on the phone from Connecticut, where he's visiting family, his physicality and quiet insistence permeate the conversation as he tells an illustrative story from his time as a teenage musician in Leland, Miss., in the 1950s.

It's lunchtime at Punch Productions, Dustin Hoffman's company, and the Brentwood office is a hive of activity. As young female assistants scurry around offering up salads and beverages, Hoffman - in a blue button-down shirt, gray cords, running shoes and a pedometer - putters around, explaining his company's logo (it's based on the large-nosed Italian commedia dell'arte character Punchinello) and joking with a photographer ("You know why I look so good: extraordinary plastic surgery and a penile reduction.

RE "Creator Is Ending Comic Strip 'Opus,' " by Sherry Stern, Oct. 7: Sundays will not be the same. When the world seemed to drag me down, I could always count on "Opus" to make sense of it all. Arnie Moore Sherman Oaks

C-sharp minor - the mere words conjure up a sense of anxious edge, which is the feeling that drives "A Late Quartet. " Starring Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener and Mark Ivanir as the players, this is a chamber piece about chamber musicians that is set to Beethoven's emotional Opus 131 string quartet - in C-sharp minor. As much as the movie is shaped by the piece - Opus 131 is a complex, demanding work - "A Late Quartet" is not really about the music. Director Yaron Zilberman, a chamber music fan, is using the intimate collaboration required of a string quartet to examine the way in which lives become dangerously entangled over time.

C-sharp minor - the mere words conjure up a sense of anxious edge, which is the feeling that drives "A Late Quartet. " Starring Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener and Mark Ivanir as the players, this is a chamber piece about chamber musicians that is set to Beethoven's emotional Opus 131 string quartet - in C-sharp minor. As much as the movie is shaped by the piece - Opus 131 is a complex, demanding work - "A Late Quartet" is not really about the music. Director Yaron Zilberman, a chamber music fan, is using the intimate collaboration required of a string quartet to examine the way in which lives become dangerously entangled over time.

Berkeley Breathed is pulling the plug on his comic "Opus" after Nov. 2 and on his career as a comic strip artist. The 5-year-old Sunday comic with a political bent, starring the penguin from Breathed's classic comic "Bloom County," is ending just before the presidential election. In an e-mail to The Times, Breathed, 51, wrote Monday: "30 years of cartooning to end. I'm destroying the village to save it. Opus would inevitably become a ranting mouthpiece in the coming wicked days, and I respect the other parts of him too much to see that happen.

Berkeley Breathed has a message for those "Opus" fans who were worried that the penguin was deep-sixed Sunday when his 5-year-old comic strip shut down. "Jumpin' Jehosphat," Breathed told The Times via e-mail, "Tony Soprano sleeps with the fishes, which is to say, dead. Opus sleeps with a bunny in a feather bed, dreaming of a more hopeful tomorrow morning." Most fans got that sweet image when they saw the final "Opus" online at humane society.org/opus. But others were worried because the penultimate strip in print took place in an animal shelter setting and then, in the finale, Opus was being put to sleep (so to speak)

Brilliant, poetic, heroic and spontaneous, Nakamatsu's Chopin album establishes the emotional opposite of the clean, accurate and faceless Romantic playing of recent decades. The 1997 Van Cliburn International Competition winner creates real heat that illuminates as it consumes the composer's musical poetry; genuine tears are the appropriate response to the young pianist's rediscoveries of familiar territory. And the little-known, seldom-heard Opus 13 glitters, touches and inspires.

Though these four 20th century composers are separated by country, style, temperament and you-name-it, Ohlsson assembles a coherent, unified program from their solo piano catalogs. He takes a relatively soft-focused view of the dramatic wartime Prokofiev sonata, and the crystalline Webern radiates a gentler glow in his hands than in those of, say, Maurizio Pollini or Glenn Gould. Yet in Bartok's mostly vehement Three Studies--a relatively rare item--Ohlsson generates all the forward drive one would want.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist is lending his talents to a crime-fighting television show in an attempt to track down the killer of a young musician who was slain nearly three decades ago. Berkeley Breathed, best known for the 1980s political cartoon "Bloom County" and the quirky "Opus" comic strip, has more than a passing interest in the 1979 case. Authorities believe the killer may have burglarized Breathed's home when Breathed was a student at the University of Texas in Austin.

Composer Wadada Leo Smith will unleash his magnum opus — a three-night abstract investigation of American racial struggle — at REDCAT next weekend. As an African American born in Mississippi in 1941, he's qualified. "When you live in the South, you're constantly part of the civil rights movement," he says. Although he's talking on the phone from Connecticut, where he's visiting family, his physicality and quiet insistence permeate the conversation as he tells an illustrative story from his time as a teenage musician in Leland, Miss., in the 1950s.

"There Be Dragons," most of which is set during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, is supposed to be about the intersecting lives of a saint and a sinner. But it is a third man, a revolutionary, who nearly steals the show. Which might have been all right if writer-director Roland Joffé hadn't been so conflicted about whose story he wants to tell. But indecision can be deadly, and it proves to be here. The British director has done very well in the past with sprawling epic tales of religion (1986's "The Mission")

The tinhorn film version of "Atlas Shrugged" fails to rise even to the level of "eh" suggested by Ayn Rand's title. But with so little going on in cinematic or storytelling terms, we can cut straight to the fascinating tea-stained politics of the thing. Conceived as the first of a proposed three-part series, director Paul Johansson's movie is the work of true believers in Rand's pet theory known as Objectivism, which can be described as "Us? There is no 'us'!" In Rand's worldview, it is me-time, all the time.

Tuesday's announcement that the Vatican has appointed Archbishop Jose Gomez of San Antonio as coadjutor and successor to Cardinal Roger M. Mahony is a significant event both for America's largest Roman Catholic diocese and for California. The selection of the Mexican-born Gomez is a decisive break with the past on at least two counts. The first is easy to discern: No U.S. prelate of Latino heritage ever has worn a cardinal's red hat. That departure from tradition makes sense. There are 5 million Catholics in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles -- twice the number in New York -- and about 70% are Latinos.

Julia Boles, 46, lives in Arcadia with her lawyer husband and their nine children, ages 5 to 20. She also manages to attend Mass daily, set aside two times a day for prayer and, with her children, pray the rosary. "People say, 'Nine kids? How do you handle that and go to Mass?' I say, 'How could I do this without the Mass?' " Boles is a member of one of the most talked about, least understood Catholic organizations in the world: Opus Dei, which means "work of God" in Latin.

Several major transformations are embodied within a single unusual hour of television airing on PBS Wednesday evening. A 1958 Jerome Robbins ballet, which astutely captured the essence of that moment's younger generation, has been transformed into a highly contemporary dance film shot in unexpected New York City locations. Beyond that, there is the improbable tale of two young New York City Ballet soloists who envisioned the entire project and became self-taught executive producers, fighting the odds to get the film made.

I have to admit that my heart skipped more than a few beats when I read the title of your Berkeley Breathed story, "Creating a New Opus" [by Geoff Boucher, Oct. 3]. Dare I dream that sweet, innocent Opus was returning to brighten the dismal world of political bickering and mayhem in which we seem to live? Alas, it was not to be. In the article, Breathed, ever edgy, pronounces himself a "fraud and a cheat." When I read that line, I went back and reread Breathed's "Pete and Pickles" book and some of my prized Opus strips.

"A Film by [Your Name Here]," (June 6) presents a clear conflict between writers and directors as to whose name, if any, deserves to be "above the title." To me, the solution is simple: That honored position belongs to the writer, producer or director whose body of work, his opus, if you please, commands special recognition. I am thinking of Griffith, Capra, Hitchcock, Scorcese, Goldwyn, John Huston, Trumbo. There are others, of course. Neophytes must wait until they have created their own opus.

The black-and-white photos of Michael Jackson are remarkable not only as previously unreleased images of one the last half-century's most photographed men. They also reveal much about the pop superstar's abiding impulses: his impish sense of humor, his fealty to yesteryear's master showmen and his concern about his own place in the pop culture firmament. FOR THE RECORD: Michael Jackson: An article about a new Michael Jackson coffee table book in Wednesday's Calendar section stated that the performer won five American Music Awards last month, including artist of the year.

I have to admit that my heart skipped more than a few beats when I read the title of your Berkeley Breathed story, "Creating a New Opus" [by Geoff Boucher, Oct. 3]. Dare I dream that sweet, innocent Opus was returning to brighten the dismal world of political bickering and mayhem in which we seem to live? Alas, it was not to be. In the article, Breathed, ever edgy, pronounces himself a "fraud and a cheat." When I read that line, I went back and reread Breathed's "Pete and Pickles" book and some of my prized Opus strips.