Soul

The most ballyhooed name change of the year became official Friday morning when a Los Angeles County Superior Court commissioner approved the former Ron Artest's request to become Metta World Peace. Amid labor discord that threatens to delay, if not wipe out, the NBA season, there is World Peace. Photos: Famous name-changers He is 6 feet 7, wears No. 15 for the Lakers and once participated in the infamous "Palace brawl. " Anyone now making his acquaintance will be meeting Metta World Peace.

In the days and weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall and the dark waters rose in late summer 2005, it didn't take long for people outside New Orleans to begin inquiring -- not just about the safety of loved ones or the state of the infrastructure but something larger -- as distinct as it was amorphous. The concern was not simply what would be physically erased in the wake of disaster -- and forced diaspora -- but what would happen to the culture. Its "ways" -- the music, the language, the rituals and rhythms -- all of what animated this unique piece of our nation's history and identity: the country's conversation piece.

Brigitte Starczewski-Deval makes dolls. Exquisite dolls. Dolls that wouldn't look out of place in a painting by one of the old masters who inspire her. In a craft demeaned by Barbies and Kens and countless other rubberized, plasticized, babbling, gurgling junk, Starczewski-Deval makes dolls for museums and collectors, for people who consider doll-making an art form. For people who won't wince at a price range of $2,400 to $14,000.

CAIRO - Osama Abdel Hadi was born into the Muslim Brotherhood. His father, a history professor, was respected within the Islamic movement and Hadi grew up steeped in piety and resistance to Hosni Mubarak's secular police state. He prayed in Cairo's ancient mosques and knew the names of Brotherhood members held in Egypt's jails. The group was his spiritual and intellectual buttress, and, amid the failings of other parties and opposition ideologies, he carried the Brotherhood's precepts as he entered university to study political science.

Simplifying the Soul Lenten Practices to Renew Your Spirit Paula Huston Ave Maria Press: 170 pp., $14.95 paper

'Cost of a Soul' MPAA rating: R for pervasive language, violence and brief nudity Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes Playing: In general release

It's not hard to understand why writer-director-producer Sean Kirkpatrick's gritty and stylish "Cost of a Soul" won an AMC Theatres distribution deal via a competition called The Big Break Movie Contest, which honors independent filmmaking and helps uncover new talent. Kirkpatrick's debut feature, made on a shoestring budget under clearly less-than-glamorous circumstances, deftly pares down a potentially epic urban crime drama into a workably tight, tense and socially conscious vision.

"Fame," it turns out, is not going to live forever. It's officially DOA. Call the coroner. Then call in the top teams from "CSI," and that sexy pair from "Bones" while you're at it, because if ever there was a crime scene that should be yellow-taped and relentlessly investigated this is it. Someone has driven a stake through the heart and ripped out the soul of the 1980 original. The responsible parties, make that irresponsible parties, should be found, thrown in movie jail and not allowed within 50 feet of a set again.

Re "Gazing at One's Navel, Politically," Commentary, Sept. 3: le Marlene Adler Marks' article decries the current preoccupation with the soul (we weren't aware there was one) in the political arena. We, on the other hand, are delighted. In our view, the soul represents the good, the true and the beautiful. If our nation is, indeed, looking for that in politics, we cry "Huzzah!" Marks questions the suitability of the soul in politics. Doesn't integrity belong in politics?

Sharon recalls working as a hospital nurse and attending to a child who had just died. The family requested that she open the window to release the child's soul, but the hospital windows did not open. Taking the situation in stride, the family, while chanting, escorted the soul out the hospital room, into the elevator and out again on the first floor to be released through the front door.

Tenderly, the lover caressed his beloved. So pale, so smooth. He tilted his head forward, the better to inhale that scent - rich and enticing. Fingertip to spine, feeling every contour, he pressed his face closer - and turned a page. I don't know what you were thinking about, but I was talking about a book. A real book. The Kindle and its ilk are just gizmos with pixilated screens. Hit the off button and its borrowed character vanishes. A genuine book has a soul of its own. It is tactile, beautiful, accessible.

Mickalene Thomas is to contemporary painting what Daft Punk is to music: acclaimed as one of the more original remix artists working today. The 41-year-old Brooklyn artist has borrowed images and poses from established masters such as Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse and Romare Bearden in her paintings. But her most recent work owes a particularly explicit debt to Gustave Courbet, the 19th-century French realist who famously painted a graphic (some say pornographic)

Trumpeter Wayne Jackson was the personification of mixed emotions in February when he and his longtime musical partner, saxophonist Andrew Love, were presented with a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award for their work over half a century together as the Memphis Horns. Jackson tearfully acknowledged the music industry accolade for the hundreds of recordings that he and Love made in Memphis and elsewhere. They had backed such R&B and soul music greats as Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Al Green, Sam & Dave and Wilson Pickett, and rock, pop and country luminaries that included Elvis Presley, U2, Neil Young, Willie Nelson, Robert Cray and James Taylor.

The One The Life and Music of James Brown RJ Smith Gotham Books: 455 pp., $27.50 Music is well said to be the speech of angels, the 18th century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote. But then, he never spent any time with James Brown. In a five-decade career as one of the most successful recording artists of all time, Brown influenced generations of musicians and reached millions of fans with his fierce talent. He was also far from angelic - demanding, egotistical and prone to pulling a gun on those who disagreed with him. Brown used his fists when he needed to (which, in his view, was not infrequently)

About 135 miles lie between Little Rock, Ark., and Memphis, Tenn., and Lucero's singer Ben Nichols knows them well. "I drove a lot, back and forth between Little Rock and Memphis when I was young," said the 37-year-old Arkansas native over a Jameson and club soda at the Cove, one of his favorite Memphis bars. "I loved the idea of being from this part of the country and driving through the cotton fields and the rice fields between the two cities and just kind of knowing that yeah, that is where Johnny Cash is from," says Nichols.

As R&B singer Millie Jackson performed at Hollywood Park Casino on Sunday night, Dwayne Alexander sat at the VIP table. So did singer Norwood Young, whom Jackson had also invited. Alexander had directed a concert documentary for Jackson in 2007. As an executive for Capitol/EMI in the 1980s, he had signed Young to his first record contract, but the men hadn't seen each other for a good while. "We acted like schoolboys all night," said Young in a telephone interview Thursday.

Robert Hilburn is very competent to pass judgment on the tin-eared, talentless morons who populate the worlds of rap and alternative rock, but he displays appallingly bad taste when he feebly tries to justify his rankings of soul greats ("Ole King Soul," Feb. 9). Ray Charles and Sam Cooke invented the genre. Without them, no one who followed would have had a template to lay their stylistic variations over. That Al Green was and still is one of the all-time greats is a given, but we didn't need Hilburn to tell us that.

We like to think that the holidays bring out the best in us, that they are like the feasts and festivals of our archaic past, when we celebrated a successful hunt or a bountiful harvest. So why do we treat Black Friday — when the season to be jolly officially commences with ritualized ferocity — as the occasion for serious lamentations about the "commercialization of Christmas" and the moral emptiness of the mall? You already know the answer: because consumerism is bad for us. But that's not really the case.

"Soul Train" was a show unabashedly by, for and about black people: the artists who performed on it, the dancers and of course, host and impresario Don Cornelius, who died last week. But it was such a rapturous, infectious house party, everybody tuned in when the show came on Saturday mornings, right after the cartoons. Including white Catholic schoolgirls like me, looking for new moves to try at the parish dance. What many people don't know is that the culture of "Soul Train" was largely the culture of black Los Angeles.

During a five-decade career, Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska had so rarely appeared in public that a newspaper dubbed her the "Greta Garbo of poetry" after the notoriously private actress. But in 1996, Poland's most reticent literary icon was forced to open her door to the world: She had won the Nobel Prize in literature and the world was clamoring for her reaction. The public attention was so incessant that she stopped writing poems for two years, a consequence she later described, only somewhat jokingly, as "the Stockholm tragedy.