Yarn

Inside a small shop in Santa Monica, visitors study the goods with the reverence of a baseball aficionado seeing his first Mickey Mantle rookie season card. The shop is called Compatto: a Yarn Salon, and the shoppers are seeking skeins of natural-fiber yarn not carried by the big craft chains -- hand-dyed silks, alpaca and even bamboo -- or to spend some time knitting and chatting with other devotees.

COLIN MELOY has probably never plucked a lyre, but the gesture would be appropriate. As leader of the Decemberists, Portland, Oregon's master purveyors of eccentric pop, Meloy pens lyrics that can seem as ancient as Homer: tales of seafarers and soldiers that songs have transported for thousands of years. "The Crane Wife," the band's new album, and its first on Capitol Records after several successful indie releases, continues his story collecting.

It might be useful for filmmakers to note that with popcorn movies, the audience's suspension of disbelief is going to dissipate in direct proportion to any attempt to call attention to Serious Issues. It's probably a bad thing if the synopsis begins to sound like the table of contents from last week's Time magazine. A case in point is "Sahara," an updated adaptation of Clive Cussler's 1992 novel featuring his serialized, formulized maritime adventurer Dirk Pitt.

Even in one of her least glamorous moments, one not too far removed from a perp walk, Martha Stewart has proven she can still set off a mega-trend. It's that poncho. The one she wore when she left prison earlier this month and boarded a private jet for the trip home. With paparazzi bulbs popping, Stewart was captured for posterity in the lacy cover-up crocheted for her by another inmate.

He picks up the phone and you hear it -- that voice. Smooth and sonorous as a cello, tinged with the singsong melancholy of the upper Middle West, the voice of Garrison Keillor has been beaming out via his "A Prairie Home Companion" live radio show now for 30 years. Though he is hardly the stuff of stalkerazzi and cable-channel gossip hounds, Keillor, 62, has been making the media rounds with more gusto than usual in honor of the show's anniversary. Broadcasting from a theater in St. Paul, Minn.

For the last 15 years, James Richards has been making paintings that look like nothing else out there. At Shoshana Wayne Gallery, nine new works are even weirder. More sophisticated, supple and -- most surprising -- elegant, they are the best things Richards has made. They're also among the most exciting abstractions being made today. Painters who mistake the medium for the message bristle before Richards' works.

My husband, Dick, and I had had our fill of beaches, bikinis and buffets on a late-January vacation in Puerto Vallarta and needed a break in the routine. So we took a daylong tour to a Huichol Indian settlement northeast of the city. The trip jolted us out of Margaritaville into pre-Columbian civilization.

Swaggering up 4th Street near Spring is an angry young man in a brightly striped sweater, offering his unfavorable performance review of Police Chief "Billy Bratton" to the air. Walking briskly on that same street are a uniformed police officer and a man in crisp business attire, discussing "reality television." Others include a man begging for change, two laughing women unloading athletic shoe boxes from a Volkswagen and a weary crowd waiting for the bus. This eclectic downtown L.A.

As James Joyce or Eugene O'Neill could confirm, genius can exact a heavy price on one's loved ones. But what happens when one sacrifices all human concerns in heated service to a mediocre talent? Keith Bunin's brave and beautifully balanced play "The Credeaux Canvas" at the Little Victory, examines the essential nature of art and the problems that can arise when an artist ignores the human imperative.

For years, newspaper and magazine articles have been calling it "the new yoga." Knitting -- that former favorite pastime of nubby-knuckled old ladies -- has not only caught on with a new generation, it's exploded. Since 1998, the number of 35-and-younger knitters has more than doubled. But as big a trend as knitting has become, it's still hard for young women to find other young women who share their passion for yarns and needles.