Imagery

The retrospective of Barry Nemett's work now appearing at Goucher shows clearly what this artist does best.It reaches back to the late 1960s and encompasses more than 100 works, the vast majority of which are small- to medium-scale. Most are drawings and gouaches (a form of watercolor) of birds, animals, trees, books and the like. They reveal a superb draftsman, a colorist of nuance and subtlety, a lover of nature and books who can make them sing with that love in works such as "Couple" (two books)

It's not often that an exhibit, as an installed entity, looks as handsome as "BMA Collects: Contemporary Prints in Series" at the Baltimore Museum of Art.The Link/Benesch galleries, devoted to prints and drawings and inaugurated at the time the west wing for contemporary art opened in 1994, provide an unusually attractive setting for art in the first place.Two slightly unequal rectangular spaces with double glass doors at either end, they're neat, tailored looking, restful in their proportions.

SanDisk Corp., well known for its wide variety of flash memory devices, has introduced an elegant little device lets you transfer any video on your computer and play it on a TV. But unlike two competing products, AppleTV and Pinncale's PCTV HD Ultimate Stick, TakeTV does its thing in a completely different way. At first glance, the TakeTV looks much like a flash memory stick. But sliding it open separates the TakeTV with the top part revealing its USB plug. This is the part that you insert into your computer.

I've marked the progress in digital photography by my family's growth. When my first daughter was born in 1996, I considered buying a digital camera. But at the time, the overpriced one-megapixel cameras couldn't compete with the quality of film. I paid $300 for a 35 mm point-and-shoot film camera that produced great pictures. I scanned some and printed them on a $500 photo printer, with lousy results. When my second daughter was born in 2000, the film camera had broken. We took some instant camera shots and had them developed at the store.

The only thing that can save Angel, the vampire lover of Buffy, is to drink the blood of a slayer. But the only slayer on hand is Buffy."Drink me," Buffy commands the fading angel, and, boy, does he ever, coming back to life as he drinks like you wouldn't believe.If this isn't a metaphor for sex (and, I might add, one of the more intense, sensual and violent metaphors for sex I have ever seen in a teen drama), then I'm the king of Transylvania, baby.The long-delayed and much-discussed season finale of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" will finally air tonight on the WB, and I hope every parent of a teen-ager and every adult who has been flapping his or her jaws about teens and popular culture since the carnage at Columbine will watch.

There is a small, cranky, iconoclastic voice in me that occasionally wonders whether painting any longer has much relevance to the future of art in America. I say this, of course, in the full knowledge that any report of the demise of painting is almost certainly premature. In an earlier incarnation at this newspaper, for example, I once took a kind of perverse delight in announcing the death of poetry, say, or the end of jazz. Well, poetry and jazz still soldier on -- though somewhat anemically, one might argue, given their illustrious pasts -- so far be it from me to consign the art of painting to a similar fate.

I want to be swept up and carried to a glittering peak on giant wings where I resist, go limp, rise transfigured. I want to be bemused and astonished. I want to be enfolded and sweetly rocked. I want to be struck between the eyes. I want to bathe, perchance to drown, in a great whirl of syntax. Reader, you have felt this way. You have craved the sweet knuckle-chop of "Call me Ishmael" and "My dear, I don't give a damn." You have been magicked by Ecclesiastes' or the Preacher's "There is a time ..."

Relax. Make big plays. Only in his dreams has Patrick Johnson been following a wide receiver's rules to live by lately. The third-year pro is a big believer in sports psychology, and he practices visualizing aspects of his trade like getting open, catching the ball and visiting the end zone. The real things have been hard to come by recently, as Johnson has just four receptions to show for the Ravens' last five regular-season games. With the Baltimore offense in a well-documented December funk since a bye four weeks ago, an unproductive receiving corps has come under greater scrutiny and pressure.

The New World presents the founding of the Virginia colony at Jamestown in 1607 and the evolution of its savior, Pocahontas, from Indian princess to British tobacco-grower's wife, as a trip though a time tunnel. It's both disorienting and revelatory, and, in the end, quite wonderful. In his sometimes maddening and resolutely idiosyncratic manner, the writer-director, Terrence Malick, sensitizes viewers to rough-hewn textures, the living filigree of flora and fauna, and the different ways opposite communities of English and Indians take in everything from strangers to sunlight.

Bill Faris believes in hell, that frightful nether world where the thermostat is always set on high, where sinners toil for eternity in unspeakable torment. But you'd never know it listening to him preach at his south Orange County, Calif., evangelical church. He never mentions the topic; his flock shows little interest in it. "It isn't sexy enough anymore," says Faris, pastor of Crown Valley Vineyard Christian Fellowship. In churches across America, hell is being frozen out as clergy find themselves increasingly hesitant to sermonize on Christianity's outpost for lost souls.