Persona

Elvis Costello emerged from the '70s punk explosion as the singer-songwriter of the crowd, and though his music has gone through changes, he hasn't slowed down since. His geeky persona, unique voice and diverse musical output have kept Costello in the spotlight and his fans begging for more. Elvis Costello and the Imposters play Rams Head Live, 20 Market Place, on Saturday. Tickets are $60 in advance, $65 on the day of the show. Call 410-244-1131 or go to ramsheadlive.com.

"Imus: America's Cowboy," by Kathleen Tracy. Carroll and Graf. 320 pages. $24."Everything Imus," by Jim Reed. Birch Lane Press. 224 pages. $19.95.In 1992, Bill Clinton agreed to be a guest on Imus' nationally syndicated radio talk show, part of the candidate's dare-to-be-hip fling with alternative media. (The same fling got Clinton the boxers-or-briefs question on MTV.) In 1996, however, the president's love affair with the caustic Imus soured. The final break came during the annual Radio & Television Correspondents Dinner in Washington.

"Lost and Found" isn't exactly the film you'd expect from David Spade, whose picture appears in the dictionary alongside the word "smarmy." That's bad news for fans of Spade's TV work on "Saturday Night Live" and (especially) "Just Shoot Me," but it makes this film a lot more watchable than it could be.Not that "Lost and Found" is some sort of minor masterpiece. Any movie that resorts to having a character dig through dog feces for yucks (not to mention the tired anti-convention of having old people talk dirty)

While the baseball world celebrates the unprecedented home run duel between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire, Chicago White Sox outfielder Albert Belle is putting together another amazing second half and another outstanding season.And it is going all but unnoticed.Belle has set club records for home runs (46) and RBIs (139) on the way to what might be the best all-around offensive season in the American League, but he has created such an unlikeable persona -- so much in contrast to the affable Sosa across town -- that he has become easy to ignore.

I WOULD HAVE come over earlier, but I just assumed the new car belonged to someone else," my friend said as she hurried into my house. "I mean, who would have thought you would buy a trendy sport utility vehicle. You're not the type."Excuse me? Not the type?"I don't mean that in a negative way. But face it, vehicle-wise, you're less the Jeep type and more the. " Her voice trailed off.What? The 1986 Yugo two-door sedan type? The El Camino with an eight-track tape player and vanity license plates that read "ELVIS 1" type?"

When Bill Clinton comes to Annapolis today, Gov. Parris N. Glendening will have a chance to study his comeback role model -- up close and in action.The governor could be watching for new ways to emulate a man who returned from the politically dead -- a president whose first-term troubles were thought to mean he could never win a second.Glendening hopes to accomplish roughly the same feat, following the same upward trajectory as the president.Clinton comes to Maryland as a champion of performance standards for the public schools, scholarships for B-average college students, health care coverage for poor women and infants and an array of other initiatives -- many of which Glendening has proposed for Maryland.

HOLLYWOOD -- "Hey, Dana! How've you been?"Queen Latifah walks through the doors of Intermezzo, her favorite Melrose eatery, and warmly hugs Scotty Weber, the Italian restaurant's chef. Waiters and busboys also call her by her given name. "They spoil me here," she says with a wide smile.When the pressure's on and her stomach growls, Latifah often stops here, a place that offers her more than her favorite Caesar salad in Los Angeles. Intermezzo is her sanctuary, a place where she neither has to shoulder the responsibility of being in the public eye as the head of a rap management company, as a Grammy-winning rap artist, or as Khadijah, the lead character of Fox's popular sitcom "Living Single."

Dressed in their usual black shirts, sunglasses and black fedoras, Full Gospel Boogie Band will take the stage at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow at Westminster First Assembly of God.The Christian rock band, a cross between ZZ Top and the Blues Brothers with some Billy Graham thrown in, will perform with another local band, King James.The band includes Doug Briscoe on drums, Buck Wike on bass, Dan Tesch on guitar, Ray Remmers on keyboard and John Pepsin on guitar, harmonica and vocals.The band members are former nightclub musicians who have played full time, Mr. Pepsin said.

San Francisco. -- Asked to summarize his impressions of the new film ''Panther'' in three words, a young African-American writer replied: ''Important historical fiction.''His observation was exactly right. The film, although highly fictionalized, is far more than just entertainment. It strikes some deep collective sensitivities about being black in America -- as was attested by the enthusiasm and empathy of the largely African-American viewers I watched it with.In his book ''The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America,'' another African-American writer, Hugh Pearson, presents a much darker side of Huey's persona -- closer to that of a Mafia capo.

"So, you want to know about sex? I'll tell you things that will curl your hair."That was my angry father talking. When my mother found my birth control pills that summer during college, there was quite a family explosion.I was blunt and direct. They hadn't told me a blessed thing about sex during my entire adolescence, unless you count the little booklet my mother left on my bed, so they didn't get to jump in now.My mother was grim. She and my father, she said, had not believed in any artificial means of birth control.

$39.99 for Sony PlayStation 2. Rated Mature. *** Persona 4 is a heck of a lot like Persona 3, for better or worse. Players who liked that game's randomly generated dungeons and virtual-socializing aspects will find more of those to enjoy here, while players who didn't won't find much to interest them this time around. But for newcomers, there's a lot of potential here. (It's also worth noting that years after the PS2 was rendered technologically obsolete, great games are still being released for it, even if this is likely among the last of them.

That crunching sound you hear is Ingmar Bergman turning in his frigid Scandinavian grave. In Margot at the Wedding, the writer-director, Noah Baumbach, wants to ape the Bergman of The Passion of Anna and Persona and Saraband. But he never conveys that his dramatis personae have anything of interest to say or that he's seen something in their existential slapstick that justifies spending an hour and a half in their hapless company. After triumphing as a writer-director in his nerve-rattling, tragicomic film about a child's view of divorce, The Squid and the Whale, Baumbach may have felt liberated to amp up another family spectacle of in-grown nuttiness and sorrow.

Elvis Costello emerged from the '70s punk explosion as the singer-songwriter of the crowd, and though his music has gone through changes, he hasn't slowed down since. His geeky persona, unique voice and diverse musical output have kept Costello in the spotlight and his fans begging for more. Elvis Costello and the Imposters play Rams Head Live, 20 Market Place, on Saturday. Tickets are $60 in advance, $65 on the day of the show. Call 410-244-1131 or go to ramsheadlive.com.

As the spring weather begins to sprout athletes, you may spot a few late-bloomers like Beth Gunter of Abingdon, who is training for a national cycling competition in Louisville, Ky. Gunter, 53, is biking 125 to 175 miles a week to prepare for next month's 2007 Summer National Senior Games, known as the Senior Olympics. Dave Doi, 60, of Bethesda is swimming, running and biking in preparation for the competition's triathlon, while his 59-year-old wife, Sue Miler, a bronze medalist in volleyball in the 2005 games, is also working out and practicing with her team.

Marlon Brando, who changed not just the face but the mind and soul of movie acting with a series of revolutionary performances in the 1950s, died Thursday at age 80 of lung failure at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. In his five decades on screen, Mr. Brando fundamentally altered Hollywood's image of a leading man, bringing out an unprecedented emotional rawness in hard-guy characters such as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, then, improbably, reviving his career a generation later as courtly Mafia don Vito Corleone in The Godfather.

While a 1970s sitcom role as an obsessive-compulsive photographer sharing an apartment with a slob of a sportswriter came to define Tony Randall's persona in the public mind, it was only the second act in a life that seemed to be lived as an intelligently crafted three-act play. His was a reputation built in the movies, refined in prime-time television and then fulfilled on the stage. Along the way, while he was never a leading man, Randall, through this persona, did as much as any actor of his generation to shape and question the very notion of masculinity.

NEW YORK -- Alan King, the stand-up comedian who parlayed a Borscht Belt sense of humor, a tummler's cheek and a big appetite for the limelight into a thoroughgoing show business career that lasted more than half a century, died yesterday morning at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. He was 76, and lived in King's Point, N.Y. The cause was lung cancer, said his wife of 57 years, Jeanette. King was an unabashed exemplar of Jewish comedy whose sensibility, delivery -- and accent -- never migrated far from their Brooklyn roots.

Jackie Walker has been conducting style seminars all across the country for 15 years, and the audience reaction is always the same: "The women crowd around me afterward," she says. "They ask, 'Do you have a book? I want to take this information home with me.' " Now, at last, the wardrobe guru does have a book: I Don't Have a Thing to Wear: The Psychology of Your Closet (Pocket Books, $12). It is co-authored by Judie Taggart, a fashion writer. "My mission is to give women self-esteem.

I was a freshman in college when this spicy Brooklyn chick named Lil' Kim stormed onto the hip-hop horizon. At every campus party that year -- 1996 -- folks packed the dance floor when the DJ threw on "No Time," her sassy, James Brown funk-flavored hit. Her flow was decidedly masculine, the lyrical content raw and pornographic. She punctuated the lazy groove with rhymes that were clever and funny, but too nasty to reprint in a family newspaper. The promotional shots for her classic debut, Hard Core, featured the honey-toned Tabasco-tongued rapper squatting in a bikini and heels.

SUN SCORE (***1/2) The joke of The Good Girl is that she isn't good at all. Though she'd be the last one to admit this about herself, Justine Last is about as self-centered a person as you'd ever want to imagine, a woman for whom any action is justified, so long as she comes out OK in the end. But the good that's lacking in the character is more than made up for in the movie itself, an unabashed look at a woman who thinks she's a lot more complicated than...