The-Burg.com - Central Virgina's Arts, Culture and Entertainment Weekly

San Diego’s annual pop-culture convention wrapped up Sunday after four days of comic books, costumes, celebrity appearances and TV and movie previews.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — It’s hard not to think of the long-awaited “Dark Night of the Soul” as a tragic album.

First delayed by legal wrangling, then indelibly marked by the suicides of co-creator Mark Linkous and contributor Vic Chesnutt, the album carried some heavy baggage when it finally came out last week.

About this story
Barrett Mohrmann is an amateur disc golfer and has played all three Lynchburg-area courses that are currently open. He consulted with Vince Whorley, a professional player of disc golf and a Bedford resident, for this guide to the sport. In 2009, Whorley won both the Elk Creek Classic and Mountain Jam VIII tournaments.

Even Lauren Smyk can admit she wasn’t very comfortable on stage when she auditioned for the Lynch’s Landing Lynchburg Star competition last summer.

Sure, she’d sung at local karaoke nights for years and had performed in classical music concerts while a student at Liberty University, but she’d never had to work the stage before.

“It was my first time in front of a crowd singing contemporary songs,” says Smyk, a Pennsylvania native who graduated from Liberty with a music degree in 2006. “There were a lot of people there that day. I thought, ‘This is scary.’”

The 26-year-old lost to friend Alma Hesson in the final round. But a video of her audition, an a cappella version of Carrie Underwood’s “Wasted,” wound up on YouTube and on the computer screen of The Almost Brothers Band guitarist Mike Davis, who was wowed by her voice.

Walter Kmiec is stalking around one of Sweet Briar College’s old dairy barns during an evening rehearsal for Endstation Theatre’s outdoor production of “Hamlet.”

It’s the famous “Get thee to a nunnery” scene — right after the “To be or not to be” speech, if you’re keeping score — in which Hamlet confronts his love, Ophelia.

When he gets to the line, “What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?” director Geoff Kershner interrupts.

“I’m going to be indulgent here,” he says, indicating that Kmiec should point to the sky and the ground when he says the line. “Since we’ve got the earth, and we’ve got heaven, let’s use it.”

They’ve also got music.

When musician Amber Leigh Edmundson listened to her debut CD recently, she was surprised at how much she’s changed in the two years since it came out.

“I thought, ‘Man, I was definitely 15 when I wrote that song,” says the 19-year-old, who will be performing at The White Hart at 8 p.m. Friday.

“My lyrics have definitely matured.”

I don’t know about you but once the warm weather hits, all I want to do is be outside, preferably with a good meal in front of me and a drink in my hand.

ROSELAND — You’d think, watching a television commercial boosting Virginia-grown foods, that John Bruguiere of Nelson County is one of the professional actors who appear in the 30-second video.

When Marc-Anthony Polizzi was a graduate student studying glass sculpting at Tulane University, he began creating art out of found objects in his spare time.

“(The glass work) is very methodical and process-oriented,” says the artist, whose work will be on display at Riverviews Artspace for the rest of the summer. “I started doing stuff like this to blow off steam.”

He began leaving the pieces all over campus — a kind of guerilla art, if you will.

“Nobody knew it was me,” he says, “until the cops came.”