“In 1994 two BYU students were in a communications class together and found that they had a common love of sketch comedy that was clean but still really, really funny. They decided to start a comedy troupe. They held auditions for cast members and behold, Divine Comedy was born. Each year a few members would leave the group and they would hold auditions to replace them. Being in Divine Comedy is a bit like being the Dread Pirate Roberts.” —Divine Comedy, Brigham Young University
Milla Jovovich, “The Divine Comedy” (1994)
“. . .The Divine Comedy was a proud effort by Jovovich, who resolutely guarded and shaped her emergence as a singer. She personally hyped her pre-release album as “a mix between Kate Bush, Sinead O’Connor, This Mortal Coil, and The Cocteau Twins.” To help move the album along, the label released a free sampler disc (I still have mine) which featured the wonderful single ‘Gentleman Who Fell.’
Largely acoustic and immensely charming, ‘Gentleman Who Fell’ was a minor alternative rock hit. The problem was that it wasn’t enough to carry the album as far as the album should have gone. After the simple success of ‘Gentleman Who Fell’, the album, and its subsequent single attempts (‘Bang Your Head,’ ‘It’s Your Life’) barely registered despite very positive reviews.” [. . .] –Matt Rowe, The Morton Report, July 13, 2011
Remembering Michael Mazur’s Illustrations of the Inferno
“Michael Mazur, a relentlessly inventive printmaker, painter and sculptor whose work encompassed social documentation, narrative and landscape while moving back and forth between figuration and abstraction, died on Aug. 18 in Cambridge, Mass. He was 73 and lived in Cambridge and Provincetown, Mass. [. . .]
“While attending Amherst College he studied with the printmaker and sculptor Leonard Baskin, who was teaching at Smith College. After taking a year off to study in Italy, where his lifelong fascination with Dante began, he received a bachelor’s degree in 1957 and went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine art from the Yale School of Art and Architecture. [. . .]
“After seeing an exhibition of Degas monotypes at the Fogg Museum in 1968, he began exploring that medium, most notably in the monumental Wakeby landscapes of 1983, depicting Wakeby Lake on Cape Cod, and in a series of illustrations for Robert Pinsky’s translation of Dante’s Inferno, published in 1994.” [. . .] –William Grimes, The New York Times, August 29, 2009
Contributed by Richard Lindemann (2006)
See also the 2020 exhibit of Mazur’s work at the Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown, Mass.
“Clerks” (Kevin Smith, 1994)
“The screenplay is loosely based on The Divine Comedy. The character Dante Hicks gets his name from Dante Alighieri, the author and fictional protagonist of The Divine Comedy. The chapter titles are also somewhat of a reference to the literature in that in The Divine Comedy, each level of hell is given a title. It can be said that Quick Stop is ‘Dante’s hell’.” –Sam Donovan
Contributed by Sam Donovan (Bowdoin, ’07)
