C01   1 <#FROWN:C01\><h_><p_>Earplay's Peterson premiere<p/>
C01   2 <p_>'Diptych' shows composer's wide experience<p/>
C01   3 <p_>By Allan Ulrich<p/>
C01   4 <p_>EXAMINER MUSIC CRITIC<h/>
C01   5 <p_>A PREMIERE by the Bay Area's Wayne Peterson, this year's 
C01   6 Pulitzer Prize winner for composition, proved both the most 
C01   7 absorbing and most instructive work featured on this season's first 
C01   8 Earplay concert of contemporary music Monday evening at Fort 
C01   9 Mason's Cowell Theater.<p/>
C01  10 <p_>'Diptych,' a 21-minute opus, co-commissioned by the 
C01  11 Koussevitzky Foundation and the Earplay ensemble, makes no radical 
C01  12 statement and realigns no aesthetic priorities. But Peterson, the 
C01  13 senior contributor to Monday's concert, revealed a quality only 
C01  14 intermittently evident in his colleagues' offerings - the gift of 
C01  15 wide experience, and the ability to learn from intense listening. 
C01  16 They are not surprising virtues from someone you encounter at 
C01  17 almost every new music concert in town.<p/>
C01  18 <p_>(Peterson's next local premiere will be a string quartet for 
C01  19 the Alexander Quartet. Composers, Inc. will present it Nov. 10 in 
C01  20 the Veterans Building Green Room.)<p/>
C01  21 <p_>Much of the accompanying fare in Earplay's eighth season 
C01  22 curtain<?_>-<?/>raiser was honorably wrought, even arresting at 
C01  23 moments. Yet, except for James Dashow's 'Mnemonics' (1990) for 
C01  24 violin and tape, distinctive personalities failed to emerge.<p/>
C01  25 <p_>The program also included Gustavo Moretto's 'Silenciosamente' 
C01  26 (1990), David Vayo's 'Poem' (1990) and Scott Wheeler's 'Night Owl 
C01  27 Variations' (1987). The hard<?_>-<?/>working performers were Joseph 
C01  28 Edelberg, violin; George Thomson, violin/viola; Sarah Freiberg, 
C01  29 cello; Peter Josheff, clarinet/saxophone; Janet Kutulas, flutes; 
C01  30 Andrew Lewis, percussion, and Karen Rosenak, piano. J. Karla Lemon 
C01  31 conducted the Peterson, Vayo and Wheeler works.<p/>
C01  32 <p_>Peterson's wasn't the only piece on Monday's concert to 
C01  33 reconsider the past; he favors the dotted rhythms found in baroque 
C01  34 dance forms. Yet, it was the composer's gift for striking 
C01  35 instrumental sonorities and the constant direction of the 
C01  36 two-movement work that won the evening.<p/>
C01  37 <p_>Scored for flute, clarinet, piano, viola, cello and an 
C01  38 impressive array of percussion, 'Diptych' consistently surprises in 
C01  39 the clarity of its counterpoint and in its deployment of 
C01  40 instrumental timbres for both sensuous and dramatic possibilities. 
C01  41 Tensions grow organically from the material without seeming imposed 
C01  42 upon it.<p/>
C01  43 <p_>The first section, 'Aubade,' is a morning song in which 
C01  44 Peterson deftly conjures an emotionally charged landscape. Burbling 
C01  45 sounds from a vibraphone, soft drumrolls and descending chords 
C01  46 glory in pictorialism, yet there's an arch effect here that derives 
C01  47 from the subtle manipulation of textures.<p/>
C01  48 <p_>Peterson arranged 'Odyssey,' the second part, in rondo form, 
C01  49 but a rich vein of lyricism and widely contrasting textures sustain 
C01  50 the interest even when a breakdown seems imminent. And one discerns 
C01  51 a sophisticated wit. The strings, in one extended passage, are 
C01  52 assigned a syrupy theme that suggests Franck or Faure. A coda 
C01  53 highlighting piano and gentle percussion leaves the listener 
C01  54 wanting a bit more.<p/>
C01  55 <p_>Less, however, would have been preferable for 'Mnemonics.' 
C01  56 Chicago-born Dashow has worked extensively in both acoustic and 
C01  57 electronic music. Here the solo violinist (Thomson) finds his 
C01  58 sonority matched by the sound on type; that, in part, has been 
C01  59 determined by the harmonic structure of the string sound.<p/>
C01  60 <p_>The explanation in the program stresses the complexity of the 
C01  61 method. What one hears is elegantly assembled, but about halfway 
C01  62 through, the attention wanders. The aesthetic relationship of live 
C01  63 musician and electronic sound seems under-defined.<p/>
C01  64 <p_>'Silenciosamente' offered eight minutes of provocative and 
C01  65 inconclusive sounds for clarinet, violin and piano. Less is more 
C01  66 for Argentine-born Moretto, who favors dynamic extremes and 
C01  67 isolated notes, from which the violin line rises to occasional 
C01  68 lyrical statements.<p/>
C01  69 <p_>Vayo's 'Poem' (for flute, piano, clarinet, violin and cello) 
C01  70 often hints at a warm, almost Brahmsian sonority, from which 
C01  71 jocularity is not excluded. Wheeler's 'Night Owl Variations' 
C01  72 separates its four instruments (flute, clarinet, cello and marimba) 
C01  73 in agreeable, almost improvisatory fashion. Twelve minutes of the 
C01  74 work, however, left an impression of grayness.<p/>
C01  75 
C01  76 <h_><p_>Family struggles in 'God's Hands'<p/>
C01  77 <p_>Theatre Works musical just misses its calling<p/>
C01  78 <p_>By Robert Hurwitt<p/>
C01  79 <p_>EXAMINER THEATER CRITIC<p/><h/>
C01  80 <p_>PALO ALTO - A crisis of faith has always been good grist for a 
C01  81 dramatist's mill, whether it's a religious leader's loss of faith 
C01  82 in his God (as in Ingmar Bergman's 'The Silence') or an artist's in 
C01  83 his craft (Ibsen's 'Master Builder,' John Osborne's 'The 
C01  84 Entertainer,' et al.). But when the artist is a kid just 
C01  85 discovering that others are as talented as he, or when the crisis 
C01  86 is an adolescent's belated discovery that his father isn't 
C01  87 omnipotent ... well, let's just say that not all crises are created 
C01  88 equal.<p/>
C01  89 <p_>That's one of the main problems with 'God's Hands,' a 
C01  90 semiautobiographical new musical by Douglas J. Cohen that opened 
C01  91 Theatre-Works' Stage II season at Palo Alto's Cubberley Theatre 
C01  92 Saturday. You want to like these people. You want to believe that 
C01  93 their story has significance beyond its particulars. You certainly 
C01  94 sympathize with them at times. But the whole thing feels like an 
C01  95 exercise in self-indulgence.<p/>
C01  96 <p_>The story starts in <foreign_>medias res<foreign/>, when Rabbi 
C01  97 Daniel Levy (Stephen Gill) heads for New York to search for his 
C01  98 18-year-old son, Benjamin (Mark Phillips), who's been missing from 
C01  99 Juilliard for several days. We're not worried though. We already 
C01 100 know what the rabbi won't discover for another 2 hours and 20 
C01 101 minutes: Ben's dropped out and taken a job at a supermarket.<p/>
C01 102 <p_>Meanwhile, we flash back through the story of Ben's life, from 
C01 103 his birth - with Dad dreaming of his son, the first Jewish 
C01 104 president - through his prolonged adolescence. Ben has a mother, of 
C01 105 course, the quiet homemaker Ellie (Diana Torres Koss), and an older 
C01 106 sister Ruth (Rebecca Fink), eclipsed by her brother from the moment 
C01 107 he's born. But except for a brief look at Ruth's struggle for her 
C01 108 own identity, and a superfluous, obligatory nod to woman's lot in 
C01 109 the song 'Bloomin' Time,' they have little to do with the story.<p/>
C01 110 <p_>THE CENTRAL relationship is between Ben, his father and his 
C01 111 father's mother, Rhea (Miriam Babin), a concert pianist determined 
C01 112 to turn her grandson into the keyboard prodigy her son refused to 
C01 113 become. The close tie between Ben and Rhea not only fosters Ben's 
C01 114 musical talents but also precipitates his first crisis of faith, 
C01 115 when his father, who <quote_>"wears God's hands"<quote/> (the hands 
C01 116 of the rabbi raised in benediction), admits he can't pray Rhea back 
C01 117 to health after a stroke.<p/>
C01 118 <p_>Though played as background to Ben's story, his father's crisis 
C01 119 is more fertile dramatic ground. A reform rabbi whose progressive 
C01 120 views lose him congregations in Walnut Creek and Illinois, he's a 
C01 121 grown man still struggling for his mother's approval. The show's 
C01 122 most interesting moment, too soon over, is a flashback to their 
C01 123 mother-son, God vs. piano confrontation and her complete rejection 
C01 124 of a deity who couldn't protect her family against Hitler.<p/>
C01 125 <p_>Cohen doesn't follow up on this theme, however, nor on the 
C01 126 rabbi's failure to recognize that his daughter has taken on the 
C01 127 social conscience side of his calling. Instead, what we get mostly 
C01 128 is a study in generic middle-class adolescent angst, packaged as a 
C01 129 swiftly flowing musical that rarely comes to rest on a dramatic 
C01 130 moment or a distinct melody.<p/>
C01 131 <p_>Few of the songs - not even a mildly sardonic hymn to 
C01 132 Manischewitz - have anything like a definable personality. Most of 
C01 133 Cohen's tunes fall into that gray netherland between recitative and 
C01 134 actual melody, easily adaptable to whatever mood the composer 
C01 135 wishes to indicate: a heavier hand on the keys for emotional 
C01 136 turmoil; a slide into falsetto for added poignancy. The music is 
C01 137 professional, painless and forgettable, capably performed by Dan 
C01 138 Casper on keyboards and Bryan Lanser on percussion.<p/>
C01 139 <p_>Director Barbara Valente gives the show a sharp-looking 
C01 140 production on a wondrously versatile set (by Joe Ragey) of 
C01 141 cylindrical blocks and slide projections, all framed between 
C01 142 Torah-like scrolls. Led by an engaging Phillips, who pushes the 
C01 143 cute side of Ben just a bit, the cast works hard, but often isn't 
C01 144 up to the demands of the store.<p/>
C01 145 <p_>NEITHER Gill nor Babin, though they handle their acting chores 
C01 146 well enough, quite manages to bring off their major confrontation 
C01 147 in 'What Good Is Prayer?' The chorus fails sadly in 'It's a Dirty 
C01 148 Job,' Ben's vision of the congregation as a Damon Runyonesque gang 
C01 149 (Ben's Broadway-style fantasy life is another theme that falls by 
C01 150 the way<?_>-<?/>side). Fink, bursting with teen attitude, and Koss, 
C01 151 in the underwritten role of Ellie, shine in their musical moments 
C01 152 together.<p/>
C01 153 <p_>But at this point, 'God's Hands' isn't exactly a mitzvah.<p/>
C01 154 
C01 155 <h_><p_>'Mad Dog' Ellroy sounds off<p/>
C01 156 <p_>By Cynthia Robins<p/>
C01 157 <p_>OF THE EXAMINER STAFF<p/><h/>
C01 158 <p_>JAMES ELLROY'S latest book, 'White Jazz' (Knopf, $22, 349 
C01 159 pages), makes previous detective fiction, including his own, read 
C01 160 like Dr. Seuss. Pared down to the verbal equivalent of 
C01 161 Gillespie-Kenton rebop, Ellroy's prose scans nervous, jittery, 
C01 162 polyphonic and blood-soaked. A fugue for tinhorns, hookers, 
C01 163 extortionists, dopers, window peepers, porno kings, crooked cops, 
C01 164 vicious Feds, millionaires, mobsters, murderers and molesters.<p/>
C01 165 <p_>For a man whose fiction treads a very thin line between 
C01 166 violence and art, James Ellroy is deceptively charming - used to 
C01 167 performing, spinning out catchy quotes and off<?_>-<?/>handedly 
C01 168 telling his life story. But if life and art forge some kind of 
C01 169 fidgety truce on his pages, you can bet that somewhere under the 
C01 170 engaging, clownish exterior, Ellroy's more profligate, dangerous 
C01 171 instincts lie in wait.<p/>
C01 172 <p_>Right now, it's time to feed the beast - the author who answers 
C01 173 not only to <tf|>James Ellroy (not Jim, not Jimmy, certainly not 
C01 174 Mr. Ellroy) but also 'Dog,' short for 'Mad Dog.' If you're 
C01 175 especially nice, he'll even bark for you.<p/>
C01 176 <p_><h_>Enjoying his fame<p/><h/>
C01 177 <p_>Mr. Mad Dog's day started at an indecently early hour - 5:30 
C01 178 a.m. - in Houston. As he folds his long legs into a booth at 
C01 179 Postrio, he peruses the menu, ordering up a charcuterie plate. 
C01 180 <quote_>"You share it with me,"<quote/> he says. <quote_>"You eat 
C01 181 the stuff with liver. I <tf|>hate liver."<quote/><p/>
C01 182 Ellroy is enjoying every bit of new fame and burgeoning bank 
C01 183 account, ordering two entrees at this very expensive restaurant and 
C01 184 then flourishing a $20 tip on top of the gratuity left by his book 
C01 185 escort. He talks fast, eats with his fingers, slurps mineral water 
C01 186 out of his interviewer's glass and complains about his thinning 
C01 187 salt-and-pepper hair.<p/>
C01 188 <p_>A rangy, lanky guy given to teensy round glasses (<quote_>"they 
C01 189 match my beady little eyes,"<quote/> he jokes), Ellroy bears a 
C01 190 passing resemblance to Adolf Hitler and nurtures a passion for 
C01 191 cashmere sweaters. He says that when he first started writing, long 
C01 192 <quote_>"before I started marrying women,"<quote/> when he had 
C01 193 $22,000 in the bank and a $600-a-month flop, he treated himself to 
C01 194 a $1,300, zillion-ply cashmere. The navy one he's got tied around 
C01 195 his neck over a faded red and white Hawaiian shirt is as soft as a 
C01 196 kitten.<p/>
C01 197 <p_>Twelve years ago, when Ellroy, a self-confessed druggie, 
C01 198 alcoholic, thief, went on the wagon and wrote his first book - 
C01 199 'Brown's Requiem,' an elegiac stroll into Los Angeles' seedy 
C01 200 underbelly of itinerant golf caddies, crooked cops, Mexican whores 
C01 201 and white powder traffickers - all the elements of his well-hewn 
C01 202 prose style were there: the offbeat hero not afraid to soil his 
C01 203 hands or use his gun; a rogue's gallery of characters who, morally 
C01 204 corrupt or not, are always riveting; a plot that zigs when you 
C01 205 expect it to zag.<p/>
C01 206 <p_>But Ellroy was wordier then. His sentence structure parsed. He 
C01 207 didn't believe in italics or words in all caps. In the last five 
C01 208 years, since he began what he calls his 'Los Angeles Quartet,' four 
C01 209 books about the crime-garnished margins of L.A. circa 1958, he's 
C01 210 dropped verbiage and parts of speech like a clumsy waiter with a 
C01 211 tray full of dirty dishes.<p/>
C01 212 <p_>That's not to say that Ellroy's next step is a comic book 
C01 213 interspersed with Batman-style sound effects, but 'White Jazz,' for 
C01 214 all its lean-mean-rat-a-tat-machine cadences, was tough to finish. 
C01 215 It took 21 months.<p/>
C01 216 <p_><quote_>"The story was all there when I started,"<quote/> he 
C01 217 says. He began with a complicated 164-page outline that led to five 
C01 218 separate rewrites. Beginning the book in a more traditional first 
C01 219 person, Ellroy says it <quote_>"felt a little flaccid to me, so I 
C01 220 went back and cut, cut, cut, subtracting words, adding words, 
C01 221 taking out again."<quote/> Basically, he laughs, <quote_>"it is 
C01 222 bebop - it's this racist cop getting into black jazz."<quote/>
C01 223 <p_>Only it's an invented syntax, as artful and riveting as the 
C01 224 dialogue in a David Mamet play, that reads just like the title - 
C01 225 jazz.
C01 226 
C02   1 <#FROWN:C02\><h_><p_>Romance of War in Old Asia<p/>
C02   2 <p_>THE GREAT GAME<p/>
C02   3 <p_>The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia<p/>
C02   4 <p_>By Peter Hopkirk<p/>
C02   5 <p_>Kodansha; $30; 565 pages<p/>
C02   6 <p_>REVIEWED BY ANDREW LEONARD<p/><h/>
C02   7 <p_>The events in Peter Hopkirk's new history, 'The Great Game,' 
C02   8 sound like front-page headlines from the past decade:<p/>
C02   9 <p_>Angry mobs fueled by religious passion take over a foreign 
C02  10 embassy in a Middle Eastern nation bordering the Persian Gulf. 
C02  11 Meanwhile, a Western army bogs down in the mountain fastnesses of 
C02  12 Afghanistan, and thousands of young soldiers die. To the north, 
C02  13 wily Muslim leaders, heirs to the tradition of Genghis Khan and 
C02  14 Tamerlane, play one superpower against another.<p/>
C02  15 <p_>But Hopkirk, a onetime foreign correspondent for the London 
C02  16 Times, has turned the clock back 100 years, to a time when the 
C02  17 insatiably expanding empires of Russia and England were gobbling up 
C02  18 Central Asia, seeking strategic advantages in their global struggle 
C02  19 for commercial and military domination.<p/>
C02  20 <p_>The British feared that Russia would not stop until it invaded 
C02  21 India, the jewel of the British Empire. The Russians were obsessed 
C02  22 with protecting their borders, psychologically scarred, suggests 
C02  23 Hopkirk, by a disastrous Mongol invasion centuries earlier. The 
C02  24 meeting ground, where Russian military outposts came closest to 
C02  25 British India, was Afghanistan.<p/>
C02  26 <p_>'The Great Game' is old-fashioned history written with 
C02  27 engrossing flair. Hopkirk tells the story of this massive 
C02  28 confrontation between the 19th century superpowers through the 
C02  29 personal stories of the various British and Russian explorers, 
C02  30 spies and diplomats who mapped out the uncharted mountains and 
C02  31 deserts of Central Asia. The British wanted information on the 
C02  32 passes where Russian troops could come storming across the 
C02  33 mountains. The Russians sought to convince the khans of the 
C02  34 kingdoms to their south - Bokhara, Khiva and Khokand - that it was 
C02  35 in their best interest to accede to Russian demands. On rare 
C02  36 occasions, the two sides met, with sometimes gallant results.<p/>
C02  37 <p_><quote_>"'We will shoot at each other in the morning,' one 
C02  38 Russian told [British explorer Captain Frederick] Burnaby, handing 
C02  39 him a glass of vodka, 'and drink together when there is a 
C02  40 truce.'"<quote/><p/>
C02  41 <p_>The place names are exotic - Bokhara, Samarkand, Tashkent and 
C02  42 Kashgar. Russian and British-er alike engage 
C02  43 in thrilling feats of derring-do, dressed as Buddhist pilgrims 
C02  44 infiltrating cities never before seen by Western eyes, or riding 
C02  45 700 miles over the most inhospitable terrain on Earth to relay news 
C02  46 on the latest Russian or English advance, or simply dying alone, 
C02  47 the victims of unspeakable treachery in remote mountain valleys.<p/>
C02  48 <p_>Hopkirk tells the story well, playing up the romance and 
C02  49 glamour while never losing sight of the overarching historical 
C02  50 picture. Of particular relevance to current-day events is the role 
C02  51 of Afghanistan and the history of the Central Asian Muslim 
C02  52 khanates.<p/>
C02  53 <p_>Afghanistan, with its fabled Bolan and Khyber passes, notes 
C02  54 Hopkirk, was the traditional staging ground for the many successful 
C02  55 invasions of India during the past 3,000 years. But when the 
C02  56 British tried to place their own puppet on the throne, they ended 
C02  57 up losing a 16,000-man army almost to the last soul. The fierce 
C02  58 Afghan tribesmen were practically unbeatable, something the Soviet 
C02  59 Union also learned after its own foray into Afghan politics.<p/>
C02  60 <p_>And Central Asia? A look back at the 19th century proves that 
C02  61 the domination of this vast area by Russia had nothing to do with 
C02  62 Marxist ideology. The overriding imperative, demonstrates Hopkirk, 
C02  63 was a strategic concern for the protection of the heartland. 
C02  64 Communism may have collapsed today, but Russian interests remain 
C02  65 the same.<p/>
C02  66 <p_>England may no longer be a player in the <quote_>"Great 
C02  67 Game,"<quote/> argues Hopkirk, but in these post-Cold War days, 
C02  68 America and Russia will be certain to seek their advantage, through 
C02  69 diplomacy, intrigue and perhaps even military force, in the new 
C02  70 republics of Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Nadzhikistan and many 
C02  71 others.<p/>
C02  72 <p_><quote_>"If this narrative tells us nothing else,"<quote/> 
C02  73 writes Hopkirk, <quote_>"it is that little has changed in the last 
C02  74 hundred years."<quote/> It is a point well taken.<p/>
C02  75 
C02  76 <h_><p_>A Vietnam War Nurse Tells Her Story<p/>
C02  77 <p_>AMERICAN DAUGHTER GONE TO WAR<p/>
C02  78 <p_>On the Front Lines With an Army Nurse in Vietnam<p/>
C02  79 <p_>By Winnie Smith<p/>
C02  80 <p_>William Morrow; 352 pages; $22<p/>
C02  81 <p_>BY ALIX MADRIGAL<p/><h/>
C02  82 <p_>When nurse Winnie Smith joined the Army in 1963, she had never 
C02  83 heard of Vietnam.<p/>
C02  84 <p_><quote_>"I was 19,"<quote/> the San Francisco writer said on a 
C02  85 recent visit to The Chronicle. <quote_>"I grew up with very 
C02  86 romantic notions about war, and I wanted to travel. My hope was to 
C02  87 go to Korea so I could wear fatigues and run around in a 
C02  88 jeep."<quote/> Smith was so naive that, although a nurse, she 
C02  89 didn't know what a condom was.<p/>
C02  90 <p_>By 1966 she was in the thick of it - Long Binh, Vietnam, where 
C02  91 <quote_>"time passes quickly but the day drags on forever,"<quote/> 
C02  92 as she writes in 'American Daughter Gone to War.' Hard work, 
C02  93 exhaustion and tragedy were <quote_>"facts of life,"<quote/> and 
C02  94 soldiers were <quote_>"put aside to die because of lack of space or 
C02  95 staff even to try and save them."<quote/><p/>
C02  96 <p_>A heart-wrenching account of Smith's wartime experiences, the 
C02  97 book tells of her odyssey from being an idealistic young nurse who 
C02  98 feared the war would end before she got there to becoming a 
C02  99 battle<?_>-<?/>hardened veteran.<p/>
C02 100 <p_>An important book, it is also a painful one, with its graphic 
C02 101 scenes of young bodies torn apart: Removing a dirty bandage from 
C02 102 the head of a wounded soldier, Smith lifted his wounded eye right 
C02 103 out of its socket; another soldier wrapped his intestines around 
C02 104 his neck before throwing himself off a building.<p/>
C02 105 <p_>Harder still is the psychic mutilation Smith describes. Early 
C02 106 on, she had visions of helping the <quote_>"most innocent victims 
C02 107 of war, the children."<quote/> Later, she prayed the Vietnamese 
C02 108 children would leave her alone. Although she dimly realized that 
C02 109 bombing Vietnamese villages and shooting their children was a 
C02 110 peculiar way to <quote|>"save" them, she was so outraged at the 
C02 111 suffering of American soldiers that she came to hate the 
C02 112 <quote|>"gooks." Once, unable to stand the sight of them, she 
C02 113 refused to let a Vietnamese couple visit their dying 4-year old 
C02 114 son.<p/>
C02 115 <p_>Though sickened by the My Lai massacre, Smith feels that she 
C02 116 understood it. <quote_>"Inside, I scream at those who condemn the 
C02 117 lieutenant in charge at My Lai,"<quote/> she writes. <quote_>"I'd 
C02 118 like them to get off their self<?_>-<?/>righteous asses and learn 
C02 119 about war first hand ... .To watch a couple of buddies get blown to 
C02 120 pieces and <tf|>then see how long they can hang on to their high 
C02 121 and mighty ideals."<quote/><p/>
C02 122 <p_>'American Daughter Gone to War' is also the harrowing story of 
C02 123 what happened to Smith when she got back to the <quote|>"world" - 
C02 124 cigarets and alcohol, emotional isolation, lethargy and depression, 
C02 125 all from memories she didn't know she was suppressing.<p/>
C02 126 <p_>It was difficult for Smith to talk about her war experiences, 
C02 127 <quote_>"especially because I moved to San Francisco, where there 
C02 128 was a lot of anti-war sentiment."<quote/> But she couldn't talk to 
C02 129 her patriotic family, either. <quote_>"They only wanted to hear the 
C02 130 funny stories,"<quote/> Smith remembers. Her mother's chatty, 
C02 131 chirpy letters form an ironic counterpoint to Smith's story: 
C02 132 <quote_>"Well, Winnie,"<quote/> she wrote, <quote_>"with the way 
C02 133 things are going I really think it would be a pleasure to stay in 
C02 134 Vietnam for a while to get away from the world's problems 
C02 135 ..."<quote/><p/>
C02 136 <p_>The book began as therapy for Smith, a way to exorcise the grim 
C02 137 and bloody visions she later learned to identify as 
C02 138 flash<?_>-<?/>backs, a common symptom of post-traumatic stress 
C02 139 disorder. <quote_>"I discover writing helps me regain control of my 
C02 140 mind,"<quote/> she writes. <quote_>"The reels won't stop, but I can 
C02 141 slow them enough to record portions, and once they're put to paper, 
C02 142 they fade back into the past, change from experience to 
C02 143 memory."<quote/><p/>
C02 144 <p_>Until the flashbacks and tears began in 1983, 16 years after 
C02 145 her return from Vietnam, Smith says, she was so out of touch with 
C02 146 her feelings, she didn't realize the war had left a scar.<p/>
C02 147 <p_>She remembers working in the recovery room at San Francisco 
C02 148 General Hospital when she saw an article in The Chronicle on groups 
C02 149 for women veterans. <quote_>"When I read it I almost 
C02 150 cried,"<quote/> she says. <quote_>"But I pushed the feelings down 
C02 151 and just put the whole thing out of my mind."<quote/><p/>
C02 152 <p_>Soon after Smith procured a vial of potassium chloride with 
C02 153 which she intended to end her life, a cousin sent her a copy of 
C02 154 Lynda Van Devanter's account of her time as an Army nurse in 
C02 155 Vietnam, 'Home Before Morning.'<p/>
C02 156 <p_><quote_>"The first page does not impress me,"<quote/> she 
C02 157 writes. <quote_>"Twelve years later she's blaming Vietnam for not 
C02 158 being able to sleep at night. What nonsense, I think."<quote/> But 
C02 159 the book brought it all back; soon the flash<?_>-<?/>backs started, 
C02 160 and the tears, and Smith remembered the article about women 
C02 161 veterans, with the number of the Concord Veterans Assistance 
C02 162 Center. The call marked the beginning of Smith's recovery.<p/>
C02 163 <p_><quote_>"I'm hoping that when vets and their families read 
C02 164 this,"<quote/> she says, <quote_>"they'll see the value of getting 
C02 165 out of the pattern of suppressing the pain and find a way to heal. 
C02 166 Whatever it takes."<quote/><p/>
C02 167 
C02 168 <h_><p_>Caribbean Family Saga<p/>
C02 169 <p_>TREE OF LIFE<p/>
C02 170 <p_>By Maryse Cond<*_>e-acute<*/>, translated by Victoria Reiter
C02 171 Ballantine; 371 pages; $18<p/>
C02 172 <p_>REVIEWED BY TERESA MOORE<p/><h/>
C02 173 <p_>'Tree of Life,' a newly translated novel by West Indian author 
C02 174 Maryse Cond<*_>e-acute<*/>, is a rococo pageant that stretches from 
C02 175 Guadeloupe to Panama to San Francisco to Paris to London to New 
C02 176 York to Jamaica to Haiti and back. A family saga that moves from 
C02 177 the early days of this century to the 1970s, 'Tree of Life' follows 
C02 178 the fortunes and misfortunes of the descendants of a dreamy peasant 
C02 179 who vaults from the cane field into the bourgeoisie.<p/>
C02 180 <p_>Cond<*_>e-acute<*/>, author of the acclaimed family sagas 
C02 181 'Segu' and 'The Children of Segu' is a native of Guadeloupe and has 
C02 182 taught Caribbean literature at several American colleges, including 
C02 183 the University of California at Berkeley.<p/>
C02 184 <p_>Reading this book is like stuffing oneself on a delicious, 
C02 185 well<?_>-<?/>cooked meal and feeling oddly ill-nourished and hungry 
C02 186 again before the plates are cleared. So much happens so fast to so 
C02 187 many in 'Tree of Life' that at times the book is hard to follow. 
C02 188 Matters are further complicated by a rich, almost poetic writing 
C02 189 style that seems at odds with such a busy narrative.<p/>
C02 190 <p_>Everything that happens in 'Tree of Life' seems bigger, 
C02 191 brighter and faster than anything that has ever happened before. 
C02 192 This is the novel as Broadway extravaganza - lots of flashy effects 
C02 193 and whirling about in gothic/exotic locales, strong choruses and a 
C02 194 huge cast of head<?_>-<?/>strong lovers, wild men and wicked women, 
C02 195 wise crones and hapless buffoons.<p/>
C02 196 <p_>Albert Louis, the patriarch of the far-flung clan, loses just 
C02 197 about everyone he has ever loved to early death. During different 
C02 198 fits of mourning, Albert is an ascetic, a drunk or a hermit. 
C02 199 Nicknamed <quote|>"Soubarou" or <quote_>"Wild Man,"<quote/> Albert 
C02 200 spends so much time in the throes of grief that one is relieved 
C02 201 when the self-absorbed old man finally dies his own death.<p/>
C02 202 <p_>One might think the deaths of several characters would simplify 
C02 203 the novel, but in 'Tree of Life,' death is simply another country, 
C02 204 like France or America. Many of the dead, more vindictive and 
C02 205 vigilant than ever they were in life, return to meddle in the lives 
C02 206 of the living.<p/>
C02 207 <p_>Cond<*_>e-acute<*/> employs the style of legend and fairy tale 
C02 208 to limn these figures: <quote_>"Jacob was born far away from the 
C02 209 Boyer-de-l'Etang plantation, in a forest in Massachusetts, three 
C02 210 years after Albert's head had slipped down between 
C02 211 Th<*_>e-acute<*/>odora's tortured thighs while she prayed to God: 
C02 212 'Let it be a boy! A boy!'"<quote/> The result is like a highly 
C02 213 imaginative and detailed woodcut - within the tilt of a head or the 
C02 214 design on a skirt, one might get an outline of a people, but such 
C02 215 one-dimensional forms give few clues to an individual soul. 
C02 216 Cond<*_>e-acute<*/> uses punctuation to heighten her linguistic 
C02 217 arabesques: If all the exclamation points in 'Tree of Life' were 
C02 218 deleted, the novel would probably be a full two pages shorter.<p/>
C02 219 <p_>The novel's narrator further contributes to the book's 
C02 220 maddening opacity. The story is told by young Claude 
C02 221 Ela<*_>i-circ<*/>se Louis, the illegitimate daughter of 
C02 222 Th<*_>e-acute<*/>cla, a spoiled, dissolute beauty who flees the 
C02 223 comfort of the family compound in Guadeloupe for a series of lovers 
C02 224 in Paris, London, Manhattan and Jamaica.<p/>
C02 225 
C02 226 
C03   1 <#FROWN:C03\><h_><p_>POP REVIEW<p/>
C03   2 <p_>MTV Show: Where's the Bite?<p/>
C03   3 <p_>By CHRIS WILLMAN<p/>
C03   4 <p_>SPECIAL TO THE TIMES<p/><h/>
C03   5 <p_>Even in the realm of pop-culture vulgarity, as the MTV Video 
C03   6 Music Awards demonstrates, this is the era of down<?_>-<?/>sized 
C03   7 expectations.<p/>
C03   8 <p_>Remember that special MTV moment just a few years back when, in 
C03   9 the middle of 'Vogue,' an unidentified male dancer heartily 
C03  10 squeezed Madonna's corseted bust on cue for all the cable-equipped 
C03  11 world to see?<p/>
C03  12 <p_>The closest thing to that 'high<?_>-<?/>light' in Wednesday's 
C03  13 telecast came when Howard Stern, costumed in his bare-derriered 
C03  14 'Fartman' persona, pointed to his saggy behind and ordered Luke 
C03  15 Perry to <quote_>"touch it for power."<quote/> This prompted the TV 
C03  16 hunk to gamely give the radio personality a good bun-rubbing.<p/>
C03  17 <p_>In this recessionary age, even bad taste isn't what it used to 
C03  18 be.<p/>
C03  19 <p_>Not that everything about the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards 
C03  20 didn't shout <tf|>bigger. The telecast lasted more than three 
C03  21 ear-boggling hours, and was broadcast live from UCLA's Pauley 
C03  22 Pavilion, which offers twice the seating capacity of the show's 
C03  23 previous home, the Universal Amphitheatre. Thirteen major pop acts 
C03  24 performed, all but two of them on the premises, all but one 
C03  25 live.<p/>
C03  26 <p_>Despite this exponential growth, this year's show may be the 
C03  27 first in MTV history without a single genuinely, memorably 
C03  28 provocative moment - the best (or worst) attempts of Stern and a 
C03  29 few other shock therapists notwithstanding.<p/>
C03  30 <p_>And from a live audience point of view, the move from Universal 
C03  31 to Pauley proved a big - emphasis on <tf|>big - mistake, with the 
C03  32 arena's massive size decidedly dampening rather than heightening 
C03  33 the intended excitement. Unlike previous MTV blowouts, TV really 
C03  34 was the place to watch this one.<p/>
C03  35 <p_>Musically, the telecast was rich with star talent, albeit only 
C03  36 one female act - En Vogue - showing that Wednesday, at least, the M 
C03  37 in MTV stood for 'men.'<p/>
C03  38 <p_>At the climax of a diverting, if not adventurous show, Elton 
C03  39 John showed up to share adjoining pianos with Axl Rose on Guns N' 
C03  40 Roses' 'November Rain,' after having earlier performed his own 'The 
C03  41 One.' Also on hand for this big finale was a 40-piece orchestra, 
C03  42 although making out its contributions over the roar of GNR proved 
C03  43 an impossibility for anyone at Pauley.<p/>
C03  44 <p_>Bringing along their own posse of onstage partyers, the Red Hot 
C03  45 Chili Peppers directly followed Pearl Jam in what was announced as 
C03  46 a <quote_>"battle of the bands,"<quote/> both of the groups 
C03  47 agreeably turning up the musical tension level for one of the few 
C03  48 palpable times in the proceedings.<p/>
C03  49 <p_>And in a show historically dominated by high-energy barn-burner 
C03  50 production numbers, Eric Clapton's quiet, tender 'Tears in Heaven,' 
C03  51 written as a response to the death of his young son, was a clear 
C03  52 favorite. In the midst of so much failed tastelessness, his 
C03  53 inherent touch of class and his ballad's bittersweet emotion 
C03  54 carried perhaps even more import than they might have in less 
C03  55 frivolous company.<p/>
C03  56 <p_>But as frivolity goes, another highlight was host Dana Carvey - 
C03  57 as Garth of 'Wayne's World' - sitting in on drums with U2, via 
C03  58 satellite, performing 'Even Better Than the Real Thing' from 
C03  59 Detroit. Garth also joined in some rock 'n' roll repartee with 
C03  60 Bono. <quote_>"I don't mean to <tf|>bug ya!"<quote/> said the young 
C03  61 Auroran, mocking one of Bono's better-known recorded quips.<p/>
C03  62 <p_>Carvey's overall reception as master of ceremonies was mixed. 
C03  63 In moments, his impressions and characters from 'Saturday Night 
C03  64 Live' - Bush, Perot, Church Lady, et al. - brought down the house; 
C03  65 at other times, he was dying and seemed to know it. But erratic as 
C03  66 Carvey was, nearly everyone on hand seemed to agree he was a far 
C03  67 preferable choice to prior host Arsenio Hall, whose benign 
C03  68 cheer<?_>-<?/>leading had always seemed out of character for the 
C03  69 show's intended rock 'n' roll attitude.<p/>
C03  70 <p_>Not surprisingly, Nirvana went furthest in providing the show a 
C03  71 sense of tension, some of it off<?_>-<?/>stage. Originally the band 
C03  72 was scheduled to open the telecast with 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' 
C03  73 but, reportedly, when they began doing a new song called 'Rape Me' 
C03  74 at rehearsals instead, nervous producers bumped their segment to 
C03  75 the middle of the show.<p/>
C03  76 <p_>Nirvana ended up performing the less incendiary 'Lithium,' 
C03  77 complete with the by-now entirely predictable set-smashing finale. 
C03  78 Having tossed himself into the drum set, singer Kurt Cobain 
C03  79 proceeded to drool, perhaps showing off a new trick borrowed from 
C03  80 his infant daughter.<p/>
C03  81 <p_>(Other rockers felt compelled to mock Cobain's antics, on and 
C03  82 off stage, most notably Elton John, who capped his ballad by 
C03  83 picking up his piano cushion and dropping it to the floor.)<p/>
C03  84 <p_>With Nirvana bumped from the opening slot, first-song honors 
C03  85 unfortunately instead went to the Black Crowes, with a standard 
C03  86 run-through of 'Remedy' that provided anything but the kind of 
C03  87 provocation MTV usually depends on to kick off its annual 
C03  88 showcase.<p/>
C03  89 <p_>Even less impressive was the second live act, Bobby Brown, 
C03  90 whose usually supple singing voice was inexplicably a hoarse 
C03  91 rapper's shout during most of 'Humpin' Around,' and whose dancers 
C03  92 looked like a mini-version of the Hammer aerobics troupe. Endearing 
C03  93 himself to few, Brown superfluously concluded his appearance by 
C03  94 winning the annual race to be the first star to smugly brandish the 
C03  95 F-word on the live telecast.<p/>
C03  96 <p_>(Sammy Hagar came in second in that contest, prompting Carvey 
C03  97 to announce: <quote_>"For those of you at home, he just said 
C03  98 <tf|>clucking - 'We <tf|>clucking appreciate it.'"<quote/>)<p/>
C03  99 <p_>Brown's elder statesman and rival, Michael Jackson, didn't fare 
C03 100 much better. Whereas once a Jackson appearance of any sort would 
C03 101 have produced some sort of anticipation, a taped performance of 
C03 102 'Black or White' in London seemed almost like an 
C03 103 after<?_>-<?/>thought.<p/>
C03 104 <p_>Jackson's presence was felt elsewhere, as well, albeit in less 
C03 105 flattering ways: Axl Rose took a minor stab at him in accepting the 
C03 106 so<?_>-<?/>called Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award on behalf of 
C03 107 Guns N' Roses. And in the weirdest proxy acceptance speech since 
C03 108 Marlon Brando sent an American Indian to the podium to turn down an 
C03 109 Oscar, Nirvana sent a Jackson impersonator up to accept the first 
C03 110 of the band's two awards, with the impostor announcing that he was 
C03 111 changing his self-anointed title from King of Pop to <quote_>"King 
C03 112 of Grunge-Rock."<quote/><p/>
C03 113 <p_>When the band later did deign to personally accept another 
C03 114 award, Cobain - apparently alluding to stories of drug use by 
C03 115 he<&|>sic! and his wife - looked straight into the camera and 
C03 116 warned against <quote_>"believing everything you read."<quote/><p/>
C03 117 <p_>All this mayhem might have seemed more entertaining to the 
C03 118 12,000 attendees, and the performances more galvanizing, had the 
C03 119 show not been plopped down in uncomfortable Pauley Pavilion, a 
C03 120 venue only a Bruin could love. The sole measurable benefit of the 
C03 121 big hall: a safe distance from Howard Stern's flatulence, verbal 
C03 122 <tf|>and otherwise.<p/>
C03 123 
C03 124 <h_><p_>BOOK REVIEW<p/>
C03 125 <p_>Terrorist Women: Muddled Thought of Maternal Ideals<p/>
C03 126 <p_>By CONSTANCE CASEY<p/>
C03 127 <p_>SPECIAL TO THE TIMES<p/><h/>
C03 128 <p_>We women don't make up more than 10% of the world's judges and 
C03 129 law enforcement officers but, by God, close to half of the 
C03 130 terrorists are women. It's hard to imagine which feminist group 
C03 131 would point with pride to this female representation among the 
C03 132 grenade-throwers, hijackers, car-bombers and knee-cappers of the 
C03 133 world.<p/>
C03 134 <p_>The first book to deal exclusively with women terrorists, 
C03 135 'Shoot the Women First' may not precisely praise this group, but 
C03 136 its author, British journalist Eileen MacDonald, at least seeks to 
C03 137 understand it.<p/>
C03 138 <p_>MacDonald wanted to find out what these 20-some violently 
C03 139 political women had in common and to answer the question, Are women 
C03 140 more dangerous than men? (<quote_>"Shoot the women first"<quote/> 
C03 141 is reputedly an order given to Germany's anti-terrorist squad.)<p/>
C03 142 <p_>MacDonald is all over the map - Palestine, Northern Ireland, 
C03 143 Spain, Italy, Germany - diligent in tracking down women to 
C03 144 interview. She gives us complicated women and tells the violent 
C03 145 things they've done - blowing up planes, assassinating bank 
C03 146 presidents, setting off bombs in shopping malls, ambushing bus 
C03 147 loads of soldiers - but doesn't supply a unifying thread or 
C03 148 convincing conclusions.<p/>
C03 149 <p_>The author's own story might have worked as an organizing 
C03 150 principle. She put herself in danger by talking to these women, 
C03 151 some of whom suspected she was a police agent. We wonder what set 
C03 152 her on the trail.<p/>
C03 153 <p_><quote_>"I had always been interested in how women succeeded in 
C03 154 what were considered to be male-dominated environments,"<quote/> 
C03 155 she explains, and the reader gets a little nervous about what the 
C03 156 author believes constitutes success.<p/>
C03 157 <p_>It's odd that MacDonald's book lacks tension. Part of the blame 
C03 158 rests with the fact that many of the people she interviewed were, 
C03 159 so to speak, retired. Those currently active are in the Palestine 
C03 160 Intifada, the Irish Republican Army and the Basque movement. These 
C03 161 women stand out in the story because they are fighting, as they see 
C03 162 it, a civil war to erase long-standing injustice.<p/>
C03 163 <p_>Kim Hyon Hui, a North Korean woman who was responsible for 115 
C03 164 deaths when she set a bomb on a South Korean airliner, couldn't be 
C03 165 any sort of feminist heroine. This beautiful and delicate woman, 
C03 166 raised singing <quote_>"Hack to Death the Capitalist Dogs,"<quote/> 
C03 167 was just following orders. Aiming to please her North Korean 
C03 168 bosses, she got off when Korean Air Lines flight 858 made stop, 
C03 169 having planted a ticking bomb inside a radio in the overhead 
C03 170 compartment.<p/>
C03 171 <p_>The West German and Italian women seem to MacDonald to have 
C03 172 muddled motives, primarily anger at authority. She finds the most 
C03 173 interesting group closest to home. The women of the Irish 
C03 174 Republican Army don't much like what they're doing, but can't 
C03 175 imagine not doing it. <quote_>"No one hates this war more than 
C03 176 us,"<quote/> says one. <quote_>"It is our country, and we hate the 
C03 177 bloody war."<quote/><p/>
C03 178 <p_>MacDonald's theory that the women terrorists hold maternal 
C03 179 feelings for the cause is pretty hard to swallow. Khaled, who now 
C03 180 works in a refugee camp near Damascus, remembers watching a little 
C03 181 girl playing in the airport lounge before they boarded: the girl 
C03 182 with her toys, Khaled with her grenades and gun. It worried her 
C03 183 that the girl might die. <quote|>"Then," she says, <quote_>"I 
C03 184 remembered all the countless thousands of Palestinian children in 
C03 185 the refugee camps. They were depending on me to tell the world 
C03 186 about them."<quote/><p/>
C03 187 <p_>It's a big stretch from that to MacDonald's conclusion: 
C03 188 <quote_>"One can begin to see why a woman fighter should be more 
C03 189 feared than a man: she views her cause as a surrogate child ... 
C03 190 ."<quote/> MacDonald turns out to be guilty of the same 
C03 191 anti-feminist thinking she criticizes: the stereotype that a woman 
C03 192 doesn't get angry on behalf of a cause; she has to be the mother 
C03 193 bear protecting her cub.<p/>
C03 194 <p_>In fact, MacDonald's interviews show that women can find 
C03 195 ecstasy in being immersed in a cause. Their attachments to fellow 
C03 196 cadre members are intense, and the drama of their lives is 
C03 197 heightened by the possibility of being captured, tortured or even 
C03 198 killed.<p/>
C03 199 <p_>In her conclusion, MacDonald makes a rushed, halfhearted 
C03 200 attempt to link the women to a common past. A few lost one parent 
C03 201 when they were young, she finds, but the majority were 
C03 202 <quote_>"disturbingly normal."<quote/> She quotes the head of 
C03 203 Germany's anti-terrorist squad, who states with weird pride, 
C03 204 <quote_>"German women are more liberated and more 
C03 205 self<?_>-<?/>aware than Italian and French women ... ."<quote/><p/>
C03 206 <p_>Then she writes, equally bizarrely, <quote_>"German women have 
C03 207 thrown off the shackles of the traditional woman in society and 
C03 208 have realized that there is no reason why they should not be 
C03 209 violent."<quote/> Are we supposed to get up and cheer, <quote_>"Go, 
C03 210 fight, win, German terrorist women"<quote/>?<p/>
C03 211 <p_>Instead of drawing her own conclusions, MacDonald keeps going 
C03 212 back to one German anti-terrorist who definitely believes that the 
C03 213 female of the species is deadlier than the male. Really? With a 
C03 214 grenade in your hand, a package with a bomb under your arm, and a 
C03 215 gun tucked in your belt, does it really matter whether you are 
C03 216 female or male?<p/>
C03 217 
C03 218 <h_><p_>MOVIE REVIEW<p/>
C03 219 <p_>'Bridge': Buddy Story With a Drug Twist<p/>
C03 220 <p_>By MICHAEL WILMINGTON<p/>
C03 221 <p_>SPECIAL TO THE TIMES<p/><h/>
C03 222 <p_>Semi-autobiographical coming-of-age movies have some built-in 
C03 223 traps and Mike Binder's 'Crossing the Bridge' (city<?_>-<?/>wide) 
C03 224 tumbles right into them. In this rock 'n' roll '70s reverie about a 
C03 225 trio of high school buddies bumbling a drug-smuggling adventure, 
C03 226 Binder mines his own memories, sometimes movingly or humorously, 
C03 227 sometimes opportunistically. But, just as in his script for 1990's 
C03 228 'Coup de Ville,' he tends to pump them up, restage his past in 
C03 229 action movie or teen-sex comedy terms.<p/>
C03 230 
C03 231 
C04   1 <#FROWN:C04\><h_><p_>Kim Hunter tackles Dickinson<p/>
C04   2 <p_><tf_>Belle of Amherst<tf/> at Theatre Club of Palm Beaches<p/>
C04   3 <p_>By CHRISTINE DOLEN<p/>
C04   4 <p_>Herald Theater Critic<p/><h/>
C04   5 <p_>Julie Harris, among the greatest American actresses to grace a 
C04   6 stage, played an integral part in developing what came to be one of 
C04   7 the strongest of the one-person shows: William Luce's <tf_>The 
C04   8 Belle of Amherst<tf/>. Her incandescent portrayal of 19th Century 
C04   9 poet Emily Dickinson won Harris the 1977 Tony Award as best 
C04  10 actress, and on long tours she shared her vibrant vision of the 
C04  11 famously reclusive, innovative, romantic literary figure.<p/>
C04  12 <p_>Though created for and identified with Harris, <tf_>The Belle 
C04  13 of Amherst<tf/> offers actresses of a certain age - Dickinson is 53 
C04  14 at the time of the play - the all-too-rare opportunity to entertain 
C04  15 and enlighten an audience, and solo yet. So it is easy to 
C04  16 understand the ongoing appeal of the piece, both to performers and 
C04  17 audiences.<p/>
C04  18 <p_>Another strong actress, Kim Hunter, has put <tf_>The Belle of 
C04  19 Amherst<tf/> into her repertoire, and she's tackling it again at 
C04  20 the Theatre Club of the Palm Beaches. Hunter, who was on the 
C04  21 receiving end of Marlon Brando's bellowed <quote|>"Stella!" in 
C04  22 <tf_>A Streetcar Named Desire<tf/> (and who won an Oscar for that 
C04  23 performance), moves adeptly through the taxing two-hour show. But 
C04  24 is it a perfect hand-in-glove, actress-in-role fit, as it was for 
C04  25 Harris? Not really.<p/>
C04  26 <p_>The playwright, drawing on Dickinson's poems and letters and 
C04  27 the writings about her, presents an engaging woman who was almost 
C04  28 self-consciously <quote|>"eccentric" - a woman who, as a teenager, 
C04  29 speculated that she might soon become the belle of her hometown of 
C04  30 Amherst, Mass., though fate and choice turned her into a 
C04  31 <quote_>"half-cracked"<quote/> spinster who habitually dressed in 
C04  32 virginal white.<p/>
C04  33 <p_>Talking with her <quote|>"visitors," as she calls the audience, 
C04  34 she confides the facts and emotional content of her life, 
C04  35 discussing the <quote|>"austere" father who never kissed her good 
C04  36 night, the brother she adored, the married Presbyterian minister 
C04  37 who made her lonely heart soar, the Atlantic Monthly editor who was 
C04  38 both mentor and crushing critic to her.<p/>
C04  39 <p_>Interwoven, of course, are passages of Dickinson's glorious 
C04  40 poetry, touching on her recurrent themes of death, nature, 
C04  41 unrequited love and immortality.<p/>
C04  42 <p_><quote_>"I dream about father every night, always a different 
C04  43 dream,"<quote/> she says after speaking of Squire Dickinson's 
C04  44 death. <quote_>"His heart was pure and terrible."<quote/><p/>
C04  45 <p_>Or, absorbing her mentor's refusal to publish her poems, she 
C04  46 asserts, <quote_>"My business is to sing. What difference does it 
C04  47 make if no one listens?"<quote/>
C04  48 <p_>And, naturally, <quote_>"Hope is the thing with feathers that 
C04  49 perches in the soul."<quote/><p/>
C04  50 <p_>Hunter, moving comfortably over Allen D. Cornell's evocative 
C04  51 set with its carefully arranged antiques, takes us on Dickinson's 
C04  52 journey from hopeful youth to underappreciated artist. Her long 
C04  53 fingers comb through the gossamer light as she emphasizes a point 
C04  54 or exudes excitement.<p/>
C04  55 <p_>The performance is solid, professional. What it lacks, though, 
C04  56 is a kind of inhabiting passion, a deep communication of the 
C04  57 contradictory soul that was Emily Dickinson. One of the poet's 
C04  58 comments about a friend and fellow writer could just as well 
C04  59 describe Hunter's work in <tf_>The Belle of Amherst<tf/>: 
C04  60 <quote_>"She has the facts, but not the 
C04  61 phosphorescence."<quote/><p/>
C04  62 
C04  63 <h_><p_>Weight-loss obsessions explored in often-sad <tf_>Famine 
C04  64 Within<tf/><p/>
C04  65 <p_>By RENE RODRIGUEZ<p/>
C04  66 <p_>Herald Staff Writer<p/><h/>
C04  67 <p_>Diets. Open the newspaper or turn on the TV, and you're bound 
C04  68 to come across a story or ad dealing with yet another fast way to 
C04  69 lose weight. According to <tf_>The Famine Within<tf/>, an 
C04  70 often-fascinating documentary by Canadian-based filmmaker Katherine 
C04  71 Gilday, one out of every two American women is on a diet at any 
C04  72 given time.<p/>
C04  73 <p_>Through interviews with psychologists, models and their agents, 
C04  74 writers, doctors and normal everyday women, Gilday has taken a look 
C04  75 at a part of American culture that has grown into a billion-dollar 
C04  76 industry. What she has produced is an enlightening, often-sad film 
C04  77 about why some women spend their entire lives battling their own 
C04  78 bodies.<p/>
C04  79 <p_>The documentary is divided into three segments: The first 
C04  80 focuses on the fashion-model industry and its <quote|>"ideal" woman 
C04  81 - 5 feet, 11 inches, 115 pounds, measurements 35-25-35 (even agents 
C04  82 admit that this ideal is very hard to find). Since the 1960s, the 
C04  83 film tells us, the gap between the <quote|>"average" American woman 
C04  84 and this <quote|>"ideal" has ballooned. What's worse, Gilday notes, 
C04  85 today's fashion models have become role models for younger women, 
C04  86 and even little girls, who will do their best to reach that 
C04  87 unrealistic ideal.<p/>
C04  88 <p_>Next comes a look at anorexia nervosa, the eating disorder that 
C04  89 causes mostly young women to starve themselves. <quote_>"I'd rather 
C04  90 be dead than fat,"<quote/> one anorexic woman says nervously into 
C04  91 the camera. The final section deals with bulimia, another eating 
C04  92 disorder in which the sufferer gorges and then forces herself to 
C04  93 vomit. The interviews here are among the film's most painful.<p/>
C04  94 <p_>At its best, <tf_>The Famine Within<tf/> explores the American 
C04  95 female psyche and why women often go to extreme lengths to achieve 
C04  96 the popular image of beauty. In modern society, Gilday states, 
C04  97 obesity is a moral, not physical, trait; being fat is often 
C04  98 associated with being lazy, dirty or stupid, a connection of which 
C04  99 we're often only subconsciously aware.<p/>
C04 100 <p_>The film covers a lot of ground and is full of revealing, 
C04 101 sometimes startling bits of information: One California study, for 
C04 102 example, found that 80 percent of fourth-grade girls have already 
C04 103 been on their first diet.<p/>
C04 104 <p_>But Gilday tends to overuse the 'talking head' shots, and the 
C04 105 material she uses to connect her interviews - shots of models on a 
C04 106 runway, women on a beach - aren't always very interesting. And 
C04 107 toward the film's end, some of the subjects repeat what has already 
C04 108 been said.<p/>
C04 109 <p_>Still, <tf_>The Famine Within<tf/> is a stimulating look at a 
C04 110 widespread American phenomenon. After seeing it, you'll never think 
C04 111 of miracle diets or lose-weight-quick schemes in the same way.<p/>
C04 112 
C04 113 <h_><p_>RECORD REVIEWS<p/>
C04 114 <p_><tf_>King King<tf/> brings the real blues to life<p/><h/>
C04 115 <p_><*_>black-square<*/><tf_>The Red Devils,<tf/> <tf_>King 
C04 116 King,<tf/> Def American<p/>
C04 117 <p_>MICHAEL CORCORAN<p/>
C04 118 <p_>Dallas Morning News<p/>
C04 119 <p_>With shovels of dirt thrown down by creative laziness, horn 
C04 120 charts, yuppies and something called the Fabulous Thunderbirds, the 
C04 121 blues are dead. Or so I thought until greeted with this 
C04 122 scintillating debut. Not since Muddy Waters' mid-'70s band 
C04 123 (featuring Jerry Portnoy, Guitar Jr., Pinetop Perkins and others) 
C04 124 has a blues group had such a good sense about what is so thrilling 
C04 125 about real blues. That these five guys are young, white Los 
C04 126 Angelenos doesn't detract from their powerful performance. The Red 
C04 127 Devils do for the blues what Dwight Yoakam did for country six 
C04 128 years ago.<p/>
C04 129 <p_>The franchise here is singer-harmonica player Lester Butler. 
C04 130 Besides blowing a cool, dusty harp, he's a singer who reaches down, 
C04 131 deep down, to pull out beads of emotion. Though most of the songs 
C04 132 are covers of artists such as Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, 
C04 133 Junior Wells and Muddy Waters, Butler is no mere imitator. He 
C04 134 sounds like he's earned the right to play the blues.<p/>
C04 135 <p_>Chalk up another big victory for producer Rick Rubin in his 
C04 136 quest to return grit, sweat and street to modern music. Even though 
C04 137 this record starts to drag a little halfway until the ending - 
C04 138 which almost becomes a relief because of too much compulsory 
C04 139 riffing - for several glorious minutes, the Red Devils revive the 
C04 140 blues.<p/>
C04 141 
C04 142 <p_><tf_>English Chamber Orchestra,<tf/> <tf_>World Anthems,<tf/> 
C04 143 RCA-Victor<p/>
C04 144 <p_>TOM MAURSTAD<p/>
C04 145 <p_>Dallas Morning News<p/>
C04 146 <p_>I know what you're thinking: What would anyone want with an 
C04 147 album of 30 national anthems? It IS true that the scenario in which 
C04 148 one would want to cue up, say, Norway's national anthem 
C04 149 (<foreign_>Ja, vi elsker dette lander<foreign/>) is an elusive one. 
C04 150 Which makes it tempting to view this timely collection as one of 
C04 151 the more absurd examples of the marketing bonanza that has 
C04 152 overtaken the Olympic experience, now more a selling spree than a 
C04 153 sporting event.<p/>
C04 154 <p_>Then again, an album gathering national anthems is at least an 
C04 155 interesting product. After enduring that procession of crassness, 
C04 156 the songs-videos making up <tf_>Barcelona Gold<tf/> (the official 
C04 157 collection of Olympic-inspired songs by contemporary pop artists), 
C04 158 the Lithuanian anthem sounds pretty good. In fact, listening to 30 
C04 159 national anthems strung together makes for instructive 
C04 160 listening.<p/>
C04 161 <p_>Because I recognized only a handful of these anthems, I was 
C04 162 able to play the game in which I tried to name that country. 
C04 163 Consequently, I discovered how discrete the relationship between a 
C04 164 country and its anthem can be (with so many featuring a regally 
C04 165 blaring brace of horns, I kept guessing Austria). Another quickly 
C04 166 evident pattern is how so many anthems are military processionals, 
C04 167 calls-to-arms marches (such as Egypt's <tf_>Hail, Gallant 
C04 168 Troops<tf/>). It makes you think about how seemingly intractable is 
C04 169 the rooting of national identity in war-making. Or maybe I've just 
C04 170 been watching too much CNN lately.<p/>
C04 171 <p_>It remains unclear why this collection was limited to these 
C04 172 countries. Maybe this is something like a greatest-hits package - 
C04 173 the world's Top 30 anthems. Not to sound an unpatriotic note, but 
C04 174 in that context, <tf_>The Star-Spangled Banner<tf/> doesn't fare 
C04 175 very well. I prefer the more forthright self<?_>-<?/>celebration of 
C04 176 Hungary's anthem, <tf_>God Bless the Hungarians<tf/>, or Ethiopia's 
C04 177 30-second trumpet exercise with the post<?_>-<?/>modern title, 
C04 178 <tf_>Instrumental<tf/>. I can't wait for the extended dance mix.<p/>
C04 179 
C04 180 <p_><tf_>Al Jarreau,<tf/> <tf_>Heaven and Earth,<tf/> Reprise<p/>
C04 181 <p_>JONATHAN EIG<p/>
C04 182 <p_>Dallas Morning News<p/>
C04 183 <p_>Al Jarreau has been moving steadily away from jazz since the 
C04 184 <tf_>Moonlighting<tf/> theme, and with this album his journey is 
C04 185 nearly complete. The man with the mellow voice pulls out all the 
C04 186 stops in search of the broadest possible audience, but he ends up 
C04 187 trying too hard. Instead of a plush, soulful album that showcases 
C04 188 his silky voice, Jarreau goes pop crazy. The 10 songs take on the 
C04 189 atmosphere of a musical circus - albeit a mellow one - as clammy 
C04 190 synthesizers, electric drum machines and sappy background vocals 
C04 191 compete for attention. Each song seems produced by committee and 
C04 192 performed by a small army. Jarreau's greatest strenghth, his 
C04 193 improvisational doodlings, suddenly sound rehearsed.<p/>
C04 194 <p_><tf_>Blue Angel<tf/> begins with a sharp, funky groove that 
C04 195 quickly becomes mired in a bog of heavy-handed instrumentation. 
C04 196 Even on the straightforward ballad <tf_>Heaven and Earth<tf/>, 
C04 197 synthesizers mimic the singer's every syllable, mocking the album's 
C04 198 only asset. Instead of inducing romance, this sugary goop leaves 
C04 199 the listener feeling sticky. <tf_>Superfine Love<tf/> is not 
C04 200 content to open with a pretty horn solo or a simple whistle, so it 
C04 201 uses both. Still, it's the best song on the album because it 
C04 202 maintains a relatively gentle swing for Jarreau to work out on.<p/>
C04 203 <p_>If there is a nod to jazz here, it's Jarreau's stringy 
C04 204 arrangement of Miles Davis' <tf_>Blue in Green<tf/>. But the pop 
C04 205 singer can't leave it alone. After a few choruses of pleasant if 
C04 206 uninspiring swing, he flicks the echo switch on his microphone, 
C04 207 cues the electric bass and punches up an even less inspiring 
C04 208 hyperactive rhythm.<p/>
C04 209 <p_>If record buyers reward this effort, expect Jarreau to drop 
C04 210 even the pretense of jazz on future efforts.<p/>
C04 211 
C04 212 <h_><p_>ANN WHITE THEATER PRESENTS WALLS DON'T TALK<p/>
C04 213 <p_>By GEORGE CAPEWELL<p/>
C04 214 <p_>Special to The Herald<p/><h/>
C04 215 <p_>Jody Hart's The Walls Don't Talk to Me Anymore - winner of the 
C04 216 eighth annual Ann White Theatre New Playwright Competition - 
C04 217 aspires to be a morality play for the '90s, and it partly succeeds. 
C04 218 But much of its message is diffused through old-fashioned 
C04 219 overextension.<p/>
C04 220 <p_>Selected from among more than 500 manuscripts submitted, the 
C04 221 play is about a small group of teenagers who ingratiate themselves 
C04 222 with an 84-year-old man, then go about methodically stealing his 
C04 223 most prized possessions.<p/>
C04 224 <p_>Everett (Charles Mace) and Harry (Gust Miller), two very 
C04 225 different men, have shared the same park bench for the last five 
C04 226 years. Harry spends his time feeding pigeons and expounding his own 
C04 227 special brand of cynicism; Everett, a former English teacher, has 
C04 228 lived a rather protected life, occupied for the most part by 
C04 229 intellectual pursuits. (Sounds an awful lot like Herb Gardner's I'm 
C04 230 Not Rappaport.) One day, two gruff teenage girls, Gina (Carol Ann 
C04 231 Ready) and Patsy (Lori Sherman), engage the older men in 
C04 232 conversation. Everett befriends the girls and after a second 
C04 233 meeting, invites them to his condominium. Everett's nephew, Martin 
C04 234 (Jeff Stevenson), wants him to sell the condo, and although 
C04 235 Martin's intentions are not totally amoral, Everett is well aware 
C04 236 that his only living relative covets his small estate.<p/>
C04 237 
C05   1 <#FROWN:C05\><h_><p_>MAGAZINES/BY DEIRDRE DONAHUE<p/>
C05   2 <p_>Revamped 'Bazaar' a picture of elegance<p/><h/>
C05   3 <p_>We all have our blind spots. And, indeed, some of us cherish 
C05   4 them as though they were distinctive leopard spots revealing 
C05   5 character. Quite simply, this reader doesn't entirely understand 
C05   6 the purpose of fashion magazines and their ceaseless chronicling of 
C05   7 changing hemlines, color schemes and fresh new faces and forms. 
C05   8 Frankly, it always seems a bit sad that by the time most women have 
C05   9 the money to devote to fashion, they no longer possess the 
C05  10 waistlines nor the firm young flesh so necessary for <tf_>haute 
C05  11 couture<tf/>. Sometimes those <tf_>Women's Wear Daily<tf/> society 
C05  12 page icons end up resembling E.T. in their designer frocks.<p/>
C05  13 <p_>These caveats aside, the newly redesigned, much-anticipated, 
C05  14 thoroughly gossiped about <tf_>Harper's Bazaar<tf/> displays in its 
C05  15 September issue a calm, elegant new design and absolutely lush 
C05  16 photos by Patrick Demarchelier. His work displays a posed 
C05  17 perfection that seems to celebrate the pre<?_>-<?/>'60s, less 
C05  18 hysterical world of fashion photography. Indeed, his work is so 
C05  19 spectacular, it makes the other photo spreads in this issue look a 
C05  20 touch drab by contrast. Compared to the sometimes frantic 
C05  21 <tf|>Vogue, the new <tf_>Harper's Bazaar<tf/> unveils a distinct 
C05  22 simplicity, although the typeface is so tiny as to strain the 
C05  23 eyeballs.<p/>
C05  24 <p_>The articles explore topics ranging from the fate of ritzy 
C05  25 department stores to Detroit-born designer Anna Sui to issues of 
C05  26 women's health and multiculturalism in the schools.<p/>
C05  27 <p_>But hey, the Hearst organization hired editor Liz Tilberis to 
C05  28 go designer heel to heel with the stylish Anna Wintour at 
C05  29 <tf|>Vogue and those lesser lights at <tf|>Elle and <tf|>Mirabella, 
C05  30 over the nebulous direction of style. You know, all that <tf|>elan, 
C05  31 fluffy stuff women are so conflicted about: i.e., can a female 
C05  32 neurosurgeon look at a series of pages devoted to how designers 
C05  33 treat the neck, the wrist, the waist this season and not have her 
C05  34 IQ drop several points? Or is this just reverse sexist snobbery on 
C05  35 the part of the blusher-shunning feminists? After all, no one 
C05  36 claims that <tf_>Car&Driver<tf/> requires serious mental lifting on 
C05  37 the part of all those male readers who happily inhale the 
C05  38 Lamborghini dream. They never fear that wives and girlfriends will 
C05  39 consider them rivetheads on the basis of their heavy-metal 
C05  40 manuals.<p/>
C05  41 <p_>And in the end, both fashion and car magazines are both in the 
C05  42 fantasy business of youth, beauty, adornment and the magical dream 
C05  43 of never saying die.<p/>
C05  44 
C05  45 <h_><p_>BOOK REVIEW<p/>
C05  46 <p_>Leonard's agreeable but diluted 'Rum Punch'<p/>
C05  47 <p_>Rum Punch<p/>
C05  48 <p_>By Elmore Leonard<p/>
C05  49 <p_>Delacorte Press<p/>
C05  50 <p_>297 pp., $21.<p/>
C05  51 <p_>By Peter S. Prichard<p/>
C05  52 <p_>USA TODAY<p/><h/>
C05  53 <p_><tf_>Rum Punch<tf/> is not Elmore Leonard's best work.<p/>
C05  54 <p_>Oh, the sharp dialogue is there. Leonard's ear for the cadence 
C05  55 of street talk is as keen as ever. And the lowlifes are their usual 
C05  56 despicable selves. The Principal Villain, gun-runner and killer 
C05  57 Ordell Robbie, thinks he's as slick and untouchable as John Gotti 
C05  58 thought he was.<p/>
C05  59 <p_>But <tf_>Rum Punch<tf/> is, well, not <tf/>dull, but maybe 
C05  60 <tf|>thin is the best word. Not quite the novel you would expect 
C05  61 from the man critics call <quote_>"America's finest crime fiction 
C05  62 writer."<quote/><p/>
C05  63 <p_>I would argue with that. I think James Lee Burke, with his New 
C05  64 Orleans detective, Dave Robicheaux, is better. I think Tony 
C05  65 Hillerman, whose Navajo mysteries evoke the spirit of the 
C05  66 Southwest, constructs more compelling protagonists. Carl Hiaasen, 
C05  67 who does south Florida at its most outrageous, is funnier. Charles 
C05  68 Willeford, the <tf_>Miami Herald<tf/> reviewer who wrote several 
C05  69 good crime novels before he died, did bad guys as well or better 
C05  70 than Leonard.<p/>
C05  71 <p_>Even so, <tf_>Rum Punch<tf/> keeps you turning the pages. 
C05  72 Ordell Robbie steals guns, rips off guns from nutso neo-Nazis and 
C05  73 sells them to crazed Colombian drug dealers. Then he blows away 
C05  74 anyone who might snitch on him.<p/>
C05  75 <p_>Max Cherry sells bail bonds. He gets mixed up with Ordell and 
C05  76 Jackie Burke, the pretty airline attendant who smuggles Ordell's 
C05  77 money into the USA from his stash in the Bahamas. Then they get all 
C05  78 mixed up together, each trying to rip the other off, 
C05  79 <*_>a-grave<*/> la <tf_>The Grifters<tf/>. The big question is 
C05  80 whether Max Cherry will stay straight or go on the grift. 
C05  81 <quote_>"You plan to rip me off,"<quote/> Ordell tells Max. 
C05  82 <quote_>"(But) lost your nerve. Gonna have to stay a bail bondsman, 
C05  83 deal with the scum while you try to act respectable, huh? The rest 
C05  84 of your life."<quote/><p/>
C05  85 <p_>Trying to figure out whether Max will beat the lowlifes or join 
C05  86 them makes for decent entertainment in this mildly satisfying 
C05  87 summer book.<p/>
C05  88 
C05  89 <h_><p_>BOOK REVIEW<p/>
C05  90 <p_>Edwardian letters, intimate literature<p/>
C05  91 <p_>The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume I: The Private 
C05  92 Years. 1884-1914<p/>
C05  93 <p_>Edited by Nicholas Griffin<p/>
C05  94 <p_>Houghton Mifflin<p/>
C05  95 <p_>553 pp., $35<p/>
C05  96 <p_>Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold 
C05  97 Nicolson<p/>
C05  98 <p_>Edited by Nigel Nicolson<p/>
C05  99 <p_>Putnam, 452 pp., $29.95<p/>
C05 100 <p_>By Diane Cole<p/>
C05 101 <p_>Special for USA TODAY<p/><h/>
C05 102 <p_>Read together, <tf_>The Selected Letters of Bertrand 
C05 103 Russell<tf/> and <tf_>Vita and Harold<tf/> provide the spiciest 
C05 104 picture of Edwardian England imaginable. Here are the ups and downs 
C05 105 of marriages among patrician Britons whose extramarital flings and 
C05 106 romantic flights would put even bohemians today to shame. Yet even 
C05 107 as their private foibles unfold, Russell in his letters and Harold 
C05 108 Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West in theirs also display the wit, 
C05 109 intellect and qualities of mind that not only made them attractive 
C05 110 to their contemporaries, but captivate us today.<p/>
C05 111 <p_>Famous as a philosopher, mathematician and political idealist, 
C05 112 Russell eventually won the Nobel Prize for literature, and these 
C05 113 letters demonstrate his abundant gifts not only as a thinker, but 
C05 114 as a stylist.<p/>
C05 115 <p_>Nicholas Griffin has edited this first of two projected volumes 
C05 116 of selected letters (Russell's total correspondence numbers 40,000 
C05 117 to 50,000, Griffin estimates) with an emphasis on Russell's more 
C05 118 private dilemmas. In doing so, he has crafted an informative, 
C05 119 entertaining and often moving novelistic chronicle of Russel's 
C05 120 passage from the earnestness of young adulthood through the muddles 
C05 121 of early middle age.<p/>
C05 122 <p_>Born in 1872 to one of England's most famous political 
C05 123 families, Russell suffered the deaths of both his parents by the 
C05 124 time he was 4 and was brought up in relative seclusion by his 
C05 125 grandmother. She struggled to hold on to her favorite grandson, 
C05 126 even in adulthood, by setting up extraordinary emotional obstacles 
C05 127 to his marriage to Alys Pearsall Smith. But as his letters show, 
C05 128 not only was Russell equally tenacious - he and Alys wed in 1894 - 
C05 129 he seemed to thrive on emotional turmoil. As soon as the scene 
C05 130 seemed set for a comfortable married life, Russell slowly but 
C05 131 surely became disenchanted with Alys and devoted himself for some 
C05 132 years almost exclusively to his work. The result was some of the 
C05 133 most brilliant philosophical writing of the century, but inwardly 
C05 134 Russell felt he had become <quote_>"a logic machine."<quote/><p/>
C05 135 <p_>Then, in 1911, he met Lady Ottoline Morrell, the famous society 
C05 136 hostess who became the love of his life - an emotionally tumultuous 
C05 137 courtship that spawned Russell's most passionate, despairing, 
C05 138 charming and agitated letters, sometimes all at once.<p/>
C05 139 <p_>Like Russell, the novelist Sackville-West and her 
C05 140 diplomat-writer husband Nicolson also seemed to compose a letter 
C05 141 for every mood. But how different their moods - and their loves - 
C05 142 were. Russell, famous logician though he was, is all romantic 
C05 143 intensity in his courtship of Alys and his wooing of Lady Ottoline. 
C05 144 By contrast, Nicolson and Sackville-West display a sense of 
C05 145 perspective (and, under the circumstances, a singularly strong 
C05 146 commitment to their on<?_>-<?/>going marriage) even when their 
C05 147 independent love affairs are at their most intimate.<p/>
C05 148 <p_>Vita and Harold married in 1913 and had two sons, the youngest 
C05 149 of whom, Nigel, wrote the well-known memoir of his parents' unusual 
C05 150 union, <tf_>Portrait of a Marriage<tf/>, to which this collection 
C05 151 of letters is an apt companion. Both books dramatize the mutual 
C05 152 devotion these partners shared throughout 50 years of marriage; 
C05 153 both books also make the reader wonder at how they managed to 
C05 154 balance that allegiance with the many homosexual and lesbian love 
C05 155 affairs each had and sometimes discussed with each other.<p/>
C05 156 <p_>To judge from these letters, part of the answer lies in simple 
C05 157 logistics. Nicolson preferred the city, where he kept a 
C05 158 <tf_>pied-<*_>a-grave<*/>-terre, while Sackville-West kept 
C05 159 primarily to their country estate, where she wrote her books and 
C05 160 cultivated what became world-famous gardens. Nicolson's diplomatic 
C05 161 duties also took him abroad frequently, usually alone.<p/>
C05 162 <p_>With so much physical separation, each may have felt freer to 
C05 163 develop emotional ties outside their time together. Moreover, 
C05 164 writing these letters seemed to serve as a way of 
C05 165 re<?_>-<?/>assuring each other of the deeper ties of friendship, 
C05 166 loyalty and - yes - love that bound them.<p/>
C05 167 <p_>Thus their correspondence, like Russell's, provides sympathetic 
C05 168 insight into otherwise mystifying arrangements. Both collections 
C05 169 also make us privy to the storms and calms that only international 
C05 170 telephone operators could possibly know if these most literate of 
C05 171 letter writers lived today.<p/>
C05 172 
C05 173 <h_><p_>TV PREVIEW/MATT ROUSH<p/>
C05 174 <p_>Shining knights may not save 'Cross'<p/>
C05 175 <p_>NEW SERIES<p/>
C05 176 <p_>Covington Cross<p/>
C05 177 <p_>ABC, tonight, 10 ET/PT<p/>
C05 178 <p_><*_>star<*/><*_>star<*/> (out of four)<p/><h/>
C05 179 <p_>There's plenty of iron, but not near enough irony, in the 
C05 180 squishy swashbuckling of ABC's inexplicable <tf_>Covington 
C05 181 Cross<tf/>, the first and far from the best (or worst) new show of 
C05 182 the traditional fall TV season.<p/>
C05 183 <p_>ABC couldn't seem to wait to inflict this cheerful anachronism 
C05 184 on us, as if all too aware how tough a sell this 
C05 185 knaves-and-waifs-in-shining-armor saga would be. Tonight's pilot 
C05 186 repeats a week from Friday night, with new episodes not expected 
C05 187 until Sept. 19, when it moves to low-impact Saturday.<p/>
C05 188 <p_>Having already exhausted the teen Western in <tf_>The Young 
C05 189 Riders<tf/>, ABC now leapfrogs several centuries backward for this 
C05 190 lavishly produced but creaky <tf_>Excalibur Jr.<tf/><p/>
C05 191 <p_>More like a medieval <tf_>High Chaparral<tf/>, the biggest 
C05 192 charge in this pilot - which I caught this weekend during previews 
C05 193 at a movie theater - comes after a rambunctious opening of 
C05 194 swordplay and havoc, interrupted when grumpy dad Sir Thomas Gray 
C05 195 (Nigel Terry) yells at his errant-knight sons: <quote_>"How many 
C05 196 times have I told you: <tf_>Not in the castle<tf/>!"<quote/><p/>
C05 197 <p_>Cute. Cute. But something short of a hoot.<p/>
C05 198 <p_>As the convoluted plot gets under way, the tone shifts from 
C05 199 this sort of deadpan <tf_>Full Castle<tf/> sitcom spoofery (raunchy 
C05 200 table manners, rebel kids, what's a widower dad to do) to deadly 
C05 201 earnest melodrama with obviously villainous scheming neighbors. 
C05 202 They wear black.<p/>
C05 203 <p_>Is this a joke? Is it for (un)real? A bit of both, and not 
C05 204 enough of either.<p/>
C05 205 <p_>Two of Sir Thomas' boys are so interchangeable one will be sent 
C05 206 to the Crusades by the time episode 2 rolls around, replaced by yet 
C05 207 another brother. That leaves us with youngest bro Cedric, a 
C05 208 reluctant clerical student who wants to be knight. He's played by 
C05 209 punkish Glenn Quinn, best known as <tf|>Roseanne's oldest 
C05 210 daughter's squeeze and who's not entirely at ease in a jerkin.<p/>
C05 211 <p_>Similarly out of place is Ione Skye <tf_>(... Say 
C05 212 Anything)<tf/> as proto-feminist daughter Eleanor. She prefers 
C05 213 archery to harp lessons, and says her lines with flat zoned-out 
C05 214 inflections that make her seem as if she'd beamed in from some 
C05 215 suburban mall Renaissance fair.<p/>
C05 216 <p_>Maybe this is what's meant by an <quote|>"international" 
C05 217 cast.<p/>
C05 218 <p_>With a grating score that sounds like John Williams at his most 
C05 219 redundant, and plotting so familiar it ends in a duel fought in 
C05 220 slo-mo, <tf|>Covington is just the first <tf|>Cross ABC will have 
C05 221 to bear this fall.<p/>
C05 222 <p_>But, no doubt, not for long.<p/>
C05 223 
C05 224 <h_><p_>INSIDE TV<p/>
C05 225 <p_>Andrew gives momentum to The Weather Channel<p/><h/>
C05 226 <p_>Long the lightning rod of material for stand-up comics, The 
C05 227 Weather Channel has been at the center of the Hurricane Andrew 
C05 228 story.<p/>
C05 229 <p_><quote_>"We've tweaked the programming to really feature the 
C05 230 hurricane,"<quote/> says Stu Ostro, the channel's senior 
C05 231 <}_><-|>meterologist<+|>meteorologist<}/>. <quote_>"We've sent a 
C05 232 crew to the Miami area to file reports not only for us but for a 
C05 233 number of local stations."<quote/><p/>
C05 234 <p_>Local outlets that are affiliates of the news co-op Conus have 
C05 235 had live Weather Channel updates, which can only bolster the 
C05 236 channel's identity. <quote_>"This is the political convention, the 
C05 237 World Series and the Super Bowl all rolled up into one,"<quote/> 
C05 238 Ostro says. <quote_>"As early as (Sunday) morning, when the other 
C05 239 TV media were giving the storm little attention, we were already at 
C05 240 the update desk saying how dangerous it was. That lets people know 
C05 241 we are not a joke."<quote/><p/>
C05 242 
C06   1 <#FROWN:C06\><h_><p_>Jackie Gleason's Dark Side Revealed in New 
C06   2 Bio<p/>
C06   3 <p_>The Life and Legend of Jackie Gleason.<p/>
C06   4 <p_>By William Henry III. Doubleday, $21.95.<p/>
C06   5 <p_>Kay Gardella<p/><h/>
C06   6 <p_>He had everything: talent, fame, money and power. Jackie 
C06   7 Gleason's public adored him. His 'Honeymooners' is spoken of as one 
C06   8 of the great classics of television's half<?_>-<?/>-century.<p/>
C06   9 <p_>Yet, with it all, 'The Great One', as he called himself, had a 
C06  10 dark side. He was deeply sensitive, introspective, and suffered 
C06  11 fits of depression, loneliness and anger. If you were a Gleason 
C06  12 fan, then let Time magazine's culture critic William Henry III take 
C06  13 you along on a journey through the deepest recesses of this great 
C06  14 comic's life and times in his excellent biography, 'The Life and 
C06  15 Legend of Jackie Gleason.'<p/>
C06  16 <p_>This is not your typical celebrity book, but a real 
C06  17 journalist's-eye-view of Gleason, warts and all, a tome that 
C06  18 captures the man's flamboyance, generosity and showmanship, as well 
C06  19 as his many faults, insecurities and contradictions.<p/>
C06  20 <p_>It's the end result of 150 interviews with those who worked 
C06  21 closely with Gleason - including Art Carney, Joyce Randolph, Sheila 
C06  22 McRae, Audrey Meadows, his writers, friends and enemies. Although 
C06  23 Henry, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, conceded in an interview 
C06  24 that he found <quote_>"very few who disliked him."<quote/><p/>
C06  25 <p_>That even includes the great comic's head writer, Coleman 
C06  26 Jacoby, who, as Henry said, <quote_>"had epic battles over credit 
C06  27 where serious money was involved. Still, he considered Gleason the 
C06  28 most talented and interesting man he ever worked for."<quote/><p/>
C06  29 <p_>The thoroughly researched, exquisitely written biography covers 
C06  30 Gleason's life from his poor boyhood in Brooklyn, where at an early 
C06  31 age his father deserted him and his mother, through his early 
C06  32 struggling years as an entertainer and his ultimate success on 
C06  33 television (he spent 18 years on CBS), films and on Broadway ('Take 
C06  34 Me Along'). Along the way there were three marriages. The book is 
C06  35 about a man who, despite his outgoing personality, remained an 
C06  36 enigma to many.<p/>
C06  37 <p_><quote_>"Who was Jackie Gleason?"<quote/> writes Henry. 
C06  38 <quote_>"To Art Carney, he was 'the greatest talent I ever worked 
C06  39 with,' but far more boss than friend, so distant that he would be 
C06  40 out of touch for years, until the next deal came along. To Joyce 
C06  41 Randolph, the original Trixie on 'The Honeymooners', Gleason was an 
C06  42 unknowable man, hidden behind psychic walls, touchy and 
C06  43 temperamental, whom she didn't even dream of inviting to her 
C06  44 wedding. But to Audrey Meadows (who played Alice Kramden), Gleason 
C06  45 was a man of boundless warmth and great restraint, a genius on 
C06  46 stage and almost a saint off it."<quote/><p/>
C06  47 <p_>What intrigued him about Gleason, the 42-year-old Henry said, 
C06  48 was that <quote_>"the bigger and more extreme Gleason got, the more 
C06  49 real he became,"<quote/> when usually, <quote_>"most actors, to 
C06  50 convey reality, pull everything in until they're almost 
C06  51 catatonic.<p/>
C06  52 <p_>"Borrowing George Abbott's old phrase, he was louder, faster 
C06  53 and funnier. He consumed more, did more, sinned more, repented 
C06  54 more, and simply plunged into life when most of us dip our toes 
C06  55 into it."<quote/><p/>
C06  56 <p_>If as the book suggests, Gleason was a moody and angry man at 
C06  57 times, he was also loyal and given to bursts of generosity.<p/>
C06  58 <p_>As Henry, quoting sources, said: <quote_>"If you were his 
C06  59 secretary, you'd be it as long as you could get yourself into the 
C06  60 chair and answer the phone. And if you were his driver, you'd be it 
C06  61 until your license was revoked."<quote/><p/>
C06  62 <p_>For those who miss Gleason, and appreciated his talent, Henry's 
C06  63 book will be a revelation. The author, who writes that he felt like 
C06  64 the reporter in 'Citizen Kane', after all the searching and 
C06  65 digging, and exposing of his subject's darker side, said he still 
C06  66 admires the man. <quote_>"There were aspects of him that were very 
C06  67 brave, and even noble, but I wouldn't have wanted to work for 
C06  68 him."<quote/><p/>
C06  69 
C06  70 <h_><p_>Cuba: A Journey. By Jacobo Timerman.<p/>
C06  71 <p_>Translated by Toby Talbot, Vintage paperback, $9<p/>
C06  72 <p_>Charles Solomon.<p/><h/>
C06  73 <p_>Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman casts an unflinching eye 
C06  74 on the self-proclaimed 'workers' paradise' of Castro's Cuba in this 
C06  75 vivid journal.<p/>
C06  76 <p_>Instead of a Marxist Elysium, he finds a depressingly typical 
C06  77 dictatorship, whose ruler, <foreign_>'El Commandante'<foreign/>, 
C06  78 insists on being referred to by a string of titles as long as any 
C06  79 Holy Roman Emperor's.<p/>
C06  80 <p_>A former prisoner of conscience, Timerman has firsthand 
C06  81 knowledge of the ruses despots employ, and he immediatly notes the 
C06  82 glaring discrepancy between Castro's image as the caring, 
C06  83 all-knowing savior of his country and his alleged ignorance of the 
C06  84 mismanagement and corruption that have reduced the inhabitants of 
C06  85 this once-prosperous island to poverty.<p/>
C06  86  
C06  87 
C06  88 <h_><p_>Kai Bird Introduces Readers to 'The Chairman'<p/>
C06  89 <p_>THE CHAIRMAN: JOHN J. MCCLOY, THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN 
C06  90 ESTABLISHMENT. By Kai Bird. Simon&Schuster, $30.<p/>
C06  91 <p_>Bill Barnhart<p/><h/>
C06  92 <p_>Writer Kai Bird has produced a long, intensely researched 
C06  93 account of the man who was called the chairman of America's 
C06  94 establishment, yet who is unknown to most Americans.<p/>
C06  95 <p_>Despite humble beginnings in Philadelphia, lawyer John J. 
C06  96 McCloy became the essence of the behind-the-scenes operative, 
C06  97 advising and obeying presidents and tycoons from the 1930s until 
C06  98 his death in 1989.<p/>
C06  99 <p_>Walking in McCloy's footsteps, we tread an astounding amount of 
C06 100 American history and witness the development of an establishment 
C06 101 mind-set that brought us Iran-Contra on the one hand and a 
C06 102 diminished nuclear threat on the other. Along the way, we see 
C06 103 McCloy reshape one of America's leading banks, Chase Manhattan, as 
C06 104 well as the World Bank. He helped set the tone for relations 
C06 105 between the country's private-sector elite and its federal 
C06 106 government.<p/>
C06 107 <p_>McCloy, from his base in the Wall Street legal fraternity, was 
C06 108 a ubiquitous participant in world history, who shunned publicity 
C06 109 and never stood for electoral review by the American public. As 
C06 110 Bird tells it, he was not motivated by money but by a keen instinct 
C06 111 for problem-solving and a sense of duty. He never displayed power 
C06 112 or wealth ostentatiously and worked well into his 80s to support 
C06 113 his ailing wife.<p/>
C06 114 <p_>The peculiarities of McCloy's beliefs worked themselves into 
C06 115 the core of American policy, especially foreign policy, under the 
C06 116 last six presidents. Deeply involved in investigations of German 
C06 117 espionage during World War I, McCloy came to espouse a strong - 
C06 118 some would say radical - ends-justifies-the-means approach to 
C06 119 national security.<p/>
C06 120 <p_>The roots of Central Intelligence Agency excesses, and even the 
C06 121 Watergate burglary, can be traced to the McCloy mind set. He 
C06 122 aquiesced in the internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent 
C06 123 during World War II and facilitated the release of Nazi war 
C06 124 criminals to improve U.S. relations with postwar Germany. <p/>
C06 125 <p_>On the other hand, he worked to integrate the U.S. Army. He was 
C06 126 a strong advocate of nuclear disarmament negotiations and pushed a 
C06 127 liberal view toward the sovereignty of such pivotal countries as 
C06 128 Egypt. <p/>
C06 129 <p_>Excellent historical writing draws on personal dilemmas to 
C06 130 illuminate events. In this regard, Bird has produced a monumental 
C06 131 achievement. At the risk of overstating McCloy's role, Bird 
C06 132 presents history through the decisions McCloy made in his 
C06 133 career.<p/>
C06 134 <p_>Excellent biography, on the other hand, requires more. And if 
C06 135 'The Chairman' can be faulted, it would be for not probing deeper 
C06 136 into McCloy. The beginning and end of the book explore McCloy's 
C06 137 personality and character. In between, we learn a lot of McCloy but 
C06 138 not enough about him. There is little discussion of his 
C06 139 relationship with his wife of 56 years, Ellen, or their children. 
C06 140 We don't hear enough about McCloy from those who knew him best 
C06 141 professionally and socially.<p/>
C06 142 <p_>Just as the monarchy seems to be unraveling in tabloid 
C06 143 headlines in Great Britain, America's gentlemanly East Coast 
C06 144 establishment - our approximation of royalty - has lost much of its 
C06 145 credibility and utility in an age of no-holds-barred public debate 
C06 146 and opened-collared billionaires like Microsoft's Bill Gates.<p/>
C06 147 <p_>The idea of an American elite imbued with a beneficent sense of 
C06 148 America's place in the world and able to <quote_>"rise above 
C06 149 private interests"<quote/> and <quote_>"discern public 
C06 150 good,"<quote/> as Bird puts it, is looking a bit threadbare and 
C06 151 even dangerous. It's important to walk in John McCloy's footsteps, 
C06 152 but there don't seem to be many Wall Street lawyers willing or able 
C06 153 to fill his shoes.<p/>
C06 154 
C06 155 
C06 156 <h_><p_>THE NEW ROADSIDE AMERICA.<p/>
C06 157 <p_>By Mike Wilkins, Ken Smith and Doug Kirby. <p/>
C06 158 <p_>Fireside paperback, $13.<p/>
C06 159 <p_>Charles Solomon<p/><h/>
C06 160 <p_>Thomas Carlyle wrote that it was America's mission to vulgarize 
C06 161 the world, but this tongue-in-cheek guide to roadside tourist 
C06 162 attractions (with pictures!) suggests that vulgarity, like charity, 
C06 163 begins at home. <p/>
C06 164 <p_>The authors highlight such tacky landmarks as the largest tree 
C06 165 stump, in Kokomo, Ind. (57 feet in circumference); the 4 1/2-story 
C06 166 muskellunge (the world's largest fiberglass structure) at the 
C06 167 Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame in Hayward, Wis.; the Creation 
C06 168 Evidences Museum in Glen Rose, Texas; Riverside, Iowa, which bills 
C06 169 itself as 'The Future Birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk,' and the 
C06 170 $15 million, 45,000-square-foot 'World of Coca-Cola' pavilion in 
C06 171 Atlanta.<p/>
C06 172 <p_>Enterprising readers might copy particularly awful listings and 
C06 173 send them to the kids of people they dislike just before they 
C06 174 depart for a cross-country vacation.<p/>
C06 175 
C06 176 <h_><p_>Larry Powell<p/>
C06 177 <p_>Works on Crime And Punishment<p/><h/>
C06 178 <p_>Crime and Punishment: The king of the crime writers, Elmore 
C06 179 Leonard, is back with <tf_>'Rum Punch'<tf/> (Delacorte, $21), a 
C06 180 novel about a bail bondsman, a stewardess and a gun dealer.<p/>
C06 181 <p_>The stewardess and the bail bondsman concoct a scheme to fleece 
C06 182 the gun dealer, which is a dangerous way to get rich. Like most of 
C06 183 the earlier Leonard novels (he's written 31, with a high degree of 
C06 184 excellence), the twists in the story grow out of his characters' 
C06 185 nature. It's also a funny story, with some of the best dialogue 
C06 186 being written today.<p/>
C06 187 <p_>Jerry Oster, the author of <tf_>'Fixin' To Die'<tf/> (Bantam, 
C06 188 20$), also has a knack for writing dialogue. That's one of the 
C06 189 attractions of his crime tale in which a thief named Elvis Polk 
C06 190 escapes from police custody and is pursued by New York detective 
C06 191 Joe Cullen. The detective appeared in earlier Oster novels. 'Fixin' 
C06 192 To Die' is also about police politics and the private devils that 
C06 193 betray police officers. Oster, former New York newspaper-man, has 
C06 194 the city's sights and sounds down pat.<p/>
C06 195 <p_>As Elmore Leonard knows Florida and Detroit, as Jerry Oster 
C06 196 knows New York City, so Edna Buchanan knows Miami. Buchanan is a 
C06 197 crime reporter who has been covering Miami violence and vice for 20 
C06 198 years. Her book, <tf_>'Never Let Them See You Cry: More From Miami, 
C06 199 America's Hottest Beat'<tf/> (Random House, 20$) is a second 
C06 200 collection of her crime pieces. She claims to have written about 
C06 201 3,000 murder cases in her career and is famous for her hard-boiled, 
C06 202 jived-up leads. If you're just discovering Buchanan, you should 
C06 203 also pick up her first true crime collection, <tf_>'The Corpse Had 
C06 204 a Familiar Face.'<tf/><p/>
C06 205 <p_>Buchanan also published a novel, <tf_>'Nobody Lives 
C06 206 Forever,'<tf/> and has a second work of fiction coming from 
C06 207 Hyperion in the fall. <tf_>'Contents Under Pressure'<tf/> is the 
C06 208 title.<p/>
C06 209 <p_><quote_>"Fiction is so much fun,"<quote/> Buchanan recently 
C06 210 said. <quote_>"It's so liberating. As writers, we like everything 
C06 211 to be tidy. We like to wrap up the loose ends. There are murders 
C06 212 that go unsolved forever, missing people who are never found and 
C06 213 bodies that are never identified - no matter how hard you 
C06 214 try."<quote/><p/>
C06 215 <p_>Buchanan came to Miami on vacation from New Jersey in 1961 and 
C06 216 fell in love with the city. She has been married twice, to a 
C06 217 reporter and to a policeman, and she likes cats.<p/>
C06 218 <p_>Paragon House is publishing a remarkable series of reference 
C06 219 books about crime. Their author is Jay Robert Nash, who won an 
C06 220 Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for his six-volume 
C06 221 Encyclopedia of World Crime. He has written many books about crime, 
C06 222 including the famous volumes on American desperadoes and lawmen 
C06 223 called <tf_>'Bloodletters and Badmen.'<tf/><p/>
C06 224 <p_>The first reference work in the Paragon series was <tf_>'World 
C06 225 Encyclopedia of Organized Crime.'<tf/> The second, recently 
C06 226 published, is <tf_>'World Encyclopedia of 20th Century 
C06 227 Murder.'<tf/> Scheduled in September is <tf_>'Encyclopedia of 
C06 228 Western Lawmen and Outlaws.'<tf/> The hefty volumes, more than 600 
C06 229 pages long and containing 300 illustrations as well as an extensive 
C06 230 bibliography, cost $49.95 each.<p/>
C06 231 <p_>Nash's guide to organized crime contains profiles of individual 
C06 232 gangsters, histories of crime families, and accounts of events such 
C06 233 as the St. Valentine's Day massacre.<p/>
C06 234 
C07   1 <#FROWN:C07\><h_><p_>Belated Tribute to a Visionary<p/>
C07   2 <p_>By AUSTIN CLARKSON<p/><h/>
C07   3 <p_>STEFAN WOLPE'S MUSIC has long been admired for its 
C07   4 uncompromising strength, vitality and adventurousness by 
C07   5 professional composers and performers, but like many other 
C07   6 <*_>e-acute<*/>migr<*_>e-acute<*/>s, Wolpe was never fully at home 
C07   7 or accepted in his adoptive countries. Still, he lived and taught 
C07   8 in New York from 1938 until his death in 1972, so it is with a firm 
C07   9 sense of timing that Parnassus, a New York ensemble led by Anthony 
C07  10 Korf, is marking the 90th anniversary of Wolpe's birth, which 
C07  11 occurred last Tuesday, with the release of an album of his 
C07  12 music.<p/>
C07  13 <p_>Although musicians in Germany, England and elsewhere are now 
C07  14 discovering Wolpe's music, the musicians in New York remain the 
C07  15 principal custodians of his legacy, and the Parnassus CD (Koch 
C07  16 International 7141) is a document that splendidly affirms and 
C07  17 carries forward that tradition. There is no better introduction in 
C07  18 the current CD catalogue to Wolpe's visionary contribution to 
C07  19 20th-century music.<p/>
C07  20 <p_>The eight pieces are well chosen. They range from 1929 to the 
C07  21 year before Wolpe's death in 1972, and show various sides of his 
C07  22 output yet emphasize masterworks of his last decade. Several of 
C07  23 them have been recorded before, but only two have thus far been 
C07  24 heard on CD.<p/>
C07  25 <p_>The earliest item was for a Berlin production of 'Hamlet' in 
C07  26 1929. The five-minute movement for flute, clarinet and cello 
C07  27 probably accompanied the dumb show in the play-within-a-play. A 
C07  28 remarkable vignette, it gives evidence of a richly polyphonic 
C07  29 imagination, fastidious workmanship and an early mastery of free 
C07  30 12-tone Expressionism.<p/>
C07  31 <p_>Wolpe's active service from 1929 to 1933 in the army of 
C07  32 antifascist artists alongside Hanns Eisler, Wladimir Vogel, Ernst 
C07  33 Hermann Meyer and others is recalled by the Three Songs of Bertolt 
C07  34 Brecht, composed for a Brecht tribute at the Hecksher Theater in 
C07  35 Manhattan in 1943. The melodies reflect the agitprop 
C07  36 <foreign|>'Kampflieder' (fighting songs) of the 30's - hard-driven, 
C07  37 modal, acrid, rejecting the allure of Tin Pan Alley - but the 
C07  38 richly textured and harmonized piano parts raise the songs to the 
C07  39 level of recital pieces. One hears in them the ethos that marks so 
C07  40 much of Wolpe's music: a revolutionary utopianism that reconciles a 
C07  41 deeply felt populism with profound faith in the value of the 
C07  42 individual imagination.<p/>
C07  43 <p_><*_>black-square<*/><p/>
C07  44 <p_>After Wolpe fled Berlin in 1933, he settled in Palestine from 
C07  45 1934 to 1938, teaching at the Palestine Conservatory in Jerusalem. 
C07  46 He wrote many solo songs and choral settings of biblical texts and 
C07  47 contemporary Hebrew poems. 'To the Dancemaster' by Chaim Nachmann 
C07  48 Bialik is typical of the poetry of revolt, whether by biblical 
C07  49 prophets or modern-day authors, that moved Wolpe to musical action: 
C07  50 <quote_>"The wrath of our soul -/ our burning heart/ will now be 
C07  51 poured out/ in our raging dance./ And the dance will rise/ with 
C07  52 thunder and lightning/ to terrify the earth/ and stir up the 
C07  53 heavens."<quote/><p/>
C07  54 <p_>Wolpe was fascinated by the sounds of the Semitic languages, 
C07  55 Yemenite folk songs and classical Arabic oud players, but was 
C07  56 opposed to the practice of creating <quote_>"a national Jewish 
C07  57 style along the lines of a chemical formula."<quote/> For his 
C07  58 settings of Hebrew texts he created a ruggedly modernistic yet 
C07  59 tonal idiom richly infused with elements of Middle Eastern melos. 
C07  60 Joyce Castle, mezzo-soprano, and Edmund Niemann, pianist, are 
C07  61 superb partners in the Brecht and Bialik songs. And Alan Kay's 
C07  62 brilliant clarinet adds a wild klezmer quality to the Bialik. The 
C07  63 songs are recorded for the first time here, and Ms. Castle, with 
C07  64 her trenchant voice and lively, accurate enunciation, sets an 
C07  65 enviable standard for Wolpe lieder, in both German and Hebrew.<p/>
C07  66 <p_>The Quartet for Trumpet, Tenor Saxophone, Percussion and Piano, 
C07  67 composed in 1950 and revised in 1952, lies at the juncture of the 
C07  68 first and second phases of Wolpe's career in the United States. 
C07  69 During the 40's Wolpe worked out systems of atonal harmony and 
C07  70 spatial proportions that served as the bases for a series of works 
C07  71 he composed in the 50's, of which the first was the quartet.<p/>
C07  72 <p_>His music of this period has often been likened to the Abstract 
C07  73 Expressionism of his friends Guston, Kline, de Kooning and Rothko. 
C07  74 The forms are nonhierarchical, yet they maintain a charged flow. 
C07  75 The quartet contains music of expansive actions and intense 
C07  76 affects. Wolpe revealed that the work's first movement is a lament 
C07  77 for the suffering of the Chinese people during the Long March, and 
C07  78 the second is a street celebration of Mao Tse-tung's victory. After 
C07  79 the powerful drum patterns, mysterious piano sonorities and keening 
C07  80 of the trumpet and saxophone in the first movement, the second 
C07  81 opens with a boppy unison theme that reminds many listeners of 
C07  82 jazz.<p/>
C07  83 <p_>But as with Middle Eastern music, Wolpe here is exploiting the 
C07  84 affinity between his own language and that of jazz rather than 
C07  85 incorporating jazz structures as such. The jazz element is one 
C07  86 among a number of levels of language that Wolpe works with in this 
C07  87 piece to develop what he called <quote_>"its craziness and 
C07  88 openness."<quote/><p/>
C07  89 <p_><*_>black-square<*/><p/>
C07  90 <p_>Conveying the movement's craziness and openness in performance 
C07  91 poses a mighty challenge. Of the four recorded performances to 
C07  92 date, the one that comes closest to Wolpe's tempo indication and to 
C07  93 the sense of delirious joy he sought to express is Arthur 
C07  94 Weisberg's 1974 version (Nonesuch 79222-2; CD). Mr. Korf's tempo 
C07  95 makes possible crystalline definition of the colors and 
C07  96 instrumental planes but fails to generate the requisite feelings 
C07  97 and gestures.<p/>
C07  98 <p_>During his last decade Wolpe was preoccupied with paring the 
C07  99 complexities of his earlier music to essentials. He focused 
C07 100 attention on creating sequences of intensely contrasted shapes and 
C07 101 gestures that achieved a balance between spontaneously intuited 
C07 102 images and logically ordered processes. In these late works, Wolpe 
C07 103 mixes various levels of language, from unique formulations to 
C07 104 echoes of tonal tunes, from jazzy riffs to rubbings of Beethoven 
C07 105 and Scriabin.<p/>
C07 106 <p_>Each of the four late works of the Parnassus CD (Piece in Two 
C07 107 Parts for Six Players, Piece for Two Instrumental Units, Solo Piece 
C07 108 for Trumpet, and Piece for Trumpet and Seven Instruments) needs to 
C07 109 be heard as a play of intense contrasts - gathering and scattering 
C07 110 actions, stable and mobile shapes and masses, symmetrical and 
C07 111 asymmetrical proportions, mixed and pure colors, wit and grimness, 
C07 112 grace and roughness.<p/>
C07 113 <p_>It is from the remarkably rapid interplay of so many strongly 
C07 114 opposing factors that Wolpe's music of the period acquires its 
C07 115 electrifying power and haunting beauty. In these late pieces the 
C07 116 alternation of gathering and scattering actions gains in intensity 
C07 117 until the final scattering seems almost to throw the piece off its 
C07 118 rails. It is often a moment of stark danger and disorder, which the 
C07 119 final gathering close just manages to contain.<p/>
C07 120 <p_>Wolpe's music pushes performers to the limits of their ability 
C07 121 and listeners to the utmost bounds of comprehension. The 
C07 122 juxtaposition of apparently irreconcilable elements challenges the 
C07 123 listener to rivet absolute attention until some unforeseeable 
C07 124 illumination appears as a kind of grace.<p/>
C07 125 <p_>Mr. Korf and his Parnassians perform Wolpe's late music with a 
C07 126 technical mastery of its labyrinthine intricacies and a lively 
C07 127 understanding of its lightning shifts of structure, mood and image 
C07 128 that bespeak many years of familiarity with it. They are worthy 
C07 129 heirs to a 30-year tradition of Wolpe performance in New York.<p/>
C07 130 
C07 131 <h_><p_>Gorecki: A Trendy Symphony and Beyond<p/>
C07 132 <p_>By JOHN ROCKWELL<p/><h/>
C07 133 <p_>IT'S EASY TO BE CYNICAL ABOUT the recent flurry of mainstream 
C07 134 enthusiasm for the music of the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki. The 
C07 135 interest centers on a few pieces - the Symphony No. 3, in 
C07 136 particular - that are consonant and songful, far from any hint of 
C07 137 off-putting modernist abrasiveness. It is fueled by trendy artists 
C07 138 like the Kronos Quartet and a trendy record company, Elektra 
C07 139 Nonesuch. Mr. Gorecki's music is being promoted to the same young 
C07 140 audience that laps up Arvo Part, Sofia Gubaidulina and, horror of 
C07 141 horrors, the American Minimalists.<p/>
C07 142 <p_>But cynicism slights the quality of Mr. Gorecki's achievement. 
C07 143 Born in 1933, he studied in Paris with Olivier Messiaen and briefly 
C07 144 became the darling of the Polish avant-garde around 1960, with 
C07 145 huge, clashing exercises in orchestral sonority like 'Scontri' 
C07 146 ('Collisions').<p/>
C07 147 <p_>By the early 60's he began to find his true voice, which lost 
C07 148 him two important sources of patronage. His individualism put him 
C07 149 at odds with the Communist regime in Poland. And his increasing 
C07 150 absorption in folk music and religion lost him the sympathy of the 
C07 151 modernist establishment. He lives now in the polluted southern 
C07 152 Polish industrial city of Katowice, but spends much of his time in 
C07 153 the Tatra mountains on the Czechoslovak border, a home of 
C07 154 particularly wild and bracing forms of folk music.<p/>
C07 155 <p_>The Third Symphony (1976) dominates the Gorecki discography 
C07 156 primarily because of a recent Nonesuch CD (79282-2) that holds a 
C07 157 place on the classical top-10 sales chart. But of the six current 
C07 158 CD's that include music by the composer, three contain this 
C07 159 symphony.<p/>
C07 160 <p_>Subtitled 'Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,' it is a mournful 
C07 161 three-movement work lasting about 52 minutes. The movements are 
C07 162 almost uniformly slow: Lento, Lento e Largo and Lento. The texts, 
C07 163 sung by a soprano, were drawn from various sources suggesting 
C07 164 broken bonds between mother and child, from Mary and Christ to an 
C07 165 imploring Polish teen-ager who scratched a prayer to the Virgin 
C07 166 Mother on the wall of a Gestapo prison in 1944.<p/>
C07 167 <p_>The singing, though crucial, is set into long stretches of 
C07 168 purely instrumental texture. The first-movement lament is flanked 
C07 169 by the two halves of a huge canon for strings, building from near 
C07 170 inaudibility to surging, shining triumph, and then receding. 
C07 171 Elsewhere the music recalls not only the mystical Minimalists but 
C07 172 also Shostakovich's late, world<?_>-<?/>weary song-symphonies, 
C07 173 Wagner's 'Parsifal' and even the radiant simplicity of Copland's 
C07 174 'Appalachian Spring.'<p/>
C07 175 <p_>The Nonesuch recording, with David Zinman conducting the London 
C07 176 Sinfonietta, is a fine one. The soprano, Dawn Upshaw, sounds pure 
C07 177 and steady yet manages to dig soulfully into this primally Slavic 
C07 178 music. But buyers should also explore one of the competing 
C07 179 versions.<p/>
C07 180 <p_>The 1987 account on the Polish Olympia label (OCD 313; CD) 
C07 181 offers an even better orchestral performance, by Jerzy Katlewicz 
C07 182 and the Polish Radio National Symphony of Katowice. And Stefania 
C07 183 Woytowicz, the soprano most closely identified with this score, 
C07 184 makes up in experience and idiomatic fervor what she lacks in tonal 
C07 185 steadiness.<p/>
C07 186 <p_>Mr. Katlewicz plays the long opening movement a shade faster 
C07 187 than Mr. Zinman does, and his more natural, flowing, organic 
C07 188 account makes the score pulse with an emotional intensity that is 
C07 189 never sentimentally exaggerated. Unlike Nonesuch, Olympia offers 
C07 190 enticing bonuses: the 'Three Pieces in Olden Style' (1963) for 
C07 191 string orchestra, which will be welcomed by anyone who responds to 
C07 192 the symphony, and a short, sweet 'Amen' (1975) for unaccompanied 
C07 193 boys' choir.<p/>
C07 194 <p_>The final competitor in the Third Symphony (Koch Schwann Musica 
C07 195 Mundi 311 041; CD) places a poor third. Wlodzimierz Kamirski's 
C07 196 account of the work with the Berlin Radio Symphony and an even less 
C07 197 steady Miss Woytowicz sounds prosaic, and the final movement is 
C07 198 much quicker than in the other performances (12-plus minutes versus 
C07 199 17-plus).<p/>
C07 200 <p_>What is missing in the current Gorecki discography is 
C07 201 documentation of his more overtly modernist style of the late 50's 
C07 202 and early 60's. But ultimately, his gentler works will undoubtedly 
C07 203 come to seem part of a unified sensibility. He has always been a 
C07 204 composer of wild extremes. He has long shown a fascination, as in 
C07 205 the Third Symphony, for a formal elegance that doesn't preclude 
C07 206 intense emotion, and some of his recent music is far from calm and 
C07 207 meditative.<p/>
C07 208 <p_>There are two recordings of the 40-minute 'Lerchenmusik' ('Lark 
C07 209 Music'; 1984) for clarinet, cello and piano. The title, which 
C07 210 suggests Messiaen's aviary enthusiasms, also derives from 
C07 211 Lerchenborg Castle in Denmark, where the score was first performed. 
C07 212 It and the String Quartet No. 1 ('Already It Is Dusk'; 1988) 
C07 213 alternate furious eruptions with mystic quiescence in the best 
C07 214 Messiaen manner.<p/>
C07 215 <p_>The two pieces are paired on another Nonesuch CD (79257-2), 
C07 216 with Kronos playing the quartet and members of the London 
C07 217 Sinfonietta 'Lerchenmusik.' This release is clearly preferable to 
C07 218 the other 'Lerchenmusik,' performed by unnamed members of the 
C07 219 Camerata Vistula (Olympia OCD 343; CD). The London musicians, 
C07 220 especially the clarinetist Michael Collins, are full of personality 
C07 221 and passion; the Polish players sound sober and bland.
C07 222 
C08   1 <#FROWN:C08\><h_><p_>Vignettes pay homage to the icons of 
C08   2 Santeria<p/>
C08   3 <p_>ART REVIEW<p/>
C08   4 <p_>'Las Siete Potencias: Mestizaje and the Aesthetics of 
C08   5 Santeria'<p/>
C08   6 <p_>Chastain Gallery, 135 West Wieuca Road N.W.<p/>
C08   7 <p_>Through Sept. 2. 1-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday.<p/>
C08   8 <p_>257-1747 or 257-1804.<p/>
C08   9 <p_>By Jerry Cullum<p/><h/>
C08  10 <p_>Arturo Lindsay calls these shrines to the seven African powers 
C08  11 <quote_>"secular art with a spiritual intent."<quote/> Each shrine 
C08  12 is filled with objects associated with the New World religion of 
C08  13 Santeria (based on Yoruba worship from West Africa), but nothing 
C08  14 has been actually used in religious ceremonies.<p/>
C08  15 <p_>However, most viewers will find these pieces charged with 
C08  16 aesthetic and religious energy. Each installation consists of a 
C08  17 painting and wall sculpture, a <quote|>"throne" (more resembling an 
C08  18 elegantly modern chair), statuary, candles and votive offerings 
C08  19 appropriate to the spirit, or orisha, being honored. (The throne 
C08  20 and offerings sit in a low boxlike enclosure in front of the 
C08  21 painting.) Mr. Lindsay's paintings are starkly abstracted 
C08  22 renditions suggesting the West African version of the orisha, while 
C08  23 the surrounding imagery often is appropriated from Catholicism.<p/>
C08  24 <p_>For example, Eshu-Elugg<*_>u-acute<*/>a is shown in the 
C08  25 paintings in his capacity as guardian of the cross<?_>-<?/>roads. 
C08  26 The religious statue in front of the throne is that of St. Anthony 
C08  27 of Padua, whose imagery reminded Santeria worshipers of 
C08  28 Eshu-Elegg<*_>u-acute<*/>a's<&|>sic!.<p/>
C08  29 <p_>Mr. Lindsay uses the traditional colors of the orishas to 
C08  30 superb effect - pure white for Obatala, vivid red for 
C08  31 Eshu-Elegg<*_>u-acute<*/>a<&|>sic! and Shango, yellow for 
C08  32 Osh<*_>u-acute<*/>n, green for Orula and Ogun, and blue for Yemaya. 
C08  33 The theme is carried out spectacularly in the Obatala shrine, in 
C08  34 which the whiteness is carried through from the white background of 
C08  35 the line-drawn painting to the cotton lining of the enclosure and 
C08  36 bowl of popcorn used as the offering. The various shades of blue in 
C08  37 Yemaya's water<?_>-<?/>associated imagery are equally striking.<p/>
C08  38 <p_>It should be pointed out again that these aren't traditional 
C08  39 shrines but artistic homages. Mr. Lindsay's paintings and thrones 
C08  40 are crisply modern (and extremely beautiful examples of a 
C08  41 semi<?_>-<?/>geometric style). The seashells and fragrant dried 
C08  42 flowers spread around Osh<*_>u-acute<*/>n's shrine, the iron 
C08  43 implements of Ogun or the moss at the feet of Orula are thoroughly 
C08  44 traditional. But the traditional materials are part of an 
C08  45 imaginative homage, not a traditional worship ceremony. Some 
C08  46 traditional symbols, such as Shango's double ax, appear in a 
C08  47 non-traditional form.<p/>
C08  48 <p_>This imaginative reinvention of Santeria symbolism has been a 
C08  49 significant part of recent Latino art in the United States. A 
C08  50 symposium on Santeria aesthetics in contemporary Latino art, 
C08  51 featuring an array of scholars, artist and intellectuals, will be 
C08  52 held Aug. 6 at Spelman College. Because of limited seating, 
C08  53 reservations are essential; call 223-7515.<p/>
C08  54 
C08  55 <h_><p_>'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' has Valley Girl bite<p/>
C08  56 <p_>FILM REVIEW<p/>
C08  57 <p_>'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'<p/>
C08  58 <p_>A comedy. Starring Kristy Swanson and Luke Perry. Directed by 
C08  59 Fran Rubel Kuzui. Rated PG-13 for language and violence.<p/>
C08  60 <p_>At metro theaters.<p/>
C08  61 <p_>By Eleanor Ringel<p/>
C08  62 <p_>FILM EDITOR<p/><h/>
C08  63 <p_><quote_>"I can't <tf|>believe I'm in a graveyard looking for 
C08  64 vampires on a school night!"<quote/> complains the stake-wielding 
C08  65 heroine of the nimble new comedy 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'<p/>
C08  66 <p_>There are vampires on the loose in Southern California and, 
C08  67 according to a grizzled stranger (Donald Sutherland goofing on his 
C08  68 Deep Throat role in 'JFK'), the only one who can stop them is the 
C08  69 chosen Vampire Slayer -  Buffy (Kristy Swanson), an airhead 
C08  70 cheer<?_>-<?/>leader.<p/>
C08  71 <p_>Buffy is not exactly what you'd call vampire-slaying material. 
C08  72 Her favorite pastime is mall-crawling. And all she wants to do with 
C08  73 her life is graduate from high school, go to Europe and marry 
C08  74 Christian Slater. Her transformation into the scourge of the living 
C08  75 dead is as unlikely as it is hilarious.<p/>
C08  76 <p_>Lighthearted and light on its feet, 'Buffy' is basically a 
C08  77 one-joke affair - Dracula's age-old nemesis, Dr. Van Helsing, 
C08  78 reimagined as a vacuous Valley Girl. But it's handled with airy 
C08  79 aplomb by everyone involved.<p/>
C08  80 <p_>Rutger Hauer plays the suave head of the undead. Paul Reubens 
C08  81 (the former Pee-wee Herman) is Mr. Hauer's right<?_>-<?/>hand 
C08  82 bloodsucker. Teen idol Luke Perry is a rebel-drifter allied with 
C08  83 Buffy in her battle against the forces of evil.<p/>
C08  84 <p_>Ms. Swanson ('Deadly Friend,' 'Mannequin Two') makes a killer 
C08  85 fearless vampire killer. She (and her doubles) can do back flips to 
C08  86 rival Catwoman's; she's even better at handling gymnastic exchanges 
C08  87 with her Heather Squad friends (<quote_>"Puuhleese, that's so 
C08  88 five-minutes-ago"<quote/> is a typical put<?_>-<?/>down).<p/>
C08  89 <p_>Maybe Buffy could guest-star on 'Wayne's World.' She's just 
C08  90 their type.<p/>
C08  91 
C08  92 <h_><p_>Just call it her 'Death' by vanity<p/>
C08  93 <p_>FILM REVIEW<p/>
C08  94 <p_>'Death Becomes Her'<p/>
C08  95 <p_>A comedy. Starring Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn and Bruce Willis. 
C08  96 Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Rated PG-13 for possibly scary special 
C08  97 effects.<p/>
C08  98 <p_>At metro theaters<p/>
C08  99 <p_>By Eleanor Ringel<p/>
C08 100 <p_>FILM EDITOR<p/><h/>
C08 101 <p_>The special-effects era in movies hasn't been especially nice 
C08 102 to actresses. After all, no one's paired Sissy Spacek and Whoopi 
C08 103 Goldberg in a blow-'em-up buddy flick or suggested Jessica Lange as 
C08 104 the new RoboCop.<p/>
C08 105 <p_>But that wrong has been riotously righted by Meryl Streep and 
C08 106 Goldie Hawn in 'Death Becomes Her,' a wicked sick<?_>-<?/>joke 
C08 107 comedy that blends the black wit of Billy Wilder with some of the 
C08 108 best effects money can buy. This movie takes our nation's Eternal 
C08 109 Youth obsession with anti-aging creams and cosmetic surgery to 
C08 110 surreal extremes.<p/>
C08 111 <p_>Madeline Ashton (Ms. Streep), a vain actress, and Helen Sharp 
C08 112 (Ms. Hawn), a vengeful author, are deadly rivals in the style of 
C08 113 the old '40s movies when men were men and women were Bette Davis 
C08 114 and Joan Crawford.<p/>
C08 115 <p_>In the film's hilarious late-'70s prologue, Madeline is 
C08 116 starring on Broadway in 'Songbird!' a musical version of 'Sweet 
C08 117 Bird of Youth.' Helen, her mousy childhood friend, brings her 
C08 118 fiance, superstar plastic surgeon Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis), 
C08 119 backstage. With the merest flutter of a false eyelash, Madeline 
C08 120 gets the good doctor in her thrall.<p/>
C08 121 <p_>Madeline and Ernest go to the altar. Helen goes to the fridge, 
C08 122 blows up to Roseanne-times-two size and lands in the loony bin.<p/>
C08 123 <p_>Cut to the present. The erst<?_>-<?/>while lovebirds are locked 
C08 124 in a mutually loathing marriage. She worries about her face 
C08 125 (<quote_>"Wrinkle, wrinkle, little star"<quote/>); he's so 
C08 126 permanently pickled that the only cosmetic job he can hold down is 
C08 127 at a funeral home. Helen, meanwhile, has been 
C08 128 <}_><-|>tranformed<+|>transformed<}/> into a ravishing redhead with 
C08 129 long Rita Hayworth tresses, a hard body to kill for and a best 
C08 130 seller called <quote_>"Forever Young."<quote/><p/>
C08 131 <p_>Her secret? Well, it has something to do with a mysterious 
C08 132 beauty (Isabella Rosselini, slinking around like a '20s vamp) who 
C08 133 dispenses a certain magic elixir. An elixir that Madeline is about 
C08 134 to try out herself.<p/>
C08 135 <p_>Director Bob Zemeckis, who took us <quote_>"Back to the 
C08 136 Future,"<quote/> turns his back on the future, with its sagging 
C08 137 breasts and spreading middles. Instead, he concentrates on our lust 
C08 138 for a cosmetically perfect here and now, with nipped tummies and 
C08 139 tucked buttocks. He takes a story at least as old as 'The Portrait 
C08 140 of Dorian Gray' and jazzes it up with some astounding 
C08 141 state-of-the-art effects (<quote_>"The Morphing of Dorian 
C08 142 Gray?"<quote/>).<p/>
C08 143 <p_>More importantly, Mr. Zemeckis realizes that the best effects 
C08 144 are best served by the best actors available. The cartoon craziness 
C08 145 of his 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' was anchored by Bob Hoskins's 
C08 146 expertise; Ms. Streep and Ms. Hawn do the same for this film. Both 
C08 147 are terrific comedians - whether suffering eye-popping physical 
C08 148 mutations that would flummox Alice in Wonderland or spitting out 
C08 149 their spite-laced dialogue (at one point, Ms. Streep sounds eerily 
C08 150 like Elizabeth Taylor in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?').<p/>
C08 151 <p_>'Death Becomes Her' loses some steam in its last half-hour, 
C08 152 with Mr. Willis on the loose in Ms. Rosselini's Gothic castle, 
C08 153 running into such supposedly pretty-but-dead celebs as James Dean 
C08 154 and Jim Morrison. But it pulls itself together for one of the 
C08 155 sickest slapstick finales in memory.<p/>
C08 156 <p_>This is one strange movie. See it with one of your stranger 
C08 157 friends. Say, someone who loves to hear Joan Rivers dish about her 
C08 158 latest facelift.<p/>
C08 159 
C08 160 <h_><p_>Wonder will thrive among extinct species at Fernbank<p/>
C08 161 <p_>PREVIEW<p/>
C08 162 <p_>Fernbank Museum of Natural History<p/>
C08 163 <p_>Opens at noon Oct. 5. Regular hours: 9 a.m.-6 p.m. 
C08 164 Monday-Saturday; noon-6 p.m. Sunday. $5; $4 senior citizens and 
C08 165 ages 2-12; free under 2. 767 Clifton Road N.E. 378-0127.<p/>
C08 166 <p_>By Catherine Fox<p/>
C08 167 <p_>VISUAL ART CRITIC<p/><h/>
C08 168 <p_>Atlanta is experiencing an unprecedented decade of cultural 
C08 169 expansion. Art and science museums, performing arts facilities and 
C08 170 libraries in the metro area have blossomed like azaleas, and there 
C08 171 are more to come. The Center for Atlanta History, the Auburn Avenue 
C08 172 Library for Research on African-American Culture and History, and 
C08 173 an expanded Michael C. Carlos Museum are being readied for 1993 
C08 174 debuts.<p/>
C08 175 <p_>But there's a big unveiling to celebrate this fall: the 
C08 176 Fernbank Museum of Natural History. When the $43 million facility 
C08 177 opens Oct. 5, Atlanta will have the largest science museum south of 
C08 178 the Smithsonian. Fernbank will fill a vacuum in science education, 
C08 179 to be sure. But it will play a larger role in Atlanta's psyche as 
C08 180 well.<p/>
C08 181 <p_>Fernbank is certainly a plus in the civic pride department. 
C08 182 After all, can a city be world-class without a dinosaur or two? The 
C08 183 museum gives us our dinosaurs - including a cast of a stegosaurus 
C08 184 and the skeleton of a giant sloth, an 18-foot-tall Georgia native 
C08 185 recently dredged up from the Frederica River west of St. Simons 
C08 186 Island.<p/>
C08 187 <p_>But this museum is not merely following in the paw prints of 
C08 188 its predecessors.<p/>
C08 189 <p_><quote_>"Lots of museums are built to house 
C08 190 collections,"<quote/> director Kay Davis says. <quote_>"We focus on 
C08 191 the public first. Atlanta doesn't have a place where basic research 
C08 192 can be translated for the public. This is a learning 
C08 193 facility."<quote/><p/>
C08 194 <p_>To that end, Fernbank will be the first museum of its kind, she 
C08 195 says, <quote_>"to tell a story."<quote/><p/>
C08 196 <p_>The story is both specific and epic. The 12 galleries devoted 
C08 197 to 'A Walk Through Time in Georgia' present the history of the 
C08 198 Earth's evolution and its flora and fauna from the big bang to the 
C08 199 future. Walk-through dioramas and interactive exhibits pair the big 
C08 200 picture with Georgia's varied natural history.<p/>
C08 201 <p_>Fernbank will be <quote_>"the first truly interactive science 
C08 202 museum,"<quote/> says Edwin Schlossberg, the New York exhibit 
C08 203 designer.<p/>
C08 204 <p_>The emphasis is on hands-on experience. Children learn through 
C08 205 play in two discovery rooms geared to different age groups. Adults 
C08 206 can research their own finds in a well<?_>-<?/>equipped lab set up 
C08 207 for that purpose. And watching a movie on the 50-by-72-foot IMAX 
C08 208 Theatre screen is, as anyone who has experienced one can tell you, 
C08 209 the next best thing to being there.<p/>
C08 210 <p_>Fernbank takes the integrated approach to learning a step 
C08 211 further in establishing connections to other disciplines. The 
C08 212 museum commissioned Atlanta composer James Oliverio to write a 
C08 213 choral work for chorus and chamber orchestra for its opening. It 
C08 214 will link art and science in upcoming exhibitions including 
C08 215 'Winterland,' a show of Norwegian paintings that will kick off 
C08 216 Atlanta's Cultural Olympiad. (The art show will be complemented by 
C08 217 a related science exhibit and programs.) The museum co-sponsored 
C08 218 'Mountain Gorilla,' its IMAX theater debut film, and plans to 
C08 219 sponsor others.<p/>
C08 220 <p_>In addition, the museum has recognized its civic 
C08 221 responsibilities as a city builder: Like other cultural 
C08 222 institutions here, its building offers a high level of design. 
C08 223 Whether or not one cottons to Boston architect Graham Gund's 
C08 224 postmodern vocabulary, at least the architecture and plan befit its 
C08 225 purpose, unlike, for example, so many of our new governmental 
C08 226 buildings, which look like average office buildings. Both the 
C08 227 approach from Clifton Road and the interior offer a sequence of 
C08 228 spatial experiences and an elevated tone.<p/>
C08 229 <p_>Fernbank is undoubtedly an important new 'attraction.' An item 
C08 230 to check off on the list of big-city amenities. Something that 
C08 231 encourages conventioneers to bring their spouses and spend more 
C08 232 money in Atlanta. Somewhere to take one's kids on a rainy day.<p/>
C08 233 <p_>But Fernbank offers more than diversion. If it does its job, it 
C08 234 will be a resource that helps us understand who we are and why we 
C08 235 are. Like all of our cultural institutions, it helps us come to 
C08 236 terms with a mystifyingly complex world.<p/>
C08 237 
C08 238 <h_><p_>Taking on the topical or the tried-and-true<p/>
C08 239 <p_>Diverse exhibits blur boundaries of culture, mediums<p/>
C08 240 <p_>By Catherine Fox<p/>
C08 241 <p_>VISUAL ARTS CRITIC<p/><h/>
C08 242 <p_>In the art world, blurring boundaries is a mission, and it is a 
C08 243 theme or subtext for some of the more intriguing exhibitions 
C08 244 planned for Atlanta museums and galleries in the coming year.<p/>
C08 245 
C09   1 <#FROWN:C09\><h_><p_>Beans of wrath - the rise, fall of Brazil's 
C09   2 cacao trade<p/>
C09   3 <p_>THE GOLDEN HARVEST<p/>
C09   4 <p_>By Jorge Amado; translated by Clifford E. Landers (Avon, 
C09   5 $12.50)<p/>
C09   6 <p_>By C.W. Smith<p/><h/>
C09   7 <p_>That chunk of chocolate you love so much will never taste the 
C09   8 same after you've read <tf_>The Golden Harvest<tf/>, Mr. Jorge 
C09   9 Amado's novel about the Brazilian cacao industry.<p/>
C09  10 <p_>Though the novel, written in 1944, has only now been published 
C09  11 in English (translated by Clifford E. Landers), the story of the 
C09  12 cacao bean boom and bust during the 1930s in the Bahia region of 
C09  13 Brazil seems vibrantly fresh. It will also be familiar to any who 
C09  14 have seen oil, cotton, silver and real estate follow a similar rise 
C09  15 and fall in recent decades with attendant human misery.<p/>
C09  16 <p_>Because it was written in 1944, the novel is not afflicted by 
C09  17 the current fashion in fiction to explore the surface of a narrow 
C09  18 subject. <tf_>The Golden Harvest<tf/> is refreshingly maximalist; 
C09  19 it follows the intersecting paths of many lively characters over 
C09  20 the course of several years. They are peasants, drovers, poets, 
C09  21 lawyers, prostitutes, landowners or exporters; their fates and 
C09  22 fortunes are tied to the production and exportation of the cacao 
C09  23 bean, and the novel charts their ongoing lives in a manner that 
C09  24 recalls the scope and thematic intent of Dresier, Tolstoy, Norris 
C09  25 or Steinbeck.<p/>
C09  26 <p_>Working solidly in that older tradition of realism, Mr. Amado 
C09  27 sets the book among a conspiracy of exporters in Ilheus, Brazil, 
C09  28 who want to manipulate the price of cacao so that the growers on 
C09  29 nearby plantations will fall into their debt and have to sell their 
C09  30 lands to them. Because the Bahia region produced most of the 
C09  31 world's cacao beans, from which chocolate is made, the exporters 
C09  32 will then have almost complete control over the global market.<p/>
C09  33 <p_>As might be expected of a Latin American novelist, Mr. Amado 
C09  34 seems to use the fictionalized events to indict capitalism and a 
C09  35 vicious free-market economy. He dramatizes the plight of plantation 
C09  36 workers and their ceaseless, unrewarding toil in scenes reminiscent 
C09  37 of portraits of slaves and tenant farmers in the American cotton 
C09  38 fields. The exporters' conspiracy results in widespread hunger 
C09  39 among the peasants, and near the end of the book, the novel's 
C09  40 communist Joaquim, says <quote_>"one day the land will belong to 
C09  41 everyone."<quote/><p/>
C09  42 <p_>But given the time and place of the novel's composition the 
C09  43 didacticism is remarkably low-keyed when compared, say, to <tf_>The 
C09  44 Grapes of Wrath<tf/>, and it's hard to tell whether Mr. Amado's 
C09  45 implied critique of capitalism is merely obligatory or was 
C09  46 restrained for aesthetic reasons. In any case, he doesn't allow the 
C09  47 need to take such a stand interfere with his ability to make the 
C09  48 characters sympathetic and fully human, no matter which side 
C09  49 they're on.<p/>
C09  50 <p_>Even the plot's mastermind, the exporter Carlos Zude, fails in 
C09  51 the end to achieve what he has always wanted more than money: the 
C09  52 love and fidelity of his young and beautiful wife, Julietta, who 
C09  53 carries on an affair throughout the book with a proletarian poet, 
C09  54 Sergio Moura.<p/>
C09  55 <p_>The story focuses as much on passion as on politics, which 
C09  56 should not surprise readers familiar with Mr. Amado's best-known 
C09  57 translated work, <tf_>Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands<tf/>. It's 
C09  58 here, in his interest in the characters' emotional lives, that Mr. 
C09  59 Amado changes <tf_>The Golden Harvest<tf/> from tract to 
C09  60 tragi-comedy.<p/>
C09  61 <p_>Despite the large cast, dozens of characters are etched clearly 
C09  62 because their individual quirks are described so vividly:<p/>
C09  63 <p_><quote_>Raimunda was ... querulous and angry, a woman of few 
C09  64 words who hated the parties and dances, with their harmonica and 
C09  65 guitar music, held now and again in the houses of workers and small 
C09  66 growers ... When she did go, she refused to dance, remaining off in 
C09  67 a corner and complaining that her shoes hurt her feet; she would 
C09  68 end up taking them off right there ..."<quote/><p/>
C09  69 <p_>But <quote_>"Whether it was picking and splitting open the 
C09  70 cacao pods, dancing over them in the drying frames on sunny days, 
C09  71 removing the visgo or mucilaginous pulp from the trough, she could 
C09  72 do it all like the best worker on the plantations. And there she 
C09  73 felt happy, among the cacao trees, waking at dawn, going to bed at 
C09  74 dusk for the deep sleep of weariness."<quote/><p/>
C09  75 
C09  76 <h_><p_>Bacchic Inferno<p/>
C09  77 <p_>A macabre tale of six college students, horror and murder<p/>
C09  78 <p_>SECRET HISTORY<p/>
C09  79 <p_>By Donna Tartt (Knopf, $23)<p/>
C09  80 <p_>By Annemarie Marek<p/><h/>
C09  81 <p_>In Greek mythology, two gods of opposing character war within 
C09  82 the human psyche - Apollo, the god of reason, and Dionysus, or 
C09  83 Bacchus, the god of the irrational, who embodies the power and 
C09  84 fertility of raw, unrelenting nature and its primordial forces. In 
C09  85 <tf_>The Secret History<tf/>, first-time novelist Donna Tartt 
C09  86 weaves a tale of horror and psychodrama with her macabre story of 
C09  87 six New England college students who, under the tutelage of their 
C09  88 professor of classics, explore the deepest, darkest realms of Greek 
C09  89 culture.<p/>
C09  90 <p_>The tale unfolds through the eyes of 28-year-old Richard Papen, 
C09  91 whose middle-class upbringing in the small suburb of Plano, Calif., 
C09  92 smacks of tract homes, fast food drive-throughs and supermarket 
C09  93 specials and contrasts sharply with that of his wealthy 
C09  94 class<?_>-<?/>mates. Richard happens upon Hampden College at age 19 
C09  95 almost by accident and largely from financial need.<p/>
C09  96 <p_>It is here, at this rather elitist liberal arts college in the 
C09  97 remote village of Hampden, Vt., that Richard meets Julian Morrow, 
C09  98 the classics professor, and the five students who prove to be 
C09  99 fatally drawn together under the auspices of pursuing the higher 
C09 100 realms of thought and culture of the ancients - Henry Winter, tall 
C09 101 stoic multilinguist; Francis Abernathy, elegant, dapper, gay heir 
C09 102 to a Boston family fortune; Charles Macaulay, the alcoholic, and 
C09 103 Camilla Macaulay, twin sister to Charles, both orphans from 
C09 104 Virginia; and imposing, blond-haired, blue-eyed Edmund "Bunny" 
C09 105 Corcoran, son of a football star turned banker.<p/>
C09 106 <p_>Naively, Richard abandons his first-year curriculum when he 
C09 107 learns about Julian Morrow's small, select classical studies group, 
C09 108 for Richard lives a two<?_>-<?/>faced life, hiding the details of 
C09 109 his plain and embarrassingly uneventful middle-class childhood with 
C09 110 fictitious stories about his past in an effort to be accepted 
C09 111 within this inner sanctum of peers. What Richard has no way of 
C09 112 knowing is that this inner circle, with which he has nothing in 
C09 113 common except his knowledge of the Greek language, will pull him 
C09 114 into a dark and vicious vortex of deceit, lies, drugs and the 
C09 115 eventual murder of one of his own classmates, Bunny Corcoran.<p/>
C09 116 <p_>The story is divided into two distinct books, the first leading 
C09 117 up to the account of Bunny's death; the second, the murder and 
C09 118 aftermath. Much of Richard's relationship with his classmates is 
C09 119 superficial in nature. Initially, Richard knows little about the 
C09 120 Dionysian experiments - using various paraphernalia to send them 
C09 121 into uncontrollable frenzies - of Camilla, Charles, Francis and 
C09 122 Henry until Henry's probing. In fact, it is not until the second 
C09 123 half of the novel that Richard himself begins to understand his 
C09 124 naivete and the horror of the incidents that have occurred.<p/>
C09 125 <p_>Julian Morrow portrays the revered classics scholar whose 
C09 126 insights about the Greek and Roman cultures lead to the teen-agers' 
C09 127 clandestine Bacchic rites in the Vermont woods and the death of an 
C09 128 innocent Vermont farmer. But it is Henry Winter who orchestrates 
C09 129 the actual Dionysian rites and is the central figure who plots the 
C09 130 subsequent murder of Bunny.<p/>
C09 131 <p_>So methodical is Henry's plotting of Bunny's death and his 
C09 132 subsequent efforts to cover up any evidence from the police and FBI 
C09 133 that Henry assumes more and more the role of the psychopath, the 
C09 134 true killer who has lost any sense of what is real or right.<p/>
C09 135 <p_>One of the more fascinating aspects of <tf_>The Secret 
C09 136 History<tf/> is the series of Dante-like dreams scattered 
C09 137 throughout the second half of the novel. They plague Richard who, 
C09 138 like the rest of his classmates with the exception of Henry, is 
C09 139 haunted by Bunny's death and his hand in it, long after the 
C09 140 funeral.<p/>
C09 141 <p_>Still, if it were not for secondary characters like Judy 
C09 142 Poovey, the frosted-haired arty animal and cocaine addict from Los 
C09 143 Angeles who drives a red Corvette with personalized tags, and 
C09 144 Bunny's best friend, Cloke Rayburn, one of the biggest drug dealers 
C09 145 on campus, who believes he might have been responsible for Bunny's 
C09 146 death, this story might be too oppressive to tell.<p/>
C09 147 <p_><tf_>The Secret History<tf/> is a large book, more than 500 
C09 148 pages and heavily laden with Homeric references. Structurally, the 
C09 149 novel experiences rough transitions between important scenes and 
C09 150 moves somewhat awkwardly to its climax. The biggest disappointment 
C09 151 is Donna Tartt's failure to achieve the appropriate denouement that 
C09 152 this story<?_>-<?/>telling deserves.<p/>
C09 153 <p_>Nonetheless, <tf_>The Secret History<tf/> is bound to be a 
C09 154 best-seller and, most likely, will head for the silver screen, 
C09 155 too.<p/>
C09 156 
C09 157 <h_><p_>The midwifery of abortion rights<p/>
C09 158 <p_>A QUESTION OF CHOICE<p/>
C09 159 <p_>By Sarah Weddington (Gosset/Putnam)<p/>
C09 160 <p_>By Ann Vliet<p/><h/>
C09 161 <p_>When Sarah Weddington argued <tf_>Roe vs. Wade<tf/> and won by 
C09 162 a margin of 7-to-2, she was 27 years old, it was 1973 and all over 
C09 163 the country forces for women's rights were on the rise. This June, 
C09 164 after a series of Supreme Court decisions allowing states more and 
C09 165 more regulation of abortion, <tf|>Roe survived a complete reversal 
C09 166 by only one vote.<p/>
C09 167 <p_>In the meantime, an entire generation of women, whether or not 
C09 168 they sanction abortion, have reaped the indirect benefits of 
C09 169 <tf|>Roe, taking for granted what their mothers could not: to be 
C09 170 able to finish their educations, to be hired instead of being 
C09 171 passed over for a man who <quote_>"wouldn't get pregnant,"<quote/> 
C09 172 to work while pregnant, to establish their own credit, to make 
C09 173 their own plans as to careers, family and lifestyles.<p/>
C09 174 <p_><tf_>A Question of Choice<tf/>, Ms. Weddington's history of 
C09 175 <tf|>Roe from its beginnings at an Austin garage sale through its 
C09 176 19-year erosion, is a well-argued brief for pro-choice voters to 
C09 177 get back to the ballot booths and make their wishes known.<p/>
C09 178 <p_>The issue was and still is, as Ms. Weddington puts it, a 
C09 179 question of <tf|>choice. As women in the '70s discovered that 
C09 180 <quote_>"they could not truly determine their own destinies ... 
C09 181 until they could control the number and spacing of their 
C09 182 children,"<quote/> the abortion issue became symbolic of 
C09 183 <quote_>"whether women would have decision<?_>-<?/>making power 
C09 184 over the issues that most affected their lives."<quote/><p/>
C09 185 <p_><tf_>Roe vs. Wade<tf/> never asked the Court to <tf|>advocate 
C09 186 abortion, but only to rule that <quote_>"whether or not a 
C09 187 particular woman will continue to carry or will terminate a 
C09 188 pregnancy is a decision that should be made by that individual, 
C09 189 that she has that constitutional right."<quote/> The 1973 court 
C09 190 concurred that, with a few rights reserved to the state, she 
C09 191 did.<p/>
C09 192 <p_>No matter which side of the issue you come down on, Ms. 
C09 193 Weddington's explanation of how she came to argue <tf|>Roe is an 
C09 194 interesting and informative memoir. We learn in detail how Texas 
C09 195 women joined forces with Austin activists and evolved from 
C09 196 lobbyists to legal defenders; how previous Supreme Court decisions 
C09 197 paved the way for <tf|>Roe; how the trimester formula (never 
C09 198 mentioned in the hearings) got into the Supreme Court decision as 
C09 199 dictum; how Presidents Reagan and Bush have shifted the balance of 
C09 200 the court by anti-abortion appointments.<p/>
C09 201 <p_>We also learn how Sarah Weddington herself evolved from a 
C09 202 <quote_>"prim and proper"<quote/> small-town preacher's daughter to 
C09 203 a champion of women's rights in the Supreme Court, the Texas 
C09 204 Legislature and the Carter White House.<p/>
C09 205 <p_>Although most of Ms. Weddington's arguments are remarkably free 
C09 206 of emotional language, her dander does rise over the smugness of 
C09 207 the vociferous minority imposing their values on the rights of 
C09 208 others.<p/>
C09 209 <p_>She makes a clear distinction between <tf|>true pro-life, with 
C09 210 its commitment to quality child care, and merely pro-<tf|>birth. 
C09 211 She also resents having to re-fight in the legislature and 
C09 212 executive branches decisions guaranteed by the Constitution. But 
C09 213 she warns that the only place to re<?_>-<?/>win disappearing rights 
C09 214 is at the polls, and outlines a plan of action.<p/>
C09 215 <p_>It goes without saying that <tf_>A Question of Choice<tf/> 
C09 216 should have a wide audience. For those over 40, it will be a 
C09 217 reminder of the dangers of a return to pre-1973, where most 
C09 218 decisions about women were made by men. For those who don't 
C09 219 remember women's previous entrapment by states with both 
C09 220 contraception and abortion laws, or the suffering or death many of 
C09 221 them faced attempting illegal abortions, it will demonstrate that, 
C09 222 in practice anyway, not all rights are inalienable.<p/>
C09 223 
C10   1 <#FROWN:C10\><h_><p_>A Singer's Penchant For Enigma<p/>
C10   2 <p_>By PETER WATROUS<p/><h/>
C10   3 <p_>David Byrne started his show at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan 
C10   4 on Wednesday night with a good idea. The stage, cleverly lit by 
C10   5 just one or two lights that gave a slightly industrial look, 
C10   6 offered up Mr. Byrne alone. Playing his acoustic guitar and 
C10   7 accompanying himself with occasional rhythms from a drum machine, 
C10   8 he performed a set of tunes that were beautifully spare. Taken from 
C10   9 all over, the songs - 'Cowboy Mambo (Hey Look at Me Now),' 'Nothing 
C10  10 but Flowers,' 'Road From Nowhere,' 'Girls on My Mind,' among others 
C10  11 - worked perfectly, with just Mr. Byrne's voice to scratch out the 
C10  12 melodies. His singing vocabulary, full of strangled cries, shouts, 
C10  13 a yodel or two and all sorts of textures, seemed stronger than 
C10  14 ever, ideal for the often enigmatic songs.<p/>
C10  15 <p_>As soon as his band appeared, however, Mr. Byrne's material 
C10  16 sank under the weight of bad arrangements and an overloud sound 
C10  17 system. And a lack of dynamic change - usually a sign that the 
C10  18 music's genesis is the recording studio and not the stage - 
C10  19 rendered the songs similar.<p/>
C10  20 <p_>This was a shame, because over the last decade Mr. Byrne, as a 
C10  21 member of the group the Talking Heads and on his own, has produced 
C10  22 some of the oddest music to have influenced pop culture, and it 
C10  23 deserved to be heard well. Though it's obviously rock, the music is 
C10  24 also full of ideas that seem completely antithetical to rock. Where 
C10  25 rock assumes the artist on<?_>-<?/>stage means what he's saying, 
C10  26 Mr. Byrne is clearly writing from the point of view of another 
C10  27 character or imbuing the material with so much irony as to render 
C10  28 it slippery. He treats rock, a deeply adolescent musical form, as a 
C10  29 vehicle for art world topics. And where grace, through rhythm and 
C10  30 virtuosity, is often popular music's province, Mr. Byrne has opted 
C10  31 instead to be clumsy, and to develop his own vocabulary of 
C10  32 gestures, musical and vocal and physical, that never tie into 
C10  33 rock's myth of power and ability.<p/>
C10  34 <p_>His personality clearly retains some appeal, at least in New 
C10  35 York, where this concert sold out. But, understandably, it hasn't 
C10  36 been doing well across the country. The logical college-age 
C10  37 audience for Mr. Byrne's music now has its own favorites, from the 
C10  38 slew of Seattle bands to hiphoppers, all more blunt than he is in 
C10  39 their intent and their politics. Mr. Byrne is now an oldies act, 
C10  40 defined by his ethos and his audience. In concert that audience, 
C10  41 mostly older than at an average rock show, seemed transfixed by Mr. 
C10  42 Byrne, who dresses like a mixture of an Elvis impersonator - 
C10  43 including long sideburns and slicked<?_>-<?/>back hair - and a 
C10  44 SoHoite<&|>sic!. On Wednesday, any movement, from his St. Vitus 
C10  45 dancing to the occasional rock posturing, brought on huge uproars 
C10  46 and a few standing ovations.<p/>
C10  47 <p_>On his new records, Mr. Byrne has found a balance between Latin 
C10  48 influences and his rock leanings. When heard live the songs, 
C10  49 enormously loud, lost their definition, leaving a large blur 
C10  50 instead of detail. Where his newer songs are loaded with strange, 
C10  51 idiosyncratic melodies and abrupt structural movements, in concert 
C10  52 the absence of articulation robbed the pieces of their 
C10  53 individuality. Mr. Byrne's weakness in the past has been his 
C10  54 coldness, and his lack of evident commitment to anything besides 
C10  55 artistic production. His inability to do anything more than hide 
C10  56 behind the personality has always limited the work and made it cute 
C10  57 at worst. A new piece like 'Something Ain't Right,' an angry 
C10  58 denunciation of God as a fraud, was lost in the blare. All that was 
C10  59 left was Mr. Byrne's character, which didn't do the song, or the 
C10  60 singer, justice.<p/>
C10  61 
C10  62 
C10  63 <h_><p_>Woody Allen as Political Metaphor<p/>
C10  64 <p_>Middle America faces off with the bicoastals.<p/>
C10  65 <p_>By WALTER GOODMAN<p/><h/>
C10  66 <p_>For the uncertain television voter in this season of the 
C10  67 family, the political choice was sharpened this week. The election 
C10  68 came down to a contest between the score or more Bushes and the 
C10  69 dozen or so Farrow-Previn-Allens who populated the tube during the 
C10  70 days of public embraces in Houston and domestic disruption in New 
C10  71 York City. Ms. Farrow's family was reportedly valued at $7 million. 
C10  72 The value of Mr. Bush's was the White House.<p/>
C10  73 <p_>At the sight of that screen of Bushes at the Astrodome on 
C10  74 Wednesday night, hard-nosed political commentators went gooey. 
C10  75 David Gergen, who usually maintains a sober mien on the 
C10  76 'MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour,' could scarcely contain himself. It was a 
C10  77 very important moment, he kept saying, incredibly important. 
C10  78 Professional skepticism gave way to open<?_>-<?/>mouthed awe as the 
C10  79 grandmother of all First Ladies presided over the mother of all 
C10  80 photo opportunities. It was repeated Thursday with the Quayle 
C10  81 family and balloons.<p/>
C10  82 <p_>Meanwhile, television news and quasi-news shows were scrambling 
C10  83 to get an exclusive shot of the house in which Mia Farrow was 
C10  84 sequestered and rerunning clips of the famously reclusive Woody 
C10  85 Allen making a declaration of love in front of other people's 
C10  86 cameras. Marilyn Quayle countered with a prime-time confession in 
C10  87 Houston about how rewarding it has been to live with Dan Quayle all 
C10  88 these years.<p/>
C10  89 <p_>So for the television fan, the lines are drawn. It is the soap 
C10  90 opera of the bicoastals versus the soap opera of middle America, 
C10  91 the late-night jazz club (clarinet and saxophone) versus Sunday 
C10  92 morning in church, the separate dwellings versus the double bed.<p/>
C10  93 <p_>Television has helped make the campaign issues manageable: Has 
C10  94 Mrs. Quayle sacrificed more than Ms. Farrow? Has Maureen O'Sullivan 
C10  95 contributed as much as Barbara Bush? Was Hillary Clinton spotted in 
C10  96 line for 'Annie Hall' when she should have been watching 'Mary 
C10  97 Poppins' with Chelsea? The race may come down to a montage of the 
C10  98 multi-culturally with-it Farrow m<*_>e-acute<*/>nage opposed to a 
C10  99 Bush family Thanksgiving Day card inspired by Norman Rockwell.<p/>
C10 100 <p_>This is a contest made for Republicans. When Mr. Quayle picked 
C10 101 on Murphy Brown, her admirers pointed out that she was mere 
C10 102 fiction, as though that mattered. But Mr. Allen and Ms. Farrow are 
C10 103 said to be real, although given the treatment of celebrities on 
C10 104 television and in the tabloids, one can never be sure. Either way, 
C10 105 for admirers of Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan, television 
C10 106 personalities both, who thundered forth the us-against-them organ 
C10 107 peals that dominated the week in Houston, the Manhattan story is a 
C10 108 morality tale on the paths of godlessness.<p/>
C10 109 <p_>Has anybody ever seen Woody Allen in church or at a Fourth of 
C10 110 July parade or any of the other places where Mrs. Bush revealed she 
C10 111 spent her time during the best years of her life as a young wife 
C10 112 and mother in Texas? For Mr. Allen the very word Texas is a punch 
C10 113 line. (If Mr. Bush and Mr. Quayle plan to attempt more campaign 
C10 114 jokes like those in their acceptance speeches, they might study his 
C10 115 timing.)<p/>
C10 116 <p_>In the religious war conjured up by Mr. Buchanan, Woody Allen 
C10 117 is a general on the wrong side. Show business being what it is, can 
C10 118 anyone doubt that he consorts with homosexuals? And he has never 
C10 119 been a closet atheist. In more than one of his movies he has taken 
C10 120 delight in kicking around men of the cloth and milking the 
C10 121 amusement in scenes of real church<?_>-<?/>going Americans, whom he 
C10 122 plainly finds ridiculous, being confronted with a neurotic Jew from 
C10 123 New York. This man has been known to kid God, that 
C10 124 Underachiever<&|>sic!.<p/>
C10 125 <p_>When Republican sermonizers in Houston kept reminding their 
C10 126 audience that the Democrats had met in Madison Square Garden, which 
C10 127 happens to be in New York City, they may have thought they were 
C10 128 only connecting the opposition with crime, homelessness and dirt; 
C10 129 add now intimations of hanky-panky among those whom Dan Quayle 
C10 130 likes to call the elite, known for their liberal inclinations and 
C10 131 contributions to the other party.<p/>
C10 132 <p_>Here is the quintessential made<?_>-<?/>for-television debate. 
C10 133 The candidates may drone on about growth packages whose details few 
C10 134 will ever understand, but who can fail to understand the wholesome 
C10 135 images that were packaged on that stage in Houston? A big audience 
C10 136 without much patience for differences between this health plan and 
C10 137 that one can be counted on to pay attention to the minutiae of any 
C10 138 story involving romance or worse among actors.<p/>
C10 139 <p_>For the Democrats, the conjunction could hardly have been more 
C10 140 unfortunate. Their only hope now is that despite the predictable 
C10 141 recycling in Republican commercials, this week's images will be 
C10 142 shaken off by others as the campaign bounces along. For the time 
C10 143 being, Bill Clinton will probably avoid being photographed in the 
C10 144 company of stars, and Hillary and Chelsea may be seen whipping up a 
C10 145 batch of their mother-daughter cookies with Regis and Kathie 
C10 146 Lee.<p/>
C10 147 
C10 148 
C10 149 <h_><p_>Psychodrama With a Desperate Grin<p/>
C10 150 <p_>By STEPHEN HOLDEN<p/><h/>
C10 151 <p_>Sylvia DeSayles, Kay Stevens, Fay McKay, Carol Jarvis, Dorothy 
C10 152 Squires and Libby Morris are hardly names that, when dropped, 
C10 153 produce a universal nod of recognition. But in the performance 
C10 154 artist John Epperson's newest show, 'Lypsinka! Now it can be 
C10 155 Lip-Synched,' these nearly-forgotten singers are placed in a vocal 
C10 156 pantheon side by side with Ethel Merman, Connie Francis and June 
C10 157 Christy.<p/>
C10 158 <p_>'Lypsinka! Now it can be Lip-Synched,' which plays at the 
C10 159 Ballroom through Sept. 6, is the newest one-man show starring Mr. 
C10 160 Epperson as his drag alter-ego, Lypsinka. The hourlong performance 
C10 161 offers further proof, as if any were needed, that yesterday's pop 
C10 162 culture never really dies. And if it happens to involve a sequined 
C10 163 pop diva with a taste for loud costumes and brassy music, it will 
C10 164 probably sooner or later find its way into Mr. Epperson's museum of 
C10 165 pop trash.<p/>
C10 166 <p_>For those not already acquainted with the performer, his 
C10 167 increasingly famous character is a willowy red<?_>-<?/>headed 
C10 168 showgirl with popping clown eyes, penciled brows raised in 
C10 169 continual astonishment and a ferociously cheery smile. A composite 
C10 170 of Delores Gray, Carol Channing, Shirley Bassey and dozens of other 
C10 171 famous and forgotten divas of stage, screen, television and 
C10 172 nightclubs, the character never speaks.<p/>
C10 173 <p_>Instead Lypsinka mouths the words to these women's usually 
C10 174 obscure recordings from the 1940's, 50's and 60's while dramatizing 
C10 175 the lyrics in a meticulously choreographed body language of 
C10 176 shimmying arms and legs, swiveling hips and clawing fingers. His 
C10 177 physical vocabulary is as brilliantly precise a distillation of 
C10 178 traditional female stage mannerisms as the movements of a Japanese 
C10 179 Kabuki performer.<p/>
C10 180 <p_>Interwoven with the songs are snatches of movie dialogue that 
C10 181 offer the spoken equivalent of the music. As a ringing telephone 
C10 182 punctuates each bit, Lypsinka changes character every few seconds, 
C10 183 eventually becoming a hysterical, multi-phrenic personality. The 
C10 184 new show's more familiar excerpts include a fragment of a Gloria 
C10 185 Swanson monologue from 'Sunset Boulevard' and a scene from 'Valley 
C10 186 of the Dolls.'<p/>
C10 187 <p_>Mr. Epperson's lip-synching is not the only thing that sets him 
C10 188 apart from more conventional drag performers. 'Now It Can Be 
C10 189 Lip-Synched,' like his previous shows, holds together as a 
C10 190 high-tension comic psychodrama that offers a scathingly funny 
C10 191 critique of modern show business iconography and the role of 
C10 192 women.<p/>
C10 193 <p_>Behind Lypsinka's desperate grin is a woman on the verge of a 
C10 194 nervous breakdown. Periodically the lights around her suddenly 
C10 195 flicker and turn greenish, and she clutches at her face in a parody 
C10 196 of Joan Crawford in her 1960's ax-murder epic, 'Berserk.' All the 
C10 197 show's emotions, whether sung or acted, have a grotesque 
C10 198 larger-than-life quality. That's partly because of Mr. Epperson's 
C10 199 shrewd selection of material that emphasizes extremes of self-pity 
C10 200 (June Christy's 'Lonely Woman' and cheery, look-at-me grandiosity 
C10 201 ('I'm the Greatest Star,' sung by Mimi Hines, 'I've Gotta Be Me,'
C10 202 by Miss Squires and 'I've Got Everything I Want' by Karen 
C10 203 Morrow).<p/>
C10 204 <p_>If 'Now It Can Be Lip-Synched' celebrates a glitzy kind of 
C10 205 stardom as an ultimate form of American glory, it portrays its 
C10 206 attainment as an empty desperate 'Valley of the Dolls' sort of 
C10 207 existence in which women, to succeed, have to be a little 
C10 208 monstrous.<p/>
C10 209 <p_>Mr. Epperson serves up his vision as pure unfettered comedy 
C10 210 executed with dazzling juxtapositions of songs and dialogue and 
C10 211 virtuosic high-drag clowning. The new show's funniest moment is 
C10 212 Lypsinka's increasingly slurred performance of 'The 12 Days of 
C10 213 Christmas' (sung by Fay McKay), in which the true-love's gifts have 
C10 214 been changed from turtle-doves and French hens into various 
C10 215 alcoholic beverages.
C10 216 
C11   1 <#FROWN:C11\><h_><p_>Which One Is Today's Woman?<p/>
C11   2 <p_>By Suzy Menkes<p/>
C11   3 <p_>International Herald Tribune<p/><h/>
C11   4 <p_>MILAN - It was a fashion face-off between heavenly bodies and 
C11   5 earthly souls. On one side Gianni Versace's supermodels - heads and 
C11   6 bosoms high, necklines and hems swooping low - striding out in 
C11   7 dresses that slithered across the curves. In the other, Giorgio 
C11   8 Armani's women - eyes down, discreet steps forward - enveloped in 
C11   9 jackets over cumuli of fabric from neck to ankles.<p/>
C11  10 <p_>Who was the winner in this clash of wills, styles and 
C11  11 philosophy as Armani and Versace closed the Milan spring/summer 
C11  12 shows?<p/>
C11  13 <p_>Round one - for presentation - went to Versace for dramatic 
C11  14 lighting, superb staging with a kaleidoscopic backcloth of slides, 
C11  15 and a beautifully paced show - even if the content was just a 
C11  16 dazzling re<?_>-<?/>mix of few ideas.<p/>
C11  17 <p_>Round two - for imagination - to Armani, whose shadow play of 
C11  18 fabrics textured like dried grass, dark Indian prints, pale subtle 
C11  19 colors and quirky East-meets-West styles expressed a fashion 
C11  20 poetry.<p/>
C11  21 <p_>Both designers had distinct and delicious color palettes: 
C11  22 Versace's bright but not brash, with pure white, lilac or primrose, 
C11  23 and Proven<*_>c-cedille<*/>al-style prints that were a fresh 
C11  24 departure from his familiar style. Armani opened the show with 
C11  25 shades of his signature beige as subtly differentiated as beach 
C11  26 pebbles. His prints had gone native but with great subtlety, mixing 
C11  27 dark Indian paisleys with the palest Mogul patterns in blossom pink 
C11  28 and almond green.<p/>
C11  29 <p_>The two shows were so strong, yet so different, that the result 
C11  30 has to be declared a tie. You take the water or the wine; the veil 
C11  31 or the Wonder-Bra; or maybe both.<p/>
C11  32 <p_><quote_>"It's for the same woman in different moods - and 
C11  33 between Versace and Armani, Milan has ended on a high 
C11  34 note,"<quote/> said Ellin Saltzman, fashion director of Bergdorf 
C11  35 Goodman.<p/>
C11  36 <p_><quote_>"They are very different designers,"<quote/> said 
C11  37 Kalman Ruttenstein of Bloomingdale's. <quote_>"The Armani woman is 
C11  38 subtle, quiet, understated. The Versace woman likes to be noted and 
C11  39 is fun in spirit."<quote/><p/>
C11  40 <p_>The two shows ran back to back with Versace first, causing Liz 
C11  41 Tilberis, editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar, to change in her limo 
C11  42 from a studded black leather suit into a white Armani pantsuit. 
C11  43 Other off<?_>-<?/>runway entertainments included Versace's 
C11  44 seven-year-old niece Allegra demanding a front-row seat, and at the 
C11  45 Armani show, the film stars Claudia Cardinale and Ornella Muti 
C11  46 sitting bust to bust.<p/>
C11  47 <p_>Versace's show was spectacular - even though it was based on 
C11  48 just two silhouettes: bell-bottom pants updated from the 1970s by 
C11  49 making them cling in stretch fabric to the hips and swing out at 
C11  50 the calf; and simple mid-calf dresses with uplifting bodices, so 
C11  51 that bosoms balanced like two scoops of ice-cream. Variations on 
C11  52 the themes included frilled layers of pattern and silk shirts 
C11  53 knotted to reveal the ubiquitous bared midriff.<p/>
C11  54 <p_>IF you believe that life's a beach, Versace had great clothes, 
C11  55 from the opening white dresses - shown with long, loose, crimped 
C11  56 hair and bare feet - to the exuberant mixed<?_>-<?/>print layers of 
C11  57 gypsy skirts. The show had little you could wear for work - barely 
C11  58 a serious jacket or simple pantsuit - but it was a fine statement. 
C11  59 The show was a mite pretentious, as music switched from rock to 
C11  60 Panis Angelicus (from the Catholic Mass) and the slides showed 
C11  61 historic paintings, regional costumes, details of fabrics or scenes 
C11  62 of Versace's beloved Miami Beach.<p/>
C11  63 <p_><quote_>"Fashion is for joy and for fun. And I know how to play 
C11  64 with rock and with grand opera,"<quote/> announced an ebullient 
C11  65 Versace, receiving backstage accolades.<p/>
C11  66 <p_>Armani took his ovation in navy sweater and blue jeans in front 
C11  67 of models sitting in Tahitian dresses against a Gauguin backcloth. 
C11  68 Inspirations from far-flung places was the theme of the show, which 
C11  69 was quirkily beautiful, even spiritual, in its use of fabrics, 
C11  70 motifs and silhouettes from other cultures.<p/>
C11  71 <p_>The day clothes had not really changed: pantsuits in putty, 
C11  72 stone and beige; straight mannish jackets still with a square - too 
C11  73 square - shoulder line; the colors quiet as a whisper. The novelty 
C11  74 was in the layering of skirt or tunic over pajama or even harem 
C11  75 pants, which seemed too identifiably ethnic, especially when heads 
C11  76 too were covered.<p/>
C11  77 <p_>Armani has never really been at home with skirts and insisted 
C11  78 too much on these, yet the designer seemed to be suggesting 
C11  79 something profound: that women can be graceful and feminine, even 
C11  80 when completely covered up. It made a nice change from the silicone 
C11  81 implants bouncing through the Milan week.<p/>
C11  82 <p_>Armani's gentle message came over best in the beautiful evening 
C11  83 clothes - slim, straight dresses, maybe in lace, perhaps pleated, 
C11  84 or under a beaded vest, or in Balinese prints, or with crusts of 
C11  85 embroidery topping souffl<*_>e-acute<*/>-light fabrics. It was a 
C11  86 show with a soul.<p/>
C11  87 <p_><quote_>"Why not mix Eastern and Western dress - the world is 
C11  88 small, and we need to find a new femininity that is 
C11  89 modern,"<quote/> said Armani.<p/>
C11  90 <p_>Neither Versace's jet-stream escapism nor Armani's submissive 
C11  91 femininity seem the whole answer for modern women. But it was an 
C11  92 exhilarating end to a dull Milan fashion week that saved its 
C11  93 sweetest plums for the bitter end.<p/>
C11  94 <p_><quote_>"If Paris is first next time, Armani and Versace had 
C11  95 better follow on its heels, because we buyers aren't going to sit 
C11  96 around for a week in Milan waiting for the big guns to go 
C11  97 off,"<quote/> said Ruttenstein, referring to the changing calendar 
C11  98 of international fashion for next season. Those dates will be 
C11  99 announced on Oct.19.<p/>
C11 100 <p_>The fashion stories out of Milan were the fluid mid-calf dress, 
C11 101 a strong revival for knits, and a continuing focus on Beatles and 
C11 102 hippie inspirations, as well as on corsetry and transparency. Often 
C11 103 simple, luxurious clothes that are Italy's strength were concealed 
C11 104 under swags of love beads.<p/>
C11 105 <p_><quote_>"When we get to the showroom, most of the nonsense has 
C11 106 disappeared - the runway is entertainment,"<quote/> said Joan 
C11 107 Kaner, fashion director of Neiman-Marcus. Andrea Jung, the store's 
C11 108 executive vice president, said they had done <quote_>"terrific 
C11 109 business"<quote/> with Missoni, Dolce&Gabbana, Krizia and 
C11 110 Ferr<*_>e-acute<*/>.<p/>
C11 111 <p_>The fashion crowd now moves on to weekend showings in London, 
C11 112 which has to decide how to hold its place on the calendar.<p/>
C11 113 <p_>THE London fashion week, which opened Friday, contains 15 
C11 114 runway shows, backed up by an exhibition, the London Designer Show, 
C11 115 at the Duke of York's barracks in the King's Road Chelsea.<p/>
C11 116 <p_>England remains a seedbed of ideas, many of which are only 
C11 117 absorbed into mainstream fashion after several seasons. For 
C11 118 example, the back-to-the-Beatles looks dominating the Milan shows 
C11 119 were first seen on London's streets and run<?_>-<?/>ways five years 
C11 120 ago, although few of the small London designers have been able to 
C11 121 make them into commercial money-spinners.<p/>
C11 122 <p_>The London season will close Monday with the British Fashion 
C11 123 Awards.<p/>
C11 124 
C11 125 <h_><p_>Derek Walcott: History's Nostalgia<p/>
C11 126 <p_>By James Atlas<p/>
C11 127 <p_>New York Times Service<p/><h/>
C11 128 <p_>NEW YORK - In a time when poetry has reveled in its freedom, 
C11 129 deploying unmetered, unrhymed lines across the page, the formal 
C11 130 properties of Derek Walcott's work are instantly visible to the 
C11 131 eye.<p/>
C11 132 <p_>To open his 'Collected Poems' is to find oneself in the 
C11 133 presence of a writer for whom English poetry is no oppressive 
C11 134 burden, to be cast off like the colonial past of Walcott's native 
C11 135 St. Lucia, but a vibrant tradition, to be plundered and recast in 
C11 136 his own contemporary idiom.<p/>
C11 137 <p_>Couplets and quatrains unfurl with a stately regularity, 
C11 138 suffused with echoes of Shakespeare and Keats, T.S. Eliot and W.H. 
C11 139 Auden.<p/>
C11 140 <p_><quote_>"Art is History's nostalgia,"<quote/> Walcott writes in 
C11 141 'Omeros,' an epic-length modern 'Odyssey' composed in terza 
C11 142 rima.<p/>
C11 143 <p_>In his work, the voice of his English precursors resonates, 
C11 144 animated by his own people's voice, a rich Creole patois mimed in 
C11 145 'The Schooner Flight': <quote_>"I go draw and knot every line as 
C11 146 tight/ as ropes in this rigging, in simple speech..."<quote/><p/>
C11 147 <p_>The son of a schoolteacher who died when Walcott was a year 
C11 148 old, the poet was raised in a bookish atmosphere. <quote_>"Our 
C11 149 house had a wire<?_>-<?/>meshed library of great books,"<quote/> he 
C11 150 recalled in a memoir of his youth, <quote_>"principally a uniform 
C11 151 edition of Dickens and Walter Scott and Sabatini."<quote/><p/>
C11 152 <p_>His teachers recited Swinburne by heart, inculcating in him the 
C11 153 notion that poetry was <quote_>"living speech."<quote/> A quatrain 
C11 154 spoken by one of his characters could serve as an ironic 
C11 155 autobiography:<p/>
C11 156 <p_><quote_><tf_>I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,<p/>
C11 157 <p_>I had a sound colonial education,<p/>
C11 158 <p_>I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,<p/>
C11 159 <p_>And either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation<tf/><quote/><p/>
C11 160 <p_>Clearly, Walcott is the latter - a nation polyglot in the 
C11 161 extreme. <quote_>"With equal right,"<quote/> as Joseph Brodsky, his 
C11 162 friend and fellow Nobel laureate, has noted, <quote_>"Walcott could 
C11 163 have said that he has in him Greek, Latin, Italian, German, 
C11 164 Spanish, Russian, French: because of Homer, Lucretius, Ovid, Dante, 
C11 165 Rilke, Machado, Lorca, Neruda, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, 
C11 166 Baudelaire, Val<*_>e-acute<*/>ry, Apollinaire."<quote/><p/>
C11 167 <p_>In part, his genius is his versatility - his recourse to what 
C11 168 Brodsky calls <quote_>"a genetic Babel."<quote/> Yet however 
C11 169 international Walcott's style, his language is quintessentially 
C11 170 English.<p/>
C11 171 <p_>More than any poet of his generation, he has absorbed our 
C11 172 poetic canon - absorbed and internalized it. Walcott, says the 
C11 173 Irish poet Seamus Heany, <quote_>"possesses English more deeply and 
C11 174 sonorously than most of the English themselves."<quote/><p/>
C11 175 <p_>At times, he can sound derivative. <quote_>"We swore to make 
C11 176 drink/ and art our finishing school,"<quote/> he writes in the 
C11 177 cadence of Yeats; <quote_>"A white church spire whistles into 
C11 178 space/ like a swordfish"<quote/> borrows shamelessly from Robert 
C11 179 Lowell.<p/>
C11 180 <p_>In his earlier work, especially, Walcott's apprenticeship to 
C11 181 his English masters has a slavish feel to it; the elaborate, 
C11 182 knotted rhetoric is too high-pitched, inflated for rhetoric effect, 
C11 183 as in these willed and ponderous lines from 'The Fortunate 
C11 184 Traveler':<p/>
C11 185 <p_><quote_><tf_>The heart of darkness is not Africa<p/>
C11 186 <p_>The heart of darkness is the core of fire<p/>
C11 187 <p_>In the white center of the holocaust.<tf/><quote/><p/>
C11 188 <p_>But at his best - and there is little dross in Walcott's oeuvre 
C11 189 - he achieves a sustained eloquence, an exhilarating amplitude; 
C11 190 he's <quote_>"a man immersed in words,"<quote/> the poet James 
C11 191 Dickey has written, <quote_>"not afraid of them, but excited and 
C11 192 confirmed by what he can cause them to do."<quote/><p/>
C11 193 <p_>IN awarding Derek Walcott the Nobel Prize, the Swedish academy 
C11 194 singled out his <quote_>"historical vision, the outcome of a 
C11 195 multicultural commitment."<quote/> Multicultural in the demographic 
C11 196 and political sense: Walcott is black, his homeland a Caribbean 
C11 197 island remote from the dominant 'white' culture, he is a poet for 
C11 198 whom exile - both geographic and personal - has been the informing 
C11 199 fact of his life.<p/>
C11 200 <p_>But his work vindicates T.S. Eliot's account of the way in 
C11 201 which a poetic tradition evolves through the modification of works 
C11 202 of art <quote_>"by the new (the really new) work of art among 
C11 203 them."<quote/><p/>
C11 204 <p_>In Derek Walcott, we can discern the history of what is most 
C11 205 enduring in our tradition, invigorated, as it has always been, by 
C11 206 the voice of our most recent immigrants. Invigorated and made 
C11 207 new.<p/>
C11 208 
C11 209 <h_><p_>Popular Culture<p/>
C11 210 <p_>A Festival With Some Strings Attached<p/>
C11 211 <p_>GLENN COLLINS<p/><h/>
C11 212 <p_>WHEN 17 PUPPET companies take over the Joseph Papp Public 
C11 213 Theater starting Sept. 7, it could mark a giant step toward 
C11 214 increasing American awareness of puppetry as adult theater. Despite 
C11 215 its long tradition and popularity in much of the rest of the world, 
C11 216 this ancient art form has never been taken quite seriously enough 
C11 217 in the United States.<p/>
C11 218 <p_>Both Jim Henson and Joseph Papp had dreamed together of 
C11 219 providing a show-case for sophisticated puppetry. And though Mr. 
C11 220 Papp died last year, and Mr. Henson the year before, the idea 
C11 221 survives in the International Festival of Puppet Theater that will 
C11 222 feature eight foreign and nine American companies. This dizzyingly 
C11 223 comprehensive two-week gathering, through Sept. 20, is the first 
C11 224 public festival of adult puppet theater ever produced in New 
C11 225 York.<p/>
C11 226 <p_>Mr. Henson's hope, said his daughter Cheryl Henson, executive 
C11 227 producer of the festival, was that the event <quote_>"would build 
C11 228 new audiences for puppetry."<quote/> It is being presented by the 
C11 229 Jim Henson Foundation, with the New York Shakespeare Festival 
C11 230 acting as host.<p/>
C11 231 <p_><quote_>"My life was changed forever by the first Bread and 
C11 232 Puppet show I saw many years ago - I think it was in the basement 
C11 233 of the Washington Square Church,"<quote/> said JoAnne Akalaitis, 
C11 234 the Shakespeare Festival's executive director. <quote_>"My life was 
C11 235 similarly changed when I first saw Jim Henson's 
C11 236 Muppets."<quote/><p/>
C11 237 <p_>Puppetry's roots can be traced to religious ceremonies in the 
C11 238 ninth century B.C.
C11 239 
C12   1 <#FROWN:C12\><h_><p_>The Persecution of Milken<p/>
C12   2 <p_>BY L. GORDON CROVITZ<p/><h/>
C12   3 <p_>In the mid-1980s, a group from Drexel Burnham Lambert met with 
C12   4 the editorial<?_>-<?/>page staff of The Wall Street Journal. They 
C12   5 urged us to stop using the term junk bonds and instead to use the 
C12   6 less colorful formulation <quote_>"high-yield bonds."<quote/> In 
C12   7 either guise, these bonds brought capital to smaller firms and 
C12   8 fueled sometimes needed shake-ups of corporate suites by funding 
C12   9 takeovers, but the Drexel folks feared a political backlash.<p/>
C12  10 <p_>Ridiculous, some of us thought. How could a financial 
C12  11 instrument be moral or immoral, good or evil? A bond by any other 
C12  12 name would still be judged by its performance in the market. 
C12  13 Ironically, Michael Milken, who was busy in his Beverly Hills 
C12  14 office that day, would within a few years be undone by just such 
C12  15 naivete.<p/>
C12  16 <p_>Milken was prosecuted and sentenced as the symbol of a decade, 
C12  17 so it's not surprising that a cultural study yields the clearest 
C12  18 picture of him to date. Jesse Kornbluth's 'Highly Confident: The 
C12  19 Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken' (William Morrow, 384 pages, 
C12  20 $23) captures how an over-zealous prosecution helped transform the 
C12  21 go-go, greedy '80s into the no-go, vengeful '90s.<p/>
C12  22 <p_>The title refers to the letters Drexel once sent to investors 
C12  23 saying it was highly confident that a transaction would succeed. 
C12  24 Funds flowed to the start-up Turner Broadcastings and MCIs, which 
C12  25 created more than 18 million new jobs in a decade when the Fortune 
C12  26 500 lost workers.<p/>
C12  27 <p_>Mr. Kornbluth, a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, recalls 
C12  28 how <quote_>"The Bonfire of the Vanities"<quote/> era on Wall 
C12  29 Street <quote_>"was deeply offensive to those who regarded 
C12  30 themselves as cultural arbiters."<quote/> It never mattered to them 
C12  31 that Milken actually lived a simple, if workaholic, life. 
C12  32 <quote_>"To stop Milken is to stop takeovers fueled by junk 
C12  33 bonds,"<quote/> Mr. Kornbluth writes, and <quote_>"to put most of 
C12  34 what is politely called New York's 'Nouvelle Society' in jail. It 
C12  35 is to make real the fondest dream of the American Establishment - 
C12  36 Congressman John Dingell, the Fortune 500, the Business Roundtable, 
C12  37 and some of Drexel's battered rivals. It is to roll back the 
C12  38 1980s."<quote/><p/>
C12  39 <p_>Mr. Kornbluth describes how inside trader Ivan Boesky conned 
C12  40 prosecutors into giving him a light punishment by claiming serious 
C12  41 crimes by Milken. <quote_>"In all that time, with all their 
C12  42 subpoena power and RICO threats, they never got beyond Ivan Boesky 
C12  43 - and Boesky never pointed out pre-announcement trades that netted 
C12  44 Milken a quick $20 million, or foreign bank accounts, or bags of 
C12  45 cash, or code names in diaries,"<quote/> Mr. Kornbluth writes. 
C12  46 Milken was no inside trader, and junk bonds are no daisy chain.<p/>
C12  47 <p_>It didn't matter. Federal prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani, Mr. 
C12  48 Kornbluth jabs, was <quote_>"more ambitious than Madonna"<quote/> 
C12  49 and <quote_>"hit the ground talking."<quote/> He twisted the RICO 
C12  50 statute into a rubber hose and held Milken's brother hostage to a 
C12  51 plea.<p/>
C12  52 <p_>Mr. Kornbluth spent 400 hours interviewing Milken. He did not 
C12  53 find a card<?_>-<?/>board cutout of greed, but a financial genius 
C12  54 who had to admit to his probation officer that <quote_>"I had a 
C12  55 hard time not taking care of people."<quote/> Even when it was 
C12  56 irrelevant to his business, even when it tumbled him into a gray 
C12  57 area of securities law.<p/>
C12  58 <p_>In a jail-house interview, Milken told Mr. Kornbluth that the 
C12  59 media were partly to blame. <quote_>"All those years,"<quote/> he 
C12  60 said, <quote_>"I thought the marketplace or the customer was the 
C12  61 final judge. I was wrong. In the short run, it's the media. And in 
C12  62 the media, nothing means anything unless it's negative."<quote/> 
C12  63 Mr. Kornbluth found one-sided coverage based on leaks from 
C12  64 prosecutors and cites bond journalist James Grant's claim that the 
C12  65 Journal was <quote_>"the useful idiot"<quote/> of the prosecution. 
C12  66 Paul Steiger, managing editor of the Journal, responds that 
C12  67 <quote_>"Journal policy precludes any discussion of sourcing, but 
C12  68 that statement is sheer nonsense."<quote/><p/>
C12  69 <p_>Milken didn't make things any easier for himself. As Mr. 
C12  70 Kornbluth also found, the private Milken <quote_>"never wanted to 
C12  71 meet the press."<quote/> When charges were published, they were 
C12  72 made against a void. Indeed, Milken only recently began speaking to 
C12  73 journalists on the record.<p/>
C12  74 <p_>Still, things have changed since Milken's plea. In January, the 
C12  75 Securities and Exchange Commission simply fined 98 brokerage firms 
C12  76 and banks for their Milkenlike technical reporting violations.<p/>
C12  77 <p_>Boesky testified in just one case, against arbitrager John 
C12  78 Mulheren. The federal appeals court in New York reversed the 
C12  79 conviction by saying that <quote_>"no rational trier of 
C12  80 fact"<quote/> could have bought Boesky's story. Trader Boyd 
C12  81 Jeffries, who testified against James Sherwin of GAF Corp., had his 
C12  82 Boesky-inspired conviction reversed by this appeals court, which 
C12  83 also overturned Giuliani /RICO convictions against securities firm 
C12  84 Princeton /Newport and Edwin Meese's friend Robert Wallach.<p/>
C12  85 <p_>Everyone, it seems, got his day in court - except those like 
C12  86 Milken, whose plea bargain meant his case never got to an appeals 
C12  87 court. At least Judge Kimba Wood recently reduced Milken's 
C12  88 longer-than-Boesky prison stay.<p/>
C12  89 <p_>For all of Mr. Kornbluth's cultural observations, the book is 
C12  90 not yet written that closely tracks Milken's persecution with the 
C12  91 credit crunch and recession. As for Milken's legacy, last year 
C12  92 funds made up of junk bonds earned 40%, and in the first half of 
C12  93 this year were ahead 12%. It's too late, but with those kind of 
C12  94 returns, let's call them high-yield bonds.<p/>
C12  95 
C12  96 <h_><p_>Intellectuals Under Pressure<p/>
C12  97 <p_>BY LEE LESCAZE<p/><h/>
C12  98 <p_>China's intellectuals have suffered, agonized and worried 
C12  99 through more than 40 years of communism. Each time they have 
C12 100 gathered their courage and raised their heads, Beijing has lopped 
C12 101 them off. Given their cruel history, it isn't surprising that 
C12 102 China's intellectuals are a cautious, mostly unheroic group. Perry 
C12 103 Link lived among them during one of their years of living 
C12 104 optimistically (comparatively) - the year preceding the Beijing 
C12 105 protests and killings of May and June 1989. His engrossing 'Evening 
C12 106 Chats in Beijing' (Norton, 448 pages, $24.95) is his snapshot of 
C12 107 that time.<p/>
C12 108 <p_>Like many things Chinese, Mr. Link's book presents a paradox. 
C12 109 It highlights the futility of intellectuals' efforts to promote the 
C12 110 improvement of China, but also provides abundant evidence of the 
C12 111 bottled-up potential that will lift China from its doldrums once 
C12 112 the old system is smashed or withers away.<p/>
C12 113 <p_>Most of all, 'Evening Chats in Beijing' makes a reader hope 
C12 114 that the day comes soon when the Chinese enjoy individual freedom 
C12 115 and this book therefore seems an absurd and unreal relic, a report 
C12 116 from a vanished Kafka kingdom.<p/>
C12 117 <p_>Albert Camus described an intellectual as <quote_>"someone 
C12 118 whose mind watches itself."<quote/> In totalitarian China, the 
C12 119 state apparatus joins in the watching, putting intellectuals under 
C12 120 enormous pressure. As Mr. Link, who teaches Chinese literature at 
C12 121 Princeton University, shows, this prressure is partly self-induced, 
C12 122 thanks to Chinese intellectuals' inbred caution and their 
C12 123 historical sympathy for the state.<p/>
C12 124 <p_>They have been too willing for their own good to be what Stalin 
C12 125 called <quote|>"screws" in the state structure. What's more, they 
C12 126 too often share the regime's fear of chaos. They may hate the 
C12 127 Communist Party, but they are scared of the void that might open if 
C12 128 it were to disappear.<p/>
C12 129 <p_>National pride helps blind them. Intellectuals are proud of 
C12 130 being Chinese and cannot imagine China as anything but a nation of 
C12 131 special importance in the world - despite their treatment at 
C12 132 Chinese government hands.<p/>
C12 133 <p_>Mr. Link admires these hollow men more than most readers will. 
C12 134 One of the bravest, Liu Binyan, who now lives in exile, once 
C12 135 described the typical intellectual as the human equivalent of a 
C12 136 town hit by a neutron bomb. <quote_>"In the end he looks normal, 
C12 137 can still see and analyze, and can pronounce regular sentences. He 
C12 138 can fit in, and function, but is devastated inside."<quote/><p/>
C12 139 <p_>The pressure on intellectuals is so intense that it seems to 
C12 140 affect their health. According to one Chinese survey reported by 
C12 141 Mr. Link, they die at an average age of 58.5, some 10 years before 
C12 142 the population at large.<p/>
C12 143 <p_>Mr. Link's great affection for the intellectuals doesn't 
C12 144 prevent him from seeing their limitations. Few have the courage of 
C12 145 physicist Fang Lizhi, who is a friend of Mr. Link, or of journalist 
C12 146 Dai Qing. Most are remarkably willing to let someone else take the 
C12 147 risks of challenging the state on even small matters. While many 
C12 148 feel that their struggle needs martyrs, they think someone else 
C12 149 should volunteer for the role.<p/>
C12 150 <p_>This might be labeled despicable, but not by Mr. Link. He keeps 
C12 151 his criticisms gentle, and self-deprecatingly includes himself 
C12 152 among those spectators at the China drama who sometimes fail to 
C12 153 perceive the moral ambiguities in their role. He does, however, 
C12 154 seem moved close to anger by the Chinese student, wearing an Adidas 
C12 155 jogging outfit and Walkman, whom he met on the campus of the 
C12 156 University of Virginia. The student felt personally let down that 
C12 157 Mr. Fang had sought to save himself by taking refuge in the U.S. 
C12 158 Embassy in Beijing at the time of the 1989 killings. He should have 
C12 159 sought martyrdom, the student said. <quote_>"When he went into the 
C12 160 embassy, he was not the Fang Lizhi I was rooting for."<quote/><p/>
C12 161 <p_>With fans like that, Mr. Fang hardly needs enemies.<p/>
C12 162 <p_>The major problem with Mr. Link's book, as with most journalism 
C12 163 from China, is the author's need to protect the identity of his 
C12 164 sources. It is hard to bring people to life on the page when their 
C12 165 real names cannot be used and their life stories are necessarily 
C12 166 somewhat veiled. The result, of course, is too many phrases like 
C12 167 <quote_>"many say"<quote/> and <quote_>"others think."<quote/><p/>
C12 168 <p_>Still, the depth and breadth of Mr. Link's contacts and reading 
C12 169 in Chinese enable him to keep his pages livelier than most accounts 
C12 170 from Beijing.<p/>
C12 171 <p_>And, he tells an important story. The Chinese state 
C12 172 increasingly resembles the swordsman in the old joke. 
C12 173 <quote|>"Missed!" he declares. <quote_>"Just try shaking your 
C12 174 head,"<quote/> his rival responds.<p/>
C12 175 <p_>In the south and on the coast, an economic boom is under way 
C12 176 and the central government's authority grows weaker daily. Cities 
C12 177 that have missed out so far are desperate to latch onto the 
C12 178 bandwagon. In Beijing, the gerontocracy hangs on. The Communist 
C12 179 leadership re<?_>-<?/>prints Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai 
C12 180 dash<?_>-<?/>board ornaments in an attempt to draw strength from 
C12 181 the party's glory days.<p/>
C12 182 <p_>Mr. Link takes his title from Deng Tuo, a brave man who dared 
C12 183 to criticize Mao's policies in a similarly titled book. As always 
C12 184 with China's intellectuals, bravery has dubious consequences. Mr. 
C12 185 Deng was hounded to commit suicide in 1966 and his criticism is now 
C12 186 seen as one of the wounds that inspired Mao to launch his mad 
C12 187 Cultural Revolution - a disaster for intellectuals and a nightmare 
C12 188 for all China.<p/>
C12 189 
C12 190 <h_><p_>Film: He's Afraid to Take the Plunge<p/>
C12 191 <p_>BY JULIE SALAMON<p/><h/>
C12 192 <p_>'Honeymoon in Vegas' is being pitched as a 
C12 193 <quote|>"straightforward" Andrew Bergman movie. That must refer to 
C12 194 the fact that it has an obvious beginning and end. But the middle 
C12 195 is delightfully Bergmanesque - which in the case of Andrew, not 
C12 196 Ingmar, means odd and very funny.<p/>
C12 197 <p_>Mr. Bergman, a writer and director, may be best known for 
C12 198 <quote_>"The Freshman,"<quote/> the Mafia spoof in which Marlon 
C12 199 Brando does a wicked imitation of himself as Don Corleone. This 
C12 200 time the pop culture icon providing the running gag is Elvis. Maybe 
C12 201 it's too obvious, using Elvis and his music as the tacky, 
C12 202 sentimental emblem of a romantic comedy set in Las Vegas. But Mr. 
C12 203 Bergman approaches Elvis the way he approaches everything: like no 
C12 204 one else.<p/>
C12 205 <p_>This shaggy dog story begins with a nasty mother (Anne 
C12 206 Bancroft) on a hospital bed, extracting from her son (Nicolas Cage) 
C12 207 a deathbed promise that he'll never marry. She departs this earth 
C12 208 with a gleeful grin, leaving behind a man who can't say yes. But 
C12 209 he's been dating Betsy (Sarah Jessica Parker), an adorable 
C12 210 schoolteacher, for years. He decides the only way he can marry her 
C12 211 is to take her to Las Vegas and get it over with fast.<p/>
C12 212 <p_>One thing leads to another, and it will all make you laugh a 
C12 213 lot: There's the hotshot gambler (James Caan) still mourning his 
C12 214 wife, who suntanned herself to an early grave. He sees her face in 
C12 215 Betsy's. There's a Hawaiian odyssey that includes the hilarious 
C12 216 sight of Peter Boyle playing an island chief who loves Broadway 
C12 217 musicals, especially 'South Pacific.'<p/>
C12 218 
C12 219 
C13   1 <#FROWN:C13\><h_><p_>Ozzy Osbourne graces fans with buckets of 
C13   2 water, hits<p/>
C13   3 <p_>By Brenda Herrmann<p/><h/>
C13   4 <p_>Come and worship at the temple of the mighty Ozzy.<p/>
C13   5 <p_>That could have been the theme of Ozzy Osbourne's Sunday night 
C13   6 show at The World Music Theatre because that's what everyone 
C13   7 did.<p/>
C13   8 <p_>In many ways Ozzy's outdoor act was similar to the one he 
C13   9 brought to the Aragon Ballroom last November, basically a 
C13  10 greatest-hits package enthusiastically dished out by Oz, guitarist 
C13  11 Zakk Wylde, bassist Mike Inez and drummer Randy Castillo.<p/>
C13  12 <p_>Opening with 'Paranoid,' Ozzy was looking and sounding good 
C13  13 and, as usual, had drenched himself - and much of the crowd - with 
C13  14 bucket after bucket of water before the first four songs were 
C13  15 finished.<p/>
C13  16 <p_>From 'Paranoid,' it was into the new, a quintessential metal 
C13  17 anthem called 'I Don't Want to Change the World,' then back to the 
C13  18 old: 'Mr. Crowley,' 'I Don't Know' and again, the new, 'Road to 
C13  19 Nowhere,' creating a constant shuffle of old favorites and the 
C13  20 strongest material from last year's 'No More Tears' album.<p/>
C13  21 <p_>Those close to the stage didn't need the video screens Ozzy had 
C13  22 packed - watching Ozzy, with his wide, robotic eyes and tiny steps, 
C13  23 was mesmerizing enough.<p/>
C13  24 <p_>When he left the stage, however, any momentum died quickly. 
C13  25 Wylde's dull, self-indulgent solos were barely tolerable and, the 
C13  26 band just didn't seem to get it together, leaving only Oz to carry 
C13  27 the act.<p/>
C13  28 <p_>And he did, right out into the audience, urging the crowd to 
C13  29 stampede forward for 'Good<?_>-<?/>bye to Romance.' In the end, 
C13  30 security gave up trying to stop the fans - two guys even managed to 
C13  31 get onstage with Oz - and, here, with everyone packed in about five 
C13  32 to a seat, was when the show peaked, with everyone singing the 
C13  33 ballad and swaying along.<p/>
C13  34 <p_>Special guests Faster Pussycat were better than expected, 
C13  35 taking the crowd over almost from the beginning. They were 
C13  36 beautiful to look at - all five with matching jet-black hair and 
C13  37 glammy costumes - but it was the way they campaigned for the 
C13  38 audience's attention that won everyone over. If singer Taime Down 
C13  39 was on the left, guitarists Brent Muscat and Greg Steele were 
C13  40 manning the right, always keeping the stage alive.<p/>
C13  41 <p_>Opening act Ugly Kid Joe wasn't so likeable. The cocky novelty 
C13  42 band seemed to expect worship but did nothing to deserve it.<p/>
C13  43 
C13  44 <h_><p_>Grant Park season ends on a Latin American note<p/>
C13  45 <p_>By Ted Shen<p/><h/>
C13  46 <p_>With a few exceptions, serious music by Latin American 
C13  47 composers is relegated to the fringe of the mainstream repertoire 
C13  48 both here and in Europe. Yet, as the Grant Park Festival season 
C13  49 closer last Saturday night proved, it's high time to redress the 
C13  50 neglect.<p/>
C13  51 <p_>All five works on the survey program, conducted by Mexican-born 
C13  52 Enrique Diemecke, are noteworthy, if only for their varying success 
C13  53 in reconciling indigenous folk strains with European styles. The 
C13  54 Grand Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (1915), by the self-taught 
C13  55 Brazilian nationalist Villa-Lobos, is surprisingly steeped in the 
C13  56 swooning gestures of late 19th Century romanticism. Loosely knit, 
C13  57 roughhewn, and strongly Schumannesque, this concerto proffers a 
C13  58 number of flashy passages for the soloist. Celloist Carter Brey, 
C13  59 energetically backed up by the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra, 
C13  60 handled them with assurance and verve.<p/>
C13  61 <p_>'Barren Land,' a 1949 tone poem by Mexican modernist Jose Pablo 
C13  62 Moncayo, is baldly Ravelian in its long-breathed plangent lyricism 
C13  63 except for an interlude of sashaying Mexican dance. The orchestra's 
C13  64 performance had a voluptuous feel. In contrast, Ginestera's Dances 
C13  65 from his 1943 Ballet, 'Estancia,' are outgoing and ebullient - sort 
C13  66 of 'Rodeo' on the pampas. The orchestra played them with an 
C13  67 immodest amount of gusto.<p/>
C13  68 <p_>Silvestre Revueltas' 'Redes' (Nets), a concert suite of his 
C13  69 1935 score for an agitprop movie about the travails of Mexican 
C13  70 fishermen, is decidedly 20th Century in its outlook. At times 
C13  71 atonal, this folksy and picturesque music is also boldly dramatic. 
C13  72 As performed by the Grant Parkers, its poignant moments did not 
C13  73 have quite the same intensity as the festive ones.<p/>
C13  74 <p_>The evening's most original work belonged to Carlos Chavez, the 
C13  75 dean of Mexican music. His one-movement 'Sinfonia India', 
C13  76 commissioned by CBS in 1936, deftly incorporates Mexican Indian 
C13  77 tribal melodies. Piquant rhythms, exotic modalities and a battalion 
C13  78 of unusual percussion instruments contribute to the highly 
C13  79 distinctive character of this music.<p/>
C13  80 
C13  81 <h_><p_>Woodstock festival offers gems of a teenage Mozart<p/>
C13  82 <p_>By Ted Shen<p/><h/>
C13  83 <p_>The Woodstock Mozart Festival, given every August in the town's 
C13  84 landmark opera house, is capable of surprises. Organized by the 
C13  85 Juilliard- and European<?_>-<?/>trained maestro Charles Zachary 
C13  86 Bornstein, it can put on a terrific show especially when it delves 
C13  87 into the Mozartean arcana.<p/>
C13  88 <p_>Featured in last weekend's season finale were a pair of choral 
C13  89 works from the composer's teen years. Seldom-performed and known 
C13  90 mostly to cognoscenti, both show a budding genius gleefully at 
C13  91 work, experimenting with musical layout and injecting earthly drama 
C13  92 into liturgical materials. The 'Orphanage' Mass, in fact, qualifies 
C13  93 as a minor masterpiece.<p/>
C13  94 <p_>Mozart was barely 13 when he finished this commission (K. 139) 
C13  95 in 1768 for an orphanage church in Vienna. Already a sophisticated 
C13  96 craftsman and gifted melodist, he turned the cantata<?_>-<?/>mass 
C13  97 into a daring showcase of imaginative, sometimes floridly operatic 
C13  98 touches. Unusual for the time was the inclusion of doleful 
C13  99 trombones and hammering trumpets that imitate the sound of nails 
C13 100 being driven into Christ on the cross. Loosely guided by the 
C13 101 dictates of the nascent classical style - though not forsaking 
C13 102 Baroque polyphony altogether - this grand-scaled work traverses 
C13 103 through moods that alternate between the somber and the 
C13 104 ecstatic.<p/>
C13 105 <p_>The performance by the festival's resident orchestra and the 
C13 106 James Chorale Friday night - in collaboration for the first time - 
C13 107 was sensitive yet bracing and exciting. It conveyed the music's 
C13 108 essential warmth and devoutness. The intimate setting and the small 
C13 109 orchestral and choral forces also added a feel of authenticity. 
C13 110 Bornstein, an intense-looking conductor with a Stokowskian hauteur, 
C13 111 coaxed graceful playing from the strings. The quartet of soloists - 
C13 112 all chorale veterans - sang cleanly and at times rapturously. They 
C13 113 were, in order of impressiveness, tenor John Concepcion, soprano 
C13 114 Joan Strom, alto Krista Depenthal, bass Matthew Greenberg. The 
C13 115 chorus, prepared by James Rogner, paid careful attention to 
C13 116 phrasing.<p/>
C13 117 <p_>The other piece was the 'Litaniae Lauretanae,' written when 
C13 118 Mozart was 17 and feeling stifled in provincial Salzburg. No doubt 
C13 119 churned out quickly for a church service, this litany nonetheless 
C13 120 is high-quality music, eloquent and lively. The performance was 
C13 121 shapely and even affecting, highlighted by ardent soprano and tenor 
C13 122 singing.<p/>
C13 123 
C13 124 <h_><p_>Formula overdose<p/>
C13 125 <p_>2 Fox sitcoms faithfully follow the recipes<p/>
C13 126 <p_>By Rick Kogan<p/>
C13 127 <p_>TV critic<p/><h/>
C13 128 <p_>Two new shows, formulaic <tf_>in extremis<tf/>, hit Fox's 
C13 129 Thursday night lineup with barely a chance - though one is pretty 
C13 130 good - of denting the ratings. First up is 'Martin' (7:30 p.m., 
C13 131 Fox-Ch. 32), a showcase for the talents of Martin Lawrence, a 
C13 132 highly energetic comic whom some may recall from his work in the 
C13 133 'House Party' films or from HBO's 'Def Comedy Jam' series.<p/>
C13 134 <p_>If you remember his work in the latter venture, you might not 
C13 135 be able to imagine him toning down his scatological sensibilities 
C13 136 to a level acceptable to the censors in prime time.<p/>
C13 137 <p_>But he has and, in so doing, has been robbed of some of what 
C13 138 makes him an original and aggressively contemporary comic. But he's 
C13 139 still winning, as the host of a talk radio show at the fictional 
C13 140 WZUP in Detroit. (Amazingly, another comedy based at another 
C13 141 fictional Detroit radio station, NBC's 'Rhythm & Blues,' will go 
C13 142 head to head with 'Martin' later this season.)<p/>
C13 143 <p_>He's a bully - insulting, misogynistic - behind the mike but 
C13 144 rather more demure in the presence of his marketing executive 
C13 145 girlfriend Gina (Tisha Campbell), who has the ability to turn him 
C13 146 into a pussycat.<p/>
C13 147 <p_>The show - for all of its topical references to such matters as 
C13 148 Sister Souljah - owes much to the sensitivities of 'Seinfeld' but 
C13 149 also to such gruff-guy-with-a-heart-of-mush pioneers as 'The 
C13 150 Honeymooners.'<p/>
C13 151 <p_>The two stars make a lively pair of romantic sparring partners, 
C13 152 and many of the supporting cast members are snappy in look and 
C13 153 dialogue. Most of them - and this might be forgiven in a premiere - 
C13 154 are shrill with their lines, as if performing in a club rather than 
C13 155 in front of cameras.<p/>
C13 156 <p_>But perhaps the oddest thing about this sitcom is that 
C13 157 Lawrence, in one of the most unusual bits of casting in television 
C13 158 history, also plays the parts of his own mother and of his 
C13 159 rambunctious next-door neighbor.<p/>
C13 160 <p_>On the surface, this might seem a novel twist, but in the 
C13 161 premiere it's merely weird in a show that otherwise has 
C13 162 entertaining possibilities.<p/>
C13 163 <p_><*_>bullet<*/>'The Heights' (8 p.m., WFLD-Ch. 32) is the sort 
C13 164 of neighborhood that seems to exist only in movies and on 
C13 165 television: a lower-class area spruced up with loud graffiti and 
C13 166 filled with young people who look as if they've just stepped out of 
C13 167 a Gap ad.<p/>
C13 168 <p_>It is there that a group of these young people gather nightly 
C13 169 in some sort of loft space to play rock 'n' roll. They called their 
C13 170 band, in a dangerously accurate example of their creativity, the 
C13 171 Heights.<p/>
C13 172 <p_>Naturally, this series is from the youth-drenched pens of 
C13 173 producer Aaron Spelling's factory. And, the characters are a 
C13 174 handsome, lithe and pearly-toothed bunch.<p/>
C13 175 <p_>There's J.T. (Shawn Thompson), the band's long-maned lead 
C13 176 singer, who chases any skirt in his vicinity and works days as a 
C13 177 mechanic. There's Stan (Alex Desert), the dreadlocked bassist who 
C13 178 works days in his father's pool hall; Hope (Charlotte Ross), a 
C13 179 guitarist from more monied circumstances than the others (I think 
C13 180 she goes to law school); Dizzy (Ken Garito), the drummer who works 
C13 181 days as a plumber; Rita (Cheryl Pollak), a saxophonist who works 
C13 182 days as a truck dispatcher; Lenny (Zachary Throne), the drummer who 
C13 183 is obsessed, ridiculously, with taping street sounds to mix with 
C13 184 the music.<p/>
C13 185 <p_>A new person joins this band in the premiere. Alex (James 
C13 186 Walter) is something of a renaissance man; one of the busiest young 
C13 187 <}_><-|>man<+|>men<}/> on the tube, working, as best as I could 
C13 188 figure, about 37 hours a day as a waiter in a coffee house and as a 
C13 189 grocery clerk; and the shyest guy in prime time.<p/>
C13 190 <p_>He writes a poem to Rita and later not only sets it to song but 
C13 191 also grabs a guitar and proves himself a talented 
C13 192 singer-songwriter.<p/>
C13 193 <p_>The budding relationship between Alex and Rita is contrasted to 
C13 194 the longstanding one between Dizzy and Jodie (Tasia Valenza), a 
C13 195 nurse and the daughter of Dizzy's plumbing contractor boss. And 
C13 196 she's pregnant!<p/>
C13 197 <p_>Both storylines are told in simple (and simple-minded) form.<p/>
C13 198 <p_>Rita and Alex exchange longing looks; Dizzy and Jodie squabble 
C13 199 because he's afraid to commit to marriage.<p/>
C13 200 <p_>Social issues, too, are reduced to comic-book levels: a 
C13 201 schoolyard pal asks Stan why he's hanging with white people, to 
C13 202 which Stan angrily replies, <quote_>"It's not a color thing. It's a 
C13 203 human being thing."<quote/><p/>
C13 204 <p_>And this show is meant to be a music thing. That's its highly 
C13 205 touted novelty hook - an original song each week given a music 
C13 206 video treatment. The problem with this is that in asking musicians 
C13 207 to act and actors to be musicians, one is likely to get a bunch of 
C13 208 mediocrities.<p/>
C13 209 <p_>I know it's tough to judge a band on one song, but the show's 
C13 210 initial original tune is a tired track called 'How Do You Talk to 
C13 211 an Angel?' It's not likely to make anyone forget 'Last Train to 
C13 212 Clarksville,' another original song from a similar and vastly more 
C13 213 entertaining TV show called 'The Monkees.'<p/>
C13 214 
C13 215 <h_><p_>2 mystery novels: 1 suspenseful, 1 insipid<p/>
C13 216 <p_>The Principal Cause of Death<p/>
C13 217 <p_>By Mark Richard Zubro<p/>
C13 218 <p_>St. Martin's, 182 pages, $17.95<p/>
C13 219 <p_>Death Benefits<p/>
C13 220 <p_>By Michael Kahn<p/>
C13 221 <p_>Button, 308 pages, $19<p/>
C13 222 <p_>Reviewed By Bill Mahin<p/>
C13 223 <p_>A writer and critic<p/><h/>
C13 224 <p_>'The Principal Cause of Death' is the fourth volume in Mark 
C13 225 Zubro's series of 'Tom and Scott' mysteries. Here, Tom, a high 
C13 226 school teacher, is the chief suspect in the murder of the school's 
C13 227 principal.<p/>
C13 228 <p_>Bypassing the plodding police, he and his friend Scott begin 
C13 229 investigating Tom's fellow faculty members - and a nasty bunch of 
C13 230 incompetents, thieves, student-seducers and drunks they turn out to 
C13 231 be.<p/>
C13 232 <p_>In one scene - almost as unlikely as one in which they beat and 
C13 233 torture one of Tom's vilest students - the two uncover a cache of 
C13 234 drugs in the home of the delinquent's parents and then summon the 
C13 235 police, who, without benefit of a warrant, charge onto the 
C13 236 premises, make arrests and seize the drugs.<p/>
C13 237 
C13 238 
C14   1 <#FROWN:C14\><h_><p_>Recreating a forgotten showbiz past<p/>
C14   2 <p_><tf|>Alma<p/>
C14   3 <p_>By Gordon Burn<p/>
C14   4 <p_>Houghton Mifflin, 210 pages, $19.95<p/>
C14   5 <p_>Reviewed by Bill Maxwell<p/>
C14   6 <p_>A critic who writes for the Irish Times<p/><h/>
C14   7 <p_>In 'Alma,' first-novelist Gordon Burn proves himself to be 
C14   8 among the best of the current re-inventors of the past. Recreating 
C14   9 a whole era in show business, one that has been almost forgotten 
C14  10 because it was wedged in between the end of World War II and the 
C14  11 arrival of the Beatles, Burn gives us a rich and hilarious 
C14  12 narrative and a sharp satire on the fatuity of fame, the amorality 
C14  13 of much of the modern imagemaker's glitz and the devastation that 
C14  14 celebrity can wreak on the private lives of individuals.<p/>
C14  15 <p_>'Alma' is the fictional autobiography of Alma Cogan, a British 
C14  16 pop singer of the '50s. In her time she was Queen of the London 
C14  17 Paladium<&|>sic! and much of the music circuit and could hold her 
C14  18 own against American 'invaders,' as they called people like Doris 
C14  19 Day, Lena Horne, Johnny Ray and Nat King Cole.<p/>
C14  20 <p_>In those days, television was still such a newfangled idea that 
C14  21 when the newsreader came on, mothers would warn their sprawling 
C14  22 daughters to pull down their skirts as he might be looking at them. 
C14  23 Nowadays, muses Alma, looking back on her life, when you cease to 
C14  24 appear on television, you are dead.<p/>
C14  25 <p_>Living alone with her pet dog, in a country cottage surrounded 
C14  26 by woods and silence, Alma finds it odd that she ever had to invent 
C14  27 strategies to ward off the clinging fans. Sitting on the London 
C14  28 Underground, she sees her 54-year-old face staring back at her from 
C14  29 the depth of a dirt-dappled window, looking a touch reptilian and 
C14  30 leathery perhaps, but still with <quote_>"nothing uplifted, tucked 
C14  31 up, sliced off or surgically repositioned."<quote/><p/>
C14  32 <p_>Much of the thrill of the big time, Alma feels, came from 
C14  33 anticipation. Few evenings lived up to the taxi ride through the 
C14  34 London dusk that began them. The contrast between the blank, dim 
C14  35 gently vibrating interior and the lights and stark specificity 
C14  36 outside (plus a few drinks), never failed to produce the perfect 
C14  37 balance between excitement and boredom.<p/>
C14  38 <p_>Alma's appetite for the social whirl even surprised herself. 
C14  39 When she wasn't preparing for drinks, a first night, a private 
C14  40 view, a record launch, a supper, she was picking herself up from 
C14  41 the night before. The formula was sleep, ice cream and plenty of 
C14  42 thick brown tea.<p/>
C14  43 <p_>She loved chewing the fat with the hacks and stars of the day: 
C14  44 <quote_>"Although I had been there and back myself and was aware of 
C14  45 the shallowness, the fatuity the whatever you want to call it, the 
C14  46 truth was that I got a kick out of the mingling with faces from the 
C14  47 shiny sheets and fresh out of the evening paper."<quote/><p/>
C14  48 <p_>But for all her pseudo-sophistication, Alma remained a sexual 
C14  49 innocent. As for drugs, when she came across some musicians soaking 
C14  50 gauze from inhalers for the hit of benezedrine<&|>sic! it gave them 
C14  51 and they told her it was a new kind of tea, she believed them.<p/>
C14  52 <p_>Much of her success was due to the tenacity of her Rumanian 
C14  53 Jewish immigrant parents, who conceived of her as an all-singing, 
C14  54 all-dancing showtime spectacular, the natural successor to Shirley 
C14  55 Temple. By the time she was 2 years of age, she was being coached 
C14  56 in voice and tap. Back home, after every lesson she had to stand 
C14  57 and give a demonstration while her father urged her on: 
C14  58 <quote_>"Don't stop 'til I tell you. I want my shillings 
C14  59 worth."<quote/><p/>
C14  60 <p_>By the time she was 10 she could walk into a cinema and tell 
C14  61 which studio made the movie by just looking at the print - MGM's 
C14  62 lion, Paramount's snowcapped mountain, RKO's radio beacon and 
C14  63 Columbia's diaphanous Miss Liberty.<p/>
C14  64 <p_>Their modest home in London became a kind of Lincoln Tunnel, as 
C14  65 one American called it, where one met all the passing show traffic. 
C14  66 Everybody who was anybody in the world of entertainment and more 
C14  67 was there. And when they were all settled and sozzled, Alma's 
C14  68 mother would take out her banjo and give them her rendition of 
C14  69 'When It Is Night Time in Italy, It Is Wednesday Over Here' or 'If 
C14  70 I Had My Life To Live Over Again, I'd Live Over a Delicatessen.'<p/>
C14  71 <p_>Never invest in material goods, she told her daughter. The only 
C14  72 thing worth hoarding was jewelry, which, when everything else gets 
C14  73 taken away from you, you still have something left to sell. Little 
C14  74 wonder that Burn has Noel Coward noting in his diary: <quote_>"Was 
C14  75 hectored in the usual scarifying fashion by that stout little woman 
C14  76 who is always at Alma Cogan's by and large charming parties in 
C14  77 Kensington, claiming to be her mother."<quote/><p/>
C14  78 <p_>But when the time came, as it must for all celebrities, and 
C14  79 Alma was no longer the star she had been, she had plenty of favors 
C14  80 to call in. Indeed she owed to a friend of a friend the house she 
C14  81 now occupied for most of the time.<p/>
C14  82 <p_>Perhaps the saddest episode in this story is when Alma goes off 
C14  83 to the Tate Gallery in search of a famous portrait done of her when 
C14  84 she was in her prime. Whatever else time may have wrought, she 
C14  85 feels, this will remain the same. Unknown to the attendants, who 
C14  86 have long forgotten even her name, she finds that her picture is no 
C14  87 longer on show and has been confined to the vaults. And when she 
C14  88 checks her name in the reference index, the card reads, 
C14  89 <quote_>"Cogan-Alma. See H - has beens, whatever happened to. . 
C14  90 ."<quote/><p/>
C14  91 <p_>In a final twist of invention, which I leave to the reader to 
C14  92 discover, Burn links the name of Alma with the notorious Moors 
C14  93 child murderer Myra Hindley and her accomplice Ian Brady. Burn 
C14  94 doesn't spare us the incongruity and obscenity of the comparison. 
C14  95 To the modern publicity-conscious world they too were icons of 
C14  96 their time. After all they made the news, didn't they? And while 
C14  97 they may not have been persons, they certainly were 
C14  98 personalities.<p/>
C14  99 
C14 100 
C14 101 <h_><p_>Civic Liberalism's debut<p/>
C14 102 <p_>Mickey Kaus calls for an end to welfare and a fair deal for all 
C14 103 who work<p/>
C14 104 <p_><tf_>The End of Equality<tf/><p/>
C14 105 <p_>By Mickey Kaus<p/>
C14 106 <p_>New Republic/Basic Books, 293 pages, $25<p/>
C14 107 <p_>Reviewed by George Scialabba<p/>
C14 108 <p_>Recipient of a citation for excellence in reviewing from the 
C14 109 National Book Critic's Circle<p/><h/>
C14 110 <p_>William F. Buckley once remarked in exasperation that he would 
C14 111 not read another book about liberalism until his grandmother wrote 
C14 112 one. I don't know whether she has, but if not, Buckley really ought 
C14 113 to make an exception for 'The End of Equality' by Mickey Kaus. Many 
C14 114 details of Kaus' argument will arouse opposition or skepticism from 
C14 115 liberals, conservatives, or both. But in its overall vision and 
C14 116 thrust, it is an original, powerful book, capable of permanently 
C14 117 altering the terms of American political debate.<p/>
C14 118 <p_>It is obvious that economic inequality has increased in the 
C14 119 United States in the last 10 or 15 years. Most disputes about the 
C14 120 subject concern either how much or why. 'The End of Equality' asks 
C14 121 a different question: Why does it matter? It does matter, of 
C14 122 course, to Kaus as much as anyone; but not, either to him or (he 
C14 123 claims) most of the rest of us for the reasons often assumed.<p/>
C14 124 <p_>The equality most Americans value, says Kaus, is not equality 
C14 125 of income but civic equality: equal dignity and respect for all who 
C14 126 do their part - that is, work. People who accept their obligation 
C14 127 to society, who work, are entitled to self-esteem and material 
C14 128 security, at any rate in a prosperous democracy like ours. Equal 
C14 129 dignity and respect mean such people's right to at least adequate 
C14 130 medical care, legal help, education for their children and the 
C14 131 other necessities of a good life, and even to some of its 
C14 132 amenities: safe and pleasant public spaces, public transportation, 
C14 133 clean air.<p/>
C14 134 <p_>These things need not be distributed exactly equally, or even 
C14 135 distributed at all. But if some people can afford the best of all 
C14 136 these goods, while many others who are working or have worked hard 
C14 137 or are willing to work can barely afford a decent minimum of them 
C14 138 or cannot afford them at all - this violates most Americans' sense 
C14 139 of fairness.<p/>
C14 140 <p_>As Kaus points out, that sentiment does not amount to an 
C14 141 ideological opposition to capitalism nor even to a populist 
C14 142 antipathy toward the rich. If through luck, talent or exceptionally 
C14 143 hard work, someone strikes it rich and wants to buy a yacht, take 
C14 144 exotic vacations, retire at 40, most of us will gladly (or 
C14 145 grudgingly) tip our hat. But that well-off Americans should live on 
C14 146 safe streets while less affluent but equally hardworking Americans 
C14 147 are afraid to go out after dark; should be able to afford crowns 
C14 148 for their teeth or nursing care for their parents or stimulating 
C14 149 schools for their kids while a lot of equally hardworking people 
C14 150 can't: this doesn't sit right.<p/>
C14 151 <p_>In short, a democracy can allow rich and poor, but not 
C14 152 first-class citizens and second-class citizens. Such at least, Kaus 
C14 153 claims, is most contemporary Americans' understanding of democracy. 
C14 154 (He bases his argument on polling data as well as on a persuasive 
C14 155 reading of American political history.)<p/>
C14 156 <p_>I think Kaus is right. And he's right, too, to perceive not 
C14 157 merely the negative side of this, the widespread popular 
C14 158 disapproval of unfair hardship, but the positive side as well, the 
C14 159 civic and psychological healthiness of mixing the classes, of 
C14 160 having institutions where rich and poor stand in line together, go 
C14 161 to meetings together, sit and root together in the bleachers or the 
C14 162 grandstands. This is what endures, and deserves to endure, from the 
C14 163 culture of smalltown America.<p/>
C14 164 <p_>The vision of civic equality as earned dignity ought to guide 
C14 165 liberal strategy. Instead, according to Kaus, liberals have in 
C14 166 recent decades usually settled for straightforward income 
C14 167 redistribution: taxes and transfers. A variety of other 
C14 168 redistributive policies are currently on offer from Democrats: 
C14 169 worker re-training; 'flexible,' or technologically 
C14 170 de<?_>-<?/>centralized, production; protectionism; profit-sharing; 
C14 171 the promotion of unionization. Kaus takes on each of these schemes, 
C14 172 arguing that none of them can really do much to halt the recent 
C14 173 sharp increase in income inequality, which is rooted in the 
C14 174 transformation of the American economy away from mass production 
C14 175 and toward symbol<?_>-<?/>manipulation, away from unionized blue- 
C14 176 and white-collar workers and toward a meritocratic 
C14 177 managerial-professional elite.<p/>
C14 178 <p_>Instead of a futile and unpopular 'Money Liberalism,' Kaus 
C14 179 advocates what he calls <quote_>"Civic Liberalism,"<quote/> which 
C14 180 would <quote_>"use the public sphere to incubate and spread an 
C14 181 egalitarian culture"<quote/> of common interests, sentiments and 
C14 182 experiences.<p/>
C14 183 <p_>There are half a dozen innovations or reforms, some of them 
C14 184 familiar, that could widen the sphere of social equality. For one: 
C14 185 a return to conscription, combined with a year of national service 
C14 186 for all who are not drafted. For another: campaign reform, public 
C14 187 financing and free radio and television time for candidates.
C14 188 
C14 189 
C14 190 <h_><p_>An American scholar's insider report on China<p/>
C14 191 <p_><tf_>Evening Chats in Beijing:<p/>
C14 192 <p_>Probing China's Predicament<tf/><p/>
C14 193 <p_>By Perry Link<p/>
C14 194 <p_>Norton, 448 pages, $24.95<p/>
C14 195 <p_>Reviewed by Harrison Salisbury<p/>
C14 196 <p_>A specialist in Soviet and Chinese affairs whose most recent 
C14 197 book is 'The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng'<p/><h/>
C14 198 <p_>No one who experienced the tragedy of Tiananmen emerged 
C14 199 unscathed, certainly not Perry Link, an American scholar who was in 
C14 200 the forefront of it all. Although he insists that 'Evening Chats in 
C14 201 Beijing' is <quote_>"not a Tiananmen book"<quote/> it is, in fact, 
C14 202 the quintessential Tiananmen book, and that is why it is 
C14 203 important.<p/>
C14 204 <p_>A soft-spoken American specialist in Chinese literature, Link 
C14 205 portrays himself as an accidental player in the Tiananmen events. 
C14 206 If this is so, he was precisely the right man in the right place at 
C14 207 the right time. Link knew the language, had spent time in China 
C14 208 previously and for months had practically lived with the 
C14 209 intellectuals who were to take part in the affair, interviewing 
C14 210 them in depth about their attitudes toward the regime and its 
C14 211 problems.<p/>
C14 212 <p_>Long before Tiananmen, Link was in possession of clues that 
C14 213 suggested to him that a basic confrontation was at hand. And he 
C14 214 himself became a participant in Tiananmen through his friendship 
C14 215 with Fang Lizhi, the physicist and dissident who became something 
C14 216 of a folk hero during the tumultuous affair.<p/>
C14 217 
C15   1 <#FROWN:C15\><h_><p_>Bella Vista: Fashion Statement from Food to 
C15   2 Decor<p/>
C15   3 <p_>By Pat Bruno<p/>
C15   4 <p_>Restaurant Critic<p/><h/>
C15   5 <p_>Bella Vista had to be a labor of love for Dan and Linda Bacin. 
C15   6 The Bacins, who own the Bacino's Pizzeria chain, broke out of their 
C15   7 pizza-only concept a few years ago when they opened Bacino's 
C15   8 Pizzeria/Trattoria, a many-seats Italian restaurant in 
C15   9 Naperville.<p/>
C15  10 <p_>The instant success of that restaurant, which featured a broad 
C15  11 range of upscale Italian dishes, seems to have been the springboard 
C15  12 for the newly opened Bella Vista on West Belmont.<p/>
C15  13 <p_>Bella Vista is really something. The restaurant is housed in a 
C15  14 building that began as a bank in 1929, and got wracked, ravaged and 
C15  15 nearly ruined after the bank moved out. Some sharp-eyed developers 
C15  16 talked Bacin into opening a restaurant in the building. Then it 
C15  17 began: What started out as a labor of love became a love for labor. 
C15  18 It seems that with one thing or another, the process of turning 
C15  19 this old bank space into a restaurant went on and on. A number of 
C15  20 restaurants around town opened and closed in the time it took Bella 
C15  21 Vista to open.<p/>
C15  22 <h_><p_>Restaurant as art<p/><h/>
C15  23 <p_>The end result is spectacular. If you take a right turn just 
C15  24 inside the revolving door, you'll end up in the bar area, which is 
C15  25 separated from a small dining area by a wall of wines. In one 
C15  26 corner are two rustic, strikingly beautiful, copper-clad, 
C15  27 wood-burning ovens that are used for pizza and certain pasta 
C15  28 dishes.<p/>
C15  29 <p_>The main dining room, with its decorative beaux-arts motif, is 
C15  30 composed of a series of levels - five, it seems - that starts with 
C15  31 an inlaid marble floor and ends way up there, 30 feet or more, with 
C15  32 open balcony seating and small dining rooms that feature 
C15  33 hand-painted, fresco-like artworks with a Sistine Chapel feel. In 
C15  34 fact, the whole restaurant is one big piece of art; everywhere you 
C15  35 look there's some type of on-the-wall original art. It must have 
C15  36 cost a small fortune to decorate this restaurant.<p/>
C15  37 <p_>Is it all too much? In its intrinsic beauty, Bella Vista 
C15  38 becomes somewhat of an anomaly on this part of Belmont Avenue, 
C15  39 where, to put it politely, businesses that are a dime a dozen are 
C15  40 bought and sold for a nickel - over and over again. Then there is 
C15  41 the competitive situation. In the two square blocks around Bella 
C15  42 Vista, there are a lot of restaurants, and a lot of them are 
C15  43 Italian, and a lot of them - an awful lot - serve pizza.<p/>
C15  44 <p_>So Bella Vista, which means 'beautiful view' (the name has to 
C15  45 have come from what is seen inside the restaurant, because there 
C15  46 isn't much of a vista outside) has its work cut out. But Bacin is 
C15  47 known as a 'slugger' in the restaurant business; he's not afraid to 
C15  48 mix it up with the competition to get his share of the pasta and 
C15  49 pizza pie.<p/>
C15  50 <h_><p_>Contemporary Italian<p/><h/>
C15  51 <p_>Bella Vista serves, as the front of the menu points out, 
C15  52 <quote_>"contemporary Italian cuisine."<quote/> This is food that 
C15  53 doesn't tweak the old Italian mustache; it completely shaves it 
C15  54 off. Calamari gets grilled and served with beans, garlic and 
C15  55 tomatoes. A salad of endive, watercress, peppered pecans and 
C15  56 Gorgonzola makes quite a fashion statement, one that would make 
C15  57 iceberg lettuce freeze with envy.<p/>
C15  58 <p_>Pasta dishes are built with sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke 
C15  59 hearts, wild mushrooms, arugula, grilled vegetables and other 
C15  60 ingredients that create tiers of flavor. The lasagna was served in 
C15  61 an unabashedly urbane, multicolored, multilayered arrangement that 
C15  62 bore little resemblance to lasagna as we know it, other than 
C15  63 possibly the shape. And the only red sauce I could find on the menu 
C15  64 was called a <quote_>"spicy sun<?_>-<?/>dried tomato 
C15  65 sauce."<quote/><p/>
C15  66 <p_>Pizzas swivel down the runway of fashion and carry the 
C15  67 'gourmet' label. They come topped with grilled or roasted 
C15  68 vegetables, smoked chicken and white beans, peppered shrimp and 
C15  69 goat cheese, roasted onions and smoked mozzarella.<p/>
C15  70 <h_><p_>A similar pattern<p/><h/>
C15  71 <p_>Entrees follow a similar pattern, boasting names that if they 
C15  72 weren't in Italian would defy provenance. <tf_>Maiale allo 
C15  73 spiedo<tf/>, for example, becomes spit-roasted loin of pork served 
C15  74 with garlic whipped potatoes, mixed peppers and buttered escarole. 
C15  75 <tf_>Tonno con capellini<tf/> is grilled tuna with roasted onions, 
C15  76 marinated tomatoes and angel-hair pasta. Every part of that dish 
C15  77 would be at home on the menu of a nouvelle cuisine restaurant or a 
C15  78 French restaurant.<p/>
C15  79 <p_>But how does the food stack up against the dazzling decor and 
C15  80 the tight but well<?_>-<?/>balanced menu (roughly six choices 
C15  81 listed under each course)? Sometimes it stacks neatly, and 
C15  82 sometimes it tumbles. An appetizer of grilled wild mushrooms 
C15  83 redolent with rosemary and lavished with shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano 
C15  84 cheese was delicious.<p/>
C15  85 <p_>But each of the three gourmet pizzas sampled left me only 
C15  86 partially satisfied. The toppings were great, but the crusts 
C15  87 weren't. Pizza baked in a woodburning oven should look and taste 
C15  88 like it came out of a woodburning oven; these didn't. The crust was 
C15  89 too thin, and it had no character, no marks from the wood fire, no 
C15  90 good chew. But some of the toppings could not have been better. 
C15  91 They included crisp and thin grilled asparagus, roasted onions and 
C15  92 marinated tomatoes; pesto, tomatoes, pine nuts and fresh 
C15  93 mozzarella<?_>-<?/>vegetables, and goat cheese. The combinations 
C15  94 were right on the flavor button and thoroughly enjoyable.<p/>
C15  95 <p_>A pasta dish of corkscrew-shaped pasta (cavatappi) in a 
C15  96 Parmesan-rich Alfredo sauce with swirls of fresh spinach and 
C15  97 pounded thin slices of breast of chicken was a delicious piece of 
C15  98 pasta work in every respect. But a spit-roasted herb chicken dish 
C15  99 was woefully short on flavor. The chicken was really bland, and the 
C15 100 promised herbs were too little and too tame. I could have made a 
C15 101 meal, however, on the delicious creamy wild mushroom polenta that 
C15 102 was buried under the chicken.<p/>
C15 103 <p_>At lunch, a grilled tuna sandwich was a delicious arrangement 
C15 104 in which the fillet of fresh tuna, perfectly cooked to a tasty 
C15 105 medium-rare, was laid between thin slices of grilled Italian bread 
C15 106 and flanked by slices of fresh tomato, thick rings of roasted red 
C15 107 onion and a powerfully good roasted red pepper mayonnaise. It was a 
C15 108 sandwich not only of substance but also good taste.<p/>
C15 109 <p_>Then there was the lasagna. This was a case where I would have 
C15 110 enjoyed an un<?_>-<?/>lasagna, in which a few layers of the pasta 
C15 111 were replaced by more of the delicious grilled vegetables. All this 
C15 112 lasagna needed to be outstanding was some rearranging.<p/>
C15 113 <h_><p_>Desserts, et al.<p/><h/>
C15 114 <p_>Desserts were the most consistent of all. A warm apple tart 
C15 115 with caramel and macadamia nuts was most pleasing. Another 
C15 116 delicious arrangement was the warm chocolate cake, a round, soft, 
C15 117 gooey-good cake ringed by small scoops of milk chocolate and white 
C15 118 chocolate gelato and raspberry sorbet.<p/>
C15 119 <p_>I hate to admit that tiramisu, which means "lift me up" but has 
C15 120 been letting me down, is boring me, but it is. I think it's time 
C15 121 someone started tinkering with the basic ingredients (ladyfingers 
C15 122 and mascarpone cheese being the most important) and came up with 
C15 123 something a little different (Bella Vista works a creme Anglaise 
C15 124 into the picture).<p/>
C15 125 <p_>The wine list, which features Italian and California wines, is 
C15 126 extensive and runs from cheap to expensive. Wines by the glass are 
C15 127 just plain expensive. And while I'm at it, I'd like to note that 
C15 128 $2.75 is too much money for espresso. Most of the fine dining 
C15 129 places in town charge less than that. And charging that much makes 
C15 130 it less likely that people will order it, so nobody wins.<p/>
C15 131 
C15 132 <h_><p_>Mitchell Our Best Writer?<p/>
C15 133 <p_>Up in the Old Hotel<p/>
C15 134 <p_>And other stories.<p/>
C15 135 <p_>By Joseph Mitchell.<p/>
C15 136 <p_>Pantheon. $25.<p/>
C15 137 <p_>By Stephen Becker<p/><h/>
C15 138 <p_>Back in the 1940s and 1950s young writers used to swap stories 
C15 139 about established writers and sooner or later someone would say, 
C15 140 <quote_>"Of course, Joe Mitchell is the best writer in 
C15 141 America,"<quote/> always the casual <quote_>"Joe Mitchell,"<quote/> 
C15 142 as if one had seen him recently in New York or was in desultory 
C15 143 correspondence with him. None of us aspirants actually knew 
C15 144 Mitchell, but we delivered the verdict with awful authority. He was 
C15 145 (and remains) a legendary figure, publishing rarely. We kids may 
C15 146 very well have been right: He may indeed have been (and still be) 
C15 147 the best writer in America.<p/>
C15 148 <p_><tf_>Up in the Old Hotel<tf/> is Mitchell's collected work, and 
C15 149 it comprises his four published volumes, <tf_>McSorley's Wonderful 
C15 150 Saloon<tf/> (a classic that should stand in every American home), 
C15 151 <tf_>Old Mr. Flood<tf/>, <tf_>The Bottom of the Harbor<tf/>, and 
C15 152 <tf_>Joe Gould's Secret<tf/>, plus several stories that have never 
C15 153 been reprinted. "Stories," yes, but they live on the border; they 
C15 154 are true stories and high art - reportage made so vivid, so real, 
C15 155 that it comes out like fiction of the highest order (<quote_>"a 
C15 156 reporter only in the sense that Defoe was a reporter,"<quote/> 
C15 157 wrote one critic).<p/>
C15 158 <p_>His titles alone are a kind of literature. One story is called 
C15 159 <quote_>"Hit on the Head with a Cow."<quote/> Another is 
C15 160 <quote_>"The Mohawks in High Steel,"<quote/> borrowed by Edmund 
C15 161 Wilson to lead off his own <tf_>Apologies to the Iroquois<tf/>, and 
C15 162 <quote_>"The Same as Monkey Glands,"<quote/> and <quote_>"The 
C15 163 Downfall of Fascism in Black Ankle County,"<quote/> and <quote_>"I 
C15 164 Blame it All on Mamma."<quote/> He can take a group of men or women 
C15 165 ('The Gypsy Women') and bring them to life like an old Dutch 
C15 166 painter; he can take a place, or a murky region ('The Bottom of the 
C15 167 Harbor,' 'Obituary of a Gin Mill,' or the Fulton Street Fish 
C15 168 Market), and ease us into it until we feel we have known it all our 
C15 169 lives.<p/>
C15 170 <p_>And how does he work his magic, this <quote_>"obsessed reader 
C15 171 of Finnegans Wake"<quote/>? In a prose so simple, so honest, so 
C15 172 monolithic that not a word is wasted or affected or vain. Mitchell 
C15 173 is to <quote_>"current American writing"<quote/> what fine whiskey 
C15 174 aged in contented oaken barrels is to soda pop. His accounts share 
C15 175 essential qualities with the Authorized Version of the Bible: the 
C15 176 prose is direct and solid and dignified, and as a result 
C15 177 <tf|>stately, whatever his subject.<p/>
C15 178 <p_>Consider the cats at McSorley's: <quote_>"He owned as many as 
C15 179 18 at once and they had the run of the saloon. He fed them on bull 
C15 180 livers put through a sausage grinder and they became enormous. When 
C15 181 it came time to feed them, he would leave the bar, no matter how 
C15 182 brisk business was, and bang on the bottom of a tin pan; the fat 
C15 183 cats would come loping up, like leopards, from all corners of the 
C15 184 saloon."<quote/> Ever wonder what makes good writing? <quote_>"Bang 
C15 185 Bottom <tf_>Fat Cats<tf/> Loping Like Leopards"<quote/> - that's 
C15 186 rhythm, that's music, and Mitchell does it all the time. He may not 
C15 187 even know that he does it. He is so gifted a natural writer (and so 
C15 188 shaped, we must think, by the Authorized Version) that he cannot 
C15 189 write badly. He may be the only writer in America of whom that can 
C15 190 be said.<p/>
C15 191 <p_>Mitchell is in his early 80s now, and has lived the century's 
C15 192 history. He is a Carolina man, and while observing the Klan's 
C15 193 solemn foofaraw decades ago he <quote_>"spent so many nights hiding 
C15 194 in the weed patch that I failed my final examinations in algebra, 
C15 195 the history of North Carolina, English composition, and French, and 
C15 196 was not promoted, which I did not mind, as I had already spent two 
C15 197 years in the ninth grade and felt at home there."<quote/><p/>
C15 198 <p_>Any gap in his formal education is irrelevant and obsolete. He 
C15 199 is perfectly at home whether telling Block Island stories or 
C15 200 quoting Joe Gould quoting William Blake. He will tell you what sea 
C15 201 urchins are and how to dress and eat them, not to mention 
C15 202 diamondback terrapins. Or true old-fashioned traditional New York 
C15 203 steak dinners, before they were corrupted by Manhattan cocktails 
C15 204 and modern manners. (His zest for food is contagious; after a 
C15 205 couple of these pieces we feel famished. He may have gone hungry as 
C15 206 a boy.) But he will also be brilliant about Calypso music or a 
C15 207 gifted child or the deaf club.<p/>
C15 208 <p_>Indeed, if you read these stories at random, one or two a 
C15 209 night, you soon realize that you are assembling a mosaic of 
C15 210 American life.
C15 211 
C16   1 <#FROWN:C16\><h_><p_>A Matter of Survival<p/>
C16   2 <p_><tf_>October, Eight O'Clock<tf/><p/>
C16   3 <p_>by Norman Manea,<p/>
C16   4 <p_>translated by Cornelia Golna, Anselm Hollo, Mara Soceanu Vamos, 
C16   5 Max Bleyleben, and Marguerite Dorian and Elliott B. Urdang.<p/>
C16   6 <p_>Grove Weidenfeld, 216 pp., $18.95<p/>
C16   7 <p_>Louis Begley<p/><h/>
C16   8 <p_>Late one Friday: a little boy waits by the window in an 
C16   9 unnamed, desolate place. A phantom, <quote_>"a shadow, withered and 
C16  10 gloomy,"<quote/> appears out of the <quote_>"smoky 
C16  11 steppes."<quote/> It is the boy's mother walking hurriedly, 
C16  12 stumbling, bent under a sack heavy with potatoes, beans, prunes, 
C16  13 and other scraps of food she earns knitting in houses of peasants 
C16  14 whose language she does not understand. The father's work - we are 
C16  15 not told what it is - pays only a quarter of a loaf of bread a day. 
C16  16 If it weren't for the mother - believing <quote_>"that we would 
C16  17 survive if we held fast to anything that might save us"<quote/> - 
C16  18 they would have <quote_>"faded very rapidly, right at the 
C16  19 beginning."<quote/> Only this time, in addition to the food which 
C16  20 she lays out as always on the floor in six piles, one for each day 
C16  21 of the week to come, she has brought in her sack something 
C16  22 miraculous. It is a sweater of many colors, like Joseph's coat, 
C16  23 knitted of yarn ends scavenged in those alien huts. The sweater is 
C16  24 bulky. Avidly, the boy imagines its warmth. The colors sparkle, <p/>
C16  25 <p_><quote_>as if the magician who would save us wanted to 
C16  26 demonstrate to us what he could do. The night enveloped us in 
C16  27 smoke, cold, and darkness; we heard nothing but explosions, 
C16  28 screams, the barks of the guards, crows, and frogs. We had long ago 
C16  29 forgotten such glitter.<quote/><p/>
C16  30 <p_>Who can this object be for? The mother, to keep her from 
C16  31 freezing as she trudges across the steppes? The boy? No, he thinks 
C16  32 it must be for the father, <quote_>"he deserved it more than 
C16  33 anybody else, since he had lost all hope long ago."<quote/> But in 
C16  34 fact the sweater is for Mara, the only occupant of the hut the boy 
C16  35 names. That is because <quote_>"she had ended up among us by 
C16  36 mistake.... The little girl had nothing to do with the curse on us; 
C16  37 she was innocent.... Caught up in the catastrophe, mixed up with us 
C16  38 and taken away, she had been brought as far as this."<quote/> So 
C16  39 they <quote_>"loved her excessively,"<quote/> thinking that 
C16  40 <quote_>"she must return alive at all costs."<quote/><p/>
C16  41 <p_>So begins 'The Sweater,' the first in the important and 
C16  42 beautiful collection of stories by Norman Manea entitled 
C16  43 <tf_>October, Eight O'Clock<tf/>. From the known facts of Mr. 
C16  44 Manea's life, one may infer that the nameless place is a 
C16  45 concentration camp, somewhere in Transnistria, a land across the 
C16  46 border which then divided Romania from Ukraine; the time is World 
C16  47 War II; and the little boy, his family, and the other prisoners in 
C16  48 the camp (other than <quote|>"innocent" Mara, soon to die of 
C16  49 typhus) are Romanian Jews deported by the Nazis. But none of these 
C16  50 words - Romania, Nazi, German, Jew, the War, typhus - are used, 
C16  51 except that once some other boys call the narrator a 
C16  52 <quote|>"kike."<p/>
C16  53 <p_>Years pass. One does not know how many. A later story is called 
C16  54 'The Partition.' The boy narrator - who had been one of those 
C16  55 children covered with scabies, <quote_>"with oversized skulls... 
C16  56 compressed, stunted, as if an instrument of torture had shrunk them 
C16  57 all"<quote/> - has survived. He is now a middle-aged man, perhaps a 
C16  58 trifle paunchy, reclusive, perpetually attired in shabby jeans and 
C16  59 turtleneck sweaters which, to his janitor, looks imported. He lives 
C16  60 in <quote_>"an adolescent's mess in an old man's room."<quote/> The 
C16  61 building is also old, well built, with large apartments for rich 
C16  62 people. But <quote|>"they" - we take them to be the Communist 
C16  63 authorities - have divided it with <quote_>"partitions thin as 
C16  64 cigarette paper, reallocated living space, redid 
C16  65 everything."<quote/> The janitor watches his tenants' every 
C16  66 move:<p/>
C16  67 <p_><quote_>thick-set, punctual, hygienic. Hairy, swarthy. The eyes 
C16  68 of a makeshift expert. A conversationalist by profession.... Always 
C16  69 attentive, he notes, makes out, identifies your shopping bag, 
C16  70 packages, voice, clothes, who you're with. The rhythm of your 
C16  71 steps, any hesitation, the least trace of bad humor, everything is 
C16  72 recorded. Such an important building, such different people, in 
C16  73 short the community demands its own laws: to know everyone, ward 
C16  74 off conflict, to inform correctly, make judicious decisions, have 
C16  75 one's eye on everything.<quote/><p/>
C16  76 <p_>The nameless narrator watches and listens too. His neighbors<p/>
C16  77 <p_><quote_>wake up, hurry, leave, rush around like greyhounds; 
C16  78 flee from the rat race; their eyes empty, they scatter in the 
C16  79 streets toward shops, trams, the bus. Lines for cheese, medication, 
C16  80 flashlights, buttons, TV sets. A line here, another there: books, 
C16  81 light bulbs, pad<?_>-<?/>locks, shoes, eyeglasses, and so on until 
C16  82 nightfall. Twilight eases their exhaustion. Up the staircase of 
C16  83 standardized buildings, concrete boxes, the leftover hours pass 
C16  84 lazily: armchair, TV, gas heater, ironing, the nightly 
C16  85 sarcophagus.<quote/><p/>
C16  86 <p_>He leaves the city for a resort - an August beach crowded with 
C16  87 the recumbent bodies of the vacationing elite of the regime, the 
C16  88 paraphernalia of third world chic scattered around them, the sea 
C16  89 bringing in <quote_>"offal, grease, pitchballs, foul-smelling 
C16  90 wrack, fruit rinds, rags, empty cans."<quote/> As yet, he doesn't 
C16  91 know how to swim. One step too far into the surf, and he comes 
C16  92 close to drowning.<p/>
C16  93 <p_>An attenuated affair with a woman who has accompanied him comes 
C16  94 to an end. This is in a story called 'The Turning Point.' In a 
C16  95 later story, 'Seascape with Birds,' he returns to the same shore in 
C16  96 a different season. It seems to him that<p/>
C16  97 <p_><quote_>The staggering, exhausted bodies should have been 
C16  98 brought here, to the deserted edge of the sea, and stretched out on 
C16  99 the cold moist autumn sand....<p/>
C16 100 <p_>If only the trains carrying them reached here, the few 
C16 101 survivors could have descended the high, dusty cliff to the jagged 
C16 102 shore. It would have been better had they been forced to watch, for 
C16 103 hours on end, the fluid violet horizon, the silky tremor of spring. 
C16 104 Transfixed for days, weeks, an entire year, before the same 
C16 105 scenery. Had they experienced this feeling of pointlessness, 
C16 106 endlessness, they might not have chased after time so 
C16 107 greedily....<p/>
C16 108 <p_>The boy, the boy at least would have deserved the cold, moist 
C16 109 winds, the blaze of mirrors, summer. He should have been brought 
C16 110 here long ago, thought the man overcome by indolence and sleep. For 
C16 111 years on end, I would have known only the light and the happy sobs 
C16 112 of the water, I could have understood why nature means nothing to 
C16 113 me...<quote/><p/>
C16 114 <p_>Thrice and four times blessed were they who perished under the 
C16 115 walls of Troy. Between these dreadful parentheses - the sweater and 
C16 116 the beach - Mr. Manea evokes with powerful and yet delicate brush 
C16 117 strokes, as though in water colors, the nightmare of survival. In 
C16 118 'We Might Have Been Four,' one senses that the war has possibly 
C16 119 ended, but not the hunger. The family is still in a 
C16 120 <quote_>"hostile village."<quote/> They steal a chicken, kill it, 
C16 121 pluck its feathers, boil and fry it, gorge <quote_>"under the spell 
C16 122 of the meat's fragrance almost to the point of oblivion."<quote/> 
C16 123 It is just before dawn when they return through the forest: the 
C16 124 mother and father, the boy, and Finlanda, the boy's young cousin. 
C16 125 The girl wears a dress in which <quote_>"she seemed to float, to be 
C16 126 beyond anyone's reach."<quote/> She has made it of material the 
C16 127 father had offered to the mother and the mother refused: she had 
C16 128 grown too thin with the war, it would not have looked good on her. 
C16 129 Now the boy sees that<p/>
C16 130 <p_><quote_>the order in which we had come had broken down. 
C16 131 Finlanda had moved far off, ever more absent. Not too far behind 
C16 132 her, he [the father] too was moving off, as if caught in the leaves 
C16 133 and in the russet light of her flowing hair.<p/>
C16 134 <p_>I watched them leave everything behind. I wanted to shout after 
C16 135 them, I wanted to hate them, but I liked them, they always joked 
C16 136 with me...<quote/><p/>
C16 137 <p_>Whereas the mother, to whom they owe their survival, now 
C16 138 <quote_>"had no patience, she was always sour, anxious."<quote/> 
C16 139 The theme of betrayal - or is it the stirring of a scandalous 
C16 140 spring, an obscene reawakening of senses - returns in the story 
C16 141 called 'Proust's Tea.' The boy and the mother are in a railroad 
C16 142 waiting room monstrously packed with old people and children. The 
C16 143 repatriation trains have been segregated, so that men and young 
C16 144 women were dispatched somewhere separately. Although nurses in 
C16 145 white uniforms pass through the crowd, distributing tea and 
C16 146 biscuits, the rescued cannot understand that they have in fact been 
C16 147 saved. The mother<p/>
C16 148 <p_><quote_>couldn't stop thinking about what might be happening on 
C16 149 the train that never arrived. She couldn't have been allowed on 
C16 150 board, she knew all too well that she looked like an old woman, no 
C16 151 one would have believed that she was not yet thirty. But then she 
C16 152 would have had no reason to want to be on the train for men and 
C16 153 young women. Surely she too had seen how they had clung to each 
C16 154 other without shame - my father and my cousin - the moment they 
C16 155 left the lineup.<quote/><p/>
C16 156 <p_>Eventually, such things are passed over. <quote_>"Normal 
C16 157 times"<quote/> return. Families survive, <quote_>"go everywhere 
C16 158 they were invited, as if to make up for lost time and to reassure 
C16 159 themselves that they had come back alive, that they could start 
C16 160 over again with renewed strength."<quote/> Once again, they live in 
C16 161 middle-class apartments. They have maids; like in the old days, the 
C16 162 maid sleeps in the basement kitchen. At night, she may receive 
C16 163 visits of one soldier or another; one night this family's maid 
C16 164 receives instead the now adolescent narrator:<p/>
C16 165 <p_><quote_>Here are my feverish hands, the curls, the uncovered 
C16 166 wetness, open to all promises, summer green darkened in the curled 
C16 167 hair, phosphorescent with bacteria. I bite into the heart of her 
C16 168 shoulder.<quote/><p/>
C16 169 <p_>Young boys learn to answer questions such as <quote_>"Did they 
C16 170 beat you?"<quote/> Driven by their parents and relatives, or by 
C16 171 their own anguish, all at once they write poems, pass examinations, 
C16 172 excel in mathematics; they are awarded prizes at schools they had 
C16 173 never before attended. The narrator is such a boy. He <quote_>"had 
C16 174 made up the lost classes; devoured textbooks, even those others 
C16 175 found dull; he swallowed everything; always hungry, concentrated, 
C16 176 impelled by his own thirst."<quote/><p/>
C16 177 <p_>But, at a certain moment, even that may not be enough. The 
C16 178 boy's identity must be defined - for grownups, the issue may not 
C16 179 arise, their identities had been formed and, however tattered, can 
C16 180 be reassumed. Such a moment is examined in 'The Instructor.' The 
C16 181 father and the mother arrange for the boy to be taught Hebrew in 
C16 182 preparation for his bar mitzvah. Mr. Manea does not name either the 
C16 183 language or the ceremony; the teacher - an old man dressed humbly 
C16 184 in black like a petty functionary or a shopkeeper - says to the 
C16 185 boy:<p/>
C16 186 <p_><quote_>You're about to turn thirteen, to become a man. That's 
C16 187 why I've been called. The ceremony is not complicated. The language 
C16 188 is old, beautiful. The greatest book of all was written in it. That 
C16 189 is why the language has survived to this day.<quote/><p/>
C16 190 <p_>It is as though the parents tried to attach the limb that has 
C16 191 been severed:<p/>
C16 192 <p_><quote_>suddenly he was seeing them from a great distance. They 
C16 193 seemed childish, ridiculous. They did not even believe in the 
C16 194 ceremony for which they were preparing him. It was just the need 
C16 195 for yet another sign that all was normal. Nothing else but the rush 
C16 196 to accumulate proof, to have relatives and neighbors and former 
C16 197 friends confirm that, yes, everything was in order that life had 
C16 198 reaccepted them, that it was just like <tf|>before, that they were 
C16 199 the same as before.<quote/><p/>
C16 200 <p_>The narrator does not rebel for long. His parents hold a trump 
C16 201 card, the ability to control his movements. In addition to the 
C16 202 Torah, he is poring over the <tf_>Communist Manifesto<tf/>. What he 
C16 203 reads there, he believes and wants to believe. That is his road to 
C16 204 an identity and a <quote_>"normal"<quote/> new life. A selection is 
C16 205 about to be made for a great honor: attendance at a summer camp for 
C16 206 Soviet Pioneer Scouts, the elect among secular believers.
C16 207 
C17   1 <#FROWN:C17\><h_><p_>Santa Maria and Spaceships<p/>
C17   2 <p_>Philip Glass's Columbus opera sails into the Met<p/>
C17   3 <p_>KATRINE AMES<p/><h/>
C17   4 <p_>During an early rehearsal of Philip Glass's 'The Voyage' at the 
C17   5 Metropolitan Opera in New York, one orchestra member asked 
C17   6 conductor Bruce Ferden how long the first act would run. 
C17   7 <quote_>"Forty-five minutes,"<quote/> the meastro replied. 
C17   8 <quote|>"Oh," said the musician. <quote_>"So if we played it 
C17   9 without repeats it would last five?"<quote/><p/>
C17  10 <p_>Commissioned for the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus's 
C17  11 journey to the New World, 'The Voyage' sailed into the Met right on 
C17  12 schedule last week, exactly 500 years after the famous landing. 
C17  13 Unfortunately, it was also about a decade too late: minimalism 
C17  14 crested years ago. Though much of 'The Voyage' is lovely, 
C17  15 especially its lush orchestral passages, and though Glass is using 
C17  16 a wider harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary now, he's riding the same 
C17  17 old wave. Still, 'The Voyage' is a hit. All six performances are 
C17  18 sold out, in part because Glass has a legion of downtown followers. 
C17  19 And there is the faint but real possibility, particularly after the 
C17  20 success last season of John Corigliano's 'The Ghosts of 
C17  21 Versailles,' that some Met subscribers are willing to give new 
C17  22 operas a chance.<p/>
C17  23 <p_>Conservative operagoers will not suffer. 'The Voyage' is scored 
C17  24 for acoustic instruments- no computer clicks or electronic beeps 
C17  25 here. But there's too little that surprises: Glass's famous 
C17  26 arpeggios abound, and the chromaticism is pretty but predictable. 
C17  27 (Someone has already renamed the piece <quote_>"Recycled 
C17  28 Glass."<quote/>) It makes considerable demands on the performers, 
C17  29 and too few on the audience. The concept was the composer's: not to 
C17  30 tell the story of Columbus, who gets very little stage time, but to 
C17  31 explore the notion of exploration, of space, of time, of the mind. 
C17  32 It's an intriguing idea and a neat way to sidestep much of the 
C17  33 Columbus controversy. But, hampered by a muddled libretto by 
C17  34 playwright David Henry Hwang ('M. Butterfly'), an overblown 
C17  35 production and his own failure to shape character, Glass doesn't 
C17  36 pull it off.<p/>
C17  37 <p_>The opera begins with a touching prologue, as a scientist 
C17  38 (modeled on Stephen Hawking) hovers above the stage in a 
C17  39 wheelchair, ruminating: <quote_>"The voyage lies where/The vision 
C17  40 lies."<quote/> He summons up a planet-filled sky, and flies away. 
C17  41 After that, the vision falters: the action moves from the late ice 
C17  42 age, when four intergalactic travelers crash to earth in their 
C17  43 spaceship, to 1492, as a hallucinating Columbus nears land. The 
C17  44 last act, set in 2092, takes an abrupt tonal shift. Frantic and 
C17  45 hilarious, it features twin archeologists (imagine Hans and Franz 
C17  46 as Margaret Mead) who have unearthed crystals left behind by the 
C17  47 ice<?_>-<?/>age astronauts. Finally, in an epilogue, the dead Queen 
C17  48 Isabella tries to seduce the dying Columbus. Amid the mess are some 
C17  49 fine performances, particularly Patricia Schuman as the spaceship 
C17  50 Commander and Timothy Noble as Columbus. There are some great 
C17  51 moments, as when the Commander tangos with earthlings who wear bird 
C17  52 headdresses- like 'West Side Story' with feathers. But too often, 
C17  53 my mind took a little voyage of its own.<p/>
C17  54 
C17  55 <h_><p_>The Rise From Rice to Riches<p/>
C17  56 <p_>A 10-hour TV series tracks Asia's economic miracle<p/>
C17  57 <p_>JOSHUA HAMMER<p/><h/>
C17  58 <p_>Five years in the making, 'The Pacific Century,' a 10-part 
C17  59 documentary now appearing on the public television net<?_>-<?/>work 
C17  60 PBS, is a history lesson that goes down easy. Produced by Alex 
C17  61 Gibney, a filmmaker whose critically acclaimed 'Battle for Eastern 
C17  62 Airlines' on PBS chronicled the rancorous 1989 machinists' strike, 
C17  63 this series covers a vastly larger chunk of time. Over 10 hours, it 
C17  64 traces East Asia's transition from dependence on America to 
C17  65 political and economic vibrancy, concentrating on Japan but also 
C17  66 touching on China, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, the 
C17  67 Philippines and Vietnam. Inevitably, the series, which will appear 
C17  68 in a number of Asian and European countries in the coming months, 
C17  69 is flawed by tedious passages, omissions and eat-your-spinach 
C17  70 commentary from those inescapable talking heads. But for every dull 
C17  71 spot, it comes alive with newsreels and pop<?_>-<?/>culture 
C17  72 artifacts - from the appalling American 1910 film 
C17  73 <quote_>"comedy,"<quote/> 'That Chink at Golden Gulch,' which shows 
C17  74 cowboys gleefully murdering a pigtailed coolie, to early Sony 
C17  75 promotional films.<p/>
C17  76 <p_>'The Pacific Century' is most riveting when it weaves Asia's 
C17  77 past with its present. One of the best episodes, 'The Two Coasts of 
C17  78 China,' places the xenophobia of today's Communists in the context 
C17  79 of China's ancient hostility toward the outside world. Gibney's 
C17  80 camera crew traveled to Mongolia and got scenes of native 
C17  81 filmmakers re-creating Genghis Khan's invasion of China, complete 
C17  82 with hundreds of soldier<?_>-<?/>extras riding horseback across the 
C17  83 steppes. To capture the era of the Opium War (when the British navy 
C17  84 overwhelmed the Chinese to protect its contraband trade), he serves 
C17  85 up details about <quote_>"Miami Vice"<quote/>-style smuggling 
C17  86 trips, Indian opium factories and entrepreneurs such as Warren 
C17  87 Delano, Franklin D. Roosevelt's grandfather. Framing the old 
C17  88 conflicts are modern images of capitalist Hong Kong - as 
C17  89 threatening to today's Communist regime as the British 
C17  90 <quote_>"barbarians"<quote/> were to the Manchus.<p/>
C17  91 <p_>Gibney does a terrific job exploring Japan's history, showing 
C17  92 how it grafted Western-style colonialism, culture and democracy to 
C17  93 its own society. Beginning with the rise of the Emperor Meiji, he 
C17  94 devotes four episodes to the country's 130-year evolution from a 
C17  95 nation of samurai to soldiers to salarymen. It's jolting to realize 
C17  96 that the Mitsubishi Corp. once ran Battleship Island, a 
C17  97 19th-century Alcatraz where coal miners lived packed into wretched 
C17  98 "octopus dens" and faced execution if they tried to escape. 
C17  99 Particularly touching are scenes from the occupation, in which 
C17 100 Japan aped all things American: a patronizing American newsreel 
C17 101 shows <quote_>"a Jap jazz band for Joe and Mrs. Joe"<quote/> and a 
C17 102 Japanese Elvis attempts to sing <quote_>"(You Ain't Nothin' But a) 
C17 103 Hound Dog."<quote/> But footage of strikes and anti-American riots 
C17 104 in 1960 explodes the common misconception that Japan's 
C17 105 transformation to economic superpower was smooth. In one moment 
C17 106 from 1960 captured on videotape, a right-wing assassin rushes 
C17 107 across a stage and thrusts a samurai sword into a socialist leader. 
C17 108 It's a chilling image of the violent, medieval forces still 
C17 109 seething in the Japanese psyche.<p/>
C17 110 <p_><tf_>Striking themes:<tf/> Once it gets past Japan, however, 
C17 111 'The Pacific Century' loses focus. (Gibney's original plan was to 
C17 112 make a documentary just on Japan, but the Annenberg/CPB Project, 
C17 113 which chipped in $2.5 million of the $4.5 million budget, wanted 
C17 114 him to tackle the whole Pacific Rim.) South Korea's rapid 
C17 115 modernization and pro-democracy uprisings are vividly portrayed, 
C17 116 but his treatment of the Chinese Revolution is cursory and 
C17 117 disorganized, and much of the material on Taiwan and Singapore is 
C17 118 just plain dull. And while Peter Coyote's fine, understated 
C17 119 narration lends resonance, your eyes may glaze over when the 
C17 120 documentary falls back on a battery of droning academics.<p/>
C17 121 <p_>A documentary this sprawling is also bound to be flawed by 
C17 122 omissions. It doesn't touch Thailand's boom or Cambodia's tragedy, 
C17 123 skirts the Vietnam War and neglects Deng Xiaoping. A segment on the 
C17 124 Philippines begs for more scenes from Cory Aquino's 1986 revolution 
C17 125 that toppled Ferdinand Marcos; an episode about Indonesian leader 
C17 126 Sukarno (described by a comrade as <quote_>"a combination of George 
C17 127 Washington and Clark Gable"<quote/>) inexplicably says nothing 
C17 128 about the thousands of leftists murdered in the 1965 military coup 
C17 129 - one of the darkest chapters of Asian history. And it could use 
C17 130 more about the underside of the Japanese miracle - the stock-market 
C17 131 scandals, the bursting of the real-estate bubble. But what's 
C17 132 striking are themes and, above all, images: a shabby crowd at a 
C17 133 Tokyo fashion show in 1960, poised between memories of abject 
C17 134 poverty and dreams of prosperity. And in a tacky video from the 
C17 135 People's Republic, a young woman sings: <quote_>"Hurry up 1997/ 
C17 136 Then I can go to Hong Kong/ Come soon 1997/ I want to have a wild 
C17 137 time."<quote/> Moments like that one poignantly capture the 
C17 138 yearnings of a region still new to affluence and democracy.<p/>
C17 139 
C17 140 <h_><p_>Playing with Paradox<p/>
C17 141 <p_>Director of the moment: Canada's Robert Lepage<p/>
C17 142 <p_>SCOTT SULLIVAN in Paris<p/><h/>
C17 143 <p_><tf_>A plain white sheet: behind it, the spectral outline of 
C17 144 the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis rolls up its sleeve and ties off a 
C17 145 vein in its forearm. Looming stage left, a giant hypodermic syringe 
C17 146 aims itself at the inside of the jazzman<?_>-<?/>junkie's elbow, 
C17 147 strikes - and ejaculates a jet of liquid across the sheet. 
C17 148 Blackout.<tf/><p/>
C17 149 <p_>Few stage directors would dare mount such a scene. Fewer still 
C17 150 could bring it off. But for Robert Lepage, a 35-year-old French 
C17 151 Canadian who is captivating audiences across Europe, the Miles 
C17 152 Davis sketch is all in an evening's work. All his productions 
C17 153 abound in wit, surprises and unlikely combinations. When he stages 
C17 154 Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet,' he has the Capulets speak 
C17 155 English, the Montagues Canadian French. When he presents a murder 
C17 156 mystery situated in Quebec, the action takes place before the 
C17 157 Berlin wall. In Lepage's 'Coriolanus,' the playing area consists of 
C17 158 a 6-by-16-foot window; when the hero rises to address his 
C17 159 countrymen, his head vanishes from view. In several productions, 
C17 160 the hero flies overhead on wires.<p/>
C17 161 <p_>A few critics tax Lepage with superficiality. But the vast 
C17 162 majority see him as the brightest new star in the Western 
C17 163 theatrical firmament. Not since the early 1970s - when the American 
C17 164 renegade Bob Wilson first mesmerized European theatergoers with his 
C17 165 slow-motion stage magic - has a director made more waves. Already 
C17 166 this season Lepage has presented five plays at the prestigious 
C17 167 Autumn Festival in Paris. This week he is directing 'Needles and 
C17 168 Opium' at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. Last summer he 
C17 169 created a dazzling 'Midsummer Night's Dream' at London's National 
C17 170 Theatre. He works in Frankfurt and Munich this winter, then returns 
C17 171 to his Th<*_>e-acute<*/><*_>a-circ<*/>tre Rep<*_>e-grave<*/>re in 
C17 172 Quebec. Already, European critics are classing Lepage with the 
C17 173 great theatrical innovators of the late 20th century: Wilson, Peter 
C17 174 Brook, Peter Stein and Patrice Ch<*_>e-acute<*/>reau.<p/>
C17 175 <p_>He is a somewhat unlikely candidate for such adulation. A 
C17 176 painstaking minimalist who uses small casts and deliberately 
C17 177 limited stage spaces, Lepage implicitly rejects the lavishness of 
C17 178 most postmodernist productions. More than that, he sees himself as 
C17 179 an intensely local phenomenon. He is a 
C17 180 Qu<*_>e-acute<*/>b<*_>e-acute<*/>cois patriot, wedded to the 
C17 181 archaic (sometimes even incomprehensible) French of the province. 
C17 182 But Lepage has turned his apparent limitations into 
C17 183 real<?_>-<?/>life assets. He crowds his tiny stages with 
C17 184 psychological and physical action. And he studs his texts with 
C17 185 brash cultural allusions - from Leonardo da Vinci to Jean-Paul 
C17 186 Sartre to the East German secret police - which he treats with the 
C17 187 infective enthusiasm of a provincial who has just come up to 
C17 188 town.<p/>
C17 189 <p_><quote_>"Modern theater people never stop talking about 
C17 190 communication,"<quote/> says Lepage. <quote_>"They've forgotten 
C17 191 that the main point is communion."<quote/> To knit his audiences 
C17 192 into theatrical congregations, he uses every trick in the book - 
C17 193 from cinematic subtitles to flashbacks to full frontal nudity - 
C17 194 plus some he has invented himself. <quote_>"Audiences today have 
C17 195 learned everything from television,"<quote/> Lepage points out. 
C17 196 <quote_>"Because of the TV and even the VCR, I can permit myself 
C17 197 all kinds of gimmicks that were off-limits ten years ago."<quote/> 
C17 198 There is a certain slightly unfinished quality about some of 
C17 199 Lepage's work. But he defends even that quality on interesting 
C17 200 theoretical grounds. <quote_>"If the images are <tf|>too 
C17 201 perfect,"<quote/> he argues, <quote_>"you forget you are at the 
C17 202 theater. You might as well be sitting at the movies with your 
C17 203 girlfriend."<quote/><p/>
C17 204 <p_>Nobody who attends a Lepage performance will confuse it with a 
C17 205 movie. <quote|>"Polygraph," one of the plays he presented in Paris 
C17 206 this fall, follows (and pokes fun at) the conventions of the 
C17 207 B-movie thriller: the sinister detective in a snap-brim hat, the 
C17 208 unconventional <tf_>femme fatale<tf/>, the tense meetings on subway 
C17 209 platforms. But Lepage transforms this familiar material, chops it 
C17 210 up into quick, punchy episodes, sows his trail with false clues, 
C17 211 blends the central plot with themes from Shakespeare ('Hamlet,' 
C17 212 mostly). In the end, the raw material is transmuted into a 
C17 213 challenging puzzle about human guilt, responsibility and 
C17 214 punishment. The murderer is never identified.<p/>
C17 215 <p_>Lepage is a searcher, a ransacker of European culture, which, 
C17 216 he points out, his native Canada so acutely lacks. Two of his plays 
C17 217 - 'Vinci' and 'Needles and Opium' - are renderings of his own 
C17 218 experiences as a provincial on the Old Continent. He searches out 
C17 219 the hotel room where Jean-Paul Sartre once lived and wrote.<p/>
C17 220 
C17 221 
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