Volume 12 - Issue 1

Volume twelve, number one

2

TheNewjournal I

Volume twelve, number one October, 1978 Aaron Betsky Editor Mark Sheehan Designer Karen Sideman Graphics Editor Eva Saks Managing Editor William H. Wood III Publisher

Editorial Staff: Dick Pershan Lenore Skenazy, Ed Bennett, Judith Spack~. loge Hanson, Jamie Romm, Peter Pokalsky Business Staff: Claire LeGross, Ed Bennett, Caroline Mitchell, Jim Clark Best friend: Brenda Jubin Copyright o 1977 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., a non-profit organization. Letters and unsolicited manuscripts welcome.

3432 Yale Station, New Haven, Conn. 06S2C Phono.432-0939 or 436-8650

the new journal, October 1978

---------------connnnent-------------------Some Girls

Still dressed with style, but most definitely Up, he was there. Not the Desire hat bobbing in the crowd. Not the workshirt of the festive blue daze jean throng. No, center stage Bobbi sports trim black plants with smart silver studs lining the leg. The matching vest and silk scarf added to the air of cool casual elegance: simple, stunning and Street-Legal.

There's a long-time golden-haired stripper on stage As she winds back the clock, turns back the page Of a · book nobody can write Where are you tonite?

Not at the concert. Most everybody had heard the album on the radio.

Most nobody wanted to see the show.

Marie was supposed to see Dylan at the Yale Bowl in '66, but he broke his neck in the motorcycle accident. She remembers it happened the day before the show. She smiles when she remembers when. She used to rock and roll. But since she got married she hasn't been to a concert in she doesn't remember how long.

Queen E. Mama Jane, she was there, "at Bangladesh." On the scene, man. An unbelievable dream. Come true? She came onetwothreefour five times, justlikethat. Jesus, I couldn't believe it. Christ, Dvlan.

Sue, she stood on line all night long

_contents___________ 2

comment: gossip, sweat, rashes. sex and contemplation

staff

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Saratoga Summers Social Notes II

Staff

Ask Eva Social Notes I

Staff

5

Thumbs up memoirs of a travelling salesgirl

6

Street Scene cello suite in B

8 ..

Clift Notes Monty lives!

10

Medium Cool t.v. lOS

II

Mixed Media Amnican art at Yak

14

The City of Light an American in Paris

Inge Hanson

Dick Pershan

Margot Ch ienne

~ YYgiS Vitlt (L

Jamie Romm

Allan Chong

Stephen Froot

for Rolling Thunder Revue. When she was drunk, she always used to play "Lay Lady, Lay" on the jukebox, but Dylan just wrecked it on TV what'd he say - forget this dance, let's go upstairs. She still listens to the record, though.

Wendy's boyfriend used to play her the records. She never used to listen.

And ever since she heard Dylan was a wife-beater, she hasn't had to at all.

Not at all.

WhenEver since: Dylan's defunct. shouldafnever/shoulda ... stayed Zimmerman, another jew-boy folksinger spinster, another dead Tue. nite in a dying club: Been makin' records with Pete Seeger; Singin's sweet but the wages are meager. Yes, in those rare sentimental moments·, Seth sits the kids, a family fireside chat: Your Granpa's seen more than his share of hard times, but he stayed true.

Satiated with dignity, this virtue, kids, is humility. Moral: Age graciously.

Or die young. Alone on a motorcycle on page 3. Sex, drugs, lurid disillusion. Dire Society, cruel and phony, reaps its victim ...Ruthlessly honest, apocalyptic" "Pure magic, graphic and mythic." Even Bob Dylan will pose NAY-KED. Time tested and true, it'll sell.

Julie won't buy it though. She's got no bucks. Dylan's got'm all, and he's going to Vegas to get more, the toothless old whore.

Why doesn't he retire?

Stop, Look Around Freshmen feel it as they step back for a few moments to ~bserve their new lifestyle with amazement. I expect seniors feel it too, probably even more frequently, perhaps more deeply. It is a love of youth and innocence and the love of losing them and learning more.

But why is it that no one sings "Bright College Years" without a smirk? Why did the Yale men-boys of the 90's write sentimental poems about their college days while we write satire and churlish commentary?

Ours is an age when all must pass

too quickly - the pages of a classic which must be read in a week, the miles traversed between home and school. We have no Yale fence upon which to sit and reflect; we congregate instead in Machine City where the fast food surrounding us encourages our haste. Our adjectives are short, our exclamations four letter long. We form our opinions as hastily as we live our lives, and abbreviate our personalities on message-printed T-shirts.

The nostalgia Yale men once felt lind expressed for their college days even while living them - showed a kind of self-awareness. They knew they were happy, they knew they Joved their esprit de corps, conventions, caps, aspirations, and eloquent professors. They savoured Yale and youth, while we, busy being busy, do not stop to do even that. The chaps before sonic booms and renovated rooms wrote songs which they realized would grow more dear as the years passed by and single college experiences faaed into a fuzzy picture of irresponsibility, camaradeiie, amazement and health. Today we disparage because it's always easiest to criticize and because we don't have the time or inclination to appreciate all that is good. Re-reading our cynicism in silver-haired days (should we become so sentimental and have a free moment to spare), it will probably pain us. Nostalgia will teach us what we should learn now - to respect and savour the richness of the present.

These are bright college years with pleasures rife, the shortest, gladdest years of life. They should not be reduced to a frenzy of overnight reserve books, overnight relationships, and overnight decisions. They are years which might be spent in learning and loving, and learning from love, and loving that learning.

The Greatest Gothic Gym The Payne Whitney gym, which usually has the massive look of an enormous secret society or a maximum security prison, takes on a more etherial air at night. The statue over the archway (of Victory? Payne Whitney? Clean Competition?), lit from underneath, looks almost allegorical. Above it the tower melts off into the darkness and light comes softly through the two rose ·windows.

A few of the wet-haired faithful push through the turnstyle and lumber out.

Inside, the towel person yawns in his booth while portraits of decades of swim teams, smiling gamely and sitting crosslegged, stretch off down the hall in both directions. Upstairs the air smells of chlorine. A few runners walk thoughtfully toward the indoor track, past the shadowy polo rooms with the padded walls and enormous wooden ho~~ A runner continued to page 15

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the new journal, October 1978

A huge, bilious, jolly, stupefied "hello" to all .from atop the snowy bedsheets of my room. in DUH, where at press time I a m still on the danger list after a deliciously decadent summer which left me on the very edge of the GRAVE!! ( M y sternly paternal physician has positively proscribed sex ·and champagne for the time being!) My titillation began in June when I was ushered into ,the seamy enclaves of the C I A, bestowed with the onus of a ~ery heavy oath, and seated at a desk in a typing pool!

It stuns, I am sure, to read that I was not flung into the very stratospheres of top secret espionage - where I could be of some USE - but they seemed to think that my reputation shed doubt on my ability to keep a secret. Quintessential bunk, I can only respond. Besides, they had no idea how many secrets I already knew, and I've never told a soul about their secret plot to buy up Agnew's novel and burn it for the energy crisis. What would this country be without strong national security? I query, and in response l can but opine: a fascist state. So whatever I on the merry wings of caprice may slip and tell you about government secrets, reader, LET IT GO NO FURTHER. I mean it ... anyway, it takes more than an IBM Selectric and a pile of boring governmental master plans to hold my interest, so I skipped out to do a little heavy-duty jetsetting on the Continent - and I must confess that, along with PEOPLE magazine and a cast of dozens, I am agitated to the farflung horizons of angst about Monaco Mugsie (she tolerates my silly nicknames) and her new hubby, a social climber and a PHONY if ever my born days have seen one. I can understand how Caroline might turn a deaf ear to Princess Grace, the old snow queen, but when she won't even listen to me - \vhat's a bosom buddy to do? Well, I LEFT- it just wasn't fun anymore, you dig? There were hundreds of other nearby pieds a terre on my master keyring, but Monaco in general was death on stilts, and I hastened my hejira lest I perish of ennui. (I was mere moments from rigor mortis when my plane lifteo off!) . . . tliere~s been a lot of hemming and hawing and foofaraw about my admittedly sassy relationship with the upper echelons of the Yale administration, but cutting through the foggy haze of rumor is one mighty beacon of truth: we're like this. (I am holding up two crossed fingers as I write.) Proof positive of my claim is that after my narrow escape from M onaco, I passed through New Haven for a few days, and though it weakens me to think of what these two darlins went through to get my phone number, I was invited to a little impromptu "pass-

3

the-torch" party with Bart and Hanna. Bart was rather quiet a nd reflective - even took a few notes but Hanna, no offense, was a real motormouth. She told me how excited yet essentially wistful she was about leaving Yale to ..wind westward to the windy City, the toddlin' town, show you around ... "We should never have started those flaming shots of tequila, but what the hell, it was a special night. (Bart got a little singed, but only because Hanna insisted upon acting out the opening of the Olympics. What a filly!) Once Hanna boldly asserted that she could chug-alug a pitcher of beer. l made the mistake of saying "~n not," and she retorted "can to," and five minutes later I gave in, at the risk of suffering a most repetitive evening. Good thing I did, too, because she poured it down in nothing flat, slamming the pitcher on the table with an ..eat your words, Summers." (I don't eat my words, Hanna, I just record over them.)

When I asked her where she learned to drink a Mastodon under the table, she winked conspiratorially at Bart and gigg.led, ..Alumni. .."

My doubledear friend FEMINIQUE FONTAINE (no, wise guys, IT was named for HER) has become a rising starlet in politics! Knowing how starlets rise, I queried as to the possible decay of her rather cashmereish moral fibers. She responded, in a voice that dripped mink, ..tell your readers that any girl who can't buck this big w~rld and keep her legs crossed should just hang up her silver stiletto-heel shoes and quit!~ Very stirring, dear, but don't be so hard on yourself - I'm sure Fanne Foxe does quite well.

Wasn't it fun this summer to see Yalies just popping up everywhere in the media? I think we got more press than Harvard, don't you? I mean, Vogue, Playboy, Mademoiselle~ I almost got one of those fabulous Mademoiselle makeovers, except they said I wasn't "before" enough. The silly flatterers! And I hope you didn't miss that engaging passel of Yalies in Co-Ed magazine - the one with Donnie and Marie on the cover, in case your subscription ran out. I was amazed at how effectively their thoughts on dating and "relationships" catered to the needs of Co-Ed's early adolescent readership. This led me to suspect that the interviews were either exhaustively rewritten or quoted verbatim. Indecisions, indecisions!

lawsuits, I am worrying less about the dangers of ..hear-say" these days because of a great surveillance device I discovered: a delightful gadget called a Unibug - a crazy little cutie who will travel anywhere - li~e on some cozy comer of t hat third belt loop and transmit your sinful, scandalous words across the trembling New Haven air and onto the red hot tracks of my tape consoles! Even now, typists ·are working around the clock, transcrib,ing conversation for my upcoming book, YALE BABYLON.

Dear Merry, Do I hear a waltz? Merry, handkissing went out with the buggy whip.

Why not try the buggy whip?

•• Dear Eva, Last week D.U.H!s .. Don't stay worried or confused" Department told me t hat I was pregnant. My doctor's response was to prescribe ..bed rest, plenty of fluids, and two capsules of Sudafed every four hours." This approach seemed somewhat dated and dogmatic, even to a P ..O.R. member like myself (also inefficacious). What do you suggest?

- Worried and Confused Dear Worried And, If it's a girl, I suggest .. Margot."

•• Well, ta-ta everyone- the night nurse says ..hi" to all, completely unaware that I just slipped a Shanghai Special in her Gatorade. I'll be out of here sooner than they think, and with a tank of anesthesia to carry out my newest project, code name .

Unconscious People Photographed m Insinuating Poses. (Nothing succeeds like blackmail!) See you in the studio - if my henchmen don't get lazy again ...

Dear Eva, What to do, what to do. I am the rookie head of a prestigious New England corporation. Everything is going well except for one teensy problem. I'm involved in a fundraising campaign for my firm, and as the deadline approaches we're still several million dollars short of the target amount. Ideas, Eva? - P. P.S. Already tried a bake sale.

Dear P., You think you have problems NOW, wait 'till you fall in love with a broke off-campus second-semestersenior transsexual in love with a dead homosexual actor. Then, ASK EVA!

as

eva

Send your troubles to: EVA, The New Journal, Box 3432, Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520.

Dear Eva, Help! I am an off-campus secondterm senior with a full course load, two jobs, and no money. As if that weren't enough, I am also a transsexual in love with a dead homosexual actor. What would you do?

-

M.

Dear M., Come on, everyone has problems like yours. If that dead homosexual actor of yours knew what was happening in MY love life, he'd tum over in his grave. If I were in your shoes, I'd try wearing bright colors or all black. If that doesn't work, come up and see me sometime and I'll see what I can do, darling.

1146 Chapel St. New Haven, CT

•• My dear dear friend BLOOMSBURY spent her summer reading Nancy Drew books and Richie R ich comics "to help psych myself up for the law boards and those oddles of applications." Good luck, darling - when we're older you can help me sue my plastic surgeon . . . speaking of

Dear Eva, I haven't been in Paris long, and when I meet a man, I'm always saying something wrong; I'm so Marsovian!

For when a man would wed a girl in my own native land, he'll bend and kiss her hand.

- A Merry Widow

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Thutnbs Up

by Inge Hanson

The bike I rode was a ten-year-old Schwirih with balloon tires and busted sprockets. My blue sales case in the baby seat behind me jumped up 'and whacked me each time my bike hit a bump. The wind whipped past my ears. The green mountains, white lines and sqtooth farmlands rushed by in a·. blur. In was 8:30 in the morning and I was barrelling dowA Rt. 60 through West Virginia mountains towards a place called Saltrock, where I imagined barrel-bellied hillbillies would meet me with shotguns. Two weeks ago I had been staring at the keys of my iypewriter at 3:00 in the morning, trying to beat out a paper on the Hamlet imagery in t:Jlysses; now I was peddling down a mountain with 20 pounds of books behind me. I wanted the denizens of Saltrock to buy them. It was my job, you see.

I stopped, put my sales case down and looked up and down 8th Ave. in Saltrock, W.Va., trying to decide where to go. The houses were not small, but most needed paint. Almost every house had a porch with a porch swing. Old people rocked slowly back and forth on their swings, watching life pass by their front walks. Flocks of plastic ducks and geese filled their yards and pink plastic flamingos dipped their heads into plaster bird baths. Jn one of the front yards I'saw a big wheeL Sounds of cartoons came from inside the house. Kids, I thought. I picked up my case and walked toward the house. It was small. The wooden steps were caving in and the whole porch sloped to one side. A few of the boards on the porch were missing and I stepped carefully around the holes. :Toys, old clothes, a rusty bicycle and an ancient sewing machine were heaped on the porc}l.. A skinny cat with matted hair and a bald spot on its head surveyed me silently.

"Hi, kitty." I reached out to pat it and it darted under the sewing machine. The smell of urine, sweat, and children was suffocating. I put my case down, stepped back two paces, knocked and turned to the side.

Nothing hap_Pened. I knocked ·again.

The cat was staring at me from under the sewing machine and I purred at it. " Hey kitty, you want to buy some books, there's some great sections on ..."

The door creaked and I whipped around.

"Hi," I said quickly. "My name's loge. I uh, loge Hanson..." I could11't temember what came next.

"How are you?" · A red-faced mao of about 50 had opened the door. Sparse white stubble grew in patches on his knobby head.

Wrinkles cut his forehead into rows of arches, making him look extremely startled. Two little children by his side stared at me. When I s miled at them, they darted behind the man's legs and clung to his faded overalls. I laughed and waved at them, then turned back to the man and began again.

"Hi, my name's Inge, I'm just another one of those southwestern salesmen, y'all don't shoot them around here do you?" The man just

looked at me.

"Uh, hi, I'm loge."

He slood there. I looked at the kids.

"Hi, you guys, how are you. What are your names?"

They ducked behind their father's overalls again. The man opened his mouth.

I smiled encouragingly. " Ahoooooooooabooooooeeeeoooo."

"Uh, hub," I nodded my bead. I didn't know quite what to do.

"Is your wife home?"

The man made a jerky sign with his bands.

"Uh, huh, well, I guess I'd better go, nice, uh, meeting you." " He can't talk, he's deaf."

A boy who looked 15 bad come up the stairs behind me.

"Ob, I see, what's your name?"

"Jackie, Jackie Plank. Who're you?" ''I'm Inge."

"What do you want?"

"I'm a Southwestern salesman and I've been talking to your parents ... " "Ooooooaheeeeeeeooooo."

"Well, it doesn't•really matter.

Jackie, do you know if there are any other kids living in this neighborhood?"

"Yeah, why do you want to know?"

"I've got to talk with their parents about school books and stuff."

"That what you got in that box there?"

"Uh, hub, dictionaries and other books and stuff." " Yeah? Well, maybe mom'd be interested in them. I done quit school last year so I ain't got no use for nuttin' like that."

"Your mom's home? Is she busy?"

"Nab, you kin just come on in."

"O.K." I picked up my case. "You guys want to see something really neat?" The two kids watched me from behind their father's legs. They smiled and looked at the ground. "Come and look." I said.

Mr. Plank signaled something to Jackie with his hands.

"Ooooooeeeeeah."

"Yes, sir," I ·said.

Jackie walked into the house and I followed him, stepping over a child of about two who was asleep on the floor. Kids were lying around the TV set. Their skin was smeared with dirt and magic marker. The stench thickened as I made my way after Jackie to his mother's room.

"She's in bed cause she hurt her back a few days ago."

Mrs. Plank's room was about the size of a closet. Her bed took up half the space and a crib filled the rest of the room. Clothes were piled in the remaining floor space and hanging from the ceiling. Jackie's mom was lying on her side in bed. She was very fat. I smiled at her. The only words that came to my mind were from the sales talk.

"Hi, my name is Inge. I'm just another Southwestern salesman. Y'all don't shoot ... " "Oooooheeeeahoo." She looked at Jackie and waved her arms.

I turned to Jackie. "She can't... " "Mom can't hear neither."

"Oh, I see, well um... " I didn't know what to do. Should I give' a sales talk to a deaf lady who was lying in bed, in pain, who probably didn't have any money?

Should I leave, or sit, or move or ...

Mrs. Plank pulled her bulk from the edge of the bed, pointed at me and slapped the mattress with her hand.

"Ma wants for you to sit down."

I set my case on the floor and looked at Jackie.

"Go on, get you a seat." I sat on the bed. Mrs. Plank patted my leg and made a sign with her hand. "She says you're pretty," said Jackie.

"Oh, that's nice. How do you say nice?" I asked him. He showed me and I made the sign, pointing at his mother. She smiled. "Ooooobahbeee."

"Well, since I'm here I might as well show you these books," I reached down and opened the case. I thought back to sales school: "Be sure all the members of the family are present, that way you won't have to redemo the books several times."

"Jackie, I'd like to talk with everyone here, would it be OK if you got your brothers and sisters?" I wondered if I should have him get his dad. "I guess you could get your Dad too, if he wants to come." I was still a little unsure as to what Mr. Plank had thought of my approach at the door.

Jackie yelled into the other room in the house.

"I don't like school, I don't want no books," came the reply.

"Tell them it's really good," I said, "it'll help them so they won•t have to take as much time studying."

"Get in here or I'll beat your brains out."

A few of the kids walked in.

"Ah, hell, Jackie, I want to watch TV." "Jimbo!"

Jimbo walked in slowly, followed by the two kids who bad met me at the door and a few other children.

There must have been at least six altogether.

"Go git Dad," said Jackie.

Jimbo stared at me for a few seconds, then waited out. He came back leading his father.

"Hi, Mr. Plank." He stuck his hand at me and I shook it. We smiled at each other. I had the whole family around me, just like I was supposed to. Now I had to demonstrate the books. Oh well, the parents were deaf, but they could see. "Let me show you this." I reached for the case and pulled out the books. "Do you guys have problems with math, or English, or adything? What do you like best in schools? Or what do you hate most?"

No one said anything. "Over here is the math section. It bas math done the old way and the new way..... cont~d

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the new journal. October 1978

Street Scene

by Dick Pershan "Get lost, kid,tt the cop hisses at me, clutching his billy club more tightly. I'm sitting on a folding chair which juts into the path of pedestrian traffic at Fifty-third and Fifth. "Sure, sir," I answer with mock deference. I see his badge: Howells. He stands staring down at the wood instrument propped between by knees, a $2,000 Romanian Tiger Cello-, on which I'd just playing the prelude to Bach's Third Cello Suite...Get lost," Howells reiterates, brandishing his club above the burnt red Juster of the instrument. I cut short right in the middle of a sixteenth note run. Four or five pedestrians who have stopped to listen disperse, several dropping coins (and one a bill) in the large green suitcase I use . as a till. I pack my cello in a canvas carrying case, fold up my music stand, and throw it into my suitcase along with the cardboard sign which has ·been dangling beneath. Staggering under the weight of cello, chair, and coinlogged suitcase, I hide in the ground floor maze of a nearby office building.

Fifteen minutes later the coast is clear. I steal back and set up shop.

My perch is a five-foot-deep alcove beneath the silver ceiling of Ted Lapidus, a stylish woman•s boutique.

The Lapidus window is a glistening expanse of glass and near-sheer metal, showcase for leather handbags and matching boots, paisley summer skirts, a set of women's ties - and nebulously reflected in the background glimmer, a blond cello player.

I face out toward the street, impeding slightly the flow of pedestrians. In going around me, some people drop coins in my case. Others kick it. A half moon of onlookers surrounds me, then disappears. From across the street a lanky black man shoots a quarter in the direction of my till with a one hand jump shot. He misses and a truck prints the image of an eagle in the wet iar of 53rd Street.

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Business is bad. Middle-aged women eye me askance and their children point at me. A dog approaches my till with hind leg cocked threateningly. An old English professor of mine walks past without acknowledgment. Down the block coins tinkle in a metal bucket. It sounds like a cash register gone berserk. Sam, a blind Vietnam vet, is raking it in with his Nixon imitations.

The police can't hassle him because be's handicapped. I consider trying to get certified as blind, nix the idea because I wouldn't be able to use my music anymore. (Last week Howells threatened to take me down to the police station for booking. Since then I've been calling the station house at eight every morning just to find out which beat Howells is taking. Once I complain anonymously that a cert~n policeman, one Sergeant Ho~ells, as abusing some of the local artiStes.)

- ---

__.::::---

Moreover, my· grandfather's law office is )ust down the street, within blushing distance. He's even more dedicated to getting rid of me than Howells. "Bad advertising,., he says. ..And that picture of you in The Times - a lot of people recognized it!" I try to hear Bach instead of his words. "What are they going to think - your father can't feed you?"

Business finally starts to pick up. A pretty blonde girl in sandals and pink sun dress tegards me with profound sympathy...The bouree," she says, "Bach's Third." I nod, smiling. She leans over, leaves two dollars in my till, and kisses me with infinite care on the forehead. Fifth A venue smells like a sunflower as she disappears, Saks-bound.

Now a gang of Japanese men shows up snapping away frantically on Nikons. When they're through, they reward me with courteous bows, coins, and an instamatic shot freshly developed. A German youth corps replaces the Japanese gang; after the tune a blond-haired boy offers me his address in Hamburg...Bach," he says with an almost edible "ch" sound, ..acb."

It's around midday in the middle of a city summer. The tar is beginning to buclcJe and ooze, leaving a pungent, burning odor. A bus bonks and I realize why car bonking doesn't bother me but bus bonking does: buses honk: in G, the key I'm playing in. I think of ways my music mixes and clashes with the pulse of city life.

I watch the pace of the pedestrians who rush past. Quickly. Jauntily. I program my tempo to the beat of the street. In time. Walking in tune. My music, in tune. Listen to the click of high-heeled shoes. Use it. My music.

Somebody gives· me an apple.

Somebody gives me a bot-rock sauna coupon. Three visits with any of twenty bot rockingly lovely rockettes. Free.

Somebody gives me a few tokes on

a jay. My music improves. I remember these things.

A few minutes later a friend arrives from Deli City across the street. ..Here you go,"~he says, unbagging a coke. I'm still playing when he slips the :;traw into my mouth. It's like a freak show - "see the kid slurp without missing a beat!" I take a break and ask him a favor: "Just keep feeding my till with quarters every few minutes, and clap profusely each time I finish." He does so, tossing coins into my till. A friend from school shows up and begins pumping my till with quarters when anyone's watching, taking them out whenever no one's around.

It reminds me of the way I once worked the Central Park Summer Festival with my little sister. For Agamemnon she was a five-year-old princess in a House of Atreus pose looking hungry. Beside her was me, a menacing, be-toga'd musician wearing a sign: "Don't let this ogre eat his daughter, your contribution can feed them both."

A percussive clanging noise rumbles down the street. Soon I distinguish Indian· whoops and drum banging, the clink and clatter of cans. My music is fractured. It's not worth playing so I sit back and resin my bow, listening as the noise comes closer. People on Fifth Avenue scamper to the fringes of the sidewalk to avoid the banging and those producing it. It's a troupe of nuts, shaven-headed figures witl) pony tails thrusting up solitary from the mounds of their skulls like unicorns. All of them wear the same tan-colored robe, and all are pale as the sidewalk. They chant mesmeric "Hari, hari, hari" as they go past.

Each member of the procession drops a pamphlet in my till. They march on, wttooping and banging, as I read one elf the pamphlets: "Meeting under the bridge, Thursday, Love - Hari."

My till begins to fill up rapidly. I've reached the point of satiation, a point

I reached several days ago when one of my street-beggar brethren leered at my take in jealousy. "You have so much," be muttered almost apologetically as he reached into my till.

Now he has so much. But I learned. I fortify .myself against future rip-offs. I sharpen the point on my end pin.

Legs is back. That's what I call the hooker who works my comer.

Mounted atop six inches of cork platform heels, she looms large and leggy, replete with rouge-smeared cheeks and a halter top designed not to stop. Sometimes Legs works with Fingers, the nattily dressed pickpocket who carries a fob watch and cane.

Fingers keeps an eye on everyone who ·akes out a purse or wallet to give mt .1 contribution, verifying where the money comes from. He watches what pockets are involved. Rather than making his play right there in front of nie, Fingers usually trails his victims down the street and rolls them at the stop-light. Once I tried to tell Howells about this co-worker of mine, but he just accused me of scape-goating. .. Punk:," he said, and threw me out.

Now I keep a sign inside my case: "Beware Pickpockets - and Police."

After a time Legs and I strike up a conversation and Fingers joins in. I get to know them, my neighbors.

They come by in the morning and ask me how I'm feeling, whether I think it will rain, what do you call the thing I'm playing. They offer me a cut of their take, but I decline...You're a class kid," Legs tells me.

A fat, affluent-looking man, in a fine naY){ suit, stops me in the middle of a largo passage. Pink face twitching, he asks me a question.

«Aren't you my son?" He tries to hug me in the middle of Fifth Avenue, in the middle of my largo. I free myself and point the tip of my bow at him: Beware.

A yoUng woman in black sneaks behind me and be~ns. singing a vocal continued to page 12

7

the new journal, October 1978

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8

the new journal, October 1978

Clift Notes

by Margot Chienne Finding Montgomery Clift's modest brown townhouse on East Sixty-first Street is as easy as pie. Getting inside · is, however, another matter entirely.

The doorbell broke sometime in 1972 or '73 ("About the time Rhoda Morgenstern began losing weight," Monty recalls), and the famous award-winning actor has not yet seen fit to get it repaired. He has spent a long time pondering why this may be so. "It's a kind of passive-aggressive thing," he explains. "I have this basic . . . velleity to call in the electrician, but some kind of unacknowledged ... hostility toward most of the people who call on me, sort of ... it makes me not want to get it fixed badly enough to get it flXed. God-damn! I hope I'm not boring you."

Let it be known that absolutely no one has ever called Monty Clift boring. Neurotic, obsessive, brilliant, catty, generous, reclusive, dead, infantile, a lot of fun, a flibberty-gibbet, a will-of-the-wisp, a clown - yes; boring, no. He has been called other things as well. Louella Parsons once called him "radiantly handsome."

Garson Kanin has called him "a beautiful actor, a darling guy, a tragic mess." Kenneth Anger, author ofHollywood Babylon, called him "Princess Tiny Meat." All of which is beside the point.

The point is, the doorbell was broken so I had to stand on the sidewalk yelling "Mr. Clift, Mr. Clift,. Mr. Clift!" like a total fool until finally Monty's Filipino houseboy, Raoul, came down to the door to let me in.

Sweaty and out of breath, I paused in front of the mirror in the front hall to take inventory of myself. My creamcolored cotton skirt almost but not quite matched my off-white rib-knit wool top, which was almost an exact duplicate of the one Elizabeth Taylor wore when she starred with Monty in George Stevens' A Place in the Sun, right down to the little fluffy round things which cover the whole blouse.

My lipstick was still fresh, my nose perky, my eyes positively glittering with belladonna. "Right this way, please," Raoul said in his heavy Filipino accent. I paused a moment longer to adjust my hair, wondering if it looked windswept enough. Raoul leered contemptuously at my reflection. He must have thought I was a transvestite. Or maybe he just doesn't like women.

My first glimpse of Mor,.ttgomery Clift in the flesh: He is sprawled over one end of a sofa in the middle of his very large, brown, austere living room. A somewhat scratched Ella Fitzgerald record, played quadrophonically, dominates the atmosphere and Monty. He keeps time, badly, _ with one foot which touches the floor.

He sings, flatly, "You make me feel so young, You make me feel so springhas-sprung. . . . " At flfty-seven-going-on-flfty-eight (he must be the only adult in the world who gives his age like that), Monty Clift needs to feel young. The boy who wowed the theater world as Henry in the original 1942 production of The Skin of Our Teeth, the young heartthrob for whom Elizabeth Taylor would gladly have given up her eye-

Another question. "Do you ever watch your old movies on television?"

"Sometimes."

There is a long silence as we both sip thoughtfully. When I am reasonably sure that he is not watching me, I straighten the seams on the back of my stockings. Seamed nylons are very difficult to find these days, but I recently discovered a place in the Village that has all sorts of things that haven't been seen since the Thresher went down for its last. I hope Monty notices.

"No, I'm not really into ... film ... anymore," Monty says. He walks over to the window. His fingers drum teeth and Nicky Hilton, the drunken lightly against his glass of Tab. He cripple whose stunning portrayal of a ~;;;~~~~~ glances at me, working his lower lip retarded Jewish eunuch in Judgment in the manner Paul Newman had at Nuremberg moved director Stanley mastered so well when critics called Kramer to tears, is now on the him "the new Montgomery Clift." He downward slope of life. To be sure, looks out the window again, his Brando, his rival and imitator, is but stopping once to turn down profile toward me, eyes narrowed to a few years younger, but Monty feels volume of the stereo. He paces again, slits. ancient, troglodytic, prehistoric by his stops again - this time to change the "Now I'm into . . . video." own terrifying time sense. "Do you record - and, being an interviewer realize," he asks me in the course of a and all, I decide that it is time to pop Jack Larson, a prize-winning playthe first question. conversation, "that two out of three wright. who played Jimmy Olsen in people in this country not only don't "Do you think," I ask brightly, the old Superman TV series, used to remember the Second World War, "that you'll ever work in film again?" occupy rooms in the top floor of they don't even know who starred in Unexpectedly, he explodes.

Monty's towrihouse. Larson has long it?" Monty remembers.

"Film? What is it these days with since moved back to California, and Monty wears his years well. Except this 'film' business? Always in the his old bedroom is now Montgomery for his·hair, now grey and thinning, singular. Like it was like working in Clift's private television studio. Monty decoupage or something. In my day his appearance has not deteriorated has a video cassette recorder, two noticeably in the last ten or twelve we said movies. We knew they were Porta-paks with cameras, a large years. By his account, "clean living" cheap entertainment. No illusions. color television, a black-and-white People in this' country are getting as gets the credit for his youthful looks. monitor, a big studio camera just like bad as the· French, mon vieux."

He quit smoking five yt;ars ago, has the pros use, and Jots and lots of not had a drink since 1966. He quit ''Vielle." I cross my shapely legs. studio lights packed into one side of Demerol the same year, although he "Whatever. I don't know ..." .H.e the room. There is very little still pops "an occasional Percadan, de sits down on the edge of the sofa, his furniture. forearms resting lightly on his knees, temps en _remps." Both arms still bear "I haven't been ... idle ... these faint trac~s from his shoot-'em-up then suddenly jumps up again, his past few years," Monty says in a days, battle scars he displays with all arms flailing wildly...The movies they Michael Parks monotone. His face the simple pride of an old salt make these days ... Jee-zus. Like that brightens. "Would you like to see showing off his tattoos. crazy one about the two hippies on some of my work?" I say yes, and he "Welcome. Come in. Sit down," h~ ""''t"r"''"t'~" . . . the real world isn't says, "Fan-tastic!" ~'r.#~~-z..-He pulls out a number of tapes 'from a lopsided stack on the floor and reads the handwritten labels on the side. ··oh, this one is ... good.

But that's not the one I'm looking for.

No ... no ... I can't find it. Here it is. Fantastic. Let me rig this up.

There're some folding chairs over aeainst the . . . wall."

"What is it?" I ask, meaning the videotape. ..You'll see. I wrote it myself. It's dramatic: I only do ... dramatic things. It's a short biography of Harry Crosby." Harry Crosby was of course the nephew of J. P. Morgan who shot himself and his girlfriend on a reasonably dark night in 1929. uy ou play Harry?" I ask.

"Yes. Watch."

We watch for five minutes or so, during which time Harry fights in the Great War, goes to Harvard, and runs orders, finally spying me at the door. like that. And all thes~ James Bond off to Paris. Monty stops the tape.

"Sit. There." He points to a leather movies. And Last Branda in Paris. He "It's not finished yet. I can't find Mies van der Robe chair near the always told me h~preferred K-Y. · anyone to play Caresse Crosby. sofa ...you look like ... someone I Ha-ha. Joke. And all those horrible Nancy Walker offered to play once knew. Tell me all about yourRoss Hunter sex comedies. The Caress~ but I wanted her to play self." He jumps and runs to the door. industry is going to the dogs."

Josephine, the girl who gets shot "Raoul, bring the lady a drink."

Raoul enters with a Tab for me and along with Harry. It's a smaller part, "What she want?" Raoul yells from a Tab for Monty. He is smirking but Nancy's never died ol\ camera a distant corner of the building. again. Apparently he has caught before that I know of, and I think it'll "I don't know." Monty looks Monty in the middle of an old be a great opportunity for her." confused for a moment, then turns to routine, called, perhaps, the "Out-of-it "Have you got Nancy on tape?" me sheepishly. "What do you want?"

Has-Been Routine." Monty looks "Not yet. Except in a Bounty ad "Oh, a Tab would be fine. Anything embarrassed. He sits down again and and a couple of Rhoda episodes I sugar-free." says, in a low voice, "No, actually, I took off the tube. rm in one of the "Fine, Tab, my favorite," Monty do keep up to date with what's going Bounty ads, of course." says. He relays this to Raoul, then on. I think the general quality is much "I didn't know that." paces around the room several times, better today than it was in the flfties."

"You didn't? I thought everyone

·•

9

the new journal, October 1978

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knew. The one where they say "But are they strong?" and Nancy says, 'Strong enough to lift these potatoes! • Well, I'm one of the people sitting at the counter, and if you look closely you can see the back of my head over in the left right after she says 'Strong enough to lift these potatoes!' They were very happy to get me for the ad.

It was an in-joke on Madison Avenue a couple of years ago that Monty Clift did a paper towel ad. I didn't get any money for it though, I insisted on doing it free, just like Judgment at Nuremberg. Do you think Kathleen Widdoes would make a good Caresse?

What has she done lately?" " I wouldn't know," I reply sweetly.

"But I'd love to play Caresse."

"No, thanks. Thanks but no. You'd make the rest of us look .. : old.

Youth is wasted on the Jungians."

Monty offers to screen-test me, however. I am to take a sheaf of papers and look disgustedly at them and say, "Poems? Poems? You call thesepoems? Why, my dog can write better than this and she's only two years old!" We do a couple of takes and watch them on the monitor.

"You're very ... good," Monty says, and I demurely agree. "You remind me of somebody ... somebody special ... I forget just who."

Monty sho,uld have had plastic surgery after his fa~ was smashed up in that grotesque auto accident in 1956. But he didn't. Photographs of him from the late 'fifties and early 'sixties sh_ow him looking like a wreck, which at the time he was. It isn't easy to go from being the handsomest actor of your generation to being one of the most dissipatedlooking. But if the pain and disfigurement steered him ever more resolutely toward the bottle and syringe, his new face, with its vaguely Semitic cast, also enabled him to play roles (in Freud, The Young Lions, and Nuremberg) in which the old Monty would have looked just plain silly.

1<l3q ...

~-s ~s~~ib~~RR

Had his luck and his health held up, Monty might have matured into a fine character actor, somewhere between Eranklin Pangborn and Peter Sellers. (His faggy, mother-ftXated bronco-buster in The Misfus iS not only a brilliant characterization, it adds some sorely-needed ha-has to that overblown paean to decrepitude.)

But then Monty had to contend with the disastrous Freud lawsuit, his addictions, and enough emotional and physical ailments to fill several medical casebooks. He has suffered from severe cataracts, amoebic dysentery, a rare form of calcium deficiency, and a number of other weird chronic things.

"I really don't know why I waited so long to get the old face fixed," he says. "It's like the doorbell. Everything takes such an effort. I knew plenty of plastic surgeons, but I guess I was afraid they'd make me look like Glynis Johns. En fin, I got up the nerve to get myself patched up here and there. Eyes. Nose. Lip. Had the jaw broken and reset. This was during '66 and '67. I didn't look younger at all. I just looked like a decrepit version of my young self. Which is what I wanted, I thin~."

We are on the sidewallc now, headed toward Monty's favorite Italian restaurant, Galvani's on Third A venue. It occurs to me when we have walked a couple of blocks that not one passerby has flashed a look of recognition at the famed actor, although several seedy-looking old men have stopped to wish me good evening.

This anonymity of Monty's is a puzzle. I myself would recognize him in a dark alley with a paper bag over his head. Has the public forgotten him?

"No, no, not at all, mon vieux," he says when I ask. "There are two reasons why people don't notice me."

He raises two fingers in front of my face and counts off the reasons as we walk. "The first is, I look so much the way I did thirty years ago that people

I

are inclined to think I just look like Montgomery Clift. Cabbie told me yesterday I could be Clift's double if I weren't so skinny.

"And the second reason is that ... many people think I'm dead. Now, this creates some problems. Some years ago I went to the Academy Awards with Warren Beatty to watch him get Best Actor for Bonnie and Clyde. He had come with me the previous year to see me win for Reflections in a Golden Eye, so I was repaying the favor. He picked up his famous smile from me, you know. Or so he says. Anyway, Butch - I call Warren 'Butch~ -Butch and I were about to go in and there were all the photographers and so forth around ...

We get to the door and they won't let me in without an invitation. So I give my name and this fellow at the door almost s~allows his tongue. He says, 'Oh, ho, you canta foola me.' Like Chico Marx. 'Oh, no, you canta foola me. Montgomery Clift, he'sa dead.'

They all think I'm dead. Butch patches things up, and they let us both in. Next day there's mention in the trades that some drunk claiming to be 'the late Montgomery Clift' tried to crash the Academy Awards. Earl Wilson, that complC?te tool, gets that all fucked-up and says that some low type claiming to be 'the late Monty Clift's lover' tried to sneak in, but was detained by the bouncers, with the able assistance of Warren Beatty.

Umgotteswil/ens, Earl Wilson gets everything wrong. Anyway - look out for the car - that's how the rumor that I was dead got started. I'm always getting confused with Robert Montgomery, too. And Cliff Edwards and Clint Eastwood. Can you believe- Clint Eastwood? Well, we both got our start as cowboys."

He squints through his heavy glasses, one eyebrow cocked ironically. I am reminded of his role as the Ivy Leaguish cowboy in Red River.

Clint Eastwood does indeed perform rather like a lower-rent version of Monty's Matthew Garth, now that I think on it. Just as Paul Newman took his usual persona from .A Place in the Sun and Jack Nicholson's portrayals remind me - de temps en temps. as Monty would say - of Perce Howland in The Misfits.

I mention all this to Monty, who smiles and does a Gertrude Lawrence: "Everyone acts like someone else. It's dreadfully confusing."

While we wait to be seated at Galvani's I add, "In Invasion of the Body Snatchers ~evin McCarthy acted just like you."

"Better quit while you're ahead, mon v,ieux."

"Vie//e."

"Whatever. Hey, I just had a deja vu. I've been waiting in a restaurant with you before, with a guy sitting at the bar just like that one" (he points to a fat man a few paces away) "and you're looking at me with ... a light ... in your eyes and I say, apropos of something or other, Better quit while you're ahead,.. or somesuch. Have I ever met you before?"

"Yes," is my reply. I've been dying all afternoon and evening to tell him this. "You met me in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1958, when I was four years old."

"A h. yes, now I remember. You're the one who didn't want to have her picture taken. Do you still hate 4

broken crayons?"

"Uh-huh."

"So do I." As we finish our antipasto a middle-aged woman in a pink blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a calf-length green plaid pleated skirt, bobby ·sox, and brown-and-white saddle shoes appears at our table. She is hyperventilating. "Oooh," she squeals, "it's Monty Clift!" She pushes a grimy autograph book in front of us and demands that Monty sign it. '"For Esmerelda, with all my love,' if you please, Mr. Clift. .. " Esmerelda giggles.

Monty looks very hard at her.

"Montgomery Clift is dead," he says.

"Dead, I tell you!"

A bald man with hairs in his nose approaches and takes the woman by the shoulder: "Come, Cosima, come along. You musn't bother these nice people. Terribly sorry, folks." He raises a crooked finger to tip his hat, only he isn't wearing a hat. Cosima, or Esmerelda, or whatever her name is, runs back to get her autograph book. I have already signed ·'Elizabeth Taylor' and Monty has added, below it, "Robert Taylor."

Studio 54 isn't what it used to be, but then, what is these days? Certainly not me, certainly not Monty. ln my Place in the Sun outfit I am immediately admitted, and a kind gentleman ahead of me even does me the favor of paying my couvert. I wait for Monty until, some ten or twelve minutes later, he slips in with a crowd of off-Broadway homosexuals.

"Somebody actually recognized me here a year or so ago," he says. "Hey look, there's Dick Van Patten! Hi, Dick. Dick was in The Skin of Our Teeth with me way back when. Hey, Dick, you're lookin' good, I see you lost more weight!" It turns out that it is not Dick Van Patten after all, but that is okay, because whoever it is disappears into the crowd and is never seen again.

"You say you've been recognized here?" I ask.

"Yeah, about a year ago. A foreigner, hadn't heard that I was dead. She worked on the props for Suddenly, Last Summer. Told me I looked better now than I ever had in my life. You'd recognize her name in an instant if I told you who it was."

As he says this, this obnoxious person from my discussion section at college a couple of years ago suddenly bumps into me and begins to coat me with slobbering kisses. "You look fantastic," says the disgusting person.

I grab Monty and tell him I want to go.

We go. The next morning he is reading the New York Gazette, one of the shorter-lived of the papers born of the newspaper strike, when he suddenly looks up at me and says, "You didn't tell me that was Senator Blahblah's son last night at Studio 54.

You should have introduced us."

"Why? Is there something about him in the paper?"

"Yes. He was killed in a hit-and-run on CPW right after we saw him."

"I find that very difficult to believe," I say.

"All I know is what I read in the papers. More co~ee?"

"Please."

10

the new journal, October 1978

Mixed Media The Garvan Collection of American Art

by Allan Chong

You can get into culture in many different ways at Yale. If you're interested in our own culture, you can trek up to the third floor of the Art Gallery, where the Garvan Collection of American Art is housed. Yale pioneered the conception of American art as multi-media expressions of society and class, eschewing the traditional European notion that Real Art consists of painting and sculpture and nothing else. Today the Garvan Office (as the ~erican arts office is now known), coupled with a new research Center for American Art and Material Culture, is the only major American art institution tied to a unive('Sity.

It was not until 1973 that a proper home was found for Yale's vast and important collection, when the 3rd floor of the old Yale Gallery was completely rebuilt to provide new office space and exhibition area.

There is no question that the new Garvan Gallery was ¡both a revolutionary and controversial approach to the display of decorative art.

Museums had previously relied on the "period room" -=- historical settings for displays of furniture, paintings and other paraphenalia. This approach tends to result in quaint approximations of colonial kitchens or Federalist drawing rooms scattered with whatever historical objects happen to be available. In the Garvan Galleries individual art items are treated as art objects in themselves and are isolated from their historical settings. The new Garvan galleries consist of a maze of stark white panels that give the objects an abstract setting: chairs and cabinets are hung one above another, or are turned upside down to facilitate viewing of important design characteristics. This deliberately didactic and analytic display leaves no room for historical atmosphere or ambiance.

Rather than give the viewer a look

backward, or gene~te a nostalgia for the past (something more effectively achieved at a place like Williamsburg, Va.), the Garvan installation presents American practical arts as creative acts, sometimes brilliant, sometimes awkward, but always telling.

In a strange way the Garvan Gallery 'approaches practical art in the same way Marcel DuChamp and the Dadaists did. Everyday household objects are divorced from their natural settings and functions and are made to stand on their own. Where DuChamp ennobled a Snow Shovel (owned by, Yale) or A Plastic Bottle Rack, the Garvan galleries will often suspend a table or a cabinet entirely in mid-air. In one particular installation, examples of 20th century chair bottoms are arranged in rows like Andy Warhol's repeating Marilyn Monroe. The 18th and 19th century ironwork display is arranged on a panel in the same way an antique Sears catalog would illustrate the same items. This abstractive approach is extraordinarily effective if only because objects can be seen as designs in their own right.

After five years of operation, the effectiveness of this form of presentaeffectiveness of this form of presenting a culture can now be fully understood. There is at least universal agreement that the new facility is vastly superior to the old one, simply because it is much larger. The designers, Paul Dietrich of the Cambridge Seven and Ivan Chermayeff, created new office space on a mezzanine to open up 10,000 square feet of exhibition space. That more than 1,500 items - more than twice as many as before - are now displayed means that there is greater accessibility of the collections for students and scholars. Panels in the gallery are set up in diagonal fashion and aisles are made narrow to increase wall-space. High-technology

features were incorporated wherever possible to save further space; a cqmpact electronic ferris-wheel rotates America's fmest silver collection at the flick of a switch; a large selectibn of old American prints is housed in convenient pull-out racks; lightsensitive miniatures are stored in special flip-up drawers that light up automatically for viewing.

More importantly perhaps, the Garvan gallery fits the needs of a university community. Displays are in chronological order, with a significant amount of wall text to explain various styles and periods and to place the objects in a historical context.

Schematic time-charts and illustrations are used whenever appropriate.

Indeed this didacticism is one of the very targets of criticism. Many museum scholars resent being hustled down one long winding passage through the display. But when one remembers that most visitors are unfamiliar with the details of connoisseurship and history concerning decorative art objects (especially items like silver and furniture), one realizes that the museum must provide the necessary information. Charles Montgomery, the first curator of the collection, sa"W a good museum as being something like a good teacher, and many of the Garvan Office's displays prove his 1>9int. One display actually dismembers an early 19th century chair in order to illustrate details and pro~ses of construction.

The installers of the galleries tried to juxtapose and compare as many examples of a particular form as possible. Items are set on raised platforms or actually hung on walls.

Thus the case furniture section, for example, would trace differences in design and function as seen from the 18th to 19th century, between geographic areas, or between social classes. Comparisons can be made immediately in the gallery. If .as a

I

result the galleries seem crowded, it is only because the designers felt that an object is more instructive on C:lisplay than in storage.

Mo're than any other individual, Prof. Charles Montgomery was responsible for this successful center for the study of American art at Yale University. His tinexpected death this past spring has raised ¡questions about the future of the Garv8 office. There is a great fear in the History~ of Art department that its faculty in American art will be permanently depleted, especially since the loss of Montgomery was compounded by, the resignation of American painting specialist Ted Stebbins. Part of t~e reason for the Garvan Office's effectiveness was that many of its curators were also mem~rs of the university faculty. This is no longer true. Moreover there is further pressure from many donors Who want to see file's traditional strength in American decorative arts continued.

The bulk of Yale's present collection was donated by Francis P. Garvan in 1930. It was Garvanâ&#x20AC;˘s progressive realization that American art had to be studied as a mixture of media and styles that led to the establishment of an institute for American practical arts. It was Garvan's widow who provided most of the funding for the construction of the new exhibition galleries. The American arts office has been particularly active in recent years. The Garva~ Office is a healthy part of Yale's art institutjon. It is well staffed and well financed; there is great stUdent interest in the American practical arts. It can only be hoped that Yale will continue to support and facilitate its important cultural study center.

tM new journal, October

11

1978

Mr. X (be has requested that we not reveal his actual name) was, until recently, a television producer with ABC-TV. In spite of his earlier success, he was fired last month by the executive board of the network.

No specific reason was given for this sudden action; the press release issued by the board said only that he had "stepped outside the range of company policy." However, certai,n documents recently obtained by this publication reveal that Mr. X was actually involved in a plan to interfere with the operation of the three major broadcasting networks and to establish a new one, TMN-TV. In this unprecedented interview, Mr. X speaks of this plan and the reasons he considers it imperative to alter the current broadcasting system. After stopping by The New Journal offices, Mr. X: depart..;<~ for an unnamed foreign country.

Solzhenitsyn does.

NJ: Are you comparing yourself to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the noted Russian writer and humanitarian?

Mr. X: Damn straight I am. Why is everyone so awed by him, anyhow?

He's just a normal guy with a little bit of guts who was lucky enough to be born in a repressive society. What about the rest of us poor slobs? Can we help it if our countries don't have Siberian work camps? Is that our fault? Hell, it's amazing how far you have to go to get persecuted these days. Just when you think vo11 finally made it, you look around and The New York Times is behind you.

It's disgusting.

NJ: Nevertheless, you seem to be

Medium Cool NJ: How did you first become interested in television?

Mr. X: Well, it all began when I was 3 years old. I went over to the TV and turned it on, with no idea of what would happen. First it began emitting sound, and then images of men began to appear - not only men, but also a rabbit, a moose, and an enormous clock with eyes on it. I now believe this was an early episode of "Capta!n Kangaroo." Of course I was captivated at once, and spent weeks wondering how these men got inside the TV, and where they went to the bathroom.

NJ: Yes, but when did you first begin to realize the potentials of television as a medium?

Mr. X: I guess it was shortly after my fourth birthday that I discovered you could change the channels. After that I entered a rather impassioned period of channel-flipping, paying particular attention to the static ground in between stations. When I was seven, I began exploring the picture control dials; horizontal hold was a great source of inspiration.

Three years later my family got a color set and I went into a long discolo.ration phase, turning the people's faces green, pink, purple, and so on. At 15 I was tuning in UHF stations, and my career was well underway.

IVJ: I see....

NJ: Mt. X, you seem to have cause9 a great deal of controversy in the world of broadcasting .

Mr. X: Controversy, hell. They're after my butt·. ' NJ: Er, yes. Well, perhaps you could tell us why this is.

Mr. X: Sure. Be glad to... .

Basically I see myself as a Christfigure. You- know, martyr for the common cause, pioneer of personal freedom set upon by repressive superstructure, courageous and idealistic even in the face of great personal risk, that sort of thing. Of course, these are all subjective views.

Still, you've got to admit rm putting my neck out on the line, and I don't even have a beard to protect it like

only too happy to JCeep otsrung tt ouL. All ttie programs we watch today are just slightly evolved forms of All in the Family or Happy Days.

NJ: How do you explain this phenomenon of perpetuation?

Mr. X: I'm glad you asked that question. That relates to a very personal theory of mine, developed over long years of tremendously insightful observation of the broadcasting world.

NJ: Would you share this theory with the readers of The New Journal?

Mr. X: I will if you really vfant to hear it. But you'd better be sure you really want to, because it takes a while to explain and I think some of it might be over your head.

-An Interview

experiencing a good deal of persecution right now.

Mr. X: That's right. That's because I know where to find the greatest resistance to change - the mass media.

NJ: Could you elaborate on that?

Mr. X: Sure. Let's look at the act of watching television first. What do you do? You sit down in a big armchair, turn on the tube ana put your mind on hold. It's like taking a bath - you become completely stagnant and let this stream of warm water flow over your brain. Your whole being is tuned into a totally reactionary state where the object is to stay exactly the same until you get out of the water and dry off. Ever see people when their TV goes on the blink in the middle of a show? They go wild and start pounding the set.

Some guys have even put their fist right through the screen. Their resistance to change is that strong.

NJ: And you feel the networks encourage this reactionaryism?

Mr. X: Sure they do. They have to if they want to survive. Just look what happened when Rhoda left "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." Everyone's mind was set in this little groove saying "Rhoda is living in Mary Richard's apartment building." Never mind that they're all fictional characters acting on a Hollywood set to begin with. We just want Rhoda and Mary to be together, because that's the way it's always been. Your next door neighbor might have a heart attack and die at age 42 and you'd never know the difference; but let Rhoda try to move to New York, just jiggle your comfortable fantasy frame a tiny bit, and everyone's up in arms.

Next week the Nielsen ratings are down 30%, and if they can't find a suitable Rhoda figure after a month, the show's had it. Hell, take a look at the new shows - Star Wars imitations, Welcome Back Koller imitations, Laverne and Shirley imitations, Charlie's Angels imitations.

We've been conditioned to respond to these shows, so their offspring can't help but succeed. People want more of the same, and the networks are

by Jamie Romm

NJ: Please, go ahead.

Mr.- X: All right then. You see, my theory is that we've entered a new era of programming. About 15 years ago, when the sit com developed, it really was a situation comedy: that is, it was made up of a character or characters being placed in ridiculously absurd, impossible situations. For instance, remember "It's About Time?" About the three astronauts who somehow landed on prehistoric earth and brought back a bllnch of Neanderthals to the present day? Or how about "The Second Hundred Years," about the guy whose greatgrandfather comes to life after spending a century frozen in a glacier?

Both are amusing premises, but, naturally, ·we know they could never happen. The day-to-day experiences of a man living with a precocious genie, or a secret Martian, or a seacaptain's ghost, or an automotive reincarnation of his mother, may not have been very instructive or enlightening but at least they bear no resemblance to reality. They were mere pieces of fluff, elaborately reproduced fa.Qtasies, meaningless wastes of time. However, among these airy tumbleweeds a very dangerous seed was talcing root. It was a seed that was planted back: in the beginning by "I Love Lucy" and "Father Knows Best." Then, watered by corporate wealth and steeped in the manure of Hollywood screenwriting, it grew up through ••A Family Affair,", ..The Dick Van Dyke Show" and ..The Brady Bunch." Then Norman Lear came along, and the ..real-life comedy" was here to stay.

Oh, sure, we still call them situation comedies. But what kind of situations do we have now? A man living with his family in a duplex in Queens. Two women living in a New York apartment. A woman living in Tarrytown. A black family in a housing development in Detroit. These shows don't get their humor from situation.

They try to show us how funny the experiences of real life are, and how funny real people are. In fact the characters are so real that people begin to see them as friends, or

neagnoors, mayoe even toven, wuu the hell knows. Do you know that when CBS killed Henry Blake on .. M.A.S.H." there were people who put their flags at half-mast? And that elementary school children have spent weeks under the delusion that they were Vinnie Barbarino? And that the actresses in "Charlie's Angels" receive dozens of marriage proposals each week, addressed to their fictional character names? We believe in these characters, we adopt them for our own. More than that we actually experience through them. Their problems are carefully engineered to simulate our problems as much as possible. We don't just watch these shows, we live them. For the space of one-half-hour we take our place among the Bunkers, the Findlays, the Jeffersons, and live our life with a laugh track behind it. That's why we're so opposed to any form of change. Everything is hunky-dory at the beginning: all the relationships balance perfectly, all the vibes are good, everyone's needs are being satisfied. Any change that occurs is going to make ripples in an otherwise clear pool. It makes us feel insecure; what is life going to be like without Rhoda? Who's going to come in and talk to us while we make.dinner? Who will we talk to about our problems at work and our latest romance? Who will be flawed and unhappy enough to constantly bolster our ego? What if we can't fmd someone? What if Mary Richard is left as lonely and bored as we are when we watch the lousy show? What if she sits down and turns on the television? Good God, what then? I guarantee there'd be breakdowns and suicides all over the country the next day. We wouldn't be able to take it. If we ourselves can't be happy, at least we can be happy as Mary Richards. And why shouldn't Mary Richards be happy? If something goes wrong, all she has to do is make a joke and hundreds of people will laugh. It's guaranteed. Infallible ego support. If that laugh track: turned on her just once and started hissing, she'd fall apart ... anyhow, that's my theory.

NJ: Does this relate to your plans fo( TMN-TV? Mr. X: Absolutely.

NJ: What was your intention?

Mr. X: Well, the danger behind this mimetic style of programming, as I see it, is that we all begin to dwell in these elaborately contrived videoworlds. We develop little laugh tracks in our heads to help us out when we can't actually climb into the tube.

Moreover, things that have been made funny on television - childbeating, unwanted pregnancy, old age, homosexuality, crime, delinquency, impotence, etc., etc. -can become inappropriately funny in real life.

Little boys are already beating up on each other to be like the Fonz, and God knows that little girls watching TV now are going to grow up with neurotic breast anxieties. Our role

.continued to page J 2

12

continued from page

I J

th~

new jouma/, October 1978

s

Mrs. Plank grabbed the books and flipped through one of them. "Ooooooooeeeeeooah," she jabbed at one of the sections with her finger and made a sign to her husband. He bent over the bed, took the other book and began going through it, pulling the pages as he turned them.

"The math section is pretty good," I tried to show it to Mr. Plank but she kept turning the pages. I looked at the sections she passed. " Yeaft, history's good too, and that's - well, that was the metric system, tell her the metric system's in there, Jackie. They're good books."

I pointed my thumbs up. "Good books!" The kids started laughing.

"Fonzie!" They shook their Mom, and pointed at me, making signs. She put her thumb up too. "Oooooooo fonziiiiiieeeeee."

"Hey you talked, that was really good! I didn't know she could talk."

"She sort of does," said Jackie.

I felt someone's hand on my arm and looked up. It was Mr. Plank.

He put his fists together and stuck his thumbs straight up.

"Two Fonzies?" I asked.

Jackie laughed. "He wants to know if you got a boyfriend."

"Oh, yes," I nodded. " He's really ..."I pointed up with my thumb.

Mr. Plank walked to the crib and pulled out the baby. He pointed at the baby and me and at the baby again and at me again.

"He wants fo tcnow do you got any kids."

"No," I shook my head and reached for the baby. "Can I hold it? Pretty," I made the sign for pretty. Mr. Plank nodded and stroked the baby's cheek, then handed it to me. Mrs. Plank tugged at my arm. "Oooogoooooodor oooooooool?" I strained to understand what she had said. She waved her hands at Jackie.

"She wants to kno;.., if it'll help out. with history and English:" "Oh, yes, it's really good for history, let me show you."

I got hold of the book without bothering the baby on my lap.

"Look," I opened the book to the presidents. "See, Carter, peanuts."

Mrs. Plank chopped at the air with her hands. Mr. Plank. leaned over and looked at the book. He saw Carter and pointed down with his thumb several times, pursed his lips, and sputtered. " Don' t like, Carter, well," I showed another president. "See, Washington, number one." I showed him one finger. He nodded. "Lots of presidents." I opened and shut one of my hands 3 times and then showed 6 fingers, while balancing the baby on my lap. Mr. Plank nodded. I pointed up with my thumb. "Good, good book." Mrs. Plank shook my ann.

"Oooooooooow uuuuchbhhh oooooooooost? Hmmmmm?"

"What did she say?"

"She wants to know how much does it cost?"

"Cost? of the books? they're $42. 10."

Jackie opened and shut his fingers 4 times and then held up 2 fmgers. 42 seemed like a lot more in sign language than in words. They can't want it, I thought. "Ooohweee oohhhab," she raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. Her hanJs flipped

back and forth. She shoved the book she had at her husband, and opened and shut her hands 4 times.

"Huuuuuuuuuuuuuum?" He raised his eyebrows and dropped his mouth open. He signaled with his hand~ as if he were making karate chops. I looked .from Mrs. Plank to Mr. Plank while they cut the air with their hands and arms.

"Oooeeehoooooood," accompanied by fmger flips .

"Eeeeoooooopooooooo," violently nodding her head up and down.

I tried not to laugh, and kissed the baby to hide my smile. ...1 think she wants to get it," said Jackie.

"Get it? Oh, the books, ohhh."

There was something I had to say.

How could I close them out? I turned to Jackie.

"Well, Jackie, I guess one of the reasons people like the way I do business is that ..."Jackie stared at me.

"Huh?" "Nothing .. . never mind. They want it?"

"I guess so."

Mr. Plank suddenly pointed down with his thumb and shut the book.

I looked at both Mr. and Mrs. Plank.and then thought back to sales school. If they seem unsure, show another section. I picked up the book again. The book opened on the metric system.

"Jackie, tell her it's the metric system, and it'd be good for school for the kids."

"Yeah, I reckon, I never could keep that straight." He flipped his fingers at his mother. She looked at the page and poiQted her thumbs up.

"Fooooooooooooonzie."

"Yeah," I said.

She turned to Jackie and waved at him with her hands, moving her fingers rapidly. Her husband nodded his head up and down.

"Ma says she guesses she'll take it.

Do you need money today?"

Money, I'd forgotten about that.

"I think so, I mean yes, about half if they have it, if not, well, I don't care."

Mrs. Plank reached into her nightgown and pulled twenty dollars out.

"EEEEEEERE." "Oh, thanks; here's your baby. Hey, Jackie, you'll really like these books, I mean they really are good. I used them at college last year and my roommate did too and my mom likes them. I know you could use them."

"Well, maybe my sisters and br!>thers could 'cause I don't go to school no more."

"Yes they could, tell your mom that. She's nice."

I put both my thumbs up. "Good books."

"Well, I got to go." I started putting the books into my case.

"Thanks a lot. Tell her and your Dad thanks a lot and you too. Tell her thanks for ... showing me sign language a little. She's . . ." I made the sign for nice. Jackie translated the message with his fingers. She made signs back.

"Mom said she really lilced having you here and she's glad cause the books'll help out." I pressed her hands.

"Well,. 'bye, Mr. Plank."

He pointed at me and made a

thumbs-up sign. I laughed.

"Fonzie."

We shook bands. "'Bye, Jackie, I can let myself out."

"Thanks for coming by," he said.

"Oh, no, thank you. See you."

I picked up my case and walked to the front door, stepping over clothes and toys and kids. "'Bye, you guys, you're going to get some good books."

They looked up from the cartoons on TV. "'Bye, lady," they turned back to the set.

I stepped down off the porch.

I wanted to say thank. you. But to whom? The cat was still on the porch.

"Thank.s, cat." It didn't seem to understand. I didn't think anyone could understand. I felt strange and sick. I picked up my case, put it in the baby seat, got on my bike and rode away.

continued from page

l l路

models are tv chatacters, and their standards are our standards. That's where TMN comes in. TMN-TV was an attempt to bring television out of the cave, to put it in platonic terms.

As long as we've developed this didactic relationship with our TV sets, why not put it to good use? All we need is someone with a good deal of enlightenment, insight and inspiration at the helm, and we could turn the whole order around. That's where I came in. Not that I was the only one around who was qualified, mind you.

But naturally, we had to have someone who could command the love and admiration of the people as well, or the entire enterprise would be rejected.

NJ: What was your plan?

Mr. X: Well, I had gathered a small coterie of maverick screenwriters and together we plotted the demise of every major show on the air waves.

Starsky was to shoot Hutch in a homosexual love dispute; the Sweathogs would die in a gang war, after which the Fonz would be indicted for murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Laverne and Shirley would get married and move to San Francisco, while Charlie's Angels all became simultaneously pregnant and turned into obliging housewives. After all these shows had been killed off, the "new generation'' would quickly step in, embodying the standards and ideals that we felt would actually improve the viewing audience.

NJ: Can you describe some of these shows?

Mr. X: Sure. Our first prime-time slot was to be ftlled by "The Young Hegelians," a loose take-off on "AU in the Family." It revolved around a dualist father try~g to maintain .paternal suprema y in a family of diverse philosophical views. Each episode would contain at least 13 minutes of vigorous intellectual debate. In the first episode, the daughter, an existentialist, gets the old man's goat by bringing home a neoplatonist boyfriend from grad school. In a hilarious main scene, the father conducts a vigorous Socratic路 dialogue with the young student in an effort to embarrass him. In a couple of years, of course, he would marry

the daughter and form a spin-off show, in which they bring up a little clan of smiling Nietzschians, but those were very long-range plans. Our next show was to be entitled "The Olympians," a light-hearted dramatization of day-to-day life among the Greek pantheon. We had planned to focus on Zeus as a sort of modified .henpecked husband, always trying to get away from Hera's nagging and kvetching to seduce a few nubile nymphs. All the episodes were to have been taken from actual Greek myths.

Then we bad a bit of scientific drama, "The Fugitives," about a group of foreign antibodies living in a human spleen. This was a sensitive, powerful drama portraying the anguished pathos of the organisms as they try to live, feed and reproduce under the coilstant threat of extermination by white blood cells. After that came 2 half-hour historical comedies, one about three drunken peasants living on a feudal estate in the year 981, the other a light-hearted glimpse inside Russian politics entitled "Life with Lenin." As time went on, of course, we could have created enough spinoffs from these two shows to span the entire course bf post-Christian European history. Then we had an animated sitcom based on the book Flatland, depicting living in a 2dimensional world. There were certain technical problems with this, mainly how the viewers were going路to tell one point or one line segment from another, but we had a team of Ph.D.'s working on it. Also, we had plans for a number of serialized novels - real honest-to-God and I don't mean any of this commercial network Irving Wallace/ Alex Haley bullshit literature. Our last project was an hour-long adventure series based on the travels of a wandering Neanderthai sometime during the Stone Age. And that's when our plans were uncovered.

NJ: How did that happen?

Mr. X: We're still not sure where the leak occurred. But those responsible will get theirs in due course, I can tell you that.

NJ: One last question - what sort of plans do you have for the future?

Mr. X: I haven't really formulated anything definite yet. But I'll be back.

I'm not beaten yet by a longsbot. I'll be back All right.

NJ: Thank you, Mr. X.

..

..,

UPDATE: Mr. X has not been heard from since this interview took place.

It was reported several months ago that he was at the head of a political revolution in a small South American country.

continued from page 6 accompaniment an octave below my line. Crowds gather, attracted by the shrill trilling of her voice. It bounces above me like a bird singing in a tree.

I ~ear for the glass in the Lapidus wmdow, for her voice is a piercin~ tenu~us wire. When she stops singing the bills come; floating into my till and the coins come clanking down. I offer her everything. "No," she says, waving me off. The young woman in black wallcs away. "The singing is enough."

"Yes," It~ to myself, moving on to the next sutte, "The singing is enough."

t路

13

the new joumal. October 1918

}The City of Light

by Stephen Froot .Of course,I could always play it safe set aside two weeks /..for foreign tr.avel . and spend the rest of the summer earning New York bucks (my usqal act). But why play it safe at twenty when the stakes are still so low? I went abroad for 3 months to seek my fortune in Paris, France.

For an urban freak and a wo~nded veteran of high schoo·· French, could there really ~ any destination but Paris? Apologies to Anglophil~s. but London seemed 1oo safe. And besides, life in New Haven had already ftlled .my quota for constant horizontal precipitation. Culture, cuisine, costume, and class were attributes that fit into. my preconception of Paris, the city. But I also remembered seeing a TV documentary as a child which focused on anti-American Freftch attitudes and showed the graffiti, "Yankee go home!" chalked onto an 18th century Paris wall.

Then, as now, well-traveled Americans insisted on portraying Paris and Parisians as the least friendly on the continent.

In the second week of my Paris sojourn, I met an elderly MoroCcan man. He invited me to take mint .tea with his family. In a moment of extemporaneous articulateness on our way to his home, I told him I came across the Atlantic to discover the Old World. He repeated the phrase several times to his family during our tea.

Many Americans travelling in Europe get the feeling that by communing with the Continent they can reach beyond television, steel, cowboys, the frontier, and Williamsburg, Virginia, to recapture the European roots of our nation's past.

For reasons unknown, the four American things most important to the French are UCLA (or oochlah, as they call it), New York City, Fruit of the Loom T-shirts, and California, in that order.

In the pouring rain around noontime one weekday I caught a glimpse of about eight construction workers eating lunch inside the back of a covered truck. They ~at around a table-covered with a table cloth and abundantly spread with food and wine.

discuss his personal theories of alienation. Another time, I stood by as two middle·aged men screamed horrible insults at each other for an hour without more than a suggestion of physical contact.

Eighth A venue. Ladies of the night on the rue St. Denis were closer to call girls and beautiful models than to the New York model. Except for the problem of tax evasion, prostitution is legal. Because of police harassment I could spot many Americans by and certain discriminatory governtheir green Michelin guides, and from ment policies, les ftlles went on time to time I struck up a conversaunofficial strike for a few weeks tion with one of my countrymen .

Most found Paris even more charming · several years ago and they quickly got what they wanted; the incident was than they had expected, but few could called the "dead streets" or something ever "feel" the place in five days. The like that. From the great number of most popular books of an American women all over the city, and the fact in Paris were Hemir:tgway's A that many older women of the Moveable Feast and Orwell's Down profession still faithfully twirl their and Out in Paris and London. room keys, one feels that prostitution is simply the respectable shop girl's reasonable alternative.

An· amazing number of street nusicians play in front of cafes and in Metro cars and tunnels. Many even earn a decent living. Paris can be The manager of a bar, an M.A. in a warm, nurturing, and human city. economics from Georgetown, only spends time with French girls; the head bartender, a British air traffic Architectural observation: In controller recently of Saudi Arabia, London all the buildings look so only looks at English and Americans. important that they make one want to Neither man is often without escort. tip the hat 1n homage to history; in Their paths have never crossed at the Paris all the buildings are that same women; the barman still h~ his important, and one stands in awe. iob.

Gay Paris, a place which has traditionally welcomed artists and political exiles; an environment steeped in history and tradition yet the birthplace of the avant garde in everything from haute cuisine to hemlines. En route from London to Paris I had perused a French for Travellers paperback so I could look for work and ascertain the price of ·a single room as I waited for my high school French to miraculously return.

My first triumph was the smooth execution of the purchase of ten Metro tickets. So elated by success at such a complicated task, I vowed to stutter and fall silent rather than speak English (first) to a Parisian.

Almost without exception Parisians responded well to the sound· of their own language:·never a nasty "quoi?!?" in response to an innocent mispronunciation. Surly fruit marchands aside, the Frepch were downright friendly. One cold, misty August night a. friend ·and I had over a mile to wall): from the train station to her home .in Marquise, which 'is near Boulogne on the Channel. We'd only walked a hun(ired yards whe~ a sedan stopped on the dar.k' road. A middleaged woman, accompanied by her young daughter. asked us if we wanted a ride. Cest Ia campagne.

Once a young French· man on a mopec;t stopped his vehicle in busy Paris traffic to give me directions to a restaurant. I hadn't signalled at all; he just noticed my exasperated countenance as I misread my map.

Cest Ia ville.

I saw the French way of life as more relaxed and refined than the AmeFican existence - aperitifs and hors d'oeuvres before a meal, classical music with their ftreworks display on Bastille Day. The French, however, see themselves as mired in tradition and rigid forms. To them America was a place of quick action and substance, of Clint Eastwood and McDonald's.

I once asked a chef how things were going in order to make friendly conversation. He replied in philosophical seriousn~ ..How can things be when I work for another man?"

This volatile fellow then proceeded to

The, English-speaking community in Paris is large enough to sustain a fetal Village Voice called the Metro. If one is French, reading the Metro is' tres chouette, if one is Anierican, reading the Metro is a must.

In manY, hours of shoppmg in open and closed' markets, I never laid eyes on br<><X<Oli in Paris. Few native French people knew what I was tallcing about when I mentioned the harmless vegetable grown right next door in Italy.

Prostitution in Paris bears no resemblanCe to that on Manbattan•s .

Both a taxi driver and a man who sells Louis Vuitton pocketbooks on the black market agree: the place for a French man who can speak English is New York; there he can easily have both money and women. As a foreigner who can hold his own in the language of the country he visits, a man stands a much better chance with the women, they. say. It's better all aroimd, they agree. The two men don't exagge~~ that much.

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the new journal. October 1978

788-881~

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the new journal, October 1978

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continued from page 2 near the track will rarely smile - a dignified nod, maybe, given with the inward-turned expression of someone coming from communion. A water polo game is beginning at the pool.

Water polo players wear little protective caps with what looks like ear muffs attached. Before they give the team shout and plop into the water, they crowd together and thrust their hands, fingers spread, in the face of an official. ''He's checking their lbs. Below him people move their fingernails," says the woman next to me, who's rooting for Trinity, "so limbs in slow motion up and down, they won't scratch." The rhythm of back and forth, lifting weights in the the game keeps changing. Sometimes blue-green light reflecting off the the ball whizzes around, sometimes rowing tank on the right. Jorge is a the players keep dipping it anxiously graduate student in philosophy, studying epistemology. He once lifted in the water, looking for a place to 400 lbs. He says he's been less shy throw. When the ball is free, one since he's been lifting. " I took up player paddles insolently after it while body building for a while, but I'm just an enemy leans on his shoulders and not built for it"; he fingers his wrists, shows his hands to prove he's clean.

"Small bones. So I'm going back to Once, someone is taken out and sits lifting to try and get my strength on the edge, clasping his knees and back." "You could say this is an scowling. "He must have done someessentially meaningless activity," he thing underwater," says the woman pauses and looks out over the shirtless for Trinity. Above, on the track the men pumping methodically at the runners are still orbiting noiselessly.

Universal Weight Machines, "But On the barbell room landing on the then, you know, you give it meaning." first floor, Jorge Ualadz is lifting 200

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No\V thru Nov. 11

Cou~e book overstcr-k is being returned imme• diately fo!lowing the sale .

5,000 title-s ·- 650 co urses

Here's a cha."lce to pick up a book in a su!:>ject you were a!wavs intt::re~ted in but didn't have the rir.n: 'tol:zkt: Coun.e ~JC"ks marked D.:: pt. 50 only.

500/o OFF on hundreds of foreign lang books from reg. stock

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