Author: Gary S. Vasilash (Gary S. Vasilash)

Doctors are prohibited from hawking products in television commercials. It’s a question of ethics. So, since the real ones can’t do it, stand-ins are asked to fill the prescription. Marcus Welby was never jumpy—and probably wouldn’t have been even if he had accidentally reversed the electric paddles used to jump-start a heart—so Robert Young became...

Stevie Wonder wants to become mayor of Detroit. He’s had some trouble determining precisely when the election will be held, but no matter. He believes that he can be the mayor of Motown in the 90’s. Now, this is no Sonny Bono and Palm Springs. Bono is decidedly a working-class stiff compared with the Retin...

It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to; You would cry, too, if it happened to you. —Lesley Gore, 1963 Mike Love’s churlish behavior at the third Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies should not have come as a surprise to anyone. His outlash against everyone from Paul McCartney to Diana...

It is encouraging to see that Michael Jackson is still capable of something more than Pepsi commercials. That he didn’t pick up an award is, as many have suggested, a backlash against the success of Thriller. But the correlation is not as direct as it seems. The real problem is that Jackson is not the...

I recently attended a performance by the quartet known as Montreux, a group which, as you may know, records for Windham Hill. I had first seen Montreux perform a couple years back during Detroit’s international jazz festival that’s called, coincidentally enough, Montreux/Detroit. Those whose sensibilities were shaped by rock and roll may know Montreux-the-city only...

You don’t hear much about groupies anymore. This is strange, since the demographics of the rock audience—ranging from about 40 to 10—suggests there ought to be more groupies than ever slithering around out there. If Pamela Des Barres (I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, New York: Beech Tree Books) is a typical groupie,...

Less Than Zero directed by Marek Kanievska screenplay by Harley Peyton based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis 20th Century Fox Tom Waits recently suggested to Musician magazine that if John Lennon knew that Michael Jackson would control The Beatles’ music, Lennon would “kick his ass—and kick it really good.” As I watched the...

This won’t be easy. But, it may be the future, at least according to a number of science-fiction writers collectively known as the “cyberpunks.” More disturbingly, there seems to be a number of scientists and researchers who agree. Hang on. The first part of the word cyberpunks comes from cybernetics, a term coined by Norbert...

In “Life-Line,” a story by Robert A. Heinlein, a scientist describes a man in the present as a “space-time event.” He explains, “Imagine this space-time event which we call Rogers as a long pink worm, continuous through the years, one end at his mother’s womb, the other at the grave. It stretches past us here...

Recently, NBC News, and the Wall Street Journal devoted features to what they claim, to an editor, is an American “obsession” with being thin. There may have been many more reports devoted to the topic—now that the passive-smoke issue is passe, people are refocusing their attention on the state of bustlines, waistlines, buttocks form, etc.,...

The Fox Theatre—a grand movie palace of Detroit’s 1920’s, which is now used primarily as a venue for acts that won’t fill an arena—contained a chronologically mixed crowd in mid-March. Paul Young was in concert. Young, a slightly chubby, baby-faced British singer (he appears, to borrow a line from Elvis Costello, “teddy-bear tender and tragically...

Entertainment industry awards shows are, almost by definition, public orgies of televised backslapping. Still, TV viewers stick with them, not so much to discover what the best movie, TV show, or record is—for each viewer already knows what’s best—but in order to see personalities in environments that put them out of character and in competition...

Now that ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it You play the guitar on the MTV That ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free (©1985 Chariscourt Ltd./Adm. Almo Music)   Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” ironically sums up the popular attitude toward the music business....

Back in the days before OPEC became a notable force on American street corners, high school, for most of us growing up in Detroit, meant one thing: a driver’s license. All we had to do was spend 12 weeks with a shop instructor, who was looking for a way to pick up a few extra...

Ray Pentzell, head of the Hillsdale College theater department, attended university during the heyday of improvisational theater off-Broadway. When he could, Pentzell traveled down from Yale to New York dressed in the “straightest” outfit he could put together. His objective was to be picked by the improv players, who often selected hapless members of the...

While Teen Wolf was opening this past summer in 1,500 theaters. Kiss of the Spider Woman found only 15 receptive movie houses. This may seem odd, given that Teen Wolf is a formula flick, a werewolf comedy in which Lon Chancy Jr. would’ve felt at home, while Kiss of the Spider Woman is “Cinema” writ...