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

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Adverpop Rock

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...

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Detroit Shakedown

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...

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Surfin’ Safari

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...

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The Grammys’ Growl

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...

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Music of the Peers

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...

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Rock and Roll Hootchie Koo

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,...

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The Null Set

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...

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Future Shock?

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...

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Summer of the Snake

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...

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Gluttons for Punishment

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.,...

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Equal Opportunity Killer

It’s hip to be square—Huey Lewis’ new gospel—may have been announced prematurely. George Michael has a different message: “I can’t think of a better question for a 13- or 14-year-old child to be asking than ‘What does monogamy mean?'” Michael is a part-time child psychologist better known as a pop singer who was once the...

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The Righteousness of Rock?

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...

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Fillet of Soul

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...

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Rock Around the Bank

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....

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Death and Taxes

Death and taxes are only a little more predictable than the art of Andy Warhol. Just one month after Warhol’s death in Manhattan at age 58 from a heart attack the morning of February 22, the day after otherwise successful gall bladder surgery, the artist was back in the news. Unlike the obits, the news...

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Desire & Death

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...

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Out of Balance

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...

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Teenagers and Lower Forms of Life

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...

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The Cult of Personality

The life of Roland Barthes will never be serialized on Masterpiece Theater. Born in 1915, he contracted pulmonary tuberculosis as a young man (1934), and spent part of his life in sanatoriums. Barthes’s education was conventional enough: he received a license in the classics from the Sorbonne, participated in the foundation of the Groupe de Théatre...

Waste of Money – Duo-Tone
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Waste of Money – Duo-Tone

G. Cabrera Infante: Infante’s Inferno; Harper & Row; New York. A wire service photo run in some U.S. newspapers prior to the November “elections” in Nicaragua featured an image that is both familiar and disori­enting. The setting: a campaign rally in Managua for Sandinista presidential candidate Daniel Ortega. The center of focus: a young  girl,...

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Waste of Money – Marketing 101

Jean-Claude Courdy: The Japanese: Everyday Life in teh Empire of the Rising Sun; Harper & Row; New York. Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853. President Fillmore was interested in putting an end to Japan’s isolation policy. Commodore Perry stuck around the harbor until the empire agreed to open trade negotiations. A trade agree­ment...

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Waste of Money – Canonizing Eleanor

J. William T. Youngs: Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life; Little, Brown; Boston. No First Lady in this century has so fully captured the American imagina­tion as Eleanor Roosevelt–only Jac­queline Kennedy has even come close. During the dark hours of the Depres­sion and World War II, Eleanor be­came a symbol of hope for millions...

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Waste of Money – Reinventing the Universe

Philosophy and Science Fiction; Edited by Michael Philips; Prometheus Books; Buffalo, NY. It is not exactlv a new idea to consider the philosoplical dimensions of science fiction. This anthology, which seems designed for one of Prof. Philips’s fresh­man survey courses, contains a few good, if obvious, selections from Stani­slaw Lem, Borges, and Karel Capek in...

Wrangling with Words
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Wrangling with Words

Denis Donoghue: The Arts Without Mystery; Little, Brown; Boston.   Jacques Derrida, maître of the critical school of deconstruction, writes of his Of Grammatology, “writing, the letter, the sensible inscription, has always been considered by Western tradition as the body and matter external to the spirit, to breath, to speech, and to the logos.” As...

Reaping the Red’s Harvest
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Reaping the Red’s Harvest

Diane Johnson: Dashiell Hammett: A Life; Random House; New York. Spade sat down in the armchair beside the table and without any preliminary, without an introductory remark of any sort, began to tell the girl about a thing that had happened some years before in the Northwest. He talked in a steady matter-of-fact voice that...

Fads, Facts & Fools
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Fads, Facts & Fools

The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World by Edward A. Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck; Addison-Wesley; Reading, MA. The Rise of the Computer State by David Burnham; Random House; New York. A few years ago, CB radio antennae sprouted on the roofs and trunks of autos like alien growths from an...

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Small is Significant

Walter Walker: A Dime to Dance By; Harper & Row; New York. Geoffrey Norman: Midnight Water; E.P. Dutton; New York. Existence — which is all there is, to answer Peggy Lee — consists of little things: there was only one Big Bang, and should there be another, none will be around to record it. Toe...

The Diaphanous Bud
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The Diaphanous Bud

There are innumerable ways to ap­proach The Name of the Rose. Its author, Umberto Eco, is an Italian, a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. The book is a best-seller in Italy, France, Germany, and here; it has received awards including the Premio Strega, the Premio Viareggio, and the Prix Medicis. The book, translated into...

A Dubious Discourse
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A Dubious Discourse

In 1963 Roland Barthes recommended: “watch who uses signifier and signified, synchrony and diachrony, and you will know whether the structuralist vision is constituted.” When Barthes put that remark into an essay entitled “The Structuralist Activity,” he was at the peak of his career as a structuralist. Yet, as is clear from that suggestion, as...

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Sighting Sylphs and Stalking Sense

One of the primary functions of literary criticism is to impose a certain order on the subject, the text. In a very basic sense, it can be thought of as a set of instructions for the reader of the text, not unlike those packed along with a dish­washer or a swing set. However, there is...