The Michigan Daily-Thursday, February 16, 1978-Page 5

ARTS ARCADE

... aweekly

roundup


More 'Magic Dragons?'
Peter, Paul & Mary, one of the
earliest proponents of what is now ter-
med 'folk-rock,' are planning to reunite
for an album and tour, according to
Mary Travers, member of the trio.
"We are going to do an album and
perhaps 15 concerts," said Travers.
"We start rehearsing in April. The
producer will be George Martin, the
Beatles' producer.''
The trio, which consists of Travers,
Peter Yarrow; and Paul Stookey, had
several hits during the early 1960's, in-
cluding "500 Miles," "Puff The Magic
Dragon," and Bob Dylan's "Blowin'
The Wind," which signalled the first
wide-spread radio airplay given to a
Dylan song.
Violence or schlock-
some choice
CHICAGO - Monday the National
PTA, escalating its two-year campaign
against objectionable television pro-
grams, announced the shows it consid-
ers the most violent and poorest in
overall quality.
The 6.5 million-member parents-
teachers organization also named what
it considers the 10 best shows.
Ratings were based on nationwide
monitoring by PTA units.
Positive contribution to the quality of
life in America, lack of offensive con-
tent and high-program quality are the
criteria for the PTA's top 10.
"Violence is still a pervasive factor in
TV programs, according to PTA mem-
bers," the organization said. "While
most of the viewers agreed that the
amount of gratuituous violence in the
regular series program had
diminished somewhat, the current
level is stillunacceptable."
The PTA had placed the networks on
a six-month probationary period that
ended on Jan. 1.
The PTA warned last July that if the
networks flunked the test, the organi-
zation would consider "alternative

courses of action, such as boycotts of
advertisers, programs and local
stations" as well as "selected test cases
of petition to deny licensing, and civil
litigation."
The organization critiqued all of the
1977 fall season's prime-time shows.
Among the programs considered ob-
jectionable due to violent content were
Charlie's Angels, Police Woman, and


Starsky and Hutch.
The PTA also selected shows poorest
in overall quality, due to "offensively
portrayed sexuality and violence,
stereotyping of women and minorities,
and general lack of entertainment
value." Among those selected were
Soap, Maude, The Redd Foxx Show,
Three's Company, and Kojak.
And what does the PTA consider to be

the best television has to offer? Why, of
course, Donny and Marie, The Waltons,
and Grizzly Adams. All in all, not a par-
ticularly encouraging picture.
More news on
rompin' Roman
SANTA MONICA - Roman Polan-
ski's sentencing in absentia for having
sex with a 13-year-old girl has been in-
definitely delayed following allegations
by the film director's lawyer that the
judge held "bias and prejudice" again-
st Polanski.
Defense attorney Douglas Dalton
filed the motion of prejudice Tuesday
only minutes before Superior Court
Judge Laurence J. Rittenband was to
have sentenced Polanski, 44,-who fled to
Paris last month.
Dalton told reporters later that he
hoped to persuade Polanski to return to
the United States if a new judge could
be appointed to the case. The director
has sent word he would not return
because he felt Rittenband would not
give him "an equitable sentence."
What's up, Sire?
LOS ANGELES - While a tyke in
Portland, Ore., Mel Blanc began doing
funny voices and sometimes he did
them in school. His teachers, however,
didn't voice disapproval of his voices.
"They always used to laugh, then
give me lousy marks," recalled the ex-
tyke, who graduated to become the
famed cartoon voices of Bugs Bunny,
Porky Pig and 400 others in a career
now in its 51st year.
Next Thursday, he has five of his
best-known voices in a CBS special, A
Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur's
Court, a Bugs Bunny takeoff on the
Mark Twain classic.
Blanc, 67, has been in show business
- but rarely seen by the audience -
since 1927. Fresh out of high school, he
made his debut on a Portland radio
show, The Hoot Owl Program."
Oddly, the job didn't require him to

do what he does now. He just sang a
comic song, "Juanita," in his normal
voice.
In the mid-thirties, he and his gift for
the odd sound arrived in Hollywood
when he started on a radio show run by
Joe Penner, a comic famed for in-
quiring: "Wanna buy a duck?" Blanc
became the duck, and in time one of
radio's busiest one-man collections of
dialects, comic animal voices and
sound effects. At one point, he
estimates, he was doing 18 network
radio shows a week.
But that success didn't come until his
debut at the studio whence came his
greatest fame - Warner Bros. That
happened in 1937 and only after he'd
spent 11/2 years trying to get his voice in
the door.
"I was doing radio here, and this guy
at the studio says, 'No, we got all the
voices we need,' " Blanc said. "I went
back every other week and tried again.
The guy kept saying no.
"Finally he dies, so I went to the next
guy in charge, Treg Brown, and he said,
'Sure, let's hear him."
The hearing led to his first Warner
Bros. cartoon voice, a drunk bull, for
$15. In 1938 he was on his way as the
voice of Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny.
How'd he cook them up?
Well, I see the character first," he
explained. "Contrary to what you'd
think, the voices always come first in a
cartoon. Then they draw to the voice.
They show me a character, say what
he'll do.
They said Porky was a timid little
guy, so I gave him a timid voice. Bugs
was a tough little stinker. I figured he
was either Brooklyn or the Bronx.
"So" - Blanc slipped into his flat,
nasal Bugs voice - "I put da two of
dem togedda and I got Bugs."
Blanc, regularly heard on two net-
works each Saturday morning - on
ABC's Captain Caveman and CBS's
Bugs Bunny - has a deep, pleasantly
modulated voice when he's just talking,
not working.
?NY .

The San Francisco-born veteran of
more than 3,000 cartoons says he does
use his civilian voice in commercials
occasionally.
But I don't care too much for them,"
he insisted. "Because you can't get too
much humor into it. I like to work
where there's humor, funny stuff."
Recent deaths
" Zerina Rinaldi - An Italian paintei
convicted of supplying the Soviet Unior
with secrets about U.S. basis in Spain.
Rinaldi died Sunday, in Turin, Italy.,
She was 63.
" Daniel Reed - Reed died Thursday
in Montrose, New York, at the age of 86.
Author of the play Scarlet Sister Mary.
in which Ethel Barrymore performed.
he was also founder of the Towr
Theatre of Columbia, S.C.
The arts arcade was compilea
through the wires of AP and UPI by
arts staffers Pat Fabrizio, Owen.
Gleiberman, Mark Johansson,
Peter Manis, Alan Rubenfeld, Mike
Tqylor and Tim Yagle.

AP Photo

Scouts didn 't steal it

"HIGH VOLTAGE
ENTERTAINMENT!"
-William Glover, Associated Press
16nt
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broadway's smash hit comedy
Bernard slade
POWER CENTER
FEB. 17, 8 m. 18 8am. 19 2 & 8 m
AA X
11F111
MENDELSSOHN THEATRE
SUN., FEB. 26, 2 & 8pmn

Norman Rockwell's oil painting "On My Honor," painted in 1952 originally for a
Boy Scout calendar, was reported stolen from the Schiff Scout Reservation in
Mendham, New Jersey. The work is valued at $50,000.

Female art aspects at gallery

By KAREN BORNSTEIN
F EMININITY is more than sugar
and spice and everything nice. It
is a delicate creation of the very softest
fibers. It is a heavy, unflattering clay
female figure. It isthe work of local ar-
tists Cynthia Webb and Lori Christ-
mastree, now, on display at the
Michigan Union Gallery through
February 26.
A student in U-M's School of Art,.
Webb has taught ceramics at the East
Lansing Arts Workshop and Adrian
School of Continuing Education. She
has also conducted art classes for the
Lansing Parks and Recreation
Program.
Christmastree, an alumna of Wayne
State University where she teaches
fiber arts, has recently begun a class in
contemporary quilting and soft sculp-
ture for the University's Artists and
Craftsmen Guild. A contributor to the
Union Gallery's 1976 Womanworks and
Holiday Invitational exhibits, she has
also displayed work at the Detroit Insti-
tute of Arts._
CHRISTMASTREE'S works are so'
incredibly fragile, yet oozing with the
richness of feminine mystique, that
they practically dare the viewer to
touch them. Her Kissed and Cancelled
series are wallhangings of the thinest
gauze, adorned with patches of dyed,
color and stitching. They exude light-
ness and airiness, as if ready to float
gently into the atmosphere.
In spots where stitching has oc-
curred, individual shiny threads hang
elegantly like fringe from the frail
gauze material. The sensation evoked
by the work as a whole is one of sheer
beauty and sensitivity. Like the wings
of an exotic butterfly, the work
emanates tenderness and wonder, as
well as a powerful feeling of pure fem-
inity.
Christmastree'3 other works consist
of a series of quilted, silk drawings.
These treasures of elegance and sensi-
tivity are pictures, sewn and quilted
with pastel threads, upon a sheet of pre-
cious, rich white silk. In many cases,
threads are left to hang delicately as
fringe, helping to enclose the picture
and separate the viewer from its direct
experience. As a result, one obtains a
sense of general mystery, richness and
awe.
DIFFERING FROM these concise
expressions of femininity, are Christ-
mastree's larger, kite-shaped pieces of
bright fuschia or yellow cheesecloth

This changes to tension as the eye
follows her body up to the straining ar-
ms, stretched in a Christ-figure posi--
tion. The figure represents a raw
vitality in life, while retaining an aura
of mystery and calculated drama.
WEBB'S WORKS do not have this
ethereal delicacy. She does not intend
them to. Her figures in thick, raku clay
are distortions of the female body. She
emphasizes the movement and position
of flesh according to the different
angles it may be perceived from.
Thsese "Womins" are -not flattering
depictions. Webb's often headless crea-
tions, reveal the human form = its
bulges, the puckering and folding of
skin, the slight indentations. What is so
incredible about these works is their
sense of immediacy and presence. This
is due to Webb's wonderful concept of
weight placement and shifts.

From her unaiashed exaggeration of
realistic qualities, rolling stomachs,
twisted buttocks and bent appendages
emanate femininity -femininity in the
sense of unadorned "woman."
Webb also does a series consisting of
five female figures. The figures are not
identical but closely related in terms of
the small head, no larger than a quarter
inch in diameter, and pinched face.
Emphasis is placed on the breasts,
which are covered with a light pink
glaze, as well as the lower abdomens
which are heavy and rotund.
IT IS EVIDENT Webb is making a so-
cial statement through the figures' lack
of individuality, the small heads, the
stressed sexual regions, and the name

of the series she appropriately titles,
Sex Objects. In all of her works, Webb
purposefully allows the lyrical clay
coils which are the building blocks for
her forms to remain visible. This
makes the viewer constantly aware of
the artist herself, the process she has
undertaken, and the unmistakable
essence of femininity.
Abel Tasman of Holland discov-
ered Van Diemen's Land, now Tas-
mania, in 1642, while en route from
Java to the Fiji Islands. By sailing
around Australia, he proved it was
not part of South America.

THE
UNIVERSITY of MICHIGAN- DEARBORN
THEATRE ARTS PROGRAM
PRESENTS


I

Iwf (i~tA

21!

the ton arbor Afim cooperative
presents otANGELL HALL
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16
THE 400 BLOWS
(Francois Truffaut, 1959) 7,8:40,10:29--AUD. A
A classic film by Truffaut (said to be based on his own childhood) about a
boy's brutalizing at home and at school. Truffaut is a master director with
children, and supplies what must be one of the most beautiful endings in
modern film. With JEAN-PIERRE LEAUD, CLAIRE MAURIER, ALBERT REMY.
In French, with subtitles. Cinemascope.
Friday, Saturday and Sunday: The eighth ANN ARBOR 8mm FILM
FESTIVAL at Schorling Aud., School of Educ-tion.
Friday: RAYMOND CHANDLER FESTIVAL continues with Hawks' The Big
Sleep at MLB 4.

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February 17 18, 19, 24 & 25- 5:00 PM
February 26 - 2:00 PM

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Adm

fiss ion $3.00 at ihe door
$2.50 in advance

Recreation & Organizations Center Group rates available
University of Michigan-Dearborn Tickets may be purchased at
4901 Evergreen Road the R.QC or Module 9
For further information or group reservations call
271-2300, ext. 433 or 269
FOURTH PROGRAM

*STUET IC UNTPresent this ad at Hi Fi Show Box Office for one FREE
*STDENTi ISCOU T Uadmission with purchase of one regular ticket at $2.
DETROIT
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I MUSIC SHOW
at COBO HALL, Civic Center
FEBRUARY 17,18&19
Admission: $2 per person. children under 12 free.
SHOW HOURS: Fri: 5-10 pm; Sat 11 am-10 pm;
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