4 * t I 1 lb c 4J7 f 11 h4e dilfreian Daitlj 420 Maynard Street, Ann Arbor, Mich. Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual ooinions of the author. This must be noted in all reorints. Friday, July 17, 1970 THE MICHIGAN DAILY theatre FRIDAY, JULY 17, 1970 News Phone: 764-0552 Won't he ever stop FBI DIRECTOR J. Edgar Hoover issued his yearly report Monday. In it, he reiterated his position that the Black Panthers are "the most dangerous and violence-prone of all extremist groups." He also chastised some white liberals for giving fi- nancial support to the Black Panthers "despite it's record of hate, violence and subversion." He said the Panthers, along with the Weathermen, could be blamed for much of the turmoil on the campuses and in the cities during the past year, especially an in- creased emphasis on "terrorism." David Hilliard, Panther Chief of Staff, denied the charge saying' "What Hoover calls terrorism, we call de- fense." THE LAST YEAR has made it clear to many people that Hoover and other branches of government are doing their best to quash the Panthers regardless of the so- called guarantees in the Bill of Rights. Panther headquarters in more than 15 cities have been attacked by local and federal police agents. All of the original leadership has been forced either into jail or exile. The idea that the Panthers are responsible for the demonstrations is giving them more credit than they de- serve. Certainly, the Panthers sympathized with most of them. However, they were organized and supported by people who are dissatisfied with the war in Indochina, with the repression of the Panthers and other black groups, and with the priorities of government at all levels. The Panthers are just one group. They have h e 1 d demonstrations. But most of the demonstrations t h a t have occurred have been caused by the government it- self. When people are angered by the government and af- ter they talk and they talk and they talk, it is only nat- ural that sooner or later t h e y should become tired of talking and begin to act on their beliefs. HOOVER CALLS IT "subversion" when the Panthers speak of their discontent with this government. But it seems that whenever groups effectively exercise their right to dissent against the government, the FBI runs to declare them a subversive group. In the FBI's eyes, Spiro Agnew's inflammatory speech- es are patriotism, but the Panthers speeches are subver- sion. The violence that has surrounded the Black Panther Party has been caused by police and police agents. The Panthers have been constantly harrassed, and on more than one occasion had to defend their homes, their of- fices, and their lives from overzealous policemen. They have armed themselves for self protection. They may be "dangerous and violence-prone" but it is only a reaction to Hoover and his kind. Hoover's statement just happened to be issued the day before the trial of one of the Panthers began. The statement came out Monday; the trial of Lonnie McLucas for kidnapping resulting in death began Tuesday in New Haven. Charles Garry, attorney for the Black Panther Party, said Hoover's statement "m a k e s it impossible for the Black Panthers to get a fair trial." Meanwhile in California, Black Panther Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton was once again denied an appeal to have bond set for him. He is currently awaiting retrial after a high court overturned his conviction on a charge of killing a policeman. He cannot even be released while awaiting his new trial. American justice. And in New York, a black woman who was brutally beaten by police 15 months ago when she was arrested on charges of conspiring to bomb public places, was finally released. The Panther woman, along with the rest of the Panther 21 in New York was held on $100,000 bail. Other members of the group still wait in jail while the beginning of the trial is not in sight. There is a law against excessive bail but judges seem to forget it when the Black Panthers are involved. In Washington, President Robben Fleming testified at a meeting of the Presidential Commission on Campus Unrest that campus unrest will not cool until the war in Vietnam ends. Fleming was right but incomplete. The war must end before campus unrest begins to cool. But many other things must also end. The repression of the Panthers is one. -DEBRA THAL NIGHT EDITOR: NADINE COHODAS Merc hat By MARCIA ABRAMSON For some time the University Players have been reputed to be "improving" - but improving is hardly the word for their The Merchant of Venice, which open- ed this week. The production was very close to perfect. As in past performances of a similar genre, like Life Is a Dream and The Duchess of Malfi, the staging was bright and innovative, the costumes brilliant. More im- portantly, the cast, led by Wanda Bimson as Portia, was totally in- volved and certain of every move in the play. There was a spirit of wholeness in the production which carried it far above anything I have seen from the Players. The Merchant is Portia's play, and Miss Bimson was all that" Portia should be, the young bride who is also a princess and who out-thinks all the men in finding the solution to the seemingly im- possible dilemma of the pound of flesh. The supporting players were all strong. Perhaps the main problem was Shylock's (Stephen Wyman's) inability to resist the temptation to put on the stereotype American Jewish immigrant inflection too often. The accent clashed with a few of his more dramatic lines, although his handling of the role was generally quite good. The Merchant is a mixed play, dark and light, playing the many love themes against the darkness of the role into which Shylock has been forced by this Christian world. There is evil on both sides, and, after he has been ruined by The Editorial Page of The Michigan Daily is open to any- one who wishes to submit articles. Generally speaking, all articles should be less than 1,000 words. :0 Portia's interpretation of the laws, Shylock stumbles out of the the- atre (in an excellent bit -of stag- ing). When he has gone, and we are expecting the lovers to begin their joyous c e l e b r a t i o n, Shylock screams, a long terrible scream, and everything stops for a mo- ment, as the players are confront- ed with what is true. But only that; the play coasts on to its light, comic ending, almost shal- Jow-but then, that has to do with Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's time, and not this production. Throughout the play a minstrel sat on stage, and almost contin- ually played Elizabethan airs. Most of the time the music was appro- priate, although it did not stop soon enough for some intense scenes. But then again, the music was used most effectively as a death knell as Antonio bared his breast to Shylock's knife, and the scat- tered use of song fitted well with the love play. All the players were graceful, with well-planned and executed movements, sometimes even dance-like. And so was the pro- duction: an exceedingly graceful execution of a well-planned move- ment. Buckminster Fuller, UNTI- TLED EPIC POEM ON THE HISTORY OF INDUSTRIAL- IZATION, Simon and -Schu- ster, $4.95, paperback $1.95. By NEAL BRUSS Buckminster Fuller's p o e t i c message is that industrializa- tion is the process by which man will reach the epoch of his sal- vation. Thus, his poem might be classified as an epic the way Hegel's Phenomenology or Mil- ton's long theodicies might be: as sweeping histories of the human struggle ending in per- fect fulfillment. The "Untitled Epic," however, does not really meet this or o t h e r immediate poetic tests, and worse, it is neither appeal- ing as verse nor convincing as industrialist rhetoric. This is unfortunate, because the poem seems initially very seductive. The poet-Bucky, as he is called-is a much pro- claimed prophet-architect of a plode out of the Present, and that is a sufficient condition for the failure of his type of poem. The "Untitled Epic" in fact be- gins with the image of a train, "the Twentieth Century Limit- ed," "reduced to . a snail-like crawl" in the eyes of the narra- tor, "zooming aloft in a pursuit plane." There is no visionary unveiling of the Future; on the contrary: From this aeronautic viewpoint as the horizon increases, the relative speed of the train through the observer's world is diminished. This ho-hum attitude, this patience with the present gives the poem something of the tone of a Steinberg cartoon, that of a bleak landscape in which ideas appear as slatternly words in rococco lettering: And it is from this fifty- thousand foot elevation on a particularly clear "North West" day that-we review the portentous entry Close to perfect Up with Bucky I '1 .r +"!" i' __ . 1 .T 1 ) w(R i ' y . R' -=2r^- which chimps tie together twigs to snag overhead bananas. Fuller, in a sanctimonious retrospective tense, makes the liberal point, which some would dispute, that the so-called un- derdeveloped world needs Ame- rican industrialization: That broader cause was that the principle of Industrialization has thus far in history been developed to hybrid full bloom only within the United States or Northern America; and in dynamic fulfillment of evolutionary balance the principle had now to be fully applied to the rest of the world;- before the world could settle down into peace and order. One wonders whether the Third World wants anything like the blossoms of Southwest Detroit, or if even for the United States, Industrialization is worth the violation of land and people. If one agrees, as Fuller would, that the end of life is to bring about some sort of' Paradise on Earth, it would seem more logical to de-escalate the industrialization, return the cities to meadows, produce durable goods of true worth and make wholesome foods easily available for all. The commuter trip doesn't jus- tify the train; shredded wheat doesn't justify the cereal fac- tory. At one point, Fuller says that industrialization achieves t r u e morality by putting man behind the wheel: When a five-ton mechanically extended man' is coming at him in the opposite direction at such speed that they must pass one another on a narrow strip of earth at the rate of 120 miles an hour, 'wil b sbooksL Au NJ 'WWI* ''ww tj 3in I 10'4 - . sa { t + ... W , tn. , , "W haven' laGid a hand on him .. . style of far-out, futuristic con- struction: modular homes, dis- posable buildings,. flying cities, and the Geodetic Domes which have been built during the last twenty years. One e x p e c t s of him what the art historian John Berger insightfully attributes to the Cubists: a rich vision of the Future without an adequate sense of the costs in energy of bringing that Future into being. Fuller does not venture to ex- of INDUSTRIALIZATION into the U.S.A. cosmos outwardly around whose whole horizon lies the rest of the world. Fuller is best in the poem when he explains industrializa- tion as the extension of man's reach and as the creation of over a hundred slaves-per-per- son for every American. Thus Fuller's poem has the appeal of those studies of learning in "Keep to the Right" needs no priestly dogma nor police enforcement. "Love thy neighbor as thyself" comes naturally to America,- on wheels. Pronouncements such as these strikecthe readeras either ec- centric or terribly oppressive. Fuller's "hold-on-a-second-and- I'll-explain" reply to the ter- rorism of Industrialization would be no consolation in a sweat- shop, and his soft-peddling of inequalities and exploitation as the mere bungling of Indus- trialists does not jive to assem- bly line logic. In fact, automo- tive workers have impressed management that they do not share Fuller's industrialist vi- sion. Absenteeism, w h i c h re- flect among other thing work- music-C - Tacchino: A healthy contrast Short stories: Three new coll By R. A. PERRY While thousands flocked to Ann Arbor's summer Money Fair, a small group of music lovers gath- ered in Rackham Aud. last night to hear the second artist in the University Musical Society's sum- mer concert series, Gabriel Tac- chino. The 35-year-old French pianist is not well known in this country, and only two of his Angel recordings-both devoted to Pou- lenc and one having won the "Grand Prix du Disque"- have been made available here. His fine concert last night won- many friends, but no doubt left as many untouched. Tacchino proved to be an artist who does not "perform" in the theatrical sense, but who seeks to provide as objective a rendition of the composer's writing as pos- sible. While objectivity in musical performances, is, of course, a non- existent ideal (recalling Wanda Landowska's famous remark: "Let other players play Bach their way; I'll play Bach his way"), it is nevertheless true that many artists add much, in the name of inter- pretation, that is merely willful. In his performance of Mozart's Sonata K. 310 (which, in terms of frequency of programming, is Mo- zart's "Moonlight Sonata"), Tac- chino created a beauty that was not dependent in any way on a uniquely stylish interpretation or on willful phrasing, but which emerged from an almost business- like presentation of the constru- tion of the music. The pleasure derived was not of interpretation but of the score itself. Although the Allegro maestoso was mildly antiseptic, the Andante cantabile and Presto were wonderfully clean, straight-forward, and musical. Where other pianists gush, linger, and over-romanticize (in- cluding Gould's ironically Roman- ticizing Intellectualism), Tacchino was simply "true" in a fashion that may be thought of as uni- quely French. Everything control- led, in its place, unexaggerated, lucid. His performance of Pou- lene's Mouvement Perpetuels, No. 3 wandered very slightly from that which Poulenc himself offered on his old Columbia album (ML 4399): as pristine -as freshly cut confetti. Even the Fantasy and Fugue in G minor (Bach-Liszt) which opened the program was never vulgar in the manner some pianists effect when they pummel out the fugue, though Tacchino's performance was not really tight or without a few flubs. Without a doubt, the m o s t thoroughly successful piece on the program was the Chopin Scherzo in B-flat minor, Op. 31, where Tacchino's fusion of digital clean- liness and poetic feeling was in- spired; the music flowed spon- taneously, unsullied by sophisti- cated sentimentalism, and one could appreciate anew Chopin's genius. Prokofieff's Sonata No. 3, which closed the program, did not gain from Tacchino's good taste; it is vulgar music and requires powers beyond mere digital prowess; Rich- ter's performance of Prokofieff, in Hill Aud. a few months ago, still rings in the ears. .Thus Tacchino's performance last night was unique and satis- fying; for appetites trained to rel- ish meat and potato fare, it was as delectable as a cucUmber sand- wich. Above all, it was supremely musical. Judith Johnson Sherwin, THE LIFE OF RIOT, Atheneum, $5.95. Barton Midwood, PHANTOMS, Dutton, $5.95. Alejo Carpentier, W A R 0 F TIME, Knopf, $4.95. By ELIZABETH WISSMAN Edgar Allen Poe made what was perhaps the most useful generalization about the short story, when he insisted upon un- ity of effect. For most, certainly most contemporary American writers, this dictum means (as it did to Poe) an attempt to manipulate the mood created in the reader. Often this "mood control" descends to the level of the merely bizarre or horri- fying. Given only a brief space in which to engage the reader's attention, a gimmick, a guaran- teed perversion, or an O'Henry twist are often used to relieve the other-wise dull and brittle pretzel. While none of the books here under review resort entire- ly to trickery, there is still enough deliberate sleight-of- hand, enough invocation to the Muse of the Peculiar, to distract us from the intended magic to the wires and mirrors which sustain the effects. The jacket to Judith Sher- win's The Life of Riot proclaims: "If there was one dominant intent in mind while- writing these ten stories, it was to si- multaneously arouse and violate the reader."eAlthough this (plus a little added vulgarity) might be enough to convict Mrs. Sher- win of pornography under the most recent Supreme Court rul- of her art. Most of the stories are published here for the first time.-significantly after' Mrs. Sherwin had been selected for publication by the Yale Series of Younger Poets, in 1969. In fact, the best of these stories, espec- ially "A Growing Economy,"' remind me strongly of the last agonies of Sylvia Plath, where- in domestic machines and mar- riage-relations become meta- phors for murder. Although many of the stories deal with this failure-of-love-and-sex-in- the-modern-world, they are as hackneyed as only the self-con- sciously modern can be. Take, for example, "The Olde Daunce" which. describes the strange appearance on a beach of an Olympic foreigner who eventually - oh you'll n e v e r guess-brings undreampt-of ful- fillment and reconciliation of mind and body to two dissatis- fied suburban matrons. Most of the tales are more mature than this embarrassing pseudo-Lawr- entia, but all are torn between adherence to approved Literary Alodels-Thomas Mann, Goethe, even Gertrude Stein-and a de- sire to render in chic alienation the contemporary angst. Despite her intelligence and obvious ed- ucation, Mrs. Sherwin is too- deliberately precocious. B a r to n Midwood 'a name even his own mother would find suspect) has collected his Phan- toms after their appearance in major periodicals such as The Paris Review and Esquire. Al- though he too relies on the sur- real, the metaphor which ab- sorbs and replaces a natural setting, Midwood's most perva- sive gimmick is irony. "I am not realy imitating Kafka because I deride my own attempts at im- itation." Thus when priests be- gin to string out the endless paradoxes of their !attempt to believe, and life is presented as a voyage on a rudderless ship, the author behind the fiction sits smug in his own mauvaise foi. So smug, inafact, that he allows himself flaws in crafts- manship (as when a native farmer says "I have acquired neither the cruelty, nor the de- tachment, nor the bestial intui- tion, that- are so necessary if one is to be masterful with ani- mals.") in the hope no doubt that such will be attributed to deliberate Brechtian alienation. More alarming is the "face- lessness" of Mr. Midwood's irony which seems to have (like God) no center but a circumference everywhere. "The Hunt1e y- Brinkley Report" is in diary form, interspersed with narra- tive concerning the television- hardened sensibilities of New Yorkers who have entirely lost the ability to dream. The name- less protaganist reports to us what he has seen reported on the news, with obstensibly sly "digs" at the amorality just beyond the ken of his innocence. But, unlike another American innocent, Huck Finn, the hero of "Huntley-Brinkley" has no conceivable position-no raft, no childhood, no moral bond with a Jim-from which to discern the incongruities he merely notes. His own reporting is in- distinguishable from the nicest morsel of NBC. War of Time, a translated collection of stories by Cuban Alejo Carpentier, has as great a sense, but much greater a con- trol, of the Absurd as that which fills both Phantoms and The Life of Riot. Carpentier's vol- ume is not an accidental. ac- cretion but a deliberate compil- ation of stories which interani- mate and modify one another. Then, too, Carpentier does not seem to be impressed by the unique condition of t h e Hu- man Modern. Although he can invent in a contemporary idiom Today's W riters Miss Wissman and Mr. Bruss are both Doctoral students in English at the University. This summer, Miss Wissman is tak- ing prelims and Mr. Bruss is working for Time Magazine. -in "Right of Sanctuary," he comments "In Latin America, coups are always successful,"- his roots are more enduring. He can see eternity even in Don- ald Duck: Whenever a child asked for the one in the window, a wo- man's hand would seize him by his orange feet and soon afterward put another similar Donald Duck in his place. This perpetual substitution of one object by another identical to it, made methink of Eter- nity. Perhaps God was relieved of his duties from time to time like this, by some superior power who was custodian of his perenniality. At the mo- ment of change, when the Lord's Throne was empty, there would be railway dis- asters, airplanes would crash, wars begin and epidemics break out. Some such hy- pothesis was needed to refute Marcion's abominable heresy, according to which an evil world could only have been created by an evil God. As Mrs. Sherwin uses marriage 1 TV REI 10 per FREE Service ---NO DEPOSIT CALL: Nejlac TV 66Z- SERVING BIG 10SC "Supposing Spiro Agnew gave a press conference and nobody came.. .." i - -- w - -