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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 6, 1976)
THE BATTALION WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 1976 ec THE BATTALION Page 9 ^ WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 1976 Book recaptures sixties Sitting back in a bucket seat nine inches I T iniilimii l | l | ' ■| — j By LUCINDA JOHNSON J"If you missed the sixties and now feel dience o| a wkward when conversation turns to that ual *y gaifenigmatic subject, I can only urge you to r e is untf| re ad Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins. Robbins had his eyes open and ‘ v iththep, hjs feverishly expectant imagination finely ly police;tuned during those intensely dynamic d curiousltimes. He has brought his findings all to- l’s supperigether for us in his roadside attraction, up their;; The whole story is chronicled by the events-saturated and stunned narrator, 1 DetetSMarx Marvelous, who is our ticket into the NewYori{outrageous socio-religious labyrinth of mpathet;: American attitudes in the sixties. 5 hostage* Marvelous tells us of the enchanting and that he«;,.very sexy couple-Amanda, the woman, and iscoverdf John Paul Ziller, the magician. Indeed the o kids. ItfJ Zillers are the originators and owners of the ecureenijCapt. Kendrick Memorial Hot Dog ge opera*:! Wildlife Preserve, another roadside attrac- plane tuition on Interstate 5 in the Skagit Valley, rad vibe;: Washington. The Zillers have many friends al troubleH the ne )1 and pi hostagi BI agent rt. Onec Book Review and animals who move into and out of the attraction and who will satisfy nearly every question you ever had about life in these United States. The most important of their friends, in this story, is Plucky Purcell whose personal history traces a headline career from his star-studded football days at Duke Univer sity to some very sensitive work in con traband distribution, to some equally as sensitive Mexican jails, to his very innocent and inadvertent entrance into the Catholic Monastic Order of the Felicitors. Through a case of uncorrected assump tion, Plucky ends up Brother Dallas, karate-master-in-residence at the Felici tate Society’s Monastery hidden in the wooded mountains of northwestern Wash ington. He is transferred to Rome to teach the Swiss Guards karate. While he is there an earthquake opens some sealed portions of the catacombs under the Vatican, and during the disaster’s confusion Plucky stumbles upon and snatches up the most famous Entombed Find of all time. He immediately ships the Corpse to the U.S. disguised as a plaster figure ... a work of art. What a hand to hold! The story is bizarre and incredible, yet it is really not so surprising. The sixties were non-stop years; they swayed frantically from amused nausea to foot-stomping veh emence. The sixties were times to get away with things. Tom Robbins brings you up close to religion and authority and the at titudes of life on this planet. You will run into yourself and most of the people you know in this book. Another Roadside At traction. Much that was not so apparent to you in the flashing light of the sixties will glow out at you with a humorously eerie insistence. Eno’s new album best yet is the steel >out New': place tke- nflict befrJ eeminghi cause it iii the cotc d in thisi w York!; ibesther: d floor d By JOHN VANORE IpEno, the “Scaramouche of the synthe sizer,” (formerly of Roxy Music) stands head and shoulders above his contem poraries in the field of avant-garde rock. Although his talents at writing, composing and playing are obvious, he is most distin guished by virtue of his imaginitiveness. Eno, remember, brought the concept of “verticle music” to rock. ■ On his latest release, “Another Green World,” all his assets combine to make it his finest work thus far. For this album’s full impact is felt not in the writing and composing, which are superlative in their bwn right, but in the production and ar rangement. To fully appreciate this, one Meed only realize that, of the fourteen numbers here, only five are vocal tracks. The nine instrumentals are all examples of Eno’s flair for successful experimentation in electronic music. ■ One of the key numbers is “Sky Saw;” the vocals come in only at the end, and in this way the song bridges the gap between the vocal and instrumental numbers. Play ing up front to two basses and John Gale’s Music Review (of Velvet Underground fame) viola, Eno’s guitar actually sounds like a saw with its harsh, grating tones. Taken in retrospect, the entire LP is a milestone in Eno’s musical odyssey. For merly, he has had two distinct styles on record. The more conventional music has appeared on U.S. releases, with back-up bands that sound like a European Who’s Who of progressive rock. Meanwhile, his longer experimental pieces, all instrumen tals, have been made available only on im ported albums from Britain. These ventures into vertical music featured only Eno and Robert Fripp, of the late King Crimson. “Another Green World” realizes the coming together of Eno’s musical split personality. The absence of any members of Roxy Music in the studio band is also important. The break, which began when Eno left Roxy Music three years ago, now seems complete. In this light, “Another Green World” may well be considered a crucial turning point in Eno’s career. Understanding the title track is essential to understanding Eno’s music as a whole. His concept of vertical music involves pre senting music as “a section from a con tinuum,’’ rather than seeing it as “a finite and bounded process.” Vertical music al lows for the interaction of various elements within a song, rather than outlining a rigid, sequential progression towards the inevit able crescendo. The title track is nothing more than a few basic phrases, repeated over and over with only a few variations, gaining steadily in volume. This short (1:42) piece is, in a nutshell, the embodi ment of Eno’s style of avant-garde rock. I must confess that I remain tradition- bound, and thus the vocals continue to ap peal to me above the rest of the album. “St. Elmo’s Fire” features, apart from Eno’s ex cellent singing, firm evidence why Eno says of guitarist Robert Fripp, “I never tire of listening to Robert’s ingenuity and in ventiveness.” If you’re interested in seeing how one man can take so many risks with new musi cal forms, and have them turn out so consis tently spectacular, look into anything Eno has put his name to. Sitting back in a bucket seat nine inches above the pavement, electrical engineer ing major Phil Blair draws smiles as he glides along in his three-wheeled, two- seated People-Powered Vehicle (PPV). Like some 13,000 bicycle riders, the Lufkin sophomore believes pedaling is the best way to travel around the sprawling Texas A&M campus. But the vehicle he rides is in a class by itself. The streamlined machine looks like a miniature speed boat on wheels and weighs less than 40 pounds. “I’ve clocked myself at 20 miles an hour going downhill without a passenger, but I hardly ever go that fast,” he said recently. Blair, who transferred from Angelina County Junior College in Lulkin, lives al most three miles south of the campus. It takes him about 35 minutes to get to school, “but I get home in 25 minutes be cause it’s more downhill going south,” he explains. Blair’s PPV has never needed repairs since he bought it last May. “It’s very rug ged and even the most delicate part, the three-speed transmission, is made as solid as a brick,” he testifies. Blair says he gets more than sufficient exercise by using the PPV. “I know it sounds funny,” he said, “but it is both more comfortable and more tiring than riding a bike, depending on how fast you try to go.” “I rode a bicyle before I got my three- wheeler, and it sure made my muscles sore at first. But I am much healthier since I started riding it, largely because I quit smoking,” he said. “After going about a mile in this thing you really need your wind.” Phil Blair demonstrates his two wheel stunt on his three wheel PPV. The people powered vehicle provides comfortable, safe and inexpensive transportation; instead of gas, it’s peddled! Blair said that narrow bike ramps and curbs on campus were no problem for his three-wheeler. “I just slow down to about 5 miles per hour and give the pedals a shove to get the front wheel over. Or I let one back wheel go over the curb when I go through a ramp.” Although Blair enjoys his PPV, a “For Sale” sign is taped to its front. “It’s been lots of fun, and I’ve had no trouble with it,” he says. “But-1 guess I’d rather have the money.” — Steven Knowles ‘Loretta H agger s’ makes it to Nashville Associated Press NASHVILLE — Loretta has fi nally made it to Nashville. Mary Kay Place, who plays Loretta Haggers on the “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” comedy- soap opera, was in Nashville last week for the first time. Accompanied by Graham Jarvis, who plays her husband Charlie on the show, Miss Place sang on the Grand Ole Opry, was given a tour of the city and met several celebrities. On the show, the dream-deluded Loretta and her ambitious husband have been trying to travel to Nashville so she can become a big country music star. In real life, she’s already recorded a country album and now may boast that she’s sung on the Grand Ole Opry, visited the Country Music Hall of Fame and had her picture taken in front of a wax figure of Hank Williams Jr. She bought a book showing the homes of the stars, sang briefly for a man drinking beer at the famed Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge and was complimented by Minnie Pearl. “She IS Southern, isn’t she!” Miss Pearl said after meeting Miss Place and discovering that Loretta really does have a Southern accent. “This is the closest I’ll ever get to the ‘Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman’ show,” Miss Pearl said. “Minnie Pearl would be a little lost in that atmosphere.” Creator of micro-miniatures breaks smallness records By SETH MYDANS Associated Press I MOSCOW — A chess game on the head ofapin. A working electric motor 8(X) times Imaller than a matchhead. A fully rigged frigate made of gold, no bigger than a breadcrumb. With a puff of breath, one could blow away the life work of Nikolai S. Syadristi, a *Jkrainian who is the leading Soviet creator Al Fade: micro-miniatures. Working under a microscope, using tools so small their blades are sometimes in visible to the naked eye and could pierce a finger without pain, Syadristi has laid claim to several world records for smallness. Included in these are the world’s small est book, half a millimeter — 0.020 of an inch — in size, with 12 hand-lettered pages sewn together with threads from a spider’s web, and the world’s smallest assembled object, a golden padlock and key 27 mi crons in size or 50,000 times smaller than a poppy seed. The Guinness Book of World Records includes no entries in these categories. It is an unusual pastime for the trained agronomist, who is also Ukrainian cham pion in the Soviet sport of underwater har pooning. “I do it for the competition, like sports,” Syadristi said in an interview at the Moscow Polytechnical Museum where his works are on permanent display. “I want to make things smaller than the Japanese, the Germans, the Americans,” he said. On display in the museum, a dozen of Syadristi’s creations sit in brightly-lighted glass cases, looking like no more than tiny specks of dust. Through microscopes setup in front of them they spring to life as daz zling little works of art. In Syadristi’s chess game, gold chessmen, 0.014 millimeters high, are ar ranged on a board that sits within the cir cumference of a pinhead. It shows the con cluding move of the 1927 world cham pionship. The tiny golden ship with platinuAn spars and spun glass rigging 400 times thinner than a human hair is a minutely detailed scale model of a 19th century frigate with wind in its sails. It took six months to build and measures 3.2 millimeters from stem to stern. One millimeter is 0.0394 of an inch. The electric motor, one-twentieth of a cubic millimeter in size, has 14 parts in all. It buzzes into motion at the flick of a switch, and Syadristi claims that it has not had a breakdown in 15 years of display. Syadristi makes his own simple, but miniscule, tools, and says his most sophis ticated technology involves learning the properties of his materials in very' small sizes. When he works at his microscope, Syad risti first washes his hands in gasoline and powders them with talcum. “If I didn’t do that, the tiny beads of sweat on my finger tips would create a flood that would wash away my work,” he said. Working on anything bigger than a hair’s breadth,” Syadristi said, “I’m home free: Splitting a hair, that’s easy, like slicing a sandwich. ” Imported and Bottled by Hiram Walker & Sons, Inc., Peoria, III., San Francisco, Calif. Tequila. 80 Proof. Product of Mexico.