ustxtxb_obs_1973_02_02_50_00021-00000_000.pdf

IN REVIEW Amalgam. Mixing Up The Act Austin Friends. It’s that time again. None of our Texas writers has published a book this week so we’ll have to find some other place to do our little bit of damage. Now, as a form, , the junk collection has always seemed attractive \(“segments are the only looking around for garbage, or atrocities, ‘the eye falls carelessly on a number of things ‘I like. Maybe “like” is too strong a word. For balance, there’s always John Lennon creeping out of the radio, delivering the latest in you-live-wrong rock. There’re always things to be disgusted at if you know how to look. Mixing up the act have the following. 1 The Texas Monthly. Well, the Texas Monthly is supposed to appear in a week or so, and I expect it to do just that, what with being packed up in boxes in the front office. The idea of a New York type Magazine based in Texas can’t be all bad:I ‘mean, with all the millions of words churned out about our heritage and the soil, there’s a lot of room left in the sanity area. I mean, there’s certainly a large hold ,where some first class U’Totem prose .might be. Someone has made the foolhardy assumption that there’s an audience here for a slick magazine which describes local phenomena other than buying buildings or the sins of the powerful. The powerful, .after all, commit many sins, only a few of which are interesting. The powerful commit an awful lot of dull sins. Sometimes a boy would like to read about something else. There are publications Which can make a story about popsicles into a story about the sins of the powerful. On the other hand, there are other pUblications in which the powerful can do no wrong. Reading the news in Texas is like ‘watching two groups ‘of crazed gorillas pulling apart a woman you’re not particularly interested in. Suggesting that -maybe she’s already dead doesn’t get you very far. Given this situation, what is there to do abOut the Texas Monthly except buy six copies, wait, and wish them good luck? The first issue has strong pieces by Gary Cartwright on Duane Thomas and Leo Janos Dr. Pepper. It has needs too, the ‘ most severe of which is for a full-time art director. A man’s hair is part of his body. You may have noticed other magazines with this same problem. 2 If you are in the unfortunate position of having to talk to someone in the next six months, it will be helpful to acquaint yourself with the growing literature surrounding three new movies. The Last Tango in Paris, obviously, plus Deep Throat and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Get your old Bertolucci, Peckinpah and pornography quips out and furbish them. For The Last Tango, Time did a cover story \(Brando “sodomizes her,” Time Oct. 28 got very excited. Ms. Kael’s 1966 essay on Brando is good if you want to talk about him. This is a lot of work will do. Effective essay-dropping has yet to receive the serious study it deserves a much handier form than the bulky, awkward book. Essays are, in general, easier to deal with from any direction in a class I once saw an illustrious University Professor destroy a Bergman review he didn’t like by calling the author a lesbian, this is empirical data folks I am not making this up. Deep Throat and Pat Garrett star Texans. 3 An American Family. An American Family is showing on public TV, a series of hours of film of a real American family being real. It’s real enough, but it’s not too interesting. The fact that Margaret Mead wrote for TV Guide to promo it is more interesting but not much. Crazy Margaret. In the extensive publicity \(“How An American Family, the idea that three guys with mikes and cameras following you down the street might cause some distortion in your behavior doesn’t seem very important to anyone. Add, for artificiality, considerable editing; someone somewhere selected a 25th of the footage shot, to show. Expect, however, An American Family to be a great roaring success, and sequels: An American Dog, An American Shopping Center, An American Hydro-electric Plant. Homage to Allen Funt. 4 About a year and a half ago Austin got its third commercial television station,’ KVUE-24, affiliated with ABC. This brought us Dick Cavett and Richard Goodman. Dick Cavett used to be a talk show host and talked about Indians a lot a little short guy. Richard Goodman is news director and anchorman for KVUE News. The KVUE News operation occasionally looks like a summer project out of the UT Communications Department, but Goodman is, uh . destined for greatness. He’s a mean man with a car crash. And let’s not kid ourselves, the distance between Kissingerand your average car crash, in terms of the viewer, is not as great as we have been led to believe. 5 But Mother never told me about . . . Jack Paar. 6 Late one day in the middle of last week, Hernandez: Houston P.D., a pilot for a possible new series, ran on NBC. February 2, 1973 21