North Carolina Newspapers

8 Th Daily Tar Heel Thursday, November Punk rock fans blast To the editor: In the DTH of Nov. 15, Gil Templeton's "review" of the Dead Boys' album caught my eye and turned my stomach (" 'Y oung, Loud and Snotty"; how true it is"). Does Mr. Templeton really think he is being objective, or is he merely attempting to incur the wrath of punk rock fans? He definitely succeeds in the latter, for his information on punk rock is both faulty and biased. He determines that "punk rock is both degrading to the world of music and hazardous to your health" after listening to the output of one group, and he admits that he did not even listen to the whole album. Templeton talks of the group's "disgusting" personal habits when he hasn't read enough to know that they are from Cleveland and not a British group as he stated, He sarcastically describes producer Genya Ravan as "obviously a real genius." 1 seriously doubt that he knows Genya Ravan was a prominent New York jazz-rock singer and producer for several years before she produced the Dead Boys' album. Our reviewer's worst point by far is his last paragraph in which he tries to discourage this "undesirable element." He truthfully defines music as "an entertaining, meaningful form of expression," but he seems to think he can decide for all of us just what is entertaining and meaningful. 1 urge Templeton to get his information straight and be a bit more objective the next time he writes a review. Maybe he doesn't need punk rock, but someone else might. T. Reid Hartis 101 Alexander To the editor: We cannot believe that Gil Templeton would be so foolish and narrow-minded as to choose an LP (the Dead Boys' Young, Loud and Snotty) at random and, based on his dislike for the one album, condemn an entire genre of music. It seems to us that Templeton had a preconceived notion of New Wave music and sought to confirm his bias in whatever way possible, regardless of the facts. The least he could have done would be to do a minimal amount of research on the band he chose to review. For instance, Templeton commented that the Dead Boys thought that they could "actually change the political structure of Parliament" with their music why would they want to? They're Greg Porter Editor Ben Cornelius, Managing Editor Ed Rankin, Associate Editor Lou Biuonis, Associate Editor e Laura Scism, University Editor Elliott Potter, City Editor Chuck Alston, State and National Editor Sara BuLLARD, Features Editor Cf EWMitH, Arts Editor t Gene UpcmftCHi SoQJdUor .Allen JesnIgan, Photography Editor Could increase in births signal a new baby boom? If recently released figures and the theories of an economics professor at the U niversity of Pennsylvania are any indication, the U nited States may be in store for a second baby boom. The National Center for Health Statistics reports the American birth rate has experienced a 6-to-7 percent increase during the first eight months of this year. The center's newest report also notes that the number of births and the fertility rate are both .higher than they were during the same period last year. Of course, the significance of these figures remains to be seen, but Dr. Richard Easterlin suspects they may signal a trend. While granting that it is still too early to tell, Easterlin said, "My general expectation is that in the next five to 10 years the birth rate is likely to increase substantially." The economist's theories are of particular interest to a world which has been concerned about overpopulation since the days of Thomas Malthus. During the '60s, the American fear of limited resources and a burgeoning. population grew, finally leading to greater birth control and conservation efforts. At that time, the effects of the post-war baby boom were taking their toll on U.S. birth statistics, and population growth in the country was peaking. In this decade, though, less concern has been expressed about population, as the energy crisis, for one, has gripped the nation's curiosity. Easterlin has not forgotten the population hysteria of ten years ago and believes that more babies are likely to be born now that competition for schooling and jobs is less stiff. With the children of the original baby boom now fully matured, the relative number of young adults is one the decline. With fewer young adults competing for jobs and spots in the nation's colleges, an increase in the birth rate becomes more likely, according to Easterlin. "In simplest terms, the fertility of young adults depends on their relative well-being how well off they are compared to how well off they would like to be," the professor says. Other population researchers attribute increases in the birth rate to an additional phenomenon. They say that women born during World War 11 who heretofore resisted marriage and childbirth are now yielding and starting families of their own. Whatever the actual causes of the new uprising in the birth rate, it is important that the nation realizes that a second baby boom could be around the corner. While a Swiftian "modest proposal" obviously is not a solution to the predicament, some response to growing population and dwindling resources is needed. The Daily publishes Monday through Friday during the m udi inn year. Ojj ices are at the Student Union Building, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. S C. 27514. Telephone numbers: 9)3-0245. 0246. lony Gunn, assistant news editor Reid Tuvim, assistant managing editor l ee Pace, assistant sports editor Melame Modlin, assistant arts editor Vcrna 1 aylor, business manager Claite Barley, assistant business manager Dan Collins, advertising manager Carol Bedsole, assistant sales manager Frank Moore and Nancy Oluer, composition editor Robert JasmLicwic, composing room supervisor 17, 1977 from Cleveland! What's more, not only is Young, Loud, and Snotty their most recent release, it's their debut. Come now, Gil, if you can't be objective, please be accurate! As for the rest of the "repulsive and disgusting" New Wave artists (the Dead Boys admittedly being one of the less distinguished acts), here are some points to ponder: Television's debut LP Marquee Moon won critical acclaim from the majority of music magazines as well as Time. The Sex Pistols' singles "God Save the Queen" and "Pretty Vacant" both reached the No. 1 position on the British charts without the benefit of any radio airplay! The Dictators' Manifest Destiny album was ordained a Recording of Special Merit by the prestigious Stereo Review magazine. Talking Heads 77 by none other than the Talking Heads, won favorable response from the listeners of the local bastion of Top 40 rock, WQDR, who had aired the LP as its featured midnight selection. Need we go on? The point to be made is this: New Wave is new, exciting and up and coming. An affront to musical expression it is not; indeed, New Wave is primarily a reaction against the banality of disco, and an expression of frustration and anger at being young, unemployed and without purpose in life. We'd suggest that the DTH find a reviewer who doesn't dream of Olivia Newton-John by night and worship Peter Frampton posters by day. Gil Templeton's article, though bearing some truth, is, we feel, an affront to objective journalism. Tom Eisenmenger 210 Carr Richard Brown 207 Carr To the editor: Re: Gil Templeton's stunning review of Young, Loud and Snotty by the Dead Boys. Aside from Templeton's neo-fascist tone and embarrassingly reactionary viewpoint toward the Dead Boys' album, he has taken a bit of liberty with the facts. First, I wonder what exactly he learned from the Dead Boys' album concerning the British New Wave, considering the fact that the band is originally from Cleveland and now bases itself in New York. Bath Bar Uwl 85th year of editorial freedom Tar Heel review of Dead Boys, defend New Wave artists Second, the H-Bombs are hardly what you could call "punk rock," especially if Templeton is after a better glimpse of what's happening in England. We are proud to be considered among the groups coming up in the New Wave, and we might caus.e a bit of distortion in your ears (unless you keep the stereo volume at two, as Templeton suggests for all punk rock albums). But we ain't punk. Just new. Finally, if anybody really buys the junk that G il spurted onto the middle of page four in Tuesday's DTH, then this town is in trouble Jesse Helms will be a shoe-in for re-election and Boston's first album is bound to go quintuple platinum. Peter Holsapple The H-Bombs Chapel Hill Road Durham. letters to Proctoring destroys honor system To the editor: I am extremely disturbed by your editorial of Nov. 8 ("Proctoring needed to make new Honor Code effective") concerning the necessity of faculty proctoring. It escapes me how one can call a system of faculty proctoring an "honor system" at all. If this is the direction in which we are to move, why not admit defeat and stop using the term "honor system?" 1 am not naive enough to think that cheating does not go on on this campus. For this reason, I am glad that the issue has been raised for discussion. However, 1 am certain that the infractions occurring under the present system are far less than would occur under a system where the faculty is the enemy and one is expected or even encouraged to "get away with" all that one can. Furthermore, how can one expect one or two faculty members to adequately police up to 400 students? Obviously they cannot. Even if the faculty could do a reasonable job. why should they? An understandable faculty reaction would be that "if the students don't care enough about the Not always 'opiate 'Godfather' production shows television's potential By J. M. BURRIS Simply by turning on the set anytime of the day or night, one can become instantly and thoroughly depressed. I'm not inclined in the least to do so; 1 wrote off the countless hours of television watching as the taxes of my childhood it's something we were told to do by our parents when there were no babysitters with whom to play cards. They assured us as they assured themselves that TV was the learning tool of the future, not having the remotest idea that it would become instead the opiate of the dumbfounded, as habit-forming as hot coffee in the morning. What did they expect us to learn, we should have thought to ask, from Lucille Ball and that greaseball husband of hers? It is depressing you see, if one has, as I do, a tubeaholic for a wife. "It relaxes me," she says when I ask if she absolutely must watch The Sew Price Is Right while I try to make sense of Plutarch's Lives. Finding Shakespeare's precise source for Julius Caesar, I thought, would be an invigorating task, one l could relish because l had delegated it to myself, for myself, and would handle it by myself. That is, until Shirley Carthage was told to "come on down." Instantly this grown woman bounces down the steps toward the stage, leaving her seat among the live studio audience to join her three new colleagues downstage to play The Sew Price Is Right. I liked it better with Bill Cullen hobbling around on his lame leg. It was as though all of TV was personified in Bill Cullen: happy, witty, nattily dressed. .. but lame. What more did TV deser e? And then came educational television, or the network we now know as PBS. The network was funded by the taxpayers and the oil companies (an unlikely pair) for the high-browed, intellectual types. I looked forward to seeing Julie Harris as Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst for weeks. No commercials, no nonsense, just plain, old-fashioned intellectual entertainment. No belly laughs, just patient meaning of a college degree to actively enforce an honor system, why should I?" The straw poll that broke the camel's back stated that 27 of 42 faculty members would enforce a proctoring system. This is evidence of faculty support? Hardly. What arc we going to use in the other 15 classes, lie detectors? What is needed at this time is not total disregard for almost 200 years of tradition, but an increased awareness of the problem coupled with a fresh approach to selling the honor system to the student body and, in particular, each freshman class. Presently each freshman class sits through brief comments about the honor system during orientation while making paper airplanes out of their programs. Then no more is heard about the honor system. Why should any student think the honor system is important if this is the treatment it gets? Why not the editor reinforce these remarks during subsequent meetings with General College advisers, RAs and ultimately each professor? Until the honor system is given a chance to function and until a better alternative is presented, I will continue to be convinced that we are taking an irreversible step backward. The students at this University deserve better than the misdirected efforts of a few claiming to represent the U niversity community. They deserve much better than a proctoring system. Marcus E. Randall C-l Estes Park Apts. Signed by 47 concerned students GPSF 'used' To the editor: Today, 1 open, or rather close, the DTH only to find that both the Graduate and Professional Student Federation (GPSF) and myself have been used in a curious manner. The relationship between the way in which Graduate and Professional students are being relieved of their supply of money to that of any other organization is at best tenuous. The facts have been hidden on this of dumbfounded' chuckles. And then the phone rang: "Hello?" "Mark, listen, 1 can't talk but a minute because the second hairs about to get started. Are you watching the game? You wouldn't believe the passStaubach threw to Golden Richards at the end of the first half. Anyway,. . ." and on and on and on for ten whole minutes, right through the scene where Miss Harris offers us a bite of cake. I switched the set off and swore never to watch it again, then and there; but the local PBS station ran the show again later in the week (a lot of people must have been interrupted), and 1 was able to see it in full. 1 took the phone off the hook and locked thedoor. That showed them, didn't it? Grown people running down those stairs to hug Dennis James, frantically thanking EMPTIES him for the opportunity to come on down to make total fools of themselves. I say it's indecent. And John Boy's moved to New York, Richie Cunningham is screen testing for a Hollywood movie career what in the hell's going on here? Having run amuck in sleazy novels for television by such un-artists as Arthur Hailey or Irwin Shaw, commercial TV reached its point of no return. Even the "live studio audiences" present for practically all of the situation comedies sound canned. They pretend not to see that theactors(?)are reading cue cards just as we at home forget what a teleprompter is, and that Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley are using one. It's hard to believe that the notes on Walter's desk are as fake as all those "assignments" he's supposed to be on every time Roger Mudd is filling in. What are we going to do, anyway, w hen all the TV regulars are dead and gone and can no longer appear on a regular basis? Johnny Carson will have to hire a guest host every night and the CBS Evening Sews with Walter Cronkite will star Roger Mudd or Dan Rather. Freddie Prinze can shoot himself, but does that faze the grey box? Hell, no! They found a replacement for Chico so quickly not one advertiser cancelled out. article by Nancy H artis ("Solve CGC budget before increasing fees," Nov. 16) in order to protect the innocent. If there is any question in anyone's mind as to what the return Graduate and Professional students see on their $ 1 4 each during the normal school year plus their contributions during the summer terms, I should like to indicate that on the average, about $15 goes in, and $7.50 eventually gets into items which have some interest to them. This is a return which attests the fact that Student Government is not really interested in the one-quarter of the campus which is the Graduate and Professional student body. So, why are these students not complaining all the time? The reason that Graduate and Professional students are at this campus is to further their own education. And due to the somewhat different environment of internal, rather than external, demand for perfection. Graduate and Professional students are not able to devote the time necessary to make their own interests understood to a group of people, some of whom eventually will understand as they, too, will be in the same predicament. It is not possible to provide all of the experiences which one acquires through graduation from a college without doing just that, and hence the explanation that Graduate and Professional students only desire to be allowed to create for themselves is not understood by those who have yet to graduate. I hope you are more careful in your future comparisons, Nancy. David Hackleman GPSF President Indians a minority, too To the editor: For the past few weeks we've been reading quite a bit in the DTH about the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, quota systems, reverse discrimination and how it effects life at UNC. We of the Carolina Indian Circle have been annoyed by much of what we have read. The final blow was last Thursday's DTH which carried an article entitled, "Committee Focuses On Race Relations Between White Profs, Black Students." This article is typical of the attitude of the University administration towards non- 1 love it when the characters on a program try to cover for a missing star or starlet, one who has died or otherwise seriously injured him- or herself, with the old she's-visiting-her-sister-in-Hoboken routine. Or, as is the case my wife tells me, of Ellen Corby's real life heart attack and her disappearance from The Waltons: they put the old grandmother in a Virginia hospital, then never spoke her name again. Real life is made to fit the fantasy TV creates; and when life belligerently refuses to conform to the . Nielsen ratings, the whole idea is shelved. Remember how the networks rid themselves of successful shows like Tlie Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour or red herrings like Dick Cavett's late show? All of this pessimism to introduce the most significant event television has produced in years. Amid all the fanfare of its Big Event and Novels for Television, NBC has presented Francis Ford Coppola's complete Godfather series on four successive nights and if you've missed it, you're nuts. Coppola, presently putting the final touches on his anti-war epic Apocalypse Now has compiled with the help of Barry Malkin.one of his film editors, the footage from both of his Godfather films with scenes which had been, for time's sake, previously cut. The total NBC broadcast lasted nine viewing hours, approximately two of those consumed by commercials and station identifications. The beauty of the whole thing is this: one of the three commercial networks, having previously adopted only sleazy, sensationalist novels like Captains and the Kings, The Moneychangers and others has presented finally a serious cinematic achievement and inserted it, tastefully, into the novel-for-television format. Coppola and Malkin worked closely with the censors to insure that segments of the film would not have be deleted merely to avoid earthy or profane language. New dialogue has been used, with the actors' providing voice-over recordings. The result is simple: The Godfather as it was presented on Nov. 1 2-1 5 was a major television achievement. NBC proved that art can be art and still bring in the big bucks. black minorities at UNC. We are tired of the manner in which the words "black" and "minority" are used interchangibly at UNC, reflecting the general policies. It may come as a surprise to some folks, but blacks are not the only minority on campus. Three years ago, when we got organized, one of the goals we began working towards was for the Indian Circle to serve as a valuable tool for the UNC administration in helping to recruit Indian Students and to provide a voice for Indian Students on campus. However, for three years the University has been uninterested in recruiting Indian students or staff or in including us in any minority-affairs programs. It has been frustrating for us to see that committees and programs on "minority" affairs have been set up and we haven't been asked to participate. Then we have to go and ask "pretty please" can we work with you. There are a few campus groups such as the YMCA and the Association for Women Students that have asked us for representatives and we appreciate it but this is the exception to the rule. We want to know what we have to do to make people aware of what's going on. We hoped that American Indian Culture Week last spring would help make our presence known but apparently not. We are even worse off than the blacks in that regard, since many people seem to think that there aren't even any Indians around any more, which is not a myth that the blacks have to deal with. We're not asking for anything unreasonable. We just want to be recognized as a distinct group of people with special needs and given fair representation in campus affairs. We want minority to mean that; not only black, not only gay, not only I ndian, not just one specific group but all of them. We have something to say, folks. We're just asking for you to listen. P.S. Why isn't anything ever said about UNC's traditionally Indian school, Pembroke State University? Forest Hazel 216 Ehringhaus Mark DeCarlo 229 Ehringhaus I would venture to say that The Godfather in four parts was, perhaps, more compelling on television than in the theatre. The commercial breaks came at logical interludes; the audience was left with no shabby cliffhanging action at the end of each night's segment; the ads and previews for the program were neither sensationalist nor cheaply alluring. More affirmatively, the two-hour., doses of. . the . Corteones'. epic struggle from young Vito's (Robert DeNiro) arrival in America to Michael's (Al Pacino) Sannonesque destruction of the underworld empire are powerful in themselves. The viewer, instead of seeing Part One, waiting two years, then seeing Part Two, lives with the film for at least four days, haunted at day by the foreboding theme and released at night by the cathartic satiation of aesthetic immersion. One of the great virtues of film is that, as Norman Mailer has suggested, there is this great immersion by the viewer in the characters and action on the screen. Even NBC's warning that The Godfather is not meant to suggest that crime and murder are glamorous, nor that Sicilians or Italians are generally crooks not even this allows the viewer to divorce himself from the Family. We cheer for the Corleones when they are attacked by the other families and weep for Brando when he keels over in the garden. We dissociate ourselves from our moral sensibilities at just the precise times, crying out for a more eternal justice when family "business" requires it. We, too, are hardened as Michael is to the realities of death and dying, of homicide and murder; and we understand why things must finally be brought to an end. ' The new scenes Coppola earlier felt he needed to cut are rich in source material for students interested in a more complete understanding of Vito Corleone's rise"to power. For my money, however, the key to the film's awe-inspiring majesty is in the comic scenes, those bright flashes in the dark of the sombre story. I still laugh out loud when Clemenza takes young Vito into a strange house to steal a rug for Corleone's wife. The comedy is in imitation of the best slapstick artists, and the still photograph my mind has taken of their walking down the street with that rug tucked under their arms is priceless. Santino's lust being satisfied against a door can no one hear the banging? and Clemenza's conversation with Michael about love and bravery over a giant bowl of spaghetti sauce; and who could forget Luca Brasi's memorized speech for the Don on Connie's (Talia Shire) wedding day these are the kind of scenes which unexpectedly pop up to lend comic relief to the tension. In The Godfather NBC has pointed the way toward television's long-awaited realization of its potential. Another rerun of Butch Cassidy, The Poseidon Adventure or Monday Night Football can hardly compete, and to feel tempted to switch channels hurriedly during a commercial to catch Staubach throwing to Richards is sinful. The drama of the film is so thick, so unrelenting, that I must rest between acts,' slumped in my scat, exhausted both mentally and physically from triftstrain on my nerves and passions. When I consider how my night has been spent, I mind neither the commercials nor being proved wrong about the "worth" of the tube. Following the conclusion of The Godfather on Tuesday night, J. M. Burris consumed his television set.