Word: arlen
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...attack should be acquitted because he watched too many movies." On Capitol Hill, shock at the verdict was quickly translated into pressure for legislation. "This case demonstrates there is something fundamentally wrong with the expanded modern insanity defense," said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania called five of the jurors to testify before a special Senate hearing on ways to make the insanity law clearer...
STILL, THIS strangely ubiquitous medium--what Arlen calls "a huge, shared, strangely experienceless experience," has become so omnipresent in a sly way that it's easy to ignore it altogether. Television criticism itself is a relatively new phenomenon--at least criticism that goes beyond the daily newspapers or the T.V. Guide's promo columns. That started happening as television became more sophisticated or, at least, more technologically sophisticated. Once t.v. evolved into something beyond the simple transmission of stage plays--when video, mini-cams, and that all-important ability to edit came into the scene--the force of the medium...
...Arlen, too, came into his own during this time. Two previous collections of criticism, The Living Room War (1969) and The View From Highway 1 (1976) were prime examples of the states of the art of this new form. There was something exciting in reading about second-rate trash that was taken seriously. It was somewhat akin to reading a sociological study of elevator passengers. Arlen also wrote a great deal about news and how television had changed the way we receive our information, and about Vietnam coverage and other such "news" events. He wrote well and with great insight...
...Camera Age, Arlen's latest collection, is also full of meticulously well-crafted writing. Thirty pieces, all written in the last five years for the pages of the New Yorker, are here. There are essays on "Dallas," on Olympic coverage, on the most ridiculous of game shows. Arlen has extraordinary control, often just quoting dialogue verbatim; it seems all the more ridiculous in print. (A game show question asks "Which part of the contestants anatomy droops?" The husband answers "chest." His secretary answers "boobs." When the wife matches them for the grand prize, the three of them go into happy...
...SENSES, in some of these pieces, though, that Arlen really doesn't want to talk about television at all. A piece on "Dallas" becomes a piece on the transition of American manners; a piece on "Shogun" becomes a brilliant essay on captivity literature. Arlen writes in a fine, high style which is extraordinarily articulate, and often one feels television simply doesn't supply enough raw material. One senses, too, that after 11 years, Arlen would really rather be writing about something else; but as his criticism digresses, the results are intriguing in themselves. The author of such nonfiction books...