Word: hayakawas
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Good questions, but the answers are hard to come by. Does the fault lie with strict parents or permissive teachers? Urban tensions or too much affluence? Last week Semanticist S. I. Hayakawa of San Francisco State College suggested that the answer to so much disaffection among the young is television. TV, said Hayakawa, addressing the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in his home town, is a "powerful sorcerer." It can bewitch children into becoming alienated and rebellious dropouts or even drug addicts. "Parents and relatives and teachers may talk to them, but the children find them sometimes censorious...
...what about the influence of commercials? They teach, says Hayakawa, "that there is an instant, simple solution to all problems. Acid indigestion can be relieved with Alka-Seltzer; unpopularity can be overcome by using Ban; feelings of sexual inadequacy can be banished by buying a new Mustang, which will transform you into an instant Casanova." Even TV documentaries, "offer neat wrap-ups of complex events." Yet, "the world makes all sorts of demands the television set never told you about, such as study, patience, hard work, and a long apprenticeship in a trade or profession, before you may enjoy what...
Having unburdened himself of all that, Hayakawa hastened to add that he had not intended to make a "terrible condemnation of television." After all, he said, it is "a wonderful instrument of communication, perhaps more effective than any in the history of the world. There are no villains in this story. We are all simply victims of the unforeseen consequences of a technological revolution...
...Francisco State College's famed Semanticist S. I. Hayakawa has no illusions. When ETC., the quarterly review of the International Society for General Semantics, devoted a special issue to LSD and other psychedelic drugs, Editor Hayakawa chose a few acid words for acid heads. Wrote he: "Most people haven't learned to use the senses they possess. I not only hear music, I listen to it. I find the colors of the day such vivid experiences that I sometimes pound my steering wheel with excitement. And I say, why disorient your beautiful senses with drugs and poisons before...
...Love Goddesses, put forth as a history of sex in the movies, is a grab bag of old film clips that suggests that the sundry excesses of Sweet Charlotte stem from time-honored Hollywood tradition. In The Cheat (1915), villainous Sessue Hayakawa leaves the mark of his desire on Fannie Ward's neck with a hot branding iron. In one of her early forays, Vamp Theda Bara anticipates the living bra by wearing what appears to be a giant tarantula. In Blonde Venus (1932), a gorilla lumbers through a chorus line, yanks off hirsute head and paws and clears...