Word: playland
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...food and drink) offer other high-tech icebreakers as well, such as CD-ROMs and new videogames. In Los Angeles, Cyber Java draws crowds with its videophone facilities. Cyber Cafe offers classes in Net navigation and Web-page authoring. At Cybersmith in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the country's grandest computer playland cum restaurant, regulars can congregate around a virtual-reality flight simulator ready for testing...
...most perplexing beach read of the summer is a train wreck of a novel by John Gregory Dunne, a very good writer (True Confessions, Harp) whose fiction usually stays nicely on the rails. Trying to figure out what went wrong with Playland (Random House; 494 pages; $25) should keep writers' workshops twittering until Norman Mailer publishes his next thousand pager...
Dunne and his wife, writer Joan Didion, have moved to Manhattan, but they lived in Southern California for years, wrote screenplays off and on and knew everyone in the movie business. The list of acknowledgments at the end of Playland names Otto Preminger, Natalie Wood, Billy Wilder and a cast of thousands. This explains part of the problem. What is supposed to be a novel is really the author's Hollywood valedictory, and he has included every good show-biz anecdote he ever heard. Unfortunately, the glut of marvelous gossip has stopped his story cold...
...black anger overwhelmed white liberal gradualism in the '80s. Then, as the intransigent white government relented and prospects for peace improved, critics -- notably in New York City -- seemed to lose interest in a man they once hailed as great. Fugard's most recent pieces, My Children! My Africa! and Playland, dealt with South Africa's smoldering race hatred via small-scale, personal tragedies. Each had success elsewhere in the U.S. and around the world but closed quickly off-Broadway. Even at home in South Africa, where the shows were lauded, people wonder what a white liberal dissenter...
...week, as people across the nation gathered at shrines to usher in an auspicious New Year, Tokyo Disneyland stayed open for 36 straight hours, serving as a kind of alternative temple. By day's end 200,000 votaries had observed the country's most important holiday at its favorite playland...