Word: posts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Automated bank-teller machines can be maddening devices, but there is one thing they supposedly do well: protect customers' accounts. Not always, apparently. Police are looking hard for Robert Post, 35, a Polish-born electronics expert and former ATM repairman who brags that he is something of a magician. According to the Secret Service, Post last year managed to make some $86,000 disappear from cash machines -- all from other people's bank accounts...
...Post allegedly worked his legerdemain with blank white plastic cards and a small magnetic encoding machine that he bought for $1,800. By peering over customers' shoulders and retrieving their discarded banking receipts, he obtained the personal ID and bank-account numbers needed to activate the computerized tellers. Using the encoding machine, he embellished his plastic with strips of magnetic tape bearing digital codes almost identical to those on the defrauded customers' cards...
Eventually, though, a recurring flaw in Post's codes was picked up by a bank's computer. Charged with fraud, Post skipped out on $25,000 bail in Manhattan. He is still at large...
Following the intricate expansiveness of her much praised novel Machine Dreams, the gifted Phillips, 35, has here assembled a collection of loose ends: first-person monologues revolving around barefoot girls, post-hippie gypsies and other street-smart naifs. One story is a kelped and matted address delivered by a castaway young woman to the baby inside her; another, the erotically charged rural reminiscence of an old lady; a third, the juiced-up riff of a 20-year-old rock 'n' roller, strutting his stuff with the swagger of the vulnerable...
With the pastiche ideology of post-modernism the theater has lost the appetite for the strong emotions and extravagant gestures that once were associated with the word "dramatic." Somehow, a cheesy melodrama like Dietrich's Dishonoured or Bogart's Maltese Falcon seems truer to the human heart than any new work I've seen on a stage in years. The theater, always a comfortable haven for dry intellectuals, may well have hypertrophied to the point that it is just an expensive substitute for The David Letterman Show...