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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 22, 1987)
_Arts & Entertainment,. Spin Magazine not folding By Scott Harrah Senior Editor Contiary to rumors that Spin Magazine had folded, and despite the fad that it missed two months of publication, the magazine plans to publish again in November, publisher Bob Guccione Jr. said in a telephone interview Sunday from his New York office. The music magazine, founded in the spring of 1985, encountered a “pure business divorce” from Penthouse International in August, he said. The company, which had bank rolled Spin from the beginning, was unsatisfied with a circulation rate much lower than Penthouse’s, Guccione’s sister, Nina, said in a previous interview. Spin is printed in Lincoln by Foote and Davies. Account execu tive Woody Nelson said that al though the company has missed two months of production, “it (Spin’s publishing hiatus) won’t chnf lie Hnu/n ” Thi' rrxmivinv/ nrinf c several national magazines like Inside Sports, Consumer Digest, and Muscle and Fitness, he said. Guccione said Foote and Da vies will continue to print Spin. Many magazines are printed in the Midwest because companies here are centrally located for distribu tion, he said. Guccione started Spin with a $500,000 loan from his father, Bob Guccione Sr., which he did not have to pay back after the separa tion, according to a New York Times article last week. The younger Guccione said Spin was like a small child that “required enough nourishment as the big one (Penthouse), but wasn’t getting it.” He said Spin moved out of Penthouse offices to a new one at 251 Fifth A vc. in Manhattan and the magazine’s next issue will hit newsstands on Nov. 17 with a Novcmbcr-Deccmbcr, year-end issue. Monthly publication will resume in January. He said he was able to raise the necessary financ ing for Spin’s resurrection, but refused to disclose the sources. He said Spin has already sold 20 pages of advertising for the next issue. The magazine’s editorial and graphic content will remain the same. However, he said, there will be a slight size change because hall an inch will be omitted from the side of Spin’s cover. He said 96 percent of Spin’s sales come from newsstands, and it only had 8,000 subscribers before the Penthouse separation. Sub scribers were allowed to either accept a refund or take a subscrip tion to Penthouse or its sister pub lication, Omni. Former Spin subscribers will now be allowed to sign up again at half price, he said. Guccione Jr. said the initial idea behind the creation of Spin was for it to be an alternative to the “safe journalism” practiced by music magazines like Rolling Stone. At the time, he said, the rock press was taking itself too seriously. “The pop press becomes so bloody safe and timid,” he said. “I think what’s exciting about a magazine is a variety of different voices'.” He said Spin encourages and accepts writing slants that aren’t welcome at other magazines. In a recent Village Voice ar ticle, rock journalist Barry Walters wrote that Spin’s “rude-boy atti tude” sometimes scares off stars. See SPIN on 7 --1 Donations, booze brew at festival By Kevin Cowan Senior Reporter y More than 1(X),(X)() people delved into the delights of the Haymarket 1 arvest Festival last weekend, donat ing 20,0(X)pounds of food and perhaps enjoying a cold brew. Deane Finnegan, special projects coordinator for the department of economic development in Lincoln, said the food will be distributed be tween the three Nebraska food banks in Lincoln, Kearney and Hastings. Wcnde Baker, general manager of the Lincoln food bank, said the Lin coln location received 11 ,(XX) pounds of food from the Haymarket festival alone, as well as 1,650 pounds from excess Memorial Stadium conces sions and 825 pounds from supermar ket donations. The food, she said, will provide 9,240 meals for the hungry people of Lincoln. Aside from food donations at the festival, the city allowed an outdoor drinking policy. And few problems resulted from it, officials said. The harvest festival was unique, Finnegan said. For the first time ever, he said, the law prohibiting outdoor drinking was altered. People drinking beer served from the beer gardens were not given citations for drinking in public. But alcohol could not be purchased from off-sale liquor cstaf lishments and brought to the festiv Capt. Jim Baird, Northwest Ccn ter team captain, said that minors possessing alcohol was not a problem in the Haymarket, despite the large crowds. “We experienced relatively few arrests,” he said, “a few fights, some problems with disturbing the peace, but only a couple of arrests for MIP.” Baird said the festival operated smoothly because police and the liq uor establishments worked together. Finnegan said some FarmAid ce lebrities showed up on the final night to frost the final touch. William Lee Golden and Rattlesnake Annie both performed for the festival crowd; Dick Clark and Kris Kristofferson made cameo appearances. Too Smooth played Friday night at the Haymarket Harvest Festival. Lieurance revises censored books “Parents have every right to object to what they find offensive and to express their views, there are mil lions of books out there, if a parent objects to one, give them another book.” —Phyllis Schlafly of The Eagle Forum concerning attempts to ban books, 1987 The first thing 1 think when 1 look at the endless, intimidating rows of books on the shelves of any library is how many of those books I could bum without anyone really noticing the difference. Charles Lieurance t wrk / 1 Alter all, books — big ones, small ones, the little tiny ones with gold foil bindings and watcrcolor pictures of ducks in the rain in them — arc in infinite supply; and how better to weed out the bothersome complicated ones and gel to the ones about real things like pomes and couples snug gling on a grassy knoll, than to arbi trarily pick a few out and gel rid of them entirely. According to People for the Ameri can Way, this year Nebraska ranked first in the nation for weeding out the bothersome books in our schools’ libraries and replacing them with tomes more appropriate to small minds. Parent groups in our state have initiated 12 eases of attempted book bannings. Three were successful. It was a good year for the litcrarily overwhelmed in Nebraska. Now school boards need to figure out which books can satisfactorily replace the ones that arc banned. To aid the layman in future banning at tempts, here is a list of replacement texts, lest it be said that conservatives bitch about a problem without coming up with a viable solution. “Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain: In many cases the Classics lllus trated comic books arc far superior to the original versions, and this is a case in point. Objectionable passages like “Jim was a good nigger” arc changed to “Some of my best friends arc Jims.” “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salin ger: J.D. Salinger’s (note the liquor reference in hisown name) unpleasant novel of alienated youth attacks insti tutions that most children obviously find nurturing and experiential. “The Helen Keller Story” or “The Summer of My German Soldier” are infinitely more inspirational talcs of youths overcoming seemingly insurmount able obstacles. In the former story, Keller — a spoiled little deaf, dumb and blind girl — becomes a completely valuable human being. In the latter, a winsome, starry-eyed adolescent girl falls in love with a really neat Aryan youth. The problem is he’s a Na/i. Can she really love a Nazi? she asks herself. What would Mom say? What would I wear 10 me Kcicnstag nan i Deep down inside we’re all the same, and if we work real hard we can overcome our handicaps. In “Catcher,” Holden Caulfield is a foul-mouthed, belligerent twerp who thinks his survival is more important than being kind, courteous and cheer ful. He doesn’t like people, and he is an individualist in the worst sense of that awful word. Docs he think about how he appears to others? His hair? His clothes? How will he get into the M.B.A. program? Youths arc unrealistic enough without being led into Caulfield’s fantasy world. “Ulysses” by James Joyce: Since it is perfectly unreadable, there is no reason for this book to exist anyway. What if everyone wrote with out periods and commas? Joyce is a linguistic anarchist. There are bumper stickers for people like this: “My Punctuation, Love it or Leave it!’’ comes to mind. I suggest perhaps “Babar goes to Botswana,” a lovely, simple book about a day in the life of an elephant that manages to capture the daily ex istence of the species without getting so deep into the happy pachyderm’s head that you get to involuntary thoughts about breasts, precipices and umbilical cords. “Lord of the Flics” by William Golding: Not all replacements for books have to be written works. After all, we arc in the latter part of the 20th century now and video has made it possible for us to forsake Golding’s abhorrent anti-Rousseau child-exploitation novel in favor ol more enjoyable, tangible and productive views of soci ety like “Gilligan’s Island,” where a cross-section of society crashes on an island and manages to rebuild society without ever once doing anything obscene to a pig. “As I Lay Dying” by William Faulkner: The Classics Illustrated version improves on this immensely, too. The novel is known for having the shortest cuapicr in mcrary niMUiy, consisting of one sentence only: “My mother is a fish.” The people at Classics Illustrated have outdone the masters once again by shortening this sentence to a clearer, more apt sentence: “My mom’s dead.” It’s what the author meant. Why didn’t he say it in the first place? He wrote it that way because he was a perverted profligate who thought about incest all the time and only wrote after all the bars were closed, that’s why. “Shane” by Jack Schaefer I I wonder just how many youths have gotten into trouble because of this book. Older men who find them selves hanging around little boys for moral support should seek help imme diately, and little boys who make friends with older gunfighlcrs need to be shown a thing or two by Mom and Dad. And we wonder why so many kids get out of school at 3:30, hop into cars with dangerous characters and wind up as mug shots on the backs of milk cartons. This is another case where teachers believe kids have outgrown books that teach about a safe, secure world where children play with children and adults play with themselves. A few more years of Dick and Jane may have kept kids from getting to o curious about older people they aren’t immediately related to. “Animal Farm” by George Orwell: Respected high-ranking officials in our government inform me that war is, in fact, peace. There’s no excuse for giving our children misinformation. The best substitute for this book is Schlafly’s own “Threat From the Stars.” If our arsenals weren’t full and our war machine on guard we’d have had it from the Russian bear by rtowtablc peace is worth a gtxxl war now and then. “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut: This is one of the worst stories ever aboutaguy and hisdog.and it doesn't go intoenougn depth and detail about their relationship. Not like “Old Yellcr,” for instance. The main character Pilgrim’s in diffeience to swimming, war and death might be nice if we could sec how the dog filled the emotional void in his life. What I most want to know is who fed the dog when Pilgrim came “unstuck in time.” A book that encourages mistreat ment of animals is no friend of mine. “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt” is all very nice for Pil grim, but how about his poor pup? Sec, we’ve taken care of a good shelf and a half of books in one short column. If we look care of one shelf every couple of monihs, we’d have this literary glut taken care of in no time. Notice that the substitute litera ture is often in a thinner formal, cre ating less of a sprawling mess in our public libraries. Book banning is not only philosophically sound, it’s func lional in the most practical of ways as well. So it goes.
