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University Daily Kansan Fridav. April 28. 19
A Point Pronounced
During a press conference yesterday morning, the spokesman for the visiting Soviet group listed three ways in which the United States and the Soviet Union can advance mutual understanding: (1) By accepting the principle of peaceful co-existence. (2) By practicing the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and (3) By promoting the exchange of scientific information, students and tourists. Of the three, the last seems the most applicable to the present world situation. It is one that should receive priority in the foreign policy programs of both governments.
THE REASON FOR FAVORING THE THIRD point above the other two lies in the fact that the exchange of students and tourists provides a means to achieve social intercourse. Only through people meeting each other can understanding be reached. Only through understanding can definitions be developed. The principle is the same as sitting down with the kid across the street—you don't have to like him, but if you can make him understand you don't like him parking his bike on your lawn, you might keep things in the neighborhood peaceful.
This is not to say that both nations should pay only lip service to points 1 and 2, however. But these are only vague ideals as yet which both the United States and the Soviet Union define in different terms. Peaceful co-existence means one thing to the United States and something else to the Soviet Union. Americans define "non-interference" in different terms than those used by the Russians. "Non-interference" and "peaceful co-existence," it must be said, are noble-sounding words. But if neither side can define these words they are meaningless.
We have not arrived at a mutual understanding of either "non-interference" or "peaceful coexistence." Neither can we decide on just what constitutes "peace." Through the exchange of information, ideas and people, however, definitions can be derived that can be used to define those noble sounding words. The more social intercourse is promoted, the better the chance of arriving at these definitions.
STILL IT WOULD BE FOOLISH TO BELIEVE that this group of Russian travelers has been sent here with the sole purpose of promoting good fellowship. Another objective is to observe our weaknesses. But it is a blind man that sees only weakness and fails to notice strength. The Russians are not blind. Neither are the American groups in Russia.
Understanding cannot be achieved by blind men.
The Dean's Inheritance
Congratulations are in order for James K. Logan, recently selected by the Kansas Board of Regents as the new dean of the University's School of Law. His appointment insures that the School of Law will continue to maintain the position of prestige and pride to the University it enjoyed under Dean Frederick J. Moreau. We are sure that he is inheriting a fine thing. We are sure that he knows it.
DEAN LOGAN IS GOING TO INHERIT something else too. He is going to inherit the law students.
These disciples of Jimmy Green are quite a lot. Quite possibly, they are the only group of young men in these parts that can embarrass a freshman girl to tears and still have her feel cheated when she walks by on a rainy day when they are not seated on the steps of Green Hall. They are the only harbingers of spring that we have ever seen that are more reliable than a
groundhog. They are the only group of young men that we know who can stick fuzzy ears on one of their members, give him a basket of Easter eggs and a pair of roller skates and pass him off as a perfectly legitimate substitute for Peter Cottontail.
THEY ARE QUITE A LOT — AND HOPEfully the new dean will let them continue in their role as a campus institution. To act differently would be to commit an act paralleled only by lighting a match to Fraser Hall.
But Dean Logan comes to his position with the highest qualifications, and he no doubt realizes the affection the rest of us have towards the KU law students...
AND NEXT YEAR SHOULD BE ANOTHER one when the freshman girls blush deeply and often on their way to class.
— Dan Felger
From the Newsstand
Modern, Meretricious Movies
It's been almost two years since I last reviewed movies in these columns, and I have to admit that I was glad to stop. After you've seen 10 or 12 bad movies in succession, you begin to wonder whether you can afford to frittier so much time away on trivialities. Even when you pick and choose
Daily Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904,
trieweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone VIking 3-2700 Extension 711, news room Extension 376, business office
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your screenings, doing your best to sniff out and avoid the worst of them, you inevitably find yourself trapped periodically in front of some dismal, pretentious hash like "Twelve Angry Men" or Preminger's "St. Joan." It can become pretty discouraging and my instinct, which I indulged, was to flee.
TWO YEARS AGO. I was still living in the illusion that the theater, even the Broadway theater, was a more adult and provocative art form than the screen. A play, to my mind, could always speak a mature, direct language forbidden to the film, which was ever at the mercy of a star, a bank, a pressure group, a dull-minded mass audience. This, I now realize, was extremely naive of me and I admit it with considerable embarrassment.
Most plays, like most movies, are subject to the same pressures and are utterly meretricious. The only sensible approach to both drama and film criticism is an open-eyed recognition of this simple basic fact. It then becomes possible to write about plays and movies without the sense of outrage provoked by the feeling that one is being constantly insulted and conned. And it avoids the necessity for the total flight from reality indulged in by the serious-minded people who will only attend an Off-Broadway play or a particular European movie.
There simply is no getting around the fact that Broadway and Hollywood at their best are better
than the best of Off-Broadway and Europe. "Camino Real" on Broadway, for instance, was a better play than "Camino Real" Off-Broadway, just as "The Asphalt Jungle" was a better movie than "Riffi." If the impulse that produces a work of art is truly creative, it can't help but benefit from such purely commercial virtues as technical polish, a virtue only money can buy.
MONEY ALSO produces movies like "Ocean's 11" which, despite its slickness, its overall sleaziness, its imbecile view of love, is nevertheless far more pertinent as a contemporary work of art than the much more artistically pretentious "Never on Sunday." If meretriciousness is to be the rule, then one can rejoice not only in the large exceptions but also in the sharp, oblique glimpses of truth such movies as "Ocean's 11" provide in spite of themselves. The phenomenon of Las Vegas, which is where "Ocean's 11" was filmed, and the society that produced it are contemporary realities and they are worth our attention, even if we are forced to view them through the distorted lens provided by Frank Sinatra and his merry little crew of Hollywood hoodlums. Let's make a stand for pertinence and allow aestheticism to take care of itself...
(Excerpted from "New Outlook on the Contemporary Film World" by William Murray in the March 27, 1961, New Leader.)
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
*YES, I FIND IT'S ALOT EASIER TO GET DATES NOW THAT I HAVE A CAR*
By Calder M. Pickett
Associate Professor of Journalism
AMERICAN HERITAGE, April 1961. $3.95.
We seldom think of Samuel F. B. Morse as anything other than the inventor of the telegraph. Yet he was one of the most vocal nativists in mid-19th century America, and at one time he occupied a position alongside Washington Allston among great American painters.
This other Morse, the artist especially and the Know-Nothing incidentally, is the subject of a highly readable article called "What Samuel Wrought," by Marshall B. Davidson. It is the key article in the current American Heritage.
WHAT SAMUEL WROUGHT WAS much more than the telegraph, as the article and several pages of excellent color paintings testify. Most famous of the Morse paintings probably is his full-length portrait of Lafayette, an incongruous pose of the democrat against a classic background. Nearly as well known are Morse's finely detailed (possibly too finely detailed) painting of the Old House of Representatives and his Gallery of the Louvre, a painting that allows Morse to bring into one vast room such works as the Mona Lisa, Raphael's La Belle Jardiniere, Titian's The Entombment and Van Dyck's Portrait of a Lady, as well as several others.
Morse painted in a romantic era when Cole and Durand were doing their highly naturalistic paintings that came to be called products of the Hudson River School. So he also is represented with a painting called Niagara Falls from Table Rock, a copy of one by Vanderlyn, and the Allegorical Landscape Showing New York University, a fanciful thing that is as dreamlike as even the fantasies of Thomas Cole.
THERE ARE OTHER ARTICLES worth reading in the new Heritage. One is a series of letters written in 1861 by a Boston brother and a Baltimore brother who already were being torn by the Civil War. Another article, by Robert Cecil, director-general of British Information Services in New York, is in the debunking school, and shows that, despite colonial gropes, tea cost less here than in Britain.
Accompanying the article on Morse is an article by a Civil War era telegrapher that shows Lincoln's great interest in the telegraph. An entertaining sketch out of western days tells about "The Red Ghost" that turned out to be one of the camels being experimented with about 100 years ago.
OTHER ARTICLES, briefly described:
"A Face from the Past," a quick look at the forgotten Franklin Pierce.
"The Wasted Mission," the absorbing story of young William C. Bullitt, 28-year-old envoy to the newly established leaders of Bolshevism.
"Two Gentlemen from Newburyport," a four-page plug for Marquand's last book, "Timothy Dexter Revisited."
"The Johnson County War," an exciting story out of frontier days in Wyoming.