ARTS SECOND

Heralded again by a huge choral and orchestral extravaganza, the second annual festival of arts and culture at Harvard began yesterday. "Carmina Burana," the Carl Orff song cycle that featured the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra and the combined Holden Chapel choirs, had been hyped with flyers that paraphrased, "My virginity makes me frisky." Well, Frisky bodies have no end of things to do and see this weekend.

You can go and see this usual chamber music and theatrical performances, or you could try something more along the fringes of Harvard's cultural life (with the ArtsFirst booklet as Your guide). Why not check out the "Exterior Lighting or Memorial Hall" tonight at sundown? Or how about a display at the Fogg Art Museum entitled, "What, if anything, is an object?" If you're wondering what, if anything, you'd get out of watching lights splash onto Memorial Hall, perhaps you'd prefer "Raining Photography," a selection form the Adams House Studio Arts Program featuring squash court shower rooms. if promises to provide a "multisensory experience." At least that sounds a little friskier.

In addition, an exhibit called "Mandala" is showing in the well known gallery space known as "The Cave outside the carpenter Center." The installation includes the random inflation of automobile airbags. To quote the Arts First booklet, "it is though that the airbag in its deployment and in its resting state implies not only matters of technological significance but also issues of human vulnerability." To wit, we must ask, "Who thinks this?" and "Who thinks this stuff up?" and Does this count as frisky?"

We can't help but be relieved that ArtsFirst did not coincide with prefrosh weekend. We wouldn't want the class of '98 to get a skewed impression of the University--we usually leave the airbags in the shower rooms. After all, we certainly can't take more than one weekend a year of "frisky."

NIXON IS HIS NAME

This week the nation mourned the passing of former President Richard M. Noxon. Though one might expect celebration is Cambridge, even here the flags are flying at half-staff. Yet Nixon was not the type to depart from the earth without leaving controversy and even a bit of mystery in his wake.

With all the JFK files released, presidential conspiracy theorists have set upon certain details of the Nixon death as fresh fodder for their nimble minds.

Nixon, they hint slyly, was whisked to New York Hospital shortly after suffering a stroke and was quickly isolated form all but a few visitors. His death was no sooner reported than "the body" was flown out to the Nixon compound (or "library" as it has been code named).

The "viewing" was of nothing more than a closed casket, draped with an American flag. Some might attribute the choice to decorum, but the conspiracy theorists, who have spent so long looking for a "smoking gun," would not be satisfied with anything less than a "stinking corpse.

The evidence, to the conspiracy theorists at least, leads to a disturbing conclusion that Nixon, ever the paranoiac, engineered his own alleged demise.

one particularly resourceful theorist claims to have laid his hands on a copy of Nixon's supposed medial records. The hospital faithfully recorded Nixon's EKG--a slow and steady beat--but around the time of death there is an 18.5 minute gap: nothing is left but a flatline. The hospital's lame excuse? "That's what is looks like when you die."

Yeah, right. And the next thing they'll tell us is that it's possible to erase an audio tape in the process of transcribing it.

GOODBYE, OLD FRIEND

Perhaps the flags in Harvard Square weren't at half-mast for President Nixon after all. They might just have easily marked our sorrow at the loss of a different, more literal, monument.