The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 26

CALENDAR Cos Amuics (Times San Diego County Saturday, August 18, 1984 PHILLIP DAVIES 'mmwimmm' XV4N 52 1 rfisi Mem Pattinian, aka Astra Schwartz, explains a sample 0 her art at gallery in Old Town. IN SAN DIEGO'S OLD TOWN PATTINIAN AND HER ART DEFINED BY ONE-LINERS STILL NO L.A. SPOT FOR THE JACKSONS By DENNIS McDOUGAL. Times Staff Writer At 7:50 a.m. Friday, top-rated Los Angeles deejay Rick Dees of KIIS-FM (102.7) told a lucky listener that she had won "two tickets up in the front row to see Michael Jackson sing 'Farewell My Summer Glove'!" After everyone in the studio laughed (he was referring to a current parody of the Jackson hit "Farewell My Summer Dees boasted again that KIIS has more free tickets to give away to see the Jacksons in concert this summer than any radio station in America.

"Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tickets!" The only problem with Dees' promises is that, like the song parody, they aren't exactly true. If the Jacksons come to Los Angeles at all, it may be as late as December and Dees may have to change the title's words to "Farewell My Winter Glove." As of Friday, the Jacksons had no place to play in Los Angeles. There were no front -row seats. There were no tickets. And the local date being discussed had changed from September to November.

"Victory" tour promoter Chuck Sullivan apparently was talking only to the Coliseum last week regarding the possibility of climaxing the nationwide concert tour here in late November or early December. Jim Hardy, general manager of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, told The Times that Sullivan called him a week ago, shortly after Sullivan had announced in New York City that eight dates at the Inglewood Forum had been canceled. The concerts had been scheduled to begin Sept. 2 and run through Sept. 12.

Instead of September dates, however, Sullivan now wants to bring "Victory" to the Coliseum in November, Hardy said. As it stands now, the tour is scheduled to end its 14 -city nationwide trek with Nov. 7-8 performances at Anaheim Stadium. Sullivan wants to add Coliseum dates following Anaheim, "but the only availability we have that late (in the year) is between Nov. 25 and Dec.

16," Hardy said. The Coliseum is committed to USC and Los Angeles Raiders football games before and after those dates, Hardy said. Despite the schedule confusion, KIIS is undaunted. The station will make good on its free -ticket promises one way or another, KIIS general manager Wally Clark told The Times. "You just know they're gonna play here.

This will be the best city they have," Clark said. Please see NO, Page 7 Coincidences are flitting through the career of Joan Copeland. JOAN COPELAND: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING docent for the evening, discussing the "decision" theme in her own wisecracking way and offering comic insights into the abstract art surrounding her. The artworks assembled for this exhibition are all dichotomous. Updown, frontback, oldnew, onoff, intellectemotion and fantasyreality are some of the dual elements Pattinian has dealt with in her paintings and mixed-media collages.

The graphics depict choices, but almost always leave the decisions to each viewer instead of offering definitive answers. The artist's extroverted alter ego, however, provided answers of her own. "She (Pattinian) never sees the gray," Astra chided as she explained a black and white collage. "That girl has a one-track mind, and sometimes the traffic on it is very light." Astra took umbrage at the choice of imagery for "in" versus "out" as well. "Merri really gave 'in' a bum rap.

'Out' should be the negative word," she complained in her petulant-child style. A 38-year-old Poway resident, Pattinian has a degree from Brooklyn College, where she studied with Leonard Anderson. She runs a graphic design studio in Kearny Mesa, but escapes to her fine art studio at home every chance she gets. Her works have been exhibited in several juried shows and galleries in San Diego and around the country. She has also produced a book entitled "Women in Design," and snared first place at the Southern California Exposition a couple of years ago for one of her constructions.

Dottie Beasley (owner of the By MATTDAMSKER, Times Staff Writer SAN DIEGO Joan Copeland has a Brighton Beach memoir. She recalls "Ghosts." It was the first play she had ever seen, and it was her older brother, playwright Arthur Miller, who took her to see it one summer night, decades ago, at a theater in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach. Now she's a star in the touring version of Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs," which runs through Sunday at San Diego's Fox Theatre, then opens Wednesday at Wilshire Theatre in Los Angeles. Lately, such coincidences have been flitting through Copeland's career like friendly ghosts. Simon's play is an autobiographical look at his Depression -era boyhood, and Copeland plays the equivalent of Simon's nagging, nurturing, nobly suffering Jewish mother.

Copeland's most recent Broadway appearance was in her brother Arthur's latest play, "The American Clock," another autobiographical work in which she portrayed the equivalent of her own nobly MOVIE REVIEW gallery) encouraged Pattinian in the project because "I wanted to give her an opportunity to stretch herself. This show is more experimental than saleable, but I believe commercial galleries should be taking more risks. We can't just be interested in selling." Like her comedy, the art Pattinian selected for this show tends to consist of one-liners. Reality versus fantasy sports a "magic" wand suspended from the painting, while the threat of a nuclear holocaust lurks below. On versus off is depicted by a three-dimensional hand tethered to the canvas and a light switch.

For intellect versus emotion, Pattinian used a copy of her college diploma in a collage with bits and pieces of "canceled checks to my shrink." Why did Pattinian integrate a stand-up comedy routine with her art exhibition? Is this just a gimmick to call attention to her paintings? "Absolutely not. People often don't understand abstract art. They think it's on a higher plane, and they're intimidated by it," she explained as she set the stage for her one-woman show. "Artists are usually nonverbal, and the critics are too hard to understand, so people come away wondering why is this art so great? "I don't want to tell people what they should be seeing in a painting. That's why I didn't want to be Merri for the performance." Astra seemed irreverent even hostile to the pieces she was there to explain, but as Pattinian pointed out earlier: "Astra is flippant to me, not flippant about my work.

I'm not trying to put down serious art with my comedy. "I used many of these pieces in my show at the San Diego Art Institute several months ago," Pattinian said. "I redid some and added pieces, but then I designed the performance to explain my work not the other way around." PHILLIP DAVIES Spanish-language programming and, like Z90, broadcast from Baja California. "We had a series of contracts with him (Diaz) that would give us control over the radio station for 35 years," Walton said. "Obviously, his interpretation of the contract was such that he felt justified in Please see RADIO, Page 3 suffering Jewish mother.

Oddly enough, Joan Copeland has trouble identifying with either woman. "It's confusing, very confusingand enriching at the same time," she acknowledged over lunch recently. Dressed in moody lavender linen, eyes glinting theatrically and with a voice at once wistful and fey, she evoked a Manhattan-bred version of Blanche DuBois. "You see," she said, "in 'American Clock' I was playing my mother and yet it wasn't my mother, because my mother wasn't Arthur's mother. So finally I had to stop playing my mother as I knew her, because the woman that I knew was not really the woman that he had written.

I'd approach a scene hysterically, and Arthur would say, 'What are you doing? She wasn't that Well, the woman I knew was a hysteric, while the woman he knew was a strong family managerwe each recall her at different times of her life." Joan Copeland sighed a little, regretful that she isn't continuing the role which won her the Dra-Please see COPELAND, Page 4 mission to wrestle to the ground the role of Simple Jungle Princess Come to Save Her People. That she does, and in the process as a friend remarked dryly becomes the single best news that Pia Zadora's had since she learned she was to be a mother. One large segment of Roberts' audience may not care a fig. Leaf. Wait until the 12-year-olds' jungle drums pass on the news that there's more to be seen of Roberts in the buff, by a waterfall and at the ol' swimming hole, than you could get in a whole afternoon's diligent scrutiny of the National Geographic.

Performance be hanged! This is art, man. Actually it's commerce, but we won't split hairs. You might think that with their accumulated credits, writers David Newman (co-writer of "Superman I and II" and the lovely "Bad and Lorenzo Semple Please see PLAYING, Page 6 By EILEEN SONDAK SAN DIEGO There's a whole other side to artist Merri Me-chanick Pattinian that never came through in her paintings. Pattinian is part stand-up comic. Recently, Pattinian gave vent to that alter ego against a backdrop of her own paintings at the opening of her new show, "Decisions, Decisions, Decisions," at the A.R.T.Beasley Gallery in Old Town.

After mingling with the gallery's guests, Pattinian slipped into a new outfit and a new persona and returned as a character she calls Astra Schwartz, "my own best friend." In the guise of Astra, Pattinian put on a performance that she feels could set her off in an entirely new direction that of some new wave comedienne. But, before she could acknowledge the joker within, she had to shed the mature adult exterior. Part of the process was to create a little girl look with a tricolored layered costume and high laced shoes. Astra then took center stage for the performance. "Most artists feel their art speaks for itself," she told the crowd that had crammed into Beasley's main exhibition area for the opening.

"But the trouble is, what language? I've known Merri (Pattinian) for years," she added in the childish voice and Brooklyn accent of Astra. "We lived in Brooklyn together. We even got mugged together. So I feel extremely confident of telling you what her work means." With that off-the-wall introduction, Pattinian went on to act as RADIO IN S.D. Z90: QUICK SWITCHOVER IN TIJUANA By THOMAS K.

ARNOLD SAN DIEGO Format changes are common among competing radio stations, but few formats have changed as abruptly as that of local station XHZ-FM (Z90). Last Sunday night, Z90's yearlong effort to succeed with an album-oriented rock format was halted suddenly when its Mexican owner took back the programming and sales rights he had been leasing to an American operator. After 15 minutes of dead air, the station went back on the air shortly after midnight as Noventa FM 90, playing a haphazard mix of hard rock. Top 40 and disco selected by owner Victor Diaz himself and his two teen-age sons, "who know more about that type of music than I do," Diaz said. The sudden change came as the capper in a fight between Diaz and San Diego Radio Company to whom Z90 was leased.

And, in its wake, the often bitter battle has left several lawsuits; countless allegations of contract violations, broken promises, and even racism; 13 out-of-work staffers, including all Z90 air personnel; and one very frustrated general manager, Bruce Walton. "With a great deal of sadness and frustration, the relationship is ended," said Walton, who also oversees another embattled San Diego radio station, KIFM (98), recently ordered by the FCC to surrender its license. "I terminated 13 Z90 staffers this week, and that's bad enough, but we were placing our company's future in the success of the radio 'SHEENA: PLAYING IT STRAIGHT FOR LAUGHS CRITIC AT LARGE WILD BILL: KEEPING JAZZ LORE ALIVE By CHARLES CHAMPLIN, Times Arts Editor William Edward (Wild Bill) Davison, the celebrated master of the golden cornet, will be performing, chops and, ulcer willing, at the First Classical" Jazz Festival, a four -day bash over Labor Day weekend in Los Angeles. Davison, who is 78, has been performing professionally for 62 years, made his first recordings 60 years ago and has by his best guess recorded 800 tunes since (including duplicate versions of such tender anthems as "South Rampart Street Parade" and "Way Down Yonder in New He is a reminder that longevity is a verdant source of astonishments. He was a drinking buddy of Bix Beiderbecke and a pal of Louis Armstrong, and has played with (and outlived or stayed active longer than) almost anybody you care to name in four generations' worth of jazz history.

What is not well known is that Davison is a monument to the good works of the Boy Scouts. Born in Defiance, Ohio, (pop. then 7,500) in 1906, Davison was principally reared by his grandfather, who built rowboats and was custodian of the local Carnegie Library (the family lived downstairs) and of a park honoring Mad Anthony Wayne. The young Davison discovered you could produce tones by blowing through short lengths of garden hose, left over from his grandfather's mendings. -Davison's hose Please see CRITIC, Page 5 By SHEILA BENSON, Times Film Critic Sheena, queena, what is the question? The unintentional guffaw, and the whooping belly laugh, I'm afraid.

Galloping, galloping, bareback across the Kenyan plains on her sturdy zebra with its flowing, tied-on horse's tail, Tanya Roberts seems to be the only member of the cast of "Sheena" (San Diego area theaters who wasn't let in on the gag. No one told her that just a touch of tongue in cheek might have saved her. Certainly not John Guil-lermin, who as director of "Tar-zan's Greatest Adventure" and "Tarzan Goes to India" should have known that dead earnestness was not the way out of this morass. But, possibly because Roberts is obviously a good sport right down to her toenails, she was wound up, made up (like a Teaneck, N. go-go dancer) and' sent on her Ql Page9- fV RADIO: INSIDE BRIDGE: DANCE: Theatre MUSIC: WnllvurwiH CALENDAR Page 6.

Kabuki drama at Japan America reviewed by Lewis Segal. Page 2. Substitutes fill the bill at the Rnu1 cave A 1Krrt flrlKnro Bruce Walton may be out as general manager of Radio Z90 in Tijuana, but the American company or whom he ran the station under contract is suing the Mexican owner for $11 million. AMFM Highlights. Page 11.

station, and it appears now that that can no longer be. "It's a terrible situation." As a result of Diaz's decision, Walton said, his company has filed an $11 million breach-of-contract lawsuit against the Mexican broadcaster, who also owns radio stations XLTN (Radio Latina, 104.5) and XHKY (95.7), both of which offer til TV: Tonight on TV and cable. Page 10. Viewing Sports by Paul Henniger. Page 11.

Nigerian Fela Kuti, who will make his first U.S. concert appearance in 15 years at Hollywood Bowl Sunday, talks to Don Snowden. Page 8..