November 7, 1993

DAVID STEWART, a professor of marketing at the University of Southern California and an expert on consumer behavior, compares voting to shopping for something you don't particularly want to buy, like toilet paper. "Where customer satisfaction is not high, you see a lot of switching," he said. "I'll buy one I haven't tried recently." He is not alone in thinking that way. In a world without strong party or ideological identifications, voters do look increasingly like shoppers in the American marketplace. They become isolated decision-makers whose choices depend essentially on the information and attitudes they pick up from the mass media, especially television.

Harvey Keitel may not be the richest, the handsomest or the best-known actor in Hollywood, but right now he's probably the coolest. Twenty years after making an impression in Martin Scorsese's ground-breaking film "Mean Streets," Mr. Keitel, now 54, is once again at the forefront of adventurous cinema. At a time when most of the great actors of his generation -- Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman -- have already had their legend-making roles, Mr. Keitel seems at a new stage in his career. Last year, two independent films that Mr. Keitel starred in and was the executive producer for -- "Reservoir Dogs" and "Bad Lieutenant" -- made him the unchallenged godfather of a new macho ethic. He shows a very different face, however, in "The Piano," the much-acclaimed third feature by the New Zealand director Jane Campion, which opens in New York on Friday. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and closed the New York Film Festival. Already there has been talk of an Oscar nomination for Mr. Keitel's performance as the settler who trades a piano for music lessons and much else.

JOAN BREIRTON, a preservationist who was born in Kings Park, pawed through a pile of dirt, leaves and rotting wood at the Kings Park State Psychiatric Center and mourned the loss of another historic structure. "This old tannery was just flat out demolished," she said, describing a late-19th-century building.

Special Today: Education Life: Section 4A

AS votes were being counted in local elections across the state on Tuesday night, state party leaders were already trying to measure how the municipal results would affect the campaign for governor next year. Both Democratic State Chairman Edward L. Marcus and Republican State Chairman John A. Mastropietro found some successes that they said would translate into stronger local political organizations to help their respective gubernatorial candidates in 1994.