March 11, 1994

The new head of the New York Power Authority said yesterday that there was no point in his agency's continued existence if all it did was churn out electricity. And so, in his 10th day on the job, S. David Freeman began a major shakeup, both philosophically and practically, of the largest public power agency outside the Federal Government. Mr. Freeman said the agency should be pioneering new technologies like the development of electricity from the wind and the sun and leading the nation toward the electrification of its transportation systems.

A 1,000-page stack of documents surrendered to a special prosecutor today showed that more White House officials than the six already subpoenaed knew of internal discussions about a Federal investigation into an Arkansas savings and loan tied to the Clintons. The documents, which came from the offices of as many as 40 White House officials, were turned over by the White House in response to a sweeping subpoena by the special prosecutor, Robert B. Fiske Jr.

THE writer Primo Levi wondered whether, should he survive Auschwitz, he would know how to describe what had happened, because "daily language is for the description of daily experience, but here it is another world, here one would need a language 'of this other world.' " And what is that language for the visual artist? There have been realist sculptures and abstract ones memorializing the Holocaust. Realist sculptures of the dead and dying have often seemed woefully inadequate, yet survivors point out that they and their families weren't tortured and murdered in the abstract. Nathan Rapoport, the sculptor of the Warsaw Ghetto Monument, once asked, "Could I have made a rock with a hole in it and said: 'Voila! The heroism of the Jewish people' ?" Obviously not, he reasoned.

NO one who has seen "Kiss Me Deadly," the director Robert Aldrich's nasty little film-noir masterpiece, is likely to forget its vision of a Southern California so spiritually parched that a single match struck at the wrong moment could unleash the fires of hell. In Aldrich's scorching 1955 film adaptation of Mickey Spillane's hard-boiled detective novel, Los Angeles, photographed in angular black-and-white, looks terminally irradiated. A burly, crew-cut Ralph Meeker plays Mike Hammer, Spillane's tough-guy alter ego, with a blank muscularity that suggests the young Marlon Brando with his soul burned out of him. In "Kiss Me Deadly," assorted thugs, molls and law officers chase each other around the city, casually knocking each other off in a frantic search that makes "The Maltese Falcon" seem like a genteel scavenger hunt. The object of their quest turns out to be the radioactive equivalent of Pandora's box. When Mike locates the sinister black container and opens its lid just the tiniest crack, it emits a searing ray of light that leaves an ugly blister on his cheek.

The Clinton Administration announced today that it would allow companies to market sophisticated spy satellite technology to commercial customers around the world. The decision marks a big change from the comparatively strict limits now imposed on satellite-imaging systems, and it caps more than a year of intense debate among the Commerce Department, the Pentagon and Government intelligence agencies.