Screws

Greek playwrights called it deus ex machina, god from a machine. Just when the hero seemed doomed to a horrible death, *poof*, one of the gods would appear and save him via some gnarly-looking wood-and-leather device wheeled onstage by Sophocles' sweating stagehands. Machines promise progress and enlightenment, from the simple wheel that got us all rolling to the Slurpee dispenser that keeps all that commuting we all do on those wheels from grinding our souls to mush.

Oooooh . . . aaaaah . . . doot-doot-dah-doot . . . ba-ba-ba-ba-dee-dah. Excuse us for not starting this review more intelligibly, but good pure-pop can cast a pleasantly mind-mushing spell, and the Legendary Loose Screws know how to say "abracadabra." The Orange County band also knows how to say "Oooooh . . . aaaaah . . . doot-doot, etc."

Hideki Irabu was told Tuesday that his old team, the Chiba Lotte Marines of Japan's Pacific League, won't take him back unless he apologizes and signs a release saying he will never try to play for a major league team in North America. Chiba Lotte assigned Irabu's big-league negotiating rights to the San Diego Padres in January. Irabu refused to negotiate with San Diego, saying he would deal only with the New York Yankees.

On Nazism and the Jews a great deal has been written--personal accounts and learned monographs--but there are very few full-scale, general works and, as far as the prewar period is concerned, Saul Friedlander's work (the first of two volumes) is not just a fine book, it is the only one we have so far.

Before there was Larry Flynt, there was Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw Magazine and host of the cable-access show "Midnight Blue," two legendary mainstays of Manhattan's X-rated scene. Goldstein apparently became the first man ever to beat a federal obscenity charge--before Flynt even started publishing Hustler. Arrested 19 times by his own count, Goldstein is proud that he's never cut a deal with a prosecutor. As with Flynt, Goldstein is important in the cause of 1st Amendment rights.

If Frank Biondi Jr.'s firing doesn't send a shudder through Hollywood, it should. It's a reminder that this is an era in which corporate entertainment giants, many saddled with acquisition debt and owned by impatient institutional stockholders, are increasingly paying less attention to traditional, but relatively insignificant, performance gauges such as market share and box-office grosses.

The NATO air command definitely has got the attention of Bosnian Serbs besieging Muslim-held Sarajevo, but the test of strength between bombs and politics remains unresolved. As the warplanes flew Thursday for the third straight day, there was no sign that the Serbian will had been broken.

Rain fell all over the Civic Center on Tuesday, and, for once, it wasn't even the metaphorical kind. It was the real stuff, soaking the unprotected and forcing them to run for cover . . . but there we go again with the metaphors. Keeping herself dry just outside Santa Ana City Hall was Sandy, a 51-year-old homeless woman ("Say I'm 39") who has spent the past five years, off-and-on, around the center.

A citizens health group petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to ban most uses of bone screws in the spine until they can be shown to be safe and effective. Public Citizen Health Research Group said the expensive and often dangerous screws are implanted in the spines of up to 70,000 people a year as a treatment for back pain.

Danny Goldberg, who has agreed to head Warner Bros. Records after a week of turbulent in-fighting in Time Warner ranks, wants to assure employees at the label's Burbank office that he is not on a slash-and-burn mission. The reason Goldberg's promotion is causing anxiety at Warner Bros. is that he is succeeding Mo Ostin, who over the last 25 years established the label as a stable, creative environment for both artists and employees. Ostin, who will step down Jan.