Prism

Now that Comcast is a partner in the Flyers, Sixers, the Core-States Spectrum and the Core-States Center, it seems the days of watching sports on PRISM and SportsChannel are numbered. It would seem that Comcast's $500 million investment will lead to a Comcast-run all-sports programming channel and exclude PRISM and SportsChannel from Comcast's local distribution. Unable to hook subscribers on a Phillies-only diet and without the means to distribute its programming, PRISM and SportsChannel would shrivel up and die. However, SportsChannel has a deal to carry 41 Sixers road games a year into the next century, and PRISM has the Phillies locked up through the 1997 season.

Has PRISM been with us only 10 years? The regional cable service has become such an integral part of the area's viewing routine that it seems it has been on the air for more than a decade. And that is despite the fact that only about 25,000 of PRISM's 370,000 subscribers (the system extends west of Harrisburg and as far north as Scranton) are in Philadelphia. When the entire city finally is wired, Sam Schroeder, PRISM's vice president/assistant general manager, expects the cable service will sign up at least another 200,000 subscribers.

Channels 3 and 57 approached PRISM this week and tried to make a deal to simulcast last night's Flyers-Edmonton game on commercial television. PRISM, which owns exclusive rights to all Flyers home games, of course said no. Channel 3 (KYW) hoped that its offer of numerous free PRISM promotional spots - in addition to serious cash - would sway the cable channel into making a deal. Channel 57 (WGBS), which owns exclusive rights to Flyers road games, hoped that an offer to return the favor to PRISM for Sunday's Game 7 from Edmonton (if necessary)

The Flyers' season opener is 23 days away and there's still no cable TV agreement. Negotiations continue for PRISM to carry the home games for one more season. But problems remain at the corporate level between Cablevision (PRISM/ SportsChannel's parent company) and Comcast. The Flyers will be on the new all-sports station in 1997-98, with the Phillies to follow in the '98 season. Comcast is the majority owner of the Flyers and Sixers. Stung by the Flyers' switch to Comcast, Cablevision reportedly is balking at carrying some Comcast programming.

Of the many images and perspectives that filmmakers have conjured to view the horrors of Nazi Germany, few are more original or striking than Oskar, the child who has arrested his own development in Gunter Grass' great novel The Tin Drum. Volker Schlondorff's magnificent 1980 adaptation - in which Oskar, played by 14-year-old David Bennent, retires from the lists of ordinary growth as an emblematic and defiant gesture of total withdrawal and protest - is that rarity, a movie version that encompasses the moral complexities and dimension of the book.

As Donald L. Heller talked about people who watch television, he grabbed a piece of paper, drew a line and divided it into three sections: Sports Enthusiasts, Sports Tolerants and Non-Sports. The first group, "enthusiasts," a gross understatement when describing Philadelphia fans, is a loyal, assured market. Forget the third group. It is the middle group that Heller, vice president and general manager of the Prism pay-television service, looks to for sustained growth in the future.

Cable channels in the Philadelphia area don't produce many shows of their own, except for sports, which makes Prism's Live From Rafters series doubly admirable. It's not only original, it's good. Live From Rafters, which airs every other week, will return at 10 p.m. tomorrow. The featured artist is Matt Sevier, a rock singer who played on the premiere on Oct. 8. The only bad thing about Live From Rafters is its deceitful title. This series is not live: It's videotaped. Asked how he could call his show live when it isn't, Prism promotions manager Harold Gronenthal said, "It's a good title.

With no Flyers games to offer, thanks to the badly timed NHL shutdown, SportsChannel Philadelphia and PRISM are filling their sports menu with a Sixers preseason game, college football and baseball. Baseball? If you really need a baseball fix to replace the agony of not having a World Series to follow, the Arizona Fall League has been airing on SportsChannel. The next game is Tuesday at 9:30 p.m., featuring the Chandler Diamondbacks and the Scottsdale Scorpions. An aspiring outfielder named Michael Jordan plays for Scottsdale, but he'll be busy Tuesday night in Chicago.

The Phillies announced new cable television contracts yesterday that will help boost the club's broadcast income by 40 percent. The four-year deals, with Prism and SportsChannel America, mean that 152 of the club's 162 games this season will be shown on television. Coupled with the club's current deals with WTAF-TV (Channel 29) and WCAU Radio (1210 AM), the agreements also mean that the Phillies can expect to receive $12 million in local broadcast fees this year - one of the highest figures in the major leagues.

The Big 5 has reached an agreement with Prism to have three women's basketball games televised this season. Last season Prism televised a local game between St. Joseph's and Villanova from the Palestra before the men's teams from both schools met. "The ultimate goal was to televise three women's games this year (season)," Prism sports director Jim Barniak said. "Last year we televised the one game as a test pattern to see what kind of interest there was and the reaction was sensational.

IT'S A MOONLESS Thursday night in North Wales, Montgomery County. Down a dead-end street just past the giant Merck & Co. pharmaceutical plant, tucked along the SEPTA R5 railroad tracks, a darkened industrial building attracts a young crowd. The unpaved parking lot is full, light sounds of live jazz seep from the rear door, and the air carries the familiar aroma of malt. Welcome to Prism Brewing's Tap Room, one of the region's best-kept beer-drinking secrets and, it turns out, a harbinger of a remarkable surge of suburban breweries.

By Les Murray Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 82 pp. $24 A Memoir of Depression By Les Murray Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 86 pp. $13 By Adam Zagajewski Translated by Clare Cavanagh Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 128 pp. $23. By Don Marquis Everyman. 224 pp. $13.50 Reviewed by John Timpane The world's made better by each good book of poems. We have few better examples than the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski.

Typical saxophone jokes don't apply to the Prism Quartet, starting with "What's the difference between a saxophone and a lawn mower?" Answer: "Lawn mowers sound better in small ensembles. " Now celebrating 25 years and the creation of about 125 new works, the Prism Quartet has explored a huge range of sounds that defy all sax stereotypes and will be showcased in the group's Philadelphia Museum of Art concert tomorrow. Even the unorthodox Chinese flute effects on its recent Antiphony disc were Prism business as usual.

This Inquirer story is reprinted from July 29, 1985. Turn back the clock for a moment to 1968, to a cold and blustery day in February. About 11,000 people are seated in the year-old Spectrum arena in South Philadelphia. They are waiting for a matinee of the Ice Capades. But the skaters never took the ice that afternoon. Instead, the crowd witnessed an event that nearly caused the financial ruin of the arena and its creators, a group of private investors led by Eagles owner Jerry Wolman and a 35-year-old Eagles vice president named Edward M. Snider.

The Baroque orchestra Tempesta di Mare has had great success mining the wealth of rarely performed works in the catalog. They're taking a giant step this week, fully staging Handel's "Clori, Tirsi and Fileno" with a 19-piece ensemble and English translations created for this show by Lawrence Rosenwald. Countertenor Drew Minter portrays Fileno while also directing, with Margaret Bragle and Marguerite Krull performing as Clori and Tirsi. Co-artistic director Richard Stone conducts this miniature by the then-22-year-old Handel, a company milestone (8 p.m. tomorrow and 3 p.m. Sunday, Gershman YM-YWHA at Broad and Pine streets, $20, 215-755-8776, www.tempestadimare.

Philadelphia Orchestra violinist Barbara Govatos honors her old hometown of Wilmington every summer with the Delaware Chamber Music Festival. Govatos and her fellow world-class orchestral musicians love to delve into the enormous repertoire of chamber music whenever they're off. Tonight's program - first in a three-week schedule - features the Orchestra's first-chair clarinet Ricardo Morales, violist Burchard Tang, pianist Julie Nishimura, Govatos...

Early in his life, Jordan Schmidt would keep his baby arms wide open, straight and stiff, when he was held. The brown-eyed boy would sob uncontrollably when things changed suddenly. He had extremely sensitive hearing. He didn't hug anyone, and no one knew why. "It drove Debbie to distraction," Todd Schmidt, Jordan's father, said of his wife. "He just couldn't hug. " Now, two months shy of their son's sixth birthday, the Cherry Hill parents are no longer in the dark - Jordan has Asperger syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism that was diagnosed when he was 3. Like a growing number of children around the region and the country with the same diagnosis, Jordan is a study in contrasts: He has trouble with social interactions and flexible thinking but attends a mainstream kindergarten class, possesses an eighth-grade vocabulary, and has written his first screenplay.

As if to draw a point about larger talents of lesser-known composers, the Prism Quartet Sunday afternoon ended its program with three movements of Philip Glass' 1995 Quartet. Philadelphia hadn't heard the work before, and yet we have; we know the same ideas in many other Glass guises. The repetition, the soulful melody, the repetition. It's another in a series of commissions that Glass has fulfilled with the same paint-by-number response. But the premieres that preceded it at the Settlement Music School's Queen Village branch each represented the strongest of distinct compositional schools.

The 76ers on tape delay? No Penn-Princeton? Whatever happened to Big 5 games on TV? There are more questions in the post-PRISM/SportsChannel era in Philadelphia sports television than there are ex-Channel 3 employees working at Comcast SportsNet. What is CN8? Why don't we get that? Why isn't this on SportsNet, too? And now, the Phillies are bracing to be bumped off local television for a game or two. Or more? It is a dilemma waiting to happen in May if the 76ers make the NBA playoffs and the Flyers' ship somehow stays the course and crashes into the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Comcast SportsNet, Philadelphia's regional version of ESPN, has been up and running for 17 months now, so the man who built it, Jack Williams, probably won't be there much longer. He'll be ready to retire again. Or try to. Williams, 59, a drawling Oklahoman who is virtually unknown to his TV audience, is not only the president of SportsNet, he is one of the founding fathers of sports-entertainment television. He was involved in the 1960s with some of the earliest cable systems.