Television has the uncanny property of turning mush into myth. Stories of banal people obsessing over mundane catastrophes acquire a perverse grandeur through their public repetition. The psychological and ideological content informing televised imagery has long been the particular fascination of the Yonemoto Brothers, two Japanese-American artists living in Los Angeles. Perhaps it is a vague "outsider" status that has directed their eye toward the source of social mythos; the Yonemotos have examined t.v. genre and cliché with humor, intelligence and agility. Produced in 1982, Green Card: An American Romance grabs hold of the soap opera format and doesn't let go. This feature-length work traces the plight of Sumie, a Japanese art student who has just finished her studies and must return to Tokyo. Marriage is an expedient way to stay in the country, but Sumie, captured by the spell of idealized love, is unable to remain emotionally detached from her "legal" husband. Sumie's personal melodrama rejects the sentimentality of the soap opera while indulging in its blissful story structure. Vault (1984) folds Oedipal phobias into the stuff of advertising. A concert cellist has a vacuous love affair with an affluent cowboy. Their fated relationship is captured with the polished detachment and self-important imagery typical of commercial spots. Only here, the Yonemotos reveal their artifice with operatic exaggeration and a number of Freudian-inspired flashbacks. Blinky (1988) is a sardonic twist on Man's relationship to the animal kingdom. Acquired as a "pet," a frozen supermarket chicken is buried in a cemetery, then exhumed and examined for cause of death. An absurd tale, perhaps, but Blinky exposes our indifference toward the things we possess, much less our sympathy for their origin-whether they be animal, vegetable or mineral. Blinky, the chicken, thus becomes a popular martyr for the multitude of slain kinsmen. Here, the Yonemotos reverse roles, entering a new, albeit purposefully trite icon into our common mythology. Steve Seid Plus a portrait of the Yonemotos, produced by the Long Beach Museum of Art for "Viewpoints on Video."