Coming from the old pornographer who has been monotonously celebrating himself for years in such tomes as Sexus, Nexus and Plexus, the report was an astonishing relief. "I've written everything I want to say," announced Henry Miller, 74—at long last. From now on, said Miller as he opened a show of his fanciful watercolor paintings in Los Angeles' Westwood Art Association gallery, he will chase down his muse primarily with brushes. "It seems to me that the battle for freedom on the sex problem has been won," he proclaimed. Then, in a meditation that many wish he had made years ago, he added: "I would hope that younger writers would find something more important to rebel against."

The joint will feature an art gallery, a color-TV lounge, a little boutique selling hippies' clothes from London's Carnaby Street and three loud, plangent go-go bands. Cheetah, a "center of happenings" opening this month on Broadway, ought to be a great spot for mods to rock in. Yet the co-partner financing the fun house will probably never frug there. "I seldom go to discothèques," explains Entrepreneur Borden Stevenson, 33. "This is a business investment." Then he brightened a bit when he thought of his late father, Adlai Stevenson. "I'm sorry he's not around to see this place," said Borden. "I'm sure he would have had a lot of laughs."

"Not long ago in Paris," recalled the speaker at Washington's Boiling Air Force Base, "I went to buy a ticket on the helicopter service. The girl at the counter asked me to spell my name. 'Oh,' she said, 'you spell it like our helicopter.' " Exactly. Aviation Pioneer Igor Sikorsky, 76, reminisced about the romance and passion of flying at a banquet honoring the father of the helicopter. "My first one was more vibration, dust and noise," he laughed, "and it couldn't fly. But now as an old man and as a designer, I am pleased most that altogether the helicopter has saved more than 100,000 persons from death" —through rescue and supporting work in Viet Nam, Korea, World War II and many peacetime disasters.

Because Johann Sebastian Bach hymned religiously in dozens of soaring masses, magnificats, motets and fugues and developed the contrapuntal organ that still accompanies the Gregorian chant, three pious Venetian music lovers wrote the Vatican's weekly Osservatore Delia Domenica that he should be considered for sainthood. Alas, replied Theologian Benvenuto Matteucci, a Protestant is a Protestant, however sublime his music. "There is an esthetic and artistic religious sentiment in his musical expressions," Monsignor Matteucci sympathized, "but it is only through the true and only church of Christ that salvation and sainthood come." So Lutheran Bach must remain unbeatified except to secular ears.