Word: afar
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...wait patiently to receive the call in January for the high honor of public service. Others wrote the speeches and heard them delivered countless times, experiencing countless vicarious pleasures with each repeated utterance. Still others commanded the organizations in each important state, directed the battle in the trenches from afar, and counted each vote as extension and product and reward of effort. All of these people and more divide and lay claim to the myriad parts of success that form the next President...
...York's J.F.K. Airport was the scene of an extraordinary meeting. Packed into the basement room 100 strong were the capos (captains), consiglieres (counselors), under bosses and bosses of the five New York Mafia clans that Gambino had ruled directly. Attending, too, were some honored guests from afar; for it was the patient Don Carlo who had maintained order among the 26 families of the national Mafia combine. His word was taken as final judgment on their affairs and squabbles. The problem: how to divide his unprecedented power...
First we identify with these strangers. The universal emerges out of the unfamiliar and sometimes bizarre particulars and communicates to us. "Guests From Afar" is recognizable as an official reception anywhere. The powdered expressions of "Court Attendants in Procession" don't mask their humanity and individual identity. The thoughts of each belong to the observer out of time, not only the Chinese of their own epoch. Most intimate of all, surprisingly, is another ritual, a formal "Procession to the Towers." In this panoply of costume, only faces speak...
...dusk, a driver stares across sulfurous marshes, the burn-off fires of oil refineries flickering like purgatory. Then all at once, in the distance, he sees the city, a kind of Oz, its lighted crystal buildings like piled diamonds. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that looking at Manhattan from afar was always to behold it "in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world...
...development is intricate and strung out over the whole length of the piece. Taylor uses his piano like an orchestra to simultaneously build different themes which appear and disappear only to reassert themselves at a later juncture. The music's complexity is stunning; like an intricate web seen from afar, his music seems initially amorphous, but upon closer examination each musical strand and the pattern into which it is woven appears. In many ways Taylor's style is the antithesis of Ayler's in that Taylor is using the new musical freedom to construct a more sophisticated form, rather than...