Word: aloftness
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...question about it, Larry McMurtry's shaggy new novel Dead Man's Walk (Simon & Schuster; 477 pages; $26) passes the all-important "Call me Ishmael" test. Its first line is "Matilda Jane Roberts was naked as the air." After that start, the narration wafts aloft into further elegant absurdity, as follows: "Known throughout south Texas as the Great Western, she came walking up from the muddy Rio Grande holding a big snapping turtle by the tail. Matilda was almost as large as the skinny little Mexican mustang Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call were trying to saddle-break...
...perfect show. MTV helped create the glitzy, surface-over-substance music-video age, and sometimes Unplugged succumbs to the very values it once reacted against. At points, the show's naked emotionality feels as false and forced as an arena full of headbangers holding their lighters aloft during a power ballad. Often enough, though, there are flashes of excellence. The best and most transporting performance in the new series of concerts was turned in by Etheridge. She walked onto a bare set with no string section, no drums, no backup-just her and her acoustic guitar filling up the stage...
...restless, relentless energy of the score -- tempered, for the first time in Glass's career, by some fetching love music -- pulls one into the film in a way that mere background music never could. By the final shot, of a sublime Beauty and her transformed Beast borne magically aloft and soaring through the clouds, the audience is as enchanted as the characters. Even Wagner, who knew something about magic himself, might have been impressed...
...friends try to find out and are soon stumbling clueless through the circus world, wondering whether the death of a gorgeous midget was suicide or murder, why the animal trainer seems himself to be a predator, and whether the dashing young man who hangs by his hair is kept aloft by cocaine...
...critically acclaimed "Olympia," an exhaustive record of the 1936 Summer Olympics, which was revolutionary in its treatment of sports. Many of her innovations are still used today. It is fascinating to watch Riefenstahl describe some of her experiments, like underwater photography of diving events, and setting cameras aloft in balloons...