Word: altamonte
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wires as actor-managers put their casts through ever more ethereal effects of movement and stage lighting; their defiance of gravity was to popular theater what the computer generation of dinosaurs and space oddities is to movies today. Arthur Conan Doyle was the son of a fairy painter, Charles Altamont Doyle, who died mad, but the creator of Sherlock Holmes was so gullible himself that as late as 1917 he defended some fake photos of fairies made by an enterprising pair of teenage English schoolgirls. You'd almost suppose that the national emblem of England was neither the lion...
...very hard to get used to. As an undergraduate in the late 1970s, it was easy to cultivate foreboding: democracy seemed washed up; both inflation and unemployment were out of control; warheads were pointed our way; the '60s had left a residue of chaos without idealism (you know--Altamont). The '80s brought fresh stuff to find deeply troubling: recession, Star Wars weapons, Reaganomics, leveraged-buyout layoffs, greed, soaring deficits, Michael Dukakis as a potential President. Now? Well, let's see: there's the failure of the budget deal to adequately address middle-class entitlements. A nontrivial problem...
After 1968, much of the drama lay ahead (the Weatherman's Days of Rage, Woodstock, Altamont, Kent State), and then the long dispersals of the '60s generation into the '70s. But the events of the origin myth ended sometime around the November election of Richard Nixon, when, it may be, history seemed to have been ceded back to the fathers, and recalled from timelessness into time...
Decades have a way of crashing to a close during the blink of an hour. The '60s ended at Altamont, when a knife-and-death climax to a Rolling Stones concert showed that the decade of love, peace and music had trouble, even with the music. The '70s limped along with an inner-directed malaise until Jan. 20, 1981, when the U.S. hostages lifted off from Tehran just as Ronald Reagan was taking office. The '80s, as befits their high-flying adrenaline, may have dissipated a few years early, sputtering to an end during the stock market's terrifying final...
...despite the mythos of such events as Woodstock, Altamont, Jim Morrison's death, and the Summer of Love in San Francisco, rock has always been little more than entertainment or release for the majority of Americans. Why, then, must Palmer insist on making the Stones significant, when it is easier--and probably more gratifying--just to appreciate their music...