Word: ascendent
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Jellicles are assembled for a clan ritual. Annually, the revered elder, Old Deuteronomy, played like a benign biblical patriarch by Ken Page, chooses a deserving Jellicle to ascend "up up up past the Russell Hotel, up up up to the Heaviside Layer," and be born again. While this serves as a passing and somewhat pretentious reminder of Eliot's New England transcendentalism, it does not provide the binding plot line that Nunn obviously hoped it would. As it is, the various Eliot cats come on doing star turns as if they were gifted gypsies eager to escape the anonymity...
...only one with a hat, Roy Jackson, 64, a retired janitor, did the drawing. His random choice: himself. He smiled warily. Evelyn Washington, 27, suggested that they pray. "Lord, please guide us," she began. And then out of her Bible she read from the 24th Psalm: "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? He that has clean hands and a pure heart...
...this album is all about. Not just the obvious kind, chasing after the girl or boy of your dreams, but the romance too that colored attitudes toward adventures of old. Today people are educated to be skeptical of heroes who skirted the globe alone, or became the first to ascend Mt. Fuji, or flew across an ocean singlehandedly, but Buffett ascribes to them the old allure of glory, bravery, and unadulterated accomplishment He harks back to the days when people were more innocent--more easily deluded, the cynics will say--when there was no People Magazine...
...ultimate tragedy of stories like Silkwood's lie in their very appeal. Crucified for a popular cause, crowned with a garland of public approval, these "martyrs" ascend into the realm of legend. Their names become watchwords for the faithful, but the details of their struggles are lost in political rhetoric and strife. Their stories are invoked without being remembered, and many who write about them sensationalize--relying solely on an inherent emotional appeal to those who do not wish to believe. Such works are often dismissed as propaganda...
...horns wanes into an A minor chord, and the reiteration of this three-second transformation during the hour-and-a-half of Abbado's new Deutsche-Grammophon recording with the Chicago Symphony warps the texture of adventure, love and almost militant drive and power until the five angels ascend, Wormwood falls, locusts emerge from the great pit, or--is it possible to compare--Brando gets what he deserves. The Pentagon might object to this violent death, or respond by sending in troops of its own. Mahler, who became a Roman Catholic in 1997, seven years before he completed the symphony...