Word: aura
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...TIME is correct in pointing out the aura of bafflement surrounding the Angela Davis affair [Oct. 26]. Miss Davis is variously described as "brilliant," "cerebral," "rational," and we are told that she chose active membership in the Communist Party, U.S.A. because of her commitment to strict Marxist rationality. But her advocation of freedom in the "act of refusal" is not consistent with the determinist world view of dialectical materialism, which leads any good Communist ideologue to define freedom as the recognition of necessity and to dismiss any other notion as bourgeois sentiment. Nor did her flamboyant Afro coiffure lend itself...
...somber portraits of 19th-century composers to Katherine's face. Her eyes seem about to tear. The piece is over. She does not move. She has been reached, and there is nothing she can say. It is a moment of passionate life-made all the more passionate by the aura of death that characterizes everything else in the film. But even so, the moment is brief; a minute later, Robert says, "So, I faked a little Chopin and you faked a little response." The walls are up again, and the characters go back to hitting their heads against them...
...moral aura around country music becomes clearest in its reaction to rock-n-roll. Until Elvis, white musicians came to the Grand Ol Opry (a converted church still using the original pews) in Nashville to learn country music's own particular styles and techniques. But with Hound Dawg, using borrowed blues lyrics and Elvis's own brand of hard twang country steel guitar, all the walls between black and white music collapsed...
...asset his money need not buy is his brilliance as a campaigner. As he moves through a crowd slapping backs, pinching biceps, winking, remembering names, he goes with an aura of confident pleasure. He has spent many hours at beaches, plunging into waves and joining impromptu samba sessions. Goldberg has climbed a 42-ft. ladder to be photographed with construction workers; that is apparently as far as he will go in that kind of stumping...
Janis Joplin knew that the aura of self-destruction was part of her appeal. She also knew that to her contemporaries she was much more than a rock singer. She was a tragic heroine whose character summed up all the contradictions, frustrations and despairs of life under 30. It was her special gift that nightly she seemed to triumph over her burdens in concerts that were a kind of cathartic theater of the young. Her exuberances, her frenzies, her "highs" set off chain explosions in the audiences. The quart bottle of Southern Comfort that she held aloft onstage...