Word: avian
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...Sweeney. They describe the bird- man's first flight: "more sleepwalk than spasm" . . . drawing "close to pebbles and berries . . . relearning the acoustic of frost." He recalls his roosting place in a chestnut tree, characterized as "a queen in her fifties, dropping/ purses and earrings," and the highlights of an avian existence as he goes "scaling heaven/ by superstition/ drunk and happy/ on a chapel gable...
...healing nicely. Birdy's case is altogether more desperate, and the main business of the film is to explore its roots. A sociologist might point to the usual downers: poverty, loneliness and lovelessness. But that would reckon without Birdy's mysterious singularity, expressed in his obsession with the avian world...
...John McPhee observed that a loon's "maximum air speed is 60 miles an hour, and his stall-out speed must be 59. Anyway, he scarcely slows up, apparently because he thinks he will fall." Big fat feet out behind them, they crash-land on their bellies, an avian comedy. On land, they flop along on their stomachs. When it rains, they mistake highways for lakes, come down like thunderbolts. People are always tending their abrasions and taking them back to ponds. To take off, they need as much as a quarter-mile of liquid runway...
...preaching to the birds, the visitation by an angel, the receiving of the stigmata), animated by the whole range of Messiaen's musical vocabulary. Strong, sharply defined motifs are derived from such disparate sources as bird song (the composer is a lifelong ornithologist and notated some of his avian themes at Assisi), plain chant and the whole-tone scale. The themes are treated with Messiaen's characteristic rhythmic complexity, but the effect nevertheless is one of almost childlike simplicity...
...quest theme. The story opens as Big Bird (played, as he is on Sesame Street, by Caroll Spinney), roller-skates through Manhattan's Chinatown and admires a scroll depicting the legendary phoenix of China. He is smitten and resolves to go to China as a sort of avian Henry Kissinger, to tell the phoenix that "American birds think Chinese birds are just swell." Finding the phoenix is the problem. Big Bird and his shaggy sidekick Barkley the Dog (played with wonderful canine verisimilitude by Brian Muehl) must locate all the landmarks depicted on the scroll; each locale provides...