Word: babel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Renouncing Babbitry for Babel, Gertrude Stein was a kind of saint to some and a stunt to others. She belongs not to the ages, but an age-the '20s. Fresh from his last safari (Dylan Thomas in America), Poet-Critic John Malcolm Brinnin goes in search of this Abominable Snowoman of modern letters. What he brings back is not startling, but it is a biographically complete if critically indulgent account of the concentric odyssey of Gertrude Stein, of whom it might be said: in her beginning was her end, because she was all middle...
Thus in a babel of discord, and six months after his death, Frank Lloyd Wright's last major work, the $3,000,000 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue (at 88th Street), opened to the public last week. Discord and controversy had marked it since the day it was commissioned 16 years ago. Wright had proposed "one great space on a continuous floor," a gigantic, uncoiling drum of reinforced concrete that swelled outward as it rose, carrying within more than one-quarter mile of continuous ramps sloping upward six stories to a great glass dome...
...these two extremes of style. In his atmospheric etchings. Harold Altman uses long, thin strokes to create a highly abstract atmosphere through which people and objects appear, much as images appear through the dots of a Seurat drawing. Another artist of this "moderate" group, Rudy Puzzeti, exhibits Tower of Babel, an atmospheric evocation of Breughel's famed painting on the same subject...
Rising over the convivial babel of West German beer halls, the tune is pure Tin Pan Alley. But Sailor Freddy Quinn's plunking baritone puts something purely Teutonic into the German lyrics ("Brennend heisser Wüstensand, fern, so fern das Heimatland-Burning hot desert sand, far, so far, the homeland"). That well-forgotten U.S. ballad, Memories Are Made of This, beats out of the German jukeboxes as Heimweh (homesickness), and the manufactured nostalgia seems violently contagious. In three years, Freddy's Heimweh has sold more than 2,000,000 copies. It is the alltime European pop-record...
When he is not blasting off from this rocket tower of Babel, Author Bradbury is an eerily engaging host at the Interstellar Hilton...