Word: backgrounding
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...skinny, 17-year-old Mark Kauffman, owner of a rickety Speed Graphic and the sole support of his parents, two sisters and 14 brothers. "Go out and cover Eleanor Roosevelt," said Bach to Mark one afternoon in 1939. At a press conference, Kauffman snapped unobtrusively in the background, produced one of the most human, humorous pictures of the First Lady ever taken. A week later it adorned the cover of LIFE, and Kauffman...
...white passers-by discuss irritably what to do with a helplessly drunk white man, unload the problem on two gentle and respectful native policemen. Such cruelty and callousness exist independent of color, but the failings of Jacobson's whites show with merciless clarity against a black background. In the book's best story, a young white South African who has migrated to London anticipates with dread the visit of his countrified mother. It is even worse than he expects; she is a liberal on the matter of race, and she turns up with a Negro college student...
Casting about for something to enliven a newsless paper one night last week, Sir William Haley, editor of the prestigious Times of London, decided to convert a gossipy background article by his youngish new political correspondent into the day's leading news story. Next morning 250,000 Britons ("The top people read the Times") learned to their intense fascination that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had lately taken Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd's arm "in a paternal grip" and proposed that Lloyd move down to a lesser government job within the next "several months...
Mankind's Prayer. To this Buck Rogers apocalypse, Composer Blomdahl fitted an atonal score marked by vocal passages of labyrinthine difficulty and orchestration of such transparent delicacy that it sometimes seemed like chamber music. Frequently the chorus was used unaccompanied as a tautly dramatic background to the soloists' soaring vocal lines, and in some sequences Blomdahl abandoned the orchestra altogether in favor of taped electronic effects. One scene unfolds against a Jabberwockian mixture that includes the speaking voices of Eisenhower. Khrushchev, Hitler, Mussolini and the defendants at the Nürnberg trials...
Leonard continued to stall and the talk got uglier. Blinky visited Leonard in Los Angeles, accompanied by a couple of tough-looking hoodlums with police records who lingered ominously in the background. Leonard got threatening phone calls ("It'll be with a pipe wrapped in a paper sack. You'll never know what hit you"). He testified that Carbo called too. said "something to the effect that 'You're going to get hurt. We're going to make an example of you.' " After the hearing, police were assigned to guard Leonard whenever he left...