Word: berlins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Well, yip, yip, yaphank, and let's all wish a happy 100th birthday to Irving Berlin. This week everybody's doin' it -- celebrating the boy born Israel Baline in Russia a century ago, who came to the U.S., reached for the moon and found that there's no business like show business. God bless America: Berlin's songs are his life...
...this a lovely day? Jerome Kern once summed up Berlin's place in & American popular music by observing: "Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He is American music." Way back when, George M. Cohan spotted the appeal of the man who had "named himself after an English actor and a German city." Berlin, said the Yankee doodle dandy, "writes a song with a good lyric, a lyric that rhymes, good music, music you don't have to dress up to listen to. He is uptown, but he is there with the old downtown hard sell...
...angel is someone who listens. In this German movie, two angels -- yes, real angels, with wings and ponytails -- listen keenly to every wounded soul in West Berlin. Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) patrol the city's streets, libraries, offices, homes. Their job is to "observe, collect, testify, preserve," to offer the unseen hand of consolation to lonely old men, restless scholars, frustrated workers, angry wives. All those voices! And everyone asking the same questions: "Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? When did time begin, and where does space...
...first third of Wim Wenders' long, gorgeous, swoony, dead-serious fairy tale, the voices of today's Berlin rise like the choral symphony of a great city. Then, gradually, a few solo stories can be heard. An old man named Homer (Curt Bois) recalls the days, once upon a time, when a poet had listeners, drawn into a circle; now he has only solitary readers, unable to warm themselves at the long-ago communal campfire of art. A visiting Hollywood actor (Peter Falk) teaches a new friend some primal joys, simple things: "To smoke, have coffee...
...East Germany, authorities continued a campaign of harassment aimed at would-be emigrants, many of whom have sought assistance from Protestant church groups in their efforts to obtain exit visas. At least 100 such individuals have been arrested, according to church officials. Last Sunday police surrounded East Berlin's Sophienkirche, one of the city's largest churches, subjecting worshipers to intimidating identity checks. The new crackdown follows a drive in January in which some dissidents were "exiled" to West Germany as punishment. Officials have evidently decided that the sweet prospect of such punishment merely encouraged the estimated 50,000 would...