Word: blackboarding
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...tonality and deviated from a traditional harmonic structure. The Guarneri String Quartet gave an interpretation of Bartok's experimentation that seemed chaotic, disconcordant and--in Bartok's spirit--utterly exquisite. A stream of notes on high E rang with a sound that was reminiscent of fingernails against a blackboard with all of its pierce and none of its bite--creating a musical chill that began by leaping onto your arms, creeping up your neck and resounding with a shiver that carried all the way through the piece's four movements...
...every bookstore-cafe manages quite so well. The Trident Bookseller and Cafe, despite its earnest endeavors (colored chalk on blackboard slates announce the various esoteric sections; a sign in the window reads "Bonsai Trees for Sale"), cannot escape the implications of its gentrified location. Next to the incense and candles, the magazine rack presents yards of glossy new weeklies which the consumer is not even allowed to bring into the cafe. More egregiously, the cafe features a non-smoking section...
...blackboard, he chalks the elements of a short story: "character, language, situation, structure, plot." He does not add "drugs, booze, angry sex, bar fighting, class resentment, familial dysfunction." The kids will learn to chord this country music on their own. Or not. Now they seem shy and tentative. The professor tries to loosen them up: "A good writer steals from other writers," he says. "Got to be willing to steal, to pillage." Got to be willing, Russell Banks might say to himself, to be merely very good in novel after novel while critics use words like talented and valuable...
...while, it's possible to hope that Good Will Hunting may partake of the same exuberant spirit. Damon's title character, Will Hunting (isn't that cute?), is a janitor at M.I.T., solving impossible equations a professor leaves on a blackboard. After hours, though, he joins his lowlife South Boston cronies for stupid boozing and brawling. Class issues, rarely raised in American movies, seem about to be interestingly engaged. But no, Will's inability to find love and embrace his upscale destiny is the product of childhood abuse, the memory of which he must recover. This brings on Robin Williams...
...culture's most powerful critic was taking his shot. On the Oct. 19 episode of The Simpsons, Bart walked up to the blackboard and, in his signature scrawl, covered it with the phrase, "I no longer want my MTV." Meanwhile, the MTV-Hater's Page Website offered a chat for "all those who are sick of MTV's mass of nonmusic-related programming." Even the demographically challenged Howard Stern, whose own audience is more Pat Benatar than Puff Daddy, realized he could score easy points by harping on the service's lack of videos. Yet despite the welling demand...