Word: bleat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...city. Stone's camera closes in on Bogosian's face as if it were the cratered moonscape of the American mind, and the actor / starts shouting into his megaphone mike. Finally, these two have become like Barry's listeners, shrill and unconvincing, weaving their own conspiracy theories in the bleat of the night. This is bag-lady cinema...
...bike does not spew stinky fumes and carcinogens. A bike is easy to park in a sliver of space, and of precious oil it needs only a smidgen to keep the wheels squeakless. Riders may turn rowdy, but the vehicle itself is quiet -- a blessed virtue amid the squawk-bleat- scream-grind-growl-honk-toot-wail-shr iek that is the voice of the big city...
...adenoids are missing, but the tone is unmistakable ("Those halcyon days of yore are gone for good"). Through the booming names and assertions comes the clarion bleat of Howard Cosell blowing his own horn. In this $ autobiographical screed, the Mouth That Roared shows that in a 32-year career, no triumph was ever forgotten or insult overlooked. In the early 1980s, his Monday Night Football colleagues made the mistake of being "full of themselves, obviously convinced they could handle the telecasts as well without me." The broadcaster turned viewer chortled as the audience dwindled: "I barely made it through...
...asphalt turf. No raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens for these guys. Kander's tunes have the catchy dissonance of a Broadway traffic snarl just before show time; violins cower mutely in the pit while the percussion sets a tempo of edgy energy and the horns bleat like Kurt Weill's orphaned children. Ebb never wrote a lyric as clawing as the imaginary one cited above, but he revels in devising anthems of urban indomitability. Everything that outsiders hate about New York City-its grime and pace, its inhabitants' steamroller pugnacity-Ebb sees as fodder...
...blossom, as if Bernstein were inhibited by 30 years of modernism from writing the kind of straightforward, expressive music that obviously agrees with him. Instead, he has compromised with a bloated, percussive score that, stripped of its bluster and its "commitment," is too often little more than a plaintive bleat. Only in the orchestral interludes, affecting, purely musical ruminations that speak louder and far more honestly than the clamor onstage, do we hear the real voice of Leonard Bernstein, struggling to be heard amid all the earnest chatter. Perhaps it is time for Bernstein to forgo the crutch...