Word: bummed
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...silence. "Thelonious Monk? He's a recluse, man." In the mid-'40s, when Monk's reputation at last took hold in the jazz underground, his name and his mystic utterances ("It's always night or we wouldn't need light") made him seem the ideal Dharma Bum to an audience of hipsters: anyone who wears a Chinese coolie hat and has a name like that must be cool...
...Island studio into New York frequently ended in barroom squabbles at the abstract expressionists' hangout, the old Cedar Bar. Painter Barnett Newman tried to keep him out of it. "The.y're laying for you," warned Newman. "You go in there a hero, and you come out a bum." One of Pollock's last major works was 1955's Search, an encyclopedia of his artistry in joyous Christmas colors. Its true thrill is seen best close up: an endless antipasto of textures, oils stained and then swirled into pastes, squiggles and scumbles, flecks and fissures that...
...BUM. Not even F.D.R.'s New Deal (WPA, PWA, NRA, etc., etc.) managed to cook up such a rich alphabet soup. Government agencies, politicians, labor unions, all 22 states and 13 political parties are known by their initials. BAA, BLA, BAP, BAM and BUM are prominent banks. MIC is the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, while MEC is the Ministry of Education and Culture, and MAC is a political action group called the Movimento Anticomunista. For slum clearance there is nothing quite so efficient as MUD (Democratic Urbanization Movement). And tax evaders must constantly watch out for the dread...
That information, plus the confession of Irwin, enabled the FBI to arrest two other suspects-sometime Salesman Barry Keenan, 23, and Beach Bum Joseph Amsler. And John Irwin was still talking. Twice before, he said, he had been involved in a plan to snatch Sinatra. "Once in Arizona," he said, "we just missed connections." On a second occasion, Irwin said, he had convinced his partners that the plan should be abandoned. Both Keenan and Amsler were charged by federal authorities with kidnaping, an offense punishable by a maximum life term in prison. But Irwin was charged only with "aiding...
Vodka Chaser. The film that made him famous was 1959's Room at the Top, in which he affected a pudding-thick Yorkshire inflection. In Summer and Smoke he purred in decayed Southern tones, in Wild Side he was a drawl-in' no-good Texas bum, and in Butterfield 8 he was a pale Yalie. This sort of variety is what he likes. "I refuse," he says with a flip of the wrist, "to be myself in films. It's been a long time since I've used my normal voice...