Word: bumming
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Modigliani is a portrait of the artist as a Montparnasse bum, or rather three: Modigliani's companions are his fellow painters and fellow flops-as the 1916 taste makers viewed them-Maurice Utrillo and Chaim Soutine. Utrillo (Ethan Phillips) is in thrall to two false gods, alcohol and his mother. Soutine (George Gerdes) is a color addict equally intoxicated by the stains on a butcher's apron and the veins of a plucked chicken. Led by Modigliani (Jeffrey de Munn), these Three Musketeers of the Night smash up cheap restaurants, cadge drinks, slash their canvases in frustrated rage...
...sort of hero. A millionaire who often lived like a bum, sleeping in a closet with his clothes on-because he believed that taking them off promoted insomnia-and spitting on the floor even in his cherished laboratories. A picturesque swearer who hired assistants whom George Bernard Shaw called "sensitive, cheerful and profane; liars, braggarts and hustlers." A would-be tycoon so crotchety and bullheaded that he could give little credit to the ideas of others; so inept in business matters that he lost control of the immensely profitable companies he founded. An incurable show-off and self-promoter...
...McGee has had troubles of his own. He has become increasingly morose, and the cases he handled were no real challenge. In the middle of the journey the Big was "embedded in a life I had some curious way outgrown. I an artifact, genus boat bum, a pale-eyed, shambling, gangling, knuckly man, without enough unscarred hide left to make a decent lamp shade. Watchful appraiser of the sandy-rumped beach ladies. Creaking knight errant, yawning at the thought of the next dragon." John MacDonald acknowledges that his hero "could not have gone on in that vein without boring...
...Boston College group arrives, six guys and a girl who walked six miles to see the Pope. One, a freshman from Elkhorn, Nebraska, wants to avoid TV cameras. "What if my mother saw it? Sleeping in the streets, cup of coffee in my hand like some bum, and I'll be back to Elkhorn in no time...
...situation is not much better on campus. He somehow remembers a pusher going door to door in Kirkland House selling heroin--curious, in retrospect, considering you can't even bum a cigarette in Kirkland House nowadays. During punching season, he is shocked by a conversation with Porcellian Club members, who tell him he must learn to party if he joins. He declines. He bemoans the decadence symbolized by Linda Lovelace's 1974 visit to Harvard...