Word: casualness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Irish extraction, not African-American, as some have supposed from his appearance) began giving piano recitals in his hometown at the age of seven. He turned down a chance to study in Paris with the late Nadia Boulanger, teacher of three generations of American composers. "It wasn't a casual 'No,'" he recalls. "I was developing a way with music that would be better off minus the labels on everything, minus the descriptions, minus the analysis...
...correctly observes, he always has had enough work to keep him busy and support his habit of "doing what I want in life." This includes a sort of guilt-free materialism--"a millionaire who lives like a billionaire," someone once called him--as he takes a casual, almost childlike, pleasure in his Rolls Royces, the Gulfstream II jet he pilots himself, his mansion in Maine. It also includes marriage to actress Kelly Preston (they have a three-year-old son, Jett) and his embrace of Scientology, which he credits for much of his equanimity. "A belief system, if it works...
...monologue is turgid and confusing. The closing act abandons comedy altogether for a sentimental affirmation of life as something to cherish by mixing a heavy dose of Thoreau with Davis' own ardent declamations. The rather opaque passages from "Higher Laws," "Solitude" and other essays are further obscured by Davis' casual commentary scattered throughout. When finally he concludes that he is "everything God intended in man," he is everyone from Jesus to Ghandi to Ghengis Khan, the poetics ring hollow...
...mentality of abstinence demands a certain elementary moral metaphysics. Teach this: the more you indulge in anything, good or bad, but especially bad--in drugs, casual sex, violence, idiot music, stupidity, driving 90 m.p.h., bad manners, rage--the more you lose. The more you abstain, the more you gain. This is not cheap rhyming paradox but a good truth that in the past generation or two has been swept away by raw sewage. For an adolescent, abstinence means security and, therefore, the freedom that comes with self-possession. Abstinence becomes a medium of clarity, the window through which...
...with the naked eye, but containing the genes for a heart-attack enzyme, streptokinase, or for 'ice-minus,' which prevented frost damage to crops, might be worth $5 billion to the right buyer." There is popularity in a passage like that. It bears information a man, even a casual-reading man, can do something with. Win a bar bet. Pass the time creatively on the scaffold with the hangman. It is skinny with legs. Crichton is Captain Reliable at this...