Word: charme
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...know that you won't have heard of him. But if you're a baby-boomer, you probably knew someone just like him as you grew up in the '60s. Dr. Prinz was the music teacher at my elder brother's school. A booming, opinionated Austrian with mid-European charm, he was a frequent guest at my parents' dinner table in the '60s, where he would hold forth on the merits of Mozart and the contributions of Chopin...
...discovered them brash and raw, and without changing their music he shaped them and made them presentable for a mass audience that suckled on the television tube. No TV show in Britain (let alone America) would have embraced the leather-clad Beatles. The foppish suits and Olde World charm of that little bow at the end of each set sugar-coated the Beatles' jagged pill and made them irresistible...
...Viewing the film 36 years later is a giddy pleasure. The Beatles' charm is easy and still disarming. The visuals exactly match the springily monochromatic music that the Beatles were creating at that time. Each Beatle was defined with a persona that became enshrined as the capsule version of their true-life characters. John the irreverently impish rebel; Paul, self-aware and cute; George laconic and Ringo the down-to-earth lad next door. (It was Ringo who prepared himself for the spiritual trek to India by shipping out crates of English baked beans...
...completely and unexpectedly that even now it boggles the mind. Like captive barbarians paraded in a Roman triumph, the vanquished Republican champions pass before us: the hapless Bush the Elder, checking his watch during a debate and fading into the Kennebunkport twilight; the brilliant Gingrich, undone by Clinton's charm and his own erratic temperament; the caustic, unhappy Dole, grimacing as Clinton sailed past his floundering campaign and into a second term. Finally, there was Ken Starr, the rosy-cheeked champion of law and order--beaten, in the end, as the perjured, priapic president cast himself (ah, irony...
...encounter with Mr. Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This man who is responsible for so much of Colombia's barbarity possesses a glittering, dangerous lucidity. After seeing Castano on TV last August, wearing a casual white sweater instead of his usual combat gear and talking with great charm and simple logic, many Colombians began to think that in a twisted way his war makes sense. "The art of the guerrillas is to hide themselves among the civilians. That may give them immunity against the army and police but not against us," Castano says chillingly. After all, say some...