Word: claptraps
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...Saito's Sato is a masterpiece deserving better than the slick superficiality of the cover story. One example: to label the Japanese Self-Defense Force as "something of a joke in an Asia that teems with massive armies" is pure claptrap. Japan's military potential, compared with that of other Asian countries, as well as that of all but a very few of the countries of the world, makes its small but excellent land, sea and air forces about as funny as a pocket battleship...
...gleaming white villa, are almost all on the eastward side of the bay. This places them away from the older, shabbier part of the harbor town, with its cluster of old streets and peninsula boulevard busy with buses and horse-drawn surreys. Developed haphazardly, with a strong flavor of claptrap and ticky-tacky, the magnificent sweep of beaches has seen the tide of tourism rise, then ebb. Now it is rising again, to fill the well-appointed hotels for the average tourist -El Presidente, Acapulco Hilton, El Elcano-sitting on the beach, surrounded by well-stocked shops...
...Last Analysis, a first play by Novelist Saul Bellow, is part Jewish-family comedy, part psychoanalytical cliché, part spoof of psychoanalysis-and all claptrap. An ex-TV comic known as Bummy (Sam Levene) re-enacts his life from womb to gloom with total traumatic recall, including toilet training, sibling rivalry, and a recurring dream that he shares his bed with a white sow. Says Bummy's lawyer: "He's like a junkie on thought...
...rise hotly to the defense of Tarzan, who is not "conventional claptrap" [Aug. 21], but one of the long line of heroes such as Hercules, d'Artagnan and John Ridd, whom most men and boys have always revered and emulated. Who but Tarzan could have remained motionless for ten minutes while a poisonous insect walked over his skin, including his bare eyeball...
PAINTERS OF THE BEAUTIFUL-Durlacher, 538 Madison Ave. at 54th. "Cockney impudence," snorted Ruskin at Whistler's painting. Whistler sued and won. The arrows the Victorians flung at one another had more zing than their painting, which they tried to free from what they called the "claptrap" of emotions. Albert Moore, Charles Conder and Lord Leighton come close to succeeding; Whistler, fortunately, does not. Beauty without feeling, after all, is like being dressed up with no place to go. Some 30 works in various media. Through March...