Word: coots
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...slept with the old coot, she deserves the money," Laura Phillips, 41 and single, said at a swanky downtown jazz club. Cathy Jamayo, 35 and also single, agreed. "If I were 89 and a 26-year-old guy wanted to sleep with me, I'd give him a billion dollars...
...reminded of this as I drive past the predictable sprawl of franchise outlets and architectural felonies along Highway 61 in Southeastern Iowa. I'm a nostalgic coot who likes the history and surprise of old friends in a chance meeting outside a building older than their combined years. I like the rumor and sass of regulars at the corner luncheonette. I'm tooling north along the great muddy Mississippi in search of these very things, and I'm not the only one looking...
...oldster reminiscing about the dead old days of watching an antiseptic world on black-and-white TV ("We got comedy, tragedy/Everything from A to B"); he might be Pleasantville's sitcom dad, now neck high in self-pity. The next tune, Shame, is in the head of a rich coot ranting about the young woman (and the gun) he needs to be happy. The third song, I'm Dead (but I Don't Know It), is the plaint of a pop singer who, after 30 years, has "nothing left to say/ But I'm gonna say it anyway." Newman dares...
There is some evidence against David's notion that in the eyes of younger people everyone born before the Inchon landing melds together into a single blob of undifferentiated old coot. There is, for instance, my favorite theory about why Ronald Reagan, the most successful oldie-but-goodie candidate in recent times, did so poorly in the Iowa caucuses in 1980, compared with 1976--a theory quickly forgotten after he reclaimed his microphone and his future in New Hampshire...
...into thinking of him as a kind of craftsy '60s bricoleur fiddling with mandalas by the seaside. (The sight of Shields, 6 ft. 4 in., with his shaven bronze dome of a head, nautical beard and Queequeg-like mien, daintily stitching in a studio littered with harpoons and coot decoys, is one of the more striking images of role reversal the art world affords.) In fact, his imagination goes far beyond that: it has a sparkling, lyric quality, which comes not so much from preordained imagery as from the way he handles his materials...