Word: costello
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hitters like Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, great characters like Casey Stengel and Rube Waddell (who had to be restrained from chasing fire engines during games), great disasters like the Merkle Boner and the 1919 Black Sox scandal. It gives us Red Barber's famous radio calls, Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?" routine and more versions of Take Me Out to the Ball Game than you imagined were possible. For baseball lovers it's the World Series, All-Star Game and Fan Appreciation Day rolled into one, with all the hot dogs and frosty malts...
Irony -- for which he has perfect pitch -- is his weapon of choice: "Alger Hiss always made his debut escorted by the Gods: He came to Washington with a reference from Felix Frankfurter and he went to Lewisburg ((prison)) with a reference to Frank Costello." In the sentence that opens an essay about one of his favorite subjects, the tragedy (or comedy) of the self-deluded rebel, Kempton dryly sums up another progressive hero: "Paul Robeson's was a career whose rise and fall were both tethered to his identity as a man of conspicuous color." Kempton's asperity...
...Elvis Costello shakes off the cobwebs with Brutal Youth...
They need not have worried. On the cusp of 40, Costello shakes off the cobwebs with Brutal Youth, a collection of 15 sinewy songs that marks his , reunion with the Attractions, the crack band that backed him on some of his best work of the '70s and '80s. Boisterous and piercing, Brutal Youth moves nimbly from caustic rock to hushed ballads, at times recapturing the brilliance of Costello's best days. "The twitching impulse is to speak your mind," he sneers on All the Rage. "I'll lend you my microscope, and maybe you'll find...
...rousing Just About Glad is a gem that captures the ambivalence of a man looking back on an affair that was never consummated. "There are a few things that I regret," Costello sings. "But nothing that I need to forget/ And for all the courage that we never had/ I'm just about glad." While Costello can still rave with more venom than many rockers half his age, some of Brutal Youth's finest moments come when he exposes the wounds under his verbal armor...