Word: crass
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...still a bottle of liquor. You know, get a half gallon of Chivas for your Aunt Minnie who belongs to the Women's Christian Temperance Union and then visit her house a lot. (Got anything to drink? Why, lookee here! Haw, Haw, Haw!) Assuming no one is really that crass, it's best to reserve bottle gifts for people like your boss, your roommates or the police man who let you off the hook when you were doing 75 down Main Street this Thanksgiving. Of course, there's no reason not to give yourself a little flagon of cheer this...
literature. Americans have been especially obsessive about doing things by the book: democracy has always involved the ambivalence of men and women hell-bent upon being superior to their equals. In the exuberantly crass moneygrubbing of the gilded age after the Civil War, for example, Americans were springing literally out of ditches into great wealth. The trajectory that their money purchased into ostentation, if not aristocracy, gave them all kinds of anxiety attacks. And so the etiquette-book business flourished, scores of manuals pouring forth to soothe and lead the nouveau riche nervously forward to some kind of presentability. Some...
Richard Stoltzman is the first to admit it: the clarinet, his chosen instrument, is no musical prince. To begin with, there is the clarinet's tendency to be loudmouthed and crass. It is the sharp-tongued marcher in high school bands, the instrument everyone loves to play badly. In orchestra pits, the clarinet is a foot soldier, sturdily seconding the melodies of the grander piano, violin and cello. Few composers have favored it with solo works. Few Benny Goodmans exist; although there have been outstanding clarinetists, they traditionally have belonged to orchestras and thus missed the dazzle...
...crass measure of money and quantity, the exhibition exceeds even the Tutankhamun show now touring the U.S., the Dresden reportedly being insured for $82 million vs. a mere $22 million for Tut, with more than 700 objects vs. Tut's 55. Negotiations for this loan were initiated by National Gallery Director Carter Brown even before the U.S. and the German Democratic Republic established diplomatic relations in 1974. Also involved were the U.S. museums to which the show will later travel, New York's Metropolitan Museum and the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums...
Alonzo's principal collaborator on FM is Ezra Sacks, a screenwriter with an unabashed affection for recent American movies. His script, which seems to be about a war between hip deejays and crass moneymen at a Los Angeles radio station, is a scrupulous homage to such entertainments as Car Wash and Between the Lines. At least one of his three jokes is right out of MASH. Film buffs will undoubtedly have a whale of a time picking out such references to other movies; viewers with a less academic bent may wonder if Sacks might not be trafficking in stolen...