Word: downright
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week the Berlin Philharmonic started its first U.S. tour. Its conductor: Herbert von Karajan, who was chosen to take the orchestra on the trip after Furtwangler died last fall. In its programs the Berlin Philharmonic stuck rigidly to tradition. Its selections in New York last week were downright condescending: Haydn's Symphony No. 104, Prelude and Love Death from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and Beethoven's Symphony No: 5. The Berliners seemed determined to show the New World how the old classical war horses should be tamed...
...Venezuela's fabulous oil wealth, coming in an ever-faster flow, that powers the boom. Under a sense-making profit split with the foreign companies that produce petroleum, the Venezuelan treasury gets about $1,500,000 a day in one form or another. What the money does is downright wondrous...
...Part-Time Author. While there may be fewer downright poor writers today, their consciousness of poverty has increased and their tastes have grown more expensive. Nonconformists eager to struggle along in attics are not much in evidence. Most writers like to live like people, and if they must be in attics, they want them air-conditioned. Half of all American writers make New York City their headquarters, and most of those tend to settle in the outer metropolitan fringe between the gentlemen's estates and small farms. Example: having sold his first novel, The Blackboard Jungle, to the Ladies...
...safety. In Disney's hands the laws of physics turned to taffy. Shadows walked away from bodies. Men got so angry they split in two. Trains ate cookies. Autos flirted. People stretched like rubber bands. But it became harder and harder to outwit the public. Disney gags got downright erudite. In one cartoon Donald Duck might walk over the edge of a cliff and fall down. In the next he would walk off the cliff and keep right on walking-on air. In the next he would keep walking, suddenly notice where he was-and then fall...
...kudos for poetry went entirely to old hands. The work of younger poets, many of them'wrapped in the academic cocoon of teaching, was downright dreary. The year saw the publication of the collected poems of Wallace Stevens, a Hartford insurance executive who puts a high premium rate on intelligence, but pays off as solidly as an annuity; and of E. E. Cummings. the aging enfant terrible who can be soaringly lyrical, typographically cute and earthily human, all in a dozen lines. It was depressing to think what U.S. poetry would amount to when these men as well...