Word: duking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...this since Franklin Roosevelt survived the court-packing controversy of 1937 and then entertained the idea of running for a third term, insists Political Specialist Richard Scammon. Then too the nation was mesmerized by the man, either his evil intentions or his genius, depending on one's persuasion. Duke University's astute James David Barber calls Reagan "the great diverter," an actor who plays to television impresarios (who, he says, tend to be gullible) by tossing out distracting ideas like New Federalism, star wars and merit pay for teachers...
What does not seem to have been greatly embellished is Bowie's own narrative of his meandering into overindulgence. He evolved a new character called the Thin White Duke. He released David Live in 1974 with a cadaverous cover that prompted the subject himself to remark, "That record should have been called David Bowie Is Alive and Living Only in Theory. " An album of original songs, Diamond Dogs, with lyrics patched up from fragments à la Burroughs, gave early warning of disaster: "When they pulled you out of the oxygen tent you asked for the latest parties." "I was living...
...There is no definitive David Bowie," he once remarked. Ziggy and the Duke have been slithered out of, like shucked snakeskins, but their creator remains a well-nurtured enigma. Perhaps by design: in concert or in conversation, he always seems like a scrupulous creation. The body, even relaxed, seems conscious of pose. The face?Leslie Howard sketched by George Grosz?can be nearly beautiful, but the mouth splits its sculpted lines when it turns up into a toothy, gratified grin, like Chaplin's as he watched a fat man fall. Bowie's eyes, always appraising, seem to look straight down...
...maids primp and pose throughout all their numbers, including "Twenty Lovesick Maidens We," and the serious self important soldiers march about the stage singing things like "When I First Put This Uniform On. "Led by Colonel Calverly (John Hoyoker), Major Murgathroyd (Daniel Pantano) and the slightly effeminate Lieutenant. The Duke of Dunstable (Michael Calmes), we watch the soldiers try to lure the ladies away the soldiers try to lure the ladies away from their poets. Finally figuring that if you can't beat them they transform themselves into aesthetically pleasing gentlemen...
...that very air is the oxygen of the epigram. W.H. Auden, who collected and concocted them, readily admitted that "aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre. Implicit is a conviction that [the writer] is wiser than his readers." François de La Rochefoucauld was a duke; elbowed out of prominence in Louis XIV's court, he retreated to an estate to polish his words until nobility could see its face in the surface: "We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others"; "In jealousy there is more self-love than love"; "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice...