Word: dulling
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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JIMMY is a $900,000 anachronism, a Hollywood notion (courtesy of Jack L. Warner) of what a Broadway musical is like, drearily familiar from countless Hollywood films of Broadway musicals. It takes consummate ineptitude to make Jimmy Walker dull and to make his mistress, Betty Compton, even duller...
...avenues and impressive architecture, though necessary to a great city, do not satisfy the equation. If the Third Reich had lasted another ten years, Berlin, which Hitler planned to rename Germania, would have become the world's most monumental city. It also would have been the most monumentally dull. In fact, it became second-rate on Jan. 30, 1933, when Hitler took power. A city cannot be both great and regimented. Blessed with culture, history and size, Moscow, Shanghai and Peking ought to be great cities, but they are not. They all lack the most important element: spontaneity...
Whatever else it may possess or lack, a great city cannot be dull. It must have a sense of place and a feeling all its own, and its citizens must be different from and more vital than those who live elsewhere. The difference does not even have to be in their favor. The native Parisian, for instance, is born with an ineradicable hauteur that others define as rudeness, and the native New Yorker knows the meaning of avarice before he can spell the word. So strong is the trait that a century ago, Anthony Trollope waspishly noted that every...
...thousand Americans a day become Californians. They come West with high expectations that the wealth, the welcoming land, the easy ambience, the astonishing diversity of opportunity will all provide something far different from the dull sublunary routine of most mortals. To many of them, indeed, the new setting does mean an end to the grim struggle for existence, the beginning of a life that frees emotional energies for the pursuit of self...
There are also too many animals at the zoo. Too many dull ones, and too many sleeping. Who wants to walk by skunks, donkeys, wild boars, and alligators to get to the monkey cage? I have nothing to say to those animals. Another problem is the bears. All real bears seem to be wildly imperfect reflections of the ideal pooh. If you don't believe me, go to the Square and look for the girl who sells home-made bears, and says in a tiny voice, "Bears for sale." In the middle of the Square. The girl is so tender...