Word: freak
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...SAID the adoption of energy conservation and low-technology solar power represent the way out of the United States' dependence on imported oil, most people would dismiss you as a "freak" from California or the Sierra Club. However, if you told that to the members of the Energy Project at the Harvard Business School, they'd most likely slap you on the back and welcome you to the club...
...18th century prose style and a tart Yankee wit, would rather dissect the toad. The eye looks out for itself; the rude and frequently ugly support systems of truth and beauty need all the help they can get. There is, of course, a long history of the artist as freak and invalid: Plato's ideas of divine mania; Philoctetes, the archer of Greek mythology, whose festering wounds made him unfit company; 19th century Romanticism with its conspicuous consumptives; more recently, Susan Sontag's musing on the literary uses of cancer in Illness as Metaphor...
...magnetic tape in the late 1940s. Most music now is recorded onto tape; when that tape is transferred to a master record, loss of quality inevitably occurs. Even if the master is excellent, acoustic impurities are picked up, the "surface noise" that frays the nerves of the audio freak like nails on slate...
...funnier and more stylish horror films, because they're so good about being shocked: "A vampire you say? My word..." Here are a few of the most precious moments in horror history: Ernest Thesiger plying Boris Karloff's Frankenstein monster with brandy and cigars; Carrie telekinetically crucifying her Jesus freak mother; Roy Scheider spooning fish entrails into the sea, prissily calling out to Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss "Why don't you guys shovel some of this shit?" and as he hits the last word, noticing this big shark a few feet from his face; Vincent Price, dressed as Richard...
...theater season, many of the plays that have received the most critical acclaim and a generous measure of audience acceptance have been about the dying, the grotesque, the brutalized and the desolate. The Elephant Man, winner of this year's New York Drama Critics Circle Award, features a freak who is mon strous, if also in eloquent human pain. Whose Life Is It Anyway? mounts a torch of a brain on the calcified column of a car-wrecked body. In these and other plays of the same tenor, there is much brightly sar donic humor. But what sort...