Word: gimmick
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...duffer who, despite the trick club, still managed to send off his shots with a spin, Pedrick dreamed up another gimmick: a golf ball with "wings." The wings, actually six tiny metal flaps, would be held tightly against the ball's outer surface by magnets implanted beneath them. But if the ball began spinning, the flaps would be flipped out by centrifugal force and act as an air brake, retarding the spin...
...gimmick is good enough. Alas, the characters are solid pine and the plot is upholstered with historical minutiae that quickly become tedious. Moreover, the book is illustrated with old photographs, prints and sketches supposedly drawn by the hero. Altogether a painfully literal effort, except for those who take joy in minute historical coincidence. Like the fact that New York had a ball team way back then called the Metropolitans. But those Mets had pitching problems...
...ringidentification gimmick, so skillfully handled in Twelfth Night, is here even more awkwardly managed than in The Merchant of Venice. And interlarded along the way is another story involving the vile coward Parolles-a plot that has no organic connection, with the main tale...
...will believe it. Tommy is not an opera, of course, but an extended song cycle. It does have its moments: Pinball Wizard, for example, is explosive, driving, topnotch-hard rock. As a complete piece of musical theater, though, Tommy is pretentious and embarrassing stuff from one of the most gimmick-prone groups in all rock. The Who's favorite pre-Tommy stunt was to smash their guitars, loudspeakers and drums at the end of every set. At the Met, save for their own vaudeville antics onstage (Singer Roger Daltrey twirling his mike like a lasso, Peter Townshend playing...
...caper" thriller (Topkapi, Rififi) in which a hungry hood just sprung from Sing Sing decides to strip a whole luxury Manhattan apartment house over a Labor Day weekend. He assembles a team of specialists to cut the alarm wires, finger the Klees and terrify any stray remaining tenants. The gimmick is that all the conspirators' haunts are bugged by various government agencies. Though it means that everything from a candy-store pay phone to Central Park itself has to be tapped, almost the whole novel consists of tape-recorded conversations instantly fungible as movie dialogue...