Word: gimmicked
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...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...
Parliamentary Gimmick. Carswell also took a beating when it came out that he had suffered what was at best an odd lapse of memory in testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska asked him in January if he had been an incorporator of the Capital City Country Club in Tallahassee (in 1956, Capital City became a private club to escape a desegregation order). "No, sir," Carswell replied. It turned out last week that only the night before his testimony, Carswell had admitted his incorporator's role to two American Bar Association representatives...
What compromised Carswell's chances most, though, was a parliamentary gimmick thought up last week by his Senate opponents. Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, a Democrat who led the fight against Clement Haynsworth, introduced a motion to send the Carswell nomination back to the Judiciary Committee-ostensibly for further hearings. For practical purposes, however, sending a nominee's name back to committee is a shelving device that permits the nomination to die quietly...
...psychiatrist friend once told me that in therapy, as in show business, you gotta have a gimmick. Howard Lester's Children of Synanon keyed on The Game, a nebulously-defined situation in which a circle of adults and ten-to fourteen-year-old kids were supposed to get out front through continuous verbalization. Warrendale has the "holding session," which is spoken of as a physical vet loving restraint in which hostile feelings are "worked out." But since these holding sessions mean holding down every one of a child's limbs, physically demanding immobility, it's hard to see exactly...