Word: gongs
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McPhee, whom this reviewer has known for 40 years, is the most methodical of intuitive writers, or the most intuitive of methodicals. Intuition tells him to bang a gong from time to time, and he does: "The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone." Full stop. Paragraph break. While this astonishment reverberates, he goes on methodically to discuss orogeny, which is mountain building (benthic refers to the ocean bottom). He was an English major who had written about gold mining in Alaska without, as he admits, knowing how the gold got there to be mined. Neither did the miners...
Every few pages, McPhee takes out his English major's rock hammer and prizes out a sample of whizbang geology lingo: plutons, grabens, horsts, gabbro, incompetent rock, punk rock, catsteps. Slickensides, if you please. Too much gong banging would become grandiose noise, however, and too much info simply another second-year geology text. McPhee, who is beguiled by his geologists and can make you see why, has a good feel for when to ease off into anecdotes. He goes after the rock wonks with butterfly net and magnifying glass...
...Falun Gong Free Meditation Classes...
...Dvorak, the score provided ample opportunity to demonstrate the orchestra's varied colors. Especially striking was the percussion ensemble of the second movement, consisting of triangle, tom-tom, snare drum, cymbal, wood block, gong and chimes. After an initial statement, the ensemble returned to a perfectly executed dynamic rise and fall. In the third movement, the flute performed the solo melody effectively with a sort of rubato, freely suspended over the rest of the orchestra...
Chen's theme, from his first film, Yellow Earth (1984), has been the indoctrination of children--and, often, their misuse by those who should care for them (read: the state). But he has never illustrated it as voluptuously as here. He and ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle bathe Gong Li in warm reds, giving her a fever of frustrated love, and surround Cheung with cold grays to reflect the ice of his resentment. As the slick gigolo and avenging angel of the Pang family, Cheung radiates the intensity of a lover scorned and scarred for life. In a performance that dares...