Word: grails
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There is a fairly promising plot notion here, a little like one of Thomas Pynchon's wonderland allegories. A motley but not unlikable crew of misfits chases around rural California in quest of a greenback grail: $312,000 in cash embezzled from a talent agency years earlier. James Caan, Sally Kellerman, Peter Boyle and Louise Lasser barrel over the back roads towing an Airstream Land Yacht, pursued by two absurdly sinister motor homes painted deadly black and piloted by unseen, relentless drivers...
...this point, however, Buckholz's bad angel has led him into a region of formidable murk. The stated business of the novel is nothing less than a search for the Unholy Grail-the pewter cup, Buckholz imagines, from which Judas drank at the Last Supper. The searchers are Matthew Mendelsohn, a 33-year-old former New York state senator, and Lise, a moonstruck German beauty. For three years they have excavated the beaches and caves of Ibiza -Lise because she believes with the force of mania that the cup is there, Matthew because he believes serenely in nothing...
...what about that modern Holy Grail the career, which woman either sacrifices for marriage or is condemned to pursue as a second-class competitor? Miss Decter believes she knows a dirty little secret. Women don't really want work-as-necessity, work as it is for a man. "Discovering for themselves how very difficult-how fraught with stress and anxiety-is the activity of making one's way in the world of work," most women, in their hearts, cherish smaller ambitions than they may militantly pretend...
...interested in playing straight gut rock. The trend among musicians seems to be toward a more complex, melodic style that incorporates jazz fusions and extends the vocal phrases instead of locking them solidly into the beat. There are also signs that the mass concert may not be the Grail of musical ambition that it once was, that it may go the way of the three-day rock festival-into oblivion. It took the pop audience a few years to learn that giant concerts tend not to be events of ecstatic mass communion but uncomfortable affairs, jammed and hot, the music...
Peace is nowhere a more fragile or elusive Grail than in Northern Ireland, where the mood of the warring Catholic and Protestant communities can swing violently. But last week, for a while at least, peace seemed a bit closer, as one of the two rival wings of the Irish Republican Army drew back from the brink of what had seemed an incipient civil war. In a dramatic policy announcement, the Marxist-leaning Official wing of the I.R.A. said that "in view of the growing danger of sectarian conflict," it was suspending "all military action" in Northern Ireland unless attacked...