Word: hazing
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...photographs resolve things more sharply than either Piranesi or the eye can, details such as the frescoes in the apse of St. Paul's, the freize of the Temple of Jove the Thunderer. Levit's ruins do not pull weathered marble's trick of fading into the sunny haze of a Roman sky, or the dust of Roman earth. He has set them off against a darkened world by burning the film up to the contour of the monument...
Smoke machines flood the stage with a primordial haze. Colored lights flash, and chain-mail costumes shine in the gloom. A guitar swoops through a sonic blizzard that might have been whipped up by Led Zeppelin. Whirling at the center of this musical maelstrom is a lanky, dark-haired lout. He shouts in a girlish tenor, drops his kimono, strips to hot pants and tosses roses to adoring teenyboppers...
...outlook of the characters is thoroughly reductionist, their feelings and moods governed by chemicals and simple physical drives. Yet through the drugged, alcoholic, and lustful haze, the characters are troubled by an occasional resonance of deeper spiritual longings, in the form of 'street sadness' and 'false memories'. These bad dreams--all that remains from a lost world of emotion and intuition are anxiously banished from consciousness...
Helprin uses a poetic style to capture the tone of the narrative ballad or the epic poem. This gives his plots and characters a remote quality: they are seen through a haze of words. The richness of his language can be a source of delight, and in some of his stories, like "A Jew of Persia," it is effective in creating an atmosphere...
Here, and in other stories, the remoteness and haze are carried to an extreme. The characters become flat, or stylized to the point of implausibility. In "Lightning North of Paris," Helprin is unable to bring to life the garret affair between two Americans in Paris, a composer and a ballet dancer; wrapped up in his descriptions of the composer's wild moments when he writes "music which if played for pigeons would have made them rise in intolerance and bend in a sheet of white and gray across the plane of Paris sky," Helprin is happily oblivious of the fact...