Word: hellzapoppin
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...dotcom bust. Staggering budget deficits. A hellzapoppin' gubernatorial recall. What other misfortune could happen to California? Well, Joan Didion, who was born and raised there, could write an elegantly acerbic book arguing that the sustaining myths by which the state defines itself are false, self-deluding and corrupt. Where I Was From (Knopf; 226 pages) is that book, and Governor-elect Schwarzenegger, for one, can give thanks that it was written too soon to include...
...artist John Bratby's love letters were put up by Sotheby's. Bratby, the Kitchen Sink school leader of the 1950s, had a hellzapoppin love affair with a much younger Diane Hills, to whom he wrote letters, as did Hills' father (less affectionately), as did Bratby's wife Jean Cooke (less affectionately still). "I understand from my husband," wrote Cooke, "the man with whom you fornicate on the floor of your flat..." All 25 boxes of the highly charged mess are now in some stranger's possession...
American Tabloid is history as Hellzapoppin, a long slapstick routine careering around a manic premise: What if the fabled American innocence is all shuck and jive? To underscore his thesis, Ellroy uses spurts of unimaginable violence the way other writers deploy commas and periods: "Sal burned a man to death with a blowtorch. The man's wife came home unexpectedly. Sal shoved a gasoline-soaked rag in her mouth and ignited it. He said she died shooting flames like a dragon...
...vast -- capacious enough to embrace reams of ancient, abstruse writings and a host of contemporary references or allusions. The latter include the Yellow Submarine, Casablanca, Tom and Jerry, Lina Wertmuller, Barbara Cartland, Stephen King, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Flash Gordon, the Pink Panther, Minnie Mouse and Hellzapoppin. What do all of these things have to do with one another? Eco's teasing answer: maybe everything, maybe nothing...
...other compositions in which randomness guides the musical program. In his most recent operas, "Europeras 1 and 2," he says, "the story exists only in the program. It is a collage of all operas, which makes it funny. It covers many different areas, like a circus-opera, a Hellzapoppin...