Word: idiom
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dial New York, the light comes on, and I send traffic. In Saigon I often had to wait two or three hours." Long is eager to learn better English. Indeed, the language barrier is the worst problem for the entire family, though American customs are as unfamiliar as the idiom. Accustomed to Saigon's strictly military parades, the Longs were surprised to find not only firemen and politicians but also schoolchildren marching in Corte Madera, Calif., on the Fourth of July. After seeing a drive-in movie theater and hearing about drive-in churches and banks, Long kept repeating...
...wrong to think of The Taking of Miss Janie as a dirge. Black Playwright Ed Bullins often uses a party as the central structure of his plays, and he does it again here. Even when it is slightly sick, a Bullins party jives. The people talk a vivid street idiom with the fluent opulence of jazz. Their moods dance. They make hot, sly, funny, drunken, sexy scenes together that have the cumulative impact of a seduction. Then they fall apart in revealing stop-motion monologues as if a petal were trying to be a flower...
Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti conducting; London, $6.98). Solti's way with Berlioz, Wagner, Mahler and Strauss stamps him as a Romantic and post-Romantic conductor without superior. This megatonic Rite now confirms his mastery of the contemporary idiom. Where Pierre Boulez etches in cold objectivity, Solti paints in swirling shapes and colors. The effect is electrifying...
...blacks. He is kind to his son, and he would be a good father if only kindness mattered. He brings his boy up in his own image, however, more than he knows. The harrowing conclusion of the movie is a bloody, scary sequence in which, as the local idiom goes, all the chickens come home to roost. The sheriffs wife is slaughtered by a couple of frightened sneak thieves, and father and son go out for revenge...
...only familiarity but self-knowledge and sympathetic imagination are among the ingredients of this outstanding biography and separate it from Goldman's earlier writing. Tracing the roots and reaches of Bruce's genius, he writes in a style charged with Bruce's own idiom and raging humor and amazingly achieves in print something approaching the same verbal energy. You cannot read his harrowing descriptions of Bruce's needle ravaged limbs or his raucously humorous passages describing Lenny's absurd, infantile and frequently brutal relationships without entering deeply into the man's experience...