Word: idol
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Bunk was a symbol of the perseverence of that music and the culture which had engendered it. His career stretched all the way back to the 1890's when he had played with the famous Buddy Bolden band. Bunk had been the idol and teacher of many great New Orleans trumpet men, including Louis Armstrong. "They was all crazy behind old man Bunk's playing" he said himself in 1942. He had worked in every joint in Storyville, and played countless parades and funerals throughout the city. And now in the 40's, ten years after his "retirement" from music...
Before you destroy a system, propose another that will solve (not hide, shift or disguise) unemployment, "exploitation," war. Anyone can promise Utopia--without specifying a program. Tom Hayden, idol of the New Left, has said: "First we'll make the revolution--then we'll find out what for." Would you employ a plumber who rips out all the pipes in your house before he learned how to repair a leak...
Death Throes. To a pounding, throbbing cacophony of percussion and the shrill tooting of a wooden flute, dancers in extravagant costumes celebrate legendary rituals, their stiff-legged gyrations seeming, like some ancient idol, only half alive. Dancer Jorge Tyller, a Yaqui Indian, reenacts with awesome control the death throes of a shot deer, his tortured posturings bringing to mind some kind of primitive sacrifice as seen by the victim...
...throughout, but puns and word games (unfortunately badly translated) shade into black humor which at the novel's end becomes a Kafkaesque surrealism that we find frightening rather than funny. Sartre, who was a real-life friend of Vian's, is amusingly satirized as Jean-Sol Partre, the cult idol who enters packed lecture halls on elephant back, crushing his waiting fans. But when Chick, Colin's friend, sacrifices everything, including his girl-friend Alise, in order to buy Partre's work, the joke turns grisly. Chloe dies from a water-lily growing in her lungs: this is both Vian...
...neurotic, there were still close alliances within its framework. In London at '13, she learned that her brother Michael, with whom she had been closest, had been killed in a private-plane crash in California. "It quite simply destroyed the family," she says. "He had been my confidant, my idol. When my brother died, the rest of us just sort of fell into our own plots of soil and grew...