Word: instrumentality
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...scene with Gugino, his skin still clings tautly to his body. The scowl that was the actor's early trademark has settled into a thin lip-line of resignation; no catastrophe laid on Turk can surprise or disappoint him. Maybe De Niro has kept his physical instrument in shape all these years by husbanding his gestures. But Pacino has been a perpetual motion machine. In this movie he still is: dancing like a boxer, chewing gum, his feet banging out a nervous paradiddle. Eventually, gravity takes its revenge. In remorseless closeup, and beneath his strangely youthful hairdo, he reveals...
...tribal areas--appeasement and excessive use of force," says Samina Ahmed, South Asia project director for the International Crisis Group. "Either way, all they have achieved is empowering the militants, helping them in recruitment and in obtaining funding." She laments the lack of a coherent strategy. "Militaries are blunt instruments; they are not good at counterinsurgency," she says. "The police would be a far more effective instrument, but there is no coordination between the military and the civilian government, so political reform and economic development--essential elements to any counterinsurgency--are not part of the equation...
...those who haven't heard them, Jarreau's swooping melody lines and improvisational growls, grunts and inflections can verge on startling. Perhaps more than any popular vocalist alive, he embodies the notion of the voice as a pure instrument. "When he gets into a flat-out jazz setting," says Heckman, "he lets it all hang out. And when he gets into one of his extended scat solos on something like Take Five, even the instrumentalists' mouths drop open...
...mirror - what you see depends on who you are and where you stand. Obama puts it this way: "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." But those metaphors all suggest that he is some sort of passive instrument, when in fact his elusive quality is an active part of his personality. It's how you square the fact that Obama once wrote the most intimate memoir ever published by a future nominee yet still manages to avoid definition. At his core, this is a deeply reserved and emotionally reticent...
...that lets the music speak most directly to the listener. Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2. Christopher Hogwood conducting the Academy of Ancient Music (L'Oiseau-Lyre). Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 2 and 7. Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra (RCA). No greater contrast can be imagined. Original Instrument Specialist Hogwood offers light, fleet, graceful performances that explicitly evoke Beethoven's classical- period roots. Toscanini, on the other hand, is rough and hard charging in these readings from 1949 and 1951. Once, Toscanini's Beethoven was Beethoven, as surely handed down from on high as Schnabel's. Today, Toscanini...