Word: itches
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INSIGNIFICANCE starts off with, well, a bang. Roeg (The Man Who Fell to Earth, Performance) opens with a tantalizing series of shots: The Actress (names are no more specific--this is, after all, a fairytale) prepares to shoot the famous skirt-blowing scene from The Seven Year Itch. Bystanders leer and sigh, particularly a vaudvillian duo manning the wind machine beneath the grating...
...Kern's itch to change and perfect is the mark of a meticulous craftsman. It is genius, though, that etches his tunes in the memory. Composer Alec Wilder, in his 1972 study American Popular Song, singled out Kern for exemplifying "the pure, uncontrived melodic line more characteristically than any other writer of American theater music." To listen to a Kern tune like They Didn't Believe Me is to realize how elegantly it obeys the laws of melody and mathematics: each succeeding phrase is both surprising and inevitable. In that one song, written for the 1914 show The Girl from...
...competition met Runny next significant moral to generic. It's a quarrel between Itch and poor, Characteristically, the brat is Itch and favored by Bunny's parents. Gene being poor and from a troubled background, is discriminated against by being forced to see Bunny without the knowledge of her parents...
...Itch To Expand...
After digesting a few dozen such nuggets of certified knowledge, one may feel a tendency to distrust experts of all sorts, and experience a nagging itch to start questioning authority. A reader may even suspect that his opinion is worth just as much as that of any horn-rimmed oracle in the land. Beware. Lest a layman become so emboldened that he or she starts holding forth at cocktail parties without having done the homework, Cerf and Navasky offer the last words of John B. Sedgwick, a Union Army general at the Battle of Spotsylvania in 1864: "They couldn...