Word: jeans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...kind of baroque humor 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 cast does a fairly solid job. Jean Richards is perfect as the whimsical girl, Louisa, falling in love. So is David C. Burrows, her father, bumbling through his own petty confusion. My favorite in the show was Johnny Armen as the Indian, Mortimer. Dressed in long underwear, tennis shoes, and an Indian wig, he played the evil forces of the world that ensnarl the boy and girl--an Egyptian, a Venetian, a Roman, and a Pirate (as well as the Rapist's Assistant). While he whips the boy in one of the tableau scenes, he keeps looking...
...stopped doing so when a ricochet almost hit his secretary. One night, when a Supreme Court Justice came to visit, Zink released a coon and a pack of hounds in the middle of dinner. Another original is Seattle's Lorenzo Milam, who lives on a houseboat, runs the Jean-Paul Sartre Memorial No Exit Roominghouse, teaches literature in a reformatory and currently hopes to become Seattle's "existentialist" mayor by "abolishing the environment" so that "there would be nothing to pollute...
...Lower East Side, invested in beer concessions and amusement parks, finally in 1919 had enough of a stake to join Marcus Loew in founding the movie-house chain that spread across the U.S. MGM studios followed in 1924, and Schenck, armed with such stars as Clark Gable, Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy, harvested huge profits even during the Depression. The studio's fortunes declined after World War II as Schenck continued to order up thinly plotted thrillers and meretricious musicals (which audiences now get on TV). In 1955 he was finally forced to step aside in favor...
...History, Jean-Paul Sartre once observed, is a bad joke played by the present upon the past. The perception has more to do with the inevitable bias of historians than with history itself. It emphasizes, however, the value of the practice that allowed a suitable interval to elapse before the present tried to judge the past. Today Presidents have taken to employing historians as personal aides, partly in the hope that they will be written up lovingly. Sometimes they are-witness Arthur Schlesinger's study of John F. Kennedy. And sometimes the joke is on the Chief Executive. Eric...