Word: kumquats
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Until we were unleashed into the outer hallway housing the exhibit, we had to find our eye candy in the spectacles that filled neighboring chairs. The rogue with the shag hairdo and glittery eye shadow sucking on a kumquat while boasting to his friends that he'd worn "everything Comme des Garons" in honor of the occasion and the older gentleman with a serious dark suit festooned with flaming red slippers enlivened the bland demeanor of an audience mostly clad in stuffy black apparel or Harvard student Abercrombie gear. The former was understandable; after all, "Rei invented black...
...President, the press secretary reports blandly, has suffered "a slight circulatory problem of the head." That's spin doctor -- better yet, parody spin doctor -- for a stroke that has left the Commander in Chief an aspiring kumquat...
...Tricky Two-Step. Complex sentences are a duplicitous politician's delight. Suppose a candidate plans to oppose kumquat subsidies. Saying so outright to a group of farmers would reap no votes -- just permanent enmity. Instead, the aspirant might try to finesse it like this: "No one in the Senate is more keenly aware of the courage and the grit of kumquat growers than myself, but we should never lose sight of how the federal deficit is robbing our children." It is an example of that classic two-step -- a sonorous lie followed by a fleeting glimpse of unpleasant reality...
These, respectively, are the opening images of two dance theater pieces by Sankai Juku, Jomon Sho (Homage to Prehistory) and Kinkan Shonen (The Kumquat Seed), which have the clear, smooth grace of a rock in a Japanese garden and the impact, simultaneously, of the same rock hurled. Each piece has a rather spindly framework that is part narrative, part philosophical speculation and part rendering of the collective unconscious poised perpetually between rigor and hysteria. Jomon Sho is a plunge into the mythic past and is the more literal of the two pieces Sankai Juku presented last week at New York...
...Kill a Mockingbird. You all read it in high school. The screenplay is a good adaptation of Harper Lee's story of racial prejudice and growing up in the rural South. The trial is effectively handled, as is the kumquat scene in which one of the kids, dressed up like a vegetable, is pursued by meanies who don't like her father defending a black man). Gregory Peck is better than he's ever been, before or after, as the slow, humble, and wise Atticus Finch. The kids are marvelous...