Word: larkishness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...year of this recording by the Red Devils, a studio band that cut only a few sides, was 1931. America had started to realize that its economic Depression was more than a fad, like flagpole sitting; it was a way of life. Yet pop music remained a larkish enterprise. Financial devastation may have swatted America, but from the evidence on records and film sound tracks, people kept on humming and strumming...
...original 1977 demo tape, widely available on bootleg cassette, Lennon prefaces the tune by announcing, in the terse gutturals of a Brooklyn gangster, "Free. As a boid.'' That larkish spirit, absent in the new version, abounds on the two-CD album The Beatles Anthology (Apple/Capitol)--60 tracks of the group's compositions, cover recordings, outtakes, TV skits and reminiscences...
...Wong Foo (whose unpunctuated title means...oh, nothing very much) has its larkish side, when the male stars are doing their struts and their dish. But it soon goes sappily didactic. Director Beeban Kidron and scripter Douglas Carter Beane want you to believe that the drag queen, because he is at ease with his ersatz sexuality, is a true liberator: he can teach feminism to women and manners to men, in this awful place called Middle America. The movie has its own fantasy credo: that heterosexuals are the real objects of pity and scorn. And gay men? Poor them...
...Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley operating at full throttle, every G.I. could hit the beach with a song in his backpack. Terrific songs, many of them. They still sound swell today, and they even look good on the bandbox stage of Manhattan's Blue Angel Supper Club in a larkish but poignant revue called Swingtime Canteen, directed by Kenneth Elliott...
...most of the well-cast Peaches lineup (which includes Madonna as a sexually outre outfielder), playing in the league is pure pleasure, a larkish flight from hometown constraints. But Davis, an entrancing mixture of wariness, reserve and quiet gumption, finds something more in it, an authentic awareness of the ambiguity of the women's position -- they are being exploited, after all -- which requires a lifetime for her to resolve. That's good, and so is her abrasive relationship with a kid sister (Lori Petty), a pitcher on the team who resents her elder sibling's cool, dispassionate competence...