Word: leveler
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...true. But you could make a longer list of his strengths, including his direct line to our subconscious. Spielberg has always maintained obsessive quality control, and when his films work, they work on every level that a film can reach. I remember seeing E.T. at the Cannes Film Festival, where it played before the most sophisticated filmgoers in the world and reduced them to tears and cheers...
Paul McCartney, born in 1942 and destined to become Lennon's songwriting soul mate, seemed a sunnier type: well mannered, level-headed, all that. But he had weathered trauma of his own, losing his mother to breast cancer in his early teens. McCartney encountered Lennon in the logical way, given the times and the two boys' musical interests: on the skiffle scene...
Bessie Smith, who earned the title Empress of the Blues in part through the sale of some 750,000 copies of her first record, took women's blues to a new level. Among other things, songs like her Poor Man's Blues ("Mister rich man, rich man, open up your heart and mind/ Give the poor man a chance, help stop these hard, hard times") represented pioneering social protests in black American popular music. Smith became the first black woman "superstar," traveling with her own tent show and attracting huge audiences...
...Armstrong had been dismissed by younger Negro musicians as some sort of minstrel figure, an embarrassment, too jovial and hot in a time when cool disdain was the new order. He was, they said, holding Negroes back because he smiled too much and wasn't demanding a certain level of respect from white folks. But when Armstrong called out President Eisenhower for not standing behind those black children as school integration began in Little Rock, Ark., 40 years ago, there was not a peep heard from anyone else in the jazz world. His heroism remained singular. Such...
...consider the completely nonlinear narrative of your average shoot-'em-up "twitch" game, such as Quake II or Tomb Raider. (Twitch games test reflexes rather than brains.) Players are dropped down in a game and proceed, level by level, learning the skills they need to survive in this new place and acquiring knowledge that leads them to the end, to closure that is as satisfying and complete as the epilogue to a 500-page thriller. Why watch The Terminator when you can be the Terminator, tapping into your own fight-or-flight feedback loop and blasting and stun-gunning your...