Word: magical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Kirsten Flagstad in 1935 made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Wagner's Die Walkuere, the audience cheered and the press groped for comparisons with "the irrecoverable magic" of Swedish-born Soprano Olive Fremstad.* Last week another Swedish Wagnerian soprano strode the Met's stage, and this time the comparison was to the "incomparable" Flagstad herself. The debutante: 41-year-old Birgit Nilsson, whose appearance in a new production of Tristan und Isolde touched off the kind of debut furor the Met's Wagnerians have not witnessed in a quarter-century...
...idea is seen at the periphery of his mind, the more horrifying because it has been so thoroughly excluded from his conscious thoughts. It is the idea of suicide. Another story whose effect lingers after the pages have been turned is Bernard Malamud's The Magic Barrel, an understated, poignant account of a Jewish marriage broker, his errant daughter, and a wife-seeking young rabbi...
...picture itself is just a wide-screen ("Totalscope") travelogue filmed two years ago in Red China by Italy's globetrotting Count Leonardo Bonzi (Green Magic, Lost Continent). At times the DeLuxe color photography by Pierludovico Pavoni and Alesandro d'Eva is magnificent. (Best scene: a mistily magical sequence in which the fishermen of the Kwei valley, winged like big birds in their bright wet coats of bark, glide out upon the morning waters on their slender rafts and dance them on the current to attract the fish.) But the film as a whole has no shape, makes only...
...invited a High Church bishop for tea. The bishop is like 20 years old, and he brings his mother. Not all the Beats are pleased. Ginsberg: "I'll go in the bathroom and watch television." Corso wonders if the bishop knows about "beer bottles that come in magic candlesticks. Is alligators holy, Bishop? Is everything holy? Are we all in heaven now and don't know about it? Jamambi, jamambi, jamambi, jamac." After that, the plot thins, but it is the flavor that matters. On the floor, walls, ceiling are "toothbrush cockroaches, coffee cockroaches, peanut butter cockroaches...
...made Grandma shudder, but today it brings smiles of delight to millions of U.S. housewives. The remarkable rise of "conven-ience" or processed foods-heralded by the slogans "instant," "ready to cook" and "heat and serve"-has set off a revolution in U.S. eating habits, brought a bit of magic into the U.S. kitchen. It has freed the housewife from long hours at the stove, made her more conscious of sound nutrition, provided her with a happily bewildering variety of foods and delicacies. A few years ago it took the housewife 5½ hours to prepare daily meals...