Word: magical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Boston have come close to defying that unbreakable rule. They have produced a building that heats itself without a furnace or conventional fuel and remains warm even during such blustery periods as the recent cold spell, when Boston temperatures plunged to 0°F. The building performs this scientific magic by a cunning engineering stratagem: it recaptures the waste heat of its own machinery, everything from computers to coffeemakers, as well as of the 2,000 people who will eventually work inside...
Considering that most of the movie takes place in a stygian cave, The Keep looks gorgeous. Slow motion and pixilation enhance the spooky mood; a telephoto lens turns the castle into a pointillist magic mountain. It is cinematic balm when a fantasy movie pays informed tribute to the decorative arts. It is also, most likely, box-office poison...
Pastels and magic are the main components of The Wreck of the Zephyr, written and illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg (Houghton Mifflin; $14.95). A small sailboat sits wrecked at the edge of a cliff. How did it get up there? An old salt describes the journey to a place where boats glide above the water like seagulls. Van Allsburg's dark, hypnotic illustrations follow the craft through massed clouds and starry evenings, until it crashes to earth with the surprise of a joke and the power of a folk tale...
...term came to refer to the medieval Moorish practice of training mounted swordsmen on wooden horses attached to circling beams. In The Carousel Animal (Zephyr; 127 pages; $19.95) Fraley, an Oakland, Calif, restorer of antique merry-go-round animals, closes the distance between this forgotten martial art and the magic of the amusement park. Gary Sinick's photographs of stallions frozen in mid-prance, oversize rabbits, frogs and chickens reveal the wealth of detail and coloration that distinguished the finest carousel craftsmen of the U.S. and Europe. The form gave wide latitude to the imagination. English Carver C.J. Spooner...
...have tricks in my pockets. I have things up my sleeve." With these first words from The Glass Menagerie, his Broadway debut in 1945, Tennessee Williams announced his dramatic strategies and asserted his mastery of verbal magic. To the American theater Williams lent a firefly glow through which audiences could see into the dissolving past, into the long nights of desire and failure. For the next 35 years, directors took their cue from Williams' own lazy flights of self-destruction, from his wispy-wise, Percy Dovetonsils voice, and launched productions of his plays on gossamer wings toward the aerie...