Word: magical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...broken off to join a group of Sicilan-American soldiers she believes are in the area, is killed by the enemy. As she dies, she imagines the young German soldier bending over her to be a member of her own clan, beckoning her to a mythical Brooklyn with the magic snow of a Statue of Liberty souvenir. And when Cecelia finally encounters the first real American soldiers, she cannot speak with them, so they make her balloons out of their supply of condoms to carry back to the group as a beacon of hope...
...fascinating, if familiar, process. When songs have that magic in them, they take on strange powers of recall. Commenting on a Noel Coward song, a character in Coward's Private Lives remarks: "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is." Songs eerily consolidate the memory, making obscure chemical connections in the brain. They conjure up moments out of time. They reconstitute things long gone, to the point that smells and images and a precise forgotten ache of the heart return hauntingly for a moment. The dramatization that occurs in the mind is intimate and utterly private. One has only to hear...
...romantic fallacy may be hidden in such prejudices. What the music stirs in the mind need not be mere sentimentality. The evocative magic worked by songs is essentially mysterious. It doubtless has some thing to do with the organization of the brain. The musical faculty resides chiefly in the right hemisphere, along with the emotions, the nonlogical, intuitive powers of the mind. Music cohabits in the brain with myth. Says Howard Gardner, a research psychologist at Harvard: "Music mirrors the structure and the range of our emotions. It has the same kind of flow as our emotional life." What...
...Merlin behind the magic is Gillian Armstrong, the young Australian director who established a reputation for intelligent, graceful and feminist filmmaking with her critically acclaimed debut My Brilliant Carter. That film formed the foundation of the now-thriving Australian movie industry, along with Breaker Morant, Gallipoli and Picnic at Hanging Rock...
...swastikas, drawn in magic marker, are the second such display of anti-Semitism at the Law School this year, and Mirchin said yesterday that he is upset. "I feel that a lot of the inhibitions about being insensitive to Jews that existed for a long time after World War II no longer exist," he said, adding. "In a certain way, anti-Semitism is okay...