Word: manically
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...career, Garland made 37 films. Only a handful are memorable and only one, The Wizard of Oz, is a classic. But she gave more than 100 concerts and broadcasts that brought millions of listeners in on her waif length. Eventually her performances also exhibited-as at a sideshow-a manic-depressive grotesque who shrilled off-key and forgot once familiar lyrics. In the last years she attracted throngs of gay and melancholy Garland freaks whose adulation was a form of cruelty. Echoes of the cruelty and the applause that masked it can still be detected in three predatory biographies...
...nervous energy. I am entering my new life, but I am not there yet. Until schedules and organization come, it's all nervous energy." Remi Saunder, a Russian émigré who devotes herself to helping Russian artists resettle in the West, believes that some of this nearly manic activity is inevitable right now. Major performing artists in Russia are treated very well materially but have little training in the use of initiative. Says she: "There you are given food, but not the choice of food." As a man who came West for a choice of choreography, Baryshnikov will...
...However manic the score-keepers of society have become though, there is no reason we should suppose, as Barzun does, that proliferation of information necessarily leads to the sterilization of history. Barzun seeks the victory of historical artist over historical statistician, without considering the possibility that someone might be both. Yet Stephen Thernstrom's heavily statistical studies are as sensitive to the unquantifiable as any previous works on social mobility. Richard Sennett's book on nineteenth-century family life in Chicago (Families Against the City) is as audacious and speculative, though not as wide-ranging, as anything Barzun has written...
...Specifically, Stephen, like Kael, begins his review with a few comments on the theories of schizophrenia expressed by R.D. Laing. Dispersed throughout the article are several particularly unusual phrases used by Kael in her review. One of Stephen's lines reads as follows: "[Gena Rowlands] moves from spasms of manic nervousness to chastened, hurt-animal despair..." Kael's review reads, "Mabel returns, chastened, a fearful hurt-animal look on her face." This is a common enough phrase, were it not followed later in Stephen's review by the Jine, "Mabel waits for the schoolbus to return with her kids, pacing...
Gena Rowlands, who is Cassavetes's wife, dominates this uneven film. Her insanity really is a manifold personality: she moves from spasms of manic nervousness to chastened, hurt-animal despair, her foolish smiles rapidly become agonized searchings for approval. The director's over-long focuses on individual actors and his willingness to let them improvise, which made Husbands so tedious, here allows Rowlands at least to show everything she can do. Despite the prodigious exposure, she can't be gotten used to the way, say Susannah York could, in her portrait of madness in Images...