Word: milieu
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...battle of Kathy is also complicated by her race; black singers such as Battle, Leontyne Price and Jessye Norman have had to make their way -- determinedly, often courageously -- in an overwhelmingly white milieu. Yet so unpopular has Battle become that she is often openly derided with the crudest kind of racial epithets -- backstage at the Met she is known as the "U.N.," or "uppity nigger" -- and speculations about her sanity are widespread. "She's young, pretty, very talented and very, very screwed up," says a Met insider. "I think she's sick, actually, but I couldn't tell...
...kind of idealized, fake-primitive images of blacks -- the Noble Negroes in Art Deco drag -- that others tended to produce as an antidote to the vile stereotypes with which white popular art had flooded the culture since Reconstruction. Nevertheless, he gained self-confidence from the Harlem cultural milieu -- in particular, from the art critic Alain Locke, a Harvard- trained aesthete who believed strongly in the possibility of an art created by blacks that could speak explicitly to the African-American community and still embody the values of modernism. Or, in Locke's words: "There is in truly great...
...times are surreal enough now; we can appreciate Fellini as a prophet and documentarian of every cultural excess of the late 20th century. There's no question that Fellini was in part satirizing his milieu. But because he was incapable of a stillborn frame of film, his pictures celebrate what they criticize; they amount to a cautionary blueprint for survival in the atomic age. If you've been very lucky or very naughty, then life for you is like a Fellini movie...
Sidhwa attempts to imbue Feroza's departure from Pakistan with some type of urgency: Feroza finds her mother's sleeveless blouse risque, so her parents decide that Feroza needs to be sent away to stem her growing conservativism, a conservatism in tandem with the milieu of the newly imposed military regime in Pakistan. But this flimsy pretense doesn't convince us that Feroza's jaunt in the U.S. is politically motivated. Sidhwa's juxta-positions of late 70s Pakistani politics with Feroza's self-indulgent trip are discovered early on in the book for what they are: forced, gratuitous...
While it may not offer the definitive statement on O'Hara's poetry, City Poet remains an lively presentation of a feverishly lived life. Gooch's intoxicating re-creation of O'Hara's milieu helps unlock some of the more insular references in his work (O'Hara once remarked to a friend on the small size of his audience: "You could fit the people I write for into your john all at the same time without raising an eyebrow"). Although O'Hara's poems to friends create an intimacy in which the reader can often share, Gooch's book adds...