Word: milieu
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Richardson's account of such figures has to be the most readable description of the avant-garde milieu of 1900s Paris since Roger Shattuck's classic work, The Banquet Years. But they are not there as mere background; their impact on Picasso, their role in the formation of his ideas and imagery, is carefully assessed. One sees, for instance, what Picasso's work got from his "odd couple" friendship with his diametric opposite, the mercurial, spiritually obsessed Jewish homosexual Jacob: it was the vein of mystical imagery, the fascination with arcana, the tarot and the figure of the artist...
...same Shinto ritual might have been helpful at the Kennedy Center in Washington, where tryouts began in August. At that point the show ran almost 3 1/2 hours. Its plot was virtually impenetrable, in part because 85% was sung rather than spoken, in part because in its conspiratorial milieu -- the warrior era of 17th century Japan -- good guys quite often turned into clandestine bad guys, or vice versa. Critics were harsh, but audiences were more forgiving. Thanks to word of mouth, the show averaged nearly $400,000 a week at the box office -- almost, but not quite, enough to cover...
Leave it to the Coen brothers -- the writer-producer-director team who were the film finds of the '80s -- to discover ferocious drama in words, character, atmosphere. Their inspiration for Miller's Crossing was a pair of Dashiell Hammett novels: Red Harvest (which provided the milieu of a corrupt city ruled by warring gangsters) and The Glass Key (which provided the plot of an aging boss and his young adviser involved with the same woman). To this blend the Coens have brought a teeming cast of sharpies, most of them spectacularly, thoughtfully venal. They speak wittily but often...
...novelist and critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger, whose latest book, Europe, Europe, includes a scene in which an American reporter visits Berlin in the year 2006. He finds himself in the midst of an environmental conference being conducted in the traditional Berlin style. "Masked demonstrators from the eco-anarchist milieu clashed with officers of the environmental police. A representative of the chemical industry, who made profuse ritual protestations of humility and reassurance, was shouted down." Going to look at the onetime Berlin Wall, the reporter finds that it is now a nature preserve. "A unique biotope," says an official. "There...
...dark, obsessive, partly despicable and wholly compelling protagonist; a strong supporting cast (Damon Runyon, Ernest Hemingway, Hedy Lamarr); a marvelous milieu (vaudeville in the '20s, New York City cafe society in the '30s, radio in the '40s, television in the '50s); a plot that comes in Gatling-gun bursts; and a resonance that is part parable of American success and part caution. Walter Winchell would make a great movie...