Word: muse
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Whitney's most meaningful cut has to be I Know Him So Well, a power-pop ballad from the Broadway-bound musical Chess, which she sings with her mother Cissy. In the song, a grandmaster's wife and mistress muse about being unable to fulfill his needs for fantasy and security; in this version, mother and daughter sing about a husband-father, and it makes for an electrifying duet. Throughout the album, the range and vocal glamour displayed offer testimony that Cissy's girl has grown up. Whitney marks graduation day for the prom queen of soul...
...perfection in the Autobiography, said that he originally set his ambitions in the light of an already God-perfected world. "Whatever is, is right," he quoted John Dryden; Pope used precisely the same line in "An Essay on Man." Washington, whose presence hovered over the Constitutional Convention like a muse, also advocated moderation: "We ((Americans)) are apt to run from one extreme to another," he wrote John Jay in 1786. As for Madison, the Constitution's principal and most elegant-minded architect, his views were straight Enlightenment dogma. "Why has government been instituted at all?" he asked. "Because the passions...
...jury. Merci, M. Pialat and all your enemies in the Grand Palais. You brought the last-minute thrill of spontaneous animosity to a festival that had nearly suffocated in gentility. Until then, this assembly of 30,000 producers, directors, stars, distributors, critics and other swains of the celluloid muse could find little to cheer and even less to condemn. Oh, sure, you could watch Michael Sarrazin strangle a nude hermaphrodite in the Belgian thriller Mascara. You could cruise the low-rent Film Market and see ads for such films as Assault of the Killer Bimbos, Space Sluts in the Slammer...
...practically impossible to serve the muse without dealing with Mammon. That is what Bernard Berenson learned and accepted early in his long and lucrative association with Joseph Duveen, the enterprising head of an international gallery whose customers included most of the world's leading collectors. Berenson, born in 1865 in the Lithuanian ghetto-village of Butrimonys, emigrated to Boston, attended Harvard and eventually became the expert on Italian Renaissance painting. For three generations, until his death in 1959, he reigned as a kind of aesthetic Pope. From his "Vatican," a Tuscan villa known as I Tatti, he issued monographs, criticism...
...their part, political leaders have courted poets, supported poets, quoted poets. Some have even been poets. Henry VIII, who liked to write verse when he wasn't making life brutish or short for his wives. Chairman Mao, who, when visited by the muse, commanded the largest audience for poetry in history. Poet Leopold Senghor, former President of Senegal. Poet Jose Sarney, current President of Brazil. If political leaders happen not to be poets, they can always seek one's company, so that he may write them into immortality or simply decorate a hard, unlyrical business. John Kennedy had genuine affection...