Word: mythical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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COMPLEXITY AND TECHNICAL ability are the only way you can get away with performing these old tunes, because half the power of a Hank Williams song is mythic: the vision of a train whistle America that's gone; Bob Wills's radio shows in the thirties with chorus girls swaying in cowboy skirts; liquor-riddled voices straining on old records. To make up for this, the simplicity has got to go, replaced by five instruments doing interesting things all at once. Here it's an electric fiddle, pedal steel, lead guitar, bass, banjo, and drums, and they all lend...
...unicorn cycles, praise is an impertinence. They vary in conceptual density. The Cluny Lady with the Unicorn set is a relatively straightforward metaphor of the five senses, so that the mythic beast gazes at itself in a mirror to signify Sight. By contrast, the Cloisters' unicorn hunt is a highly complicated and frequently obscure allegory of the passion of Christ, mixed with references to courtly and profane love. But in each, a way of seeing reality that was both freshly direct and symbolic is embedded in a matrix of almost unbelievable formal beauty. Detail by detail, this...
...world is dangerously imperfect. There are no doctors, and so Comte dies of routine appendicitis. He becomes an object of mythic veneration, a Mao Tse-tung of the new age. In a post script - one has seen it coming a hun dred pages away - a successor notes that his fellow survivors have voted "that practical research into the manufacture of .36 rifle bullets should be instituted immediately and given top priority." And so on. But post-apocalypse society is fun while it lasts...
...Benchley's fictional conceit that a Great White Shark of mythic size and ferocity has veered out of its normal deepwater territory and begun to pot-hunt off the swimming beach at Amity, L.I. The creature kills a young woman who is swimming alone at night. When bits of her body wash ashore the next morning, there is no mistaking what has happened, but the town fathers persuade Police Chief Martin Brody not to close the beaches. After all, it is the beginning of the tourist season, rentals are lag ging anyway, and with luck the thing will rumble...
...wintry tragedy of its first part to the vernal romance of its second. Ripping apart the links of that Great Chain of Being with disease and death in the first acts, the play reassembles them with health and life in the last ones. The Loeb Ex version of this mythic renewal breathes life, but not robust good health...