Word: navarro
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Noise imitation is an art generously described as culturally insignificant, and its practitioners are historically tenants of the ghetto reserved for Swiss bell-ringing acts and families who come onstage to play Jealousy on paper-covered combs. But Lucho Navarro, a Chilean who gave up aspirations for the quiet life of an electrical engineer to devote himself to noisemaking, is such a master of the art that his wordless vocabulary has become a hilarious Esperanto; by imitating the sound of nearly everything, Navarro reminds his listeners that the world is indeed full of sound and fury. Coming from...
...Manhattan's Village Gate cabaret, Navarro announces (in Spanish and infant English) that the great liner is setting sail from New York-"ba-hoooooo." Then Spain and 10,000 oles as the matador enters the corrida. A veronica ("shwuss") and the bull flies past ("bohr-uhm, bohr-uhm"). Another 10,000 oles. With only a word here and there, Navarro moves on to England for the Queen's birthday and produces an affair of state: troops marching, planes swooping close by them (the sound of both at once), rifle fire, drums, bagpipes, bugles, hoofbeats, helicopters...
...between times, Navarro turns dials on imaginary television sets (gunfire everywhere), short-wave sets (static and screams), moves in on an auto race at Indianapolis (skid, crash, silence-then the thin crackle of flame...
Novelist-Playwright Longstreet, 51 (The Pedlocks, High Button Shoes), was a youthful art student in Paris, but this hardly qualifies him to write about the titan of the century. The morning meditations and night thoughts attributed to Picasso (called Julio Navarro in the book) are the cliches of art; his views on life and love are similarly copybook. And the speeches put in Picasso's mouth ("Balbac, I've got it! A whole new approach to painting!") often make him sound like a U.S. adman in the throes of a new toothpaste campaign...
...Batista unwittingly gave Castro his biggest boost: a brutal counter-terrorism campaign that drove thousands of Cubans from neutrality to opposition. Irresponsible police thugs in Havana blunderingly murdered Pelayo Cuervo Navarro, a respected, nonviolent leader of the anti-Batista Orthodox Party ("About like killing Lyndon Johnson," say the rebels). A 15-year-old boy, suspected of bomb tossing, was castrated in Santiago and shipped home dead to his mother. When Rebel Frank Pais, a young schoolteacher, was shot by cops in Santiago, 80,000 Cubans marched to his funeral and closed down the town for seven days with a general...