Word: odes
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...expect their probe to tie up some of the loose connections of the Iran-contra affair. Hull greatly admired former National Security Council Aide Oliver North, the contras' aggressive champion. When North's associate Robert Owen appeared before Congress's Iran-contra committees last spring, he read a treacly ode to the Marine colonel penned by none other than John Hull. The contras gain sustenance, the poem read, from the "knowledge that on this troubled earth there still walk men like Ollie North . . . In our lifetime, you have given us the legend...
Chronicling the life of 1950s teen-idol Ritchie Valens (Lou Diamond Phillips), La Bamba is an ode to the American middle-class dream. The film opens with the Valenzuela family, a group of Mexican immigrants, working as California migrant workers...
Only on "Ahead" and "Over Theirs" does the band achieve any sort of success. The former is a shuffling, sequencer-laden dance tune, built around a piercing guitar riff. Though highly unoriginal, it's the record's only memorable tune. "Over Theirs" is a dirge-like ode to obscurity, in which singer Newman chortles about boundaries just out of sight, backed by a melodic guitar line and atmospheric keyboards. Although the band's art-school derision makes you cringe, the song achieves a sort of synthetic beauty despite itself...
Every character, great or small (and truth to tell, they're all small), has the juice of comic originality in him. In jail with Hi, one convict strums Beethoven's Ode to Joy on the old banjo. The bounty hunter -- he's real, not just a Hi dream -- is a demon road warrior, a warthog from hell who grenades rabbits and torches roadside flowers, can catch flies between his filthy fingers, and has a secret tattoo of Woody Woodpecker on his left pectoral. Gale and Evelle (lots of gender-bent names in this picture) lecture Ed on the importance...
...loveliest, most self-revealing story appears near the end. Birds of a Feather is an ode to the woodcock, that plucky, reclusive little game bird of the uplands. Preparatory to a hunt in upstate New York, Humphrey reads up on the bird. "He gets curiouser and curiouser. His brain is upside down. His ears are in front of his nose . . . Like the woodcock, I too am an odd bird; I know I am, and I would change if I could, because being odd is uncomfortable, but, no more than the woodcock can, I can't, not anymore...