Word: offhanded
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...horn was no more a stunt than all his roguish jokiness though. The music flowed from a kind of high spirit, a purposeful passion that the horn symbolized and the silliness deflected. There was nothing slight or offhand about the way he played, or how he lived. Born in South Carolina in 1917, he began to teach himself trombone and trumpet two years after his father -- a bricklayer by trade and a weekend bandleader by calling -- had passed on; before he left his teens he was playing professionally with the Frankie Fairfax band and had got himself his nickname...
That glimpse of Washington, where the powerful Senator William Fulbright redeemed the clownish Arkansas Governor, helped banish ideas of playing jazz in smoky nightclubs. Clinton asked his high school counselor, Edith Irons, what college offered a good program in foreign service. The only one she knew, offhand, was Georgetown, but she would look up others...
...Player is both very good and a quintessential Altman movie -- meaning smart, hip, satirical, charming, ironic but not callow, rich with telling offhand incident. "What's unique about The Player," says Trudeau, "is that he brings all this signature observational detail to a picture that Hollywood completely understands. In many ways it's a very traditional Hollywood movie, but he's given up nothing. That's why people are so astonished." It is, in a word, crypto-conventional, self-consciously including all the obligatory elements of commercial moviemaking -- stars, violence, unclothed women, lockstep plotting -- but messing with them. The really...
...anything could be art so long as it wasn't a painting or sculpture, those luxury items that the galleries peddled to the bourgeoisie. Works were conceived as ideas to be preserved in whatever medium suggested itself -- video, snapshots, the artist's own body -- the more offhand the better...
...months since Johnny Carson became America's most famous lame duck by announcing that he would retire from the Tonight show this year, at the end of his 30th season. Now, as the long-awaited finale draws near, a show that has always depended for its appeal on the offhand, the spontaneous and the ephemeral is acquiring an air of great moment. Hollywood stars are clamoring to be on with Johnny for one last time. Elizabeth Taylor appeared last month for the first time ever, thanking Johnny for "30 years of brilliant entertainment." Regular Tonight visitors too seem less interested...