Word: operas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Anything for Billy does for the gunfighter what Lonesome Dove did for the trail-driving cowboy: re-creates a brief but indelible period as horse-opera bouffe. But the Billy book does something more. Through Ben Sippy, dime novelist and later a scenarist for western movies, McMurtry confects a folklore about the making of folklore. By adding his special glow to long- forgotten pulp fiction and the advent of a machine that projects our fantasies, he answers the fundamental question, Why would a nation that strongly believed in its manifest destiny enshrine in its legends a nihilistic punk...
BOOKS: The legend of Billy the Kid as horse- opera bouffe...
With a madwoman--who may not really be crazy, though everyone tells her she is--a conniving old woman who screams "Oedipus" with every word to the squabbling heirs, Suddenly sounds like a soap opera set in Rappacini's garden. There's even an implied castration...
...there is some method in this benign musical madness, that should come as no surprise from a singer who had written five plays by the age of 15. Born in New York City, where his father Robert helped break the color bar at the Metropolitan Opera by singing a major role in Aida in 1955, McFerrin grew up mainly in Los Angeles "in what they now call a 'dysfunctional family,' " he says. "I didn't get what I needed from my parents. They were busy dealing with their own pain." McFerrin started studying music theory at six and learned from...
...country where the private lives of public figures are veiled in mystery, Ott dares to ask questions that others only think about. What salaries do Soviet athletes earn? What sort of family life does an opera singer have? His guests may balk at the questions or try to evade them, but every honest answer is a small victory for openness. Says Ott: "I am sometimes accused of being too philistine in my approach. But I think such questions are exactly what viewers find interesting. Families, apartments and salaries are the only points where their lives touch and overlap with celebrities...