Word: overblown
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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BERNSTEIN'S CASE for Stravinsky is eloquent and convincing. He quotes Theodor Adorno, a dogmatic advocate of Schoenberg who accused Stravinsky of hiding behind an insincere mask of eclecticism. Bernstein defends the neoclassical mask as a reaction to the extreme subjectivity of overblown Romanticism and draws interesting parallels to the poetry of T.S. Eliot. But here, too, his polemic dislike of Schoenberg leads him to inaccuracy and self-contradiction. Having accused the serialists of mechanically turning out music that is "form without content," he now condemns them for discarding the order imposed by diatonicism. Stravinsky's "great save," neoclassicism...
Life of Leonardo da Vinci. An Italian TV crew came to the Crimson a couple of months ago to film a documentary on university politics ten years after the Berkeley Free Speech movement. The crew thrust mikes in editors' faces, banged clapboards shut with overblown bravado, and generally looked like characters from a Keystone-Cops-Meet-C.B. Demille short. All of which made me doubt that this Italian TV documentary on da Vinci's life would be any good. I was wrong. This has so far been an excellent series, and even the dubbing (by suave Ben Gazzara) doesn...
...among the bedrock 25%, such questions do not seem to matter; their view of Nixon remains immovable. Some in this group take their cue from the Administration and consider Watergate a "blip" that has been overblown by a hostile press. Others are more cynical (though they would probably describe their attitude as realistic) and deride their opponents as hypocrites. To them, politics is always dirty, and Nixon's conduct in office only slightly worse than usual, if that. Furthermore, many Nixon backers consider him a man who sees and understands their interests, particularly in areas like school busing, welfare...
Caro's book comes close to being a history of New York from the first decades of the century to the present. If Caro tends to see Robert Moses behind every brick, well, he was there almost always. But Caro's attack on the Moses myths is nearly as overblown, at least in style, as the myths themselves. He writes breathlessly, and sometimes The Power Broker sounds more like a harangue against a political opponent than a well-researched biography...
...youth culture he admires so much, as well as what must have seemed to his a battery of new perceptions about America. But nothing else really new emerges out of Dateline: America other than a few interesting interviews with young people and a few boring ones, all romanticized. overblown and laden with dubious significance by Kremen. There is no cohesive vision of what's happening to the country...