Word: overtness
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Guitarist Jimmy Page, 54, and vocalist Robert Plant, 49, both former members of the '70s megagroup Led Zeppelin, seem to amuse each other constantly. It's nothing verbal, nothing too overt--nonetheless, when you meet them, there always seems to be a smile playing about their lips as if they were both in on a secret joke. The pair's new CD, Walking into Clarksdale--their first full album of newly written collaborative material since Led Zeppelin first broke up in 1980--has a similar vibe. When you hear Plant's aching vocals paired once again with Page's tough...
...some reason, however, those beautiful Playboy women haven't been knocking on my door, so I've become discouraged with my old aesthetic. I feel it's time to move on--to change styles. I think I'll go for something less sleazy and overt, maybe something more natural. In any case, interior design requires hard work and risk taking. Only yesterday I found out that my superintendent wants to charge me $75 just for using tape on my walls. I wonder what he'll say when he finds out I'm thinking of painting clouds on the ceiling...
What was missing, in short, was a battleground, a field of overt tension in which mass emotions might rise to an occasion. Instead, there was the presence of absence, which eats at the mind quietly and which can, when touched by one last straw, incite a riot. It may be that the death of Diana came simply as one loss and absence too many. Whatever else Diana was in the world, she effected a lovely presence, and who could not weep for the loss of that? Gone, Diana seemed to emblemize the word; she was everything gone. One grief stood...
Holub is less successful when he turns his hand to overt political commentary. The heading of the book's second section, "Trouble on Spaceship Earth," sounds like the title of a Discovery Channel special, and the subject matter is suspiciously similar. When Holub dispenses unqualified environmental advice and chastises trendy scientific theorists, his otherwise sparkling essays acquire the atmosphere of soapbox sermons. The otherwise pedestrian chapter is punctuated by a few gems, such as "What the Nose Knows," a Proustian reverie on the atavistic power of scent, and the powerful "Shedding Life," which might have been titled "Killing a Muskrat...
Hence the deliberate bumping of the story to 1910 (the novel was first published in 1902), to accentuate the closeness to present-day society of this transitory period of modernization, down to the street lights, elevators, subways and evening gowns. Hence also, perhaps, the film's overt eroticism, which constitutes the boldest and most potentially controversial reworking of the text. In James, the eroticism is so finely distilled that it breaks through to the surface only fleetingly, and then restricted almost entirely to the violence of suggestion and language rather than action. Softley's contemporized approach works because...