Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...scarcely gone or forgotten. Last week in Washington, Richard Nixon, 70, Gerald Ford, 69, and Jimmy Carter, 58 (another man forced into retirement by Reagan), gathered to salute Rickover, under whom they had all technically served as lower-ranking naval officers. Nixon rumbled through Happy Birthday on the piano (strange, considering it was no one's birthday), Carter saluted the admiral's influence on him as "second only to my father," and Ford, perhaps wistfully, called Rickover "a man who could hold an office far, far longer than...
...knows what he is. "I'm a rompin', stompin', piano-playin' son of a bitch. A mean son of a bitch. But a great son of a bitch." Here's to you, then, Jerry Lee Lewis, unreconstructed rocker and mean-mouthed, sweet-souled Louisiana country singer. A new twelve-album set, Jerry Lee Lewis: The Sun Years, covers the glory years from 1956 to 1963 and is assembled with the kind of reverence and archival zeal usually reserved for the cantatas of a J.S. Bach. The collection, sold in this country for under...
...hallmark of the original Sting was its ragtime piano theme "The Entertainer," which sums up the irresistible devil-may-care attitude Newman and Redford brought to life. Though unbelievably canny, the characters in the original seemed extremely vulnerable; the risks they were taking appeared real. The sequel contains a multitude of tricks, but lacks the force to raise any of them to such reality. The background music for Sting II is appropriately the famous piano rag--mutilated in an adaptation...
...presented in a manner so stylized that mere vestiges of reality remain. It drifts further: Battalions of ghost-like children in night-gowns prance beneath the ancestral portraits of the venerable Ponticelli apartment. A frosty window frames a child, wild-eyed, endlessly hammering discords out of a tinny piano...
Some scenes have the bizarre beauty of surrealist painting, and all are skillfully crafted. The final glimpse, in which the 'symbolic children,' donning bowler hats and other adult clothes prance to a sentimental tune played on the familiar piano, haunts as a danse macabre. But even if a metaphor superimposed upon another should create an interesting metaphor for the ever-central void, the concept cannot sustain interest for all that long. Whatever its merits, the piece is likelier to clicit a perturbed yawn than a leap of any sort...