Word: pocus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...magic formula, they can, without working, acquire all the wealth and possessions that seem concentrated in the white world. Officials are forever trying to explain how the world uses labor, capital and raw materials to acquire its "cargo," but that is all so much hocus-pocus to the tribesmen. As Sydney University Anthropologist Peter Lawrence notes, "They can't conceive of a factory where goods are manufactured. They believe that everything has a deity who has to be contacted through ritual," and who only then will deliver the cargo...
People down at City Hall, he continued, talk about the problem all the time, but it's all "only razzle-dazzle and hocus-pocus. I want to do something, " he said...
Another musical, Jimmy, profiles the last really Fun Mayor of Fun City, Jimmy Walker. Broadway's unceasing penchant for self-celebration will provide a whole clutch of musicals, among them Hocus-Pocus (Harry Houdini) and W.C. (Fields could have thought of a better title). The Girls Upstairs is a tale of Ziegfeld Girls who have passed their prime, and Shubert Alley is about the three brothers who gave Broadway some of its more pungent history...
...opera worth discussing has been composed." On the Paris Opera: "Full of dust and dung." On the French musical community, which he left in 1959 to settle in Germany: "There is more stupidity there than anywhere else." On the verbiage of conductors who talk too much: "Sheer hocus-pocus...
Visually, the Burton Faustus is a darkling carnival of skeletons, candles, caves and necromancy, tricked out with such cinematic hocus-pocus as action shots montaged into a skull's eye sock et and heartbeats lub-dubbed onto the sound track. There is even a bit of bor rowing here too: a film clip of the magnificent charge of the French knights at Agincourt from Olivier's Henry V inexplicably turns up, and it is easily the best thing in the movie...