Word: portraits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Despite the teen trappings, a sense of mission infuses Sarafina!, a portrait of repression and rebellion at a Soweto high school. During "notes," a 15- minute discussion of finer points in the performance, the kids jump up to argue with the assistant director, Mali Hlatshwayo, in rapid-fire Zulu. He thumps his chest. "Emotion," explains one of the cast. At the stage door, starstruck American youngsters gather for autographs, but the kids of Sarafina! don't preen like the show horses of your average chorus line. The girls are mostly hefty. The boys tend toward skinny. Plain faces, remarkably ordinary...
...major talent for self-publicizing. Capote talked endlessly about "the difference between very good writing and true art" and left no doubt which he was serving up. To a considerable extent he was taken at his own estimation, though a large part of his writing (his 1957 New Yorker portrait of Marlon Brando is an overpraised example) was nothing more than good, smooth journalism. His pretense that the powerful and meticulously written In Cold Blood was something to be called a nonfiction novel demeaned both forms...
...even more striking feature of the Olympus is its "auto zooming portrait mode." The user simply selects the proper setting on the camera's control panel, points and clicks. The lens will zoom in or out to ensure that the subject's head and shoulders are well framed in the viewfinder. "If you want to take portraits of people at a party," says David Willard, a senior vice president at Olympus, "the camera will automatically zoom to give you same- size shots of everyone...
...evenings. Chaplin squatting grey and nude, atop his chiffonier, swinging his thyroid around his head by his bamboo cane, like a dead rat. Oona in an aquamarine gown, applauding madly from the bathroom." The banned Hamilton version: "At one point in a letter to Burnett ((Salinger)) provides a pen portrait of the Happy Hour Chez Chaplin: the comedian, ancient and unclothed, is brandishing his walking stick -- attached to the stick, and horribly resembling a lifeless rodent, is one of Chaplin's vital organs. Oona claps her hands in appreciation...
...implication was that For the Record was unique in its venom and singular in its criticism. Yet apart from its astrological revelations and acid-limned portrait of the First Lady, it is not so much in a class by itself as the latest addition to a long, groaning shelf. Deaver. Haig. Stockman. Speakes. Regan. Even two Reagan children, Patti and Michael, have written slap-and-yell books about the First Family. And more are on the way. Helene von Damm, once Reagan's personal assistant and later Ambassador to Austria, has reportedly penned something less than a valentine...