Word: primally
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...virtuosity performed by the Grateful Dead drummer and a super group of percussionists from Nigeria, Brazil and India. Planet Drum, which has been No. 1 on the Billboard World Music chart for the past nine weeks, is a rollicking time machine, at once archaic and up-to-the-second, primal and technologically smart. In songs like Udu Chant, Temple Caves and Dance of the Hunter's Fire, the players coax a torrent of tattoos and flowing rhythms from a battery of drums, synthesizers, Chinese cymbals, rattles and even Mexican donkey jaws...
...consider the Kennedys themselves. Inevitably the darker, carnivalesque vision of America that has emerged in the wake of post-assassination investigations has not exempted them. Curiously, otherwise skeptical assassination buffs are among the last misty-eyed believers in Camelot. They still hold to the primal scenario sketched in Oliver Stone's JFK: a Galahad- like John Kennedy gallantly battling the sinister right-wing military- industrial complex to bring the troops home, ban the Bomb and ensure racial equality on the home front -- a Kennedy killed because he was just too good to live...
...emerges a lopsided triangle: the strong man and two people independent enough to survive him. Billy had first caught Dutch's attention when he juggled four balls on a railroad overpass. But he and Drew are both jugglers, really, of other people's emotions -- even those of Dutch, whose primal whims toward these two outsiders are to adopt one and have the other killed...
...half of Jacques Rivette's four-hour La Belle Noiseuse. The phrase is loosely translated as "the beautiful nut case," but Frenhofer, not Marianne, is the genial lunatic: a man of the world who is a mad monk for his art. In his atelier the two act out a primal ritual of man appraising, adoring, subjugating and re-creating woman. This glamorous film, which won second prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival and deserved even better, can be taken as a commentary on the creation of anybody's art: hard work that is its own reward. Its mind...
Americans in the future may enjoy replaying the fiasco of the Thomas confirmation hearings: primal, defining national theater. The drama had layers -- legal, political, cultural, racial, ethical, sexual. The hearings were a bad moment for middle-aged white men. The Senate Judiciary Committee sat arrayed in its Caucasian glory, like Muppets of Bomfog and Claghorn, each Senator more confused and senescent and miserable and lost to pomposity than the last -- a row of flushed egos that said goodbye to dignity and intelligence sometime during the Eisenhower years...