Word: protean
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...songwriter should be able to maintain a consistency of style and feeling is not unusual, but in a solo album the establishment of such an identity too often comes at the expense of variety. Fortunately Cale is a complex man, and he has plotted Violence with a subtlety and protean vigor that overwhelms the threat of monotony. If Cale can be called a genius, it is because he achieves in a solo album the multiple development and reinforcement of feeling usually attributed to the best albums by groups...
Quackser is an urban savage who prefers shoveling horse manure from the streets of Dublin and spreading it on ladies' flowers to working in the foundry with his father. Without Wilder's protean talents, the film could have been absurd: an upper-middle-class American girl studying at Trinity College (Margot Kidder) nearly runs Quackser over in an MG but winds up taking him to her farewell dance and ultimately to bed. Wilder makes the affair believable by investing his role with an appealing integrity as well as sexual overtones; he himself added two scenes early...
...Protean as the President's efforts have been, they have not been altogether convincing. Nixon called the state and territorial Governors to the White House to talk about "current matters before us regarding both foreign and domestic matters." There was no discussion about controlling National Guard trigger fingers; Nixon defended his Cambodian strategy at length. He and Henry Kissinger also chatted informally with Governors Robert McNair of South Carolina, John Love of Colorado, and John Dempsey of Connecticut. On short notice, Nixon dropped in on a meeting of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. executive council, a body that has always been...
...Conant's lack of total candor, perhaps the natural result of Yankee reticence. Whether he is describing a faculty revolt in the late 1930s (over tenure and promotion) or his disgruntlement with John Foster Dulles 25 years later, Conant tantalizes more than he satisfies. Perhaps, too, in his protean lifetime Conant commissioned and read too many committee reports for the good of his own prose...
...plays no one works. Great drama consists mostly of people fighting, hating, making love (licit and illicit), living in a family, being frightened, being bored, reminiscing about the past, wallowing in self-pity, making jokes, mourning, drinking, talking and dying. Because it contains almost all of these things, the protean stuff of life, The Three Sisters is eternally compelling theater...