Word: protean
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Leave it to Benjamin Franklin, that protean spinner of projects, to publish the first foreign-language newspaper in America. The year was 1732; the paper, called the Philadelphia Zeitung, was aimed at the city's burgeoning German population. As the decades rolled by, the growth and variety of the immigrant press mirrored the flow of the immigrants themselves. By the early 1900s, when the boatloads of newcomers reached their peak, some 1,300 foreign- language newspapers and magazines were being published in the U.S. New York City alone boasted a cacophony of 32 dailies, including ten in German, five...
Oral history has long been recognized as a legitimate and fertile form. But what about oral biography? Well, when it concerns Norman Mailer, the enduring enfant terrible, perpetual showman, seigneurial collector of wives and children, and protean writer, it amounts to a genre all by itself. Journalist Peter Manso sets out the lengthy musings of friends and enemies, editors and critics--almost anyone who has anything significant to say and some who do not--including Mailer's overprotective mother ("Running for mayor (of New York) was a mistake, and I told him, 'You don't understand all the spiteful things...
...work on its way toward being one." But one of the salutary developments in recent years is the expanding definition of opera to include musical theater, a category that now encompasses everything from La Boheme to Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George. Fueled by Bernstein's protean musical gifts, West Side Story was one of the opening salvos in a revolution that invigorated a tiring genre...
...protean John Malkovich is Al Rockoff, a gonzo Associated Press photographer. The craziest of all the leftover journalists, he is also the most aware of the real situation. In the tensest scene of the movie, Rockoff and a British friend try to doctor a British passport to allow Pran to escape. Their last minute failure is ironic enough to wrench a theater-ful of popcorn-filled guts...
...Edward's comic characters are sleeped in obsession: the only idea in the head of Inspector Clousean, the prototypical Edwards character, was his devotion to his duty. The problem with this theme in Edwards's work is that his characters can get mighty boring mighty fast. Even the protean Peter Sellers could not save the Panther films from a sense of mechanical flatness that was a reflection of the monotony of the protagonist's character. Clouseau was an original idiot, nothing more. When Sellers played a truly vacuous character in Hal Ashby's Being There, he could give the film...