Word: proteans
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...should warn you when I'm not well," sings Jeff Tweedy midway through Sky Blue Sky, the sixth studio album by Wilco, the protean band Tweedy has fronted for a decade. Over the years, Tweedy's brooding lyrics--fueled by battles with anxiety and addiction--have often overshadowed the spare beauty of his songwriting. But Sky Blue Sky is bright and affecting, mixing doses of '70s soul on tracks like Side with Seeds and Hate It Here with the sun-drenched guitar rock of Impossibly Germany and What Light, on which Tweedy advises, "It's alright to be frightened...
...after reading it, I still have difficulty defining the nebulous and protean genre, which includes legal thrillers, spy thrillers, and action-adventures, and traces its lineage to a variety of authors including Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Conrad, and Graham Greene...
...live-action animated film. That is, Linklater first shot scenes with his star cast of actors - including Keanu Reeves (as Arctor/Fred), Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder - and then had artists trace over the images, adding such fantasy elements as bugs crawling over one druggie and a protean "scramble suit," worn by Fred to disguise his identity (whatever that is). At times a face is given a kind of Jell-O elasticity. Linklater first used this process, called rotoscoping, five years ago in Waking Life. It's appropriate to the subject, and is used artfully, though with...
...perhaps to a greater extent than in his previous collections, Saunders often borrows from the language and stock characters of mass-market advertising. In the title story, for instance, the disembodied “voiceover” intones its way into scene after scene. It proves protean as it is omniscient. One minute, it is reassuring a man whose faithless girlfriend has been snatched away from him by a giant, apparently biped, Twinkie on-the-run, “not to worry, there’s more than enough sweetness to go around.” The next...
Risk-taking seniors making daring mental leaps? That's not the stereotype. Indeed, until quite recently most researchers believed the human brain followed a fairly predictable developmental arc. It started out protean, gained shape and intellectual muscle as it matured, and reached its peak of power and nimbleness by age 40. After that, the brain began a slow decline, clouding up little by little until, by age 60 or 70, it had lost much of its ability to retain new information and was fumbling with what it had. But that was all right because late-life crankiness had by then...