Word: quaintness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Like a Pharaoh's tomb, the stage is stocked with the relics of a bygone life: a clutter of armoires and grandfather clocks, quaint archaic radios and phonographs, fringed lampshades and a golden harp. A man in a policeman's uniform slowly enters the attic room and sniffs the dust of decades. He walks over to the harp and plucks at a string. It is slack, jangled and flat-an omen of the theatrical evening to come...
...orchestra, which merged in 1928 with the rival New York Symphony and became the Philharmonic-Symphony Society, has doubled from the original 53 players, to 106. What was once a daring program, with its mixture of orchestral works, chamber music and arias, now seemed merely quaint. The razzle-dazzle of Kalliwoda's Overture in D Minor sounded tame to ears familiar with Wagner, Mahler and The Rite of Spring...
Ustinov has chosen to view hippiedom as the social dawn of a New Jerusalem. A very pukka Sahib general (played with quaint and artful foxiness by Anthony Quayle) comes home from liquidating the white man's bumbling in Malaysia, only to find that his son and daughter have become neoprimitive natives of swinging England. His daughter (Margaret Linn) is complacently pregnant-by whom, she cannot be sure. His bearded guitar-laden son (Sam Waterston) looks "like a leftover from the Last Supper," and his so-called mistress is a breastless, hipless, bass-voiced androgyne. Ultimately, the general goes...
...believes in those things anymore? We know the delights of the sexual relationship. . . . Nowadays if you want to f---somebody, you do, if he or she is willing. You just do it for whatever there can be for both of you. This is why The Scarlet Letter is so quaint to us--all that agitation about fornication...
Kitchen Realism. Finally, Jonas decides that all of these relationships are a barrier "separating the two halves of his life." To become a whole man on his own terms he enlists in the army. The move may seem rather quaint to some readers today-but Jonas says that to end his adolescence, he must break with his narrow past and find the courage to fight for his own future...