Word: raffish
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...actually happened. In 1894 a fast-moving fire engulfed the Delavan House hotel in Albany, New York. Fifteen people died, mostly kitchen help and chambermaids trapped in top-floor workers' quarters later found to have sealed emergency exits. The second event is pure fiction by the author of such raffish and elegiac novels as Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game and Ironweed. In 1908 Giles Fitzroy, a prominent Albany physician, tracks his wife to a Manhattan hotel, where he finds her in the compromising company of an actress and a playwright named Edward Daugherty. Enraged and humiliated, Fitzroy shoots...
...inevitable: a second, cheaper line. Prada's is called Miu Miu. It costs less than half the regular line ($150 for a top to $750 for a leather jacket) and is aimed at a younger market. The clothes, which were shown this month in New York City, are raffish, designed for the young and slender. The designer treats them as a sort of private joke. "It's about the bad girls I knew at school, the ones I envied," she says. "It's about bad taste--which is part of life today...
...superior goofball plot, raffish cast and zany sex scenes (a critical test for a humorist) make this the funniest of Buckley's books. The style alternates between Saturday Night Live and Raymond Chandler: "A tsunami-sized wave of nausea rolled through him. Nick's eyes went groggily back to Monmaney, who was peering at him without sympathy. Yes, a real killer, this one, looked like he flossed with piano wire...
...seafarer who once brawled with Papa, and Robert Duvall as Walt, a fastidious Cuban barber, now retired. Harris has fun overacting, Duvall has fun underacting, but nobody has any fun with the opposite sex. Frank has a snappish relationship with his landlady, played by Shirley MacLaine, and is too raffish for Piper Laurie, who is excellent as a dignified lady he meets at senior-citizen matinees. Meanwhile Walt moons over a young waitress (Sandra Bullock). Also written by a sprout, Steve Conrad, and directed by Randa Haines (Children of a Lesser God, The Doctor), who specializes in the woes...
...indeed, relished -- the irony ! that his death last week was, as the old show-biz line has it, a shrewd career move. The musical iconoclast, best known for his work with the seminal 1960s rock band the Mothers of Invention, was in many ways the prisoner of his own raffish image: hirsute hippie freak; countercultural sire of prototypical Valley Girl Moon Unit Zappa and her siblings Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva; opinionated crank ("AIDS is a CIA plot"); and First Amendment scourge of Tipper Gore. With his death from prostate cancer, a few days short of his 53rd birthday...