Word: raffishly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...multitudinous winners made Sunday night's endless Emmy Awards show even longer by thanking everyone except passersby. But they omitted gratitude to two raffish institutions that have boosted nearly every career in Tinseltown: the entertainment industry's West Coast-based daily newspapers, Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. Vaunting oneself in "the trades"* is second nature throughout Hollywood. Says one major studio executive: "Ours is a business of hype." Scarcely a day goes by without an ad, a story or a skillfully planted gossip item about an overnight success, an out-of-town comeback, an agent...
...subjects with an exacting realism and directness, to drive the mincing preciosity of late mannerism out of art-such were the aims of French Caravaggisti like Valentin de Boulogne (1591-1632), whose Fortune Teller raises narrative to a pitch of ironic theater worthy of Caravaggio himself. It is a raffish image of tavern survival: the old circular comedy, as the gypsy woman bilks a credulous soldier while a man steals her chicken and a little girl lifts the thief's purse...
Readers who enjoyed John Gregory Dunne's True Confessions (1977) know the author as a connoisseur of the raffish, the macabre and the sleazy. They also know how deftly Dunne snatches sentiment from the jaws of cynicism, and how he can cut a plot line with fine malice. But in his new novel, Dutch Shea, Jr., sentiment is savagely chewed and the free association of memory is substituted for plot...
...earlier and in many ways more pleasant France. No Englishman could show more excitement over a cricket match than the average sports-loving American, and last week's beginning of the World Cricket Series was a national ritual for most Americans. Louisiana, in turn, has retained that raffish, somewhat off-center charm we associate with all things French: good food, good conversation and a fine contempt for conventional morals. It has also retained some unfortunate reminders of its frontier heritage. Unlike America, where handguns are outlawed, Louisiana allows every ten-year-old a six-shooter. No one is safe...
...most raffish and fantastic crew that I have met yet and even I-excessively broadminded as I am-feel somewhat shocked by the goings-on." That was how Tennessee Williams described his Provincetown acquaintances in a letter to his friend, Novelist Donald Windham, in the summer of 1940. Now the playwright has returned to that scene. But somehow that raffish and fantastic crew has fled his memory, and the characters on the stage of Manhattan's Jean Cocteau Repertory would not shock a novitiate...