Word: ritualism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...revolutionary songs. On July 25, the eve of the anniversary of the revolution, a boisterous nightclub hushed to a reverential silence as a popular singer began the national anthem. The audience displayed only rapt attention and, a moment later, spirited participation. To them, this obviously was not an empty ritual...
Still, eliminating the ritual will be difficult even with the best of will. Two years ago, former HEW Secretary Joseph Califano put out a tough warning against an eleventh-hour spree. Later studies showed that 77% of Califano's printing budget for his own Office of the Secretary was spent in, yes, September...
With the Astros, Joe Niekro performs a superstitious pitching-day ritual that is bizarre even by baseball standards. Decked out in the same Levi's and black-and-white shirt, he stops on his way to the park for a cup of coffee with a friend. He insists on draping a towel around the neck of Pitching Coach Mel Wright. And then, when his team is at bat, he sits on the same towel on the same spot in the dugout...
...neglect of the obvious to write about America without mentioning Tocqueville, or Africa without a nod to Conrad. Those authors are not only fixed points to steer by but fetishes that protect a writer from foundering in swamps of detail. Edward Hoagland does not get around to his ritual reference until page 91 of African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan: "Far from learning something new about the black-white torque that is such a misery in America, here I was freer of it. But the other reason why I had come to Africa, instead of to another southern continent...
...light show with a more bizarre finale. Coppola, while creating progressively weirder war scenes, runs dry before he reaches his crucial imaginative leap: Kurtz's fastidiously designed compound looks as tame as a set in an oldtime jungle horror movie. His murder, which is archly intercut with the ritual slaughter of a carabao, is the film's only poorly shot death scene. Apocalypse Now's much talked-about discarded ending - another air raid - would not have illuminated this murk...