Word: roc
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Backing up the scientific ranks will be 20,000 amateurs with cardboard-box viewers or aluminized Mylar screens sold at fast-food outlets. (Without such precautions, sun gazers risk damaging their eyes.) Some will even usher in the event at a roc-'n'-roll celebration on an old armed forces base in Rivers, Man. But the music may be dirgelike. Weathermen are predicting only a 77% chance of clear skies over Winnipeg. As for more southerly latitudes, even a clear sky will not be of much help; as one Winnipeg observer puts it, the difference between a total...
...decay are almost universal. The 1,250-room Fontainebleau Hotel-so haughty in its heyday that Comedian Alan King joshed that it charged him $25 a day, not for accommodation but merely to use its name -was sold early this month in bankruptcy court. Next door, the Eden Roc has just emerged from years in receivership. Once it featured entertainers like Harry Belafonte and Wayne Newton; this winter its "headliners" will be its own singing waiters. At least three other hotels are tangled in bankruptcy proceedings; vacant stores dot the island, and even the members of the world...
...second poem, "Two Birds: A Dialogue," is a sarcastic, earthy blast against what Chinese editorials have long called the "goulash Communism" of the Soviet Union. It depicts a conversation between two birds, one a giant roc that soars over the earth, with "the blue sky on its back," and the other a timid sparrow "scared stiff" in his bush. The world is in chaos ("Gunfire licks the heavens,/ Shells pit the earth"), and the sparrow wants to escape to "a jeweled palace in Elfland's hills." The roc replies angrily...
...message is clear. While the sparrow-presumably the Soviet Union -hopes for an easy paradise, the roc -a symbol of China-knows matters can be improved only by a revolution that turns the world "upside down...
Nice and cartoonish (presumably we're still vulnerable, and went to the Thon to feel five again), but something about it was threatening, the way masked figures are at a roc concert where violence and ugliness are very near--painted faces leering as if to say that this gathering is a drug that will alter things so that you won't know who you are or who your friends are or what the world...