Word: seemly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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American bands don't seem to have the staying power of the English. Of the great American bands of the 1960s, only the Grateful Dead remain, and they're rapidly fading into an overproduced haze of disco in their studio albums. Oddly, it's Neil Young--the most inconsistent artist around, hopping from drunken, off-key singing on one album to sugar-coated acoustic pap on another--who has brought out one of his best albums, more than a decade and a half into his career...
Wedekind was undeniably an influence on Brecht, who has the same disdain for interior logic, presents characters as symbols, and portrays a similarly seamy and exploitative world. But Wedekind's people lack the earthiness of Brecht's; their passions seem forced and silly. Brecht managed to create recognizable, if exaggerated, people. But Wedekind's characters are pale and disembodied ghosts. This failure flaws the play and riddles it with inconsistencies that make the characters hard to portray, the play hard to follow, and leaves it ultimately insubstantial. Wedekind brilliantly creates an atmosphere; he simply cannot create people to inhabit...
...from the first moment he, his two-and-a-half foot dread locks and his dozen-or-so band members walk on stage, 15-20 thousand people focus on him. The concert is billed as a festival of unity, and at this first moment Marley and his crew seem to be successful. All eyes see a man who is both a genius and so stoned he seems about ready to fall over. He sings "Rastaman Vibration." The audience, which was seated until Marley walked on stage, is now on its feet, many are dancing, and others jumping over a fence...
...Marley as they escorted him to and from his post-performance press conference. When Marley is on stage, there is unity, but when he is offstage there is fear. When he starts playing, he is bigger than life, when he stops he is again vulnerable, and those around him seem to know this. There is a customary search before many rock concerts, but at Marley's the search was more than routine...
Only two kinds of books seem to be published nowadays: those that are about Bloomsbury and those that are not. Every survivor of that glittering artistic and intellectual cabal, every survivor's survivor, has given testimony. Leon Edel is one of our leading literary biographers, the author of the magisterial five-volume Henry James. But what can even he add to the existing mountain of data? Only two characteristic Bloomsbury virtues: form and sensibility...