Word: skins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...title role in the film biography of Gertrude Stein, or a playwright called Alabama Gross describes his heroine as someone who has "taken to drink, prostitution and puttin' on airs." But the humor rests firmly on psychological substance and can be so telling that it sheds, temporarily, its skin of mirth...
...nothing arty in Ray's art. By the same token his actors act, not with the usual bombinations of Oriental drama, but as though the camera had found them alone and simply living; and they live, as few characters in pictures do, real lives that swell to the skin with pain and poetry and sudden mother wit. Actor Chatterjee, as a young man too gifted to be strong, provides an unforgettable object of the Biblical lesson (Luke 16:8): ". . . the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light." And Actress Tagore, though...
...space is a tough neighborhood for frail balloons. Microscopic meteorites punctured Echo's skin, allowing the gas inside to seep out. Sunlight exerted a slight but persistent pressure. Gradually Echo lost its regular shape; flat places and wrinkles appeared on its shiny surface. "She's prune-faced already," says Richard Slater of G. T. Schjeldahl, Northfield, Minn., the company that made the balloon. When Echo turns deliberately about once in eight to ten minutes, flat places sometimes act as mirrors, making the sun's reflection momentarily brighter. Wrinkled places dim the reflection. The radio waves that...
...sure how long it will last. All its gas pressure is probably gone by now. The only reason it keeps its shape is that the forces that tend to shrink or distort it are extremely small. Slater estimates that meteorites nibble away about 1¼ sq. in. of its skin per day. Eventually the sphere may collapse, pushed to a pancake by air drag and pressure of sunlight, or drawn together by the Mylar's "memory" of the way it was folded in the launching rocket. But a flattish or crumpled shape may continue to serve for years...
...virtuosity is amusing: "I question myself eagerly. Is this amusia, aphasia, agraphia, alexia. abulia? It is life.''* The narrator, a knockabout literary sort named Lawrence Lucifer, gloats over sex, happily flexes his ability to shock ("I am afraid to shake hands with him, for fear that the skin will slip the bony structure of the hand and come away. It would take so little to produce the skeleton from this debile bundle of meat...