Word: solemn
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...Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets, Lars Eighner recounts his own adventures in the modern wild West. However, unlike his literary predecessors who lovingly detailed the majesty of the Rockies or the solemn grandeur of the California sequoias, Eighner chooses a much different subject. Instead of landscapes and flora, he describes the nooks and crannies of the Texan welfare system and the urban beast known as Los Angeles. From the perspective of a homeless man wandering across the Arizona desert, Eighner gives an update on life in today's real frontier, the streets...
These bizarre juxtapositions, commingling the solemn and the sordid, helped forge the legend of Big Brother as newspaper columnist. In the words of a 1933 ad slogan, WINCHELL HE SEES ALL HE KNOWS ALL. With its rightful emphasis on the power-mad side of Winchell's persona, Gabler's biography validates Burt Lancaster's chilling portrayal of gossipmonger J.J. Hunsecker in the 1957 film The Sweet Smell of Success. (In real life, Winchell, in cinema noir fashion, had his daughter Walda carted off to an asylum in a straitjacket in paternal rage against an unsuitable marriage.). The same haunting sense...
Despite those feelings, there's nothing solemn about Horne's "prayer." The album begins playfully with Maybe, a Strayhorn rarity written for Horne, and she gives it an easy swing that belies its hard-won wisdom ("Love is a shoestring/ Any way you tie it, it may become undone ...") Next comes Something to Live For, the great Strayhorn-Ellington ballad about having it all without having love, which Horne suffuses with trembling vulnerability. She's raucous and tough on another worldly Strayhorn number, Love Like This Can't Last. And with beautiful enunciation, she finds the quiet essence of Strayhorn...
...dealing faro or looking for a gold strike, occasionally makes a living as a peace officer not entirely immune to corruption. What you shouldn't do -- especially at 3 hours and 15 minutes, a length that implicitly promises epic grandeur -- is turn his story into a solemn biopic, grinding relentlessly, without selectivity or point of view, through a rootless and episodic life from adolescence...
Heller smiles sheepishly and says, "I'm capable of being very serious, but not capable of being very solemn...