Word: somberly
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This plot is loose and baggy enough to give Vonnegut plenty of leg room, and he strolls about at will. He offers a lengthy account, for instance, of the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and of their subsequent executions in the 1920s. Not all of the digressions are somber. Starbuck meets Nixon and finds the President's smile "like a rosebud that had just been smashed by a hammer." The hero's meditations on money are childlike enough to produce odd insights. On his first morning of freedom, Starbuck leaves his seedy hotel to buy a newspaper...
...flavor of the '30s-overlaid, now and then, with a sharp erotic curiosity. Instead of the irony of a '60s Warhol or Lichtenstein, one is treated to an unremitting earnestness, a moral concern with the voids between people and the circumspectness of their gestures. It is a somber sight, this "populist art," as one of Segal's admirers dubbed it; and it gives a special density to the retrospective of 100 works by Segal that is on display at Manhattan's Whitney Museum...
...Once as somber as the Federal Register, the Journal is now sprinkled with photographs and cartoons. This concession to the 20th century was engineered by Sullivan, former assistant publisher of Newsweek International, who was brought in four years ago by Anthony C. Stout, one of the Journal's founders and chairman of its parent company. Sullivan has loosened the magazine in other ways as well. An understated but chatty "People" section keeps readers posted on the doings of Government and media luminaries, and an "Update" column concisely covers developments along such news-fronts as national health insurance, coal-burning...
Krzysztof Penderecki: Violin Concerto (Isaac Stern, Minnesota Orchestra, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conductor, Columbia). Stern could easily coast along on the war horses of the repertory, so more power to him for continuing to stretch himself in challenging new works. This somber single-movement piece, composed for him in 1976, is less abstract, more late Romantic, than the experiments in shifting sonorities that made Penderecki's name in the 1960s. Over brooding drumbeats and pedal tones, Stern gets a virtuoso workout in involuted runs and dissonant double-and triple-stops. But what stays in the mind is the sustained, eerie high...
...that most crucial of Hollywood privileges. If it belongs to the producer or the studio head, the director is outclimaxed. William Wyler, for example, directed Wuthering Heights for Samuel Goldwyn in 1939, closing the film with both main characters, Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier) and Catherine (Merle Oberon), dead. Such a somber ending greatly disturbed Goldwyn, and he asked Wyler to insert a brief clip of the two lovers in heaven. The director firmly refused. Thus it was a stunned Wyler who attended the premiere and watched Heathcliff and Catherine strolling amid cottony clouds just before the lights went...