Word: soule
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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SOMETHING HAPPENS when you stay too long in the suburbs. Those inclined to harshness see it as a kind of dry rot, a slow and dusty torpor of the soul that accommodates itself all tooeasilyto the relentless affluence of Scarsdale and Grosse Pointe, to a world of shopping malls and Little League coaches and bitching at the mailman. Even at its best, suburban life breeds a brand of insularity, an isolated arrogance of comfort, that forces its own visions of itself into small places, like bedrooms and garages. Small places and small horizons--no better way to chronicle this world...
Safire is too light-footed to write like that. On his fifth anniversary as a columnist last April, he wrote that he avoids "evenhanded analyses, sage soul searchings or detached observations. I am in the business of writing informed polemics ... with a satisfying zap, so as to affect people in power and their policy in formation. In 1973 1 was hopelessly defensive; now I am happily aggressive...
...watch. Timeless, he has lost his place in history. A girl's black bell-bottomed trousers "flare out as shadow would flare out/ If the source of light/ Were centered in her belly." The poet moves in his leather jacket, "a cow's hide stuffed with soul." In "War" he compresses the century's anguish to four barbed-wire lines...
...song succeeds nonetheless. "I Don't Know," which follows, is very funny and includes some extremely suggestive lines from Belushi ("Baby, you know when you bend over I see every bit of Christmas, and when you bend back I'm looking right into the new year."). On "Soul Man" Cropper delivers the same great riff he's been playing for years, and fellow MG Duck Dunn's bass line is downright thunderous. " 'B' Movie Box Car Blues" and "Flip, Flop & Fly" are fine, though not up to the standards set by the album's other tracks...
...Eugene O'Neill knew so well, the dark jesting soul of the Irish is stalked by the ghosts of the past. "Da," which won the New York Drama Critics' and Tony awards, is about a capricious old party, saltily portrayed by Barnard Hughes, who refuses to be buried with his effects...