Word: splendidly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Americans in their celebratory moods sometimes behave as if they had invented freedom. They have at least given freedom a splendid home. The text of the great Fourth of July birthday party will not dwell on the ugly side of American freedom (the founders reserving freedom pretty much for white male property owners and countenancing the enslavement of blacks, for example). Nor will the star-burst rhetoric discuss the heartlessness of much American freedom, the bleak lives of those who cannot compete. Freedom has a lot of Charles Darwin's logic prowling around in it, hungry for the weaker animals...
...serious work in the classical vein. Sondheim's West Side Story collaborator Leonard ( Bernstein has called him "compulsive and excessive," not least in his commitment to the idea that everything in a musical must strictly serve the task at hand. Even so, Sondheim's songbook made up a splendid 1977 review, Side by Side by Sondheim, which in turn became a beguiling two-record album. Cast albums, even of such failures as 1981's Merrily We Roll Along, are prized by collectors. Last September the belated complete recording of his 1971 spectacular Follies turned into a pair of sold...
There were more than 600 of them, a spirited sea of tuxedoes and dinner jackets and splendid organza gowns. Their weathered faces suggested that some fellowship of older folk, maybe retirees, had assembled in Washington's Hilton Hotel last week. They were, instead, veterans of what President Ronald Reagan called "a twilight war." What bonded them and brought them together was the storied Office of Strategic Services, the cloak-and-dagger agency that was born in World War II and led to the formation...
...Rivera's political life had as many twists and turns as the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl. It inflated his personal myth but obscured his achievement as a formal artist--by which, as the political characters in his murals fade into historical remoteness, he must be judged. For its public, this splendid show has set that process in motion, giving us back a great soul who was also, at least some of the time, a great painter as well...
...escape is tempting. "How I would like to disengage, if only for a while," he wrote one day last year, "away from decisions, scrutiny, interaction. To be alone." Once a friend teased Cuomo that the perfect job for him was Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. There, in splendid remoteness, he could contemplate and decide. Cuomo had already thought...