Word: splendidments
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Together, they perform beautifully--Costello offers Bacharach his first substantial lyricist and collaborator since Hal David, while Bacharach roots Costello in a sound rich with splendid hooks and lush instrumentation. Costello entirely rises to the challenge of matching the Bacharach melodies with poignant musings on heartbreak, love stories laced with the chill of specific, damning truth. On the outstanding "This House is Empty Now," a moving portrait of a man who cannot make sense of the unreliable memories that inscribe his vacant home, Bacharach and Costello write: "Do you recognize the face fixed in that fine silver frame?/Were...
...virtually everyone in Berlin is likely to head for the same place: the Brandenburg Gate. Once a symbol of the city's loathed division, it was triumphantly reopened in December 1989. A decade later, it is certain to be a particularly joyous gathering place to usher in 2000--with splendid music, wondrous fireworks and considerable jubilation...
...lives among women, which is splendid most of the time--unless I want to play video football. "What about some football?" I suggest to my wife. "Maybe," she says, grabbing for the video-game controller. "But first some Bust-A-Move." Bust-A-Move! Oh, accursed game! My wife and daughters want to play only Bust-A-Move-2, a Tetris-like, digital opiate, circa 1996, that entails firing small colored balls into three-of-a-kind formations. When you lose, a chicken squawks in what sounds to me like a mocking tone. I will admit the game has appeal...
...liver had sent in its formal resignation (in the form of alcoholic hepatitis), he quit drinking and--though a ruin of a man, hardly able to take 10 steps without collapsing into a chair--blossomed forth with an extraordinary intellectual radiance and simplicity. He displayed as never before a splendid gift for conversation, for friendship (I knew him a little), for teaching (he was a professor for years at the University of South Carolina) and for fatherhood. It was in that last period--his once massive and muscular body shrunken, gasping for breath because of a fibrosis of the lungs...
...space agenda remains splendid though underfunded. If the leading edge of popular curiosity trends for the moment away from space and toward cloning, we may sense that in the transition the future has grown a little retrograde, at least from a moral and theological point of view. As the American space program began in the '50s, rockets routinely exploded on the launch pad and collapsed into their own ruins like defunct Las Vegas casinos. The nation's leading rocketmeister was the boy wonder of Peenemunde, Wernher von Braun, inventor of Hitler's Vengeance Rocket...