Word: staccato
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...mourning seem to have been burned into his head with a blowtorch. He is pale, wary, jumpy, an urban night monkey traveling in the jungle of cities from Paris to New York. The combo behind him breaks into a jazz beat, and he punctuates the air around him with staccato jabs of his hand mike. Nervously he whips the mike cord, and it coils and undulates like a black snake. At the end of it, his slight body stiffens in a convulsive spasm, a lightning rod under a direct hit. The mouth opens in grief, and he sings of losers...
...first novel and James Jones's From Here to Eternity, to which the publisher compares it, is that Jones had something to say, however gracelessly he said it. Author Linakis settles for Eternity's vacant form: a military milieu, dirty words, laconism parading as toughness, and the staccato sentences, intended as drumbeats, that only evoke memories of a first-grade reader. The scene is Belgium after the war. The action is provided by U.S. Army deserters and assorted, brutal military police...
...battle scenes that follow have an eerie air of realism. Supporting the landing at Guadalcanal, the ship undergoes her first attack by Japanese aircraft. Sirens, bugles, bosun's pipes and klaxons sound while a single blinker flashes in the darkness. The voices of fighter pilots mingle with the staccato rat-a-tat of machine-gun bullets: "I see about 40 bandits . . . Red, where are you? Dusty, Dusty . . . Dusty's gone in." Then the big, 16-in. guns belch out billows of multicolored smoke...
Splash in Surf. Distinct from the brown-sound school are the Beach Boys from California: "We're not colored; we're white. And we sing white." They made their big splash with the "surf sound"?clean, breezy orchestration, a jerky, staccato beat and a high, falsetto quaver reminiscent of the Four Freshmen. The Beach Boys' tenor harmony goes so high that it sounds almost feminine, a fact that has all but locked out girl singers from the scores of surf groups performing on the West Coast. Beach Boys' songs, says Jack Good, producer of the rock 'n' roll...
...beside the play that took second prize in the Anderson Award competition, "The Reprisal." Mark Bramhall, an Osbornian iconoclast, puts a reckless, sensuous man into the collar of a divinity student, then sticks both man and collar in one corner of a writhing triangle. The dialogue blazes with violent, staccato speeches as David, the protagonist, banters and bickers with his mistress and the good girl in the piece. Occasionally the sarcasm and the yelling get childishly out of hand, but as a whole the drama is exciting, exhausting, and superb...