Word: static
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Contra Gentiles." Even before the Second Vatican Council, some progressive Catholic theologians were abandoning the kind of worshipful Thomism Tracy describes. After the council had ushered in a new spirit of intellectual freedom in the 1960s, Thomas' fall into disfavor accelerated. His structured philosophy was criticized as too static, his rationality rejected for lacking the insights of existentialism. This year, at one typical U.S. Catholic seminary-St. Joseph's in Yonkers, N.Y.-only one course specifically offers studies in the work of Thomas Aquinas...
Vigor and Grace. Lucille Ball plays Mame, an event calculated to please those throngs who dote loyally on her reruns, which rain down on television like static interference. Miss Ball has been molded over the years into some sort of national monument, and she performs like one too. Her grace, her timing, her vigor have all vanished. When she is photographed at close range, the image goes soft, indicating that the lens was smeared with Vaseline and shrouded in gauze. The other actors in the movie are clear enough on their own. But when they step into a shot with...
Lately it has been possible to seek relief from frenetic and kinetic imagery by looking backward. Publishers are now offering a string of new picture books filled with the ancient snapshot, the static portrait and the severe documentary. Some of them are a bit special: albums of Victorian children and antique pornography. More than nostalgia or a desire for escape is at work, however. Portraits, especially of anonymous folk from the otherwise dead past, exert a peculiar fascination. One broods over them, foolishly nodding and speculating about what the people were really Like and the lives they must have...
...dated, he drags Teresa down to his own level of platitudes and the play begins to sound inane. ("She's as boring as a bottle of olive oil." "I didn't know olive oil was boring.") Things begin to happen fast, but the play goes off balance once the static, dreamy atmosphere of the first act is left behind. The rest of the play ignores the social and sexual issues raised by the plot--marriage between the rich Lorenzo and the poor Teresa--and it just doesn't have the magic to make up for it. Ginzburg's people...
...other fans of the Czech nationalist will want to save their pennies for this set. Kubelik's surging way with the music catches its color and drama and seems to belie the uneven moments in some of the early symphonies. The Berlin Philharmonic, reduced so often to a static silkiness by its regular leader, Herbert von Karajan, here seems positively to revel in Kubelik's ruddy approach...