Word: steined
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Sire Records' Seymour Stein, an early champion of punk, finds that the music reflects a mood of total indifference among the young. "They feel they had nothing to do with making the world the mess it is today, and they're also not going to do anything to make it any better-because they can't. They come to the music for the sake of the music, for entertainment, for getting...
...Only Cubist Town. The first two sections, dealing with the period 1900-50, are at least competent. The history they describe is more settled and hence readily encapsulated. The "period rooms"-unconvincing reconstructions of the Gertrude Stein salon at 27, Rue de Fleurus, the "291" gallery in which Alfred Stieglitz introduced Matisse, Brancusi and modern photography to a tiny coterie in New York, and Piet Mondrian's Manhattan studio, among other places-are tackily made and none too accurate. But the paintings fare better...
...fame and political power. The star is Elesina Dart, a beauty of good background who has gone through two marriages and flubbed one promising theatrical career. The impresario is Ivy Trask, a cynical, shrewd middle-aged fashion editor and social arbiter at Broadlawns, the Westchester estate of Judge Irving Stein, banker and art collector...
...cleverly maneuvers Elesina into the "salon," where poets recite new odes over cocktails and scholars extemporise treatises on Shakespeare at the dinner table. Irving Stein, who heads this circle, is a Jewish multimillionaire banker who heads this circle. His ideal in life is to create a "temple of beauty" at Broadlawns, his weekend estate. Clara, his unloved but valuable because Protestant wife, is "the centerpiece of his collection, the beautiful woman to whom the beautiful porcelains, the ivories and jades, the medieval tapestries and stained glass paid silent tribute," the "priestess for the shrine" in the suburbs...
...epitomizes the calculating bitch without becoming a caricature. None of her actions strain credibility, and this is an asset for a plot that gets as cluttered as this one does. Ivy realizes her thwarted spinster dreams through Elesina. Anticipating or rather shaping the impact Elesina has on the Stein men, Ivy patiently builds the foundation for the power she knows Elesina eventually will wield. Disregarding the sacrifices the Steins and eventually she herself make for Elesina. Ivy engineers a divorce, schedules rendezvous for adulterers, sheds the appropriate number of tears at funerals and calmly confronts suicide. The one obstacle...