Word: swanning
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...These included gold. The Scythians were rich. They wrung tribute from every caravan that crossed the steppes, and they carried their gold not as raw bullion but as flamboyant ornament. Other materials went to dust?except for some ornaments of wood or cloth, such as the elegant swan made of felt stuffed with reindeer hair (see color opposite) that was discovered, preserved by ice for almost 2½ millennia, in a tomb in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. Yet the gold survived. Almost all the major examples of Scythian gold have remained in the U.S.S.R. up to now, chiefly...
...Mabel waits for the schoolbus to return with her kids, pacing like an anxious speed freak, demanding passersby to give her the time, and chasing after them when they try to ignore her. At a party she gives for her own children, she stampedes them into a performance of Swan Lake and supervises their deaths in a finale accompanied by a thunderous orchestra. The only scene of Nick at work is shot in the handsome, gralay, cinema-verite style characteristic of Cassavetes's earlier work. We got a sense of the other source of pressure in Nick's life, although...
...slot and pile of mail." L.A. has long been the culture capital of suspense fiction. Boston may now be moving up. In Parker's God Save the Child, kidnapers instruct that the ransom be put in a green book bag - a touch as evocative of Boston as the swan boats in the Public Garden...
...like the split screen. De Palma's axiom is that in popular culture, today's wow is tomorrow's cliche and the next day's nostalgic treasure. The corollary is that our opinions in these matters are more often the product of cynical manipulators like Swan than of genuinely informed intelligence...
Indeed De Palma is particularly tough on the youths who invite people like Swan to swindle them. They are observed to grow as hysterical over a talentless transvestite swinger named Beef (played in the film's gaudiest comic turn by Gerrit Graham) as they do over the pure loveliness of Phoenix's voice. A wedding onstage turns them on, but so does an assassination. "That's entertainment!" Swan cries, and no one challenges his all-purpose definition of the term. The terrible possibility exists that he is right-that nowadays all turn-ons are equally transitory...