Word: taut
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...campaign chairman, the tall and taut Bay is mostly behind the scenes, plotting strategy, raising money, orchestrating commercials. Pat calls her every 30 minutes to check in. Bay is the personification of his barking inner voice, goading him to run for President, something she has been doing for a decade. Whereas Bay talks nonstop in her brother's rat-a-tat style, Shelley is painfully reticent. Her only public role is to smile serenely, sit behind the candidate onstage and form the visual punch line to one of his biggest applause getters: "I want to introduce the lady I intend...
...overwhelming, unstoppable energy" (Donen's phrases) blew away your reservations. For there was always something disarming in the forthright way that Kelly, who was born in Pittsburgh, the third of five children, and worked his way up out of the chorus line to Broadway stardom with his tough, taut performance in 1940's Pal Joey, stated his needs and his aspirations. These extended beyond the standard American desire to transcend one's past and transform one's limitations. For he was part of a generation that wanted to reinvent both the stage musical and the movie musical...
From the start John had a spooky, modernist poise. His taut mouth, his appraising eyes made him the group's soul and wit as surely as McCartney became its prime musical mover. Cynical, cool, Lennon was the eye of sanity in the Beatlemania hurricane. Asked, during the first U.S. tour, when the Beatles found time to rehearse their songs, he replied, "We wrote 'em; we recorded 'em; we play 'em every day. What do you rehearse? Smilin'--that's all we rehearse." His edginess suggested a roiling interior life; you could write a novel about what you imagined...
...characters acrobatics contribute to the oneiric atmosphere. When Ward sings a soulful "Lay Me Down" with his shirt off, he dangles form ropes exposing his taut, sinewy body. The scene is choreographed as gracefully as a ballet. Later in the play, he delivers a speech upside down, supported by his ankles, with his shirt falling on his face and exposing his chest. The dimples of his abdomen flex each time he speaks, rendering his stomach an amorphous face...
...Fiction causes more chatter than pulp fiction--American Tabloid is a big, boisterous, rude and shameless reminder of why reading can be so engrossing and so much fun. The secret, of course, is language. When it is used well-which in Ellroy's case means being pared down to taut, telegraphic sentences, subject-verb-blooey!-one word is worth a thousand pictures...