Word: tonic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Never mind gin and tonic -well, perhaps a short one -and forget the return of baseball's prodigal sons. We are dealing here with primal matters, with a current in the national psyche far deeper and more powerful than our tropism toward corn on the cob and Japanese cars. Ice cream is our drug of choice, and butterfat-the word itself is dizzyingly lovely and globulous-is the occasion of our guiltiest and most delicious sin. Fourteen percent butterfat. Eighteen percent. Four hundred percent butterfat, some dreamer with glazed-over eyes says and actually seems to believe. The great...
...firms were upbeat. The Soviets were quiet, their stodgy aircraft, like the Il-86 transport, displaying a technological lag. And Ronald Reagan's new defense plans and action in lifting Jimmy Carter's "leprosy" policy (U.S. embassies were ordered not to help arms sellers) were a tonic that may nudge the $57 billion industry off a plateau, providing thousands of new jobs. America's air and space exports now amount to $18 billion a year, second only to agriculture at $41 billion...
This year the results are often tonic, enjoyable and full of hope. Some shoots of real vitality have been emerging from the conceptual rubble of late modernism. Although there is nostalgia for the arid pieties of yesteryear-Peter Lodato's two blank 11-ft.-high rectangles at the Whitney, for instance-the general tone is unsystematic, quirkish and opposed to movements. So much so, indeed, that curatorial bias gets in the way. No one is likely to miss minimal art, but the total exclusion of color-field painting reflects as much bigotry as its absolute dominance did ten years...
...hero in the finale. The mood, once inspired, intense, becomes introverted and tenacious. Mahler returns to C minor after the third movement's maundering for a thread of unity. In fact, this is the only symphony of Mahler's eleven in which he uses the classical return to tonic...
...million words on the "ethnomusicology" of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific. Pop is sometimes treated in solemn detail. On the Beatles: "Early style is typified by She Loves You (1963), with its duple metre, almost hypnotic beat, pentatonic melody, 32-bar song form and tonic-mediant tonal relationship; its text concerns adolescent love, and has a quasi ritualistic 'yeah, yeah, yeah' refrain...