Word: tonic
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...Hines to the mellow, foursquare harmonies of Bill Johnson, once lead singer of the Golden Gate Quartet, perhaps the greatest of all gospel groups. Cooder was going for what he calls "the power, the fleetness" of the old music. He got it fine. Listening to Jazz is a sensual, tonic experience in collective musical memory, a little like having a long closed door in your house blown open by a cool, gentle summer wind...
These rough judgments cannot wholly condemn their maker. H.L. Mencken was above and below all an entertainer who liked to shock. In the process of making errors, he freed the language from cant and proved a tonic influence on writers from Sherwood Anderson to Norman Mailer. His tragedy was in staying too long at the zoo until his fellow visitors began to notice a want of sympathy and substance. Back in 1942, Critic Alfred Kazin observed that Mencken's "conception of the aesthetic life . . . was monstrous in its frivolity and ignorance." Others soon echoed the critique. Finally, even...
...followed by a daughter, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, in 1964. But by 1967 the marriage began to show visible strains. Rumors abounded of Snowdon's dalliance with fashion models. Increasingly, Margaret appeared imperiously scornful of him in front of friends, throwing down too many gins and tonic, while he tooled around with a trendy branch of the Mayfair smart...
...last paintings of Cézanne, Monet's lily ponds. That sense of exaltation, of a long life resolved and its aesthetic structures made luminously explicit, is missing. Instead, we get a lot of dash and gusto, a polymorphous, ill-focused energy. It is enjoyable, and even tonic. But these are not likely to be the paintings that fix de Kooning's place in history...
There has always been bad writing in this country, sensational and self-indulgent writing, full of topical delusions and crudities, though sometimes it has been valuable as a tonic and revelation to the best writers. Still, why is there in America today the oppressive sense that the art of writing has degenerated, slackened, been standardized and cheapened? The question has been voiced before, and it has been valid before, but there is a special urgency in it today...