Word: touche
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After playing in oblivion for the first 30 years of his career, George Lewis became so popular in Europe that the arrival of his band was sufficient to touch off riots. There were maybe a hundred European jazz bands trying to copy the Lewis sound. Even young men in Italy, Australia, and Japan were crowding around their record players, religiously copying all the Lewis imports they could get their hands...
English teenagers mobbed him, trying to touch him, to see his face, to hear his voice. He played before packed concert halls, mesmerizing huge audiences with the simple, lyrical beauty of his horn, receiving wildly enthusiastic ovations at the end of each number. What was the magic of this frail little black man from the back streets of New Orleans? What was there in his music that spoke its message to the hearts of these Englishmen, Swedes, Danes, Germans, and Japanese as it had spoken to his own people for almost 50 years...
...Wednesday meeting session at which heads of departments could hash out their problems. He had promoted an ambitious acquisition program, whose most notable purchase was 47 paintings from the Gertrude Stein collection for $6,500,000. He had hired enterprising young associate curators to put the maturing Modern in touch once again with the artistic underground. Most of the staff thought it a shame that Lowry had to leave almost before he had moved his furniture into the modest co-op on Park Avenue that the museum had obtained for him-even though, contrary to rumors, he had been entertaining...
...Jews, and their carefully tolerant gentile connections. The story begins in the 1940s at a political dinner given in honor of Judge Simon Mannix, a shrewd, large-minded man who has been "mentioned" for the Supreme Court. He is well sketched by the author, and one impudent touch is superb: Mannix has a deaf son, she relates, and thus has learned to lipread. To know what is being whispered at a testimonial dinner is to be an ironist, and Mannix is one. As he leaves the dinner to exchange ruefulnesses with an ancient Virginia jurist, the reader looks forward...
...avant-garde deserves neither cultist celebration nor complacent denunciation. Someone in the future may conclude that it was purest fantasy, wantonness disguised as on act of faith. It may turn out to be only senescent romanticism. But we cannot envision that future. For the moment we might breathe and touch the things of our poor, sweaty, nervous present and consider that even a living illusion can be more valuable than a dead reality. The generic challenge to dullness is not an irritation but a moral obligation, not heroism but perhaps a duty of every life of any quality. To claim...