Word: ur
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...Julia Ormond's Guinevere is all up-to-date feminist spunk. The Camelot of Jerry Zucker's "First Knight," says TIME's Richard Schickel, is more a modern gated community than a myth-enshrouded, 6th century realm. And the great romance that was played out there -- legend's ur-Triangle -- comes across as not much more consequential than suburban adultery: "One can easily imagine Guinevere and Lancelot as Gwen and Lance, furtively smooching on the 18th tee during a country-club dance, or stealing glances across a crowded PTA meeting." Still, Schickel admits, "the scenery is always pretty" and "every...
...John Lennon (Ian Hart) was its soul. Paul McCartney (Gary Bakewell) and George Harrison (Chris O'Neill) only whined and purred, respectively, while Lennon and Sutcliffe did the heavy lifting. John, you see, was Liverpool's own angry young man and the sole creator of this proto-punk, ur-grunge band (don't you love revisionism?). And Stu, preening moodily, was John's closet love god -- before a brain tumor drove Stu mad and killed him, thus establishing his credentials as a rock Rimbaud...
...words, is literal, figurative, pervasive. If we stick to the literal for a moment, it would be more logical to say, "All men are car thieves." Far more men are car thieves than are rapists. But it is women's vulnerability to rape that cries out. Rape is the ur-crime that unites women. Fine. But the charge that "all men are rapists" is a slander and an outrage. It is also not true -- all men are not even potential rapists. All- men-are-rapists is a moral stupidity as well, since it annuls the distinction between a decent...
When instant gratification becomes a supreme virtue, pop culture follows. Siegfried and Roy, the ur-Vegas magicians (imagine, if you dare, a hybrid of Liberace, Arnold Schwarzenegger, David Copperfield and Marlin Perkins) who perform 480 shows a year in their own theater at the Mirage, don't seem satisfied unless every trick is a show-stopper and every moment has the feel of a finale. In front of the new Treasure Island is a Caribbean-cum- Mediterranean faux village fronting a 65-ft.-deep "lagoon" in which a full-scale British man-of-war and pirate vessel every 90 minutes...
...granddaddy of all German Romantic operas, with its setting of a folktale about a forester who accepts magic bullets from the Devil to win the hand of his beloved in a shooting contest. For Waits, Burroughs and Wilson, what the opera provided wasn't an Ur-text but a pretext...