Word: victrola
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...comedic touch." The surprise is that an actor so versatile can be so focused. Ask Phil Alden Robinson, the writer-director of Field of Dreams. "You can't force him to do something that's false," says Robinson. "He marches to his own Walkman." Or maybe to his own Victrola. For Costner is both a harbinger of the postimperial American male and a throwback to heroes of Hollywood's grandest days...
Perfection hit its head on a diving board last week and, in a blissful spell of dizziness, thought it heard the Suriname anthem playing on the Olympic Victrola. For just a second there, a 4-ft. 11-in. Turk seemed to be lifting a 420-lb. dumbbell, the equivalent of two Olympic committeemen. A buoyant black swimmer with ordinary thighs was receiving the gold medal. South Korea was rioting in a boxing ring. The phones were working. The laundry was ready. And in the race for regal figure, Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis both came running...
Morris writes tellingly about the bonds between his characters and their pets, a subject that does not crop up too often in serious fiction. Victrola recounts a day in the life of a man named Bundy and the dog he inherited when an upstairs neighbor died. As he runs his errands, Bundy notices that other dogs no longer pay any attention to his faithful companion: "One by one, as Bundy's dog grew older, the younger ones ignored him. He might have been a stuffed animal leashed to a parking meter. The human parallel was too disturbing for Bundy...
Windsor shows his heart when he writes this way. As for his head, he says, "The Lord must have vaccinated me with a Victrola needle. You won't never get me to stop talking...
...World War I was seven years past, the Russian Revolution was eight years old, and the music on my grandmother's wind-up Victrola was Yes, We Have No Bananas. Unaware of history's higher significance, I slumbered through the bliss of in fancy, feeling no impulse whatever to make some thing of myself." He did, eventually. Baker's elegantly literate humor column for the New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1979. Yet Baker, born into an age when boys still dreamed of be coming President, refused to dream of becoming anything...