Word: virgil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...vote campaigns are ostensibly nonpartisan, meaning the amount spent does not have to be disclosed to the Federal Election Commission. As a result, official spending calculations can be misleading. In September, eight-term Representative Mike Synar, also in Oklahoma, narrowly lost a Democratic runoff primary to Virgil Cooper, a retired principal. Cooper's victory seemed all the more astounding since Synar, the well-funded incumbent, had outspent him by a huge margin. But in fact, if all the money invested in supposedly nonpartisan voter-education efforts by interest groups opposed to Synar were added to Cooper's total, Synar...
...film opens with Wyatt Earp, played with cool reassurance by Henry Fonda, and Earp's three brothers driving their cattle west to California. In search of "a shave and a beer," Wyatt and his brothers Virgil (Tim Holt) and Morgan (Ward Bond) head into the town of Tombstone leaving young James (Don Garner) behind to watch the cattle. When Wyatt takes it upon himself to subdue a drunk Indian so that he can get his shave in peace, he begs the question, "What kind of a town is this?" Immediately, he is offered the position of town marshall, but turns...
...scrawl a wobbly triumph of galatea or et in arcadia ego on a canvas, and suddenly he's up there with Roberto Calasso, if not Edward Gibbon. When an audience that has lost all touch with the classical background once considered indispensable in education sees virgil written in a picture, it accepts it as a logo, like the alligator on a Lacoste shirt. The mere dropping of the name, or the citation of a tag, suggests that a classical past still lives, solid and whole, below the surface. But a toenail paring isn't a body...
...scholarship to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia gave Rorem entry into the company of the other wunderkinder and their mentors who, from the 1940s on, would do much to define what serious American music was all about: Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thomson, Marc Blitzstein, Lukas Foss, Samuel Barber, John Cage. Rorem's feelings of admiration, doubt, jealousy and gratefulness for these figures inspire the sharpest sketches in a book crammed with sharp sketches. On two composers who straddled the concert stage and Broadway: "Lenny Bernstein would never have been quite what he was without the firm example...
Still, one leaves this rich meal feeling curiously empty. The reason may be that Rorem has been voluble about every facet of his life except whom and what he really cares about. Explaining why he felt his protege was "not a dependable critic," Virgil Thomson once said of Rorem, "His egocentricity gets in the way. It prevents his seriously liking or hating anything." Rorem quotes this remark, along with others even less flattering about himself. It's a gutsy thing to do, but it only points to a terrible void...