Word: wren
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Susan Seidelman's Smithereens, made for $100,000, is a cautionary tale of the Manhattan punk milieu in the tradition of such '60s films as Shadows and The Connection. Its 19-year-old heroine, Wren (Susan Berman), has seen it all, done most of it, learned nothing. Outfitted in punk khaki - checker-rimmed dark glasses, red sneakers, ornamental bruise on her arm - Wren crashes the Peppermint Lounge and puts the make on new wave musicians, who pay about as much attention to her as they would to the framed landscape on a motel-room wall. This Piaf-size...
...Hollywood "expose" with little of the craft. For every quirky glimpse of street life (a ten-year-old boy running a three-card monte scam, a prostitute who will "show you my scar for $5"), there is a derisive stereotype of the working-class drudges who get in Wren's way. Wren is so determinedly self-destructive that it becomes hard to care about her fate. Nonetheless, Berman does her best to bring this tough, tart Irma la Douce to life. She and Brad Rinn, as a naive Montana boy who offers Wren vagrant hope of regeneration, snipe amusingly...
...Puritan tradition of early New England churches, but its form is traditional only in that the white-trimmed gray clapboard and spire convey a sense of historic continuity. The architecture is closer to the modern simplicity of Mies van der Rohe than the baroque intricacy of Sir Christopher Wren...
Oldest or not, the place reeks with tradition. Historic buildings (such as Christopher Wren Hall, the oldest academic structure in America still in use) serve as classrooms and offices. Plaques and statues dot the campus...
Knowledge of our displacement, knowledge of death--these are consciousness for McMichael, and what consciousness does is worry and plan, though it hungers like the wren to say "Here I am," to make a place out of sleep or to make "Pasadena" or a house like a nest, to make love. This is a long American poem remarkable in that it stays completely in the world of ordinary consciousness, of history and fact and daily life. It does not wander into myth, the dark of nature, or sexuality, fun as that might be to read. The passage about lovemaking...