Word: xanadu
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Football games at New Haven are hearty experiences. Yale is an educational Xanadu: the Harkness bells play the 1812 Overture; heelers for the Yale Daily News (once, the oldest college daily) roll a gigantic soccer ball around the Old Campus; Mellons sprinkle millions into the University coffers; secret societies practice strange rites...
...John W. ("Bet a Million") Gates and Diamond Jim Brady. Seeking an oasis of sanity more like the pastoral simplicity of his childhood, Baruch bought Hobcaw Barony, a historic, 17,000-acre parcel of land in his native South Carolina just north of Charleston. Hobcaw was nature's Xanadu, a game hunter's paradise especially famed for its massed armadas of ducks. Toward the end of his book, getting ahead of his story, Bernard Baruch tells with dramatic relish and glowing pride of F.D.R.'s month-long recuperative retreat at Hobcaw in the spring...
...from Korea to Hungary, using a pony express of 200,000 horses to maintain rapid communication, from his palace in Peking (which Marco Polo described with its "walls covered with gold and silver") or his pleasure-domed summer palace, with its 16-square-mile enclosed park at Shangtu (the Xanadu of Coleridge's famed verses). But because the Mongol Khans decreed that the elite Confucian scholars -who, under the Sung Dynasty, had ranked just below royalty-should be reduced to a category one degree above beggars, few Chinese scholars showed up in Peking to answer Kubla Khan...
Architecturally, Adams includes two fragments of that vanished land, the Gold Coast, where the walls are dark with oak paneling, the windows small and leaded, the bathtubs crouch on scaley clawed feet, and the square swimming pool steams with the mosiac erudition of Xanadu...
...film is least effective when it attempts an external and rapid depiction of events. But when it searches the mysterious depth of Kane's palace, Xanadu, and the depths of this man who had to be loved, it hits hard. The force behind the film's greatness is always the driving genius of Orson Welles, of whom a critic once said, "There, but for the grace of God, goes...