Word: xanadu
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...Kane before its release in 1941, and so overwhelming its pressure on Welles' reputation, that it can be seen as the apex of his career, perhaps of Hollywood's Golden Age. It surely makes the man worth one more biography, Simon Callow's Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (Viking; $29.95), and the film worth a long documentary look, The Battle over Citizen Kane by Thomas Lennon and Michael Epstein, on PBS's The American Experience next Monday. These solidly researched works revive a thrilling era in American theater and film--a five-year span dominated by the Boy Wonder...
...there were the famous liaisons with actresses: Welles wed three, Hearst one. For decades, while his papers denounced Hollywood morals, the old man lived openly with Davies, a comedian he foolishly tried to remake as Garbo. She stayed with him, good times and bad, in San Simeon (the "Xanadu" of Kane), his Spanish-Moorish-Italian "ranch" crammed with four millenniums' worth of trophies. It was your crazy uncle's attic, half the size of Rhode Island...
...fall of a national celebrity whose initial passion for championing the "working man" is replaced by an obsession with embodying his own myth. Welles, who co-wrote, directed and produced the film, plays the cynical multimillionaire from his idealistic college days through his demise, old and forgotten in the "Xanadu" he has built to himself...
...updated introduction to the 1994 edition, Grinspoon makes it clear that his intent is neither to encourage nor to stigmatize those who partake of the demon flower. This is just the facts, ma'am, a fogie's guide to Xanadu. Grinspoon has collected and synthesized a great deal of information, and he gives ample to time to the anti-weed agenda. The author quotes a few scary tidbits from the FBI: "He [the user] becomes a fiend with savage or 'cave man' tendencies. His sex desires are aroused and some of the most horrible crimes result..." Horrible crimes...
Coleridge moved "caves of ice" to Xanadu from the Kashmir region of northern India, where they had been described in 1795 by the Rev. Thomas Maurice in The History of Hindostan. Alexander and a friend, forbidden to travel there because of political turmoil, attached themselves to a mob of religious pilgrims and pressed on regardless. The journey was not entirely spiritual; an overcrowded campsite was fouled with human dung. This does not prevent Alexander from creating a beautiful scene. "I saw, on drawing back the tent flaps," she writes, "snowdrifts gleaming on the towering black peaks and, a long...