Word: youthe
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...child is quick to learn, slow in the forgetting. So many images and impulses of our youth, their sounds and smells and emotions, stick with us for life, as a comfort or reproach. They have an indelible immediacy: the room you were in the first time you heard That Song, a school outing that revealed fresh pleasures, the weight of an early crush on some boy or girl, the thrill or shiver at a favorite movie - all these are embedded in muscle memory...
...Terence Davies has been exercising these muscles for most of his professional life. The writer-director is probably best known for his version of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth with Gillian Anderson. But that was a detour from his examination of his youth in postwar Liverpool. In a trilogy of short films in the early '80s, and in the features Distant Voices, Still Lives (1987) and The Long Day Closes (1992), he wove a tapestry of family life, of a violent father and gentle mother, an entire neighborhood that soldiered through hard times singing pop songs...
...Anyone so deeply indebted to his youth will naturally be suspicious of change. In the '60s, the Beatles made Liverpool the world's pop-cultural Mecca, yet Davies sees "John, Paul, George and Ringo: as "not so much a musical phenomenon, more like a firm of provincial solicitors." The smooth crooners of the previous decade quickly faded, "the witty lyric and the well-crafted love song seeming as antiquated as antimacassars or curling tongs." As an appraiser of public buildings he is no less a conservative than Prince Charles. Davies rails against the New Brutalism, a style that incarcerated generations...
...Davies' adaptation of John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible, the central character says, "If you were different from anybody else in town, you had to get out." In one sense, Davies escaped his youth; in another, he keeps returning. And his imaginative understanding of it hits the viewer, even one who's never visited or cared about Liverpool, with the shock of recognition. Among the many snatches of poetry and pop songs in the film are these lines from T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will...
Still, perhaps as a sign of the growing tension over the trip, Lombardi himself added further misunderstanding. The typically affable Jesuit spokesman blasted media organizations for referring to Joseph Ratzinger's involuntary membership in the Hitler Youth, saying that "never, never, never" did the future Pope take part in the group. It was, however, later verified by reporters in the Pope's own writings when he was a Cardinal - and confirmed by Lombardi - that in fact Benedict had been forced to register in the organization for a brief period...