Word: bumming
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Falcon and the Snowman omits no telling detail - about falconry, the drug trade, spy satellites, the duo's stoned bum-bung, and their torturous legal battles after capture. But there are enough tantalizing loose ends in the book to make it clear that Lindsey is describing life, not art. Why, for instance, did TRW put a 21-year-old, $140-a-week college dropout in such a sensitive post? Did the leaks really damage U.S. security? Perhaps Boyce and Lee actually were being used by the CIA to spread false evidence. If not, concludes Lindsey, then "the affair...
Modigliani is a portrait of the artist as a Montparnasse bum, or rather three: Modigliani's companions are his fellow painters and fellow flops-as the 1916 taste makers viewed them-Maurice Utrillo and Chaim Soutine. Utrillo (Ethan Phillips) is in thrall to two false gods, alcohol and his mother. Soutine (George Gerdes) is a color addict equally intoxicated by the stains on a butcher's apron and the veins of a plucked chicken. Led by Modigliani (Jeffrey de Munn), these Three Musketeers of the Night smash up cheap restaurants, cadge drinks, slash their canvases in frustrated rage...
...sort of hero. A millionaire who often lived like a bum, sleeping in a closet with his clothes on-because he believed that taking them off promoted insomnia-and spitting on the floor even in his cherished laboratories. A picturesque swearer who hired assistants whom George Bernard Shaw called "sensitive, cheerful and profane; liars, braggarts and hustlers." A would-be tycoon so crotchety and bullheaded that he could give little credit to the ideas of others; so inept in business matters that he lost control of the immensely profitable companies he founded. An incurable show-off and self-promoter...
...McGee has had troubles of his own. He has become increasingly morose, and the cases he handled were no real challenge. In the middle of the journey the Big was "embedded in a life I had some curious way outgrown. I an artifact, genus boat bum, a pale-eyed, shambling, gangling, knuckly man, without enough unscarred hide left to make a decent lamp shade. Watchful appraiser of the sandy-rumped beach ladies. Creaking knight errant, yawning at the thought of the next dragon." John MacDonald acknowledges that his hero "could not have gone on in that vein without boring...
...Boston College group arrives, six guys and a girl who walked six miles to see the Pope. One, a freshman from Elkhorn, Nebraska, wants to avoid TV cameras. "What if my mother saw it? Sleeping in the streets, cup of coffee in my hand like some bum, and I'll be back to Elkhorn in no time...