Word: blend
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...lives in Paris but commutes to Tokyo for four monthlong visits each year. His clothes, which feature sharp lines and muted colors, have a worldliness that combines Eastern ease with Western tailoring. "I have tried to bring different cultures together," he remarks. Kumagai sees contemporary Japan as an imperfect blend of the traditional and the new: "I have tried to mix them the right way. In the '80s, many designers have tried to destroy balance. I wouldn't want to remove the real balance of the human body...
...Maxi squirmed in her Calvin Klein jockstrap. They'd added a new dimension to her sex life. Was she a pervert?" The question could only be put by Judith Krantz, back again with her patented blend of eavesdropping and name dropping. Her heroine, Maxi Amberville ("her surpassingly green eyes, the precise color of Imperial Jade"), is the customary flaring, rich, tousled, naughty, gorgeous protean number. This time she is a publishing vicereine with a field of ex-husbands, a bewitching mother, a homosexual brother, a heterosexual near-blind brother, and an eleven-year-old daughter by magnificent, "fascinatingly brooding, darkly...
...rhythms of a hoofer to orchestrate a characterization. Like all the best actors, he always made it look easy. Like Spencer Tracy, he seemed a natural force: everything seemed to flow out without calculation. Tracy, however, made chamber music; Cagney was a marching band. It is probably this particular blend of effortlessness and theatricality that moved Orson Welles to marvel, "You're supposed to be scaled down and subtle in movie acting. But look at Cagney--he's big. Everything he does is big, and it works...
Perhaps the most laborious writing effort was undertaken by the accountant, J.R. Sprechman, whose first novel, Caribe, (Dutton; 280 pages; $17.95) took him decades. The result is anything but weary. The narrative has the sheen of quicksilver, and it manages to blend brutal scenes of New York City drug wars, hints of the supernatural reminiscent of a South American fable and political intrigue worthy of John le Carre. The scene is a haunted, Haiti-like island, and the four main characters are a blunt Manhattan policeman, a slippery arms dealer, a volatile Caribbean dictator whose paranoia is justified...
...kitsch." Maybe he means for us to see the faltering but brave Amelia and Pippo as surrogates for himself, still worthy of sober interest, maybe even moral admiration, although the headlines now go to younger directorial stars. Certainly he insists on pumping out more of the "Felliniesque," his trademark blend of the grotesque and the surreal, than we need to get his point that TV is vulgar and coarsening. More moving is his presentation of two carefully imagined archetypes of aging. Masina's Amelia is a woman grown more emotionally compact with the years, defending herself against their onslaught with...