Word: doggerel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...said the late Richard Feynman, no slouch himself). But the great physicist was also engagingly simple, trading ties and socks for mothy sweaters and sweatshirts. He tossed off pithy aphorisms ("Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it") and playful doggerel as easily as equations. Viewing the hoopla over him with humorous detachment, he variously referred to himself as the Jewish saint or artist's model. He was a cartoonist's dream come true...
...Jackson, life can't get any better than it was that night in 1984. Securing Goodman's release instantly transformed him, in the public mind, from a doggerel-spouting opportunist into a diplomatic star and serious presidential candidate. But only a few weeks later, Jackson's references to New York City as "Hymie Town" hit the front pages, plunging him--and his standing in the polls--into a depression. Ever since, through two presidential campaigns and countless crusades, he has been trying to recapture the acclaim he won in Damascus and the euphoric high it gave...
...only do we hear him in those trumpet players who represent the present renaissance in jazz--Wynton Marsalis, Wallace Roney, Terence Blanchard, Roy Hargrove, Nicholas Payton--we can also detect his influence in certain rhythms that sweep from country-and-western music all the way over to the chanted doggerel...
...known as the wry gentleman who every few months came calling on Johnny Carson. Stewart would uncoil himself in the Tonight Show guest seat, tell one of his hilariously laborious anecdotes, perhaps read one of the verses that, in 1989, made him a best-selling poet. One bit of doggerel elegized his pet golden retriever: "And now he's dead./ And there are nights when I think I feel him/ Climb upon our bed and lie between us,/ And I pat his head./ And there are nights when I think/ I feel that stare/ And I reach out my hand...
...Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman) completed the film in 1994, hoping to promote it with a sound track CD comprising music from the festival stars (James Brown, B.B. King, Miriam Makeba) and new groups like the Fugees, who laid down a rap track over Ali's incantatory doggerel. But no one wanted to distribute the movie--until it won the documentary prize at last year's Sundance festival. The picture opens this week, 22 years late, but just in time for an expected Oscar nomination...