Word: dull
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JIMMY is a $900,000 anachronism, a Hollywood notion (courtesy of Jack L. Warner) of what a Broadway musical is like, drearily familiar from countless Hollywood films of Broadway musicals. It takes consummate ineptitude to make Jimmy Walker dull and his mistress, Betty Compton, even duller...
...futility and senselessness was again present. But it died quickly as we marched up the avenue and sat around the monument. There were so many people of all ages, sizes, shapes and colors. One sign read "You have finally brought us together, Dick." At the monument the speeches were dull, the air was icy, and the songs fell flat. We built fires with the AFL-CIO banners. No fools, those workers, they brought wooden sticks with their placards. A little of what made Woodstock a legend made life bearable at the monument...
...avenues and impressive architecture, though necessary to a great city, do not satisfy the equation. If the Third Reich had lasted another ten years, Berlin, which Hitler planned to rename Germania, would have become the world's most monumental city. It also would have been the most monumentally dull. In fact, it became second-rate on Jan. 30, 1933, when Hitler took power. A city cannot be both great and regimented. Blessed with culture, history and size, Moscow, Shanghai and Peking ought to be great cities, but they are not. They all lack the most important element: spontaneity...
Whatever else it may possess or lack, a great city cannot be dull. It must have a sense of place and a feeling all its own, and its citizens must be different from and more vital than those who live elsewhere. The difference does not even have to be in their favor. The native Parisian, for instance, is born with an ineradicable hauteur that others define as rudeness, and the native New Yorker knows the meaning of avarice before he can spell the word. So strong is the trait that a century ago, Anthony Trollope waspishly noted that every...
...forced himself to show a Dutchman's overt hatred of Germans, and to feel indifference toward Jews (as Jakov Lind he had despised, in the way a boy despises dull relatives, the Jews who let themselves be freighted off to concentration camps). Because Dutch laborers do not write, he stopped his habitual scribbling. "Writing was something I dreamed to do again in peacetime, something beautiful and pleasant that will only occur when one is allowed to live again. Jan Overbeek is a ghost, a shadow, a piece of printed paper with a fingerprint and a signature . . . 'I wish...