Word: palely
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...looks up expecting to see the familiar opening scene of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler -Hedda's new husband nattering away with his auntie. Instead, in a startling departure from the script, Maggie Smith as Hedda strides silently onto the empty stage. Clad severely in white, she is pale and tense, her features a mask of mortal exhaustion and despair that might have been painted by Edvard Munch. She smokes, paces, contemplates herself in a mirror, stares moodily, doubles over in a spasm of nausea. All of the contradictory qualities that are to make up her mordantly gripping performance...
Nilsson's pale blond hair and even paler complexion have earned him the nickname of the White Rabbit. From a musical viewpoint, he is really Tweedledum to Newman's Tweedledee. Both men are married and live in Los Angeles; both are basically recluses whose principal social activity, until recently, was playing pingpong together. They are also equally red-hot songwriters who have turned out hits for such diverse talents as Peggy Lee, Judy Collins, Ella Fitzgerald and the West Coast rock group called Three Dog Night (which moves up to No. 1 on the Billboard chart this week...
Vidal has every right to pay his personal respects, as well as to insinuate longstanding feuds into his book. Yet the thin veil of fiction that he swirls so adeptly around the pale data of his life is disappointing. It will seem particularly so to those who fell for Myra Breckinridge's critical dictum that...
...Never can the eye identify to what a given shadow or strip of wall belongs: solids and voids merge into one another, forms and backgrounds alternate, a given square jumps up or slithers downward depending on whether I couple it with a dark green spot or a piece of pale sky. Thus, identifiable things are transmuted into abstractions and begin their own independent life." From that moment on, Vasarely's canvas was to become a visual theater expressing the permutations of light, space and movement-in short, what has come to be known...
...engulfs the listener in a musical-mystical doomsday. "It sounds," says Kagel, "as if the organ were exhaling her soul." For Ligeti's equally iconoclastic Etude No. 1, Zacher hooked a vacuum-cleaner motor to the organ pipes to achieve a tiny flow of air and precisely the "pale, unearthly and strange" tone color specified by the composer...