Word: showmanly
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...back-flip dunks with his eyes closed. But the man had never won it all until his Chicago Bulls captured the N.B.A. crown in a clinic of Jordan aerobics and cagey teamwork against the Los Angeles Lakers. Now will all those who scorned him as a great but selfish showman -- a one-man Harlem Globetrotters -- please shut...
...Scarface, he drew nightscapes of drug paranoia and police brutality. As writer-director of Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, the Vietnam vet exorcised his demons by portraying the war as a rite of passage -- to fratricide. In Talk Radio he suggested that the penalty for a showman's reckless truth telling was to be killed by his audience. Jim Morrison, in The Doors, pays a similar fee for fame; the poet's capricious muse drives him to drugs, madness, death. Oddly enough, Stone's tortured artistic mission -- dispensing downers to a movie public famously addicted to escapism...
...story, to some extent, with the difference that whatever Madison may have once thought, Bly is a gifted poet, critic and showman who has transformed his long struggle into a strange, mythicized American phenomenon of celebrity and mass therapy. Bly is the bardic voice of that interesting but vaguely embarrassing business, the men's movement, which strikes many men as somehow unmanly. Well, says Bly, that shame is something they will have to get over...
...much a showman (with a touch of the mountebank) to stay in the king's role for very long. I have a theory that children of alcoholics make brilliant mimics, because reality and identity for them are unstable, subject to sudden disappearances and weird transformations. They are constantly auditioning nuanced identities in hopes of pleasing insanely unpredictable parents. At the kitchen table now, Bly becomes his spiritual and poetic mentor, William Butler Yeats, going trancey and reciting The Lake Isle of Innisfree in a high Irish singsong, tone-deaf Yeats sliding up and down at the end of the line...
...silly, self-conscious attempt at manly authenticity, almost a satire of the hairy chested, and he pours forth a thoughtful but technical answer: "The drum honors the body as opposed to the mind, and that is helpful. It heats up the space where we are." As a spiritual showman (shaman), Bly seeks to produce certain effects. He is good at them. He could not begin to see the men's movement, and his place in it, as a depthless happening in the goofy circus of America. It is odd that Bly is not more put off by the earnest vulgarity...