Word: time
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...transported in a time machine to a different tonality of mood, one has only to listen to Moritat (Ballad of Mack the Knife). Datelined 1928, here is the authentic shiver of Nazi gangsterism stalking the streets of doom. All the great numbers follow - Alabama-Song, Surabaya Johnny, Bilbao Song, Ballad of the Pimp and the Whore. In all these songs, a caustic social vision is wedded to a winningly expansive lyricism. This Cabaret is a feast for Broadway...
...less appropriate for chronicling old Russia than the primitive camera. The dead stillness required of the subject, though unnatural to everyone, was singularly unsuited to the Russians' vitality, spontaneity and general rambunctiousness. How stolid they look, gathered silently and ceremoniously around the samovar in the garden at tea time, when, as we can guess from Chekhov and Turgenev, they were surely spellbinding talkers. The trouble with such snapshots from a nation's family album is that they must be viewed with a head full of literary and historical associations, while fiction may draw even the most unknowing into...
...family retainers and hangers-on. Nearly all of Russia's 19th century writers were members of the much maligned gentry, and their fiction is full of portraits of country squires doing what they do in these photographs, picnicking under the birches, hunting bear, playing whist or idling away time. Though many landowners were deeply in debt, as they complained in countless novels, a few of the noble Russian families possessed highly conspicuous wealth. A glimpse of the sumptuous Sheremetev Palace in St. Petersburg recalls the astonishing fact that before Russia's serfs were emancipated in 1861, the Sheremetev...
...Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: a South American village transformed by magic and time...
...Pyrenees at the beginning of the 14th century, became a surprise bestseller. But then, Montaillou was a singular town. The curious beliefs, the robust lives and the sexual proclivities of its townspeople, revealed through the testimony in their subsequent heresy trials, afforded an intriguing peephole into another time...