Whatever else it may be--stimulus, tranquilizer, aural nipple, too of executives, Muzak is basically trivializing. It is not simpl...y that it relegates music to the province of wallpaper. Background music never need be banal. When it is used in support of drama, it can greatly enhance without harming itself. Mozart was entirely amenable to such films as Elvira Madigan and The French Lieutenant's Woman; Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote aptly for The Invaders, Arnold Bax for Oliver Twist, Sergei Prokofiev for Lieutenant Kije and Alexander Nevsky, Dmitri Shostakovich for others. In such uses, music collaborates with artists, it becomes an art among arts. But Muzak collaborates chiefly with management: it is used as an aural smoke-screen, a form of jamming, a hormone in the henhouse, an emollient in cemeteries.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mark Twain didn't psychoanalyze Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. Dickens didn't put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry! Good ...copy comes out of people, Johnny, not out of a lot of explanatory medical terms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is a ass--a idiot. If that's t...he eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience--by experience."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mother came to us destitute. She brings a child into the world, takes one look at him and promptly dies. Without leaving so much a...s a forwarding name and address.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »