Not exactly rock-star status, but heady stuff for this 51-year-old son of a former chicken farmer, a garrulously intelligent, wonkish politician whose previous claims to fame had been fighting against Donald Trump projects on the West Side and for a rail freight tunnel to Brooklyn.
12.
Wells portrayed Russia as recovering from a total social collapse, " the completest that has ever happened to any modern social organisation . " He minimized the role of the Bolsheviks in the fall of the Russian state, and presented this explanation of their success : " While all the rest of Russia was either apathetic like the peasantry or garrulously at sixes and sevens or given over to violence or fear, the Communists were prepared to act ."
13.
The Banger Sisters, as they were nicknamed in those bad old days, are obviously inspired by the Plaster Casters, the notorious Frank Zappa acolytes who made plaster replicas of rock star phalluses . ( Cynthia Plaster Caster, who looks a bit like Sarandon, is still a minor celebrity and maintains her own Web site . ) When Suzette and Lavinia let down their hair ( Lavinia actually shortens hers into a fashionably spiky shag ), the two women garrulously regress into their carefree 20-year-old selves.
