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Fire Escape Partners
3465 25th Street, Suite 17
San Francisco, CA 94110 | (transitive verb)
[ah-KLOOD] 
1. to close or stop up, as a passage; 'occlude an artery': "A commuter ahead of me on the escalator took it upon himself to occlude the walking lane, leaving an entire trainload of people glaring up at him."
2. to block the passage of, especially light or liquid
adjective form: occludent
Origin:
Approximately 1597; borrowed from Latin, 'occludere': to shut up, to close up ('oc-': against + 'claudere': to shut, to close). In action:
"If there were such a thing as a sure bet in the world of girl-power-pop, Ms. Moore would have been it. She released 'So Real' at the crest of the genre's wave. She had her own show on MTV, as well as a contract with Neutrogena, thereby guaranteeing her an on-air presence during both regular programming and commercial breaks. Her lyrics and videos featured the tried-and-true mix of youthful purity and barely legal sexual subtext. (She even had the requisite stain on her reputation, a rumored relationship with the Backstreet Boy Nick Carter that provoked wrath in the hearts and chat rooms of Nick Carter fans everywhere.) But major superstardom failed to materialize, despite platinum record sales, and instead Ms. Moore has spent fully a quarter of her life and the whole of her career best known as someone who, like Jessica Simpson, is not quite Britney Spears.
...But as Madonna -- always a useful piece of evidence for just about any pop-cultural thesis imaginable -- proves, the persona that sells a video on television can be a disadvantage on the big screen. Ms. Moore, who never had the outsized image that has so occluded Ms. Spears's and Madonna's movie roles, is free to act and she doesn't appear at all uncomfortable doing it. In 'How to Deal,' she plays a punked-out and dissatisfied teenager whose belief in love is challenged by her parents' divorce and restored by the boy (Trent Ford) who almost gets and then refuses to lose her. Alongside more seasoned actors like Allison Janney, Peter Gallagher and Dylan Baker, she is as good as the movie, which is serviceable. In 'Saved!,' as the manipulative, born-again queen bee at a fundamentalist Christian high school, she stars with Macaulay Culkin, Patrick Fugit, Jena Malone and Heather Matarazzo, among others, and she is everything that she was not in her videos: cold-eyed calculation, wreathed in sweet and pretty ways, shilling for a nominally noble cause in the guise of sincerity. And, strangely enough, as an actress, she can pull it off."
Mim Udovitch. "Mandy Moore's Nonblond Ambition," The New York Times (July 20, 2003).
"Religious faith is a most filling vapor.
It swirls occluded in us under tight
Compression to uplift us out of weight..."
Robert Frost (1874-1963), U.S. poet. 'Innate Helium.'
"In real time, it's 9:15 p.m. at the Curran Theatre. That's when Elaine Stritch cranks into 'Why Do the Wrong People Travel?,' the hilarious, show-topping song she sang in Noel Coward's 'Sail Away' 42 years ago...
'Liberty,' which won a Tony Award for special theatrical event on Broadway last year, is simultaneously unblinking and elusive. As witness to her own sustained life of self-presentation, Stritch can only offer up the truth as she saw it from 'up here.' Few shows have shared that heady, occluded view so completely.
'I'm Still Here,' a song she resisted singing because it's her obvious anthem, sounds newly made when Stritch does it. Her raw voice and enormous grin, steely eyes and far-flung arms -- everything she's got goes into the song."
Steven Winn. "Strong as ever, Elaine Stritch breathes life into a story of high notes and low points," [Theater review of Elaine Stritch at Liberty: Solo show.] San Francisco Chronicle (July 17, 2003).
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