Ms. Faith played Joe's Pub with half her band (augmented by computer tracks), but she arrived in full regalia: a dress paved with rhinestones and a two-tiered, two-toned pompadour accessorized with fuzzy black puffs.
"The world is ending soon/ It's all crumbling at my feet," he sings, in a voice like black puffs of truck exhaust, then barks, "But baby loves me!" His voice is isolated and upfront in the mix, like someone standing uncomfortably close.
Keane was taking exception to his own caricature – the "madman", permanently on the point of explosion, little black puffs of toxic smoke coming from his ears – and the way it missed the other layers to his personality, and maybe he had a point judging by a little story that does not actually make it into his new autobiography.
It is true, for instance, that Nash had an inspired summer of mental activity in 1949; what is less certain is that he and some friends were in a bar, that they gazed in competing lubricity at a blonde, and that the friends disappeared in little black puffs of smoke, leaving Nash to sprint back to his office and complete his thesis.
The skies were flak-filled, angry black puffs everywhere.
Plumes of gray and black smoke puffed up from between the grave markers, where guerrillas bearing rocket-propelled grenade launchers were positioned.
"She has made a parade of people all in black and puffed out with pillows," Ms. Robbins said, "so they're misshapen like shadows".
Occasionally Ms. Wang was full of herself, as with a sad sack of a black coat puffed over a royal-blue gazar skirt.
Near a café, he pasted a portrait of a small black boy puffing out his cheeks; on a cobblestoned street, he put up a photograph of a teen-ager jabbing out his chin as if it were a baseball bat.
