The brisk cross-chatter cannot disguise a tension that everyone feels but no one wants to acknowledge.
The picture has the thriving, constant cross-chatter that makes the chorus of the Sly Stone song that gave the film its title, as well as the racial tensions that Mr. Stone sang about and that still course through this country nearly 40 years later.
This is the stream of chatter, the cross-waves, one side of two- and three-sided running dialogues.
The group's percussionists were weaving chattering cross-talk into the rhythm section's rock and shuffle, with punctuations and supporting riffs from the horn section and robust call-and-response vocals.
The chatter is a cross between the talk in Hewlett and Chinatown: low-key but persistent, drifting from family news to stocks, from Mandarin to English.
The voice-tweet tool gives us a mechanism that will work just as well across micro-communities, whether inside the Chatter firewall or cross-domain in a FriendFeed conversation.
In fact, the whole Chatter experience resembles a cross between Facebook and Gmail.
And yet every group in the line ceases its chatter the second it crosses the threshold into 263 Prinsengracht.
Enough of listening to endless chatter of principals, school staff, crossing guards, monitors, authority figures.
There was a time when movies themselves felt like small towns: rooted fast in their environments, and alive to the wistful chatter of minor characters as they crossed paths and then went on their way.
Now I'm hearing from multiple sources that Chatter will also be getting secure cross-company instant messaging.
