Just as the song began to feel indistinct, out crept the soul belter Sharon Jones.
From the beginning, she has felt indistinct, as if without a personality — "the defeating sense that her own shadow was identical to all the rest, and to the house next door, and the house next to that".
She hears raucous applause from an adjoining room And then she declares: "Some gypsy blood has been awakened" and she feels "an indistinct... desire to plunge into this whirlpool".
Hopper's "Night Windows," with its plump rumps, raging fires and gently breezing curtains feels similarly indistinct, sandwiched between other paintings on a crowded wall.
It makes it feel slack, indistinct, over-casual.
The latter portion of the book can feel hazy, indistinct and glided over -- certainly reflecting the powerlessness and numbness she comes to accept as a patient, but also, perhaps, because it's not as thrilling of a subject.
Perhaps Lahiri spreads her net a little too wide at times; there are sudden excursions into the viewpoint of Subhash's mother or Udayan, characters who have previously existed through the eyes of others, while Bela, the daughter, feels a little indistinct, her crucial formative years somewhat glossed over until she returns as an adult.
That memory was probably the jolt he needed: his first five songs, stretching back to the early 1970s, had felt wan and indistinct, plagued by uncertain sound and unsteady vigor.
Straight through to his last recordings, Campbell sings with a strong, rangy tenor that manages somehow to be both ordinary and remarkable: even when we've listened to that voice for decades, there remains something a bit indistinct about it, but in a way that feels more universal than faceless.
Whether that negates the value of West's work, or renders it false, is a personal decision his listeners can now make for themselves.Yet it also feels like these questions (Are an artist and his work so intertwined as to become inseparable, indistinct? Can we love one and not the other?) are becoming the central worry of our time.
The sylvan details cast a sharp, lacy scrim over the indistinct color patches, and the powerful figure/ground illusion makes the patterns seem to recede until it feels as if one's eye were nearly pressed to the canvas.
