pianist vs. piano player; name sought for mystical phenomenon

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:17 PM -0500 2/7/02, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>
>And when Itzhak Perlman plays klezmer music, it's on the fiddle.
>
And, as I recall it wasn't "Violinist on the Roof", although that
might be the more appropriate name for a Broadway revival, with the
prices they charge for musicals anymore...

In the "Life imitates the ADS-L" department*, today--the day
following the 20-20 Downtown piece on linguistic profiling (not badly
done, I thought, ranging from clips of the famous exchange during the
O. J. Simpson murder trial to an interview with John Baugh)--the new
New Yorker (Feb. 11) arrived, containing not only a long review
article on the Randall Kennedy book mentioned earlier on the list
(_Nigger:  The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word_), complete with
an excerpt from RHHDAS, but also an article on Dashiell Hammett that,
while not directly mentioning the Elisha Cook, Jr. "gunsel"
character, alludes to the fact that "Hammett's editor worried
about...the obvious homosexuality of the the novel's crooks".  The
same article mentions in passing that "Bob Dylan allows that his
favorite film is Truffaut's 'Shoot the Piano Player', in which
Charles Aznavour replayed Humprhey Bogart playing Hammett's idea of
the ultimate urban hero."  I hadn't thought of this movie (which as I
mentioned in my post this afternoon was once my favorite too,
although I'm no Bob Dylan) in donkey's years until thinking of it in
connection with the current "pianist vs. piano player", and here it
is in print a few hours later, folding back on the independent
"gunsel" thread.   Is there a name for this kind of coincidence or
confluence, which isn't quite either syzygy or deja vu?

larry

*I know, I know, it's really "The New Yorker imitates the ADS-L" department