Word: acte
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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GIZA, EGYPT The Pyramids A helicopter will place a golden 30-ft.-high pyramid atop the biggest pyramid during Act 2 of an electronic opera --$15 to $400 --50,000 expected...
...perfect as the moment seemed, it wasn't quite at the imperial level that Jiang aspires to. Even in Beijing, where the WTO celebration was as choreographed as the first act of Cats, the zip and pop of a truly great moment was missing. Ordinary citizens weren't glued to their television sets. And the triumphal speech to his fellow Chinese--the grand gesture or unforgettable sound bite that would lock in the historic moment--never occurred. But such policy blahs don't mean that Jiang won't one day pull off that kind of Maoist dazzle...
Investigators say the strongest indication of a deliberate act lies in what the airplane did. No alarms signaling equipment breakdown or other emergency went off before the autopilot was disconnected. The steep descent was steady and controlled. The captain would not pull his control yoke up while the co-pilot pushed down. There was no radio mayday and evidently no attempt to signal a hijacking. The plane's final climb may be explained by traditional aerodynamics or by a pilot's desperate effort to regain altitude...
Partly this was the act of a masterly politician. Jiang's amiability reflects a man working hard to avoid offending anyone. It's a kind of sensitivity few Emperors would exhibit, but it is probably tied to the fact that Jiang isn't ruling 15th century China. He's ruling a 21st century nation in which the role of Communist Party leadership is being questioned. Explains Jonathan Pollack, the Rand Corp.'s chief China expert: "Jiang is something of a paradoxical figure... The leadership is very anxious. They have a collective self-esteem problem." Jiang's response...
...Levinson packs his movie with more melodrama--including Little Melvin's kidnapping of Ben and Sylvia from an early rock concert--than you would think it could hold. What's important is the casual, even digressive, movement of the piece. It plays like a memoir, not a conventional three-act movie. There's room here for Ben to shock his family by dressing as Hitler for Halloween, for a faux-naive stripper to electrify Nate's theater, for the strange power of a new-model Cadillac to cloud the mind of a '50s male. In short, Liberty Heights seems...