Word: amidst
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Edmund Burke cast an indignant eye across the English Channel at the French Revolution and wrote sarcastically: "Amidst assassination, massacre and confiscation, they are forming plans for the good order of future society." Burke was the prototype of skepticism about certain revolutions. Since the French Terror, history has paraded past too many Utopian dramas of transformation that ended by being as totalitarian, as murderous, as the regimes that they swept away-triumphs of hopeful zealotry over experience. Stalin turned the Russian Revolution into a self-devouring machine that crushed its own in the basement of the Lubyanka. Especially because...
...reau began by shifting the action from the upholstered, hypocritical fin de siècle to the 1930s, in the shadow of Nazism. to the 1930s, in the shadow of Nazism. He and Designer Richard Peduzzi placed the singers amidst stark mausoleum-like sets in monochromatic blacks and grays, all vast, sterile spaces and icy slabs of marble. The results captured the harsh, merciless qualities of the opera perhaps too well. They were undeniably powerful, particularly in the hair-raising scene in which Lulu guns down Schon on an enormous staircase. They were also brutal and at times faintly ludicrous...
...though I've always hated champagne, everyone was wearing real bow ties, and I kept calling the 80-page program a "scorecard," I did, as I always have, know how to laugh. Amidst all my discomfort, laughter once again came to my rescue...
...clear that they were, though. The week passed in a frenzy, all chants and demands and marches and late-night deadlines. Vignettes: Derek Bok's frozen smile as he crossed the Yard, bureaucratic calm amidst a self-righteous storm; Dan Steiner chatting with protestors on the steps of University Hall, a few left-over torches burning down after the year's most spectacular protest march; the bemused set to the jaws of the University policement covering the demos, unsure of how to handle these kids who, they were told but did not quite believe, might try to grab a building...
...other surrealistic song on the album, "Side of Fries," is just as strange as "NACL," but not as funny. The idea of a well-dressed hotdog amidst a panoply of random images doesn't hold together well enough to give the song a central idea, but listening to "Side of Fries" is akin to reading James Joyce without the notes...