Word: aridity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Kitano took over direction of Violent Cop after Fukasaku dropped out. He didn't plan the film or write it. But it's all Kitano in its charting of an arid landscape with no easy signposts. No sentimentality here?indeed, no evident feeling. He seeks no sympathy for Asuma. The man needn't be attractive, only compelling. If you want to idolize or iconize him, that's your business...
...real name, but he needs to protect his brother. He teaches school in a red, dusty district of KwaZulu-Natal. People here know the disease is all around them, but no one speaks of it. He eyes the scattered huts that make up his little settlement on an arid bluff. "We can count 20 who died just here as far as we can see. I personally don't remember any family that told it was AIDS," he says. "They hide it if they do know...
Still less is the austerity of a Minimalist work going to be seen as an affirmation of virtue, like a hair shirt on a saint. Rightly or wrongly, it is more likely to be seen as the Emperor's new clothes--a lack, a way of frustrating expectations with arid polemics about the arguable limits and nature of art itself. Between (say) the bricks, the cinder blocks and the parallel stripes on one hand and (say) the gilded statue of General Sherman on horseback at the corner of Central Park by Augustus Saint-Gaudens on the other, a vast gulf...
...deal-breakers squaring off on opposite sides of the North Atlantic are among the least affected by the possibility of rising temperatures and swelling seas. According to projections by the United Nations, Bangladesh could lose up to 16 percent of its land area to the Indian Ocean. Semi-arid parts of North Africa and Southern Europe could become deserts. But agriculture in Northern Europe and the North Great Plains would most likely boom in the event of warming--a longer growing season coupled with easier shopping due to less ice in the Great Lakes means the northern latitudes have less...
Shortly after noon on May 4, the National Weather Service station in Albuquerque, N.M., sent out the Haines Index, a measure of moisture and stability factors. In the arid brushland, a low Haines Index (a 2, for instance) is good: conditions are then unlikely to lead to wildfires. On May 4, however, the Haines Index was a potentially catastrophic 6, a situation predicted to last through the next day. Not a good day to start a fire. Especially in one of the dryest years on record...