Word: aridity
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...Magazine, for example, sung in an arid yet passionate rasp, Edwards muses on how literary works have been replaced on people's bookshelves by visually slick magazines featuring everything "from the absurd to the obscene." The haunting, slow-tempo Yellow Brown recalls the cyberpunk film Blade Runner; synthesizer bass notes drip like fat raindrops, and the sounds of droning machinery resonate. Edwards laments ecological destruction caused by technology: "In the city air, in all our seas, you can see every other color bleed into/ Yellow brown. There's nothing to save us from ourselves...
SOMALIA, A SICKLE-shaped expanse on the Horn of Africa, stretches across an unforgiving desert, arid and commanding. For centuries nomads have crossed and recrossed the territory in search of food and water. Akin in language and religion, this homogeneous people should have been destined to live in unity, without the tribal strife that tears apart other African countries. But limited natural resources and internal disputes have historically kept stability at a distance, and the clans of Somalia have regularly battled one another into a state of anarchy...
...foreign artifacts and ideas, but the vast majority of them would never want to live abroad. Those who do emigrate often suffer from chronic homesickness. Though keenly embarrassed by their economic and social backwardness, they believe passionately in the inherent superiority of their own soulfulness when compared with the arid materialism of the West. Ivan Goncharov's classic 19th century novel, Oblomov, presents the ethnic German Stolz as a model of energy and industry, but it is the dreamy Russian Oblomov who handily wins the competition of cultures. It may take Oblomov most of the day just...
These are rich times for American opera. After years of prospecting in the wilderness of arid academic styles and played-out compositional veins, composers may finally have hit an operatic mother lode. Within the past year, the Metropolitan Opera has staged two successful world premieres by Americans, John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles and Philip Glass's The Voyage. This month, through Nov. 24, Lyric Opera of Chicago is striking pay dirt with William Bolcom's McTeague. Eureka...
Consequently, although Basquiat's images look quite vivid and sharp when one first sees them, and though from time to time he could produce an intriguing passage of spiky marks or a brisk clash of blaring color, the work quickly settles into the visual monotony of arid overstylization. Its relentless fortissimo is wearisome. (An exception is some of the works on paper, which attain a delicacy of placement and interval absent from the paintings...