Word: artful
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Carlin took stand-up comedy to a new audience and helped redefine it as an art form. In the '70s he sold out concerts, released best-selling albums, starred in HBO specials. Then, after rebounding from drug problems, he reinvented himself a couple more times. In the '80s he re-emerged as a kind of curmudgeonly uncle, with small-bore observational humor and an aphoristic style. In the '90s he tacked back to harder-edged political material, complaining about everything from the environmental movement to the middle-class obsession with golf. Even in his late 60s, Carlin was as sharp...
...with unfulfilled promise. If Reagan conjured the past, Kennedy downplayed it, urging Americans to instead grab hold of the future. He liked to cite Goethe, who "tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment, 'Stay, thou art so fair.'" Americans risked a similar fate, Kennedy warned, "if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress ... Those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future...
...early '70s Carlin had completed a remarkable change, opened up a new audience for stand-up comedy and helped redefine an art form. Like Lenny Bruce - whom he idolized and who helped him get his first agent - Carlin saw the stand-up comic as a social commentator, rebel and truth teller. He challenged conventional wisdom and tweaked the hypocrisies of middle-class America. He made fun of society's outrage over drugs, for example, pointing out that the "drug problem" extended to middle-class America as well, from coffee freaks at the office to housewives hooked on diet pills...
...perceptive on the cliches and buzzwords of the era as ever: "I've been uplinked and downloaded. I've been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I'm a high-tech lowlife. A cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, bicoastal multitasker, and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond...
...this deal is more about money than any hybrid art form. Dreamworks gets at least half the funding it would need to get out of its troubled marriage with Paramount, ensure its independence and still make six or so movies a year. Meanwhile, Reliance, which runs huge telecommunications and financial services businesses in India (and shouldn't be confused with Reliance Industries Ltd., another massive conglomerate owned by Anil Ambani's even richer brother Mukesh), gets an entry into Hollywood and some of the biggest names in the business. "If they [Reliance] identify a particular segment as high-growth they...