Word: backgrounding
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This shift away from farce reduces all the earlier scenes, a good two-thirds of the play's to background for the real drama of the second half. In this light the play's first act is much too long and rambling; an entirely extraneous street women and her rabid dog, included purely for a few limp laughs, are only the furthest extreme of the play's meandering. The early scenes of the second act show what that first act might have been: here, the script is tight, and much more amusing...
...Principal Norman Silber: "Our Asian kids have terrific motivation. They feel it is a disgrace to themselves and their families if they don't succeed." The results bear him out: between 40% and 50% of pupils in Lane Tech's advanced-placement math classes are of Asian background, and two of the school's four National Merit Scholarship winners so far are Asian. Says Silber: "The parents are on the school's side...
Even in its more refined moments, seicento art in Naples was geared to a love of strong sensation and imminent catastrophe: crowds and Vesuvius in the background, diseases of the body, instabilities of the soul, Thanatos and Eros beating the big bass drum. One recognizes in the Magdalens and Madonnas the women that visitors like John Evelyn wrote of, "generally well-featured, but excessively libidinous." Even still lifes by artists like Paolo Porpora and Giovanni Battista Recco have the swollen intensity of painting infatuated with the surface of the world. However, Recco's picture of objects on a kitchen...
...five full minutes. Finally, the man wearing the flag relented. He nodded his head. He hugged the carabinieri one at a time, kissing them on both cheeks Tears--or was it sweat--were visible on his face. The carabinieri smiled, while the blue lights continued to flash in the background...
Against this background of unrelieved divisiveness, it seemed natural that, almost instinctively, West Germany's voters turned to the burly, folksy, reassuring figure of Helmut Kohl, 52. Less than two hours after last Sunday's polling ended, computer projections showed Kohl's Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian ally, the Christian Social Union, gaining an estimated 49.3% of the popular vote. Kohl's Social Democratic rival, Hans-Jochen Vogel, 57, ran second with 38.2%. The environmentalist, antinuclear Green Party polled around 5%, possibly gaining a disruptive foothold in the Bundestag. The small Free Democratic Party, Kohl...