Word: barrenness
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...most significant thing about Marsalis' career is not his personal success. It is the fact that, largely under his influence, a jazz renaissance is flowering on what was once barren soil. Straight-ahead jazz music almost died in the 1970s as record companies embraced the electronically enhanced jazz-pop amalgam known as fusion. Now a whole generation of prodigiously talented young musicians is going back to the roots, using acoustic instruments, playing recognizable tunes and studying the styles of earlier jazzmen, from King Oliver and Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. Moreover, with major record labels...
Director Andrei Belgrader wisely adopts a minimalist approach towards this play, recognizing that its success depends on acting and the use of dialogue rather than any inspirational staging. The set is appropriately barren, and the difference of agreement between the two characters is highlighted with a minimum of movement. One clever touch is Belgrader's decision to spice the 18th Century satire with modern references and expletives; they serve both to shock the audience into attention and remind us that the script has meaning for contemporary society. Another is Shalhoub's coughing jag, with its reference to Topol's song...
...about oil, or is it about order? Those who say the gulf crisis is about oil note that U.S. military forces would not be massing to protect one distant feudal monarchy and restore another if the barren sands of Arabia had nothing underneath. Those who say it's about something finer -- re-establishing a civilized world order -- argue that we would not be going to all this trouble if the threat to our energy supply came in the traditional way: by a meeting of oil ministers in a Geneva hotel...
...they converge on Houston this weekend for the 16th Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations. Their visit will be attended by Wild West fanfare and reported by more than 3,000 journalists, but is any real work likely to get done? Many past summits, in fact, produced results as barren as the North Texas Panhandle. If the chief executives of the world's most powerful economies simply spend three days hammering out a pious communique and frolicking at rodeos and barbecues, then maybe this form of junket should ride off into the sunset...
...realm currently specified by Senator Al Gore. "The environment has become a question of national security," says Gore. Indeed, environmental threats are the most analogous to military ones, and it's easy enough to stretch national security's original intent in this direction. "Environmental refugees" fleeing from homelands ! made barren by shattered ecosystems are poignantly reminiscent of fugitives from the plains of war. Social instability, breeder of violence, is a spreading by-product of desertification and deforestation in lands as far apart as the Philippines and Egypt...