Word: bleak
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Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly; 2002) Tomine is comix's tartest short story writer, exploring the bleak lives of aging West Coast Gen-Xers. Newly reprinted in paperback, this collection of his work includes a story of a woman who makes desperate prank phone calls to the booth outside her window and another about a sad obsession over a blonde shop girl. Full Review
...President himself has been the victim of a "filter" - in the form of Vice President Cheney and the Rumsfeld crowd at the Pentagon who have kept the bad news from Iraq off his desk. Indeed, it was to make an end-run around that particular "filter" that a bleak CIA assessment of U.S. operations in Iraq was leaked to the media. The analysis, written by the CIA's Baghdad station chief from reports compiled by some 270 operatives on the ground, makes nonsense of the administration's sunny attempts to measure progress by schools rebuilt and electricity supplies, and also...
...darkish--side under control. Which is to say that he is an Englishman, well practiced in masking pain and absurdity and descents into sheer goofiness with mannerly behavior, sly irony and stiff upper lips. Don't get me wrong: Love Actually is not a black or even a particularly bleak comedy. But it does remind us--sometimes with a winning, unpolished awkwardness--that the pursuit of love is a game that is as dangerous as it is exhilarating. --By Richard Schickel
When she photographed a Jewish giant at home with his parents or a Christmas tree in Levittown in fullest bleak regalia, Arbus was situated between complicity and awe, a place where irony is beside the point and mere compassion has been left behind for something like mordant communion. It all makes for some complicated feelings. There's not a false or sentimental image anywhere in this show, yet one of the final groupings of pictures, in which retarded children face the camera to throw us back at ourselves in difficult ways--can move you to places where tears...
...could have an unfathomable power, but her most basic aim was not so mysterious. Arbus wanted anyone who viewed her images to find spiritual kinship with her sideshow freaks and drag queens. She also wanted viewers to discover, in her photographs of "ordinary" people, what was feral or bleak or unnerving in us all. It's all there in A young Brooklyn family going for a Sunday outing, N.Y.C., a couple with their attempted aplomb undone, even though they don't know it, by the wild and lyrical distraction in the face of their little boy at the bottom...