Word: bleakly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Screenwriter Dennis Potter. As in his TV film The Singing Detective, Potter mixes memory and desire, threat and therapy, a misanthropic wit and the ache of nostalgia for old songs and sweeter dreams. Importing this brand of satire to rural America was a risk for Potter; some of his bleak irony must have been seized by Customs. But the ache of his characters is universal. And in Nicolas Roeg (Performance, Don't Look Now) he has secured a gifted director for whom reality has always been just one of the 57 varieties of imagination...
...tidal wave of grief that followed the murder of John Lennon on Dec. 8, 1980, flowed from several sources. Perhaps the most gaping of these was the shocking obliteration of a decade's worth of hope. Millions awoke one morning bleak with the promise of winter to learn that now the Beatles could never get back together, that the expansive spirit of the '60s had definitively expired ten years past its prime...
...either side of the debate suggests that solutions will be easy to find. No matter what remedies are proposed or adopted, thousands will remain unemployed and unemployable, and for them the prospects are bleak. A strained federal budget may mean more cuts in benefits and greater demands on private agencies and churches to fill the gap. Mayor Koch and his followers have suggested an ad campaign listing reputable charities and government agencies where panhandlers can get help and concerned New Yorkers can send donations...
Finally, in 1965, the triumphant mission of the U.S. spacecraft Mariner 4 brought some reality to musings about Mars. The craft flew past the planet at a distance of only 6,100 miles, transmitting 22 television pictures of a bleak, moonlike landscape, pockmarked by craters and showing no signs of life. Even so, hope persisted. To demonstrate that a Mariner flyby at a distance of thousands of miles might completely overlook a thriving civilization, a young and still unknown Carl Sagan that same year sifted through a thousand pictures of earth shot by a weather satellite orbiting only 300 miles...
...said Jorge Rosales, a press officer at the Nicaraguan Resistance headquarters in Miami last week. Word had just leaked that the contras plan to lay off many, if not all, of their civilian employees. "Everybody knows there has been a negative vote in Congress," said Rosales, referring to the bleak prospects for more U.S. aid to back the contra war effort against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua...