Word: bleakness
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...picked me up at the Holiday Inn in Redding, Calif., a wizened guy in a black T shirt and jeans driving a politically incorrect white Hummer. "Believe it or not, this is a pretty nice little town," he said as we headed out to his ranch, past a bleak, unending landscape of big-box stores that brought to mind a recent Haggard lyric: "Everything Wal-Mart all the time, no more mom and pop five and dimes... What happened, where did America go?" A vague populist annoyance with big stores and big shots is one of the themes that have...
...midst of this bleak news - and as Sarkozy was in the U.S. thrilling observers with a speech to the United Nations on September 25 - French Prime Minister François Fillon described the nation's financial and economic state as "bankrupt", and indicated serious belt-tightening would be required to address the situation. Fillon soon regretted the public concern the term provoked: as Sarkozy returned from New York with assurances that "there are no austerity plans" for France, Fillon found himself obliged to explain his use of "bankrupt" as glib and non-literal. A French public groggy with weeks...
February is the coldest month, and February in Denmark is about as bleak as it gets?until I reach Finland. Looking at the desolate fields near Lammefjorden outside Copenhagen, at first I don't see much to eat. But Soren Wiuff, a vegetable farmer, is digging up crosnes, tiny curlicue-shaped, artichoke-flavored roots, with his bare hands. A Danish TV crew is taking close-ups of my shoes punching through the frozen mud crust. It's hard to say which they find more entertaining: the idea that someone would visit a root-vegetable farm in Prada heels or that...
...remade in Hollywood (The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven) and Europe (Yojimbo as Leone's Fistful of Dollars). Leone followed up with For a Few Dollars More--surely the most honest title ever given a sequel--and the spaghetti western craze was born. Django, director Sergio Corbucci's bleak riff on Fistful, with its hero lugging a coffin that has a machine gun inside, spawned at least 50 movies named Django. The most recent, Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, which played to rapt crowds at the recent Venice and Toronto film festivals but has no American distributor...
...melancholy induced by looking into the waters from a bridge segues into a roll call of famous suicides and murders on the river, sealed with the observation that "The Thames has always harboured an affection for severed heads." Ackroyd attributes the moody riverside settings of Charles Dickens' Bleak House or Great Expectations to the novelist's misery at being sent as a 12-year-old to work in a ramshackle, filthy blacking factory abutting the Thames while his father was locked up in a debtors' prison. Fact and fiction are inseparable in the city of both authors: Dickens may have...