Word: blunt
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...once have been serviceable. But in Goya, and in its equally forlorn predecessor La Loca, written in 1979 for Beverly Sills, the music no longer has any discernible creative impulse; instead it seems to have been composed by the yard, measured to fit and then snipped off with blunt pinking shears. Menotti has recently confessed that "I have my doubts about how important my music is." After Goya, he may be the only one who does...
...always clear. It lay in his unique gift of pure color. He possessed to the nth degree the power of making a flat disk of yellow or a slice of viridian turn into a lemon or a leaf, bathed in sunlit air. Sixty years have done little to blunt the impact of the flat-out chromatic intensity of some Matisses from the 1920s, like Anemones in an Earthenware Vase, 1924. The structure of the painting is as lucid as a theorem, with its pattern of rectangular hangings, panels and tabletop and the surging diagonal of the flowers in the vase...
...wily is about the last word Marylanders would apply to Mikulski. Blunt, outspoken and feisty would describe her better. She is a fierce debater, with a fondness for pointed quips. "I define public service as not only to be a help but to be an advocate," says Mikulski. In the Senate, she adds, "I plan to use the good mind, the good mouth, the good heart God gave...
Since he first went to work for California Governor Ronald Reagan in 1967, Lyn Nofziger had been one of the Republican Party's shrewdest and most colorful strategists. Blunt and profane, with a wisecracking sense of humor, the former newspaperman served on Richard Nixon's White House staff, advised the Republican National Committee and helped guide Reagan to the presidency. Nofziger left his job as Reagan's political director in January 1982 to launch one of Washington's proliferating "communications" firms. He apparently succeeded at his brand of lobbying, but at considerable risk to his reputation as a smart operator...
...journeyed to the White House to tell Richard Nixon that he had lost his support on Capitol Hill. In the 1980s, when many thought of him as a kind of political relic, he achieved perhaps his greatest effectiveness. Although he was never a Senate insider (he was far too blunt and unpredictable for that), as chairman of the Armed Services Committee he won what he considers his most important victory, the passage of the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act, which streamlines the byzantine military decision-making process...