Word: blunting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...trapped middle-ager wants to flee, like Gauguin to the South Seas, but erstwhile bankers of 45 who desert their Parisian families and become great painters are one of a kind. To blunt the pain of reality, he slips a whisky bottle into his desk and nips at it. (Alcoholism climbs a steep 50% in the 40-60 group over ages 30-39.) His medicine cabinet begins to look like a pharmaceutical display, and he retreats into hypochondria. Indeed, the sense of being straitjacketed by fate may contribute sizably to the cardiovascular and cardiopulmonary attacks that increasingly fell middle-agers...
...avant-garde international survey of the arts called "Voyeurama," a rambling column by John Wilcock (an original staffer on the now middle-aged Village Voice), and a presumably popular feature called "Slum Goddess," which consists of photographs of young girls who radiate "antiEstablishment qualities." The want ads are blunt and to the point. Sample: "Groovy, free spirit chick wanted to share West Village apt. with guy, 27. No rent...
...consistent deverbalization--which marks good and bad songs alike on Blonde on Blonde. Emblematic of the present wordlessness stands the cardboard jacket, filled with snapshots where past albums abounded in liner notes (often awkward but sometimes incisive). The songs themselves, by profuse blues repetitions and by overlong choruses, generally blunt the listener's attention to the language of the songs...
...state employment, special export credits to stimulate foreign trade, more public housing, complete overhaul of Illia's disastrous oil policy that forced Argentina to import petroleum for the first time in years, and reorganization of the country's food-distribution system to eliminate middlemen and help blunt the cost-of-living spiral...
Paul Sparer's blunt and pragmatic Cassius is fine in the first half of the play, but degenerates into overwrought fustian towards the end. In his quarrel with Brutus before Philippi, his low delivery of "Brutus, bait not not me," with shaking knee, is ten times more powerful than all the torrent of screaming and bellowing he soon gives vent...