Word: bombastes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...living a double life? "Tell the administration that you're working on the opera Karl Marx or The Young Guards, and they'll forgive you your quartet when it appears," he said. Moreover, at 157 minutes the film is itself guilty of some of Shostakovich's own sins, including bombast and repetitiveness...
...champion, gently guiding an audience to proper appreciation of the artist's gifts. Simple things, yes. But how hard they are to come by, what luck is required in the quest, and how rarely artists themselves confront their difficulties in an engaging spirit. The whine of self-pity, the bombast of self-aggrandizement, the low moan of tragedy are the notes most often heard from the creator on the subject of his life...
...sometimes incredulous now at 1968, not only at the astonishing sequence of events but at the intensity, the energy in the air. People lived their lives, of course. And yet the air of public life seemed to be on fire, and that public fire singed the private self. Revolutionary bombast gusted across the wake of elegy for something in America that had got lost, some sense of national innocence and virtue. More than in ordinary times, people thought about death, about spiritual fulfillment, and about transfiguration...
...tragedy is that in the contentious climate of Washington, the struggle becomes the end in itself, the media relishing the daily bombast, the Congress determined to trim the presidential wings, the President dedicated to preserving his rights of passage. Important issues get slighted...
Like many American artists since, West came to believe in his own greatness too early. It gave him the self-confidence that turns to bombast. Much of his work is thin and overstretched. In the insecurities that underlay his rhetorical sweep, West remained somewhat provincial, but the big historical "machines" he painted for English clients partake of Jeffersonian ideas precisely because those ideas were also current in Europe -- particularly the notion that the morality of republican Rome, its emphasis on pietas, obligation and memory, plainness and bravery, could underwrite a new republican state...