Word: clutter
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...rainbow light of a moral predicament . . . Vuillard takes everything to heart." One might not infer that from Vuillard's subject matter, which conjures an intimate world of material satisfactions: the Third Republic interiors, with their mottled wallpaper and yellow light glowing thickly on well-stuffed chairs: the clutter of books, statuettes, lamps, dishes, forks; the poetry of possession. One of his portrait subjects is said to have told her maid to hide the cold cream, because "M. Vuillard never leaves anything out." She was, in a sense, wrong; Vuillard's eye for the telling shape was methodically acute...
...principal instrument of that struggle is their collective power of reasoning. The importance of intelligence on the court is not so much that it promises the right result, but that it will serve to expose and carve away the clutter-emotion, prejudice, unexamined tenets of historical faith-that can get in the way of decision making. If the decision is not always the best, then at least a well-reasoned opinion gives judges, lawyers and judicial scholars a chance to spy out its fatal inconsistencies...
...have a verbal brilliance that suggests what Printer or Joyce might have done if they had been born in this country. One skit, called "Image Sales," is a staccato recitation of brand names, commercial pitches, and want ads that conjures up visions of America choking on its own verbal clutter. Another mixes the language of a Brooklyn barroom with the rhythmic moans of an OMchant. Other vignettes are purely visual, as when, after going through the motions of a Madison Avenue version of life, a spotlighted actress stands wearing the smile and vacant eyes of a small town politician...
...pointless to worry about whether Suez is a shapely and coherent play. It isn't. Useless characters clutter the stage, scenes balloon or shrink out of proportion, and at the final curtain the plot snaps shut arbitrarily as native soldiers run onstage shooting. Osborne's anger still glints and cuts, but it cannot draw blood from such straw men as critics, in-laws and American tourists...
...lately, a good candidate for the laurels of obscurity was the Musée Marmottan, a two-story mansion in the outer regions of the 16th Arrondissement near the Bois de Boulogne. From its opening in 1934, the place attracted about 30 visitors a month to admire a lugubrious clutter of porcelain, stained glass and Napoleonic furniture. Guidebooks ignored the Musée Marmottan. Even its hours were absurd: two afternoons a week, except during the tourist-laden summer, when the museum perversely stayed shut for two months...