Word: contemptable
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Among the younger designers, jokes tend to be about the future, but a future as it was conceived in a more hopeful past. It is a neat trick. This strain of the new-wave sensibility is an ironic mixture of nostalgia and contempt, simultaneously mock futurist and mock historicist. The allusions are to old television and B movies. At the Whitney, Dakota Jackson's UFO-shaped Saturn stool (1976) and R.M. Fischer's enormous, intimidating Max lamp (1983) are like fakey props from 1950s science-fiction films. Burton's saw-toothed aluminum chair (1980-81) seems to be a throne...
...strangest twist yet came last week, as the state's Republican Governor and Democratic legislature struggled over a prison-reform bill. The corrections commissioner, Stephen Norris, was ordered jailed for contempt of court. Although Norris was spared a five-day prison sentence by an appeals court, Governor Lamar Alexander called the incident the "most bizarre, strange, weird and unusual set of events I've seen as Governor...
...rest of the world does not share the Americans' native sympathy for cowboys. Beyond the territorial waters, "cowboy" is often a term of derision, of contempt. In Europe, the word frequently conjures up everything that people fear and mistrust in Americans. It suggests unpredictable, violent behavior, a heedless and cavalier lawlessness and a kind of vigorous stupidity: a hard killer glint in the American eye, the loose cannon rolling around in the American mind. Viet Nam was a rip-roaring American cowboy adventure that turned into a nightmare. The cowboy idea does not always ^ travel well abroad. It works best...
...Lavelle was convicted of perjury for denying any involvement in EPA's dealings with the Stringfellow Acid Pits, a notorious waste dump in California, where Aerojet General, along with many other companies, had dumped tons of caustics, cyanides and heavy metals over the years. Burford was also charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to give it some internal EPA documents; the charge was dropped after she quit in March...
...first place, or why we are supposed to sympathize with this life's ambition. The film seems to work against its own supposed stand for women's rights. Walking past a row of leering truck-drivers, June's female companion offers in smiling, taunting contempt, "Hello, assholes," reducing her to their level. The issue of socio-economic progress degenerates into feminism at its iron-fisted worst: men are pitiful brutes...