Word: decay
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While each of the monologists is interrupted with a certain metronomic regularity, there is no visible thematic link between the speeches, though a mood of melancholy and decay permeates the evening. Each speaker seems to be addressing himself, a form of alienation that succeeds wonderfully in alienating the audience. It may be that Albee had in mind Walter Pater's dictum that "all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music." The kind of music one gets in Box-Mao is the dead space between notes...
...much can be said for some of the other coverage now emerging. Editors chose some unlikely writers to cast a new light on events, and it is quite often a lurid one. In Esquire, that chronicler of human decay and perversion, Jean Genet, reports that he could smell America decomposing; he was also fascinated by the size of the thighs of Chicago cops. In the same magazine, William Burroughs concocts a fantasy in which a purple-bottomed baboon runs for President. Esquire's John Sack, on the other hand, convincingly finds the typical cop much more playful, much less...
...object of scorn. Many critics for years ridiculed the sprawling metropolis as a gaggle of suburbs "in search of a city." They had a point. The core of the city not only failed to share in Southern California's explosive postwar growth but developed ominous symptoms of decay. Though downtown Los Angeles remained a stronghold for banking, finance, oil and insurance, jobs in other fields followed people to the suburbs. Vacancy rates soared in dingy old office buildings. Sleazy stores and bad restaurants proliferated. Forsaken by many retailers, streets that once bustled with affluent shoppers became a depressing arena...
...potential suicide. After all, his father killed himself. He was obsessed by the "spoliation of nature"-human and mineral-in the once aristocratic Philadelphia suburb where the family lives. Charley, idle and lonely, powerfully infected by his father's preoccupation with decay, conceives a death wish of his own. A neighbor woman, an ancient relic of the town's past, wages a moral and psychological battle to exorcize it, finally succeeds by dying herself. But Charley lives on, haunted by the fear that he had really meant to kill...
...life to be more than the choice, as he puts it, of "what kind of death we can bear." With bafflement, almost with rage, he confronts "the man" he himself has created and asks: Was there not something "unnatural in any man who imagined he could escape the inevitable decay of life and not accept the decline into final disintegration...