Word: deft
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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More than any one character, it is the decade of the '70s itself that serves as the focus of Rick Moody's deft second novel, The Ice Storm (Little, Brown; 279 pages; $19.95). The story of the Hood family is set in 1973, by which time, as Moody writes, "the Summer of Love had migrated, in its drug- resistant strain, to the Connecticut suburbs five years after its initial introduction." In this new era of shag carpets and social upheaval, the Hoods and other New Canaan families have exchanged Chippendale propriety for Naugahyde and wife swapping...
...York City or Los Angeles, Fraser's deft and epigrammatic work about a romance between a gay man and a straight, married one would not seem startling. Indeed, his equally raw Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love played off-Broadway for months in 1991. But as the crusaders of the culture wars point out, there is more to America than its coastal metropolises. In Cincinnati, where Oh! Calcutta! was shut down briefly in 1974, where a museum was prosecuted in 1990 for displaying the late Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs, and where an antigay ordinance was enacted last...
...night-club life do exist, however. At the high end of the scale, Oscar de la Renta's clothes for Balmain in Paris are exquisite, better than the ready-to-wear he produced for his own line in New York. Anne Klein's offerings, now designed by the deft Richard Tyler, are impeccable without being boring. And Calvin Klein remains a great editor of trends. He suited up models, mixed and matched and threw in some chaste jumpers and wearable fuzzies...
...almost too unbelievable for its intended effect. Yet, with post-modern sensibility, mere reality was not the object of depiction, but derision. By subverting the most fundamental principles of a democratic legislature, the council provocatively demonstrated the absurdity of "representative democracy." Through their deft drama, the political concept essentially becomes an oxymoron...
...finds, including Louis's dark-headed, punk roomate, Sophie. Of course, Sophie and Johnny get together within the first few minutes of the film, even before Louise gets home from work, Sophie ,without any sort of guidance in her vapid, drugfilled life, finds a beacon in Johnny and his deft tongue, both in and out of bed. Johnny sees her as another living being, only existing because some amoeba was able to evolve into a frog that crawled out of the water and eventually became a primate which can now speak all of his urges, including sexual. Needless...