Word: delirium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...young stud is directed through some steamy autoeroticism by an unseen older man. Shock the bourgeoisie? The opening scenes in Pedro Almodovar's films seem designed to shock the Borgias. And that's just for appetizers. The one aesthetic commandment of this Spanish writer-director might read: Begin in delirium, then floor it till the closing credits...
Whose life is this, anyway? Alison Poole, not yet 21, is studying acting at the Strasberg Institute and excess at the end of a coke spoon. She is the protagonist of this fleet, frequently nasty and fitfully funny chronicle of drug delirium, sexual excess and committed shallowness during the dimming of the 1980s. She devotes so much time to getting off, in so many ways, that it is a wonder she found time to lend her voice to the narration. As he demonstrated in his 1984 Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney knows this turf and its voices...
...conclusion Gitlin writes; "Disappointment too eagerly embraced becomes habit, becomes doom. Say what we will about the Sixties' failures, limits, disasters, America's political and cultural space would probably not have opened up as much as it did without the movement's divine delirium." Gitlin's greatest achievement in this monumental book, perhaps, is that he is able to avoid the elegiac fatalism of the Ghost Dance in his analysis of the complex impact that this seemingly most self-contained, all or nothing of decades has had on contemporary society...
...even in this Spielberg war, wisdom brings bitter lessons. It teaches Jim that he may -- must -- filch food from the dying and take shoes from the dead. When P-51s zoom above him, the plane-crazy boy crash-dives into delirium; his dreams have singed him by flying too close, poisoned him with their oil and cordite. Alone with an ailing woman (Miranda Richardson), who stokes his first erotic fantasies, Jim looks up and sees the atomic blast over Hiroshima as a blazing crystal vision. Even at the end, when a plane drops bundles of Spam and Luckies like...
...treatment, there was no doubt I was well on my way. My appearance was shocking. I was about 20 lbs. underweight and malnourished, the result of giving up almost all forms of food except coffee, sugar and, of course, alcohol. I was in the early stages of delirium tremens, the DTs. I sometimes heard faint ringing noises in my ears and suffered unexpected waves of vertigo. I felt near constant pressure in my lower back and sides from the punishment my liver and kidneys were taking. My personality was also seriously diseased. I was nervous, reclusive, by turns extravagantly arrogant...