Word: despairs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...strengths of Brother Can You Spare A Dime? lie in the director's creation of a vivid image of a decade characterized by uncertainty and despair, a decade brightened only by America trust in Roosevelt as a paternal cult figure and by the refreshingly lighthearted fantasies of Hollywood. Disorder and confusion are starkly represented in scenes depicting violent strikes at a Ford Motor Company plant, a Communist rally in New York, a Ku Klux Klan gathering and MacArthur's dispersal of the Bonus Army's Washington gathering in the waning days of the Hoover Administration...
...those of us foreigners who have luckily escaped being saddled with the albatross of American self-condemnation, the self-flagellating despair of bourgeois life has always been a puzzle. For three decades, we in the rest of the world have watched American movies with mouth-dripping envy, fantasizing about the day when we too will have those shiny Formica kitchens, the big cars with lots of chrome, blinking computers everywhere, Las Vegas, Gary Cooper. It seemed like paradise, but good old Richard Cory just went and shot himself. In spite of its inane aspects, the recent flood of nostalgia...
...days about the "pounding" that the Harvard defense took from Brown in Saturday's scrimmage, particularly the pass defense. True, Brown passed for five touchdowns and both Bruin quarterbacks, Bob Bateman and Paul Michalko, had a field day, but it isn't quite yet time for Crimson fans to despair about the coming season's prospects...
Again in this vein, "Too Much of Nothing" is a meditation upon the danger of despair...
Dylan has this concept of "the flood," akin to Hunter S. Thompson's "Edge:" one must sever all connections with artificial identities, reject everything that is taught, believe only what experience has shown you to be true. The danger of course is madness and despair, and Dylan has flirted with both of these (listen to "Dirge" on Planet Waves: "I went out all along Broadway/And I felt that place within/That hollow place where martyrs weep/And angels play with sin"). In this light, all these songs about "nothing" constitute a portrait of Dylan confronting his dread in a number of ways...