Word: dourness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Scotland, memoirists would be expected to lacerate their enemies and rain garbage on them, and if you raked in $18 million doing it--bingo! more power to you. A wonderful dour tribe, the Scots, and the right to groan and moan is sacred in Scotland. Here we have been duped out of it by the people who gave us aromatherapy and seaweed wraps...
...related and, I believe, obvious, points need to be made. One is that Soviet Communism was a dour, acquisitive tyranny; and leftists in the U.S. and Europe who believed in this failing light despite reams of damning evidence were, at the very least, lying to themselves. The other point is that a man should not be punished for saying what he thinks. If Robeson rejected a homegrown system of oppression to embrace another, more toxic one, that was his right. He should no more have been denied a passport then than he should be praised for stainless political acuity...
April showers may well bring May flowers, but this year April sunshine has been bringing out scores of Harvard sunbathers. Even the most dour students have found themselves tempted outside, content to forget work for a few hours and dedicate themselves to the wholesome pursuit of melanoma. After all, there could be few places more beautiful to lie outside than in the middle of Harvard Yard—except when it is barricaded off for fertilization—or down on the grassy banks of the Charles...
...hook have always been a lethal combination. But Minogue has been doing a variation of her current skimpy act for the past decade (excepting a one-off duet with dour artiste Nick Cave), and U.S. audiences have roundly ignored her. Her new album, Fever, sold more copies in its first week of release than all her previous albums did over the past 11 years. What makes her breakthrough even more confusing is that it comes just as America is closing the window on a four-year period of relentless teen pop. So why Kylie...
Lawrence's style, naturally lit and roughly realistic, matches the writing. Lantana sometimes has the air of a routine police procedural, sometimes the quality of a dour film noir. But this movie, so alert to mischance and dreams that don't quite work out as they should, has a good soul, a heart yearning for decency. What's terrific about it is the way it lets us discover those qualities subtly, inferentially...