Word: dourness
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...invested the BBC with his own strong sense of dignity by requiring unseen radio announcers to wear dinner jackets while reading the news. Reith resigned as BBC chief in 1938 to head Imperial Airways, which merged with another airline the following year to become BOAC. The dour Scot ran several ministries in the wartime governments of Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill...
Using a rigorously unadorned style, Director Jim McBride, who was also coauthor of Glen and Randa's script, conveys a sense of primitive desolation, transforming contemporary landscapes into primeval heaths. Although the film is unsparing in its apocalyptic vision, its dour brutality is frequently alleviated by a cool eye for satire. There is, for instance, a fine and funny sequence in which Glen decides to be (as he puts it) "see-villized" and sits down like a good suburban husband with his pipe and newspaper in front of a gutted television...
Fahlstrom's most recent productions are brightly colored Monopoly boards on which players can practice CIA takeovers and World Bank manipulations. In their way, they are as dour and simplistic as any Weatherman communiqué, and they lack the verve and pullulating fantasy of earlier Fahlstroms. They are participatory posters, meant as ironic distress signals. Granted their bald look, it can still be said that no painter has approached the radical dissatisfactions of the times with a blacker or edgier...
When the economy was lively and money was loose, bankers were only too eager to counsel their customers on the advantages of borrowing. When money tightened and the economy began to turn sour, bankers turned dour. As interest rates for loans rose dramatically, many a loan officer became severely selective. Less affluent customers were often treated like indigent in-laws. Now the situation has suddenly reversed. Bankers are loaded with relatively cheap and ready cash; it is borrowers who are playing hard...
...Lennon proves once again that artists like politicians, are best judged by their works, not by what they say in public An excellent byproduct of Lennon's recent wallow in self-pity is his latest record John Lennon Plastic Ono Band (Apple), one of the most fascinatingly dour LPs in rock history. Part psychoanalytical printout, part notes from a Dostoevskian underground, part black comedy, the music has a morbid, Mussorgsky-like power that makes it hard to believe that its author once wrote I Want to Hold Your Hand. Working Class Hero a relentless dirge with the style and strength...