Word: dourness
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...upon a time, a drab tapestry hung in the Leverett dining hall. Then the University Art Museum snatched the tapestry away for preservation. For a year, Leverett survived without art. (What would Barbra say?) Everyone wanted something different from the banal, old portraits that Dowling describes as "the Harvard dour faces-white males looking very serious." Finally, the House Masters scraped together enough private money to commission a picture from a young abstract artist, Gerry Webster...
...film noir style. He can light a mean street, a smoky barroom or a morning-after bedroom in the best tradition of the genre. But these venues are no longer situated in a big city. Dahl's Red Rock West, released earlier this year, was set in a dour little Western town. Seduction mostly takes place in a small, upstate New York town. What Dahl is saying is that you can perhaps avoid becoming a crime statistic by living in the boondocks, but that evil, in the larger sense, is everywhere and inescapable...
...playing Jack's eldest neice, Kate as superficially severe towards his heresy while secretly devoted to her once-idolized uncle. She explicitly acknowledges the contrast between their past as the eligible belles of the town and their reduced current circumstances. Despite her projected persona as the most serious and dour of the sisters, she conceals the most tender affection of all the characters...
...kind of New Journalism about the Old World. As a youth in Soviet-dominated Pinsk, Poland, which is now in Belarus, Kapuscinski saw friends and teachers disappear -- part of Stalin's mass deportation and resettlement program that aimed to replace diverse nationalities with homo sovietus. This misfortune, as a dour professor in Baku tells the author, threatens present-day peace and stability from the Caucasus to the Pacific. "Now," he says, "one cannot move anyone without also moving someone else, without doing him injury...
Dante (Brian O'Halloran) has the night shift at the Quick Stop convenience store in Leonardo, New Jersey. Bright, dour and put-upon, he wastes or redeems his time by fretting about life -- about everything but his place in it, which he accepts with a readiness that annoys his friend Randal (Jeff Anderson). Clerks is a nothing-much-happens -and-ain't-that-the-big-truth? movie that gets considerable mileage from a couple of white guys, and their friends and customers, sitting around talking...