Word: dourness
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This is the Washington tourists see - 13 million visitors a year, 3.5 million in April alone, when the Tidal Basin wears a garland of cherry blossoms. Tourists do not generally see the black ghetto areas like Anacostia, where trimmed lawns and trees as stately as dowagers mix strangely with dour housing projects and graffiti-ridden seesaws. Nor are there many tours that stop at the corner of 14th and Belmont, where stained couches lie cut open on the sidewalk. Washington is 70% black. Not all is poor black; the "Gold Coast'1 out along 16th Street is largely black...
Modern, that is to say post-Freudian, Vienna. But the doings related in this film are strictly pre-Freudian, not to say prehistoric, in their banality. A rather dour young American psychiatrist (Art Garfunkel) is accosted at a party by a young American something or other (Theresa Russell), who is rather feverish in her gaiety. Instead of his suggesting a professional appointment, they decide to have an affair. But he cannot keep it light, and she cannot take it seriously; the rich variety of sexual experience she has had has led her to the conclusion that the pleasures of romance...
...campaign once again dominated by personality and TV imagery, Anderson was handicapped. To his credit, he has shunned much of his image-shapers' advice to win votes by artificially changing his platform behavior. Instead, Anderson has remained true to himself: erratically ebullient, enthused, inspiring, as well as dour, bored, cranky and preachy. In a post-debate memo to Anderson, Stewart Mott, a millionaire backer, wrote sympathetically as well as critically: "That fateful evening, you needed to come across as sensational, exciting, lively, endearing. Instead you were stiff, statistical, stubborn, unsmiling-terrible body language. We know...
Square, squat and dour-faced, Kania is the only top Polish official of solely peasant stock. Raised in a village in southeastern Poland, he trained as a blacksmith, but in 1945 went to work for the Communist Party. In 1968, although he had little formal education, Kania was appointed head of the Central Committee's administrative department, where he ran the party machinery according to the wishes of the Politburo and the party secretaries. To satisfy so many constituencies, as he evidently did, Kania needed considerable bureaucratic skill-and the political finesse of a big-city mayor. As security...
After Wladyslaw Gomulka's 1970 ouster as Communist Party Chief, following a disastrous series of riots over food prices, his successor came to power on a wave of popular good will, a man of the people who would change things. As gregarious and outgoing as Gomulka was dour and withdrawn, Edward Gierek began meeting directly with workers to hear their complaints. Time and again he asked: "Will you help me?" Delighted with his down-to-earth style, the workers shouted back: "We will...