Word: franticness
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...none is half so painful as Paris 7000 (ABC), featuring George Hamilton as a trouble shooter at the U.S. embassy. George is all that remains of the most expensive (original budget: nearly $8,000,000) debacle in TV history, The Survivors. The series was glued together in the frantic eight weeks since ABC gave up on the original program. George professes to believe that in Paris 7000 there is "more of the real me," which is to say the patina beneath the suntan of a man who after eleven years in acting still has only two expressions-a saturnine scowl...
...Frantic and Languid. Armah's fiction is stiller and clearer. His second novel, Fragments, is set at a lower voltage than The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, his first novel about the failure of revolution to inspirit his fellow Ghanaians. But contempt for his countrymen still seethes, this time because they are corruptly devoted to cars, tape recorders and neon "WELLCOME" signs at airports. Baako, his fragile hero, cannot adjust to such trinket worship. His sister's premature baby dies when the family too quickly presents it at an outdoor festival because they are anxious...
Oppressed by such signs of avarice, Baako's mind cracks in a long, brilliant scene that is at once frantic and languid. Armah unwinds the entire story slowly, circling the fragments of Baako's breakdown with the sureness of an African tribal dance that seems always on the edge of monotony, yet is continually closing on the climax. For Baako, too, there is a circling. First he approaches nearer and nearer to a knowledge of what lies at his center of being. Then he is literally and figuratively encircled by others like a mad dog. In an Ibsenian...
...Super Bowl and Kansas City's powerful defensive front four reminded National Press Club Speaker Robert Finch of what he termed his own "Frantic Four: pollution, the population explosion, the Pill and pesticides." The Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare continued: "The best thing we've found so far for the population explosion is a 24-hour schedule for athletic events on TV-all year round...
...frantic hawker stands in front of each shop, jerking passersby inside with either a friendly tug or a non-stop, 78 r. p. m. sales-pitch. The walls, laden with shining guitars, pinata dolls, and obscenely fluorescent paintings of nudes and bull-fights, flash down aggressively at the customer. Mexicans sit behind the counters, talking and laughing, while middle-aged, paunchy Americans solemnly try on yard-wide sombreroes in front of the mirrors...