Word: grimness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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BOOKS . . . GOING DOWN: Before the onset of its Disneyfication, New York City1s Times Square boasted a grim-looking strip club that successfully distinguished itself from the area1s many other grim- looking strip clubs. In big pink letters on a white marquee, this establishment proudly alerted passersby that it featured live girls working their way through college. Patrons, presumably, found topless women who had taken the SATs to be more tantalizing than those who had not. That's the basis for Jennifer Belle's comic first novel, Going Down (Riverhead Books; $12; 254 pages), which chronicles a year in the life...
...When fellow Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy wrote, for the 6-to-3 majority in Romer v. Evans in May, that a state constitutional amendment denying legal redress for discrimination based on homosexuality violated the equal-protection clause, Scalia wrote a withering dissent. He scoffed at the majority opinion's "grim, disapproving hints that Coloradans have been guilty of animus or animosity toward homosexuality, as though that has been established as un-American" and derided Kennedy's reasoning as "preposterous" and "comical," then dismissed the holding as "terminal silliness...
Then there's cyberpunk, the Net-based genre whose grim, dehumanized vision of the future dominated sci-fi during the late '80s. Its seminal work was the 1984 classic Neuromancer, by William Gibson, who never was happy being pigeonholed as a cyberpunk writer. "It wasn't our term," he says. "It's one of those labels." And although he did invent the word cyberspace, says Gibson, "I had to spend years and years figuring out what it meant." In the past few years, cyberpunk has lost some of its glitter, perhaps because cruising the Net has become so commonplace...
...Turner's Slave Ship and Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, in an image of total pessimism. This, Homer says, is what the voyage of life comes down to: hanging on and facing down your death when all hope is gone and there are no witnesses. It is a grim and hard-won vision, but in it, as in his descriptive powers, Homer remained supremely a realist...
...clashing symphony of red and black: crimson-shrouded ghosts line his way to a raging hearth, where he shouts out his twisted passion. This one will be hard to explain to the kids. But then Disney animation, from Snow White to The Lion King, is a parade of grim fairy tales about death, separation, betrayal. Hunchback has new traumas for the little ones; they will be terrified, perplexed, mesmerized...