Word: grounding
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Stalin despised it as "decadent bourgeois formalism" and had it locked away. Khrushchev called it excrement and branded its creators "pederasts." Brezhnev ordered bulldozers to smash it into the ground at an outdoor exhibit. Such has been the fate of Russia's modernist art at the hands of dictators bent on enforcing their philistine tastes with the whole armamentarium of the totalitarian state. Even Mikhail Gorbachev has found that the tradition of putting down avant-garde art dies hard among cultural bureaucrats. As a result, the visual arts have been far slower than literature and music to benefit from glasnost...
This "retroactive" plague, as Andrew Holleran calls the AIDS epidemic in Ground Zero (Morrow; 228 pages; $16.95), is causing not only panic but a radical change in sensibilities. Phrases like "oral sex" and "anal penetration," once startling to read outside hard-covers, are now routinely bounced off satellites with the weather reports. "Making love," one of the sweetest phrases in the language, now suggests a cause of death. Still, the world is sharply divided into the sick and the well, and AIDS can be something of a lark if you are a robust heterosexual college student at a safe...
Holleran knows the limits of stoicism. He qualifies the old saying "Life is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think" with "Too schematic . . . most of us think and feel." Ground Zero is the proof. It is a tragicomic tour through Manhattan's homosexual nighttown: the gay bathhouses, pornographic theaters and bars that the author cruised a decade ago. He finds the atmosphere radioactive with fear; sperm reminds him of plutonium. In this subdued climate, Holleran finds new enjoyment with his surviving gay companions. He meets many over freshly dug graves and notes the difference...
Like neighbors who grate on but cannot escape each other, the U.S. and Mexico know they must get along -- however much one or the other may have to grit its teeth. Rarely, though, have American teeth ground louder than in the case of William Morales, the no-hands terrorist (he blew them off making a bomb). Sentenced to as many as 99 years for a string of bombings, he escaped from the U.S. to Mexico in 1983, was captured in a gun battle and drew an eight-year jail term for killing a Mexican policeman. The U.S. had been dickering...
...want to play that kind of Hispanic woman, which is to say, an American citizen." This is an actress talking; these are show-biz pieties. But Moreno expresses as well a general Hispanic-American predicament. Hispanics want to belong to America without betraying the past. Yet we fear losing ground in any negotiation with America. Our fear, most of all, is of losing our culture...