Word: gruff
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...rough edges grate his contemporaries. The latest Summers brouhaha—courtesy of a hostile Faculty of Arts and Sciences meeting on Tuesday—is the same old story told and retold in The New York Times since Summers took over the Treasury. He’s gruff, sartorially sloppy, colleagues consider him aggressive, even arrogant. Also, he’s brilliant—one of the sharpest minds in President Clinton’s cabinet. He’s a potential Nobel laureate in economics. And he loves to argue. One gets the impression that he really...
...Naked,” the album’s lead single, is a prime example, as German singer Brezel Goring prattles on in kitty-cat vocals at a second-grade register about the virtues of nudity. The bad translations (and the frequent intrusion of a gruff gravelly-voiced “rapper”) can’t help but bring to mind the debt the band owes to Björk’s Icelandic ’80s band the Sugarcubes, for both groups’ consciousness of (and commitment to) the fact that their translations might...
...standard “Worried Down with the Blues” that Haynes’ songwriting capacities are brought into question; overall, the songs on this album impress less than those on The Deepest End. There are still ferocious moments on many of the tracks where Haynes’ gruff voice can make your hair stand up or where his guitar playing is especially emotive, but many of the songs are difficult to tell apart and thus the album feels slightly ambiguous. Chord changes are relatively predictable as are many of the guitar riffs but the Mule plays this music...
...Stacy Keach) is a trucking magnate who confesses he knows little about movies. Yet he's not the usual power-hungry philistine but a sensitive, level-headed decision maker. The director (Harris Yulin, as a veiled John Huston) has to spout some of Miller's windiest metaphors, but his gruff philosophizing is dead serious. The only real figures of ridicule are the pompous husband-and-wife acting coaches (modeled on Lee and Paula Strasberg) who hold Kitty in their sway. But even those caricatures (entertainingly acted by Stephen Lang and Linda Lavin) seem to grow out of Miller's genuine...
From the first words of his 10 p.m. keynote speech—a gruff “Reporting for duty!”—Kerry emphasized what has been a defining theme of the convention and his campaign thus far. Alluding repeatedly to his now-familiar personal narrative that included service on a boat in the Mekong River during the Vietnam War—and his subsequent opposition to the unjust war that it contributed to—Kerry portrayed himself as a principled war hero wary of the dangers of armed conflict...