Word: hysteria
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Although Anastasio and McConnell jammed for most of the night, drummer John Fishman controlled the pulse of the audience and led everyone on the musical journey. Fishman seemed to know just when to intensify but, more importantly, when to slow things down if mass hysteria seemed to be threatening the 16,000-odd people filling the Centrum. Phish is more raw in the late nineties than ever before, and their jams tend to be faster and more rock-based than in the past. However, they have retained the ability to direct the mood of the audience. From the first furious...
Within the chicly amoral terms Berg sets--and brutally enforces--Diaz is curiously believable. So is the way in which stunned calm (we're going to get away with this thing) and hysteria (no, we're not) alternate among the well-played accidental criminals. We do find points of identification with them. And heaven knows, some of us are fed up to the teeth with movies glossily restating humane sentiments. Finally, though, Berg's relentless, youthfully enthusiastic assault on conventional pieties grows tiresome. And we begin to choke on laughter that was from the outset pretty dubious...
...same hysteria flows when large, fast-growing high-tech companies start shopping around for new plant locations. Intel Corp. invited six Western states--Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas and Utah--to compete for a new computer-chip fabrication plant, or fab, and selected the winner in March 1993. A senior executive explained the decision this way to the San Jose Mercury News: "We're going to build where Intel gets the best deal...
...regardless of the consequences. Jackie, however, tries to find a balance that seemingly doesn't exist, between speaking freely and still trying to qualify dangerous statements (like his brazenly racist quips). For instance, he offers us the previous comment on Jewish wives and their timid husbands and elicits audience hysteria; the mood, however, turns somber when he immediately adds "But adultery is nothing to laugh over. Adulterers are no subject for comedy." Why ruin the mood? Why make the audience nervous to laugh...
Whatever else the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal may ultimately be viewed as--grounds for impeachment, epic tabloid sideshow or the latest outbreak of puritan hysteria in the culture that gave us The Scarlet Letter--it already provides a cautionary tale about the dangers of instant intimacy. In the socially transient, lonely world of Washington, where betrayal is only a subpoena away, even between the closest confidants, and a flurry of quickies in a private bathroom can turn a couple, in Monica's words, into "sexual soul mates," fast friendship may be the ultimate danger...