Word: hysterias
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...hyper expressionistic playing of the first half of the concert would have been quite appropriate in the Berg Quartet. Here, unhappily, the energetic intensity of the performance at times bordered on hysteria--the only moments of the evening when solid technical mastery began to waver. Too many crunchy or strained fortissimi, and an over-emphasis of percussive aspects resulted in something like Everyman's stereotype of a 'modern' work; and the audience response was stereotypically reserved. But all of this is contrary not only to the spirit of the score, but also to Berg's expressed attitude toward the performance...
...death. His concern stemmed partly from the painful heart attacks he suffered when he was still in his 30s. The ailment, never definitively diagnosed, was the cause of continuing anxiety. Indeed, Psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, Freud's most authoritative biographer, thought that the symptoms themselves were due to "anxiety hysteria," while Schur believed that Freud may actually have had a coronary thrombosis. Freud was also profoundly affected by the deaths in his own family, beginning with that of his brother Julius when Freud was only 19 months old. When his daughter Sophie died, he spoke of "the monstrous fact...
Being caught in the middle of Ernest Lehman's debasement of Roth's novel isn't funny either. As the movie version of Goodbye, Columbus proved, the controlled hysteria with which Roth cauterizes his past is hard to translate into film. Actors, scenery and background music only dilute the intensity of Portnoy's brilliant lie-down comic routine on the psychoanalyst's couch. Roth's re-Joycing in the scenes of Portnoy's heroic masturbations lose their hilarious dimension and descend pathetically into the baggy-pants scatology of the oldtime burlesque skit...
...arrests capped the largest man hunt in West Germany's postwar history. Tens of thousands of police have been combing the country for the terrorists, who have brought West Germany to the edge of hysteria. In the previous two weeks alone, the Bonnie und Clyde gang is believed to have been responsible for six major bombings, including two at U.S. Army installations that killed four U.S. servicemen and injured 41 persons. Modeling themselves on Uruguay's Tupamaro guerrillas, the gang, which numbered about 25 at its zenith, has engaged in a string of brazen bank robberies, car thefts...
...from the military-industrial complex, and challenged to a duel, he storms out, after having accidentally swallowed his son's purge. It is all rather ridiculous, and it occasionally has its points, but why it is called surrealistic is never clear. Perhaps the attempt to reconcile murder, constipation, and hysteria with the Adams House Upper Common Room is intrinsically so bizarre that it automatically becomes surreal...