Word: inertia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Thanks to inertia, things in motion tend to stay in motion. Take a soccer ball--once it's kicked along an obstacle-free trajectory toward an open net, not even Isaac Newton should be able to stop...
Among active playwrights, perhaps the most prolific and far-ranging exemplar of the Theater of Ideas is Britain's David Hare, 38. His comedy Pravda, a broadside attack on the political inertia of Fleet Street, co-written with Howard Brenton, has become the hottest ticket in London. He wrote potent screenplays for two current films, Wetherby and Plenty, the latter an adaptation of his 1983 Broadway hit about postwar British decline as reflected in the tormented life of one politically involved woman. Now Hare's A Map of the World, being given its U.S. premiere at the off-Broadway Public...
...century. That document predicts a dramatic 6% annual rate of economic growth (vs. last year's 3.8%) through sharply increased productivity. The drafting was no easy task, Gorbachev told a meeting of the Communist Party's Central Committee, because "not all of our managers have broken away from inertia, from old approaches." One such mossback, presumably, was 74-year-old Nikolai Baibakov, who was ousted as the head of Gosplan, the Soviet economic planning committee. He was replaced by Nikolai Talyzin, 56, a former telecommunications engineer who was Moscow's representative to Comecon, the East bloc's common market. Also...
...tangle of "transparent" figures, came straight from late Francis Picabia and perhaps from Salle's German contemporary Sigmar Polke. There is also a strong debt to earlier James Rosenquist. Salle draws, or rather traces, awkwardly and flatly. His imagery mimics the nullifying influence of TV, its promotion of derisive inertia as the hip way of seeing. Underneath, a congealed eroticism, derived from the misogynies of soft porn and the misty cliches of romance-illustration; on top, a disconnected shuffle of high-art fragments and other visual flotsam. The effect is often harshly sexist and supercilious: porn-in-quotes garnished with...
...personified, is utterly self-absorbed. Saturated in American comforts (like TV dinners: "this is the way we cat in America. I got my meat, I got my potatoes, I got my vegetable and my desert. And I don't even gotta do the dishes.") Barely fighting the law of inertia, he always seems earnestly preoccupied with doing absolutely nothing. Eddie, Willie's sidekick, is defined by his lack of a personality. He capitulates to whomever speaks the loudest (usually gravel-voiced Willie) and even looks like a watercolor version of Willie's original...