Word: inertia
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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...
...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...
Gromyko sent me abroad several times as his representative. My diplomatic mission to Africa in 1971 was depressingly instructive. Because of economic deficiencies and bureaucratic inertia at home we would be hard put to meet the expectations our expansionist diplomacy aroused. Instead of gaining friends, we would, in many instances, lose credibility. In their own policies toward the Third World, it seemed difficult for Americans to realize that a number of these initially Moscow-oriented countries did not want to emulate the Soviet model. The West's great advantage is that, except in a state of war, in the long...