Word: modernes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is a sober subtext to this nonsense. The film preaches against the excesses of self-absorption that are the wages of modern celebrity. It also makes a case against the cult of youth by demonstrating the grotesque lengths to which some people will go to try to cheat mortality. Since only a few thousand of the world's most privileged people are in a position to cope with these problems, it is hard to work up much moral indignation about them...
...writer who needs a metaphor to improve the clarity of his art. Yet this passage from his new novel, A Bend in the River, colors a simple botanical fact with the suggestion of a broader truth. Alex Haley notwithstanding, uprootedness remains the predominant theme of the times. The good modern novelists know this, and Naipaul is one of the best. He is also one of the most exotically unrooted, an Indian, born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, who has spent most of his life in England. Like his friend Paul Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar), Naipaul can haunt...
Certain public services are so obviously desirable that they are beyond debate in modern urban societies. The thought of doing without schools, parks, hospitals, street lighting and such could scarcely enter a civilized mind. The ever wandering human species recognized roads as obvious necessities soon after man began meandering across the earth. Later, mechanical wonders that aided travel were put in the same category. Today every ranking industrial nation nurtures the use of cars, buses and airplanes. Along with these, railroads are treated as indispensable in every well-developed country-except...
...recent years Parsons, one of the fathers of American sociology, had suffered the assaults of an Oedipal rebellion. Many young sociologists found Marx's explicitly revolutionary analysis of modern capitalist social relations more appealing than Parson's more abstract, apolotical--and therefore, it seemed, inherently conservative--theory. Critics characterized Parson's convoluted prose style as opaque and his analyses as suggestive but inadequate, if not simply incorrect...
Like Python, Beyond the Fringe specializes in heavily satiric parodies of the moronic aspects of "the hurly-burly of modern existence," as exemplified by the morons themselves--the twit who shows up at an opera he does not like 497 times in the hope of catching a glimpse of the royal family, the Scotland Yard detective with all the intellect (if not looks) of an iguana in heat, the one-footed man ("unidexter" is the term used) who wants to try out for the role of Tarzan...