Word: phrasings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...zanne, in a phrase that spoke volumes about the classical ambitions of early modern art, said that he wanted to do Poussin over again from nature. Welliver's ambition, at least in part, is to do the same with Pollock. Such landscapes are "allover" paintings, slices taken from a boundless field of pictorial incident. The apparent disorder of the view, that energetic chaos of sticks and rocks, is formalist to the last square inch...
...film's grace derives in part from Director Tim Hunter's brisk and unpretentious style, an ability to find the values in a scene efficiently, nail them down and move on unfussily. One would like to call it American classicism, if that phrase did not have such a forbidding ring to it. Mostly, however, the joy of the film arises from the acting of its central roles. As Mason, Jim Metzler conveys solidity without stolidity, commonsensicality without priggishness. It is the sort of self-effacing work that often, unfairly, gets overlooked in the movies. That is especially...
Civic boosters take pride in a healthy real estate market; it's great for Boston's image as "the livable city"--Mayor White's phrase. But if the cost of livability includes millions of dollars in fire damage and the title of America's arson capital--and the social pressures that title implies--Bostonians had better ask themselves if they can really afford...
...memoirs, Menachem Begin wrote fiercely of the emergence of "the Fighting Jew." For much of Jewish history, through the long centuries of the Diaspora, that phrase was an oxymoron, a kind of contradiction in terms. Israel was the creation of fighting Jews, of course, but at least until the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel was the heroic and democratic underdog struggling for its very existence in the vast and hostile Arab wilderness. For a couple of thousand years, Jewish morality presupposed a kind of victim's righteousness, the special blamelessness of those without great collective power. Now Israel...
...demonstrably not true, and 2) it is certainly not for the rest of the world, meaning, implicitly, the historical tormentors of Jews, to presume to give moral instruction to the Jewish people. Begin in his combative mode strikes ugly notes. Last week his government even used the dark phrase "blood libel" to dismiss condemnations of the Israeli army's behavior at the camps. The phrase invidiously linked the critics to the medieval anti-Semites who accused Jews of crucifying Christian children and drinking their blood at Passover...