Word: present
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...along similar lines. Several proposals for limiting honorariums (as lucrative speaking fees paid by special-interest groups are euphemistically labeled) are being considered by a bipartisan House panel. The plan considered most likely to succeed would gradually phase out speaking fees as House and Senate salaries increased from their present level of $89,500. Thus a 7% pay raise would be accompanied by a 7% lowering in the earnings allowed from speeches, which at present are 30% of salary for a House member and 40% for a Senator...
...women in Viet Nam, to Francis Scott Key, to Kahlil Gibran (!). The hunger for memory etched in stone is exactly what one would expect from a culture that, having just now transcended paper and entered the radically ephemeral world of video, finds itself living in an ever moving pastless present...
...once ubiquitous Mike Douglas? Frank Reynolds? Michael Dukakis? Pastlessness is inherent in video, with its fast cuts and dissolving shots and rerecord button, with its moving tape forever recording a vanishing now. For a television society, every day is Today, This Morning and Tonight. Television life is a rolling present relieved only by commercial breaks...
...live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin," wrote Chesterton. Science makes a more severe judgment. It calls living in the present psychotic. Not happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care living in the present, but the real thing. Some individuals by reason of accident or disease (generally alcoholism) suffer from what is called Korsakoff's psychosis: they have no memory. Not that they have forgotten their ancient childhood memories. They often retain these. But they have lost entirely the capacity to establish new memories. Everything they see, everything they hear, everything they think, they forget within...
...Washington Project for the Arts is shopping around for a museum willing to present the Mapplethorpe exhibit, and a laser artist is making plans to project images of Mapplethorpe's photos on the Corcoran Gallery's facade. By canceling the Mapplethorpe show, the Corcoran's Orr-Cahall hoped to deflate the flap and engender serious reflection about what is art, what is not and what the Government should support. Those, she admits, are questions to which "no one has yet found answers...