Word: primal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...were to go back to the elements of the states and to examine the oldest monuments of their history, I doubt not that we should discover in them the primal causes of...the habits, the ruling passions, and, in short, all that constitutes what is called the national character." --Alexis de Tocqueville...
...blithely as if it were a cardboard prop, and incorporated their famous arguments into gag lyrics for their duets. They worked literally nose to nose: Jerry would lick Dean's face; Dean would flick his cigarette ashes in Jerry's mouth (and lick Jer's face). It was primal therapy on the 12-inch screen, stripping bare a volatile marriage in all its grotesque intimacy--a bizarre comic display of love and resentment. No way it could last...
...open, pieced-together asymmetry of Constructivism. Form for him is always closed and unitary, though different forms could be added to one another to make a whole, as in the interplay between sculpture and base. And he especially loved form that spoke of life or awareness at their origins: primal, self-enclosed, a marble egg floating in its own space like a cell, an egglike head lying on its side, filled with what the poet Octavio Paz called "the dreams of undreaming stone...
...could read Sabbath's Theater as Roth's backlash, a Mamet-like refutation of P.C. feminism. But that would be missing the point. Roth never comes close to defending Sabbath. He only hopes to render the man--his "primal emotions and indecent language and careful, complex sentences"--in such high relief that, try as we might, we cannot despise him. When Sabbath is booted out of his puppetry professorship at a local college, Roth sees fit to include, as a foot-note, a lengthy transcript of the offending teacher-student phone sex episode. This is only Roth the provacateur, daring...
...turning out three-minute, radio-ready songs (Today, Disarm). It also excels in creating longer, art-pop compositions that wander about for seven minutes or more, exploring a variety of musical textures, melodies and emotions. The band's first CD, Gish (1991), featured assertive rock that was at once primal and cerebral; its second, Siamese Dream (1993), was a buzzing, humming, intricately constructed maze of sounds...