Word: rant
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With their appetite for visual excitement, newscasts often open with the latest rant from the cross-legged Ayatullah, then move to shots of Death-to-the-Shah street crowds, who by now economically wave their fists most fervently when they see the camera's red light upon them. Next the "students" appear, enjoying the dream of every terrorist and airplane hijacker: to have television cameramen vying to record their loudest threats and wildest allegations. This has usually been balanced, if at all, by a brief low-key response from the State Department spokesman, and by the infrequent appearance...
Khomeini did not create U.S. television's imbalance between self-restraint and rant, but he has profited from it. Once he seemed bent on expelling all foreign correspondents, but now more than 200 of them are "persona grata" in a land where American diplomats are not. Journalists walk the streets of Tehran encountering little hostility, despite Iran radio's constant and strident anti-American propaganda. In their on-the-air questioning of the student militants, however, they too seem inhibited by the fear of jeopardizing the hostages. When Khomeini gives televised interviews, he chooses which submitted questions...
...mission is, to put it mildly, imperial. "I had made it clear," he wrote in 1963, "that a single stroke of paint . . . could restore to man the freedom lost in 20 centuries of apology and devices for subjugation." The Met's catalogue is stuffed with this kind of rant and salted with fulminations against the demons of the "corrupt" art world that make the Ayatullah's views on the Shah seem, by comparison, mere tickling. Nevertheless, Still's notes on the history of abstract expressionism, which sharply contradict some...
...First Week at Sleep-Away Camp Approach. This tactic is particularly recommended for those who have never been away from home for long periods of time. Prerequisites: a vacant, wondrous, slightly overwhelmed stare, a willingness to get out there and meet lots of people, and the ability to rant glibly about topics of no particular relevance. A lot of people seem to take this line, apparently reasoning that in the first week, blissful ignorance and complete openness make for the best approach. It's probably not a bad idea; there's no better time, ever, to meet people here...
...main cultural facts of the '70s was an upsurge, in the U.S. and Europe alike, of realist painting. It came in all modes, from gaudy airbrush renderings of photorealist motorcycles to inflated history painting, and in all emotional temperatures, from gelid beaux-arts nudes to the expressionist rant of political muralists in East Berlin. Much of it was instant art, and instantly disposable. But a striking deposit of achievement remains, and one of its components is the work of the Israeli painter Avigdor Arikha. A scrub-haired, passionately erudite man of 50, Arikha is best known in Paris, where...