Word: relentlessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fictional account of how things might go horribly wrong risks comparisons either with George Orwell's classic or with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. To a remarkable degree, these two books have staked out the turf of contemporary antiutopias. Which punishment is it to be this time? Relentless, inescapable totalitarianism or the mindless, synthetic stupors of technology? As it turns out, Atwood's look at the future takes place under conditions that Orwell would recognize. Repression is the order of the new day in The Handmaid's Tale. But the villains in this piece are not the ones that...
Herman's dictum proves regrettably true as an assessment of his own work. Although Girls offers raucous pleasures, they derive more from the skill and exuberance of the leading ladies, all past Tony winners, than from the melodies and lyrics, which are burdened with cliche-ridden predictability, relentless optimism and, worst, a prevailing sameness. Uggams' torchy numbers seem too much alike because the songs do. Loudon's comedy, almost all based on self-mockery for being plump and presumably over the hill, eventually becomes distasteful. Rivera, who could dance the telephone book entertainingly, more or less does just that...
Gramm-Rudman is designed to work with a kind of relentless efficiency. The deficit ceilings set by the bill march inexorably downward. The target is $171.9 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, and $144 billion for 1987. Then the bill decrees that the deficit go down by $36 billion annual increments: to $108 billion in 1988, $72 billion in 1989, $36 billion in 1990 and finally zero in 1991. If Congress fails to meet these targets, the cuts that automatically kick in will be evenly divided between defense and domestic programs, and they are likely...
...Linked not only by ideals but by the cultural establishment's chilly rejection of their efforts, they and several like-minded colleagues forged a style that prized content over form, emotion over intellectuality; gradually, they won over wider audiences with the uncompromising excellence of their visions. Today Glass's relentless, repetitious music has become gentler, smoother, subtler and more flexible. Wilson's stream-of-consciousness stage pictures, which are intended to evoke emotional states rather than further conventional narrative, are beginning to creep into common director's parlance...
...like Goya, both the royal chronicler and the social critic. But unflattering shots of the glamorous and privileged are one thing. How to cast that incinerating gaze upon ordinary people? Not one to swaddle his Western subjects in the gentle conventions of "concerned photography," he has persisted in his relentless inspection of bad skin, weak chins and glassy-eyed expressions. He also has resorted in places to cliched potshots, as in one picture of a nine-year-old cradling a gun. Yet he has given most of the people in these pictures ample means to make their own case...