Word: slang
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...privacy of their bedrooms and bathrooms. It may be that no salesman, not even these salesmen, would traffic so doggedly in obscenity. But to say this is to assume that Mamet's ear-to-the-gutter dialogue is naturalistic. It is not. This is street slang refined and extended into the surreal, the baroque, the abrasive, the lyrical. And as spoken in blazing ricochet rhythms by his energized septet of actors-especially Mantegna, Prosky and Lane Smith as a harried customer who comes close to emotional collapse-Mamet's absurdist riffs almost make sense...
Sottsass created Memphis in late 1980, he says, to "get rid of institutional rhetoric." The replacement? What he calls "suburban slang." The name appropriately comes from rock: Bob Dylan's Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again happened to be playing the night Sottsass crystalized the project with half a dozen young followers. His oddly hued, plastic-laminate-covered Carlton room divider, whose bookshelves extend at eccentric angles, is intentionally haphazard-looking. Since books tend to settle on an incline anyway, reasoned Sottsass, why force them to stand at attention? With a core committee in Milan, Sottsass...
...Straus & Giroux will publish in June, is a masterly example of the Russian mode of skaz, or first-person narrative in the vernacular rather than in literary language. Aleshkovsky, who tells his manic tale in the voice of the crook, displays a phenomenal command of police, prison and underworld slang, as well as Russian obscenity. The writer is currently at work on a novel about a Soviet exile in the U.S. Its hero is a small-time Soviet Casanova who ceaselessly roams the country in a rented car in search of love and lust. He finds both with a succulent...
...conventional stereotype is as cumbersome as its reliance on stock gags and "cute" statements. Director Jordan's idea of humor--falling brooms and burning toast--is admittedly a sign of domestic chaos, but certainly an insufficient ploy to keep the audience in hysterics. Similarly, Wheaton's gratuitous use of slang phrases like "shit" and "knocked up" quickly becomes sophomoric and intellectually insulting to the audience...
...only has the success of MTV forced radio to play a wider variety of music-to "open its playlists," as industry slang puts it-it has itself assumed both the aspect of radio and much of its influence. "MTV is the largest radio station in America," says CBS Records Vice President Frank M. Dileo...