Word: sordidness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Sordid, vicious Tijuana, just across the Mexican border, was a place for Californians to get roaring drunk during most of Prohibition. Seven years ago a syndicate of U. S. hotelmen went two miles deeper into Mexico, to a hot springs oasis and there built a complete, lavish money-spending plant, charged high prices, black-listed the Tijuana riffraff and called their settlement Agua Caliente ("Hot Water"). Repeal killed drab Tijuana, merely boomed the horse & dog racing, the Casino gambling, swimming, drinking at Hot Water. Natives of Hollywood, only an hour and a half away by plane, got in the habit...
With his white beard waggling in emphasis, Exeter's Gascoyne-Cecil graphically described his latest visit to the U. S., urging British Laborites to go and see for themselves how sordid, graft-ridden and enslaved by party machines he found U. S. Democracy. This brought His Lordship to his point, namely, that the House of Lords ought not to pass the India Bill (TIME, June 17) on second reading last week because it may give Indians a modicum of Democracy. "How are you going to void some great political machine's controlling the great masses of India?" cried...
...quarter of a century Sir Horace Edmund Avory has been "The Hanging Judge" to terrified British criminals who also called him "Acid Drop." Scrawny-necked, thin-lipped, slit-eyed and fearsome on his high bench in Old Bailey, Sir Horace sent to the gallows a yearly grist of sordid British murderers and that misguided Irish patriot Sir Roger Casement. The Acid Drop also corroded Clarence Hatry, greatest of British swindlers, whose gigantic frauds unsettled confidence in The City and hastened Depression (TIME, Oct. 21, 1929). Last week Super-Swindler Hatry sat in a cell from which he may emerge...
Author Louis Paul feels filial to the U. S., but instead of a mammy song he has written a novel which amply vents his feelings: "The country is fecund, heartwarming, uncritical-like a mother. Sordid things there are always there; it is necessary to look about a bit for beauty." Author Paul has looked & looked, seems not quite sure what his view adds up to. He modestly dedicates The Pumpkin Coach to Critic Burton Rascoe, who once avowed: "I am so constituted that I had rather read bad stuff than nothing." But Author Paul does not do himself justice...
When Wozzeck was given in Philadelphia four winters ago, conventional operagoers shuddered at its dissonances, stamped Composer Alban Berg as a stark ultra-modernist who had little regard for beauty. Wozzeck's story was sordid. Its music was an enigma to many, though none denied its power. For six years in his home in Vienna, Composer Berg has been working on a second opera, Lulu. Boston had the first U. S. taste of it last week when Sergei Koussevitzky conducted five symphonic excerpts...