Word: spasmed
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This is true gallows humor, bitter and funny, set in Argentina nearly ten years ago during that country's period of paramilitary repression. Left wing violence triggered a savage righ wing reaction, a protracted spasm of bloodthirstiness and fear among the police and the military. To be a professor, a student, a known reader of books, or even to be associated distantly with anyone who might be stigmatized as an intellectual, was to risk joining the "disappeared ones," which meant to be seized, bound, tortured, murdered and thrown into secret graves...
...averted however when after Sophia tells him that she no longer accepts the validity of the curse Tolchinsky claims to belong to the Yousekevitch family. The townspeople accept Leon's assertion, and after Leon's and Sophia's marriage they throw off the cause of unintelligee in a spasm of facile self-betterment. Yes, it's contrived and so, it doesn't make much sense...
This would merely be the latest spasm of cannibal chic-the recycling of pop-culture artifacts that produces Top 40 homages to the Three Stooges and drag queens in Marilyn Monroe sequins-if it were not for a more significant revival. Five Hitchcock films are back where they belong, in the movie theaters, after 20 years in distribution limbo. Constituting the best and the least of Hitchcock's work during his most productive decade (1948-58), the "forbidden five" are once again demonstrating their director's box-office magnetism. Rear Window (1954), the first of the quintet...
...delegate slung a live cat around his neck. Two Bundestag Deputies played soccer in the aisles. From the podium, a man in a clown suit complained that the conference was interfering with Carnival, West Germany's annual spasm of pre-Lenten revelry. A delegate suggested that male candidates for the European Parliament in Strasbourg, whose nomination was the purpose of the meeting, should "undress and present themselves in the nude because the human body reveals political attitudes." Keynote Speaker Antje Vollmer railed against the "industrialized nature-destroying internationalism of neocolonialist nation states." Finally, the proceedings were disrupted...
Ordinarily, the spasm of savagery simply passes and recedes in time, an ugly, vivid memory. But last week, in an extraordinary moment of grace, the violence in St. Peter's Square was transformed. In a bare, white-walled cell in Rome's Rebibbia prison, John Paul tenderly held the hand that had held the gun that was meant to kill him (see cover). For 21 minutes, the Pope sat with his would-be assassin, Mehmet Ah Agca. The two talked softly. Once or twice, Agca laughed. The Pope forgave him for the shooting...