Word: squalidity
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...worth discussing. What could be further from the concerns of Matisse or Braque than the images to which German intellectuals gave the name Neue Sachlichkeit - "new objectivity"? There, in contrast to the French tradition of measure, delectation and ordered feeling, of art "above" politics, was a cold, laconic, even squalid-looking art that wanted to contribute its voice to the tormented political theater of the Weimar Republic. It was antiexpressionist too; painters like Otto Dix, George Grosz or Christian Schad, having survived the 1914 war, and being immersed in the suffering, inflation and political instability of their defeated country...
...underside of the Alaska myth, where the American Dream in its last pure expression rips rapidly across the forests and tundra in an oily fever of seedy opportunism, watching, listening, talking, poking around. He observes everything, and lets it all accumulate. He records demythologized Alaska more obnoxious and squalid than it is majestic and forbidding. Along with the peaks, glaciers, freedom and big bucks, he gives us the alcoholic cabin fever of the Arctic winter, the grimy linoleum floors of numberless joints like the Northern Saloon in Nome where half the boozers sling .357 Magnums as equipment for late night...
...Gulag a fantasy; as early as the '30s Stalin's murderous intent had been revealed. The "Red Menace" has been revised downward many times, but a generation ago there were many non-hysterical, unxenophobic Americans who found Communist rhetoric and performance to be morally squalid, and who deserved better than the work of self-aggrandizing Congressmen and sycophantic "cooperative witnesses...
...start, this is a film noir in garish, ominous primary colors; the design takes its cue from the camp surrealism of modern Germanic directors like Daniel Schmid and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. More important, however funny-peculiar the plot, Union City tracks its characters' shabby lives and squalid passions so relentlessly that it becomes a portrait of lower-middle-class despair. And Lipscomb's performance is devastatingly acute. His gestures are just too broad, his harsh voice much too loud; Harlan's swagger and insecurity go hand in white-knuckled hand. Lipscomb throws himself into Harlan...
...Squalid politics," fumed Republican Senator John Tower of Texas. G.O.P. National Chairman Bill Brock sniffed that Jimmy Carter "has a lot of nerve even showing up in this city." But there he was smack-dab and unrepentant in Detroit, the capital of an auto industry that has been forced to lay off one-third of its workers. While the Republicans were getting ready to throw their big bash and coronation, Carter swept through town en route to Japan and illustrated the power of a President to steal headlines from his opponents by acting on problems they can only denounce...