Word: squalidity
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...SUPPORTING players round out the organic unit of the group. They communicated the visceral meaning of a squalid poverty in their coarseness and their greed. The cast studied the peasant-figures of Breughel and Bosch when they first began to think about their characters during their own ten weeks of rehearsal, integrating their visual impressions with sensitivity exercises. The influence of the two artists can also be seen on the backdrop, which is essentially a giant scroll set on its side and rolled to different panels by the entering actors. Arnold Trachtman's black-and-white murals are intriguingly similar...
American law permits divorce, but reluctantly. It is a deeply rooted Western tradition that the partners must be somehow punished for ending a marriage. Hence the squalid court fights, private detectives with strobe guns, ruinously expensive lawyers' fees and the weeks at Reno dude ranches. A quarter of American marriages end in divorce, and most of the divorces are doubly bitter because of the judicial process that formally pits the parting husband and wife against each other...
Lavish Homage. Perhaps the only Spot in the Soviet Union where Stalin's anniversary was marked with joy was his birthplace, the squalid little Georgian town of Gori. There, obdurate Georgians, proud of a native son's fame (or infamy), paid him lavish homage. TIME Correspondent Stanley Cloud found policemen posted along all the roads to Gori on December 21, stopping all but residents of the town to prevent Georgian jubilation from becoming an unseemly public spectacle...
...National Commission on Urban Problems, headed by former Senator Paul Douglas, has castigated urban renewal as "a failure quite irrelevant to the housing needs of the poor." Some projects have turned into slums as squalid as the shanties that they replaced. St. Louis' Pruitt-Igoe project, hailed as an architectural gem when it was built in 1954 for $117 million, has become a center of vandalism, muggings, dope, sexual perversion, rape and homicide. Stairwells and hallways reek of old garbage and excrement. Recently, elevator repairmen refused to work in the buildings because of repeated sniping incidents. Despite low rents...
...strictly rational viewpoint, which may be a dangerous and misleading way of looking at it, Bethel was a neatly symbolic choice for the festival?the Biblical town of that name was a center of idolatry denounced by the prophets Amos and Hosea. To many adults, the festival was a squalid freakout, a monstrous Dionysian revel, where a mob of crazies gathered to drop acid and groove to hours of amplified cacophony. In a classic example of its good gray mannerisms, the New York Times in an editorial compared the Bethel pilgrimage to a march of lemmings toward...