Word: squalors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...take no drugs/ But Christ she's hit the bottle/ Like there's no tomorrow." And while Hefner ballads usually chronicled a brief infatuation, many French songs are about something like commitment. In The Stars, the Moon, the Sun and the Clouds, the singer chastises his girlfriend's scholarly squalor: "It's all very well/ Learning poetry by heart/ But it doesn't mean/ We have to live like poets." As with so much electronica, there's a soulless quality to this record, not helped by Hayman's insistence on recording with a drum machine. His DIY aesthetic...
Nobody does abjection like Michel Houellebecq. He's French, after all, so he has the exemplary squalor of Sartre, Celine and Genet to live up to. It was the state-of-the-art estrangement, plus the sex, that made his second novel, The Elementary Particles, a huge best seller in Europe and made Houellebecq (pronounced Well-beck) a heavily contested literary star. Last year he was acquitted by a French court of inciting racial hatred after he called Islam "the most stupid religion." (Does it help to know that his mother left him in childhood for an Arab and converted...
...dead baby shoved in his face by an Indian beggar. "We were all horrified and, I think, more than a little envious," he writes. "All visitors to the developing world, if they are honest, will confess that they are actually quite keen on seeing a bit of squalor." And readers, if they are honest, will confess that they are more interested in this traveler's disintegration than in his resurrection...
...Ghadeer district is filthy; the rooms are damp and smell of rotting garbage. Her pets, a mangy brown pup and two molting cats, have shed clumps of fur on her bed, an old foam mattress on the living-room floor. There are pieces of stale bread everywhere. But the squalor doesn't seem to bother Nouman. She has lived in much worse places - a succession of prison cells, torture chambers and mental-hospital wards. Her living room may be fetid, but it is home, and she's free. "Nobody bothers me here. Nobody does bad things to me," she says...
...smartest movies of 2000, in any country; the hauntingly beautiful Behind the Sun (Brazil, 2001) and Argentina's bittersweet, Oscar-nominated Son of the Bride (2001). The leap, however, is most evident in City of God, whose driving samba-and-funk artistry provides a rare glimpse of the Dantean squalor bearing down on Brazil's tourist beaches. Hailed as one of the best Latin American films of the past half-century, it was snubbed by Oscar, many critics complain, because of its violence. Set in Rio's notorious Cidade de Deus favela and narrated by a teen who manages...