Word: statics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...feels gritty and honest. Jarmusch's black and white landscapes are bleak, almost neutral: the Florida beach looks like Ohio without snow. As Eddie mumbles. "It's funny. You come to someplace new and everything looks the same." All of Jarmusch's spaces are defined: landscapes are linear and static, interiors bordered by walls and corners (compared to Wenders' romantic and rambling Americana deserts). This "new style of American filmmaking" is so ironic it makes your teeth hurt, but it's also witty and incisive. Paradise is a strange portrait of young Americans and new immigrants, looking for "the promise...
...opposing, and dominant, view is that the continued presence in Lebanon of Israeli troops, bogged down with occupation duties and mired in static defense, is helping to inspire another, perhaps more serious, threat. That is the one posed by the Shi'ite Muslims in the south, who constitute at least 60% of the 1 million people in the occupied territory. Many of the Shi'ites originally welcomed the Israelis as their liberators from the P.L.O., which had created a state-within-a-state in the region. Since then, however, a minority of Shi'ite fundamentalists, followers of Iran's Ayatullah...
...distinguished thing" yields to no potions or megadoses of prose. DeLillo's gifts are lavish, but his vision is a bit facile. The white noise of the title is electronic static forced into symbolic service as some sort of universal death rattle. Throughout, technology is depicted as the ominous messenger of our common fate; even the price scanners in supermarkets are spooky. Discovering malevolence in things and systems rather than in people is a little callow, especially when DeLillo's solemn moralizing overruns his comedy. Perhaps that is why, after eight books, he still seems like a writer making...
...guerrillas are expected to filter back into Kampuchea, but the Vietnamese have made public statements indicating that they intend a permanent occupation of the border region, depriving the guerrillas of their comfortable zone of sanctuary. If the K.P.N.L.F. intends to fight on, it will probably have to abandon static defenses in favor of more classic guerrilla tactics, dispersing its strength and moving deeper into the Kampuchean countryside. Said one analyst in Thailand: "If you're going to be a proper guerrilla, you can't be protecting large, fixed bodies of civilians...
...Rizzoli; 318 pages; $85) is a particolored object lesson in how art is overtaken by commerce. Carpets and rugs from the 16th and 17th centuries demonstrate an imagination all but forgotten in modern examples. An antique Agra is alive with a profusion of delicate figuring; a new Agra is static and merely crowded. Inadvertently or not, Gans-Ruedin's selections give the reader a chance to compare the finest rugs with the run of the mill. It is one's best defense against a dealer's trumped-up superlatives...