Word: stones
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Inventing a terrorist conspiracy and then setting it in contemporary Jerusalem may seem a coals-to-Newcastle sort of enterprise. Why bother with make-believe when the reality is so vivid and convoluted? Robert Stone provides an engrossing answer in his sixth novel, Damascus Gate (Houghton Mifflin; 500 pages; $26). All of Stone's previous fiction has featured heroes whose problems are implicitly religious. Their pathologies--the heavy ingestion of drugs and booze, the habit of seeking or stumbling into serious, life-threatening trouble--stem from their uneasy sense that God still exists, but not for them. Damascus Gate makes...
Something is wrong with Dempsy, N.J., of course. As a moral to Price's story, this would be pompous. But the author doesn't offer a moral, simply an accurate portrayal of a society all of whose visible elements--cops, press, E.R. medics, pastors, mothers' groups, gawkers and stone throwers--take their energy from pain. A reliable energy source, the reader reflects; bloody hands make the world go 'round...
NASA Piles of dead rats in space are an embarrassment. Or the basis of a new Parker and Stone comedy...
...movies should find High Concept and Easy Riders, Raging Bulls thoroughly engrossing. Ultimately, though, both also seem as depressing as a Swedish art-house film. Simpson's fate reflects the shame heaped on his whores: his heart failed while he sat on the toilet reading a biography of Oliver Stone. Biskind's book ends with a death too: the 1988 demise of brilliant but burned-out director Hal Ashby, whose Coming Home, The Last Detail and Shampoo were touchstone films of the '70s. Other directors fared only a little better, ushering in the '80s and '90s with divorces, addictions...
TREY PARKER & MATT STONE Comedy Central drops $15 million on South Park creators. The wages of poop are terrific...