Word: stones
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...simple as the little smudge that is the comet Hale-Bopp, which was for a while the world's most celebrated dot. Since it was an ancient dot, and one that got around a lot, it shed an astral glamour wherever it appeared. Like the President or Sharon Stone, it made everything, even whole mountain ranges, look more consequential beside it. So we nominate Hale-Bopp as Punctum of the Year, a year in which matters large and small left people unexpectedly moved...
...scarcely seen a Westerner when the century began--now seeming as visible, and even as fashionable, a figure as Richard Gere. John Cleese speaks out for him in London, Henri Cartier-Bresson records his teachings around France, Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys interviews him in Rome for Rolling Stone. In the past few years he has opened 11 Offices of Tibet, everywhere from Canberra to Moscow, and last year alone provided prefaces and forewords for roughly 30 books. The 14th Dalai Lama is surely the only Ocean of Wisdom, Holder of the White Lotus and Protector of the Land...
Gore's shortcomings as a retail politician--emphasizing the wrong phrases in speeches, going stone-faced when he should be empathic, forgetting to work the rope line--have led him to compensate with big, attention-getting moves. He calls them "long bombs," the kind quarterbacks throw when nothing else is working. Gore planned to throw one last Sunday by flying to the 155-nation global-warming conference in Kyoto, Japan, where the U.S. finds itself scorned. Why was Gore planning to insert himself into a no-win situation...
...apparently killed himself, a fact that many close to him are finding almost incomprehensible. "Everyone felt that if someone had called us and said, 'Michael overdosed,' we would have said, 'Jesus, we saw that coming 10 years ago,'" explained Ed St. John, a former editor of Australian Rolling Stone and a friend of the singer's. "If he'd crashed his motorbike off a cliff, we would have said, 'Yeah, that's Michael.' But the suicide is the hardest part to understand. I've never seen him depressed." That irrepressibility may have fueled one early theory about the cause...
...problem is that it's difficult to maintain emotional identification with the main characters while we're having our minds and emotions numbed. For instance, the scenes of Max and Horst at work in the concentration camp--endless vistas of two ragged, small figures stumbling across the whiteness of stone or snow in their meaningless work--evoke echoes of the theatre of the absurd, of postmodern anguish a la Waiting for Godot. But it seems unclear why this effect is courted in the first place. The movie's ultimate aim appears to be a statement about the sublime aptitudes...