Word: surrealness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Secretariat, wrapped up a year of service with a blast at the "deadwood, featherbedding, fraud and abuse" that permeate the world body. The departing Under Secretary- General for Management pulled no punches, charging that some vital agencies have become "patronage dumping grounds" and that the budgeting process is "almost surreal." Further angering Secretary-General Boutros Boutros- Ghali by going public with his mince-no-words report and then repeating his charges before a U.S. congressional committee, Thornburgh, a former Attorney General, warns that antireform forces are defeating efforts to make the U.N. more efficient. Computerization could save $20 million...
...clock one morning last July at the Limelight, one of New York City's wildest night spots, and the computer-generated "techno" music was deafening. Not the best place for an interview, perhaps, but Rosenfeld, 21, a promoter who did marketing work for the club, insisted on this surreal setting. He feared that the interview could be some kind of setup arranged by Secret Service or FBI agents, and thus he wanted to be near "friends and security" in case something went wrong...
...Ross compensates for any shortcomings in the adaptation with his masterly direction. The audience senses the presence of a single influence guiding the production with confidence. The countless surreal touches, each individual in its humor, share an outrageousness which unifies otherwise disparate scenes. The Monty Pythonesque floweryrobed, curler-toting, cake-gobbling housewife is clearly related in tone to the manic judge, wig askew, smashing his vast gavel against his alpine podium. The same hand is evident in the Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee act of Supervacuo and Ambitioso, the bathtub suicide of Lutecia and the conversational blowjob Vindice gives Rapacioso...
...great deal of the credit must go to Ross, whose direction is evident in the characterization of all the cast. His interpretation is wonderfully imaginative and hysterically funny. But for all its surreal humor, it never loses sight of the drama. The Revenger's Tragedy is a morality play, showing a society ruin itself through its own appetite for destruction. Had he tried to portray that moral void in a straightforward manner, Ross would have failed. The bloodthirstiness of the story is too much for the modern audience. Instead, somewhere in the final scene--with the chandelier spinning, Luxurioso gorging...
Forced retirement also left him more time for painting, a hobby he has enjoyed for many years. His artistic tastes run to the surreal; one painting is called Nausea. Another, Coma. A third, an allegorical study of genocide, is set in a frame that, by various accounts, was either painted red to look like blood or painted in actual human blood that Kevorkian salvaged from outdated samples at the local blood bank, and from...