Word: taut
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Dark streaks aside, Justified is also, as you'd expect from Leonard (and writer Graham Yost, formerly of Boomtown), a funny show, with taut dialogue and a distinct sense of place. Its supporting characters are a riot of wiseass agents, sardonic thieves and big- and small-time hustlers. Its Harlan County is both timeless and of the moment, plagued with meth heads and skinheads and littered with overbuilt developments left over from the housing boom. (The fourth episode moves the action to Los Angeles as Givens chases a fugitive from his past. It's excellent as well, but the sunny...
...failure of unimaginable consequences, the President needs to inspire equivalent unity within his own party. It won't be easy to herd Congress's collection of tense, defensive, anxious Democrats, distracted by tough re-election bids and the grim disapproval of an angry electorate. But as you watch the taut health care endgame, just remember that there is a reason we don't know much about how Barack Obama handles losing: it almost never happens...
...bouncing off the uninterrupted guitar. One of the vocalists begins singing the melody before the other drapes a gauzy harmony on top. The opening is enchanting enough to repeat for another three minutes, but Local Natives refuse to rest on their laurels. Instead, the song swings into a taut rock groove with punchy electric guitars and a gurgling bass. The drums cut in and out, adding tension and release at the perfect moments and then letting the track build slowly upon itself with each soaring harmony before the ultimate release of blazing guitar and fist pumping high notes. The joyful...
...language begins to break down. The thrill of the Nabokovian sentence lies in its intense compression, that hyper-compacted poetry of the apposite adjective or unexpected metaphor that separates it from the more loosely polemical Russian literary tradition. It’s why Nabokov adored Tolstoy’s taut prose and thought Dostoevsky a hack. In “Laura” this compression unravels—degenerating near the end into mere personal notes (“invent tradename, e.g. cephalopium”) and haphazard lists (drawing linkages between self-dissolution and Buddhism...
...think of as quintessentially Bauhaus: spare, sharp-lined products like Marianne Brandt's geometric tea-and-coffee sets and Josef Albers' austere little stacking tables. Marcel Breuer devised his soon-to-be-famous tubular steel chairs with their bands of stretched black canvas, a skeletal combination of lines and taut planes that looked like an X-ray of a chair. Even then, while factory production may have been the aspiration for many pieces, old-fashioned handcraft may still have been the method behind them. The interlocking grids of Albers' glasswork Goldrosa give it a rectitude that says "modern...