Word: throwaway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That is a simple but accurate description of a situation approaching the crisis stage throughout the U.S. The affluent, fast-paced, throwaway American culture is producing trash on a stupendous scale. Between 1960 and 1986, the amount of American garbage grew 80%, from 87.5 million tons to 157.7 million tons annually. It is expected to increase 22% by the year 2000, when the malodorous mound will weigh 192.7 million tons...
What does still work is Albee's sense of throwaway absurdity. A good deal of this absurdity appears in the dialogue's intentional inanities, cliches and fragmentary conversations. Some comes from the situation: when Mrs. Barker visits Mommy and Daddy, she removes her dress, as if it were a coat or a hat, and spends the rest of the play in her slip...
...stage directions to a snapping string, but each has his own sense of what it meant. To one, it suggests the call of a heron; to another, an owl; and to a third, a cable breaking in a distant mine shaft. In most productions the moment is a throwaway. In a few it hints at the theme of an encroaching Industrial Revolution to which this doomed family cannot adapt. In the splendidly insightful version now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the incident becomes a central metaphor. Just as the characters cannot resolve the objective truth of what they heard...
...their lyrical content is not, even they would admit, particularly interesting." SAWtooth productions like Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up are basically transmigrated American soul tempered down and slicked up into a formula that makes fashion as much as music. "A single really is a three-minute throwaway piece of plastic," says Stock, as if he's talking about a miniskirt. "It's nothing greater than that. But it's entertainment...
What is lost when heroes vanish? Henry David Thoreau (a man who would have been at home in 1968) wrote an enigmatic throwaway line in Walden: "I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse and a turtle dove, and am still on their $ trail." The words, vaguely allegorical and haunting, have something in common with Paul Simon's "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" One has only to inspect the field of presidential candidates in 1988 to feel a sense of some hero loss in the drama of American life...