Word: torpor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...broken glass in the run-offs. It wasn't the American Dream, but it was an acceptable substitute: the random and the strange. Driving down 70 could not fit anymore into my easy categories--the images flowing past my windshield demanded my attention. The television mode with its comforting torpor collapsed in the face of scenes no screen could capture...
...exercise its potential magic, there must be beguiling charm and a contagious affection. Farrow and Perkins project neither. Farrow's Phoebe is naive without the endearing thread of home spun innocence. Her vocal habit of putting equal stress on each syllable, word and sentence leads to aural torpor. Perkins' Jason is waspish and petulant with out a trace of roguish lovability...
...hears the din in Khartoum where the Blue and the White Niles meet and in a southern Sudan sapped to a "hopeless torpor" by epidemic. The specific character and hardship of a place are conveyed with arresting brevity. On the hard desert of the Muslim north: "It depressed me to see the starved, tethered donkeys outside suffering while the fat ones ate, and the thirsty chickens dashing for a chance to peck at our spit." In the river town of Gelhak he records the visual cacophony in Polaroid prose: "We saw a man with a monkey's nose...
...have periods of action and passion and reform," says Schlesinger, "until the country is worn out, and then periods of passivity, negativism, quietism." The first two decades of this century were periods of action. "Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson wore the country out." Then came the relative political torpor of the '20s, followed by the fierce activity of the '30s and '40s, the quietism of the '50s, then the eruptions of the '60s and early '70s. After the introversion of the mid-and later '70s, Schlesinger believes, we may now be on the brink of an explosively creative time. Says...
...Rimbaud set to a tune suspiciously like Smith's only hit, "Because The Night;" "Dancing Barefoot," in which she sings with more precision than she has yet managed; and "Broken Flag," a sweeping anthem to her curious idea of America. But even these tracks partake of the torpor that fills the rest of the record. During her last tour, Smith padded sheepishly around the stage and did her best to play cute. The music on Wave acts identically, and neither escapes with a shred of credibility...