Word: torpor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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More and more musicians are losing the delicate art of infusing their music with soul. Not soul in the sense of smooth shakers like Barry White--I'm talking about the kind of soul that fights numb torpor and erases indifference. The kind that stirs powerful emotions inside of a person, the kind that can get a reaction...
...held France in a sickly thrall since 1987. Three former French government officials facing charges of "involuntary homicide" and criminal "inattentiveness and negligence" will learn their fate in the final scene of a 12-year drama that has spanned the depths of human tragedy and the shallows of bureaucratic torpor, with a strong supporting cast of ignorance, chauvinism and arrogance...
...they once had. Not only has Fox muscled in on the traditional Big Three, but two smaller networks, UPN and the WB, are also vying for viewers. So are dozens of increasingly potent cable channels. Cable made more inroads this summer, when the networks slipped into their usual rerun torpor. The cable industry delights in pointing out that for the first time ever, in the 2 1/2-month period from July through mid-September, the prime-time audience for all basic-cable networks combined exactly matched that of the Big Three...
Almost obscured by this torpor is the fact that there has been some remarkable progress over the past five years--real changes in the attitude of ordinary people in the Third World toward family size and a dawning realization that environmental degradation and their own well-being are intimately, and inversely, linked. Almost none of this, however, has anything to do with what the bureaucrats accomplished...
...real Irish trouble is that hardly anyone outside Ireland cares about this endless insurrection. Filmgoers certainly aren't moved in great numbers, as the box-office torpor of Michael Collins indicates. Some Mother's Son is just as unlikely to stir the masses. It doesn't clarify the IRA's collective character: Are its members insurgents? Martyrs? Thugs? Assassins? Instead the movie piggybacks its own little story, about the growing respect of the two women, onto the dreadfully edifying drama of the Sands campaign, including his election to Parliament on his deathbed. There's a power in these scenes that...