Word: underworlders
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Miami Vice is the most intensely serious cop show on TV. The drug smugglers, mob bosses, psychotic youth gangs and smut peddlers who emerge from the underworld each week are the most vividly portrayed evildoers on TV since Eliot Ness squared off against Frank Nitti on The Untouchables. Even more striking, however, is the show's depiction of the temptation that evil presents to basically good men. It is no accident that Crockett and Tubbs frequently go undercover, and seem to blend in perfectly when they do. Moreover, the show's most powerful episodes deal with law-enforcement officials...
...another gun favored by criminals, the compact Israeli-made UZI. That well-built weapon is more accurate, but it is more expensive at around $700 and far more complicated to convert to automatic firing. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms unintentionally gave the MAC a boost in the underworld in 1979 when it classified the gun as a semiautomatic weapon. The distinction was crucial: semiautomatic guns, which require a separate pull of the trigger for each bullet, can be purchased easily. Automatic weapons must be registered with local and federal authorities and their sale accompanied by fingerprints, certification...
...objects of ineffable fragility and beauty. These include six polychrome ceramic bowls excavated over the past five years at Tikal, the largest of all the known ancient Maya cities. Found in tombs at a site dubbed Mundo Perdido in the Peten jungle of Guatemala, these funerary vessels depict the underworld gods and beasts that haunted the Mayas. One bowl rests on a turtle swimming in a painted, stylized underground sea. Rising from the lid is the symbol of resurrection, a long-beaked water bird...
...that reflect the Mayas' grotesque imaginings of hell. The 14-in.-high Old Fire God is a satanic orange figure that holds out a human skull. Another censer represents a Maya lord whose throne is decorated by the long-nosed figure of the Cauac Monster, who rules the Maya underworld...
...laughs at the self-delusion and hypocrisy of it. His play, told in montage style, juxtaposes reveries by the ingratiating central couple--for example, about the pleasures of "nondirective, noncommitted, nonauthoritarian" sex--with satiric snippets depicting how that rhetoric translates into the raunch and squalor of an anonymous sexual underworld. The supporting cast all play multiple roles; Ken Kliban and Lily Knight are especially effective as an AIDS victim's estranged straight brother and tolerant chum. Hoffman has written rich, lyric dialogue for the leads: a budding writer (Jonathan Hogan) who is diagnosed as having the disease, and a former...